So, this morning I want to talk about some koans, and maybe, you can just leave your
chapbooks where you are.
I want to talk about some koans, and I'll say a little bit about what koans are.
Maybe it's a little greedy of me to try and talk about more than one in one talk, but
I'm going to.
Koans are usually thought of in terms of the Rinzai tradition, where one passes through
a curriculum of koans, and it may feel like answering some riddle and then getting approval
of that, and there's a curriculum of four or five hundred different, one of these old
traditional stories that are used in the tradition we are in of Soto Zen from the Japanese founder
Dogen and Tsukiroshi.
We also talk a lot about koans and use koans in practice and Dharma training, but with
a very different approach.
They're not stories to kind of figure out or solve, they're aspects of our own practice
to incorporate.
I did develop my own curriculum of just thirty-three koans from some of the traditional sources,
and some students have worked with me individually on that, on some of those.
None of them have ever gotten to the final ten, which are all from two American masters,
Bob Dylan and the koans I want to talk about today, which I consider the highest, from
a great American yogi named Yogi Berra, who played catcher for the New York Yankees.
Anybody here from New York?
No?
Okay, well, I lived a decade in New York.
Now I'll dedicate this talk to the people in New York who right now are facing this
great climate change megastorm, flooded and most of them probably without power anyway.
Here we are in Chicago, and so these koans are often dialogues, and going back to ninth
century Chinese masters, but teachers have used more modern stories as well.
Most of these traditional stories focus on particular churning phrases.
Some might be more accurate to say that Yogi Berra provided us with a great many churning
phrases, which I consider really masterful, and there are many, many of these, and I can
maybe just mention a few of them, a few more of them in the discussion, which I look forward
to, but I'm going to focus on maybe a half-dozen of them.
Again, that's a lot, and it's just my dharma brief, but I have sort of arranged them in
three categories, kind of practice instructions, and then really various commentaries on time,
and many of you know that I'm very interested in Zen and Buddhist perspectives on time and
temporality, and then the last one has to do with transcendence, so here goes.
The first one is, well, these are wonderful sayings.
Yogi Berra said, if I didn't wake up, I'd still be sleeping, and some of them he offers
commentary on.
He said on this one, I had set my alarm and it didn't go off.
Man, was I relieved that I woke up on time, but for all of us, if I didn't wake up, I'd
still be sleeping, so this is sometimes in Koan practice called a checking question.
If I didn't wake up, I'd still be sleeping.
Can you pay attention?
Did you wake up this morning?
Are you still sleeping?
This becomes a real question in our meditation and in our life, and of course, if you didn't
wake up, you'd still be sleeping, and I've talked recently about Dogen talking about
expressing the dream as the realm of all Buddhas, but Yogi is talking about the need to be awake
and pay attention.
Are we sleeping through our zazen?
So in this kind of meditation, our style of zazen is very gentle and relaxed.
I don't walk around with a stick and hit people if they're sleeping.
I sometimes will make postural suggestions at most, but even though this sitting is gentle
and settling in, and it really depends on some regular practice of sitting upright and
paying attention, still, you should be paying attention.
It's not about sleeping.
So Yogi has other wonderful practice instructions.
The next two kind of go together.
Maybe I'll talk about them one at a time at first.
He says, when you come to a fork in the road, take it.
Now, maybe he might have said the same thing if it was a spoon in the road.
I don't know, but when you come to a fork in the road, take it.
This is actually deep dharma advice.
When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
Can you just do it?
So often I've had students come to me and say, I have to decide between this and that.
They're at some fork in the road.
They're at some place where they need to make a decision in their life or in their practice,
or how should I sit, or how should I take care of this problem or that situation?
So we do come to forks in the road.
And sometimes we stop and hesitate.
Now, Yogi says, when you come to a fork in the road, take it.
Just do it.
We may think that if we have to decide between column A and column B, or left and right or
whatever, that it's really important to make the right decision.
And people get stuck and hesitate and spend sometimes years trying to decide which path
to take, as if there were one right path and one wrong path.
So when you come to a fork in the road, either path might get you there.
Actually, there's another.
There's another.
It's not one of the ones that I was going to talk about, but I'm going to try and get,
his phrasing is so astute that I don't want to misquote him.
But I think I remember this one.
We're lost, but we're making good time.
Something like that.
I may not have exactly.
So when you come to a fork in the road, you may think that you have to pick one,
that you have to make the right decision.
But actually, both decisions might be the right decision.
You might get there either way.
Both decisions could be the wrong decisions, and that might be OK, too.
It's not about that there's right and wrong.
And I think for a lot of people in our culture, along with thinking that they've got to make
the right decision, there's this corollary.
And some people have come to me imagining that I could tell them what to do.
Ah, and there's this idea that we have somewhere in our culture that not only is there one
right decision, but there's somebody up there in the sky, often in a long white robe and
a long white beard, who knows what the right decision is.
And if only you could get him to tell you, that would be, you know.
So I commend to you this teaching from this great American yogi.
When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
Just do it.
And sometimes you need to backtrack and try the other one.
But there's another one of his that I wanted to talk about that relates to this in another way.
So the yogi said, we made too many wrong mistakes.
He's actually talking about the 1960 World Series when my pirates, I grew up in Pittsburgh,
beat the Yankees.
But anyway, we made too many wrong mistakes.
This is really deep.
What is it to make a wrong mistake?
Dogen said his life was one continuous mistake, or mistakes upon mistakes.
So you might take the wrong fork in the road.
You might make a mistake.
You might do something harmful.
You might do something that, you know, after some period of time,
a few minutes or a few years, you say, oh, gee, I wish I hadn't done that.
So what do we do when we make wrong mistakes?
So he doesn't say you shouldn't make mistakes.
He said we made too many wrong mistakes.
Probably it's necessary that we make some wrong mistakes.
It's certainly necessary that we do make mistakes.
How do we learn from our mistakes?
We made too many wrong mistakes.
It's actually important to make mistakes.
But, you know, our precepts are guidelines into how to not make mistakes that are really harmful.
How do we make mistakes that we can learn from?
So learn from your mistakes.
Look at your mistakes.
Maybe the whole thing is a mistake.
Maybe you're here by mistake this morning.
But thank you anyway.
Glad you're here.
How do we see our mistakes?
How do we live with our mistakes?
How do we enjoy our mistakes?
How do we make right mistakes?
So these are all, I think, very good practice guidelines
for how we bring our practice into the world.
Again, there's so many.
There's like the Blue Cliff Record.
I think there's a hundred different ones of these turning phrases in here.
I want to talk related to that.
I want to talk about yogi's wisdom about time.
So I've talked here a fair amount about how, from the perspective of Buddhism,
from the perspective of Zen and Dogen, the founder of Soto Zen,
time is not some external container.
Time is actually our experience.
Dogen talks about being time or existence time.
Time moves in different ways.
It moves in many different directions.
It's not just past, present, and future.
It's not some external container that has some objective reality somewhere out there,
even though we think of it that way.
And, of course, Dogen says we should study all of the different aspects of time.
So I have a watch to see when it's time to stop talking and ask your questions.
Time is also just our life.
Time is not some objective, solid thing.
And we all know this from sitting periods of Zazen.
And some periods may go by very fast.
And some periods, we're sure that Dogen has fallen asleep.
And from the point of view of the clock, they may be exactly the same amount of time.
So time is not something that exists objectively and externally.
Anyway, that's a little background into
Dogen's really deep wisdom about time.
When asked the time, I replied, you mean now?
What time is it?
You mean now?
Oh, now, now.
Yes, here, now.
What time is it?
You mean now?
So Yogi says, I don't know when I first said this.
But for some reason, it's stuck with me.
And I say it all the time.
So it's always a good Zen answer.
What time is it?
You mean now?
Can we be present now?
Or do you want to know what time it is when the talk finishes?
Or when we started Zazen this morning?
Or anyway, there's lots of ways to look at this.
But what time is it?
Oh, now?
So how do we see this now, which is not stuck in some particular hour of the clock?
So Yogi also said about this, one of his more famous lines, it's déjà vu all over again.
So how many of you have ever had that, you know, that déjà vu experience where something
seems like you've been there before?
How many?
Only one?
Oh, wow.
Most of you.
It's déjà vu all over again.
Déjà vu doesn't just happen once.
We have these habit patterns.
So we make the right mistakes and wrong mistakes over and over and over again.
And particularly in Zazen, you know, particularly when we're sitting,
particularly when we're aware, you know, of our practice.
Oh, no, not this again.
You know, our habit patterns are deeply ingrained.
And we may think we may have sat with them a long time.
We may have gone and studied them psychologically.
And, you know, there are many therapists in the room who can help us with understanding,
you know, these patterns of thinking and reacting and making wrong mistakes.
Déjà vu all over again.
Here it is again.
And, you know, there's a commentary, and it's not on my Koan curriculum, but Bob Dylan says,
Here I sit so patiently, waiting to find out.
Something about waiting to see how many times I have to,
how long it takes to get over going through all these things twice,
something like that.
I messed up the line, but here I sit so patiently waiting to find out.
How, what it takes to get over going through all these things twice.
And, you know, Dylan's a genius, so maybe he only has to do it twice.
Most of us, it's déjà vu all over again and again and again.
How do we, and this is an important part of our practice,
how do we sit with these things that come up again and again and again?
And sometimes, so when you raised your hand about some déjà vu,
there's also this experience that maybe one of the psychologists in the room
can explain to us during the discussion what that is in our mind when,
you know, some experience happens and we think, Oh, yeah, I've been here before.
I've seen this before.
Not just that you've been to a Sunday morning talk here before,
but something about some patterns you recognize from somewhere.
This happens in our life.
And how do we enjoy it?
And if it's a wrong mistake, how do we, you know,
try and not go through it too many times again and again and again?
So I'm talking about a number of these sayings from Yogi Berra.
There's a lot.
Maybe I could talk about any one of them all morning.
But, you know, it's déjà vu all over.
What time is it?
You mean now?
How do we see the complexity of our experience?
Our experience is time.
Our experience happens in time.
And this now that Yogi talks about includes past and future.
But what does it mean that this now includes past and future?
One of my teachers, Joanna Macy, is coming here next July.
She talks about deep time and re-inhabiting time
and really experiencing the complexity of this now that Yogi talks about.
He has a couple more useful commentaries.
And there's two of them that I kind of like to put together.
He did put there.
They fit together for me.
So I'm going to try and just say them together.
First, he said, the future ain't what it used to be.
And then he said, which I think is very related to that.
It's never happened in history and it hasn't happened since.
So the future ain't what it used to be.
And it's true.
There's all kinds of stories about what the future would be like in 2011.
I don't know why this is coming to mind.
But did any of you ever see the Jetsons TV cartoon?
So that was one vision of what we'd be like now.
The future ain't what it used to be.
It's, in fact, what time is it now?
It's now.
But also that our future ain't what it used to be.
So what is the American dream?
Well, we had an American dream for the future.
It's changed.
We're trying to hold on through economic and environmental catastrophes.
Anyway, the future ain't what it used to be.
Yogi's comment, I just meant that times are different.
Not necessarily better or worse, just different.
The future ain't what it used to be.
So how we see the future is what we say about it right now.
And the actual future, you know, next month or next year or 20 years from now will be what it is.
When?
Right now.
But, you know, still our now includes this future.
So the future ain't what it used to be.
It's pretty good.
It's pretty deep.
It's very funny, you know.
I can open it at random.
And oh, here's one of my, just a random, you know, comment by Yogi.
This actually has a story behind it.
One of the Yankee officials called and he sleepily answered the phone.
And the guy said, sorry, Yogi, I hope I didn't wake you when you replied.
No, I had to get up to answer the phone anyway.
So I've used that sometimes after.
Anyway, the future ain't what it used to be.
Well, what is it now?
What will it be then?
How do we see the future?
The future is part of our present.
This is one of the things Joanna Macy is very wise about.
That we, that our fears about the future affect us in the present.
How do we really take on this time now with this changing future?
So he said the future ain't what it used to be.
And then he said it never happened in history and it hasn't happened since.
So history has to do with the past.
But that's also what we say about history now.
And it hasn't happened since.
What would it be like for something to happen after history?
So actually, I'm talking about these rather quickly.
And each one of these is a turning phrase and is a koan.
Because they are worthy of sitting with.
And staying with.
And studying deeply in Zazen and in your life.
It's never happened in history and it hasn't happened since.
We can see this in many ways.
So you can think about personal history.
That never happened to me.
And it hasn't happened since.
What is that since?
You know, this funny turning word in this line from Yogi.
And actually, I'll reveal to you that I've edited what he said a little bit.
Because he was talking about Don Larson's perfect game in the World Series.
So actually, what he said is it's never happened in World Series history
and it hasn't happened since.
So that makes it a little less deep, maybe.
He's just talking about this one event.
But really, the essence of it.
It's never happened in history and it hasn't happened since.
Many things didn't happen in history.
And what is this since?
What time is it since?
You mean now?
How do we see both future and past, which we call history, beyond,
not outside of time, not in some timeless transcendent world,
but in some deeper way?
This is actually, you know, the prajna, the wisdom,
the insight of Buddhism and of Zen.
How do we see this process of our lives and of the world and of history
and of the future?
How do we see this in a deeper way?
Zen and, I would say, the wisdom of Yogi Berra is about going deeper.
Unthinking, how we usually think about history and time and the future
and making mistakes.
So, you know, it's not that we are outside of history.
We live in the world of karma, cause and effect.
And through our Sazen, we get a sense of something that goes beyond.
And yet, how we get to that beyond, how we get to that hasn't happened since,
is through causes and conditions.
Each of us in our own way and all of us collectively as a Sangha
and all of us collectively as a country and a species,
you know, have a collective karma, pattern of cause and effect,
that we are subject to.
So, maybe everything's happened in history.
Or maybe the things we think happened in history didn't really happen,
and yet they deeply affect us.
How do we see both that which goes beyond cause and effect,
without ignoring cause and effect, as the famous fox koan advises us?
How do we see, we can't track and trace all of the causes and conditions for any event,
and yet the knowable truth of causation is that everything that happens,
happens because of many causes and conditions.
It's not random.
Everything that happens to us personally and to our world happens
thanks to this process of history.
And everything that we do, and this is the future and what it used to be,
everything we do has an effect.
And we have the precepts as guidelines to how to look at that
and try and find a way to do that without making too many wrong mistakes.
How do we find our way to be in time without being too caught up in wrong mistakes?
To see that it's deja vu all over again and yet not be caught by that.
So that's all by way of leading up to my favorite saying by Yogi Berra,
which I consider one of the greatest Zen sayings of all time.
He was actually given the nickname Yogi as a little kid,
because he used to like to just sit and they thought he was like some little yogi.
So there's this thing in Buddhism called Pratyekabuddhas,
who seem to realize the wisdom of Buddhas without
having trained in a particular tradition like we have.
And we are very grateful for this tradition.
It's a tradition of practice and of teaching.
But there are these beings who somehow just see through how the world is.
And Yogi Berra was never an intellectual.
He has another saying here about how he was...
One of his roommates on the Yankees was studying to be a doctor.
And Yogi was reading these big medical books and became a doctor, actually,
after his baseball career.
Yogi liked to read comic books.
And so one time his roommate said,
Oh, how did it turn out?
Yogi said, Oh, it turned out really good.
How did yours turn out?
Because he was reading these big medical books.
So Yogi's wisdom comes from, you know,
we say in going back to the Sixth Ancestor that this concentration,
this meditation is itself wisdom.
It's not that Samadhi and Prajna are one like this.
So wisdom is not about a lot of study or learning or hearing lots of dharma talks.
That may all be helpful guidance.
But turning within, settling, focusing, calming.
This insight arises and clearly, you know,
it does in some people without doing Zazen.
Although in some sense, you know,
I think maybe Yogi got his nickname because he did do Zazen.
Anyway, my favorite saying, again, of Yogi Berra's,
and maybe in all of Zen,
and for those of you who are interested in working with me on this Koan curriculum,
even though you've heard these stories,
that doesn't mean there's not stuff to work on.
But anyway, he said, If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be.
This is really deep.
If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be.
What is our idea of perfection?
So we probably all have some, you know,
we may have read books that talked about enlightenment or enlightenment experiences.
But what is perfection?
What is transcendence?
What is the ultimate?
If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be.
Yogi is pointing us back to this.
This life, the body and mind on your cushion right now.
It's important to make mistakes, even wrong mistakes,
maybe not too many of them.
But if the world were perfect, it wouldn't be.
How do we learn our life and our reality
and find our way to share kindness and insight in the world?
Through imperfection.
We all have limitations.
As human beings, we have limited, you know, perceptual.
We don't have eyes in the back of our head.
There are limits to what we can see and hear and so forth.
There are limits to what we can think.
We have spiritual limitations, too.
How do we find, how do we use, how do we enjoy?
How do we celebrate?
How do we play with these limitations,
these imperfections in ourselves and in the world
and in the people around us, the people closest to us?
How do we see their particular limitations
as something that has something to teach us,
as something that is a gift to us?
Not just to tolerate imperfection,
but to really study and enjoy imperfection.
If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be.
There'd be nothing to do.
We wouldn't even have gotten born if the world were perfect.
There'd be no Buddhas in the world.
Buddhas appear in the world because they're suffering,
because we are caught in causes and conditions,
because we have problems.
So you should enjoy your problems.
Maybe it might be helpful to not have too many wrong problems,
but even the wrong problems, how do we work with them?
This is perfection, to live in this world of imperfection.
So again, each of these sayings, including that one,
there's a lot more to say about
our ideas of perfection are dangerous.
Trying to get to some perfect place can be really dangerous.
It can really prevent us from seeing the reality of our life as it is,
and enjoying that, and working with that,
and practicing with that, and helping awaken it.
So if the world were perfect, it wouldn't be.
So as I said, there's more to say about all of these,
and I can read some of Yogi's other statements,
but I'll stop and ask if there are any questions,
or comments, or responses.
Please feel free.
Steve, hi.
Hi, I've worked for 35 years in corporate life,
and I had one person I didn't particularly like,
he was a very aggressive manager type of multi-millionaire.
He said something that I thought was a real come on once,
and he said, if I ever wrote a book on business,
if I ever write a book on business,
it was an experience living in the corporate world,
this would be the title.
Somebody asked him, you know,
these numbers are just absolutely unattainable.
What should you do?
Any suggestions?
And he said, I want you all to think mental thoughts.
And I always thought that would be the name of a great book,
Think Mental Thoughts.
Good.
And in Satsang, we should also think physical thoughts.
I don't know how you could not think a mental thought.
But mental thoughts are also in our body.
They're in our mudra, they're in our back,
they're in our leg position.
Good.
Thank you very much.
Yes, Deborah.
Several years ago, my grandchild went to a movie called Conquered Canada.
Ah.
And there was a line from it that has always stuck with me.
It's like a come on for me.
And the line is, we need our destiny on the road we took to avoid it.
Ah, good.
When we talk about perfection,
it resonates with that for me,
is that the care and the fear about the road
you're trying to take.
And it almost doesn't matter.
Say it again, please.
We need our destiny on the road we took to avoid it.
Good.
Yes, yes.
Thank you.
Other found dharma from pop culture or anything else?
Titus.
I think the fork koan and this comment also makes me think of Sung San,
my first teacher.
And he used to say, do something, something happens.
Do nothing, something happens.
Yeah.
Yeah, so if you don't take the fork in the road, still, that's a choice.
Yeah.
Yes, Eric.
I don't know how to, if you don't mind, I just have a feeling it does somehow.
Good.
Stephen Wright, someone asked him if he had ever fallen asleep driving.
He said, no, but I've woken up driving.
Good.
Yeah, that's a great one.
Yeah, driving.
Yeah.
And actually, that can happen in any situation.
We could fall asleep in a zazen, we can also wake up in a zazen,
but you can also do that in walking meditation or walking down the street.
Driving is a kind of intense one because we go into automatic pilot sometimes.
Thank you.
Nancy.
Along those lines, I was thinking that wrong mistakes are maybe the mistakes
we don't even know we're making before we don't wake up.
Yeah, maybe so.
Do we know when we're making mistakes?
That's an important question.
Maybe right mistakes are also mistakes that we don't realize we're making at the time.
But we found out that we were making them.
Yeah, so maybe all mistakes are afterwards.
To call it a mistake is after.
Do we call something a mistake as we're making it?
I don't know.
That's another question to bring to these.
Again, all of these are aspects of our own lives,
and you can choose which ones inform your own practice.
Other questions or comments?
Right.
My kids accuse me of being judgmental sometimes.
I'm sure most parents have experienced that,
but I try to let them off the hook a little bit.
One of the things I tell them is to make better mistakes.
Yeah, that's good.
I'll try and do that, too.
Make better mistakes.
Other reflections, responses?
Yes, Joan.
I love working at Harvard, and I'm often being surprised at where I am,
and realizing I wouldn't have anticipated that I'd be here now.
Five years ago.
Either fork will get you there, but the there is different.
Yeah, and actually, whatever we anticipate or expect never happens.
It's not that it's wrong to have expectations or to make plans,
and some of those may be wronger mistakes or righter mistakes,
but when you actually get there, what time is it?
You mean now?
It's not...
Can anybody give me an example of anything that ever happened as you expected it?
If we look, the more closely we look at this,
you mean now, or this déjà vu all over again,
if we just say, well, okay, we were going to...
I'm sitting in this, in Ancient Dragon Zen Gate, and we're talking.
Well, of course, I expected that, but I couldn't have said who each of the people would...
I mean, the more we look at, what is this now?
What is this déjà vu all over again?
The more we see, it's not what we thought it would be.
Never happened in history.
Kathy.
This makes me think about a Dharma talk that Nathan gave a year or so ago,
and he used an example from Ojibwe tribe.
Do you remember that?
And gave us a handout.
I remember that, but I don't remember the example.
And so it has to do with the fork in the road idea.
He said that their idea is that instead of having a path from here to here,
for anybody, that typically we go a direction, and then for some reason,
maybe our destiny catches us, or maybe we realize we made a mistake.
But sometimes we go back, and we change direction.
And then we live a little longer, and we figure out something else.
And sometimes we change a little bit more.
But it ends up looking like a variegated sort of...
There's lots of forks in the road that end up taking us on a path.
But I thought that was interesting to me in terms of all of this.
Yeah, there are forks, of course, there are forks in the road constantly.
And it's not...
The other thing about forks in the road, we often think in terms of two alternatives,
but always there's many more than two.
Maybe we think in terms of two and duality because we have left and right,
and front and back, and we're bilateral beings.
I was at the Field Museum not too long ago, and in the Cambrian period,
the dominant life form was echinoderms, and they have a five-part symmetry.
So maybe they would understand the five ranks very easily,
but they would think in terms of five alternatives at once, I guess,
if they thought, if they had mental loss.
Yeah, thank you.
Yes?
It made me think of Paul Reps, you probably know,
and in one of his books, he talks about this story of some school in Japan,
the kids were...
They used a pillow, it was this decision-making game,
and one side was yes, and one side was no,
and one side was both yes and no,
and the other side was neither yes nor no.
Sounds like Nagarjuna, yeah.
Yeah, so I often try and think about that.
There's also something about this work in the road from Gary Snyder
in his book Practice of the Wild.
He's talking about our practice as really being wild,
and our reality as being wild.
He's talking about wilderness in terms of the environment,
but also in terms of our language and our mind.
Our language is not something that we get from reading some grammar book.
How old are your kids now, Phil?
Twenty-four months and ten months.
And the twenty-four-month-old one is speaking?
Yeah.
She is?
What about your ten-month-old son?
Three months.
But Isabel, is that her name?
Yeah, when she started talking, do you remember what she said first?
Okay, that's a common utterance.
But what was her first sentence?
Yeah, what about, has Grace started talking yet, Kevin?
Oh, yeah.
Well, what's her first sentence?
That's a good question.
I was just trying to think, I don't know.
Maybe, okay.
The new one hasn't.
I'm sorry, I forget.
Emily.
Emily, has she started talking yet?
Just in single words.
Single words.
But somehow a sentence appears, and it's not from studying anything.
It's just listening to Amy and you and being around,
and suddenly there's a sentence.
So our language is wild, and our practice is wild, Gary says.
And he also talks about the path.
And what you said, Kathy, reminded me of that.
It's not just that there's a fork in the road.
He talks about the path as being something that's wild,
and really we learn the path by going off the path.
Maybe that relates to the wrong or right mistakes,
but Gary talks about sauntering off the path.
That's how we find our way, actually.
Talking about the way or the Tao is through the wilderness,
through trying various diversions from the path.
So I don't recommend trying to find some perfect way to practice,
or some perfect way to sit zazen or meditate,
or some perfect way to get enlightened.
If the Dharma were perfect, it wouldn't be.
If enlightenment were perfect, it wouldn't be.
Maybe just for fun, I'll read you a few other...
I don't know if these are koans, but just some other sayings.
Well, this one's certainly relevant to our current economical situation.
Yogi said, a nickel ain't worth a dime anymore.
And then, he was talking about a particular restaurant,
and he said, nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded.
Oh, here's the one that I was talking about earlier.
This is the one I was thinking of before, when I mentioned vanilla.
We're lost, but we're making good time.
He was driving to Cooperstown to the Hall of Fame,
and his family thought he was lost, and maybe he was.
But they were making good time.
One more.
If you ask me a question I don't know, I'm not going to answer.
Oh, this one's...
Anyway, there's so many of these,
and some of them may be more worthy as koans than others,
but one of his teammates came to see his new home in New Jersey,
and his reaction was, well, Yogi, what a beautiful mansion you've got here.
And Yogi replied, what do you mean?
It's nothing but a bunch of rooms.
So anyway, any last comments, reflections, responses, anyone?
Yes, Joanne.
Who was following him around right now?
It started to become a thing that he said these things,
and all his buddies just remembered them,
because they were so, you know, whatever, funny or deep,
or people got it that what he was saying was,
And some went around and interviewed his friends and collected these.
Yeah, so they were collected.
This is just one book of the collections,
but, you know, what he said, what Yogi himself says about that is,
I really didn't say everything I said.
So maybe on that note, we'll close for the morning.
Thank you.