As you might be able to surmise, I am not Karen Dakotas. Karen got sick and felt this would not be a good moment for her to give a talk, so I was asked to fill in. For some reason I've been thinking on the question of what's really important about this practice lately. I think that perennially we all think about this from time to time, you know, and you hear Zen teachers are always saying, well, the most important point is, and it's invariably something else, you know, it's different each time, but it marks out a territory that is pretty consistent and broad and close.

[01:12]

And I think what what I've been considering and what comes up as really essential to me, and each of these kind of assertions about what the most important point has to do with, what are you working on? What's at the core of one's own life or one's own practice or one's own struggle? or one's own joy and satisfaction and realization. And for some reason, as I've been writing and thinking in the last few weeks, I keep coming back to a concept of, and it's not a concept, the experience of intimacy, which is, I think

[02:20]

It's both the essence and the practice of what we're doing here. Constantly becoming intimate with ourselves and what's around us, and of seeing the gap, seeing where we're missing being intimate with things, seeing the pain in that, and having a moment-to-moment streaming opportunity to be intimate. So I've been, in the last couple days since I had to think about this talk, I've been sort of looking into it and looking into what some of the teachings are around it and looking into the word itself. You know, the word itself, you know, has a Latin root that for us means interior or inmost which is interesting because when we use it it's almost always in a relational sense and in a sense it's

[03:49]

It's like this practice, it's turning oneself completely inside out and of reality turning itself inside out so that what's innermost and interior becomes accessible and exposed and not hidden to oneself nor is it hidden to everyone else. Dogen writes about it, there's a fascicle in our teacher Dogen's great work, the Shobogenzo, called Intimate Language, and in that he writes Intimate means close and inseparable.

[04:57]

There's no gap. Intimacy embraces Buddha ancestors. It embraces you. It embraces the self. It embraces action. It embraces all generations. It embraces merit. It embraces intimacy itself. Right now, Right now is the very moment. Right now, you're intimate with yourself, intimate with other. You're intimate with Buddha ancestors, intimate with other beings. This being so, intimacy renews intimacy. Because the teaching of practice and enlightenment which are one thing to him, practice and enlightenment, not separate, is the way of Buddha ancestors. It is intimacy that penetrates Buddha ancestors.

[06:02]

Thus intimacy penetrates intimacy. So this is the challenge of practice to me. How do you know, first of all, how do I know myself? How am I intimate with myself, with my feelings, the full gamut of them, my joys, my fears, my ability to sit still, to pay attention, and then how am I feeling not apart from anything. Even at the very moment when I might like to run and hide, there are many of those moments, I'm sure you have many of those moments, when this might be the last place you want to be, and sitting upright facing the wall might be the last thing that you want to do.

[07:21]

and yet there's really no place else to go. So there's intimacy right at that moment and intimacy in this terrific resistance that we sometimes feel. Intimacy is, throughout his work and it's a synonym for realization. But it's important not to have too inflated an idea of what that realization is. There's intimacy, you know, we talk about it a lot in psychological terms, we talk about it in terms of sexuality, we talk about it in terms of our relations with others, and in that opportunity there is always realization.

[08:43]

For me, It doesn't come easy. I remember when I started, I play music and I used to make my living almost entirely doing that. And when I started performing on stage, I had a not unusual kind of stage fright. I would get up there and because there were all these people, I would start to shake. Just not a very functional way to play the guitar. And I had to remember to breathe. And as I breathed, I could sort of settle in and become intimate with the music and let that take me.

[09:52]

But still, when I was on stage, then the next challenge was, how do you talk to people? And I spent, I don't know, a long time, many years. If you were here, which you are, and I was up here with my guitar, I would do all my talking kind of like this. I was afraid to look at the people who were in front of me. And then the more close manifestation of that was that if I were talking to you, say, I would be afraid to look you in the eye, that it was very difficult. The intimacy of that, and I can't say what it is,

[10:56]

was too much. It was overwhelming and I couldn't do it. And it didn't have to do with whether I liked the person or didn't like the person, whether I was attracted to them or not attracted to them, whether they were related to me, my family or not. It was just more than I could bear. And I don't think this is such an unusual experience either. And so I kind of trained myself just to do it. what that means also and I think most of that training has come kind of in the context of sitting Zazen and being here being in a place where I'm comfortable and safe and also of having to look myself in the eye

[12:19]

having to sit there and face this kind of wandering mind, slippery intention, and having to return and look at that again and again, so that then, if I meet one of you and we're if I've learned to be upright and face myself, then it's easier to sit and face you. And maybe easier to communicate that I have faith that you can do that also. that this is the kind of training and opportunity that we have in sitting upright here.

[13:32]

Not doing anything else with our minds, but facing it. Not distracting, not pulling away into some other realm, but sitting upright and facing ourselves. gradually facing the world. We become very intimate sitting in the zendo with, I become intimate with the cracks in the wall that are in front of me with the way the light moves. The other day there was a very, seemed like was a very pale spider that was climbing up the wall, just in peripheral vision. And I'm not sure it was there or not. And it was very difficult not to look, not to try to figure out for sure whether it was there, but just to let it crawl up the wall.

[14:45]

Sitting here, because we sit together, If you sit for seshin or for a couple of periods, together you become intimate with your neighbor's grimace as he or she unfolds her legs after zazen. And you sense the effort that they're making. and then it moves outward. You become intimate with... I become intimate, speak for myself, with this block, or with this part of Berkeley, of the South Berkeley community, and that intimacy means not just taking in some perception of what's going on,

[15:51]

but it means feeling very clearly what my own appreciation is, what's going on in the streets, around the houses, what my own apprehension or fear might be as I walk down the block. That's another kind of intimacy. In all of your daily activities there's this possibility you become very intimate with the gas pump and go to the station to fill up your car. And then by training, by thinking of what the implications of your own feelings are, you become intimate with the sense of or with the knowledge of the desolation of vast parts of the world.

[16:54]

the places where that gasoline comes from, places where it's carried across, places where it may accidentally have spilled, and that that becomes part of the intimacy that you have as you're pulling that metal thing, you know, off of its little rack and pushing the button and pulling the lever, putting it into your tank. that larger sense of intimacy also fills your mind at that moment. Here at home, I become intimate with my children. Often, sitting here, I can hear them upstairs and I can picture their wonderful golden bodies and the great joy and energy that they have.

[18:02]

And I also have to become intimate with the fact of their inevitable aging, their infirmity, and their ultimate death. With my own inevitable decay, with the fact of it that I can feel if I really tune in. So this is intimacy with everything. With your eyes completely open. Turning yourself inside out. It's really hard. It's impossible. And yet we try to do it again and again. Because not doing it, turning away from this kind of intimacy, which we're so tempted to do, just brings real suffering.

[19:22]

The price is very high. That separation is suffering. As someone spoke in the Zen Do last night, what she learned from Blanche Hartman, the all comparisons are suffering. All these kinds of separations are pain and suffering. And the intimacy itself is not about comparison. Although, as Dogen teaches, it includes comparison. It includes separation. It includes

[20:25]

your mind that loses its attention when you're sitting Zazen, it includes your mind that is not open to what's going on in the world around us, that that also is an opportunity for intimacy, that the realization of that separation, realization of that comparison, realization of being shut off in different ways, that realization itself is a very intimate experience. And in its intimacy, offers immediately transformation. Right then. It's not like it offers it next week because you figured something else. No, it's right now. So, can I stand it?

[21:35]

Can you? We're really lucky. We have this tradition and this practice that's all about this. The Zen, Suzuki Roshi Zen, Dogen Zen, Mel Zen, Soto Zen, offers a very gentle but incredibly persistent way of learning intimacy. of learning to be close with each other, of learning to be close, first of all, with ourselves, because that's where we have to do the work first. We've got to do it here. So we've created a kind of safe harbor in the Zendo and a safe harbor in the Sangha, where we can expose ourselves first to ourselves, and while we're doing that work,

[22:52]

since we're hanging around with each other, we learn about each other, we're exposed to each other, and it's more or less safe. It may not feel entirely safe, but it's a risk that we have to take to really gain our true lives. I was thinking about a month or so ago, I participated in an interview with Thich Nhat Hanh and asking him about how he saw, what he saw was problematic for people practicing Buddhism in the West.

[24:05]

I was thinking of that last night. He wrote, or he didn't write, he said, my practice and my teaching is always focusing on the real difficulties, the real problems that we are having in the present moment. There is violence within. There is loneliness within. There is anger within. There is restlessness within. And we suffer. And because we suffer, we are not able to help the people around. And if we have the desire to help, we cannot help because we don't have enough peace inside. And I think peace and intimacy are so interchangeable in this context. That is why it looks like the people in our society are very individualistic, selfish, thinking about himself or herself alone. But in fact, even if you have the desire and intention to be helpful, It would still be difficult for you to do so because when you're not in peace with yourself, it's very difficult to relate to people in a peaceful way in order to help them.

[25:18]

When you're not intimate with yourself, it's very hard to be intimate with anyone else. It's very hard to make peace. I think these things are really synonymous. So how can we practice this kind of peace and intimacy? We practice it by practicing patience and friendliness with all those around us. We practice it by listening very carefully when people are speaking and also thinking about considering our words as we use them, considering what the impact might be, considering what is it that we're bringing to our words.

[26:25]

This is about being intimate with yourself, knowing what you're bringing to your language as you speak it, knowing what your motivations are. We train ourselves by undertaking things that are challenging, that stretch us, first in ourselves, with things that we think are a little beyond us, with our families, and then perhaps in our larger communities in the world. We also begin this practice of intimacy with being settled in ourselves and on ourselves with sitting and just encountering the silence when it's silent, encountering the chatter when there's chatter in your mind, encountering the

[27:36]

kind of wavering and slippery quality of your mind and always returning. Returning to being upright. Returning to your breath, which is always being offered. And practicing that again and again. And doing it in a way that is very, it's very spacious. But it's also persistent. It also keeps returning with some sense of confidence and faith that this challenge of intimacy, you can meet it. That it'll open for you. that you have the possibility of turning yourself inside out so that everyone can see you and that in fact it's safe to do so and that as you do it the world and the people around you will also be turned inside out and so we can all see each other

[29:07]

as clearly as we can. And when we see it wrong, we bow to it and try again. And that's, you know, even in making mistakes, even in having misunderstandings, even in falling into violence, and then seeing ourselves, there's this constant stream of intimacy that's available. So maybe I will stop there and have time for some questions or comments. Thank you. modern life, maybe my big issue is how to deal with, or that is to say, the big issue is the relationship between people and other beings are increasingly abstract, in fact, valued for their abstraction.

[30:37]

And the abstraction increases. How do you deal, what's a good way to deal with other human beings who are, who seem to you to be dealing with you as an abstraction? So that the intimacy, so that the screaming is absolutely shut off. Which screaming is shut off? The screaming. The screaming. Oh, the screaming. live by their terms. Don't you have a choice? Let's see. Tell me about it. It's hard. I mean, mostly for me, what's hard when that happens is I get pissed off. Because I feel like I'm being treated like an abstract.

[31:45]

This already happened about three times this week. And it mostly happens dealing with institutions. It happened dealing with the parking ticket bureau. And with Blue Cross. These are big institutions. And I just found the gorge rising. Why? Why? Because I was clinging to... It's self-clinging. I was clinging to some sense of justice, some sense of right, some sense... I was clinging to the sense of me. You know, it's like, they're treating me unjustly. You know, me! How could they do this to me? And quite honestly, as that happened, I felt I was physically poisoned.

[32:51]

And I'm not being metaphorical here. Chemicals came into my body that I then spent several hours kind of working through my system. And I could see it. I was caught by it. But at least I could see it. I may not have been nice and polite to them, but I was pretty direct, and maybe from what I saw, from what was coming up in me, I'll have a bit more ability to step back from immediately going to the position of me. This is where we get in trouble. locking down on this idea of myself, of what's right, how I want to be treated, instead of really trying to figure out if I was not going to be able to convince them, no matter how righteous I got, or how I didn't get real angry on the phone.

[34:08]

I didn't get abusive or anything, but I felt it kind of in me. It wasn't going to work. So you really have to see where you have to be able to accept certain kinds of circumstances, step back from certain science circumstances, and also see what may work and what may not. Is there another route around this? Often there isn't, but you don't have to accept it on purpose. Does that speak to it somewhat? It's a big, big issue. Yeah. It's not a trivial issue. I'm glad you brought it up here. Because the practice that I have anyway is in my real life. Yeah. The training, what we're doing here, this is actually our real life. But it is not, it is just It's not separate from our real life, but we also have lives that are in places that are a lot less safe than all of us sitting around in here now.

[35:15]

But this is our real life too. Greg? I don't think insurance companies are in real life. You should know, right? Anytime you want help dropping me, just give me a call. Help what? Anytime you want help dropping me, give me a call. Okay. Well, when Catherine Thons was here in the spring, she reminded us that in the realm of desire, nothing is satisfactory. And I think if we just remember that, it will help. something else, just to let go of it. So intimacy, I think, is a very tricky business because of the cultural definitions that you mentioned in the early part of your talk.

[36:32]

It's something that we want, it is part of Speaking of an entirely different way. Well, I think he was talking as he often did. He used concepts to destroy concepts. I think they had the same notions of intimacy as well, and certainly the same problems. The human problems, as marked out by the Buddha 2,500 years ago, haven't changed enormously. But what he was talking about, he was talking about intimacy in a lot broader sense. You know, intimacy of even of being intimate with the suffering of desire.

[37:37]

You know, intimacy within intimacy itself. So yeah, it is complex, but we should try to step back from the way, don't let convention define our thinking. Use the words to help ourselves. Well, there is a word that's a little bit missing for me, which is transformation. And I wonder if intimacy is the ground of transformation. So that when Thich Nhat Hanh says that we need first to be at peace with ourselves, that's so. On the other hand, my experience is that sometimes I am and sometimes I'm not, and there's no blanket condition. It comes and it goes, and I'm always working with the coming and the going.

[38:39]

And so if I wait to be entirely peaceful I'm going to wait a long time before I move out. But it's not like that anyway. It's always going and coming. And with the situation that you described with the insurance company is very good because you were able, because of your practice, to stay intimate with all the stuff that you didn't like. And I think we are feeling here the transformation that was a result of that. in your grounding and your understanding, which is very now shared. But it seems we would just think of intimacy. That's not enough. Yeah, I agree. And I thought I had said that, and if I didn't, I missed it. It's like... It's so much part of my thinking, I can't find a good metaphor for it.

[39:43]

But I agree, sometimes when, and this was part of the discussion actually that I wanted to have, we'll take that on, but it wasn't the opportunity for it. Sometimes when we hear peace, we think of it in this kind of mushy and non-dynamic way. We miss the coming and going of it. Whereas if you think of peace as really just being able to state present with all aspects of what's going on, with the negative aspects and with the positive aspects, that it's a dynamic state, that it involves transformation, the transformation involves really seeing yourself moment to moment, the things that you may like and the things that you don't like. One or two more? Maybe not.

[40:49]

Thank you very much.

[40:54]

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