Morning. So we're very happy this morning to have our speaker, long time student here and senior student Richard Haley. Richard is has been practicing here since 1973. And he's been Chutes overhead student, a member of the senior student group and has received great recognition from Sojin Roshi. He is a father, a husband, and now becoming an increasingly accomplished woodworker. He's led numerous groups here and regularly has a Dharma group that meets weekly. Twice a month. So anyway, we look forward to hearing what you have to share with us.

[01:01]

Thank you, Alan. Good morning. Fine morning. Sunny and it's going to get up to 80 degrees or something even hotter today. So enjoy it while it lasts. So I'm here because I love Zazen and Zazen loves me. And I'm going to talk about how Zazen gives us the love and the comfort and the security to face very difficult parts of ourselves. And those parts that we've been avoiding for much of our lives. The hateful parts, the scary, lonely parts. And I think this morning we had the bodhisattva ceremony where we talk about our tangled and twisted karma. And how do we get to know that tangled and twisted karma is some of the benefits of Zazen.

[02:07]

As you heard, I lead a Dharma group here at the Zen Center on Monday evenings, every other Monday evening or thereabouts. And we are reading and chewing on a book called Transformation at the Base by Thich Nhat Hanh. It's a book about consciousness, about the Buddhist view of consciousness. And some of you may not know, but these consciousnesses, there are eight of them. And the first five are our sense consciousnesses, our eyes, smell, touch, and so on. The sixth is the mind consciousness. The seventh is manas, or sometimes thought of as our ego. And the eighth is the store consciousness, storehouse consciousness. And these consciousnesses can see the world accurately or inaccurately. The five sense consciousnesses can see what is really there or not.

[03:12]

As a student artist, I can tell you that it's really hard to see what's really there. Because we have this preconceived idea of, let's say, what a flower is. I was drawing a blackberry, an unripe blackberry. And I think of a blackberry as got these tiny little round individual seed pods, as it were, that come together and make the entire berry. But when you really look at it, those little guys are not round. They're kind of like connected straight lines and little curves here and there and that sort of thing. So if you don't really look at it, you're not seeing what's there. The sixth consciousness, the mind consciousness, has the opportunity to both see things truly or not. But when you get to the seventh, the manas, or the ego, and to the eighth, the store consciousness,

[04:17]

then you're hopeless. What comes up from there is really going to be a false image. A good example of that would be, if I say to you, bomb blonde shell, what do you see? Something comes up. Like a cartoon. A cartoon, yeah. Or a big, huge bomb that's painted white or creamy color, blonde color. Or maybe Marilyn Monroe or something like that. But the idea is that that image, whatever it is, is an image that's coming from your mind. It's not an image of what it is I'm saying. And the manas, which basically borrows all of its ideas and images from the store conscious, has got the same problem. It's dependent on what's already there in the mind. And whatever was already there in the mind is only a model of what's going on in the actual world.

[05:19]

As we know from blackberries. Okay, so that means we're kind of doomed in a sense. We're really pre-programmed to be prejudiced, to see things from the viewpoint of the way we see them, the way we think we see them, and not the way they really are. Years ago, I was at a conference, and I was listening to this talk. And the speaker said something. And I thought he said one thing, and I checked with a friend of mine, and actually the speaker said the total opposite of what it is I thought he said. It was amazing. At some point or other, I just tuned out of what the speaker was saying, and I replaced it with what I wanted to hear in my mind. Totally, totally amazing. Kind of scary, too, when you think about it. So another example, an idea.

[06:19]

You know, we're told that we should walk in another person's shoes for a mile. Moccasin shoes, tennis shoes, whatever, for a mile. And that's okay, because it may give you their viewpoint. But even so, you're still not going to get the accurate viewpoint. You're going to get their viewpoint. You're going to have your viewpoint. And there's going to be lots of other viewpoints going on there. Also affecting us. So the eighth conscious is the store conscious, and that's because it stores what Thich Nhat Hanh calls seeds. Seeds, I'll read to you what seeds are out of the book. Thich Nhat Hanh starts this book with 50 verses that are translated, I think, from one of Vietnam's great Zen teachers of historical time. And this is translated from that. I'm going to read you the first four of the 50, talking about store consciousness.

[07:23]

Mind is a field in which every kind of seed is sown. The mind field can also be called all the seeds. In us are infinite variety of seeds. Seeds of samsara, nirvana, delusion, and enlightenment. Seeds of suffering and happiness. Seeds of perception, names, and words. Seeds that manifest as body and mind, as realms of being, stages and worlds. All are stored in our consciousness. That's why it's called store. Some seeds are innate, handed down by our ancestors. Some are sown while we were still in the womb. Others were sown while we were children. I would go on to say, and others are being sown as we speak, right now. As adults, we're constantly, things are being planted in our store consciousness. The seeds have an interesting analogy of the way he describes them, because then he goes on to talk about there are wholesome seeds and unwholesome seeds.

[08:26]

A good example of a seed is anger. You're being cut off by the, you're driving in traffic and you're cut off by someone and you get angry. There's a seed of anger that's sitting in you and it arises. So you have the opportunity now of doing several things, but one of them you can do is you can water that seed and let it flourish in you and exacerbate the anger, keep it going. Continue raging at the person who cuts you off. Or you can put a hot lamp on that seed, dry it out, and let it recede back into the store conscious. It's not going to go away. It's going to recede back into the store conscious. You might do that by saying, well, the guy's in a hurry, or, well, this has happened to me lots of times before, and if I get angry, it's just going to make me feel bad. So I'm not going to do that sort of thing. And there's lots of ways to handle these watering processes that are going on.

[09:31]

That's another kind of seed. Attraction, in my case as a man, I'm attracted to a certain kind of woman. And if you want to know who that woman is, you just have to look at pictures of my wife when she was 20 years old, and you'll see that's the person. And each of us has attractants. I'm sure that at our ages, we're probably pretty familiar with the kind of person that we're attracted to and the kind of person that we're not attracted to. So there's another seed, something going on that's there that arises. I heard this story a few weeks ago about some studies that they were doing with infants, children. They had a bowl of cereal, one kind of bowl of cereal here, and one bowl and another bowl of cereal over there, and they had infants sitting there. And then they had a puppet. And they had a puppet that had a big smiley face and a puppet that had a frown and wasn't so happy. And they got this baby to associate the happy puppet with the one kind of cereal

[10:34]

and the sad puppet with the other kind of cereal. And later on, they came back, and that baby preferred the cereal that was associated with the happy puppet. This is within months of the child's birth, already forming preferences, already establishing pleasure and pain, suffering, and ideas about how the world really is. So this stuff goes back a long, long way from almost the very beginning. Probably in our womb. I know my daughter, my first daughter was five months. My wife was five months pregnant with my daughter, and we went to a rock concert in New York City. And my wife said, she was just rolling in rock. All that loud music. And she still likes loud music. So, yeah. So they're there. And we're stuck with them.

[11:35]

That's just our human condition. We are just, here we are. We're just stuck with them. So I asked Merrill, the surgeon, a few months ago about how we handle these seeds. They come up. And he said, a thought comes up, and it's an unwholesome thought. And I said, how do you handle that? And he says, well, think about something else. Take your mind and go somewhere else with it. Kind of like what I was talking about with the anger. Just take it somewhere else and do something with it. So I've been practicing that myself. When I recognize that an unwholesome thought, idea, feeling comes up, I say, well, this is not what I want to do. This is not what I want to think about. And very often I just stop thinking about it.

[12:39]

And I find that pretty good. But it does require mindfulness. And Thich Nhat Hanh goes on to talk, When mindfulness is practiced, our mind consciousness has the capacity to be wholesome. In moments of forgetfulness, it has the capacity to be unwholesome. And it can also be indeterminate, either wholesome or unwholesome. So, mindfulness now is pretty important. And that's where we come to Zazen, of course, is mindfulness. Suzuki Roshi has some comments about mindfulness. And I'm reading out of the Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, page 115 in my old copy. I think it's on some other page in the newer copies that we have. It's a chapter out of a section entitled, Readiness, Mindfulness. The importance of things in our understanding is to have a smooth, free-thinking way of observing. We have to think and to observe things without stagnation.

[13:43]

We should accept things as they are without difficulty. Our minds should be soft and open enough to understand things as they are. That sentence really captured me when I was reading it. Our minds should be soft and open enough to understand things as they are. So, soft Zazen is thinking. Now, what is soft Zazen? That's interesting. He goes on to say, When our thinking is soft, it is called imperturbable thinking, the kind of thinking that is always stable. It is called mindfulness. Thinking, which is divided in many ways, is not true thinking. Concentration should be present in our thinking. This is mindfulness. Whether you have an object or not, your mind should be stable and your mind should not be divided. This is Zazen. So, I ask myself the question, What is soft Zazen?

[14:45]

Dogen Zenji, in his essay on the rules for Zazen, Zazen-ji, Zazen is not learning to do concentration. It is the dharmagate of great ease and joy. It is undefiled practice enlightenment. So, now we have ease and joy Zazen. We have soft Zazen and ease and joy Zazen. It is great. So, I am wondering what these are and how we go about doing them. I am often taught, and I know there is a woman who has been practicing here for many years, Rebecca Mayeno, who talks about Zazen as mother. We settle into Zazen and we breathe and we sit in our posture and we just go up and down with our breathing,

[15:51]

in and out with our breathing, and pretty soon we experience some of this joy and ease that Dogen is talking about and some of the softness, just letting go of those things which are grabbing hold of us. When I used to work as a computer programmer, I would spend eight hours a day really concentrating on computer programs or meetings with people or various other issues going on in my life. I would come to Zazen in the evening and my brain would still be programming. It is amazing how it just kept programming. It just kept thinking about all those issues and things like that that were going on. And as I settled into the Zazen, pretty soon that programming activity and those thinking and the worrying about what was going on

[16:52]

and that sort of thing would start falling away and I could just let go of it. So I think that is some of the softness and the ease and joy of what they are talking about here. As I wrote here, there is a deep understanding of giving up needing things and wanting things and honors and relationships, giving that up and replacing it with love for our self, for our self-respect. Not a love for our ego or our aggrandizement, but for the self that is even deeper in our persons. Some people would call that Buddha nature, our love for our true nature, for our true self. When we can sit Zazen, that can kind of come up and we can start trusting that in our lives

[18:00]

and when something scary comes up, something that we wanted to avoid for a long time because it puts us in a bad light, that thing that I did two years ago to that person, that was a terrible thing to do. So I have been avoiding that thought for two years because you know that you don't want to think it because you don't want to see yourself as being a bad person. But when you have this love of self, understanding that there really is something there that is true and wonderful, you can start facing that bad behavior and maybe making amends and maybe not, depending upon where it goes. But at least you can actually see it and that's really good. We become honest with ourselves

[19:09]

and this releases a lot of energy. When you have to spend a lot of time thinking, moving yourself or not allowing yourself to think things, it takes a lot of energy to do that. A lot of energy avoiding stuff that's going on in your mind. But when you can start facing that and start seeing it, then that releases a whole lot of energy. Many of you have witnessed that as an example in the past. A lot of energy that we previously used to keep ourselves safe and hidden, and this also increases our compassion for other people. Not only does it free ourselves, but it also frees other people around us. They see that we're becoming honest and they see that we're not going to lash out

[20:12]

and strike back at them for maybe past transgressions, make them look foolish. There's no need for that because the energy of making someone look foolish comes from wanting to boost yourself up. But if you have loved yourself, you have identified this self that loves you and that you love, you don't need to do that anymore. Okay, so you can see that I love Sazen, and Sazen loves me in that sense. I also want to talk a little bit about Sazen as a rehearsal for death. This came up in a Dharma group, actually, a conversation that one of the members of the Dharma group had a friend's child die, actually die within hours of being born.

[21:15]

It was a very sad situation, and so we started talking about death and what it was and all that, and talking about Sazen as, well, I think of it as maybe not death, but rehearsal for death is what it was down here. I'm not sure that it's even rehearsal for death. What I wrote is, we can let go of needing to have, to claim, and can let go of much, perhaps everything. Okay, so when we're sitting Sazen, and these thoughts and feelings and needs for love, needs for having stuff, needs for food, there's a lot of needs that are arising in us as we sit Sazen. As we sit Sazen, those needs start falling away. So when all those needs start falling away, then what's left is kind of a, well, the true self,

[22:15]

Buddha mind, Buddha energy, Buddha nature, flavor of things, that doesn't ask for anything, doesn't, doesn't require us to perform or behave or act or whatever, which is really nice, very comfortable. And I had a thought, which just went away. The, the, so, when I think of death, of course I think of the cessation of things, but, you know, there's a lot of different ideas about death and what it is. People, cultures have created ideas about death and life after death and what it will entail. Christian, I guess, has their view,

[23:17]

and some schools of Buddhism have views about it. When I start hearing about those different views, frankly, my mind goes kind of blank. I get kind of gaga, and I can't really follow what people, the logic that people are using. So I don't really understand all the different issues that the various cultures and schools and whatnot and thoughts have about death. But I've often thought that maybe, maybe, what's it, let's say Aristotle, Socrates talked about death. Well, maybe it's just like going to sleep. Maybe, and if it is kind of like going to sleep, then there's sort of a, there's a sort of a sensation of it. And Zazen, in a sense, is not going to sleep, certainly, although I've done plenty of sleeping in Zazen. But there's kind of an ending of all desires and all needs.

[24:20]

And so the fear of it, the fear of dying, the fear of cessation, I've experienced. I was sitting Zazen, actually, down way over there in the corner, during one Sashim, many years ago. Actually, Blanche Hartman was leading the Sashim here, back, must have been in the early, mid-80s. And so the last period of the five days, and I was breathing, and I just kept, my breath just kept exhaling and exhaling. And suddenly I got very scared. Because I said, what if I never take another breath? What if I never inhale from this exhale? Scared me. And so I, of course, took a breath. But it did scare me. It's like, oh, I'm going to die.

[25:22]

And later on, I was sitting at home, and the same thing happened to me. Except there my thought was, okay, I'll just go ahead and die. And then I took another breath, and there it was. So something happened there. Of course, I'm still afraid to die. You know, we come from a long line, a very long line of survivors. Watching a program on Darwin last night, and way back when we were fishies, and even earlier, every one of our ancestors was someone, or some entity who survived. And we've inherited all that energy to survive. And I know that that's part of our karma, part of our human condition that we, and of course every other animal's condition too, but as humans, we really suffer for it

[26:24]

because we want to avoid death and run away from it. And we associate so many things with death. For example, being insulted by someone. Not very nice, not very pretty, but I've always seen that as kind of a reason we don't like it is because the fact that we're going to, someone insulting us means they don't like us, which increases our chance of dying. We're not going to be part of the community. We're not going to be safe. So we're afraid of that. So much of our life is run by the fear of death, our desire to acquire stuff, right? Money, things like that. It kind of comes back to that energy that we have as human beings, as living human beings that we inherited, that's true, that we can't deny that we want to live. Period. There's no doubt about it whatsoever. And sometimes we're willing to sacrifice other people for our desire to live. Okay.

[27:26]

So I'm going to close by giving you a warning. And that is that I've talked a lot about the benefits of Zazen and how wonderful it is. And so you can sit there and say, okay, I'm going to go sit in Zazen and I'm going to fall in love, or I'm going to go sit in Zazen and I'm going to learn how not to be afraid of death, or I'm going to go try to do something in Zazen. And we've been warned by our teachers for many, many eons that that's not the thing we should be doing, shouldn't be trying. There's a story about a Zen teacher who sees a student, I guess a very accomplished student, sitting in Zazen and the teacher goes over and says, what are you doing? And the student says, well, I'm trying to become Buddha. And the teacher says, oh. And he goes away and comes back with a tile that had just come out of the kiln and he starts polishing it. And the student says, curious, what are you doing?

[28:32]

The teacher says, well, I'm polishing this tile to make a mirror out of it. And the student said, well, you can't make a mirror out of a tile. And the teacher said, well, you can't become a Buddha by sitting Zazen. So that's an interesting story. You can't get love by sitting Zazen. You can't get learning about death by sitting Zazen. You can't get something by sitting Zazen. Except maybe these that don't work quite as well as they used to. So I talk about all this good stuff about what Zazen is, and I'm just saying, no, wait a minute. Don't sit down and say, okay, I'm going to get this stuff that he's been talking about because it ain't going to work for you. The way I thought about this and what I like to do is to say, okay, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to do what my teachers have told me to do when it comes to Zazen, which is basically sit up straight, as straight as I can,

[29:35]

and concentrate on my breathing. Let my breath fall down into my hara. And when my thoughts spray away from just following my breaths or counting my breaths or whatever, then when I remember that I realize that that's what's happening, then I come back to that counting, that following of breaths, and just being there. And that is enough to do Zazen. And all this other stuff I've talked about, well, let's see. I know Mel's talked about he can't promise this stuff, so I suppose I shouldn't say I can promise it. But since I've been practicing since 1973, I have found that sometimes it happens, sometimes. And quite early, I think about the third or fourth time I said Zazen, I was having a real conflict with my sister. And suddenly I realized that that just all melted away.

[30:38]

It just wasn't there anymore. I said, how come it wasn't there? So that was really nice. That was really good. Well, that's all I have. I would like to have some questions. I'd love to. I will dialogue and discuss. Anybody have a question? Something stuck in my mind when you said you can't get love with Zazen. And I assume you're talking about other people loving you. Are you talking about you loving other people? I'm curious because I think that sometimes sitting in Zazen deepens my sense of compassion. And I think the idea that I can't go sit Zazen seeking that feeling of compassion, but I'm wondering if I can fully experience the compassion without sitting.

[31:44]

I certainly encourage you to continue sitting, if that's what you're debating. I don't think it is. I encourage you to continue sitting. But I don't think that's going to strike. I didn't think you were thinking about going on strike. But I think what you're saying is exactly what I'm saying. I think you're echoing basically that Zazen allows that compassion to arise. And the more Zazen, the more allowance there is. If you seek it, you won't get it. Is that what you're saying? If you seek it. If you sit down and say, okay, I'm going to become compassionate now. The next 20 to 25 minutes from now, I'm going to be compassionate. That's not going to work. Yeah, right. It's like we have to sneak up on it. That's the way I thought about it. We sneak up on these things. And I think that, well, for me, frankly, I started sitting Zazen because I thought it was going to lead me to enlightenment, which I thought was going to be a cheap legal high. Back in the 70s, we were into that sort of thing.

[32:49]

Without ruining the chromosomes, right? Beg your pardon? Without ruining the chromosomes. Without ruining the chromosomes and my lungs and yes, the rest of it. So I did, I did start Zazen with a certain amount of greed. And I think that that, I think many of us, I can't really speak for you guys, but I even think that sometimes Zen teachers kind of, kind of encourage that. They sort of say, yeah, you know, come, come along. Let's look at this wonderful stuff. And they turn around and say, well, of course you're not going to get that wonderful stuff, but maybe you will. But then as we sit, and certainly this is true of me, as I sat, I realized that the sitting was wonderful. I suppose you could say it was like a high, but it wasn't really. The trouble with drugs and alcohol is that you get stoned and then you can't get unstoned. You know, you're just there for hours and months and things like that that are there.

[33:51]

But by releasing, letting go of that stuff and releasing energy, that was wonderful. Yes. Thank you. Actually, let me ask the woman behind you and then I'll call on you. How's that? You know, I just got back from L.A. yesterday because my mother died last week. And I was sitting, I spotted everybody here and I got the number of us. We were so busy making arrangements, I didn't even call. Anyway, but I was there for the last two weeks of her life. And it's been like a thousand years that I've watched her. She was kind of, she was always kind of stampy. She's sharp as a whip and kind of real hard on us with what I think. But anyway, when she was dying, she was so kind and every word was just, Oh, that looks wonderful. And the tattoos and the outline of those rings. And my son said, my oldest son said, Mommy, she became a bride. You know what I'm saying?

[34:55]

It was her nature, she became her own nature. I'm just, truth. Yeah, truth. That consciousness, I thought of that the whole time. And it was just, I mean, I dragged myself here because I've been up all night. Thank you, thank you. My pleasure. It's wonderful. She was, she sort of gave up all of her ideas about things and just accepted. Catherine. I was very, well, I love the idea of soft-sounding. And I was very intrigued by what feels like a contradiction that I often encounter as we talk, Donald. And it starts with Sojourn's advice that the way to deal with a negative feeling is to just stop making it better. I've been arguing with him about this for about the last 20 years.

[35:58]

But I was interested because I felt that at the moment that you said that, you accepted that, that's good, I'll try it. And one of the things he says to sort of defend that strategy is that for people who hang on to their strong feeling and sort of cultivate it and whip it up, because they kind of like the adrenaline and the intensity of it, that this is a good strategy because it's like, oh, I don't necessarily want to keep doing that, keep obsessing with this stuff. And I also find that there are a realm of other strategies that, for me, have been way more fruitful. And when I just turn away from something, which I actually do very easily, it turns out to be repression. And I just suck it and I don't acknowledge that I'm angry and then it leaks. I mean, it's devastating for me to turn away from a negative feeling

[37:01]

until I've done something that Kwon Roshi at Sonoma Mountain calls investigation. And I've heard that also in your talk, that later when you were talking about Thich Nhat Hanh, learning to see what's really there. And I can almost remember the moment on the cushion at Sonoma Mountain when I got it that because I was beginning to learn to feel compassion for myself, I was able to allow myself to see a negative feeling, or I was able to acknowledge an anger or embrace a petty feeling and say, oh, that's me too, oh yes, instead of, oh no, I'm not that, I don't want to be there. So I just love it when we're talking about this is when you get the balance. And remember that there are really two paths to work with the negative seed. And understanding it and letting it, and being with it, sitting in it, feeling it,

[38:04]

and until it transforms of its own, is to me so much more productive, just for me, than trying to turn away from it. Right, yeah, definitely. We need to do that work. So we say, with our mindfulness we can say, this is not a thought or an action that I want to continue, which is good, because you don't want to exacerbate that karma and just keep rolling the ball along. And then with the love and caring that we have, we can start looking at that and saying, well, what's underneath that, what's happening? It's okay to have this feeling, it's okay to have this thought, and I love myself, and then pretty soon it starts melting away. Well, to follow on this, I'm in general agreement with what Catherine was saying. I've just been reading something, so mindfulness is one of the factors of awakening. Investigation is another factor of awakening that goes hand in hand with mindfulness.

[39:06]

Investigation in a kind of technical way, it's partly looking at where something comes from, but it's also looking at, oh, if I go down this road, is the effect of this train of thought going to wind up in a station that's wholesome or a station that's unwholesome? And then, as part of this process of discernment, to really ask, do I have some choice about this? Do I have some agency? Because usually, when I was talking with someone last night, I was talking about a performance who felt really locked in their life, and she said, the advice that she gets from her Buddhist friends is, lighten up, that does not work, and it pisses her off. So, we were talking about this, what does this mean to actually turn towards the conditions of your life

[40:09]

with a sense of investigation, with a sense that you have some agency, not necessarily over the actual conditions, but over your response to it. And the other thing I would add is, sometimes I can't do this myself. If I'm caught in a way of thinking, I need to talk to somebody, I need to talk to a friend, not necessarily a teacher, somebody who understands, who is going to say, well, what if you look at it this way, or that way? And so, investigation is not something that one needs to do in a solitary fashion. One can actually get help. And usually, as soon as you take a step to get help, usually the stuckness is because you feel, it's mine. And I'm alone with it. And as soon as you break down that barrier, and realize that, oh, we're all in it together,

[41:16]

then it can start to loosen. That's why we sit together. Our practice is not described like, we don't sit in a hermetic, just know we don't sit in a cave by ourselves, we actually sit around together, when we can. Any more questions? Any other questions? Yes? Thank you, Richard, for your talk. I think one of the things that, in line with the last two comments, one of the things that Shazen offers me, especially around those thoughts that keep recurring over and over again, even when you try to just let them go, is insight. In that, oftentimes I'm able to, really, as part of my investigation, to sit into it and breathe into whatever's coming up. And then, oftentimes,

[42:19]

it almost seems like magic, I guess, in certain ways, but insights do come forward. The softer my mind and body becomes, and that's just very gratifying. I guess I was thinking, I'm not sure that Alan said this, this is what I'm kind of interpreting it as being that we get caught up in the problem so it's such a strange knot, like the Gordian knot, right? It's this very complicated rope going in and around and all over. Those are our problems. And, of course, what's his name? I forgot his name. Comes by with a knife, with a sword. Manjushri. Alexander. Manjushri? No. Alexander the Great. That's true. So, Shazen, kind of like you were talking about,

[43:21]

I kind of want to interpret what you were saying, that we have this problem and it's going around and sometimes we go talk to somebody and they cut through the knot for us and sometimes we're sitting and the knot just seems to dissolve. Well, one of the joys and also one of the difficulties of exhausting is that you can't go anywhere and there's no book or TV show or, you know, whatever to avoid yourself and so you just, you're there, you sit with it. That's why I like Sashin so much because you're there, you know, period. Shazen period after Shazen period. Wonderful. Are there any more questions? I got the high sign for the ending but if somebody has something they need to say. Thank you. Oh, wait a minute. One more. Al? One of the things that I'm struggling with is particularly to sit with a cushion on the floor

[44:22]

and I'm wondering about the form itself as I move out of the form that I've been used to for so many years and how much, you know, how much of Zanzen was giving a pain or, you know, to actually look at the pain and accept it and so forth and I think that I'm at a stage where I'm really wondering what I used to, in this body, to practice. Yeah, I experienced that too. I hurt my knee in June and I discovered I couldn't sit cross-legged for a while and I had to sit in a chair or sit upright. I found it really hard. It took me a while to learn how to do it. There's a learning, I think, to learn how to sit in whatever posture that you're settled into. So you're moving from cross-legged to a chair. That's a big change. I would suggest cutting off the back of the chair

[45:25]

and just have it like a stool and have a little stool and put a Zafu or a pillow on top of it and then something like you've got the support for your legs. So you're not going to relax into the back. Some people with bad backs, I guess, have to do that. The rest of us should have stools rather than chairs. I once asked the abbot of Tokufuji in Japan, Grace Shearson's teacher there in Japan, about pain. He said, he thought, I asked him a question, is pain necessary for Zazen training? And I think the answer was yes. Certainly they said 50-minute periods there at that monastery. So pain is certainly part of their practice. And I think pain is wonderful because it really forces us to give up. And I live such a comfortable life. The pain of Zazen, of the Shishin Zazen, is sometimes the only really serious struggle I have in my life.

[46:27]

I know I don't like it. It's not fun, but there it is. Thank you.

[46:36]

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