Birth and Death, Part 2

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BZ-02808
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you tomorrow
good morning
can you hear me okay
yes good
ah
today is the twentieth of december
looks like a beautiful clear crisp gay and berkeley
just on the cusp of the winter solstice
ah
i haven't been outside yet but hopefully of people and these touch base with the day
have someone suggested yesterday and i followed up with a couple of people that are usually at the end of sixteen we again the rawhide to sixteen we would have a show son
and i thought about it hands
checking around and checking internally it seems like that's good idea
so tomorrow
we'll close the field with a show son i think most of you know what shows on his show sunday sir
he is a dharma question and answer between the teacher an individual students
and it's it's a wonderful exchange that takes place in public ah many have you been to show son in secede and also many of you have been to certain low fees ah
some his gatherings on thursday nights which are really a version of have chosen chosen chosen is more of a ritual but i think we're gonna scale back some of the ritual dimensions of it cause they don't translate well on to zoom ah
but will have the essence of it just where ah well we can meet
so i'd like to encourage you from your experience in in she
and from what we've been talking about the last couple days ah please bring a question
ah
i think it it's really helpful it's the question is a practice question not an intellectual question though sometimes it's a little hard to distinguish from for some of us distinguish between the two ah but
keep it brief ah without a lot of framing or preamble to the question and ah my responses are lucas is this is the spirit of are just on my responses to you
you know it's not some abstract principle it's too
the person
that i'm speaking to and your question can be to me ah and i think almost all of us know each other so that it's a very intimate exchange ah and so that's that's my basic instruction to you
luckily get into a lot of detail so please
either think of a question or
bring yourself to that moment
and take a breath and see what question arises
so what i'm thinking actually a because i don't want to
kind of curtail any a bar
ah precious and time ha i'm thinking that instead of doing a lecture tomorrow will do zazen to the morning and then and enclosed with the chosen ah and top
i did get tattoos and i just don't want to cut into it any words really ah i'm really enjoying zazen hook you are and i'm joined sitting with everyone there's so many good friends and old friends on the ah
kind of among the participants
so

want to read something
from art
selected by sultan i'm sort of
moving between his lectures and i think that today's talk is is essentially gonna be about time
the time
of our birth the time of her death the time of our life
and how we how we perceive it

the today
as i said ah
today is the cost of the winter solstice
solstice is a word that ah
derives from to latin words saul when son and sister a to stand still
ah
and it means that the the sun's angle appears to stand still and at this at that moment the solstice which is actually at two o two a m is are coming morning so sixteen hours from now
the mom the apparent motion of the sun in relation to the earth reverses
so ah the winter solstice is the in the northern hemisphere it's the shortest day of the year
in the southern hemisphere it's the longest day of the year that is above and below the equator
and we also have he wrote the vernal and autumnal equinox which leads ah spring and fall which in which the sun falls django is exactly on the equator and so the days and nights or of
equal duration
ah
so you could say
i'm getting in trouble here that we are
experiencing we're close to the death
of autumn
and the birth
of winter
now
ah
in show g ah

dog and rights
birds is a phase that his entire in entire period of itself with its own past and future
death is a phase and with entire period of itself with its own gas to future
ah
and then he says accordingly when birth comes face and actualize purse and with death comes face and actualized death do not avoid desire them
and this is residence is something we might remember from
genji oh go on
another philosophical work of duncan's
ah he says burst and expression complete this moment
death is an expression complete this moment
they're like winter and spring
you do not call winker the beginning of spring nor summer the end of spring

i'm
well some of us do
and that released in later of time ah
the seasons follow each other
ha
but here dogan is talking about moment by moment time
here's one perspective from surgeons commentary
within each moments activity of birth is also death
birth and death are happening at the same time
delete moment
the birth of something he's also did get of something
and death that something is the birth of something
otherwise continuation couldn't happen
emptiness in this sense means the space in which something can happen
so i would say emptiness is
ah
one can see it as potentiality
the space in which something can happen
it's called her life
and within our life there is a constant
appearance of birth and death

he says birds have something is also gets something that the that something is the birth is something otherwise continuation couldn't happen
without emptiness everything would freeze as it is
or maybe without mps everything will turn up
pile up into an unimaginable mass and get it get at each other's get everything would get in each other's way
in the same way
if you look at birth and death in that light death is necessary for birth of manifestation
if there was no guess there couldn't be any manifestation and vice versa
if there was no manifestation there couldn't be any death
and here i think
search he gets to the heart of the matter
so think he means to live and love
each moment in its full function right now
not clinging to existence not wishing for death
otherwise we have a one sided understanding of existence
that is called an upside down view
he said what i studied this would get a gujarati years ago
he had a picture of a little man in a circle upside down

jackie means to live and love
yes
the commentary that i found of
by jogo okamura
we're talking about he's talking about the fastball shoji
and ah which we can and his birth to death said the japanese would show as a verb means to live
a carew
and also to be born
shoji is the process of life of our life in which we are born live
die
so this evocation of he kuru to live
brings to mind the wonderful movie
by akira kurosawa
would you call a kilo ah i wondered if you have seen that
i'm lucy i see hand and can see everyone but ah
by replication this was suzuki but his favorite movie
ah and it's it's been
ah
isn't leads among my favorites it's incredibly moving so the story of a key do
is about
a civil servant whose kind of as a cipher he spends his life are doing his work and the the original the first seed you can't even see him because he's hidden behind a huge stack of papers that he has to clear away for anyone can see it
and he is a doctor's appointment
he goes to the appointment
and he finds out that he has received ah a very bad cancer diagnosis and as only a short time to live
and he walks out in a daze
and with the sense that
he has short them to live and he hasn't lived
he's done all of he's done his job he has a couple was pretty ungrateful kids and up and a very difficult relationship with his wife isn't care about anything and ah there's something wrong
really deep the meaning of his life is missing completely
ah and he keeps looking for he looks for it ah in
ah you look for it religiously he looks for it is disagree
sequence where are this gentleman mr watanabe goes to nightgown he goes to the the nightclub districts and he know he indulges all of the senses for for a while and you know gets drunk and goes to prostitutes and does all
list of and it's just meaningless
and
one day as he's walking home he passes a
ah well ah
he has seen with young woman that he thinks he's in love with he lay hee ha cafe
he sees ah he gets the idea
observing children
and so he has a kind of awakening experience in that moment and then as he's walking home he sees ah
this
can a polluted
area near his house and he envisions making a playground
and he pours everything he has
every out of his streets
into fighting the system into getting the pyramids into raising the money into building this playground for kids and then it opens and the kids are playing
ah and in the last scene of the first part
he is in his his
walking home at night he stops in the playground
and
he gets i'm one of the swings any starts happily swinging
he dies
completely happy
and then the second half of the movie is ah
all the people who had been or was supposed to have been close to him at his funeral
speculating on
what happened what happened to this guy
because he caged
so this is a hero to live he lived
and it's interesting the the criticism says at
it's loosely based on the story i told you about yesterday by tolstoy to death of ivan illich
ah i haven't your chances a week will experience in the last moment of his death what rv has its awaking experience
some months earlier
so that he can really serve
so this to me
is exactly what she
ha

when he says so janky means think he totaled am a little else to live and love each moment he needs for function
to love each moment means to love each be
and to love each moment
meals
to settle in today
the surgeon vote she says
when we said
a body mind and breath are harmonized with universal wisdom the universal rhythm his birth and death
there's no separation
we realize that our whole body and mind is simply universal activity
we don't control the way the blood runs through our body
we didn't control the way we were born or manifested in the world
we may have been kicking and screaming
but that is beyond our control
and we don't control the aging process even though we may try
and we don't control the dying process
it is simply the universe doing its thing
we say i am breathing
but it's just an idea we have
we'll actually been breathed by the universe itself
there is nothing we can do about that even though we try
we try to shape everything in a certain way
as he says that's because we are under the impression that i'm under new patients i am the center of the universe you're an impression that you a descendant universe and you know we're both right and we're both wrong
but
we try to save everything has certain way
but it is simply the flow of the way things go
if we say there is no self some truth to that
if they we say there is self through some truth to that too

this is where people get stuck
they hear that it shouldn't be an ego self
and they tried to shake it off
how do i get rid of my ego self
but the self is necessary
we just offer it to the three treasures
so this is to me this is the same has
throw yourself into the house of buddha
just offer yourself to the buddhas and then the buddha is will use you
as they wisely see it
but we have to beat this often have to offer in three treasures
so do says there is no inherent self
there's simply the self of the universe
each one of us is a manifestation of the universal self
as yes a tiny roshi she once said
we all belong to the same knows all society
we all belong to the same loads whole society here we are breathing the same air heating the same food
and deemed deluded about the same delusions
and agree like them
that's that's the anderlecht that ledger is a great place for you to end ah eating the same breathing the same area and same food and been deluded about the same delusion
helen that

i could end there but i think of a sound is another story which i had never seen before and i just you know this may be a little
ah jumping around but i think
i'll trust you to make the connection
ah
i was looking to see if there was some place where ah
some citation that kiddo was suzuki rockies favorite movie i know that i'd read it someplace i don't know where and i was looking online and i found this section ah where it's mentioned by
reverend ogilvy
given a cousin ogilvy
was in san francis use he is a total shinshu minister and i was stopped and bet that your kids to school yesterday as well and he he was in cleveland and and he was in chicago and before that he had been a young man a minister in san francisco
and when he came to the ministry
he was really just completely lost he didn't know what you're supposed to be doing and ah
he went to suzuki roshi this is in probably the late fifties early sixties
and they became very close friends ah and reverence is has spoken about suzuki roshi ah it he's he's a wonderful exemplar of that can wander in mind that i was speaking of but he read interview with david chadwick he tells the story
suzuki roshi you often gave a talk to his english speaking students and i would sometimes go this was a psychology ah and bush street
one time he was speaking to us
something one time when he was speaking to us something stuck that made my ministerial lives change so that i wish to continue
he would use a little japanese a woman in english help and think i guess
he started talking and walking in front of people this in the zendo back and forth slowly and steadily and he said today
today a an not today while gonna did a why is the subject and jana is like is with emphasis
today
easily your party today today is today
he's who is pronounced just as just he's just is pronounced as a jap japanese way your party means absolutely
today is absolutely today
then he walked again slowly and steadily in front of us
and he said
today easy will not do tomorrow
today is employed say and say today easy not to yesterday
ah today is not yesterday
and then he said he would walk slowly and speaking in that way said today is not tomorrow
delhi walk in front of one of the people sitting in the front seat
and he grabbed his neck and shook him
and said to him do you understand
i was kind of surprised at what he was doing
then he smiled with all his heart
he said today is absolutely today not yesterday and not tomorrow
and he smiled again and said that's all
i couldn't even stand up i was shocked
that is
the compressed version of shoji
today is absolutely today
not yesterday and not tomorrow
so i'm gonna stop there and ah leave time for some question i'm leaving you to make the connections here ha in i worry a little bit this is philosophical or abstract but it's not it's a bad heart
distance
and we get to do it we actually get to do it all the time
but
we're working on it in session and we're working on it together
so we're not alone with it and that allows us to ah that allows the love to flow
so i'm gonna stop and die later he can manage the year accumulate
thank you rosanne am
so as we all know and are used by now you can raise your glue hands in the president's window and maybe today on be actually able to see those hands on it's not on his sorry heiko will take the questions
i'm able to see that hand of of of hechos so
we'll start with heiko please on mute yourselves
thank you rosanne and thank you for leaving it as to make the connections that are a lot of dots the and i was a kid i love to do it and it seemed easy
the yesterday we were talking you talked about zheng k and in your class about zinc eight about the boat and in in the world of the boat ride today in your
during your target one by you said
we love our beings and i recognize that within the
from janky i got the idea of a response field here i am a boat in the middle of a world that is known to the boat and knows the boat as the boat but beyond that i it's outside the response field so this term response field is my own ah
when i love all beings i love those within my response field those who are touching me and who are present in this absolutely today which is why i get to the question absolutely here absolutely now my response field is liked about limited
yet it is not limited
in the sense of being with or in the presence of doing with
everything within my response field and wonder if you could discuss that a little bit or how that strikes you
how that strikes me is
that
what you're calling the response field as i understand that i'm not i'm not quite sure because it's it's your turn to me is
i

when you ride in a boat your body and mind and the environs together or the undivided activity of the boat the entire earth and sky entire sky about the undivided activity in the boat so what this means
to me is that your response field is your perception
our perceptions are limited
but the environment of the
bo is universal the environment of ourself is universal even though we don't see it
the whole thrust of these of these festivals
is actually
two
help us see
the vast scale
ah of
our universal reality this is you know what i was saying yesterday ah i i found it or

ha
one
when in response to ah what yoni was asking ah about the cells in his body but i responded
ah the whole earth is actual true human body
that's a true response field but when limited we have learned capacities so that's what i would to etc would say to him
and you can never see everything you know this is one of them model things i've been thinking about
he would be kind of
ah this kind of idealization of mindfulness that that we have ah
these days
ha
my feeling is mindfulness is putting your attention on one thing on one discontinuous moment of time ah in place and that is really important to be able to do but when you put your attention
in one place you have to realize that
there's other places that you end up open your attention
so we can't you know accepted very rare move to move when we feel when we made to his total openness ah even that i question whether it's total it's just really wide so ah we have to keep remembering
that there's more then i said the center of the universe
i think i'll stop there
a johnny pleased unmute yourself
hassan some say yes
him a hero
ah mr watanabe has an awakening on and
has a mission to serve children and bilkis playground and
he does that it sounds to me
he does started a similar way to us sitting zazen without any gaining idea on this is something he's compelled to do on and however once he does it
key then steps in to that playground in onto the swing in
becomes a child
activity young and really realizes his life
just got it
i was the question was your question but it was just he was just to comment on that attended the reality as you the commenter is that was how it seemed to you or yeah i think that's really good that he ah
he doesn't just build the state and stand up stand back and watch it he gets hundred swing and swims the child is that shot he was there was no child left in the guy who had the cancer diagnosis
but by the time he dies that child is alive i cried at some wonderful it's really one if i really you know if anyone i i have a copy of the movie ah on dvd if anyone has a dvd player anymore i'm happy to lend it to you and
you can find online link and pretty shirts in the criterion collection it's just it's so beautiful
thank you thank you to me
i guess you will you on new yourself and ask your question
yes and is a question is a comment and them
yeah i think that the void of crossover and tolstoy i mean he was inspired by to send us the of speech and and i think that the kitchen w r l d is over there are different we're living in totally different wrong
a technological world which is kind of like you know everything is an this and also like yours get filling it with so much right now it doesn't mean that it's a started so that long time he could be that this kind of like is but anyway it might put my fingers like with all the respects that they have i'm not trying to
disrespect anyone with i'm just i just trying to you know as a freedom of expression of the up in a speech and i'm just trying to save by my give my comment and i don't expect you to give me any answer donating is just i think what you're saying is a spiritual propaganda
seeing as a slogans a hit a lot of his slogans since i entered this in a
in the a lot of his future sometimes i heard something that is you know i kinda big feel like maybe it's just kind of like but is because this is the or be right now we are in totally different world and is not anymore their work that's why it this is you know that we need another way of talking i think we're winning
another way of communicating a about this stinks and and not just keep this it seemed about this and and and and as as yeah this is i think that's all i wanna see and as i said you know is a comment is not a question or anything like it thank you thank you
well i kicked the comment and i will think about it harm
irrespective of whether
i fully agree or not ah
i
respect your thoughtfulness and ah will think about it some thank you
next we have heather scientists
warning hassan
i
ah
i'm so thinking about the comment that was just made but i actually have a a question i love this quote today is absolutely today not yesterday not tomorrow and sort of the liveness have some of these quotes that you've been giving us
and i feel like i was really connected to that way i'm moving through the world at an earlier point in my wife
and i think like like many people
i'm there's a question of burn out for me just pure burn out that mean disconnected from is feeling and in the
i'm in the experience of covered it's even more so because i'm i'm already burned out and now i'm
teaching my ten year old how to get through fifth grade is
and so i i would just love a maybe a pep talk
where are you know a morning of sauce and or some something that shifted up to keep the lens fresh is good and maybe gets me through like ten in the morning but i ten thirty i'm burned out again
and keeping that sort of ongoing connection to that feeling of aliveness i wonder if you have any words of encouragement

but easier for me to see your aliveness it may not be so easy for you to see it always
but this is where we we look to our friends and on family to reflected back to us in the moments when we may not be able to see ourselves
and just
i think that
there are moments
certainly are moments of of of a lot of darkness and difficulty that that i experience
and i look at those and also look at it as i said i tried to see that
by reflection from others but also
i'm wary of my propensity to boil everything down to an absolute in any given moment
you know and so to recognize the mechanism of recognize the fluidity that exists just not just within a moment but begin within what i call myself and
looks about yourself
you know ah
and
appreciate it

linda has
boring
mom why i have a just a teeny response to what heather just said and than my question
i've been getting some help from rob anderson lately and he would say if i said that to him he he might say don't try to get ready for your burn out
befriended
ah
anyway
even though that's hard do i found it helpful hurt
why think your out just to say you're burn out there is information in a message there and we need to figure out what it is actually saying to us
don't bring ourselves back into balance yeah it's just another like aspect of what you're saying
oh it at the beginning when you started talking this morning you said i'm enjoying as in and i hope you are too
but i'm not enjoying it ah
and
but i enjoy how i feel when i get up
oh
but when i'm sitting there i really
try to get out of it and stuff like that so you have any help on and enjoying my like a candy decide to enjoy it can i
no
well it's kinda i mean you know in in danger in our for cancer andy
there's a line the thousand i'm speaking of is not learning medication is simply the dharma gate of repose and bliss and i think i spent fifteen years think okay i'm ready for the diamond made of window which is reposing bliss happen
ha and one day i sounded sneaking in and it's not always like that i mean i am enjoying it i'm really enjoying it to the today or this is weak and their mornings when i get up when you know i just feel like i'm ready to jump out of my
skin but i just do it because that's my vow ah but you know i can tell you
i don't know how you enjoyed you just let that arise ah when it arises when it's ready to rise at all arise i don't know
how many good advice and i'm not and i'm not
you know i'm not a pollyanna and i have not somebody who believes ah i think i have a much more kind of
can i say ah

surgeon has a very different attitude
he designs are somewhat different attitude them than i do ah ah i don't think it's necessarily gonna fix every in my life but but if i look in a long and the long run i see how much of my life has changed
in the in the years that i've said
and so that may not be the same as enjoying a given period of zazen but it's it is definitely some solace thought oh no
so i get it you say i hope you're enjoying it too and i say i'm not see a later
well no not see you later
i know i'm not enjoying it right this second and see later i'll see you get worse we're sticking together here oh okay allowed to right yeah i answered when using see you later it satellite and i'm gonna go away no away okay okay okay
my local go anywhere okay
there are three more questions but i i contacted or i haven't got it because it's a comment or it's just some i'm excited because the subject that came up because yesterday during zazen
i had this experience where i was having a good amount of pain and the nice and it's not something that i'm unfamiliar with and so i was just going to the breaths deep breathing and
there are some somehow and it wasn't trying to do this but somehow i brought because when when when one is in pain time seems to drag on the there's something about it that i was able to enjoy the spaciousness of that time dragging on while the pain
the i was really grateful for that i was trying to make it happen today like you say you can't make it happen
but how can i make that happen again
you're learning i don't know i don't know how you tell one does anything because this comes back to the question that we address yesterday of this of the illusion of self power and other power
so ah i think
i'm surprised at the extent to which i find myself
i discovered the the other power side of me and i guess
into useful
you know you can't make yourself enjoy doesn't like as linda was asking you get you know you can
necessarily find the spacious some pain and i want to say that there are times i don't idealize that either there are you know and in this respect i'm not trying you ah
ah
i'm not trying to sell spiritual propaganda ah there are times when pain
just
flix you off into
something deep and scary an unavoidable and that's it's not like every pain can be mastered by zazen
but where you can allow
an opening
good do it where you can see the spaciousness
then i feel like that is how we train ourselves to you
see that that's one of the potentiality
and it's like we just train little by little
thank you thank you that's really helpful and it helps me to relax when you say that because my tendency is well if i've had that wonderful experience of enjoying the two realms at the same time i gonna do that one hundred percent of the time which of course is impossible
and not to be grasp after
so what are the things that i urge i was reading an article about mother teresa
and that
reportedly ah he had experience early in her life where god spoke to her and joe really gave her her calling
and that she had as as priests do they they all have ah
spiritual advisor spiritual counselors ah that they that they speak with
she spent the rest of her life
waiting for god to speak to her again
it didn't happen
ah
so i think we had to be grateful for what will been given
kinross we had a susan marvin did you still have a question susan

if not then we can skip to kabir now i i do can you hear me guess i can hear it on
i took my hand down because of the time you have time
it's alarm
while to comments down
it
i remember sajjan once saying about kind of what you're describing kiko
well you got a peek
and maybe that's what
hassan you were saying about mother teresa
you want whether it's a peak it was it wasn't just a beak it was dead for her with a clear voice but doesn't get big they can happen small or not
right
and the other thing i wanted to say was it seems like everything you're talking about points towards like our perspective would you say that because of our limited perspective we don't see birth and death
it's as the same thing yes
hum
yes i mean i don't want to get coordinate in i don't want to go on a tangent about perception but it's it's sort of that the heart of what lori and i have been thinking and studied in talking about for the last ten months
yeah to me it seems like so art you know our task than in our training is to and i guess that's what we're doing remind ourselves so that i mean for me this came up the other day in i'm always building compost piles and
i was looking at the new one that i just built and
you know you put all this dead material in the compost pile as you're building it everything's dead and within days it's just teeming with life there's just all this life in they are going at it and i was looking at it thinking it you can't say it's dead you can't say it's a
live and i don't mean that to sound trite but it's just teeming with life and death and it's it's very exciting
and yet in our lives with people our perspective is that death is something bad and yet in that cycle of making compost it's on
they're both feeding each other and you can't have one with the out the other
and it it there's nothing bad about it actually so i just my comment is that as you talk about that i think our job is really to remind ourselves or developed the imagery or maybe you have a comment about
about that how did i do arms
and you know
try to make it brief ah this is what this also came up yesterday we were talking ah already from surgeons commentary about
comparative light in comparative dark
that everything is light is good comparison to some element of darkness dark is comparative to some element of light life or birth is this is where birth includes death and gets include first you put a bunch of stuff you think you say
conventionally you would say is dead actually it's full of life if it wasn't full of life in in its own form it couldn't give birth to the compose party you know
and so this is
what dog is getting at is actually both sides as usual
ah that
thinking about one school of buddhist philosophy the madame as to school at the emptiness school right the mta school you know which is the heart sutra ah and it saying that data description other way universe is
is empty of self
be that everything is composed of something else and so that the mp school the other philosophical school the yoga charter school which is what we've been studying is not about the nature of the universe but it's a that are subjective perception of the universe
it's how we see it
ah so there's emptiness
and then there's how we see the world which which brings forth another those are just different ways of thinking and perceiving
so that they don't exclude each other they're just different angles like you know light is a wave light is a particle
the think kansas i hope that's okay thank you of course thank you very much yeah i guess thank you
a hose on we are over time and there are three more questions i'm so hot is to the us
we weren't able to get to write i'm okay that's fine thank you and you know hold your question if it's if the question it's important you you can ask a that show santa mar
dope