Good morning. This weekend I took my second airplane trip in a couple of years, so it's not that often, but even so, it's easy to be accused of being a jet setter. I just flew down to Los Angeles for the weekend to perform a marriage ceremony, and then flew back here to come and talk at Green Podge. And many kind of unusual things happened, and very interesting things happened, and I stayed, the people that I was, the family that I was doing this wedding with, put me

[01:12]

up at the Beverly Hills Hotel. And they said, well just take a taxi from the airport, and the taxi from the airport took me way up in the hills somewhere else. We eventually got to the Beverly Hills Hotel, and it was a roundabout. I couldn't believe the hotel was up there, but I thought the taxi driver must know what he's doing. So that was a roundabout, and then the next morning, when I got up and I sat down about six thirty in the morning to go over the ceremony, and to think about the people who were getting married and so on, the lights went out, in Beverly Hills. And then they stayed out until about nine o'clock, which was kind of unusual. Anyway, I was touched by the whole weekend, by this particular family and the quality

[02:18]

of their relationship with one another. The woman getting married has two sisters and two brothers, and they're a pretty close family. Anyway, as I say, the quality of their relationship among each other touched me. I thought about it some, and I wanted to share with you a few of the things that came up. One was, after the wedding I had, well, first of all, the wedding we did, we decided to do a Buddhist-Christian wedding. It was my first Buddhist-Christian wedding. So, rather than doing Buddhist vows, I read a passage from Corinthians, and I don't know

[03:24]

the Bible hardly at all, but it was a wonderful passage in Corinthians, the thirteenth chapter about love. It says, in some versions of the Bible, charity, and in other versions, love, and it's a passage that says, love conquereth all. Love does not vaunteth itself, is not puffed up. And even though I may be a very accomplished person in a lot of ways, if I don't have love, then I am nothing. It was quite a moving passage, and that was nice for me to realize there are these passages in the Bible. I think about the Bible as having all these strange stories about some strange tribes who did various things and got into various wars, and family history sort of stuff. But there are these other wonderful passages. So that was nice.

[04:30]

And the occasion for marriage and doing a marriage ceremony like that brings up for me the question of form, of form in our lives, and how important and profound that is that we participate in various forms. I read, then coming back from Los Angeles, in the part of the passage from Wendell Berry's book, Standing by Words, there's a chapter on marriage, and I read that over again. He says there are basically two kinds of muses. One is the muse of inspiration, which in a kind of colloquial way, we might say that that muse says, as we're all quite accustomed to, go for it, you can have it all now.

[05:31]

And the other he calls the muse of realization, and that muse says, it's a lot more difficult than you thought it was, isn't it? And in this way, we have many kinds of desires, needs, ambitions, wishes, intentions that are springing up all the time. And then we have the question of how to enact those in our life. And we have the basic, we're confronted with the basic fact that there's no simple way

[06:34]

to do this. There's no way to just go ahead and accomplish, or just go ahead and satisfy desire. And this in Buddhism is, of course, the first truth. It's not so simple, it's basically impossible. And so you see, if we can't just go out and by our skillful means, or not so skillful means, satisfy, act on our desire, act on our impulse, act on our intention, our ambition, and so forth, what shall we do? How do we live our life?

[07:37]

And the forms we take up in our life remind us of this kind of truth, whether it's the form of marriage, or the form of sitting still. Both of these forms, in their own way, remind us of this truth. And over a period of time, with some patience, and forbearance, and trust, over a period of time, we find some way to blend our desires with the situation of our life. It always strikes me, or often strikes me, when, as in this wedding, and I would talk

[08:43]

to guests and people there, how much wisdom we all share. At one of the family's previous weddings, the husband, the man who is being married, he does, well, he's in the movie business, and he makes the, what is it, before the other movies come out, they're called trailers, but they're also called the previews, he makes those previews. Anyway, at his wedding, he had a video camera, so he went around to everybody there and said, all right, tell me, what's the secret of your marriage? What's it really all about? And they were going to show this movie last night, so I missed it, I was on my way back.

[09:44]

And so we, you know, many of us, we understand, or have some sense of this, that marriage is the, is living happily ever after, yes, only it's not exactly, and yet we make a commitment to participating in that form. So one of the people there told me, though, what he had said on the video, he said, well, what you should know about marriage is you're not just marrying one person. First of all, you're marrying a whole family, and secondly, the person that you're marrying is not going to be that person for long. And he said, it sort of brings up the question of, is there a soul, because what do you love

[10:59]

finally, in the other person? Because their smile changes, or their body changes. And we say, I will marry you for better, for worse, and we don't say, only if you don't gain another five pounds. And in the wedding, actually, I ended up hearing all this sort of, you know, little family tidbits, but the present, the wedding that just took place, that I was performing, the man apparently has been more constant in the relationship, and he's been asking the woman for some time to marry him, and they've actually been together for seven years. It's taken her a long time to agree. And I forget what it is that had happened, but something had happened, and then she gained

[12:06]

a lot of weight. In fact, she gained 50 pounds. And he said to her, will you marry me? And she said, when I lose 30 pounds. Anyway, she apparently, she doesn't, she looks fine now, but I can't imagine. But she finally lost 50 pounds and agreed to marry. But still, they didn't put that in the agreement, you know, that she couldn't gain it back again. So, again, we have this kind of question, you know, what is it that we commit ourselves to? Who is it that we love and cherish? And here's somebody who's been married for, you know, 20, 25 years, has a couple kids in college, and says, well, there's a lot of people there. I'm not exactly sure who it is that I'm loving and cherishing these days. And yet, he's quite committed to his marriage.

[13:12]

And he's somebody who's spent a busy life, apparently involved in the market, and so he has to keep up on what's going on financially. But recently he started painting, and apparently there's a little book by Winston Churchill that he read about painting. So, he finds painting quite absorbing, even though he's not very good at it. I felt this morning somewhat more anxious than usual about talking with you about this,

[14:29]

because I don't usually talk about or emphasize the importance of form in my talk. So I'm not used to telling you how valuable forms are, and I've been starting with the form of marriage, but it's also for me the form, as I said, of sitting still, the form of wearing robes, the form of shaving one's head. And mostly I don't talk about the importance of form because I'm not a... I don't seem to find myself these days a close adherent, and yet I have a strong appreciation and respect for form. Another of the things that Wendell Berry said about form, which is true, again, for someone

[15:38]

sitting still as well as someone married, he said it may be that the greatest service that form offers is that it works as an obstruction and deflects us from our intended course. It baffles us and deflects us from our intended course. And that when we don't know what to do, perhaps we have begun our real work. And when we don't know where to go, perhaps we have begun our real journey. This is so important, that we can find ourselves in such a place. And then he continues, the baffled mind, the mind that is not baffled is not employed.

[16:45]

The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings. The stream that is impeded is the one that sings. The stream that flows over all those rocks. The stream that goes along, unimpeded, doesn't sing. So form is tremendously important for us that way that it brings us up short, that it baffles us and that it's then necessary to have some patience and forbearance and not try to solve things too quickly. And so very literally in meditation to be willing to sit with it, to be willing to sit still

[17:54]

with the bafflement, with the deflection from one's intended course. Or as I've been thinking recently, you know, the universe just doesn't seem to behave the way I would like it to, if I had my choice. So, another friend of mine told me something about marriage that she had come across, someone who said, to be married is to re-own your own projections and discover who you're living with. Isn't that nice? And meditation is like that. When I was, I found out, when I started practicing meditation, I didn't think, you know, I was

[19:07]

greedy. I thought it was just all those other people who rushed up at tea time to the table and grabbed the cookies. But I didn't do that. I'm not a greedy person. And I was the cook, you know, so I was particularly sensitive to those people rushing up to get it. Or the people in the meditation hall, when we had baskets of bread, who would look down the road and see who they had to share the basket with and then figure out how many pieces they could get away with taking. You know, are they heavy eaters or light eaters? Let's see. You could kind of have it gauged as to whether, you know, who was who. And then there'd be a spread with peanut butter or sesame or something, you know, and then how much of that? No. Then just take a third of it, you know. And rather than spreading it on the bread, you just take a big chunk of it and put it in your bowl. So I thought, well, I'm not a greedy person, I don't do that. And then, what's wrong with them?

[20:09]

You know, how can they do that? In fact, you know, I'm kind of angry at them. Why are they doing that? They shouldn't do that. I thought Zen students didn't do that. They must not be real Zen students. I am the only real Zen student. Sometimes it takes a while, you know, to discover that I'm that person too. One day, Suzuki Roshi's wife gave me a box of salted nuts. It was a box of, not just peanuts, but mixed salted nuts. And I just put it in my room. I didn't think anything about it, because I don't, you know, I don't gobble those things

[21:13]

down right away, you know. And then about ten days later, you know, I happened to notice it, and I started eating them, and I thought, these are really good. And then I noticed that I never ate those when anybody else was around. And by the end of that box, it kind of occurred to me that I might be a greedy person too. That's very interesting, you know, to find that out. And we have this kind of, we have this saying in Zen that the lotus, the beautiful lotus

[22:14]

flower has its roots in the mud. And it seems oftentimes to take some form to make us aware of the mud, and to bring us into, in fact, intimate contact with the mud. Sometimes even to rub our face in it. It seems to take some form. Otherwise, why would we do it? You know, because we're kind of, we started out not to have, to have a beautiful flower of our life be a beautiful flower. We didn't start out to have our nose rubbed in the mud. And then we get married because it's a beautiful flower. We come to meditation because this will be a beautiful flowering of my tranquility and calmness, my peace of mind. You know, this will be a wonderful flower in my life. And it turns out that the form instead actually brings us in an intimate way into the mud.

[23:21]

So this morning I was rethinking this old saying and I thought, if you want your life to flower, you have to eat dirt. I've modernized the saying. So this is very interesting to see. This is what form brings us to and helps us do. And it doesn't necessarily work. This is another part of it, of course, is that sometimes it fails. Sometimes, you know, we can't find a flower. It never seems to flower. And there are, it seems, occasions when it makes sense to put down one form and pick up another. Because some forms, for any one of us, are more conducive and helpful for us individually

[24:39]

to go through this process of becoming intimate with the dirt. Some people, the form of marriage works very well and the person they're married with, it works to do this. And over many years, this is an ongoing process. We find out who we're living with. We go through and absorb a lot of dirt and there's flowerings, various seasons, winter, spring, summer, and so on. And within meditation, there are many forms. There's Zen and Tibetan Buddhism and Vipassana, and various forms people take to and can make. The form is something that, over a period of time, you make your own. And it's important, whatever the form is, that you make it your own and use it for your

[25:45]

own realization and for your own work. Another of the things I've found in talking with people about marriage, for instance, and I think the same in sitting, you know, there's quite a strong tendency to try to make the person that you're with more acceptable. Kind of straighten them out. Kind of teach them a thing or two. Kind of improve them. Make them a little more to your liking. And, of course, this same tendency while you're sitting.

[26:45]

I want to have a nice mind. Why are you behaving like this? You're so distracted, you shouldn't be distracted. It's really upsetting to me when you get so distracted. In fact, it annoys me. This is really depressing. I can't do anything about my mind. It seems to have a mind of its own. I thought it was mine. So, over a period of time, and sometimes it takes years and years and years to finally convince yourself that it's not all that possible to make your own mind more acceptable or to make the other person more acceptable. And it begins to occur to you, I think, little by little, more and more over the years, that you would do well to accept more. To be more accepting rather than to try to make the other person more acceptable.

[27:51]

And certainly, if you're going to sit still for any period of time, there's no other way to do it. You're going to have to spend a lot of time with somebody you don't particularly like. And this is called becoming refined. You become refined and polished in the process. But that's really nice. That's the wonderful healing and powerful quality of meditation or marriage, is this willingness finally to spend some time with somebody you don't particularly care for. In a rather, you know, nondescript way. Well, we're just sitting here, aren't we? Nothing's happening. You're still the same old jerk you always were. I'm sorry about that.

[28:54]

Well, what have you done for me lately? Can't you give me some wonderful experience for a change? But when somebody else is willing to do that with you, you know, it's kind of an encouragement for you to do it also for yourself and to do it for somebody else. And it can be finally such a relief that you don't have to devote so much of your effort to trying to be the person that you like. And only the person that you like and not those other people. The many people that we can be. And the same for the other person. It's such a relief when somebody can accept you in that way. And you don't have to be so devoted or spend so much time and energy

[30:02]

in being a perfect person for somebody else. So I came across, getting ready for lecture, I came across a short poem by Rumi, Persian poet, Sufi mystic. The poem says, We are we are the mirror and the face in it. We are breathing the breath this moment of eternity. We are pain and that which cures pain both. We are the sweet

[31:04]

cold water and the jar that pours. We are pain and what cures pain both. And it's often in our life the forms that bring us to this realization. They bring us to the awareness of the pain that we are and brings us the cure for that pain. Brings us the sweet cold water.

[32:04]

Also this morning when I thought about this talk I was reminded of the story many of you know about the Zen teacher Oka Soten when he was a fairly young boy about ten years old. His teacher asked him would he go to the store and get some pickles. The monastery was some way from the store or the temple and Oka Soten set off. For the store. On the way he came to a poster some poster advertising a circus. So there were paintings of lions and tigers whatever and acrobats. And he stood for a long time looking at the poster fascinated and dreaming about the circus.

[33:28]

He didn't know how long he stood there but after a while he heard the temple bell ring for dinner. Then when he heard the bell he went running to the store. He ran into the store and he said give them to me. The storekeeper said what? What? And he said the pickles. So he got the pickles and he went running back to the temple. On his way back to the temple he realized he'd forgotten his hat. He went running back to the store again and he said give it to me. And the storekeeper said what? And he said my hat. And the storekeeper said you mean the one that's on your head? And then he realized it was on his head. Then he went running back to the temple with pickles in his hat. And that's the end of the story.

[34:34]

Except that a later Zen teacher in this particular lineage is a Zen teacher by the way who became a Zen teacher I guess late 19th century early 20th century and most of the Zen teachers who later came to America are descendants from his lineage. You know, students of students of his. Anyway, Suzuki Roshi about the story said Okasoten, he was a very good boy. I was always very struck by that. He was a very good boy. He had spent a lot of time daydreaming. Is that so good? What was good about that? The thing is that something brought him back. He heard the bell. And something brought him back

[35:41]

and said oh. And then he went to get the bell. To get the pickles. So it's often times form that brings us back. From the reverie or from the desires from the imagination from the fantasies that we can become involved in. And there's no way to there's no way you know to it's considered in Buddhism to it's considered a hindrance to stick to the form. There's no way to adhere rigidly to a form. It can't be done. And when you do that's called it's called an obstruction. In Buddhism it's a fetter.

[36:42]

You have a problem. You have a problem. Actually we have to have the dirt come up. We can't just stick to the form. And the importance of the form is not that we stick to it but it's a context for absorbing the dirt and having a flower bloom. Thank you. So I would just like to close by supporting each of you in your efforts to find maintain and tend the particular forms of your life. There's a kind of

[37:46]

mark of our society in general that forms are somewhat in disregard and disrespect and that it seems fairly few people appreciate the potential for growth that comes with the taking up and practice of forms not in some rigid way but in a way that you are working to make it your own and as a way to support and encourage your own inner growth and development as a whole human being to reown your projections find out who you're living with out there in here. This kind of

[38:48]

working taking up and tending of forms is the kind of work that doesn't happen overnight or in a few minutes but takes you know each day of our life and something that takes place over many years. Somebody asked the Dalai Lama if I do spiritual practice when will I notice any change in my life? And the Dalai Lama said you should wait at least 10 years probably 20 is better before you might notice some change. In fact you might want to examine the change over several lifetimes then you probably

[39:50]

will notice some change on that kind of scale. So this is also the kind of work that we do in our own lives that we don't always see what the result is. We don't always seem to be getting anywhere. And at the same time I'm convinced this is the most healing and most nurturing positive thing that any of us can be doing. One way of saying it anyway. So I appreciate you I appreciate your willingness to do this and your efforts in that direction. Thank you.

[40:46]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ