Last week we talked about, as we have been talking about for a long time, the middle way as the mode that we practice, the mode in which we practice. If we're in this middle way, then there's this way of being with it that's called Does that sound familiar?

[01:13]

Although I maybe didn't say it that way last week, that's sort of in a sense what I was trying to talk about. In this practice called the Middle Way or the Buddha Way, we are able to have the practice no matter what is happening. Or another way to put it, the practice is being with whatever is happening in this middle way.

[02:32]

If we're not in the middle way with what's happening, because of being off-balance, we... the off-balanceness becomes a condition for this special phenomena called missing life. It is, it's actually a living, it's a phenomena of living being, a living being can be a condition for a way of living that seems to be missing living when we're not balanced in the midst of living. But if we are balanced in this middle way, there's no missing life

[03:43]

And then there is this practice. And this practice is exactly the same as life at that moment. And being exactly the same, for a living being to be exactly the same as life this moment, is precisely what is meant by Buddha. So in a sense this is a very simple presentation of Buddhist psychology or the psychology of being awake.

[04:52]

The psychology of being awake is... I forgot how I said it a moment ago, but something like being... in the middle way in the midst of what's ever happening. I differentiate between being in the middle way with what's ever happening and being off balance with whatever's happening. There's a difference there. In both cases we are in fact intimately with whatever is happening. Our life is always intimately, is always intimate with whatever is happening. But if we're, if we are unbalanced in this intimacy, then we don't call it Buddha.

[06:02]

We call it suffering. but if we're balanced with it, it's Buddha. Okay? So that's a very simple way of talking about Buddhist psychology. Now, I could say, are there any questions? And then that would be then sort of this will be the topic for the evening, this very simple presentation. And maybe I should let the presentation be very simple and then see what happens if I say. Are there any questions or comments? Catherine?

[07:06]

What is balance? What is balance? What's the middle way? What? You brought... Catherine had just introduced a word into the conversation called overwhelmed. Did you know that you introduced that word? Okay. Were you conscious of introducing that word? Huh? Okay. I didn't say overwhelmed, did I? You don't remember what I said, actually? Well, then I get to say it several more times, I guess. Okay, so what is your point? Your point is, what is off-balance, or what does it mean to be... Huh? Off-balance. Or you interpret off-balance as overwhelmed.

[08:07]

I just want to stop there and think about off-balance being interpreted as overwhelmed. In a sense I think that makes sense, that is kind of like sensible that you... it's hard for us to imagine being overwhelmed and being balanced. Not hard to, but it's easy to think of you're balanced and then you're overwhelmed so you fall over. Hmm? You can? Okay, so let's say you were balanced and then you felt overwhelmed and then you leaned some way. You don't just stay upright and balanced when you feel overwhelmed and you go, whoa. Or you go, whoa. Right? So what's your question? You said, as far as I remember, if you're balanced, it's Buddha.

[09:21]

I said if you're balanced, it's Buddha. Yeah. The being balanced is the middle way. So let's say something happens. Something like some big pain comes up or something. Okay? let's say a pain in your heart comes up. And so being balanced with that, first of all, is not to distract yourself from it. And we talked about those two basic modes of distraction. One is self-mortification. The other is indulgence in sense pleasure. These are two basic modes of distraction from what's happening. For example, a pain. Okay? So those are examples of being off balance or distracting yourself away from the pain. So it could be a very strong pleasure in your heart.

[10:23]

Nice warm feeling in your heart area that's like starting to spread throughout your entire body into your armpits and your elbows and down your forearms, into your fingers and up into all your little hair follicles on your head. pleasure and you just like say, you know, well, I wonder if I can get more of this somehow. So that's an example of leaning into a sense pleasure. You're having a sense pleasure. You're having a and you're having a pleasureful sense and so you lean into it in a way that takes you away from it. Can you imagine such a thing? Or you start to think, now, what did I do to get this? I want to figure out how I got this. Like an innocent bystander and feel the pleasure. No.

[11:26]

You lean into it. Actually, what some people do is they actually say, I don't deserve this pleasure. Can you imagine that? This is not for me. So they mortify themselves. themselves away from it. Those are just two simple examples of how to distract yourself, bend away from it. Okay? Two ways to be off balance and miss the experience, even though of course you don't miss it. You just concoct this new thing and miss it. Okay? And the other way The other, so those are not the middle way. So the middle way is just, if you have a pleasure, it is like radically a pleasure. If you have a pain, it's just, you're just really right there with it, that's it. You have no alternative to it. You don't, you don't, you don't flinch at all from your life.

[12:34]

And so, There it is. That's also a way of kind of like leaning away from what's happening is to grasp some view of what's happening. So what's happening for us human beings is that not only do we have pain or pleasure, not only is what happens for us pain or pleasure, But we usually also have some view of it. Some view. Some opinion. Some theory about this pain. Any of you ever had a theory about a pain or a pleasure? Or a view about it? This is quite common. So what's happening is not just pain and pleasure but theories and views about pains and pleasures we also have. Plus a lot of other stuff is part of what we experience.

[13:36]

To just be with pain and just be with the pleasure and just be with whatever view we have at that moment in this middle way means that we do not grasp those views. So like you have a pain and then you have a theory, this pain exists. Or sometimes people have a theory when they have a pain, this pain does not exist. This is not a real pain. There's various causes. We come up with a view of this thing does not exist. Those are two views that we can come up with. The middle way is not to grasp them. They're just there. Pain's there. View's there. And all kinds of ways of distracting don't grasp the distractions and we don't grasp the views about what's going on.

[14:44]

So what happens when we don't grasp the views? What happens? What happens when you don't grasp views? What? No, they didn't fall away yet. At the same time, the views are there, okay? The view's there, we don't grasp them. What happens at that time that we don't grasp? Huh? We're free of them, yeah, what else? We're not distracted by them, what else? We don't... We see clearly, what else? What? We're balanced. Right. What else? What? What? Life happens, yeah. What else, Savya? Buddha. That's Buddha. That's not really, you know, all that Buddha can be, but that's basically what Buddha is.

[15:46]

Buddha can blossom out from that basic Buddha, which is just not grasping anything that's happening. And the middle way is just not to grasp anything that's happening. It doesn't like these things drop away. But not because we made them drop away, because they naturally drop away. Everything drops away on its own. But then you're with that dropping away. So you watch the whole world drop away. Because you're not holding on to it. It drops away, but we don't like that sometimes. So we're holding on. So we say, so have it. So then the next, then the world comes back all fresh and new and we miss it because we're still holding on to the last moment and so on. When we're not Buddha. When we are Buddha, it's like, it's happening, we're not grasping it, we're not someplace else. Buddha, and then that all goes away. That all ceases and then it's like, boom. This is a little bit of a distraction, but please forgive me.

[16:51]

Do you forgive me? Beforehand? You don't know what it's going to be, but did you forgive me? You can tell me later if you forgive me. Please forgive me. So I was listening to radio on 19th, no, on Pacific Parkway. Is that what it's called? Park Presidio. Is that what it's called? That street? Park Presidio? You know that street? It's funny, huh? Talking about, you all know about whales, right? These humpback whales that make these sounds like... You know? And they go... This was discovered in 1969. Some guy was out there in his little boat... What's it called? It's called a hydro... hydro mic, hydro... Huh? Hydrophone. He put it down in there. He heard these whales. And then since that time, he'd been discussing what these sounds of these whales are.

[17:56]

Is it language? Blah, blah, blah. So they said on this... So they've analyzed these sounds that these whales make. And... I think through studying through information theory and audiology and various other things, they're of the opinion now, the latest opinion is that those patterns of those sounds are not of the level of complexity. Like they make these sounds and some of these sounds go off. on for like 16 minutes of some kind of a discrete package of sound patterns that seem to make a whole and then they get repeated. They have language. But they're not thinking that it doesn't sound like they're language or it also doesn't sound like they're communicating any content. To make a long story short, it doesn't sound like they're actually communicating any content to each other. And someone said, just at the end of the show, maybe they're doing something else besides... Maybe they're trying to communicate something, and actually they used the word abstract, but anyway, maybe they're trying to communicate beauty.

[19:08]

Rather than like, you know, passing information back and forth, which is power, right? Information is power. They're just sharing beauty, maybe. Well, Buddhas actually are mostly sharing beauty. but in order to help people they speak languages because people are trapped in languages so the buddhas go into the languages to practice the middle way so that they can be with what's happening in this way such that you see that what's happening you understand that what's happening is beauty never anything but. And it's also beautiful, it's also beautiful, it's also beautiful that people do not get it because they're distracting themselves from the beauty.

[20:12]

They'd rather have something a little less intense than beauty, so they are into it or whatever. So Buddha is not to lean away from it. And then, if anybody is leaning away from it, somehow the other phase of Buddha is that Buddhas naturally sing. They sing about being a Buddha. And then they translate the song into whatever language works for the person to get the person in their language to start being with what's happening. in this middle way. And then they tune into the beauty, and then they start singing. So that's a version of Buddhist psychology. Any other questions? Yes, what's your name again? Bayon. Bayon? How do you spell it? B-A-Y-O-N. My question is about suffering.

[21:19]

And I was in my sleep. Someone mentioned that there was two kinds of suffering, necessary and unnecessary suffering. And I was wondering if you have a comment about that. Comment on necessary and unnecessary suffering? Sometimes what they do is they say actually necessary and unnecessary pain. That's another way I've heard that expression. And actually, sometimes people say the unnecessary type of pain is suffering. So that's the way they use the word. Actually, the Sanskrit word dukkha, I think in Pali it's basically pronounced dukkha also. The etymology that I've heard of it is that it's referring to a wheel that's out of round. Okay? A wheel is quite round.

[22:22]

And that's like what I was saying before. It's like the wheel of your experience or the circle of your experience, it's like you're like off center. You know, you're like you're not right there with it. And that's dukkha. But also dukkha is used for just regular pain. So like if you have a... If you sprain your ankle, you may get a pain. That pain is actually helpful because probably you should sit down and put ice on your ankle or rub it or something until this whatever, the tissue that's kind of upset, calms down, and you can walk safely again. So that kind of pain is... I'd call it good. I'd call it helpful. Or you have a pain in your tooth, so then you... Maybe you go to the dentist if you have health insurance.

[23:33]

Or somebody hurt your feelings. You know, they scream at your ear. or something like that, and you feel pain. This kind of pain I think is helpful. It helps you understand something's happening between you and somebody else. But the basic unnecessary kind of suffering is a suffering that you would resist the pain in your ankle by saying, How about a little self-mortification here? That was so stupid, why did I do that? Oh, you pushed me, you wrecked... No, no, that's... Anyway, to mortify yourself, to distract yourself from the pain, that's suffering. Even when you have pleasure, that's not necessary. Suffering, that's just pleasure. Then you, like, worry about how long it's going to go on. That's unnecessary. So some kinds of suffering are either necessary and or, I would say, helpful.

[24:37]

They're part of their properly. And you've probably heard of some people have some kind of disease. Disease, actually, that's probably a funny word. They have a lack of disease. They have a lack of ability to sense pain. And such people need special assistance to get around because, you know, They leave their hands in doors as they shut and stuff like that because it doesn't make any difference to them, right? So you have to watch them as they go out of doors to make sure they get their hand through. The whole body clears the door before it shuts and things like that. So our sense of pain, our bodily sense of pain is really helpful so we can take care of our body well. But to resist that pain or be off balance in relationship to that pain, that's suffering. And generally speaking, not only is that common among us, but it's, generally speaking, non-stop for most people.

[25:39]

Because the physical pain, for many people, comes and goes. Actually, the suffering comes and goes, too. I shouldn't say it's non-stop. I should say it's... What do you call it? It's continuous, even though it... comes and goes, it always comes back the next moment because we have this basic attitude of being off balance. So whether we have physical pain or not, we're always off center. We're always trying to get away from what's happening, almost always, and therefore we have this suffering. Does that make sense? So the first truth of the Buddha is the truth of suffering and that includes both the truth of physical pain but primarily it includes I shouldn't say that it includes both physical pain and the sense of being off balance.

[26:51]

And so the Buddha faces this pain without without any alternative. And I take it back, not the Buddha faces it. I would say facing this with no alternative is Buddha. And it is also the end of suffering in that moment. Is emotional pain associated with physical pain? Or are you saying similarly? I think some emotional pains probably also are helpful. For example, it's helpful if someone insults you Sometimes it's helpful if it hurts because they're trying to hurt you sometimes. And you don't understand what they're doing unless you feel some pain.

[27:55]

So it helps you understand your relationship to them when you feel emotional pain. But if you are in this balanced way with your emotional pain, there is Buddha there with that emotional pain. You're just experiencing emotional pain. That's it. So let's say we have depression. Yeah, so let's talk about what you mean by depression. I would say depression is being very unhappy, or a state of unhappiness, a state of low energy. In other words, the person actually is alive. And as far as I know, if you give somebody, if you test the temperature of the body of a depressed person, they're pretty much in the neighborhood of 90 degrees.

[29:00]

They don't, their body temperature doesn't drop. But they are in a state where their energy is, I would say, highly blocked and contorted For example, I think if you look at the brain of a person who's depressed, you find it's very uneven. Like one part's really hot, another part's really cold. If you look at the thermal gradient of a happy meditator, the thermal gradient is pretty even over the whole head. I also look at the thermal gradient of a child, of an infant. It's pretty even. Also, the thermal gradient of the baby's back is pretty much one color. But most adults, it's splotchy. They have a lot of heat here and cool there. So a depressed person, you see one part of the brain is being highly used, the other part of the brain is not being used.

[30:02]

And this causes all kinds of disturbance and pain in the organism. And so my theory about depression is that it partly comes from the overuse of cognitive faculties and the underuse of others. And I compare it to like, on a mental level, like chewing gum. You know, if you chew gum for a long time, you'll use your jaw muscles for a long time. I think you can actually get depressed by chewing gum for a really long time just because a certain part of your brain gets used, overused, and it actually throws your system off. Anything you do in an unbalanced way for a really long time, I think, can make a kind of depression. But the thing you can do really a lot is thinking certain ways over and over. So, for example, I... This is... What I'm saying now is Buddhist psychology to the extent that a so-called Buddhist teacher is talking about psychology, right?

[31:10]

LAUGHTER You won't find this discussion in very many Buddhist texts, right? But if this was being taped, is this being taped? If this is taped and transcribed, this might be put in a book called Buddhist Psychology. But anyway, I discriminate between depression and being sad. For me, being sad is like if you lose something and you don't let go of it. For example, of... not being balanced with what's happening. Something appears and then something disappears, but you resist that disappearance, and this throws your system off in a certain way. This is not Buddha. This is clean to something that's lost. This is not healthy for the system. So what a healthy system does is it offers the awareness of this creature who is clinging to something that's lost.

[32:15]

It offers them sadness, which is something you can feel. And if you open to that feeling, just open to it pretty much. If you could open to it with your whole body and mind, then in that opening there is a release of the clinging. to this lost thing and then there's a refreshment you know you're okay you've adjusted to this loss but you couldn't let go of it without the assistance of you couldn't feel the loss directly but so you're offered this indirect opportunity of feeling sad and if you're open to the sadness there's a kind of referral of that opening to the sadness, which refers to the clinging, and you let go so you're refreshed. Depression is like when you lose something. You lose your job, you lose your spouse, you lose your friend, you lose some money, whatever.

[33:18]

You lose your car, you lose your house. And in the original loss, it's like maybe you're there, you know. in the middle way with the loss, Buddha's there. But then afterwards, maybe Buddha wasn't there, maybe right away you started saying, I don't like losing this house. I don't like losing my health. I don't like losing my health. I don't like losing my health. Or another one is, why, why, why, why? And then why, why, why, why? Put in something after the why. Why did this happen to me? Why did I do that? Why did I do that? Why did it happen to her? Why not somebody else? If I had only, if I had only, if I just, if I just, I should have, I should have, you know. This kind of thing can happen over and over and over and over and over.

[34:22]

And I think that leads to depression. And the depression is not just that that's this kind of overuse of certain kinds of obsessions, but it throws your body off. So actually then your body actually inherits this. And at some time, right away, this physical thing takes over and you're just at the mercy of it. And that's why medication sometimes works. And I read a story about one depressed person who tried everything, including drilling holes in the head, which sometimes is helpful. He had holes drilled in his head that didn't work. And nothing worked. Nothing he tried worked. But then the depression went away. Just parenthetically that... A lot of people who are depressed, when they start feeling better, they commit suicide.

[35:32]

When this guy was really depressed, he was so depressed he couldn't even, like, his energy gets so low, you can't even think of ending your life. And then you feel quite a bit better, and then you have enough energy to think of killing yourself. And that's when a lot of people commit suicide. And this guy... point that out. But anyway, after it was all over and he got over it, he wrote this. By the way, this thing about depression was not my side trip. I was talking about the whales, right? This is Neil's thing. When this guy got over the depression, looking back on it, he said, well, did anything help? Nothing got him out of depression. He said, yeah. The thing that was helpful was my father's love. Didn't make the depression go away, but his father was with him. You know, his father came over to his house, his father took him out to dinner.

[36:36]

Depression didn't get touched by this, but that was the thing. Only thing that was helpful was love, which again is basically the middle way. He couldn't practice the middle way himself, but somebody else was practicing the middle way with him. somebody else was there with him, and wasn't trying to trade his son in on a... I wish I had a non-depressed son. If you do that, if you have a son that's depressed, or a grandson that's depressed, or a daughter that's depressed, or a wife that's depressed, or a lover that's depressed, and you wish they were different, then after a while, you'll abandon them. It wipes you out. because you're off balance. So it throws your energy off and pretty soon, bye-bye, I can't be near you anymore because you're not getting well. So his father was there with him. His father was there with him. His father was there with him.

[37:37]

That's the way Buddha is with you. No matter how slow you are in learning the middle way yourself, Buddha is not in a rush for you to learn it. Buddha wants you to learn it. That's all that Buddha is there for, is to teach this to you. But Buddha is always with you and will not abandon you because Buddha does not think you're going to be better after you learn this. Buddha sees when you don't understand and your beauty when you do understand. And for you to be with your experience like that is Buddha. Depression is like not being with what's happening and then just crank that thing over and over and over in your thinking. And you throw your body into just a terrible, twisted blockage, even though you're still alive. If you weren't alive, it wouldn't hurt so much that you'd done this to yourself. You basically almost killed yourself and managed to live.

[38:39]

And so you're like in this extremely painful situation or a little bit painful situation. Depression has a range, you know. So I would say actually a little depression. Sometimes we're a little bit depressed. When we a little bit basically get into this kind of thing of mind go over there and sort of argue with something that's happening. That makes us a little depressed. And in some ways sadness may be the medicine not so much for the kind of thinking we do, like the clinging we do with our body, which isn't so bad, I don't think. So any comments about this very simple Buddhist psychology, Elena? By the way, Elena and Fred, I'm really sorry about the mistake on the schedule.

[39:46]

I'm really sorry about that. That you had to go through hell. Huh? He did? Well, that's appropriate. I didn't do anything. I didn't know about the appointment. Nobody told me, but still I... I know how hellish it is to come from Berkeley to San Francisco in the middle of the day. I was channeling to you, you know, take each other in San Francisco. Never go back to Berkeley. Yes, did you want to say something? what psychologists call co-dependent, or children of alcoholics, or children of, yeah, people who behave like alcoholics. I think they're supposed to be adults who would love alcoholics.

[40:47]

They're supposed to be co-dependent or something. And a lot of those people, one of the characteristics is that they are depressed. It's a natural thing for them to grow up depressed. So speaking, however, if you start doing these practices, for example, and eventually you can see that this is coming up and it's . But he sleeps there, and you get to say, it's good. I'm fine. It's OK. There can be this pattern with depression or whatever. But is that the way? Take away the part about I'm fine, I'm happy.

[41:49]

That doesn't sound like the middle way to me. That sounds like grasping a view. A theory called I'm fine. What if you actually feel it's okay and feel it's fine? Like just actually feel that way? Yeah. So then don't grasp it. Your view is what you actually think. You actually think you're fine. You actually think you're like a terrific person. You think you're great. That's fine. But to grasp that is not the middle way. That is a distraction from what's happening. There's what's happening and then there's like grasping what's happening.

[42:53]

That's a distraction from what's happening. What's happening actually cannot be grasped. When you grasp it from its utter ungraspability. When you don't grasp it, you're facing the fact that experience cannot be grasped. You can't grasp beauty. Pardon? We can think. Yes, we can. And if there's beauty, you can think about this beauty, too. Just don't grasp the beauty. Yes? Yeah? I was... Yes? Yes? We need to find, if we're depressed, we need to find a way to face the depression without indulging in it.

[44:03]

So, you know, if you're depressed and you like, it's possible that if you're depressed, you might think, okay, he says, well, I'm supposed to face it. So I'm going to go sit down in my room and just face the depression, which is, that's right. But the thing is, if you're depressed, you might not be able to do that. So what you might do is go sit down in your depression, stick your head in it, and just get more and more depressed because you don't understand what it means to face depression because the depression is because you're sticking your head in your pain and banging your head against it. So in that case, what facing might mean is that you go swimming in the bay. probably with, you know, what do you call it, a buddy the first few times to make sure you don't die. Or climb Mount Tam, you know, but not take little short trips until you get in shape. Or walk around Mount Tam.

[45:06]

Or work in the kitchen at Zen Center. Or work in the garden at Green Gulch. But use both hands. Do symmetrical activity as a way to help you face your suffering, face your life in a balanced way. Does that make sense to you? I wouldn't recommend for a depressed person to sit down and do a lot of quiet sitting. I think they have to generate some more positive energy before they can face this pain and this, what do you call it, this obsessive thinking, before they can actually face it without actually just getting more into it than they were before. There was a kind of therapy called, it's called Nikon, a Japanese therapy, which Nikon means looking inward.

[46:14]

And it's particularly, it's called a quiet therapy. In other words, it's a quiet therapy, but they do not, when the people are depressed, they do not have them sit. They have them actively try to think of things they feel grateful for, particularly in relationship to their parents. I guess because a lot of people are depressed, particularly in relationship to their parents, that their parents have died and they can't stop thinking how it was their fault that their parents are dead, things like that. So they try to generate more positive energy before they actually enter into the meditation with this type of thinking. Otherwise it can just swirl you in. So that's why I think physical activity, especially symmetrical physical activity, I think, to keep moving, when you're tending to sink into this stuff, to keep moving, I think it's a good thing to do.

[47:21]

When I was a little kid, I had polio. And when you have polio, basically, you know, before they had, even actually, when you have polio, you have polio, that's it. And there's nothing so far I think they can do about it when you have polio. They have a serum that you can take and not get polio. But once you have polio, you've got it for a while. And that means that you're in an inflamed state. You know, your body's inflamed. Your nervous system's inflamed. Nerves are swollen and dysfunctioning, right? So you have trouble walking or breathing or whatever. All right? that's polio so when I had polio what they did with me is they just kept me moving and massaging me and stretching me particularly moving those parts of my body which were paralyzed because of the polio before that they just put clamps on the and the kids would be deformed and the atrophied muscles, which would never grow back.

[48:25]

Depression, I think, is something like that, that a certain part of your nervous system and body are inflamed, and there's nothing much you can do about it in this inflamed state. The inflammation is going to last a certain period of time. You can keep moving and massaging yourself psychically and physically while you're in this inflamed state. When the inflammation passes, which it might, it does in polio, it passes, then if you've been taking care of yourself in this way during the period of inflammation, then you damage to your body and mind that occurred during the time of inflammation. So I think if you can take care of yourself while you're depressed, then when it passes, you don't have all this atrophy that developed under the onset of depression. But there's some way there's not that much you can do about the depression. It's going to last.

[49:27]

I think depression is, to a great extent, it's an effect due to certain ways of thinking, what we mean by depression. We usually don't call people depressed when they're doing thoughts, unless they're already depressed and continuing them, which they sometimes do. So I think depressed is more like being paralyzed. Yes, Edie? I think love is the basic thing to do, which is the middle way. What I mean by love is the middle way. Overwhelming? Are we talking about the depressed person or the people that are... The people around the depression and around the depressed person.

[50:37]

The depression is... Oh, wow. Again, I don't think, you know, I choose not to live a life that says that things knock me off balance. I want to live a life where I take responsibility for being off balance. What about children? What do you want to say about children? That's what you choose not to appreciate. I choose to live a life where I see and understand that people choose, not choose, but people's responses to what's happening is the place to look for the key to the fullest life.

[51:54]

So with a child, you look to the child's response. as the place where the child's welfare will be discovered. And the way I look to the child's behavior, the way I trust in looking at the child's behavior is the same way I trust in looking at my behavior. What if there's someone who's depressed? What if there's someone who's depressed, yes. They can't... Yes. Yes, yes.

[52:56]

The question is not acceptable by me. What's the best way to deal with a person who is depressed? Well, I said it a few times, but before I say it again, did you want to say something, Eric? I just... You have a comment? Do you want to make it now or later? It doesn't matter. Okay. The way I trust to relate... Are we talking about relating to the depressed person? Right. The way I trust related to the depressed person is basically no alternative to the way they are. And to be with them, to be very close to them, to be intimate with them means that I do not, I do not, I appreciate the way they are right now. I respect them the way they are right now. I love them the way they are right now. And I hope,

[53:57]

that they will become and that they will be free of pain. But the way they are right now, and if they continue to be this way, I will stay close to them no matter how long they're sick. And I will not, at this moment, seek for anything other than what's happening. Even though I wish, you know, Buddhas are I wish that they will be free of suffering, but I do not seek anything other than what's going on. I'm intimate with them, and I do not do anything. That's the way I trust. I agree with you. I think once you're in the suit, once the depression has kicked in, it's inflamed, there's not a lot of you about it directly. But unless one is constantly depressed, you emerge from these states.

[54:59]

practice can really be dynamite is watching the mental part of the initiating sequence leading into the depression. One is very mindful of reactions and thought patterns in your head, then you can see the very glimmering beginnings of the kind of repetitive. which then create a whole physiological cascade. And that's a remarkable place where basic mindfulness and a certain kind of detachment from the thought, observing detachment, can really... Oh, it's starting to work now. And he did some touch, you can just even... Or just by watching it, it loses its intensity. I'd like to point to that one point right there where you said sometimes you can just knock it over, but then you changed it to... Just by watching it. Just by watching it what? It loses its intense character.

[56:03]

it loses its intense character but just by watching it means just by watching it in the middle way where you do not seek you do not seek to not fall into it you do not seek to avoid it you really are as though you were you know you are not attached to some outcome and in fact that does not contribute to it. And if it doesn't have any power, if it doesn't already have the momentum to create this slippage, it's enough, it's enough, it's enough. And it may be that since there's no current contribution to the arising of depression, it might not arise. knock it over a little bit. I should say the middle way is not to intend to knock it over a little bit.

[57:09]

The middle, blooming from the middle way might be a knocking it over. But the knocking it over would be knocking it over without seeking anything. Emerging from the middle way, touching a person, a shaking of a hand, a song, a whistle, a shout. These things can come, but they are not disrespectful. They are not saying, I do not want you to be the way you are. They are songs coming from appreciating the beauty of the mind which we're observing, the behaviors which we're observing. Out of that, other activity can arise, but it's not the activity of seeking. It's not the activity of grasping. It is the activity of non-seeking and non-grasping. And it is just as active as any kind of manipulative, disrespectful, off-balance. It's just that the difference is that it demonstrates the middle way and the other ways demonstrate the path of suffering.

[58:10]

I follow the stream to the source and sit and watch for the time when the clouds crop up. Or I may forget about going home and being a big meditator and just run into a woods person in the forest and we laugh and talk and forget about going home. I have, it's, we used to try to stop at nine o'clock and it is now five after nine, so we'll stop. If you can remember your question, we'll bring it up later.

[59:16]

And also I have a reading list of psychology stuff that you can, if you want to study anything, I don't recommend them, but I brought it anyway. Next week I intend to talk about consciousness. some Buddhist teachings on consciousness. So, don't miss that. To apologize for sending you chocolates when I'm probably not on your diet. Well, thank you for your intentions.

[60:21]

And thank you for your politically correct apology. I have a question about hope. Yes.

[60:33]

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