on a machine that its first incarnation was the iPhone. You know the story, right? No. No. Yes. Oh, there was a meeting. There was a meeting at Apple, and they wanted to build an iPad, but they couldn't because there was no... a manufacturer or technology to build such a big screen at the time. So someone at the meeting, not Steve Jobs, said, I could turn it into a phone. So they made the iPhone, and then later the technology was developed for this iPad. Oh, okay. Okay. So here we are. Anyway, so that was so much fun to talk to you yesterday. Now what? Nothing. Can we have fun again? Yes. So how's it going?

[01:01]

Snowy. Slowly. Snowy. Snowy. We're sort of snowed in. Snowy? Oh, it's snowing there? Yeah. Lots. Lots. Well, that's kind of good. I mean, I think it's good. Well... We are sort of, I think, more or less relying on you for today's meeting. But I can give you a bit of a synopsis of what we touched upon today. Which the entire morning we focused on one question, which is we were wondering what are therapeutic postures or attitudes and specifically in relationship to yogic practice. So each person, we just kind of went around and each person thought about what is my basic attitude in therapy.

[02:07]

And we just came up with a nice list and in reference to also some aspects in reference to reading your letter and some aspects in reference to what we've learned through Zen practice. OK. And then this afternoon, maybe the important outcome of this afternoon is that we decided to continue these meetings. and thought about different ways to continue what got started in this weekend. And number one, we would like to meet again next year in January around the same time. What about having a meeting when I can join you when I get back after May 16th? Okay. We hadn't considered.

[03:09]

I mean, once a year. I need more fun than that. Yeah. No, I think the dates will have to be worked out with each of us, and then we don't yet have a 2018 Johanneshof schedule, but that makes sense. So then we'll look for something later in the year, I guess. Okay. I would like it because I didn't think I should be at the first meeting, but the second meeting, maybe it would be all right. I wouldn't be too much of a nuisance. But you stuck into the first one, too. No, I didn't, yeah. Like, electronically. But, you know, it's interesting that if we were on a conference call, I would have a different feeling than being on this visual call because even if I can't see your faces... and I can only see an outline of a shadow in front of a lamp. Still, it makes me feel more connected and I can feel, to some extent, a bodily presence. Just by how your head is and the angle, like Alexander's head is to his right now.

[04:14]

This was kind of the same for us yesterday. Okay. Are you really a part of it? Okay, good, thanks. Yeah, go ahead. Okay, so another thing we just encouraged people to also join, if possible, the Kassel seminar in September. Okay, and then… Well, I think you could bring a lot into the Kassel seminar, I hope, after this kind of discussion together. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And then we collected today different questions and topics for individual exploration and research. And I think each person has carved out maybe two questions, one or two questions that they want to specifically observe throughout the year and work out and actually

[05:22]

you know, write about them so that there's some kind of... Maybe write about them. Maybe write about them. Okay, well, maybe write about them. But with the basic idea of that these, whatever the person comes up with in relationship to the question could be a... An outline for a discussion. An outline for a discussion in the next meeting. so that we start the meeting with some material. Now, will some of this be included in your minutes, Nicole? Everything is included in my minutes. Everything? Well, that's impossible. All the non-verbalizable stuff just isn't there. Yeah, I think I'd have to agree. It's between the lines. You will find this in between the lines. That's one of those statements that you can't disagree with. Yeah.

[06:24]

Okay, because I would also like to, if any of you have any thoughts, I mean, I have never quite presented consciousness in the way I've done now as an instrumentalization of physiological awareness. Now what I've left out of that description is an instrumentalization or perhaps better a utilization of awareness as the vehicle for imaginal thinking in contrast to a discursive or ideational thinking. Now, so if any of you have any reservations about my way of describing this, or there's some other person or yourself who has a different way of looking at it, that would be very helpful to me because I'm just trying to make sense of our practice in the context of Western processing.

[07:35]

So if now or in the future you have some suggestions or extensions or reservations, that would be very helpful to me. I'm just developing how to talk about these things in Western terms. Okay. Okay. All right. Yeah. So anything else you want to say before I say a little bit about Dukesan? Wait, is there anything else we have to say? Yeah, well, maybe one aspect that we discussed, what should the size of the group be for the next meeting? And basically, the feeling was to not yet open the group up, but to stay with the people who've been invited for this year. And of course, there are some people who have been invited but aren't here and have also responded.

[08:39]

So we felt we should... And again, next year, invite those people too. But other than that, the basic feeling was that this is about the size that we can handle. If it was more than that, it would be more difficult to have a constructive discussion. But that's, of course, you guys have to experientially decide on the basis of your own conversation. I mean, you know, like how many people make a jury? You know, how many people can really have a conversation? Robert Duncan, a friend of mine, and his partner, Jess, they would never invite more than two people to dinner because then you'd have too many conversations going on at once. So maybe you have to decide what the size would be. But I would think that there are going to be some people who any one of you would say, oh, that person really should be part of it. So I would say there's going to be a... a border in which you have to be a little bit open. And I would also suggest that maybe you could have two levels of... I hope Marie-Louise picks that up.

[09:45]

Two levels of... Yes, she did. Two levels of... inclusion one is those who actually come to the meeting and those who also get maybe the minutes or uh some reports of it either in from you or others because there will be people say can't you let me know what's going on there so of course you didn't tape the discussion but you minuted the discussion anyway that's just a comment yeah okay um I'm drinking Gyokuro here. And sometimes Robbie has given me some very good Gyokuro tea. And having it here, I'm letting the water get cool here. And I have a teapot here. And I'm putting some water in the leaves. And you have to wait a bit.

[10:50]

You have to wait until the water is at the right temperature and so forth. Now, the question I bring up, just because I happen to be doing this, is this about the tea or is it about the culture? In other words, the Japanese will tell you when you receive instructions that the water is supposed to be such and such a temperature and the and you leave it for so many seconds and so forth and so forth, and now they make Zouji... whatever they're called, Zouji Rushi heaters, which set the temperature for your Kyokuro and another temperature for etc. But... It's not, I would say, this is not about, really, I'm not just wandering off into space here.

[11:51]

This is not just about that the tea requires to be made this way. It's about a culture which prepares the tea to be made this way. In other words, the culture has decided that, again, excuse me, we overwork this idea that everything's an activity, but somehow we have to keep exploring that to have a more complex sense of it. So in other words, if really what this is about, and even the teapot, you can't see it here, but it's clear that the potter held it here. then glazed it so you can see his thumb where his hand reached across it as he held it and here you can see where his fingers were lower fingers so that in a way it's a signature that's his way of signing the pot that this pot was made by him he held it that way his hand was that size

[12:57]

So he shows that the pot is an activity. So in other words, really how you drink this tea is not having an exact temperature. The tea assumes you're in the midst of an activity. You have to pace your own activity in relationship to the temperature of the water. So if I don't make it something, I have to work here a little. I'm doing various things. And then I say, oh, the water must be ready now. And sometimes it's too cold. So that tells me something. Sometimes it's not quite cool enough. So the tea engages my activity. in order to engage the activity of the tea so you get the right kind of exact kind of taste and a certain sweetness to this yoguro tea. So the tea actually is rather expensive, but it's expensive because it's a process. They make the tea in this way so it infuses with your activity.

[14:00]

It's not just an infusion of the water with the tea, but an infusion of your activity within the tea. So I'm mentioning this because I'm trying to find ways to talk about imaginal thinking as a process or imaginal tracing, something like that, visceral thinking in relationship to ideational thinking. Now, one more example. trying to be as concise as I can here. I mentioned to Paul yesterday that he was talking about the altar there and offering incense, etc. And I mentioned that there's a, on our altar, on the left side of the altar, of course, left and right, which is the left of the altar, which is my left. The There's a little incense burner someone gave me that I use for Suzuki Roshi's picture, the sort of founder's altar.

[15:08]

Okay. So it's on a little omotesenki, which is a kind of tea ceremony, one of the tea ceremony schools, which uses a little kind of brocade cloth. Okay. So I have that brocade cloth on the altar under the incense burner. Now for two or three years or more, I come back from Europe and even every few days sometimes I have to go and move the little piece of cloth so it's not edged with the main altar cloth. Okay. And I do it. I sometimes do it in front of the Eno and in front of the person, the Jisha, who's handing me the incense. But then, two days later, I see it lined up with the edge of the cloth. Okay. So what's behind that? If you assume everything is separated, if that's in your mind as a view, then you connect things because they need to be connected.

[16:15]

So... Okay. But if you assume that everything is connected already, then you don't have to connect things. You only have to give each thing its own space because it's already connected. So each thing then is inter-independent, using that word. And so it has its own space. All right. So I recently, during Zaza even, got the Eno to come up. Because finally, after several years of moving it, having it moved back, I get tired of trying to do it by physical example. Because in an imaginal culture, you do it by physical example. You simply don't explain. Okay. So I said, look, I keep moving this cloth, and now you pull it a few millimeters so it's not... The cloth makes a space for the incense burner. If we don't, one, they're calling me for breakfast. Hello? I'm talking to my friends in Europe, so I'll be late to breakfast.

[17:23]

Thanks. I have to get used to all these things. I'm not used to using earbuds. Anyway. So I said, look, if you're going to join this little square piece of cloth with the altar cloth, we might as well not have it, because it doesn't serve any purpose. If it has its own space, then it gives its own space to the incense burner, and it gives its own space to the picture of Suzuki Roshi as a little separate altar. OK, so there's that. Okay. So it dokes on and the client, uh, therapist relationship, which I started thinking about this after yesterday's joining with you, um, is the, one of the most intimate and complex encounters possible in the world.

[18:27]

Okay. So I can't, not a therapist, so I can't speak about that, but from the point of view of dokes on, um, Now, you can think of breath as an attentional location and an inspirational sight and a pulse or pace, a location of pulse or pace. All right. Because the breath, you're breathing, but as soon as you bring attention to the breath, you can bring... mental postures to the breath. Anyway, the breath is a location. And you can make use of the breath as an attentional tool. Now, normally, I don't explain this about doksan because The future teacher is supposed to learn Doksan by going to Doksan often enough that they get the feeling of how it's done with very little instruction.

[19:39]

For instance, yesterday I said about how Doksan is a... a modality of knowing which is not present in your usual social discourse. Okay. So here is what happens in Dogesan from the point of view of somebody who's experienced in doing it. At the moment, not the client, the practitioner enters, there's an attentional site established. and you feel that attentional site without thinking about it, you just feel it. And then you join that attentional site. The joining of that attentional site actually changes the site. So the person comes in with a certain pace or state of mind or something. What can you do about that? The first thing you can do in the world of imaginal tracking or tracing

[20:42]

is you feel the... And you can use the breath as an attentional tool. You feel the moment they enter. Then you immediately join that with your own feeling. You don't impose yours, you join that. And then there's waiting. So there's joining and waiting. And... The idea of joining comes from jugular and how the neck and head are connected in English. So it's a very bodily, visceral kind of knowing. You feel the location of the person, you join it, and then you follow it. And as the person walks across the room and sits down, and the process of sitting down and says they're cross-legged or whatever they do with the bows, all of that becomes part of finding yourself in the bodily visceral pace, visceral means, I guess I know what you have in German, but it's probably the same, visceral, your gut, your gut feeling, your kind of visceral tracking, touching.

[21:56]

You feel the person sitting down, and then, and you're establishing a pace. Now, in this yogic way of looking at things, which I keep trying to find ways to bring into our cultural ways of thinking, is if everything's connected, what is the moment of connection? The moment of connection is the pace. One of the great examples of it in Asia is the dragon, which is the union of clouds, weather, etc., water, etc., and it represents the activity of joining. So there's a moment of joining and following that joining. So the connection between phenomena and yourself, if you're part of phenomena, then how that is experienced is, I think the best word that I can find in English is pace. So you give everything its space, and so acceptance is also an activity of giving things its own space.

[23:01]

So as you accept the person who's coming into Doksong, you feel you're giving them their own space, and then they're walking in your space, which is also being given to them and they're creating. And that is a kind of alchemy or... imaginal process in which then what happens keeps being a contrapunto or a riff on the pace that's been established, neutral pace that's been established. And then you see what happens within that, and too much is possible, that becomes the main content of Doksana. Okay, riff enough. Now, I suppose that could be applied to the client coming into the room. Obviously, it's at least conceptually simple.

[24:04]

I have stopped speaking. We are thinking. But we haven't stopped listening. Okay, that Alexander tells it like it is. I see you over there next to Alexander. I see your hand at least. To my feeling, To my feeling, what you just said and the dog sound, it's exactly what happens when a patient comes in. How we or I tune in to a person coming in. The space thing, this meeting, this giving space and being allowed to take space, it's not similar. It's nearly the same. Okay, well, that's great. Then the... in the Zen approach here, that this happens in a non-conceptual knowing space.

[25:13]

The trouble, as soon as you put words, words are controlling factors. If you name, you shout in fear, and then you name that fear, that's an attempt to control the fear, to deal with it, et cetera. So as soon as you name, you start a mind that's attempting to control. So a non-conceptual state of mind is a mind which is allowing things to happen in the danger and potency of immediacy. Immediacy is potent and dangerous, and most people don't want to be there. But when you're there, things happen on an imaginable level. Now, I recently had a person practicing with me for years, gave me an analysis of... every word in a part of a comma. Basically, he still doesn't get that you can't take these things and verbalize them.

[26:14]

Well, it's useful to verbalize and say it could mean this, it could mean that, etc. But if you locate yourself in that ideational controlling mindset, The koan hasn't been written that way. The koan has been written like an image in a dream leads to other dreams that leads to other associations, which is another level of tracing, tracking, or kind of thinking process. So the koan, if you have in the koan 20, which a number of us have been looking at recently, the moon in the water, the moon in a puddle, etc., You take that image and you let that image work in you without giving any verbalizable identity to it. You let that image function in you and then it calls forth its own process, which is not a language process. But it's very difficult for us not to try to grasp things with language.

[27:19]

So then the question is, when you're in doksan, how do you refrain from grasping things in language, but also enough language to sort of locate it in a practical sense, but not to determine what it is through language? I mean, that's how you'd approach doksan. Okay. Okay. But what about when people come to doksan and they do the whole prostration, and they do that, and then they're sitting... Say that again slowly. When people come to doksan and they follow the ritual, this prostration, then they sit down, and then they don't say anything. This also happens, yeah. If they don't say... Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, so how long do you stand there just sitting there and listening to the silence? And what I also remember that you asked the INO, because this takes time, because sometimes it takes five to ten minutes, that you also asked the INO, please ask the people to sit down and start talking and start and bring up the topic.

[28:38]

But some people, they don't want to do that. What do you do then? Well, I think this, I don't know if this relates to the psychotherapeutic client relationship, and we can talk about this when I'm there or some other time, but basically it's just your own intuition of whether or feel on whether you want the person or sometimes you And it depends on what the person is capable of dealing with. Are they fully present in this noksan encounter? Or are they thinking about other things or wondering if they're smart? Or should they say something intelligent or something like that? If that's where they're at, then rather quickly, I bow and ring the bell. Or if I start to bow and then they start to say something, then I listen to what they say. But I'm happy to interrupt the process or acknowledge they're just sitting there and we're just doing zazen together.

[29:46]

But that's just something you have to play by ear and learn what to do. But in general, it's interesting to me, when I have to see 60 people in two days, somehow the Doksans go really fast. I don't even try. When I see 20 people in three days, then the Doksans go slowly. I don't know what happens. But there's a feel when they walk in the room, when you create this attentional moment and discover a pace, the context actually influences the pace without you even doing anything. All right, so something else? This tea is quite good, by the way. Glad to hear it. It's the right temperature. Is this way of meeting someone in Doksan, is Doksan the only place where you do that? Well... You're not trying to put people in a dope sign situation in ordinary circumstances like if they're cutting carrots.

[30:55]

You don't want anybody to cut their finger off. But no, the sense of being present, joining, waiting. Present, joining, waiting is the initial moment of every encounter. But the present and the joining are not... They may be, in a sense, informed by your mental posture, but the present and the joining are not... They're just felt. Now, I have to make... five or six or more fires a day in here in this room or in the house, because that's the only heat we have is these wood-burning stoves. And there's a logic to how much paper, kindling and logs, when you put the logs in and so forth. But really, it comes down to, after you're fairly familiar with the logic of it, the process of it, it comes down to the feel.

[32:04]

And once you get the feel of a fire, you can almost make a fire with a little corner of a piece of paper, one piece of kindling, and a big log. But it's the feel of it. And so this kind of imaginal... visceral process is to always locate yourself in feeling first and primarily and allow the language and societal and cultural aspects float or bounce around on top of the feeling, which is the primary vehicle of the attentional encounter. I'm still trying to figure out how to talk about these things. So, you know, um, I'm always in the stage of state of incompleteness.

[33:14]

I'm sorry, but I'm trying to take notes. Yeah. And I did get the last point, um, starting by allow the language and societal considerations, considerations. to kind of float on top of that, but the primary medium of the encounter is feeling. nuance you know it's interesting the word nuance means comes from cloud and so it's a kind of cloud thinking you don't try to give things a deterministic form you allow them to be clouds nuance literally means the varying shades of color in clouds as they change so how do you find yourself new antically romantically in the midst, and romantically in the midst of an encounter with another person.

[34:18]

Any other? Now that Leon has said this is what's happening, maybe we can go on to something else. I have a question. Can you translate that, Nicole? Yes. So this present, joining, waiting, do I know that exactly from body therapy? I am familiar with the present, joining and waiting from body therapy. Yes. And I was just wondering what is the decisive ingredient that makes the DocuSan And so then I'm wondering, what is the crucial component or ingredient that makes dokusan a dharmic encounter? Well, I would say that if you

[35:35]

tried to call dunks on a dharmic encounter, then you probably also have to call your physical therapy encounter or the encounter with a client, as Leon describes it, as dharmic encounters as well. Because in this sense, a dharmic encounter would be, what does it say in that same koan? To fill your body with the dharma. When your body is filled with the Dharma, what does it mean? How does the Dharma fill the body? Well, it would be when the physical articulation of the world is articulated in you as a shared pace So when that shared pace is physicalized or visceralized or something like that, that shared pace is to be filled with the Dharma.

[36:39]

And you can see it. You can see a person. They can walk into duksan, and you can see they're not filled with the dharma. They're just thinking about how they're going to present themselves or what is happening or a certain anxiety sometimes, et cetera. And how can you shift that in your own body so that they shift to an imaginable dharmic experience the immediacy, how do you create doksan into the potency of immediacy? Well, I mean, the experienced practitioner supposedly usually does that, and less experienced people are in their usual societal mode of thinking and being. I sometimes make an inner pun for myself with psychologist and seismologist.

[37:50]

The psychologist and the seismologist are both looking for the earthquakes. I mean, you know, Paul and I have been talking about Buddha fields. You know, in Theravada Buddhism, there's a phrase, whoever sees the Dharma sees me. Well, whoever sees the Dharma is to enact, to ascribe, that means to write. In yourself, the... field as a dharmic field, and that dharmic field is where the Buddha, which is the field the Buddha inhabits, a realized person inhabits. I think also this use of the breath as an attentional tool

[39:03]

I mean, as you, as it's obvious, and it is that the word inspiration and expired empire, et cetera, uh, uh, inhale and exhale is all, um, uh, related to the breath. So the breath itself, when it's an attentional location and you give it space, it's also intrusive conducive to inspiration. So the intentional breath held or suspended inspirationally is sometimes the source of a flow of intuitive thinking. So the breath then also becomes, the attentional breath site becomes a hinge, a somatic hinge, a hinge where samadhi or disappearing happens, but the breath also becomes a hinge where you can shift minds, shift modalities of mind.

[40:06]

So this whole teaching of bringing attention to the breath has itself many modalities. One is, of course, developing an experience of bodily continuity through the vehicle of breath. But then the breath itself becomes an attentional site, which can be the hinge of shifting the mind, the hinge of curing the pace with another person, the hinge or location for where inspirational and imaginal thinking can find its landscape. Yeah, I'm, you know, maybe I'm just deprived from seeing you, so I start almost turning into a taste show here. But these things are well up in me, and it helps me to say them, to find ways to say them, that they may function in you imaginably and not discursively.

[41:15]

Okay, is that enough? Shall I go to breakfast or should I start? No. Okay, so somebody else want to say something? We have time for one or two riffs. Oh, I see. You mean riffs from me. Yeah, right. Is that the riff? Okay. Well, anything that would encourage me to... think about how we should continue these meetings, because my own feeling, I said, I really do believe, as I said in my little letter, that it is psychology and psychotherapy which has opened an imaginable, as I put it, path in our society. In other words, if psychology didn't exist, we would be confined ideationally in a way that practice, the idea of practice, would not be possible, it wouldn't be a path.

[42:23]

And so the way in which psychology predating the societal involvement, I say that because it's been a long involvement with Buddhism, colonial British involvement, etc., with Buddhism for a long time, but the societal involvement of Buddhism in the West is presaged by, I think, psychology and psychiatry and psychotherapy. And so now... now that they're both kind of similar paths with different configurations in our society, how do those two paths, like tunnels or spaces or openings or a cloud leading you, how do those overlapping and separating paths.

[43:25]

Now, how are they going to affect Buddhism and practice? And I think that we have to find that out ourselves. I think many people too quickly conjoined psychotherapy and practice. And I think, for instance, much of what I've been talking about is really about the yogic sense of mindfulness, which is actually all related to an engaged mind. an engagement with the potency and unpredictability of immediacy. But for most Westerners, mindfulness means conscious attention to things that are named. This has nothing to do with real yogic mindfulness. But we understand it, we understand mindfulness as a conscious process of noticing what's nameable.

[44:34]

And that's okay, but it's not what really yogic Zen mindfulness is about. Roshi, could I ask you a question? Because we talked about today, now it came to me as an very urgent kind of a koan because we discussed the contradiction between psychotherapy and Buddhist or yogic practices. And we talked about in psychotherapy we try to help our patients construct a healthy narrative. And as we know in Buddhist psychology we try to deconstruct this narrative. And we talked about, is this a contradiction? Is this a paradox or maybe a colon? And I would like to know your, if you have a thought to that.

[45:39]

Well, I could think, I mean, obviously, it's something I've thought about a great deal over many years. But whether I could say something about it, that's another question. If you want to. It's a different, saying something about it's a very different process than investigating it. um as i said in my letter there are four i think we the the we could say the process you look at when you're practicing with somebody is have they stepped away from loosen their sense that their sense of self is in an inherent self an inherency okay So then, if you shift to self as a function, you can't function without some kind of narrative self.

[46:41]

Okay, so you need to establish, so I tried to articulate it, you need to, so that you can feel the constructive, in other words, if you recognize that a robot could observe, listen, and walk around a room through all kinds of sensors without any idea of me-ness, okay, so if that's the case, we can walk around, look at things, et cetera, without any sense that that's I doing it, it's the senses doing it. All right, so if you really spend some time, and this is actually practicing the aficionados, sense separately if you practice each sense separately until you can really feel the process in yourself that you're constructing the path in front of you you're constructing the space with each footstep etc now I'm just I'm just trying to because he you know to get a physical visceral again feel for this you have to start doing it rather mechanically I find so

[47:46]

If you get a physical feel for the sensorial process and you can feel yourself constructing your the space in front of you as you walk in the snow or ice or across those two little bridges, etc., you begin to actually feel that you're constructing that. Okay, if you can feel you're constructing that sensorial continuum, that conscious continuum, Then maybe you can have a feel for your constructing on the basis of the precepts, a societal continuum. As I said, jokingly, you get a merit rating or a credit rating. We do have to establish an identity in the world to hold a job and so forth and so on. But that doesn't have to be thought of as, again, inherent. You're constructing it. But you're constructing it alongside and through your own values.

[48:54]

So what are your own values? I mean, I think Snowden is a kind of hero. I mean, he had this courage to, as I said, to feel the difference between his societal continuum and his accountable personal continuum. And he chose his personal continuum. continuum. But as I said also in the letter, we're in that traction. Traction is where things stick together like traction. We're in that traction between our societal continuum, accountable society, and accountable to ourself, accountable to others, and accountable to ourself continuum. And then then we need to have, as I put it, and I'm happy to have this expanded, extended, changed, whatever your ideas are, then we need the recollectible continuum, because you need to have some memory involved.

[49:58]

What I did yesterday, where I live, where I put that pencil on my desk, etc. So you establish a recountable continuum. And when you get to be my age, you can begin to see that... The recountable continuum, sometimes you get up and I go across the room and I say, why did I get up? Well, the recountable continuum is getting old. Seriously, I'm looking forward to the jokes. There's a joke about that you've probably all heard where a guy gets up, he says, it's terrible. I get up and I don't know why I stood up. And the other one says, oh, it's worse for me. I start upstairs, and I stop in the middle to catch a breath, and I don't know whether I was going upstairs or downstairs. And the third guy says, well, thank God that hasn't happened to me. He knocks on wood. Then he says, come in. Come in. So the accountable continuum has to... recollectible continuum has to also function.

[51:11]

Okay. Then, if you can really establish, and I think if I was a therapist, I would definitely, and I do in my relationship to my practitioners too, the people I practice with, emphasize establishing an accountable societal continuum, exercise emphasizing an accountable personal continuum, And that happens in monastic life. Whether you function in the kitchen or whether you have traumas in the kitchen, all that has to be sorted out. So then, once you can feel, as I've said again in the letter, these four continuums as constructs, then you can more easily shift your sense of identity almost biologically to your breathing, your metabolism, your encounter, attentional encounters, contextual attentional encounters, because that is also you, but that's a you which includes your context always.

[52:19]

Ah. Thank you for limiting. So, the narratives, I think that there's a, one of the confusions in in Western thinking about Buddhism is the idea that Buddhism is about non-self, and it's not about non-self. It's about self as a function and not as an identity, not as an inherent identity. Because it's crazy to think you can't function, that you could function without a functional self. But you don't have to identify with that functional self or conceive of it as an inherency. If it's an inherency, then everything is not changing. But to enter changing also means freeing yourself from thinking ideationally in a way that turns everything into something that's potentially controllable.

[53:25]

And when you want to live in a world that's potentially controllable, the potency and danger of immediacy is lost. At the moment of death, you think, oh, now here's the potency of immediacy. Goodbye. Yeah, and people are pointing to their watches. I see. That's that Indian tie-keeper. Grosjean already said goodbye. That's right. Well, no, it's not my last breath yet. It's an intentional breath. Okay, so I guess you guys can go on. I hope that I didn't... overtook your discussion. I'm sorry if I did. It was great. Thank you.

[54:26]

And I'll call you tomorrow at 5. All right. Well, anyway, thanks. Do you have any more meetings? Are you meeting tomorrow, too? Yes. Yeah, tomorrow until noon. And that's the last meeting. But today is your last meeting for the day? Yes. Okay. Well, anyway, thank you for including me. And again, any comments you have that helped me develop this way of looking at our process of connecting and separating, I would appreciate. So I'll go have breakfast if there's still food on the table. Thank you. Bye-bye. Goodbye. Bye-bye.

[55:14]

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