given by Nomon Tim Burnett
Beginner's Mind Retreat, Bellingham Dharma Hall
October 05, 2003
By Amy Ellis Nutt
Newhouse News Service
JERRY MCCRAE / THE STAR-LEDGER
A work sheet shows various figures in an attempt by Mike and Margaret Timmerman to break the cipher of Thomas Jefferson Beale
The numbers are always there, phantom houseguests in the home in Bayonne, N.J.: 71, 194, 38. ... Mike Timmerman sees them in the ribbons of steam curling up from his coffee cup every morning: 1701, 89, 76. ... Margaret Timmerman sees them in the water coiling down the drain as she does the dishes: 11, 83, 1629.
And the couple see them one last time: waves of numbers settling into a tidal pool at the bottom of their dreams. The numbers are a secret code, a cipher, and for 20 years Mike Timmerman has been trying to unravel the message inside those numbers. He was joined in the search by his wife, Margaret, when they married four years ago.
And a $20 million treasure is the lure.
For 180 years, the Beale Treasure, thought to consist of more than 2 tons of gold, silver and jewels, has remained hidden in the foothills of southern Virginia. The exact location is concealed inside a code, a single page of 520 numbers. Hundreds, if not thousands, have tried to break the code - mathematicians, professional cryptographers and computer scientists, as well as psychics, dowsers and amateur detectives.
Among those who have tried, and failed, are Herbert Yardley, founder of the U.S. Cipher Bureau; William Friedman, the greatest cryptanalyst of the first half of the 20th century and the head of U.S. Signal Intelligence Service during World War II; and Carl Hammer, now in his 90s, the retired director of computer science for Sperry Univac.
The story began 40 years before the start of the Civil War when 30 men set out to hunt buffalo. Instead, according to legend, they stumbled upon veins of gold and silver in the Sawatch range of the Rocky Mountains, about 250 miles north of Santa Fe, N.M. The men mined the ore for 18 months, then agreed that a few of them should haul it back East for safekeeping. Led by Thomas Jefferson Beale, the small band made two wagon trips east, one in 1819 and another in 1821. Each time, Beale stayed for the winter at the Washington Hotel in Buford's, Va. (now Montvale), 30 miles west of Lynchburg.
In the spring of 1822, Beale left the hotel and headed West. He entrusted a locked iron box to hotel owner Robert Morriss, telling him he would send instructions about the box should he not return for it.
Morriss never received the letter, and Beale never returned. Twenty-three years later, Morriss broke the lock on the box and found a letter addressed to him from Beale, along with three sheets of paper filled with numbers. The letter said the three pages were codes, which, with the use of a written "key," would reveal three messages. Those messages were a description of the treasure, the names and addresses of all the men who had a claim to part of it, and its exact location. Presumably, the letter that never came from Beale would have included the key.
For 17 years, Morriss tried to break the codes. Then, nearing death, he passed on the contents to a friend whose name has been lost. It is known that the friend, consumed with finding a solution to the ciphers, bankrupted himself and alienated his family. But before he died, he broke Cipher No. 2, the description of the treasure, by matching the numbers of the cipher against the sequentially numbered words of the Declaration of Independence.
The decoded message said: "I have deposited in the county of Bedford, about four miles from Buford's, in an excavation or vault, six feet below the surface of the ground, the following articles. ... The first deposit consisted of ten hundred and fourteen pounds of gold and thirty eight hundred and twelve pounds of silver ... The second ... consisted of nineteen hundred and seven pounds of gold and twelve hundred and eighty eight of silver, also jewels obtained in St. Louis in exchange to save transportation and valued at thirteen thousand dollars. The above is securely packed in iron pots with iron covers (and) the vault is roughly lined with stone and the vessels rest on solid stone and are covered with others. ... "
The allure of the Beale ciphers lies in their formidable simplicity. They were apparently constructed as simple substitution ciphers, in which numbers replace letters. But in the case of the Beale ciphers, the key-document by which the scramble of numbers could be turned into plain English has never been found.
Because the Declaration of Independence was discovered to be the key to Cipher No. 2, many people think a related historical document or literary work could unlock the secrets of Cipher No. 1. Among the texts studied as possible keys are the U.S. Constitution, the speeches of Thomas Jefferson, the works of William Shakespeare, the books of the Old Testament and the poems of Francis Scott Key.
"I got copies of the Lynchburg Press from Dec. 7, 14, 21, and 28 of 1821, right around the time Beale would have been at the Washington Hotel," Mike Timmerman said. "I wanted to see if anything pertaining to Beale or his party was in the paper, and I thought maybe the key was hidden in there somewhere. So we went through each article and applied it to the code. It took us a whole year, but nothing turned up that fit."
One possibility is that Cipher No. 1 was created using a "one-off" key, that is a document - say, a letter or an essay - penned by Beale himself. If there is a unique key, and if the only copy has been lost or destroyed, then the remaining Beale ciphers may never be broken, the $20 million in gold, silver and jewels never found.
Louis Matacia, a land surveyor by profession and a dowser by avocation, thinks he knows where the treasure is buried. Matacia is an expert in dowsing, an ancient art in which the person holds a divining rod to locate underground targets such as water, oil and minerals. His divining rods have included everything from a wire coat hanger to specially designed aluminum angle rods. Approaching a rocky outcrop in the Blue Ridge mountains near Goose Creek Valley, Matacia unsheathed a dowsing rod and held it gently in his right hand, pointing out from his chest. Suddenly the rod swung wildly to the left. He approached the same spot from the opposite direction. The rod swung dramatically to the right.
"Big treasure is like a bolt of lightning," he said matter-of-factly. "The force is so strong it just kicks out. Here it is, 27 feet down by my calculations."
Matacia thinks the hoard was buried in a cave under the granite outcropping, but he has not found the entrance, and digging straight through the rock, he said, "would take a large drill, at least 10 honest men and about $50,000."
Matacia is in no rush. The belief that he has found the treasure is perhaps more precious to him than the treasure itself. "If I never dig it up, it's not the end of the world," he said. "There's a right time for that treasure to come out of the ground. And it's not now."
Freedom is a word that is used in so many different ways, and usually with an underlying agenda, that it has all but lost meaning. So I looked it up in the dictionary. The first definition listed is "The condition of being free of restraints." A little further down is "The capacity to exercise choice; free will."
We all live in such fortunate circumstances. We are free of restraints right? No one is going to lock us up. We don’t have to worry really about the cops breaking down our door and dragging us away. (Although if you learn about the so-called Patriot Act you might be surprised by what they can do now without probable cause, but that’s another story.) Not everyone in the world is so lucky as be free from restraints or, more importantly, free from the looming threat of restraints.
And we fit the second definition also. We do, for the most part, have the capacity to exercise choice and free will. We all chose to come to this retreat today, we could have done any number of other things, but we chose to come here.
So the big question is, if we are free of restraints and free to exercise free will, are we really and truly free? The analysis of the Buddha after much hard work and study, is no we are not free. We are not free of our minds. We are not free of our narrow views. We are not free of our prejudices, much as we wish we were. We are not free of our opinions. We are not free of our thoughts.
He also suggests to us that the two strongest varieties of thoughts and opinions are those having to do with desire - with what we want - and those having to do with aversion - what we don’t want. As we start to study our mind using the tools of meditation practice as we have been trying to do this morning it’s actually quite surprising how many of our thoughts can be placed into these two categories. We aren’t used to thinking about thoughts as things that we can categorize, but later on we’ll do some exercises to investigate this and maybe you’ll see as I have and as most people who take up this practice have found - there are strong and very persuasive thoughts of desire and aversion oozing out of our minds pretty much constantly.
And as I’m sure you’ve experienced - things don’t go well in our life when the basis of our actions is obsessive desire or strong aversion. It might seem like it’s going okay but in the end it really doesn’t work out.
Eihei Dogen, the 12th century Zen priest who founded this school of Zen, wrote:
In attachment flowers fall; in aversion weeds spread.
Think about that for a minute. "In attachment flowers fall" - if we love something and are really attached to it, really desiring it to continue exactly as it is our long term happiness is really in jeopardy you know, because everything falls. Everything changes, everything dies. Maybe this is going to happen anyway, but it’s our holding, it’s our desire which makes this natural process of decay and change such a big problem for us.
And "in aversion weeds spread" - this seems to be literally true in the garden for starters! The workplace seems to be an excellent place for the study of aversion. And the more you indulge in dislike and annoyance for that special person at work, the worse it gets right? There’s some kind of feedback loop that gets started and just keeps going. And that aversion can often become, for a time, the most significant fact of one’s entire life. Our poor loved ones have to listen to us every evening venting about that so-and-so at work. What kind of life is that?
Now there’s nothing wrong with having a mind. To say that having difficult thoughts means there’s something wrong with having a mind is kind of like saying that bleeding when we are cut means there’s something wrong with having a heart. Bleeding is so inconvenient doctor, would you please remove my heart for me?
A common confusion about meditation practice is that it has something to do with stopping our mind or shutting down parts of our mind that we don’t like. Well that kind of practice would just be another manifestation of desire right? Trying to get rid of thoughts we don’t want. I don’t like those thoughts, get rid of them!
Our attitude in Zen meditation practice is not about finding ways to micro-manage our thoughts. It’s about settling down a little bit and experiencing those thoughts within a larger context. Suzuki-roshi said there are two ways to working something difficult - the first is our usual way which he called stuffing a snaking into a bamboo tube. Our disadvantageous habits of mind are the snake let’s say - we want to contain them, stop them, we are sick of them, so let’s see if we can find a way to grab on to that snake without being bit and stuff it into a bamboo tube - that will stop it and we will have freedom. The second way, he said, is to give the cow a very large pasture. There is a fence around the pasture but it’s so large, so vast, that the cow can relax and wander around with some sense of ease - the fences so far away that they don’t seem to be a problem at all.
The best of those two approaches in meditation obviously is the second. You cannot control your thoughts. You cannot control your mind. It is possible to create the illusion of control over the mind sometimes, usually through some kind of extreme technique, but believe me it is only an illusion and suppressing something natural, like our mind, always backfires in the end. So no - we don’t try to control the mind. Instead we practice giving the mind a huge pasture - a huge space for the thoughts to float around in.
My teacher, Norman Fischer, taught that true freedom is when you can see your thoughts and emotions and mood as just weather of the mind. We just finished what was basically an endless summer so this is a good day to consider weather. Weather comes and goes right? We don’t control the weather. People with advanced degrees and incredible computers can barely even predict the weather. There are sunny days, there are cloudy days, there are rainy days. Once in a while we have a cold snap. Or snow. So tie our happiness into always wanting to have a certain kind of weather would be pretty silly right? I like sun, but I don’t like drizzle. So I will now complain and be unhappy about half of the time, right? I could move to California I guess, but then all of those perfect sunny days one after another... would that be kind of boring?
It’s the same with our thoughts and emotions. If we want more freedom, more ease, in our life, we need to let go of our desire to have a certain kind of emotion and a certain pattern of thoughts all the time. It’s just a silly plan. An unrealistic and unrealizable desire that we could spend the rest of our life chasing after. Instead when we are upset, we learn to give our upset feelings a big pasture to roam in. And we hang out in there with our upsetness, breathing, crying, just being there as best we can. And we can take a little succor, a little encouragement even in the midst of the worst emotional state from the knowledge that really and truly, this too shall pass. And it does, it really does. Even the most horrible thing that can happen, the intense emotions and thoughts from even the worst event we can imagine will eventually loosen it’s grip a little. Especially, in my experience, if we can learn to see it as just thoughts, just emotions, just weather, and let it play out as it needs to play out in the large open pasture of our mind.
And it’s the same with the times when we do have emotional states that we most enjoy: beautiful flowers in the mind. When I was planning this talk, our little two year old son woke up and wanted to a hug. Such a beautiful thing getting a deep and heartfelt hug from a child. Such a precious feeling. And as soon as he’s done with that and ready to play with his trucks - forget it - it’s over. Do you remember having a visiting auntie scoop you up and try to create that kind of intimacy - it doesn’t work. That deep feeling of intimacy and connection is magic and it only arises when the conditions are just right. We can definitely have some influence over those conditions, and we certainly should try to have some positive influence over the conditions of our life, but we cannot control our life. And we cannot control others. Not at all. So when flowers fall, when the cloud covers the sun on a gorgeous day, we can just sigh and let it go. And we can learn to appreciate the poignancy, the real beauty of that act of letting go. Because when we let go of needing things from our loved ones we are giving them the give of freedom. Or at least the possibility of freedom. We are offering them the vision of that beautiful pasture.
The people in our life may or may not be able to enjoy the large pasture we offer them. According to their own struggles, according to the conditions in their lives, they might not see it as a large pasture - they might run straight to one of the corners, jam themselves into the corner of the fence and complain. I understand that teenage children are quite skilled at this. I’ll let you know in 12 or 13 years what I find out.
The point of all of this talk is to encourage us all to give this a try. I mean why not? It’s very easy just to go back to our mental business as usual if it doesn’t work out for us. We all know how to be our usual selves and we are all quite skilled at that. So for the rest of today let’s try another option. Let’s trying placing our faith not in our favorite ideas, but in the breath instead, in the bare awareness of what’s happening in each moment. Part of the Zen technique is to come together with mutual support and live for a time in simplified circumstances. When you are here at the Dharma Hall practicing meditation there is really not much going on. It’s a very simple thing. Just breathing. Just returning to the breath. Returning to awareness of the body. Returning to life. When thoughts arise we notice them, we appreciate their power, and we turn them loose in a large pasture and let them go.
And to support us in this practice we suspend for the time we are here the habit of small talk - chatting is great there is nothing wrong with chatting but let’s set it aside while we are here practicing, let’s give ourselves and others a break from that constant desire to tell our story. Let’s just be here together as light, as breath, and just this. I think you’ll find that there is a deep sense of connection and mutual support that arises from practicing silently together. It might at first feel a little awkward - like we don’t want to be rude and ignore our neighbors, but in the end it can be quite natural and quite graceful. That just attending to our own practice with a good heart is really helpful to our neighbors in the meditation hall and there is a real feeling of kinship and connection there.
So let’s try this for the rest of the day. While we are meditating, while we are talking, while we are eating, while we are taking our break after lunch. Let’s give this a try and see what happens.
There a million different practices like this, and this style of Zen meditation may or may not turn to be the practice for you, but if you have some feeling of resonance some feeling of this being somehow something worth checking out from our work today, I really encourage you to give this a real go. Try setting up a sitting area at home and sitting maybe 10 or 15 minutes each day, try coming to our Thursday night practice every week for a month or so, try coming to a longer retreat. And just see how it feels.
I really believe that whether this practice is right for you or not, we all need some way to practice with our mind. Some activity that we do regularly whether we feel like it or not. Something with some grounding in a teaching or a tradition, and I really do think it needs to be something where we have some support from others. Ultimately a deep and transformational practice can’t be done all alone. Many of the activities might be done alone, but really we do need support and help otherwise we will just turn the whole enterprise into another complex of desires and aversions, and sooner or later we are trying to stuff ourselves back into that bamboo tube. I think we need this for ourselves, our loved ones need this from us, and the world needs us to do this.
Thank you very much.
Resident Priest Nomon Tim Burnett has been a student of Zoketsu Norman Fischer since 1987 when he was a resident at San Francisco Zen Center's Green Gulch Farm. After sitting practice periods at Green Gulch and Tassajara Zen Monastery, Tim helped found the Bellingham Zen Practice Group in 1991. Tim was ordained as a Zen Priest by Norman in June, 2000. Like his teacher, Tim is interested in the possibility of deep and complete practice by lay people.
A person of wide-ranging professional interests, Tim has been a botanist, elementary schoolteacher, writer, and computer programmer. In addition to his work at the Resident Priest of Red Cedar Zen Community, Tim works as a software developer.