It's quite interesting to do. It's one of the Vijnana practices. It's a practice in shifting your sense of well-being from whatever you usually do to sound. And it's a shift to discovering the patterns and continuity within sound. And finding a sense of continuity in something that's inherently unpredictable. And when you do something like that, you change a lot. And of course sound is also not only sporadic, it's out of sight.

[01:12]

And being out of sight, we are more able to hear it as our own mind hearing. So it's one of the best practices, traditional practices within Buddhism, to begin to notice that everything's occurring in the mind, the sounds are occurring in the mind. I can't see those birds, but I can hear them. So it's more easy for me to know they're in my hearing and in my mind. But when I look at you, you're so visibly out there, it's harder for me to remind myself that you actually just as much so in my own mind and seeing.

[02:25]

So the practice of bringing your... sent your continuity to the tissue of sound, has many teachings within it. Okay. So you're freeing yourself from lossy compression. Okay, now to continue with the, going back to the beginning of the metaphor, Buddhism would say there's something like many layers of CD and DVD going on right here. And your sense of location is one of the needles.

[03:36]

But that sense of location can't go very far within the layers as long as the sense of identification is somewhere else. When you can connect the sense of identification to the sense of location, you can go through other layers at which there's realms happening. But we don't see these other realms because they're invisible to the usual kind of attention we have. They're invisible to the usual kind of attention we have. Like Siegfried was separating the sense of me from the sense of witnessing.

[04:46]

And the more we can do that kind of thing, and separate the sense of witnessing from location and identity and so forth, and bring them together in new ways, you begin to develop the ability to see what's recorded underneath this situation. So you begin to be able to experience what's not within the usual sense realms. Okay, does that make sense as an image to you? Anybody? Okay. I think it's interesting that

[05:48]

one is completely invisible to the other in the CDDVD. It's there with more information, but it's just not seen. Yeah, and this is the idea in Buddhism of interpenetrating realms which don't interfere with each other. interpenetration, wobei sie aber nicht miteinander interfere, keine Auswirkungen, sie stören sich nicht, sie haben keine Auswirkungen aufeinander. Die Avantamsukha is basically a teaching of not interdependence, but interpenetration without interference. Also die dringend, aber nicht gegenseitig beeinflussen. Earlier Buddhism talked about interdependence. Later Buddhism talks about interpenetration without interference.

[06:51]

Okay, I think we should take a break soon, but I'll give you a little bit of this. These are interpenetrating realms. All ten of these are in each one of them. But we don't see the others once we're in one of them. Now the therapists or the Buddhas, they're nearly the same. Job is to know although the person's in here, they can come in at this point. Now, Some kind of externalized Buddhism emphasizes this is almost a real hell in the Christian sense.

[08:12]

But in Buddhism, it is definitely not Sartre's idea that hell is other people. In Buddhism, hell is us. And you can live in a world which basically is a kind of hell. And this can be taken over. I mean, in the Second World War, you could say most of Europe lived in a kind of hell. Yeah. Now, the sense of a realm, again, is that... Once you get caught in a hell road, for example, if we're in this realm of self-regarding thoughts, the structure of your narrative unity, now I'm taking self here

[09:24]

as a kind of narrative. And it has a structure, and this narrative self is moving toward unity. Okay. Now, given that this self is the... dependent on your personal history. Certain things have happened to you with your parents, with your life, but circumstances that are different for each of you. So you have the so-called, let's call them facts, not exactly facts, but the facts of your history. And you added narration to it.

[10:46]

You added a storyline to those facts. And there's a structure to how you tell the story. And there's a unity or lack of unity to it. Okay, if you're in a hell realm, the facts are the same, but the structure, the nourishment, the unity are different. So if you can move a person into, say, the human realm, the facts remain the same, but now the way the story is told is different. So part of a Buddhist sense of how to work with situations and people is to see what realm is

[11:49]

overall determining the situation. And be able to enter that realm. And you can enter the realm because each one of these are doors. So the hell realm also has a Buddha in the hell realm. You can't enter as the Buddha in the human realm, but you can enter as the Buddha or the therapist in the hell realm. Is that clear? More or less clear? We can go back over it some more. Okay. Okay. Let's take a simpler one, the asura, power being. Now, this would be, let's take war again. in Serbia and Kosovo now, there are some people acting like beasts.

[13:05]

And some people, once that bestial realm starts and you begin acting out of animal-like creatures, it's quite contagious and you begin to draw other people into this bestial realm. And you can get a whole population of decent people caught up and acting like beasts. So anyway, again, this is the Buddhist idea of how societies function and so forth. Okay. Now, a power being.

[14:07]

Now, Gerhard mentioned to me yesterday, or this morning, about an organization which puts people in positions of authority to manipulate them. In other words, you take a person with a weak ego, but you give them authority, and then you hook them into liking the authority, so then they're part of the organization. And in subtle ways, that's what all corporations do. You want to promote people slightly above their capacity. And then you hook them into the organization. And that would be using this realm of the power being, the usher, we call it. And once that starts, it's very difficult to get out of it.

[15:38]

So you could say you could have a client, for instance, who at home is a really decent guy. Or gal. Though guy is used in English for man and woman. And when this guy or gal goes to work, they get caught up in the ashram realm of power being. And their personal history, who they are, their psychological history, will function differently when they're in this realm. And their psychological history will work differently when they are in the power area than when they are in the human area. So that's enough to give you an idea of how Buddhism thinks of these ten realms. And we can look afterwards at how these others are understood. The sense of a realm Because it emphasizes the spatial dimension, also emphasizes the contagious dimension.

[17:01]

It's very communicable to others immediately. So it very quickly isn't just a personal realm, It becomes a shared realm. So you almost can't separate one person from another in these realms because they get caught up in the same way of functioning. Okay, so why don't we sit for a few minutes, then we'll have a break. And thank you for translating. Thank you. What did this idea of realm ring any bells with you?

[18:04]

Does it make sense? Do you have any comments? Maybe I can share an experience I have in my work as a sociologist at a scientific institute. Please, just to say. I mean, what I remember is just discourses, or something like organizational culture. That's what it brought to me. Also zum Beispiel in meinem Bereich, wo ich arbeite, wir machen sehr viel Auftragsarbeit und die Auftragsarbeit, die muss für die Auftraggeber, die irgendwelche Ministerien sind oder irgendwelche Gemeinden, Kommunen oder so. It just always has to fit and the standard is just 95% to 100%. And at the end of the project, there are actually only discussions about what could have been done even better. And the 95%, which have been done well, are simply not emphasized or talked about. and also that it is not accepted what you do right or what you do well, which is actually felt throughout the institute.

[19:25]

And then I notice how difficult it is to escape this as an individual or to say, if this is over, then we will talk about it in another form, Can you tell me briefly? Yes, so I shared my experience I have at the Scientific Institute where many people work who are just living in their heads and their ideas and what we are doing is working very much for communities or for the government and so the idea which pervades the entire Institute is all this work we are doing has to be 95%, 200% and so there's always at the end of the The work has to be 95 to 100.

[20:27]

It has to be good, excellent. So the anti-institute is pervaded by this idea which somehow produces a kind of fear and it's somehow like organizational culture or like discourse theory. So that there is a certain discourse in an organization which somehow creates a certain atmosphere and it's particularly hard for one person to resist that or to bring some different flavor into the situation. So that's what I thought about that. You're not trying to bring a different flavor into the organization, are you? Oh, yes, I do. You know, I have a disciple, in the full sense of the word disciple, in that she is... I've given her transmission and she's acknowledged to teach and so forth. And she's a research psychologist at the university in Mexico City. And she did work using, she developed computer tools to test people's intelligence.

[21:44]

test their intelligence free of how educated they are and how acculturated they are. And she found that many of these street kids are really extremely intelligent. There's almost a direct correlation between how much they're troublemakers and how much they're intelligent. And she, for this work and other work she did, got the Social Scientist of the Year Award in Mexico. And the president of Mexico presented it to her, etc.

[23:02]

But at the same time, her whole work has been suppressed because the society, which is very hierarchical, does not want to hear this. The lower are lower because they're low. And on the other hand, the whole work was suppressed in some way because you simply don't want to hear that in society, that those who are down are down because they are kept down. So, something else about this idea of realms? Of course I know that from work, but Naturally, I know it. I was waiting, I was waiting. So naturally I can experience it in my work, that it's really... Here's the practice, it's when you leave the husband and wife, because it's so amazing that you can, within five minutes or within 20 minutes, you can experience your husband being in all this.

[24:25]

A beast in air. In minutes each. Thank you very much. Yeah. So these are shared rooms. Yeah. I was thinking that the work you said you did with and how they keep a problem going, is exactly this idea of a realm.

[25:28]

So by doing on odd days, like you're asking them to step out of that realm, Something else? So it sounded very familiar to me in relation to social roles and functions. Particularly relating to this decent guy who is transformed into a power being. Yes. So my main experience or life experience with working with needing or disturbed children.

[26:50]

In In the last years, I had many school classes with hungry ghosts. Pupils were hungry ghosts. In ghost days, they were really like humans. And we were able to work together. But there were days when once people started to spin. So all the others started also to physically spin, you mean?

[27:54]

No, no, just that kind of spin. Also beating each other up. And she was no longer able to balance the group. I understand. and therefore I'm quitting my job because it's no longer possible for me. Yeah. I should define, for those of you who don't know, what a hungry ghost is. Maybe... Go ahead. Hungry ghost... Sometimes they're drawn in paintings. They have distended bellies. And they have throats smaller than a needle. So it means someone whose needs cannot be satisfied. They've defined, they've created needs for themselves that it is not possible to satisfy.

[28:56]

And they go from situation to situation always more unsatisfied. You can see lots of hungry ghosts around in our society. Nothing, no matter what you give them, doesn't satisfy. And it's considered basically a hell realm. Always hungry and yet you can't get anything down. To save the honor of my children. As the children I taught, they were really needy. No, no, I understand. I'm glad you're defending the honor of your children.

[30:05]

Anyone else here? So what we experience in our groups or seminars is that it can be also the other way around, so that people experience and are amazed, oh, it can be different, or we can experience ourselves quite differently. And so they experience a different Rome. Yeah. Well, that's... Why a Sashin is organized the way it is, say, you bring people into another kind of realm. That's why the schedule is so important. So that whatever the Sashin schedule is, it should be different than what your usual habits are.

[31:10]

And it should stress you sufficiently that you change layers. But I said in the last Sashin, no matter how difficult I made a Sashin, no matter how hard I made the schedule, no matter how much suffering there was, most people's ideas are much stronger than mine. They'll have the same ideas at the end of the session as they did at the beginning. Did I interrupt you?

[32:21]

No. OK. I wonder how much you can keep control of this process because in marriage you can One word can lead you into hell or into humans. So I'm wondering about the control you can take over these processes and coming into different processes. Well, I'm not a therapist. I'm just presenting this as the way Buddhism says it's useful to look at things.

[33:28]

But I think it creates a ground for developing some techniques to use. Now, the The two main characteristics to understand realms is that they are spatial and layered. We can call that vertically spatial. So, I think we all understand it very well, but let me just say a couple things about it to... Can I? Yes, go ahead. Sure, because I mean spatial and layered, but what about, I mean, so much is also by language, done by language.

[34:36]

For instance, how you speak, what you are allowed to say, which codes are appropriate, what not to say. So maybe you could say also something about how language is used. But language is part of the structure of the spatial structure. Mm-hmm. Now the spatial is important because it's Because it's spatial, it's self-organizing and self-justifying. In other words, you can't treat it as an isolated psychological problem.

[35:40]

because when you understand it as a realm, it means you've got the phenomenal world and other people to reinforce the view. In your example, the family would be creating a particular realm that they all reinforce. But once you're in a particular realm, Trees and birds reinforce the realm. You see the tree not as a sibling, but as something else. So it's hard to break into that, because the world keeps telling them they're right. And our society fears solitude.

[36:56]

And we put music in elevators, for instance. Yeah, and the armrests in airplanes pump music and comedy at you and things. There's an assumption that you never want to be alone with your thoughts. Okay, I'm all by myself in the airplane. I plug you in. And I see it as a form of social coercion. It's to get us to participate in the particular realm that our civil society is. And the importance of it being layered is that there's several layers going on simultaneously.

[38:03]

So as you pointed out, though I'm sure it can't be true of Siegfried, that sometimes a spouse will say, my husband is a beast at home. I know I'm a beast sometimes. But, you know, when you're in the public realm, your job, whatever, you're held in place by that realm. When you go home, there's only one other person. It's much easier to change layers when there's only one other person. And what's also in the idea of this sense of layering is that these are not sequential from hungry ghost to beast.

[39:27]

All these layers are going on in us. with different degrees of emphasis. But they're all keeping track. So you can know somebody who has more of a kind of obvious split personality, for instance. You can see that the main realm they're in is whatever it is. And when there's any stress or pressure, or any challenge to their identity, they shift the layers very quickly. And when that second layer comes, that other layer comes out, it's clear it's had its own eyes and ears all the time and has been tracking everything from this other point of view as well as from its main point of view.

[40:39]

So everything that happened in the last six months has a different interpretation that was hidden until it came out. So an important part of this idea realms is that The layers are simultaneous, and each one is going on all the time. And so part of practice is to try to create situations where you move someone into another realm. That's what monastic life is about. Till they can make that their main realm. And then they go back into ordinary life. And the monk is just under the... Let's call it a monk. The monk is just under the surface. And you, some of you may feel that if you've gone to Sashins.

[41:52]

Even though after the Sashin, you get up at seven, say. There's a feeling that some part of you still gets up at 4.30. Or could. And one of the ideas of a monastery, a practice center like Johanneshof or Crestone, if you know it's there and people are following that schedule, you can feel that schedule in yourself because they're following it over there. So what we asked ourselves recently is if rituals have this function of emphasizing the transition from one state into another.

[42:59]

Yes, I think so, yeah. That's why in Chinese society, ritual was the most important element, because it controlled these layers. But isn't, I mean, there are several kinds of rituals, and I would say there is, what you emphasized is the where you enter from one, from one state of mind or state into another. Rite of passage. Yeah, rite of passage. But there are much more rituals which are just celebrating any moment just to... The point theologist. Yes. So that you just notice that there is a certain moment.

[44:02]

Yeah. Well... Yeah, there's deadening ritual and there's all kinds of rituals. But ritual is quite... Again, it kind of has a bad name in our society. So then you have to ask yourself, why is it so elevated in Confucian society? And there's a particular understanding of rights, R-I-T-E-S, in contrast to R-I-G-H-T-S. So anyway, I think that that's enough.

[45:04]

Now, I want to let the discussion continue, but when we're over, I'll try to say why the ten are in this order. So I would like the discussion to go on, but when we are done with it, I would like to go into why the 10 are in a certain order. Yes. The question still concerns me whether that, if there is an influence in a group, So I'm still wondering about the influence in a group. So if there, for instance, is one person who has a good influence into the group, or there's a person who has a bad influence to the group, Is this also what is meant in Buddhism as interpenetrating body?

[46:14]

In other words, This idea of a realm, does it overlap with the idea of a mutual body? Yes. And one important factor in there is that it is assumed and experienced in Buddhism that good is more powerful than bad. That it is more powerful. Yes. It's a little bit like Hobbes, Mills and Locke. Are we born good or are we born evil? And Buddhism would say, for different reasons than they did, that man is inherently good. Anything else?

[47:38]

So obviously, the hell realm, hungry ghosts, beasts, this is the worst, right? This means everybody is in a mess. A chaotic situation. And the hungry ghost I explained. And the beast is quite close. Clear. And I think Asher's is quite clear. And the human realm is what we would think of as an ideal kind of person. the way we'd like things to be. But Ashur is right here because we have a very big tendency to go to here. It's just a simple idea like power corrupts and power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. And it's very complicated because we accomplish a lot in this realm.

[49:04]

You start corporations and you know One faces scientific discoveries and so forth. But you get caught up in a realm where you have no access to actual lived life. Your life is elsewhere. Okay, so a human being would be a person whose life is here. And accepting all of our everything, including being sometimes this. And the really perfected human being is the divine being. Now, there's a big line across here. A divine being is still

[50:15]

has no real control of their destiny. Sometimes I know one or two prominent Buddhist teachers who really are... There are... They're involved in, we could say, a Buddha realm, but a Buddha as a divine being. They're always nice. They maintain a calm state of mind at all times and so forth. But it's more of a divine being realm than a Buddha realm. This is mainly determined through what it is to be a human being.

[51:22]

And this is determined by what it means to be a Buddha. And the disciple is someone who sees this difference and makes a decision. And so they are making decisions through the Buddha realm, or let's say original mind or mind itself. to try to make it accessible in some way in language, these people are involved with perfecting the contents of mind and experience. These are perfecting the... I don't know where I left off but the contents of mind and this is perfecting the mind itself okay

[52:33]

So in this sense, a disciple is considered higher than an angel or a god. So gods and things are an idea of a very great human being or something like that. That's considered lower than a disciple. From here on, there's more choice and it's more inclusive. Now, a Pratyekabuddha is a Buddha who's enlightened by accident. They're enlightened through the world, like the type of experience you spoke about. Or the Buddha, when he touches the ground, the whole world testifies to this actuality.

[54:03]

So the Pratyekabuddha is enlightened by the sound of a tile hitting a bamboo or something. But the Pratyekabuddha doesn't know how to teach. And they don't really, their relationship is to the phenomenal world, and they may have physical or mental or energetic enlightenment, And there's different kinds of enlightenment. But they don't have enlightenment through and because of other people. Okay. Let me give a definition of bodhisattva vow.

[55:04]

The bodhisattva vow is basically to become to bring yourself into accord with all of sentience. to bring yourself into accord with all of being, and to relate to the potential enlightenment of other beings. And it's only thought that when we could say the self covers everything, When your realm extends to all of sentience, I'm told you can clip the DNA out of a firefly.

[56:04]

And put it in a tobacco plant. And the tobacco plant will glow. So there's... So anyway, the boundary between what's sentient and insentient in Buddhism is very wide. It's all really sentient. So when your realm is the opposite of a self-regarding realm, It's an all at once regarding realm. In a sense, we were speaking earlier of your energy flows into this situation. Your energy flows into everything with a sense of sameness and equality.

[57:22]

That is what divides this from this. And the Bodhisattvas want to use discovered this, I call it the sky of sentience, in the sense that we say, cherry blossoms and apple blossoms come out because of the sky of spring. You can say it's the water or this or that, but the whole sky of spring allows spring to happen. Yeah. So you can't, there's nothing I could take away.

[58:29]

If I could take away this, it would also take away Eric. The interdependence is so profound and it's all at once. That this is also sentience. And you. And you. So there's a sense in this bodhisattva vow of a sky or space of sentience which allows sentience to appear. So the bodhisattva practice is to find ways to bring the sense of this sky of sentience into your realm, to make that your realm. Even the intention, even the idea or the intention to do it already changes your realm. And the Buddha was accomplished this.

[59:30]

But it's thought again that all of these realms are going along in us all at once. So the idea of a realm is each one of you has within you the history of a Buddha. You have all the experience that make one a Buddha. You just haven't connected the dots. Your narrative doesn't tell you that story. But with meditation practice and other ways of changing the layers, you begin to find sometimes you're in the Buddha realm. Crestone recently... Somebody comes to Crestone regularly and... A disciple of my name, Dan Welch.

[61:05]

And his ex-wife wrote this kind of joy of cooking, vegetarian cooking book. She's got a number of cooking books out, and the main big cookbook on vegetarian cooking. This is a long story by the way. For a little point, I mean. But there was a discussion. We have a German woman who lives in Creston named Katrin Birkel. And she's lived in Japan and China for quite a length of time. And we all noticed that when she cooks a meal following the Japanese cookbook, it tastes like Japanese food. Anybody else at Crestone follows the Japanese cookbook, ends up tasting either German or American food.

[62:09]

In other words, what Deborah and Dan were discussing is no matter how clear you make the recipe, if you don't know the taste of what you're cooking toward, German sauerkraut tastes a lot better than American sauerkraut. I mean, in America every now and then you have to have sauerkraut or chop suey. Back when I was a little kid at least. And the chop suey was horrible. And sauerkraut was really awful. But coming to Germany, sauerkraut is great.

[63:28]

With potatoes? Because in Germany you know how to cook toward these sour tastes, which in America it's just sour on top of sugar or something. So the sense of this realm again is is you have the history of a Buddha. You haven't eaten Buddha's food yet. You don't know what the taste of a Buddha life is like. So part of practice is to try to give you the taste even for a few moments in sitting there. Buddha mind. And then when you learn that and you can cook toward it, so to speak,

[64:30]

It begins to awaken your history as a Buddha. And layers of memory that were inaccessible to you before, which were non-conscious, And I say non-conscious instead of unconscious. Because unconscious I relate to that which is unconscious to the main narrative of your story. So it's material that won't come up in ordinary psychoanalysis or something. Until you change or give the taste of another of these layers, and then there's a whole layer of billions of bits of memory. So one of the things you do, this whole business of going back in meditation through your past lives, is you go back and you

[65:59]

Take some vivid experience as one of the practices. Say you remember an incident in third grade in a classroom. So you put yourself back in that situation. And you learn to stay with it and hold it vividly. And then you notice holding this, you notice what kind of day it was. What the sunlight was like in the room. then you know it was the third period in the morning or something. And then you say, who was sitting in front of me? Who was behind me? And it's amazing what you can start to read back.

[67:09]

Pretty soon you can virtually create the whole classroom, each person. Then you can move it sequentially forward. And like when you went home after school. and whether you had a sandwich when you first got home. And what happens in that is not only do you come up with details you can hardly believe you remember, But you become into possession of your own story in a way that you almost can't any other way. A sense of the material and how you supply a narrative to it. And it has a tendency to free you from it.

[68:19]

Like beginning like Siegfried to be able to see the difference between me and... And it also has the effect of creating space where these other layers, the DVD layer or the B-U-D-D-H-A layer come up in between. And there's definite practices, for example, when you get really stable in your sitting. You explore your hell rooms. And you really open yourself to them. I don't know if any of that's useful.

[69:22]

But you reminded me. So that's basically the teaching of this sense of a spatially extended and simultaneously layered realms in which we exist. And that... you could make your own ten. Because the fact is, our experience is spatially extended and layered. What you call the layers is up to you. But what you call the layers is a vision of what's possible for human beings. This is a particular vision of what's possible for human beings. Okay, shall we sit for a few minutes? Thank you for translating again. Well, I feel very grateful to have another time with you.

[71:31]

And I feel very lucky that Christina and Eric and Julius too were able to change their busy schedule and job and everything and come down and sit here with us. I feel Oh, very lucky. And it just increased. You missed the best part, but it's okay. No, actually, we haven't discussed anything. We've just been waiting. I actually don't know which is true. In any case, I'd like to start out this morning with anything that you feel about, think about what we have discussed so far.

[72:50]

And also I would like to consider the few mornings we have as a moment in which we can look at the direction we're going or shift the direction we're going. So now I'm listening. On this cooler day. Yes. I refer to what you pointed at in the next step, the eight sufferings. And we are much looking forward to these eight kinds of original mind. Well, not eight kinds, some kinds of big minds.

[74:03]

Eight ways of attention, eight kinds of... Oh, yeah, eight doors of attention. My impression is, for my work, this is a crossing point of Buddhism and psychotherapy, working with attention. Where do I direct it to? What am I perceiving? Okie doke. That doesn't need to be translated, I know. OK, what else? I'm still occupied. Each of these rooms has its own structure.

[75:16]

Mm-hmm. What that means. Excuse me. Mm-hmm. Do you mean you want to hear what she's whispering to me? Oh, yes. To go with you through all the layers. The way I understand the structure is something else than the content. Okay.

[76:17]

What do you mean that you see the structure is different from the content? Yes, at least in the therapeutic Context, yeah. So in other words, you might have different contents, but the structures are often similar. For example, working with couples.

[77:49]

What is the function of this graph? My question is, could there be something similar in the realms of . Like descriptions of patterns. OK, anybody else want to add something to this? The realms? Questions in relationship to the realms? What came up for me? I remember a seminar where the topic was conflict and aggression.

[78:59]

and we did an exercise. And then [...] we did an exercise. That violence came up. Wild things? Violence came up, yes. I should think. Everybody knew when the quality of the atmosphere changed. Yes. Anyone else?

[80:39]

What's bothering you? I'm laughing because there's one question coming up all the time. What is the quickest way to become a sattva? That's all what's coming up. Really? You're at the first stage already when you start thinking that way. While you were out of the room, Siegfried, Christina discussed whether she could become a bodhisattva soon. You should give her the task, cherish your husband all the time. Okay. I'm not someone who thinks that that whatever that

[82:34]

There's all kinds of stuff in us that need to come out. Well, there's some, but there's not everything. And when you play with like reifying these realms, you create stuff. that wasn't there, I think. You know, we have possibilities of getting the flu or something, or cancer. But they're very dormant, hopefully. But once they cease to be dormant, they begin to affect everything, and it's hard to turn them to dormancy. So we could, for instance, articulate a seminar in which we spent a day in each one of these realms, and we tried to find out what it was like to be in hell together.

[83:55]

I don't think it'd be a good thing to do. In practice you become familiar with each of these realms and you become you lose your fear of them. But you don't, what can I say, how do I say it? You know enough to know, to be familiar and not fearful, but you don't go beyond that. Unless a whole bunch of stuff just happens. And I think this is not a Buddha in like the Buddha, the historical Buddha or something like that.

[85:23]

This is the Buddha capacity or intent within these kinds of realms. So this is the Buddha that's of these ten realms. Let's not think of it as a person, but as an energy or capacity or something like that. So if we just take this very simple statement that Sukhiroshi used to make sometimes, which sounds pretty schmalzy, even My vocabulary is increasing. He used to say, even a thief is stealing for his mother. And this is the Buddha entering the realm of the thief.

[86:24]

Because when you meet a thief, you discover that maybe very tiny part somewhere where they're stealing for their mother. So you relate to them as a thief, but you relate them to a thief as someone who's stealing for their mother. And so the thief feels, oh, someone who recognizes me. Or that possibility is there. So in hell realm or hungry ghost realm or anything, the idea is that you have the capacity to join the person where they are, but not be caught by where they are, which also must be necessary for any therapist.

[87:36]

But that's actually one of the, someone mentioned the rites of passage yesterday. That's one of the advantages of the difficulty of sitting, is that when you really have sat through a great deal of mental and physical anguish, It's one, very purifying. But you lose your fear of pain. And you find a way to be quite present and clear in the midst of pain. And it makes it much easier then to go into craziness or into illness with someone from their point of view as if you'd be willing also to be ill.

[88:55]

Sorry. As if you would also be willing to be ill or crazy. If the thought is too present, boy, I'm glad I'm not crazy, it cuts you off from the person. I don't know if these ruminations respond to your question, but... General, I think, to avoid these situations, to ask the question, what does dysplasia mean, what's their way of being, or their actions? not to look too much on diagnosis so diagnosis gives you kind of start but then you play it by ear and you're ready to be surprised it's always a surprise if you ask like that yeah okay yes

[90:22]

I'm always, there's a certainty there that there is a potential of development. If this is hidden or not really visible, could this be the Buddha behind a narrative structure? Yes. I hope so. That's what I think. And I think that's the case, or otherwise our life wouldn't work. But what's interesting, if that is the case, why do so few people recognize it? You know, back to what you said, I also feel, although I don't feel there's a person involved, I also feel that anything any human being has been, we also are.

[91:55]

Anything any human being has been, we also are. We haven't made it flower, but the potential is there. We can't say, oh, I'm not like that. I used to have a little practice. I don't know if this makes sense in colloquial, in English, but every time I saw somebody, I thought, there but for a gene go I. Their but for means their but for I would be exactly like that except for one thing. So there but for a gene, go I. I'd see some person, you know, talking to his hat and, you know, I'd say, well, that's me with only a slight difference.

[93:05]

There but for one gene. And it... helped me recognize, you know, I had to find some way to, you have to find some way to practice these things. And that's my practice of these little bows, which I sometimes feel like, you know, you're walking down the hall and this guy's bowing to you, you might think, no. But I find it useful to have some way physically in my body to recognize each person. Something else. So this was useful.

[94:35]

You're glad I presented this. I mean, it was useful enough, right? Because I'm trying to find things and actually during the year...

[94:42]

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