I vow to chase the truth of those courageous words. Good morning. This morning I wanted to talk from a Berkeley Zen Center case number. Whatever the number is, we have a lot of cases here. We haven't put them in shape and recorded them and numbered them. But this is a Berkeley Zen Center case. And it happened during our practice period during the Shosan ceremony.

[01:03]

I knew there was going to be a Shosan ceremony and I really like to be prepared for things but I forgot when it was and so I assumed it would be in a reasonable time and I got here one morning at ten of six and I realized it was the Shosan ceremony. And fortunately there were some people that went ahead of me and Miriam sort of asked the question that was going through my mind. And so she gave me a version of what my question was, which was, how do you recognize your destiny? And Mel said, this is the second time I'd asked him this and the first time I'd forgotten what he'd said. So the second time I was determined to remember and he gave me a different answer.

[02:06]

But he said that you know where you've come from and you know where you are so your destiny is where you go. But that didn't seem quite right to me because I'm not all that sure of where I am or where I was. So, try it again. And he came up with the maze. That life is like a maze. And that there are all the openings. But most of the openings in the maze are dead ends. So, destiny is the opening in the maze that takes you all the way through. And that was getting better. But then how do you know which opening?

[03:10]

So I asked that and he said, consistency. And at that point I felt answered and began to wonder about what consistency is. So ever since then I've been thinking about destiny and how it is that we follow our path and how it is that we identify our path and how it is that we follow it. And what consistency is. So of course we always have the model of Zazen that's at the center when we are wondering about rather large things like the path or destiny. We always have the concrete practice of Zazen to return to for some kind of pointer.

[04:17]

And Zazen is a very consistent practice. Do it over and over. and we try to be as open and engaged as we can in Zazen so that we are just accepting everything that comes and are completely engaged with everything that comes. And when we're in that position there's no Question. We know what to do. But then we get off our cushions. I was very moved by a story I read, not a story, but an account I read in the New Yorker four or five weeks ago by Oliver Sacks. Maybe some of you saw it.

[05:21]

And the name of it is To See and Not to See. And it is about a man named Virgil who grew up on a farm in Iowa. And when he was three, had some very extremely severe illnesses, polio and meningitis and something else, and almost died, was in a coma for some time. but did recover, but when he recovered, he seemed kind of slow, his mother said, and not quite there. But he did okay, until people noticed that his eyesight wasn't good. And in fact, by the time he was seven, he was essentially blind, as a result of these illnesses. So he grew up as a blind child,

[06:22]

and learned braille and learned how to walk with a cane. And then when he was a young man, when he was 20, he decided that he would have an independent life and he moved to Kansas, I think, to some small town. And he trained as a masseur and got a job at the local YMCA. had an apartment nearby. And people felt that he did good work. He enjoyed his work. His tactile sense was very keen. He had a pretty good life. He enjoyed listening to sports. He had a good memory for baseball stats, that sort of thing. And he even went out with some women. And his life went on this way. And as the years went by, he fell more and more into quite a comfortable bachelorhood existence.

[07:31]

Until he was 50. And he met again a woman that he dated much earlier. and she had been widowed, and they still felt some affection for each other, and they decided that in a spirit mainly of companionship, they would get married. And this was quite a step, but it seemed the right one. Her name was Amy. So as Amy got to look more and more at Virgil, she began to feel that he was kind of stuck, that actually he could have more space in the world, and he could push himself some more. And above all, why wouldn't he have an operation which might restore his sight? After all, there was nothing to lose, he was blind. So she began to push these things,

[08:35]

His mother wasn't so keen on the operation, but after a while they decided to have it. Isn't everyone entitled to their sight if they can have it? So he was operated on. There were cataracts, very severe cataracts. He was operated on. And then comes the moment of truth. when, after a certain period of recuperation, the surgeon takes off the bandages. When the bandages were removed, he heard a voice coming from in front of him and to one side. He turned to the source of the sound and he saw a blur. He realized this must be a face. He seemed to think that he would not have known that this was a face if he had not previously heard the voice and known that voices came from faces.

[09:37]

The rest of us, and now I'm going to read a little bit of Oliver Sacks' commentary. The rest of us, born sighted, can scarcely imagine such confusion. For we, born with a full complement of senses and correlating these one with the other, create a sight world from the start, a world of visual objects and concepts and meanings. When we open our eyes each morning, it is upon a world we have spent a lifetime learning to see. We are not given the world, we make our world through incessant experience, categorization, memory, reconnection. But when Virgil opened his eye after being blind for 45 years, having had little more than an infant's visual experience, and this long forgotten, there were no visual memories to support a perception. There was no world of experience. and meaning awaiting him. He saw, but what he saw had no coherence.

[10:41]

His retina and optic nerve were active, transmitting impulses, but his brain could make no sense of them. He was, as neurologists say, agnostic. He began a long struggle. Virgil began a long struggle to move from the world of a blind man to a sighted man. And it was enormously difficult. Just read a couple of things. Through these first weeks after surgery, I had no appreciation of depth or distance. Streetlights were luminous stains stuck to the window panes, and corridors of the hospital were black holes. When I crossed the road, the traffic terrified me, even when I was accompanied. I am very insecure while walking.

[11:44]

Indeed, I am more afraid now than before the operation. Because before the operation he'd had the heightened sense of touch and the assurance of the cane, and now he'd lost those. Also, the whole orientation to time and place With the blind, the sense of being in a place is less pronounced. Space is reduced to one's own body, and the position of the body is known not by the objects that have been passed, but by how long it has been in motion. Position is measured by time. For the blind people, people are not there unless they speak. People are in motion. They are temporal, they come and go. They come out of nothing and they disappear.

[12:44]

So, it was very hard for him to walk. It was very hard for him to be out. It was almost impossible for him to read. He couldn't even, have I marked it? He couldn't even count his five fingers very well, because it would seem that a finger, after it had been counted, would disappear. It was confusion with time and space. Nothing, everything was just slipping out. It's a kind of, um, quintessential nightmare, I think, that we all are being wholly lost. that we all can sense. And Oliver Sacks says that indeed the literature corroborates Virgil's despair, that for anybody who has been blind decades, this discontinuity between not seeing and seeing is enormously overwhelming.

[14:02]

The work of building up the receptive apparatus is so hard that people do get depressed. Other people have gotten depressed, and other people have let go of life, and that was what happened essentially to Virgil. that he'd always been on the heavy side and during this time of marriage and the sight or his eyes being operated on, returning, he ate more and more and became very obese and then an old kind of latent illness that he'd had revived and he was reduced to a very helpless and invalid state next door to death. So, that's kind of a poignant story about getting out of one's own element.

[15:17]

You know, in the Genjo Koan, there's a line, if a fish leaves the water, that fish dies at once. If a bird leaves the air, the bird dies. that we have a place that we've learned in the world and we've learned that place out of a long process with it, a long interaction where we have built our perception, we have matched our perception to the response that we're getting from the world and when that gets interrupted it is one of the most alarming experiences we can have. So this question of destiny, how do we move?

[16:20]

Virgil in a certain way, moved too far. He moved out of his element. He took on more than he can handle. And most of us in our lives have had periods where we felt, situations where we felt overwhelmed, lost, more than we can handle, more than we can process. We have that. We know what that's about. And then, of course, the other aspect is going for too much, not going for enough, holding back, not meeting experience as it comes fully, but flinching. And we do that all the time.

[17:23]

when we don't really, when we don't really acknowledge what our fears are, don't fully acknowledge what our longings are, what our griefs are, even what our joy is, and begin to habituate ourselves to some kind of compromise. where the solution seems safe and constant, seems in accordance with what other people are doing, but yet, but yet, it's not quite enough, and we have that little edge restlessness or grief or desire that keeps scratching. I know a man and a woman who live up at Garberville.

[18:32]

They live at the end of a dirt road, a very long dirt road. It takes an hour to drive the dirt road from Garberville. And they had a vision of having a very beautiful farm in this extremely remote place. And they began to live together and moved out to this farm in a tent. And year by year they built the place up to be really very, very beautiful. And then they had more plans for what could be done with it, how it could be more integrated into the world. And along the way, they had tried to have a child, but couldn't. And so they were sorry about it, but after a while they dropped the idea. And they really enacted this vision, and were launched in the next step of how to bring the world in,

[19:36]

when the wife gets pregnant. And their whole blueprint that they had worked so carefully seemed like it was just not going to work. This place is not a good place to have a baby, to raise children, and so on. And at that point, the man had a dream. He dreamed that he was standing next to a river that was flowing very fast, a white river. Very fast, very cold. And he knew that as it went past him, it dropped into a very precipitous waterfall. And so he stood there and he saw a boat of people, well-dressed, content, happy people, go down the river. It went out of sight. He stood there. And then he watched and a raft of kind of more scraggly looking people passed, disappeared, and he stood there.

[20:41]

And then there were just some people, no raft, just being carried down the stream, and he stood there. Then he realized he had to jump into the stream. not knowing where it went. You just had to jump in. And from time to time, that's what we know. And from time to time, that's what we have to do. But yet, even when we jump into the stream, the consistency can still be there. Some time ago, a Chinese teacher that Ron invited here, whose name was?

[21:45]

Master Xing Yin. Master Xing Yin came, and someone asked him, what is the most important thing we can do in our practice? And Master Xinyan said, do the same thing over and over and over again. He said, regulate your life. Well? That's what he meant though. Oh, that's what he meant, regulate his life. Did he say do the same thing over and over again? By way of explanation. Yes, I see. I see. Regulate your life. And what does that mean? It means doing the same thing over and over again. Yeah. And of course that is what we do in Sazen. We do the same thing over and over again. And so when we are doing the same thing over and over and over again, we really know what's going on.

[22:52]

And we really know what's going on. And when the moment comes to jump into the stream, we can identify that moment. Suzuki Roshi has two chapters on this topic, and one was constancy, and the other was repetition. But the repetition seemed a little bit more what I've been thinking about. And in the chapter about repetition, he starts off talking about Buddha's life and how when Buddha first got the call to meet his destiny, to explore what enlightenment meant, he thought that it was the more traditional ascetic idealistic route of taming the senses and he tried that and someone just asked me today or yesterday what that statue of the extremely skinny man was doing on the community room bookshelf right next to the Avalokiteshvara and that poor guy is the emaciated Buddha

[24:13]

But he understood that that wasn't the way. And then he just opened himself. And that's what this chapter about repetition is about. Buddha's way was quite different. At first he studied the Hindu practice of his time and area, and he practiced asceticism. But Buddha was not interested in the elements comprising human beings, nor in metaphysical theories of existence. He was more concerned about how he existed in this moment. That was his point. Bread is made from flour. How flour becomes bread when put in the oven was for Buddha the most important thing. How we become enlightened was his main interest. The enlightened person is some perfect desirable character for himself and for others.

[25:18]

Buddha wanted to find out how human beings develop this ideal character, how various sages in the past became sages, in order to find out how dough became perfect bread He made it over and over again until he became quite successful. This was his practice. But we may find it is not so interesting to cook the same thing over and over every day. It's rather tedious, you may say. If you lose the spirit of repetition, it will become quite difficult. But it will be not difficult if you are full of vitality and strength. Anyway, you cannot keep still. We have to do something. So if you do something, you should be very observant and careful and alert. Our way is to put the dough in the oven and watch it carefully. Once you know how the dough becomes bread, you will understand enlightenment.

[26:23]

So how this physical body becomes a sage is our main interest. We are not so concerned about what flour is, or what dough is, or what a sage is. A sage is a sage. Metaphysical explanations of human nature are not the point. So the kind of practice we stress thus cannot become too idealistic. If an artist becomes too idealistic he will commit suicide because between his ideal and his actual ability there is a great gap. That's really the story of Virgil in some ways. Because there is no bridge long enough to go across the gap he will begin to despair. That is the usual spiritual way. But our spiritual way is not so idealistic. In some sense we should be idealistic. At least we should be interested in making bread which looks good and tastes good. Actual practice is repeating over and over again until you find out how to become bread.

[27:27]

There is no secret in our way. Just to practice Zazen and put ourselves into the oven is our way. So, somehow we have to be very alert and very careful and very consistent and very watchful about this process that is going on. Because this process of making the dough and putting the dough into the oven is all that we are. We're nothing more than this process, this limited process. And so, our destiny, our finding our way, our psychological development, are all just ways of describing this process.

[28:38]

And in one way, it's very trustworthy. Life, without exception, puts us into situations where we can either meet it or turn aside. We have these, in psychology, these developmental guidelines or developmental points in our lives where we can fall into shame, into guilt, or be autonomous or where we can lose ourselves or find our identity or where we can take care of our own gardens or generate our energy into the world. Many others. And when we meet these developmental tasks, hold on, we are on our path.

[29:44]

And when we fail them, wholly or even just a little, we're a little bit tilted. And so our practice is to notice when we're tilted and come back. even if our life seems to have really fallen into a kind of cul-de-sac, if when we are engaged in practice we know that there's always a possibility of coming back. So trusting the process, not trusting the blueprint or trusting what seems as if we ought to have, what we have a right to, but just putting the bread in the oven again and again. I'd like to end with one more story and then perhaps we could have a discussion about how this process goes.

[30:47]

There's a man at the AIDS Center, the two men that I really enjoy talking to, named David and Jay. Both of them have had been HIV positive for a long time. and had AIDS for more than 10 years, which is unlikely. They're beating the odds. They both are nurses and they both are inveterate drug users. They go up and they go down. They live their lives. They were lovers years ago and then sort of lost track of each other and now are lovers again because all their peers have died off. And so they are, they share a very nice apartment, a deco, a real Oakland art deco apartment that's been solidly together and they will live out their last days together.

[32:02]

Jay's mother was a drug user and alcoholic and he was always a drug user and alcoholic. And he always had some sense that his life was kind of just a flash of lightning. You know, that he had this life and there had been lives before and lives afterwards. He said even as a boy he took this very kind of Asian view of what life is. Very fleeting kind of phenomenon. And he was also sure, somehow, that in past lives, again and again, he'd been a monk in a cave. been a very austere, ascetic person. And that his job in this life was to live out every sensuous, sensual thought that he could possibly have. And he had, in fact, devoted his life to this destiny. And he is

[33:04]

Appreciative, content, wanting no other, wanting nothing else. He was hospitalized eight or nine years ago, was at death's door, and when he was lying in bed, Tina Turner came onto the TV screen. Tina Turner had always been his idol, and he had imagined that by that time in life, Tina Turner would be an old lady, but there she was, full-blooded on the TV screen. And she was talking about her Soka Gakkai practice, her chanting practice. She chants, And so he thought, when he turned off the TV, well, she's my idol, I'll try the practice. And by the time he chanted Namu Myoho Renge Kyo three times, it clicked, and he realized, whoops, I've been here, this is where I am, this is who I am.

[34:26]

Well, he didn't give up his drug, he didn't give up his lifestyle. But he did adopt the practice, and the two of them balanced each other nicely, because when he'd fallen into complete excess, he could chant and restore himself. So that's what he does, and he sort of says, he says, well, I could chant more, but I chant enough, and whenever I chant, I feel wonderful. So... That reminded me of the other chapter in Suzuki Roshi about constancy. Here is a man who really has been constant in his life. People who know the state of emptiness will always be able to dissolve their problems with constancy. And in a certain way, Jay knows emptiness.

[35:28]

He knows it in his bones. And he has accepted it in a very deep way. He's accepted his destiny. That's pretty hard to do. It's pretty hard for any of us to do, to accept our destiny. And when we do, the people around us are very grateful. So, that's all I have to say, and good, I hope we can have some. Yes? Well, I want to ask you about Tina Turner. I actually, I just saw the movie last night, What's Love Got to Do With It, about her life, and it seems like she started, I appreciate the perspectives on what is our destiny, what is each one of our destinies, and it just makes me think of something I read recently, and I don't mean to use a loaded word, but someone was saying that they felt everyone's destiny was simply to become holy.

[36:51]

Yeah, yeah, I think just that, that we can become whole, W-H-O-L-E, that is without having to make too much of it, H-O-L-Y, and we sense that pretty clearly. And that sense really does give us our faith in our process. It gives us our faith in the way. That our ability and practice really helps us just to wait. Isn't in a sense just practice our destiny? I remember Philip Campbell saying Well, I don't know. You know, one can say, and this is a very fruitful question, you can say that Virgil's life was a failure.

[38:10]

But on the other hand, you know, we judge, if we say it was a failure, that he missed something, that's... one way of looking at it, but then we can't judge. We don't know what all, what his life means in the big, in the big stew that's going round and round. We don't know the meaning of his life. And, in fact, in the big pot that's turning round and round, you know, everything's okay as it is. So, we want to work very hard and achieve wholeness in our destiny. It's a very big context to that. So, our destiny is practice. I don't know. I mean, I like Jay's... You couldn't say that Jay is... Well, you could and you couldn't say that he is in a situation of practice.

[39:20]

We say that practice is the... our decision to live by intention rather than desire. If we say that that's practice, one could say that Jay made, Jay's intention was to lead a very sensual life. I don't know, I'm just going on and on. Charlie? is that destiny not only involves the entry into the maze, but all of the blind, all of the root within the maze.

[40:25]

Oh, but that ends too. So, thinking along those lines, I would ask you whether big destiny includes small destiny. I was so glad I wasn't shoe-so the other night. And that feels like a question that the shoe-so could answer. It was sad for me. And so in a way I feel like he had actually worked out his destiny and under force of

[42:06]

he had a genius for, you know, just feeling people's bodies. I mean, I don't know that he was a genius massage person, but that's how he understood people. And once he saw that he couldn't understand people anymore, it was extremely painful. So you can... I mean, in a sense, yeah. It's sad.

[43:26]

Well, I wonder. I mean, you certainly can end up not being fulfilled. Yeah. And is that the same as missing the big destiny? Well, it's a good question. Yeah. Yeah. Susan? I just wanted to make a comment about, I wasn't there, but this business of the maze and the dead ends. And I think the dead ends are actually extremely useful. kind of consider them places to do research. And I don't like to cut off any part of myself, you know, the part that's progressing or maybe the part that's taking three steps back. I don't like to get too perfectionistic in my practice. And I was thinking a long time ago before I came here, I spent a year in bed with real severe depression. And basically all I did was get out of bed to drink.

[44:29]

And I used to think that that was a real negative time in my life. But looking back on it recently, I see that there was actually a lot going on that was really important. And you know, we can't really see a lot of this stuff in in terms of our own perspective is very limited. So I think it's really important to not judge it too much, because there's always a larger perspective. What Virgil's life meant, or whatever. And it may take several lifetimes to work this stuff out. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I think that the dead ends are like, we go to the dead ends and it's like putting the bread in the oven. It's another way of testing ourselves and finding out what is going on.

[45:30]

That's very important. Sue? There's some things we can choose in our lives and we have a say in how our life goes and then life comes along and tells us what we're going to do and we don't have any say about it. And I think that regulating our life is a place where we can have some say and then there's the time when we have to jump in the river and we don't have any say.

[46:34]

And I don't know that it's any less terrifying for having some regulation. Right. Judy? is your destiny, nothing in the world will keep you from that. Did he say that? Yeah, and that was really powerful for me. For many reasons, but it just came back into my mind. Well, you know, I asked also, there was one more question, maybe that was the first time that it came up during discussion, when I didn't seem But the second time I asked, is destiny irresistible? And he said, sometimes there are surprises. Yeah, well, it's all a wonderful kind of spooky field.

[47:36]

You said, you were talking about how, in the case of Virgil, he took a step out of his element, which ended up being unfortunate. On the other hand, you said, a problem can be a fear of moving toward, or a fear of facing, a fear of meeting life. And you portrayed these as sort of like opposite sides of a coin, or opposite ends of a coin. the spectrum. And I, for myself, I often struggle with the question of which is which. Sometimes I feel very much overwhelmed. Sometimes I feel perhaps I've gone beyond my element. And other times I feel I'm simply too timid and just afraid to choose. And I can't tell which is so. Yeah. Well, that's why we are fortunate to have practice because practice enables us just to sit there with that edge.

[48:52]

Just to sit there and just to keep that edge. Just to keep putting the dough in the oven again and again and again until there's some settlement. But if you don't keep the edge, if you fall into a solution that's too quick, then then you've really fallen. But if you can just sit with the question, even if it's not a question that you can understand terribly well, but just sit with the sense and the feeling of the connection, eventually the answer will emerge. Do you know that by experience? Yes, I absolutely know that by experience. Yeah. And for me it always involves going much slower than I thought I should go. Michael? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[50:38]

It's not sufficient. Yeah, yeah. Thank you.

[50:44]

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