Okay, sorry. This morning, I'd like to introduce you to Bill Richland. Some of you, I'm sure, know Bill. He started practicing at Berkeley Zen Center, actually, in 1967 or 68, when he was a young man. And later, he went to San Francisco Pictures of the 70s and 80s. Hello?

[01:24]

How is this on? Yeah, everybody can hear okay? It's always a pleasure to come back home to Berkeley Zendo, which originally was on Dwight Way, in Mel's attic. Such has the growth of American Buddhism been now. I say, you know, a major temple of the Dharma in America, and you're all part of it. And I'm very proud, really, to be part of it. I began here, and Mel was my first real teacher and mentor. And in those days, it was always felt that San Francisco Zen Center was the kind of Mecca. You know, if you were really serious, you would go there, and you could go to Tassajara and everything. But, you know, these days I feel like maybe There are all these spiritual stories about how you go around and around the world searching for your teacher and finally you find out he lives two doors down. Maybe this is the Mecca or wherever we practice is the Mecca.

[03:14]

I got a call from Ross earlier in the week. He wanted to know about my books and so forth. I hadn't really thought, sort of forgotten that the topic was to talk about the book. But Ross said, oh, he'd read the book. He was interested in hearing more. So I think I will talk something about not so much what happened to me. What happened to me is I got sick and then I got better. That happens to all of us. And one day we'll get sick and we won't get better. And that's it. But I want to talk about about it since this is a group of practitioners from the standpoint of practice, from the standpoint of Zazen. An illness this serious challenges, if anybody has it, challenges our sense of what practice is, what value it has, can it really help us in times of need. I think that the Buddha Dharma came into the world at a time when

[04:28]

Life was really terrible. It was very hard to be a human being in those days. Very hard. Life expectancy was probably, I don't know, 35. Most of your children died. You starved, maybe. If you were lucky, you didn't. Famines, pests, rats took things. There was no middle class. There was no heat. There was no electricity, you know. I think we're still, when we recite things like the Bodhisattva Ceremony, some of the power, I think, of those words have to do with when you live a life like that, a healthy day when you have enough to eat is a real cause for celebration. We Americans don't live that kind of a life, so it's a different It's a different exercise for us to come into this practice from our lives of immense comfort and affluence, even compared to the rest of the world. And yet the Buddhadharma is no less relevant, in fact, maybe more relevant to people like us.

[05:38]

Anyway, I got sick rather suddenly. I had a brain infection. It nearly killed me. I was in a coma for about two weeks. And then when I woke up, I was pretty much unable to do anything. I couldn't move. I couldn't speak. It took me about two years to fully recover. It's a very serious neurological condition. So what's unusual about an illness like this and what I wrote about a lot is if somebody asks, well, what's People, when I went on my little book tour, radio talk show hosts would say things like, well, what do you Buddhists believe? What do you believe? Believe in God? Stuff like that. Well, I think that Buddhism is pretty simple, really. I mean, it's simple to describe, it's not simple to do.

[06:40]

Paying attention is very close to the center of it. Paying attention is is the main game really and if zazen is anything and it's not really describable exactly what it is it's something like paying attention when you're not doing anything else to distract your attention something like that that might be a good provisional what do you pay attention to is a whole other question but at least there has to be a basic sense of attention well I learned in the course of recovering from this illness first of all that Attention, physiologically, is a very high-level brain function. It goes fairly quickly. As any of you know, if you've had the flu or if you're tired or if you're depressed or anxious, you can't pay attention. Paying attention is a very, you know, it's the top of the hierarchy of brain functions, you know. Breathing may be like down at the other end, but paying attention even when we're talking to our spouse for example if We suddenly get anxious.

[07:50]

We don't pay attention. You know they're my friend Roger Walsh told me about a Guy who's one of the world's leading experts in facial nonverbal expression facial expressions And he's so good That if he's talking to you he can say wait a minute What where were you just then you weren't paying attention? And he's right, you know, there's something about the eyebrows and he's done tests and it turns out if people, when people aren't paying attention and they come back to paying attention, there's something that we do with our eyebrows. Everybody does it apparently, there's a little thing and you can see that. So paying attention is, if you can't pay attention, it's very hard to practice Buddhism the way we do, where Zazen is the central practice. I lost a lot more than the ability to pay attention. I couldn't see very well. I couldn't hear. I couldn't think very well. A lot of damage of various kinds, mostly to the lower centers of the brain.

[08:52]

So the rug that I was standing on for all of my adult life, spiritually speaking, was totally pulled out from under me, and I had no idea how I could, in a sense, practice, as we put it, in this situation. I really don't want to blinger too much on the details of my illness. It was very hard, and it was a neurological illness. And I was very lucky I got all better. Many people don't. But I did get to experience what it's like, the relationship You know, we read about Buddhism, which is a pre-scientific wisdom tradition, and there's not much in there about brain physiology, you know. It doesn't talk about the hippocampus or the things that scientists know. But they're beginning to, you know, they have people that do Zazen and they put the electrodes on now and they can see what goes on.

[09:54]

For example, in Samadhi, the, let's see if I got this right, the left parietal lobe which is almost always when you're awake, lit up, it doesn't light up, it stops lighting up. This is very surprising to neurologists, they don't see this in ordinary people, but when you meditate and enter Samadhi, there's something about the left parietal lobe apparently, so my neurologist tells me, that is connected with self and other, with Knowing I'm me and you are you there's in fact. I was also told that neurologically There's a kind of space about arms arms length that the brain kind of understands as the boundary itself and this left parietal lobe Mediates that somehow so that's how we understand. What's a threat? You know if the tiger comes within a certain distance, then we run away things like that well in meditation apparently

[10:55]

this part of the brain goes to sleep and yet we're awake. This is the first real kind of fusion between what we know scientifically about how the mind works and what Buddhism knows about the mind by studying it for 2,500 years directly. What I've got to find out is what it's like when critical functions in your brainstem and other very low-level functions, like perception, spatial orientation, things like that, get damaged, and yet the higher functions are intact. One thing that happens is your neurotransmitters go crazy and you start to feel panicked all the time or something. Everything gets very scrambled. One of the first things I found out after three months of rehab when I got home is I tried to sit thinking that would help. I couldn't do it. And even today, people say, well, what do you mean you can't do it?

[11:56]

Of course you can do it. You just sit there, you know. Could you not cross your legs? No, I can sort of cross my legs. But anyway, I certainly couldn't pay attention. I couldn't hardly form a thought. My brain just didn't work. So it was a real crisis for me. I really felt, first of all, I felt, gosh, you know, my practice really isn't so strong. If it were strong enough, I'd be able to deal with this better. And I wasn't dealing with it at all well as far as I thought. I was crying all the time and acting in very infantile ways. And some part of my brain that sort of could pay attention kind of knew that, but it was totally out of my control for a long time. So, I'd love there to be a, you know, brain damage sutra in the literature to, you know, and I wonder, well, you know, probably the ancient monks had strokes. In fact, one of Jack Kornfield's main teachers in Burma had a stroke, had several strokes.

[13:01]

and became kind of, you know, he drooled and he couldn't talk very well. And, you know, Mumon Roshi, who's I'm sure is deceased now, when I was younger, he was one of the most famous Rinzai Zen masters in Japan. He had Alzheimer's, so he slowly forgot everything. This is kind of an unknown area for us, but I bet you in this audience, there are quite a few of you who either know someone, your parent or a friend who has had this kind of illness. And what's more, whether or not we have such an illness, one of the things that I felt had happened to me was kind of a dress rehearsal for dying. because I very nearly did die, and when I was in the coma, I was actually awake inside my mind in a kind of bardo state. I've checked this out with some of my Tibetan teacher friends, and they said, yeah, that's pretty much what the bardo is.

[14:04]

You have kind of visions, a kind of alternative life that you think is real at the time. It's not like a dream, but then you wake up and you realize it was a dream. But I've talked extensively with Frank Ostaseski who was the founder of Zen Hospice and he's taken care of many many He thinks maybe 2,000 dying people so far in his life And he says, you know, we can't romanticize the dying process and think that it's all wonderful a lot of what happens is the disintegration of self the entire The brain is dying. The whole body is dying. So you go into very disintegrated and altered states of mind, hallucinations, psychosis, tremendous states of panic, fear, and that sort of thing. This is, he said, you know, about 50% of the time, depending on the illness, this is kind of what happens.

[15:06]

And so I got to go through all of that, and yet I'm here to tell about it. So I think that in terms of its relevance to our daily practice, which is really the important thing. I'd like to talk about Zazen specifically now and really the kind of different ways to do Zazen or different ideas we bring to the cushion. And I'll just speak from my own personal experience. Starting back in those days, you know, all of us were very idealistic and didn't understand Buddhism very well, thought, well, we're coming to the Zendo to be enlightened. You know, kind of, you know, when is it going to happen kind of thing. At least a lot of people felt that way. I felt that way. And I think the practical experience of zazen, when you start, is pretty sobering. It's not much like enlightenment.

[16:08]

It's more like your legs hurt and it's very boring and you don't quite know what's going on. And then if you go deeper, your mind is just full of a million thoughts and you can't figure out what you're supposed to be doing. Are you doing it right? And various things. And then the first real challenge in a sense is to set aside all the initial ideas that brought us to the cushion. You might say our way-seeking mind, which is not something, these days I tell about it and I kind of laugh at my youthful naivete, but that isn't quite right. You know, that way-seeking mind, mixed up though it might have been, that's what brings you to practice. That's like your first great treasure. And we should have great respect for that. Whatever idea it was, whether you're depressed, or whether your spouse is dying, or you're dying, or whatever it might be, or you're just confused, you get there somehow.

[17:10]

And so we have to deal with what starts to happen when we sit. The first big challenge is to grapple with, I think, what Suzuki Roshi liked to call the monkey mind, the distracted mind, ordinary discursive thinking. we begin, particularly in Sesshin, to have a different kind of experience of consciousness, which is very calm. And calm, or samadhi, is a big part of the early stages of practice, getting familiar with physical and mental calm, having a stable posture so that your body is very still but quite relaxed. Your mind is not like the mind you're used to, no inner dialogue for a while, tremendous states of great inner peace and joy. If you look at the life story of the Buddha,

[18:10]

He was like a beginning Zen student too. He went to all the yogic teachers of the time and they taught him various ways to achieve very deep states of calm and trance. And what distinguished him from all the other spiritual teachers of the time is that he very quickly moved through those stages and realized this is not it. This is not going to fundamentally deal with the issue that was burning in his heart. Because he realized that, wonderful as it was, Samadhi states are like any other state, temporary. They come and they go. You have a Sashin, it's wonderful. You get up, you leave, and life resumes and you forget. It fades away. So this is not, if Samadhi is to be the ground, it's not deep enough.

[19:12]

It can't last. But Samadhi is very important. Samadhi, we might say, getting back to my first thought, Samadhi is a It's a kind of deeper attention. It's a different kind of attention. You know, usually in... It's interesting. I keep thinking when I talk about practice. When I was a kid, I practiced piano a lot. I was a pianist. My mother was a music teacher, and she was adamant that I be good. So, you know, like any kid, I would practice the pieces for a while, and I would start to, you know, fool around on the piano. And then from the kitchen would come this, I can still hear it, you know, this high-pitched, you know, whiny voice, practice! Practice! So when I talk about practice, you know, it isn't... We don't do that kind of practice. We don't do that, isn't what we mean.

[20:13]

It's more like when we say a law practice or something. It's deeper than just rehearsing. But, I'm sorry, my train of thought. is not linear. I've learned this from my wife and I've just accepted that that's who I am. But it'll all come together if I'm paying attention. So Samadhi is a kind of attention that's different than paying attention to the book you're reading or paying attention to the task. It's an attention, if we think about that neurological fact, which may or may not have any relevance, that somehow something happens to the left parietal lobe and the sense of self and other is different, and so we pay attention in a different way. But here's the koan that I had to confront, and it's the biggest one that I ever had in my life.

[21:15]

What do you do when that all goes away? The tools are gone. Everything, the toolkit falls out of your hand. You have nothing left. You have a brain that won't work. You have a body that won't work. You can't do any of the things that we talk about when we talk about Zazen. Then what do you do? How do you practice? And this is... We have to be prepared and I have to be prepared and all of us have to be prepared. There will be one day when we're lying in a bed and someone like Frank Ostaseski or somebody from hospice or our spouse or somebody is sitting next to us and it all starts to go away. I used to feel, well, it's overly dramatic to talk about, you know, sit on your cushion like it's your last moment. It doesn't really mean a whole lot. But there is some truth to it, I'm beginning to realize now.

[22:16]

If we practice come to the cushion and sit down and do Zazen, but we don't even stick to Zazen. Zazen is, we don't come to Zazen as though somehow we can always come to Zazen. Zazen will always be there for us. If even that we're willing to let go of, then we can practice with a deeper sense, I think, more serious. I was reading in Not Always So, which is Suzuki Roshi's new book of lectures, edited by Ed Brown. Suzuki Roshi talked about an experience that I knew about anecdotally for years, where he almost drowned in the creek. Were you there? No? Yeah. A lot of early sense students were there. He really did almost drown. Nobody knew he didn't know how to swim. went down and people were busy, you know, frolicking and didn't realize it. And he says, he talks about the experience in a very practical sense.

[23:19]

He said, well, you know, he had some real upsurge of fear and panic as he was dying. His body, you know, as anybody, well, you're drowning, you start to feel that. He said, well, the reason that happened is he wasn't so serious. Strange thing to say. Well, it seems pretty serious to me, you know. He said, no, if, if What he means, I'll see if I can try to replicate. Have any of you read this lecture yet? Yeah. Try to replicate what he said and maybe you can help me, Mel, because you probably edited it. Watching the legs of the girls. Well, I like the way he talked about that because it made him feel very human. I think in those early days it was nude bathing down there, nude mixed bathing. Like anyone he all these young beautiful people he doesn't not notice, you know So he was watching the the legs of the girls, you know kicking in the water and he was going down And you know, but he said because I was not so because oh, I'm sorry Well, he remembered him You were there yeah, I mean he thought they were girls I

[24:36]

Maybe he was looking at you. Maybe he thought you were a girl. Anyway, what he said in the lecture was, because I wasn't so serious, I was afraid. If he was serious, what he means was, if he was thoroughly prepared every moment, really, but certainly in that moment, well, life, death, it comes at any time. then he wouldn't be so scared and then he could be more effective, you know? I think what he's saying is, you know, being a little frightened, he wasn't able to, you know, call for help or do something. This is very interesting. I really feel a very deep connection with that statement. I mean, it was very sincere and helpful for me because that was very much my experience, too. You know, I think because I wasn't so serious, people said afterwards, oh, you had such a strong will to live, that's why you survived. Well, I did. I mean, I really wanted not to die. And when I was recuperating and, you know, kind of a basket case, I really wanted to be better.

[25:37]

And so I suffered a lot. Partly because my brain wasn't very functional, so I couldn't quite figure out what to do. But I think fundamentally, you know, I really wasn't ready for this to happen. You know, I wanted it like, it's like the Woody Allen thing that I quote, because I think it's very wonderful. He says, it's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens to me. You know, I just wasn't ready. And, you know, in some sense, I have to grapple with the sense, you know, if I'd been too relaxed about it, I would have just died because I was so much on the edge and I was in this coma. And the whole coma, all the visions were all about some kind of struggle, about solving the problem, about getting through it. If I hadn't had that strong will to live, I wouldn't have lived. I would have died. People who are depressed or who don't care that much about living, you know, doctors know that they don't recover very well from illnesses. But at the same time, to figure out a way to practice even when the body is gone, even when the brain is going, even when our attention is gone, even when we can't be calm,

[26:53]

even when we can't find samadhi, even when there's no way to make anything better. That's really the ticket. And you know, in the early days, I can remember now, I was a young man. And like many young men, I wanted to do it better than anyone. And I really wanted to you know, plunge deeply into the depths of Samadhi. I wanted to have a good state of mind. I wanted to be calm and, you know, replicate the footsteps of the Buddha completely and have great spiritual experiences. Well, all those kinds of things have more or less happened to me a long time ago, really. And now, now, here's what I'm thinking. I'm thinking, you know, I'd kind of like to have as bad a state of mind as possible when I come to the cushion. That's what I'd like to do. I'd like to be in a disturbed state of mind. Not that I'd like to, but there's no problem for me if it comes.

[27:59]

Do you follow what I mean? Because after what I've been through, I feel the more practice I can get, the more I can find a different a deeper way to be calm that is in the midst of all of that, the more I can be serious in the way that Suzuki Roshi was talking about. The more I can handle anything. I really came up against something I couldn't handle. And I think that... I think that we need to have that experience. Suzuki Roshi said in Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, he talks about What do you do if your child is dying? I'm sure you all know this chapter. Well, you try to do everything you can, but the child is dying. There's no hope. They're not going to get better. What can you do? He says, well, you can sit. And he doesn't elaborate and say too much what's going to happen. Maybe we think what he means is, well, if we sit, we'll feel a little bit of calm.

[29:03]

We'll feel a little bit of respite. Now I feel his meaning is, no, you won't. Your child is dying. How can there be any respite? How can you go sit on a cushion thinking that you'll feel a little better? You won't. If anything, you'll feel worse because you'll have nothing to distract you. But, you know, you're just going to be with your suffering. And I actually feel that one of the things that made Suzuki Roshi a great teacher and an extraordinary teacher was not because he had an IQ of 200, not because he was physically powerful or strong. I think it was because he suffered a lot in his life. I think my guess is that many times in his life, regardless of his attainments, regardless of his experience in Zen, he had to deal with things that he couldn't handle. Terrible things. Not the least of which was seeing a million of his countrymen die in a crazy war, which I know was extraordinarily painful for him.

[30:10]

So I feel, I have a good friend who's a Tibetan teacher. She's an American, but she's in the Tibetan tradition. And she tells me, well, you know, this is a teaching that's been given to you. She rather more believes in celestial bodhisattvas and reincarnated high beings and things like that. And I don't really exactly. So I find it always a little bit strange that she will say that. I keep thinking, well, It didn't feel much like a gift to me, it felt like a curse, but I can't ignore that it was a way for me to go deeper and for me to understand some things that I really didn't understand in my bones before. You can understand things in various ways. Intellectually is the easiest way and the most superficial way and then we understand things from feeling. We understand things from experience but there's a way even deeper than that which is to understand things in your bones.

[31:18]

And I think that I think for Zazen to really ripen at some point we need to bring to it something We have to give up the notion that it's a way to handle things. That it's a way to handle things. It's a very natural understanding and I think that as we go forward in our practice, we can handle a great many things with the power of Zazen. The power of Zazen is definitely a real help. But there may come a point, there will come a point, where it won't help, where nothing will help, where there's absolutely nothing that can be done. The problem can't be solved. You're not going to recover. And then what do we do? This is, I think, the point at which Zazen stops being some kind of spiritual practice that we do an hour a day or a week a year or something like that and it becomes something else altogether.

[32:22]

And then we... We have an opportunity to see through the entire fabric of earthly existence into what we can't really have a word for, but we call emptiness or fullness, boundlessness, true nature. There's a lot of things that look like true nature and there are a lot of experiences that seem like true nature, but, you know, Suzuki Roshi used to say something, at least when I was around, I don't know about you, but, We used to pester him about enlightenment all the time, and one time he said, well, you might not like it. You know, I think he was only half joking. He was a very, he had a great sense of humor, and he knew how to needle us in certain ways, but I don't think that was a joke, really. I think that, from two points of view, we might not like it.

[33:25]

One is it's a tremendous responsibility. You know, if you, if you see things as they are, how can you ignore what's going on. So it's a big responsibility. Don't start unless you're really willing and able to go all the way and really commit ourselves to those vows we just chanted, which are extraordinarily deep. A good friend of mine who was slated to be ordained at the same time as I was one time at Tassajara when Suzuki Roshi was talking about sentient beings are numberless. I vow to save them." He started to cry. And he said, I can't. I just can't. This is too big. I can't do it. He cried and cried and cried. Suzuki Roshi did not say anything. Just let him cry. And then he said something which I'll tell you what he said, but I won't explain it.

[34:27]

I'll just leave it for you to think about it. He said, I won't be your friend. He may have said more, he probably said more, but I really remember that, that he said that. And then the fellow did not get ordained. I won't be your friend. This is the strict side of enlightenment, you know. It's not a great thing that makes our life better. It's a big responsibility. The other thing is, it's not necessarily wonderful either, you know. some experiences are wonderful some experiences are terrible but beneath all of that there's something more fundamental that doesn't really have a flavor exactly but it certainly can emerge out of something terrible as equally as something wonderful and uh... so i i have to give my my tibetan teacher friend a credit it was a gift really uh...

[35:28]

And I've mostly forgotten about it, really. And when Ross asked me to talk about it, I thought to myself, just a little bit, I thought, oh, gosh, again, you know, I don't really want to talk about it. But I am talking about it, and I hope it's been helpful. I'm certainly willing to answer some of your questions about it. But to me, the only important thing about it now, now that I'm better, and that's very wonderful, is the gift, the teaching that it had for me. the gift that it gave me to make, to force me to go deeper, not to rely on my intellect. which went away, not to rely on my physical strength, which went away, not to rely even on the people who love me, who could only help me so much, they could comfort me, but they couldn't make me better, not to rely even on Zazen, which I couldn't do, not to rely on Suzuki Roshi, who was gone and couldn't help me, not to rely on anything, and then see what we can do.

[36:36]

you know, in that situation, not to rely on any idea of anything that we think is going to help. Something is there, nevertheless, that's deeper than all of that, more fundamental, deeper even than life itself. that I think, my guess is, this is how I understand when Suzuki Roshi said, well, I wasn't so serious, that's why I was suffering when I was drowning. Mel and I were talking before the lecture how it often seemed superficially as though Suzuki Roshi didn't have the vocabulary to say what he meant, so he would say odd things, but, you know, that's sometimes true. But much of the time he was saying exactly what he meant. It's just that we didn't have the vocabulary that We didn't have the understanding of the vocabulary he was trying to put together that was coming from his experience, from his understanding. So when he said, well, I wasn't so serious, it doesn't mean that I'm going to be serious, I'm dying, I'm serious.

[37:38]

That isn't, not that kind of serious. That's the kind of seriousness that I thought was serious when I set out on practice. It's not that kind of serious. You know, it's a seriousness that almost looks like being very relaxed, really. Today we're alive. Tomorrow we die. Life goes on. You know, I've met a lot of Buddhists in the last 30 years. Asians, Americans, various traditions. And I'm always looking, what's What's the common thread, you know? Because there's all these different traditions. We do our more Japanese-flavored tradition. There's people doing Tibetan. There's people doing Southeast Asian versions, Korean. They all have their flavor. One of the common threa- Well, there is- One of the things I think there is, is there are about five or six main practices which are universal to all traditions. Sitting.

[38:39]

Bowing. Chanting. vows or precepts, some kind of robe. Every culture has its elaborations of that and we will too. In a hundred years it will be American. But those things are in common. But from an experiential point of view what I notice is the people who seem to have some accomplishments, some familiarity, some closeness to the Buddha Dharma seem very Soft. Not that they don't get upset, not that they don't have emotions, not that they don't get angry. I hear the Dalai Lama gets very angry, as well he might, given that all of his people are being killed. But there's a softness, a flexibility that is not easily won.

[39:42]

And I think that's the seriousness. That's the meaning of the word serious. See, it means something very different in the words of somebody who's speaking from that experience. I'm not so serious means I'm not soft enough yet. I'm not, the clay isn't, you know, still a little hard stuff in there, it's not loose. So serious clay is soft clay. So maybe if there's anything that I have, gleaned from my experience is to be more soft, as a way of being more serious. So, maybe a few questions. Yes, yes. Oh. I'm wondering if you could give me your answer. I don't think there's a preset answer. I think that situation itself bleeds you.

[40:53]

If I could tell you, then it wouldn't be the situation you describe, you know. I don't mean to sound mysterious, it's just that's the way it is. I think that at that level, You can't hold up a card and try to remember, you know, what somebody said. This is how you do it. I think at that point, I guess all I'm saying is at that point, there will be something for you. If we have the strength to reach out for it. So I think we can have that confidence. Yeah, please. Life force.

[42:06]

It's something like life force. And I think there's two sides to it. One is kind of me. Just I want to live. I don't care about anything. Just I want to live. Totally selfish. Just I want to live. And the other is I want to live for something. And I think those things can't be separated. They go together. I think that I mean, certainly the former was very strong in me. I could really feel it. As my friend Roger Welch says, when you're very ill, altruism is the first casualty. All your resources sort of tunnel in and just, I've got to take care of myself. But, so there was a lot of that. And I was very infantile, I think, and just scrambling around to live. But there was also, I think, a sense, I'm just trying to be honest, that I wanted to live for something. I'm not ready for this to end.

[43:08]

I have things I want to do. And I think those things came together in a way that formed, I don't think intentions are ever, simple or pure. They're always kind of complex, but I think, yes, I think there was an intention. I mean, in a sense, that bodhisattva vow is a kind of intention to live, really, because if you don't have that vow, I mean, if you don't have the intention to live, the vow doesn't mean too much. I mean, it's like, live, die, I don't care that much. I mean, there's a real sense of caring in that. I'm going to do the maximum that I can, make the greatest effort to fulfill this vow. That's a kind of a vow to live as well. But not to live just so that you can enjoy yourself exactly, but to live in some wider context, to do the Bodhisattva work. That's what turns, you know, Buddhism is, you know, like all wisdom, true wisdom traditions, is a kind of alchemy. We transmute these kind of animalistic urges of various kinds, you know, will to survive, sexuality, greed, all these things.

[44:18]

We, you know, transmute them. We don't get rid of them exactly. When it says to get rid of desires, what it really means is to, you know, transmute them and turn them into something else, but you can use that power. So, I don't know if I'm addressing what you said, but... Yeah, thank you so much for a very meaningful talk. You're welcome. I wonder if there's a connection that, for you, that I heard between something you said at the beginning and the end. You talked about 50% of people go through a kind of struggle, real deep struggle with their disillusioned self, what happens is they lose their physical abilities and mental abilities. And there's another 50%. And in my experience, that allows kindness and graciousness that comes through because everything else is lost.

[45:21]

The self is lost. And for those people who can accept that, not rare in my experience. It's really a very different kind of process of dying. And I hear that in your talking about Well, this is very true. A good friend of mine, their mother recently died, and all along, right up until close to the end, she didn't want any spiritual stuff, he was involved in Buddhism, you know, don't talk to me about that stuff, don't bring the priests around, I just want to die, I don't care. The last few days, suddenly, she began to have these extraordinary visions, her whole demeanor lightened up, you know, this kind of experience that we can have, and she

[46:22]

She became full of love, full of light, everything dropped away. As a friend of mine who's a psychiatrist noted to me recently, I think it's very interesting to consider, you know, almost all of our neurotic defenses, our ego and so forth, are really designed to keep us going, keep us alive at all costs. When the moment is actually happening where you're dying, What's the use? They fall away. They just don't have anything to hold on to. So very often when people die, there is this tremendous opening, this tremendous sense of connection. But not always. This is the point that my friend who did the hospice work is making. Sometimes it can be quite terrible. I think a lot depends on the nature of the illness and how it affects your brain, quite frankly. And I think if we're kind of counting on a so-called good death, I think it's a little bit luck of the draw.

[47:33]

I think we have to be prepared for any kind, you know, violent kind, drowning, having a piano fall on us, whatever it might be. And then, you know, we're more soft, you know. So, That's why he was talking about not romanticizing the death process. He's seen it all different ways. I think a lot has to do with this quality of attention. If you're able to pay attention, if you're not in so much pain, if you're not drugged, and you can actually see what is going on, then I think that's a so-called good death. But it's not always the case that you can pay attention, that's what I'm saying. So, we have to find some way to be that doesn't rely on having these higher brain functions. They might be there and they might not. And I think, in a sense, the most developed way to die is bring it on, whatever it is. Yes?

[48:37]

In his book, Suzuki, talks about when you're practicing Zazen, when you're becoming, just really concentrating on your breathing, that you should be doing that with your greater mind, not your smaller mind. And I took that as being, you know, the Buddha nature that we are striving for. You've done Zazen for many, many years. When you had your illness and you were recovering, or even when you felt close to death, When I was in the coma, I did. This is what's very bizarre. Well, I'd rather not go into the details except that, and this applies to the death process too, when my brain was most diseased, when I had a fever of 105 and this virus was coursing through my brain, inside my consciousness I was very lucid.

[49:49]

I had a great deal of ability to pay attention. The world I was in was not this world, you know. It's when I emerged and had to face the reality of what had happened to me that I lost that. That's just the honest answer. I can't explain it exactly. Getting back to what Suzuki Roshi said, I think that, you know, when I was trying to practice the breath, again, being the performance-crazed young man that I was, I wanted to do it perfectly, you know, count it perfectly, never forget, no thoughts, you know. That's a very small-minded way to count the breath. I mean, that's like my mother, you know. Practice! She wanted to hear Mozart there, you know. Well... Mozart is just one of the sounds that can come out. And yet, you know, it's all part of the bigger picture. The effort to count the breath is the thing, not the counting of the breath.

[50:54]

It's the effort. Because that... alters the attention. It's the attention that's the thing. So this took a long time for me to understand, because I wanted to do it perfectly. Maybe one more, if there isn't. Yes? Oh, maybe that line is in it. Thank you very much.

[51:30]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ