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. I feel a great joy to be here with you all in this room, and I gather there are people who will be together with us through technological means, so hello to you all. Many ways to be together. I'm really touched to be here. This is a short visit, but just in my short time here, I feel both the beauty and the calm of the austerity of our tradition, of the Soto Zen tradition. But I also have been touched by many people who have offered their warm hearts, and I feel very supported. And... cared for in this space, so I thank everybody who's made that happen.

[01:01]

So I'm wandering around the country talking about mindfulness and intimacy, and I am aware that at some Zen places, when people hear the word mindfulness, they go, oh, really? Do we have to go there? You know, it seems kind of like maybe a tired topic, but I don't think we've run out of value for investigating it. So I'm going to just read you a couple brief. I'm going to read you a paragraph on the chapter on mindfulness and a paragraph in the chapter on intimacy just to give you a sense of where I'm coming from. Mindfulness is being aware of things in the present moment in a way that promotes well-being. To practice mindfulness is to choose some aspect of our experience and focus attention there in a sustained way. There is discernment in mindfulness, but it is nonjudgmental. It is kind. It allows the mind to rest in the phenomena of the present moment and take a break from creating a relentless stream of imaginations about the future, reviews of the past, or judgments of the present.

[02:11]

Our awareness is one of the most amazing and powerful things we have as human beings. Rather than taking it for granted... and allowing it to focus wherever the mind's habits choose, with mindfulness we can better focus awareness on things that are truly beneficial. Intimacy, in its simplest definition, means close familiarity and friendship. Words, however, have power and meaning beyond their definitions. No matter what the dictionary says, some words evoke very different meanings or feelings to different people. To some folks, the word religion evokes inspiration, warmth, and wonder. To others, constriction and closed-mindedness. Intimacy is a word a bit like this. It can evoke feelings of connection and safety. But for some people, it's pretty scary or stickily sentimental. And then there are the folks who think it just means sex. And if that's you, you are going to find this talk a little disappointing.

[03:16]

Here I will be pointing towards a way of understanding and experiencing the word intimacy that fosters compassion, calm, and joyful action. I use intimacy here as we often use it in Zen discourse. It's about harmony between autonomy and interdependence. In intimacy, we are individuals who are connected, and we are also one undivided whole. We can develop both healthy boundaries and healthy boundarylessness. The way I talk about mindfulness and teach about mindfulness is fairly conventional. It's just based in study and practice with the early Buddhist texts on mindfulness, particularly the Four Foundations of Mindfulness Sutra. The way I talk about intimacy may be a little less conventional. People have various associations. Here, I will say, from my perspective, intimacy is how things are.

[04:24]

Or you could say intimacy is reality. So if we take into our hearts or minds the basic idea underlying much Mahayana thought, which all things, all conditions arrive to create any particular thing. So like your experience right now or the bowing cloth. All things come together to produce that, and each thing is always conditioning everything else. So if everything is completely dependent always on each every other thing, how could things be more intimate than that? So this is a really radical closeness or familiarity. So on the other hand, we usually associate the term intimacy with particular situations where we feel intimate. So like... Oftentimes what comes to mind for people is romantic relationships, and these are places where sometimes we feel a deep connection. And generally speaking, those environments where we feel like we're opening up into connection to something else and our sense of alienation is diminished are those situations where we would describe ourselves as feeling intimate, and those are the situations where we're actually seeing more clearly reality.

[05:47]

Like we open up into intimacy actually through real relationships with all kinds of things. People, but also animals. Trees. I just had a really intimate relationship with a raven yesterday. There are two ravens. I think because I was wearing black simaway, they thought I was a really big raven. And they were attacking me. Like one of them almost hit me in the head. Do you know these ravens? Are they famous? Because they were right in front. I thought, wow, they don't like Samui. Anyway. But that was an intimate encounter. We were together. So, one of the reasons I wrote this book is that we are living in a time of a mindfulness movement. What does this mean? This means that when you check out at the grocery store, you may likely find a mindful coloring book. And... And, you know, the magazine racks have supplements from all the major magazines, mindfulness supplements.

[06:51]

Pretty soon there will be mindfulness Snickers bars. And then everything is going to be great. So this is happening. And you may think, well, I don't have anything to do with that. I'm doing Zen. That is okay. But because of intimacy, you can't ever not be a part of anything. So too bad. Okay. So anyway, the mindfulness thing is I do secular mindfulness training as well as Zen teaching, and I hope it is helpful. You know, most of the work I do is with addicts and alcoholics in recovery. I myself am a recovering addict. And also with police training. And those are environments where I hope what I'm doing is beneficial. providing the secular mindfulness training. But there are many very good critiques of the way mindfulness is being appropriated from the Buddhist tradition into American culture very, very rapidly. And there's not enough time to unpack all those critiques right here today because we could do that quite a bit.

[07:57]

But the one that I am responding to most with my work and with this book is that you might find yourself, maybe you're at your job, Stressful job. And then your job provides you mindfulness training. They may even require mindfulness training. Like when I go to police departments, they're required to go. So you might find yourself receiving a training in mindfulness where someone is saying, like, you should just learn to, you're going to practice accepting everything. And... The idea is like, oh, if people are just a little more chill, they'll be more productive. I see this mindfulness for productivity. So I got to say, I'm really not interested in promoting productivity with mindfulness. And in fact, I am not a Marxist, so I don't want to get in trouble here. But Karl Marx did once say, religion is the opiate of the masses. And this isn't something, I love religion. I'm a priest, for goodness sake. But he was pointing towards something...

[08:59]

insightful, which is that religion can be appropriated into systems of power to get people to play along with them. And right now we live, all of us are intimately involved in systems that are enormously harmful. So we live in a country that is characterized by white supremacy and patriarchy. Transphobia and homophobia are an endemic to our culture. Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are on the rise. We have an economic system that is massively harmful to many people. And we have a way of consuming that is devastating our kindred, our animal family, and our plant family. So all this is going on. So if what happens with mindfulness is it becomes a way for everyone to just kind of play along in a more chill way with the way this is all going on, I don't want to be a part of that. So I was kind of shocked and amused and horrified to find that my book is categorized as a self-help book.

[10:06]

But here's the thing, is I don't think there's yet a category in the bookstore that's called the universal liberation for all beings section. And I'm kind of waiting for that to come about because then we'll really be getting somewhere. So when intimacy... talking about intimacy and how all things connect is a way of bringing the Mahayana understanding that all suffering is bound together into the mindfulness frame. Just to be brief, another real critique of mindfulness is like I meet a lot of people and they're like, oh, you know, I go do a training and they're like, oh, I already do this. I have my app. I'm in San Francisco, so you probably are app designers. So thank you. because people really like these apps, but the message, the subtle message, is that what this is about is people sitting alone in their room and doing their little mindfulness thing.

[11:10]

Mindfulness was conceived in the context of community. Community is key to how it can function, and community relationship with teachers, with other people who are doing the practice. with your wider community. The great womanist essayist and poet Audre Lorde once wrote, without community there is no liberation. She saw a deep truth. From a Dharma perspective, say you do your practice and the fires of aversion and delusion start to die down. But if you have not addressed the fundamental delusion that you can never be separate from all of life, you're still bound in a narrow view of what liberation can be. So framing... So I'm sort of saying mindfulness is an object-based practice.

[12:13]

So if you read the Four Foundations of Mindfulness Sutra, there's many different categories of things that you methodically develop... mindfulness of, awareness of. So starting with the breath and then the body, we begin to open up into phenomena we would consider mental, like ascribing positive and negative values to things, desire, aversion, tranquility, rapture. So we just start noticing these kind of phenomena. So what we do is you make categories and then you specifically become aware of them. So the thing is, there's a... critique of this methodology that is very prevalent in Mahayana literature. So Mahayana literature, the term mindfulness rarely occurs. If we just take a simplest way to look at this is you have the Eightfold Path as the principal path model for early Buddhism or Theravadan Buddhism. And in Mahayana it's the Sixth Paramitas. The Eightfold Path has mindfulness, the Sixth Paramitas don't.

[13:14]

And if you... kind of dig into why basically what this looks like is Mahayana tradition tends to say why are you going to cut reality up into little pieces to look at when it's already one completely intimate whole the whole problem is you're cutting it up into pieces so you should just jump into reality now because you're already intimate you can't even jump into it because you're already hit so Zen people go I like that part that's cool that's what I want to do But I think both ways of practicing and looking at things are more valuable together than separate. Not one leaving out the other. And this viewpoint is not one that I invented. It's one that came from my study of one of my favorite Dharma teachers ever, Vasubandhu, in his writings on Yogacara. And central to his way of integrating...

[14:14]

Thiravadana Mahayana practice is this integrating object-based methodical development awareness of certain elements of experience with this non-dual practice. So objectless practice where we just, it's like a shikantaza. There's no particular object of focus and there's nothing, no object you're trying to achieve. Just putting all the objects down and letting wholeness emerge. So I wrote this book called Inside Vasubandhu's Yogachara. And there are actually people here that were kind of excited. But most people were like, yeah, I don't want to hear about that. That's pretty weird sounding. So I wrote a book with a nice friendly title. Now all the Zen people are like, mindfulness? So our ability to realize intimacy is personal and state dependent.

[15:15]

So that means everyone experiences it differently and it occurs in different environments differently. So just to take for an example, sex, having sexual relationship with someone can be a place of profound connection where the borders between the self slip away and people feel deeply harmoniously connected. But, sex can also be an incredibly alienating experience. And it can be in a whole range of those things. And likewise, so I'm like a nature guy, so I've been traveling around the country for about three weeks talking about this, which has just been wonderful. There are amazing people all over the place. You should go out and find them all. But when I have a night off, I just immediately am like, I'm going to run off in the woods, and I'm just going to go for a walk, I'm going to sleep outside.

[16:21]

And for me, when I can just be somewhere where the things I'm seeing were not made for people, they just co-evolved of themselves, and I'm part of that, and I feel that connection, and I open up, and my sense of this chattery, controlling self subsides a little bit, and I feel that opening. As I was talking about this back home at the Minnesota Zen and Meditation Center, my friend Wayne said, yeah, nature's all right. I go for a nature walk every year or two if I have to. Some people are like this. It's not like nature is magical. It's relational. It's a relationship. It's always a relationship. Or family. Some people are like, when I'm in the bosom of my family, I just feel so connected and my energy just flows in a naturally supportive way and I feel so supported and it's just like, ah.

[17:24]

But yeah, then there are some people who just start laughing when I say that because it seems so impossible and unimaginable. So I'm from Minnesota. So I'm going to talk about Prince. How about that? My friend Ayo Yatunde has founded an academic journal called The Theology of Prince. Oh, yeah. So Prince, you see, if you see Prince play music, you see a person disappear into the activity of Prince. that he was doing, of the making of the sounds and the moving of the body, a complete immersion in this. And for many of us, we would see this as a spiritual act. And so you could see this person having this kind of experience of opening up.

[18:27]

And then, like if you go into a venue, performance venue, there'd be thousands and thousands of people And they would be called into this sense of opening, of connection. And you could see all these people. And they're going, purple rain, purple rain. And they don't know what that means. No one knows what purple rain is. Which is probably one of the reasons why it helps people open up into this what is-ness. So a person can not only develop an ability to experience intimacy, but they can help other people to open up into it. But Prince also died alone in an elevator of a drug overdose at the age of 58. And this may seem like an extreme example, but this is how we are.

[19:35]

We have contexts in which we naturally can open up into intimacy and places where we really don't. And most of us carry places where we are wounded, where we are habituated to doing things that are not beneficial or even very harmful. This is normal. And I bring up Prince in particular, although it's an extreme example, because we have... in the Zen tradition, this model of people who are able to sink into a realization of the total connection they have with the world. And people feel it. And they help other people open up into it. We do that for each other in this tradition. But sometimes there are people who are, they kind of, you're like, wow, the way they're doing that is very powerful. Many people will go to them and have that person help them open up into a profound intimacy.

[20:39]

But time and time again, we've seen people with this capacity also do extremely harmful things. Not in every case, but many, many cases. In particular, I will call attention to the large number of male Buddhist teachers who have abused their power to exploit women sexually. But... although that's what I tend to emphasize when I think about this, multiple people have come up as I've been on this teaching tour and said, it's not just sex and it's not just men. So it's human. It's human. So there's lots of work being done so maybe we can make an American Buddhism where this isn't happening, or at least it's happening less. And so that's really important and I'm really glad and I hope I am a part of it. But one of the, and the work will be all different kinds, but one of the things that can help is for schools of Buddhism that radically emphasize non-dualism and objectless practice and just jumping into this wholeness to use some of the psychological acuity of mindfulness to say, I am going to be very carefully aware of whenever I experience desire or aversion.

[22:01]

For example, those are just a couple of examples that come out of the Sadi Patana Sutta. So it's like there's an internal process and a tool for helping us know when there's parts of ourselves that are wounded that need to be healed. And you might think, dang, man, I thought I was going to come and you're going to talk about how to get along with my girlfriend better. It's mindfulness and intimacy. And now you're talking about Patriarchy and, yeah, well, my invitation to all the gentlemen is work to overcome patriarchy, and I think your relationships will improve. So, and I also want to say, to quote Audre Lorde here, the great womanist, essayist, and poet once wrote, The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has a direct bearing on the product which we live and on the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives.

[23:05]

The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has a direct bearing on the product which we live and the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. So investigating ourselves will transform what happens relationally. And in particular, the quality of light. So mindfulness has a what, which is like the breath or the experience of aversion, and then a how, which is with compassion. Just as my therapist friends say, unconditional loving regard. There you are. I know you're here. That's actually very powerful. Seems like maybe it's not enough. Well, it's probably not enough. But you do all the other stuff a lot, so how about a little unconditional loving regard? So I'm going to read you a couple of sections from this book. This will be... The book is kind of organized around just regular parts of our lives, so our body, our mind, our heart, our teachers, our community, our work, our play, nature, ritual, family, stuff like that.

[24:24]

Just looking at how we can... cultivate mindfulness. And I should say, what I forgot to mention is with, say, intimacy, we have these tendencies that are where we're more naturally realized intimacy and where we don't. And the basic message of Buddhism is you're not stuck. There's suffering and you can do something about it. That's, to me, the shortest way to say the Four Noble Truths. There's suffering and you can do something about it. Every single moment... that there's consciousness is an opportunity to work for the liberation of all beings. How cool is that? And hey, no pressure. Because then the invitation is to just slow down and provide unconditional loving regard. Start there. This is from a chapter called Heart. Have you ever seen someone laughing in the rain? Or someone stoop-shouldered, shuffling along on a green and sunny day? Perhaps in a time of crisis, you've seen someone respond with resolve and energy and someone else collapse into fear or despair.

[25:29]

Maybe someone you know gets testy and then you know it's best to leave them alone. When a loved one is dying, sometimes people are overwhelmed with pain and can barely take care of their basic needs. And sometimes they leap into frantic action to avoid their feelings. And at other times, they only know one thing, profound or all-encompassing acceptance and love. I've seen all this in others and in myself as well. One of the clearest insights of my years of meditation is how powerfully my emotions color my experience, my perception of the world. When I am angry, I feel isolated and I feel the need to control, the need for swift action. When sad, I feel alone. I'm like there's nothing worth doing. I feel like staying in bed. When I'm afraid, I feel vulnerable, like I have to get away. When I'm ashamed, I feel abandoned, like everything is pointless and that I'm fundamentally flawed. When I feel intimacy with people in my environment, on the other hand, I feel connected, I trust what's happening, and I am patient and engaged.

[26:33]

Afflictive emotions are the reason the practice of mindfulness exists and why the kind of intimacy this book is about arose as central to Buddhist thought. Buddhism is at its root a set of practices and ideas designed to free human beings from afflictive emotion. So when I was studying Vasubandhu's 30 verses on consciousness only, which was for quite a while, it's like this beautiful text, and it's a model for how consciousness works. And about one-third of the way through, it has this long list. It says, this is kind of how consciousness works, and here are the phenomena. And then you list phenomena. They're like 55. And I was like, oh, God, lists. I don't want to do lists. I'm a Zen type of upbringing, so I even had one friend from somewhere around the Bay Area who sent me their translation of this same text. And where the list came, it just said, there's a list here. And then it skipped the whole section.

[27:34]

So I get that. But... After studying it for a while, I had a blinding flash of the obvious, which is that of the 55 elements, I might have the number wrong, sorry, about 40 of them are what you would call emotional or affective. So he says, this is how consciousness works, and here's the phenomena. And then 70 or 80% of those that he wants to talk about are emotional. And I thought, hmm, maybe how we feel matters to Vasubandhu. Yes, I think so. And then as I went through and kind of looked He's the part, the Sadi Patana Sutra, the Four Foundations of Mindfulness Sutra, where he's deriving this way he's expressing object-based practice. You see, it's a pretty various complex text, but you see littered throughout it little things that we would call emotional or affective, and they're a substantial part of what we should be attending to. Things like lust, hatred, rapture, tranquility, energy, torpor, sloth,

[28:36]

Oh, those are the same thing. Well, anyway, you get the idea. So when it comes to taking up mindfulness practice or object-based meditation is what I'll call it, I think you can access the power of this fairly simply. There are complex ways to do it which are really good, like actually working through all these texts at length with practice is good. But just... recognizing that the invitation is to pay attention to how you feel. And for some people, that's like, well, duh, that's all I do. And other people are like, I have feelings? So we're different in this regard, but I haven't really met anyone who is excessively aware, moment to moment, of how they feel. Now, I've met a lot of people who think about how they feel maybe too much. That's different. I'm talking about not thinking about it, but actually... giving direct loving regard to the feeling state itself. So just when you're sitting zazen, I may get in trouble because I'll poison everyone's minds on how to do zazen.

[29:44]

No, it's going to be good. Because don't you notice you sit and you begin to, like, you hear things. So the sounds of the bells and the birds, you're more aware. Wow. And you're more aware of the body and of the... like that wall, which is so fascinating every time you look at it. But we just want to make sure that part of what is coming into awareness is how we feel. That's all. Make sure that happens. Because it's quite possible for consciousness to shield itself from elements of experience without knowing we're doing that. That's actually how consciousness works. It's usually excluding most of experience so that it can kind of pick something out that it wants to work with. So I just encourage everyone to Develop this part of your practice. And I will say, the obvious thing is, if you know how you feel, you're less likely to impulsively act on it. But just very briefly, from a Yogacara karma theory perspective, the feelings come from previous conditioning.

[30:47]

So there's previous conditioning, like a feeling like irritation, plants a seed so that there will be a feeling of irritation later. This makes sense, because this has happened to everyone here at traffic lights. So you know what I'm talking about. The first time you ever saw a traffic light, you were just like, wow. But it's not like that anymore, is it? Because all those seeds. So anyway, there's a seed. And when that seed bears fruit, then you're going to have a feeling like that again. So there's a feeling of irritation. Now, normally, we're not aware of this process happening or of the feeling state itself. We're absorbed in a thought about the thing. So we don't see what happened down here on the affective level. And another similar seed will be immediately planted. So a seed of irritation bears fruit, and a seed of irritation is planted. And then we can just see the ring of suffering spinning round and round. Look at our world. And yet, if we can be directly aware of the feeling state itself, it bears its fruit, but in the light of awareness, it is exhausted.

[31:51]

And then you're going to plant another seed. What is that seed? It's a seed of unconditional loving regard. And that is going to be good for the world. So this is a moment-to-moment practice. You can do it thousands of times a day. But even if you do it four, it's pretty good. I would argue the most powerful thing we can do to liberate people from suffering is to do this. Because we can never understand how powerfully we are driven by unconscious habits. We'll never know that. But I do think that we are. And so we can dismantle the ones that are most pernicious within us and change. Okay, so I'm going to read another passage. Now, in considering what to read, you know, like I'm going to go and talk about this book. So what am I going to read? So I have to pick. And I picked this chapter mostly because it's about someone I really deeply love and admire.

[32:54]

So Tomoe Katagiri is, as far as I know, and I'm waiting to be corrected, the first person to have taught the sewing of Zen monk's robes in the United States. And it happened right here at the San Francisco Zen Center. So her husband, Dining Katagiri, came with Tomoe to the United States to assist, my understanding, is Suzuki here. And then they moved to Minnesota. Some people asked them to move to Minnesota and found the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center where I teach. And Katagiri Roshi died over 25 years ago, but Tomoe is still alive and still very wonderful, and she no longer teaches sewing because her eyesight does not allow her to see the stitches. So, Tomoe Katagiri taught me well, mostly by staying by my side and quietly pouring her energy into what we were doing together.

[33:55]

Komoi-san helped bring the art of sewing Zen monk's robes from Japan to the United States, and she was my teacher in sewing the robes that symbolized my ordination. She gave me precise instruction on the technical aspects of sewing, with which I am far from adept. Oh, man. But to me, her real teaching lay in her embodiment of patience, attention to the present moment, and quiet, warm intimacy. It was not uncommon as we worked side by side for us to be silent for an hour at a time to support wholehearted focus on each stitch. After the entire robe is sewn, which took me about a year, it is carefully ironed and folded precisely. Ironed and folded like origami. I frequently found the sewing process frustrating. This is a profound understatement. but she just calmly stitched away beside me.

[34:58]

I recall the moment when I finished the robe, when I finished the final stitch, a moment I had been waiting for. I said, Tomoy, I finished the robe. I was ready for a birthday cake or maybe some fireworks. She put down her sewing and moved to stand up and she said, I'll turn on the iron. So sometimes Zen teachers are hard to be around. It's true. I don't think she was consciously teaching me, but she brought me right back to what was in front of me. She modeled not living for some other time when the current task, the current manifestation of life is done. She hadn't been waiting for me to finish, and she realized nothing is ever really finished. Life goes on. All things connect. She took care of the world by focusing on the life at hand, and that was teaching enough for me.

[35:59]

So I was at a treatment center in Minnesota, a chemical dependency addiction treatment center called Hazelden, where I provide Buddhist recovery and retreats and also secular mindfulness training. We were just having this daytime thing. It was like a one hour little talk. People from the area can come around. It's not like inpatient or anything. And they just come and learn how to stay sober and be in community. And so I was just giving a very introductory thing, little instruction on how to practice mindfulness of breath, short sitting, and some talk about how this could be beneficial to recovery. And afterwards, This woman put her hand up, and I said, oh, yes. And she said, that was really nice. Thank you very much. For me, this was meaningful because I'm a therapist, and I teach mindfulness to my clients all the time, but I've never practiced or received any instruction. Wow!

[37:17]

This is happening, everybody. This is happening. So this is like the most extreme example like this I've encountered, but it's not that uncharacteristic. And on the one hand, therapists are trained to provide unconditional loving regard. So that's powerful. It's powerful. The principal reason therapy works is its intimacy and loving regard. Liberation is relational. But... I come from a tradition where if you're going to be teaching people how to do this stuff, the expectation is you spent a few thousand hours meditating and immersing yourself in community and relationship with the teacher and the teachings. So I am not here to decide what we should do, but I'm just here to bring to consciousness that this is happening. And you'll be like, I'm not a part of that mindfulness thing, but you can't not be a part of it.

[38:21]

Because that's how intimacy works. So somehow, taking into our hearts that we can be part of something that would bring the beauty of the Buddhist tradition to this country in a way that's respectful of the people who have carried it to us for all these thousands of years and is a means of liberating everyone and not just helping people calm down a little bit. Although if they're calm, it's going to help. I know that. I get that. Yeah. So I'm going to read one more short passage and then wrap up. And so the end of this book, I have a chapter called The Ones We Love, a chapter called The Ones We Don't Know, and a chapter called, I'm wondering what you are thinking. Everyone has their own language for the third category. I call them the ones we don't like. It seemed fairly neutral. Anyway, I'm just going to read you the beginning of the chapter called The Ones We Don't Know.

[39:24]

Many old Buddhist teachings say that seeing our interdependence is seeing truth and not seeing it is ignorance. Ignorance basically means not knowing. If you think about all the things you don't know, how many pins are in your pincushion, how many stars in the sky, How many people are laughing within a mile of you and how many crying? How things are for each of the approximately 40 trillion bacteria living as part of your body? Where you left your umbrella? What's going on in Yemen right now or on Mars? You get the idea. We're pretty ignorant. It's all right. Let's start there. Let's just take a moment to be intimate with the vastness of our ignorance. Like a great ocean of not knowing. Do you know what each of the billions of fish in the sea are experiencing right now? Intimacy with this not knowing situation can open the door for a deeper sense of our interdependence and connection to what we can't know but are already a part of. Usually we ignore what we don't know.

[40:30]

The human mind picks out a tiny infinitesimal corner of reality and tries to figure it out and then spends a lot of time feeling like it's got a handle on things. Really, it's ignoring infinite things to give itself a tenuous sense of security in the vastness of this wild, unfurling world. If we practice mindfulness of our body, mind, and heart, we can begin to see the process by which the mind constructs this small picture of the world. We can see that our awareness moves between a broad, spacious sense and a constricted, narrow view based on how our body, mind, and heart are interacting. If we practice objectless meditation, the mind's categorizing slows, and we tend to actually experience gaps in the mind's tendency to actively ignore most of what is happening. We find ourselves occasionally resting in a non-differentiated awareness. While we will always remain in a kind of ignorance about the infinite aspects of the universe, we can diminish the degree to which we actively

[41:37]

though generally unconsciously, ignore things. This is the path by which we begin to see interdependence, to see a world that is not made of things to judge, control, and manipulate, but a world with which we are intimate and to which we can offer our best effort. So grateful to be with you this morning. Thanks for your kind attention and for upholding the Dharma and this beautiful tradition in this place. I think of you often sitting around in Minnesota. So thank you. 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.

[42:40]

For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[42:48]

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