Good morning. Good morning. We're on Julian Morgan's celebration day. Did you know we were having a Julian Morgan celebration? No? Yes. Today was Julia Morgan's, I think. And Julia Morgan was the woman who built, designed, and built this building. She was not an industrial engineer, a structural engineer. In the 19th century, she was a structural, she was a Roman structural engineer at the end of the 19th century, unheard of, right? And on top of that, she was an architect, also unheard of, definitely unheard of. Of course, she wouldn't marry, nor did she have children. She wouldn't want to. She wanted to work. And she did. And she created a wonderful building.

[01:04]

She was the architect, designer, and on-resort builder of St. Simeon castles. Did you hear that? No? Yeah? And she also made that place by Selma, by the sea, right? The complex. And she made the women's, in Berkeley, the Women's Club, Women's Society building, that Berkeley Women's City Club. Yes, thank you. It's a great building. Have you ever been in there? We took a tour of it. Yuki, our director, is also an architect. And she took us about a few months ago. Hi. She took us to Berkeley to look at some of Julia Morgan. Julia Morgan has lots of buildings in Berkeley. So we went to that one. And it's a fabulous building inside. Anyway, this has nothing to do with my talk. As a matter of fact, if I don't stop talking, I will never finish. But I do have a show.

[02:05]

I'm supposed to make two announcements. Lunch tomorrow will be at 11.30. So questions and discussion will be here right after the talk. And also, because I'm the one that makes the announcement about the Saturday song, or at least for a while, that's what I'm calling it, for lack of a better name. On January the 31st, those of you for whom Saturday is your main Sangha event and who have a practice at home, a sitting practice, and want to deepen that by doing what we do, which is working together and then figuring it out from there, right? Do you know what I mean? Yeah. So... They'll say in the monastery, you know, everybody was like a little stone. And the monastery was like, probably it used to be like a rushing river or the creek, the Tassajara Creek.

[03:06]

But the way I heard it was, it was like a washing machine. All the stones were in the washing machine. Anyway, they bump into each other and they become smooth and sharp edges if our egoic sort of self gets more slowly worn away. So we wanted to offer that delightful experience to anyone who is interested by turning over Saturn to those people who I want that. So we're having a meeting on January the 31st at 1230 here to discuss what that might be like. Drew Morgan, the woman whose aesthetic and courage we celebrate to this day, this day, had no idea the building that she so passionately designed and built

[04:09]

For several Jewish women, I think in the 1920s, 1923, I think it was first inhabited. Do you say inhabited? We are animals, really. Anyway, in 1920, what was I saying? Oh, she would have no idea that today we're talking about it. I'm going to talk about it in terms of Zerun. She wouldn't have imagined that, I'm sure. But as we look closely at the building, at the attention to detail, and I hope that you do look at the building. At the well-shoed limber spouse, the railroad's mind confirmed a wonderful silence sitting right in the courtyard. He's sitting on that side of the courtyard, and you look towards this way. There's a wonderful relief of a woman right set against the brick. It's really nice, and you can sit there. There's a nice kind of peaceful quality about it. We might be able to imagine her sitting at her table, all empty of self-concern, patient, concentrated, open, present, corroding from her empty mind the design for this building.

[05:26]

So this day seems to me full of aesthetic appreciation. I thought it was a good day to begin a discussion about... what I could call the mind of creativity, maybe, and Zen Buddhism. This is a subject quite dear to myself, close to my heart. Like, for example, right behind you is a magnificent display of orchid flowers. And I think behind me also, is there not? So today is a day to just sort of allow ourselves to appreciate loveliness, and I might suggest to appreciate as art also things that are not so lovely. Because with an empty mind, a mind that sees things without holding to discrimination, a mind of non-discrimination, everything can be art. And art can be our daily life.

[06:29]

A year ago, I think, a year ago, anyway, Darlene Cohen, one of the practice leaders here, asked me to come to Tassajara to do the music day of what was called the Women in Buddhism at Tassajara. Somebody did a day of tea and somebody did a day of... Massage, that was the next day. And some little bit of body stuff and a little bit of music. And I really liked it that she asked me because I'd been doing Zen for a long time and before that I was doing music and I always wanted to sort of find a way to connect those two. And so it gave me an opportunity to go back to that and to think about it a little bit. So I did. And I did some partial kind of something that made me feel pretty good, but not enough. And so I spent this year thinking about it some more, because I'm going to do it again in the summer. And I think I'm a little bit closer, but maybe not completely.

[07:39]

But I want to share with you what I've been thinking about. What do I mean, really, by the mind of creativity or the aesthetic mind? The mind I'm talking about is removed from self-clinging long enough, at least for a moment, to experience a sense of being, just buddhiness. In the Buddhist tradition, it's called buddha-arunas, when there's no separation between the muddham and yourself. There's no watcher. There's just arunas being one with activity. So this is a mind in Buddhism that is brought to our experience of everyday life. And I'm not talking about a particular state of mind. That's important to note. But a mind that's free of any state of mind, a flowing mind of awareness, free from self-referencing. What Buddhism does, I suggest, and that is what we do, is we take this mind of not self-referencing and we bring that mind into everyday life.

[08:51]

And that becomes the... That is our intention. That intention plus the vow to... I was going to say save all sentient beings, but I don't like that word. But to walk with all sentient beings towards freedom and to help or whatever. Towards freedom is our way, is the Buddhist life. Those two sides. And... So that's how I want to connect. That's what I want to talk about, about art, that kind of mind and the difference between what art does with it and what Buddhism does with it. But the mind, that mind from that experience, that insight, if you have it like that, is not so different, I don't think. A long time ago when I was in school in Berkeley... When I was in school in Berkeley, I was taking a class in literature.

[09:52]

It was a great class. We read Shakespeare and so on and so forth. And I knew as we were reading things in my class that I was listening to the teaching. I didn't know it was Buddhist teaching, but I knew it was down there. And I knew that it was important stuff, and I knew that it could somehow influence your life. But when I was looking at the person who was teaching this class, the person was a mess, a total mess. I had no respect for this person. He was just nasty. But he was full of all of those words, and he would serve those words to us and let us, you know, give us things to read that were transcendent stuff. I was going to read you from Shakespeare, but I have no time, so I won't. You want to hear Shakespeare? Well, I read this last time, so I thought I'd skip it, but all right. It's so good. It's from The Tempest, just when I read it, I was like... Our revels now are ended.

[10:54]

These are actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air. And like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great grove itself, where all Richard and Harriet shall dissolve. And like this insubstantial pageant faded, we've not a rack behind. We're such stuff as dreams are made on. And our little life is wounded with a slope. I love it. Anyway, soon after that, I left thinking that college was going to give me answers. And sooner after that, I met Suzuki Roshi, who I felt actually embodied what he was talking about. And so I was interested in how, what he did.

[11:57]

So I'd like to take a look. No, wait. Yeah, so Buddhism, in my sense, would be able to show me how to forget my sense of being a small, separate self. That was my pain. And not just a limited, conditioned experiences, this is a key, which I had already experienced anyway in music and dance, but to take that experience with some insight of my self and move it into one's daily life so we could live with some sense of low self-referencing every day, all day long, which of course I don't do, but I sort of thought Suzuki Roshi was close, you know. So I was reading a book, one of those were in, where did I see that book? Oh, Katagiri Roshi first told me about this book. It's called Beyond Buried in Anxiety, and it's about, and it's written by a man named

[13:04]

How do you say it? Yeah, you could get that from this. F-O-M-I-H-O-M-Y-I. How's that? So this book, in this book, he describes an experience called flow, flow experience, which I want to also share with you. It has different aspects to it, and he's divided it all up. See if it strikes a balance. I mean, because, and it wasn't until it struck the best, because we all had these experiences. This is not a visual experience. You have these experiences if you're totally focused without self-referencing, no watcher. I'm telling you what it is exactly. No watcher. You know, those are the rules that we're dealing with.

[14:09]

We understand. You have the BOSIC. things necessary for you to be able to do it, like you know the scales in music, or you know the moves in judo, or you know how to play basketball, and then you kind of loop into this other thing. In music, it will be that you actually play music. You're not practicing anymore. Your practicing is done. We've done that down, and now you're playing the music part. You know, you loop into that kind of thing. And so I told you already. So there's a motion of action and awareness. We don't have self-reflection. There's a center of attention, no time, right? Because you're completely in the present. There's kind of a fusion with you and your environment. And like I said, the basic rules and the basic skills you have under your belt, but the activity is just enough so that we're not there to move it.

[15:18]

We're there to tell the leader we're going to do it, right? And there's clear feedback of what's happening in your realm, and there's also no goal. There's no goal. You're not doing it. You're not climbing the mountain actually to get to the top. You're climbing the mountain because the process is so incredibly rare that we just want to keep climbing and climbing and climbing because you want to be in that space, that kind of space. Now, I really want to make... I'm walking on thin ice here. But anyway, I'll keep talking about it. This experience, this activity... where the self kind of drops away includes everything. It's not some special kind of state of mind necessarily. Everything is included in it because in this state of mind we can use everything. Everything, it's non-discriminatory because everything that happens, you know, if you're playing basketball and somebody throws you a set of cues, you catch the set of cues, put it in your pocket and continue right on down the clip.

[16:23]

You're that present, you know. And the reason why we can be that present is because the self-reflective mechanism is not there. And when we're really present, we don't need it anyway. There's a difference between awareness and the self-reflecting watcher. If we ground an awareness and present, this watching thing is just an idea that we have, and we call it us, but it isn't us. It's just an idea, a sense of a separate self, but it's just a function of mind, this watcher, this observer. And what we do in Zen is when this watcher comes up and makes a stir of our, we become an object, and it makes a stir of our lives. Like just before I came running, I was taking a bath, And it's really amazing what we do. It's so normal, but it's so pathetic is the word that came up. I don't mean it that way. It's not pathetic.

[17:25]

It's just tragic. It's not tragic. It's us. It's just us. We do it. I'm taking a bath, and in the bath, I'm telling myself, I'm taking a bath, you know? I'm taking a bath, man, I think I'll turn on the water, maybe it's a little bit too cold, and then I'm, you know, and I'm talking to myself, doing the whole thing, and then I think, because I'm, you know, doing this talk, so I thought to myself, you know, stop it. Would you just take a bath? You know? No? And really, and so here's the interesting part. The part that's telling yourself to stir is the self, and it comes up in lots of different ways. It struggles. Whenever you have to struggle, that's the self. When your mind is caught somewhere and you have pain, that's the self. When you make a judgment, that's the self. And hold to it, that's the self. Whenever you see yourself corroding, an identity that's separate from actual just things going on, what we're building in is where we forget it.

[18:33]

And this is our intention. This is our vow. We live day to day in that vow. And we live in Sangha to help us with it, trusting that everyone else is also doing the same thing. And really it's, I can't tell you from my heart how important that is. to, if you know to. Everybody doesn't have to do this. You know, it's a pain in the neck. And we don't remember it half the time anyway, but that's our intention. And there are all kinds of things you have to remind you. That's why it's helpful to live, you know, in a situation where other people are doing it. I've told you the main thing. That was a secret anyway, so if I don't finish the rest of my talk, it's not a total ross. So I was going to mention a quote from Bogan, but I want to get to Cezanne because it's just so fabulous. The quote from Bogan, you know, it's the thing about, hear sounds fully engaging body and mind, you understand them intimately.

[19:39]

To study the self is to forget the self, or to forget the self is to be basically awakened by all things. That stuff. And then I was going to ruin something from a musician, but... I'll explain it real fast to you. You know, when you play music, you have this experience. Oh, I won't. You have... I don't need to tell you that. Okay. When you play music, what happens is that... I'm sure it happens in other things as well, but music is how I've understood it. I play the flute. You're standing there playing the music, and you're completely aware of the music you're playing. You're hearing... that we're about to play, you're listening to what just passed, because music is, you feel in time, but actually when you play like that, there is no time. It's all really totally present, but there really isn't any present either, really. You're just completely there. The music ahead of you is there, the music behind you is there, and you feel like you're not playing it at all.

[20:41]

Your body is playing it, and you're just listening, you're just aware, watching this thing happening. It's really a wonderful thing. And I think all of us have these kinds of experiences, actually. So I was going to talk a little bit about that, which I will. I don't know why I'm rushing. My watch is five minutes fast. Now I remember, see. Now I watch those old five-minute fasts because it helps me not to be too rote. And I tend to be rote, so it helps me not to be rote. So now I'm thinking to myself, I have five-minute minutes to listen to a song I wrote. Actually, I'm a kid, so I wish that wasn't done. I know. It's good to appreciate when you do get a kick out of yourself, you know?

[21:45]

Because a lot of times we don't get a kick out of ourselves. So we should know that we do get a kick out of ourselves. Cezanne was a wreck. I love Cezanne. He's a friend of mine because he's another person who sort of takes me there, right? Again, look at, what I'm saying is, you do have these insights, but the point is not to be taken somewhere else. The point is to have that mind here, and not that mind even, that's not said correctly, but to see through the creation that we make all the time. These little experiences just give us the insight that our small self is totally a fiction. But it's here that we have to live. And we can't live here with a mind that doesn't hold, that doesn't self-reference all the time. Anyway, Cezanne was a recluse.

[22:45]

Recluse? Reckless? Recluse. And he didn't get along so very well with people. But he was this genius and a painter, so he would, he lived, he would walk in the hills and he would, he was basically alone most of his life, most of his adult life. And this is a quote from Sylvain about the process, his understanding of what he went through when he painted. Do people know his paintings? I brought two just in case. The process of realization takes place all at once. With a single effort, I draw everything together into a single relationship. At that moment, the scene itself disperses, vanishes. What is it that lies behind the phenomena of nature? Perhaps nothing, perhaps everything.

[23:48]

I clasp them all together, these phenomena, right, left, here, there, everywhere. I grasp these tones of color, these subtle shows, and put them together. And they create lines. They become objects without my even thinking about it. My canvas has it all clasped within its hands. Mind you, if I were to show the slightest weakness... Above all, if I think while I'm painting, if I get in the way of this process, then everything collapses and is lost. The artist is a receiver, a sensitive plate. But to make the plate sensitive, there have to be several different immersions, study, meditation, Joy, sorrow, these are the preparations that are so necessary.

[24:50]

And this is a quote from a viewer of pictures of Cézanne. Cézanne used color to unify a picture. There is no motion from the objects or the atmosphere. There is stillness everywhere. Right, too, seems timeless and neutral. Perspective is broken up so that there is an absence of tension in perspective depth. Cézanne corroded forms and space with color. Objects appear to form themselves, to grow out of the surface of the picture and to dissolve themselves in it again. Cézanne looked deeper to find the still point, the absolute. He looked through the forms to a deeper emptiness, the ungraspable element. That is the true nature manifest by form. His paintings attain a vital, contemplative peace and then emanate that peaceful serenity to the viewer.

[26:05]

And this is getting close to what I think art is real about, which I'll just tell you. I think that the amazing thing about an artist, be it the medium of paint, form, or sound, or verbs, or dance, movement, you know, whatever it is, the great artists, what they're able to do is take this mind of not-self, and then show it to people, and then somehow communicate it in the name of the viewer to enter that space. So that in music, for example, because that way I understand better, in order to be a real biblical listener, what you need to do is focus your mind, drop your chatter,

[27:09]

It's harder to be the listener than it is to be the musician. Anyway, you have to really focus your mind, drop the self-chatter, and give yourself over, physically almost, to the music. And the music will take you. Coltrane, Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Schubert. and rock and roll. It does. That's why, if I may say, that's why people, should I say this? You know, sometimes you do drugs and stuff like that, and then you put music on and stuff. In a sense, it's kind of a laziness in a way, because with the drugs, they help you drop your self-reflecting thing, right? So you're able to surrender to whatever the medium is more easily. Alcohol, you know, all that stuff.

[28:11]

But ultimately it's not really, because it's so conditioned and it's destructive anyway, right? And we can do this without the drugs. We don't need drugs to... I don't want to lecture anybody. So here's Suzanne. I'm sorry, but those prints are not very good. But anyway, this I had in my kitchen. And of course, Suzanne was the, from what I understand, although at his time they thought he was a complete idiot, but he was the, he's now considered the father of modern art, right? And this is what really great artists do. They take the regular forms that we're used to and they really create them in a different way.

[29:15]

Poets use words in a different way, right? So they cut through our habitual way of seeing things You see how the perspective is distorted and how it unifies the picture, the colors are, how the picture seems, you can't really, the things are there, but we can kind of, they're not quite, they're kind of ungraspable a little bit. The other picture is better at that. All of the forms are there, but they're somehow, something else is happening. And if you look at his, and you can look and [...] look at his pictures, for a really long time because they're not quite there somehow. To me, there's this sense of the ungraspableness of foreign, the emptiness of foreignness.

[30:16]

This is, I had this in my living room. picture, and I just sit and stare at it. See? Everything is there, and he unifies it with color, so it's very interesting the way he uses color, because you've got pinks and all kinds of things in the sky, and in the mountain, and down in the valley, and greens are everywhere, because it unifies the picture. And one last quote from Rilke. I could have brought... Actually, I have.

[31:21]

I have something from Rota's mythology, but I think that will take too long. Because Rota himself also, in words... Anyway, he's a great poet. This is what he says about Cezanne. Okay. Speaking about the word balance plays in the art of Cézanne between the reality of nature and the reality of the image, which when Cézanne achieved it, he said, was like a folding of hands. His was an infinitely responsive conscious which so incorruptibly reduced a reality to its color content that that reality resumed a new existence in a beyond of color without any previous memories. In this beyond were even notions of ugliness and bleeding lose their meaning What exists is being revealed as existent.

[32:25]

Or in other words, artists, regular artists, would paint, I read this here. Cezanne paints, here it is. To be more explicit, first artistic perception had to overcome itself to the point of realizing that even something horrible, something that seems no more than disgusting, is, and shares the truth of its being with everything else that exists. But how of one piece is everything we encounter? How related one thing is to the next? How it gives birth to itself and grows up and is educated in its own nature? and all we basically have to do is to be, but simply, earnestly, the way the Earth simply is, and gives her consent to the seasons, bright and dark and whole in space, not asking to rest upon anything other than the mutt of influencers and fursers in which the stars feel secure.

[33:36]

Isn't that great? So we have presence, total presence, undivided activity, just being or flow. We have experiences of ourself. the artist, the great artist, is able to communicate that experience and at its best enable other people to have that sense of no-self. And the difference between great art, I'm suggesting, and Buddhism is that the intention of a Buddhist is to integrate that mind And again, when I say that mind, it's not a particular state of mind. And the insights that come from such a mind, which is the insight that our separate sense of self is a fiction.

[34:43]

The sense isn't a fiction, that's our feeling. But that we think it's true is a fiction, that we think we're separate is a complete fiction. and that we actually lose that understanding in our daily life. Like I said, how I said before, that when we see ourselves corroding the self, like if we tend to be depressed, or if we've given up, if we think we're a failure, all of those thoughts are just corroding who we are again. And even though they have feelings that come along with it, like pain, you know, physical pain, those thoughts hurt us, actually. What we do is we go completely back to the activity. We go to the body and go back to the present activity, forgetting the self, forgetting those thoughts that we were just telling ourselves.

[35:53]

That's our practice. That's the practice that we do all the time, as much as possible, again and again and again, every time it comes up. Humiliation is really good for that kind of thing. Embarrassment, apologizing, being jealous, you know, anger is good to look at in that way. Everything, everything, everything, everything, excluding nothing is a place to see the Dharma. So we've just begun the practice period here, and that's what we'll do during the practice period. We'll get to focus where we intend to practice like that, where we intend to do that. And I'm suggesting today, I guess, that one way of doing that is to appreciate in our daily life what could be said somehow is like art.

[37:07]

Art. There is art all around us, whether it's the flowers behind me, this lectern, the blackness of this lectern, the groan of my bowing Cloth. The uniqueness of each individual face. This person's glasses and that person's glasses. Different shape. So as we walk around the building, or if you're going to leave, it's a lovely day. Maybe today we can, when you look at something, you know, really, really look Really look. And if you're listening, really listen. And if you're walking, really walk. And notice when your small self rushes back in.

[38:12]

And then see if you could sort of forget it. You know? And we can all do that together. Because that's what we do as Buddhists. So if you look at the building, and there are tools that weren't there today, if you look at the building, if you go outside or in the courtyard, look up at the soffits. There's designing up there, and there's ceramics. She did ceramics all over the place. Look at how she blows through arches and, you know, around, and the symmetry of that wall. It's really beautiful. And... Enjoy your day.

[39:04]

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