This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Welcome to the San Francisco Zen Center, Green Gulch Farm, Green Dragon Zen Temple. Good morning. I went a few weeks ago to the Museum of Modern Art to see the Ruth Ozawa exhibit, kind of a brilliant artist who was turning everyday objects into art. And there was a quote from her that I saw on one of the, next to one of her paintings. And it was instructions to her students that said, draw what you see, not what you know.

[01:08]

Draw what you see, not what you know. And that's really stayed with me. And I thought, in a way, it's a good saying or almost a definition of Zen practice. Live, live what you see. Live what you see, not what you see. what you know. So I wonder right now, what are each of you seeing? What do you see? What do you see? I mean, you might even just look around. Look around. What do you see? And can you let go of what you know, right? So maybe often what we know is, you know, scanning for threats or internal critic or all kinds of ideas that we have. So this practice, I think she's encouraging this practice of letting go of the usual scanning that we might have and the possibility of just being here.

[02:27]

maybe here, with a sense of curiosity and maybe even with a sense of wonder. What will happen? What will happen here in this time that we have together here in this amazing old barn, now meditation hall? And I often, in my life, and teaching that I do, whether it's in the Zen world or in the business world, I often like to start with two questions. What brings you here? And what really brings you here? And the what brings you here is generally what I think of as the small mind question, right? What brings you here? But then putting in Inserting the what really brings you here is an invitation for a different perspective.

[03:38]

A different perspective. What really brings you here? And then the question is, well, what do I mean by here? Here in this particular place? Green Gulch? This Zendo? Or out to Green Gulch? Or... what brings you here, wherever you are in this place in your life right now, or the bigger, what brings you here? How did you get here? And I don't know the answer to any of those questions. How did I get here, here? I first landed at the San Francisco Zen Center when I was 22 years old. I took a one-year leave of absence from Rutgers University in New Jersey.

[04:45]

And somehow that one year turned into 10 years of living here. at the Zen Center and I started at the city center and then I went to Tassajara. And I felt like I was just beginning my time at Tassajara when I got tapped on the shoulder and was informed that I was going to Green Gulch, this place called Green Gulch Farm. And I responded that I didn't want to go to Green Gulch. And these were different times then And the response was, you're not being asked. And then I found out that I was coming to Green Gulch for the purpose of figuring out how to farm with horses. And I was certain that somehow someone had misread my resume.

[05:53]

despite that I was from the garden state, and despite that I liked gymnastics, and I did a little bit of work with horses, but not the kind that moved at all. So I was like, I thought someone had made a mistake here. And yet, you know, and yet, here I am. And here each of you are, however you answered the what brings you here. And what I want to talk about this morning is the power of and yet. And yet. Interesting, right? And yet. Whatever, you know, whatever we might say about whatever we might say about what brought us here or what we like or don't like, there's generally an important perspective, some other perspective, and yet.

[07:03]

And I want to read two of my favorite and yet quotes from the Zen tradition. And the first is from Dogen, and this is how he begins his instructions for meditation practice. He says, the way is basically perfect and all-pervading. How could it be contingent upon practice and realization? The whole body is far beyond the world's dust. What is the use of going off here and there to practice? And then the next sentence is, and yet. And yet, if there is the slightest discrepancy, the way is as distant as heaven from earth. if the least like or dislike arises, the mind is lost in confusion. So in some way he's saying, fundamentally, we all are awakened beings.

[08:06]

There's nothing missing, there's nothing lacking. And this is a fundamental truth and I think a fundamental conflict within the Zen tradition. And to me it's interesting, Zen, Zen, I just think, is a code word for being human. The whole objective of Zen practice is how to be more human, how to be fully human, or maybe how to be fully ourselves. And so Dogen is starting by saying, we are all fundamentally free, awake, perfect, just as we are And yet, if the least like or dislike arises, we're lost. And yet, we're easily distracted.

[09:09]

We're easily looking for what can go wrong or fantasizing about what might go right. we're doing anything but going back to the Ruth Osawa quote, anything but just seeing what's here. One of the common phrases that our founder of these temples, Suzuki Roshi, used was seeing things as it is. And I think that's what Ruth Osawa was suggesting by her statement about draw, or as I'm saying, live Live what you see, not what you know. Yeah, so, and yet, you know, so you could say there's an awful lot of suffering in the world right now, and yet there's a tremendous amount of beauty and amazing, amazing, wonderful, beautiful things that are happening.

[10:14]

You know, There's so much to do. There's so much to do. And yet we can stop and enjoy and enjoy this breath and enjoy this life. So one of my other favorite and yet quotes comes from Suzuki Roshi who said, every existence in nature every existence in the human world, every cultural work that we create is something which was given or is being given to us. So everything, everything was given to us. But then he throws in the, and yet, and yet, everything is originally one. We are, in actuality, giving out everything. moment after moment, we are creating something.

[11:18]

And this is the true joy of life. So here he's, I love the Zen practice and maybe human practice has a way of kind of pulling the rug out from under us, right? This every existence was given to us. I think we can kind of get that, right? Everything, everything. this air, this wood, these hands, this body and mind, it's all gift. It's all gift. And I think that's seeing that it's all gift. But then the second part of Suzuki Roshi's statement is, and yet... Everything is already fundamentally one. And therefore, we are always in the act of creating something new.

[12:27]

We don't know. We don't know what will happen next. There's this sense of... To me, the in yet is stepping in in a very powerful, wonderful way to this sense of... of not knowing, not knowing. Originally, as I was putting this talk together, the title was going to be Horses Don't Get Stuck in the Mud, and Yet. And this was based on, right, so I did end up, despite my resistance, I ended up here working with the horses. These two horses, 1,800-pound Herchelon horses that Zen Center had purchased. And I arrived and basically said, here, figure it out. Figure out how to farm with these animals. And it was actually three years of some of the most wonderful, fantastic learning part of my life, being here and getting to know those animals and learning from those animals.

[13:38]

Of course, we also had cows every morning I would milk a cow and bring a bucket of fresh milk out to the... And that lasted until we realized that in order to get milk, the cow needs to be pregnant. And that means something is going to happen. And when that happened, when this little calf showed up, that was the... No, we can't do this. You know, this was something beyond. This didn't... It didn't feel... It didn't feel right. But the... One of my favorite stories from that time was I was actually standing right over here when someone came running up to me and said, Mark, there's a horse stuck in the mud. And I said, horses don't get stuck in the mud. And they said, come, come look. And I went over where the Wheelwright Center is now on the other side of the kitchen where there is a

[14:41]

We used to have the horses out there to feed and to pasture, and there's a small pond there that was mostly dried up and was mostly mud, and apparently one of our horses, Snip, went in to get a drink of water and was not quite being careful enough and slid and slid and slid and was up to her head in the mud, this 1,800-pound horse. And... The next thing that I remember, the scene I have seared into my mind is Green Gulch fire hoses wrapped around the butt of this horse. 20 or 30 people from Muir Beach Fire Department and all of the students all little by little yanking on this fire hoses and I was in the mud holding onto the horse's head And little by little, we got the horses, the horse out.

[15:44]

So horses don't get stuck in the mud. And yet, and yet, and yet they, you know, they do. And I think this and yet, this and yet is really all about perspective, perspective taking, perspective taking. And... It's really hard, it's hard, almost impossible not to get embroiled in political conversations these days, and I really do not want to go there, but it's impossible not to in a way, and it's okay, especially I think from the perspective of perspective taking and from the perspective of impermanence and change and emptiness. This is where I wish somehow, you know, maybe part of our job is to insert a bit more sense of seeing what is and not so much what we know.

[16:55]

Or seeing the world more as it is. Seeing our own perspective and other people's perspectives. But from including a sense of self and selflessness and the fact of change and impermanence, that we really don't know where this is all going to lead. We know there's a good deal of pain and suffering now, and I think I've been studying history, and it seems like there's been a good deal of pain and suffering at least for the last 400 years in our country. but this sense of perspective taking. And there's two, there's a beautiful Zen poems about perspective taking, right? When the wind stops, flowers fall. When the bird sings, the mountains become more calm, right?

[17:59]

When the wind stops, the flowers fall. So flowers are not supposed to fall. They're supposed to fall when it's windy. It's not supposed to be that way. And when the bird sings, it's something about the sound of the bird that allows us to have a feeling of the mountains becoming more calm. And I think so much of Zen practice, this practice of perspective taking, this practice of acknowledging that we each see the world through our own particular lens. You know, there's one image is that we humans are like a frog at the bottom of a well looking up, right? And that we only see this much. And I think this is part of the second half of Dogen's, right?

[19:01]

And yet, how can we train ourselves to see more clearly, more widely? How can we acknowledge that we can't help but see through our own lens? But how can we see through other people, at least aspire to see through others' lenses? How can we see even through the lens of a frog or of a tree or of a rock? I was I was out in the wilderness up at the Trinity Alps last week. And I was sitting next to a tree at the base of a lake. And this tree seemed to have like five or six big root patterns, all beautifully, gracefully going into the lake at the bottom of this tree.

[20:02]

And I was like, how? what is the perspective, what is it? You know, we take things so much for granted about, like even a tree. And when I got home, I asked my friend, my new friend, ChatGPT, I asked, what is happening in a tree that I am not aware of? And it said, oh, there are so many things happening in this tree. You have no idea. And it listed five separate categories of cell growth and regulation and photosynthesis. And we just go, we look at, you know, it's like we look at it and we think it's, oh, it's just a tree everywhere. And we have no idea what's happening. going on inside of it and all of the wonder and amazement that is happening.

[21:04]

And of course, the same is true in us, right? And people around us, right? The miracle that we each are, you know, that our hands and bodies and minds are, right? So this, you know, we're all very ordinary, We're all very ordinary human beings, and yet, and yet, I think this is the great and yet. One of my, during the three years that I lived here working with the horses, I learned to weld and to sew harness, and I had a welding teacher named Harry Roberts. who Harry was a Irishman, PhD agronomist, thought to be one of the most knowledgeable people on the planet about California native plants.

[22:11]

And Harry was my welding teacher. And one of the things that he often would say is that the secret of welding is to realize that metal just looks solid and that all you need to do is apply a little bit of heat to it and suddenly it's soft and pliable and you can then bend it and shape it and make it into things that you want to want to make and use and of course then he would kind of smile this was a metaphor for he said our human life is like this as well things just look don't be don't be fooled Don't be fooled by what we know. Don't be fooled by what we know. See more deeply. Have the perspective that metal can take many, many forms. Yeah, so this practice of perspective taking.

[23:22]

There's a a famous Zen. It's funny, I always have to laugh at myself when I say these stories are famous. They're famous in a very thin slice of the... They're famous between me and Jiru. But there is a very well-known story. If you've studied Zen for 20 years, you'll sure to know this story. And the story... This story is about a teacher who is giving a lecture like this to a room full of students and in a challenging way says, don't tell me about before, don't tell me about yesterday or the past, don't tell me about the future, say something, say something about Zen. And of course, no one says anything and the teacher looks

[24:25]

over the students and says, every day is a good day. Every day is a good day. And I think this is a very beautiful, important, wondrous kind of perspective taking. Perspective taking, right? So many, many ways to practice, I think, with perspective taking and to use this this and yet, and yet. I was once in the process of developing a program to train mindfulness teachers in the business world. And I went to one of my mentors for some advice about, well, how do you train mindfulness teachers? What are some elements that are important in training people who want to be teaching meditation, teaching mindfulness, teaching these awareness practices?

[25:36]

And one of the things he said that surprised me, he said, make sure that they have an ordeal. Give them an ordeal. That word surprised me. But something about it felt right. And this is, I think, the, you know, The first noble truth of Buddhism is that there's no avoiding ordeals. There's no avoiding difficulty. We learn from ordeals. We learn from noticing one person's ordeal is another person's great fun and wonder, or learning situation, or how to not avoid difficulty how to not avoid the fact that horses do get stuck in the mud or that we do get asked to do things that we don't want to do or we do things that we think are going to be great and they turn out not to be so great.

[26:39]

Life is filled with ordeals. Sometimes getting up in the morning can be an ordeal. One of the more memorable things that happened for me while I was a young student living here and taking care of the horses, or maybe the horses were, the horses were really trying to take care of me. They really wanted me to do it right. But one day I got a phone call from my mother saying that my father was quite ill and I decided to, I needed to go back to New Jersey to go see about how to take care of my father.

[27:44]

And what was, one of the really memorable things was I had such a terrific support system here while I, those years, those three years that I lived here at Green Gulch. And I would say the whole time that I lived, the 10 years that I lived here, in this community, it's amazing the support that would arise to help meeting these ordeals, these challenges of life. I had a variety of horse mentors, people. I would drive up regularly up the coast and go help Harold Hart. He taught me how to use this tractor and I would clean out his stables, load his horse manure into a big flatbed truck, and drive it back down to Green Gulch and unload it into our compost bins. When it came time for me to go back east to be with my father, there were two very senior women here who were like, I don't know, almost like my, I call them my support system, almost like my angels.

[28:59]

So when I I arrived in my father's hospital room in a hospital in New Jersey. My mother and my brother, my older brother, really didn't quite know what to do, and I didn't know what to do, but these two women who were here at Green Gold's, they knew what to do, and they told me. I reported that my father was completely disoriented, was highly drugged, and they had him... literally tied to the bed so that he wouldn't get up and wander around the room because he was so highly drugged and disoriented. So these two women friends of mine said, you are in charge. The doctors aren't in charge. And let them know that. Tell them to stop giving your father drugs, untie him, and have a real conversation with your father about what is actually going on. Which was, I learned that he probably had weeks or maybe at the most months to live.

[30:06]

He was a pretty advanced form of cancer. And somehow, with the help of these women, I was actually able... And my girlfriend at the time came with me. We had just started living here together, and somehow... I needed that support as well, and she was tremendous support. And now my wife. And my father had been really not very happy about me dropping out of Rutgers and coming to the Zen Center. In fact, some were disappointed and quite angry at that choice. And also, I think, completely puzzled. But as my father came to, and I was able to have a real conversation with him about what was happening, I told him, we're in the hospital, you have really advanced cancer.

[31:17]

I always like to hold out hope. We don't know what will happen, but you probably have a limited time to live. And this became one of the most important conversations with my father, and maybe in some way in this lifetime. My father looked at me and said, I completely don't understand what you are doing. But whatever it is, keep doing it. Keep doing it. That there was some, that was for me, maybe, I don't know if it was the first time, but a time when, you know, I was just a young, you know, a young Zen student trying to figure out how to survive with the horses. But I feel like there was some feeling that I was carrying that I didn't even know.

[32:26]

that my father could feel. And I think that's one of the reasons we practice is to cultivate some way of being in the world. I loved the film A Complete Unknown, the story of Bob Dylan. And in the early part of the film, He goes to visit Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger's sitting there, and Pete says, what are you doing here? And Woody Guthrie, or Bob Dylan looks, young Bob Dylan looks at Woody Guthrie and says, I'm here to catch some sparks. I'm here to catch some sparks. And I feel like we come and sit and live in community to catch some sparks. And I feel like I've had this... amazing, unbelievable opportunity that the number of teachers and mentors and angels support people that I've had in my life that I've caught sparks from.

[33:38]

And my, I hope that I have, you know, that I can give off a few sparks now and then, now and then. And I feel like my father, something happened there with my father. And yet, right? So my father was really angry with me. And yet, right? And yet, something happened. So I, the core practice, and I think it's not talked about so much, or at least I don't know that this language, the language of perspective taking, right? Perspective taking. and whatever phrase, you know, that, you know, live what you see, you know, live what you feel. Don't be caught by what you know. Don't be caught by our, you know, our own wanting things to be different somehow than they are, and yet aspiring, aspiring for things to be very different than they are, but in some very

[34:51]

open, positive, more kind of wondrous way. So I was trying to decide if I want to finish here with a poem or a song. And I think I'm going to be greedy, I think, and do both. Let's do both. So here's the poem I wanted to read. It's a poem about perspective. It's called Things to Think, by Robert Bly. Think in ways you've never thought before. If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message larger than anything you've heard, vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats. Think that someone may bring a bear to your door, maybe wounded and deranged, or think that a moose has risen out of the lake and he's carrying on his antlers, a child of your own who you've never seen.

[35:57]

When someone knocks on the door, think that he's about to give you something large, tell you you're forgiven, or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that it's been decided, if you lie down, no one will die. So lots of perspective. And the song. I'm hoping you'll help me. Please help me. The song is about perspective. And it's about every day. It's like if there were a song to promote every day is a good day. There's maybe a lot of songs like that, but this is the one I happen to know. And it's short. And it goes like this. So the words are, hey, ho, nobody home.

[37:03]

No eat, no drink, nor money have we none. Still, we will be merry. Let's sing it three times. Please join in. Hey, ho, nobody home. No eat nor drink nor money have we done. Still we will be merry. Hey, ho. Nobody home. No eat nor drink nor money have we done. Still we will be merry. Hey, ho. Nobody home. No eat, nor drink, nor money have we none. Still we will be married. Beautiful.

[38:04]

So I tried to make the and still could have been and yet, but it doesn't quite. It has the same meaning. And still we will be married. And yet we have nobody's home. We have no money. We have nothing to eat. And yet, and yet, every day is a good day. I hope, I want to open it up for questions. What do you think? How are you all doing? What's happening? What, yeah, please. And Tima has a microphone. Questions or comments, reflections? Yeah, anything, please. So I learned five years ago that being in the mud was the biggest gift I could ever think of. So when the shit hits the fan, I go in and I think, I just say, okay, what's the lesson?

[39:08]

What's the present? Where's the gift? Being in the present. And keep being in the present and the gift comes out and you go, oh, and it's so wonderful. You know, I think that attitude will serve you well. Yeah, so it's also good. I learned also I'm perfectly imperfect. Perfectly imperfect. Yep. Yes. I love your chat prompt for what is going on inside a tree. And I was thinking you must be amazing when it comes to prompts for chat GPT. And I'm just curious what your experience of prompting is in that world. I'm really new at it and just, you know, I'm learning. I'm learning. And I'm kind of amazed.

[40:11]

You know, I do feel that... I think people who know a lot more than me who say this is gonna be a really tremendously transformative technology, I think they're right. We don't know, and so I feel some responsibility to, unlike, I mean, I remember, I still remember when the first person came into my office to show me this thing called the internet. This, I mean, literally, I was running I was running a greeting card and calendar company. It was the late 80s. And I remember thinking, who needs this? So I'm trying not to make that same mistake. And I do think it is a pretty, I'm finding it to be a pretty amazing just tool, a tool for things, as the internet is, as my phone is.

[41:13]

But I think there's something. Again, it's interesting how much... It's good to keep in mind, you know, especially in the political world, it's good to keep in mind that we can't predict the future. We really don't know what's going to happen in our own... We don't know what's going to happen next here. Maybe there's an opera singer here who's going to stand up and start singing. We don't know what's going to happen. And it's something about that not knowing. Again, that's the end yet is a way to help us to not be so sure of things. I've been enjoying the tool a lot. Yeah. I particularly, I started and ran a greeting card company. So I'm a professional quote collector.

[42:15]

And I'm always looking for quotes and things, and it's a great tool for that. So thank you. Yes. Thank you very much for this wonderful lecture about different perspective, because I really feel the lightness in it, and the lightness of not knowing and having different perspectives. And yet, I want to ask, although I- I heard you say, and yet. We all caught that yet. And yet I want to ask, although I know that's not a room for political questions, and yet I think I cannot reconcile that in my own thinking with what I see going on in this country. There I see an enormous, on the side of progressive, so to say, an enormous need for clarity, moral, ethical clarity, and certainty. My question is how to reconcile this lightness of having different perspectives and the tremendous need for standing up at this very moment in time.

[43:25]

Yeah, yeah. In a certain way, I don't think these things can be reconciled. And there's something about, you know, and I think to me this is, One of the real gifts, one of the core practices or insights of Zen practice, again, which human practice, allowing ourselves to feel the pain of what's happening, to not shy away from just how messed up, difficult, painful, crazy it is what's happening in our world right now. But in some way, it's been like, you know, but it's our parents, my parents certainly lived, you know, my parents lived through, you know, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Hitler and back and back and back.

[44:28]

And yet, and yet here we are, I think we can see, we can see and imagine living in a peaceful world. And yet. So I think to me, I hope that this practice allows us to feel the pain, even to, you know, it's okay to rail and be angry at times. Anger's okay. Anger and pain are, I think, important responses as are love. and possibility and connection and perspective taking. That's, I think that's the, you know, for each of us to bring those sparks, to generate those sparks as much as we can of love, of possibility, of connection, but also I think of being angry about what we're seeing and feeling the pain of what we're seeing.

[45:34]

I don't know what else. That's all I've got. But thank you for that. And it's not to be avoided. It's not to be avoided. So I appreciate you bringing up the question. And you brought it in very delicately, which I also appreciate. So thank you. Yes, Timo's going to give you the microphone. I think ChatGBT is quite capable. And yet, is ChatGBT capable of saying and yet? Yeah, yeah. I think it's quite capable of saying and yet. But what I thought... where, where my mind went to is, I think we really are suffering as a culture from a, uh, a lack of human contact.

[46:46]

So it's beautiful, you know, um, I, I, uh, you know, please, um, please mingle with each other, you know, after, in a moment I'm going to stop talking and leave and you should talk to each other and come, come out and have tea and, Talk, there's something, I know it's hard and scary, right? I think it's one of the shadow sides of our technology is the lack of human connection. So that worries me about our world. Yeah, I think it's community, so community and human connection. So vital, I think. Other, anything else? sit quietly together for a few minutes.

[48:09]

Yeah, just noticing. Whether your eyes are open or closed, what are you seeing right now? Maybe imagining yourself. Can you picture yourself as a new baby? What was it like for you being born into this world? Can you remember or picture yourself as a young child, maybe as a 10-year-old or just noticing what comes up as you think about your life as a youngster.

[49:33]

And maybe think about imagining using, you know, it's amazing our own imaginations, right? More powerful perhaps even than chat GPT, our imaginations. Can you picture what might your life be like in five years from now? Five years from now, where might you be? Who will you be with? What will you be doing? whether it's easy or not easy to go there, and then maybe imagining yourself on your deathbed, imagining you're very old, you've lived a very long and rich lifetime, and you now know that you don't have long to live.

[50:39]

Can you feel a sense of ease and possibility even in that. And then letting go, letting go of all of those images and being here right now. How are you? How are you? Right? Can you feel your breath? Can you feel your whole body? Your whole body. And noticing that we're not limited. We're not limited by these bodies.

[51:43]

And yet, and yet we are and yet we're not. Live what we see and feel and not so much what we know or assume. I appreciate a lot your good hearts and your attention. And I'm excited about the muffins. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive

[52:48]

Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfzc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[53:09]

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