At the beginning I asked you about what, you know, to look inside and see what the most important thing in your life is. Or as Suzuki Roshi used to say, what's your inmost request? And so I have this, this is a vow, an inmost request of Dogen that he wrote to express his inmost request. And then after he expresses it, he goes on to say some other interesting things. So I thought you might want to get an example. another disciple of Buddha's inmost or deepest concern. Would you like to recite it together?

[01:34]

So the title of it is Eihei Koso Hotsugamon. Eihei's name is Eihei Dogen, and koso means lofty priest, and gan means vow, and mon means verse. So it's a verse. Hotsu means to give rise to. So it's the verse giving rise to the vow of the Zen teacher, Ehe Dogen. We vow with all beings from this life to hear the true Dharma, that upon hearing it, no doubt will arise in us, nor will we lag in faith, that upon meeting it, We shall announce worthy affairs in the midst of the Buddha Dharma. And to do so, the Great Earth and all living beings together will attain the Buddha Way.

[02:43]

Although our past evil karma has us greatly accumulated, indeed, being the cause and addition of obstacles in our sitting way, may all Buddhas and accessors who have attained the good way be compassionate to us and forgive us for part of the effects, allowing us to transform this way into the hindrance. May they share with us their vocation, with the skills of our missionaries, with their spiritual life and their teachings. Buddhas and ancestors of all worlds, we in the future shall be Buddhas and ancestors. We are very Buddhas and ancestors. We are one Buddha and one ancestor, a way and a body-mind. We are one body-mind. He tried to say the same in their passion, but was really eloquent in it. We are able to sing with an echo of interest.

[03:47]

Therefore, the Shaman Master certainly would have said, those who had his eyes were not enlightened, not only enlightened. His eyes saved the body, which is the fruit of many lives. Before, it was more enlightened. They were the same as we. The enlightened people of today are exactly as those of old. Why haven't we explored the farthest reaches of these causes and conditions as it is practiced in the exact transmission of the verified Buddha? Convexing and repenting in this way, one never fails to receive profound help from all Buddhas and ancestors. By revealing and disclosing our lack of faith and practice before the Buddha, we melt away the root of transgressions by the power of confession and repentance. This is the purest and most color of true practice, of the true line of faith, of the true body of faith.

[04:52]

I'd like to say thank you to all of you, and I'd like to say thank you to, I guess, Tim and Deborah, who sort of led the organization of the retreat. Is that right? Thank you very much for your efforts. I got the sense at the beginning of the retreat that you were already pretty tired out from all the work of getting it together, so I really felt Sorry for you. But at the same time, grateful that you did this for your friends. Thank you. Thank you. And Amy, I think, you know, as you can see, did a great job of pulling together the kitchen practice. Excellent. And of course, almost all of you also work in the kitchen, I guess. So thank you for doing your part. And thank you for wholeheartedly participating in the meditation practice.

[06:10]

You did a great job. Thank you. We wrote notes to you. And we wrote this. Is there anything you'd like to discuss at this time? I had the one question about when you make a commitment to bread, or to something else, to moral, to ethic, morality. How is that?

[07:10]

I want you to remember my thought on this. If you're making the commitment, how is that different from carrying yourself into the room? Yeah, so you can actually, this is something you can witness. You can witness sometimes it happen, maybe, that there's room entering. Actually, you know, the word for going to see the teacher in Zen is room entry or room entering. It doesn't say, you know, you enter the room, I enter the room. Just the practice of going to see the teacher is called room entering. It also could be translated as inside the room. So this thing can dependently co-arise called being inside the room or entering the room. But this other thing can... And that's like...

[08:12]

the conditions of being in a room arise and you're there. But it can also be the way that you're there and then the room comes and you go in the room. So when it comes to the arising of a vow of making a commitment to practice the Bodhisattva precepts, to practice, to commit yourself to... moral life, that can be something with you are already here and then you come forward and you act on the moral commitment. You do it. And you can feel that, that that's your perspective. And again, that's kind of a deluded approach to a necessary thing. We have to make moral commitment. And so most of us would do it from this point of view of, I did it. The other way it can happen is you could be like sitting someplace and you could just feel this thing arising in you, you know, like maybe like you might feel even like something like you might hear the sound of a bell and suddenly you feel there's a wish

[09:41]

to wholeheartedly practice the way. And you don't feel like you made it, it just feels like, sort of like it comes with the bell. It's the same intention in a way, but in one case it's something that's done by this independent self who was there before it happened and did it. The other case it was like the sound of the bell came, the experience of the bell rose, and then the experience of wishing to make this, wishing to live this way arose. And just like the conditions came together for the bell, like the sound and the organ that can hear sound, the organ that's sensitive to sounds, and the arising of the consciousness of the sounds comes together, in dependency on the sound and the ear organ, the ear consciousness arises.

[10:44]

That's the way the Buddha would account for hearing a sound. There's no kind of like agent on top of that in the account of hearing the sound. Okay? So then there's like the thought of moral commitment, the mind which can, the mind organ which can be sensitive to that, and the mind consciousness arises. That actually does happen sometimes, and there's no agent there. So you can tell when that happens sometimes, you can notice, it happened but I didn't do it. Like I was thinking, I don't know when I was, I was thinking just a few minutes ago, I was actually, I was looking at the, at the propellers on the fan, and I was thinking of the years when I was the abbot of Zen Center. And various things happened during those years at Zen Center. But, you know, I really didn't feel like I did any of them.

[11:48]

And I also didn't feel like I hindered them, really. I mean, I didn't stop them. They happened. I didn't try to stop them either, most of them. But they happened. Various things happened. But I never really felt like I did them. I just felt like, well, they happened while I was abbot. flowers bloomed, babies were born, people got sick and died, buildings were built, practice periods happened, people studied, people meditated, there were ordinations, there were funerals, there was happiness, there was sadness. All this stuff happened for nine years, and I didn't do any of it. I just sat there in the middle of it all. And That's really how it seemed to me. I really didn't feel like I did it. And I didn't. And I didn't feel like I should get any credit.

[12:54]

And I didn't. So they said, we don't need you anymore, go away. So you can see, sometimes you can be blessed with a vision of seeing that that's how things happen. But even if the moral commitment happens in this deluded way, it still has to happen somehow. You need it. And maybe it doesn't happen in the enlightened way. But you can see that it's not the enlightened way. You can see that you think you did it. And then you probably feel maybe proud of yourself for thinking such a good thought and having such a good feeling. I remember just what comes to my mind is one time I was driving around the corner in the mountains in a car, and I came around the corner and I saw a bunch of people gathered on the other side of the highway, you know, and I saw a motorcycle tipped over.

[14:02]

And I kind of thought, well, maybe somebody had an accident. And then I saw the guy lying on the ground, and I saw the blood, and I got this piercing feeling. And it kind of hurt. But then I felt happy because I thought, yeah, it's right that it kind of hurts me to see this guy bleeding. But I didn't think I made that happen. And I wasn't proud of myself. I just felt good that I felt connected with a stranger who was suffering. But I didn't feel like I made it happen. It was like a surprise. I was just driving along, see this guy, blood, pain, happiness. I didn't make any of that happen. I just kept driving. It's a little harder to have that feeling about driving, though. One time somebody was giving Suzuki Roshi a ride back from Tassajara, chauffeuring him.

[15:04]

And I think they said to him, Roshi, how come you don't drive? And he says, too dualistic. You know, you drive the car. And the person who told me the story said, so you let me do the dualistic thing. But it's hard not to get into, I drive the car. It's not impossible, though. If he practiced harder, longer, he probably could have learned how to drive a car in a non-dualistic way of just the coming forth of all the conditions to realize a driver. It can be that way sometimes. Matter of fact, you probably know that it is sometimes that way. without necessarily that you're spaced out. You just, you can feel all the conditions coming together and driving's happening, but you don't feel like you're doing it. But it's a little harder, maybe. Yeah, it depends, it depends.

[16:08]

Enlightenment depends on things just like delusion does. But anyway, you can see the difference between those two ways, and you can kind of see the difference if you watch, you can kind of see. Again, I often do this diagram. This is the world, okay, or the universe, okay? And this is the universe, and there's one more thing. There's a universe plus one thing, and what is that thing? What? Yeah, it's me. It's what? Yeah, it's the independent self. The world plus one thing. Now, we don't think there's the world plus, you know, Jim. He knows. And he's the only one who knows. Nobody thinks there's a world plus somebody else.

[17:24]

Even your baby. You don't think there's a world plus your baby. But you do think there's a world plus of all people. What a coincidence. There's a world plus me. Most people understand this for some reason. And there's the other experience, okay? The other experience is there's the world and something's missing. You know, it's like the world and... There's the world. There's the world and then... Isn't there something else besides the world? Let's see, there's the world, there's all you guys and there's the retreat center and there's lunch and... Isn't there something else? Oh, I know what that is. It's me. That's enlightenment. Except it usually doesn't take that long to fill in the hole. Usually it comes, when the things come, you're there pretty quickly.

[18:27]

But sometimes there's a little gap. And then you can see, oh, it's me that's, that's the one thing that's missing, because there is you, really. It's not that there's not you, it's just you're not an additional thing to the universe. Even though it kind of looks like that. We all kind of feel that way. But that makes it easier when you have yourself sticking out there, because it's easier to take care of yourself, right? Because you know right where you are, and you know who to be concerned for. That's probably efficient. Because you've got yourself. And then you can have all your little friends like... Otherwise, you know, you might get lost in the shuffle, right? But actually not, you won't get lost in the shuffle.

[19:30]

The world will support you. Everybody will take care of you. They won't forget you. They won't drop you off the edge of the universe. And you can feel the difference. So that's why if you pay attention to that teaching you can watch it and sometimes you see it pivot from one side to the other because it pivots on you. That's why we're talking about self-realization and understanding the self and realizing the self or the self-fulfilling samadhi. Self's in there. Even Avalokiteshvara's name is observing the self-existence, observing the way the self exists. The bodhisattva is looking at the self. There is a self to meditate on. How does it exist? Well, we know the answer to that question, but can you see it? Watch for it.

[20:31]

Watch for the revelation of, you know, first there was a mountain, then there was no mountain, then there was, right? First there was a self, then it went away, and then it came back. How did that happen? All these conditions came and then there was a self. So you can see this. You can meditate on that. And it can be about actions too. Actions like first there was an action, then there was no action, then there was. How did it come? Watch. Well, there was you and there was me. And there was the room and there was the heat. And there was the smells, and there were the birds, and then there was us. And there was the activity, and there was the dance. Okay? Thank you. Deborah, did you have a question you would like to bring up?

[21:32]

I don't know if I can articulate it very well. Okay. I'll try. I was reading the Kendra Cohn copy, part one, and I was just thinking about the ash in the wood, and I was just... I hear the sense that when Dogen's speaking about that, he's saying that the ash is not contained in the wood, which is our causal mind thinks the ash is contained in the wood, that the molecules just get changed and go into ash. He's saying, this is why we need to understand, That is not the case. They're separate. And I had the sense that at the Pentecostal horizon, D.C., he's saying almost, I think it would be in the sense that things are just created just like that all the time. There's not any really causal. The ultimate reality is there's no causal relationship. There is a causal relationship. There's a causal relationship. It's just that there isn't

[22:34]

like this lingering thing that jumps over from one moment to the other, that sits up above the moment. And then this stuff changes, and this thing goes on, this stuff changes, and this thing's gone. So there's an ash that's been there all the time, and now it's firewood, and now the ash is in the firewood, and then the firewood gets burned, and the ash is stripped away of the firewood, and then there's the ash. And even the molecules in the ash that you could verify, this ash has carbon molecules And you can say, and I think this carbon molecule here was actually in the wood. We can't do that yet. No, we can't. We can't do that. No. Well, we can't prove it anyway. But even if you could say, it would be hard to prove it. Because even if there's carbon molecules here and carbon molecules there, these carbon molecules also arise because of conditions and cease.

[23:38]

And then other carbon molecules arise. because of conditions that cease. These carbon molecules don't also get transferred from the firewood over to the ash. But we think that way. We think that they do, just like we think we do. And that's the thing about rebirth. I have trouble. How does the self get put over into the space between the birth and the death? I mean, the death and the birth. It doesn't. The self doesn't get carried over. It wasn't there in the first place, and it doesn't get transferred over, but there is a causal relationship. So the actions that occur to this body and mind have consequence. If this body and mind studies the consequence of that, is that there can be contemplation, and the consequence is that there can be meditation, and the consequence is that there can be enlightenment. But these things don't get carried over. That's an illusion.

[24:42]

Yeah. Just like also when we look at a wave, you know. Really, it looks like the wave is moving from out in the ocean up to the beach. It's not that's an optical illusion. Really the water is just going up and down. Water goes up here and down there and up here and down there and up here and down there. And we see this thing, this thing here going from there to there to there. You say, well, okay, well energy is getting transmitted. Yeah, that's true. Energy is getting transmitted. But the energies, you don't see that except as it does by raising with the energy. Depending on certain energy, the water goes up. And depending on the energy going away, the water goes away. So the waves, what we see coming, but you could also say, well, OK, it isn't the wave. It's the energy is coming. The energy is moving. But really the energy is arising and ceasing. And so is the arising of the water and the ceasing of the water.

[25:47]

But we don't see arising and ceasing, arising and ceasing, arising and ceasing. We see a thing called a wave going . We see the wave maybe growing. It seems to be growing maybe too. But it's basically the same wave, right? Just like we grow, we're basically the same person. Just like the firewood shrinks, it's basically the firewood is now ash. This is the way we think, and the reasons why we think that way is the dependable arising of us thinking in this incorrect way. And there's lots of other incorrect ways that we think. that are easily shown to us and actually we can unlearn those incorrect ways of thinking. Like some of the ways we think about probabilities and so on and so forth, you know? We can learn how to change the way we think about mathematical reality.

[26:47]

By learning, by studying. When you first ask people certain mathematical questions, most uneducated groups, 99% will get it wrong. And you can teach the group, and a half an hour later, 100% of them get it right. And you can ask them a similar question, and they even can remember what their previous intuition would be about the answer. but they learn something so that they don't believe that mistake, they know this other way of dealing with it. So you can do that way with your perceptions too. Our minds can be transformed by studying teachings. Yes? Say it again. That's already a label. Yeah. It's our dualistic minds.

[27:54]

Great. The reason there's the word fire is the ash. Yes. And it creates a false connection. Yeah, that's part of the dependent core arising of the illusion. Language. And then language, once you've got language, you're cued into the projection of essences onto things. So that's part of how it happens. So actually in that song where it says, who can explain it, who can tell you why? Fools give you reasons, wise men never try. Actually, wise men do try to tell you how you get enchanted. They do. They explain to you how to get enchanted. Fools rush in. Hmm?

[28:55]

They're wise men who try. Anything else you would like to bring up? Yes? There's a phrase that sometimes arises spontaneously within me when things are going well. Something like, life is good. Yeah. I don't know how to ask what I'm asking. Is that a delusion? No, it's not. It could be not a delusion. Spontaneously does not mean without cause.

[29:56]

Spontaneously means basically without an external cause. Okay? So you're sitting there and this thought arises in your mind, life is good. That arises because of conditions. For example, language, language education, having a brain that was stimulated by language and language education, maybe some positive sensation. Maybe some wisdom, throw a little wisdom in there. Maybe someone being kind to you. These conditions come together in this thought, life is good arises. It's spontaneous means you don't have to have an external thing called you making it happen. You are sitting there and you're one of the conditions too for this thought.

[31:02]

And it arises, and spontaneous in the sense that you don't sit there thinking, I think I'll think that life is good. Now, you can think like that, actually. You can say, I think I'll sit down and think that life is good. I think I'll sit down and meditate on how good life is. Okay, life is good. As you know, some people who are having a hard time You know, what they do is they sit down in a chair and they say, I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm all right, I'm okay, I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy. I'm going to make it through the next few minutes, I'm okay. And sometimes their therapist says, go ahead and say that, that's fine. They can't, they don't trust it, they just sit there. It will come up in them. I think I'll make it, I think I'll make it through this moment. So anyway, that's spontaneous things that can happen. They actually do happen that way. It's just that we add something to them usually. Somebody's scooping up credit for this.

[32:03]

But they really happen spontaneously and then somebody tries to say, that's mine, I did that. Like if something, you know, if some good action happens through you and you just enjoy it, And then somebody comes in and says, who did that? And somebody else says, I did. You go... But before anybody says anything, you maybe feel like, that was nice. You don't necessarily say, I did it. It happened near you, but you don't necessarily feel like, but if somebody else has trick-headed for it, boom, I did it. So it's lurking there to jump on and get credit. But if nobody's getting credit, well, I guess I don't have to either. Especially since nobody's around to tell anyone. One time I was in Japan, and I was sitting someplace, and these words came in my head.

[33:14]

The words came in my head were . You know what that means? . No. So I sat there and I said, Nodo kawaita. Nodo kawaita. I thought, hmm, what does that mean? And I said, oh, I know what it means. It means I'm thirsty. It means actually, it means that the throat, nodo, has become dry. Kawaita is past tense, meaning become dry. So the throat has become dry is a Japanese expression for I'm thirsty. I was sitting there, and the Japanese expression for thirsty came up, and then I realized I am thirsty. But I definitely did not think that I was saying that I'm thirsty in Japanese when I didn't even know how to say it, except I did know how to say it.

[34:16]

As an example of it, it arose, I didn't make it arise, but in the process of finding out what the word meant and that it applied to my condition, I realized the dependable arising of it partly, but the main thing I realized is I didn't make it happen. although I was a condition for it. It's spontaneous, right? You see that? Were you fluent in Japanese when that happened? Well, I wasn't too fluent, but I was fluent enough to have that phrase in my mind, such that when I became thirsty, that phrase came up. Now, a couple days before, I was probably practicing saying, no do kawaita. Okay? Another example, a related example was, but when I said noda kawaita, although I could say it at the right time, I didn't realize that it applied to anything, and I didn't know what it meant.

[35:20]

It also could have been possible that I felt thirsty, felt the thirstiness, and then said noda kawaita, and I probably would have known what it was meant. But I heard the word before I had the sensations. Really, it's probably the sensation came up and the word came up. But I sort of wonder, I got more attracted to the word than the sensation. And then when I found out what the word meant, I realized the sensation was there. These things can happen to our mind, right? Just like, again, you can, like we used the example before, you can be driving down the street and you find yourself stopped at a stoplight. And you look up and it's red. Somehow you stopped the car at the stoplight, but you didn't really notice that you saw it and stepped on the brake. You actually had the sensory impact, your body responded, but you were thinking about, in your case, Hawaii. Aloha!

[36:22]

it's somewhat dangerous but actually it's sometimes not so dangerous because actually you've trained your senses are seeing the light fortunately you were looking ahead rather than off the side so you did see the light when you see that light your body's been trained to step on the brake when you see those red things So, and that can all happen before you know. Just like I also mentioned to somebody, those, what do you call it, those airbags open and close before you even know that they opened. They happen so fast. They go poof, put you back in your seat, and deflate, all that can happen. And all you know is that you've been in an accident. And you didn't go through the windshield, but you didn't see it. But you did register, your body did register the event. in the form of a broken nose or, you know, red cheeks or... You were there, but it was a little too fast for you to conceptualize it.

[37:27]

A lot of things happen, we're totally there, and physical things that you actually can learn to do with your fingers and your feet, you can actually do them in response to something, but it'd be too fast for you to conceptualize that it happens. So in that level of behavior sometimes there's no self-involvement and it's skillful. These things do happen. This is a big part of our life. And we can become more intimate with that. It's possible. And it's good. It's our basic animal life that we can get more intimate with. I think that may be very closely related to what happens when you master an instrument. Yeah. Then once you've mastered it, you slay. Right. Before that, it's work. Yeah. Learning to drive the car, learning to play the tuba. Yeah, or before that, it's like learning and reflecting.

[38:30]

And then you go into sort of the tranquility of it, and then what you've learned is the basis of it, but you're not thinking anymore. It's just happening. You're not even doing it. But you had to get trained first. You have to use your discursive thinking. Mozart said, music is calculating without knowing it. You're doing mathematics all the time, right? But you're not thinking about it anymore. But you did think about it, in his case, probably for many lifetimes. So when he was born, he already knew how to do the calculations. When he was four years old, his little brain was doing all this mathematics. with very little time in his body before he could do it. And by the time he was not very old, he was just doing it without even knowing he... Well, he did know he was doing it, but he could check in and tell you the calculations, but it was so natural after a while. So we can train ourselves to do the calculations of the teachings so that after a while it is kind of spontaneous.

[39:39]

so that you aren't even doing all these nice vows. You're just saying, I wish this person would be happy. I hope this person's happy. But it's coming without you thinking that you're doing it. You just see a person and you just wish that they're happy. You just want the best for them without even going through the process. I think I'll think of a nice thought about them. But it requires training for most people. Because we've got this other program which says, I hope things go well with them after me. I hope they're somewhere near when this good stuff happens to me. Okay. In regard to, I think, co-arising, you eliminate, there's no conceptual thought.

[40:55]

Say, like, you use the stoplight example, or learning an instrument or something, or it's just there. Say, like, a situation, like, if you're walking through the woods, and a bear comes out, and it's coming right at you. There isn't really time to conceptualize anything except terror, maybe on an animal level, you know, in that moment. There isn't time to like think out or, you're not gonna sit there and be like, well, this is kind of colorizing. If I don't run, I could get eaten, if I do run, might or probably will get eaten, or maybe not. You know what I mean? That kind of an intense moment like that, in this realm, I mean, in the human realm, how... Or even in the animal realm, you might immediately have a response. But if, for example, your response might be to run, in which case the bear will most likely chase you and kill you.

[42:02]

So in that case... the animal response would not be skillful. Funny thing. If you were meditating as you're walking along and the bear arose, you might be able to notice the dependent core rising of just animal fear and the impulse to run. And conceptual consciousness might come in there and say, Maybe not. And that might come in there even if you still were, you know, let's say you were meditating but you still hadn't really realized the non-separation or the emptiness of the separation between you and the bear. Let's say you hadn't realized that, but you still might have heard the teaching that it's better not to run from bears. Now, not running from bears does not guarantee that you won't get killed by the bear.

[43:07]

but generally speaking, recommended not to run because they like to chase things. And they don't usually like to eat people. So just to stand there, and also it's recommended not to look at them in the eye, but just get big and make some noise. Don't try to scare them, but just be big and fairly noisy at your best chance, apparently. So you remember that teaching, even if you're still deluded about your relationship with a bear. Now, if you're not deluded about your relationship with the bear, you still might do the same thing that you would do if you heard that teaching. You might be. But you might also access some even greater creativity than that. I don't know. But that's probably maybe the best thing to do. But the animal response might happen, the feeling based on your animal stuff, But I don't know if little kids saw a bear if they would naturally think of running.

[44:14]

I don't know. But that could be a little kid's animal reaction, is that they wouldn't run. Which is why we don't usually let little kids run around by themselves, is because they might not run away from a bear. But you have to teach them that bears are dangerous. Once we've got the idea that bear is dangerous, then we have that animal response. OK, which is actually not so helpful until it is time to run. But that may be, generally speaking, the last resort in this case. So actually, to circumvent what you learned about bears might be good. And not be afraid, because actually your fear doesn't really necessarily help you stand there and be tall for the bear and not look at the bear. So in this case, your animal reaction, I don't know what your animal reaction would be uneducated about bears.

[45:23]

I don't know if humans are naturally afraid of bears. I do not know that. Generally, we're afraid of things bigger than us. Of course, we have that sort of in us, but that might not be helpful. So it's kind of complicated. If you're open to the teaching, then circumventing your natural animal impulse might be what you're getting from the teaching at that moment. Well, there's two teachings. One is conventional teaching about how to relate to bears. The other is the Buddhist teaching about your actual relationship with the bear. This is a dependent core arising in this meeting. Now, of course, I hate to say this, but if you're actually meditating on the truth, you could go through the whole process of the bear eating you, you know, in pretty good shape. You'd be in pain, but you could let the bear eat you without hating the bear or hating yourself for being eaten by the bear.

[46:25]

So you can actually be liberated while you're in the pain of being consumed That's possible, although it would be somewhat painful, because, you know, your nervous system... But you probably would also just pass out. So the thing about... Once you're meditating properly, it doesn't matter that much, I would say, whether you get eaten by the bear or not, because basically you're on the right track. And you're going to die pretty soon anyway, but you're going to die in a good place. So it doesn't matter so much from the point of view of dependent core rising. You know, you're going to die basically loving the bear. You know, you're going to die realizing your intimacy with the bear. And that's fine. That makes a successful life.

[47:28]

There are some things, though, that are more instinctive, like leaning over the edge of a cliff. You don't have to be taught that. That's more like built-in at a certain age. At a certain age, when kids come to cliffs and they don't back up, they just walk off the edge. You know what I mean? There's a certain age when there's that depth thing, they don't have it yet, so they'll crawl to the edge of the bed and just go right over. But when they're a little older, If you put a kid on the ground, like a checkerboard ground, and you have big checkerboards and little checkerboards, when it comes to the little checkerboards, it'll stop. Does that make sense? Because the little checkerboards look like a drop off. So if there's a pattern before the baby, and then the pattern gets finer with a sharp edge, they think it's a cliff, so they stop, even though it's flat. But at a certain age, they'll just walk right over the transition in the pattern into the other area.

[48:40]

And if it were a cliff, they would actually go over the cliff. But at a certain age, and it's about the age that when they start crawling, just slightly, but sometimes they can get crawling a little ahead of when a thing happens. And sometimes it comes after they start crawling. So if it's before, no problem. But if it comes after, some kids could crawl over a cliff. So that's why you have to watch them. But at a certain age, you don't have to watch them anymore. They won't do it. Like my grandson, he's very careful. When he was coming to stairs, it was very easy to teach him to not go down like this. Turn around and go down like this. Because when he came to the edge, he did not want to step over there. But he wanted to get across the area, but he knew he shouldn't just walk over there. So then he learned this other way of going back down. And there was one place I was with him. And we were at this place that it had a flat surface like this and a slight incline like this next to the flat place.

[49:49]

And he was going from the incline to the flat place. And the difference between the incline and the flat place was this much. And he came to that place and turned around and crawled over this tiny little incline. Even though, I mean it was really tiny, but he could see that slight difference and he did the same thing he would have done if it had been six inches or a foot. Of course now he just steps over it, but you know, that stuff's built in. And you don't have to learn that. So when you come to the edge there, you feel something in your body. And in that case, it actually is good to stop, usually. Sometimes it's not, because sometimes if you stop and turn around and go down backwards, something will go wrong. These are all statistically worked out as usually what's good. We've worked it out over the eons about what the best probabilities for the way to see things are.

[50:56]

So we found that it's probably, usually it's better to be aware of the peep of this shape of thing to be more salient about this shape of thing than the space between them. When you see these shapes, that's more important than the space between those kinds of shapes. Really, for some other animals, it may not be that important. It may be more important to get between the space. That may be more interesting. Depends on their situation. But we're... built to see, to have certain things be really important and other things not. Like men are built to be kind of like very attuned to the body proportions that women are not. The male nervous system is very sensitive to ratios of the size of the eyes vis-a-vis the size of the face. Like eyes that are a high percentage of the face are more attractive than eyes that are a low percentage of the face.

[52:01]

Why is that? It's all about reproduction. Yeah. It's about that younger women, their eyes are larger in relationship to the size of their face than older women. You know, one of those keen paintings. You know those keen paintings? Those huge eyes. That's not considered art. Did I say art? No. I didn't say art. You said you call them paintings. They are paintings. What they are is they're just stimulating the male pattern of the big eye to the small face. It sort of does a thing to the male organism to see that ratio.

[53:08]

This is an extreme version of it, which is kind of like a joke. So we're built to care more about that proportion than something else. And where women aren't so much into that, I guess, not as much. But we have to deal with this stuff. And if we understand, we do better in relationship to it. We're all going to walk around like this. See you later. You know how attractive she got? It's literally saying, my eyes are bigger than yours. Anything else? When you come back?

[54:25]

Well, probably next summer or next winter, or maybe she'll come here when it's cold sometime. How do you feel about a Seventh-day retreat? Well, I feel fine about it, but I wonder, my question would be, how do you feel about it? Like, maybe you'd be interested, but I don't know if anybody else would. So that would be part of my question is, is it just a couple of you that are interested in it? That would be my question is, who really wants to do it? So if you have some ideas, you might poll your membership to see it. You have to do really, I think, the scheduling time. Yeah, sort of think about it. Or just the actual length of time, since how to schedule stuff. You need a long time, like you're in advance almost. I mean, my schedule. Yeah, so why don't you think about, you know, it's a nice idea, but sometimes you have a nice idea, but nobody can come.

[55:31]

Is there some expression like that? Yeah, right. That's the expression. Something long like that, you couldn't have organized to have a rotating, no. Some people could come for three days, four days. So people wouldn't be here for all of that, but they could come for them, like that worked for them. I don't know if that's in keeping with the idea of a session. Well, there's, what do you call it? There's, what do you call it, pluses and nines? There's pros and cons. It's nice to include more people, but there's... One way of doing it, if you let people come for the beginning and then drop out at the end, the problem of that is if there's a weak feeling at the end, kind of this dribbling effect, that's the problem of letting people come for the first two or three days and then having some other people go.

[56:38]

It has some problem. that has the advantage in that the people that are there at the end were there at the beginning. The other way around is you can have some people come at the beginning and let other people in later. So then that doesn't have that weakening feeling. You have a growing feeling rather than a dribbling away feeling and people... we had this kind of like group thing, right, this animal social thing, is that we sit with these people and then we bond with them and then they disappear and we kind of like go, where are they? You know, it kind of like, it's a little bit of a disturbance to have the person sitting next to you go away. It hurts a little bit. It's okay, but, you know, because eventually they're all going to go away anyway. But that's a drawback of The other way has the strength of new people coming and not people leaving. But the problem with that is twofold.

[57:38]

One is that the people who have been there the whole time, first of all, are initiated. They're into the sitting. And the new people that come in, when they come in, they're just starting to get into it. And they're having difficulties which you had three days before. So, you know, that's another problem with that. Plus, If there's teaching going on, they don't know what's been going on, and you do. So either the teaching has to stop and have to start a new dimension, or it's like, you know, to go over it with them. So there's a problem in the teaching of new people coming in. So that's some of the problems of splitting the group up. It's sometimes maybe better just to have So it's kind of good to have everybody together and do the same thing. And that means that some people, if it's long, that means some people can't come. But then you can also have shorter things. But the question is, how many people really do want to do a long thing?

[58:42]

And is it practical to arrange to do a long thing with just a few people? Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. But I'm not saying it's impossible to do this thing of, it kind of depends. If you had like 25 people who do a weekend and 20 who do the next few days, or vice versa, or have two different phases of teaching, one topic for the first part and another topic for the second part, that's also possible. so that the second part doesn't end on the first part. So there's ways to do it. But there are these things to think about. And they can create a kind of difficulty that's just set up by the way things are arranged. It doesn't have to be there. Now, there's some situations where you have a good group. In some situations, you have as many people as you can have doing the whole thing.

[59:44]

That's the simplest. Like the Green Goats, we have retreats and waiting lists for people to get in. And if people want to do part-time, we say, well, we'll wait and see because probably there's some people who can do the full thing. So there's some considerations to decide. Yes? I just wanted to add to that. This is our third retreat that we've done with Rev, and it's the first one that was five days. And it's the first one that everybody, with one exception, and a few people who arrived just a little bit late due to circumstances beyond their control, has actually been here for a long time. So sometimes maybe having a longer retreat retreat planned. There is lead time for letting people know as long as people take that in and really think about it and save. I mean, there are more people who could have come if they knew they wanted to 12 months ago, they could have saved. I mean, the dates were established fairly early, I think.

[60:50]

It's just, you know, knowing to register with, oh, yeah, we've got to save those dates. Right, exactly. But I think that, you know, the commitment to having a five-day retreat seems to have worked very well. This is the most consistent group, even though it's longer. Yeah. I'd just like to say, too, that I think this is a superb retreat venue, absolutely superb in every way from comfort of the lodgings to placement of the bathrooms to really beautiful . um you know adequate kitchen i mean all kinds of things it's a little bit off it's hard to get to from the freeway but you know you can cope with that so um if you're out of place with all this grass You're going to get a lawnmower.

[61:56]

Those guys have a $50,000 lawnmower. You think they can tell them when to pull the grass? No. So you can work with them. Can work with them. Is that a $50,000 lawnmower? Oh, at least. The one they had, was that Friday? Yeah, the four buckets behind it? We don't know. You don't know. I would also like to invite you to come back to Cleveland sometime. I know last year, I believe you came after the Pittsburgh, which was nice, because I know I wasn't able to do the Pittsburgh retreat last year, so I was able to practice with you. And I don't know, we in this group seem very abstract practitioners. Maybe it's your schedule, perhaps we could add a summer-winter schedule, one location, summer, one winter. One thought we had last year, although I don't think anyone successfully followed up on it, but maybe people could, was there might be some very nice place that's sort of midway between Cleveland and Pittsburgh.

[63:04]

So if people kind of found such a place, there could be a co-sponsor. There was one on the borderline. I just couldn't get it. Oh, really? Where was it? I'll call you, I'll email you. No, it's in Baden, apparently it's called Baden. It's right in the back edge of the state. Yeah, because somebody suggested like areas which is very far away from here. Something in between. We could get some nice energy line between the two. We hope to do that. In fact, I will be sending each of you a list of all the information I have regarding addresses and emails of each other. And so if anyone does not wish to be included in that, let me know so that we can just, if you have questions, come up practice-wise or just bring in information regarding our practice.

[64:07]

Sure. Yeah, I'd just like to add too. I can't say enough about what a wonderful job Phoebe did. I mean, when we were out strolling in the evening, she was in here scheduling and thawing out spinach while we were going to bed. And you made it so effortless for us to just come in to the kitchen and the amount of planting And, you know, pre-arranging that he did, it just made everything, you made us look good, the cooks look good, especially you. It was wonderful. It was fabulous. I just want to thank everyone for pitching in so nicely. Everybody was in that kitchen a lot more than it needed to be and helping out so diligently, so thanks for that. I really enjoyed doing this. I mean, it doesn't feel like it didn't work for me. We sensed that. Very pleasant to be around. Many of us felt as pleasant as you were.

[65:09]

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