We seem to be specializing in intimate gatherings these days. Nice. Intimate and all girl. For those of you who were here last weekend or in my obstacles class, forgive me, I'm still working and being worked by the same texts. And I figure As long as there's juice coming forth, it's worth staying with them. So, one of the texts, if you will, that I've been... It's more like I feel like I'm being worked, is from this new translation of the Dhammapada by Tom Cleary, that is very, very good, really fine. His translation of the verses, I think, is especially wonderful. But he's also then drawn relevant quotes from other texts, other sutras, and Zen proverbs, and many different things from his extraordinary, broad, direct experience of texts by way of kind of commentary on what he's translating that's the Dhammapada.

[01:22]

So in particular what I want to reference this morning is one of the quotes that he makes in the first section of the Dhammapada on the couplets or the ten verses from the sutra that's called the Scripture Unlocking the Mysteries. That's a quote that describes or identifies a delusion what's the basis or causal factor for delusion, which is of course such an important factor in our suffering, terrible factor in our suffering. And the other text that I'm still working with is this quote from the Book of Knots that Annie Proulx used in her novel, quite remarkable novel, called The Shipping News. which if you don't know it, I hope you will.

[02:25]

So let me start with a quote from the Sutra, because the quote from the Book of Knots is more by way of a kind of hint about how to approach what causes delusion. That was Rosie. I'm thrilled to be out. Delusion arises from clinging to an imaginary reality, formulated under the influence of the lull of words, the habit-forming influence that repetition of mental talk has on the state of the perceiving and thinking mind. man that you were talking to me about this morning is a perfect example.

[03:33]

Clinging to an imaginary reality. And where does that come from? The lull of words. Delusion arises from clinging to an imaginary reality formulated under the influence of the lull of words, the habit-forming influence that repetition of mental talk has on the state of perceiving and thinking? The repetition of mental talk? Yeah. Doesn't it? So, of course, with all of the practices that we are engaged with, what we're doing, at least ideally, is cultivating our willingness to notice the details of the lull of words, the mental talk, the patterns of thought and speaking that keeps reinforcing inaccurate descriptions of the nature of things and profoundly affects the way we view the world

[04:49]

and what we see when we look out the window and see reflected back at us a lot of projection and fear and these tangles. I did a one-day retreat up in Sevastopol yesterday and we worked all day with bare noting and the meditation for working with fear, working with afflictive emotions, but what we focused on was fear. It was quite a large group, it was almost 60 people and quite a range of people including people who were brand new to practice. And it was a very rich day for me. People were unusually willing to kind of bring forth what was coming up for them as they did this first step in the transformation meditation. And I was struck over and over again by how much of what people were talking about was the consequences of this mental talk.

[05:53]

One of the particular tape loops that many people seem to have in their inner tape machine, their CD player of the mind, was, I'm not good enough, I didn't do enough, I'll never do it right, versions of. I'm not enough, or I can't do enough, or I didn't do enough, or I'll never be able to do enough. And, of course, there are all kinds of permutations on that particular message theme. There was one young man in a wheelchair. He has had a colostomy. So he's got, you know, a bag he's got to keep attending to. He and another woman who had had some kind of an event, medical event that had caused paralysis, so that not her face or head, but the left side of her body, see her hand was frozen like this, and her, looked like her leg was pretty frozen and that she had no sensation in it.

[07:14]

So she had to be very intentional whenever she would walk because she only, her bearings were all coming entirely from her right leg and watching what her left leg was doing and she was decaying. These two people were so, a source of such inspiration for me because they both were really right there. The woman had clearly had a lot of experience as a meditator. which was clearly a resource for her. I could see that. Anyway, at some point, the young man described to me privately that he was having a lot of very intense emotion coming up, and he noticed in doing the first step of the meditation that very quickly the emotion would fade. And then he had all this chatter about he hadn't been doing enough.

[08:18]

He clearly wasn't working hard enough. He was tricking himself. Incredible amount of doubt and cynicism about what he could do. And of course, you know, from my perspective, the meditation was effective because this intense fear and anger was coming up and then fading very quickly. So we had some conversation about this process. And he said, oh, maybe I'm working too hard. Maybe I don't have to worry about how I'm tricking myself. And it was like this burst of light came over him. He was just stunned. And what we began to uncover together in our conversation was that he had this story from when he was very young about big, strong, negative emotion.

[09:23]

It lasts a long time. You're in its grip. There's nothing you can do about it. I'll never be good enough to not be someone who has this kind of stuff coming up. Those kinds of messages. And I just kept hearing this quote, ah, the lull of words, mental talking. So he had this tension between the description that he had carried for much of his life about how things are, and then here he was doing something and having some direct experience that didn't match that old description. Of course, what was so wonderful in his case was he was receptive. He had some willingness to be open to a different possibility. He was very responsive. Of course, as I looked at him, you know, he must be maybe in his late 30s.

[10:30]

Very beautiful young man. kind of locked in his wheelchair. So I kept wondering, I wonder how much of that willingness is from the kind of grinding of his circumstance and who knows what kind of suffering. Our suffering does grind down our resistance to looking at things a different way, at least it can. So the second quote, and I keep, I feel like this description about what's called the hairy knot, is advice that can be very helpful in as we become aware of the kind of knottedness of mental talk, of description about the nature of things that's not examined, and not so accurate and yet is prevailing.

[11:34]

As cultivating knots, R. D. Lange talks about knots in a very interesting way. How much in our family of origin we get conditioned to certain knots. There are certain knots we almost inherit and then we add our own particular tug and pull to knots. And I think we can actually, at least I've certainly had the experience of experiencing certain kinds of habits in my mind, habits in my behavior or my speaking, as having the effect of knotted, knotting string, not string that pulls easily off of a ball, but being all knotted. And that I can feel places in my body which feel knotted. that the relationship between these mental knots and the knots, physical knots or emotional knots or breath knots, that's not just metaphor, that there actually are these places of constriction and tightening that are kind of resonating with what the sutra is describing.

[12:53]

So here's the advice that comes from this. The Ashley Book of Knots. To untangle a snarl, loosen all jams or knots and open a hole through the mass at the point where the longest end leaves the snarl. Then proceed to roll or wind the end out through the center exactly as a stocking is rolled. Keep the snarl open and loosen and loose at all times and do not pull on the end. You just see myself like this. Permit it to unfold itself. I think it's really good advice. Loosen and open. Keep loose at all times. Do not pull on the end.

[13:54]

Permit it to unfold itself. The language is very interesting. Permit it to unfold itself. And I think it's a very accurate description of what the cultivation of awareness, that is, awareness which is pure in the sense that it's free of judging. I think that the cultivation of that kind of awareness is exactly the awareness that is about permitting, permitting to loosen. Yes, extremely so. I think that's exactly right. So, somebody I know has been going through a time of great suffering for her child. And he's now old enough and circumstances are such that

[14:57]

She's now moved into that point in parenthood where she gets to watch her child suffering and not be able to protect him from his suffering and not able to do anything about his suffering. All she can do is to practice permitting it to loosen. So recently what happened was he shut down, he stopped talking. I don't know, maybe a little depressed. Anyway, just shut down. Didn't want to talk about what was going on for him. And of course, what happens then? The mother muscle starts to work over time. And there is this impulse to grill the kid with, you know, nine million questions. And my experience is the more I grill my kids, and it's been true since they were really little, the less I find out. So how do I permit the loosening?

[16:00]

By staying present. By being willing to be open to whatever arises. And specifically in this situation, my advice to my friend, based again on my own experience, was stop asking questions. Make statements, maybe, if that's appropriate, about what's my day been like, how it's going for me, what I'm concerned and worried about. And then I get to just hang out there, cantilevered out, without any guarantee that my kid is going to tell me anything or respond or anything. But with that willingness to feel cantilevered out there, not knowing if anything will come back, is a kind of spaciousness, a kind of loosening and opening up that is conducive to confidence and trust within myself and with whoever else I'm engaged with which harkens back to Suzuki Roshi's advice about the way to tame your, is it cow or horse?

[17:09]

I can't remember, is to keep the critter in a big pasture. It's the same Advice, actually. A very big pasture. So big that the creature doesn't experience itself confined. It's why the punishment of solitary confinement has always struck me as particularly cruel. A black hole that's a little tiny bit bigger than the dimensions of one's body. and not very high. And we create solitary confinement for ourselves and our mind. So, I'm bringing these two quotes forth and because I've found continuing to

[18:16]

reference them, continuing to go back and read the quote from the Sutra, letting the lines kind of cook in me over the last couple of weeks since I've been working with these two quotes actually, has the effect of a little more loosening, just puts loosening and permitting on my map. without trying to loosen or permit. It's just, I'm reminding myself about that possibility. So, you know, when I sit or walk or go out to my office to get something that I need for the morning, just in the detail of sitting down quietly or walking Can I do what I'm doing with that quality of permitting, of loosening?

[19:25]

And of course, to do that, I also need to be willing to notice the opposite. When I've pulled on the end of the string or when there's some constriction, that's a kind of nodding. during our first sitting this morning, it took me a while to realize that I had a whole lot of tightening up in this part of my face. It's just the consequence of registering and being with some news. But all I had to do was have the awareness of the areas of tightness, and immediately there was some easing. I didn't have to, all right, Yvonne, relax your lips. That wasn't necessary. To simply notice, oh, a little constriction. And by focusing on posture and breath, the easing was right there, was a possibility.

[20:34]

Noticing when I went to get the tape, I seem to be having a particularly difficult time these days with getting the little wrapping paper off the tapes. When I was back in Bill's office, he's got these lethal scissors. They're really long and sharp. This big, long pair of scissors stabbing the end of the wrapper with it. Of course, the thing finally ripped, sending the scissors scooting across the edge of the tape into my thumb, of course. What else? You know, here I am kind of jamming at this thing. Doing it quickly is another one of those moments where I revert to certain kinds of habit, you know, forcing, forgetting about easing and loosening and allowing the damn cover.

[21:45]

I mean, you know, the very words with which I relate to the cover are about constriction. This damn cover, why don't they never come? You know, they always and they never. All that mental talking, which is a little insignificant example of what contributes to my having false views, which is really what this quote is describing. Not seeing things clearly as they are. So all of a sudden I realized, oh, the cover around the tape is a snarl. I'm experienced, I'm relating to the tapes when they're in there, package as a kind of snarl. So here's an opportunity to work with that particular snarl a little differently because of course I'm fiddling around with these boxes of tapes periodically and often.

[22:51]

And there are, of course, some snarls which I'm not yet ready to give up. I think those are particularly challenging situations where there's a part of me that is still holding on to something. I was with a group of friends recently as a group of us who are all Dharma teachers and we get together regularly to just hang out with each other. One person in our group was talking about a certain situation or certain situations in which for him what comes up is a kind of anger which he really enjoys. kind of glee when he describes it. We had a very interesting conversation about those emotional responses that are clearly trouble.

[24:12]

But there's that little niggling place in the mind where I'm enjoying this, I don't want to give it up, comes up around anger, comes up around gossip, comes up around resistance in the form, I don't wanna, you can't make me, I don't have to, I'm too little. I mean, I think for each of us, we could probably think of a few responses that we actually aren't entirely convinced we wanna give up just yet. criticizing someone else because it makes me feel better about myself. There's an array of... And yet there's another part of my mind that knows, oh, this is a causal factor for suffering.

[25:16]

So then, how do I cultivate permitting the snarl to loosen itself when that resistance, that I don't want to come I think that's very useful to think about, extremely useful. I think being patient and tender and firm with resistance. I'm not going to force my way through resistance, but I'm not going to turn it away and say, oh, well, I don't have to. I'm going to keep whatever it is I have as a possibility in mind. The story that always comes up for me around this particular issue is one I've told some of you before about my first encounter with Thich Nhat Hanh's meditation on gratitude for one's mother. And when I first read, it's written out in a little pamphlet called A Rose for You, with a picture of the rose on top.

[26:24]

Part of it is I always feel a little bit cajoled into what could for two cents be a little sentimental or a little too sweet. What do you mean a rose for you? So I had a pretty strong negative response the first time I read this little meditation. All I could think of was, well, not with my mother. But I also didn't just put it away, out of sight, out of mind. I left the meditation on the bookshelf facing out, so whenever I would go into the room where that little pamphlet was sitting, it would kind of be there. I could almost feel it doing this kind of jumping. Yoo-hoo! And, you know, a year or so of having it kind of doing this, I opened it up and looked at it again, and I noticed that there was a little softening. I was not entirely ready to do the meditation, but at least the possibility of doing it was beginning to arise.

[27:29]

And in time, I was actually able to consider things that I am genuinely and authentically grateful to my mother for. And I think there's a completely different tone to that practice in the loosening, the permitting myself to come to that practice when I was able to. I think it comes up a lot around forgiveness. When somebody has done something really terrible to me, or to someone that I love, to someone I'm close enough to so that I register the terrible consequences of someone's behavior, and everything in me doesn't want to include them in the group of people that I do practices for, that I open my heart towards. And then there's this other voice that said, but you should forgive them. You should, you know, all that should stuff.

[28:34]

Well, I'm not ready to do that yet. I know somebody who thinks of me as a kind of surrogate mother and has for 30 years. And after a number of years, she uncovered a lot of very, a very terrible history with her family. A lot of abuse, including sexual abuse, with her very proper and good citizen doctor father. And she had been doing a lot of work around just uncovering what was so, and then slowly doing the work of healing. And she had been at some kind of group for people who have this kind of childhood trauma in common.

[29:35]

And somebody who was leading the group had made a very strong pitch about, you must forgive the perpetrator. And my friend came home and immediately called me up weeping and ranting and raving. Do I have to? She was really quite outraged. And what came up for me as I listened to her was, this is not a kindness to say you have to forgive your father. You aren't anywhere close to being ready to do that. It's not even time to have it on the screen. There's too much that has to happen in relationship to oneself before that begins to be possible. So, you know, just out of my own practice and listening to other people over the years, I think the advice from the Book of Knots is invaluable.

[30:44]

It's really about the cultivation of patience and loving-kindness. It's a loving-kindness verse. We should copy it out and put it in whatever, you know, Sharon Salzberg's book on the cultivation of loving-kindness. This can be an addendum. It was just accidentally left out. I think the more interested we can become in delusion and what sponsors delusion. I think that can be very, very helpful. And I think to begin with, it's extremely helpful to appreciate that we all have our delusions and that if we get too caught up in

[31:49]

not allowing ourselves to know our own capacity for delusion, then we're just caught in the sea of judgment. I don't do that. Very dangerous. I found myself this morning thinking or just remembering Thich Nhat Hanh's poem about please call me by my true names. poem about remembering that if the causes and conditions were what's necessary, I too could be the pirate who rapes the 12-year-old girl on the refugee boat. And the little girl then jumps over and drowns. It's one of the verses in the poem. I am a 12-year-old girl just raped by a sea pirate who jumps into the ocean and drowns.

[32:56]

And I am the sea pirate whose heart is not yet open to love and understanding. And it goes through in this poem articulating the perpetrator and the person harmed. as a challenge to us to keep in mind over and over and over again. Can I really say if the causes and conditions in my life were what they were in the pirate's life? If I knew enough to understand what the causes and conditions were in his life, could I really say that I would not behave in the same way? And it's, I think, very tempting, because to look at our capacity for corruption, to look at our capacity for violence, to look at our capacity for acting in ways that causes great harm, can bring up a lot of fear.

[33:58]

We turn away from that capacity in ourselves. And, of course, the great paradox is the more open I am to my own capacity for harming, for unwholesome thoughts and speaking and action, the more open I am to my own capacity, the more deeply I can understand, and that's what's arising, and that's the ground in someone else's life. And I then am more likely to act skillfully. I hadn't thought of this experience until I was in this conversation that we had in our teacher's meeting the other day. One person was talking about her, everything in her these days wants to sort of go to another planet because of her feeling of despair and dismay with the violence and

[35:09]

suffering in the world that we live in. And what is it, 40 wars currently going on? But it's interesting somebody counted. So we got into this conversation about violence and fierceness. And I remembered something I hadn't remembered for a long time and I told this story about one time when I was still living in the city around in the Page Street neighborhood where the San Francisco Zen Center is. And right next to the center is a big apartment building which has a garage. And there's only one entrance and exit into the garage off of the street. The way in is the way out. And there was a kind of storage area at the very back of the garage. And it's a big building, so the garage goes back quite far. And I walked in late one morning to get something out of the storage area.

[36:11]

And as I came back through the cars towards the open door from the street, this very large teenage black kid from the neighborhood was coming in towards me. I would guess he was probably maybe 18 or 19. Six feet or twelve, I don't know. I mean, he was big. And my arms were full. And he's coming towards me, looking like he doesn't have something good in mind. And when I looked at him, I saw my son. And I just dropped what I had in my hands, and I just ran right at him, yelling at the top of my lungs. Don't you think of what you're thinking about doing. Don't you even think it. This is going to be big trouble for you.

[37:13]

And I just, I just had this rain of mother rage, you know, like, don't you dare get into this. And this kid kind of, and his mouth dropped and he kind of was so stunned. And he kind of backed out onto the street. And I just didn't stop. I just went for him. And he turned around and ran up the street back to the housing project that's, you know, half a block away. And of course, afterwards, when I realized, as I watched this giant kid running up the street, I sat down and I completely lost it. I started to just shake when I realized what I had done. But I didn't see my enemy. I saw this kid about to act out of who knows what and be in really big trouble.

[38:15]

And I had this very clear sense that anything I could do to keep him from doing something that was going to get him into trouble was important for me to do. And I wasn't afraid. I wasn't worried about myself. I was worried about him. And afterwards, I spent a long time trying to figure out, where did that come from? And it had everything to do with my having certain kind of sympathy for delusion, for the ground of the kind of delusion an 18 or 19-year-old young man who's too big and too strong for his age, for what he's emotionally and psychologically and mentally capable of managing. Well, I knew that from my own son, who was off the charts from the day he was born. Bigger, stronger, capable of incredible strength in a positive or in a negative way.

[39:20]

Well, I hadn't thought about that experience until it came up the other day. And I've been sort of thinking about it and realized maybe that's what the Bodhisattva vow is about, is really allowing ourselves to experience ourselves as each other's mother. That no matter what our child does, we don't close our hearts off unless something has happened that we haven't taken care of within ourselves. Which doesn't mean we don't have boundaries and limits, which doesn't mean we don't say no about certain kinds of things, but it's coming from compassion, it's coming from sympathy, it's coming from understanding, it's not coming from anger and a closed heart. Anyway, I think for me it was that episode arose out of a kind of momentary clarity, which was hardly my standard state of mind, but I had a glimpse of a way to be in the world that actually had a very big effect on me.

[40:43]

And I had, not very long after that, A similar experience coming out of the guest house in the same neighborhood, walking back up the street to the flat where I was living. And this young kid came up alongside of me and stuck a knife right by my side. And I clamped my arm down over the knife and I turned around and I slapped him. And of course, again, I sat down on the steps as soon as he ran away. Just, I fell apart. It was like, oh my goodness. But, you know, that's what we had at that time in that neighborhood. We had these young kids running amok. How can I keep my heart open? How can I be interested and curious about how does anyone grow up and think that going out on the street and pulling a knife on someone will be a solution to their suffering?

[42:01]

And I can't understand that in generalities. I have to understand that in very particular ways. I have to know someone's story. I have to be willing to listen to it, and I have to be willing to listen to whatever gets resonated within myself, including my own capacity to act like that, if the causes and conditions were the same. So, that's my... Absolutely. You know, there's a habit, there's a practice actually in Japan where one of the things you can do is you make a place where you can sit down and write, and you offer a little stick of incense and bow, and then you sit down as a practice, as a kind of meditation, and you write out a verse or a text, passage from a text,

[43:08]

as a way of meditating on it. And if you do that every day then of course the whatever you're writing drops in. It's a way of learning it by heart through the hand and through the physicalness of it. And it begins to drop in and then be available as a kind of resource. It's a wonderful practice. And I think both of these quotes that really lend themselves to being used that way. I've been writing out the quote from the Ashley Book of Knots for a few weeks now and it's beginning to drop in. The other, we used this as another focal point in the retreat last weekend. This is a verse that Bill found in a footnote to one of the polytexts. Hard rains the rain on covered things.

[44:12]

No rain rains hard on open things. So open ye the covered things, so no hard rain will rain on that. The covered things being our fault, what we hide. That's another candidate. Anyway, yes, I'm a candidate. Okay, what I'm wondering is, she's examining, there might be cookies over there. You never know what's in people's purses. Yeah, outside is safer than inside. I'm wondering if any of you have anything up with respect to meditation practice or with respect to what I talked about.

[45:16]

And it's fearful of becoming too dour. I am remembering that the Dalai Lama talks about happiness as a motivation. I've also been recently spending more time with happiness. And what is happiness? And am I happy? And it has come up that I have this, especially with my students, the thrill I get when I discover they've made an error. I mean, it's really fun. gossip, which of course I know the gossip is troublesome, but I have a good time with it. But since I've taken on the practice of knowing what's happy, that's starting to get very specific for me. Like, oh, I just found out she made a hair. I get to tell her that. And I realize that it's not quite the same as when I'm happy, like fruit watching or something. There it is. There is something different about it. There's a thrill of energy. But if I look at it closely, it's really not happiness in the same way as when I make something good to eat and I have happiness.

[46:50]

And I don't have it down yet, but I find that it is interesting if I look at happiness the same way as I'm trying to look at suffering, that some differences are coming. Now, one thing that you might consider is that The source of the happiness may range depending on the motivation. What I mean by that is, if my motivation for finding that one of my students has made a mistake is that kind of glee of, aha, caught you, that has a little bit of the, I put myself up by putting someone else down, energy in it. That's one kind of motivation. There can also be, I think, very genuine and authentic enthusiasm and happiness when someone makes a mistake because there is the opportunity for looking into and opening up and illuminating something.

[47:55]

Something very lively happens when there is an environment in which acknowledging a mistake is possible, is supported. in a wholesome way. So you can have what from the outside looks like exactly the same response, but what's actually going on is very different depending on my motivation. Well, I also think that that's not a practice that is traditionally taught without some very clear foundational work. So anyway, in terms of the examples that you're bringing up, I don't think that gossip, I haven't yet discovered the pure or wholesome motivation for gossip. Maybe there is, but I haven't found it yet. But the other example that you gave about enjoying happiness when one of your students makes a mistake, I think there's much more possibility there depending on

[49:05]

on what's, what the trigger, what the motivating trigger factor is. Well, I'm hoping that more people's attention will be able to see it, because as an energetic hit, you know, the way anger can be so energizing at times, unless it's one doesn't need to get angry in order to get the energy. Right. Maybe that'll work out with this. All right, now something else just occurred to me that I've been trying to kind of feel out. I haven't been able to... I've been trying to articulate what I know more at a sensing level, which is the enormous benefit of bare noting. And what you just said triggered something for me, which is, if you in the beginning just do bare noting of happiness, You just do bare noting. You don't try to think about it or analyze it or figure it out. You just notice. You will begin to have a series of insights about different kinds of happiness.

[50:12]

It'll begin to be like the Eskimo is describing, snow. And I just, that kind of clicked something for me. It's interesting. So this is to help your friends not think you're about to take the cloth, shave your head and take the cloth. I like what you had to say about that. Forgiveness and seeing the shadow sides of ourselves and knowing that we could be perpetrators because I wasn't the wife since childhood, and many years of reading, many books, trying to find wisdom somewhere that would help me with that. And I finally found it in Booth's reading. And they were, I don't even know who the writer was, author was, and I don't know if the translation was accurate, but the help that I found in there was there for me at the time.

[51:19]

Because psychologists and psychiatrists But you know, there's a way in the Buddhist tradition that that process is described that is often misunderstood, which has to do with what in Western psychological terms we describe with respect to boundaries and limits. So I may be able to cultivate very deep understanding for how someone who has done things that have had great harm for me I may come to some real understanding about how that person came to be able to behave in these ways. And I may actually be able to have some sympathy and forgiveness for that person and be very clear that certain kinds of behavior simply is not okay.

[52:24]

Those are not mutually exclusive. And I think it's quite easy to misinterpret some of the teachings as sponsoring a kind of doormat-itis. And I think that really is just a misreading. And I think that understanding about forgiveness is tricky, quite tricky, particularly with the extreme forms of abuse and harm. I like what you said about fierceness when you were describing your experience in the garage. There's some quality about all these deities that are fierce. Yes. And fierce has an implication of... It can be righteous fierceness in a way. I don't mean to confuse that with self-righteous, but righteous fierceness rather than violence or ferocious behavior with sort of a wrong motivation?

[53:26]

Well, it totally has to do with the ground from which the energy is arising. And of course, in the sacred art tradition of Buddhism, all of the so-called terrifics, that modality is arising from compassion and wisdom. So, particularly, I think you've had this experience, Marsha, where you meditate on a particular image. that's really fierce. And you begin to see a kind of sweetness, a kind of open-heartedness in conjunction. It's not such a tension. You don't feel like the quality of toughness or fierceness is at odds with open-heartedness and really developed compassion. Quite the opposite. So, you know, it's kind of in the tough love school. Would you talk a little bit about motivation and intention when one needs to generate that in oneself?

[54:33]

Fierceness? No, not fierceness, just motivation and intention. push. And I can't afford, I don't think that I can afford to be gentle with myself by observing these mental processes and being... You could be gentle but also firm. There's a difference. Gentle can go in hand with firmness, especially if you're being realistic about what you're setting for yourself to do. But I think this is exactly where clear intention, the practice of clear intention, can be enormously helpful. And, you know, the person who articulates this in Western terms is Peter Drucker in his autobiography, Adventures of a Bystander.

[55:38]

He talks about Miss Sophie and Miss Elsie, Elsa Elsie, his grammar school principal and third grade teacher. who taught him basically about what in the business world we know of as goal setting. But it's really about having a clear intention. And in the business world, in our culture, everybody knows about clear intention. We don't translate what we know in that very secular context to the spiritual realm. But I think that clear intention is what the symbol of the wish-fulfilling gem. You know, sometimes, like the Jizo at Green Gulch, which is so beautiful, the Jizo is holding a jewel with flames radiating around it. Well, that's the symbol for the wish-fulfilling gem, or another way of putting it is clear intention. And if I can set for myself very clearly what my intention is, and every morning, before I even move out of bed,

[56:42]

to remind myself my clear intention for today, for this morning is. And what I've discovered is that if I start small and specific, my intention for this morning, or the next hour, or this meeting, or this phone call, that I then begin to develop a sense about how to frame my intention over a longer period of time that's got some groundedness and clarity. And then at the end of the day, what you do is to then say, okay, how did it go today with respect to my intention? So there's a kind of review and then renewal of intention just before you go to sleep. So if you do the intention practice, when you first wake up and just before you go to sleep, those are the times when we have the most absorbency and the intention drops in. So my advice would be to say, okay, my intention is to start, get this project moving.

[57:51]

So the implication then is this week my intention looks like I want to do these three things. The implication from that is today I want to make these three phone calls and do this task. and be willing to refine how you articulate that in terms of what's really doable. So you're not always overreaching, which I think is a problem. I also think that if there's resistance, there's something useful embedded in the resistance. It's not just for no good reason. For example, if you feel a little fear about what you're taking on, knowing that and knowing the detail of what that is, and having it come forth in the way that it only will come forth if you do it with some tenderness, can be very useful in including the fact of some fear or apprehension as you move forth.

[58:55]

Because if you don't, you're just leaving part of yourself behind. And the problem with inattention is I don't always have some say about what I'm not paying attention to. I blot out what I want to blot out, but I also blot out some other things as well. At least there's that possibility. I found the practice of clear intention very potent, really potent. Now, in terms of motivation, I think that we almost always think about motivation after the fact. What was my motivation when I did such and such? And it has to do with being more conscious about what's fueling something I'm doing, which I can see, you know, with the 20-20 vision of the next day or whatever. And the more I begin to see my motivation after the fact, the more I can then begin to see, oh, this is motivating me to be quiet now in this meeting, or to not speak up, or whatever.

[60:06]

Yesterday, the woman who organized the sitting, really nice, sweet woman, And she said to me in the morning, she does these, opens her house to a day of mindfulness three times a year. Everybody comes early and moves, the living room goes into hiding and this great wonderful big room becomes the practice space. And she had told me when she first asked me if I'd come up, she said, well we ask for five dollars for the day and I'll keep two for our expenses and give you three. So that was the way I understood it. And then when I got up there, she said, well, I also ask people to give dana. And how should we do this? Do you want me to get up and do a little talk about the practice of dana, generosity? And I said, that's fine, because I'm a guest. I don't know quite how they do it. So at the end of the day, she got up and she told this story about Donna and how it works in Asia and how in the old times when a teacher was going to go to do a teaching, the teacher would walk to where the place was and would be housed and fed and taking care of everybody on the way.

[61:23]

She had this really lovely story about how Donna works in Asia. It was quite beautiful and inspiring and a little idealistic. So she turned to me in all her sweetness and trustiness and she said, Do you agree? And from the depths, the bowels of my being, I said, no. And I didn't say it with any heat. But she asked me. She had not before asked me about my feelings about the whole Donna practice in America, which I thought about a lot over a long period of time. And I'm quite convinced it doesn't work. It's the opportunity for manipulation. People think, what am I supposed to do? And there are no guidelines. It's an opportunity if you have a lot of stuff around money to just continue having a lot of stuff around money and not be conscious about it.

[62:27]

And just, I don't think it works. It doesn't read for us. So we ended up having a 45-minute conversation with this whole group of people in which I just said, well, this is what I've discovered. This has been what my experience has been. This is why I do it the way I do it. I'm a complete oddball, very futile.

[62:47]

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