This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning, everyone. Just to clarify, Tassajara is not a business. And all businesses are not businesses. I want to start with a part of a poem. And then later I'll read the whole poem. The piece is, do you remember that time and light are kinds of love? And love is no less practical than a coffee grinder or a safe spare tire. Do you remember that time and light are kinds of love?

[01:03]

And I was debating whether to tell this story, but I'll go ahead and tell the story, which is, as I was writing this talk a couple of days ago, I was writing about love. And at the time, the name of my talk was that Zen equals love, and that the word Zen actually is, I think, a mistranslation. Right? So... It's interesting, this word, and many of you know this, some of you may not, that Zen was the best that people could do to take this word from Chinese to Japanese. In China, it was called Chan. And because of the language, the best they could come up with in transliterating it was Zen. And Chan... was the best they could do, that before that, the Sanskrit word in China was jnana. And jnana is translated as kind of absorption or sitting or, yeah, to sit, absorption.

[02:21]

And I think the word absorption, I think, actually means love. to be absorbed completely in what you're doing, where everything else falls away. As I was working on this talk, an email came in from a friend of mine in... I think she was in Bangkok. And she said, Mark, could you please... Would you mind making an introduction to a good friend of mine who wants to meet... wants to be introduced to Jon Kabat-Zinn, who is one of the real, I think, major players in this space of making mindfulness accessible. Jon has written several books. And I got this email and I thought, why does she think I have a connection with Jon? I had had some really nice connections years ago, but it had probably been three or four years since I had any connection at all with Jon and

[03:24]

So I started writing an email to John. I literally started writing an email to make this introduction, and I realized my friend didn't send me the email address of the person she wanted me to connect John with. So I didn't send this email. I sent my friend asking for this woman's address. Ten minutes later... Of course, I received an email from John saying, just saw your newsletter. Lovely, thank you. And I emailed John and said, this is kind of miraculous, this synchronicity. And I said, I'd love to, you know, it'd be great to catch up sometime. And five minutes later, my phone rings and it's John. And he said, I'm stuck in a hotel in Los Angeles.

[04:27]

I'm at a conference and I mistakenly got here a day early. And then one of the first things John said in this short conversation that we had was he's been thinking that meditation practice is essentially an expression of love. And I said, John, there's something very strange happening here. I said, let me read you what I've just written, that Zen was a mistaken translation, that it actually means love, and that the way that we express it is not only in our meditation practice, but in everything that we do, whether it's what we call but also how we bring practice out into the world. And I think for most of us, that's some kind of business, some kind of business or leadership.

[05:34]

Yeah. So, but the question, you know, the question is... how do we do this? It's easy to say that Zen is an expression of love. Well, first of all, what do we mean by love? And then how do we actually bring this out into the world? Especially this world that we live in now, right? I suppose it's always a really hard time to be alive. It just is, right? I think always. I look back at what my parents lived through World War II and the Holocaust. I was lucky to have not been drafted into the Vietnam War.

[06:44]

So it's interesting, though, coming back to these synchronicities. I was thinking that, I think everything is like that, right? Everything, everything is unexplainable and amazing when we really pay attention. You know, I was just looking at this, this cloth here is, I don't know where, I think I found this in the Tassahara Goodwill. oh, let's see, it would have been, I don't know, 45 years ago, and I sewed, and how'd it get here? Like, what's it doing? It's just been in my closet. Actually, I use it, it come out every time I do a Dharma talk. I get to bring out this cloth that I somehow sewed by hand at Tassahara 45 years ago. And instead of being drafted and finding myself in a war in Vietnam,

[07:48]

I got to walk in the front door here, and I ended up staying for 10 years, living here at the Zen Center. And as Mary was saying, much of my life has been about this kind of bringing these practices, the integration of spiritual practice, contemplative practice, and business practice. And recently, I wrote a book called Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader, in which the subtitle is Lessons from Google and a Zen Monastery Kitchen. Lessons from Google and a Zen Monastery Kitchen. And it was completely, you know, there was some, a variety of accidents and mistakes that led me to write about these seven practices, which came from my good friend, and probably many of you know, Norman Fisher, who I asked to come speak to a group of Google engineers who I was training to be mindfulness teachers inside of Google.

[08:57]

And it was a really interesting event in that somehow no one had told Norman exactly what he was going to do, including me. And I noticed on the agenda, right away it said, Norman gives talk about mindfulness. And Norman was sitting next to me, and I pointed out this to Norman. And Norman very nonchalantly got out a piece of paper and a pen and wrote down these seven practices. And I thought they were beautiful and wonderful. And little by little, a book started to emerge. And when I called, I started feeling funny about it, and I called Norman to get his permission. And I... In that conversation, Norman of course said, what seven practices? He totally didn't know what I was talking about and I read him what they were and he said, those are great. Those are really good and good luck with your book.

[10:00]

So the seven practices are love the work, do the work, don't be an expert, connect to your pain, connect to the pain of others, depend on others, and keep making it simpler. And more and more, when people ask me, what do I mean by mindfulness practice? Or what do you mean mindful leadership? What is that? I now feel like I at least have a roadmap. I think these seven practices are a pretty good roadmap into describing in some way, from some point of view, what mindfulness is and what this kind of bringing mindfulness into our everyday lives. And so actually what I mostly want to talk about here this morning is this question of Zen as love, but maybe more underneath that, the topic of that

[11:12]

I believe we all only have one career. That's what I want to kind of unpack for a few more minutes, right? That we only have one career and that our career is to love, that our career is to find, to discover our own selves, to become more and more aware, self-awareness, And at the same time, to aspire and practice to go beyond our own selves. And part of that is to help others. And again, for some of you who study, who are students of Zen, I'm borrowing this from Dogen, who was the founder of Zen. Zen in Japan in the 13th century, right, to study ourselves and to go beyond ourselves.

[12:13]

And this is the, I think this is the career. And so often I get asked, I seem to be, I don't know why people come to me for career advice since I don't even know what I do. People ask me, well, what do you do? I don't have a pat answer for that. But I find myself... being in conversation with a lot of people from a lot of different aspects of their careers, wanting some help with that. And I've more and more come to this sense of that. It really is a big relief, I think, to realize that we have one career, this career of knowing ourselves, going beyond ourselves, and helping others. And I think this And this practice of knowing ourselves and going beyond ourselves, it's very much interconnected with practicing love.

[13:15]

And by love, I'm talking about, it's a bit like what you might be familiar with Joseph Campbell, who talked about the hero's journey. And he was an anthropologist who back... even before my time, I think in the 1940s, he came up with this hypothesis that all human beings are on a particular life journey. And it starts with, we all are called. There's some sense of call. The first step on the hero's journey is answering the call. And I think this is the call of knowing ourselves and going beyond ourselves, the call to love. And the second step on the hero's journey, which I think is pretty fascinating, is refusing the call, which to me is realizing, the way I interpret that, is that when we are called, when we feel some urge to do something big, when we realize that we have no choice

[14:31]

but to step into the fullness of our lives, the fullness of what it means to be a human being, that the way into that is through suffering and through pain and through difficulty. This is, I think, the human condition, again, which if you go back 2,500 years ago, the Buddha came up with the same sense, that starting on the path to practice, the container, of the path to practice is what does it mean to be a full human being? One of the things I love about Zen is that it doesn't take itself too seriously and that the whole idea of Zen is to get rid of Zen. The whole idea of Zen practice is to be fully human and to be asking and answering that question. What does it mean to be fully human? What does it mean to love yourself. Not so easy.

[15:33]

For whatever reason, not so easy to love ourselves really hard. And then to be able to love ourselves enough, or at least at times enough, that we can step out and connect with and love life, love others. And that the way to do that is to look really closely at why we don't love ourselves and what we don't love about ourselves, to look at all of that stuff that's there, and how this is where I've been learning a lot by reading about and studying, which I think the Buddha did also, and Joseph Campbell does, and the study of how we have evolved as human beings And Zen in some way is an antidote to some of that, our own evolution, right? That we, I've talked about my friend often.

[16:39]

I had a friend, I have a friend who, actually he recently left Google, a really interesting man who, my friend Mario, who grew up in Spain with the burning question of how does the brain work, right? He wanted to know, like, what is it about the human mind? He wanted to know how does the human mind, how does the human brain work? And Mario became a physician. He got his MD. And he was then really disappointed and discovered that doctors don't know how the brain works. So he then continued on his path and got a PhD in neuroscience. Again, disappointed. Neuroscientists don't know how the brain works. So then he got really highly passionate about storytelling and filmmaking, and he proceeded to get his master's degree in filmmaking.

[17:39]

And talk about synchronicities, right? And he got hired by Google to be a filmmaker. And his second week at Google, he was walking by one of the main auditoriums and heard someone speaking in this auditorium, and there were several hundred people in the audience. And Mario walked in, and he immediately said, here's someone who knows how the brain works. And it was Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. And it was soon after that that I met Mario, and he was in one of my classes. I was teaching mindfulness at the time at Google. And Mario became kind of a student of mine, and then... we became colleagues. And it was Mario who first said to me that we human beings are descendants of the nervous apes, right? The apes that were chill and cool, they all got killed. It's the ones, it's that so part of our evolution is around scanning for threats, right?

[18:49]

And this is, right, that we've evolved we've evolved as human beings to be alive and pass on our genes. I think we also evolved to be loving and wise, but we have to contend with the nervous ape in all of us. And I think this is why we have the inner critic, that we are scanning for threats internally. And it's this evolutionary process that, wants to keep us safe. I think it's really good to remember that that voice internally and externally, our judgments, our fears, our scanning for threats, is about safety. And we also, and this is one of the things that the Buddha talks about, is that we are also the descendants of the imaginative apes. We're always imagining what's lacking, right?

[19:50]

That's... There's always something left. And this, from an evolutionary point of view, this is good. Imagine that if you had a meal and you were done, you didn't need to eat anymore. Well, that's not the way it is. We need that next meal. We need that next entertainment or distraction, sex, any of those things, any of the cravings. And we're also descendants of the empathic apes in that we are... We've evolved to literally feel the feelings of others, but we've evolved to be tribal. And it's only a certain group that's the in-group, and everyone else becomes the out-group. And there's super interesting studies about this. So it's interesting how this is, essentially, this is greed, hate, and delusion. This is greed, hate, and delusion is scanning for threats, always needing something, and the delusion of separateness, the delusion that we are separate.

[20:54]

So part of this practice is even to love the nervous ape, to love the imaginative ape, to love the empathic ape in all of us and to get to know it, to really get to know it and to not be so tossed around by greed, hate, and delusion. I was thinking of, you know, I wrote, this book came out a couple months ago, and I've been doing a lot of really interesting interviews. The one that really stands out for me was, it was like a seven-minute interview for this radio station. It was a phone interview for a radio station in Mississippi by an African-American man. His name was Alvin. And it was one of those, you know, these radio interviews, like I come on, I can hear all these commercials.

[22:00]

It's all very hyper. And Alvin comes on and he says, so Mark, what's the first practice? And I tell him about that. And then right away he cuts, what's the second practice? You know, we go through all seven practices. I had like 30 seconds to answer. And he said, okay, we're done. And then suddenly his whole conversation a demeanor changed and he said, can I ask you a personal question? And it was really interesting to feel the qualitative difference from him being this radio person to he just dropped down and I felt this immediate connection with him. And he said, how does it make you feel that our president does the exact opposite of all seven of your practices? And I felt like he's really asking me this question and I need to, how can I meet him in this moment?

[23:03]

And I could feel almost like tears coming to my eyes with his question because I could feel it was a very personal question. And I said, it breaks my heart. It breaks my heart to have what we as a country and that our children and that we're being exposed to this particular style of leadership. So Zen as love and only one career. Again, a little more nuance about what this might look like. So I think if you look at Zen practice through the lens of love, you can see it's all about love. It's just slightly hidden. It's just beneath the surface. And I think the way that Zen expresses love is through four core paradoxes. And these paradoxes are around self and selflessness, around time and timelessness, around effort and effortlessness, and around

[24:19]

what's kind of ordinary, and richness, right? And so I want to suggest that these are kind of four core consciousness practices, Zen practices, love practices, which is the practice of letting go of self. Again, getting to know self. Again, self is, I'm using it here as it's that, you know, it's our It's our small self. It's the self of greed, hate, and delusion. And getting to know it and leaning into our loving, big mind, the mind that is not separate, the mind that feels, imagine feeling safe, imagine nothing lacking, and imagine no separateness between not only each other but all of life. And to me, when John said on my phone call with him, meditation practice is an expression of love.

[25:22]

I think very practically it is just that, that we're not, you know, there's all kinds of ways that meditation gets talked about these days, you know, from stress relief to, you know, many, many benefits, and those are all great. You know, I'm really glad that there's lots of benefits, and I'm glad that science is studying about how it changes your brain. That's terrific. However, I think it's more like It's more like stepping into practicing what it's like to be completely safe and not scanning for threats. What it's like to not lack anything, to not have, to feel needless, nothing lacking, to cultivate that and to not feel separate, to practice with this radical sense of connection. and partly even going back to Mary's introduction of me, I felt like my first real experience of this I felt like was in the Tassajara Zen Monastery kitchen.

[26:35]

Where it was kind of seamless, this going from doing meditation practice every day, practicing this sense of safety, satisfaction, connection, and again, Our language is so dualistic. It's something even beyond those words. But then going right into the kitchen every day and bringing those practices into chopping carrots and onions and working with people in an environment where there was tremendous pressure. We had, unlike in most of the world, when the meal is ready, you ring the bell. In a Zen monastery, when the bell rings, the meal is ready. And this puts a tremendous amount of pressure on things. And then there's also, Tassahara turns into a resort and conference center and has a reputation for producing gourmet quality of vegetarian meals three times a day.

[27:47]

And so this was an environment where there was tremendous amount of expectations, pressure. In the summertime, it would be 100 degrees. When I worked in the kitchen, there was no electricity. Everything was done by hand. And yet, I just loved it. I just felt like I love work. And this is, like, it just gave me great joy. And I also found in some... strange way, it helped my meditation practice. To be working with people, to be expressing the sense of love and service in that environment made me want to practice harder. Made me want to see my own, I mean, certainly, especially when I was, I got to be the head cook for a year. And there, that was a real introduction to leadership, to see how many things I did that weren't working and how angry people would get with me for telling them what to do or not telling them what to do.

[29:01]

Either way, some people were angry with me for one and something. It was like, wow, these humans are so complicated. And how do you ask someone to cut the onions and they find out? I hate cutting onions. Do you hate me? Like, no, I don't hate you. I'm just asking you to... And it's exactly that way at Google. It's exactly the same. It's the same exact thing. Like, would you do this report? Well, why are you... Like, anyhow, it's so interesting being able to bring this sense of work into the world. Being able to bring practice and work together. And again, I think these... these practices of selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness, and richness are all ways. Timelessness is to just do what you're doing and to have the ability to not be clocking everything.

[30:06]

Effortlessness is to Again, so much of Zen, I think, it's this paradox of this effort to not make an effort. This effort, it's like Suzuki Roshi famously says, I think it's in the book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, a father who thinks he's a good father is not a good father. That someone who thinks that, someone who, if you want self, the way you The way you get self-respect is to let go of wanting self-respect. Just being, just being with what we're doing, just being more and more knowing ourselves and going beyond ourselves. And this practice of richness is seeing just how incredibly rich everything is when we're not caught in our small minds, when we're not caught by judgments and things.

[31:09]

Hmm, let's see. All right, what should we do? I have like another week's worth of things to talk about here. And I'm, you know, we can't practice timelessness. Mary told me we can't do timelessness too long this morning for a little bit, for a little bit. So I think I do want to try something that I actually think it's important for me to stop talking and have you talk a little bit to each other. So find a partner, quietly. So without saying anything, completely quietly, feel free to turn to the person next to you, and then I'll give you some instructions. Find a partner. If you happen to be a three, that's okay. Two would be better. In a minute, I'll let you introduce yourself.

[32:15]

But for now, just turn to the person. And here's what we're going to do. Okay. If you need a partner, feel free to just, you know, if you want to opt out of this, you can. But you'll be sorry. So what I want to suggest is just have a short conversation with your partner about how does love show up in your life? How does love show up or not show up in your life? This is the suggested question. So there's the question. I also want to bring in practice number three of my seven practices is don't be an expert.

[33:23]

So I want you to not be an expert as you answer this question. Don't try and be witty or smart or even have it together. It's a really hard question. You probably don't know the answer and that's great. I want you to go with be awkward. Just jump in. Like, here's how I bring love into my work and life, or here's how it doesn't show up. That's the suggested topic. The other possible topic is talk about anything you want to. Because this is a rare... This, talk about... you know, synchronicity, you may never again have the four minutes with this person in which one of you can talk and one of you can listen. I'm not going to time per person, but I want to make sure that you're practicing listening and you're practicing speaking and that you're bringing as much a sense of lack of expertise into this conversation.

[34:38]

Okay? So I'm If you haven't, in a moment, you might have to keep voices down, right? Keep voices down so that you don't have to yell at each other. That's one thing I've learned. And this is just an experiment. Let's see what happens. And then, Doan, if you can ring a bell in four minutes. Literally, we're literally going to do this. So it's roughly two minutes each. Again, I'm not going to... Well, maybe, how about ringing a bell at two minutes so we know it's halfway? Do you have a watch over there? You must have a watch, right? And then at four minutes, and then we're done, and we'll come back. All good? Close enough? Go ahead. more minutes.

[37:49]

Two more minutes. Thanking your partner.

[40:34]

Coming back. Clearly they don't let you talk to each other other than... Anyone make a new best friend? So just to... I realized one thing I wanted to do is just give a few examples and read the poem and be out of here. So I felt like I already gave an example from Zen of self and selflessness, which is Dogen's, right, to study the self. Study the way is to study the self. And then it's about going beyond the self. When it comes to timelessness, Suzuki Roshi in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind says, time goes from present to to past. Time goes from present to past.

[41:36]

There's a famous, many, many known kind of Zen cones about effortlessness. One is, you know, what is the way? And the response is ordinary mind. Ordinary mind is the way. Again, this to me is an expression of effortlessness. And when it comes to richness, one of my favorite Suzuki Roshi quotes, which my first... My first career after leaving the Zen Center was I started a greeting card company called Brush Dance. Despite that, I've almost never sent anyone a greeting card. I've happened to produce millions of them, literally. And one was a Suzuki Roshi quote that said, the world is its own magic. The world is its own magic. And I think... It's interesting if you read Zen literature too through the lens of love. Like try that sometime.

[42:36]

So like, you know, the original Zen story is Bodhidharma being asked by the emperor of China, right? What is, you know, what is Zen or what is the highest meaning of the holy truths? And Bodhidharma, it's translated as empty without holiness. I think he really said love, right? Love. He's really said love. And if you look at all the, you know, when the answer, when the Zen teacher answers a similar question and says, the cypress tree in the garden, he's like, love, come on, he's saying love, it's clear. So I want to end with the poem, the full poem that I started with. And this is a poem by Tony Hoagland called The Word. Down near the bottom of the crossed out list of things you have to do today, Between green thread and broccoli, you find that you have penciled sunlight. Resting on the page, the word is as beautiful.

[43:40]

It touches you as if you had a friend, and sunlight were a present he had sent you from some place distant. As the morning, to cheer you up and to remind you that among your duties, pleasure is a thing. That also needs accomplishing. Do you remember that time and light are kinds of love? And love is no less practical than a coffee grinder or a safe spare tire. Tomorrow, you may be utterly without a clue. But today, you get a telegram from the heart in exile proclaiming that the kingdom still exists. the king and queen alive, still speaking to their children, to anyone among them who can find the time to sit out in the sun and listen.

[44:46]

Yeah, I love the sunlight. You might pencil that in on your list of things to do today. Tomorrow you may be utterly without a clue, but today you get a telegram proclaiming the kingdom still exists. Despite the insanity in our world, the kingdom still exists. And I think the way to find it is to love. Thank you. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[45:49]

May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[45:51]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_97.95