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. Thank you, dear friends, for having me here with you. I think it's my first time doing a program with the San Francisco Zen Center. And I'm really happy to follow in my teacher's footsteps, Thich Nhat Hanh, whose picture is behind me, who also, I think, came often to the San Francisco Zen Center, particularly in the early years of the center. So I always like to invite us all to take our seats in our showing up in this virtual Dharma Hall together by checking in, by just sharing a little bit about who we are,

[01:27]

what brings us here today or what's alive in our minds and hearts today. It's wonderful also to know what land we are calling in from, we are living on, what land is sustaining us. And so if you are willing to put in the chat And if we can open the chat for folks to share what lands you live on in terms of the native people, whose land you're on, I'm calling in from the land of the Munsee, Lanaki, and Merrick peoples of Long Island, New York. So you could share your location and also something that's about you in this moment.

[02:29]

Something that's alive for you in your body, in your mind, in your heart. Something that you're needing here today or that you're bringing with you that you'd like us to hold together. So I'll offer some moments for us to reflect and put these in the chat so that we can also really arrive here together as a sangha. Know each other a little bit more. just to speak out a little bit of what you all are sharing.

[04:00]

Curiosities that some are bringing. Gratitude for Tai's presence and bringing his teaching into this ritual kendo. Happiness to see each other again. self-compassion, eagerness to hear the teachings, appreciating life of practice, being with sadness in this moment, hoping for ease, a tender heart, delight to see you again. Peace and tenderness to Mother Earth.

[05:05]

Community, interconnection, presence with challenges and uncertainties. Every step. Grateful for Thai, for Thich Nhat Hanh, and for you and for this chance to be together. Just the cat and me. looking for connection and inspiration, grateful for vast, deep human connection, grateful to be here in community. And it's so good to read the places you're calling in from and to have those First Peoples, First Nations, honored in the naming.

[06:10]

Greetings, dear ones, and thank you for your presence. So happy to be in community with practitioners, tender heart, finding hope for all beings, for democracy in the U.S., I'm grateful to have this opportunity to be with you and learn. Holding a friend who very recently transitioned. Thank you for sharing that with us. We hold you in that transition as well. Looking for wisdom and some peaceful time. Grateful for this moment, for this time here in community. to help me ground and manifest ease in my life. Grew up in San Francisco, a walking distance from the San Francisco Zen Center on Fel and Laguna.

[07:23]

And a shout out to Neil Brand, someone who also plays the banjo and fiddle. Seeking resilience and hope. Joy in rediscovering my creativity and being able to share it with those who are suffering. Thoughts from my friend Jeff who passed last weekend unexpectedly. Holding you, holding Jeff. Thank you for sharing, sharing this. So, Thank you for your shares, and it's good just to hear from you and to know what our collective is holding and bringing. Yeah, so a few more shares.

[08:25]

Delighted to be here with peace and a mind full of curiosity and joy. sitting with the Rittenhouse verdict yesterday, grieve, today working. And another one, grateful. Yeah. So I want to invite us to begin the talk now, and there'll be some space for questions and responses. in about 35, 45 minutes. I want to begin by honoring that today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance, November 20th. It's also known as the International Transgender Day of Remembrance.

[09:27]

It memorializes those who've been murdered as a result of transphobia. And it brings attention, awareness to the continued violence that transgender people endure. like to start by telling you about a Trappist monk named Father Theophane. I had a chance to hear him speak in person at Snowmass Monastery in Colorado. He wrote a small book that's a favorite of mine called Tales of the Magic Monastery. Kind of koans, but from a Christian perspective.

[10:30]

So he lived in this very beautiful monastery that I also had a chance to visit in the mountains, the Rocky Mountains. And he tells a story of going into a three-month solitary practice in one of the huts on the side of the mountain where he could be surrounded by this pristine environment and herds of wandering antelope and elk, birds and all sorts of creatures and quite far from the monastery. So he would go for months at a time there on silent retreats. On one of these occasions, he talks about praying and meditating deeply for three months and a question. arose within him, what am I leaving out? And he couldn't find a single answer, but the question haunted him and became a silent mantra that arose again and again.

[11:42]

When he finally prepared to leave the isolated hut, he was walking a narrow path back towards the monastery. At that moment, the sun shined directly on a simple rock on the side of the path. He bent down and lovingly picked up the rock. He said, I apologized to this beautiful rock that I had completely ignored. I stood up, looked around, and apologized to all that surrounded me for not being fully present. Apologizing not just to that which was beautiful and pleasing, but to everything that was part of that moment. So this is a question that can guide us.

[12:53]

It can be a deep practice that we whisper to ourselves over and over. What am I leaving out? This is a story for me about intimacy. Dogen says enlightenment is intimacy with all things. In this time of great and growing division politically, economically, culturally in so many ways this getting divided from each other, but also from ourselves and from the earth.

[13:55]

The medicine for this experience of division, separation, is intimacy. And dharma, mindfulness, it is a practice of intimacy. helps us to become more intimate with whatever is arising by seeing what it is we're leaving out. Practicing to really experience and live life deeply, fully, with our whole selves. It's a practice of getting close to life, coming close to ourselves, coming close to each other, touching reality closely.

[15:03]

So it's learning to see ourselves in each other and to see others in ourselves. In an intimate encounter, we open ourselves up to listen, to learn, to receive another, or whatever our object of awareness is, whatever is present. As some of you have mentioned already, I am also sitting with... the turbulence in the wake of the verdict in Kyle Rittenhouse's trial from yesterday and really wanting to stay intimate with this experience to stay connected to what this whole

[16:17]

very charged situation can offer us. So there is real fear and Anger and despair. And grieving. Confusion. There's great... This verdict really... points to the rifts in our society.

[17:21]

And so making space as part of intimacy to feel whatever the emotions may be swirling at this time. Creating a moment to pause, to open to and honor what it is that's here. However we see this reality. And just noticing. Is there a disconnect? Is there a numbing? Is there an opportunity? a hardening? Is there a heating up?

[18:25]

Is there a cooling down, a pushing away, distrust? Maybe relief, vindication. From what I've been hearing in different ways, of our society, there are basically two sides that are hardening against the other. And I invite us to give space to whatever our response or reaction may be in this moment, whatever sense of connection or disconnection of judgment, blame, hatred, disgust, sadness, compassion, open-heartedness, willingness to stand up and challenge the status quo.

[19:39]

Whatever is here, how to be intimate with that. What is our practice? And even in this moment of grief or great upset, what does it mean to ask ourselves, what am I leaving out? Can we be intimate with all the many beings involved in this very real situation of harm and deluded othering? And for anyone who isn't aware of this trial, Kyle Rittenhouse was 17.

[20:48]

living in Illinois, and he crossed into Wisconsin with an automatic rifle to protest protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, who were protesting the shooting by police of an unarmed black man, which left him paralyzed from the waist down. And Kyle Rittenhouse killed two people at this demonstration and wounded another person. And the verdict was just given yesterday of not guilty on all counts. So in the teachings of the Buddha, subject and object are not two separate things.

[22:02]

What we observe or perceive is not actually separate from us. So there are 18 realms. All of our experience is contained within these 18 realms. Eighteen realms are made up of the six sense bases. So the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, mind. The six sense consciousnesses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, cognizing. And the six sense objects. So all the things that we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, and know. So all of our life experience is contained within those 18 realms. What sense organs we use to perceive, the ability to make sense of what we're perceiving, and the things that we perceive, all of them inter-are.

[23:10]

So we don't have perceiving without the object of perception. They co-arise together. So there's no smelling without a nose and something to smell. In this way, the object of our awareness isn't separate from us. The subject of awareness. When the subject arises, the object is also there. There can't be a subject without an object. So whoever or whatever we perceive as other, as soon as we perceive it, we are also them or it. Our ways of perceiving that other come from us, come from our own mind, our own patterning, our own ancestral ways of perceiving.

[24:21]

So the perceiver and the perceived arise together. They don't arise separately. And the Buddha said, most of our perceptions are wrong. So perceiver and perceived arise together. And if most of our perceptions are wrong, What does that say about the object of our perception? Most of the time we don't perceive the object of our perception correctly. So this is why the Buddha encouraged us to be mindful when our sense organs touch sense objects. So that we won't fall. into unnecessary suffering, like taking a stick to be a snake.

[25:33]

My teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, also known as Thai or teacher by his students, he made a calligraphy that said, are you sure? And he invited us to post it up and to ask ourselves very often if we're sure about the views and the perceptions that we have. So intimacy is about seeing and listening to what is actually here. And not just experiencing life through our perceptions of life. touching directly, contacting what is as fully as we can, with a clear mind, with an open heart, without prejudice, without views, bare awareness and attention.

[26:51]

not through a filter or lens. To do this, we need to empty ourselves to perceive more accurately. We have to let go of our views and let the noisiness in our mind settle in order to hear clearly. Sister Gina is a sister in the Plum Village tradition. She was the abbess in the nun's hamlet when I was a monastic. And she tells a story of sharing mindfulness with the children. She asks them to be silent for a minute or so and notice what they were hearing. And they...

[27:56]

They noticed many sounds, birds, wind in the trees. And she asked them, were those sounds there before, also before you were paying attention? And they nodded, and they understood those sounds were there, but we only hear them when we are also there. Usually we're not there. We're not touching life directly. We're not truly alive because we're not emptied of all of the busyness in our minds that is like a veil between us and the actual reality of life. We are in a in a mind made caught up in our views, in our perceptions, our thoughts.

[29:01]

And when we are able to come to some stillness, to silence, meditation, to bring our mind and body together, bringing our awareness into this moment, then we can see that lens, that veil that's obstructing us, that's between us and life, and we can let it go. In the heart of the Buddha's teachings, Thich Nhat Hanh writes, there are many beautiful aspects of our consciousness, like faith, humility, self-respect. non-craving, non-anger, non-ignorance, diligence, ease, care, equanimity, and non-violence. Unwholesome mental formations, on the other hand, are like a tangled ball of string.

[30:09]

When we try to untangle it, we only wind it around ourselves until we can't move. These mental formations are sometimes called afflictions or kreishas. because they bring pain to ourselves and others. Sometimes they're called obscurations, because they confuse us and make us lose our way. Sometimes they're called leaks or setbacks, ashrava, because they are like a cracked vase. The basic unwholesome mental formations are greed, hatred, ignorance, pride, doubt, And views. So letting go of our attachment to views is a key practice of freeing ourselves from these basic setbacks or ways that we leak our energy, our presence.

[31:20]

So views of themselves are not problematic if we hold them skillfully, if we don't attach to them. They can be helpful if we know how to use them intelligently. So it's like climbing a ladder. In order to get to the next rung of the ladder, we have to leave the rung that we're standing on. To get to a deeper view, we have to be willing to leave the view we have behind. One of the ways of talking about right view, which is one of the eight practices of the Eightfold Path, wise view, skillful view, one of the ways right view is described is,

[32:30]

Letting go of all views. And that's the way of speaking of nirvana also. The extinction of views. The absence of all views. Not being caught in any view anymore. Ajang Cha, the Thai forest master, speaks about this in the same way. He says, if you let go a little, you'll have a little freedom. If you let go a lot, you'll have a lot of freedom. And if you let go completely, you have complete freedom. I remember a sister in the monastery.

[33:33]

had a practice of asking herself regularly, what is it that I need to let go of? We might ask ourselves, what view could I let go of? In the 14 mindfulness trainings of the Order of Interbeing, that The first three are all about non-attachment to views, letting go of views, not imposing our views on others. They came out of his experience of the war in Vietnam, which was a result of views, of ideologies. that led people to destroy each other and homes and whole ecosystems and cause terrible destruction.

[34:51]

And this is happening in so many places still. Our attachment to views is causing us to harm ourselves, harm other species, harm our planet. In one of these, the second training, one attachment to views, it says, truth is found in life. And we will observe life within and around us in every moment, ready to learn throughout our lives. Truth is not found in a view, in an ideology, in a position. It's found in life. We have to observe life carefully to be able to be intimate with life, to respond to the truth of life in the moment.

[35:57]

not our idea about it. So being intimate with life, being intimate with others, is being attentive to how we can find truth in each moment. So this is a quote from a teacher of mine, Jane Marshall, who writes, True intimacy is an awakening that notices that other humans are not simply objects in my universe of scientific knowledge, nor are others direct participants in my solitary contemplative awareness. Another human is another universe of awareness that is viewing me within their universe of awareness. If a person has little or no sense of intimacy, We call that narcissism, a state of psychological limitation having to do with being locked into one's own brand of self-imaging.

[37:06]

Intimacy is a realm of living that challenges narcissism. So narcissism, he says, that's from his book, The Thinking Christian. Narcissism is this inability to be intimate. on a personal level. And what are we refusing to be intimate with? First of all, ourselves. If we can't be intimate with ourselves, particularly with our own pain, then we cannot connect with others. We need to make a connection with ourselves and then with others. James Baldwin says, I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

[38:17]

So hate is the abdication of intimacy with ourselves. Coming home to ourselves to be with our pain is an important part of addressing painful interpersonal difficulties. Holding ourselves with care, compassion, listening to ourselves, being intimate with ourselves. So on a group level, there's also This in-group and out-group is also a manifestation of narcissism. One group not willing to be intimate with itself first, and then with another group that is considered other or less than. And the whole focus becomes on sustaining that group, which functions as an extension of the self, the individual self.

[39:30]

this recent trial with Kyle Rittenhouse it's an expression in my view of the narcissism of white supremacy and it condones and facilitates further expressions of violence and assigning the other as an object that's separate from us that is the distorted other that we cut ourselves off from. And in doing, we cut ourselves off from ourselves personally, collectively. So whose voices are we unable to hear in our own lives?

[40:54]

When we're separate, when we're cut off, when we see ourselves as separate, because we aren't actually separate, but when we see ourselves as separate, cut off, violence is born out of that vacuum. I once heard someone say that every moment of mindfulness, is a moment that prevents violence. That's because every moment of mindfulness is a moment of intimacy. It's a moment of listening, of coming close to. You don't violate that which you know and care for deeply. Hannah Arendt, a philosopher, a Jewish professor and writer, really studied how Nazi totalitarianism took over in Germany.

[42:02]

She says, what prepares people for a totalitarian domination is the fact that loneliness wants a borderline experience. usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century. And so many of us are so lonely. And without a grounding, without a... a sense of belonging to our larger whole. In the 1950s, people had twice as many friends as people do now in the US. Loneliness is a kind of pandemic.

[43:08]

And it's said to be more deadly than heart disease and smoking and so many of the top killers in terms of illness. When we're lonely, we're easily manipulated and pitted against each other. So listening deeply to the stories of others is a way to heal the narcissism that can arise on a group level. When in the early 2000s, Plum Village hosted groups of Israelis and Palestinians. Their work was to just

[44:10]

for the first week to be embraced by the community. And in the second week, they just spent time listening to each other's stories. One day, one group would speak and the other would just listen for the whole day. And the next day, they would switch. And in that way, there was a much deeper understanding that came about. And where people arrived at Plum Village seeing each other as enemies, They were able, over time, to take each other's hands and walk together on the walking meditation every day in the monastery. And they left there and they created a sangha, a group that would practice mindfulness together. Israelis coming into Palestine. This was before the wall. Palestinians going,

[45:11]

to practice with folks in Israel. Yavila McCoy says, proximity is the only way people learn and change. Proximity, intimacy, listening deeply, not leaving out. And intimacy, listening deeply, is also a way out of loneliness, prejudice, and discrimination. After 9-11,

[46:16]

I suggested that we set up a council of wise elders whose sole purpose was to listen to the suffering of people first in the United States and then other countries that felt hurt, harmed, damaged by the United States. And that the people who would be with the listening should be capable of really holding space for everyone for hearing all sides and that this this set of deep sharing and deep listening should be televised and that that is how healing might occur by allowing the truth of

[47:19]

the pain in this country, the pain in the world to arise. I'm very grateful to the young and older activists and climate pioneers in different countries, especially the global South, that spoke deeply at COP26 about this pain, this suffering, asking the world to listen, to open their heart, to hear. I think we still have a long way to go. But that was some very... Heartfelt sharing of suffering by many of those people from the countries most affected by climate change right now.

[48:32]

Children, millions of children starving in Kenya because of drought caused by climate change, caused by the recklessness of wealthy countries, developed countries, now having a direct impact on developing countries, poor countries, and the capacity of people in those countries to sustain livelihoods to survive. How do we listen to the wish to be free, to be safe, to be seen as a full human being in each of our unique wonder and dignity and glory?

[49:59]

It's there in the hearts of every human on this planet. And it's in those that are... It's in every species of this planet. It's in the planet Earth herself. But it's in the victims of violence and oppression and... It's in the perpetrators of violence and oppression. It is all of these facets of this jewel of humanity need to be included and understood and healed. Thank you for your kind attention.

[51:25]

And we can take a breath together and then we'll recite the closing verse together. 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.

[52:04]

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