MALE SPEAKER: It's a great honor
and pleasure for me to introduce Les Kaye. Les is abbot of the Kannon Do
Temple here in Mountain View, and a master in the Soto
Zen lineage of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. Many of you probably know Les's
teacher through the wonderful book, Zen Mind,
Beginner's Mind. Many of you probably don't
realize that the lectures collected in this beautiful
book were given by Suzuki Roshi here in Silicon Valley
at the small sitting group that ultimately grew to become
the same Kannon Do Temple that Les now leads. In the introduction to Les'
own book, Zen at Work, my friend Misha Merrill describes
Les's unique place in our local Zen history in this way. "Les was profoundly
affected by Suzuki Roshi and his teachings. And within a few years, he was
a Zen monk practicing with a small group in Los Altos,
California where Suzuki Roshi came to speak once a week. Now this may not seem so odd
considering the times. Plenty of people in the San
Francisco area were doing some pretty exotic things during
the 60s and early 70s. Zen practice was just one
item on the menu. But imagine, if you can, a
neatly dressed IBM manager sitting in the midst of all this
craziness, someone who continued to have an ordinary
home life and drive to work every day 9:00 to 5:00. That was something
else indeed." After more than 30 years at IBM,
Les eventually retired in 1990 to devote himself to Zen
teaching and practice at Kannon Do and beyond. He has long taken a special
interest in the integration of meditation practice
and working life. So he is a wonderful guest to
join us here at Google where so many are trying
to do the same. Please join me in welcoming
Les Kaye. [APPLAUSE] LES KAYE: Good afternoon. It's exciting for
me to be here. And it's an honor because you
have had some terrific guest speakers over the last
several months. Thanks to Ming, I've had a
chance to review the videos of two of your most recent
speakers, Jon Kabat-Zinn and Mattieu Ricard. Is that how you say
it, Matthieu? That's good. Matthieu Ricard. And they were very inspiring and
very touching talks that they gave. And the videos
were wonderful. And I was very moved by their
presence, the presence of these two men. I can't see you if I do that. These men exhibited four
outstanding qualities. First of all they're very smart,
very intelligent men. They showed dedication and
sincerity to the work they were doing on behalf
of others. They were very wise. And finally, they were
just nice guys. And if any of you see them,
either of them, if you did, I think you'll agree
those are four qualities that they displayed. Now today you have me. My intelligence doesn't
come near theirs. They have their PhDs from very
well-respected universities in very difficult scientific
topics. And me, I'm just grateful that I
have my Bachelor of Science. My intelligence doesn't
match theirs. I don't know where we get
our intelligence from. Is it genetic? Do we get in the first few
years of our life? I don't know where
we get it from. But at some point you realize
you can't really do much about enhancing your intelligence. You got what you got at some
point in your life. I can't do anything about
my intelligence. But these three other factors,
I have some choices. And we all have choices about
those other factors, about being dedicated and sincere,
about being wise, and about being nice people. To have those qualities, in
Buddhism, that's called selflessness. It's called selflessness,
to be selfless. And we can all make that kind of
effort if that's the way we want to be in our life. We can make that
kind of effort. That effort is called
spiritual practice. Not religion, that's something
else, but spiritual practice. So what I hope to convey to you
today is the relevance of spiritual practice to our daily
lives and how it can bring us balance in a busy
and stressful world. For the past 100 or so, our
society, American society has slowly become overwhelmed
by the rapid growth of technology. I think you'll sense there's
some truth in that. The rapid growth of technology
and the increasing abundance of material goods, that's what
the 20th century brought us. Technology and material goods,
they bring us many advantage in our lives. They make us safe. They protect our health. They increase our comfort. And they overall improve
our quality of life. Technology and materialism, they
do those things for us. But the problem is over the
past century or so we have allowed them to create an
environment that conditions us to be concerned mainly
with what we can do and what we can possess. And we slowly start to lose our
concern for who we really are, what we really are. That's the unintended
consequences of technology and of material abundance, the
unintended consequences. So for the past two or three
generations we have become more and more excited about
consumer goods. I think the first Sears
and Roebuck catalog came out in like 1898. And became extremely popular
because now you had pictures of the stuff that
you could get. And over the century that kind
of advertising got more and more sophisticated. So we became slowly conditioned
to getting more things, newer things, bigger
things, better things, more entertaining things. Inherently that's not bad. But there are unintended
consequences because we slowly become conditioned to the
feeling that I must have it. I have to have it. Have you ever opened
the newspaper? The back of the first section
of the Mercury News has is huge Fry's ad. And you look and say, oh,
I've got to have that. We're becoming conditioned
that way. It's not because we're
bad people. But that's what's happening. When we become overwhelmed by
materialism our spiritual life diminishes. Because people become not so
concerned who they are, and how they are to be in this
world, or what is helpful in this world, or what is the best
way to understand other people, and what is the best way
to be with other people. We start to become concerned
with our own personal well-being. That's just what happens. It doesn't mean we're
bad people. But that's what happens. We become conditioned by
the society we're in. It's what happens. And your past two speakers
were Buddhists, me too. The fundamental insight of
Buddhism is that suffering, human suffering, comes
from desire. If you know anything about
Buddhism, that's the first thing you read. Suffering comes from desire,
a desire that is based on ignorance of the real nature
of the phenomenal world. Now this ignorance that Buddhism
talks about has nothing to do with
not being smart. It has does nothing to do with
lack of intelligence or having a small or limited
mental capacity. The ignorance that Buddhism
talks about is the result of having a narrow worldview, a
narrow worldview, as if we were living in a tunnel, a
narrow world view that comes from living in a tunnel so that
we cannot see or be aware of the world around us. And we cannot feel our intimacy
and our connection with our world. And so therefore we are
unable to recognize the nature of things. That's what a narrow worldview
does to us. We can't recognize the
nature of things and we lose our intimacy. It's like living in a dream
world, which in turn causes us to think and behave foolishly
and create suffering. Even though we may be very
smart, even though intelligence may be there, we
think and behave foolishly. Let me give you an
example of that. I think you're all familiar
with this the story of Genesis. Adam and Eve lived in Eden
and they had everything, everything they could
possibly need. And so they were perfectly
happy and content, no problems anywhere. They had everything. But they were tempted and
they had a desire for one more thing. They gave into their desire
for one more thing. Even though they didn't need
it, they gave into their desire for one more thing. And that created suffering. That's the story of The Bible. Now The Bible tells you that
that's original sin. Buddhism says that's original
foolishness. It has nothing to do
with being sinful. It means being foolish. So when we give into our desires
for something we really don't need, it's
acting foolishly. And that creates suffering. To me, that's the meaning
of the Genesis story. That's the Buddhist
interpretation of the Genesis story. So the antidote to desire and
the antidote to suffering is spiritual practice. Now it's not about religion. Spiritual practice is not about
religion because there's no dogma connected with it,
there's no worship, and there's no belief system. You don't have to believe
in anything to engage in spiritual practice. Spiritual practice is about
having our life express our inherent human qualities, our
inherent human qualities. Generosity, patience, energy,
caring, wisdom, those are our inherent spiritual qualities. We are not originally sinful. We are originally like your
previous two speakers who are really nice guys and
really cared. That's who we are
fundamentally. And this is what spiritual
practice is about, helping us manifest those qualities. We are inherently selfless. We are inherently unselfish. However, that quality gets too
often obscured by our desires. This is the point of Buddhism. Desires get in the way
of who you are. So when we have spiritual
practice in our lives, when we can act selflessly, we have a
feeling of satisfaction and joy despite any difficulties
that may occur in our life. Despite any suffering that
may occur, we feel OK. We feel joy in our life. We feel connected
with each other. We feel friendly and warm. We're not jealous. We're not defensive. We're not competitive. We're not judgmental. That's spiritual practice. And it all starts
with meditation. And you have a meditation
program here in your workplace. And you're blessed
because of it. Spiritual practice starts with
meditation, which really is, when you look at meditation,
when you look at what you're doing in meditation, it
really is the practice of awareness, awareness. Awareness is not a religious
term, is it? Emphasizing awareness and
practicing awareness is the basis of spiritual practice. It has nothing to do
with religion. The practice of awareness
means we are continually present, not distracted. Or at least we're trying to be
present and we're trying not to be distracted. We can't do it 100%. We can't be perfect at it. We get distracted. But we try. We're making our best effort
to be aware, to be present. So spiritual practice enables us
to understand things beyond their appearances and beyond
what common sense may tell us about something or someone. We see beyond all that and we
see to the truth of things. This is what spiritual
practice does for us. A short story about awareness
and attention. Awareness, like paying
attention, it seems like a very, very ordinary activity. It's something you
do all the time. But actually, it is
the foundation. Like I say, it's the foundation of spiritual practice. Now a long time ago, once upon
a time say in the 9th century in China, there was
a man who was a counselor to the emperor. And he went to see the
local Zen master. And he said, in this kingdom,
people are very difficult to govern. They are so unruly. It's really hard
to manage them. It's really hard to govern
them they're so unruly. Please give me a word of wisdom
to help govern them. So the Zen master picked up his
brush and he dipped it in the ink and he wrote the
calligraphy for attention. And maybe you can show me later
what that looks like. So the counselor
got very angry. He said, hey, I asked
you to help me. I asked you for some wisdom. And you give me this? Give me a word of wisdom. So the Zen teacher took his
brush dipped it in the ink and he then wrote attention,
attention. What does this mean? Why does attention
equate to wisdom? How does attention govern
the unruly? Now we believe, we
assume that we're always giving our attention. I'm aware. I know what's going on. We believe that. But it's not always so because
we are very easily distracted. And when you do meditation,
you notice that. You become aware of that. When you sit in meditation you
notice how your mind likes to go and do some other things. We are easily distracted and
we are always letting our awareness stray. And we multitask on
purpose, don't we? We let our attention stray. So that Zen teacher tried to
illustrate to this man, attention is the most
important thing. There are many different ways or
many different things that we should pay our
attention to. There are three. First of all, we should pay
attention to what we do in our daily life and to the things
of our daily life. And when we do this completely,
we can understand, we can deeply understand how
things exists in this world. And this is important to
understand how things are in the daily world, a world made up
of temporary shapes, forms, colors, sounds that are
constantly changing. Everything is constantly
changing. And when we pay attention to the
things of this world, we finally start to recognize that
things are not permanent. So when we give our attention to
the ordinary things of the world, we see into their
true nature. And we see that all things
have the same fundamental qualities without exception. And this is an important
dimension of wisdom, understanding the nature
of the things of the everyday world. The second thing we should pay
attention to is each other, to people: how we are the same and
how we are different from each other, how we react, how
people create things, how people find comfort, how they
are helpful to each other, and how they suffer. With awareness of each other,
with awareness of people, we come to understand how we should
be with each other and thereby come into harmony
rather than isolation. And finally, the third thing
that we should give our attention to and constantly
be aware of is ourself. We should be aware of our
activities and how we do them, how we do things. We should be aware of
how we do things. Do we do them with a calm mind
or a frantic mind, with anxiety or with peace? We should pay attention to
ourselves especially when we get clumsy and make a mistake. That's the most important time
to be aware of ourselves. Because when we make
a mistake, our awareness can alert us. I didn't pay attention
just then. I made a mistake. I got clumsy. I didn't pay attention
just then. And as we know, attention,
attention. Awareness can tell us,
oh, I didn't pay attention just then. Then we can pay attention to
any feelings that arise because we made a mistake. Look at my response to that. Look at my reaction to that. Painful feelings can arise when
we do something clumsy, when we make a mistake. Painful feelings just
can arise in us. And that's a form of suffering, those painful feelings. And from that suffering, we
can make a vow to be more mindful and to pay attention. In that way, and mistake
can be helpful. If we pay attention to it and
open to it, not push it away, it can be helpful because
it causes us to suffer a little bit. And out of that suffering we
say, I don't want that to happen again. I'm going to pay attention. Mistakes can be helpful. And they can help us be creative
if we're willing to pay attention to them. So if we don't have awareness
practice continually life gets mixed up. We make all kinds of mistakes. We don't pay any attention
to them and life keeps getting crazy. Life gets mixed up. And our view of life becomes
narrow as if we're looking at the world from inside
of a tunnel. And without awareness, without
paying attention to the way things are, and to the way
people are, and to the way we are, without paying attention to
that, we can become fooled by appearances. We become fooled
by appearances. We can't tell the difference
between something that's good and something that appears
to be good. We get all mixed up. And we become a slave to our
desires, to our preferences, to fashions, and to our
unexamined values. We all carry around a set of
values about what we think is the truth of things and the
way things should be. But have we really examined them
to see if they're valid? Without awareness, we don't
examine our own values. And who knows? They could be way off base. When we become a slave to our
desires and our preferences, our reflection and our
selflessness, it gets short-circuited. However, there is a feeling
emerging in our society-- it's just starting to emerge-- that fulfilling our desires
is not enough to provide us meaning. The fact that you have a
meditation program here is evidence that something's
happening. Something is emerging in our
culture that says, this materialism, this technology,
it's maybe not enough. People are beginning
to think this way. People are beginning to
recognize that putting the emphasis on consuming leaves
an empty feeling. There's a sense that there
must be more to life than possessions. More and more people are
beginning to feel this way. When we recognize that pursuing
happiness, pursuing happiness is a superficial
way to live. We start to ask ourselves,
what should be my true orientation in life? If that doesn't work, if that
gives me an empty feeling, what should I be doing? What's my true orientation? And we look around for other
choices, and some are beginning to emerge. We ask ourselves, what's
the point in my life? How should I live it? What is happiness anyhow? What is it after all? These are spiritual questions. These are spiritual questions. They're every day questions. But they're really spiritual
questions because it means we are seeking. We want to know what
it is that's real. When we start asking those kinds
of questions, this is the start of spiritual
practice. So practice starts with
recognizing the pleasures are not enough, and that attaching
to them robs us of understanding and distracts us
from living an authentic life. At bottom, that's
what we want. We want to know what's real,
what's true, and we want to live our life authentically. If we get caught up pursuing
possessions, it covers over this fundamental desire. When we finally get fed
up with possessions we say, wait a minute. I have some questions here I
need to explore and answer. And I really believe that's
starting to happen. It's been starting to happen
for the last 50 years. These things have a very
slow momentum. But that's what's happening. Now many people are very
skeptical of the notion or the idea of spiritual practice. They think spiritual practice
means you have to drop out of society. You have to go live on a
mountain or you have to live in the desert or a cave
or something. Or they say, well, it's
too demanding for me, an ordinary person. I can't do that. They feel that spiritual
practice will interfere with having a normal, everyday life,
and that we have to live in some kind of austere,
ascetic, and what's the other word I'm thinking about. I'll think about it later. I just lost the word. What is it when you're not
married, when you don't have relations with another? AUDIENCE: Celibate. LES KAYE: Celibate. They think spiritual life means
you have to be celibate, ascetic, and austere. You have to live in isolation. I thought he was going to
program me right out of here. It's not true. It's not so. It's not so. Material and physical
comforts are OK. They're inherently not bad. Fun is OK. Fun is OK. Satisfaction is OK. Having friends is OK. Having a family life is OK. Working on problems with your
friends and solving these problems and making
progress, it's OK. There's nothing wrong with it. It's not a sin. But it is true that we, as
human beings, are easily overwhelmed with pleasures
and possessions. Material things surround
us everywhere you go. And they courage our desires. And they encourage
attachments. And they interfere with our
understanding and with wisdom. They interfere with
our relationships. And they interfere with our
peace of mind if we let it go too far. Now when we recognize the
limitations of possessions and comforts, then we start to seek
balance in our lives. Few people, a very small
percentage of people, say, I'm dropping out of all this. It's too much. I'm going to go live
on a mountain. It's too much. I give it up. Most of us say, you know this
stuff isn't sinful by itself. But I've got to find
a balance. I've got to find a balance. So we seek balance in our lives
when we recognize that there is a limitation to
pursuing possessions. We turn to spiritual practice
to understand who we are fundamentally, and what life
should be beyond having possessions, and what life
is like beyond the appearance of things. The material greatness is not
the true measure of a society. We think about some previous
empires, the Roman Empire, or the empire of Alexander the
Great, the great Roman Empire, the great Babylonian Empire,
whatever it may be. Usually we measure that
greatness based on the material accomplishments. But the true measure of
greatness, of a society, or of an individual, is in nonmaterial
relationships. The true greatness is in our
nonmaterial relationships such as how we support each other,
how we care for each other, how we encourage each other, how
we create things together, and our openness with
each other. This is the true measure of
greatness, not how materially well-off we were or are. So our awareness, our practice
of awareness, our spiritual practice, encourages us to
reflect on ourself and how we are in the world and
how we relate to people and to things. Are we careful of what we
do and what we say? Do we take care with that? Are we attentive? Are we accepting? Are we respectful of
each other and of what the world offers? Or are we interested only
in what pleases us? And do we simply ignore
what we don't like? And therefore, do we
become careless? Spiritual practice, our
awareness practice, encourages us to reflect on those
aspects of our life. Now despite all of our efforts
to create a trouble-free world, unpleasant
things arise. Difficulties do arise. And it's beyond our control
most of the time because things just change. But if we react to these
difficulties by complaining and pushing things away, we
simply create problems. I remember something that
I experienced when I was really small. I must have been three
or four years old. I'll never forget
this episode. I was a kid, really a little
kid, and I was at a friend's house playing. I was playing with a friend
at his house. And his mother said, come
on, here's lunch. So we went and sat down at
the table for lunch. And his mother had prepared
something, gave each of us a plate of what she prepared. And my friend picked up the
plate and he threw it across the room because clearly he
wasn't happy with what his mother had prepared. A mature mind doesn't do that. A mature mind is grateful
and accepts whatever is offered by the world. The immature mind says, the heck
with it, and throws it across the room. We don't do that. We try not to do that. A mature mind doesn't do that. So the most important thing that
we can do for ourselves is observe ourself and the
various ways that we have as human beings of creating
problems. Because we all have the capacity to create
problems. And we do from time to time. When we become aware of the
difficulties that we ourselves create, we learn from them. We learn from them. And we learn how it is
that we create them. And then, through that
education, we can learn to avoid the traps that we fall
into like Adam and Eve. They didn't get a
second chance. But if they had a chance to
reflect on what they did, they wouldn't reach out for
one more thing. When we learn how we create
problems and learn how to avoid the traps, we can reorient
our mind so that we understand ourself
and our life. I'd like to tell you a story now
or relate something that I read that illustrates what I've
been trying to say for the last half hour. Occasionally there is a
real-life story that demonstrates how people devised
their own suffering. I read an article in the San
Francisco Magazine back in December of 2003. It's already an old article. But it really struck me. And so I brought the experience
of it here today to share with you. The article was titled,
Larger Than Death. And it traces the suicide of a
woman named Ella King Torrey, who had been the president
of the San Francisco Art Institute. She took her own life when
she was 45 years old. She took the job as president of
the Art Institute, which is a very challenging
job, in 1995. She took over a very
well-respected school. But the school was underfunded
and needed some energy and some vision. Now Ella King Torrey was
a supercharged woman. She had overwhelming
enthusiasm. She had an infinite
number of ideas. She was very focused in her
ambition and on her work. She delighted meeting creative
and intelligent people and bringing them together. She loved putting together
innovative and ingenious networks of people. She was very good at that. And she was inspired by making
things new and creating something out of nothing. That's the way she
was described. She loved to create something
out of nothing. She was really charged up much
in the same way that you are, creating something and making
something out of nothing. She was a terrific fundraiser. I don't know if you're
terrific fundraisers. She was a great fundraiser. She knew all of these
influential people. And she could do that. She increased the donations
to the San Francisco Art Institute fourfold while she was
president, from $500,000 a year to $2.5 million a year. She was great. But she also spent
very lavishly. She spent on visiting artists,
on building projects, on exhibitions of art, and
on providing grants to struggling artists. And she also spent a lot of
money on expanding the library of the institute. Now when the dot.com bubble
dried up and the donations to the institute dried up, the
board of directors discovered a huge deficit. Because she was the president
she took the blame. She got fired in April of 2002
after seven years on the job. She got fired because
of this deficit. And it was a year later that
she took her own life. She committed suicide without
leaving a note. Her friends and her colleagues
were absolutely dumbfounded, absolutely bewildered. They could not comprehend how
this woman who had such purpose and such an appetite
for the exciting life-- she loved fine food
in San Francisco. She loved the wine. And she loved the beautiful
things and the fashions. She loved dressing
up in color. She loved to laugh. She loved her friends. How could such a person
take her own life? Nobody could figure it out. I think that the source of this
tragedy can be traced to how she saw herself in a limited
way, as if she saw herself from inside a tunnel. She saw herself in
a limited way. She saw herself strictly as
a glamorous and successful person constantly in the
limelight doing terrific things and being
enthusiastically applauded by her successes. When she got fired, it destroyed
this image she had of herself, this desperate
image she had of herself. Her firing destroyed that. It's an image that defined
who she was. It was an image of what she
believed she had obtained and what she felt she
had to obtain. It was an image of herself. It wasn't her true self. It was an image defined
by what she did in her everyday life. But it wasn't her true self. It was an image of herself. It was an image that depended
on her grasping for and holding on to the things of
this world which have no permanency, and which by their
constantly changing nature they can't be held on to. So something changed in
the economic world. The donations dried up. She got fired. Things changed. And this change destroyed
her image of herself. I think she saw herself in
a kind of chess game. How many of you play chess? If you play chess you know that
the most powerful piece on the chessboard is the white
queen, the white queen. She saw herself as the white
queen being in charge, having the capacity to make very
powerful moves. Now in chess, sometimes the game
takes a very surprising turn and the queen has
to be sacrificed for some other advantage. It's is pretty rare. But it's part of a chess
player's strategy sometimes to sacrifice the queen. That's what happened here. The game continued but she
could no longer play. That's how she saw herself. The game is still going on. But she wasn't in it anymore. She was no longer in it
as the white queen. So because she did not have an
inner vision of who she was, because her belief was that
she was in the game as the white queen and that's all there
was for her, not being president of the San Francisco
Art Institute left here with an empty feeling and
without purpose or any meaning in life. In other words, her life, the
very successful life that she had up to a point, was
lived externally. Very exciting, it was a
very exciting life. But it didn't have intimacy and
it didn't have reflection. So her tragedy was her inability
or her unwillingness to stop the rush to grasp
what is out there. That's where all her
energy came from. She was in a rush to grasp
what was out there. Now this rush probably fueled
her creativity. But her story should warn us
that we put ourselves at risk for suffering and for tragedy
when the rush is all we know. When the rush is all we know,
and we put ourselves at risk. Now the founder of Zen Buddhism
in Japan was the Zen priest named Dogen. And he wrote a lot and
gave a lot of talks. And one of the most memorable
things he said in one of his talks goes like this: To study
Buddhism is to study the self. To study the self is
to forget the self. To forget the self is to be
enlightened by all things. Now this woman, Ella
King Torrey, was unable to study herself. She was unable to contemplate
the purpose of her life beyond the everyday successes of the
daily world, the transient successes of the daily world. She was unable to contemplate
her life beyond that. She didn't realize that her
inherent true self was not diminished because
she got fired. She didn't know who she really
was beyond the image she had of herself. And when that image
was destroyed she couldn't take it. She was unable to allow herself
to be enlightened by all things rather than
grasping for them. If she could have done that, she
would have had a balanced life that did not end in a
self-inflicted tragedy. Awareness practice, spiritual
practice, meditation practice, say it anyway you like, it
quiets the mind so that we can come back to calmness and to
balance, so we can come back to balance. When our mind is noisy, it means
it's in a kind of panic. What do I do next? I put my glasses somewhere. Where are they? We're in a panic. How do I get out of this
busyness that I'm in. That's not a quiet mind. That's a noisy mind. The noisy mind does not
understand the need to go back to before the beginning,
to before step one. For example, when you're given
a problem, when you come across a problem to solve in
your life or your work, you don't start solving
it immediately. If somebody says, here's
a problem. You don't say, step one to
the solution is this. You don't do that. What you do first is you try to
fully understand the nature of the problem. You become intimate with the
problem itself before you start coming up with
solutions. In other words, before you
do something, you need to understand the point of doing. When you start rushing to solve
a problem before you understand it, it
doesn't work. And in your own experience,
well, you probably have done that. And you learn from it and you
don't do that anymore. But before we do something about
a problem, we go back before step one. We go back to zero. Through awareness practice, we
learn how to bring in our mind back to zero and back
to balance. Before we do something to solve
a problem or before we do something with our life,
we come to balance. This is the point of meditation
practice. Come back to balance. Come back to balance. Come back to a mind that isn't
noisy before jumping out there and trying to solve some
problem, before doing something before we know
what it is we're doing. So to solve a problem or to live
in the very next moment, we first have to prepare our
mind to come back to zero through awareness practice,
spiritual practice. Then our problems can be seen
through the perspective of our true nature rather than
through panic or through our emotions. So awareness practice,
meditation practice, will train our mind to bring our
awareness and our balance to everyday affairs. So if we become troubled by some
emotion or feeling during the day, we can recognize
anger is starting to arise in me. Or fear is starting to arise in
me, or sadness, or grief, or some feeling, some emotion. When we recognize and accept the
feeling that's happening, the mind can return
to balance. And this is what's called
starting from zero. The emotion may not go away. But it won't be troublesome. It's natural. In Zen, spiritual practice
has always been associated with work. Let me try to illustrate that. A saying from back in the 9th
century by Zen Layman. "My magical power my spiritual
exercise consist in carrying water and gathering firewood."
What does this mean? It means that the everyday
world, the relative everyday world, is not different from
the spiritual world. Another story that goes along
with that, the abbot of a Zen monastery in the 4th century
always worked out in the fields with his monks. When he was into his 80s, he
still worked out there. And they became concerned that
he was still working at this advanced age. And they told him to stop. And he said, no. So they hid his garden
tools, his tools. And with that he
stopped eating. So they gave him
back his tools. And then one night in a talk, he
said, a day of no work is a day of no food. The point of trying to make is
spiritual practice in the Zen tradition, anyhow, has always
been associated with work. How we do our work is our
spiritual practice. Let's see if I can get
to the next slide. Nope. OK. When there is spiritual practice
in the workplace, there are benefits to
the individual. There's increased ability
to focus on a task or relationship. There's more energy during the
day and a sense of buoyancy at the end of the day. Rather than stress at the end
of the day, you feel buoyant and confident. There is increased confidence in
our own ability to respond positively to whatever
may arise. There's better capacity
to listen and to empathize with others. There's more patience and
tolerance in complex situations. And there is reduced stress
in the midst of continual distractions and demands. These are the benefits
to the individual. To the workplace as a whole
there are benefits. As people learn to accept and
work with change, rather than feeling threatened by change,
we become more enterprising and thoughtful. And we expand the total creative
capacity of our workplace when we become open
to new ideas and to risk-taking. Well we do become open to new
ideas and risk-taking because fear and stress diminish as we
pursue our spiritual practice. We communicate ideas more
effectively because we become more focused as listeners and
more persuasive as speakers because our ideas become clearer
and the depth of our commitment becomes clearer. This happens when you do
spiritual practice and you practice awareness. We have higher productivity,
higher efficiency, quality work improves, morale improves
because of our improvement in interpersonal relationships. Problems are solved in a more
comprehensive manner because we see things in a broader
scale, not through a tunnel. And our decision-making is
improved because we focus on creative choices rather than
personal concerns. I want to close with a story,
a real-life story that indicates, that expresses, how
simple meditation practice can totally change a life,
spiritual practice. I'm going to read you this
story rather than just relate it to you. I took the trouble to
write it out as a story, and it got published. So I'm just going to read it
to you if you don't mind. It reads like a piece
of fiction. "A crawl and stop,
crawl and stop. Even by 9:30 the manic commute
into the city had not yet settled itself into a
smooth trajectory. Patience remained essential. On this damp November morning,
we were making our tenth consecutive daily trip into
San Francisco to teach the final hour of meditation
at work. Shelly broke the silence as
the city skyline came into view the sun starting to show
through the thinning fog. 'How do you think the class is
going?' Her voice betrayed a tinge of concern. 'It's hard to say. This group is so different
from the others.' Shelly had offered to help me
teach meditation at work to a unique group of students in a
unique training program called Step Ahead. Step Ahead was a 28-week
Welfare-to-Work program cosponsored by PG&E, The San
Francisco Department of Human Services, City College of San
Francisco, and The Women's Foundation of San Francisco. The students, mostly women,
including many single mothers all experiencing stress and
uncertainty in their lives were being taught marketable
workplace skills including word processing, spreadsheet
preparation, and database maintenance. PG&E guaranteed a job for
at least six months to successful graduates. I was asked to teach meditation
at work as part of the Step Ahead curriculum to
offer the students a way to reduce stress and maintain
composure as they struggled to master new technical skills
and to learn how to swim upstream in the daunting, often turbulent corporate world. 'It's not easy for them to
sit still,' Shelly said. 'There's a lot of fidgeting
going on.' 'Part of it may be that
it's not voluntary. They have to attend. Its part of the whole program
they're in,' I said keeping my eye on the on again off again
tail lights in front of us. 'That's right. I wouldn't want to be told
that I had to meditate. I sure would have a
lot of resistance. It's something you have to
come to on your own.' The conversation paused as we
turned off the freeway and headed into downtown. After a few minutes, Shelly
spoke up again. 'I think one of the biggest
difficulties for them is the subtleness of meditation. They don't get any feedback. It's hard for them to tell
if they're getting anything from it. For sure that must
be discouraging.' Shelly is a marriage and family
therapist specialing in addiction and recovery working
with high-risk teens and their families. She is intimately familiar with
the mountainous world of lifelong frustration and
discouragement, of the frightening slippery
cold feelings of hopelessness and isolation. Over the past two weeks, she
and I had listened to the stories of our students trying
to find ways to encourage them to sit quietly with an alert
posture and to stay aware of their breathing. During the meditation part of
the class sessions, many gave up immediately unable to find a
minimum of self-discipline, slumping in their chairs with
their arms folded waiting for the 20 minutes to end. Even for those that were giving
the practice a chance and making their best effort, I
knew it must be frustrating. I wondered if we had done any
good, if all the commuting and the effort had been worth it. At the end of the class on
this final Friday, the students thanked us as we, in
turn, wished them well with their studies and their
new careers. Then something happened that
erased all my doubts. The last woman to leave the
classroom took me by the arm and drew me aside. In her tearful voice
barely audible, I heard relief and gratitude. 'Mr Kaye,' she said, 'I don't
hit my little boy anymore.'" That always happens to me
when I tell that story. Do you have any questions about
anything that I tried to convey to you today? Yes, please. AUDIENCE: I actually
have two questions. When you say spiritual practice,
other religions have their way of spiritual
practice, right? So when you say role of
spiritual practice, it just doesn't mean medication. It means the whole broad
different spiritual practices when you're referring to
spiritual practices in the modern world? LES KAYE: So let me try
to say your question. AUDIENCE: OK, thank you. So my question was when you say
spiritual practice, you said it doesn't concern
religion. You just mean spiritual
practice. And I know a lot of people who
don't meditate but they think they're doing spiritual practice
because of their religious beliefs. Do you also include that when
you mean spiritual practice. LES KAYE: No. Spiritual practice, to me, is
based on awareness, paying attention to ourselves, paying
attention to the world around us, having an open mind and
being ready to accept whatever the world tells us, not
having a closed mind. This is spiritual practice,
paying attention. AUDIENCE: And the second
question was about meditation. Do you have a way to meditate,
or just sitting down and calming down? Is there a specific way that you
should meditate or do you endorse a certain meditation
technique? LES KAYE: Well I think we're
going to be doing that in a few minutes. We're going to be having
a meditation session. AUDIENCE: Right. But there's all different kinds
of meditation techniques or different ways. And so do you sort of convey
one over the other. LES KAYE: I'll show you one. But let me say something. You use the word technique. I was present when somebody
in an interview, a radio interview, asked a Zen teacher,
what technique do you use in meditation? What technique do you use to
encourage people's meditation? And he said, we use the most
important technique, people's own sincerity. This is the basis of
spiritual practice. AUDIENCE: So that was basically
my question. So there is no technique,
right? It's just how you go about
what you just said. LES KAYE: Yes. The technique is
not important. It's our attitude that's
important. Well, OK, one more question
if there is one. Yes? AUDIENCE: I'm not if
this is more an observation than a question. I found a bit of what I'd call a
cognitive dissonance on your Adam and Eve analogy. I understand your message
from that. But I think that particular
story may not be the best match for the point you're
trying to make. The exact reading is that
originally when they were happy, they were ignorant. The fruit was from the
tree of knowledge. And so basically they took the
bite and, in effect, they became aware of how the world
really was and suddenly became unhappy, which I think is at
odds with the message that you're carrying, which is that
what we're actually seeking is a greater awareness of the
world as it really is to achieve our happiness. I don't want to use the
word enlightenment. I understand the point that
you're making with the story. But I think it's probably
not the best one to use. I think it's probably not the
best story to use because there is a second contradictory
message that's classically brought along
with that one. LES KAYE: When they bit
the apple, they saw how the world wasn't. AUDIENCE: It's the fruit of
the tree of knowledge. Ming is signaling that we
actually need to go. But thank you for your talk. It was enlightening
and informative. Thank you. LES KAYE: Thank You.
