So this morning I wanted to talk about fear. I've been paying attention for some time to fear, trying to pay attention to it and to notice when I'm feeling it and when I'm not and when I am feeling it but I don't think I am and when other people are feeling it and how that affects me. And I've been really trying to appreciate fear. I have been appreciating fear. I guess when I was younger, I think essentially I was kind of ashamed often of feeling fear and just if it was big I had to deal with it, but if it was not so big I would try and pretend it wasn't there.

[01:11]

But we all have very complicated relationships with fear. You know, you can see kids don't like it and on the other hand They like to watch scary movies, we all do. We all like to have the right amount of fear. We need that and it does something, it stirs us up and it makes our juices run when it's in the right amount. So the Heart Sutra, it gives us a kind of basic position regarding fear. I think if I were totally fearless at this moment, I would recite it. But knowing the way I am in this situation, I'm pretty sure if I tried to recite the Heart's Hope Sutra, which I know very well, I'd make some kind of mistake. So perhaps we could all do it together. Maybe not the whole thing, but I want the section that talks about fear.

[02:17]

We begin in emptiness. In emptiness, no form, no feelings, no perceptions, no impulses, no consciousness, no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, no color, no sound, no object of mind, no realm of eyes, until no realm of consciousness, no ignorance and also no extinction of it, until no old age and death and also no extinction of it, no suffering, no origination, no stopping, no path, no cognition, Also no attainment. With nothing to attain, the Bodhisattvas depend on Prajnaparamita, and the mind is no hindrance. Without any hindrance, no fears exist. Far apart from every perverted view, they dwell in nirvana."

[03:23]

So that's kind of the basic, our basic practice position regarding fear. That if we are living in clarity, if we have no hindrances, we have no fear. I have a friend who's not a Buddhist who went to a funeral at Green Gulch. And she was very disturbed, kind of weirded out, by saying the Heart Sutra, as we've just said it, in the context of this coffin and death. No eyes, no ears, no nose. It was very, sort of, know-everything. It was very disturbing to her. But of course when we chant, no eyes, no ears, no nose, we know that we're chanting that from a point of balance that we do have eyes and ears and nose and thought forms.

[04:28]

And those are, that is the landscape that we live in. And our perceptions, our feelings about all that are very real. But on the other hand, as we practice, we know that these thought forms and perceptions as they come are not permanent, don't last forever, and are not comfortable, and are not real in themselves. So as we practice, we honor the experiences that we live through and we treasure the experiences we live through. And we also know that they're kind of like traces of clouds, that they're real, but they're moving, they're marked by these three signs of, the three marks of existence.

[05:31]

And that as we really practice and as we really begin to understand that this is the character of thought forms. They gradually, they're always there, but they gradually acquire a certain kind of transparency so that what seemed extremely fearful, extremely urgent before begins, we know that we'll live through them. Just as in Sesshin, if you've just begun to sit Sesshin, it's the first day or so, you're quite convinced that you won't get through the Sesshin and that it's been insanity that has forced you to sign up. But then you begin to find that you can in fact get through one period and then another period. and then another period and so little by little your confidence builds and you begin to realize that in fact you can get through a whole session.

[06:48]

And it wasn't sanity. And it wasn't sanity, yes, yes, yes. So I think that's what the Heart Sutra is talking about, how we find that position that little by little how we come to live in the midst of our lives and appreciating both appreciating the experiences that come to us and also knowing that none of them are final which is the huge fear when one is a child somehow I think our most pervasive and basic fears are that we're caught and it's always going to be that way and we're stuck and we'll never get out. That's the kind of basic nightmare. So I'd like to... I'd like to read something from

[08:04]

called The Tiger's Cave by a man named Leggett, a story which speaks to the issue of effort and non-effort regarding fear and the kind of stances that we take. The shogun, Imitsu, in early 17th century Japan, was very interested in fencing and kept several fencing masters at his court. Also in favor was the Zen master, Takuan, from whom many of these masters took lessons in meditation and Zen. A wild tiger was sent from Korea to the shogun as a present. And when the caged animal was being admired, the shogun suggested to the renowned fencer Yagyu that he enter the cage and use the arts of fencing to approach the tiger and stroke its head.

[09:11]

In spite of the warnings of the tiger's keeper, Yagyu went into the cage with only a fan. Holding the fan before him, he fixed his gaze on the tiger and slowly advanced. In face of the animal's threatening growls, He managed to hold it under a psychological dominance and just to touch its head. Then he slowly retreated and escaped from the cage. As he came out, the sweat poured off him. The Shogun turned to Takuan and said, has Zen anything else to show? The Zen master ran down to the cage, his sleeves flying in the wind. He jumped into the cage and faced the tiger. The master spat on his palm and held it out to the tiger, which sniffed, then licked his hand. The master lightly touched its head, then turned and softly jumped out of the cage. After all, marveled the shogun, our way of the sword cannot compete with Zen.

[10:15]

So I think that this is our experience too, that sometimes fear comes and we need to take a kind of heroic attitude to it as part of Seixin. You need to just face it with all your effort and determination. and get through it. And I think we've all been through situations where there's been some kind of crisis, maybe a car accident, something quite threatening. We're attacked, and we deal with it at the moment quite well, and then it's over and shaking, terrified, because it's been an enormous effort. We've been called upon to make an enormous effort, and we have. And then the other side of it is this complete ease, that just a different strain, that there isn't fear, that the situation doesn't need to call for fear, and that fear is quite irrelevant.

[11:34]

And I think our own experience is that we move back and forth between those positions. And sometimes we're very fearful and make an effort, and other times things are really quite simple. And it's often hard to know which it's going to be. I had the experience a while back, I've been in Tokyo, done the evening chants for a long time, and I was in the zendo, and my daughter was in the zendo, and it was my turn to be Kokyo and I began to chant and I noticed my daughter and I got so nervous that my voice began to tremble and afterwards she said, did I scare you? Yeah, she did. And I would never have guessed that my daughter would have scared me in those circumstances. It creeps up and suddenly you're caught when you didn't suspect it. And that's where we can be grateful to fear. And that's where fear becomes our teacher.

[12:41]

Because it shows us these little postures that we've assumed without knowing quite that we've assumed them. And it catches us, catches us in them. So we come to practice hoping, perhaps, to get rid of fear, and then as we practice more, perhaps coming to appreciate it more. And when fear comes up in practice, it's often a good sign that a person may sit for a while, for some months, for some years even, and be doing the right things,

[13:43]

And then, for some reason, begin to feel a lot of fear, as I said. And that's really a good sign. That's really a sign that things are opening and that some of the habitual patterns are beginning to become more transparent. So I think my experience of practice certainly has been, on the one hand, increasing comfort, and on the other hand, dealing with the alarm of feeling increasingly unsettled, going back and forth, and not liking being unsettled, but also feeling grateful that I can be. I wanted to read some from a New Yorker profile that came out in the spring about a French tightrope walker

[15:08]

named Philip Petit. He's a kind of modern-day samurai. It's a little bit analogous to this more traditional story. Of course, a tightrope walker is in the most intense and intimate relationship that perhaps one can be in regarding fear. He's a man in his middle thirties, French. His father was captured by the Nazis during the war and managed to escape. And Philippe was a very oppositional and rather unruly child who didn't do the right thing. and became very enamored of some tightrope walkers that he saw and by the time he was an early adolescent had begun to practice walking on the tightrope and it became his obsession.

[16:20]

So I'm going to read little excerpts and this is from one of where, in New York City, he's walking across a tightrope above the World Trade Center. At 7.15 a.m., as the city began to awaken, Petit took out a yellow grease pencil and drew his symbol and wrote his name and the date on the beam of the roof. That's what he always does when he starts a walk, and started his walk. Word spread rapidly. An unbelievable story has just arrived, I don't believe it, one broadcaster said. Report of a man walking across the World Trade Center buildings on a tightrope. In the street, 1,350 feet below, a quarter of a mile, throngs of people gathered. They abandoned their cars to gawk and traffic snarled. Port Authority police responsible for the tower's security raced onto the roofs with emergency squads from the city police. Petit never glanced at them.

[17:30]

He glided back and forth in the wire, holding his long balancing pole. He lay in the wire. He knelt, bowed, danced, and ran. He sat down and watched a seagull fly beneath him. Finally, after nearly an hour, he ended his performance, walked back onto the South Tower, and was handcuffed. When he reached the street, people cheered him and tried to shake his manacled hands. They booed the police. Why did you do it? Reporters shouted. In English, more accented than it is now, Petit replied. When I see three oranges, I juggle. When I see two towers, I walk. Psychiatric and physical exams at Beekman Hospital found him normal. His pulse was 88, his blood pressure 120 over 90. He was booked on criminal trespass and disorderly conduct charges, held for several hours, and then released.

[18:31]

The Manhattan DA, after consulting with the parks commissioner, discharged the charges on condition that Fatih give a free performance in the city park for the city's children. What a beautiful punishment, Fatih said. The punishment took place three weeks later at night over Belvedere Lake in Central Park. It had all the theatricality Petit could have wished. A dozen searchlights played on him, 80 feet in the air, clad in a silver costume. On the ground, a German brass band struck up a tune, and a crowd of thousands waited expectantly. The wire ran from a tree at the northeast corner of the lake to the watchtower of Belvedere Castle on Vista Rock, a distance of some 600 feet. The wire rose at an angle of 30 degrees to the turret. Around the shoreline, three city lifeguards were posted inconspicuously, for Petit had told park officials that he could not swim. In the searchlight's glare and with band playing, Petit walked the wire twice, tumbling, lying down, doing twists and turns.

[19:38]

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw some children playing next to a guy line. One of them jumped and grabbed it, and the shock passing along the rope to the cable threw Petit into the air. He caught the wire with one leg, upside down, still holding the 45-pound balancing pole with one arm. He managed to pull himself upright and continue for a third and final crossing. In the Belvedere, as he changed for the post-walk press conference, Petit was heartbroken. I was in tears completely from this disgrace. People seeing me hanging there like a chimpanzee, he recalled, some energy out of nowhere got me back up. I was so angry, it was so ugly. He recalls that he asked a friend, Annie Alex, what shall I tell them? And she replied, tell them the truth. It's always a fight. And Petit says he did. So, we wonder why we said Zazen. And we do.

[20:42]

and it's a little bit like seeing oranges and juggling and seeing two towers and walking. We just said Zazen. And when Mel was giving lectures during the Sesshin, he talked about Zazen being a tightrope walk. The traditional instructions about what to do with your mind as you're sitting is You don't think, and you don't not think, but you try to non-think. And what is non-thinking? That's our tightrope. What is non-thinking? We don't allow thoughts Non-thinking is the unrestricted activity of mind that allows the thoughts that always come to just arise without either being developed or without being suppressed.

[21:51]

That's our tightrope. One night last summer, Petit gave a special performance at the cathedral in New York in honor of St. John's, in order of its centennial. The cathedral was plunged into darkness, then a spotlight shot a beam into the balding in the middle of the church. picking out a white-sheathed figure in the air, entwined in a rope and holding a lighted torch. In the religious setting, amid the bare stone walls and the stained-glassed windows, the mysterious sight was galvanic. Slowly the form slid from heaven to earth on the rope. His face strangely wrapped, as though he were in a dream, but he'd walked down the nave towards the narthex and climbed on to cross poles fifteen feet high.

[23:00]

From that thin, wire rose into the dim lights of the cathedral. Suddenly, Petit leaped onto the wire, his mop of pale hair flying, and rushed over the black-tie audience. The wild, youthful figure balanced a lily on his forehead and slid along the wire while a pianist played Stravinsky. He lay on his back, trickling gold dust to the floor forty feet below. He sat up and rolled backward. The audience gasped. Flashing a devilish grin, he tangoed, his back arched. The feet, marvelously precise, touched down without error as they returned from space, though Petit never glanced at them. And then they ascended the wire in slow, sure progress. His figure grew smaller and smaller, the balancing pole making a cross against the rising wire. Eighty feet in the air, the wire was too thin for the audience to see. For one chimerical moment, he seemed to walk on air, an angel released from gravity.

[24:01]

Then he sprang onto the shackle between columns over the transept and bowed. The lights went on. Organ music sounded triumphantly. The right Reverend Paul Moore, Bishop of New York, said, I get flack whenever the church does anything other than evening prayer. But as soon as the performance began, I forgot my worries and was overwhelmed by the sheer beauty. It was one of the finest moments in the history of the cathedral for beauty and deep religious meaning. So we know that there's something in this balance. There's something in this balance that we all know how to make. And that it's very large. and very inspiring both to others when they notice that we're balanced and to ourselves as we feel the balance.

[25:04]

One more. Petit dislikes talking about the dangers of the wire. Maybe it's too personal. Maybe other people's fascination with the risks annoys him. Maybe it bores him. With stunning predictability, reporters asked, what do you think about up there? And are you frightened? And why do you do it? And his stark replies are, I am too exhilarated to think. I am too busy to have fear. And I am not here to discuss why. If he's feeling pugnacious, he adds, I carry my life in my hands, but it's a detail. Sometimes going all out, he says he is a poet and wants to live to be an old man because he has many dreams to accomplish. When he's asked if he's a superhuman athlete, he simply makes disparaging noises.

[26:07]

Petit doesn't train. He may go for a long period without touching the wire and then make a crossing of several hundred feet. His faith is in his technique and his resourcefulness in meeting the demands of the moment. He is absolutely assured of his invulnerability. Of course I have that certitude, he says brusquely. It is necessary to what I do. Nevertheless, before he goes in the wire in performance, he pats his totem, a carved wooden lion he describes as hungry, mad, skinny, vicious, strange, and beautiful to me. And he says, I would lose my soul and my reason if I didn't touch this lion. Looking reflective, he adds, one of my chief joys is to be by myself. That may be why I love the wire. I am alone and in control. as I am not on the ground. So, alone and in control. When I think of alone in that context, I think of all one.

[27:16]

That that's his invulnerability. That there's nothing extra. It's that, it's that mu position, that mu shin, no mind, no eyes, no ears, no nose, that position that protects him. All alone and in control. There's, and there are koans about that too, you know, sitting up on the top of the mountain, the position of deep samadhi, where there's just one. And I like what he says about the lion, too, about his very sensuous relationship with fear. So it's interesting to see it played out and to remember how we play out our own dramas as well.

[28:23]

And as we remember this, it's very hard to think of zazen as boring. When we remember the tightrope, that we're always walking, whether we're conscious of it or not, we can't think of zazen as boring. So while we live in a condition of fear, we probably live mostly in a condition of fear, we have so many ways of dealing with it, of acknowledging it and being anxious, of not acknowledging it, denying it, letting it make us manic, controlling, all the kind of neurotic patterns.

[29:32]

So we live in this condition of fear. And we also have a very good idea of how to get out of it. We also have a wonderful sense of natural balance. And it's that natural balance that brings us here. And it's the natural balance that makes our posture feel good. And it's our natural mind, it's our original mind that we have. that can find that center point as we sit in our body-mind that can find that balance point. And so what can we say about the position of safety? The position of the Zen Master who went into the tiger's cave and just allowed the tiger to lick his hand.

[30:40]

Something very powerful in that. A tiger might not have licked my hand. The image that I find... Well, when we're in... There's a difference between the heroic position of the warrior who went in and the bodhisattva position of the Zen master who went in. The hero is always in some relationship to fear and the bodhisattva has been able to include fear. The Bodhisattva has been able to overcome all feelings of separateness. And when all feelings of separateness are overcome, then there are no hindrances and there's no fear.

[31:46]

And there's even no fear often around him, her. And the tiger will come and lick her, his hand. So the image that I really like, and I've always found very consoling, describing this position of safety, is the image of the wind bell. The whole body, like a mouth, hanging, no matter where the wind comes from. Tongue always sounding, ding, ding, ding, prajna, prajna, prajna, prajna. So that's the way we depend on prajna. And we do. From time to time we all just are wind bells. And we just, whatever comes up, we're just there with nothing extra.

[32:53]

And that's our safety position. And that's where our heart's desire is, to be in that position. And that's how we come together to help each other find it. So that is all I thought about to talk about fear. And maybe some of you have some responses or stories. And I was afraid and full of fear, but I was just doing what I had to do. Then when I did something like Kokyo or Suri or whatever, the anticipation of it, I just had in my mind the fear and gasping for breath.

[34:07]

So it's almost like if you don't think about it, you're just going and doing it like right now. I think fear catches us where we're carrying baggage, that particular point where we're carrying baggage, and that's fear the teacher. Fear comes with a knife, and fear shows us the baggage that we're carrying. So if there are situations, I mean, different people are caught by different kinds of fears, but the fear of any kind of public performance is a big one for many people. Somebody's told a story about a pianist who, he was proficient and good enough so that he'd memorized all his music.

[35:09]

And he came on stage and he sat down at the piano and he sat there. And he sat there, and he sat there, and he sat there. And ten minutes later, he walked off stage. And he said afterwards, he hadn't even been able to remember the names of the pieces he was supposed to play. So one's image catches, and then behind that fear of, if I don't have an image, where am I? Who am I? You know, the big dragons lurk. And Sophia points us to it. Lots of questions but I won't ask them all. In an alternate universe there is a version of the Tiger's Cave in which the Zen Master walks in the cave and is eating. Which is to say

[36:12]

It's not always so safe. That was the risk that he took. And he could have walked in there with... I don't know that he walked in there with total... I'm not sure what's the real story. They walked in there with total assurance or he just walked in there. And he could have befriended the tiger or the tiger could have eaten him. My point is that it... it's not always so safe and that if we look at this practice as a way of making our lives safe then we have another big problem. Right. Right. There's a story about Buddha who when a tigress a starving the starving tigress and her two cubs came up Buddha sacrificed himself to the tigress so that she could eat him and have food for children. Right. Not saying But then these bodhisattvas are in a position of not feeling separate from anything.

[37:23]

Including their own risk or death or dismemberment or any of that? Their own person, yeah. So from one point of view that's very safe and from another point of view it's... Well from our normal point of view it's not what we view as safety. No. We want to be protected from these fears. That's right, that's right. It's like these non-violent people who sometimes are killed. Yeah, I think our greatest fears are losing control and dying. Spiritual death or physical death. Those are the two things we hold on to. We're afraid to let go. How are we afraid of spiritual death? It's interesting. We get stuck, and sometimes we enjoy the stuckness.

[38:27]

There, right. Right. Right. We need that protection, and hate it. Yeah. I have experiences with anger, but also with life and fear. I was angry at an individual and demeaning him a lot, and was just letting it consume me. And I had to find some other way to respond to it than the ways that I usually respond to it, which are to try to run away from it or to try to not deal with it, or to just feed it endlessly and obsess on it, or talk about it forever and ever. And none of those options has really worked for me in this case. And so what I did was I looked at it sort of like the images in a Tibetan book of the dead, where they say, when you die, you're in this interim state.

[39:40]

all of these peaceful and wrathful deities come, and some of them are monstrous, horrible, awful, axe-wielding, bloody-smoking things, these terrible, frightening creatures that you're confronted with, and what the Tibetan of the Dead said is to remember that they are you. They're just simply your own mind. So, that's sort of the way that I felt. It sort of felt like I was confronted with one of these things, and that The person that I was playing was simply a mirror for my own monster. And how do I now respond to my own monster? And so, instead of doing any of the usual things, I decided I would offer a flower. And I offered the individual a flower. And don't really care what the individual thought about it. That was just my gesture to my own anger and fear, and I found when I did that, that it went away, and I was no longer tied to this person by those feelings, and can now deal with that person in a positive way.

[41:00]

And that was just a real new thing for me, to be able to do that. Yeah, yeah, that's very powerful, that's nice. I was at a sashim recently somewhere else where they had bowing practice and first we all did nine bows together and then we were asked to think of somebody of a time recently when our feelings were ruffled and either a person that we were angry at or some angry feeling in ourselves and do full bows to that for maybe five or six minutes. And I was easily able to come up with a person. And by the time of five or six minutes had come up, my position was altogether different. Same thing. Same thing. Just honoring that inside demon. Very powerful. I tend to be a very careful person in general.

[42:02]

So two years ago, my husband and I moved into this house that we really loved. My reaction was to be terrified, because the fear was, you know, I'm here, I love this house, it's going to be taken away, and I will never find one again as wonderful. So for two years, you know, this thought has been going through my head, you know, I'm going to take it away, this is tragic, you know, et cetera, et cetera, and sure enough, A week or so ago, we got a call from my mother saying she was going to die. And for three or four days, you know, total disaster. And then something set in, like, oh, gee, we're moving out. And it was like, for two years, you know, I was having this terrible, terrible feeling, and it finally happened. Of course we haven't moved yet. So thought forms are not truly real.

[43:04]

Yeah, one stumbles against that and it's such a relief when we understand it. I don't understand something that happened to me this summer. I didn't know it was a murder. The troops were firing on people. And I was with some press people, two press people, and I said, I turned my camera and I'm afraid to look where I was wearing one. And continued taking pictures. And I didn't feel fear. And I don't understand why. I don't feel afraid of it, but I said, I think it's just, is that suppression? Or is that not acknowledging it? Or, it was very strange for me. Because I'm not, I don't usually do that. It's not my occupation. It was a religious activity that I was doing. Why did you do it? I had my camera. And it just felt important to you that the pictures be taken?

[44:08]

Yeah. Yeah, it sounds like you were in the wire. A kind of samadhi. Yeah. [...] Just, just very natural and nothing extra. Nothing, no hindrances. Yeah. Yeah. Can one sustain the wire? That's our practice, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, our practice is to fall off. Luckily we don't fall. hundreds of thousands of feet. It seems to me just impossible that I'm always falling off one side or the other.

[45:09]

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it seems to me that then once I practice then I'm always falling off one side or the other. Well, you always have an ability to get on again, don't you? You must, you keep coming back. Yeah, that's your talent, climbing on. All of our talents. I think it's time.

[45:40]

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