Hi, everybody. Good day, Meg. Good day. I first have to be familiar with, make yourself familiar with this sense of two aspects of our reality, the mind of content and structure, and the mind free of structure, form and emptiness. Space and the objects that appear in space.

[01:09]

The one who is busy and the one who is not busy. Now, you can't force these things all into one kind of philosophical category. If I say the one who is busy and the one who is not busy, that's not exactly the same as form and emptiness. If I say the one who is busy and the one who is not busy and the foreground mind and the background mind. You can't collapse these things into equivalent categories. However, the dynamic is very similar. The relationship is very similar. You understand? So we're talking about the relationship and these two end points. Don't try to force them into some mathematical rigidity. Now one other way of dividing it is absolute and relative.

[02:26]

And absolute and relative, absolute is equated with emptiness. And relative is equated with form. And the word relative means the world is related to relative to emptiness. But relative also means the world is relative to itself. It's interdependent. Enlightenment is called a revolving of the bases. You turn around in the seat of being. You revolve your bases. Now, there's various experiences of Protestant conversion.

[03:33]

It's very like Enlightenment, or Kaple-Roshi's book. The Three Pillars of Zen has lots of cases loosely disguised of enlightened experiences. They're very much like Protestant Cooper's experiences in William James. And there are some great teachers in this century who were, I would say, physically enlightened, but nitwits in other ways. In other words, I'm discounting to some extent this enlightenment stuff because you can be enlightened. In a big experience you could be enlightened with never having noticed the experience. Enlightenment is a factor of human beings, capacity of human beings. Your body can be enlightened and your mind may not be. Your mind can be enlightened, your body may not be. Your intellect could be enlightened and your alcoholic personality might not.

[04:41]

So let's get all the enlighteners together and have one big zap. It would be a disappearing act. Because as long as you're alive, there's some remnant. Something left here. But among these different kinds of enlightenment and all these experiences are, you know, they can be quite helpful in the context of practice. I think enlightenment experiences can be delusive outside the context of practice. And I think there are people in mental hospitals who've had enlightenment experiences they couldn't handle. They didn't have the structure, practice, the structures of self to know what happened. Their capacity for enlightenment exceeded their capacity for ordinary life. Among these various experiences, the initial experiences are more specific, Kensho, Satori.

[05:58]

But enlightenment in the deep sense of Buddhism means something very specific. It means a revolving of the basis, how your life will you may open into that through some big experience but some of the well-known commentators and western writers on Buddhism take much too seriously because they were somewhat naive I think the importance of the enlightenment experience as a big opening experience because it can open up into a lot of different things what it opens up into how it functions within the person is what counts for Buddhism Okay, relative and absolute. What are we talking about? Now, absolute and relative is not talking about the philosophical categories of form and emptiness, but rather the mind of form, the realized mind of form and the realized mind of emptiness.

[07:18]

So now I'm not talking about just form, but the realized mind at form. What is form? Form, as we well know, is a interdependent relationship of all the that is. Clouds, rain, rugs, flowers. Now, it's assumed that as you practice with noticing interdependence, it's not at some point the understanding of interdependence is ecologically responsible and you may come to recognize belatedly that the path of timber is not a forest.

[08:41]

The past of timber is our history of building houses of wood. which we could say we've inflicted on the forest. Forest is a complex environment, and when we cut the trees, of course, we cut the environment. Now, intellectually, if we know that, maybe we will save more forest. Maybe we won't fill up the Indian Ocean with sediment washed off the foothills of the Himalayas because the Bank of America supported timber cutting in the Himalayas. But that's still a responsible intellectual understanding of interdependence. It's not the mind of interdependence.

[09:46]

The mind of interdependence would mean that you, by noticing and noticing and noticing interdependence, you generate a mind that feels this interdependence. Like I said yesterday, the mind of connectedness. In other words, if you have a mind of separateness, a mind established in separateness as a reality, And you try to perceive connectedness, it's perceived as politeness or something. The mind of connectedness is more an attunement. So as you develop the mind of attunement, we could call that relative. Okay, now this is a kind of refinement on, an experiential refinement on the idea of form. Do you understand? Because form is everything.

[10:52]

Now we're talking about form as understood as it actually is, as interdependence, and then generating a mind of connectedness, of interdependence, an attunement with interdependence, that the mind itself, it's not sometimes, I mentioned last weekend, considered, it's given a kind of erotic turn in that separation now comes to be rubbing against each other. Rubbing against each other. Connectedness becomes the fertility of conjugation. And continuity becomes the absorption of continuity into orgasm, into a point which disappears.

[11:56]

Into the sneeze where your heart gets a beat. As we say, you know, sleep is a preparation for death. Yes. What is it? Thanatos and Morpheus are cousins in Greek philosophy. Brothers. So we're talking here now about something not mental at all. So form has really become form. So if this is form, what is the emptiness as the absolute?

[13:08]

If I look at a mountain, if I look at this hill above us, the first day I walked over to the top of this hill, you've got a freeway up there that goes to north of Australia, something like that, M7 or something. I don't know what it is. I don't know if you made it by defoliation, but it's a path that's wide as this room. It goes, I don't know how they... Anyway, a big path is up there. But if we look at this hill, these hills, what I'm trying to do is reverse the way we normally usually look at them. If we look at this hill, if we look at it from the point of view of the relative, The hill is there.

[14:45]

It appears in our consciousness. It's interconnected with all kinds of things. We can take a walk on it. It's got those wonderful birds in it. So we see its interconnectedness and we feel its presence here. Sitting here would be different if that hill wasn't there. It could be a different presence here, the kind of spirit of a place. And we call it a coming. Or we can go hiking on that. We can make a plan to go hiking on that hill. Like this afternoon, tomorrow, if you're going to be here, we could go for a hike on that hill. Now, if I look at that hill, not in terms of interdependence, but I look at that hill, and it just appears at this moment, appears again.

[15:56]

And it's one of these fleeting moments, like 12 o'clock doesn't happen, right? One minute to 12, half a second to 12, half a second after 12. There's no measurable 12. approach and gone but whatever you say about 12 it's either slightly before slightly after and yet each moment of time is time and yet we you know but this is again like the six dimensions folded out of our three-dimensional consciousness so it's very hard to notice Now, that moment in which I look at the hill and the hill arises is like 12 o'clock. It's timeless. Let's just try to understand it that way. Say that at that moment I die.

[17:00]

Is that a measurable moment? It was a half a minute before he died, two seconds before he died, and suddenly he wasn't there anymore. How long did that last? I mean, there is a process of dying. The feet get cold first and it works up the body and so forth. But aside from that process of death, actually dying, how long did that take? It took no time at all. So don't be afraid of death. I'm being serious. It happens in times. Your death will take no time at all. You've suffered already much more than you'll suffer when you die. I mean, unless you have some excruciating illness, but that's the process up to.

[18:08]

That's not dying. And then if you survive, you'd say, oh, I'm glad I survived. But the excruciating process up to dying is an excruciating process up to dying. It's not death. Death is no problem at all. Except you don't see your friends so often. They don't see you. You know, there's... Oh, boy. Now, if we were going to take a... If I died on this moment... Look, no duration. It is like the moment of looking at the mountain, just as it appears in the mind with its absolute independence.

[19:13]

That's also the absolute, or kindness, or emptiness, not grasp. Now, if I die, what continues? Most of my interconnectedness continues. You won't forget me by tomorrow. What's happening here is an attunement and interconnectedness that even if I perish on this moment, wouldn't you be surprised if I did? Even if I perish on this moment, nothing's worth it to surprise you that way. If I disappeared on this moment, what would continue is my interdependence.

[20:26]

My daughters, my family, the centers where I live, a lot of my

[20:32]

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