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Tuning Presence: Zen's Communal Harmony

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RB-02919

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Practice-Period_Talks

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The talk explores the concept of "practice period" within Zen tradition, critically assessing its significance beyond routine daily life and how shared experiences and practices can foster deeper connections, akin to "tuning" an orchestra. Attention is paid to the role of the spine, breath, mind, and space in establishing a grounded sense of presence. The notion of "Original Mind" is discussed, suggesting a non-essentialist view where acculturation can be suspended through practice to experience a form of shared consciousness. The potential for a practice period to create profound interactions unmediated by personality or psychology is underscored, along with references to Dogen's teachings about experiential engagement with sutras.

  • Referenced Works:
  • "Original Mind: The Practice and Craft of Zen in the West": This book's title reflects a nuanced exploration of consciousness and Zen practice, illustrating a shift away from essentialist views. It suggests the potential of meditation for recreating non-acquired states of mind.
  • Dogen's Teachings: Dogen speaks to interacting with sutras by deriving personal insights rather than seeking definitive truths, aligning with the talk's emphasis on experiential practice.
  • Shoyoroku (Book of Serenity), Case 16: This Zen koan is used to illustrate how practices can cultivate connections beyond the conscious realm, parallel to an orchestra tuning.

  • Concepts and Techniques:

  • Four Habitations: Involves focusing attention sequentially on the spine, breath, mind, and surrounding space to create an integrative field of awareness.
  • Simultaneity in Practice: Discusses shared awareness or perception within a collective context, contributing to a deeper understanding of mutual existence beyond individual sensory input.
  • Attention and Field of Mind: Differentiating between experiencing mind content and the broader field it operates in, aiming for a collective tuning and shared understanding.

These elements together frame a robust investigation into how structured communal practice periods and meditation cultivate profound cross-individual connections.

AI Suggested Title: Tuning Presence: Zen's Communal Harmony

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Transcript: 

As I tried to say last time, I wasn't so clear, I think, but what I would like to try to do with you in what we're calling Choson is explore what this practice is. I'm not emphasizing exploring your practice. That's part of what I... If I'm exploring your practice, I would be trying to engage with you in a way that I could see what happens in these three months. But really, I'm just wanting to look at what this practice is. I feel a little bit like... I don't know, the only image I can think of right now is a kind of person who maybe has never seen, or let's say a car ends up on some island in the Pacific which has never seen a car before.

[01:08]

So they learn to drive it, and maybe there's several cars, and they start to have roads and things, but no one knows how the car works. They put gasoline in it, but... They know how to drive the car, not to run into each other, but they don't really know how the car works. So I feel that way about what we're doing. I know pretty well how to drive or practice this tradition, but I don't really know in a way I'd like to, what is the inside of the constitution of this tradition? And one of the mysteries to me is practice period. I think I have a more thorough understanding of why Sashin works, understanding in the sense of being able to

[02:13]

make decisions about how it should be constituted, et cetera. But it kind of surprised me, because practice period, in a way, you could say practice period is essentially, as you quoted me yesterday, supposedly, daily life with a twist. But it's also boring daily life with not enough twists, or something like that. But, you know, we did the first practice period in Pasar, I think, in 66 or 67, and that's 49 years ago. And many people who did practice periods look back on the three months or in those days I didn't accept students unless they could stay for at least two years and so for the most part people were there for two years some people were there for five years but most people stayed at least two years so but many of them I hear from look back as it was the most

[03:24]

defining time of their life, or interesting time of their life, or something, you know. And I wonder why, because I think when we were there together, they were kind of bored and what to do, etc. So I, and what I'm trying to do now, as you can see, is I'm trying to find out what schedule, since I've been living particularly either in fact or ideally, for 49 years now or more, and seeing my life through a monastic schedule. So now I'm wondering what schedule do I, which feels like practice, do I want to do or can I do? But of course monastic life or living at Tassajara is both the location of the facilities and the schedule.

[04:29]

And it's also doing things with other people, defining yourself through other people. So what is this definition of oneself through other people? Now, I've always assumed this really pretty much, but it's now some, I don't know if I mentioned it last time, but I guess more or less established that if you look at good friends, good friends share the same DNA as if they had common great-grandfathers. Did I say that in Germany? But I didn't say it here, did I? You said it last. I said it last time? Okay. So that means that some level of communication at the level of DNA is going on.

[05:36]

But we are clearly not. We may feel it, but we're clearly not conscious of it. but maybe feeling it is a kind of consciousness of it. Okay, so what I'm saying is I'm just using an example of that something is happening here that's outside of any ordinary knowing or happening whenever you're with other people. So what happens I guess I asked the same question last time. I'm still asking myself the question. What happens when we're here together? What are we establishing? Or how do we establish a field of connectedness that makes practice period work?

[06:46]

And I noticed the other day, coming out of my room up here, the tower room, I was wearing my gaita, the kind of wooden shoes, the kind of clogs. And the wooden shoes, the sound of the wooden shoes, excuse me. The sound of the wooden shoes was resonant with the sound of the Hahn being hit. So I found my walking with the wooden shoes and the Hahn were somehow in the same tonal range. And that gave me a certain kind of feeling. It made me think of what you said yesterday, Christian, about when we are attuned with each other in chanting. And so I also mentioned, and Christian has brought it up several times, I guess, what I'm calling the four inhabitations or four habitations.

[08:06]

And so if we just look at this as a practice, what you're doing is you're bringing attention to a part of the body. Now I think that's an important thing to notice, or at least do, but maybe noticing it helps too. Now again, I'm talking in a field in which there's doing and noticing doing, and does the noticing make a difference than when you just do it? And of course if we're going to You know, Sophia said an interesting thing to me when she was quite teeny. She's quite good at music. I'm not at all good at music.

[09:08]

But anyway, for some reason, she's quite good at music. And she, I think I've told you before, that she was... In Freiburg, we have a piano. And she was making music on the piano. She was like... three or four. And she clearly could distinguish. I can't. When I hit the piano, now it's the same as when I hit it when I was six. You know, it's wrong, wrong. I don't hear. I actually just don't hear it. Not my capacity. But she hears it. She asked me, don't you hear it? And I said, no, I don't. And one of the first things she said was, when she saw a piece of music being played, she said, I guess she was about five years old. She said, somebody wrote this music, didn't they? And I said, yes. And she said, well, then I could write music too. If it was written, I could write music. Well, I mean, I heard music and I never thought of, I could write music.

[10:13]

So, but she's grown up in a feeling that you make, you create the world. The world is creatable. And, uh, And in a sense, when you don't just do things, but you notice what you do, then that noticing is a kind of creative act as well. It can be, anyway, because it's through noticing what we're doing that we are able to recreate it and create something new. As Dogen has said, don't let the sutras turn you, you turn the sutras. So you don't look at the sutras as what the truth is, you look at the sutras to discover your truth and see if you can bring that back into the sutra. So again, it's this experientially based practice which we're not

[11:15]

going to the text to find out what we're doing. We go to the text only to explore the truth of the text in ourselves. That's kind of the discipline of Zen practice in particular. So again, I'm describing that we're bringing attention not to the spine, but also that we're bringing attention to a particular part of the body, which also means we could bring attention to some other part.

[12:18]

So then we can ask ourselves the question, why do we bring our attention to the spine among the various choices? And then I've said, if you explore this practice, you can say, why do we bring attention to the breath and not some other activity? Why don't we bring it to the heartbeat? You can in Zazen. It's a little hard to do in normal circumstances. And then bring attention to the, as I've said, from the spine to the breath. and the breath to the mind, and the mind to the space. And one of the things that I spoke about this in the Chautauqua seminar, and one of the things that several people mentioned, including Brian, is how come you talk about the spine in some detail and the breath in some detail, and then you just mention mind and breath, mind and space?

[13:28]

I mean, about four people brought that up, didn't they? Like I was shortchanging them, you know. Well, I talk about this client, but I don't talk about the mind. So I was wondering, you know, partly it's that what I mean by mind and space, I can more speak about here than I can in the Chautauqua Seminar. And because here I think we can just feel what is meant by mind, and then the mind that extends into space, and here I'm really speaking about space which is the space which is not a universal. I've often been emphasizing recently there are no universals of time and space. There's only your bodily time and your extended time, the textures of time, and there's the textures in effect of space that right now

[14:53]

The space I'm present in with you, or something like me is present in, or something I can call me is present in, is made by my activity in my mind. And that's actually a big part of Koan 16 in the Shoyuroku, which they were working on in the, I think it's 16, in the winter branches, where Magu walks around with his staff. So in a sense we could think of, if we are here together, developing practices which tune us to each other. It's a kind of tuning, I'd say, like you hear an orchestra tuning up in the various I can't say that without remembering Michael McClure, the poet, who also wrote some wonderful plays.

[15:57]

And one of his plays, he has a, I don't know why I'm telling you this, but it always pops into my mind. He has somebody walk in, visibly walk in. The audience is small. These are kind of, you know... Sam Shepard was part of the same world. Sam Shepard had become a big figure in the theater world and things. But they were all small theaters and small audiences. But this Michael had a... Somebody walked in with a violin and somebody else walked in with a cello and they sat down and somebody started tuning their cello and somebody else started tuning their violin, violin, cello. And then very quietly he brought in the Philadelphia Orchestra tuning itself. So you're... And you're... And nobody noticed the transition.

[17:04]

Everybody was sitting there, and then suddenly people looked up, where the hell is the orchestra? And he really fooled everybody. He didn't get it, but it was only two guys up there. But anyway, so there's a kind of, in a way, if we are practicing together and one of the things we do and we establish some, I think we each practice in our own way. But the degree to which during practice period we can establish some shared way of practicing. It's like tuning up an orchestra, maybe. And the word orchestra means something like what appears. It's related to the word origin, what appears. Or where the chorus is located in the orchestra pit. And so it's what appears. And so we tune our spine, in effect. We tune our body through our spine.

[18:06]

And that becomes actually a tuning or a educating of the spine by bringing attention to it. And it educates attention, because attention is affected by the spine. And then you connect, then you take another step and bring attention to the breath in relationship with the spine. and then, as I said, the mind, and then the space we generate. So by doing that, you're tuning your own body to attention, but actually we're tuning, tuning, potentially tuning each other into another way of being together that's not conscious. but maybe somewhere close to the way in which we know each other, feel, smell, each other's DNA.

[19:14]

I know when I... I don't drive much anymore. I used to drive quite a lot, but I don't drive much anymore, and I feel a little bit... It's a nuisance to have to drive. I kind of prefer not to. But... And when I first start to drive, I feel kind of awkward. Do I have to not hit that car? Do I stay on the road? What a nuisance. And... But after a while... I get into the field of driving, which you probably all know, being drivers. I mean, I used to feel it really clearly when I was in Europe. I'd have to drive from, say, Berlin to Johanneshof. It's a long drive. And I'd do it in the middle of the night. Cars are going 100 miles an hour and 120 miles an hour, et cetera. And I'd just get in the field. The car would almost do it itself. And that field, and I don't think anymore about do I stay on the road or not stay on the road.

[20:26]

It's in the field of driving, which somehow feels like it's established with the other drivers as well. You know, just driving down here the other day... Boulder, I, after a while, got into that field and just drove. And then time passes in a different way. And likewise, I find it with the Yoyoki. We get into the field of tuning ourselves with physical objects. the meal just happens and suddenly we're pouring the water. It just happened in another timeframe. At least that's my experience. So I think that the success or the satisfaction of a practice period is when, for some reason, the group of people decides to tune themselves with each other.

[21:52]

I mean, maybe not subconsciously, but you decide to do it. I mean, it happens. It's a kind of non-conscious intention, perhaps. And part of that tending, one of the things that, you know, I'm trying to work on... re-enter the text of my book, Original Mind, The Practice and Craft of Zen in the West. And just the title I chose, Original Mind, is a problem because it has a well-established general meaning of prior, an origin prior. And that's a kind of essentialism. like Plato's essentialism, that there's an ideal form.

[22:55]

And Buddhism is in a kind of clear contradiction to the idea of essentialism. I mean, real simplistically, this cup is an inadequate form of an ideal cup. There's an ideal cup in imagination, and this is an inadequate form of it, incomplete form of it. But from the point of view of Buddhism, the cup is just as it is. It's your perception of it that's adequate or inadequate. So there's no effort to make a perfect cup so you have Japanese cups. Clearly meant to be odd because your perception of it is what you work on. So the idea of an original mind, a kind of innate original mind, is basically a belief in essentialism.

[24:12]

And Buddhism is not essentialist in that sense. But there is a... supposedly studies again I'm not a psychologist supposedly psychological studies which affirm that almost everybody in ordinary their ordinary thinking their underlying assumptions about the world are essentialists they think that each person is somehow has an essence there's an essence or a soul or an essence to each person that makes them unique Well, Buddhism, you know, to the extent that we are particular through our genetics and so forth, yes. But Buddhism, the emphasis is clearly in Buddhism on nurture, on what happens. You know, if you plant an oak tree in one place and an oak tree in another place, it grows up quite differently. So... So here I'm not speaking about us tuning ourselves to some essential nature, though I think that that's probably the psychological dynamic of tuning yourself to each other has this kind of concept in it, working behind the scenes, that each of us has some essential quality.

[25:39]

And I know myself, too. If I'm here... practicing with you in the context of each of your individual practice, I make an effort to be continuously in touch with, at least at some level that's maybe like the DNA, I don't know, some level in which I feel each of your practice and what's happening in it and how these three months will affect that. So maybe that's kind of another essentialist idea. Each of you have your own practice. But also, if we do have this kind of interior belief of essentialism, it may be also part of our finding some way to relate in an essential way to each person.

[26:40]

Okay, so what I'm saying, and going back to original mind, and I'm going to stop in a moment, I think. One of the important things, and I think we can look at original mind, and I'm trying to, in two ways. whether we call it, as I like to do, originating or originary instead of original, to avoid the well-established, again, meaning of prior to or first instance of, Because there's no, strictly speaking, there's no original mind. I mean, acculturation starts at birth. So there's no mind that's universal and free of culture. But we can, in effect, tabula rasa can mean both a blank slate and it can also mean an erased slate.

[27:49]

So from the point of view of an erased slate, then original mind can be... Because through meditation practice and zazen and instrumentally using the wisdom teachings, we in effect erase... a large part of our acculturation so that we end up with a mind that's, you know, pretty similar to each other and pretty similar to each... I think in any culture you can get pretty much to a similar kind of original but not innate mind. Now, maybe you think these distinctions are not so important, but they do, when you're really trying to look at what's the basis of our practices, very different if you think there's some innate... If you think there's some innate behind this, just like believing in God, and then you're not really teaching Buddhism.

[28:52]

So... Now, I believe, Nicole, it was you who brought up simultaneity. I've heard. Okay. And you mentioned it yesterday. Christian mentioned it yesterday. I think the simultaneity that's established in practice, and again, I'm trying to keep it simple here, is not a sign of the simultaneity of grandfathered-in DNA, but the simultaneity of a shared... originary mind, perhaps. And here we're talking about a yogic skill to begin to distinguish between the experience of the contents of mind and the field of mind. And the more you can actually feel the difference between the contents of mind and the field of mind, the field of mind which isn't something permanent, but is more

[30:07]

equally or continuously present on each appearance, the more that you can make that distinction between the contents of mind, you have the power, it's a kind of power to be able to shift your attention and locate it in the field of mind and not be distracted by the contents of mind. The more we approach that, the more we're tuning ourselves with each other at a very fundamental level, I'd say as fundamental as, or more so perhaps, than some kind of shared DNA. I mean, when I'm in Germany and I'm in France or I'm in Europe, it's clear, most Germans share DNA. They look alike, they... Speak alike, etc. And then you look at France. Hey, we are in a different DNA field when you're in France or Italy. Amazing, all these related people.

[31:12]

They don't get along always, but they're all related. genetically. So there's tribal and genetic and national identities which have real physical, and of course Europe's in a huge crisis about it now as more and more people arrive who don't have the tuning of original mind or something like that. Anyway, so all I want to say is that right now what I'm trying to explore by being in the practice period with you, but out of the practice period schedule, I'm trying to notice by this different position of mine what tunes the practice period. Because if I can understand that, and we can develop the practice period in those terms, practice period has a chance of continuing into the future. Okay.

[32:12]

That was my riff. So if anyone has something you'd like to say, please do. Roshi, if it wasn't already used up by Christianity, would you use Genesis mind? Genesis? I don't know what that means. I mean, I know what the word Genesis is, but instead of genetic mind? Instead of originary. Instead of originary? Well, I don't know. I have to genuflect on that. Rishi, the other day when we were having this discussion on simultaneity, Dennis brought up this experience that he and Reynold had on the deck where there's what he described as they had a mutual perception.

[33:17]

And my understanding of what Dennis was describing as a mutual perception was... and I felt like is an important distinction was not that they were, that they were seeing the same thing, but that they were seeing with the same scene. And that was what made it mutual. And that's what made it, um, kind of, I mean, kind of extraordinary is that when you talk about, um, uh, I don't know what you just said, sort of at the end you said something like we're meeting each other from this original, we're meeting each other in this original mind or where we share the same original mind. Is that the equivalent? I mean, would you describe that experience in those terms?

[34:19]

Well, I think... Usual perception? It seems to me the distinction... I don't know what Dennis and... And who had... I don't know if that was actually the experience each of them had, but when he talked about mutual perception, my understanding of what is really meant by mutual perception and noticing mutual perception with another person is that you notice that you're sharing the same scene or sharing the same awareness. So I guess what I'm asking is, is that what you're... Yeah, but I'm now asking Dennis. Okay. Dennis and who else was it? So the two of you felt you had the same perception or that you were in the same circumstance? I was investigating with Nicole, trying to find out what we were going to be talking about, and we were using the word simultaneous, simultaneity.

[35:26]

And... I thought it might be an example was this event where there was a sound, a crash, a noise and our two different reactions to that sound and my feeling that there was something very shared in our in our meeting on that event and trying to find out if that was going to fit this word simultaneity. Well it sounds to me like, I don't know what Reynolds felt, but it sounds to me like you recognize you shared a simultaneous context but not necessarily the simultaneous perception within that context.

[36:28]

helpful in pointing out that the individual responses were different. But the context was the same. Did you have some feeling? Did you notice anything going on there? I think Dennis has explained it very well. But you had some similar kind of experience? Yeah. Yeah. What interested me was the connection. Yeah. well there's layers of simultaneity here we're in the same context we might have the same perception and as I said we might have the same shared sense of erasing our acculturation some of it it's still not It's a very complex area to try and investigate.

[37:31]

Yeah, but we're creating... I mean, one thing we could say about practice period is we're trying to create the context where you can have a connection with each other that's more fundamental than personality or psychology. And if you establish that, Your lifetime of relationship to people in terms of their psychology is completely different. You just don't get hooked into people's psychology, their feelings, etc., in the same way, because there's always a more fundamental connection. Or you know how to live within that more fundamental connection as the most definitive way with other people. And that basically is what I would say is what's meant by compassion in Buddhism, is to reach that point where you have a relationship that's so fundamental with people it's not affected by personality and psychology. Yes.

[38:34]

You've also suggested, it seems to me, or I've inferred from what you've said, that this group can actually do something to promote that process or that state I'm wondering what are the kind of practical activities or actions that we could take that would actually promote that well I could say something but anybody else want to say something in response to what Reynolds said or anybody else Because I think what we can do is, if you notice, when you feel more connected, like in a Yogi meal or something like that, you kind of try to, like you find the right note singing, middle C or something, you try to stay with that and then...

[39:40]

So you notice when you do feel more connected and then you try to enhance that in your practice with others. That's what I would say right now anyway. I'll have a try. Yeah, please. I mean, the elders are speaking, right. Well, I was trying to put my foot into my shoe. I see, really. On leaving the center. When I've tried to do that, sometimes my shoe has fallen under the stairs. Yeah, that's happened too. My robe's trying to get down. I wanted to stay with that bodily experience when this broom fell. Yeah. And Reynolds is asking application. You're going to keep knocking down brooms every time you see it.

[40:44]

So by refusing to react to the broom dropping and staying with my body it became more interesting in observing his reactions a few feet away. But that was the technique, if you want one, Reynolds, is to insist on staying with bodily awareness. Yeah, that's good. I agree. You have some tea waiting for you next door. Yeah, I think what happens is something which you're implying is when you practice, more and more you notice things but you don't react.

[41:50]

I mean, it's almost as if somebody slaps you and you say, hmm, somebody seems to have just slapped me. That's interesting. Or a broom falls over or you break a cup, oh. Look at that, that cup broke, but you don't have any feeling about it in the sense of it just happened, that's all. Maybe we're also working on the conditions of the ability to notice connectedness more and then staying with it. to both noticing and staying with it. When you say, sometimes you feel more connected and you try to stay with that as a kind of note in your life. But maybe this question of what is the practicality of doing the practice, I'm saying now, well, we also work on the conditions

[42:55]

for this ability to feel more connected in this fundamental sense. Like what we've been discussing, if we just take the habitation, it would be by bringing attention to the spine, knowing what that means, making it more continuous, knowing what it means to have attention on the breath, noticing what bodily awareness is, how the body opens up successively in ways that allow connectedness to be felt more. So... There's always noticing differences in the texture that are already existing, so you can notice exceptions from the rule. If you feel mostly disconnected, you can feel sometimes the exception of feeling connected, and that's very informative, I think, as a general rule. To notice when there's not connection is as important as noticing when there's connection. Yeah. And then there is, I feel, our practice is also working on the conditions of...

[43:58]

of just the ability to notice or notice distinctions that otherwise elude our awareness. Yeah, I agree. I think that's... I agree with that. And we're not trying to be sort of better people or something like that, but we're trying to be more fundamental in how we exist with others. And this is a kind of proving ground, training ground that primarily was developed by the Chinese, I would say, and built into Zen practice. And it's interesting that, again, it's sort of like at the level of DNA, you can't do it exactly, you can't know it, but you can create conditions where that's more likely to happen.

[45:01]

So we create conditions where connectedness at a fundamental level is more likely to be noticed and then enhanced. And I really do think this is what compassion means in Buddhism. It doesn't mean helping others. It means feeling this fundamental connection and then out of that helping somebody if it makes sense. And so that's why it's so difficult when people... I get challenged quite a bit. You never talk about love. You don't mention compassion. Well, this is a rather subtle thing to mention if you're talking about compassion at this kind of level. Does compassion involve suspending attention from the outside? external environment so that some attention remains available, like attention bandwidth remains available for the spine or for the breath.

[46:20]

Well, I don't think you have a limited amount of attention. And so I don't think you have only so much bandwidth. You can only... I think the more you use attention, the more it gets developed and wider and stronger and less... And you can't tire it out. You can tire out your usual energy, but you can't tire out attention exactly. I heard a Qigong teacher once speak about the development of attention and how you have it on a certain part of the body. And he said later, it is advanced to have it on two parts of your body, and it is also more difficult to have it in three places.

[47:22]

I wasn't really practicing at the time when I heard that, but it struck me as something like, yeah, probably this is really something most people deal with. Attention is locked into one thing. When that is not so much a concept that you restrict yourself to, probably if you were noticing your life with a freedom from that concept, you would notice at many times the tension is on various things and it's all functioning together. But the way we have, it seems to me in our culture in particular, the way we have a concept of concentration we're kind of locked into one thing and everything else is... So part of this field experience is kind of to release yourself from this constriction that attention is locked. It was very interesting for me to hear him speak as a Chinese person, speak to Westerners, kind of freeing them a little bit from how they were thinking about the development of attention.

[48:38]

But I couldn't notice it at that time in the same way I can now. Well, I studied with Dr. It wasn't who, doctor, what the heck was his name? He was studying at the Stanford Research Institute, who'd just before that studied Uri Geller, you know, things like that. Anyway, he was kind of great, and I actually got him his visa for the United States, sponsored him in the United States by chance. Anyway, yeah. I would say, and I don't know much about Qigong really, I just studied with this kind of wonderful Chinese guy. He was a German trained medical doctor as well as a Qigong teacher. And when I knew him he was late seventies. I think when we do something like the Four Habitations

[49:45]

We take that as a practice. You're bringing attention to the spine and then widening that to the breath and then widening that to the mind and then widening that to the space you're occupying. So that's kind of like one field of attention, one bandwidth or something like that. One spectrum of attention. And with... What the heck was his name? Doctor? No, it wasn't Doctor Who. Otherwise he would have been in a British phone booth. Anyway, wonderful guy. And Madam Woo, maybe it was Woo, W-U, Dr. Woo. I think it was Dr. Woo and his wife, Madam Woo, who was 76. And she could throw people at a distance, you know. Oh, goodness. She could do two at once or something. He could do about seven or eight people at once.

[50:49]

Dr. Woo. No wonder I got mixed up with Who. But he was Woo. Anyway, my experience with him is, when I used to stand still with him for half an hour or more, you know, with my hands this way or this way, I got so that you develop a very energetic unified attention. And then, because his form of Qigong was also a martial art, Then you wanted to divide that into different units, but it still was based on an overall field. But that dividing into different units took new yogic skills. So maybe that's what the guy you're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. Also, it seems to me like our propensity to name things interferes with the process too, because if I'm

[51:51]

paying attention to my spine and I'm telling myself I'm paying attention to my spine, it's very hard to pay attention to it. That's right. It kind of is a way to shift, use something like bringing attention to the spine to shift out of consciousness into awareness and to shift out of naming, discriminating. Well, we're supposed to end about now, aren't we? Mm-hmm. Yeah, 425. Oh, I'm late again. I'm very sorry. But anyway, it's so nice to hang out with you guys. And thanks for serving tea and everything. There's going to be a time when I won't be able to get out.

[52:56]

And I would like to even install a knight hoist. Do you know what a knight hoist was? It was knights in armor and were so heavy they couldn't get on their horse. So they had these kind of gadgets that would pull them up. I thought about it last night. I can't get out of bed and I want to go. Yeah. You know, I can't just stand up. I have to crawl. You don't know Susan Pilhoffer, do you? I do. You do, yeah. I was just told, Nicole told me, she called me this morning to ask me about some seminar or something, and she said the snow is so deep, it's halfway, it's not as deep as it's been, which is the whole first story's been closed sometimes, but it's halfway up the windows of the first story. And so you know Susan Pilhoffer. Oh, you know her daughter even. Yeah. So she was supposed to ring the bell or something like that. So she started from Yohannesov over toward the Zendo, and she fell in the snow.

[54:00]

So she'd get up, and she couldn't stand. So she crawled all the way. down the snow, you know, got walls like this on either side. She crawled, she's about 70 years old. She crawled all the way to the sandow on her hands and knees in the snow. And I understand her very well. Because I'm sort of there myself. But I said to Nicole, Nicole, How did she feel? Was she upset? No, no, she was completely laughing the whole way. Of course, we all establish her as part of our tune by beginning and ending behind her.

[54:57]

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