Good morning. For the last year and a half or so, I've been working on Saturdays, so I haven't been coming to the Saturday lectures. So it's a little scary to come after a year and a half and be on this side of this plane right here. Last night in the middle of the night when it was raining, pouring rain, I was thinking, well, there will probably only be a few people who will come to the Zen Do tomorrow morning. So it's encouraging that so many people bothered to come on a Saturday morning when it's in the middle of a rainstorm.

[01:19]

And if some of you are here new, haven't been here very much, and many of you have been here for a long time. And I think that most, all of us have some kind of an expectation of why we're here. We have some expectations. And if we're new, we have a certain expectation of what's going to happen when we come into this room. And if we've been here a long time, we also have some kind of expectation of what's going to happen when we come into this room. And usually, Like anything, once you've been doing it for a while, and particularly after you've been doing it for a long time, your expectation changes.

[02:34]

This isn't just true with this situation, but most situations are like that. It's interesting to Remember the first time that you came to the Zen Center, or the first time you tried meditation, the first time you listened to a lecture and watched the person bow at the altar and then come sit down. And remember what your expectation was, what you thought was going to happen. And also what you thought was going to happen with Zen practice. How did you see yourself doing it? Why were you interested in it in the first place? Why bother out of all the thousands of things that you can do in the Bay Area?

[03:37]

Why pick this thing to do? And probably most of us have some expectation when we start that somewhere along the way we will have the possibility of having an improved state of mind or some kind of a better state of consciousness. I would imagine most people have some version of that expectation when they come to Zen Center the first time. It may be kind of vague, but probably there's some expectation like that. But you have no idea how that's going to develop.

[04:41]

How are you going to get to that improved state of mind, better state of mind? What I find from experience, and I think what most people find from experience, is that the possibility of an improved state of mind is true. You could have an improved state of mind. But what actually fills your The activity that you're engaged in as you come, after you keep coming here over and over again and you stick with it for a while, inevitably the sense that you deal with is all of your personal problems.

[06:00]

Your personal problems tend to come out. by the act of sitting down and being still, your personal problems come out. They just do. In one form or another and in different levels. And anybody who's really interested in Zen practice, to the extent that they really want to engage in it, and stick with it, has to grapple with these personal problems that arise. Problems, emotions, anger, sadness, sense of separation, loneliness, aggressiveness, fear,

[07:03]

everything. And it's probably not how you think of Zen practice at the very beginning. Because Zen practice and Eastern spirituality has a more ethereal image in the society. But it's a kind of phony image. And it's been anybody who's been around here for a long time, I think, begins to find that out, that that image, that ethereal image, is a kind of phony image. That the actual experience is more gritty, kind of hard work. Not necessarily, I mean, it can also be buoyant as well, but it's a gritty, it's work. And this work is, in the initial stages of Zen practice, which may last for 40 years, that this work is, first of all, beginning to know yourself and to know your makeup, how your ego works, how your emotions work, how your mind works, being familiar with how your mind works, examining yourself.

[08:51]

You can't escape it. But the particular quality of examination in Zen practices is what distinguishes Zen practice from some other kind of practice of psychotherapy or some other kind of religion or maybe Scientology or all the different slews of self-awareness paths that there are. Buddhism and Zen within Buddhism has a particular approach to self-awareness as a kind of an initial stage of a larger awareness. And the heart of Buddhist approach to self-awareness is the kind of pivot point of non-attachment or attachment and the possibility of not, well, just attachment and understanding how attachment works.

[10:01]

And in particular, attachment to our sense of ourself, to a sense of a separate self. And, you know, Dogen, Ehei Dogen, uses the words, he's, Dogen was a, sort of the founder of this particular stream of Zen practice. He lived in, at 1200 to about 1250, 1255. Dogen used the word in one of his little columns, Think Not Thinking, he asked, he illustrates a story One monk asked the other, what do you think about when you're sitting there in meditation?

[11:06]

And the other monk replies, I think not thinking. So then the first monk says, well, how can you think not thinking? And the second monk replies, non-thinking. So the way that he's using the word non in this little example, the word non is like, it's not yes and it's not no. It's not being confined to seeing only yes and not being confined to seeing only no. Not coming on down on one side or the other. Non-duality is the easy way to say it. So it's the same with non-attachment. That non-attachment is... It's not... It's not being limited to just being attached or to not being attached.

[12:21]

not being caught by attachment. And so that's what, you know, what Zen people study is attachment and non-attachment. That's what we, in all different forms and things that we do, that's really what we're, that's the heart of what we're trying to understand. Whether it's pleasant or unpleasant or boring or interesting, somehow we have to come to understand what attachment to ourself or non-attachment to ourself is all about. And it's a difficult task. And so all of our lectures and all of our studying and so forth all revolve around that pivot point.

[13:36]

So one version or one form that our attachments take that has occurred to me lately and for quite a while is is what I would call the story. How entranced we are with stories of all kinds. How we fill our life with stories. We love stories. Television is just one gigantic story. It's just every channel has a different story going on and you get and you sort of vicariously enjoy or just become absorbed in this particular story that happens to be at that moment and then there's another story and another story then you switch a channel and there's another story and if you think about comedy we you know

[14:54]

Comedy has come into its own in America in the last 10 or 15 years become much more popular but and I recently went and heard some comedians and I Felt like many people in the audience were straining to laugh They felt like they in order to get their money's worth they really had to laugh And if they didn't laugh they weren't somehow getting their money's worth And I understood that feeling, like you want to laugh, you want something to be funny. But I also thought, you know, you don't need to demand that comedy be funny so much, because what's happening here isn't just laughs, but what's happening here is also storytelling. That comedians, on one hand, are trying to get you to laugh and we enjoy the release of laughing. But also, a good comedian is a good storyteller.

[15:57]

They take you through a story, and it's usually amusing, but it's a story. And listening to a good storyteller is really interesting. There's an art in that, because they have to somehow crystallize experience and reality in such a way that is compelling to you to listen to. But still, you know, it's being, we become entranced with the story. It's entertainment. And of course in meditation sometimes it seems like we're telling ourselves a non-stop series of stories. All of our thoughts are actually usually pieces of little stories, little dramas that we've got going in our life. dramas that already happened that we can kind of review. Potential dramas that we could create. And we can, like an editor for a film, we can, we have this, we're in this great position of being able to edit it as we go.

[17:08]

We can change, slip in a piece here, try that part, move that around and try some other option. And that's what fantasy is. A story is a fantasy, actually. But it's a fantasy that kind of has a plot. I guess as a fantasy, you could imagine a flower. That would be a fantasy. But a flower that first the rain comes, and the rain stops, and the sun comes out, and the flower dies, and somebody else comes and picks up the flower. Then we turn the fantasy into a story. And, you know, if you think about the kinds of things that really grip you in your life, the things that really, what you think about, what seems important to you in your life, think about how much of that has to do with a kind of a story of what you want in your life.

[18:10]

Whatever it is that you want or whatever situation you would like to have happen in your life, and there's many potential situations is there are people in the room. They're all, usually involve some kind of a story that you have planned out that has various endings. You don't know how it's going to end and you probably don't even want it to really end because we like, we like being engaged in exploring the story. At our Dharma group number one, last week we had a little talk about fantasy. This may be a little bit of a romanticization of the process, but I was thinking it's a little bit like

[19:19]

panning for gold in one of these discussion groups. You have all this sand in this pan and he keeps splashing it around and you know, it's all interesting but there's all this sand and then after a certain amount of time of discussion, a few little kind of flakes or nuggets kind of sink down to the bottom and you kind of distill what you've been all sort of trying to get at in the discussion. That's one interesting thing about our discussion group. So we were talking about fantasy, because apparently this came up during the last Sachine lecture, question and answer period. And the one thing that we seemed to agree upon after discussing this was that the problem with fantasy isn't that fantasy per se is bad, it's that usually fantasy involves trying to get away from what's present now, which we don't particularly like.

[20:21]

So it's not so much that fantasy is bad, it's just that it's a way of avoiding our actual life, because we don't like what's going on in our actual life right now. So it seems like, you know, humans have this wonderful amazing complexity when you compare humans to other animals and critters in the world. What we can do is amazing. But we also pay the price for that in that our minds have this possibility of whenever we don't like something, rather than just sit there and suffer with it like an animal might have to, like an animal might have to suffer with just being uncomfortable and just be uncomfortable, but we have this way of avoiding, at least we try to avoid being uncomfortable by just shifting into some kind of a fantasy, subtle and gross, or some kind of a story that will

[21:34]

be an alternate to what's happening, which is not particularly pleasant. Something that could improve upon what's happening now that we don't like. And so for me, it's very clear, and I would imagine for others, that being the practice of letting go of stories is an essential part of what we're doing. And of course that's what we do during meditation. When a story comes up, we let it go. and come back to our breathing or whatever concentration technique that we're using. But we let the story go.

[22:35]

And meditation, zazen, is a time we set aside to particularly practice letting go of when a story comes up. But I think as the more that I do this, the more that I'm impressed with the power of stories, the power of, even though I can know everything that I'm saying intellectually, and could practice this during meditation, still, the power of storytelling, particularly internal storytelling, is so powerful and so pervasive And in all the little subtle ways, the little subtle ways that it works, it's impressive, the amount of energy that goes into that.

[23:45]

And so that's, the other thing is that you could feel disgusted, like disgusted with this obsession with stories, and it's like watching television, in a sense. You know, I can't believe it, but there's a pretty standard statistic that the average American watches television between six and eight hours a day, or at least has a television on. I just don't believe it, but I've seen it in several places, so I imagine it's true. So it would seem kind of disgusting that we spend so much time doing this, but somehow somehow I have to have some feeling of respect for the very, particularly the stories that are really the gut stories, you know, the core stories in our lives, the things that we most care about, or that we're most obsessed about.

[24:58]

These stories, I respect them just because Because that's what I've got to work with. And what we all have to work with is our stories. And you can't just throw it away. Yeah, maybe you could. Maybe you could just throw it away. Throw them all away. At a certain point, maybe that's what happens. But until that point, what do you do? Do you just go around feeling disgusted? Or do you go around just saying, ah, there's nothing I can do about it. I'll just trip off. And, you know, it's interesting, it may just be me, but I actually, I appreciate other people's engagement in their compelling stories more than my own. I think that mine are kind of silly, actually.

[26:02]

But I see other people's stories that I can see the delusion that's involved or the kind of pain that's involved, but I also see a quality of effort and of using what they've got to deal with the difficulty of the story that's a difficult story. And I really appreciate that in people. No matter how absurd the story is, just somebody's effort to cope with it and to deal with it deserves respect. So I think the only thing, my words of wisdom to myself are to be mindful of how stories work, how my storytelling works, to be mindful of it and not carried away with it.

[27:19]

and not promote it, but also to take it seriously and to treat it with some care. So this talk didn't go anywhere near what I thought it would. But that's okay. And so I'll just bring it to an abrupt end. And there's some time for questions or comments. Rebecca? I guess I've known you for more than half your life by now.

[28:26]

Yeah, yeah, you have. is body work. And when I look at you, the difference and the change in your story that I see is remembering a person whose shoulders were at right angles to their neck and seeing someone now. I'm always, and it seems to me that part of our story, part of our work, which you haven't commented on, which I know is a big part of your story, is our body comes to blows with that story, actually. So I wonder if, with your experience, you could say something about that.

[29:41]

I'm afraid I can't say too much. Talking about the body is a whole thing in itself, which is interesting, but long ago I decided that I didn't want to be uncomfortable physically, so I started doing yoga. And so even though what Rebecca is commenting on was true, that I was sort of crooked and was sick crooked and still do. Ever since I've done yoga, basically, I've been pretty physically comfortable. There wasn't much of a story there. I just decided right from when I was pretty young that I wanted to be comfortable physically. Or you would say you're attached to being comfortable?

[30:57]

Definitely, definitely. See, I didn't even bother to talk a story about it. I just went out and did the most effective thing I could think about. So definitely there's a... See, wouldn't it be great if for your mind you could do something like what you can do yoga for your body? or that your mind could be as flexible and kind of comfortable as you could make your body if you're willing to do the work of yoga on a daily basis. Body actually seems to be much easier because you can actually do exercises, but mind is much more subtle and tricky, in my experience. So anyway, But another interesting thing, though, is that the people that have not taken the route that I've taken, people that do struggle with really being uncomfortable physically, I appreciate that, but it's really difficult to feel how somebody else feels when they're uncomfortable physically, and yet you know.

[32:16]

If you haven't been sick for a long time and you get sick, all of a sudden you realize, you have empathy for people that are sick. You see what it's like. I guess, I don't want to cross the conversation, but what I was thinking of more is the place those two things meet, and it doesn't have necessarily to do with memory. Noah said, you're not taking deep enough breaths, that's why you have trouble chanting. And for years I've been trying to take deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper breaths. And suddenly I found out that it wasn't my breathing, but that there was a great deal of tension in my throat. And as soon as I recognized that and could work with it, I mean, it was a very emotional experience.

[33:26]

And whatever I was holding in my throat changed, and I could change. I mean, this is years and years and years of this, but there's some, you know, some kind of memory there, that I'm, there's some place where mind and body meets. Yes. It's very, it's mysterious. That is true. How? It was interesting that you brought up the dharma discussion. And as you were talking, I realized, you know, this whole thing about stories is that, you know, there is a yogi who has said, that we have put together to define ourselves.

[34:36]

And without that, then there's a certain death that happens. Once you come to the realization that you've just been making it all up, that everything you're doing is based on this thing that you've made up, the string of events that have some kind of meaning to you and then in the present moment you're acting on them and everything you do is because this story you've told yourself about experiences that you've had Because this is where the non-attachment comes in. You know, I'm also in this class, death, you know, deathly class. We're talking about, you know, what does it mean to die, and what is it really? And I think it's letting go of your story. You know, it really is letting go, because at the moment of death, you're probably going to cling to it like, you know, adding it on is sort of maybe the central story that you're adding on to, and then you're making up new ones, you know, and then there's this whole big sort of tangle of something.

[35:54]

And then you sit down, and when you're sitting, as you say, this, you know, this projector turns on, you know, and you start watching it. And, you know, you can either get attached to what you're watching And so that's really interesting to me, how everything sort of fits in. Just one thing about you saying about at the moment of death, it would probably cling to our story like the Dickens. I think that's interesting, that thought.

[36:55]

My grandmother, who was always very proper and repressed, she's, as a young woman, very vivacious and basically because of her family and my grandfather and so forth, became very narrow and tight and sort of just, you know, pinched. And then as she was dying, and he was very polite, extremely polite, and would never say a critical word about anybody. And then as she was dying, you know, my mother was talking to her, and my grandma said, tell me the truth, you know, about my dying. Nobody else will tell me the truth. Nobody else ever tells me the truth. Tell me the truth. She would never talk like that in the rest of her life. But at that moment, the kind of facade dropped away, and she just became this kind of core person who had kind of been covered up for so long. That's interesting, because one of the things that we're reading in this death class is the death of Ivan Ilyich, which is a told story story.

[38:01]

And he's the same kind of character, and the same thing is happening. And nobody will tell him the truth, and he's not even telling himself the truth, We are. Yes. I feel you said two very important things, that we should have respect for our stories and we should be mindful of them. I think it's probably very harmful to push them away, say they shouldn't be there and I don't want to think about them. We really have to sort of feel deeply where they arose from. Yes. And then we can be freed from them. Yes. Yeah, I wanted to say a few words in defense of stories.

[39:03]

Because I think they're so wonderful. And one thing that occurred to me when you were talking is, I have a whole series of fantasies which are like my own personal library. And I take one out and I play with it for a while and then I'll put it back on the shelf and then I'll take out the next one. of following that analogy, it would be nice if I could regard them as library books that I had to return. And that I could check them out at some future date, but perhaps it would be better if I didn't buy them and keep them, but if I return them to the library. Another thing that occurred to me when you mentioned your grandmother is that my father is now 87, and I saw him recently. And he's losing, he's going senile. He's become like a shell, a very old, physically very, a shell.

[40:12]

But almost all that is left are stories. And they're mainly stories of when he was young. And they're stories, they're earth-shaking stories. I mean, they're the important stories of his life. And if it weren't for those stories, he wouldn't even exist anymore. So that's another word in defense of stories. I mean, sometimes that's all people have left. when he was 20, and all of a sudden, there's a person there. The other thing is that I'm a writer, I make my living as a writer, and what I do is go out and interview people and get their stories, and I write up their stories. And they're fascinating, and they can be very educational to other people. Similarly, the student talks here. talks, the way of seeking mind talks, they're stories, but they can be tremendously illuminating.

[41:17]

You can think, oh yeah, or, you know, you just have, you connect with those people and those stories and it can be very helpful. I say, don't do away with little stories. Well, it's the attachment. The stories are fine. It's the attachment and the clinging to the story that's the problem. But it seems to me, I mean, maybe this is the wrong way to look at things, that every human being, and maybe animals for all we know, each one of us is a story. Our lives are stories. Some may seem more interesting than others. Some may have more things going on. Some are longer than others. But they're all stories. I mean, that's why we have so many biographies and autobiographies. We've got all of these incredible stories. Yes. How's the time? Eight minutes past eleven. Okay. We should probably stop.

[42:17]

Okay. Thank you. Thank you.

[42:21]

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