Everyone Has a Light

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So, good morning and welcome to the Sashim that will be closing our Aspects of Practice practice period on this gorgeous, slightly overcast, kind of appropriately so, November day. So, this practice period some of us have been digging in deep to our founding teacher Suzuki Roshi's early lectures, his unpublished talks on koans, those unanswerable questions that are in the Blue Cliff Record. So just for those who may not be as familiar with it, the Blue Cliff Record is a compilation of stories primarily from the great Chinese teachers and Zen masters of the early Song Dynasty that was compiled by a teacher named Seppo Juken.

[01:03]

These were lectures that were given mainly in 1965 through 1966 by Suzuki Roshi. And in this month-long practice period, we've studied Sun-Faced Buddha, Moon-Faced Buddha, Hakijo and the Fox, Nansen's Ordinary Mind, and Joshu's Seven-Pound Robe, stories which ask us to see our wholeness in the midst of our circumstances. We've also watched a video of Suzuki Roshi, and I may be a bit of an outlier here, but I don't think I began to understand what his teaching was about until I actually saw images of him. and saw how he held and manifested the practice with a lightness, a sense of humor, groundedness, a certain seriousness, and an enormous compassion, and watched him transform into a blue jay in the midst of his talk as he heard its sound and became the bird at the same time.

[02:17]

So we've had his teachings in many different ways, and it's really out of his great compassion that we're here, and out of that compassion that I want to talk about one of my favorite koans, which he covered in this series of lectures, one that points to a competence in our life. It's Bluecroft Record number 86, when man's everyone has their own light. So, and my subtitle for this, if you will, is Shinryu Suzuki's Inmost Request. Inmost Request is a phrase that he used a lot in a certain time period when he was teaching. Coincidentally or not, around the same time that he was giving these particular talks on the Blue Cliff Records, so 65 to 66. And so, what brings you here? How'd you wind up at Berkeley Zen Center?

[03:21]

How'd you wind up on a spiritual path in your life? I understand we had about 10 people here for Zazen instruction, so some of you may be brand new to the idea of sitting Zazen. Welcome, if you are. You are here with the same internal engine and motivation, if you will, as those of us who've been around some people here in this room for 40 years. that inmost request, that inner light is what brings us here. Now that may come as a surprise to some of you, to some of us, because usually we think we wind up here because we're suffering in some way, and we need to do something about that suffering. And believe it or not, those two things aren't at all different. Do you ever wonder how Suzuki Roshi came to America? He was, by all reports, even in retrospect, kind of an ordinary monk in Japan.

[04:25]

He had not an easy life growing up. He had a very difficult time in his early life, even as a temple priest. He made an error in judgment and invited an errant monk to stay at the temple, and that man wound up killing his first wife. murdering his first wife. You can imagine the guilt and remorse that he carried about that and about his own maybe not listening in the way he should have to his circumstances. He grew up and came of age in Japan during the war, a time that was very conflicted among the religious community there. And when he decided to come to America, he probably came for a variety of reasons. We don't know all of them, of course, but one of them that he is known to have said is that in Japan sent a lot of wasted metal

[05:32]

products that were left over to the war back to America to make into tin cans and he wanted to bring something better. So you can see he was listening to all kinds of in most requests different manifestations of it when he decided to come here to bring Zen practice to America. But usually we think we come out of our suffering Kishnamurti called us, in this way, second-hand people. People who normally judge and assess ourselves in comparison to others. We don't know who we are. We lose track of what that inner energy, that inner life force, that inner place that we come from. And it takes us a long time to come back to trust and find confidence in our life. And so that's a lot of what brings us here is we know that something's missing from our lives or that we're somehow out of touch with that which is most vital and we're looking for.

[06:54]

And our practice helps us find it in a variety of ways. We learn to to take comfort and actually joy and not knowing how we measure up against other people and other things, those usual standards that we live our life trying to evaluate ourselves by? Isn't it wonderful to be thrown into a practice position that you've never done before and be asked to be head server for the first time for a sashim or to be a cook in the kitchen when you haven't done that before? How do you measure up? You don't know. You just do it. That's how we do our practice. So, Suzuki Roshi, as I said, for a number of talks, in fact it's so interesting, I actually didn't know this until Ron pointed it out the other night, that this phrase in most requests is one that he used a lot of

[07:58]

for a very finite period of time. And then he didn't so much. I think it got replaced by pointing in other kinds of ways to something that maybe is misconstrued in a hedonistic generation like he was teaching in the 60s, I don't know. But in one of his other early lectures, he described in most request He said, what's your basic intention? Sooner or later you will reach inmost request or enlightenment or Buddha nature. You will find out all that you do is based on your inmost request. That's pretty startling when you think about it. All that you do is based on your inmost request. He says, then you'll find, excuse me, then he says, before you know that, you're just wandering about.

[09:00]

But after that, you will know the oneness of wandering about an enlightened life. After you know that, you'll know the oneness of wandering about in our lost, bumping into things, making mistakes, an enlightened life. Once you know what that is, you'll find out the meaning of practice. So we all kind of know what that is, don't we? Not bumping around in our lives, trying this thing out, thinking we want to be with that person, thinking maybe this career, maybe that hairstyle, maybe this dress, maybe if I be this kind of person, it'll all turn out okay for me. None of that is right. But we also have an early experience of what it means to be right, if you will.

[10:03]

You know, what it means to be ourselves. And I think often of the example, the early example of Buddha being a child under the rose apple tree. Yeah, so he's just a little child, his father's you know, going over some of the fields and grounds, plantations or whatever they were called in ancient India that he owned. Baby Prince is there in under the tree, under the rose apple tree, and it's a perfect day, rather like today, a perfect day that's just warm enough, and the trees are in full blossom. and the birds are singing, and he feels just totally comfortable, totally at ease in who he is. Remember those feelings as a child where you didn't have a worry because everything was just right? No questions about your security, no questions about where you stood in the world, you were just where you needed to be.

[11:11]

We all have that feeling in ourselves and we all know where it is. We have those moments too, moments of creative flow maybe is a common way that we think about it now. Maybe it's athletics. When you're swimming or running and in a particular rhythm. When you're skiing downhill and you've hit it just right and you're going down full blast along the turns and not missing a beat. You might know it in dance. You might know it in the music that you play, especially improv. I knew it in solving biochemistry problems in college when something hard just broke open and I was totally with all of those molecules as they snapped into place. You don't even know that you're you. You just know that somehow you're caught up in some jet stream of energy. that's just where you are meant to be.

[12:14]

And then boom, like being sent down from the vortex of a tornado, you land on your butt in the ground and you go, wow, what's my life? What happened there? And you feel lost, lost again. This lecture that Suzuki Roshi gave was in July of 1965, and the materials we have are based on student notes. The koan is Jun Men's Kitchen, Pantry, and Main Gate. I'm gonna read it now. The pointer, which is a little opening, I'm gonna read two from Thomas Cleary, mainly because in Suzuki Roshi's notes, He focuses on one word in his translation on this. I want to read the pointer and then the case, and then I'll go to Suzuki Roshi's rendering of it in a few minutes. The pointer.

[13:17]

He holds the world fast without the slightest leak. He cuts off the myriad flows without keeping a drop. Open your mouth and you're wrong. Hesitate and thought and you miss. Tell me, what is the barrier-penetrating eye? To test, I cite this case. One man imparted some words. The students were gathered with him in his quarters late one evening, and he said to them, everyone has a light, but when you look at it, you don't see it. It's dark and dim. What's everybody's light? They hesitate and he says on their behalf, the kitchen pantry and the main gate. They're puzzled and so he says, a good thing isn't as good as a good nothing.

[14:24]

So, Unmann From the ninth century of the Tang Dynasty, he had his first awakening with Zhou Xu. Zhou Xu, who we've heard a lot of during this practice period. His quality was direct, brief, and powerful. And I thought it was interesting that he's the Dharma, great, great, great, great grandson of Setako Kisen, whose Sando Kai we know and we recite regularly. And his Sando Kai is a poem merging harmony and difference, or lightness and darkness. So there are echoes of those teachings many generations forward. The pointer, to read it again in Suzuki Roshi's words now, to control the world, to control the world without omitting a single feather

[15:29]

to stop all the streams of passion without losing a single drop. This is the great teacher's activity. If you open your mouth in a dualistic sense, in his presence, you will fall into error, hesitate and you will be lost. Who has eyes to generate barriers of this kind? So on this last Thursday night class, we talked about Zhou Xu's seven pound cloth. And in it, Suzuki Roshi said in his commentary, he said, our life is the unfolding of our inmost desire. Our inmost desire knows intuitively where we should go. So our life is both created and controlled by some rules. Pretty provocative, huh? Our life is controlled by these inmost requests. And so our life is both created and controlled by rules.

[16:33]

You know rules. We usually think of them as something that constricts us. And even in the most wholesome sense, we might think about them as precepts, as the guidelines about how to live a wholesome life, if you will. And those precepts can be seen as proscriptive, but they also can be seen as setting some wide guideposts, some touchstones for knowing how to direct your life. But it's even more subtle than that. It's even less directive, less clear than that. These kinds of rules that I think Suzuki Roshi is talking about when he talks about how we know and listen to our inmost request. Usually when we think about finding the rules in our life is reading a book. I sure tried to do a lot of that when I was younger.

[17:38]

You know, what color is my parachute? Please tell me what to do with myself. Or making, when you're gonna make a major decision, making a list of pros and cons for this choice or that choice and seeing how they balance out. Or in medical decision making, we look at the risks and the benefits before you decide on a particular risky kind of treatment. But even Freud said this was limited. He said, make the important decisions based on your intuition, not on anything like this. So what are the rules that guide us? What is the guiding light of our inmost request? I would say it's like the birds migrating The sooty shearwater, do you know this? This oceanic bird flies 40,000 miles a year out over the ocean. Do you have any idea how that's possible?

[18:41]

I don't. Maybe an ornithologist does, but it's kind of beside the point. Somehow this bird knows which way to go. The plants know how to turn to the motion of the sun. A lost dog can find its way home over hundreds of miles. It's kind of like that. How do we know which way to go? In the Ginjo Koan, it says, you find yourself right where you are. Know what that feeling is like? When you find yourself right where you are, you know you're in your own life, where you wake up and you know you're exactly where you're supposed to be in what it is that you're doing. How can you say how that is? How do you arrive there? It's not easy, of course. It's not easy to tune in to pay into that because we have all the vicissitudes of our human life.

[19:45]

All of our passions and our desires, all of the mind, all the pressures that say we have to pay the bills, we have a certain place that we have to be. people who in our lives that we're responsible to or for and so all of those competing voices having a body that has its own mind and doesn't necessarily cooperate with what it is that you want to be doing or what you feel like your impulse is. All of those different forces are going on and yet somewhere inside there's something that guides the force of your life and the direction in which it goes. In Suzuki Roshi's talk, he puts an emphasis on the word control. To control the world without omitting a single feather, to stop all the streams of passion without losing a single drop.

[20:48]

Control, he says, he talks about the balance between The materialistic, if you will, the form side of our life, the materialistic side of our life, which he describes as positive. Positive maybe in the sense that it's building up a certain kind of self, a certain kind of life. It's the way in which we create ourselves. It's procreative in our life. That's not a bad thing. It's a necessary thing. We need to have a life. We need to know who we are. And it's a naive thing. It's naive in a way because it's self-centered, because it puts us in the center of the universe, and that's just one side of the reality, isn't it? And then he says there's the spiritual side, which he describes as being negative. Negative might be seen as subtracting, taking away, minimalistic, pure, untainted.

[21:52]

And these two sides seem to be in competition within ourselves. He says the material side of us is doomed to be either internally or externally critical. It's based on comparing. It's that first part of ourselves that oftentimes brings us to practice in a certain way where We know we're suffering, and that suffering has to do with being out of sync with our real lives, looking for something that's outside of ourselves, trying to create something that isn't inherently here, that's unnecessary, that's additive, perhaps. So he says that side is doomed always to fall short in some way, either by internal or external evaluation. The spiritual side, he says, may be resistant. It's also limited because it's missing a whole part of itself.

[22:57]

He said it can feel divided from itself, helpless, helpless in the face of material power and knowing how to make its own life. And I think he was looking around and seeing a lot of young people who were searching in that way and finding that lack of balance. We have, in order to be ourselves, we often have to, let me try again. We have to be both in ourselves, and too often we have to accommodate. When we accommodate successfully, that often results in a kind of depravity of one side or the other, or a kind of deadness. When we're not successful, it can be a destructive kind of force in our life. of body, or of both. This is our search for the true dragon. The true dragon. How do we see the two aspects not as mutually exclusive, but as they are, both arising from our inmost request?

[24:06]

Both sides arising from our inmost request. Neither is wrong. Both are vital. Both are necessary. When we don't view them dualistically as one or the other, but as part of our whole being, part of the human form and life and energy of vitality that nourishes us, then there's reconciliation and wholeness. So the control that Unmon is talking about and manifests in stopping the streams of passion, he doesn't mean to stop being a sexual, loving, procreative human being. He means Don't be pushed around by it. Don't be willy-nilly. Don't be abusive to yourself or others in how you use it. Don't lose a single drop. Be yourself entirely. Be yourself entirely, but know who it is that you are. Integrate those two sides so that we're not caught in the windigo of judgment and recrimination in causing harm, and that our karma

[25:16]

Karmic tendencies are Teflon. They're like Teflon. They arise and they slide off of us. And they slide off of everyone else. There's nothing sticky. Oh, that's just Andrea being irritable again. Drop. Move on. The koan. The koan. When Man says, attention! Although everyone has a light within himself, it cannot be seen in one's utter darkness. Now what do you think I mean for the light of everyone? As no one could answer, he said, a temple storehouse in the main gate. And then after a while, he said, it'd be better not to say anything, even if it is a good remark. We go out looking for our light in the way that we do in a storehouse of our family legacy, our earnings, our possessions, or dharmic teachings.

[26:26]

Or we look inside the gate of marriage, of a career, or of Berkeley Zen Center for the answer for our light. But what the light is is not a state or a possession that we obtain. It's not something to be acquired. even through our hard work or maintained in the usual way like a car. We discover it in the utter darkness, not ordinary darkness, but the utter darkness. It's not the ordinary darkness of a light going out where you can go and flip a switch or fix it like some behavior you would wish would go away or by sitting more Zazen. Delusion is often what we think about as being that darkness, but actually that delusion or anger or folly or greed is actually part of the light that we're seeking. Part of the inmost request, to borrow a title from Sherry Euber's book that I like a great deal, that which we are searching, seeking is causing us to seek our very suffering

[27:42]

The transformation of that very suffering is that which is causing us to seek. The darkness is that which is so dark that our usual ways of seeing have gone blind. It's the kind of blindness like justice. You know the image of justice who has blindfolds on and she's holding the scales. And she's able to see because she's not looking with the eyes of discrimination. She's not looking with eyes of preconception or eyes of self-concern. That is the dark. That's dim and dark, utterly dark, and the darker the better. We learn to trust our vision in the dark. You know how it is when the lights first go out? When the lights first go out, you're like tripping over things and you're not able to see at all, and gradually somehow you acclimate and you get over the kind of shock and disorientation that the lights are out and you have a sense of where things are in the room.

[28:50]

And instead of walking, furniture touching, furniture walking, you settle back into your body and yourself and you kind of make your way through the dark. It's like that. There is a story of, I'm Pretty sure it's Un Man when he met his second teacher, Tao Wu, he's on pilgrimage. And he's asked by his teacher, why are you on pilgrimage? And he says, I don't know. And his teacher approved and says, not knowing is most intimate. Not knowing exactly where we're going in the dark. Not having an idea of what it is that we're looking for, going after, but trusting ourself in the journey. That's intimate. That's knowing.

[29:51]

That's being in touch with our light. Some of you may have remembered a few practice periods ago, Sojin talked on the subject of light and he referenced a book called, And Then There Was Light, which is the autobiography of a French resistance worker, a man who went blind when he was eight years old. And his job in the French underground was to be the recruiter. So he was responsible for recruiting in every member of the French underground and the resistance against the Nazis. Can you imagine? He had no visual cues about these people whose acceptance into the organization was a matter of life or death to everyone. And he was superb at it. How did he do that? What was that light that he was seeing? So, the darkness is when the five skandhas receive sensory information with the impassiveness of insentient beings, with the impassiveness of that which has no discrimination, with no storyline, with no past, present or future, but is just like vast open space receiving.

[31:22]

When we're like vast open space, are we not intimate with our lives? That is actually the other line of that story between Un Mon and Dao Wu. Not knowing is most intimate. The student's still befuddled. Can you please tell me? Please tell me what I'm supposed to do. How am I supposed to find my way? I'm pilgrimage. And Dao Wu says to him, It's like the clouds floating in the vast open sky. The sky does not hinder them. It's like that. So in the Sandokai, we know about light and darkness, like front and back, foot and walking. Both are required for a stable, balanced life. When we were doing Kinhin this morning, I was reminded that one foot's in front and the other's behind. And then one foot's in front and the other foot's behind, right?

[32:27]

What's forward, what's back? What's dark, what's light? Everything's all there. Both are needed walking along. So the light is not a thing. It's not something we possess or go after. It's really more like a function or an activity. Every person has her own radiant light manifest with and in concert with everyone else. Our light's totally dependent on everyone else and it's completely arisen out of our own life. It's not an object. It's not outside of ourselves. It's nothing we need to acquire. It's something that we just need to become aware of. Always inherent, always functioning, and like our bodies, if we eat well, rest, exercise, we thrive.

[33:34]

If we pay attention, slow down, stay close to our intentions in our life, our vow, if you will, and practice, it comes alive. Like embers with good, dry kindling applied In his commentary, Suzuki Roshi points out that Dogen says this light is not red, yellow, white, blue. It's not something specific or concrete, if you will, but it's based on an original vitality. He says, Suzuki Roshi says that although we have a profound question, the way we know its answer is not through our cognitive reasoning mind, but by living out the completeness of our lives. So I have a story. When I was a kid, I was an odd kid. And my best friend and I, she was the other married girl, we were the two with dark hair in our high school, the only two who had black hair in our high school, and so we found each other.

[34:45]

And we were always asking each other what the purpose of life was. It's embarrassing, we found letters we had written each other from that time, and it was really pretty embarrassing. And I'm sure that we read books, And we really tried to figure it out hard, because we wanted so much to figure out where we belonged, if you will. And somehow, over time, she turned out to be an amazing mother of two really special young people, and the best friend to an ever-widening circle of people who need and are in need that she considers entirely her friends, entirely even. She's a gracious and generous and grounded person who is as whole as anyone I know and has not set foot in any kind of spiritual community in her life.

[35:51]

And her friend has somehow over the years figured out that her inmost request had to do about serving. And all the other concerns and worries and pains and suffering about what didn't happen and what might have been and why didn't it happen have all dropped away. And so that light has been revealed. Suzuki Roshi said in his commentary, and the words are so beautiful that I can't do any better, so these I really am going to read. He says, the mystery of why we pursue truth in the spiritual world or physical pleasure in the material world should be understood as the vital request of our true nature. The vital request, I might also say the vital activity

[36:53]

of our true nature. Our spiritual and physical pursuit of life is always carried on the realm of duality and that is the ultimate cause of our suffering in this world. That's the Four Noble Truths. The cause of suffering appears to be dualistic only in the empirical world. And I might say that we live inside our own individual existence And so we must live out our own personal life. And even though it's not separate, we feel as if it's separate. That's the source of our suffering. But Suzuki Roshi goes on to say, in reality, in Zen practice, beyond intellectual formation, there is no duality. This freedom does not come from outside, nor is it the result of practice. No guarantees if you come inside this gate.

[37:55]

You can have complete enlightenment if you're like my friend and never come on in. The freedom does not come from outside, nor is it the result of practice. In fact, practice is meaningful and joyful because of this freedom. And I might add that we are alive as part of the network of interdependent origination. That is, our lives are intimately connected to everything else. We're supported by the whole universe, and we support the whole universe. And we inherently experience, like we do in a perfect run down the ski slope, or a perfect basketball pass. When we're in the zone of our lives, we know that to be the truth. He goes on and says, practice vitalized by our inmost request is self joyous practice. This practice covers everyday dualistic life. Duality should be realized as oneness and oneness should be manifested as duality.

[38:59]

Obviously, you can't not. It's a given. The joyous continuous effort to realize the oneness of duality is the way to obtain vital religious freedom. And so I say we sit Sazen, practice together, bow and eat, and make our lives together. One man says at first the temple storehouse and the gate, but actually he's misleading. It's not about any of those things. It's just do it. Show up, live your life, and trust it. you actually can completely trust your life. And we're doing it right now. So that's what I have to say. I think there may be time for a question or two. Thank you very much.

[40:02]

Jeff? The last set? Yeah, I'd happily do that. I'll do it without my comments. So, he says to the koan, the mystery of why we pursue truth in the spiritual world or physical pleasure in the material world should be understood as the vital request of our true nature. Our spiritual and physical pursuit of life is always carried on in the realm of duality, and this is the ultimate cause of our suffering in this world. This cause of suffering appears to be dualistic only in the empirical world, but in reality, in Zen practice beyond intellectual formulation, there is no duality. This freedom does not come from outside,

[41:10]

nor is it the result of practice. In fact, practice is meaningful and joyous because of this freedom. Practice vitalized by our inmost request is self-joyous practice. This practice covers everyday dualistic life. Duality should be realized as oneness and oneness should be manifested as duality. A joyous, continuous effort to realize the oneness of duality is the way to obtain vital religious freedom. Did you connect? Do you know your life? Everyone is quiet. Denise, please. so much as some comment, which is, I was really touched by the part of this inmost request and how it tries to guide us in the direction and aim us in the way that we are intended somehow in this lifetime.

[42:28]

And so during, while you were explaining and talking about that, I was really moved because I feel that sometimes. And it's always so fascinating. Yeah, part of what I find so encouraging about this is, just imagine, no matter how big you goof up, no matter how out of sorts you feel, there's something alive in that that's related to the vital force in your life. Can you trust that? There's something alive in whatever you do, actually, that's trying to guide you, that's trying, It sounds like it's outside of yourself, and I don't mean it that way at all, but that force of life is always active within us, and it's a matter of staying in touch and in balance with it. And we do that by sitting, we do that by following our precepts, by listening to our vows, but it's bigger than that.

[43:33]

It's beyond that. And it's alive all the time. Linda. You said that we all had some time in our childhood that we could remember as being innocent, simple, flowing. And I did a quick scan of my memory and I don't remember any such time in my childhood. I wonder if I'm a freak. Well, it's hard to look back and know what we remember. But I wonder if you don't have it somewhere in your body. Well, I do, but I don't locate it in childhood. Okay, I'll amend the next time I give this talk.

[44:40]

I'll tell a story about you instead. Yeah, please. I just wanted to throw in, my path has been mostly confused and very long, but during college, the Moody Blues put out a song that I misheard. what you're meant to be, you will be in the end. And I've heard it differently, but I heard that and it answered a faith that I was being called to, that I was willing to give at 18. But I've referred to that throughout my entire life. And I've always been like, what in the heck? Oh, what you're meant to be. And so I had that before Suzuki or maybe at the same time. Dare I ask what the real lyrics were? What you want to be, you will be in the end. And I was disappointed to find that translation because it didn't answer the same issue within me.

[45:44]

Thank you. Maybe they're not so different. We'll see. I seem to think. I'm just thinking about flow. I'm a great believer in flow, but then I thought, you know, a Nazi machine gunner could be into flow. So how do you know flow is good and not so good? Yeah, it's a challenging question. I think flow, like karma, doesn't have a morality to it.

[46:45]

It doesn't have a good or bad to it. It just is. I thought we were using flow as a marker of Well, flow is an expression as an activity of being in touch with your inmost request or enlightenment. But you know, I don't know that a gunner from a plane, an American plane over Japan has we might put a different value on that. It's an activity informed by a lot of different forces in that moment and who is that person showing up to those forces in that moment.

[47:56]

It's very hard to evaluate exactly requires a subtle practice. I think that's right. Yeah, I think that's right. I think it's hard to think about it in a simple way on that point. Linda, please. Well, this point is a very important one to me. I'm glad that Coe mentioned it. And I think it's really important to keep clarifying it. So whatever we're calling flow, this is just my way of clarifying it. whatever we're calling flow, is not equivalent with what some people talk about as enlightenment. It may be that side that the guy who turned into a fox got confused when he only saw emptiness and he said that we are

[49:02]

that an enlightened person is not affected by cause and effect, is immune to cause and effect. Then you could be a Nazi gunner and enjoy flow, or a samurai who cuts through the enemy and says the enemy is a thing of emptiness. And Robert A. Kuroshi wrote beautifully about that. He said, if that kind of flow, use of Zen in that way to describe the samurai's ability to concentrate and see the enemy as emptiness is really enlightened, then what happened to all the screams of the widows and children? And what happened to all the blood flowing? So that's my answer to his question. Thank you. Tamar, Walter, and then Denise, if we have, well, maybe Tamar and then should we stop? then we'll have to stop.

[50:05]

There are probably people in the room who know much more about this than I do, but most of the accounts written by people who have been in military situations where they had to kill civilians and do actions that most humans find reprehensible is that they're not in the flow that actually one of the biggest predictors of PTSD is whether the person does something that is not congruent with their inmost request. So there's actually a really interesting issue of inquiring mind on mindfulness in the military, which I refer people to because I think it speaks to this in a really pointed way. Thank you very much. That's a good note to end on.

[50:55]

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