Thank you, Alan. Good morning. Yes, she's on the Queens of Pain team. I worry about her. So as Alan was saying, I lead the Wednesday night study group where we sit for 40 minutes starting at 7.20 and then have reading and discussion in the community room after the evening service. And several weeks ago, a woman who came asked me what were the community's beliefs And I said, well, we don't have any beliefs. If you think that we have beliefs, if you think that I'm telling you we have beliefs, I apologize for that.

[01:57]

And I was pretty happy with that answer. But as the evening went on, and as the days went on, I began to wonder whether it was a very good answer or not. And so I asked Sojin, that question a few days ago. Was that a good answer? His response over the period of the time we were together was, well, change is one of our, not necessarily beliefs, but core ideas, core ideas about Buddhism. And the Four Noble Truths, which you probably all know about suffering, suffering caused by desire. Suffering can be ended by managing desire. and the way we do that is through the Eightfold Path. And another sort of core understanding is the four or the three Dharma Seals, Nirvana, Samsara, and Impermanence.

[03:10]

Things that are not the same, not staying the same. And also interdependent co-origination. And I knew that today, and I guess tomorrow especially, is the official Earth Day. So I said, well, Earth and us, that sounds like interdependent co-origination to me. So I said, I'm going to talk about that. And I started reading some literature on it, and they talked about the 12 causal links, cause and effect links. And as I read more and more, my mind just sort of turned off. I couldn't really understand what they were talking about, which bothered me a lot. And sometimes, when I'm reading Buddhist literature, the intellectual discussions just don't work up here. very unhappy. But I think I do understand a little bit about what this means, this interdependent co-origination.

[04:19]

The words are hard for me to put out. One of the books that I was reading, the author, who was, I think, from Sri Lanka, writing in the 1930s, a series of radio lectures that were given over to BBC, talked about it as dependent origination. And Thich Nhat Hanh talks about interdependent co-origination. So maybe they mean the same thing. But I do think, as I'm an old systems guy, I've been in computer programs for a long time, and I used to be a systems analyst, and so I think I understand a little bit about what systems are. Systems are made up of entities, and entities, they change, and when they change, they cause a change in one of the other entities in the system. And then that causes, in turn, a change in other entities, which cause change in other entities, in other entities, in other entities. And finally, that change, although it's been transformed, comes around to the original entity and changes that original entity again.

[05:24]

And so you have this constant vibration, if you will, where everything is changing. And that's what's going on here in the unit where we live, in our universe. Our universe is, everything is connected, the Indra's net that some of you may have heard about, where each entity is like a diamond, a very precious diamond. And it's connected through every other diamond, through every other entity, and creating this vast net of communication. And one of these entities is changing and it vibrates the other entities and so we just have this tremendous vibration of change and interrelatedness. And so I was thinking now Earth Day is kind of like where we're we're celebrating the fact that we're part of the Earth, that we're created out of the Earth, and the Earth has made us, and at the same time, we're making the Earth.

[06:37]

Certainly, we can see that with global warming these days. They're becoming much more clear in most people's minds that us humans, because of our activity, have made significant changes in the weather. and the climate, and this is going to have really unknown effects, but they don't appear that they're going to be very good. They're changed. It looks like they're going to be a change for the worst, at least for most of us. Now, some people will probably have a pretty good time. I was learning about Siberia, for example. It's a very cold part of the world, but maybe it's going to get a little warmer, which they might like there. I don't know, but that's a little off the subject. Just thinking that, you know, that, that, um, one of the problems with, with change is that we, we can make a value out of it. We can say this is bad, but, um, you can't really do that. You can't really say it's bad.

[07:38]

You can't really say it's good. We know it's change and we know it's not going to work for us, but, um, okay. So cosmic change never comes to rest. Now to segue a little bit, because I wasn't able to really understand the 12 causes of change that were described in the literature, part of the reason was because I was spending my time reading another book called On Intelligence, which just came out in 1970, 19... 2005! It just came out in 2005, and for some reason I bought an audio version of it, and I've been listening to it as I've been commuting and walking. And I can tell if a book is good because I can listen to lots of books when I'm commuting, but when I'm walking, it's got to be really good to take me away from just walking.

[08:39]

I walk in Tilden, and that's a wonderful place to walk. So I was really intrigued by this book, and its premise is the man The author, Jeff Hawkins, and his co-author Sandra Blakeslee. Sandra Blakeslee is a science writer for the New York Times. And Jeff Hawkins, if any of you have PalmPilots or are familiar with PalmPilots or the TRIO phone system, then Jeff Hawkins is your man because he was the one that developed those. He actually invented the graffiti text writing that's used in those systems. And he's really been interested in brains and the brain architecture and intelligence and how it works. And so, besides being a very effective entrepreneur, he's also been studying brains. He went to graduate school up here in Berkeley on intelligence, biointelligence.

[09:39]

and has formed an institute down the peninsula called the Redwood Institute of Biointelligence or something. I'm not quite sure what the name is, but trying to develop his credentials. And in the preface of his book, he asks this, the brain uses vast amounts of memory to create a model of the world. Everything you know and have learned is stored in this model. The brain uses this memory-based model to make continuous predictions about future events. It is the ability to make predictions about the future that is the crux of intelligence. So in the book he goes on and talks about how the brain describes these predictive ability and he gets in quite a lot of detail about the structure of the brain and all that fascinating stuff. I won't talk about it here. It takes about 10 hours in the book to go through all the material. But I was intrigued by it because

[10:41]

The brain, as Sojin has said many times when talking about Zazen, the brain has thoughts and those thoughts are going to be coming up. And the brain's function is to think. And as I take it out a little bit further, according to Hawking's, the brain's function is to predict. The thoughts that we're having in a sense are predictions from the So I want to talk a little bit more about that. First off, let me ask you this. Somewhere over the rainbow. Many of you, right. What were you doing? You were predicting what was going to come next. One, two, three, four. Predicting what's going to come next, right? Four score and seven.

[11:47]

So our brain is doing this, and the point is that you don't have any control over that. When I said, Jingle Bells, your brain is going straight to the next verse. Well, many of you are not. Most of you, some of you maybe not, but most of you are. The brain is hardwired to make these predictions, and when it has an input, like somewhere, it's searching around for what's gonna come next, given that input. When you look at a face, he's talking about the way your eyes scan. You look at a face, and the very first thing you see is maybe the nose. and then a third of a second layer later the brain says there's a nose there this probably should be an eye and it directs your eye your eyes to look in that for the eye in that face and then it directs your eye to look at the other eye and so it's predicting a nose there must be an eye there must be another eye there must be a mouth and so on and so forth

[12:55]

So if your brain sees a defect in this model, for example, suppose the face you're looking at doesn't have a second eye, your brain is predicting a second eye and it doesn't see it there. And it's kind of unhappy. Wait a minute. And it attends on that. So in the book Hawking says, that's why when people see defects, you know, a person with a visible physical defect, they stare at it. It's not that they're being rude. It's that they don't have any choice. Their brain is saying, this doesn't fit my prediction. What's going on here? And it's like the brain gets a little unhappy, in my opinion. The brain gets a little unhappy when it doesn't make that prediction, when the reality doesn't fit the prediction. And these things come, and you're hearing what I'm saying, but you also predict when you're reading. You go on and you predict what the next word is going to be, what the next symbol is going to be.

[13:59]

You can do the same thing with feel, same thing with smell, same thing with taste. All these things, there's a prediction process going on there. So then I think, um, take this a little bit further about, um, childhood traumas. Uh, we had a student here many years ago. Um, many of you know her and she was up here once on a Monday morning and said, uh, during Sashin sometimes I have memories of what happened to me as a child and she was, she was physically abused, uh, when she was a child and, uh, these feelings would come up for her and she would go into the go into the fetal position and kind of relive in a sense that experience. So what's happening is that some thoughts, the brain kind of is predicting or has predicted that for her that this trauma is going to happen again.

[15:11]

Something like that. It's that memory and that prediction, and so her feelings and her reactions are going to come up in the same way that they came up in the past. I think we're all familiar with that idea. The post-trauma stress disorder that we've heard about, I first heard about with Vietnamese veterans, and that also appears to be very prevalent, is the same problem. I was riding on an airplane once with, actually, the man who was the treasurer of Chevron Corporation. Guy at that time, back in the 70s, was probably making a half million, million dollars a year. Pretty important person. And he was a Vietnam veteran. And he was telling me one day when he was riding the AC Transit bus over the bridge to work, there was a backfire. And the next instant he found himself on the floor of the bus, ducking and covering. So it was that quick, that fast. these memories and these predictions come. He didn't really have much control over it. His brain just said this is the situation and it remembered how he should behave which is get on the floor, take cover.

[16:19]

So it's interesting that Alan was talking about my older daughter who's now 28 when she was about Eight days. Our next door neighbor was holding her and almost dropped her on her head on the cement. And I still have visions of that, even though it didn't happen. From time to time, that memory comes up and I get afraid. I get scared. It's kind of an interesting reaction. So. Of course the reason I'm bringing this up is I'm saying now how does Zazen affect this memory process? What's going on? Because it's my belief that Zazen helps us manage these memories. So this is a book of refining your life, which many of you probably own.

[17:24]

So Jin has lectured out of it many times and we're going to cover it starting on Wednesday in the Wednesday night group. So if any of you would like to start working on this book at the level that we're doing it, please come. 40 minutes of Zazen, about 10 minutes of service, and then we have tea and reading and discussion. It's kind of nice because it's a small group. Typically, there'd be three, four, maybe five people there. So there's an opportunity to really ask questions and have discussion, a lot of opportunities for cross-talk. Does it have a new title? Well, this particular book, Refining Your Life, I don't know. He may have come out with another edition that has a different title. And Ichiyama is very accessible. I'm not quite sure how we're going to cover it yet.

[18:31]

On the Berkley Zen Center website, there are two lectures by Sojourn, which are on the website, and I'm going to print them both out. And I think I'm going to use the first lecture for the first night to find out what the format of how we'll cover this book, how that will work. But you're all welcome to come. It'll be interesting. So I wanted to read a paragraph out of this from Ichiyama's commentary as kind of a way of addressing the question of what is Zazen doing with these thoughts, with these predictions? Because we're sitting there and our mind is predicting. I submit that there's no way to stop you from ... there's no way to stop your mind from predicting. But Zazen does something. Okay, usually we go around getting all excited over the thoughts and feelings that fill our minds.

[19:34]

So that's the prediction and the feelings that come from reactions to the predictions. When we do Zazen, we let go of all of that and gain a freshness, a true sanity. That alone is the true form of the self. When we practice Zazen, we have to let go of all those ideas that arise, regardless of how frightening or grandiose they might be. In doing so, our true form manifests itself naturally. So, I don't know how that seemed like it fit here. The operative sentence for me is, when we do Zazen, we let go of all of that and gain a freshness, a true serenity. So I was wondering to myself, How do we let go of that? How do we let go of those predictions? How do we let go of that thinking when we're doing Zazen? And it's not something that, in my experience, that I can force and it's not something that I can make go away.

[20:44]

In Zazen, when I teach Zazen, I ask people to concentrate on their Hara, and when they remember that they're having thoughts, and when they also then remember that maybe having those thoughts isn't what they want to be doing during Zazen, that they go back and put their attention on the Hara, the breathing in and breathing out. When I first started sitting Zazen many years ago, the instruction I got was to count my breaths and to feel the breathing, the breath sort of coming in my mouth, coming down into my tummy, and then leaving again. So it's kind of like a sea, if you will. Somewhere in the literature, there's a description of letting the breath be like a swinging door, swinging in and swinging out. So it seems like what we're doing is, what I'm trying to do is to distract my mind from its prediction of lots of other things and have it predict just the breathing in and the breathing out.

[21:48]

Have it predict just the counting from 1 to 10 and then starting over again, 1 to 10. I remember the first time I got to 10. a little late, so sit in the living room. And I got to 10, and I was so proud of myself. And then I started over at 1, and I realized that I really hadn't accomplished anything at all. What did I do? Just had to start counting again. But it seems to be effective. And after many years now, I don't have to do that so much. Although sometimes I do. Well, I do. I program computers. And I'll spend a full day programming, and my mind is programming computers from then on. And I come into the Zen Dojo and start sitting. I'm still programming computers, basically. And I feel like we really have to do a horrendous amount of just concentrating on my counting and my breathing to sort of distract my brain from its habitiation of programming computers.

[23:04]

And I suspect that a lot of you may have the same problem with other activities that you have. You come into the Zendo and your brain is still habituated in its other activities. And so sometimes it takes a real Herculean effort to say, well, I'm going to count my breaths and let that go. So that's what I do. So Zazen then is a way to teach our mind to let go of predictions, and become maybe not quite so alarmed when the predictions that our minds are constantly making don't fit with what's going on with reality. That's kind of the way I'm interpreting it right now, what's happening.

[24:06]

So we're making a prediction, and it's like, somewhere over the... hedge. Wait a minute, that don't fit. And it's a little bit of alarm or laughter. A comedian takes advantage of this stuff really well. Because it doesn't fit the prediction and something's going to happen. And our brains sometimes get alarmed by that. So I wanted to read. by A.H. Dogen's writings. For some people, their own views are primary. They open a sutra, memorize a word or two, and consider this to be buddhadharma. Later, when they visit with an awakened teacher or a skilled master and hear the teaching

[25:11]

If it agrees with their own views, they consider the teaching right. So if it agrees with their own views, they consider the teaching right. And if it does not agree with their old, fixed standards, they consider his words wrong. They do not know how to abandon their mistaken tendencies. So how could they ascend and return to the true way?" That's pretty telling. It's kind of like, when we study, and learn something, that study and learning becomes entrenched in our brains because our brains are now using that to predict what's going to happen. What is the Buddhadharma? Okay, it's what I studied. It's what I remember about what the Buddhadharma is. Something different comes in, some different idea. It doesn't fit what I studied before. It doesn't fit my prediction. Sometimes we just throw that away. I want it to fit what I think reality is, what my brain thinks reality is.

[26:14]

So, uh, Bogan, uh, says, uh, it doesn't agree with their old fixed standards and his words are wrong. They do not know how to abandon their mistaken tendencies. So I say, uh, The only way I know how to abandon those mistaken tendencies is to counteract them. And one of the ways to counteract them is to sit zazen. When I sit zazen, it doesn't matter anymore if the prediction is right or wrong. Somehow I'm comfortable with that prediction. It becomes okay. It's like Ichiyama was saying, sort of give it away. It becomes peaceful. So, just one final sentence from Dogen. Zazen is not learning to do concentration.

[27:18]

It is the Dharmagate of great ease and joy. It is undefiled practice enlightenment. So, with that, there's quite a lot of time for questions. That's okay, because I really like questions, Yes? When you're saying that our previous brain patterns keep us in error, but on the other hand, like the reason I'm doing this instead of reading a Zoroastrian say, is that it seems to make more sense to my brain the way it was when I encountered it. How is that? Who gets that middle part? You're saying as a... I heard the word roach? Oh, as opposed to becoming a Zoroastrian or a Marxist or something.

[28:24]

Oh, I see. And I ended up doing this. And it seems to me that it has to do with it being... Well, let's see. I'm still not sure I understand the question, but let me talk a little bit and see if it comes out. Well, one way I thought maybe you were asking the question was, why am I becoming this instead of becoming that? Why am I becoming, say, a student of Buddhism as opposed to becoming a student of Rosicrucianism? Yeah. Something like that. when you I encounter do you encounter the true teaching and your brain is in the way but it seems to me that my perception of what the true teaching is as opposed to some other teaching has to do with my brain at this point if I've never done zazen and had some other way to find it well you're very lucky um I remember once um yeah

[29:52]

someone who has learned or heard the name Buddha has good karma. So your previous conditions and ideas that you have in your brain when you first encountered Buddhism probably presupposed you to those ideas. I don't know quite how you came to it, but I know for me, the idea of suffering, I could see how I was suffering. And I didn't like that. That's what brought me here, actually, to begin with, was that I heard that Buddhism and Zen was a way to overcome my suffering. So I like that idea. So I was suffering. And I also remember thinking, because I was born in a... Living in the United States, we're a Christian community, for the most part.

[30:57]

At least I grew up in a Christian community. My parents sent me to Sunday school. They didn't go themselves to church, but they sent me to Sunday school. And I remember being very frustrated that Christianity did not have Zazen. because I became very enamored of Zazen and believed in Zazen very early on. Some of the books I read talked about meditation and whatnot, and so I said, OK, I've got to try it out. But when I did, I realized it was really what I wanted to do. So I don't know if that answers your question or not, but that's kind of what It's the front loading that got you ready for it. Yeah. by not moving and by breathing in this very comfortable way.

[32:34]

Yes. And also memories are encoded in muscles as well as in cortical neurons. All the way down. There's memory. The whole body is remembering and predicting what's going on. Yes. I'm curious about the relationship between this prediction and intuition. I think they're the same. Your brain, you have enough information that you say, I kind of think this is the way it's going to be. Well, there might be. Using the word prediction, I was thinking it kind of maybe makes what we're thinking maybe a little too narrow. In the book, the way Hawking uses the word prediction, he's using it in a way that describes how the brain structure is working.

[33:36]

But basically, the higher layers of the brain are sending signals down to the lower layers of the brain saying, this is what you should expect to see. This is what you'd expect to have happen to you. Some of you are not going to get signals from outside, and some of you are going to get signals from that. And these are the signals that you're going to get. And the lower layers, if the signal is coming up and it conforms with what the upper layers are saying, it's a happy camper. It doesn't do anything, but basically it sends back and says, yeah, I got what you thought I was going to get. But if a signal is getting, you thought I was going to get this and I'm not getting that, then it sends a signal up saying, wait a minute, I didn't get that. So that's what it's saying about prediction. So when you're thinking and intuition, your brain... There's all these interconnections. That's one of the things that Hawking says. A lot of neuroscientists don't appreciate the fact that the nerve that's going way off into other parts of the brain really does have an effect.

[34:38]

A lot of neuroscientists are saying, well, because it's so far away, it takes so long for the information to get from one part of the nerve to the other part of the nerve, it's not really playing much of an effect in the brain. And Hawking was saying he doesn't think that's true. He thinks that these way distant connections are making a big, are having a big impact in what's going on in the way the brain is doing its processing. So intuition is bringing all this stuff together and it comes with a flash. So I don't know, that's where I am right now. Yeah, Walter. bring this idea of predictions back to your topic about belief. It seems to me that they're linked, of course. Because it's the predictions I think so.

[36:24]

It seems to me it's the same idea. Hawking's was talking about this idea of we change the way we see the world. For example, I was talking earlier about the face. The signal comes in and the brain says, well, this might be a face. And so the brain says, ask the eye, look over here and see if there's an eye over there, or look over there, see if there's a nose. Is there an error? And it's basically, it's predicting how things should be and it's directing the eye to move. This is all happening in tens of seconds. Y fixes for a very small fraction of a second, moves over, fixes for a very small fraction of a second, moves down to the nose for a small fraction of a second. All these signals are then coming up and supporting that prediction. So it's like the prediction is Prediction of the upper part of the brain is pushing down and asking the cells in the eye to behave in a certain way.

[37:34]

So it's in a sense is saying I'm expecting to see a face. And sometimes. We have this game at home, we have this big abstract picture, and we say, where are the faces in the picture? And of course the artist had no intention of putting faces in the picture, but I can find lots of faces in that picture. Because I see two eyes and a nose and a mouth, a little smiley mouth or a frown and that sort of thing. It's not there. No, the artist didn't put it there, but my brain did. Very much so. that prediction. The examples were very cultural. Somewhere over the rainbow, okay, so we all assume we've seen or heard of Wizard of Oz. If I'd grown up in rural Vietnam somewhere, that wouldn't be true. I'm just

[38:35]

Well, those predictions ... this brain structure is in the neocortex, which is the mammalian brain, so it's not really dealing with things like heartbeat and breath so much, but definitely culturally. I mean, I would not expect a person from rural Brazil, if I sang Somewhere Over the Rainbow, to be able to understand what I was talking about. They would think I was nuts. So I would use an example coming out of their culture. And if it came out of their culture, then yes. That's the idea. It's the learning. We learn and then we're stuck with what we learn. We're just, we're victims of what we learn. That's the idea. There's lots of questions and we've come, we're almost out of time. So a couple more questions and then, yeah. Can you repeat the title of the book? The title of the book is On Intelligence, and there's a website. If you Google On Intelligence within the first four or five answers, you'll see Hawkins.

[39:58]

Jeff Hawkins is the scientific author, if you will, and Sandra Blakeslee is the science writer who helped him express himself in a clear way. And it's a wonderful book. But in some sense, when you look at the Heart Sutra, what's that saying? It's actually going through this huge litany of all the Buddhist tenets. And the response to each one is that, in their essential nature, there's an emptiness. There's an inherent non-existence, even in that which we hold. So the Zen way, in some ways, is saying that if you hold this way of not believing, and even in our beliefs, we all have these beliefs in some sense as an inherent part of being human.

[41:03]

if you are able to manifest this quality of not engaging in that, holding this space of not believing in your beliefs, and hanging out in or opposed in that place, what happens? Where are you in some sense? That's where I think then it descends in that, in that place of not believing in your own beliefs. Yeah, it depends upon how you think the woman, what the question the woman was really asking. When I first heard the question, I thought she was asking me a Zen question about belief. Sort of like, do you guys believe in things like other people believe in things where you're rigid and have this very structured view of the world? That's kind of the way I thought she was asking the question to begin with. But maybe she was asking the question like, well, what is Buddhism all about? How does Buddhism go about seeing the world? And that's why I think the second answer would have been, in the environment where I was, been a more effective answer for her.

[42:08]

Because I was in a group of people who were all kind of struggling to learn what it is that's going on and that sort of thing. If I had been the Shuso giving an answer to a question, maybe the first way I answered it might have been more effective. I don't know. Yeah, so that's kind of, I mean, there was no right, Okay. I think that's it. Thank you.

[42:40]

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