thank your partners and come on come on back any any ahas or great any comments anyone wants to make about how was that just good anything anything else anyone wants to say about how that was that you shared with your partner that you can share with the group I thought you were going to burst out in song. You and Richie Havens, right? My partner and I are at very different stages in our life. Our reaction to that was very different. Well, I would suggest that regardless of what stage of life we're in, this is a good thing to do. as a way of getting more done.

[01:00]

That it's a little bit like hitting a kind of reset button, which in some way is a way that, since I've been down here, I've been reading Suzuki Roshi lectures, and he often talks about meditation practice, zazen practice, as a little, he doesn't at all use this language about letting go of your to-do list, but he does talk a lot about forgetting improvement. Forgetting improvement and there's a sense about dying, actually giving up completely anything and a sense of hitting the reset button. There's another lecture in which he talks about that life is like a movie and that we forget about the screen. We all want to see the interesting movie and we forget about the blank screen. So this is a I think an experiment that I've been playing with as a way of kind of quickly going towards that blank screen in our lives.

[02:08]

So thank you for being willing to play with that with me. My name is Mark Lesser, and I feel so honored to be here and to be here at Tassajara. I feel very much like this is where I grew up. You know, there's a... There's a book called Everything I Needed to Know in Life I Learned in Kindergarten. Well, I was a little slower. For me, everything I needed to know, I learned at Tassajara. And I spent, I lived here for about 10 practice periods and six summers, mostly in the kitchen. I think I spent four summers in the kitchen. I was dishwasher, baker, assistant cook and head cook and I think everything I needed to know I learned as dishwasher before there was electricity here when all the dishes were were done by hand I was trying to think of a Tassajara story to tell one that one that comes to mind is there used to be these outrageous teas

[03:25]

in the afternoon, like at 3 or 3.15, in which all of the guest leftover desserts and sometimes pancakes and muffins from breakfast. The walk-in fridge would be emptied out onto the tables in the courtyard for this afternoon tea. And I can remember one afternoon in which this group, it was like two or three hikers, came backpacking in. They kind of stumbled in. to Tassajara after being out in the wilderness for many, many days or maybe weeks, and they didn't really know where they were, and they came upon this tea. And I think I was one of the people putting things out, and this man turns to me and says, is this some kind of a cult? And without even thinking about it, I said, yes, it's a food cult. So Tassajara is a little like a food cult. I want to take this opportunity to read a little bit.

[04:35]

This is a book of mine that has just recently been published called Less, Accomplishing More by Doing Less. And I thought that I would read just a few paragraphs from the prologue. And this book starts with one of my favorite quotes from It says, Having lost sight of our goals, we redouble our efforts. Having lost sight of our goals, we redouble our efforts. This is a Mark Twain quote. Does this sound familiar? I hear some nervous laughter. There's an old story of a man riding very fast on a horse. As he rides past his friend standing on the side of the road, the friend yells, Where are you going? The rider turns towards his friend and yells, I don't know. Ask the horse. The pace and intensity of our lives, both at work and at home, leave many of us feeling like that person riding a frantically galloping horse.

[05:38]

Our daily incessant busyness, too much to do and not enough time. You know, it's kind of funny reading this at Tassahara, but I happen to know that even people, you may not know it, guests may not know it, but I think people who live here actually often feel this way because there is so much to do during the summer. Our daily incessant busyness, too much to do and not enough time, the pressure to produce a to-do list and tick off items by each day's end, seems to decide the direction and quality of our existence for us. But if we approach our days in a different way, we can consciously change this out-of-control pattern. It requires only the courage to do less. This may sound easy, but doing less can actually be very hard. Too often, we mistakenly believe that doing less makes us lazy and results in a lack of productivity. Instead, doing less helps us savor what we do accomplish. We learn to do less of what is extraneous and engage in fewer self-defeating behaviors.

[06:44]

So we craft a productive life that we truly feel good about. Every life has great meaning. but the meaning of our own can often be obscured by the fog of constant activity and plain bad habits. Recognize and change these, and we can again savor deeply the ways we contribute to the workplace, enjoy the sweetness of our lives, and share openly and generously with the ones we love. Less busyness leads to appreciating the sacredness of life. This is actually my favorite line in the book. Less busyness leads to appreciating the sacredness of life. Doing less leads to more love, more effectiveness, and internal calmness, and a greater ability to accomplish more of what matters most to us and by extension to others and the world. I did a book reading.

[07:49]

at Samovar's, the new tea lounge right across the street from Zen Center in the city a few weeks ago. And when I arrived there, the woman who arranged for this book reading, she said, how do you do book promotion? How do you go about promoting this book? And I said, I said, I make as much effort as I possibly can in strategizing in planning, in really trying to be strategic and put a lot of energy and effort into promoting the book. I said, at the same time, I also try and completely let go of looking for any kind of results at all. There have been times when I've checked my Amazon ranking several times an hour. You can kind of go crazy. So there's a certain letting go that's required in book promotion.

[08:53]

So she looked at me and she said, well, how are you doing on both these things? And I said, I'm failing miserably in both. And actually, I felt really right, and I felt really wholehearted in that... that I was really making a very sincere effort to promote the book as strategically and fully as I possibly could. And at the same time, I was making a sincere effort to let go and not look for any kind of results and just to have this pure sense of whatever happens, happens, to do both. And I think this is actually a pretty good way to talk about Zen practice. I think that this is often, you know, I think, you know, if you're working in the kitchen here, or you're cleaning cabins or the dining room, I think you make your best, you really make your best effort.

[09:55]

You really try and do everything you can to make the tastiest food, the cleanest cabins, the best service. And then to some extent, you have to, there's no choice but to let go of it. You know, when the when the casseroles or when the potatoes are on their way open, you can beat yourself up thinking that you wish they had been better, but it's probably better just to let go of it and to learn from it. So it's really interesting. I think this practice can be applied to many, many things in our life, even to Zazen practice. This practice, I think, we want to be sincere... in our sitting practice. We want to be sincere in whatever our practice is. And at the same time, there's a sense of the practice of letting go. The idea for writing and talking about busyness came to me when I couldn't help but notice wherever I went,

[11:04]

and you would meet people out on the street or wherever they were, and you said, how are you doing? It used to be people would say, fine. But now I've noticed everybody says busy. And that somehow the busier you are, the more important you are. And if your Blackberry happens to ring while you're saying you're busy, and if you're driving at the same time, and eating or putting on makeup. I've noticed I can't... I always smile when I see women putting makeup while they're driving. There's a rule now that there's no text messaging, but there's no rule about makeup for driving. I think that something should be changed. But there's a sense of busyness, of how... And to some extent, I've only been... here a few days this time at Tassajara, but I know when I think back to my own time being here in the summer, it's easy even for students to get caught up in a sense of busyness, of that.

[12:12]

And it's pretty amazing, isn't it, to hear in a Zen monastic setting. But I think it's really kind of a, it's almost in our cultural DNA, this sense of that we don't like there to be any spaces in our lives, and then we complain about it. And at the same time, there's this interesting edge of complaining about it, and at the same time kind of bragging about it, that it makes us kind of feel important. And I want to just define that this word busyness, I don't mean busy in the sense of engaged and present. I mean Busy in the sense of not so engaged and usually a quality of avoiding. A quality of avoiding anything that might happen to be in any way difficult or uncomfortable.

[13:14]

Busyness can be the answer to all of that. I've become a big fan of David Brooks's the conservative writer for the New York Times, who I couldn't stand his writing as he was supporting the Iraq War, but I've gotten to really appreciate him. He wrote, he's been writing really interesting columns. One he wrote recently, he was talking, it was called, this was last week, it was entitled something like How We Live, and he was talking about the Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, and he He was talking about how wonderful her achievements are. But he was a little bit concerned that, because she often talks about that she doesn't have a life outside of her work. And he was saying in this column how there seems to be a trend in Washington DC amongst people that are doing really wonderful things.

[14:19]

But he was saying how this is kind of sad that people don't have a life. He wrote another wonderful column, too, that isn't exactly on topic, but I think it also... He wrote a column talking about... It was entitled Dignity. And he was talking about that there's been a lot of lack of dignity amongst our politicians recently. And he went on to say that he doesn't always agree with the politics of Barack Obama, but that he's the most dignified... politician to come along in ages, and that he believes that Obama, as an example of dignity, may have an enormous impact on the culture in our country and throughout the world. So I thought that was pretty courageous and pretty wonderful for Brooks to say that, who has been not all that supportive, for the most part, of Obama.

[15:22]

So what I started... I started writing a series of essays on this topic of busyness and looking for different ways that I thought were ways to reduce busyness and ways to help people be more present, more at ease, more engaged in their lives. And as I started writing this series of essays, I started noticing I started noticing a pattern that there seemed to be kind of five key topics that emerged. And I called these five topics the less manifesto. And these are five categories in which to pay attention to do less of. And these five are fear, assumptions, distractions, resistance,

[16:24]

and busyness. Or this last piece is kind of called Finding the One Who's Not Too Busy, based on a Koen, a Zen story with that title. And this is the integration of activity, of work, of making an impact with lack of busyness, with stillness. Because all this lack of busyness doesn't necessarily require stopping. In fact, the key, because so often in our lives, we don't have the luxury to spend so much time stopping that we need to find a way to be completely engaged and not busy. And I wanted to mention that the underlying principles of this book, this book was very much not written as, it's not... it's not an overtly Buddhist book or Zen book.

[17:26]

It was really my attempt to translate Zen principles and Buddhist principles into ways that would be very accessible to anyone who didn't have any Buddhist or Zen exposure whatsoever. But underlying this, and what I want to kind of mention tonight being here at Tassahara, is that there are In Zen and in Buddhism, there's what's called the Three Marks, and these are kind of three teachings that it's often said that any teaching that is a Buddhist teaching or a Zen teaching needs to have these three pieces in it. And these three are impermanence, no self, the idea of no self, and awakening or enlightenment. So these three ideas in a way permeate this writing and yet don't really use that language so much in the book that it's more about translating.

[18:33]

So I want to just maybe talk a little bit about these three and then see about wrapping up by relating these to the book. We'll see how I do time. I want to have time for questions. We have to stop at 9.20. My favorite story about impermanence, which I imagine some of you have heard, is a story about Katagiri Roshi, who was a teacher who taught here with Suzuki Roshi and on his own in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This is a wonderful story about He was the head of the Minneapolis, Minnesota Zen Center. And I've heard a few different people tell this story. Natalie Goldberg tells it quite nicely as how they were really trying to get Kategori Roshi to be better at fundraising. And they got him to have a fundraising day, a Sunday, at this temple, this house that was turned into a temple.

[19:44]

in Minneapolis, and they spent weeks inviting just the right potential donors to give money to the Zen Center, and they cleaned up the temple really nicely. And this was this Sunday afternoon, and Kadigiri Roshi had his best Buddhist robes, colorful robes, and was all looking very spiffy, came down for this fundraising event, and he looked up at everyone who was sitting in the room, and he looked at people and he said, You are all going to die. And Natalie said that she so respected Kategori Roshi that he just had to be himself. That he needed to talk about impermanence. And that it might not have been so great for fundraising. But she so appreciated how authentic Kategori Roshi was. I think in some way, impermanence, this is the great one-liner of impermanence, is that you're all going to die.

[20:49]

But this is great for a great reminder about not being busy and doing what matters. Impermanence is the fact that we are all going to die is a terrific reminder and teacher that we shouldn't waste time. We should really do what matters. And no self, I'll just say one of my favorite quotes, which I feel like is a really great no self quote, is a quote by the great Japanese teacher from the 13th century, Dogen, where he says, to study Buddhism is to study the self, and to study the self is to forget the self. And in some way, this is, I think, a really very apropos quote to this idea of of no self and in the context, too, of busyness, that it's not about avoiding, not at all about avoiding the study of the self, but the reason we study the self is to forget the self, and forgetting the self can be when we can get out of our own way, we can be fully engaged and get a lot accomplished.

[22:04]

And the last piece is about awakening. the belief and the possibility of awakening in every moment. And in the Zen tradition, if you take this idea that it's not about improvement, in some way there's a sense that we are already awake. It's like our to-do lists are already... In some way, our to-do lists are complete. There is nothing left to do. This is that when we can lessen busyness, we can be more in touch with the sacred. And I think all of this, all of what I've been talking about, even going back to... to just finish by reading again just a few a few sentences from the very from the very end of the book and in here is what a quote by Suzuki Roshi where he says you are perfect just as you are and you can use a little improvement and this last piece is entitled you are perfect just as you are see if you can fully own the notion that you are perfect just as you are

[24:11]

Really let it seep into your mind and body and into your bones. This is a fundamental understanding of the Lest Manifesto. We are born with all the wisdom, playfulness and imagination we need. We just sometimes need help and reminders to return to our senses and get out of our way. It is the firm knowledge that nothing extra is required. You have everything you need. At the same time, we must embrace the paradox that despite being perfect, we can all use a little improvement. Needing improvement does not make us less perfect. Instead, the idea simply recognizes that nothing is stagnant, everything is changing. There's always the possibility for developing more awareness in this moment. We can almost always develop ways to work better and increase our effectiveness. And we can always find more ways to benefit others and improve our lives and our world.

[25:13]

That is why we are on this planet. Of course, change brings the possibility of pain, of failure, and new problems to solve. May you meet them, too, with less effort, more composure, more effectiveness, and greater joy. I think we have a few minutes, miraculously. Anything anyone would like to bring up in the time that we have? Yes? Yes. Yeah, I think... I think in some way, we can't eliminate fear. And in fact, fear keeps us alive, right? If you see a rattlesnake on the path, I recommend being afraid.

[26:16]

I mean, really, that fear is in our DNA. But I think in some way, there's a lot of, often though, we see a stick. If you see a stick on the path, and you think it's a snake, and you're afraid, this kind of fear is a problem. And often, I'm using this stick symbolically, often in our lives we're in situations in which there's absolutely no reason to be afraid, but we feel fear. So lots of zazen practice. Lots of, I think, the practice of mindfulness practice. And in a way, I think, becoming familiar and friends with our fears. One of the practices I talk about is the practice of inviting your fears to tea. It can be useful to name what your fears are. Often we kind of keep our fears in the shadows, and I think it can be useful to let them out, talk about them, become friends with them, and

[27:28]

And I think also just this practice and realization of impermanence and the practice of no self is a way to get a sense of not being so pushed around by our fears. And one of the things I notice, I've been teaching a lot of workshops in a lot of different environments, and as soon as you start to talk about fear, it's a subject pretty much everybody can relate to. And all of us, I think, carry around this mistaken belief that we have more fear than anyone else. And I can assure you it's not true. That it seems to be something that people really carry around. And I think just seeing that can actually make people softer and kinder. Human beings are fragile. We should be kind to them. we have time for another question or two you should write a book that's a good yeah no that's that's great it is it is like I think busyness in a way is like right activity without heart without without real without real engagement it's it's a way of kind of skimming the surface it's a way of kind of confusing

[28:56]

activity with productivity. But I like that. Thank you. Yeah, well I like to think that maybe hearing that reminds me of an expression that I find myself using is Zen practice and mindfulness practice is kind of like a way of uncrusting your heart. That there's a way I think that in many, many situations it seems to be that we need to take really good care of our hearts or they get kind of crusted. They get crusted in relationships, in communities, in work. I think it's important to look for lots of support and connections and practices that can help us to uncrust our hearts.

[30:04]

I'm showing that it's 920. Is that what you show? Well, I think we need to get everyone to sleep. So I just... I just want to end with saying that I want to thank all of you who are here as students for taking care of Tassahara and doing all of the wonderful work and sitting and practice and keeping the heart of Tassahara so alive and vibrant and I feel like I feel like you're taking such great care of the guests. And this practice of service and friendliness is just a terrific practice. And I want to thank all the guests who are here, because without you, all these people would have nothing to do. And I also want to suggest, you may or may not know, I just got off.

[31:16]

I was chairman of the Zen Center board last year. and I still have really good board connections, and I know that there's actually spaces at Tassajara this summer, which is unusual. So tell your friends to come to Tassajara this summer. They can actually get here, despite the rumors from the past that you can't come to Tassajara. It's like the Yogi Berra quote, right? Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded. Thank you very much. Tension equally.

[31:56]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_95.07