Good morning. Last week, if you were here, you found most of us in the residential community not here. We were at a retreat at Groondorch, an annual event where we try to open up and discover how better we can practice together as a community. One of the things that arose in the discussion is art prepared to the people here today. One of the students said we should be more attentive, we should honor, we should respect more the beginners who come to Pearl Street, because this drills beginner's mind temple, as Suzuki Roshi named it. And I thought that was a very prescient and good suggestion to make.

[01:09]

because sometimes those of us who are professionals take it for granted that the newcomers with a set of catch-ons will very long catch up. But it places me under a much greater ambiguation in speaking this morning. As some of you know, that's something I can do even in my sleep. Because now I see that there may be someone in this room, as there have been in the past, who came to Pope Street and he did not or she did not even know the known Shakyamuni Buddha. This has happened. So how am I going to speak in the presence of such a run in a world that will not further confuse them or repair them that can I say that would encourage them to come and be with us not just for a Saturday morning.

[02:14]

What makes it so difficult is that the same thing that I say could have diverse reactions on the part of the listener. I could say something that would attract, and I could say something that would repair, and say I'm working quite a tight whip. The talk that I was, and will to try to give, even before I came to that memory of last week, was inspired by a casual encounter with a discussion, not a discussion, a reply down the roadway about soundbites. and how basic they are to the political success or failure of people because if you construct a 20 or 30 second statement and do it really very rare, you can reach out and grab somebody and make them part of a very rare entourage politically.

[03:17]

But what interested me most, the way I know about soundbites, read my lips, it's the economy stupid That interest of Lumiere's was not that aspect of it, which as a writer in the business for many years I understand, but why they work. And it was fairly simple. Most of us are so caught up in the revel-blow responsibility with our lives, let them haunt through the traffic, saying that the bird, the devil, just thrown up over the middle of the road. The children are demanding a certain tote from the TV store and so on. In that life, we try to somehow engage with the global society, pay a little attention to the boom and bounce of the boat, and when someone can give it to us in a nuclear package, we feel that we somehow ever have touched those and can now let that aspect of our lives go.

[04:21]

We now know that the situation goes until the next day. If we don't go any deeper than that, we slip from one soundbite to another. These soundbites work because, somehow or other, they connect with things we already know but have not given expression to. Or we don't really understand, but we do respond from some deeper place than the superficial animal might indicate. And then I realized this is the realm of our lives, not just in the presence of TV soundbites. And so I would like to develop this morning a personal experience with a soundbite that turned upon me years before there was any film about television. Those of you who may remember, I hope people don't remember, But if anyone remembers my last time, I explained how I had come to the end of a 17-year difficulty with a sound bite, which I got from the Bible.

[05:35]

Blessed ever pure in heart, for they shall see God. It took me 70 years to start as a five-year-old, pursue that sound bite through my life, and finally get rid of it. And it was a wonderful view, because the energy that I had bound up when trying to throw down to that sound bed and live the rest of my life was not free to do other things. And for a couple of weeks, I was right on top of everything and feeling great. And then the symptoms came back, and I realized that, as the teacher said, the problem solved was the problem revealed. and so I will get to the story of the second soundbite. As the first runner took place in my grandfather's house, who was well known to Brent from Germany, perilous when he trained the Reb, have enough money to be the rep for the bank, have a lab to start gathering work through, take two and three trips to work everywhere, have servants in the house in other words, and I guess I was born with a silver-cladded spoon in my mouth.

[06:49]

But there are certain aspects of that life that, as a child, began to prefer me, and after prefer me to disturb me. And I guess the easiest way to bring it out together is to talk about the purrs. On the Scote, on the Scote old house, behind which the few have stretched to Long Island Sound, there was a garden, and in the garden there were three pear trees. The fruit was not very good. If you cooked them too big, they were almost inedible. If you waited for the right time, they were rotted. And so we took those pears and we put them up, as we said in those days, in jars. And there were reels of pears down in the root cellar.

[07:54]

from those trees, which we never got around to eating. And that bothered me very much. Then, as the community began to develop from a country room to a town, a street was servoed on the side of our property. And lo and behold, those two pair of trees were not ours anymore. They were outside the property line. But still my gran never sat by the back window to see where people would not steal the pillows. And one day she called me, get the man. And rose out of the house and there was some wet room club in a superior German attitude, sure to Irish. They were up in the tree with her bear, two bears, and so on, and they were shaking those trees, and we, of course, were farming down there, and we used them, of course, for a pear fight, right? And she screamed at them, and the bear barked, and I'm standing in the background with the gun.

[09:01]

which was a res of .22 rifle my uncles used to use to shoot the rats in the chicken ride. Now, the bears knew that there was a sledge lodged in the barrel, but it didn't work. So, no matter how often my grandmother said, shoot, shoot, I fortunately was kept from shooting. But the idea of Remembering our possession of pillars that we may land with ours, with a gun, was a little hard to take. But I understood the situation pretty well now as a child could in those days. But the rule of clincher came the next year. Well, a little Italian man with a large pushcart came to the back door and said, the pears are failing, and would you please ask your grandmother if I could pick up the pears?

[10:05]

So I ran into the house, and I reported the situation, and she said, no, those are our pears. And I had to go out and confront this man and tell him that my grandmother said no. And then it came from one of those epiphanies of life. My man is his less. And soon all of the good things, the trips, the vocations, the food, all of those things suddenly appeared in a much different light than they had before. They weren't women's anymore. They were totems. And so that... soundbite, a nightmare of where less, became one of the main forces in directing my life. And out of that, I puzzled it.

[11:09]

I listened very closely. I read the newspapers. I tried to find out where it should be sold. And I discovered that there were certain things about life that children weren't supposed to know. They were revealed sometimes in racist remarks at the table. They were referred to in discussions of the dirty and the ignorant and the farmers. My grandfather was a immigrant, but there were foreigners who were of a different color, who lived further south than Germany. There were no black people in our community at that time. And I got the idea that you defended yourself with guns, not just against the people who wanted the pears, but on the peripheral, on the circle of the wagons. And I decided then and then, I would learn everything about everything so that I could do something about that situation that I found so puzzling.

[12:15]

And probably this air route was ultimate in the childhood's experience with the time that we were in the 20th Century Limited. There were no planes in those days, and we were going to Chicago. And it came out of the underground in New York at about 120th Street, which is Harlem. And it stopped for probably a light at the track. And there I was, face to face, through the first very window of an apartment house with a little black boy my age, or my size at least, and no further away than from here to those windows. And he looked at me, and I looked at him, and I could see through the window that there was nothing in the apartment there. None of the pictures and statuary and drapes that were in my house. And because he was in the corner apartment and the tone was so perversion, I could look down the Harlem Street and there were no green grass and there were no tiling trees.

[13:21]

And we sat there, each looking at the other, and I found myself saying, if I had to live like that boy, I would get a gun. Now, here is a privileged child, raised in a lot of luxury. Where did that come from? So as things went on, I did what many people of my class, my liberal class, did. They entered into the world of political action. to do something for that little boy in the window. And of course, I was one of those. But most of those people found a place beyond which they would not go in that effort. They preserved their own social position.

[14:25]

And in my case, as I've told many times, and I'm not continuing to bear with it today, I went further into a radical position. I lost my job, I lost my service in the community, my family was disturbed, I had to go to work, etc., and so forth. So in my reverse window, I find myself working on the kitchen in the restroom. And it's a bad night. And the staff is standing around swapping stows. And the note to do, I was out on the road for transporting stolen securities across state lines. The night port was out on the road for... River... A couple of the roaders were in and out of jail apparently because of prostitution. And here I am. I want to be one of those, right?

[15:28]

So I tell them about my story. I'm in ritual of contempt of Congress and I'm looking at six months in jail and a $10,000 fine. and that sort of got them. They said, well, what did you do? And I tried to explain that I supported the First Amendment in the presence of an American Activities Committee. What was the First Amendment? And so we got into a discussion about that. And I happened to have mentioned that I once had a job where I ate in restaurants on the other side of the Red and reported on them on my radio program. There was one black guy looked at me and he said, let me get up this throat, man. You'd do about all of that for any bloody piece of paper? And I said, well, I wouldn't call the Constitution United Stoves for any bloody piece of paper, but yes. He says, man, you need psychiatric care.

[16:33]

We're trying to get out of this bloopin' kitchen. So, I have not forgotten those people. I have not forgotten the people I knew aboard ship. Their descendants there out in the street in the morning. The siren sounds, sometimes gunshots, violent arguments. I'm living in my old house, this beautiful place where the food was great and everything was clean and everything was just wonderful and That world is now coming closer to me. And it has been for the 25 years that I have been trying to practice. People said, look, under the conditions then, you did the best you can. Why don't you just drop it after who agreed to sell the world? You pose your dues, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

[17:36]

And confronted with the situation as it was now, I had to be with them. Then I had to do with the word of the rules and the roads therein. That was left for me to do about it. But there was the doubt remaining. teacher has said, when Ramon's a child of his age, even in what one deems to be one's very own. Method in my story is unusual. This is the way the way it is. Suzuki Roshi would remind us things as it is, things as it is. My word, the day I was born, 20,000 men died between breakfast and lunch in one of the battles in 1915 on the Western Front. Today, my word includes Sahuaro, Chiapas, Chechnya, and you name it, there's a long list, right? The California poet Robinson Jeffers wrote,

[18:44]

It is certain that the web cannot be stopped as hurried. It has challenges to accomplish and must coot through avalanches to have a new discovery. It must end at that. This is but after necessity. It is after a sacrificial duty. Mine's web is a tragic music, and it was not played for his happiness. It describes and not resolved that by other discourse. Where am I to serve that world? I remember once sitting in this exact same place that I had referred in my talk to some higher in Africa, a poor building in Rwanda, and found myself saying, Suzuki Roshi said, if you're driven and dying, then there's nothing you can do for them. And I said, then those are my children as much as the ones that call me grandfather and father.

[19:55]

If you're children of dying citizens. Then I had a seminar. We used to do, I'm sure many of you were with me on them, big peace marches that we did in San Francisco and those that were there when the bombs were about to fall. Massive amounts of people moving down Market Street And I was in one of those parades once. I don't know the exact year, but they were repetitive. It was like family reunions where I got together and sat with people we hadn't seen since last year. And I said to myself, what are you doing? And I stepped to the side of the curb and watched the parade go past. And I was heard in the shower. Someone behind me who knew me in the parade took a picture. of this dripping man and this dripping flower. I think that was the place where I took my first step towards the center room before I knew that it was here.

[20:58]

I remember the time that my grandfather and I stood in front of a rice dog, still smithing. He said, take a good look around. You won't see a Jew or a communist left alive in Germany in a few years. This is 1933. And I was the bear in the Harlem window. I was this montage of these people coming back. And I noticed those crabs sent in for lives by the owl. And having not fulfilled my vow to serve the Word, the question arises, how can I pass up the service unto beings? At least the Word was a known quantity and the time and variable was precise, but serving beings? What about now? And this, evidently, is a problem that runs in my family, because my firm vow, plus two months' ground charge, served the Word of God.

[22:05]

You know, if I hadn't been born, I wouldn't be having all these troubles. So I came home from that child-killer session. Pretty like that. I don't think any Welsh teacher has quite gotten through what my grandson did. And Senator Brevin Barrett took of Julie Harris over actress Emily Dickinson. And I needed something, too. calmed me down. So I listened to Emily, with whom I have quite an intimate association. But there was one undertone that I had never heard before.

[23:10]

I would have liked to have played you Julie Harris's recitation of this poem. I'm not going to try to imitate her, I'll just give you what Dickinson said. I reason, earth is shed, and anguish absolute, and many hope. But let of that, I reason we'll die. The best man terrible cannot excel to carry. But let of that. I reasoned that in heaven, somehow, it will be even, and there will be a closure given. But what of that? I reasoned earth is short, and anguish absolute, and many hope. But what of that? I reasoned we will die. The best mortality cannot have said decay.

[24:17]

But what of that? I reason that in heaven somehow it will be even, a new equation given. But what of that? And what struck me personally about that is that I had always been looking for a new equation. There was the Christian equation which sustained me for seventeen years, and the humanist equation that sustained me for another seventeen, and the Marxist equation that sustained me for seventeen years, and the Buddhist equation that sustained me for another seventeen years, and it does not sustain me any more. Because what I have been doing, and he would say, looking for heaven, Somehow it will be even, and we'll talk about an even pleasure whenever we could share it with you here. Somewhere, somewhere, somehow it's going to be even, and a new pleasure will be given, and everything will be all right.

[25:19]

But what of that? Teacher has said, a poet who takes us to the bottom of the heart, then knocks the bottom out. I think Emily came as close as she ever could to the bottom and that film membrane that separated us from the universal condition. Another poet said, now must choose between perfection of the work and perfection of the life. To which a philosopher replied, let us then become artists of life. And another poet said, the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extension of personality. And here, the poet comes very close to the Buddhist position.

[26:23]

To study Buddhism is to study the self, And to study the self is to go beyond the self and be awakened by all things. Should, if it's not obvious, point out that when anyone says, I reason, I reason, I reason, that is exactly that reverse that we do. We figure it out. We start out by saying, if I had not been born, I wouldn't be how I may have been struggled. And you take that from there, then that's the right direction you go into. That's it. And you think and you reason and you worry and you fiddle and you suffer. Because what we're trying to do is to maintain a part of you, a Christian part of you, a feminist part of you, a Buddhist part of you, A poet, a poet, you know.

[27:27]

These questions, these koans that I've throwed at us, that I've referred to as kitchen posts for donkeys. Yes, I've reached myself to a post. That's a little bit pure and heart-promotion through God, and there's more delicious that they've got now. But I'm still there. There, as the sutta says, though the basis is reached and the reproach comprehended, true eternity still flows. And if we are able to unhook ourselves from our dauntless hitching poles and throw ourselves into true eternity, then all of the stuff that I have been bearing with for the past 35 minutes is irrelevant.

[28:31]

Who cares? Let's end it there for now. So no matter what can be said by a poet, by a priest, by a scientist, by an artist, that flow can never be contained. It doesn't matter how tight we weave the mesh of your neck when we try to reach out and catch the flow, it will go right through. You can't do it. When I read the, I heard the Emily Dickinson poem, I remembered a haiku by Isa, who is one of the noted haiku poets of Japan. He's not put under some spirit as someone like Basher, for instance. He was a common ordinary man. He was not an intellectual.

[29:33]

He was not an artist. He was marred and marred his children and they died. Well, except one who he never said because she was born after his death. And he wrote a haiku about the breath of one of his children. Like a dream, like a bubble, and yet, and yet. You see, in the Diamond Sutra, it's written, as a dream, as a bubble, should our life be viewed. Notice, please, that it did not say our life is a dream or a bubble, but it should be viewed as that. Like a dream, like a bubble, and yet, and yet. But what of that, you see? But what of that and that and that and that? That seems to be the place where if we were persistent in our practice, we can live in the midst of anguish absolute and many hurt.

[30:47]

Well, the problems are there. They're without having to go to heaven and find a new equation. You know, I've said it so many times. This, my show, is what it's all about. This is right, this is left. This is right, this is wrong. This is good, this is bad. This is heaven, this is hell. And you can carry that through whatever that kind of means. But, When you know that there are wires out of the run, then you can deal with them. They're not the so-called be-all. They're just something that comes up out of the and let and let. They come up in the form of the death of your child. They come out in the form of that we're out of that.

[31:35]

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