This podcast is offered by San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning, everybody. Nice to see you all. Lots of old friends and new friends. Thanks for coming. Lots of other things to do that you could be doing. It's a beautiful day. You could be in the park. So thanks for coming to Dharma Talk this morning. I would like to dedicate my talk this morning to my friend Cindy Morning Light from Willits, who's a member of our Everyday Zen Sangha in the Bay Area, who died yesterday afternoon after

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long time with cancer. When I was thinking of her this morning, I thought of that old biblical phrase, a woman of valor. She was a woman of valor. She was very forthright in standing up for issues she believed in, tireless in her working for them, and endlessly cheerful. even in her illness. So I'm thinking of dear Cindy today and wanting to dedicate my talk to her, even though I realize probably none of you knew her. So I would like to start my talk this morning with a joke. It's a really great joke. I just found this joke yesterday when I was fooling around on YouTube and heard a lecture by Slavoj Žižek, who is endlessly smart and very funny.

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This is a joke that I learned yesterday from Slavoj Žižek. And maybe it's even a true story. It's about Niels Bohr, the physicist. So Niels Bohr had hanging over the doorway of his house somewhere in Denmark, a horseshoe for good luck. So a friend of his came to visit him and said, you know, you're a scientist. You know a lot about science. Why would you have a horseshoe hanging over your door? You couldn't possibly believe in that stuff, could you? So he said, you're absolutely right. I am a scientist. I know a lot about the physical world. There's no such thing as luck. Superstition is superstition.

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Of course I don't believe in this. The person said then, well, then why would you hang a horseshoe over your door if you don't believe in it? And he said, Well, someone told me that it works even if you don't believe in it. So that's a great joke, right? So it's also a perfect Zen story and a good introduction to what I want to speak about today. So Niels Bohr was an absolute master in understanding the physical world. He was one of the inventors of quantum mechanics.

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I'm pretty sure it was Bohr who figured out these two uncanny concepts of quantum mechanics. One is called complementarity, which, in a word, means that, for example, light can be a particle when you look at it one way, and a wave when you look at it another way, even though a wave is not a particle and a particle is not a wave. Somehow this still works. He also figured out the concept of entanglement, which means that two particles very far away from each other with no causal connection can influence each other simultaneously, somehow. So, Niels Bohr was someone who understood that the world is much weirder, the physical world, the actual world of stuff, is much weirder than we think it is.

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So, he didn't believe in horseshoe luck, at the same time he knew that the world is bigger than our explanations of it could possibly be. So he must have got some good out of that horseshoe somehow. It must have made him feel good to see a horseshoe over the door of his house when he entered the house. It must have given him some kind of pleasure or comfort and a sense of well-being even though he didn't believe. He didn't need to believe in the luck of or the superstition of horseshoe luck. He did, however, have to hang that horseshoe up. Right? Which he did. And leave it there. So that's a good introduction to my topic that I've been thinking about and writing about for a while.

[06:22]

Imagination. The world could be otherwise. The world is otherwise. Imagination and the bodhisattva path. I started thinking about this and writing about it. If you've never written a book, you don't know that it takes a long time between the time you write the book and it appears. By the time the book appears, you're thinking about something else entirely, and you forgot you even wrote the book, you know. It's a long time goes by. So it's a while ago that I started thinking about this and writing about it, and I was thinking about it and writing about it with a sense of urgency about our world and the many problems that we have, the human problems that we have made. And as the book came out and I've been going around talking about it, my urgency has only increased quite a bit.

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I used to feel like spiritual practice, Zen practice was a really good thing for those people who wanted to do it. irrelevant to those who didn't. But now I feel like in order to survive our human problems, the problems we have created over a long, long time like things like sexism, racism, homophobia, toxic resentment, but especially this every day, increasing warming of the planet. We actually now need, everybody needs spiritual practice. Specifically, we need to be bodhisattvas.

[08:41]

We need lots and lots of us to take up the commitment to be bodhisattvas. Spiritual heroes tirelessly make effort for the benefit of others, no matter whether it looks like the effort is successful or not. That's just what they do. They keep on making effort for the benefit of others. They are unselfish people who are resilient, effective, and who have a strong love for everyone. even their enemies, if they have enemies. And they have in their hearts the strong sense of a good human future, despite the evidence. We need lots and lots of people like this. And to be such a person, to develop...

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of bodhisattva attitude and spirit, you don't just one day decide. You have to work at it. It's actually a lifetime's work to develop this bodhisattva spirit and this commitment. It takes training. It's a path. It's not an accomplishment. It's an ongoing path. That's what this book is about. The world could be otherwise. Imagination and the bodhisattva path. And that's why even though I'm getting old and feeble and tired, I persist in running around and telling everybody about this because I really think we need a critical mass of bodhisattvas among human beings on the earth. So I'm going to read some from this book, and I'm going to read you the story that opens the book.

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It's a story about the imagination and its power. It's a story about the surrealist poet Robert Desnos, who was French. Also, he was Jewish. When the Nazis overcame the French during World War II. Desnos had no other choice but to go underground and fight for the resistance, which he did. He was captured. He was sent to the concentration camps. So one day, along with a truckload of other men, Desnos is crowded onto the truck bed They're being transported from the barracks. They know where they're going because every day the trucks go out full and every day they come back empty.

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The men in the trucks, never seen again, they're going to the gas chambers and the ovens. So they don't talk in the truck. Everybody is totally speechless and grim. They don't look at one another. The truck arrives very slowly. Mournfully the prisoners descend as if they were dreaming. The guards at the camp who are normally joking and bantering and fooling around can't help but catch the mood of these men so they quiet down. So it's a very subdued, mournful mood, which is suddenly and abruptly disrupted when one of the men in the line, it was this nose, spins around, grabs the hand of the person behind him and sticks his face with great excitement into the man's hand.

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Because it turns out Desnos can read palms. He's reading the guy's palm. And he gets really happy and animated. He says, I'm so excited for you. This is wonderful. You're going to have such a long life. Children, you're going to have three children. And such a beautiful wife. You're going to be wealthy. You're going to have such a brilliant career. I can't believe it. These lines are just brilliant. At first, nobody knows what to think. But then they begin getting animated. And one after another, they're all putting their palms out. And this note is reading everybody's palm. And everyone has some kind of similar good fortune. Long life, children, wealth, brilliant career, traveling all over the place.

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Wonderful life. So little by little, you know, drop by drop, as this goes on, people don't know what to make of it, but they can't help but kind of catch fire with... Because Desnos is so committed to this and so sure of it that they can't help but catch fire with it. And they all, the whole... It's like all of a sudden from a funeral that the whole thing becomes like a carnival and they're all excited and clapping each other on the back and congratulating each other and saying, wow, this is so great. The whole thing changes. But even more astonishing than this, the guards are also affected by this. Like the prisoners, the guards had been living a dark spell, a kind of a dream in which the outlandish idea of every day marching men to their slaughter somehow made sense.

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But now, with this absurd and unprecedented event, this sudden and gratuitous evocation of an alternative reality, the spell is broken. And the guards now are disoriented. They don't know what is going on. They don't know what to believe. The reality that they had been living a moment before is somehow cast into doubt and they're no longer sure what's real and what isn't. Maybe their better natures long suppressed in an effort to conform to the Nazi madness that defined their world and long numb to the grief, the guilt, the horror that they probably somewhere in their souls felt but couldn't acknowledge.

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Maybe all that was somehow stirred by Desnos' powerful commitment to his absurd and maybe not absurd vision. We don't know what was going on in the minds of the guards, but we do know that they are so undone by what they see in front of them that they just don't know what to do, but they know it doesn't make sense to go on with what they had been doing, so they, without knowing what to do, they just load the prisoners back onto the truck. The truck goes back to the barracks, and those men were never executed. Desnos did not die. in the camps. He lived through the end of the war. This is a fact. And unfortunately, it does not have a happy ending because he got typhus and died, but he did not die in the camps.

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What a story, right? I first heard this story here in town at the Jewish Museum. when I was doing a poetry reading, which the title of it was something like, Living Jewish Poets Read the Works of Dead Jewish Poets. So there were a bunch of us Jewish poets that were selecting, you know, we each chose a dead Jewish poet, and we read a few poems. There were a whole bunch of us. Alan Bernheimer translates, my friend Alan Bernheimer, translates Desnos. So he read a bunch of Desnos poems and told his story. And I said, after a while I thought about it, I thought, wow, you know, this is too good to be true, right?

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Can this really be true? So I said, Alan, where did you get this story? He said, well, I got it from Susan Griffin, who's a Bay Area writer, and I don't know Susan Griffin, but I found out how to get a hold of her, and I said to her, is this story true? And she said, well, I don't know if it's true, but I got it from my friend Odette, who's a survivor of the camps, and she thinks it's true, but I'll ask her. And so she asked Odette, and Odette said, well, I think it's true. I don't know if it's really true, but I got it from somebody who was there. And I believe that it's really true. But when I thought about it some more, I realized this story is definitely true. It's true. There's no doubt whatsoever in my mind. One way or another, the events that this story describes happened. Because the imagination is that powerful.

[20:13]

As every artist knows, the imagination creates its own self-validating truth, truer than any other form of truth, true enough to effect inner and outer transformation. So when I say I'm absolutely certain this story of Robert Desnos is true, I'm not saying that I'm certain that it was an objectively verifiable occurrence. I believe it was, but I couldn't prove that. Maybe I could if I tried very hard. But it doesn't really matter. I mean that the story, as a story, is certainly true. Its truth changes my life and expresses something essential about who we are as human beings and what we're capable of.

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To be human, I think you have to believe in the power of the imagination. Without it, we're not human anymore. What is... the basis of all of our great religions, the stories of the Bible, the Buddhist sutras, the Koran, all religious texts, all folk tales, all myths, all rhymes, poems, plays, novels, anecdotes, movies, music, ritual, pictures, dreams, These are all imaginative projections that rise up from the depths of our unconscious to expand the soul, to help us feel who we actually are and what the world actually is. If we don't have imagination, we can't move beyond the habitual one-dimensional perspective

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that we'll get if we only pay attention to our outer perceptions and our fearful emotions. So we think of imagination as the opposite of reality, an escape from reality. But imagination is not an escape from reality in its truest sense. Imagination deepens and enriches reality, adding depth, dimension, feelings. and possibility. All creative and ennobling aspects of our being human have their source in the imagination. With no imagination, reality is way too flat. It just provides no inspiration. You become just plod, plod, plod if there's no imagination and lift in your life.

[23:43]

To go beyond the possible to the impossible, you have to imagine it first. So our time, the time we're living in now, is dense with physical stuff and information. It's busy and it's rough. If you're a privileged person with possibilities, then you have a very demanding career. You have a very full social life. You have a family you're trying to keep in touch with. You have a lot of interests. probably your life is better now than anybody has ever experienced before in the long history of humanity at this point in time.

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But it's also exactly because of all this stuff that you have in your life. Your life is difficult because it's so stressful. It's so demanding. You're busy all the time. And the possibilities for growth and accomplishment can make you dizzy. However much you are, you must be more. However much you know, you have to know more. However much you have experienced, you have to experience more. You have to have more fun. more tomorrow than today, and more the next day than the day before. It's hard for privileged people to catch a breath. Of course, the majority of people are not that privileged.

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They don't enjoy those great expectations. And in our time, for those people, a decent life seems further away than it ever has. because the top 10% of the world's populations owns 90% of the wealth. The other 90% worldwide don't know if they'll get by. So for the vast majority of people on Earth, the daily struggle to survive in ever more trying social and economic circumstances becomes relentless. whether you're privileged or not privileged, you know about the world beyond your small local place. You know what happens on the other side of the world.

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Because now we have the ubiquitous news media, which has become our collective nervous system, twitching our attention with constant jolts of true and false information, and now it becomes difficult to tell the difference about political, environmental, economic, and social problems. Nobody avoids this information. Even if you try to avoid it, you don't avoid it. It becomes part of your psyche. You dream about it at night. What will the future bring? What's the world going to be like for our grandchildren's children? Will there even be a human world? We try not to think about it, because who can think about this? We don't talk about it, because what are we going to say?

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But it's there. Dread is almost like a substance in the air around us. Sometimes we feel it, sometimes we don't, but it's always there. And what can any one person do about it? So I'm convinced that the world actually could be and actually is now otherwise than that. That the possibilities don't need to be and actually are not limited to the tangible and the knowable, to the negotiable, to the data. We are constantly collecting about practically everything measurable. We can measure so much, we now have the illusion that we can measure and understand what the world is. We can't. The world is always, like Niels Bohr knew, more than we can figure out.

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more than we can know, and we've forgotten that. And that's the realm of the imagination. The imagination doesn't measure, it doesn't devise, it doesn't instrumentalize, it doesn't define or manipulate. Its nature is to open us up, to delight us, to mystify us, to shock us, to inspire us. The imagination has no limits. It leaps from the known to the unknown. It goes beyond facts to visions and intensities. It will lighten up this heavy world. It plays in the deep end where heart love are the most powerful of all forces.

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Spiritual practice is about cultivating the imaginative in us, cultivating that space in the heart. That's really what it's supposed to be about and what it really has always been about. Even though religion ends up becoming a force for social control and aligned with the powers that be and so on and so on, that's successful religion. unsuccessful religion is the real religion. Religion is not supposed to be that successful. It's a perversion. Jesus had 12 disciples. That was the right number. I was in Vancouver reading from this book in a bookstore and we were talking with the crowd. We were talking about spiritual practice and it was this Chinese woman who A lot of Chinese people live in Vancouver. So this Chinese woman said, I grew up in China. And the last thing in the world I ever wanted to do was practice Buddhism.

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Because I knew how stupid it was. It was just a bunch of superstition. People went to the temple. They burned some paper money. They threw it in the thing. They prayed for a good exam score. Who believes in that? It's ridiculous. So I was totally... turned off and uninterested in Buddhism. And then we emigrated to Vancouver, and I see all these white people practicing Buddhism. So I'm thinking, what are they doing? This is crazy, you know? And then I inquired and kind of got into what they were doing, and I thought, this makes sense. And now she practices Buddhism, but only in Vancouver. When she goes to China, forget about it. So this is the crazy world we live in, and that's because here we don't understand anything about Buddhism. We don't know that Buddhism is about China and Japan and all that. We don't know that. And we're a very unsuccessful religion, despite the big building here and everything. Compared to the assets of the Catholic Church, we're not too successful.

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Thank goodness, right? We still can be open about all this. We still can be confused and find it wonderful. we still confront the imagination because we don't have enough power to crunch the imagination. But every religion in its bowels, right, in its mystical side, has the same stuff. It's not just Buddhism that has this. So we need to make use of the tremendous wisdom, right, in Buddhadharma, but in every other tradition of every sort in order for us to commit ourselves to a path of the imagination so that we can be bodhisattvas. So that's the specific thing about Buddhism that I want to emphasize, and I think it's true in all the great religions. All of them have their own version of this idea to be a person of service, a person committed to love and kindness.

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And in Mahayana Buddhism, there's this wonderful ideal of the bodhisattva, the kind of energizer bunny of Buddhism who just keeps going. If you knock the bodhisattva down, the bodhisattva just pops back up, you know, boing, [...] like one of those dolls, you know, those punch dolls. That's the bodhisattva. The bodhisattva just eats up all kind of difficulties for breakfast. It gives her strength to keep on going. And it's a very realistic path because you see with two eyes. With one eye you see with the imagination that the world could be is otherwise, that you know it's true, that everybody you see you love, everybody's a wonderful human being, you see that. With the other eye you see, yes, there's all these really bad problems. It's bad and even worse than anybody thinks. You see both those things at the same time. You see your own commitment to be a bodhisattva and you see your own drastic imperfections. You know.

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well, I'm not that loving. I'm not that kind, really. I see. I'm always shocked, you know, to realize, wow, how many 40-some years of Buddhist practice, maybe 50 years, and I'm still this big an idiot? It's hard to believe, you know. But there it is. There's the evidence. You know, there's the evidence. Because I see my own mind, right? There's the evidence. But that's okay. Keep on going, right? That's okay. You don't have to be perfect. Keep on going. So that's the spirit. You have to have that spirit. In other words, you've got to be honest and real about your own failings and the world around you, but at the same time have this spirit of keep on going. So this is a matter of training. It's a matter of discipline. You don't just, like I say, think you're going to do this and then that's it. So that's what we're all doing, right? Those of us who are... Training and Zen, probably everybody in this room, one way or the other, is serious about their spiritual practice, I guess.

[35:39]

It's a daily discipline. You know, we're sitting, we're chanting, we're doing this, we're doing that, but mostly it's about our conduct. So the bodhisattva path is defined by six great practices, the six paramitas. Generosity. Ethical conduct. Harmlessness, caring. Patient forbearance. The ability not to be thrown off by bad things that happen. Bodhisattvas know 100% bad things happen every single day, no doubt about it. That's part of the path. Patient forbearance. Joyful effort. Every day we make effort in our practice with a sense of zest and joy. And we know how to do that because we practice it. Meditation. I think we all know how important meditation is for the path. And transcendent wisdom, prajna wisdom.

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The ability to see things as they are with open hands, without holding on to any definition of how things are. Those six practices, which are each one a training, a lifetime commitment for training, little by little, grow our bodhisattva hearts. So we have a vision of how to live and a vision of how to be together as human beings. We don't know what's going to happen. Nobody knows what's going to happen. Everybody who tells you what's going to happen is just giving you an estimate, an idea about what might happen. They might say it's likely to happen, but nobody knows precisely what happens. And even when the thing that happens happens, it doesn't feel like what it felt like before when they said it was going to happen, right? Bodhisattvas understand that. So they're never discouraged. They keep on going.

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I think when there's a critical mass of bodhisattvas in this world, what seems outrageously impossible now will suddenly be normal. So you have the power to commit yourself to the bodhisattva path. And that means that every single day you are making the world better and different when you smile at someone, when you feel your own love, when you do something of benefit to somebody else, however small it may seem. Drop by drop by drop by drop, the world is transformed. If you are discouraged or somehow in denial about the world, don't be discouraged and be in denial anymore. Just roll up your sleeves and get busy being a bodhisattva. That's it. So, thank you for listening to my – I feel like I can now get off my soapbox.

[38:51]

My wife, who's been attending a few of my talks, said, you're getting to sound like a televangelist. So, sorry about that. I think she's right. Sorry about that. But I'm not asking you to give me $10 each. At least, yeah, a hundred. At least there's that in my favor, yeah. Anyway, I really do wish everybody here the best. And please do continue with the path that you are already on. And if you haven't noticed, you will notice in a moment or so that you are about to take the bodhisattva vows. You're going to take the bodhisattva vows in a minute.

[39:55]

You're going to... We're going to say this in a minute. You're going to commit yourself to saving an infinite number of beings. An infinite number. You are going to do this. That's what you're going to say. You're going to commit yourself to... however many delusions there are in your heart and in all of us collectively, you're going to bring every one of them to a close and there will be no more delusions. You are going to do every positive spiritual practice by entering every Dharma gate, an infinite number of Dharma. You're going to enter all those gates and you are going to become nothing other than the Buddha way. This is what you're going to do. Exactly. Exactly. But you're going to do it anyway. You're going to do it anyway.

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In the imagination, in the heart, in the biggest space that there is, you're going to do it. Especially you. Thank you very much for listening. 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, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

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