I feel very lucky to have this opportunity to practice with you and to study with Sojourn, and I'm quite aware that there are many, many people who can and should be sitting in this seat. And there is something, in my mind anyway, a little bit arbitrary about there being one person in one year and that we're marching on in that way. Everybody is a senior student in some way or another. So I'm going to start and sort of give you the bottom line first and then kind of backfill. And the thing that I had wanted to talk about on Friday or before is that what has been on my mind a lot, which is the work that I've done. all my working career because I'm in the process, very much in the thick of retiring.

[01:05]

In fact, I decided fully almost a year ago to retire. I told clients in January that I would be ending in March. I ended in March and pretty much focused on saying goodbye in that month. And April was to dismantle my office of 30 years, and that was a big project. And May was going to be the start of my retirement. So my plans may have changed a little bit, but not in a way that feels actually very congruent with stepping into this new chapter of my life. Is there going to be a discernment process about that? So coming back to the kind of bottom line about what brings me to practice, the question that I have, what I would call my burning question, the Dogen question, is how do we know what we know?

[02:22]

How do you know when you know? What is it that knows? It's been a very good and informative question and just on the other side of it is, I think, the hindrance that I deal with which is doubt. And asking the question, how do you know that? How can you say that? How can you be so sure? And kind of together with that is a bit of an envy with people who have great faith. Although, I do question it, like, don't you have any questions? But the way it's manifested is, for example, when I was an undergraduate I thought I wanted to be an architect and I was in architecture class and we would be given these design problems and the final day would be you would come in with all your drawings and put them up on a board, everybody would, all around the room, and then

[03:29]

each person individually would defend their design and people would say things kind of hyperbolic like, and you will go through the space and then it'll arch in a vault and people will be, and they'll wax about how people would feel about being in the space. And I would think, how do you know that? There's no data, there's no, at the time, actually there's a whole field now about how people use space, but at the time there was no data about that. That was my kind of burning question then. The way it manifested a little bit later was when I began to study psychology and took the Psych 101, as many of us have, and you read about these experiments that usually the professors do on hapless freshmen in their Psych 101 classes.

[04:30]

And this particular one really caught my attention. And the experiment is that there are nine people in a room and an experimenter. And there is actually only one of them that is the subject. The other eight are complicit with the experimenter and kind of in on what the game is. But the subject doesn't know that. The subject thinks that everybody is operating in the same dark place that they are operating. And psychologists call the people who are complicit confederates. I don't know why. So the experimenter does something like hold up two cards and say to the whole which one is longer. And they start with the Confederates and they go all the way through the Confederates and the Confederates all pick this one. And then they get to the hapless ninth person and see what that person does, which that person picks.

[05:41]

And then they count the number of people who go with this or who go with that. And the result of the experiment is that 75% of the subjects go with a group. And less than a quarter of the people go with their own, what their own perception tells them. And what I said, I described this to my first therapist. I've been in therapy pretty much all my life of one kind or another. And I said, my problem is, as I'm defining it, is that I would go with the group. And because of the dilemma that I inherited from my family, I might even doubt my own perception. I might even question whether I was seeing it right. But even if I was convinced that I was seeing it right, I would not want to step outside. So that dilemma is the other side

[06:46]

How do you know what you know? And it's about how you listen to what your own experience is internally and what the data is externally and how you figure out what is true for you, for me. And it is a life project that I have been working since then, actually, how to listen to, how to understand what my intuition is, how to believe it, trust it, when to question it, how to let it be refined by new data and what other people are telling me is going on. And I think it's not an accident probably that the person that I'm married to is a philosopher whose work is epistemology, which is the study of knowledge, how do we know what we know.

[07:51]

And that Buddhism would be the place where I would land, where the head guy says, here, I'm telling you this, but don't trust me, go out and find out for yourself. Make this your experience, which I have always found to be such a relief, such a spaciousness and openness for finding one's way. So this is what I came to, this is my Sunday revelation, and I was talking to Libby about this, and she said, yes, the source of knowing is experience, but it is also tutored experience. Experience informed by tutoring, and tutoring informed by experience going on forever. So that's what I'm calling my bottom line.

[09:05]

That one knows from one's experience, yeah, that's right, but also that experience, I don't want to say exactly shaped, but is informed by being in a relationship, by being in a trusting relationship in which there is another mind working with your mind about what is happening and figuring it out together and mirroring and so forth, that we don't do it alone. So, Sort of now stepping back to my work. I was hired by Alameda County Superior Court in 1982.

[10:13]

It wasn't a job that I wanted and I wasn't actually looking for a full-time job. I was looking for something else. I wanted to start a private practice and so forth. And I went to the interviews because I want to practice with interviews. So I marched my way through these interviews and then I got offered the job and I had to really figure out whether I would take it. And the thing that got me to take it is that it was an opportunity that rarely comes around even once in a lifetime, which is to start a department and hire from the ground up every single person in the department to do a new service to respond to a new code section. And the code section was that people who were separating and divorcing and had children and disagreed about their children had to go to mediation first before they got to litigate. So this department was the mediation. These were the group of people who would provide that service, provide it free.

[11:14]

in the court, sort of like a detour sign from the court. Interestingly, and kind of a side comment, the person who hired me was Judge Michael Bellacci, and he died in February. and after a long and stellar life. And so during this whole process of ending my practice, which I was now in private practice, I've been going to memorial services, several of them, and meeting with people and reminiscing about all and sort of reestablishing this connection. So it's been quite intense and deep. So that changed my life, taking that job changed my life. I offered them two years, I stayed for 12 because I was very much taken with the challenge of translating psychological information into the legal system and vice versa.

[12:24]

And I came to the job with no experience at all with law, with a court, I'd never been in a courtroom. And they said that would be the easy thing to teach, They were hiring me because of my experience with family's crisis and administration. I had been working doing crisis family therapy in East Oakland, where the crisis in those cases was between an adolescent runaway and their families and figuring out that issue. The model in the legal system for finding the truth is very well defined. There's the thing called the rules of evidence and what's admissible and what's not admissible and what the rules are for what you can count on as a fact in a case, what the judge or a jury can count on.

[13:28]

The problem with families is the way families operate don't fit at all with the legal system, and everything in families is hearsay. And hearsay isn't admissible in a court of law, right? So what would happen, and what did happen, is that the courts themselves were, There's no comparable word for this word, and it's a good one. It's iatrogenic, and it's really used in the medical field, which means physician-caused disease. Diseases are problems caused by being in the hospital or being treated, like a staph infection that you get or pneumonia or whatever that's incidental to whatever it is that brought you in. there was a pretty high consciousness that there was a lot of iatrogenic effects of the court system on families. That it encouraged people to gear up and fight, to not talk to each other, to not find common ground.

[14:36]

It posits that there are two opposing interests. And in a family, in a family where there are children, first of all, there's not just two opposing interests. there are many interests that don't have a seat at the table, the children, the grandparents, and so forth. They're actually quite involved with the dilemma, whatever it is that the families bring to the court. And even the idea that these two interests are unrelated, that is, that the best interest of this person isn't completely tied up with the best interest of this person, it doesn't fit with families. Ultimately what happens, even when a family is separated and there are children, there's still a task that brings them together. They will always be parents of a child or children and they will always have a common job and a common interest that they cannot step away from forever.

[15:42]

They are bound together forever. So the idea that there were these effects on families that would cause them to have more difficulty with each other when they got home and made dinner for their children that night was part of what was trying to be solved by the mediation. And it also turns out that that's really not a good way to find out what's right and true. That idea that two attorneys can come in and paint a picture over here and do that narrative and paint a picture over here, and then the collision of those two narratives will somehow have the truth fall out on the floor in the middle, like jousters going at each other, actually doesn't fit that scenario either. Like, I'll give you an example. This is a friend of mine, a good friend of mine who's a family lawyer. had this case in which, in this case they're not children, but there was a family business. And the question was how to divide the family business.

[16:42]

Who would get it or whether it would be divided and how? And the husband was an engineer and had invented something and they manufactured it and was the creative energy. And the wife in this case was the office manager. And the story they told, the narrative they told was he said, she was always in my way. She hindered me. I would have been so much more successful if she hadn't been there. And the family business is mine. I created it. I'm the creative force here. And she said, if it weren't for me, he wouldn't have a business because he is whatever he was, whatever her narrative was, he was scattered. He couldn't, you know, make the payroll and all of that kind of stuff. And another attorney or other attorneys less wise would just take the story of the person that they're representing and tell it as loudly and as boldly as you could.

[17:48]

And then you leave the judge to kind of scratch his head and try to figure out what the umbrella story is on this tale. But there was a silent partner. And so my friend had the opportunity and got permission to interview the silent partner and who said, look, this business depends on both of them. And he didn't appreciate her. She didn't appreciate him. And their divorce is about their lack of appreciation of each other. It's not about one of them not being essential to this business. So if you fought it out in court, what you do is reify the injury and the narrative of the injury rather than figure out what the healing umbrella was of the story with them, with each other. That's the norm in families.

[18:58]

that there are contradictory narratives in a relationship. The research says that that's true even in relationships that are not breaking apart, that are successful relationships, that the narrative of one spouse does not match the narrative of the other. I don't know how they determined that. I don't know what the study was that determined it, but my imagination is that You had 10 couples and one spouse had a column over here and the other had the narratives over here and somebody was trying to draw the arrows between them, like the puzzle in the newspaper or something like that, and you couldn't do it, you couldn't match up the narrative. So that's part of the work, that was part of the mediation work, which is, both how to hold narratives that are not matching and not collapse in either direction toward either one.

[20:04]

And I have to say part of that is tolerating the anxiety of not knowing, not tolerating not being able to know what the answer is. And to figure out what to do in any case. And one of the ways I think about it, I was lucky in that I had training in family therapy as part of it. Oh dear. I thought I had a diagram. So I'm gonna have to describe the diagram that I drew. Oh, here it is. I don't know if you can see this. It's just a five-pointed star. So this is a sort of conceptual way of thinking about how families operate. If these circles are people in a family and this is how they're seeing things, this is the angle of their view.

[21:11]

You can see that depending on how you draw this, the overlap of their perceptions about what's happening in the family can either be very large or very small, but it is there somewhere. It is the common reality that we all rely on. But there's a certain part of their experience that is hidden to themselves or hidden to other people, not recognized, not seen. And when people are in conflict with one another, when they're threatened, they retreat to and emphasize the part that they think is not reflected or seen. And therefore, you get the contest of the fight of the narratives that are hidden and not the overlap. And that's one of the explanations I came up with, with why that is true, but it's just a kind of diagram. This work is intense, has been intense, has been very fruitful but intense and it is another reason I came to practice because the intensity of the work needed to be balanced by the intensity of the vacation.

[22:22]

And so somewhere in here I ended up doing a lot of wilderness traveling and a lot of whitewater rafting and especially would take a long vacation in the summertime, like a two week or three week time away. which was a complete mindwash, a real reset. And I would come back, the way I would describe it, I would come back the way you feel at the end of a seven-day Sushine. There would just be this sense of settled, and my mind would be at ease, I guess I would say. And I would try to hang on to that. I would make these dedications, I'm gonna hang on to that. That never works, actually. It never worked. Several years went by, and then I realized, kind of in the mid-90s, I have to do something when I'm in town. I have to do something ongoing. I didn't call it a practice, but I recognized that I needed something, that vacations don't do it.

[23:27]

And that was the first time I stuck my nose here. And I think I did it. three days Sashin or two days Sashin or something around about 1995. But I sort of came and went at Tosahara and other places. I am not somebody who, I have envied the people who say I came here and I just felt at home. I just knew I was home. I'm not a person actually who comes to the feeling of being at home easily and One of the great surprises when I received my Dharma name was I was very afraid of getting a Dharma name because I was afraid of what it would point to in terms of what my edge was and I was nervous about that. I hadn't anticipated how reassuring the first name is, the original home. which sort of, it was deeply moving to me.

[24:35]

I'm gonna tell one more story and then I'm gonna stop since, my watch says 10 minutes, is that true? Is that what you got? It says five. You have five, okay. Well, let me just tell this briefly and then leave some time. One of the things that I did, and I did it not as a plan, that was a happenstance. I have a group I've been meeting with for a number of years to talk about Dharma and how it moves in our lives, and we decided to have a day of sitting, and the location that we had had sort of fell through, so the upshot was that it ended up in my office. This is mid-March while I'm still seeing clients. So we moved the furniture back and did a modified day like eight to five, modest day.

[25:36]

And next to the last Zazen period, the last one you sit facing out, right? I realized that I had all day been sitting facing an empty client chair. And I started to cry because just in that moment this sort of ghostly trail of people passed through that chair of people I had seen and I felt the reciprocity of the relationship, I felt how much I had and learned from them and gained from them and how much they had been my support, they had been my living and how their trust in me had been my living and I felt quite grateful for that and it actually changed, I think, the way that I said goodbye in the next two weeks after that.

[26:43]

And I will say also briefly the koan that I'm sitting with is Mumenkan 35, Sejo is separated from her soul. And so I've been, it's a story about separation and reconciliation. So I've been sitting with this separation that I've been working with with people and their reconciliation and how that is between people and within oneself and so forth. So let me hear your comments and thoughts and so forth. of holding that anxiety?

[28:11]

By repeatedly getting caught not doing it. Yeah, you know, I mean, I'll give you a very brief example, but I mean, over and over and over again, you listen to one person and you go, oh, that's, I got it. And then you go down that road And then at some point, you get your chain yanked because you hear the other narrative and you go, oh, right, wait a minute, and you gotta backpedal. A very simple one is I was seeing a couple and he spent the first, I don't know what, 20 minutes of the hour complaining about how she wouldn't go see his accountant. They were trying to decide to get married. And her not doing that was reflective of her not willing to cast her financial lot with his. And I mean, he had, he was going for it. And I was sitting there thinking, Well, I can see that.

[29:13]

I get his point. She is kind of this and that, and he's responding to that and her, and I went for it. And she sat there quietly, and when he was spent, she said, we're sitting in Berkeley, she said, whatever his name was, your accountant lives in Philadelphia. And I went, Right. There's always a fact that kind of tilts the whole thing that makes you kind of appreciate that there's another side. And I can't tell you the number of times that has happened to me. It is the bigger truth that that always happens. And so there is really no choice about sitting with the difference. What I do try to do, make it tolerable is to, what I have said to myself and other people is the universe is big enough to hold these in some way that I cannot see.

[30:16]

There is some overarching way in which both of these things can be contained and held and understood and I can't, and I can't at the moment see it. I really appreciate the story of the couple that were dissolving a business, and then the silent partner came in, and it's getting me to think that we all have silent partners in our relationship, if we can just hear them speak and illuminate the two sides. You can get to the overarching picture. Yeah, thank you. What a morning. My brain is just, my viewpoints are flipping and my view of my own life is just like, oh yeah, that's what happened. And it just seems like the people, your clients are so lucky.

[31:25]

And it's a creative act together. You work with people and I would imagine you're training, doing a lot of training in this process of the universe is a big place and there's an overarching way of looking at it and no one might buy it. And that's a really, I mean, listening to the news on the way down, you know, I just thought, wow, this is really great stuff. And I would have been one of those people who said, no, this is the longer line. asking to see if people really love me. I just had a lot of realization about that. Sometimes I didn't say that. Thank you. Thank you for your talk.

[32:29]

It's incredibly rich, of course. But I want to see if I need You've had a career where you help people kind of find a connection, a connected reality. You worked in a system which is, like you said, all about opposing realities and making one. Right? That's the core system. This one is right, that one's wrong. How has that sense of Like you said, you have these experiences of your judgments being, you know, of what's real, obviously being wrong. How is your sense, and I'm interested in how your practice has helped you to deal with that sense of the difference between

[33:33]

Well, actually the narrative is a reality. Not all narratives are not real. I mean, they're just not complete. There are some aspects of the narratives which are real. But maybe I'm not getting your question. Well, my question is, how has practice informed your exploration of that question? Well, I think there's an opportunity and certainly it's been true for me that all the practice here is not on the cushion, it is also in relationship. And the number of times that I've been caught by someone else's narrative or someone else's narrative has been directed at me and it's contradictory to mine, have been incredibly rich and important moments.

[34:49]

They've not always been easy or happy, but they have been... Having it come up in this arena, this... holding environment in which we all have an intention is incredibly powerful, and it has been more useful to me than working it through in therapy, actually. You know, Hakuin has meant a lot to me, the story about Hakuin being, accused of being the father of the neighbor's child and being given the child to raise and his response was, whatever you say. And then the story changes and the baby gets taken back and he says, whatever you say. And that ability to, I've really worked with that in my own self about trying to

[35:58]

not only have my own reality but also to let the other person have their reality and to include that and to try to understand how it is that the other person is perceiving what I'm doing regardless of what my intention is. My intention is one thing but the impact of my behavior is another. And so understanding that and having a contained place, a sangha, in which to do that, in which we can have those experiences with each other and then we can come back and sit and be silent and then still be there. The relationship is still there, has really been a big practice for me.

[36:50]

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