Good morning. It's getting cozier in here. There are a few more of us this morning than the last time I was here. I was struck this morning when I tried to figure out whether I needed to bring my eyeglasses with me or not, about how everything changes. Some mornings in some print I need my glasses and other mornings I don't. Some of us spent the day in retreat yesterday in remembrance of Veterans Day and Armistice Day. So we spent the day collecting ourselves and remembering, dedicating

[01:03]

practices to the memory of those people who have died in wars and to all of those who suffer and have suffered as a result of wars. And at eleven minutes after eleven o'clock on the eleventh day of the eleventh month we rang the big bell outside at eleven second intervals, joining other people around the world who do the same thing at the same time, or as close to it as we can approximate, to remember some possibility that we hold in our hearts about laying down our arms, that is working for peace in the world. Today is the day of the full moon

[02:03]

and tonight we will do a full moon ceremony, which is the time each month when we recite the precepts and express in some formulaic way confession of all of our actions, activity of body, speech and mind which has caused harm in the last month. In our sitting yesterday, sitting and walking and listening to a wonderful talk that was led by Robert Aikenroshi, we were considering together and individually issues that have to do with forgiveness and healing. And so those are the themes that I would like to continue with this morning. It seems to me from my own experience

[03:07]

and listening to that experience of others that we don't heal unless we can, first of all, know in some particular detail what a particular situation is or what the wound is, if you will. So we first have to practice our capacity for being awake to things as they are, to allowing ourselves to notice as much of what we can bear to notice. And that it is only after that seeing that arises the possibility of forgiveness, forgiveness of ourselves and forgiveness of others, which seems so simple and yet also seems to be difficult for many of us to do.

[04:11]

And yet when there is some expression of what it is we've done that we want forgiveness for, which is the way I understand confession, stating what it is we've done, what has happened, expressing some regret for whatever that is, and then asking forgiveness from ourselves and from others, it is out of these various activities, these various practices which we find in many wisdom traditions around the world, it is out of these practices that healing begins to occur. Last night, eight monks, Tibetan monks from Ganden Monastery in southern India, historically the biggest monastery

[05:17]

in the Tibetan Buddhist monastic system in Tibet and again in exile the largest monastery in India, the college of Tibetan monks Shardze College from that monastery has sent eight of their monks to come to this country to do various practices which are in their tradition that have to do with these very things that we're talking about. Their big thing is healing. They do a meditation called the Medicine Buddha Meditation, which is about healing. And they do a variety of practices that have to do with purifying and healing the environment that we live in and within ourselves and in the world of human affairs. They will be coming here on Thursday evening

[06:17]

and will be doing their various practices in the Bay Area. So anyway, they arrived at our house. They will sleep over for the next two weeks. Bob and Ann Aiken are also sleeping over and there was a little bit of flurry before the monks arrived, beds to be made, etc. And Mrs. Aiken said after they arrived, It's amazing. It's so calm. How can we suddenly have so many more people but everything seems so calm? And of course, in getting ready for them, I was not feeling so calm. I had forgotten that these monks tend to bring with them a calm and joyful atmosphere. So we'll see how it goes the next two weeks with our big Buddhist slumber party.

[07:22]

This afternoon, actually, at Zen Center in the city, they are going to do an empowerment for the Medicine Buddha meditation, if any of you are interested. So we were talking about what kinds of figures do you use to help you in doing these practices. And the conversation we had last night sent me back again to rethinking what we'd been considering yesterday about how do we heal and when do we heal and what do we heal. And I remembered again something that happened to me a few weeks ago. I went to San Quentin with a number of other people for a demonstration, a kind of vigil, actually, against the death penalty.

[08:29]

And we met about 5 o'clock in the afternoon. It was several weeks ago, pre-earthquake, a very cold, windy dusk, and there were several hundred people gathered, a surprisingly large number of what my daughter calls regular people, men in suits and women who looked like middle-class America, not at all who I expected to see at such a gathering, and a surprising number of people who were gathered there from all over the world. For part of the vigil, there were people who gave little talks about what they were doing and why they thought it was so important for us here in California to abolish

[09:34]

the death penalty and to work to have that happen because so many other parts of the United States watch to see what we do here in California. And as part of the program, two men got up. I noticed them before the program started, sitting side by side on the steps of the house near where the loudspeakers were set up, looking like two old friends. And when it came time for them to do their presentation, they got up on a table that had been set up, somewhat precarious platform, and each intern spoke. The first man who spoke described how he had been a victim of an armed robbery, and one man had been killed. He had been shot and severely wounded such that he

[10:37]

had lost a kidney and had had some serious damage to other organs, internal organs, that had left him in the hospital for a long time, going through a number of operations and a paraplegic for several years, a great deal of intense suffering. And he described how the man standing next to him was the man who had shot him and who had been in San Quentin on death row for a long time. And he described how... It's interesting, just then, it's like their faces just came up for me. He described how at a certain point in his own healing process he realized that it was too costly for him to continue

[11:40]

harboring ill will towards this man, that for his own sake he had to find a way to forgive him, and that when he could do that he felt better for himself and for the man who had caused his suffering, and that as a result of that his heart had opened to the suffering of others in the world in a way that had significantly changed his life. And then the other man spoke. I never did find out how he happened to get from death row to standing on that table, clearly not in shackles or under guard. Interestingly, we were right near the gate and the guards for the prison were all standing there at attention, listening carefully to everything that was said.

[12:44]

Anyway, the man who had shot the first man stood and spoke and talked about how he would, he imagined, until he died, carry with him his feeling of shame and deep regret for what he had done, and how there was nothing he could do that could take it back. That he would have to live with the consequences of his actions and there was no one doing that. And he then spoke of his experience of being forgiven by the man whom he had hurt, and how much that had helped him in his own effort to forgive himself. And so the two of them have devised this sort of Mutt & Jeff

[13:49]

team and they go around together and they tell their stories. And they talk about what has happened in their respective lives and in their relationship with each other and, as a result, their relationship with the world. And how much has happened that has allowed them each to live their lives fully and engaged with the suffering and work of alleviating that suffering for all beings in the world. Once you knew what their relationship was with each other, it almost didn't matter what they had to say, just seeing them, standing next to each other, watching them afterwards tell each other, that was very nice, you did that well. I think they understood what we were saying, kind of patting each other and going back to their seats on the stairs,

[14:55]

sitting next to each other, huddled close together for a little warmth because it was a cold, windy, blustery night. Pretty mind-boggling. Not so different from hearing His Holiness the Dalai Lama talk about how even the Chinese who are in government in Tibet and are the cause of extraordinary suffering, torture, imprisonment, killing, oppression for His people whom He loves, even those people, He reminds us all, want to be happy. And how much

[16:02]

we can treat our so-called enemy as our teacher, because who else gives us such a wonderful opportunity to cultivate these qualities that we want to cultivate of patience, of compassion, of sympathetic joy, of generosity, and so forth. So I ask myself, and I ask anyone that comes along that looks like they might be able to tell me something, how do I practice forgiveness? The Buddhist path has many practices that have been followed for a long time that have to do with the cultivation of forgiveness. Akinroshi mentioned one of those practices yesterday. It is the practice of loving-kindness, loving-kindness meditation, which comes from the Theravadin tradition,

[17:04]

where we meditate on extending loving-kindness from ourselves to another person. We're usually advised in this meditation to start with those whom we already love, because it's easier, and to practice on the people that we already have some loving feeling for, and to then move to the people that we have some more neutral feelings for. But the practice that has a certain kind of yeastiness and richness is when we practice the cultivation of loving-kindness for someone we don't like, someone with whom we say, ugh, get me out of here. Because, of course, it is that person who can help us look into that aspect of ourselves which they are reminding us about,

[18:06]

that aspect of ourselves which we want to push away and say, ugh, get me out of here, go away. There is a practice which Stephen Levine talks about. It's in his book Who Dies, a practice based on loving-kindness meditation practices called self-forgiveness, which I've talked about before, but which I keep coming back to because it is so central and crucial in this cultivation of capacity for forgiveness, that at the heart of our capacity for forgiveness rests our capacity for forgiving ourselves, that we tend to be unforgiving of others directly to the degree that we are unforgiving with ourselves. And so in this particular meditation,

[19:09]

what one does is to call forth the image in one's mind's eye of someone who has done something harmful to you. And you say to that person, I forgive you. I forgive you for whatever you may have done through your thoughts or your speech or your actions that may have caused me harm. And you call them by name and say to that person, I forgive you. And then the second part of meditation, you call up the image of some person that you want to forgive you. This is the part of meditation that many of us have a harder time with. And so you then imagine yourself sitting in that person's seat, speaking to yourself.

[20:11]

And you assume that person's voice and you call your own name. And you say, as I would say to myself, Yvonne, I forgive you for whatever you may have done that has caused me harm. Whatever it may have been through your thoughts or your speech or your actions, I forgive you. There is a practice in my wonderful beloved text by Shantideva, The Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life, a practice that some people I sit with on Friday mornings have been doing recently called The Practice of Praising Your Enemy, a kind of generosity practice. It's pretty hard to praise someone I haven't forgiven. And what I've noticed is that if I can find something,

[21:15]

it doesn't matter how small it is, that I can praise, that I can appreciate in the behavior, the activity, the expression of someone that I feel, I just don't like that person. If with such a person I can come up with something I can praise, it helps me find a way to forgive that person for whatever it is in them that I find troubling or hurtful or difficult. I also find that if I repeatedly say to myself, remember, everyone in the world wants to be happy, even so-and-so whom I don't like. That person also wants to be happy.

[22:15]

What I notice when I remind myself about that is that something in me softens a little because there is that place where I know we're not so different from each other. Of course, there is this voice of the inner judge that comes up in this arena of forgiveness, this area of practicing forgiveness. There is this voice that tells me about how I'm creepy or that person's creepy or such-and-such isn't done the way it should be, etc. So in the realm of cultivating forgiveness and in the realm of developing our capacity for the transformation of suffering to healing, we become necessarily engaged with whatever capacity we have for judgment.

[23:23]

I recently met a woman whose name is Natalie Goldberg, who is a writer and a long-time Zen practitioner who has written a book called Writing Down the Bones. And she has a one-page chapter on the editor, which I would like to read to you because she has a fresh way of talking about the editor, which I think you might enjoy. She says, It is important to separate the creator and the editor, or internal censor, when you practice writing. I think that in this book that she writes about writing, you could really read it with reference to any creative activity, not just writing. So she suggests that if you want the creator to be free, to breathe freely, to have some space, to be able to explore and express the creative aspect,

[24:28]

then you have to meet the editor or the internal censor. If the editor is absolutely annoying and you have trouble differentiating it from your creative voice, sit down whenever you need to and write what the editor is saying. Give it full voice. You're a jerk. Whoever said you could write? I hate your work. I'm embarrassed. You have nothing valuable to say. And besides, you can't spell. Sound familiar? The more clearly you know the editor, the better you can ignore it. I want to underscore that sentence. After a while, like the jabbering of an old drunk fool, it becomes just prattle in the background. Don't reinforce its power by listening to its empty words.

[25:32]

If the voice says you're boring and you listen to it and stop your hand from writing, that reinforces and gives credence to the editor. That voice knows that the term boring will stop you dead in your tracks, so you hear yourself saying that a lot about your writing. Here, you are boring as a distant white laundry flapping in the breeze. Eventually it will dry up and someone miles away will fold it and take it in. Meanwhile, you will continue to write. So this is the latest quote that I've found to tack up on the bulletin board right in front of my nose to remind me about a possible relationship

[26:36]

with the inner censor. Treat that voice like laundry flapping in the breeze. But I particularly like the thought that it will not only dry up, but that someone with kindness will gently fold it up. That's great. Thank you. There's another aspect of this process of forgiveness and healing that our old friend Thich Nhat Hanh has talked about in his very moving poem, Please Call Me by My True Names, which has to do with our capacity to know the capacity that exists within each of us for all of the possibilities of human behavior.

[27:38]

That the most dreadful behavior in the world is the kind of behavior we are each capable of given the right causes and conditions. One of the verses in his poem, which I recite over and over again, which has always stayed with me so powerfully, is the verse that goes, I am a 12-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat, who throws herself into the ocean and drowns after being raped by a sea pirate. And I am the sea pirate whose heart is not yet open to seeing and understanding. Over and over again, I am reminded how easily I can believe

[28:43]

that I'm the 12-year-old girl and how deeply I do not want to look into my capacity to be the sea pirate. I find myself wondering about those two men at the vigil outside the gates at St. Quentin. How much in the process of forgiveness did the man who was wounded, how much of his process depended on his not staying separate from the man who had shot him? How much of his capacity for forgiveness depended on his understanding that there were causes and conditions that led the man who had shot him to be in that place behaving as he did? Not that that behavior should be condoned, but to understand that

[29:44]

there are causes and conditions that lead people to behave in these ways that cause such harm. And that if we can look deeply into the world we live in, the society we live in, we can see how deeply connected we all are and how our behavior, how what we consume, how the way we live affects others who are not so fortunate, whose causes and conditions lead them to become robbers and murderers, to act out the psychosis of our shared culture. One of the things that Akinroshi brought up yesterday in our discussion was the possibility of looking deeply

[30:49]

into what he called the qualities that exist in each of us, what is sometimes in some traditions called a person's essence, the essential nature that exists in each of us. So when I see someone who is angry, can I see deeply underneath that that here is a person who has a capacity for passion, who has energy, has a capacity for enormous energy, that someone who is lazy has a capacity for enjoyment, that someone who is passive has a capacity for equanimity and for patience? Can I look into my capacity for stubbornness and see that deeply underneath my stubbornness lies a capacity to stay with something that is difficult,

[31:52]

so that that quality which I initially treat with such judgment and aversion, if I reframe the way I look at that quality I see, there is a way in which this quality is my good friend, is my best shot at being in the world in the most wholesome way I can understand in any given moment. It gives me a completely different way of responding in the face of the behavior that I meet by virtue of living in the human community. So what we're talking about is how we transform ourselves, our mind, our responses, our attitudes.

[32:55]

So much of it depends on how we look at things. So much of our response to what happens in our lives has to do with how much information we have. We think our fellow worker is not carrying his or her share of the workload, is lazing off. We get angry at that person because he or she is not doing as much as I'm doing. But do we really know all of what is going on for that person? What happens when we find out after the fact that that person has in fact been very sick and doesn't have a certain kind of physical energy to sustain himself or herself through the day and so is doing as much as he can, perhaps working shorter amounts of the workday

[34:00]

but doing extra things at night which I don't even see or know about. How often I have the experience that if only I had trusted another person enough to believe that they were doing their best, that I just couldn't see what was their best because I didn't have all the information. It says 1152. A watch which has not been turned back because I don't know how. A few weeks ago our friend Jenny Grote sent an announcement about her calligraphy show and this beautifully calligraphed piece of an ancient riddle which is about transformation. This is the riddle.

[35:03]

Once I was water full of scaly fish but by a new decision fate has changed my nature. Having suffered fiery pangs I now gleam white like ashes or bright snow. This is a riddle describing salt. So let me read it again. Once I was water full of scaly fish but by a new decision fate has changed my nature. Having suffered fiery pangs I now gleam white like ashes or bright snow. When I read this again a few days ago I was thinking about the new relationship

[36:08]

we all have to the earth since the earthquake. Somebody said this morning, Isn't it amazing when the earth starts to move as if someone had taken a big rug and flapped it? And Wendy Johnson who is the head of the garden talked about being out in the garden and seeing the ground begin to act like the waves in the ocean. That's not the way the ground is supposed to behave. So when we were walking yesterday I felt a kind of vividness as I placed my foot on the earth because for that moment, that footstep the earth was sustaining me but who knows at any minute it could change and I know that this week the way I didn't know it a few weeks ago. Having suffered fiery pangs

[37:14]

I think that is so often how we experience the process of change the inevitable change that goes with our very existence. Shakyamuni Buddha has said at the bottom line everything changes and that's the only thing that doesn't change and we fight tooth and nail. So this morning on the 12th of November on the day of the full moon can we join together in renewing our intention to quiet the inner critic to let that voice flap like so much laundry on the clothesline how's that for an outdated image?

[38:21]

And to turn towards the truth of ourselves and our nature, our essence so that we can forgive ourselves when we act in ways which cause harm or suffering and can see how even in those actions which we see afterwards as a mistake there is some opportunity for transformation, for healing for learning from that experience to move ahead out of our intention to become free of suffering for ourselves and others. I'd like to close with a poem of Rilke's which I read the first two lines of some while ago and then I found the rest of the poem.

[39:28]

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing there is a field, I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn't make any sense. Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing there is a field, I'll meet you there. They are intention They are intention

[40:14]

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