you. I want to talk about silence today.

[02:18]

Actually, I'd rather not talk at all. The silence. The birds. Such a treat. just to be here with you in silence. We spend a lot of time sitting together in silence. And our silence seems more eloquent than any words. I can say, or anybody can say, maybe. And sometimes it's hard just to sit with the silence.

[03:28]

You all came here for a lecture, you came here to hear something, so... We sit very long, we may get restless, you may think, Well, I came here to hear a lecture, so she better say something. I did a wedding last week, and the bride had come from a Quaker family, and her mother, and she wanted to have some silence in the ceremony. And there's a place in the wedding ceremony where the guests are invited to say something to the couple, to express their feeling about the wedding, the relationship, being there. So we decided to put some silence, a period of silence, just before inviting people to speak.

[04:34]

So the plan was two minutes, maybe five minutes of silence. It doesn't seem very long, but... After about thirty seconds, the groom looked at me and nodded. Let's get going here. It was enough already. And one of the people said to me afterwards, said, You know, there really wasn't enough time, from a Quaker point of view, to speak out of the silence. One didn't have enough time to be moved to say something. To say something maybe more superficial. So we have some anxiety being together with a lot of people in silence. Maybe nobody will say anything. Maybe nobody has anything to say. Maybe something's gone wrong here, they don't know what to do next.

[05:42]

The interesting thing about sitting together in silence is that we share this great common thing, this no-thing. And we each experience that no-thing. that silence in our own very particular way. And that experience may change from moment to moment. And when we sit in silence for a long time with the same people, say in Sashin, we have some experience of each other that's maybe deeper very qualitatively different than our usual experience of people just working together, talking together without that background of attention to the silence

[07:08]

And there's something about being really connected to people those moments when you really feel close to somebody that are born out of silence. And we spend a lot of time thinking about words and how to communicate with each other in words but what makes communication is not the words but the listening the attention that we're paying to one another. So if we're having a conversation and I'm thinking about what I'm going to say next, I'm not really listening to you. If I can really listen to you if I can quiet the commentary and the chatter in my mind about

[08:19]

what it is you're saying and what's going on. And there are always a thousand things going on. I may agree or disagree, may have various emotions, various physical reactions, various ideas of my own. If I can quiet that, just be with you, there will be some communication, some feeling of connection, And that's what relationships are built on. And it's very hard to give someone your undivided attention. You know, right now I'm sure that everyone is thinking lots of different things. Some of them may be related to my talk. Some of them may be completely unrelated. Last night I went to a lecture.

[09:28]

My rather famous psychotherapist was talking about relationship and relatedness and how hard it is to be connected and related and to work with relationship in this society because he said, we don't really believe in relationships because you can't see them. It's what happens in between people. We believe in psychology and we believe in biology and we believe in society, but relationship doesn't have its own science and is in that sort of nowhere land. And in his work he described trying to help people could shift their relationship from treating each other as objects, and he used Martin Buber's terminology of I-It relationship, to relating to each other unconditionally, or I-Thou type of relationships, or what we would call seeing each other, relating to each other as Buddha.

[10:50]

And he went into a long elaborate explanation in a very linear way of all the stages there are and all the things he does to get people to move through these various phases. And the turning point, he said, was a point where people are able just to stay with their emotions, just to stay with the anger or the fear or whatever it is, and the body sensations that accompany those feelings. And that's what we do in Zazen. That's the turning point. Just to be with that stuff without judging it, acting on it, blaming it, trying to get rid of it, feeding it, starving it, just being with it. And we all know how difficult that is because we're so conditioned

[11:53]

to want to be comfortable, to avoid discomfort, to be right rather than wrong, to know that we're there because we have some reaction. And it's that reactiveness that separates us from our wholeness. because the reaction or the discrimination cuts us off from the rest of our experience, from the next thing. Taking sides, whatever side you take separates us from the other side and separates us from each other. And when we can just be quiet and listen to ourselves unconditionally we experience our wholeness and the wholeness of other people, our interconnectedness with other people.

[13:09]

And as this man talked last night I kept wanting to say to him, you're on the right track, now shut up. shut up and be here with us. But he was giving a talk. He had 45 minutes to give a talk that he usually did in a whole day. And so he kept talking faster and faster and trying to give us more and more ideas about how to be right here in the present with each other and listen. and the audience got more and more restless and confused and I felt so grateful for our practice and so grateful that I could come here and give a talk and if I just sat here for a half an hour you would understand

[14:15]

One of the difficulties of trying to teach or talk about anything is that one wants to be clear rather than confused. one wants to be clear rather than confused, it's hard to be tolerant, hard to be compassionate of one's own confusion. And that's what I want mostly to communicate is the importance of being compassionate towards our own confusion and the confusion of other people.

[15:48]

Because it's that compassion if we can direct our undivided attention to our own inner confusion listen wholeheartedly to the chatter in our mind without adding any commentary, without trying to change it. If we can contain our many conflicting ideas and emotions as if we were a pot on the stove with our attention as the flame letting that stuff cook and transform

[17:11]

This is not some esoteric leisure time activity. It's not some hobby. The practice is not something that we just do in our spare time to feel better or improve ourselves or something. This attention in silence, just cultivating a pure, compassionate attention to our own confusion is, I think, an extremely urgent matter. As I watched the riots on television and have

[18:21]

followed the aftermath. I think often of the admonition, Dogen's admonition, we must practice as if to save our head from fire. Save our head from the fire of greed and anger and confusion. Buddhist psychology talks about the different aspects of consciousness, our sense consciousness, our awareness of mental processes, the subconscious, and kind of vast

[19:36]

storehouse consciousness, which includes everything, which includes all the possible emotions and experiences and feelings and states of mind of everybody, anywhere, past, present and future. And sometimes we talk about planting seeds, in the great storehouse consciousness there are the seeds of every possible emotional state. And through our own activity, through our own what we do with that which arises in the conscious mind, and because of our experience, our karma, some of these seeds are watered and they grow.

[20:44]

And we can choose to water the seeds of compassion. We can choose to nurture the seeds of joy. But we can't just ignore the seeds that we don't like. We can't just ignore the seeds of anger and greed and confusion. If we try to get rid of them, it's like pouring weed killer all over the yard. You'll get rid of the thistles and the poison oak and all that stuff, but you'll also get rid of everything else. So the purpose of zazen is to cultivate the ground, to cultivate non-dualistic, non-discriminating mind.

[22:00]

Not the mind that only thinks generous thoughts, the mind that includes everything. It's like having a garden that can include poison oak and snakes, scorpion stuff that we don't like. If we can tolerate that toxic, yucky stuff in ourselves, you can more easily understand other people. If the policemen could have acknowledged and tolerated their own fear and vulnerability, been friendlier to it, perhaps they wouldn't have had to beat Rodney King to a pulp.

[23:03]

They were trying to get rid of their fear and it wouldn't go away. You couldn't tolerate So they said, well, he's the source of it. And we hear other people saying, well, they had to beat him up because he was dangerous. And we may become so angry that we want to beat that person up. And then the president comes along and says, there's no excuse for violence. It sounds so self-righteous. Completely denying the violence that's perpetrated by the government all the time. He said he went to Los Angeles to learn.

[24:14]

And you could see how difficult it was for him to really listen. How difficult for him to identify with his own rage and understand the rage and the confusion. is people. And like the rest of us, feels a desperate need to do something, to be right, to fix it. And that's very uncomfortable. And so like the rest of us, at times, may split off whatever side's making him uncomfortable, project that on somebody else, and act out of whatever side he's chosen at the moment.

[25:27]

That kind of dualistic thinking comes out of that deep discomfort with confusion. our discomfort with our rage and our confusion, which exists together with an equal number of opposite feelings. So from the point of view of practice, what we need to do is to give up our attachment to seeing ourselves a certain way to be comfortable, to be right. In order to make positive changes in the world we need first to be able to see things as they actually are rather than seeing them only through the prism

[26:43]

of our prejudices and our preferences and our preconceptions, which is obviously distorting. Mel often talks about, in order to... if we want enlightenment, if we want something precious, we have to pay the price. And if we want to attain enlightenment, we have to give up our delusion. And I think that in order to shed some light, to see the light, first we must know our own darkness. This is T.S.

[27:46]

Eliot, In Darkness. Oh, dark, dark, they all go into the dark, the vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant, the captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters, the generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers, distinguished civil servants, chairman of many committees, industrial lords and petty contractors all go into the dark. And we all go with them into the silent funeral, nobody's funeral, where there's no one to bury. I said to my soul, be still and let the dark come upon you, leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about. I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.

[28:55]

Wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing. There is yet faith, but the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought. So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, you must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. in order to arrive at what you don't know you must go by a way which is the way of ignorance in order to possess what you do not possess you must go by the way of dispossession in order to arrive at what you are not you must go through the way in which you are not and what you do not know is the only thing you know and what you own

[30:14]

is what you do not own, and where you are is where you are not. Only don't know. the terror of nothing to think about.

[31:18]

Zen literature doesn't talk about this very much. It doesn't talk about the price that we have to pay The loss of a sense of security about who we are. Perhaps it's taken for granted. We should understand that. But I think that the practice, that what we are trying to do in this country, in this culture, at this time,

[32:44]

with this practice is extraordinarily difficult. When we talk about living in enlightenment, our ideas are so broad We talk about practice in everyday life being the same thing. We don't mean meditation and sweeping the temple garden are the same thing. We're trying to extend that. We're trying to extend that concept to meditation and action in the world and to extend that attitude toward

[33:47]

family relationships, relationships with people we work with, political activity, to really include everything in our experience. And that's an enormous task. And for me it's the only the only task worth doing. It's why I'm here. It's why I'm here in this endo, it's why I'm here on this earth, as far as I can tell. Is to try to bring together all the spirit aspects of

[34:54]

myself and my experience for the benefit, not just of my own peace of mind, but of everyone I come in contact with. And what I have to deal with every day is not knowing how to do this, of not being able consistently to do it, of one minute feeling that great connectedness and compassion for everyone.

[36:00]

And the next minute, being furious and self-righteous about somebody who's done something that offends me. Have one minute. investigating who is this who is so offended and the next minute going off into my rage But even if I knew how to do it, I hope I wouldn't sit here and tell you.

[37:02]

Because then I would be doing to you what was done to me, what was done to me last night by the man who knew the answer, what was done to me by my parents, what's done to you, I'm sure, constantly. And I don't want to do that to you. Because you know what you have to do. And I know that you're already doing your best. And really I just want to be here with all of you in the silence.

[38:06]

If you have something to say or something you want to ask, please feel free. I feel exhilarated and moved by your story. I'm thinking about how many times I haven't let my tears flow simply because I didn't have a Kleenex handkerchief.

[40:55]

Thanks for your time. Thanks for being here. As a collector of innuendos, I don't know how inadvertent Elliot is, you know? I went to a sashim one time ago with Joko Beck, and she did the pieces of the Four Quartets instead of the Heart Searcher. Well, I guess the cocktail party is a Zen story. Some picture hunters say that. I don't know that one. I really appreciate what you said about silence, which I've been thinking about. Also, the way there actually isn't such a thing as silence.

[42:04]

So, it's making me think about what we're really needing when we want to find room for silence in our lives, and how silence is actually a very alive, sort of vibrating thing with a lot in it, the kind of silence we can experience. And then also I guess there's a kind of silence, sometimes the absence of words, spoken, too, so that it's hard to... Well, there's a kind of dynamic tension between noise and silence that's always going on, and it's not such a sharp distinction, which is just interesting. It's kind of like emptiness. It's everywhere and you can't find it. Thank you.

[43:48]

You're welcome. When you... I forget what the exact words in it were. The terror of no thought. I do remember... I'm trying to hear you actually. I was just speaking essentially about that. It's true, you don't find much in Zen literature. He talked about, as one approaches in Zazen, it was very descriptive, as one approaches selflessness, being without self in Zazen, usually what happens is we get scared. And we veer away, back into thought, back into thought as sound. And when he said that, it rang completely true for me.

[44:56]

We don't know what it is that we're afraid of, but it's fearsome. lives with thoughts and sounds and activities, because we're afraid of what happens to contact something that is much larger and much more fluid than this idea of self that we've tried to nail ourselves down to. My experience is that it's much as uncomfortable as it is, it's much more possible to tolerate in the context of Sangha and working with other people where there's a sort of understanding that we're all here to let go of what's holding us back and we can just be with each other in that

[46:23]

in that space, whatever it is. Because there are times when it's kind of like walking around without skin. are enormous.

[46:57]

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