I vow to taste the truth of God's guidance words. Good morning. It does feel like home whenever I come back here. I really enjoy the opportunity to come back and sit with you and talk with you. It's one of the really nice places to give a talk because there's a possibility of a lot of conversation among us in addition to what I have to say. So I look forward to that. And thank you for the invitation, Alan. Alan just asked me a week ago, and fortunately for all of us, I immediately thought that I would give a talk which I prepared recently and gave at Green Gulch. That's why I said yes for only a week in advance because I already had my talk.

[01:04]

So let's see how it sounds. If I can keep it from falling off the top. I've lived at Green Gulch for 12 years, and worked at Zen Center for many years, but most recently for the last five, I've worked in Mill Valley as a school teacher. I teach fifth grade. And through teaching school, I've become interested in science, which I had previously had no background in at all, but I'm finding to be especially interesting in my second career.

[02:29]

That's what I'm going to talk about today, science, one of my favorite things to talk about and think about and be influenced by. One of my favorite topics in science is a rather revolutionary one which is challenging mathematicians and and scientists to think again about their disciplines, their separate, separated disciplines, which is called chaos theory. If you've seen Jurassic Park yet, you may have noticed that there was a chaos theorist in the movie, so I liked that.

[03:35]

I liked it especially that such a popular movie has what I consider to be a really important new development in our world. Chaos Theory is concerned with process uh... complexity and and transformation and it's it's revolutionary because it uh... reaches across scientific disciplines and it takes another look at ordinary phenomena uh... there are various people who have been influential in developing the theory and one can start at almost any point in history to say when this theory came around, but one person that can be noted is a man by the name of Edward Lawrence.

[04:39]

He was a meteorologist working in the fifties, trying to find a way to make reliable long-term weather predictions. And as we know, he found that it couldn't be done because of what has come to be called the butterfly effect, a lovely visual image which goes a long way in explaining chaos theory. The butterfly effect is, or means, that tiny unseen influences can combine and escalate in unpredictable ways to produce huge effects in systems where it's impossible to track every variable, like the weather, the movement of the Earth's atmosphere.

[05:46]

And the reason it has the name butterfly effect is because this discovery or this piece of information is illustrated by imagining a butterfly flapping her wings over Beijing and the slight breeze that she creates from flapping her wings can eventually cause a blizzard over Chicago. So that's tiny influences can lead to unpredictable and unforeseen and huge effects. And further than that, that at any given moment there are innumerable

[06:50]

of these tiny, unnoticeable, seemingly unnoticeable influences, little energies going on all the time, and we are affected by all of them, and affect all of them. The first thoughts that I had when I heard about the butterfly effect were of the children in my classroom, and of education generally, and also of Buddhist practice. Because the butterfly effect is to me especially evident here. Teachers are always trying to convey to children how important and unique they are as individuals and how much responsibility they have and how much they affect in ways that they don't see or no, but how much effect all of their actions have on each other and on all the beings around them.

[08:00]

And likewise, how much they are affected by factors, by forces, by people around them. The butterfly effect strikes me as a beautiful counter-concept to a medicinal concept even, to that hierarchy of the idea of superiority, inferiority, lesser and greater, which are certainly our educational system and as we know our culture is largely based on. And there's a reason for it. There's a legacy that we've inherited, which I'm looking at from the point of view of science, which upholds the notion of hierarchy, superiority and inferiority. Giving rise to, as we experience it, racism and sexism and speciesism and

[09:13]

in the classroom the notion that children are constantly balancing the notion of success and failure of who's better and who's doing well and who's not doing well with the notion that all of us are trying to convey to children against all odds that in their uniqueness they are crucial their presence and contribution in their lives and on this earth is crucial. I was reminded when I first read about the butterfly effect also of I remember, I don't remember where I heard it from, but I remember there were about ten years ago or so, in discussions that I remember having, something about ethical dilemmas, hypothetical ethical dilemmas.

[10:25]

What would you do if so-and-so? And I remember one of these dilemmas was, what would you do if you could travel anywhere in the world for an all-expenses-paid vacation as long as you wanted, with whomever you wanted and doing and eating and seeing whatever you wanted. And all you had to do to earn this vacation was to pull the wings off of a live butterfly. Would you do it? And I remember being in those discussions and feeling, I remember some of my friends saying, sure, no problem. A butterfly only lives a couple of weeks, and after all it's going to die anyway, and it's just a butterfly. And that whole body of thought to me is so poignant against or alongside the butterfly effect, you know, pulling the wings off of

[11:39]

a butterfly because it's a lesser creature, because it's a less significant member of this earth, and also it has less significance than what this vacation could really mean to me. And I think that we, of course, this is a rather ridiculous hypothetical dilemma. But in fact, I think we notice when we take a close look at our lives and of our daily actions, that these kinds of dilemmas are before us all the time. A little, you know, not quite so wild and ridiculous, but there they are, making choices. And how do we, what do we base our choices on? Do we base our choices on hierarchy, superiority, inferiority?

[12:41]

In zazen and in everyday experience, we have a sense of the extraordinariness of each moment without exaltation. But we also may think of zazen, or everyday experience, in terms of a hierarchy. Is it good zazen? What's a good zazen experience? What's a lousy zazen experience? How do I get a good zazen experience? How am I going to get good zazen out of this period of zazen? And who got good zazen if I didn't, you know? What are they doing over there? How can I get some of it? And these are questions which I think arise in us, not only in Zazen, but just all the time. This hierarchy, making a hierarchy out of our experience, out of our just everyday experience.

[13:55]

Which implies a belief in a hierarchy, in a lesser and greater value to experience. I believe there's also an understanding, a concomitant understanding in our culture of what's come to be called chaos theory. One sees it in education, in art, in feminist thought, in certainly in the environmental movement, environmental awareness. So there's these kind of two concepts, two notions of what our reality is about. There's more than two, but both of these structures are coexisting in us somehow, in zazen and in everyday experience, in our work life.

[15:11]

At least, I don't know about you, but that's how it is for me. And in zazen, when we sit zazen, or when we do anything at all, we have we can say that we're the whole universe. And the experience of the whole universe is available to us as our own particular experience on each moment. And I think we all have, even though we all have a sense of a statement like that, we have a sense of the reality of a statement like that, of a connection, a web of connection. a web of loving connection that we may or may not have access to at any given moment, and we may not even remember at any given moment, but there's something about that that we share and have in common.

[16:15]

We're certainly aware of how every little thing we do unnoticed influences affect our Earth in unforeseen ways, just our common everyday living habits like shopping and driving. One reason why I'm so taken by this theory, aside from how much it applies to Buddhist practice, is that it's concerned with everyday complex reality. like clouds and like boiling water. Chaos theory has to do with complex systems in transformative states, in process and change, and in context. And this is revolutionary in science because, you know, mainstream western science has been concerned for centuries with

[17:27]

taking things apart, and trying to find the smallest components of things, isolating variables, controlling experiments, to the purpose of making predictions, of making our world at least in part predictable and controllable. And even though discoveries in particle physics in this century, decades ago, really lift the cover on that model, those discoveries, the model being a machine world that need only be taken apart and examined to be understood, those discoveries are really held up from being widely understood, partly because of the language of physics, I think, and mathematics.

[18:30]

Although, in practice, the one discovery that I'm thinking of is called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which has such, to me, has such an application in Zazen. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle has to do with whether or not the smallest components of things are matter or energy. And it turns out that it depends on how you look at it. If you set up the experiment to observe matter, you'll observe matter. If you set up the experiment to observe energy, you'll observe energy. And that sounds familiar to me. I don't know about you, but the application to me in Zazen is that that observer is involved. That observer is not a detached observer.

[19:34]

There is no such thing as a detached observer. We're completely involved and there's no way of stepping outside and looking in, looking in the window. that we ourselves, whether we know it or not, whether we intend it or not, are interacting all the time with phenomena in the context of science, certainly in the context of Zazen. So, chaos theory going back to this sort of historical view of science in which things can be broken down into their smallest parts examined and then put back together in the way that we prefer. Chaos theory is another model altogether that it has to do with our really not being in control, our really not having control over the outcome.

[20:48]

We all have a sense of chaos, at least I do. We all live with chaos and are trying constantly to cope with chaos. And we all, of course, boil water every day. The boiling water issue is this. Water follows a predictable pattern. Convection current, as it heats up, the heat rises and gets to the top of the body of water and then falls. So there's a current that's set up. And this is predictable up until the time that the water boils. And then all that, the predictability sort of falls apart. There's a transformation that occurs. The system transforms into a chaotic system. And the way scientists had responded to that situation was to give up, just look at something else that was predictable. And calling those patterns that they've given up on, random.

[21:55]

So, traditional science deals with predictability versus randomness. Using computers, mathematical patterns can be generated visually in a variety of ways, giving rise to beautiful images called fractals. And fractals these days can be seen on t-shirts, posters, on your screensaver. The program called Mandelbrot, you know, it's a fractal pattern. Mandelbrot is the mathematician who named the image. The interesting thing about fractals is that they replicate the complexity of nature in a couple of ways. First of all, the same fractal pattern may describe a variety of unrelated phenomena, seemingly unrelated phenomena.

[23:04]

For example, a lightning bolt, a broken glass, and the course of a river, all described by the same mathematical pattern. Or the fluctuations of animal populations, the stock market, cloud formations, seemingly unrelated phenomena described by the same pattern. And secondly, the complexity of a system remains the same at different scales. So the complexity of the whole California coastline is the same as the complexity of one rock of the coastline, is the same as the complexity of the atomic structure of the rock. So there's a pattern of self-similarity of different phenomena, totally different phenomena, and also of different scales. So this again sounds familiar to me.

[24:10]

There's a strange kind of effort needed in practice, and I think, to me, chaos theory provides a useful model. It's not an effort that's controllable, that results in something that is predictable, or that can simplify experience. In my experience, we cannot simplify our experience. We can change the scale. My experience is that I can change the scale of my activity. I can scale down or scale up, but it doesn't take very long before whatever it is I'm doing becomes complex, equally complex, as complex as I can stand it. Regardless of whether I'm living at Green Gulch or Tassajara or being a school teacher, there's a level of complexity that seems to be stable.

[25:20]

So in practice, in my view, we tend to, our effort is to tend to the complex unknown. Unknown, unseen influences generated by us and affecting us all the time. And here we are just tending to the whole thing as best we can. Nothing to take personally. no way to keep an eye on the fruits of our excellent deeds. I remember a lecture when I was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley in 1971 or 72. I was going to a class taught by Dr. Lewis Lancaster of the Buddhist Studies Department. And he was talking in his lecture that day about the perfection of giving, saying that perfect giving, according to the sutras, is when there's no thought of giver, gift, or receiver, like somewhere it's described as like giving the flowers on a distant hillside to all the Buddhas.

[26:47]

But, he said, we should not hold back from giving, just because it might not be perfect. We should notice that our giving might not be perfect, but we should not hold back, because giving is good, and we should all be giving a lot. And to me, that's always been an important point, that holding back on giving, for the perfect giving, is like an expression of hierarchy. It's an expression of, you know, what's the good giving? And I'm not even going to participate in the shoddy giving or in the less than perfect giving. That kind of holding out for the big one is, to me, at a demonstration of this underlying belief in hierarchy that I think, myself, I'm thinking about a lot.

[28:04]

So for me, chaos theory, aside from what scientists and mathematicians are doing with it, which by the way, a lot of what scientists and mathematicians are doing with it is applying it for military purposes, for business purposes and for other purposes that tend to be highly funded in our world today. But for me, I can apply it as a different model, a different way of thinking of my experience in which hierarchy and control and superiority doesn't even make sense. In chaos, who knows who's in charge? Who cares who's in charge? In that sense, it's a true democracy. And I think it's a timely and important contribution to, or it can be, to Buddhist thought.

[29:09]

And lastly, I want to say that chaos theory is certainly a concept. And I'm spending my time talking today about concepts. In Buddhist practice, of course, we don't, and in life, we don't live in a world of concepts. And in zazen, we allow concepts to fall away of their own weight. We also know that concepts have a way of sneaking in when we're not looking. And in that sense, I believe that concepts can be used as tools. Concepts can also be used as weapons. Tools can be used as weapons. Medicine can be used as drugs.

[30:14]

But our practice I believe, in my experience, has to do with developing mindfulness, so that we know when we pick up a concept, we know that we have a concept, and we know to put it down, we know to allow it to fall away, and that we don't forget that we have it in our hand and start bopping somebody over the head with it. So that we We use tools and we use medicine appropriately, but we don't deal in drugs and weapons. So that's the, after spending however long I spent talking about concepts, just to place concepts in their proper tool shed,

[31:19]

I wanted to say that. And that's what I have prepared to say today, and I would like to hear what you would like to say. Could you be more specific? Well... It's probably the same as Green Gulch. Yeah, I think it is. What I'm driving at is, just a few moments ago you referred to picking up that you may believe that.

[32:36]

Well, my own, what I'm thinking right now, and I would hope that other people would contribute to this comment also, what I'm thinking is that we are overly invested in hierarchy and control. And I've chosen the word structure in my own sort of inner vocabulary substitute for hierarchy. That structure has a usefulness. We have roles with regard to one another, and those roles have a usefulness. And that's a structure. To me, hierarchy is something that I'm thinking at the moment that I don't need that.

[34:18]

I don't need to pick that one up right now. Structure, I do need to pick up. You know, in my classroom, I'm the biggest and tallest. I'm in charge, right? I get paid. They don't. They don't have a choice about it. I do. So there's, on the one hand, I can look at that as hierarchy. And I find that if I look at it as hierarchy, it's a fairly destructive interaction. Or maybe destructive is too strong, but maybe it's not what I want. Structure is a concept in my classroom, for example. And the reason I'm talking about a classroom is because it's an experience that all of us know. We've all been students in a classroom. It's one of our common experiences. And we know how it feels.

[35:20]

So structure is something that I can use in my classroom to say, well, I'm just going to say how it's going to be. And that's going to give us some structure so that we can do something together. And I feel the same way about our Buddhist practice a lot. That there's a lot of structure that we have here. Now, I think it's important in Buddhist practice, in my classroom, anywhere, to always, always carry an awareness of the concept and to examine the appropriateness of it in any given moment. Always be ready to put it down. That's as much of a response as I have at the moment. Does anyone else want to? Yes. I was thinking more of like the rhapsodal geometrical set.

[37:02]

Well, here's one thing I can say. What the Lawrence, Edward Lawrence, who was doing the work in meteorology in the 50s, what he discovered was that his predictable, his charts of predictability after about two days just went wonky and there was nothing recognizable about the trends that were happening in the third or fourth day that he could trace to the variables that he knew about. So the idea, what he said was, even if there were a structure of, if you could ground level to the top of the atmosphere, of sensors one foot apart all the way through the atmosphere to pick up little changes, tiny little breezes that, you know, we open the door and a breeze is created, a fly, a flea, whatever.

[38:27]

sensors every one foot could pick up the number of variables, the influences that would lead to the great effects three days later or more. So the one has an image of tremendous complexity. There's great trends that are fairly predictable, but the complexity within those great trends is it's conceivable that it could be predicted, but we certainly couldn't do it with the technology we have. Now, that's in the context of weather and meteorology. But I think the atmosphere is a really interesting model for me for this body of thought. Do you want to say more? And that tendency in me, in a way, to look at the big and ignore the small, ignore the detailed complexity and the detailed unpredictability of things.

[41:11]

Anybody else? and what I've seen for myself in the past few years.

[43:15]

I suppose it fits in in my mind that not only is there In my mind, when we're invading control over how we're going to be perfect, cared for, like it's cared for going to feel good, or it's cared for

[44:59]

And those thoughts, I don't think, fall within what I would feel about being cared for. Being cared for has always been a big thing. And very likewise, being responsible in unknown ways. To me, involved in what I would call being cared for. Let's go on and hear from some other people, and maybe we can come around to that. And maybe if it doesn't matter at interviews, you know, if it's not a matter of interviews, I can look at it.

[46:55]

You know, the campaign I've been supporting, it reminds me of when I was 13 years old, I got an interview in the distribution, and that is when the, you know, the, you know, it's like a holiday, right? Every other year, I'm distracted by every other year. You know, you're in it and you're unaware of the connection. And you have another connection. And in that sense, there is committed care.

[49:33]

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