No, it's fun to play with words. We should place ourselves a little below. Yeah. Yeah, and I think I... grasp a little bit more of it because we spoke about it and then I actually asked Robbie as well because I was I remember you talking about fish swimming in the water of others and then you were talking about the fish panting and not having any water and then having an aquarium for your fish as well and well as I understood it now it's when you I can't remember anything. But it was good to look up it anyway. I have to look it up. I bet you can remember. And it's good that it's fuzzy. I don't want to like, you know. Okay. Okay. Yeah.

[01:00]

Someone else wanted to tell me something. I enjoyed the metaphor of not inviting your thoughts to tea. Yeah. And the metaphor of the hope. I'm very grateful for the teacher, you know, Okay. Yeah, metaphors extend beyond what you can say in words. And then you can work with them. Yeah. For me, I kind of got the very focused on what you said about ticking one to one and somebody asking you, hey, how are you doing? And you just rang the bell and set out. And somehow it really got to me with all this social and cultural norms and settings we're in.

[02:06]

And I think I got to feeling of how caught I am in that. And it was a little feeling of somebody pulling a rug. But I think a tree hugger should know that you don't have to have social cultural conventions with trees. How are you, tree? How are you feeling? It might be a good approach. Right now I thought, what do you call it, the conventional mind, You've said it several times that it's hard to detect or discover because it's always there.

[03:14]

Yeah. And I think that's a very... It's always there when you're awake. Yeah. And that becomes very obvious that sometimes sitting here listening when I try to make things fit. Yeah. And they really don't, because they're not fiddable. And to try to step out of that and notice, which is not very easy at this moment, but it's a really neat thing to try to do and to experience. to do that and to leave things a bit blurry. Yeah. Discover later on maybe what they are for me. Mm-hmm. Or what I will do with them. Whatever.

[04:14]

Well, it's much more important to get a real feeling for a small part. Mm. Because a small part, as you live your life, it widens, you know? Yeah. So, it starts out small, but then it begins to infiltrate your thinking. And, um, So a small difference with a little angle is a very big difference after a few weeks or months. So it's much better than understanding a lot of things. If you have a feel for one aspect, it will have more power in your way of being. You two speak a lot when it's in Swedish. We do? When I was here, you were talking a lot. I talked about the now. The concept of now. And my answer was, maybe the concept of now is both now and not now. That's a concept. Yeah, that's good.

[05:15]

That's good. That's an unsaying, an apophatic comment that you take away. Going to sleep? No. I just said I purely enjoy the thorough way of doing things. For me meditation has been closing eyes, going in, disappear. Which isn't all bad. No, but I'm very used to that. And for me, it's opened a different gate of coming out, being present in the action. Like taking up a glass and just being there with the glass. That's very big for me. And I like that.

[06:18]

And it's not that the other one is bad or wrong. It's just that it's a different perspective of taking that, coming out and doing the same thing. So from the disappearing, going away from, transcending, it's really the other way around. And bringing that into life. Well, you used the word thorough, and much of what practice is about is being thorough. Not just, oh, I sort of understand that. I mean, look at what happens when you look at a simple statement like, don't invite your thought to tea, and you look at it thoroughly. Oh, are these both thoughts? Thoroughness is really a very important part of practice. To look at small things thoroughly. Consciousness again tries to make everything equal. Understandable.

[07:24]

We sacrifice the mystery to understanding. And also, when meditating, it becomes very obvious for me, the discursive mind. It's very sneaky. Oh, boy. So you have to be sneakier. In one sense. Okay. Okay. Come on. No. I'll go with judo. Yeah, because in judo you use the power of the other, or jiu-jitsu, you use the power of the other, and you say, yeah, that's exactly right. Because it's very obvious that when I try to push my thoughts away, they go, for a while they fight, and after a while they say, well, okay, I'll go away, and they go around, and they're there again.

[08:40]

And the only way to make them go away, so to speak, is to go with them first. And then leave them. Instead of trying to push them away, you go with them and leave them. That became a metaphor for me when meditating. Okay. That's good. I appreciate it. I mean, it's gratifying. Gratifying for me, too. meet with people I don't know, you know, a little bit, a tiny bit through Ravi, but don't know, and have this strange thing I've been doing for 45 years make sense to somebody, you know, in such a short time, right? Well, it was very obvious to me just before when I was trying to explain to you how I got explained to me about the fish that I didn't want to, you know, go into it and explain to you, to explain it to myself, because I just wanted to keep the feel of that I was, you know, that I got it, sort of.

[09:43]

So I just wanted to keep feeling of, you know, going up there again. Understood. We were talking about the practice of Zen or Buddhism and psychotherapy, and I'm a baby therapist. You know, my teacher's book is called Beginner's Mind. The beginner's mind has many possibilities and the expert's few. I second to that. Particularly as a beginner, we like that. I'm a beginner. Well, you could say that. But anyway, I can see, and I'm not trying to, as I said the other day, I'm trying to relate and not to make it the same. Because in Some of the teachings have been about the floating attention when you're in therapy.

[10:46]

You can let it float between the client, yourself, and the relationship. Your association, etc. Yeah, and just trying to be aware of several things at the same time. When you talked about the Well, the way I understood it was the direction that was more important than exactly where you are. And that was one of my understanding of Antonovsky's, the little I've read about Antonovsky and the health thing is that it's not really important whether you're healthy or unhealthy. It's important in which direction you're moving. So there are quite a few... Yeah. not quite a few, quite a lot of rotating topics. And the end point of that, it makes me curious, makes me want to practice. Well, no one knows exactly where, I'm not a student of psychotherapy or psychology in any serious sense.

[11:55]

Of course, I've been exposed since I was Even quite little. My mother spoke to me about Freud and things like that. China and various things. She kind of laid little seeds in me. In more ways than one. But no one knows exactly how, where Freud got his, you know, be on the couch and free association. As far as I know, no one knows exactly, but it's clearly a meditative technique. I hear the couch has been much abandoned by most therapists, but somehow Freud recognized you change a person's posture, you change how they function. And then free association, as I understand it, is not just about free associating, which is actually the fourth skanda. Free association requires the...

[12:58]

confluence or resonance of the therapist also to free associate or create a mind that tunes in to free association. So those are both definitely meditative approaches, which he, it's interesting, he took one, I would say he took the fourth skanda and changed the world. Because all over the world now, people deal with things in psychological terms. And if anybody does a study of St. Thomas Aquinas, say, they have to bring in what was his psychology, who were his parents, you know, whatever they know, because you have to bring in the psychological dimension now. And... And... And from my point of view, he took one aspect of this and showed how much it changes the way we think about everything.

[14:06]

Okay. Len Hart. I'm here. Yeah, I know. I know. I can tell. Okay. Uh, let's sit at the end and now let's just continue if it's okay with you until we need a break I brought my 24 hour watch and now I don't know what time it is but I think it's a little after 2 I said I wanted to make a case for consciousness because from one point of view consciousness is from Buddhism While it's a necessary function, it also deludes us because it makes us not notice that things are impermanent, not inherent, and so forth.

[15:11]

But it's a fantastic event, consciousness. I mean, that's my feeling. Because it's this conceptual tapestry which is so... dimension that it gathers our experience from our entire life and brings it into the concept of the now. So we have available to us a very large part of our life experience. And the richness of it, I mean, just for example, for me, to be here with the smell of the ocean like Maine and the houses the clapboard houses and board and batten when you have flat boards and a little strip they make barns of it in the United States but it's also the way New England houses are often done like they are here and yeah the wooden steps going down the stones and all that stuff um

[16:30]

I find it beautiful, but I also find it beautiful because I have so many memories associated with it. So memory, association, enrich my experience of being here. Or if I just smell oil, my grandmother heated her stove, the cooking stove was the stove where you put oil in and the oil in little rings burnt. They didn't have gas. And if I smell anything like that, But what I recognize is that actually all my experience is tied to such, maybe we could say poetry. Moments after I first experienced the smell of my back, my grandmother's house in Maine, moments after I experienced that, the next experience, the next days, etc., are all rooted in memory.

[17:36]

There's the initial experience, but all 10,000 experiences in the rest of the summer have an element of memory. So, even your first experience, I mean, immediately after, which is almost just first experience, your second experience, is already as a component of memory. So, consciousness is so constructed this tapestry of concepts to not just present us the present but to gather everything we've done and to gather our culture too into our immediate experience now if you identify with it as the way things are too much it's diluting But particularly if you can bring in this other non-conceptual feel for the world, then it actually enriches the way consciousness presents the world to you.

[18:43]

It's like you loosen the puzzle parts and then other dimensions of the world come between the parts of the puzzle. Does that make sense as an image? It's like you spread the parts of the puzzle out. We occupied a bigger field and you could see between the pieces of the puzzle into a wide world that's present here that's not just contained in our memory. There's another metaphor. One I never thought of before. Thanks for offering it to me. Okay. So, let me start with the five skandhas, okay? Oh, no, I promised you. Maybe it's Christmas time. Oh, no. Oh, no.

[19:32]

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