Ed Brown, Lecture, August 19, 2003. Good evening. I'm Ed Brown, and I'm the Zen part of the evening, theoretically. And this is Philip Moffat. Philip is our Vipassana representative tonight. I am going to talk first so that Philip can straighten out anything I've said that may give you some misconception about either Zen or Vipassana. Is that what I'm going for? Absolutely. We always sit like this. I am Philip's right-hand man, and he is my left. Philip and I, anyway... Philip and I have gotten to be friends, and so we decided to do some, you know, teaching together, or something resembling teaching.

[01:10]

Those of you who are in the workshop will have to say, you know, if there's any teaching going on. But anyway, Philip seems to be more interested in this week in talking about the similarities of Zen and Vipassana, and I seem to be more interested in talking about the differences. So first of all, I'd like to just share with you a story. When I was at the Buddhist Teachers Conference a few years ago at Spirit Rock, we had little home groups, you know, to help us get acquainted with each other. There were little times during the day when we were assigned to a home group. And in my home group, I was with Joseph Goldstein and Shinzen Young, Sogny Rinpoche, Sogyal Rinpoche, and Gaelic Rinpoche. And we sat down, we made little circles of chairs, and we sat down together, and I was sitting next to Joseph, and the three Tibetan Rinpoches were right across the circle.

[02:15]

And Sogyal Rinpoche looked over at us, and he said to me, so, after we'd introduced ourselves, so, Ed, what is the difference between you and Joseph? And, you know, and I said, well, we wear little outfits, and they don't, and our hair is shorter. And Sogyal Rinpoche said, no, I'm serious. And I'm still regretting that I didn't say at that point, and that is the difference between you and me. Oh, well. So then I lapsed into not being able to say anything appropriately serious, like, well, they practice noting, and we practice just sitting. Does that explain something to you? And not being willing to try to say something facile, and, you know, think that I gave up, and that they're like, this is what you're going to need to say after all.

[03:27]

But anyway, I'd like to mention a few things, and then it'll be self-explanatory. So I want to, first of all, mention that we decided this morning, you know, that whatever the particular techniques or teachings of the school, you know, what's important is to have your life. And to experience your experience, or, you know, in the Buddhist sense, you know, to be awake, awake this moment in the present. So I want to mention to you a story where this kind of happened to me. It only took me 19 years of Zen practice, and I had actually become the teacher here at Tassajara. And I was sitting up in the Zen dojo one day, and I thought, why don't I just touch what's inside with some tenderness and kindness? Why don't I just touch what's inside? And right away the tears started pouring down my face.

[04:31]

I'd been practicing Zen. I'd been, you know, getting it right. I'd been doing all the forms. And I was good enough that I'd become a teacher. And, you know, the tears started pouring down my face, and a little voice said, well, it's about time. And so I didn't know, you know, is it Zen? So in those days, Katagiri Roshi was Abbot of Zen Center. It was kind of our time of upheaval at Zen Center. And so I went to ask him, I thought I'd better check this out. Is it okay just to touch what's inside? Rather than just sitting, or following your breath, or counting your breath, or, is that all right? What do you think? And he said, some of you know Katagiri Roshi.

[05:34]

I said, Ed, for 20 years I tried to do the Zazen Dogen before I realized there was no such thing. And I thought, oh, right on schedule. So this is the sort of funny business we're in, you know, doing practices and then trying to get the practices right. And we actually just want to have our life. And, you know, feel our feelings, think our thoughts, see what we see, be alive. And this is rather different than performance, you know, gaining approval, being right, being good, you know, not making mistakes, looking good to other people, being respected, being admired.

[06:38]

So, you know, we're busy doing a lot of different things. And since then my practice rather changed. That was 19 years ago. And it was then that, you know, it was shortly after that I left Zen Center. I'd been a resident for about 20 years by the time I left. And then I started, well actually it was a year or so later, then I came back to Zen Center and was the Tantra at Green Gulch, the head of practice at Green Gulch. And then I thought, you know, I wanted to find out about this Vipassana practice I'd been hearing about. So I called up Jack Kornfield and said, Jack, would you come and lead a Vipassana retreat here at Green Gulch for some of us? And he said, sure. So we had a 10-day Vipassana retreat in the center of Green Gulch with Jack for 16 people who could be spared from the regular Green Gulch schedule. So we did our usual morning Zazen and then, you know, after breakfast we went into our Vipassana practice and then in the evening everybody came in to sit down.

[07:46]

So I got quite interested in Vipassana and I practiced with Jack and several of the others who became Spirit Rock teachers, Sylvia Forstein and James Perez and so forth. And then I went to, Gil Fronsdale was at Green Gulch one day and he said he was going to go to the three-month Vipassana course in Berry, Massachusetts that year and why didn't I come too? And I said, why don't I? And so on the spur of the moment I decided to go do three-month Vipassana retreat and I studied with Joseph Goldstein and Michelle McDonald. So I've had a fair amount of experience in Vipassana and a fair amount of experience in Zen. I don't want to talk so much tonight about Vipassana. I want to talk about what to me is distinctive about Zen. And of course you have to understand that whatever I say is just me. You know, Zen is obviously a lot of things, Vipassana is a lot of things, there's a lot of different teachers, there's a lot of different traditions and so forth.

[08:51]

But, you know, I sort of said it jokingly but we have, you know, clothes. We have the family clothes, you know, and when you come to Zen Center pretty quickly you join the family and you wear the family clothes. Which go back many centuries. And you're dressing in Buddhist clothes. Or, you know, Buddhist clothes. You're not wearing anymore your clothes. And we have ceremonies, you know, where you, and we sew our own rock suit and then we receive it in the ceremony where we take precepts. And we do, so in certain sense, you know, meditation, there are differences to me about meditation. The most distinctive one to me is that in my sense of it, Zen really does emphasize posture. Very specific about posture. You know, and that you can, you know, and I wouldn't do it normally sitting here but, you know, you can actually practice sitting exactly straight up, exactly right in the middle, not leaning to the left or the right.

[10:04]

This is the way I used to sit here, that's me. But you can also practice, you know, sitting and it's, sitting in Zen is not just sitting, it's ritual. It's the ritual of sitting. When we walk into meditation hall, we bow. And there's a form. So you're walking into ritual space, you're acknowledging ritual space, and you're in the middle of a ritual. You're not in ordinary space anymore. You're not in ordinary time, you're not in ordinary reality, you're doing your practice. There's something, you know, very definite about that. And so, you can practice, and it's a kind of yoga, you know, and it's very emphasis on, you know, often on this very physical. Right in the middle and then, and then you start to notice where do you end up, or how do you, and then people come by and, you know, you're leaning. And you didn't know.

[11:07]

And implicit in that, of course, is that every posture has its attitude. It goes along with it. And I, you know, you can exaggerate these things, but we all have our posture, our stance, our belief, our attitudes towards life. And we do them, and if you've watched some older people, I watched my mom do her posture more and more and more. Carefully, thoroughly, completely, because more and more of, you know, just being social and just being a person faded away. So pretty soon my mom, by the end of her life, was the way she did herself. It comes out more and more. If you're not working on it, if you're not studying it, you get to be more and more your underlying inherent stance, posture, beliefs, and it gets more and more clear. So, you know, anyway, start now. I see Oksan, you know, Suzukuro, she's a widow, and I saw her a year ago, and she's been doing her exercises, Qigong, and various things for, you know, 30, 40, 50 years, and she's not like that.

[12:20]

Because she's been practicing, she's been doing physical practices. So, it doesn't, so who she is is somebody who does these things, not somebody who ended up being more and more themselves. More and more their attitude, their beliefs, and holding on to it. But this posture is right in the middle, and then you study and you find out, like, how to be right in the middle and to let go of your usual stance, your habitual posture. And over time, you find out how to have you come out too. All the time, you're actually coming out, but you're coming out more freely because it's not your limited expression of yourself, the beliefs that you ended up with. But, so I think there is a difference in sitting. That kind of emphasis to me is what really characterizes us, and distinctively from other sittings, because we actually don't specifically tell people much besides that.

[13:21]

Take this posture, go and sit. Learn to meditate by meditating. And the idea of this is that each of us, each of you, you know, we already have a wonderfully free, liberated mind. So why would you tell it, do this, don't do that, do this, wait a minute, stop that. Why would you tell your wonderful, free, liberated mind what it needs to be doing and what it needs to not be doing? Give it some instructions. So, this is always a question in, you know, in practice. And on the other hand, if you don't get any instructions, I tell you, you can get pretty lost, pretty spaced out, because you're kind of just sitting there. And then it helps, somebody says, well, you could notice your breath. Or they say that pretty soon you start to notice more because you're noticing your breath, or whatever it is you're noticing. Alright, so I want to mention a few other things just briefly, because I only have a little bit of time.

[14:24]

I find it quite distinctive that not only, you know, this is about a dozen, but, and we have clothes that we wear to ceremony or ritually. And maybe even, you know, literally be a Buddhist, be in the Buddhist tradition, be in a spiritual family. And spiritual families can be at times as dysfunctional as regular families, but you kind of hope for the best. And, you know, and every family has its issues and problems, but okay. But you can actually be in this family. And, you know, I am Suzuki Roshi's disciple. And I had Dharma transmission with Mel Weisman. I've been entrusted with the Buddha Dharma. Ceremonially. Ritually. I am one with all the Buddha answers. And we do that, and then we have this, you know, ceremony.

[15:26]

We have this ritual. And we also do, you know, things that some of us are a little uncomfortable with. We do bowing. We do standing bows. We do half-prostration bows. We do chanting. We do, you know, not a lot of chanting, but a fair amount every morning, noon, evening. And, you know, both bowing and chanting are ways, again, you let go of your habitual you. And instead of standing the way that you stand with your attitude or, you know, however you do, you, you, you give that up and you bow. And actually who you are comes through, of course, in your bowing, but it's a different you than the you that appeared in your habitual posture. You let go of that. You're somebody who bows. And you're a bowing person. And people say, what is the meaning of that? Well, you know, traditionally in Zen and Suzuki Rishi emphasize practice first, ask questions later. You know, I'm not going to explain to this. Why don't you practice it?

[16:32]

And then we'll talk about it. So, um, bowing and, you know, Paul Reps said one time at Zen Center, Paul Reps was great because he was so kind of, he had studied with Nyogen Tsunzaki in Los Angeles. But he was very, um, he wasn't, you know, a Buddha, a doing Zen way, you know, that we do formally Zen. But he said to bow, bowing is you get your head below your heart. You get some fresh blood in your head. And if you don't get your head below your heart now and again, it's going to think it's in charge. So we practice putting our head below our heart. We practice, or even just lowering your head, even if it's not below your heart, you practice lowering your head. You practice putting your hands together, which is bringing your consciousness together. Your two sides of your body, the two sides of your brain, you're bringing them together and you lower your head. You're letting go of who you are, your usual stance.

[17:32]

I'm in charge. I know what I want. I know the way they should be. What's wrong with them? What's wrong with me? Why are they like that? They should know better. And, you know, or whatever you do. I'm so depressed. Nobody cares. So, you know, we do this. And there's postures and habits of, you know, so habits of mind are also habits of body. So we do these body practices. We do sitting for us as a body practice, bowing as a body practice, chanting as a body practice. And when you chant, the sound comes through and washes through your body. And you hear the sound, you create the sound, you're entering into sound. And that sound is washing through your body and mind. It's considered a cleansing practice. We do, when I was thinking about it today, I realized, you know, we do some things. There's lots of things we don't do. You know, we don't have, we don't give people any like meditation practice to develop compassion or loving kindness.

[18:34]

But, you know, there's certain things we do. So we serve each other food in the meditation hall for a good deal of the year here. And that is an extremely powerful practice. Those of you who have done it know, it is extremely intimate. It makes, you know, it's just a wonderful thing. You are so close to somebody and you find out you know them so well. You know, we bow to each other. You put the food down. The person holds out their bowl. And you're putting food in that bowl. And you are so close to each other. You are so connected. And you're offering food to somebody. It's extremely powerful. And many people have talked about, you know, the ceremony. So, eating for us a lot of the year, it's a ceremony, it's a ritual. It's not, we're not just eating anymore. We've moved into ritual space. We're observing things. We're studying things. We're saying things. And, you know, people have a hard time with this. Why, how can you eat in 70 minutes? You know, how can you chew your food that quickly?

[19:36]

And it turns out that actually if you're mindful and, you know, just tasting and eating, you can eat your food in that time. And you don't need more. And you don't just sort of keep eating. Because you're talking, you're not paying attention. You know, the thing ends. And if you haven't finished, you've got food in your bowl. Everybody's cleaning their bowls. You're late. It's just astounding, these things. And so we've structured all these things. Now, for a lot of people, they find all this, oh, this is so strange. You do all these things. But all these things that we do actually are at some point bringing us around to feeling what's inside. Letting something come home to your heart. And it's amazing how much practice it takes. I spent, you know, a lot of time in the Zen Dojo, rushing through the Zen Dojo, because I thought it was good practice to go quickly. I'd heard in Zen, you know, you move right along. So I used to race the person on the other side of the meditation.

[20:38]

See if I'd get to the end before they could. And I was serving Suzuki Roshi very carefully whenever I served Suzuki Roshi. And then I thought, well, what's the difference between Suzuki Roshi and everyone else? Why don't I just serve everyone who serves Suzuki Roshi? Is there any real difference? So then, just as carefully, I started serving everyone. It's very intimate, very close. And we're all Buddha. And we practice in a similar way, you know, when we walk onto a star, we practice. We stop when we bow to each other. Kind of foolish, don't you think? Kind of a waste of time, right? But over and over again, you do that in Buddhist Zen. These people are so beautiful here. Everybody you've bowed to. It's unbelievable. You bow and it's another beautiful person. It's another awesome presence. So we're quite involved in the Zen tradition with all of these rituals.

[21:39]

And of course, the point is, can you meet somebody? You know, can you meet yourself? Can you be with your friends? Can you be awake with them? Without so much worrying about whether you like it or don't like it. Or it's good or it's bad. Or it's what you wanted or didn't want. And you have your life. And, you know, sometimes it's not the life you would have ordered if you had a chance to order it. You know, like dessert. I want to read you one little Zen poem and end my part of it. Out of my pocket. This again, this has to me a flavor of Zen. There was a Japanese Zen teacher named Denjo. And one day he went to visit a teacher named Denetsu. And he said to Denetsu, How should a student use his mind?

[22:44]

And Denetsu said, Bring me a book. Bring me your mind. Denjo was at a complete loss. And Denetsu said, Well, what mind will you use? What mind will you use? And at that point, he had some kind of experience. Awakening. He broke his staff. He'd been traveling all over. Seeing many teachers. He broke his traveling staff. And he stayed at the monastery there for 19 years without ever going outside the gate. And this is a poem he wrote after 19 years. A thousand miles in search of a teacher, I came to Tomikawa.

[23:50]

With no way to use the mind, at last I meditate in peace. I don't know how many cushions I've worn out staying here for 19 years at a single stretch. With no way to use the mind, at last I meditate in peace. How would you otherwise? You keep thinking, there's some way to use my mind better. I'd better instruct it. I'd better tell it. I'd better straighten it out. So another Zen teacher said, For 30 years I tried to sweep away the dust. And I realized that sweeping away the dust was just dust. Now, he said, everything appears completely new. So at some point in Zen, you know, we see if we can not be very busy. Practicing.

[24:53]

And that's practicing. Thank you. So the reason I sit on Ed's left rather than his sitting on my right, from my perspective, is that I always take whatever time is left. But he usually goes first. So at that same conference at Spirit Rock of Buddhist teachers from all the traditions, the most heated discussion was around the question of what was the implication of the fact that Mara visited Buddha throughout his life.

[25:54]

What was the implication of this? And it was quite interesting, actually, to hear everyone's perspective on this, and what it meant. And we weren't trying to come to a consensus. I mean, you can't get two Buddhist teachers in a row to come to a consensus, let alone a number of them from a number of different traditions. So as we are exploring this together, we're not trying to come to a conclusion. We're trying to learn to hold the question of our own Buddha nature in a more open, a more broad way, so that in whatever way possible, we enrich our practice and enrich the way we live our lives. We live Buddha Dharma more fully in our lives, just by holding the question rather than seeking answers. Rather than sort of a kind of summary description of the Theravada tradition,

[26:59]

because it is so vast with so many different particular lineages that practice so different from one another, I thought that it might be useful both to the people that have been studying with Ed and I over these last few days, and to some of you here, to start with where the Buddha started. And maybe in that way you will understand a little bit about the why of the Theravada tradition, which is understood as the tradition of the elders or the farce tradition. The Buddha said at one time, I teach one thing and one thing only, suffering and the end of suffering. I teach one thing and one thing only, suffering and the end of suffering. And then at another point he said, he, sorry about that, it was practiced that way in those days,

[28:01]

he who understands clinging and non-clinging understands all the Dharma. He who understands clinging and non-clinging understands all the Dharma. So maybe those can be bookends in terms of how we all approach the Dharma, whatever our tradition is. So the Buddha spent 40 years wandering all over northern India, at least part of India, teaching what these things meant. Forty years. And then on top of that, since then, there's been 2,500 plus years of commentary by wonderfully realized people, and maybe some that weren't so wonderfully realized, trying to explain what he meant by those words. And then on top of that, two rather different traditions developed

[29:02]

to explain what he meant, or at least how we could understand it, if they weren't explaining what he meant in the same way. They were saying, well, this is how we can understand it, this is how the people that are like us can understand it. So, a lot of reflection on just some very basic kind of teachings, trying to understand it. So, it kind of comes down to your life. Your Buddha Dharma. What is your suffering? What do you perceive suffering to be? What do you perceive to be its cause? And do you believe that it's possible to seek relief from it? One would assume so. You're sitting here in this wonderful retreat center. And how do you go about it? So, how do you go about finding the end of suffering? Right now, at this time, in this century, in this millennium. And the second question is, until you find the end of suffering,

[30:07]

how do you live? How do you live it? You have these various goals in your life. You have these various dreams. You each envision yourself living in some kind of context. But then, how do you live in that context? How do you live in that context, if you believe that there is suffering in the end of suffering? It's the question each of us face. And it's the question that each of these traditions have tried to answer. Now, from the Buddhist use of the word suffering, he was not referring pain. He was referring suffering, as he means that word. Life is painful. I guess everyone's noticed that already by now. Life is painful. There is the pain of the past, the pain of this very moment, and the pain of some imagined future,

[31:10]

of which you're feeling the pain right now. That future may never happen. Like Dwayne said, some of the worst moments of my life never actually happened. But we suffer right now in a very real way, huh? In a very real way, we suffer. So what do we do? What is this pain? What is this relationship that the inherent pain that's there in the dual world, what the Buddha called the terrible twins of pain and pleasure, gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and ill repute, this duality, this endless dance of the opposites, that's life. Ordinary life is a constant dance of the opposites. Each of you know this for yourself already. So, there's pain in that. The pain may be physical pain, it may be the pain of not getting what you want, or it may be the pain of losing,

[32:12]

or anticipating losing what you have and you really care about. So these three kinds of pain, the pain of these three kinds, such as the whole web of Mars, try to navigate through that as you are, whether you're 21 or 81. How do you navigate through that? Until you reach that point when you're no longer caught in that web, you're no longer defined at all by that web. How do you live? And how do you go about finding your way through that web so that you in fact can in this lifetime or some lifetime be beyond it? So, the Buddha was not talking metaphysics. The Buddha was talking about the real dilemma of life, what in today's language we would use as existential, the existential pain, the existential dilemma of life,

[33:15]

or the phenomenological dilemma, the phenomenological suffering of life, not some theoretical but actual real suffering. So, he said something quite radical, and he said that this suffering all comes because of the misperception of the mind. And our suffering comes from a misperception of our individual mind. Big deal. If it's a misperception, then maybe we can learn to perceive it correctly. And in fact, that's what in the two Zen traditions, each using different tools, as just beautifully described, the set of tools you use to break you out of this misperception. And maybe in the meantime,

[34:18]

to help you live more skillfully while you're struggling with this misperception. And the same with the Tibetan school, they're using a different set of tools. And then the same with the forest tradition, the tradition of the elders, we use yet a different set of tools. So, each set of tools has advantages and disadvantages. Maybe one set of tools works better for a particular person at a particular time in their life, and then another set of tools better later, but maybe none of that matters. Maybe all that matters is this heart's yearning. That's really not for any of us to have to know. We're only responsible for our own heart's yearning and opening and finding the tools that work for us. Holding the questions, holding these questions in some way that's alive for us.

[35:21]

The Buddha said that suffering comes about because when we experience this chain of events that happens moment by moment in our lives, we get confused at one moment in that chain. And we talked about this in our smaller retreat earlier today. There's this point in which there arises this feeling of pleasant and unpleasant, which is very beguiling to us. We like that pleasant, oh, that's good, want more of that. Oh, don't want to lose that. Or it's unpleasant, oh, get away from me. Or like, I've got to throw it away. You actually might notice Ed's postures in that. He was talking about those postures, these reactions of leaning towards, leaning away from the pleasant and unpleasant. From that misunderstanding of pleasant and unpleasant, the way we view it in the Theravadin tradition,

[36:22]

there arises this idealization of that which is pleasant or this idealization of getting rid of that which is unpleasant. And in doing that, we start to imagine that which is temporary, a fly buzzing, a mosquito bite, you know, someone hurting your feelings, getting your heart broken, having cancer, whatever it is, all temporary, because we're all going to get old and get sick and die. So that it's all temporary, but we so idealize what's arising in that moment that we make it solid. Oh, if I just had this ice cream for dessert, or oh, if I could just sit longer, if I didn't have so much work to do here, whatever the story of the moment is, of which there are in the stories, we idealize, we idealize, so we make out there real and almost coincidental. We make this self real, solid, unchanging,

[37:28]

in the face of all evidence, that in fact it's endlessly changing, that in no moment are you like you are in any other moment. We completely lose track of this. And in those schools of Zen, there's ways to remind us of this, in the Tibetan, there's ways to remind us, and so in the forest tradition, ways to remember ourselves, bring back together that which we already know to be true, which our inherent nature already knows fully. We simply get clouded over. So, the process then becomes one of, that's real, I'm real, and then we're caught in samsara in that moment. How many times in this week have you been caught in that circle? How many times have you wanted something, and been tied about it, contracted into it, been disappointed because you didn't get it, or get it, and then immediately start wanting something else?

[38:30]

What was the point of all of that? Is that the meaning of life? To want this thing, and then worry about getting it, and then even getting it, and, but oh, I've got it, I've got it, but I don't want to lose it, or I'm kind of tired of this. What's next? What would be the point of that? So, finding a way to live outside that confrontation, what we call taking birth, because as we take birth, as we start to believe that all of these endless desires that arise are real, that they are solid, that they are the meaning of life, we take birth in that world, we take birth in the ordinary world, and in fact, we get lost, and we suffer. We move through the web by time and again remembering, using whatever set of tools that are available to us, until at some point, the web is less sticky. So, the moments in our lives are less sticky. So, there's a spaciousness,

[39:33]

there's a kind of clear understanding in your life. Not you as somebody extra special, but you as you are now. There gets to be this kind of clear understanding. And whatever it means, that becomes the Dharma, and maybe at some point, for some people, maybe for all of us, we're outside the web, and nothing in the web sticks to us anymore. Marvelous thought, that could be true. In the meantime, our life flows on, moment by moment, whether we are participating with it in a conscious way, in a connected way, in a Dharma way or not, our life flows on. So, our choice, in a way, is do we wish to participate in it, or do we wish to just simply let it drag us around. Because it will, if we don't consciously participate in it. You have a number of tools for working with that. We have a whole series of tools,

[40:34]

having to do with mindfulness, with all the Brahma-Viharas, loving-kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity, that we use, and all these other tools that we employ. They're all just tools. The Buddha said, just a finger pointing at the moon. Don't confuse the finger and the moon. Don't confuse the teaching. Don't confuse the practice techniques with the direct experience itself. Whether it's just one little moment of not being stuck to the web, or being free of the web. This is part of the way we work. Part of the time, what we notice is how empty all this phenomena is. That there's not really anything substantive there. And we spend a lot of time in practice trying to realize this. We have all these different ways that we work. To realize the emptiness, this clear, spacious, luminous mind that's empty. And then, part of the time, we spend seeing how we're all one.

[41:36]

How codependent arising occurs. How each of us are completely dependent, not just on everyone else in this room, but everything else on this planet, everything else in this universe. That it's all arising together. And that the very benign, kind of agape love, the benevolence of this arising is so incredible, that it all arises together. So we spend quite a bit of time trying to come into some direct experience of that. A teacher in a whole different tradition described his practice this way. He said, When I see that I am nothing, that is wisdom. When I see that I am everything, that is love. When I see that I am nothing, that is wisdom. When I see that I am everything, that is love. My life flows like a rhythm

[42:37]

between these two things. From my limited experience with all the traditions. We each try to point that out. We each try to hold that possibility for each of us to realize that. It's been a great pleasure to be here with you this week. I am greatly enjoying it. I am quite honored that you have me here. I hope that I am worth speaking of some useful reflection. Thank you.

[43:14]

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