It's just Maiden. Is she here? No, I embarrassed her. She just made me this robe. Wonderful. I've always wanted a black, or nearly black. Chromo. I only have a net one. And suddenly it appeared today. What would you like to talk about? Could you tell us the milkshake thing?

[01:21]

I think what I said is enough. To make real sense of it, I have to go into the YM philosophical distinctions. and show why such a simple example can parallel. But to to talk about why and philosophy takes a little bit of time. It's not important. Yes. I've been thinking about it since you asked. Can you speak louder? Okay. $20,000 seems like an awful lot of money for communication, and the only reason I can think of that it might be necessary to spend that much is if it would be essential to have direct communication from one person to another. But without that parameter, then indirect would be quite good enough.

[02:22]

For example, carrier pigeon. Yeah. I was thinking in terms of old radios and aircraft and things like that. And I'll be able to receive it. And then we're setting up a ham radio experiment. I think we are. Try that out. But for the most part, for instance, we had during the fire, we had a whole bunch of CB radios strung along the road. down into … we couldn't make any contact at all. There's no … it's just too deep, it's a radio hole, you know, there's no … very hard to get … the Forest Service, for instance, could not communicate with themselves in Tassajara, even though they had several repeaters set up in the woods. Sometimes they could receive messages in there, which were being sent from one part of the forest to another, which happened to be able to get in, but then the people in Tassajara couldn't radio … the Forest Service people couldn't radio out often couldn't answer the message being coming in. So the problem of setting up a radio system comes down to putting in repeaters.

[03:26]

And to put in repeaters, you can put in one repeater. If we can get one repeater in and out, we can do it for about $20,000, we're told, to set up a radio system. Now you can get, the thing is, you can get some hands to set up some kind of radio system, probably, and the people we've been in contact with who would be interested in doing it, trouble is all the hands have other jobs, and they could possibly get the equipment, get all the equipment together, and just, I don't know why this is, I should tell everybody this, it's a little, but I'll try to be short. If we could get all the equipment together, they might be able to put it together over a period of six months for us, or longer. because they can only work on certain times, you know, and come down in. And then, when it's done, I'm told... Now, I'm told by Art McDole, who's a communications expert and emergency services head for Monterey County, that you can use such a system, but you cannot plug into the Mother Bell system with it, unless it's FCC-approved equipment.

[04:37]

And FCC-approved equipment Somehow, for some reason or another, can only be supplied, the setup that they will approve can only be supplied by Motorola or RCA or something like that. Now, if you go, if you need two repeaters, two repeaters, for some reason there's an FCC regulation which requires you to go to a microwave system above one repeater, two repeaters would cost, a microwave system would then cost us $200,000 to get out of Tassar. So, the cheapest solution seems to be either just to run some line up through the woods on the ground. because it's hard to put it up in the air now because the trees are burned, run it up through the ground, on the ground, and tie it in. Now, the problem with that is that there's a lot of servicing. We spend a lot of days out walking back and forth in that line, and then there's an expensive charge for a call, I believe. Now, it used to be, maybe it's a little different now, I don't know, but if we had a telephone company come in

[05:38]

It seems that all of it comes down to around $20,000, no matter if it's the cheapest we can do it. Now, we haven't got exact figures yet, but if we run a line out, if someone else does it, we have no servicing anymore, and the big cost is actually the servicing. Over several years, the big cost is the servicing. And we do need, in emergencies, and for our guest season, and for the general contact of having three places so separate, we do need phone communication. We can do without it. It makes for emergency that we need some contact. And then for the guest season, anyway, I don't know, we'll see. All of these things, you get in, you think, it's just like the reseeding question. You think, well, we can just reseed the hill. But then you start getting into the water and how to get water up high enough to water what you're planting. How do you do it before the rains come? And there's such a vast acreage involved, vertical acreage. The problem, it's big. It's not like around here where it's defined territory.

[06:43]

And this is a big problem. We can barely plant a few acres here and harvest them. Yes? In terms of emergency evacuation, is there a place for a helicopter? There is. We have a helispot there. We built it a few years ago. The problem is that most helicopter pilots do not like to come into Tatara because it's too tricky. We've had helicopter pilots come in there before. The army has flown in several times and they seem to be willing, but other helicopter pilots we've had come in once, twice, or three times for some reason, they say, I'm never going to fly in there. And Tassajara was so smoky during the fire, for example, that you couldn't see to get in most of the time. So there's a helispot, but then you have to phone out to tell somebody that they've got to come in, you know. And we can usually hike someone out. I mean, even on a stretcher we could get someone out. in probably 12 hours up the road even if the road is blocked i would guess maybe i'm being optimistic road can be blocked that's going to be fun probably yes

[07:52]

I've been thinking a little bit about your possible form, and I wanted to ask you... I don't actually have much to ask, just to present my idea and see what you think about it. I was just thinking of trying to understand form through the... I guess you used the idea of composing yourself. But I was thinking of the idea of limits as being a critical... aspect of form, the idea of like definitions and what is form and what is not form. You know, like being ... and the idea of composing yourself with some kind of clarity about what actually is the form you're dealing with. Exactly. What else? Who finds waking up one of the most difficult times of day?

[09:16]

I don't know what time of day you're waking up. If you're waking up during the day, it's not so hard. 3.40 and 1.00. It's changing for you practicing? Yeah. Well, the The transition from sleeping to waking is difficult.

[10:30]

I'm thinking of all the different ways one wakes. different circumstances in which one wakes up. I suppose that there's one difficulty when you stay in bed too long, or you sleep just as much as you need all the time. There's a kind of difficulty there which I won't talk about. Now, someone will ask me, please talk about it. But for most of us, it's the difficulty of getting up sooner than we want to get up, because of the wake-up bell and going to meditation, or because we have to go to work, or something like that. And I think that the interruption of the need for physical rest is one problem, and the interruption of the need for more psychic freedom is another problem.

[11:39]

I think what makes waking up work for us is if your intention is to wake up without equivocation and you remind yourself of that intention before you go to bed at night and you further know that zazen will take care of the psychic needs for more sleep and that if you take care of your day you can take care of how much rest you need by resting during the day. With that, with the fullness of that thought, and then the practice of when you decide to get up in the morning, just getting up, without thinking, without saying, not with moving ahead of the thought, well, it would be nice to stay in bed. Before, as in fact, triggering yourself in a Skinnerian way, so that when the thought occurs, should I stay in bed longer? That thought is the thought which leads you to get up. as that thought is about to appear, you've trained yourself, like a dog climbing to a bell, to get up.

[12:53]

You all know the story of Suzuki Roshi and the lamp, right? I've told you several times. Someone told Suzuki Roshi that he This is not a story you should tell on a famous Zen master. Someone told Suzuki Roshi, you have to sleep with your head to the north because the sutras say so. Suzuki said, oh, they do. Well, he was never concerned with those things much, but his Jisha said, it says so right here. So his Jisha said so, not because the sutra said so, because his Jisha said so, he decided to sleep with his head to the north. And she, in that picture with the woman, she put out the bed for him with his head to the north. So he got in the bed with his head to the north, in his cabinet, that's the heart. Wake up bell in the morning, got up, got straight up, walked straight toward the bathroom door, ran right into a lamp. Knocked the lamp over, you know.

[13:58]

He was so embarrassed. But he just had this habit, you know. If you wake up, bell comes, gets up, you went straight into the bathroom, right? Except somebody moved the bathroom. Why not, when I feel like yawning, just yawning until I'm done? That's fine. When you're talking to something that's not... It's just interesting to do it the other way. You can yawn with your mouth wide open, but say you don't want to yawn right here. Just try it, just an experiment. And what happens when you yawn with your mouth closed, to do the same thing teaches you something about breathing, because you see it happen in a different way.

[15:01]

So you see the function of that need which occurs during the day, to breathe in that way, occurs several times to people during the day usually. is identical to one method we use when we first sit down to deepen our breathing. It just happens to be something that we teach, but you don't have to teach it. You just close your mouth and you yawn. You can find out how to do it, because your body does it. But usually, when I try not to yawn, I almost succeed in it. Yeah, well, I don't mean to try not to yawn. Completely yawn, but Yawn. Stretch your face muscles some other way, you know. I don't mind, yawn is just any way you like. One thing I talked about during Sasheen, which could give you a different feeling of

[16:10]

of form, maybe in a theistic context by comparison with a non-theistic context, is that in the West we tend to – and it struck me during the service at Grace Cathedral – there was a feeling that the church or the form of the ceremony was like an automobile in which the participants in the ceremony were passengers. and God or the church or something like that was in the driver's seat. And maybe in our society I think we think too much that the Constitution is in the driver's seat or the Bill of Rights or law or contracts or something like that, that somehow when you want to get down to an important issue you don't depend on the moral quality of the individuals involved, you depend on a definition which defines it so that it's such and such. So, for instance, our tax laws don't attempt to depend clearly.

[17:19]

Ultimately, they do depend on whether you're honest enough to pay the taxes, but they don't clearly depend on the honesty of people to pay the taxes. They try to construct a situation that you couldn't possibly get out of unless you have a lot of lawyers and figure out the loophole, because there's always going to be some loophole. So this comes up in Japan, in a country where at least a significant portion of the culture has been thoroughly influenced by Buddhist ideas and approaches, is that Western businessmen will come and they will say, well, let's set up Petticoat in Japan or something like that, some company like that. and a contract will be written and the Japanese will go along with it because Westerners like contracts for some reason. So they'll work out this contract and sign it and almost as the American businessmen are walking out the door, the Japanese businessmen are heaving the contract in the waistband.

[18:29]

Because they don't come down, they come down to their feeling with the other person for what the nature of the deal was. So when the American businessmen come back later as happens with a change situation. Inflation of the dollar or the yen or something, you know, has happened. The weather's changed. Some situation has changed which has resulted in one party being benefited more than the other if you follow the contract. And the Americans insist, well, this is the contract. The Japanese businessmen will say, well, that's not fair. That's not what we agreed on. the American businessmen will say, the Japanese are so dishonest, they don't follow the contract. And the Japanese businessmen will say, the Americans are so dishonest, they're trying to beat us over the head with a piece of paper, and that wasn't what we intended. Because there's more of a sense in a Buddhist culture that in the end you have to depend on the person.

[19:35]

So you see it in another example. A kind of commonplace example is a ... I'll just do the sociology of Japanese society, but in a more fundamental way, I'd say this is an example of the same thing. A friend of mine, Dr. Nagasaki, I was going to his house with him. He'd been teaching me Japanese and he's a professor of Buddhist logic, and we went to his house, and his house was locked. And he didn't have a key, and I was going to climb in the window for him. But I said, you don't have a key. I said, did you forget your key? No, I don't have a key. What do you mean you don't have a key? He said, I've never had a key. He said, all my life I've never had a key. And I said, all your life? He said, well, I've never come home and found no one home. Now, could any of you say that you've never come home from childhood until now and found nobody home?

[20:43]

I mean, it's just completely different. And it was an emergency. His daughter had some kind of thing and she had to go to the doctors. But even then, normally she'd call a neighbor and ask a neighbor to come be in the house. Because even if you go on a vacation, you go, a house must be attended. It's a problem we have with our house in Japan that Tencenter has in Kyoto, that if we leave it, even for a few months, or a few weeks unattended, the neighbors get very nervous. Somehow an unexplained fire is going to happen in the house. It's going to fill with rats. It's going to collect ghosts. I mean, something is going to happen there that's bad if it's empty. It's going to get stagnant. You know, they really don't like it. They want someone in the house. And if we don't have someone in the house, they would, after a while, arrange, they would put pressure on the landlord to take the house away from them. Because someone should be in the house. They call it a roussaban. A roussaban is the person who stays in the house when it's away. Now, we do it with children. It's illegal, in fact, to leave your child in a car unattended or in your house unattended.

[21:51]

But we don't think of form or buildings in the same way. But in Buddhist culture, you treat all form that way. Someone has to be in the driver's seat of form. And doing the ceremony, I found that really, when I was doing the ceremony at Grace Cathedral, I had nothing, I mean, there was nothing but Dr. Schumacher, my feeling for Dr. Schumacher, and my, I mean, I had nothing to rely on. And if I, whatever ceremony I did, it was only my propelling it that had anything I could find. I mean, I sat there in this wonderful chair with a canopy and little red books. I felt great. It was a little funny because I was barefoot. I had Japanese shoes on and you're barefoot and then these marble floors and this great hall, you know. There's something somewhat wild or primitive about Buddhism that I didn't

[22:53]

He's used to, she takes care of the flower arrangement, and when the flowers are, he's often familiar with his mother changing the flowers, so I guess, I don't know where he found them, he must have taken them out of a flower pot somewhere. He said, they're starting to die, we better change them. So whenever we offer space, we offer space, like here at the Wheelwright Center to visitors, that's attended, somebody here to make the tea or something like that. But sitting there at Grace Cathedral I went through, now what can I offer from Buddhism? And I didn't have anything to offer except what I might say about my feeling about Dr. Schumann. Because there was no form to offer except that which I could propel. And I think that is characteristic of a non-theistic approach versus a theistic approach. And it's interesting to think as our constitution as a form of God for us, as arising out of a theistic approach to culture.

[24:08]

I think, when I say this, by the way, that I'm comparing a commonplace understanding of Christianity, which is really most of our understanding, with an essential or fundamental understanding of Buddhism, and it's an unfair comparison. For us, who are trying to understand Buddhism, we have to deal first with our commonplace understandings of Western culture and Christianity and Judaism. Yes? Rishi, since the end of the machine, these last couple of days, I've been feeling a kind of ragged transition. I was wondering if you could, I don't know, help how we might approach the transition from the sense practice.

[25:19]

Weather it. Could you hear what he said? He said that coming out of sasheen, the concentration of sasheen and the mind of sasheen, he's found the transition into clumsy, green-gulch, ordinary life, rather ragged and He didn't say clumsy in Green God's life, but I said that. But that's the way it should be. I can remember the first saschins I did for quite a few years. I'd come out of saschin onto Bush Street, you know, from Bush. You know, there was a wonderful rhythmic quality about being on Bush Street, which is a one-way street, because the cars would come down the road like Cossacks. And then the red light would come and he'd be quiet for a while. He'd wait for about three or four minutes and then he'd come down again and he'd wait for a little while, all day long.

[26:21]

But then walking out of the building, God, bright light, horn honking, complete cacophony, you know. And I would always want to go back into the sheet, so disorganized. And I often felt somewhat depressed for a week or two weeks after each session. Finally, I came to welcome the depression because it gave me some experience, you know, kind of, you know, that experience. which I knew would pass because of sasheen. So that's quite natural, you know. And eventually, if you keep doing sasheen, pretty soon there isn't that transitional problem. You come out and beautiful diamond headlight. It's all a matter of description.

[27:41]

So what description are you going to give your own life? That of Buddha? Or that of some default?

[28:01]

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