Good morning, everybody. It's wonderful to have you here, to be here with you. This unusual creature, face, was handed to me when I went home a moment ago, and it's from Bali. It looks like, it's a mask of sorts, but it looks like the same face that is on the Garuda, the transformation symbol, symbol of compassion. It doesn't look very compassionate. But I thought I should bring it over, because maybe it'll bring me luck, or maybe it'll help all of us in some way. I haven't named it yet. I had met this young man in Bali who drove us around

[01:11]

when I was there. His name was Wyan Joni. He was about 26 years old. He was a wonderful, wonderful person. So warm, so open, and so on. And we just seemed to hit it off. And so this friend with whom we were staying over there brought this, just brought this back now. This is from Wyan Joni. So I thought maybe I should bring it here. Pass it around? Sure. It's kind of delicate. They turn these things out by the thousands over there. And they're all hand-painted. I'm sure it has something to do with, you know, like the wrathful deities that eat up our bad karma, and all help us overcome our afflicted, supposed afflicted minds.

[02:17]

I have a feeling right now that I'm in this dream, and I'm sitting in this big hall, and there's all these people looking at me. And I've got all of these, I hear this voice echoing in the room somewhere that has a remote resemblance to my own, but is also kind of rather something else, somebody else's voice. Sometimes everything feels spongy, permeable, almost like a, what do you call them, almost three-sided hologram? Three-sided, insubstantial, light show hologram. My life today feels a little like a hologram. Anyway, we know, it is said that whatever our perceptions are, our appearances, that appearances are illusory,

[03:37]

and are not to be trusted as something substantial of any kind. Furthermore, that the nature of our suffering, or the reason for suffering, or the reason for fear that underlies our dukkha, or our dissatisfaction, is a misunderstanding, or a lack of understanding of the nature of reality. A lack of understanding of the nature of reality, this is not only Buddhist, in fact I think it's principally a Vedanta, a Vaidya Vedanta teaching, but it applies to Buddha, Buddhism. Even though the Buddha didn't make so much of a philosophical statement that way in the beginning, it was a direct approach, find out what the problem is, you're not feeling good, what's the cause? Is there a way out of the cause, and if so, what can we do about it?

[04:41]

Well, what is the nature of reality? What is the true nature of reality? Well, it depends on who we ask, and what particular religious persuasion and culture you come from, but at least in the birthplace of the Vedas, and the Upanishads, and the Buddha, the nature of reality is God, or the nature of reality is Brahma. That of which there is no witcher, which cannot be found, which cannot be described, which has no size, shape, or form that can be grasped by our perceptions, and at least in one tradition is that force in which spins out the world through the vehicle of karma. That karma turns up as our subjective experience through the illusion of maya, time and space,

[05:44]

that kind of cosmology, and it manifests as trying to work something out subjectively. Seeds have been planted in the past, our ancient twisted karma, and we're all working that out. Now how we work that out is the question, how we come to understand what this means. In Buddhism, the nature of reality is emptiness. That is the same thing, but it's given a different name, at least in the Mahayana tradition, it seems to be that shunyata, the ungraspability of all phenomena, is actually the stresses on the via negativa, the way of approaching something by what it isn't.

[06:46]

All things, according to all Buddhist practice, have three characteristics, which are, of course, as you know, impermanence, a lack of self, an absence of self, and delusion, which we derive from the first two. Now when we mean self, what self means, of course, in this particular instance, is that there's some, I'm just reiterating, I guess, or going over what most of us already know, but it doesn't hurt to mention it again. A self, an atman, a buddhala person, thing, a life, an idea, a self that has some autonomous, permanent, self-referencing, independent, unconditional existence as an entity, as a self.

[07:59]

Of course, it's not hard to grasp, any of us, our minds, that we know we can't find such a thing, if we really look for it. We know that, in some sense, we're all interdependent, that we rely on one another, and so forth, in this web of being that we call the world in our life. But even so, that is not so much what we actually experience as a self. The self that we most often experience is this sense of I am here, I am. And this is very important, actually. To be born with this sense, we call it manas, or in the Yogacara school, the seventh consciousness that puts together the other consciousnesses, and feeds back into the mechanism of some kind of storehouse, that there's a separate self-existence, a contracted existence from this godhead, there is no witcher, and manifests its karma as an independent being.

[09:02]

But this feeling, you know, to begin with, of I am here, this is very important to have this radiant effugence of the self being in the world and enjoying its life. We love our life, we love to be when we're born. Look at little Elizabeth coming into the dining room, she skips. We all want to skip through our life. We're happy to just be me. I am me, and here I am. And yet, even though the Buddha said that what he could find when he looked for this self was really just what we call the skandhas, I could, conventionally speaking, find form, and I could find, in fact, body and mind. The self that we think of is essentially what we consider to be our body and mind. It is restricted or limited by that in some way.

[10:06]

Form, sensations that respond to the form, perceptions, formations, all the stories we make around it, and of course consciousness. The big number, big C, consciousness. It seems that consciousness underlies all of this. It all seems to be appearing in consciousness. The Buddha said, I can't find any Atman, I cannot find a self, I cannot find a permanent ontological basis for existence. Maybe they can in the Vedanta, but I don't see that. What I find is the absence of a self anywhere I look, and yet here I am. What is this? This is what we, small selves, come here to find out about, too, I think. Every morning we chant, given emptiness, there is no form, no feelings, no form, no feelings, no perceptions, no impulses, no consciousness, no eyes, no ears, no nose, etc. You can't find any of that.

[11:13]

What is that? What do you mean, no eyes, no ears, no nose? First time I heard that I thought, this is crazy. This is really weird. Of course, I have a nose, eyes, consciousness. Or in the Genjoko, Dogon, the same thing, you know. As there is no ... as the myriad things have no abiding self, there is no Buddha, there is no person. There is no birth and death, there is no delusion and enlightenment. Again, stressing that aspect. Really interesting. Bodhidharma comes in front of Emperor Wu, as we know, and Emperor Wu asks him, What are the highest teachings of the Noble Truths? Holy Truths. What are the highest teachings of the Holy Truths?

[12:16]

Bodhidharma. Nothing holy. Vast emptiness. Wherever we turn in the Mahayana wisdom teachings, this is what we encounter. The stress, you might say it's a strategic device to help us disassemble, or what was the word? What's this post-modern word I'm looking for? Deconstruct, thank you. To deconstruct the obvious, whether it seems to be an obvious or an apparent world self, other, and so forth. I think a lot of examples of this. The Diamond Sutra, for example, that's one that almost preempts all of them for this, looking at the absence of something. Subhuti, you know, who's supposed to be the wizard, the one who's really intelligent and really understands the Prajnaparamita,

[13:20]

the wisdom teachings of form is emptiness and emptiness is form. Ask the Buddha, how should a Bodhisattva stand and behave in the world? You remember reading that, maybe. How should he perform, or she? The Buddha answers something like, Subhuti, Subhuti, no one who posits, or no one who creates a perception, no one who creates a perception of a self, or of a life, or of a person, or of a soul, can be called a Bodhisattva. If you create a perception that there is such a thing as a thing that you can get hold of called a person, a sattva in this case, or a soul, you know, that which comes before or after the present moment, or that which arises at the present moment as life or the world, which is, I think, jiva or jiva.

[14:23]

Or the Atman, the self. No, one who posits that such a being or such a consistently self-referential thing exists, or doesn't exist for that matter, is not capable of being a Bodhisattva. Wow, I'm a long way from that, I would think, you know. All I see is people. And then, of course, there's Hui Ning, you know, the sixth ancestor, the Chinese ancestor of Zen. We know that story from the Platform Sutra. Same thing, again, but in a little more detail. Some of you might not know the story of Hui Ning, so I'm going to tell it a little bit. But the legend is, at least, these are all in some sense legends, which has some prototypical or archetypal truth to them, is that he was this poor peasant,

[15:26]

who one day actually hears the Diamond Sutra being spoken of, that there's no support, to give rise to a thought that has no support. And all at once, his mind is cleared, and he goes and looks for a teacher in the monastery, the fifth patriarch of Zen. And while he's there, according to this story, as you know, he's relegated out to the rice grinding, one of the low jobs. It's like kind of a kitchen. The person would be, let's just say, a scullery duty, or someone who swaps the day. You know, anyway, that's what you do. He's out there. Well, at this time, they were going to paint a wall in the monastery, and there's this wall, and so the abbot says to, the teacher says to the sangha gathering, they said, I want you folks to write a verse about your understanding of the Dharma.

[16:34]

According to the story, all the monks ran away to their rooms, because the head monk, whose name I think was something like Shinshui, is that right, Shinshui? Something like that. Shinshui, yeah. He's so smart, he has it down so cool that they don't even feel they have a chance. They're not going to compete with him at all. He goes and writes on the wall, you know, and he says something like, there's many translations of this, but in essence it's, the body is the Bodhi tree, the mind is a clear, bright mirror. Don't allow any dust to alight on it. The mind, the body is the Bodhi tree. And the mind is like a clear, bright mirror. Don't let any dust alight on it. That's a pretty good teaching, you know. Actually, that's pretty much the fundamental teaching, is that we have this body, which is the body of many lifetimes, given to us to take care of. And it's a sacred body, that the world is a sacred thing. And that we need to practice with this,

[17:40]

that there's a lot of problems that this mind has, there's a lot of kleshas, or obscurations, or defilements to clear up. And by taking a certain path of practice, by really taking hold of our life, a very important point, we can clear up the difficulties, but we have to be very vigilant, we have to practice a discipline, we have to take our life in hand, and so forth. This is sometimes called the narrow path. Well, you know, when Huining comes along and sees it, or actually, according to the story, has somebody read it to him, right? And they read this thing to him, and he listens to it, and during, I think during the night, maybe, sometime, at least he gets somebody, he can't write, but he has somebody write, and he says, something like that, there is no bodhi body, nor any bright mirror.

[18:42]

From the beginning, not a single thing exists, that's one translation, or there's only the void on what could any dust fall. So there's the essence of the Prajnaparamita teaching again, this emptiness teaching. There's nothing, nothing, nothing that you can get hold of, he's saying. So... And of course, when the teacher saw that, who his successor was, this is the teacher, this is the student who has a deep, deep understanding of the true nature of reality. It's a kind of dream we're dealing with. So how do we practice with this kind of thing, you see? When we come, you know, the self that we are familiar with is the limited self, is the self we're born with, the self that begins to lose its brightness,

[19:44]

that joy of life as it gets older, becomes acculturated, begins to learn its limitations, its rules and regulations, as they're handed down. The separate self begins to encapsulate it, and then of course the separate self, or the small self, as we call it, is fortunate enough to have nurturing and care, it can develop in a rather healthy way. But it is characterized by the sense that it's the persuasion of separateness from everything else that arises. And it does everything willy-nilly, even its best intentions are to preserve the self. It constantly feels it must improve, receive recognition, affirmation. That is essentially an organism of reactivity

[20:48]

that reacts to the force of experience by three modes of reactivity. I like it, I don't like it, I don't know if I like it or not. So it's always doing this, like this, like this. And it becomes more and more solid and more and more dense as it goes along, always trying to secure its territory, always trying to establish itself in the world, always ambitious, always searching, always looking for a way to win, to be one up, to secure itself, to be somebody. Nothing wrong with this, but because it lives in a world in which all entities are impermanent. In fact, there are no entities. Impermanence is just the name for the fact of process that everything is change already. There isn't any thing that's already an entity that's going to change. If there were, then it would be a solid, it would be a it would be a self.

[21:50]

But there is no self. There's just change, the appearance of change. Yet this feeling, this separate self, since it's over here on one side, it's trying to hold on solidly, and everything out here is changing all the time. Of course, if this out here, the world, and all of our experience has changed too much, this thing over here that's trying to hang on kind of freaks out. Of course, there's a lot of help for it, both physically and mentally. We're fortunate to have therapists and doctors and so on that always kind of help straighten it out, give us some assurance, some consolation, some way to deal with all of this that's changing over here. And it's freaking out this separate self that's trying to hang on to some identity on this side. Eventually, you know, it gets what it wants, and then whatever it gets, it's going to lose. So it begins to get a little smart, this self, and begins to understand that this world, what we call the world of appearances and so on, that it's always beckoning us to come hither,

[22:51]

taste me, feel me, eat me, hug me, take me into yourself, particularly in a culture like ours, begins to seem pretty problematical to this self, and begins to look for answers. Maybe I'm just talking about me. Maybe I should just say me, rather than this abstract self. Anyway, this sounds like me, you know. This sounds like my history. I have a history of this kind of experience. Disabused of my notions of some solid world in which I may find something called happiness that is lasting, in which it doesn't wear out, because when it does wear out, no matter where I go or what I've done, person, place or thing, sooner or later, it's not enough. It's never enough. It is never satisfied permanently. Not a relationship with a person, place or thing,

[23:52]

it ever seems to work out the way I want it to. Exactly. It's always fraught with problems. And I feel this problem is a burden, and I hear there must be a way out of this. A lot of people have gone through this. There must be a way to deal with this. So, you know, I put my resignation to whatever I'm doing, and I sell all my goods. I hear about a place called Green Culture. There's a retreat center. There's a place where actually this becomes a focus of attention. There's teachings about all this. People have gone through this since time out of mind, and there's a long literature of how to handle with this sense of dissatisfaction that seems to plague my life. And I get it once more. Once more I become something. Once more the old cycle is over, and a new cycle begins. Now this is the place where I'm going to find the truth. And at first it's wonderful, you know.

[24:55]

I don't have to work for it. I mean, I don't have to go out and get into the dust of the world. My food is taken care of. My shelter is taken care of. All I have to do is what I'm asked to do. I don't even have much responsibility. Just tell me what to do, and I'll do it. It's wonderful at first. But, after a while, I begin to find some dissatisfaction. Not only does my body hurt, and I'm tired all the time, but I begin to really question what I'm doing here. Why am I doing this? The whole meaning of it, to try to find relief from my suffering, becomes in itself a problem. And I don't... You know, the teachers who I thought were so wonderful actually have feet of clay, like me. And the food which I thought was great is not tasting as good as it used to. And I begin to find fault with everything. Not only that, I thought it was great the way this place is run.

[25:58]

It's not running the way I thought it should be. I know a better way to run it. Why don't they see it? How foolish they are, the way they do these things. And I realize I'm back in the same old boat again. I'm back on the wheel. This is samsara, you know. So when I sit, you know, when I first sit, I begin to really inspect myself. Is there a self anywhere in this that is suffering this? Where is it? Well, it seems like it's in here and here, in my body. But I can't find it in my body, actually. Because it's always changing. And I can't find it in my thoughts. Everything seems now to be consciousness. And that's all appearing... Everything is appearing in consciousness. Thoughts, feelings, people, places, my history, everything is... Maybe consciousness is what I should be looking at. Consciousness itself. But how can consciousness see itself?

[27:00]

Yet, when I look back at my life, everything seems to have changed, right? I've changed, the world has changed, everything has changed. But this feeling of the self, this feeling of I am, has not changed. I am, consciousness is still aware of something going on. Maybe I should look at that. Forget the dramas. Forget the traumas for a while. Forget the movie on the screen. Become the screen, as they say. Or maybe even better, become the light that is filling the screen. Here, there's even that. Making the movie behind... Maybe I can get in touch with that, at some point. I ask myself, who is trying to get... Who is trying to find this? I can't even... Not only can I not find a self in the makeup of myself, but I can't find the self that's asking the question. And then one day it occurs to me, it's all going on by itself. There is no I. There never has been an I.

[28:03]

There is the conventional I that I've always thought that we take care of, but a real substantial I. Where is it? I can't find it. And all at once this thing kind of opens up for a little while. Goes, whoom. And lo and behold, I'm happy. Because I don't exist anymore. There's all this stuff out there. I must be that. The only reason I know that there's an I is because of all this other stuff out here. All of you. God, I could almost cry. It's so beautiful. The whole world is so... This is marvelous. I've discovered it. There's only oneness. Yippee. I go running to the teacher, and the teacher, whoom. And pretty soon that oneness, I begin to realize, hey, that's another thought. This is all a thought. Everything is a thought. I won't think anymore. I'm thinking about not thinking. I can't seem to... I'm spinning here. I can't seem to get out of this.

[29:05]

Okay, quiet. Get quiet. I've got to go and sit down and shut up. Sit there and try to... There's such a thing called shamatha. First you've got to calm down. So I try to calm down. For a long time, years of time, I just try to calm this down. Cool off. Every time a thought... No, no. I don't believe this. This does not happen. No. But the self-sense, the separate self, is still big. It's still... I want to live. This thing is... Something's dragging what they call me forward. So consciousness, too, is a thought. All of it seems to be thought. The whole kit and caboodle, what we call mind, is just thought. Everything seems to be some concept designation. Nothing seems to have any existence at all, substantially. If I go to look for it, all I find is other ideas and thoughts. Boy, I've really been brainwashed. But who did that? So I can't find a reason why I feel this way.

[30:09]

I just feel this... I look for emptiness. You can't find emptiness. It's like going into a store that's empty and saying, I'd like to buy about $100 worth of emptiness, please. It's not a thing you can get hold of. So what I'm looking for, of course, is some ultimate subjectivity, some absolute subjectivity, that I can finally get my... wrap myself around. And the more I look, the more I search, the farther away it gets. And so I finally really give up the search. Stop searching. There's nothing you can do about it. Thoughts, you know, there's thoughts without a thinker, there's action without a doer. Let all that stuff go on. Take care of itself. All you have to do is come back to... Come back to what? Come back to I am. There is no I. There is no now. There is no predicate. And yet, and yet, and yet, here I am.

[31:11]

Here you are. Here we are. Finally, by eliminating more and more, I mean, as the mind begins to eliminate itself, deconstruct itself, there isn't all this busyness, a sense of openness happens, and that openness is not filled with nothing. That non-graspability is not a nothingness. It's filled with intense energy and light. And it is basically happy, because it isn't anything at all that you can get hold of, that you can know, ever. All at once, you don't have to do anything about it. You already are that, and you just have to be what you are. It's so simple. And then it goes again. Boom. I had it. I tried to get hold of that. For a while it was good. And now I'm back to the little old diagon again.

[32:13]

So it's like this. It opens for a moment. Of course, maybe you can do practices like, you know, jhana states and so on. You can go in trance states. But always, always, when you come out of these states, even, I don't know that I've experienced Nirvikalpa Samadhi, you know, no perceptions, no perceiver, nothing to perceive. Of course, every night in deep sleep, we do that, actually. When we're not dreaming, there is consciousness. My heart's going, all this stuff is going. But there's no awareness. Yet everything is going on. Every time I open my eyes in the morning, there is the world. Was the world there before or not? We tell ourselves, of course it was. But examine that and see. Every day you wake up, you're starting the world anew. There is no world aside from that. You can't believe it. You can't believe it. Test it out. Where is the world when you're not conscious of it?

[33:15]

So is there a world? Well, if there is, then it's a self. The world has a self that you can get hold of. You can't get a hold of the world either. It does not exist in that way. But you have to, by practicing, by going back and again, who's doing this, what, and keep looking, keep looking for this subjectivity, for this self. And never make that the practice. Whenever something comes up and slaps you in the face, from the nama, hurts your body or your mind, ask it, don't go off that way, come in. What was it though? It said turn your light inwardly. Take the backward step that turns your light inwardly and body and mind of themselves will drop away. These people were not fools, you know. They were not telling us a bunch of lies. There was something about this. In fact, it is so radical that little by little you may discover you don't even have a body. There's no body. There's no substance anywhere.

[34:22]

Imagine that. Only once you disappear. That's what happened to Ramana Maharshi. One day he found out there's no body. Oh my God, he freaked out, you know. It was just light, pure light. The light inside. The light that I am is the light that I see by. The light that I see by is the light that I am. That becomes the basis of your reality. And nothing else can take that place in terms of happiness, but that kind of experience where there is no more experiencer and yet everything is arising as you. What was it? Dongshan walked across the stream, looked down, saw his reflection and said, Ah! It's not me, I'm actually it. I'm not it. It's actually me. It's all me. But there's no me experiencing it. It's just coming spontaneously. What a relief. But nothing that you tell yourself, what we call our ego, will ever accept that

[35:23]

until you prove to yourself that you cannot find yourself. Search though you will. Heaven experiences, whatever they may be. They come, they go. Of themselves. Don't mess with it. Let it do what it's doing. That's why silence becomes the rule. Sink into that silence. Become that silence. You are that silence. We are that silence. Everything comes out of that. And where that is, what that is, behind all of this, behind consciousness and so on, even the Buddhas and ancestors sit mute before that. Nobody knows. Nobody can know. And yet we know that that's what we really are, even though it's indefinable and ungraspable and unknowable. That is our true self. That's my... It seems to me. But you must realize that we tell these stories to each other. These are words. These are concepts. These are ideas. They in themselves have no substance.

[36:24]

This is just another story. And if I look for this story, and try to make something out of it, it becomes unreal, too. It becomes just... It doesn't exist. But that's what we do as human beings. We tell these stories to one another. We have to. We must need to do so. Always redefining ourselves until finally the definition of who we are. We see we're just constantly redefining, constantly redefining, constantly redefining, until there's no... We realize there's no self to be redefined. Then we can step out and just do what's up in front of us. That's what Soto Zen is. Whatever is arising at this moment... And by the way, you can't find this moment either if you try. There's no now. By the time I know it's now, it's gone. And by the time the impulse has reached my brain, through my perceptive mechanism and so on, it's already passed. You're experiencing the past right now, just like you're experiencing the stars. Millions of years ago,

[37:29]

they appear to be here, but they're not. It's an appearance. This phantasm, this dream we're in, we have to wake up from it. But there's nobody to wake up. So, what do I do? Well, I have to go give a talk. I have to wash the vegetables. I have to go back and cook something. I have to raise the kids. I have to go to work. We can't get hold of any of it, but that's what we're doing. The Bodhisattva vow is to return to that place of illusion, of delusion. Delusion within delusion within delusion. That is the home of the Bodhisattva. It may be possible to find Pratyekabuddhism, to find your own liberation from all of this and say, goodbye world, you know.

[38:30]

We come back into this space of delusion, into this dream with gift-bestowing hands saying, hey guys, what can I do to help each other? We're already doing that, as a matter of fact. That's the joke. The Bodhisattva is doing that. And, as the Hindu or the Indian says, you know, it's God playing all the parts, forgetting that he's God. It's all one person. Light that is one though the lamps be many. Wonderful feeling when it really sinks in. But where does it sink in? I think especially since my son had his stroke, I have felt the, what should I say,

[39:33]

ungrasped, this fact that there is an unborn. If I look at my experience and this I am thing, I cannot remember a time I wasn't here. The depth of the dew drop is the height of the moon, whether it's the ocean or dew drop, whatever I'm experiencing is everything. Even if it's just I'm a small person, small realization, it still is filled with the sense of I've always been here. But if I look for who I am or where here is, I am always here. I can't find any of those things. But that's my experience. What makes me think it will ever be different? We are always here doing this. And there is no time. It's just this. Now this, now this, now this, now this. When that sinks in, what is there to do but what we're already doing? Then it becomes almost fun and funny and enjoyable.

[40:34]

Of course, we collapse back into our old habits again and have to keep coming back to that space. And of course, before any of this whole thing comes about, it is really important that we clean up our act. We're not so nice to ourselves or one another, actually. We have a lot of problems with that. We need to get straight with ourselves and the apparent self with the apparent world. That's why we take precepts, I think, you know. That's why we take vows. That's why we take on practices in order to kind of straighten ourselves out so that we don't have these, what they call the hindrances, you know. We're not so overcome by sense desire or by what we don't get and therefore we have the old will. The hindrance to keep us from stepping into this space or we just get sick of it and we're lazy

[41:37]

and stupid. The animal realm, you know, oh, I don't care, I've got mine. That's space. Or what else is there? You know, nervous, anxious, all this anxiety. You've got to work with that. It's very important. It's not where you just step in these spaces. This takes time. It's gradual, gradual, gradual process. Maybe those sudden moments of realization are waking up this thing I'm trying to get at happen, but all the rest of it is really gradual. It feels so gradual and it's in time. Oh, what's the last one? Doubt. Yeah, pessimistic doubt. No, I can't do this. I'm not strong enough to do this. I'm not good enough to do this. But once you start this, you can't give it up. Once you get a taste of this practice, you will always be doing this some kind of practice. You cannot go back the old way without feeling that you're dying, really killing yourself. By the old way,

[42:38]

I don't mean the old way of life, I mean the old way of something that's contracted, presumably, separate self-sense. Once there's even a little opening, you're hooked to keep practicing. And that's a good thing. I think. I often think if I can do it, anybody can do it. But Saturn eats its children. Saturn is this voice in us, this negativity that says, you're not good enough, you can't do this. You're not strong enough. You are strong enough. We are strong enough. We are good stuff. We are light. We are light. And there's nothing that we have to attain. This is the other message. There's nothing to be attained. We've already attained it. All we have to do is recognize it again, to recognize it, to see it again, to know it again. This is what we must do. This is what we're looking at. I'm sure you agree with me.

[43:43]

Don't you? Don't you think this is right? Does it feel like that to you? Huh? Am I nuts? Yeah. Okay. Well, even that nut is not solid. Have we got the time? See, there is no time. 10 to 11? 10 to 11. Yeah, I think they're not. I can take a couple of questions, but, you know, if you want to see me and talk about this, we can also have a private audience or meeting up in the tantra school if you want to talk about this more. The more you talk about it, though, as the sutra says, the more you talk about it, the further you get from the truth. Because we still pile all these concepts up.

[44:45]

But if it helps, if it helps to talk about it, if it helps to get it out on the table, let's do it. Anyway, let's take a couple of questions and then call it a morning. Anybody? No? Oh, yes. Why do I think that compassion has a scary face? You mean the way they manifest it? Well, I think the scary face is to scare away the delusions. Don't you? I mean, it's to be fearless in your compassion. You chew up the negativity,

[45:47]

you chew up the the uncompassionate. But, you know, the thing I'm talking about, I'm trying to talk about, is once this thing opens, there is only the feeling of total compassion. You don't have to make that happen. That is already your natural state. Truly, believe me, it is. Just let it be. You're already doing it. We are already compassionate. If we weren't already compassionate, we would not be living here today. We do compassionately take care of one another. It's built into the system. But I don't know why it has... I think there's... I don't know, actually, what the answer is. I don't know why certain cultures portray compassion as fierce. Anybody know why that is? Yeah? Did I hear if?

[47:09]

We don't want to. About something. Let's have a little, you know, tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee. Let's agree to have a fight. I know couples who based their whole relationship on quarreling. I don't know. It seems, you know, that none of that has any substance to it, actually. I don't really have any answers. I have experiences, but I don't have answers. Because for me, the questioner is dying. The one who asks the questions is not so important to me anymore. That's why I don't like to play the answer man. You already have the answers. I have the answers. You have the answers. Just give up the questioner. It has no substance either. Thus spoke Daigon.

[48:23]

Baba. Baba Wawa. Is there anything said or not? Baba Wawa. May our intention May our intention

[48:36]

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