Thank you all for being here. For joining this Sashin. And usually the baby falls asleep in this kangaroo pack, but we'll see. We thought since we don't have a babysitter, maybe the second best or next best thing is to immerse her in the field of the Sangha wrapped in Buddha's words listening to the voice of her parents but maybe it won't work yeah so as you know I'm always thinking about this practice and how this practice works in the West

[01:23]

And just now, you know, I was at this conference in Basel, which I participated in for neighborly reasons. And it was pretty big, about, I don't know, 1,400 or more people. And quite a large percentage of those came to the things I did. So to give the lecture and zazen and so forth, that takes some effort, but it's not... I can just talk about something, if possible. So this lecture and zazen That requires a certain amount of effort, but I can just talk about something.

[02:34]

But the seminar was more difficult. Because, by the way, I think if she's going to be too much trouble, we can switch. Maybe we can swap. Christina or Gisela. Gisela's gone. Oh, yeah, there you are. You were going to be gone. Oh, okay, connection. She has a friend who's extremely sick that she has to spend some time with this week. She has a friend who's... Excuse me. Gisela has a friend who is very sick with whom she will spend some time this week. The seminar, as I started to say, was more difficult. What can I, if I have no background, what can I talk about?

[03:36]

After listening to them for a while, I decided I would do something as basic as the four foundations of mindfulness. So that made me think a little bit about what had been the foundations of my practice here in the West. trying to put things together from my study with Suzuki Roshi in a way that functioned within the paradigms and language of my contemporary culture. And what I've found over the years is that sometimes things turn on a word.

[04:48]

A word can block our understanding. And then I, you know, say, you know, a teaching, say, has a particular shape in Japanese and Asian culture. But if you take it out of that culture, then it has all these loose wires that have been pulled out of the sockets. And you can't find the plugs in the west. Where do you put the wires back in? So not only do you have to find new plugs, or locate the plugs in your own society, your own culture.

[06:14]

But you have to also pull new wires out of the teaching and see where I can find out where I can make the connections. So again, when I look back on how I tried to sort through and create a practice here in the West, I see that there were some real basics that kind of laid the foundation, paved the way. So am I being pushed back into going over this very basic four foundations of mindfulness?

[07:19]

I realized how basic the four foundations were to my practice. And how these four foundations, each one is a foundation for the next one. Mindfulness of the body. mindfulness of feeling, but not the same feeling as the feeling of the five skandhas, and then mindfulness of the mind, and then mindfulness of the phenomenal world, or mindfulness of dharmas. So I'd like to speak about these four foundations in this session.

[08:31]

No, I don't know. I'm quite sure I can't do it all today. But maybe it takes a couple of days or three days. We'll see. Now the Diamond Sutra starts out with the Buddha went to town and begged and stuff like that. He came back and he had his meal. and cleaned his bowls, washed his feet, lifted his body into uprightness, made his body upright, And then he fixed his mindfulness.

[09:48]

So he's not always, as someone said, blissed out. Yeah. Transported in rapture, as they might say technically. Oh yes, pretty much the same, yeah. Okay. Wrapped attention, we say. Which means you're, like sometimes if Sophia looks at you without turning away, you can say that's wrapped attention. You'll notice that probably during the Sesshin I will bring up Sophia a number of times. Yeah, not just because her name is Wisdom.

[11:02]

But because we shouldn't talk behind her back. I invite her to come to the lecture. So the Buddha brings his body into uprightness. And then fixes, establishes his mindfulness. And then begins to speak. Now we can think of this as a kind of lens almost, the uprightness and the established mindfulness. It's a kind of lens of which the town is having lunch, washing his feet. through the concentration of this upright mindfulness, is transformed into the Diamond Sutra.

[12:19]

We don't even have to think he knew this before. We can think of it, this teaching appeared when he sat this way and established himself in mindfulness. I still think it's hard for us to recognize how essential this posture is and mindfulness is In a yoga culture which assumes that everything is a construct,

[13:20]

in a yogic culture that assumes that everything is a constructed construct. And we, as Westerners, always have the taste that it's somehow already there. Now, does that mean if you, now we're doing, we've all come from town somewhere and begged a bit for our living? Worked for our living. And now we've come here and we've just washed our bowls. And perhaps you'll wash your feet a few times in Sashin. And now you, this first day, established this upright posture. And established yourself in mindfulness. Now at least you're approaching this. Now, will the Diamond Sutra appear out of each of you this week?

[15:00]

Maybe so. Maybe it will appear and you won't recognize it. Or maybe you need the poor foundations of mindfulness to recognize it. Yeah, like a sutra like this is, you know, these scholars say, well, this is a formulaic, formula beginning. Many sutras in... Hinayana times and Mahayana times start with this formula. The Buddha returns from begging and so forth and then sits upright and blah, blah, blah.

[16:08]

So it just stuck in like, oh, here's a cookie cutter formula. Let's put it in the beginning of each of these sutras. But it's also an alchemical formula. Much like in a laboratory, they might say, if you want such, you have to put these chemicals together first. Then you add this with that. Then you have a different result. But many may start with the same initial formula. And what scholars don't realize often that they have to practice this formula before they can go into understanding the text.

[17:19]

Was Gelehrte oftmals nicht verstehen, ist, dass sie zuerst in diese Formel hinein gelangen müssen, bevor sie den Text verstehen können. Ja, and there's a vastness and immensity in these simple words. Und da ist eine Weite und Immensität in diesen ganz einfachen Worten. There's the whole of the Sashim. There's the whole of hundreds of Sashins. Settling yourself in mindfulness. Of pouring mindfulness into yourself. Yeah, because The kind of mindfulness that the Diamond Sutra, this formula, is talking about is not the mindfulness of I sort of look at this stick, you know, but that I penetrate the stick with mindfulness.

[18:26]

Well, it's kind of hard to imagine penetrating the stick with mindfulness. But you can imagine more penetrating your body with mindfulness. Pouring mindfulness into your body. If you do it, you almost come into... A solidity of mind and body. I say solidity, it sounds funny. How can mind be solid? And I don't mean a rigidity of mind and body. It's almost like you filled your body up with mindfulness. Do you have the word sediment, like sediment fills up something?

[19:46]

Yes, it's like you're sedimented with mindfulness. It's almost like you filled your body up with mindfulness. So when the Buddha lifts his or her body up, she's transforming the body into mindfulness. And the more you sit, the more this is possible. This isn't the first time he did zazen. Yeah, that was only the, what could we say, the rhinestone sutra. A rhinestone, you know what a rhinestone is?

[20:58]

It's a fake diamond. Oh, okay. You know, like glass or something. It was not the rhinestone. His first sasin, he produced the rhinestone sutra. Nothing to do with the rhine down here. Anyway. Anyway. So he'd been doing zazen, so when he did zazen, his whole body, her whole body was established in mindfulness. Yeah, body, and then he established his mindfulness in the immediate situation of giving this lecture. And this mindfulness can be very, it feels solid. And it decontextualizes our usual way of knowing. And this can be a little scary for us.

[22:19]

I remember my first sashins I mentioned occasionally, I think. They were on a bush street in San Francisco. Which is one of two arterial one-way streets. Where all the traffic, every time the lights change, come roaring like Cossacks down the hill, up the neck, down the hill. The street one block away, Pine Street, they all went the other direction. So we'd hear this roar of traffic and the light would change and it would be silent for a little while.

[23:23]

And I remember I kind of feared coming out of the Sashin in the evening of the last night. And I would come out, and these headlights would be so bright, I actually was really shaken inside. They'd spin at me, these big white things. Yeah, I mean, they had nothing to do with cars. They were just these huge white things. I felt like a deer in a hunter's light. I think in America it's illegal to do it, but some hunters do that.

[24:34]

They catch a deer with a bright light. I don't know if they have it on their gun or whatever, and the deer doesn't know what's going on, and they shoot it. I think it's considered unfair, but hunters do it. I felt like that, you know, like a deer in a headlight. Well, this is a kind of decontextualized experience. I see it in Sophia. If she gets used to seeing my face at a certain distance, This is changing just now in the last few days.

[25:40]

So I can bring my face up close to her and it's the same face she saw from a distance. She's 11 weeks old, right? So until recently, if I brought my face up close, it was a different object. She had no way to think that the face from here was the same object as the face from six inches closer. She has no context for a face at different focusing distances. Sie hat keinen Kontext für ein Gesicht in verschiedenen Fokussierabständen.

[26:46]

As an example I used all these cows across the street here and the cows all around us in Crestone. If we took her up to one of these cows across the street, as I've said, it would just be a big, brown, shaggy field. She had no idea that's a cow. What is that? How does she know that's a cow? She has no conceptual context for it being a cow. Even at a distance, she doesn't know it's a cow, but she can see something. Okay, today at lunch, for example, I'm trying to give you examples of decontextualization.

[27:48]

So I'm sitting lunchtime and I decide I should move the chanting card, meal chant card. So I look down to my side. I know it's down there. I put it down there. And I can't find it. All I see is a white-brown rectangle. And it seems to be merged with a black rectangle.

[29:20]

And there seems to be a pale white, whitish line or stripe painted across it, gluing it to the black rectangle. Now I'm just not presenting this as anything special, obviously. It's just because it's not special I'm presenting it. So I think, where's the chanting card? And what's that brown-white rectangle? Maybe that's it.

[30:24]

But it's glued to the black rectangle. I can see that it's glued down by this stripe. So I won't be able to separate them. Okay, so then I remember in the back of my mind is the chanting card is on a saboteur. So I bring those conceptions forward in my mind. The conceptions that were there that made me turn toward the side. But those conceptions weren't part of what I saw. What I saw was just what my senses presented. Without organizing conceptions.

[31:43]

It's the same. In English, you conceive of something, you think of something, but you think of it in a way that gives it a form, and that form is called a conception. Sorry. Okay, that's fine. I guess perceive and conceive are nearly the same in German. Okay, thank you. I'll try to translate it better. All right, should I say it again or should we just proceed into the mystery? Okay. What my senses saw was not organized by the conceptions.

[32:55]

So then I had to bring from the back of my mind these two conceptions. Of Zafu and sutra, chanting cards. And then immediately, oh, it popped into view on top of the Zabatang. Then I saw that the stripe which glued them together was simply the light coming in over the black curtain. I assume all of you have had somewhat similar little anomalies. But those anomalies are the Diamond Sutra. When the Diamond Sutra says, no idea of self, No idea of a lifespan.

[34:09]

This means uncontextualized knowing. Okay, so what sitting does, what when you pour mindfulness into your body, Or maybe mindfulness isn't the right word. I don't know what word. Right now I'll say the liquid of attention. That liquid of attention begins to decontextualize you.

[35:13]

Yeah, so when I walked out in the street after a sashimi, I didn't have the context of the headlight in the car. I just had this entirely too bright a light. When I stopped and said, okay, this is a street and that's a car and those are headlights. And I took all that tremendous energy of automobiles. You know, if you're in a car accident and you get hit by a whiplash or something. You get a whiplash.

[36:21]

You have to do some kind of mathematics about the whole weight of the car and the speed because it's a tremendous force on your body. So there's a tremendous energy of these automobiles meant to drive you at speeds and see objects in front of you at a great distance. But as soon as I contextualize it, Oh, it's just cars. Headlights. Put it aside. And suddenly this sidewalk in front of me becomes fairly calm. If it was a roar of buffalo coming down the street,

[37:23]

I would be so surprised at, whoa, what am I going to do now? It would be no more dangerous maybe than the cars. But I couldn't contextualize the buffaloes on Bush Street very easily. So Sesshin sitting here are just by the schedule, by the Sangha, by sitting seven days, we get sedimented in mindfulness. sedimented in attention so much attention to things that our usual framework of knowing won't hold all the

[38:39]

attention. So that actually makes you wonder, should we do sashins for lay people? Yeah, you can get used to it. But some of us don't lose our sensitivity to sashins. And we need really a few days at least before and after to come back into our usual orientation. Our usual way of contextualizing our world. So at least we need the seven days, I think, of practice, because we begin to recontextualize the last couple of days.

[40:10]

Okay. So, you know, we started, I guess we forgot the drum and T went a little long and so forth, so we started a little late. Yeah, but I don't want to take away your break. We haven't changed the schedule. So let me see if I can put what I've said so far into some kind of place or order. Because I'm moving toward talking about the first foundation of mindfulness. Which is more a bodyfulness than a mindfulness.

[41:24]

And usually when we look at ourselves, we say, who are we? That's a real problem in Zen practice. It may work in psychology, but we can't really ask, who are we? Of course you can ask it anytime. You can ask anything you want. But who are we is a much more productive question in Zen practice after you ask what are we. Wer sind wir? ist eine sehr viel produktivere Frage in der Zen-Praxis, nachdem man sich gefragt hat, was sind wir? When you look at a tree, unless you're Irish, you don't say, who are you? Und wenn ihr einen Baum anschaut, und solange ihr nicht ihren seid, werdet ihr nicht fragen, wer bist du?

[42:56]

You say, what are you? What is it? Sondern man wird fragen... When you go to a medical doctor, he asks, what is wrong? He doesn't ask, who is wrong? If he has some psychological astuteness, he might want to ask, who is wrong? If your mother in your kidney... But let's start out with what is wrong first. Oh, my kidney is, or my stomach, something's wrong. So the first foundation of mindfulness is about our what-ness, not our who-ness. And not the what-ness of something dead, but the what-ness we share with a tree.

[44:04]

Remember, I'm also teaching from that Rilke poem I've been giving you, where he says that the space that is outside of ourselves defiles or violates a tree, violates things, the space that is outside of ourselves, violates or defiles things. Again we come back to this immensity that the Diamond Sutra starts with.

[45:17]

The immensity of the practice of just establishing body and mind and attention, attentiveness. to establish this immensity of only the body and the spirit in attention and in being attentive. In this awareness energy. Why would he say it violates things? He says then if you want to establish a tree, or perform a tree, or ordain a tree, what's that? So what I'm talking about in this first foundation of mindfulness This what-ness.

[46:28]

It's the what-ness we share with the tree. And with everything all at once. And with the hundred grasses. We can't say who are you to the grasses, but we can say what are you. And that whatness we share with everything. Thus we start the first foundation of mindfulness. We need to slip into it also through decontextualized knowing. Now little Sophia right now is beginning to contextualize her knowing.

[47:35]

She's getting her little body together. And last week or so she can reach out with intention. And before she just bumped you. She couldn't keep her hand on you. Now she can kind of pour intention into her arm. And she can bring attention from that arm. And she can bring attention back to her consciousness. Her consciousness is being shaped right now. There's a Taoist saying, The sage wanders among the 10,000 things.

[48:42]

Being shaped or organized by the 10,000 things. Not by two or three things. Not by what Castaneda calls the foreign installations we have. So whether we like it or not, in Sofia we're going to establish a German headquarters. and an American headquarters. These are foreign installations. Yeah, I mean, as I pointed out, they say a baby can say all sounds of all languages up until about a year old.

[49:49]

But what is it, four tones of Chinese, Dieter? I think it's seven or eight in Vietnamese. Yeah, I can't say any of them. I can't even say most German words. so the 10,000 things are available to her beyond all known languages but pretty soon German and English will be installed in her they're like foreign installations or headquarters Die sind so wie fremde Einrichtungen oder solche. To get past those headquarters, headquarters, consciousness quarters.

[50:56]

Oh, my God. Oh, my Buddha, you have to say. Also, Headquarter heißt wie Kopfquartier. Und somit sagt er, What was the second quarter? Consciousness quarters. We have to decontextualize these foreign installations. And let the 10,000 things slip past. And sometimes that's a disintegrating force. Sweeping us out of language. We may feel nothing to hold on to. But then, if you come back into this upright posture, Establish yourself in mindfulness.

[52:05]

You can be open both decontextualizing and to recontextualize yourself. In a deeper and deeper way. Transforming consciousness into awareness. And we could say this is the teaching of the Diamond Sutra. Okay, that's enough for now. Thank you very much. If you have the same intentions and the same passion, you will always be able to cross the road. You will always be able to cross the road. You will always be able to cross the road. With all my heart and soul, I promise to reach you.

[53:44]

I promise to reach you. Thank you for watching!

[54:51]

I am the greatest of men who has taken a lot of pride from the Dharma. Because it is the only one that has to be held in high post of sanctum. And although I think that I am the only one that can, but only if I had to step down and talk to the Father. So I didn't feel yesterday I was able to be as clear as I'd like to be.

[56:37]

Yeah, so I'll try again. Yeah, some of it I'll try again. Mm-hmm. I don't know why, you know, I can't really explain why I've always been asking myself fundamental questions. Or maybe a little crazy questions. You know, what's going on? How do I exist, etc.?

[57:38]

Yeah, I imagine Sophia wondering what all this is that's appearing in front of her eyes. And she's got these two people who are hanging around all the time. And one of them, she feels she's not really separate from. And she sees all these objects. And I'm sure she sees the objects without generalizations. Lots of thises. No connection between them. So somehow I kept, I don't know why, maybe I'm infantile, but I kept this kind of peculiar feeling.

[58:55]

And I couldn't, I felt a little disenchanted. No, disenchantment, yeah. Out of enchantment. Out of... Enchant means to... Be delighted? Entzaubert? Entzaubert. Yeah, sort of out of place. So wie... von meinem... Außer sort... Also wie verschoben, von meinem Platz weg. No, it occurred in lots of things. I remember the first time I had to ask someone to type a letter for me.

[59:59]

I had this job and they gave me this job and they said, you have to get these letters typed. And I had... So I spent about 20 minutes trying to work up my courage to ask this person to type this letter for me. And I thought, what if she says no? Do I pull out a gun and say, hey, type that letter? Yeah, so I finally got up my courage and I asked and then I ran back in my office. She said yes. But much earlier than that, I could never figure out why anything worked, why anyone did anything. Because I couldn't make it all make sense.

[61:10]

But I had the strange confidence to recognize that I couldn't, I didn't think really anybody else knew how to make it make sense. Yeah. So at some point I discovered Buddhism. And I began to find ways to try to make sense of how we, I, actually exist. And I couldn't have done it just from taking reading. It took Suki Rishi to make me realize something was possible. Excuse me, so you said you had confidence you'd find somebody who knew it.

[62:53]

I had confidence that... No, I had confidence to recognize no one else seemed to understand. So I kind of resigned myself to not understanding. Yeah, so I... Then I met Suzuki Roshi. And somehow I saw a possibility of understanding. Yeah. So I... And Buddhism gave me the tools. But it took the example of Suzuki Roshi. But I didn't accept all of Buddhism either. And whenever I work with a teaching, I'm trying to see if it actually makes sense the way it's presented.

[64:04]

Yeah, okay, so that's, I'm talking about the four foundations of mindfulness. Okay, so now let me go back again to, I'm sorry, Sophia. Now, it's not just fatherly affection that makes me talk about her. It's a rare opportunity to study another human being, another being, very closely. Es ist diese seltene Gelegenheit, ein anderes menschliches Wesen so nah zu beobachten. Okay. And I'm also reacting to debating with... Und ich beziehe mich auch auf das Diskutieren mit oder Überlegen von... Yeah, that this idea of oceanic consciousness...

[65:22]

Yeah, so I'm speaking about that too. Now, what do I mean by oceanic consciousness? From ocean. Yeah, ocean-like consciousness. Yeah, and at least it used to be in my reading, I would find this in psychological reading, oceanic consciousness. as some undifferentiated experience of oneness, which was usually considered a kind of infantile regression. A regression to a time when you experienced everything without duality.

[66:25]

And this term was sometimes used to dismiss all spirituality. Somehow enlightenment, samadhi, oneness and so forth were considered some kind of delusive infantile regressions. People say these things and they read them in books and they say, oh, that's interesting. But what I felt was, whoever's writing this, is in a one-size-fits-all reality. Do you have that expression in German, one size fits all?

[67:41]

Like you buy socks, they fit anybody. So we call it just unit size. Unit size, a unit size reality. Yeah. And such a writer couldn't imagine or any other possibility. But I also saw in such writers or theorists a kind of delusion of permanence, of an implicit permanence. Verwirrung von impliziter Beständigkeit. Yeah. And because the feeling was you're not creating, this oneness can't be a real experience. Also das Gefühl, man schafft nichts, nicht, diese Erfahrung, sorry again.

[68:46]

An experience of oneness. Diese Erfahrung von Einsheit. Can't be something you're creating or is real in the world. It has to be something you experienced as a child that you're bringing back up. Anyway. Okay. So let me go over a little bit again a little more in detail what I see happening with Sophia. She's born with an uncoordinated body. Everything just moves around. And we can watch her establishing a kind of headquarters, body headquarters. And then the next step is she begins to put together a sense hub or a sense center.

[69:54]

she's hearing things and seeing things but at first they're not connected and after a while though she can hear something and look toward the sound so she puts together some kind of sense center Yeah, and then she starts putting together some kind of consciousness center. Yeah, where she's again like beginning to be able to put intention into her arm. And what's going to happen next, and she's always already at the very beginning, she's going to put together these three centers, the body center, the sense field center, and the consciousness center.

[71:20]

Together with language. Yeah, it's going to be a kind of, I think, parallel process. And consciousness and ability to articulate all these centers will happen through language. And then she'll get a very closely wedded relationship between consciousness and language. Yeah, now I think it's up to us as parents and us as a culture how wedded consciousness and language is. And certainly one of the things practice is trying to do is separate them.

[72:26]

And then she develops a kind of self-identity. And she's also developing an observing consciousness or awareness. And I don't think that observing consciousness is the same as self-identity. But unless we know they're different, they get conflated or they just basically get melded together. Now, I don't know if all this is true. This is what I observe. In a similar way, I observe how I function and just as much as I can how others function. Okay.

[73:45]

Now again, can we separate the observing, can she grow up feeling the observing awareness is not the same as self-identity? If it's possible, you're bringing her up as a Buddhist, I would say. Okay. Okay. Now, what's, okay, I often use this example. If I hold this object up, and you concentrate on it, and this is called a nyoi, something Sukhiroshi gave me, and originally it was a back scratcher.

[74:51]

So it's a teaching staff because it reaches anywhere. And it's also kind of natural and unnatural. You see the grain of the wood, but it's strangely bent. So if I hold this up, and you look at it with some concentration, we create what we could call a consciousness arises. would be it, which is a little different, if it's a flower or the baby or something like that. Okay. So we could call it a nyoyi consciousness. Okay, and as I always do, if I take it out of sight, But you stay concentrated.

[76:16]

What have you got now? You're concentrated, but there's no object of concentration. Now you could say the object of your concentration is the field of concentration itself. The field of concentration or the field of mind becomes the object of concentration. We can say that's samadhi. Samadhi is when mind is concentrated on itself. Samadhi bedeutet, wenn der Geist auf sich selbst konzentriert ist. And when samadhi is really stable, you can bring an object back into it and examine it from the state of concentration.

[77:18]

Okay, so what happens is every object creates a field of mind. No matter how concentrated you are, if you're unconcentrated, it still creates to some extent a field of mind. And that field of mind goes unnoticed. Because it's not consciousness. It's a field of mind itself. It's behind the objects of consciousness. Okay. Now, we don't usually notice this field of mind. Or a field of awareness.

[78:29]

But you're creating it. In a way, it's your life achievement. the more this field of mind is stabilized, all in all, I'd say the more psychologically healthy you are, and the more the more your experience of yourself is only in the realm of consciousness, the more you tend to be easily destabilized or emotionally upset and so forth.

[79:40]

At least, I'm not talking about anything I've read. I'm talking about what I see and experience. Yeah, and I've never talked about this exactly. Someone said to me, when I was speaking yesterday, Someone said, another person said that they got a feeling for what I meant when I said languages swept away. And someone else said, isn't this a bit like not naming things? Yes, it's related. Okay, but we have, okay, the practice of instead of thinking about things, you name them.

[81:00]

Yeah, person. You can use your name, Akash, Mahakavi. Akash or Mahakavi. Tree. Grass. You don't think about it, you just name it. And let your mind settle in the name. And in a way you've taken the name out of language, out of the syntax of language. If your mind is caught in language, It's entangled in language. But if you just say a name, you can drop the name in a way you can't drop language. So if you just practice naming, Take a few days and go through, just name something, flower.

[82:24]

Garden. Like that. And after a while you find you can drop the names. And look at things unmediated by words even, or names. That's where Colin, like the one I gave you last night, comes from. Can you show me, tell me a word that has not yet been spoken? Can you tell me a thought that hasn't yet been thought?

[83:26]

Such statements come out of people who practiced enough to take the names off things. And what's there when you take the contextualization of names away? Now we can call these all formulas or these practices are kind of formulas. Alchemical transformative formulas. And you really have to do them. You have to take some time and name everything and then let the names drop away. This is a fairly gentle practice. Yeah, and quite refreshing. But if we're talking about an ocean of... Wenn wir aber über einen Ozean der Nicht-Dualität sprechen, lässt euch das davon einen Geschmack bekommen, lässt euch darin warten,

[84:54]

Get wet a bit. But it doesn't duck you underwater. And Sashin can duck you underwater. And sometimes you go, give me a word, I need to breathe. It takes a while to learn to breathe underwater. Yeah, but we're all, it's, you know, it's, you know, naming, peeling the names off. We're still trying to move into the same area where we do not need language in order to know. Thoughts that have never been thought are appearing all the time. Now, normal development differs in various cultures, of course, but all in all, I'd say normal development of a child is into some kind of consciousness.

[86:33]

I don't think she will develop awareness unless she practices. Although growing up in a Sangha, hopefully she can get taste of awareness. She can get weighed in awareness. Mm-hmm. Yeah, now, Yeah. When you're in Sashin and you're sitting and suddenly and you're particularly painful and every, you know, everything hurts.

[87:49]

Yeah. And suddenly it goes away. For some reason it goes away. Just washes out of your body. And you sit there for a few moments. Or maybe even a period or two periods. As if you're nothing but air. Nothing's there to hurt. The structures are gone. I would say you're waiting in awareness. It's the structures of consciousness hurt where awareness doesn't hurt. So Sashin is something that, through a rather painful process sometimes, can give us a taste, a feeling for an immersion in awareness.

[88:54]

Taste for awareness. Immersion in awareness. Okay. Now, I'm not saying an adept practitioner doesn't feel grief or doesn't suffer. Or if you hit him or her with a hammer, she won't feel anything. Though I knew this crazy acupuncture Chinese guy who had me hit him with a hammer regularly. He was really a Chinese show-off. And he used acupuncture needles as long as this and big curved things. Yeah. When he found out I knew this quite famous Qigong master in San Francisco,

[90:09]

You were studied by the Stanford Research Institute and stuff. He got into this thing, I can do anything he can do. And really, he gave me a hammer. He said, hit me, hit me. It was quite amazing. Every place I aimed, he moved all his chi there, and it was, you know, just sort of bounced off. It was somewhat impressive. But in general, you hit somebody with a hammer, it hurts. But the more you're simultaneously immersed in awareness, you're also simultaneously free of suffering.

[91:44]

Now we're talking in a practical way what it means in the Four Noble Truths about there's freedom from suffering. Yes, and it's not simply a matter of freedom from psychological suffering. It's a freedom from how you are now structured through practice. which comes from the structuring that you have now through practicing.

[92:34]

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