This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. a lot on this topic, this paradox of know yourself, forget yourself. Know yourself, forget yourself as a practice. And I want to start with a Zen story, a Zen parable. This is a fairly known cone in the literature. And it's about these two Zen teachers. student and teacher, both who are quite famous in the Zen lineage, Dao and Yin Yang, teacher and student.

[01:06]

And they're making a condolence call, a funeral, and they walk into this funeral. It happens that apparently they get there early and there's no one else around. And the student, who is Dao in this case, walks up to the coffin and raps on the coffin with his hand and turns to his teacher and says, alive or dead. And the teacher responds by saying, I won't say. I won't say. So again, the student knocks on it, alive or dead. Again, I won't say. I won't say. So this is... these Zen guys are quite something. I mean, imagine yourself going. Imagine you doing that. Imagine walking or seeing this, going to a funeral and knocking on a coffin and then asking this question, alive or dead?

[02:16]

And I think in some way there's something so irreverent and playful and intimate about even having such a discussion, such a way of being in the world, of raising a question about what is life? What is death? How do we find ourselves? How do we know ourselves? How do we express ourselves? And at the same time, what does it mean to forget ourselves. I was thinking of a story that, you know, it's interesting. I think we, I like looking at our own lives through this lens of story, of paradox, of koan. What is it that we can learn?

[03:19]

And it's not always big things. It's like what brought us in the door today? What's the story of how we got in the door here? What brought you here? What brought you to come into Zen Center? What brought you to San Francisco or to say whatever things you're saying? And a story that I've been thinking about more, and it's interesting, this is something that happened a long time ago. This was, I think it was, about almost 16 years ago, where my mother was diagnosed as having a brain tumor. And she was in Florida at the time, and it was really clear that it was time for her to leave Florida, and she came and lived with me and two young children here in Marin. And It was an amazing time of going around to doctors to try to find out what was actually happening.

[04:25]

And it turned out that she didn't have a brain tumor, but the drugs that they were treating her brain tumor with made her quite ill. And in fact, all of her system started shutting down, and she... She was diagnosed as having lung cancer or a lung infection. She got a really bad lung infection. And I can remember being with her at the doctor's office, and the doctor was describing all of the things that we could possibly do to the aggressive possible strategies that we could take in order to keep her alive. And I took the doctor aside and I said, what would you do if this was your mother? And he said I would take her home and make her comfortable. And so we took my mother home and we cleared out our bedroom.

[05:27]

My wife and I cleared out our bedroom thinking this would be a nice, quiet spot. But it's interesting how she just immediately plopped herself down on our living room couch. That she, again, it's like alive or dead. She was actually ready to die. But she wanted to be in a place that was alive. She wanted to be in the hot spot of our house, which was the living room couch. This is where everything was happening. And this is a way that both of my children could really take care of her. And they both really participated in her dying. And I got the amazing, what a gift I got to be with her. as she was dying and to breathe those last few breaths with her. And I can remember, you know, after she died, this question, you know, alive or dead? Alive or dead? What happens? What is this mystery about life and death?

[06:30]

And she died in the middle of the night, and the next morning, I remember describing... to my son, who was 12 at the time, that his grandmother had died and described what had happened. And he didn't want to come look at the body. That was too much. And it was interesting that he wanted to go to school. He said he just wanted to treat it as a normal day. He was going to go to school. And I didn't think this was such a good idea. But I didn't stop him. And so he went to school. And about an hour later, I got a call from someone, one of the school counselors, saying that my son couldn't stop crying and wanted to come home. He wanted to walk home. And was this okay with me?

[07:32]

And, of course, I said it was. And... And about an hour later, he walked in the front door and he looked at me and said, you know, Dad, walking is a really good thing to do in times like this. I think you should try it. And he came over and we gave each other enormous hug and we were both crying and it was very much a time of life and death. And knowing how much we were learning about ourselves, and at the same time, a kind of giving up, a kind of forgetting self. And I think these moments of real transition, real change, when our world shifts, is when I think we have that big experience of our reality changes.

[08:36]

so how do we practice with this knowing ourself and forgetting ourself? And I think in a way, it's paradoxically, I think of it as a kind of leaving home as a way of finding our true home. That this knowing ourselves and forgetting ourselves means to really pay a lot of attention to what our own attitudes, our own beliefs. What's our belief system? What is really important to us? What are our motivations and what's driving us? And I think our conventional world and our conventional attitudes keep us, I think, really tied to a kind of comfort and clarity and which makes it hard to really know ourselves.

[09:42]

And there's a set of practices from Tibetan Buddhism that I'm not sure why I rarely hear talked about within Zen. But these practices are called the Eight Worldly Dharmas. And these are four sets of... values or attitudes or ways of being that are all very familiar with us. These four sets are pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and disgrace, and gain and loss. This is the way of the conventional world of seeing that most of our activity, if we look, if we start to know ourselves more carefully, if we look at ourselves about what's important, what's driving us, how do we make our decisions, they're almost always around these kind of four juxtapositions, pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and disgrace, and gain and loss.

[10:53]

And for a lot of us, it's the fear, we're so much fear, fear of pain or blame or disgrace or loss Sometimes, you know, just a look from someone that feels like blame and you can notice that your chemistry changes. Or this kind of seeking after praise. It's very, very, very subtle. It's very subtle and sometimes not subtle at all. Not subtle at all, right? Like, you know, I want to be, you know, am I the best lecturer? You know, how am I going to be rated? I've been doing a fair amount of teaching in the corporate world on places like Google and Twitter, and there, at the end of my workshops, they all rate me. And I noticed that I was starting to get caught up in, what can I do?

[11:55]

What can I do to get all fives? That was a perfect score. And I noticed... I noticed the more that I cared about that, the less I was myself. That it was interesting to notice that, to really start to notice that and to go in with this sense that I don't really care about the ratings. I'm here to show up. What is it I can give? there's this wonderful Pablo Casals quote in which someone asked him, don't you get nervous when you speak in front of people? And he said, nervous? Why would I get nervous? All I'm thinking about is how can I love my audience? How can I love them? And that, I think that underneath these,

[13:01]

These pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and disgrace, gain and loss is this kind of, this is where love and sincerity and practice and egolessness are. But we can't skip over getting, entering and knowing and really the way to get there is by noticing our own attachments, our own attitude. What is it that What is it that triggers us? What is it that sets us off? I was just... Someone last night sent me an article about habits. And I guess there's a new book out. I haven't read this book, but there's a book called The Power of Habits. And in there they talk about, in a way, how these kind of eight pieces... these eight attitudes, they get ingrained as habits.

[14:03]

And that much of what we do is habitual, but habitual often in a good way. Like once you learn to drive a car, it becomes a habit. And it's good that you don't need to pay so much attention unless, of course, there's someone in back of you and you're backing up in this habitual state and you're not paying attention. Or opening the toothpaste or getting dressed. So much of what we do is habits. For some people, walking in the door and coming here could be a habit. Maybe not a bad habit. But it's interesting just to see. They break it down into that there are these kind of three pieces of habit. There's a cue, there's a routine, and then there's a reward. The cue, routine, and reward. And the marketing executives use this stuff really well. they really study this stuff and look at what cues are people looking for and how can we get people to do things and buy things and act in certain ways.

[15:07]

So I think really important as a practice to really enter this practice of knowing ourselves, of deeply knowing ourselves and what that actually means. And In some ways, Zen practice, this practice is the practice of knowing ourselves and forgetting ourselves. And the meditation practice, again, is just that. It's just that practice of kind of in each moment, in each breath, it's knowing ourselves, really seeing our own feelings and emotions, our own attitudes, our really studying, getting in touch with the body. And there's also a sense of letting go and giving up with each breath. Meditation, this practice of meditation, which gets used, people substitute the word mindfulness or the word meditation.

[16:16]

Here the word zazen is used, which is the Japanese word word for meditation, and it's nice because I think we have these ideas about what meditation is. So I think of meditation as being able to talk about it from at least four different vantage points. One is from a kind of psychological vantage point. It's actually really getting to know our own psychology. Just by sitting, and noticing and allowing whatever thoughts, feelings, emotions to arise and getting to know them and seeing our own psychology. It's very much a body practice and a physical practice, just this practice of being in the body, of knowing our bodies, of checking in with the bodies, being able to practice being both alert and awake and relaxed at the same time.

[17:22]

It's also a brain practice, and it's a way that more and more there's studies on neuroscience is showing that we can actually change our brain and change our physiological being just by this practice of sitting. And there's really interesting studies coming out that have been done about A lot of studies showing from long-term practitioners and the whole idea of neuroplasticity. So one of the really interesting neuroplasticity studies is London cab drivers. In order to be a cab driver in London, you have to become intimately familiar with hundreds of thousands of streets and ways to get around. And they've shown that there's parts of brains of cab drivers that the part of them that is about perception and analytical thinking and memory is literally much more brain activity and there's a part of the brain that's larger.

[18:31]

And the same is true of people who are long-term meditators. There's a part of the brain that has been changed and brain activity, particularly less reactive emotional situations. So the amygdala, which is the emotional part of the brain, gets changed through this practice of knowing ourselves and forgetting ourselves. And there's this fairly famous quote that people often use of Dogen, who was the founder of Zen Buddhism in Japan in the 13th century, in which he says, to study the way or to study Buddhism is to study the self, and to study the self is to forget the self. And to forget the self is to be awakened, enlightened, intimate with all things and all people. Now, we have to be a little careful about this forgetting the self stuff.

[19:36]

I think that I've noticed it can be a problem when people think that they can forget themselves without really, really knowing themselves. In fact, there's even in some... religious places, there's a particular disease which I call a PES disease, a premature enlightenment syndrome. And this is this idea that we can somehow give up our egos without fully, fully embracing what's actually happening with us. Knowing ourselves and forgetting ourselves means grappling with impermanence, with change, with the fact that everything changes, and also the reality of relatedness, that there is no fixed self.

[20:37]

So this is how we practice with, how we get to know ourselves and forget ourselves by seeing, by embracing these two truths that Buddhism is... is based on the truth of impermanence and the truth of no fixed self. And there's this, when I was thinking about my son giving me this advice about walking and saying that walking is a great practice, reminded me of a, there's a second century Indian philosopher named Nagarjuna. who wanted to really prove this idea that there is no fixed self and that what we think of as a self doesn't exist. And in fact, the way that he went about doing that was to try and dislodge our usual assumptions about words and conventions and ideas.

[21:42]

And he wrote a series of poems called Verses from the Center. This was the second century, in which He wanted to prove that a lot of our ideas about everyday things didn't exist in the way that we think they do. Even things like walking. Like we take the word... This is the problem with this knowing ourselves and forgetting ourselves because we hear the word walking and we immediately think, oh, I know what that is, and we're off to the next thing. Or we hear an idea, or we hear a person... Someone starts to talk, and suddenly, oh, we know what they're going to say, and we're not listening. Or we start to talk, and we know what we're going to say, and we're not listening. So this kind of playing with what is actually happening? How can we really show up for our lives? How can we really know ourselves? What does it mean, this...

[22:47]

alive, alive or dead. I think this alive or dead is a great access point for how we know ourselves and forget ourselves. And this second century Indian philosopher, Nagarjuna, he wrote, I think the first poem he wrote was called Walking. And I'll just read a few verses from his poem on walking, in which, again, he's basically trying to disrupt our usual idea of what walking is. He says, I do not walk between the step already taken and the one I'm yet to take, which both are motionless. Is walking not the motion between one step and the next? What moves between them? Could I not move as I walk? So am I moving or am I walking? If I move when I walk, there would be two motions, one moving me and one my feet. two of us stroll by.

[23:47]

Walking does the start in steps taken or to come, or in the act itself. Where does it begin? So he's showing that the simplest things in our lives are not so simple. And that what if we pay attention to walking, like actually noticing? So this is one of the things that we do here, in between periods of meditation, we often do walking meditation. And it's a way of taking that same attention when we're sitting to beginning to put it in motion, pay attention to walking. What happens when you lift up a foot and move your foot and put your foot down? To pay attention, I once... I took an improv class recently, and one of the things that we did was they asked us to pantomime putting your clothes on in the morning, like act out putting your clothes on in the morning.

[24:57]

And I was struck, but I had no idea how I put my clothes on in the morning. And it's been interesting to start to pay attention. Like, what leg goes in, what happens? Or even, how do you get out of bed? What's your first thought when you wake up in the morning? What's your thought? What's your mood? What's your state of mind? So it's just bringing these things alive, being alive for our lives. I sometimes, when I think of this Zen story of knocking on the coffin and asking the question, alive or dead, One question is, well, whose funeral is it? And I think it's our own. I think it's our own funeral. And it's the sense of asking the question now in our own lives, are we living in a way that's alive or are we living in a way that's dead?

[26:01]

What brings us alive? How can we bring each moment alive in our lives? How can we bring everyday activity, including are difficulties and failures and strains and struggles that we're not going to get rid of, pleasure and pain and praise and blame and fame and disgrace and gain and loss, but to intimately get to know all of these things and find a way to see how getting caught in those deadens us. So this is knowing them, becoming familiar with them, and letting them go, finding that we can know them, we can embrace them, we can become familiar with them, we don't have to beat ourselves up when we say, oh, I'm looking for praise again, or oh, I'm blaming, but noticing, letting it go, and doing it with a kind of a grandmotherly, loving attitude of knowing ourselves and forgetting ourselves.

[27:03]

And these, you know, there's no... I more and more am seeing that there's no avoiding the paradoxical nature of being a human being. Know yourself, forget yourself. Be confident and just don't know. Be confident and just don't know. Are you supposed to be confident or are you supposed to not know? Yes, yes. And it's not like... The word balance gets used a lot. And I think we don't want to find some middle point between confidence and not knowing. So we want to be, I think, completely confident and completely giving up knowing and finding a way to find our own sense of enjoyment and

[28:06]

pleasure, and love, and sincerity right in the midst of these paradoxes. Know yourself. Forget yourself. Be confident. Just don't know. Another paradox that I love is fight for change and accept what is. Fight for change and accept what is. So, well, what is? And change what? I think we're often... I think we're often fighting for change or looking for change. But again, all these things, they're all interconnected. These are words that are all, I think, about ways of knowing ourself and forgetting ourself, of bringing our lives alive. How do we bring our lives alive? Last summer, I was teaching a accomplishing more by doing less workshop at Esalen.

[29:13]

And the group was, there were a lot of people who took this who wanted to find out how to be more effective, how to get more stuff done in their lives, but also they had a real spiritual interest and they were more and more relating to me as a spiritual teacher and as a Zen priest. And at one point, someone said, oh, I really get it. I really get what you're saying about how to be effective in the world, how to be an effective person in the world. It's really about accepting this. And they use this phrase, whatever the universe brings, that you should have a whatever the universe brings kind of attitude. And in that moment, I realized, you know, I'm also a person who is a businessman and I work in the business world and the world of getting stuff done.

[30:13]

And this whatever the universe brings you attitude was not doing it for me. And when this person talked about and said, oh, I get it, it's all about whatever the universe brings you, I said, you know, for me, when it comes to like the world, of getting stuff done, the world of business, the world of stuff. I'm not a whatever the universe brings you kind of guy. I'm a write the freaking business plan kind of person. And I think, so this is, you know, it's fight for change and accept what is. So it's not just about accepting what is. This is a whatever the universe. But what is it we're wanting to change? There's a lot of real problems out there in the world. How can we help? What can we do? What can we do to express our own compassion? How can we relieve suffering? How can we help to fight for more social justice, for more equality?

[31:20]

How can we bring this knowing ourself and forgetting ourself into the world? How can we bring it into humanity? really helping others. I think I'd like to try something and have you talk for a couple of minutes. Okay. So here's what we're going to do. In a minute, not yet, I'm going to ask you to turn to the person next to you without talking. And I'm going to ask you to have a really brief conversation with the person next to you about what do you think about this know-yourself thing?

[32:32]

forget yourself. How might you practice with this? What does it mean to you? How might you practice with this knowing yourself and forgetting yourself? And you can practice right as we are having this conversation by exploring what it is you're saying, And then you can forget yourself by listening to the other person who's talking. And notice, are you thinking about something else? Can you, for just two minutes, forget yourself enough to just listen to what this other person is saying? So, again, there's a lot of people in the room, and it's a small space. We also need to be aware... of keeping our voices. Really get close and keep your voice down. Otherwise, there'll be a huge loud noise and no one will hear.

[33:34]

So just find a person. Just find a person. I'm not going to time per person. So just speak for a minute and then have the other person speak for a minute. So we're going to do this literally for like a couple of two or three minutes, and then I'll have, we will ring a bell in three minutes, okay? So please, find a moment. What does this mean to you? Know yourself, forget yourself. Okay. Shh, shh. So please thank your partner. And come on back. I'll let you talk for a minute.

[34:40]

Look what happens. Let's stop. Yeah, I know. Well, you can all continue this. want to leave you with one final paradox and then I have a short poem. The other paradox that I think is a wonderful part of this practice is embrace emotion and embody equanimity. Embrace emotion and embody equanimity. So there's nothing about know yourself or forget yourself or alive or dead that is about suppressing emotion. And I think, in part, all this practice is about owning and knowing and really getting to know, really getting to know our own emotional life.

[35:47]

And in a way, these eight practices, these eight worldly dharmas, all can be used as as ways to really get familiar with our own emotional life. And then equanimity is how we kind of sit right in the middle of it. People often think of equanimity as being kind of cool. I like to think of it more as this really warm equanimity, this warm equanimity. That's what I'm aiming for in my own life, is to find that to be... fully, fully emotional, and to find equanimity at the same time. And I think, again, these are all, I think, the same, just different words for the same practice of know yourself, study yourself, and forget yourself. And I want to read a poem that I'm sure has been read.

[36:49]

many times here, and I know Paul has read this poem at least once, but I don't think I've ever read this poem. It's called Last Night as I Was Sleeping by Antonio Maggiado. Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt, marvelous error, that a spring was breaking out in my heart. I said, along which secret aqueduct, O water, are you coming to me? water of my new life that I have never drunk. Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt marvelous error that I had a beehive here inside my heart, and the golden bees were making white combs and sweet honey from my old failures. That's my favorite line in this poem. Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt marvelous error that I had a beehive here in my heart, And the golden bees were making white combs and sweet honey from my old failures.

[37:53]

Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt marvelous error that a fiery sun was giving light inside my heart. It was fiery because I felt warmth as from a hearth, and sun because it gave light and brought tears to my eyes. Last night as I slept, I dreamt marvelous error that it was God I had here inside my heart. but that's incorrect. And dilution means blessed vision. So it's really like, that's not an error in Machado's form. This is a vision that he has of all these things.

[39:00]

I've seen it translated as mistake. Yes, not a mistake. I've never seen it translated. Say it again. The Catholic religion that is used means like seeing a vision. Thank you. Well, I feel like I've just made a blessed mistake. And I really appreciate you pointing that out. Thank you. Thank you all very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge. And this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[40:01]

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