Become a sustaining member of the
Commonwealth Club for just $10 a month. Join today. Hello, I'm N.W. Smith, co-chair for the Commonwealth
Club's member led Arts Forum, and I am pleased to welcome
Commonwealth Club members and everyone else to our program today. Normally we'd be doing this
in our in person, at our beautiful building
on the Embarcadero in San Francisco. But we're doing it today
like we have many programs during the past two years, virtually. The Arts Forum holds special programing related to the arts in the Bay Area
and beyond. Throughout the year coming
up, September 20 is a program called Who Is Cleopatra,
an in-person panel of women artists from San Francisco Opera
discuss women's issues in relation to the ancient
powerhouse leader, the queen of Egypt. Today, the Arts Forum is honored to present
this special program. And welcome back, Robert Rosenbaum,
who has delighted Commonwealth Club and excuse me,
Commonwealth Club audiences several times in recent years. Bob Rosenbaum is an American Zen teacher with Entrust ment in Soto Zen from Mal Weitzman and Deng Chi in ordinary mind, Zen from Karen Trizano. He's a founding member of the Ladies and Teachers Association, and he started Meadow Mind Sangha in Arnold and Bella Szeto, California. He's currently
running an ordinary mind center in Sacramento,
where it's 114 or something. Anyway. 111 today, one. Hundred and 11 degrees. He is a senior teacher of Dai,
young qigong or wild goose
qigong in the lineage of young, measured, authorized by Master Wei
Leo of the Wenwu School. He worked for 30 years as a neuropsychologist, psychotherapist and behavioral medicine specialist until retiring about ten years ago to devote all his time to Zen and Qigong. Bob has authored numerous journal articles
and book chapters, as well as the books Zen
and The Art of Psychotherapy, Walking the Way 83 Zen Encounters with the Daodejing and What's Wrong With Mindfulness
and what isn't. Zen perspective is about now and then. Now about that is not your mind. Exclamation point. These are Zen reflections on
this are and Gamasutra and Bob Rosenbaum explores that question by inviting the forum participants to experience the vast ungraspable mind that can never be broken. Taking you on this magical journey explored through the Buddhism's Sangam, Sir Gama Sorry Sir and Gama Sutra. Who are the lenses of contemporary
neuroscience, perceptual psychology and the Zen practice of making our lives our art? So like the arts world, the Sir and Gamasutra is a springboard for exploring sensory experiences sight, sound, taste, smell, touch, and the Buddhist
Sixth Sense of mind or cognition. I am sure you are going to enjoy this witty, authentic
and refreshing contemporary insights
from neuroscience and psychology and learn something of the citrus profound teachings from his decades of teaching experience. Among arts related insights,
Shared is an appreciation for the music of the mind to intersect with ancient perennial Buddhist wisdom and everyday human yearning so that that I'll turn the mic over to. Welcome back, Rob, Bob Rosenbaum
to the Commonwealth Club of California. Over to you, Bob. So that's the book. Okay. Nothing's hidden, but there's an infinite field
we cannot see. That's how I like to start the book horizon. Stretch ahead behind below, above. Within our range of vision, though,
everything we see is refracted, not just through the corneas
and vitreous tumors of our eyes, but they're also bent
by the lenses of our minds. So when you and I see a flower,
we see it something like this. But when birds and bees and small animals see a flower, they see something like this because they have ultraviolet receptors. We can perceive ultraviolet light, but the ultraviolet light
gives these and other animals a kind of bull's eye of where
to go on the flower. And we might think,
Oh, wow, we see more than they do, but they see other than we do. And in fact,
some animals have the same three options responsive to three different
wavelengths of light like we do, plus the fourth, the ultraviolet light. There are some humans who have the three usual options,
plus a fourth at a higher frequency. And what might they see? How can we even imagine it? There's so much that we don't see. At this
very moment, you're not seeing more. Then you're seeing. So I got into the story and Gamasutra
because it addresses this issue. It says, Well, when I don't see why don't you see my not seeing. If you see my not seeing. Well, obviously that's not
the characteristic of not seeing. But you're seeing it. But if you don't see my not seeing, it's
naturally not a thing. How could it not be? You? So this is a Zen koan which appears in the Book of Serenity. And you might look at it
and like many koan, you sort of go, Huh? Well, something kind of makes sense. No, it doesn't. Where do we go from here? I mean, we're such visually oriented
creatures. We thought seeing is believing into it. We learn how to Photoshop, things
like that. And now these days, if I look at my face
and I say, Oh, I'm not attractive enough, I can Photoshop
it and make it much more attractive if that's the kind of thing you're into. Well, the Syrian government sutras
a little unusual among Buddhist structures in that it starts
it starts with the story of near fatal attraction to an illusion. At the start of the Sutra Anon the Buddhist disciple is going around
on his begging grounds, and he goes to a brothel thinking
they might want to contribute. And a beautiful woman,
the Matanga woman, embraces him, seduces him and strokes him,
and a nandos about to give in and have sex and break his vows
when the Buddha, by his miraculous powers, is becomes
aware of it. Now, this story of religious people being seduced happens in all religions. It has been known to happen
these days as well. But for example, in Christianity,
this is the last temptation of Saint Thomas Aquinas. And in Christianity, of course, an angel
comes down to help him resist temptation. Well, in the short and Gamasutra,
the Buddha manifests a miraculous mantra,
the Sean Gama mantra, and he manifests that and sends Manju Sri
to rescue both Ananda and the Matanga woman
who have been installed by a sexual demon. And he brings them to the grove,
and Ananda is humiliated and upset and he goes,
Oh my gosh. Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I feel so badly. And the Buddha says,
look, let's let's not worry about saying guilty
or you're guilty or apologizing. Let's get to the root of the matter. What motivated you to seek enlightenment? And Ananda says,
I was dazzled by the Buddha's radiant body, sparkling with the 32 hallmarks of enlightenment. And Buddha says, Well,
what was it that saw those four marks? Who was it? Took delight in them. And Ananda replies, idealized it in them, and love them with my mind and heart. So the Buddha says it is the fault of your mind
and eyes that you are bound to the circle of birth and death. Well, it's not quite what we expected. He goes on to say, Someone
who does not know where his mind and eyes are will not be able
to overcome the stress of engagement with perceived objects. And was mentioning the arch and the arch might
start from perceived objects, but they have to go to the objects
that have never been seen, that are not even objects
that are inspirations. So the Buddha asks Ananda, I'm now asking you precisely
where are your minded eyes? Well, that seems to be an invitation to be
mindful. Mindfulness is big these days. In mindfulness, it's good. But if you think about it, there's mindful and there's mind and there's eyes. And how do they interact with each other? Well, let's try a little experiment. So I don't know how
well this will work on Zoom, but I put up these three candles. And if you're looking at the screen
right now, I'd like you to focus on
just the candle in the center and really look at the candle and focus in on it and try and make it
the only thing you see. So it's sharp and clear and then still keeping your eyes open. Let your eyes relax a little bit soften so that your field of vision widens. And you can see
maybe the other two candles a bit and they're a little fuzzier, but
the center one's a little fuzzy or two. And maybe you can see
beyond the screen in the wall and the ceiling
and the floor and notice what that's like. And then while you're doing that, notice what your belly feels like and just visualize your bellybutton where it is and then go back to that central candle
and just that and just the flame. And it's very sharp
and it's very clear and concentrate. Concentrate. And then soft and soft and so think and notice when the eyes are soft, there's the mind goes in qigong
we say we sometimes say Eyes open, seeing nothing, eyes open, looking far. I think in looking within
all the same thing, basically. So eyes and mind seem to be related. I hope you won't mind my saying
that everyone talks about mind, but nobody really knows
what they're talking about. We have all kinds of language of my mind,
your P's and Q's. I'm going to give them a piece of my mind. I can't make up my mind. Will you mind the children? He's out of his mind. What's all this mind
that people are talking about? There's all kinds of books about it. Go into any bookstore,
you'll see mind over mood. You'll see mind over medicine, the power of mind
finding freedom in every challenge. And of course, the mind diet. They'll be books like Take Back Your Mind. You Are Not to Your Mind. And of course, many wonder for books on mindfulness. This book by Joseph
Goldstein is quite wonderful. But once you have mindfulness, well, then
you have to have all the books about it. An eight week plan for finding peace,
mindfulness for self-compassion, mindfulness for trauma, mindfulness for ADHD as a prescription. I've worked with a lot of adults
with ADHD. I don't think meditation
is the first way to go with it. You can try it. We've got all the practical books
for beginners practicing mindfulness for adults. We've got the simplifying books
mindfulness in plain English, mindfulness
without the bells and beads. And of course you can't have mindfulness without a bear named Pooh. We've got games. Oh, and of course,
how can I forget Mindfulness for Dummies cards, games, coloring books, journals. As long as we're publishing all these books,
we might as well make a workbook for kids. The workbook for teens. Mindfulness routines 10 minutes a day or maybe even 5 minutes a day. Or if the grand prize winner one minute mindfulness. What's that mind everyone's talking about? The Buddha says, Ananda,
what are the two fundamentalists? First is the mind. That's the basis of death and rebirth. In this mind, it's
dependent on perceived objects. And it's this mind that you and all beings make use of and that each of you
consider to be your own nature. Nature, I call it. In the book
I remind who is devoted to getting things my way, seeing things
my way, making discriminations, avoiding disasters. But Buddhist teachers have said this mind,
which is able to make everything its object, this these varieties of mind. And there's many kinds
of this kind of mind. These varieties of mind
are not the teaching of Buddha's ancestors that the Buddha says as a second fundamental full awakening, the original understanding,
the real nature of consciousness or condition phenomena arise from it. Yet it's among those phenomena
that we lose track of it, even though it's active in us
all day long. In the book I call this om my own big mind it. Sometimes called in Zen
non discriminating mind. So as then teacher says, there's a subtle consciousness, unreal later to being and nonbeing keenly aware, but it's a part from passionate
thought and discrimination. And this mind, not that mind, this mind makes one raise one's eyebrows and blink. This mind makes one walk stand, sit
and lie down Be confused, Get into trouble Die here, be born there Eat when hungry Sleep when tired Well, this isn't obvious So the Buddha is going to spend some time
with Ananda and try and explain Zen. And I know you want to calm the mind. You want to be free of suffering,
free of death and rebirth. So I'm going to ask you again. And he holds up his arm
and he benches five fingers into a fist and he sends forth light and he asks, Ananda, did
you see something in an business sense? I did. And Buddha says, What did you see? I saw that. That's come one. Another name for Buddha raise his arm,
bend his fingers into a fist. That for it's like dazzling my mind denies
Buddha says, when you saw my 50 minute light,
what did you see it with? And a 90%. Oh, I and everyone saw it with my eyes. Buddha said, your eyes can see my face,
but what do you take to be your mind? That was startled by it? And Ananda says, Well,
you know, you've been asking me about where my mind is
and what my mind is, and my mind is what I've been using to determine
where it might be. My mind is that which has the capability,
capability of making such determinations. It's my mind,
you know, it makes distinctions. And the Buddha says, Ananda, that is not your mind. And the title of the book, wow. On and on the startled.
He said, that's not my mind. What is it? And the Buddha says, it's merely
your mental process, and these assign false and illusory attributes
to the world of perceived objects. And this delude you
about your true nature, and it causes you to suffer. So the next section of the structure goes
into visual processing as an example of how misleading are visual senses? And there's many visual illusions. You might have seen this one where
if we were in person and I'd say to you, How many of you ever seeing the train
coming towards you? And about half of you
would raise your hands? How many of you are seeing the train
going away from you and about half of
you would raise your hands. And probably if you look at this
and you kind of move your head around a little bit, you'll be able to see
a wait is coming towards me now. It's going away from me now it's coming. Well, what is it doing really? Really. That's a tricky question. Well, but the mind is the eyes
and the brain, right? I mean, a Gregory Bateson
was fond of saying, well,
a blind person was walking with a cane. Is that cane part of their body or not? How about when if you wear glasses
or contacts, when you take your glasses on and off, are you taking part of your body
on and off? When you're reading a book
and you see the words, are you seeing with your mind
or with your eyes? And if you're imagining something,
a square or a triangle, a circle or where is that happening? And most people would say
it's in the brain, but it's not. It's the the visual impression that we get on our retina
is actually upside down. And so it comes down to the brain and the brain does various things
and the brain turns it right side up. But there were some Swiss studies
about 80 years ago or so where they had people wear goggles 24 hours a day after 4 to 3 weeks. And initially,
you can imagine they didn't everything. They had trouble. At a certain point, they learned to compensate
and the world looked upside. The world looked right side up. Okay, well, you can learn. But what's really interesting to me
is when they took the goggles off,
the world looked upside down for a while. The energy verdict. So which is the real world? Right side up or upside down? Your eyes won't tell you. Your brain won't tell you. If I were to open your skull
and look in the gray matter, I'm not going to see a picture anywhere. There's no picture in your brain. And in fact, modern
theories of perceptual psychology are leaning towards
we don't represent objects in the brain. We learn how to interact with objects. And so our perceptions, our body action events, anyway, the brain is not the mind. And although you've got all these
you see all these books on mind mastery by rewiring your brain, and we see books
like The Mind and the Brain and the Power of mental force. Well, you can use all the mental force
you'd like, but if you have to unlock a door
and you don't have the key, staring at it and thinking about it
may not get you very far. I mean, there's all these books
train your mind, change your brain, change your brain, change your life, train your brain, change your mind
and transform your life. The arts with the brain in mind
leading with the brain in mind. How to change your mind. The brain is not the mind at all. You have to do is ask this woman helpline. Santoro, who had an article
in the New York Times just a few days ago titled The Curious Hold in my Head. Now to the right. I've I've I've got a picture
of a basically a normal looking brain, an MRI scan. But Helen Santoro was born
without a temporal lobe, so her MRI looks like this, missing a lot of brain and cognitively she's completely normal. She just graduated college. She's actually a graduate student
in neuroscience. This is not so uncommon. Pediatric neuroscience colleges
often can reassure parents when people are born with missing parts of the brain or brain injury,
something else happens. And the mind is bigger than the brain. And for that matter, neurons
aren't for the nervous system. Glial cells, the fluids in your brain,
the glucose, the sugar in your brain, the the various neurotransmitters,
which incidentally don't hit localize point
but get diffused all over the place. They all affect things. The microbiome
you probably know the bacteria in your gut changes
the way you feel and think. So is the vagus nerve to which people say,
well, well, but if you wasn't there, that experiment
where they stimulated a single neuron and the person saw Jennifer Aniston's
face, it's the Jennifer Aniston neuron. So yep, there was that test. But then they stimulated that neuron again and the person had
a completely different face that they saw and they stimulated it again and they had
a completely different experience. And then you can stimulate
a different neuron and you'll see Jennifer Aniston. Basically, there's no single unique neural
signature for anything. There's various combinations
of neurons at play. The brain doesn't focus function
by these little bits and pieces. Despite what you might read in the media, we're seeing more and more
that the brain functions by networks, not isolated locations. So the next time you see a news
article saying, we found the place in the brain
which does such, just think of this slide. It's kind of complicated. We haven't figured it out. We probably never will. So in terms of network X, if you look at the default mode network, when the brain's
not doing much of anything, you can see all different parts of the brain
light up doing different things. If you look at the salient network,
when the brain is keying into something, trying to accomplish something
or different parts of the brain light up and there's different ways of modeling
and mapping these networks. And there's even it's getting clear
that the there are overlapping networks,
the multimodal sensory network. So for example, when we're listening to someone speak, the visual information we get from
their lips is processed in the auditory cortex. Incidentally, that's one of the reasons
why zoom fatigue sets in the visual information and the laboratory
information don't think quite right. The assume when blind people echolocate which you might go wait blind people can echolocate
yeah they can as long as their parents
don't stop them from doing it. It's common for people who are born blind at a certain age to start making clicking
sounds. And based on the clicking sounds,
they can tell where objects are, whether they're hard or soft,
big or small. But the auditory information that they get is processed by their visual cortex. And their ability to do
this is quite remarkable. So various combinations of neurons
are at play in ways we don't usually think about. Certainly holds true for sensory
processes. Physical actions,
or mental events like feelings and feelings are not fixed. They're also not fixable. There is a climate
in the weather of our lives, so most people think, Oh yeah, feelings. There's like six or seven basic feelings seeking anger, fear, loss, grief. And they're in our brains. You can kind of see them in the
in the little circles in the lizard brain. And we have to train our rational brain
to take care of them. And they're all very hard wired. Well, there's all kinds of data for this. So we know that certain brain areas
are involved in anger, certain brain areas are involved in fear,
so forth and so on. But I just took a little time to show you all the overlap. I mean, the hypothalamus is involved
in four different areas. The amygdala, you see it in three
actually more than that, the anterior cingulate in care,
nurturance and grief in panic. The neurotransmitters and neuromodulation
are all over the place. It's messy. It's not so easy to say this is what a person is feeling. So this old model of how feelings work is tending to be replaced these days
by saying, Actually, we don't have emotions in us,
we create them. We have a general sense
of what our body is feeling like, what our thoughts are like,
what our energies like. And then we we start to interpret them. And because it's hard, most people, if you
say, Well, how are you feeling today? What are you feeling? People say,
Oh, I don't know, I'm not so bad. It's very culture Pacific specific. It's our whole brain process
and it's not categorical. It's not seven emotions, it's dimensional. Many different events
can lead to a similar emotion, and the same brain path
can lead to different emotions. So instead of this old model
we were seeing that there's a dimension of arousal distributed through the brain, a cortical and subcortical and a valence distributed to the brain, cortical
and sharp cortical. And that's all you need to get a whole range of emotion in a spectrum of emotions. And then if you add an intensity, you can see there's millions of emotions,
just like there are millions of colors. Well,
so our eyes don't tell us what's real. Our feelings don't tell us. So this is exactly what's going on. How about our sense of touch with
that tells us what's real. While we in Qigong
there's a movement where you reach out and your arm is supposed to be parallel
to the ground. And my students, they reach out and often their arms are up little
or they're down a little. And I say to them, No,
no parallel to the ground. And they say, My
arms parallel to the ground. And I say, Look in the mirror. And they look and they go, Oh my gosh,
our proprioception is not so accurate. We often don't know where our body is
and we have mistaken ideas of what our body is like. Or to take another example,
if you take a warm object, not hot, just mildly warm, and you take a cool object and then you place your hand on it, you're not going to feel a little warm,
a little cool. It's going to feel slow burning hot. That would be like touching a hot stove
and you flip your hand away there. I won't go into the neurology of that, but the point is that describing temperature as hot, medium or cold doesn't really capture
what it's like to be at 16,000
feet on a glacier under a cloudless sky. So this is my friend Robin Boustead,
and we were on a glacier in the Himalayas
and the temperature was a pleasant 70 degrees Fahrenheit,
but the sun was burning. Our skin, the wind blowing from the ice felt
freezing. The air's thin. So you don't hold in your your heat,
so your body leaches, see, and meanwhile you're sweating
because your exertion warms you. So an average temperature, temperature
doesn't convey how we're hot and cold and neither hot nor cold nor in-between. And the problem with
I mind distinction, mind is it wants to be hot or cold or in between. It doesn't like this. Well, but a lot of different
things are going on at once, even if they seem contradictory. Well, maybe that's true for weird things like glaciers and Himalayas,
but pain is pain and pleasure. Pleasure? Not really. This is a T-shirt
some amputees like to wear to kind of make fun of the fact
that they've lost their arm. The fact is that missing arm
very often hurts like mad, even though it's not that they're phantom limb pain can be excruciating. Very difficult to treat in a limb that's not there. So you are experienced. This don't necessarily fit neatly into physical sensation
versus psychological feeling. I like to say to my clients, pain is a sensational feeling and it has very specific applications
to say, well, where is your pain can be misleading
because the sea fibers, for example, don't give you much localization
information. They're common in the viscera,
they're common in chronic pain. And so the pain can float around
in your body and the person goes to the doctor
and they say, Where's your pain? Oh, it's here. Well,
last time you told me it was over there. Well, last time it was like,
Oh, it's all in your head. Well, it's not all in your head. There are reasons for this. They say, well, give it. Tell me what it is on the ten point scale. Well,
there's all these different kinds of pain. And if something is flickering madly but not too hot, where do you put it? On the scale? So the thing is, pain varies and all of
our experience is continuously changing. If you look at the little orange dot,
it's like pain. It throbs, it gets bigger,
it gets smaller, bigger, smaller. Except that's not what's happening. If I put a little box
around the orange dot, you'll see it staying the same size. And that's because
all of our experience is contextual. We say, Well, it's contextual,
but things happen, things happen to us, but we don't retrieve our memories. We recreate them each time. We don't pull off a videotape
and replay it. It's more like an improv example,
and we've got all kinds of memory biases. I won't go into them all here,
but because of these people, can in good faith
misidentify as eyewitness testimony. You can pretty easily
induce false confessions. There are false memory syndromes. I know someone who has a clear memory of visiting his mother
in the hospital when he was six years old. However, his older sister said they didn't let kids
visit their parents in the hospital. I know that that didn't happen, but we're very sure about our memories,
or at least our thoughts. I mean, okay, our memories aren't terribly reliable, but we can use our rational thought to to get to what's really real. And you might remember how Benjamin
Franklin said, Oh, it's so convenient
to be a reasonable creature, since we can find to make a reason
for everything. As in this example where Groucho is the ruler of Freedonia,
and Mrs. Teasdale says to him,
Oh, the war is coming. I've talked to the ambassador
from the other country. Can't you please do something
to avoid war? Hold out the hand of friendship. Mrs. Teasdale, you did a noble deed. I'd be unworthy of the high trust
that's been placed on me if I didn't do everything within my power to keep our beloved
Fredonia at peace with the world. I'd be only too happy
to meet Ambassador Tarantino and offer him, on behalf of my country,
the right hand of good fellowship. And I feel sure that he will accept this gesture in the spirit
in which it is offered. And suppose he doesn't a finding that'll be
I hold out my hand. He refuses to accept that,
allow a lot of my prestige wounded me, the head of a country
snubbed by a foreign ambassador. What does he think he is? And he can come here and make a stop
out of me in front of all my people. Think of it. I hold out my hand
and that hyena refuses to accept it. Why the cheek for crushing swine. He'll never get away with it. Can you feel that way? Oh, he. Refused to shake hands with me. Oh, this is the last straw. There's no turning back now. This means. More. Well, our thoughts can be very convincing. They're what? Cause war. But thoughts are objects of mind,
not mind itself. The Buddha says they're like
elaborate mirages that appear in space. They have no real existence of their own, fundamentally awareness and all. It's conditioned to objects. In other words, everything you see think,
every object you touch, every feeling you have is the pure wondrously understanding, enlightened mind itself. This is the mind only school of Buddhism, which says Walls, tiles and pebbles
which are mine. The mind has thinking,
sensing mindfulness and realization, and it's free of thinking, sensing mindfulness and realization, dreams and fantasies. Flowers in space are the mind spring flowers
the autumn moon are the mind Each is the mind yet it can never be broken. Now that's the key. We want to touch the mind
that can never be broken I mind, Oh, mind that's not your mind This very mind is us to which you might be thinking, I don't understand. And in fact, Buddhist disciples stay. I look here
and there I'm going about in circles. I don't understand. I find nothing that's fundamentally
my mind or my mind's eye seems to be mere speculation. So Buddha says, Well, you're sincere,
but you don't quite trust the teachings, so I'll have to make use of another
everyday situation to dispel your doubts. So he has somebody ringing the bell and the bell rings
and he says, You hear the bell? I was going to ring the bell,
but Zoom won't let me do it. It sounds weird. Just the bells ringing. He says to everyone, You hear the bell
and people go, Yes, the bell fades away. Now do you hear the bell? Everyone goes, know, Buddha said, Let's try to get there and hear the bell. Now do you hear the bell? Everyone says No. It happens again. And at the end Buddha says,
Why have you given such muddled answers? People say, What do you mean?
You rang the bell. We heard it. We said, we heard it stopped ringing. We said we didn't hear it. To which the Buddha says
it didn't distinguish between hearing and sound. You thought you heard the bell,
but when it was ringing and didn't hear it when it wasn't, then how
did you know the sound had ceased? You had to be able
to hear sounds, absence. Remember stealing, not seeing your true unconditioned hearing. True mind includes both sound and silence,
and it's more fundamental than either sound or silence. I won't go through this,
but throughout our day we rely on hearing what is unbounded and every place and being is always sounding. It's a still my God, I don't understand. And one of the disciples says,
I might as well be a deaf man trying to hear a mosquito
from a distance of more than 100 paces. Couldn't even see the mosquito,
let alone hear it. I mean, if everything,
everything we sense, everything we touch, everything we feel
are the minds. Well, how are their mountains, rivers
and everything else on earth to which Buddha says, are you saying to you have to understand. But if you think understanding
has to be added to your basic true mind, you're falsifying true
mind and enlightenment a true mind to which an understanding is
added cannot be a true enlightenment. What it would be incomplete and true mind has to be complete. But then he goes on and says What in enlightenment
at lacks understanding? Also cannot be the true
intrinsic enlightenment, because then it would have some quality that defines once the category of something understood is mistakenly established
in the mind, the category that which understand is mistaken,
we establish as well. And we separate ourselves
from our experience. We're caught in a self centered dream where everyone dreams
what they are, but nobody understands. It follows when you're location of a navy blue team, if you're you understand yourself fully. If not, how can you understand anyone else or anything? So we think I understand or I don't understand
or I kind of understand. Never understand it. If I keep at it some day, I understand. Basically we're caught between is
and is not which Buddhist that these are nothing
but delusion. In the midst of delusion,
one cannot avoid thinking. That is, and that is not only
from within the true mind. And when escaped the error
of trying to point to is and is not no thing exists. Everything's an illusion,
but it doesn't mean it's unreal. Well, you can see the white triangle, right? Pretty easy to see the white triangle. Except, of course, it's not there. And if we jiggle this and jiggle
that and jiggle a few other things, the White triangle is gone. But it was never there. You see, Buddhism functions by a different kind of logic called the Tetra Lemma. To appreciate it
any experience we have to go with a, not a, both a
and not a, neither a or not a. I understand. Well, actually. I don't understand. Well, actually. I do understand
and I don't understand it. Actually. No, I don't understand. It's neither understanding
nor a not understanding is is not
is is the same as is and is Tunisian. Neither of them. This has specific consequences. We think when someone dies. Oh, I should be sad. Oh, but maybe I'm happy
that they're out of their suffering. Maybe I'm both saddened. Happy? Well, maybe I'm neither sad nor happy. This is the way our life is. So the Tetra
lemma says there's a triangle to the left. There's no triangle to the left. There is. And there is not a triangle to the left
there. Neither is nor
there isn't the triangle to the left. Well that's the first half of the show and Gamasutra
I don't have the opportunity here
to go to the second half, but it is practical, as practical
as the lotus blooming through the mud
and the mud blooming through the lotus. So what do we do? The rest of the book is about
how to undo the knots in our minds, how to turn around the outflows is a verse from the daodejing. Everyone is certain
they see things quite clearly. I still wander in darkness with the waves in the waters,
with the winds playing ceaselessly on the ocean so deep, countless things rising. See them turn and return. Return to their roots at their roots to be still in stillness, recover, revive and endure. So this too goes on. 25 sages
tell how they came to true understanding. And the last sage says, I listened not for sound, but for the basis in life
and basis of sound. And I heard the cries of the world and discovered
compassion was not a feeling. We create an emotion that comes and goes. It's our basis. The time of compassion is ever here. At this very point, there are instructions
for stabilizing a place, for awakening instructions,
for right living precepts,
the Buddha says one who enters samadhi while practicing meditation in stillness,
but who does doesn't to refrain from making false claims,
but who still lies is like someone who molds
a piece of excrement into the shape of a piece of sandalwood
incense in the hope it will then be fragrant. And there's other precepts. And at a certain point he goes around
the Buddhist warns that this is okay. So you get to a certain point
and you think, I must say, and then demons may arise within you and you have all these miraculous powers. You can pull intestinal worms
out of your body without harming yourself or the worms, but you've not become a sage if you think you're a sage, all kinds of bad things will happen. He goes into that key point is don't think you're a sage or you wind up like this. That's what comes to pertaining
somebody too early in my life. So ultimately we end the book up
by reaching. We learn we can only be fully engaged
by letting go of ourselves, reaching to each other for each other,
that reaching its realization in our incompleteness and delusion we keep
reaching for that which lives beyond. But it's always right at hand. Nothing is hidden. Oh, there's an infinite field
we cannot see. It's practiced. Just a matter of encountering
and meeting everything with our utmost
sincerity, a trusting heart, our true nature. Reaching for itself
is to practice with heart beyond heart, even with half a heart. So I think I'll end
by mentioning the sutures about love, not the initial demonic love
from the beginning, but about bowing to each other
with reverence and joy. I thought I'd end with this poem
from some years back that I wrote How wonderful. There's no thing to be grasped despite this self, that striving to let go clutches
firmer, folding the laundry carefully, making such straight lines
that I double back upon myself. A wave watching waves
create a beach of footsteps, salt and stars. Each strand of seaweed can only be itself one word in conversations between tides and light and your wind becomes the ocean disappearing into sand. You really took us along a trip. Carried on a roller coaster. Yeah, well, it is. And I'm thinking about, you know, how in theater it's this suspension of disbelief and we see we see the actor taking on what it is that the playwright
or the director has encouraged them or directed them to do. And that is the actor to believe that or we to believe the actor,
which you do believe. Who told the actor to do that? You know? Well. Suspension of disbelief is so fundamental to, I think, to the arts, to seeing not seeing,
hearing that hearing. Yes, yes. But in order to see, to suspend disbelief, you have to stop believing that there's a person up there
who's an actor. You have to stop believing that this is just a stage. My teacher used to say We shouldn't believe anything, but we should have great faith in everything we encounter. I can't insulate that, let's say, but so I know, I know, I know. There's a story
you told me about Peter Brook that, you know, that illustrates
the great theater director who took us on many journeys
in his work and how how is the audience to be drawn in? I'm seeing what I'm seeing in front of me. Oh, and the person next to me is seeing what I'm seeing,
but seeing what they're seeing, you know. But then and then Peter Brook
took this into account in his work. And I love this example you cited of what was the predict the play. The end of the first act midsummer dream. Yeah, yeah. Tell me the story. Well, it was one of the most wonderful
theatrical experiences I had. So empty stage, middle of the play. The lovers are cross
running after each other. The fairies start
throwing confetti in the air and making weird sounds. At a certain point,
Oberon swings on a rope down to center stage and spreads his arms. And it's just magic. It's just wonderful. And everyone's enthralled and gradually
on the stage, empty and empty. And all this time
the house lights have been coming up and there's still confetti on the stage
and only pockets left. And he's sweeping the concert in
and sweeping the confetti. And I like clearly up
and it's time for the intermission. But everyone's just sitting there
transfixed. And so Puck looks up from his sweeping
and he sees the audience and he goes, Go. Go. It's intermission. So let me ask you, at that moment, is he an actor? Is he Puck, is he Peter Brook? Is he Shakespeare? I wonder who he leaves himself to be
at that moment. He's all. Powerful. Everyone in the audience follows his lead. Get up and leave, feels like God,
which is fine as long as he doesn't think that he's a sage and really is God. But what about us? We're all leaving. Well, Groucho has another one. Hello. I must be going. I'm sad to say, that's our life. Hello. Must be going. What? On ground level? The show and Gamasutra says there's no birth and no deaths. There's no suffering
and no extinction of it. All these delusions are actually real. But they're real. They're not real in the way
you think it is. So a mirage
in the desert of an oasis looks real and it is real as a mirage. But if you drink the last of your water
from a canteen thinking, Oh, there's more, there's an oasis there, and
you get to the oasis and there's no oasis. You'll die of thirst. So real and real false dichotomy What if nothing's real and nothing but unreal? I refuse to to try to answer that. At the tip. Because in a mirage once in my life. It slapped me. No, no. Once in my life I was in I was in Egypt
once, and at a certain place they got us off the bus and they said,
we want you to look at this. And we looked across the desert
and everything there. It was like this village,
you know, way far beyond that. And they said to, That's a mirage. You're seeing a mirage. And I took a picture and the mirage is in the picture. Wow. So every mirage or now it is. It isn't. I couldn't write and that's real in the sense of that's
what our experience is like. You remember
we went hiking in a pile. Yes. I just just say I've been studying
qigong with Bob for about ten years and he's he's enabled me to do far more to be far more active
than I thought I could be. So but I'm in better shape than I was ten years ago or 12 years ago. And I actually went to the Himalayas way
above my pay grade. But we did it so. And Bob Bob was my leader. And you might remember that, yes. All of the hikers would frequently ask
the Nepalese guides, oh, how far is it? Know, I'm getting tired. How far is it? And they said, Oh, not far now. Yeah. And an hour go by. Well,
how far did it go? Well, not far now. And any time you ask in Nepali,
how far is it? They'll go not far now because they mean they're not thinking
about time of distance. They're thinking if you're enjoying
where you're going step by step, it's not forever. We're always right here. And they were. And they were. They were they were right there with us. I learned so much from them. Step by step. Now, I think that's
I think that's a very useful mantra to carry ourselves towards a conclusion. And we've reached a point in the program
where we didn't have other questions, really. But I wanted to remind people
that in the chat room is a link to where you can go
if you want to buy the book at a little discount
from the Commonwealth Bookshop and I encourage all of you to buy it. It's a wonderful book
that is not your mind. Now we know what that is or how. Well it is. Where it is. Okay, well. Can I tell a quick anecdote before? Absolutely. And then that'll be perfect to carry. Us once I was meditating at a retreat and I went to see my teacher
and I passed a plum tree and the fruit on it was kind of green,
but it was ripening. And I went into my teacher and I said, Oh,
I feel like that plum tree. I feel like, you know,
I have some inkling, but I'm ripening, but I'm just not ripe. And my teacher looked at me
and said, The difference between you and the plum is the plum doesn't worry about it. Oh, okay. Don't worry about all this stuff. We just went. Down. Radish. And don't believe your usual thoughts and feelings
and whatnot are the way it really is. Okay, I think I'll stop there for today. And and so I want to express on behalf of
the Arts Forum and the Commonwealth Club, this is Andrew Smith, co-chair of the Arts
Forum at the Commonwealth Club. And we're so grateful to Bob Rosenbaum,
the author of that is Dot Your Mind, for his very thoughtful and enlightening presentation today. And I want to thank our virtual audience
for being with us today. Let's eat and let friends and supporters
know. Also, they can listen to this program in a few days on the website recordings podcast selection
of the Commonwealth Commonwealth Club's website and so please let people know
they can do that if it hears as well as it says. So thank you so much, Bob. And we look forward
to your next enlightened discussion. And I'm am delighted
that you all joined today during this. This is the Commonwealth Club's 119th year of enlightened public discussion. Wonderful. And so this meeting is now adjourned. Thank you and thank you all. Thank you all. Thank you all so much.
