How's that? Good morning. Good morning. It's awfully nice to be here, isn't it? I think so. It's a nice, sweet feeling to be in a room of good-hearted people sitting quietly, focused, sincere, still. Pretty nice. So, do we really need to talk about anything? You know, I do worry that once I get up here,

[01:13]

I'll have forgotten everything that I might ever have had to say, but so far it hasn't happened. And I do find that, excuse me for not getting right into my talk, but I do find that it's easier to talk if I don't have the idea that I'm going to tell you something that you've never heard before. I think of talks more like, you know, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I mean, you've had oatmeal before. You've had eggs. You know, you've had toast. You've had potatoes and spinach. But it's still nice to eat, isn't it? So, I'm going to just go ahead and serve up some words. And just like when you eat something,

[02:14]

you'll take it in and then some of it might end up being nourishing and some of it you might end up discarding. Some of it might just turn into compost. So, that part's up to you, you know. And you don't even have to think about it. It'll take care of itself. So, this week I've been thinking about, well, I've been somehow particularly interested in the lecture of Suzuki Roshi's, which he called something like pure silk, sharp iron, or white silk, sharp iron. And he talks about the practice, you know, Zen practice and training. And he says, you know, that we practice in order to get rid of ego.

[03:15]

So, I want to talk about this today. I'm not a big fan of the word ego, but I'm going to give you, you know, how I think about it. To introduce this talk, he says that, you know, we practice meditation to experience something through the body, to experience something with your body, not through my words or not because of some teaching you've heard, but to experience the teaching or the truth with your body, to have some experience with your body. This is very similar, you know, this is, you know, Suzuki Roshi wasn't any better at this than I am. That's nothing new, you know. But somehow we need to hear it again and again. This is interesting. Every so often, I am interested in the Zen teacher, Nyogen Senzaki.

[04:15]

Very unusual man. He came to this country, you know, about 1906 or something, you know, and lived in Hayward for a while. They had a farm that they couldn't succeed very well at. None of them were farmers, you know. They were all artists and they didn't know how to farm and it was kind of a poor piece of land anyway. So it fell through. And then eventually he moved to San Francisco and he, you know, he washed dishes and different things. And when he earned enough money, he'd run a hall and give a talk on Zen. And eventually he taught Zen in Los Angeles. And, of course, he was interred during the Second World War. So Kean, the Zen teacher in New York, was also interred during the Second World War. And then he moved back to Los Angeles

[05:23]

after the war. And one of his students was Paul Rapps, who, you know, wrote some of the early books about Zen, including Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, which is how I got interested in Zen. Probably some of you, at least, have heard the story. I was going to college and, you see, I was already thinking about this because I wrote a paper about alienation and anxiety for my social psychology class. Got an A on the paper. And I was as alienated and anxious as ever. And I thought, you know, couldn't I do something that actually had an impact on my life? Couldn't I actually do something? And it's that kind of feeling of with my body. Couldn't I actually do something with my body that would have an influence on my life, that would shift my life in another direction, so that I wouldn't be as alienated and anxious?

[06:27]

And alienated has that sense of being apart from yourself. Sometimes you experience it more as being alienated from the culture, but it's also alienated from yourself. You know, it's separate from yourself. Not willing to be yourself or not understanding how to be yourself. So we have this question, you know, which is which? You know, which is ego? And so Suzuki Roshi said, well, we practice to express our true nature. Our true nature. So how do we get at that? Or how do we know whether who we are now or the way we do things is expressing our true nature? Or that's just our usual alienated and anxious way of going about things? And is being alienated and anxious just an expression of our true nature? This is a little bit to sort out here,

[07:28]

you know, sift through. Because Buddhism says all of these, you know, from time to time. And coincidentally about that time, my brother, who has since then became a first of all an Episcopal priest and now is a Catholic. At that time, my brother was attending the Zen Center in San Francisco. You know, this is 1964. And he sent me a letter. And he used to send me letters with, he'd hand write out the stories. This is before Xerox machines. He'd hand write out the stories in Zen Flesh Zen Bones. And one of them was about a young man who writes to his mom and says he's doing well in school and getting good grades and helping the other kids study and having a great time. And his mom writes to him and says, son, I didn't raise you to be a walking dictionary.

[08:29]

Why don't you go to the mountains and attain true realization? And I thought, that's for me. So the end of the school year came and I dropped out and it said, reasons for living. And, you know, I put, to go to the mountains and attain true realization. And I got as far as the mountains, you know. Two years later I was at Tassara. And I learned to make bread and then the Zen Center showed up there too. I was already a Zen student but then Zen Center bought Tassara so it worked out. Spent a lot of years in the mountains. And I did a lot of things with my body, you see, to experience something with your body. And what Nyokin Senzaki said finally,

[09:30]

he did actually a little scroll before he died. And he said, fellow students or bodhisattvas, he never referred to himself, you know, as though he was a teacher. Always as a fellow student. Fellow students of the Dharma. Please, you know, trust your own head. Don't put any false heads above your head. Keep your feet warm and your head cool. Minute after minute, watch your steps closely. These are my last words for you. And again, so it's very simple, you know. It's very easy for thoughts and for us to primarily reside in our heads, in our thinking, in our emotions, and not really to inhabit the rest of our body. So this is very powerful and it's very revolutionary to actually settle into your body

[10:34]

to over and over again extend your consciousness, re-inhabit your body, whether it's following the breath in the abdomen or having your awareness in your feet, especially when you're walking or standing. This is very unusual. So Suzuki Roshi said, you know, you may think that if you have, if you can do this practice, it's still, if you can sit perfectly and attain some particular state of mind, this isn't perfect practice. And what he said was, once you realize or have a full experience of practice, then whatever you do, whether you're sitting or standing or speaking or working, you will express your mind to others.

[11:38]

And what you express is the mind of not sticking to anything. Recently, I saw a friend who'd spent some time in Dharamsala and she said that when the Dalai Lama walked in, she just started crying. And she thought, what is this about? And she looked around the room and almost everybody was crying. And she realized this is just, you know, seeing somebody who is so completely there and just a human being and just a good hearted person. And as he says, you know, my religion is kindness. And he didn't have to say anything. And people in the room were just struck by his presence. It's very powerful. So I want to talk some more about this

[12:44]

because it's also related to, you know, why would you practice? Why would we do anything? And what is a useful attitude or stance or posture? What is a practical attitude, stance or posture? And the suggestion here is what's practical is not to stick to anything. So usually, you know, we have some strategy or stance or posture of how to get through and how to, you know, life successfully. So we have, you know, and we have implicit in our way of going about our life is particular thoughts and feelings. And this is one of the things that strikes me because in a certain way, you know, there's a basic confusion about what freedom is or liberation. And I think, you know, I would characterize it as here in the West,

[13:44]

in America, our idea of freedom is to go on, to be able to go on thinking what you've always thought and to be able to go on feeling what you've always felt. And you're free to do that. And you wouldn't have to have anything happened that caused you to think anything differently or feel anything differently. Of course, sometimes this gets to be a little uncomfortable and you kind of wish, couldn't I think something else or feel something else? But for the most part, this is freedom and this is our way. You know, it's also called, you know, happiness is never having to really experience anything. Do you know that one? That's like comfort food. If you have comfort food, you don't have to experience anything. It's the same. It's what you're familiar with. It's what you always have known. You know, so it's comfortable. You can be comfortable. So let's just experience things

[14:46]

that we're comfortable experiencing. This is, you know, and then this would be, you know, happy. And, you know, you're free and you're free to do that. Anyway, for me, this also goes along with the basic concept or sensibility in the West that we seem to have that, you know, there's really no such thing as cultivating consciousness. This has been implicit, you know, in science and medicine, that disease, you know, how long has it been that, like, so like, oh, how you eat has nothing to do with it, does it? This is like just beginning to be recognized, you know, in terms of science or medicine. And nobody wants to, you know, nobody's going to tell me how to eat. You know, like, no, I should be able to eat however I want. And then if something goes wrong,

[15:47]

oh, that's just chance. And I'll get some medicine and they'll fix me up. Do you understand? This is our usual, this is our attitude towards things. I don't have to change what I'm doing. I can just go on behaving the way I behave. And if there's a problem, we'll fix it. And this is also that, you know, we don't recognize or honor or appreciate people who actually have cultivated consciousness as a culture. So for instance, Suzuki Roshi in his lecture says, good art, he says, it would be useful, you know, he's talking about the art of Japanese calligraphy, but extending to art, you know, and he says good art has very little, it is able to express

[16:48]

your true personality or your true character. And what that is, is your character when it's free of ego, or pretty free of ego. So does that sound like America? You know, here it's more like if your art doesn't have any ego, it's worthless. No, what sells is ego. You know, you do something dramatic, something unique, something individual, you know, and then that's marketable. Something that is free of that, it's like the difference between Van Gogh and Chinese landscapes. Nobody wants to buy Chinese landscapes, very few people, but something exciting, dramatic, flamboyant, that gets attention.

[17:48]

So we actually tend to honor ego in our culture, rather than honoring, you know, the developed consciousness. So putting your mind or your consciousness in your body, in your feet, is, Suzuki Roshi says, how you free yourself of ego. You let go of, and ego in this sense then is, you want to go on thinking what you've always thought, you want to go on feeling what you've always felt, you want to go on and just have experiences that you're comfortable with. You don't want to experience something uncomfortable. That's ego. So when you're willing to, you know, be uncomfortable, some people say, this posture is uncomfortable. It was for me for a lot of years, but I went ahead and did it anyway. And it's so comfortable now. Just sit here. Anyway,

[18:50]

you know, so Zen practice is an example of that. You know, you could do something that's uncomfortable, and you could have experiences that you would never, you wouldn't ordinarily sit still for. And you get to experience those things. And you get to have thoughts and feelings that you normally manage to avoid by your activity, by your speech, by your behavior. You can normally regulate and have experiences that you're comfortable with. Well, I want to shift this a little bit now. Recently, I was very fascinated. Many of you may have seen it. There was Dan Goldberg's new book is out. Dan Goldman's new book is out called Destructive Emotions. He's the one who wrote the book Emotional Intelligence. And how you could,

[19:53]

rather than trying to avoid feelings, you could have your feelings. And rather than being reactive, you could learn to respond. You could acknowledge your feelings. And then rather than being reactive, just doing something out of habit, you could, for instance, make a list of things you might do and then pick something to do. You'd have a more sort of measured response rather than a kind of reaction. You'd have a chance to reflect on what would be some appropriate behavior. And in his new book, it's pretty interesting because they've now been doing scientific studies. And there were two Tibetan-trained Buddhist monks in particular that I read about. They actually were both born in Europe, but they've been trained for nearly 30 years in Tibetan Buddhism and done solitary retreats oftentimes for three years at a time in various trainings.

[20:55]

And in Wisconsin, they have a laboratory where they can study the mind, the brain waves or patterns. So they put this person, one of them who's described, they had him in what's called a functional MRI, and they can see his brain pattern. And then on cue, he would go into a particular meditation. And he did for them six different meditations on cue. And on cue, his brain wave would change. They said for most people, there's no difference between their brain waves except basically between awake and asleep. But this person, when they had him in the functional MRI, and they would say, would you do the meditation on compassion? And then he would do it for, and they'd sort of countdown, and he would click it on. He would just turn on the meditation on compassion.

[21:59]

And 90 seconds later, they'd say, okay, and it would go off. And he did a meditation on compassion, fearlessness, mental one-pointedness, vast space, and then a couple other ones. Maybe there was gratitude or generosity. I can't remember. Two more. Visualization was one of them. Visualizing the Buddha or a Bodhisattva, this kind of thing. Visualization was the fifth, I'm not remembering the sixth. So this kind of thing, you see, is kind of unheard of because the basic idea in Western culture has been there's screwy things that can happen with the mind. You can go off, but then there's just kind of a baseline, and that's where you're at, and that's health. And you're fine. And that's the way the mind is. So there hasn't been the sort of acknowledgement that you could actually cultivate or train the mind, and your mind could be kind of above that

[23:01]

sort of baseline that we call normal or healthy, so to speak, above, or developed in some way, you see. So this is what I'm talking about today. So on one hand, you could say this is developed, but on the other hand, this is getting rid of ego or polishing. The metaphor in Suzuki Rishi's lecture is you wash the silk over and over again and it becomes pure white. You temper the iron while it's hot. You hit the iron while it's hot, and it becomes very sharp, and you have to hit it while it's hot. So when he says in this way, you know, you can train yourself so that you're very soft, very clean, flexible like silk, and you're very sharp. Yeah. So there's a kind of, you know,

[24:01]

so we have various attitudes or thoughts about this. You know, that anyway, like who are these people who might do that, and are they better than me, and should I try to compete with them? And, you know, we have various ideas about this. So there's kind of two ideas in Buddhism. One idea is, you know, that in terms of these kind of things that I'm talking about, one is that you could practice in order to clean away ego or that's also known as, you know, clearing away attitudes that are self-limiting attitudes, self-limiting postures, self-limiting ways of going about your life.

[25:02]

Do you understand? Any particular virtue that you have can also be a kind of, you know, any particular virtue can also be like a flaw. Any particular flaw can be like a virtue, right? Sometimes people are, for instance, extremely, you know, they have a lot of common sense, very practical, they can get things done, and when you get things done and you're very practical like that, and then you have a place for everything and it's all very orderly and it's neat, and you're handling life, and then how are your relationships? Maybe there could be a little more sort of flow or friendliness. It wouldn't all have to be so practical, you know, and get things done. And maybe it could just be a little more friendly and warm-hearted. But, you know, it's very practical, you're getting things done. And then, of course, there's people who are warm-hearted and friendly and they can't get anything done.

[26:03]

And if you have, and you know, what we're going by again is we're using our gauges or what covers, what is said to cover our true personality or true character or true nature. On one hand it's ego, but on the other hand it's thoughts, it's feelings. Habitual thinking, habitual feelings. Something happens and it just triggers, you know, old feelings. Something happens and you go into your usual thought. Oh, that just goes to show I'm good at this stuff, you know. That just goes to show you can't trust the world. You know, this morning, it just, you know, I don't know, it happens to me all the time. I go into my thoughts and feelings. You know, I went to, I picked up something and then I knocked a bottle that was there, you know, and it falls over. And I was like, why did you do that? I was just getting something, okay? You don't have to do that. Just kind of stay there. Stop that. I didn't ask you to fall over, okay?

[27:13]

And I go right into my, you know, and isn't that the way the world is? It just gets in your way all the time, right? Anyway, that's just me. That's just my stuff, you know? But you probably have some of your own. You know, what kind of world it is? What kind of place you live in? What are people like? You know, and can you trust them? Do you not trust them? Can you be friendly to them? Can you not be friendly? Do you get to say what's going on for you or do you have to keep your mouth shut because you're worried about what they might think if you actually told them? See, we're all the time like living in the world of our thoughts and feelings. What we can say, what we can't say, how we can behave, how we don't behave, what they're gonna think, what they might, you know, how we could impress them, how they're gonna think well of us, how we're gonna, you know, be liked, how we'll be respected, how we'll be loved. Of course, the love can't be earned, but let's not go there. That's approval that can be earned, remember?

[28:18]

So, you know, you could be free of a lot of those things and you could let life in and experience who's there today and it wouldn't trigger your old emotions and it wouldn't send you into your usual thoughts of, oh, that just goes to show everything's getting in my way again, you know? It's all out to get me, it's all out to, I guess it's just more dharma teaching. It's another growth experience. You know, all this kind of stuff. But anyway, we can actually, this stuff, you know, they say eventually clears up. I don't know, I've been at this a long time. I am not like this monk that they put in the functional MRI. So I better get back to somebody who's actually, you know, talking about somebody who actually, you know, has gotten somewhere in Buddhism, Buddhist practice. So he would just switch on, you know, compassion, mental one-pointedness, 90 seconds on, you know, 90 seconds off,

[29:22]

and then the next one, whatever, you know. And they had him in this thing three or four hours and he'd just keep doing it. Unbelievable, you know? And one of the things they noticed about that that Dan Goldman found particularly striking was that when he was doing the compassion meditation, it showed that the left prefrontal lobe of the brain was especially active. And they know from other studies that when the left prefrontal part of the brain is active, person tends to be happy, cheerful, buoyant, friendly, you know, engage happily with people. When the right prefrontal is more happy, the person is worried, anxious, stressed. And if it continues for, you know, habitually over a period of time, the person is likely to have a clinical depression. So the Dalai Lama said, well, yeah, that's right. You know, when he was practicing meditation, the compassion meditation, obviously he was the first beneficiary.

[30:23]

Practicing compassion for others, for other beings. Then, you know, he's happy. He's buoyant, he's cheerful, he's feeling friendly. Sometimes I feel like, you know, what happened to our, you know, in Zen, we just do Zen, we just sit. And we don't seem to do much in the way of, you know, particularly like compassion meditation or meditation fearlessness or, you know, but maybe it's good for something. I don't think we do so well necessarily in the functional MRI, but, you know, who knows. Who knows? But then they also had this person, these two Tibetan trained monks, they took him to San Francisco. And, you know, Peter Ekman has this lab there where he's been studying facial expressions.

[31:26]

And he has found, you know, he's been doing this for 15, 20 years or more. And he's found that emotions and the facial expressions for emotions are universal, no matter the culture. So somebody, whether you're in New Guinea or Japan or Africa, you know, you can recognize somebody who's angry, particular facial expression. Somebody who's scared, you know, somebody who's happy, somebody who's disappointed, there's particular facial expressions. And he's now tested over 5,000 people. And generally speaking, the people who scored best are secret service agents. They're trained to notice what's going on with people. And if you're a student of this, he can train somebody, he can train people to notice very minute facial expressions. And part of the, it's not only minute facial expressions, but oftentimes they're very fast. It's very difficult for people to,

[32:29]

they can, for the most part, be impassive, but every so often they're, you know, something kind of comes through. And so people who've been trained will catch that little instant where the person was angry or intimidating. So they trained, they tested these two Tibetan monks and they scored higher than anybody ever had, than any of the 5,000 people. And they had no training at this. It's just because they feel empathetic. So they right away just empathize with the person that they see. And they scored a little differently on recognizing different emotions, but basically they both scored better than anybody taking that test. And finally, they took them over to Berkeley. If somebody in Berkeley studies the startle reflex and they make a loud noise, maybe even, you know, shooting a gun off in the room

[33:32]

or, you know, and anybody, when there's a loud noise like that, their face goes, there's a particular timeframe, you know, whatever it is, a quarter of a second later, you know, their face goes through a particular startle expression. So they had him doing this and he did the meditation on vast space. And his face did not change. They had never seen this before. They did not think it was possible. But I found all this very, you know, touching, very impressive that somebody could, and not because, and again, you know, they quoted the Dalai Lama, they said, you know, really, Buddhism is not about developing the capacity to perform these yogic feats. Like, oh, you know what? I can keep, you know, my facial expression doesn't change when I, you know, hear a loud noise.

[34:33]

I don't do that startle reflex like other people. But, you know, it did seem like, you know, what the Dalai Lama said is, you know, there's two that to be able to work with or to have some fluidity around intense emotions, you know, and to have resolved the intensity of those emotions and to clear up the habitual thinking, you know, that's what we're doing. That we don't get caught. It doesn't mean we don't have strong feelings. We don't get caught and reactive in our emotions. We don't get caught and act out our thinking. And Suzuki Roshi called this, you know,

[35:34]

not sticking to anything. Because usually what we stick to is some way, as I say, you know, to keep things comfortable. That's usually what we stick to. And we have various ways to do that. Various, one of us will have various ways. And of course, the interesting thing is then that we also notice the limitation, but we rather would not, we'd like to go on being me. So basic dilemma in practice, right? How can I go on me and then, but have everything work better? And, you know, the old country and Western song was, everybody wants to get to heaven, but nobody wants to die. So this is the basic challenge, you know, that we have. So what is it that's you or that you identify as you that also limits or stops or hinders you, you see? And is there some way to, you know,

[36:37]

as you know, wash the silk or sharpen the iron so that you're free of, or you let go of some of these aspects that you call you or think of as you, which we could call ego or which are your, you know, the habits that you're caught in and so that a kind of a deeper personality or your true nature can manifest. So this is one kind of idea. And then the other kind of idea is that actually, you know, you could cultivate your nature or your consciousness and develop yourself in various ways and become more compassionate or kind, more friendly or generous. And that it wouldn't just be to benefit others, but actually when you do that, you are a beneficiary too. Do you understand? So many things to me, you know, are,

[37:45]

I don't know, I just have to, I go on, you know, with what I do. Recently, amazingly enough, the New York Times called me up and said that they wanted to do an article about the Tussar Bread Book. I don't know if you saw it. It's the end of March, finally came out. And so I said, fine, you know, the Tussar Bread Book came out in 1970. But it's still around and the media needs stories. And I guess, especially if there's a war going on, you want it to have some kind of, you know, nostalgia, you know, good time, good feeling kind of pieces, like let's make some bread folks or something, I don't know. And I thought they did a pretty nice job. I talked with the woman for an hour or two and she wrote a pretty nice piece.

[38:50]

One of the things I mentioned to her, you see, is, and to me, it relates to what I've been talking about, was that, you know, when you make bread, this is something, you see, you do with your body, with your hands, you know. And then people say, well, what about a bread machine? I get really good bread that way. Well, you know, you don't. And the interesting thing is that when you knead the bread, you may get pretty good bread, you may get pretty good bread, but what you don't get is you don't get your hands massaged. Because when you knead the dough, the dough is massaging you. See, this is like, and this is like somehow like what happened to this idea, you know, the shakers, a hundred years ago had this idea that gift, that work is a gift to the person doing the work, especially when it's work with your body. You do something with your body like this, it's a gift to you, not to the people that, you know, you make the bread for,

[39:53]

but the doing of that with your body, with your being, with your hands, you know, is a gift to you and it's invigorating you and it's, you know, it comes from, whether you call it the divine or the beyond, or it comes, it's beyond and it's coming in. And then after you've made bread, your hands feel ecstatic, your body feels ecstatic. Well, you can get the bread, but you don't get that, you know, if, you know, when you do use the machine. This is, you know, it's sort of like, what happened? What happened in our culture? Let me see. That we would all get sort of entrained to, you know, for the most part, to like work at, you know, some kind of mental job and then have to buy all the necessities, including, of course, if you wanna have fun, go out to the movies, spend some money, drive someplace, rent a video, go to Disneyland, fly to Hawaii.

[40:56]

You wanna have a good time? Yeah, spend some money. We'll provide it for you. See, even pleasure, like we don't even have hardly the capacity to enjoy something. Isn't this amazing? This is the world we're living in. So this is, you know, to me, you know, and somebody, you know, I used to get, because originally the Tussar Bread Book had said, you can write Ed Brown, care of the publisher, you know, Shambhala, so I used to get hundreds of letters. And people literally would say things like, I feel like I've re-owned my life from corporate America. I can make bread. I'm not dependent. You know, I have power, you know, to do something in my life, to create something, to make something. Isn't that astounding? You know, and then it's not just, you know, cooking and there's cooking and then there's gardening

[41:57]

and there's sewing and, you know, there's so few of these things that we manage to do anymore. And then, and so much of that is like, it's a gift. It's your body, it's your being, and you, it's like Suzuki Roshi says about Zazen, we practice Zazen to experience something through our bodies. We can also do that with work, you know, and doing something with our hands, our being. Even just going for a walk, you know, rather than driving, you know. It's amazing. Ah. Ah. Finally, you know, of course,

[42:58]

as Suzuki Roshi said, and it's, again, fairly similar to what I've been mentioning, true freedom, as opposed to this other kind of freedom, you know, the freedom to go on thinking what you've always thought, to feel what you've always felt, to have comfortable experiences that you've had before and you don't have to really relate to because nothing new is happening. And then why is my life so boring? And then why would I, you know, go out to some movies that entertain me, you know, but are nice and safe and nothing's really happening and so forth. But he said real freedom is to not be limited by this troublesome Zen, formal Zen robe. You know, this awkward, you know, formal practice. To not feel limited by that. And he also then went on to say, you know, this is not any different than to not, you know, to wear this civilization

[44:01]

without being bothered by it, without ignoring it, without being limited by it, being free. Anyway, so as you know, this is not something easy. And I'm clearly today not giving you any answers, but it's kind of stirring the soup. And you can see what, if anything, you absorb from all of this. Anyway, I wish you well in this endeavor to, you know, realize yourself, your true nature and to express yourself fully. You know, your good heartedness, your kindness, your warmth, your compassion, your friendliness. This is what we're studying and what I think we're here to do in this life. So thank you very much for being here and your devotion to this.

[45:04]

Thank you. Blessings. Amen.

[45:10]

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