Good morning. The dogs thought they should be over here, not over there. I thought, oh my goodness, what's going on over there? Racket, racket, racket, racket. There are a couple of things I'd like to mention. First of all, I don't know who brought this incredible seed pod, but thank you. It's really very... What is it? I don't know. It's a magnolia. Oh, that's what it is. It's very beautiful. The seed inside is the color I want to paint that alcove where the Buddha is sitting. As I think many of you must know, tomorrow night at 7, many people around the world are going to be doing a vigil lighting candles and standing or sitting in silence for the hope of peace in the world.

[01:10]

So I hope that all of you will do that wherever you are. My next-door neighbor called her friend at Inquiring Mind to see if there was anything happening in Lorain County, and she said, oh yes, a goat morrow. I also want to mention that we are going to have an extra sitting, or the minute the calendar gets mailed out, then there are corrections. There will be an extra sitting in May, the last Saturday, in celebration of the blue moon. You know that expression, once in a blue moon, when there's two full moons in a month, and we have that in May. In particular, I want to thank you, Karen, for sending the email with the report, I gather from the London Times, on a speech that the senior Mr. Bush gave at Tufts.

[02:25]

I don't know if any of you have seen it. We haven't been able to figure out if it's appeared anywhere in the media. in this country, but I will shortly send it out to everyone who's on the email list and ask you to read it and send it around. The president's father made a very strong pitch for multilateral, a diplomatic program. So, which brings us to what I want to talk about this morning, which is, of course, suffering. Excuse me for repeating this quote, but I know a number of you have not heard these two quotes. This is a quote from Rilke. So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises before you larger than any you have ever seen.

[03:29]

if an anxiety like light and cloud shadows moves over your hands and everything you do. You must realize that something has happened to you. Life has not forgotten you. It holds you in its hands and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? for after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you. I'm going to start a group called the Closet Buddhists of the World and Rilke is one of the charter members. And then this is a quote from Henry Wadsworth Longfell, If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

[04:41]

So what I'd like to talk about this morning has to do with the pointing out in the Buddhist tradition in describing the nature of things, that characteristic of interdependence. I think that we often, out of the untrained, conditioned mind, react in the face of our suffering or another person's suffering as though those were separatable. And of course what has happened for us in this country in the last couple of years is that our sense of the suffering of the world has come home.

[05:49]

That our ability to think that certain kinds of suffering happens over there not on my corner or in my neighborhood or in my town or in my state or in the country I call my home country. And I think that sensibility of here and other, me and other, has really, if we're at all willing, to register experientially the state of the world. We're all in the same stew pot. One of the consequences of a so-called global economy is that we can begin to see more and more, if we want to,

[07:00]

how what we choose to use or buy here ripples out throughout the whole world. I have for a number of years done interdependence practice at least once a day, most commonly with something I'm eating at a meal before I start the meal, but not exclusively. Sometimes I'll do it with respect to my eyeglasses or using a pen or a piece of paper or sitting in the car before I start the ignition or with some piece of clothing or shoes. Literally anything that is part of what I use and consume in my daily life to take a few minutes and to ask myself, how did this come to be here as I'm about to eat a sandwich or write with a pen or use a piece of paper?

[08:12]

How did this come to be here in my life such that I'm using this in this moment? And to take a few minutes, sometimes a few minutes, not just a few seconds, to think about all the elements, all of the factors, all of the beings, human and otherwise, that have contributed to the bread or the piece of paper or the shirt coming to be in my life. I find that this, rather simple way of calling up, in some particular ways, the fact of interdependence. Very helpful. Recently, someone came to ask my advice about what she calls an unbelievable mess.

[09:21]

I think we could talk about our current state of affairs, American foreign policy as an incredible mess, but let me stay closer. This is pretty close. A very dear and old friend of mine, who some two or three years ago had some substantial assets. that were turned over to be managed by someone who probably didn't know what he was doing and ended up giving all the money away and not paying attention to the governmental requirements about things like money, income taxes, etc. So it's gotten to be a very big mess. And I wonder if any of you can think about a situation that got worse the more thoroughly you kept your head in a paper bag.

[10:37]

Have you ever had that situation? Where you dig a hole and stick your head in it and pull the dirt in on top of you? And of course, whatever my mess is just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. So what this person came to talk to me about, as she called it, this colossal, unbelievable mess, has been weighing on my heart-mind for the last few days. half day or so, I get another bulletin in over the airwaves. The operator's send button on her email doesn't work, so she's been calling me, leaving messages with yet more chapters and verses to the mess.

[11:42]

And what, when I have let myself sit with actually put myself in the shoes of each of the people involved in the situation. What is abundantly clear is that what is happening in each instance is suffering of various kinds, but nevertheless suffering. And what happens when I separate myself from another's suffering is I'm much more likely to then go to the habit of judging and blaming. You did all kinds of bad and wrong things, and it's all your fault. And that, from some point of view, may be the case. But most situations, when we look into them, are far more complicated than that.

[12:50]

The person who is in the it position, probably, certainly if this is the case in the situation I have in mind, had a lot of help getting there. I've been thinking a lot these days about the Bodhisattva of Compassion. This articulated and expressed, repeatedly expressed manifestation of compassion called Avalokiteshvara. In my own life and practice, what I've come to see over the years is how much becomes eased and untangled with being present, listening, regarding, without judgment, without reaction.

[14:20]

but present. How often I've had this experience of sitting with someone who came with some big trouble and if I could be thoroughly present in this way that's modeled by the Compassion Bodhisattvas, the person who came to me so often sees for themselves what they need to do or not. Some years ago, Annie Proulx wrote a book that some of you probably know called The Shipping News. And she used at the top of each chapter a quote from the Ashley Book of Knots. I was so taken by the quotations that I went and got a copy of the Ashley Book of Knots. It's about this thick. And it's, you know, for people like my son who do things with rope.

[15:28]

sailors and such. And one of the quotations that has stayed with me abidingly since I stumbled onto it is the one about how to untangle a knot. And the advice that you should never pull it, pull the ends. Allow the knot to untangle itself. How much possibility disappears when we turn away from each other, and even worse, when we slam the door shut, literally and figuratively. And how much that turning away from the suffering that presents itself in my life, that looks like it's someone else's, that's your problem.

[16:39]

If I am patient and look deeply enough, what I'll see is that it's our problem. That whatever suffering there may be arising in someone else's life resonates in some way with my own. And my ability to be present with someone else's suffering seems to require that I'd be willing to be present with my own suffering. Otherwise, I'm just doing what I call ambulance driving, distracting myself from the suffering that I can do something about, particularly with respect to my own reactive patterns. I can't remember if I've said this here.

[17:49]

I may not have. In the Theravada tradition, as you surely know, the so-called four immeasurables begin with loving-kindness, and out of the cultivation of loving-kindness then arises the cultivation of compassion, and out of that the cultivation of joy, and out of that equanimity. In the Himalayan or Vajrayana stream, the first of the immeasurable set is cultivated is that of equanimity. That is the dismantling, the dissolving of picking and choosing, of prejudice. And from that then can be the arising of loving-kindness, compassion, and joy.

[18:59]

I think that sequence makes a lot of sense. Especially when I think about this business of my cultivating my willingness to be affected, to resonate, to know that the suffering of another is my suffering. Giving up my prejudices helps in that process a lot. I'm not at all recommending that we take on the suffering of the world globally as a starting point.

[20:08]

What I'm recommending is the opportunity that comes up in our daily lives as we encounter the suffering of another person near to us. And to begin to notice the difference when I have the slightest turning away, the slightest discomfort with what is coming up within my own mind stream as I let myself notice or have some increasing awareness of the suffering of another. and to pay attention to the reactive pattern that arises, particularly when I'm in the face of someone's suffering, where I'm not so present.

[21:21]

How quickly judging and blaming comes up. I had a very interesting experience yesterday. Bill and I went on a little research outing. He was researching something that was relevant for a couple of his clients and the research was taking place in a shopping center here in Marin County and there's a woman who has a store there who I know a little bit, and so we went in. And there in the window was a big announcement about winter sale. What arises in my mind?

[22:26]

She didn't send me an announcement of her winter sale. Good old me, [...] me. Anyway, we went in and I introduced her to Bill and Bill to her, and she said, you know, the postcard I sent to you for our winter sale came back. And she looked at it on her computer and she said, well, is this right? I said, yeah. And she said, well, you gave this to me. The other one must have come from another address, and I'm pretty sure. I had misaddressed it. Why didn't she send me the announcement? How quickly I could go to that place of, she doesn't care about me.

[23:31]

I who introduced her to lemon verbena tea after all. She owes me. Funky mind. And of course, my actual experience in the time that we were visiting together was that she's still the warm-hearted and open-hearted, interesting and creative person that I have experienced her to be. Enormously generous and forthcoming about her experience as a tenant, which was part of Bill's research program. Altogether, a very heartwarming little visit, in addition to useful. how often we project out what we are afraid is going to happen, and keep ourselves from noticing how we have contributed to the arising of what happens, or don't notice that what we were dreading isn't what's actually going on.

[25:05]

And of course, in the Buddhist tradition, the promise is that if we will cultivate our capacity to show up, to be present, over and over again, no matter where we go, to always come back into the present moment, resting in attention. how different our experience of the world will be. Not what we're thinking about might happen or what we're afraid might happen, but being present sufficiently to have the taste, no matter how brief, of what happens out of presence. how little of what we busy ourselves with we actually need to do.

[26:18]

How many of us get distracted with minding somebody else's mind stream as a way of not minding our own? Especially those of us who live with a partner. I am a real expert on Bill's Mindstream. Well, I'm not, actually. But it's very tempting. And how often do I get drawn to minding somebody else's mind stream who's doing the very thing that I do or that I until recently did? So there's still that kind of resonating dis-ease with a certain pattern.

[27:27]

I find studying the mind continuously fascinating. Not always a thrill, but fascinating. And my conclusion is that the more I develop an ability to be present with my own suffering, the more I'm able to be with the suffering of another, and to actually uncover the fact of interdependence of the relational aspect that has to do with suffering and joy. So I want to I want to reread this quote from Longfellow. I kind of like to get a big coat hanger and do this with it.

[28:36]

dangle it in front of my eyes. If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. A number of years ago, someone that I was practicing with at the San Francisco Zen Center as someone who was an ordained priest, ordained by Suzuki Roshi, and who was always a wreck. His robes were usually pretty wrinkled and dirty and a mess. He was a bit like Pigpen. You remember Pigpen? Not a bit. He was a lot like Pigpen.

[29:39]

He is still a lot like Pigpen. And I remember also someone, this person, Mr. Pigpen, is someone of enormous generosity and kindness. He also has some irritating habits. I remember one time coming back to my flat and discovering that he and his best friend and scaled the wall of the building and kind of Spider-Man-like went around the edge of the building until they found a window that wasn't locked and came in and helped themselves to whatever was in the kitchen because they were hungry. Boundaries were not Mr. Pigpen's strong and developed suit. But I remember pretty early on in the years of our practicing together,

[30:44]

his saying something, and it was really more what he didn't say, but the kind of feeling tone of his saying something about none of us can ever know about another person's suffering. What we see is not what is there. And it was one of those comments that dropped in for me, both because I had a sense of how much this insight on my friend's part was an important factor in his kindness to other people. But that he was also pointing out that we simply can't know what someone else doesn't let us know, and even then, Is there not a certain kind of sorrow and sadness and suffering that we may not be able to quite articulate?

[31:55]

I've never forgotten what my friend was pointing out. And as I was thinking about him and this conversation between us this last week, I realized that what he was saying was an important factor in his ability to resonate with the suffering of others. So that's what's on my mind this morning. I wonder if there's anything that you'd like to talk about or bring up for us to talk about together. I'd just like to say there's a candlelit vigil in Fairfax at the Parquete.

[33:00]

And I think there's one in Pottery's Dish. Good. And one here. And hopefully lots in lots of places. And then I guess we take pictures and send them somewhere. That's some way of, I think it's moving on, it's organizing that piece of it to try to have some sense of kind of knitting many people around the world doing this. Do you want to say something about the movie Blind Spot? Oh, yes. Yes, yes. Bill and I went to see Blind Spot Thursday night. It's a German film that was basically an interview with Hitler's secretary. It's a very important film to see. It's very relevant. There's another piece of email going around about an 80-year-old man named Muller who helped start the UN.

[34:06]

He gave a talk recently. in which he said he feels a miracle has happened in the world, and never in the history of the world has have people come together to oppose a war before it happened. And that the UN has become the voice of the world in opposition, has become the other superpower, that the United States has thought of itself as the only superpower. And now there are two superpowers. It's wonderful, I can nail it. Yeah, thank you. It's a very important perspective because of course the rhetoric coming out of our own government is that the UN is wrecked, is ruined, is pointless, is beside the point. And to have another perspective of this... It's true, it's true. Yeah, it's wonderful. Anyway, please see Blindspot and watch all the body language, not just what she says, although what she says is very revealing, but her body language is also very revealing.

[35:36]

Thank you for reminding me. If I don't write it down, I get distracted. Marsha? Your point about appreciating and trying to understand the suffering of others, immediately I went to, as I think I have before when we've talked about these things, but I've never actually heard anybody say that, to imagine myself, is the suffering of our president. Yeah, no exceptions. Well, and you know, particularly after getting the piece that you sent to me, where it's very clear that his father is taking a very different stance and some glimpse of some

[36:47]

real tension within this family where there's this very high priority for loyalty and cohesiveness and solidarity. I think the practice of putting ourselves in another person's shoes, particularly anyone that we get kind of locked into as the focal point of what's wrong, is has a kind of leavening and, you know, the double digging in the garden effect, aerating all that projected judging and blaming. Not always so easy to do, because we have to climb over our resistance to do it. One of the themes that I find so engaging is Trudel Junge's struggle to reconcile all her experience, direct experience with Hitler, with what she subsequently learned about the

[38:20]

Nazi policies in Germany and in Europe. She kept using the word for pressure, criminal, and shaking her head each time. How can this man who was on the whole so charming and courteous and thoughtful to me also be such a violator of human norms. And the overlapping tension on that within herself, how could I have been so blind to this? And how hard she was on herself for her blindness. A very gripping movie.

[39:24]

Describe her description of coming across the memorial in Berlin. In Munich. There's a memorial to the members of the White Rose Movement who, this works very briefly, there were students in Munich in 1942. who opposed the war, distributed leaflets clandestinely, but were identified and arrested. I forget if they were shot or hanged. But she came across this memorial to, among others, Sophie Scholl. And she said, here's a woman who was born the same year I was. She was in my yard gang. She was in my class. And she saw what was going on. And she acted. And I didn't. Why didn't I?

[40:33]

I thought that she could be open to this kind of deep self-examination. It was as moving as anything in the film. Yeah. And I learned something from this film about the long period of silence in Germany after the war. Yeah. I just wanted to add to that that apparently what also the Germans were silent about was about what we did to them. That is the dreadful carpet bombing in Munich and other cities that killed hundreds of thousands of people. They never talked about that either after the war, for decades.

[41:33]

They never faced their own suffering or the suffering they caused. Well, this collection of essays that is now out written by Sebald, where he really was bringing that up for us to look at. And it's very troubling. Very troubling. Well, there's also a much bigger book, I think it's not been translated yet, called Der Brandt, The Fire, written by a German journalist, Jürg Friedrich. It's thick, in which he recounts what the German experience was like. When was that written? I think it came out in maybe 98, 99, 2000. It's recent. I mean, it's just remarkable how much after this time of incredible suffering before there is some voice describing what happened.

[42:43]

And I think A kind of silence is a kind of turning away, a kind of sealing off what I don't know how to be with. And I think we all have some experience of that, at least on some small scale. And then what happens when there's a kind of collective turning away? Because we don't know how to turn toward what we're accustomed to turning away from. I just got a call from somebody who's going through having somebody with an enormous amount of physical pain from a work-related injury and in the process of trying to cope with the pain became addicted to some medications and a long period of detoxing simultaneous with the

[43:49]

than having the pain still there to contend with. And I hadn't heard from this person for a few years. So when she finally came to see me, I bent her ear a bit about what arose for me in not hearing from her, that I wanted to know how she was, even if how she was was not so great. She said, well, so I'm calling you to let you know how I'm doing, because I don't want you to be so unhappy that I'm not telling you how I'm doing. But I could so, just in the timber of her voice, feel the kind of edge she's on between the suffering of detoxing from going off all these medications and the physical pain that she doesn't know quite how to be with.

[45:12]

Just one thread of suffering coming through a message on the message machine. Can I just take a few minutes and let that in? I can't remember what brought this up for me. It was some conversation I had in the last few days where I remembered what several, or before we'd seen the movie, I'd gone to park the car and I passed a group of homeless people in San Rafael. And they were giving each other some advice, particularly one young man about, you know, don't try to spend the night in the parks.

[46:19]

because they're very high fines and they're being watched, you know, kind of helping take care of this guy. And I remembered what several homeless people have told me about how, for them, the hardest thing about being homeless is having people walk by as though they were a post being related to as an object And what a difference, for the people who were talking to me about this, it would be for them if someone just made eye contact and nodded or said hello. I was telling you about my experience in the driving room. Oh yes, with the man who was working next door. you know, a Latino man helping our next-door neighbor do a scorched-earth policy next door.

[47:25]

And, you know, pretty stern. I guess Bill waved and said hello, and he said it was like the sun came out. I think the practice of eye contact and greeting of some kind to someone who's homeless on the street can be a very revealing practice. Because of course, what comes up for so many of us is our fear about, that could be me. Kind of anxiety about all those things that get manifested as being harmless. Jane? I'm not going to be very articulate, but I got clear when you were talking about something that happened recently.

[48:34]

My sister ended up back in prison for stealing, and it looked like I was out of town. It looked like she had a public defender. It was a lot of years, because they were going to lump together a couple of things. And my husband and I got really clear to help her by getting a lawyer, and really part of it was the awareness of her suffering, and the suffering also of her child, who's young. And I realized that I was afraid at first to tell my brother, because I thought he would call me a patsy again, you know, you're rescuing. And I got really clear that why I was doing it, you know, that I was doing it in a way to help, but it was not condoning, and it was not ignoring what had happened. And when I called him because I got clear I realized he was really wide open. He said, I really understand and thank you. And it was really being able to hold both. She's not taking responsibility. I mean, there's still that suffering of what she's not doing, but also recognizing the suffering of her life. But just being able to, getting clear on my part, enabled he and I to have an opening that I really didn't think would happen.

[49:38]

So it just made me aware. And the other one was, we have a homeless guy in Santa Soma a regular guy, and ever since my son was young, we'd go by, and I'd always say, hello, and look at him, and it's interesting, because it still happens, and I notice this guy mutters and talks and all, but when we say hello, he'll stop and look up and kind of, hmm. You know, he stops all of that. It's like that's his way of kind of coping in the world, but it's fascinating, just what happens when you do make that connection, so. You know, some, now, Years ago, when I was about to go down into the subway in New York, there was a young woman at the top of the stairs. It was winter, so it was also a place where a little warm air was coming up the stairwell. And I just stopped and looked her in the eye and said hello. And there's a way in which

[50:42]

her face and a certain quality that I experienced with her is still so palpable. And I didn't have any sense that, I mean, that seemed quite sufficient. The beggar and homeless trip in India is much better worked out. The king of the beggars is said to be one of the wealthiest men in India. Nothing this morning? There's always something.

[51:46]

Well, that's true for all of us. There's always something. I'll throw it out there. This week we had a conversation about my... I think a kind of disappointment in myself about my pattern of not remembering. to work with the practices that I know how to do when some reactive pattern arises. And this last week, after dinner, I drove over to Target with a specific errand in mind and got to the garden center, which was closed at a different hour than the rest of the store. I was mightily irritated and got back in the car and just felt this kind of, you know, my irritation energy moving and remembered to do the centering and grounding and field practice and then it occurred to me that I remember more often than I notice that there's a way in which I

[53:11]

can undermine my own confidence in the practices that I know how to do by disregarding what I do remember or forgetting what I remember and get into a kind of generalizing of, oh, I never remember to do what I know how to do. Well, this is where the whole notion of that working with the dissolving of prejudice and to begin to see a kind of internalized prejudice against myself with all that, you know, always and never. And where are the mind of both in? Both I remember and I forget. I do both. Well, I think I have this aiming for always. Perfection. Yeah. Good luck. And when it's not always, I'm disappointed.

[54:14]

And not so realistic or useful. Well, particularly if I'm going to jump from thoroughly conditioned mind into perfection in one leap. Kathy? I had kind of an interesting experience with suffering this past week, a fellow who lived about my sub-age, who's curating a show at the Central Camp in England, and stayed in my home for a few evenings. And the first evening we sat down, he proceeded for some reason to tell me about all the suffering in his life. I've never met him before. We were chatting, and he told me all about his suffering, his difficulties. And I, you know, I sat there and just listened. And my first response, I realized, was he had told me more than I wanted to know.

[55:22]

And what was I to do with it? And why? What was the message? And I immediately went into analyze mind. And it was really, I just noticed each day how it happened each day. He stayed with me for a few days, and he's not gone yet from the centers. I've interacted with him most daily. And it's just an interesting exercise in knowing him and receiving this information and seeing the persona that he puts forth. and sitting there in the lecture thinking, no one would ever know. Right. Well, and I particularly encourage you to flag the impulse to do. It's not the description of Avalokiteshvara.

[56:32]

Listening, regarding, hearing, seeing. Not doing. There's nothing about doing. I don't feel even inclined to do anything, which I'm really pleased about. And when he left, he said, well, he said, for some reason you know more than anyone else does about me, and I don't know why, you're just such a good listener. And I thought, and I really don't want to do anything, I have no desire to do anything. I just found it really... I don't know what it was. I just quote, deserve this. Ah. It must be about me. I deserve. Well, I do. Yeah, no, no, no. I'm just saying what... Beware of sarcasm. Yvonne, would you repeat again what you said last week at Greenbelt about if I'm about to get involved?

[57:44]

Remember a woman in question? Oh, yes, yes, yes. Because I've had a couple of emails from people who were trading that Rilke, and one woman was very interested to have you write it down. Is what I am about to do, including taking care of myself, or instead of taking care of myself. It's a specific question, it's a question specific to the habit, the reactive habit of rescuing. But it's also a particular manifestation of the difference between the mind of either-or and the mind of both-and. Want me to write it out? I think I can remember this time. Is what I'm about to do instead of taking care of myself or including taking care of myself?

[58:51]

And as I have said when I bring this practice up, if I can remember to ask the question, I have at least up until now always been able to answer it. It's the remembering the question, you know, I'm going to have a permanent installed wire implanted on top of my head and I can clip these various practice triggers dangling in front of me. We'll call them sunglasses or something. Well, after all that racket about this monster storm we were going to have and it was going to go on for who knows how long, we have this Completely. Lovely spring day after a quite nice, warm, wet night. It could be my brother who does, manages plant ignition, sometimes calls things like this a sucker hole.

[59:54]

Not a sucker hole. No, because then they'll get out to light their fire, and then an hour later, it's back again. Yeah, well, of course, one of the great Meditations on impermanence is meditations on weather. And, you know, it does always change. I used to call them Dharma dangles. Very good. Thank you. Well, we'll perfect our helmet for hanging Dharma dangles. Take good care of yourselves. I see you all.

[60:38]

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