I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good morning. Good morning. Today's speaker is going to be Lori Sanaki. She's a long-time resident of the Berkeley Zen Center, as most of you know, and she has two children, and she was a shuso a few years ago. So please give her your attention. Sojin wasn't supposed to be here today. Today I want to talk about how we live at the intersection of delusion and enlightenment.

[01:02]

Do you know what the intersection means? Like where the two roads cross? And on the deluded side In Buddhism we don't talk about bad people but we do say that people do make mistakes and they can make mistakes that cause problems for themselves and for others. Have you ever done that? Ever made a mistake? And that also we can do things like sharing and friendliness that bring a lot of benefit to ourselves and others. And Buddhism also teaches that When we make mistakes, there's always a reason. There's always a reason when we make a mistake. And that sometimes it can help to try to figure out the reason. For example, you might make a mistake because you're not paying attention.

[02:06]

Like, you know, you might forget your lunch or your sweatshirt and you might go to school and not have any lunch or be cold because you forgot your sweatshirt. So that's making a mistake because you really aren't paying attention when you need to be. Like when you left the house you need to think, what do I need to take? And then there's other reasons for making mistakes. Can you think of any? No? Sometimes We make mistakes because we want something really badly. So badly that we can't even remember the rules or what we're supposed to do, right? You've probably had that happen, right? You just want something so bad that you just take it, grab it or something. And sometimes we make mistakes because we get really mad. get really, really mad and then we might hit or yell at somebody or something.

[03:11]

Sometimes your parents probably do that sometimes too, right? Parents can make mistakes too. Any other, can you think of any other reasons? One of the reasons I can think of is because we're scared. Sometimes we make mistakes because we're scared. You might not want your parents to know something you did, so you might lie because you were scared that they would get mad at you. Or if someone's picking on your friend, you might not go to help them because you'd be scared that you might get picked on, too, or something. So sometimes we make mistakes when we're scared. But then we do good things, too. Like I was thinking about sharing. I was thinking how when little babies first get a ball, they just want to hold it, right? When you first play with a ball, you just want to have it, and you want to hold it. And then as you get a little older, you realize, oh, actually, this would be more fun if I was sharing it.

[04:21]

If you throw it to somebody and they throw it back, it's actually more fun, right? So it's very natural, you start realizing that sharing is actually more fun. I want to tell one little story. There was a Native American grandfather who was talking to the kids in his tribe, kind of like I'm talking to you, I guess. And he said, inside of me there are two wolves having a terrible battle. One wolf is the wolf of anger and jealousy and greed and not paying attention and fear. And the other wolf is the wolf of sharing and peace and harmony and friendliness. And he told this, and one of the, what do you think?

[05:22]

Do you have any questions? Do you have any questions pop into your mind? One of the kids in the group had a question. What do you think it was? That's close. This person asked the question, which one will win? Which one will win? And the elder, the Native American elder said, the one I feed. The one I feed. So when I say we live at the intersection of delusion and enlightenment what I think of is that no matter what happened yesterday, today is fresh and new, right? So if you made a big mistake yesterday, today is still new and fresh and you can do something smart. If you did something smart yesterday, today is still new and fresh and you could make a big mistake. But it doesn't matter because then the next moment is still fresh and new and you have another chance.

[06:25]

So you always have a chance. Well, that's the amount that I prepared for you guys. Anybody want to say anything? Any of you guys want to say anything? Lihong? Alice? Malcolm? Okay then, you guys can... This morning I tried to get Alex to clean up his shoes.

[07:30]

There was like three pairs of shoes and I told him to put them in the back on the shoe shelf and I went back there and he had like dumped them all in a big pile. And I said, put them away neatly on the shelf. You know, we're supposed to have a Zen household here, you know. And he said, oh mom, that's just desire. So another way to say what I'm trying to say here is that I'm proposing that it's a more helpful paradigm to think that we live at the intersection of delusion and enlightenment than the one that I sort of unconsciously have tried to fit my life into all my years of practice, which is we're on a journey, right? The journey metaphor is very common. Delusion at one end, enlightenment the other. The further we get towards enlightenment, the further we get away from delusion.

[08:32]

The further we get away from delusion, the further we get towards enlightenment. And I found that recently when I've tried to see myself through that paradigm, I'm like jumping around all the time. I'm jumping here, jumping there, jumping close. Sometimes I seem close to delusion, sometimes I seem close to enlightenment. And also my friends seem to be jumping, jumping, jumping around. Sometimes seeming to be very close to enlightenment, other times seeming to be very close to delusion. So I found that when I started to think, oh, we're just always at the intersection where the two ways meet, then I could be still and just be there. a friend of mine, my boss actually was taking an online course in spiders. And one of the things she learned, and I still find this impossible to believe, but you're never more than three feet from a spider.

[09:38]

And so what I, I think what I'm proposing is like, unfortunately, we're never more than three feet from delusion. Fortunately, we're never more than three feet from enlightenment. Or another thing I was thinking about was, I remember Don Juan, I don't know, Don Juan was like a seminal teacher of mine in my teens and one thing he says is you should always walk around with death over your left shoulder, I think. Is that right? Or right? I think left shoulder. So this is sort of like you should always walk around with delusion over your right shoulder. So if we're walking around with death over our left shoulder and delusion over our right shoulder, then how do we relax? How do we just relax and be there? And when we think of it this way, when I think of it this way, then what we look to in our teachers is not so much how far they are along the line, but actually how they turn, how they keep turning in every situation.

[10:52]

They just keep turning. in the direction of enlightenment which is paradoxically turning towards delusion in a way. You turn towards your delusion to turn towards enlightenment. And so when we watch our teachers we're actually just seeing the way they do that and trying to imitate that and trying to do that ourselves, how they're doing that. Buddha had a student named Angulimala who was basically a serial killer. Angulimala means finger garland and he had a necklace with fingers of all the people he killed around his neck. And the way they met was Buddha was going to go into this certain area And the villagers told, don't go into that area, because that's Angulimala's hangout. Don't go in there. And he said, it's OK, I'm going to go. And three times they tried to talk him into not going, and he went ahead and did it.

[11:53]

And he walked in there, and Angulimala saw him in the distance and started to run after him, to chase him, to kill him. And in one of the rare moments of supernatural occurrence in the Pali Canon, in the original teachings, there's very little sort of miracles or supernatural things, but in this case, Angulimala is running to chase him, and the Buddha's walking slowly, slowly, and he can't catch him. He just keeps getting further ahead. No matter how fast Angulimala runs, he can't catch him. And he's obviously, by this time, freaking out, I imagine. And he yells to the Buddha, Stop! Stop! And the Buddha says, Angulimala, I have stopped. When are you going to stop? And he did just right then. And so there's an example of someone who was turning towards delusion, turning, turning, turning, and suddenly just started turning immediately the other way. And so it can be done.

[13:02]

So an example I wanted to bring up of this is It's been happening to me quite a bit lately, but always, I think, that people are coming to me with a sense of outrage about something someone else in their life is doing. And I can understand that. I sometimes feel, I feel outraged about sometimes about what people in my life are doing. It's interesting, I looked up the word outrage. Outrage is not actually related to rage. Outrage is, it's the combination of the word that's related to ultra. The first part is ultra and the age part is the same age as in language and wreckage and courage. So it's of the ultra. And I think what people are expressing is a sense that something a person has done is just way beyond acceptable limits of what a person can do.

[14:12]

And I'm not talking about like opening up the paper and feeling outrage. I'm not setting that aside completely, but talking about someone who's in your life. And I find that when I really listen to a person, tell their story in their own words, it makes sense. It really makes sense the way they feel. And what they think, what they do makes sense. And then I got into this situation a few times recently. This is both inside and outside the gate. where I had actually two people who were in conflict with each other both expressing a sense of outrage about what the other person was doing. I found it very, very difficult to tolerate and I actually, I began to feel pretty outraged myself about this and about the way people were talking about each other.

[15:14]

And again, I can understand how we feel this way, but I want to propose that when we feel outrage, that is like a stellar Dharma moment. because basically we're taking a situation that's happening, an event that happens completely within the laws of nature and particularly within the laws of dependent co-arising and completely within our ken, in other words, completely available to us to study and understand and look deeply at the causes and conditions. And somehow with our minds, we can turn that into something kind of like on a par with the Holocaust or something. I mean, and it's really amazing that we can do that with our brain. With our brain, we can do that. And actually, when we feel outraged, that's actually another moment of dependent co-arising.

[16:19]

because something happens and we've got a scale or we've got a gauge. We've got a way of gauging the acceptable behavior, the area of acceptable behavior, and we evaluate this event as being outside of that. So it's really as much about where we draw the line. And I think that to kind of course in our outrage I propose that to course in our outrage is kind of a way of feeding delusion. So I'm encouraging myself to take those opportunities to really look deeply at what the other person is doing. And you can also ask people if you don't understand what they're doing. You can't say, what you're doing is outrageous, why? But you can if you can sort of get through that part to where you're really curious, you can find out.

[17:26]

And I think you'll find that when you hear the person describe it in their own words, it makes sense what they're doing. You still may not like it, it still may not seem right, and it still may not be right. But it's understandable. I was thinking that our life is kind of like a cross between Lord of the Rings and Groundhog Day. It's like every day we have to go on this journey where we take the ring of self or the ring of delusion and arduously with a lot of help from a lot of different kinds of beings, right? get to the mountain that it was forged in and throw it in. And then the next morning the alarm clock goes off and there's the ring back there, you know, beside the bed. Well, I wanted to try something.

[18:41]

And I don't know if you're game, I've never done anything like this before but I want to sort of take, go a step further in this direction and sort of propose that in the context of meditation it's really more like delusion is our oxygen and enlightenment is our carbon dioxide. Enlightenment is really just a byproduct of our coming to terms with delusion. So I wondered if we could do a little meditation here. If you'd be up for that. And the way we do this is when we breathe out we breathe out everything we know of friendliness Everything we know of peace, breathe out.

[19:42]

And when we breathe in, anything funky about our state of mind at all, just anything negative, anything we don't like, any pain, physical pain that we're struggling with, or anything that we feel is bad, breathe that in. Breathe out friendliness. Breathe out peace. If there's anything off about what I'm saying or wrong or mistaken just breathe that in. And anything you know, anything that you know within you of truth Breathe that out. The bad comes in, the good goes out.

[20:56]

And there's a lot of suffering in the world, a lot of people doing harm to other people. at all levels, in all ways mistaken people doing mistaken things, confusion we're just going to breathe that in all of that, breathe that in and anything we know of healing we're going to breathe that out, we're going to share anything we know of healing breathe in torture breathe out healing And if there is a project, as there seems to be, to kind of like concentrate all the resources of the world into the hands of a few people, if there is such a project, let's just breathe that in.

[22:17]

Breathe that in. Right now, breathe that in. Bring that close. And we're gonna breathe out everything we know about sharing. Sharing the planet. Just gonna breathe out sharing the planet. You're going to breathe in sweatshops and seed patents, prisons. Bring them here. Bring them all here. We've got a lot of delusion. We'll keep it with ours. Just bring it here. Bring it close. And everything we know about sharing the planet, breathe it out. Like they say on Sesame Street, all of us could have a happy, healthy place to be if we can learn to walk and swim and fly and crawl in earthling harmony.

[23:21]

Breathe that out. Well, as usual, it didn't take me nearly as long to say all the many things I had to say. Do you have anything to say? Yes? Thank you. What if you think you know something, let's say, about the truth of how things really are and you think maybe you have a responsibility to share that knowledge with other people?

[24:49]

I think that it's always okay to share what you see. I mean, I don't know if it always works, but I think one thing that happens is there's a difference between what we see and where we go with it. Like, Alan was reading this interesting book by Paul Ekman that's all about faces. He studied faces and he studied how you can actually tell when someone's lying, for example, when someone, you can tell, but you can't actually tell, and this is part of his teaching, you can't tell what the person really is thinking. So you can see a look pass across a person's face. But for us, for people, it seems like we go very quickly to the story behind why they're... So we see someone's telling a lie, let's say, and we go very quickly to this whole story about... And we consider that as a big part of the truth that we saw. We saw something, that's true, but...

[26:02]

where we go with it is really just always never getting at what happened. It just never gets at it. And once you accept that, once you sort of relax with that, oh, I see, I'm never getting at it with my mind, my mind is not gonna get at it. It doesn't mean that you say to yourself, I must not have seen that look or something. You don't say, you don't pretend you didn't see what you saw. but you cultivate, I think, I think that whether it's delusion or enlightenment is whether you cultivate some kind of scary narrative about what's going on or whether you cultivate a curiosity about, wow, what's going on for this person that they felt like they had to do that right now. So I don't think it's, you know, I think whether it's delusion or enlightenment is very conditional on the situation. Yes, Linda? Well, I think it's based on conditions.

[27:27]

So, like, I'm trying to introduce a condition. I'm trying to introduce a condition in us for when we feel outrage, we might do a different thing than feed it. It's all still, you can't get at. I don't know if you can get at that. It's conditions. Doesn't the story suggest that we're making a choice or something like that? Yeah, right. So you make choices, but the choices you make are among the ones available to you. And the way things become available is is based on conditions. So that's why we try to encourage each other, right? We try to introduce, the Buddha tried to introduce some new conditions to encourage people to do it differently.

[28:30]

So we just try to keep, whenever we, if we think something could introduce a good condition, we try to do it and then we see if it did or not, I guess. And then we do it that way. uh... kate and then i think about feeding the wolf or not if i'm angry about something and think about who do you talk to, who's going to feed it and who's going to turn it another way and when you talk about it at all and how when you're dealing with it in your own mind you're conscious of your conscious of your own drives And how do you become more conscious? Someone might, sometimes, someone says something that sticks in your mind. And that can be one condition to make a difference.

[29:38]

I mean, I think it's sort of the beauty and the terror of it is the conditionality. In other words, because it's conditioned, things can always change and new conditions can be introduced. But because it's conditioned, you can't control it either. So at that moment, do you think of, do you think of it or not? I mean, do you think, okay, I want to talk to somebody about this. Who am I going to talk to? I mean, you know, what do you think? I can't control it. Cole? That was a great talk. Two things. I don't know if you're familiar or not with the kind of children's teaching and practice of breathing and the pollution. second thing is when you were speaking to the children I just you know whether it's children or adults I think there's something about that way of thinking like

[30:49]

When you FTP to your server... to write this to a child It's a little hard because I don't think if I hadn't planned my talk before I found out I was gonna do the kids, I wouldn't have brought, I don't think I would have done good and bad. I wouldn't have introduced the idea of good and bad so much.

[32:14]

I don't think I just wouldn't have gone there somehow. So it's like that's what came out when I tried to merge the two things somehow. Good, well, that's good. I loved what you had to say to the children too, and I agree that the simplicity with which we permit ourselves to talk to children is almost always the easiest way to get information between adults too. but it was really helpful to them, and then they say back to me something that was basically diametrically opposite to what I had said. And I think that they heard the right thing, and that what I think is up to me to choose to say to someone isn't necessarily what gets transmitted.

[33:27]

So it's maybe not all my responsibility. That's why it might be better not even to think about it like you're helping the other person. Just really to try to find a way to say it, that something, I don't know. I don't know, I think it's the realm of talking is, it's pretty, that's really where the two, you know, the inner delusion and enlightenment really meet there. I think Barbara, and then Sonia? Just one quick comment, and your comment to the children about Something happened this day, but you have the next day. One of the slogans that I use for myself is to remind myself that a day can start at any moment. You don't have to work something together to start the next day. That's just a convenient way to... Day is like every minute is a day, right? Some days really are like that. Like when you have little babies. Let's see, Sonia, and then Jerry.

[34:33]

Is your name Sonia? I like what you said about energy in and energy out. So looking at delusion and also enlightenment. That's the energy again, what you're doing with the energy in and out with looking at face when you are talking, that reading the face, and that's exactly when you were talking, I could see that energy in you, that is, reading the energy is the science we have to look at today. And my question is, should we look at this meditation as reading the face, as a study? And how can we bring that to the children? Because Like adults, they don't like to do meditation. They don't like to practice this energy.

[35:36]

How we can implement this, bring this to practicality? Well, you know, I don't know. But kids really, they model, they go on what you do. They learn what you do. That's what they learn. So you just have to do it and hope. Do it yourself and hope that it looks interesting enough to catch their attention. So they can ask you, what are you doing there anyway? I'm looking at if I can teach children, then I can teach the Middle East. Yeah. Jerry, do you still? I found the meditation very interesting, and I'm not sure exactly how you intended it, but for me, breathing in the awfulness met with a lot of resistance.

[36:41]

I found myself kind of tightening up, and in order to really be able to do it, I really had to expand and let go, and really let go of the small mind a lot and just like open to it and I thought it was very useful and it would be a very useful meditation in that way. For me, yeah, I mean I don't know if it's doing anything else but it really helps me find my edge of where I, where I, where's that muscle where I'm keeping the bad things out and keeping the good things in and that's how you find it by thinking of really bad things and seeing if you can take them in. What's it going to take to get there and then And then also seeing how it feels like, oh, as I read about this not from Pema, but from Trungpa, and it's like there's a big space inside of you when you find this thing that you're going out, it keeps getting bigger somehow. It's very counterintuitive in a certain way. At first I said, why is she making us do this?

[37:42]

That's not what we're supposed to do. Thich Nhat Hanh says, you know, look at your heart, smile at your heart. Why is she making us do this? And in order to, it is all the time. So to be able to let it in. The idea that you can keep it out is the really diluted part, yeah. And Sue? Also on that, it's hard to shift gears so quick. Back and forth. That's what I'm thinking about. Yeah, I think you yeah you it's right I yeah both are yeah I mean especially this morning when I was doing it in the way I was doing it you couldn't really do it but I think you they people really do it's more like you get it down to just gray smoke is the bad or something and you breathe that in and then blue light or something and you know I mean you get it down to something really simple but I just wanted to try it together.

[38:50]

That was great. Peter? I appreciate your talk too and on that same note I found also that Yeah. Jake. You said breathing in the oxygen and breathing out the carbon dioxide. And the plants are taking in the carbon dioxide. They're breathing out the oxygen. So delusion, enlightenment. The same. what one person's meat is another person's poison or something. Yeah. Yes. I don't know your name. I can't remember your name.

[39:52]

I'm just going to add on to some of the things that were spoken about hemichondria and I worked quite a bit with that and they start that's not real threatening to breathe in. And then you work your way up to things that are really difficult to breathe in. And you always start with your own mind, your own... You don't start with like pollution or something out there. You start with something, your own anger or something, your own funky state of mind. So it's not like you're rejecting yourself or something. Oh, please. Thank you. I was going to ask you, actually. Meeting is non-discriminating. Non-discrimination. in a non-discriminating way.

[41:07]

So we simply breathe in and without discriminating. And whatever comes in, comes in. And that's the compost for cleaning it out. And then whatever we breathe in becomes purified because it's non-discriminating. Non-discrimination means, or purification means non-discriminating. Rather than thinking about objects, physically breathe in with whatever it is. And just let everything in. And then breathe out what you're actually purified without thinking about it. So there's more discrimination.

[42:15]

So simply, breathe. Suzuki Roshi said, when you breathe in, you come to life. When you breathe out, you let go of everything. That's my understanding. Thank you. That might be the last word. Thank you.

[42:58]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ