I know to taste the truth of the darkest words. Good morning. Several years back, around the 40s, there were a group of Japanese scientists who wanted to verify or test the validity of Zen meditation. And so they got together a group of Zen priests and made these scientific tests on all phases of Zen meditation.

[01:08]

And the basic equipment they used was electroencephalogram, which I'll refer to as EEG. I took EEG tests in the 60s. Langley Porter Clinic in San Francisco, they were carrying on that work. A lot of psychologists and scientists were collaborating. The EEG is a brainwave testing machine. So they decided that the way to test the results of the meditation was through brainwaves.

[02:13]

So the scientists and psychologists were collaborating on these tests and around 67, 68 They were asking Zen students from San Francisco and Berkeley to volunteer to participate in those tests. And you'd go over and you'd sit in this little closet and they'd put electrodes on your head. And then you'd sit in Zazen and they would test your brainwaves on these machines. that made graphs. And at the time I didn't think so much about it, or so much of it. I wasn't particularly interested in the scientific evaluation of Zazen. But recently I've been reading some of the research, and it's pretty interesting, actually.

[03:25]

it helps to refocus some of my understanding. And I think it can be very valuable. And especially for people who need, in our day and age, some scientific evaluation or validation. I think it's helpful for those people. But there were four types of brainwaves that were prominent. The alpha waves and the beta waves and the delta waves and the theta waves. And alpha waves are usually associated with sleep or a very calm kind of mind.

[04:32]

And what the researchers were interested in particularly was alpha waves. If the Zen meditators really produced alpha waves when they meditated, this was felt to be very important because alpha shows a unified kind of mind. And, of course, Zen students, when in deep samadhi, or even an advanced Zen student, will immediately start producing alpha waves when they begin to do zazen. And beta waves are the waves that are produced through thinking mind. mental activity. And delta waves are more agitated kind of waves that are produced through conflict, through anger or instability, mental instability.

[05:48]

And the theta waves are waves very deep slow waves that are associated with deep sleep. And they discovered that old-time monks, people who have been practicing for 30 or 40 years, produced these theta waves in their zazen with their eyes open and in a waking state. which is very unusual. It proved to the scientists the very deep, calm mind of someone in Zazen who has been, who has mastered Zazen. And they made various comparisons between practitioners and people who were drawn from various other, who had never

[06:56]

experienced zazen before and they put these people who had never had no experience of zazen in the same positions as the people who had experience and the results were quite different. So it didn't depend so much on the positions as it depended on the depth of practice. So alpha waves are very characteristic of Zen meditation. And the scientists are very pleased with this and helped them to verify all of the claims made by various patriarchs or ancestors in the Zen tradition. And they tested the various things like zazen and qinheng and even things like belief.

[08:02]

How belief helps to regulate the various systems within the body and mind. Very interesting. And one thing that was mentioned was the difference between sleep and awareness in zazen. And the scientists were very not surprised but impressed with the fact that the Zen people, people in Zen meditation could produce the same kind of brainwaves as someone in tranquil states of sleep and yet they were in a state of complete awakeness and awareness

[09:27]

They went off to India. Do you remember? We used to have a lady here named Dolly. Dolly Giptazi. And she was working for Professor Green, who was interested in biofeedback. And they went to India and tested yogis and different people. And they found that the yogis also were able to a very deep concentrated meditation, but their meditation was different. It was more like sleep, actually, or some detached state. For instance, in a meditative state, when there was some interruption, like a pencil tapping or some kind of interruption. It would record on the Zen master's mind and make some record, but it wouldn't stay there.

[10:40]

It would just be there, something receptive. But when you did that same test to the yogi in India, there was no record. It didn't record. There was no response. So Zen meditation is a little different than yogic meditation, and the aims and purposes are not the same, although there's a lot of similarity. But Zen meditation is awakeness and awareness, and always done with the eyes open. a state of awareness. The scientists are very impressed by the state of awareness of the Zen student. In Zazen, you know, we're supposed to think, not thinking, as Dogen says, without

[11:56]

chasing our thoughts away, extraneous thoughts, the Zen student has a very deeply concentrated mind just on the subject. So a Zen student can sit in Zazen, have perfect posture and equanimity, and yet have all kinds of images coming up in the mind. and all kinds of associated trains of thought which are on the surface of the mind. And without eliminating those or chasing them away, the Zen student just lets those thoughts come and go. They come by themselves and disappear by themselves. and the Zen student doesn't make a conscious association between the thoughts.

[13:02]

But nevertheless, a conscious association is made. You know, we think if someone comes into the room, we say, oh, someone's coming to the room. And then that leads to another thought. where who is this person and then when the person sits down you have this thought of them sitting down and then maybe you start thinking about them and then that leads to another thought and pretty soon you have this chain of thoughts which goes on and at some point there's nothing more to associate it with so it passes out But at the same time that this association of chain of thoughts is going on, this Zen student is still sitting Zazen. So there's a kind of subconscious attention, attentiveness, subconscious conscious concentration.

[14:08]

And this same kind of dual concentration plays an active part in the world. When Zen student is acting in the world, they should have that same basic concentration, subconscious concentration of Zazen. And at the same time, to be able to deal in the realm of associated thoughts and actions without losing the basic concentration. A little while ago I talked about how our mind, Suzuki Roshi talked about how our mind is like a screen.

[15:15]

a movie screen. And the activities of mind are like the projections on the screen. But the screen itself has to be blank. And this blank screen is like our fundamental mind, fundamental consciousness. And we're not so aware, usually, of our fundamental consciousness. We delight in the pictures and the associations we make about the movie. But in Zazen, what we're interested in is just the screen, just the blank screen, the white screen with no projections. But even though we want to see the screen, it's still pretty hazy.

[16:25]

And there's always something being projected on the screen. But through our conscious effort, our conscious activity of zazen, we know about the screen, about the white screen. So we don't pay so much attention to the pictures, because what we're interested in is the white screen. But when we go out into the world, the picture takes on more meaning. And we have to be very careful and attentive to the pictures, to the picture of our life. And we have to respond to it. But at the same time, without losing the understanding or losing our basis of the screen. We also describe it as the water and the waves.

[17:30]

That's a classical description of our mind. The calm water. The nature of water is calmness. Actually, placid. No, just clear, calm water. That's our basic nature. So in Zazen, we resume to that basic calmness. Just no waves, no ripples. And as soon as you throw something in, you throw a pebble into the calm water and you have a ripple. And in a storm, you can't even see the ocean. All you see is the waves. And the object of our practice is even though there's a storm, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that the ocean is really tranquil.

[18:31]

If you go down a little bit, you find that the storm doesn't really reach all the way down. There's a place where it's still very calm and you can meet your mind. So in our everyday activity, we always try to find this place where we meet our calm mind, where we're always in that place. So that no matter what's going on on the surface, we never lose ourself, we never get knocked off our place. And this is the basis of what we call always being in control of the situation. Not controlling the waves. We don't try to control the waves. We just, when the waves get heavy, we just get deeper.

[19:36]

We just go deeper. So, in the most extreme situation, we just go deeper and deeper. So, our difficulties actually is our opportunity. That's why we always say, our difficulty is our opportunity, because the more difficult it gets, the deeper we can go. If we don't have that difficulty, we don't feel like going deeper. You know, we have to kind of be forced into that depth. So some practice like Sashin helps us to get deeper into our fundamental mind. So you can tell a Zen student who is really practicing

[20:40]

when they have a big problem, or when the sea is getting rough, they just base themselves deeper and deeper into the calmness of their mind. So, alpha waves can be sustained. Our alpha mind should be with us always, not just when we're sitting down or having our brain waves measured. Zen students should always be producing those alpha waves, no matter what's happening. Most important thing for a Zen student is not what their reaction to stimulus is, but how to keep their calm mind. So it's always a big challenge.

[21:45]

How do you keep your calm mind in all circumstances? It doesn't mean that you don't do something about it. When we have calm mind, then we have response. We're able to respond. When we don't have calm mind, then we can only react. So there's a big difference between reaction and response. Reaction is just with nothing deeper than our agitated mind. We lash out. Response comes from the ability to come from a deep place and a place that is our real self. reaction is to be caught by the other side. And response comes from the unity of yourself and the other side.

[22:50]

So that response is a kind of wholeness, comes out of wholeness rather than partiality. There's a kind of saying in Buddhism the difference between the lion and the dog. When someone shakes a stick at a dog, the dog leaps for the stick. But the lion goes for the person. So, you know, we have this kind of in our society we have these people who hide behind shields and shake sticks and our attention is focused right there at the end of the stick and we chew and bite and get all upset instead of going right behind the shields to the source.

[23:58]

But if we're coming from the Source ourself, then we can see the Source of other things. And we don't have to clutch at straws. So a lot of Japanese scientists, their psychologists, scientific psychologists, are interested in using Zazen or Zen meditation methods as therapy.

[25:07]

And kind of the problem is, you know, they'd like to divorce it from the religious aspect. See, you don't need to have the religion in order to have the therapy. And that may be so. But I think the goals are quite different. And in our Zen practice, we always have people who come to practice for therapeutic reasons. And we don't. That's fine if people do that. But it's not the highest meaning of practice. But I think it's very important, and if it helps people, it's very good. And it also may help to lead people into practice, into the deeper meaning of practice. Because people come to practice for various reasons, and they don't really know why they come.

[26:10]

I think most of us have come to practice for various reasons, but it takes us a while to understand what our practice is really about. Maybe 20 or 30 years. Or maybe we never do understand what it's really about. But I think that that's a valid entrance. Therapy is a valid entrance into practice. But I think that if it's only used as therapy, or limited in that way, that it loses its real function and meaning. People today want to extract the religious content out of things and just use the practical aspect, which is a big mistake. Although calming the mind can be done by anyone, and it's very good practice for anyone.

[27:21]

People can sit in chairs and unify the mind. But it's not the same as real practice. But I'm I feel good about the scientific approach to meditation practice. I think it's very interesting to see that kind of analysis. And also to see how impressed the scientists are with their method. with the Zazen itself and to actually verify the explanations of our teachers. I think they're very serious about what they've been doing.

[28:28]

And I remember seeing movies the early 60s when we were doing that, those tests. And the movies showed these Zen priests with big masks on, walking King Kong with big masks and big tubes and wires coming out of, going up their robes and out of their sleeves and out of their noses and ears. Very funny. But it's very meaningful. I think that if some psychologists or psychiatrists who practice Zen seriously can incorporate some of the Zazen, some of the Zen meditation into helping patients, I think that that can be very valid. But one of the things that impressed me was that some of the scientists could actually penetrate and accept and explain the actual meaning of what Zen meditation was about.

[30:06]

And that was heartening. They didn't just say, oh, well, it's not that at all. They could really penetrate it. and using some of their own terms and they could explain it as much as you can explain something and attest to its validity. Do you have any questions? Yes. You described the good sense student as one who could go into the depths and come from a very deep place in various phases.

[31:13]

Speak up a little bit. Speak up. And then you said that one can attain calm mind by sitting in a chair and other means, and doesn't. And then you said that practicing calming of mind, aside from its religious context, isn't the same. So what's the difference? What I mean is, it doesn't have the same goal or depth. You can sit down and calm your mind, but unless you have constant practice, and have gone through the various stages of concentration and meditation, you don't have the same result, even though a beginner can sit down in a chair and just watch breath control.

[32:13]

You just, you know, calm their mind and their breath, and it will be beneficial. But it's not the same as someone who's been practicing, not exactly the same depth as someone who is an actual Zen student practicing stillness. Other than the length of time of practice, what constitutes the religious difference? What do you mean by... Well, the religious difference is faith in the mind. faith in Buddha nature. That's quite a big difference. It's one thing to sit down and calm your mind and it's another thing to have faith in Buddha nature and to have your life oriented in that way. It's like the difference between

[33:17]

having a rowboat in a puddle and being on a ship in the sea. They're the same. The elements are the same, but the field is quite different. Carlos? Yeah, I had a comment. It's possible to What kind of state? Biofeedback. And what kind of state? Just a calm physiological state. So, for me, the difference between the machine approach, which attempts to produce certain physiological symptoms, there's a book called The Realization Response written by a medical doctor at Harvard who talks about being relaxed and what that does for you. The other half is what's transmitted by the teacher, and those are beliefs and attitudes.

[34:25]

attitudes are very important. But the attitudes sort of tell you where to go once you're calm, what to do with that calmness.

[35:26]

Do you simply stand back and watch the world burn, or do you step in and try to help what's happening in that conflagration? One can be very calm and yet very cynical, in a sort of very detached sense. Or you can be very calm and yet very involved and pay the price that comes from that involvement. I think you can go either way. It just brings us in. Yeah, I think that's a good point. We've talked about goals and that sort of thing. How would you describe or what would you say about the concept of liberation or enlightenment or realization in all of this? In all of this? practice oriented toward Buddha, orienting our mind toward Buddha, directing our light toward the Buddha path, all of that.

[36:46]

But within that, as it's all throughout the literature, there's talk about the experience of enlightenment, the experience of liberation, realization, something like that. What role does that play? Well, enlightenment is more like unifying with everything. When your mind is unified with the mind of the universe, there's no difference. When you experience that unity, that's something like enlightenment. Is that the goal of practice? Yeah. That's the goal of practice. I agree with what you say, except if, say, a psychologist is helping someone, they can help someone in this way.

[38:29]

Then it's not so selfish. But if someone is just practicing as a self-improvement, gimmick or, you know, in some way, then it has an aspect of selfishness or self-centeredness to it, which is not so desirable. But if that's the level that it's maintained on, then it's not so meaningful. But if it helps a person to understand that enough to give up that self-centeredness and take on the bigger practice in a more bigger way, then it can be a help, too, in that way. So it's hard to judge, you know. Sometimes you say, well, a thing is good.

[39:32]

A thing is bad, you know. But a thing is a thing, and it has its good side or its bad side. And it can go either way. But I understand what you're saying. I appreciate what you're saying. Is going deep kind of like dying? I can't quite talk about goals around here. Kind of like dying? Well, sometimes we talk about the great death, you know, which means giving up all of your small ideas about things. unifying your mind with everything. You can say with everything. Yeah, it's just that whenever I try to get up and come in the morning, I'm terrified that I'm going to die. It's real easy for me to come in the afternoon or midday. Still here.

[40:34]

Still have the morning. It's really, if I go sick, you know, I'm going to die. That's all. Well, but when? In the morning. Try it. I think I better. Take a chance. Take a chance. about coming to practice with a therapeutic reason. If our problems stem from our notion of sufferedness, then ultimately practice is the ultimate therapy.

[41:46]

It's the ultimate therapy. If by coming into a unified mind, well, a unified mind would ultimately resolve. It's the ultimate therapy, but we have to be careful of our categories. Because if it's the ultimate therapy, then we say, oh well, it's therapy. The category is religion. And if we You know, if we say it's the ultimate therapy, then we're dealing with therapy, still dealing with therapy. Maybe the ultimate therapy, but we don't want to substitute categories. Otherwise, therapy doesn't take us far enough. Religion, religious consciousness takes you as far as you can go. And therapy is still dealing, you know, it's still on the side of existence.

[42:51]

When we're talking about therapy, we're talking about the side of existence. And when we talk in religious terms, there's existence and non-existence. And non-existence is just as important for us as existence. And so, activity, you know, existence, is one side. Non-existence is the other side. In our practice, we're always focusing on the non-existent side in order to balance the existent side. We have to be constantly aware of the blank screen in order to understand what existence is about. So therapy is concerned with existence. Religion is concerned with existence and non-existence or the totality of life and death and no life and no death.

[43:58]

So it's a whole bigger subject. So we have to be very careful that religious practice doesn't turn into opium or into utilitarianism. It shouldn't fall into either one of those two states. Opium, it means like it's a panacea for all your ills or gives you some kind of fantasy about that will hold you off until the time when you're finally gone. Some fairy tale. And on the other side, we shouldn't say that it's going to cure all your ills.

[45:09]

But religious practice is a way of basing yourself in reality. for good or bad, or for whatever it means. It may be terrible, it may be good, but at least it's within the realm of accuracy. And so, you know, we're always finding that accuracy, It's not that, you know, if you know the right things, then you'll be okay. Finding out the right things moment by moment, you're finding that accuracy and that reality on each moment. And if you don't have it on this moment, then you don't have it. And if you have it on this moment, you have it. So it's not like, you know, you're always safe.

[46:16]

You have to find it every moment. know where you're at every moment. I agree very much with your categorization, sort of from a conventional point of view, that there are these two categories. And I think that there's a unifying theme around them, both.

[47:23]

And that's, I guess I would call it alienation. solve the problem of alienation. And that in the category of therapy, that the alienation that's trying to be corrected is within ourselves, sort of, you know, within the mind or within, you know, between selves, within ourselves. On a sort of religious level, that the alienation that's being addressed is between person and more things that transcend ourselves, you know, God or existence, non-existence. But what seems difficult for me in terms of maintaining that categorization is that that almost seems very Judeo-Christian, that separation.

[48:31]

And one of the things that I've appreciated very much in getting from Zen and studying Buddhism is the insight that the attempt to address alienation with the universe, the alienation between ourselves and the rest of the world, is not really separate from the problem of addressing the alienation within ourselves. That finding a deeper mind, there's a real relationship between trying to address one form of alienation and the other form of alienation. So the categories break down. Well, ultimately there are no categories. But if you, that's the one side.

[49:33]

The other side is that everything has its own place. So you have to talk about therapy, and you have to talk about religion, and you have to talk about the various categories. If you understand that, you're okay. If you only understand categories, then you start alienating everything. And that's one of our problems, is that most, and especially in our Western culture, we don't, Understand the unity underneath everything. Of course, everything is, there are no categories, ultimately. And we need to know that and act out of that. That's the white screen. But at the same time, we have all these categories and we have to respect them. And so, we know how far something can go in some certain direction. according to its, you know, tall trees are tall and small trees are small. This is the very important understanding, you know, in Buddhism.

[50:36]

A small tree is small and a tall tree is tall. And a little rock is small and a big rock is big. And they're all equal. They have perfect equality. That's how, you know, if you're working on a job and someone is the boss, and you're janitor, and the boss does his work perfectly, and you do your work completely, you're all equal. But if you're the janitor and you want to be the boss, then immediately you introduce inequality into the situation. It's a simplistic, very simple thing I'm talking about. You can argue about it in various ways, but we need to understand the point.

[51:41]

So anyway, there are boundaries to everything. And there's no problem. And Zen practice can be the ultimate therapy. But therapy is therapy, and religion is religion. And again, we have to respect each one. I think that, I understand that respecting categories, and I think that they're not quite so discreet or so black and white, and that real therapy, you know, at its best, is also concerned with non-existence, and it deals with that. So maybe that's the point, that there's a miracles between the two. Yeah, oh yes. Ultimately we should drop all the categories.

[52:53]

But we need them. We have to respect them. So both things are going on at the same time.

[53:04]

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