and to this introductory Dharma talk for the intensive. My name is Kyoshin Wendy Lewis, and the theme of the intensive is nature and experience. And I think this is a very sort of important theme in spiritual history and the history of the spiritual tradition. So it's been very inspiring to me and challenging. So I hope that I can present both of those perspectives. Part of that topic is about solitude and nature and how this is related to mindfulness. There are a lot of teachings in Buddhism that... You know, we sort of don't get to studying them sometimes for a while.

[01:01]

And one of those is the four foundations of mindfulness. So you might study it and then forget it and then go back to it and then that sort of thing. But mindfulness has actually become a term, a kind of generic term for meditation as a method to reduce stress. And it's very effective for that. And that type of... mindfulness develops a form of meditation called shamatha, or calming. This is the most basic meditation, and it's the foundation for deeper meditation. Shamatha is also called meditative quiescence. There's this sense of an aura of peace that you can... often experience the first time you sit. So most people become somewhat familiar with it, but then it moves back and forth, and as it deepens, it can get a little jagged, and so then you have to go back to it.

[02:08]

So as I said, you know, after this establishment of shamatha, it's possible to... go deeper into meditative techniques that are called Vipassana practice. And that's the teachings of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, or the Satipatthana Sutta. And I taught on this sutta a couple of years ago, and it stayed with me, so I still work with it. So what Vipassana does is it allows a deeper examination of... the habitual activities and tendencies of the mind. So the root of the term sadhi is shmirti, and this means to remember, to recollect, to bear in mind, as in the tradition of remembering and memorizing texts. So you memorize the text, and then you start to learn it in some way.

[03:10]

It teaches you through this memorization, and so it'll come to your mind. So that's the point of memorizing them. So I consider mindfulness as a form of remembrance or remembering. And in considering nature and experience, the topic, I think the world is always reminding us somehow that we are dependent on it for meaning and purpose as well as for understanding and love. In Longing for Running Water, the theologian Yvonne Gebera discusses the role of knowledge in what she calls her ecofeminist epistemology. Knowing is not primarily a rational discourse on what we know. To know is first of all to experience.

[04:10]

And what we experience cannot always be expressed in words. To attempt to express in tentative and limited words what our experience is vis-a-vis this or that is to struggle to translate into words not only the vibrations that go through our bodies, but also our meditative silence on things and facts in life. This could be called the second step in what we call knowing. The first step is ours alone. It is what we feel happening on the periphery of our body person, of our intimate personal being. And this is what the Four Foundations are addressing, and I will explain that more. So I think often people, including me, come to Buddhist practice looking...

[05:17]

for a solution or a accommodation or an answer to or escape from the human condition. And that's what the Buddha did. And after his enlightenment, he taught some methods and perspectives that he said would assist in the process of realizing freedom. So this was a Satipatthana Sutra, which includes these four contemplations. contemplation of the body in the body, the feelings in the feelings, the consciousness in the consciousness, and contemplating the dharmas in the dharmas. So the first three are very internal. They're kind of personal and, you know, what we have to work with, essentially. And so the fourth, the dharmas, which includes the instructions and the teachings, is our resource for bringing the body, the feelings, and the consciousness into maturity or realization.

[06:26]

And so one of the things to consider is how much effort we are able to or willing to give to that teaching and similar teachings. So the Satipatthana Sutra is referred to as the only way. And there are five interpretations of that. What is the only way? The first is that there is no need to consider other practices. This is it. The second is that it is applied and accomplished alone. The third is that it is the one way of Buddha. The fourth is that it leads to one destination, nirvana. And the fifth is that there is no other way to nirvana, the end of suffering and the destruction of mental defilements. So I, as you may intuitively feel, I wanted to talk about the second interpretation of the only way

[07:39]

that is described as something we do alone. Because I think this is very difficult for us, the thought that, you know, deep spiritual experience and transformation require solitude. And, you know, you can feel it sometimes if you're in nature. That's one place where, you know, a sort of quietness and stuff feels sort of more appropriate. But when we choose to do that and choose to do it even when it's not so pleasant is kind of how this particular aspect of it works. And Yvonne Gabbara alludes to it when she says the first step is ours alone. So it is recommended when you are practicing the Four Foundations that you go to a secluded place and to be in seclusion. means to remove oneself from social contact and activity, you know, to isolate oneself.

[08:47]

So where do we find this seclusion? In a way that's kind of affirming rather than sort of running away or being in some sort of aversion, although I think that's a natural part of it as well. It's not like you're trying to find something perfect, but how can it be nurturing to be in seclusion? our solitude. So it's recommended that these practices be accompanied by faith and humility. And this is a kind of confidence in and surrender to these teachings and what they offer. So how do we discover that faith and humility to engage in them? So To remember that these meditative techniques were discovered by people who were in solitude for a long time meditating. And that's what the Buddha did.

[09:54]

He came out of his solitary meditation and offered these teachings because that was his experience. So if we look back to where it comes from, we might also... have to consider that that's where we go to understand it. So these are, the Buddha is one example. There are early Christian mystics who were in the Egyptian desert, and there's hermits in China that live in the mountains that you've heard of, and so on. And in the Bhaya Bharava Sutta on fear and dread, which something, that solitude seems to bring that up to some extent, a monk says, remote jungle thicket resting places in the forest are hard to endure. Seclusion is hard to practice and is hard to enjoy solitude. So I think remembering or considering that spiritual effort is accompanied by a type of loneliness and disconnectedness is

[11:06]

It can seem very personal, but it's also enduring it or entering it to remember that this is a natural part of spiritual effort, and it can be cultivated and even enjoyed. So I think one interpretation for solitude for spiritual intentions is that it resolves the problem of loneliness, through communion with eternity. So this sense of connectedness to something larger or more extensive than our kind of narrow view of reality can actually sort of have this freedom to it so we don't feel lonely in our solitude. So I've been reading various books on the natural world and biographies of people who are closely concerned with the natural world and on spirituality.

[12:17]

And basically, I'm always reading, but these particular books sort of came together. And the first one is called Far From Land. And it's a book about seabirds and how they live and what they found out about them now by putting little devices and stuff like that. And it was just so wonderful to read these things that are going on that I know nothing about and most of us know nothing about and pay no attention to. And these birds, some of them live for 30 to 50 years. partly floating, but almost always flying. And then there's an albatross. The albatross has a locking mechanism on the back of its wings so that they'll stay open. And it just flies and flies for immense distances. And when birds are nesting, the younger birds who are not laying eggs and that sort of thing will go farther to find food.

[13:27]

and leave the food that's available closer to the nesting places to the nesting birds. There's also some birds that have a special acid in their stomachs, seagulls are one, so that they can digest rotten food. So they've adapted, so that's why they're at the dump, and they also eat rotten food in the ocean. How did that happen? What was that process evolutionarily? I can't imagine. So as I was reading this book, I was remembering, and I've told a few people this, that when I was a little girl and I heard about reincarnation, what I wanted to come back was an eagle. I wanted to fly. And then after reading this book... I've changed my mind. And I'd like to be one of those albatrosses that fly for years and years and years.

[14:31]

So another book that I read, some of you may have heard of, it's The Hidden Life of Trees. And it's written by a forester who oversees a new growth forest in Germany. And so almost all old growth forests are gone. There's about 3% of them left in the world. That little pinch, you know, you realize, gone forever. And the wood has been used for fuel and for building, you know, things that are useful to us and support our lives, and also to clear the land for agriculture. So these are all things that we benefit from, and yet they've required this great deal of destruction. So the subtitle of his book is What Trees? about trees, what they feel, how they communicate, discoveries from a secret world. So I'm biased in favor of trees because I'm not sure why, but I feel a sort of resonance with trees in general.

[15:43]

I mean, even in Golden Gate Park, there are certain trees that have deep meaning for me. And, you know, I sometimes get upset when they're removed, but then I'm just like, I cannot control the world, you know. But still, there's this connection, this feeling. And so I wonder about that. But I feel safe among them for some reason, even if that is not true. I feel this safety and this quiet. And I'm happy when I'm around trees. So the author, Peter Wolleben, I'm not German, but... He lives among trees all the time. And he has both this experiential and this scientific perspective because he's taking care of the trees. He has to think about balancing and that sort of thing. And he keeps trying to be really practical in the book.

[16:44]

But there's this underlying ache, just like, oh, all those trees gone, you know, kind of... in how the survival of humans requires so much destruction of the natural world and disturbance of all these complex systems in it. And he says that he once visited a forest where the oaks, a certain type of oak, were all dying off from a fungus. And when he came back to his forest, he was wearing the same shoes. And very soon after that... those same types of oaks in his forest started to die. And he wondered if it was because he was wearing the same shoes. So we, you know, this kind of way we just live our lives, kind of don't really think about how we're affecting nature in that way. And I thought, hmm, have I come back from Tassajara and brought some stuff, you know, spreading it in a park or something? Anyway, in a biography of Henry David Thoreau,

[17:48]

The author describes this camping trip that Thoreau took with some friends, and one of them accidentally threw a lit match, and it burned this whole hillside. And it looked like they were just sort of saplings or something like that, and they just went on with their camping trip and everything. But Thoreau went back to see what had burned. And it turned out it was a little grove, a small grove of dwarf trees, some of which were over 1,000 years old, and they were gone. burned up. So Thoreau was a naturalist, and he was also a carpenter, and he built fences and built buildings for other people, and he was also a gardener. And he understood the poignancy of that, that there was this... He had to cut down the trees in order to build his house. He had to... And he actually... took a sort of run-down house and used most of that wood to make his little cabin.

[18:50]

But where did that wood come from and so on? And he understood that. And once he heard that an old-growth forest, a piece of it was going to be cut down, and he rushed to go look at it and be among the trees. And he described the sense he had of this deep communion of the trees with each other and with the earth. So in her study of mysticism, Evelyn Underhill has a description of the role of nature in spiritual development. She says, visible nature as the medium whereby the self reaches out to the absolute is not rare in the history of mysticism. the mysterious vitality of trees, the silent magic of the forest, the strange and steady cycle of its life, possess in a peculiar degree this power of unleashing the human soul, are curiously friendly to its cravings, minister to its inarticulate needs.

[20:06]

So I think what's striking about reading these books and reflecting on my experience of reading them and my experience in general, including the time I lived at Tassajara, is, you know, the natural world is kind of filled with these mysteries of survival in this very stark and beautiful world. I was mentioning during our orientation about the insects at Tassajara and how it sort of finally got to me. in a couple of years when they were really bad. And these are biting flies and mucus flies that go around your eyes and your ears and that sort of thing. And ants chewing away the insulation and the cabin I was in and all kinds of things like that, spiders. So nature is not just this sort of beautiful, wonderful. It's also these other things are going on.

[21:11]

It's very complex, and how those things are interacting with each other, how sometimes insects will infest trees and destroy them, and it's all, anyway. But what I think is often the case with nature is that we just don't pay much attention to it. Maybe we do when we want to go out and have a nice walk, or, you know, maybe... There's this moment where we see something and are inspired by it or something like that. But most of the time it's kind of peripheral to us. And our concerns are with our personal comfort and survival. So we want our houses, we want our clothing, we want even our musical instruments and all these things we want. And... Where did they come from? There's these trees that they used to make some instruments. I'm just remembering this. I think it's in northern Italy or something that had gone through the period of the small ice age.

[22:16]

So the wood was different, the layers of the wood. And so the instruments made from those trees sound different. But now the trees are gone because they cut them down. So it's just so complex, you know. But even though the bugs and the spiders and everything at Tassajara, I also carry with me something about that place. And when I go back, I feel like I'm visiting it almost like a person or an entity of some sort. And I know that it's indifferent to me as a person, but I also feel like there's some awareness of me in that space that I also meet again. when I return. In another book called The Shattering of Loneliness by a Catholic priest, he describes how he was an agnostic and how he experienced what is called conversion.

[23:21]

Now, I think people often mention, you know, in their coming to Buddhism or in meditation, feeling like it's coming home. And I think that that's the sensation of conversion. He says, I knew I carried something within me that reached beyond the limits of me. I was aware of not being alone. What had happened? I believe it true to say I had remembered. He goes on to say, the church permitted me to read my banal, sometimes squalid life, into a narrative of redemption that not only reaches back to time's beginning, but remembers forward into eternity. So, for me, these books seem to be in some sort of conversation with each other, and partly, you know, in a similar way that they touched me, and they continue to touch me and inspire me and concern me.

[24:28]

I've... been thinking and talking for a long time about this poignancy of our personal and shared lives. You know, there's our longings and our desires and our aversions and our passivity, our hopes, and they can seem so important, and they are. But they also have a slightly destructive quality, you know, this kind of expectation or a sort of selfishness, you or the natural world to serve us or fulfill us in some way. And we can't escape this, you know, so it's, you know, one of the tasks of spiritual endeavor is to make an effort to consider our impact of this, you know, these personal and self-referencing needs while also kind of being aware of the vitality they offer and express. So knowing that they're

[25:30]

have this destructive quality, but also this creative, life-giving quality. And how do we navigate, negotiate, struggle with that? So I think the benefit of mindfulness as remembering is that it allows us to have You know, let these things be in conversation. They're always talking to each other and informing each other. And another benefit is they say that mindfulness can conquer boredom in secluded places. So that's another aspect of solitude. You know, you can get sort of bored. Even during, you know, sometimes during a sishin, you're like, another period of solitude. So how do we sort of bring that energy back into what we're doing in this sort of solitary exercise?

[26:33]

So that's what mindfulness is. So the Satipatthana Sutta ends with an assurance of attainment. Through contemplation of the body and of the feelings, the consciousness, and the dharmas, the meditator reaches purification, the overcoming of sorrow and lamentation, the disappearance of pain and grief, reaching of the noble path, the realization of nirvana. And at the same time, the enlightened person goes on living and relating to people and getting involved in all the necessities and vicissitudes of life, survival, and purpose. And in the midst of that, this resource of nature is being destroyed by us, by all kinds of circumstances that have accumulated over a few thousand years, particularly the last thousand.

[27:40]

And so this resource for solitude and for deep spiritual experience and intention is kind of disappearing. So as I got a little sad about all this, I thought, well, you know, in the end, maybe there'll still be like this little cave somewhere or the side of a mountain or a little garden where there's still some water and some tree maybe and some weeds and there'll be a person sitting there sort of communing with eternity. So solitude, nature, and remembering, I think, are accompanied by a hint of anguish or aching or poignancy for their rarity, partly, and also for this kind of... They seem unimportant.

[28:48]

We don't remember that nature, our natural world, is... sort of being destroyed. And there's even, you know, sort of a derisiveness that's expressed towards someone who wants to do this work in solitude or in nature. And, you know, that's a waste of time or, you know, it's kind of, you know, what is the point and what are you going to accomplish? Because, of course, you're supposed to be doing something. and making something, and being somehow successful in different ways. So at the same time, several of the desert fathers talk about the necessity of tears or sorrow in our effort, and also the joys and simplicity of this communion.

[29:50]

So do we really want freedom or nirvana? It's not required, and I think it does require a great deal of effort in what they call going against the stream. And for what purpose? It's hard to know. But I believe, and really deeply believe, that it's worth the effort. Just even get a hint of what these spiritual warriors and heroines and committed practitioners have left for us to consider, to remember, to have a sense of that experience of peace and this extraordinary pleasure that's not sensual. It's expanding in a certain way and also grounding. So thank you very much.

[30:55]

And I will just check the time. Well, I think we could take one or two questions. Yes. Well, reading these desert saints, there's very few places where there isn't life.

[32:34]

There's insects. There's, you know, when there's a little bit of rain comes and all of a sudden everything's blooming, you know. So it would be hard to, you know, there are places that chemically are dead, but I don't think they would be the ones that you're talking about. as being a resource. So I think that the desert saints are interesting to read for that reason because they go there because there is so little. And yet they're alone, but one of the rules is that another mystic or solitude has to be within sight. So you're actually alone, but you always have to be in relationship with these other solitudes. And if you need something or they need something, there's someone there.

[33:35]

And that's true of the Chinese hermits. They live fairly... close to other hermits and people come to visit them and bring them food and that sort of thing so they're hermits but they're also connected and yeah so I think that's kind of I'm not sure if that's exactly addressing your question what do you think Or the extent of our ability to experience it.

[34:52]

Because we're very narrow, usually, in our experience. One more. I think it does and can and doesn't have to. Because it's also, there's lots of things you can do. And part of it is to enjoy while it's available what there is. Because you realize this poignancy of its disappearing. And of your own life disappearing. So as you age, you know, oh, this is... I'm not going to be here pretty soon, so I'd better look around and appreciate what is here.

[36:00]

Does that answer your question? But I do think it is... I try not to politicize spirituality too much, and I'm not saying that's right or wrong or anything, but part of our spirituality is to do something. It is to offer that... caring, yeah. Okay, thank you very much.

[36:28]

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