This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening. So we're starting a new time at Tassajara, the spring work period. And it's really new for everybody. You know, some of you may feel like you just got here and you're brand new and everyone else knows what they're doing and you're kind of out of it. Or some of you might feel like I've been here longer than all of these people except Leslie. And I really know what's going on and they don't know what's going on and they should get it together. It's wonderful to be back.

[01:01]

This is my home. I've come back here many, many times. But really, for all of us, those of us just coming out of the practice period, it's very different now. If you ask any of them, I think we're all in a little bit of shock for how gone the practice period is. And yet, here's still Tassajara, but in a different form. So it's new for those of us who've just done the practice period. It's new for those who are returning, you know, who've been here for work periods for many, many years, some of them, some of you. But still, it's new and different this time. So I kind of wanted to put us all on the same page, just to remind us all that it's new for all of us. And then my hope is tonight to talk a little bit about, you could say, what is the practice at Tassajara?

[02:02]

But some of you might not use that word practice so much. So you could also say, what's going on here? What are we doing here? And again, we may have many thoughts about that, assumptions about what I'm doing here and you might have assumptions about what you're doing here you know whether that might be that you know you came to help a place that you care about a lot to help take care of it or maybe you came here to get enlightened or maybe you came here to study Buddhism or to just get a break you know Get away from the rest of your life and come here. And even though we work hard still, somebody else cooks your meals and sometimes somebody else does your dishes. Once in a while you have to do them. Sometimes you have to cook the meals too. So even though all those things are true, I would say there's something else going on at Tassajara for people who call themselves students.

[03:18]

And also for people who don't call themselves students. That something else happens here. And tonight, I'll call that being more in touch with, being more able to experience our true life. Somehow being able to be there more for our true life. So where does that... true life, if I can use those words, come from. I would say it comes from the interaction of our karmic being, which we carry around in our body and mind, and everything that happens around us. So we sometimes have the feeling that here's me, and I'm walking around in the world, and things and people interact with me, or they impact me. Something happens and I either like it or I don't like it.

[04:19]

But I'm sort of moving around through my life and then things happen to me. And I participate in them. And that's one way of describing it. But another way of describing it that's really just as true is that actually as we move around or as our life happens, as it happens in its ongoing way, there's A new me created all the time by this interaction with whatever, whoever is around me. So there's no me moving around through my life being impacted by things. Rather, kind of think of it as it's more ephemeral. It's smokier. It's like there's this energy moving around all over and a new me is created out of it. And that karmic body and mind is still part of it. and everything else that you, each of you, as we interact with each other, a new me is created.

[05:24]

And this usually comes into conflict with some of our ideas about ourself. We have ideas that we carry around about who we are, and maybe usually is the wrong word, but at least it sometimes comes into conflict with our ideas about ourself. Sometimes we're pleasantly surprised by the new me that is created, but a lot of the time we're slightly appalled. Which is part of why I wanted to talk about this tonight, because especially for those of you who are planning to stay here longer, it can get kind of confusing or even frightening or disappointing that... the new me is often a very familiar or a pretty familiar old me. That in this karmic realm, lots of the new me being created has a lot of familiarity to the old me that's come up at various times.

[06:33]

And we might think that that is somehow a mistake. You know, that you came here to really settle into... different you you know and that some freedom from those old habits might be available to you here at Tassajara and I think some freedom is available but the freedom actually comes in the midst of the old habits instead of just leaving them you know outside the gate or at the other end of the road so those A lot of those old habits will probably appear here at Tassajara. So that's one thing that I wanted to try to do in this lecture is to encourage you to not be disappointed or offended when that happens. But to expect it, that actually that's what we need to meet in order to deeply and fully experience our true life.

[07:36]

So as I was saying, we tend to carry around some ideas about ourself. I wanted to tell a couple of stories here. One I just read in the Santa Cruz newsletter. So if some of you just read that, excuse me, because I'm going to repeat it now. Kokyo used it in a lecture recently. And it is this, that out there in the real world, in town, this woman, She had a Saturday morning off, so she decided to give herself a treat and go to the local coffee shop and take her cookies that she'd bought and read the newspaper and drink her coffee and eat her cookies at the coffee shop. So she went to the nice coffee shop and she ordered her coffee and sat down at the counter and got out her bag of cookies and... proceeded to drink her coffee and open the cookies and take a cookie.

[08:43]

And the man who was sitting next to her, having his coffee, reached over and took a cookie out of her bag. She was like, what? What is he doing? But she went on reading her newspaper, drinking her coffee, and she took another cookie, and he took another cookie. She said, this is really presumptive. They're my cookies. Who does he think he is? But she didn't say anything. She went on, and she took another cookie, and he took another cookie. And by this time, it seemed kind of strange. So she didn't really want to talk to him about it. She kind of just wanted to get out of there. She was trying to enjoy her Saturday morning with her cookies and her coffee and her newspaper. So anyway, they continued like this until there was one cookie left. And then... He reached over and broke the cookie in half and took half and handed her the other half. And she was really not happy, but she did not want to get into a conversation with this weird guy who was going around eating people's cookies.

[09:51]

So she finished her coffee and she left the coffee shop and she went out to her car and she got into her car and there on the seat of her car was her bag of cookies looking just like the bag that she had just shared with this gentleman. And she realized, oh, he wasn't eating her cookies. She was eating his cookies. And he was even nice enough to share the last one with her. So you can feel like her world, just when I was telling you, her world just like switched around, right? Her whole idea of herself and this guy and the whole situation just Just like that. It's totally wrong. And we can understand that. I mean, we have that kind of situation. So we get these ideas of ourselves and of the world that are pretty, even though that, I mean, that's a simple thing, right?

[10:55]

And it seems like a kind of surface thing. I am... a person who has carried her cookies into the coffee shop and deserves to eat them, and now I'm being impinged upon by this guy who is eating my cookies. Seems like a simple thing, but it really is a kind of subtle, deep thing to be able to have the flexibility that what we're looking at might not be the way it is. or might not be the way that everybody sees the situation, at least. The other story, which I hope I can make fit in here, I want to find some way to bring this in because I realized this morning that today is the 33rd anniversary of the Zendel fire at Tassajara in 1978. And, you know...

[11:55]

because I was lecturing tonight, I was trying to look for relevant things. And so, oh, well, maybe there's something about the fact that it was, you know, something about that fire that could be brought up. And then tonight I was sitting at dinner with Galen and Diane and Flip, and Diane and Galen were talking about how they had been here for, they had been around long enough to be able to say, I knew you during the fires. And they were talking about not the Marble Cone Fire or the Zendo Fire, but the Kirk Creek Fire and the Basin Fire. And so, again, it came to me, oh, yeah, the Zendo Fire, 33 days ago today. So, pardon? 33 years ago today, thank you. Or days or hours or kalpas, yeah. So we had, you know, the practice period was still going on at this point.

[13:00]

And the summer before had been the Marble Cone Fire. And those of us who were here at the time had worked really, really hard to protect Tassajara and had been successful in that and felt really good about that. And then that winter... But it had burned all around. So that winter, there were what they called 100-year storms. So the creek was very high most of the winter. And the road was washed out numerous times, completely gone, because the culverts weren't in the road yet. So when the creek would overflow, it would just wash out the road. It would just come down the road to Tassajara. So we'd gotten through that. Now it was the spring. You know, the flowers were coming out. The creek had gone down. And it was almost the end, you know, the end of the practice period. And we were doing a ceremony. I wasn't actually here.

[14:01]

I should admit this. I was actually out at Jamesburg waiting for my oldest daughter to be born, which is why I can remember the date so easily. She wasn't born on this day, but she was born very soon after this. But they, we, were here and... in the old zendo, down where the student eating area is, having a ceremony, which at that time we only had once during each practice period, the Shosan ceremony, where everyone asked the abbot a question. So almost everyone at Tassara was there in the zendo. When a fire started in what we now call the pit by a propane refrigerator, and because it was a lot of old wood there, it just came roaring up out of the pit, to the zendo, and someone luckily happened to notice by the back door of the zendo that it was in flames, basically. So people had to leave, most of them left by the side door, and some people got out the back door, but a lot of people didn't get their shoes.

[15:06]

It was really, it was very dry wood. And then they, you know, immediately switched from ceremony mode to trying to get water onto the fire. which I'd forgotten because the road had washed out so often. The water lines that come down from the reservoirs had been washed out, so we had reconnected the water through fire hoses. There were a lot of fire hoses left over after the fire in the summer, so we connected the water to down here through the fire hoses, but it was kind of looped through the trees because the road was washed out. just before that, so there was no pressure in the water lines when we turned on the fire pumps. So the people were bringing water from the creek and throwing it on it, and they were up on the roofs, and they managed to protect the kitchen and the pine rooms and to stop the fire at the Zendo. But here that evening, basically the heart of Tassajara, the Zendo at Tassajara, was gone.

[16:15]

Just like people would wander by and just look at these, this smoking ashes, you know, after all of protecting it, you know, through the forest fire and through the floods. Then somehow by a fire right here, you know, homegrown fire, the heart of Tassajara was gone. And it felt, it was a lot of despair, actually. It felt really impossible. to go on, and the summer was coming, and what were we going to do? How was it going to really be Tassajara? So as you can see, something quite surprising came out of that. This zendo was built in about three weeks. Not quite like it is now. There wasn't any ceiling or lights, and there weren't tons, but the basic room was here. And again, that kind of surprising... oh, this feels like something that we love, something that we depend on, is gone.

[17:20]

It's just completely burned up, gone. What are we going to do? And yet, the response of some people, Paul Disco and Richard Baker and various people, was to just build this room, which turned out to be actually better in a lot of ways. It's less hot in the summer and less cold in the winter to be up here. So, again, that our idea are not fixed exactly. It can't really be fixed because the world is working against it being fixed. You know, our idea of ourself and who we are, we try to figure out who that is and hold on to it and rely on some part of it. oh, well, at least I'm honest, or at least I know how to crochet or something, you know, something that we can rely on. At least I can practice Zen. At least I can, well, I don't know if we can sit Zazen, but we can call ourselves Zen students or something.

[18:26]

So we try to get something like that, but the world doesn't really let us rely on it because everything is changing. So... If we can change with it, if we can meet the new me as it's created, there's less suffering. Basically, we have less suffering because we're not running into resistance. But of course, a lot of the time we certainly resist change. So this is, again, this is what I think... is happening here at Tassar. And I think it happens, it looks to me like it happens even for those people who don't sit zazen. You know, if they come to Tassar and there's some more, I don't know what it is. I could make some guesses, but maybe there's no reason to. Maybe it's just that life slows down enough here or that that's kind of our agreement with each other, whether we know it or not, is to...

[19:30]

notice what we bring to a situation and am I carrying around some old idea or some idea that I'm just putting on to this person or this and we we tend to notice it more here but I think Zazen is certainly that's kind of the essence of Zazen really is just to sit down in the midst of whatever's happening in the midst of our true life if we can call it that and let our thoughts about it and our feelings about it happen. Just let them happen. Let them come up and let them go away. So not to argue with them, although we might argue with them. Some of our thoughts might be arguing with them. But just to sit there, just to stay there and for a short time, let them come and go kind of at their own pace. So... We might have the idea that zazen is something different than that, that it's supposed to be very quiet, that you're not supposed to have those thoughts about what's going on, or that you're supposed to be able to sort of feel it all moment by moment as it's happening.

[20:48]

And if we have that idea about zazen, we will probably be disappointed because the depth of our... ideation about what's going on is so it's so strong you know it's so deep this and it has so much to do with our searching for who am i in this situation and so we kind of when i first started sitting one of the things that was so surprising to me it was like a shock was how much i said the same thing over and over and over to myself i would just like repeat not necessarily like one sentence it would be more like a story you know a whole story and then i'd go through it and then i'd start over and i'd say the same thing over again i was am i crazy you know what have i always been doing this and i don't know whether any of you do that but for myself i think i do do that all the time and mostly i don't notice and it's a way of kind of convincing myself

[21:58]

or trying to convince myself, oh, you are there. I know who you are. This is who you are. And it's a lie. A lot of it is just a lie. So as I'm sitting there listening to myself do that, it becomes apparent that it's not actually accurate. So that's a very important part of Zazen, is to have this experience of ourself, experience of the way we think, experience of the way we feel about things, in this sitting still situation where life is going on and we see how we think about it. So, as I said, I wanted to say that tonight for encouragement to those of us who are going to be here for a while and may find ourselves doing things like that about certain situations. and to say that I feel like this is actually a very beneficial place, a very beneficial practice, and that I'm very happy to be here doing it with you.

[23:11]

And maybe also to encourage you, if it does start feeling discouraging or, as I said, it can even be frightening or irritating, to please try to talk with somebody about it. I think one of the things that happens for us, similar to my feeling like am I crazy when I heard how my mind was talking, is that we don't believe that who we are, what's being manifested, is actually all right. We feel like, no, no, no, this couldn't be okay. Wrong person has just appeared. This one, I should try to definitely try to hide it. Don't let anybody else know what's happening and try to get rid of it as quickly as possible. Turn it into something else. And usually, hopefully, we fail at that because if we succeed, then there's probably trouble is waiting because it will come out again in some other way.

[24:16]

But when we fail at it, we can really wonder, is it okay? Is it okay to be who I am? So I encourage you to talk to one of the practice leaders if you start to wonder that about your experience here, to just make an appointment and tell them, this is what's happening for me. What do you think? It can sometimes be very reassuring that they're not as appalled by you as you are. So I think I'll stop there and see if any of you have any comments or questions. If you don't, it's OK. Yes, Brendan. It seems like there's a similar sort of grasping at someone's here to tell the story to.

[25:43]

Someone's here to tell the story to? I don't know if that's what you were saying. Well, you know, restless energy can come from many things. I think, you know, we could just have had too much tea or be nervous about something or so... Yes, we often add stories onto that. I'm not sure exactly what you're asking, but... The restless energy is not really a problem. I mean, can we stay with the restless energy when that's what's happening? And usually, I think what... Or often, maybe not usually, but often... that can be very uncomfortable, and we don't want to stay with restless energy, so instead we go off into some story about it. Like, who's to blame? You know, maybe Tassajara is to blame, because why don't we just have practice period? I didn't feel so restless during practice period, because I wasn't running around working all the time.

[26:46]

Or that person said that thing to me, and now I feel really, I have all this energy about it. So I think... the story is often a distraction from just being with whatever us is manifesting at the time. And it may be in response to something, but in a way it's in response to everything. So to just embody it and be flexible, ready for the change, not imagining the change. I think that this practice is kind of like, I don't know anything about riding horses. I've never ridden a horse. I rode a mule once and I got bucked off. That was enough for me. But something like riding a horse, it's like, can we ride the horse of the immediate present and stay flexible enough to be with the immediate present instead of imagining the future or regretting the past?

[27:56]

And no, we can't. We're constantly falling over on one side or the other. We're constantly either grasping at something or trying to get away from something. But when we notice, can we come back? Oh, here I am. And one of the ways that Zazen helps this happen is it's not so much talking ourselves into it. like talking ourselves back to the present is more like a settling just a settling. Naturally not not knowing even how we do it. Thank you. Yes. [...] Like what?

[29:04]

What about those stories? Mm-hmm. Yes. No, that's good, useful. We can, of course, attach to anything, right? That's why in the Lotus Sutra, you know, this story, it basically says, also, don't hold on to these stories. So even though they're helpful, they're only helpful for a time because even zazen, even anything, really, because we so want to find something to rely on, we tend to take a hold of it. luckily it won't stay there for us. We find out this actually isn't reliable. But many, many things are beneficial.

[30:11]

Everything actually can be beneficial for unraveling an idea of self because the self unravels. It's just it's constantly changing. So everything is actually beneficial to finding that out, including some stories that have been crafted particularly for that purpose. Anything else? Yes. and you get out of this five-month odyssey, you'd be such a different person, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm kind of thinking, I don't think I could change much, even if I tried.

[31:12]

But I'm trying to stay open to whatever changed quickly. I seriously doubt I'll be the exact same way when I come out as I am coming in. But I kind of feel like my friends will be disappointed when I come back to them. to a story about the kind of change I'll go through needs an openness to the type of change I will go through. Yeah. Well, they're basically the same thing. You know, non-attachment to a story about the change you will or won't go through is an openness to the change that you will go through and the change that you won't go through. So it's... stories might come up from your friends or from yourself about what might happen and some portion of them might even be true but to the extent that you start carrying those around or start critiquing what's happening how much is it matching up to your story and

[32:28]

resisting, resisting what is actually happening, the change that's actually happening or not happening, well, it's just more resistance. But something will happen. Some change will happen, as you said, and some change won't happen. And, you know, can you, yes, of course you can just be there. I mean, that's the other thing. Of course we are just there. We're just living our life. But then we have these ideas that often cause us pain. And your friends, well, who knows? You'll have to ask them whether they're disappointed. They might be very happy to have the parts of you back that they give back. Thank you. Yes. Danny. It seems to me what I've noticed about myself is it's usually the most painful story that I tell myself.

[33:30]

One is the hardest to let go of. The ones that I seem to want to tell myself over and over again is if I, it just takes that long to look forward and so forth. Can you talk about painful stories? Painful, so painful like memories? Painful memories or stories where I feel like I did things badly. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think that part of it is we really don't want to settle into it. We don't want to just accept that it's happened. We sort of keep going back over it, thinking, isn't there some way I could retell this where it wouldn't have happened? I remember when Reb was in Houston, I think, right, where he broke his femur. He was riding his bike.

[34:31]

and thought he was going into a driveway, but instead he ran into the curb and fell off the bike and broke his femur. So he was then in the hospital and then couldn't sit for a long time, and I talked to him not long after he came back, and he said, you know, my mind just keeps going back to that moment. It just goes back to that moment. It's like something in me thinks... If I just go over this one more time, I can get into that driveway. Just make it into the driveway and avoid this whole big change in my life that has happened. So I think, or we're looking for, you know, what did they do that made me do this? Or, you know, just some way to make it more palatable instead of just like, okay, this hurts. This really hurts. And it happened. Yeah, I don't know whether we can, by recognizing that, necessarily stop them from happening, or as you said, our mind just needs to do it for a while.

[35:40]

It just has to go over it and over it until it gets finally convinced this is life as it is now. But I think that's the kind of common thing that we go back over, things that we see as mistakes. even though once they happen, I don't know if you can call them mistakes anymore then, and they're just life. Do you want to say anything more about it? Is that enough? Do you want to say anything else? Yeah. Thank you. Anything else? Yes. Yeah.

[36:44]

Well, I should say this just receiving and accepting is not passive. No, I don't... I don't think passive is actually one of the possibilities for us. We're always doing something. As long as we're alive, we're interacting with ourselves and with other beings and with the world. So if we're resisting our state of mind, we're interacting. And if we're accepting our state of mind, we're interacting. And I think that resisting our state of mind just makes everything tighter. It's like, even if we don't like our, would you say appalling or? We have an appalling state of mind. You know, if that's really what's happening, like say we're in a bad mood, to resist that bad mood doesn't normally exactly put us in a good mood.

[37:56]

It puts us in a resisting mood. So to actually just like, okay, this, not to, maybe what you're pointing to is not to, by accepting it doesn't mean to ratify or to, not ratify, you know, kind of make it solid, not solidify it. Like, oh, I'm in a bad mood and now I'm going to be in a bad mood for a long time. Not that, just to sort of lightly, flexibly hold the experience of being in an appalling state of mind. And I think happiness actually comes, happiness breaks through quite naturally when we do that. Not necessarily every moment, but if we're actually there for... even an appalling state of mind, and then in our life with it, something like, you know, when I was standing waiting for the dencho and feeling a little dread about coming here to talk to you all and what was going to happen.

[39:13]

Still, I looked up and there's this beautiful moon and little bats, you know, flying around across the moon and across the trees. And if you're there for it, it's happy. It's actually quite wonderful. Or I've told this story before, but walking, when I was president of Zen Center and I was walking from some terrible meeting to a different terrible meeting and feeling very tense and like there was lots to do and many problems and all. But I was walking down the street and by chance somehow managed to be present for a moment. And this... wonderful breeze just blew across my face. And I was like, oh, that was wonderful. So there was a moment of happiness there. So I think actually joy, happiness comes from being willing to be who we are. Try it.

[40:15]

Let me know. Anything else? One last. Anybody got any questions? Yes. What kind of cookies were they? I don't know. I wasn't there. He didn't mention. That probably means that's enough questions. You have to go that far. Don't search any further. Okay. Thank you all very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, 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.

[41:18]

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