This podcast is offered by San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Thank you all for being here. Good evening. It's wonderful to be back here to see all of you. Some familiar faces and some many new faces. The last time I gave a talk here was February of 2020, a while ago, about six weeks before the whole world shut down. I talked that evening about mindfulness and meditation, about the Sathabatthana Sutra, about why the Buddha thought mindfulness was what he called the direct path to awakening. And I ended with a poem by one of the first Buddhist nuns recorded in the Pali Canon.

[01:06]

She said, fill yourself with the Dharma. When you are as full as the full moon, burst open. Make the dark night shine. And so I thought I would pick up tonight sort of where I left off. The world has changed quite a bit since February of 2020. This room has changed. This building has changed. And as I said, just a few months after, a few weeks after I spoke, we all went home and locked down for months and months. And many of us, when we were at home, we got in the habit of picking up our phones. and many of us haven't really put them down since. So the last time I talked about why mindfulness matters, and tonight I thought I would talk about something that's made mindfulness more difficult.

[02:16]

Since many of you don't know me, I should talk a little bit about my background. I'm a Zen priest, as you can see, and a teacher. I was ordained by Kobanchino Odagawa Roshi back in 1998. and completed my formal training with Kenjo Akiba Roshi just last year. I'm currently chair of the board here at Zen Center, and I lived in this building just upstairs. I went and took a peek at my room very early in my Zen career. Many of you know that We lost the zendo in Tassajara just last week in a fire. And I don't want to talk too much about that tonight, but I know it's on many of your minds and it's on my mind too as I come back and sit in this hall. I didn't spend nearly as much time there as some in this room, but I spent enough to feel the loss.

[03:25]

And I know people around the world are feeling it too. And so it didn't feel right. to speak here tonight without acknowledging it. But mostly tonight I want to focus on something else. When I left City Center about 35 years ago, I spent much of my time working in the technology industry down south, Silicon Valley. I worked at Google on YouTube's recommendation algorithms and other things. I worked at Facebook and Instagram. I worked at Apple. And I left the corporate world just last year, now teaching, coaching full-time, which means for just about the first time in my own adult life, nobody's actually paying me to stare at a screen all day. And yet I still stare at a screen much of the day. And so I wish I could tell you that I've achieved some sort of wise, balanced relationship with screens, that unlike you, I can walk away from my phone for an hour, a day, or a week and not even notice that I've achieved some sort of Zen bliss with technology.

[04:43]

But I really haven't. The first thing I do every morning, pretty much, is look at my phone. Even sometimes before My eyes are fully open. My hand is groping for the nightstand. Four decades of Zen practice, and I still wake up grasping. And I say all this not to list my resume or my failings, but because both are relevant to what I want to talk about tonight. I worked for many years on some of the systems that are making it so hard for all of us to pay attention. I didn't think about it that way at the time, but I do think about it that way now. Let me go back again to the words of the Buddha, the Pali Canon, probably the closest we can get to what Buddha actually said. In the old Pali Sutras, there's a short teaching that you've probably heard before, at least in paraphrase, in the Samyutta Nikaya, where the Buddha compares...

[05:53]

the untrained mind, to a monkey swinging through a forest. The monkey grabs one branch, lets it go, grabs another. It reaches for fruit, lets it fall, reaches for more fruit. It never stays still. The monkey isn't doing anything wrong. This is just what monkeys do. They grab things. And the Buddha said that our minds are like that. Restless, grasping, easily distracted. We have a thought. We let it go. We grab another. We have a feeling. We react to it. We chase the next feeling. This is the monkey mind. And if you spent any time in meditation or really any time being alive, you've experienced yours. You sit down, you follow your breath. And maybe four seconds later, your mind is somewhere else. It's thinking about what you're having for dinner or replaying a conversation from last week or remembering something you forgot to do at work or composing a text that perhaps you're never going to send.

[07:02]

And then you notice you've wandered off and you come back to your breath, perhaps. And then a few seconds later, you're gone again. My mind is the same as yours. This is the human condition. It was the condition 2,500 years ago. and it's still the condition now. The monkey mind predates the smartphone by two and a half millennia. The Buddha's monks didn't have phones, but they had mosquitoes and sore knees and perhaps the loud breathing of the monk sitting next to them. Distraction has always been with us. The human mind has always wanted to be somewhere other than where it is. This hasn't changed. What has changed is that we've built a machine to feed the monkey. And I want to talk about that machine for just a minute. When I was at YouTube, we were trying to solve what seemed like a simple, reasonable problem.

[08:07]

When someone finishes watching a video, what should we show them next? It's a basic question with enormous consequences. If we show them something they like, then they'll watch another video. And another. and perhaps another. And each additional video is an opportunity to make some money. And so we built algorithms that learned what people kept watching. And the algorithms got very good at that. We were not the first people to work on this. Back in the 1990s, when NBC would try out various shows after Friends on Thursday night, they were doing the same thing. trying to keep viewers watching until Seinfeld came on later. That job was both harder and easier than ours because they had to pick one thing that millions of people in America would watch. We got to pick something different for each user, something chosen especially for them, something most likely to grab their attention.

[09:11]

I don't think anyone in the room sat down and said, let's build something that exploits human psychological vulnerabilities. We said, let's build something people will enjoy. Because after all, why would you keep watching if you didn't enjoy it? But it turns out there's an answer to that question. That perhaps we didn't have the imagination or the courage to see. Because the things that keep people watching are not necessarily the things that bring them happiness or joy. in the usual sense of those words. Instead, they're often things that tap into deeper, more reflexive parts of the brain. Novelty, outrage, social comparison. In a sense, the monkey mind. The same patterns that Buddha diagnosed as obstacles to awakening, we were engineering into a product used by a billion people, and now by billions more. The Buddha identified five hindrances, five obstacles to mindfulness.

[10:19]

They show up all over the sutras. They are sensory desire, ill will, sloth, restlessness, and doubt. These aren't character flaws. They're features of the human mind, as natural and predictable as the monkeys grasping. The Buddha didn't judge people for having them. He just pointed out that they get in the way of seeing clearly. And what I want to suggest tonight is that these five hindrances diagnosed 2,500 years ago are really what our devices have learned to exploit. Not on purpose mostly, not with ill intent perhaps, but effectively. The first hindrance is sensory desire, that craving for pleasant experience. In the sutra, the Buddha compared sensory desire to drinking salt water The more you drink, the thirstier you get.

[11:22]

And if you think about your phone, the endless notifications, the bottomless feed, the infinite scroll, the content that never runs out because the craving never runs out. The feed is engineered to be bottomless because a feed with a bottom is a feed you put down. The stated goal of keeping everyone on those feeds is connecting people, and in some ways they can, but they also create a saltwater fountain where so much of the world now drinks. The second hindrance is ill will, anger, irritation, resentment. The algorithm learned something that the engineers perhaps didn't fully understand at the time. Anger holds our attention. A post that makes us outraged holds our attention longer than a post that makes us smile. And so the most successful platforms ended up amplifying outrage without anyone necessarily deciding to do that.

[12:29]

They didn't set out to make us angry, but they optimized for what kept us looking, and anger keeps us looking. The Buddha said that ill will is like holding a hot coal. It's the person holding it who gets burned. and our phones let us hold a thousand hot coals a day. The third hindrance is sloth. Not physical laziness exactly, but a kind of mental dullness, a fog. Think about what hours of scrolling actually feels like. You're not resting. You're not thinking. You're in a kind of stupor. Your thumb is moving, but your mind is sedated. This is sloth in the Buddhist sense. The mind is not asleep, but it's certainly not awake. It's somewhere in between, and that in-between state is remarkably seductive, which is why it's so hard to snap out of. In meditation, we sometimes call this sinking.

[13:33]

It's the kind of sitting where you're technically on the cushion, but you're basically napping with your eyes half-opened. Scrolling is the same thing, but with a glowing screen. instead of a cushion. The fourth hindrance is restlessness, the opposite of sloth, the agitated jumpy quality of a mind that can't settle. Every interruption is a tiny jolt of restlessness. You were here, present, and then your phone buzzes, and now you're wondering what that was. Multiply this by dozens or hundreds of notifications each day, each one pulling us out of wherever we are and depositing us somewhere else. And then you have to somehow find your way back. I once read a study that it takes an average of 23 minutes to fully recover your focus after a single interruption. 23 minutes.

[14:36]

Most of a period of Zaza. If you get just three notifications an hour, you never recover at all. You spend your entire day in a state of partial attention, which is really a state of total distraction. The fifth hindrance is doubt, not intellectual doubt, which can be healthy, but the paralyzing kind, the kind that says everyone else has it figured out and I don't. Imposter syndrome, but where literally everyone feels like an imposter. And of course, This is now manufactured at industrial scale. Everyone's life looks better. Everyone else's practice looks deeper. Everyone else's lunch is more photogenic. Everyone else's kids are better behaved. Their vacations are more interesting. Their homes are cleaner. The comparison trap is ancient. The Buddhist monks almost certainly compared themselves to each other too and had opinions about whose robes were sewn better.

[15:44]

and worn more correctly. But now we've built a machine that allows you to see the fictionalized highlight reel of a thousand people's lives and invites you to measure yourself against them all simultaneously. We've industrialized doubt. And so there we are. We have these each in different amounts and different combinations, but we all have them. Five obstacles to mindfulness, identified in a deer park in India around 500 BCE, and now engineered into the most widely used consumer products in human history, which I'm sure many, if not all of you, have with you right now. And again, to be clear, I don't really think it was a conspiracy. The people who built these systems, people like me, had good intentions. Steve Jobs, the visionary, behind the iPhone, I don't think was an evil genius. He was a longtime meditator himself who had the same Zen master as me.

[16:50]

He was trying to build a product that people found useful and enjoyable, what he often called delightful. But the incentive structure of the resulting attention economy is simple. Attention brings revenue. And the monkey mind turns out to be an endless source of attention, if you know how to provoke it. No one needed to read the sutras to figure this out. The data and the dharma, it turns out, were describing the same thing. There's another teaching I want to bring in here from the Salata Sutra, also in the Samyutta Nikaya. The Buddha tells the story of two arrows. When an ordinary person is struck by a painful feeling, it's as if they are hit by an arrow. And it hurts. But then when they worry about the pain, when they get upset about it, when they lament and grieve, Buddha says that is like being hit by a second arrow.

[17:54]

The first arrow is the pain itself. The second arrow is everything we add to it. And this applies again, I think, to our screens with uncomfortable precision. The phone delivers that first arrow constantly. a piece of bad news, a hurtful comment, an anxiety-inducing notification, a photo that makes you feel inadequate. You can't avoid these entirely, not without retreating from the world in a way that few of us want to do. And the middle way, which is where the Buddha always points us, is not about retreating entirely from the world. It's about being in the world wisely. But the second arrow is the reactive scrolling, rumination, the three hours that vanish, the common thread argument with a stranger you'll never meet. The second arrow is what we do to ourselves after the phone delivers its jolt.

[18:56]

The second arrow is where most of the suffering lives. Now at this point in a talk like this, you might expect me to say, just throw your phone in the ocean. But I'm not going to say that. Not because our phones are harmless. They're obviously not. The evidence is clear that the way most of us use our devices is making us more anxious, more distracted, more lonely, less present. Our Surgeon General issued an advisory about it. Jonathan Haidt has written an entire book about what it's doing to kids. The data is real, and I take that seriously. But the Buddha's first noble truth doesn't say that the world is the problem. It says that there is suffering, and there is. And when he got to the second truth, the cause of suffering, he didn't point to external conditions. He pointed to desire, to craving, to our relationship to those conditions.

[20:00]

If the phone were the cause of our suffering, the Buddha wouldn't have been talking so much about suffering 2,500 years ago. Because the Buddha didn't just live before phones and every other sort of screen. He lived before radio. He lived before books. He essentially lived before all our modern distractions. But he didn't live before craving. And he saw that craving was the cause of our suffering. Not something manufactured in a factory in China, but something manufactured right here in our own minds. This matters, because if the phone were the cause, the solution would be simple, get rid of the phone. But anyone who has tried a digital detox knows that the craving doesn't go away when the device does. It finds something else to grab. Before smartphones, people were glued to their televisions, before televisions to radio, before radio to novels.

[21:03]

I remember as a kid, sitting at breakfast with my parents, long, long before anyone even conceived of a smartphone, and reading the cereal box instead of engaging with them or with myself. In the 18th century, there was widespread panic about the effects of novel reading on young women. The arguments will sound remarkably familiar. It was corrupting their morals, making them unsuitable for domestic life, rotting their brains. People said the same things about rock music, comic books, when I was a kid, Dungeons and Dragons. The delivery mechanism changes, but the monkey mind remains the same. Our minds were grasping at branches long before there were apps on those branches. And honestly, if the phone were the cause, there would be no Buddha. There would have been no reason for a young prince in India to go searching for the cause of suffering 2,500 years before phones were invented. But he did go searching, and what he found

[22:06]

was not an external cause. He found tanha, craving, thirst. The Buddha recognized it immediately. We reach for the phone because we're bored or anxious or lonely or just slightly uncomfortable with the present moment. The phone promises relief and it delivers briefly before the dissatisfaction returns and we reach for it again. This is the cycle the Buddha described in that deer park. He just didn't know it would one day fit in our pockets. I want to take a brief detour here, not because I need to, but just because it's something I've been thinking about recently. I mentioned the fire in Tassajara, and it's been on my mind. If you haven't been there, it's about three hours south at the end of a 14-mile dirt road.

[23:11]

There's no cell service. There's very little Internet. It's tightly rationed. When I'm there, I try not to use it at all. And so when I drive in, my phone becomes a very expensive clock. And then the clock becomes unnecessary, too, because my day is organized by bells. I visited Tassajara several times over the years, and the thing that always strikes me is not what I gain exactly, but what falls away. By the second or third day, I stop reaching for my pocket. By the fourth day, I've mostly stopped thinking about what I might be missing. By the end of the week, the idea of checking texts or emails can feel as remote as the idea of flying to the moon. It just doesn't arrive. It's not that I've achieved some sort of nirvana, but I've shifted my attention. to other distractions. But then eventually I drive out, and somewhere on that dirt road, I think maybe about eight miles from the gate, my phone buzzes back to life.

[24:17]

It picks up some signal from somewhere, and with it, all those notifications, all those messages, the whole machine reaching out for me as eagerly as I usually reach for it. But there's a moment right there where I don't care. I don't even want to read the messages. I don't want to see the notifications. I just want to enjoy the drive through those mountains, bumping along that crazy road. So bumpy it always reminds me of the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland, but without the two-hour line. And in that moment, my mind is just quiet. Not blank, not empty in a dull way. Alive. noticing the sunlight on the hills, the dust behind the car, the smell of the trees, seeing everything is just what it is, and feeling that's enough. The monkey is sitting still for a moment, not because anyone forced it to, but because perhaps there's nothing it needs to grab.

[25:25]

That's what the other side of craving feels like for a moment. It feels like the world is already complete. But usually, before I even get to pavement, I pull over somewhere and check my phone. And within a few minutes, I'm back where I started. This used to depress me, but now I find it instructive, because it shows that the craving is not permanent. Nothing is permanent. It can settle, and it does settle given the right conditions. The problem is that most of us don't live at the end of a 14-mile dirt road, and we don't want to. We live in the world, and the Buddhist path, the Middle Way, is always about finding wisdom in the world. His own monks and nuns may have retreated to the forest and the mountains, but they came back. They always came back. So what do we do? those of us who live in the world who need our phones for work and family and directions, what do we do?

[26:33]

Well, let me return again to the Satipatthana Sutra. The Buddha's instructions there are simple but radical, and they boil down to one thing. Pay attention. When you breathe in, know you're breathing in. When you breathe out, know you're breathing out. When you stand, know you're standing. When you walk, know you're walking. When you pick up your phone, know you're picking up your phone. I want to offer a small practice. It's one I try to use myself, and it's almost embarrassingly simple. Before you unlock your phone, take one breath. Just one. And in that breath, notice what you were feeling the moment before you reached for it. Were you bored, anxious, lonely, avoiding something, or perhaps reaching out of habit, feeling nothing much at all?

[27:39]

We can try it right now, not with a phone, just with ourselves. Just take one breath with me right now. That's it. That's the whole practice. You don't have to put the phone down. You don't have to judge yourself. In fact, please don't judge yourself about this or anything else. Just notice. Notice without judging. That noticing is our practice. That pause, that single breath, is the space between the first arrow and the second. Maybe that sounds too simple, too basic. But there's nothing wrong with simple. There's nothing wrong with basic. Part of what distinguishes Zen is that our practices tend to be simple. The Tibetans and Theravadans have more elaborate practices, these intricate tricks they learn to do with their minds. We have Shikantaza, just sitting.

[28:45]

But a simple practice can take you a long way. That's what I found with this phone breath. I've been doing it for a while. And what I found is that noticing changes things. Not every time, not dramatically, not always as much as I'd like, but enough. Sometimes I noticed that what I was reaching for was because I was anxious about something, and that noticing gives me just enough space to sit with the anxiety instead of numbing it. Sometimes I noticed I was just bored, and the boredom turns out to be more interesting than whatever I was going to scroll through. And sometimes I notice whatever I notice, and I pick up the phone anyway, because I'm still a person with a monkey mind. And this is a practice, not a cure. The Buddha in the Satipatthana Sutra starts by claiming that seven years of dedicated practice would be enough for awakening.

[29:47]

Just seven years. But then he corrects himself. He bargains himself down. Six years, five years, four years, three, two, one, then months, finally gets all the way down to seven days. Just seven days of truly paying attention and awakening as possible. I quoted that six years ago, and I'm quoting it again tonight, because I think it might be the most hopeful thing in the entire Pali Canon. Not because most of us can sustain seven days of unbroken mindfulness, I'm sure I can't. But because the Buddha is telling us that attention is truly that powerful, that the capacity to simply notice, to be present, to not shoot the second arrow and not be hit by it either, is not a minor skill. It's the whole path. And practicing it, even just for a week, can make all the difference in the world.

[30:49]

I want to close with something that's been on my mind too lately. In the Pali Sutras, the Buddha lists generosity, dhana, as a foundation of lay practice. We usually think of dhana as material giving, money, food, clothing. And that aspect of dhana is important. I hope you all practice that sort of dhana. But I've come to think that in a world where attention has become the most valuable commodity, Giving someone your full, undivided attention is one of the most generous things you can do. Put the phone face down, close the laptop. Look someone in the eye. That's Donna. That's practice. Take a moment and reach for your partner, your friend, your neighbor, instead of reaching for your phone. That's something you can do tonight. as soon as you leave this room. We live in an economy that treats our attention as a resource to be extracted.

[31:56]

Every app, every notification, every algorithm is competing for a share of your awareness. Choosing where to direct your attention, deliberately, mindfully, is a radical act. It might be the most radical act available to us today. I spent time building the machines that compete for your attention. Maybe some of you here are working on that still. That's okay. I don't regret that work exactly. Much of what's been built is genuinely useful. The internet does connect people who would otherwise be isolated. It does give voice to people who would otherwise be unheard. It makes the Dharma available to people who will never walk in to a temple like this. These are real goods and I don't want to pretend otherwise. But I've also spent a long time practicing a tradition that teaches us how to reclaim our attention and give it away on our own terms.

[32:59]

Both of those experiences tell me the same thing. Our attention is precious. Your attention is precious. The Dharma encourages us to take a long view. This technology is new. The challenge is ancient. And the practice is the same one the Buddha taught so long ago. I started tonight by quoting the great nun Puna. Fill yourself with the Dharma. When you are as full as the moon, burst open. Make the dark night shine. I really, really love that image. We live in a world full of glowing screens. But the light Puna is talking about is different. It doesn't come from consuming attention. It comes from giving it away, freely, to the people sitting next to you, to the world right in front of you. It's dark out now.

[34:05]

Your phones are in your pockets. And for the next few minutes at least, you don't need them. There's nothing on your phones you need to know right now. There's nowhere else you need to be. You're already here. Thank you. I think we have a few minutes for questions. I'm sorry. I wasn't supposed to bow until it was time to ring the bell. Do we have any questions? I'm curious in trying to live mindfully, how do you practice it in a way that that itself doesn't become the distraction or disassociation?

[35:10]

I think, I guess what I really mean is like, how do we practice it in relation to the things that we need to show up to in the world, when sometimes, like, focusing purely on mindfulness practice, it sometimes feels like maybe we're trying to pull away. Does that make sense? Yes. I think mindfulness practice can feel that way, but I don't think it is that way. And in fact, I do think it's the opposite of that, that sometimes our practice can feel like sort of an escape or retreat from the world. But really, our practice is the opposite. Our practice is fully engaging with the world all the time, facing whatever is there, trying to see the world as clearly as we can. So trying to be fully present in each moment, in each interaction,

[36:15]

It's not some sort of escape from the present. It's a complete embrace of the present. So it's showing up to everything. I was wondering, do you think that part of the technology-focused issue is that historically we only knew about things happening in our community, and now knowing about the whole world's problems is harder? I mean, I think it's hard to know if it's harder... And, I mean, you do have to go back pretty far to where we really only knew about our community.

[37:24]

I mean, at least before, like, the telegraph. So we're talking, like, 150, 200 years. And it's a little hard to know what life was like then, sort of subjectively. Like, did people feel less distracted? And I guess, to me, what's interesting... is that mindfulness and attention have been such a big issue for so long. So as much as we feel distracted, you know, Buddha felt distracted. And so it probably can't really be the case that the root cause are things like that, are knowing about things outside our immediate community. You know, I think... It probably has made it somewhat worse, somewhat more difficult to be fully present, but it was already quite difficult. So, you know, were people 200 years ago more mindful than they are now?

[38:34]

Maybe a little. But people, you know, that's around the time that probably the first Westerners were encountering Buddhism, and they were like moved by it. So it was speaking to them too. So yeah, I don't think that's the root problem, but it may make things a little worse. Thanks. I was just gonna comment. I mean, it could be a combination of factors, the technology itself, as well as the plethora of events. I mean, in terms of songs, there is the fact that apparently the attention span has been getting shorter every generation. And it was a thing where, well, we're familiar with songs being around three minutes long, where they used to be eight minutes long, and so on and so forth.

[39:44]

Thank you. We probably have time for one more. There's another question out there. So I know you mentioned that it's not really the technology that's the root problem, but rather, I guess, pre-existing issues. But I'm curious if and how your mindfulness practice did affect what you chose to work on in technology industry and how you chose to do your work there. I think for most of my career, I really thought about my work and my practice as very separate things. And I think for many people, it is. They have a job that is their job, and it's how they make a living, and then they have their practice. So I don't know that it did influence it at first. Over time, I think I tried to look for ways to...

[40:48]

to bring them closer together. The very last job I had in the tech industry was actually at Headspace, where they were building meditation apps, and that is either the best or the worst job for a Zen priest in technology, depending on how you look at it. So, yeah, I think for a long time it didn't influence. And I was okay with that. I thought of this as how I was supporting myself and my family rather than as a direct expression of my practice. My practice informed how I related to people and how I sort of held myself in work, but I didn't think of it any differently than if I was working in a store or a factory or anything else, that I was trying to do my work ethically, but I didn't see it as a direct expression of my practice. But I think as I continued, I looked for ways to try to use technology in positive ways.

[41:51]

All right. Well, I think that's about all the time we have. Thank you all so much for coming. It really is lovely to see all of you here in this beautiful space and sharing our practice together. So thank you so much for having me, and thank you for coming. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[42:37]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_97.68