Good evening. This practice period is about kindness. So I will try to speak about the place of kindness. We all assume that we are experiencing the same world. We assume that our experience of this world is the same with everybody else's and not just our world. But each one of us is a different set of experiences and expressions.

[01:03]

in the world that comes into being when we come into life dies when we die. Our ways of taking in this world of having particular patterns of thought, habits, of experience, of working with the intake of our senses is very unique to each one of us. There's no way to borrow a fart from someone else. That's a quote that Uchiyama Roshi quotes his teacher, Sawaku Roshi. At the same time, our lives are deeply interconnected, and depending on each other.

[02:05]

Practicing in community, practicing with each other, is to surrender to our connectedness and to enjoy each other. Acknowledging our karmic dispositions, we agree to follow the guidelines, the schedule, the forms of the temple. And practicing with each other in this way is being intimate in the sense of Dogen's intimacy. We agree to be inseparable. Committing to support each other, to respect each other, to let each other be who we are. and not to avoid the difficulties that come up between us. It takes some effort, as we all know, and there are many, many ways of making this effort.

[03:21]

So I would like to speak about a very enjoyable experience that I shared with Tim, Tovar, and Linda over several months during last year. We would meet every Thursday morning to do homework for our mediation training offered by Zen Center. And that looked like one person would speak about their most important or most prevalent experience of the week. They would try to tell what they were practicing with. The second person would completely attentively listen to the first person and then tell back what they had heard. Maybe adding a feeling that was expressed indirectly but completely attending to what they had heard.

[04:38]

The third person would just be witnessing the two others and then we would rotate the roles so that everybody would do all the three of them during that hour. We enjoyed this coming together every week very much because We got to know each other more and more in a way that was not so familiar. It was different than dinner conversations. And it also supported us in exploring more skillful communication with each other. So I wanted to suggest this as a form of a dialogue study group. particularly for this practice period. For me, this is a form of Dhamma friendship, studying the self together.

[05:44]

In the Buddhist tradition, there is the concept or the idea of the kalyama mitata, the spiritual friend. And this doesn't only refer to the teacher-student relationship, but also to a group of peers being friends to each other. In the Upada Sutta, in the Pali canon, there is a conversation recorded between the Buddha and Ananda, his attendant. where Ananda enthusiastically declares, this is half of the holy life. Lord, admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie. And the Buddha replies, don't say that, Ananda, don't say that.

[06:48]

Admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie is actually the whole of the holy life. We study ourselves by being inseparable, by being part of the mix. We make a commitment to attend to this life in particular and also to our life together. Being Dharma friends opens us to be in the same place with everybody, not lonesome or separated, just particular in the way we are particular. Each grass and each form itself is the entire earth," says Dogen. Everybody is with us in what we are. And in this particular way of ours, we are intimate with everybody and with all things.

[07:51]

To me it looks like everybody is expressing some particular way of engaging in the guidelines and forms of the temple. And each one of us produces the practice community together. Our particular way of being is prominent at the time when we all do the same thing. And it is not that we try to do something special. We are something special. We are just a particular emerging among the endless realm of human possibilities, and we are completely depending on each other. We are depending on someone being on the fringes and someone being at the center of the community, respecting each other, Respecting each other's practice is essential for understanding how we are connected.

[09:01]

What is it to be intimate? How does the separation of self and others fall away? It is important to arrive at the place where we are to be with everybody else. How do we know this place of being with everybody? We have metaphors to touch it. David White, says at the end of his poem, The House of Belonging, This is the bright home in which I live. This is where I ask my friends to come. This is where I want to love all the things it has taken me so long to learn to love. This is the temple of my adult aloneness, and I belong to that aloneness.

[10:28]

as I belong to my life. There is no house like the house of belonging. This is the bright home in which I live. This is where I asked my friends to come. This is where I want to love all the things it has taken me so long to learn to love. This is the temple of my adult aloneness, and I belong to that aloneness as I belong to my life. There is no house like the house of belonging. This is where I want to love all things, points to the experience that things can just be what they are. without being good or bad or other. A doll of aloneness is the place of settling the self by forgetting the self and knowing that we are not separate.

[11:38]

Coming to all senses without anything extra, completely being What happens at this point? Listening, sitting, breathing. It is not an accident that we sit still in Zazen in the particular way we do. It is one of the most ancient forms to come to our senses and to be present with this universe. We surrender to this form given to us through the experience of our ancestors, and we take care of it as a gift. We pay attention to the particularities of this form to release our self-centeredness.

[12:49]

It is useless. It is not a tool. There's nothing to attain. Sitting zazen, sitting upright, still, without moving, is our place of homecoming. John Kabat-Zinn says, when you do fall into presence, healthy children live in the landscape of presence much of the time. You know it instantly. And being home, you can let loose, let go, rest in your being, rest in awareness, and present itself in your good company. Zazan has no goal except to be present with everything.

[13:54]

It is presence in this particular body and insight in our complete connectedness. To be present is to be aware of feelings, sensations, thoughts, and to not hang on to them, but to just let them pass by. When our mind is busy, when we notice that our mind is busy, it might be helpful to be aware of our breathing. And when we notice that our mind is wondering, to come back to breathing. We become aware and breathing can help us settling, grounding, and allowing space. And breathing is happening with or without awareness.

[14:59]

It is our ancient mammalian brain that takes care of our vital rhythms. It gives us some kind of trust in the universe when we listen to this. It connects us. It is like an expression complete this moment. Nothing needs to be added. So talking like this might sound like an abstraction or like an ideal, and so I would like to turn back to the moments when the ideal is missed. You might have heard the story about the African tribesmen that were hired by an American TV crew to carry their equipment through the jungle to the city. The TV crew insisted on a rapid pace of moving forward.

[16:08]

After several days of moving on, they reached the place where it was only one day distance away from the destination. At that point, the tribesmen refused to continue going on. The TV crew made pleas and promises and made the point that it was only one more effort to get to the destination. And the tribesmen were adamant and explained that they had moved in an unnatural pace for a while and that they needed to wait until their souls would catch up with their bodies. I know this feeling of displacement from car rides when I drive someplace and I get out of the car and have no idea how I got there.

[17:16]

It can be even more prominent when I have to take a flight, transatlantic flight, with losing a night or losing a day, and maybe even landing in a different season. And I think this feeling of displacement is connected to our belief in space in the same way that we believe in a continuous time and that we think that we are a separate physical entity. I also think that we only can be home everywhere when we allow our feeling of displacement. And I wanted to bring up

[18:21]

forms of kind of everyday displacement. One common form of displacement is interrupting self and others. Interrupting each other in conversations is a pretty pervading habit. Instead of completely listening, we throw in our version or our viewpoint. And as I mentioned earlier, as part of our mediation training at Zen Center, we learn listening completely to what another person has to say, and we reflect as clearly as we can what we have heard the other person say, and that's called looping. In this process, we open our attention to our habits of interrupting on different levels. And we start to understand what a relief it is to give each other the space to completely express themselves.

[19:37]

A feeling of disempowerment, of being disrespected, disrespected or of shutting up can be the result of interrupted communication. We are actually predisposed to this habit of interrupting as we do it all the time to ourselves. We are hunting for the better experience at every moment and in meditation we are able to watch this, to watch this happening. When we watch the unfolding of thoughts and bodily sensations and we see ourselves distracted by a new thought, jumping away from what we were feeling, interrupting our experience. The inner process of interrupting that we might be aware of is also manifesting in the way we relate to our environment.

[20:54]

We are used to multitasking, being on the phone, writing a note, and surfing the internet at the same time. What we avoid is wholehearted attention and sustained unwavering attention to one object. What we cut off is being immersed, being one with our doing. In his book, Attention Revolution, Alan Wallace makes the point, at any given moment, our minds are on one thing only. So the experience of attending to multiple things at once is an illusion. What's really happening is that the attention is rapidly moving back and forth from one field of experience to another. Recent scientific research indicates that multitasking is in fact not very efficient for the quality of awareness allotted to each task is diminished.

[22:11]

Another displacement is being busy all the time. We are filling every minute of our time with something with those thousand things that we need to do. When we want to meet, we put out our calendars or palm pilots and start a peacemaking process to find a time where we can meet. Business takes us out of touch. It is known as spiritual laziness. We might use it as a painkiller but it has bad side effects over time. What convinces us to be here where we are? Miraculously, we can shift from a place of separation, despair and aloneness, suffering, to a more open space

[23:26]

responding immediately and relating with fewer restrictions. As part of my chaplaincy training, I volunteer at Laguna Honda Hospital and I visit women on an open ward with 18 women suffering from different levels of mental disability, mostly dementia. And when I first went there, I had the feeling I was going to hell because of the suffering, of the intensity of suffering, and the stories that I was confronted with. I was overwhelmed because I had a lot of assumptions about the American health care system.

[24:28]

about the impossibility of communicating without short-term memory, about the tasks of a check-in. And I had to let go of a lot of these ideas and just go back and try to find a way to meet those that would never recognize me. And after a while, the visits at Laguna Honda have changed to an experience of some kind of break on nowhere land, where I do things that I usually never do and meet people that I would never meet otherwise. It's more a place of discovery at this point. I'm coming to the end and I would like to close with a poem.

[25:42]

We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time to the unknown remembered gate when the last of earth left to discover is that which was the beginning. At the source of the longest river, the voice of the hidden waterfall, and the children in the apple tree not known because not looked for, but heard, half heard, in the stillness between two waves of the sea. Quick now, here now, Always the condition of complete simplicity, costing less than everything. And all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well, and the tongues of flames are enfolded into the crowned knot of the fire, and the fire and the rose are one.

[27:00]

Cheers, Elliot. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you.

[27:16]

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