Hi. How are you? OK? So let's start out with a little discussion, if anybody wants to bring anything up. See how much we share of understanding of where we've got so far. if we've got anywhere. When I look at you, from a scientific point of view, I might conceive of light bouncing off your forehead and into my eye, forming an upside-down image. Me experiencing that and also interpreting my concepts about who and what you are and that you're over there. And now, when you said before that when you look at someone, what you're actually doing is seeing

[01:02]

What your mind... I forget the phrase you used, but you're seeing... Seeing your own mind, or you're seeing the capacity of your mind to see, to know. All right, so when I look at you, I'm seeing the sensation of sight, plus all the concepts and associations that go with that, and you define that as mind. Mm-hmm. Pretty good. Remember the connection between borrowed consciousness and... The more I'm not seeing associations and concepts, the more I'm seeing mind. It's all mind. But if I'm talking about, say, the essence of mind or the field of mind, that's seeing like the water and not the waves.

[02:06]

So I can talk, when I'm looking at you, I can also see all the associations that arise, but the more I see that, I'm drawn into a mind that sees you as separate. The less I see the baggage, the content of the mind, I just have the direct experience of seeing my own seeing of you. then I have a more direct experience of seeing it. Now, for instance, in meditation, it happens quite often, you hear a sound. If you name it a particular bird or an airplane, it's very difficult to really hear it. Then it becomes an airplane or something. But if you just hear it without naming it as much as possible, an airplane can sound like the music of the spheres. can sound unbelievable, but we tend to diminish it when you name it.

[03:12]

You make it useful in a certain way, like, you know, but, so I mean, you can't say where the boundary is of mind, but we're emphasizing more, this experience arises more when you see the field of mind than when you see the content of mind. Does that make sense? But that which is seen, in either case, there is only seeing. There's nothing more than that. I can say I see it, but I mean, who says it's this that's seeing? There is just seeing, isn't there? That's all there is. Okay, yeah. There's seeing, seeing. But your eye consciousness is supported by consciousness.

[04:17]

I mean, the act of physically seeing is still supported by an accompanying consciousness, which either can have content or cannot have content. Not too important. Because there's smelling. But smelling can be related to seeing. So we're talking about a matter of emphasis. But strictly speaking, there's no one seeing. But as long as we're alive, there's a sense, being alive is a sense of knowing. Yeah. And there's a quality of knowing, even if you don't form that knowing into concepts. How could you know that there was knowledge there? If you're doing a process of identification and you say there is seeing, there is experience, it's a natural inference to say there's something that's doing that.

[05:24]

And you might put your self-identification into you are the observer. That's just an idea, an inference. Or you could take your idea and say there's just seeing and functions. But how would you know? It feels different. And it's a gradation. Here there's very little experience of a knower. Here there's such an experience of a knower you lose a sense of your individual perception. And you can actually experience the difference. Trust me, that's the case. Yeah? It was very interesting for me when I started bed practice and reading the Heart Sutra and Siddhas. No eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind.

[06:32]

So it says in this koan that I brought up before, in walking, sitting, standing and lying, before noble postures. Walking, sitting, standing and reclining. Hold to the mind before thought arises. Look into that and see non-seeing and then throw that away. So the effort is you're holding to the mind before thought arises then you're able to look into that mind before thought arises, and you see non-seeing, then even that you throw away. So maybe I should give you this koan again, just to give you a feeling for it. What are you doing?

[07:35]

I'm going on pilgrimage. Where are you going? I don't know. Not knowing is nearest. This is the call. Now there's a lot of commentary about this, come on. And the commentary has things like mouth says, kind of like a children's thing, mouth says, I am the most important of all senses because I speak and I smile. And the nose says, the most important always holds the central position. And the eyes say, but I see and I shine. And I'm above you. And the eyebrows say, well, you may.

[08:38]

And the eyes say, well, why are you above me? You're not important, eyebrows. And the eyebrow says, just imagine how you'd look if I was below you. Okay. Now what is something this corny little story getting at? It also says, in the eyes it's called seeing. In the ears it's called hearing. What is it called in the eyebrows? The emphasis in this is that each sense occupies a different realm. As I spoke a little bit about this the other day, our senses give us a seamless picture of the world. And we think what we're seeing is the totality of what we're seeing.

[09:44]

We have that sensation and that's the sensation we're supposed to have because our eyes cooperate with creating a three-dimensional picture of the world. However, if you imagine that everyone in the world was blind, everyone, you could hear this bell and you could feel the vibration and its coolness and you could smell the metal of it as I've said it's amazing we have such sensitive noses we smell molecules of metal and but there was no way we could imagine what it looked like if there was nobody who saw we could not imagine that this could be seen could be You could feel it, but you'd have no ability to imagine it could be seen.

[10:50]

So this koan says, hearing, seeing, smelling, each has its own realm. But the whole point of this is, what's between the realm? Some animals have... a sense to detect, some fish can detect pressure, can guide themselves by the pressure in water. Squids communicate with an immense color range that far surpasses any chameleon. And they can say that, all these beautiful women are on my left, Men are in the center here. So say that you're a rival for this woman over here. I would show you a kind of fierce side while I'm giving a rainbow display over here.

[11:57]

And they clearly talk to each other. These colors, thousands of colors flash back and forth between them. And they're clearly talking in color. We can't imagine that because we talk in words. So what's between the senses? Well, of course, right now, there's a lot going on between the senses right now. What's going on in this room? A thousand handy phone calls, or cellular phone calls. Hundreds of television stations, radio stations. We just don't have a chip for it. Now, if someone told you a hundred years ago, told a group of people a hundred years ago, this room is filled with television movies, you know, you would not be considered irrational. How do we know what's going on here? We only know what our senses show us.

[12:59]

And our senses are very specifically realms quite different. Feeling this is very different from hearing it. And seeing it is very different from hearing it. These senses we have look at this, and they look at this, and they look at this, or here. And all this is not there, but we put it together in a seamless picture. Okay? Yeah? Yeah. morning that you were able to detect emotions by the smell. I haven't ever heard anything like that. I have heard people say that. I have heard people say that. Yeah, you can. Is it the perforation? It's not like a rose. You're right. No, no, just a physical reaction. Well, you know, it's I just noticed, coming from a rather scientific family, I just noticed that I began to have information about people that I didn't know where I got it.

[14:07]

And so I discovered that when I was quite far from them, I didn't have it, but when I was up close, I did. And so I finally determined it had to be smell. And I noticed I didn't have it when I had a cold. But it's difficult to really, because it's not in the category that we have words or language for it. Yeah, you could think it's intuition, but then it's... Yeah, where's that coming from? But it's not one of the senses, like hearing, thought, taste, touch. Yeah. Isn't there a dimension to every sense that has... extra sensory perception. In every sense there's a dimension that you can hear notes that are not all the truth. Every sense has that sixth sense in the time of rush, does it not?

[15:12]

Yeah, I think there's a range. The senses have a wider range than we're able to notice. If you prefer to call it intuition, that's fine. I prefer... You seem to be saying, and I think you did yesterday also, that intuition doesn't exist, and even now it sort of has to be part of one of these things. What do you call intuition? Well, it's that sort of undescribable knowing. But where does it come from? My gut, right? But it could be different for other people. I mean, there is this thing in the... I don't know. I think we call it intuition because we don't have a developed sense of seeing it in a more discriminated way. I can't think of any exact word for intuition in Buddhism.

[16:13]

We group a lot of things into intuition that happen outside our knowing. and we call it intuition, but it's a kind of general word. And, you know, women have it better than men, so I want to be included. I'm just kidding. What? Yeah, but that kind of, if it was intuition in the sense you mean, then it probably wouldn't work within the proximity of smell, it would work in the proximity of my gut tentacles. Yeah, but you wouldn't even have to be in contact with aliens. Well, we can get into the idea of non-locality now, like how do you know that someone's died who is in another continent. That's more subtle. There's another one which is more immediate, which is electromagnetic field perception. It's all documented that our electromagnetic fields change when we look at electromagnetic fields.

[17:17]

And um, it was documented, because the features are, you know, I rely a lot on electric field changers flying themselves to the environment they're in. So we clearly got that perception. Um, another explanation perhaps, when you close down ghettos with a coal or something like that, you know, also you'd still be picking up wood, you'd still be picking up, you don't have to make any fibrations. and that will change things not necessarily at a distance, not necessarily only at a close distance. That our awareness, that cold shifts our awareness as well as our sensory acuity. And as you mentioned, this non-vocality of life is something which is more and more documented. That world's noting scientific phenomenon of deception exists in people, to a greater or lesser extent. And other cultures will talk very clearly about perceiving the environment that we're in.

[18:21]

Yeah. Well, I'm not trying to demonstrate these things or prove them. I'm just pointing out that they exist. OK? Can I ask about the form of content? Which? But let me stay with this for a minute. The emphasis in this koan, where they say, what is it, if it's called in the eye, seeing, if it's called in the ears, hearing, what is it called in the eyebrows? is to be aware that a great deal is going on between your senses and beyond your senses. And that that should be part of how you perceive.

[19:24]

That's all. So we're not trying to say we're like sharks or we're like dogs who can smell at a molecular level but we can't. Things... Although we do have more capacity than we... Because we edit... I would say we have a primarily eye-dominated consciousness. And it excludes information from the other senses which can't be fit into our eye consciousness. So one of the practices in Zen is to separate out each sense and work with each sense separately. In a very practical way, like you go for a walk and you walk along a path and you see if you can just smell the path without looking or, you know, just see if you can smell where the path is, where the grass starts, where the dead leaves are, and so forth. And you try that now and then when you take a walk. And you try just feeling like a blind person might the presence of the trees.

[20:26]

And the idea and fact of it is, as far as my experience is, that the more you develop the acuity of each sense separately and you can suspend the other senses, you begin to hear and see and feel things in much greater clarity. And then you can bring that together and orchestrate it. Like you just concentrate on smelling and hearing. could just concentrate on smelling and tasting. Because we do taste the world, too. And our state of mind is very affected by how your mouth gets dry when you're nervous and things like that. And when you want to clear your mind, you swallow it off. And I think a lot of our habits of sucking on candy or smoking have to do with not knowing how to work with this but needing to occupy this sense field which we discount except for eating so um when you function

[21:46]

with a larger sense of the world than just your eyes tell you, we call that great function. So great function means you're able to let yourself be in a situation with a wider sense than just what your five or six senses are telling you. Does that make sense? No, I'm sure some people can actually pick up the feeling of what's going on here in terms of radio and television, etc. But it's not usual to be able to do it. And then there's what's beyond and not in between. I would say these television programs are here in between our senses, but not beyond our senses. So again, a koan like this, not knowing is where are you going, not knowing is nearest, suggests that you act through a not knowing, because when you act through a knowing, you're acting too much based on knowing in a graspable sense.

[23:06]

It doesn't mean you don't use your senses. It means in addition to using your senses, you sense in general and maybe with an intuitive sense, feeling, we could say. Yes. Now, but this not knowing, there's four ways we can... It's not just like sloppy not knowing. So first of all, you have a certain distraction. Let's just look at the stages of our development. First of all, we're usually rather distracted and easily distractible. And you develop by practicing mindfulness. You're bringing your mind to your attention, bringing your intention and attention to what you're doing and to your breath. You begin to develop a feeling of completeness. You start feeling complete a good part of the time.

[24:12]

And you can practice with that again just by doing simple things like I reach down to pick up this bell. It can be the reaching down to pick up the bell is one motion. Now I can just do this. But what I've actually done For me, it's much slower than that. It's because I've decided to move my hand or I've let my hand decide to let it move. So my hand goes down, picks up the bell, but actually there's a slight pause there and I feel the coolness of the bell. Then I bring the bell up into this area of my body. This empowers things. If I pass something to you, I won't just do this. I'll bring it here. and give it to you. That'll tend to be my habit. So if I pick this up, that's one thing, and I feel complete. Like a painter feels when they know a painting is done.

[25:18]

If you keep painting forever, it gets to be a complete mess. At some point, you stop. But that feeling of when to stop is true in small activity. There's a stop there. There's a stop on the bell. That's a stop. And so if I do things with a sense of completeness in each thing I do, then that completeness will make me feel more complete. It's that simple. If you do things kind of in a rush and halfway all the time, at the end of the year you're going to feel kind of incomplete. So these things are quite simple. Do each thing with a sense of completeness on it, or discover a sense of completeness, or discover a sense of nourishment, and you find yourself nourished and complete. Now, the reason I... Much of Zen habits come out of this.

[26:21]

For example, if I come into the room, when I open the door here, let's imagine that door, and I open the door, and I... Here's the door. In Japan, a door is called a genkan, which means mystery gate. But the Japanese have forgotten the mystery gate, just like we've forgotten that the entrance means to be entranced. So we step through the entrance, which means we're stepping into another space. Now, we would say you're breaking the precept to steal if you open the door and just walk in. You've taken that room before it's given to you. And actually the precept in Buddhism is do not take that which is not given. So you, in each thing you do, you have a moment's pause and you allow it to be given to you. Am I making any sense?

[27:25]

So you open the door and you look at the room for a moment. Then you step over a fresh hole. And when I come up to my cushion, I always practice the same thing. I come up, bow to my cushion. But actually what I'm doing when I do that, bringing your energy together, and when you bow like this, what you bow really is you're gathering your energy here, lifting it up, not bringing it down. So I look at this place and I stop for a moment and I bow. But that's just, I could do anything. And then I look at the room. And I stop for a moment. I don't have to do that, but that's my habit. And then each of those things was a kind of complete thing.

[28:27]

Then I step up. That's complete. Then I stop for a moment. Even if I do it quite quickly, I actually have a feeling of stopping. Then I bring my backbone down to the... And I have a sense of each one being separate. That's separate. Now this is separate. I put one leg down. Then I stop. Then I put this leg up. Then I stop. Then I get myself as best I can. Then I let myself... This is very basic Zen practice, is to teach in this way. And a teacher actually doesn't usually start teaching a student until they find themselves complete on each moment. Because they're not ready to receive the complete teaching. or the teaching completely, until they themselves begin to find themselves complete.

[29:33]

So teachers watching you to see if you... Now, I haven't had time to watch all of you, but I'm sure you're nearly perfect, if not complete. Isn't there a sense where you're not complete? Of course. But we're, in the larger sense, let me continue here. I said that we go from distraction to, by contrast, a feeling of completeness. And that feeling of completeness is also, can be understood as a feeling of nourishment. Like you, when I'm talking to you right now, I tend to talk in a way that I feel nourished by my talking. And if I don't feel nourished, I change the subject. Or I'm quite strict with myself. I don't keep talking about something unless it nourishes me.

[30:37]

And this changes your energy for the day and for what you're doing. Okay. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes, that's right. So I'm changing, I'm giving myself a number of ways to experience continuity other than my stories. So I'm beginning to feel complete on each moment, which means more and more that I have a kind of physical sensation of continuity through feeling complete. You're quite good.

[31:39]

Could you say that it brings down to awareness rather than between thoughts and consciousness? Yes, I'm more... The idea in Buddhist practice is to shift where your home base... to awareness, and then use consciousness when you need to, but not stay in consciousness, not identify with consciousness. It occurs to me that if you take a kind of grand meta-position, that's in a way what Western society and Western science particularly, since Descartes is in fact doing, separating maybe with some intention to be complete. You mean Descartes? I'm thinking of the method of separation in science, which came from Descartes. If you're looking at the development of society in general, maybe that's the process that Western society is going through, of separating...

[32:46]

Yeah, I'm hearing you. I'm trying to think about it because Descartes is the great troublemaker. I know. I just was seeing it differently by taking a kind of sociological perspective or metaphysical. Yeah. No. Well, it may be that... Well, yes. Yeah, I'd have to think about that. It may be that the position of extreme separation we've got ourselves into is opening us now to seeing separation as a flow. Because what I'm doing here is noticing separation which is constantly flowing into the next action. It's only momentarily a sensation of completeness. It's not really separation, it's completeness. Yes, I know what you were saying before. I was just thinking that that may be applying. Yeah, it could be. I'd have to think about it. What did you say? Completeness. Yes.

[33:52]

A calmness or a being. So we could say physically it's an experience of completeness and mentally it's an experience of nourishment. Now a dharma, you could define a dharma as a unit of nourishment and completeness. Because dharmas are how we experience things. And we don't think that's enough. So then each breath, you can bring your attention to each breath so it feels complete or nourishing. So each action, I look at you. I look at you with a feeling of a long and certain completeness. Yeah, I know that Einstein is trying and others, but...

[35:13]

Yeah, that gets us into a complicated discussion if we try to talk about that. But let me say that I know a number of these well-known chaos theorists. For instance, Stuart Kaufman is a close friend of mine who wrote this new book, pretty much changed the way we look at Darwin and evolution and so forth. And their views are extremely quote-to-be, extremely quote. if not identical. Okay, so now we have, we've gone from distraction to an experience of completeness, or a sensation of completeness. That sensation of completeness allows a further step, which is a sense of fusion. Not one. A sense of fusion in this absolute moment. The more one feels that, then one can release into what we call chaos, or no more learning.

[36:24]

In which, at that point, everything teaches you. At that point, you can trust what you were saying against the wall there. What is your name? Jill. Jill? Yes. what Jill was saying, to just go with the flow or can we trust the situation. But in Buddhism and in Taoism too, I believe, that you can trust that the complexity of the situation is in itself a form of knowing and guiding. when you've gone through this distraction-completeness fusion. Because at that point, your consciousness is more open to things as they exist without your editing out or discriminating so much. So there is the practice of just trusting things to teach you without trying to plan ahead.

[37:32]

But that is based on a consciousness which is developed through this experience of completeness and nourishment. Now, I've simplified it a bit. So your way-seeking mind seeks through the experience of completeness and nourishment. Does that make sense? In other words, you're tuning in a station. What station are you going to listen to here? You can listen to ABC, Australian American Broadcasting Company, or you can listen to CBS or whatever they are, CNN. But if you want to listen to EMPTINESS, it's very fine tuning. And And that tuning is done through an experience of nourishment and completeness.

[38:37]

If you're distracted, you can't tune in that station. Am I making any sense? I've never said these things before. I mean, some of the things I've said. But, you know, I much prefer to get out on a limb and wonder, how the heck am I going to make sense of this here? Now, another thing I said I would speak about, and I haven't gotten to inward and outward, inward and interior consciousness yet, is the four elements. Now, again, I'm working with what I said here, is we can deepen and transform our experience of the phenomenal world. We need some way in which we relate to the phenomenal world. We are in the phenomenal world, and we eat the food in the phenomenal world, and we look at it. But mostly, we don't feel directly.

[39:41]

Our consciousness separates us. We look at a tree, and we see that a tree isn't conscious the way we are. Now, again, you can work with language. Try to get away from nouns and when you look at a tree see treeing instead of seeing a tree a Tree is a static concept even though the word tree means truth It's the root Saint they share the same root because generally when you open your door the trees still there Like the truth is supposed to still be there But in fact the tree is tree And it's changing all the time What is doing the tree? The tree. The earth, the sky, the clouds, interbeing is doing the tree. The tree is a momentary bringing together of clouds, air, earth, are looking at it, so forth.

[40:52]

In a similar way, being is being. Yeah. Yeah. And we don't, I mean, the mirror, I mean, the strange thing is, is that there's anything at all. Is that anything exists at all is already amazing. That we all exist here, I mean, it's amazing. I mean, you can't explain. You can explain something about it, but you can't explain that why things exist. Okay, so the four elements are important in Buddhism because they are what we share with the phenomenal world. We have our own solidity and the rock has its own solidity. So you practice noticing your solidity. How solid you are, how your bones are. You actually, in meditation, really get as you can begin to have a non-interfering observing consciousness, you can begin to really feel your solidity, your there-ness.

[42:03]

And you can separate that out from other aspects of yourself. Because there is a very solid part to us. Then you can also work with our fluidity, our water quality. Solidity tends to stay in place, water tends to go down, and there's a fluidity and softness in our body. And I'll leave these for you to practice with. And there's a feeling of heat, which is more emotion this way. of rising movement, motility. And if I look at my favorite talons here, there's a movement, when I look at you, there's a movement upward. I can feel a movement upward when I look at you, and it may even make you feel a movement upward in yourself.

[43:11]

And I can also feel a settled feeling, as I can let this kind of liquid, settled feeling come down on me, and it's possible the other colon might feel that. And I can feel the space of me, inside and around me. I often teach kids, you know, when they play, they count one, two, I tell them, I tell them, oh, that's very good, one, two, three, four, five, but how many spaces are there? So they count one, two, three, four. I say, how come there's four spaces and five fingers? Well, okay, six. No, seven. Oh, I don't know. So we have, you know, it's not, you know, it's quite complicated what kind of space is here. So I try to get kids not to just count the thing, but the space.

[44:19]

And immediately you're into emptiness. Because there's four spaces, but this is an uncountable space. And it not only includes the fingers, but penetrates the hand. In fact, from the point of view of physics, there's almost nothing here. There's mostly space here. So you begin to feel the space that allows your body to be, that allows your lungs to breathe, that allows you and I to appear separately and yet connected. The more you get the feeling of that, you can bring that feeling to walking along, like taking our proverbial walk again. you can feel the tree in its solidity, but then you can also shift and feel its own sap fluid quality.

[45:24]

You can start feeling its movement. And if you're really open to that, I mean, I've noticed, for instance, I usually have some cut flowers on the table where I work or where I have breakfast. And if you don't think about it, the flowers there... and you just kind of feel the flower, often even cut flowers in a vase move. They're of course dying, so they're slowly moving, but they tend to move slightly. The petal will be slightly different. In that movement, you can start to feel it in yourself. But it means your senses have to be somewhat slowed down in the space of the flower. So in a way, this is waiting for something to be given to you. So if I wait for you to be given to me, I wait until I feel myself from your phenomenal world. That isn't just an idea of, well, there's ecology and we're all connected and water and et cetera.

[46:29]

But you begin to directly feel that you're the same stuff as that. And the more you feel you're the same stuff as that, but a different arrangement, There's a different way you feel in the world. You look at a dog, I mean, my experience is the more I can allow myself to be in awareness, and in particular a blissful awareness, and in general the less you identify with your sexual thought, Just allow yourself to be present in your body and breath and mind. It's a delicious feeling. It's a kind of, it is a blissful feeling. There's a feeling of joy that keeps coming up for no reason. There's a gratitude. You turn on the faucet, you think, a miracle, water comes out of the faucet.

[47:32]

You look like a sap, you know, some kind of nitwit. But everything is amazing. And it is. The more you're present in this particular moment without expectation. So if there's this blissful feeling, you begin to feel it when you look at other people. I particularly feel it with animals. My experience is animals are in a bliss consciousness much more than we are. But they don't have so many problems with conceptual thought either. so people who say like animals don't feel pain only humans feel pain and when you do an experiment on a dog the dog is simply making noises like a piece of farm machinery he never had a pet I'll tell you do you know those studies they've done on dogs knowing when their owner's coming home

[48:41]

Rupert Sheldrake's done it, but also a friend of mine. I used to sit with Michael. I'd sit with Michael and Michael's dog would get up and lie by the door. Actually, it was his wife's dog, Delcy. I'd say, Michael would say, oh, Delcy's on the Golden Gate Bridge. That's 20 minutes away from here. And then they lived down about 90 stairs at that time, Mill Valley. And then he'd say, oh, she's... He'd stand up by the door. Oh, she's parking the car. She'll be in in about five minutes. And then she'd come walking in with the groceries or something like that. We can't explain these things. But I think that we'll go along if a dog has a Buddha nature. Whatever the nature of a dog is, it ain't so bad. Is there something we should talk about before we launch into something else?

[50:05]

You talked about five senses, the way we become the holder, and lifting that back to the threefold. I presume that you would think that we lift all three of those functions as well. So our senses don't necessarily support our senses differently. Neither of them necessarily cause Yes, that's right. But when you shift to what I will call now a mind of connectedness, a mind of attunement, then your senses, as I've said this morning, begin to reinforce or inform that connectedness. And the practice with the four elements is one of the ways in which this basic assumption of yoga culture, that there's a macrocosmic-microcosmic relationship, is discovered in practice.

[51:21]

Well, I think that the practice of the senses, you simply have to do it. There's not much more I can say about it, but that you have to take some time each day or one day a week or something and see if you can separate out a sense and really concentrate on one sense for a period of an hour or so and really concentrate on another sense for a period of an hour or something like that on a walk. And it begins, luckily, practice is a homeopathic medicine. It works in small doses. So it's amazing it works at all because you get 20 or 30 or 40 years of habit. But within a year or two, you can make a big change by doing small practices now and then. And if the intention is to continue the practice, that intention itself is working even when you don't bring attention to it. Your attention is very, very powerful.

[52:38]

You may have an intention as a child to become like a... I know a singer, Linda Ronstadt, she decided to be a singer when she was three or four. And it just stayed underneath everything. And whenever singing occurred, she felt right. She felt complete. Finally, this intention informed it. So if you bring something into your intention, everything starts informing. Of course. I want to get into it. We can talk to the point of saying that she's the interventional security station. Yeah. 10 T.S. I was thinking to myself, if we're looking for the space between the wrong things... Or we're allowing them to be.

[53:44]

Right, allowing them to be. But we actually, over the years, are not in a form of false business. Yes. Because that's what kept coming to my mind, and I thought, now he's not saying that I might be reading it. Yes. Because to me, there seems to be the event that happens to me occasionally in a strange way. I don't know, I don't analyze it. But a great openness of false business, where you receive things which you can't define as false. I can have nothing that I can relate to, but it just happens. And I thought, is that really what we're aiming at? Yes. Yes. Okay, then somebody might ask the question, particularly a psychotherapist, or somebody who's a little nervous, how do we know we're not crazy? Yes. How do we know we're not... How do you know that you're not hearing voices or something like that? Quite difficult. Well... Again, Buddhist practice is rooted in the ability to determine for yourself what's wholesome and unwholesome.

[54:57]

It's called the practice of the four abandonments. Completeness or nourishment would be part of that. What's wholesome now and in the present or unwholesome in the present and what situation now and the present and leads to unwholesomeness or leads to wholeness. This is something you should be able to determine yourself. Now, when I'm giving you these practices of nourishment and completeness and so forth like that, I'm giving you practices that will actually help you determine what's wholesome and what's not wholesome. So when you have a feeling that... Now, Dongshan was asked, this is one of... What I'm talking about now was a turning phrase from me in practice. Dung Shan had heard, read, and talked to other teachers about that to hear the teaching of insentient beings.

[56:05]

Dungsan was a pretty straightforward guy, and when he was young, when he was 15 or something, he was chanting the Heart Sutra, and the Heart Sutra says, no eyes, no ears, no nose, etc. He said to his teacher, what's this all about? I have eyes, I mean, eyes, ears. His teacher said, you're too good for me, you should go to so-and-so. Anyway... So Dung Shan is very straightforward in this. And so he asked this teacher, he said, I don't hear the teaching of insentient beings. What is all this nonsense? He must have been a part Australian. He was an early immigrant from Australia to a different kind. And his teacher said, although you do not hear it, do not hinder that which hears it.

[57:15]

So although you do not hear it, do not hinder that which hears it. Now, when it feels complete and whole, and there's a very definite feeling of of its thoroughness, and it doesn't make you feel debilitated or nervous or lack energy, you can usually trust this. And you can more and more... This is a craft. I'm giving you a kind of rough picture. But the craft is you fill in the in-betweens I'm talking about. And you begin to sense when you're off base, when you're on base, and so forth. But the idea of great function is... to not hinder that which hears it. Yeah.

[58:18]

Even... Yeah, that's great. Funny you say great and humility. It takes considerable humility. Like the guy who said he's written the best book on humility. Yeah, it takes considerable humility. You can practice with that, but always trying to put yourself lower than the other person you're talking to. We have an automatic tendency to try to put ourselves a little above the other person and feel a little above. And it's a bad habit. I mean, But you can start trying, experimenting with the other... Yes? I don't mind. I wonder if that's a man's practice. I think that could be a dangerous suggestion to... Oh, it could be, I suppose.

[59:22]

If you notice you do that, then you ought to try the opposite. That's right. If you notice you... put yourself below, then you ought to try, I don't know, the opposite, but you ought to try at least to feel equal. Sorry to be so male chauvinist there. I really got the feeling, what? Well, it's making yourself vulnerable, or open, or not defensive. Breathing into the space, waiting for things to be given. Patience actually means to wait for things to begin.

[60:27]

Yes, what do you make of it? I suppose that should be changed. Yeah, I hope it is. It's just that some people abuse that. Well, I mean, there's no question that women have a different experience of these things than men in our society. And I, you know, it's hard. I mean, I'm unfortunately a male. And I always try to be as feminine as possible, but I'm not very good at it. But I really got it when I came home from Star Wars with my daughter, who's now 34. And we came home from Star Wars, and I went with a bunch of friends, and we all went together, and we howled. It was great fun to see this movie together. And I came home and said to her, didn't you enjoy Star Wars? No. I said, why not? There was only that wimpy princess and everybody else was a man.

[61:33]

And I thought, what if I went to movies and I only saw a wimpy man and a cast of thousands of women? If I saw that repeatedly, I might start feeling, geez, you know, am I good enough or something like that? But, you know, it's funny, on a little movie like that, I didn't get it until she pointed out to me that everybody in that movie is practically men, all doing kind of things. Oh! [...] No, he sure acted like man. Stereotype. Back to old Descartes. Didn't he dream the night before he formulated, I think therefore I am, that all his left side had decayed? Yeah, I'd heard that, right. My daughter, a little bit. Can I tell another daughter story?

[62:36]

I like my daughter so much. They hated my tell story. Damn, don't tell me that story. But anyway, my daughter Elizabeth, who's now taller than I am, when she was about four, let's see, she was born in 79, so this is 82 or something like that. So she's three or four, nearly four. She was already doing gymnastics, and she was jumping from, you know, she had a weekly class for children in gymnastics, and she was jumping from a table to a chair, and there was this great big armchair we had, that nearly got knocked over. And I was on my way to Tassajara in the middle of the night, it was about, well not the middle of the night yet, it was about 10.30, and she should have gone to bed, but she was staying up while I was getting ready to leave. Tassajara was where we had a monastery. And she's, and I said to her, Elizabeth, would you cut that out, I said, you know, when she nearly knocked this chair over.

[63:39]

I said, you're acting like a little boy. I said... I said, little girls are supposed to sit on the... I said, little girls are supposed to sit on the couch holding a doll to their chest, staring out into space with a benign smile on their face. I really said that to her. She said, I said, the little girl is supposed to sit on a couch, holding a doll, staring out into space with a benign smile on her face. She looked at me and she said, well, some don't. And then she said, and I'm the leader of those who don't. She's been like that ever since, you know, okay, stand back.

[64:49]

So I wanted to go back to what you said about, before we go into the whole discussion, about placing yourself lower than other people. Another person, not other people. Okay, not generally with the interaction. And talk about if you do that habitually when you're off your center, so that it's not done. But you won't do it. This is a craft. Yeah, because if it's done off center, it leads to extraordinary explosion. Yeah, so this is a craft. You do it actually out of strength. But knowing that... That's what I'm saying is correct. I mean, you can't have to take these things I'm talking about in your own experience and make this like... You can tell an artist how to pot, but you actually have to pot to know how to pot.

[65:52]

So you have to feel... Okay, so why don't we take a break? You'll finish afterwards.

[66:05]

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