Good afternoon. This is part of Humanities Division Workshop 68. Today we don't really have much of an introduction. We have Dick Baker of the Zen Center in San Francisco. The Zen Center is about eight years old. They have lectures twice a week and they have meditation every morning and every afternoon. They have about 80 students coming to their lectures and they have about 60 coming to their meditation periods. So without further ado, I'll introduce Dick Baker of the Zen School. Hello. I never know quite how to talk about Zen to people. Can you hear me in the back? Yeah. Okay. Because for me, in a way, Zen doesn't really exist.

[01:08]

And also, it depends so completely on meditation for most people that it's hard to just talk about it. So I called, when he asked me for a title of the lecture, I called it, No Zen. And also, most... of the books on Zen, which have come out, have treated it as something special, not talked much about meditation, and made it rather attractive. And there's a kind of unattractive side to Zen, too. I'd rather, in a way, talk about the unattractive or more difficult side. ...particularly have made it a sort of a sugar... But it has a kind of, because I drove through the Yellowstone National Park a while ago with the Zen Master.

[02:22]

We were going north. And as we passed through Yellowstone Park, it was already, and yet there were still bears, which should have been hibernating. stopping our car. And in front of the car until we were almost ready to hit them, then they'd jump out of the way and they'd stop and knock on the window. So you'd have to give them some cracker or something like that. So I asked the ranger when I came, met a ranger, why they weren't hibernating. He said, well, they liked the goodies and the junk from the cars so much. They wait till the last car goes through before the snow closes the road. They usually don't survive hibernation because they eat too much junk. That's sort of like human beings. We lost their way some way. Most human beings in some ways lost their way. Getting back to that way is not so easy.

[03:24]

I did a three-day conference as part of the Esalen program. Mike Murphy, who's head of the... Not doing anything. We just went in and sat down. And no one knew what to expect. And they began to be more and more uncomfortable. And we just let them be uncomfortable until we started talking. And in a situation in which was unstructured, like what meditation is from the Zen point of view. Watching your breathing or meditation. More formless. Because you sit, when you meditate, you sit in a rather... And the point of that is

[04:30]

sit in a way in which you realize that the position is comfortable. Generally, you go a month or a year or two before it becomes comfortable. But you did it more solidly and in which your body calm, but calm isn't exactly the right word. It's a non-activity. It's actually a kind of non-activity. And so you sit this way so that you know your mind and body, which really are... before it... And so that... any activity.

[05:34]

And so then and then you begin to know yourself physiologically and mentally. And you have a reasonable face. And that's meant to free you from conceptualization, free you from all conceptual systems. As it dissolves other conceptual systems. And you end up So ready for any activity. His books are rather dry. A personal warmth about him. In it, his own involvement, commitment,

[06:35]

which I'll read to you. To the views elaborated by Scheller, Freud, in the core of our being, a basic anxiety, in which all other forms of anxiety rarely. If one has never felt it oneself, convince. If one has felt it, however much one may try, it may... Withdrawn from the world, you wake up... and with a knowing sense of your face of this astonishing fact that you are usually we avoid this experience as much as possible and painful usually I'm very but the I plus

[08:08]

experience of having which is why we enter into and live in that and you become very confident in this kind of emptiness and for many people this is pretty scary analysis, which is really rather traumatic than some sort of experiential experience. You're very comfortable and So there's a kind of shift.

[09:26]

You can talk to the Lord or something like that. At home, emptiness. Meditate. It's like concentrating on your breathing. or on a koan, a thinking problem into your mind, like another kind of . But you really understand that, and all of you could go and just . when you get

[10:56]

Sometimes I can't pretend to be here. It seems extremely real. I can't really tell if it's real. That is upsetting. Had some... You've just left thoughts on yourself. Or get involved with them.

[12:31]

So it's more like an accident. Thank you. You're still playing.

[14:13]

You still have your skills, you know. It doesn't matter.

[15:14]

It's a result. Who you are in the manner in which...

[17:26]

I don't hear my poor wife. This kind of way of thinking is nice. But we agree from anything that is mine, so that anything that happens to me, I do it.

[19:56]

I don't know. Then I'm right. Then I shy away from the direction in which I'm going. Which direction? We... Open to whatever. And so that then... It's hard to talk about.

[21:03]

Thank you. Like, um, time. Oh, no, no, it's hot.

[24:12]

that doesn't matter. How do you understand that?

[28:19]

Amen. Thank you. This way is actually...

[32:59]

land in Memphis. student relationship.

[38:40]

Most of it, because we're Americans, partly it's more pronounced here than Europe, it goes the other way toward too much formalism and too much dependency on teachers. We have some idea of doing it ourselves, of being free, of being individual, you know, and the idea of being dependent or of having a powerful relationship with another person who you follow absolutely sounds, you know, really horrendous to us. But the reason is Again, I'll try to approach it from various... When I'm talking about these things, I can't say specifically, so I sort of scatter a number of examples in an area, and I hope you catch an idea coming, which is that Rudolf Burckhardt, Rudolf Burckhardt, anyway, was the great historian who discovered the Renaissance. I mean, literally discovered the Renaissance. Before that, the whole concept of the Renaissance didn't exist. And he was a great historian. He particularly emphasized L-I-E-N, or L-I-N, who really created the idea of Baroque art, and the term painterly came in the vocabulary because of him.

[39:48]

And then his student was Gideon, who's the great architect who wrote Space, Time, and Architecture, and the person who's written a history of all culture from the point of view of design, architecture, et cetera. A very great book. And these This lineage, here there's a lineage in history from Burckhardt to Herflin to Gideon. And when you start looking at great doctors, I was talking to somebody about this the other day, either psychiatrists or surgeons, etc., almost always there's a link to another surgeon who was a great surgeon. And if you look in the art, painting and poetry, there's almost not, a major poet who doesn't come out of a group of poets who have brought each other up to some lineage. And I've been talking recently with this, too, about a very brilliant young man who's both a Jungian and a Freudian analyst. And what is the craft that goes into helping someone?

[40:52]

I mean, when you go to ask advice from a Freudian or a Jungian or whatever, he doesn't answer you in the same way. He doesn't relate to your question the way the ordinary person would try to give you advice. Well, when you talk to a first-rate psychiatrist, they can't tell you what they do. They can't tell you exactly what it is. That there's some craft, some deep craft involved, which is beyond any kind of discussion. You have to learn it intuitively from the other person. And so the master-disciple relationship is a kind of apprenticeship in which Buddhism is a very elaborate and philosophical system and 40 years. And even then, if his teacher says he's a Zen master, that's not enough. Other people have to spontaneously recognize you as a Zen master for you to be acknowledged as a Zen master. It's up to other people to determine that you're a Zen master. You don't go around saying, I'm something special. If other people begin coming to you, then maybe you're a Zen master. Well, this kind of thing is not... You can't learn it.

[41:56]

You just can't talk about it or do something like that. You have to literally live with your teacher. You have to walk around with him, be places, and see what he does. And his way of teaching will be extremely subtle. I mean, it seems subtle, at least when you talk about it. It's very obvious when you're involved in it. I mean, he may, for instance, avoid your glance for a year. When you're with him, he just may not look at you for a year. And he may, I mean, you may, all the time, you may begin to feel really angry. And you have all kinds of emotions. You have irritations. He works harder and longer energy than I have. He's in his 60s. But anything is possible and all emotions are experienced in relation to him. I mean, at one point I came to the conclusion that even if he's a fraud, I'm stuck with him as my teacher. And it's that kind of commitment which is needed to make the relationship work. And so then he may smile at me when I'm not expecting it.

[42:57]

Or he may, I don't know, he may wait for a year or two to criticize someone at a time when he can praise them at the same time. The time when he can bring something home. He just watches his students all the time and then waits for the right moment to help them. And in that kind of relationship, you just are there. You watch how he walks, how he does things, etc. And the, I mean, I, a lot of students come to me for advice and I talk with them and seem to be able to help them, you know, to some extent. But I can't do what my teacher does. I mean, people come to him, I've seen people And he'll look out the window and make some irrelevant remark, and it'll all just wash away. How he does it, I don't know, it's so occult to me. I watch and I say, what's going on here? And I can't figure it out. But if I ever expect to teach Zen, really, I have to be with him to try to intuit what's going on. I think our time is about up, and let me just say that it seems to be 7 to 12.

[44:05]

is that we have the Zen Center in San Francisco. We also have this place down in the mountains, which we're in the process of buying, which has worked out very well, I guess partly because America really wants something like this. We have a place in the mountains. It's only 10 miles from the Big Sur coast, but you can't get there from that direction. You go up Carmel Valley about 13 or 14 miles past Carmel Valley, and you turn up into the Los Padres National Forest over a 5,000 foot pass and a 20 mile dirt road that wanders up and down into it. We have 160 acres, and we have Monterey County, the oldest trade days when horses brought people in has been used much in recent years and it's got hot springs and it's a very beautiful spot and we have 40 students there now living all year round we had about 70 students there this summer practicing meditation all the time and the zen masters down there now more than san francisco and we have a couple other priests things that, as much as we can, what's going on down there this summer, how the whole thing is developing and why we practice meditation, et cetera.

[45:23]

And I have some of the sheets now. I've been working at the printers with it. And hence pictures and things about the meditation things. And if you'd like to get a copy of it, somebody will put a piece of paper over there, and you put your name and address. As soon as it comes out, it'll be out in about a week, I'll mail you a copy and give you some information about what we're doing. What should I do?

[45:44]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_73.38