I vow to take to you the slightest words. Good morning. It does feel like home whenever I come back here. I really enjoy the opportunity to come back and sit with you and talk with you. It's one of the really nice places to give a talk because there's a possibility of a lot of conversation among us in addition to what I have to say. So I look forward to that and thank you for the invitation, Alan. Alan just asked me a week ago and fortunately for all of us I immediately thought that I would give a talk which I prepared recently and gave at Green Gulch. That's why I said yes for only a week in advance, because I already had my talk.

[01:03]

So let's see how it sounds. My wild gestures. I've lived at Greenville for 12 years. And I've worked at Zen Center for many years. But most recently, for the last five, I've worked in Mill Valley as a school teacher. I teach fifth grade. And through teaching school, I've become interested in science, which I had previously no background in at all, but I'm finding to be especially interesting in my second career.

[02:26]

So that's what I'm going to talk about today. about and be influenced by. One of my favorite topics in science is a rather revolutionary one which is challenging mathematicians and scientists to think again about their disciplines, their separate separated disciplines, which is called chaos theory. If you've seen Jurassic Park yet, you may have noticed that there was a chaos theorist in the movies. I liked that.

[03:29]

I liked it especially that such a popular movie has has what I consider to be a really important new development in our world. Chaos theory is concerned with process, complexity, and transformation. And it's revolutionary because it reaches across scientific disciplines. and it takes another look at ordinary phenomena. There are various people who have been influential in developing the theory, and one can start at almost any point in history to say when this theory came around. But one person that can be noted is a man by the name of Edward Lawrence,

[04:31]

He was a meteorologist working in the 50s, trying to find a way to make reliable long-term weather predictions. And as we know, he found that it couldn't be done because of what has come to be called the butterfly effect, a lovely visual image which goes a long way in explaining chaos theory. The butterfly effect is, or means, that tiny unseen influencers can combine and escalate in unpredictable ways to produce huge effects in systems where it's impossible to track every variable, like the weather. the movement of the Earth's atmosphere.

[05:35]

And the reason it has the name Butterfly Effect is because this discovery or this piece of information is illustrated by imagining a butterfly flapping her wings over Beijing And the slight breeze that she creates from flapping her wings can eventually cause a blizzard over Chicago. So that tiny influences can lead to unpredictable and unforeseen and huge effects. And further than that, that at any given moment there are innumerable of these tiny, unnoticeable, seemingly unnoticeable influences, little energies going on all the time, and we are affected by

[06:51]

all of them, and affect all of them. The first thoughts that I had when I heard about the butterfly effect were of the children in my classroom, and of education generally, and also of Buddhist practice. Because the butterfly effect is, to me, especially evident here. Teachers are always trying to convey to children how important and unique they are as individuals, and how much responsibility they have, and how much they affect in ways that they don't see or know, but how much affect all of their actions have on each other and on all the beings around them. And, likewise, how much they are affected by by factors, by forces, by people around them.

[07:57]

The butterfly effect strikes me as a beautiful counter concept to a medicinal concept, even, to that hierarchy of the idea of superiority, inferiority, lesser and greater. which are certainly our educational system and, as we know, our culture is largely based on. And there's a reason for it. There's a legacy that we've inherited, which I'm looking at from the point of view of science, which upholds the notion of hierarchy, superiority and inferiority. Giving rise to as we experience it, racism and sexism and speciesism, and in the classroom, the notion that children are constantly balancing the notion of success and failure, of who's better and who's doing well and who's not doing well, with the notion that all of us are trying to convey to children against all odds that

[09:17]

in their uniqueness. They are crucial. Their presence and contribution in their lives and on this earth is crucial. I was reminded when I read about the butterfly effect also, of... I remember, I don't remember where I heard it from, but I remember there were, about ten years ago or so, in discussions that I remember having, something about ethical dilemmas, hypothetical ethical dilemmas, what would you do if so-and-so, and I remember one of these dilemmas was, what would you do if you could travel anywhere in the world for an all-expenses-paid vacation as long as you wanted, with whoever you wanted and doing and eating and seeing whatever you wanted.

[10:25]

And all you had to do to earn this vacation was to pull the wings off of a live butterfly. Would you do it? And I remember being in those discussions and feeling... I remember some of my friends saying, sure, no problem. A butterfly only lives a couple of weeks, and after all it's going to die anyway, and it's just a butterfly. And that whole body of thought to me is so poignant against or alongside the butterfly effect, pulling the wings off of a butterfly because it's a lesser creature, because it's a less significant member of this Earth, and also it has less significance than what this vacation could really mean to me.

[11:30]

And I think that we, of course, this is a rather ridiculous hypothetical dilemma, but in fact, I think we notice when we take a close look at our lives and of our daily actions, that these kinds of dilemmas are before us all the time. A little, you know, not quite so wild and ridiculous, but there they are, making choices. And how do we, what do we base our choices on? Do we base our choices on hierarchy, superiority, inferiority? In Zazen and in everyday experience, we have a sense of the extraordinariness of each moment without exaltation. But we also may think of Zazen or everyday experience in terms of a hierarchy.

[12:39]

Is it good Zazen? What's a good Zazen experience? What's a lousy Zazen experience? How do I get a good Zazen experience? How am I going to get good Zazen out of this period of Zazen? And who got good Zazen if I didn't? What are they doing over there? How can I get some of it? And these are questions which I think arise in us not only avows him, but just all the time, this hierarchy, making a hierarchy out of our experience, out of our just everyday experience, which implies a belief in a hierarchy, in a lesser and greater value to the experience. I believe there's also an understanding, a concomitant understanding in our culture of what's come to be called chaos theory.

[13:50]

One sees it in education, in art, in feminist thought, certainly in the environmental movement, environmental awareness. So there's these kind of both two concepts, two notions of what our reality is about. There's more than two, but both of these structures are coexisting in us somehow, in Zazen, in everyday experience, in our work life. And in Zazen, when we sit Zazen, or when we do anything at all, we have, we can say that we're the whole universe.

[14:53]

And the experience of the whole universe is available to us as our own particular experience on each moment. And I think we all have, even though we all have a sense of a statement like that, of a connection, a web of connection, a web of loving connection, that we may or may not have access to at any given moment, and we may not even remember at any given moment, but there's something about that that we share and have in common. We're certainly aware of of how every little thing we do, our unnoticed influences affect our Earth in unforeseen ways, just our common everyday living habits like shopping and driving.

[16:02]

One reason why I'm so taken by this theory, aside from how much it applies to Buddhist practice, is that it's concerned with everyday complex reality, like clouds and like boiling water. Chaos theory has to do with complex systems in transformative states, in process and change, and in context. And this is revolutionary in science, because, you know, mainstream western science has been concerned for centuries with taking things apart, and trying to find the smallest components of things, isolating variables, controlling experiments, to the purpose of making predictions, of making our world, at least in part, predictable and controllable.

[17:03]

And even though discoveries in particle physics in this century decades ago, really lift the cover on that model. Those discoveries, the model being a machine world that need only be taken apart and examined to be understood, those discoveries are really held up from being widely understood, partly because of the language of physics and mathematics. Although, in practice, the one discovery that I'm thinking of is called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which, to me, has such an application in resolving it. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle has to do with whether or not the smallest components of things are matter or energy.

[18:07]

And it turns out that it depends on how you look at it. If you set up the experiment to observe matter, you'll observe matter. If you set up the experiment to observe energy, you'll observe energy. And that sounds familiar to me. I don't know about you, but the application to me in Zazen is that there's that observer, that observer's involved. That observer is not a detached observer. There is no such thing as a detached observer. That we're completely involved, and there's no way of stepping outside and looking in, looking in the window. That we ourselves, whether we know it or not, whether we intend it or not, are interacting all the time. with phenomena, in the context of science, and certainly in the context of science.

[19:15]

So, chaos theory, going back to this sort of historical view of science, in which things can be broken down into their smallest parts, examined, and then put back together in the way that we prefer, Chaos theory is another model altogether that it has to do with our really not being in control, our really not having control over the outcome. We all have a sense of chaos, at least I do. We all live with chaos and are trying constantly to cope with chaos and we all course, boil water every day. The boiling water issue is this. Water follows a predictable pattern, convection current as it heats up, heat rises and gets to the top of the body of water and then falls, so there's a current that's set up.

[20:22]

And this is predictable up until the time that the water boils, and then all that, the predictability sort of falls apart. There's a transformation that occurs, the system transforms into a chaotic system. And the way scientists had responded to that situation was to give up, just look at something else that was predictable. And calling those patterns that they'd given up on random. So traditional science deals with predictability versus randomness. Using computers, mathematical patterns can be generated visually in a variety of ways, giving rise to beautiful images called fractals. And fractals these days can be seen on T-shirts, posters, on your screensaver.

[21:28]

The program called Mandelbrot knows fractal patterns. Mandelbrot is the mathematician who named the image. The interesting thing about fractals is that they replicate the complexity of nature in a couple of ways. First of all, the same fractal pattern may describe a variety of unrelated phenomena, seemingly unrelated phenomena. For example, a lightning bolt. a broken glass in the course of a river, all described by the same mathematical pattern. Or the fluctuations of animal populations, the stock market, cloud formations, seemingly unrelated phenomena described by the same pattern. And secondly, the complexity of the system remains the same at different scales. So the complexity of the whole California coastline is the same as the complexity of one rock of the coastline, is the same as the complexity of the atomic structure of the rock.

[22:43]

So there's a pattern of self-similarity of different phenomena, totally different phenomena, and also different scales. So, this again, Sounds familiar to me. There's a strange kind of effort needed in practice, and I think, to me, chaos theory provides a useful model. It's not an effort that's controllable, that results in something that is predictable, or that can simplify experience. In my experience, We cannot simplify our experience. We can change the scale. My experience is that I can change the scale of my activity. I can scale down or scale up, but it doesn't take very long before whatever it is I'm doing becomes complex, equally complex, as complex as I can stand it, regardless of

[23:55]

whether I'm living at Green Gulch or Tassajara or being a school teacher, there's a level of complexity that seems to be stable. So in practice, in my view, we tend to, our effort is to tend to the complex unknown. Unknown, unseen influences generated by us and affecting us all the time. And here we are just tending to the whole thing as best we can. Nothing to take personally. No way to keep an eye on the fruits of our excellent deeds. I remember a lecture When I was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley in 1971 or 72, I was going to a class taught by Dr. Lewis Lancaster of the Buddhist Studies Department.

[25:04]

And he was talking in his lecture that day about the perfection of giving. It's saying that perfect giving according to the sutras is when there's no thought of giver, gift or receiver. Like somewhere it's described as like giving the flowers on a distant hillside to all the Buddhas. But, he said, we should not hold back from giving just because it might not be perfect. We should notice that our giving might not be perfect, but we should not hold back, because giving is good, and we should all be giving a lot. And, to me, that's always been an important point, that holding back on giving for the perfect giving is like an expression of hierarchy, an expression of what's the good giving.

[26:12]

I'm not even going to participate in the shoddy giving or in the less than perfect giving. But kind of holding out for the big one is to me a demonstration of this underlying belief and hierarchy that I think myself I'm thinking about a lot. So for me, chaos theory, aside from what scientists and mathematicians are doing with it, which by the way, a lot of what scientists and mathematicians are doing with it, is applying it for military purposes, for business purposes, and for other purposes that tend to be highly funded in our world today. But for me, I can apply it. as a different model, a different way of thinking of my experience, in which hierarchy and control and superiority doesn't even make sense.

[27:24]

In chaos, who knows who's in charge? Who cares who's in charge? In that sense, it's a true democracy. And I think it's a timely and important contribution to, or it can be, to Buddhist thought. And lastly, I want to say that chaos theory is certainly a concept, and I'm spending my time talking today about concepts. In Buddhist practice, of course, we don't, and in life, we don't live in a world of concepts. And in Zazen, we allow concepts to fall away of their own weight. But we also know that concepts have a way of sneaking in when we're not looking.

[28:28]

And in that sense, I believe that concepts can be used as tools. Concepts can also be used as weapons. tools can be used as weapons, medicine can be used as drugs, but our practice, I believe in my experience, has to do with developing mindfulness, so that we know when we pick up a concept, we know that we have a concept, and we know to put it down, we know to allow it to fall away. and that we don't forget that we have it in our hand and start bopping somebody over the head with it. So that we use tools and we use medicine appropriately, but we don't deal in drugs and weapons. So that's the, after spending however long I spent talking about concepts,

[29:37]

just to place concepts in their proper tool shed. I wanted to say that. And that's what I have prepared to say today, and I would like to hear what you would like to say. In everyday life, in everyday life in Berkeley, how can we use hierarchy and control appropriately? Could you be more specific? Well? It's probably the same as Green Gulch. Yeah, I think it is. What I'm driving at is that Just a few moments ago, you referred to picking up concepts and using them and putting them down.

[30:42]

Through much of your talk this morning, you referred to hierarchy and control in a way that suggests that you may believe that our culture is overly invested in those concepts or practices or values. still hierarchy and control have a function? Yes. But how can they be used appropriately so that they don't get out of control? How can one pick up hierarchy and control and put it down? Well, what I'm thinking right now, and I would I would hope that other people would contribute to this comment also. What I'm thinking is that we are overly invested in hierarchy and control.

[31:49]

And I've chosen the word structure in my own sort of inner vocabulary to substitute for hierarchy. That structure has a usefulness. that role, you know, we have roles with regard to one another, and those roles have a usefulness. And that's a structure. To me, hierarchy is something that I'm thinking at the moment that I don't need that. I don't need the word, I don't need to pick that one up right now. structure I do need to pick up. You know, in my classroom, I'm the biggest and tallest, I'm in charge, right? I get paid. They don't. They're, you know, they don't have a choice about it, I do. So there's, there's, on the one hand, I can look at that as hierarchy, and I find that if I look at it as hierarchy, it's a fairly destructive interaction.

[32:59]

Or, maybe destructive is too strong, but you know, maybe it's not what I want to facilitate in a classroom. But structure, structure is a concept in my classroom, for example. And the reason I'm talking about a classroom is because it's an experience that all of us know. We've all been students in a classroom. It's one of our common experiences. And we know how it feels. So structure is something that I can use in my classroom to say, well, I'm just going to say how it's going to be, and that's going to give us some structure so that we can do something together. And I feel the same way about our Buddhist practice a lot, that there's a lot of structure that we have here. Now, I think it's important in Buddhist practice, in my classroom, anywhere, to always

[34:00]

always carry an awareness of the concept and to examine the appropriateness of it in any given moment. Always be ready to put it down. That's as much of a response as I have at the moment. Does anyone else want to? Yes, go ahead. I have a different question, so maybe somebody else. Well, maybe we'll kind of segue. Could you say something about how a very limited number of initial variables, say two, can result in a very complex structure that is revealed through chaos? Like the butterfly effect? Well, I was thinking more like Well, here's one thing I can say.

[35:11]

What the Lawrence, Edward Lawrence, who was doing the work in meteorology in the 50s, discovered, what he discovered was that his predictable, his charts of predictability after about two days just went wonky and there was nothing recognizable about the trends that were happening in the third or fourth day that he could trace to the variables that he knew about. And so the idea, what he said was, even if there were a structure of, if you could build a structure on the Earth, in the Earth's atmosphere, from ground level to the top of the atmosphere, of sensors, one foot apart, all the way through the atmosphere, to pick up little changes, tiny little breezes that, you know, we open the door and a breeze is created, a fly, a flea, whatever,

[36:23]

every little influence that's created, not even every one foot. Sensors every one foot could pick up the number of variables, the number of influences that would lead to the great effects three days later or more. So the woman has an image of tremendous complexity. There's great trends that are fairly predictable, but the complexity within those great trends is, it's conceivable that it could be predicted, but we certainly couldn't do it with the, certainly with the technology we have. Now that's in the context of weather and meteorology, but I think the atmosphere is a really interesting model for me, for this body of thought, Do you want to say more? Well, I just might point out that the circle is perhaps the easiest thing to grasp.

[37:36]

The ratio of the circumference to the radius, pi, is a number that has no predictable sequence of integers to it. And over millions of years, tens of millions of religious leaders, and no recognizable, repeatable pattern of these numbers. So that sort of notion supports my effort in Buddhist practice. And here he is, right in front of us. And that tendency, in me anyway, to look at the big and ignore the small, ignore the detailed complexity and the detailed unpredictability of things.

[38:54]

Somebody else? our lives as being shaped and thinking on the character that they take on as a result of large influences, as a result of major movements that we can only understand. And what occurs to me is how the character of our life, just like Well, thank you very much for your lecture.

[40:30]

I appreciate it. I'm not really good at And what I've seen for myself in the past few years, I've gotten much better at letting go of things. You know, I let go more quickly. And it seems that the more I let go, the better my life works for me. And I have this continual sense of being cared for. And you know, some days are kind of crummy, But the sense of being cared for, I don't understand how that would fit into the idea of chaos, or the concept of chaos. The sense of being cared for. Well, it certainly fits in in my mind.

[41:33]

Let me think. I suppose it fits in in my mind, not only cared for, but in scientific language we use words like influence, but another word for influence is cared for. In my mind, when we're exerting control over how we're going to interpret cared for. Like is cared for going to feel good? Or is cared for, you know, what's cared for going to feel like? Or what's it going to look like? Or how am I going to evaluate whether or not I'm being cared for? Those thoughts, I don't think,

[42:35]

fall within what I would feel about being cared for, being cared for in always a big sense. So being influenced in the ways that we're talking about here, in infinitesimal ways, and then likewise being responsible in unknown ways, to me falls in what I would call being cared for. Let's go on and hear from some other people, and maybe we can come around to that. Well, I think that that fits in with what my mind has been grappling with while you've been talking. You brought up the Heisenberg Uncertainty And I kept thinking of the phrase that comes up in my mind a lot.

[43:51]

It's like a bad habit. It doesn't matter, but everything matters. And maybe if it doesn't matter, it energies. If it's not matter, it's energy. It depends on how you look at it. Being cared for, being not cared for, it's a matter of interpretation. and how we look at something. Attitude is certainly something we know about in education. Somebody's attitude makes a huge difference on results. Academic results. Yeah, concrete results. And I was, and this is, I'm just really, my mind is just racing, but I was looking through the radio on the way in here this morning, and they want to, there's some some beautiful place with wild creatures in the high and passable reaches of Idaho, I believe. And the military wants to use it for a bombing range that has a river in the middle, one high peak on either side.

[44:55]

And it would make great target practice. And it would save them 20 minutes in having to go to Nevada. And the town wants it in Omaha because their economic future is dependent on the military. They stay. And I kept thinking. what matters, you know, what matters here. And how the military spokesman was talking about, you know, the importance of this and the animals that live there and the eagles soaring overhead don't matter. But they do. And we have a hierarchy that affects them. So anyway, that's all. To me, the The Chaos Theory that I've been describing, it reminds me, and I'm sure some of you, a lot of images in Buddhist literature. The Net of Indra, the, you know, the... What was that? The Hall of Mirrors that somebody had built for somebody? Does anyone remember where that one came from?

[45:57]

The Viruchanas Tower. The Viruchanas Tower. The image of a jewel which reflects every other jewel and is reflected by every other jewel, the image of a web of connection, a web of loving connection. And in that sense, there is tremendous care, and each of us are caring for and being cared for. Certainly medicinal for us.

[46:57]

Time? It's telling me it's time. Yeah, in the air, in the light rays. One more? Sure. And what I'm wondering is, isn't that accidental? And why does that work? Is that validating the teachings? And is it necessary to teach the persons who want to verify their existence? Is it necessary for them to see the reflection of themselves in the mirror?

[47:58]

And if they do not see the reflection of themselves in the mirror, then they do not exist. And is chaos theory a scientific discovery or is it a bluff? And if it's a bluff, thank you. Would you like to pick one of those questions? I will simply respond. A book that I read, and I'm planning to read this summer because I have a chance to read a bit in the summer, I read 20 years ago is A Hundred Years of Solitude. Do you know that book? And it's a very important book to me. My memory of the book, and that's why I'm going to read it because I'm going to find out if it's really in the book, is that it's a story of families over time. And there's one character in the book who's trying to translate something, some literature from another language.

[49:03]

And he's working on it, various things are happening, and he's going back and working on this translation over the book, the course of the book. And the end of the book, he finally gets the translation. And by that time, everything's totally fallen apart and fallen to ruin, and everything is coming to an end. And what he's reading in the translation is a description of what's happening. And he's reading, he gets the description, he gets the translation clear in front of him, that things are falling apart, babies are being eaten by ants, and whatever is happening. And my own feeling is that it's not like science is over there doing that, and Buddhism has always been doing that anyway, and why do I have to look at science to get validation? But that, isn't it interesting that in the world that we live in, that what comes up for us seems to be poignant at any time.

[50:10]

It seems to really have important application in a variety of languages. The language of science, the language of Buddhism. I mean, Buddhism is fairly new, you know. Why do we need Buddhism? Why do we need Chaos Theory? Why do we need any of it? But these languages are coming to us at this time. Are they coming to us? Are we going to them? Are we calling forth something? Who's calling forth something? All of us together? You know, the air around us? So, that's how I think of it. That's my response. And I don't know if it has to do with your question. Thank you.

[51:08]

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