So I'm finding a pace in speaking. that's related to a pace of your silences. And I find if I wait for the space of your silences, it's like what I'm saying is more likely to slip in under the thought coverings. But we can all hear it ourselves. If you listen for a moment, we shift, we move, and so forth. But in the midst of the movement, there are some moments which are quieter than others. You can notice those quietnesses.

[01:14]

And you can act in them. And you can hold back and not act in them. Or you can go against them by acting in the noisiest moments too. Or you can go against them by acting in the noisiest moments too. And we're usually doing things like that, actually. But usually our attention isn't developed enough to do it with much consciousness. But I think you can understand the example. There's little moments of a silence that are always appearing. There was one that just went by. And in a similar way, there's little moments of clarity in your thinking.

[02:18]

And part of the mindfulness of the body is to become aware of those little moments of clarity and move your attention into those and abide in them for a moment. But this kind of attentiveness is only possible, I think, if you develop the habit of being mindful of the breath. Excuse me. It's fun to have a cold. It's a change. Interesting change. Everything tingles differently.

[03:23]

Yeah. Okay, I think it's a good time to take a break. Yeah, and it's 10 to 11, or 7 to 11. Yeah, we're going to have lunch at what? Twelve. Twelve. Quarter past twelve. Oh, that's true. It will be later tomorrow, I guess. So let's have a break until quarter after 11. And when we come back, I'd like to have some discussion with you. Thank you very much. What shall we speak about?

[04:30]

Yes. I would like to know, first, normally in sotusen or shikantasa, the only object of our awareness is the breathing and nothing else. And I would like to know whether there are other exercises of awareness which are connected with the Southern and our practice, which have other objects or more detailed, like you talked about looking at a flower. whether there is any practice with special exercises which is connected with Zazen. Yes, so normally in the zazen what we practice is the only object of attention, the breathing.

[05:44]

And I would like to know, in connection with this zazen and this practice, whether there are other exercises that teach mindfulness, which have another object, or whether there are special exercises. Well, your question raises a lot of questions. Yeah. I don't think of what we're doing here as Soto Zen.

[06:50]

I could even say I have no particular interest in Soto Zen. And... although it's not... maybe it's not relevant, but... But... But I think it's part of the context to say that, for example, Suzuki Roshi consciously decided not to have any relationship with Soto Zen in Japan. So I say that if I try to describe what we're doing, I would say something like the Dung Shan Dogen Shimryal lineage.

[07:55]

Soto is a combination of two people's names. Dungsan and Sosan. Or Tosan and Sosan. So I would put Dung Shan and Dogen and Shinryo Suzuki maybe in the names of our lineage. We could still say that's Soto. But it opens up Soto from the way it is often taught in the contemporary forms of Soto school. So if you look at it from the point of view as Dungsan's lineage, then you see in his teachings and in the koans implied the whole of these kind of teachings.

[09:22]

Or if we just chant the Heart Sutra, Unless we just chant it as sound, if we chant it as a menu of our teachings, then within it are the five skandhas and so forth. And those are part of this practice. Now then it's another question, why... Why does Zen and many schools emphasize a single practice to the exclusion, to the seeming exclusion of all other practices?

[10:27]

And I think if you look at people who emphasize a single practice, their assumption is that it includes all the other practices. But I think in the West we have to make it more clear how it includes all the other practices. So I think one way to practice, for instance, is bringing your attention to the flowers.

[11:41]

And I think it's good to practice what I call What do I call it? Direct evidence. What? Evidence. Yeah, but that's a technical term. So just, let's say, direct attention. I can't remember the phrase I use. What? Direct perception. Yeah, okay, direct perception, okay. I think it's useful if you have something you like to look at, especially like flowers on your table in the morning. to just give your attention to flowers, whatever it is, every day for a minute or two.

[12:45]

And it's useful to bring the four categories, various teachings to it. But you could bring the four noble truths to it. You could see how they're changing. And if you look carefully, actually, there's a slight difference in the relationship between flower and flower, even in a minute or two. Sometimes they actually visibly move if you look carefully. And then there's whether they're suffering or not being stuck in this coffin of water.

[13:52]

Giving us some joy though. And just the color of each. I mean, every object is a template of the mind. Every object you look at calls forth the mind into that shape. I mean, I don't know what a dragonfly sees up there, or in here, but whatever the dragonfly sees or I see,

[14:55]

I mean, there's something here. It's not all ephemeral. But whatever we see, we are looking at our own mind, seeing it. And that's part of this practice, to notice it. So... These flowers allow us to see the mind that allows us to see the flowers. So we see these colors. I believe birds, we see three combinations. I think birds have four and six combinations of color possibilities that biologically they do. These are the colors we see. And so forth. And smell. Our topography of smell is very different from a dog's topography of smell.

[16:24]

This kind of consideration, when you just rest your mind and proprioceptive attentiveness. proprioceptive means a body sense of alignment with the world. a bodily sense of alignment with the world. And I think that one should be creative. And trust what you find you want to give attention to. And trust what practices arise from your own creativity.

[17:28]

OK. Something else? Yes. You talked about being aware of the breath, especially in your activities. Isn't it so that if I do something, I have my attention on what I'm doing, and at the same time at the breath, isn't that two things I'm doing at the same time, and the attention is neither here nor there? Yeah, that's a conceptual problem. But when you practice, it's really not a problem.

[18:47]

I mean, if you fall down, Your attention is on not hurting yourself. And your attention can be all over the place. Your attention is looking at the sidewalk, looking at your body. where your elbow is, what you're carrying, and so forth. But you're not doing two things at once. So maybe we have to speak about attention as a field of attention or a presence of attention rather than a focus of attention.

[19:57]

So you do practice developing attentiveness to the breath, you do develop a focus of attention. I can remember an anecdote of Do any of you know who Pablo Casals was? A famous cello player. I think by far and away the most famous cello player in the world when he was alive.

[21:00]

But he died before most of you were born, Bronson. But believe it or not, I organized the Pablo Casals master class once. In 19... That was around 1962. He was a great guy. I liked him. he was playing once or rather he was observing a young man play who just won second prize in the Moscow music something or other. There are two things he said to this young man which I remembered vividly.

[22:08]

I just remembered, and I was just at the time fairly new to Zen practice. This young man who just won this, whatever that, annual music contest in Moscow is. He said, yes, your fingering is producing the note you want to produce. Oh, my goodness. How are you? But your head... hand is not beautiful. He says, if the posture of your hand is beautiful, the note will sound better.

[23:09]

That's one thing he said. And the other he said, he said, listen to the one note you're playing. And the other he said, And he said, what do I mean by hearing the one note you're playing? He said, what I mean when I hear the one note is I know The woman in the red hat, or red something or other, in the front row is half asleep. The people up in the balcony, especially a couple of them over there, are paying attention. And I can feel a drip of sweat dropping down my side of my chest under my clothes.

[24:11]

But I hear the one note. So that's more what we mean. The field of attention. Pablo Casals was interesting to watch him also prepare for his own performances. He would sit on a rather ordinary hard chair just off stage. And he'd be there 20 minutes or so before he was supposed to perform. And he just sat there, absolutely motionless, holding his instrument.

[25:15]

So this I kind of noticed, of course, because I was just starting to practice. And then somebody would come and say, now and he would simply get up and walk out and start right away. So in that sense, as I'm speaking now, for instance, My breath is part of my speaking. And I find the more I'm present in the breath of my speaking, not only does it not interfere with what I say, What I say seems to be more physically located in me.

[26:21]

What else? I warned you. Now this is your, you have to do your part here. This sounds a little bit like the sound of one hand, just what you just said before about Pablo Casals, a little. It makes me remember this story. Yeah, can you wait while I do the sound of one nose?

[27:26]

Yeah, maybe. I don't know what you mean by the sound, how you understand the sound of one hand. I don't know anything about the sound of one hand. But somehow it came up to you. I just remembered the story I once had written before this. Mine was terrible. Yeah, it's okay. Deutsch? Deutsch? I think it's good to trust if a koan appears to you if you have read a koan. And then in some other context, the koan pops up.

[28:44]

You can usually trust that the context that pops up is telling you something about the koan. So Pablo Casals can be our Zen teacher. Cooperating with Hakuin Zenji. Yeah. I still find it, after quite some years of trying to practice, very difficult to bring attention to the breath without influencing. Without influencing the breath? Without influencing the breath and the within. Although sometimes, for instance, when I wake up, I feel that there is this field of attention and I can see the breath going up and down.

[29:55]

It's very pleasurable. But it's never something I can intend. It just happens. He doesn't know how to speak German. I don't speak Dutch. You can translate for him. His German is very good. Why don't you say it? Bitte. I still find it very difficult after so many years that I have tried to practice Zen, to bring my attention to the breath without affecting the breath. Maybe that's not a question. No, no, it's good. Well, it's important in

[31:11]

Then practice not to try too hard. And it's good in zazen to make an effort and then relax. And usually that's not too hard because you make an effort and then pretty soon you're distracted and thinking about something else. You can think about that as, oh, well, I'm relaxing. And strangely enough, you come into this more clarity of a field of concentration. Not through effort. But through the relaxation of effort.

[32:17]

So, for example, you might have been following or counting your breath. Then you're just distracted, thinking about something or other. And suddenly a kind of clarity rises up through the distraction and takes over. And then you notice the clarity and it goes away. Yeah. Two things I can say about that. One is, if it goes away when you notice it, you have a very fragile field of concentration. I often say that the two main yogic skills for Zen practice are one-pointedness and a non-interfering observing consciousness.

[33:34]

In other words, a consciousness which can observe your state of concentration without disturbing it. So, Mike, you can intend to bring attention to your breath. And you can also though intend to So you wake up in the morning and you find yourself concentrated in your breath without effort.

[34:42]

You can know the physical feeling of that. Or you can know the state of mind which is concentrated on your breath without effort. You can memorize that state of mind. Or physically remember, say, There's a kind of physical knowledge of that state of mind. Then you can intend to realize that state of mind in which you... your breath is concentrated without effort.

[35:43]

And that's typical of Yogacara practice. to know the states of mind which generate certain concentrations. To know the states of body which accompany certain states of mind. And, you know, as I've said often, students, when they're studying, if they're clever, do that. They remember the state of mind in which they studied. the state of body or mind in which they studied.

[36:45]

Instead of trying to remember certain facts, they try to recreate during the test the body in which they studied. And then they're more likely to remember what they learned. So many of these of these simple things that are techniques in Buddhism are not unfamiliar to us. It's just we've never thought about developing them in the way Buddhism does. So this point of remembering is very important.

[37:51]

That's what you find in Satipaṭṭhāna, the same idea of setting up, the remembering. Yes, that's right. And it's called dharāṇic memory. You remember or know the physical states that accompany states of mind. Again. I repeat these things, but a basic of Yogacara and Zen Buddhism, basic to all Buddhism, but emphasized in Yogacara, is all mental phenomena has a physical dimension. And all sentient physical phenomena has a mental dimension.

[38:56]

So any state of mind you have has a physical dimension. And often rooted in a different part of your body, not just a physical sensation. And as we physicalize the mind through practicing with the breath, and weaving the mind and body together, we begin to be able to see and know a physical topography of the mind. Okay? What else? What else? What else?

[39:57]

I would like to hear more about the one-pointedness. Well, any practice of... Any practice of bringing your attention to your breath is a practice to develop one-pointedness. Yeah. I mean, we're mostly already quite one-pointedness. Because our mind is always returning to our thoughts. That's a kind of one-pointedness. Because one-pointedness technically means that which your mind returns to without effort.

[41:30]

or that which the mind rests on and doesn't go away from. So most of us have already realized one point in it. Because our mind is always resting in our thoughts. So the practice of one-pointedness means, can it rest on other things? Okay. So, can you bring your attention to your posture, your breath, for example? Or these flowers? Can you simply rest your attention on these flowers? And your attention doesn't go away? And if it goes away, you can bring it back very easily.

[42:50]

Or if it goes away, it returns by itself. Those are various stages in the development of one's pointedness. And if you practice long enough, doing sasana and So forth. Eventually you find you can rest your mind pretty much anywhere and it just stays there. Now if it doesn't, And if it keeps returning to something else, then you observe and study what it returns to. So then you're in this territory of mindfulness of feelings or mind. because the effort to realize mindfulness is not just about realizing the effort to realize one-pointedness.

[43:57]

is not just about realizing one-pointedness. It's also about what you can learn through the process of learning one-pointedness. Okay. So let me give you the most basic example, I think, for us in our practice. Okay. You're... The purest way to see this is during meditation practice. And meditation practice is the shortcut to having these practices permeate our mind and body. And you find... Unless you're making a pretty big effort, your attention returns to your thinking.

[45:26]

To the stream bed of continuity. Okay, so why does it return to the stream bed of continuity? Or the streambed of consciousness. Well, there's going to be a number of reasons. And you can see the reasons when you interrupt this streambed of consciousness. One of the reasons will be that you identify who you are with your thoughts. And you identify who you... You identify who you are with your thoughts and you identify with the future direction of your thoughts.

[46:48]

This is an implicit choice you've made. It means you've made a choice for a future self rather than a present self. For example, Which means you're not accepting yourself. That means you're not trusting yourself. So your implicit decision to identify with a future self is made explicit. through seeing that you can't realize one-pointedness. Then you can say to yourself, do I really want to identify primarily with a future self?

[47:54]

see that problem and say, decide, I'd like to identify with the present self as well. Sometimes at least. And as soon as you do that, you begin to interrupt the stream bed of continuity. You're following my images so far? You can think of it as kind of a sluice or channel in which Your sense of identity and continuity is flowing. Your sense of continuity and identity. And it has direction toward the future. It's usually up here around the head somewhere.

[49:18]

And you poke a hole in it. And it pours down into the body. And then you feel in the present moment in this body. But then you get scared because you lost your sense of continuity. So quick, off it goes again. It sucks you back up and... The hole will get patched. But you had this experience. It wasn't so bad. So then you noticed that... that you get scared if you lose a sense of continuity. And people do. If you take psychedelics or I don't know what, or you have some kind of crisis, sometimes you don't know

[50:21]

What the next moment is. Or if your thoughts don't make sense in the usual way. You can think you're going crazy. And going crazy is often you feel disconnected from your thoughts and your sense of continuity. But if you move your sense of continuity into your body and into your breath and into phenomena then you can much more sustain breaks in mental continuity. So you actually are in a process then of shifting your sense of continuity

[51:33]

to breath, body and phenomena. Out of future-oriented thoughts. Yeah. So you're shifting your experience of one-pointedness. Or you're using one-pointedness as an acupuncture needle. Or a drill. So then you can notice that Things like how you identify with conscious thought.

[52:53]

With repeatable knowing. But everything's changing. So if you identify with repeatable knowing, from the Buddhist point of view, you're deluded. So, maybe I'll learn one day. So I would say that we return to our thoughts not really because they're so darned interesting. And sometimes they're pretty horrible.

[53:54]

Compulsive. What's compulsive? Sorry, thank you. Yep, you still are stuck in them. And I think that then you see that there's probably three things happening. You identify with your thoughts as you. You don't have an alternative identity. You fear the loss of continuity. And you don't have an experience of an alternative sense of continuity. And you have a view, implicit view, of permanence. And your thoughts keep returning, your identification keeps returning to your thoughts because it's more repeatable.

[55:16]

more knowable and that's an implicit sense of permanence. So then you see that the antidote to permanence And the counter-pole to permanence is to remind yourself of impermanence and change, etc. And then you are, from a Buddhist point of view, less deluded. So, the reason our mind, our attention, keeps returning to our thoughts, for me to sum this up, it's where we find continuity, where we find identification with the future self.

[56:26]

And it's where we reinforce our view and permanence that things aren't changing. So the fact that we have only one form of one-pointedness shows us the degree to which we believe things are really or want them to be permanent and shows us that we have no real way to be in the present. So, in other words, the reason we emphasize one-pointedness is it's a very good skill to learn. But the learning of it itself is, if anything, far more important.

[57:40]

Because it shows us that delusions we have that prevent us from learning. For example, when we come to form as objects of mind, then you're immediately in what's called the five delusions that prevent you from seeing the world as objects of man and prevent you from being absorbed in meditative states or jhana. And jhana is the root of the word jhan in Zen. So again, what we're seeing here is that if you look at simple things carefully,

[58:46]

Why can't I be one-pointed in some other way than on my thoughts? It unfolds layers and layers of us. And that's the point of these four foundations of mindfulness. How many of you have seen this movie, Patch Adams? It's quite funny. What I don't like about it is contemporary movie making is too semiotic. What I don't like about contemporary movies is that they are too semiotic. So because each item in the movie advances the plot.

[60:07]

So each item is a little sign or symbol of that kind of event. Modern filmmaking technique. So it becomes very stereotyped. You can predict what this unit is going to do to be an example of that. I don't really understand what you want to say. Sorry. Every item that they show that's part of this scene, is not that experience, but a symbol of that experience. So modern Hollywood movies go real fast and they And they get you right away, but it's all very stereotyped.

[61:24]

Perhaps it's good visual storytelling. But it doesn't have the feeling of life. Because the feeling of life is, at each moment, you don't know where it's going. And in a movie like that, you know what each item, where it's going. Because in actual fact, each item Each moment has filaments going in all directions. And Robin Williams is in it, and he's almost an uncontrollable actor. I think he's really, you never know where he's going. So this movie shapes him into this But still fun.

[62:34]

And quite touching. But he has this thing of four foundation. He says to this crazy guy in the movie, he says, what do you see? Everybody says, four fingers. Oh, you idiot, this guy says. But if you actually... the answer he finally gives later, you know, is eight. Because if you look beyond the problem and I see you, To what's really going on, I see one, two, three, four, at least eight. So Zen practice is like that, there's one point in it. But if you look past that, you see... Yeah. Robin, I was at a place with my family once.

[63:55]

Did any of you see this? This is just an anecdote. Did you ever see the Dead Poets Society? I thought it was a pretty good movie, too. And... He tells these kids not to pay attention to their teachers, tear pages out of the books and so forth. But he's very much like that himself, Robin Williams. Mrs. Good... What was that woman? Doubtfire. Doubtfire. It's this woman, Doubtfire, who... If you see him in social situations, he almost can't be straight. He's just fooling around, talking constantly. It's unbelievable. Anyway, we were at this place taking a little vacation north of San Francisco.

[64:58]

It was way before the movie... Dead Poets Society came up. And my now 20-year-old daughter I don't know, two and a half or three, just walking. And she was running all over the place. We were trying to have breakfast. So I sent my 16 or 17-year-old or 18-year-old daughter. I said, go get a visit. She was running, talking to everybody and running out into the garden. And I said, Elizabeth, come back here. Sally was saying, Elizabeth, come back here.

[66:00]

And suddenly this guy sitting near the window said, don't do it, little girl. Don't do it, girl. Don't do it. And we looked and it was Robin Williams. So how many one-pointedness or one-hands sound do you see or hear? So we're supposed to have lunch five minutes ago? So let's hear the sound of one bell for a moment. And then the sound of three bells. Thank you very much for this morning.

[68:24]

You're welcome. So let's see if we can penetrate this second word as a practice of feelings. You know, I had no plan to talk about the four foundations of mindfulness.

[69:27]

Not that I usually have a plan anyway. But I'm a little surprised I'm speaking about. I suppose it dawned on me that I... Pretty hard to talk about mind and environment without saying something about the four foundations of mindfulness. Because if we want a bridge between mind and environment, Four of the bridges have to be these foundations. To the body and to the phenomenal world. Yeah. And also I... Yeah, so then... And then when I just looked at you, I thought, oh, I should speak about the four foundations of mindfulness.

[70:44]

And so I usually trust that if something comes up, like one hand, I usually trust that there's, let's, at least I like to think there's some reason for it. Did we lose one hand here? Yeah, I think so. I wasn't quite sure if he wanted to continue. Uh-huh. Mm-hmm. And my hesitation to speak about it was that I assume you all understand it already.

[71:45]

It's hard to be familiar with Buddhism without being familiar with these four foundations. And then, as you know, I hate repeating myself. Although I do it constantly. I... You know, when things are this simple, it's hard to find a way to talk about them in a fresh way. Mm-hmm. But anyway, I haven't spoken about them thoroughly for so long, so I decided to. So we can think of these four foundations also as a way to say hello to ourselves.

[72:55]

Hello to our body. What's there? Who's there? Oh, I see. Breath is there. Or solidity is there. And so this is to say hello to our feelings. The first distinction I always have to make is feelings doesn't mean emotions. Yeah, we feel our emotions, of course. But we also... feel the rain.

[73:57]

And the rain isn't an emotion. So, yeah. And feeling is usually divided. I mean, if you look it up, the word is, I think in Sanskrit, vedana. Is that how you pronounce it? No, V-E-D-A-N-A. Yes. Vedana, yeah. He's our Sanskrit scholar, sorry. Well, yeah, but still. So... And it usually means... It's usually defined as... Feelings that are pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. Now this is quite easy to at least hear. Yeah, pleasant, unpleasant, neutral. But if you start to practice it, it's not so easy.

[74:57]

Okay. Well, first of all, feeling is Being alive. It's that sense of knowing which accompanies all mental and physical aliveness. If you've been in an accident or something, They want to know if you feel anything. So feeling is the most, let's say, the most basic sensation of being alive. We just had a wonderful brief rainstorm. And you could just practice with feeling the rain.

[76:27]

Especially if you're outside. But if you're inside, you can feel the rain too. Because it immediately, if you let it, can take over your... mode, state of mind. And it's impossible for it to reign without some associations of other times it's reign coming up. So like with the practice of direct perception and waiting for the flowers to speak to you, you let the rain speak to you. Sometimes it will speak in a louder voice when there's some thunder.

[77:34]

If you live in the desert like where high desert like where Crestone is and especially Santa Fe you fairly commonly have multiple rainbows. And such an extraordinary smell that somebody wrote a book titled The Desert Smells Like Rain. The rain so seldom, the rain awakens something that's been waiting in the earth to smell. So if you just let yourself be penetrated by the feeling of the rain, without directly actively trying to perceive it, so

[78:47]

Not only are you in the feeling of the present rain, you can feel the associations with rain, a rain mind coming up. And perhaps it can be so present that if someone telephones you, As soon as you speak, they say, oh, is it raining there? Because your voice is filled with the feeling of the rain. My daughters, when they call me, I'll answer the phone totally normally. And they'll say, Dad, you're in Sashin. I think by the sound of your voice, it's the third day. And they're always right. I can't hide it.

[80:03]

It's like you call somebody up and they say, Did I just wake you up? No. Yes, you can hear a voice loaded with dreams. So this feeling is present.

[81:10]

But usually we don't come in Usually feeling is so... Usually feeling is so taken for granted... That, for example, at least in English, most people confuse feelings and emotions. Anger is a feeling. An emotion, it's the same for them. So we might enter a feeling through its, again, pleasant or unpleasant. But it's more difficult to enter a feeling that's neutral.

[82:24]

We don't have any way to notice what's neutral. We notice if it's pleasant or it's unpleasant. And pleasant very quickly changes into a posture of I like it or I dislike it. And then we get what I call seesaw mind. And then we get something like a seesaw that bored kids play with. One kid sits on one side. In English, there's quite a different word. There's dandle board in New England. I don't know what it is. Dandle board is a seesaw.

[83:24]

Is it? Oh, I see. There's many regional names. From the Midwest to... California, it's called a teeter-totter. From Midwestern to California, it's called a teeter-totter. Maybe we should make a teeter-totter for the kids out here. Except that kids are always getting hurt on teeter-totters. One jumps off and the other goes... And often children get hurt by one jumping off and the other falling down. Yeah. But I like see, saw. S-E-E and S-A-W. Ich mag dieses see, saw. Because our mind is like that. I see, I saw something. Denn unser Geist ist so, hin und zurück und vor und zurück. It's like a pendulum mind.

[84:25]

It swings back and forth between I like it and I don't like it. Es ist wie ein Geist, ein Pendelgeist, der hin und her schwankt zwischen ich mag es, ich mag es nicht. Yeah, but the teaching isn't that it's just pleasant or unpleasant. It's pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. And this doesn't make any sense unless you practice. Why don't you close the door? Thank you. Because what you're looking for here is you've got this basic sensation of being alive.

[85:28]

And you're bringing mindfulness to it, attention to it. So first you notice that it's, yeah, you notice you feel pleasant or you feel unpleasant. You notice, this is again just studying yourself. You're in the test tube of mindfulness. And bringing mindfulness to it is not just neutral. It actually begins to cook the... Cook what's in the test tube. Mindfulness kind of turns the temperature up. And you begin to see this feeling mode bubble.

[86:39]

And it bubbles into liking and disliking. Yeah. So let's go back to the feeling, listening to Und ich möchte zurückkehren zu dem Gefühl und zu dem Hören des Regens. Und ihr werdet sicher wahrnehmen, wenn dieses Gefühl sich hinbewegt zum Wohlbefinden, dann seid ihr mehr getrennt. or if it turns into unpleasantness, you're more separated from the rain. Again, what the kids in English say, rain, rain, go away, come again another day.

[87:42]

What do you say in German? I just translated it. We don't have a song like this. You mean kids don't say, God, I wish it wasn't raining? But they don't sing it? They don't sing it, as far as I know. Oh, yeah. Sun, sun, sun, stay and keep the rain up. We would like to have more sun than rain. Oh, yeah, it's the same thing. You're more positive, maybe. This is very positive of you. So you notice that if you can subside, let go away, like the tide subsides, you actually feel more pleasant when it's neither pleasant nor unpleasant.

[89:07]

So you begin to see how this feeling is conditioned by contact. Because you're really practicing, this is a movement really toward emptiness. Because the more you can empty the shaping of contact, the more you feel permeated by feeling. The more you can empty the shaping of contact, the more you feel permeated by feeling. And contact means contact with memory. Any association. Or with a particular sense. And you see that feeling is lessened when the contact is habituated.

[90:21]

So I'm going through this to give you an opportunity to enter this practice of mindfulness of feelings. If you really practice, you're always alone. I like, I can't remember who it was. Maybe I'll think of it before. But said, if you really read Shakespeare, You find yourself absolutely alone. You may know a lot about Shakespeare, read commentaries and things, but Shakespeare is so much more complex and real than any of its commentaries.

[91:44]

It's like if you're really in a complicated situation in your life. You can't really look to what other people have done, what have I done in the past. This throws you into a completely new situation. So when you start reading Shakespeare and you really get into it, You may in the middle say, oh my God, what's going to happen? What can happen here? You're like, you feel like the first person who's ever read this.

[93:44]

It's like maybe falling in love. You feel like you're the first person that's ever fallen in love. And even if it's The third time, I hope not the twentieth. And let's say it's the third or fourth time, it still feels like it's absolutely never happened before. And practice is like that. When you really come into even a simple thing like the sound of the rain. There may be many associations, but the more you move into the feeling like it's the first time you've ever heard rain like this, If you still have this capacity, or can come into this capacity again, that we sometimes associate with being a child,

[94:57]

then you're closer to this feeling that's neither pleasant nor unpleasant. Am I making any sense here? That's why I said feeling is the practice of mindfulness of feeling. It's the main road or main gate of emptiness.

[95:42]

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