Gloria left me this poem when I was talking about money last time. And this poem is not Gloria's, but it's a friend of hers named Ted Fleishman. The name of the poem is called Up. That's good. I'll read the poem. I get up and go to the bathroom. Then I eat cornflakes and go to work. I am going there in my car, and when I get there, I try to get more money. I need more money. When I get in my car and go home for dinner, then I get in my car and go home for dinner. But I have to get back and get more money. I need more money. A pretty interesting poem.

[01:08]

It kind of describes the life of most people. I think Buddha would describe this as maybe the perfect description of being caught in the world, samsara. How we're caught in the world of samsara. Without composure. no place to rest, no place to settle. In this poem, there are places to settle, but the poet doesn't point that out.

[02:14]

The poem gathers momentum actually starts out quite simply, I get up. But ends with, I need more money. And keeps gathering momentum and ends in this more and more frantically, quickly turning wheel. and then stops. Where does it go? Where can we be taken from there? But the poem starts out very well.

[03:21]

I get up. This is, in Buddhism, you know, I get up is the first act of our day. And we need to find complete composure in that first act of I get up. Oh yes, this morning was pretty interesting. I got up. The alarm rang and I got up and as soon as I got up I heard this pop and then it sounded like a waterfall in my bathroom. And I opened the bathroom door and there was a waterfall. It was like Yosemite Falls in my bathroom. It was so thick that I couldn't even see, really couldn't even see through the bathroom.

[04:27]

And I said, well, there are no pipes in the attic, no water pipes in the attic. Where can this be coming from? So I looked out the window, even though I knew it wasn't raining. The water was already just deep and thick in the bathroom floor. And then it was coming into the bedroom. So we started rushing around, you know, trying to find out what to do. And then I ran downstairs and I found a bathroom and ran downstairs trying to find the water turn off. And I was on my hands and knees looking for it. All the bushes had overgrown the There's a shutoff valve which is down by the ground. I was pying my way through the bushes. So Ron came out and he saw my hands and knees in the bushes.

[05:31]

I don't know what he thought. He came out and found the valve and so we ran back upstairs and it was still coming out. So I just walked into the bathroom, into the waterfall, and the connecting tube from the water to the toilet had just popped off. The pressure popped it off. So I turned that valve off. But that was the way I woke up this morning. We were all laughing. Bill said that he could hear us laughing in his endo. He was in his endo and he could hear us laughing. It's kind of an interesting way to wake up. But ordinarily... The root who lives down below was awakened by the water coming through the heater

[06:35]

And he looked out the window. Oh yes, and I said, and go to the bathroom. You never know what you're going to find. said that when he went to the bathroom, when he went to brush his teeth in the morning, he spent maybe 20 minutes brushing his teeth. And he learned, he made a great effort to just brush his teeth when he, in India, although I haven't been there, they sell these little sticks, I understand, twigs. And every morning you go out and buy your little twig and you chew it and brush your teeth with it.

[07:54]

I met an Indian singer, Pran Nath was his name, who was touring the United States and he had a whole bag, I don't know, a suitcase full of these twigs that he brought with him. So Gandhi, you know, he just spent 20 minutes brushing his teeth with this twig. And he made a great point of the fact that he was just brushing his teeth. His whole life was involved in brushing his teeth at that time. And then when he was through brushing his teeth, he would turn to the next activity. So the first part of this poem goes pretty well. I get up, wonderful, and go to the bathroom and brush my teeth for 20 minutes, if you're Gandhi, and then I eat cornflakes.

[09:00]

Great. Just eating. And go to work. But that's where the division takes place. Getting up, going to the bathroom and eating cornflakes are really concentrated activities, you know, wonderfully concentrated activities. But then I go to work, it's all lumped together in one line. And go to work, it's all lumped together in one line. It's like a kind of bag of stuff, you know, that doesn't... that's not very well defined. And I think as our day begins, and we get into our activity, all kinds of elements come into our life. And we have a lot of difficulty sorting these elements out and taking up these elements and using these elements.

[10:06]

Rather, we start being used by these elements because it's such an overwhelming force. I go to work and go to work. Thousands of small activities involved in this one act of I go to work. But it all becomes a kind of mishmash. Then I am going there in my car. That's good. And when I get there, I try to get more money. So a little bit of clarity, a little bit of mindfulness. I'm in my car. But then I try to get more money is thrown in as a reason, the main reason.

[11:12]

And it keeps going on and on like that. I go home for dinner, but then I come back and make more money. Going home for dinner is a kind of interlude. Put some more fuel in in order to go back to make more money. We get kind of caught, you know, in the pursuit of money. And money is very valuable. We should pay great respect to money. I'm serious. Without money, we really wouldn't be able to manage our lives. We wouldn't be able to interact with each other on such a complex scale that we do. We can't barter, even though we want to. I remember when I was in my 20s, we always thought about, well, maybe it would be better if we just bartered. You know, we traded things. instead of using money, but it doesn't work.

[12:21]

You can't do it. You can do it on a small scale, but we need to have this medium of exchange. And when it works well, we all work well with it. But since it's always somewhat out of balance, we find ourselves compensating. So, learning how to manage money, learning how to take care of it, and learning what it means to us, what it means to our lives, is very, very important. Suzuki Yoshi used to criticize people who felt that they had to give up their jobs or try to practice without any money.

[13:21]

He said, even if you go to the mountains, you still have to live on with money. It takes money to go to the mountains. And it takes money to buy food in the mountains. It takes money to have a sleeping bag, and so forth. So, he said we should pay great respect to money, but we should know the place of money in our life. The pursuit of money is kind of like the pursuit of happiness. Happiness is not an object. Happiness is a result. But money is a little more tangible. happiness. So it's something that, you know, we can fix on.

[14:26]

Happiness is always, what we call happiness is always a dream, kind of fantasy, or kind of ideal. So you can't really grab it. We can daydream and we grab our dream. But money is something, it's green and it's paper and it's goes back and forth, you know, and as you watch it go back and forth, and you want to get something, you know. You have to pay the rent, you have to buy the food, you have to get gas in the car, you have to buy the car, and so forth. All these things. But the great challenge, you know, for us is how to manage money so that it doesn't become the pursuit of our life. so that we're not constantly catching on to the tail of a money tiger, paper tiger, a money tiger that in the end devours us.

[15:35]

And it's pretty hard not to, pretty hard to stay free of that. when we get a job, we're always looking for some advancement, you know. We settle into some work, but then, you know, pretty soon we want more and more. I remember when I used to work in the building trades, It was really hard work. I used to work as a house painter when I was in my early twenties. And you work all day long, eight hours a day with a half an hour for lunch. And you work as fast and as hard as you can.

[16:39]

And all day long, working just as fast and as hard as you can. And at some point I decided that I would find some kind of painting job that was more skillful but less pay. Now, to take a job that's more skillful and less pay is the opposite of the way you're supposed to go in society. What you're supposed to do is to let go of something that pleases you or creates some kind of real work in order to make more money. So when there's a decision or a trade-off, you're supposed to let go of the skill in order to make more money.

[17:47]

If you look at the way things go, I think you'll find that that's the way they go. But I always went the other way. And I took jobs that were much more interesting, but less money. I read an account of the Rolls-Royce factory. It was in the Chronicle. a month or so ago. And it was an interview with the workers in the Rolls-Royce factory. Now, as we know, the Rolls-Royce is the world's most expensive car. And the workmanship on the Rolls-Royce is the best in the world. And no Rolls-Royce is exactly the same as another. And each workman, each mechanic, creates a certain part for the car.

[18:51]

And each one is a little bit different. And everything is handmade, pretty much handmade. So the man that makes the grills and the radiators, there may be 10 or 15 men that make grills and radiators. And each time they make one, it's always different, a little bit different. And they always pride themselves on their workmanship. But no one in that factory makes anywhere near as much money as someone, say, in a Ford factory or a usual production factory. And the interviewer was asking, one of the men that makes radiators, why he worked for less money. He said, well, if you don't have satisfaction in your job, then you have to be compensated for it by money.

[19:56]

So, I think that holds pretty true If we don't have satisfaction, we have to make up for it with money. This is all very general. You can always pick out instances where this doesn't hold true. But generally speaking, I think it's so. We make a trade-off. Sometimes we have great satisfaction and lots of money. That's what we all want, great satisfaction in our work and lots of money. Sometimes we're in a position where we have to support a lot of people or something, or ill health or something. But still, the problem

[21:07]

is not to lose our composure in that situation. Maybe, you know, you have to work two jobs day and night because you need the money for something. But it doesn't mean that you have to waste your life. You know, we're always looking for the ideal situation for our life. And because we don't get the ideal situation, our life is full of dissatisfaction. So composure or patience or however you want to call it.

[22:15]

Buddhist practice is how to enter that situation and fully become that situation. without getting... chasing after it. We're always saying getting caught, but I think getting caught is actually very accurate. For a Buddhist monk, you know, practice of a Buddhist monk is to cut all that desire. For a layperson, it's because of circumstances, it's to take care of family or

[23:36]

or the situation that you're in, in the most economical way. Economical meaning economy of means. Economical applies to money, but it also applies to how we take care of our activity. to make things work. If you're a runner, you have to find the most economical means with which to run, which means economy of energy. Using just the right amount of breath

[24:39]

the right kind of rhythm, being mindful of being loose and not tense. And in Zazen, the same things apply. And we should be able to apply that kind of economy that we have in Zazen to our daily life. When we find ourselves caught in a situation that really binds us, we should try to find out how to get out of that situation, how to cut off the desire that's continuing that situation. We say, you know, that hell is created by ourself.

[25:47]

But in Buddhism, it's also a place to train. That's where our training takes place. It's interesting, you know, we don't see it in the same way as maybe somebody else. People see, make some big distinction between heaven and hell, you know, as two different places. But in Buddhism, there's only one place, and it's either heaven or hell. Actually, it's not really either. But what we call hell is the place where we train. That's our opportunity for training. So when we're in that situation, what do we do?

[27:01]

And composure is... How we train is training in composure, or training in patience. Not waiting, but How we settle into hell without being destroyed by it. How we settle into heaven without being destroyed by it. In the Buddhist cosmology, in the wheel, there are many realms, many worlds. Hungry ghosts, fighting demons, hell, human beings, animals, so forth. And we find ourselves in one of these worlds or another at any given time. So, when we're in this world, whichever world we're in, we must find our composure in that place.

[28:12]

How do we find composure in that place? That's our koan. How can we be free of that? How can we find our freedom within that place? That's the point. The old Buddhists, you know, the Hinayana said, don't ever get into that place. That's all well and good. Don't touch it. But, unfortunately, we find ourselves in that place. We find ourselves in hell before we realize it. And we find ourselves as a fighting demon before we realize it. And, you know, we want to have some state of mind which is the state of mind. What is the state of mind that we want to have?

[29:20]

Some state of mind that takes care of everything. We call it enlightenment. Enlightened state of mind, which takes care of all situations. It's called, actually, composure, but it doesn't mean some facade. It doesn't mean a facade. How do we have composure in any situation? This is actually the koan that we're faced with over and over.

[30:25]

This is a good example of Dogen Zenji's Genjo Koan. That's the koan that we are constantly practicing with. How to find complete freedom and composure. within every situation. State of mind, you know, is changing constantly. If we try to grab some state of mind, hold on to some state of mind, we end up in hell. That's called suffering. That's what Buddha called the realm of suffering. Trying to hold on to something wonderful, So within all of the constantly changing states of mind, and constantly changing states of being, how do we find complete composure at each moment, within each situation?

[31:41]

I think that sometimes we don't realize where our field of practice actually is. The changing forms of our life, each one of those changing forms from moment to moment is our field practice. And the koan exists right there. So without trying to stop what you're doing, sometimes we think, well, maybe I shouldn't be working here or there, I should be just practicing.

[33:16]

But that's a mistake. Everyone has to earn money. We all have to learn how to take care of it. We all have to learn how to take care of our lives and take care of each other. One of the things about this poem that I see as a reflection of our society is the fact that we're all working for ourself, or working for ourself and somebody, but we're not all working for each other. A friend of mine came back from China recently, and was so struck, by the way, in China, people don't have money, they don't have cars, and they all live in little houses, six people to a room, sometimes. Very crowded, a billion people.

[34:20]

But everyone is well fed, and most people have a pretty good composure. And everyone is working for everyone else. There are problems, and I'm not saying it's the idealized state, but this kind of problem doesn't arise. I don't know how we ever will get our society off of its self-centered horse. But it's built into us to assert our individuality as selfishness.

[35:39]

kind of built into our society. So we isolate ourselves more and more and devour more and more and feed each other stuff to devour. And we give with one hand and take with the other. our society like this, giving with one hand and taking with the other. So... I think at some point, our great revelation in our lives is when we realize that we don't need to have so much.

[36:57]

And we don't need to devour so much. And we can actually turn our attention to more living and less and kind of get off that wheel and find some satisfaction. and find some composure. I think also patience is, in its deep sense, is knowing what the right thing is to do, and being able to do it, and feeling good about it, even in the face of criticism.

[38:19]

Do you have any question, maybe? You said that one thing that we have to do is to see what our desires are and to, I think you said, cut off desire or to stop those desires. And my experience is that it's usually pretty easy if you stop and look at a problem to see what your desire is. Many desires are recurrent, seem to come up again and again. I wonder if you have any helpful hints on how to really stop desire. This is a good question because even though we can see what's causing the problem, you know, if we want, say we like wine, and we like drinking it, and then pretty soon we create a habit of drinking, and then pretty soon, before long, we can't stop drinking.

[39:43]

So a desire becomes accelerated and expanded out of proportion, and we're drinking, we end up drinking, and we don't want to drink. But so the compulsion has taken over and we've become caught or enslaved by drinking. The same thing goes for money or anything. And at some point we want to stop. We see what's wrong. We see the problem. Somebody will say, well, if you see the problem, then it's gone. Or if you see the problem, then it's just a matter of getting rid of it. But that's not really so. Because the problem has a life of its own. so to speak. And we set up a certain pattern, and the pattern keeps perpetuating itself. And we're part, instead of controlling it, we become part of it. We become part of the pattern.

[40:48]

So it's very hard to stop something. We have things like Alcoholics Anonymous, Smokers Anonymous or whatever it is. There's even a Sex Fiends Anonymous. That's right. There's not a Money Fiends Anonymous. that I know about. But we don't see it, we don't see our problem yet. So we don't have that kind of cure. I think it will come eventually. When we see it, when we see our problem as an over money and objects.

[41:55]

Anonymous. Collecting things. I think a lot of people, myself included, have experienced the breaking of an addiction, like the ones you're talking about, and accompanying exhilaration, and then they crash back into it shortly afterwards. I'm wondering if it isn't because there's another side to the addiction, which is what it fills up in you. And the fact that you can't live with that emptiness for very long without coming back to it or replacing it with something else. That, for me, is the problem. It's very good getting rid of it. Great, you know. It's like there's this big emptiness. And that's... We have to be able to live in that emptiness. Otherwise, you know, something takes its place and then that something, you know, is better than nothing.

[43:04]

But it's not as good as nothing. Because it's another thing. And to be able to live in nothing, or live with nothing, and find your composure and satisfaction. This is really a necessary step. And then from that nothing, you can start to move out. It's That's where the break comes, actually. It's like dying. You have to completely die.

[44:08]

It's like smoking. If you stop smoking, you're looking for something. But you have to just die completely. You can never smoke again. And there's nothing that really substitutes for it. If you have another one... I remember when I used to stop smoking. And a year later, I'd say, I don't have to smoke, I'll smoke this cigarette. But, you know, I know that I don't have to. But that was just my idea. But after I smoked that cigarette, then I started smoking again. So, after the last time I stopped, I said, I can never have another cigarette. There's no substitute. I just don't do it. And don't takes the place of do. Don't do it takes the place of do do it.

[45:13]

It's really simple. Instead of I'll do it, I don't do it. And don't do it is very satisfying. Don't do it has to be as satisfying as do do it. So the satisfaction comes from, instead of doing, don't. But it, you know, it doesn't always, it's hard to break a habit, hard to, especially something that's from a lifetime. Our karma, very strong, karmic fruit. Karma is the action and the fruit is the result, result of karma, which keeps perpetuating something very strong. I think there's a myth about, for me, about seeing where the desire is and then it's like my mind says, well there's a way then to make a clean place and I don't think that's true.

[46:15]

I think what's true is that it has a lot to do with non-attachment. If I can begin to get it that there's always going to be, my mind is always going to be running out desires and compulsions and obsessions And the more I attach, obsession is attachment, the more I attach to the problem and to the things that I'm hearing my mind say, the more there is a problem and a desire. And the less, the more I let it just kind of run by me, which is why sitting is so marvelous, the less the problem becomes, the less the desire becomes. But even in the midst of the reddest, the reddest passion to kind of be on fire with that and also not be attached to it. I mean, I think that's composure. Yeah. That's, I think so too. Not the clean slate. No. Not the myth of the clean slate. Yeah. I think so too. How does one just get up?

[47:19]

Just. That's the name of this poem. The best thing about this poem, the name is Up. No, no down, no anything, just up, completely up. Nothing, no opposite. So it's 4.5 when the alarm goes up for the first time, as opposed to the 10th time around 8. Well, I think, as you get older, I mean, after you've been practicing for 15 years, then you can wait. Then you can what? Then you can turn off the alarm and wait. And then get up. I'm not even kidding. Just get up. You know, just without a second thought. The way that I found that works is

[48:20]

Just before you go to sleep at night, you say to yourself, tomorrow morning when the alarm rings, I'm not going to lie in bed, I'm going to get up. And somehow that often carries through. Yeah, if you do that, you don't even have to have a clock. You can set your own timer, you know, at 5 o'clock or 4.30 or whatever. I will get up. And you can train yourself to do that. Can you train yourself also to have a clear mind when that alarm goes off, to be rational? Yeah, you can. You can say, no matter what I'm thinking about, I'll get up. No matter how confused my mind is, I'll get up. That's compulsion. We think, you know, we have to know our direction, we have to know what we're doing, so what if we don't? know enough to do what we say we'll do.

[49:30]

That really takes care of a lot of stuff. Mark? I heard in Africa that only children use alarm clocks and adults can get up on their own without alarm clocks. They just tell themselves when to get up. But like Meg said about suggestion, you know, I suggested to myself this weekend, I got up, made coffee, and I went back to sleep. When you grow up. I don't think getting up, you know, there's no magic to it. It doesn't get easier. It's the pits. You just get up. There's 10,000 reasons not to get up every morning and you just... Sometimes they went out. But it's not... There's no magic. There's no... I mean, everyone has their little tricks, but basically, it's not easy to do.

[50:36]

I don't find it easy. I remember Mel saying the same thing. That was a big revelation. After all these years, he still liked to sleep late. Maybe some people aren't like that. Would you say some more about not working in your own behalf, but working in others' behalf, as you were talking about societies fostering that, different societies fostering that, different attitudes, and would you say some more on a personal level? You mean like how we do it? Well, a Zen center is a... Well, let's look at it as a monastic life. It's everybody working together to support their life together. So, in a monastic situation, you actually have almost no what we would call personal life.

[51:44]

which is doing something for yourself. You just do something that... since you're not making any money and you're not collecting food for yourself, you're really not doing anything for yourself, there's a collective mind which takes care... it's a small society, so... everyone has their position within this one mind, right? And does whatever it is somebody cooks, somebody works on in the garage, or in the cars, or does book work, or works digging, or in the garden, or someplace, right? And so, this is a kind of ideal community where every, all activity is done for the benefit of the community, and the benefit comes back to each individual.

[52:54]

So, and the satisfaction is in the doing the activity itself and also in knowing that the activity is part of a larger network which is supporting everyone else. So it's kind of harmonious activity. And that harmonious activity is called satisfaction. But even in that activity you find lots of difficulties. Especially because you don't always do interesting things, what we would normally term interesting things. And that's part of the training, is that what you do is not interesting in an ordinary sense. But you have to find the interest within yourself, within your own activity.

[54:00]

ability to act. So it's not that you're drawing interest into yourself, but you're creating interest within yourself. So that whatever you do, when you actually learn how to do that, you don't discriminate between interesting activities and uninteresting activities. everything becomes equally important. And this is where we have our difficulty, biggest difficulty, is we pick out things and we say, these are the important things and these are the unimportant things. And our life is geared toward these important things and we're stumbling over the unimportant things on the way to the important things, not realizing that the unimportant things are right there at our feet, which are just as important, just as fulfilling. And so in our life together, In this lay community, you know, we all live in different places and have our lives in the world, reaching into the world.

[55:13]

But through our practice together, we hopefully stimulate some kind of activity like that. And when I read this poem, the first lines, I get up, I go to the bathroom, I eat cornflakes, those are all wonderful activities. But they look like preliminary activities. They're not preliminary. They're actual life itself. But they look like preliminary activities too. I need more money, I'm gonna get more money, da da da da. And life gets lost. Just stumbling over. the subtleties of our life, the subtle moment-to-moment richness of our life in all of our minute activities.

[56:19]

So Zen practice is the opposite of that, focusing completely on the most mundane activity. one activity after the next, not to walk in a dream, not like that, or in a slow motion or something, but to really take care of everything, every activity, with respect. And then satisfaction becomes constant, even though there's difficulty, even though there's confusion. you can appreciate the confusion, and you can appreciate the difficulty. And if you can appreciate the difficulty, there's no difficulty. So instead of taking out the good part and throwing away the bad part,

[57:31]

We include our whole life. Everything is included. Somebody says, I can't practice at home. Well, there's no other place to practice. I can't practice at work. There's no other place to practice. Because what I see in the money is I see that I've got to control what's going to happen to me tomorrow. But I wonder too, I'm so cautious with my own will. I would see people and say, why are you doing that? You can't just say... No. The best thing is to fix yourself. A physician fixed himself. And from your example,

[58:40]

you'll change society. Yeah. So what we need to work on is how to do that with ourself. If you say there's no other place to practice except in the present situation, what then is the usefulness or the desirability or existence of a monastery? that when you're there, then that's your present situation. Now, didn't he mean why create that... I know that's what he meant.

[59:54]

But I mean, wouldn't that... if practice is many more challenging, isn't it? in the so-called active world? Or difficult? Practice is challenging wherever you are. And we make various situations. We create various situations for various reasons. Monastery is one situation. Your family is one situation. Your work is one situation. You know, we can discriminate. This is the monastery, this is your family, this is your work. And we need to discriminate, but we also need to not discriminate.

[60:46]

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