Our little research projects of a weekend or so, in which we're trying to understand ourselves well enough in order to continue practicing on our own. Now as this koan points out, there are certain sicknesses that can arise from Zen practice. Now, before all of you have an anxiety attack, Let me say that if you practice for well-being, I don't think there's any sicknesses involved with practice or very unlikely.

[01:10]

But if you practice to develop your deeper understanding and subtle body, then you should practice with others some of the time at least. So you can understand this, you may and can, partially correctly, understand this koan as these sicknesses mean attitudes that cause your practice to stagnate. Before I go further, let me ask how many of you have read this koan at least once? How many of you have not read it at all?

[02:34]

Okay. Only three? Okay. Well, I think since we don't have much time for discussion this evening, probably I should just talk a little bit about the koan. Now, I'm assuming that most of you have some... Well, most of you have been to seminars with me, so you have some experience with how I approach koans. And as a research institution, as our Buddhist research institution, BRI, we, and since we're Westerners,

[03:46]

And since we are Westerners, we need some understanding of the image and experience and practice of the body in Indian Chinese culture. And we need an understanding of the identity energy complex, which is understood in Indian Chinese culture. Now, we got into this a little bit in the Heart Sutra discussion at Kinsey. And I know only three of you were there, so I can't draw on that, but I want to continue some of what we brought up there.

[05:22]

Because this Well, obviously Buddhism usually talks about non-self. And I say that Buddhism is a teaching of multiple selves. But it's actually a particular dynamic of an interrelated dynamic of how we activate identity.

[06:23]

And it's quite different from the dynamic in the West. Now, I wouldn't try to explain this to you, even though I think it would be useful or interesting to you. Unless we were looking at a koan like this. Because I need a certain permission to talk to you about things. Either most Zen teaching, as we've been talking, occurs in dialogue. And traditionally, if there's no dialogue, the teacher leaves. At least some kind of interaction among us. Where we together try to understand this.

[07:34]

And these sikkhans are based on this idea of dialogue. But even though we haven't developed dialogue too much, I can still feel all of you talking inside. So the koans give me a permission or an excuse at least to talk about things I wouldn't ordinarily find some reason to talk about. So I think the first thing we should do is look together at the koan, at least the beginning part of it.

[08:39]

Young men's case 11 in the book of Serenity. Young men's two sicknesses. Introduction. A bodiless man suffers illness. A handless man, person, compounds medicines. A mouthless person ingests it. A senseless person is well. But tell me, how do you treat a mortal disease? Now, what is a mortal disease? In this case.

[10:18]

Life. Life is the mortal disease here. Okay. Now, these phrases, a bodiless person, a handless person, a mouthless person, are not poetry. They're an attempt to describe an experience. An experience in which it's also possible to be ill or to cure yourself. So, case. Great Master Yanmen, in Japanese he's called Ummon, said, when the light does not penetrate freely, There are two kinds of sickness.

[11:47]

One is when all places are not clear and there is something before you. Having penetrated the emptiness of all things, subtly it seems like there is something. This too is the light not penetrating freely. Also the Dharma body has two kinds of sickness. One is when you manage to reach the Dharma body. But because your clinging to Dharma is not forgotten, your sense of self still remains. And you fall into the realm of the Dharma body. Even if you can pass through, If you let go, that won't do.

[13:11]

Examining carefully to think what breath is there, this too is sickness. Now I don't know I think I can, but I don't know for sure how clear we can make what they're talking about clear. I'm convinced it's worth it if we can. Und ich bin jedoch überzeugt, dass es sich lohnt, wenn es uns gelingt, das klar zu machen. So I want us to try. Und so möchte ich, dass wir das probieren. Now, again, you know, I don't pick, I don't say, ha, well, Sinsheim, be a nice group of people, let's do Chor No.

[14:18]

11. Und ihr wisst also, ich gehe jetzt nicht so vor, dass ich sage, aha, Sinsheim, eine nette Gruppe von Leuten, lasst uns mal Chor No. 11 probieren. I don't want to do it that way. I'd rather we're doing one koan after another and koan 11 just came up because this is the 11th meeting since we started looking at koans in Europe. So I say, what am I supposed to do in sin side? Mein Gott! Oh, my Dharma body! Koran 11? This is impossible. So here we are and we've got this thing facing us. And now I wrote out the book at 4.30 in the morning.

[15:33]

I was lying in bed thinking... So I got up and I wrote out a whole new version of part of the Koran. And I thought it would be of help to you, so I showed it to Ulrike. She said, this should be on the riddle page at the back of a newspaper. I think she thinks it made it worse, actually. So what I imagined was a psychiatrist or a scientist or a artist or a maybe medical doctor trying to teach his students

[16:40]

So he says to his students, he says there are two kinds of, there are three kinds of sickness and two kinds of light. And one is receiving wisdom. And the second is I forget what I said now. Receiving wisdom. Seeking wisdom. No, the first is received wisdom. Seeking wisdom. And receiving wisdom. And the first is the light to see things as they are. The second is when the light penetrates deeply, but still you do not know which way to turn.

[18:00]

The third is light seeking light. So I'm just trying to explain this. I'll just read this to you, and you'll see why Eureka reacted this way. Another teacher says, I feel like a fool here, another teacher says there are three kinds of light and three kinds of sickness. This is what I spend my time doing. The first is received wisdom. The second is looking for a flashlight. And the third is holding on to nothing. The first is the same, seeing things as they are. The second is also the same, yet suggests a remedy.

[19:00]

When not knowing where to turn, looking for a flashlight. And the third is eating up black holes. Here, even going beyond, the sharpest ones bury the world. Finally, there is being lazy and dull, not seeing beyond things as they are. If you don't know it already, that's the best. Even before dawn, the wind plays in the shadows of the grass and covers the path with green leaves. The myriad forms are precipitous.

[20:05]

How do we know what is in another's heart? Some grasses are sour, some are bitter. So it didn't help Ulrike, so I'm not sure it would help you. But if you try to imagine a psychotherapist saying, for example, at the point at which, and it's not very complicated, At the point at which you can really have received wisdom, you really can see what Freud and Jung and Adler and others were talking about.

[21:10]

So this is a kind of light or a kind of understanding. But at the point, but then the second is seeking wisdom. You've seen through what Freud and Jung and others have said and taught. And you see it all can be turned around. Creativity still plays a role in it. But you don't know where to turn. You don't know how to find what to do. So you look for something, a flashlight. You look for some solution.

[22:12]

There's still a sense of something you feel you need that you don't have. And then the third would be when there's no one present and light is seeking light. If light is the experience of understanding something, then that light can be present with or without something to understand. And when that light is present, sometimes understanding will appear. In that situation, therapist and client are teaching each other or no one knows what to do, but something appears.

[23:26]

And then the latter one suggests there's a fourth sickness, which is holding on to no one knows what to do and waiting for something to appear. So this is a little example of, I think, what could be an artist trying to teach another artist or trying to teach a doctor how to... meet with a patient when there's no, each patient is a medical or psychotherapist, each situation is actually quite new. Or a scientist looking at very basic questions and revising how we look at things. And that spirit needs to be in your practice. You need to be willing to be with yourself in ways that you don't know what will occur.

[25:04]

Now, what I've presented you as a kind of version of the first part of the koan, is a fairly accurate version of one level of the koan. But it doesn't have the deeper level that's in the koan of how this is actually our mind-body physiology. Now the most There's three common, what's called common sicknesses in Zen, since that's part of the subject of the koan.

[26:29]

One is somewhat uncontrolled or involuntary physical movements that happen to some people. Another is called twilight mind or something like that. When your mind, when you get deep into your practice and you haven't developed your inner consciousness, And the power of your mind tends to draw you inside and you get rather dark or depressed or disoriented. And another is the opposite where you can't keep from being distracted by outside things.

[27:45]

So this koan is talking about, young men is talking about the problems that occur when you practice without a real sense of how body and mind work in practice. So this koan is attempting to show you the structure, the inner structure of mind-body meditation practice. And I think we can look at it clearly enough so that you have a good sense of how your mind-body work in practice. Now the tendency in these koans, as you can see, and also the little version that I wrote,

[28:54]

Is to speak in language which has overlapping meanings. Where certain statements almost sound the same. So you have to figure it out for yourself. Because actually, when you're practicing, what occurs to you, being able to read yourself takes some experience with noticing very small differences. So now I'd like you to, maybe you want to stretch for a few minutes and we can sit for a little bit.

[30:11]

Most of the people in this koan are Dungsan or his disciples. This is Dung Shan and his students. And one of them, Su Shan, is known as Nin Zenji. And he is also called Uncle Dwarf. because he was short and ugly and rather mischievous. Mischievous? And he had a very sharp wit. And he was an expert at yogic states of mind.

[31:25]

And when anybody wanted to know something about these things, they'd say, oh, let's ask Uncle Dwarf. And one story told him about him. True or not, I don't know. is that when Dung Shan was giving transmission to Cao Shan, Su Shan hid under the chair. So when everything was over and Cao Shan left, And three or four particular teachings were transmitted. Uncle Dwarf jumped out from under the chair and said, I have Dung Shan's teaching in my hands.

[32:35]

It's all mine now. And Dung Shan said, you can't get it that way. But later he became one of the main disciples of Dungsan. So if any of you are hiding under here... I'm surprised they were sitting on chairs. Well, sometimes transmission centers are done on a great big chair. I don't know if that's the story. Yeah, vielleicht für alle, die jetzt hier unter diesen Stühlen versteckt sind... Actually, we're all hiding under each other's chair right here. But I don't know, I want to give you a feeling that how, this may sound unusual to us, but how commonplace this was in the congregation of young men in Dungshan.

[33:40]

Even the word, we can start there, for, as I've said, for mind, that's translated shin, actually means heart-mind. And it means that you're experiencing a field here or a connectivity here. And if you just think and you don't feel a physical connection with this part of your body, your thinking is rather sick-making.

[34:42]

It draws energy away from you, depletes you. And I don't know how to give you a sense to feel this as a unit. But this sense of a connective feeling, a kind of pattern that makes mind is essential to this practice. And I think that the best way to do it is to, again, keep working with your breath. So maybe, generally we emphasize feeling our breath in our backbone. But maybe it's good to feel your breath from here to here as a kind of column that you're working with.

[35:56]

And I would say that this evening, or in general, at least a few times a day, emphasize this feeling. And to trust that if you have this feeling, it's something real. Even if you imagine something, it's something real. So instead of saying, oh, I just imagined that, no, I imaged it and made it real. It's a more positive way of thinking About the, about, well, you know, it's a great mystery, this. I mean, you, this is, our life here is a great mystery.

[37:15]

I mean, I'm sitting here and I have a lot of thoughts. Too many. Too many. I don't think so, but maybe you think so. And most of you can't see my thoughts. Or I can have thoughts which pretty much are invisible to you. And you can't say they exactly occupy space. You can't say that they're material. And yet I can have a thought, my hand is there. And I can merely think, I would like my hand to move.

[38:15]

I can add intention to that thought. And that thought turns into physical action. That's actually extremely mysterious. We take it for granted. But you see, have you seen Ghost? That movie? Anyway, it's a movie about a guy who goes to heaven and becomes a ghost, and it's rather Christian in image. But it was actually written by a guy who also wrote Jacob's Ladder, who's a Tibetan Buddhist. He disguised his first Buddhist movie as Christian.

[39:17]

He disguised his second movie as psychedelic. But there's a scene in it where these two, in a subway, he runs into another ghost. And this ghost is still quite attached. The light is not penetrating his Dharma body freely. And he says, this subway train is my subway train, you take another subway train. And he discovers he can actually push it, even though they can walk through doors, he can actually push it.

[40:21]

So the protagonist realizes he's got to learn how to push people too because he's trying to protect his wife who's going to be murdered and so forth. So the other ghost gives him a lesson on how to move a cigarette package with your mind across the station floor. And these two guys are staring at this thing in the cigarette pack. Russian psychics like to do this. Mm-hmm. And so we are amazed at that this is mind over matter.

[41:34]

But we don't have to look so far. This is mind over matter. I've just turned a thought into movement. And I can let the thought not move it, or I can let the thought move it. This is quite amazing. Maybe I'm crazy. But it is quite amazing. And when you recognize that there's a little point of consciousness in thinking that translates into physical movement, what is that point? Knowing that point at which mind and body join, in which this wider sense of body that we receive through meditation has no boundaries but then becomes boundaries.

[42:52]

This is the study of this koan. And the study you We are lucky enough to be able to do, in a relaxed, protected way, if you join in this tradition, which is contemporary as well as ancient, of how we study ourselves. how we study our own life and death, and our own health and sickness. So schlaf, schlaf gut.

[43:58]

So sleep well. Thank you. You can study that too, just we'll get a sleep. Morgan, good morning. I felt this morning that You should at least be familiar with this long koan before we try to talk about it on any level. So I hope you all had a chance to go through it once at least together. Does anyone have some... No.

[45:18]

Does anyone have a few questions or anything you'd like to bring up in relationship to this story or anything else? Yes. It's not a question, just something. Reading this poem made me feel, or I ended up in a kind of, oh, it's hopeless, and whatever I do, this is the first, and feeling really confused. And that's something I'm anyhow, somehow in at the moment. So I thought, well, that's the right poem. But it changed. from yesterday to today, and we meet again, and somehow like to accepting of what we have seen through it or something. And yeah, it felt differently.

[46:19]

And... Yeah, and then I had just this, it's like a wave, this chaos and not knowing, not understanding and trying to find, to hold on to something and telling it. Yeah, if I just stayed with it for a while and somehow give up to solve it or something, then it changes further on. And by reading it then I found one percentage that somehow seems simple again. It's just what I need now, so I'm quite content. Good. When I read it for the first time, I had a feeling of total hopelessness, and you can't do anything anyway, and everything is too late, and there is no way out.

[47:26]

And in the course of being, it changed to something like, okay, then it is just like that, and I don't know what's going on. It's a bit like that, and then it always strikes me again and again, and then it's okay. And if I stay with it for a while, and try to solve it, or find a speech, or something solid, something clear, then I somehow solve it further. It also happened to me when I was reading, that I suddenly found a sign or two. Somehow it is also there. I know this wave. Okay. Anyone else? Yes, Mark. What? Oh.

[48:27]

You're asking me what it is. Okay. It's something I'll have to teach, I think. It's something I'll have to teach, I think, these days. Something else. Yeah. Yeah. We just got here. Hello. I found that a big attraction in Zen was the feeling that I could get rid of fear.

[49:37]

And I would like to ask you what your first thought that's possible, if you want to answer that. what your personal relationship to fear is at the moment? I don't have much fear of anything. Not much fear? No. I was concerned about the question of fear or what Zen is. I would be wrong if I said none. Mostly from my side, at least it's because I don't care much about what happens.

[51:11]

But it's true, one of the fruits of practice is sometimes, often, becoming quite free of fear. For some reason a story that helped me when I was younger is the story of the Buddha being eaten by tigers. It looks like from the story that he said, they're hungry. And there's no way out. So I think he salt and peppered himself. It's such a stupid story, but I don't know why it helped.

[52:24]

So I always carry salt and pepper, actually. Um... Hmm. But for you and for each person, it's not really a matter. If you practice with, I want to get rid of something, your practice is not going to go very far. Practice has to start with, always start with acceptance. If I'm a fearful person, I may be psychologically fearful. I may be chemically fearful.

[53:27]

In other words, the chemistry of my particular endowment may make me highly sensitive to external influences. So whether it's psychological or physiological in this moment, the chemistry of this moment, you just have to accept it. So maybe you can decide you will become the Buddha for fearful people. And I will teach people how to live in the midst of fear. So it's much better to try to become the Buddha who lives in the midst of fear than the fearless Buddha. And if you can really radically have that kind of acceptance, you might become fearless.

[54:31]

But practice with goals is only to herd the small personality toward the cushion. But real practice is just okay. And as I've said, it's the only way to embed yourself in the complexity of the present. And the complexity of the present is the only true complexity we have. And in that way the present can teach us. But it has to start with acceptance, the alchemy of acceptance. And that's part of taking the precepts, this kind of acceptance of our human identity with each other.

[56:01]

Anything? Someone else? Yeah In the group we were talking about this picture rubbing the back of the clay medically viable and we were concerned what will happen to the making and we thought it would fall loose disappear Is it true? And what means this picture? Well, that image is one of the items in this koan which tell you what it's about.

[57:17]

Some of the traditional ways of answering these koans is what's outside the monastery. Oh, I don't know, snow and it's kind of cold and there are black trees. I think I'll pull the shaders. And this way of answering suggests a certain kind of presence and imperturbability. But it doesn't really get at the depth of these koans. That kind of immediate response is good. But a little image like this is showing you something

[58:19]

rather esoteric is going on in this koan. And in some versions of this story, the question of what is going on outside the monastery And it is presented as what is esoteric teaching and exoteric teaching. Something else? I come back to it because that's important, that image. Yes. Yes. I would like to know what this image means where this old man comes with the silk to the marketplace and tries to make a profit.

[59:59]

And we just couldn't agree on how to explain this. I agree. Go ahead. Most of this we'll come back to in the discussion, but I'm very glad you brought it up. Well, the boat crossing, as it points out in the koan, the boat crossing the rustic ford is the Dharmakaya. And the sailing into the reed flowers shining on the snow bright emphasizes the experience of sameness and enlightenment, and is the Sambhogakaya body. And the bolt of silk, silk is used because it's something manufactured from the brightness of the snow flowers.

[61:19]

And so the bolt of silk and the old fisherman relates to the rustic Ford is the Nirmanakaya body, the manifestation body entering the marketplace. Now, this isn't hard to understand, but unless you know how these things are written, you don't usually see this right away. Even when it more or less points it out in the next... next paragraph from the next page. So you can ask yourself, why bother to present it in such disguised images? Because they want to avoid awakening the intellectual mind.

[62:42]

And because they're not really disguised. They're not metaphors, they're images. So I'll come back to that in a moment. Something else? Yeah. Then there's no sense in living. Even if you have... This means life itself, this statement.

[63:45]

If you want to live forever, you might as well give up now. But even if you have a mortal disease, like cancer, where you are very likely to die in one or two years or five years, If you don't have a mind of comparison and anticipation, you can live quite joyfully. And this is really, my students run a hospice for people with AIDS or did in San Francisco. And everyone remarked on after people got through the demoralization of facing the disease, And giving up their future.

[65:19]

There was a kind of strange elation around the place. People were, what, freedom? No future. Jeez. No plans. And people were, and a weird kind of humor developed, a kind of joking about it. And even when there was a lot of physical pain, the physical pain occurred as an immediate sensation, not as, I'm dying. So we have tremendous capacity for joy and freedom.

[66:27]

And without a mortal disease, we probably wouldn't. I can't imagine life without dying. Ich kann mir Leben nicht vorstellen, ohne zu sterben. Obwohl ich das oft vergesse, dass ich einmal sterben würde. Oh dear. Ja. Ja. In our group, we mostly talked about what is really meant with this term, disease, or concept.

[67:30]

And what did you decide? We had different opinions about it. I think the title of this koan should be Young Man's Three Ways of Achieving Health. Because that's really what he's talking about. In the process of deepening your health, There are certain obstacles. But if you see those obstacles, your health will even get greater.

[68:33]

Now, I think we should take a break in a moment. And I'd like to respond to, though after the break, to two or three people who've spoken to me about difficulties in their practice and so forth. Difficulties that relate to this koan. And I also have to think of a way, find a way with you to talk about this koan.

[69:37]

And you know, I have a funny reluctance to talk about these things with you. And I think it's for two main reasons. One is that I really want to talk to you about Buddhism in the way you want me to talk about Buddhism. I want to fit in with your image of Buddhism. And I want to amplify the good parts of Buddhism you've already discovered. That's one reason, and a related reason, is I don't want you to get stuck in kind of martial arts, thinking about the body and trying to develop special powers or something.

[70:55]

And the other reason, I would say, is that I was already teaching and acknowledged as a teacher years ago when I didn't understand this stuff very well. So why should I teach it to you now when it wasn't necessary for me? Well, I did understand it implicitly. Or I knew it implicitly.

[72:06]

And what I've discovered over the years is that maybe I was lucky. And it definitely helps, I'm convinced now, to know it more explicitly. And I also have a certain feeling because it sounds esoteric. And I don't like teaching things that sound too esoteric. Unless there's a real student-disciple relationship between us and we've agreed to discuss these things. But I also have to face how commonplace and non-esoteric this is in Buddhist culture in Asia. So if it's commonplace for every student in Asia, you should know more about it.

[73:18]

So I'll try to show you how commonplace it is after break. So let's have 20 minutes or so. That everything is changing. Everything, everything, everything is changing. means that there's always a certain danger. This koan says, myriad forms are precipitous.

[74:20]

All these myriad forms are coming together in this moment we call the present. Which is also one of the great mysteries. Because this present has no dimension. It's always a moment before or a moment after. And the dimension of the present is a function of your interior memory. So as I've been saying, you don't just hear, if we had a tape recorder as fast as a fast camera,

[75:30]

You wouldn't hear a full word, you just hear a little blip. But you hear words and sentences and you feel the extensive simultaneity of space. And you create a sensation of a present. And that sensation of a present, that duration of a present, is influenced by the potency of your consciousness. And the degree to which the past memories enter into this duration of the present, And the degree to which predictability and anticipation influence this present.

[76:41]

Is something through your development you can affect the actual constituents of the present? if you have the kind of mind which it's possible to develop, which can see the present forming. And to be in the present forming moment is the deeper meaning of mindfulness practice. And we do feel this has a certain predictability. And we build our life on this predictability. And our social institutions Our medical institutions.

[78:15]

But if a shout, I won't shout. If a shout cuts across that, it cuts right through the predictability. And your body reacts with Or if cancer strikes across this moment. So we don't know. There's always some danger. Even thinking is a form of danger. Because thinking has consequences. Den Denken hat Konsequenzen. If your thinking doesn't have consequences, you're not thinking, you're kind of revving the motor.

[79:16]

Und wenn ihr euer Denken keine Konsequenzen hat, dann denkt ihr gar nicht, sondern ihr lasst nur den Motor leer laufen. Wasting gasoline. Und verschwendet Benzin. And you haven't put yourself in gear. Und ihr habt euch selbst nicht in Gang gebracht. Now certain attitudes can, just as my thought can be translated into physical movement, the attitudes with which your present moment is shaped or formed, can have a big power. For example, what Andrea brought up.

[80:19]

And explaining or expressing her way of reading this koan. If you have, and what she expressed is a shifting of attitudes during the reading. Now, if you have an attitude when you approach a koan, this was written for human beings. I am a human being. If when I read this, I'm confused, then the intention of the writers was to confuse me. Ah, then it makes a lot more sense. If you think, I'm not smart enough or other people understand it better, then you're mixed up.

[81:48]

There's a great thrill in meeting somebody smarter than you. Or more developed. Because you feel What's going on here? I don't know what's going on. The chemistry is quite good because myriad forms are precipitous. We always want it to be safe. A peer is someone who can say something you haven't thought of. And anyone who can say something you haven't thought of is seen as superior. So we want all of our friends to not say things we haven't thought of. So that means you want all your friends to either be inferior, and since they're usually not, you all play a game of not saying things that no one has thought of.

[83:06]

And the whole society can be like this. And it's very difficult for, you know, for some obvious thing that no one's, everyone knows but no one's saying to get out there. And maybe that's good as a social process. But for you as an individual, as a creative individual living in the midst of this danger of being alive, with awareness, can have more confidence and more courage. This is also necessary as part of the social process.

[84:28]

But if you start exploring yourself, it can feel dangerous. You can lose your anchors. And your boat is floating like that single leaf down the stream and you don't know where it's going. And we all cooperate to make life predictable. And we do it very well. And it's essential. But don't be fooled by it. Do you understand? And if you try and you believe in the predictability, it will make you sick.

[85:45]

And this is really one of the sicknesses that young men is pointing out. Accept the predictability, make use of it, but don't believe in it. I'm a nest builder. Every place I go, I make a little nest. And I feel very comfortable in it. Whether it's a hotel room or my apartment. But I'm quite aware that chaos reigns right past the edge. So we all have our ways of dealing with it. But just as in any situation there is a dimension where you really don't know what's going on. And the koans reflect this.

[87:03]

Now, koans are made by human beings. I mean, to me, with my feeling for koans, it's an extraordinary act what these people did making these koans. But it's still made by human beings, so it can mostly be understood. But still, for the most part, it's meant to put you in a situation where you don't know what's going on. And if you want to practice with koans, you have to start liking being in a situation where you don't know what's going on. Okay, then how do you find your center? Now, a number of you have come up and talked with me about practice.

[88:25]

And some of you have some pretty real problems with practice and some ordinary problems that still are difficult to face. Now, these are problems also with life itself and not just with practice. But practice does change the ingredients of your soup. Your psychological soup, your daily soup, your physiological soup. It adds ingredients, which changes the dynamic of the relationship of the ingredients. And you can start losing your usual way of organizing yourself.

[89:43]

Or, as your practice develops, you lose the way you organized yourself earlier in your practice. You may not even be aware that you actually worked out a way to organize yourself in relationship to your ordinary life and to practice. Now, you have to become more aware then that you are in the midst always of an act of organizing yourself. And what are you going to do? Okay. Now, sometimes for some people, probably given their physiological chemistry, And we're all a soup of peptides.

[90:47]

And you do various things and you make various peptide cocktails and drink them. Mm-hmm. I think someone told me there's 80 different peptides that make an infinite number of combinations of possible emotions, moods, etc. So right now we are making a peptide Buddhist elixir.

[91:54]

And we're drinking it straight down our backbone. Now, some people, when they meditate, the ingredients that are added to your soup Come too fast. And you get overwhelmed. Now you can get overwhelmed by sitting too much. Or you can get overwhelmed by sitting at all one period. What to do? There's a certain danger. And you are the doctor. But we can help each other. And this koan is about helping you. Now, the question I asked myself, and that's a continuous part of my mindfulness practice,

[93:35]

is what the ingredients I am supporting you, encouraging you, or showing you that you can add to your life through Buddhist practice How do they affect Westerners? How do they affect you, whether you meditate or not? How do they affect you, whether you're in a monastery or you're in a lay practice situation like this? I don't know all the answers. But I don't think just because I don't know all the answers, I should stop doing this. I've been doing this now for

[94:35]

33 years. Longer than that, but full-time, 100% of my time for 33 years. And I'm afraid I'm a poor example. Maybe for five years, I'm not a bad example, but for 33... But I have had a certain experience. And I feel I should stir that into the soup. The western soup. Now, one of my best friends, who I talk with quite often, Oh, I've known 30 years or more. And we talk on the phone somewhere between once a month and four or five times a week. And the other day, I told this, mentioned this,

[96:03]

The other day he said to me, Dick, we've been talking, I mean, it's taken 25 or 30 years to come to this conversation we just had. And this was obvious, but it also struck me as quite interesting, and it certainly struck him. There's no one I'm more suited to talk with. We've both been for about the same length of time on very similar interacting paths. And we both trust each other completely. And there are virtually no boundaries between us.

[97:29]

And yet it took 20 or 30 years to have the conversation we had the other day, and all the previous ones were satisfying. So each practice, each moment, each conversation was satisfying? And yet, at the same time, it may take us a long time to have a conversation. Where we can actually hear each other and we understand each other's...

[98:10]

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