about the Dharma Aizen Center when I was in Phil's office. It's on my desk, a letter that I sent out, which tells a little bit about the Dharma Aizen Center. And it begins like this. To be present at the birth of something new is to witness the vitality of something ancient. The ancient way is always shedding its old skin and emerging fresh, wet and shining. The arising of a new dharma center is an expression of the fact that from the very beginning there is no lack. Because the center of the universe is located at no distance from the arising of awareness, we can create a zendo a magnificent dharma workshop right here and right in our own backyard.

[01:02]

Well, what I call a magnificent dharma workshop here is an old carport that we've fixed up a little bit. By we, I mean a group of people who've been sitting Zazen with me for some of them for many years and some just recently. We did a series of Saturday work parties in potlucks and re-shingled and reframed a couple of walls and had big discussions about what to do with the floor and whether or not to have heat. And finally we just put some grass mats down on the concrete and voila! We have a Zendo. And we're cooking along there with Morning Sazen every day at 5.15 in the morning.

[02:09]

And we do a little service after that. And then recently a group of people who have more time than I do to sit Sazen have started sitting also in the afternoon at 6 o'clock. And then we have Sunday half-day sittings once a month and various other events. And the Zendo, this old carport is behind the house. If you go back up the driveway, people just walk up the driveway and around the back, there's an old fig tree, probably planted right after the house was built, which would be about 75 years. It's an old house. And the fig tree arches over the little pathway. And so a big part of the experience of arriving there is kind of going under the leaves, these big leaves of the fig.

[03:11]

And now the fruit is beginning to swell, and every day the branches get a little bit lower. So you're ducking as you come around the corner. So I've been calling it Old Fig Zendo lately. Someone said we should call it Give-A-Fig Zendo. See, that's why we can't do that. I've been working the last week or week and a half very intensively building a rock garden and moving boulders and I have a crew of well six people but not all of them are working on this with me but it's an interesting problematic process of finding how to create with what you have at hand something that resembles the vision you have in your mind.

[04:27]

And I actually drew a sketch or a picture of the waterfall for the client I'm doing this for before we started building it. And then we had all these tons of rock delivered. And then I find the rocks that fit the picture. But there aren't always rocks that fit the picture exactly the way I drew it. So the picture changes. And I feel a little bit that I'm continuing this rock garden now with words, giving a talk today. I have some ideas and some notes, and then there's you. In the end, the Waterfall began working on Wednesday this week.

[05:40]

And it's wonderful because you don't know until you actually have everything in place and then you can start the water coming down from the top. This one has five little falls coming down the hill. And that's a magic moment after a lot of sweat and some strain and some feeling of Is this the vision, or is this the compromise? Or is this the vision, or is this something better? It's not what I had quite imagined. This rock is not the rock I wanted, but this is the rock that I have. And then I'm working and fiddling around and jiggling them, You know, it makes a big difference. You move it over an inch, and suddenly it's in place.

[06:42]

You tilt it a half inch, and it comes together. Or it doesn't. I've been working on a morning echo, which we use at the service in the old Fixendo. And I wanted to share it with you. For me, it's the echo for starting the day, and I feel that it's wonderful to be able to start the day chanting the Heart Sutra, and with some sense of gratitude and some sense of dedication. The echo is a dedication that is chanted after we chant the sutra. Are there any people here who are new for the first time?

[07:45]

One, two. Are you just new here or is this the first time you've heard any kind of a Zen Buddhist Dharma talk? What? New, new. Well, welcome. If I use a word or something that you don't understand, raise your hand and ask. Because sometimes I assume some language. With deep gratitude, we remember the many true teachers, friends, family, and benefactors who inspire and encourage us along the path of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. The Dharma wheel turns and is yet still. The realm of peace is vast, calm, and yet compassionately alive.

[08:50]

Myriad phenomena shimmer in the dark ocean of being. Now as we enter our day of work and activity, let us remember the one who is not busy and be free from self-clinging. May the spirit of our Dharma practice be alive in the many forms and faces known and unknown. We dedicate the merit of our efforts to the liberation of all beings in every realm. May all attain the awakened way. And then we go off to work. The one who is not busy I can't explain Buddha, Dharma and Sangha.

[09:52]

I'll do it in one word. Buddha, awaken. Awaken one. Dharma is true, true reality. Sangha, friends. So when we say Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, we are saying awakened, true, reality, friends. I have a tendency to put little notes on my altar, one of my altars. to remind me of what's important. I think we all need some reminders. So lately I've had on my altar, all dharmas without exception are enlightenment.

[11:16]

This is actually what Shakyamuni Buddha realized when he saw the morning star. It reflected on the situation that all dharmas, all phenomena, all things are already awakened, are already enlightened. It makes a difference when you go through your day if you think of things as things, or if you think of things as enlightenment. At least it does for me. So again, well, that's 650 years ago. commented that when the self moves forward and experiences things, that's delusion.

[12:30]

And when things move forward and advance the self, realize the self, that's enlightenment. When we know this, there's no problem. When we really see that, then our birthright, our very nature is awake. Our very nature is true and honest and completely sincere. So how do we get confused? I was recently reading a very interesting book to me. Its title, I think, is Emotional Intelligence.

[13:38]

Daniel Goleman, author, he's a pretty, well, he's a very good writer, writes for the New York Times, and he's collected in this book a tremendous amount of information about how our minds and our emotions work, say our rational mind and our emotional mind are so interconnected. And early in the book he talks about how our brain evolved. When we say mind in Buddhism we mean mind that includes, we mean various things sometimes, but we mean mind sometimes to include everything. particularly as mind includes our consciousness and our heart. So we always say mind has heart. So I think people practicing the Buddha Dharma for centuries have realized the fact that the emotional mind and the rational mind are

[14:52]

completely interconnected. But in reading, I learned a little bit more detail, which was interesting to me. When you think about how our brain evolved, we have a root brain, which we share with most life forms that can respond to anything. And I think of it more as the reptile, the reptile brain. For me, I think of it as my lizard brain. And actually, I've been making friends with my lizard brain for many, many years, and I didn't really quite understand how it works. But the lizard brain is there, and the lizard brain actually can respond to heat, light, food, has a sense of smell, the olfactory sense is significant, and actually around that, then we have some strong emotions, because if you smell something that is powerfully attracting, it may mean this is your mate, or you may smell food, this is your survival, you may smell an enemy, and you just react.

[16:14]

your lizard brain just reacts. You ever have the experience of being of two minds? Or do you ever have the experience of wondering, why did I do that? Or why did I get so excited about that? A few years ago, on a summer family camping trip, we were on the Russian River, sleeping right on the ground beside the river. And I woke up with this beast right on my face. And I started screaming, skunk, raccoon, get off of me. And I was thrashing around, woke up the whole camp, trying to throw this big, big skunk right on my face. The skunk kept trying to hold me down.

[17:23]

It turned out that the skunk was my wife. During the night, Lane had been reaching, she was reaching over me to reach for the flashlight. And her hair was all over my face. And my lizard brain was severely stressed, right? The lizard brain went into a big shock. And it took me a long time to ... I didn't really understand how that happened until I was reading this book, Emotional Intelligence. It turns out that there's a part of the brain called the amygdala, which is just a little couple of almond-shaped and sized parts of the brain that are right around the ring that's the next level of evolution above the lizard brain.

[18:30]

And we have evolved this capacity for survival to short-circuit the rational mind. When something is particularly threatening or exciting. And this, of course, is tailored for each personality. We develop our own particular set of what's exciting or what's threatening. But when something is particularly powerful and we sense that it could be a threat, or we sense that it could be a great opportunity, too good to miss, too good to think about, the information goes right past the main circuit that goes up to the rational, the neocortex, the thinking mind. And the amygdala kicks into gear and has the capacity to put a lot of little chemicals, little hormones, and stimulate the system, like adrenaline and so forth, stimulate the system to react before you have time to really think about it.

[19:46]

And so, when I read this, I finally understood what was happening when I thought that my wife's hair was a skunk on my face. This is really something that we need to contend with all the time. And in the tradition of this lineage, we have teachings that are designed to help us from getting into big trouble when our amygdala just kicks into gear. We have ethical teachings. Imagine what would have happened if I was the kind of person who was already in a state of fear and slept with a gun under my pillow. Some people do that. Some people sleep with guns under their pillows. And you know, probably know, I don't know the exact statistics, but I know that of all the homicides that occur, most of them are friends killing friends, or family members killing each other.

[21:09]

Something has triggered their reptile mind, really. And they're reacting. to a situation without really having time to think it through carefully with their whole rational mind. We talk about karma. You're talking about karma in several senses. In one sense, karma literally means action. And so karma, in a big sense, is our situation, just our whole situation, which is changing, which is action, which is an ongoing, vital, dynamic working.

[22:16]

We're a part of it. We're a product of it. We're also in the process of it. We're in the flux of it. Tentatively, we can say, okay, it's me doing something. We say, did you raise your hand? No, okay. Tentatively, we say karma is cause and effect. Cause and effect tends to look like a linear sequence. And so it's not actually quite like that. It's also a question of, you know, where does something start? we recognize from the beginning that things start all over.

[23:23]

In Buddhist philosophy, we don't find that things start in one place. Things start all over. Then what sense, what's the sense in which you, create karma. What's the sense in which you may change what's going on? Usually we don't even know what we're already doing. We have this wonderful practice of stopping, which helps us see what we're already doing. Some people sit zazen wanting to feel some happiness or feel some relief, but instead what they feel is a lot of noise.

[24:44]

What you may experience when you sit is a lot of thoughts and confusion and feelings coming up that you didn't even notice, you didn't even realize were there. You really can't be free of creating karma. Now, we talk about karma in a second sense that we didn't really explain. The first sense is karma is the situation, the total activity. In the more specific Buddhist sense, we talk about karma as creating a false image of self. We talk about karma as attachment to what's not really there, but it may be our identity. And maybe all of our hopes and dreams.

[25:47]

And maybe all of our resentments and grudges and biases and prejudices. All of that together. And so we cultivate an intention to stop creating karma. to stop creating that which adds more noise and confusion, which adds attachment and compounds the problems that we already find ourselves in. So part of this practice of simply stopping and sitting is to let go of all of our tendencies every one of them. Completely stop doing all that stuff that we are doing consciously, unconsciously, that we think we have to do.

[26:56]

And then there's a cultural aspect of karma. Karma is partly inherited in terms of our family, our friends, the neighbors. our siblings, the country we live in, we tend to just absorb a whole picture of the way things are, which may be partly true and may be partly erroneous. I wanted to read a little poem. I have it here. which actually relates to karma in a personal sense and in a cultural sense. William Stafford is the poet.

[28:04]

I relate to him quite intimately, I think. I don't know whether it's because we both grew up in Kansas or Or what exactly? Here's the poem. Now I remember in our town the druggist prescribed Coca-Cola mostly in tapered glasses to us and to the elevator man in a paper cup so he could drink it elsewhere. because he was black. And I remember the Legion gambling in the back room. And no women, but girls. Old boys who ran the town. They were generous to their sons or to the sons of friends.

[29:11]

And of course, I was almost one. I remember winter light closing its great blue fists slowly eastward along the street, and the dark then, deep as war, arched over a radio show called the 30s and the great old USA. Look down, stars. I was almost one of the boys. My mother was folding her handkerchief. The library seethed and sparked. Right and wrong arced. And carefully I walked with my cup toward the elevator man. I was asking people if someone knew, because this poem has the thought of being almost one of the boys, and the poignancy of that.

[30:32]

Being one of the boys, there's a part of him that really wanted to be one of the boys. There's a part of all of us, or part of each of us, that really wants to be connected. And yet when he saw what it meant to be one of the boys, he couldn't be one of the boys. Because being one of the boys excluded the elevator man, who was black. It also excluded women. They weren't allowed in the Legion Hall, right? So we have this collective, what I'm calling collective karma.

[31:39]

And it troubles us as individuals and it troubles us as a as a country, it troubles us. I think even as a sangha. I think we have to be very careful that we don't have a kind of a clubbiness in the sanghas that we create. We have to be aware of our need to be connected and also be aware of our tendency then to exclude. Because the Sangha, the community of true friends, really includes everyone, includes everything from the very beginning.

[32:44]

And if we don't see that and don't remember that, then we're actually breaking the Sangha. We're actually destroying it. Now when you know that you have some problems, you have a reptile mind, as well as the mind that you think you have, both may be causing you trouble. And you have, by virtue of your birth, or your gender,

[33:54]

or your family or your sexual orientation or whatever, the kind of music you like, the kind of art you like, you find yourself identifying with various groups or rejecting other groups And you find that that's deeply embedded in yourself. How can you even live with yourself? How can you live with yourself? I remember a couple of teachers, Kadagiri, I remember Kadagiri Roshi talking about karma and he said, you don't know how karma is right on your back. You don't realize how karma is right on your back.

[35:04]

He meant it's right on your back, right through your back. Right in your bones. And I think I used to try to get rid of some of that stuff. And I thought that doing Zen practice would save me from myself. Until I heard many years ago at the old Dharmadhatu Center in San Francisco, it must have been about 72, 73, I heard Chogyam Trungpa, who had been actually a close associate, well, not so close, but a good friend of Suzuki Roshi's.

[36:11]

Suzuki Roshi was his mentor. And once he said, Buddhist practice is just making friends with yourself. We're talking about sitting. The fundamental practice of sitting is making friends with yourself. So I think that's been a part of Zen practice a long time, although I think sometimes we overlook the part of making friends with yourself. And we think that we get involved in thinking that we should be like this or we should be like that. And then recently I ran across a poem in, let's see, well the author's name is Galway Kinnell.

[37:25]

I don't know this poet, but it's in the book Loving Kindness by Sharon Salzberg. And I think that's a wonderful book on how to make friends with yourself and others. And this is called re-learning, re-learning loveliness. The BUD stands for all things, even for those things that don't flower. for everything flowers from within of self-blessing. Though sometimes it is necessary to re-teach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on the brow of the flower and re-tell it in words and in touch

[38:31]

It is lovely until it flowers again from within of self-blessing. We can help each other in the Sangha. We can help each other in this fashion. You can extend your hand to your dharma brother or sister and remind him or her of their own loveliness. This loveliness that I'm talking about is not something that you can really possess.

[39:33]

I think we have a big problem. We have cultural standards of beauty. We probably have biological standards of beauty. And on top of that, we have cultural standards of beauty. It may be hard to believe that you are beautiful. Or if you think you're beautiful, or because your culture tells you you're beautiful, it may be hard to realize that you're beautiful before you're beautiful. Well, maybe that's enough. If you just remember that you're beautiful before you're beautiful, and you remember that your big mind, which I haven't even talked about, and your zazen, your zazen is bigger than you think it is.

[40:58]

So what you may experience when you sit down is of the tip of the iceberg, what you're expressing when you sit is vast and wonderful. And every once in a while, you really get to taste it. And every once in a while, you really get to see it in your friends. Are we out of time? Well, it's two minutes after 11. We have until midnight.

[42:01]

Thank you. In that case, are there any questions or comments? Well, thank you for the wonderful talk, and you are moving into my question, which is, is the good karma, and what is good karma? Yeah, that's the other talk I didn't give. Donna, Sheila. samti, virya, jnana, prajna, which Mali knows. That's my first thought. Those are the six paramitas.

[43:03]

The practice of six paramitas are perfections which go beyond our usual motivations, actually, our usual motivations, which are self-driven. Dana is generosity, and Sheila is ethical conduct, and Xanti is patience, and Virya is energy, and lighting up And jhana is zazen, and prajna is wisdom itself. So, these are included in re-teaching each phenomenal thing its loveliness.

[44:08]

In relation to Karla, I have a very practical question about livelihood. And it came to mind because it sounds that, as though as a landscaper, you work for yourself. I don't know if this is true or not, but I work for myself. And I have to decide what to charge people. And I am continually conflicted out of many minds. Because my impulse is to help people. Somewhere deep down I have a feeling that charging for anything is bad. And at the same time I have to support all of myself and half of my son. writer. So I wonder how one thinks about these very practical issues in a dharmic way.

[45:28]

Maybe I'm not, I'm asking the question in a somewhat scattered way, obviously, partly because I feel very conflicted about it. It's something I think about a lot. And I do something that's highly skilled, that really helps people. And yet, I feel very confused about what's right to charge. And my livelihood depends on it. Sure. We could go around the room and ask people what you should charge. I think you don't know how to think about it. I agree that to charge anything, in a way it's a kind of a shame.

[46:34]

But then, so sometimes I feel Yeah, when I have to pay the bill for the dentist, and I have to pay the bill for PG&E, and pay the bill for fixing the car, so I'm like, well, there should just be enough money in the account to cover these things, right? Because I'm working hard, and if we have a system that works, people would have enough to cover their needs. But then I find out that there isn't any money in my bank account unless I charge somebody first. So I have to include that. That's the society we're living. At one point, I think maybe many of us dropped out. I dropped out for a while and did panhandling.

[47:41]

I thought, well, the old Ancient Buddhists in India had a tradition, they had a culture in which people could be supported just by going begging. But you couldn't have a family. You could support yourself by begging as an individual. And as many of you know, having a family is a much bigger project than supporting yourself I found out that even at Zen Center, here in America, we didn't feel that it was really workable to go out and just go begging on the street. It comes up as a question every now and then, something we could consider doing. I think we have to accept the reality of the culture we're living in.

[48:48]

recognize that money is some kind of communication that we have to have to take good care of and be clear about. It doesn't exactly represent our identity. And we get in, I think, a lot of trouble in this country because we do identify wealth. We identify with wealth. People tend to identify with their income or identify someone else with their income. We tend to feel differently about someone who has a lot of money. And we tend to feel differently about someone who just can't get it together, has no money. So I think we need to be practical and realize that there's a sense in which no one can pay you what you're worth. you're already worth so much more than they could possibly pay you. So that's on one side.

[49:52]

And on the other side, you have the spirit of giving where you'll do something because you enjoy it and you think it's wonderful and you'll offer it with a generous spirit and not expect anything in return. That's the other side. For myself, I've had to adjust my rates, my fees for doing the work I do over the years. And I kind of look around and see what other people are doing. And that's part of it. So it's just seeing what, is there some standard out there? And occasionally I ask people, do you think I charge too much or do you think I don't charge enough? And so I think getting that feedback is helpful.

[50:59]

Then I think, I look at what auto shops charge an hour and what therapists charge and what plumbers charge. And I figure, well, I'll charge a little less than the most reputable plumbers. About the same as the average auto shop. You know, it kind of works out in there. That's for a certain kind of work I do, but then I have to charge a different scale for my employees, and so it gets a little complicated. The most important thing is to be clear in your communication about it. And recognize that you're doing this to be paid and be very upfront about it. I actually wouldn't be doing, I wouldn't have built that waterfall I was telling you about if I wasn't gonna get paid.

[52:04]

Although I might like to build a waterfall, I wouldn't build that one for that person at that place. If I had just free time and support, I might build a waterfall a Zen temple someplace, I would donate. Is it midnight yet? It's closed. Yeah, I think after giving a talk, However many people there are in the room, we need to each have a follow-up talk for an hour or two. There's more opportunity during tea, which is next. Since I can't do that, please talk to each other.

[52:58]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ