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he didn't answer
time
so i am very fond memories of this place
spoken here are well placed here and now work as a spiritual practice reading a book now
very good i i am there was a combination of restaurants non residents
the book that i wrote his
was primarily directed toward people who work in the outside world
office jobs are high pressure corporate jobs by basic
a goal in writing the book was to try to point out ways in which people could
not have to write off that time in their life as sort of a spiritual desert but could find ways to do the traditional practices that you're all familiar with mindfulness practices breathing meditation visualization
practices of generosity the bodhisattvas bow all those sorts of things while you're on your way to the fax machine so it's a very
the out there in the world kind of book because that really reflected my wife and i left here i went to work as as to reset it and smith and hawk in which is still around most of you probably know the company the time he wishes
burgeoning entrepreneurial garden tools company with a strong connection to green gulch and your i
rose and the executive ranks rather quickly is a very small company so that wasn't too hard to do and then
the amount of time the reality of having been a zen-like for fifteen years began to hit home and i realized how am i going to possibly survive in this kind of environment with the background that i have in the knowledge that i have from practice so out of after fifteen years of doing that
both and and and in my own business
that was really was the genesis of of my work
i do want to talk about work tonight in a way that i haven't ever done to an audience says behind an experiment but to this audience i think it's appropriate that i do so it's the kind of
stuff about works that i really couldn't talk about in my book is it the book was really designed for general readership but before i do that i do want to say something about
a major illness that i had ah
because i think those of you old timers who yummy would kind of like to know how it all turned out and also i think that it's hard to for media talked all of you without your knowing is part of my life of about twenty months ago july of ninety nine
i struck was struck with a near fatal case and encephalitis a brain infection and was for quite a long time
quite profoundly disabled i couldn't walk i couldn't
talk i couldn't do much of anything and i had to be i had to learn how it was like having a major stroke i had to learn how to do everything i can
i couldn't play the piano i couldn't
do much of anything for more than ten minutes at a time so hum that was very profound experience in addition to which i couldn't people when i got physically able to i i really couldn't sit for about a year ah
for reasons i might go into a little bit further because they're sort of interesting for those who do sit that
the brain rules and there are things that can happen in the brain that can make it impossible for you get
to sit male weitzman recently read quoted suki roshi will always seem to say wonderful things even long after he died
a quote from the only luxury i'd never heard where he said i think it was in the middle of of zazen to suddenly said here often would do that he would just say something that sounds and he said sometimes as and doesn't help
and that was extremely helpful for me to have no
because it made me feel better about the fact that that was my experience it didn't help at all
first period of time now it helps me a lot but there was a time and sounds i wasn't a thing
but i'm much better now i've regained all my faculties and except for little low energy and
that sort of thing i'm pretty much all better which is from western doctors point of view
off the chart completely i mean there's no medical precedent for it they can't explain it all i can tell you is that besides having very loving family members and friends have prayed for me i was visited twice by a very talented to them healer and whether or not
it was he for some magnificent deity who saved me i can't say but he was there and he
the second time came on his own just because he intuited that without his coming i might not prevail so i'm grateful to him as well as rate many other people
all that being said let me get to the topic of what i wanted to speak about tonight and i hope i hope that maybe some time for discussion afterwards because i'm sure that i'd like to hear from you i have a feeling that work here hasn't changed all that much there's still the the fields thirst kitchen
there's cleaning there's ah
all sorts of things that people do in a monastic kind of environment
i suppose my first lessons in
spirituality and work we're just watching suzuki roshi work
and since probably very few have you ever knew him in the flesh
let me describe him to you he was said about five feet tall maybe on his tiptoes it's a very small me and weighed about ninety pounds of in pounds
he who
look like a very gentle feather a and until he did something like move a heavy stone and and he realized he was immensely strong when you wanted to be
there are lots of stories about his strength there used to be a fellow unfortunately now now no longer with this sandy alomar love this was a suzuki roshi is attendant and elements six foot for about two twenty seven seeing the two of them together nice really a trip
an alum use taking a walk around passed after his lumia an elegant course was a very strong man and
hiroshi loved stuns and so down to test the heart he would work with them and the stones down her really quite big some of them were you know
wait and thousand pounds
and allah would try as best he could to help suzuki roshi movie stones and
he told him one occasion where the two of them are trying to move this stone and allen which just all this might just you know pressing a try to move the stone then he felt something beside him and suzuki where she came up underneath him and started pushing the stuff just
this little man was way stronger than allen elements more than twice the size of twice its weight so how how he acquired that strength remains a mystery but
he was
remarkable and very energetic and agile when he did things and he was a great fan of work when it is sainz used to be was clean first and second
which is also a very japanese notion that you know cleaning is or seventies
very very important and
i mentioned on the new rules just before the lecture and i don't think that that zip the japanese ten style of work can really be understood unless you actually visited japanese monastery and watch the tremendous speed with which people work
that's kind of the expectation
and suzuki roshi was that way he would work very quickly and thoroughly and
he actually i was his attendant on period of time and he actually
you know i supposed to wipe them
room down with towels wet towels and i was very clumsy at the very slowly wow i thought same people were supposed to do it and one time he just came up grabbed a towel away for me without sanity to east
show me how supposed to be done and i realized i had a lot to learn about wiping down floors you know he was quite an expert at it from on years so actually what i really want to talk about tonight is
i have notes here
the four stages of mindfulness and the poor guys and it's relationship to work on and if we have time maybe
the distinction of what i would call work without distraction and work with distraction so that's my
topic
terrain so let me begin by have
ah quoting harry ron and used to be kind of a mentor here hard to describe who he was he was part american indian but he helped get the farm started and he taught people here how to do work of various kinds because he'd done a lot in his life so he taught pm
apple well the and he was an agronomy so he taught how to work with farm tools and tractors he was a kind of jack-of-all-trades very wise man
and he was always very annoyed
he was a kind of a rough talker you know the
server a rough neck in some ways and he was always annoyed at at the way that we hear worked he didn't seem to him that we've made a real connection that he thought that we should make between what we did in the sand don't eat it outside the sandra
would crash the cars into things and people would try to well they run into flame to their hand and he wants them do it shake his head as they went off to the infirmary to get treated you know things like that he didn't think we did too well and it's true in those days most of the trucks that greenville jones which full of dance so
i want to talk i've thought about that comment for many many years harry was very serious about it because he knew how serious we were about our zen practice in our zendo practice and so on
since i'm dedicating the following to harry because i think that
he's the inspiration for what i'm going to talk about so let's start with ah
and the work of san and what goes on when we sit on and the stages of that this is very thoroughly laid out particularly in the terror bata texts like the of a city maga and others
not so might not so explicitly and zan but suzuki roshi used to talk about it as the four stages of sand or four stages of zazen he described it somewhat differently than i am going to but i'm gonna use
i'm something of his language in doing so
the first i don't know if you still do this but in my if my day the first type of zazen that we used to teach people was counting the birth the breathing
that's still a practice offered yeah
so let me talk about that practice because that illustrates my point i just really want to make a point
so if someone comes here for the first time that's what they're taught is to count the brass is a way to begin to learn
how to harmonize and concentrate the mind
and characteristically this is coming i used to give size and instruction to a lot so i have some experience of people reporting back in the first thing people will tend to say as oh well that's easy and kind of boring i mean one two three four you know what what is there to that
that you know they find it very easy to do for some while maybe this was your experience when he started to you and that's what i call the first stage is a kind of
it is a kind of mindfulness but it's very much in mind it's very much like sitting here and counting one two three four five ounce of your mental thing and samadhi or real concentration and it's true since really hasn't
begun at that point but there is some some preliminary sense of concentration if you follow i'm saying because you are counting and so you're not strapping with lots of other things so there is some beginning to be a common and regular realization of the mine so we call that of purse
stage ah
i think suzuki roshi would call it normal thinking or regular thinking
but it's not like distracted thinking it's concentrated thing but still very regular thinking
then a person might come to practice instruction and say i don't know what's wrong i i used to be able to count my breast is fine and now i'm i can't do it i'm losing track and fourteen fifteen and i'm like i'm getting all i'm getting all distracted
and they think that that they're going backwards that they used to be able to do this thing well now they can't well actually what's happening is the mind is actually beginning to sell and the the practice is beginning to deepen
and as a consequence the the mental faculty
the the
what we call mana or the ordinary mind that counts is beginning to
ah
settle and not be so active and consequently you will discount so actually this is a deeper a beginning to be a deeper stage saucepan although most people don't realize that they think think they're you know failing in some way anyone to know what to do to get back to that old wave perfectly doing it right
do you know
really the whole point of this thing is to learn how not to do it right you know to let go of that and let the mind start to settle and harmonize so this is what we would call the second stage of of meditation or ah
sometimes we call say second jhana the word zen as comes from word john the same word it means
concentrated mind and i think zucker she's term for this was clarified thinking or pure thing
ah the counting is still going on but
there are some
connotation to it there isn't a sense of same sense of effort the thing is beginning to take on a life of its hard and
begin to move
some people find this a little bit disturbing but actually this is the beginning really of true saas and is when this sense of settling begins to happen so that's the second stage
in the third stage if we're still talking about counting on
the a new experience begins to emerge
county becomes clear again like it was the beginning but there's a different quality about it there's more of a sense that it's happening by itself that the concentration on it is self perpetuating or self
motivated and it's not that the sense of effort is gone there's a quality of been able to sustain it without any sense of effort it's a kind of whiteness
of concentration and of consciousness and
this is what suzuki roshi called
ah
no thinking but you still have some emotional feeling so hot
the intellectual part of the mind has come to rest but the deeper forces of the mind
your emotions your feelings may be anger restless and sadness those are still there but the exercise of concentration is is going much better so people start to feel very good now i'm really now i really know how to sit
ah and then there may come a time when
ah
the something deeper happens and it's a little hard to describe but
this is the point at which perhaps counting begins to disappear as a separate practice and there's just the breath
and the breath is clear and how there's no separation will be between
ah somebody called you in this breathing it's happening there's just breathing is going on and secure she called this whole stage or deep stage where even emotion is gone and you don't really feel anything
this is really maybe the the real dharma gave her the true gate of sounds in practice at this point ah you really have entered the gate and then deeper practices from this begin but i don't want to go into that because
those practices don't really relate to work much but these stages i've talked about up to now have their analog very clearly in ah the state of mind that you have get activity
so now i'm going to it
is it isn't clear so far what i'm talking about okay i think up to now this all should be pretty familiar to you because you're all sitters and you all spend a lot of time and zendo itself from harry roberts point of view your you've been in the zendo now we're going to come out and do something
so here is where the whole issue of work comes in and what is the what differentiates and ordinary non-practicing person's state of mind in work and as an practitioners state of mind and work well it has
as very much to do with these saying stages of mindfulness that i've been discussing
so by way of illustration let's take a task that probably most of are familiar with them
kotick about cutting carrots because cutting carrots as a little dangerous
a little more dangerous than dishwashing as the water's too hot for cutting care if you have a sharp knife and you can cut your finger so
the stereotype that there used to be a rock at around in the world is that sand students were very very slowly because they were trying to be mindful and i remember an incident and smith and hawken and there was a time when a lot of sense to work at him and hawking and and the warehouse manager came to me
he said lu you i guess you know about the send staff down here is a yes i do you was so
you know just a regular guy didn't know anything is he said i've got this guy from zen center working on the warehouse and he is so slow i mean could you talk to him or something because i don't know what what to say i mean you just i mean he's a smart guy and anything but he just slower than any money so i sat down and we talked and guy was an english major and you know by now
are working a warehouse packing boxes which smith hawkins is rather challenging thing to do almost as hard as cutting carrots because we had to pack boxes with in shovels and little tiny you know widgets and audience was a kind of an art to do and had to wrap it all up with tape and get it so wouldn't it wouldn't
check around and make sure it off it in a box and it was a challenge to get it in one box rather than to and so forth and i i asked this fellow what was going on i said you know that john think should be slow and he said well this is great you know this is just like green gulch i i get to be very mindful here i i'm working
and i said yeah but you know this is a business and you know you're being paid an hourly wage you you've gotta produce some stuff in ah
he said well if i do that i won't be mindful in be careless and there was a guy named dave who was working at the time high school drop out
kind of a chatterbox drinking coke radio know your phone's always jap joshing around cursing fooling around a real mess saw tight
anybody has been to high school is met them
but he was really good at packing boxes i mean really good gave had a natural physical intelligence that was unparalleled he could take a table of desperate garden tools and it can be listening to rock on the radio and treated his diet coke can tell dirty jokes think we can
if you can and you know she would never make a mistake you know if the state where head to go from the left side of the right side is just girls heat stapling with to have left he puts show any case it up he'd be telling a joke even listening to rock and will get to just be a was so cool
and he was the best hacker who they all kept track and you can pack more boxes with west mistakes and anybody there and you know it was just and i pointed that out too
my santa friend and he was really really insulted if you know you said look i have a master's degree from duke or something
and i really think this that to compare me to this guy stay and it's just it's just awful you know how can he be of aragon of anything i said well i'm saying is a paragon i'm just pointing out that somehow or other he can pack boxes with more a adeptness and care really bad
faster than you can
just some it's a bag so you think you should check out what davis doing and see if you can learn anything so
that was kind of one of my formative experiences about this whole issue of mindfulness and work
so let's talk about cutting carrots because that's something maybe a lot of you have done if you've never done it before
you start out
pretty slow because it's a sharp knife and you're not too familiar with the task and carrots or uneven they're all different you know so you have to be very careful and slow and so yes you're being very mindful this is at the remember that four stages i talked about this is like the first stage of counting the breath
you know you can do it very well in a certain fashion and your carrots are cut beautifully but it takes a long time to cut those carrots
now many have you been to a japanese restaurant or recently or ever be ever watch the sushi chef
you ever watch from cut vegetables you know
and then very slowly a reach out for something and then they'll bring it over and then very very fast and slow and fast you know this is ten fifteen years of mastery of these skills you know it has nothing to do with speed it has everything to do with your state of mind can
and the harmonization of the body and mind in what you're doing what's common to all these different ways of working his attention attention is the key to all a practice it's the secret there's a famous send story about a q some of you may
read about a q was a famous he was a mess up like to receptor happened to be any illegitimate son of the japanese emperors so nobody could say a word believe me
he got to be abbot of a big some monastery at one point but he had affairs with prostitutes
body poetry and
pissed on buddha statues and get all sorts of very crazy things have all of which is written her in any books in the library about image she about but there's one famous story about in that i love it's in my book
because it was eric doesn't mean he wasn't a he was still the same guy and a wealthy patron came and said oh venerable added please
could you write me some calligraphy
now the hidden agenda here is that to get a calligraphy from a famous added by kick you whom everybody sort of secretly knew was the son of the emperor was a big coup and you could go home as at rich patron and hang it in the altar and get a lot of points for that in japanese culture so it was a big deal to get a cue to do
calligraphy and typically ascent sent master would write some kind of poem or quote from the sand call on or something very know elevated so accused said sure to do that and they got the materials picked up a and wrote the character for tension and mindfulness on scroll me said years
and the patron didn't want to say it was so far from what he was expecting that he was nonplussed yet this man has such high status he couldn't be criticized so he said venerable master i wonder if perhaps you had something more you were
ish to right
and if you said oh yeah fine he took the school gaffney wrote the same character again attention
get the best and
patron tried one more time
how to politely asked the abbot if he would please finish his sin aphorism and so you this time quite irritable he wrote attention attention attention so they were spies the same character and that was the scroll with patron got so this is
always been very important story for me because the lesson is very clear this is this is the key to everything paying attention but there's lots of different ways to pay attention and as because deeper into practice we find that attention
ah
develops or migrates from being
a conversation between subject and object in which subject pays attention to the object like you're paying attention to the carrot very closely and the night very closely to or counting your breath to subject and object becoming intimate or close and not so clearly
differentiated ah
and then finally subject and object disappear and ah there really isn't anything but the care and maybe in the end there isn't anything even the carry isn't there it's just the activity itself so if you keep in mind or or think about a sushi chef you watch watching a restaurant or anybody who's very so
gilded something already skilled
restaurant worker cutting carrots who cuts them extremely fast extremely accurately but with great attention or maybe not even attention that you could notice maybe that person is so good at it that they can be talking to somebody else and still make no mistake by dave packard you know who was really so good at packing
in some way we had actually son
natural physical samadi i worked with him and i saw it he had a kind of talent for this work and he could do it better than anybody even know penis superficial way you would look at him and say he's not paying attention but how could he not been paying attention his work is so good
so attention maybe needs to be written five times because there's actually five different kinds at least five different kinds and
so in this environment monastic environment where a lot of your work can be done luckily for you without distraction unlike the larger american workplace you have the opportunity really to bring the lessons of zendo out into your
activity and begin to practice with the various possibilities of attention in the same way that you do when you're sitting and in fact that is really to pay off if you will have sitting practice is not sit to sit you sit
to live and living is activity is working is is ultimately in our tradition of the manifestation of the vow to liberate all beings that's what you're here to do and the work in the zendo is really to develop the capacity to do that in whatever activity
the you're in so when you're picking vegetables
the
you can pick them very very slowly one by one that's one kind of attention you can take them very quickly and sloppily that's a kind of inattention but there's something going on there you can pick them very quickly but very perfectly and your own state of mind can be attending to your work
not attending to your work thinking about your boyfriend or girlfriend or very much
mean if a sushi chef with those super sharp knives starts thinking about boyfriend or girlfriend i think they might lose a finger you know a part of the fifteen years of training you know what a sushi chef traditional in japan first two years that all they do is sharpen
two years just a sharp they learn to sharpen the night
can you imagine how del that must be in a certain sense and i'm going to be funny i don't
why do they do that because you're cultivating a certain very very attuned kind of attention or mindfulness and only when they can sharpen knives to the masters satisfaction are they allowed to use the knife
i suppose it has something to do with knowing how the am sharp and i is
that they practice sharpening the knife for so long and
only after many years are they allowed to do advanced techniques like that very thin slice into fish that they do and other sorts of very elaborate things these are all manifestations of
a kind of you might say applied zazi and or take as harry said taking you are zen practice out of the zero and into the workplace the highest stage of all this is that really the secret
stealth weapon of my book is that actually the kind of practices that i wrote about in the book which you're trying to do these sorts of things in a highly distracted
a profit seeking greedy
i'm not very caring environment of corporate america is really the highest challenge of all it's the highest practice and
if you can do that i never claimed in my book that i did it i claimed that i tried and i think it's a it's really the fundamental challenge of the whole society
and this is one of the little ah
you might say incubators of that alternative mode of work to bring
that kind of sense of concentration and do a highly distracted environment that has no sympathy for that kind of attention at all if you can keep your wits about you and that kind of environment then you can be deserve to be called the for work master
somebody who really can work and to be able to be a vice president of marketing and advertising agency and have the same
the presence of mind and attention as a sushi chef
i have yet to meet that person but i'm still looking and you know i'm in the business world still and so i have my eyes out and if anybody thinks that i'm the one because i wrote a book about it
i'm humble enough and honest enough to disobey them a bad it's very hard to do but i i did try
and when i was sick i learned that
there's a kind of pain attention
that you could do when the actual physical
ah brain cells that
that make attention possible or physically damaged i had to try to do that
as that was the biggest challenge of my life to try to pay a ten that when i literally did not have the the brain capacity to do it
that was a very humbling lesson you should all be very grateful to your brains that they work as well as they do because as a survivor of of a time when my brain didn't work much at all i realized that even in that situation it's possible to make some kind of effort
and during my time of rehabilitation i met people who are much worse off than i was who'd had strokes are we had parkinson's who had epilepsy realize that harm
this
this notion of attention the a queue was so adamant about in spite of the sort of protocol of the patron coming to the abbott and abbott writing something that would be impressive on the patrons wall if you obviously have no patience with that he wanted to write what mattered
that there is a kind of attention it's so deep that if you really can't even talk about it you can do is do it and i think that those of us who knew suzuki roshi and i think i'll conclude on this note who knew him as a teacher will all agree
that his deepest teaching was wordless it was just watching him and be with him that counted the most and i can't really explain what i mean by that
yep
say yes you have been there
he was a very special person in and his energy still pervades all of zen center that's why you're all here one that the man hundred pounds a wisp of a person who even when he was dying of cancer could
blue huge stones
it's very moving thing during a member and it's been thirty years since he died and he still as though
beacon in my wife and probably one of the reasons i survived
the illness that i had is because i had and strength that i didn't know i had that came from him i think
he two faced and actually succumbed to a fatal disease and
he was amazing
to watch him dying and page tree
i'm walking around in the halls barely able to stand up completely normal cheerful exactly as he always was no indication that anything was amiss you know friendly you know
to his last breath he was just saying
it's a lesson that i will never forget if those who were there will never forget it was astonishing
but he had a power that
goes beyond anything that i've talked about tonight but it underlies everything that i've talked about tonight and i hope that maybe some of what i've said is been useful to you maybe has some practical application i picture all of you doing the various things that i use to do here you know
and i think about your your efforts to sort of figured this all out this sam stuff and you know san san and working following the schedule and you know what does it all mean
i'm not sure i know anymore than you do but for what since you asked me to say something i've done my best not so i'm happy to talk with you as much or as little as you like i'm not falling asleep yet although i may say yes time
no i do keep it says something about saving all things and how you see that is being manifested by someone who may be
making that now as they cut carrots or whatever and also how you see that is manifested in your system sushi chef who is very skillfully doing the task has they're killing you
as opposed to the first person may not be so skillful
well first person may or may not the first person is more aware of some deeper but it has an intention to i
follow the buddha dharma and let's take us our example a sushi chef who isn't interested but nevertheless
is do me the job and paying attention the way that you described well what comes immediately to mind and you can look this up is the in three pillars of sand by philip cashflow there's a description it's about his master yasir shah there's a description of five kinds of
zan or five kinds of let's say attention and concentration and
the third of the five where the second of the five this second of the five yes is called
non buddhist centers in outside the way that is concentration
good examples would be martial arts teachers or
shares or and people that develop the martial arts masters are often have tremendous samadi power
so that's not very good manifestation of the bodhisattva vow but they have perhaps great meditation skill so yes tiny classifies that are nearly as related to buddhism but not really a part of it so there's a there's a
and overlap to circles you know between buddha dharma and samadi and then samadhi and then non buddha dharma and then there's some intersection where you have you can you can also have the reverse you can have somebody who is a very deep practitioner and a very deep lover of the da
arma
can't concentrate at all
there's the famous example of the are hop and sixteen gar hot the sweeper now i love him he was simple minded he was kind of an idiot everybody thought couldn't do anything had no concentration ability but he was the sixteenth are how he was greatly enlightened
because it is hard not because it is samadi power so samadi isn't everything but it's
it helps
but at the same time the bow is in everything either but it helps so it at the extremes you could have the bow with hardly any samadi if the dow is strong enough and you can have great samadi with hardly any bow and unless you have a very practice tai it's sometimes hard to tell the difference so
people might get totally wrapped up in the some martial arts master and think they're right greatly enlightened and there's simply greatly concentrated and they're actually in their own state of mind cold blooded killers yeah
there's there's a phrase in the city maga that i love
there is actually a dharma i'm getting very technical here but for your benefit i forget the pali word after all these years but it means wrong samadi
don't forget the words but the example that it uses is this a dharma this capability of the mind is that which causes the murderers nice not to miss
you can look it up so a murderer has great samadi
in a certain very crude sense of the word but completely antithetical to anything called the vow that that make sense yeah i remember that can you bring it up that that trays always stuck in my mind wrong samadi cause they recognize this that the monks who built the rb be
and that that somebody in fact it says in the rv dharma this is all coming back to him now
samadi itself is ethically neutral
of people are in sports yeah people in sports you know like there's the psychic side of sports that book by mike murphy about quarterbacks who you know time slows down and they see a light and they throw the book
has a touchdown well people think there's something spiritual about that it's samadi and it's definitely out there but it's not
you know it doesn't have much to do with what we do but it's not entirely unrelated you know there's some or we shouldn't we shouldn't put down people in sport sometimes those people in their hidden lives have a a real spiritual bent because they are so good at what they do and so concentrated or it maybe later in life they
you can come to it
so concentration is good vow is good but are two different things you know mean when they come together than you have one good
buddhist practice or
yeah when you mentioned earlier the corporate environment the very greedy very kind of an unfriendly to mostly sort of pensively have we will you want to work them
i didn't say i wanted to work there i needed to work there
i had a family i had to make a living for work their way anybody works anywhere you know this
just know sheer necessity
no i didn't want to work there it was not something i wanted to do it all and i didn't like it
the most
that's an honest answer i wish i could give you some profound
purpose in mind but it was really pretty practical didn't feel if you could find good family
right
yeah certified
really made a an effort but that happened to be a time in my life when i was pretty confused and didn't have a lot of time to think about it so you're right yes i'm i'm sure i could have come up with something better but
it's getting hawk and also at that time you know as i say that robot is it phrase patagonia all of a sort of new age businesses they all fell back into the pit in a sense then
you know you can't really escape the fundamental mission of what business is all about is about money and
it took me awhile to figure that out so i was maybe a little more idealistic than i should have been and also i as i say i wasn't thinking too clearly at the time
yeah i too love two questions one is
while you were ill so ill did you ever wanting to know that because we chant for people who do well being pants on the tenth of a hobby die from the i was just want to hate
if you had what was your experience did you actually experienced that that when you send many people prayed for me and i was just wondering what the experience from that side was if you can even describe it was one thing in the everything was about the body something like you're making me about seeing a
finding your body again
well to the first point

yes or no
when i was in a coma
a very very deep coma a common that the doctors said i would never come out of the i actually was dreaming constantly my mind was continuously active nobody knows this but i know i've written a book and i told you about it it it's coming out next year you can read about it i had hundreds of dreams all of which i remember
the wound new and a the medical
machines were registering no brain activity so poorly on them
and i had one punch mean that i've started
because it answers your question i won't tell you the whole during the guy anyway i was in a farm very much like green gulch and i was visiting and i was walking down a path and this old black man said oh you you ought to go see guido he's in charge here so i went down to see guido guido is this cheerful italian
guys in oh come to the bar and we're going to have a drink and hit us italian accent you know so we went i would follow them down to the barn and all these people were there
yeah and he said well we know why we're here it's because of roberto roberto is no longer with but we all remembered him we pray for him we loved and we're going to have a drink for a beer and i had this wonderful sense of all these
strangers
letting me into their circle and their family and i was part of it i felt so wonderful it's like this i had this big italian family is very stereotypical but you know the dream just picks up on tv or radio or whatever if you know if you know it a dream is the dreams were were highly paranoid i the in their dreams all the doctors are trying to kill me for example i mean
dreams try to help you but they may have they're not very smart hosted the time so this dream was a very nice dream and and he had a keg and i figured it was beer but turned out it was whiskey
drew out these big tumblers of whiskey and a big glass and seen it and we all had that we gave a toast to roberto you know we drank and we often warm and wonderful and everybody was you know
the national know embracing so
what is that true i mean i think it means that at some level i sensed
that so many people were to are thinking about me and it came into the jury because i never had most of my other dreams are about trying to survive but that dream was about a being loved by a wonderful people
so that's what answer
the other answer is that i was too sick to know what was up which and was up so i and any any conscious level i i barely knew who my wife was a this highway in a highly altered state of mind and barely conscious and
hallucinating quite a lot so i i'm glad that so many people cared about me but
and some fundamental level all i was trying to do is survive so that's my other answer as far as your question about the body is concerned i told you before the lecture that com for the first year after my illness because of where the on this was in my brain
and breathing were highly distorted and almost hallucinogenic actually they were loosing a check and so
trying to do zazen was a very unsatisfying and quite frightening experience because i functioned much better when i had something to do my mind kind of
mobilized its limited damaged resources when i was eating their meal or watching television or doing something but when i was just being there on the awareness of
all it was seriously wrong with my nervous system was overwhelming and so it was too hard
i felt how very bad about it i saw it goes a real wiki that i couldn't sit you know i supposed to be a zen student and student suzuki roshi i'm supposed to be tough and everything but it was too it was too hard and i wasn't strong enough maybe somebody stronger maybe suzuki roshi could it but i couldn't and i try
i'd i found chanting worked channing was the practice that work for me because i became up for a while of faith buddhist or share to i mean a buddha with these beaks he's reacts with the beads i used and to use the boys and to cheer and bow and something or something then was more like work
work actually then like city was on
it worked for my nervous system so that was an example where i kind of activity samadhi or work somebody and you know into them booties and that's a very important part of training is those kinds of practices
ah were much more successful from the in easy my suffering than harm sunset he was until about a year that sauce and began to coalesce again and i actually could i be sitting there i felt like my breath with somewhere across the room i couldn't buy
and it didn't know and didn't even feel alive or something that hard to describe it's hard to describe
i have neurological damage states unless you're in the mid aughts there's no words to describe oliver sacks is written some marvelous books about people who've been neurologically damaged him and how strange it is very strange
you probably all seen the movie rain man yeah
the to stand you can do lighting calculations in his head now it sort of like that you're in this world of surpassing strangeness
what will you i'm not there anymore
hope that answers your question
what how much longer should we go well are usually and around a anything is now but didn't take another question so we can be fine chair am i gonna have a different experience avoid showing that can stages of learning to do something here and will be a thousand or wow
work and getting more
attention as you go it seems like for me well for instance like harvesting baby lettuce i work on a fireman it at first it was like i was a lot i was really slow and it was like the meeting and lead counsel that as count everyone in
my attention just to be so there till they keep count and to do it right and really get you know everything trim dry and now it's like i can something from the nva they i memorized how to do in my body to trim and then the
counting just happened and i'm right on but my mind can be like thank you for different things well i'm doing this and i can do it perfectly but i can i'm totally distracted know that's that's part of it
that's that's certainly a stage that distraction is not a bad thing i talked about that when i talked about counting the brat and then you find you can't do it at very well or then you can do it but then i guess i just talking about the stage where you're doing it but your mind is off somewhere else what you're doing it that's a stage two
that's a kind of concentration i wouldn't worry about it
it's an inevitable stage in the process that the fact that you can do it and yet your mind is free means that your concentration is pretty stable
but it's maybe not you know you're not a lettuce master yet but for a pretty good something
but actually you know
you know someone once asked suzuki roshi were all the time when i'm in size and i'm thinking about things in his answer was what's wrong with thinking
so at some level if you're doing a good job and you can also think about other things
maybe you shouldn't be so critical yourself maybe that's pretty good
no one there's no god on high this looking into your mind and saying okay i see a thought their units has to be wiped out you know the fact that you have that freedom to do their job and also think is is pretty good
there's a certain theme that i think probably the sushi chefs think about lots of things they're good enough to be able to do that you know but the master sushi chef the one that wears the purple clothes he's probably just thinking about the pitch
heather appears can you say anything about games mindfulness well davis kind of like a i forget your send name susan
mayor mayor like me as question you know he had a kind of non buddhists a concentration ability he was like a natural martial arts student you know if you go to martial arts school every so often somebody comes in and they can just do it they had a knack for a town a bruce lee kind of prodigy
type person that their life might be a complete wreck and probably it is and in all other respects they're not very admirable but they have this ability and dave actually got fired not long thereafter not because he wasn't a good worker but because he failed to he was drinking too much ep on the show up on time
so i'm not holding him up as a paragon and much of anything except that he was a rogan acker and i think that's all i really brought it up for is just to point out that
this whole issue of mindfulness and attention is it's kind of complex and the buddhist literature recognizes that goes into some great detail about the different ways in which concentration is manifested in remember what it says concentration by itself
is ethically and spiritual neutral it has no a particularly good or bad qualities in and of itself what it has is infused into it by your character so a a person with good concentration in good character is a highly admirable person
person with good concentration and bad characters person with good concentration bad character
i wouldn't trust him with you know that
much
maybe one more if there is one
no thank you know if it's in yeah but
what analysis oh well so why i want to argue this but bombings i practice and performance and i don't think that i think that someone is mean anything much larger to kill people they don't i'm just that point i the you so it is i studied martial arts to and i study with teachers that
ah made it clear that if you've got to a certain level that they knew killing techniques and they would teach them as part of the curriculum
you're right i mean that's ninety eight percent of martial arts has nothing to do with killing people but i was thinking more the rate the origin of martial arts a saint japan particularly in the samurai class was very explicitly that was their job is as the warrior class to learn how to kill until effectively by we no longer use it for that for
purpose but if i know what what kind of martial arts last edo which is it is very peaceful yes i started keto quito to but believe it or not they are killing techniques and an akita
if you don't have you've never heard of them ask a black girl
the to let him know if they've ever heard of them and then because our yeah
gnabry many people will talk about it but i studied with somebody who did and you sort of have to go to japan the you know them done this a who was invented by buddy dyer national show well they say that bodhi dharma and getting a lot of things slowly but according to buddhist monks the brackets for the right and china are absolutely and one of the reasons they did is because
they walked along on pilgrimage and they had to defend themselves against bandits and they weren't allowed to carry weapons that was against precepts and so they had to have some of that's interesting surviving
so
you know this is a whole separate discussion there's a whole range in martial arts i quito actually
i knew somebody quite well who studied the way shiva who was in the founder of aikido where sheba went to china to actually refined his understanding of ikea for the uganda quito en quito is some harm
hartley can go and it's partly of martial edge ancient chinese martial art car called bagua in which is very circular motions and tom
and was one of the techniques studied in the monasteries by monks you know karate literally means empty hand means no weapon the and it was a technique used by so i hope i didn't offend you in any way by so i think they should tell you that that and as a martial arts is about killing
and it isn't now but believe me at one time that's what it is used for a lot of and there's a very horrific book which i almost hesitate to tell you about
it is called zenit war know and and it's probably in your library and if you think that the practice that you all and practicing has nothing to do with killing or martial arts or bad things read that book is quite sobering
the zen sect in japan was very implicated in some of the very bad things that happened in world war two and ah
my feeling the feeling of many of the people and including the author that book from i know is that the zen school was patronized for many centuries by warriors and
we talked earlier about corporations money talks and temples should always be careful when their money comes from if professional killers build your temple you have to be a little careful about
what the quid pro quo might be maybe they want to know how to concentrate better in a gamble so they can be better on the battlefield so the send school in japan as a very complicated and special history and is closely allied with the samurai class and the samurai class were after all master swordsman and there
job was to funny
so
but this would all be classified in that section in the five pillars of sand under non buddhists
xiaomi he explicitly talks about martial arts section perfect
q
the