You all heard that, say more about, say more about Dogen's saying, think not thinking, or Stephen's putting it, thinking without consciousness? Well, there's two ways you could look at that. You could think hard about it, sort of philosophically, what could that mean, you know, thinking without thinking, thinking without consciousness. And I think that there would probably be some profit in sort of doing a rigorous or philosophical analysis of that idea. But, and I've thought about that, you know, for many years. But I've come to the conclusion that it's more profitable to look at it in a much more simple way. And that is, and this way is not, I didn't just make

[01:09]

it up, I mean, it's also one of the interpretations traditionally in Soto Zen of that phrase of Dogen. And that is, if you define consciousness or thinking as an attachment to thoughts in a continuity, trying to figure something out, trying to make a continuity of thoughts, then to think without thinking or to think without consciousness would be simply to allow something to come into the mind without trying to make something of it. So, think not thinking either boggles the mind as a paradox or seems to suggest a kind of blankness of mind. But I don't think, practically speaking, in terms of our actual practice, that looking at it that way is profitable. It's much better to see it as allowing thoughts to arise in the

[02:15]

mind without trying to make a continuity of them, grabbing them, being too interested in them, but just letting them come and go. So that's how I would interpret that. I would say that that means, rather than, you know, like I often say to people, if you're sitting in meditation and you have the most profound insight that you ever had, or even if you like become completely enlightened, please forget it and just go back to your breath. Don't think about it. Don't worry about it. Don't make anything of it. Just let it go. Just let it go and come back to your breath. So, in that way, it's think not thinking if thinking means to make something of something. So that's how I see that. In other words, freedom within what arises in the mind, rather than being carted off by it and making something of it. Is that clear? Yes. Doesn't it sound like some sort of a counter-game, kind of like balancing, that perhaps even the

[03:16]

conventional thinking can become a flow, that it's all part of it? Yes. And sort of an antidote, going back to your breath as sort of an antidote, so it doesn't cut too far off the deep end on the other side. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's not that conventional thinking is wrong thinking or problematic thinking, because there are times, like I was saying, there are times when we don't even bring this up, right? Because we have business to take care of. And there are times when it's not an advantage to have your thoughts come and go. You've got to remember things and details and so on and so forth. So conventional thinking has its place and needs to be honored and taken seriously. But is that all that there is for us? If that's all there is, then I think we get very, it feels very confining. So we have to see that there's a bigger context to it. We have to see, oh, now is the time when conventional thinking is what's most important and what I have to engage in. I know that there's more than that, but right

[04:18]

now that's what I'm doing. So I think we, so in Stephen's poem, he says, which one of these is real? Neither one, nor the two together. So it's not that conventional thinking or conventional self is unreal or wrong. It has its downside, for sure, but so does, if we, I mean, I know people who get stuck in the inventive self and fail to acknowledge the conventional self. This is called often a form of insanity, you know, right? I mean, people who can't acknowledge that there's everyday life. And a lot of times we get people who come here and they want to, you know, see everything in that way and I usually deny the existence of it even and say, forget it, you know, please cut the carrots in the kitchen and wash your hands before you eat and take care of business and don't worry about this stuff. And could that business become sublime also? Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah. Absolutely. Yes? I have a question along that line. When you're sitting, and these associations come

[05:23]

up automatically. Yes. It may be about anything, and then we're seduced. Because it sounds interesting, maybe we're trying to get away from, from the experience of being in the present, and we try to follow that line of thought, that theme. And it seems to me that in order not to do that, then very often, if I didn't give that much importance to these ideas that come up, we're not as seduced as I am by these ideas that come up. I would perhaps have fragments of thoughts coming up, incomplete things, which it really doesn't matter because they, I'm not talking about things I'm trying to think through, or figure out, or solutions, problems. I'm thinking about the, I'm talking about the things that

[06:28]

just come up automatically. And I'm almost inevitably seduced like a musical theme or something. Yes. So if I, if I don't allow that to seduce me, or try to combat my grieving, then more often than not, I would probably get just fragments of ideas, and then midway through a sentence something else might come up, or a feeling, or an impression, or whatever. It would be a mishmash, maybe, of physical sensations and emotions. Well, yeah, but it only looks like a fragment from the perspective of the habit of putting it together. If you actually didn't do that, if you just really did have a commitment to return to your breath, what would happen is you would have momentary thoughts and sensations arising, which would

[07:35]

be more or less complete in themselves, each one. Not fragments, but more or less complete in themselves. And then you would also have far less, far fewer such phenomena, because your mind, you would not be adding fuel to the fire, so the mind would be calmer. And so when something did arise in the mind, it would arise more beautifully, and as a whole, and complete entity, and then it would go away. So that's more, I think, the more the feeling. And we don't really believe this, see, that's the thing, is that we really believe, like, a thought comes into the mind, like, you know, you have a thought about some relationship that you're involved in, let's say. That seems like, oh, you know, this is really, ah, I never thought of it that way, and then you start thinking about that, and you believe that that's the thing to do. You don't believe that just to sit there and follow your breath and let the thoughts go is actually worthwhile. We don't really believe that, you know. No matter how much we read it and we hear it, what we really believe is that if only we

[08:38]

could think this through and work this out, it's all going to be okay, see? So we constantly do that. But I'm telling you, it's really the truth, that that's not going to really work out. In the end, what really works out is to let it go. The letting it go is the solution. Well, the reason I use bragging is because that's what my linear logic would call it. Yeah, that's what I'm saying, yeah. Right, right. And a lot of the, and not to say, now again, I want to be clear that I'm not saying that there's no virtue in thinking something through. There is a virtue of thinking something through. But it's just that that's not what we're doing in zazen. So, ah, you know, you sit in zazen, you let go of thinking something through, you just give yourself to your zazen practice, then the bell rings, then you get up, then you think it through, and it's a lot simpler. You can think more clearly. And there isn't the complexity, I don't know about you, but I know that I've observed, looking at

[09:40]

my own mind, that there's a tremendous amount of repetition and wasted energy and stupidity and confusion in my mind. Now, that might not be the same as you, but that's how my mind works. So I know, I'm, you know, and I've been sitting on that little black cushion for many, many years, and I'm really convinced that this is my mind, round and round and round, without any brilliant, you know, solutions. I'm convinced that that is really it, because I've seen that over and over and over again. So it's fairly easy for me to sit there and say, well, I know that's not going to get me anywhere, so let me go back to my breathing and my posture. So, and then, you know, having cleared my mind in that way, I can work out what I have to work out, in terms of the ordinary decisions that I need to make and so on, because my mind is a little clearer and calmer, and I get used to the signs of confusion and delusion

[10:42]

and circular thinking, I'm used to that, I see it coming a mile away, and I say, oh, there's that, and I know that if I do that, and this happens, and that happens, and that happens, and I'm in a mess, and I've been there many times, why go through that? See? So, you know, if your mind is like that, then give it up. Just give it up, and just sit there, and then later on, you know, if you have to work something out or make a decision, then do it, you know, and talk it over with somebody or whatever it is that you do, whatever your process is, and sometimes I talk to people about that, you know, well, what is it you're trying to decide, and what's the best way, blah, blah, you know, let go of everything and just, if you really have a calm mind, you know, and a mind that can let go, then something that appears as a horrendous difficulty does not necessarily appear so difficult. You know, if I get the job, great, if I don't, well, that's too bad, I'll do something else, see? Whereas before that, oh no, I have to blah, blah, blah, you know, you break

[11:46]

your head over these terrible big deals that seem to constitute a life, and actually, it's not that big a deal, you just move through and accept what comes more, and so that comes of going back over and over and over again, so sometimes I say, you know, like, another translation of the term awareness is, sometimes in Sanskrit, awareness, they use the word sati, which means awareness, but sometimes they use the word smrti, for the same idea, and smrti means remember, so sometimes I think that our practice is nothing but remembering over and over again to actually return to the basic point, which we constantly forget, and we have to be very patient with ourselves, because our habit of believing in these kinds of personally generated solutions from the conventional self is really deep. No matter how many lectures you go to, and you think, oh yeah, that's really right, I really believe

[12:47]

that, and then you get in your car, and the next minute, you open that door, and you'll be inside, and boom, it's the same as before. I think it has to do with the safety. Oh yes. We're convinced that unless we're... It's familiar, yeah. That they're thinking through, and are heard, and so on. Right, right. In a linear way, we're going to be lost in a kaleidoscope of... I think that's right. Sense impressions, and fragments of thoughts, and we're very scared of that. Right, right, look into the terrible mirror of the sky. Yes? I must say, not always, but sometimes when I meditate, the thoughts are much more unlimited, because there's no stress around, and I have a long time, and then beautiful thoughts come, because there's no limitations, and I see things in a more beautiful way, and I think that's also well into that, because there's not, you know, the intellect or limitations

[13:47]

aren't there, and all the small feelings are deeper. Yeah, but don't get too excited about it. One of my favorite stories in the tradition is about one Zen master who was serving as head cook, and he was cooking in a big monastery, a huge pot of rice for hundreds of people, and he's got this big pot of rice, or soup or something, and he took the lid off of the soup, and out of the steam in the pot springs up the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara in full splendor, colorful, beautiful, and he looks at Avalokiteshvara, looks at his watch, gets out the wooden spoon and starts hitting Avalokiteshvara over the head and says, get out of here, it's time for serva, for lunch, go away, go away, go away. So we have to be like that, it's time to go back to the breath, go away, go away, you know, no, let's not indulge ourselves in these, no matter how beautiful. If it's beautiful, you know, we'll see it out of the corner of our eye and that'll be fine,

[14:52]

and we let it go and we go back. I mean, we're so interested in ourselves, you know, but actually we can let go of ourself too. So not to say that, you know, these are not, we have many pleasant and wonderful experiences in meditation time. Yeah, right, right. So I think that we do, in reality, we do, just as you're saying, see many beautiful things sometimes in meditation and even see and understand solutions to problems and so on and so forth. The only thing is that we don't make the effort to do that and we let it go and we just come back to our breathing. If it's important, you know, you'll remember it later. You don't need to make a big deal out of it or suddenly whip out your notebook in the middle of Zazen and start writing things down. You don't need to do that, you know. Yes? I'm fascinated that we do something as simple and primitive as the breath to meditate because, on the other hand, it sometimes seems a contradiction.

[15:53]

It's the most essential thing of the body, the perfect thing there is, and yet we want to be spiritual. But I believe also since the mind works mostly through association, it becomes so fragmentized and the mind gets stuck. It's like, you know, a heart is becoming fragmented. It becomes stuck on something. We have a hard time changing our perspectives and going into different programs. It just gets stuck and then frustrated. And I think maybe the breath, it's not about the breath. It's just a vehicle to go back to the most essential that everybody shares. And that breath, going back to the root of the source, because all this fragmentation, this association, are just metaphors. Everything that we deem important at a certain point is only a metaphor to understand something about a reality that we don't know.

[16:55]

I believe anything is static. Even the computers we use, I guess, if you can recognize the quality of things in the world, you know what I mean? It's a metaphor. Yeah, I agree with you. That's true. Thank you. Yes. Thanks for the wall, Stephen Combs. I was bothered while you were talking about the whole question of explication, of explicating poems, you know, in the same sense that explicating a nocturne by Chopin or a painting by Susanna, I have a problem with that. It's come up for me before here in terms of what we do right here, and using the question to answer it, too. It's our reliance on language so much when that seems to be contradicted by what we're actually doing, by the practice. And I was thinking just now about the Christian tradition, there's some monastic traditions where they practice silence, complete silence,

[17:56]

and I wondered if you could comment on that. So you're saying that it bothers you that we try to explain something like a poem, right? Yeah. Well, I share that problem, too. And believe me, it's occurred to me more than once, when it's my turn to give the Sunday lecture, and I think, boy, you know, like, in the end there's a saying, you know, why take a knife and gouge out a hole in perfectly good meat? In other words, why say anything? It's occurred to me more than once. Maybe I should just, you know, get up there and not say anything. It would actually certainly be better. It would be more profound, no question about that. It would be more profound, more interesting, more beneficial to do that. But language is one way that we contact each other,

[19:02]

and I think that there's a convention about that, right? There's a convention that we're coming to a Zen lecture. And oftentimes I'd like to talk about something that has nothing to do with Zen, but I don't do that either, you know, because I feel out of respect for the people coming, who I don't really know, some of the people I know, but every week there's maybe 25, 30, 40, 50 people that I don't know, that have never been here before. And, you know, while I don't want to be a slave to everyone's expectations, on the other hand, I don't want to be impolite either. And so somebody comes expecting to hear something that they can understand, because we could also shout and, you know, recite impossible-to-understand Zen cases and not explain them at all, which is a tradition too. And I'm sure there are some people who would enjoy that. But my own feeling is that people come wanting to hear something that they can understand that will be of some benefit to them. And even though I'm well aware of the fact that that only goes so far,

[20:05]

still it feels friendlier and more respectful to someone coming for the first time, and there's always most people. So on balance I say, well, I always decide, after thinking it over, that, well, I guess I'd better do it like that. But I am well aware of the limitations of it, and when we involve ourselves in intensive practice, then it's sitting. You know, like when we do a sasheen, we sit for, what, I don't know how many hours a day, maybe 14 or 15 hours a day, and in that 14 or 15 hours there's a one-hour talk every day, the purpose of which is not to explain anything, but just to encourage us to keep going, because it can be hard. So the talks are encouragement talks. The talks on Sunday morning are a little bit more giving some understanding of something, which in the end is also encouragement too. If you ever noticed, when I give a talk, I don't think I ever give a talk, ever, or I don't say in the end,

[21:08]

and what I'm talking about is the meditation practice, right? And what I'm trying to say is, if this makes any sense to you, please do the meditation practice, because that's the only way you're going to ever find out what I'm talking about, even though this may sound like a good idea to you, but really, to put it into practice, you have to do the meditation. And so that's what I always say. Actually, all my talks are precisely the same. They're all the same. In fact, I get very bored with my own talks. I wish somebody else... Because all I'm saying is, well, the world is a lot more mysterious than you and I know. Our mind only goes so far. Let's do zazen. That's my talk. I can get up every Sunday and just say this. That's all I ever say, you know. But I don't want to just say that, because it's unfriendly, and I want to... So I say Wallace Stevens, or this, or that, whatever I can, and it'd be a little entertaining, and so on and so forth, so people will feel, you know, more inspired to do this sitting,

[22:10]

and that I'm not a rude person, and so on. But that's all I'm ever saying. And you're right. Our words only go so far. I mean, the Zen tradition is repeating this endlessly. But also, it's not that it's outside the words either. If it's in the sound of a bird, if it's in the breath, it's no more and no less in my sentence. No more and no less. We think the sentence is explaining the sound of the bird. The sentence is explaining the feeling of the breath. It's not explaining anything. It's just my version of a bird song, you know. That's just my way of singing. That's all. Yeah. But I think there's something in Zen coming to the West, in our traditions, in trying to come to knowledge that encourages a dialogue, that can be a way of getting closer and pointing to the truth. Maybe we never grasp it fully, but I feel like I was sitting today, and some of the things you said, I wanted to get up and say,

[23:11]

but Norman, this is my experience. I'm talking about it. Somehow, that brought us closer, and I feel that there's something to be said for honoring that part of our Western psyche, and engaging in that kind of dialogue together, that does point us closer to the truth. Yes, there's that too. And in addition to that, there's something else too. I mean, there's two levels of talking about this subject here that we're now on, which is the use and value of speaking about the Dharma. One is that it's encouraging, and I think what you're talking about is part of encouragement for you and for many people, to dialogue and grapple with these ideas is part of what encourages you to practice. But in addition to all that, there's the fact that there is a huge international social dialogue going on in our world that is consequential, because depending on the way governments and businesses, etc., etc., think about the way the world looks, they do things, right? So another thing that we should feel responsible to do

[24:15]

is engage in that dialogue, and I personally have the feeling that there are aspects of Buddhist thought, I'm not talking about Buddhist practice now, which is more primary for us as individuals, but aspects of Buddhist thought that are useful to be part of that dialogue, because they would be more humanizing. People maybe wouldn't harm others and do things in certain ways if they thought about things in a little bit different way. So to put those ideas out there and make them part of this dialogue that the whole world is constantly involved in is useful. That's a little bit different thing from you and I practicing together. That's different. But also not entirely different, because Sunday at Green Gulch is both those things together. Sunday at Green Gulch is sort of a public dialogue with all of us who are in business or science or whatever we do, and it's also a very private time for us to discuss our intimate practice together.

[25:17]

It's both. So my Sunday talks are different from my other talks, where in my other talks, in the context of a retreat, I don't necessarily talk about that on that level. So there's a lot to it, actually. And of course, I've thought a lot about language and its purposes and ins and outs of it, and it's complicated. But yes, Gertrude Stein said something like, Ezra Pound explained everything too much. She's just a village explainer. You can't explain, you know. And I think that's true too. It has to do with intention. Is our intention the point, the truth? Or are we afraid of that? Are we going to try and cover that up with words and back off? Yes, right. That's right. And there are words and words. In his introduction to the Blue Cliff Record, Maizumi Roshi has an interesting thing where he says there's different kinds of reading. There's reading with the eyes,

[26:17]

reading with the mind, reading with the stomach, reading with the heart, reading with the breath. So there's different kinds of reading. There's different kinds of language use. It all may look the same, but depending on the intention and the purpose behind it, it's very different. There's many kinds of language use. Let's see. I appreciated hearing some of what you said today. I sometimes almost think it doesn't matter what's said. What I'm listening for is what I tend to hear. You talked about our habit of hearing or working with just parts of things. And that just really put a piece in place, I think, of helping me with something I'm working on. I've noticed that I have this heart-beating resentment about one of my children. I'm holding responsible for possibly the death of my other child.

[27:23]

And, you know, I'm aware that this is not good for me and that I don't want to be doing this, but it's like I don't know how to not, I don't know how to interrupt it. And just something you said about that, how we focus on the parts of things, just really helped me see that that's just part of the situation. Exactly, yeah. And it's not a whole situation. And there's a part of me that's angry at a part of him. And that's really just like a very small part. There's a lot of other things going on. And just, you know, your words opened up the possibility for me to see that. I'm glad, yeah. I think I was going to see it eventually. But, you know, it just happened during your words. Yeah, they call that in Zen, turning words. Yeah. Turning words. You know, I don't even know if that's exactly what you meant by what you said,

[28:29]

but it's what I was listening for. Exactly. It isn't that I came knowing that you felt that way and I was trying to think of some little thing to stick in there so that you would... No, I'm just doing what I'm doing. And because of your practice and my practice and we're practicing together, these little things happen, fortunately, you know, and it's good. And I think it's also another reason that it's very important to be careful about what we're talking about because we never know what we're teaching another person. That's right, that's right. So to be as aware as possible of, you know, saying what's true for myself. Careful speech is very important. But I would like to just say a word about the general issue that I... because I think it's something that we all experience of having the persistent arising of negative or afflictive emotions and thoughts. Knowing better, you know, knowing that we don't want this to be coming up. This is not what we feel is right or good for us or anybody else

[29:33]

and we're clear that we don't... it's not what we even believe and yet it's coming and coming and coming over and over again and we don't seem to be able to control it. And that's a very uncomfortable feeling. And I think we all know about this, whatever form it takes for us. So I think the most important thing in a case like that is to do the practice of patience. Now you don't think of... you think patience sounds like, you know, an old sort of Christian virtue that we don't have in Buddhism but in fact patience is one of the six paramitas, the six practices of the Bodhisattva. One of them is patience and I have a whole... sometimes I talk about patience and give talks about that. Patience is very, very important. Patience involves understanding the process of the futility of attachment or aversion. If we, you know, try to grab on to something this is inherently frustrating

[30:34]

because we can't grab... we can't hold on to it. If we have a great feeling, say in meditation, as many people have a wonderful feeling and they'll say, oh boy, I can't wait to get down on that cushion again and have that feeling again and of course it's totally different and they can't reproduce it and they're sitting there in great frustration. Anything like that, you can't hold on to anything. You know, nothing that we seem to possess can you grasp. And the same way with pushing away. You can't push something away that's present. The act of pushing something away only makes it come more. So when you have an obsessive thought like that that you don't want, you automatically are pushing it away. Every time it comes up you're trying to push it away and you have a lot of self-judgment around that. I shouldn't be feeling this way, what a bad person I am. I'm supposed to be practicing and look at all these years I've been practicing and here I'm thinking like this is terrible. All of that whole complex of thought is the outplaying of aversion and you have to know that. So that's why, you know, a little bit of knowledge is a good thing.

[31:37]

Because if you know that, you say, oh, that's how aversion is working now and aversion is making this, giving even more power to this. So you're hip to that, see, and you don't... so you try to not engage in that whole process of aversion and then it still comes up because there has been aversion in the past and that energy of that aversion in the past will make it continue to come up. But now you practice patience. You go back to your breath. You try not to activate judgment and aversion. You let it come up and you let it go away and then it has less power, you're not adding fuel to the fire. Eventually it goes away. So one has to have a clear idea of the aspiration and the aspiration is not to have afflictive and negative thoughts because then we're happier, everybody around us is happier, that's what we want. We understand why we want that. We're also aware of what is actually coming up. We're aware of the process of aversion and as much as possible not trying to engage in it. And we know the feeling of the practice of patience, sometimes translated as endurance or forbearance.

[32:41]

There are things that come up that one simply must forbear. Practice does not mean that we're going to be in bliss every minute. We're going to definitely have unfixable breaks in our life. So we have to anticipate that and practice forbearance. If we practice forbearance and not aversion, we can heal even in the midst of our unfixable breaks. So in that way we work on that. But that happens to every single practitioner. In case you thought that you were the only one for whom that happened, now we all know. We all come out. We all know that everybody has that problem. But if we're used to practicing forbearance and we're clear about our aspiration, that doesn't have to be an insurmountable difficulty and we can let it go. And we can anticipate it before we start adding fuel to the fire and we can take all these things in our stride. It's possible to practice that way. So thank you for bringing that up. It's not just you that feels that. I think we all have that problem.

[33:45]

Yes, that's just another. The word in Sanskrit is kshanti, which these words have many dimensions in the original language. In English you could translate it as patience, forbearance, endurance, like that. Different aspects to it. Yes, yes. There have been titles like Zen and the Art of Cooking or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, etc. What would Zen and the Art of Thinking be like? Well, I think that's exactly what we've been talking about. We've been talking about thinking and letting go of thought. And here we're talking about thinking with some advice to ourselves about forbearance, aversion, aspiration. So all these things, this is really our topic for the day. It's really different ins and outs of Zen and the Art of Thinking, which is a very important topic, for sure. Didn't Suzuki Roshi say something like, go ahead and think all you want, but think nothing of it? I'm not familiar with that quote, but it's a good one.

[34:47]

If he didn't say it, he could have said it. If he didn't say it, he should have. Somebody, yes. How much of this negative thoughts and uncomfortable feelings you've been talking about, is that the whole thing is my thoughts or some of it comes from outside, from society or the relationship with other people? Yes. Is that all? Well, all thoughts are produced by causes and conditions. And causes and conditions come from a variety of sources, definitely. I mean, clearly our thinking is influenced by the culture we live in, by our parents, our associations, our... Yeah, I mean, absolutely. In fact, it would be hard to distinguish between what I really think and what I get from everybody else. I don't know how you could really distinguish that, actually,

[35:49]

unless you wanted to say, well, what I really think is dharma. My true self really thinks only in dharma, which is just a way of talking. But otherwise, how could one ever distinguish? We've never been separate, right? We were influenced while we were in the womb by different substances that were going into our body from our mother. So we've never been independent. We've never had a single thought that wasn't influenced by the food we eat, let alone the ads on TV. So watch what you put in there. Watch what you allow yourself to be influenced by. That's an interesting point. I don't ever watch television myself, not because I decided to, but because we get terrible reception. To the point where you can't actually watch anything. I have a television, but it doesn't work.

[36:50]

I mean, I can't get any programs on it. And it's a good thing, because I probably watch it all the time. And I think it's been beneficial for me that I don't watch television, and especially for my children. My children have never watched television. I mean, they've watched it occasionally, but they've never had a life in which television was there and they could turn it on. It's never been an issue. So I don't have to ration the television or say you can't watch it or something, because we don't get any reception. You can't watch anything. And I think that's been of a tremendous benefit to them, and it's been a benefit to me. So it's tricky, because our practice is not to be, say, like the Amish people who have a decision to maintain a lifestyle that's like 1875 or something. That's not our practice. We are engaged in our world. But how are we engaged? There's lots of realm for choice in there. Do we watch porno movies every night?

[37:52]

What would that do to us if we did that? How much television do we watch? You read the news because you care and you want to know. But a lot of people read the news. Maybe some of us read the news obsessively, because you don't want to be with yourself. I know people who do that. You walk in the house, you turn on the radio and the TV, and you open up the newspaper, and you're sort of like... And actually, if you stop and talk for a second, you realize, I don't even know what I'm... I just don't want to be with myself. I might think about my life or something. I might feel something. I don't want to do that. So I think that most of the interest in the news nationally is like that. I think most people read the news as an escape. And I actually don't read the news that much myself. Again, not because I decided it's bad for me or something, but because I actually don't have time. Because my schedule starts at 5 in the morning and ends at 9 at night.

[38:52]

And I have a lot of things to do, and I actually don't have time to sit down for whatever it takes, half an hour, 45 minutes, and read the newspaper every day. So I glance at the newspaper, and I try to listen to the news on the radio in the morning. So I have a general idea of what's going on. But I don't think that's so good. I don't like that about the way my life goes. I would rather have a little more time to be more informed. But there's choices in here, right? How are we going to live in America? How do we do that? There's a million different ways of living in this country. What news do you... Are you aware of the news that Tom Brokaw wants you to know about? Is it that news that you know about? Are you aware of the news that Mr... What's his name? Terry Ott from the Chronicle wants you to know about? Are you aware of the news on KPFA, what they want you to know about? That's where I get my news. But there's a million ways of knowing the news and knowing what's going on. So do we think about it?

[39:55]

Do we evaluate how we live in America? Or do we do it automatically? Because it's a choice. Like I was saying this morning, it's a choice. So I would say that it's a good idea to kind of reflect on what is going in there. What do I eat? What do I do? How do I spend my time? Who do I know? Who are the people that I associate with? And so on. And think about all of that in terms of your... Imagine if you thought of your life as something that was precious, that you were dedicated to spending this brief span of it for the benefit of others, and that therefore how you spent your time and your life was crucial and very important. And then you would think about what you did. Maybe you would think... Maybe you would live your life differently in some important ways. And I think we need to think about that because we're making choices, whether we're making them consciously or unconsciously. We're all making choices. And sometimes I confess that I don't have a happy feeling

[40:57]

about the choices that many of us make. Now I think that... I feel like our group at Green Gulch is quite small, narrow, and self-selected. In other words, I feel everybody who comes here, they wouldn't be here if they already hadn't made some pretty important choices. But when I look around, you know, at the scene at large, I don't really know what's going on, you know? I mean, I don't know all the people out there and so forth. But I imagine that people are not making great choices and that the way that we're living collectively is not that great. So we should start with ourselves and make those choices and then, by our example, encourage others around us. Yes? How do you clarify that selective process against judgmentalism? Yes, good point, very good point. In other words, on a broader scale, how do you make a discrimination

[41:58]

and not fall into negative judgmental thinking, which is afflictive thinking, which, you know, is debilitating? Judgment, what we call judgmental thinking, which is a kind of a popular notion. What do we mean by that? We mean thinking that is self-oriented. I want to feel good about myself, and I feel bad about myself, and I judge myself. So it's all centered around the self, judging the self, and then projecting that outward and judging other people, right? But the centerpiece of that, what the engine that turns that kind of thinking is some sense of the self as being separate from other people, separate from the world at large, that we would judge and worry about and then project that same self outwardly. To make discriminations based on our commitments of our practice,

[43:01]

which is, you know, the vow to save all beings. Don't we say that on a Sunday morning, right? We say that. Sentient beings are numberless. I vow to save them. In other words, in infinite scope, I vow to live for the benefit of others, thinking about others and helping them the best I can, including myself. I vow to shut down all delusions, confusions in the mind. I vow to let go of them. What's the other ones? I vow to... Beings are numberless. I vow to save them. Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. Dharmagates are endless. I vow to enter them. Dharmagates meaning aspects of the teaching. I vow to bring up as many aspects of the teaching as I can. And that's what I want to do with my life. And then Buddha's way is unsurpassable. I vow to become Buddha's way. My whole life is going to be nothing but Buddha's way with nothing left over. If that's our commitment, if those vows are our commitment or some version of them,

[44:02]

and that's the basis on which we make our discriminations, I don't think we fall into judgment in the negative sense because judgment involves separation. In other words, if we say sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them, and I am one of them, then how could we project negativity onto others and ourselves? So in other words, we substitute a small-minded, unwise basis. We take that out, and instead of that, we put in there a wise and much broader and wider basis. And on the basis of that, we make discriminations because Zen practice is not about stumbling through life like a zombie, although it may look that way. And we may even have days when, in fact, we do stumble around like zombies. But actually, the reality is that Zen practice is also about making wise and clear distinctions and discriminations, not in the spirit of, I'm right, you're wrong, or that's good, that's bad, but in the spirit of, this is what I'm committed to,

[45:04]

this is my way, this is my practice, and based on that, I better do this and not that. No? I hate this, I reject this. So, you know, I don't go to Broadway and go into the girly shows. Personally, I don't do that. I never did. Maybe I missed something, but I don't. But if I go down the street and see the people in the shows, I don't think, these are nasty, awful, terrible people, I don't like these people, they should be rounded up and put in jail, and blah, blah. I really don't feel that way. Why? Because sentient beings are numberless. I vow to save them. Well, I want to, those are part of me, these people are me, and I want to, I'm concerned about them. I don't think they're probably doing what they're doing because that's the job that they could get, or they have some belief system, I don't know. But they're probably pretty nice people in their way, and, you know, if I knew them, I probably, my heart would go out to them. I don't have a bad feeling about them, or even a murderer, you know. There's people who go and they get on top of a building and they shoot a whole bunch of people.

[46:05]

Are they evil? They're terribly, terribly misguided and suffering people. I don't know, four or five or six months, I've been working with a very interesting study group of four young men, about twelve years old or so. Very interesting. And we get together about once a month, and we do some meditation practices, and then we speak about deep matters together. It's been a lot of fun. And the last time we met, we were talking about sort of ways of thinking, and we were talking about modernism and ways of thinking in modern times. And we were saying that in modern times

[47:09]

we have learned how to think in parts, dividing things up into parts, and that this has given us a tremendous amount of information. We know a lot more about the world since we began seeing things in terms of parts. But the downside of that is that we could feel misunderstood or lonely in such a world, so full of information, that we could see ourselves also as apart, literally apart from everything else. And we could feel misunderstood as if we were islands in a stormy sea. So we were talking about this, and I was sort of wondering whether they could relate to this at all, you know, as twelve-year-old boys. So I said, maybe it's hard for you at your age to see this or grasp this idea.

[48:12]

What do you think? Does it make sense to you? So one of the boys said, Yes, yes, I know exactly what you mean. I feel like that myself. He said, I feel as if no one really understands the real me. He said, in fact, I don't think that I understand myself. He said, I feel like there are whole parts of myself out on the edges of myself that I haven't even seen yet, and I barely even have an idea of what they are. So how could anybody else know what they are? And I was really astonished by this comment of his, and I've been thinking about it ever since. There's an old Zen case about Master Yunmen, once addressing his assembly,

[49:15]

and he said, Medicine and disease subdue each other. The whole world is medicine. What is the self? Medicine and disease subdue each other. The whole world is medicine. What is the self? Disease, in this saying of Master Yunmen, is our dis-ease, the dis-ease of our hearts, the dis-ease caused by our stupid or unskillful ways of living and thinking. So as human beings, I think naturally we find ourselves in a state of dis-ease, and the medicine is the Dharma, is the teaching. The ways that we find that we can work on our dis-ease,

[50:18]

calm our mind, be more skillful in thought and speech and action, and cure ourselves of our dis-ease. So this is medicine and disease. And medicine and disease subdue each other. Medicine eliminates disease, disease produces medicine to cure it, they kind of cancel each other out, and we let go of dis-ease and we let go of medicine, and we just are living without dis-ease, without medicine. So this is what Master Yunmen means, medicine and dis-ease subdue each other. But then he says, astonishingly, the whole world is Dharma, the whole world is medicine.

[51:19]

Even dis-ease is medicine. Everything is teaching us, every sound, every smell, every thought, every sense of feeling, every consciousness object, every psychological object arising in the mind is a sutra, is a scripture. And this is how the world really is. So he says, if this is the case, then what is the self? What is the self? Can there even be a self? Conventionally we all know what our self is. Our self is our body and our thoughts, our emotions, our intentions, our history, our associations, our likes, our dislikes, our talents, our tendencies.

[52:23]

Maybe our self is also our social position, our possessions, our accomplishments, our desires. Maybe you have your own list and you would add other things to this list. Our self is something we worry about, evaluate, make judgments about, we're proud of it, we're ashamed of it. But it's something that we are aware of, something that we know about. Maybe we're trying to work on our self, or defend our self, or justify our self. So I say, I use the word conventionally. Conventionally we know what our self is. And this is an interesting word, conventionally.

[53:34]

It's made up of vention and the prefix con, C-O-N. Vention is from the French word venir, to come, which is from the old English word common, means to come. And the prefix C-O-N means together. So when we go to a convention, we're all going together as a big group, right? So a convention is a big group. And in a big group it's hard to speak very intimately and accurately about what is most hard to speak about. Because there are so many people listening in, they won't understand. So you have to talk in broad and general terms, accepted terms that everybody will immediately understand,

[54:38]

although those terms will not allow us to get to the heart of the matter. So the things that we say at a convention are easily understood, although they may not be very true, at least in terms of our most intimate self. So this self that I just talked about is conventionally our self. Now the word invention is from the same French and old English root, to come. But the I-N part means on. So the word invention means to come upon something, to be sort of strolling along and suddenly come upon it, stumble upon it. In other words, discover it unexpectedly.

[55:40]

So if you invent something, you don't exactly figure it out. There's an element of surprise. To be inventive is not to be methodical, but to work something out systematically. But to be inventive is to be open to new possibilities and surprise. To have a respect for the unknown, to be working in the dark. So if we have a conventional self, maybe we also have an inventional self, or an inventive self, which is much broader and much more mysterious and unknown to us than our conventional self. Like my young friend, we may only dimly sense the shape of our inventive self.

[56:50]

Or maybe we don't even know that it's there at all or we've never heard of it, the idea of such a thing before. Certainly it's not something that we talk about much. Maybe we can talk about it. Today's a very good sneezing and coughing day. But whether we can talk about it or think about it, I feel like many of us have a sense of it in our lives, and we have experiences from time to time that point in the direction of it. Did you ever wake up in the middle of the night

[57:52]

with a very powerful dream on your mind and for a second you don't know where you are or who you are or whether it was a dream or not? Or maybe you've been to the high mountains by yourself for days and days and days and haven't spoken to anyone and climbed a mountain and when climbing got very, very tired to the point where you just couldn't think anymore and you kept going almost automatically and then you got to the top and looked down on a wide valley that seems to go forever. Or maybe you lost someone

[59:02]

that you love and for a second felt that it did not make any sense that that person could be gone, that you could never see them again. What would never signify? So these are some of the kinds of experiences and there are many others that we could have that would perhaps point to a sense of an inventive self wider and deeper and broader and more unknown than our conventional self. And when we have these experiences and we understand that there is another sense of our self, often it has the effect of making us see our cares and problems as a conventional self as being. Not so important,

[60:04]

not so gripping as they seemed. So today I want to read you some poems by Wallace Stevens that remind me of this. My favorite Wallace Stevens poems are the most obscure ones, usually nobody ever heard of the ones that I like. Here's one called Blanche McCarthy. Blanche McCarthy. I don't know why it's called Blanche McCarthy, it doesn't have anything to do with Blanche McCarthy that I can see. But anyway, Blanche McCarthy. Look in the terrible mirror of the sky and not in this dead glass which can reflect only the surfaces the bending arm, the leaning shoulder and the searching eye. Look in the terrible mirror of the sky

[61:07]

oh, bend against the invisible and lean to symbols of descending night and search the glare of revelations going by. Look in the terrible mirror of the sky see how the absent moon waits in a glade of your dark self and how the wings of stars upward from unimagined coverts lie. So I don't know how many of you know Wallace Stevens, the immortal American poet who conventionally died in about 1955 or so. He was a lawyer and early on he got a job

[62:09]

working for the Hartford Insurance Company in Hartford, Connecticut where he worked his whole life. And apparently he was a very practical and skillful insurance man and a good member of the Republican Party. And hardly anybody at the Hartford knew that he was one of the great poets of his time. Maybe they didn't read poetry, I don't know. So important was the Hartford Insurance Company to Wallace Stevens that when he was 70 years old he was still working there. And he was offered a professorship at Princeton University, like a one-year visiting professorship, which he really wanted to do but he told them that he would have to turn it down because he was afraid that if he went away from his job for a year somehow they would make him retire. So he didn't want to take a year off to do this

[63:10]

and stayed at the Hartford. And yet, at the same time, all these years, he must have worked there 30 to 40 years or more, he had another life that was going on at the same time. An inventive, wider life than the one that he showed to his colleagues at the Hartford and that was a life of basically what he would do, there was a park across the street from his house and he would just go every day to the park and for many, many hours on the weekend and stroll around the park and he would think about poetry and then when he'd come home he'd write down the results of his musings in the park. He did this practically every day for all those years.

[64:12]

Look in the terrible mirror of the sky he begins and not in this dead glass which can reflect only the surfaces. Looking at our inventive self may be terrible, may not be pleasant or exciting sometimes, it may be a little scary. And our inventive self doesn't appear in the mirror, it doesn't appear in the surfaces of our lives, in the bending arm, the leaning shoulder and the searching eye of the surface. This word terrible doesn't necessarily mean bad or negative. It means also

[65:22]

full of dimension like intense, powerful, dreadful, fearful, awesome. And we don't look in a reflecting mirror, we look into the sky to see our inventive self. The sky that doesn't show us our image but shows us a dreadful nothing, maybe an occasional cloud that we can say oh that looks like a horse and then it doesn't. So it's a little scary. So don't look in the mirror, look into the terrible mirror of the sky

[66:25]

and don't look at the surfaces, the bending arm, the leaning shoulder and the searching eye, look instead this way as he says, oh bend against the invisible and lean to symbols of descending night and search the glare of revelations going by. So look into the invisible, look into the night, look at the glaring symbols that flash by, maybe so fast we hardly see them or know that they're there. Like sudden flashes of lightning in the sky and then completely gone. Was it there? Did I see that? Gone before we knew it was there. These are the revelations of the inventive self, hardly known and maybe we even on purpose

[67:28]

make an effort to forget them for fear that they will disturb us, disturb our conventional lives for fear that we don't have the resources to be able to accommodate them. And then he says look into the terrible mirror of the sky, see how the absent moon waits in the glade of your dark self. The absent moon, this is our inventive self and this is why it's terrible because it really isn't anything, it's absent, the absent moon waiting in the glade of our dark self or of our unknownness. The Master Yunnan is saying the whole world is medicine.

[68:29]

What is he saying? If the whole world is medicine, then what is medicine? There's only medicine when there's disease. Medicine only exists relative to disease. If the whole world is medicine we can't really say it's medicine and we can't say it's not medicine. I am not myself. The world is not the world. Medicine is not medicine. All that we can define and know fails us. And yet as he says see how the wings of stars upward from unimagined coverts fly.

[69:33]

So and yet out of this place where we can't know ourself, know the world come these discoveries, these pure inventions these marvelous lives of ours that we somehow stumble upon. So when Master Yunnan says what is the self I don't think he's asking us to give him an answer. I think that he wants this question for himself and he wants us to hold this question also. Every moment we have this question, what is the self? And it's not idle speculation because every moment calls on us to answer this question for now because every moment we have to make a choice. If we're alive every moment we're doing something. We must choose and act.

[70:38]

There is no moment without choice and action. So we answer that question but then the next moment again, what is the self? Here's another poem by Wallace Stevens. This one is called The Indigo Glass in the Grass. The Indigo Glass in the Grass. Which is real? This bottle of indigo glass in the grass or the bench with the pot of geraniums the stained mattress and the washed overalls drying in the sun? Which of these truly contains the world? Neither one. Nor the two together. This bottle of indigo glass in the grass

[71:51]

sounds exotic somehow, doesn't it? Although indigo bottles are relatively common. But the sound of the line, this bottle of indigo glass in the grass is the inventive self. And for Stevens probably because he spent so many years working in the Hartford Insurance Company the inventive self always appears as something very exotic, very unusual. And it's always opposed to something very plain and ordinary like a pot of geraniums, the stained mattress and the washed overalls drying in the sun. These are images that usually don't appear much, this type of image in Stevens' poetry. And the inventive self I think is exotic, is extraordinary. But it often appears right in the middle of what's ordinary. I think Stevens needed something special

[72:59]

because for him the power of that specialness was important to overcome the force of the ordinary. The ordinary has a tremendous force and the conventional has a tremendous force. It's nothing. So it takes a certain amount of counterforce to break out of it. And so I think for Stevens it was this exotic element. But actually the inventive self is special and exotic and unusual only in comparison to the force of the conventional. When medicine and disease subdue each other there is no specialness or non-specialness. There is just very simply what appears. So we have a very special exotic inventive self, unexpected surprising self and the conventional self with all its force

[74:01]

of the quotidian. You know, the indigo glass and the washed overalls. Which of these is real, he says? Which of these is real? Which truly contains the world? Neither one. Nor the two together. We can't say, you know. We can't be smug about it. In the end we don't know. So I'm going on here talking about something that may or may not register for you. I don't know. I hope some of you have an idea of what I'm saying. We can talk about that here. Sometimes we can't talk about it. There are times and places when we wouldn't bring it up.

[75:01]

And if asked point blank we would deny it because it wouldn't be appropriate. It would be irrelevant. At the Hartford, believe me, Mr. Stevens was not discussing these things. And I wouldn't either. Would you? No. We have business to take care of, right? But, you know, once in a while on a nice Sunday morning in December at Green Gulch we can bring these matters up and we won't tell anybody about it when we leave. I think we need a chance to discuss this crazy stuff once in a while. Although it's hard to know what to do with it. Or about it. That's why I think we're very fortunate

[76:04]

in our practice to have a way of evoking, working with a shiny little flashlight on the edges of the inventive self. Which is our Zazen practice, our meditation practice. It's so simple, you know. We just sit down, straighten out our spine, turn our attention to our breathing, stay with our experience, whatever it is that arises, and just let go of the conventional self. Let it float away. Give it a break, you know. And let our inventive self peak out if it can. It may be terrible,

[77:04]

it may be indefinable, it may be hard to see whether it's there or not. And maybe even it will peak out in very ordinary ways. Peaking out around the edges of our, of the screen, you know, of our ordinary conventional thoughts as they rise and pass away in meditation. But I think if we do sit, we will sense this inventive self. And we will feel, oddly, some sense of peace and release just in letting it come forward even a little bit. On Friday, I went to the high school, Tam High School, where I used to work, and

[78:07]

it was the last day before the vacation. Usually, you know, the dreaded day for teachers. So one of my friends at the school had the idea that she would have me come and teach a class in meditation on that day just to make the whole thing a little easier. So I did. I went down there and went to the 8 o'clock psychology class at Tam High in room 13 in Wood Hall and taught a class in meditation. And I just talked to them a little bit about meditation and then we did sort of three kinds of meditation, starting out with the most coarse meditation object and working our way to the most subtle. And so first we did some chanting, a little simple chanting to focus the mind on the sound of our voice and so on. And then after we did that, we meditated on the sound of a bell, to hear the sound of the bell

[79:10]

and see if we could hear when the sound decayed into silence. And then we meditated on the breath. And after we were finished, and they were very, you know, well-behaved. I don't believe what they tell you in the newspaper about high school students. They're actually quite wonderful and well-behaved and so forth. So after this, I said, okay, now talk to the person next to you about what you experienced in your meditation. So they had a lively discussion and then after that I said, okay, what happened? And it was really interesting what they said. Nearly all of them said that they were really surprised at how much more was going on in their minds and outside in the room than they had thought. When they just were concentrating on the sound of the bell or chanting, they became aware of a lot more thoughts

[80:11]

and a lot more sounds and movements and activity going on than they had been aware of before. But the astonishing thing they said was that even though there was more stuff happening than they had been aware of, it didn't make things feel more complicated or more stressed out. See, they felt calmer even though there was a lot more stuff going on and that surprised them. So as I said, Wallace Stevens' form of meditation was to stroll I think he read a lot too and maybe sat and let his eyes go out of focus looking at the book too, maybe he did that. But he also walked a lot and I think he really understood about meditation and he has a poem here which is really about meditation pretty directly. This is the favorite poem of someone who was staying at Green Gulch

[81:18]

this weekend and that's how come I'm giving this lecture about Wallace Stevens' poetry because I gave so many lectures and I thought, oh geez, I don't know what to talk about anymore and I finished talking. And then I was talking to her and I gave her the idea of talking about some Stevens poems. This one is her favorite, it's called Solitaire Under the Oaks. You know, like the game of solitaire. Solitaire Under the Oaks. In the oblivion of cards one exists among pure principles. Neither the cards nor the trees nor the air persist as facts. This is an escape to principium, to meditation. One knows at last what to think about

[82:19]

and thinks about it without consciousness under the oak trees, completely released. In the oblivion of cards one exists among pure principles. Neither the cards nor the trees nor the air persist as facts. This is an escape to principium, to meditation. One knows at last what to think about and thinks about it without consciousness under the oak trees, completely released. In Zazen practice many things may arise in the mind but we let them come and go freely. We don't hold to them as facts that we have to worry about. They just come and go freely.

[83:21]

And this feels very different even though it might be the same thoughts. It feels very different not to take them as facts to return to pure principles. I wouldn't put it that way but that's... Mr. Stevens liked to read the French symbolist poets and the idealist philosophers so this is his language. We return to pure principles not facts. One knows at last what to think about without consciousness. You know we spend our whole lives wondering what to think about. Our conventional self will restlessly search a whole lifetime for what to think about and never find what to think about because whatever it thinks about will be

[84:26]

slightly unsatisfactory. It will not give the conventional self what it feels it wants, what it feels it needs. But when we enter into a real meditation when we let go of our mind, let go of our body, let go of our self then we know what to think about with full satisfaction. And we think about it without consciousness, without conventional self-awareness, without judging, without evaluation, just letting a flow of the mind and of the reality around us come and go. Dogen calls this think non-thinking. Stephen says think without consciousness.

[85:33]

And when we do this we are released, completely released under the oak trees just as Buddha sat under a tree completely released. And when we went out last Sunday to see the morning star at dawn or before dawn we gathered first under the oak tree out here before we began our quest down to the farm for the morning star. There's nothing more beautiful to me or more characteristic of California landscape than those places where you see the coast live oak. They don't grow in forests together. They're usually one here and then space,

[86:37]

some hillside, some grass and then another one over there. They're very beautiful, the oaks. I had a hard time stopping copying down these Wallace Stevens poems so one more and then we'll stop. This one is called A Clear Day and No Memories. No soldiers in the scenery no thoughts of people now dead as they were fifty years ago young and living in alive air young and walking in the sunshine

[87:39]

bending in blue dresses to touch something today the mind is not part of the weather today the air is clear of everything it has no knowledge except of nothingness and it floats over us without meanings as if none of us had ever been here before and are not now in this shallow spectacle this invisible activity, this sense. So this poem has two stanzas of six lines and the first one is about the conventional self. It's sort of saying, this is the conventional self

[88:42]

and that's not how it is today for me. No soldiers in the scenery no thoughts of people now dead as they were fifty years ago young and living in alive air young and walking in the sunshine bending in blue dresses to touch something today the mind is not part of the weather no memories, no haunted regrets no thoughts of the past no shadows of things one should have done and so on and so forth which is what characterizes our conventional self and our usual way of thinking that's not how it is today today is a clear day and no memories today the air is clear of everything it has no knowledge except of nothingness and it flows over us without meanings as if none of us had ever been here before and are not now we're not here we're here in this shallow spectacle

[89:46]

shallow because everything is right there we don't have to get underneath it it's there, it's exactly there in this shallow spectacle this invisible activity, this sense this sense of our inventive self, our wider self we don't have it, you know, but we have a sense of it so when we settle into our inventive self, when we have a healthy respect and a sense of it in our lives when that becomes the person that we have confidence in the person that we depend on, the person that we identify with then our whole life is just Yun Men's question moment after moment what is the self? no answer, no meaning

[90:48]

no knowledge it's as if we're here and not here at the same time it's as if we have a history but it's like we never were before history is only conventional if we have something at that moment, terrific if we have nothing, fine we can live great, we can die it's okay right here here is that place and the way goes straight ahead from here thank you may may may

[91:44]

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