Good morning. In view of the date today, I'd like to ask us to start by taking a moment's meditation in memory of all of the people who were killed on September 11th, three years ago, all of them, and all of the people who have been killed since in the war that continues. Let us meditate on peace. Perhaps let peace begin with me. May there be peace in me.

[01:22]

May there be peace in my family. May there be peace in my community. May there be peace in my country. May there be peace in the world. Let peace begin with me. Thank you. I don't want to speak any more about that except to urge everyone who's eligible to vote, be sure that you register to vote, and vote your conscience. What I want to talk about today is something quite different, actually. I'm trying to respond to two requests at once, and I hope you'll bear with me. I was asked to give this talk just Thursday night because the person who was scheduled

[02:31]

needed a substitute, and I also have another request to provide a way-seeking mind talk to someone by next Wednesday. That request has been around for a while, but due to my procrastination I haven't responded to it yet. So, I hope to take care of both requests at once by making this morning's talk a way-seeking mind talk. So perhaps I should explain that a little bit to those of you who haven't been in practice periods here and are not familiar with this term. It began with, there is for each extended practice period, which we do from time to time, twice a year at Tassajara and twice a year here, and at Green Gulch, often we

[03:31]

will have a head monk or a head student. And their responsibility is to set the tone for wholehearted practice. They get up first every morning and ring the wake-up bell, for example. And they sit next to the abbot and face out, and it's the first time they're invited to speak from the dharma seat. And just so they don't get big-headed about it, they're also responsible for cleaning the toilets and taking care of the garbage. And initially, this way-seeking mind talk was the first talk that a head student gave the first time they sat on the dharma seat, explaining, or trying to explain, or at least focusing on, who is this and how did it get here? Something about your life and what do you think are the influences in your life that

[04:37]

led you to practice? As you look back on it at this moment, of course, if you do more than one of these, you will see the story is different every time. Some elements are the same and some change. And of course, we have a whole life up until the point we start practice. And everything that has happened in that life, without exception, including maybe the nine months intrauterine as well, are the causes and conditions of what I do at this moment, including the causes and conditions of how I came to practice. It's just like a stream, you know, at any particular time or place, what that stream is, is the result of everything that has happened upstream until that moment.

[05:37]

And so it is with our life. We can never pick one cause because there are innumerable causes and conditions for everything that happens in our life. So one thing I can say about how I came to practice is, well, just good luck maybe, you know, and the contribution of innumerable bodhisattvas who somehow led me this way. Or, I could say, maybe the influence of some energy from a previous life, I don't know. But still, that's too easy and I need to say something. Actually, this is kind of the first real koan in Zen history that we know of, that is, in the sense of a question that a teacher gives to a student.

[06:39]

And when Huai Rang, Nanyue Huai Rang, came to the sixth ancestor, the sixth ancestor said to him, where have you been? He said, I was at Mount Song. Then he said, what is it that thus comes? Or it's been translated variously, what is this and how did it get here? What is this and how did it get here? Nanyue Huai Rang couldn't answer and he continued to practice with the sixth ancestor and eight years later he felt some clarity and he came to the sixth ancestor and said, I think I have an understanding.

[07:39]

No, he didn't say, I have an understanding. And the sixth ancestor said, what is it? And he said, to say that it's like something misses the point, or to say that it is anything misses the point. And the sixth ancestor says, well, can it be cultivated and realized? And Huai Rang said, it's not that it can't be cultivated and realized, it's just that it cannot be defiled. And the sixth ancestor said, it's just this which cannot be defiled that all of the Buddhist ancestors uphold and protect. It is like this for you and also for me. So this question of what is this and how did it get here is for each of us an interesting

[08:42]

question to ponder. And so, aside from helping students in a practice period get to know each other better and develop more cohesion, it's a very interesting thing for people to ponder, to have this request to give a way-seeking mind talk. And so, it has become more widespread now. Generally speaking, during a practice period, one of the highlights of the practice period is that each week one of the members of the practice period will give a way-seeking mind talk on Thursday mornings. So, I was born in 1926 in Birmingham, Alabama, to a young couple of Jewish ancestry, Reformed

[09:47]

Jewish ancestry, not, you know, ethnically Jewish but not religiously so. My father prepared for Bar Mitzvah and then declined to do it and was, in later life, an atheist. He was a scientist and sort of a product of the French Enlightenment, you know, reason is above all and that was a time when it seemed that science and religion might be incompatible and he went with science. My mother was, it turned out, quite a wonderful woman whom I didn't appreciate much until much later in life, as often happens with daughters and mothers, but she also was not at all religious. There was a, I also had an older sister, four years older, but there was another member

[10:57]

of our household in Alabama, a middle-class family, we had a live-in housekeeper, nanny, cook, maid, who was with us for all of the first sixteen years of my life except one. She was actually a very important person in my life. She was in loco parentis much of the time because my father had inherited some money and went into the automobile business because he was enamored of automobiles since they first arrived in his life when he was a teenager. There's a story that his mother drove her car into a garage to have it fixed when he was maybe sixteen and this grease monkey, you know, came out from under a car and dirty coveralls and grease all over him and it was her son and she said, Joseph, go home and don't ever let me see you here again, you know, it was not an appropriate thing for his

[12:04]

time and place. But he loved things mechanical, he loved to know how things worked and he became a physicist and, you know, which is all about how things work in the physical world. But the depression hit Birmingham before it hit the rest of the country since it was an industrial center and he lost his business and had to go bankrupt and lost his inheritance and his mother helped him, helped both my parents go back to college and finish their degree. He had left to join the army in 1917, he had been at MIT. So they went back to college and we moved to Tuscaloosa, Alabama where the university was and Mabel came with us. She of course was very religious, she used to sing gospels as she worked.

[13:08]

And she had a good deal to do with my upbringing because she was with me when I was awake more than my parents actually. She's the one who knew me well enough to teach me how to iron by ironing everything except my Girl Scout uniform because she knew that I would want it ironed and that I wouldn't have the chutzpah to say, why didn't you iron my uniform, you know. So I learned how to iron by ironing my Girl Scout uniform. And scouting was very important for me in my youth. My father had been a Boy Scout with Dan Beard who was the founder of scouting in America and I went to scout camp with my sister when I was six and she was ten, it was the first time I went to scout camp. We did a lot of camping in times when there weren't, you didn't just drive into a state

[14:15]

park and there was a campground, you just picked something out of a map that looked like it would have a likely water source and you went there and you made a camp, you know. And we did that actually when I was six, five I guess. We drove across the country from Alabama to Colorado to a summer camp where we spent all summer. My parents were counselors and in return for that my sister and I got to be campers. And we drove all across the country camping all along the way and Dad was always so pleased that the places he had picked out from a topographical survey map turned out to be good campsites. And he was, among other things, taught astronomy and when he would take his astronomy class

[15:16]

out on field trips with the telescope he made a little three-legged stool for me to stand on so my eye would reach the eyepiece. So I went with his classes to learn about the skies. We used to go camping always in August at the time of the Perseid meteor shower and just lie there all night saying, there's one, there's one, there's one. So I really learned from him to really appreciate the natural world and the kind of wonder of the universe. He loved to read poetry and I loved to listen to him read poetry. When they went back to school my mother studied English and became an English teacher and he became a physics teacher and I remember particularly one poem he read often, he loved

[16:17]

it, Robert Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra, come grow old with me the best is yet to be the last of life for which the first was made. He died before he was 52. So that always has a certain poignancy with me. I remember the only two times in my life I remember being spanked. I realized later when Lou once spanked our oldest son, came from the same place. He was terrified for my well-being. It was otherwise, there's kind of a famous story in our family of my father was determined never to be authoritarian because his father had been very authoritarian and so he would

[17:18]

explain everything. You know, being a teacher he had a lot of patience and so if we would ask him anything he would explain it in great detail. So it's been said that at some point, I noticed my sister in a little autobiographical piece she wrote claims this and I claim it too, anyhow one of us asked him to explain something and said, could you tell me the short way? But, you know, he was the kind of guy you could ask him, Daddy, why is the sky blue? And he could tell you. So it was kind of wonderful. So my relationship with him was great. But part of it also was a side that was quite, turns out to have been quite difficult for me. When I was about three I overheard some conversation that made me realize that they had expected

[18:24]

me to be a boy. My mother had gone to see a palm reader when she was pregnant. She and her sister had gone to a palm reader for fun. The palm reader told her she was carrying a boy. And so I already had an older sister so they were very happy about that and my father had decided to name me Thomas Jefferson, who was his great hero, and I didn't turn out to be a boy. So the way he announced my birth to the sister who had gone with her mother to the palm reader, he used to do these things by telegram, you know, ten words or less. And he said, Madam whoever, damn liar, Blanche and Esther both fine. Well when I heard that, you know, what I heard at three years old was, oh, they wanted a boy. I'm going to have to be a boy. He wanted a son. So I made my best effort to be his son for many years.

[19:26]

We built boats together. I began my college major in physics. I was very good at math. One of the things, one of the reasons I want to tell this story and let somebody else take it off of tape rather than write it is I have a real aversion to writing and part of it is that my sister was very, very good at writing. She was very, very good at all the things that mother was good at. So I didn't go near English, literature, history, social sciences. I just stuck with math and physics and chemistry and practical matters and mechanics and building boats and those kind of things. When I was six, it was 1932, the depths of the depression, the public school that I was attending, the county public school in Tuscaloosa, ran out of money and closed. So my parents put me in a private school.

[20:28]

The only private school in Tuscaloosa was a Catholic school. So I went to Catholic parochial school for the rest of first grade and all of second grade. And I used to go over with my classmate when she was going into the church and saying the stations of the cross and I just loved the feeling of the church. And I loved the second grade teacher, Sister Mary Catherine Flynn, who was then I think about 26, round-faced Irish nun. And I really appreciated the faith and devotion that were a clear part of who she was. And I think that imprinted me a lot. I had the good fortune to meet her again before she died through just a happenstance when I went to a Buddhist-Christian inter-monastic dialogue at Gethsemane Monastery and met an

[21:33]

abbess from Alabama who said that she was there in her convent in the infirmary. And so as soon as I got home from the conference, I got another ticket and went back to Alabama and went to see Sister Mary Catherine. She was very glad to see me and we talked and I walked in the room and she said, Blanche, how are you now? She probably knew my name because Marlis had told her my name. She didn't know my last name because I was married. She said, Blanche, how are you? How's your sister Margaret? Sixty-some years later, how about that, how's your sister Margaret? A few months before she died. Your father was a tall man, wasn't he? Amazing. I guess they didn't have too many Jewish kids in that school, so maybe it was easier to

[22:35]

remember us that way, because I came home once with a hundred in catechism and my father went storming down and said, I thought non-Catholic children didn't have to take catechism. And she said, well, no, they don't have to, but she wanted to, so I didn't see any harm in it. I used to say Hail Marys for my sister because she was then ten and she was kind of experimenting a little with profanity and I thought she was going to go to hell and be damned, so I better save her. She found out about it and kind of beat me up for it. And actually I found out that my parents were kind of worried for a while that I was going to become a Catholic. But I did participate in every kind of religious opportunity that occurred in my childhood. When I was nine, my great-aunt came to live with us and she went to temple every Saturday

[23:40]

morning and I went with her and I was in the choir. This was a Reformed temple. And I still get all choked up when I hear Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Ephod, which is the tune with which Ashkenazi Jews chant the affirmation of the one God. And when I was living out in the countryside where there was neither temple nor Catholic church actually, as far as I can recall, I went to Baptist churches, I went to Presbyterian churches, I went to the Bible school and won the prize for quickest one finding the passages in the Bible that were dead out. So I had a sort of an interest in this whole realm and then out of loyalty to my father

[24:46]

I began to, well, he began to realize how awful the situation was for African Americans in the South in the 30s around a case called the Scottsboro case. And so he became very active and started having a lot of meetings with a lot of people who were coming down from New York to organize tenant farmers and it was during the 30s, you know, during the New Deal and there was a lot of union organizing going on and in the South there were a lot of union, well, all over there were a lot of union organizers beaten up and intimidated and a lot of them ended up coming to our house, which is sort of out in the country, for rest and recuperation and there was a lot of talk about the social injustice in the South. And my father got very involved and he ran across a book on Marxism and it was so exciting

[25:48]

to him, he took it into the chairman of the department and said, Dr. Wooten, you've got to read this book, it's found in the library of the University of Alabama, strangely enough. But then the word got out to the university that there were these meetings happening at our house that were interracial and Dr. Wooten called my father in and said, Joseph, if you wish to remain at this institution, if you wish to remain at the university, you will have to conform to the mores of the institution. And he said, Dr. Wooten, I do not care to conform to the mores of the institution, I quit. Well, he hadn't said anything to mother about this, you know, and the result was that we left Alabama and went to move up to New York and he took a job with, I mean, a job, he wasn't being paid much, really just organized with an organization called the National Committee

[26:49]

for the Defense of Political Prisoners and what he was doing was going around trying to get people out of, you know, union organizers out of jail who'd been framed on one charge or another, trying to get black people registered to vote, doing all kinds of unpopular things in the South and raising money for it in the North and my mother ended up having to support the family, actually. I never thought about that until later, I mean, dad was my big hero, but, you know, mother's the one who kept the family going. She got a job as a rental agent for some big apartment building out on Riverside Drive because she had this charming Southern accent and people would just be delighted to hear her go on about the charm of the apartment without asking, well, are you going to paint this or are you going to fix that, they'd just sign the contract. So Bing and Bing loved her. And we lived in a ratty little walk-up flat on the Lower East Side for a year. I was not really prepared to take care of myself on the streets of New York and so it

[27:54]

was kind of a rough year for me. Toward the end of that year, my father was in Alabama organizing and he was kidnapped and beaten up and left for dead, thrown out of a car in a cornfield. He managed to get some help and get to a hospital and when he recovered he said, nobody's going to run me out of my hometown, so we moved back to Birmingham and Mabel came back to work for us. So that was the year that Mabel was not in my life. So golly, I haven't gotten very far, have I? I was nine years old when we moved back. So, as I was growing up, the New Deal was, my father was very much in support of Franklin

[29:06]

Roosevelt and the New Deal. He was not so popular in the South and he and my uncle used to argue loudly about it. And because of the kind of work he did, the people of our general social milieu didn't let their kids play with me because my father was a so-called, excuse the term, nigger lover. So the kids I played with were kind of a rougher group of kids than I might otherwise have been playing with. So I learned some of the seamy side of life. During that time, we had our house shot into, we had a cross burned in the yard. One of the memorable memories of the cross is that my mother was wearing white shorts

[30:13]

that day, I guess it must have been a weekend because she wasn't at work, she was running in and out of the house with a silver water pitcher pouring it on the cross and Mabel got a hose and put the fire out. And my mother was not all that ditzy or dumb. My mother was a very intelligent woman, but I don't know what was possessing her then. I still have that picture in my mind. But those were kind of scary times for me. And yet, you know, I adored my father and never even occurred to me until years later after he was dead that, I mean, I couldn't see my mother for dirt, you know. Years later, Marge pointed out to me that Mother had supported the family all these years while Dad was doing all this great stuff. And I began to appreciate her a little more. Because, I mean, the only complaint I ever heard from her was she really hated it that

[31:16]

she had to leave the university because she loved teaching. She really, really enjoyed teaching. And one of the kind of lessons in integrity that I got from her was she taught freshman English which was a required course and Alabama is just insane about, the University of Alabama is insane about football. She was teaching at a time when, those of you who know football, when Bear Bryant was on the team. And she told the coach, I'm not going to pass those boys if they don't do the work. I'll coach them so they can pass if they want to, but I'm not going to just pass them. So we had all these football players out at the house being coached by them. And one day Bear Bryant actually brought her tickets on the 50-yard line and she said, why Bear, these wouldn't be bribes, would they? Oh, no ma'am, oh why thank you Bear, I'd love to go to the game, thanks so much.

[32:20]

She also told me during this time when she was beginning to be waked up about what was going on in the South, she decided to assign for a book report George Washington Carver's autobiography, Up From Slavery. And he was by then, had a PhD and I believe founded Tuskegee University. Anyhow, she came home and she was so outraged at this student who had written this almost illegible book report which ended with, all in all it was a good book for a nigger to have wrote. And she said, she said, I put on there, I'm sure that Dr. Carver would appreciate your condescension, but she said, I know he couldn't even understand that sentence. She was really upset. So that's kind of the way it was in the South when I grew up, like that.

[33:24]

And that's what concerned my father so much. And that's what ended up with him being a communist because the people he found who were really, really leading the fight to make a change were communists. And it was a very idealistic time and, you know, I really believed in socialism. And when I came from, when I finally, I went to Tassajara and I came to Green Gulch and I happened to have a job in which I was responsible for handing out the stipends. We all got stipends of about $25 a month and they were all the same except for people who had children, they got more. And I thought, wow, this is it. From each according to his ability to each according to his needs, this is just the ideal I've always had. This is wonderful, I'm going to live here the rest of my life. But, you know, we couldn't keep that up. We are human and everybody is looking out for themselves and people wanted more.

[34:29]

And we couldn't, we couldn't actually sustain it. But at the very beginning, I was very, very thrilled with the idealism of this community. And we don't do too bad, we don't have vast differences, but people with more responsibility get a larger stipend now instead of everyone getting the same. Of course, it was everyone except the abbot at that time, which was one of the reasons when it turns out that the abbot was not willing to live as simple a life as he was encouraging all of us to live. We couldn't sustain it. People's bitterness and self-concern changed that for us, much to my chagrin. So later on, I met someone who had the same kind of ideals as my father. And he also read poetry. And he also was quite a romantic.

[35:32]

The first time I got him to pay me any attention, and we spent a little time talking until late in the evening. The next morning, he came over to where I was staying. I was visiting in Berkeley, where he lived. And he came under my window and sang, Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me. Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee. Well, we've been married now for 56 years. Very romantic. What? What? So... So Lou and I were married, and we had four children. And... Long about 22 years into the marriage, it was a little shaky, and we went...

[36:39]

Well, I had a good friend who gave me a book about Zen. The Zen Teaching of Wong Po. And I read it, and I thought, wow, yes! You know, I went back and looked at it later, and I said, what did I think I understood? But, I mean, the opening sentence is something like, The great way is not difficult, just give up conceptual thinking. And I can still say yes, but I've been trying to do that now for a long time. And it's not so easy. You know? And we were having a little difficulty in our marriage, and we went to a marriage counselor who was a Reiki therapist. It turned out, we didn't know it at the time, but it turned out that he had leukemia and he was dying. And so all he said to us was, I don't have time to do traditional Reiki therapy.

[37:46]

What I'll do is work with you for about six weeks, and then I'll guide you on a mescaline trip, and then we'll... And then we'll look at the material that comes up on the trip afterwards. So these were separate, you know, but during the course... Well, I mean, actually, all I remember about the mescaline trip was that I couldn't accept food because there were so many starving people in the world, it would be wrong for me to take food. They offered me some food, I remember that. I remember standing in the backyard and looking at a camellia and seeing it pulsing with life, seeing, just feeling the connection with the camellia. But what I also remember was when we were discussing, you know, just in one-on-one therapy, at that time I was... Lou had been blacklisted from his job.

[38:49]

He'd gotten a job in a restaurant and worked there for some years, but I had gone back to work and I was supporting the family. I would say that I was essentially supporting the family for a good part of that time. He was taking care of the kids so I could go to work. At that time, I would say that both of us would have described our relationship as she's the strong independent one, he's the weak dependent one. And I had that kind of relationship with my oldest son, I had that kind of relationship with a lot of people, and my therapist said to me, Don't you see... And so I had a very good self-image of myself as a strong person supporting a lot of people, right? Pretty nice. My therapist said to me, Don't you see that you're encouraging people to be dependent on you? It's just your way of expressing your dependence.

[39:51]

If they're dependent on you, you won't be left alone. And it was so clear, and it was so devastating, because my whole self-image was demolished. Instead of thinking that now that I had been doing something good, I thought, My God, I've been sucking my self-image out of everybody else's and leaving them feeling bad about themselves, these people that I think I love. So I was feeling like a vampire. I was feeling really evil and devastated by that discovery, which was quite clear. I mean, this is kind of what... I never heard the word codependency, but this is what codependency is. And during that time, let's see, Lou went back to take care of his father one summer, and it was not clear if he was going to come back.

[40:52]

I had... A friend of mine had given me this book on Zen, and a friend of his had given him Kapilavrishi's book, Three Pillars of Zen. So he had that back in Connecticut where he was, and he was reading it, and he started sitting Zazen back there. I left out a very important thing. In 1968, in the fall of 1968, my son was a student at San Francisco State, and there was a student strike. And it was actually described in the newspapers as a police riot. The police got really worked up about arresting people and got quite violent by the end of the day and arrested hundreds of students, beat up hundreds of students. Luckily, my son, who was a Quaker and a pacifist, had said when they came around the building to attack his picket line, said to people, walk, don't run. So he was in the back, and he got arrested first. And he said he was really glad he got arrested first because they hadn't gotten all excited

[42:00]

and started roughing people up until later in the day. So some of the leaders, it was a black student strike, some of the leaders of the black community were on the TV and urging members of the community to come interpose themselves between police and students to prevent further violence. So the next day I dressed up in my best finer and went out to interpose myself between police and students, and I was there a little early. I was kind of watching. There was a picket line here, and the pickets were some kind of nudging the students who wanted to cross and go to classes. They weren't blocking anybody, but they were kind of in the way. And then there were some jocks taking pictures of this, and then one of the pickets grabbed the camera and smashed it. By this time, I'd become a pacifist. I hadn't been during the war. During the Second World War, I had been a mechanic in the Air Force and very much supported the war

[43:02]

because it was a war against fascism. And I'm watching this thing going on between the pickets and the jocks, and I'm saying, where's my side? And during this period, all of the kinds of things I had counted on were falling apart. I mean, the things that I felt were stable were becoming unstable. A friend of mine had a bad headache, went to the doctor, was diagnosed with a brain tumor and died really quickly. And not long after that, I had had a very severe infection, ended up in the hospital and almost died. And so I was pretty rattled by that. There is a case in Mumon-Khan where Master Mumon says something like, you'd better pay attention to what I'm saying,

[44:05]

or else when it comes time for the five elements to separate, you'll be like a crab in a pot, scrabbling with all eight arms and legs to get out. And that's kind of how I was after Pat died and after I almost died. And so this marriage counseling therapy and the mescaline trip were after that, and then the student strike were after that. So all of my certainties were falling away, and I had nothing certain to depend on. So I just kind of didn't know what was going on. I was just looking for ground to stand on. And so it came time that day for the planned rally, and we all rallied for a talk in the central quadrangle of San Francisco State. And then there was a loudspeaker announcement saying, this is an illegal assembly,

[45:05]

and this phalanx of police in full riot gear, shoulder to shoulder, stretching across the entire quadrangle, came from behind a building in full riot gear, poking with their billy clubs. And without any thought, I ducked under some people's hands in front of me to be between police and students. I wasn't thinking, I'm doing this because that's what I came here for. I just did it without thought. And there was just a kind of a... time kind of stopped, and I made eye contact with the policeman right in front of me. Actually, at the moment I ducked under, there was a whistle, and the police went from holding their billy clubs this way and poking people to holding them sideways. In politics, a policeman,

[46:07]

particularly a policeman in full riot gear, was as much the essence of not me as anything could be. But we made eye contact, and I had an overpowering experience of identity with this riot squad policeman right in my face. It was totally beyond anything I could comprehend, but it was totally more real than anything I had ever experienced, and it really blew my mind. I kept backing up slowly so that there wouldn't be... there were people behind us being pushed against walls and had to go in between the buildings and stuff, and people were tugging on my elbows, and I'm looking at this policeman with this experience of identity, with what had been until that moment the epitome of not me. And afterwards, you know, I went on through the day.

[47:14]

I went later to a meeting of parents and formed a parents' committee to support the strike, of which I became chairman. I went on the radio the next day as a spokesperson for the parents' committee to support the strike. But in fact, my political life ended with that moment. And I had to, you know, I was just dumbfounded. The last thing in the world I ever expected to experience was identity with a riot squad policeman. And I had to find out who understood that. And in my searching around and reading, I heard about the Berkeley Zen Dome. I didn't go for about several months after I heard about it. It just seemed too weird, you know, Zen Buddhism for an atheist like me. But I finally went and had meditation instruction

[48:24]

and began sitting every day. From the day I had meditation instruction, I began sitting every day. I did not really know why, but it was irresistible. You know, I needed to understand that experience with a riot squad policeman. And of course, there is the saying in Zen, self and other are not two. And certainly now I can look back and say that was certainly an experience of self and other are not two. But it has taken me a long time to understand that experience, but it was pivotal in my life. So, maybe the time is up. I don't know. Time just goes on and on, and I'm just blabbing away. So, at some point Suzuki Roshi came, I guess probably the next Monday morning

[49:42]

because he used to come to lecture at the Berkeley Zendo every Monday morning. And somehow when I saw him, I thought, he understands what happened with that riot squad policeman. And so that really kept me coming back and kept me coming to see him. Maybe that's enough for now. Hmm? Oh, bring Lou back. Oh, yes. Actually, I didn't know if Lou was coming back because things had been kind of rough. But he did. And it turns out that while he was back there, he had the book, was it Three Pillars of Zen?

[50:43]

And he read about Zazen, and he started sitting Zazen back in Connecticut while I started sitting Zazen in Berkeley. When he came back, we were both sitting Zazen. How about that for good fortune? Boy, the gods were with us. But he wouldn't come to the Berkeley Zendo with me for a while because it was my trip. And he said, you know, first it was my mother's trip, and then it was this trip, and then it was that trip. I'm going to sit at home. So he made a little Zendo at home and sat at home. But actually, once he came down and heard Suzuki Roshi talk, it was kind of irrelevant whose trip it was. And so we both sat at the Berkeley Zendo for some years. He went to Tassajara, actually, before I did, because at that time I had a job and at that time he didn't. But the rest is just the playing out of getting more and more deeply enmeshed in Zen practice

[51:50]

until here we are. So that's my way-seeking mind talk for today. I do think that it's important to drop who we think we are and just explore the question of, what is this? Just be curious about, what is this? We have so many ideas about who we think we are. But just to directly turn inward and find out what this is, I think you will find that it's totally connected with everything there is, even including Ridesquad policemen. Thank you.

[52:49]

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