Good morning, everyone. Good morning. Today is Today is August, 3, 2025 and the title for my talk is unselfing, and we'll get into that in a moment. Last weekend, many of you were out at Chapin mill for the ceremony, transmission ceremony for Dhara-sensei, and there was the little performance at the beginning where people asked her questions and she answered. And I want to go back to the question that I asked. I thought the answer was quite good, by the way, just not. But it was a quote from Dogen Zen master, Dogen, who was this great Japanese master, born in the year 1200 and he said this, to study Buddhism is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to awaken to the 10,000 things there are a lot of different translations of that final line, but this is the one that I like. It's so concrete and direct to forget the self, to find ourselves with no barrier whatsoever between us and the world we are, the world.
Study Buddhism is to study the self. A lot of people work on the question, Who am I? Certainly a direct way of studying the self. But no matter what your practice is, you're studying the self. This. Is it? This right now? What is it when we get truly absorbed in our practice, in whatever way we forget ourselves, you can get into a very deep state where there is no one there.
At that point, things really light up. Come to awakening.
Dogan said another, and there's another quote from him says, You think your mind is ideas and concepts, but actually is grasses and trees and pebbles and stones you
all of us, all of us are afflicted with the inadequacy of the small self of this me.
We look critically at ourselves. We find that we're selfish. We're worried about what's good for us, how things are going to work out. We concern ourselves with what other people think of us.
Something some people, it's debilitating, the feeling of inadequacy.
Self is limited by definition, it's selfish, it's illusory, it's not real, and it's so petty. I often say when I'm giving a workshop that if there could be a transcription of everything we think during the course of the day and you are forced to read it, be embarrassing. Anthony de Mello, favorite guy of mine, Jesuit priest and pretty wonderful teacher. I. Says of the self, I'm an ass. You're an ass. It's just, it's just the way it is. That's our limited self referential way of being. But there's something else. There is, what we call in Buddhism, our Buddha nature, our true nature, responds without thinking.
Well, I got on to this topic reading from a blog by a woman named Maria Popova. Pretty interesting woman, and she had this to say. She said, walking through the white walled gallery at the graduation show of one of New York City's most esteemed art schools between beautiful young people with Instagram faces, I was struck to see project after project take up as its subject the least durable, most illusory aspect of human existence, the self. Where was the Iris Murdoch in these dawning artists flies to remind them that art at its best is an occasion for unselfing We'll get into Iris Murdoch in just a moment, but Maria Popova goes on and yet, who can fault them? Not just their generation, but our entire culture, seems to have forgotten that identities and opinions are the least interesting parts of people. Ripples on the surface of the ocean of the soul. So painful when my grandchildren were growing up to see my granddaughter's obsession with how many likes she got on whatever social media account she was using, I uh, people grow out of that, but some people don't. And all of us, to one degree or another, care what other people think.
It's not that that's wrong to think about yourself or be aware of yourself or know what other people think about you. We're programmed to have a good idea of what other people think of us, because it affects our evolutionary fitness. People who didn't have a clue didn't have as many children,
but that That preoccupation screens off so much more that's out there.
So this is, this is Iris Murdoch, she said, I'm looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding, perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly, I observe a hovering Kestrel. Kestrel is a small Falcon, pretty amazing bird. In a moment, everything is altered. The brooding self, with its hurt, vanity has disappeared. There's nothing now but Kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter, seems less important. And of course, this is something which we may also do deliberately give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care.
I course, we
can force this. Can make too big a thing out of it. Can start getting into the business of trying to control what our mind state is, and that's not the way that we practice in Zen. That's not a good way for anybody who's working on themselves to have a picture and try to conform to it. We do in Zen practice is give ourselves to the practice and then let the changes happen.
Iris Murdoch says a self directed enjoyment of nature seems to me to be something forced more naturally as well as. More properly,
we take a self forgetful pleasure in the sheer alien, pointless independent existence of animals, birds, stones and trees in
it's beyond human, this world, this world of things, this world of creatures. And
doesn't move at our beck and call. It's deeper.
She says, Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real, love and so art and morals is the discovery of reality. What's beyond this little self? She says, the self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous conscious consciousness. And virtue, the word virtuous is really interesting. We think of it as being moral, being a good person, Huey to the rules and regulations. But virtue has a has a meaning of original, meaning of strength, of directness. The great Zen teacher, Japanese Zen teacher, Bankai, his lifelong question was, what is virtue? The word for it is Te Tai, Chinese word is a Confucian idea, bright virtue. Then for Bankai, this was something he worked on for years, and finally came to a great awakening
to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous conscious consciousness. This is the non metaphysical meaning of the idea of transcendence to which philosophers have so constantly resorted in their explanations of goodness. Good is a transcendent reality, means that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.
It's not easy to do, and Murdoch says it is an empirical fact about human nature that this attempt cannot be entirely successful, because we always have that self never going to stop being an ass. It's just baked in. I it.
But there is this world, this immediate reality. It's in front of us all the time, just so beyond our petty concerns, our limitations. Everybody has access to this. We're all full of light. Zen practice is one way of accessing that, finding that, making that a real part of our lives,
finding the freedom we've always had, freedom of children, spontaneity, joy, the only thing that keeps us away from that is our preoccupation with ourself. In this particular blog of Maria Popova, she says, I'm suddenly reminded of an essay by Annie Dillard from her 1974 masterpiece, pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which one of the Pulitzer Prize in which I revisit frequently as basic irrigation for the soul and the subject is Dillard, experiencing experience of stalking a muskrat at Tinker Creek. I.
And popolo writes in an epoch, because in 1974 is an epoch before this one is 50 years ago, and the world was wildly different. Then it was imaginable that any fragment of the self could instantly face a worldwide mirror of millions, and that any experience could be photographed and instantly become not only a commemoration of itself, but a commodification of an inner world traded for likes the
Dillard writes in the 40 minutes I watched the muskrat, he never saw me, smelled me or heard me at all. I never knew I was there either for that 40 minutes last night, I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate. I received impressions, but I did not print out captions. My own self awareness had disappeared, it seemed now, as almost as though had I been wired with electrodes, my EEG would have been flat. Of course, it would not have been flat. She would have been dead. I have done this sort of thing so often that I have lost self consciousness about moving slowly and halting suddenly. It is second nature to me now, and I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves. I
then she quotes from Martin Buber, the Christian writer, or actually no Jewish writer, who quotes an old Kabbalah teacher said, when you walk across the fields with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones and all growing things and all animals, the sparks of their soul come out and cling to you, and they are purified and become a holy fire in you. This is reminiscent of something I've read before By the Zen teacher John Tarrant.
He said, There's a gate in the mind, and stepping through is like leaving the palace that has come to feel like a prison on the other side of that gate, silence fills all the spaces. Nothing is happening, but what's happening? There's no urgency. Nothing more is needed than what's here. In that silence and plainness, things step forward and shine by themselves. Though I enjoy seeing this, I don't make it happen. It's not something that can be controlled. Help is unexpected. You
This, of course, is what Dogan is pointing to to awaken to the 10,000 things.
And then Annie Dillard says it is astonishing how many people cannot or will not hold still. I could not or would not hold still for 30 minutes inside, but at the creek, I slow down, center down and empty. I'm not excited. My Breathing is slow and regular in my brain, I am not saying muskrat. Muskrat there. I'm saying nothing. If I must hold a position, I do not freeze. If I freeze locking my muscles, I will tire and break. Instead of going rigid, I go calm. I center down wherever I am. I find a balance and repose. I retreat, not inside myself, but outside myself, so that I am a tissue of senses. Whatever I see is plenty, abundance. I am the skin of water. The wind plays over. I am petal, feather, stone. I.
It's interesting that she says, I could not, would not hold still for 30 minutes inside. This is one of the interesting things about people who do have access to this kind of absorption, but only in certain special situations, only when they're playing their sport, or only when they're out in nature, which is a wonderful thing to do, but it's really, really helpful to develop the ability to be still, to be open in all situations, to be able to bring that to every aspect of our life. That's really the aim of Zen practice. It's not easy to sit still for half an hour, but it's what we do again and again. Of course, it's one thing to aim at sitting still, and it's another thing to do it. And it's hard to force it. It doesn't work too well to force it, really need to have an interest in what's in front of us. That's why the breath practice is such a wonderful practice, because if you spend some time without any grade, giving yourself a grade, or worrying about how you're doing, just gently returning every time you drift away, turning again and again to the breath. It becomes amazing. It's wonderful. It's the rhythm of our life, whether we recognize that or not, in the Zen. In our Zen practice, we allow the breath to be however it is. Sometimes it's rough, sometimes it's tense, but if we're doing we're gentle with it and we just patiently come back, you relax into it.
Then, like Annie Dillard, our Breathing is Slow and regular. You
there's a phenomenon that I think began in Japan called forest bathing. Basically, you just go out into nature. The Wilder, the better. If you've done this, probably noticed how wonderful it is, how much drops away
doesn't always happen, because sometimes we're so preoccupied that we can be in front of incredible natural beauty and it's just sort of faint and doesn't move us. When I was in my teens, at some point, my parents took our family to Niagara Falls, I remember standing there looking at the falls and thinking, I don't feel anything. What's the big deal? Actually, at the time, I knew there was something wrong with that. It was like, huh, maybe some other time
I was with my son in the Adirondacks. We were hiking together, and I remarked on how much I enjoyed just walking through the woods without any thoughts. And he was puzzled by that says, I'm never not thinking I
it, yeah,
there's a Japanese movie. I think there was a short review of it written in Zen Bo in our newsletter, news magazine. Movie was called perfect days, and it's about a Japanese man who works for the, evidently, for whatever company cleans the public toilets. His life is incredibly sad. Visible. Just watch the rhythm of his life. It's a very quiet, meditative movie every day when he walks out of his apartment, looks up at the trees overhead, and of course, the camera pans up and we watch them too, that rhythm of the branches swaying in the wind. I haven't kind of experienced once where I had been doing some computer programming for a local nonprofit and typed in the wrong command and had deleted an entire disk full of data, and when I discovered this, I just looked up in the sky and there was a tree waving back and forth. So later on, it turned out there was another copy. So I was saved. The tree saved me.
It's a it's it's kind of a comforting thing to realize that no matter what we end up doing in our lives, if we just give it to us, give it ourselves to it wholeheartedly, it'll be wonderful. We could be waiting tables. We could be cleaning toilets. Could be painting houses.
So much of what we strive for, and it's not wrong to strive by any means, but so much of what we strive for isn't actually the most important thing, and it doesn't necessarily bring happiness. There's all kinds of studies where people get what they want, and within a few months, their happiness level resets to whatever it normally is. We seem to accommodate to whatever our circumstances are. I
so much of practice is just finding our way into wonder, into enjoyment. It's easy to get sidetracked, especially early in practice, but for many people, late in practice, by ideas of perfection and how well I'm doing, and make that the center of your focus, which obviously is not what we're trying to do, helps so much if you can just appreciate and open up to whatever is in front of you.
Lot of times find ourselves bored, distracted, and what we usually do is to double down on our concentration, squeeze some of our skeletal muscles, try to squeeze the thoughts out of our head. You know, I've done a lot of that. Sometimes it works a little bit. It's not the greatest way. Though, there's a teacher and a Japanese, contemporary Japanese teacher I've read from him before, Shoto Harada Roshi, who says the way to avoid haziness in Zazen is to open yourself up as much as possible. This opening is the point of zazen. In fact, the mind becomes clearer in zazen, not through forced concentration, but through ever expanding openness. As we liberate our awareness becomes larger and more vast. To achieve this openness, you need to relax completely when you feel sleepiness or mental distraction coming on, or when you find yourself getting fuzzy in your focus, don't try to focus harder. Just rest your eyes on the point in front of you in a way that you're clearly aware of it without forcing your concentration upon it. True, one pointed attention does not involve concentrating on one thing and shutting everything else out, but rather opening your awareness so that everything is seen clearly. Can bring the same openness that's instilled in us by the natural world and find it everywhere. No matter what it is, we bring our attention, we focus our attention, we open our attention. Everything shines. Everything lights up.
I bring in one more guy, the German writer Herman Hesse wrote Siddhartha Steppenwolf before the band was formed.
He says, wonder is where it starts, and through wonder is also where it ends. This is no futile path, whether admiring a patch of moss, a crystal, a flower or a golden beetle, sky full of clouds, a sea with a serene, vast sigh of its swells whenever I experience part of nature, whether with my eyes or any other of the five senses, whenever I feel drawn in and chanted, opening myself momentarily to its existence and epiphanies that very moment allows me To forget the avaricious, blind world of human need, rather than thinking or issuing orders, rather than acquiring or exploiting, fighting or organizing. All I do in that moment is Wonder makes me brother to those wondrous things I behold and experience as the living world, butterflies and moths, beetles, clouds, rivers and mountains. Because while wandering down the path of wonder, I escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity. I
The original teacher here at the Zen Center, Philip Kapleau was his teacher, was Yasutani Roshi, and Yasutani successi successor was a teacher named Yamada Roshi, who's also died now. He said, the practice of Zen is forgetting the self in the act of uniting with something so simple. And yet, no matter how hard we hammer it, we forget, get caught up in our agenda.
We forget the self by waking up to what's right Here, by looking directly and
it's enjoyable. It's gentle. I Hmm,
there's a sense of wonder, or a sense of questioning, sense of yearning to be reunited with our own true home that fuels our practice, which can be steady, like a small stream, moving around obstacles. Get stuck, let go open up. Get stuck, let go, open up, tolerant of ourselves, tolerant of others, understanding that we're all here in the same situation. You
This way our kindness and compassion can grow. No need to be the star, no need to worry about how we compare to other people. It's always a good sign when you find yourself able to rejoice wholeheartedly in the success of others. It's a little Wake Up Call if you find yourself in. Envious, thinking, how come I am not like that? Everybody is the way they are all working from right where we are, and everything we need is right in front of us. You
okay, our time is up. Stop now and we'll recite the four vows i.
