Somebody asks a question and the teacher goes, whap, [...] whap. We're rather scared of that kind of physical expression, but it's actually a relief to have it. To just talk at somebody or embarrass them or shame them is often worse than giving them a little kick or a hit, you know. It doesn't have to be fighting, it can be some kind of communication. But a teacher does not do that to a student until the student has a consciousness which would know what was going on in his mind at the moment of being hit. If a person is out to lunch, you wouldn't hit because he'd say, what the hell did he hit me? But a person who's not out to lunch, right? When you hit them, they know what's happened that moment. They know what flashed across their mind at that moment. And the teacher knows pretty much what's going on. So probably just because there's long familiarity. So, as I was saying, you know, obvious things occur, like you notice when you get a headache, you know. The moment you can feel something happen in your head, which is the beginning of a headache, and you know what happens simultaneously around you, or what somebody said, or what occurred, and you don't, so you just relax that point, and you don't have a headache. I mean, you just, that kind of thing, just nothing important, and we're not supposed to talk about it. Sounds like some candy, you know. Practice and you won't have headaches.

[01:30]

I need some example, you know, to give you four. So, you find you can let go of your thinking processes and just be maybe awareness itself, without an object of awareness, and you find you can be aware of what's going on around you and with you most of the time. I can't remember now how I'm relating that to the formation of our community. Oh yes, that's right, waiting, waiting, that's right. So there's a waiting for and allowing phenomena to participate in your activity. But also, you see, there's the idea in Zen, which I was trying to get to, that if you're conscious, if you're aware, as that is occurring, you are participating in it at the level at which it's occurring. Instead of being there after, always being subject to events, you're participating. For instance, if you, again this is a rather funny model, but by the time you see something it's already in the past, you know. But how to perceive something

[02:57]

at the moment it's happening. If you see a person, if you try to define a person at the moment of his happening and not as the past, you don't see form anymore, you see a kind of energy. And you're one with that energy too, but you're usually out to lunch, so you're rather subject and pushed around by your bladder or the subject-object distinction. So waiting is something important in this. And then next is energy, and energy again, if you stop having so much tied up in your karma or history or oppression, etc. There's an enormous amount of energy that we have that's released. And then there's meditation and wisdom. Now, to allow the practice of these six things is the main purpose of Zen Center's community, and to make it available to other people. And one way we do that is, for example, we have, for the most part, decided to not have any media representations of our practice. People come all the time. In fact, newspapers and television people threaten us that they'll do a bad story on us if we don't accommodate them with a good story. It's really extraordinary. The arrogance of the media is just unbelievable. I can understand some of Nixon's complaints.

[04:24]

But on the other hand, the media has a right to report news, but generally they're not reporting news. The local newspapers were quite nice too, you know, they come and they just want to do a story because we're there. But national media, usually they have some idea like, what are the new religious groups or are the young people's movement all like Manson, you know, or something like that. So then they're talking to you to find out how you're not like Manson, you know. And, you know, I mention this because right now I got a phone call yesterday with ABC television wants to do a fourth or third part of a series on world Buddhism on us. They did the others outside the country and filmed them. They got an Emmy for it etc. I don't like to reject it out of hand but I will talk with them but I have some ... so far we've always decided not to do such things except in Japan where it doesn't affect as much we've let Japanese distributors do stories about us. But part of this is that because we don't allow or as much as possible limit media representations of ourselves is partly because of emphasis placed on actually doing it, actually that talking about it actually interferes with your perception of it.

[05:49]

So, the result is that people want to find out something about us, have to physically come. So, we have enormous call on guest space, etc. So, one thing we do, which we started because we wanted to keep Tassara open when we bought Tassara in 66. It's an extraordinarily beautiful isolated mountain valley in the middle of 350,000 acre wilderness area. We kept it open to people to come. But now, the majority of people come because they're interested in what we're doing or want to participate in what we're doing in their own way. So anyway, we keep Zen Center open for people to come and participate in it. And the same at Green Gulch, we're creating a place called the Wheel Ride Center. George Wheel Ride, who was the co-inventor of Polaroid camera, used to own it and he more or less gave us this valley right beyond the Golden Gate Bridge on the ocean. And this will be a place for a painter or a poet or a scientist or writer to come and have some space. It's actually an old Zen tradition to keep your place open for such. In fact, in Japan, Kobori Roshi's temple is, Zen temples in Kyoto are where

[07:09]

the Communist Party meets, and the Zaibatsu who control Sumitomo and Mitsubishi meet, and many painters and artists. It's kind of space for that kind of, so we'll leave, have the Wheelwright Center open to that kind of space. Now, I've talked about an hour, I think. You told me 45 minutes. Stop in a minute. So what we're trying to do, oh I know, I'm getting back to the question of value. Instead of trying to have the most, the best building or the most, the best of something, aside from the fact you don't want to have things that are rare or cause people to feel, other people to want them because it's troublesome. Value, you more have the best table you can make. So, your community is also defined by the number of people who can perform the services that you need. Now, we're not trying to be completely independent or isolated. In fact, the more Taoist-type practice is sometimes somewhat superficially characterized as, you know, trying to go to a groovy place and get groovy with it and eliminate your internal commotion and prevent other commotion from coming. And the Zen way is much more to go where the most disturbances are and be able to not be disturbed and in fact link your commotion with other people's commotion, but you yourself aren't so caught by your commotion.

[08:38]

So actually you allow yourself to be exploited. You allow yourself to be deceived. You're not always trying to correct people. You go along with them and join in their situation. So we're not trying to be isolated and we're not trying to be independent. It's rather interdependent. But we do find ourselves moving towards some kind of definition which takes various forms. For instance, now we have a woodworking shop which makes tables and bunk beds for the Panthers and all kinds of things for people related and friends of our community. And we'll have the tables that we can make. We won't try to have the best table possible. You know, there's more that sense of value. And as for clothes, we have a thing we call the alaya stitchery, which makes pillows, meditation pillows. I think made the meditation pillows in the room, meditation room upstairs, but also makes these pants, which we call fat pants. And Again, I think it may be interesting to extrapolate a little on some differences. For example, for Buddhism and also for Japanese culture, which is so influenced by Buddhism because Chinese monks brought the Chinese culture to Japan, clothing is not thought of as something that covers your indecency and allows convenience, which is more or less the idea in our book. They fit our body.

[10:07]

but it's more like cloth has its own dignity and you have a relationship with it. So you don't cut the cloth and shape it so much, you more or less more simply put it around your body and it has its own relationship and you move in a rhythm with it. The concept of rhythm is very important in the skin, it's a kind of field or body culture which does this. So more formal situations require clothing which more restricts your rhythm, which slows your rhythm down. Likewise, in Japanese gardens and Chinese gardens, or the steps up to a place, you often make, create a space where you have to walk in like this to get to a place, because you are physically changing in the process, and you often put several steps, because the steps of going up physically slows you down and changes your breathing. And then it may require some alertness to step on this and this step, which also establish a rhythm. So they actually are working with your rhythm as you approach this type of building or that type of building and your clothes, etc. And also clothes are more to allow the energy of the body and your hang-ups to be revealed. So you're not trying to hide or facade to make you look wonderful, but rather you wear clothes which show how your body is, you know, tilted or etc. Anyway, so we find ourselves making clothes

[11:35]

and furniture, and growing vegetables, and with a neighborhood foundation. And then we have a children's center in two places. And we're trying to work with how do you bring up children. Again, this goes back to the ideas of culture. I think most children have been brought up by their culture primarily and partially by parents. But when you try to have each individual unit, which supports itself, has its own money, et cetera, then in addition brings up the children primarily except you send them off to public or private school which is more it's not some wholeness in that sense of what you're trying to teach a person. It seems to me that most families don't have it together enough to really bring up a child and they botch it you know but it's not botched so often when they're shared bringing up the children and when you have non And each person, perhaps, each person's own realization is somehow related to having a child, maybe. And non-parents have a right to have a relationship to children. They may not need to, but we create opportunities. We're just trying to think this out. We talk to people like Eric Erickson about it, who lives out in the Bay Area, and others to try to get as much information or experience from people as we can, but mostly we are

[13:04]

trying to see what is necessary in our own situation. And so we are trying to preserve the family unit as and with the primary responsibility for bringing up the children, but allow the children to also have communal space, common culture space and non-parental relationships, if that makes sense. So we're, all of what we're doing is just a process. We don't, you know, we're just trying things and we're not trying, we don't try anything too radical. We're more like, as I said to Stuart yesterday, we don't run across the ice if we can run around the lake, unless there's a forest fire or something. We tend to try to do things that seem to be possible and we don't break, we don't like change our diet radically because, I mean, diet is extraordinarily subtle and it's been going on for thousands of years and what you eat, little tiny amounts of what you eat may be very important. just a word if you, you know, aren't so involved in thinking about things, just a single word can flash over you with a physical reaction. How much more so a gram of something in a tranquilizer, you know, or in what you eat. So we tend to try to stay within the realms of what's been traditionally eaten, but yet we're changing our diet, you know, and we try to stay in the realm of how you usually bring up children. We're not Rikians, you know, but

[14:30]

and may be informed by some of Wilhelm Reich's ideas, but we try to bring up our children with also the changes more out of our own intuition or needs. Let's see, is there something I've forgotten, Yvonne? I guess I've mentioned the major things that we find our community trying to do. Again, there's two or three ideas which go in there. One is the Zen monasteries or community. Zen life was first put together by a man named Hyakujo in China about the year, oh, in the 7th century. And he said, a day of no work is a day of no eating. In fact, when he was quite elderly and they tried to take his tools away from him so he wouldn't work in the field, he refused to eat.

[15:33]

So this is quite different from a great deal of Buddhism where some Buddhist monks will not handle money, for example, but for Zen you wouldn't ask somebody to do something you wouldn't do yourself. So there's a day of no work is a day of no eating is and all of that the ramifications of that is again a parameter in our community. In addition, the idea of right livelihood and right livelihood or right survival is Well literally it's sometimes translated as don't sell liquor and it means don't sell Buddhism, don't try to convince anybody of Buddhism, don't try to intoxicate people, don't try to press your view on someone. So you wouldn't run a liquor store, you know, you don't or a bar and you wouldn't You might drink liquor, but you wouldn't sell liquor. You wouldn't be involved in things which, you wouldn't work in the armament industry. You'd work toward things which benefited people pretty clearly. So, many people in Cent Center do work outside the community, and when you try to limit yourself to right livelihood, strictly speaking, there's almost no jobs you can find except washing dishes.

[17:00]

Again, there's the counter idea of our Lenin-like willingness to do what other people do, so you, if necessary, work in the armament industry. But again, you may work there with some different kind of attitude, you know. That's enough, maybe. Well, it is nice to sit with a possible dreamer.

[18:06]

I think, yeah, a dream, a possible dream is the only dream that is worthwhile. A possible dreamer, not like the impossible dreamer. No, no, no, a possible dreamer, that's the difference. And as I listened to Dick, I was struck by the, not only the humanity of what he was saying, I'm sorry, I was struck not only by the, oh, we have no microphone, okay. No, it's all right, it's all right. I was struck not only by the humanity of what he was saying, but the enormous biological sense which his concept made. I heard centeredness, I heard linkage, I heard connectedness, I heard expressions about rhythm, field, communication, and the creation of a human entity where man is the measure, man in all things. And the idea of centeredness and linkage, and that the center being there, available for linking up with and linking to

[19:33]

is something which I think he expressed very clearly. This sense which you say, which you spoke of, of background, the ever-present background, and the object, time, the gravitational pulse, so to speak, of time, which binds, provided if you are in a moving world, And if you in some way arrest that, then you can much more readily focus into how things really are. That is something which many speak of, but to you and to those who practice what you practice is a daily contact with a source which is clearly very important and becoming much more important in terms of survival. I was so struck by the imagery which you used at the beginning, the imagery of the relationship between the made and unmade,

[20:55]

between the mind and the connectedness to the body, and the relationship, the reciprocal relationship between mind and body. And I hope particularly that since you mentioned body culture, and since this is a means of self-communication and communication which is very important, yet totally or rather atrophied in Western culture, because of the exosomatic extensions of ourselves through technology, I hope that you will comment on that, particularly in relation to the experience of it in children. Because I think when children learn to experience that in a coherent way, without puzzlement, as part of their daily lives, on a sort of off-course basis, I think many attitudes, other attitudes, could change. And I, for one, would like to hear more about how you go about that.

[22:09]

That, that is the relation of this body, the sensors, the slits, the slits of the special sensors, the skin as a wider sensor, the muscle system as an even wider sensor and coordinator and propellant, and of course the visceral functions as well. All this area of body awareness which is being talked about, touted about, sold, marketed, packaged, and so on, nowadays, I think needs a very careful and respectful look. And I think the way you seem to go about it, from what we've heard, conveys this feeling of not just acquisitive curiosity, I'll put my body under control, I'll control my heart rate, I'll run my blood pressure, and so on, but a sense of reverence, of respect, which is this part of the sentence. Now, when one connects with one's body, and in some way acquires, in the best sense, a friendship with it, a sort of

[23:25]

which can be in other ways called mastery, but in fact it has to be a friendship, then I think one can convey this and model it to others. And in this respect, again, I was very interested to see the way your practices are conveyed essentially by a sort of subtle, as I sense it, subtle, non-coercive communication, which requires discipline to be sure, but nevertheless is a communication, a sort of trading. I give and I take, and I take and I give, a sort of sensible biological arrangement. And when one comes then to the encumbrances which surround one's person, namely what you said about possessions and all the excrements, so to speak, of affluence, culture, which surrounds us and in which we are wallowing, drowning, and which our children cannot escape from. Again, one has to devise means of, particularly during a phase of transition,

[24:54]

How does one carry out this kind of attitude in a society which is totally determined and totally geared to do precisely the opposite? How do you manage? How do you fight the suburban ghetto and the ghetto? Both the children in both, in a sense, are deprived. They both stare, except that one stares on the television, which he got for five dollars and with a Coke bottle, and he sees the same thing. And the other one sits in a plush basement in suburbia and looks at the same thing. I have something about television. I hope that no media people hear, but I really think that that is, as it's developed, it is one of the most malignant influences on the development of our children. How does one manage that? How does one insulate this? Every culture which has survived, every culture, and cultures and religions are survival devices, they're evolutionary survival devices which the social organism has always developed to attain the unattainable by making it possible to have, by building life rafts. Every has had

[26:21]

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