Really. For about a year. OK. From our last class, there were a couple of people who wanted to know about it, who wanted to kind of investigate further. Go again. So, you know, the ending and. There's nothing about seeing himself in the river and seeing his reflection in the mirror in the river and have that applied to this. And he does mention that. But what I'm going to do.

[01:05]

Before we do anything, I'm going to read you a story. You don't like it? Case history about what we've been studying. When we had our first class, I told you about this book that Andrea so kindly lent me. called And There Was Light by Jacques Lucerne, who was blinded at 18, born in the 30s, last century, and grew up in France. But at 8, he became blind through an accident. And later on, when the war came, When the Germans took over France, he became maybe the head of the underground resistance.

[02:18]

So I'm going to read you just the first part, which is how he discovered himself by becoming blind. Every day since he was blind, since he had his operation, every day since then I have thanked heaven for making me blind, while I was still a child, not quite eight years old. I bless my lot for practical reasons, first of all. The habits of a boy of eight are not yet formed, either in body or in mind. His body is infinitely supple, capable of making just the movements the situation calls for, and no other. Ready to settle with life as it is. Ready to say yes to it. And the greatest physical miracles can follow from this acceptance. This sounds a little like Tauntion.

[03:30]

I'm deeply moved when I think of all the people whom blindness strikes when they are fully grown, whether it is caused by accident or injury in a war. Often they have a hard life, certainly one harder than mine. At all events, I have other reasons, not material, for thanking fortune. Grown-up people forget that children never complain against are so foolish as to suggest it to them. For an eight-year-old, what is, is always best. He knows nothing of bitterness or anger. He may have a sense of injustice, but only if injustice comes from people. From him, events are always signs from God. These simple things I know, and I know that since the day I went blind I have never been unhappy. As for courage, which adults make so much of, children do not see it as we do.

[04:33]

For a child, courage is the most natural thing in the world, the thing to do through life at each moment. A child does not think about the future, and so is protected from a thousand fall-bays in nearly every fear. He relies on the course of events, and that reliance brings him happiness in each step. This, of course, you can argue against, but nevertheless, You can see that it's so. From now on, I shall find obstacles in my way, very serious ones, as I tell my story. First, obstacles of language, because in what I have to say about blindness, little is known and almost always surprising. I shall run the risk of sounding either trite or extravagant. Then, obstacles of memory. I went blind at the age of eight, and I am still blind, and what I experienced then, I still experience every day. Without wanting to, I am bound to confuse dates and even periods.

[05:34]

But such barriers are more literary than real. Facts are facts, and I only need to rely on their eloquence. I recovered with a speed that can only be explained by my extreme youth. Blinded on May 3rd, by the end of the month, I was walking again, clinging to the hand of my father or mother, of course, but still walking and without any difficulty. In June, I began learning to read in Braille. In July, I was on a bench on the Atlantic, hanging by the trapeze, by the rings, and sliding down slides. I was part of a crowd of children who ran and shouted. I was building castles in the sand, but I shall come back to this later, for at the time, other matters were more important. It was a great surprise to me to find myself blind, and being blind was not at all as I imagined it, nor was it as the people around me seemed to think. They told me that to be blind meant not to see, yet how was I to believe them when I saw?

[06:36]

Not at once, I admit. Not in the days immediately after the apparition, but at that time I still wanted to use my eyes. I followed their usual path. I looked in the directions where I was in the habit of skiing before the accident, and there was anguish, a lack, something like a void which filled me with what grown-ups call despair. Finally, one day, and it was not long in coming, I realized that I was looking in the wrong way. It was as simple as that. I was making something very like the mistake people make who change their glasses without adjusting themselves. I was looking too far off and too much on the surface of things. This was much more than a simple discovery. It was a revelation. I can still see myself in Champs-de-Mars, where my father had taken me for a walk a few days after the accident.

[07:38]

Of course, I knew the garden well. Its ponds, its railings, its iron shingles. I even knew some of the trees in person, and naturally I wanted to see them again. But I couldn't. I threw myself forward into the substance which was space, but which I did not recognize because it no longer held anything familiar to me. At this point, some instinct, I was almost about to say a hand laid on me, made me change course. I began to look more closely, not at things, but at a world closer to myself, looking from an inner place to one further within. Instead of clinging to the movement of sight toward the outer world, Immediately, the substance of the universe drew together, redefined, and peopled itself anew. I was aware of a radiance emanating from a place I knew nothing about, a place which might as well have been outside of me as within.

[08:45]

But radiance was there. or to put it more precisely, light. It was a fact, for light was there. I felt indescribable relief and happiness, so great it almost made me laugh. Confidence and gratitude came as if a prayer had been answered. I felt light and joy at the same moment, and I can say without hesitation that from that time on, light and joy have never been separated in my experience. I've had them, or lost them, his eight-year-old kinshaw experience. I saw a light and went on seeing it, though I was blind. I said so, but for many years, I think, I did not say it very loud. Until I was nearly 14, I remember calling the experience, which kept renewing itself inside me, my secret, and speaking of it only to my most intimate friends.

[09:47]

I don't know but they were friends, and what I told them had a greater value than being merely true. It had the value of being beautiful, a dream, an enchantment, almost like magic. The amazing thing was that this was not magic for me at all, but reality. I could no more have denied it than people with eyes can deny that they see. I was not light myself. I knew that, but I bathed in it as an element, which blindness had suddenly brought much closer. I could feel light rising, spreading, resting on objects, giving them form, and leaving them. Withdrawing or diminishing is what I mean for the opposite of light was never present. Spiky people people who can see, always talk about the night of blindness.

[10:52]

And that seems to them quite natural. But there is no such night. For at every waking hour, and even in my dreams, I lived in a stream of light. Without my eyes, life was much more stable than it had been with them. As I remember it, there were no longer the same differences between things, lighted brightly, less brightly, or not at all. I saw the whole world in light existing through it and because of it. Colors, all the colors of the rainbow, also survived. For me, the child who loved to draw and paint, colors made a celebration so unexpected that I spent hours playing with them, and all the more easily. Now they were more docile than they used to be. Light threw all its colors on things and on into in the street, all had a characteristic color which I had never seen before, I went blind.

[11:54]

Yet now this special attribute expressed itself on me as part of them, as definitely as my impression created by a face. Still the colors were only a game, while light was my whole reason for living. I let it rise in me like water in a well, and I rejoiced. I did not understand what was happening to me, for it was so completely contrary to what I heard people saying. I didn't understand it, but no matter, since I was living it. For many years I did not try to find out why these things were going on. I only tried to do so much later, and this is not the time to describe it. A light so continuous and so intense was so far beyond my comprehension that sometimes I doubted it. Suppose it was not real, that I had only imagined it. Perhaps it would be enough to imagine the opposite or just something different to make it go away. So I thought of testing it out and even resisting it.

[12:55]

At night in bed, when I was all by myself, I shut my eyes, I lowered my eyelids as I might have done when they covered my physical eyes. I told myself that behind these curtains I would no longer see light, but light was still there, and more serene than ever, looking like a lake at evening when the wind had dropped. Then I gathered up all my energy and willpower and tried to stop the flow of light, and I might have tried to stop breathing as I might have stopped breathing. What happened was a disturbance, something like a whirlpool. But the whirlpool was still flooded with light. At all events, I couldn't keep this up very long, perhaps only two or three seconds. When this was going on, I felt a sort of anguish as though I were doing something forbidden, something against life. It was exactly as if I needed light to live. Indeed, I needed it as much as air.

[13:58]

There was no way out of it. I was the prisoner of light. I was condemned to see. As I read these lines, I have just tried the experiment again with the same result, except that with the years, the original source of light has grown stronger. At eight, I came out of this experiment reassured with a sense that I was being reborn. Since it was not I who was making the light, since it came to me from outside, it would never leave me. I was only a passageway, a vestibule for this brightness. This being I was in me. Still, there were times when the light faded, almost to the point of disappearing. It happened every time I was afraid. If instead of letting myself be carried along by confidence and throwing myself into things, I hesitated, calculated, thought about the wall, the half-open door, and key in the lock. If I said to myself that all these things were hostile and about to strike or scratch, that without exception, I hit or wounded myself.

[15:06]

The only easy way to move around the house, the garden, or the beach was not by thinking about it at all, or thinking as little as possible. Then I moved between obstacles the way They say bats do. What the loss of my eyes had not accomplished was brought about by fear. It made me blind. Anger and impatience had the same effect, throwing everything into confusion. The minute before I knew just where everything in the room was, but if I got angry, things got angrier than I. They went and hid in the most unlikely corners, mixed themselves up, turned turtle, muttered like crazy men, and looked wild. As for me, I no longer knew where to put hand or foot. Everything hurt me. This mechanism worked so well that I became cautious. When I was playing with my small companions, as if I suddenly grew anxious to win, to be the first at all costs, and all at once I could see nothing.

[16:12]

Literally, I went into fog or smoke. I could no longer afford to be jealous or unfriendly, because as soon as I was, a bandage came down over my eyes, and I was bound hand and foot and cast aside. All at once a black hole opened, and I was helpless, inside of it. But when I was happy and serene, approached people with confidence, and thought well of them, I was rewarded with light. So it is surprising that I loved friendship and harmony when I was very young. Or is it surprising that I loved friendship and harmony when I was very young? Art was such a tool. Why should I need a moral code? For me, this tool took the place of red and green lights. I always knew where the road was open and where it was closed. I had only to look at the bright signal which taught me how to live. This is one of Suzuki Roshi's approach to precepts. He said, if you practice precept by rote, it is heresy.

[17:18]

But if you go through your practice, if you're guided by the light of your practice, you follow the precepts. And I'm trying to follow those. It was the same with love, but let us see how. The summer after the incident, my parents took me to the seashore. There I met a little girl my own age. I think she was called Nicole. She came into my world like a great red star, or perhaps more like a ripe cherry. The only thing I knew for sure was that she was bright and red. I thought her lovely and her beauty was so gentle that I could no longer go home at night and sleep away from her because part of a life left with me when I did. To get it all back, I had to find her again. It was just as if she were bringing me light in her hands, her hair, her bare feet on the sand, and in the sound of her voice.

[18:25]

How natural that people who are red should have red shadows. When she came to sit down by me between pools of salt water, under the warmth of the sun, I saw rosy reflections on the canvas of the awnings. The sea itself, the blue of the sea, took on a purple tone. I followed her by the red wake which trailed behind her wherever she went. Now if people should say that red is the color of passion, I should answer quite simply that I found that out when I was only eight years old. How could I have lived all that time without realizing that everything in the world has a voice and speaks? When Mastipojan inquired about the Dharma, he was told, he said, I heard that walls, tiles, fences, and stones are all preaching Dharma. How could I have lived all that time without realizing that everything in the world has a voice and speaks?

[19:47]

Not just the things that are supposed to speak, but the others, like the gates, the walls of the houses, the shade of trees, the sand in the silence. Still, even before my accident, I loved sound, but now it seems clear that I didn't listen to it. After I went blind, I could never make a motion without starting an avalanche of noise. If I went into my room at night, a room where I used to hear nothing, the small plaster statue on the mantelpiece made a fraction of a turn. I heard its friction in the air, as light a sound as the sound of a waving hand. Whenever I took a step, the floor cried or sang. I could hear it make both these sounds. and its sawing was passed along from one board to the next, all the way to the window, to give me the measure of the room. As I spoke out suddenly, if I spoke out suddenly, the window panes, which seemed so solid in their putty frames, began to shake, very lightly, of course, but distinctly.

[21:01]

This noise was on a higher pitch than the others, cooler, as if it were already in contact with the outside air. Every piece of furniture creaked once, twice, ten times, and made a trail of sounds like gestures of minutes past. The bed, the wardrobe, the chairs were stretching, yawning, and catching their breath. When a draft pushed against the door, it creaked out. When a hand pushed it, it creeped out in a human way. For me, there was no mistaking the difference. I could hear the smallest precession in the wall from a distance, for it changed the whole room. Because this nook, that alcove, were there, the wardrobe sang a hollower sound. It was as though the sounds of early days were only half real, so far away from me, and heard through a fog Perhaps my eyes used to make the fogs, but at all events, my accident had thrown my head against the hanging heart of things, and the heart never stopped beating.

[22:11]

You always think of sounds beginning and ending abruptly, but now I realize that nothing can be more false. Now my ears heard the sounds almost before they were there, touching me with the tips of their fingers and directing me toward them. Often I seemed to hear people speak before they began talking. Sounds had the same individuality as light. They were neither inside nor outside. They were passing through me. They gave me the bearings in space. They gave me my bearings in space and put me in touch with things. It was not like signals that they functioned, but like replies. I remember well when I first arrived at the beach two months after the accident. It was evening, and there was nothing there but the sea and its voice, precise beyond the power to imagine it. It formed a mass which was so heavy and so limpid that I could have leaned against it like a wall.

[23:19]

It spoke to me in several layers all at once. The waves were arranged in steps, and together they made one music. Though what they said was different in each voice. There was rasping in the bass, and bubbling in the top register. I didn't need to be told about the things that eyes could see. At the end, there was the wall of the sea and the wind rustling over the sand. At the other, there was the retaining wall, as full of echoes as a talking mirror. What the waves said, they said twice over. People often say that blindness sharpens hearing, but I don't think this is so. My ears were hearing no better, but I was making better use of them. Sight is a miraculous instrument, offering us all the riches of physical life, but we get nothing in this world without paying for it. And in return for all the benefits that sight brings,

[24:24]

in such abundance. I needed to hear and hear again. I multiplied sounds to my heart's content. I rang bells. I touched the walls with my fingers, explored the resonance of doors, furniture, and the trunks of trees. I sang in empty rooms. I threw petals far off on the beach just to hear them whistle through the air and then fall. I even made my small companions repeat words to give me plenty of time to walk around them. But most surprising of all was the discovery that sounds never came from one point in space and never retreated into themselves. There was the sound, its echo, and another sound into which the first sound melted and to which it has given birth. altogether an endless procession of sounds. Sometimes the resonance, the hum of voices all around me grew so intense that I got dizzy and put my hands over my ears, as I might have done by closing my eyes to protect myself against too much light.

[25:41]

That is why I couldn't stand racket, unless noises or music that went, I couldn't stand racket, useless noises or music that just went on and on. A sound we don't listen to is a blow to body and spirit, because sound is not something happening outside of us, but a real presence passing through us and lingering unless we have heard it fully. I was well protected from these miseries by parents who were musicians and who talked around our family table instead of turning on the radio, but all the more reason for me to say how important it is to defend blind children against shouting, background music, and all such hideous assaults. For a blind person, a violent and futile noise has the same effect as the beam of a searchlight too close to the eyes of someone who can see. It hurts. But when the world sounds clear and on pitch, it is more harmonious than poets have ever known it, or than they will ever be able to say.

[26:48]

At first, my hands refused to obey. When they looked for a glass on the table, they missed it. They fumbled around the doorknobs, mixed up black and white keys at the piano, fluttered in the air as they came near things. It was almost as if they had been uprooted, cut off from me, and for a long time, just made me afraid. Fortunately, before long, I realized that instead of becoming useless, they were learning to be wise. They only needed time to accustom themselves to freedom. I had thought they were refusing to obey, but it was all because they were not getting orders, when the eyes were no longer there to command them. But more than that, it was a question of rhythm. Our eyes run over the surface of things. All they require are a few scattered points, since they can bridge the gap in a flash. They half-see much more than they see, and they never weigh. They are satisfied with appearances, and for them the world glows and slides by, but lacks substance.

[28:00]

All I needed was to leave my hands to their own devices. I had nothing to teach them, and besides, since they began working independently, they seemed to foresee everything. Unlike eyes, they were in earnest, and from whatever direction they approached an object, they covered it, tested its resistance, leaned against the mass of it, and recorded every irregularity on its surface. They measured it for height and thickness, taking in as many dimensions as possible. But most of all, having learned that they had fingers, they used them in an entirely new way. When I had eyes, my fingers used to be stiff, half dead at the ends of my hands, good only for picking up things. But now each one of them started out on its own. They explored things separately. changed levels, and independently of each other made themselves heavy or light. Movement of the fingers was terribly important and had to be uninterrupted, because objects do not stand at a given point, fixed there, confined in one form.

[29:07]

They are alive, even the stones. What is more, they vibrate and tremble. My fingers felt the pulsation distinctly, and if they failed to answer, with a pulsation of their own, their fingers immediately became helpless and lost their sense of touch. But when they went toward things in sympathetic vibration with them, they recognized them right away. Yet there was something still more important than movement, and that was pressure. If I put my hand on the table without pressing it, I knew the table was there, but knew nothing about it. To find out, my fingers had to bear down, and the amazing thing is, that the pressure was answered by the table at once. Being blind, I thought I should have to go out to meet things, but I found that they came to meet me instead. I have never had to go more than halfway, and the universe became the accomplice of all my wishes. If my fingers pressed the roundness of an apple, each one with a different weight, very soon I could not tell whether it was the apple or my fingers, which were heavy.

[30:21]

I didn't even know whether I was touching it, or it was touching me. As I became part of the apple, the apple became part of me, and that was how I came to understand the existence of things. As soon as my hands came to life, they put me in a world where everything was an exchange of pressure. These pressures gather together in shapes, and each one of the shapes had meaning. As a child, I spent hours learning meaning against objects, and letting them lean against me. Any blind person can tell you that this gesture, this exchange, gives him a satisfaction to deeper words. touching the tomatoes in the garden, and really touching them, touching the walls of the house, the materials of the curtains, or a clod of earth, and surely seeing them as fully as eyes can see, but it is more than seeing them, it is tuning in on them and allowing the current they hold to connect with one's own, like electricity.

[31:29]

To put it differently, this means an end of living in front of things and a beginning of living with them, never mind if the word sounds shocking, for this is love. You cannot keep your hands from loving what they have really felt, moving continually, bearing down and finally detaching themselves. The last, perhaps the most significant motion of all, Little by little my hands discovered that objects were not rigidly bound within a mold. It was form they first came in contact with, formed like a kernel, but around this kernel objects branched out in all directions. I could not touch the pear tree in the garden just by following the trunk with my fingers. then the branches, then the leaves, one at a time. That was only a beginning, for in the air between the leaves, the prairie trees still continued, and I had to move my hands from branch to branch to feel the currents running between them.

[32:32]

At Jouvard de Eel, in the holidays, when my small peasant friends saw me doing these magic dances around the tree, and touching the invisible, they said I was like the medicine man, the man with an old secret who heals the sick by mesmerism, sometimes at a distance, and by methods not recognized by medical science. Of course, my young friends were wrong, but they had a good excuse, and today I know more than one professional psychologist who, for all his scientific knowledge, cannot account for these incongruous motions. With smell, it was the same as it was with touch. Like touch, an obvious part of the loving substance of the universe, I began to guess what animals must feel when they sniff the air. Like sound and shape, smell was more distinctive than I used to think it was. There were physical smells and moral ones, but of the latter so important for living in society I shall speak later on.

[33:35]

Before I was ten years old, I knew with absolute certainty that everything in the world was a sign of something else, ready to take its place if it should fall by the way. And this continuing miracle of healing I heard expressed fully in the Lord's Prayer. I repeated it night before going to sleep. I was not afraid. Some people would say I had faith. And how should I not have it in the presence of the marvel which kept renewing itself? Inside me, every sound, every scent, and every shape was forever changing into light, and light itself changing into color to make a kaleidoscope of my blindness. I had entered a new world, and there was no doubt about it, but I was not its prisoner. All the things I experienced, however remarkable and however remote from the everyday adventures of a child my age, I did not experience in an inner void, a closed chamber belonging to me and no one else. that took place in Paris during the summer and fall of 1932 in a small apartment in the Champs de Mars, and on a beach on the Atlantic between my father and mother, and toward the end of a year, a new brother who had just been born.

[34:48]

What I mean to say is that all these discoveries of sound, light, smell, and visible and invisible shapes established themselves serenely and solidly between the dining room table and the window of the court. The bric-a-brac on the mantelpiece and the kitchen sink, right in the midst of the life of other people and without being put out of countenance by them. These perceptions were not phantoms which came bringing disorder and fear into my real life. They were realities to me and the simplest of them all. But it is time to make clear that, along with many marvelous things, great dangers lie in waiting for a blind child. I am not speaking of physical dangers, which can well be circumvented, nor any danger which blindness itself brings about. I am speaking of dangers which come from the inexperience of people who still have their eyes. If I have been so fortunate myself, and I insist that I have, it is because they have always been protected from perils of that sort.

[35:57]

You know, I had good parents, not just parents who wished me well, Once his hearts and intelligence were open to spiritual things, for whom the world was not composed exclusively of objects that were useful, and useful always in the same fashion, for whom, above all, he was not necessarily accursed to be different from other people. Finally, mine were parents willing to admit that their way of looking at things, the usual way, was perhaps not the only possible one, and to like my way and encourage it. That is why I tell parents whose children have gone blind to take comfort. Blindness is an obstacle, but only becomes a misery if folly is added. I tell them to be reassured and never to set themselves against what their small boy or girl is finding out. They should never say, you can't know that because you can't see. And as infrequently as possible, don't do that. It's dangerous. For a blind child, there is a threat greater than all the wounds and bumps, the scratches and most of the blows, that is the danger of isolation.

[37:08]

The danger of isolation is the worst. When I was 15, I spent long afternoons with a blind boy my own age, one who went blind, I should add, in circumstances very much like my own. Today I have few memories as painful. This boy terrified me. He was the living image of everything that might have happened to me if I had not been fortunate, more fortunate than he, for he was really blind. He had seen nothing since his accident. His faculties were normal. He could have seen as well as I, but they had kept him from doing so. To protect him, as they put it, they had cut him off from everything and made fun of all his attempts to explain what he felt. In grief and revenge, he had thrown himself into a brutal solitude. Even his body lay prostrate in the depths of an armchair. To my horror, I saw that he did not like me. Tragedies like this are commoner than people think, and all of them are terrible because they are avoidable in every case.

[38:16]

To avoid them, I repeat, that it is enough for sighted people not to imagine that their way of knowing the world is the only one. At the age of eight, everything favored my return to the world. Does that mean move around to answer all my questions? They were interested in all my discoveries, even the strangest. For example, how should I explain the way objects approached me when I was the one walking in their direction? Was I breathing them in or hearing them? Possibly, though, that was often hard to prove. Did I see them? It seemed not. And yet, as I came closer, their mass was modified, often to the point of defiling real contours. to color, just as it happens where there is sight. As I walked along a country road bordered by trees, I could point to each of the trees by the road, even if they were not spaced to regular intervals. I knew whether the trees were straight and tall, carrying their branches as the body carries its head, or gathered into thickets and partly covered the ground around them.

[39:20]

This kind of exercise soon tired me out, I must admit, but it succeeded, and the fatigue did not come from the trees, from their numbers or shape, but from myself. To see them like this, I had to hold myself in a state so far removed from old habits that I could not keep it up for very long. I had to let the tree come toward me and not allow the slightest inclination to move toward between them and me, I could not afford to be curious or impatient or proud of my accomplishment. After all, such a state is only what one commonly calls attention. But I can testify that when coming to this point, which is not easy, the same experiment tried with trees along the road, I could practice on any objects which reached a height and breadth at least as great as my own. Telegraph poles, hedges, arches of a bridge, walls, along the street, the doors and windows of these walls, the places where they were set back or slipped away. So, at the very end of this chapter he says, all of us, whether we are blind or not, are terribly greedy.

[40:31]

We want things only for ourselves. Even without realizing it, we want the universe to be like us and give us all the room in it. But a blind child learns very quickly that this cannot be. He has to learn it, for every time he forgets that he is not alone in the world, he strikes against an object, hurts himself, and is called to order. But each time he remembers, he is rewarded, for everything comes his way. It's pretty amazing, I find it. Sounds just like the Dharma. And how he comes to the same discoveries as so many of the ancestors. And when I think about it, it really makes me feel much more confident in the ancestors.

[41:32]

That they... They can't do this. This is what they've transmitted. You know, then my ears, my Suzuki, where she talks about the sound of one hand clapping. He says, well, that's because the sound is already there. That's amazing. So is there anything that you'd like to. Anything to discuss or question? Could you repeat the name of the book? Oh, it's called And There Was Light. And his name is Chuck W.S.S.E.R.Y. W.S.S.E.Y. Rand. W.S.S.U.R.

[42:45]

W.S.S.U.R. [...] W.S. I just can't stop. Yeah. [...] I think he would probably enjoy it. And the other sister who was not alone in his day, but he he was, you know, spent a lot of time So that was the one thing that kept his mind going.

[43:50]

And so, you know, all the classics, you know, all the philosophers he was. He didn't. He said that he was not well nourished by the philosophers. They always had some shortcoming, which he felt was always something incomplete about them. Approximately when did he die? I think it's on the back. I think in the 60s. One time he died in an accident. I haven't got that far. So recently, 60s and 60s. Yeah. So I was like eighteen hundred. You were born in 1924. Twenty four. Well, do you have any question about Donnie Andrews?

[44:55]

Not a question, but when he was talking about how objects come out to retune, I remembered how when I'm hiking in Nepal, if you watch the Nepalese walk, and they never look at the ground. they walk over terrain without slipping on terrain where most of us are just kicking our butts and being so careful. And I've tried to learn from them. And if you really let your feet do the walking, you can feel the ground come to meet you. And what you said about, as soon as you try and balance or do this, you lose it. But the difficulty that I found is it takes a lot of trust.

[46:00]

Because you get this fear of falling. So I guess I just wanted to say that trust is part of this whole Well, yes. I think you did talk about faith. But we grow up wearing shoes, so we depend on shoes. And many people in the world grow up just depending on their feet. And the contact of the feet with the earth is so different than the contact of shoes. But with the Earth is a totally, totally different world. The feet, the sensitivity to the feet and the world in the ground. I often say, you say I walk on the ground, but actually it's also true.

[47:04]

The ground is walking us. And I think that's to me that that's what he's like bringing out that he's realized that And objects come forth and confirm the self, which is Dogen's very well-known phrase. Objects come forth and confirm the self is true understanding. So we do this a lot because our eyes are so, we just take seeing for granted and then we skip over so much, and it's easy to live in a superficial way, in our eyes, so... So what is true seeing? That's really important. What is true and real seeing? And in Seleucus, we talk about seeing things as it is.

[48:06]

Seeing things as they really are. in a true sense. I remember seeing a program, I think it was the Natya Tibetan training, but it might have been some other indigenous training, shamanistic training, to be a spiritual leader. They'd take a child, and the child would spend the first six or seven years in a dark cave. And I said, that really sounds horrible. That was a trade. It was a six, seven years in a dark shape. Now, I remember back to it back in the 70s when we first started the practices over there. And there was a story which was really going around about this shame in Alaska. Someone went with him to Alaska and the training he went through to become a shaman.

[49:15]

And then he's sitting out in the middle of the snow in an igloo. And he had this vision for many years. I think what we have called the vision quest. You know, I mean, just out there with nothing. And you have to find your way. You have to. He said the suffering was so intense that it just forced him to have his awakening. And he said, unless we have this, we awaken through our suffering. We don't really understand it. But I think it really is. Well, you know, Mr. two and a half, five and a half. Yes.

[50:16]

And he, if people ask him about his life, he always emphasizes that, contributing to his life work and his view of the world. I don't know how he got blind or how he became sight, but the fact is that he was blind for those three years of his early childhood. Oh, for just three years? Yes. You also said that Freud was the most important person in his own development and vision of creativity because He talks about making the invisible visible. I didn't hear about the blinding.

[51:18]

Well, that's kind of what we do, isn't it? We make the invisible visible. We have these thoughts, these ideas, and then we actualize them and bring them into visibility. We do this all the time. This is a creative process. In terms of this week or recently in the work I'm studying, we're talking about quantum theory. And I know that most of us have heard about it, that it was reminded in a class in which they are, once they look at the structure of everything, of course, atoms.

[52:20]

But atoms consist of vast, infinite space. You're looking at an atom. You're talking about a huge amount of space. And so as they look at deeper and deeper what's in each particle, all they can find is trapped energy. So basically trapped light. What this person is seeing is that light. Part of it is moving from Descartes' really mechanistic view the quantum view, the view of relationships, that it's the relationships that matter between the things, rather than the actual, from the point of view of Descartes and Newton, it was all very mechanistic, that the cosmos and the world and the body, the human body and plants were all mechanisms. And then it's the shift to seeing everything as in a relationship to one another.

[53:21]

And when he talks about the energy between the leaves of the tree, it's tangible, feeling that tangible energy between the leaves of the tree. That's how he understands what things are, the energy, the energy fields, you know, which are light and energy. Yeah. Often when I'm sitting in Zazen, and I think probably other people here too, on a Saturday, we're kind of being stripped away, the senses are being stripped away, or being kind of You know, you can't remove the singing and such. And then there's this wave of Camasio smell, you know.

[54:28]

That's probably Camasio. And I think that that subject is about what he was talking about, about, you know, this, the senses are being, are kind of heightened when, or more sensitive when our body is kind of restricted in a way, in that sort of habitual sense. Well, it's interesting what you're saying about that. He said some people think that when you're blind the other senses are heightened. He says it's not that they're heightened, it's simply that we're more aware. Right? Yeah. So, more aware of what's around us and how things are permeating us. Because I think the thing about eyes, seeing, is that we can calculate distance. you know, things that were distant or close. But when you're not seeing, you don't have that same sensation of things being close or far in the same way.

[55:32]

And everything is more yourself. So I'm talking about how what I perceived was the sense of pressure, understanding things through pressures. You walk into a room and you can tell where the where everything was. You can tell whether it's a recess in the wall because the pressure was different when you walk by it. So if the window is open, you can tell where the windows are because there's a decrease in pressure. So he moved around in a world of pressures. which actually guided him so much, and that things were moving through him, not just around him, but through him. It's just kind of like letting go, so that you realize that the universe is your true self.

[56:37]

It's not surprising to anybody that's ever seen a flying samurai film. So my question is that in the so-called pressure cooker of the dendo, where we feel voices and walking on the floor and smells and all that, that's one thing. But then when we leave here, the sense is kind of a retarded way. And we don't necessarily feel it with the same vibrancy and intensity. Like, we walk out of the dendo, the flowers look bright and smell and all that. Then it dissipates. we go back to our usual conditioned response to this. So the question is, how does one, is it possible to maintain that level of receptivity, or is that kind of gaining idea or wishful thinking, or is it something that you just let go of and just enjoy when it's there and

[57:49]

Don't long for it when it is not in one's consciousness. Well, actually, because when one reads the jar of books and we read the story tonight, you think, well, that's like twenty four seven. He's probably like twenty four seven. But he said something that was too intense. He had to like kind of close his ears from the company. So like he has a setup for him. We have to work for him. Like the third patriarch says, never mind chasing after it. Just let go of cherished opinions. Just let go of cherished opinions. And then the mind becomes clear. So practice, whether in Zen or outside of Zen, is to have an unassuming mind. That's what I call it. Not assuming anything. Simply be open.

[58:51]

And this is what Savicka was talking about all the time. Just be open. Just don't have anything, any preconceived notion about things. And then, you know, be more open to experiencing each moment. And I think that's what you get by just living your life little by little. Some people, you know, just little by little. But you know, moment by moment. Totally. Yeah. So that's. But that's right. Yeah. I particularly appreciated how he talks about couldn't afford any longer to harbor ill will or be afraid or lose his faith because he lost the light to a certain extent? Well, I thought what he was saying was, as soon as he did that. Right, right, he noticed the connection.

[59:52]

Yes, as soon as he did that, he was the connection. As soon as greed, or ill will, or jealousy, or anything like that came up, or anger, he was the light. That's a very good teaching for me. Yeah. You know, just on a psychological level in my life, when I'm afraid, you know, the world is different. Yeah. I see things differently. I don't know. Heaven and hell is in here. But that's why I said that he had he had a natural teacher of the precepts that followed him one by one. When he would do something wrong, he would suffer for it. It's like he would lose his life. And when he wasn't, when he was open and loving and compassionate, he would gain his life. And he also talked about how it's very important to remember that he was in the world with other people.

[60:57]

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And he's always with other people. And as the book goes on, it gets more and more. It's in that book. I wanted to come back to what Ross was asking about. One of the things we practice in Qigong is our gaze, and how to direct our gaze. And one of the things we'll do is, the first instruction is eyes open, looking ahead, seeing nothing. Kind of like the way we put our eyes in zazen. and to practice that during the day, I find sometimes I'm getting really bombarded by all the stimuli if I can assume a stance and turn my gaze that way, so the non-discriminating open gaze is like the inner eye

[62:05]

And it's actually something I think you can practice. So, I find it helpful to intentionally do that sometimes. Especially if I'm feeling off balance. You know, in Zazen, all of our senses are open. Seeing things, hearing things. Feeling feels. Tasting tastes. The mouth smells. But there's no I that does that. So it's simply seeing. Seeing is seeing. And so when seeing is like that, it's seeing without a concept. Without conceptualizing or discriminating it. So simply this sound, this sight, this But if you can practice that, then when something is, when you meet certain senses, you act spontaneously, without necessarily thinking.

[63:24]

And he talks about that too, about acting without thinking. being the result of his being a she clearly. So we are always making up our stories. Making up a story. Unfortunately, our brains seem to process visual information a lot through pattern recognition. Yes. Should be very surfacing. Yes. Yes. But, you know, we process information, which is normal, but we process it through the filter of our ego group process. through the filter of our desires and our opinions and our views.

[64:31]

Instead of just letting the process, the processing process, without the views, without the interference, And I think that what we fear is that we'll do something wrong if we don't manage and control everything. So we're always figuring out ways to manage and control things. And we're usually making a mess of things because of that. But super society is based on this. So much. It's hard to do that. That's a problem. So, you know, we practice kind of goes against the mainstream. It goes against the mainstream because the nation is to continue to process stuff to be safe.

[65:35]

And allowing us to let go of that burden, it's kind of scary because it's out of sync with the society. So what do you make of the, in the beginning, he, sort of almost casually mentions and then doesn't come back to the idea of light and joy being coalesced. Yeah. What about it? Well, what do you think of that? Well, I think that's our natural endowment. That's just our natural endowment. And we've probably all experienced that at some point, but put it away. whatever we thought about it, but you have a distant memory. I think everybody has a distant memory, or maybe not so distant.

[66:42]

And that's what brings us to practice, even though we don't know that. When we sit in Zazen, you know, it's like lighting a light, letting that light come forth. That's what it is. I did some copy. Well, I was able to put it on the net for us to copy. I don't know if you need any time, but you get that. Mr. Hunger's practice instructions to take the backward step. You stand in the center of the circle where light issues forth. I think that's the most beautiful thing you ever wrote. I don't have it. I got it. Take a backward step into the center of the circle.

[67:48]

Well, I guess you also get some more. Practical. Yes. Thank you. It's not also practical. Well, that itself is practical. Go ahead. For me, that's more metaphorical. That's not metaphorical at all. I can literally take a step back. Yeah. Well, still, you still in various ways. Anyway, go ahead. This is something that. From where I stand, it's really so true. Either purify, cure, grind down, or brush away all the tendencies you have fabricated into a parent's habit. Then you can reside in a clear circle of brightness. So that's the answer to Ross's question. Exactly.

[68:49]

And I thought that circle of brightness, as he said, would be a good name for a place. Yes. Yeah. Well, you know, we're going to have a few minutes. So next time we're talking about Mr. Hamza and his practice, especially. And Alexander put them pages on that. You can you can tell me. Bye.

[69:42]

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