Sunday, April 26, 2026

Good morning. Well, again, thank you to everybody for being here and for your kind invitation for me to speak to you this morning. I think I should begin with how it is that this theme — Dogen's profound insight that enlightenment is intimacy with all things — came about once Aaron had proposed that I speak to you.

About a year ago, I was up in British Columbia facilitating a retreat and a self-inquiry group, twice a week, a group of people who were working on the inner examination of who I am. And we were working with something that Krishnamurti said. It's one of my favorite lines of his, which is: when I understand myself, I understand you. And out of that understanding comes love, compassion. I thought this corresponded quite well — not the same words, but a correspondence — with Dogen's enlightenment is intimacy with all things. So during the discussion with the group, for some reason, that line of Dogen's just came out of my mouth. And everyone in the room got very quiet. I don't think anybody in the room — there were about 14 of us — knew who he was. So it started another line of inquiry that was really rich. And so when Aaron said, would you like to do this? — that's instantly what came to mind. There was a synergy there that was quite beautiful.

I also wanted to acknowledge that when I went to your website for the very first time, I was really struck by what you call your affirmation of welcome. It's really beautiful, and I'm sure you know it, but for those who don't, I want to read it to you, because it made me feel very at home with doing this with you. It says: embracing all, the Santa Barbara Zen Center affirms the fundamental connection of all beings. We warmly invite people of every race, ethnicity, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, immigration status, and ability to join us in the practice of zazen. Aspiring to do no harm, we recognize our liberation is interconnected with the liberation of all beings. May all beings realize their true nature. I don't know who wrote that or how long it's been there, but it's very inviting, it's very loving. Thank you.

We have a banner — a very small banner — in our house. It has words on it, and every time my husband or I walk by it, it reminds us of a state of being and a way of interacting in the world that brings about a little more presence and even sometimes much-needed resilience. It's a quote from the Dalai Lama that I'd like to read. He said: there is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples. My philosophy is kindness. Those words have a way of centering. And it corresponds with exactly what you have on the homepage of your website as well.

I've got some notes here, and I'll explain why I'm relying on them so much in a minute. But kindness and generosity, of course, is something the world desperately needs. We all know that. We all feel that. In some ways we're all grieving for the place we're in, in America and throughout the world. So it just so happened that while I was preparing this talk, the cruelty of the times we're living in kept infiltrating it, as it were. It was this background thing that just wouldn't go away. And that's kind of been building up over a little bit of time.

So as I began to write down my reflections about Dogen's beautiful insight that enlightenment is intimacy with all beings, I couldn't help also but contemplate the state of the world. And I usually do speak from an outline, so I hope today you'll forgive me for reading some of this instead of making eye contact with you as much as I'd like to.

When I noticed why I kept losing the threads as I was putting this talk together, I realized it was because we are always living in a kind of tension with the duality of human existence. On the one hand, we're capable of great goodness. On the other hand, as you know, we also destroy life and we destroy the planet — that is our species. And so one has to — and I have to — hold those two things together. It was interesting to work on this and to do that at the same time, because I had not acknowledged to myself how much this has penetrated, how much the difficult times we're living in has penetrated. I speak to people online in private appointments, and it's always coming up, always, always, always. And somehow I thought I was immune to it, but none of us are.

One of the ways I handle that is I just take long walks in the woods, because it's very accessible here where we live. And as you know, Dogen loved nature. He was often in communion with the rivers and the mountains. And that, I think, made it possible for him to transcend — it helped him transcend the times he lived in — because medieval Japan wasn't all that different from where we are here in America.

Once I reconciled it, I was fine. Suddenly things started to work a couple of days ago. I had something to draw on in myself for these times that are kind of shattering. And that is that back in the 1990s, I worked as a photographer for human rights organizations during the Balkan War. I witnessed firsthand the cruelty of war, along with the courage of ordinary people caught in the crossfire, and the extraordinary compassion of those who came to frontline hospitals, risking their own lives to take care of the wounded and to care for the dying.

At first, I could barely cope. The shock to my system was so great — I could barely cope with seeing wounded children, and all I could really see was the dark side of humanity. That was it. That's all I could see. But once I began to process the shock — because I was there almost four years, back and forth — I began to see something else. And it's difficult to put into words. But what I saw was the shining beauty of compassion as it flowed from those who were attending to the wounded, and then flowed back to them as gratitude and even love. And in a moment of standing there in the middle of all this chaos, I saw that the giver and the receiver were one. They were not separate. And in that moment, all of the wounded in that makeshift hospital, its staff of volunteers, and myself, were all flowing in the giving and the receiving. Love, compassion was flowing in all directions. Everything was one, in the midst of a chaos that was somehow very still.

For me, it shifted everything as I continued to do my work there. Because you are viscerally connected with the duality that we are. And it — I still really have difficulty expressing this — but in a sense it gives me what I call sacred optimism. Sacred optimism. And it's not any kind of escape. It's not any kind of facade. It's the truth. And it's the same truth that Dogen spent his life articulating.

He was no stranger to war himself. Thirteenth-century Japan was a cauldron of change and a vicious battleground for warring factions, as the powerful exploited the poor and the marginalized, and the privileged had everything while children starved. There were even monks — I'm sure you know this — who warred against each other. At the beginning of his monastic life, these warring monks, who did not agree with his interpretation of what the true Dharma is, burned his monastery down, and they had to escape deeper into the mountains, where they rebuilt, built another monastery. And yet Dogen didn't flinch. He kept going. And it's really the reason why I think Zen continues to flourish in Japan today and, of course, here in the West.

When he said that enlightenment is intimacy with all things, he was of course pointing to something beyond our conventional notions of intimacy. Because that word — intimacy — conjures up images. And of course it's translated from the Japanese, but everyone uses the same word: intimacy with all things. It's something as close to us as our breath. A hidden truth that shatters our conception of what we think reality is. Because it's the thinking mind that creates this reality — the dualistic reality — within ourselves, in the way we separate each other by religious tribe, spiritual tradition, race, gender, and so on. And yet our intrinsic and intimate relationship with everything is at the bottom of our existence.

But what Krishnamurti called the conditioned mind — the egoic mind, the construction of me — is a very difficult barrier to seeing the truth of our interconnectedness, our intimacy. A biologist, the sciences, can sometimes show this. The climate is related to human behavior. Without the forests, we don't have enough of the right combination of oxygen. Everything that the earth itself is telling us all the time: everything is interconnected, everything is interdependent. But here we are. The consciousness of our species is, I think, in the process — as it has been for a long time — of evolving. That's my own view. And there is a pushback. There's always that pushback to something that threatens the status quo.

One of the things that gives me sacred optimism is that there are countless groups and organizations all over the planet who are doing this very thing today — what you did this morning — who are adding something into this container we call human consciousness that is whole, that is a level of togetherness instead of otherness.

What Dogen talked about over 800 years ago was that we belong, all of us. We're together as one in the matrix of life. We're all dancing together. We're all walking each other home. He suggested, with that insight, that in the practice of zazen, this intimacy may reveal itself — or it may not. It may also reveal itself while you get up off your cushion and make breakfast. There are no set rules or boundaries with this realization that you and I have an intimate relationship. In this way, with an understanding of the egoic self — having seen what that is — life can be a meditation. Going to the grocery store can be a meditation. Taking your child or your grandchild to school can be a meditation. If there's enough presence, enough quietude in the mind, to see that everything I say, everything I touch, if there is some awareness in it, if there is an intention of kindness — it changes everything.

So this intimacy of everything is at the center of Dogen's teaching. And it's why I resonate with Zen. It's at the center of Zen. It's really — even though it may not be apparent — this intimacy, this compassion, is really at the root of other traditions as well. In recent years I've been speaking a lot about Krishnamurti's contribution to the understanding of the conditioned mind, because he had some amazing ways of phrasing and speaking about this thing called me, and the prison of separation it imposes upon us. The mind-made illusion that divides everybody into factions — it's so apparent, so stubborn.

So to realize the truth of our intimacy with everything, Dogen essentially said exactly what Krishnamurti said many, many centuries later, what Gurdjieff has said, what the mystics have said: we start with ourselves. We start with the construct of my own mind. We look at what we think we are, or what we think we should be or not be. We look at all these basic things about ourselves, about our thought patterns, and how these patterns of thought are repetitive and how they determine our behavior — and how quickly a flash of anger will arise, or frustration or irritation. But in seeing it, it falls away. And one can see it while one is yelling at someone — you see it, but it's too late. That's all right. The movement is so fast, the movement from thought to emotion. It's the practice of seeing, again and again and again, that loosens the vice of this construct called me. That's really, in my own words, part of what Dogen brought. It's part of what others have brought since then, and actually even before.

I've spent most of my adult life studying the three traditions that resonate with me most, and that is Buddhism, contemplative Christianity, and Sufism. It's not that the others don't matter — it's just how my life unfolded, where I was born, the whole chain of events that sent me to a Catholic school. And then when I left at the age of 16, I just said, I can't do this. Many years later, I came back, having studied Buddhism, and I saw things in Christianity that I hadn't seen before — because it's not what they really talk about, but yet it's there. And this is just my experience. Everyone has a different connection with the tradition they were born in.

What I was interested in, in doing this study, was where do they intersect? Where do the world's spiritual or religious traditions — whatever phrase you want to assign to it — where do they intersect? Where is the common ground? Because if you look through human history, so many of the wars are fought on the basis of religion. It certainly was a factor in the Balkan War that I covered. And it's always been a part of our dilemma. A psychologist might say, well, it's an excuse for something else. It's all mixed up in the same tribalism that humans have clung to — maybe coming out of a survival mode from the cave days. You can read thousands of books about this whole problem, about why we are the way we are. But the looking, the seeing, in my own individual life — of my own pettiness at times, my own irritations, my own prejudices, my own unwillingness at times to listen, to try to understand what the other — the so-called other side — is seeing that I don't see. And how can they see that anyway? What's wrong with them? It's a huge work. It is a life's work — many lifetimes' work — to get to the moment of communion, of union with another, with a stranger.

Now, in my investigation not only of Dogen but of the three traditions I mentioned, there are three things they all have in common. Maybe more, but those are the three. The first is the primacy of compassion. The primacy of compassion. Even though it's not always lived, it is embedded in those three. And I think it's also in Judaism and Hinduism. Second, the importance of self-study through meditation or contemplation — the study of me, the self. And third, the embrace of our fundamental oneness, of a fundamental ground of being that is love. Thomas Merton called it the ground of love for which there is no explanation. Our intimacy is that deep with each other.

Now, having mentioned Thomas Merton — who I think was so aligned with Dogen — that's the amazing thing: through the centuries, divergent people from divergent cultures, from completely different geographies, traditions, training, have the same experience. And when that experience arises, all of those boundaries are gone. I don't know if you're familiar with this statement, but I'd like to read it — even if you're not familiar with Thomas Merton, it doesn't matter. He was a Trappist monk, and he lived in the hills of Kentucky in his hermitage. One day he was down in Louisville. It was very crowded. But he saw something that completely changed his view of himself and his relationship to the world. And when I read this, you'll know why I'm reading it. He wrote:

"In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people. They were mine and I was theirs. That we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world — the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. Now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this. But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun."

So way back, 800 years ago in medieval Japan, Dogen was saying the same thing in a different way. Enlightenment is intimacy with all things.

I became familiar with Zen about 20-odd years ago, first by reading Thich Nhat Hanh, and then I somehow stumbled on Dogen's poetry. I don't remember how, but through his poetry I felt like I got to know him before I read some of the more difficult writings of his. His poetry is so lyrical, so simple and direct. His poetry contains so much stillness that I resonated with it. I also loved his connection to the natural world — to a flower, to a heron. So much of his poetry is about an observation and a direct experience of oneness with the mountain. The things he says about mountains are worth reading. First of all, it'll just turn your mind upside down. The mountain moves. He says, don't look at a mountain the way the brain looks at a mountain. Of course we immediately name it — Mount This, Mount That. We give it attributes. Our language is a gift; it's also sometimes quite a burden.

I look out the window and I see a robin. I've named it. All of a sudden there's something separating me and the robin. I named it. I love looking at birds that I don't know the name of, because there seems to be more ease in connecting with something other than the name and the attributes I know are connected with that name. This is part of the self-study — that we could somehow drop away this naming. It's not that we get rid of everything. We need a map sometimes to get to a town we don't know. We need this part of the brain. But it gets in the way of connecting. That's why these direct experiences of some kind of union of love with someone you don't even know — something happens. There's no language involved. There's no image involved. It's — well, you know what Krishnamurti said. He said it's the act of seeing without the filter of thought. Dogen said the same thing, just in a different way. And the act of seeing is the miracle of transformation — seeing without thought, without labels, without names. Direct seeing. For that, the mind has to be quiet. Thinking has to drift away.

Getting back to Dogen's poetry — they're musical. There are high notes, low notes, because some of the poetry is not all lightness. There are expressions of doubt and despair in some lines here and there. But always, again, always there is the stillness that resolves it.

Somewhere along the line, I read Instructions to the Cook. To me, even though it's very involved, the basic thing here is that the daily preparation of food is practice — is meditation. They grew their own food, so we go shopping for our food. Well, that's a meditation. The way we touch things, the way we notice the color, whatever shoulder we're bumping up against at Trader Joe's trying to get at the lettuce — it's all a meditation. He talked so endlessly about preparing the food, how we touch it, how we cut it. Is it all just rote, routine? Or is there really an attention there in how I cut an apple or a tomato? This was so important in his monastery. It's an honor to be the cook — a great deal of work, less time for sitting if you're working in the kitchen. But it was an honor, because that work was intense and it had a deadline. So how do you cook, prepare, and serve without feeling the stress of the deadline? I was enthralled with the way he wrote about that. Still am.

So he elevated what goes on in the kitchen as the gate to a deeper realization of our connectedness — not only with the food, but with the people we're preparing the food for. Our presence affects the food. I think he didn't say it in those words, but it's something to reflect on. Or lack of presence. It's all unquantifiable — you can't quantify any of this — although my plants grow better to Mozart than to hard rock. They've tested this out. So yes, our presence affects everything, because we're intimate with everything.

So preparing a meal, a cup of tea — daily life for Dogen was meditation. It was zazen. And you bring the quietude of zazen into the motion of living. They're not separate. Sitting on my cushion for an hour and then getting up and putting gas in my car are not separate. He phrased it this way: those who see worldly life as an obstacle to Dharma see no Dharma in everyday actions. They have not yet discovered that there are no everyday actions outside of Dharma. That's a powerful thing. Nothing is excluded — cleaning the cat litter, all of it.

He went further. He said, zazen is not the life of an individual. It's the universe breathing. So if you just get in touch right now with the fact that we're breathing.

I've talked about the poetry, so I'd like to read one or two for you. Maybe you've read the poetry — I don't know. But there's, as I mentioned, a stillness in these poems that I think expresses his own deep relationship, the intimacy — because we're talking about a relationship, aren't we, when we talk about intimacy? My relationship with people I don't know, that I happen just to walk by in a museum or wherever I am. Poems, like music, like some parables, have the capacity to bypass the intellect altogether, to bypass any filter that we may have, and go straight to the center of our being, the heart. So I chose the following poem because it moves swiftly, like an arrow, and yet it's very still.

In the heart of the night
the moonlight framing a small boat
drifting
tossed not by the waves
nor swayed by the breeze

Five lines. And it's a novel, in a way. It's life. It's the stillness that illuminated the observation. Out of that stillness the poem arose. But you can almost feel what's underneath the words. Everything is woven together. It's the silent act of seeing what is, at that moment.

I'm running over. I wanted to touch on the search — our own individual search, and Dogen's search — because he searched for the same things we do. As a young man he was searching for something he wasn't finding in Japan when he was 23. So he went to China, hoping to find a practice and an understanding of Zen that was not available, from his point of view, in his home country at that time.

But before that, long before that — he was about eight years old when his mother died. His father had died when he was two. And when he was at his mother's funeral, this little eight-year-old boy — very precocious — saw incense rising in the air and then disappearing. And in that moment of deep sorrow, because they were very close, he and his mother, he realized that no matter who you are, rich or poor, young or old, no matter how much power you have, everything is impermanent. And that was the seed, the initial seed, of his search.

Each of us is on a search still. And each of us has our own impetus for seeking the sacred. And what Dogen said is that ultimately we have to turn the light inward first. In the Genjokoan, he lays it out, and I think it's so clear. So I'm just going to quickly state what you already perhaps practice. He said: to study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things.

Now, if you're not a Buddhist, you don't even have to use the word Buddha. Because the way to this sort of self-actualization, to realization, has to go through the crucible of me. I have to get out of the way. And that means understanding how my mind works — the structure of me. That was the very foundation for Dogen. And I think it corresponds quite well with Krishnamurti and Gurdjieff and the contemplatives and the mystics. The language and the way it's presented is not going to be the same, but the underlying truth of this is there.

I made some reflections on each of these three things, but we're supposed to end at noon, so I'll have to skip it. But I do want to end with two poems.

Because the mind is free
listening to the rain
dripping from the eaves
the drops become one with me

And finally:

The true person is not anyone in particular
but like the deep blue color of the limitless sky
it is everyone, everywhere in the world

So thank you for your attention. I don't know if there is a little bit of time for any kind of comment, question, or conversation.

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Question: Cynthia, thank you very much. I'm giving you a bow for sharing your sacred optimism with us, for comparing these large spiritual traditions and finding the commonality in them and how they speak to our own practice here. Really grateful to you. We usually do take a little bit of time beyond noon for Q&A, so maybe we could stay together for about 10 more minutes to field questions. I'll turn it over to our group here. And normally we breathe before we talk, so we're breathing. Can you hear me, Cynthia? It's Erin.

Cynthia Overweg: Hi, Erin.

Question: I think one of the things that stuck with me throughout the conversation — and even before you started, knowing what you were going to speak to, what quote you were drawing from — was this word, intimacy. More than really a question, I just want to reiterate my gratitude. It's a word that I use a lot — cultivating intimacy — when I teach things too. I'm very drawn to that word. And I think in listening to you, I hadn't really fully understood it until now. Which is: it brings humanity to this vast concept of oneness. Meaning, even though inside of me I know we're one, it's a concept in my head that I then have to experience. But with that said, it's even in those moments of great awe that I'm having — let's say, within nature — it is because simultaneously I'm feeling intimate with it as well. So I just really appreciated that you explored that more. I'm more drawn to that word now as well. That quote in particular — that word, at least for me, is a doorway and a bridge to embodying this interconnected, tangled web we're a part of, and more so from a place of compassion and from my heart. It brings the compassion to the interdependence and the interconnectedness that we share. Because without that intimacy, for me at least, it lacks some quality where I can truly relate with it on a deeper level — this concept of oneness and interdependence. Thank you.

Cynthia Overweg: Thank you for speaking to that. So I'll go on this one. I don't know how many people are aware of this film — it's an old film, maybe 20 years ago, set in Denmark, on the North Sea, very cold and austere, a small village. This woman shows up and is not welcomed by anyone. None of the people who live in this village really like each other. And she decides the solution is she'll apply her trade — she was a chef in Paris. And she puts on this feast, and they start talking to each other. And it undermines the whole tradition of separateness that this village had experienced. I remember that film standing out in my mind. What film expresses that kind of message? This was an exquisite example of what you're talking about — preparing food and sharing it with people who are estranged from one another.

Question: Babette's Feast?

Cynthia Overweg: Babette's Feast, yes. I'll look it up. She has — or actually, she receives — a legacy, and she spends every dime she inherits putting together this feast for the people in this village who are so cold and disconnected from one another. And she gives everything she has, basically, to put on this amazing feast. Such passion. That sounds beautiful. It's the kind of film I would love. Yeah. Thank you. It's these small acts of kindness. Going back to the Dalai Lama's statement — if there is an expression of kindness, it's not always returned, so there can't be a motive involved. But a smile, little things. I notice that at the checkout counter at Vons. Is it a transaction or is it a relationship? Sometimes maybe I don't have the time or the energy — I just want to get out. But then there's that moment before you leave where you might be able to make contact with a smile. Something is recognized, isn't it? When you look someone in the eyes, when you look an animal in the eyes, something arises that feels kind. It's not always mirrored back. We're always looking in a mirror. That's something hard for the brain to accept, but we're always looking in a mirror. And I try to practice with that — especially with the eyes. As a photographer — I don't do it for a living, only for a few years did I do it professionally — but you have to really see what you're taking a picture of. And quite often the human face is a fascinating thing to photograph. Or the face of a deer. There is a mutuality there. It's palpable. And sometimes a still photograph really can transmit that whole rush of what the photographer saw, right into you. Because it's you.

Question: I think we have time for one more question or comment. Bob?

Cynthia Overweg: Sorry, Bob.

Question: A question and a comment. First, thanks for your overview of the history of consciousness — it really struck home with me. We have so many connections in our searching for the truth. My first question is, where were you born, and what Catholic school did you go to?

Cynthia Overweg: I was born in New York, but I didn't go to Catholic school there. My father was in the Navy, so we moved around a lot. First I went to a British school because we lived abroad — very strict, very, very strict. You had to learn all the plant names in Latin, that kind of thing. And then when we came back to the States, we were in Virginia, and I went to Catholic school. But after two years, I told my mother, I can't do this. Please don't make me do this anymore. And she agreed. So I was out. By the time I was 16, it was the dogma — it just drove me out. But I happened to live in Camarillo at one point, and it's a beautiful, very unique church there. People come as pilgrims from all over. I happened to get into a conversation — I didn't mean to, but I happened to get into a conversation with the priest. And he thought Buddhism and Christianity had a lot in common. So you never know what you're going to find. You can never paint it all with one stroke — that's what I'm trying to say.

Question: Very good. And my last comment: throughout your talk, I kept hearing the words enlightenment, illusion, and seeking. And it reminded me of a quote I heard — and I don't know who said this — that enlightenment is not so much achieving something, but more a pulling back of the curtain of illusion that there was ever a seeker or anything to be sought.

Cynthia Overweg: Exactly. Exactly. Thank you.

Question: Thank you, Cynthia. Really appreciate your being with us on screen today. We hope that at some point you can be with us in person when you come back to this part of the world. We'd love to sit with you and have the chance to continue practicing with you.

Cynthia Overweg: I would like that too.