Well, good morning, everyone. I only half expected to have an unexpected visitor today, but she demanded that she come with me at the last moment. I want to tell her in front of all of you that I find her presence rather distracting, particularly as I'm here to give a talk today that I've practiced for all week long. There's really something important I had to tell you about the teaching and that you would not go away disappointed. But I think one of the first lessons that we all learn in life is to expect the unexpected. But anyway, this visitor that visits me, not only this time of year,

[02:03]

but at other inopportune times, has been given the name of Biddy Buhex. And Biddy Buhex, well, I'm here to give a talk today. And Biddy, is it OK if I give a talk today or not? Anyway, what do you think of my talks? You don't like my talks? No. I think they're very boring. Boring. Well, I'm here to talk about today the essence of the Dharma. What in the world is that? Biddy, I want you to give the talk or I'm going to give the talk, but we both cannot give the talk.

[03:11]

So let's have a vote. This is a democracy and we will abide by the decision of the majority. Let's see the hands of those who would like me to give the talk. Come on, get them up there. And how many want to see or listen to Biddy? Well, I guess then all I could say is pitch him your number, witch. Oh, he always does that. Those little put-down-the-sides of his. You want to know what the truth is?

[04:13]

You want to know why you came here today? Why did you come here today? Because you're not satisfied with the way things are. Right? Right? You think you're going to hear something here that you've never heard before. What? All right, you've heard it before, but I'm going to tell it again. You've come for something that is already your own. Huh? How do you like those apples? You come here to practice. What is practice? If you say you see here a witch.

[05:15]

Which witch is watching which? Is it that I'm here because you're there, or I'm here because you're there? I don't see witches. I see a lot of pretty people. They're going to look like me someday. And that's one of the reasons you're here, right? You don't want to look like me. You don't want to be an old witch. You don't want to be old and sick and infirm. You want to be in control. You want to be in control. Okay, okay, me too, yes, yes. You better own up. He thinks he knows it. Sometimes he thinks. When he gets up from his cushion, he understands.

[06:18]

As if he didn't understand when he sat down. When he sat down, the bird sang and he heard him. When some fragrance or other passed his nose, he didn't think, oh, I'm smelling something. He just smelled it. When he sees something, when he opens his eyes long enough to see it, the blank wall, he thinks he sees emptiness. As if that was emptiness. No, he already had perfect perceptions. You all got perfect minds already. Hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, playing your life. But, but, but, it's not enough.

[07:20]

Right? Right. Thank you. At least there's one intelligent person here. All right, have your fun. But what I'm saying, you shouldn't take seriously. But you better treat it seriously. The problem is, you already take your lives too seriously. You think you're going to control your suffering by controlling the world. What a lot of thought has been trying that for millennia and it still doesn't work. You can sign petitions, walk in parades till the end of time. The world is not going to change to suit you or me. Well, me, yes. But not him. Why?

[08:28]

She wants me to hush up. Do you want me to hush up? No. Yes. You think it's enough? No. Yes. You just wait until Halloween. Well. As I was saying. Who did you think that was but my outer ego? The one that always wants to say all the things I never say when I sit here. Why do we practice? Because we are dissatisfied

[09:37]

with the witnessing awareness of all phenomena which is unborn, unspeakable, ungraspable, yada, yada, yada. You've heard it all before. But we don't believe it. The same person I thought I was when I was two, was ten, was twenty, was thirty, was fifty, was sixty, was seventy. That consciousness that has heard, smelled, tasted, touched and so forth this world and gone through it, that awareness has not changed a bit. Nor has it for you. Nor can you ever remember a time when it has, actually. What does change is everything else that you can't see, that you can see. And what cannot be seen unless we begin to practice or that which we cannot be aware of in our practice is that which is always already the case. The witnessing awareness that has no beginning or end. That is not born out of phenomena.

[10:41]

It doesn't go away because of phenomena. They call it Brahman, they call it Buddha Mind, they call it the Godhead. We call it all sorts of names but there is a dynamic process at work here of awakeness. And that awakeness has been talked out of itself by all of our conditioning and that's the teaching. To see that fact truly, to sit down with it, to get quiet enough that we can tune in and listen to the twelve tape stereo that's going on in our heads telling us what we should do to change all of this. How by searching for an answer out there somewhere or even in here somewhere, I will finally, down the road, under some other condition or other, know the truth. In some sense, practice is an undoing of that whole trip, that whole ceremony, that whole ritual of constantly searching for some relief,

[11:42]

for some relief from those aspects of our life or our mortality that plague us. Halloween actually is a time when we have some ritual around bringing forth the demons, the let go of, the attached to, the remnants of the beloved, and those as well that have no face, those ghosts in the night, that go bump in the night. And that night, of course, you can't find outside or inside either. That night is also everywhere. The unknown, the unspeakable, that of which we are afraid and threatened thereby. It is a time in which those spirits or that feeling is released into the collective mindset.

[12:48]

We call it on the astrological scale in the old days, Scorpio. The time when all those things in the last six months in which the light was gathering and so on finally comes to that equilibrium. And now after a month of going into darker and darker days, mornings particularly, we notice it in the northern hemisphere, we begin to get that old primal feeling that if I haven't got my nest egg together, I ain't going to make it through the winter. It goes way back, this fear, this interning, and brings all of our insecurity to the fore, a time of death and regeneration, a time of total cleaning up our act. This is not the dark that we're coming out of the springtime when coming into a new phase is give me life, liberty and the pursuit.

[13:50]

This is the time that says, this is the eighth step after the beginning in which we say something's got to die. We've got to let go of something. And in order to do that, human beings since time out of mind have performed rituals of one kind or another. Inacted, this is not the Mardi Gras, this is the Totentanz, this is the dance of death. This is the one that acknowledges in our collective mythology the inescapable knowledge that all of us have that what we got or what you get, you will lose eventually. And because we like to hang on to those things that are pleasant and sustaining to our imposed identity, the identity imposed on this ever-present witnessing awareness, we feel threatened by that fact. Let's admit it.

[14:51]

And so we feel that by searching for some answer, some book, some teacher, some lineage somewhere, there's a way out of this suffering. And of course, people have come along like the Buddha who said, I'm only interested in two things, why we suffer and how to get rid of it, if there is a way. And the nature of our suffering, very simply, as we all know, is not understanding the true nature of reality. And the true nature of reality is this thing I'm describing that we all know that is prior to all of our experiences, but is not separate from them. And the aspects of ascetic or monastic training is to simply give somebody a format where they can sit down and finally have all the distractions of the world removed. That is to say, you don't have to hunt around for your bread or your shelter.

[15:53]

All you have to do is get your butt on a cushion and look at a wall and do nothing. And is it possible for a human being to sit and do nothing? Well, if you haven't come up against that already, I will save you the explanation that would spoil the fun of finding out what it is to do nothing. What it is to find out what nothing really means. And to have all of that nothing suddenly redeemed in everything that is arising. But we have to talk, we have to have some kind of structure to talk ourselves out of striving to get what is already the case. We actually have to go through a very painful process with our mind and our body, an actual yoga. Reading is not enough. And so to have people come here and swear to get up at four in the morning and come to a cold zindo and dark and, you know, and be sure you have a good sleep,

[16:56]

and you enter with this foot and face it this way and do this, everything prescribed exactly, so they can sit down and do nothing? You think your mind is going to buy that? Your mind is going to sit down, or our minds sit down and think, this nothing has got to be the big wham. This nothing has got to be it, all I have to do is find it now. And the more you forget the old, there's an old saying, you know. You can't find Buddha, God, Brahman, whatever. You can't find the witnessing awareness, ever-present witnessing awareness. You cannot find Buddha, so stop looking. You cannot lose Buddha, so stop worrying. But we worry and we look, endlessly. And we still feel that somebody out there, some condition or other that we change will finally make it better.

[17:58]

It will make it better on a relative sense, on a compounded sense, in the sense of experience, which, because it is born in time, will die also in time. We come to sit with all of our goblins and witches, which are our attachments to some form or other of being in this world in a solid way that we can hold on to. And it's been said again and again, the instructions are very clear, the way is not difficult. It's the second koan in the Blue Cliff Record. The way is not difficult, said the third Chinese ancestor of Zen, if you hold no preferences. Did I hear if, if? I used to know some people on the street, and one of them would always come up to me and engage me in some conversation. And I would start talking back, some kind of answer,

[19:00]

and if would appear, and he would always say, did I hear if? If ain't nowhere. He did not want the conditional mood, he wanted the absolute touching in right here and now, no ifs, ands, or buts. So this is the time of the year where we get in touch with all of those beings that are bewitched, bothered, and bewildered, think they're in love, until the object of the love changes, and then the object becomes hate. We're on that seesaw, greed, hate, and delusion, that moves our life, that's the wheel of wanting to search for some answer to this thing we call our life. But the answer is already the ever-present answer, that is prior to anything we can put on it, because it can't be placed into

[20:02]

time and space. And yet it's not an it apart from it. And if you see that, if we see that, if we can practice from that disposition over and over and over again, every time the world steps on our feet, every time it bumps into our ideals, every time we are rocked out of our comfortable niche by the force of our own experience, the way is not difficult to have no preferences. But Biddy knows and was here to remind me that I have all kinds of preferences. I still draw the line. A monk that puts on the robe is not supposed to any longer draw the line between what I'm trying to protect and what is happening in the world at large. But how is that possible until we finally have worked through all our stories and trips that threaten us? Not possible. So we have to practice.

[21:07]

Even if that practice, the ultimate of that practice is, I knew it all the time. I just couldn't let go of the story. Today, among the ceremonies that we do here, there's one also that is celebrated in the Far East. In Japan, it is celebrated during the month of August, actually, in a ceremony called Obon, kind of the Day of the Dead, or it's called... What is the ceremony called? What is the ceremony we're doing tonight? Seigaki. Se. And Gaki. Gaki literally means hungry ghost. Now, it's interesting that in Japan they do it in the summertime and it's done with a great deal of festivity. Boats, little paper boats with candles in them are set adrift on the river,

[22:15]

different rivers in Japan and ponds. There are pavilions in which people are doing folk dancing and there's a lot of sake flowing. It just seems a very celebratory time, and it's actually acknowledging... I guess we can interpret it literally and psychologically and intellectually on many levels, but we are acknowledging our attachments, both good and bad, both in the sense of gratefulness for all that has passed before and also for the understanding that whatever has been passed on to us has been passed on by that which is now gone and dead and we honor them in that, in some way, by calling to mind those spirits, so that karma or that aspect of ourself that is unfinished, unresolved. And so by acting out and by having celebration, by calling the hungry spirits, the preta loka, to reveal themselves, to come forth,

[23:21]

we can acknowledge the fact that there's a part of us that's always searching, always grieving, always rendered unhappy by the loss of something important, either very near or culturally more distant. But we perform that same ceremony and there's, of course, many legends, underworld legends in the East as in the West, and one of the tales about this segaki ceremony is that there was a disciple of the Buddha and he was tormented by dreams of his mother, his deceased mother, suffering unspeakable horrors that she couldn't eat or drink, that when food was presented to her, it turned to fire in her mouth and any libation,

[24:22]

anything to quench her thirst turned to blood or pus or some very disagreeable thing like that. And he'd have this dream over and over, this vision over and over, so he goes to the expert, to the practitioner who knows the answers to this, and he says, Hey, you know, I'm having this bad dream, can you help me? And he gets, you know, got in touch with it and he said, Your mother's spirit is hovering in the hungry ghost realm and that hungry ghost realm is depicted as the being with a large head, a tiny mouth, a very small neck, long neck, and a very huge belly, bigger even than mine. Big, like someone suffering from malnutrition, advanced stages of it. And the aspect, the insatiable, the unquenchable, the unslakeable aspect of it is that no matter how much the being tries to eat or put into its mouth,

[25:27]

it can't ever get enough to go down to feed itself, so it's slowly starving to death. By what it's getting, it's either turning to shit or it's burning the mouth or one is starving to death. And so the being is constantly craving, craving a new experience, craving a new beginning, craving, driven by that, and it's insatiable. So he says, Your mother's in that realm and you have to go there and get her out of it. So in this hell realm, of course, hell always seems to be down, doesn't it? So he goes down to the hell realm, one of those myths. And he opens, he has the key, the key is the Dharma. He has the key to open the door to the hungry ghost realm, but when he does, he neglects to shut it fast enough and all the hungry ghosts flood out into the earth. And so he meets his mother, he gives his mother the taste that she's looking for,

[26:29]

the taste that she's been spitting out is the taste of the truth, which is the taste of the all-embracingness, the all-embracing love of the universe, the all-embracing acceptance of phenomena. But all the other beings that are still suffering the insatiable craving of one kind or another are abroad now in the world and have to be called back to see if they're finished with hanging on or are hanging on to them. Our reluctance to let the beloved, some aspect, go. So we're called back. So there's all sorts of, in the ceremony, all sorts of noises made. We have noisemakers, it sounds like Halloween or it sounds like New Year's kind of combination. To invite the hungry ghosts to see or to meet with us and we will offer them whatever they want to make them happy. Whatever they want, they can have. It's not our decision about what the hungry ghost wants.

[27:29]

They're hungry ghosts, we will feed them what they need. It is called the Bodhisattva practice. We feed one another what we need at that moment, even if we're hungry ghosts. We give that to each other. You want a little bit? Okay. Remember, it might slip a little Dharma in with it. Which is, you want candy? Here's the candy. But after you have the candy, you're going to feel stuffed and want to take a walk. And then you take a walk, you're going to get tired, you've got to lie down. You lie down, you have the bad dreams and you feel groggy, so you've got to get some coffee when you get up. You know, rush after rush after rush after rush. So anyway, the hungry ghosts are abroad in the world. And in China they had ways of entertaining them with Chinese circus and dances and acrobatics and so forth, just as in Japan. And we don't do it so much here. We don't entertain them as much, but they might find us very funny and entertaining. But we also pay, you know, our...

[28:33]

We also pay homage, you could say, or we also bear witness to all of the goodness that has brought us to the realization that there is a practice that teaches us that things are perfect as they are, even though we don't believe it. And must find it out each for herself, himself. And that's the talk Biddy would give, I think. Right, Biddy? Yes! No, Biddy never agrees. Biddy's the part of ourself who refuses to go along with whatever trip makes you feel good. Biddy's the one... The witch is the one that comes and upsets you. And the good witch upsets us in a way that we help see through our masks, our stories. There was a monk named Pai Chan.

[29:39]

He was actually a teacher. He was a teacher of a very great Zen master, Wang Po. And one day, when Wang Po woke up, he understood something about what I'm trying to drive at, which was... He said, he said, that things are perfect the way they were, that he was already free and unhindered, because all of the trips had dropped away. They were just trips, they were just movies. And he could really dance with the movie and really dug the movie. In fact, he played the movie to the full, in the roles that he was given. The roles that were given, we play them out. Anyway, he's... We have a practice period that just started here and all the monks are sitting. And one of the head monks is really sitting very well, very tight. But Wang Po is down in the corner. He's sound asleep. In fact, he's curled up on his zafu, sleeping. Teacher goes up, Pai Chan goes up and wraps him on the shoulder.

[30:41]

Wang Po looks up at him, goes back to sleep. Teacher goes back to the head monk and hits him on the shoulder. There's a monk awake over there. Why don't you wake up? Right now, I don't know which of those two monks you think you are. The fact is we're both of those monks. We're the one that's being carried in to the veterinarian, purring in its mistress's, like a cat in its mistress's arms, an old cat. We think we're going to be given a new can of tuna or something. Another cat jumps out of her arms when she carries him in and runs down into the gutter and gets eaten by something, maybe.

[31:43]

But I made a free decision not to be carried in on some persuasion or other. The other cat, he doesn't know, she doesn't know, but she makes a leap into what she doesn't know. So in that story I've always thought, which cat am I? And I've suddenly realized that for years I wanted to be the cat that jumped out of the arms and made a free choice. But the teacher reminds me, the time reminds me, if not life, I'm also the one being carried in. And what carries me in are my preferences, as they say, my views that have to be undone little by little, day by day, effort by effort. Yeah, this is the time in the movie

[32:58]

when we meet to say goodbye, in some ways. It's the ceremony behind all of the orange and black crepe. So I exhort you, if you have a practice or an experience, believe it or not, that if there's hungry ghosts lingering in your psyche or your life, you know, light a candle to that spirit. Light a candle, incense it, make an offering to that spirit. Make a gesture to that spirit and say goodbye. And there's a poem by Bosco, is it Bosco?

[34:05]

Drummond de la Ronte. A time comes when you can no longer see say my God. A time of total cleaning up. A time when you can no longer say my love because love finally proved useless and the eyes won't cry. The hands do only rough work and the heart is dry. Women knock at the door. I don't answer. I remain alone, the light out and my enormous eyes shine in the dark. It's obvious I've lost the capacity to even suffer and I want nothing from my friends. Wars, famines,

[35:09]

deaths, family fights inside buildings still go on and no one will ever really be free. Some, the delicate ones, judging the scene will prefer to die. But a time comes when death doesn't help. A time comes when life is in order but just life with no escapes. When we reach that place, that Scorpio, that's this time of year, when life is just in order, no fancy things up or down, gross or subtle, just life. By sitting on our cushion long enough or by being present long enough, we can come to that place

[36:10]

and then that just life is not just life anymore. Or at least the just no longer hurts. There will be a question and answer after this, so we'll talk more then. This is probably enough. Thank you.

[36:52]

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