Something like you know or you understand that you're connected with everyone. You're not separated. You understand that. It makes sense to me. You feel it to some extent. Habit. Another way of understanding. You understand that you're separate. and independent of other people. That's an animal, isn't it? Right? Yeah. So we have these two. And when I integrate them in that way, then that active in that way, to some extent, that makes stronger that way. It makes that way stronger. That develops that habit of active from the point of view of I'm here, and I which is separate from you.

[01:02]

And that's what we call karma. I, the actor, do these things in this world. And then that creates that way of functioning, creates the world, a world that sort of reflects back. I do things by myself. Other people do things by themselves. They do things to me. I do things to them. We're independent, and we make a world based on that way of seeing things. And that world has risen. And you can see it to some extent. And sometimes when that world, as that world manifests, sometimes it's like almost we almost sometimes almost 100% forget about the other point of view. Like there's almost no sign of it at all. Like we really think this other person is not us. And we can't even remember a shred And we want to actually get rid of them entirely, sometimes.

[02:04]

Or get complete control of them, sometimes. These kind of things happen, where this other view is almost not present at all. So if we actually see the world, if we could actually see the world, mostly from this other way of seeing how we're interconnected, and acted from that. That way of acting is not karma. That's enlightenment in action. So in fact, when you see how your life just appears, your personal life, you can still see yourself as a person, when you see how this personal life, this personal existence, just appears constantly, moment by moment, through everybody else. So then you see and understand interdependence of your life with all other beings.

[03:10]

And also you could see that other beings depend on your life and depend on each other. This is the vision of the Buddha, to see this interconnectedness and to see it like that completely thorough. And not even to see it as external, but to be totally nothing but that vision. And then acting from that vision, you're going to act independently. But your actions arise, everybody comes forth and gives you your life, and then your life, what it gives you, produces action. So your action is not your own personal creation anymore. You're acting for the whole universe. This is enlightened vision. And of course, in that situation, you do nothing but act for other beings, by other beings, through other beings. And in that vision, all egotistical views are totally available. They're flowing all around and doing their thing.

[04:13]

But they're all supporting you and giving you life, rather than you have a life, which is . Egotism is just part of what gives you life. But it's not the major thing that gives you life. It's just one of the things that gives you life. . They are both the enlightened simultaneously with this egotistical view, completely together. Now, some people feel that it's only the egotistical view that's all they have a sense of it. They only have a vague, soft, fluffy sense of this other thing. or almost zero. So it sometimes seems that there can be delusion all by itself. And some people feel like that. But enlightened beings always feel like the delusion is completely with them. Enlightened vision is inseparable from deluded vision.

[05:15]

A deluded vision does not feel any connection to enlightened vision. So the root, which I propose, which is kind of surprising to people, the root to the realization of the enlightened vision is not by trying to think in enlightened ways, although it's OK to think in enlightened ways. It's just that to try to think in enlightened ways is more deluded than just thinking in deluded ways. Whatever way you try to think, it's deluded. Whatever way you try to think, it's deluded. You can think of something by yourself. So when you try to think in these better and better ways, it's probably better to think in better and better ways than to think in worse and worse ways. But the best way is to realize that whatever way you think is delusion. In other words, that you're studying delusion.

[06:19]

You're responsible for taking responsibility for your deluded thoughts. When you take full responsibility for your deluded thoughts, then you realize enlightened vision. But taking full responsibility for your deluded thoughts requires complete pure mindfulness, complete courage, complete patience, complete compassion, complete wisdom. You have to actually see exactly how you're deluded, not just sort of say, OK, I'm deluded. I'll sign. So you're deluded. How are you deluded right now? Specifically, exactly how you're deluded. And also what's required, which I'm emphasizing right now, is you have to fully express your delusion, which a lot of people, especially Zen students, kind of try to hold back and try to hold their delusion in check.

[07:22]

But then if you hold the illusion in check, you can squish it down and put it in a box behind you somewhere. And it just controls your life. It just sits in your head and tells you what to do all the time. You're totally a slave of it. But what it is. So what you need to do is you need to express it. Bring it out here where you can see it and say, oh. Oh, there's the delusion. Okay, and I take responsibility. I take credit for it. I own up to that delusion. When you see the delusion as it is, you see, oh, here's the self that does all these things. Here's the self that does all these things. Here's the self that does karma. You see that relationship. Pretty soon you have a chance to see, actually, it's the other way around. All the things you think you are doing are doing you. A switch can occur. You're totally there. To put your delusion out there, again, requires mindfulness, courage, patience.

[08:27]

To put your delusion out there unmindfully is not really putting it out there. It's just kind of like putting on a consolation prize version, some summary, some approximation, some delusion, rather than a clear vision of the delusion. In other words, you can have a wise presentation of the delusion. And you can tell the difference between your delusion and other people's delusion. That's not my delusion. And you can see how your self arises there. Exactly how you tell yourself from other self. That's not mine. That's not my smell. That's not my thought. That's not my passion. That's not my taste. That's not my body. That's kind of surprising to people to hear that.

[09:31]

So the way to unify those two worlds and have the egotistical one not to bring it out in front and really give it its full expression. Full expression of egotistical view is not indulgence of it, objection. No expression is to put it out just like it is function. It has to give it exactly its life. No more, no less. And it's the same to give each person that you meet exactly their due, their function, just as they are. No more, no less. Each flower You should know exactly what to do. Yeah.

[10:32]

So the Buddha never acted like the Buddha. Not a Buddha acted like himself. So Buddha was a person who suffered in a particular way that was characteristic of himself. And he finally got to a place where he acted just like he was. And then he was enlightened. And somebody told me that they recently heard the story of Buddha's enlightenment night. They heard it again. They heard it many times, but it struck home this time. He sat there and he said, I'm not going to move until I settle this matter that I'm concerned with here. And then Mara came and I guess first the hostile energies came.

[11:34]

and just try to scare them away. Just stay present. Then the more alluring, seductive energies came. Just stay present in the face of those. I think Mara said something like, there's different versions of it, but one version is, I am master of the universe. You have no right to sit here. This is my world. You don't have a right to be here. And then the Buddha touched the earth to see if the earth would support him having that address. And the Buddha said, sit right there, boy. That's where you're supposed to be. And then he didn't. In other words, you can be who you are. And that's what he did. He was himself at that time. Completely.

[12:37]

This is all the same. A rooted person. And he realized exactly what a rooted person was, and that's enlightenment. Yes. No, no, no. They don't very often say to do that. Many people don't say, try to see things the way an enlightened person sees things. I haven't heard much instruction like that. Have you? Sometimes they say, see everyone as Buddha. But when you try to see everyone as Buddha, that's not the way enlightened people see Buddha. They don't project Buddha onto people.

[13:38]

They see regular people. And then they see the regular people just like they are. That's Buddha. There aren't Buddhas out there and then regular people. And then the Buddhas get projected onto the regular people. Regular people, that's all we've got, the Buddhas. There aren't some other Buddhas. So you see other people as Buddha doesn't mean you start to see little bumps on their head. But actually, if you watch carefully other people, you'll start to see bumps on their head. They'll start to turn gold. But if you try to see them as golden, then you'll miss them. That's because you don't see that the person already who deserves your attention as they are. If you don't have this ordinary person with whom you feel some pain, your attention, openness, then you won't be able to see the Buddha.

[14:52]

Usually, when we meet people, we close our heart to them. If we close our heart to them, it means we close our heart to the pain we feel. So when we can't see them, our eyes shut. My eyes shut closed, closed down. I used to like Mose Allison. And to my hometown, Minneapolis, I would always try to go see him. I moved to San Francisco, and he lived right down the street. He played down two blocks from Zen Center. I never went to see him because he was always close to me. So if the Buddha was around, some of you people wouldn't wait for a few weeks, maybe. If you knew he was going to be around for several years, you might say, well, I'll make a appointment next week. But if we all knew, we only had just a few seconds,

[15:55]

I don't think any of us would pass it up. Maybe we would because we're afraid some of us might go, I'm not really going to take up a lot of time. But we really knew that he had nobody else to see. He just came here to see us. And the schedule was open. We went to his home. To meet each person. Not trying to meet them with that kind of respect. That's how people care. And then that doesn't contradict your taking responsibility for your delusion. You could read me right there and say, I'm giving this person my full attention. I'm treating this person . And actually, you know, I kind of have these judgmental attitudes toward them. Like I think this person's not that good a Zen student or something. Or I think this person, I have these negative thoughts about this person. But I'm treating the person just like I treat them.

[16:56]

That's how Buddha would have negative thoughts towards some person. Buddha might have a thought, you know. Buddha's brain or Buddha's antenna might tune in. Sleazeball. Temporarily, that thought might be running across Buddha's mind. Sleazeball. But Buddha, being enlightened, would treat the person in front of him with the utmost love and respect, even though temporarily I've bottled it in my mind. Well, it depends. If he was talking to certain people, he might say, Here I am looking at you, my dear disciple. And I just thought, sweet boy. Buddha could tell, you know, if you trusted him enough.

[18:01]

And some people, you can talk to them, and they know you love them so much, and you can actually tell them what's actually running through your mind. You can say, blah, blah, blah, blah. You can say these amazing things you have, and just tell them, because... They know you love them, and you do love them. And you know that you're telling them just because you're telling them what a kind of trashy mind you have at the moment. But I know this other lady I knew, and I actually liked her very much. And every time I saw her, I thought, or sometimes I tell them. That's what I always thought every time I saw her, because she was just, you know, she was shaped like this, you know. So I thought, I tell you. But you know, she did not know the extent of my love. I had not shown it to her. She did not understand my affection for her.

[19:06]

So I never could tell her. I never could say it to her. I never felt like she would think that that was really affectionate and appreciative. So I never told her. It's a beautiful altar. We made it. So sometimes if you don't think it's going to be helpful to tell people certain things, you can't tell them. Acting phony? Yeah, well, I think it's... What's acting phony?

[20:08]

Not saying what's on your mind. You said two different things. Not saying what's on my mind, for me, is not acting phony. The fact that I don't say everything that comes through my mind is not acting phony. I said everything that's been going through my mind. No. You people would just gag me, I know. So I don't have to find out what you were doing to me if I told you. It's not funny. The little bit I let you know about it is sufficient for you to know that I'm crazy. Everything, so like rub it in, you know. Okay, we got the message. Thanks, it's enough. So I'm not being phony. I'm not letting you know how crazy I am. If you really want to know, I'll tell you. So the people who I do tell say, that's enough. That's not funny. Why don't you have something on your mind about someone that's really getting in the way of being a .

[21:19]

Yeah, well, if you start studying, that's the point, is if you start studying your egotistical patterns, your selfish mode of operation, you start to see that come in certain categories. Certain categories account for all the different types of experiences we have. And it isn't an additional category called me or self that owns these. So actually, none of these belong to somebody. However, it is not somebody else's . But sometimes, because someone else can't express something or is rejecting some feeling, because of the way they reject it, See, their body shows you they're holding something back.

[22:23]

And you can sort of intuitively sense what they're holding back, and you have a feeling for them. Or when someone's having an experience of pushing you away, so they don't get lost. And you're trying to keep each other involved. We're all trying to keep each other alive. up until the point that one of us really wants to not live. And then we all have to let that person go. So if a person's ready to stop being a person, stop being alive, let them. And they send a message back to us, let us go. If we won't say OK, it's hard for them to do it, because we're holding them. And of course, some people not letting us go, giving us that message, would be more disheartening than others. because we have some people, even though we're connected to everybody. It's good not to confuse whose body's having what experience, even though we're very responsive to each other.

[23:33]

You know, one time I was sitting in the zendo here, I looked at somebody across the Zendo, and I forgot what they did. They did something. And then I saw a ghost of that person. And I realized, it seemed to me, my realization was that the ghost that I saw was created by my not fully aware person. I had an experience of it in which I did not fully, I wasn't fully participating.

[24:52]

And as a result, this kind of ghost appeared right around me. It looked like a person, but it was like, you know, it was like kind of an unsatisfied, unsatisfied kind of yearning phantom of a person. Well, kind of like right around me, going on to move slightly. I think it was because the situation, they haven't moved much. So I could see I was watching the person. And then, but I wasn't creating when I started painting. I sort of noticed, I put the two together because I kind of was aware of my lack of presence with my experience. But I was present enough with a later experience to see the ghost and to remember that I wasn't paying attention to them the same way. in the later moment than there was in the earlier moment.

[25:52]

So my feeling is that for ourselves, we create ghosts of our past experience by lack of . And our psyche wants us to come back and feel that fully. We feel haunted by experiences that we haven't lived. And it's another thing that happens with other people who die who we don't let go. They feel that we can hold people back. And I've heard of and seen some cases of some people moving towards dying And the people they love the most are obligated to tell them not to read. And then the people who are trying to read become psychotic because they want to go and they want to stay. They really have had enough of this.

[26:54]

But they feel like the people who they love are telling them you can't live without you. The way they resolve it is becoming psychotic, which is they aren't going, and they can't, and they don't want to really go along, and they don't want to disappoint the other person, but they can't really, there's no way to resolve the conflict with their present situation so they become psychotic. And then the story, when the person says, okay, okay, you can go, they come back, they become sane again, and they die. Basically, whatever it is, it's already happened. Most of the stuff we're afraid of is already happened. What we're afraid of is the pain that's already happened, which is understandable. Kids, or even young, older, various age groups, in other words,

[28:01]

that they take responsibility to experience. In fact, they feel like they won't survive. And in fact, they're right to the extent that they didn't feel it and they did survive. So in some sense, it was, in some sense, something good about it because it's flowed here. Our enlightened nature wants now more than that. Now it wants to go back and fully experience the things we didn't experience. It's not exactly going back exactly, Feel it now again fully. Feeling it now again fully. Okay, that's all it wants. It loses it well. It never had power. What has power is our self-protective motives inappropriately required. Then they have power over us. If you try to protect yourself by not experiencing some experience, then that self-protectiveness has power over you. But then your healthy side of you says, no.

[29:04]

Forget about the self-protectedness. That's inappropriately applied. Come back and feel this. And the power over us is not exactly power over us. It's like requesting us to do what's healthy for us. So in some sense, power over us, you could say, or the power to draw to invite us to come back and feel it. Because if you do them, then you're done. Now you can move on. So when I looked at the person in the visual impression, it wasn't so much a feeling. It was a visual thing. out of not experiencing a visual thing. But the feeling things are not necessarily the ghost of the person. It's the ghost in your own feeling department. So you make a feeling ghost that haunts you, haunts you, haunts you, and says, When are you going to feel this? That was a visual ghost who says, when are you going to see this? Smell ghosts, taste ghosts, touch ghosts. If somebody touches you and you don't fully feel it, perhaps even a .

[30:08]

Can you imagine someone touches you in a way that's pleasurable and you don't fully experience it and that haunts you for years? You'll haunt for years a pleasurable touch that you couldn't accept at the time. That was so much what you wanted that you didn't dare to feel it. And your body says, go back and feel that. And you go back and feel it, and you're now haunted by that pleasure. It can even be a pleasure that you thought you would freak out if you thought the pleasure, but the pleasure then haunts you, and you yearn for that pleasure. It would be a concentration ghost, a state of concentration that you couldn't stand.

[31:19]

You entered into a state of concentration, but then you couldn't stand how wonderful it was, so you flinched. You were haunted for years by that concentration state that you didn't fully experience. But if you fully experience some wonderful state of concentration, then you can let it go. That's it. It can be meditators often haunted by meditation states which they don't fully experience. And therefore, they're not ready to let go. Does this make sense? So in all these ways, you can make these ghosts. Well, the way I recommend it is that you don't try to go back, but you just be present to practice upright sitting, and the stuff will come to visit you. And if you're practicing formal settings endo, or practicing upright digging a trench, or practicing upright cutting vegetables and making beds, or having dinner, or talking to somebody upright, I say, if you're upright, this stuff comes flashing by.

[32:36]

And if the stuff isn't flashing by, an upright doctor. It's probably like leaving some of this block from being represented to you. If you curl up in a ball, you know, this stuff won't come back. You sit like this, you know, you say, well, we need this stuff dealt with, but if we do so, we're not going to waste our time banging on your back. But if you sit up straight and in a balance,

[33:10]

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