Good evening. Thank you for coming. I feel rather, in a certain sense, honored to be speaking tonight. We have both a Zen and cooking workshop this week and a meditation and the Torah workshop this week. I feel like kind of an honored speaker. And then all of you came. Thank you. And then on the other hand, you know, I feel,

[01:01]

oh, not exactly like a, what are those things called? You know, like a fake? Yeah, a charlatan. Not exactly like a charlatan, but, you know, sitting in my cabin before the lecture tonight, I'd much rather read Rumi poetry than, you know, Buddhist books. So I have the clothes for the Buddhist priest, but somebody the other day asked me if I'd ever read the Avan-Tam Sakka Sutra. I don't think so. When I have a chance, I read Rumi or Kabir or odds and ends of things, but not very much Buddhism. Once in a while, if pressed, you know, I'm going to be giving a Dharma talk, I'd better read some Dogen or something. A week ago, when I gave a Dharma talk, I found a wonderful saying I liked, you know, a Dharma saying.

[02:05]

So I mentioned this Buddhist, you know, Zen teaching from a thousand years ago. I'll tell you just the beginning tonight, just so you can kind of get a flavor for if I was doing a Buddhist talk, what it might be like. And then I can go off on my, you know, idiosyncratic other direction talk for tonight. This very mind, heart of hearts, is Buddha. The most wonderful, awesome spiritual being in the whole universe. That's the beginning of the saying. That's classic Zen. This very mind, this mind, you yourself, heart of hearts, this place, this time, this is Buddha, the most awesome spiritual being in the universe. And then you don't need to hear any more. You got that? So tonight it's more like my talk is rather than in that direction, it's you are a Buddha and you are an ordinary person. And, you know, to be a Buddha doesn't mean you have to get rid of the ordinary person.

[03:12]

You're an ordinary person and a Buddha. So I want to share with you a little bit about my life, and, you know, we'll get to the Buddhism part. And I'm assuming that my life, each of our lives, is something about Buddhism. You know, we say, when you let the truth of the moment, when you let your heart go out, you let the truth of the moment come home to your heart, that's Dharma. You know, it doesn't have to be something out of a sutra, right? It's, you know, what's in our heart finally. And practice has something to do with, Zen practice has something to do with clarifying your heart, right? Suzuki Rishi called it to purify your love, because our love gets confused, you know, and selfish and mixed up.

[04:12]

And when we sit and experience and sit with our pain and our difficulty and our thinking and our feelings, and we sit with all that, we become larger hearted, and our love extends more widely. I'm now 56, and I must say that the years since I was 50 have been some of the most difficult of my life. I thought being a student here was difficult. When I was in my 20s, you know, the Zenda was down there, you know, the student area before it burned down, and I couldn't sit still. I'd shake and move, and in those days, if you shook and moved too much, they'd come and hit you. Stop that. And so then if I stopped that,

[05:15]

I'd start to relax, and then I'd start to fall asleep. So when you fall asleep, they'd come and hit you. Wake up. So in order to wake up, I'd sit there. Okay, I'll wake up. I'm awake, all right. And then, because I was moving, they'd hit me. So I thought this practice was a challenge. Living here was a challenge. One day, in the middle of a session, right before dinner, I gave up. You know, I just put my knees up and I put my head down, and Covincino was here, and there's a little altar there at one end of the room. The rest of the tans were on the floor, and within less than a minute, Covincino was right by my seat, and he said, Let's go outside. And as soon as I got outside the door, the tears started streaming down my face, and Covincino just took me by the hand and led me back to my cabin. And the tears were just pouring down my face,

[06:17]

and then he put me down on my bed, and he just kind of started stroking me, and I started sobbing convulsively, and my arms were shaking, you know, just flapping, and my legs were shaking, and this went on for like 15 or 20 minutes. I thought that was pretty intense. And then my roommate, or my half-roommate, the person who lived in the next room to me, but came through my room to the bathroom, he said, Oh, I've been studying Rolfing. I can help you. I can massage you, you know, and you'll be able to release more of this. So he started jabbing his thumbs and various things between my ribs, and sure enough, I cried even more. So that was a very auspicious evening, it turned out.

[07:25]

You know, the rest of the community got in cars and things, and because it was one of those nights in September when you could go up to the ridge, and the sun was setting in the west, and the moon was rising. The full moon was rising in the east, and both the full moon and the sun, you know, were in the sky at the same time. So I missed that. I was just in bed, and I went to sleep kind of a little early that night, and then the next day I went back for more. I must say it was a lot easier to sit after that. Sigh... But somehow now, so... And then it sort of felt like I was making progress, you know. Anyway, I don't know how much progress there is to be made, but...

[08:31]

You know, it seemed like I was getting my life together, growing up. And then, you know, after I hit 50 at some point, it all started falling apart again, and, you know, I started crying, you know, for no reason. You know, I could just be, you know, anything. Turn on the water faucet and just start crying. And having temper tantrums, you know. I mean, you know, I would put something down, and maybe it would, you know, like a piece of paper, and it would, like, somehow miss the counter and go onto the floor. And I'd just start screaming, raging about nothing, you know. And I thought Zen practice had helped me, you know, grow up. And it turned out that I was, you know, more emotionally unstable than ever.

[09:36]

Interestingly enough, about a year ago, I met a woman, and she told me, she said, Oh, my husband, you know, he cries for no reason. He has fits of anger and temper. Huh, this is sounding familiar. So I said, I'll bet he's in his mid-fifties. And she said, Turns out, yes, he is. And some of many of you know, but my mother died two weeks after my third birthday of cancer. I said, I'll bet something traumatic happened to him when he was a little boy. Like one of his parents died. She said, his father died when he was two. Anyway, this is to say, we all have our own story.

[10:46]

You know, and we all have our own pain. We all have the tragedy of our life. Even if we had, as some people swear, a happy childhood. A while back, my daughter was doing therapy, and she came, she saw me one day, and she said, My therapist says that you and my mom practice benign neglect. So even benign neglect, I mean, what can you do? So I was sitting around after I visited the Zen group in Monterey one night.

[11:53]

Some of us went out to dinner. I don't know if this is true of all Zen students, or true of everybody in the world, but here we were at dinner, and the woman whose husband is in so much pain, someone asked her, How's your husband? And she was talking. And then another woman there at the table said, It's okay, don't worry about it. You know, one day it will just clear up. And the woman kind of turned to her and said, Well, what do you know about depression? And it turned out she'd been born three months premature, been in an incubator, almost died several times. They didn't know if she would live. As a young woman, she committed herself to Agnew State Hospital. She had 18 shock treatments, which are, it turns out, very good for something or another.

[12:58]

I forget. I have a friend who runs the San Francisco hotline for teenagers, Crisis Suicidal Hotline for Teenagers, and so he was telling me what shock treatments are good for. Now I can't remember, but there's something they're incredibly good for. Maybe this woman had that. But she had 18 shock treatments, and one night, about midnight, she just said, Huh, it's time to leave. I'm out of here. And she, in effect, this just came to her. It just came to her. I'm out of here. I'm ready to leave this place. I'm going to get it together. I'm going to do what I need to do, and I'm getting out. I'll do it. She took charge, and she figured out, How do you talk to these doctors? How do you connect with people? What do you say? What do you do? How do I get out? She did it. She was out. Then she became a Zen student. I joke with people sometimes.

[14:04]

Oh, I was at the Zen Center for 20 years. I was committed. I was an institutionalized person. It was so much like the orphanage. I fit right in. I spent four years in an orphanage, so the Zen Center was perfect. I was right at home here, with all the rest of you orphans. We're all, you know, in some way orphans. We think, Oh, I have, you know, family and friends and parents. Oh, really? So do you or don't you? You know, is it an ordinary person, or is it this very mind that's Buddha? Then we just, and then, you know, so here's a woman who's three months premature, in and out of the hospital. Another woman, the next woman says,

[15:06]

Oh, well, my mother always told me, you were never wanted. You know, your husband was a week late getting his vasectomy. Somebody's mother wasn't very happy. And then another woman said, Oh, oh, well, after I was born, you know, my mother had slipped a disc and she went right into the hospital for the next six weeks, the first six weeks of my life. And then the last woman at the table said, I'm not talking about it. It was that bad. It was worse. It was so incredibly painful. I'm not going to talk about it.

[16:09]

Usually when we talk about the first noble truth in Buddhism, it's something very abstract. Life is suffering. Things don't work. They don't work the way you want them to. You're with people who are unhappy. You're with things you don't like. You can't have things you want. But, you know, the truth of this is, life is very painful. And actually when we got into this world here, you know, we all got, we all got wounded pretty young. It's part of incarnating in this plane, in this universe, in this human world. It's part of being born human is to get hurt, is to be wounded, is to have pain. And it's part of, you know, then how we orient ourselves in our life. It gives us a path.

[17:20]

I was telling some of you at the cooking workshop today, why do you suppose I started cooking? So I could be the mother I never had. I'm going to offer food. I'm going to feed people. And at the same time, you know, I'm becoming the mother I never had, and at the same time, where is she? And my father, I don't think ever got over my mother dying. I think from then on, you know, he was angry and resentful, you know, towards God, towards the universe. What kind of a world is it where you could fall in love so deeply with somebody, and they die, you know, at the age of 41? Is that fair?

[18:23]

It's not fair. It's not fair. It's not right. It's not just. What kind of a God would do that? And then there's way worse things, you know, that happen in this world. Some of you, you know, probably have families where way worse things happen. People are murdered and beaten and abused. So we all, you know, aim, then, you know, are oriented in our life, and then some of that orientation is towards, you know, never ever again having that pain. That's the orientation of, you know, our life, and that means closing your heart,

[19:25]

never forgiving, protecting yourself, distancing yourself, having the right kind of space around yourself, not necessarily getting too intimate. You can get this close and no closer. So at some point, though, some of us are interested in how do we actually love? How do we actually open our heart? How do we actually let ourselves, you know, just experience life moment after moment to experience what's there? Rather than, I'm not sure I'm willing to experience this because it, you know, somewhere in this experience, if I'm not careful, will be the pain I said I would never have ever again. So I love the line like in Rilke, you know, when he says, for instance,

[20:27]

round apple, smooth banana, melon, gooseberry, peach, how all this affluence speaks death and life in the mouth. I think, oh, it's such a wonderful, sweet, delicious raspberry. Yes, and it's death. And it's pain and it's suffering and it's disappointment and it's hurt and it's resentment and it's joy and love and blessedness and bounty and delight. It's all there every moment. So how will you have a moment where you just have one and not the other? You close off is how you, and then you try to do it. We keep trying to have experience just one side and not the other side. We keep trying to do that. And then we wonder whether we're Zen students or not. We wonder, why can't I do that? Look around at America, you know,

[21:30]

and people in America, oh, they all seem to be able to do that. They're just being happy all the time. It's television, it's fast food. We're just happy. We don't have pain and suffering in our lives, do we now? How are you? Fine, thank you. How are you? Yes, and how's the kids? Great, thank you. Yeah, they're going off to college now. Oh, wonderful, good. And how are your kids? Oh, good, fine, thank you. So when is there a chance, you know, will you have, you know, there's a line in Robert Bly's poems, you know, will you have sorrow at last? That's, you know, will you sit still in the middle of your life, feeling what's there in your life finally at last? Will you sit there?

[22:30]

Will you do that? What is sorrow for? It is a storehouse of barley, corn, wheat, and tears. One steps to the door on a round stone, and the storehouse feeds all the birds of sorrow. And I say to myself, will you have sorrow at last? Oh, go ahead, be stoic. In the autumn, be tranquil, be calm. Or in the valley of sorrow, spread your wings. This is, you know, our life. Do we try to avoid the sorrow endlessly, or in the midst of our true life, we expand? And there's no expanding without

[23:32]

actually having the pain of our life. Because how do you, otherwise how do you expand? Oh, can't go there. Oops. How will you ever love if you, you know, if you love, you can be hurt. I was in town on Saturday, and I met a woman, and just for about ten seconds, you know, I kind of glanced back, and then there was love. There was intense love, you know, in our eyes meeting. It was like magic. We don't look at people like that, right? Gotta be careful. Walk around, I don't think so. Careful. This is Zen Center, this is Tassajara.

[24:33]

I got out one day, you know, Saturday. I was in town. It was off campus. Ten seconds, fifteen seconds. A few minutes later, we looked again, and there it was again. This spark, this intensity, this connection, this warmth, this heart-to-heart meeting. I started several times the rest of the day, and neither of us dared go there. Because it's love, and it's beautiful, and it's amazing, and it is scary. It's scary for a lot of reasons, you know. It's scary because you can be hurt. It's scary because you could hurt. You could be hurt. It's scary because it's so deep. And then it's scary because, like,

[25:36]

are we going to have to do something about this? Or can we just let it be what it is, and not have to act on it? You know, plenty of people, that happens, and then the next thing you know, you're married and three kids. And then it's sort of like, well, there was just a, wait a minute. How did that happen? A friend of mine treats people with hands-on healing, so he sometimes says to people after the treatment, you don't have to marry the first one. But anyway, this is interesting. All right, I want to shift this a little bit because I want to get to a little bit of Buddhism. But I'm going to get there in a little roundabout way, okay?

[26:38]

Bear with me. Several years ago, my partner Patricia was in Cassandra Light's doll-making class. Many of you are probably familiar with it. It's up in Berkeley. You go to this class over a period of nine or ten months. I think it's ten months, but you have a month off, so there's nine months to make basically a life-size figure. You start with the feet. You make the feet out of porcelain, so it's like a very smooth, you know, white clay. You make the feet and hands and face out of porcelain. Eventually, you construct a body with, you know, a skeleton with at least a spine, and then you put in objects for the chakras. There's cotton batting, cotton muslin for the skin. They go to Goodwill and other places

[27:43]

and get fabric and clothes. You end up with a life-size figure. While you're doing all this, you meet for three or four hours a week, and while you're doing this, you know, people in the classes, which used to be all women, but now men, I think there's some for men now. But it used to be all women, and while you're doing it, then you do certain kinds of process work. Write a letter to your father telling him all the things you never dared to tell him. Don't have to send it. The things that you wished for and never received. The things that you received and never wished for. You know, write down your strengths and your weaknesses. Write down your aspirations and your wishes, your intentions. And so you get to know the people you're working with

[28:49]

over a period of nine or ten months. And at the end of this, there's a show somewhere. It's usually been in Berkeley, sometimes in San Francisco. And there'll be the doll, life-size doll. There's one, by the way, you know, at Zen Center, Suzuki Roshi, was in the dining room at Zen Center for many months or years. Maybe it's still there, I don't know. Cassandra did one of Suzuki Roshi. So there'll be a figure, and it's often a little scene. Sometimes it's someone's, you know, father who was a drunk and abusive. And creating this life-size figure, and over a period of months, and doing all this work, someone can come to some sense of forgiveness. I had an experience recently.

[29:49]

I was doing, I'm doing a kind of, I don't even know what to call it, you know. It's a kind of body-based therapy, but you don't get touched. So, a person says, you know, what are you feeling? So, oh, I have a, you know, a pain, tension in the top of my neck, at the base of the skull. And so then he'll tell a little story about it, and you just repeat the story. This is the terror I felt as a little boy being left at the orphanage. So he says that, and I just repeat it, you know. He says a couple words, and I repeat it. And then he'll say, and what are you feeling now? Oh, I have an aching in my stomach. So it just goes on. And then at some point he says, I'm willing to have my body let go of this. And I repeat that, and then we go on. It's interesting. I'm finding it quite useful.

[30:50]

We don't do that in Zen, you know. We don't have stories. Some Zen teachers don't want to hear your story, you know, because it's not Zen, it's therapy. So it depends on your teacher. But the last time I had a session, and the other thing that he does sometimes, I said, oh, well, I have an ache around my heart. And so what he does sometimes, instead of telling the story, he'll say, well, let's ask it what it has to say. Why don't you ask what it has to say? And it doesn't have to have anything to say. That's okay, but just to see if it does. So I asked my aching heart, what does it have to say? And it said, there was never a time I didn't love you. Is that me saying that? Is that my father who dumped me at the orphanage?

[31:53]

Is that my mother who died? Is that God, is that Buddha? There was never a time I haven't loved you, I didn't love you. This is related, I bring it up because it's related to this story. At this doll show, so there'll be a figure and then there's often a little story about this figure. So one of the shows, there was a really sweet, wonderful looking older woman. Sitting there in her rocking chair. And the story was that the whole time, month after month, the woman had been working on this figure. She hadn't known who it was. She made the feet, the hands, the face. And finally when it was all done with the body, the clothing, one of the other women in the workshop said, that looks like the grandmother. Your grandmother that you've been talking about all this time.

[32:58]

And it turned out this woman, the story was that when this woman was eight, she'd started to wonder where her grandmother was. All the other kids at school seemed to have a grandmother. And so she asked her parents, where's my grandmother? And her parents said to her, the Nazi bastards killed her. And she never asked about her grandmother again. And she always missed her grandmother and longed for her grandmother and wished that she had known her grandmother. So then there it was, this doll. And another woman in the course said, that looks like the grandmother that you've always wanted and that you never had a chance to meet. And she thought, it's my grandmother. And then,

[34:02]

seeing the doll, she realized, my grandmother's been in me all along. So this, for me, reminds me of Suzuki Roshi's teaching, which is, although you're an ordinary person, you're also Buddha. Although you're small-minded, you're also big-mind. Big-mind is like the grandmother who's been with you all along and you've never met her. That you didn't quite notice was there all along. Big-mind doesn't come and doesn't go, doesn't appear and disappear. Big-mind doesn't increase or decrease. Big-mind is always there, always on your side. And we say when small-mind becomes calm,

[35:05]

big-mind resumes its true activity. And for tonight, I want to suggest some kind of simple way about this. Maybe I'm slow, you know. Here I am, finally, in my mid-fifties. And in various ways, I think this has happened sooner, but it's sort of happening again now, which is, I recently thought, why don't I be a grown-up? You know, I've spent so much of my life waiting for somebody to love me, mom and dad to finally show up. You know, why don't you take an interest in me? And so on, and so, I thought recently, I should be the parent I never had. I should be the parent that I always keep looking for.

[36:09]

I should be the parent that I keep resenting other people for not being. I should be this person. So this is very similar to, you know, the story that's told of, I think it's in Michael Wenger's little book, Thirty-Three Fingers, about Soan Roshi and some, a Zen student came and said, you know, I'm so discouraged, what should I do? And he said, encourage others. It's exactly right, you know. So, that brings me to the first of my writings up the sleeve. This is my daughter's favorite prayer. You know, it's the famous prayer of St. Francis. I thought for tonight, you know, it could be a Zen prayer, it could be a Jewish prayer,

[37:10]

Christian prayer. It's a prayer about being the parent you never had, manifesting, going ahead and manifest big mind, you know, rather than getting caught in small mind. Lord, make me an instrument of your peace, where there is hatred, let me sow love, where there is injury, pardon, where there is doubt, faith, where there is despair, hope, and where there is sadness, joy. Grant that I might not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, it is in forgiving that we are forgiven,

[38:13]

and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen. So the amazing thing, you know, is that although we're all, you know, we've all been hurt and wounded, you know, we're also amazing people.

[39:16]

We've endured and we have this capacity to love, to forgive, you know, to reach out to one another, to connect. We have a capacity to sit here in silence and absorb and be with our own being deeply. So one of the Rumi poems that I was reading before lecture to end with, it takes the courage of inner majesty to sit inside this room. It takes the courage of inner majesty to sit inside this room where there's no celebrating good fortune, where talks of luck are embarrassing. However your robe of patches fits is okay.

[40:22]

Just right. If you are God's light, keep moving east to west as you have been. Don't pretend something, don't pretend something other than the truth. I'm fine. I'm a terrific sense student. Oh, yes. Well, I used to be. Excuse me. I'm sorry. Don't pretend something other than the truth. Oh, go ahead. I don't mind. I enjoy it. Now, my favorite line. Should I tell you that? Measuring devices, measuring devices won't work in this room where love dervishes meet. The measuring devices won't work in this room

[41:25]

where the love dervishes meet. There's no way to calculate. You know how we're doing. The courage of inner majesty to just sit and be with your life inside this room. Measuring devices won't work in this room where the love dervishes meet. No tradition grows here and no soup simmers. We sit in the pure absence of no expectation. That sounds like Zen. But anyway, it's just a poem by Rumi. But Zen is everywhere. You can't help it. There's no escaping it. Sigh. So the ordinary person that we are, you know, we measure.

[43:02]

How am I doing? I'm improving. I'm not improving. I'm a better person. I'm not such a good person. And to realize our deep abiding doesn't come, doesn't go grandmother mind, big mind, you know, is to set aside the measuring devices and, you know, hear the crickets. Feel the inside of your hand. Sense your breath flowing in and out. Know your heart is beating warmly. And it's not about accomplishment or attainment or lack of accomplishment, lack of attainment, but entering this deep, warm flow of our life going on.

[44:07]

So thank you again for being here tonight and sharing this time with me. I appreciate your presence your good heartedness, your love. Thank you.

[44:21]

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