straw poll here about how many of you would like to continue using the Japanese as well as the English in that chant and how many of you would prefer to drop the Japanese and just do the English so how many would prefer to keep the Japanese and how many would prefer to just use the English okay That happens every time. I just feel like I need to check it every now and then and see. Well, I have... You know, I've mentioned many times that this teaching of Dogen Zenji is... Actually, he's quoting Nagarjuna. And he says, the mind that sees into impermanence.

[01:00]

In this world of birth and death, the mind that sees into impermanence is the mind of awakening, is bodhicitta, is the mind which determines that I need to wake up and see reality in order to benefit beings. And I've also mentioned that there was a moment in my life when I had a very... dramatic face-to-face encounter with impermanence, which I'd never given a thought before. And sure enough, it started me searching for how do you live this life if you know you're going to die? Certainly there must be someone who knows. And in the course of my searching around someone gave me this book, The Zen Teaching of Huang Po, in which I read... The Master said to me, all the Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the one mind, besides which nothing exists.

[02:15]

And then it goes on and says... It is neither long nor short, big nor small, for it transcends all limits, measures, names, traces, and comparisons. It is that which you see before you, begin to reason about it, and you at once fall into error. It is like the boundless void which cannot be fathomed or measured. The one mind alone is the Buddha, and there is no distinction between the Buddha and sentient beings. And it goes on to say, This mind is no mind of conceptual thought, and it is completely detached from form. So Buddhas and sentient beings do not differ at all. If you can only rid yourselves of conceptual thought, you will have accomplished everything. But if you students of the way do not rid yourselves of conceptual thought in a flash, even though you strive for eon after eon, you will never accomplish it.

[03:22]

And somehow, when I first read that, I said, yes! Then I discovered the Berkeley Tango, and I began to sit, and I read it later, and I thought, what did I think I understood? But, you know, shortly after reading this, then I met Suzuki Roshi, and he said, The first time I heard him speak, you're perfect, just as you are. And I thought, well, he doesn't know me, I'm new here. But he kept talking like that. And, you know, this Dogen Senji says in his universal recommendation for the practice of Sassen, Think not thinking. How do you think not thinking?

[04:23]

Non-thinking. This in itself is the essential art of Zazen. And he goes on to say, the Zazen I speak of is not learning meditation. It is the Dharma gate of repose and bliss. And then, so, you know, everywhere you turn, it's sort of no deliberate thinking. this teaching it permeates Zen and then last this past year I saw some things on the internet someone named Jill Bolte Taylor who was a neuroscientist had a stroke and she spent 10 years rehabilitating herself.

[05:26]

And then she wrote a book called My Stroke of Insight. You can see I found a lot of things interesting in here. You notice how many stickers I have? I think there are 26 of these little post-it tabs. So I'm been working with this instruction to relinquish comparative mind, conceptual thought, the self-making that we tend to do with our mind, the storytelling that we tend to do. I've been working with that for close to 40 years now. But here is someone who, as it happens, is a neuroanatomist, is head of the at Harvard University, who had the experience of a hemorrhagic stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain.

[06:29]

The left hemisphere of the brain, and she talks about it in the book, she gives us sort of a neuroanatomical description of what she's working with, and then she is able to recount her own subjective experience of losing the use of her left hemisphere and experiencing everything through the right hemisphere. And suddenly, all of these years of instruction and effort made sense to me. This is the effort we make in sitting meditation. is to still the incessant chatter of the left hemisphere, which does conceptual thinking, which does all this comparative thinking that we do, which constructs a separate self, which divides the world up into this and that.

[07:34]

As it happens, this is the side of her brain which was affected by the stroke, and it was not functioning. This is where language is comprehended. This is where time sets happen. This is where spatial, where your experience of where you are spatially in the world, so boundaries of this and not this, was not functioning. And her experience was, what Dugan Sanji says, the Dharma gave a repose and bliss. She was totally peaceful. not at all afraid, the experience was a blissful one. As strange as that may seem. And the kind of miraculous thing is that she didn't lose consciousness during this thing. She was conscious. She just was not thinking in language.

[08:39]

She was not thinking in concepts. She was just experiencing that part of the mind which experiences connection, which experiences love, which experiences boundlessness and all-inclusiveness. And so our effort in meditation is to give up that thinking which separates us and to actually experience the boundless connectedness of this being and all beings, of this being and the whole cosmos. So it somehow made more sense than just think not thinking, how do you think not thinking, non-thinking, this in itself is the order, what's that?

[09:41]

But here's someone who can say, this is what happened to me, and this is what my experience was. The book is called My Stroke of Insight, and I really recommend that you go to the library, check it out, and read it. Meanwhile, I am going to, I'm afraid, read you some bits and pieces. Because, you know, my reporting of her and her own reporting of her perception are two different things. She says, although I rejoiced in my perception of connection to all that is, I shuddered at the awareness that I was no longer a normal human being. How on earth would I exist as a member of the human race with this heightened perception that we're each a part of it all? and that the life force energy within each of us contains the power of the universe.

[10:44]

How could I fit in with my society when I walk the path with no fear? I was by any one standard no longer normal. In my own unique way I had become severely mentally ill. And I must say there was both freedom and challenge for me in recognizing that our perception of the external world and our relationship to it is a product of our neurological circuitry. For all those years of my life, I really had been a figment of my own imagination. Here again she says, in the absence of my left hemisphere's negative judgment, I perceived myself as perfect, whole and beautiful, just the way I was. Just what's a supernatural thing. It sounds like a sound master. And I cried when I read this.

[11:53]

Creating a healthy balance between our two characters, the character... of the right brain and the character of the left brain enables us the ability to remain cognitively flexible enough to welcome change which is the right hemisphere and yet remain concrete enough to stay a path the left hemisphere learning to value and utilize all of our cognitive gifts opens our lives to the masterpiece of life we truly are. Imagine the compassionate world we could create if we set our minds to it. Sadly, the expression of compassion is often a rarity in our society. Many of us will spend an inordinate amount of time and energy degrading, insulting and criticizing ourselves and others for having made a wrong or a bad decision.

[13:19]

When you berate yourself, have you ever questioned who inside of you is doing the yelling and whom are you yelling at? Have you ever noticed how these negative internal thought patterns have the tendency to generate increased levels of... inner hostility and or raised levels of anxiety? And to make matters even worse, have you noticed how negative internal dialogue can negatively influence how you and others and thus how you treat others and thus what you attract? My two hemispheric personalities not only think about things differently, but they process emotions and carry my body in easily distinguishable ways. At this point, even my friends are capable of recognizing who's walking into the room by how I'm holding my shoulders and what's going on with that furrow in my brow.

[14:28]

My right hemisphere is all about right here, right now. Have you ever heard that expression? Right here, right now. Be here now. Present mind is the only mind. It's so fascinating to me how what Joe Bolton-Paylor experienced has been what teachers of the Dharma have been telling us for generations, for 2,500 years. For me, it's really heightened by having someone who can describe, from a scientific point of view, what's happening. So in any event, a lot of what she says here is, you know,

[15:38]

Sometimes the kind of thing I manage to say in my best moments in Dok San, you know, those moments, I think it must be those moments in which I'm connecting with the person in front of me, right brain to right brain. I think this is the effort we have to make, is to really not reinforce the judgmental thinking that is the function of our left brain. I mean, we need to actually judge when we're driving a car how close we are to the edge of the road and how fast we need to be going and so forth. We need that. We just don't need it in interacting with the person in front of you, the person in front of me. It really is not useful for me to go around judging you or me and putting labels on good, bad, or indifferent.

[16:57]

Those kinds of labels that we put on ourselves and others obscure our actually being able to see from moment to moment who we're with. We just label them and then that's that, you know. we no longer see them as they are in each moment. Because we're changing in each moment. We're not some static entity that is all this way or all that way. We're continually changing in response to the causes and conditions around us. And how other people see us and judge us, or how we see and judge others, is part of the causes and conditions that create the interactions of each mind. Freed from all perceptions of boundaries, my right mind proclaims

[18:08]

I am part of it all. We are brothers and sisters on this planet. We are here to help make this world a more peaceful and kinder place. My right mind sees unity among all living entities, and I am hopeful that you are intimately aware with this character within yourself. And then one of the most prominent characteristics of our left brain is its ability to weave stories. The storyteller portion of our left mind's language center is specifically designed to make sense of the world outside of us based upon minimal amounts of information. Throughout the resurrection of my left mind's character and skills, this is the entirety, ten years of her recovery from the stroke she's gotten about.

[19:12]

It has been extremely important that I retain the understanding that my left brain is doing the best job it can with the information it has to work with. I need to remember, however, that there are enormous gaps between what I know and what I think I know. I learned that I need to be very wary of my storyteller's potential for stirring up drama and trauma. And then, this is the part that I think is really important. The portion of my left mind that I chose not to recover was the part of my left hemisphere character that had the potential to be mean, worry incessantly, and be verbally abusive either to myself or others.

[20:15]

Frankly, I just didn't like the way these attitudes felt physiologically inside my body. The point that I want to make there is, it's a choice. It is a choice. When these negative emotions arise, we do have the capacity to choose to entertain them or not. This is, you know, I've often quoted Suzuki Roshi saying, you don't have to invite each thought to sit down and have a cup of tea. You don't have to entertain every thought that occurs to you. If a thought arises in you, she says here for example, Frankly, I just didn't like the way these attitudes felt physiologically inside my body. My chest felt tight. I can feel the blood pressure rise, and the tension in my brow would give me a headache.

[21:18]

In addition, I wanted to leave behind any of my old emotional circuits that automatically stimulated the instant replay of painful memories. I found life to be too short to be... preoccupied with pain from the past. So the point I want to make from this is a point I've mentioned to some of you one-on-one. We do have a choice. When a thought or emotion arises, remember that story I told you from the Native American tradition of the boy who has the dream in which the wolves inside him are fighting and he goes to his grandmother's grandmother, grandmother, I had a dream and the two wolves fighting. But grandmother, which one will win? The one you feed.

[22:19]

So we do have a choice whether to feed these painful emotions. whether to encourage them, whether to say, yeah, and besides that, da-da-da, and you remember when, and so forth, and we just can build up a whole list of grievances that just feed the anger or feed the fear or feed the anxiety. Or we cannot. We can notice what's happening in our body. We can stop and breathe with it. and work with allowing it to subside and calm down and not feed it. I mean, the first beginning of that is to learn that you have the choice, that these emotions don't continue unless you feed them.

[23:21]

In talking about, you know, just from the neuroscientist's point of view, she says, I define responsibility, and then she rewrites it, response ability, that is, the ability to respond, as the ability to choose how we respond to stimulation coming in through our sensory systems at any moment in time. Although there are certain limbic systems, emotional programs, that can be triggered automatically. It takes less than 90 seconds for one of these programs to be triggered, surged through our body, and then be completely flushed out of our bloodstream. My anger response, for example, is a programmed response that can be set off automatically. Once triggered, the chemical released by my brain surges through my body and I have a psychological experience. Within 90 seconds from the initial trigger, the chemical component of my anger has completely dissipated from my blood and my automatic response is over it.

[24:36]

If, however, I remain angry after those 90 seconds have passed, it is because I have chosen to let and that circuit continue to run. Moment by moment, I make the choice to either look into my neurocircuitry or move back into the present moment, either to hook into my neurocircuit, allowing the reaction to melt away as fleeting physiology. There is nothing more empowering than the realization that I don't have to think thoughts that bring me pain. Thanks to my stroke, I have learned that I can own my power and stop thinking about events that have occurred in the past by consciously realigning myself with the present.

[25:44]

Now that my left mind's language centers and storyteller are back to functioning normally, I find my mind not only spins a wild tail, but has a tendency to hook into negative patterns of thought. I have found that the first step to getting out of these reverberating loops of negative thought or emotion is to recognize when I am hooked into these loops. And I've spoken of that before. to congratulate yourself when you recognize, oops, I'm falling into this old habit again, I remember this habit, it gives me a big pain in the neck. The moment you recognize that you've fallen into an old negative habit, instead of saying, oh, shame on you, you can say, oh, good for you, you noticed, now you can stop. There's a huge difference between those two things. One is just adding to the negativity and beating yourself up, And the other is, oh, good.

[27:04]

You caught yourself. You can let it go now. I am a devout believer that paying attention to our self-talk is vitally important for our mental health. In my opinion, Making the decision that internal verbal abuse is not acceptable behavior is the first step toward finding deep inner peace. It has been extremely empowering for me to realize that the negative storyteller portion of my brain is only the size of a peanut. Just imagine how sweet life was when those cranky cells were silent. These passionate thoughts and feelings have the potential to jump instantly into my mind.

[28:05]

But again, after their 90 seconds have come and gone, I have the power to consciously choose which emotional and physiological loops I want to go into. I believe it is vital to our health that we pay very close attention to how much time we spend hooked into the circuitry of anger or the depths of despair. Getting caught up in these emotionally charged loops for long periods of time have devastating consequences on our physical and mental well-being because of the power they have over our emotional and physiological circuitry. That said, it is equally important that we honor these emotions when they surge through us. When I am moved by my automatic circuitry, I thank myself for their capacity to experience that emotion, and then I make the choice to return my thoughts to the present moment. Based upon my experience with losing my left mind, I wholeheartedly believe that the feeling of deep inner peace is neurological circuitry located in our right brain.

[29:32]

This circuitry is constantly running and always available for us to look into. The feeling of peace is something that happens in the present moment. It is not something that we bring with us from the past or project into the future. Step one to experiencing inner peace is the willingness to be present in the right here, right now. Knowing that I'm a part of the cosmic flow makes me feel innately safe and experience my life as heaven on earth. How can I feel vulnerable when I cannot be separated from the greater whole? My left mind thinks of me as a fragile individual capable of losing my life. My right mind realizes that the essence of my being has eternal life.

[30:34]

Although I may lose these cells and my ability to perceive this three-dimensional world, my energy will merely absorb back into the tranquil sea of euphoria. Knowing this leaves me grateful for the time I have here, as well as enthusiastically committed to the well-being of the cells that constitute my life. Another avenue for shifting one's focus away from the churning loops of our left cognitive mind is through purposely using our voice to interrupt these looping patterns of thought that we find distressed or distracting. I find that using repetitious sound patterns such as mantra which literally means place to rest the mind is very helpful.

[31:36]

By breathing deeply and repeating the phrase in this moment I reclaim my joy. Or in this moment, I am perfect, whole and beautiful. Or I am an innocent and peaceful child of the universe. I shift back into the consciousness of my right mind. I've often wondered if it's a then why would anyone choose anything other than happiness? I can only speculate, but my guess is that many of us simply do not realize that we have a choice, and therefore don't exercise our ability to choose. Before my stroke, I thought I was a product of my brain and had no idea that I had some say about how I responded to the emotion-searching environment.

[32:43]

On an intellectual level, I realized that I could monitor and shift my cognitive thoughts, but it never dawned on me that I had some say on how I perceived my emotions. No one had told me that it only took 90 seconds for my biochemistry to capture and then release me. What an enormous difference this awareness has made in how I live my life. Yes, sir. Yeah. I don't know, but I from what I have understood, I think that Shakyamuni Buddha's experience of enlightenment was happened when his left brain's cognitive thinking

[33:44]

and he experienced the world through his right brain. To me, her description of how she felt, of being completely at one with everything, is his description of how he felt. Well, we're not all wanting to be able to turn off our left brain with a stroke, thank God. What I'm bringing practice, how practice comes into it is, okay, short of having a stroke, how can I quiet the activity, this continual storytelling and judging and comparative mind, which is exactly what all of the Zen teachers I've ever encountered have told me to do. Katagiri Roshi is saying to Lu, Lu-san, you think too much, you talk too much, you write too much.

[34:53]

From now on, only haiku. What's only haiku? Only haiku is what you see in this present moment and your immediate response to it. So I don't think, I think that practice is exactly the instructions that we get from our teachers about letting go of this storytelling. Letting go of this self-constructing. Letting go of this separating ourselves from our direct and immediate experience. And being much more cognizant of our immediate experience in the present moment. That's what practice is. This is just sort of confirming that or explaining that What we're doing in practice is quieting the left brain and giving as free a rein as we can to the right brain, short of having a stroke.

[36:11]

Practice is noticing when we have hooked into it and letting go of it again and again so that we are not just automatically hooked into our judgmental separating mind every time a thought arises. It's important that we realize that we are capable of feeling physical pain without hooking into the emotional loop of suffering. I am reminded of how courageous little children can be when they become extremely ill. Their parents may hook into the emotional circuitry of suffering and fear while the child seems to be adapting to his illness without the same negative emotional drama. To experience pain may not be a choice, but to suffer is a cognitive decision.

[37:15]

When children are ill, it is often more difficult for the child to handle parental grief than it is for the child to endure the illness. This same can be true for anyone who is ill. Please be very careful what circuits you stimulate when you visit someone who is not well. Death is a natural process we all must experience. Just realize deep inside your right mind, deep within your heart's consciousness, rests eternal peace. The easiest way I have found to humble myself back into a state of peaceful grace is through the act of gratitude. When I am simply grateful, life is simply great. Okay, that's enough of Jill Goldie-Taylor for now, but I really do recommend this book.

[38:24]

Yes. Is that the question again? Secondary questions. Decided to be using the right part of the record, more left part of the record. Where's this decision-making? What is it making? In my guess, it's maybe interrelated parts. As Jill Taylor says, you know, I value, I value my left brain. Notice that I spent ten years reconstructing it. And then she could not have written this book without her left brain. Which she did for the benefit of others. She didn't need this information, but she felt that the information she had gained through the experience would be of great value to others.

[39:29]

It was a very compassionate act for her to spend all of her time and energy letting us know what the experience is when we don't hook in to the negative thinking that we can't hook into. And she's not recommending that we throw away the left brain. She's recommending that we notice when it's causing us harm and check in and see, is this what I choose to do? instead of just going by habit into all of these old stories that we've constructed, of course we need the cognitive functions of our left brain. But we don't need to believe everything we think. One of my favorite bumper stickers is don't believe everything you think.

[40:31]

We can think a lot of things, but we don't have to believe them. It's true. And when somebody just agrees with us, you know, I mean, that's all extra. Yes. Next week. Oh, good. Yeah. Good. Yeah. of the American character. And I think somebody told me that her mother made the remarkable decision to allow her daughter to rest rather than following the conventional practice of intensive neurological and physical rehabilitation, which means both the Taylor death and the remarkable relationship

[41:38]

in which she is not knuckled with, she's allowed to rest. And finally, there's very suggestive research that we have a whole level of central nervous system that goes on in our bodies, not just in our skull. And this autonomous part of a biological activity in our belly is so extremely rich that it ends the term deceptive brain. So, I think that's all true that she did have an exceptional mother. and an exceptionally caring mother.

[42:45]

I think the points that she's making here, we can take with or without her mother. We're not having a stroke right now. The points that she's making here about the fact that we do have a choice, which thoughts to hook into and elaborate on and feed, and which thoughts to... to notice which thoughts are leading us into pain and suffering, and that we can also choose to let them go. We don't have to have her mother to do that. What we do have is the insight that she got from her experience, which she is sharing with us. All I'm actually doing is saying, isn't it interesting how consonant her experience was with what we see in all of the Zen literature we read and study and all of the Zen teachers we've met and talked with.

[44:00]

That's, to me, kind of exciting, is that it's not just these strange... Zen folks from India, China, and Japan that had these experiences. But someone right here, right now, who happens also to be a brain scientist and can share what some of the brain circuitry is with us, who's sharing her experience. Yes. No, that's a very interesting question. Maybe, maybe. It's certain to me, you know, we have language about in my gut, you know. We know that there is intelligence in our gut. If we study, you know, when we're studying precepts, we discover that we...

[45:04]

Before we do or say something that might be breaking a precept, we feel some hesitation in our gut. The precepts are built into us. They're simply any human in trying to discern how we should behave in the world with one another. in order to live in peace and harmony, come up with pretty similar responses so that the precepts, you know, the preparatory precepts sound like the Ten Commandments. It's not surprising, you know. And if you go to any other culture and see what are the rules that their wise elders have discerned would make the common life easier, you find that they're pretty similar. It's all about what it means to be human and what it means to live in human society, not about what one particular religion, how one particular religion happens to phrase the advice on how to live.

[46:18]

And where I feel hesitation or concern in my actions is in my gut, is in my middle here. It's not... between my ears. When I'm having some concern about, should I do or say this? Does this feel right? It doesn't feel right between my ears. It feels right in my, as Shaw itself used to say, what does your inner say about it? It feels right in my gut, or it feels wrong in my gut. So I agree with you. There is intelligence here. I think it's time for us to... Oh, yeah. That's way past time. Excuse me. Now...

[47:20]

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