Morning. This is my friend. He's rather silent. But he moves around a lot. He has a story that he wants me to tell. He's a little shy to tell it himself. So I'm going to tell it for him. Okay. Good. A long time ago, there was a king who lived a long, long ways away. Is that right? Am I right so far? Okay. Who lived a long, long ways away. And he had a bunch of people that lived under him or under his rule. And these people lived a long, long way from him. And they had gardens.

[01:00]

farms and they grew vegetables and they grew all kinds of things that the king liked. So the king wanted some of those. So he said, send me some of your vegetables and send some of your fruits and send some of the pieces of your labor like the clothes that you make. So they said, okay, we'll do that. So they sent him some fruits and some vegetables and some clothes, and then they returned to their playing and growing and being happy living in their community. But because they gave away a whole bunch of the stuff to the king, they made bigger farms and bigger houses. And when the king heard that they had made larger amounts of food, he got angry and he said, I want more. Send me more. Is that right? Yeah, okay. Send me more. I want more fruits and more vegetables and more clothes.

[02:05]

So the people weren't happy about this at all. But they did it. And then they built bigger farms because they needed larger spaces because they were giving all this stuff away to the king. And when the king heard about this again, he got even more upset. Am I telling this right? Okay. he got even more upset and jumped up and down and yelled and stomped his feet and told his soldiers to go and get more food and more vegetables and more clothing. So they did. This made the people on the farms and the homes very unhappy. So after this time, they wrote a letter to the king And this letter said, Dear King, can you read it?

[03:12]

You have become so bossy and we who live far away have to obey your rules and give you more and more of our fruits and vegetables. Yes. We say enough Enough, right? Enough. Can you say that? Enough. Enough. Enough. It is time for us to take care of ourselves and we will make our own rules and work in our gardens and grow fruits and vegetables and be happy and dance. But now we have the right to be free to work in our gardens and grow vegetables and be on our own. and sing and dance without you taking things from us or telling us what to do. So all the people agreed that they would do this.

[04:13]

So they stopped sending things to the king. And they became their own communities. And they had a great celebration. And they decided to have that celebration every year on a particular day. Do you know what that day is? They decided to call it a birthday because it was the birth of a group of people. And that birthday was called July 4th. And that's today. So today, is a birthday of all of us. It's one of the few birthdays in which we all have the same birthday at the same time. So I hear you all are gonna go out to the garden and do some fruits and vegetables, but maybe not make clothes.

[05:22]

Is there anything you would like to say? No? Okay. Bye-bye. Have a nice birthday. Bye bye. Bye bye. It's been a long time since I've sat here looking at you like this.

[07:32]

It's wonderful. How many are here for the first time at Green Gulch? Welcome to Green Gulch. Enjoy your day here. And please come back. Speak up, okay. Raise my voice. I actually have been gone from, I lived here for many years, and about nine years ago, I moved to the East Bay and got married and started living as a lay priest. Now you might want to know what a lay priest is, and when you find out, please tell me, because I too have wanted what a lay priest is. But I think probably I'm a lay priest. So the question when you leave a place like this and you practice for many, many years and you're no longer in the midst of the formal practice, there's no bells, thank goodness, ringing at 4.30 in the morning and then you get up and go sit in this fairly dark room and watch the light get lighter

[08:52]

And then your whole day is sort of mapped out for you and you go to bed at night and you do this day after week after month after year. So what is it to live when you don't have any of that? Does the practice just go away? Is practice contingent upon bells ringing and sitting facing a wall and being quiet for long periods of time and once a month sitting all day long? I don't think so. I don't think so. And yet, I think when we start, many of us think that that actually is. That actually is not only practice, but maybe to some limited degree, if you're not living in a residential community or a monastery, it's really, really hard to think of yourself as practicing. But I want to say that's actually much too narrow. because most of you sitting here and listening to me actually do not live in any kind of residential community, and maybe have never even been to a monastery.

[09:59]

However, there isn't any reason that you can't have a full-fledged practice, just like everyone living in a community. And that's because, actually, we are living in a community. So, I live in the East Bay, an apartment complex that has 450 apartments in it. So of course that's a community. There's at least, if you multiply that by two, you're already up to 900 people. So that is a community. The sad thing is they don't know they're a community. But I behave as though they're a community. I talk to them as though they really are my neighbors and they live right next door to me. And they see them walking down the street, and I stop and chat. And some of these people, they just sort of ignore me. This is just this crazy guy that lives up there. You know, he's behaving as though we all live in the same place. So there actually is a way to what you learn when you come here, and what this place does do is it teaches you how to do that.

[11:11]

And so when I left, I... took with me a variety of tools, and I wondered how to apply these tools, how to work with them. So one of the most obvious ones I found is, as you notice, there's an altar here with a statue on the altar. And have you noticed that when you go into a supermarket, the place has altars when you're leaving? There are these long sort of like altar counters-like And there's someone standing behind it just waiting to talk to you or very minimally take your money. So I decided that instead of seeing that as a cashier, and this was a scan machine, I was going to start to see that as an altar. And there was a Buddha standing behind it. So one of the ways for people to realize their Buddhahood is

[12:14]

for you to treat them as a Buddha, whatever they may think of themselves. Because the truth is they are. So when you're standing there in front of the person and you give them your full attention and your full caring, and you understand that whatever difficulties you have had or are having in your life, this person too has those kind of difficulties. There's a different relationship with that person. There's a different presence that you have with them. Lou Richman, also a former long-time resident here, has a little website called Aging for Practitioners. And it's about people who are practicing who are getting older and older.

[13:20]

And when you used to do all these vows as an older person, now it starts to become a little difficult to do all these vows. And getting up on a tan, what a challenge getting up on a tan, particularly when you only do it once every nine years. So he... he made me start to think. I haven't actually given much thought to aging in relationship to my practice. But when I started reading his little website, and he only writes maybe a little paragraph or two, it's not very long, just enough to entice you, just enough to make me think about this. And about the same time that I heard, I read that Lou's writings, I tuned in I tuned in to Science Friday. So if you're at work all day, particularly on Fridays, you may not be familiar with Science Friday.

[14:24]

But from 12 o'clock, I actually think it's 11 to 1, but I only know it from 12 o'clock to 1 o'clock. And it's a program that deals with all types of scientists or sciences. And this particular one had two parts. Two, like, 20-minute parts. Now, all of these are available on the NPR Science Friday website, and I highly recommend them. So maybe what I'm about to tell you will entice you a little bit. So the first one was multitasking. So all of us are probably familiar with multitasking. Multitasking means that you talk on the telephone, you talk to your friend, and you text all at the same time. So that's actually, the man that runs this is called Ira Flatoff, and he himself is a scientist. And his questions were, how does this really work? How does the brain work when you're standing there, and all of us have probably had this experience, you're standing there talking to someone, and they have this little gadget in their hand.

[15:34]

And while they're talking to you, their thumbs are going up and down like this. And in the middle of that, the phone, this little gadget they hold, rings. So then they stop and then they talk. They're still standing in front of you talking to you. So his question was, does this work? I mean, what's going on in the brain while this kind of thing is happening? So he was talking to two researchers. One was from UCSF, the Medical Center in San Francisco. And I don't remember where the other one was from. Both of them were doctors that did neurology research. And all of this, and the next piece I'm going to tell you, is all coming about because they have new kinds of equipment that will see what's going on. C is not the right word. That can monitor the movements through the brain of the chemicals and the electrical currents when you're doing different activities without having to invade your skull to do it. You can put a skull cap on, and they can read these.

[16:37]

So... The first man he talked to said, well, you know, we were a little shocked at what we learned. He said, what we discovered is multitaskers are really bad at what they're doing. And he said, single taskers do it much, much better. And I thought, oh, I think I've heard that before. One thing at a time. So his question was, well... what about the people who multitask? And they said, well, one of the things they learned is they found that multitaskers actually think they're doing really well. But once they put them into these tests and run these different kind of experiments, what they discover is, what the multitasker discovers is that's not true. And in fact, one of the researchers was a multitasker. And he said, once I learned about this, I started to change my behaviors. So the question was, young children start out now doing this, very young.

[17:41]

And it was even brought up that now at the dinner table, it used to be at the dinner table, you know, you sat with your family and you ate together and you had conversations. But now, now people bring their little gadgets with them and they sit at the table while they're eating or in between bites. Maybe you can bite and do one hand on him. I never thought about that. Maybe you can do it. And do the texting and talk on the telephone while they're having a family dinner. And it used to be that was a serious no-no. And now, now it's become acceptable. It's okay. It's all right. Don't talk too loud. So the next question was, well, what happens to your brain? What happens to one's behavioral development when they're doing this? And the response was, well, that's not such good news either. One of the things that happens is, of course, anyone that's done any kind of meditation knows you can only focus on one thing at a time.

[18:48]

The human brain cannot focus on two things simultaneously. It is not a possibility. So what they found was people would... concentrate on this, and then move over here really fast, because your brain can do that really fast, and move over here and concentrate on this and move over here. But there's a downside, and the downside is every time you disengage from one activity and you go to another activity, there's a cost. And the cost is when you return to the activity you disengage from and re-engage, you've lost something in there. the focus is not as good as it was earlier, and often you forget things. And this happens very fast, so it's often not noticeable. So when multitaskers are trying to do two and three and four things at a time, what they've discovered is none of them are done very well. And one of the consequences of multitasking, as he pointed out, is businesses are now requiring people

[19:56]

to be able, not all business, but many businesses, is you actually have to have your little texting machine, your little cell phone sitting there with your texts turned on, and your email's up on your screen, and they expect an answer to an email in 15 minutes, whatever you're in the midst of doing. So our businesses are turning to where, in order to actually accomplish your job, you actually have to multitask. So at that point, the man said, this is sort of current. We can't tell you what goes on. We have not done any long-term research on this. This is something that's just we've learned about in the last month or in the last year or two. So we actually do not know the long-term development consequences of someone who starts to do this when they're eight and nine, and they do this for 10 or 15 years. What did seem to be true is multitaskers were not very good at doing a single task like reading or writing.

[21:02]

So they called that hard thinking. The scientists called it hard thinking. They were not good at hard thinking. And yet it's pretty clear that most of the development that's gone on in our society has come about from someone or someones who spent a good amount of time doing hard thinking, which means one item only. In fact, they discovered when they tried to get, this was again up at UC San Francisco, they tried to get volunteers to give up their cell phone and text machines for one week, and they offered them money, and no one would take them up on it. They said it would destroy our social life. Well, I don't text, so I actually have no idea. I can only sort of guess what that's about. But it's sort of, it's strange, particularly we who talk so much about doing one thing at a time.

[22:11]

So that led into his next part, which was a science writer for the New York Times. just put out a book called The Secrets of the Aging Brain. And again, this was all research that's come about through this new equipment all in the last year to two years. And I thought that was really wonderful. The Aging Brain. And then it has a subtitle, something like The Secrets of the Middle-Aged Brain. something indicating that there's all this stuff we don't know about the middle-aged brain. So in the ensuing conversation, what it turns out is they've actually never tracked middle-aged brain development at all. This is a brand new field. They now have tracked them for some years, but the information they had was very old. In fact, you know this thing called midlife crisis?

[23:15]

It's a myth. There is no... No medical evidence of any kind for midlife crisis. And they brought up a whole bunch of things. What is it? The woman said, yes, I've read all of these books. And she actually mentioned Gail Sheeney, which I have read a lot too, who always talked about when you got beyond middle age, how things became sort of the doldrums. No evidence for that at all. None. None at all. What they were finding is that the brain in healthy human beings continues to develop into mid and late 60s. And that only in the late 60s does there start to be a curve in learning ability. And more importantly, I grew up learning that we start to lose brain cells someplace in our late 20s. That they die and they're never replaced.

[24:18]

Complete myth. No truth to it all. In fact, the brain cells reproduce at about 30% up until your late 60s. They are always growing. They don't know how. They don't understand it in their research because so much of this is on the other side of what we all grew up learning. And they even learn something about You know how you walk in the other room and you forget what it is you went into the room for and you said, oh, I have a senior moment? Well, I first want to suggest that people do not use the phrase senior moment. It's really terrible. And partly what's terrible is you're liable to believe it. So forget senior moments. What seems to occur is some place in our mid to late 60s Our processor, to use a computer word, our processor lags just a hair.

[25:20]

A millisecond, they called it. A millisecond. If you feed information into your brain in the millisecond that there's a lag, you won't remember a couple minutes later what it is that you were going to do. However, what they've learned is you can do something about it. And what I was surprised about is two weeks earlier, I had learned quite by accident about this. Because I too would think of, I would be working on my computer and I'd think, okay, I'm going to go and get blah, blah and bring it back. So I'd get up and go, what was that I was going to do? So I'd go back to the room and sit back down and try and create this again. And I could come back up with it. And then... Because I came back up with it, I actually walked out with it in my mind. Okay, da, da, da, sort of like chanting it. And I would remember it. So what I started to do was every time something came up that I wanted to go do and it made me leave where I was to go do it, I would take a moment and I would say it to myself.

[26:28]

You know, whatever it was I was going to do, a phone call or write something, I actually said it in my brain. I haven't gotten to where I said it out loud yet, but I say it in my brain. And I've discovered almost all of those forgotten moments are gone. And that's what they discovered. If you take the time to tell yourself what it is you're getting ready to do, you won't have any trouble remembering it. Well, you won't have too much trouble remembering it. So you might wonder what all this has to do with Zen, huh? The practice of being present. The practice of being here. So here's sort of the challenge to take away from today. Are you willing to be present right now

[27:32]

The interesting thing about being present is you cannot be present in the future or the past. You can only be present now. Right now. And all of these things that these scientists were talking about, all of them had to do with right now. One step at a time. So in Suzuki Roshi's book, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, He starts the first chapter out with posture. So I want to encourage everyone, even as we're sitting here. Now, we're sitting in a Zen room. A lot of us are sitting on cushions and chairs. How is your posture? Do you feel it? Can you feel your buttocks on whatever you're sitting on, a cushion or a chair? Can you feel your hands? How are your hands? however your hands are.

[28:37]

Do you feel your hands? Are you sitting upright? Upright means upright as opposed to straight because a lot of us can't sit straight. I have a curvature at the upper spine and it won't go straight. But I can sit upright. So you can think of upright. The shoulders are over your hips. Your hips, when you're standing, are over your heels. And your head, of course, is on the top of your neck. But it's raised a little bit as opposed to leaning forward. You can experiment a little because when you lean forward, even when I do that, It affects my breathing. And when I sit up, my ear of passage is opened.

[29:41]

He says a really nice thing about posture. These forms are not the means of obtaining the right state of mind. To take this posture is itself the right state of mind. And of course, while you're sitting upright or standing upright or walking upright, You have to breathe. You probably notice that you can't breathe in the future either. Or even the past. You can only breathe now. So the unique thing about that is if you turn your attention to your breath,

[31:04]

and you follow your breath, you can only do it in the now. You can't do it in the past or the future. pretty freeing feeling, isn't it? Being in your posture, in breathing, not pursuing anything, not avoiding anything, just being present. for something completely different.

[32:33]

I had some question of whether I should read this. But I asked my friend and she thought it was fine. This is called The Top Five Myths About the Fourth of July. And I must say, when I read them, I was very startled. I had no idea. Myth number one, independence was declared on the 4th of July. Now, any in-depth historian or student of history will probably know all of this, but I'm not any of those, so I didn't know any of this. America's independence was actually declared by the Continental Congress on July 2nd. The night of the 2nd, the Pennsylvania Evening Post published a statement, This day, the Continental Congress declared the United Colonies free and independent states.

[33:37]

So what did happen on the 4th? The document justifying the act of Congress, you know it as Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, was adopted on the 4th, as is indicated in the document. As one scholar has observed, what has happened is that the document announcing the event has overshadowed the event itself. When did Americans first celebrate independence? So I'm not sure. I may have mislaid the children a little bit. When did the Americans first celebrate independence? Congress waited until July 8th when Philadelphia threw a big party, including a parade and firing of guns. The army under George Washington, then camped near New York, heard the new July 9th and celebrated then. Georgia got the word August 10th.

[34:42]

And when did the British family in London get wind of the declaration? August 30th. John Adams, writing a letter home to his beloved wife Abigail, he was in France, the day after independence was declared, predicted that from then on, the 2nd of July would be the most memorial day in the history of America. I am apt to believe, he said, it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as a great anniversary festival. He was just a little off a couple of days. The second myth about the 4th of July, the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4th, so they've already alluded to that. Hanging in the great rotunda of the Capitol, I did see this when I was last there, of the United States, is a vast canvas painted by John Trumbull depicting the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

[35:49]

Both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams wrote years afterwards that the signing ceremony took place July 4th. When someone challenged Jefferson's memory in the early 1800s, Jefferson insisted he was right. The truth? As David McCollum remarks in his new biography of John Adams, no such scene with the delegates present ever occurred in Philadelphia. So when was it signed? This is amazing. Most delegates signed the document in August, August the 2nd, when a clean copy was finally produced. Several did not sign until later, and their names were not released to the public until January of the following year. The event was so uninspiring that no one apparently bothered to write home about it. You can sort of imagine that.

[36:49]

I mean... If you watch the PBS movie John Adams, you can see how they were all doing all these different things, and this piece of paper that they passed around and signed was just one of the innumerable things that went on. Because, of course, from their point of view, many of them had already sprung free, and this was just a formality. The truth about the signing was not firmly established until 1884, when historian Chamberlain, researching the manuscripts, minutes of the Journal of Congress came upon the entry for August the 2nd, noting a signing ceremony. Now this one I had heard ever since a child also. The Liberty Bell rang out on July 4th. Well, of course, you now know that the event did not happen on the 4th. But did it happen at all? It's a famous scene. A young boy with blonde hair and blue eyes was supposed to have been posted in the street next to Independence Hall and to give a signal to an old man in the bell tower when the independence was declared.

[37:59]

It never happened. The story was made up out of whole cloth, completely made up in the middle of the 19th century by the writer George Leppard in a book intended for children. The book was aptly titled Legends of the American Revolution. There was no pretense that the story was genuine. Now this one, we even looked up this one to find out more information. So I always... have heard ever since sixth grade that Betsy Ross sewed the first flag. Not true. A few blocks away from the Liberty Bell is the Betsy Ross house. There is no proof Betsy ever lived here.

[39:04]

As the Joint State Government Commission of Pennsylvania concluded in a study in 1949, Every year the thongs come to gawk. As you make your way to the second floor through a dark stairwell, the feeling is overwhelming. History is everywhere. And then you come upon the famous scene. Behind a wall of plexiglass, as if to protect the sacred from contamination, a Betsy Ross mannequin sits in a chair, carefully sewing the first flag. Alas, the story is no more authentic than the house itself. It was made up in the 19th century by Betsy's descendants. The guide for our group, so this is actually off a site for the history of the Constitution in the U.S. on the web. And this person actually went around and did the tours on each one of these. He said, the guide for our group never let on the story was bogus.

[40:11]

However, Indeed, she provided so many details that we became convinced that she believed it. Poor Betsy. In her day, she was just a simple, unheralded seamstress. Well, actually, that's not true either. She was a very active... woman in her time and was very responsible for many things that happened. And actually, she did so for George Washington at his request, a flag that they had used during the early movements of the Civil War so that his group actually had a flag. So she was responsible for that. However, there is a man responsible for the first flag. Let's see what it says here. So who sewed the first flag? No one knows who actually sewed it.

[41:14]

However, we know who designed it. It was Francis Hopkins. Records show that in May 1780, he sent a bill to the Board of Admiralty for designing the flag of the United States. A small group of descendants works hard to keep his name alive. just down the street from Betsy's house. You know Betsy's house that they took the tour? Is this house, the caretaker for the local cemetery where Benjamin Franklin is buried, entertained school children with stories about Hopkins, a signer of the Declaration, who is also credited with designing the seal of the United States. We asked him what made the fantasy spun at the Betsy Ross house. He confided he did not want to make any remarks as he was a paid employee of the city of Philadelphia, which now owns the house. So that's the 4th of July.

[42:25]

Still, it's really wonderful to get together with families and picnics. Where I live, they do the 4th of July and the 3rd of July. Maybe they're a little closer to the real one. I live in Richmond, and Richmond doesn't want to have conflicts with San Francisco over the 4th of July. So on the 3rd of July, in this case was yesterday, they actually have big barbecues and everything in the park, and they do a huge firework display in the evening when it gets dark. It's wonderful. And should you not want to deal with the crowds in San Francisco next year, because it's too late this year, please come to the city of Richmond to the marina, and there's this amazing firework display that goes on there. So I want to end with a poem here called From Blossoms. From Blossoms. comes this brown paper bag of peaches we bought from the boy at the bend in the road, where we turn toward signs painted, peaches.

[43:36]

From laden boughs, from hands, from sweet fellowship in the bins, comes nectar at the roadside. Succulent peaches we devour, dusty skin and all, comes the familiar dust and comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat. Oh, to take what we love inside, to carry within us an orchard, to eat not only the skin but the shade, not only the sugar but the days, to hold the fruits in our hand, adore it, then bite into the round jubilance of peach. There are days we live, as if death were nowhere in the background, from joy to joy to joy, from wing to wing, from blossom to blossom to impossible blossom to impossible sweet blossom.

[44:40]

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