How's that? Well, we say that Zen can't be communicated by the conscious mind, so I don't really know why I'm here. Probably is what led to all those stories of people getting hit with sticks and getting their noses twisted and things like that. Actually, we did get hit by sticks in San Francisco one year, about 40 years ago. The bishop was retiring and going back to Japan and he came through and it was a big deal and he just came around and hit us all with his stick. And it worked, I haven't forgotten. So, Suzuki Roshi was asked why he bothered talking and lecturing when he also claimed that it didn't represent the nature of Zen.

[01:11]

And he said, well, it's like scratching your foot with your shoe on. But I talk anyway. I think I'll shed some light on that today, at least I'll shed one version of light. What triggered this whole thought that I'm going to try to present is the comment that Sojin Roshi made. One day I was telling him about the wonders of the latest research in cosmology and how we found dark energy and dark matter, and everybody was having a good time, and he says, oh, he says, that's the Sando Kai. And so that was a couple years ago, and I've been thinking about it ever since. Because I didn't know any Sando Kai, and he didn't know any physics.

[02:21]

I've been reading the Sandokai and I've been thinking about it and I've been studying it with a wonderful group of people and a Dharma group that meets alternate Mondays and that's really helped. So there's an interesting thing about talking about the Sandokai, it turns out there's a correlation between how old the speaker is and and how frequently they talk about the Sandokai. And Suzuki talked about the Sandokai in 1970, and he died in 71, and he was 67 years old, and I thought, gee, you know, I was 30s at the time, low 30s, and I thought, well, he's pretty old, you know, Now I'm 68 so I better say something about the Sangha Kai just in case.

[03:32]

So when he spoke about the Sangha Kai he talked about four lines a lecture and it took about 10 or 12 lectures to cover the Sangha Kai and this is all available in a beautiful book that Chödrön Roshi is responsible for making available, editing. But I'm just a little guy and I'm going to try and do one line today. So, I'll be lucky to get that across. The one line is, branching streams flow on in the dark. It's the title of the book. So this is an old poem, and it uses Chinese Zen imagery.

[04:41]

And until you know the imagery, you can't really get a feeling for what they're trying to say. The streams are kind of like light flowing in the darkness. And light, in this context, is considered the world of duality. So it's not like a good little searchlight. No, it's the world of duality. It's the world that we can express. It's the world that we can write down. almost all that our consciousness deals with, the world of light. And the darkness is a much bigger world, it's the absolute, the world of everything.

[05:49]

This is the world that you can't talk about, This is the world that you discover through Zen. This is the world that exhibits the characteristic of oneness of all beings. And the light is part of the dark and it makes the whole thing in this view. So, I thought about that and I think it's a nice view of things because there's a lot more that we don't know that we do know. And science is sort of gradually pulling things into the light

[06:52]

of consciousness, of conscious feeling, and Zen is sort of slowly pulling everything together as one, the dark and the light. But we work on the same idea, that the darkness can be seen through the light. I mean, we're working this way to approach the oneness and the absolute. And so it seemed to me that I had to think of the light as being a reflection of the darkness. So again, I went to Sojin Roshi and I said, well, it seems to me that light is a reflection of the darkness. And he said, the function of darkness is light. And I like that.

[07:55]

I like it when a Zen master is a Zen master. So, that seems to be the situation. So, I started thinking, well, you know, if I see streams flowing down through mountains, I can tell where the streams go, which means I can tell where the mountains are. So, there's a little reflection in the light of the darkness. The Fukan Zazengi teaching us to do Zazen. So, the first thing that I take from this view is that By studying in the light, by being the light, which we are, we can get glimmers of the darkness.

[09:04]

In other words, we can scratch our foot through a shoe and get a little bit of satisfaction. So it's worthwhile to study, read this stuff, talk to each other. the be-all and the end-all, but it's worthwhile. And this is my opinion, I mean, some people are scholars. So, the way this branching streams flowing on in the dark was used in the Sound of Kai was a picture of the the practice flowing through time and the streams of light that were coming and going and branching were the lineage. And you can use that same model for a lot of different things that go on in our lives like

[10:17]

you could see the darkness as the primal formation of the precepts and our lives going through them. You can think of it that way. But another thing is that It turns out that your relationship to darkness is very important. And the way that you work on your relationship with darkness is by practicing. All of our practices, the services, the tsao-tsen, the work, the mindfulness, takes you closer to this great unknown absolute.

[11:27]

And it's... it's not just theoretical. Recently I was in Bhutan and they have one percent of the population there is priests, celibate priests. And they're all working hard, and they don't think there's enough of them to save the country. And they do ceremonies, long, hard ceremonies. We just did a Bodhisattva ceremony, which is kind of long, but that's nothing compared to what these guys are doing. And they're trying to save the country by their practice. And I always wondered about that sort of thing.

[12:31]

But I think it's also true of the older—when you get older you get a feeling for this sort of thing. As this light that is you flowing through the darkness gets darker and darker and starts to peter out, you feel more one with the darkness and you kind of get ready to just merge. I asked Sojin Roshi again about this sort of thing. I said, I have a young grandson and he's just becoming a person, he's developing a self, and I can see that he's going to suffer.

[13:48]

And I love him. And I don't want him to suffer. So I said, Satsang Roshi, what can I do to keep him from suffering? And he says, work on your practice. And I'd rather have some kind of a pill or something. So, and what I've decided to just present, because that's been my practice, is to work on my practice for the sake of the people around me. And I'm convinced that if you work on your practice, that it creates a harmoniousness that goes to the people around you and keeps them from suffering as much.

[15:05]

I don't know how far it extends. I hope it goes to the whole world. The Bhutanese think at least it reaches the borders. And so that's the second thing that I get from this idea of branching streams flowing in the darkness, that these branching streams work with the darkness and create harmoniousness, because you take the harmonious from the darkness and you express it in the light. So you can help each other that way. So those are the things that I got from this one line, and we have plenty of time. So then I wanted to put in a footnote, because I opened this whole thing with Sojourner Roshi's comment about cosmology.

[16:22]

So I'm going to talk about cosmology for a while, and it's not instructions for how to live your life, but it shows something that made me realize that Sojourn was right. By the way, the data that made him right was not taken at the time he made his statement, so this is a valid prediction. Just about a year ago, some astronomers got together and they got a whole thousand hours of time on the Hubble telescope, which is an amazingly large grant. What they did is they looked out through the north, north out of the Milky Way, where there's not much background, so they could see a long way.

[17:37]

Then they recorded all the galaxies for as far as they could see, fainter and fainter and fainter, so they used their whole thousand hours. Some of these they did the redshift analysis, which tells you how far away they are. and others they got a whole bunch of people on the ground to look at. So what they ended up was with a map of all of the galaxies in an area about four times the size of the moon and going almost back to the beginning of the universe and where they were spaced. And it looked like a big spider web if you just projected on the screen. But then they did a really cute thing. They took the galaxies that were far away, and they looked at their images with what's called a gravitational lensing analysis.

[18:38]

General relativity says that light is affected by gravity, just like mass. And gravitational lensing takes advantage of that. Actually, as the light from these faraway galaxies goes through all of the matter, the dark matter and the normal matter, mostly dark matter, 80-90% dark matter, the image gets split and it gets bent and it gets distorted. And these guys were able to analyze all of that and find out how much matter was in between these galaxies and us. they're able to do it in steps. So, what they ended up with was this map of the universe in time, basically, of all the dark matter and what did it look like? It looked like branching streams of dark matter going all the way back 14 billion years.

[19:48]

These streams, all of the light that we see from the stars and stuff comes from normal matter, which is, you know, a few percent, and yet the dark matter kind of herded it into these streams, and the streams are kept apart by the dark energy, and so you have these branching streams, and this dark matter and dark energy going back, streams of light, all those millions of galaxies. And all those millions of galaxies, those little streams of light, is where any consciousness like ours would be. Because that's the kind of matter that we're made out of. So that seemed pretty close to a Sandokai-type description. But it's not Zen because I can say it, and it's not personal, so. That's all I have. So anything you want to ask is fair game. Yes.

[20:52]

The dark matter is the branching streams and within the streams are all of the galaxies. The dark matter kind of herds the galaxies into the streams of dark matter. Yeah, it's mostly dark matter. And we don't really know. We see it reflected in the light and we don't really know what it is. Those branching streams that they found. Or also, we don't see those. Well, you could call the light, the light is sort of showing us where the streams are. You could call the light the streams. Yeah, because that's all we see. But we're figuring out this other stuff. But we don't really know why it happens. Yeah, way in the back. Yeah.

[22:07]

They got onto dark matter about, oh, 15 or 20 years ago. They were watching how the galaxies would move around each other. And if they believed in normal mechanics, which we've never known to fail, or even relativistic mechanics, they didn't move right. They moved as if they were much heavier and moving with the part that we see inside of a much larger part that is heavier. But we couldn't see anything of that. And through different experiments and stuff, they figured out that it was not any kind of matter that we knew. it had to be something else. And they called it dark matter because there was no light coming from it. So that's dark matter.

[23:11]

And I should tell you dark energy too then. Then you'll be up to date. Dark energy is an energy that causes expansion. So it's kind of opposite of gravity. The simplest theory is that it's everywhere uniformly, but it's very weak. But once things start getting pretty far apart, it becomes dominant. So they were looking at how fast things were moving very far away. in these special experiments looking at supernovae. They can tell. And they found it far away. We would expect things to slow down because you have the Big Bang and everything kind of slowly comes down, but actually it's speeding up. That's what they found. That's what the light told us about the dark energy.

[24:17]

So the dark energy actually took over about six billion years ago when things got diffuse enough. And it's made a lot of changes. There's not nearly as many galaxies colliding. We're making a lot fewer stars. And the universe is changing its character. And as far as we know, it's just going to keep getting more diffuse. So that's dark energy. So those two things are something that we can see the effect from the light, but we don't know what they are, we don't know how to get in touch with them. Maybe we get in touch with them by doing Zazen. Probably as much as we do, I mean we're made out of electrons and stuff, you know, and we think we have purpose in selves.

[25:36]

I take a very anthropomorphic view towards the universe. Yeah. Well, it wasn't something that I decided I needed to do and worked on it. It was that I was attracted to this practice. And for some reason, I just kept doing it. But I see the effects now. I mean, I see, you know, even though I'm very much a person, I actually feel some compassion coming from somewhere.

[26:47]

So, I've somehow either shed something or gained something. And I actually feel compassion that comes, I don't know where from. So I think that's one effect. And the other effect is just the normal ... I mean, I can't tell, see? I can't tell if I made my daughter not be crazy anymore by concentrating on her and sitting with her and trying to give her comfort, because I don't know what would have happened otherwise. So it's difficult. You can't prove this sort of thing. But it seems like a good way to work.

[27:55]

in your life and with people. But I've noticed it in other people too, I've noticed it like whenever I go and talk with Sojin, it always makes me feel good, you know. Why? So that's the kind of evidence I've got, and that's the kind of things that have happened to me. Yeah. Doug, can you say something about your reaction to the Buddhists and your job? Yeah, I was very much impressed by those guys. They go in early in the monk body. They really work hard and they see themselves as having an overwhelming job of saving the country. And I saw them just staggering with fatigue and still dancing.

[29:01]

And that's a large fraction of the population, 1% of the population. In the people, I saw... a very comfortable and gentle way with each other, and a welcoming way with us, and just an absolute belief in the tenets of Buddhism. They have Manjushri in their school rooms, And they have typically a room in each house for meditation and worship.

[30:08]

A lot of their worship is done by... What do they call it? Well, they use images and ceremonies, but when you get right down to it, we kind of kept pushing on this monk that interviewed us, and when we get right down to it, he said, well, it's okay. He says, you see, the Tantric Buddhists don't tell people what they do, see, it's secret. But if I said, well, okay, just go in a quiet room and get a cushion and sit in lotus position. So we recognized that. It's a wonderful country, very much together, and they're doing a tremendous experiment by changing to

[31:17]

democracy. We wish him well. John. Yeah. There's they they seem to not have really decided what to do in this case. A lot of Nepalese are in the southern part of the country and they're Hindus. Some people have told me that there's more Nepalese than, that there's more Hindus than Buddhists, which is true in one of the other countries he visited, Sikkim. That's a sore spot and a problem and there didn't seem to be a clear solution.

[32:20]

And that's a real test, how that comes out. Megan? What are the monks trying to say through time from floods, famines, attacks, people going crazy, the whole thing. Well, from suffering, from suffering. I think from suffering in the Buddhist sense. They don't want people to get lost and suffer. There's a question here. Yeah, you've got to scratch it yourself. Oh yeah.

[33:53]

Anything you can think of. But it's always a hint. Yeah. Yeah. It's scratching. It feels like someone's hitting you with a stick, but it's actually scratching. Russ. Yeah. I think when I was doing, if I helped my kids, it was without knowing it. And I was searching for a way to actually know that I was helping them.

[34:57]

But I don't, I'm not searching for that anymore. I'm just working on my practice. Can you say that last sentence louder? Craziness.

[36:05]

I don't see craziness as something that functions that way. I think it makes more like a whirlpool. I don't see it as forming like a flow. I see it more as a disruptor, like a rock in the road, something like that. And it always bothers me, the Kalpa idea really appeals to me.

[37:11]

And it worries me that they seem to be thinking now that it doesn't, that we don't have Kalpas, but that it just keeps on going for us. Yeah. Yeah, it's not my fault. Yeah, we just take data and guess at what it means. I know how you feel. I like that idea of coming in. But it looks like we're just going to go on forever. Yeah, in a physics sense, yes. I think they're coming around to the Buddhist idea of some little part of our brains is getting uppity and thinking it exists.

[38:25]

Andrea. I was thinking, you've sat for 40 some odd years. Yeah. And you've lived for almost 70 years. Yeah. Sorry. So far. And in that process, you've found in yourself or tapped into I'm wondering about your experience of the process of aging and what role you think that plays or how that plays into the experience that you're having now of being more intimate with the dark.

[39:30]

Well, the first thing is the lessening of the hormonal flow. really helps. And I think you get kicked around for a long time. You finally can either see it coming or just take it, you know. And so you don't get as concerned and you relax more. And that's, I think that's when these things come in and become part of you. Compassion. Yeah, I said these things, but one would be compassion. So you're saying if you get out of the way, your ideas about what you want for your life and where you're going gets out of the way and compassion

[40:40]

I think so. I think as you stop going around in a loop being yourself, you know, then these more general things start coming to the fore. Is that true for everyone? No, it's not. That's another question I asked Sojin Roshi once. I said, you know, can everybody be fixed by zazen? He says, well, he says, Some people do Zazen for decades and it doesn't work. It looks like Zazen, but it's not. That broke my heart. Can everybody be fixed by getting older? No, but they'll cause less damage. Yeah. This is the last question. You answered the question of consciousness as self-consciousness.

[41:47]

Yeah. But even consciousness is a mystery. Knowing. Knowing. Yeah. An idea when you fit it between... Just knowing. Yeah. Well... Yeah. I can't repeat it. You'll have to say it again. I said, you answered the question on consciousness, you spoke about self-consciousness, but I think obviously we're conscious of the unconscious. But there's a mystery with consciousness itself, with the quality of knowing something. Where does it fit in the material world? Yeah. I can see that more as a direct evolutionary advantage to be able to do that.

[42:48]

To know something, remember something, act on something again. I see that as an advantage to reproducing more than other species. Would it arise from purely... would it be extendable purely in material terms? I think they can probably almost explain that now by sticking you in an NMR and doing experiments with you. They're really getting pretty precise about how certain things can arise.

[43:24]

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