So, I just want to encourage you, please honor the commitments that you made for practice period. And also, as I encouraged at the opening session two weeks ago, for those of you who are in practice period, see if you can articulate a practice intention for these six weeks. And, please come and talk to me or one of the other senior students about what your intention is, so you can actually hear yourself say it and kind of get it in your bones a little more deeply. So that's, those are my encouraging or chiding words for the morning. We've been studying two fascicles of Dogen, which pertain to, on the one hand, they pertain to

[01:00]

birth and death and life, and they also pertain to the larger activity of the universe, the whole works, or the total dynamic working. And we've been studying that, and the shuso, Carol Paul, has been approaching it by way of the koan of the man up a tree. And I'm approaching it by way of different koans and different stories. So I'm going to start with a story and then really use something very vivid and meaningful to me from Suzuki Roshi, and we'll have some chance for discussion, I hope. I just have to say I've reached an age where I am probably repeating my stories.

[02:02]

I only hope I didn't repeat them three days ago, but this one comes to mind. So I figured out this happened when I was five years old. When I was five years old, I was in nursery school on Long Island where I was growing up. And when I was sick, if I had tonsillitis or chest cold or something, I got to spend the day in my parents' bed, watching television and reading. I realized also making model airplanes and ships out of plastic kits. I think probably I got high on the glue, you know.

[03:04]

But it was interesting because in that setting, I felt really, really safe and perhaps more safe than kind of at large when I was well. I was close to the middle of the house. People brought me food, and they really were concerned about how I was. So I was watching television one day, and there were these public service announcements, these kind of documentary clips that they would show between the programs. And one, what I remember is it was a clip about heart disease. And it showed a guy who was late, who was rushing. He was rushing to work, and he was rushing to the bus stop. And of course, the bus was just pulling out, right?

[04:07]

And he was running and huffing and puffing, and he clutched his chest in pain. And the message there, and that really got me. And the message there was, never run for a bus. You know, and I felt there was some existential urgency in that message for me, which turned out there was some accuracy in that intro perception. But anyway, the next day, I was better. And the bus came from the nursery school and came to the driveway and pulled in the driveway, and they honked their horn. And I walked out very slowly and mindfully to the bus.

[05:08]

And it's like, I was blowing his horn, say, come on. The kids were yelling, come on. I said, nope, I'm not going to run for the bus. So what is it? What is it that we know organically in ourself? You know, there's something that we fear, something that we hold on to about our life or what we think of as our life. In a very real sense, you know, we might fear the pain that we imagine we're going to experience. Thich Nhat Hanh writes,

[06:10]

our greatest fear is that when we die, we will become nothing. Many of us believe that our entire existence is only a lifespan beginning with the moment we are born or conceived and ending the moment we die. We believe that we are born from nothing and that when we die, we become nothing. And so we are filled with fear of annihilation. And I think there's something really accurate about that. And I think that we can even, there are moments when I know some of us have experienced a sense of that in our Zazen practice, that when we sink into Zazen and we settle really deeply, the boundaries of who we think we are begin to soften and drop away.

[07:19]

I heard that yesterday, I don't know if any of you heard Terry Gross yesterday. Did anyone hear Michael Pollan? Yeah, it was a really interesting program that actually made me think, oh, maybe I should try LSD again. Didn't make me think about it for long, but but I actually found a transcript. And so what he says at a certain point on this psychedelic exploration that he made, he said, I found myself in a place where I could no longer control my perceptions at all. I felt myself scattered to the wind, almost as if a pile of post-its had been released to the wind, but I was fine with it. I didn't feel any desire to pile the papers back together in terms of my customary self. And then I looked out, and I know how paradoxical this sounds.

[08:32]

I looked out and saw myself spread over the landscape like a coat of paint or butter. It's quite beautiful. And that was okay. He said the consciousness that beheld this, though, was not my normal consciousness. It was completely unperturbed. It was dispassionate. And I was content as I watched myself dissolve over the landscape. So that's transcending this fear. I think in terms of the non-being, there's also a feeling of, there's some feeling of grief of being separated from those that we love, of not seeing them again. That's very, it's a painful thought. Because we can see how much we love them, and how we are attached to them,

[09:41]

not in some driven or, you know, kind of un-Buddhist way, but just love. We're connected to them. And the thought of not seeing them again can be very painful. One with grief. I've experienced that. And also, I think that perhaps, and this is where it gets, one has to wonder if there is hardwired into us as animals, as mammals, as perhaps as any kind of animal, that there's an existential drive to exist. And I think that there is, that part of the fear that we have is maybe part of our wiring.

[10:46]

But Suzuki Roshi offers a different perspective. I know that probably most of you in this room have read this, but it just seemed so vivid to me this week. The passage in Ten Mind Beginners' Mind, it's called Nirvana, The Waterfall. And Suzuki Roshi says, I went to Yosemite National Park and I saw some huge waterfalls. The highest one there is 1340 feet. And from it, the water comes down like a curtain thrown from the top of the mountain. You can see it, you know, you can see it from the valley. I remember playing a wedding at the Awami. Is that what it is? Yeah. In the back, you know, it's like we were playing and I'm looking up and there's the waterfall. You know, it's like astonishing. It's like hard to pay attention to your instrument.

[11:58]

Watching this curtain of water coming down. It does not seem to come down swiftly, as you might expect. It seems to come down very slowly because of the distance. And the water does not come down as one stream, but it is separated into many tiny streams. From a distance, it looks like a curtain. And I thought, it must be a very difficult experience for each drop of water to come down from the top of a high mountain. It takes time, you know, a long time for the water finally to reach the bottom of the waterfall. And it seems to me that our human life may be like this. We have many difficult experiences in our life. So as each individual drop, we experience various conditions. And, you know, sometimes we feel we're plummeting through space, you know, and

[13:05]

where's this going to end up? But at the same time, I thought the water was not originally separated, but was one whole river. Only when it is separated, does it have some difficulty falling. It is as if the water does not have any feeling when it is one whole river. Only when separated into many drops, can it begin to have or to express some feeling. I have to say, as a retired English major, I think this is what is called the pathetic fallacy. Is that correct? Does anyone know? But it's, you know, uh-huh. It's okay. Pathetic seems, uh-huh, maybe not accurate. That's

[14:08]

true. But it's true. What he's ultimately saying is that there is no difficulty. When we see one whole river, we do not feel the living activity of the water. But when we dip a part of the water, when we dip a part of water into a dipper to hold it up and drink it, and that's where he starts. He's dipping water. He was talking about at age, you dip water, you take a sip, and then you pour the water, the rest of it back into the basin. We experience some feeling of the water, and we also feel the value of the person who uses the water. So in the center of this is this passage, which is where I want to focus in. Before we were born, we had no feeling. We were one with the universe. This is called essence of mind or big mind. So in other words, we come from oneness.

[15:21]

We come from just the flow, the total dynamic working of the universe. Now, after we are separated by birth from this oneness, as the water falling from the waterfall is separated by the wind and rocks, then we have feeling. So in this world, in this life, between those markers of birth and death, I'd say we suffer life. Suffer is an interesting word because it of course has the meaning that we ascribe to suffering, pain, and so forth as Dukkha in Buddhism, but it's also to suffer means to allow. When in the Bible it says,

[16:29]

suffer the little children, it means to allow them to come forward. To suffer is to, it's another word for experience, is to really allow ourselves to be in oneness, in our distinctness. So we have, after the water is falling from the waterfall separated by wind and rocks, then we have feeling. He says, you have difficulty because you have feeling. You attach to the feeling you have without knowing just how this kind of feeling is created. He says, when you realize that you are one with the river or one with the universe, when you do not, I say, when you do not realize that you are one with the river

[17:32]

or one with the universe, you have fear. So this is our response. This is our response. Sometimes it's our response in Sazen, when the boundaries, when our concentration goes very deeply and those boundaries begin to dissolve, we kind of clutch. We grab back for what we see as our life, what we see as our, you can say, it's the mistaken notion of integrity. Integrity meaning wholeness. And this is what Michael Pollan is speaking of, to see in the midst of this experience that he was having, to see, to have a glimpse that beyond his ordinary

[18:34]

individual self, he was really suffusing the entire world. He was spread like a coat of paint or a layer of butter. And he was comfortable with that. He was having a glimpse of that big mind and recognizing that actually, what I'd say is there really is not a distinction between the water that's coming out the river and the water that's falling. And of course, then the water that returns to a river at the bottom of the waterfall. Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact, we have no fear of death anymore

[19:41]

and we have no actual difficulty in our life. Well, this is, I think this is perhaps perhaps idealistic, but this is also what we are looking for in our practice. We're looking for little clues and glimpses of this as the reality for how things actually are. And he says, when the water returns to its original oneness with the river, it no longer has any individual feeling to it. It resumes its own nature and finds composure. How very glad the water must be to come back to the original river. If this is so, what feeling will we have when we die?

[20:42]

We will have composure then, perfect composure. It may be too perfect for us just now because we are so much attached to our own feeling, to our individual experience, existence. I think what he means is too perfect for us. It's like, it's more perfect than we can imagine. It's more, for some reason, the last few days, I've been keep coming, keep, the word easeful keeps coming to mind. I don't think I've ever used that word before, but when we renew our existence in the river, in that flow of total dynamic working, it's easeful, but it's easeful beyond our sentiment, beyond any particular thought

[21:55]

we may have because we won't be thinking. We will just be flowing. For us, just now, we have some fear of death, but after we resume our true original nature, there is nirvana. That's why we say to attain nirvana is to pass away. To pass away is to attain nirvana. To attain nirvana is to pass away. Is not a very adequate expression. Perhaps to pass on or to go on or to join would be better. We say everything comes out of emptiness. One whole river, one whole mind is emptiness.

[22:59]

When we reach this understanding, we find the true meaning of our life. When we see this understanding, we can see the beauty of human life. Before we realize this fact, everything that we see is delusion. Sometimes we overestimate the beauty. Sometimes we underestimate or ignore the beauty because our small mind is not in accord with reality. You could call it emptiness or as Kaz Tanahashi and Roshi Joan Halifax translate, they translate shunyata, which we translate as emptiness, as boundlessness. It's this limitless nature of this total dynamic working. And Suzuki Roshi says, to talk about it this way is quite easy,

[24:09]

but to have the actual feeling is not so easy. By your practice of zazen, you can cultivate this feeling. When you sit with your whole body and mind, with the oneness of your mind under the control of the universal mind, in other words, when you just let go and surrender to the flow, which includes pleasure, pain, like, dislike, aching legs, the sweet taste of yogurt and prunes in the second bowl during breakfast, all of that is boundless. And surrendering to that is really taking that boundlessness to heart.

[25:17]

So what Suzuki Roshi, I think, is pointing out, he's saying, yes, we come from oneness. We return to oneness. But it's also true that we can experience that oneness in every moment. That actually, I would say, even the waterfall, the individual droplets in the waterfall, they appear individual, but they're just part of another passage of flowing. And they're just like, here we are, a bunch of droplets from the waterfall plunging through space right now, as we sit here very nicely and silently. But notice, we're all sitting together. We're sitting next to each other. We are not alone.

[26:33]

We're not moving through space alone. We're moving through space side by side with each other. And that's part of our practice as well. Yes, we have our own individual practice within Big Mind. But it's also, it's not our individual practice. It's something that we do together with our friends, our partners on this journey. We're not taking, I'm not taking an LSD trip and experiencing myself as distinct. It's actually, we're all on this big trip together. You didn't know that. We dosed the coffee today. So this is also part of the nature of our practice. The part of the nature of our practice is that

[27:41]

we do this together. We have to get ourselves sitting. We have to arrange our bodies and arrange our clothing, arrange our robes ourselves. But we sit down together. And we recognize that we have that connection. So I don't know. I think about that young boy that was me. That was 67 years ago. And he's still alive in my mind. And basically, what comes to mind is to say, well, look at all that's happened.

[28:54]

And look where you've had an opportunity to go. You know, and sometimes you ran for the bus and sometimes you didn't. But right now, I'm alive. You're alive. And we have this precious practice that we share together. And we can give life to each other. And we can give life to those around us, even those in the most difficult circumstances. So I'm going to stop there. And leave time for questions, comments. Yeah, Ben. Thank you, Hozon, for your talk. When you were talking about difficulty or fear or sadness one can have, thinking of leaving your loved ones or them

[29:56]

leaving you, it made me think of a smaller type of sadness that I've experienced a lot. I don't know how common it might be, but I've always had trouble with goodbyes. Especially going to visit family that's far away, spending maybe a week with them, and then leaving them. And that's sort of like a little grief or a period of mourning there. And in a certain sense, even everyday experiences, we have this illusion that they continue to happen. Because they do for a while, even though each time they occur, they're slightly different. But really, each little moment is lost as it goes. And to me, that makes me feel a little sad. I don't know if you have anything to say about that, the passing away of each moment. I think we learn to live with that. There is a loss, perhaps. And in those circumstances,

[31:11]

we have the awareness that I may not see this person again. And sometimes that's really sharp, because it's actually true. And sometimes you never know. But I think that's part of the condition that that sense of loss is also a marker for our connection. And so we can be grateful for the connection that we feel. And what I've found in my life, and my life is getting longer, so far, is that the people that I'm connected to, you may not see somebody for 10 years. But that connection is just completely alive. And when you

[32:17]

see that person, you may pick up a conversation that you had set down 10 years ago. And it's interesting, at this stage of my life, there was somebody I saw a couple weeks ago. And I had to peer through the curtain of age to, oh, I see who you are. And probably, you know, he might have had to do the same thing. But that was just, you pull aside the curtain, and that person is right there. And you just, your connection is indelible, your connection doesn't go away. So I think we have to bear that loss. I don't know. I mean,

[33:18]

I think that to me, that loss means, oh, I'm alive. And I can appreciate it. It's hard, there's so many people, you know, we all have wide networks of friends and acquaintances, relatives, and you know, you want to be fully responsible to them, perhaps. And you can't, because the time, the time in our lives just isn't there. Yeah, Anthea. Thank you for the talk, and sharing my five-year-old self. Because when we were talking, I was just imagining a beautiful kid. And then I thought about my five-year-old self, I had asthma really bad as a child. And that was the only time I got supportive. Right. I lost it in my 20s, because that's when I started having lucid dreams of

[34:42]

friends and family members that passed away. And they always show me that things are better for them. And you know, the ones that are really close to me, like my sister, she'll still show up when I don't do things. So it's kind of like a curtain between life and death. Right. So they're looking at us through a curtain. We just can't see them. We can't get back to them. But it's just a curtain. Yeah, so Thich Nhat Hanh actually talks about this. He says, the same thing happens when we lose any of our loved ones. The day my mother died, I suffered for more than one year. But one night, I was sleeping in the hut in my hermitage. I dreamed of my mother. I saw her sitting, I saw myself sitting with her. And we were having a wonderful talk.

[35:44]

She looked young and beautiful and her hair flowed down. It was so pleasant to sit there and talk to her as if she had never died. When I woke up, it was about two in the morning and I felt very strongly as though I had nevertheless lost my mother. The impression that my mother was still with me was very clear. And the idea of having lost my mother was just an idea. It was obvious in that moment that my mother is always alive in me. What was the other, Andrea? Thank you. Both questions and your answers touch on another aspect of the same story. It came to my mind as you were talking. You were talking about maybe animals and animals all have the same fear that humans are about death. And I thought about my experience with

[36:47]

people and with animals as they've died. And I wonder, you know, an animal when it's attacked is going to feel fear before it dies. But I think for us, my experience is maybe it's cultural in part, and maybe it's human in part, that it's our sense of separate. More than it's our, we lose that or we don't have a sense of the natural flow of where we belong. That we're, we stay separate. Yeah. Yeah. It's a sense of our fear. We don't have that sense of separateness. I don't know whether other cultures do or don't. But I think that you're getting at something in terms of that sense of separateness. And I think that's what Michael Pollan

[37:50]

is pointing at in this. I think the book is called How to Change Your Mind. And I think that's what people are trying to work with. And I think that's also what Suzuki Roshi is getting at. And I don't think, I think that like for an animal, the fear of death is a reflexive thing. I don't think they sit around wondering about their prospective death. But we do. I did as a five-year-old child. And I had no, I had absolutely no experience of anything or anyone dying. So, Judy. I was thinking about this in the context of Balinon meetings that I've been going to, and this theme of laws, where, you know, the serenity of prayer starts with acceptance,

[38:58]

serenity to accept things that cannot change. And to me, this feeling of separateness as a form of suffering. To feel closeness with the can't-fix-it distancing that happens, like in my family, where I often miss out on really key important life cycle events because of the relationships, and the addictions, and all these things that aren't really spoken about, but they're spoken about in Balinon, for instance. And that's why it's such a great reference for that. So, I'm just wondering how to be with this sense of living with loss from that angle, as not being separate,

[40:01]

and therefore not suffering within. Wow, it's really, really painful that my sister's about to give birth, and, you know, don't come for a while. Yeah, I mean, I think that we're all working on a kind of cost analysis. You know, the price for asserting that connection is just too high, right? But hopefully, we have, it's not the same. But we have other places where we can connect. So, we know we're not alone. And we really need to know that we're not alone, because we see it in our own families. I see it in my family, just that aloneness can be so powerful, and it's an overwhelming and isolating

[41:10]

reality, or seeming reality. It's not the reality, but we let it define us. So, here, what we're doing is something else. You know, we're making another choice of connection. Linda? Yeah. Sure. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. To take into the air my quiet breath,

[42:24]

now more than ever seems a glitch to die, to cease upon the midnight with no pain, while thou art poured forth thy soul abroad in such an ecstasy, still was thou safe, and thy fears are vain, and thy hide will become a song. John Keats gets the last word.

[42:49]

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