This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Welcome to Green Dragon Temple. Perfect day for dragons. Fog-loving dragons. I've been involved in a little workshop with Lee Lip and some people cultivating the practice of mindfulness. In Zen, mindfulness is very important. We say,

[01:00]

don't set up standards of your own. And we also say, don't put another head above your own. So between those instructions, last week someone asked me, why is Zen so strict? I wasn't sure what they were talking about. I don't know, does anyone know? I said, without really knowing what they were talking about, I said, because life is strict. So this first phrase, don't set up standards of your own, I think of as a wise counsel to not argue with reality to actually accept and appreciate the way things are.

[02:09]

And as I've been realizing since I've been doing this practice and even before, maybe before doing this practice, I realized that I needed to pay close attention to see things accurately, to see things as it is the phrase that Suzuki Roshi used to see things as it is but at the same time seeing things as it is is to include any any beliefs or attitudes or preconceptions that you might have or I might have that interfere with seeing things as it is So how is it to come back and start at zero, to actually see things without some interference?

[03:11]

In the classical instruction of mindfulness teaching in the Mahasaripatthana Sutta, many of you know, it's called the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. And the first foundation of mindfulness points to mindfulness of the body. That's always a good place to begin, bringing your awareness and attention to this body. And there's a whole sequence of instructions, beginning with the body simply sitting, finding a quiet place, Finding a way to sit with a sense of intention, of kind of a dedicated sense of being fully present and paying attention to what arises in the body.

[04:16]

And then there's specific instructions for the breath. But simply noticing the breath, not to judge it, not to evaluate it or have some particular kind of breathing. But to simply acknowledge and appreciate this breath, this in-breath, is a long breath. Or it's a short breath. Or it's a tight breath. Or a relaxed breath. Whatever it is. So it's simply to acknowledge the breath. And then to acknowledge all parts of the body without reservation and actually with full appreciation. Every part of the body needs to be functioning just the way it is for you to be having this moment of life. So there's a sense of gratitude that comes along with this practice of mindfulness.

[05:18]

After focusing on the body, this second foundation of mindfulness has to do with attending to Feelings. Feelings in their most simple form. Noticing whether something is pleasant or unpleasant. Or whether it's simply a sensation that is neither pleasant or unpleasant. Simply a neutral sensation. So it's very interesting to take up the practice of noticing what one's senses whether it's with sound there's a sound or with taste or with touch or something that one sees and is there associated immediately with it a sense of oh that's pleasant or that's unpleasant or it's simply acknowledged

[06:31]

So this is the basic classical description of the foundation of mindfulness of feelings. Simply noticing that and seeing if one can stay there. But often you might notice that what happens is the mind goes beyond a sensation of pleasant or unpleasant and begins to create a whole reaction to the experience. So the third foundation of mindfulness has to do with this tendency of having a whole karmic body arise that is in reaction to or response to or is activated by experience. Some sense experience. And sense experience can even include sense experience of thought.

[07:37]

So a thought may arise in the mind and there may be another awareness that, oh, this thought is pleasant or this thought is unpleasant. So in this third area, many of us experience all the problems of our life, all the difficulties that show up. We fail to realize how perfect everything is when something happens and then there's a reaction to it. And then our attention to how we're responding to the events of our lives may become clouded, confusing, and we may wish it was different. Oh, I wish my life was different in some way. And the fourth foundation of mindfulness then is looking at all the ways in which we may support or interfere with the clarity and compassion that we have the capacity for.

[08:55]

So the fourth foundation of mindfulness includes the basic Buddhist teachings of what is wholesome and what is unwholesome. What supports enlightenment and what supports Now recently someone recommended a book to me, and I want to read a little bit about it, a little bit from this account. This book is a wonderful story. It's an autobiography, a memoir, and it's entitled And There Was Light. Autobiography of Jacques Luceyron, Blind Hero of the French Resistance. How many people here have read this? Okay, I only see one hand. Another hand, okay. Now what was striking to me about this, it says blind hero, and I thought he became a hero even before the war.

[10:03]

Because he was a child in France who was very active running around and playing and so forth at the age of, I think, seven. He ran into something that went right into his eye and put out his eye. And then they did a corrective surgery on it, which blinded him in the other eye. So this was... This would have been about 1940. No, 1930, when he at 31 and 32, something like that, when he when he had this experience of being blinded then in both eyes. So this is just a few segments of his account of how he worked with that. And I'd like you to hear it from the point of view of mindfulness practice, because he's discovering his own mindfulness practice.

[11:07]

So he said, in the days immediately after the operation, I wanted to use my eyes. I followed their usual path. I looked in the direction where I was in the habit of seeing before the accident. And there was anguish, a lack, something like a void, which filled me with what grownups call despair. Finally, I realized that I was looking in the wrong way. It was as simple as that. I was making something very like the mistake people make who change their glasses without adjusting themselves. That was a very interesting statement. People who are changing, trying to change something in the environment rather than changing one's own approach. So it's good to pay attention to one's habitual approach. Then he says, this was much more than a simple discovery.

[12:13]

It was a revelation. Some instinct, I was almost to say a hand laid on me, made me change course. I began to look more closely not at things, but at a world closer to myself, looking from an inner place to one further within, instead of clinging to the movement of sight toward the outside world. Immediately the substance of the universe drew together, redefined, and peopled itself anew. I was aware of a radiance emanating from a place I knew nothing about, a place which might as well have been outside me as within. But radiance was there, or to put it more precisely, light. It was a fact, for light was there. Confidence and gratitude came as if a prayer had been answered. I found light and joy at the same moment. And I can say without hesitation that from that time on, light and joy have never been separated in my experience.

[13:16]

So then... He goes on and talks about this whole experience of light. But then he noticed, there were times when the light faded, almost to the point of disappearing. It happened every time I was afraid. If instead of letting myself be carried along by confidence and throwing myself into things, I hesitated, let's see here, I hesitated and calculated Then all these things became hostile. And without exception, I hit or wounded myself. The only easy way to move about was by not thinking about it at all. Or thinking as little as possible. Then I moved between obstacles the way they say bats do. What the loss of my eyes had not accomplished was brought about by fear.

[14:23]

It was fear that made me blind. Anger and impatience had the same effect, throwing everything into confusion. So this is a deep wisdom that he's discovering here. That it wasn't the loss of his sight that made him blind. It was fear. It was anger. It was impatience that actually, literally, caused blindness. And then he talks about sound. You always think of sounds beginning and ending abruptly. But now I realize that nothing could be more false. Now my ears heard the sounds almost before they were there, touching me with the tips of their fingers and directing me toward them. Sounds had the same individuality as light. They were neither inside nor outside. They were passing through me. They gave me my bearings.

[15:24]

in space and put me in touch with things. There's one more little section I think I want to do. A sound we don't listen to. This is quite striking to me. A sound we don't listen to is a blow to body and spirit because sound is not something happening outside us, but a real presence passing through us and lingering unless we have heard it fully. So he talks then in the same fashion about touch and the other senses and realizes how true it is for him. And then he experiments with this in many ways. How true it is for him that listening very carefully, this practice of mindfulness is a refinement of his attention. As he says, if he... If you try to press on something, when you try to be mindful of it, or try to bring attention to it with some kind of sense of aggressiveness, if you press on it too hard, you actually can't feel what it is.

[16:38]

So it's a matter of lightly sensing. Lightly sensing. Lightly touching. Now this has to do with things in the world around us, and it also has to do with the things inside us. inside us and outside us become unified, actually, in our experience. So to be willing to pay attention to what's arising inside you, it's good to pay attention to the sensations of one's own body and accept the sensation exactly as it is and see if then you notice, oh, I'm adding something to it. Can I set aside the thought of what I'm adding to it? For example, if I have some pain in my... Right now, do I have any pain?

[17:40]

Right now, I'm relatively free of pain, so... But I feel a little tension. So I feel a little bit of tension kind of right here. So if I attend to that for just a moment, there may be a part of me that says I'd rather that tension not be there. If I have a feeling or a thought that I'd rather that tension not be there, if I want to get rid of it, then I'm actually forming a barrier within myself or a division within myself. So this practice of mindfulness is also a kind of cultivating a friendliness. Can I be friend? Can I be a friend to this tension? Right here. So at this moment, I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time talking about this, but I want to I want to talk about an experience I had two days ago.

[18:49]

My wife and I, Lane Olson and I were coming back from Colorado. Long driving trip. And we stopped for a little lunch in Wells, Nevada. On Highway 80. At the, I don't know, at the Crisnos Sandwich Place. Crisnos Sandwich Place. So then, after we had our little lunch, we came out. And it was Lane's turn to drive. And she got in the driver's seat and I got in the other seat and we backed out. And just as we were about to go, this man dressed all in blue came over and started waving at us and said, you're not going to drive with that tire like that, are you? Well, he was pointing to our left front tire and

[19:57]

I thought, oh, I had driven up there to that point, and I thought, I certainly would have noticed if there had been a flat tire at that point or something. So usually, before I even get in the car, I kind of pay attention to see, are the tires inflated? This is a good mindfulness practice. Before I go on with the story, I should say, maybe I'm a little bit of a, well, I don't know, I shouldn't say I'm a tire nut. But I do pay attention. I do pay attention to cars and tires, and in my opinion, the tires are the second most important thing about a car. The most important thing is the brakes. Even with bad tires, you can get in trouble if you don't have brakes.

[21:00]

So brakes, I think, are the most important, and tires are the second. And usually, in fact, I gave my wife, when we got together, one of the first, I think her first birthday present she got from me was a set of tires. That she, she, I thought she was neglecting her tires on her car. And I was a little concerned about her safety, actually. So, here we are. This fellow says, you're not going to drive with a tire like that, are you? And so I get out, and I get out. I walk around the car, and he says... Look at that tire. It's down to the wear bars. It's unsafe to drive. I looked at it and I said, well, it has some wear.

[22:03]

He went into this whole lecture about how federal law has to protect foolish lay people who don't know about tires. How federal law has dictated that tire companies put these wear bars in there so that You can tell when the tire needs to be replaced. And I said, okay, you know, I see that. I know about wear bars. And he said, well, you don't understand. So just bring your car over and I'll put it up on the rack and we'll check out the tire. So the Chevron station was right there and he had a little tag on his shirt that said, I think BF Goodrich. Maybe it was a good year, a good something. It was good, but my feeling about this was not so good. And then he went so far as to say, you know, driving on that tire is stupid and dangerous.

[23:16]

And he didn't exactly call me stupid. But I kind of felt like that, you know? I mean, he didn't say, you're stupid. I checked with my wife later. Because I said, did he call me an idiot? She said, no, but he said it was stupid to drive on that tire. I said, okay. So she's listening to all this, right? And he's kind of haranguing me about this. Finally, so I said, okay, I see it, I see it, and I see the amount of wear, and I just disagree about the need to change it, you know? And he said one more time, he was quite vehement, you know? And I almost felt, you know, I was beginning to feel like I was being harassed here. So how to be mindful? Could I actually see the tire?

[24:17]

What was I looking at, you know? I had been paying attention to these tires, and I was actually impressed with how well they've been behaving. And so I just said, OK, I hear you, but I don't agree, and we're going to go. And his last words, again, were to repeat that people like you are cause accidents on the highway all the time. And I know I have a tendency. Now, here's a mindfulness situation. I know I have a tendency to be arrogant and to believe my own ideas. I know I have that. So I have to take that into account. At the same time, I also don't... I take this Zen phrase, don't... Don't put some other head above your own.

[25:23]

Don't put another head above your own. I also take that seriously, that I don't let someone else take the role of being the one who is in charge of my life. So this is a very, very challenging point. How to be accurate and how to make a good decision. When someone tells me that I'm about to do something that's stupid, that's not so bad. You know, I'll probably do a lot of stupid things. But stupid and dangerous, I thought, that's pretty bad to do something that's stupid and dangerous. So it really affected me. I noticed, you know, Lane was going to drive and I was going to take a nap. But now we're driving... And I'm not feeling like taking a nap. I'm noticing there's adrenaline up in my body. So this is all, for me, just a very interesting study.

[26:27]

And then I also was very grateful to Lane, my wife, because she trusted my decision. So basically it's like, okay, tires, they're your department, you know. There are other areas that she's, you know, I agree with her, and it's her department, right? Yeah, I can give numerous examples, but I won't go into all that. I'll just say that this was, I was grateful to her for saying, okay, you know, she trusts my evaluation of the tires. And so we drove a little way, we stopped, And I got out and I actually looked at all four tires. I said, yeah, they're okay. And I have reason. It's not just that it's my own opinion, but I've actually consulted with other tire people.

[27:34]

And I know where bars are and I know where it's down to the where bar and so forth. So I said, okay, well, let's just drive. I think we'll be fine. The other thing is this car, this Honda, has a feature of if your tires get low, light will come on on the dashboard. So there's another safety feature built in there. So let's just drive. So we drove all the rest of the way safely. And then yesterday afternoon, I went to my local tire guy. And without telling him the story or anything, I just pulled in. I said, would you take a look at the wear on these tires? And he walked and looked carefully at each tire. And he said, well, they're showing some wear on the inside. It looks like they're wearing a little unevenly. And maybe it would be good to get an alignment. And I thought, yeah, OK.

[28:43]

And he said, OK. What about the wear bars? And he said, well, you know, you've got a few thousand miles at least on here. And so I just want to say it's good to get a second opinion sometimes. So none of us maybe even know enough, but I've also studied my own mind enough to know that should I should I get a second opinion just to check my own tendency to be arrogant you know my own tendency to hold on to my own idea just because it's my idea to confirm or to evaluate what it looks like to my eyes and get another set of eyes on that and take a look at it. Still, it's interesting to me.

[29:46]

Then I thought, and I've had various other thoughts, should I follow up on this? And I still might. Should I send a letter to the Better Business Bureau? Because I really think, what's going on there? I'm not sure. But it seems to me that the guy was trying to sell tires. And that he... may be doing this to various people who particularly come from out of state and drive through Nevada and pull in and he has this thing of saying, well, yeah, you can't drive on those tires. And a lot of people would believe him. He says he has a little label on his shirt that identifies him as an expert. So this, coming back to this practice of not putting another head above your own balanced by don't set up standards of your own is a kind of parameters for us to pay attention to in this practice of mindfulness mindfulness is is always say directing attention to seeing what is just as it is

[31:04]

Now, seeing what is just as it is refers to what's happening internally, what's happening with objects around us, and what's happening with, say, people around us. Now, how should I feel toward this person? How should I feel toward the next person who shows up with that person? that expert identification on his shirt, right? And start telling me something, you know? Should I be angry at him or should I be particularly wary of him? Or the next time I drive through, should I avoid that part of Nevada? Should I avoid people, you know, that have some resemblance to this person? There's all kinds of things that... come up in one's mind as a reaction to that kind of an encounter and it's relatively mild encounter it only lasted about seven minutes you know so it's not some someone I had to deal with again day after day after day but sometimes we are in situations where we have to deal with some someone coming at us day after day and

[32:30]

How to sustain our own balance and clarity in the midst of that is quite a challenge. So we all need support to do that. In this case, I felt that I was supported by my companion in the car. Later on, my view is supported by checking it out with another expert. And I notice that I still also have some thoughts that come up around that person. Should I just drop it? Should I just set it aside? Or should I actually contact the Better Business Bureau in Wells, Nevada? Or something like that. I still haven't decided whether it's worth that trouble. Is that something I should take? I actually don't know the name of the person. Then I did have the thought that came from back when I was doing that, particularly involved in political action and demonstrations.

[33:40]

I was trained that it was always good to get the name and badge number of the officer who was confronting me and to let them know that I was getting them. Let me get your name and badge number, right? And sometimes that would change their behavior. So I didn't think of that this time. Oh, you know, actually, if I'd really been paying attention, if I'd really been settled and grounded, I could have, you know, I could have asked for his name. And maybe that would have been a more compassionate thing to do, to ask him for his name, to actually get to know him a little bit better. So this is... just pointing to the complexity and difficulty with one small incident. And each of us goes about our days and encounter many situations where it's hard to see clearly.

[34:46]

It's hard to actually see clearly. One might second guess oneself. One might add. more opinions to the situation than are necessary. One might notice anger arising. One might notice fear arising. One might notice certain kinds of bias or attitude that comes up and clouds one's situation. Or as Jacques Luceron said, he realized that he was actually blinded by fear or anger, not by the lack of sight. So this is just a quick kind of review. The four foundations of mindfulness beginning with body, particularly awareness of sensations in the body and breath, awareness, feeling, noticing what's pleasant,

[35:56]

or unpleasant. States of mind. Noticing whether one has some habitual state of mind or whether right now there's a state of mind that has something like anger arising in it, sleepiness arising. Whether there's anything in one state of mind that is already clouding one's perception. Or whether one's state of mind, on the other hand, is clear and bright and alert. It's helpful to notice. And then it's important for each of us to make a kind of a study for ourselves because each of us have our own way to study. Our own way of responding to things and our own history of, say, attitudes, opinions that we carry along with us. Some of them are our own, and some of them come from our culture.

[36:58]

Some of them come from our, say, family legacy. Some of them are kind of borrowed, that we're still carrying. And we're not quite sure why until something comes up. We realize there's some dissonance with how we see reality. And that's an invitation to carefully investigate, carefully see. So I thought maybe in honor of the theme of driving and so forth, I wish we could sing Relax Your Mind. Some of you know, it's an old Lead Belly song. Lead Belly created this song. the situation of driving many of us get involved with a certain kind of tension in our bodies driving it's good to be ready to go it's good to be ready to stop it's good to have a relaxed mind when you're moving forward it's good to have a relaxed mind when you're stopping so it's good then in that context it's good to notice one's own tendencies to want to go and one actually should stop

[38:27]

and to be hesitant about going forward when one should be going forward. So Lead Belly made some Library of Congress recordings. I think Alan Lomax was recording him, and he said, when I'm driving, I look right through the windshield. If you're sitting over here, are you talking to me? I don't look at you. I look right through the windshield. I've been driving all over this country and I never even hit a chicken. So some of you know, you can join in on the chorus anyway if you don't. Relax your mind. Relax your mind, helps you live a great long time.

[39:30]

Sometimes you've got to relax your mind. So that's the chorus. You want to join in? Relax your mind, relax your mind, helps you live a great long time. Sometimes you've got to relax your mind. Oh, when the light turns green, push your foot on that gasoline. That's the time you've got to relax your mind. Relax your mind. Relax your mind. Helps you live a great long time. Sometimes you've got to relax your mind. And when the light turns red, push that brake down to the bed. That's the time you've got to relax your mind.

[40:33]

Relax your mind. Relax your mind. Helps you live a great long time. Sometimes you've got to relax your mind. I had a friend cross the railroad track. Oh, Lord, Lord, he forgot to relax. He lost his life because he forgot to relax his mind. Relax your mind. Relax your mind. Helps you live a great long time. Sometimes you've got to relax your mind. And when the light turns puce, that's not the time to be confused. Sometimes you've got to relax your mind. Relax your mind. Relax your mind.

[41:34]

Oh, help you live a great long time. Sometime you've got to relax your mind. Thank you for listening and singing and please pay attention. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfzc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

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