I would really like to encourage those of you who have a sitting practice to sit as in. And obviously because I'm speaking, thoughts may arise in your mind and if any of those thoughts are helpful, great. And if not, well, you won't have wasted your time. because you're not being sitting in Zazen. And that means simply returning to the present moment, to the sense of warmth that's in the room, to whatever way the light is falling in your particular corner of the universe, and whatever particular sounds are rising, enduring, and passing away. And just take this as a period of Zalzane with the extra item or phenomenon that somebody is speaking.

[01:17]

Or not speaking. I don't know if the heat is on in this room or if it's just a number of people in it, but it just seemed kind of warm to me. Those of you who know me will know that I've got a preference for things to be on the cool side rather than the warm side. And so I've been really enjoying these last few weeks of cold weather. not just cold, but cold and sunny. And it's really invigorating and refreshing. We've been close to freezing temperatures, and I've been thinking, you know, all that's missing is a layer of snow.

[02:27]

Now, if we had had just The dusting of snow, that to me would have been the icing on the cake. That would have, when it snows and your whole familiar landscape takes on this strange quality. It's familiar and yet it's completely different. It's like it's being renewed. To see the familiar landscape covered in snow, you recognize it and don't recognize it, and it's all over. You see the similarity of the whole world. I remember once in Ireland driving home from work on a winter evening, and it was dark because...

[03:30]

Of our latitude, it gets dark about 4, 4.30. So coming home from work, it was dark and snowing. And the 40-minute ride on the motorbike took an hour and a half, maybe close to two hours. But what was really amazing was when I got in, indoors, and I took off my helmet. It was like a half-inch of snow just forming. perfect sphere of the helmet. My helmet had become something new. So I've been keeping track of the temperatures in San Francisco and Dublin. When I go into work and I log into my computer, I have to check my emails. The homepage is not what most people have or would expect, San Francisco's Zen Center. The homepage is a Google page and you can customize it so I have a little weather station on it and tells me what the temperature, humidity and wind speed is in San Francisco, in Dublin and in Sydney.

[04:47]

Dublin because that's where I'm from and I still have family there. Sydney because I have a brother there. San Francisco because that's where I live. And it has really striking me as somewhat odd. So often I've really wanted to go home to get the cold weather. And this kind of almost mono temperature doesn't quite do it for me. So I've been wanting to go home to get some cold weather and maybe some snow. But what really struck me as odd was that the temperatures in Dublin are warmer. and the temperature is in San Francisco. Not all the time, just some of the time. So maybe I'll stay. One morning after Zavzin, after our morning schedule, I was walking up the street. I'm living at 340, so I was walking up the street.

[05:52]

It was cold, sunny morning. Cars were coming down the street. People were walking by. And I noticed this flower, this fully opened, fully awake, meeting the world kind of flower on a tree. And it struck me as, wow, it seems to be the only one that I could see. Really strange, it's like the Udumbara flower that blossoms once every aeon. a really powerful symbol for the awakening of the mind. And also a little bit spooky because I thought, isn't it too soon? Is this plant getting the seasons mixed up?

[06:56]

But it was really amazing to see this flower. in a cold, crisp, cold morning. I saw later that it's common for this hour, this right season. Magnolia. But it also brought to mind the words of the poet, Patrick Cabana. We have thrown into the dustbin the clay-minted wages of pleasure, knowledge, and the conscious hour. And Christ comes with a January flower. It'll come again later. We have thrown into the deathbed the claim into outrageous deathbed in his trash can.

[08:04]

We have thrown into the dustbin the clay-minted rages of pleasure, knowledge, and the conscious hour. And Christ comes with the January flower. One of my favorite memories of this kind of weather, cold, crisp weather, is from my... from early on in my meditation history or story. There's this youth hostel about two, two and a half hour drive northwest of Dublin in a county called Cavan. So this is a rural youth hostel and it would close for most of the winter period. So the meditation group that I belonged to would rent it for a week's retreat, ending on New Year's Day.

[09:09]

And so it was on its own two or three acres. There was a pond. The pond was surrounded by trees. There were trees elsewhere. And a little bit away from the pond was this, like, very large, flat, That surfaced rock. And as the ground was kind of soggy or else frozen or whatever, I would do Qigong exercises on this rock. And that pond had frozen over. So it was this like really perfectly still place to do my Qigong exercises. Well, one day, I saw a black cat walking on the ice, very carefully putting one paw in front of the other.

[10:21]

It was like that cat was totally in the moment, totally amazed by the transformation that had taken place. Maybe, I don't think it had snowed, but... It was like this frostiness in the whole scene. And it was like the cat, as it walked, was thinking, is this real? Let me see, is it really, really real? And there was Ingen watching. At one point, maybe a cat saw something or just forgot about the surreality of it all, and decided to walk, and then was caught by the surreality of it again and decided to stop. The front part stopped first, and then the rear end just slid up to actually come level with the front.

[11:28]

Wow. Continued on. So birth and death are a serious matter. Don't waste time. Oh, after Christmas, we'll have no need to go searching for the difference that sets an old phrase burning. We'll hear it in the whispered argument of a churning, or in the streets where the village boys are lurching. And we'll hear it among simple, decent folk too, who borrow dung in gardens under trees, wherever life pours ordinary plenty. Won't we be rich, my love and I?

[12:31]

And please God, we shall not ask for a reason's payment. the why of heartbreaking strangeness in dripping hedges, nor analyze God's breath in common statement. We have thrown into the dustbin, declaring into the wages of pleasure, knowledge, and the conscious hour. And Christ comes with a January flower. I think this book is in the library. It's called Soto School Scriptures for Daily Services and Practices. And somewhere in it, I don't know where, there is a line that to me really hit the nail on the head.

[13:37]

It's probably not the right phrase, but it's kind of like that. It's more like it held up the pyramid to the rainbow of light and saw the white light coming out. When Buddha is in birth and death, there is no birth and death. By Buddha, we mean the one who is fully awake. or awakeness. By birth and death, we mean conditioned existence, the progress of the wheel of life, which bears the three marks of impermanent, insufficient, and insubstantial, and is driven by the impulses of greed, aversion, and delusion.

[14:37]

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking. Suppose you could say the planet. Everybody knows that the captain lied. Everybody's got that broken feeling like their father or their dog just died. Forgive me if this is actually your case. Some big mind or awakeness enters into this life of gain and loss when we develop the capacity to be present, to allow into the present moment our grief and our joy, when we are not distracted from the present moment by our disturbed mind. In the midst of our grief and joy, joy and sorrow or our boredom, we do not forget where we are.

[15:47]

We do not lose contact with the present sense tata of being in this room, in this body. The sounds that are available, the quality of the light because we sit with our eyes half open. whatever smells are coming your way, the quality of the air that you're breathing in and the feel of it on your skin, and wherever thoughts and feelings are arising and falling away. I came across a very curious expression for this In one of the Pali Canon texts, it's curious, so wait for it. It says that at all times you should remain self-possessed.

[17:01]

So in touch with the senses, in touch with what is actually happening, in this moment. And Dogen says, to study the self is to forget the self. And I add, eventually. It is the impulsive or even the compulsive action of the mind which is made almost invisible by a habit. that leads to birth and death and with its associated narrow perspective of gain and loss. It is the practice of just sitting, of being able to remain present in the face of impulse of pressure. That leads to the weakening and even relinquishment.

[18:02]

That leads to the weakening and even relinquishment. of that impulsiveness with the corresponding freedom from that restrictive, narrow perspective. These boots were made for walking. And that's what they're going to do. Because one of these days, his boots are going to walk all over you. Was it something I said? Or something I did? I'm going to ask Chajo, does the dog have put in nature? And Jaijo replied, on this occasion he replied, Mu, meaning no.

[19:11]

The monk continued, wait a minute, I thought everything has Buddha nature, how come the dog doesn't? And Jaijo said, he still has impulsive consciousness. So our practice of just sitting is an antidote to that. Or we need to take this practice, not limited to the zendo, but to take it into our life. To extend it at every opportunity. And this to me is the essential meaning of the precepts. It kind of reminds us where we tend to be impulsive and do things that we would later regret or wish we hadn't said or done. The precepts are there as a kind of a red light. Slow down, stop. It kind of puts like a check, as in chess, puts a check on that movement by keeping the precepts in mind.

[20:17]

It works against that impulsiveness. I'm still working across the street in the development office. I've been there for three and a half years, I think. And with all respect, all due respect to Blanche and Norman, my real teacher has been the computer. It teaches patience like nobody else can. It teaches attentiveness like nobody else can. And it provides many opportunities to just return to the present moment and see what is actually happening. But one of my favorite things on this computer is I deal with a database called Razor's Edge.

[21:24]

And we keep records of everybody that we can, mostly donors and organizations. People that might be interested in Zen Center or Zen Center might be interested in, we're kind of like the ZIA. So the computer calls each record a constituent. So whether it's an organization or a person or a group of people, it's a constituent. And when you make changes to a record and you click close, it says, do you want to save the changes that you have made? I say, yes. And it kind of switches off and then comes back and says, ding, ding, constituent has been saved. I think, great. Saving all beings one at a time.

[22:30]

Sign up here. For a small fee, you can put your name in the Book of Zen. So, just before Christmas, I was... There's two offices up there. Well, there's more than two, but there's two that I'm highly conscious of. The office that I'm in, the Tassajara office, and Dana's managing the Tassajara office, and they had come to the end of their season, around about September, and we needed to get all that information into the ZIA computer, into the development office computer, because we generate a mailing list, and all the people who are guests at Tassajara will receive a guest brochure soon. So previously we had entered these records one by one, a person kicking away at a keyboard, and I thought, well, maybe this time we can do something called an import.

[23:44]

And I've been familiarizing myself with imports in various ways throughout the year. And so we had to do an export from the Tassahara database, arrange it in such a way that it could be imported into this database, and somewhere In this process, you know, I really wish I hadn't done that. I overwrote about 500 names with blank addresses. So the first thing is I could feel this tension arising, and this what? And when you do an input, you can't like undo. You know, when you're cutting and paste, you can undo and do the import. It's kind of unforgiving. So I wanted to strangle my teacher. But I knew that it wouldn't really care.

[24:51]

So as I could feel this kind of panic arising, this sense data rushing in, that became like a light. wait a minute, we're going into territory that we don't really need to go into, we don't really want to go into, and it's not really helpful. So I said, okay, can I relax those muscles? Can I just feel the chair supporting my weight? This is kind of late at night, late being like either before or after dinner. just before and after that, dark outside. Notice the light that's outside, the sound of a passing bus, the silence of the telephone, and the kind of zazen mind of the computer. Notice what this moment is actually in itself.

[25:58]

Nothing awful is happening. Nobody's trying to kill me. And even then, if they were, I would try to do this practice, just being present, noticing what the pain feels like. But this was kind of easy because nobody was trying to kill me. So it's just like 500 names being, or 500 addresses being erased. So relax into it. See if you can relax those muscles. Notice what the background is doing. Notice the almost like artistic configuration of the environment that you're in. Notice the background. Notice the lights hanging from the ceiling. The lights around the altar. Why is the room arranged this way with everybody like?

[27:00]

It's almost as though you're looking at me. the way there is an inside and there is an outside, and that there is glass, well, that I can see through, I guess you can too, and that the trees are just getting on there with being trees, the traffic, just getting on with what it's doing. So in returning to the present moment, There was enough space to think, maybe I can do something. Maybe there's a way around this. And one thought occurred to me, and I went on that. Ten minutes down the road, I realized this isn't going to work. I'm just digging a hole where nobody really needs a hole. And then I said, well, maybe there's something else that I can do. If the worst-case scenario arose, we'd do a backup.

[28:06]

And the backup is somewhere in Texas or Arizona. And the tech guy recently had told me previous to this, because I was doing other imports, that he doesn't actually know yet how to retrieve a backup. So it wouldn't be nice. And I'm kind of scheduled to be leaving the development office, so I thought, well, maybe this is the way I go out. Maybe I go out in style. And if that's the way it is, then that's okay. My last note on the page of Development Database Manager is to spill the ink. And maybe that's the way it is. We don't know how it actually goes. So I figured out a way around it and went along and so on. It all worked out well.

[29:09]

It's just this being able to return to the present. When Buddha is in birth and death, there is no birth and death. It's just the universe doing its thing. So we kind of roll with the throw. We get thrown, we get off-balanced, and we fall. And then the thing is to return to where you are, and then act, and then do something. Growing old is another form of this. At any age, you can grow old. As we grow older, we lose our eyesight, perhaps, or our hearing, or our teeth, or our mobility.

[30:15]

And we don't really want to accept this. I had a birth injury in the week, so I'm getting a little bit older. As a constellation, we may be getting a little bit wiser and maybe even a little bit wealthier but generally we're on a downward slope and modern science has come up with marvelous techniques of making the period longer so that we get to eat more bowls of cereal more macaroni cheese I don't know, we get to have maybe 10,000 or 30,000 more meals. And in each moment, even when you're getting that root canal, perfection is there.

[31:21]

Background is there. We can work on not acting on impulse, The impulse is a flinch to kind of try to wriggle out of the situation mentally. You can give yourself to the moment. Notice the background. Notice the internal background. Notice what the body and mind is doing. Notice what this moment actually feels like. And so with each step, we get kind of closer, I could say, to the end. Maybe one day we'll get the news, I hope today is a good day to die. I forget which Zen master said, every day is a good day.

[32:25]

I used to have glasses that were light reactive. When... The sun went down, when the sunlight disappeared, they would become clear. When the sun was shining, it would get dark. I said to her friend once, you know, I could be run over by a bus someday, and the sun would come up, and these glasses would get dark, even though I'm dead. They're just going to do their thing. You know, they're not really... They're doing it for me, but they're not really doing it for me. They just get on with what they're supposed to do. Everybody knows that you love me, baby. Everybody knows that you really do. Everybody knows that you've been faithful.

[33:31]

give or take, a night or two. So how will we sit with the conditions of our life? And as we move from the personal to the collective, and the collective is still personal, it's just collectively personal, and we look at our planet and the situation that it's in, maybe it's moving towards Ruin. And we watched the doomsday clock in advance. What are human beings going to do? We watched the ice caps melt. Do we take it as news as if the doctor said, you may have cancer. What do we do with this news?

[34:36]

Is doom inevitable, or can we prolong it? In a certain sense, it's kind of beautiful to watch these ice caps melt. It's almost like when you are meditating, When somebody turns the kettle on, the electric kind of kettle, while you're meditating, you notice the rise in energy in that part of the room. You can eventually hear it bubbling, and then it clicks off. Just being able to appreciate what it is like to listen to a kettle as the water comes to boil. And so we get the opportunity, like no other humans have, perhaps, to see the ice caps melt.

[35:45]

Maybe it was something that I said. No. Maybe it was something that I did. Well, maybe I can do something which is not really designed to exert more control, because it's our ability to exert control that's kind of got us into this mess, but realizing my mistake and wishing to express that now I understand. So the lover who walks out because of my bad and terrible behavior I may not be able to get back, but I may be able to take on board what the message actually is. So as the ice caps melt, I think maybe I need to change my relationship.

[36:57]

Maybe I need to not approach life in a controlling and exploitative way. But I need to approach it more with respect and gratitude. And as I see the ice caps melt, I may say, well, maybe I'll walk instead of drive. Maybe I will somehow use less energy And it may be that this, on a collective level, works. In Europe, there is a campaign called the power of one. But again, the idea is, if we do it, we can control the situation. That's not what I'm talking about here. This is a matter of personal integrity. When I see that my actions or the way I behave has upset you,

[38:03]

and cause you harm, then I take on board, I don't want to do this, so I change my behavior. I might not be able to win you back, but that is beside the point. I accept that my actions have caused this harm or damage, and now I change them. And the ability to return and be present helps us to take on that perspective. Everybody knows that the plague is coming. Is that where we're headed? The challenge is to sitting upright or get stronger. We're kind of insulated by our wealth at the moment.

[39:05]

But how far will we go and maintaining not just our energy supply, but our food supply. Will this century be a century where there is war for food? Everybody knows that the plague is coming. Everybody knows that it's moving past. Everybody knows that the naked man and woman just a shining artifact of the past. Everybody knows that it's coming apart. Take one last look at this broken heart. Before it blows, everybody knows. That's how it goes. So come, my friend,

[40:10]

Be not afraid. We live so lightly here. It is in love that we are made, and in love we disappear. And though the mats of blood and flesh are posted on the door, there is no one who has told us yet what Bully Street is for. When Buddha is in birth and death, there is no birth and death. Advent, poem by Patrick Adam. We have tested and tasted too much leather.

[41:14]

through a chink too wide, there comes in no wonder. But here in this advent darkened room where the dry black bread and sugarless tea of penance will charm back the luxury of a child soul, we'll return to doom the knowledge we stole but could not use. And the newness that was in every stale thing when we looked on it as children, the spirit-shocking wonder in a black, slanting Ulster Hill, or the prophetic astonishment in the tedious talking of an old fool, will awake for us and bring you and me to the yard gate to watch the winds and the bog holes, cart tracks, old stables where time begins. Oh, after Christmas, we'll have no need to go searching for the difference that sets an old phrase burning. We'll hear it in the whispered argument of the churning, or in the streets where the village boys are lurching.

[42:20]

And we'll hear it among simple, decent folk, too, who borrow dung in gardens under trees, wherever life pours ordinary plenty. Won't we be rich, my love and I? And please God, we shall not ask for reason's payment, for why of heartbreaking strangeness in reaping hedges, nor analyze God's breath in common statement. We have thrown into the dustbin the claim and good wages of pleasure, knowledge, and the conscious hour. And Christ comes with a January flower. With our intention equally.

[43:17]

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