Yesterday there is a question going on in my mind. Yesterday we used this image of water and waves. And you said that you could concentrate on the water and the waves would then be... Yeah, and not in the... Not the main thing, they would somehow... Yeah. You said, if I understood correctly, we identify with the water and then the waves and things, they are not so important anymore. Is it possible that there is a situation where the waves are so strong that we cannot see the water beneath or in it?

[01:30]

Well yes, of course, but not if your practice is mature. Ja, natürlich, aber nicht, wenn deine Praxis reif ist. Denn was du immer kennst, ist das Wasser und nicht die Wellen. Es ist möglich, dass du eine Krise erfährst you know, war or horrible things happen to your family or something. Where your practice isn't sufficient for the crisis. No, and we never know what our limits are or our capacity. But suppose these kind of simple images of the tiger down below and the hanging by a rope in your teeth, these are all images to suggest that it takes a pretty extreme situation to disturb your mind once you've really...

[02:35]

found mind itself and not the contents of mind. We can still be tested. But there's another aspect which I didn't mention, which is that there's always a quality of practice which is... that develops through meeting occasions.

[03:43]

Aber es gibt noch einen anderen Aspekt, über den ich nicht gesprochen habe, und das ist eine Qualität, irgendwie mit Gelegenheiten zusammenzutreffen. So it seems in a way that practice is waiting, one way of looking at practice, is it's waiting for the crisis which unifies it. The moment where, you know, everything counts. Nothing. And that's of course dying. For some of it, it's another kind of crisis, illness or, you know. Some kind of life situation. So that kind of crisis can function just as powerfully in a monk or a non-monk or a lay person or anything.

[04:45]

So this kind of practice is also a kind of preparation for those things that may happen to us. Now, we probably should stop pretty soon. But I want to go back to this sense of two things. I don't know if we can touch on it much in this short time we have. The interrelated themes of paying attention to your narrative, your story. And the maturing of your story. Mm-hmm. And it's hard for me to say much about it because I did therapy three different times before I started practicing Zen.

[06:23]

First time was, not important exactly, but the first time was actually when I was six years old or something. I somehow grew up, I realize now, for the time, a quite liberal family. My family was skeptical of society. Didn't really believe in it. Wanted no status in society. Thought an interest in status was something superficial. And they were interested in health food and things like that. And they felt you should sort of live outside society because society was corrupting. They had a kind of intellectual bohemian view of the world.

[07:41]

And they were very positive about psychotherapy and things like that. So when my grandmother's house burned down Or a big part of it burned. When I was five or six years old. So I began to be worried about how do you prevent a house from burning down? And I was worried about my family. So I'd wait, I'd go to bed early because I was a kid. And I'd wait until everyone was asleep. And then I'd get up and I'd walk around the house to make sure nothing was on fire, and then I'd sneak back upstairs and go to bed.

[08:46]

So after some months of doing this, my parents began to, you know, they told me several times, I don't have to do this. They'd check. So, but I was really wanted to protect things so they'd look out the window and I'd be in the dark walking around the house. So they thought, maybe this kid should see a psychiatrist. So they brought me to a psychiatrist in Chicago, and I talked to them several times about my brothers and sisters. And anyway, I stopped walking around the house in the middle of the night. So I actually found I used to do it at Tassajara.

[09:49]

I'd stay up till everybody was in bed and I'd get up and check everything at Tassajara. At Greenfields I did it too. Yes, right, yeah. And then in college, somebody noticed I was looking kind of at least existentially depressed and they recommended I see a therapist. And then when my sister had a rather big breakdown, I decided to see a therapist myself and for two years I did regular therapy. So I really don't know much about therapy except, you know, what one as an intellectual knows about therapy from reading Jung and this stuff.

[10:56]

And my own experience with therapists. Yeah. And I find now that therapy is much more sophisticated and people are much more skillful than they were at the time I did therapy. Und ich stelle jetzt fest, dass die Therapie ganz wesentlich verfeinert ist und dass die Leute auch viel höhere Fähigkeiten haben als zu der Zeit, als ich Therapie gemacht habe. But in any case, I developed psychological techniques as part of my practice. So I followed narratives and figured out ways to do it and so forth. Ich habe jedenfalls solchen Erzählsträngen, bin ihnen gefolgt, und I figured out how to, ich habe herausgefunden, wie man das tut.

[12:11]

Yeah. And, yeah. So for me, it's very clear I brought psychological approaches into Zen practice. And I've often considered doing a book, the psychological uses of Zen practice. Because although it's not developed within Zen, I think it could be. Though I don't think it substitutes for the process of talking through your self with another person. obwohl ich nicht glaube, dass das ein Ersatz wäre für diesen Prozess des Durchsprechens, des dich-selbst-Durchsprechens mit einem Therapeuten. And one thing I've discovered, rather painfully, is I, as a Zen teacher, can't do that with people.

[13:16]

Und etwas, das ich auf schmerzvolle Weise entdeckt habe oder erfahren habe, dass ich das nicht tun kann mit den Leuten. I can't, in most circumstances, even give advice. I have to stay out of that kind of relationship. Or pass on some obvious observations because they take a different quality. If they come from me, then it's just an observation. Yeah, like somebody says, blah, blah, blah, and I say, well, just looking at what you said, it's like this. I can't do that. Yeah, I mean, Zen practice depends on the extreme amount of trust between the teacher and the disciple. And you're not just seeing a person for an hour.

[14:25]

Your whole life is visible to who you're practicing with. You're not just seeing a person for a therapeutic hour or something like that. So your whole life is part. I think it would be very hard to do therapy with somebody who lived in your house with you. A certain distance is necessary. But I, in effect, have to practice with people I live with all the time. And still, trust has to develop But that trust has to be probably, if you get into a psychotherapeutic relationship, that trust is more complex to maintain. And you live with the person too. But I would still say, again, going back to the second theme, how do you mature your psyche?

[15:40]

Now I think I made a big mistake. Because after a while in practice, I think I was feeling, yeah, things were great. I basically had no problems. I felt good all the time. And there was a period of many years where actually I never dreamed. No. No. The view of most official formal psychotherapy is that I did dream, I just didn't notice it. I'm convinced that's not true. I'm quite clear that I did not dream. That dream sleep was absorbed by my meditation.

[16:42]

And for many years I slept so little anyway, I didn't have time to drink. Because I did get to a point where I could do pretty well in two and a half to three hours sleep a night. And I felt at this point like my personal history was gone and I felt I actually didn't like people I didn't like being called Baker Roshi all the time But I didn't like being called Richard or Dick either because I felt no connection with that person anymore. I felt I'd so reformed myself that very little from my personal history crossed over except certain kind of habits or something.

[18:15]

That gave me a lot of confidence and strength. And I think if I'd been head of a small meditation center or a monastery in Japan, there'd be no problem. But I think, and I don't have time to go into it in much detail, to say the least, But the mistake I made was several fold. One is I ceased to mature my present personality with an engagement with others. And if I'd lived in some kind of monastic detachment, I might have had an effective role in the lineage.

[19:29]

But I didn't, because of this detachment, I didn't actually understand people so well. I understood them well enough to practice with them, particularly the more adept ones. But all the complexities of the lay community and everybody's interests, I had not much touch with. Things people cared about, I just couldn't imagine anybody caring about them. So looking back on it now, I realize I actually didn't I interrupted the maturing process of my own psyche.

[20:59]

If that makes sense. And that might have been okay if I just lived in a monastery the rest of my life. But it wasn't sufficient for the kind of complex life I actually find myself in. Now a little bit in relationship to what we talked about at the bar. I mean, my marrying Marie-Louise is partly an experiment. I don't mean that, and I, you know, I promise not to take more than a couple more minutes. I don't mean that... you know, I'm experimenting with this wonderful woman's life.

[22:04]

But there's such a level in me from when I was very young of seeing this whole world pretty meaningless and for no reason to participate in it. wo ich das Leben als sehr bedeutungslos sehe und wo es irgendwie keinen Grund gibt dafür, da teilzunehmen daran. And the only way I've decided to do it is just to view the whole thing as an experiment. Und die einzige Art, wie ich damals mich dafür entscheiden konnte, daran teilzunehmen, ist das Ganze als eine Art Experiment zu nehmen. And then Tsukiyoshi encouraged me in that, actually, because I wouldn't participate in things, I wouldn't vote, I wouldn't... I have a job, I wouldn't do things. Suzuki Roshi said, no, just see what happens, experiment. So experimenting with what is this life is my life. So my commitment to lay practice also now includes a decision, okay, I'll go back into lay life.

[23:31]

And because I don't actually want any more, or I don't want the comfort of just monastically. Yeah. Since I seem to be stuck with staying alive for a little bit longer. If I was going to die in the next five years, I'd be happy to just live at Creston. But since it looks like I'll be alive for a while, I thought, okay. I'll lead every aspect of life I can. But those of you who didn't know me when I was younger wouldn't probably think that I'm leading extremely limited life compared to what I did when I was younger.

[24:45]

When there were virtually no limits in what I tried to do all at once. I'm practically an ascetic now by comparison. But this whole process has convinced me that somehow if we're going to have a genuine lay practice in the West, Zen isn't going to do everything. It might do everything for monks, but it's not going to do everything for lay people. And we need to Reconceptualize Zen practice. In a framework that works in the West. And it works in a way Westerners are put together. Yeah, so that's my little speech, I'm sorry.

[25:46]

All stimulated by our estimable Eric Griesler. And his own experience in what makes his life work. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you for translating. I guess there's just a door. Oh, she knows how to, I see. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Well, let's see. It's okay.

[27:11]

Is there anything you'd like to bring up following our most recent discussion? Yes. I just wanted to say that it touched me very much when you say you relate to people how they will be. How they will be, yeah. I mean without ignoring how they are, but... Yes. I don't know how to explain it. I don't know how to explain it. Yeah, I would like to ask you again in a way.

[28:40]

What you asked the first evening. What I asked before. how you would, without trying to get rid of something, how you would include it in your practice. For me, there's a feeling of sadness in my life. I don't know where it comes from. And on the one hand, I like it because it's familiar to me. On the other hand, it sometimes feels like, it feels like something I'm dragging behind me.

[29:55]

And sometimes it also feels like something which holds me back. Yeah, but it's there. And so, I mean, I can imagine, well, I can go back and look at my history and I can do all that. And maybe that's good. But from the point of view of practice, how would you deal with that? Well, first let me say that, take a different kind of example. So say you had some disturbing, compulsive thinking. So you're going to drive off a cliff every time you drove on a road or something. Or some other kind of compulsive... Well, I mean, it doesn't make sense to say, I'm not going to do anything to get rid of that.

[31:15]

But still, the basic dynamic of practice is to accept first and change later. So the first thing is to just accept it, get used to living with it. But even getting used to it is not accepting it because you're not acting on it, say, if it's a negative thing. Getting used to it isn't accepting it, because accepting it could mean acting on it. So accepting it and not acting on it is already a form of saying, I don't want this. I think you try to explore ways to lessen it. At the same time, you accept it with really a finality, like if I live with it all my life, that's the way it is.

[32:34]

Somehow I find, I think this attitude seems to have a lot of power and most things give way under it. Now, either in myself or if someone came and spoke to me, I would make a distinction between whether, say, sadness or outrage, anger, say, is neurotic or existential. What I would mean by that is... Yeah, it's neurotic, it's something unrealistic or it's some... Really involved with the personality.

[34:10]

If it's existential, I would say it arises more from the way your view of the world, your experience of the world. And I think in this world we live in, it might make sense to be sad or outraged. And I remember talking to Tsukiroshi about this. And we talked in specific about a sense of anger or outrage, which is different than rage. Outrage and rage, I don't know. Rage is just anger about something. But outrage is... You fundamentally disagree with the way that you're outraged at the war or you're outraged at pollution or something.

[35:18]

You're not angry about pollution. So Sukhirashi spoke about a kind of deep fundamental anger which was part of his life. Yeah, he went through the Second World War, he went through Japan having nuclear bombs dropped on it. And other things. But he said for him, the outrage was a kind of fire or source of strength or energy. So I think that when we have a view that's accurate,

[36:20]

Which maybe we experience as sadness or something like that. That there's no reason to try to get rid of it even. But I think the more one accepts it, my experience again, is the more one accepts it as just way of being in the world, it becomes, yeah, it's not so noticeable after a while. But I think it's a kind of strength, actually. If that makes sense, I don't know. I mean, to you and your experience. Is that okay, what I said?

[37:41]

Do you want me to say something else? I'm probably at the limits of what I can say. Anything else? Yes? I have a question about I have a question referring to the Buddhist rituals, which I sometimes use in the setting, in my therapy setting. So for example, with cancer patients, I do these prostrations. They do prostrations, you do prostrations together.

[38:41]

So for me, this is somehow natural. Like, also in Bert Hellinger, he does this bowing to, I don't know, the parents, and also in this yogic practice of sun, sun, I don't know. There is this bowing. I see this as a really helpful support for these people. So now there is a patient where she has kind of compulsory thinking and for me the practice with the five skandhas came up. So I somehow feel reluctant to pass it on to her because I am not in any way allowed to do that.

[40:08]

I would trust your intuition. And you're not trying to teach Zen, you're trying to help this person. If you're trying to teach Horst the five skandhas, maybe you might want to discuss it and then go to Paul and talk to him. But this is, you're not really teaching Buddhism. You're trying to help this person in a very particular situation. If the five skandhas help her, teach her six or seven skandhas. My feeling is there is an inner asking of permission. You've just been given permission. It's just an outer giving of permission. So I noticed that bowing seems to be something natural, but carrying the teaching into my therapy work, this is something different.

[41:47]

Yeah, but I understand and I appreciate your sharing how you're using the teaching. Do you teach them the bowing as just a kind of physical act of bowing or do you teach it as a yogic process of working with your energy? I'm unclear what the yes and no was. I didn't understand. It's a physical act. It's not a teaching about energy or... Yeah. Because you might try this sense of bringing your hands together and drawing it up and then bowing in such a way that you give out of yourself. Or the way of sort of giving away the cancer maybe and taking something in.

[42:50]

That kind of intention concretized in acting is often helpful, I think. Going back to my question. There are many inner feelings or thoughts which we label these are good and these are desirable and these are bad and not desirable.

[43:59]

Like for example anger, outrage, sarcasm. I learned for years to integrate this. But somehow, What I wanted to develop, what I want to invent and what I have been talking about over the years, what I want to invent is an antenna where I can insert this inner feeling and where I can let myself be carried away by it. I want to develop a kind of antenna, a kind of feeling, where these feelings should just be there and carry me, and where I have to get rid of it. Because I'm very curious about this thinking of getting rid of it, because I myself experience, if I do this, they come up anywhere, and I don't recognize them as such things.

[45:17]

Sometimes only the drug is better than before. So I have a great respect for the fact that it is very easy to say, okay, then let them be and to push them away. And so, let's say, the question for me is whether they come to a different place, which is much more decently and destructively related to my life than if they had seen something, where they come from. I don't know. I think that this practice of finding your breath and body in your speech, with pause for each person, each situation, each sentence, I think it makes it possible to be really present in your speaking before you say things.

[46:26]

And if you form a very strong intention to not do a specific kind of thing, Say I did two or three things in speaking with people that I didn't think was, I thought was hurtful or something. I wouldn't say there was three that I noticed. I take one and try to really become present to it for several months. And see if I could stop that at the source before it's spoken. So I make it very particular. I wouldn't worry about the others. People have to suffer with me. But if I could get one to do it and finally get the feeling of it, you know, kind of trigger.

[47:47]

And once you get hold of that trigger, you can stop it. But if you're on the other side of the trigger, it's too late. Yes, Mikael? Does the unspoken include the unsought? But I don't know. Unspoken, I mean the kind of realm in which you're forming yourself prior to thought and speaking. But I don't think the unthought is exactly the same realm. We no need to discuss this, but I don't think the unthought is the same realm as the unspoken.

[48:51]

It's like translators often don't know what they're translating, that the speaking arises separate from thinking. They sometimes translate a whole lecture and have no idea what they translate. It passes through them. Okay. Now I should speak about emptiness. You should. Yeah, now I've never spoken about emptiness. I've certainly spoken about emptiness. I've never tried to speak about emptiness in the way I would like to speak about it. Because I want to try to do which I have not done before.

[49:53]

To give a somewhat, if I can, full... of the experiential reality, actuality of emptiness. Okay, and I haven't taught this before. Which means I don't know how to teach it yet. Usually I have to try to teach something several times before I see, oh, That's how to present it so it makes sense. So you could all leave and I could keep trying it out and then you could come back at some future seminar.

[50:57]

But if you're patient I'll try to learn now. Okay. Okay, I think it's helpful, first of all, to put the idea of emptiness in a historical context. Okay, I think if emptiness just floats out in our mind space as some kind of philosophical idea or experience, it's kind of hard to make sense of it. I think if we have some feeling for its history, it helps us. Because if you see it's not a gratuitous idea,

[51:57]

It's not a gratuitous or unnecessary. It's an unavoidable idea. Okay. So in early Buddhism, emptiness is part of a list of three things. emptiness impermanence and suffering and it's framed in a rather negative way impermanence is the impermanence of any essence And early Buddhism is criticized by Mahayana, or characterized as, Early Buddhism treats emptiness as like the emptiness of a vase, inside a vase.

[53:24]

And in Mahayana Buddhism, the vase itself is also empty. It's not a container, the container is also empty. And early Buddhism emphasizes the emptiness of the person. Yeah, as a kind of version of impermanence. But one of the differences with Mahayana Buddhism is emptiness is everything, person and phenomena is empty. Okay, if everything is empty, you're not talking about a real fundamental view of the world. And the emptiness of the Mahayana is a positive emptiness.

[54:25]

Mm-hmm. Now emptiness falls into, I would say, three major categories. One would be the emptiness of impermanence. That mainly functions on an intellectual level.

[55:32]

That you can see everything's impermanent, you can think about it, notice it, et cetera. And the second is what I would call non-knowing. So impermanence, non-knowing, and the third would be the field of mind. Now, So if we speak about impermanence, there are certain... This is not a philosophical question, but an existential question.

[56:56]

Impermanence is not... very interesting as a philosophical idea. But it's extremely engaging as an existential reality. So, first of all, there's no entry into the understanding of impermanence until you genuinely accept your own death. And for other reasons, we went through this a little bit at Rastenberg. But And there's several stages of accepting one's own death. One is that first just knowing it.

[57:57]

And being pretty clear that there's not gonna be an exception made in your case. Not so easy, actually. Okay. And second is to not just know you're gonna die, but actually be willing to die. And the phrase we practice with is to be willing to die and yet gladly remain alive. And then the next step is really to be ready to die. Even if you have children and obligations and you're not really ready to die because you have to take care of your children, in my case, for instance.

[59:17]

Still, it's very helpful to have a mind that if you had to die at this moment, it's okay. It's a kind of deep relaxation. And to carry this practice slightly farther, or the clarity a little further, is to, at each moment it means, to have the feeling of, this could be the last moment. Okay, so if you come this far, Then you're living in each moment as if it might be your last.

[60:30]

Then you actually do have a feeling of impermanence. You're not just saying, okay, in the future, but right now it's sort of permanent. And when you feel that way... Yeah, things, there's a softness to the world. And that softness is something like the experience of emptiness. That softness and suchness are sort of close. And suchness, thusness are considered to be, and the word means, an experience of emptiness. Okay.

[61:31]

Now there's a quality of emptiness also like... Well, here's this room we're in. Und es gibt auch eine Qualität der Leerheit, die ist so wie, ja, da ist dieser Raum, in dem wir uns befinden. And last year, this building was a building. Und letztes Jahr war dieses Gebäude hier ein Bauwerk. A building means? Eine Baustelle. When the word with A and building are one word, it means it's in the process of being built. It was a building. Okay. So we can maybe imagine here the walls being down, the space that was here before and so forth.

[62:31]

But if you're in In Vienna, on the Ringstrasse, those buildings look pretty permanent. Some of them look like maybe it'd be nice if they weren't there. But they've been there a long time and there's a lot of feeling of permanence to them. But even there still, there's this experience of it's there for a while. You can feel the space it's made from. Now, I think I should give you the four marks.

[63:54]

Let me give you another aspect though, experiential aspect of emptiness. I think Jeffrey Hopkins is quite good on this. If you go home and you look to see if your spouse is there, And you hunt around the house and they're not there. Or you look for your pet, say, and where's my dog or cat? You have an experience of the absence of the spouse or the absence of the cat. That's not the same as coming home and finding the cat there or not owning a cat or a spouse. Hey spouse, where are you?

[65:31]

So this experience of the absence of something is also a territory you can explore to get to know the experience of emptiness. Now that's a kind of entry to the experience of absence. But if you explore that experience of absence, in other words, you're not just noticing that no one's there, you're noticing how you experience the absence. So when you look at something, you can experience the absence of something. As a kind of relief.

[66:44]

Again, a kind of relaxation. Okay, so now let me say something about the four marks. Yeah. I feel the flowers having been moved, the space is different here because the flowers have been here. It's that kind of physical sense. Now if we put the flowers back there, and you still experience their absence, that would be form and emptiness. To experience the absence when things are present.

[67:46]

So I'm trying to find ways to poke into this, see if I can make it named. In an experiential sense and practice. So, That's how we say it.

[68:58]

Four months, okay. The first is birth, or something like that. Usually it's called birth, but we can also say appearance. And then, the second, and this is, Basically, each dharma has four marks. It's obvious, but experientially it's not obvious. And the second is duration. And the third is dissolution, shall we say.

[69:59]

It's the best English word of now. And the last is disappearance. What does this mean? It means that we have a very important idea here, which is appearance. Important, at least from the point of view of practice. And the question here is, What kind of world do you live in? Do you really see it as impermanent or not?

[71:01]

How do you remind yourself of its impermanence? Now I can bring in this koan that Paul has spoken about. He mentioned it the other day when I went to his lecture in the Sesshin. And I heard he mentioned it, talked about it at the seminar in Wien. So why don't we stick to some familiar themes? And this is the same dynamic Dharma duo as before with Engo, Union and... You know where the dynamic duo is, right?

[72:19]

Batman and Robin. They never heard of Batman and Robin here. Maybe it's not true. Okay. In this case, it starts out with Yunyan. In this case, it starts out with Yunyan. Asking, why does the bodhisattva of compassion have so many hands and arms? And hands and eyes. And arms too. And Da Wu gives an actually extraordinary answer.

[73:19]

He says to his younger brother, it's like reaching for your pillow at night. Okay. Now, the introduction to this koan says, No obstructions, clear in all directions, spiritual power manifest everywhere, and so forth. So what is the introduction pointing out? That this is a world view. This is a world view. This idea that everything is Hands and eyes is a view of the world, not of the universe out there and stars and moons, but a view of the world.

[74:37]

What kind of world do we live in? How do we explore the world we live in? Like reaching for your pillow in the dark. Okay. This way of looking at the world is, and the Yogacara and Buddhist view in general, but specifically the Yogacara, is what's first of all real is our experience. Now, if you want to try to understand Yogacara thinking, And Yogacara experience, teaching, is you have to

[75:45]

give first priority to experience. Now what do I mean by that? I think it's useful to go through this ritual of a ritual reminding of the practice of appearance. You know, I'm struck by how Sophia learns rituals before functions. For instance, she doesn't want to use the baby toothbrush we've got here. That's the wrong ritual implement. Wrong ritual implement.

[76:58]

Ritual? Implement is something you use, a tool, a hammer. Marie-Louise and I used gigantic toothbrushes. Yeah, so she's in the little tiny body. planning to be an adult right away. So her toothbrush, kid stuff, she wants the real thing, you know? Yeah, and then she's discovered just fiddling with a toothbrush, even though she has no teeth, doesn't mean anything. You've got to put toothpaste on it. So she absolutely fusses now until she gets the toothpaste too. Although she's figured out how to open a large percentage of the world, she hasn't quite figured out how to get the toothpaste open.

[78:07]

But she goes through this ritual of getting the toothbrush, getting the toothpaste and then taking the right, the correct end of the toothpaste moving it back and forth over the top of the brush. Anybody who has kids may know this stuff. And then she walks around the house happily brushing her imaginary teeth. So the ritual comes first, actually. Eventually there may be teeth and toothpaste, but right now it's just this ritual. It helps me understand why, in Chinese culture, ritual is one of the two or three most important things of all to know. So in some ways I go through certain rituals in trying to teach Buddhism to remind us of certain practices.

[79:19]

One of my rituals is the ritual of appearance. So, if I look at Walter, I have an experience of looking at Walter. If I look away from Walter, I no longer have an experience of looking at Walter. Mentally, I know Walter's still there. And I can look back and you might have gone, but you're still there. So what's the rule? In Yogacara, I give precedence to experience.

[80:39]

So, when I look away from you, you have disappeared. Of course, I know at some level you're still there. And proprioceptively, with the body that Christina spoke about. Pro-perceptively, I still feel you. But in some important sense, I practice the four dharmas. The four marks, I mean. When I look at you, I notice you're appearing. Now, when I look away from you, I have the generalization that you're still there.

[81:40]

That's just a thought. Well, I mean, just, it's a thought. Okay. Yeah, it's a legitimate thought. But experientially, I mean, what's the problem with it? Well, it's not quite accurate. I don't really know if you're there. But the main problem is it's a bad habit. Because if I think you're still there when I look back I see the generalization, I don't see you. Do you get that point? Okay. So if I get in the habit of when I look at Walter, I don't think he's there.

[82:40]

When I look at him, I don't think he's there. But I pause and I look and yes, you're there. I let you appear. Now, if I'm thinking, you appear instantly. Green shirt, shiny head, nice guy. Bodhidharma mouth. But if I don't think you, then actually I have to let you appear. I actually have to... My senses go through a process. It takes a few... a measurable length of time to notice you. Yeah, I feel your posture, the tones of your clothes.

[83:59]

The feeling in your cheeks and so forth. So actually, if I don't have the thinking generalization and I hone to experience, hone means lean in the direction of, then I have to let you appear. And in fact, if I let you appear, you participate in that appearance. Because you feel me I mean, Sophia, because she doesn't know that it's impolite to stare.

[85:16]

She downloads new people. And some people, particularly ladies with blue hair, get very nervous about being stared at. Manche Leute, besonders Frauen mit blauem Haar, die werden da nervös dabei. They say to us, oh, your baby's very serious. But she's not being serious at all. She's just downloading. And you can feel her downloading. So she is letting the person appear. Okay, now I look away. And I look over here at Krista and Paul, say. And you appear. Okay. Now, if I look back at Walter now, If I have a mental idea that he's there, I just look back and I see the same thing I saw before.

[86:42]

But he's not the same as he was before. His backbone is actually a little different. And the way his energy is in his shoulders is slightly different. And so when I look back, if I don't have the bad habit of seeing generalizations, or seeing memories, then I really see a new Walter appearing. Or somewhat new. Okay, so what do we have here? Both are true. I can look back and I see more or less the same Walter or Guni. And if I look back, you're not 100% new, but you're also new.

[87:45]

Now, the question is, do I emphasize the newness or the generalization. Yogacara says, no question, emphasize the newness. For two reasons. One is, it enters you into a new world. Another is it breaks the habit of permanence. It breaks the habit of seeing generalizations. Of seeing memory. Because if I look back at you and I see the same person.

[88:56]

I'm just seeing a memory, and that memory has more power than to see you newly. The memory has more power than seeing the person newly. In other words, the memory takes over the seeing. Mm-hmm. So you don't notice the differences. No. This is a tiny point. But it's a world-shaking point. Yes. Absolutely. I mean, I guarantee you, This is a strange promise.

[90:24]

I guarantee you, if you develop this simple practice, you probably will never be bored again in your life. That's an amazing promise to offer people, right? I have a little bottle here, right here, and you know, You can buy this for only $2.50. There's a joke in America about in the old days, people used to tour the United States selling cure-alls. Patent medicine. There was one called Suritan, which is nature spelled backwards. There was one called Serotin, which was advertised as nature's spelled backwards.

[91:30]

That somehow made it good because it was nature spelled backwards. Yeah, so I was just joking. Here I have this little bottle of nature spelled backwards. It only costs $2.50, you know. And five bottles only cost $3.50. That reminds me of an anecdote. Can I tell it to you? This is absolutely true. I was with Earl, a friend of mine. We were on a ship in the Suez Canal. And this guy came on with some sort of fake watch. Not a real watch, some kind of cheap watch. And he wanted, I don't know, $50 or $60 for it. And Earl talked him down to $25.

[92:33]

And then to $10. And then to $5. And then Earl just threw it overboard. And the guy said, 10 cents? No. I wouldn't have dared do it, but Earl just looked at it and says, poof. That's the guy with the dog? That's the guy with the dog, yeah. Scientifically, it's true that the next time you look at something, it's different than before. Yeah. It's true in all lots of ways, not just scientifically.

[93:34]

Okay. So in this... This is basically, when we do this, we're at the core of Dharma practice. This is what Dharma practice means. To, first of all, see appearances. Yes. About duration and dissolution. Yes. I mean, what's the difference? Be patient, be patient, be patient. Okay. You're rushing ahead and we're still in appearance.

[94:34]

But he's leaving tomorrow, see, so he's afraid I won't talk about duration until tomorrow. And the rate at which we're going, I might throw the whole thing overboard. So let's have a break. And some of them seem kind of stupid, but, you know, stupidity is okay. For instance, one of the senses of walking in Zen practice is you walk with the feeling that maybe the earth won't be there. So I noticed when Sophia is walking over one of these grates, you know, she's not sure.

[95:44]

She takes my hand because it's just... It's particularly... It was particularly true in a restaurant in Big Sur, right on the edge of the cliff, where the floor is glass. She was...

[95:56]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_73.84