So good morning, everyone, and welcome to Beginner's Mind Temple. My name is Kyoshin Wendy Lewis, and this morning I will be speaking on the topic we're studying in the intensive, nature and experience. Today I'm going to offer an overview of what I think of as the spiritual context, and I think that will make sense as I speak. And I assume that some sort of spiritual inquiry has brought you here today. So I also want to assure you that my view and my teaching on this is just one of the teachings, ways that the teachings are offered at Zen Center. There's many teachers here, and there's all different views. So if you're new, you know, Just be assured that there'll be a variety, including what I offer.

[01:03]

So I know that each of us, including me, has times in their lives where things are calm and everything's going all right, and other times when things are all rocky, and sometimes when they go a little farther than that. So this morning, I decided that I have a bad cold, and it's making me feel a little... Wispy, I call it. And a few days ago, one of my brothers-in-law was in a very serious accident. So he's in the hospital and has been put into an induced coma because he has bleeding on his brain. So that's happening. And I can't go to visit because I have a cold. So in the midst of that, I felt very... held and felt great calm in the Zendo this morning, and I think that was partly the participation of all the people who are doing the half-day sitting today.

[02:13]

It was very grounding for me and comforting, so I want to thank you for that, and hopefully some of the others of you who are in some circumstances felt that as well, or even if you're not. So I think it's interesting in our lives the choices we make for this relatively short period that a lot of us are here in this body, in this life. The theories of having past lives and future lives are very rich to examine and consider. But this particular set of circumstances just happens once. So what do we do with that? And I think the choices we make are usually egotistical. And why shouldn't they be? Things that serve us, that are useful to us, that reflect us back, back to us, that we are wonderful in some way.

[03:16]

And so those are our preferences. And there's no reason to be apologetic about this. This is our human nature. And yet, you know, there's sometimes this urge or curiosity about a kind of wider or deeper or more nuanced or ambiguous view that is not just self-confirming, but has this aspect of holding, you know, the past and the present and the future in some way that's a little deeper and more comprehensive than we usually have access to. And I think that agency in our lives is often supported by how much power we have, how much money, connections, control. And this is kind of the human history of suffering and success.

[04:20]

And we are destroyers in order to survive, to have that control. And this is intentional and unintentional. And it's partly what we're destroying. And this is the relationship to nature that's part of my theme, is what we think of as the past that's no longer useful to us. So we think, oh, well, that doesn't matter anymore. So we sort of forget it. And, you know, that keeps happening. So we don't realize all of... the things that are being destroyed. And this has been going on all through human history, so you don't have to feel bad about it, badly about it, but to consider it, like, hmm, what do I push aside? What do I ignore? What do I not know that might give me a sense of my relationship to everything?

[05:25]

And I think there's even a sort of... pleasure or something. I'm not sure if that's the right word for it, but a kind of enjoyment in, you know, kind of destroying, like I'm doing it my way and all, you know, all that other stuff that's old fashioned or no longer, you know, and there's this kind of pride that we can have in that. And I'm not saying we feel it all the time or anything like that, but there are these moments where we might feel that. And, you know, we can observe this in our everyday life. in ourselves and in others. Like, you know, when someone gets a new position, this is true for me too, so don't worry about it, but, you know, you get this new position, you say, okay, I'm going to do it my way, and it's going to be better, it's going to be this, it's going to be that, and there's a kind of arrogance in it, which is very human, and a lack of gratitude, because we, you know, we just want to have everything else

[06:27]

that we don't understand. If we don't understand a system that's in place, we just want to replace it. So rather than try to understand it, we get rid of it. And as I said, I don't think that these are inappropriate attitudes. They're even expected of us, you know, that we are going to improve a situation. And that's something that's also part of it. There's this destructive quality and then this creative piece. And so how are those talking to each other? But in the sense of destruction, because we can see it in these kind of ordinary ways in our life, you know, how is it impacting our whole reality to have that attitude in these ways that we just are relating to each other every day and then extend that out into how we perceive the whole reality. world, I guess you could say, and all the things that are going on out there.

[07:29]

So I've certainly had this attitude, as I've already said, and there was one job that I had at Zen Center that just gave me a little shift in that attitude, and so it was probably the best job I could probably do. possibly have, I thought, oh, yes, you know, I'm going to go in this job and I'm going to do this and that and I'm going to take care of this and that. And after a few months, I just kind of slowed down and I forgave everyone who had been in that position before me for all the things I had, you know, been critical about in them for the way they did it. And I realized I was caught in my habit patterns and the whole habit patterns of all the people around me and the endemic type of decision-making that is part of any institution. And I just, you know, and then I knew that a lot of times people would praise me because I had done something for them.

[08:35]

And so I couldn't really tell what was really being appreciated and what was just conditional. Yeah. And I think that's one of the aspects of having authority or power, is that that's the kind of relationship you end up having with people. I was reading, I just remembered this, I was reading an article by Peter, I'm not sure how you pronounce his name, Sheldahl. He does art reviews for The New Yorker, and he's ill. And he was saying, you know, once you have authority, people stop telling you the truth. And I thought, yeah, that is kind of what it feels like. And that's not absolutely true. But it's just this kind of tendency. And so, you know, considering that. But it turns out, you know, there's a lot of ambiguities in power because your sincere desire to have an effect and to make improvements and care about people and, you know, do all kinds of things are also there.

[09:43]

But in that position, I felt like my arrogance had sort of taken a blow. And I watched that and just, you know, worked at accommodating it and seeing how all that worked. I ended up being in that job for about three years, so I had plenty of time to consider all this. At the same time, I thought, you know, I'm still going to do this. what I want to do. I'm still going to try to make these things happen that I was hoping would be helpful to other people and to the actual physical building itself. And I think I had a little less presumption and a little less, what do you call it, I'm doing this kind of feeling and just made the arrangements and made it happen in whatever way was possible with all the complications.

[10:45]

So that kind of arrogance and ingratitude that I'm calling that is something that often exists between the generations, although that's not all that exists between the generations. But that's one of the pieces of it. But it's interesting that the clash of... I guess you would call it, of generations isn't exactly real because human nature is consistent. So, you know, it's like the next generation, quote-unquote, comes in, and they're all basically doing the same things as the last generation, plus teaching the next generation to also behave in that way. And so we just keep doing it. There's also this little contradiction where we sort of make heroes of past generations and want to emulate them.

[11:49]

And that's often a projection of what, you know, a reflection of ourselves. But still, it's all pretty slippery, I would say. The historian Philip Blom commented that history in general and historical progress in particular, is not so much the depiction of a logical sequence of events as an invention of historians determined to impose systems and orderly narratives on the unruly past. So often, you know, I'll read one historian about something, and I'll say, oh yeah, that's interesting, oh that's what was happening, and then I'll read another one, and it's from a different perspective, and they are including all these other qualities. Often historians will focus on only one part of the world that's happening. And so all these other things are going on in the world and all these other places.

[12:52]

So you get these very limited views, and it's not inappropriate because it focuses some attention partly on... the consistency of human nature and human behavior and how things unfold again and again and again in a pretty similar way. So I've said this before, but there's that saying, you know, the one who ignores history is bound to repeat it, but I think we're bound to repeat it just because our... It's human nature that doesn't change. What's happening, what's occurring in a certain way shifts around, but our ability to accommodate it and evaluate it and accept it is pretty consistent. So the purpose of this ordering of history is to be able to both criticize and glorify the past, he says.

[13:53]

He adds, folly usually triumphs over master plans and points to how that folly is at the base of so much destruction as well as occasionally creation throughout history. So this destruction creation, destruction creation that we're kind of involved in and the consequences of the destruction and then the hope of creation. And, you know, since we don't get out of this, this is where we are in the world, at least as I have experienced and I guess you would call studied it or considered it. Is there a way to see it a little bit more clearly so that we can shift the destructive consequences in a creative way so that the creative part can get stronger.

[14:58]

Because it isn't quite as satisfying as destruction. It has less power feeling in it. So it's very interesting. So one of the things that... I think I was a somewhat too thoughtful young person. And I... When I was a teenager, and I don't know if this happens to all teenagers, but several seem to have this experience, I started to resent my parents and think of all the mistakes they had made and how my life could have been different if they'd been different, that sort of thing. And, you know, I had some reasons for that. My father was an alcoholic, and it did sort of make our life a little stressful, I guess you would say. But I realized as I looked at them that if I were to blame them, and I've mentioned this to other people, this realization, I would have to blame their parents and their parents' parents, and pretty soon I'd be all the way back to the beginning of the first little cells out of which we evolved.

[16:10]

And that didn't seem to be very useful. So I considered that this life, My life was my responsibility. And there were things about what I had received that I deeply appreciated. My parents had a certain quirky sense of humor in a way, and my mother's was quite informed. And... this appreciation of beauty and of reading and of music that have been very supportive for me. So there was a lot I received. And when I looked at their limitations, I thought, oh yeah, I have mine and I'm going to have limitations too. So there was some sort of ameliorating of that kind of resentment and separation. So when we can consider the world as less of kind of an orderly succession of events or a succession of events that we can put in order, then as this somewhat disorderly kind of mishmash, I think that we negotiate and navigate in our own ways, I think it can allow us to be a little less certain and less arrogant.

[17:41]

and be a bit more humorous about our notions about what is best and how to get there. And, you know, consider how don't criticize others and praise ourselves so much. You can't help it. That's why it's one of the precepts. So, you know, but just think about it. So... what in Buddhism is called the unsatisfactoriness that is part of this human condition, I think can bring us to ask questions about meaning and love and purpose and vocation that don't depend so much on our being right. Because in the midst of it, there's this corresponding sort of tug that also repeats itself in human nature, and that is... and patient and a persistent form of love and hope that I think in a certain way is not so much a part of our logical, rational way of seeing things.

[18:55]

And it's not, it doesn't have so much of that sense of progress to it, I guess you would say. but it does have this role and this impact as it's also functioning in all of that. And I think that this can have a spiritual, eternal urgency to it. And in Buddhism, this urgency is usually understood through stopping. And at that point, asking our mind, and our heart, and actually our bodies too, a myriad of ethical questions. And I think these questions go to the kind of heart of our vanity, or our sense of self. And if you think of having a sense of self being vanity, it might help a little bit in terms of not having such a strong sense of self, rather than saying, I have to get rid of myself.

[20:01]

Just look at the vanity part of it. And so I think this way of examining ethical teachings is what matures us to deep Buddhist compassion. Partly because it so much includes us. It's not a compassion that I'm feeling towards others. It's this deep sense of our own human nature that then connects us to our understanding of others. So this, you know, narrowness and vanity, you know, we can't help it. And they're inevitably destructive with also this possibility of something creative arising out of paying attention to them, caring, and also recognizing the functioning of what the Buddhist teaching calls the middle way, which is the...

[21:04]

middle way between self-indulgence and, what is that other side? Shame or sort of self-hurting. So the Buddha, in Buddhism, it's being overly ascetic. And I think, oh, self-punishment, that's the other side. So, and that's the middle way between arrogance and shame. And it's difficult to discern because destruction and creation are always talking to each other. So Yvonne Gabbara, she's a theologian, and I'm referring to her work, Longing for Running Water. She examines this in various ways in developing what she calls an ecofeminist epistemology. And this longing for running water is about ecology.

[22:09]

How long are we going to have fresh water to drink? And how many people don't have it? And so she's examining that. What we call theological truths are experiences some people have had and have tried to express within their own cultural settings. We repeat them as if they were ours. but often do so without making them our own. If we do not make these experiences our own, we run the risk of losing contact with the vital meanings they bear, meanings we receive and also to which we add. Often we turn traditional religious statements into truths, that are somehow above and beyond our bodies and personal histories. To the degree to which we distance these truths from their origins and from ourselves, we act as if they had some hidden power over us.

[23:18]

It follows that when we ask questions about the tradition, we believe we have lost our faith and are seized by fear for daring to raise such questions. Nevertheless, these questions give meaning to the perspective I am describing. To recover our human experience, to permit the meaning of our deepest beliefs to develop in our minds and bodies, is the guiding principle of this epistemology. This opens up a critically important dimension. struggling against certain alienations that hold us captive to an authoritarian system that limits our ability to drink deep of our own experience. So what she's talking about here is, you know, how do we apply these experiences that these historical spiritual people have had, who we venerate, and yet kind of put...

[24:25]

behind us or next to us or on the altar. So how do we incorporate their intuition, their insight, their experience into our own bodies and our own lives? So one way I think this sometimes happens is while we're very appropriately inspired by the idea or ideal of a bodhisattva, we often choose a bodhisattva and then project our own ideology onto the bodhisattva rather than that bodhisattva looking at us. And this can be very creative and compassionate and very useful, but it's also something to look at. I'm putting this experience outside myself and onto this bodhisattva. And then... saying that that bodhisattva looks like me. And so this way we do that.

[25:26]

So I think that dismantling our projected preferences takes a great deal of personal experience in meditation and ethical determination and examination. And sometimes this can be felt as a loss. We might feel a little disoriented or think, well, if my ideals are not... And what do I hold on to? But it's also remarkably freeing. And I think that that's where that experiential part comes in. That our projections are often based in some sort of authority that we've either adopted or we want to have a good connection with. And also... in our cultural expectations and assumptions, which we've been thinking about for some years now. So I can't be entirely sure of this, but I believe that we prefer our, you know, a form of self-indulgent freedom, freedom on our own terms over spiritual freedom.

[26:41]

The latter, spiritual freedom, I think is disconcertingly calm. It's very odd. And even if you just had moments or a few days of it or something like that, it's like, hmm. And this calm abiding in the past, present, and future, or in the context of mortality and eternity, is not so self-confirming in a certain way, even though for the moment we might see, oh... This is great. Look what I've accomplished. But then it dissipates, and we're like, oh, okay. This required a lot of effort. I had to meditate and ponder and contemplate, maybe pray. And so where is this coming from? So it's not passive. It's not passive. because of the effort it requires, and I think that that's, again, what Ivanka Barra is referring to.

[27:48]

But it's available to all of us, and this is where I think the natural world comes into it. And if you think of the natural world only as some sort of ideal where everything is sun and pretty and flowers, that isn't what I'm talking about. I think that... The natural world is inspiring and exhilarating. It's also frightening and indifferent. And those are all ingredients of the process of spiritual transformation. So that's how I see our relationship to nature in terms of the spiritual path. So when I visit Tassajara... I always take one long hike at least alone. And I tell the director I'm going and when I think I'll be back. And there's a lot of uncertainty involved. There's rattlesnakes, there's ticks.

[28:51]

Sometimes, you know, the sun is pretty hot and you can, you know, I take some water, but still. And... There are mountain lions there, and there's poison oak. So when you get back, you have to make sure you scrub yourself and all that kind of thing. And at the same time, as there are the mountains and these oak trees, particular oak tree that I love, and the birds and the clear air, the air in the area around Tassajara is so clear that that's why they have an observatory in those mountains, because of that. Air is one of the clearest airs, I guess you could say, in this area. And there's running water in certain parts of it. And so what is that as well? And yet I met this dedicated hiker who has a special app on their phone just in case something happens.

[29:54]

And this app will... contact a satellite somewhere so that the satellite will call somebody and say, and I thought, should I be worried? Should I be scared? Should I not go out alone? And so I wonder about that. But then, if I weren't out there alone, would I see things? And, you know, I'm not congratulating myself on seeing these things. I just saw them because of the circumstances. There was this little... There's these pygmy owls. They're very tiny. And there was one sitting in a branch right above the path as I'm walking along. And I've seen huge rattlesnakes, and they're just lying there in the sun, you know, and stuff like that. But there's a certain sound that the breeze makes in different areas. Like if it's all grassy, it's one sound. If it's trees, it's another sound. And... These things, you know, I don't quite understand it, but they give me a pleasure that I don't feel in other circumstances.

[31:07]

It's a particular kind of pleasure, and I actually enjoy it more than most pleasures. And when I walk in the city, there are also aspects of beauty and uncertainty. There's traffic and... disoriented people, I would say. And then there's things like the rain and some little puddle that's reflecting something. I saw this car once that I really liked, and I went over to look at it, and the trees above it were reflected in the window, so I took a picture. Because there was something about that relationship between this vehicle and those beautiful trees. And I actually like a lot of cars. That was a Chrysler Crossfire, it's called. It's a cute little car.

[32:08]

And some buildings, and the ways, you know, some of those wrought iron fences are just amazing. So both the uncertain and the beautiful kind of touch me. And sort of invite me to reflect on my responses of kind of approval and disapproval and liking one and not liking the other. And realizing those responses belong to me, not to the things. And so negotiating that. So as Bhikkhu Jnana Sabono describes it in the text we're using, the best nature can do for us is to show us the simple truth, to show us ourselves. So examining the teachings of Buddhism and applying them, the ones that Jnana Sabono refers to and the other ones that we know,

[33:19]

can seem a little bit counter to our Zen way. But traditional Zen teachers know all these teachings, and they're often talking about them, and we don't know it because we don't know them and haven't worked with them and let them deconstruct us. So I feel that these teachings are very valuable to our deep self-understanding, and development of compassion, and worth examining whether we actually engage in them or not. So again, I would recommend considering some of these teachings that the founders of the spiritual traditions have engaged in. And I think one of the fairly anonymous ones is what we call solitude. And that requires a context.

[34:23]

So for the Buddha, it was a jungle forest. And he was not far away from other ascetics there. For the desert fathers and mothers, it's the Egyptian desert. And other ascetics were not too far away. And mystics and... Hermits of various traditions live in mountains, in the wilderness, and other locations of retreat. And I think when we consider solitude, often what comes up is a fear of loneliness. And I think this is just a fear like any other. And that it should be faced just as we would face any other fear. Like... well, yeah, I'm going to be afraid. I'm going to be alone. I'm going to be lonely. And just say, okay, that's just another fear. And accommodate it. So thank you very much.

[35:35]

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