This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Evening, everybody. Can you hear? Is the sound working? Yes, good. Good. Oh, well. We just had a service a while ago for the gun violence in Gilroy and El Paso and Dayton, Ohio that's happened in the last few days. And yesterday, August the 6th, was Kathy and my 43rd wedding anniversary.

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And it was also, I think, the 74th anniversary of the American Armed Forces dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on that day in 1945, I think, and probably tomorrow is the anniversary of the second bomb. You would have thought they made an impression with the first one. Why would they need to drop another one? And on Monday, a couple days ago, we had the death of Toni Morrison, one of our great American novelists, who wrote with such power and passion about the world of African Americans, especially the suffering of African American women.

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but also the strength you get from enduring suffering and the power of community to hold suffering. That was lately, but it could have been any four days. of the year we would have had such anniversaries and such events because this is us. This is us. This is who we are. This is what we have done. These are the consequences of living in a big human family.

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But the world could be otherwise. The world could be otherwise. The facts don't change. But how do we understand them? How do we understand those facts? How do we hold them in our hearts? How do we live our lives and go forth? The world could be otherwise. It depends on us. It depends on our strength and our vision. commitment and mostly our courage. So I'll read you a little bit from this recent book of mine, The World Could Be Otherwise, Imagination and the Bodhisattva Path.

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And it starts out with a story about how imagination can change the world. even under the most trying of circumstances. And it's a story about the French surrealist poet Robert Desnos. Desnos was a young man during World War II times. He was Jewish. He was French. When the Germans overcame France and set up a Puppet government there, Desnos, along with the many other young men and women, went underground and fought in the resistance. Then he was captured and he was sent to the concentration camps. So one day, along with a lot of other men, Desnos was crowded onto the bed of one of the trucks that transports prisoners from the barracks.

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They all knew where they were going. Every day a full load of people left the barracks and every day it came back empty. They were going to the gas chambers and the ovens. You can imagine the feeling of the people on that truck, the mood, no one is speaking, no one is looking at one another. truck arrives, the prisoners descend in that same stricken mood. And the guards who, they're just their job, you know, they always have a good time and joke around, but they couldn't keep up their joking. They caught the mood of these prisoners. But all of a sudden, one fellow in the line,

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curls around, grabs hold of the palm of the hand of the man behind him and sticks his face down as if he's a palm reader. It's Desnos. He's a palm reader, it turns out. He's reading this guy's palm. It just struck him that this was the moment to read this guy's palm. So he starts reading his palm and he says, I can't believe this. I have never seen such a long lifeline. This is amazing. You're going to have a really long life, family, wealth. You're going to be a wealthy guy. You're going to have a great life. I can't believe it. I'm so excited for you. I'm so thrilled. Everybody says, what? What? But they just... can't help themselves in that moment of maximum intensity, and they all stick out their palms.

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A whole bunch of them surrounding Desnos with their palms thrust out, and Desnos grabs palm after palm, and he's reading their palms, and every one is the same. Long life. This one's traveling here and there. This other one's going to live in America. Can you believe it? You're going to go to America, the greatest... country in the world where everybody's happy all the time you're gonna go there gonna have a wonderful wonderful long life there everybody gets this same sort of prediction and the whole mood of course changes and everybody's now there's they start you know laughing and clapping each other on the back and the excitement is absolutely contagious and But even more astonishingly, this has a big impact on the guards.

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Just like the prisoners, the guards had been living a dark spell. You know, Nazi Germany was like living under a spell. How else could such a thing happen? So they had been living in this dark spell in which it was a commonplace, sensible thing that you would march people off to be killed. But now, all of a sudden, with this totally absurd, crazy thing that Desnos is doing, this sudden and gratuitous evocation of an alternative reality, The spell is broken all of a sudden. And the guards are confused.

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They actually don't know what is going on and what they should do. Maybe they're better natures because, of course, they were regular people just like you and me. They had better natures. which had been long suppressed in an effort to conform to the crazy Nazi world, which had been long numb to the grief and the guilt and the horror that they probably felt but couldn't afford to let themselves feel, maybe all that was all of a sudden stirred up by Desnos' powerful commitment total commitment to his absurd or maybe not absurd vision.

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Well, we don't know. We don't really know what the guards were thinking or anything about them. We don't really know who they are. But we do know that they were so undone by what they saw in front of them that they didn't know what to do, it didn't make sense to just go on, so they loaded the men back onto the truck, the truck turned around, went back to the barracks, and these men were never executed. Desnos was not executed in the camps. He was liberated at the end of the war. Amazing, right? I first heard this story at the Jewish Museum in San Francisco.

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Did you know there's a Jewish Museum in San Francisco? They once had a reading that I participated in. It was called something like, Living Jewish Poets Read the Works of Dead Jewish Poets. So there was a whole bunch of Jewish poets on the stage from San Francisco, and each one selected some dead Jewish poet to read works of that poet. And I read works, I remember, of Paul Silan, who I really think is a marvelous poet and has influenced me a lot. But my friend Alan Bernheimer read poems of Desnos, and Alan translates Desnos. And he told this story. And I was so amazed by this story and so moved by it. But after a while I thought, can that really be true? Did that really happen?

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It's just too good to be true, right? So I wondered and I said to Alan, where did you get that story? Is that really true? And he said, I got it from Susan Griffin. who's a Berkeley writer, I don't know Susan Griffin, but I found out how to get a hold of her and I said, Susan, is this true, this story? And Susan said, well, I don't know if it's true really, but I got it from my friend Odette, who was a survivor, wasn't there, but heard it from a man who was there. And she thinks it's a true story. So is it true? But then I thought, it's true. It's true. I have no doubt in my mind whatsoever that this is a true story. When I say I'm absolutely certain that this story is true,

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I don't mean that I've researched it and discovered that it is an objectively verifiable occurrence. I mean that as a human being, I know, you know too, that this story is certainly true. Its truth turns your heart and it expresses something absolutely essential about what it means to be a human being. Because the imagination, again, whether the story happened as an objective fact or not, doesn't matter as much as the fact that it's a story that pierces our imagination. And the imagination is really powerful, and it's of essential import to our humanness. the Bible, and other religious texts.

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Folk tales, myths, rhymes, poems, plays, novels, anecdotes, music, rituals, pictures, dreams, all imaginative productions rise up from the unconscious to expand the soul and to help us to understand who we really are and what the world really is. We can't do without it. With the imagination and the exercise of the imagination, we can move beyond the habitual one-dimensional perspective of our outer perceptions and our naturally fearful emotions, and we can find real strength and courage. We think now of the imagination as a kind of escape from reality, the opposite of reality. Imagination is not the opposite of reality. It's a function in us that cognizes reality, shapes reality.

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We really are imagining this world. We really are. our imagination, take the facts of this world and make it into the world we're living in. How do you like your world? How are you imagining it? Imagination deepens reality. It adds texture, depth, dimension, feeling, and possibility. Everything in us that's creative, and ennobling sources in the imagination. Without imagination, reality is just too flat to go beyond the possible to the impossible. We have to first imagine it with passion and conviction.

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So I don't have to tell you that we're living in a very exciting 21st century, very, very busy and very rough. For the people who are doing really, really well at the top of the heap with their demanding careers, exciting, creative, demanding careers and their busy lives and their social lives and their families and all their interests, this could be the pinnacle. of human life on Earth, this moment, this historical moment, for those people. But it's also exactly because life is so full, very difficult, because it's so stressful and so demanding. The possibilities for growth and accomplishment are absolutely dizzying.

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We could be on Mars in a minute. We could have artificial intelligence in the next minute. You have to know more this hour than you knew last hour. You have to be more. You have to experience more. You even have to have more fun. You've got to go to more fabulous places than you went last year. And this is accelerating all the time. It is actually kind of hard to take this wonderful life that we have. But that's just for a few, maybe like, I don't know, 5% of the people. For the vast majority of the people who don't enjoy such great possibilities. it's actually getting tougher and tougher.

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It's hard to just, like, make the rent. You have to work in the city and live thousands of miles away, or anyway, lots of miles away, and drive for a long time. And the gas is very expensive, and you can barely afford it. And whether you're a privileged person or not, everybody's aware of the world beyond your household. Now the news media is everywhere, except here. It's like our collective nervous system twitching our attention. with constant jolts of true and mostly false information about political, environmental, economic, and social problems.

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And all that becomes the stuff of our psyches and our conversations. What's going to happen in the future? I'm here with our grandchildren. What about them? The dread is thick in the air. And so many of us are disturbed, really badly disturbed. There's so much mental illness and addiction and all that where it's disturbing. The world is very disturbing. But mostly we don't let ourselves feel it because, you know, like those guards, you can't feel the madness, you know, too much. Anyway, what are you going to do about it? I am absolutely convinced not only that the world could be otherwise, but that the world actually is right now otherwise.

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That this world I just described is an imagined world. and we could imagine another world and live in another world. The facts are the same, but the spirit, the energy, the point of view is totally different. The world's possibilities do not have to be limited to the tangible, the knowable, the negotiable. They don't have to be limited to the data that we are maniacally collecting every second on one another. Data gives you the illusion that you know what's going on. Nobody knows what's going on. Data tells you nothing. The world is more than you know. The imagination doesn't measure, devise,

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or instrumentalize. It doesn't define and it doesn't manipulate. Its nature is to open things up, to show us the mystery that we are and the world is, to amaze us, delight us, shock us, inspire us. The imagination has no limit. It leaps easily from the known to the unknown. flies way beyond the facts to visions and intensities. It lightens up the world and it plays in the deep end where heart and love swim. The greatest, most inspiring and most powerful production of the imagination is love.

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To care about others, really care about them with compassion, care about their suffering, care about their well-being. That takes imagination. Most of what we think of as love, or quite a bit of it anyway, is all kind of mixed up with I have my needs I need a friend I need someone to keep me warm at night I want this or that for my life and you fill the bill but that's not love that doesn't last very long as we know from all the relationships that are constantly breaking up every five minutes we don't really yet know how to love. It's really an achievement of the imagination to open the heart that much, to say, this person is so important to me, much more important than anything I would need and want for myself.

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Not only that, this person is myself. The great poet Percy Shelley wrote in his essay, The Defense of Poetry, that poets, by which he meant all people who cultivate the imagination, poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, he said. And what he meant by that was that all just laws, all just societies are based on love and compassion. It's all those people who work with the imagination that open us to love. That's why we value true religious practice and the arts, because they open the heart to love.

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So that's why he said, poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. So here's a little quotation from... another book of mine, a poetry book called Escape This Crazy Life of Tears. And that book is a poetic diary of a pilgrimage to Japan. And so these few lines here are my little shorthand notes of a Dharma talk we heard at a Heiji monastery by Huitzu Suzuki, our dear friend. the living, breathing Suzuki Roshi, who I love a lot. He's a wonderful Zen master. He said this, East, West, the person of Zazen is the same.

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Grandmother mind, the kind heart, is imagination. feeling for another, see them as yourself, takes imagination. Imagination expands the heart. One day, woke, heard sound in both ears, sudden hearing loss, my eyes don't work right either. Age is slowly melting my body with each loss of There's gain. My ears. My eyes. More mine. Now than ever. Before not. So, when I lose my life to death, will my life be owned by me more than it ever was?

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Isn't that astonishing? Who would think such a thing? Who would think such a thing? What a profound teaching. Imagination expands the heart, causing us to understand ourselves as others, to understand that our self doesn't belong to ourself. So that when we lose part of ourselves, we're gaining more truly who we are. It's the opposite of the way we usually look at things, right? I don't think we really understand the possibilities of compassion and love yet. the joy and the liberation possible to understand what we really are and who we really are.

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In Buddhism, the practitioner who strives to understand her life for the purpose of benefiting others To know that one's own life is only one's own when you give it away is called the bodhisattva. Bodhisattvas are the energizer bunnies of Buddhism. They just keep going. What they love to do is practice Dharma on behalf of others. And every way of practice is always with the spirit of benefiting others. Even when we sit in Zazen and we're all by ourselves, sitting in Zazen, we don't think we're all by ourselves. We think that every breath is for and with the whole universe. And when we get up from Zazen, we look around and we think, what can I do?

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How can I help? Oh. Maybe I look at a cloud. That would help. Can't see anything else to do, I'll do that. Every way we help. Bodhisattvas practice generosity, ethical conduct, patient forbearance, which gives them the capacity to take all the difficult things in life, the grief, the sorrow that is everywhere you look, every day, to take those things and turn them into dharma, turn them into strength and beauty. That's the practice of patient forbearance. Enthusiastic effort to really take delight in practice. And also that involves taking care of yourself, knowing what your energy is and so on.

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enthusiastic effort and meditation and transcendent wisdom to develop the I, the actual I of the imagination that sees the world otherwise, that sees through the illusion and the craziness of the worldview that we all share. I always am amused at the end of a seven-day session, people will say, oh, that was a great session, and now, back to the real world. What? The real world? Your breath is not real? Your body is not real? The baffling immensity of your mind is not real? So this book is about all that. It's about the bodhisattva path and how to practice it. So I'll I'll conclude with a poem, since this is about the imagination.

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This is a poem of Robert Desnos, one of my favorite poems of Desnos, and I asked my friend Alan to translate it, and he and a friend collaborated on this translation. A frightening stillness will mark that day, and the shade from street lamps and fire alarms will sap the light, and all will go silent, the quietest and the noisiest. The squalling infants will finally shut up. The tugboats, the locomotives, the wind will silently glide, and the great voice that comes from far away will be heard, passing over the city, long awaited.

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Then, at the millionaire's hour, when the dust, the stones, and the absence of tears arrange the sun's dress on the great deserted squares, finally, The voice will be heard coming. It will growl endlessly at the doors. It will pass over the city, ripping out flags and shattering windows. We will hear it. And what silence before it, but even greater. the silence, that it will not disturb, but that it will charge with approaching death, that it will wither and condemn. Oh, day of sorrows and joys, the day, the day to come when the voice will pass over the city, a ghostly gull told me that the voice loved me as much as I loved it, and that this great

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terrible silence was my love, that the wind carrying the voice was the great revolt of the world, and that the voice would favor me. So thank you all very much to that. But more than that, thank you for already knowing everything I've said. And I know you know everything that I've said, because if you did not, you wouldn't be here. You would not be at Tassajara unless you already understood this. And I'm very grateful to have a room full of friends to support me, and we all support each other.

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Thank you. 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. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org. and click giving.

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