Yeah, and I'm happy to have more questions too, because it helps me feel what we're doing. But let me start with these two questions. By a precise target, I meant a now target, of course, not a target in the future. So I meant, you know, let's take the phrase we've been talking about, to pause for the particular within the breath. Excuse me, pausing a moment for the particular, but I forgot to ask you, you have a flip chart, don't you?

[01:08]

Yes. Do you have paper for it and things? Yes. Okay. It would be nice to have it set up. Oh, okay, that's good. I'll try not to say anything you don't already very well know while you're gone. So, okay. Okay. So that phrase comes from my trying to be precise. To give one a physical entry into the particular. In our actual activity, mind and body.

[02:24]

So that's just, you know, anyway my effort to be precise. Now part of your practice or any one of your practice with that would be to find out if it is precise. Now I'm emphasizing the particular, of course, because the particular is the way the world is. It's a extraordinary display of the particular moment after moment. And the particular doesn't exist for us through generalizations. If we want to know the wide field of the particular, if we imagine that's possible or we have some experience of that, that has to be entered through the particular.

[03:46]

So when we talk about the Dharmakaya Buddha, which means everything all at once, That means, and I put it that way, because it means an experience of everything all at once. So if you translate the Dhammakaya Buddha as the universal Buddha or space or something, that's pretty hard to experience. But if I say everything all at once, well, yes, that's somehow within the range of our experience. And all at onceness. Like I can look at you and kind of soften my eyes and body can feel you all at once.

[05:04]

You can scan the night sky and feel... Not so clear now, but... It's not night now. I know it's true for the night. I think of Colorado. In Colorado, the night sky is just a sparkle with stars. So, but you might find that these English words don't work for you. Then it's not precise. So you'd have to find some German word, probably, which has a feeling you can feel it in your body. What?

[06:14]

I would prefer there. Now I get the flowers a little nearer. Thank you very much. Okay. So, whether you use English or German words, you then want to fine-tune those words by actually applying the practice. You see how it works when you Do it. Okay.

[07:15]

So that's more or less what I meant. And when a teaching, when you can't find that preciseness in a teaching, that experiential preciseness, Wenn du also diese erfahrungsmäßige Genauigkeit der Belehrung nicht finden kannst, dann solltest du die Belehrung nicht praktizieren. This is something we do, and it has to be in the realm of doing. And so if you can't do it, feel how you could do it, then you have to either reframe it or work with another teaching that you can do. Yeah. Now, in both of these questions that you had and most of the questions we have had,

[08:16]

Are examples of questions that you can ask a teacher or a friend maybe or look through a text perhaps? What could this be? Really, you have to ask yourself. And the more thoroughly you ask yourself, the more effective is the question you give to a teacher. Because second and third generation questions are more fruitful than first-generation questions.

[09:32]

In other words, if you've done your best to answer it yourself and come to, oh yeah, a resolution, and that produces another question, and then you try to resolve, and that produces, that question's a good question to ask. Also wenn du die erste Frage mit der arbeitest und die bringt eine zweite Frage hervor und du arbeitest mit der Frage und die resultiert wieder in einer dritten Frage, das ist dann eine gute Frage. But you don't say to the teacher, oh go away, I haven't got my third generation question ready yet. Aber du gehst nicht zum Lehrer und sagst, ich habe jetzt meine Frage der dritten Generation noch nicht parat. If all you've got is a first generation question, you just ask that. When you trust what appears, practice is not rehearsal or preparation. I mean, you might prepare something to get ready for some situation.

[10:42]

But more fundamentally, you trust the process, the doing of it. How deadly, usually dull, lectures read from a piece of paper are. A lot of preparation went into the lecture. But the person giving the lecture didn't trust the process of giving the lecture. So because of that lack of trust, it's dead. And it might look good in a book, but it doesn't sound good to listen to, usually, almost always.

[11:47]

Yeah, so it doesn't mean you don't prepare, but the greater emphasis is on trusting the process. And questioning is the fuel, the engine of practice. So you've noticed what happened when you danced for a week? We're all jealous. When I first started coming to Europe I went a lot to to Rajneesh discos.

[12:57]

And people encouraged me to do seminars which were half dancing and half sitting. To dancing Roshi, they used to say. But I said, no, no, no. I'm just going to sit. And if you want to dance, we dance afterwards. Yeah. And when I sit, actually, I feel everything is there. Dancing, the mountains. The ocean. My friends. Okay. Now the most, so I can sort of like try to enter into this question of energy.

[14:00]

But two most, one problem it's, you know, we don't, in German you don't, we don't have a good word in German for mind. And the English word for mind works pretty well. But we don't have a good word in English for sure, maybe for German for energy. Yeah, but I'll use the word energy. And in China and Japan they have ki and chi, which is part of what we mean in Buddhism by energy. And in the teachings of Zen and the... and the Buddhism which emphasizes particularly meditation practice, directly or indirectly, energy is the most common thing to speak about or practice with other than mind.

[15:32]

And what we mean by mind and what we mean by energy are practices very closely related. So I don't want to get into it in too much detail. It's a whole other thing. To try to find a way to talk about it. But let's say that the attitude is, as I often say, don't think about doing things right or wrong. Think about doing things 100%. 100% means with your energy.

[16:36]

Right or wrong? Consciousness traps our energy. Awareness frees our energy. And when there is no trace of permanence in your thinking, awareness is lost. True awareness or the fullness of awareness appears when there's no trace of permanence in your thinking.

[17:37]

Yeah. Okay, now let me just, I've said this many times, I kind of get tired of saying it, but I think it's the best way I can say something about permanence. Let's take the very simple practice of bringing attention to your breath. All of us can do it for a few minutes or a few moments. It's quite easy to do. It's extremely difficult to do for an hour. Or to do it all the time. So then you should ask yourself the question, why is something so easy to do so difficult to do over a long period of time? Okay.

[18:50]

The answer is, I think, even if you can see the world is changing and there's no real permanence, you establish in your consciousness thinking a kind of permanence. You see yourself, I mean consciousness presents us with a past, present and future. Yeah. And that past, present and future and the need to see ourselves in that context all the time is an implicit sense of permanence. So if there's an implicit sense of permanence, we will keep returning to consciousness and we won't be able to stay in awareness, which has a feeling of timelessness.

[19:52]

Time becomes what it is, which is succession and distance. Distance. Yeah. I mean, it takes time to get to the center of town. Takes time for me to physically go to Christian. So time is is distance and succession. You can't be out of time. You can't have no time. I mean, you can have no time in a relative sense because you're supposed to meet somebody and something or whatever.

[21:10]

But in an absolute sense, you are time. Your activity is time. So you always have time. It's true. Fundamentally, you are time and you always have time. Now when you realize this, When this becomes a shift in your view, in your reality, sometimes you're late, sometimes you don't get things done. But you don't feel rushed. Because you know you are time. So, On the other hand, you might hurry to do something, you might not be able to do everything, but that's not an inner tension, it's just you can't do everything.

[22:36]

Yeah. So consciousness' job is to supply us with a predictable world. It's necessary. I think of the Piaget study, a little blind child who left a toy somewhere before he went to sleep. Was Piaget Swiss? And so he was in Oregon at this time, and this little blind child discovered a few things outside of Switzerland.

[23:42]

So when they brought the little blind kid down to the playroom in the morning, he crawled directly over to where he'd left the toy in the corner of the room. Piaget said, according to the report I read, Eureka, object permanence. Because we have to have a sense that the tree is still going to be there in the morning. That's because sometimes it's not, though. We lost one at Johanneshof recently. But the word tree and truth are the same root, because usually the tree is there the next morning. But that's not fundamental reality, because the tree might not be there tomorrow morning.

[25:06]

In Buddhism, this is called the two truths. We need permanence, and yet we also need to have a feeling of timelessness every day. Sometimes it opens us up. dass wir also Beständigkeit brauchen und auch, dass es dieses Gefühl gibt von Zeitlosigkeit und es sich manchmal irgendwie wie sich öffnet. Now, when you become free, when you break the habit of permanence, also wenn du dich befreist, wenn du die Gewohnheit der Beständigkeit unterbrechen kannst, while still acknowledging the need for predictability, but the need for predictability, which is the function of consciousness, has not deluded you into or created a habit of

[26:21]

Okay. So you recognize predictability. You don't turn that into a need for permanence. You see, I'm trying to be here quite precise, quite exact. Okay, now, awareness is most present when we're free from traces of permanence or implied permanence. Okay. And then awareness feels free of boundaries. And in awareness there's tremendous energy. So You work with your energy to awaken awareness.

[27:48]

And you work with your awareness to awaken energy. And so, in a way, you work with your form to free yourself from form and to open yourself into energy. And you might beat the form out of you by dancing for a week. Or you might sit and the awareness begins to clarify the form of your sitting. As consciousness loses its hold on you. Then knowing that feeling of energy that zazen awakens, we try to feel that energy.

[28:56]

Usually we try to feel it here. And keep it with, sustain it with us, sustain it during our activities. And that's part of the practice also of doing things with two hands. You don't... If you just do things... I watched a waitress last night. At lunch yesterday. At that restaurant we were at. Thank you. And she handed me the salt while she was talking to somebody else this way. She put it on the table backwards. It was perfectly fine and she didn't drop it. But our practice is that both hands are fully engaged when you do something.

[29:59]

Even if you don't do it with two hands, if I pass this, this hand is as fully alive as this hand. Yeah, I watched a film actually a friend of mine made on Kentucky fried chicken in Tokyo. My daughter works for Starbucks in San Francisco and she complains about it. I say, no, no, this is good work, this is good practice. I say, give them more energy in your presence, Elizabeth, than in the cup of coffee you give them. And I always say, Elisabeth, be more present in giving the cup of coffee instead of in the cup of coffee itself.

[31:16]

She says, oh, Dad. She says, oh, Dad. But anyway, I watched them train these people in Kentucky Fried Chicken in Tokyo. And they were taught to turn their back completely on the customer and do something fully in front of themselves, you know. And when they brought the package to the customer to turn their whole body around, holding it with both hands and pass it to the customer with the feeling of passing themselves. And that's really, this comes from Buddhism. It's that the serving of the food is as important as the making of the food. So a lot of restaurants in Japan, the cook serves the food because he's made it and he serves it.

[32:39]

It's part of the whole procedure. Yeah, this is all a culture which you know, through Buddhism works with its energy all the time. And you can also find ways to practice. A good way is the threshold, the doorway, the entrance. You can also practice with the threshold, the entrance. Yeah, I'll fart. Okay, so, but when you come across in the door, you feel the room, you notice the room, you don't think the room. So you step in with your confidence, with your energy. You don't come in, I'm a little late and I'm sorry, you know.

[33:41]

You come in, boom! So you don't come in and say, oh, I'm a little late, I'm sorry, but... So you don't come in and take over the room, but you come in and feel the room and then go to your place. And there we come to the idea of the original mind. I guess it was announced that we're going to end at two o'clock. We have to think about how do we end at two o'clock. We wait till the clock says two and we bow and leave. There's no lunch, you know, that way.

[34:43]

But if we take an hour or two for lunch, we might as well stop now. So after a while, we'll take another break. Then we'll come back for a while, and then we'll end. If you want a real lunch, you'll have to wait until after we end. Okay. Okay. Okay, an initial mind, first of all, we always have to work with our condition. Whatever it is, that's where we start. You can't say, I want to start somewhere else. That's not possible. And it doesn't work to say, geez, I've got a miserable state of mind. I hope it improves.

[35:55]

And you wait around for it to improve, feeling miserable. Well, this is a fact of our life. It is like this. It is like this. Okay. Okay. So let me try to talk about the conception of the teaching. Which I've been emphasizing. The title of this seminar is The Realized Life. Now, that doesn't mean in the Buddhist way of thinking about things that, well, I'm not realized and I'm going to do things to become realized.

[37:13]

That's the usual way we think, of course. The Buddhist way of thinking, Zen way of thinking, is I'm already realized. Is that true? Yeah, in some sense it's true. But it's not important really whether it's true or not. What's true is it's a true teaching. If you think I'm not realized and I'm going to do things to become realized, this is not a very effective teaching. A much more effective teaching is to say, I'm already realized. It's like the image of the wave returning to stillness.

[38:29]

If the wave says, I'm just using this as an image, of course it's just an image to try to get us to think a certain way. If the wave says, jeez, I'm not still at all, I'm all shook up. I think 10 or 15 waves down the way I'll calm down. I'm going to wait till we hit the beach. Then I kind of absorb into the sand. Yeah, it might be true. He feels better. She feels better when she hits the sand, I mean, or he hits the sand. Yeah. But it's not a very effective teaching.

[39:44]

It's much more effective if the wave says, I'm already still. I can feel in the shape of this wave my return to stillness. So right now, I'm already still. And when you really feel that with the power of awareness, sometimes the whole wave just flattens out. Maybe it becomes a swell. Do you say a swell? It's when the ocean doesn't turn into a wave, it just goes up and down. A wogan, yeah. I knew that. I already knew that. So you use the word already a lot.

[40:49]

Already still. Already free of the pressures of time. Already enlightened. Already arrived. Already connected. Are we separated? No, we're already connected. If you have the idea of already separated, it reinforces the separation. If your initial mind is already connected, you'll notice connectedness instead of noticing separation. Okay. So the conception of the teaching is it's already here, already here. So if you're not

[41:53]

If you're quite distracted, your fundamental attitude is already free of distraction. Even if you're not free of distraction, it works better than thinking in terms of, oh, in the future I'll be free of distractions. If you can't do zazen one morning, say, and you wanted to, I don't know, you slept late or you have to go somewhere early or something. So you say, what I need from zazen, I will have. Now. And it appears.

[43:13]

This kind of attitude is our practice. Now, again, if you say, oh, this isn't really true, as a teaching it's true. It's not true as a description of your state of mind at that moment, but as a teaching it's true. Okay, are we okay? Yeah, everything fine. I'm not writing a book, you're okay and I'm okay. I get annoyed when I see such simplistic titles, but there's some truth to it. Simplest form already realized. Or whatever you mean by realization, or we take realization as a kind of Rorschach.

[44:26]

You know Rorschach? Yeah. Then what is it that you would like to put in place of the word realization? Calmer? Free from anxiety? What? Another powerful attitude is, say that you feel like, I know somebody who feels like they might be schizophrenic. And they don't know what to do about it. But when they found themselves saying to themselves, Okay, maybe I'm this way.

[45:33]

Maybe this is me. Maybe me. If I can solve this problem, others can solve this problem. If I can find a way to live as a schizophrenic, Others can do it too. This is a very powerful attitude, and it's very similar to already arrived. I know somebody came to see me recently who is German, but he practiced with me in San Francisco for quite a few years. And he was a real heavy-duty alcoholic. So I kept trying to... Because practice almost worked for him. And he would stop drinking for a while, but then he started...

[46:36]

So, you know, at some point I didn't see him anymore. But he showed up at Johanneshof, Johanneshof recently. And I said, how are you doing? Are you still drinking away? He says, no. And he said... I said, when did you stop? He said, I was made such a mess of my life And my marriage. And I was in mental hospitals a number of times. And said, one day, I said, I'm causing so much trouble for everyone. And if I can learn to live, free myself from alcoholism, other people can.

[48:00]

And at that point he stopped drinking. So this is also the bodhisattva ideal. When if you realize what kind of person you'd really like to be, It feels selfish. But if you have the feeling, the kind of person I'd like to be, if I can be that person, other people can be that person. And that insight and that teaching transforms how you are, how you're alive. And the feeling of doing it with and for other people who are like yourself makes your effort much more subtle and connected.

[49:12]

These are all versions of the same idea of what's already happened. Okay. So I'll take a minute now and I'll put the four marks on the board and then we'll stop. Because I think that's a basic teaching and now I'm bringing a teaching into our discussion.

[50:22]

And I said that I want to speak about some of the basics of Zen practice. And I have, but I haven't named them so specifically. But the basics are Zazen, meditation, Working with the breath. Practicing mindfulness. Knowing how to use a teaching. A view and attitude. And working with what I call gate phrases. And all of these things are interrelated.

[51:29]

They're different aspects of each other. Zazen and mindfulness are interrelated. Breath, it's all the same. Different aspects of the same thing. And teachings, view, gate phrases, they're aspects of each other. The four of them are very simple. Most of you are familiar with them. How can Buddhism be so simple? Disappear.

[53:00]

D-I-A? A? D-I-P? Disappear and... I don't know why I can't... It disappears when I say it. When you spell it with T-P? Two P's. I'm glad I have my spelling checker with me. Well, this word is disappearing here. Okay. I'll say something about this when we come back. I just talked to a young man. He's not here, I don't think. And he's been trying to reach me for the whole seminar, leaving notes and coming by the hotel and things.

[54:05]

And he's someone interested in the martial arts and things like that. And he began practicing in Venice as a statue, somebody who stands completely still. And he started just because he was selling things on the street. He was a street performer and he saw a couple of guys doing it and they seemed to make quite a bit of money. So he thought, hey, this is a good idea. Do nothing and make a little money. So he started doing it. And he didn't know how to do it, but he kept trying to work with how you could stand completely still. And he got so he could do it finally. At some point he came to Lucerne and continued doing it.

[55:47]

And I'm not going to tell you the whole story, but at some point he was just sitting by the lake and he had, and I just talked with him very clearly, a Kensho experience, a Satori experience. And it changed everything for some time. And then it began to go away and then he tried to imitate the changes for a while. So he came and wanted to talk to me about how can he get back there. Anyway, I had to give him the bad news. Anyway, but what's interesting is he really did feel that he came to a place, and he discovered his hara, and discovered how to really stop inside and out.

[57:04]

And he knows, it didn't surprise him, he knew nothing about Zen, he couldn't figure out, but then he started reading in martial arts books, and he realized, hey, this must be Kensho. So it's kind of strange, I think. Don't you think it's strange? This Kensho enlightenment is a capacity of us human beings. and it's strangely related to actually being able to sit completely still and we say sit like a mountain And that's an image he used.

[58:07]

I felt I was like a mountain, unable to be moved. And we don't say sit like a tree. We say sit like a stump, a tree that's been cut down. And I don't emphasize it too much because it's pretty hard to really sit still inside and out. And even if you learn to sit still, I can't promise you Kensho. I worked so hard and I didn't get anywhere. But it's pretty hard to actually sit still inside and out. But if you come to that point, it's a kind of door you open into. It's just there.

[59:09]

It's here already. Yeah. So just the teaching to sit like a mountain or sit like a stump Can be enough. There's other teachings too, don't worry. Anyway, we have this capacity to discover, to feel how we actually exist. And I think for most of us, although the effort to sit still is important,

[60:15]

And to discover real stillness. Probably more important as a teaching for us is to find ourselves completely at ease. is for us, glaube ich, wichtiger, uns wirklich vollständig, gelassen, entspannt zu fühlen. Because Zen is more fundamentally a practice about relaxing, to really be completely at ease. Denn Zen ist grundlegend mehr eine Praxis des Entspannens, But that's a gate, like sitting still. And sometimes, the other day I expressed it as like practice brings you around a corner that you can't think yourself to.

[61:25]

So it doesn't help, I mean, you know, it doesn't help to say, sit still and then explain what will happen. His lack of expectation was good teaching, good practice. But most of us can't be that innocent anymore. But anyway, we can... We can imagine, feel, taste this stillness and ease and see if we can keep coming back to it.

[62:28]

And it always has to start with acceptance. And I'm quite sure that having talked with him, for instance, it was the combination of his practice of stillness and a moment of when he really just accepted his situation as his was. So these two came into conjunction. But for most of us, our practice of the entry to a realized life begins and ends with acceptance, acceptance. Okay.

[63:42]

Now, I gave you... I mentioned these, what I'd call the basics of Zen practice. And they're basics because, you know, it's just the territory of what we do. And I'll put the... Nothing special. I'll just put out, write them down. Zazen. Breath. My wellness. Teachings. And gateways.

[64:45]

And so you have these as a kind of territory in which you can find your practice. Sometimes you do zazen. If you can develop a habit of doing zazen. But you wash your face in the morning, you do some zazen in the morning. It's just a habit like sleeping and waking. It's best when it's like that. You just do it. When you like to do it, you just do it. You do it when you like to do it, then your ego basically controls it. And it's hard to make a practice that you just do. Which is often boring and not very satisfying.

[66:10]

And the learning curve is sometimes downward. It goes up and then it goes down. So it gets kind of hard just to do it. But after a while, there's some satisfaction in it. You feel not only better after you've done it, but you feel kind of good when you do it. And it's kind of hard to notice what's good about it actually. Because our consciousness is mixed with awareness. And our consciousness wants to find it interesting or exciting or important or something. But when there's less consciousness and more awareness you don't think about things but things appear and disappear.

[67:29]

Then sometimes there's a kind of strange joy for no reason. Nothing good happens but you feel kind of joyful. Unfortunately, it's a joy or bliss even that... Consciousness almost can't recognize. Consciousness likes happiness. You get a present or something, you get a promotion, you feel happy. There's some reason. But the joy of awareness is non-referential.

[68:30]

There's no reason. You might be only miserable. joy in just being alive. Part of a realized life. And this also, when you start being able to feel this, when you begin to allow it to be, it does then become something easier to do, more satisfying. Now when breath becomes more like your companion, I know this sounds stupid or schmaltzy or something. Yeah, but how can I be lonely when I have my breath?

[69:48]

It's sort of like that. Oh, a good friend. Here you are, breathing in. I've got lots to do, but my breath is here. Some kind of attitude like that, you can start finding attentiveness, aliveness within and through your breath. And this kind of attitude helps to teach you mindfulness, to bring you into a kind of mindfulness. Mindfulness is the presence of mindfulness that touches your situation. You may feel it in your activity, on your steps, you know. One way to make your steps, your walking more mindful is to feel like you're stepping into the unknown. as if the floor might not be there.

[71:16]

If you feel the floor might not be there, you step with a little bit more aliveness. Or... Or you feel like I've arrived in the promised land. Some of you play games like that. If this isn't paradise, where is it? That's how you have me on. This must be paradise. Hey, das muss das Paradies sein. Why not? Warum nicht? Like that. Some kind of game you play. Also, irgendwie solche Spiele. Das sind schöne Spiele. Okay. So, gate phrases is a way to bring a teaching or an insight into your activity. Yeah, it's just there in the background of your mind.

[72:23]

Or it's there in your breath. And the most basic one I keep offering you is just now is enough. Because it's wonderful, this dress. Stop this phrase because it's clear just now it's not enough. You're hungry, you've got to take a pee, I mean, you know. I didn't say toilette, but that's all right. That's how you say it. That's how you say it. You're so nice. Anyway, so... but at the same time it has to be enough because there's no other alternative.

[73:28]

So just now is enough always opens you to fundamental must. Because Kensho or enlightenment experiences are everything seems to be right. Everything seems to be exactly as it should be or is. Everything feels, wow, I don't know what to say. But you can eat with a phrase like, just now is enough. Because sometimes you feel, okay. You relax inside just now. In fact, it has to be.

[74:30]

What alternative do you have other than just now? And I think those of you who do martial arts, I mean, if, David, I would guess that if someone's facing you with a sword or with... you know, a shark in the dark. You better have a mind of just now. If you're going to be prepared, isn't that true? Creston, we have bears around, and one bear tree, poor girl, one day, and we pissed all over him. And he said, just now. Just now. It wasn't toilet and it was pinkling. Okay.

[75:50]

Okay, so now we have a teacher. We have the teaching of the four marks. Now that's... A little hard to practice. No, it's the teaching of the particular. How do we actually exist? I said the other day that last night that this sound we're hearing somebody practicing the drum Yeah, it was a sound, our actual experience of it is a sound within us. Yeah, so the world, the sound, each of you is appearing in me, appearing in each of you. Also die Welt, die Töne, Geräusche erscheinen innerhalb von mir, in jedem von euch.

[77:21]

So the world is a series of appearances. and the brain is always knitting them together. If you study the way my eyes move, I'm actually moving my eyes all the time around, but I get a seamless picture because my brain sews it all together. So the teaching of the dharmas, which means to perceive things, to notice things in the smallest experiential unit, And that's helped by noticing things first of all in units of breath. But anyway, things appear.

[78:27]

This just means things appear, that they're born. So if I look at this part of the room, you appear. I mean, in actual fact, If I look, all of you appear. White, black, red, blue, etc. And there's a certain duration to it. But in fact, you're all moving and it's a little different. connectedness of energy among you. So there's no permanence, so there's dissolution. And in fact, I want to wipe the slate clean, so there's disappearance. The way the world exists is like that.

[79:34]

Things appear, last for a moment, and dissolve. But we participate in the experience by not having, not expecting permanence. But, of course, duration itself is established art. Duration is not a fact. It's a fact of our experience, not a fact in physical reality. So we have an experience of duration, of presence. And that's also our experience of time. That there is a present time in which we can move and do things. And that present time is Yeah, there's different kinds of intensity of time.

[80:49]

Of how things feel connected or separated. And sometimes my little daughter, Sophia, you were having breakfast with us near the table. She was kind of fussing this morning. And when I notice her, she's really, I mean, she's learning a tremendous amount all the time. I mean, so many words, new things, everything. And she's engaged like the way a watchmaker might be engaged in the watch. Every object, if I don't look, if I look away, she's got it apart. I give her a flashlight, she's holding up the bulb.

[81:52]

That's actually a different experience of time. And I think most of us as adults think that our childhood was a very large percentage of our life. So she's living in a different time than I'm living. And if I don't enter her time, then she feels interfered with. She starts getting fussy. But each of you is in a somewhat different time. We can say part of the practice of knowing others or compassion It's feeling each person's time and not assuming they're in the same time as you are.

[83:17]

And letting other persons, waiting for other person's time This young man who I just spoke to, he said after this experience, I found I'd be in a shop and I was always feeling things from the shopkeeper's point of view, the clerk's point of view. I never used to feel that. I began to feel saintly. As soon as I started feeling saintly, it began going away. And I couldn't make myself feel this.

[84:18]

I only felt it when it just happened spontaneously. But we can practice with waiting for another person to show us or give us their time. That's all in this practice of duration. And letting go, not clinging to it, just letting it go and letting it change. You appear when I look here. So you appear when I look there.

[85:19]

And I let you go. And you appear here. You are almost as nice as the animals over there. So the practice I gave you the other day, yesterday, was the other day, wasn't it? to pause for the particular within the breath. That's the best I can say, and it's the best in all my different ways of talking about the particular, the best way I've ever said it, I think. And when I say best, I mean it's the most effective way to enter the world as dharmas, as moments. And when I say best, I mean it's the most effective way

[86:20]

Now if you decide to practice this or you just find yourself trying it out, You'll develop the habit of the pause. Instead of making everything continuous and implicitly permanent, You pause for each person you look at. We in practice articulate that by bowing to each person you meet, inside or outside.

[87:41]

But you can't go around your job bowing to everyone. But you can have the feeling of pausing as a way of respecting each person, this extraordinary thing each human being is. The most complex, extraordinary thing we know about in the Cosmos. Mysterious. So you just pause for each person. You pause in your breath.

[88:42]

This is quite good. So you're weaving mind and body together because you're pausing and breathing. And for each particular. How it's parted from the whole and how it's part of the whole. How each of you is quite independent. And how each of you is also a relationship with people and family and so forth. Breathing and eating. So you're part of the whole and parted from the whole. So each particular becomes... you discover your own particularity.

[89:57]

Now if you get in the habit of that, you begin also to be able to practice the four dharmas. because this habit of pausing for the particular within the breath develops the capacity to notice each moment as appearing. and to feel its duration and feel how you hold its duration and feel how it will dissolve and you release it as well. So you hold the duration and you release the duration.

[91:07]

This is the practice of the four marks. The center of why Buddhism is called Dharma practice. To discover how we actually exist and feel our way into a realized life. and feel our way into a realized life. The realized life is nowhere else but right here. Okay, so maybe we sit for a few minutes and then we'll stop.

[92:02]

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