Kaizan Doug Jacobson began practicing Zen in 1974 with Dainin Katagiri Roshi in Minneapolis; he had Jukai in 1977. A householder, father, contractor, and civil/tunnel engineer, following his retirement, he became a full-time resident at Jikoji Zen Center* near Los Gatos. He received priest ordination in 2010 and Dharma transmission from Shoho Michael Newhall in 2015. He has led many sesshins, monthly zazenkais, periodic seasonal nature sesshins, and weekly dharma discussion groups. He also helps to maintain and develop infrastructure at Jikoji, getting his hands dirty as a form of Zen practice. In addition, he assists prisoners with Buddhist practice.

Full Transcript

So the present moment is right before us, and we engage in yesterday's memories and in tomorrow's dreams and concerns. We chase after the past and long for the future. Sometimes we long for the past and chase after or resist the future. The longing, the chasing, the resisting, happening in our moments of mind, body, and the moment by moment, the present, again, is right before us. And life itself is found and experienced in this present moment with the 84,000 instances that are in this moment and the inconceivable number of connections and threads that flow before us and through us. This is flowing eternal moment.

And in this experience of this moment, we stop to look at and taste and think of these connections of existence. And thus begins dependent arising, referred to as the 12 factors or 12 links of interdependent origination or dependent arising. These are, this list includes ignorance, intention, the sixth sense consciousnesses, the material mental elements of sense objects, the sixth sense organs of connection, and the quality of feeling and tone, the thirst that arises, the fixity of use and fixity of self. The resulting forces of becoming arises that causes us to act. And these result in birth, decay, and death.

The vastness of these moving streams of existence, the interconnectedness of all things and the involved arisings are all naturally prone to cause us to wonder how to make it all work or how it all works. This can lead to deep study, but it can also become overwhelming and we become fixated on particular parts of it and this causes us suffering. And the Buddha has helped us with this and all the ancestors have helped to make sense of this flow of existence.

The Buddha once said, when this is, that is. When this arises, that arises. When this no longer is, that no longer is. Any one thing depends on all other things to exist. Understanding is fundamental. There are many kinds of understanding, physical, emotional, intellectual, shallow, middle, deep understandings. And it is these deeper experiences of understanding that open us, awaken us, enliven us, and sometimes even enlighten us.

I was upset on how some people I love and care for were navigating situations that included me. I made observations that resulted in judgments that in the moment really lacked deeper understandings. Stuck on plateaus and vistas that seemed to show what is. I was blind to the deeper underpinnings of the realities. My little stool or stepladder provided a view over the hedge, yet the flood of thirst for particular outcomes did not show the bigger movements and conditions, though all of it is ever present. These moments are overwhelming and uncomfortable and led to the stress and suffering for others and for me.

So I'd like to take a breath and another. And just focus on this one activity and examine it. How does watching breath help us to unbind? What goes into this watching? And what is in control? Is the breath in control? The watcher is the awareness in control. The awareness of the breath, the awareness of the watcher watching. Is there control or is there just watching? And how attuned is our watching?

Before we watch anything, the universe has myriad possibilities. And once we observe, then the possibilities are transformed into noticing. The in breath or the out breath. Before we pay attention to our breath, the possibility of in breath and out breath is present. And when we notice it, it becomes either in breath or out breath. These two possibilities. Before we notice, it's called superposition where you place two or several likely outcomes as possibilities.

So recently I was fortunate to receive a book called the great bio-centric design by Robert Lanza. That postulates that the universe didn't evolve consciousness. Rather it is consciousness that makes the universe. He postulates that the behavior of some subatomic particles, indeed all particles and all objects are inextricably linked to the presence of an observer. This has been well studied in quantum physics. Absent conscious observer, all particles at best exist in an undetermined state of probability waves. Space and time do not have a real existence, he goes on to propose, outside of the animal's sense of perception. Space time is the process by which we perceive change in the universe.

He goes on to postulate that the mind is unified with matter and the world through the modulation of the ion dynamics in the brain and at the quantum level that allows all parts of our information system known as our consciousness to be simultaneously interconnected.

Lanza cites an experiment called the Leibit experiments that were initiated about 40 years ago and they're quite simple and it involved three components. One was the simple making a choice, the measure of the brain activity of the observer and the clock. Neurons fire at about 70 to 250 miles per hour. So the choice the subjects were told was to move either their left arm or their right arm by flicking one's wrist or raising a left or right finger at the moment they made that decision. They were instructed to let the urge to move appear on its own at any time without any pre-planning or concentration on when to act. The precise time at which you move is recorded from the muscles of your arm, they were told.

The second component to measure the brain activity where all these electrodes put on separately detecting the urge of the action because there's an urge to the action from the actual action of the right or left. And fortunately this was within the experiment's abilities to measure. The third component was of the clock that could measure milliseconds to pinpoint the participants precise time of making the decision.

Turns out that right before the participants made a decision to move their left or right arm, there was brain activity. They discovered that this decision to make a movement with the left or right was preceded by a change in the brain signal patterns and the experimenters could predict which arm they would move prior to the decision being made by the participant. The experimenters could tell which arm they would move before the experimenters knew what arm they decided to move. These results seem to show that the decisions made in the brain's neurocircuitry occur even before the participants were conscious of them. This kind of shoots down the notion of free will.

In our meditation practice we are asked to notice our breath. Let our breath naturally move in and out. And then with our awareness we watch our breath. And then we can watch our breath to where it ends and where it begins. And when we watch our breath where it begins at that moment of change, it sounds like from these experiments that in our brain there is already a predecessor signal that the breath is going to change that we're not aware of. And it's probably true of our heartbeat as well. That right prior to the heartbeat changing again and again there's a signal to it's time. And there's a slight delay between the actual action and the preceding indicator to beat our heart again.

So I want to explore this and maybe this is, or just consider this. If we follow our breath, we're following something that has, is naturally arising before we actually notice what we are aware of. When we are on our path, are we noticing what is naturally arising prior that is arising prior to our awareness and all we're doing is catching up to what is actually before us. So when we choose to take a right or a left on a path, is that decision we made before we actually make that decision? Are we in truth when we are on the path following the way with our current moment awareness, we're actually watching the unfolding that is not under direction, under our full control, other than our ability to put our attention to our awareness to what is unfolding.

Perhaps the premonitions we have, the dreams we have that provide some clues about what might unfold in our day or in our life. Perhaps the suggestions from others, those close to us or passersby, maybe guideposts or messengers or carrier pigeons of how it will be and what is ahead. When we read a sutra, the moment before we even went to the sutra to read it, where we led to find the sutra to read. And through the reading of these sutras, it leads us to new vistas of meaning in our life. When we meditate on a word, when we contemplate a phrase, when we listen to the sounds, we get indicators of what is arising, of when this is, that is. And when this is gone, that is gone.

So I'm going to stretch the time scale a bit. Many orders of magnitude. From examining milliseconds to faster realms of time. We have heard that our practice originated with the Buddha. Was founded by the Buddha or was discovered by the Buddha. We also know that more than 8000 years ago, there's evidence of mystic practices in many regions of the world. Among the homo sapiens.

I've told this story before about here in our zendo in the next building over. Of on a full moon at dusk. A flock or a called a rafter of turkeys. Congregated in the flat of the creek below the zendo about 30 feet away. At dusk. Could hear him rustling down into the creek and they all were there. Could hear one turkey. Call out six or eight syllables. With a response of the rafter of turkeys. With the six or eight syllables. And the solo turkey made the call again with another response. It was a call in response with these turkeys at full moon at dusk. That lasted for about 10, 15 minutes.

Call and response is something that is part of many cultures from sub Sahara in Africa to Islam and Judaism and Christianity and Buddhism, paganism. Is used and lunar events are used in our. In all of these different religious cultures. Turkeys and all birds are related to the Archaeopteryx to first appeared 160 million years ago. The major extinction 66 million years ago. Killed off the terrors. But there's still some reptiles related today.

Many bird species. Maybe all bird species have social customs, social aspects, social ways that form a culture. They communicate with visual signals, calls and songs. In this in the spring after the young chicks are hatched. You can observe one hand leading these turkeys through the woods. And a couple of hands in the rear that keep guard over the string of checks. And in these movements, you can observe seven factors of awakening. So, excuse me, you can observe four of the seven factors of awakening. Three of them are kind of hard to observe serenity, rapture and equanimity. How do you observe those things in an animal? But you can observe them paying attention, mindfulness, you can observe. They're discerning. What they're going to do next or where to go. They're discerning. They're persisting in their effort and they're concentrating. Those are four important factors of awakening. Turkeys have memory and ritual too.

So our Buddhist practice began with the Buddha a couple thousand years ago. Most probably this mind body practice is something that goes far beyond whatever we had thought. It's humbling to consider that Buddhism and other ways of practice, some refer to as New Age when we were noticing them in the 50s, 60s and 70s. And I don't know if that term is still used today. But really, they're quite old practices that have been that we are refining, but have been practiced for a long time.

So back to this present moment and all that there is, including the store consciousness, it is it is vast. And all of our predecessors have probably contributed to making it right for us today, right here, right now.

So to wrap up, I want to say that if our mind function precedes awareness of it. I want to conjecture that perhaps when we follow the way, when we follow the path that is unique to each of us, when we are tuned to the way it unfolds before us, we are watching the ripening. The continuous ripening of conditions and where we put our attention is most important. That our intention is put right before us allows the possibilities, the superposition of possibilities to unfold one way or another, but not both ways. Where we put our attention allows us some tuning of how the unfolding resolves.

To close, I'd like to read a poem from the 1200s from Farid Undin Attar, and it is The Conference of Birds.

A bird questions the hu-poh about audacity.

The bird said, is audacity allowable before God's majesty?

One needs audacity to conquer fear, but is it right in his exalted sphere?

The hu-poh said, those who are worthy reach a subtle understanding none can teach.

They guard the secrets of our glorious king and therefore are not kept from anything.

But how could one who knows such secrets be convicted of the least audacity?

Since he is filled with reverence to the brim, a breath of boldness is permitted him.

The ignorant, it's true, can never share the secrets of our king. If one should dare

to ape the ways of the initiate, what does he do but blindly imitate?

He's like some soldier who kicks up a din and spoils the ranks with his indiscipline.

But think of some new pilgrim, some young boy whose boldness comes from mere excess joy.

He has no certain knowledge of the way and what seems rudeness is but loving play.

He's like a madman, loves audacity, will have him walking on the red carpet sea.

Such ways are laudable. We should admire this love that turns them to a blazing fire.

One can't expect discretion from a flame and mad men are beyond reproach or blame.

When madness chooses you to be its prey, let's hear what crazy things you have to say.

Thank you.