Nomon Tim offers a reminder that during troubling times, as always, we do not know what will happen and that it is important to maintain a "big view" of difficult situations. We can appreciate the freedom of intimacy with deeply not knowing. We are also reminded that Zen practice, whether one engages in formal "steps" such as taking the precepts or entering priesthood or does not, can be a profound, deep and intimate practice.  

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Tim's Talk Notes:

Here's a poem to begin:

The Broken by Alberto Ríos

Something is always broken.

Nothing is perfect longer than a day –

Every roof has a broken tile,

Every mouth a chipped tooth.

Something is always broken

But the world endures the break:

The broken twig is how we follow the trail.

The broken promise is the one we remember.

Something changed is pushed out the door,

Sad, perhaps, but ready, too ready, for the world.

Something is always broken.

Something is always fixed.

I want to share some wise words from Hogen Bays. Hogen Roshi is co-abbot of Great Vow Zen Monastery.

Thanks everyone for being here. The purpose of Dharma is to help people find meaning in their life and to reduce suffering. So when we're talking about any topic, that’s the intention. One of the especially important parts is that we have a big view.

A few days ago, we had a national election. As you all know, we cast our votes for the candidate we hoped would have the best effect on our lives, just as everybody else did. Some people were elated with the outcome, while others were devastated. Some people's fears were enormously relieved, and most of the country's fears were greatly eased. However, some people's fears were really stoked. Some are ready to flee the U.S., while others invested a lot more money in the stock market, which surged. Many people, looking at all the candidates’ past actions, believe the world is going to become a much more hostile, less friendly, and more punitive place. Others feel that now there’s hope for stability and economic progress.

If the election had gone differently, some people would be ready for a civil war, while others would be looking forward to a new era of inclusivity and peace. So, as practitioners who are interested in the nature of truth and who aspire to peace, wisdom, loving-kindness, the relief of suffering, and liberation, how do we meet these circumstances? How do we respond to a situation like this election?

I'm going to propose that first we take the big view. There are two sides and many sides to everything, but let’s look at it from four different perspectives: the personal, the rational, the responsiveness, and the benefit of others.

From a personal perspective, it’s important to understand that fear is suffering, anxiety is suffering, and anger is suffering. The more afraid we are, the angrier we become; the more fearful we are, the more we suffer. This creates a cycle where the more we suffer, the more we react negatively to our friends, neighbors, families, jobs, and relationships. Anger, fear, anxiety, and suffering do not lead to clarity. They do not lead to calmness or effective action; instead, they lead to suspicion, fear, and righteousness.

The first place to always begin is not with anger, fear, suspicion, hate, or doubt, but to ask ourselves: How do I bring myself into a state of calmness and clarity at this moment? We can breathe deeply, sit down, and stop our minds from spinning endlessly. Fear is always about the future; it’s always somewhere else. So we bring ourselves back to what is real right here, right now.

In this moment, what's there to be afraid of? If we look right here right now, we see nice people behaving themselves very pleasantly, sitting in harmony. By relaxing on the out-breath, we can bring our nervous system into equanimity, calming down, and dropping the fear of possible futures.

The second principle is to have an intelligent understanding of what’s going on. This doesn't mean understanding the media's narrative, which typically projects a sensationalized story. The media wants to make things exciting to keep our attention, so we have to derive our understanding from reality, not just stories.

One reality we can all observe is that we don't know the future. If you think you know the future, let me know, and we can go to Las Vegas to resolve our financial issues! The truth is, we think we can predict outcomes, but the further out in time we get, the less accurate our suppositions become.

Another way to understand the world is through causation. To be here now, in this room, listening to this talk, an infinite number of causes and conditions had to lead to this moment. This includes 30,000 years of history, technological advancements, and countless individual and societal factors. We need to acknowledge the many factors that influence who we are and how we live today.

The third principle is to recognize that every life has challenges. That’s a given. When we face challenges, we have two basic approaches: we can learn from them and grow wiser, or we can collapse and feel like victims. Each challenge is an opportunity for us to expand our understanding, learn to be more creative, and tap into inner resources we may not have recognized before.

Challenges can lead us to either wisdom and loving-kindness or to complacency. Without challenges, we might become stagnant. When we face difficult times, we must summon our strength and evolve, which ultimately leads to personal growth.

The last principle I’ll discuss is to recognize the cyclical nature of existence. How many governments have risen and fallen over the past 30,000 years? The way the world operates is that things rise, fall, come together, and fall apart. This isn’t inherently good or bad; it just is. By accepting the nature of life, we can choose to surf the high and low waves instead of being flooded by them.

Now we reach the part of how we can respond. We can only respond with our actions in the present moment. If we want to care for others, it begins with what we can do right now. For example, if we want to help hungry people, we must start with our own hands and intentions in our local community.

When faced with a crisis, we should first clarify our minds and understand whether we are going to respond with anger or with peace. It’s essential to act with a sense of connection to others, knowing we are all linked. Out of this understanding, we can plant the seeds of clarity and create positive changes in the world.

Finally, we can help others find peace and clarity. This might involve meaningful joint activities and community involvement, whether that’s offering support, sharing Dharma, or organizing events. Regardless of the challenges we face, we can keep these four principles in mind: seek calmness and clarity, understand the situation intelligently, function skillfully according to our values, and help others.

May we turn everything into wisdom and kindness. May it be so.

So nice offering there from Hogan, huh? But thinking about this and talking to people, I appreciate these wise words. But maybe, like me, you notice that there's something missing here, which is we can't really understand the big situations. They bring forward the difficult practice of deeply not knowing. And while there's freedom in that, we really don’t know what's going to happen.

It’s very difficult because we are conditioned with minds that want to understand, want to have reasons, and want things to be orderly in this universe and in alignment with our values. One of the deep teachings in the Tibetan tradition is to deeply consider that all people, everyone you meet, wants to be happy and doesn’t want to suffer.

And then we have a big challenge. When we see choices and actions and outcomes, they seem like they’re going to lead to a lot of unhappiness and a lot of suffering, right? So it's kind of a Koan for us. Somehow, these actions—by ourselves, by others—are always in alignment with these goals: wanting to be happy and secure, stable, not afraid, and free from suffering. That’s why people act how they act. That's what they hope, right? That's what we hope.

The other thing I think is a little bit missing from Hogan's wise words is we need to look more at our own blind spots—the many choices and actions we make that increase suffering and that aren't in alignment with our values. Small ones mostly, maybe sometimes big ones. Who doesn’t have things they regret that they could learn from?

It'd be so easy to do a massive amount of othering on whichever side of the political divide you find yourself. Those others don't get it. I get it. But the other thing that I thought about in Hogan's lovely encouragement to take a breath and calm down, which is wise and true, is what about our dear friends and loved ones who have experienced significant trauma? How? Why would that not be active, you know? Maybe it could be extremely active right now.

It’s insulting to tell people triggered by trauma to calm down, isn’t it? So it’s a very complicated thing. No words can quite say it right, and I don't mean to pick on Hogan. Lovely guy. Those were good, wise words. But no words are ever quite right, are they? Something's always left out. And yet our work is to be clear and to be kind.

We must be brave enough to open our mouths, even though it's not going to come out quite right, and express our love for this world and each other and everyone in this world. He does talk a little bit about impermanence, but I want to bring that up again because I think it's a great source of comfort for us here to remind ourselves, with a lot of strength and a lot of energy, that I do not know what's going to happen.

Whatever things I imagine are not nuts; they’re based on something—our understanding of the world, past observations, and always slightly distorted by our opinions, views, and biases. But our predictions of the future are not dumb. It's just that it’s not going to happen that way. We know this for a fact—something will happen, but not exactly what we predicted because how could it be exactly that? That's only a thought you're having now—an imagination of the future.

As we were finishing service tonight, I had a thought I never had before. I’ve always appreciated service. I know sometimes these forms seem a little weird, but I’ve never really felt that way. For whatever reason, I don’t know why. But as we were doing service, I had this feeling of great comfort—you know, deeply comforting—to do this practice together, to do service together. Healing, embodied, connected.

I’m just making up reasons; I don’t really know why. I just felt so comforting—like a warm blanket, you know. So let’s see what are the ways that you can find that are healthy, connected comfort. And we go on. You know we go on together. We keep practicing. We keep wondering. We try to understand. At the same time, we know we see that we can never really understand.

And we do this practice right of being able to hold both sides: to make an effort to understand even as we know we can't really understand. I don’t even understand myself and my motivations, you know. So if somebody thinks they could understand the motivations of like 90 million people, well...

But I want to understand, and I’ll keep studying. One of my personal goals, I hope I pull this off, is a little side note for me personally. Robert Reich, who was the labor secretary under Clinton, I think, is an economics professor, politically involved, and he has an online video economics course where he says he can really help you unpack the sequence of events—policy decisions, world economic issues—and all of it makes sense if you study it.

He says this will help resolve this unbelievable disparity in income inequality in the world and in our country that has left so many people behind. I’d like to understand better how that happened. I know I have some imaginings and ideas, but I’d like to understand better. So that’s just one goal I have for understanding, and I’d need to set aside 10-20 hours to actually do that, you know. So I’m going to try. Hold me to it.

How did we get to be where we are? There’s stuff we can all learn, and it’s going to take more than just scanning the headlines to learn these things. It’s going to take an investment to understand our world a little better—this world we’ve created with each other.

So anyway, I’d rather talk about the 12th century and what Dogen was up to, but I figured we'd better talk about this, too, huh? One thing Dogen brought to us, which we got to really enjoy on Sunday and are continuing to enjoy today—and it’s relevant to the bigger topic here—is that we have a ritual path around living well, living wisely, and living with love.

You don’t have to do this particular set of things; you can still live exactly the same way. But we’ve inherited this beautiful system of studying the precepts, studying the Zen ethical guidelines, and really trying to understand them through our lives and in our lives. Not an academic study, a personal study. We do that for at least a year, maybe many years, maybe every year, for the rest of our lives.

Then for some people, it's right to do a physical representation of that vision, to make and sew a special garment. A bunch of people are wearing them; it looks like a little bib funny. Oftentimes, people wear dark, subdued clothing under the dark, subdued colored bib. You can't even see it, but it's there, you know.

As we did that, we gave the people new names—audacious. Naming somebody: names of recognition and names of encouragement. The other thing you might not know about Zen is that Zen is into paperwork. The Zen adepts of China, when this was all sort of developed and elaborated, many of them were from the literary classes—the upper classes of China.

I’m afraid we did inherit a bit of a class-based system, and we’re trying to be more inclusive now. The Chinese basically invented writing thousands of years before anybody else, and they’re kind of proud of it. It’s their thing. And so a special occasion deserves special writing. Because they write with a brush, it’s also a form of art—all writing is, but it’s more obvious with a brush.

So partly with a brush and partly with, I think, some sharpies involved too, we gave the new Baby Buddhas documents to certify that they’re part of this warm hand to warm hand lineage of love and understanding, going back to Buddha and before. Part of why I wanted to tell you about all this is to reassure you that you don’t have to do it.

One is not less than or more than, greater than for having gone through this process. It’s just one choice, one path of practice. The great thing about what we are up to here is there are many, many ways. As many as Dogen himself said, there are many minds as there are persons and as many ways to do this practice as there are minds. Each of us has our own trajectory.

So, if doing all this doesn't ever feel right for you, it doesn’t mean you're a failure or something like that. Maybe you’re just being wise and recognizing where you have resonance and where you don’t. But that kind of stuff can really catch us up, so I wanted to bring that up.

In my life, a similar thing is my father and many relatives—my father, my uncle, my niece, my stepfather—all have PhDs in the hard sciences. They’re really smart people. I was the oldest son, and nobody—I don't know if anyone ever said this out loud, but it was pretty clear what I was supposed to do. I did an undergraduate degree, so I got a little street cred for that. But then I went off and got a job in the mountains, in preschool, nature, and painting houses. One time I worked for a house-moving company, which was really interesting—moving houses.

And all through my twenties, I figured like one of these days I was going to get around to applying for graduate school so I could be a physicist. It seemed like it was just one morning, I'd think, “Oh, yeah, today’s the day. MIT? Maybe Caltech? I think it’s Tuesday." But obviously I never did, and I felt guilty about it, you know. I felt like I let them down. I didn’t feel particularly ashamed by anybody. I knew my father was content—as long as I’m happy, he’s always been very clear about that.

There was nobody telling me what was wrong with you for not going to grad school. Sometimes I find that people who have gone to grad school talk about it. One of the things I've noticed is they always say, “Well, undergrad? I went here.” So I recognize that's coded language for saying, "I went to grad school.” So I started saying that when I had an opportunity to talk about it. You know, somehow college was involved. "Oh, undergrad! I went to UC Santa Cruz.” There was no grad school.

One day, I was doing a mindfulness class for a group of doctors. Many of these people had MDs and PhDs. Can you believe that? You know, of course, in our usual way, we see these really smart people, but these are people who are really good at going to school, you know, and really determined about going to school, or maybe they didn’t know any better. Maybe they couldn't have made it working for the Van Dusen House Moving Company. Probably not, you know.

So I’m working with this group of doctors, and I’m feeling a little inadequate for my lack of pedigree. One of them gave me a beautiful teaching, so I hope someone gives you a teaching like this sometime. She says to me, “Tim, I love what you offer us. It's exactly what we need. You offer us this way to come home to ourselves, to feel ourselves again. You give us just enough to do it, and then you get out of the way and let us do it.”

I'm not going to ask you to take out my appendix, she says, but you're just what's needed here. And I realized, and so there I was. I was actually at a medical school, you know, high academy. I was like, “Oh.” I got my PhD somewhere else.

So if you never do the Rakusu thing, I hope you’ll remember, or someone will remind you, that you did exactly the right thing with what you chose to do. Because these are beautiful practices, but like all things, they can divide us, right? And for goodness’ sakes, there are enough ways that we’re getting divided.

So I just wanted to express the hope that our ritual empowerment and steps and stages, such as they are, always serve to heal and unify, and never to divide. We remind ourselves and remind each other when we do these ritual steps that this doesn't mean you're better than somebody. It's the opposite, you know. It means you're willing to be humble and put your imperfect self out there as an example of Buddha, as embarrassing as that is.

So this is my part two from Sunday, and you can't return it.

So that’s what I wanted to say tonight. I hope you feel comforted by being together. Does anybody want to add anything or share anything for the greater good?

Okay. Actually, that’s really good. Another thing we learn in Zen is, I’m not modeling that very well, but it means it's better not to speak, huh! Enough words already.