I now taste the truth of the Tadakites' words. Good morning. Good morning. Catherine, I don't think we need the lights. Middle one. Ah, thanks. Well, it's wonderful to be here with you all. This is the first long sitting I've done in several months, and it's the first talk I've given, I think, in a number of months, since before Meili got ill, and then me. And I feel like I haven't had, I've had some opportunity to speak a little bit in kind of open talks about Meili's illness.

[01:04]

I don't think I've spoken much about mine except to quite a number of you as individuals. And I thought I would do that a bit today and maybe draw out some points that might be useful for our Zazen, particularly on a Sashin day. I can just touch on a few points, but obviously I can talk about this for a long time, but I'll try not to and leave some space to hear your own thoughts and questions. First, I just wanted to say thank you to the Sangha as a whole, to those of you who directly and indirectly helped out in these last couple of months.

[02:06]

particularly helped my family and our household. Things were a little ragged for a while. But I can't imagine what it would have been like if we were living alone. You know, it's very hard. And I'm also aware that that in that time there have been a couple of other people in the community who were living alone and that your kindness and efforts were extended to them as well. I think this is something that we naturally know how to do and that somehow the pace of our lives and even the institutional structures sometimes rather than facilitating that

[03:09]

natural help and support kind of box us in. So we're trying to break down those boxes and see our lives as connected with each other and I really appreciate that. So the experience, we had In my mind, there was the process of dying of a friend and a sister that then led, not necessarily causally, although perhaps karmically in ways I don't understand, into a process of near-dying and illness for myself. And this happened really quickly. You know, Meili's whole illness, it was four weeks from diagnosis to her passing.

[04:15]

And as most of you know, Mel and Mary Mosene and I were there. You know, I was, we were there. Mel and I were there in the room as she died, which was a very powerful and natural experience. Kind of like, I mean, these things become cliches, but kind of like giving birth. Although the effort was of a different quality. And then that was on a Thursday. We came back on Friday night. And on Tuesday, I felt really ill and by Saturday I was in the emergency room. But I was thinking about this death and our connection. The whole experience of Maylee's illness was a real shock, I think, to the community.

[05:28]

And even though she had been gone for a while, the connections that many of us had with her were very close. And I think my illness was just another strange kind of blow. And I'm really grateful that the outcome was good, because I think if I had died, which was possible, it would not have been tremendously encouraging to people who were doing Zazen, nor to people who thought about or were male priests. But fortunately, that wasn't the outcome. But still, the effect of her dying, both on the community and on each of us as an individual, really had an impact. And I think that that impact has to do with our own concern

[06:35]

Concern for our lives a concern for our deaths with our own unknowing And Fear and I've been I was thinking about that last night and remembered that Wonderful section in Zen mind beginners mind called Nirvana the the waterfall Nirvana means extinction, means to blow out. Parinirvana, which often gets interpreted as death, the death of the Buddha, the death of a Bodhisattva, means complete blowing out. But Suzuki Roshi puts a little different on it. Let me just read you a little bit of this section. Before we were born, we had no feeling.

[07:47]

We were one with the universe. This is called mind only, or essence of mind, or big mind. After we are separated by birth from this oneness, as the water falling from the waterfall is separated by the wind and rocks, then we have feeling. You have difficulty because you have feeling. You attach to the feeling that you have without knowing just how this kind of feeling is created. When you do not realize that you are one with the river or one with the universe, you have fear. Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact, we have no fear of death anymore, and we have no actual difficulty in our life. When the water returns to its original oneness with the river, it no longer has any individual feeling to it.

[08:51]

It resumes its own nature and finds composure. How very glad the water must be to come back to the original river. If this is so, what feeling will we have when we die? I think we are just like the water in the dipper. We will have composure then, perfect composure. It may be too perfect for us just now because we are so much attached to our feeling, to our individual existence. For us, just now, we have some fear of death. But after we resume our true original nature, there is nirvana. It seems to me that there are many ways to die. And in a short period, I watched two, which were pretty good.

[09:56]

And I'm going to read you some sections. I sort of did a chronicle. to put down what happened. And I will talk about that, but I was thinking, people die as they live. It's a lifetime of habit. In the case of those who have lived a life of discipline or faith, that practice becomes habit, like a song that one realizes has been running through one's mind on its own. It's a matter of character. There is no right or wrong way to do it. Robert Aitken quotes an exchange between Yamada Koen Roshi and his wife, Anne Aitken. Yamada Roshi asked her, what do you think of death? Anne replied, why, it's like when a bus stops before you. You get on and go. Aitken Roshi comments, her death many years after that dialogue made clear how deeply committed she was to the truth of her words.

[11:00]

So conditions of death vary greatly. Some deaths are too sudden for us to know about. We have no opportunity to see character in action during those last few moments. How was it? How did they die? With what mind? Until he came to realization, the great Zen master Hakuin was tormented by speculations about the untimely death of an earlier Chinese Zen master, Ganto. Ganto was killed by bandits, and at the moment of his death, his great shout could be heard for miles. Hakkoen writes, if such a thing could happen to a man who was like a unicorn or a phoenix among monks, a dragon in the sea of Buddhism, how was I to escape the staves of demons of hell after I died? What use was there in studying Zen? Some people are fearful, some resigned, some are defiant, some detached, as if dying were happening to somebody else.

[12:03]

It's important for us not to romanticize this act. While there are people whose death seems natural, even noble, others endure a long wasting passage where each quality we think of as basic to our humanity is stripped away. It can be very hard to witness and very painful too. So in this era of strong drugs and hospitals and hospice, pain control is well understood. With drugs, a tenuous balance is sought between awareness and pain control. So Meili had an intravenous morphine drip. This led her beyond the threshold of consciousness, but allowed her body to focus in on the main task of breath after breath. Her eyes had the most faraway look, as if she were seeing what we could not even imagine. There were moments when pain showed in her face and in the narrow restlessness of her limbs.

[13:05]

readjusting the morphine level brought relief. But as we sat with her, I didn't sense any distress. While Meili's mind was drifting on a morphine cloud, her body was manifesting the steady Zazen practice we've admired for many years. That's what it really felt like. But I kept wondering, where was she? And this was a real powerful koan through the week that we spent with her. Looking in her eyes, breathing with her, we just sort of naturally, when you're sitting in the room, your breath enters the same rhythm as hers, which was a wonderful kind of connection. But I kept wondering this and knew that I didn't know. So just what happened to me was while I was up there, I have this kind of chronic skin infection that manifests as patches of irritation and very small in parts of my body from time to time.

[14:21]

So I got one on my elbow. And I had scratched it or it just got abraded, as things on the elbow do, and it became infected locally and I wasn't paying much attention to it. I would put Neosporin or something on it, but evidently that didn't work by the time I got back here was probably more generally infected and became what they call a cellulitis, which is when an area of your body becomes infected rather than just a localized point. But I kind of didn't get it. Not kind of, I didn't get it. Because when I got sick on Tuesday night, it was like right after residence meeting, I just remember it's like a switch was thrown and all of a sudden I felt just wasted. And I went upstairs and

[15:22]

And I got in bed, and I thought I had some flu, because it was so sudden. But I didn't connect it, really, with what was going on in my elbow, even though I started having some pains in my arm, in kind of bands. And I just didn't deal with it effectively, because I thought it was a flu. But then I kept getting weaker and weaker. And by Thursday, I was kind of alarmed because I basically was just in bed. So I knew this was something more serious. I went to the doctor on Friday and she diagnosed a cellulitis and gave me a mild antibiotic. And I think it was a misdiagnosis. She didn't get what was going on, but that's another story. But what was going on was that I had already become septic. In other words, that infection had gotten into my blood. and was really knocking me out.

[16:25]

And I could, by Friday night, I could hardly get up to go to the bathroom. And by Saturday morning, Lori called the on-call doctor and You know, he had some words, but he wasn't real alarmed. Nobody was real alarmed. But fortunately, she was supposed to go out to Green Gulch, and she didn't go. And she called our friends Lynn and Hillary, whom some of you might know. They practice here from time to time. They're nurses. And they came over, and they sort of did some... They looked at me, and they took my temperature and my blood pressure, and they said, you're in the hospital now. And at this point, I was like, whatever. It's like, sure, call the hospital, fine. I said, can you walk?

[17:27]

I said, well, let me try. And I got up, took about three steps, and I said, no. He said, okay, we'll call an ambulance. So they called the fire department, who were great. And big, they were really big people. They really filled our bedroom. And they were really present. Their training was really good. But at that point, my temperature was like 93 or 94. And my blood pressure was like, 60 over 30, you know, and I was on the way out. I did not, of course, realize this. I was not feeling good. I was feeling as sick as I could ever imagine, but relatively calm. And it never occurred to me that I was going to die, although it seemed to occur to a lot of other people, including the physician at the intensive care unit, who was not at all sure that I was not going to.

[18:37]

It was actually So I was in septic shock, which meant that my kidneys were completely shut down, my liver was shut down, my lungs were not functioning very well, and things were very dicey. The one system that seemed to work really well was my heart, which is what I've had trouble with. over the first two days, they put in something like six or eight, I think it was six or eight liters of fluids, and they only got out 100 cc's. So there was nothing happening. And I, whether it was, I think it was a combination of diminished capacity, which was clearly happening, and also maybe some denial, but also just perhaps some deep bodily intuition.

[19:52]

I wasn't afraid because I didn't think I was going to die. Afterwards, while I was recovering, I realized how easily I could have just slipped away. very easy, and it wouldn't have been painful, it wouldn't have been fearful. I mean, I was in a lot of pain, but not from the act of slipping away, not from the act of clutching. And I wondered if this was somewhat how Meili had felt, at least initially, you know she said to me at one point early on just before her surgery and I asked her how she was she said well you know I've always been a little detached so I'm just watching this happen and I felt like well I was watching it happen and you know they were doing

[20:54]

some relatively drastic things to my body and I was just, I wasn't, I didn't feel that I was resisting. But I also know that I wasn't clicking on all eight cylinders because I kept asking, I was in the ICU in intensive care for three days and I kept asking the doctor, well can I go home tomorrow? You know, because I had this thought on my mind, you know, well, nowadays, they don't really keep you in the hospital very long. They want you to, they want to get you out. And I was, you know, I said, just like pump me full of drugs and send me home. And he said, no, you may be in the ICU for two weeks. At one point, they said, he kept trying to get through to me. Right now, you are one of the four or five sickest people in this hospital. Well, thanks. That's a real badge of distinction. It didn't get through.

[21:59]

But I should say that This was an ordeal. I was not allowed, they couldn't give me any painkiller, nor could they give me any sleeping medicine for the first maybe five days, because they didn't want to do anything that was going to suppress my system. And at the same time, because my blood pressure was very low, they were shooting me with different kinds of adrenaline. So it was like, I think I was pretty wired. And what Lori says was, I was awake, like for four days straight. And I'm grateful. I know I was awake. I remember that I was awake. But what I don't remember is how I filled, how those four days possibly passed.

[23:05]

It was very intense. Let me just read you another little description, because this sort of gets to the aspect of practice, I think. I was resident in the Alta Bates intensive care unit for three days, I think. Time was running by altered rules. It could have been one day or one month. Nurses monitored me closely. They were always checking something. Dr. McFeely, a point man on the intensive care team, was by several times a day as his hands deepened the pockets of his white coat. He was worried. Even today, the mortality rate for people with septic shock is close to 50%. So those first two days, I had no kidney function. I've said that already. Messages were going out to friends by email and word of mouth that I might just die. I can see now that if things kept going downhill, I would have slipped away.

[24:11]

It would have been easy. But I must say that I never sensed this at the time. Call it intuition or denial or simply diminished capacity, I'm not really sure. But I was aware that if things did not turn a corner, I was in for some intrusive treatments that would not be fun. Dr. McFeely was clear that I was very close to needing a respirator and kidney dialysis if those organ systems didn't begin to respond. In my own mind, I thought, okay, if that's what needs to happen, but I'd rather not go there. My own memory is at best impressionistic, but what I do remember is that I was awake through all of it. Laurie says that from time to time I would nod off to sleep and then snap awake. It may have been my own struggle not to lose control, not realizing that I wasn't in control anyway. That edgy, wired quality of awakeness was probably an effect of the adrenaline I was getting to keep my blood pressure up. But hour after hour, I gripped the bedside rails fiercely, just trying to endure the pain and discomfort.

[25:18]

There was a lot of that. My whole left side was swollen from the infection. Laying in bed all day, too weak to move, my back would go into spasm. Everything seemed to ache. The pain was dull but deep. There seemed to be no way to get comfortable, no easy position. Pain medication was still out of the question because it might further suppress my system. There was no choice but to bear the unbearable. I kept thinking, I just want to jump out of my skin. I really thought in those terms, which was interesting since it was my skin that, in fact, was infected. But now I know what that means. Lori said, you have to do this one breath at a time. And I did not take her words as a Zen cliche. She was right, and I knew it. All the same, I responded, I don't know if I can do that.

[26:20]

But there really was no alternative. Time dragged by. A minute watched on the clock seemed to take forever. Breath by breath was the only way. Later on, I thought of Meili's words to Mel. What she had said, sort of in the last day that she was speaking, was, she said to him, she was leaning in very close, said, I've never done this before. And I found some interesting resonance. Well, it was a matter of our different characters. Meili would say, I've never done this before. And I would say, I don't know if I can do this. Following breath and minding mind were all I had to rely on. That's our practice. It proved to be sufficient. In this effort, I identified with Meili on her deathbed, just breathing.

[27:25]

I did make a little deal with myself in the first excruciating days. I would stay with my breath, but I would groan on the out-breath. Actually, I did this for hours at a time. Just... Just on the out-breath. The sound and resonance seemed to ease the pain. And there was nothing else to do. This is... In a one-day Sesshin, I don't think a lot of us are going to get to that point. Maybe some of you will. In a multi-day Sesshin, we do get to that point where there is no place to move. There is no way to get comfortable. Now, of course, we can always walk out, but that's not comfortable either.

[28:28]

I think that Mel, if any of you remember the story of his first session, he left at a certain point into the day in the afternoon, and I think he went out to the marina, is that right? And he walked around on the rocks and realized that wouldn't do either, and so he went back. And I think that There's a way, the lessons of this illness, there are many lessons. One of them is that the training that we're engaged in here is about facing the unbearable, learning how to bear the unbearable. whether it's physically unbearable. And in the case of the story of Mel's, you know, I think it was physically excruciating.

[29:32]

And then he left, you know, and it was no longer physically excruciating, but it was mentally unbearable. And so he had to return. Facing our illnesses, facing our death, facing the loss of love, the loss of what we have maybe counted on as stability in our lives, all of these things are liable and sometimes likely, and at least in the face of our ultimate lives, certain, that we are going to have to face. Zen master Ikkyu went to visit a man who was dying and the man said, looked at him in surprise and said, you know, I'm going to die and with real distress.

[30:37]

And Ikkyu with great compassion turned back to him and said, I'm going to die also. This is not negotiable. But how we face it, with what uprightness we can muster, is really important. Even when that uprightness is completely horizontal, I couldn't do it breath by breath. I just want to be clear about that. But for periods, I could do that. I could come back to my breath. I wasn't sitting Zazen in there, but I was able to watch my mind, to watch the way it would contract on the pain or contract on the impossibility of the situation.

[31:43]

and experience the anxiety there and then I could return to that breath whether it was groaning or not groaning and I kept falling off and returning and falling off and returning just as we do when we try to follow our breath here in Zazen. And what I found to real joy was that the doing of this, of just this kind of effort that we're making in here today, was just such valuable training. I mean, otherwise, I don't know what I would have done. And I wouldn't have been really able to be, I would have been, even though I couldn't find a comfortable way to lay in my bed, I could actually be comforted

[33:07]

by the words and intentions of people who practice as we do, by Lori's words, by other people. You know, there's some of you here who came and read to me or massaged to me, massaged me, just to be receptive and to be receptive to whatever the doctors and nurses brought me. I don't think this is a quality that is limited to practitioners of Zen, but we have a tool that will help us in those circumstances, but it also helps us in everyday, in our lives. It helps us to bear those discomforts with a kind of equanimity and even a kind of joy.

[34:13]

In Suzuki Roshi's commentary, we have these feelings as we're separated out from the river, from the river before our birth and the river after our death. We cannot avoid the world of feeling and yet if we know that we're actually part of that river there's some great comfort there and it allows us to encounter our feeling in a very different way rather than just the the way that feels like we are kind of desperately and desperately alone in that individuality. In fact, we are not.

[35:19]

You know, even as we are falling through the air, we're falling with countless other fellows who we're the river and we'll become the river again. And so when I returned, even though I was very weak and grateful that I hadn't died, it took me a while to begin to get that that might have been an outcome, I felt like coming back here was returning to this river. that was flowing and it continued to flow. It was very interesting to be laying upstairs or sitting upstairs and for the first week or two I didn't come down because I didn't, I just couldn't really, I didn't want to answer a lot of questions.

[36:20]

But what I felt was the daily flow of practice, it was palpable. And I also want to say that I felt that the thoughts of people, the concerns, the chanting that took place here and in various places, I could also feel that. And it reminded me of that onflowing river. So I'd like to encourage you to keep that mind as we sit here today, to keep the mind of the whole that you constitute, that you help constitute, and let that sustain you in the sometimes unbearable nature of your feelings.

[37:30]

And watch it to the extent that you can, watch it flow. Watch those feelings move. And what Suzuki Roshi doesn't say there, but I think he does elsewhere, that the great joy, that there's great joy in just being alive, which means having these feelings. whether they're painful, pleasant, neutral, to feel them, to be able to apply your mind to them, be able to breathe with them and into them is a miracle. It's a miracle that we worked our way into when we were born. It's a miracle that we'll work our way out of or just slip out of when we die. But it's just astonishing to be able to be here and be with those feelings.

[38:43]

So I just want to encourage you to let yourself float along with that, but with effort. Maybe it's swim along or stroke along, I'm not sure. But don't get carried away by those feelings. Rely on your practice and rely on each other as we sit around containing that practice. So I think I'm going to stop there and just leave a few minutes for question or discussions. This is just kind of one one take at this. But I think it's kind of just a key thing that I drew. So there are other questions, other thoughts. I'm happy to entertain them. Nancy? Complex issue. What I find odd about the Suzuki-Roshi quote is the emphasis on the flow before and after.

[39:50]

It sounds very Hindu. And my mother died right before. So I've given a lot of thought, spent a lot. And my parents were devout Catholics. So in that process, I've been away from the Catholic Church for a long time, but both the ritual and what the priests had to say around that, a lot of it was based on, you'll be together if you're And that's what my father is now holding on to. And I think we deny death in a lot of ways in our society and in various religions with some sense of there's something after if not something before. And so that's what I find odd about that. Our practice, I think, is more the Anne Aitken quote, getting on the bus. Let me just say that the point that I have difficulty with, which is similar, is just when he says, how very glad the water must be to come back to the original river.

[41:18]

It's kind of anthropomorphizing of water. I'm not sure the water really cares, frankly. What he does say, before we were born, we had no feeling. And after we die, we have no feeling. So what he's saying, and I think he spells it out, and certainly other Buddhist teachers spell this out in different ways, is that even though something continues, it's not I. It's not a self in the way that maybe they were talking about in the church, and I've been troubled by that at various funerals also, Christian funerals, Jewish funerals. But that something does continue, and that in that continuation, there is no suffering.

[42:32]

you're dispersed into your elements. And that's what I felt, you know, that I could slip away very easily. And in that slipping away, it would be slipping away from grief, fear, any holding. That's the way it would have been. And you could say it's a physiological thing, just sort of oxygen, starvation, you know, but there was no fear of clutching in that circumstance for me. the other hand there could be as well but we have to rid ourselves we keep working with this conception of self it's so pervasive and what is it? Well in the same way I often earlier today about birth, the breath.

[43:39]

He said, you know, he felt daily had been born. He used that term birth. In the room there was a birth. And so I keep wondering, I mean, you remember him saying that? I do remember him saying that. Good. Yeah. So I wonder daily what that means exactly. a new person without any dualism or it's not a person? I don't remember the context in which he said that, the way and I don't want to speak for him, the way I understand from having been with some people who are dying and having also been at the birth of my two children, these are very different seeming processes. What's parallel to me is that they are they're gritty and physical and they're about body.

[44:47]

In one case it's about body giving forth another body which is a miracle and in this sense of dying it's about body giving up but it's also physical and it's Maybe the common theme is just this is no matter how you do it, it's hard work. Now, I don't remember that he was saying giving birth in terms of, you know, giving birth to Bailey in another form. I don't think he was saying that. I didn't respond as a skeptic. I just kind of turned it around in my head. Keep turning. Peter? whether it's in a drop form in a waterfall, or whether it's in a river.

[46:22]

So for me, that kind of bridges the gap between what before, what after, no feeling before, no feeling after, what's happening here in the middle, where we feel like we're separate, we feel like we're individual, but we're still water. And our practice is to find that water every moment if we can, certainly while we're sitting here in this end zone. And also, our searchers there, But they don't mean after we die or before we die. It means always. So the potential to always feel that is always present. It's our job to enter the stream while we're out of the stream, so to speak. But the stream is going on, regardless of the form. It's Buddha nature. I mean, and this is a metaphor, so we can't take it too far. But it's Buddha nature, not not self, so that Buddha nature is there independent of form and it's our job as well as just enduring or kindly greeting our feelings to also keep looking into the essence of this Buddha nature.

[47:47]

and experiencing it directly. It's interesting how many ways there are of understanding a malstatement about death is like a birth, because the way that I had understood it was that it was like a door. And being with my own father, as he was dying, he had been in a coma for days before he died, and he was absolutely immobile. But as he was dying, he took those three deep, shuddering breaths, which was initially so startling, because I had my hands on his arm, and he suddenly moved. And I knew that that was what was happening. And we sat with him for a while, and then we were asked to leave, while I guess the doctors come in and check and do whatever. When we came back in, it was so clear that he was gone, in a way. You know, we sat there for half an hour with him, And it was like this door going through.

[48:57]

And I don't think that I thought of it as a bird then, that it had some, and I have not been present at it, that it had something to me of what I imagined it would be like, that there's a passing through and something is changed forever from that point. Maybe one more, Claire. Ellen, you used the term slipping away a few times, and there have been twice in my life when I've hovered between life and death, and it felt at those times that there was very little difference between them, maybe a baby step. Yeah. But sitting here now, there's an abyss between my life and death, and I'm wondering if you felt that way when you were close to death, and then how do you work with that in your life? Well, I felt that way, I've had several experiences of it. one when I was having a heart procedure in 1989, and I felt it was very close. At that point, I also, I was just on the edge of dying, and I went, I became unconscious, and then came to consciousness in about, I don't think it could have been more than 10 seconds later, but I was in this operating room, and I remember thinking,

[50:17]

could go either way and I said well if that's the way it is that's okay but I would prefer not to but it was very close and in retrospect I see here how close it was in this last illness but right now I don't want to die you know I'm farther from it at least in my illusory mind. It could happen, we could have the big earthquake and the whole building could fall down, or anything, or I could have a heart attack, or anything could happen to any of us. But we have this illusion of continuation, but when the time, when the moment comes there's life, there's being alive and there's being not alive and that passage, how we face that passage is important.

[51:23]

I mean the Tibetans put great store in just that moment, in those thoughts, in that moment, in that it conditions your future rebirth which I won't get into because I think it was Wittgenstein, about which one does not know thereof be silent. But if you do this practice, you can have more awareness as you're facing that, just that small step. And sometimes, this is again, Mel didn't talk about this, but to decide whether she was turning towards life or turning towards death because she was giving some mixed messages. On the one hand she was ready to let go, on the other hand she was preparing to live for another year with chemo which was not so realistic and he asked her to look at what was her mind towards this and then later that day the doctor came in and

[52:36]

But we have to face that. I think we should probably end here. And we can talk another time or, you know, offline, as they say. Beings are...

[52:56]

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