Yes, I am very nourished. Very nourished. And today I feel this process of going into the division and differentiation and learning from it. In the morning when you were teaching the eight sufferings that it's very impressive to go into these details of this teaching and to go in the differentiation of this teaching. And there was something like Yeah, to realisation, recognition, yeah. And now I'm very much occupied with the idea about how can I make it work, how can I put it in practice, how can I deal with it, not only by myself, but only in my practice as a therapist.

[01:28]

Of course, part of the teaching of something like this is The content of what's being taught, but the process of looking at them. So this kind of process can be applied to other things. And that's what I'll talk about after I hear something from you. I'm very glad you came in. I mentioned the flag there later. Sometimes it's got enough.

[02:50]

Because I had the impression that I'm a total flatliner. And today I realized that it also goes up the heel. That's very, very, very happy, I think, really short. And I made it in a way which is very familiar and a way in which I deal with those things. I made a graph. But I'm not so sure about that. I'm satisfied with the graph, but I think it will improve.

[03:54]

I am very moved when I think about my personal history. When I left Portugal, I was very old. The serious part behind that is that the first four of them, I was very touched by them because birth is already far away in my case and old age and sickness, maybe sickness and death will approach and will come. I've heard. And I don't feel it in this way actually right now, but in contact with my old-aged mother, I'm always in contact with that, that it's going to happen.

[05:15]

And what I want to do is to deal with that problem or with these fears and root sufferings with dignity. Yeah. Let me say the best way is to get ready to die now. And not wait until it's, you know... So... And if you're willing to die now, then, you know, it's no problem because you always have extra time. You usually have a little more time. I know that's easier said than done, but it can be done. Yeah. Did you close your windows?

[06:34]

Yes. You know, actually, I remember I just left mine really wide open. Yeah, I'd better change. Like a teaching letter. I'm going to ask you if you can teach me how to do that. You go down, you think, well, it makes sense, we're a little aged, etc. You can hear it, you say, what? Five Skandhas there. And then you start at the beginning, birth, death, illness, it all looks clear, except why the five Skandhas. Excuse me, I forgot what the five Skandhas... I see. I'm so glad to have the courage to admit. I'm so glad to have the courage to admit.

[07:36]

Warm. Even. Reception. Impulses or gathering. . This is what we usually experience, consciousness. constructed from these four.

[08:51]

And in practice with the five skandhas you learn to isolate each. And you discover that each has its own past, present and future. So this is the Lifeboat. If you imagine the self, anyway, this is a substitute for the self. Everything you can think of falls in one of these categories. So the only thing not in the thing is self. So this is a way of talking about the function of cell through the construction of a consciousness.

[09:55]

So sometimes it means cell in Buddhism. But it would have been more natural here to put self as one of the sufferings. And the fact that they put the skandhas here instead of self, they expect you to recognize the turnaround point, because skandhas can be self or non-self. So let's turn around to that. So in a teaching like this, they usually put in some incongruities to make you look at it more deeply until that incongruity is congruous. um dich dazu zu bringen, da hineinzuschauen, bis dieser scheinbare Widerspruch zu keinem aufgelöst wird.

[11:08]

Now we can look at this and we can analyze it the way I did. But if you just practice with it, and you just keep bringing yourself back to it, it's the teaching, so you keep looking at it, this begins to unfold in you anyway without analysis. Because there's a kind of implicit analysis that goes on through attentiveness. Yeah. Yeah. And I also want to thank you very cordially for the teaching. And also for the way you are teaching.

[12:21]

It's very beautiful and I'm very touched by it. If you work for me, I can be very active and nice to you. And there are so many things I could talk about which are working in me from this teaching, and there are so many that I cannot talk about them, all of them, but what I want to say is that I have the feeling that I'm in the midst of something, and this is also in the midst of myself.

[13:30]

I'm very attentive. I would like to listen to you, but at this moment, there is nothing I can say or ask. OK. I have the feeling that the teaching of the Ayurvedic suffering would be something I could make a poster of and put somewhere. ... And I have the feeling somehow that it would be good to do that and to look at what it makes or what comes forth in myself and in others by that. And I think my speciality or what I'm good at is to compare.

[14:50]

And you gave several good hints which are useful to me. Yeah, OK. I've been here only for a while, short while. We'll see. And the way I like to do that is to grow into a question for a while. And this little stick prohibits that and calls for just asking.

[16:03]

So in the morning, I was stuck in this idea of separation. Because I remembered the function of the self, which were separation, connectedness, and continuity. . And what I'm interested in is where's the difference in this separation in the function of the self and the separation in this teaching of the eight sufferings.

[17:09]

Well, the emphasis in separation as a function of the self is just we are separate in some ways and we have to establish that separateness. As I say, you have to know this is my voice and not his voice or your own voice. I'm sorry. You have to know that... Yeah. Well, let me... We have the three functions of the self. And the first is separation. And separation is like our immune system.

[18:57]

Our body wants us and doesn't want us. We tend to emphasize this in our culture. At least on the surface we emphasize separation. yogic culture tends to emphasize connectedness. Back to absorb continuity in the connected. So in a yogic culture, you more have connectedness and separation. And this is what? In our Western culture, we have more continuity in separation than we are connected.

[20:01]

And if you just stop and think about how are we connected, you say, I'm Hawaii. Or I'm married. But there isn't much that really senses an immediate connectedness. It's always present. And I would say our mantra is already present. And I would say that if you want to practice, use your mantra already connected. So like when I look at you, So the assumption before a thought arises is that we are separated.

[21:27]

So I have to think about how can I establish a connection. What you want to do in practice is you want to change that assumption that's prior to thought arriving. To already connected. So the ideal, when I look at you, already connected. And what I then feel when I look at you is already connected. I don't have to make any effort to be friendly. I merely have to acknowledge in various ways how we make this process. Now you can work with a phrase like, but we do it then. We work with imagines and phrases in a mantra-like way.

[22:35]

And you do it with penance. I come up and I stand with something and it introduces it. Under my breath. Also man macht das etwa in der Art und Weise, ich begrüße dich und dann sage ich in einer Mantra, wir sind bereits verbunden. So that feeling actually, you don't say it that well, but it comes across. Man sagt es also nicht sehr laut, aber es kommt durch. And a kind of softness, a medium. Und eine Art von Weichheit steigt drauf. So a teaching like this is meant to So this is a teaching like this, which I actually came up with. But I mean, I made it up to work with the Western sense itself.

[23:43]

But a teaching like this, if it worked, it shows you how you can shift between these three. These are included in this, and these are included in that, and so forth. how these set the stage for the bodhisattva self. Now, this kind of separation, of course, increased by this. And they're all forms of separation which we work at by practices which emphasize connectedness, wisdom, acceptance.

[24:43]

Okay. Now, this thing about asking questions and so forth, Also diese Sache mit dem Fragen beantworten. You don't have to practice Zen, but in Zen the feeling is you should at any moment have a question. So you should be able to say, what do you say? Unless you're the translator. LAUGHTER Could it be you're permanent, really?

[25:45]

And the reason is the feeling is if you're practicing, the fertility of the practice is the question you're working on. Let me try to give you an example. Like I say, instead of analyzing a dream, It's perfectly fine to analyze dreams if you want to. And it's, of course, been important in psychology to see what happens when you do. But the attitude... In Buddhism, it's not to analyze your dreams.

[27:00]

You bring the dream, the feeling of the dream into your daily consciousness. Because the problem with... analysis of a dream from a Buddhist point of view, is the considerations you bring to the dream are considerations from our everyday life. And they're considerations from how it fits into our personal history. Perhaps there's a personal history going on in us, unknown to us. So in a way, analysis tames a dream. I think it's good to tame dreams sometimes, maybe.

[28:14]

And I'm sure when you're skillful, they are very revealing. But just the general attitude in Zen is to bring the dream, the feeling of the dream as a kind of pressure from non-conscious, within you. And you let that pressure press on everything you look at. And you let then the situation talk to you. The other approach to dreams is to learn to go into the dream and investigate it from inside the dream. In a very similar way, you find the question you're working on, which is only half coherent or half cohesive. And you keep the pressure present, and it's always coherent.

[29:16]

introducing itself to the world. So the dream, a question like this can't, a basic question, fundamental question, can't be answered by you. It has to be answered by your context, your situation, your Things begin to speak to you. So if you imagine a good Zen student would be like a balloon full of water. And the pressure is working on his question or his practice. And the teacher comes by every now and pokes and a squirt comes out. And you might say, oh, very good, clean water. Or you might say dishwater mind. Mind you've just been washing your karma in.

[30:40]

Anyway, I'm mostly joking here. But anyway, there's some point to this feeling of being able to say something. Yes. I'm not touched or not concerned that there are several levels here. And the one level is that the concepts, when I hear them or feel them, sometimes make me, yes, incredibly shy. So I am touched by being here on several levels, and one of those levels is that the concepts you are presenting are touching me by their beauty.

[32:02]

I have the feeling that they are very beautiful. And I have the feeling that many of the things you are presenting I know already, are familiar to me, but they are more like pieces which are not connected. It makes a huge difference And what touched me most, or what I'm dealing and I'm occupied with most, is about the realms of being yesterday, that they have a spatial dimension.

[33:09]

Because normally I tend to think about myself to have more a time dimension. Sequential. Sequential than a spatial dimension. And the simultaneity of moments. And these levers are happening at the same moment? Yes. So that I have the feeling that you could approach two different layers at the same moment. Yeah. So today I just was struck that the scanners are also part of the age suffering. So I couldn't believe that. Yeah. Now it seems logical to me and clear, but my first impression was that I could not understand it.

[34:18]

The eight sufferings. Why the five skandhas are there. But now you understand. And I think that's what I'm most concerned about now. The thing you're asking me. And that's also the thing I want to do most in the next time in the future. . Yes, but you can't do that. It's not really a drink for a good person. You have to drink the straw. The straw? Yes, the straw. Delusion, yeah. Egoism. Egoism, weakness, comparison. That is something I think we had also in psychosocial.

[35:21]

And we talk about this, and we deal with that, but we don't deal with delusion. This is from somewhere in the kitchen. But it's true. or that touches me so much that I have the feeling I, for many things that are inside, I somewhat with the word here, we find language for it. I hear language, not kind of language, but just . Yeah, OK. So it's interesting to me that I have the same thing that like Guni. So it's like in this koan, the amazement, every dog has Buddha nature.

[36:31]

I don't understand so much about what you're dealing with. What is the difference between disappointment and delusion? Because in German you have These words are very connected. Delusion in this means to think something's real which isn't.

[37:42]

Yeah. I'm very glad you brought it up. I'm glad you brought it up. So I want to share an experience I had. One of the most wonderful things I can think of is when there is a thunderstorm and I'm lying in my bath.

[38:44]

And these powerful sounds. And then suddenly there was something like a kick, where the sounds came out of my head. And then the feeling for the body went away. It was very... And then there was a sudden shift, as if these powerful sounds came out from my head, and also the feeling from my body vanished, and it was really powerful, that's the word for it. So for a few moments. Yes, I understand. During Saturn, I have problems that I'm constantly occupied with. Now I'm in the future, now I'm here, now I'm here, and I'm just noticing where I am.

[39:50]

And what also occupies me is the 10 rooms, the science, this room, what that actually means, or what it has for consequences. And what I'm also talking about with these ten realms of being, the realm of disciples, what does it mean, what are the consequences of that, this realm? And I also want to say something about dreams in Gestalt therapy. You're working with dreams in a non-analysing way. that we take certain elements of dream and that people identify with it.

[41:18]

For example, when a house appears in a dream, I am the house and the house is the wall. There is a room next to me. And that makes completely new experiences possible, because there are always resonances So the way we are working in the start therapy with dreams is, for instance, if you take, I have a dream about the house. You say to the client, I am the house, and my walls are that thick, and there is also a room which is a complete mess. And in the way people identify with that, it resonates and brings up certain new perspectives. Yeah, I understand. One difference with Buddhism and psychology is that psychology is much more...

[42:20]

I don't know what word to use, explicitly interactive than Buddhism. So that you... Which is interesting, and it's an addition to this kind of larger shared practice that we have. And, of course, Zen practice, Buddhist practice in general, is very interactive, but it's not interactive the way psychotherapy is. And, of course, Buddhist practice and Zen practice are interactive, but in a different way than psychology. And I think there's definite elements of the way psychotherapy is interactive that could be brought into Zen practice. Another kind of difference is this distinction between a mindology and a psychology. If psychology probably tries to deal more with this directly,

[43:30]

And a mindology says, how do these things arise from the function of the mind? And let's work the way the mind tends to make comparisons. And once we get that worked out, then let's go back and see what's left here. But it's quite useful to have both corruption. Do you want to say something? I am also very happy to be here. On the one hand, because it is always a great support for me in practice if I can see and listen to Roshi from time to time. And that brings me up a little more in practice.

[44:48]

So I'm also very grateful to be here. Also because I'm able to listen to you because it also leads to my practice in a certain way. To have, you know, these curves. It is for me a very... Well, what you bring to me is a somewhat strange world, because I deal with it in this way. And that's also a bit difficult, but it's very interesting and very touching, very beautiful. and what other people are bringing up or what they are saying, it's for me a little bit like a strange world, because I don't deal with questions like this, not in this way, but it's very interesting to me and very touching, although sometimes quite difficult to translate. And I would just like to say something about this idea of separation, because I see how it touched me this morning when I was walking with Julius.

[46:15]

Just this feeling when people pass each other and act as if they don't see each other. And it is completely clear that they see each other, but how much energy one needs ... I'm coming from a small village and it was usual and it was normal that everybody greeted anybody at each moment. And you didn't mind whether you knew him or not? And I came to the... With 18, I moved to the town, and it took me two or three years just to unlearn this habit, to create... because you feel stupid when you're doing that in town. When I was first in Germany, I was saying to other people, and someone said to me, are you running for Burgermeister?

[47:22]

Also, wie ich das erste Mal in Deutschland war, da habe ich zu jedem Scott gesagt, oder was auch immer, und jemand hat mich gefragt, willst du zum Bürgermeister gewählt werden? But you know, I would say, and I say this to Americans, they ask me about teaching in Germany, I have many observations about what it's like to teach in Germany versus in comparison to other European countries. to practice and live in Germany. And I usually say, Dharma Sangha developed in Germany for a number of reasons, but one of the most crucial is the inherent friendliness

[48:25]

of Germans in Switzerland and Austria and Germany. I find that Germans, and I mean Austrian, German-speaking people in the larger German culture, I know some people think there's some divisions between Swabians and Bavarians and things, but... Anyway. But for me, In private, in private situations like this, semi-private situations, people are more mutually supportive of each other than in any country I've ever been. And it's sharp, and there's many ways in which this is the case.

[49:43]

And it's probably the main reason I'm practicing here, because of the way each person supports each other person in their practice. But then when you go out in the streets of the cities, everybody is cool. You ask somebody for directions and they hardly turn towards you when they give the directions. They just want to keep going. But I finally... see that now as the reverse of this friendliness in semi-private situations. It seems, again, from an outsider's point of view, There's an immense respect for each person's own space and privacy.

[50:47]

When you don't want to intrude on someone else's space. And the funniest example of this for me is when you go into a restaurant. Everybody sits and puts a lot of energy into not noticing this table and that table. Yeah, they're all listening, but... But no one pays... And then you get up to leave and everyone says, Auf Wiedersehen! In America, it's the opposite.

[51:53]

You go and everybody says hello, and then when you leave, no one notices. I sometimes wait in a restaurant. I go in a restaurant and eat something, just so when I leave, I can say, oh, Peter's there. Okay, it's probably break time. But I'd like to, if it's okay, push the time a few minutes. Okay. One is, you know, I do, I of course like it that you appreciate what I'm saying and what we're doing together. And I likewise, it's obvious, appreciate being here. I'm always giving you little bows inside myself.

[52:55]

Mm-hmm. But what will really make me happy, not that this is your interest, is if you can really And make use of this yourself. It becomes something that makes sense to you and works for you. And I think a very important part of that is to have discussion among each other. So sort of compare notes, compare understanding, compare experience. And I think it's kind of hard to do.

[53:56]

This group's almost small enough to do it, but it's kind of hard to do a group particularly in English. So I might ask you to at some point break up into two or three groups. and have some discussion among yourselves. And I'd like to try it at least, and if it's not useful, we don't have to do it, but I'd like to hope you'd be willing to try it. Okay. Now, I'd like to work... this sense of importance, of attention. Buddhism is a, let's call it a yogic philosophy. And it's not a revealed teaching.

[55:07]

What does it mean that it's not a revealed teaching? It means that some human being discovered this for him or herself. And if some human being revealed this teaching to themselves, we can also reveal it to ourselves. Now, so the main effort in adept practice is to reveal the teaching to yourself. But also, there's no problem in sharing the teaching teaching as it's developed.

[56:10]

Because a lot of the teaching is really about your discovering it for yourselves. Ideally, all the rules, for instance, in a monastic practice place are just Really, what makes it possible to do it together? Plus breaking our usual habits. So ideally, there's no rule that isn't either how to support each other in practice or how to rub us the wrong way in our purpose. And I'm not saying this to get anybody to think about living a monastic practice type life formally.

[57:11]

But rather the rigor in trying to keep the practice related to our basic life. If we look at Julius. Some of us really like to look at Julius. What does he do? He looks at things. He kind of looks at this, looks at that.

[58:23]

And in that is what's most basic for human beings from this point of view of a yogic philosophy. There's curiosity. There's interest. And there's direction. There's these two things, attention and direction. The most basic unit of a living being. Now, what is phenomenal about, you know, a human being versus a rock, or this rock of a pillar?

[59:30]

is that we can give attention to something. And we're amused by, you watch a kitten, it gives attention. So if we look at the most basic ingredient of life, it's attention. And the other overall The most important single quality to this attention we have, this mind we have, is that it can have direction. And we could say that all of Buddhism is based on working with attention and direction. Now, I'll present to you the eight forms of friendly attention.

[61:02]

Or the eight gates of attention. And they're very simple. And I don't need to present the structure, this kind of structure. As Gerhard pointed out, conversation at the meal table. I mentioned the muscle of attention. But I might in a Sashino lecture mention the muscle of attention, but behind that reference is these eight gates. And there's the important thing in relationship to attention in Buddhism is that you give attention to attention itself.

[62:30]

That's unusual, actually. In other words, most of us give attention to the bell, to this, but we don't give attention to attention itself. And the second is the thoroughness. And the third aspect, the typical Buddhist way of doing things, is attention. Very similar though. Attention not only points at the object, It also points at the mind giving attention. Okay. So this very typical Buddhism, what is the most basic thing that's the root of life.

[63:56]

It's curiosity. It's interest, and you can see it in Julius or any baby, curiosity. And we need that. You look at an apple, and you look at it carefully. Is it edible, or is it spoiled, or whatever? So basically the practice of attention is rooted in not a revealed teaching or something, simple curiosity. But it's again a study of curiosity of the process of attention. You not only give attention to the object, attention to attention itself and the attention to the mind in which attention arises. And then what is the result? You mature attention You evolve attention into something that's different than you started.

[65:18]

So we could say mindfulness is the practice of evolving attention. And what basically is direction? Intention. So we can give direction to attention through intention. And it's the working with intention and attention is at the root of all Buddhist practice. Now, I genuinely think you start with something extremely basic. The way Julius plays at the table means wie Julius während dem Essen am Tisch spielt. Und man entdeckt in sich selbst die gleiche Fähigkeit, Aufmerksamkeit zu geben und Intention zu verwenden.

[66:26]

Dann kommt die Frage auf, was für Art von Aufmerksamkeit und in welche Richtung. Und das ist genug vor der Pause. said, the coming and going of birth and death is the true human body. I find that Dogen was a 13th century Buddhist, Zen Buddhist, Zen master and philosopher. And one of my ancestors in the lineage.

[67:41]

And, God willing, I'm also happy to have him considered one of your ancestors. I think that's an extraordinary statement. The coming and going of birth and death is the true human body. He means that this is not Eric's body. This is what he sees and works with as his body.

[68:41]

But his true body, his true human body, is created from all his comings and goings in society with Christina and Julius, and even with me, and with his grandparents and so forth. All those comings and goings, through birth and death, are actually, when you look at it, what makes our body. That's a very far out and big and realistic conception of what our human body is. And it's this body which practices. He also went on to say, even And yeah.

[70:04]

is where ordinary humans Drift about. Even though birth and death is where ordinary human beings drift about, it is also where great sages are liberated.

[71:12]

So this is a Isn't that a great statement? Maybe you don't appreciate it so much yet, but I hope you come to appreciate it. It's also the statement of a teaching which is, again, not a revealed teaching. All we've got, if you don't have a revealed teaching, if there's no Archimedean point, there's nothing outside the system, then all we've got is this. So what are we going to do with it? It's the ordinary coming and going of birth and death.

[72:18]

And this is our true human body. I've also, you know, I know big numbers kind of just get lost in the mind. Vast numbers. But one that's been sticking in my mind in recent weeks is if you count it in the in the neocortex, in the mantle of the cortex. Mantle or the cortical sheet in neocortex. Which is about the size of a napkin and about that thick.

[73:23]

If you counted every synapse in it, one per second, it would take 32 million years. That's it right here. even there. See, you can make fun of somebody you practice with. My permanent translator is fighting back. He likes to fight back, actually. And there are 10 with 80 zeros after it of positively charged particles in the known universe.

[74:35]

That's a lot. There are 10 with millions of zeros after it, the number of connections possible in the neocortex. And what evolution shows us is the neocortex has become, during evolution, has become increasingly fluid. And its resources are allocated through competition. And there's no question, I think, also that literacy has changed our brain.

[75:37]

So what I'm saying is I think that when you change the way you function, if you make simple changes from like identifying with a literacy-based mind, to a mind that processes functions through signless states of mind, you're actually creating another kind of human being. another kind of human being where even probably medically it will be somewhat different. I think there's surprisingly big changes even over decades in one person.

[76:40]

But I think there are definitely how can I say definitely, but I think definitely there are big changes over generations. So I think that my feeling is that is that you get a population going a certain direction, and that direction gets more and more reified. And my feeling is that when you practice, you're doing something by changing the way you function.

[77:53]

You're doing something biological as well as psychological. So I think we can actually think of, there's a certain plasticity in our beingness with others and with ourself. I think when we make decisions, we're making decisions for our entire gene pool. So on the one hand, I say, oh, it's very simple. All we've got is direction and intention and so forth. But at the same time, I think when you build on those, you end up with slightly different kind of human being. I think most people would agree that our consciousness, at least, is primarily created by culture. And culture-bound.

[79:09]

But, so what we have to ask is, what culture And how is it bound? And I think we have a choice of what culture we bring into our living. And if you actually begin to function less through identifying with language, in a basic way, you're changing your internal culture. Of course, when we look at Julius, we see that his development isn't just his attentiveness and direction.

[80:18]

It's how that attention is received by his parents and by other people. They've done studies which show there's a direct correlation of IQ and general intelligence with the kind of attention the child got from the parent. Okay. Now we're just little guys. We're doing the life the best we can in our culture of this century. But that doesn't prevent us from having a big vision. And it's not something egotistical to have a big vision. I think it's a necessary capacity of us human beings.

[81:27]

So if we can have a vision, we can function in relationship to. it's almost irrelevant whether we realize that vision. But that vision becomes part of our larger way of giving attention to each other. And a lot of this has to be hidden practice. So you give attention to other people in terms of what's allowed by your culture. But you give some other kind of attention in every other way you can, that sort of slips around the sides.

[82:34]

For instance, to just make a simple example, you're talking with somebody and having a normal conversation. At the same time, you aligned your body with their body. Or you brought your breath into conjunction with their breath. And you have to be a little careful because if you do it too much, the person gets quite nervous. What's going on here? Or you can feel another person with your stomach while you're talking with your head. And you can sometimes pull their energy down. by pulling your own energy down.

[83:39]

So basically practice is hidden practice, but you're attempting to live your vision without interfering with other people's views. Anyway, this is the general idea of practicing with others. Which even I've been doing this 40 years, I'm a faltering failure. But I got the vision. So these eight gates, I'll make them really simple.

[84:45]

Observe. Mull. Attention. Mull is like to mull over, to think over, to ponder. Erwägen. Like you mull if the process of making alcohol or something too. Yeah, but it's a process of thinking. It's also a process of thinking, to mull over, to think over, to turn over, to chew. It's almost like chewing your cut. Gären, aber auf der anderen Seite auch erwägen, suchen zur Reife zu bringen. Gären. Aufmerksamkeit. zu entfalten, sich vorstellen, eine Vision haben, erkennen oder

[86:06]

öffnen und das Gleiche. So those are just one word kind of memory devices. Now, generally, this is meant as a way to approach a teaching. But it's a... basically a process of evolving attention. Okay. So let's take something as an example. Let's take my simplest example, space connects. Okay. Anybody have one of these pointers? If you like, go on. Okay, space connects.

[87:28]

So someone tells you that, like I just did earlier. So you've observed, you've just observed the object teaching the statement, space connects. you bring attention to it. The observer is you bring attention to it. And then you mull it over. Space connects. But you begin to have certain feelings through mulling it over. Space connects, space doesn't connect. What if it did connect? You know, just simple ways you mull it over. There's nothing mystical about this. I mean, in very pedestrian ways, you think about it. But through thinking about it, you begin to have some feeling.

[88:38]

And you begin to give attention now to that feeling, the result of having mulled it over. And through that often a teaching will unfold. So you begin to have an operative understanding of it. So, we take something like this. You simply bring attention now. Get as much information as you can about it in just ordinary ways. Memorize the list. Christina suggested that we photograph these and sell them as posters.

[89:39]

She didn't suggest that. So you put this up as a poster in the back of your mind somewhere. So that's the first step of just bringing attention to observe me. And then you move it over. If you keep mulling it over, you begin to see, suddenly you see somebody walking down the street and say, that's a hungry ghost. They recognize, my brother, my brother is a hungry ghost. So in mulling it over, you recognize, begin to notice this in yourself and in situation.

[90:49]

And so by beginning to, by mulling it over you begin to have some examples and you begin to think, Maybe this is so. Now, this is a natural thing to do. This is just an extension of natural curiosity. And most people practicing come to some process like this on their own. But once you notice the pattern in yourself, the process, you can actually bring your attention to things, knowing the phases. You stay with the mulling over phase for a while. You don't rush. A teaching like this is not meant to get you here, it's meant to let you stay here or here as long as you want.

[91:52]

And it might be years or it might be months. You might be mulling over several different teachings at the same time. Okay, we got in a rush. But if you keep mulling this over, simultaneous, not sequential, my brother's a hungry ghost, actually I can see a hungry ghost in me too.

[92:53]

And then at some point you begin giving attention to, yes, I saw it in my brother, I see it in myself, I see in our society that we do such and such. And it suddenly makes sense to you as an operative understanding. This stage. You give attention to what you've been mulling over. Suddenly it starts to open up.

[93:14]

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