Usually I try to glue everything together, so it might make some sense. But it seems that these Sashin lectures, this time I'm not using so much glue. I'm just presenting some stuff. If you want to glue them together, it's better not to. Perhaps it would be good just to let them drop into the dark pool of inner silence. But I would like to speak about some ordinary, seemingly ordinary, practical things today. But let me start out with a koan. I guess it's In the Blue Cliff Records of Hekigan Roku, I guess it's 67 probably.

[01:26]

And I'll just give you some phrases from it. In the first line of the pointer, the introduction, it says, he holds fast without the slightest leak. Im ersten Satz des Hinweises, ganz am Anfang, da heißt es, er hält fest ohne das kleinste Leck. Er hält die Welt fest zusammen ohne das kleinste Leck. Now, unless these guys are simply fooling us, what are they saying? Wenn die Borschen uns nicht einfach nur zum Narren halten, was sagen sie dann damit? Are they talking about another kind of world than we know? Or are they talking about a world we know but overlook? Anyway, they're talking about something I know and I'm convinced.

[02:27]

As well, that... This is fun. But they're talking about something that I'm convinced and I know is for them real. And I know it can be real for us. And I know on the whole that it can be beneficial to us. So in that light, in that spirit, we look at a phrase like, he holds fast, to hold fast to the world without the slightest leak. Excuse me, please. To hold fast to the world without the slightest leak.

[03:42]

Does he hold fast the world or to the world? He holds the world fast without the slightest leak. Er hält die Welt fest ohne das kleinste Leck. Yeah, thank you very much. What kind of mind is this? What kind of person is this? Maybe you don't care. Maybe you're curious. But here we are, and if you're interested in this practice, we have these kind of statements that you can put somewhere in one of your active shelves, a shelf you look at occasionally. So an ordner, den ihr gelegentlich betrachtet.

[04:46]

Now the koan goes on. Nun fährt das koan fort. Young men, famous young men. Und der berühmte young men says, each of you has a light. Er sagt, jeder von euch hat ein Licht. Each of you has a light. Jeder von euch hat ein Licht. But when you look for it, You can't find it. It becomes dark and dim. Why would he say something like this? Is he just trying to fool us? You know, again, I can say to Gisela, Gisela, you have a huge bump on top of your head. But when you try to touch it, it's not there.

[05:49]

Why should Gisela pay any attention to my saying something like that? You might see her walking through the hall, and when she thinks no one's looking, she goes, To see if she can catch it. But it's a kind of strange thing to say. You each have a light, but when you look for it, you can't see it. And then after... He said that, he added, he answered for the assembly. The pantry and the gate. The pantry, the kitchen, where you keep the store things. The pantry and the gate. And then he said, nothing is better than nothing.

[07:05]

Or nothing is always better than something. So I'm just throwing this out to you. It's said that he also, another way he put it, He would say, each of you has a light that shines continuously. As from ancient times, it shines continuously. But when you look for it, oh dear, it's dark and dim. So anyway. And what's interesting about this is it says that young men said this, repeated this statement whenever he could for 20 years.

[08:24]

So this was pretty important to him. He kept saying it for 20 years and he said, and almost no one during 20 years understood. Okay, so now let's talk about practical things. One thing I asked Gisela at lunch to close the window. And we have some problem in the sender with it being too hot and too cold and no way to ventilate it easily. But there's a very old tradition to not sit in a draft.

[09:27]

And again, if you look at this book of Kasa's, Enlightenment Unfolds. There's a section on Ru Jing's, his teacher's, the journals Dogen kept when he was with his teacher. And this is something Ru Jing repeated to him, don't ever sit in a draft. No one says the Zendo should be warm or should be cold. but don't sit in a draft. So the zendo can be very cold, but it shouldn't be draughty. There should be some even, consistent temperature, whatever it is, and you can adjust to it.

[10:29]

Then there's statements like, don't seek a cool place here, don't try to find a warm place. And one of the first teachings I received from Suzuki Roshi is I was sitting in the front row while he was lecturing. In San Francisco, it's not... It's never very cold. But it's often quite chilly. And the temperature changes during the day, particularly when the fog comes in. And people would be always trying to open the windows or shut the windows or turn on the heater or something like that. And Sukhirashi kind of let people do what they wanted.

[11:50]

But he was standing right there, you know, like that, and I heard him mutter, why don't they adjust their body heat? This was a kind of news to me, to adjust your body temperature. And I'm making no claim to being able to do it, but I have that spirit to adjust my body temperature. Oh, now we're closing all of this. Did a draft start? Oh. Because of the noise. Oh, I see. I don't expect such immediate results.

[12:55]

I expect to drop this into the dark pool of silence. Okay. But with Art Eno you never know. Things happen before I think of them. And he gives funny instruction, Ru Jing, you know, and Dogen writes all this down. You should tighten all the belts of your robes and kimonos and underwear. We don't wear this. We don't have underwear you can tighten, but anyway, they did. Now don't you think that's funny instruction to tell somebody?

[13:59]

And then the next minute you're saying, you have a great light but you can't find it. Yeah, it's a nut house we're in here. And Sukershi, I used to walk around like this sometimes. He told me, you can't walk around like that, you have to walk around like this. And he was always correcting little physical things I did. Now, Ru Jing also made us, in Dogen's journals, Ru Jing also spoke about qin hin.

[15:18]

And Dogen says that in the great light storehouse hall, and Dogen says that in the great light storehouse hall, Ru Jing got up and demonstrated K'in Hin. And Dogen remembers that clearly and writes it down. And I remember very clearly, many times actually, in the first years, Sukhirishi getting up and demonstrating Kinhin. And it is as vivid for me as any lecture he might have given about the Sambhogakaya essay. And Rujing explains to Dogen that you step forward with only half a step.

[16:36]

With coordinating your steps with the breathing. And he says, nowadays, no one in the whole world but me knows this way of walking. And he also said he was Napoleon. I'm just kidding. In English, when somebody's crazy, they claim to be Napoleon. No one in the whole world can walk this way or that way. Again, this is strange. Why would he say no one in the whole world walks this way but me?

[17:38]

I mean, you all do Kinhin in the morning. Do you really feel that this is really a big deal? I'm doing Kinhin. I mean, if you... Oh, trumpeter. The trumpeter of bad singing. Yeah. But, you know, I... I know Thich Nhat Hanh quite well and I've practiced with him since 1983 or so, off and on. And he's introduced a way of walking to tens of thousands of people now.

[18:40]

How can you introduce a way of walking to people who already walk? And now all over the place there's these people who walk around in slow motion saying they learned it from Thich Nhat Hanh. What's unusual about his way of walking? And is it the same as our Kinhin? If you know Kinhin, as I knew Kinhin well long before I met Thich Nhat Hanh, It seems similar, but it's different. Now, how I would define Thich Nhat Hanh's walking is that he arrives with each step. He's not going anywhere.

[20:15]

He's arriving with each step. Now, again, this may seem like nothing to you. But what has he done with this way of teaching walking? Because his way of walking is only vaguely coordinated with the breath. Well, I've told some of you, you've heard my story about walking in this peace march with Thich Nhat Hanh. But I want you to know that a way of walking is not nothing. So this was the last big peace march in the United States. And for those of you who have heard the story before, I'll try to abbreviate it today.

[21:40]

Basically, we'd only met during that week or so. And we decided to go to the peace march together. And so I joined him with about, I think there were eight of us all together. And he, I don't know, we were there, and you know, there's bands and people and stuff, and there's, I don't know, half a million people or more. He was a huge mark. And we met at the UN building where it was starting. And we liked each other a lot, and he agreed to come to Tassajara, and I agreed to go to his place in France, which was just him at the time, pretty much. But I didn't know much about how he walked.

[22:50]

So we got in line. We got ready to go. And he gently hooked his arm under mine. And pretty soon all eight of us were all hooked together. And then he walked quite slowly. And occasionally I tried to go a little faster. I mean... You know, we've got the AFL-CIO, you know what that is? The American Federation of Labor marching band behind us. Yeah, and they're in this whole parade just trying to go, you know, half a million people or so.

[23:55]

So... I'm here and he's here and the two of us were in the middle. We were walking along sort of like this. I'm not kidding. And then we'd come to a red light. So we'd stop. And then the red light would change. And the band is behind us. And the band is behind us. But no one will move. I mean, no one will pass us. Honest to Buddha. And so the light's already green for like 20 or 30 seconds. So I put my foot forward. And then I'm all by myself with my foot back.

[25:09]

And then I pull my foot back. And I say, okay, you're the boss. And after a while, almost just before it turns red, he starts to... And we went, I don't know, many blocks this way, and the whole west of the parade, a third of it about, was way ahead of us. And we're eight people. And there's a line of 200 people wide that won't go past us. You'd have to call this a city. And there were two things he did. He arrived with each step. And he walked as if these missiles, which were based mostly in Germany, could be shot at any time.

[26:11]

Most people were there to be counted. From the helicopter, we estimate there's 680,000, you know, that kind of counting. But he walked with the feeling that on each step, these missiles might go off. But he went with the feeling that these rockets could go off with every step. And we had this very serious feeling. So it was going well. We had such a cosy feeling together. All these things on. And at some point, and I've met some of the leaders of the parade later, and they were desperate to get us out of the way because nobody could get past us.

[27:31]

So they set up barriers and made us go this way. Then after we'd gone by with two or three hundred people, they moved the barriers and... But as it happens, we went this way and there were no stoplights on these side streets. And then we saw what happened to me, so we turned. And we came along without stop signs. And we ended up ahead of where we'd left off in the parade. We marched from the UN and up to Atlanta. We continued to 57th Street and up along the park. And it was only up around 57th Street, a little before the people began to go past.

[28:53]

You know, New York City, that's quite a long ways. A couple hours or three hours of walking. at the pace we were going. And sometimes this is so hard to believe that so many thousands of people couldn't go past eight people. That I've sometimes felt I shouldn't tell this story, it's not believable. Even I began to say, can it really have happened in my own mind? And then a while ago, a few years ago, I met somebody, I think in Germany, two or three people. And they happened to be, have been standing on the steps of the Or wherever the big Catholic cathedral is in New York, near the Museum of Modern Art.

[30:11]

They were standing like, say, that's the cathedral, they were standing like there. And we came by with most of the parade ahead of us. And they said, we couldn't believe it. Here suddenly were these few monks walking along with this immense line behind them at this snail pace, not sneller, snail pace. And they said, we all burst into tears. So how you walk makes a difference. And the way he walks, he feels like he's so arrived This was so conveyed to the eight of us, people felt some kind of aura or space that they couldn't, they felt sacrilegious to walk past.

[31:27]

So let me take this opportunity to say something about Kinyin. Now we have been doing fairly often sort of fast walking. Now, what is the difference? Now, we can certainly do fast walking and it freshens us up if we're sleepy and so forth. With the idea of K'in-hin, Dung Shan's lineage K'in-hin, is that you get up and walk in a way that you continue zazen mind. So you usually get up just where your cushion is and just there you start to walk.

[32:41]

go faster or create a line or anything. Just start from where you are. And you really walk You almost don't move. You're not going anywhere. You're not even arriving. You've already arrived. Maybe it's like Samantabhadra, entering without taking a step. Now when they've analyzed, scientists have analyzed walking, Ordinary walking is you're falling forward. And you prevent your fall by putting your foot forward. You're kind of falling, but you keep stopping on that walking. But in that sense, we're not going anywhere, King, and you're just... You're letting your inhale as you lift your heel.

[34:03]

Lift you up slightly. And then as you exhale, you let that exhale drop you down forward slightly. But the breathing is moving. And Rujing says you don't sway. It looks like you're not moving. And if you want to deepen this with a little effort, as I've taught sometimes, Tighten up the back of your leg and pull your energy up the back of your leg and down this way as you step forward. Again, I wouldn't do that every step, but you can do it a few steps.

[35:05]

Tighten up the next leg and bring it up. This is bringing your breathing and energy together in the movement. Now, in the more Vinji Deshan style of practice, The effort is to maintain a direction in your practice, an intentional direction in your practice. Now I'm not being critical of their method. in what I'm saying.

[36:06]

Dogen has quotes Dogen and Ru Jing both say things like, Linji and Deshan don't understand this at all, etc. But I don't know about this rhetoric. But I did, and most of the years I was in Japan, I actually practiced in a Rinzai monastery. I'm just pointing out a difference. They tend to sit 30 minutes. And they tend to sit with more directed effort. And they usually sit this way. Some in their hand and then... And they sit more so that they have the thumb in their hand and, as I show it. And Kinin is very kind of... And also the Kinin is more so, as Hoshi shows it.

[37:12]

Maybe you guys would like that. Maybe you like that. And when you come in the door, like you come in the door, you open the, step in the Zendo, it's... And when you come in the Zendo, then it's, as just demonstrated... This is good. I learned to do it. You know, it's fun. And in Soto, when you don't want food, you say, no food, you know. In Soto. But there's some difference. In the Dongshan style of practice, we're trying to maintain, develop a continuity of mind which is directionless, which is open to the impulses of the universe.

[38:13]

And that's a rather different feeling. It's much more like getting to know your baby. You can't force the consciousness of the baby. You're on the hook of that moment with the baby. You're all alone with the baby. And you and the baby teach each other And there's no book exactly that can help you. And you couldn't explain to anyone these moments in which you felt you and the baby understood each other.

[39:16]

So maybe some sort of baby-like or grandmotherly mind you're developing in our lineage. Which isn't going anywhere. Right now it's just here. walking in a way to not go anywhere. You know, when I watch people walk, for instance, English people tend to stride. They kind of walk with their shoulders straightened. And I haven't studied how German people walk. It looks to me like they walk more from here.

[40:17]

They kind of walk along looking at the nature, you know. And Japanese people glide. They walk from down here, not up here, and they move their legs from here. The Japanese people sort of go like this. And I would guess that the difference between Japanese people and British people and German people is not separate from these slight differences like how you walk. I bet if you took a British couple and a German couple and put them in the same forest and said, walk along this path, And a Japanese couple too.

[41:33]

And then asked each of the three couples what they noticed during their walk. I bet it would be quite different in all three cases. I'll tell you just a couple more things. Our time is almost up. I saw a film once, again I've mentioned this a couple of times, of a blonde Australian or blonde South African girl, I don't know.

[42:43]

four or five years old, four years old probably, and an Aborigine or black girl, I don't remember which, from one of the two countries. And there was a tree stump. And it had about, I don't know, 50 things piled on it. And they brought the two little kids up and both little kids looked at it and then they knocked it all down. And then they said, put it back. And the little European girl could put only two or three things back in any order. But the black girl put everything back, all interlocked, exactly the way it was even photographed. And I would say that probably the white girl saw the objects as in a container of space.

[43:56]

I would say that the black girl probably saw each object as its own space. These are small differences. I can't say one's better than the other. But certainly in our yogic practice we emphasize this more physical space. The pantry and the main gate. Just the way we walk or stand. And how even standing is a form of arriving. And how, if you take a statement like of Dogen and of Zen, a stone maiden, in the middle of the night,

[45:23]

gives birth to a child. And if you understand that mentally, it doesn't make any sense. Stone maidens don't give birth to children at any time of night. Immediately two-thirds true. Because there is such a thing as the middle of the night. And there is such a thing as giving birth. And there are stone maidens too. But the relationship between them, what is that? And when you repeat this in a mantra-like way, when you relate to it mantrically rather than syntactically. begins to have another kind of meaning or feeling for you.

[46:35]

Now, when we do the orioke, which is a very physical practice, to bring you in the main gate and into the pantry, Into physical space and not mental space. Now, for instance, picking up the Setsu. If I can sit beside people for ten years and I'll pick up the Setsu. That's the cleaning stick. And they'll pick up the Setsu. But I've never picked up the setzu the way they pick it up. Because what the person imitates is the act of picking up, but not the fact of picking up.

[47:40]

They see picking up starting. And then they go into the mental action of picking up. But the way I pick up the Setsu and the way I was taught by Sugiyoshi, this is the Setsu. I bring my hands toward it to pick it up. But I simultaneously bring the other hand to it, and I frame them a moment. And so I kind of feel the energy of arriving, perhaps, the energy of the stick between my fingers, before I pick it up. So I put one hand there and then I pick it up.

[48:47]

Then I move this energy of my lower hand over to the bigger bowl. Then I take this and switch. And I can do that in front of people for years and they never see what this hand is doing. You can do the Setsu any way you want. I don't care, really. But what's interesting is the person often is trying to imitate me, even looking carefully, but they don't see what my other hand is doing. And I'm not a magician like David Abram. There's no sleight of hand here.

[49:51]

So it's interesting, the difference between living in a mental space and living in a physical space. And kinhin is also about learning to live in a physical space. And the oryoki and the service are all designed to continue this physical space of openness to the impulse of the universe. And the repetitions, physical formality, the way, as you notice, I think the way you wash your face probably, Or where the men would shave, perhaps.

[50:57]

There's probably a very similar pattern every time you wash your face or shave. Or brush your teeth. That there's actually a kind of ritual in how you do it that allows you to do it without thinking. So once you know the rituals of sashing well, It frees your mind into a kind of a funny kind of openness. And you come closer to this Holding the world fast without the slightest leak.

[51:57]

Or this begins to make sense to you. And in the commentary it says, it's not that you don't see the light. It's that you don't know how to use it. Wider haben wir es den ganzen Brusten.

[53:44]

Ich gelobte sie zu beherrschen. Der Erbiet des Boller ist noch übertreiblich. Ich gelobte ihn zu erreichen. Adi Madhyamanshi Surya [...]

[54:59]

Thank you. We'll see how we can help thousands of millions of people. Now that I've been able to talk to you for a long time, I think it's time to say goodbye. How are you all? Okay. Fourth day.

[56:14]

I'd like to speak about form and guess what? Emptiness. We chant it every day, form is leerheit. And I don't think most of us have much understanding of this as practice. And it's, as you know, a little hard to talk about. So maybe I even avoid talking about it. It's so easy to get mixed up. But we have a nice grey day, and the world's getting smaller, at least foggier.

[57:18]

And we have such a wonderful translator. It must work out, too, these huge muscles. Anyway... And we have you all softened up after four days of pounding. So maybe this is a good time to speak about it since there's the intimacy of our situation. For the practice, the realization of form and emptiness is the most intimate way to know the world. This is the teaching and discovery of our old ancients. I think Buddhism developed over, of course, many centuries.

[58:33]

And they found carrying this teaching more fully into their lives produced some kind of wonderful way to be in this world. And I don't think we can just look back to the historical Buddhas that, you know, greatest of all sort of realizations. Of course he represents this in the tradition.

[59:35]

But to really understand Buddhism we have to look to the whole lineage of teaching. But if we even look at this koan I gave you the other day, young men saying, right where you stand, there is a light shining. But when you look for it, it's dark and dim. He's speaking about emptiness. And he says, we're used to going about in the daylight and distinguishing people. And things.

[60:51]

By daylight. But what about at midnight? When there's no sun. No lamp. No moon. Well, what do we know then? We can ask this question, what is it? In another way, we can say, cut off light and darkness. Yeah, maybe you can ask, what is it in the daylight? Pretty easily. But when there's neither light nor darkness, what is it? The Sandokai says, myriad streams flow in darkness. Yeah. So... Young men equates light and emptiness.

[62:09]

Yeah, but they also talk about the sun coming out at midnight. Mm-hmm. And the midnight watch sounding at noon. And this flowing of the streams in darkness. Or in darkness there is light. But don't see it as light. And in the light there is darkness. But don't see it as darkness. This kind of statement is also typical of Zen.

[63:09]

In emphasizing darkness almost more than light. The operation of things outside the senses which usually work in the light. Right now in this room, again, I can see you all. But there's a great deal going on in this room that I can't see. There's a flowing, a connectedness going on in this room among us. that is not in the light. And the Quran says something like pouring black ink into black lacquer. And sometimes this practice of form and emptiness is also likened to pouring fresh water into fresh water.

[64:32]

Okay. So form and emptiness is not a philosophical idea. It's only a philosophical idea to start you thinking. Now I said, I kind of gave conceptual thinking a bad name the other day. And I shouldn't do that. I meant, what I said was, when you perceive, don't perceive a conception.

[65:40]

When you perceive a conception, like perceiving the act of picking up, instead of the fact of picking up you're perceiving a conception. When you perceive the idea of the floor and not the extraordinary fact of this floor. So many ancient forests in each board. Among other things. You're perceiving If you just see a floor, this would be an obstructing conception.

[66:45]

So there's obstructing conceptions. And there's erroneous conceptions. But there's also conceptions as the method of wisdom. For example, if I have a conception that on each step I'm arriving and my mind and intention in that way as arriving is fused with my then this is a conception used in the service of wisdom. We can think of the conception then as a gate.

[67:47]

I like the word sluice gate. Do you know sluice gate? Sluice is a... E-U-C-E? S-L-U-I-C-E. It's a kind of like an irrigation, an artificial channel used to conduct water. So it's a kind of, this is a conception, sort of like a gate. You open it and the conception of arriving, do you understand? Arriving is a conception. You use the conception of arriving and your energy pours into your act. Now Tibetan Buddhism and Indian Buddhism particularly use mental formations as antidotes to mental formations. Chinese derived Zen Buddhism

[69:11]

also does this. But it tends to overall emphasize somatic intelligence over analytic intelligence. So in other words, we try to give you practices We try to give you practices, physical practices, which open you to understanding. And the deep sense of non-gaining mind And acceptance as embeddedness. Or uncorrected mind.

[70:39]

Only makes sense when you understand them, they're a mental posture which frees the somatic intelligence to work. To go back to the baby image yesterday. You and your baby. Some of you have babies, or at least all of you were once a baby. there's some minute activity going on. And I think the minutia of the activity between mother and child baby or father and baby, also probably generates the complexity of the intelligence of the baby.

[71:50]

And also there's actually studies which show that emotional activity and vocabulary have to do with the later measurable intelligence of children. But you can't really have a plan for that. You just have to be present and responsive. You have to listen to what the baby wants, too. Especially you have to listen to what the baby wants. And this is also... One of the things we mean by the teaching of insentient beings is that can you come into a mind where you hear everything speaking to you?

[73:09]

If you tried to describe it as a voice, it probably wouldn't make sense. That you have the experience of hearing something. And this openness to hearing is... most present when there's a no-gaining idea, when there's a no-gaining mind. As soon as you have a plan or a gaining idea, you only hear what's within the context of the plan. Or then you have to have very sophisticated maps. And Zen says, okay, yes, we can have very sophisticated conceptual maps. But the particular view of Chinese derived Zen

[74:26]

is that the physical complexity of the world is more subtle than mental formations. I mean all that, the hundred grasses, And molecules and atoms and all that stuff. It's so much more subtle than any thought I can have. Except the movement of consciousness itself. So here we have the pantry and the main gate. meaning the particularity the physical particularity of the world So here we have a conception like of uncorrected mind.

[75:46]

No gaining idea. Yeah, or so forth. And the assumption is Here is an opening to a somatic functioning. Where small things you begin to notice, that you notice outside your usual way of thinking. Dass man beginnt kleine Dinge wahrzunehmen außerhalb seiner gewöhnlichen Denkweisen. And you begin to noticing them and acting within them without even noticing you're noticing them. Und man beginnt sie wahrzunehmen und innerhalb von ihnen zu handeln ohne zu bemerken, dass man sie bemerkt.

[76:52]

But you know you're doing it. although you're not witnessing it because there's a deep satisfaction. So let's get underneath the drama and the simplicity of Zen. into the subtlety of Zen as a particular expression and realization of Buddhism. Okay. Say you're with somebody who's dying. Yeah, a parent or a friend. And I know quite a number of people who come into practice because of a young friend, when they were young, dying unexpectedly.

[78:02]

Or Dogen when his mother died when he was young. And he never forgot the image of the twin streams of incense smoke rising while his mother was dying. So just imagine you're with somebody, somebody with cancer or somebody with old age, and you recognize they're going to die pretty soon. Somebody I spoke to recently told me they prepared the funeral service for somebody before they died. They had to leave And it was likely this person had died before they came back, so they prepared the funeral ceremony before the poor person was dead.

[79:33]

So, you know, this friend of mine, I can't place who it was right now, was quite aware this person was going to die, obviously. So again, let us imagine we're with somebody who's dying. They pretty clearly have only a few days at best to live. And when you look at them, you're completely aware that they will die soon. They're present and you can already feel their absence. This is a cognition of emptiness. Now, we would say, technically, it's a conceptual cognition of emptiness.

[80:57]

Because you're imposing an image and knowledge that they will die on the substantive body. Does that make sense? In other words, you're looking at this person and you know they will die. But really you're imposing the knowledge that they will die on top of looking at them as this person is still maybe having a cup of tea. So this is, we could also say, a kind of analysis. It's obvious they're going to die, but you know this by a kind of analysis. They're very sick, they're very weak, etc.

[81:59]

So this is related also to what we could call an inferential experience or understanding of emptiness. I know this stick won't last forever. In fact, it broke in my suitcase just coming over here and it's been glued back together. So that's an inferential understanding that this won't last forever. And if it's a person, any one of you, you'd all look quite healthy. So, you know, you look as real as a stick at least.

[83:02]

But I know someone told me the secret. that all of you will die one day. So I can impose that understanding on you. I mean, not, I won't do it forcefully, but... Yeah. So... When I know you and I know you as a person who will also die, I am beginning to have an experience of emptiness simultaneous with the form. This is obvious. Everyone has this. What's the difference in Buddhism? The difference in Buddhism is you try to make... the realization of the impermanence, the primary perception, not the secondary perception.

[84:29]

I might say people are like the hundred grasses. Over the centuries they come and go in the wind. That kind of awareness is developing the feeling of impermanence and emptiness. Okay. Now, when I infuse my step with the feeling of arriving. I have a funny sort of sense of the weakness of the step or the maybe emptiness of the step.

[85:31]

when mind is not present. But when I feel the power of putting my mind in my step so I can make a few hundred thousand people walk slowly. Or some martial arts expert can make their arm immovable in the way their mind is in their arm. this is also an experience of emptiness because this mind that's in the arm can't be grasped so here we have some analogies Of impermanence and emptiness.

[86:45]

Change and emptiness. Space and form, or emptiness and form. or mind and form. So we have the contents of mind and the space of mind. Okay, now, when you say a simple thing to somebody like, don't invite your thoughts to tea, You're pointing directly to the field or space of mind. Because if you don't have to invite your thoughts to tea... There must be some place where you are where thoughts aren't, from which you can say, I'm not going to invite my thoughts to tea. So the more you practice not inviting your thoughts to tea,

[87:48]

And you just let your thoughts come and go. You begin to feel the space of mind. A lot like you have some guests in the house. They're coming in and out, but you don't want them to stay, so you don't offer them. Coffee or tea. Well, you tell them the television's over there or the door's over there. That's what TV is for, to keep the guests happy. Okay. So when you can do that, you're experiencing the house... And you kind of wish the guests would leave because the house would be calmer. So the simple teaching of not inviting your thoughts to tea is pointing to the calmness of mind when there are no thoughts. This is also an experience of emptiness.

[89:20]

It's good for all of you because I've forgotten my watch. So we won't have any idea of how long this lecture is. Until you start levitating. No, no, no. Okay. Emptiness can take a long time. Okay. So this is also an experience of emptiness, a practice of coming into a realization of emptiness. You feel the form of the leg and you feel the mind which is analogous to emptiness.

[90:26]

When it's in the leg, it changes the leg. But the mind is not graspable. Neither in past, present or future can it be grasped. Okay, now I used the example of the setzu stick yesterday. Okay. Now, one of the reasons we pick up the setzu stick like we do is to use both hands. And again, we have this practice of bringing our energy equally to each emergent. which again changes the territory in which we live. And by bringing it equally to each thing, we reverse the habit of energy going into the products of self. Because self is all about discriminating what belongs to the self and what doesn't.

[91:56]

What belongs to me and not to others. What's part of my story and not part of my story. But the more you have the experience of bringing energy equally to each thing, whether it belongs to you or not. Whether it belongs to your story or not. You're breaking the link between thought and self. Between energy and self. So, one of the ways we do that also because you can think of your hands again as like an orchestra. You're conducting your aura. I've seen too many movies.

[93:00]

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