First of all, the reason I attached this machine is that Michael and Bill think I should do what I said at Lindisfarne a few years ago, should be in this book and there's some, maybe there's some things about community I might say today that could be, would be well put in it, I don't know. So the few things I may out say, you can tape and then if we have any discussion I think the tape recorder should be turned off. There it goes, blah, [...] blah. Did you close the door of the office? You can still hear it. And Bill Bill and I were talking about something last night, about relationships of people within the community, which isn't really what I intend to talk about so much this morning, except indirectly as a matter of community priorities. Mainly what I thought about being here is you're starting again, from Fish Cove to

[01:19]

6th Cove or 6th Avenue or something. And can you hear me okay? So I thought maybe it would be useful to you to share some of the things that we've found out over 15 years and especially over the last 10 years on what things tend to make a community stay together. Because we've certainly seen a lot of them disappear since we've been since we've started and my feeling about it is is it primarily it's a matter of priorities and which makes a difference but I think first of all the community is I think it's my own feeling is always good to reduce things to what is essential like like you if you reduce a marriage you say what is a marriage you know

[02:19]

In the end, if you're going to choose a mate, you ought to choose somebody who's able to make a decision and stick to it. You may be attracted to a whole range of people, right? But the person you want to marry is the person who can make a decision, who's capable of making a decision and sticking to it. If you marry someone else, you're in for trouble. And so that's just sort of simple and actually I think people intuitively are attracted to somebody who's able to make a decision. That in itself is an attractive quality, the ability to make a decision and stick to it. So a community to me, when you reduce the community to its essentials, it's basically repetition. It's doing the same thing every day and the willingness to do the same thing every day. significant thing Bill has said to me. And a lot of people ask me sometimes something to the equivalent of, does Lindisfarne only exist in the pages of Harper's Magazine? And does it exist in the people? And my response has to be when people ask me on the circuit, which is concerned with Lindisfarne, when people ask me that,

[03:37]

I have to say, to me it looks like Bill is committed to stay there. This isn't just something he's doing for a short time, and he's going to go off to the university again or something like that. Without that commitment on Bill's part, and then more and more on the part of others, you can't get a community to stay together. If I was going to be, or Suki or she was going to be at Zen Center only for a short time, no real community would find itself there. One of the responsibilities in the Zen community, if you are there and somebody becomes a student, that means ten years or a lifetime or something. There's no way you can sort of say, well I've been doing this for three years, now I'm going to go teach at Harvard or something. If that thought is in your mind, The things that make a community gel, it won't gel. It just will. Somehow it just won't. So the priority of the decision to stay for a very long time, indefinite length of time, and if you do leave, you leave only when it's possible to leave and there's someone else to replace you or to continue or something like that.

[04:58]

And in my mind that's not a matter of saying it and then thinking well, having a private reservation. The private reservation will destroy the community. The private reservation you can't hide because when you live together you know what people feel. So anyway that kind of commitment. repetition again. If a community, first of all you can, that's something that's very, always very interesting to me, is you can repeat what's difficult and you can't repeat what's easy, you know. You can go to a difficult movie several times, you can read a difficult novel a lot, you can't go to an easy, you know, movie more than once. And this is especially true of inward-looking communities. An inward-looking community which doesn't have much relationship to the outside world is... Dan, could you get me a glass of water? This is the glass in my bathroom, I think, or in the room. It's not a bathroom, is it? Yes, it is. No, it isn't. It's a toilet room.

[06:16]

If it's an inward looking community you know like some bunch of monks on top of a pile of rock somewhere with nobody else allowed, it has to be quite severe for the simple reason if it's not severe people won't stay. It's not severe because of the nature of the Rocky Mountain or something like that right? It's severe because people won't do something over and over again if it's not severe and or difficult, there's no reason to do it otherwise and it's very interesting because something new comes out of, something unique comes out of when you do something difficult, it's a little different each time. Now the other kind of community is the community which has a great deal of interrelationship with the outside world as you do and as Zen Center does and when you have that it's it's primarily a matter of balancing all the factors, and balancing all the factors means priorities again. I think your priorities have to be very clear and very worked out. I think a community to survive has to have very sophisticated

[07:34]

policy going on. I mean, you have to have a group of people who meet regularly and who review policy and review policy and develop it so that somebody, a new person coming in after, say, this group of people have been meeting two or three years, almost cannot understand the conversation because they've developed to a point where you're discussing policy in an extremely sophisticated way, probably in more sophisticated than a large corporation discusses the nuances of what's happening and the priorities and such things. A large corporation is actually fairly simple to run because they have one product, one accounting system basically, and people come in at 8 in the morning and leave at 5 at night. You don't have 24-hour people with a whole range of life problems and life situations, etc. But I don't think you should discount the factor of difficulty.

[08:37]

that the community will not stay together again, I think, or at least its likelihood of staying together are less, unless the life in the community chafes a little bit. It shouldn't be easy, you know. It doesn't have to be difficult, but there's got to be something about it which makes you feel, jeez, I'd rather not do this or this a little bit. If it just happens to be whatever you want to do all day long, then it doesn't have that ability to repeat itself. It's strange that that's so. And even it's good to have some kind of initiation to enter, some kind of ... anybody can drop in and spend time, you know, maybe. But once they're here, there should be some kind of Well, of course, what we do is Tangaya, which you wouldn't do, is a person has to sit for five days, all day long without breaks, and if they can do that, then they can come in, yet eliminates people who aren't so serious, you know. And we have a waiting list of people to do it, right? Who think, who prepare for several years, oh my God, Tangaya. And they spend several years just getting ready to do it, you know.

[09:54]

I'm not suggesting you have Tangariyo, you know, a roomful of people here sitting in here a week, but probably you can evolve some kind of a sense of what a person coming in, it would be good if a person coming in was expected to do, you know, maybe if they're going to be a resident the first four weeks they really just are kind of a work we have a kind of work program, which they just do a lot of work here. And then after that they can ease off to a schedule, which is something a little different. It doesn't have to be really any more difficult, but a little different schedule, something like that. That kind of thing, I think, makes a difference. If anybody wants to talk about some aspect of it as I go along, as long as it's not, you know, if you don't mind the tape recorder we can talk about it. About some more things I wanted to say around that, but anyway, it doesn't come to mind right now. One of the

[11:12]

Also, there should be some difference between living on the outside and living on the inside of a community. It's useful, actually, if the schedule in the community is slightly different than the schedule outside. If you get up a little earlier, It's a little different. Your activities start a little bit before the day. That's the easiest thing to do is get up early, but it's because then there's a tangible experience. I don't know if I can put it into words, but first, obviously, there's a tangible experience of being in the community, which is that when you go out there, you feel it differently. For instance, if you've been, and there's a certain advantage to this, community life should be different than individual life. If somebody goes to Tassajara, for example, and I'm drawing on our experience, but I think it is transferable, imaginatively transferable. If a person lives in Tassajara, say, for three or four years, they never leave Tassajara. They can never leave Tassajara. Wherever they are the rest of their life, the Tassajara schedule is running in their mind. If they get up at

[12:46]

they say, well I didn't get up at 3.30, you know. I mean maybe the army does the same thing, if you're in the army you have a sense of well, you know, there's a kind of, so that if the Buddhist schedule works well it means that it feels like an ideal way to run your day and when you do it some other way you can feel it, oh this is, I'm a little off that, and that that tension is actually very useful. a sense of, people in Zen Center have a sense when they're in San Francisco for instance that now Tassajara is doing such and such and you may have a sense that Fish Cove now, Fish Cove is doing such and such or if you're, it makes you conscious of the community if you're up town somewhere you know, oh at the church now such and such is happening. There's a way to reinforce that with you know like we use it with wooden hands and bells and stuff, bells that don't mark beginnings and ends but mark transitions, a little different way of using bells and things but I'm not suggesting you do that but just talking about that aspect. Now in a question of priorities and again in Buddhism we have the three treasures are Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. Sangha means of course the community.

[14:10]

And dharma of course means the teaching or all things as teaching, not just all things but all things as teaching. And Buddha doesn't mean the individual, it means the individual as Buddha. So nowhere in there, in those three highest priorities, is there anything to do with the individual and what you have to be careful of in the community is Again, this reservation, this individual personal reservation of which it often involves, without intending it, raiding the community for pre-community values. Do you understand what I mean? You get from the community things that are very useful to you that you don't get as an individual but their value to them is in your individual trip, right? and you see some of the Tibetan and Japanese groups doing that in this country, is that they're playing out a scene in America with American students, but really the whole program is edited in Japan or Tibet, and they're doing it

[15:21]

The identity of it hangs together in Japan or Tibet, but doesn't hang together here, because they see it played out in terms of what enhances their image in Japan or Tibet, or what makes sense in terms of Japan or Tibet. And those groups do not and will not hang together, because the gel has to be here. It can't be, you know, just a kind of back, the perspectives can't come together at some other point. So if the perspectives of your use of community come together in your individual life, your individual satisfaction, you'll drain energy from the community and the community won't want you in. And if there's a lot of people doing that, it'll dissolve the community. you have to genuinely have, to be in a community, this is again my own experience, maybe it's possible otherwise, but my own experience is you genuinely have to have the community as your highest priority and not your individual situation. And this particularly applies to personal and sexual relationships between people. This is what Bill and I were talking about a little bit last night.

[16:39]

if the community values are not uppermost. As far as I can tell, every commune I know about, money has been a big factor in a lot of communes, not the lack of it usually, but squabbles about it and possessiveness about it. But every commune I know about, every loose structured community I know about, including the where you know like the community I'm part of up in the Sierras with Gary Schneider now in Ginsburg and about 40 families we have several thousand acres tied up in different ways. I don't want that on the tape by the way. And in other in theosophical groups that I know about in other Buddhist groups in the various utopian communities that have been in the East and in the West, the ones I happen to know about, and then including things like Krishnamurti and the Vedanta Society, etc. The big problems and the things that have broken the communities up after a certain number of years have been sexual mix-ups between the members, and especially if the leader is involved.

[18:09]

It's often not known, but I would say that a lot of the communities in this country, which still look like they're hanging together, are teetering right now on this whole problem. And it's just not visible to outsiders yet, but a lot of them are just teetering on this problem. They have terrible divisions within And one thing you find out if you, you know, you have to take a different value system, you have to leave your old value system behind when you come into a community as much as possible and the whole purpose again in the Buddhist community is how to get rid of that stencil when you come in. The first thing you ask when you come into a community and the first job and why right effort is the first thing, one of the first things emphasized in the Eightfold Path. When you come to your wits end and you sit down on the cushion or you come into a community and you say, well I'm going to look again at what life can be like, the first thing you look at has to be the values and understanding you bring to that moment that you came to from your life, right? So right effort means in the Eightfold Path is

[19:32]

to get rid of those that are delusive. So your first thing is to examine what you're doing and to throw a little Buddhism in there, mindfulness does not mean in here, mindfulness does not mean contact with things, you know, like you maintain an awareness all the time with what you're doing. Much more accurately than that it means an awareness of the senses themselves. So instead of you're making contact with what you're seeing you're dropping the endpoints actually of thought perception and thought object or sight object or hearing object and you're seeing, seeing itself, hearing, hearing itself without worrying about the endpoints. So your senses begin to fill up so you experience your senses as the tangible media kind of field element of your experience. Anyway that's more Buddhism. that's the shift we make and then into right effort to see what kind of delusions and stencils are in that already. So anyway we had this kind of looking at what kind of understanding you bring and if you bring previous values to the community you have to be there's a great deal of sophistication required if not every individual in the community is capable of it the sort of governing body has to be capable of it

[20:50]

not only for themselves but capable of conveying this feeling to others that they have to rethink the values they bring to the community. Otherwise, you have basically a raiding of the community energy. A number of people together bring a tremendous, I mean, it's a real hit. I mean, why communities exist, basically, is we like to get hits off each other, right? So the question is, are you possessive of those hits or you're not possessive of those hits, right? And a group of people can stay together for quite a long time out of inertia and energy and built-up affections and desires and hopes of various kinds, right? But if there's a rating factor going on that you're using those hits or you're also collecting in a personal way, that energy will run out because the situation itself won't produce its energy. It'll be running on the energy you bring to it and not on the energy it creates itself. And you've got to get the community so it runs on the energy it creates itself. So how you get, anyway that's enough on that, how you get hits off

[22:11]

each other, I suppose. Yeah? Well, I don't think you can run, my own feeling is, and again I have quite a lot of authority of my side, excuse me for saying so, because Buddhism is probably the oldest institution in the world, right, and it's hung together for various reasons. And one of the reasons is that it's based on consensus, maybe an egalitarian approach but totally through seniority. In a Buddhist framework there's absolutely no reason in the world to give a person who's been around one year any more than a one-year say.

[23:33]

There's no reason to give him a one-year stay. It would be like in a marriage expecting someone to know something about what it's like to be married five years after you've been married one year. To be married one year, to go from person to person is exciting, but it's very much like going from airport to airport all over the world. They're all the same and you never see what the country is like, right? You get tired of your old airport because you can't develop and you get stuck in an airport where you naturally would fly to another airport, go to Bali or someplace. But if you actually enter the country, there's no way to know what being married five years or ten years is like without being married five years or ten years. And there's no way in a community to know what it's like to be in a community five years if you're only there one year. So my feeling is you have to have an egalitarian system of consensus through seniority. In other words, when a person first comes in, they don't have much say at all. And of course, as the community gets older, it gets harder and harder to get on this governing body. But in the early days, it may take a few months. But the important thing is that there's a difference between, so that there's a sense of, when I understand the community, then I can be on the governing body.

[24:56]

So what we do, and I don't see why it wouldn't apply to you, is that we take the key positions. Also, the other important idea in there is rotation, is you take the key positions of, say, if you have somebody who's a cook and somebody who's in the office, and those people should meet regularly, once a week. And when you've been there long enough, either through time or through position, you're on this group of meets. and there will be a trust in that group if it proves its selflessness. And it's clear that it's rotational and it actually follows the rules and it isn't that some people get on it and then just run it, control it, because of their power. And seniority takes it out of the context of talent. If it's in the context of talent you end up with an powerful person who's been around only six months running everything sometimes, because either they've got more energy or they've got more sophisticated sense of relationships or something like that, and that'll bust up a community too. And I think in a community it has to be egalitarian in the sense it gives everyone a chance regardless of talent. Now if you look at egalitarianism in a somewhat more developed way, if you give simple egalitarianism, everybody who's here is here, you actually run it by talent.

[26:17]

the most powerful people will run it. That's not egalitarianism at all. If you want to give everyone a chance to run it, regardless of talent, then you've got to have a system of rotation and I think seniority is my own view. Yeah? I see it as a problem where the longer you stay in a community, the more you can proceed with useful things you can do for the community. But if you're also in a family, you're likely to find yourself giving over time. It's easy to give over your own individual time. Although at the same time, you find yourself giving over family time. That's the big problem. Well, let's talk about that. Here he comes, the family. Hi! So, well let me just say, an example of the values we have. America is going, right now, into a kind of

[27:39]

some kind of willingness to explore fantasies. And I think it's a kind of, in some ways, it's the asshole of psychology. The popular psychology is much more powerful than sophisticated psychology, popular psychology, the idea is that you should get everything out there and try everything out, etc. This is not the idea in Zen at all. In Zen, you get everything out there but you do not necessarily act on it. If you act on it, you act on it in a way that is, I mean, there's right-handed and left-handed Tantrism and even right-handed Tantrism, you act on it in a way in which there's always detachment. And that's very different than our idea of acting things out. But also, you lose the value of ... I mean, fantasy does have a real role. Not all fantasies can be acted on, of all kinds, not just sexual fantasies. But anyway, right now there's an enormous pressure to, well, in this lifetime, in this century, we suddenly have a chance at our fantasies.

[29:06]

Also, to my mind, this has been created by the Industrial Revolution because it's released enough energy so that a lot of people can create their own little trip and the petroleum balloon is soon to be deflated and there won't be enough around to create their own little trip with summer houses, etc., at least in their fantasies. and we'll go back to a much more community-type life. I mean, everyone will, I think. And so it's permitted a tremendous amount of anonymity. And if you live in a city or in a college community, for instance, you can have any kind of intimate relationship with anyone you want, and if it doesn't work out you just move to another apartment or you stop seeing the person or you change classes or there's no problem about it you know you don't have to run into the person again right but in a community if you have some kind of emotional relationship with somebody sexual or not sexual which is tumultuous and difficult and leaves bad feelings because you haven't worked it out properly and you're trying to live with that person it doesn't work in the community you know

[30:28]

you end up with people who cannot be on that governing body together because they still feel they don't trust each other. And one of the things that's been true in Zen Center is that a lot of the early people have paired off. Zen Center has a tremendous longevity and seniority. As you know, out of 250 people, over 100 have been with us more than seven years. But it's still marked by the early phases, 1961, 1963, 1965, of people for various reasons. The practice got more difficult and they wanted it to be simple. They wanted to go out to the movies with Suzuki Roshi and they stopped going out to the movies with everybody. They dropped off or something like that. But a lot of it was antagonisms with people that built up and they didn't have the mechanisms within the community to solve them. And they were willing to do things which were basically taking outside values into the community and saying, then they couldn't work together. And the people who couldn't work together, one of them would go away and one of them would stay. And I would say that most of the people who are central to the community who left, left over triangles. And there's always a trip going on in the leader. If the leader is

[31:55]

You always want to de-egg or de-ball or seduce the leader, usually. And Tsukurishi was great, everybody would try to make some kind of play, particularly women of course, for Tsukurishi. Tsukurishi was just completely neutral, you know, they couldn't get raised with any interest at all, one way or the other. So that game we all play, because particularly in our adolescence it was one of the most satisfactory and efficient, amazingly efficient ways to get attention that we ever came upon, you know, better than needing your diapers changed. And I don't think any of us give up the remnants of that as a way to get attention, you know. So if the community is going to hang together, the senior people, not just the leader, but the senior people have to be quite, their priorities of the opportunity to be in the community has to be put above the satisfaction of personal relationships.

[33:00]

eventually the community gel corrodes. And for, again, this is Buddhism and not so important for you, but for a Buddhist, the real problem is two approaches to Buddhism, of course. a person who practices Buddhism through being a layman, through being married, through being a businessman or a professor or something. There's the other way, which you practice, I don't know, you can't say through anything, practice is its own priority, so that by contrast you wouldn't be practicing through your marriage, you'd be saying, should I get married or not you'd ask yourself because you'd say most couples that I see only one of them can really practice the other one has to work out their own practice or it's more difficult for them both it's very hard for two people to be painters or two people to be poets or two people to practice they're just particularly in the same situation generally it's hard so your question when you get married is will the intimacy and familiar relationship of marriage and sexuality actually

[34:24]

make this person less likely to practice. And if you come to that conclusion, you shouldn't get married. That's the real difficulty in getting married in Buddhism, is because the opportunity for the person to practice is considered a higher priority than your satisfaction in a marriage, etc. Now that's maybe carrying a little bit too far, but that at least what's in... well, not at least, this is also maybe carrying a little too far. What's also very important is the ability to take or leave something. If you're involved in a relationship and you can take or leave it, depending on how it affects the community, generally you can work things out. But if you can't take or leave it, then you get values in which the community is not the highest priority. Okay, let's see. So the last things I want to say, I guess, This is just common sense, but it's also Buddhism in the sense that Buddhism gives it a priority above all other priorities. But it's also common sense. Buddhism just emphasizes the degree to which it's given priority. And that is, all of the early rules in Buddhism are about, most of the early textual material, is how you exclude somebody from the community.

[35:51]

Because it's very clear, the Sangha is based on the ability to exclude someone. They don't fit in, they don't work, or they do something or other over and over again, or they threaten violence at somebody. They're just ways of asking them to leave. In a community at large, at a much more difficult time, you can only put them in prison. But a Sangha can exclude people. And this ability to I don't know, ability and willingness to exclude people is, I guess, fundamental to the thinking, again, in the Sangha. You make it possible, but again, they're excluded really when you come down to it, when they don't put the community as the highest priority. But anyway, so there's a whole lot of rules about don't do this and don't do that, but when you really look at it carefully, again, Buddhism has nothing to say about sexuality, marriage, relationships, it couldn't care less. Any combination is possible, Margaret Mead's arrangements, you know, that she's written about recently. You can have five people married, you can have, I don't know, it doesn't make any difference, right?

[37:16]

but isn't just going to care about it, it's not a concern to it. But two things are of concern to it. One is you don't hurt others and you don't deceive others, and those are considered higher priorities than anything else. And these are our two guiding principles in Zen Center, is that no one cares what kind of relationships you have. Well, okay, we have certain rules which are kind of unspoken, which is that a new person does not get involved with somebody for at least six months. If they do, they're kind of on notice that it may lead to their leaving the community. Because generally a person gets involved with somebody for six months, generally it's somebody who's a little bit anxious, they're used to making a relationship in whatever new situation they are, and then as soon as they get settled in it, they see they've chosen the wrong person, and then they shift to somebody else. And by the time they've made that shift two or three times, they've so structured themselves in the community in those terms that everybody's a little wary of them, and they're not taken too seriously, et cetera. So we have a sort of six-month rule that new people don't get involved with other people. And more important, that senior people don't raid the new people. The new people are vulnerable. So if senior people raid the new people, we'll ask a senior person to leave the community if they do it.

[38:46]

Or we'll make the whole system a community problem. We don't... The governing body will discuss everything. But we'll, if necessary, make the whole community discuss it. What do you think about this thing? If the person is not willing to turn over their private decision to have a relationship with someone in the community, then they can leave. Because the community is the highest priority, and if it's not, again, it'll dissolve. So the community has a great deal to say whether your relationship continues or doesn't continue. And again, if it doesn't, the person leaves. If you say, it's my business, then we'd say you have no business in the community. If it's your business, rent an apartment and live somewhere. You can have your business anywhere you want, but in the community it's our business. There's no such thing as my business in the community. So, except for these rules about, you know, beginning students and things, we have no rules except you don't hurt others, you don't deceive others. So if a marriage is coming apart, now again, what will happen in a community and what you had in sort of restructuring, destructuring, something or other. A destructuring impact on marriages.

[40:13]

Well, they have a... I wouldn't put it that way. I would say that what you experience being in a community is that there's a range. It's not a matter of together or apart. There's a range of together and separate. And what a couple experiences in a community is a range that's possible. You can be together a lot or together a little you know, sleep together some or have separate rooms or etc. So a marriage can sort of come apart and actually find a place that works for it. Because almost any relationship can work, given a context for it. You know, some people you can only see once a year, if you see them twice a year you're pissed at. Well, it works once a year, right? So a community allows more forms like that to occur. And so if a situation occurs in Zen Center, we just had one, and basically I can tell you what happened.

[41:33]

I just tell you just for an example, again I don't want this on the tape, but you can take it off or turn it off. I listen to you and it makes a lot of sense, but it's hard for me to see the practicalities of dealing with that in a group this size. Well, we were once this size. That's what I'm asking about. We were once this size and we did it. How did it work then? Well, in many ways it gets more difficult when the governing body is separate from another group of people who have to trust it. But it is difficult and it's difficult The real difficulty is I don't think the size of the community but that the community is not large enough yet to have its own energy and you haven't been together long enough to really have effectively seen that where you actually are putting the priority of the community at the priority of the person. I don't mean you forget being an individual.

[42:58]

but you do have to bring in all the time and the first few years especially this priority of the community. Now we will in our community we'll let anything happen as long and we've had acknowledged homosexual couples and to some extent been willing to acknowledge other kinds of relationships other combinations but They have to be carried out so you don't hurt or deceive others and it is possible, it's possible for two or three people to shift their alliances or to shift the degree to which they're together or apart without hurting or deceiving other people. If we discover that someone's doing it and it's taken time, there's a deception involved, you're deceiving the other person or hurting the other person then we say, there must be some way to do it. because it's not worth creating some new relationship. It's like making money, it's like right livelihood, it's like making money as a slum landlord to build yourself a nice big comfortable house somewhere, you know. If you build one relationship and hurt another, I mean we have a kind of value, well they should be able to stand the hurt, you know, it's part of life. In Buddhism that's not an acceptable statement, you know. If you make all of the possible things

[44:13]

reasonable things over a time frame of some months and the person still is just adamant, then they're not facing the reality of the fact that their relationship's changed. But you give the person a chance to restructure it. I guess that's about all I have to say about the whole thing. Yeah? But nobody in Zen Center knows that, particularly in the early days. We didn't have any idea that. We just came and Sukhya Rishi was there and we started hanging out and we worked it out ourselves. Sukhya Rishi never told us. Twenty-five hundred years ago somebody said. Well we never took vows for years of course. so that I'm thinking of the whole infant aspects of them because Andrew Oshie said in this month of summer, if you're interested in serious practice, forget about families. You're just wasting your time. You can't have serious practice and have a family situation. And so he was, in a sense, devil's advocate taking an extreme position. And I'm trying to think of the individual thing here, for example. But it's a lot of questions. It's a question of individual. Let me say something about that one point, because that's important. Turn the machine off, please.

[45:39]

We don't have a monastic model. We're trying, in a sense, to find relationships with individual, what we would call individual scholarship, and where one can write or do something and have some kind of individual creative life and communal context. But what happens in a community now is small and moves in the city. We say, we say The monk-none thing, and Mahayan Buddhism is basically a layman Buddhism, you take the form as a strategy of a monk sometimes, but there's an inner monk that the layman has to have, but that's a little different. But we say that if a person, if you get involved with somebody outside the community, first of all, whatever you do doesn't disturb the community, no one cares. If it's not of notice to anybody, no one cares. Because it's not a matter of you should or shouldn't, it's a matter of the

[46:50]

priority of the community. So, if you get involved with somebody outside the community, there's no problem at all, but the question then is, particularly for us in Zen Center, is that that person almost inevitably enters the community. So, it's not so simple, you know, but in New York City, I mean, not everyone's going to enter Linda's farm, so you have a rather large field out there. No, I don't think, but then you do have a problem, which you have to think about. You have a resident scholar, you know, a brilliant Las Vegas dancer. And what do you do with her, you know? Well, the community has to have some kind of reservations worked out that we won't get involved with the person, or we will, or you're free, but the same is true in a Japanese village. You know, if you live in two or three Japanese villages, right, they'll be, say, they're connected and know each other. There may be

[47:50]

thousand people in the two or three villages, right? But Akuhiko-san, you know, knows that in the whole thousand people there's only two women open to him, because all the rest have some kind of other kind of ... so it's ... the community does become very aware of itself after a while, that there may be a hundred people involved, but actually only there are only certain possible combinations, just because of all kinds of things, factors. You know people well and it's very clear what fits and what doesn't fit, etc. And so on a fantasy level, all kinds of possibilities are there. But the more that fantasy level is grounded, the possibilities aren't there. But that just comes with time. But in the beginning, all I guess I'm suggesting to you is that what's valuable is to examine and to think about, and I don't think it just applies to Buddhism, I think it applies to every community I've looked at, and I've seen the problem. Boy, I've seen more nervous breakdowns and knife fights. I mean, I just know lots and lots of situations where people are very, very upset, and threats, suicide, divorces, because it can get very heavy, and people can no longer be in the community.

[49:10]

is more serious in a way and more common, but the other is also kind of devastating, is that one does have to think about how do you place the community priorities in. I think that there's no question that common sense, if you don't deceive others, you don't hurt others, should be there. And then the rest is just thinking through by your own self, what are the implications of my behavior? And how can I take responsibility for the impact? I mean, my feeling is, again, is that every relationship has its responsibilities. There's all kinds of intimacy, kind of flirtation, of friendliness, etc. But the more you're aware, you can see the responsibilities of the various possibilities, and you only do the ones you can take full responsibility for. That's just common sense, but it has to be worked out and discussed among each other, so you have certain ground rules that you accept. Whatever they are, you ought to come to what you accept as ground rules, and if they're very minimal, don't pretend they're more. And if you don't have some agreement, then you don't have some agreement for a while, and maybe you don't get some agreement, but my feeling is you do discuss it and see that what you do agree on is minimal ground rules.

[50:32]

which in the end really has to be what's also, it probably has to come from the leader, and it has to be what the leader is willing to subject him or herself to. That minimum, and then the others can say, well, at least if he or she does that, I'll do that too. But I don't think it restricts any relationship. It just means the relationship has to progress in the context which allows the community to also survive. And to me, an exceedingly important issue because it's what's broken down every community I know about. And the question you had about couples and being married, I think when we get into a kind of stupid position in Zen Center of kind of unrealistic and uneconomical expectations. A lot of the couples get into the woman wants as much chance to participate in the community as the man and the man and there's a pressure to we'll take care of the children equally and we'll

[51:55]

So-and-so should be home as much as etc. You know, we're not together We should be home four hours of each day or I don't know what but That's maybe ideal and it's nice but if you look outside you'll see that most people and if you the husband goes away at 8 in the morning or 7 30 in the morning and if he has anything other than a Time clock job. He comes home at 6 30 or 7 30 at night day after day after day And you sort of have weekends maybe And to expect the community to be much different is very unrealistic. For one reason, the economics of the community are much more stringent than the nuclear family. And Zen centers simply can't afford it. I mean, if we had everybody have their ideal way of taking care of children, etc. Green Gulch, for instance, it's particularly clear in Green Gulch is there's so much heavy work to be done that we just can't afford to make a division which everybody can equally share the babies and etc. But there are some other values. When you're working in a situation like Greengulf, Tuscarora, San Francisco, at least the working members of the couple are not across the city somewhere. They're still just down the field or nearby and you see each other quite a bit. You see each other more off and on and less in blocks of time. So you have to switch, in a way you have to switch your values to a lot of off and on

[53:23]

and not so much blocks of time. But I think it's incumbent on the community to create blocks of time for couples. And if it doesn't, the couples have a very hard time staying together. When I talked to Dan about this, I mentioned an interview with Art Irons, the French historian who wrote about collecting history of the family of the pre-industrial period. Oh yeah, I sent that around. I thought that was interesting, yeah. One of the things that struck me was that he wrote about community in many ways. He said he found out, I don't know how, but that there was no compulsion towards an effective bond in the family, and therefore... Affective, you mean affectionate? Affective, yeah. The bond was in the family, and therefore the son felt more... the son decided he didn't really love his mother for the moment. He could go down and play around with his accident, which was very substantial for him, and at a later time he looked at reason about his mother, because there's no

[54:52]

Right, that's right, the compulsion in a nuclear family that you have to love your mother, father, brother and sisters is gone at Green Gulch. I mean, because the kids, there's so many adults you can have an affectionate relationship with, this is again, your relationship with your mother can take the form it takes, you know, and the relationship with your father can take the form it takes. Well, I think that's true. I mean, I think that a couple, it's healthy for a couple to have a, it's very difficult, you know. Maybe you have to divide it into I think two people can't stay together unless they really just, first of all, I think it's good to look at everything from your deathbed, you know. I've got a few more minutes to live and well, I'll spend the last few minutes with this person, you know. Suzuki Roshi said, supposedly, I never knew he said this, but anyway he supposedly said this, according to somebody who published that he said this, that life is a boat you set out in to sink.

[56:10]

And it's true, you know, so the number of minutes you have left are not so important. On the one hand, you can make any relationship work with any human being. In fact, I think parents choosing your mate probably works better. They're more smart than you do at 20. My feeling is you can make any relationship work. You may not be able to make being in love work. But there's other kinds of love, which are deeper perhaps. But my feeling is at first a couple has to have a commitment of we're going to share space the rest of our lives. Why not? We're lucky to find anybody who'll put up with us. So if we find somebody who's willing to put up with us, then we share that space with them for the rest of our lives, right? Whether you're in love with them or not is another factor, and that may come and go, and you may have affectionate bonds with other people, which can take various forms. They don't mean you have to shift your household every so often, you know. And if your work is interesting to you, you don't get too much involved in leisure, one of the products of all of this stuff. If you're a bit busy,

[57:39]

I mean, you may be involved in something, but you don't have time to get so involved, you know? But this comes back to what you said, you know, a lot of our fear that we feel, I mean, we have this, maybe it's from the industrial revolution, when the world was seen as a big threat, and you had to, and if your family had to be a really secure nest, but if somebody wants a person to help begin to discover on the other person, it may just trigger off a lot of that fear. Well, if you have developed in yourselves a kind of detachment where you can take or leave something, if it works, I'll do it, if it doesn't work, I won't do it. It doesn't mean you're not going to leave the commitment to be with that person the rest of your life, but in some senses, if you find out that they have different interests, well, all right, you have your interests and they have If you have that feeling, usually that creates a field where there's much more possibility of being together. But also, if you want to keep meeting a new person, not the same old airport, you have to allow the person their own development. And if you allow the other member of your couple, if you're possessive of them and want to fix them into what you do is you may develop but the other person doesn't develop, then you finally

[59:05]

relating to a diminished person because you've possessed them. If you allow the other person their own, this is again my own observations and experience, if you allow the other person the chance to develop independently of you, to have their own practice, I don't know, weaving, Buddhism or writing or something, that also means the danger of their developing close relationships with other people. But if they really are relationships that come out of their own development and own practice, they're unlikely to be, practically speaking, they're less likely to be threatening than when you get into a possessive situation and the person really basically wants to get out and sees the other person as a way out. That's definitely right. You yourself have to go through that, getting over that possessiveness, but if your mate has not gotten over the possessiveness, then you

[60:25]

let's hope they work on getting over the possessiveness too, because otherwise you can't have every casual friendship you have as a possible threat, and that's just not a tenable relationship. But generally in a community that won't occur, if the community is really working, because it becomes apparent that it's not, you know, there's so many varieties of satisfactions of relationships that it's not We're still in the process of figuring it out and I may go back to San Francisco now and find there's been a whole realignment of relationships that have been in the wings for five years and Gunn Center has been abandoned and they're all out living in separate apartments. I'm not asking the sense of taking vows, I'm asking the sense of persuasion. Does the community have greater priority than the marriage? I think by definition that any marriage that's going on in the farm must have more priority than the community. I think if you take any couple within this kind of community and you say that they've been inspired by marriage, it would be unrealistic to say that living in a farm is not a priority, that marriage shouldn't be any sort of priority.

[61:38]

I wouldn't think of it in those terms. We don't put people in that position either, but we all belong to our sex, you know, men belong to other men, and we belong to the human race, and we belong to occupations and jobs. And if a couple, and we do find, it's interesting, there's two couples in particular in Zen Center who both were practicing in both centers, but the point at which marriage occurred one person began to treat their mate as a possession. And there's just been nothing but trouble in those relationships from now on, because it's always like they're away from this. And they forget that this person, in Zen center or not, is possessed by, belongs to also, other men or other women, etc. And my feeling is that when you have that feeling, It's not a matter of Lindisfarne versus the marriage. It's a matter of the person in the context of society versus the marriage. And my feeling is that marriage is extremely high priority. And to make it work, I mean, my own marriage has lasted 14 years now. And I guess we'll continue. I haven't called up today to check.

[63:03]

And every day, it could end any day. I don't ever take it for granted, but my priorities are very high, too. Other things just aren't as significant. I can't get that involved in something else. I'm not 20 anymore. I see what you accumulate over a period of time with someone. You can't replace that. Though you do get in very complicated situations where it feels very true and real to follow something up with another person. It's happened, it's a very real feeling. And I think in some cases one follows it up, in some cases you see the implications of it are not worth it. And you make strategic decisions. But if you do decide to follow it up and you don't know where it's going to go, you get the agreement of your mate in the situation. But again, the agreement can only, I think, be tendered. If this gets to the point where it would end our relationship, I'll end the other, which you never know for sure.

[64:30]

That feeling has to be pretty clear there before the mate can allow you to venture out on a relationship which could go in any direction. I mean, to me these are very practical problems and they especially occur in the first years of a community because there's a lot of kind of, wow, there's all these people around and they're all nice and we get to know each other, etc. But one thing that's clear with Suzuki Roshi, if Suzuki Roshi had had relationships with students, it would have caused, you know, the way to have a relationship with him then would be to have a, or who's his favorite, or, but any kind, it's very difficult to give specificities the value of, well not generalities, As soon as you bring a relationship which has all the potentials or all the possibilities in it, as soon as you bring it down to one possibility, you narrow it. Whether it's going to the movies or sexuality. And it's very hard to make a relationship that's in familiar terms, to have the power of a relationship which is like you have with Suzuki Roshi. So it's in the later stages of a relationship like Suzuki Roshi with his students, he may then watch television with them. But in the early stages he doesn't.

[65:57]

And I think it's difficult, I don't know quite what words to put this in, but it takes a long number of years to make a relationship that's in terms of specifics, like a marriage, have the power of a relationship which is not in terms of specifics. So again, I think, one, my feeling is one works at that, is that giving the, you know, not going from specifics, anyway, I'm not being so clear about that, so I'll stop talking about it. Anyway, this is the experience that we've had at Zen Center, which doesn't, except for the priorities of things like don't hurt and don't deceive, doesn't have much to do with Buddhism. It just has to do with our sitting down and finding out what makes us stay together. Meditation helps a great deal because it does reduce pettiness. A lot of the things that would become matters of dispute. dissolve when you meditate regularly. The things that are not petty remain as matters of dispute, but those are solvable. The petty things that are not solvable are the worst things, because they're small matters, but they're not solvable. And those things tend to dissolve if you meditate. I guess the question you raised about people here coming into this, and they're only going to be here for a certain length of time,

[67:20]

It's a very different situation than we have where there's no question that person's practice, and I don't think it has to do with Buddhist tradition and vows, I think that's irrelevant, almost irrelevant, but it's rather that it's very clear not only is the community of a higher priority, but higher priority in the community is practice itself. So everything is put aside, and this makes a big difference. If you don't have that, and you just have community as the highest priority, you have a more difficult situation. What I would recommend to you is that you do have a review process and a feedback process on couples and relationships from the group as a whole, a governing body. Maybe Synanon works very well, and Synanon does it with the games. The games involve everybody, the games is just another version of a governing body, but they do it through this kind of... You know what's happened in Synanon, and I think this is very interesting to point out. A person I know has been in Synanon for some years,

[68:43]

their head of the schools and one of the things that they told me about recently is they found first of all that there was quite a lot of pressure from the women in the community because they couldn't share the responsibility with the men because they took time out to raise the babies and then get behind in the whole process of learning the skills and when they came back into the community they didn't know as much, were not as familiar with the situation. because they'd in a sense been for at least two or a couple years or sort of nine, so a few months of the pregnancy and then the months of nursing and maybe it amounts to a couple years, they've been sort of less involved and during that time men and women who have not done that had jobs and other jobs and getting experience and they ended, re-entered the community sort of feeling a little out of it and this small difference tends to compound itself and eventually you'll have men take over the community. I mean, I don't think there's almost no way to avoid that unless the community takes as a value making space and allowance for the time out of the community that women do and also thinking of giving that, being out of the community and taking children, bringing up children as an experience that's valuable to bring back into the community. If you don't think in those terms, eventually the

[70:11]

A small edge is the whole game. So what they did at Synodon, which I thought was rather amusing, is that they said, all right, let's take the babies away from the families. And at six months, all the babies are turned over to a nursery, which is partly run by this person I know. And so they have this big nursery school education program and they call, they're a little bit more blunt than Linda Spiner's Zen Center, they call the parents who hang around and tell the teachers what to do with their seven-month-old kid, head suckers, because they're all about sucking on the heads of their kids and anyway. But what happened is once that got started, and the Black Panthers did the same thing, they turned their kids over as early as six weeks, so that both adult members of a couple are able to work for the community. This is reported to me, whether it's true or not, I don't know. The women in the community so liked it that they turned their kids over so voluntarily after a while, six months, and then had jobs and did various things.

[71:22]

That worked very well for a while, and then suddenly there was a baby boom. Everybody began having babies because they could just turn them over after six months. So they had these big rooms full of babies, with everybody willing to have a baby now, where there were certain controls before on it, that they didn't want to have babies because it interfered. When there was no interference, the baby population increased, and then they now have a new rule on sending on no babies. Their response to that was no babies at all. They haven't said no sex yet, What's his name? I loved his expression. Chuck Diedrich, who's head of Sinan, said that would be going beyond the money. I like that expression, going beyond the money. Anyway, so everyone, all the communities I know about are trying to work with this problem of how does a couple participate and what is child And Zen Center's thing is we're, one thing Zen Center does not do, which some groups do, is we don't come out with a, I don't come out with a position paper on child care, you know, and then the community follows this way of child care. There are a lot of things I can see the community should do and I'm pretty sure they will come to, but we just don't do them for years until everybody comes to them.

[72:37]

So how we're going to work out exactly child care and men and women and couples participation and sharing the responsibility is really up to the couple's children, etc., to work out. But it's coming along. Well, you in effect, because you don't have a governing body separate from a larger group of people, which rotates into, you have everyone together, right? So it becomes a kind of like a Synanon game. because it becomes kind of a working it out right here, there isn't somebody you can turn to for authority, so it becomes more like a synonym game in a sense. Question being asked. we'd probably work it out... well, we're just so much more complicated in our structure than you are. I mean, we have various levels of groups and meetings and so it's discussed at various levels. But it would usually be discussed with me and then it would be discussed maybe at a level of where four or five people would meet about it and we'd think about it. Then it would be discussed depending on the situation. But certainly the person in a relationship can assume that the staff of Green Gouge or San Francisco, Tuscarora, the place they're living, is discussing it.

[73:58]

and that I'm involved, and I'm usually involved way, way before it gets to the staff level, the staffing involved. But in your case, I would say that as you add people, and what I've said, what Bill and I talked about last night and the other day, at least what seemed to come out of a conversation we had concerning repetition, etc., is that community is, to me, in my mind, community is based on habit. If it's not habit, it won't hang together, and it's habit for the outside people, too. If you really need something, and this came out of Bill and I talking the other night, is you need something like Thursday nights at Linda's Farm. If you have it every other week, it's not a habit. So you've got to have something where everybody says, well, Thursday night I can go over and be in the church. I like being in the church. I don't know what will happen after tea with some people. I'll get to see Tim. They don't care much. There may be somebody giving a little concert, or there might be some poet reading, or you might have one of the many visitors, Lindisfarne Fellows, or people connected with the Institute of World Order, or a new school of social research, or, you know, 50 times a year or so. And if it's a habit, you'll have people begin to drop in. I mean, it'll be slight. I mean, we went for years with four people and 20 people and stuff. But you don't count the people, you don't care.

[75:18]

You just do it. And eventually, you know, people start thinking, well, jeez, I think you should have a sign out there saying Limbis Fund. A lot of people walk by who then will locate it in their mind. I mean, a lot of people, thousands of people walk by. More than enough you need for Thursday nights or Wednesday nights or something, you know. I mean, out of the tens of thousands who walk by, there's thousands who might be interested in Limbis Fund, you know, over a period of six months or something like that. I think you should, my feeling is you should do something, some relationship to the outside community that's a habit, a habit for them. So they think, oh yeah, okay, Wednesday night, I'll drop by and that's fine. My feeling is you should be free. And the speakers probably should be for free, and they should come because they're willing to do it. There'll be no reason that you should pay them $50 or something like that. If you do an outside lecture and invite people, And particularly if you charge, then you should pay them $200 or some amount of money. But if it's just drop-in situation, and I think you'll build the number of people, you may be pressed a little while at first, but in New York City, my God, there's people coming in all the time. If we decided to have such a thing at Zen Center, just keeping track of when Houston Smith's in town or when Eric Erickson's available, we could have somebody two nights a week all year round if we wanted. Because there's just so many people coming to San Francisco,

[76:47]

to be at UC Berkeley or to be at Stanford or something, but you certainly can do it in New York. It just means somebody, I don't know, maybe you, I don't know who would do it, has to be attentive. One of the ways you find out is you get subscribed to all the extension brochures and growth centers, etc., and you see when somebody's coming into town. And then you call them up, oh, you're coming to town for such and such, would you come over to Lindisfarne on Wednesday night or Thursday night? Bill Thompson will be there, and some other people, and I think Gary Snyder's going to be in town. And they'll come over for the other people. And we'll just chat. And a lot of people, the bottom line, I was at the bottom line last night, which is a rock bar or something like that, you know? Some friends of mine sort of are heads of the Atlantic Records, so we went over there with somebody named Melanie, was it? She's just signed on at Atlantic. But people like that, partly it's done because of the press. A place like the Bottom Line works because most of those people want to generally give concerts where, you know, there's 20,000 people or 7,000 people. So they go to the Bottom Line, there's 200 people. But they go to the Bottom Line because they sometimes want to do that kind of thing, and not do the formal lecture where they're on call, and you can get fine energy. And my own feeling is that you often get people who like to do a kind of informal drop-in thing, chat with some people who are friendly,

[78:13]

initiated audience because you get initiated audience and the value of initiated audience is great if you have an audience where there's a whole bunch of people walked in and expect something from you and you feel you've got to produce for them but if you have initiated audience you can go and just you don't have to worry about proving yourself and I think you can offer an initiated audience once a week and you could have a habit and from those people who come regularly you'll draw new residents I don't think so. No, I'd do it in a church and I'd paint the room and make it as pleasant as possible. I think you have a real advantage in the church because as I was saying to you, a lot of people walk down the street and just want to walk off a busy street into a church. And I think we, you know, since then there's nothing, well, not nothing, but maybe nothing but geography. Nobody goes to Tassarov or anything else, but they like the valley. They go to Green Gorge because it's a beautiful place. And there's no reason not to use the geography or the church. And a lot of people would like to go into a church. They don't care who's going to do something. Once a week they can go to a church. And I think churches, these great cathedrals, are more interesting than whoever the priest was probably in the 1472, right?

[79:34]

and you went because of this great feeling. And I don't see any reason why people shouldn't come here, partly just to be in a church, no matter what's happening. You can do other things in it. I mean, the churches in the Middle Ages were the site of all kinds of carnivals and fornications, and it just was a place to hang out. Question from the audience. Does that happen much? You haven't had bomb threats yet, which we just went through two weeks of bomb threats. Well, you may have to have a door which you admit people only who you know or want to let in. You say, I'm sorry, it's closed to members. you know, or you have some kind of membership. I don't know, maybe you shouldn't put Thursday night, you just said Lindisfarne out there, cultural community, you know, or something, and then you have the Thursday night thing is passed out through word of mouth some other way.

[81:02]

I don't see any reason why you can't have free evenings, and the other evenings are a different type of event, that's where the person is going to prove himself, and you pay the But also, if you're going to have more extension students, you also need more residents. For every 50 extension students, you need one more resident or something to handle the problem. But if you have 50 extension students, probably one of those will define themselves as a resident. All right, that's, yeah.

[81:50]

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