I see you figured out that there was a talk tonight. Somewhere along the line it was kind of, you know, I started out thinking I was going to give a talk every night and then Catherine and my friend Patti came up to me and said, you know, you don't have to give a talk every night and maybe it'd be, you know, like, see, you could take a night off. And so I said, you know, I kind of heard something else like, you know, we don't want you to get too tired. You better take a night off. And so I said, oh, okay. And then I woke up. Well, then I gave that talk last night about the old monks who worked with the mushrooms, you know, and how hot it was and how they said there's no other time but now and who else could do it but me. And I thought, I better give a talk tonight. And I thought, well, actually, if it's up to me, I'd just as soon give a talk, you know.

[01:05]

And I realized that I'd sort of heard what they were suggesting kind of wrong. They just said like, it wasn't that they said, you know, that you're going to be too tired and we can't live with you, you know, if you keep giving talks every night, but it's just saying that that possibility of not giving a talk every night was there. Anyway, I decided to do a talk tonight. We've been talking about, we started talking about way-seeking mind, the aspiration for enlightenment, the effort that we each make to fulfill in some way our inmost request in the midst of what we can see is obviously an imperfect world. And even though we can't attain perfection in the sense of producing, being a perfect person or producing perfect dinners or having perfect meditation practice or being the greatest

[02:08]

Zen student ever, we can still make a sincere effort to express and bring forth our deep and best wish for one another and our own life. And last night, I talked about faith, the quality of, to some quality of diving into our experience. And I related this to marriage, zazen, cooking, any form that we make a commitment to participating in requires a certain faith because we don't know how it will come out and yet we agree to do it. We agree to cook a meal, we agree to sit a period of meditation, we agree to write a poem, a certain form, we agree to be in a relationship and we give our word and that

[03:16]

word that we make a commitment allows us to dive into our life. And so this form is actually necessary in that way. And as Wendell Berry said, which I think is useful, form is what impedes us or obstructs us in a way and baffles us. In this way, it serves us to vitalize our life and our way-seeking mind. There's many old Chinese sayings and Confucian sayings remarking on how it is that good fortune can turn into calamity, calamity can turn into good fortune and it's exactly because of this, that when we have good fortune, we relax, everything is fine, I don't need to pay attention to anything, things are going along, I don't have to be aware particularly and then it turns and in the same way, bad fortune, calamity can turn into good fortune

[04:21]

because we have to now struggle and be aware and watch what happens and pay attention. And so if we keep this kind of thing in mind, we don't have quite the same kinds of ups and downs like this. This kind of practice or faith, so I want to give you a poem, I used this this morning in our workshop, which is another way of talking about faith, diving in. Yesterday I used the Kabir poem with enter into your own body, there you'll find a solid place to put your feet. This is a poem by Rilke, a European poet early 20th century and I use it a lot, it's one of my favorite poems.

[05:21]

You see I want a lot, perhaps everything, the darkness of each infinite fall, the shivering blaze of each step up. There are those who live on and want little and are raised to the rank of prince by the slippery ease of their light judgments. But what you love to see are faces that feel thirst and do work. Most of all you love those who need you like a crowbar or a hoe. It is not too late and you are not too old to dive into the increasing depths of your life where it calmly gives out its secret. So this is the quality of faith, diving into the depths of our life. Whether it's meditation or cooking or meeting a friend, smiling, having a cup of tea, each moment has this kind of possibility of depth to it.

[06:28]

Even though our discriminating mind will say, oh this is just a cup of tea, no big deal, had a lot of cups of tea, there's still the possibility of depth there. And I mentioned a poem by Dogen, or not by Dogen but the Dogen quotes of, the black dragon jewel is everywhere. But each moment we don't find a jewel. So in some way we need to dive in and this quality and we need to be involved with form and the quality of being involved in form is sometimes in Buddhism there's three aspects, the training in morality, training in concentration and training in wisdom. So this diving in and the fact that we live with form and abide in form and we can't find our freedom anywhere else but in form and in an imperfect world, this is all the aspect of training in morality.

[07:30]

And tonight I want to talk about the next training, the training in concentration. So what happens when you dive into experience? Is it very nice there? What happens when we dive into experience? A lot of things, we meet a lot of things that we didn't necessarily want to meet and rather than jewels we find a lot of things that are suspiciously like dirt and slime and mud. And some of the dirt and slime and mud smells suspiciously like it's just come out of a sewer somewhere and we begin to smell and it's not very pleasant. It's not a very nice place necessarily. When I started working here at Tassajara I was the head cook of a monastery at 21 or whatever how old or how old I was and of course I was pretty idealistic and know-it-all and

[08:44]

I thought I knew what Zen was and you know I could watch other people who would come up at tea time and try to get up to the table before the others and get the biggest treat and I thought I'm not greedy. Those people are really greedy aren't they? And look at how they push up there and look at how they always get the big piece and actually you know I had a little different you know I was more like proud that I wasn't greedy right because I don't do that, I don't rush up to the table. So I thought I was pretty good but you know you can kind of suspect that if you see somebody else doing something you audit you know you kind of need to check and see whether maybe you're doing that too because chances are you'll spot it in somebody else before you spot it in yourself right? And it was only after you know I don't know there was one time when Oksana, Suzuki Roshi's wife gave me a box of salted nuts and I thought well this is nice I'll share them with some other people but I didn't.

[09:46]

I'd saved and I hoarded the whole box of salted nuts going up to my cabin waiting for nobody to be around eating every last one. No I'm not greedy. Anyway at some point you know enough of those kind of things happened and then you know I sometimes would go and get oh well we had the nose no you know we just had a personal tantrum it was yesterday wasn't it the day before yesterday I guess this personal tantrum now once a month but we used to have them like every week or ten days so you could order things so I'd order jars of peanut butter and cans of honey and you know crackers and things and then you know I'd get those big rye crisps that are about this big around you know and then put on peanut butter and honey and these big big sandwich sort of things and then I'd go off and eat it someplace and it was so good.

[10:58]

No I'm not greedy well you know after a while it's things slip you know and you have to finally admit like it comes home finally I'm I guess I am kind of greedy aren't I and it's not a very pleasant thing to admit after the way you know one has been criticizing the other people who are greedy you know what bad people they are and then you know then to have to admit that I am one of those bad people one of those not Zen people one of those not very good Zen student people it's kind of humiliating even though nobody else really knows exactly or everybody else already knows. They noticed long ago so actually I should have been humiliated a while back. I'm the last one to find out and I used to be and I would be so angry now that one didn't take me very long you know to notice that I was the one who was angry and other people noticed it pretty early on too.

[12:12]

And on the whole other people said well you know everybody gets angry and but I was the one who had you know such high standards for myself you know and I would think you know well I know everybody gets angry but I don't. You know I'm not everybody I am you know better than everybody I am you know I am more advanced than everybody you know I want to be special and different that way it may be that it's very natural to get angry but you know I'm not going to do that. And so I actually you know made a practice of making every effort not to get angry you know for one year two years. Do you know what happens when you make that kind of effort? Do you get less angry or more angry? This is to divide yourself against yourself is it not? You pick one aspect of yourself like this anger and you say but that's not me when you get angry then you can say well I couldn't help it that's I'm not really an angry person that wasn't me I could I was overcome with anger.

[13:25]

And then as far as my own relationship with anger I'm saying hey listen I'm not going to have anything to do with you. A friend of mine recently said who's had lots of experience with diving into her life and finding out and observing what's going on she said sometimes there would be such inexplicably intolerable states of mind. If you stay on the surface of things you don't have to go there but when you dive in whether it's to cook or to be in a relationship or to meditate you'll find yourself now underneath the surface. And once in a while even if you don't choose to go there you'll end up underneath the surface. Well finally after about two years of getting really angry a lot you know I did things you've probably heard the stories about somebody throwing knives in the old kitchen here. It wasn't knives really it was just my glasses.

[14:40]

I took off my glasses and threw them across the kitchen against the wall. So I don't wear glasses anymore. And one time my friend Alan was here and one time I was so angry and I but I went instead of getting angry in the kitchen I went outside and knelt down on the deck out there and I beat my fist on the floor of the deck. I was so mad and I didn't know what else to do you know and my friend Alan came up to me and he said you know what I'm going to tell you I'm going to tell you a story and I said I'm going to tell you a story and he said you know what I'm going to tell you [...] I'm going to tell you a story and he came up to me and he said I was so embarrassed. We actually waited to get angry and then went out and did this stupid thing anyway. But it was about 2 years had to go by before I finally realized it occurred to me how am

[15:42]

How am I ever going to find out what to do with anger if I always am going to keep my distance from it and not have anything to do with it? How am I ever going to learn how to relate to anger? Or what the heck anger is? And how am I ever going to be a whole person if there's me and then there's, you know, these things that are out there lurking, you know, that might overcome me? You know, when I'm a little tired, you know, and then somebody else, if I'm a little tired and then some other aspect of mine can jump in and say, now's my chance, he's a little tired. And then I don't have the energy to say, get out of here, you know, I say, all right, you're going to be here, I'm leaving. And you know, in this way, we abandon ourselves to some feeling that's happening, because we don't see how we can be there with this intolerable feeling. Well, this is all kind of, you know, in its own kind of roundabout way, a little kind

[16:50]

of background for you about concentration practice. Because one aspect of concentration practice is you want to get all aspects of your mind, right? Concentration means one mind, one object, one moment of awareness. Everything is collected together, okay? So there's not a mind, and there's no boundary anymore between me and then these other possible states of mind that could attack me. That's not a whole mind now. That's a mind that there's a wall someplace, there's a boundary, there's a division. There's me and the things that could get me, or get the better of me, or get the worst of me. And so then how can you have a whole mind? How do you have a whole heart? The concentration practice is one way we heal ourselves, one way we become whole, one way

[17:52]

we collect ourselves. And we do this, you know, we don't necessarily start directly with, you know, me and my anger, or me and my greed, but we start by concentrating on, you know, something we're doing, something like our breath and meditation, our posture. I mentioned the other day when you cut the carrots, cut the carrots, we begin to concentrate on the activity. So tonight there's this little further kind of instruction that I want to share with you about concentration, and I thought I'd read some of these passages to you. And this is talking about concentration in a basically, you know, pretty conversational kind of way, not a particularly, you know, one, two, three, four, five way. But for the purposes of our talk tonight, it's the way I'd like to talk about it.

[18:57]

So this is all little passages from Dogen's, Zen Master, Zen Teacher Dogen's work, the Instructions for the Cook, Instructions for the Head Cook. But you know, if you listen to this, you can see it can apply not just to the cook, but to living, to meditating, and to our own being. So Dogen, Zen Teacher Dogen says, in the art of cooking, the essential consideration is to have a deeply sincere and respectful mind, regardless of the fineness or coarseness of the ingredients. The essential consideration is to have a deeply sincere and respectful mind, regardless of the fineness or coarseness of the ingredients. When you gather and prepare wild grasses, make it equal to a fine cream soup with your

[20:01]

true mind, sincere mind, pure mind. When you wash the rice and prepare vegetables, you must do it with your own hands and with your own eyes, making sincere effort. Do not be idle even for a moment. Do not be careful about one thing and careless about another. And he repeats this in different ways in several different passages here. Do not be careful about one thing and careless about another. So this is very easy to do, you know. When the anger shows up, we say, get out of here. But when something else shows up, we say, oh, how nice to see you. But how will we ever learn to deal or to really know either if it's so automatic? What will we learn about relating to anger if we always tell it to go away? If we're always careless with it?

[21:03]

So he says, when you're preparing the food, don't discuss the quality or the quantity of the ingredients. And above all, don't complain about the quantity. You know, in this case, you're issued a certain amount of food to prepare for the day the monastery gives you a certain amount of food. Don't complain about the quantity of the ingredients. But you can see pretty easily how this can also apply to, you know, yourself. Don't complain about your own ingredients. I'm not strong enough. I don't know enough. I'm not enlightened enough. I don't have enough energy. You know, I'm this. You know, I don't have it in some way. Don't complain about that either. And the ingredients, what we're talking about is and what we were bringing up in the first lecture is in a very simple sense that it's quite obvious and apparent once we look that we can't control the ingredients we get in our life.

[22:13]

We're going to get certain ingredients to work with. And we can't control it. Some of us are men. Some of us are women. Some of us are stronger. Some of us are weaker. Some of us are prone to certain kinds of diseases or, you know, illnesses or emotional problems. And we've had certain upbringings. So the ingredients that come to us, we can't control. And we spend so much of our time trying to control ingredients. So this is a big shift here, you see. This is the shift we made by diving in with faith, not knowing what the result will be and not even knowing what the ingredients will be. But we're going to meditate anyway. We're going to cook a meal anyway. We're going to live our life. And so given that, we make some even same effort with each thing. Regardless of whether we consider it a fine thing or a coarse thing.

[23:18]

We give it our attention. What will we do with it? How should we handle it? How do we use it? So this comes up like, you know, leftovers. What about leftovers? And all of these things, you know, leftovers and the carrots and the tomatoes, this is also each of us. Can we always be a wonderful bright red tomato? Are we always going to be, you know, a wonderful fresh dish of lasagna? Or sometimes we're kind of like the leftovers, right? Sometimes the leftover is me. I'm kind of leftover. I'm this kind of little stuff that's leftover. I don't have much to offer tonight. What am I going to do? So you start by doing it with the stuff out there. It's not that different. So if you take care of leftovers, you're taking care of yourself.

[24:21]

You know, you're taking care of others. And you start with something simple like food. You hold your breath because it's easier than, you know, taking on other people maybe. So even if you're going to throw out the leftovers, at least you know, you look at it. You know, you examine it. Is it useful for anything? Can we put it in a soup? Can we put it in a casserole? You know, what could we do with this? How could we utilize it? And so when we discard it and throw it out, you know, we've considered. And then we haven't just said, oh, that's some leftover. Get rid of it. You know, and I have sort of the opposite problem. I have too many leftovers around, right? I don't want to throw those poor things away. So they kind of pile up. Anyway, you can still throw them away, but, you know, you consider them, right?

[25:23]

We consider them. We give our attention to things, and then, you know, we still may discard it. In the same way, when you pick up a carrot, I mean, obviously, we have to, if we're a cook, part of the cooking is that we pick through things. We sort things. Eating is a whole process of sorting, right? From the time that the ground, you know, a plant sorts out what it's going to use from the ground and the sun, and it puts all those things together in the plant. The plant does a kind of sorting. And then we take a certain part of the plant that's edible. We sort that out, the part that's not edible. And we cook that. And then our body does that. You know, once the food is inside of us, there's more sorting going on. What can be used, what can't be used. So, concentration, at least in the way we're talking about tonight, this is what is sometimes called formless concentration,

[26:25]

as opposed to a concentration where, you know, you have some object of meditation, of concentration in meditation, such as your breath, or a mantra, or something else. Rather than a particular object, you have one object after another. In cooking, you have one object after another. There's cutting something, there's washing something. Dogen says, each thing you do, then pay attention to what you're doing. Use your hands. Use your own hands, use your own eyes. And do it with sincerity, with wholeheartedness, with this careful attention. So that when you wash rice, you don't lose any rice. You should have some, you're pouring the water out of the rice, you want to wash it again, you have a strainer to catch the rice, so that no rice comes out in the water. This kind of careful attention, moment after moment, is the basis of concentration,

[27:30]

and the basis of how we become whole. It's through this kind of effort that doesn't neglect one thing, and concentrate on something else. Recently, you know, and this kind of work goes on, and on, and on, right? I mean, that was whenever it was, twenty years ago or so, when I was getting so angry and being so greedy. And, you know, last year I had this experience, which I don't know, I probably share this with you every year at this workshop time, but some of you haven't heard it, so. But, I don't know, it was sometime last year, and I was kind of, you know, tired in the morning, and somehow kind of cranky. I went to make myself breakfast, and there was one egg in the refrigerator,

[28:33]

and nobody had told me that this was the one egg that was there, because nobody could get it out of the refrigerator. And it's sitting there in one of those little holes in the refrigerator door. And I went to get it out, and it's stuck. Now, I've told this story before, and people say, oh, but Ed, didn't you know you just put a little warm water on it, and that dissolves the stuff, and then you just take it out? Well, I didn't know. No, I didn't know. So I thought, I'll get the egg, and I'll just wiggle it a little bit. Wiggle it the gentlest little bit. Well, the gentlest little bit broke it right away, and then the slime starts coming out of the egg. And I was, first of all, really irritated, really annoyed. Damn. And then I thought, now, do I put my hands underneath here, or do I go in the other room and get a sponge, and the stuff is dripping down onto all those other bottles in the refrigerator door

[29:36]

that you never know what they are or what's in them, and you never do anything with them anyway? Maybe it would be just as well, and then we could throw them out. Well, I opted for keeping my hands there, and waiting for, you know, most of it to drool down through the door into my hands. And I got it all, and I go into the other room, and I put them in the sink, and I wash off my hands. And I was so mad, you know, and I thought, and I literally thought this, and Buddhism says, this is the way we think. This is in the sutras, mind you. This is how we think. And I thought, that refrigerator and that egg are conspiring. They did this on purpose. And when I went to open the refrigerator door, you know, the egg says to the door, you hold on to me. I'll hold on to you. He's kind of out of sorts this morning. We're really going to get him today.

[30:38]

Now, you have to believe that in order to, you have to believe that in order to get that mad. Because otherwise, what are you getting mad at? You know, you have to get mad at the fact that there's somebody there, there's something there who's having this intention, you know, and is purposely planning to do something to you. You know? Otherwise, you know, how do you ever get angry? You know? So I got really angry, you know, and then at some point, you know, I started sort of like, well, to the egg, I'm kind of saying, well, let go. Why couldn't you just let go? Why don't you just let go of the door? What's wrong with you anyway? So if you're lucky anyway, out of all this, you get a little message. You know, like, who is it that needs to let go? You know? Oh boy. So then I tried, then it turned out there were some other eggs, you know, someplace.

[31:43]

I got out the eggs, then I got out the cheese. No, it wasn't that it was moldy, it was in plastic. It was impenetrably in plastic. I couldn't get it out of the plastic. This is modern America because, you know, it's tamper-proof, right? Nobody's going to have, you know, put anything on that cheese in the market. It's completely tamper-proof. It's so tamper-proof that you can't open it up when you get home. And I didn't have any of my sharp knives with me, so I got the knife out of the door there, and I whack at the plastic wrapper, and it won't come apart. And I'm getting mad again, you know? I'm getting really angry again, like, why is this wrapper doing this to me, you know? And it's like everything is conspiring again, and they only do these things to you when you're on edge anyway,

[32:45]

when you're tired, and they don't do these things to you ever when you're feeling really good and on top of it, you know? They only do these things then. And then I'm starting to go to myself, you know, I'm starting to go like, open up! Open up! Oh, boy. I got two messages that day, right? Well, I finally found some scissors that were sharp enough to get the package of cheese open. But this is, you know, anyway, this is the kind of thing that, you know, it keeps happening. Life is like this. You know, the eggs do stick to the refrigerator, and the cheese packages don't open up, and these are the ingredients that we have to work with. And who each of us is, are the ingredients. Some of us have, you know, many kinds of kind of problems,

[33:46]

or, you know, anger, or grief, or, you know, whatever it is. You know, sorrow. And once we start plunging into the depths of our life, and we get beneath the surface, we will encounter many strange and sometimes objectionable things. And the advice in concentration is each thing, treat each thing the same. Don't, over and over there in that passage, don't be careful with the fine things, and then careless with the coarse things. Don't arouse a joyful mind over the good things, and then disdain over the other things. It's one more thing to relate to, in some way. Even if it's to, you know, relate to it long enough to get,

[34:49]

you know, to hear yourself saying to the object, open up, let go. And all of these, you know, so at this time, we will meet the parts of ourselves that have been neglected, and we can invite, in some way, the parts of ourselves that have been neglected, or isolated, we can invite to join us in the activity we're doing. Sometimes it can be very direct, you know, and I was reading some psychological thing recently, you know, and, you know, the person says, you might have to make a deal with your psyche.

[35:50]

You know, like, listen, you help me sit in meditation for 40 minutes, and I'll let you lie around later. You can be a complete slob. And you might get that part of you that's such a complete slob to join you in sitting for a while. You know, you make a little deal. Or you say, listen, if you don't like the way I meditate, and you find me such a tiring person to be around, why don't you show me how you would meditate? You know, and I won't say anything while you do it. And you can meditate, and you think, you might think that I meditate in a kind of uptight kind of way, and you might kind of like, you know, find me kind of tense. Why don't you just show me how you would do it? I'm just gonna sit here, and you can do it. I'll watch, you know, I'll be quiet. I won't bug you. I won't make you be more energetic or anything. You just do it in your own lazy way. You know, however you want. And I'll just hang out here with you. I won't get in your way. And you have a little deal. You find out something. That there's more than one way to meditate. And some part of you that's been dying for the opportunity

[36:55]

to express itself has a chance. And the part that's lazy is also the part that, you know, oftentimes the part that we've been neglecting is the part that has the wisdom. You know, the part that can say, well, here, I'll show you how to open up. Here, I'll show you how to let go. You know, if it's laziness, then often that means that we've been so, you know, like I'm going to do it perfectly. And then if you're going to do it perfectly, and you put so much energy and intensity into doing it perfectly, don't you think there's some other part that's gonna say, and like, come off it, would you? Aren't you on some kind of a trip? God, I can't stand that. I can't stand people who are so much like that. There's another part of us that's like that, right? And we have to get these parts together. So over time, you know, we have a chance. We're feeling so many different ways.

[37:55]

And another quality of this kind of way of thinking about concentration... I lost it there. But another quality is that even when you're feeling lazy, you can still meditate. Or when you feel lazy, you can still cook, but you can find out how to cook in a kind of lazy way rather than in the way that you were going to get everything done. And you can meditate in a lazy way. And when you're angry, you can... You know, you can have an angry person meditate. You can have an angry person cook. And you begin to then make this separation between the most obvious expression of the emotion and the emotion. Like, when I'm angry, I have to yell. You know, I'm going to beat my fist on the ground. Or I'm going to hit something. And you find actually that anger can do dishes. Anger can practice meditation.

[38:56]

Anger can cook. Anger is actually very competent. Anger is actually very creative. And it's extremely energetic. And it's very powerful. And the thing about it, though, is you can't... You know, the other part of you that didn't want it around is the part that doesn't know how to handle it, doesn't know how to control it, and would like to have everything just the way it would like. And it would like to be in control. And anger is more than that. Anger is bigger than that. And you don't quite know what's going to happen. You know, people used to come up to me like they were walking around a building. Even though they were walking right towards me, they were peeking to see what kind of mood I was in. I think... Well, anyway, we won't get into that. But anyway, so part of our practice, then, is sometimes to step aside, you know, and then let anger do these things.

[39:59]

Let anger do the dishes and do the cooking and practice meditation. So there's somebody who's working in a very careful kind of way. And it's all going to be kind of nice. And I'm going to be a nice person. And anger will show up. And the anger and this nice person have to kind of, you know, come to terms with one another. And you come to terms with one another by inviting anger to do something with you, like cook. And you invite anger to come and do something with you, like cook, rather than saying, No, anger, I'm not going to have anything to do with you until finally anger takes it upon itself to do something that, you know, you wouldn't do in your wildest dreams. And that comes from... Because you never would include anger and let anger help you do the dishes or anything, right? Or help you sit in meditation. You never get out of the way for it. You never get together with it, then. And the lazy mind is, you know, is like the mind where you were trying so hard. Well, maybe you need to relax a little more.

[41:01]

And so invite lazy mind to do it with you. I had to do both. People in the kitchen, I worked with in the kitchen, you know, they never worked as fast as I did or as well as I did. They couldn't do as much as I could do, you know. I couldn't stand being around them, right? And finally I decided that, you know, and I spent months, you know, trying to get them to do it the way I did it because I was in charge and I knew what Zen was. And also it's kind of a new boss. You know how it is with new bosses. They think they're going to get everybody to do it their way. And finally there was a kitchen rebellion. They said, look, you know, we have bodies and minds and arms and legs. We have minds. You know, we can taste things. You don't have to decide everything. You know, we don't have to do everything your way. Would you please, you know, let us do some things, you know, our way, the way that we would do it? And I said, but, [...] you know, and then, you know, the authorities here

[42:03]

kind of got on their side. And I got a little ultimatum, like, you can go on being the cook if you're willing to work with these people. That's another way, you know, we learn by working with other people. I was too intense. I was too angry. I needed to be more slovenly, more lazy, you know, a little more relaxed, you know, and, and bring that into, you know, my mind, into my being, include that in my life. And I had, you know, that was really kind of embarrassing. That was really humiliating, you know, to have all those people come and tell me, this is who you are, you know. And it was also kind of funny and a couple of places a little ironic because one woman said, and you treat us just like the bread dough. And, and, you know, my relationship with bread dough is kind of like this love, you know,

[43:03]

just needing this sensuous object and then making love with the bread dough, you know. And this woman sort of used it in a different way and then she kind of stopped and she said, actually, you treat the bread dough pretty nice. She said, you, you treat us just like you were another, we were another implement in your hand, another tool in your hand, you know. But we have these whole bodies and minds, you know. And that's the way our, our anger is and our laziness and our greed. It's this other being that wants to express itself in us. But because we don't let it, it comes up in funny ways, other places, askew. The way is we don't invite it in, we don't include it. We, we disdain one thing and we're careful with another. So I sat out there in the sunshine one morning and there was a woman here who was, you know,

[44:05]

who had cancer and was dying, Judy Dixon. And I'd known Judy for several years and I talked with her about this and she said, she finally said, Ed, I have faith in you. I remember sitting out there in the sun. It was so nice to have somebody say that to me, somebody like her. Anyway, I have faith in you to do this kind of, make this kind of effort and to collect yourself in this way and to invite the various parts of your being to participate in the things you do. And this is how we, you know, can live. Zen doesn't say we should get rid of our passion, but somehow we need to include our passion and to live with passion. But it's not on a particular, we don't wait for a particular object. We have to find out how to have passion

[45:07]

in simple activities, in our sitting and walking and having a cup of tea and cooking and cleaning cabins, raking the ground. And we don't need to be so quick to, as I've been saying, to, you know, isolate some part of ourself as though it was so bad, when if we invite it in and include it and we learn how to include it, it can teach us something very valuable that we've been missing. In this way often the jewel, the black dragon jewel, is in what we've been rejecting. I was going to give you a Rumi poem

[47:07]

somewhere around the end here. A Rumi is a Sufi poet. And this poem for me had some quality of bringing these, as you'll see, opposites together. So it had some feeling of what I've been talking about. They're lovers again. Sugar dissolving in milk. Day and night, no difference. The sun and the moon melt together and amalgam. This is the season when the dead branch and the green branch are the same branch. The cynic bites his fingers because he can't understand. Omar and Ali on the same throne, two kings in one belt.

[48:10]

Nightmares fill with light like a holiday. People and angels speak the same language. The elusive ones finally meet. The essence and the evolving forms run to meet each other like children to their father and mother. Good and evil, dead and alive, all blossom naturally from one stem. You already know this. I'll stop. Everywhere you look, it's one vision. Your body is a candle touched with fire. Thank you very much. Please remember this is a quiet area.

[49:15]

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