I vow to face the truth about darkness worse. Good morning. Good morning. So, this week it's my turn to pitch hit for the Abbott. So I'll be following the schedule to the best of my ability, which is not as good as his, but I'll be here most mornings, and Tuesday and Friday evening, and I'll be doing interviews, and you can sign up if you like. And I apologize for being such a stranger and not being here more, I feel sort of honored and yet like there's people who are here more and really know what's happening and are practicing here every day probably in a better position to help but please make whatever use of me be like

[01:27]

I've actually been thinking a lot lately about what does it mean to be helpful to people? How do you help? And I get to think about it a lot because the work I do involves helping people. I have children who always want some kind of help. It's not always clear. what they think they want is what would actually be helpful to them. And whenever I give a lecture, I always think about, well, what do people want to hear? What would help people? I know when I come to lectures, I'm often really hungry for something. So as many people as there are in the room, there may be that many different appetites.

[02:31]

It's hard to know. All I know, really, is what has helped me at various times, or what I think may have helped me, and I don't even know if that was really it. The Buddha struggled with this problem, also, how to be helpful to people. And actually, when he first... after he first became enlightened he felt kind of hopeless about it. He felt... The way it was was so profound that nobody would listen to an explanation of it. Nobody would believe it. Maybe nobody even wanted to hear it, really. And gradually he was persuaded to give it a shot anyway.

[03:35]

You know, maybe nobody would understand, maybe nobody, but maybe somebody would understand, maybe somebody would listen. And for the sake of those, would you please try to explain how it is? And so he reluctantly agreed and actually some of his, the people who had been practicing with him when he was an ascetic didn't listen to him, actually didn't want to have anything to do with him because he had stopped being an ascetic, he'd started eating again and sleeping and being more moderate and they thought he was, he'd kind of regressed and fallen off the path. but of course gradually he did find ways to talk about his experience and he found a lot of different ways actually and was able to explain how it is to each person who asked him he explained it

[04:58]

in a way that was aimed at them. I remember when Suzuki Roshi used to lecture, I often felt that he was like reading my mind. How did he know that was the lecture I needed to hear today? And I think everybody, often lots of people, felt that way. So partly that kind of intimacy develops when people practice every day many times a day together, the same people. But it happens because there really is one mind and we all share it. And when we sit, when we come together in silence I'll hear something.

[06:07]

Silence is really wonderful. I don't know if you have been affected like the rest of the country by the Olympic madness. but last night I and a bazillion other people were watching the Olympics, and I've missed most of it, but what has really struck me this time about it, and maybe it's always this way, I don't know, is how much talking there is, and how much just chatter, not even counting the commercials, but just the commentators.

[07:19]

And I was reading something in The Faith to Doubt, and Stephen Batchelor says that compassion arises when would quiet our internal chatter enough to perceive what somebody else is needing or asking for or demanding or desiring. And I was thinking how these ... what a difficult job it must be for these news people who, rather than trying to quiet their internal chatter, have to amplify it. have to create more internal chatter and externalize it and keep it going endlessly. What an awful thing to have to do to yourself, to your consciousness, day after day after day.

[08:27]

And how And not surprising it is that we have the problems we have in our society and how remarkable it is that we're all here basically to listen to silence, to cultivate silence. Maybe that's the most helpful thing I have to offer you. In the silence, you can hear the sirens and birds

[09:36]

This morning when I got up, the frogs at my house were already awake. Very loud. Beautiful frogs. They're big ones and little ones. They're having a convention. But usually the noise of our mind and the noise of the city and the noise of the busyness of our activity drowns all that out. In one of our recent newsletters, Joko Beck quotes, it's Pascal, saying that all of man's misery is caused, all of suffering is caused by man's inability to sit quietly in a room doing nothing. This implies that if one could only sit quietly in a room doing nothing, one could make a significant dent in suffering.

[11:03]

while you were having the bodhisattva ceremony in here I was talking to a gentleman who came by looking for some comfort his father had just died a couple of days ago and he was in great distress because when he heard the news that his father had been sick for a couple of weeks. But when he heard the news that his father had died, he was drunk. And his wife told him that a call had come that dad had died. And she said, well, you know, there's really nothing you can do. And so he just rolled over and went to sleep. And now he feels really terrible because his whole family was there and he missed an opportunity to be together with them and to say goodbye to his father.

[12:24]

And he keeps turning it over and over in his mind and he kept saying, you know, it's, I just couldn't believe that he was really gone. It sounds so trite, but, Now I've got not only the loss but the guilt and I don't think I can get over it. I don't know what to do. I think it's going to drive me crazy. It was real clear to him that he didn't have... that he didn't go because he was drinking and that he was drinking because that's what he always did. It wasn't just because his father was dying, that was what he did. And he said, you know, it's not that I have to drink, it's just that I don't know what to do with my mind otherwise.

[13:31]

I go to work every day and then Then when I come home, I don't have any more responsibility. I don't know what to do with my mind. Do you think Zazen would help? Think I should try and sit? It's hard for me to recommend sitting to people because I've always found sitting quite difficult. It's not the first thing I think of. I've been sitting, more or less, off and on for most of my adult life.

[14:39]

And I still find it difficult to get up in the morning and sit. I still find it difficult sometimes to sit still, find my mind wanting something other than what is. But I'm so grateful to have been introduced to this practice when I was so young to have had some opportunities

[15:47]

to sit and do nothing. I used to like to sit and do nothing actually when I was a little kid. My mother called it daydreaming and wool gathering. She was always trying to get me to go out and play or find a friend or do something. But when there's nothing that you can do, it's very important to be able to do it. Nothing. Very difficult. As many of you know, I do a lot of counseling

[16:59]

people who have serious illnesses. Yesterday, I went with a patient to visit her priest. This is an older woman who has cancer, and she has a lot of other diseases too, She's done very well with all the others, but somehow the cancer has just really thrown her. And she's terrified of dying. She's not terrified of pain. She's not terrified of suffering. She's afraid she's going to go to hell. And she was raised in France before World War II and spent her adolescence, a good deal of her adolescence, in bomb shelters. who lived in Normandy near where the landing was.

[18:01]

And I think that the trauma of her cancer treatment has brought back the trauma of that time in her life. And one of the things that was most traumatic for her besides the obvious just terror of not knowing if you were going to be dead at the next moment and watching your whole town and your whole community be bombed into smithereens, was that she was raised in a Catholic church at a time when there was just constant talk of sin and eternal damnation, and her consciousness was just full of whatever, any, almost any thoughts or feelings or even body sensations that she became aware of were immediately classified as sin and she just felt like there was nothing that she could do right

[19:26]

And her parents reinforced it a lot because she was a very bad kid. She liked to read books, and she wanted to go to school, and she wanted to go to college. And her parents wanted her to go work in the factory. But she was really irresponsible and a bad kid because she liked to read. So she has this idea about herself that she's really no damn good, and she's definitely going to go to hell. And her parents said so, and the church said so. And so now she's old, and she's sick, and she thinks she's going to die. And she's just terrified. I mean, she's really, really terrified. She just shakes and cries when she talks about it. She talked about how wonderful a priest at her church was and how loving and everything, but how unworthy she was of his time and how he said that the church had changed, but she just couldn't understand it.

[20:40]

And she really felt that she had to make a relationship with God. And So I said I wanted to help her with that, and I thought it was really important that she make a relationship with her priest. And if he was doing all those wonderful things, he must be a pretty special sort of person. So, would she go and talk to him? Well, she was afraid. Would she let me go and talk to him? Well, she thought that was cowardly. So we went together. And the priest was a wonderful young man who kept saying to her, we threw the French Jansenists out. You don't have to worry about that anymore. It's OK.

[21:44]

All you need to do is just let God love you. It's OK now. It's safe here now." And she kept saying, but I have to do this, or I have to do that. You don't really know how bad I am. And he kept saying, tell me. Tell me how bad you are. And she'd tell him that sometimes she was angry at people who were mean to her. And he'd say, sometimes he was angry at people who were mean to him too. Thought that was OK. And he wanted to give her absolution, and she didn't want to take it. And he kept saying, just accept what's given. It's being freely given. But the chatter in her mind was so loud, she just couldn't hear what he was saying.

[22:55]

And it was very sad because she was on the one hand asking for forgiveness and the priest was trying to be helpful, he was trying to give her what she asked for and she couldn't accept it. And so it's a great puzzle for me how to help this woman because it's clear to me that she has to do something inside herself. She thinks she's looking on the outside for something. But she's actually being given what she thinks she wants. And it's not what she wants, and it's not what she needs, it's not helping her.

[24:05]

It's just convincing her more and more that she's not really worthy, that she's not really good enough, that there's something weird going on here. And of course partly she's right, there is something weird going on. She was told as a child that something was absolute truth, now she's being told by an equal authority that the opposite is absolute truth. She's got a big problem. and we have the tools to investigate the problem the problem of our life and death the problem of how is it that we have been born we've been brought into this life only to be ejected

[25:09]

somewhat later. The problem of how we will meet our death is not an abstract problem or a problem that we can afford to deal with later. The man who didn't make it to his father's deathbed didn't make it because he couldn't allow himself to believe in the reality of it. It was too painful. and there's always something there's always something we have to do always something more important than just sitting and being with our actual experience

[26:41]

It's just amazing to me how our lives are set up so that we're almost forced to ignore the most important thing most of the time. So to bring awareness of life as it is to each moment is a very pressing thing. We can't just drop everything and sit down in the middle of the road.

[28:02]

We'd get run over if we did that. We can't just all quit our jobs and go sit under a tree. And even if we could, I don't know that that would really be so helpful. to us or to anybody else. It's nice to be able to stop everything and sit for an hour, take a day off on a weekend and do a one-day sitting. But if that's all we do, it's just an island and we have no way to get from the island to the rest of our life.

[29:08]

We can't wait until the conditions are perfect But we always have our breath, wherever you go. You can't go anywhere without it. When Buddha was dying, Ananda tried to get him to stick around longer You know, I heard that you had some kind of special power, that if you were really completely enlightened you had a special power and you could really overcome any kind of illness and live forever. And Buddha said, well, actually that was true. And he did have that power and he really could overcome the illness and live forever.

[30:24]

But it wouldn't be right for him to do that unless it would really be helpful. Ananda said, yeah, it would really be helpful. I'm not ready. And Buddha said, well, you know, I don't see how it would help you for me to hang around. The only reason you want me to hang around is so you don't have to deal with the pain of the loss and being separated from me. And that's not a good reason. I've taught you how to deal with attachment. You have all the tools, you know everything you need to know.

[31:31]

held back anything. I'm not the kind of teacher that kept the best part for his deathbed. I've already told you everything I know. You just need to do it. And the longer I stay around, the longer you don't have to do it. This is about letting go. So the story goes that that's why Buddha chose to die. That that was what would be helpful. Give the students an opportunity to practice letting go. To find out for themselves, to not rely on

[32:34]

to deal with their feelings. So is there anything you'd like to talk about?

[34:04]

And I can refrain from helping you. Charlie. This morning on the radio, Carefree Arizona. Offered to burn written worries in Carefree Arizona that were mailed to him. And this was his personal practice. He indicated that writing down the worry is halfway towards resolving it.

[35:20]

And while you were talking about Sometimes ritual works, sometimes it doesn't. I just thought about it. I was thinking about that a lot when we were sitting with her priest because one of the things that's thrown her the most about the recent changes in the Catholic Church, she was away from the church for about 20 years and in the meantime they modernized it, is that now when she goes to confession she has to look at the priest in the face. He's got an office, looks a lot like my counseling office, you know, he's got a sectional sofa and a busy desk and just a regular kind of an office.

[36:21]

And he's, you know, dressed in casual clothes and, you know, he got on his knees and did the absolution thing, but he wasn't wearing the right outfit, you know, and he didn't have the props. And so of course she didn't believe it. And he didn't get that. that the forms, if they were connected to something, were very powerful, and that that's a wonderful connection to the Absolute. is having this kind of, having a ritual where you do it a certain way and anybody who does it, does it that way. It gives us a bridge from the personal to the universal.

[37:23]

That's very, very helpful. Yeah, you talked about stopping the mental chatter and as you brought up that idea, that concept I had that experience, and I thought, yes, that's what I came for. I didn't know it, but that's what I came for today. And what Charlie talked about, you know, writing your worries down and sending them to Carefree Arizona, I think that that release is somewhat of what I get here. And sometimes I can do that sitting at home, and sometimes I can't, and it's been, the worry is not a worry I have, or the thought, the chatter isn't a chatter that I have, it has me completely in the grip, it's grip, and when it releases, I can see that.

[38:26]

And then, oh, that's what was going on, but in the meantime, this incredible suffering. And, you know, I'm not worthy, this woman, that you spoke about, your patient, your client, I could see the similarities we have, I have in my life, where it's so clear that I could just step outside and stop the chatter, and then it would, the depth of the suffering would just lift. But I can't always do that. Well, and the depth of the suffering doesn't always lift, sometimes it's the depth of the suffering intensifies. But you're suffering what you're suffering rather than indirectly. The chatter creates layers and layers of suffering on top of the suffering. And sometimes, you know, when you let go of that

[39:31]

You've just got your experience which may be something that you actually can bear. It's like you can walk up the mountain but not with a hundred pound pack on your back. Yeah. The pain or the realization of I didn't accomplish something in teaching this week that I couldn't even look at That's the direct pain. It's like, oh. But the stuff I'd added on top of it was so fuzzy and so mish-mosh that I couldn't even get to direct the problem. So it's sort of a relief to get through all those levels. That's what it is. I'm not a bad person. I missed my mark. You know, and I felt guilty about something and didn't know what it was. And I also think that there's some sort of payoff in that confusion or that pain onto the suffering, and I'm not sure what it is.

[40:43]

But I think it has to do with not changing or fear of failure or whatever. I'm interested in that too, what the payoff is. Particularly the payoff of being not good enough. It seems like such a painful position, but it's so entrenched, and I've been there too, to be, you know, like the unworthiest person that ever hid in a corner. I think the payoff is that you're a person. You're an entity.

[41:44]

You have something, however painful, that is solid where you think is solid. And most people would trade anything for that sense rather than, and this is where Buddhadharma is very radical, because it says it's not there, there is no person. There's just a collection of feelings, perceptions, and bits of matter that are subject to change, that are impermanent and can change.

[42:49]

And mostly, in the West anyway, that's very scary. Yeah, it is very scary. It's really scary. And, you know, many people would much rather reify, you know, the misery of their lives than face, you know, than face the fear of being insubstantial and the responsibility for having to for having power over your life to change. That's a lot of responsibility. But actually, in Buddhism, it's not such a heavy responsibility. Well, because Buddhism doesn't, you know... There's no sin. There's no sin, and also, if there's really no self, then there isn't...

[43:55]

so much solidness to the responsibility. It's a moment after moment thing, rather than, you know, just kind of... Right. There can be some lightness to it. But you have to go through... I mean, often you... There's a lot of suffering to be experienced, you know, before you just... open your eyes to the lightness, but it's there at any moment. Yeah, you can drop the pack anytime. But I think the thing that isn't advertised, and maybe it's not advertised because it's different in the East, is the loss. the experience of loss and the terror of letting go of all the ideas we have about who we are. Even the ideas that, you know, you think you'd be glad to be rid of.

[44:59]

Letting go of them and experiencing that space, which is very liberating, is also terrifying. Eastern cultures, I think there's more of a sense of communal identity, family identity, group identity. So I think it's very difficult for Westerners to set notice on a sense of individuality. Very scary.

[46:04]

It's such a fixed idea. Whether I'm wrong or right, or lost or found, it's a fixed idea that's very painful and without the, whatever it is I think I need, happening. The thing that really cuts through that is the, is unexpected and not. That's why I think I like a situation of that fear allows for some, although it's a terrible suffering, it allows for some lost quality, some blur. And in that can come out something else if I'm awake, if I'm drunk with some other idea.

[47:25]

I think that some of the forms of his practice, the courage of seeing past the fixed conditions. And I think some of the stories and some of those things that work as a real encouragement. The trauma of of thinking that she's so wrong, the woman who's thinking she's so wrong. I was really Things can happen though sometimes.

[48:33]

I remember a cat that walked in the church. It was a very important moment. I hope so. That's for sure. I hope so too. Yeah. Well, what I have to say is a little bit sadistic, but it's sort of powerful for me. I'm just starting to take up the game of God. And in golf, it is like your right hand is the strong hand and it's like your identity. But to be good at golf, you have to let your right hand move away and let the left hand take over and flow naturally. So that's a hard lesson. It's very simplistic. But it is the strong identity and the cultural and the awareness that you have to try to let it fall off so your left hand can do the motion with grace.

[49:41]

And this is the hard thing in life. And rituals, all these things are supposed to help. But it is not easy. Wendy? Yes, Fran, I would like to know, how did the session end? between you and the man who had heard that his father had died. What happened when you two parted? Well, he agreed, he decided to go and talk to, sit with his father's body for a while. And I offered to talk to him again and I offered to do memorial service here and what seemed to be most helpful to him was actually I told him about how we have a memorial service every year for Suzuki Roshi and even though he's been dead since 1971 we still talked to him so it wasn't ever too late.

[50:53]

That seemed to get his attention. It hadn't occurred to him that he could still say something. Because one way of perhaps looking at this kind of life is, is it a surprise that he went back to sleep? opportunity for him to look at his life a bit differently?

[52:05]

Well, we talked about that and about how, you know, it was an opportunity to do that and that it would be, that if he could use the guilt and the feelings he had about how he had been running his life as a away as, like, fertilizer for growing some changes, that that would be quite a tribute to all the good things he said about his death. Although that seemed like something that he wanted to do, he really didn't believe that he could do it. And when he told me how much he drank and how long he'd been drinking that much, I wasn't even sure how safe it was as something to recommend, and they do out there in the hospital, which is one of the challenging things about talking to people in this kind of situation.

[53:09]

We should probably stop right now, but we're going to have tea and cookies and you're welcome to, please everybody stay and we can talk some more informally. Thank you very much. Nice.

[53:32]

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