Good morning. Welcome to the San Francisco Zen Center. I was drawn to Zen practice as a path and practice to finding freedom and to owning and respecting and trusting this ordinary, precious life. And my practice began and is regularly encouraged by noticing where I'm tight and where I'm caught, where I'm not, not very awake. And I didn't know it at the time, but I think this practice for much of my life has been the practice of right view. And even as I was preparing to give this talk, I noticed a part of me started to get a little tight and a little anxious about coming and talking.

[01:07]

And I noticed I had the thought, oh, well, it'll be good when it's over. I'll feel better when it's over. And then I noticed, here I am, writing, preparing to write and talk about right view, and getting tight and not and wanting not to just be in the moment, wanting not to just be where I am. And clearly this was another opportunity because after all, no one dragged me out here. In fact, for me, this is a practice of noticing my own fear and tightness and a practice of letting go. And my hope also as I was preparing for this talk was to find my own edge of not being so comfortable, of wanting to do a talk that wasn't so easy. And also my hope was that in some way this time together will be maybe help you be on your own edge and that together we can find a way for right view to be contagious.

[02:21]

We can all find more ease and freedom, right in the middle of our own discomfort. This made me think of, I've been experimenting these last few years with taking improv classes, partly also as a way to play with this edge, and I was remembering one class in particular in which I arrived for the class, and the teacher came in, the young woman teacher, and she said, today we're going to do improvised Shakespeare. And I looked at, I kind of went over to her and said, you know, I haven't really ever studied Shakespeare that much, and I don't know that I'm going to be able to do this. And she looked at me and she said, great. So she was a teacher of right view for me. So my question that I've been asking, I feel like, Much of my life is, what does it mean to be a human being?

[03:24]

And more recently, what does it mean to be a human being on Earth at a time where living systems are declining, where the actions of our society are threatening the planet that we call our home? I'm particularly interested in how these questions interrelate, our views and perceptions, our spiritual practice. and how we engage with environmental issues and issues of war and peace, issues of our planet. How are these all connected? In what way is it a mirage that these are separate issues? What really is right view? So one definition of right view is that it's the faith and confidence that we can transform our views, that we can transform our deeply held perceptions and reactions. So just to kind of back up and give a little bit of context to just briefly about this idea of right view, where it comes from, it comes from the teachings of the Buddha from 2,500 years ago, who proclaimed what would have become fairly famous in Buddhism and in the world, these four noble truths, the truths of suffering or difficulty.

[04:48]

the truth of the cause, that there's a cause of suffering, that suffering is caused by grasping, by wrong view. The third truth is the truth that there is a way to transform our suffering and difficulty. There's a way to find complete fulfillment and happiness. And the fourth truth is the truth of the eightfold And these are kind of eight very concrete and mystical practices. But the first of these practices is the practice of right view. The others, some you're probably familiar with, like right speech and right livelihood, are kind of two that become fairly common in the culture. So just a few days ago, President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize and simultaneously spoke about war and a just war and spoke about peace.

[06:00]

And I wondered, is there such a thing? What is the perspective of right view in the world we live in today? Does war and killing people actually make the world safer? Is this possible? What is right view? in this situation. At the same time, right now, our world leaders are meeting in Copenhagen. Nearly all agree on the severity of the problem from the economic cost to the threat of the health and survival of our planet. There is a paper that I actually was a talk that Paul Hawken gave fairly recently to a group of It was a college commencement speech in Portland, a wonderful talk called You Are Brilliant and the Earth is Hiring. And one of the things he said in his talk is, we have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy Earth than to renew, restore, and sustain it.

[07:10]

You can print money to bail out a bank, but you can't print life to bail out a planet. At present, we are stealing the future, selling it to the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich. It is a way to be rich. I thought that was a really beautiful line. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich. It is a way to be rich. this so-called ordinary world. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship Earth was so ingeniously designed that we have no clue that we are on one, no clue that we're hurtling through the universe, unaware of the speed, no sense of danger, and no need for seatbelts. And we're vastly interconnected beyond anything that we can imagine.

[08:16]

Our bodies are each communities, each of us made of more than one quadrillion cells. Charles Darwin said that each living creature is a little universe formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven. And Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if stars only came out once every 1,000 years, what would we do? Of course, no one would go to sleep that night, that night that the stars came out. Perhaps there'd be tears and joy and a feeling of rapture as everyone together went for this event of seeing the stars. But the stars come out every night. And instead, most people watch television, play video games, Pay no attention. And if 10 people were to go look at the stars, each person would see something different, different patterns.

[09:25]

Each person would have a different experience, a different view, a different perception. What if we didn't take our hands and eyes, our hearts, for granted? What if we realized that the trees and flowers, the wind and the rain, And our planet Earth is not separate from our bodies and minds. What if we could actually feel and experience the miracle of our bodies, of our ability to know our own feelings, to know the feelings and energy of others? And then as I was thinking about these things, I also was thinking that I drive a 1995 Honda Accord. And I recently noticed that it has 186,000 miles that I've driven on this accord, which struck me that this number, 186,000, is the speed of light.

[10:26]

Light travels at the speed of 186,000 miles per second. And the fact that I've driven this much means that I could have driven around the circumference of the planet more than five times. I was staggered when I realized this. It also seems how odd that my car has burned more than 6,200 gallons of gasoline. What is the impact, I wondered, of my perceptions, of my views, of my actions? And there is a very recent article that caught my attention in the Huffington Post that was titled, Does Death Exist? And it said, and the answer is no. And even before I read the article, I went right down to the comments that people listed, and the very first comment said, damn, I guess the only thing that is certain anymore is taxes. But this article was written by a physician who's also a quantum physicist who said that...

[11:41]

quantum physics describes that we live in an infinite number of universes. What we call events happen not in one universe, but in many. The question, who am I, is merely a 20-watt fountain of energy operating in the brain. This energy doesn't go away after death. Energy doesn't die. It cannot be created or destroyed. Quantum physics also Zen Buddhism, says that space and time are not what we think. Everything we see and experience right now is a world of information occurring in our minds. Space and time are tools for putting everything together. It's a quote by Einstein in which he says, people like us know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

[12:43]

People like us know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. In some early Buddhist texts, they knew that with great confidence that we live in many universes. In texts that proclaim to be speaking the words of the Buddha from 2,500 years ago, these texts often begin with the Buddha emanating rays of light from his forehead or rays of light from his teeth or sometimes rays of light from his toenails. On these rays, everyone can see billions of universes, billions of different planets. They see people doing good things, acts of kindness, acts of compassion. They see universes of generosity, of tolerance, of wisdom. So these were kind of what were thought to be facts, experiences that people had of many, many universes.

[13:53]

And there's an ancient Buddhist text that says, you should absorb yourself in contemplation in such a way that you manifest the nature of an ordinary person without abandoning your cultivated spiritual nature. You should absorb yourself in contemplation in such a way that you manifest the nature of an ordinary person, an ordinary human being, without abandoning your cultivated spiritual nature. So how can we live in this spiritual universe and simultaneously live in the ordinary world, in the world where people need food and shelter, the world of compassion, as well as the world of violence and pain, incredible destruction of our planet, incredible possibility for healing. How can we see that these are not separate worlds? One way to describe practice is that practice is the yoga of ordinariness while simultaneously cultivating spiritual practice.

[15:04]

As soon as we see ourselves as separate, from nature or even see ourselves as separate from troubles and cries of the world, we start to create problems. We have these icons here in this Buddha hall, and these aren't icons that we worship, but we see these as models of our own wisdom and defining wisdom as cutting through our habitual thinking and our delusion. these icons in a way are examples of what we mean by right view. A basic understanding of right view is that people, that all beings are not separate. In fact, the view from the perspective of Zen and from quantum physics is that separate beings don't exist in the way that we think they do. Separateness is much like the illusion that Einstein described about time, a stubbornly persistent illusion.

[16:11]

So in the relative ordinary world that we live in, there are right views and wrong views. But from another perspective, all views are wrong views. Zen could be described as the practice of eliminating our views. The quality of our views can always be transformed, always be deepened. Right views can be described as the absence of all views. What does this mean, the absence of views, the absence of separateness? So from the perspective of right view, we don't need to manufacture reverence for life or love. It's what is already there. We only need to let go of our views, our deeply held beliefs that get in the way of the love and reverence that fills us.

[17:15]

There's a Zen sutra called the Vimalakirti Sutra in which Vimalakirti is this very kind of brilliant, wealthy businessman. Actually, it's a very unusual Buddhist sutra because it's about someone who very much completely lives and operates in the world. And he's asked the question, how can you feel compassion for beings if you don't see people as separate? If you think that the idea of practice is to let go of all views, to let go of all separateness, how then do you see individual beings? And he responds, When he considers living beings in this way, he generates the love that is truly a refuge for all beings, the love that is peaceful, the love that is without conflict because it is free of passion, because it is with equanimity, the love that is non-dual, the love that is imperturbable, and the love that is firm.

[18:25]

It's resolve unbreakable like a diamond. So in this... Vimalakirti is saying when we get out of our own way, when we let go of the things that get in the way, what's there at the core of all of us is this love and compassion. And right view means to treat ourselves, others, and the planet with respect, with reverence, with love, and with compassion, not as anything separate from our own hearts. Right view means to see through the the stubborn illusion of separateness, of any sense of lack, and to practice with radical acceptance, gentle, complete openness, and a sense of wonder. I looked up to see what Thich Nhat Hanh had to say about Right View, and he said that Thich Nhat Hanh is a Vietnamese Zen teacher who spends most of his time in France, but also writes, has written many books, and

[19:30]

travels around the U.S. lecturing. So right view is not an ideology, a system, or even a path. It is the insight that we have into the reality of life, a living insight that fills us with understanding, with peace, and with love. So I'd like to, I want to try a little experiment here, right here in the Buddha Hall. So without talking yet, I'd like everyone to just turn to the person next to you. Without talking yet, just turn to the person next to you and see if everyone can find a person. If you need a person, if you don't have one and you'd like one, raise your hand. So what I'd like us to do is just to have a short conversation with the person sitting next to you.

[20:39]

And a few rules or a few suggestions. One is this can be a practice. The actual doing this can be a way of practicing right view, which means to see if you can let go of your preconceived ideas and really listen to the person who's who's across from you in a way maybe that's slightly different than how you might normally listen, that you really give them your complete attention. And if you're the person speaking, see if you can speak perhaps from a sense of whatever right view might mean to you, meaning speak in a way that you don't have to try and impress the other person or look good or even look like you have it together in any way at all. We can trust that we're among friends here. So the suggested topic that I have is, so what do you think right view is? Or what do you think wrong view is? Or do you have some example that comes up that maybe from this morning?

[21:46]

It's like we do, our lives are like amazing universes if we think of all of the things that have happened this morning. since we've gotten up. All of the things we've seen, all of our perceptions, all of the choices, all of the things we've said, we've already, most of us, have taken in more words and information than our parents did in a lifetime. It's the world we live in. So just see what comes to mind maybe from this morning. What happened this morning that might be an example for you of right view or wrong view or anything that comes up for you. We're just We're just going to do this for a couple of minutes. Make sure that each person should get two minutes to speak. I'm not going to time it for each person. We are in a small space, so I want to suggest that everybody try and get close and keep your voices low. Otherwise, what will happen is everyone will have to shout to hear the person next to you.

[22:48]

Let's really be aware of our sound level. My suggestion is Have a short conversation. What does right view mean to you? Or some example of right view or wrong view? Or whatever you really need to say in this moment that comes up. It may have nothing to do with right view or me or anything else. So you have a couple of minutes to talk and a couple of minutes to listen. I'll give a one-minute warning, please. Thank you.

[24:20]

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

[25:47]

So one more minute. One more minute. Thank you. Okay.

[27:17]

Okay, if everyone can finish up, please. So please thank your partners and come on back. Thank your partners and come on back. So did anything happen there in those conversations that anyone wants to share? Anything at all? What? Thank you. Anybody's life changed? Or how about some simple thing that happened that surprised you? Yeah. Yeah, you can speak loudly soon. future, solutions, learning, the present, anxieties in the future.

[28:33]

That has something to do with right view for us. Why aren't you in Copenhagen now? Why are you here? Yes. Yes, Gloria. We were both feeling a little bit guilty about the harm of driving cars. Even though we're limiting our amount of driving, he actually rides a bicycle most of the time. Anyways, there's a certain amount. We're just seeing more how driving costs are. This morning in my kitchen as I was getting ready to come here, my daughter Carol asked me So give us a preview. Tell me one thing that you decided to leave out of your talk. And I was just thinking, oh, I should say that now. Which, Gloria, you're saying that kind of in another realm.

[29:42]

There is a statistic that for what it costs to send one soldier to Afghanistan for a year, we could be building 20 schools in Afghanistan. the cost of one soldier, we could be building 20 schools. Any other, maybe one more comment or not? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Well, there's a whole interesting discussion in Right View that, as I was researching this for Thich Nhat Hanh talks about choosing what seeds we want to water, that he talks about this idea of store consciousness, that we all have this kind of deep consciousness in our bodies, and that we make choices about, through our actions, through our thoughts and through our actions, about what things we want to grow.

[30:59]

and what things we want to not grow. And so from some vantage point, wrong view would be to be giving attention and juice to those things that we actually don't want to be growing in ourselves, and to be paying attention to putting our own action and thoughts into things that we do want to develop. Well, thank you for all you know, not refusing to speak to each other. I wanted to finish with a very short poem by David White, poet David White. To be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to the other. To be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to the other. To remember the world Let me read it through one more time.

[32:27]

What shape waits in the seed of you to grow and spread its branches against a future sky? Thank you all very much.

[32:56]

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