An unsurpassed, penetrating, and perfect dharma is rarely met with, even in a hundred thousand million kalpas. to see and listen to, to remember and accept. I vow to taste the truth of the divine God's works. Good morning, Berkey Zen Center Sangha. Good morning and welcome to today's Dharma talk. It will be delivered by Luminous Heart. Luminous Heart began her Buddhist practice in 1987, and her first teacher was Thich Nhat Hanh. with whom she studied with in Plum Village. She led a Thich Nhat Hanh Sangha in Los Angeles for 10 years, and later joined the Zen Center, where she resided for 11 years.

[01:07]

She was Shiso, supporting her teacher Roshi Egyoku Makau in 2009. She relocated to East Bay in 2016 and joined Berkeley Zen Center, where she has served on the BBC board and currently is a member of the and participates in the coordinating group for many communities. Luminous Heart is a retired clinical psychologist and a retired hospice chaplain, but she has not retired from Zen practice, thank goodness. Thank you for speaking. Special welcome to anyone who's here for the first time. either in the Zendo or online. Special welcome. Gorgeous day. This is my favorite time of the year, autumn in general, but especially that everybody I hope see the beautiful beaver super moon last night.

[02:19]

It's a perigee moon, so closest to the earth. It looked very big. I have a new little dog in my house and I can take her out without leash in an enclosed area where I live, garden area. And we were out last night gazing at the moon and early this morning because we also do that. It's just been a treasure. I feel very moonful. I hope you're all warm enough i'm very layered with clothing i hope you are too it's a it's chilly okay so if i can do this did i lose am i right seem good to me okay actually i don't need these i just had eye surgery and the glasses that i've gotten are theoretically

[03:24]

or reading, but at a certain level, and otherwise they don't work. So I'm going to try it without and see if I can see what I want to see here. So when I first began to think of a focus for this, I initially decided, no? I decided on the topic of anger and how we relate to it in Buddhist practice. I read articles and listened to some talks on anger from various perspectives. And at a certain point I found myself going stale. Not that this topic can ever be fully put, sort of done and dusted.

[04:27]

Got that handled. That doesn't happen with anger. We see anger everywhere. Sometimes in ourselves, between ourselves and another, or between others. Lord knows. And in the world. We see anger, rage, hate, revenge, impudence, violence, all manifestations of how anger can color what we see and how we are, actually how we are in the world with it. And in these times, these very uncertain, very uncertain times, and often painful times, I think it's work we need to stay with. However, this morning, I began to shift my focus when I was planning a trip back east to New England to visit at the most beautiful time of the year in New England for me, and to revisit some of my thoughts.

[05:46]

I went to college in Massachusetts, I went to graduate school in Massachusetts, in the Connecticut Valley area, which is sort of my inner geography. The poet Dina Metzger talks about how we all have places. We know our home, this is mine, one of mine at least. So I wanted to go see some old and very cherished friends. including my college roommate of four years, and actually another friend, my closest friend in college, to also see, and other people as well, and my older brother. And actually, he was the original stimulus for my creating the whole trip, which became a kind of odyssey. memory lane for me in many ways it was quite lovely it was a wonderful time as it turned out and i had the added joy of having my dear daughter come with me and to share with her she said to me i don't know you at age 20 mom i don't know who you were and how you and what formed you and so it was quite special as it turned out for her to

[07:11]

be with friends of mine and have them be telling stories about me and with me and so on to get a glimpse of where I came from, so to speak. So my brother's wife has breast cancer. He has prostate cancer and fast-progressing glaucoma. And I became, I haven't seen him in 10 years. So I became aware that I wanted to see him and that it could very possibly be the last time that I would see him. So I felt as though I wanted to go to say goodbye. I was not planning to say that to him, not given the nature of our particular relationship.

[08:13]

I would not say that aloud to him, but the visit, the perspective of the visit became a koan for me. This very challenging relationship, how to be present with it, with him. So let me give you a little bit of the back story of why this is a working koan for me. When I think of my brother or journey together, I remember how much I adored him as a child. He was two years older, and the way that that can happen with siblings is that I sort of worshipped the ground he walked on. Everything he said was the right thing, the true thing, and I kind of saw his eyes and his perspective. And just in case I didn't, he would make sure that I did, but it wasn't so hard to persuade me.

[09:15]

I was very impacted by him and loved him very much. He was a very physically challenged boy, extraordinarily severe and multiple allergies, dreadful asthma, and he had an anaphylactic response to nuts and nut products, which are in many more foods than you might imagine. So as a young child, I saw him as a small boy placed on a stretcher, strapped in, put into an ambulance that just screeched its way out of our driveway, taking him to the hospital because he couldn't breathe. And I saw that many times. Terrifying, actually. I didn't know that he would come back. We had no rugs in our house.

[10:17]

He was very allergic, very allergic to dust. So we had no rugs. We had no pets except for fish, turtle, that she had at one point along the way. Although every year on my birthday, when asked what I wanted, I said I wanted them. or a dog or a cat or a bird. Never happened, but I never gave up asking. That was our house. We really had to be careful with him. We go out to a restaurant, which we very rarely did. My dad, who was a pediatrician, my mom was also a nurse, so we were a medical family. my dad would go into the kitchen of the restaurant and interview the chef and make sure that which exact olive oils and so on and so forth went into each piece of the food. It was because he really was, it was kind of dangerous for him otherwise.

[11:19]

On top of that, he had to spend in bed, probably spent, he probably missed a third of school each year for all of grammar school, because he would get sick very, very quickly. And I, on the other hand, was nauseatingly healthy and very athletic. Think of it, and try to imagine that for him, it must have been so hard for him, because I'd come in, I loved him, I wanted him to come in and visit, and I'd come in all sweaty and muddy and dirty from having played outside, and he would be a lion in his bed not able to move. So, I don't have to imagine too hard how that must have been for him, my relative freedom of motion. On top of all that history, in ninth grade, he spent three months in a hospital bed because he felt his retina

[12:26]

And in those days, the treatment for that was to be put on your back with sandbags, immobilizing you completely. And he was in that state for three months at age 14. I can't fully, but my parents were tuning back and forth from the suburbs to New York every day to see him. It was a very hard time for him. And my parents then decided after that to send him away to a preparatory school. I don't know all their reasons for it, but I rather imagine he was behind some in school because he couldn't, teachers brought his homework and so on, but he wasn't having the school interactions that he needed. And so he was sent away in 10th grade preparatory school. And in my experience of him, he changed radically when he went away.

[13:36]

And the first year when he came back home for the Thanksgiving weekend, the other to me, he felt very unavailable, removed, super cool kind of. keeping us all pretty much at a distance, including my parents. And he would sort of hold forth and tell funny stories. He could be very charming and interesting in that way, but it was at a distance, without contact. And I felt enormously pained by that, the lack of what had been our connection, which I didn't understand at all. So I made up stories about why that might be so. I didn't know the word trauma in those days of that time in my life, but I thought maybe something terrible had happened to him at school, something really terrible that I couldn't imagine, something terrible.

[14:49]

And again, I didn't have languaging for this, but I had some sense that he had been so close to my parents, kind of enmeshed because he was so ill for so long, that he had needed to really start to break away in some way. Or simply that he had been... What just happened? Okay. I don't use my hands, I guess. Is that good? We're good? Yeah. Do you have a pocket? I do have a pocket. Okay. What I think I started to say is it may have been the direction he was already... but it just became more pronounced after he went away.

[15:50]

What I do know is that we never came back to any connection, any real connection again. Not in all the subsequent years of when we grew up, when he got married, I got married, we had deaths in our family, we had celebrations in our family, not in any of those contexts. Was there ever any sense of intimacy or closeness again? Keep talking. reminds me of being at Plum Village one summer with Thich Nhat Hanh and the fascination that he was because he had a very soft, gentle voice and he was giving lectures on the Abhidharma and so he was mic'd and mic'd and mic'd.

[17:04]

He had all these things. But he also had his own tape recorder. He wanted to do it himself as well. So he would, you'd hear this click when he came to the end of a tape and then there'd be signs with 400 and some people in the room. And he would very slowly in his way tape recorder and he'd look at it and nod and see that it needed to be changed and so he'd press that button and open it up and then he'd turn it over, make sure it was in snugly, and then he'd put the cover back on and then he'd press the button little thingies were working, and then you put it back in this pocket. It was like this total meditation for all of us. We're all sitting watching like this, so it just reminded me. So when my mother died, and he had never really come back close with my parents either, but when my

[18:14]

mother died on her deathbed where a deathbed promises on her deathbed she said you have to keep you can do this and he can't you have to do this so i said yes and i kept trying to do that for years and years inadequately and unsuccessfully because he he really was out of a nature to or self-disclose or be vulnerable or accessible, at least in my perception or the way that I think of operating in my judgment. And I have my judgments in here, of course. So I couldn't find a way to be in contact with him. And I kept trying. Part of the way my brother related to me was that he critiqued me a lot. I was found wanting most of the time.

[19:18]

I did not quite meet with his approval and it was palpable. Other people could see it and tell me. This is the back story. This is to connect this story now to practice. I think it's in our nature, at least in our storehouses, seeds of possum. at least one of them, is that we can relate with compassion, we can be deeply open-hearted and caring and kindly. It's a possibility for all of us and for many of us it manifests easily and more often and perhaps less, but it's there for the taking. I think it's one of the reasons I became a clinical psychologist and later a chaplain was really wanting to support and be of help.

[20:22]

Of course, there are always other reasons as well, but that, I think, was one of them. Along with perhaps wanting to be right in my perception of what other people should do or see or how they should be, the judge part of me, the controller part of me. And I think there's a potential for therapists, and that's certainly not all therapists and counselors, but certainly for some to rely on diagnoses and to know what their client's experience is and how they feel and what which in fact is not possible. We can't ever know. the experience fully of another, what their inner geography is, their context, their field. It's hard enough for us to begin to know our own.

[21:23]

So in preparing for this visit, I spoke to my teacher about my brother and about the trip. And she's been my teacher for 25 years and she certainly knows my concerns and she knows All my blind spots are enough of them. So I took this koan to her. I was a shuso, as Ross mentioned, or head trainee at the Zen Center in Los Angeles. In that center, in that tradition, you're a shuso for a year. And on the first day of your shusory, I don't know what's the title. Roshi presents the Shuso, the new Shusos, with a fan. And you carry any time you're in the Zando, if you're bowing for the community, if you bow in and bow out, if you are giving a talk, you're the first to speak in any context, you're invited to speak first, and the fan is with you all the time.

[22:41]

And on this were written three words. See as is. Just three words. Easy, right? See as is. Okay, got that down. Not so easy, really. It can be maybe 60 years or so. begin to get close to it as a full way of being. It's very central for our practice to see as is and to see how we lead our lives. Not wish things to be, or dream things to be, or imagine things to be, or fear things to be, but actually seeing, seeing as is. So just as a side story around this topic area, the year after I was a chaplain in the Los Angeles Men's Central Jail, and I worked with a cadre of chaplains, so we were all in a variety of jails and prisons.

[24:07]

And one of the priests from the Zen Center was working in a central California prison, and he created a Sangha there and actually gave Jukai to a few of the members of that. And at one point, one of the members of that Sangha finished out his term in prison and came out. and he had taken Zhukai, and he wanted to come to the Zen Center. And at that point, it emerged, and we had not aware that he had been a sex offender with teenage girls and latency-age girls. And at the Zen Center, there are 26 residential arenas and possibilities, and there were two families. and there were two other residents who were survivors of very radical sexual abuse.

[25:15]

So it created a huge, as you imagine, brouhaha, and Roshi, a Gyoku committee, actually called a HEAR committee, and she asked me to coordinate it, and the idea of it was that we were going to research out how other institutions worked with this, with this kind of issue, if they did. So we were Protestant churches and Catholic institutions and synagogues and mosques and Hindu temples and talking to people who ran halfway houses, anything that was residential or partially residential. It was... We did this for two years. And Roshi Egyoku would attend the meetings maybe once out of every three times. And she would listen, mostly listen. And at the end of each session, she would ask what we came to call guidance because they pushed us so much.

[26:29]

They were so simple and they pushed us so hard. She would say first, so who is not included? in this consideration. And we've been including and studying and still, who is not here? Who is not? It's a very important question. And the other question she often asked was, what is not yet seen? Which is an interesting question because if you saw it, you'd already be seeing it. So it's a challenge to remember that we're not seeing everything and how can we open to see? to receive what we're not yet seeing. And I felt the challenge of these questions hugely. And it was actually very important teaching for me to not operate from foregone conclusions or to know something, to be sure that I know the right thing. So back to see as is.

[27:31]

This is not a simple direction. It's an ongoing challenge. It's very closely related. I feel them to be quite connected because it's hard to see as is if you already know. It puts up a block. So as we know, Not knowing is the first peacemaker order tenants. And not knowing does not mean that we don't know anything about what is before us. We may know a goodly bit, but it rather bespeaks an attitude, oneself open, staying open to seeing what is here, what is this now. Not from, oh well, I already know this, I recognize this, so I know what this is, but what hasn't been considered yet?

[28:40]

We, in our language, we say not hoping to fix view. So it's a practice of continuing to open the lens of the heart-mind. constantly open. So when I talked to Roshi about my trip, she first, she can be quite Manjushri-esque when needed, and so she was being that with me at this point, and she spoke to me about my pattern, which I have, of to fix, to do something, and at one level it could be seen as a way of trying to control a situation or to have it have an outcome as I think it surely should have the outcome as it should be. He invited me to see as is with my brother, to actually see releasing all my stories of which I had many, many, many stories and releasing the need to change

[30:01]

what was present or to fix things. And then she added on that our relationship, my relationship with my brother was, I'm quoting, a karmic coincidence. Well, I'd never heard the term before, I don't know what else has, but I had never heard that term before and something triggered me and I started to laugh. And I laughed for, I don't know how long I laughed. I was uncontrollable, I was weeping from laughter, and she was laughing too. And we went on and on, laughing about this kind of coincidence of a relationship. If you feel into this, it's very powerful, actually. So at the end of my five minutes of howling with laughter, without quite knowing why I was laughing, actually, I felt as though I had lost about 100 pounds of weight that I had been living for a very long time with my brother.

[31:09]

It's like something, you know, the animals shake off after trauma. I felt like that. I had shaken it off. All the family shibboleths, all the oughts and shoulds about how we should be. And then, coincidentally, karmically connected, which could be said of all of us, by the way, are karmically, coincidentally connected here. It freed me to just see. It was an enormous freedom for me to just see my brother as without my stories about him and to love him, even though there are a lot of times I don't really like him very well, which is different from loving him and important. and to truly wish him well in his life. Okay, so then we had a 24-hour visit.

[32:09]

I arrived with my daughter, and the first words, I hadn't seen my brother in 10 years, and the first words he said to me were, well, you're really kind of late. Okay, that was, there we are. Okay, so I can't say it was an easy or comfortable visit, His criticizing was there, and as a way of closing down talks when others have different perceptions, he's not really tolerant to hear other views. So those behaviors were still there. It felt different, and it felt truly different, was that I could sense, feel, but certainly sense the suffering in his way of being. I could feel it. not just with me, but with his niece, my daughter, whom he hadn't seen as an adult, and with his own wife. And by seeing that, as it is, at least to a greater degree, compassion rose very organically.

[33:20]

It wasn't like I had to work for the compassion, it just came. And I'll do some sadness as I speak. I may not see my brother again. So I did say goodbye out loud because that's not, that would have been way too out of the sphere. But I said goodbye inside myself. But I know my practice around this isn't over. He's a teacher for me, an ongoing life teacher. Yeah. So I want to talk a little bit about how I'm practicing with this, in this koan of relationship with a difficult person.

[34:24]

So Thich Nhat Hanh gave us a while back this image of pointing ourselves toward the North Star in our practice. We say things like beings are numberless, I vow to save them all. We point ourselves to it. We point to the North Star and on that trajectory we fall off the path a lot. all the time, because we're just folk, we're human, and we do that, and we fall off. And then, hopefully, we check that we're off, then all these skillful means and practices that are available to us in this practice for writing ourselves, for first of all, becoming aware that we're off the path, and then seeing what that is, feeling into it, and then doing what's in order to put ourselves back again on the path.

[35:30]

And we do this over and over. Somebody said the expression, eight times down, nine times up. But that's more than eight and nine. It's thousands of times in our lifetime that we fall off. Even with the very strong intentionalities, we fall off. But we do this over and over so that these ways of being that we aspire toward eventually come to rest more in us, to abide in us, so to speak, or become a return to inside ourselves. And even with the most sincere practice, there are places for each of us that are especially challenging, as is my brother for me. and require patience and loving kindness from me to me to start off with.

[36:31]

So one practice is learning how to pay attention to when and how, I'm going to speak in the first person, how I go into story. So just to begin to develop awareness of, oh, I'm in story, to be able to say that. It's kind of tricky because we're kind of a smart species in some ways, and we make up stories very fast, within a millisecond. We don't just see a tree. We see a sycamore tree, old tree, shedding leaves. So we create a whole elaborate thing rather than just seeing tree-ness. So it's hard for us all to do that. It's like when we create a story and they become familiar. I just watched Born Yesterday, which is my most favorite movie of all time, and I've probably seen it 30 times, and if I were asked, I could probably say the lines.

[37:39]

Nobody's asked people if that should ever happen. And I think when we create a story, it has that component. I have this story about this is who my brother is. I condemn many of them, not one. Many, many, many, many stories. So instead, so recognizing, oh, whoop, there's story rising, is . So otherwise, what we're doing is staying in the old movie and we're watering the seeds that are around that movie, around that story, the seeds of dissatisfaction or what's wrong with the picture, etc. That's what we're watering. So the first, for me at least, is really trying to stay aware of, oh, I'm in story. And sometimes if I catch it that fast, I can just drop it. Sometimes not so much, I have to do a little more homework. But awareness is the first part of that.

[38:41]

Another practice for me that I've been doing for a long time, I will continue to do is metta practice because it keeps my heart open or more open. And I think when we're doing metta practice, we're including, you know, in that passion is sympathetic joy, potentially, is equanimity. All those things are available as we've been exploring the Brahma Viharas in this. practice, period, the heavenly abodes. Wonderful. So to do my brother to be safe from harm and suffering, to be at ease in his life, free from hindrances, at peace, and to have joy in his days, and to do it over and over and over and over. A practice that I do, I think I've spoken about it here, but it's been a long time, and many of you are new, so I'll do it again.

[39:54]

Before I came to Buddhist practice, I was in a Hindu practice with a teacher in India, a medical doctor in India, a talker. He had a recommended practice called Ishtra Bhirdi, which was sort of like in a way like what we call metta practice, in the sense of well-wishing, especially for somebody that was painful or challenging or difficult for us. Practice involves putting a box on your altar and putting money in it. It could be anything, but it's easier if it's money just to handle that. put in a set amount of money that you decide on a penny, a nickel, a dollar. It's your Elon Musk, a million dollars a day, whatever. But to put it in every day, and when putting it in, to do this in-depth well-wishing.

[41:01]

May you be well, may you be happy, may you be at ease, may you be free. May you be spacious. And then the second component of that, which is quite interesting, actually, is that you keep putting the money in. And at a certain point, that money has to be spent on that person. They're already dead, but you can still use it for a cause they might have believed in or whatever, or if the person is alive, then the idea is that at a certain point that you decide, you use that money to buy them something that would bring them joy, that you think would be nice for them, but something that you know would be hurtful for them, would give them pleasure. So what begins to happen as you're doing the Ishti Priti over time, you're accumulating all these niggles and bimes or dollars or whatever,

[42:01]

And the mind automatically turns to, well, what does that person really love? Or what brings them joy? What would be a happy thing for them? So it's a lovely practice that I'm doing, continue to do. This for me, and it feels very important so that I don't spiritually bypass is to feel the sadness when I'm sad. To feel the sadness that this one beloved in history brother and I have no connection. It's so fun and so lovely to be of support to each other and connect and to giggle over what happened when we were eight or whatever. So to allow the sadness presence without trying to get rid of it or talking my way out.

[43:04]

I'm gonna tell one quick story and then I wanna stop. So I think joy is a practice and it's a little interesting to talk about joy. You don't make joy happen, that's not the way it works. But I'll tell you a joyful story. So the day after the election, I'm not talking about choice here. The day after the election, I drove my new little dog to the veterinarian in Richmond to have many teeth pulled. This dog was not well tended. And so that was already a hard thing for me to do. I left the dog. Her name is Maggie. I left Maggie at the vet's and I started to drive back home for the day because I couldn't pick her up till the end of the day. And I was on Martin Luther King Boulevard in the left of the two lanes. And I was stressed. I was stressed at where we are as a country, what's the end of this world right now.

[44:17]

I was just felt stressed. And I also was worried about Maggie. Wasn't paying good attention. Must have moved my car somewhat to the right, not must, I did move my car somewhat to the right, so I scored along the side of another car. And I could, so we moved to the side of the road, and as we're moving, I could hear making those sounds that cars make when they're very unhappy. And so we parked. I knew something was wrong with my car. I knew nothing about the person's car. I didn't know who was in the car. And we pulled over and an older man got out of the car and he walked toward me and he said, are you all right? Is anything hurt?

[45:17]

Did you hurt any part of your body? How was your neck? Are you okay? And I've been in so... Trust me when I say I've never had that kind of response. It was so open-hearted, I started to cry. I just was blown out by this open-heartedness, so lovely. And finally, when we got past that and my tears, we went over to look at his car, and there was indeed a big scrape along the driver's side door. And I said, I'm completely responsible and I'll call my company and we should exchange information. And he said, you know, I'm not going to buy another car in this life. It's got a lot of dings and dents in it already and scrapes on it. He said, I'm not going to get that thing painted. The rest of the car will just look worse if I paint one door. He said, I'm not interested in doing it.

[46:18]

So let's just call it a wash. And again, it was like, what, you know. And we exchanged numbers because I knew I'd have to give that to the insurance company. What I can say from that experience is my whole day was colored with joy. I just felt so heart opened and so touched. It was like a reminder, this is who we are. This is who we can be. This is... We have this in us all to be this kindly and this open and this dear with one another. So it was a deeply joyful moment. And I think we can make joy happen. We can't do that, but we can practice staying open for joy when the joy arrives. I'll just leave you with Robert with

[47:21]

Blake, William, not a quickie poem from Blake, who said it all in four lines. He who doth bind to himself a joy, doth the winged life destroy. He who kisses the joy as it flies, then see sunrise. Thank you. Happy to hear from you, especially if you have anything you want to share, but if you have ways that you work with challenging connections in your life online too. If you're in the center, just raise your hand and I'll bring a mic. And if you're online, please raise your digital hand. I think that's a hand, but I can't see that. Yeah, Paolo. Thank you, Luminous Heart, for that profound teaching.

[48:31]

I really I'm finding not exactly joy, but some satisfaction. In the result of the teaching, which is being. In the moment with what I don't know. And. to drop this pretense that I know what to do with myself and my day and to maintain my intention, but to be open to process and awareness and to allow things to be as they are and stop trying to RoboCop everything in my reality. It's a pleasure to be reminded of how much I God almighty, how much I don't know. Relief, isn't it? Don't you find it an enormous relief that you don't know? And it's funny because I keep catching myself wanting to hold on.

[49:35]

Right. Yeah. Yeah. But it's OK. I might need to unclench my hands. I think I can I can get a little more comfortable with it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Is that Ron? Is that Ron? I'm sorry, Ron. It's hard for me to see. The names aren't showing up. Is that you? Did you have your hand up? No. Okay. Sorry. No pressure. Thank you, Luminous Heart. I think when you were with your brother, I recall there's love but not like. Could you say a little bit? Because when we look at them, it's dualistic.

[50:36]

How could you love but not like? We're talking about a different kind of love. Could you say a little bit about that love that transcends? And I'll tell you that. that works. I'm not quite sure. Am I still on? Yeah. I'm not quite sure exactly the chemistry of like, but I think it's chemical. There's something just, there are people that I'm drawn to that are easy for me than like and be familiar with or at a more casual level to have a sense of friendship. And then there are people that are more challenging for me to to do that with i have to i have to notice that i'm something is distant i think love is at least in part intentional it's it's um i mean we love certain people who are easy don't intend to love your newborn baby you do you obviously very much so but um

[51:44]

to truly do mature loving, deep loving, is to have an intention toward that, I think, and that's what the difference is, perhaps. One is more chemical for me, and the other is my heart, how I want to be and how I want to see people that are, anybody. And how does that, how does that, inform unconditional love. There's this suffusing love over the entire world versus particularities of liking and disliking. Say a little bit about that level of love, unconditional love. What is unconditional love, you mean? How does it work? Well, how does it manifest? How does it manifest? Imperfectly, but... Well, that's so.

[52:47]

I mean, I think to truly love, even with a pure heart, which we all aspire to, but that's layers and layers worth of working in itself, it's aspirational, unconditional love. At the relative level, it clearly does when we're talking in the absolute realm, but for me, for talking relationally if there's an intention. Thank you very much. Thank you. So on this love and like, sometimes the way I relate to it is don't like the behavior.

[53:56]

And so the question is, what is the Dharma discernment of what is the nature of like? If it's a wisdom eye, if it's a relationality, that you and I are intimate, and as best I can tell, I'm bearing witness to a harmful behavior. And that when that I, the letter I, EYI, that also is in relational with other people, places, and things. Sometimes it's a group that's responding. So how, you know, Dr. King said, we need to love the hell out of them, right? And then Who is them? So there are a lot of ways to speak to this. What I notice in this moment, this is a really important question right now.

[54:59]

How do we disrupt harmful behavior as best we can see in that moment? So how would you say in what you were sharing in this practice, if you will, of love, can can help us with that hmm well i always love your questions because they're so oh i wish i had more wisdom here than i do um Boy, if Joanna Macy always used to talk about we have each chosen to be born in this time. It's really wonderful to hear that. We've chosen somehow to be here right now with this incredibly world situation.

[56:09]

And then how did we each come, how did we come into that? And I don't have a simple one-shot relational answer to that. I know there are people that are very hard for me to hear. And part of my practice is to see if I can, with intention, I have to intend it. It doesn't happen without my getting to the party, so to speak. I have to intend to hear. Or this person is me and I am they. That's the most simple, basic, one person to one person response that I can give. And I think the same is true larger, that the people that are easy for me to put in a category or a box, who they are, misses, and make up a story about them, is to unsturify them, unsturify them in myself.

[57:14]

Because it's not the Latino vote, or Latino thinking, or African-American thinking. It's not like that. Remember this. Remember this. For me, that's a beautiful practice of what you were speaking to, is the koan of what is karmic coincidence. Thank you. Thank you for your wonderful, really inspiring. Thank you so much. When you were talking about being with your brother in the presence of, I believe it was, your daughter? Yes. And his wife? And his wife. Yeah. So I was thinking about just these three women. And in the wake of this election, I've been thinking about this a lot because it feels like misogyny is just like burst forth this vile, ew, really, like suddenly, you know, that's been like scarcely helped.

[58:24]

All of a sudden it's like right in our faces. Yeah, and so that's a big category, men. Are men broken? And how do we, you know, this is really a serious thing. I think about this a lot. How do we heal men? How do we heal? Speaking as a cis-het-white man, I think about this a lot. It's a huge co-op. YOU HAVEN'T THOUGHT ABOUT IT. NO! OR EITHER THAT OR TOO MANY OF US. IS THERE TIME FOR WHEN?

[59:26]

PASS. WE'RE PASS. SORRY. YOU'RE NOT GOING TO ANSWER MY QUESTION. No. Then I'll sit with you. I accept it. I accept it. We'll sit with it together. Okay. Thank you. You're welcome. Things are numberless. I vow to awaken with them. Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. I vow to become it. Beings are numberless. I vow to awaken with them.

[60:28]

Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. Un surpassable, I vow to become Welcome to Berkeley Zen Center, those here in the Zendo and those joining us via Zoom.

[62:20]

My name is Hax. If you have any questions about BZC, please speak with today's Zazen instructor, Preston Evers. He's right there. Tomorrow, BZC will hold a women's sitting. The registration is closed, but you can join on Zoom for Linda Gallian's Dharma Talk at 1015. On Monday, Manzan Shokoman will give a Wayseeking Mind Talk at 8 a.m. over Zoom. Next Saturday, Hozan Roshi will give the Dharma Talk. On Sunday, November 24th, we will have a half-day sitting from 8 a.m. to noon. If you have any questions or would like to register, contact Gary Artem. He's right back here. Registration is now open for our annual seven-day Rohatsu Sashin. Monday, December 2nd through Sunday, December 8th. Please check the listserv and website for the registration link or contact Colleen Bush.

[63:23]

It's Thursday, November 21st. Sign up early as we are limited to 33 participants per day. Some recurring announcements. The Wednesday drop-in group meets from 7.10 to 9 p.m. The group particularly welcomes newcomers to Zen practice. contact Ikushin Jerry Oliva. Her email is in the links for reoccurring activities. BCC has a queer Dharma group that meets in the community room on the second and fourth Mondays of the month from 7 to 8.15 p.m. This group welcomes those who identify as LGBTQ+, may be questioning and exploring their relationship to any of these aspects of identity. You can ask me questions about this or contact Pauline Krishan for more information. There's also an email in the reoccurring activities. For more information about membership and our programs here, you can visit our website.

[64:27]

If you'd like to leave a donation to BCC, there is a donation box also on the table of the bulletin board, as well as on the website, you can go to the generosity tab. I will need two volunteers who have time to stay after our... to help with cleaning teacups. One and two, thank you both. And for those in the Zendo, please remain in silence until you step off the Zendo porch and then socialize. For those online, feel free to mute and to greet each other. Hello. Hi, everyone. Good morning, everyone. Have a good one. Have a good day.

[65:28]

Thank you. Be well.

[65:31]

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