Good morning. This morning I felt scared. Do you suppose there's any reason to feel scared? This morning when I felt scared, I didn't know why I felt scared. Certainly there's been, you know, a great tragedy in our lives with the terrorist attacks. So that might be a good thing to say, I'm scared. But you know, I've been scared for, frankly, years.

[01:10]

And more often it seems like it has not much to do with anything about today. It seems to be some residual sort of terror from when I was little. You could call it conditioning. But many of us have had, you know, some trauma in our early life. So my trauma started at birth, I was premature. I just found this out a few months ago. My mother went home from the hospital a week later and I was there another two weeks. And in those days, 1945, they didn't have volunteers come to the hospital and hold you. So I tend to feel most of my life a certain disconnection, certain impossibility of anyone else being there. It's kind of scary, if you could be scared.

[02:25]

And it's kind of sad and it's kind of angry and resentful. So, did I get over that? Happy childhood. And then shortly after my third birthday, my mother died of cancer. I really find three-year-old boys rather annoying. I wonder why. The poor little three-year-old boy that I was must have done something wrong, bad, that mother died. It's good to have an explanation, you know, for bad things happening. It's called, then you feel as though you have control. If I behaved better in the future or differently, these things wouldn't happen again.

[03:32]

So, and then three days after my mother died, I was in an orphanage without my mother, without my father and without my brother. And I've been told, well, you know, the first week you were there, you just sat in a little rocking chair, rocking back and forth all day long. You didn't play, you wouldn't do anything. We were all worried about you. And then I decided to join the club. I attempted to join the, with the activities going on. And now they tell me, oh, you really liked it there.

[04:53]

When we brought you back after a little outing on Sundays, you would run off to play with your friends. You couldn't wait to be back. You just loved it there. On the other hand, I've been told, I have about four memories for those four years that I was there. On the other hand, I've been told, if you don't have very many memories, there's probably some things that happened there that you don't want to think about. I don't know what they were, but after my dad remarried and I went home, you know, my teddy bear suffered a lot. This week, I've been reading Lenore Teare's book on Too Scared to Cry. It's a book about childhood trauma. The backbone of the book is about the Chowchilla kidnappings that you might remember. 1976, a busload of kids was abducted and they were buried alive in a tractor trailer.

[06:01]

And they managed to dig their way out, finally. So they were gone a little over 24 hours. And you know, it's hard to know if any of them have gotten over it. And you know, a lot of us may never get over it. And is it so bad not to get over it? And here we are. And a funny thing I was reading in that book about post-traumatic reenactment, that's what kids do, often extremely literally. There was a little girl after the kidnapping who put the kitchen chairs up on the dining room table and had her little three-year-old sister sit up there and she played bus driver.

[07:03]

And when she was asked, well, isn't this reenacting the kidnapping, she said, oh, no, no, my bus gets there safely. It makes all the stops. But it's a way to redo, you know. So what have I spent my life doing, you know? I found a group of people who like to sit. You might think this is spiritual practice, you know, but you could also see it as post-traumatic reenactment. You sit facing the wall, nobody's there. Everybody keeps their distance. Nobody connects with you. Nobody comes over and touches you. It's just like, you know, being born premature. There's no possibility of connection.

[08:12]

You're all on your own. You're just out there. And the whole world is there and, you know, you're disconnected and isolated. Or you're connected in, or what, you know? What is the reality of any moment of our life? Or you could see it as, oh, I just got to sit there like in the rocking chair after mom died and I got dumped in the orphanage. My dad was overwhelmed and scared and frightened and couldn't handle things. Couldn't handle. I met, I saw somebody recently I've known for years and he's told me, oh, the last three years I've been taking care of my boys. I said, well, what happened? It turned out his boys were exactly the age of my brother and I when my mother died. And he's been taking care of his boys the last three or four years. And he said, oh, my wife, it turned out, was living a double life. She'd been living with another man since before I met her.

[09:17]

And she went right on living with him as well as with me all the time we got married and had kids. And he didn't find this out, you know, for seven or eight, for 10 years after he knew her. Do you think that's not traumatic? And then your whole reality shifts, right? How do I believe my reality? What did I think was going on? And then it all falls apart, doesn't it? And reality as we knew it is gone. And he decided, I'll figure out, you know, how to do this and take care of my kids. Beautiful day today, isn't it?

[10:18]

Amazing day. This is, I think, this is the warmest I can ever remember it. The warmest and balmiest, sweetest day I've been at Green Gulch. The feeling in the air, you can smell now the rose blossoms, it's unreal. Or is it? What do you suppose reality is? I came, I found a little gata on the front desk at Zen Center a month or so ago. It says, don't chase after the past. Don't lose yourself in the future. The past is no longer here. The future is yet to come. Dwelling, living mindfully in the very here and now, the practitioner dwells in stability

[11:27]

and freedom. Living mindfully in the very here and now, the practitioner dwells in stability and freedom. Death comes unexpectedly. How can we bargain with it? We must be diligent today, tomorrow will be too late. The sages call one who dwells in mindfulness, one who knows the better way to live in peace and harmony. Mindfulness is the quality of here and now. Oh, and I forgot to tell you the third thing that I might be afraid of today. I was going to have to give a talk in front of hundreds of people, and I'm supposed to

[12:38]

be a Zen teacher, and you might be looking to me for some guidance, or reassurance, or faith, or salvation, liberation, awakening. I don't know, you might be looking to me for something, and I have nothing to give you. I wish I could grant you immunity, protection, stability and freedom, but I'm afraid that's not my job. And, you know, several people lately, they've told me, well, what we like about you, Ed, is that you're real, and that you're ordinary. Oh, shit. I guess that's the best I can do for you, huh?

[13:45]

Maybe it's the best I can do for you. So that brings me to, you know, one of my quotes here. I was reading recently, I'm going to get to the subject of my talk eventually, you know. This is all to introduce. Oh, by the way, while I have it here, and then, you know, yesterday I was cleaning up a little bit. This is New Year's greetings from the Stone Creek Zen Do. That's in Sebastopol, Jisho Warner. And it says, the rain over, the clouds drift away, revealing clear, washed sky. It was always there, but I forgot. Each of us, you know, has a mind that is clear, washed sky.

[14:58]

And it's easy to forget, isn't it? And pick up things to scare yourself with. I read this recently. I was reading Andy Ferguson's Zen Chinese Heritage. I was down at Tassajara, and it was on the sale bookshelf, so I got a copy. And I went down to the pool, took off the plastic wrap, and started reading. And mostly I find these old Zen stories kind of annoying because I don't get it, you know. What are they talking about? And then I read this story, and I thought, I'm in the right tradition. Deshan entered the hall and addressed the monks saying,

[16:06]

I don't hold to some view about the ancestors. Here, there are no ancestors and no Buddhas. Bodhidharma is an old, stinking foreigner. Shakyamuni is a dried piece of excrement. Manjushri and Samantabhadra are dung carriers. What is known as realizing the mystery is nothing but breaking through to grab an ordinary life. Bodhi and Nirvana are a donkey tethering post. The 12 divisions of scriptural canon are just paper. For wiping infected skin boils. So this is the lineage, the tradition that I'm in.

[17:14]

I wouldn't want to give you something, you know, for you to grasp onto and cling to and hold to. Against what? The enemy? Against your resistant self? Against... So this is all interesting. And what I really want to remind you about today is that, you know, there is no fixed reality. Whatever you think, this will happen, that will happen. We don't know. I'm doing well. I'm doing poorly. Who can say? I'm a good person or a bad person. I'm ashamed of myself. I'm disappointed. I'm sad. I'm scared. Who knows? And there's no reality that you need to hold on to and keep and have.

[18:19]

Reality is completely fluid. And we are all creating it. This is the amazing thing. We all create reality. Each of us creates reality. Mostly we try to figure out a reality, a way of being that will defend us and protect us from harm. And of course, we don't wish anyone harm. It's very basic to human nature not to wish harm. And those who wish harm are confused. When we wish harm, we have lost our way. We're confused. We're not, I don't think, in touch with our true heart. Not to cause suffering is basic to human heart. So we create reality.

[19:31]

And mostly we try to figure out what will be a good way for me to be that will make sure none of these terrible things ever happen to me. This is mostly how we organize ourselves, organize our bodies, our minds, our speech to protect ourself from harm, from anything terrible happening. And then when something terrible happens, we try to figure out how to do it better. So many times, for instance, in the book I've just been reading, and obviously, I have personal reasons for reading this book about childhood trauma, which I didn't dare read until a few buildings collapsed in New York and many people, hundreds and thousands of people lost their lives. Then I thought, maybe I should read this.

[20:32]

But what people, victims of trauma do, kids especially then, is many kids who are outgoing, bright, bubbly, friendly, decided it would be better to hide, to be small, to not talk in class, to not be there, to duck across the street, to hide from people, to get out of their way, to make themselves sometimes literally invisible. There are kids who play that they've become invisible and get others to join in their game of being invisible, literally, not just making yourself small and indistinct and fit in and blend. And it's often difficult without, you know, and most of us never had any real, you know, sense of how do I get out of this? You know, I came up with this strategy and it may be it served me to protect me

[21:42]

and to have me fit in and blend in and be accepted because I feel if I stood out, that's how I come, I got hit. So why don't I blend in, disappear into life? Once in a while, somebody gets over this or past this and once in a while, and sometimes we realize that the way we have of living our life, although it's been very useful and very helpful and gotten us through and gotten us to here, is now our prison. What our way of life that protected us is now imprisoning us. I used to say, oh, they don't want me to talk to them. How's that? Is that reality? No, that's what I tell myself, you know, to protect myself from being seen

[22:49]

and being known and being met. They don't want to hear it from me. So I've, you know, I in my way learned, you know, many things. Now, as I mentioned, I still don't know is Zen practice, you know, a really spiritual path or is it traumatic reenactment? And then maybe what's so bad about traumatic reenactment and maybe all of our life is that. We're going back, you know, we always, there's always some difficulty or issue in our life. One theory of consciousness actually is that what is consciousness is, you know, we think consciousness is about reality, but there's now scientists are

[23:52]

guessing that consciousness is actually about things that are an issue, but we take consciousness to be about what's real. You know, for instance, now they've done studies that show that, you know, if you decide to scratch your head, why don't you decide to scratch your head and then scratch your head? The part of your brain that says, I'm going to scratch my head now is the last to know. Your brain is already doing it and you've already started the action and then some, another part of your brain goes, oh, I think I'll scratch my head now. And it just got informed about the same time that you noticed you were going to scratch your head. And it was already happening. Your being is already responding, you know, our being, our life is already responding to things even before it's conscious. And then consciousness, we come up with some story, I'm scared because. And, you know,

[25:01]

why would we want to go, I'm scared because, then we think I could control, I can control the things that make me scared. How will I control them? This of course runs counter to basic, you know, Buddhism, or I don't know about basic Buddhism, but certainly Zen. How do you control the wave of the 10,000 things? You know, what do I do when the wave of 10,000 things washes over me? And the Zen teacher says, don't try to control it. Easy enough to say, right? So how will you control? And, you know, the weekend before, the September the 11th, by the way, was the 30th anniversary of my ordination as a priest. And I can tell you, that is no way to celebrate. I was looking forward to my 30th anniversary as a priest.

[26:02]

Now, I don't know. Anyway, but that weekend I was telling people, you know, this is, nothing has changed. I was teaching the First Noble Truth, the Four Noble Truths, the Four Noble Truths, the First Noble Truth is, we don't know what will happen. Did you get it? And we can't control what will happen. So what will you do? You know, what will we do? What's the alternative to trying to control? This has been, you know, from the start, the aim of Buddhism, the aim of Zen. What will you do instead of trying to control? What will you do instead? And what they, and the instead to do is, is there some way we could, you know, actually be in our heart, dwell in the present, deeply, mindfully, here and now, acknowledging one another, meeting

[27:13]

our friends, you know, smiling at our companions, feeling our life, being in the midst of our life, you know, letting go that it can't be controlled. And letting go, we have some freedom and possibilities, and we're not caught by the past or the future. Here's a little poem. This is a secular poem, or is it? Oh, I'll find it eventually. Here it is. This is called, The Way It Is. It's by William Stafford.

[28:14]

There's a thread you follow. It goes among things that change, but it doesn't change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread. But it's hard for others to see. While you hold it, you can't get lost. Tragedies happen. People die. And you suffer and get old. Nothing you do can stop times unfolding. You don't ever let go of the thread. So, it's another way to talk about the clear, unwashed sky that is the essence of each of us.

[29:21]

So, I'm also reminded, this last summer, I was reading Soulmates by Thomas More. It's a book about relationships and soul. And he says, you know, there's a lot you can study and learn about relationships. And you can do therapy, and you can learn communication skills. And if you're lucky, you can get somebody to teach your spouse some communication skills. But the point of his book, he says, is why don't you expand your poetic imagination? You know, we get so concerned about how to control things, how to make the outcome work,

[30:27]

you know, how to make things come out the way I want them to. I know a lot about this. It's what you do when you're three. It's what my neighbor's son has been doing for the last several months. He's three. Mom, pick that up. No, I don't feel like it. Pick it up, Mom. Ha, ha, [...] ha. Et cetera. Who's in charge? Anyway, poetic imagination. Expanding your poetic imagination so that it includes what's happening, actually happening in your life, rather than bemoaning the fact that you can't control things so much that these things don't happen. So, you know, what will we do? This is, to me, as good advice as anything, you

[31:35]

know, expand your poetic imagination. This reminds me, you know, of Suzuki Roshi's, you know, the FBI came and talked to Suzuki Roshi about me, because I was applying to be a conscientious objector. He said I was a very sincere student, because I came to meditation at 5 in the morning. Must be a sincere student. Anyway, I didn't know that until years later, you know, when I got the file from him. They talked to the people I did gardening for in high school. How did they find these people? Amazing, you know. But we were practicing Zen during the

[32:40]

Vietnam War, and, you know, if you said to Suzuki Roshi, I'm going to the Peace March, so I won't be at the sitting on Saturday, he would say, fine. And if you said, I'm not going to the Peace March, I'm going to come to the sitting here on Saturday, he would say, fine. Why don't you do that? And then, you know, there's that famous story about the student who said, shouldn't we be out protesting the war? He was way in the back and Suzuki said, what? And the person in the front row said, shouldn't we be out fighting against the war, protesting the war? And Suzuki jumped up, you know, and started hitting the person who wasn't even the original questioner, you know, in the front row with his stick, with his little stick, and he said, the war is right here. It's right here. Don't you get it? It's right here, right here. And then he apparently sat down and said, I'm not angry. But, you know, we don't know what to do. And so, what's in your heart? You know, where does

[33:51]

your love go? What is your expression of your true heart, of your nature, of your love, of your life? I think it's pretty nice to cook and garden. My next door neighbor has a sign up in her kitchen, dull women have immaculate houses. But what did she do? You know, the day those planes hit the buildings, she started cleaning. Started cleaning her house. I don't know. I think it's pretty nice to clean and garden. But, you know, maybe there's other things you're moved to do. And there's no right answer. This is poetic imagination. It's always been time for poetic imagination. What can we dream up, you know, to do in our life? And that's rather different, isn't it, than the prison we've all been in?

[34:58]

How to behave so that nothing terrible happens? How to get it right? How to be good so that I won't get hit? This is the big, you know, challenge for any of our lives, how to get out of our own confinement, confinement we put ourselves in. So I have another Zen teaching for you, for what it's worth. This is in Tom Cleary's book, The Teaching of Zen. It's from a Zen master named Liao An, who lived in the 14th century, early 14th century, a little less than 700 years ago. This is Tom Cleary's translation.

[36:00]

The essence of mind is unpolluted, basically complete in itself. Just detach from false mental objects and there is the Buddha, the Buddha of being as is. Just detach from false mental objects and there is the Buddha of being as is. Clouds wash away and you see here clear, washed, vast being. When deluded, you deviate from the real and you pursue the false. When enlightened, you abandon the false and return to the real. After you've reached the point where reality and falsehood both melt

[37:03]

and delusion and enlightenment lodge nowhere, then you use up your old karma according to conditions, trusting in essence and enjoying natural reality, exercising kindness and compassion, helping out the orphaned and the unsheltered, forgetting subject and object, annihilating shadow and form. Becoming a person beyond measure, living in a realm of experience beyond measure and doing a task beyond measure. So the task that I call beyond measure today is, you know, having an ordinary life,

[38:10]

not knowing what to do, dreaming up what to do, stepping out of your own prison. What would be the right thing to do? What would be the best thing to do? How can I protect myself? How can I defend myself? This is all, you know, false mental objects because there's something in our heart that can go forward and expand and be vast and spacious. I'm working on this. And I want to encourage you in your effort too. There's no, you know, this is, as he says, when reality and falsehood melt, what will you stick to? It melts. There's no right to stick to and defend and attack. There's no wrong to get away from. There's no right that you can stick to and be safe and secure.

[39:19]

And then he says, when you let go of that, what happens? Your heart comes forward. You use your karma according to conditions. You're kind, you're compassionate. You help people. And it's not because you told yourself to do it. It just, you just dreamed it up. Just occurred to you. What will you say? What will you do? How do you, how do you stand? Do you believe you're about to be attacked? The children who have been in trauma, you know, believe they're about to be attacked. So do you spend your whole life, you know, being suspicious? And will that help? Do you spend your whole life being defended? Does that help? Does it help to be scared? Does it help to be timid or shy? Does it help to be brash?

[40:27]

How fellow, well met. How nice to see you. Great being here. What is going to help? You know, is there some behavior that would get you through? And then we say, you know, that's, that's the one that, you know, the clay Buddha doesn't go through the water. You know, the wooden Buddha doesn't make it through the fire. The right behavior, you know, is not going to get you through. What about the behavior that, you know, is beyond measure that you don't know of? You haven't conceived of. It's the inconceivable. We have a chance to, you know, live a life beyond measure and to do things that are just inconceivable. What will they be? I don't know. I can't tell you. Now could I? And so, you know, this kind of thing, you know, I'm telling you, this is not something you can

[41:34]

just, oh, I get it. I'll just do that. You know, it's something that you sit with and you, you breathe with and you let work on you and things will change, you know, for you. So, this is what they've found now and I should probably stop. You know, it's probably been long enough talking, but I want to tell you about another book I've been reading. You know, I do read more books now than I used to for a while there, but, you know, most of them aren't Buddhist. But I've been reading this, I was reading this great book called Hair, Brain, Tortoise Mind. Have you heard of this little book? Great book, Hair, Brain, Tortoise Mind, and it's a book about Zen, but it's presented as though it's about science, neural science, you know, science of the brain and the mind and physiology of the brain. And the subtitle of the book is How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less. And science is now, science is now figuring this out and they're proving this, you know,

[42:37]

that what he calls D-mode, which is deliberation mode, figuring things out, is for most situations in our life, that's only good for a few things like math problems, you know, but for most of our life you can't figure out, you know, deliberate and figure out, like, who do I marry? Do I marry this person or not? Checklist, you know, pluses, minuses, you know, add them up, you know, give them a point value, you know. You know, most of our life we can't deliberate and get to the answer. Deliberate, so he calls that D-mode, which is also default mode. We tend to fall back on thinking, you know, inappropriately to figure things out when they can't be figured out. So we're just out there, you know, beyond the capacity to figure out, beyond measure, you know, beyond conception. And we do things.

[43:37]

And we can, and we can be, you know, we can create. And we'll see what we all do, won't we? We'll see what happens. And so, you know, according to science now, this is scientific now. The real problems of your life, you know, can't be figured out. So when you go to figure them out, you know, if people describe what's happening when they do problems, problems where you're adding up and subtracting and you're doing that, you can tell the person what you're doing. But when you're figuring out something that can't be figured out, that you just have to dream up or you have some insight or intuition or sense of what to do, and you hit on it and it pops into your mind and it pops up there. To get to there, what is going on? People describe it as, I don't know what's happening. Nothing seems to be happening. Does that sound like meditation? And you thought you were just sitting there and nothing was

[44:45]

happening. That's what's supposed to be happening. That's the other side of post-traumatic reenactment is, you know, nothing's happening and you dream up, you know, and something pops about what to do in your life. Over and over again, something pops, something occurs to us and it flashes into our awareness out of, we don't know where it comes from. And it's not about, you know, what's right or what's wrong or what's good or what we should do or shouldn't do. It's our response to life. Boom. You know, last, a year and a half ago, I went to see my doctor. I told him I was depressed. And he said, well, the good news is that if you don't kill yourself,

[45:48]

if you don't commit suicide, you know, if you're not that depressed, you're not that depressed, are you? Checked with me. He said, if you're not that depressed, then the good news is you live just as depressed people live just as long as people who aren't depressed. And of course, for a depressed person, he said, well, that's depressing. But I decided, oh, about a year ago now, I realized that for me, most of depression is is the passion of life and the, you know, the heart, the heart, the passion, the enthusiasm, vitality, this free response to life, you know, gets told that's wrong. If whatever you dream up to do, you tell yourself that's wrong, I can tell you that's depressing.

[46:53]

You see, that's judging yourself. Am I good? Am I bad? Is this the right thing to do? Is it wrong thing to do? Is this the best thing to do? You just go ahead and do it. You do it and you manifest your life, you know, and we don't know, you know, what the result will be, but you will have expressed yourself. And it's something about your heart. It's connected, you know, to let your heart come forward. Great heart of compassion, the vast guide that we all are. Oh, well, there's more to talk about, but you've heard enough. So thank you for being here today, and I wish you certainly prayers and blessings. And I find it really wonderful to be here with all of you today. So, thank you.

[47:54]

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