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. I'd like to begin this talk by expressing gratitude. Thank you to my teacher, Agent Linda Ruth Cutts, for your teaching and support. Thank you to the Tonto, or Head of Practice, and the Green Gulch Practice Committee for inviting me to give the talk today. Thank you to all of you for being here, those of you in the room and those of you online. And thank you to the great earth, sky, fire, and water. For giving us life.

[01:02]

For nourishing and sustaining us. Yes. I do. Or maybe Kika can help me because I don't know how to make it stay where it's supposed to be. I need the keekster. Thank you. You're welcome. How's that? Hopefully just enough. I also want to take a moment to honor and express gratitude for the elders in our community, some of whom will be moving soon to Enzo Village. And if you haven't heard about Enzo Village, it's a Buddhist-inspired senior living community. that was created through a partnership between San Francisco Zen Center and the Kendall Corporation.

[02:08]

So we'll have a formal ceremony later this afternoon to honor our departing elders. And right now, I just feel moved to fully acknowledge all of the emotions that I think our elders are feeling, and I think many of us are feeling as well. The rest of us too. Sadness and grief, I've been hearing a lot about that. And I think there's also excitement, curiosity, and a lot of not knowing and a lot of fear about that. I can't really imagine Green Gulch without our elders, who were once our beginners, who were the creators, the initiators of this place.

[03:11]

And I feel some really deep faith and trust that they will always be here, even though they're leaving soon. They'll always be here, permeating Green Gulch like a thick fog. and calling out to us in every ringing of the bell and every quail call. So I first became a resident here at Green Gulch over 20 years ago now. And since then, I've spent time at all three of the temples of San Francisco Zen Center, mostly Green Gulch and Tassajara. And I just moved back to Green Gulch last April. with my husband, Zenko, and our three-year-old daughter, Mira. And since moving back to Green Gulch, I've been really struck by how, even though I had lived at Green Gulch for seven years in the past, even though I'm a relatively senior student at Zen Center and a practice leader, even though I already know many of the residents here, even though the land is deeply familiar to me,

[04:28]

And even though the unique breeze of the student lounge bathroom hasn't changed a bit since I first smelled it in 2003, still my experience since returning to Green Gulch in April has felt like a completely new phenomenon. I am no longer a fresh-faced 20-something or a fresh-faced 30-something with boundless energy searching for my way in the world. Or at least that's my image of myself in the past. I have a family now. I have more of a sense of San Francisco Zen Center as an institution. And it seems like my orientation towards life has shifted somewhat from looking for something for myself to taking care of my family and this community. It's a little more complicated than that, of course, but kind of in broad strokes. I feel this shift in my orientation, kind of a shift outwards.

[05:33]

And at first, after moving back to Green Gulch in April, I felt like, what a unique experience. What a gift to simultaneously feel like a new person here with a clean slate and a fresh start. And also to feel like I'm returning to an old home to kind of know the ropes. feel pretty familiar with this place. What a gift to not really be able to define or pinpoint exactly how it is or how I feel about being back. To be in a state of not knowing and openness without some fixed sense of who I am at Green Gulch or where I stand and to be able to drop any preconceptions and just see what happens. And actually, even though we usually don't see our lives this way, if we've lived in the same place for a while, maybe had the same career for a while, and we have kind of established routines, it's harder to see this, but we always have this opportunity to approach the world with beginner's mind, even situations that we've encountered a million times.

[06:54]

When I moved back to Green Gulch in April, I had just finished a year and a half stint as the director of Tassahara. And there were many challenges that I had to meet when I was director there. Pretty much the full spectrum of challenges from nuanced interpersonal challenges to really basic survival challenges like how are we going to get food? over the road when there's several feet of snow and ice and everything in between. I completely exerted myself. And because there was such a small group of residents at Tassajara during this post-COVID time, every day I showed up for my work and showed up for the Sangha feeling very needed. I knew what was going on with everyone. I felt very alive. fully engaged, which is how Zen students sometimes describe being overly busy, fully engaged.

[08:06]

And I was only able to do that because of the support of my husband, Zenko, who was Mira's primary caregiver while I was director. So when we moved to Green Gulch, we asked if we could do a switch and if... Senko could take a turn having a full-time position and I could take on more of the child care responsibilities. And I went from feeling connected to everyone in the Tassajara community and in the middle of the action all the time to feeling pretty isolated and somewhat clueless about what was going on at Green Gulch. As our Shuso Steph recently referred to it in her beautiful Dharma talk, I felt like I was on the periphery here. And it was such a radical shift. And the person I had become at Tassajara, who was the center of the action and needed and fully engaged, was suddenly gone. Of course, there was a lot of relief and many things that I appreciated about spending time with Mira here at Green Gulch last summer.

[09:18]

But occasionally I would notice this. urge come up to prove my worth to be more useful to the community as a whole. And when that happened, I tried to really study and tease apart the wholesome parts of that urge because I think that we as humans naturally want to connect with our communities and be a part of helping them function. And the parts of that urge that might have been closer to what Pema Chodron calls the urge to recreate ourselves. She says that when our world is disrupted and we don't know what's going to happen next, where we are or who we are, we try to recreate ourselves or return to the solid ground of our self-concept. Try to be our solid, immovable idea of ourselves.

[10:18]

instead of opening to the opportunities that a beginner's mind offers. And really, our world is disrupted all the time. Change is constantly occurring. Sometimes it's really noticeable, like when we move to a new home, then we might notice it more. But I think we spend a lot of time and energy recreating ourselves during all the little disruptions and the little changes in our lives. And when we're focused on recreating ourselves, there's less space for new possibilities to emerge. But when we loosen this urge to recreate ourselves and when we let our idea of our identity fall away a little bit and allow ourselves to feel a little exposed, a little naked, like I'm feeling right now, we have a chance to discover something new.

[11:20]

something that we couldn't see before. I think many of you are familiar with the book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, which is a compilation of talks by the founder of San Francisco Zen Center, Shinryu Suzuki Roshi. It's kind of a foundational text around here, a book that we often use to share and introduce the spirit and flavor of this practice. especially with new students, beginners. So from the prologue of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, the goal of practice is always to keep our beginner's mind. If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything. It is open to everything. In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities, but in the experts, there are few. In the beginner's mind, there is no thought, I have attained something.

[12:24]

All self-centered thoughts limit our vast mind. When we have no thought of achievement, no thought of self, we are true beginners. Then we can really learn something. The most difficult thing is always to keep your beginner's mind. There is no need to have a deep understanding of Zen. Even though you read much Zen literature, you must read each sentence with a fresh mind. You should not say, I know what Zen is, or I have attained enlightenment. Beginner's mind is the secret of Zen practice. So first I want to talk about this idea of attainment or achievement. I think for most of us, maybe especially if we grew up in America, we grew up in a dominant culture that emphasizes this concept of individual attainment or achievement.

[13:40]

Most of us grew up in a world that tells us that we should try to prove ourselves worthy. be good at things, and demonstrate to others what we know. And often there's a related assumption that individuals who are successful and worthy will therefore make lots of money, maybe be famous, have certain kinds of power. But I think even those of us who might reject parts of that culture or dominant mindset and make our way, for example, to a Zen center, might still operate from that same mode, that orientation of attainment or achievement. We might want to improve ourselves, be enlightened, be happy, be at peace. And this is ultimately just a different flavor of the same idea that I, as an individual, can attain and achieve something that

[14:47]

of the idea that changing our external circumstances and getting something that we at first think is outside of ourselves will lead to happiness and contentment. This act of wanting and grasping creates a tension that is painful, that arises out of our feelings of longing and incompleteness, a feeling that we are separate and not whole. When we want something that we think we don't have, whether it be getting married, getting a certain job, being well-liked by our peers, even some idea of enlightenment or spiritual attainment, and then we get it, or in the case of enlightenment, we think we get it, even briefly, we usually experience a feeling of satisfaction.

[15:48]

But that feeling has less to do with the thing that we've attained and more to do with the fact that we're getting a break from the painful activity of wanting or grasping after the thing that we think is going to bring us happiness. So then when that brief feeling of relief and satisfaction fades away, as all things inevitably do, And our life chugs along and we experience various new problems. We tend to search for something new to grasp at. What will bring me happiness now? And we keep operating under this delusion that happiness is a result of getting the things that we think we want. So I want to emphasize that this is all totally normal. Nobody wants to suffer, and there are so many powerful cultural and biological factors that lead us to believe that grasping after things outside of ourself will relieve our suffering.

[16:58]

We spend our lives caught in a self-centered dream, and the first step in our practice is to acknowledge that. Noticing that we're in a self-centered dream might sound pretty straightforward, but it's remarkably difficult because our minds have gotten so used to our way of seeing things. They've dug these deep trenches and pathways. And we can get stuck in addictive patterns of grasping and fixating, which cause the same thoughts and reactions to occur again and again. So the medicine is to pay attention and study the self diligently over and over in each moment. And when we start to notice our patterns and really pay attention to them, they can become less solid.

[18:03]

And we might see that we could drop some of them. And that is when we can step into this new territory. That's where beginner's mind emerges. And what we discover when we engage in this practice is that our idea of ourself as an independent, permanent entity with clear boundaries separating it from the rest of the world, while it's totally normal that this is how we perceive ourselves on a day-to-day basis, and it helps us function, get the kids to school, and we're surrounded by other people doing the same thing, And we have to relate with them. And then we get pulled into their little self-centered worlds and their ways of seeing things. But still, ultimately, this idea of a separate, fixed self is not accurate in the deepest sense. In this tradition, we sometimes talk about small mind and big mind.

[19:11]

The relative and the ultimate. So the small mind is the mind that sees itself. as separate and fixed and permanent. And big mind is the mind that understands that there's a deeper reality, always functioning, of interconnectedness and oneness. So again, from that prologue to Zen mind, beginner's mind, all self-centered thoughts limit our vast mind. It's not that self-centered thoughts don't exist. or that we should pretend they don't exist or try to suppress them in order to be good practitioners. Our practice is to notice our self-centered thoughts, study them, see what happens when we follow their lead, see what happens when we don't follow their lead. And we don't really need to look for big mind or seek it out because it tends to reveal itself when we accept and thoroughly study.

[20:14]

that small mind. Another way of saying all of this from our great ancestor and the founder of the Soto Zen school, Ehe Dogen, to study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind, as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and experience themselves is awakening. So studying our minds, our habit patterns, transforms from the bottom up our previously held ideas of attainment, of inside and outside, and our relationship with the world.

[21:28]

And the more we study that wish to relieve our own personal suffering and study all the enticing but ultimately ineffective ways that we have been trying to relieve our suffering, the more our orientation naturally kind of shifts and opens up from a self-centered focus to a wider, more connected focus. For me, this is a very kind of visual teaching. It's an embodied teaching, a shift in orientation. So instead of moving through the world centered in this body and mind and its agenda, carrying the self forward, and all the physical and mental strain of that way of relating with the world, the hunching of the shoulders, the grasping, the weight of all of our preconceived ideas. We can see the self in everything we meet.

[22:31]

The self is not located in this body alone. We can drop the shoulders. We can open the heart. And myriad things, All beings are able to then come forth and experience themselves completely. And we let them experience themselves. And we see how we are supported by their full manifestation. And that's meeting everything just as it is with an open and curious beginner's mind. Nothing extra. Pema Chodron, again, she writes, being preoccupied with our self-image is like being deaf and blind. It's like standing in the middle of a vast field of wildflowers with a black hood over our heads. It's like coming upon a tree of singing birds while wearing earplugs.

[23:34]

So we miss out on our life, on the world, big time, when we're moving through the world in a self-centered, expert-minded, attainment-oriented fog. And it's kind of ironic in a way, but in our practice, we use repetition of a different kind to wear down the habitual, repetitive patterns of our small mind. So our self-centered habits want experiences that can reconfirm their existence and their importance. experiences that provide stimulation or a sense of specialness. And when we engage in repetitive forms in the zendo or in our work practice, they help wear down any sense of our separate, personalized contribution. During zazen, thoughts arise, fantasies, opinions, judgments, plans, over and over.

[24:44]

but we don't act on them. We just recognize them and return to the breath. And over time, this helps to cut that habitual connection between our thoughts and what we're doing. So we might sit there thinking, I have to do this, I have to be this certain way, but instead of reacting habitually, we just remain still through it all. And this stillness helps us see that loop that our mind is on more clearly. Similarly, the bodhisattva precepts and the shingi or monastic guidelines that many of us take up in this life together as followers of the way encourage us not just to change our behavior, but to study our habit minds and become intimate with the causes and conditions that underlie those behaviors. So, for example, when we...

[25:46]

renounce the misuse of intoxicants or the misuse of sexuality, we might see more clearly the way that we use these things to escape our reality, to comfort ourselves, to distract ourselves from something that we don't want to see or experience. And that's ultimately what we're really renouncing when we thoroughly engage in this practice. We renounce the idea that there's some way, that we can escape who we really are and what's really happening. Because there are so many forms and guidelines in our practice here, it can be easy to reify those forms and guidelines to make them solid, to hold on to them tightly. And that, again, it's the same habit mind that's looking for something and grasping, just maybe... redirected towards something that we think is more benign, the forms of our practice together.

[26:51]

So as we practice together and follow the forms together and follow the guidelines together and meet with our teachers and communicate with our Sangha friends over and over again, like Suzuki Roshi says, we need to remember our beginner's mind. The most difficult thing, he says, is not to forget. our beginner's mind, but to do all these things with flexibility and openness in our heart. The secret of Zen practice. Barry Magid sometimes refers to this as the paradox of practice. He says that our practice is a discipline that promises freedom, full of hierarchical relationships, that foster true independence, forms that give formlessness, and transformation that allows everything to be just as it is.

[27:54]

So last winter, I read a pretty fascinating article in the New Yorker. It was written by Elizabeth Colbert, and it's called Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds. I'm going to share a little bit about that now. She starts by describing a series of psychological studies that took place at Stanford in the 70s. Maybe some of you have heard about them. And one of the studies asked a group of students to read. It's a little morbid, but we're all... comfortable with birth and death here, to read a series of suicide notes and to try to guess which ones were real and which ones were fake. And after they submitted their guesses, some students were told that they did very well at guessing. They guessed most of them correctly. And some students were told that they did not do very well. But that was a lie.

[29:08]

In reality, all of the students had been pretty much equally successful at their guessing. And the interesting thing about this experiment is that after they were told, we just lied, you all did pretty much the same, and the point of this experiment is to see how you respond to being told that you did well or not. They were then asked to guess how well they did compared to like an average person. And the students who were told originally that they had done very well continued to think that they had done above average. And the students who were told that they had not done well continued to think that they had done below average, even though they had been told that that was a lie. So there were a series of experiments. They all led these researchers to the same conclusion, which was, once formed, impressions are remarkably perseverant.

[30:09]

They persevere. Our impressions persevere. Even after the evidence for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs. So this is those neural pathways again, right? Those deep ruts. And the thing about these experiments is it points to how quickly we form these pathways because... It wasn't even over a long period of time. It was like a very quick experiment that they couldn't let go of this belief that they had been told. So this article by Elizabeth Colbert explores a few recently written books by a number of cognitive scientists that try to explain why is it that humans have this tendency to get so stuck in our neural pathways. And persevere in our beliefs even when we're told that our beliefs don't match reality.

[31:11]

And I'm going to talk about a couple of these books too that I read were called The Enigma of Reason by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. And The Knowledge Illusion, Why We Never Think Alone by Stephen Sloman and Philip Fernbach. So humans are... apparently the only animals that use reason. And there's this tendency to think that that's because we're so highly evolved, our brains are very advanced and sophisticated, and that this ability to reason is evidence that humans are more intelligent and superior to other animals and we can solve abstract logical problems. But the argument from these cognitive scientists is that Reason developed in humans alone because compared to other animals, we are extremely social.

[32:14]

And they use the word hypersocial. We cooperate with each other more than any other animal. And reason developed to resolve the problems that are posed by living in collaborative groups together. So early humans learned that... If they lived in a collaborative group together, it had certain advantages. They could hunt a large animal together and be more successful than if they tried to do it alone. And it's much easier, those of us living at Green Gulch know, to live in a collaborative group when the people within the group agree with each other. So, for example, our hunter-gatherer ancestors were really concerned with their social standing, with making sure that they weren't the only ones risking their lives while other people hung out in the cave. So they used reason to win arguments with each other.

[33:17]

Like, here are the reasons why you should go hunt the woolly mammoth. And we tend to think that we use reason to think better and come to better decisions on our own. in our own personal decision-making, but in actuality, most of our cognition and decision-making is rooted in intuition, which occurs below the surface of consciousness, our bodies, the world around us, and other people and their minds and knowledge, our peers, our communities. So those are the ways that we think and make decisions through those four things, but we use reason mainly in our interactions with others to justify ourself and our decisions to others and to produce arguments to convince others of something that we want to convince them of. So again, we make our choices intuitively and then we justify our choices with reason and rationalization afterwards, even though reason was not involved in our decision-making process.

[34:31]

We have strong opinions about things. And then the reasons that come to mind to justify those opinions tend to be ones that support those opinions. Even though in most cases there are just as many reasons that don't support our opinion as well. But we kind of have this way of tunnel vision where we kind of see the reasons that support our opinion really easily. And we kind of have a way of not seeing the... reasons that don't support our opinion. So, as humans, we learn so much from each other, and that comes with huge benefits. And it also makes us very susceptible to misinformation. This tendency to embrace ideas and information that support one's pre-existing beliefs, and reject information that contradicts one's pre-existing beliefs has come to be known as confirmation bias or my side bias.

[35:39]

And you may have also heard of it as being in an information bubble or an echo chamber of ideas. And from an evolutionary perspective, it seems like this trait should have been selected against because it literally blinds us to reality. including possible threats to our existence. But again, this unique hyper-sociability of humans seems to outweigh, in an evolutionary sense, the importance of recognizing reality. Every time we hear something that supports our pre-existing beliefs, every time we talk to someone who believes the same thing that we do, It releases dopamine in our brain and we experience pleasure and we want to experience more of that feeling because dopamine is very addictive. It literally rewires our brains. And then the impact is that our pre-existing belief becomes stronger and more solid and then reinforces the beliefs of the others in the group, leading everyone to feel like their position is justified and

[36:55]

even when there may be no real truth underlying those beliefs in the first place. So I think we know on some level ultimately the reality tends to be that nobody understands anything in all of its complexity, not the people who agree with us and not the people who disagree with us. And Dogen understood that people are not swayed. By reason or intellect, he once wrote, when you say something to someone, he may not accept it, but do not try to make him understand it intellectually. Do not argue with him. Just listen to his objections until he himself finds something wrong with them. Irrational beliefs are strengthened and solidified in our minds, and when you add technology like the internet to the mix, bias expands at an exponential pace.

[38:08]

Echo chambers thrive and grow, unhindered by actual human connection and physical reality. Because more and more of our lives take place on computers and phones, people seem to be having a harder and harder time identifying what is real. Our circles of water, our ideas about reality, are now created not just by what we sense around us, they are created and defined by the internet, by what you could say is virtual reality. And it's become remarkably easy for people to manipulate other people, to stoke hatred, isolation, confusion, and chaos, to silo people into echo chambers where we only listen to people who believe what we believe and to profit off of it. When people are told lies and deceptive statements that invoke fear, it's the opposite of that dopamine hit.

[39:16]

Their brains experience chemical responses, defense mechanisms like cortisol, and adrenaline, which override any logical, rational response. And when people are in this state, dehumanizing metaphors are very effective, making it easier to focus on certain things and ignore others. So I know this is a lot. Taking all of this in and then returning to this practice of beginner's mind, it kind of blushes out what we're up against. When we endeavor to meet the world free of preconceptions and judgments, there's this evolutionary drive to get along with our community and believe things that may be untrue or irrational. And it's a really powerful force. It's literally addictive. To let go of a belief sometimes means

[40:20]

letting go of a bunch of other beliefs, or abandoning our communities, going against those we trust and love, and challenging our identities. And that's really scary. And it may feel threatening to our survival on a really basic level. Even for those of us who have created communities devoted to dropping our beliefs together and supporting each other in that work, it can still be scary. Everything exists interdependently with the rest of the universe in both obvious ways and imperceptible ways. This is a Dharma teaching you've probably heard. Nothing exists on its own. Myriad causes and conditions are involved in every arising and ceasing. And these cognitive scientists believe that humans have taken interdependence farther than any other life form.

[41:28]

And because humans have been relying on each other's expertise and collaborating for so long and in such complex ways, our brains cannot clearly distinguish where our knowledge about something ends and where someone else's begins. So we end up believing that we know more than we actually do because we aren't fully aware of all the ways that we rely on each other. This collaboration is why humanity has been so successful. It's much more efficient to divide labor and skills among a group. rather than each person needing to know how to do everything. If we didn't rely on each other's knowledge, we would each be totally overwhelmed by how much we would need to know. How to cut down a tree, make paper, how to grow food, not to mention how to make a cell phone. There's no way we could live the way we do without relying on each other heavily.

[42:34]

And because humans are so interdependent Our end products, whether it be a political policy, a movie, a scientific discovery, or a religious tradition, don't show sharp boundaries between the various contributions. The process belongs to the group. But this also leads our brains to create a simplified version of the world. because we blur the edges and think that we have knowledge about things that we're only somewhat familiar with. And this tendency has increased with the internet because we now live with the ever-present sense that we can easily find out anything that we need to know. And we confuse access to knowledge with knowledge itself. Everyday humans are capable of more and more, but it's not because individual humans are getting smarter, as we might imagine.

[43:37]

It's because our shared pursuits are growing more complex and our shared intelligence more powerful. So on that note of shared intelligence, the last point that I want to bring up from these cognitive scientists books that I want to share, that I really appreciated, has to do with how we tend to define intelligence as a personal attribute rather than the ability to thrive within one's community. So there are many ways to measure intelligence, but ultimately, the authors argue, a great community needs a balance of people with different skills who are willing to work together, and that's more important than the individual intelligence of any of the community's members. Intelligence is not just about processing information, but also skills like understanding the perspectives of others, taking turns effectively, understanding emotional responses, and listening.

[44:45]

Our wider culture tends to elevate individuals like leaders of movements, presidents, famous scientists. instead of the communities that they are a part of and supported by, including the people who cook their breakfast and clean their toilets, or the work that was done before them and which provides the basis and support to their work. Often, multiple scientists in different parts of the world make discoveries at around the same time as each other, And it's not some crazy coincidence. It's because they're working in a community of knowledge that is developing together. So truly inspiring leaders see the whole. They see ways to inspire people to work together and they help foster the conditions that allow myriad things to come forth and experience themselves. There's a course taught at Columbia University called Ignorance.

[45:51]

I love that that's the name of the class. They invite all these different scientists to come and speak about what they don't know, what they would like to know, how they might get to know it, and what might happen if they find it out. So these cognitive scientists, Lohmann and Fernbeck, write, A real education includes learning that you don't know certain things, a lot of things. Instead of looking in at the knowledge that you do have, you learn to look out at the knowledge you don't have. To do this, you have to let go of some hubris. You have to accept that you don't know what you don't know and learn how to make use of others' knowledge and skills. And once again from Suzuki Roshi, When we have no thought of achievement, no thought of self, we are true beginners. Then we can really learn something.

[46:53]

In any situation, instead of reacting habitually, we can slow down, really look, really smell, really taste. We can welcome the world into ourselves. rather than carrying the self forward and receive a gift. We can, as Paul Haller likes to say, experience the experience that's being experienced, even or especially if it's something we'd rather not experience, something that we want to speed through to achieve resolution and get to the good part of our day, which I confess was how I was feeling about this term. But now I'm here and I'm laughing and I'm enjoying all of you. Just stay with it, whatever it is, because this is your life and all of it without exception.

[48:01]

It's true that the next moment might be better or it might be worse. We don't know. Experience the experience that's being experienced, not the one you anticipated you would experience with your expert's mind, and not the one you wish you were experiencing. And Zazen supports us in this. Through the act of Zazen, we cultivate a deep, fundamental patience with this person, this mind, this body. A patience that does not squirm or try to escape from what is. or be someone different. Even though we think we know something or someone, even though we've done something a million times, we can bring a feeling of curiosity to the situation. Anytime we encounter any situation, any person, any decision, any conflict, any request,

[49:08]

We can respond with harshness or disapproval or greed, and then those kinds of responses will strengthen and grow fixed and frequent in ourselves and in others. Or we can meet the situation or person with curiosity, openness, spaciousness, a light touch. This is beginner's mind, the mind that is always present, though often drowned out by our discursive thoughts, our small mind, the stream of chatter. And our practice isn't to get rid of our discursive thinking, we need it to live our lives, but to cultivate the awareness that beginner's mind is always there too. It's always there and we don't have to choose between the two. We can hold them both together, small mind and big mind. So beginner's mind is the secret from Zen practice.

[50:19]

And also the most difficult thing is always to keep your beginner's mind. It seems like it should be so easy and simple to keep our beginner's mind, but it's not because there are such strong forces behind our habits and ideas. So let's all support each other. to practice with this most difficult thing, to cultivate our beginner's minds by recognizing and acknowledging when we are making assumptions about each other, practicing humility, recognizing our interdependence, because we can't possibly do this alone. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma.

[51:21]

For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[51:30]

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