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. Good evening. Good evening. Welcome to the new year. As I was talking, Tanya, this was when we came in, I said, It's just kind of like family night in some ways, Wednesdays, you know. Often people, residents are here, and of course everybody's welcome, but it always feels like family night to me. You know, when the family comes together, the client comes together to talk. And of course we're all part of this family. We're all born. We all die. We all so desperately want to be happy. I don't want to avoid suffering.

[01:00]

And we're in this adventure endeavor from top to bottom. Sometimes we don't even know how they end. We're joined. But I believe there's a very profound connection in the inner being. Not just the inner being between us, but the deep core what we are, that sometimes our difficulties, I don't know, can you hear me? Our difficulties allow us to access, and our joys allow us to access, this very special place that's quite tender. So one of my vows this year is not to be afraid of that place, and to share it with people too. So first let me introduce myself because I see new people that I don't know.

[02:01]

My name is Bart Lancaster and I'm a resident priest at the city center and I live next door. My nature job, I call myself priest administrator, meditation in action. You know, how do you practice meditative or wisdom and compassion in administration, you know, working in human resources, hiring people. How many people would start? Maybe they have to leave. How do you do that with a kind of kindness to the rightness? And stay here. There's seemingly no end to this practice when you engage in that life. Sometimes you think, ah, I can't be a practitioner. I'm doing this kind of work where I'm in isolation.

[03:03]

You can do this practice anywhere, at any time, during the day. And you're thoroughly acceptable. This is your home. You have the binding right to this practice, to this life. And you belong. It's very important that we realize we belong. This is our citizenship life here. And it's not easy. There are difficulties. So welcome to the new friends and to the old friends to Beginners by Temple. Something new. Maybe we know pretty much what's going to happen, but maybe it's not always so. And in fact, I would actually say It's rarely exactly what we thought was going to happen. We sort of round out the edges so we don't get scared. And usually it's quite unique what's going to happen.

[04:07]

Who we meet, how we respond, the newness of it. So not always so is a generosity, which is the first thing. What I mean is letting go, giving weight, being generous, not clinging to anything. both in our internal being and in our inner being with all of us. So I thought, as it's a new year, and my birthday is next week, and along with Robert Tapas and Jordan Thorn, we're all one, three days apart next week. It's Capricorn, so. And this is, I looked it up in the honors of the broken God of beginnings and endings, but also of great transitions. Passages, endings, and portals, possibilities. So things end, seemingly, and then something new arises. And, you know, our teaching is, that's true, but yet nothing

[05:16]

ends completely. Nothing new arises completely due to the profound connection of all life. So here at Zen Center, it's been a difficult time. We've lost our central advent. I think everyone probably knows now. Maybe some people don't be able to see who passed away on New Year's Eve And we had many losses, and we'll have losses. This is our life. Buddha said, if you will rejoice so greatly at birth, then you should also rejoice as greatly at death, because they're linked. One inevitably leads to another. Don't be so well-sighted here. Pay attention to their connection. And yet nothing completely ends.

[06:18]

We are our pets. We are these people's lives, too. I was thinking of three people who have meant a lot to me here. One is Lumberland, that I've been connected with very different people, Jerome Peterson, and now Abbott Steve Sleppy. And from each one, even when they didn't think they were showing me something, how they lived their lives. You know, from Luke Hartman, my husband, I learned how to, many things, how to be generous in a very practical way with people. You know, there wasn't a guy with big gestures talking about love and gratitude. And once during a one-day sitting, Mr. Sheen, I was on the You know, Lou did all the candles and the cheating, and I was sleeping on the couch. I loved to nap. I loved to sleep. I was sleeping on the couch, snowing away, and I heard the door open, and somebody said, oh, there he is.

[07:28]

I said, I think he's asleep, pretty obviously. And Lou said, he looks tired. What a sleep we can do the all day. And the door closed. So that was Lou, you know. I could carry that load, I'll do it. It was always like that, you know. And it was very unassuming, very powerful, you know. We learn, we read books and have concepts, but we learn by our heart meeting heart. How do these people live? Watch how this man does things, you know. I can't do issues. Can anyone fuck out of them? And I'd say, can I help you now? Get away from me. No, I'm not bothered, I got it. It wasn't going to give you a hug, but it was like, I got it here. Real direct.

[08:30]

I learned Zaza instruction. The first time I gave Zaza instruction, I went on and on, and then Michael Wenger taught me later. Apparently, I was talking about the spirit of donkeys. I went and said, it was pretty good, pretty good. He said, but you actually never got to meditation. I said, you kind of left something the meditative didn't get. So I followed Lou around. And I watched how he talked with people. He just said, this is where the legs go. And that's a deep respect for people, not mediating their experience. You can do it. I'll just show you how to get going. I carried that. And Jerome, I learned, it's always Jerome was wonderful, and he had various, Michael once said, Jerome's really tough. But he was this guy, he was just going to be alive here, shared in his life, you know, in his own way.

[09:36]

He just lived his life unabashedly. A kind of madcap fashion. It's going to be eccentric. There's a kind of bravery in that. I see I'm not so perfect, but I can share that. I can just let that out here. This is an okay place. I'm not going to fit me out. I'm going to have to hide all this stuff. I can just be here. I need to relax a little bit. I belong here. I didn't realize it. And from Yogan, we had a meeting this week called the Tri-Temple Leadership. And we were talking about Yogan. And I had this image of Steve Stuckey. I always think of him as sort of an Arnold Mennonite Kansas farm boy. I don't know how he's. So I had an image of him. You know, he's just died. It was sad, but I had an image of him. He used to wear this brown hat.

[10:37]

I can't remember what was on it. Sort of a baseball cap. I'd see him after riding his bike, he'd ride up to the ocean. So I had this image of him with his brown cap on, in a field that began just leaning on one of those old clouds. Well, you know, spring's coming. What seeds are you guys going to put in the ground now? What's next? He had this quality. He was just brave in his own way. He would just tell you the truth. And he would say it. That's a brave kindness. Kindness and bravery. And that kind of courage and kindness are usually linked together. It's very hard to be really courageous if you don't have deep kindness. Otherwise, it's very aggressive. And you're quite tainted, you'd be really be courageous. So I think it is this, let's get to it.

[11:38]

So there's this sadness in the end. Here we are together, this heritage for half a century now. People have brought their lives here. They keep one in this room, devoted their lives, the root stock. If you were devoting something, bringing something, Here we are together in 2014 with a new vignette. This is the sight of two-faced God or a white face. There's the past totally contained in the present, and the future totally contained in the present. And yet a little different, something unique, something a little unknown that we're going to experience together. So what will you bring to it, I thought to myself. What are you going to bring us this year? At the meeting we had, we said, say something. Everybody say something at the end.

[12:41]

And I said, to be brave and upward. That's the only thing. To be brave and upward. In some ways, I sort of like the corners of things. Less Zen centers and more Zen corners. My nature is... I'm not going, but I kind of like to walk around the edges to try to be more available, to take chances. So this is to be brave. It's not to be aggressive or angry. It's to be available. Yes. Yes. Can I help? That kind of available. That's brave availability. So I would propose, this is a good time that I have several people I study who stuck together and I say, well, every year's a good time. We put aside something, we give thanks for the things we've had, the people we've known.

[13:41]

Now, what do you want to do now? What do we want to entertain next? Sometimes we feel we're not maybe so good enough or You know, ah, you know, those guys, they practice more than me. I don't think it matters so much anymore. I'm thinking a lot about this, you know, I don't, I've had my wow moments, you know, my little, not little, but I've had my insight moments here, wow. But, how big they are, they're pretty small, actually. Doesn't matter, but I can truly be good. I can truly be kind. I can truly be upright. I know something about it. I can connect with all of you. The Christians use agape love, this unconditional love, this openness. So I was thinking, yeah, that's pretty important.

[14:45]

Maybe I'll work with that this year. He knows a little about that. Maybe I'm not so enlightened. That's a big thing. I'll work with my God and share with you whatever I can. So that will be kind of one of the things. And I think it's a good time for everybody to, you know, take stock within this, not like, this is a grand adventure, birth and death. What now? You know? We have this place together where people can come and meet their true light, you can see. You know? People come here, you know. We don't just accidentally come here. We profoundly want to be happy. We deeply want to secure first our own happiness. The Buddha says, seeing how deeply I want to be happy and secure my happiness, and knowing everybody else is exactly the same, how could I ever be unkind again to another creature?

[15:48]

Oh my gosh, we're all here together trying, though. Now, we don't know a lot about really making ourselves happy. We have funny ideas about it. We need to refine this, by the way, and that's what we're doing. We refine it, hopefully gently with each other, I would propose in the upcoming year. It's a difficult world to live in. We were in our leadership day, and we were all heating, and it's 69 degrees, and we're getting sunburns, and somebody said, Oh, this is great, and I feel so guilty. The weather is so good. Everything feels a little funny these days. But we still have our intention, this intention in the upright to help people to be truly happy, to end their suffering. This will be kind of what I would like to do. I think everybody, it's a good time to think about that. What am I going to undertake?

[16:50]

And if you don't feel like, oh, I can't do it, you know, my favorite go on is Esau Dorsey's go on, if you get the karma you deserve, whether you deserve it or not, you know, don't worry about totaling up the rights and wrongs of life. It's beyond that. What are you going to do? That point's back here. Oops, I'm alive. What am I going to do? What's acceptance beyond acceptance, beyond even your dream of acceptance into true inner being or this being? You have to let go of it. This is not always so. Sometimes it's startling when our meaningful connections with things are blown up that way. I know who this is. But we get trapped. But not always so. This open door again is refreshing. I think being a little bit uneasy is OK for us.

[17:54]

Don't get too easy. But we're going to be OK. This is the Amitabha Buddha. Steve Weintraub once said, this ludra means it's OK. This is the OK. It's OK ludra. It's OK. It's too warm. People are dying. It's OK. Doesn't mean there's not self, right? Doesn't mean that. But there's a way to penetrate and live here that you can find. This is the problems of the Buddha. That's why we believe they express it. Jeff, what were you plagued this week? Maybe that's not quite a good thing. What's yoga? Carbo just means what you plank the hardest. How we meet things at this position is what we experience.

[19:00]

So you have a great opportunity to do something new. And it's your right to do something new. The Buddhas have made a contact with you by being pure in a human body. It's like the Christian mythos of Christ. We cannot theoretically be saved. We have to do it in flesh and blood. We have to do it here. Somebody has to do it, show you how. So pay attention to how people are showing you how to try to help you. Not just your ideas about how to help people, but how they're really trying to help you all the time. And maybe it's good to vow, we say, one of those people, to be on the side of wellness or well-being, as opposed to dis-ease, to be on the side of well-being, to take this great vow.

[20:07]

but it'd be, it sort of would make us, you know, these beings, [...] you know Really try to listen deeply to people. In a way, that's all we can do. If you're a member of someone else, that's all you can do is listen deeply. Let people unravel their own mythos and story and be different. I want to try to do that. I think this would be wonderful in our community to really listen to each other and to be honest with each other. But sometimes we're honest. But everybody, you know, sometimes I think, I tell people, if you could just look at a person and then imagine being on the fantastic possibility of a great being right there, they're maybe a little stuck, I'm maybe a little stuck, but there's a great possibility here.

[21:36]

So when you're talking and you're kind of encouraging to see the possibility as you're doing it, you know? And in fact, that's a good practice. The Buddha and also the relative and human and difficult and problematical and carnival. And that tender place, don't judge it, just that tender place is very interesting when you hold both of those. Buddha, and I really feel angry, a little selfish here, but ah. So let both of those exist. And try to offer that benefit to the people around you. So, this year, you know, don't worry about saving the whole world than me. But stack here. You know, stack here with yourself and one person. Listen to them. The benefit is being, possibility, not always self.

[22:38]

Possibility is being, being. But you're also talking, by the way. It's encouraging for people to be treated like... Not like somebody who's... Stretched. Stretched. So encourage, don't blame. You can do that, don't blame, but encourage each other. Kind of find encouraging words. Like, you know, parents are with their kids. It's not like you were bad. You worked so well, didn't you? Let's try this. Shift things a little bit. I think that would be good for us here, good in the center, good in the world, to share this kind of a beat. So I'm gonna try this issue. Sometimes I think it critical a lot and then I get invested in it and I realize

[23:45]

It makes me feel stronger, grieve, or safe. But it actually is a little poisonous. You have to devour it. And so let it go. It's a little scary to be so big. Let it go. Let it go and not be a meaningful or valuable or the smartest person. Let all that know for a moment. And just be part of something. Michael Langer, who is the person I work with and he teaches, he did a picture of me and he said, Oh my, finally getting on, being in the way. But he doesn't mean. So here's what I thought last night, the only night I woke up. I said, it's not going to kill your ego. If anything, you have a healthier ego. You move it over. You kind of just in the way now, but you move it over. You need a healthy ego, actually. You move it over. You can't kill it, you shift it. And you get a chance to look around them.

[24:47]

And some of the portals to that kind of movement are this empathy and exceptional parent. It's a great human trait we have. It defines it. I can feel what it's like to walk in your shoes. If we lack that, actually, that's almost the definition of the humanity when we lack any empathy. And yet, what is it? It's a very interesting state. It doesn't really exist anywhere. It's not conceptual. I empathize. I extend outwards. So ethics and morality, I think, are the kind of essential ability to extend. And of course, things come in then. When we open that, what we said. So this kind of opening, I think, is healthy human experience. So Michael said, you're getting out of being in the way. Shift it over a little bit. Sometimes there's confusion, you know, that you have to transcend yourself or kill yourself.

[25:52]

So Buddha, in his enlightenment, he didn't say, I have destroyed the dispositions. Dispositions are how you form things. He said, I've appeased my dispositions. They're over here. I know how they work. Don't kill anything here. The Bodhisattva, kill nothing. You use everything. Everything is useful. You've been given a lot of very useful stuff in your cracker jet box. People, we don't know how to use them to be good at happening. So, but to want that, yes. True happiness. Yes, I might do it. I don't know how to do it, but I can do it. It's very hopeful. I'll teach this now. I encourage people. Sometimes we're good at being frank here, but we encourage them to.

[26:53]

You know, like when we make our announcements sometimes, sometimes we're very critical of each other. We do really good things here. People are helped here. You know, people are helped to be born, to die, to study, to be fed, so we can do good things here. So we should be more generous with our statements here. These are really good food this week. We had all the kids here for a Christmas party. This is good stuff. This is extension of creativity and caring. This is good. I think it's good to pat yourself in a little bit. You can do more of it. We're a tough people, the Americans, you know. The Dalai Lama went with this neuroscientist. He said, everybody desires happiness. That's the seed of Buddha. What is your desire for happiness?

[27:55]

And somebody said, I don't know if people want to be happy. I said, what? People that don't want to be happy, that's a problem. And then they all said, oh, well, really, your holy state Really, they want to be happy. They feel they don't deserve to be happy. Oh, he said, oh, that's okay. We can work with that. Now we have something to work with. There's a hook, a creative hook we can work with. Oh, you want to be happy, but you don't deserve it. We can work with that. Yes, you deserve to be happy. But he said, I mean, be happy right now. But truly, yeah. This is the trick. May not be the happiness you imagine. You know. So we go on here. It's New Year. We work with, oh, I forgot, I'm not Ed Sanderson, by the way.

[28:59]

Well, if he didn't like the talk, I was Ed Sanderson. Ed Sanderson is our new man who's coming in, and he was supposed to give the talk. and he had very minor surgery, I believe. He's gonna be fine. We're taking good care of our Abbots and Abbots, but he couldn't talk tonight, so I was, Rosalie said, you're on, come off the bench, you're going in the games. Here I am, but Ed Sanderson is our new Abbott, and he will be giving some talks, I believe, for coming months to get to know the City Center of Residential. So change in our, loved Abbas is going to be stepping down soon too, so it's going to change. But she'll be here too. And she'll go on. Just like Seth said, we'll go on. Because we're here. We're animated. We're part of life. We can do something.

[30:00]

We're alive. Let's do something. Let's start a new year. Let's make this a wonderful Zen place, a Zen opportunity for people. You know, here we're, you know, for the last five or six years, we've been, wow, what sense is it going to be? You know, a lot of discussion and people have different opinions. It's okay, but they're all good people. All these are good people trying to do their best. You're part of this too. What sense is it going to be? You can define it yourself, how you meet people when you answer the door, when you sit, when you eat there. Is it actually how you live your life? You don't have to get rid of concepts. What do you do? How do you begin? Take good care of yourselves and each other this year.

[31:01]

I would say I hope that would be my hope. And remembering those that have gone before the beginning of this time that will cherish their memories. And I think everyone in this time of year, we had a grief counselor. He said, you might remember people in your family. I thought, all these people. And yet, I'm here because they support me. We're very vulnerable creatures. We need to be cared for. This love is part of our lives. Parents care for you. People care for you. So it's a good offer if you can offer that to people. And some of us didn't get a lot earlier. So now we need to take care of a little extra portion. So this is good work.

[32:04]

This is the work of the Buddhists. There's some kindness with each other. Kids just keep saying the same things. If you act that way with someone else, you'll treat yourself differently. It's one of the secret. If you love Braley, this comes back here. Your world becomes a world of love, in all kinds. What you give, you're going to also be pardoned. This is what sustained you. Take good care of me. I bring you up. We deserve the day. I truly am. Let's say you're done in this journey. This is wonderful. 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.

[33:09]

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.

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