to that. Gossip is really destructive. I guess I would request that that be considered and I would like to see that contained in the document. Well, that's a useful That's a good point. I think that it's in the guidelines for the Dharma groups. Right.

[01:01]

I want it to be so clear that it's also in this document. I feel it's that important. People may not understand what what Rani is talking about. If I understand it, we have these dharma groups which are small groups of people who meet regularly, who talk about their lives and intimate concerns. And the principle that applies there is that matters that are talked about are then not matters of general discussion to the community at large or with others, right? And in fact, the correct way to handle this, you know, you have free discussion within the Dharma group, but if you said something, if you told me a story, you know, and we were in the same Dharma group, and then we were standing outside on the porch a few days later,

[02:05]

The appropriate thing would be for me to ask you, can I ask you about this? If it was something that I wanted to know or something I wanted to discuss. The principle of confidentiality there would be, so we're outside the circle of this room, I would ask your permission if we could talk about this. You could say yes or you could say no. That's my understanding. I think I'll talk with Anne about that. That would be my request. exactly what you described happened, at least on one occasion. I think some of this kind of material really needs to be spelled out very clearly. So thank you. Thank you. And the other thing is that all of this will happen, no matter what rules you have. And how we practice with it, how we keep our center When the suffering arises because we feel that there has been, you know, somebody's, you know, violated a boundary, if you want to use those terms, or hurt us, you know, how we practice with that, not standing on the principles of, oh, you broke this rule, but

[03:28]

finding our dharma position and our centeredness even in the midst of this, this is also a challenge because we can't pretend that if we have this document or these precepts or these 287 rules that human inventiveness or human habit of mind is not going to find some creative way of you know, pushing that boundary or pushing our buttons. So that's our practice. Jerry. I wanted to add to that something about wayseeking mind talks. Uh-huh. Because in wayseeking mind talks, people disclose information. Right. And they do it in a certain way. They say it in their words. And I personally have had an experience where something that I said in wayseeking mind talk was And then I heard about it in a kind of a public arena.

[04:33]

And it seems like it really discourages that kind of openness that people do have in ways that you might not see. give those talks fairly regularly. I think that's right, and I think the same rule would apply. So Wake Seeking Mind Talks, for those of you who don't get up at 5.30 on Monday mornings, almost every Monday morning we have, after Zazen, a student talk. And we've been doing this, gosh, we've been doing this for close to 20 years. And often The initial talk is where people talk about how they came to Zen practice, how they came to be sitting in this seat that day. And so it's very autobiographical. And lots of personal details are shared. So I think that that makes sense. So one more question and then we have to stop. Charlie, did you have something?

[05:34]

Well, yeah. I was just going to say, I don't know where it fits in. And it seems to me that the big problem they had was not working with the criminal justice system. There's only one place to go. Well, that's actually in the process part of it, and that's true. If it's a criminal violation, then it has to be, you know, it has to be dealt with here as practice, but it also, we have to be clear where there's a violation that needs to be brought to the attention of the law. Absolutely. I think we need to end. It's late. But thank you, and I'll be around outside, and I hope we can continue to talk about this.

[06:35]

And your suggestions are quite helpful. Beings are numberless. I vow to stay with them. Illusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end. I thought that sort of comes from top down. It's based on what you could call emergent phenomena. If you started out as a reductionist and you could calculate well enough, you might come up with a human being eventually, but you don't. Emergent knowledge is knowledge that takes these things that have emerged and studies them.

[07:38]

And in theory, the study should be consistent with the reductionist knowledge. You start with little things, you get big things, start with big things, you get little things. They should be connected. But the connection is so complicated that you can't figure it out. For instance, evolution. Evolution is well studied, and quantum mechanics is well studied. It's the little things and the big things. There's a tremendous path in between them, and we don't know how to go across that path, but we believe both ends. And if someone were really smart, they might be able to deduce quantum mechanics from evolution. And so what interests me is this emergent phenomena of the Dharma and these people who found it.

[08:54]

I really believe they found it. by their practice. How does it compare with the reductionist current thoughts about time? The theory that we have now that seems to work really well is quantum mechanics. And it's been around quite a while. And there are prescriptions for calculating things, and it works. I mean, it just works. But there is a bit of controversy about it. Although you can calculate things and it works, exactly how you interpret what these equations mean when you want to think about them for perhaps going beyond is still an area of discussion.

[10:09]

There are a lot of different approaches, but I found an approach by a fellow named David Deutsch. He was instrumental in putting together quantum computing. And quantum computing has actually been done on some very small basis, so he's not such a slouch. So he has this book called The Fabric of Reality, Sounds like a Zen book, right? And he takes the tact that he wants to explain these things very simply and start from the simplest approach he can. And so he picked one of the most easy quantum mechanical things to see, and that is just the passage of light through slits. This whole idea of passage of light through slits actually was the birth of quantum mechanics because when you'd add another slit and

[11:34]

used the same old assumption that light just went straight through it. It didn't work. There were just shadows where there shouldn't have been and everybody could see them and there's no way to escape it, you know, it was just there. So they started thinking about what could have caused it and ended up having a particle wave duality and having probability waves forming and unforming that you could never see. But what David Deutsch does is he just says, they're real and the many options are many universes. He says, The problem is, if you try to explain it by things interfering with each other, you can turn the light down very low so that it's just like a single particle of light goes through at a time.

[12:47]

Nothing to interfere with anything and yet you still see this pattern. By the way, he points out that frogs can see a single photon. So if you shine a light at a frog and he backs up far enough, he'll see it start flickering. That's a digression though. So, he says, in interference experiments there can be places in a shadow pattern that go dark when new openings are made in the barrier casting the shadow. This remains true even when the experiment is performed with individual particles. A chain of reasoning based on this fact rules out the possibility that the universe we see around us constitutes the whole of reality. In fact, the whole of physical reality, the multiverse, contains vast numbers of parallel universes. Well, how about that?

[13:52]

They're not independent. They're not exactly independent. There's weak quantum interferences between them. It's basic for the theoretical physicist in the group, which I know there's one. He's taken the probability wave function and just chopped it up into different universes and said the whole thing's real, it's all there. So that's one thing. So everything is there at the same time. Now, another thing that comes out of quantum mechanical phenomenon is a connection between everything that's in this multiverse. And it comes in the simplest way. It's tied together in many ways, but in the simplest way, there's a principle called the Pauli Exclusion Principle, which says that any electron anywhere has to have a certain relationship to any other electron.

[15:14]

I mean, what are our thoughts? Our thoughts are, you know, little bursts of electrons in here doing something. We don't know exactly what. And at least it's correlated. We haven't found any thought particles. So, somehow it comes out of that, you know. So, you can imagine that that there is, I mean, it's not, as far as we know, to the best of our ability, there is a connection between all of us and everything. And exactly how sensitive we are to this connection is an open question. And there may be beings or people that are very sensitive to it and people that aren't. I mean, I can imagine that there was some highly talented emergent phenomena scientist maybe 2,500 years ago who was sensitive to these things and just realized it.

[16:37]

You could call him Buddha. And So that's this little bit about science. And I guess I should quote Dogen relative to the last thoughts that I was giving. Later, in this vesicle, Dogen says, each moment is all being. It is the entire world. Reflect now whether any being or any world is left out of the present moment. So, I don't see anything to disagree with that. which is nice because here we are in the year 2000 and we're studying intensely these things that were put out about 800 years ago and we're such a forefront people.

[17:55]

It's nice to know that it doesn't seem to be that different, you know. I mean, we're certainly not wasting our time but It just feels good to me. So talking about time, I can't go into the arguments, but in David Deutsch's book, he goes through time and he just is really upset with the concept of time. And he says, time is not a sequence of moments, nor does it flow. And he says, the supposed motion of the present moment in the future direction or the supposed motion of our unconsciousness from one moment to another is nonsense. And he makes a pretty convincing argument.

[18:56]

And you can compare that with Dogen, when Dogen steps back after explaining and talks about the ordinary person seeing time. He says, yet an ordinary person who doesn't understand Buddhadharma may hear the words, the time being this way. For a while, I was three heads and eight arms. For a while, I was eight or 16 foot body. This is like having crossed over rivers and climbed mountains. Even though the mountains and rivers still exist, I have already passed them and now reside in a jeweled palace and vermilion tower. These mountains and rivers are as distant from me as heaven is from earth. It is not that simple. At the time the mountains were climbed and the rivers crossed, you were present. Time is not separate from you, and as you are present, time does not go away.

[20:02]

As time is not marked by coming or going, the moment you climb the mountain is the time being right now. This is the meaning of time being." So I think these two guys would get along. Dogen says, he says more about this concept of time moving. Do not think that time merely flies away. Do not see flying away as the only function of time. If time merely flies away, you would be separated from time. The reason you do not clearly understand the time being is that you think of time only as passing. In essence, all things in the entire world are linked with one another as moments. Because all moments are time being. They are your time being.

[21:05]

I see these moments that Dogen refers to as the same as Deutsches Universes. all these moments. And the fact that these moments are linked together. Link. What's the link? It's just inescapable to me that the link is the fact that you can actually do physics. I think that this allows physics to be done. To observe the connections. So Deutsch says, yet our intuitions about the properties of time are broadly true. Certain events indeed cause and effects of one another. Relative to an observer, the future is indeed open and the past fixed and possibilities do indeed become actualities.

[22:13]

The reason why our traditional theories of time are nonsense is that they try to express these true intuitions within the framework of a false classical physics. In quantum physics they make sense because time was a quantum concept all along. We exist in multiple versions in universes called moments. Each version of us is not directly aware of the others, but has evidence because physical laws link the contents of different universes. And actually when this theory first was being cooked up, there's a fellow named Bruce DeWitt who was working on quantum mechanics and he discovered within this framework that other times are just special cases of other universes.

[23:22]

And they also, in the quantum mechanical formulation, an observer can't tell what universe they're in. So this is guys now talking. So here you are, you're in all times and all universes and you don't know which one you're in. So relax. So Dogen says, all beings of all kinds in the visible and invisible realms are the time being actualized by your complete effort, flowing due to your complete effort. Closely examine this flowing. Without your complete effort, nothing would be actualized, nothing would flow. So, it's actually through us that all of these connections are made.

[24:30]

And you can't really say us, It's all me, or it's all you, or it's all, just all. And actually, I think the me and the you are just a small little perversion and a ripple in the force. So Dogen says, in your study of flowing, if you imagine the objective to be outside yourself and that you flow or move through hundreds and thousands of worlds, for hundreds and thousands and myriads of eons, you have not devotely studied the Buddha way. Sometimes I read that and I don't expect that last class. Oh, but It's loaded with yous, and I think he's trying to say that it's not that you flow anywhere.

[25:56]

You're already there. I think that's what he's trying to get against. Back to our fellow Deutsch, this will be the last time. Deutsch says, it is tempting to suppose that the moment of which you are aware is the only real one. Thinking about Dogen again. Or at least a little more real than the others. But this is a solipsism. All moments are physically real. The whole of the universe is physically real. Nothing else is. Dogen says, just actualize time as all being. There is nothing extra. So these guys seem to be pretty close.

[27:01]

And I don't think it's an accident. One's a reductionist scientist in the 21st century, and the other's a... Well, we don't know where the... But we know when Dogen was. And I think you could call him an emergent phenomena scientist. He didn't have a bunch of instruments and stuff. He just had himself. Yet... come very close to the same viewpoints. So, that's all I had prepared for today. Basically, what I've shown is that there's two sets of words that seem to be revolving around the same idea. But in Dogon there's much more.

[28:09]

Zen is not so much about words. It's about what really is. Words really are. Half words. But he actually gives prescriptions. in this discussion about how to actualize these concepts. So two weeks from now I'm going to work really hard and maybe I can tell you something about that. So I think we have a little time for questions. I saw David's hand go up really fast. You used an expression, so relax, which maybe that's a foreshadowing of what's to come in two weeks, so I should just save my question, you tell me, but that's an

[29:25]

I wonder if you could open that up for us a little bit. I think it was embedded in your discussion about multiple universes that we all share in them. Why should we relax? I think you should relax because you don't have to figure this all out. I'm not saying I'll do it for you, but you don't have to figure it out. Paul. There's something in the physical universe that you're talking about. that makes me think of the World Wide Web and what's happening in physics and science now and a kind of digital universe where we've become points on the planet that are related to an energy system somehow.

[30:47]

I imagine, I think about the World Wide Web or the idea of being all interconnected and that it is a model of this universe that you're talking about somehow. Somehow a projection of that energy system. Can you talk about that? The web. I first dealt with the web when it was called ARPANET, which was a Department of Defense product. I think the net is a very simple thing that that we've managed to come up with that helps us. But the level of complexity between that and my fingernail is so incredibly... My fingernail is so incredibly more complicated that I think that...

[32:13]

I think it's a nice start towards creating something that would be beautiful. I think that's about all I can say about it. Paul. I love this lecture. full of very profound, deep thinking. I quoted it all. It's like, I want the text and I want to listen to the tape and then bits of it you could think about for a very, very long time. And I didn't understand almost all of it. The question is, I think, a useful trick, not just for me, but for everybody here if I want to ask it, is that physics, to do physics and to understand things that way, you have to be very smart. And there is a lot of very complex and subtle thinking that goes on.

[33:20]

You have to be able to do that very well. And the mathematics, for example. But with Zen practice, we hear that it's the stupid people that get enlightened first. That's why you should relax. So what's the connection between that enlightenment and this enlightenment? Well, it's the difference between how difficult it is to get somewhere starting from little teeny things, you know? Like the physics guys, they've got thousands of people, they're getting millions of dollars and they're working with these little teeny things and they've come up with these ideas, you know, I did pretty good. That's the reductionist from the bottom up, you know, and if we work hard enough, we may get a fingernail. But if you're an emergent scientist, emergent phenomena, you operate more on your intuition, on what your body tells you and the world tells you.

[34:35]

I mean, I don't know how Darwin came up with what he did, but he just wandered around, and the same thing for Dogen. I mean, I really think that they're scientists. They're observing, they're feeling, they're responding, and they just... It's a lot more mysterious than doing it from the reductionist way. And I was neither one. I mean, I was an experimentalist. You know, I just, they said this should happen and I'd go check and say, you're nuts. Back, back here. You, you, yeah. I'm curious, I don't want to Too intellectual, too complicated, but I'm curious your point of view on, you know, I would subscribe to what you're saying. I trust you, it makes sense. Do you notice much of a

[35:38]

Many people propound false equations between, say, Zen and physics, Zen and science, and things like that. Is there much of that? Because I think there's some people who just kind of publish and they publish, and it's just much, you know. Do you find much of that? Yeah, you heard some today. I can't really give an opinion because I've never read any of those things. I mean, I just, there's too many things to read. So, I'm sorry. But it would be very easy. I mean, you know, there's even in so-called hard science, there's a lot of stuff that's just not true and not right and people are lying to get ahead and, you know, it's just like being with regular people. So it's nice.

[36:51]

Yes, back there. We talked about the possibility of enlightenment, that's where I'm getting your thought process. If it could be demonstrated to your satisfaction that physics could not demonstrate an enlightenment experience, would that matter to you? No, no, I wasn't even... I didn't mean to give that impression. If it could be demonstrated, then we'd, you know, inject everybody. But if it couldn't be demonstrated, I wouldn't mind at all. I think physics comes from a direction that makes it very difficult to achieve a goal like that.

[37:59]

Oh, wait. You're next. Thanks, Doug, for your talk. You spoke about parallel universes. And when you say parallel, I think of things occurring at the same time. Yeah. So, is there... When you speak about that, do you mean that there's an infinite number of universes occurring simultaneously, or is there a universe that just moves? They're all still. There are many of them that are simultaneous, and there are many of them that are not. And all times are there, if you think of time. He got trapped into creating all of these because in order to make the light ray not go where it wanted to go, it had to kind of bounce off and it had to kind of

[39:18]

be selected and so he had to have all options available. So all options are available. And so these number of universes is very big. So I think it's non-denumerable infinity. Let's see, you wanted to know I forgot where I was going with that. Did I answer your question? They are different. They are different times. But it's hard to say they're different times because time is the very thing you're... Yeah, I know. It's the problem of trying to use the language set with God.

[40:24]

It shouldn't be uchi. I pointed, please. Well, I didn't understand quite a bit of what you said, and I don't even quite understand the question that I have, but maybe you can tell me if it's nonsense or if it's something. But I always think about memory in conjunction with these kinds of talks and meetings. Memory... For instance, the older I get, the more memories I have. Did they really happen? If I forget them, did they really happen? We base our actions, in great part, on memories of something that happened. Are those things still happening? Are all the past things still happening? What about people remembering the same thing differently? What about my father, who's 92 and senile and has forgotten everything and he used to be a brilliant physicist? You know what I'm getting at?

[41:26]

It's this whole... I think that it's a problem or a puzzle of memory. How does memory play into this whole talk of time being? Yeah. Fine. If I answer your question completely, I'll be robbing myself of what I'm supposed to say next time. Because I just add one small personal thing. The older I get and as I start to lose my memory and the more memories I have, the more it starts to dawn on me in kind of a frightening way, did these things actually happen? That I'm now basing my life on? I think it's kind of like half real and When we remember something, like say we remember someone who's gone, in a way, those patterns that you create when you do that are them.

[42:36]

The patterns that you create are them? Yeah. So you create them? I think so. Out of your memory. Yeah. Ah. Andrea, and then we have to stop. I get the feeling from when you're speaking about quantum physics, that as compared to 13th century Zen master, emergent scientist, that quantum physics, there's something missing, that it may always miss the mark somehow. if that's what you think, and what that might be that's missing? I don't know if there's anything missing. It could be that everything's there, although, you know, we're still looking for more stuff. But... In the answer to the other question, I said I didn't think that physics could come up with enlightenment.

[43:50]

I don't think there's any logical inconsistency, but it's such a complex task to go from electrons to people achieving enlightenment that I just don't think it could ever be done. I think it has to be done from the other end. So that's why I'm here with a specialist. Is it okay if I say something? Oh. Just for Paul, that you have to be really intelligent in order to be stupid enough. Kings are...

[44:54]

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