This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Welcome everybody. Everybody that's here. Everybody that's here for the first time. Everybody that's here for the... nth time or even the nth squared time and welcome everybody in the um you know vast and mysterious online community um i'm really indescribably grateful to be here giving this talk so thank you Nonetheless, it's worth asking, you know, why are we here?

[01:12]

And I don't mean that in the large sense of the word, why are we here? I mean that in the specific sort of medium-range sense of the phrase, why are we here? Why is there a Zen Buddhist temple in the middle of San Francisco? that invites people to come on Saturdays and listen to someone talk about a arguably 25-year-old, 2,500-year-old religious and philosophical tradition. It's an excellent question. And... So to start with, there's, you know, the problem, right?

[02:21]

Which is that 2,500 years ago, you know, as today and as for the entire intervening period, things are and have been a mess and people and other beings have been suffering for it, sometimes subtly and sometimes horrifically and extravagantly. And probably everyone has seen the Casey Green, this is fine dog cartoon, right? An amazing... percentage of those people that have been um suffering over the years i'm not totally clear to me it's a majority but certainly a large plurality are kind of like the dog you know they're sitting in a burning house and with a cup of coffee my understanding is that the original cartoon was just two frames right there was and a lot of frames have been added on over the course of the intervening 10 years but the two frames are

[03:41]

Dog sitting in a burning house with a cup of coffee. Dog takes a drink and says, this is wine. Yeah. Or to put it more poetically and in a slightly more Buddhist context, there's this famous koan. It's the 28th or a case in the Book of Serenity, which is one of the large collections of these stories about interactions between teachers and students or students and students, and occasionally things that are way off in left field. But in any case, this one, there's this teacher named Hugo and Mungkau Sim. So how is it when I... rain sits in a withered pine.

[04:43]

It sets up this beautiful image. You can imagine a hilltop. I've just spent much of last week riding my bike in central California all by myself in the absolute middle of nowhere. These beautiful weathered trees with birds sitting in them. I don't know how many... red-tailed hawks I startled out of their reverie, right? So you imagine a crane perched in a withered pine on a hilltop, and Hugo says, down there on the ground underneath, it's a mess. And the mug says, okay, well, what about, what about, why not? Why not? drop of water is a drop of ice. And Hugo says, oh, you know, when the sun comes out, it's a mess. And then he asks the real question.

[05:44]

He says, okay, what about during the Buddhist purge in the middle of the Tang Dynasty? We can talk about that in a moment. He says, what happened with the with the spirits that were intended to guard the teachings. And he says, well, it was really an embarrassment for the two guys at the gate. So there's a couple of things there. One is that in the middle of the Tang Dynasty, there was this horrible political upheaval. And at the end of it, the Tang emperor was like, okay, we need to one, wipe out foreign influences on Chinese culture, and two, we need to rake back some cash and people from the monastic system.

[06:45]

And so they essentially canceled Buddhist monasteries all over China. And you can imagine, like, you know, in the... So you can imagine... east asian buddhist monastery they almost always have these really powerful and imposing guardian figures at the gate right so there's there and often they're standing there and one of them is going like and the other one is going like this and they're one one of the things they're doing is they're breathing but the other thing they're doing is they're they're they're essentially trying to scare away all the um you know interferers, disruptors, and detractors, right? And you can imagine these guys standing there doing their thing, and a whole mob runs in and kicks all the monks out, and they're like, whoa, what just happened?

[07:48]

So anyway, kind of a mess, right? it's like things are kind of a disaster and people break themselves into believing not necessarily all that things are okay. I mean, the funny thing is that people have a wide variety of, of responses to, to human life and the world and so on. But if you, if you kind of poke around, like, you know, internet, for example, or maybe read the comments pages on the New York Times or something like that, you get the feeling that even the people that think things are going horribly and they're sitting there at their table in the house with their cup of coffee and go, oh my god, the house is burning down.

[08:53]

They still kind of have this idea that they uniquely understand what's going on, and even if they don't know what to do about it, are really willing to cling to their dream of special understanding and control, which is amazing under the circumstances. So that's the problem. We make a mess of things, we suffer, and we're diluted about our understanding and control of the mess. You know, self-diluting about our understanding and control of the mess, about the nature of the mess. And so the Buddhist proposition

[09:58]

again, roughly 2,500 years ago, around that was something like this. We don't actually know in any detail what the life of Guru was like or what he actually taught. But what we do have is we have this long record of stories about his life and stories about stuff that he said. And it doesn't matter how to view that. You could view it as history, you could view it as philosophy, you could view it as mythology, however you want to do it. And there's scholars all over the world that take all those points of view. What those stories bring to the fore, and not everyone completely agrees with this, but certainly the with the establishment of the Zen school in Japan, the guy that established the Zen school in Japan said essentially what I'm saying to you now, which is, hey, the Buddha thought this because I read the stories or heard the stories.

[11:13]

And here's what I'm telling you. Here's how it works. And here's what he said. He basically said, what you do is you engage in a... lifetime program of mindful self-study framed by heartfelt vows to live an exemplary life and avoid harming self and others right that's kind of the you know that's the summing up there um and He said it more poetically than I just did. But if you read the... Zen is a Mahayana Buddhist school, but if you read the Theravadan canon, it says more or less the same thing.

[12:16]

A lot of the stories in the Pali canon are about... the Buddha being asked, you know, how and why should we practice? And he says the same thing. He says, if you engage in this precept-driven program of mindful self-study, it, well, among other things, makes you better at living and also is transformative and palliative by turns. So essentially, they're recommending introspection, a program of introspection.

[13:33]

And These days, I would say, from a philosophical perspective, introspection kind of gets a bad rap. I don't know if any of you have read Daniel Dennett, for example, but he has a lot to say about how ineffective introspection is as a way of understanding the world, right? And then he has some pretty specific reasons for this. And the interesting thing is that over the course of millennia, the Buddhists have also discovered these things. The ways in which introspection can be problematic. And the obvious ways in which introspection is a complicated tool to use kind of go like this. One is... obviously we have a limited view, right?

[14:37]

Each of us has a unique perspective on the world that arises out of our location, our time, our cultural placement, and our specific lived experience and the conditioning that arises from it. And we see, everybody sees the world in a unique way and also, let's be clear, a limited way. because it's limited by exactly that conditioning and by that placement in space and time. And we've probably talked about this ad nauseum in this context, but there's this wonderful talk by Richard Feynman about this exact phenomenon. where he basically... I won't go into the whole talk.

[15:38]

It's great because he imagines... He has you imagine a spider standing on the surface of a swimming pool in order to get at this as a metaphor. But his basic point is this. You're sitting here and you're thinking, wow, I'm taking in the world. But actually... really your body are coursing vast energies that, that come from the farthest corners of the universe and, you know, and radio signals that you can't hear and, and, and, you know, the, the gravitational waves that result from the death of, of quasars. And I mean, it's just, you know, we have a really limited scope. So, In terms of what we can see and our ability to, you know, he talks about the spider floating on the surface of the swimming pool and figuring out from the shape of the waves, whether it's just a little breeze blowing across the surface of the swimming pool or whether Jimmy has just done a cannonball, right?

[16:53]

And we're pretty proud of our ability to, you know, take in the waves that we can actually take in. and and and make up a model for the world but it's nothing compared to the actual complexity and ungraspable marvel of the universe even the universe in this little tiny space right here right um and um and so we have we have a very limited view and it leads to um limited ideas about how things are about reality right and and and the the fundamental nature Even Feynman, the physicist, at the end of this talk says something like, he calls it the ungraspable nature of nature. Wonderful. So that's thing one. Thing two is that

[18:01]

we have a tendency to be self-deluding. And we'll get into a little bit of how this actually works later. But we're constantly tricking ourselves about what we see and what we hear and so on and so forth. And we take in a fair amount of information and we throw away... the vast majority of it immediately without even perceiving it, right? And then hammer what we got into a frame that we've preconceived and said, and we say, okay, this is what's happening now. But if you, you know, there's a whole bunch of famous experiments that expose exactly the limits of this sort of thing. Like the one I was reading about today, there's a... debate between Dennett and this other philosopher that mentions this experiment, where essentially you take a playing card, you hold it out here, and you keep your field of view.

[19:05]

We think of our visual field as being full of fairly accurate representations of objects in our visual field, except maybe at the edges. We're willing to allow there's a little bit of fuzziness at the edges, right? Because if you take a playing card, you hold it out here, and you slowly swivel it into view, it's only right about here where you start being able to actually read the thing, right? The notion that our visual field is an accurate representation of what's out there and we see it all clearly, it's an illusion that we cook up in order to satisfy ourselves that we can get around in the world without bumping into things. That's what it's for. And that other things are not going to come and bump into us like cars and stuff. And

[20:18]

that intentional well necessary and and um and some and to a certain extent automatic but also intentional limiting of our our knowledge of and our interpretation of the world that we see you can see how that leads to all sorts of delusions about about the world and about the other beings in it, and so on and so forth. And then worse than that, we're kind of prone to, in addition to the sort of standard forms of self-delusion, we're also prone to delusions that arise out of ambition, like, it's okay for me to have this thing even though i'm taking it from this other person because uh you know i don't know because i invented this concept that makes it okay right it's okay for me to break the precepts in this way because um i deserve it right and where

[21:44]

And we tend in that way to also mess with our experience. So one of the problems defined, you know, as identified by Suzuki Roshi in writing Zen by Beginner's Mind is that you learn how to sit, you sit down and you start doing it, and almost immediately you find yourself thinking, you know, this is not the way it should be. It should be this other way, and I will make it be that way. And it can cause all sorts of... Well, I mean, the standard critique that's leveled at Zen practitioners is that they're engaged in navel-gazing, right? It promotes a kind of navel-gazing, a kind of... denial of the actual nature of experience and a pursuit of or even illusory attainment of another kind of experience that we idealize.

[23:07]

But All that said, even though introspective practice doesn't show us about reality and is prone to all these difficulties, if we approach it in a particular way, what it can actually reveal to us is the nature of experience. To the extent that we're capable, the nature of this experience, the experience of this one living their life moment by moment, and this mind producing thought and so on moment by moment. And so realizing this about a little over 2,000 years ago, the most

[24:16]

the best attested Buddhist school of the day, the Sarvastavadans, cooked up a scheme called the Five Skandhas, which I don't know how many people were here today and you helped chant the Heart Sutra, but it kind of listed them in the context of the Heart Sutra. Skandhas translates usually as aggregates in English translations of the literature. There's a really sort of talented Buddhist scholar by the name of Red Pine who makes the point that it's actually not precise to say aggregates. He says it's more of a reference to, you can imagine a mangrove forest with all these aerial roots all sort of coming down and clustering to the point where after a while you can't see the the forest for the roots, right?

[25:20]

And that's kind of what Skanda's referring to, according to Red Pine. And I don't know if that's true or not, but it's a lovely poetic image, right? So they're kind of like the... The scheme is intended as kind of a rubric for understanding human subjectivity and human experience. And the... the, the, the roots of that human experience and human subjectivity are, they're, they're kind of a, it's kind of a layered structure. And so I'll just go through it. Right. So there's the, there's form, the realm of form, which is to say the physical realm that includes our sensory hardware. It includes tea cups. Yeah. Condained water. Nice. Thank you.

[26:21]

And so on. And then pretty much all the other layers are fundamentally metaphysical. So, you know, in that moment, I lifted the teacup and there was contact. There was a lot of contact. There was contact with my fingers with the cup. There was, there was, effort, there was some sort of stored procedure for how to drink, and there was some water. Amazing, right? It was pretty good, actually. But the point there is that out of that contact arises what we refer to usually in the context of the skandhas as sensation. And again, as I was saying earlier, we take it, we experience a lot of sensation all the time, like really, really a lot.

[27:24]

If you, if you actually pay attention to your, your self as a sensate, for lack of a better word, machine, right? It's, It's telegraphing reams and reams of data every second around the system, around the underlying network that supports it, right? And, you know, we're all sitting here just bathing in sensation. There's cars going by. There's people talking. Everyone's probably got, you know... Maybe a little discomfort in some joint or other because they've been sitting around, which reminds me, you should sit comfortably if you like. If you need to shift your posture, it's okay.

[28:27]

You don't have to sit like the statue on the altar. The statue on the altar makes it look good and easy, I think. But anyway, we're bathing in this sensation, and the additional idea that the scheme presents is that sensations are either pleasant or unpleasant or maybe neutral, and maybe they also have a degree of excitation that arises around that sensation. So on the basis of those valences, some sensations arise into perception and register with us, right?

[29:32]

And therefore, so that's the second layer is the layer of perception. And at that point, we do some additional work, right? Like that dog, right? So there's dog out there parking. And I don't know about the rest of you, but what occurs in my mind is an image of a dog about this big that kind of maybe is shaped like a miniature schnauzer. But for some reason, it's kind of green colored and it's going... Arf, arf, arf, arf, arf. It's like a cartoon dog, not the one in this is fine, but another dog, right? And, you know, probably everybody else has a different response to that. But the point is that once something arises to the level of perception, then memory is engaged and pattern matching and...

[30:35]

association, that we have a kind of associative, vast associative storehouse of memory, and at very least an explanation arises for the sensation, and sometimes patterned responses are also dredged up, right? And then, and all of this is transpires and impinges upon our consciousness. Okay, so if you look at these layers, you've got form, sensation, perception, kind of mental formation, and, you know, maybe explanation, maybe volitional activity, and so on and so forth, and then consciousness. And you've got, so you've got a physical layer, right? You've got a metaphysical, you know, three metaphysical and processional layers that are pretty easy to understand, right?

[31:39]

There are processes that transpire in the physical substrate that cause these activities to take place, right? And then on top, there's awareness or consciousness. And that is like this miraculous mystery that nobody has a clue about. People have been trying to explain human consciousness for millennia, and we're really no closer to explaining it now than we were 2,500 years ago. It's completely a mystery. And when I was studying neuroscience in grad school, when you'd raise the consciousness question, all of the best... professors of the day, but I'll say, we're not going to talk about that. And we just really just put it down. We can't get into that because it's so mysterious and ungraspable that we're just going to tie ourselves in knots and shoot each other in the foot, basically.

[32:51]

And that's still mostly the case, but every now and again I run across a book where somebody says, well... If we're going to try and explain it, this is how we might want to start. But honestly, it's still just this grand mystery and kind of a miracle and an indescribable gift that sometime during the course of the evolutionary history of life on the planet, probably hundreds of millions of years ago, way before humans, some evolutionary process decided that things would go better for the the you know the beasts that it was evolving if they were at least a little bit self-aware right amazing When you study that, and I guess my final point about this Skanda is that as a scheme for talking about and thinking about and sort of understanding experience in general and the experience of practice in particular, it's about as good as anything anyone's ever come up with, right?

[34:11]

And if you study it, what you notice is this, right? You have this consciousness, this awareness, right? And embedded in that awareness are several modes of attention, more than two, but two really obvious ones, right? And the first one is a kind of a broad, fundamentally kind of unloaded, receptive attention that naturally and seamlessly trades place with a kind of focus of attention, focused attention when, when a perception arises and draws your attention, right? So, um, you know, truck slowing down car with, uh, with, you know, pounding music, um, uh, a sense, you know, sensation in my right knee. Um, uh, and, uh,

[35:14]

And also, the scheme of the skandhas, in addition to identifying the five realms of the senses, also includes, at the same level, and almost, you know, with using the same language, mental activity, the generation of thoughts, the generation of images, and so on, right? So, in principle, we have this... broad container of awareness and receptive attention that gives focused attention to a particular sensation or thought and then lets it go and then does it again. And you can watch yourself do this in sitting zazen all the live long day. It's actually kind of great. And for the most part, it kind of works like a champ. But what happens is the following, right?

[36:18]

Eventually, a thought arises that has enough sort of emotional juice associated with it or is intriguing or compelling. And by eventually, I mean like usually within 10 or 15 seconds. Okay. that it draws your attention and your mind slips into this, the third mode, which is a, which is a special case of the, of focused attention, which is our mode of, of sort of self narration, self destruction, ruminative thinking and so on. And as far as I can tell, and this is mostly just anecdotal stuff and things that I've observed from, you know, raising a bunch of children, is that, you know, when kids are somewhere between one and two, they have a realization.

[37:20]

My now adult daughter told me about this revelation once when she was, again, about one and a half or something like that. She goes, you know, I discovered today that I can talk to myself without talking out loud. She'd already learned how to talk, and now she all of a sudden could talk to herself in secret, right? And she could start building this narrative of the self and these ideas about the self and so on and so forth. And, you know, she's been building them ever since. She's now, what, 33 or something like that, and she's a college professor. But I think we all do that. That mode... the mode of self-construction, self-narration, thinking about what we're going to say, thinking about what we said, thinking about what we're going to do, thinking about what we're not going to do, et cetera, all of that stuff rises up and becomes really the center of our attention.

[38:27]

And I think in the neuroscience world, they even call that the default mode, that when you sort of slip back, When you're engaged in, say, a task, maybe your intention can be entirely drawn by that task. But if you let go, you perhaps have a brief moment when you're in this sort of state of broad receptive attention, and then something comes up and you're like, okay. And the interesting thing is that there's pretty broad agreement, if you read books about practice, that that transition from receptive attention to self-construction is practically impossible to watch, right? It's like there's this weird thing that happens where all of a sudden that other mode says, oh, no, you should be paying attention to this, and it gets out some sort of eraser and erases the context, and all of a sudden you're thinking, right?

[39:31]

And that makes it That makes it difficult to work with. But again, what you discover is that over time with practice, you discover that everybody has this sort of cycle of attention where you're present and then you're tangled up in ruminative thinking. And then that not long after, and again, tens of seconds, maybe minutes, something occurs where you're impelled to broaden your attention and be present again, right? And at that point, nothing is hidden, right? You can see the thought, you can see the emotions, you can see the etc. You're present and the contents of your experience as a human are

[40:34]

is is on display it's accessible right and to so to learn to to practice and and again this is this is the essence of the program of mindful self-study is to essentially surf that cycle of attention and and rest in the moments when when you're actually present and make and really make the most of them, right? Really be there, right? Really make this subtle effort to inhabit the body and mind that's present in that moment, right? And if anything, to bring up a kind of curiosity about it. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma Talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive.

[41:38]

Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

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