Good morning, everyone, and welcome. For new people, I'm Taigen Layton, the teacher here at Ancient Dragon Zen Gate. I want to speak this morning about Buddha and primarily about the Dharmakaya Buddha, which is the reality or truth body of Buddha. So this This question, what is Buddha, is the background of many, if not most of the teaching stories or koans in the Zen tradition. And we take refuge in Buddha, the awakened one, as well as dharma, the truth, the reality, and sangha, community. Our practice is to sit like Buddha.

[01:04]

So we all sit, whether we're sitting cross-legged or kneeling or in a chair, we're sitting upright, relaxed, sitting like Buddha sits. And we have an image of Buddha in the center of the meditation hall as a model of that. And in some ways, and our Sutras and Founder Dogen, 13th century Japanese monk, talked about sitting as, in some ways, becoming Buddha's body or allowing this body, this physical presence on our seat to be informed by Buddha's body. So what is Buddha and what is Buddha's body is a basic question. And partly I'm talking about this this morning as a preview for what I'll be talking about through the Rohatsu Session this coming week.

[02:11]

Some of us will be sitting five days. Some will be coming for part of that. But that's Wednesday through Sunday, and everyone's welcome to come to the Sunday morning talk. But I'll be talking about aspects of particularly what is this Dharmakaya Buddha. So fairly late actually in the development of Mahayana Buddhism, the Buddhism of North Asia, the Buddhism based on the idea of the Bodhisattva, the awakening being, liberating all beings, there developed this idea of three bodies of Buddha. So the Bodhisattva is in some sense working our way up to Buddha or in other ways the expression of Buddha. So these distinctions we don't have to hold so firmly. This is a way of talking about aspects of our practice.

[03:16]

But the teaching about the trikaya, or the three bodies of Buddha, is that first there's what's called the nirmanakaya, which is the transformation or incarnated body of Buddha. So that's like Shakyamuni Buddha, the historical Buddha, who lived 2,500 years ago or so in what's now northeastern India. But also this incarnated Buddha, there could be many others. There were Buddhists before Shakyamuni, there were Buddhists after, and we sometimes refer to particular people as Buddhas. So Dogen talked about the great Chan master, Zhaozhou, as the ancient Buddha, and about Hongzhi as the old Buddha, and so we can think about people in the world as nirmanakaya, Buddhas practicing in the world. For example, I don't know if any of you here have backgrounds in Tibetan Buddhism.

[04:24]

A lot of people here have backgrounds in many forms of Buddhism, but Dilgo Kinsey Rinpoche, a great teacher from Nepal last century, In my opinion, and many others, just looking at his picture, it's clear that he was a Buddha. And I know people who studied with him. And so, okay. So, nirmanakaya is the Buddha as a human. Maybe there could be nirmanakaya who are other species besides humans. There are other intelligent species in the planet. Octopuses are supposed to be very intelligent. They have multiple brains. So I don't know if there's a nirmanakaya octopus somewhere out there. Maybe so. I don't know. Anyway, nirmanakaya is the incarnated body of the Buddha, okay? Then there's sambhogakaya, which is, means technically the reward body or the enjoyment body of Buddha.

[05:30]

And this is kind of beings, maybe we could say spirit beings or beings in other, dimensions or realms, but who are accessible and come to assist us. So maybe some of the great bodhisattvas might be considered some bhogakaya buddhas. And Amida Buddha, for example, who's the object of veneration in East Asia, it would be a Sambhogakaya Buddha, and also the healing Buddha, Nyorai, Yakushi Nyorai in Japanese. So Sambhogakaya is actually very interesting, and I'm hoping to get into studying that more with all of you this next year. But I want to talk today and this week about Dharmakaya. So dharmakaya is, dharma means reality or truth. It's the truth body of Buddha, the reality body of Buddha.

[06:30]

Again, this is a way of talking about Buddha that developed really after most of the Mahayana sutras. So it's fairly late development in this bodhisattva teaching. But it's a way of talking about something that I think is helpful to what I want to talk about today and this week. So Dharmakaya Buddha is the body of Buddha that is the whole universe. The aspect, we could say, of Buddha that is the whole phenomenal world. This planet and other planets and all dimensions and so it's the fabric of reality as awakened. Buddha just means the awakened one. So again, we sit in some ways to sit like not to become Buddha exactly, but to express the Buddha that's already here on your seat, under your seat, around your seat.

[07:37]

how do we physically express Buddha, and part of that is this upright sitting that we do. And I wanna talk about this, so the Dharmakaya, again, is just everything as Buddha, seeing the whole world as Buddha, as awakened. This is not how most of the world operates, of course, in terms of the newspaper headlines or whatever, but this sense of reality itself has awakened. is what the Dharmakaya is about. And we mention these three bodies of Buddha in our meal chant. And there are various ways that both Sambhogakaya and Dharmakaya have been depicted. In Japan, they have

[08:39]

great Buddhas, the Daibutsu in Nara, for example, one of my many favorite Buddhist statues in Japan, is huge. It's the largest bronze statue in the world and in the largest wooden building in the world, at Todai-ji Temple in Nara. I don't know how large it is, but the ears are eight feet long. So just to give you an idea. And it's a beautiful statue, even though it's on this immense scale, just as a way of depicting the immensity of Dharmakaya. So this is particularly a Dharmakaya Buddha. So what I'm going to talk about more this week, and I want to just try and introduce a little bit And then I'm going to go into a couple of other realms. the teaching of, and it's not explicitly called Dharmakaya, but I feel like that's what it is, the teaching in the Maha Parinirvana Sutra, which is one of the great Bodhisattva Sutras, considered one of the highest sutras, along with the Lotus Sutra in East Asia.

[09:54]

And it's the story about And it's very long. There's a new translation of the first, I don't know, third or quarter of it that's a very thick book. So it's one of these very, very long scriptures in Buddhism. But it's supposed to be the words of the Buddha as he was about to, and the story of the Buddha as he was about to pass away into nirvana. So it's called Parinirvana. uh... when i uh... and sometimes the sutra is called just the nirvana sutra and in buddhism in some way nirvana well the the original word means extinction it means to let to end our the cycle of rebirth that's one of the background teachings in Asia to end the cycle of rebirth, to check out into the lofty realm of nirvana.

[11:00]

It's the extinction of all of our greed and anger and confusion and all of our seeking and all of the stuff that gets people into trouble. We pass away into nirvana. So in Japan, one of the things that happens after death is that, and there are numbers of them, but one of the things is that everybody who dies is called Hotoke, which means Buddha. So just passing away is to become a Buddha, in part. But anyway, this Mahaparinirvana Sutra gets into many different things, but the teaching I wanted to talk about, I will talk about this week and more next Sunday, is about basic, the deconstructing and overturning of basic Buddhist teachings, impermanence, suffering, dukkha, impurity, the impurity of the world, and non-self.

[12:04]

So I mostly want to talk about this in terms of self and non-self, because really our practice is about seeing how our idea of ourself gets in the way of just being free. And our whole language is about this. There's subject, verb, object. We are selves verbing objects out there, or trying to prevent ourselves from being verbed by subjects out there. There's this sense of separation of ourself and all things. There's a fundamental problem that is part of how people, not just in our consumerist society, but all the way back. Part of the way the human consciousness, discriminating consciousness, works is that we have this sense of separation, so we make up this self. And practically speaking, of course, we need to have some self.

[13:07]

We need to know our address and our phone number and all of that stuff. Email, if you have an email, whatever. These are all the things of the self and all of our stories about our self. So the early Buddhist teaching talked about anatman, non-self, that this self we usually think of is a falsehood. However, in this Nirvana Sutra, the Buddha does this very strange thing. And I'm going to talk more about this this week, but basically he says that these ideas of suffering, impermanence, impurity, and no-self are actually erroneous. They're just expedient teachings to to help us get through our usual conventional sense of separation, our usual way of thinking.

[14:08]

Because people don't see the truth of permanence, bliss, purity, and self from the perspective of Buddha. So in this Nirvana Sutra, this Parinirvana Sutra, the Buddha says that with the awareness of what is sometimes called Buddhadhatu, the Buddha realm, which is where the Dharmakaya is. Actually, the true teaching is permanence, purity, bliss, and self. So the Particularly, I want to talk about this in terms of self and how our usual sense of self needs to be deconstructed. But then there's this other reality, this dharmakaya.

[15:09]

And in that reality, ultimately, yes, there's self. Yes, there's permanence, that Buddha is eternal. And like the Lotus Sutras that some of us studied here a couple of years ago, in the Mahaparinirvana Sutra it also talks about the inconceivable lifespan of Buddha, that Buddha only pretends to pass away. So this becomes an issue in this sutra where he's about to pass away. But that actually Buddha is always present. For a very, well, for a very, very, very long time. And for twice that long in the future. So this is all a kind of very, so I apologize to newer folks, this is all very highfalutin Buddhist teaching. But the practical part of that is to see that when we sit, even for one period, but as some of us will for five days, or parts of those five days coming up, we settle into a kind of

[16:19]

some possibility of communion with some deeper reality. And I'd suggest that this has to do with the Dharmakaya or the Buddhadhatu, the realm of Buddha in which, yes, there's self. Yes, there's permanence. Yes, there's bliss. And yes, there's purity even in the world. Now, from our being a storefront temple in the middle of a big city, it's hard to see that, of course, in our everyday activity. But we can get glimpses of that. And such glimpses make a difference. So in this sutra, the Buddha reveals the existence of nirvana to bodhisattvas. Because the Buddhadhatu, the Buddha realm, is present within all sentient beings, these four qualities are found not simply in the Buddha, but in all beings.

[17:24]

This ultimate self, not the self that separates us from each other and all things, but the self that is all things, expressed in particular ways by each of you on your seat. by each thing. This implies that the Buddha and all beings are endowed with self in direct contradiction to the Buddhist teaching of no-self or anatman. So when the Buddha said there was no self, what he actually meant there is no mundane conditioned self, which is how we usually think of ourselves. So this is This is a way of talking about this question, what is Buddha? or this is one of the ways, or, you know, part of the gift of Buddhism is that any way you get, anything you want to get stuck on, it will deconstruct.

[18:31]

The teachings deconstruct themselves because the teachings are empty, you know, everything is empty, and yet there is, from the point of view of this dharmakaya, self and bliss and permanence. But if you hook onto that as something that has to do with your small self, that's not it. OK. So this is tricky stuff. But it's part of our tradition. As some of you know, we sometimes chant the Long Life Sutra to the Bodhisattva of Compassion, Kanon or Kanzeon, which has this line, jo rakuga jo, which is exactly this. permanence, bliss, purity, and self, which is, again, beyond our ideas of self. So I want to try and talk about this. today and tomorrow, and I may bring this up during the session, in terms of this very dense physics paper that somebody sent me called, Consciousness in the Universe is Scale-Invariant and Implies an Event Horizon of the Human Brain.

[19:53]

This is by two Dutch scholars, and it was in the Neuroquantology journal and I've mentioned this before I think last week but I want to try and go into it a little deeper today because even though I don't really understand it and it's about geometry and I know there's at least one person here who studies physics and who can probably explain some of this more but it's about toroidal geometry and the way the universe is and this is according to current of physics and math science, but it seems to me, just reading it as very much a layperson, not a scientist, that what it's talking about has something to do with this idea of Dharmakaya and Buddhism. Not that we need, not that Buddhism needs to look for science for verification of everything, although there's now all these neurological studies of meditation and the benefits of it.

[20:56]

But anyway, I'm just going to read parts of this and maybe comment. It starts, the abstract starts, our brain is not a standalone information processing organ. It acts as a central part of our integral nervous system. with recurrent information exchange with the entire organism and the cosmos. In this study, the brain is conceived to be embedded in a holographic structured field that interacts with resonant sensitive structures in the various cell types in our body. So later on in the paper, it talks about information as a kind of physical quality of the universe, which, you know, I don't understand, but it sounds really cool. Anyway, and it talks about this being a field-receptive mental workspace which is created. So to think of our brain not as some piece of matter in our skull, but as a mental workspace.

[21:59]

It's an interesting different way of thinking about the self. So again, I'm just going to read bits of this and maybe comment, but he says they propose that the supposed field receptive workspace in a mutual interaction with the whole nervous system generates self consciousness. And it's conceived as operating from a fourth spatial dimension, which they get into later, which is not time. It's something anyway. And this is adequately defined by the geometry of the torus, which is a particular geometrical structure that is envisioned as a basic unit or operator of space-time. So again, this is modern science talking about the way our consciousness works in relationship to all of reality.

[23:03]

It is postulated that consciousness in the entire universe arises through scale-invariant nested toroidal coupling of various energy fields. So this is a very different way of thinking about intelligence and consciousness. They say, we find support for a universal information matrix that was extensively described earlier, and they referenced many earlier papers about this stuff, as an implicate order as well as in a spectrum of space-time theories in current physics, the presence of a field-receptive resonant workspace associated with, but not reducible to, our brain. may provide an interpretation framework for widely reported but poorly understood transpersonal conscious states and algorithmic origin of life. It also points out the deep connection of mankind with the cosmos and our major responsibility for the future of our planet."

[24:11]

So there's this Bodhisattva element that they introduce in there sort of towards the end. because we are connected with everything in the universe, which is kind of what the Dharmakaya is talking about, we have some responsibility to respond. So that's, so I want to see if I can go a little further with this. Yeah, so in the introduction of the paper itself, again, more really interesting things. Consciousness can be defined, they start, as a state of a semi-stable system that has developed in a cooperative and cyclic operating mode so that it has become, quote-unquote, causally self-observant. So we are aware of the self. And Dogen, our 13th century Japanese monk founder says, to study the way is to study the self. So this is about studying the self. Thereby, it can not only predict aspects of the local environment, but also can integrate memorized information and future directed projections into a personal worldview that serves individual survival, development, and social communication.

[25:25]

So the sutras talk about the Buddha's omniscience, or knowing, a wider context. So it says in this paper, an even wider context for consciousness is offered in which our individual mind is seen as part of a larger universal consciousness being instrumental in the entire fabric of reality. So, to me, when I saw this, I thought of this Dharmakaya. Again, consciousness, therefore, is not only a human faculty and implies a reflective state that both involves information integration as well as subjectively, quote-unquote, feeling of past and future events. It requires a graded complexity of life systems to deal with the requirements of multitasking and ecological maintenance. So many of you have some relationship to multitasking and many of us are concerned about ecological maintenance. A central item in brain research is the question whether consciousness should be conceived solely as an emergent phenomenon as related to the extreme urological complexity of the brain, or rather, that the central nervous system is embedded in a much wider context in which it also receives quantum wave information, partly parity, parity unrelated to the known senses.

[26:58]

And this is a lot of what Zen teaching is about. realizing that our usual way of knowing is limited, that our human consciousness, we know a lot of things, and we can be very skillful with our linear knowledge of a lot of things, but as one of the koans says, not knowing is most intimate. So to realize the limitations of what we know, and to realize that there is more to know, or realize that we know in various different ways. So Dogen talks about water, you know, fish relate to the water in Lake Michigan in one way, humans in another way, and then he adds that hungry ghosts and dragons relate to the water in other ways. So how we see the world is conditioned by our particular apparatus. So I'm gonna just do a little more from this strange paper and there are all kinds of diagrams about this is a diagram of the brain and how it so I mean anybody who wants to I can send you this paper just let me know it's very long and I you know I don't understand most of it but

[28:16]

The particular holographic type of consciousness situated in the particular event horizons as a sort of bordering memory domains can effectively function as a nested information workspace. I like that, just to think of our brain as an information workspace. that is related to other information workspaces. Anyway, that in humans is instrumental in constructing a mental mode of reality for internal use in each individual, thus functioning as a global reference system. It is instrumental in the overall monitoring of each individual, of any intelligent species that inhabits our universe. In addition, it should therefore be involved in the fine-tuning with and updating of a supposed universal consciousness. Again, going back to this idea of the dharmakaya. And I want to jump to just the very end of the paper, the kind of conclusion.

[29:21]

The authors prefer to rather rephrase the question, if consciousness is indeed the most fundamental aspect of reality, how does consciousness result in the manifestation of matter? So they get into all kinds of things from this way of thinking. The central postulate of the present paper in this respect is that consciousness can be regarded as the most basic building block of nature, and consequently is present at all levels of the fabric of reality. This isn't how we usually think. We usually think in terms of matter and cells and elements, but they're talking about consciousness as the basis of everything. It's a very different way of seeing the world. and they get into talking about wormhole structures and black holes and white holes and anyway. It may also, so I don't know how this relates to Star Trek or whatever, but it may also provide the potential for extrasensory inter-individual communication and correlated brain signals.

[30:34]

So again, this is a current scientific paper, not science fiction. Since the postulated holographic workspace projects its active information from a dedicated virtual screen in our brain as described for event horizons in current cosmology, these projected multilevel fractal wave structures thereby contribute to the integral wave function of our universe. So again, our usual idea of self is separate from everything out there, separate from material things, so-called things. But this is a very different way of seeing things. And I'll just, the concluding paragraph. Through deep insights, contemplations, meditation, and reasoning, we can recognize some intrinsic aspects of such an all-embracing universal consciousness. However, our limited minds, being individual parts of the cosmic consciousness, operate in time-space-energy constraints and inner conditioning.

[31:36]

and these only partly can reflect the true nature of reality. In spite of this handicap, humanity should realize that faithful honoring of such a connecting principle may provide a potential to preserve our precious planet and guarantee a real future for mankind." Which of course is very much in this. Okay, so this is, for whatever it's worth, a current scientific physics paper that's talking about universal consciousness as this function of, as a way of generating and as a function of what we usually think of as reality. It's the matter of the universe. So again, to try and go beyond this abstraction, what does this have to do with our practice?

[32:43]

And in our Zen school, we study other dense teachings in different ways, dense in different ways, like some of Dogen's writings, not as a way of trying to figure out or understand how everything works, but to support our practice. How does this support our practice? How does this involve how we sit as Buddha when we're doing meditation and how we are Express that deeper awareness that we can glimpse, whether through physics papers or just through settling deeply into being present and upright and observing.

[33:44]

Inhale and exhale and feeling this limited body space, this limited workspace on your seat. And how does it connect with everything else? because in some ways our practice is about connection and relationship and non-separation and this deeper reality of this, what we in Buddhism call Dharmakaya Buddha, Buddha as the reality, awakening, awakened awareness, liberating awareness. which involves kindness and caring and helping beings who are caught in suffering, which of course is all of us, but also all of us have this connection to, through our practice, to something deeper. And so a lot of what our practice is about is how do we express that?

[34:50]

not just in the meditation hall, but when we go out in the world. Practices like generosity, and ethical conduct, and patience, and energy, and skillful means, and so forth. And we have precepts about how to try to express this in the world. So I want to try and study this with people who are going to be here this week and look at what the Nirvana Sutra has to say about this other deeper reality of self as opposed to our usual way of thinking of non-self. So in closing, though, I want to just mention something about what's going on in the world, the so-called ordinary world, the material world.

[35:57]

This week, so part of bodhisattva practice is paying attention and responding to various levels of and kinds of suffering in the world, our own, including our own patterns of grasping and anger and confusion, and really getting to know that and not being caught by that, but also people around us and how to be helpful, but also in the systems of the world. I feel some responsibility as a Dharma teacher and a precept teacher to speak this week about something that's happening in Washington, D.C. and in our country, which is the current tax bill that the Senate and the House have just passed different versions of. So, this is just my opinion, but I feel some responsibility to express something about it, that this tax bill is really kind of a heinous attack on our country and the people of our country.

[37:16]

It will tax almost everybody else for the sake of giving huge benefits to the 0.1%, the most wealthy people and the wealthy major corporations in our country in a situation in which there's already vast inequality. And it'll do things like lead to the end of Medicare and Social Security. It's damaging to health care. particularly to women's health in a lot of ways. It's hugely damaging to our environment because tucked into it are things like giving away the whole Arctic to fossil fuel drilling at a time when we should be trying to end fossil fuel dependence and find alternative energy systems for the sake of responding to climate breakdown that's happening all around us, obviously. And so anyway, I just wanted to say that in closing, and that it's not a done deal yet.

[38:25]

They still have to confer. And so for those of you so inclined, I would encourage you to contact your Senators and Congress people, whether they're Democrats or Republicans, this is something that all of them need to respond strongly to, and that we need to respond strongly to, to make it not happen. Because it will really have a lot of damage. Oh, and amongst other things, it's going to be vastly damaging to education and higher education in this country. because tuition waivers will be taxed. Even if students don't get the money of tuition waivers, they'll have to pay taxes on it. It'll make graduate school basically unaffordable to everybody except the very wealthy. And this will decrease, this will be damaging to science and you know, many things in our country. So I just, I feel responsible to say, to mention that.

[39:28]

And if you feel so inclined to contact Senators or Congress people, it could help. So, okay. We have a little bit of time and I wanted to here if any of you have questions or responses or comments about universal consciousness and the mental workspace and our connection to all of that or just about these different aspects of what is Buddha. So we have a little bit of time if anyone has questions or comments on any of that or responses. So again, the point is, when we sit like Buddha, what is it that we take refuge in?

[40:38]

What is it that we turn to? And these different aspects of Buddha is a way of just seeing this in a more nuanced way. There's the Buddha that is just particular beings or people supporting awakening in the world. There is the Buddha that is in this, these, I don't know what spirit realm, beings who can assist us. And then there's this whole universe as awakened, which is not something we can grasp with our usual way of thinking, but somehow just to hear about it, changes how we see, or can't change how we see ourselves. Yes, Brian?

[41:40]

It seems fairly easy for me to think about consciousness But this article talks about consciousness as being a foundation of all physical reality, and Dogen talks about fences and tiles and rocks as Buddha-nature. Can you say something about Yeah, yeah, yeah, good. Well, it's not that, you know, if we say consciousness, we have some idea about that, because we have human consciousness. But to think about awareness, maybe is a better word, that is the floor aware when you step on it while we're doing walking meditation?

[42:49]

Well, I don't know, not in any usual way. But from the point of view of this sense, again, I can't grok all the physics of this. But there's some way in which, well, a different example. There's many native peoples think this way, indigenous peoples, Cheyenne peoples in the prairies say that rocks have consciousness. Now that's not how we usually think, although Dogen talks about the green mountains walking, and we can, there's various ways to think about that. If you go to Japanese rock gardens, some of those rocks have obviously been through a lot. You know, you can see the... the patterns in them.

[43:51]

And so this is not how we think of consciousness or even awareness, but then how does a, you know, so for us, you know, if you think about ants, for example, they seem to have, they seem to be, you know, small and insignificant, but they have this social structure that's really elaborate that they are all part of. Or how to, or think of trees, how do trees see us? There's a discussion now amongst botanists of plant intelligence. Not in the way that we think, but that plants actually do react to various threats. This has been demonstrated. They can communicate at distances with other members of their species. So vines, for example. know which direction to move somehow to find something to grow up on. They've done scientific experiments to demonstrate that.

[44:55]

So how trees and other plants have awareness is not, you know, what is that? And I mentioned octopus. Octopuses apparently are one of the more intelligent species on the planet, and yet they have multiple brains. I don't know if they have brains in every one of their legs, but they, what is that? How does that, you know, we're used to thinking in a binary way because we have left and right and front and back and men and women and, you know, we have, We think in terms of binary, and our computers are built based on binaries, but what would an eight-fold or a five-fold structure of intelligence look like? Well, you know, I can't even... Language can't begin to even talk about that, or at least as we usually know language. So then if you think about... So you mentioned the passage from Doguen where he talks about when one person sits, all of space awakens.

[45:59]

So this is a rather radical claim. But it's at the beginning of Dogen's writings that he says that the point of our zazen is that when we display Buddha mudra, the attitude and posture of Buddha, with our whole body and mind, that it echoes fences and walls, grasses and trees, fences and walls, tiles and pebbles. So, you know, fences and walls, man-made things. There's some way in which there's some interaction that happens between what's happening when we are sitting upright and still and relaxed and connected to one of these aspects of Buddha, and everything else around us. That's the starting point of sattva, this practice we do. And he says that there's also this mutual inconceivable guidance between the Zazen person and all these, and the grasses and trees, fences and walls, tiles and pebble.

[47:06]

Now that gets into this kind of physics paper of this mental workspace that we are connected to other things with. So in that sense, the floorboards aren't gonna yell when you step on them, but there's something going on that we're not, that is not part of how we usually think. And just to be aware of that changes our sense of our self-conceit and all of that. When you said, man, woman, that's when my brain started to go, wait, there's more than that.

[48:13]

And I think our gender and sexuality are, in the last century or so, one way that we can kind of recognize that what is really in the last decade. Sure, there's much more variety there. And I've been thinking about this in terms of anxiety. The way that animals and us as animals live with a certain level of anxiety all the time about how we're going to live. And when we're really anxious, our brains constrict our field of awareness down to a very, very limited realm. It's like fight or flight, this and that.

[49:14]

And I think about zazen as one way of learning to sit, and the more we can allow our mind and our consciousness to relax, it seems like the more we can recognize that there's maybe a little bit more there. We can recognize that all the time. And it's always been there, but it's us, actually, who have been cutting that way, way down. And that's my way of making sense of everything Yes, and the point of this, again, isn't to have some, you know, elaborate, fancy understanding of any of this, but then how do we live? Good.

[50:32]

Yes. Yes. So we're running low on time, but Stephen, excuse me, as someone somewhat first in physics, I don't know if you have any comments on any of the things that I repeated from that paper. Okay, I'll send you a copy. and anyone else who's interested. But I won't quiz you. This will not be a quiz about it. Anybody, any other comments before we stop? Well, thank you all for listening.

[51:17]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_90.85