Today is Sunday, March 16, 2025, and my title for this talk is living in interesting times. Most people know there's a famous Chinese curse. May you live in interesting times? And that's come true for for us, time, times are quite interesting from a objective, historical point of view. This is fascinating. However, there is there's a couple other components in the air these days, and those are anxiety and dread. So many people are affected by this. I feel it a bit myself. Can't say that I'm immune, but comes up a lot in dokan. My wife is a therapist. She hears it from her clients. I hear it from my neighbors, my friends. So many people are unsettled and their mind chi just keeps going to the situation today in this country and as a result throughout the world, how many people are upset and traumatized?
Yeah, there was an article in the Washington Post, and they interviewed a Washington sleep psychologist named Mark Rosenblum, and he said uncertainty is one of the biggest breeders of anxiety. There's this kind of fairly ironic paradox that the less I sleep, the more depressed and anxious I get, but at the same time, the more depressed and anxious I get, the less I sleep. There are a lot of people that are reporting waking up in the middle of the night, mind going there later in the article, or maybe in the beginning, I can't remember, there's this quote, the level of late night dread in Washington right now cannot be squashed by all the weighted blankets in the world.
And it's not for no reason. People are being hurt. It's no question, and it has the potential to get worse. We in this country, we have a history of being feeling anyway, feeling protected. You know, we're got two large oceans on either side. We haven't really been subject to too many invasions, not since the British came down from Canada in 1812 or whatever that was, and we chased them out all the way to the Gulf of America. I it
we've seen ourselves so many politicians have talked about this as a beacon of hope, of democracy for the whole world. That was part of the justification for the Iraq War, bringing democracy to Iraq, this fond idea that many administrations have had that through the use the judicious use of American power, We can somehow make stable democratic states. How is that working for you? Not very well.
There's been this period since World War Two of relative peace and calm compared to previous history. It's the new normal. Just even though their disaster is happening all around the world, they're not on the scale of what we saw in World War Two and before. In World War Two, 14 million people died in the Soviet Union, either in battle or of subsequent starvation. 20 million people in China. I.
In Poland only 6 million, which was 20% of the population of the country, the potential is always there for horrible disaster the
been famines and epidemics throughout world history. The reading recently about the Irish potato famine happened around, I think 18, the mid 1800s the time it was over, the population of Ireland was 40% less than it had been, not all through death by starvation, although there was a lot, a lot of that, but also people leaving Ireland. That's when many of our Irish ancestors came to this country. I
most people know that that famine was result of the potato blight, which, and some people may know that one of the reasons it was so intractable is there was only one variety of potatoes that was grown in all of Ireland. It was a real monoculture. We understand a little better now about the dangers of a monoculture, but it was also exacerbated by the government, by the rulers in England, by the land system. People could own land in Ireland, they weren't Irish. They were English. They owned land, and they would rent it out to middlemen, who would then turn around and rent out very, very small parcels, barely enough to subsist on. And that's how people lived, just living in a hovel and living totally on potatoes, which it turns out, you can eat nothing but potatoes, and you can survive. There's enough vitamins and whatnot in them. Then that fell apart. As things do. We're Buddhists, and so we know there is no such thing as a permanent state. Everything is in flux. Things can get worse, things can get better. There are no guarantees.
Of course, for anxiety, it's always the worst when there is that uncertainty, when we don't know what's going to happen. Don't know how bad it could be
when there's a sudden change, when the rug is pulled out from underneath us. Certainly, those characteristics of the current situation feed into this disease that so many people feel. There's another aspect to it too, and that is, I think it's fair to say there's some real ill will on display. There's this whole thing you hear about owning the libs. There's maybe some element of intentional harm. There's a guy named Russ Vought. Russ Vought, he's the Director of the Office of Management and Budget. He was in Trump's last term, and now he was has been confirmed again. And he's also one of the major players, authors, I guess, of what's called Project 2025, which was sort of the roadmap of what this new administration would do if they came to power. There's a video which was obtained by ProPublica, in which he says, we want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected when they wake up in the morning. We want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so we want to put them in trauma. It's a it's alarming. Yeah, and and, and there's a hook there. Isn't there. When you feel that somebody is intentionally hurting you, it's really hard to be objective, to let it go, to understand something about what's going on and and in the minds of people who are pursuing this agenda. There are reasons. You know, there's there's the feeling that many people have the bureaucracy is way too bloated. You see it everywhere. See it in local government. You see it in federal government. Remember being amazed when I realized how many of the people that worked for the Rochester Public School System. We're not teachers. Teachers are the minority. Somehow we need this. We build up this huge bureaucracy, and then we can't do anything about it until somebody apparently decides to come with an ax. This is kind of a pattern that's been used in Silicon Valley, where you tear things apart and then you can put them together more to your liking, which is also a scary thought.
But when you, when you feel that intentionality, it really, it's really easy to get caught in in your head, to get caught in your emotions, and you're thinking, trying to game it out, thinking what could be done. I
It's all helped along a course by the type of news and social media that we've developed, which survives based on our engagement and cultivates that engagement through outrage, speculation,
wherever it is, YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, simply the conventional media, even the Washington Post, the New York Times, everybody's looking for what's engaging, what capture captures us, and it's quite sophisticated, too. I mean, there's, there's, it's studied. You.
It's really hard not to find yourself buying into it.
And if you're like me, you may have a fear of just letting it go, because there's that saying, if you're not angry, you're not paying attention. But what are you paying attention to? Is it just the same cycle of thoughts, the same dread, the same unwillingness to not know, to see things are happening, we don't know what's going to come out of this in the long run. We don't even know for sure that it's bad.
So all of us, some people aren't, aren't so bothered by this. I was talking to a neighbor who's independent, and he quite aware of the some of the idiocy that's going on, but he said, you know, my my world is my friends and the kids I work with at school, and it's a legitimate place to come from, because that's where our effectiveness and our power is, is in our world, our daily world. There's something I've read before from Carl Jung. He was interviewed in Germany before the World War Two, but after the Nazis had taken over in Germany, he was actually interviewed in Switzerland. He was Swiss and not German, and he said, point blank, I'm not concerned about the world. I'm concerned about the people with whom I live, the individual, the other world is all in the newspapers. My family and my neighbors are my life. The only life that I can experience that is what we would call direct experience. What lies beyond is newspaper mythology. It's not a vast importance that I make a career or achieve great things for myself. What is important and meaningful to my life is that I shall live as full. Is possible to fulfill the divine in me say the best revenge is living well. So if you're upset with the people moving the levers of power, look, look within. Find, find that inner balance, because it's there.
How do we handle it? Certainly not by Doom scrolling and perseveration that is running through a cycle of thoughts over and over again. Check in every now and then and see if the thoughts you're thinking are ones you thought maybe 100 1000 100,000 times. And you don't handle it by burying your head in the sand. You have to recognize people are being hurt. There's trauma, and some of it isn't just the trauma of worrying or not worrying, and worrying about the situation in general and not having any particular threat to your own life, besides the reduction in your portfolio. There are a lot of people out there who don't know whether they'll be able to stay in this country. My friend who wasn't so my neighbor who wasn't so engaged with the whole show, told me, the last time I talked to him, that there's a young kid at Brighton that he teaches and coaches that's just a great kid. He's from France, here on a visa. He'll be going home. He can't stay it's a shame this country was built on people coming from other countries and joining in the American adventure. Now that's called into question. You.
The bottom line is we have to make peace with uncertainty, with not knowing, and as Zen practitioners, that's our specialty. That's what we learn to do. The three most famous words in Zen, Roshi used to say this again and again our I don't know. So what Bodhidharma said to the Emperor Wu at their interview, when the Emperor asked him, Are you not a holy man? I don't know.
What we have is this moment. It's where we need to go, and sometimes, times like these, can wake us up. So we do go there. We do come back to the moment, to the raw data of our senses to the stillness that's always there, to our true nature. We had a founding member of the center, Audrey Fernandez. Many people know her old timers. She was here when I came back in 1968 and people started to pour in from all over the country. This was one of the few Zen centers at the time. So we had people from everywhere, other countries, and a lot of them came because of the troubled times the Vietnam war was going on, and I remember being unable to get the worry out of my head. My draft status was undetermined, and I really, really did not want to go. And Audrey used to say, what this, what Zen needs, is another good war. So we haven't got that yet, but maybe something just as good.
We also need to recognize that the potential for disaster is always there. You it's always with us, and our ability to ward it off, to be safe is limited. We dance over the abyss. Do we do it with courage, or do we do it and shrink? Drown our sorrows in this or that,
it's important too not to buy into the nastiness. There's something that the Buddha. Said it's in the dharmapada, one of the earliest sutras, words of the Buddha. He said, How will hate leave him if a man forever thinks he abused me, he hit me, he defeated me, he robbed me. Will hate ever touch him if he does not think he abused me, he hit me, he defeated me, he robbed me. There is only one eternal law, hate never destroys. Hate, only love does a lot of people get tired of being on the side of history that has to forgive. We'd like to mete out punishment, but that's that's not. It's not the way to go. That's not that doesn't accomplish a thing that just plays into someone else's playbook. I'm sure there are people in the administration that would like to see violent demonstrations, see people doing things that can be highlighted show the depravity of those who resist. Uh,
a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said, if we could read The Secret History of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility people do what they do because of who they are and what they are is determined by their genetics and their experience. How they've suffered battles, they've had to fight, disappointments, damage, the contemporary Chinese chan teacher Guo Gu read from before, says, when a person holding a stick hits you, do you get angry at the stick or the person? No one gets angry at the stick because it is the person holding the stick. Similarly, if a person is in the grip of greed, aversion and delusion and has wronged you, do you get angry at the person or at the three poisons? Three poisons are greed, aversion and delusion, greed, anger and hatred, once the one who has wronged you is under the sway of vexation. Don't see them as the perpetrators, but recognize the three poisons as the culprit. In this way, we can actively forgive and help others. That's so much of what's at stake if you lose your balance, if you fall into curling up into a ball or lashing out in hatred, how can you help other people who are suffering? How can you be any kind of a role model or comfort? How can you listen?
There's a something that I picked up when I was in a when I was going to AA, which I did quite a lot in the early years of my sobriety. Lot of People Know It. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. We have delusions of what we can do. We think by imagining scenarios somehow or accomplishing something, our power is sadly quite limited one person in the nation of hundreds of millions of people,
so much that we can do right here in our own Sangha, in our own locality. Have to admire people who are actually feeding the hungry, helping the sick.
We have to come to terms with being insecure and having those we love also insecure we
now, Helen Keller said security is mostly a superstition. Does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring advance. Nature or nothing. And this is the call we're living in interesting times, and it calls for people to be courageous,
not to minimize, not to catastrophize, to actually come to terms with being in this state of not knowing, this Bardo intermediate state.
I want to read something from a book by Pema Chodron, probably her most well known book, called when things fall apart.
Think I would have put a marker in there.
She talks in one of the early chapters about how difficult she found it when she first took over as the teacher at Gampo Abbey. She has a monastery that's up in Nova Scotia. I She
says everything that I had not been able to see about myself before was suddenly dramatized, as if that weren't enough, others were free with their feedback about me and what I was doing. It was so painful that I wondered if I would ever be happy again. Felt that bombs were being dropped on me almost continuously, with self deceptions exploding all around in a place where there was so much practice and study going on, I could not get lost in trying to justify myself and blame others. That kind of exit was not available during this time, a teacher visited, and I remember her saying to me, when you have made good friends with yourself, your situation will be more friendly, too. I had learned this lesson before. I knew that it was the only way to go. I used to have a sign pinned up on my wall that read only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation, can that which is indestructible be found in us somehow, even before I heard the Buddhist teachings, I knew that this was the spirit of true Awakening. It was all about letting go of everything. I
and then going ahead a little bit, she says, we don't know anything. We call something bad, we call it good. But really, we just don't know when things fall apart and we're on the verge of we know not. What the test for each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize, not think we know, not conceptualize the spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place that's really swell. In fact, that way of looking at things is what keeps us miserable, thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly. The very first noble truth of the Buddha points out that suffering is inevitable for human beings as long as we believe that things last, that they don't disintegrate, that they can be counted on to satisfy our hunger for security. From this point of view, the only time we ever know what's really going on is when the rug has been pulled out and we can't find anywhere to land. We can use these situations either to wake ourselves up or to put ourselves to sleep. Right now, in the very instant of groundlessness is the seed of taking care of those who need our care, and of discovering our goodness. This is our natural, spontaneous goodness, not becoming rigid and moralistic, becoming available, flexible. She says, I remember so vividly a day in early spring when my whole reality gave out on me, although it was before I had heard of any Buddhist teachings, it was what some would call a genuine experience, spiritual experience. It happened when my husband told me he was having an affair. We lived in northern New Mexico. I was standing in. Front of our adobe house, drinking a cup of tea, I heard the car drive up and the door bang shut. Then he walked around the corner, and without warning, he told me he was having an affair and he wanted a divorce. I remember the sky and how huge it was. I remember the sound of the river and the steam rising up from my tea. There was no time, no thought, there was nothing, just the light and the profound, limitless stillness. Then I regrouped and picked up a stone and threw it at him. I When anyone asks me how I got involved in Buddhism, I always say it was because I was so angry with my husband. The truth is that he saved my life. When that marriage fell apart, I tried hard, very, very hard to go back to some kind of comfort, some kind of security, some kind of familiar resting place, fortunate, fortunately for me, I could never pull it off. Instinctively, I knew that annihilation of my old, dependent, clinging self was the only way to go.
Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition. If we could only realize it, nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off center in between. State is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don't get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It's a very tender, non aggressive, open ended state of affairs, and that's the case if we're not just focused on wanting it to go away. Just want some peace and quiet. I just want this all to be over. Well, you don't get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need. She says to stay with that shakiness, to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with a feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge. That is the path of true awakening. Of course, she doesn't mean buying in to the desire for revenge, but seeing it, letting letting the light of awareness shine on it, letting all those things come up that we're not too proud of, because they will these situations will bring that out, sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic. This is the spiritual path. It's, it's, it's a wonderful opportunity. Dealing with adversity. You don't become strong until you do so many things that we can look back many of us in our lives, and think what I thought was a disaster was wonderful. It changed me for the better. For me, I think back to my DUI, driving, driving drunk, even within a day or two, I realized, oh, this could be good. This could be good. Sickness can help the disillusion of a marriage, as with pepper children losing a job. There are some people, certainly not all, who are losing their jobs in the so called downsizing that's going on that are going to end up in a better place than they are now, so much depends on our good luck, but also on our mindset. How open Can we stay? How much courage can we find? I
A again, getting the knack of relaxation in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic. This is the spiritual path, getting the knack of catching ourselves, of gently and compassionately catching ourselves, is the path of the warrior. We catch ourselves one zillion times as once again, whether we like it or not. We harden into resentment, bitterness, righteous indignation, harden in any way, even into a sense of relief, a sense of inspiration. Every day we could think about the aggression in the world, in New York, Los Angeles, Halifax, Taiwan, Beirut, Kuwait, Somalia, Iraq, everywhere, of course, is back during the Gulf War. It sounds like we have our own examples, in the Ukraine, in the Sudan, in Syria, in. Ah, so much suffering all over the world. Everybody always strikes out at the enemy, and the pain escalates forever every day. We could reflect on this and ask ourselves, Am I going to add to the regression in the world every day, at the moment when things get edgy, we can just ask ourselves, Am I going to practice peace, or am I going to practice war?
So I always worry when I give a talk like this,
that people will use it as an excuse to just let go of any concern whatsoever. Tried to keep that balanced, we all need to find that balance now at one point, talking with my sister, who lives in Vermont, she was completely unaware of so many things. This is back a while, while ago, but she didn't realize that Donald Trump was running for president. She's just living in her little world, and maybe that's okay, but it's also good to be a citizen, to wish our country well, to wish our neighbors well,
then to act. There are ways we can act on a national scale. Can write to your congress person, but most of the good we do happens right at home. People that we can help directly can donate to good causes. Can bring understanding and we can work on ourselves. Can do this practice for the sake of all beings.
