That you will fall asleep and then you wake up and you want to go back to reading, right? Then you fall asleep again. Then you wake up and say you lost your place, you forgot what it is, so you go back a page. When you start up and you read along, and you get to the same point and you fall asleep again. So you can usually stay awake during the preceding pages, but you get to that point, you know... So it's very useful to study that point. What made you go to sleep? Yeah, but if you look at that point, then you can say, why did I go to sleep at this point in the page? And I can tell sometimes when I can feel, to a limited extent, when a person is connecting with what I'm saying.

[01:28]

In einem begrenzten Ausmaß kann ich also durchaus fühlen, ob jemand also mit dem, was ich sage, verbunden ist. And if they, and I'm distinguishing people who are just bored, I can tell that too. Und ich unterscheide da also von, auch zu Menschen, die einfach nur gelangweilt sind. Also das merke ich auch. Yeah, or my voice is kind of droning on. Oder meine Stimme dröhnt einfach nur. But with a person I can see there's a connection going on. They'll fall asleep for one of two reasons. They have to avoid what I'm saying or they have to hear it with a different mind to let it in when they're sort of sleeping. In some ways, I wish I could snap my fingers like Milton Erickson, and you'd all go to sleep, and I could put in a lot of stuff.

[02:49]

I'd go like this, and you'd wake, oh, that's fun. And in a certain sense, I wish I could cut with my finger like with an Eriksen and you sleep on command alone. And I could really celebrate all this stuff with you. And then at the next finger snap, you're all awake again. Now, if I was a good Zen teacher, I wouldn't have to say all these things. I'd talk about this while I was giving you things, but I'm pretty primitive, so I do it the way I do it. Yes. What you give us in kind of this way, would that stick much better?

[03:50]

Yes, it does stick better. Yes. Yes. I have a question about the bodyless body. I would like to know what makes up such a body, how it is formed, how I can choose, and what the transition is. Well, I would like to know more about these out-of-body bodies and how, you know, what they're made of and how I can experience them and what the transitions are like and so forth. Well, I'm not going to ask you to shave your head. But really to study this kind of thing some kind of mutual commitment has to be there.

[04:54]

It's not free information. Because it can't be. It comes through as I said earlier developing a domain of attunement. And primarily it's shown, not spoken about. So, but I think what I said was enough, which is that The first gate is developing mind-body, weaving together first breath and mind, and then mind and body.

[05:56]

But I think what I said is enough, that we learn to connect breath and mind and that we then weave the body into this breath mind body. At a certain point, when you really have developed this kind of mind-body-phenomenal-world-cohesiveness, the posture itself begins to teach you. And mindfulness itself begins to teach you. But the first is establishing that. I gave a lecture last Sunday in Sinsheim on the relationship between initiations, formal initiations between teacher and disciple

[07:13]

the Sangha and informal initiations that you give yourself. And I use the example of Naropa practicing with Tilopa for 12 years. And he was waiting until Naropa had an objectless state of mind. Because certain initiations cannot be given as if you're going to turn them into an object. inside your own personality or so forth. So, but you know, if you have the feet, what I would say, I'm not speaking to you, taking your question seriously.

[08:18]

If you establish that as something you see as a real possibility, you hold that as a feeling. And you concentrate on establishing a unity of mind and body. And then if you have that feeling that I just mentioned, that will begin to permeate this establishment of mind and body. And when you have this feeling that I just talked about, then it will help you to penetrate this development of this mind and body. So I said a lot in the last while.

[09:53]

I just emphasized how intention works as vision to transform practice. And you don't try to satisfy the vision, you hold the vision. And you hold the vision in the context of practice and it begins to pervade everything and show you what's obvious that you don't see. Anyway, it's something like that. Is it snowing or raining or both?

[10:53]

It was beautiful seeing those big flakes come down earlier. It was beautiful seeing those big flakes come down earlier. Can you ask another question? Of course, yeah. . Well, I'm still carrying this initial theme in my mind about the people who practice more achieve more excellent performance or masterhood and something.

[12:01]

Does that mean, if I translate this, more sitting is better? More days in which you sit once a day is better. Yes. But is it better to sit all day long? No. Well, I'm seeking instruction here. I mean, are there some kind of limits or boundaries? Yes, the more you can practice mindfulness all the time, the better. But Zazen shouldn't be practiced all the time. And I would recommend that no one sit more than two or three hours a day.

[13:10]

In fact, generally, I would say for most people a couple of 40-minute periods is more than enough. Unless you're in a situation with a teacher where there's like a week's session or something, that's different. But in general, daily life, once or twice or maybe three times a day is more than enough. So if a little mindfulness is good, more mindfulness is better. But if a little zazen is good, more zazen is better, no. And that's a very big mistake a lot of people have made. The idea is to bring Zazen mind into your daily life, not bring your daily life and crush it into Zazen.

[14:20]

Someone over here? Yes. For me, meditation was always connected to a goal, to go somewhere or to develop myself somewhere. And at this point I realized that for me it was simply a compulsory exercise. It was no longer fun. I felt that it was like a contra. How did you feel when you noticed that in this sitting it started to make more fun and joy and it was no longer based on anything else? And this goal, how can you best direct this intention so that it does not go in the wrong direction, that it should always be good for me, that I want this and that.

[15:26]

So for me meditation practice used to be kind of very goal oriented like I should achieve a certain goal or change in a certain way and in that sense then it became almost like a job, a duty and lost all pleasure. But now I'm sitting kind of, you know, just sit and kind of recover or retrieve this kind of pleasure in it and this relaxation in it. So my feeling, my advice or my remark at this point would be to express this intention or to feel intention in a way doesn't get mixed up with having a goal or leading to a goal. You can sit here and say that. No, that's completely true. I mean, although several of you expressed to me the agony of sitting, or of this odd posture, I think of Dogen. He describes it as self-joyous samadhi.

[16:36]

I would say the entrance to that is the idea, which I mention very often, of nourishment. Mindfulness, if you want a kind of sense of when you're practicing mindfulness and when you're not, when you're on beam. It's when your state of mind feels nourishing. And when you're sitting zazen and you don't feel nourished, you're not really sitting zazen. And anxiety is the opposite of nourishment.

[17:47]

So if you feel angst, that's what you feel, because also we're just practicing uncorrected mind. But you're also discovering when even the angst can be kind of nourishing, like sometimes when you're sick, it sort of feels good to be sick. Or when the sounds you hear feel nourishing. And your breath feels like food. And your breath is a kind of food. It's actually vitalizing your breath, I mean your blood, your lungs, your mind, your psyche, and so forth.

[18:52]

Both psyche and spirit as words are rooted in breath. Spirit are both rooted in the word breath. So I think I've said way more than enough.

[20:01]

What I'd recommend is, on the whole, you forget everything I've said. Because I'm just trying to give you a picture that, you know, if it stays with you, fine. If it doesn't, it's fine. And under the picture I'm trying to give you a feeling, and if that feeling stays with you, that's better. And for the most part, the most simple of the practices I've given you that hit you, that is what you should do. Bringing mind back to breath. Or if you sit, counting your exhales.

[21:21]

And the other practice, as I mentioned, is naming your exhale and inhale. Yeah, you can say, oh, that was a nice inhale. Or traditionally you say it's a long inhale or a short inhale or exhale. What you're doing there is actually quite interesting because generally we name permanence. We name things that are pretty always there, like this cup. We don't have much habit of naming impermanent things. So when you name your breath in the practice of mindfulness, you're naming something that goes away right away.

[22:36]

It's not there any longer. And it becomes actually, if you get used to it, a different way of language. You begin to be able to find a recognition of impermanent things. Our language keeps tying us to permanent things, substantiating permanent things. So why don't we, we're going to have lunch around one. So it's twenty to one almost, let's sit for five minutes or so, and then we can have a little break and have lunch.

[23:38]

Thank you. There's your exhales.

[27:23]

And there's your, there's the inhales. And there's whether they're even or bumpy. Or long or short? And there's the sound of the rain.

[28:28]

And there's the whole compass of the body. The body in its particulars. And the whole feeling of space around the body and throughout the body. All these things are mind.

[29:33]

And the weaving of mind and breath. There's no goal.

[32:48]

You don't have to do anything or be anything. You're just enjoying aliveness. This kind of ease and relaxation is at the root of practice. And at the root of realization. Dogen again says, self-joyous samadhi.

[34:04]

So we'll meet again at four o'clock, is that okay? That gives you a chance to take a break, practice mindfulness. I'll see you at four o'clock. We develop mindfulness, but how can I develop intention? Because I think in order to practice, it's so important to have intention. So the necessary basis is intention. Well, I think you develop intention in two ways. One is you reinforce its credibility by analysis.

[37:01]

You make your intention more and more believable or credible through analysis, that, hey, this is it. And then also you discover your intention. So you come at it from the point of view of analysis, and you come at it from the point of view of discovery, because often intention is there very deeply, but it's kind of overlaid with other things that are not clear or not recognized. So the more you recognize, recognize intention, it makes it deeper. And, you know, that's, again, the basic idea of Dogen, that your first thought of practice is actually enlightenment. So that's where the intention comes from. And that first thought of practice is an intention, but it's all kind of muddied up. It's not very clear. You don't stick to, you know, it's not clear. But if that intention becomes very clear and you nourish it, you have to, I guess those are the three things, analysis, discovery, and nourishment. And the will body. Oh, yeah.

[38:08]

But the will-body is realized intention. So you don't need a will-body in order to realize intention? A will-body is the fruit of intention. As far as I understood, intention is the pivot. The intention, for instance, if you take the precepts to live your life, as you said, you decided that this life is your own life and then you have the intention and your life is a creative act. And at the last lecture you said the difference between enlightenment experience and enlightenment, there also intention is the pivot, because you have to make the intent. Well, I think pivot's a good word because the basis is understood in two ways. Basis is view.

[39:11]

And it's through intention that we affect the basis or the view. But basis also means something that is both mind and body, mental and physical, and neither. A kind of sub-sub-stratum of consciousness. And it's not within the realm of consciousness. And that basis is where views are lodged. and from that basis project out into our thinking, into our action. And often those views are established or that basis is turned Or seeds are in that basis through practice and through your teacher and through your meditation and through your etc. But it's like a plant that's held down by your karma, by your obstructions. So zazen gives light to that or sunlight to that. Yeah, but it's a different intention to...

[40:18]

Then, for instance, if you have a personal intention from a personality, whether thinking body or your wishes. Well, intention, ideally, is deeper than personality. But wherever you can get it, fine. But intention is... But intention is, as you say, the... It's... I mean, the first of the Eightfold Paths' views, the second is intention. But it's intention that shapes your views, and intention that translates your views. So intention is a kind of pivot between views and the other six of the Eightfold Path. Is that what you meant when you go to Dalai Lama, when he says that it's not what he said when he got his Nobel laureate? Yeah, Nobel Prize. He said, it's not because I'm so good or something like that, but it's my intention. You too could have this intention.

[41:22]

Yeah, I think what he said was, I'm not such a good practitioner. I don't deserve this, in a funny way. He said, but my intention deserves it. Something like that. This intention we all can have. So it's his way of saying, I'm not better than you because I have an intention which we all can have. We, Laura, the other day, I like people who aren't falsely modest. We said to Laura the other night, because we sat and talked with her, and then the next morning, actually, because after our Mike Boss interview, we said to Laura, I said to Laura, you know, we all view you as the secret mayor, and you're the secret mayor of this town. She says, I know. The Burgermeister. Well, I thought she owned the shop. No, she just works there. In fact, when we first came the first year, that old man with the extraordinary face that looks like he should be in any painting of a peasant that's ever been imagined.

[42:27]

It's such a great face. And his wife had just died, and she was the employee. But I hope she's in a profit-sharing arrangement of some kind with him, you know, because basically she's the place. She doesn't know how to drive. She bicycles every day. She bicycles to her every day. Was it like in a Kafka book, the arrangement upstairs, you have the seminar and upstairs everything goes on. Yeah. It was good, no. Worked out all right. I mean, I almost was tempted to say that next time we do a seminar that we can use that room and not, but, you know, we couldn't have many more people. Eighty-some people is about the limit for that room. Mrs. Tweedy could fit in 50 more people.

[43:29]

Not with their legs crossed. It made a nice feeling among people because in the room at, I don't know, at the church, you're more apart from each other and you're not so tempted to give up, give space to others because there's a lot of... No, it's true. I used to notice that in We had a kind of biggish house in San Francisco and a small house at Green Gulch. And always, you know, if we had sort of 12 or 15 people for dinner or something, the smaller room was always more convivial. We had better conversations and more... That's why people like to sit in kitchens, not in dining rooms, living rooms. It's easier to speak also. Yeah. It's easier to feel your breath. Is this, and everyone else's, and smell everyone else's, you mean this to be a part like that?

[44:33]

No, it's broken. Oh. Rest mine. over there please sometimes doksan the sixth day of sashimi people come to doksan dragon breath I need a snorkel yeah that's why I use this drawing no that makes me cough I'm recording this. This is the chitchat in between lectures. It shouldn't always be excluded knowledge. Okay.

[45:35]

So I'm glad you came, you guys. So I... Please sit comfortably. You know, the four foundations of mindfulness is... And like sutras, they start, thus I have heard. So I thought I'd tell you an anecdote about where that comes from. Ananda was in the lineage, there's Buddha and then Mahakashapa and then Ananda.

[46:40]

Buddha, Mahakashapa and Ananda. They would get very upset. Ananda was the Buddha's first cousin and was born on the same day as the Buddha. And Ananda was the first cousin of Buddha and was born on the same day as him. The Buddha, maybe Shakyamuni's first cousin. And after teaching Buddha taught for about, historical Buddha taught for about 45 years. And the first 20 years he didn't have an attendant or only occasionally had an attendant. And so hearing that he wanted an attendant, various people in the assembly or congregation or monks asked if they could be his attendant.

[47:46]

And Buddha said no to all of them. And so somebody asked Ananda if he would be the Buddha's attendant. And Ananda said, if he wants me to be his attendant, he'll ask me. It didn't seem to be overawed by the Buddha. So the Buddha did get around to asking Ananda, hey, will you be my permanent attendant? And Ananda said, I have eight conditions. They're called the four rejections and the four acquisitions. Acquisitions and four rejections.

[49:14]

To get something. To acquire. So the first of the four rejections is the Buddha can give him no robes for being his attendant. And he gets no special food. If they give special food to the Buddha, especially spoiled pork, they... Excuse me. Ananda doesn't have to eat any special food. That's a little joke, because the Buddha died of eating spoiled pork, supposedly. Not a very noble death, is it? Anyway... And he said that he also did not want any special room for being his attendant.

[50:35]

And finally, he didn't have to accept any invitations or no invitations that came to the Buddha, necessarily had to include Ananda. On the other hand, see if I can remember them all, Ananda could bring the four acquisitions. Ananda could accept any invitation for the Buddha, and the Buddha had to go if Ananda accepted it. Already I think Ananda is getting the better deal here. Second, Ananda was able to bring any devoted person to the Buddha and the Buddha would meet with him. Third, Ananda could bring any question or doubt he had and present it to the Buddha, and the Buddha always had to take the time to give him an answer.

[51:54]

And fourth, if the Buddha happened to give a talk or a sermon while Ananda was away, when Ananda came back, the Buddha had to repeat it for Ananda. The Buddha said yes to all these things, right? So Ananda was the one person who heard all of the Buddha's teaching. So later, when they tried to compile the teachings, 84,000 sermons, none of them on tape, they would turn to Ananda and he'd say, Thus I have heard. And he would say, somebody asked him once, he said, not a syllable is different.

[53:33]

Of course, in a non-oral culture like ours, we couldn't imagine saying that, but in an oral culture, it's possible. So I certainly don't remember Sir Kirsi's teaching syllable by syllable, but the reason I didn't want to go to Japan, except that he asked, was that I began to miss his lectures, and I couldn't expect him to give me four years of lectures when I got back. Yes, and of course I can't remember talking about Suzuki Roshi word for word. And that was also one of the reasons why I didn't like going to Japan so much, apart from the fact that it was of course sufficient for me that he wanted me to go, because I couldn't wait for him to repeat four years of lectures.

[54:35]

And I just missed it. I told you this story, I don't know, just because it amused me and because I thought it put a human face sort of on this, this, you know, big, big, big founder of Buddhism. What I'm trying to do in speaking to you about mindfulness, in a way I wish I could teach mindfulness just as it might be useful to any person in any category of life. But I'm kind of limited because, you know, I'm a Buddhist and I understand it from a certain point of view, so I'm teaching it from the Buddhist point of view.

[55:39]

But also, although it's commonplace now for everyone to speak about mindfulness, you know, of course mindfulness, it actually is Buddhist teaching. It didn't exist before Buddhism. I don't mean there's a kind of mindfulness and awareness in our culture, but specifically the phrase mindfulness and its common use comes from Buddhism. In general, mindfulness comes from a teaching called the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. And that's mindfulness of the body through the body.

[56:55]

Mindfulness of the feelings through the feelings. Achtsamkeit der Gefühle durch Gefühle. And mindfulness of consciousness, awareness through consciousness. Und Achtsamkeit des Bewusstseins oder Gewahrseins durch Bewusstsein. And mindfulness of the dharmas through the dharmas. Und Achtsamkeit der dharmas durch die dharmas. Now, these four actually overlap a lot, so it's very hard to teach them separately. But I think it's useful if you think of this as a kind of cooking process. When Arnold Schwarzenegger brings his mind to his muscle, it's a kind of cooking process or alchemical process. So you're mixing mind, body, feelings, the phenomenal world through this practice of mindfulness.

[58:17]

So again, I'm trying to present these to you so that you can hold them in view. Because there's two aspects to practice, really. One is that there's specific things you can do. But the more subtle... aspects you can't do, but you can hold in view. So now I'm talking about mindfulness of the body. When we talk about the breath, we're talking about mindfulness of the body. Because the breath is called a body-conditioned thing.

[59:36]

Of course, it also can be conditioned by the mind, but it arises through the body. So I've said quite a bit about the mindfulness of the body through the breath. So we could say mindfulness of the... How can I put it? mindfulness of breathing through the mind. And we could say mindfulness of the breathing through breathing.

[60:43]

So you don't have an observer which is breathing, but breathing is, what can we say, breathing itself. Now, another aspect of conditioned things is the organs of the body. And you practice mindfulness of the organs of the body, and generally that can be done most easily in the sitting posture. And maybe we could say if Schwarzenegger says a pump with the mind in it is worth ten, et cetera, maybe we could say a liver with the mind in it is worth ten livers without the mind in it. I'm sure in the history of Buddhist teaching no one has ever said anything quite that silly, but anyway.

[61:51]

But you actually take care She gives her own talks, I don't know what she said. But actually you take care of your body and your organs through bringing mindfulness to them. Now I'm not going to go into it, but we spent the whole last seminar I just did in Sinsheim on the five elements.

[62:53]

Which is one part of the practice of mindfulness of the body. And the basic idea there is that the macrocosm and the microcosm, or you and the phenomenal world, are made from the same stuff. And although you can know that intellectually or conceptually, how do you feel it? And you feel it by bringing mindfulness to each of the four or five elements and feel their continuity in the world and in yourself. So nothing is dead. All your minerals, your solidity, your fluidity, all those, the wind, earth element, etc., all are alive and connected and flowing with the world.

[64:01]

But we could spend a whole weekend on that, so we won't, because I just did that. But what I'd like to emphasize here then is the, how can I say, because it's such a negative word in English, your deportment. Deportment means your conduct, how you carry yourself. Yeah, so what are you trying to say? I don't know. I don't know. I'm trying to say that... You have to give the lecture now.

[65:24]

I'm trying to say that deportment, while it's a rather unattractive word, it's one of the aspects of mindfulness of the body. Conduct, discipline, deportment, nobody knows how to translate it. What was it about deportment, the relationship to mindfulness? That deportment is one word for the practice of mindfulness of the body. So I'm wondering how to express that, but let me just say that there's a domain of each action.

[66:28]

that you develop a feeling for. So, say I have my glasses. There's a domain of holding my glasses. And that's also very similar to what a dharma means. A dharma is a non-repeatable, unique, ungraspable moment. But that has its own organizing or centering quality. So if I'm sitting here, there's a domain of my sitting here.

[67:56]

And if I get up, I have some feeling of a domain of getting up. Does that make sense? So I get up, and I have a feeling of coming up as a specific act. And I know when it feels complete, when it's completed. And I don't just stand up, I come up to standing. And no matter what I do, what anyone does, if you're mindful, is it has this sense of being a domain in which you exist for a moment. And as each breath that you count, say, or notice a long breath or a short breath, you're naming something that's not graspable and immediately disappears.

[69:16]

And you notice the breath arising and disappearing. And you notice the conditions from which it arises and the conditions of it disappearing. So I'm trying to give you a sense of Buddhist mindfulness doesn't just mean paying attention to what you're doing. It actually means more like a domain of aliveness, which is not permanent. It only exists for a moment.

[70:25]

But its power is in its impermanence. If my hand was made of stone, it would have not much power. And the pigeons would shit on it. But my hand has more power. I mean, if I turn it toward you like that, there's some power in that, which is different than if I turn it like this, etc. And a healer is somebody who has begun to feel their power the power that's in the posture of their hands. But that healing power is always present in every posture if it's mindful. How can I give you another feeling for this?

[71:30]

Generally we think that I'm standing here in this space And if I have this scarf for example, it is in my hands. And if I put it down, I put it down in this space of this room. But that's not actually what happens, I think, scientifically or buddhistically. There's no such thing as the space of this room.

[72:31]

Independent from this scarf. So this scarf is its own space. Just as much as the room is its own space. And one isn't more real than the other. So if I take the scarf and I fold it it's now a different space. And from the point of view of Buddhism, it's now a different object. It's no longer a scarf. It might be a good pillow, but it won't keep my neck warm. Now you may think this is silly, but if you get the feeling for it, it's actually quite different world to live in.

[73:46]

So when I put the scarf on, I have the feeling of joining the scarf in creating a certain space. And that's, of course, where mudras come from. Yes. Is your space in that very moment different from the space of the skull? They're interrelated. And it's your together scarf, Richard's face. Yes, you could call it like that. And it's a different space than the scarf before, falling down and Richard standing.

[74:49]

And it's totally unique and will never happen again. And it's not graspable. Is it the same phenomenon that I experience when I am talking or living standing up or sitting, like the scarf folded or hanging down as a scarf? Well, this is why we speak about the four domains or the four postures of walking, standing, sitting, lying. And it's not you who happen to be walking or you who happen to be lying. No, the walking you is not the same as the lying you, as you know. But we tend to try to emphasize the permanence more than we emphasize the discontinuity. And when we talk about everything's impermanent in Buddhism, we mean our mind rests in impermanence.

[75:51]

You can see I'm getting myself in trouble in a minute if I go any further. Help. Helfer. Helfer. But maybe simply when we, later when we take a break, you can have a feeling of yourself not as permanent, but as in the domain of walking when you walk downstairs or one of you two. If we practiced with these flowers, as I've done in the past with practice of direct perception,

[77:17]

Maybe, Eric, you could move the flowers to the middle for me, could you please? Another Buddhist cripple. That's why I didn't get up and move him. It's useful to practice with the Four Noble Truths taking something as an object of direct perception.

[78:44]

This is a way to remind yourself of how things exist. So first you can look at the flowers from the point of view of impermanence as suffering. From the point of view of time. The flowers are quite beautiful right now, but eventually they will wither and die. And on that perception, you can feel your own withering and dying and arising and disappearing. So the second noble truth is that there's a cause.

[79:54]

These are interdependently related to everything. And you can spend a few moments, you know, reminding yourself that a florist brought these here or someone went and bought them at the florist. And there was a gardener in a greenhouse. And there was a truck that brought them using gasoline. And Esso or British Petroleum or somebody, you know, made a buck, you know, or a Deutschmark. And there was a certain amount of pollution, you know. And over the fields of the flowers and the greenhouses that you see drive by, sometimes you can see the gray sky sweeping.

[81:11]

And you can see the whole history of people raising flowers and so forth. And the tulip mania of the Dutch in the 17th century or whenever it was. Or you can go back to the Buddha holding up a flower for Mahakashyapa. So there's nothing that is not connected to these flowers. And that's the second noble truth, that everything is caused. And the third noble truth is that there's a freedom from causation. This is a little harder to get, but on one hand it means enlightenment.

[82:22]

But it also means something like my daughter saying, I belong to me. The flowers at this moment are in a condition of flowering independent of their birth and their decay. And this is their karmic moment with us, which is different from the seed and the compost. And this is expressed in Buddhism by firewood is firewood, ashes are ashes. Or as I say somewhat jokingly, pig is not the past of pork. Pork is a human history inflicted on pigs.

[83:35]

But it means that each thing at this moment, dharmic moment, is independent and free. In that sense, the flowers are their own space. And free of past, present and future. Now, the sense of Buddhism is that you can enter this freedom of past, present and future as the continuity of mind. Which is dynamically very different than having a continuity of mind based in an assumed permanence. So you see that when you practice Buddhism and look at mindfulness, you immediately get into a pretty deep way of looking at things.

[84:46]

And then you have, again, the domain of your liver. Both interconnected and also quite independent. And you can know it both ways. And you can know your friend that way. You can look at your friend as interconnected with everything around him and his own family and with you. I can look at your friend as quite independent, almost luminous, complete being. And your friend also exists that way, though most of our friends don't know it. And you can help your friend by knowing your friend that way.

[86:10]

If you can recognize them that way, you intuitively instill in them the possibility of seeing themselves that way. And that's called the true practice of generosity. And that's the first parameter of perfection, to practice generosity of that kind. Maybe we sit for a minute and then we have a break.

[87:35]

The sound is caused by the bell and my striking it. But the sound has its own past, present and future in you. It's connected to the bell and has its own independence from the bell. It's connected to the bell and is completely independent of it.

[88:59]

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