This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. It's a rare accomplishment to be thoroughly and truly and completely deluded or unaware. If you watch yourself in Zazen, you space out. You get caught up in this or that. But then, almost despite yourself, you come back to that moment of presence, that moment of connection. Maybe we demand of it some kind of exalted purity. that it will be so pristine, so thorough, so energetic, so illuminated, it will slice open the world and its perfect, pure essence will become apparent and abundant and utterly transformative.

[01:20]

often in the process of practice. We start with the basics. And there is something there to let sink into our bones. There is something there that's requesting that it become a deeply committed, involved endeavor. But if we extend from that, that somehow... it will purify and sanctify existence, even the sense of self and the agendas of self. We create a challenge that's not necessarily part of waking up. I say not necessarily because often the challenges we create for ourselves have a teaching within them. You create a problem, then through great diligence and effort, you resolve the problem, and you learned a lot in the process.

[02:38]

And you're left with this age-old notion. Did I have to do that? Did I have to go there, create that mountain that needed to be climbed and then climb it? In some ways, yes. It's very difficult for us as humans to be grateful for the process. It seems to me often it's easier to be a little or a lot resentful. As we take on the basics, as they become part of us, and as they start to, sometimes despite ourselves, sometimes as a consequence of incredibly sincere and diligent activity, they start to integrate into our life.

[03:44]

Some of the way our psychological makeup is being thought of now is that we have what you might call short-term or immediate involvement in our existence. Something arises, we have responses, we're stimulated by the moment, we're stimulated by all sorts of things. But it is somewhat momentary. And then in other ways, it's this wonderful replay of the theater of our archetypes. You're re-meeting your mother, even though she's been dead 25 years. You're re-meeting her and this person and you're working on your relationship with your mother. Whether this person likes it or not. Understands it or not. And similarly, when we sit Zazen, you know, there is this momentary involvement.

[05:04]

Not to say that it's without metaphor or without some imputed meaning. So even in the moment, we add the adjectives to the experience. And then sometimes, as you notice in your sitting, there's an enchantment. You become entranced by deeper thought, deeper images, memories. And in the immediate state, you know, someone's phone could go off, for instance.

[06:12]

And you get to see if your mind is spacious, accepting, it's more inclined to be amusing, you know? You hear the tune and you notice it's kind of playful liveliness. If your mind is determined in its sincere wish to practice, something's intruding upon the purity you're trying to cultivate. And then it arises, and then that intrusion has to be met, has to somehow be resolved. We create the problem, we resolve the problem, and in the process there's discovery. But it's not so easy in that process to not feel some limitation, some struggle, something we're pushing against, something we're striving for.

[07:24]

And what I was trying to say in that way of turning delusion on its head the same way the Jesuit turned sinning on its head for my brother. A different mindset, you know? Because we sit down to do Zanzen and we think, okay, here we go. This is going to be an unbelievable, uncontrollable display of consciousness. You know? My mind is just hell on wheels. Let's see what it comes up with next. The very disposition, the very permission of it, the spaciousness of it, relates to what arises in a different way. It creates a different arising in that

[08:31]

the adjectives, the attributes it associates with it. And part of the challenge for us is how to sustain the diligence, the attention to the basics, while we're allowing this permissiveness. And that takes some juggling. It's easy to set them in opposition. Over here, Diligent, sincere, exacting. Over here, spacious, accepting, no fixed goal, no fixed arising is required. So how to bring those together? And I'd like to try to address that question with a couple of poems.

[09:38]

And I have to confess, the poet Naomi Shihab Nye just sent me her latest book, so guess where the poems are coming from. She wrote a book about her father, who was a very significant... figure in her life. And lovely for her, a very positive figure in her life. A great source of positive images, positive expressions. One story she told me once was that Her father, and it's a habit she has now, would listen to the news, and he was quite liberal in his views. And George Bush was president, and he would some... George Bush would make some, you know, statement, some activity, and he would be...

[10:57]

in disagreement with it. So he'd write to George Bush, you know, expressing his disapproval, disappointment. And then one day, George Bush called him on the phone. She tells the story wonderfully because his father utterly would not believe it was George Bush. The way she tells it was something like this. Our father answered the phone. And the person on the other end said, do you know who this is? And he said, no. Don't you recognize the voice? No. It's George. He says, George who? George Bush. Oh, come on. Anyway, it was.

[11:58]

George Bush, her father was Palestinian, but he always started his letters to the president as something like, as a loyal and proud American, I want to say, and then he'd toss in what he disapproved of. George Bush wanted him to travel around the country. this was the start of the Iraq War, you know, as a Palestinian, as an Arab, you know, saying, you know, how much he approved of the country. And her father said, well, I'll do that. But I have a few policy changes that I would need you to make in advance. And guess what? It didn't happen. So this was her father, a person she loved, admired, and was guided by and supported by.

[13:13]

I'm sorry you lost your father, people say. And I step outside to soak in stripes of gray cloud. Hand touches aren't real. You needed it. I don't. Maybe tonight your laughter carpets our rooms. I keep finding you in ways you didn't know I noticed or knew. Every road, every sea, every beach by every sea keeps lining up with what you loved. Here's a line of silent palm trees. It's as if... you are answering the phone. That way in which what inspires us, instructs us, supports us is woven into our being.

[14:17]

It's not simply a notion. It's not simply an intellectual nugget You know? It's part of our breath. It's part of how we see the sky. It's part of how a line of silent palm trees evokes a connection. As if the person was answering the phone. You know, it's marvelous that we have someone had enough khuspa and heart to think up a holiday such as Thanksgiving. You know, that we can remember what's woven into our being, into our bones, into our feelings, into our perceptions of the world.

[15:24]

That which causes us to give thanks, that causes us to appreciate, that causes us to remember that our life has taught us, that people in our life have taught us. They have offered us the guidance, the example, the instruction to engage this life in an appreciative way. And to bring that to our zazen, to bring that to our practice of awareness, our practice of mindfulness, along with the diligence, the returning to basics. This is the natural counterpart. This is asking us to be...

[16:30]

precisely this and nothing extra. And this embracing with appreciation everything. How to bring both of these to our meditation practice. And how to bring both of these to our life. If we only bring the diligence of immediacy, where will the nourishment, the inspiration, the sense of ease and appreciation, what will inspire it? Sometimes I think in our diligence, It's hard to realize how much we've learned, how much we've been taught, how much we've been supported.

[17:42]

But we have. By people we know and by people we don't know. I sometimes find that, personally, I find that a very nurturing thing to think of. The people have supported my life. that I'm not even aware of. The other thing that I caught from that poem was, you know, a conventional life. Your father's dead, you must miss him. How can her father possibly die as long as she's alive? All those beautiful memories, the ways in which he's woven into her being. And how our conventional life is made lighter than air as we see, as she says,

[19:02]

And she goes outside and sees strips of gray cloud. I'm sorry you lost your father, people say. And I step outside to soak in stripes of gray cloud. Is her life a metaphor for the gray cloud? is the gray cloud a metaphor for her life. And this is, I would suggest, another wonderful way to look at what arises for you in your meditation. This arising, a metaphor, a poem about this existence. that in the linearity of my thinking and the certainty of my knowing is so concrete.

[20:12]

There's me, I'm this. And then as we settle and we watch its subtle movements, we watch how a cell phone goes off and it changes our mood. Or at least it changes where our attention is. Are we thinking of something and just the weight of what's happening in our perceptual field and that thinking blend. So we can think of awareness practice as this diligent purification that will create an exalted being out of what we are.

[21:17]

But we can also think of awareness practice as this amazing opportunity to see the way consciousness weaves momentary images, momentary experiences. And when you pay attention, you notice all the more so when we do Zazen. As consciousness settles below the authority of linear thinking, the reification of the determined messages that we propose with... certainty with something upon the world. To start to see them as an illustration, as this moment's expression. To start to watch how they weave together and how they fall apart.

[22:24]

how they weave together and how they fall apart. And how, in a way, to be a little dramatic about it and also to be quite realistic about it, it's a matter of life and death. And Naomi's book, it's called Transfer, is about life and death. When my beautiful friend, aged 95, asked me to help her to commit suicide, I had to distract her, tell jokes, bring up her old boyfriends. My friend's problems were greater than mine. Deeply weary of disintegrating body, dry of tongue, eye, rich of spirit, she begged me only twice. I'll save the pills, then you know. She grinned. Okay then, I'll suffer like a true American.

[23:36]

Reciting Shakespeare loudly through the halls of that grim nursing home, heads turning her direction. What were her favorite passages? I was soaking up the scene. How could a few pride lines have the power to spark nods? Her English teacher's voice trumpeting through bright red lips. Old women in barns do better with a little paint. Opening, closing, holding. The way everything changed. Language lifted us to a higher track. Sometimes, before I left, in her room started with chocolates and cards. She still talked about love affairs she wished she'd had. conjure it up. We draw upon sometimes obvious memories and images and sometimes upon utterly mysterious archetypes.

[24:52]

Something comes out of our body woven in there by the very intensity of being alive. And even though conjured up, it's extraordinarily potent. It can create a barrier in front of us that seems insurmountable. And it can create a lightness that allows us to raise our spirits even under the most dire circumstances. How amazing that this is the territory, this is the potency of our consciousness, of how our momentary experience is engaged. So we sit, we learn something about the basics.

[26:01]

And how do you learn something about the basics? Naaru, the Japanese word to study. Study, to learn through repeated application and engagement. Something's woven into our bones, into our blood, into our feelings, into our breath. And that brings the capacity to be more conscious. And to trust that. To not determinedly take ownership and say, now, things will be the way I will say they will be. No, they won't. Just send Zaza in for five minutes. And watch carefully. And the more carefully you watch, the more you see how true that is.

[27:07]

things will not be the way you say they will be. Sometimes it seems like anything but. And as we continue to pay attention, as we continue to bring this spacious awareness, this spacious connection and openness and appreciation, that unfolding teaches the self, teaches the conditioned nature of existence, and teaches something beyond both. Which brings me to the koan, which is... Monk asks the teacher, My name is Icho.

[28:10]

I ask you, what is Buddha? Teacher says, you are Icho. This whole process that I've been trying to talk about, this is the Buddha manifest. This is the process of being Buddha. that constantly unfolds and constantly changes and has no fixed form and is expressed in every form, including you, H.O. So there's something profoundly paradoxical in our practice. In some ways, it's all our clinging it's all our insistence upon me, separate from everything else, and all the thoughts and definitions and understandings and judgments and conclusions that go along with me, that that is not the great sin that's going to cast us into eternal hell.

[29:33]

As a Jesuit priest said, It's way more difficult to get to hell than that. It's way more difficult to thoroughly and completely absolutely believe your own stories of self. You're constantly interrupting them. The world is way too interesting and intriguing. You're busy with the pains of being mean and then a cell phone goes off. And in those moments You forget. You forget me. And then often we rush back to the Adam Porden business. Yes. Wait a minute, what was I worrying about? What was really bothering me? What image, memory, story that I've repeated through my mind 20 times in the last three hours?

[30:38]

Do I need to repeat again? How utterly amazing. That would be so urgent, so necessary to do. You are echo. Just that very process you're going through is a process that can instruct and illustrate the process of waking up. Seeing it for what it is. Approaching it with curiosity and appreciation rather than a sense of determined need to radically and completely change it. It's how it's related to That's a transformative act.

[31:40]

It arises simply as a product of conditioning. How could Naomi not feel this way about her father? All that has been created through their time together. How could Echo not be Echo? How could Naomi not be Naomi? How could you not be you with the thoughts and feelings and memories and fears and desires and sadnesses and regrets and sense of self-worth and sense of self-failure that have come to be part of your existence? And one last poetic image from the verse of the koan.

[32:47]

Far away, deep among the blossoms, and surely if we hold this human life with some appreciation, we'll see the blossoms. Far away, deep among the blossoms, the partridge sinks. And those blossoms will offer up their teachings. Ascending the falls, the carp became a dragon. Yet still by night, fools fish for her below. the images, the carp is caught in the waters of habitual, repetitive thinking and thought and behavior.

[33:59]

In seeing it for what it is, in seeing it as an illustration of ever-changing existence, some freedom, you see yourself conjure up an image, a response. Sometimes it's obvious how it came into being, and sometimes it's utterly mysterious. But either way, in seeing it, in letting it be spacious, in letting it be held more with appreciation than aversion, more giving thanks than condemnation, in that spaciousness possibility, like a dragon that can swim in the water, walk on the land, and fly in the sky.

[35:02]

And in those moments when consciousness takes flight, when the memory of father becomes striped gray clouds. When the silent line of palm trees connects as clearly as a phone call. Don't just allows us then to be a struggle. Searching for limitation, hesitancy, or difficulty. The strange thing about our human consciousness is our inclination to return to the difficult and the painful as our deepest truth.

[36:17]

Someone smiles and says hi, how easily we accept it and release it. Someone fronds and swears at us for days, weeks, months. We cling to it, like cling to a thorn that keeps pressing deeper into your hand. It's almost like that pain is a deeper truth. No, it's just a deeper pain. That's all. To marvel, to have compassion for that very human tendency. And to be patient with the way it turns our mind and disposition.

[37:21]

Find those moments of giving thanks, of appreciation. And for those of us who are sitting today, to let them be woven into the body and the breath. Like each inhale. This moment of yes. This moment of willingness of being. This moment of acceptance. and embracing of what it is. And letting it bring forth whatever it brings forth. Marveling at the mysterious workings of human consciousness. we enter thoroughly into the workings of the self and we discover there's nothing fixed about it.

[38:41]

There's nothing endlessly solid and unchanging within it. And that that's pretty good. doesn't have so much to do with annihilation as it does have something to do with abundance. It has more to do with constant creation. And this tantalizing challenge and proposition for each one of us How can all this show us, support us to have a more spacious, alive existence?

[39:44]

To look at that carefully, to study it, as if the teacher was saying, you, you are Buddha. Thank you very much. For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[40:28]

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