time to start, right? It is. Let's do it. So it's great you can come. And so I think it's probably worth asking Well, let's back up a little bit from that. So zazen is this two-part word because it has two syllables, right? And one of the syllables is za, and the other one is zen. And the... The first particle, Za, is something that refers to sitting.

[01:04]

So this thing I'm sitting on is a Za Bhutan because I'm sitting on it and so on, right? The second, Zen, is a lot more complicated. And so first of all, it's the name of the Buddhist school or sect that San Francisco Zen Center is a part of. Let me see what's going on here. OK. And second of all, even more sort of significantly, it's a Japanese cognate for a Chinese cognate for a a word in Sanskrit and Pali, which means something like absorption or single-pointed concentration, and it is often translated as meditation, right?

[02:11]

So, okay, so that seems pretty straightforward. The usual way to translate zazen would be seated meditation. But just so you know, the people who founded the Zen school, you know, sort of counterintuitively do nothing but insist that Zazen is not seated meditation. It's something else. So we'll get into what it is, what it actually is a little bit later. But I just wanted to let you all know that the word itself is slightly complicated. I don't know if you can see this, Cad. This is... I do all my sitting in the garage. And this is the garage cat. His name is Mojo. And he's not actually my cat. He's just a cat that lives in my garage. And so he is going to be lurking about. So just, you know, some things may happen with the cat.

[03:14]

Every now and again, he decides when I'm in the middle of talking that he wants to bite me. And there's nothing I can do about it. So that may happen. So anyways, awesome. So there's a bunch of you sitting here now. And some of them, you I can see as odd black and white icons. Some are photographs and so on. But I wonder if anyone wants to volunteer an opinion about why anyone would be interested in seated meditation or your single-pointed concentration or absorption? And in particular, what was it that motivated you to log in at whatever time zone you're in and listen to me talk about it and watch Mocho, the garage cat, waltz around the garage.

[04:21]

If anyone wants to volunteer something, the way to do it in this context, particularly since I'm so far away from the stream, is raise your hand using the participants menu, and Kodo will turn on your mic. Anybody? Any thoughts about what motivated you to log in and check this out? Brad has raised the first hand. I'll unmute you now, Brad. Good morning. Good morning. Yeah, no, I have been using, I guess you'd say, current events as a reason to get a little bit more serious about my practice. I've been going to the Zen Center for about five years. And I felt that I needed, I'd like some refreshers this morning.

[05:28]

You know, I've been sitting daily for at least the last five years. But, you know, I just felt like, let's get some refreshers this morning. Nice. Well, that's great. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that, you know, even though it's not seated meditation, Zazen, one of the things that it actually is is a set of procedures and methodologies, right? And it's one of the kind of fascinating things about Buddhist practice in general and Zen practice in particular is that it focuses, if you look at it, largely on mechanism and on... procedure, which is to say practice, on what the practices and mechanisms are of living a life that feels awake and alive, right?

[06:35]

And those procedures can be pretty finely tuned, right? And so, yeah, it's definitely worth doing that. So thanks, and congratulations on on sitting on your own for so many years. We'll talk a little bit about that too. So that's great. Anyone else? I see one other hand or two. Was there another hand or is that it? Okay. It looks like Brad raised his hand again for a moment. OK, that's great. Awesome. Well, cool. Yeah, so that's a start. And I would say what? The fundamental reason for it goes way back.

[07:50]

points into the nature of the human condition. And so it's worth talking a little bit about what that is. And you look at the world, what you see, and pretty much, as Brad was saying, you pick up a newspaper or your iPhone and read some news feed. you see the human condition writ extremely large on a planetary scale. And it frankly looks like a train wreck. Most of the time, it looks like a train wreck. And on other scales, sometimes it looks OK, and sometimes it also feels like a train wreck. And those scales range from the experience of being in here in this body and saddled with or gifted with this mind and maybe yoked to this mind would be a better term, right?

[09:08]

And experiencing what that's like all the way up to watching the unquestionable train wreck that is global politics and all the little scales in between that you can see the way in which the human condition plays out. And whatever it is, it's not pretty. And what's also pretty unquestionable is that people have known about this for as long as they've we have a record of them knowing about anything. If you look back at all the ancient literatures of the world, so the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, all that other stuff, things that descended from oral traditions, and so we can assume are even older, but were written down quite a long time ago. So we have a record of them, right?

[10:11]

Oddly enough, a lot of what we have a record of from that era is economic activity. But all the stuff, not all the stuff, but a lot of the stuff that's not economic activity is a literature that laments exactly the condition that we're talking about. So if you look at the beginning of the Odyssey... As I recall, what it is, is it's a conversation between Zeus and Athena. And Zeus is saying, ah, these humans, such a pain. We give them free will, and then they go make a mess of things, and then they blame us. I think we should just wipe them all out and start again. Athena is like, no, they're not all bad. Look at this Odysseus guy. He's pretty cool. He's smart. He's devoted. He works hard. He's, I don't know. He has all these virtues. And we've really been kind of kicking him around the GN in the Eastern Mediterranean for decades now.

[11:18]

Can't we just give him a break? And so it kind of goes on from there. But, you know, pretty good summing up of the human condition. We have this free will, you know, with that and $5, you can get a cup of coffee in this town. And we're just... just go around and make a mess of things and then blame it on somebody else. In the case of the Odyssey, it was the gods. It's not all that great. And even back then, the gods recognized it. So... As long as people have recognized this, they've also been trying to cook up solutions and the solution or explanations first and then solutions. And the solution that was cooked up by the Buddha about 2,500 years ago has a number of novel features that I think at the time were probably pretty surprising.

[12:25]

I'm not, I think... surprising in at least in one way in that they were pretty modern that I think the earlier explanations often had to do with this assertion that the world was full of vast natural forces that don't necessarily have our best interests at heart and we have to act in order to trick them, placate them, satisfy them, whatever, so that they don't just wipe us out. That was really the old school solution. I remember there's a temple in Linda, a very, very old temple that's in the present idea, sort of identified with Athena, who actually knows what...

[13:30]

what people called her originally, but what you had to do to make the Athena of Lindos happy was feed her picnic food. No meat, no all the kind of animal sacrifices that other people were doing. You had to bring her... honey, cheese, bread, and all this other stuff. And there's a path up the side of the Acropolis in Lindos by which people would ascend carrying their picnics to the temple on the top and land at the top and drop their picnic and say, here, take this. Be happy. Have a picnic. Enjoy life. And don't ruin mine, please. And it's not totally clear that that worked, but at least people were gathering a lot of picnic food and presumably eating some of it.

[14:37]

But whether or not that solution worked out particularly well, after a while, people kind of got sick of it. And there was this moment of cultural ferment that was actually spread pretty broadly across the what was then the civilized world, India, Central Asia, the Aegean and Western Asia, and so on, in which people started cooking up new explanations and new solutions. And one of them was the Buddhist solution. The novel features of the Buddhist solution are outlined in this talk that the Buddha supposedly gave after he woke up. And without going too deeply into the story of his life, the main narrative arc of the story of the Buddha's life is that he is

[15:51]

this guy who had everything and he had experienced pretty much everything the world had to offer. You know, according to this story, he was a prince. He had this life of privilege and was being prepared for a further life of, of, of power and influence and, and, you know, and then bolted leaving his, his family and his responsibilities and, his newborn son and so on, and ran off into the world to try and find a solution to the problems that had been bugging him exactly around the nature of human suffering, which is what we're talking about here. And in the story, he goes there, as I was saying, there are all these new ideas and methodologies. And he goes and he tries out all of them, not all of them, but a lot of them. philosophical schools and yoga schools and so on.

[16:55]

And he goes to study with this teacher and that teacher and the other teacher. And after a while, they're all, hey, you're really great. What if you take my teacher training course and then we can do this together? And he goes, no, I'm not doing that. And he walks off and tries something else. And in the end, he's living in a forest, practicing these deeply renunciate ascetic practices, really kind of running down his body, eating very little, drinking very little, spending all day doing very difficult sort of yogic meditation and so on. he has this revelation that, one, his original life as a prince was not all that great and didn't bring him any closer to an answer to the questions he had about human suffering and the human condition in general.

[18:08]

And also, this life of being a forest ascetic was not doing it for him either. And it was actually killing him and not bringing him any closer to an answer. And so he said, well, here's what I'll do. Maybe this will work. I'll sit down and I'll meditate until something comes up. And he does and something does. He has a moment of awakening where some insight or deep understanding of the exact nature of the human condition arises in him. And for a while, after he wakes up, he thinks, I couldn't possibly explain this to anyone. It would just confuse them. And in the story,

[19:13]

a whole bunch of beings of various sorts, you know, spirit beings, humans, and so on, all come to him and say, oh no, you have to explain this to people. And finally he relents and he goes to give a talk. And the people that he's giving a talk to are his former companions in the ascetic practices business. And they don't really think a whole lot of him because he's, he stopped being an ascetic. And so he has to really give this succinct and compelling talk. And what he says is, well, life is suffering, first of all. It's sort of the four axioms of Buddhism. And I think no one really needs any convincing of that. As we... we're talking about earlier, right?

[20:17]

You just read the paper or think what it feels like to be inside your own body or bring up what it's like to be in any sufficiently complicated work environment in which people really care about what they're doing. At all of those levels, human activity is to be fair, can be tremendously rewarding and inspiring, and at the same time, has potential to cause tremendous and really long-lasting suffering in each of us. And we also generously give that to each other by all of the usual techniques, which no one really needs to needs any prompting to recall. Everyone has stories like this. Families, work situations, friend groups, larger social organizations or political organizations, American politics, and so on.

[21:30]

They're full of stories in which the emotional qualities of people's relationships have deteriorated so far that they're incapable of actually doing anything together except making each other unhappy. It happens a lot. And that's just the people part. If you look at the effect that that has on the world today, it's also appalling how much suffering that causes in our fellow beings. even in the living systems of the world that we don't usually think of as having agency or intelligence. So much disruption and kind of horror as a result of this.

[22:31]

And then here's the really novel part. He says, well, what he says is that the suffering arises from a certain kind of grasping and aversion. But if you kind of dig into the PowerPoint presentation that you can derive from these top four bullet points, what you discover is that he's really saying it's built into how we're constructed as humans. And it's associated, interestingly enough, with those things that we think of as our greatest gifts. So does anyone want to volunteer, by raising your hand, a guess about what are

[23:34]

what our greatest gifts are as humans. I mean, we don't run particularly fast. We're not particularly strong. We can't hold our breath for an hour. We can't fly. We don't have poisonous fangs or spines or any of those things that make it really great for other beings to get along in the world and make a living, right? So what is it that we have that's so awesome? Does anyone have a guess about that? Nice. Yes, we have a brain. Well, you know, snakes have a brain too, right? But what's so special about ours? It's the way we use our intelligence. Yeah, I think that's correct. So it's clear that, say, cats, although you'd never know it to look at him, engage in intelligent behavior, this kind of biting, for example.

[24:49]

But what are the particular qualities of our intelligence that are so incredibly useful? Well, other organisms also form communities, but it's the way that we interact within our community. Yeah, totally great point, right? And I would hazard an assertion that the fundamental components of that social interaction that has enabled us to take over and ruin the planet are... our really sophisticated language ability. We have this highly symbolicated and richly grammatical language capacity that we all use every day as though it was just like drinking water or walking down the street. It's amazing. And an ability to do long-range planning

[25:57]

of a kind of remarkable sort that allows, among other things, the building of iPhones and all that stuff. And then finally, this remarkable ability to construct social identities, like layer upon layer of social identity to which we relate in a way where it's like because we're an ex, a Democrat or a Buddhist or a member of the DAR or whatever, we assume a certain agreement with the other members of that social identity, which those assumptions may be paper thin, but they have tremendous power to compel action and emotion and so on and so forth. So yes, absolutely, that's right. That exactly... Those capabilities are not exactly unique, but they're kind of hypertrophied in humans.

[27:04]

And they've allowed us to, using our capacity to be broadly and richly social, to do a lot of stuff, including sit here and have a conversation between people who are at some, you know, impossible remove from each other using this little box that's sitting on a stand in front of me and some other box that's sitting on the stand in front of you. Right. Amazing. Right. Really remarkable. So, yeah, those are those are our gifts. And they come with a tremendous cost. And and the the the cost. is that in order to use them, we have to construct, reify, and attach significance to this notion of self and other that turns out to be tremendously problematic.

[28:13]

Everyone has this. Well, not everyone. Almost all people build a model for the world and a model for the self, and they situate that and animate that model for the self in that world and attach a tremendous amount of significance to the actual physical location and situation of that self-model. And it's social. position and status and so on. And we obsess, worry, plan, agitate, execute agendas and so on around those two things a lot. Not always, but a lot.

[29:22]

And we're predisposed to believe that our agendas, needs, wants, desires, and aversions, all the rest of that sort of stuff are supremely important, fundamentally more important than anybody else's, and deserve special attention from us and probably from everybody else all the time. And you can imagine why this causes problems. It's not hard to see, right? You stand to people that are constructed like this up next to each other, and because of their conditioning, they have different ideas about those things, or they have a conflict of interest. And it can easily lead to conflicts that are, that are powerful up to deadly in their consequences.

[30:29]

I have a friend, really kind of marvelous guy, who in a former life was a British war hero and commanded a tank column in the Bosnian War. And his column in one winter evening was going down this very remote country road somewhere. And he came upon two guys standing in the middle of the road, just beating each other to a pulp. And so he calls up his two burliest sergeants and he has them separate them and sit them down. And somebody brought out a little cook stove and sort of warmed it up and made some tea. And they're all sitting around. And he... through a translator, asked them, you know, who they were and what they were doing there. And it turned out one of them was a college professor and the other was a doctor.

[31:33]

And they'd lived these, you know, supremely benign kind of middle-class lives in Bosnia until things fell apart. And then here they were out in the woods fighting... to the death over a small cache of firewood that each of them had discovered that somebody else had left, right? So they were actually fighting over the right to steal somebody else's cache of firewood and bring it home to their family because the heat had been turned off and the only way they could figure out to warm their family in the middle of winter was to have this firewood. And at one point in the conversation, one of the guys said to everyone, he said, you know, You may think we're really kind of idiots here, but the truth is you're only about 10 days away from being where we are. It doesn't take much. That's the essence of this condition. It's easy for conflicts of interest in which caring is involved to turn into deadly disputes.

[32:40]

And it gets worse because of our capacity to build social layered social identities and motivate large groups of people behind those social identities such that you have a nation over here that disagrees about something with a nation over here, you can get genocide, systemic racism, brutal, long-lasting wars, and so on. Awful. deeply entangled with those things that make us human and that are the stuff of our lives, right? If we didn't have language and this willingness to meet using language, we wouldn't have poetry and pop music. That would be bad. We wouldn't have... So many of the things that we, if we didn't have an ability to plan in the way that we do and work together in the way that we do, we wouldn't have any of the things that we think of as valuable and beautiful in our lives, right?

[33:53]

That would be bad. But entangled with those capacities is the ability and even predilection to misuse them and cause horrific suffering. So that's the bad news, right? The good news is that the Buddhists then said, okay, but freedom from that is available right now and continuously. And I don't think anyone really needs any convincing of that either. If you look deeply into the... nature of your inner life and the nature of your daily life, it's not all calculating and obsessing and stressing.

[34:56]

There are moments in which that stuff kind of melts. Imagine, for example, your most intimate remembered conversation with someone who you really trust and with whom the The barriers sort of fall away when you talk to each other, right? Wonderful, right? The suffering in there melts in a way that is easy to appreciate, right? Or imagine a time when you were deeply engaged in some physical activity, work or play. Sometimes in those moments, there's no thought of self at all. It's just the activity, right? Wonderful. So there's freedom. Right in the middle of a human life, there's freedom. And then the Buddha said, well, and here's a program that you can execute in order to align yourself with that freedom.

[36:03]

And the program is sort of eight bullet points. I'm not going to list all the eight bullet points, but if you back out of that into the sort of meta points, they are this. Become aware of what's happening, right? How this process works, right? Change your life such that you become... It promotes more awareness and connection with that knowledge of what's happening. And meditate and be mindful. So that's it. That was his talk.

[37:05]

according to the story of the life of Buddha, everybody in the group was like, OK, we're doing that. And that was the end of the story. And since then, there's been Buddhism. And after a while, there was Zen Buddhism, after a pretty long while. But now we're going to look at the kind of last point, the last bullet point of the program, which is the meditation and mindfulness, because that's what we're here for anyway. So here's what I'd say about that. The basic instructions for meditation in the Zen school are written down in the 13th century, and they kind of go like this. And the document in which they're recorded is pretty interesting because it initially says something like, oh, this Zazen is great.

[38:05]

It is the key to relief from suffering and a life that feels free, untrammeled, and skillful, a way of living comfortably and skillfully with the human condition. And here's how you do it. And then the entire rest of the document is pretty much procedural. So it says, put down some matting. Put a cushion on top of it. So here's a cushion I'm sitting on. Actually, I have two cushions. I'll talk about that in a bit. And it says, sit down. Tell everyone to go away and stop bothering you. And stop worrying about whatever it is you were worrying about before you started sitting down. And then... and then sit. And he says in the document, he says, sit either in the full lotus position, which is this, or he suggests also half lotus, which is this.

[39:12]

And I'll go into a little bit more detail about that. So if you wanted to sit in full lotus, you would place your right foot on your left thigh, and your left foot on your right foot. And the only reason I'm demonstrating this is because there are some things that are kind of good about full lotus, right? You'll notice that my knees are kind of close together, right? And there's equal weight because of the way the posture is constructed. There's equal weight on my knees and on my sit bones, which are sitting on the cushion. So I feel my lower body is pretty solidly planted on... the mat. And that's really what you want. But when I started sitting 27 years ago, this posture was impossible for me. And over time, it's become more possible. And now, after 27 years, it actually turns out it's pretty comfortable.

[40:14]

But for those people for whom it's not comfortable, there's also half lotus, in which he says, Well, let's see. I'll do it like this. Here, I'll do it the other way. Your left foot against your right thigh, like that. Now, notice what happened when I did that. My knees moved further apart, and the issue there... is that that puts more stress, oddly enough, on your psoas muscles and your sort of upper quads. And you'll notice that if you explore it, that the further apart your knees are, the more pressure there is here and that you need to sort of work with that, right? So there's another posture called Burmese, where you just drop this leg all the way down to the mat. That doesn't, that, you know, Both of these alternate postures reduce the amount of twist required in your knees and hips, but they further stress your sort of upper quads and psoas muscles.

[41:27]

So there's another posture that's been adopted over the years called CESA. The basic form of Seza is this. You just sit down on your legs. It's actually a variant of a yoga posture I think called Duryastha or something like that. You sit, I mean, essentially like this, right? And this is also tremendously comfortable. But for some people, it's only comfortable until your legs start falling asleep. And often that happens. I don't know if you've ever done a tea ceremony, but in tea ceremony, you have to sit in this posture for a couple of hours. And I guarantee you, after a couple of hours, your legs are going to be asleep. And usually, for a lot of people, the time is more like 10 minutes. So you don't want to do that. So there's two possibilities for how to mitigate that. One is you can take a cushion and put it on edge, put it in between your legs, and then sit down on it so that your sit bones are resting on the cushion.

[42:46]

So that's one variant. And the other variant is you can use a bench like this. put the bench underneath your sit bones. I prefer the bench because it allows me to keep my legs aligned and together, and that's more comfortable for me, but some people may get different results. So anyway, so those are the kind of postures that you can do while seated on a mat, right? I don't have a chair here, but... There are also chair postures, and it's perfectly, it's completely possible to sit zazen in a chair, and then why not, right? The injunction in all of these cases is you want to feel really planted. So if you feel, you know, the nice thing about seiza is that you're pretty planted.

[43:50]

Your knees are down, your... Your butt is firmly planted on whatever it's sitting on, on the bench, on a cushion. Or if you decide to really go for it and sit just on your legs, your butt is pretty planted on your legs. And it feels solid. It feels balanced and so on. And the same would be true for sitting in a chair. What you want is you want your feet to be firmly planted on the ground. And you want to have a sense that your weight sitting on the chair is being carried essentially on your sit down. So there's a kind of tripod of support and a kind of solidity. You feel like you're solidly planted enough so that you can sit for 100 years. So that's the lower body posture. And everyone probably needs to explore the detailed nature of their own lower body posture because everybody's lower body is different.

[44:51]

One of the things you have to play with, is height, is your seat height. So let's say I was sitting in full lotus all the way down here without a cushion under me at all. You'll notice that my left knee is elevated a little bit. And that's just because of the way my legs are built. But if I get up here, obviously, Both my knees are solidly planted. And if I had a cushion this high, I could sit like this without a problem. And for me, this height is pretty good. But you can adjust the height of your seat. You can get these support cushions. You can buy them online. You could probably make one for yourself. I forget where I got this.

[45:54]

I think I got this from an online supplier. But you put them under your cushion, and you can also put them under a joint that has a particular problem with being supported because it's stiff or because you've had some injury or something like that. So you can use these to adjust your seat and make it be the right height and give you a sense of sort of balance and solidity in your lower body posture. And then, not surprisingly, there's an upper body posture as well. And it goes like this. You want to straighten your back. And what that means is allow your back to take its natural curves. A little in at the base of the spine, out around the shoulders, up in at the back of the neck and up, right? sort of have the sense that your head is being elevated by maybe being attached to the ceiling by a piece of fishing line, right, or something like that.

[47:02]

Gently, but a little noticeably, your head floats above the shoulders. This allows your chin to fall, and your face to sort of fall into a vertical plane, and your chin to be a little bit tucked, but not forced into a tuck. Just it naturally falls into a tuck. We keep our eyes open and downcast. And there's a hand posture. It looks like this. Put your left palm on top of your right palm. Bend your fingers around in a circle and place that right here. So where here is, is your thumbs should probably be... at or above the height of your navel, and the rest of your hands should be sort of below that, and that you make it a nice big round circle. That draws attention to this part of your body, and we're gonna talk about that in a second, right? So, oh, one last thing.

[48:07]

Your belly and your lower back should feel soft and flexible. There's a little bit of engagement of these sort of large muscles to keep you balanced, basically it should feel pretty soft, right? Not clenched or, and also you should notice whether there's tightness in your quads and psoas muscles and trying to loose that as well. So just to sit here for a second in this posture, eyes open and down, bringing in the light. bringing in the pattern, not really looking at stuff or looking around the room. And then try this. Put your attention in the middle of your body, just below your navel. There's a place there that in Japanese they call the hara. It's kind of the bottom of your diaphragm.

[49:07]

So just to put your attention there and maybe bring a little tension to that place, maybe by slightly... Tightening your lower stomach muscles. Slightly tightening the muscles in your pelvic floor. And then from that place, breathe out. So breathe all the way out. And then at the bottom of the breath, pause. And then breathe in. And then out. Do this about five times. And then let your breath settle into its natural rate and depth, and just watch it.

[50:12]

Maybe when you breathe in, you can imagine your breath sort of floating up your back. And then as you breathe out, down your front, flattening the belly and into your heart. But if you don't want to do that, just watch what your breath actually does. By now, you've probably noticed that your mind wants to think things.

[51:32]

It's okay. That's what minds do. That's what we're like. But just to notice that when a thought comes up, it can either arise and just disappear, or it can sometimes rise up and grab the attention and sort of pull you in and hold you for a while. But invariably, it lets go. for one reason or another, either because you hear something, you feel something, or just for some unknown reason, all of a sudden that thought event dissipates and you're back here. And just to, in that moment, take the time and make this subtle effort to really connect with the breath, with the body, with the contents of your sensorium, and step directly into the present moment. This is it. This is the only moment in your life right now. This is it. Just to inhabit that as fully as possible for as long as you're there and then watch what happens next.

[52:41]

Eventually, other thoughts will start to suggest themselves. Oh, look, I should think about breakfast. What happens after this? Who's that cat? Et cetera. Just to watch that cycle. That cycle is yourself expressing itself moment by moment in the middle of your life. So just to get intimate with that and intimate with the body in which it lives and breathes and works. That's the activity of Zazen. And furthermore, As I understand it, we'll get to do a whole lot more of it in a little while because there's an official period of Zazen coming up pretty soon, right? Is that right? We probably have time. Do we have time for a couple of questions before that? Or what do you think? We do. I think we've been just over five minutes.

[53:44]

That's great. Excellent. So does anybody have any questions? I might see a hand. Nicole, your hand's been up for some time. I'm not sure if you have a question now. Oh, it was before when you were asking about what do we have as humans that is unique. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I think I would add our capacity for compassion. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's right. I think that's part of... of how we're built. Yes, completely true. Yeah, I agree. And then you kind of went into that just on your own and elaborated more on that. Cool. That's great. Yeah, well, thanks for that. That's really good. And it's worth noting that these capacities that we have, they're present in the experience of sitting.

[54:54]

You can observe them in action. in pretty much intimate detail. They're not wholly conscious, but their results present themselves to our attention in the process of sitting. And that's one of the sort of gifts of zazen is that those things show up, basically. So thank you for that. Any other questions about zazen? I have a question. Great. Go ahead. Zach, it seems like there are two ways of thinking about emotions when you're meditating, and one is just to notice and drop the emotion, and the other one is to just fully let that feel the emotion until it disappears. What do you think? Yeah. Well, okay. So that is an extremely good question, right? There's a... I think the...

[55:57]

And the answer has two components, and those components are the sort of ground of practice, right? One is, there's a line in ancient scripture that says something like, turning away and grasping are both wrong because it's like a massive fire. What's like a massive fire? Your life. And the way it expresses itself in thought and emotion and sensation and so on and so forth, it really is what we're all falling through space and burning. That's what we're doing all the time, right? So massive fire. It's like the sun, right? Sometimes, and so the request there is to stand as close to that fire as possible not reach in and grab it because then you get burned. But if you turn away, then nothing will ever warm you, right? So to be close and stand up right next to it and inhabit the moment of being in that.

[57:01]

That's great, right? And as applied to emotions, that's the thread that says feel the emotion as it plays out. really sense its effect on your body and mind. Notice the narratives that spin up around it. Notice the direction that it wants you to go. But don't do anything because that's what you're doing in Zazen is you're being in the middle of your life and you're not acting out your default response. So that's one thread. The other thread goes like this. Sometimes that's difficult. Sometimes it's so difficult that it's actually... that it can be crushing. And so it's good to have to develop a set of personal techniques or personal skillful means around how to just let things go. And what's useful for that often is this idea of sort of grandmotherly mind.

[58:09]

You can bring up a mind that's that's self-empathic, self-compassionate, and that listens and understands and goes, ah, I know that's really hard. And you use that act of self-empathy as a way of letting go of whatever it is that's playing out in your mind, right? And there are other ways to do it too, to refocus your concentration on the breath and use the... that the awareness of the breath and awareness of the body to sort of dissipate the emotional load that's arisen in the moment. Practice requires both skillful means and engagement with direct experience. You can't do one without the other. Does that make sense? Or do you have any more questions about that? Because it's a deep subject, right? Any other? Yeah, anyway. No, I really liked how you put it.

[59:13]

You really just have a choice, really, to which way you want to go and experiment with all those. Yeah, exactly. And there's a way in which this has a little bit in common in behavioral therapy. You initially try the direct experience route out on things that you don't think are going to totally floor you. And over time, you kind of work into it. That's kind of how it works, actually. So I think that might be all the time we've got, right, Kodo? It is true, Zach. Okay. Well, it was really, really great sitting with you and talking about this stuff. And so after this, there's a period of Zazen, and then there's the talk. And then for those of us who are... part of Saturday Sangha, there's Saturday Sangha, which if you're interested, there's a bunch of information on the website about that if you don't already know about it.

[60:16]

And you're free to join. So then that will be after the talk. So thank you really a lot. And see you soon. That was wonderful, really. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Zach. Thanks, Cotto. Thanks for hosting. Thank you. Thank you, Zach. Thanks. Bye. Bye.

[60:42]

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