Welcome to the Tessahara Dining Room Theater, tonight's performance piece. I don't do performance pieces, I just sit here and talk. Well first of all, I sometimes wonder how to start the talk, so I thought I'd start by, you know, a little review of Monday night's talk. Some of you may not have been there, and then some of you were there as I mentioned on Monday, may not have heard the most important part, because as I mentioned, you know, often the most important part is the part we absent ourselves for, because we know it's coming. But that's part of what tonight's talk is about too. So, Monday I talked about viewing, you know, one way to think about spiritual life or, you know, I guess spiritual life for lack of another word, is to practice being large,

[01:01]

to be a large person, you know, and rather than making yourself small or shrinking, shrinking away from your own experience or shrinking away from other people, shrinking away from being seen by other people, shrinking away from knowing other people, shrinking away from difficulty, shrinking away from tension, because there's a basic problem with that kind of strategy, which is when you start to make yourself small or shrink, this will not make you large, but also if you have some tension and you start to shrink away from it or difficulty and you start to shrink away from it, now you have more tension and more difficulty. You've added the difficulty or tension of shrinking to what was already the difficulty or tension that you had. So for instance, in meditation, I often suggest to people, people say, well, what do I do

[02:03]

if I have pain? Well, the first thing is, you know, if you start to do meditation or yoga for that matter, you know, with your face, your teeth start to clench, your jaw tightens, your eyes are getting, and you're going to, you're going to, you know, get through this. This is making yourself tight and small and tense and the pain that you had will get worse because you're shrinking, because you're tensing up in response to the difficulty or pain that's there. So if you can't relax your face, it's better just to move or to relax your posture and start over again, and then you have some energy and buoyancy and bigness to meet the difficulty when it comes next time and see if you can't remain large when the difficulty is there, the pain is there. Or the, you know, another, anyway, basically you can, you can find or notice in your body when there's pain, like in your knee and sitting, your body actually starts to pull away from

[03:08]

it, you know, because your mind, your mind is pulling away, but also your body will start to pull away and then it will hurt more. So shrinking away from what is difficult or painful, you will have more difficulty and So it's counterproductive, it doesn't work. And you don't become large that way. So again and again, the simple kind of advice is if you want to be large, which is a kind of fundamental human desire in that sense, go ahead and try it out. See what happens. And usually, you know, pretty soon something will come along and, you know, knock you down and then you go back to being large again. Because the, and as I mentioned Monday, part of the, you know, our basic misconception or our wrong thinking, what in Buddhism would be called wrong thinking, is that when something painful happens, which is usually called emotional, I mean, there's physical pain, but the pain

[04:14]

we really don't like is the emotional pain, you know, like our own anger and our own fear and our sense of abandonment or betrayal. And there's, you know, loneliness and sadness. There's many fears that are, it's just difficult to be around them. You notice that? And because it's, and so then we start to think why, you know, people, and people say, well, why do you feel like that? And then you start looking around for cause. And the most obvious causes are anything that happens to be in the vicinity. The person you live with, where you live, what you're doing for work, or if, you know, if you're here at Tussehar, it's the weather, it's the weather, the bugs. There are all these external causes, you know, you start looking around your environment

[05:16]

for the causes, and then if you could just take care of those, then you start to think what can you can do about all those things, so that they will not cause you to feel like that anymore. So, the problem is that actually those things were not the cause. The feeling, you had the feeling already, and something in the environment kind of triggers it. This is basic Buddhism. You know, nothing is directly making you anything, causing you to be angry, causing you to be sad. You know, the people in your life don't do that to you. And the corollary of this is, it's never, you know, your experience is not the same as someone else's intention or purpose. My mother died when I was three, and obviously the purpose was to abandon me. I don't think so. But my experience is certainly to feel abandoned, to feel betrayed. She did this to me. Why did she do this to me? What did I do wrong? But that's a major example, but, you know, all the time we do this.

[06:21]

Somebody says something and we say, oh, well, you make me mad. Well, they didn't, it wasn't their intention to make you mad. You got mad, and that doesn't mean that was their purpose. That was their intention to do that. They were just saying something and they were expressing themselves, and you got mad. And you got mad. It's not, that wasn't their purpose or intention. Once in a while it is, but, you know, mostly, mostly it's not, your experience is not the same as somebody else's purpose or intention. And yet, then we say, you did that to me, so now I'm going to treat you this way, so that in the future you don't treat me like that and do that to me anymore. So this is called, you know, well, anyway, this is not, this is, what do you call this? You know, this is kind of a bind. This is samsara, you're caught, you're stuck, and this is not, so liberation, you know, one aspect of liberation is just correct your thinking and remind yourself the things that happen are, you know, the things around you are not the cause of what's happening.

[07:23]

And the people around you, it's not their purpose to do this stuff to you. It's not the bugs. The bugs didn't set out to annoy you, except in Mark Twain. And, you know, the heat, the sun doesn't decide, oh, I'm going to annoy these people. But as soon as you, if you want to think any of these things, then you will start, if you believe any of these things, then you will start thinking, how can I treat these people? Can I change my job? Can I change the people I live with? Can I treat these people and things differently, so they don't do this to me anymore, so I won't have to feel that again? And that strategizing, that thinking, you will get very small in the process, and you will stop experiencing your life and the flow of vitality in your life, because you'll be making yourself small and thinking and scheming, how do I get these people to behave differently? And how do I get my own body and mind to not do this to me and not betray me and not make

[08:26]

me feel this way? And how do I get, you know, so once you're thinking like that, that's small already. And if you start to act on any of those things, that's confirming that you must be small, or you wouldn't set out to do that, that those things, all those things make you small. You're admitting that, you're agreeing to that whole scheme. So anyway, again, you know, just go ahead and be large, and whatever comes along, that's that, you know, meet it. And I mentioned Monday night, you know, from Nelson Mandela's inaugural address, which apparently is actually an anonymous woman, speech writer, or maybe not so anonymous. You know, he says, making yourself small doesn't serve anyone, and shrinking, shrinking, you know, is not a benefit to others, you know, it's not a benefit or a help to others to shrink so that they don't feel insecure around you. So anyway, in spiritual practice, we're studying, you know, how to be large, how to be a large person and not to shrink, not to become small, not to go away, to go ahead and be present.

[09:30]

And inevitably, you know, and so from that point of view, you know, you can say expand, expand into the difficulties rather than shrinking away from it, expand into the difficulty, you know, extend into the tension, or, you know, you can also say stretch or reach beyond it. Go ahead and be large, or see if you can find the vitality of your being, the vibrancy of your being, because your body has energy and vibrancy and vitality, and is there some way you can go about the activities of your life? So there it is, you have it. You know, so we were talking today, I was talking with somebody about kitchen, and they said, and so they said this morning, somebody read something I had written or said or something, I forget. It was about, oh, working with tenderness, which seems fine, but the full corollary is go ahead and work faster, but with less effort. You know, it doesn't mean to be gentle or tender or, you know, your vitality, your vitality

[10:39]

isn't always in going slower, your vitality sometimes is speeding up. So you want to find out, you know, how to move, and you can actually be working with your, you know, your feet and your legs, and how do you walk, and do you walk in a way that gives you vitality, or do you walk in a way that drains you? And do you breathe, how do you breathe? And this is not something you figure out, this is more like giving your body permission to have vitality, to have vibrancy, to be alive, to, you know, have energy. You know, so as far as that, so this is, Kali Giriraj used to say, let the flower of your life force bloom. Then he'd say, this is Zen. It's not about, you know, and as I mentioned Monday, he also, or some time, I keep forgetting who I talked to, but, you know, he said, Zen is not like training your dog, okay? Do this, don't do that. Let the flower of your life force bloom. So inevitably there will be some difficulties or tensions, and so in that sense, you could

[11:47]

also say that spiritual life is, you know, how to meet those difficulties and tensions in a way that you confront and change your own identity, your own way of going about things, your personality, in a sense. So recently I've been quite taken with a story about Achan Char, who was Jack Hornfield's teacher in Thailand, a forest monk. Many Westerners studied with Achan Char. And one of the stories in the book about, you know, people meeting with him, one of the stories is, he said, people come to me and they say, I've got a hot rock in my hand, what should I do? And I say, let go. And then they say, no, I want it to be cold. So this has something to do with how are you going to meet the difficulty in your life. You know, are you going to hold on to the way you think, the way you understand, the way

[12:52]

you go about things, or are you going to let go and go ahead and have some vitality and energy in your life? So what comes to mind for me, for instance, is things like, well, I want everybody to always like me. I never want anybody to ever be mad at me. How successful will you be? Now, isn't that like a hot rock in your hand? I mean, how workable is that going to be? But a lot of the time we go around like, let's see now, I'm going to see if I can behave in such a way that everybody likes me. Pretty soon you're pretty small. How can you say anything? How can you do anything? And then pretty soon people are mad at you because you're making yourself so small. Why are you so shrinking? I'm not that scary a person, am I? You don't really have to please me that much. And so actually in our effort to go around and everybody like you, pretty soon you're

[13:54]

so small or nobody's ever going to get mad at you. How are you going to do that? How are you going to arrange to be sure to say the right thing? You'll have to make yourself small to go about that. So Achan Chah suggests just let go. Don't say, no, I want to go on doing my behaviors, behaviors that I've always done, but I want them to work. This would be the same thing as having the hot rock. No, I want it to be cold. I want to go on behaving the way I've always behaved, but I want it to work. So this is the kind of dilemma we have and why in spiritual practice we sometimes say something like, just let go. Let the flower of your life force bloom. You know, there's an expression I like, which I mentioned when I was here earlier this summer. Don't slam to the sky by looking at it through a pipe. We're, we're actually already large people. We're all large beings. In Zen we say, you know, Suzuki Roshi often talked about big mind, and he said, big mind

[14:56]

is always with you. Nothing ever happens to big mind. Something happens to small mind. And when you think, oh, I'll do this and I'll do that, and then I'm going to get it so nobody always, this and that, everybody always likes me, nobody's ever mad at me, I'll have people respect me, and then you've made yourself small in your effort to do that. But nothing ever happened to big mind. Big mind is always there, even when you're making yourself small. So this is nice to know, isn't it, isn't that a relief? So, don't, don't worry. If you feel like you're making yourself small, don't worry. It's not true. You know, in a, you know, fundamental lasting, you know, real sense, you only, it feels like

[15:57]

you're making yourself small. Big mind is always there. Anyway, this also, there's some things that we tend to, human beings tend, I don't know about any of you or us, you know, maybe we're all sort of spiritual people and, well, I still drink coffee. No, anyway. You know, it's not possible to get enough of something that doesn't inherently satisfy. Speaking of letting go, you know, so I'd like to have more money, you know, the big ones are like money, success, you know, sex. So if you could just get more, it would, you know, would you ever get enough? Well, the problem is that you don't actually get large. Those things don't actually just make you large. And you'll notice that. And so then you can never get enough. And in fact, you know, money and sex become things that you can have that help you stay small, you know, because then you can afford, you know, you can afford to not be sort of

[17:05]

challenged or stressed and you can, money can, you know, pave your way. You can ride around in a limousine or take a helicopter or, you know, your private jet. You don't have to go through those lines at the airport. You don't have to have that kind of stress that other people have. And, you know, you can arrange things so that your life goes smoothly and what have you, if you just had enough money. And then actually you go on being small. So that none of those, you know, the idea is that if you had money, you wouldn't have to be with the stress and difficulty and tension. The money would take care of that. And you wouldn't have this challenge of figuring out how to become large. So it's, and so those things like that are not inherently capable of making you large. So then you can never get enough of them. So again, the basic, you know, sensibility is, in Zen we say, if you want to attain suchness, practice suchness without delay. If you want to be large, practice being large. Go ahead, go for it. So I think it's time I get to some stories here.

[18:06]

So the sensibility here, as you can, as I've been saying, you know, expand into difficulty. What do you do with difficulty or, you know, something that happens that's painful? So here's a couple of stories, which I was reading. I read the recent Turning Wheel magazine, which is put out by the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and there's an issue about hatred. And there was a fascinating piece in there about a man in North Carolina in Durham who used to be the head cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan there, and since his, you know, resigned from the Klan and became a union organizer and, you know, worked with blacks on the various things, and, you know, really changed his life just by noticing, you know, he wasn't doing some kind, it wasn't like he was doing Zen or something. Anyway, that was an interesting story. One of the things he noticed, for instance, that sort of turned him around is the city council people used to call him up and say, we're having this meeting, there's going to be a ball of black folks there, why don't you get some of your folks down here so we can balance things out? So you know, they'd get 40 or 50 Klansmen to go to the city council meeting to kind

[19:14]

of sit there, and then he said, and then, you know, he would go to dinner sometimes at the house of the city council person and that sort of thing, and then he said one day he was walking down the street and one of these people was walking toward him, and the person crossed the street to avoid him, and he said, I thought they were my friend, that was my friend. I thought we were in this together. And so then he thought, this is, this doesn't make sense, does it? Interesting, you know, something as simple as that. And he was on a special commission to work on race relations, and he had a terrible time working with this black woman, and they finally became very dear friends. And they both hadn't done much with, you know, anybody from the other race. So that was a fascinating story, but I was especially taken, there was an article by a woman named Lenore Friedman who lives in Berkeley, who wrote a book called Meetings with Remarkable Women. And she's in her 60s now, and she's studying about hatred, what are the causes of hatred

[20:19]

and, you know, what kind of possibilities are, what can reconcile things. So this is a real question for how to be with, what do you do with hatred? Are you just going to shrink away from it, see if you can avoid it, never meet it? So one of the stories she told was, she said at one point, a few years back, there was this Israeli soldier who was on patrol in the occupied territories, what was then the Occupied Arab Territory, and some kids, as they often would do, started throwing stones at him. This is a situation that, you know, you could get scared, you could, you know, start shooting, any number of things, obviously have happened in that circumstance. In this case, the soldier picked up the stones and started juggling. And the kids stood there transfixed and started watching him, and then he used to go back every day and perform for them, for some period of time.

[21:23]

And then, of course, he probably got reassigned, because that's not the way you're supposed to be a soldier. It's not good for a soldier's image, we're trying to control these people, not entertain them. I don't know what happened. But that's quite a wonderful story in that, you know, we sort of have that sort of wish or dream that if there's something difficult, we could just hit on this way to kind of juggle things and really transform the situation, and wouldn't that be great? And it also reminded me of the parable and, you know, the story of Buddha when he was sitting, prior to his enlightenment, at one point, you know, all the armies of Mara, the Maras, you know, the demon who brings illusions. All the demons, the armies of Mara attacked Buddha. So there's all these little funny creatures and goblins and whatever, and armies, and all these spears and arrows and everything are flying through the air towards the Buddha,

[22:26]

and in the pictures, you know, they get to a certain distance and they all turn to flowers and drop to the ground. So that's the way the Buddha did it, you know, pictorially. So the soldier juggling the stones that were thrown at him reminded me of the Buddha. So we'd like to do that, that would be terrific. If we could just juggle. But I think the other story, one of the other stories she told seems to me, more often, you know, a way to expand into difficulty, which was, a way that we can expand into difficulty, which was, she said, not so long ago in the Midwest, a husband and wife, whose daughter had been raped and murdered, agreed to meet with the man who had been convicted of the crime, and he agreed to meet with the mother and father. So this is a situation of tremendous, you know, emotional intensity. And everybody agreed, you know, to be in that situation, and nobody knew what would happen.

[23:34]

And they sat down at the same table, on opposite sides of the table, and they sat there and they just looked at each other for a very long time, and then all together, at the same moment, they all started crying. Something, you know, so real about that, don't you think? And it's interesting, I mentioned to you the other night, you know, the basic Zen notion of just throw yourself into whatever you're doing, because you don't know which is the mistake and which is not, and so you think, well, I'll be careful not to do the mistake and I'll put my energy into doing the thing that's really good, and how do you know? And so we say, just go ahead and, you know, engage in each moment of your activity. And there's something wonderful about that, for instance, if you're slumping, do you just straighten yourself up? Oh, I wasn't really slumping, I'm sitting up straight. I didn't really do that.

[24:35]

You could also spend some time in your slump state and start to notice, like, what does that feel like? What's going on there? How did you organize yourself to be in that state? How do you organize your body and your being so that you slump? What is it you're doing now? And you could actually spend some time studying that and knowing that, and then you know something else about how to release yourself from that, rather than just going like, no, I wasn't there, but after a while you're going to be back there, so why not study what there is like when you slump, when you make yourself small? How did you do it? You start to notice, how are you doing these things? This is interesting, you know. There's something real about that, about how to work on things. And so, one of the things also that interests me about the article about Lenore Friedman is why is she studying this? She's in her 60s, and her sister is in her 60s, a few years older, and they haven't talked

[25:36]

for two years. So actually, now this is an example of the difficulty and pain and things in your life actually are often what motivates you or move you in your life, and actually motivate you and give your life direction and power and energy and vitality. And then you think, oh, I'm going to get rid of all these things. I wouldn't be necessarily so fast or so sure what it is you need to get rid of and what it is you should keep. But if you start thinking about it, you'll come up, you know the things that you like and the things you don't like and the things you want to get rid of and the things you want to keep. And you want to be a great, wonderful, buoyant person who juggles everything all the time and how wonderful that will be, and you never want to cry and, you know, whatever it is. So because we think like that, but, you know, so this is a story that shows here's somebody

[26:37]

who's studying hatred because of, you know, her life is intimately involved with this. And she said when she was a little girl, she was five or six, and her sister was about eight, and they were fighting. And after a while, she kicked her sister viciously in the shin, and her sister fell over and started crying. And then their father came in the room because he'd been in his den studying. And he was mad at them because they disturbed him. And so he paddled both of them with a hairbrush, you know, made them, you know, bare their bottoms and walloped them with a hairbrush. And she said she didn't cry and her sister did, so she won. And now these two women 60 years later aren't talking to each other. And she doesn't know what to do. She said, I've written three letters to my sister in the last two years, and now I look

[27:39]

back and I see each one of those letters had a fair amount of anger and a fair amount of ultimatum. Now it's your turn. I've done my part, writing. Now it's up to you. The next move is yours. And, you know, various things that, you know, where she's angry with her sister. And so she's studying how, she's not just studying, you know, she's studying about hatred and things, but she's also studying her own life. What am I going to do in my life? This is the way our life works. So we, you know, we don't know. I wouldn't, you know, it's best not to be too sure or not to know for sure what you need to change or not change in your life. Just let the flower of your life force bloom, you know, energize yourself, make yourself large. See what happens. You know, life will bring you, you know, what it needs to bring you. And you can practice expanding into your difficulty in a way that you let go of it rather than

[28:40]

clinging to that hot rock where you say, no, I just want my behavior to work. I'm not going to let go. I want the rock to be cold. So there is a way that we can engage in detention or difficulty and at some point we let go because we know that our basic intention and wish is to be large and we expand into the difficulty and we notice how we're organizing ourselves to respond to situations like that. And we notice what we're doing and we get to a moment where we, because we notice that clearly what it is we're doing, we know I'm doing this. It's not all those people. It's not the work I'm doing. It's not the job I have. This is the way I organize myself. I organize myself to be resentful. I organize myself to be angry. You know, I organize myself to be sad.

[29:43]

And then when you notice how you do that, you have a choice to go on doing that or not to do that. And you can let go of something. You can drop the hot rock and it starts by being large. Just go ahead and be large and see what stops you. Don't go on being small trying to, you know, get around all the difficulties, sneak by. So tonight, the other night I told you a poem by Anna Akhmatova, the Russian woman. And I'm going to tell you that poem again in a minute, but first I want to tell you another one of her poems. I don't remember exactly the beginning of the poem, but you know, it's a list of various people with difficulty in their lives. So I'll run through a few possibilities. The rest of the poem I can remember, but it's something like, if all the battered wives,

[30:45]

the criminally insane, the starving poets, the homeless, if each of them had given me one kopeck, I'd be richer than all the kings of Egypt. But they didn't give me kopecks. Instead, they shared with me their pain. So now, I'm stronger than anyone, and I can bear anything, even this. She lived through, you know, a lot of difficulty in her life, went on being a poet, you know, making herself large. If each of them had given me one kopeck, I'd be richer than all the kings of Egypt. But they didn't give me kopecks. Instead, they shared with me their pain. So that now, no one is stronger than I, and I can bear anything, even this.

[31:48]

So I want to tell you again the poem from the other night, and then the poem I told you I'd tell you tonight. And then we'll see if we have anything else to talk about. So the other poem by Anna Akhmatova is something like this. A land not mine, still forever memorable. The waters of its ocean chill and fresh. The sand on the bottom whiter than chalk. Late sun lays bare the rosy limbs of the pine trees, sunset on the ethereal waves. I can't tell if the day is ending, or the world, or if the secret of secrets is inside me again. I can't tell if the day is ending, or the world, or if the secret of secrets is inside me again. No, difficulty is not just difficulty.

[33:13]

No, tension is not just tension. Your vitality is in there somewhere. The energy and the largeness of your life is in there somewhere. So the other poem I wanted to share with you is a poem by Rumi. It's called Story Water. So on my way down to the bath today and back from the bath, I memorized it. I thought that would be appropriate if I memorized the poem walking to the bath and back. And while I was bathing, because it's a poem about water, hot water. And you know, it's easier to memorize poems when you're moving than when you're standing still. You know, they did tests with kids. You know, if you want to learn a foreign language, it's easier to learn if you're tossing a ball back and forth with somebody. It's interesting, but body movement while you're trying to memorize something helps you memorize something.

[34:16]

And Julie, didn't you say that that's how you memorized all the herbs in Chinese medicine? That's a category of herbs we told him to do. Yeah. Julie memorized all the herbs and things she needed to know for Chinese medicine walking along the hills and outside of Green Gulch. And then I went to him and I said, oh, let me be able to do this. Remember? And he said, well, how are you doing it? And I said, well, I write it all on index cards when I walk, you know, looking back every day. So I said, well, that's how all the monks memorized the scriptures. They know what part of the road they were. But if they couldn't remember, they would remember when they were walking. So I did test the boys. So I would take them on the trail. So that's a perfect example. So anyway, here's the poem. I'll see how well my walk to the bath. Remember the parts of the bath, the parts of the road. So the poem is called Story Water. A story is like the water you heat for your bath.

[35:18]

It brings messages from the fire to your skin. It lets them meet and it cleans you. Very few of us can sit down in the middle of the fire itself like a salamander or Abraham. We need intermediaries. A feeling of fullness comes, but usually we need some bread to bring it. We're surrounded by beauty, but usually we need to be walking in a garden to know it. The body itself is a screen to shield and partially reveal the light that's blazing inside your presence. Stories, water, the body, all the things we do are mediums that hide and show what's hidden. Study them and enjoy this being washed by a secret you sometimes know and then don't.

[36:28]

The body itself is a screen to shield and partially reveal the light that's blazing inside your presence. Stories, water, the body, all the things we do are mediums that hide and show what's hidden. Hide, all the things we do are mediums that hide and show what's hidden. Study them and enjoy this being washed by a secret we sometimes know and then not. I like the feeling of that poem because it has to do, I think, with being large. And that being large doesn't mean you always know the secret. Sometimes you know the secret and sometimes something is revealed and it's not. It's revealed and it's hidden. And what's hidden often helps you in your life. And your difficulties can help you in your life.

[37:49]

Sometimes it's just difficult to know which hot rock to drop. Anyway, thank you for being here tonight and I wish you all well. The area outside the courtyard here, we ask people to be silent after 8.30. I'd like to encourage you to remember that. And also, in here, a few of us will stay and move the chairs back. And if you could try moving the chairs quietly, picking them up and putting them down rather than sliding them screechily across the floor. Thank you.

[38:49]

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