I lived through the 60s you know in San Francisco. Quite a large percentage of the people I knew took a lot of psychedelics. And in the middle of the phenomenology of some extraordinary experience, They'd write down an accurate description of it. And then you read it later and you think, oh God. It's really nothing. But I think when you, I don't know, you're a great, wonderful writer. I'm just an amateur talker.

[01:10]

But I have some experience of when a line does appear, you start writing. The situation now includes the line you've written. And sometimes that line you've written It's like a fountain, an artesian well in the situation which more flows out of those very words. Okay. Yeah. I would like to hear more about this imperturbable able mind.

[02:21]

From my experience, because I didn't sit for one year now, and I watched how I'm functioning, then first I was dissatisfied because I didn't find time, And then I just accepted it and then I just watched how I was functioning. And now you talked about a changed point where you see the world. And you only can do this with a highly established practice of mindfulness. this imperturbable mind. I'm interested in that.

[03:22]

Yeah, who isn't? Okay. Well, maybe we can discover it. So I should speak a little bit, I think, about mindfulness. It seems to be what's expected. Again, we have this alchemical formula. Cleans his balls, washes his feet. Sits upright. and intently establishes himself in mindfulness.

[04:23]

There's a lot in that statement. Intently establishes himself in mindfulness. I think one of the answers to Suzuki Roshi's questions When is a tree a poem? One of the answers is Rilke's poem. The space outside of ourselves violates things. If you want to establish the existence of a tree, Invest it with that space which finds its source in you. Surround it with constraints. Surround it with constraints. Surround it with constraints. In other words, let it grow again in the space, that space which arises from within you.

[05:40]

This space has no boundaries. The tree can only be found through your renunciation. I think this is one answer to Suzuki Roshi's question. When is a tree a poem? Okay. Okay. Invest it with mindfulness. What is this mindfulness? Just simple attention? Well, the first foundation of mindfulness.

[06:42]

And it's called the first. It's called a foundation. It's not only a foundation for our own practice. And realization. It's a foundation for the second practice of mindfulness. And they're meant to be understood as a path in a sequence. And the first is you bring attention to your body. You bring attention to your body as a what and not as a who. You're asking, what is it? You're not asking, who is it? If you go to a doctor, the doctor says, what's wrong? The psychotherapist says, who's wrong?

[07:53]

The doctor says, what's wrong? Well, my stomach is, or my kidney or something. The doctor's concerned with the what-ness of the kidney. The wholeness of the kidney might be important, but the whatness of the kidney is first. Now that's actually a harder thing to do for most of us Westerners than you'd think. You've got to be able to ask yourself the question, what am I? And not have that question always eclipsed or pressed down or ignored. by the question, who am I?

[09:01]

You've got to be able to put who am I out of your life for a while. The first foundation of mindfulness is based on the primary question being that fills you, what am I? What is this? It's essential. It's the what-ness. The what-ness of this. Yeah. Good translation. Um... So you bring attention to the body. But how to the body? To the activities of the body. To various... Okay, there's no generalizations here. There's no who here, which is a kind of generalization, too.

[10:13]

There's just what. Well, which what? Are you going to think about it? Then you've... Then you've... you think about it in this consciousness you borrowed from your culture. So how do you, if you're not going to think about which what you bring your attention to. You have to get yourself into the habit of just trusting what appears. You don't want to get so distracted as 100 watts a minute. What's a minute?

[11:19]

You're so distracted, you bring your attention to this and then this and then this. So there's a craft here. Or an art. Bring your attention to just what appears. But you're not distracted. You try to stay with it for a while. So it might be your physical activity. Might be your breath. Most powerful, most important is your breath. Your breath does many things. As I always point out, bringing attention to the breath, to be able to do it for more than a few moments, means you have to be able to find your sense of continuity in the body.

[12:28]

When we spoke about this the other day, At the Johanneshof Sashin, Marie-Louise was translating, and as she translated, had the experience of riding a horse. So I was speaking about a physical, visceral continuity. Because usually our attention goes back to our mind. Because we need for our psychological health And our sense of identity. Continuity in our thoughts. When we lose that, we feel crazy. Yeah, but you can get, so you don't have to follow continuity, the continuity of the world through your thoughts.

[13:33]

Thinking can idle in neutral, not even first gear. So when I tried to speak about this sense of a physical, visceral continuity in the world, a whatness you share with the world, you don't share wholeness with the world. You don't have a who as a tree. You have a what as a tree. So the more I feel my what-ness, I share that what-ness with each of you and with everything. And when you're really established in that what-ness, There's a very solid feeling of continuity which is closely connected with imperturbable mind.

[15:08]

So as I was trying to talk about this, Marie-Louise did not know she knew the experience. But she found herself translating with the feeling of riding a horse uphill in a muddy field. She says, you have this horse... Struggling to feel its whole body through your body physically going up the hill. And yes, the practice of first foundation of mindfulness is much like that. You feel some immense solidity. And the other foundations of mindfulness are based first of all on coming into that solidity. A kind of sedimentation of mind in the body.

[16:11]

So little Sophia is trying to get her body together, her senses together, and bring that into attentiveness. and develop and shape a consciousness that intermingles with her parents so that she can live in our world. She wants desperately to live in our world. So we have to kind of give ourselves into her infant's consciousness, to find ourselves in her not yet fully shaped space, And the more we can be there, we can draw her here.

[17:41]

So she draws us into her space and we draw her into our space. And together we create a shared consciousness. And so we can begin to shape language and so forth. So all of this is going from the body into shaping a consciousness. And in the practice of mindfulness, you're taking all of that away and going back into the body. And it's not really the mind looking at the body. I think the actual wording in the sutra is to know the body in the body. It's not about the mindfulness of the body. It's almost like you pour attention, pour a mind into the body.

[18:48]

And you find various openings to pour it in. But you lose the point of view of an observer. So it's just the body. Horse body and muddy field. To get. So what are the openings that you pour mind, pour attention into? Breath is one of the most powerful. And you learn to experience things in pauses. to get into the habit of knowing things in pauses. The clear comprehension of each activity cleaning the bowls washing the feet the clear comprehension of the in-breath

[19:52]

That's a kind of pause. And that's a teaching to bring a pause to each moment. That shouldn't interfere. Clear comprehension of an in-breath. The clear comprehension of that moment where the breath changes from an in-breath to an out-breath. And the clear comprehension of the out-breath. And that pause at the top of the shift. Yeah, like that. That's one of the openings. Another opening is the postures. We actually have a different mind with each posture.

[21:06]

Let me go back to a truism of yogic culture. I have to remind myself always All mental phenomena have a physical component. All sentient physical phenomena have a mental component. All sentient physical phenomena have a mental component. The first foundation of mindfulness is to develop the ability to know the physical feeling of every state of mind. Yeah, so the openings are the four postures. Walking, standing, sitting, reclining. And to begin to use that to really know there's a different mind that goes with walking or standing. And to really fulfill and stabilize the mind of each of these four noble postures.

[22:27]

Yeah, and then there's the dimensions that we can notice, the four openings of solidity. liquidity, motility, movement, and heat and space. Those are all openings into which you can pour Attention and mindfulness. So I can shift into the feeling of solidity and feel the solidity of each of you. Bones, stuff. And perhaps I can also feel your aware energy. This is a word I want to get into the dictionary.

[23:41]

Awareness doesn't work, energy doesn't work, let's put them together. So each of you have an aware energy. Okay, like that. And then, lunchtime. And then there's the parts of the body. Yeah, and so forth. So we've sort of entered the first foundation of mindfulness. Maybe we can come to the important transition to the second foundation of mindfulness. And it's expected that you have so established yourself as a given at the beginning of the sutra. before you try to cope with the experience of all dharmas are without self.

[25:00]

Okay. Let's sit for one minute. I don't promise it will be one minute. What time are we supposed to come back and start? Five, three, 3.30? 3.30, okay. Thank you very much.

[27:26]

I hope we have a good lunch. And if Christiane is in charge, it will be good. So I see you at 3.30. Should we come 10 minutes late? Because we're starting a little late. Welcome. Welcome. In this wonderful place, there are so many bird sounds.

[28:54]

Yeah, I can say there's a kind of field of bird sounds as well as this A field of trees. But if your attention is within these bird sounds, They're very precise. Each one is so precise. So different from another. I wish I could speak so clearly. I can say something like immersion in a field of

[30:15]

non-grasped being. What good does that do anyone? I can't say that was anything like the precision of the birds. So I don't know, you know, it's a I feel foolish saying these things. But if you don't take my words as descriptive but take them as directive and pointing in some direction. So we spoke earlier about the first foundation of mindfulness.

[31:25]

And you want... Yeah, it's just a primitive practice in a sense. It's simple. You're bringing attention to... What you can notice. And in this first foundation of mindfulness, you're bringing attention primarily to the body. Are the 80 people all taken care of? Or do you have to leave? Oh, tomorrow. Okay. Thanks. So you trust just what you notice.

[32:33]

Because you don't want to think about what you bring attention to. We can give you a general picture of openings into the body in which you can pour the liquid of mind. It's strange, it's almost like the mind is sedimented in the body, or awareness is sedimented. And gives the I hate to say these words. It gives the body a kind of solidity. Like I said, you feel if you're riding a horse.

[33:36]

When the solidity of the horse goes into your body. The first foundation of mindfulness is to bring that sense of solidity into your body. Yeah, and so generally you can bring attention to your activity. I'm reviewing slightly here. To the four postures. To breaths. Which takes you out of the continuity of mind, of thought. And which weaves mind and body together. So it's almost a little bit like... You're making some mixture and breath stirs it up.

[34:41]

Weaving mind and body together. And then you pour in some vanilla sauce. You pour in something into the four postures. I pour something into the four elements. And now you pour something into the parts of the body. Now the Satipatthana Sutra mentions the 32 parts of the body. But when I refresh this practice in myself, yeah, you can aim at the 32 parts. But I find 32 parts just in my hand. Yeah, so I like to start with my hands usually anyway.

[35:56]

So I start with the first joint of my little finger. Hi there. Yeah. The first thing you do when a baby's born is they either tell you it's a boy or a girl or they tell you it's got ten fingers and toes. Seems very important. It's got ten fingers and toes. But after we've got them, we kind of forget about it. So we bring our attention to each part of the finger. Now you can bring your attention to your organs too. And if I start with my hand, I usually work up my arm.

[37:09]

By then bringing attention to my shoulder, I can go into my body torso more easily. And you can begin to feel the the so-called interior of the body. The stomach is obvious. You can feel your stomach when it's indigestion. And you can feel your lungs pretty easily. Yeah. The kidney and other things are harder to feel because they're functioning throughout the body. They have an anatomical location. But in actual fact, the functioning is throughout the body.

[38:10]

It's like you can feel your heart, but you can also feel your circulatory system. Now this, I know sometimes if I speak about this as a practice, I feel like, geez, some people feel, okay, so we've got a stomach and lungs, why do I have to bother? But then if I'm in the world of Buddhist practice, the power of attention is so taken for granted, it's taken for granted that you bring attention to the parts of your body as much as we take a shower.

[39:28]

Take a shower, you feel better. And really all the parts of your body, your organs feel better when they've been washed in mind. Sometimes I say these things, I think, I sound like a New Age something or other. Which usually I pronounce Newage. Because new age rhymes with sewage.

[40:29]

New age, new age. Because sometimes the new age gets a little rooted in spiritual ideas rather than practice. But anyway, we wash the organs of the body and mind. However that sounds, I'm saying it. And we're talking about the what-ness of the body, not the who-ness. So say you start with the fingers again. You bring attention to each finger. Each part of the finger. Yeah. The back of the hand.

[41:35]

And you can feel the bones in your hand. And you can feel your knuckles. You've got more than 32 there already. One, two, three, five, ten, thirty. Okay. So it doesn't matter. I mean, I think, discover your own parts of the body. Yeah, so, I mean, you do that after a while, you feel your bones moving in your hand when you do something. And you feel the skin... and all the stuff in and around the bones. You feel it as much as you feel, you know, we know the outside, I know the outside of my hand. Through this very ordinary Buddhist practice, I would say I know the inside of my hand better than the outside of my hand.

[42:44]

I can't really, I can see the outside of my hand, I can't feel it with the detail, I can feel the inside. And there's a larger quantity of inside than there is of outside. Yeah, I can feel this part of my hand. And I can feel this part of my hand. Then I can feel this part of my hand. And that's something different than these two parts. If you concentrate on your hand and just feel your hand, this part is different than this part. Sometimes it feels like there's a kind of something different right here.

[43:51]

Almost like you're cupping a column that you could hold in your hand. Whether you feel something like that, exactly like that, you do feel something different. Yes, so what have we got here? We've got stuff plus something. So I said, just what is the hand? I mean, the what-ness of the hand. Instead of the who of the hand, we're looking at the what of the hand. But the what of the hand isn't the same as this. There's some difference between the knuckles and the bones. And the difference between the fingers and the... center of the palm.

[44:59]

You know, I think if you have some, you know, you can feel what healers do with their hands, because you can feel your own hands a bit. Now, if you just look, if you look at the who of the hand, oh, these are my hands, they don't have much in the way of an independent existence. But if you look at the what of the hands, you find the what is something extraordinary. Then see it. So I'm calling it now stuff plus. We don't know what the plus is exactly. But we can feel it. And if you go up, say, now you've gone back up through the shoulders into the lungs. You can feel the space and sponginess of the lung.

[46:24]

And for this little experiment, I suggest you start with the right lung first. You get a pretty clear feeling of the The lung and the ribcage. And the lung up in, the tip of the lung up into the shoulder. And to get a feeling of it, first you can move air up into the tip of the upper part of the lung. And you can see if you can visualize filling every corner of the lung. And if you bring attention to the right lung like this the right lung begins to return the favor. The feeling of the right lung, which is different from the arm, begins to give you a

[47:31]

A lungful feeling. How are you feeling today? Oh, lungful. So there's some kind of quality the lung has that that begins to pervade the body when you bring attention to the lung. Yes, this is kind of fun to do. Maybe it is like a baby discovering what he or she can do with the body. So anyway, every time I do it, which I've done it many times for 30 years now, excuse me, 40 years, I'm trying to forget how old I am.

[48:57]

I'm going to have to be 65 to see my daughter into college. I mean, 85 to see my daughter in the college. I'm looking for the fountain of youth. And if you know where it is, let me know. But perhaps this practice is, you know, something close to... Regularly waking up the body from inside. Yeah, so you wake up, now I've been speaking about waking up or getting familiar again with, renewing your friendships. with your right lung. And it's just as whatness. Now you go over to the left lung. So now because you know the right lung, you can really feel the left lung.

[50:18]

Very quickly you can feel it reaching up into the shoulder and so forth. But there's something different. There's some kind of different feeling right here. And you can begin to feel feel something different here. It's not the lung. And it has a presence like the palm of your hand. So you have this heart area. And you can now, because you've, I find anyway to Not just assume I have this heart area, but to notice it in relationship to the lungs. Not noticing it as some spiritual quality or anything. Just noticing the stuff of the lungs. heart area.

[51:28]

Whatness of it. It's quite a little field. And it reaches into the whole of the body through the circulatory system. But it also reaches through some kind of presence. And you can begin to feel a presence of the body itself. And in fact, you're awakening the presence of the body. And now also, instead of thinking, oh, I have a chakra system, you discover actually, oh yes, not only is there a feeling here, there's a feeling in here centered. And there's some kind of feeling here too that's different than against more like the palm of the hand.

[52:38]

Yeah, but you can't really compare it. It's as different as each bird sound. It's very precise and yet it tends to be a wide precise feeling. And I find one of the things that characterizes the chakras They tend to draw everything into them. At the same time, they seem to go out in all directions. And the more you practice, the more these things seem to have a life of their own. One of the obvious ones for people who practice is this area here. Yeah, which often tingles.

[54:05]

or itches. And I mention it partly because some people come up to me and get worried. I've been practicing, wow, I have this funny feeling here, everything is going like this, like that. I say, don't worry, why do you suppose the Buddha's got that bump on his head? The bump is a, I mean, there's a human, the Buddha is sculpted to be quite human. But it also has the indications on it that the subtle body is predominant. So they put the bump on the head here. And they put jewels on the body often, if it's a bodhisattva, or the clothes fold exactly at the chakra.

[55:26]

Now I think if you look at the who of the body, Yes, this is important. Yes, part of your personal history. Yes, that's accumulated. But you miss something if you don't also look at the what-ness of the body. The whatness that we share with everything. When you find this tingling, say, it's actually responding to the tree which is a poem. Or you find that... Certain states of mind where you feel particularly clear are signaled by this feeling.

[56:42]

clear and not separated. And often the more you feel your what-ness and the what-ness of everything is one continuity, you're more likely to feel this activity. So what have we got here? The first foundation of mindfulness is to come into the bodyfulness of the body. Not the mindfulness of the body, really.

[57:45]

Whatever I say is wrong. I'm used to that. But we have some directionality here. And the directionality of bodyfulness of the body is better than mindfulness of the body. It's hard to translate in German. I'm sorry. No, don't have to. Oh, yeah. I don't mind. Okay. Yeah, how wonderful it is. Each of you, wow, wow. Each of you has... such a amazing

[59:03]

subtlety, presence. If we can get our mind away from the who of us, and settle into the whatness of us, which we share with everything, and yet that whatness is It's stuff plus. Okay, so now we're in the second foundation of mindfulness. Which is the simplest of the four. And so the fact that it's so simple should give you a clue. That it says, Geralt says, the hinge. The hinge of the teaching. That makes this into a path. Yes. So what's the second foundation of mindfulness?

[60:27]

The first, third and fourth are a whole bunch of things. The second is only mindfulness of feelings. Not emotions. But feelings of pleasurable or not pleasurable. So we have an entry there. We have an entry there. You can notice when things feel pleasurable or when things don't feel pleasurable. That's easy enough to do. We spend a lot of time doing that. We wander through the world. Pleasurable? Okay. Non-pleasurable? Okay. But it's a kind of pendulum.

[61:32]

And it's a kind of dangerous pendulum. Because it gets us in the habit of thinking, feeling in either-or terms. The world is divided into what we like and what we don't like. But as what is a is the door to the first foundation of mindfulness. Neither pleasurable nor not pleasurable is the door of the second foundation of mindfulness. The world as a whole doesn't fall into your likes and dislikes. And if you tend to have a habit of like or dislike.

[62:42]

you miss most of the world. This forest is not involved in your likes and dislikes. If I look out at these trees and so forth, I can just... see them. Yeah, I can practice bare seeing or something like that. And such practices are meant to kind of peel off like and dislike. But if I can kind of let go like and dislike, much fuller, world appears.

[63:47]

Now, I discovered when I talked about this the other day that I again have to make the distinction between feeling and emotions. All these things get conflated. Conflated means Pushed together. I mean, commerce wants our attention. Commerce wants our attention. The advertisers buy our attention. Even the news buys our attention to sell products. So the news that gets our attention is what's reported. And our attention is externalized.

[65:15]

Yeah, and commercialized. Yeah, and simplified. And it's our most precious... Our attention is... What we give attention to is our life. How many of you give more attention to your clothes then your right lung. This is a terrible mistake. I'm serious, it's a terrible mistake. But it's like a disease. It's nice to have nice clothes, I agree. Fashionably undressed. But I give a lot more attention to my right lung and left lung. So there's a distinction between feeling and emotion.

[66:37]

What's the distinction? An emotion is involved... There's various ways I can approach it. An emotion is involved with feeling. If I brush my finger across Sophia's cheek, It can be pleasurable, I hope. He's embarrassed, he's blushing. If I scratch Sophia's cheek, she pulls her head away.

[67:52]

It's unpleasant. This is not really emotion. At the moment she's born, before she has any memories of anything really, if I touch her cheek gently, it's pleasure. And from the time of her birth, when she has no memory at all, when I stroke her, it will be pleasant for her. Give her the smell of garbage. We have a little composting can in our kitchen. Sometimes it smells pretty bad. So I put the baby's head in it. She goes... I'm experimenting. Yeah, if I dump it on the floor?

[68:58]

But she doesn't get angry. Why should she get angry? It's the same smell. I hold her down to the floor and say, smell that kid. But if Marie-Louise comes back, she gets angry. That's an emotion. The smell is just a feeling. Pleasurable or unpleasurable. Yeah, so if Mary Louise comes back into the kitchen and the garbage is in the garbage can, She's not angry. If I dump it on the floor, she's angry. Yeah. What the heck did you jump on the floor for? The baby made me do it.

[70:07]

At gunpoint, yes. No, I'm joking. So where does the anger come from? The anger comes from associations. She doesn't want the garbage on the floor, etc. The baby doesn't care whether it's on the floor or in the can. So there's a big difference between feeling and emotion. The source is different. The source is the body itself. Before Sophia has memory or anything, she has pleasurable and not pleasure.

[71:12]

So we can begin to study our feelings. So we have feelings of pleasurable and not pleasurable. And indifferent or neither nor. Now, feelings of pleasurable or not pleasurable. They can arise from the body. They can arise from perceptions. I hear the bird sounds, it's pleasure. I hear some constant hum of the refrigerator, perhaps it's not pleasure. Mm-hmm. Feelings of pleasure and not pleasure can also arise from memory.

[72:26]

I remember the particular smells. or I have all kinds of associations. So part of the practice of the second foundation of mindfulness is to know whether feelings of pleasure and not pleasure rising from the body, or from perception, or from memory, or a mixture. And there's a big difference. You can think of it as a kind of funnel. Okay. that likes and dislikes funnel in associations.

[73:33]

It's an opening for all your likes and dislikes going back a million years. And it shuts off the subtle body. Okay? So the subtle body, like the feeling of the chakras, the heart, the palms of the hand, the stuff plus is lost in likes and dislikes. Likes and dislikes are so gross that the subtlety of presence is lost. So the practice of the second foundation of mindfulness is to open up the knowing of neither like nor dislike, and to allow, how can I say it, to get familiar with not only being established in the

[74:58]

physical, visceral continuity of the body, but to also be established in... in the presence of the subtle body, the presence of the body itself, and the subtlety of the body itself, Before likes and dislikes shut it off. Do you understand that this makes sense? There's so much just obvious practical wisdom in a teaching like these four foundations of mindfulness. That's a path.

[76:22]

Until you deal with the whiteness of the body, you can't have a direct experience of this subtle presence. And in a sense, practically stabilize yourself in it. And now open yourself up to the way I usually talk about non-graspable feeling. It's like there's a feeling in this room right now. That's what I usually say. In any discussion about the Dharma, I try to find an excuse to remind you that everything is mind. Da versuche ich immer eine Entschuldigung dafür zu finden, euch daran zu erinnern, dass alles meint ist.

[77:29]

Und ich versuche auch eine Entschuldigung dafür zu finden, euch immer wieder daran zu erinnern, dass das, was eigentlich vor sich geht und was wichtig ist, I'm trying to speak to your mind enough to occupy it, to keep your attention, but I'm really trying to speak to your non-graspable feeling, which at each moment is different. Not only you individually, but together, the feeling in the room. Which is different than when we were sitting, meditating. It's different from moment to moment. And this is not emotion.

[78:31]

This is something to do with the subtle presence of the what-ness of this situation itself. The what-ness that we can't separate from spirit. So if you smell the garbage in the pail, it's merely unpleasant. You don't even like or dislike it. But when it's on the floor, and you skidded in it and fell on your back, then displeasure turns into dislike.

[79:46]

I thought of that once when I was a waiter. One night I was One late afternoon Memorial Day, I and the other waiter were extremely busy. We worked as a team. And we were the, excuse me for saying so, but the fastest team. A guy named Pierre, a short guy, an artist who had a lot of energy. So this is just an anecdote. Nothing to do with subtle body or anything. So they kept giving us all the extra tables.

[80:47]

Because all the other waiters were overloaded. So we said, yeah, we'll take them, but we don't clear the table. We're going to just put all the courses down at once. We'll take you as a table if that's agreement. Okay, they'd say, fine. So at one point I had this big table with about eight people in a big circle. And the table that appetizer dishes, main courses and desserts and everything was all on the table. And I had a big metal tray and I piled everything on it. And on the top I put the coffee carafe.

[81:57]

And I picked it up and started for the kitchen. I had fun doing these things. And this young woman who wanted to work as a waitress all summer at this place And the management always said no. Let her work that night. And as I started for the kitchen she tried to squeeze between me and the table and hit me in the stomach and off went the tray. They sued for $10,000 later. They sued the restaurant.

[83:02]

But dishes just began raining down on the table. And the coffee carafe spun around. It was like something out of the movies. And some guy got hit by a big platter and it broke over his head a big what? a big platter as he started to get up the plate hit him and he went back down this is all true it wasn't staged and his wife stood up and said he just got over a coronary And the young woman was running away. The waitress had hit me in the stomach.

[84:03]

And I said, come back here. She turned around, came running back, hit all the food on the floor and slid on her back. And the entire restaurant, about 125 people were up. So that's an example of, I said, garbage on the floor, and you can see all of this story appeared. So you see how associations pour into something. So when it's on the floor and it's no longer just not pleasurable, it becomes a dislike.

[85:14]

You open yourself to all kinds of moods, irritation, it's always like this, blah, blah, blah. So it's useful to see the wound of likes and dislikes. It doesn't have to be a wound. But if you have wounds, karmic wounds, they enter, re-enter you continually through likes and dislikes. Somehow, the more you're based in neither like nor dislike,

[86:47]

In the second foundation of mindfulness, you stabilize yourself. Your initial mind is neither like nor dislike. Okay. free of the back and forth, the pendulum of like and dislike. And strangely, like and dislike is replaced by something we could call pleasurable interest. Maybe we can go back to the baby. In your home self I have to carry the baby sometimes to the other part of the building. She takes a tremendous interest in the ceiling.

[87:57]

She's in my arms, you know. She gets totally fascinated by the ceiling as you go down the stairs. And now she knows it well enough. When we enter the hall, she gets all excited again because all of these rafters appear and stuff like that. But all the way through, down the next stairs and etc., she's fascinated by the sea. This is neither light nor dislike. It's a kind of pleasurable interest.

[88:58]

We could almost call it a non-referential joy. There's no reason she likes it. She likes it just because it's there and it's... A variety of things. And this pleasurable interest is she cares about things. And caring is the... Pleasurable interest is the root of caring, and caring is the root of compassion. So in the second foundation of mindfulness, prior to ordinary associative thinking, you have the roots of compassion, the arising of compassion.

[90:13]

Rising from the aliveness and presence of the what-ness of the world itself.

[90:16]

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