This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. I want to say good morning to all of you present here. I want to say good morning to everybody who may be online. I want to say good morning to everybody to you. And thank you for the invitation to speak, also to Tanto Tino. There you are. I know that the topic of the practice period is exploration of silent illumination. Is that correct?

[01:00]

So that seems a very, maybe, exotic notion. But we all can do something right now, and you can take it home, how you can create a conduit inside you to that silent illumination. And that is your breath that's with you wherever you go. And I would invite you to just take a moment to really sit upright and comfortably and find out what that is. If you can have your feet on the ground for just a moment while we do this. And then just feel... Feel your breath coming and going just the way it does for a moment. And then pay particular attention to the little pause at the end of the exhale.

[02:15]

And hang out there just till the inhale comes back by itself. Just see if you can Touch that pause, that stillness. Each time you breathe out at the end of the exhale. That place in your body, that energetic quiet is an access point to silent illumination. You can tap into this wherever you are at any given time. It's a wonderful tool because it's with you all the time. Wherever you are, you're breathing.

[03:16]

As long as you're alive. It's no luggage to carry around. if you cultivate this, it also calms your nervous system down. So it's a wonderful thing to do when you're nervous. I did it waiting out there before the lecture because I'm more agitated and more nervous than I was since quite some time. So just to have this and to know this and to employ it. And you can try it out and experiment with it and find out for yourself if it is a helpful tool in your life, in your daily life. And see how you feel right now.

[04:24]

How is your body? What's running in? What emotional landscape do you find yourself in? And what is running in your head? And nothing is wrong. It's just tapping into what is available to your perception at this moment with no judgment, no good or bad, no story, just how is this being, body, and mind here at this moment, in this space. This coming week is going to be Thanksgiving, which for me is like divided in gratefulness and in giving. The practice of generosity, the practice of giving. And then I looked up

[05:26]

because I'm not from the U.S., so in my country we don't have Thanksgiving. And being invited to give the talk now made me look it up. What is the origin of this? I live here since tens of years, and I never felt the impulse to look it up because it was just what was happening, and I wasn't giving a talk a few days before that date. There's no end to learning. And I was struck because I felt the story about it, that it was related to its histories, that in 1621, the pilgrims, the pilgrims, the European pilgrims, got together with the Wampanwag, I don't know exactly how that's pronounced in their language, people, for a gathering that lasted several days where actually the native people brought the food and they taught the pilgrims how to grow corn, how to hunt.

[06:45]

And they built the coalition, but then that very quickly fell apart. So... right the day after Thanksgiving is the national native day of mourning. And it's not by accident that they are basically only righted by a night, those two days, because they mourn the genocide of their people, the theft of their lands, assault on their culture that is ongoing and the many betrayals of treaties that the white people have made with them and to me this is just bringing up I have similar it's it's

[07:53]

It's so complex, it's so ambiguous in terms of that there's not one single true story. There are so many meanings and so many events that create that situation that it feels very close to what is so apparent in our current times. And that... So how do we hold a space big enough to allow for all of it and not forget that our thanksgiving is so connected to the suffering and sorrow of Native people? And usually we only see one. or often we only, not usually, often we only see one, depending on where we are.

[09:00]

And so to not forget about that and be willing to feel the complexity that doesn't allow for just one single feeling or one single view of things. just one truth. So I want to talk a little bit about that because I feel in our world that's there. We can't or if we just see one single view, if we only listen to one point of view, if we justify our view, create a bulwark of justifications, we actually miss life.

[10:07]

And we smother life in ourselves and around us. And it is a very human tendency to want to have a solution or a resolution or an answer that then gets rid of the problem. So that's a human tendency, and the tendency by itself is not bad, it's just a tendency. If we don't know about it and don't keep opening our hearts, keep opening our interests, even though it leads to less knowing what to do, then that tendency is actually helping us to study what the view we tend to because it gives us a feeling of safety or security or a feeling of now I know what to do.

[11:19]

Then we can also see what it excludes. what is excluded from that view, what is not invited. Because all manifestations of life, all of them, plants, animals, nature, climate, people, human beings, history, the cosmos is full, is complex, is one huge complexity of inter-penetrating, interdependent manifestations, arisings, passings away. That's life.

[12:20]

And it's one of the characteristics that Buddhism talks about reality is that it is impermanence. So nothing is stable. It may seem stable because we don't see how rocks or mountains change. But if you go a few hundred years backwards, it didn't look exactly the same. So we don't see the change because it's so slow. But that doesn't mean it's not happening. And then there's rapid change like a storm. So that, in some ways, groundlessness in terms of nothing is fixed is hard for us to be comfortable with. It's like just living on a surfboard or on a boat on the ocean all day long, where the winds and the waves and the rains and the storms and the sunshine

[13:26]

have always an effect. And what helps us to keep balancing, keep finding a balance for now and then again for now and then again for now. You can't have a permanent balance on a surfboard. It's not possible. So that still point in you with your breath. It's one place you can return to, whether it's stormy, whether it's quiet, whether you're agitated, whether you're happy, whether you're sad, whether you're angry, frustrated, irritated. That's there. And it's so interesting to me that in a hurricane, there's the eye of the hurricane, where it's completely still. in the middle of everything that's swirling around. And that's, in some ways you can say that's also placed in your body at the end of your exhale that you can return to and cultivate.

[14:32]

And it does bring us into the moment of now and takes us out for a moment to either worry or think or be excited about the future, or thinking about the past, or planning something. It just takes us to simply being for a few breaths. And being is a beautiful thing that we don't have in German. That is in English. Languages have such wonderful different words that are so illuminating what they mean that other languages don't have. And being, for me, is such a word. Because it is a noun which has some fixedness to it, but it's also a verb. And that's what we are. We are a 360-degree holographic continuous word

[15:42]

arising and being being you know it's it's not a static thing so to become familiar with that become familiar with whatever we feel whatever feelings come through in any given moment can we be allow them to be here without attaching a story or making it an identifier of who this being is, is part of the practice, is part of becoming familiar with the overall groundlessness of everything that's rising. And I think that is really, when I look at the situation we're in, we find ourselves in, here in the United States, in this world, the bigger world, when I look at that bigger picture, I am very prone to feel totally overwhelmed because

[17:18]

There is no simple solution. One side thinks these people should not be here, these people should be here, our neighbors should not be here, maybe, or they should be here, or we should get rid of those, but we can't. You know, there's also a saying somewhere in one of the sayings that stays with me, there's no place on earth to spit on. There's no place we can throw anything away because it just gets placed somewhere else. Our trash doesn't disappear. It just is on a dump that creates its own karma. So when we start to really think about that, what we need to do is then to return to this here.

[18:20]

this being here, this environment that this being lives in. And because peace starts in our hearts and starts with being at peace with the complexity of the being we are, with all the different feelings that we're capable of everything. And as long as we think we're not capable of doing that, that's just the bad guys over there or the bad women or whatever, we are not the peace. And we don't know how to nurture peace, really. It starts with ourselves. So also in that sense, returning to your breath and to the end of our exhale, creates a space where acceptance, where a nonjudgmental mind, where the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are calmed down or quieted.

[19:34]

You know, the teaching of karma, which also helps me in some ways to look at the current situation we're in, economically, climate-wise, politically. And, you know, many of you have family members that are, families are divided politically between, and they don't know how to talk to each other, because when they do, they try to convince the other of their own viewpoint. That's not the conversation, and that's not being really interested in how, how come, you see it this way? What is the evidence for you that makes you see it that way? And then lay it on the table and then we have a bigger picture and we can all look at it. So there are maybe many families that just don't talk about this because it only creates tension. And ultimately that's not very helpful.

[20:41]

It may not be the best idea to do it at Thanksgiving dinner, but So individually to start having conversation, to be really interested and not just have an opinion where the other person is coming from or what they're defending or what they're standing for is really tough work. But it's worthwhile work because the teaching of karma says what is happening in the world at this point is the results of hundreds of years of actions. And what we do today has consequences for tomorrow, for us, maybe in two months, maybe in five years, but also in the whole world. So we today create the world, co-create the world that our kids

[21:42]

our grandkids, their kids, their grandchildren, future life is being affected by. So we can't go out there to fix it very well because when we look how it's been tried to fix with perpetual wars that just shift from where to where they're going because they create so much harm and resentment and unfairness that They're just the preparation for the next war that we can start in our life, within ourselves, within our partnerships, friendships, workplace, neighborhood. And for that we have to know what are our values, what is really important for us. There's a wonderful book out since, I guess, probably 30 years.

[22:44]

That's by Stephen Colby, I think his name is. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. It's a fabulous book and it's still absolutely relevant. I see people laughing and nodding because you read it or have seen it. What stays with me all the time is he looks at different people that are highly effective in life, different artists and business people from all walks of life, and he found they all share the same seven habits. And what stayed with me as a habit is that they know clearly what their fundamental intention is, and that they use each time they have to make a decision They look at it through that fundamental intention. It's a little bit like the government in Bhutan.

[23:45]

They're doing that. Their national gross, what is it called? Gross national product is happiness. Happiness is being content with your life. being interconnected, taking care of your environment. It's the only country in this world that has a negative carbon output because so many percentage of their forests cannot be touched. They look at every business proposition, how does it relate to their values, their values of community, their Buddhist values. their economy, and then they decide based on that. And so they say no to very lucrative offers because they don't align with what's important to them.

[24:47]

And so one of the habits is the people have clarified their fundamental intention, which then helps them to differentiate, and that I find the most helpful to me, between what seems urgent and what is important. And urgent shouts and yells and creates a lot of turbulence. Importance is much more quiet, so urgency kind of makes us not access distracts us and then we respond to one crisis after another that doesn't help to really fundamentally change something. So they have cultivated the ability to whatever is in front of them gets related what is really important to them and that informs how they respond to what's in front of them.

[25:52]

So that also we can do. we can become more clear, we can write it down, we can put it on the mirror so it reminds us every day what is my fundamental intention. And the situation it's been lately here has really activated me, has... makes me want to be more engaged, but that means I have to look inside more. Not just to be engaged outside, but really engage with myself, get myself out of a habit of how I live in this world where everything is going, you know, more or less okay. It doesn't seem that way anymore, so now I have to return deeper into myself. We can also feel, when we feel uneasy or discomforted or anxious, our body is such a wonderful ally.

[27:19]

We can feel it in our body. It stiffens. When we start having a fixed view, our body and our mind stiffen, just tighten up. when we start paying attention to that, we can actually then just see if we can relax and let whatever made that stiffen happening, something we heard or something we thought or something that we read, to just feel the feeling or the unease rather than stiffen against it. There's a profound way of relaxing, and also that still point at the end of your out-breath can be a moment where you can just go, and then the next in-breath comes. You can go, and now it comes back in.

[28:27]

It's actually amazing how long it takes till by itself the next in-breath comes, and how wonderful that space is. How quiet, without content, just being. Ehe Dogen says something, Ehe Dogen, the founder of this school of Buddhism we're practicing here, which is just one school of Buddhism, doesn't own the truth, but is one way, one path to help us relate to the truth in life-affirming and life-supportive ways.

[29:57]

And he writes, that's in a section that is called The Fundamental Point. When you sail out in a boat to the midst of an ocean where no land is in sight and view the four directions, the ocean looks circular and does not look any other way. The horizon is just a circle. That's what you see. But the ocean is neither round nor square. Its features are infinite in variety. It is like a palace. It is like a jewel. It only looks circular as far as you can see at that time, in that moment. All things are are like this.

[30:59]

You, your partner, your friend, your neighbor, the tree in front of your house, the dog, they're all like this, infinite in variety. You see a part of it because you're looking at them from a particular place, in a particular time, in a particular context. Though there are many features in the dusty world and the world beyond conditions, you see and understand only what your eye of practice can reach. So here he also introduces the eye of practice. which today I would say, so I look at you, I look out into this space, and it is very familiar because I started practicing here in 88.

[32:12]

There's the same Manjushri sitting there. It got renovated, and it's filled with a few people I know since a long time and many, many people I've never seen. you have never seen. So there is familiarity, but if I keep in mind to not get stuck with the familiar, but know that there is infinite more that I cannot see. And not because I'm stupid or I don't want to, but it's not visible to me because I'm sitting here, so I see this. I don't see your backs. But if I know that this is a very, very limited view, I tread very differently, more carefully, more open,

[33:21]

to seeing something because somebody moved and I suddenly see someone I can't see from here. And that to me is also the eye of practice, to apply the understanding or the teaching and apply it to my everyday way of being, of relating, of taking information in. and looking for the bigger picture. And the bigger picture comes in a collaboration with everything that's around you, with what's happening in nature, with what's happening to your neighbors, which what's happening to your partner. It's a mind of inclusiveness, been interested in including more than what's just in front of my eyes.

[34:28]

And hearing more, hearing, getting information that changes. So how many of us look at another TV channel for news? We tend to listen to just one that we agree with, that's easy for us, that doesn't create discomfort. So to cultivate that capacity... So then he says, though there are many features in the dusty world and the world beyond conditions, you see and understand only what your eye of practice can reach. In order to learn the nature of the myriad things, you must know... that although they may look round or square, the other features of oceans and mountains are infinite in variety.

[35:33]

Whole worlds are there. It is so not only around you, but also directly beneath your feet or in a drop of water. So to cultivate that openness and curiosity and interest, interest comes from interesse, which means, it's a Latin word, it means interbeing. So it's also understanding that we are completely, absolutely, interconnected with everything that is in this universe. With each other, our bodies pick up the body's energy, we regulate each other, we ping off each other, with everything.

[36:42]

So on some level there's no over there. even though it's geographically maybe very far away from us, it still affects us. And what we do in our tiny little, like, you know, little ants, in our tiny little life in the whole universe, what we do affects the whole universe. And to understand that and to trust that and not think you're... inconsequential that is what this practice is about and whether you know it or not your intentions affect everything you do so it's really important to know your motivations and be interested in them and find out what are the things I do to defend myself against feeling a particular feeling or against

[37:45]

or when I'm defended I'm shut down I'm hardened I close down and that also prevents me from getting enough information to move forward in a liberating way so Pema Churjan somewhere said in every moment in every situation all the ingredients to be fully human fully alive and fully awake are present. Every time, every moment, all the ingredients are present. So when we start looking for those ingredients, when we notice when we shut down, when we withdraw, when we don't engage, because we don't know why, this is fine. Then we just pause and orient ourselves and calm ourselves and then see where is a doorway to engage in an intentional way.

[38:51]

So it's not engagement all the time, engagement is what I'm proposing here. I'm proposing that we pay attention to when we are open-hearted, when we are closed-hearted, when we have fixed ideas which shut us down and create seemingly very simple solution like We think security and happiness belong together. For other things, you can find out what the things are. You just automatically are glued together for you that don't really belong together, that are not necessary for one or the other. So... Pema Chodron also says, as human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution.

[40:00]

We don't deserve resolution. We deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright. which is the middle way. An open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity. So there again, if you pick that up and want to take that into your life, that little practice that you can do anywhere you are in any situation of just feeling your... Exhale all the way to its end and hanging out in that pause there till the next inhale arises by itself. To see if that calms you enough to not be captured by uneasiness and moved by it into quick judgment, quick action, quick...

[41:06]

or into supporting a fixed idea. I saw that I think the kitchen left, so I have to look what time it is. Oh, I have a little bit more time. Thank you. Patience, the practice of patience is also wonderful. helpful tool in this. It's an antidote to aggression, to violence. So, be with practice your capacity, your tolerance of just Being with what is arising in you, a thought, a feeling, a sensation in your body without making a story or creating a future based on it or a definition of you from it.

[42:25]

Just, wow, anguish. How do I know I call this anguish? What is the... body sensation that then translates in my head, I'm in anguish or in despair or sad or joyful or irritated. They all have different energetic and sensory and somatic expressions. So if we are interested and capable and train our capacity to let them be and not turn away and not jump in but to just feel them we start to notice that they have a life span they they get triggered by something that's usually not in our control they arise and then they go away and are replaced by something else so

[43:31]

But if there are things we don't want, we tend to brace against them and then we're shut down. And that has a much longer lifetime because that's something we did. An action. So to be with not suppress, to not enhance by whipping it up with terrible views of what's coming down the pike. Because making us more fearful is not making us more capable to meet it if it is happening at the time. If it ever happens at the time of happening, if we're bracing against it, We're not able to respond to it to the best of our abilities.

[44:36]

So, for example, if something activates us and irritates us or angers us, can we just be quiet and not speak till we've calmed down? There's a pressure in those... they want to come out, they want to retaliate, they want to tell them your point of view and convince them, and even if you have to force them. So if we can just know we're activated, we're triggered, being triggered is never a good partner in action. Being triggered can give us a lot of information that then can lead to skillful action. But to just go with the trigger is never doing that. We have to go back and repair, which we can do. If we haven't killed the person, we can repair.

[45:48]

If we killed them, there's no repair for that. to know what's going on with you and to be patient with what's happening. Make space around it. Wait till you're calm enough to actually look for what would be an appropriate response. Now, Gil Fransdale, the teacher from spiritual I mean, a Vipassana teacher and a Zen teacher, he said, our practice is to help things not get worse. And I think that is a wonderful lens to look through at things, to look at how can I help this not to get worse rather than how can I fix this?

[46:50]

Because fixing is very often just we want to be rid of the pain that's in a situation, which can be enormous. And it's so much pain and suffering in this world that it's just beyond. So how do we create the heart that can feel that pain and then tread carefully, full of care, full of compassion, full of the understanding that I can see that much and there's way more to it. So also to see where are people that see another angle and can we collect, can we create the space where many, many angles and many views can actually be on the table together rather than to have them just fight from the beginning with each other.

[47:53]

And we have to do that also within ourselves, all the different parts of our beings, ones we like and the ones we have decided we don't like for whatever reason, because our parents didn't like them or we run into trouble with them. But so too can we also create that internally, that space of seeing what is and letting it be. not grabbing it and making it into something and not denying it, because if we let it be, it's in an alive state and it gives us information and it starts changing. While I'm looking for the thread to pick up, the energetic thread, I invite you to just do your breathing.

[49:15]

Visit your little still point inside your body. I want to end with two corns, if I can find them. One is called Summons by Aurora Levine Morales. Last night, I dreamt 10,000 grandmothers from the 1,200 corners of the earth walked out into the gap one breath deep between the bullet and the flesh, between the bomb,

[50:37]

and the family. They told me we cannot wait for government. There are no peacemakers boarding planes. There are no leaders who dare to say every life is precious. So it will have to be us. They said we will cup our hands around each heart. We will sing the earth's song, the song of water, a song so beautiful that mansions will turn to weeping. The mourners will embrace and grief replace every impulse towards harm. Ten thousand is not enough, they said. So we have sent this dream like a flock of doves into the sleep of the world.

[51:41]

Wake up. Put on your boots. You who are reading this, I am bringing bandages and a bag of scented guavas from my trees. I think I remember the tune. Meet me at the corner. Let's go. There's also one by Hafez. Out of a great need, we are holding hands and climbing. Not loving is a letting go. Listen, the terrain around here is far too dangerous for that. you very much for being here, for bringing your intentions into your lives, daily lives, just where you are, and of helping this world heal and ourselves heal.

[53:11]

Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[53:36]

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