Good morning. Greetings, bodhisattvas. Greetings, future ancestors. So today we're in the middle of our getting close, not quite to the middle yet, maybe of our six week practice period. I guess we've completed. Two weeks of six. And the topic for the practice period is basic Buddhist teachings. And I've been thinking that what we're doing with this study, this practice period study, is kind of like strengthening our core, like you do in exercise where you have to keep strengthening your core, especially as you get older. And that's kind of like what we're doing.

[01:03]

And of course, in one sense, our core is Zazen always. And we've been talking a lot about Zazen. But another way to understand our core are these sort of foundational teachings of Buddhism that are pretty much shared by all the schools, most if not all of the schools of Buddhism. And they're kind of the foundation from which all these flowerings of these different schools. have come. And, you know, during this COVID year, I somehow ended up in a few different groupings tackling these really challenging Mahayana teachings. And it feels really good to return to these core basic teachings after that. It feels to me like those sutras are, they're like a really complicated dance move or gymnastics or athletic dance. task, you know, or like figure skating. It's as if Madhyamaka teaching is like the quadruple toe loop of Buddhism or something.

[02:09]

A really difficult move that you need to have a strong core to perform. And you can sort of feel it when you're studying these challenging teachings, like you're like, whoa, I'm going all over the place, you know. And you And in fact, even in these teachings themselves, there's often a passage that says, if you can listen to this teaching, if you can read this teaching without freaking out, that in itself is your Bodhi mind, you know. So anyway, strengthening our core. And of course, one core teaching of Buddhism, as most of you probably have heard, is the Four Noble Truths. The truth of suffering, that there is suffering. Sometimes life is suffering or the five clinging skandhas are suffering. And then the second truth is the cause of suffering. The third truth is that there is a cure. Where there's a cause, there's a cure.

[03:12]

And then the fourth truth is the cure in detail, which is the Noble Eightfold Path. And so with this first truth, the truth of suffering, It seems like there's two basic responses to when you first hear that teaching. One response is like, you hear that life is suffering and you think, oh, thank God, I thought it was just me. Or like, oh, they're saying the secret out loud, like the emperor's new clothes or something. It feels like something's being revealed that we kind of all knew, but we were afraid to say or something. We didn't know if anybody else felt that way. So that's one response. And another response is just to feel really turned off. Like it's so negative, so gloomy, so life denying. And, you know, both responses are valid to me.

[04:12]

And even the same person can have both responses at different times. For example, when I first, I took world religions in high school and we studied Buddhism and world religions. And I didn't resonate with Buddhism. It seemed so, yeah, dry, really dry. And yeah, life denying. You know, where was the love, the bliss, the joy of Baba Ram Dass or like the Sufi dancers, which, you know, is... those were somewhat available to me in those years, my early high school and early college years. By the way, I apologize that my camera likes to refocus sometimes. It's just a thing. It does. Anyway, so I didn't resonate with, you know, those early, that early Buddhist teachings were in world religion, Buddhism from the perspective of a world religion, Buddhist philosophy.

[05:17]

And even, you know, compared to Zen stories, which at that time I didn't exactly realize were the same religion. I didn't quite realize Zen was Buddhism in a way, you know. On Monday, Karen sometime was talking about how she first read this first story in this book, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, which happened to be the first book I also read in high school. And I was looking at the book this morning. Actually, the story that she responded to is the very first story in the book. And the story that I responded to that, you know, and I've talked to many people, actually, who this is their first Zen story is actually the third one in the book, which is the story of Hakuin and the baby. I'm going to retell it. Many people know it. A girl in Hakuen. So Hakuen was like a very important 18th century Japanese teacher.

[06:23]

And a girl in his village gets pregnant and she's afraid to tell her parents who the real father is. So she says it's Hakuen Zenji. She says the Zen master is the father of this baby. And the parents are furious, you know, and they... take the baby, when the baby's born, they take the baby to Hakawan and say, okay, you did this, you take care of this baby. And his response is, oh, is that so? So does me, maybe, you know, in Japanese. So then he takes the baby, takes care of it, and then a year later, or in my mind, more likely a month later, The mother can't stand it any longer, and she admits to her parents that actually this other person is the father. And they go to Hakuen, and they apologize profusely, and they take the baby back, and his response is, oh, is that so?

[07:24]

And... You know, I guess you could sort of stretch it and maybe you can see something about the Four Noble Truths in that story, perhaps. I don't know. But to me, it's very juicy. It's, you know, Hakuin, he's composed, but he's not apathetic. I mean, he's open to what the universe is handing him, including figuring out how to take care of a tiny newborn baby. And that kind of aliveness is what seemed to be lacking in these, the world religions version. And then, of course, Later, after I'd been flailing around a bit in my late teens and into my early 20s and experienced death and heartbreak, getting more and more confused and unhappy. Then, and also connecting with the practice through Suzuki Roshi, who's a gentle, fresh way to immerse yourself. And I had more like the first response.

[08:24]

Thank God. Thank God we're spelling this out. putting the truth on the table where we can study it and maybe learn to deal with it. So by the time I began my Zen practice in earnest, I was fully on board with Noble Truth Number One. And it's not so much that everything is suffering or that life is suffering as that, for one thing, suffering is the root cause of... all our problems. It's what makes us make bad choices, which cause difficulties for ourselves and each other and others. And, you know, when they talk about when you learn about the first noble truth, the truth of suffering, they sometimes talk about there being three kinds of suffering. And now in the Thich Nhat Hanh book that we're using for practice, period of study, he kind of checks that out the window, the three types. But I kind of

[09:25]

resonate with three types. I don't know if my three types are the same as the three types traditionally. But to me, the first kind is like the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Tragic things, sad things, harms, traumas that happen to us. Almost everyone has some pain and loss from childhood. And some have much more than a little. And these leave a mark in our bodies. It could be a physical harm. It could be an emotional harm. It could be mental harm or spiritual harm. But it leaves traces in our bodies that we have to work through. And, you know, many of these things are from our childhood, but then sad things continue to happen into our adulthood, various losses that we all can experience. They can happen to anyone, but they feel unique to ourselves. They're part of our story at the same time.

[10:28]

And the second kind of suffering is a bit more of an everyday thing. It's the way that often the things I like or want seem far away, and the things I don't like and don't want are often nearby. And, you know, we are built as social beings, and we have a need to be safe, a need to feel we belong. We need to feel our worth, our value, and we need love. And these are built into our psychophysical systems. And so in our lives, we can easily feel bad about ourselves and feel like we're not worthy or we don't belong. There's something wrong with us. We shouldn't be feeling this way. That's a really common one. Whatever the feeling is, I shouldn't be feeling this way. So it's so easy to get down on ourselves. And that's, to me, the second kind of suffering. And then the third kind is termed the suffering of conditionality, which is like just the fact that any of this stuff in the first two could happen is our vulnerability.

[11:40]

And we're either unconsciously or consciously aware of our vulnerability. Bad things can happen at any time to me or my loved ones. And also, anything could happen that would make me feel like a failure or an outsider. So I'm vulnerable to all of that. And even if something good is happening, I know in the back of my mind that it could end. It will end. It could end. It might go away. So there's that vulnerability. That's the one way to talk about the third type. And then there's another way to talk about the third type, conditionality, that points to something a bit deeper and maybe something a bit more towards these more challenging Mahayana teachings, which is it's related to our false division of subject and object. So the perspective of myself is... I'm like a fixed point in time and space, and all these things are happening to me.

[12:42]

And even the feelings in my body feel like they're happening to me, another me, not the body is one me, but then it's happening to me also, another me. And so we're kind of constantly buffeted by all this outside stuff that's happening, or we're pulled around by the allure of some of these outside things. So that's another way to think about the suffering of being subject to conditions. We're trying to maintain this fixed thing, keep it going, and then we're just always like outside things. whether they're in our bodies, anything could be outside from this perspective. Okay, so that's the first noble truth. However you define it, and our lives include a fair amount of unease, dis-ease, frustration, unsatisfactoriness, and downright pain.

[13:46]

You know, they say that newborn babies cry average two hours a day. It's hard to be a human being. It doesn't always feel so good. And this, you know, this kind of is the main topic of Buddhism. Buddha said, I teach suffering and the end of suffering, period. Because it's the main cause of the kind of problems we can do something about. So then the second noble truth is about the cause of suffering. And, you know, the Buddha, the way he lays out this basic teaching, he's talking more like a healer than a religious leader, actually, or almost any kind of problem solver. Like, first we state the problem, then we find the cause of the problem. Three, is there a solution to this problem? And four, what is the solution in detail? So it's really very practical. And more like psychological healing than religion in a way.

[14:52]

We have no cosmology, nothing you have to believe in, nothing that you have to take on faith. You know, you don't even have to believe in this first noble truth. Just study your life and see what you see. What is your experience? And it's also like the Buddha's giving us the user manual to our psychophysical system. You know, like, you know, you get a new device and you don't really want to look at the manual. It's like nowadays everything's plug and play. Right. And we're like that, too. We're plug and play. A newborn baby is totally plug and play. That's maybe part of the problem here. The baby can't look. It can't read the manual. It can't look at the manual. And there's hardly even a manual for the parents that works, you know, because the baby is so plug and play. And, you know. Who has time to look at the manual at that point? So our Buddhist practice is like admitting, okay, we need to look at the manual now. I tried this plug-and-play way, and now it's not working so well, so I'm just going to get out the manual.

[15:54]

That's Buddhism. And I thought the most mind-blowing part of the Thich Nhat Hanh reading, which I think was actually not in the part, if you saw the one that came out on the email, the pages, it was not in that part, I think. But anyway... His take on the second noble truth I thought was really mind-blowing. And, you know, the second noble truth is usually phrased something like the cause of suffering is desire. And anyway, to me, whatever you say, it's like the cause boils down to one thing. That's the way I was always taught. Whether you call it attachment or clinging, you know, Sojin used the phrase being caught by things. in this, you know, the cause of suffering is being caught by things, being continually caught or repeatedly caught, or even just always being a little off-center. But Thich Nhat Hanh actually, he says, you know, and the thing I love about Thich Nhat Hanh, I don't know how you feel about this, he is so confident when he defies a traditional teaching.

[17:00]

And it's not, it's not... It doesn't have any feeling like that. And he doesn't say, I've been to the mountaintop and I see, you know. He says, we can all see that this makes no sense. He'll say, you know, we can all see that this makes no sense. So his framing is like the years in desire as the first of, as like shorthand for a list of things. The cause of suffering is desire, maybe like the five hindrances, maybe I think the first. The first of the five hindrances is desired. Or the three poisons, greed, hate, and delusion. So he's saying it's not this one, it's not like it boils down to this one thing. And so he's basically saying don't use this spoiler alert mode and actually look at your own suffering one by one. Study it and see what the cause is. for you of this one and this one and this one.

[18:02]

And then when you do that, you know, you can, you can investigate and then you can use these teachings to cross check, you know, like I'm blaming my mom, but Buddha says it's not that, you know, or something like that. So it's a conversation with the teaching and your own study of yourself, which, you know, feels a little bit more like our, Suzuki Roshi-style practice or Dogen practice. So in this case, though, you know, we can look at some of the causes of the three types of suffering I outlined. And so the first type, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, could maybe even more simply be stated as trauma. And there's... a huge conversation in Western psychology right now about treating trauma. This even came up at lecture last Saturday, and it came up at the priest meeting.

[19:06]

It's bubbling up around us. It's the new way to understand our suffering from the Western psychological point of view. And the approach actually is something like sensory awareness. It's to... with the right kind of help and support to see where these traumas are held in our bodies, including intergenerational trauma. And, you know, some kind of mindful awareness of the body is what they're using. And so, I mean, this is a really gross oversimplification of what's happening in the conversation of Western psychology. And there's a lot available about that. If you can't find it on your own, we can help you find out more about that if you're interested. And, you know, of course, trauma has all kinds of different levels of acuteness or whatever.

[20:11]

I think sometimes for me, the pain of sashim does help me work through trauma, emotional trauma. You know, it's like the pain kind of reassociates me to my psychic pain, you know? And so it's right there. And just by holding it, holding my suffering with the kind of friendliness and respect and appreciation, that is part of what can metabolize it. It takes time. But I think that's one thing that can happen. with our Zen practice. However, we also know from experience of 50 years that it can be really counterindicated to sit Zazen, especially facing a wall in a quiet, silent room and all sort of the accoutrement of our Zen practice can really be too triggering for people's trauma.

[21:14]

And so... think the takeaway is really like don't go it alone you know that's why we talk to teachers and talk to our friends you know you don't have to go it alone whatever you're going through get help informally formally in whatever way you know try different things there are many many ways of healing and digesting and metabolizing what happened So what about the cause of the second kind of suffering, which is the everyday being buffeted by the range of feelings and disappointments and anxiety and about whether we belong, whether we have value, whether we're loved, whether we're safe. And I think, again, Thich Nhat Hanh's encouragement to investigate for ourselves. However, since I have to give a talk and I have to give some causes, to explain the second noble truth, we could say that one possible cause, the way we talk about in Buddhism is, you know, our self.

[22:23]

It's so easy to be caught, you know, by appearances outside, by our feelings, our perceptions, our preconceived beliefs that we're going into the situation with. And there's some way we get into this echo chamber of our self and we're turning around and And the metaphor that used in some scriptures is like a silkworm where you're wrapping yourself tighter and tighter and tighter. If you start down that road, you know, you just keep wrapping yourself tighter and tighter and tighter into a little cocoon. And it feels tight, you know. We feel boxed in. We feel like an animal in a trap or a fish on a hook. Or, you know, what does it feel like to you? What's the metaphor for yours? And it seems like we are boxed in from the outside. And, you know, maybe we are. But a big part of it, and the part that our practice is addressing, is that we're being boxed in by our own mistaken beliefs about ourselves and about the world.

[23:28]

We're so wrapped up in them that we can't see beyond them. And this includes the third kind of suffering, the belief or perspective. that I am this fixed point which is being bombarded by all these happenings. And, you know, there's some truth to the self perspective. But the other perspective to explore is that we ourselves are just like these things. We're another momentary happening just like all these things. We're not like standing on the bank of the river being splashed by the waves. But, you know, our molecules are part of the molecules, are some of the molecules of the river. And so the third truth, the so-called end of suffering, would be, the cure of suffering, would be to develop this other perspective. And not that we get rid of the self-perspective, although the self-perspective can evolve and mature and heal and soften.

[24:34]

And one of the main ways that happens, actually, is by developing the other perspective. We develop this wide, spacious, flowing, fresh, alive perspective where we're just part of everything. We're part of the huge everything. We can step back into big mind. For me, it feels like it's behind. Maybe that's not true for you, but I step back into something that's holding everything. That's our big mind. That's our Buddha nature. It's holding all the individual things, all the sufferings, all the experiences, and it's holding them with friendliness and respect and appreciation. So lately I've had a little bit of a, I don't know what to call it, a kick I've been on or something, which is based on noticing. Oh, I remember now that I can go to gallery view.

[25:38]

Thank you. I'm a little tired of looking at myself there. Hi, Ross. Hi, everybody. So what I'm noticing lately is that we have the same word for feelings that we have for practices. So like, is it that we're supposed to feel patient or we're supposed to practice patience? Are we supposed to feel compassionate or feel generous? Or is it that we practice patience when we're not feeling patient? It's so easy to, we judge ourselves by our feelings. You know, if I feel impatient, I immediately think, oh, I'm such a bad Zen student. How could after all these years of practice, how could I feel whatever it is I'm feeling? We judge ourselves by our feelings. But that's not what we're talking about, actually. It's the same word. And that's, I wonder if that's a problem or if that's fine, but we need to wake up to it, you know.

[26:46]

Maybe we should have different words for the practices than for the feelings. I don't know. But it's the actual practice is not about trying to change our feeling directory like, you know, push it down, push it away. All those things that we tend to want to do, possibly cultural baggage, but also maybe just human. I don't know. But, you know, I shouldn't be feeling this way. I mean, how often do I think that, you know? And so it's really, it's in that moment to do the practice. When we're feeling impatient, it's not about the feeling. It's about what we do in the next moment, which is what we do. If we're practicing patience, we might pause. We might take a breath. We might not do the thing that we were about to do, which feels exactly like the feeling.

[27:49]

I mean, until you slow things down, there's no gap between being bugged by somebody and punching them in the nose. It's the same thing. But if you slow it down, you'll see that it's not the same thing. There's a space in there. And the space is not to whitewash the feeling or cover it over or get rid of it. The feeling is, okay, now I'm feeling this. What shall I do? What was that practice I said I was going to do in this situation? Can I remember what I said? And not with any sense that the feeling is wrong. Feelings are just simply results. And in no list of Buddhism, no study of Buddhism, is that ever the point where you introduce change to change the feeling. It's after that. It's even a couple steps after that, usually. The grasping, the clinging, the reacting.

[28:50]

And, of course, our feelings are changing all the time. And they may evolve with practice. We may be less impatient, perhaps. But, again, There's that gaining idea. We're not worrying about that. The causes and conditions are coming together for this feeling to be occurring. And we have very little control. We may have some control over those. It could turn out, if I go to the Zen monastery, I'll feel less irritated. And then sometimes you find out, actually, it doesn't work that way. I'm just as irritated here as I was there. That's a good way to learn. So... So it's not that we want to ignore the feeling and move on to the practice. It's like we hold the feeling and then we remember what the practice is, which has usually something to do with breathing, feeling where it is in my body, feeling what it's about, perhaps something old maybe, reminds me of da-da-da, my mother, my father, my sister, my brother, whatever.

[30:01]

Or maybe not. Maybe it's not that deep. Maybe it's just momentary. But just don't go forward from there. Go forward from the pause. Go forward from the space in between what's happening. That's the cure in a way. That's one cure. Okay, so the fourth truth, and Hozan, trying to learn how to call him that, Hozan Sensei, is going to talk more about the fourth truth, the holy eightfold path on Thursday. So please come on Thursday. And I'm just going to do a short introduction. And I kind of already have started talking about the cure, because the third one really is just that there is a cure. And as soon as you start talking about... what the cure is, you're already out of the third one, in a way.

[31:04]

But in my introduction, I'm going to divide the path into three categories. Our attitude, our conduct, and meditation. So first, our attitude and our basic attitude can be summed up by Suzuki Roshi's no gaining idea. In fact, a lot of what Suzuki Roshi's Everything he's teaching is kind of about our attitude. A lot of it is about trying to, you know, an attitude adjustment. Just our attitude from the usual attitude of what's this going to get me or how can I be safe or how can I avoid this? No gaining idea, you know, have no designs on becoming a Buddha. Big mind. You know, our basic practice is to express something. Something big and vast and indescribable. Just by being, by sitting, by pausing when we're angry, we're expressing something there.

[32:14]

That's the point of the practice. Not anything else. At least not at this point in the attitude stage. So that's our attitude. And the second category is our conduct. And... It's quite simply put in the precepts. And I think also there's going to be a class taught by Andrea Thatch in the 16 Bodhisattva Precepts. I think it's two weeks after this Thursday, maybe. Anyway, check the schedule. But the precepts are vast and wide. The precepts are a huge practice. It's not just not to do harm. learning not to do harm myself. We have to prevent harm. It's not just learning how not to steal. It's we have to prevent stealing, you know, like of land and resources and labor. It's not just working to be honest, learning how not to lie myself.

[33:18]

It's how can we create the conditions in our sangha and in our society of truth and honesty. It's a lifelong practice, the precepts. So then in this scenario, the third category is the meditation. So, I mean, the interesting thing about the Eightfold Path approach is that actually those first two are the precursors to calming our minds. In this, you know, it's wonderful to develop our attitude and clean up our conduct, and in this scenario, they are like, that's how you settle your mind, by doing those things, by changing your attitude and your conduct. You know, when I first started sitting, I think maybe for the first year, I don't know, I've never heard anybody else describe this, and maybe I've never mentioned this, I had all in my zazen, I had these memories floating up of mean things I'd done.

[34:26]

Has anybody else you can tell me? You know, just little things, little thoughtless mean things. Fortunately, I'm lucky. I wasn't, conditions were not such that I, you know, did much more, I don't think, than hurt people's feelings and maybe even badly, but still. But I kept, they just kept coming up. They just naturally, it was, we were not studying the precepts at that point in 1980. It was just what happened in my system. I kept seeing these faces, these hurt-feeling faces that I had not absorbed at all the first time, but it was in my memory. And I had to sort of metabolize all that and, you know, accept myself, accept what happened, apologize maybe in a few cases. And then you can start to settle.

[35:26]

And your mind can settle. And when your mind can settle, then you can step back, as I said for me, or whichever way the step goes for you, step back into big mind. And hold, hold all these little wonderful and horrible things that are happening in the world of happenings. And so, in a way, after that, you circle back to your attitude, right? That helps you with your attitude. When you can calm your mind and see the emptiness, see this thing about how the subject-object divide is not real, then you develop your attitude differently. Your attitude towards others, towards yourself, towards the suffering of the world. so you keep looping back around and once you have that insight from the inside about your attitude then you might even have inside more things about your conduct the subtler things that no one else thinks are wrong but you know they're just off they're just off especially right after you do it so that's the best way to tell sometimes and then

[36:53]

The idea would be in here. It's really hard not to introduce a gaining idea, I have to say. It's really, really hard to give a talk about Zen practice without introducing a gaining idea. So now here I'm doing that, which is you circle back around, and then your mind can calm even more. And when your mind calms even more, you have more insight into this big mind, and that helps your attitude, which helps your conduct. Anyway. Ad infinitum, hopefully. That's what I had prepared to tell you. And now I would like us to have a conversation. As usual, we invite you to raise your digital hand. And I encourage you just to get straight to your question from the heart.

[37:55]

I love how Blake says good sangha. Just every time. Anyway, please. Questions, anybody? Raise the hand. And one thing... Hako. Oh, Hako. Laurie, would you like to... Okay. I was just going to say, it's okay to sit quietly, too, is all I was going to say. But go ahead, Hako. Thank you, Laurie, for bringing it down to the ground. Really, really easy to understand. Really, really easy to see the sprouts and the seeds in... granularity in terms of my own causes of suffering. And as you went over the different things, I had to laugh and had to sort of understand because it was so right on for me.

[39:07]

The thing I'm left with is not a question, but the gaining idea. And I really appreciate that. Although we do come around and around and around, and each time we get back to that seat and we see, for example, that face that we heard or that thing that we know about, we can recognize that there is a different attitude. Or we find, I've found in my experience, openings to new attitudes as I come around. And that is just such a realistic message of hope. The comment I was going to make was, yes, when people say thank you for your patience, I respond, I wasn't really being patient. And I guess I would say I was practicing. But thank you for opening and taking me a step back with you. Thank you. I saw there was a message from Charlie, Blake.

[40:10]

I saw that one, which is, aren't feelings just thoughts? Or was it just our feelings thoughts? And I don't think so. And there's different ways to talk about feelings in Buddhism. I am going to tell you what I think they are, which is not exactly maybe the party line. Feelings are things that happen in your body and your mind together. So they're kind of a bridge. To me, they're a bridge between the body and the mind. So I can have various thoughts. And I'm not having a feeling with all of them. If I look at Joe right now, who's right under my square, and I think, does he like me? Or I worry that he doesn't like me. I might have a feeling then. But I could have another thought about him, but I wouldn't have a feeling. So feelings are in our bodies. And that's a good place to study them. Because they have all sorts of...

[41:12]

stories and beliefs and they run out in the mind they run feelings they run whole movies you know one time i've told this story before i was sitting in zaza i was upset with somebody when i sat down and i thought i had a such a vivid imagination of what i was going to say and then they would say that and then i would say that and they would say it and that it fortunately five minutes before the period ended i realized what i was doing and i thought It was exactly like a movie I was watching. I played a movie for myself, and it was feelings running it and churning them up more and more. But as soon as I realized that, oh, you know how when you watch a movie, you have all these emotions, right? And then when the movie's over, they're gone. It was like that. It was just gone. It's like, oh. I still had to deal with that situation. This thing with the feelings.

[42:17]

But again, I'm not saying they're wrong. It's just their evidence, their outcome, their results. But to me, they're not thought. To me, thoughts are another thing, even though they're close. Everything's closely related, right? And there's something artificial about separating them out. But also there's something helpful for our study in my mind, my beliefs. Peter Overton. Oh, can you unmute, please? Yes, Peter, unmute. Thank you. Thank you, Laurie. This has really been interesting. I wanted to follow up a little bit on what you were just saying, because I've been thinking about that since you started talking about impatience and whether or not you felt impatience and whether that was the same as being impatient. And sometimes I think it's useful to examine the way we talk to ourselves about what's going on.

[43:19]

Like, I am impatient. I sort of classify that as a judgment about exactly what's going on with me. Or if I say I feel impatient, that's something about something going on in my body. And so sometimes the way we talk, gets us in trouble because we're not just making a distinguishing about how we're processing the experience. Yeah, and I think you have to be pretty quiet to even notice that difference, right? Uh-huh. It might be. I mean, I hope everybody here, no matter how long, could notice that right away, but it's when I get really quiet that I think, oh, I'm talking to myself. I mean, I can't even hear that because I'm feeling how I'm feeling from the talking, you know, bad about myself, downtrodden or something.

[44:22]

Yeah, there's lots of stuff that happens after you become aware of your feeling, your actual feeling. Right. It's sort of like, you know, it's another world, really. Yeah. Yeah. Study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. Don't forget the self before you study the self. That's the right word. Thank you. And you know, it's okay for us to sit quietly. One of our, you know, Karen Dakotas was saying that, and I don't know how well this is going in her group, but they were working on just, if there aren't any questions, sit, and then maybe the really quiet people, will have the nerve. If we leave enough space, and if nobody does, that's fine too. But it's okay for us to leave a little space. It feels like it'll hurt the speaker's feelings if there are no questions. And I can relate to that.

[45:24]

It might feel that way afterward, but what I'd like to say is let's just try feeling that inner prompting. If you feel an inner prompting, even if you're scared, please come forward. Ross Blum. Hi, Ross. Hi there. So I am here now. Okay. Thank you very much for bringing up the Western psychological model for helping us with our traumas and realizing ourselves. I've heard it said that you have to have a healthy self to forget the self. And I'm wondering how do we discern the difference in our practice to

[46:28]

utilize a psychological model or paradigm versus just sitting. As you mentioned in your talk, sometimes sitting activates things and we revisit past traumas in our life. So how do you discern or what encouragement or advice do you have for us to, when we're sitting, how to move forward? Which school of thought? Yeah, good question, I think. I think it's a process, and it might involve talking to people and describing. I mean, I think everybody sits down and there's pain and discomfort, and we have to sit through a certain amount of that. And I think I probably need to talk to more people. I have one friend who stopped sitting because she had such a traumatic childhood that it didn't make sense to her.

[47:32]

And she tried for a long time and judged herself badly for a long time. So don't do that. That would be one thing we could say. Don't let it go on for a long time without asking anybody, without talking to anybody, and just trying to... power through or whatever you think the Zen students are doing in Japan or whatever. So, and they can go hand in hand, you know, and so find, and I think we can, you know, to some degree, you find an inner prompting about what healing modality you could explore in tandem with Zen practice. They don't have to be either or, and you could pause, pause, do a little, you know, and, you know, I think people who have intergenerational trauma, you know, from racism or, you know, family violence in the family. You know, I was so lucky I had no male violence in my family. Really, my one uncle could lose his temper a little bit.

[48:34]

I had a lot of absent men. But, you know, now that I've talked to people, it's amazing how many people have experienced violence in their childhoods, you know, from family members. So you might know, and some people will minimize, if you find yourself not wanting to tell anybody or thinking it can't be as bad as I remember it or trying to make it like other, you know, all those kinds of things, I would say have a deeper conversation with someone. And, you know, I think the BCC senior students, we're trying to up our game a little bit about this, be more aware of other options. that we can point people towards and be more aware of maybe what the signs are. But I mean, I think a lot of us felt some kind of relief pretty early on in our sitting. And it's not, if you don't feel that, it's not, there's nothing wrong with you.

[49:37]

It's not wrong, it's just a different, the different psychophysical systems response, you know. I don't know if other people have more insight about this that they want to answer, I'd be open to that. Thanks, Laurie. Yeah, we're not trained therapists, so what's our training and Zen practice is what we can offer people when they come here. So there's a place where maybe this person needs another kind of help to supplement or encourage them that they're not getting wholeheartedly with just sitting and, as you said, plowing through it because we don't want to plow through things. We want to experience things and be with them and work with them. It's a very different kind of mindset. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Jeff Taylor, I invite you to ask a question. Hey, Lori. Hey, Jeff. It's always so good to see you in the seat. I was thinking that same exact thing.

[50:39]

That's because you could see yourself. No, I was thinking about you. It's so good to see you. Just kidding. You did a couple of things that I really wanted to point at that resonated for me. And when you told the story of Hakuin and the baby, you pointed at something that I think is really important to me, which is this idea of the warm blood of Zen, of warm hand to warm hand, of the aliveness of practice. Yeah. I mean, it's easy to use the overused meme of staring at a blank wall as a very dry and sterile experience, which couldn't be farther from the truth. When Mel used to talk and he would kind of riff on the ineffable where he would sit just a little way beyond our conscious mind and call us into that interplay of light and dark and it would conjure very alive and very human experiences that are really articulated in a dimension that's hard to speak about.

[51:43]

Because it is that ineffable thing that we can't really wrap our hands around, touch, say, or otherwise concretize. And that story points at that for me, and thank you for sharing that. The other thing that you did that I thought was... The baby's important in the story, because if someone had told him, oh, you're a jerk... And he said, oh, is that so? And then they came back and said, I was wrong, you're not a jerk. Who cares, you know? But he actually took care of a tiny newborn baby, you know? That's it. Hey, deadbeat dad, here's your baby. It's like, what? Yeah, yeah. And when you said he wasn't apathetic, that's where the warmth kind of enters the story. Yeah, yeah. That he took the baby, he cared for it, and in the compassion, the very human and warm way. He was really present for the experience, both sides of it. Deadbeat dad, here's your baby. And, oh, by the way, we'd like it back, please. Yeah. The second thing that you did, well, the other thing that you did that I personally resonated with is you talked about the difference between an internal experience of how we experience ourselves in our internal world and how we experience the external world kind of coming at us and having all of those experiences, comfortable, uncomfortable, and otherwise.

[53:00]

And the Ginjo Koan, which you were just talking about, really calls that for me, right? I mean, to study the self is to forget the self, but you can't separate those two experiences. You can't forget the self before you study the self. It doesn't work. And so I think the Ginjo Koan in that particular instance is saying something that's really very true. So forget the second part. Study the self. But when you study the self... How is it you'll do that? How do you hold that idea and how does it change for you over time? That's a really interesting question. But the thing that I was going to talk about in relation to what you said is that when we talk, the Genjo Cohen also talks about the idea of when we carry ourselves forward and experience myriad things, that's delusion. That's actualizing and reifying a sense, a self that doesn't really exist. That myriad things come forth and experience themselves, that's awakening.

[54:06]

Some say enlightenment, and I don't like that word, so I don't use it very often. So when these things are actualizing themselves, this idea of... How do we experience reality and where's the separation between who we are and what experience is? I think this is something really important to point at. How do we experience the reality around us? You talked about that space so nicely. Anger is energy. Your body vibrates with it. But how do you get that breath in front of punching somebody in the nose? Where is that breath for you and where is your practice in that? And these are both jewels to be turned. I mean, one of the sutras I torture badly. I mean, it's probably heretical. But back when the Buddha was, you know, still hosting cocktail parties in the park, and lots of you have heard me say this a hundred times, somebody came up to him and said, what happens when we die? And the Buddha turned around and said, well, how the hell would I know? He said, well, what are you going to do next?

[55:08]

That's a really interesting question. And so whether we're working with trauma from childhood or or whether we're working with an uncomfortable conversation from yesterday, what are you going to do next? That's where the right conversation lives for me. How do I experience and how do I convey compassion? Or how do I experience and how do I convey wisdom? What am I going to do next? That's where encouragement comes in. Not that I live in the past and I'm constantly addressing my trauma. That's not necessarily a really productive experience. More productive is, Laurie, how do we help you do whatever the thing is you're really hungry to do? Let's talk about that. And if there's something that's getting in the way, fine, we'll talk about that too. Anyway, as you can tell, I'm kind of moved by your talk and you've inspired me. You're launched. Thank you, Laurie. Ken Nabb, I invite you to unmute yourself and ask a question.

[56:16]

Hi, Laurie. Hi, Ken. Going back to that same Hakuin interchange, I think that if we put ourselves in Hakuin's position, you were talking about the difference between thoughts and feelings. I think, obviously, his first thought would be, this woman is mistaken when she says, this is my baby. And that's an accurate thought. It's not just something floating through his mind. But that doesn't mean... I assume that he's thinking to himself and thinking... Would that be like what we would do in that situation? We would say, no, I'm not the father. Where did you get that idea from? And what are you talking about?

[57:19]

But he presumably, at least in the story, is thinking, well, if if she thinks I'm the father, this is going to be complicated. You know, it's going to. Maybe the daughter said this or something. What am I going to do? This is not going to be a fruitful response to say that. And so given this situation, I'm going to respond in a different way. I'm not going to say that's true, but I'm also not going to say that's not true. I'm just going to say, oh, OK. like that is that so is not quite a good translation because in English that always has a little bit of a oh is that so you know it usually means no that is and I think in the Japanese it's probably asoka which is neutral it's like you just told me something and I say oh is that right it could be

[58:32]

Oh, that's interesting. I didn't know that. Or like, okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. But not with no undercurrent of, oh, okay. Yeah. You know, it's like, oh, you're giving me the Babel to take care of. Okay. I mean, it could even be like, hmm. Which, again, is ambiguous. You don't know if he's he's not admitting anything, but he just say, OK, I heard you and I hear what you say. And so, oh, OK, I'm going to take care of the baby. But that's the we can assume that his feelings, even though he had the accurate view that she was mistaken, what he's going into there is like. I'm not going to bring up that conflict. I'm just going to accept this.

[59:33]

And given that I'm going to accept it, I'm not going to make any issue about it. I'm just going to say, oh, OK. So this is a subtle thing, and it's exactly that distinction you were mentioning between thought and feeling. It's like he may have been thinking, oh, she's wrong, but he's reacting to say, how am I going to do the best response to this thing for all concerned? And so the best response is to bring it on. OK. And then when we get to the end of the story, a similar thing, like he doesn't say, well, I told you. Maybe, have you learned a lesson from this or something? You just say exactly the same thing. Like, oh, okay, here's the baby.

[60:37]

Anyway, it's interesting to make that distinction of thought and feeling there. And the response has to be like, he has to make himself feel or just be feel like this is okay. Okay. not just that i'm putting up you know making the best of a bad situation it's like all right that's enough i mean you went to his ego i went to it was a big turning point in my practice when i thought he might have felt oh no i don't know how to take care of a f star star star baby and but you know that could have been the feeling right the feeling but oh my god no way and how can i do this you know but again it was like okay that's my feeling right now that i can't do this you know but the response i want is okay universe you gave me this i'm taking it

[61:40]

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