So we're studying the Four Noble Truths, which is Buddha's first teaching, and it's contained in the sutra we were just looking at, the Dhammacakka Sutra, the Wheel of Dharma Discourse. And he preached this sutra soon after his enlightenment. You know, he left home and he did various practices and the last thing he did before his enlightenment was practice with these five ascetics and he practiced asceticism to an extreme and he got so skinny. You've seen statues where you can see his backbone from the front of it. It just ribs and then you can sometimes show his backbone. And they also suffered humiliations. And then he realized that that was where it was at, and the middle way was the way.

[01:01]

And he washed himself, and he ate something, and he started sitting in the way he had sat when he was a youth, when he sat under the rose apple tree by his, where his father was working, and just enjoyed the quiet. So he sat like that again. And he sat and then after a while he thought he was just going to sit by the Bodhi tree until he figured it out, which he did. And then once he had kind of consolidated that, he was debating about whether he would teach and he decided not to because he thought nobody would understand. And the Brahmin came and said, there are those that will understand. And so he thought about it and decided, all right, he would. And he, after some consideration, he decided that these five ascetics that he used to practice with, that they were people that probably could understand. So that's where he'd start.

[02:03]

So he decided to preach to those five ascetics. And he went and he found them. And probably, it was about two months after his enlightenment, and he went and he preached this Dhammacakka Sutra. So what I'd like to do is start by reading that and we'll just go around and Please each read a paragraph. Do you have a copy of this? Do you have the handout? OK, well, we need to copy this at the end of the thing, OK? That's my master. So, Charlie, you want to start? CHARLES M. NELSON JR. : Matrix. There are these two extremes that ought not to be cultivated by one, this one, or what two? There is devotion to pursuit of pleasure and sensual desires, which is low, coarse, vulgar, ignoble, and harmful.

[03:14]

And there is devotion to self-mortification, which is painful, ignoble, and harmful. The middle way, discovered by the perfect one, avoids both of these extremes. It gives vision, gives knowledge, and leads to peace, to direct And what is the Middle Way? It is the Noble Eightfold Path, that is to say, Right View, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration. That is the middle way, discovered by the perfect one, which gives vision, gives knowledge, and leads to peace, to correct knowledge, to enlightenment, to nirvana. That's what you wanted to do.

[04:16]

There is this visible truth of suffering, the birth of suffering, the beating of suffering, the sickness of suffering, the death of suffering, this horrible lamentation of death, grief, despair, suffering, dissociation, remorse, and suffering, dissociation, remorse, and suffering, not to get once and for all. In short, the following attributes are clear and complete in this comparison. Where is this novel truth of the origins? It is a craving, which produces renewal of being, accompanied by relishing life. Relishing this, in fact, in other words, craving for sensual desires. Craving. Craving. There is this novel truth of the cessation of suffering. There is this noble truth of the way we enter the cessation of our suffering.

[05:21]

This is the noble thing that we have, which is to say, the right view, the right introduction, the right speech, the right action, the right language, the right effort, the right humanness, and the right inspiration. There is this noble truth of suffering, such as the insight, the knowledge, the understanding, the vision, the light, that arose in me about things not earthly. This noble truth must be penetrated to by fully knowing suffering, such as the insight, the knowledge, the understanding, the vision, the light, that arose in me about things not earthly. This noble truth had been penetrated to by fully knowing suffering, such as the insight, the knowledge, the understanding, the vision, the light that arose in me about things not heard before. There is this noble truth of the origin of suffering. Such was the insight, the knowledge, the understanding, the vision, the light that arose in me about things not heard before.

[06:28]

This noble truth must be penetrated to by abandoning the origin of suffering. Such was the insight, the knowledge, the understanding, the vision, the light that arose in me about things not heard before. This noble truth has been penetrated to by abandoning the origin of suffering. Such was the insight, the knowledge, the understanding, the vision, the light that arose in me about things not heard before. There is this noble truth of the cessation of suffering. Such was the insight, the knowledge, the understanding, the vision, the light that arose in me about things not heard before. This noble truth must be penetrated to by realizing the cessation of suffering. Such was the insight, the knowledge, the understanding, the vision, the light that arose in me about things not heard before. This noble truth has been penetrated to by realizing the cessation of suffering. Such was the insight, the knowledge, the understanding, the vision, the light that arose in me about things not heard before. This noble truth has been penetrated to by realizing the cessation of suffering. Such was the insight, the knowledge, the understanding, the vision, the light that arose in me about things not heard before. This noble truth has been penetrated to by realizing the cessation of suffering. [...]

[07:31]

This noble truth has been penetrated to by realizing the cessation of suffering. This noble truth has been penetrated to by realizing the cessation of suffering. This noble truth has been penetrated to by realizing the cessation of suffering. This noble There is this novelty of the brain leading to the cessation of suffering, such as the insight, the knowledge, the understanding, the wish, the accomplishment, the awareness, the renewal, the peace, and the happiness. This novelty must be conjugated to a new, deeper meaning of the brain leading to the cessation of suffering, such as the insight, the knowledge, the understanding, the wish, the accomplishment, the awareness, the renewal, the peace, and the happiness. As long as my correct knowledge and vision in these twelve aspects, in these three phases of penetration to each of the four noble truths, was not quite purified, I did not claim to have discovered the full and

[08:34]

that is supreme in the world with its deities, its Maras, and its devendants. In this generation, with its monks and Brahmins, with its princes and midwives, but as soon as I correct my allegendation in these twelve aspects and the three phases of each of the four noble truths were quite purified, then I claim to have discovered the full enlightenment And a word about the handout. Well, I gave you a reading list. Those are the texts that I used. I don't expect you to buy them. I don't expect you to read all of them, though it certainly is useful, especially what the Buddha taught.

[09:40]

It's a very good basic text, but it's a general text. In other words, it's not simply about the Four Noble Truths. It's about the Buddha's basic teachings. The first turning of the wheel of the Dharma and the one by Chan Master Sheng Yen, which is, I don't, I just gave away my list. No, no, I don't need it. Right, those two are about this, this sutra. The, as I say, what the Buddha taught is general and the life of the Buddha is also general and what we just read is taken from the life of the Buddha. And what Bhikkhu Nyanamoli did in this book is go through the Pali Canon, which is the writings from the time of the Buddha. Pali is a language that precedes Sanskrit, and it's thought of as having been pretty much Buddha's words, so that's probably not accurate, but something like that.

[10:47]

Anyway, he went through the Pali Canon and took out all the references to Buddha's life, And then he took out some references to, there's a chapter in here called The Doctrine. And so he took that straight out of the Pali Canon. So it's straight out of Buddha's words, though it's not obviously every sutra of the Buddha, there are a lot. And then what I did was I went through the part of the chapter on the doctrine that had to do with the Four Noble Truths, and I cut and pasted what I thought was useful. because even that, it's too long. And also some of it is really obscure. So we're not going to go through all that, but I commend it to you and suggest to you that it's useful to read at least that, read the handout before the class or after this class. And I also want to encourage you, if you have questions as we go along, please just interrupt and ask.

[12:05]

If you look in here, you'll see he's got notes about it. And he's got the sources, because there are various, various compilations of the Buddhist teachings. They're collected into the Vinaya ones, and there's the long discourses, and the middle length discourses, and the short discourses, and so on. So it's listed in here. This is a great book. This is a book that would be really good to have in your library, to own this book, buy this book. the life of the Buddha. It's here in the library also. I don't know if it's here tonight, right now, but I know that I've seen it here. I got it not that long ago. So I think it is. What? From Sri Lanka. Well, this one is from Sri Lanka.

[13:06]

The third edition was in 1992. So I don't know, but... Yeah, they may well, that's probably where I got it. And I only got it... I got it when I taught this in Vallejo, so it's within the last three years that I got it. The value was very high, and so am I now. Okay, so the Four Noble Truths, as we just read, are the truth of Suffering, which is what we're going to talk about at some length tonight. The truth of the origin of suffering, which is craving or clinging or attachment, particularly attachment to the sense of self, to the conceit, I am. The truth of the way out of suffering, that there is a way out of suffering, of letting go of this clinging, this attachment, of finding Nirvana.

[14:16]

In the Mahayana view, of course, you find nirvana by accepting, clinging, and understanding that it's empty of independent existence, rather than cutting it off. And that the way to do that is the Eightfold Path, which we will review, the Eightfold Path, but I think it's really a whole other class. Tonight, I want to talk about the truth of suffering. And I can introduce it, but it's something to practice with. It's just like he says, understand it intellectually, practice with it, and come to really understand it. To know in your own life, in your own body, that there is this suffering, there is this basic dis-ease. in our experience, it underlies our experience.

[15:24]

And I prefer the translation dis-moods because obviously in your life you don't go around suffering all the time. There are times when you feel calm and or actually happy or content. But below that, if you get quiet, you find that there is this sense of dis-ease. Sometimes you can think of it as a sense of loss, or a sense of knowledge, in your body, knowledge of some kind of separation. Intellectually, you know we're all connected, but the feeling is that there's something wrong. And we'll continue to talk about that for all four weeks. And you can understand that. I think you really have to understand that in your own body. It's not just in your mind, but in your body. And I love this quote Buddha said, in this very one fathom long body, along with its perceptions and thoughts, do I proclaim the world, the origin of the world, the cessation of the world, and the path leading to the cessation of the world.

[16:45]

So, right here, right now, in this body, so it's not like he's some god out there. He's saying, you have to understand it in your body. And you can understand it for yourself. And the word world there, I think, is a synonym for suffering. In other words, that's a version, that's a description of the Four Noble Truths. Did you notice that? And loka, the word there translated as world, also means life or being. So in this life. there's suffering, an end to suffering. What's the Chinese name for this red dust? This red dust? The world? Yeah. Yeah. There's a, there's a, um, maybe it's a, um, Ocean City or something.

[17:51]

I don't know. There's one thing that Leslie just loves to lecture about, about this, golden body going into the red dust. The Buddha sometimes described having a golden body, a 16-foot golden body going into the red dust. Yeah, going into the samsaric world, the dusky world. So the first noble truth is dukkha, or as I said, dis-ease suffering. And he describes three different kinds. There's dukkha-dukkha, which is plain old suffering that we all know about. If you cut your finger, it hurts. If you're sick to your stomach, it hurts. If you lose somebody to death, it hurts. That kind of thing. Pain and suffering of ordinary life. And then there's something called the parinama dukkha, which is the suffering caused by the fact that things change, which is also pretty easy to understand.

[19:01]

You have something you really like, and then you lose it. And in fact, I mean, in a way you could think of somebody, somebody that you care for dying is also things, things changing. So that's unpleasant. And sometimes experienced as painful. And we say to you, sometimes you think, you know, okay, if you get a new car and then you worry, it's going to get scratched. And then it gets its first scratch and it looks kind of painful and then you get used to the idea. But this, experience of things changing is a suffering in our lives. But the one that's a little more difficult to grasp and that I've already touched on is called Sankara Dukkha. And it has to do with the suffering arising from the fact that conditioned states

[20:13]

the suffering implicit in our makeup group. And this is where we talk about what's called the five aggregates. And he says that dukkha is the five aggregates affected by clinging. And the five aggregates, which I will talk about, and some of you, I'm sure, are already quite familiar with them. The five aggregates is a way of describing a human being. Another word for aggregates is skandhas. All five skandhas in their own being are empty. You may have heard that before, the beginning of the heart syndrome. And that functioning of those five skandhas gives rise to this sense of self. this sense of being a separate, substantial, inherently existing being.

[21:23]

But also, on some level, we know that's not true, and that's the dissonance, because we are simply the functioning of these five standards. We are simply change. We don't have a separate self. There isn't anything stable. There isn't anything to hold on to. And on some level, I think we know that. But we sense that. And that's the dis-ease. Because we want it to be. We want to have separate, concrete, substantial, inherent existence. We want to have something to hold on to. So we keep trying. In a way, that's the suffering, this trying to somehow shore up this experience and make a thing of it. You keep trying to make something of it.

[22:26]

But why would we want it if it's the cause of separation? Because we're ignorant about which more next week. Really, I think the alternative is frightening. I had this wonderful experience once at Tassajara kind of really visceral that I realized I was carrying around a sack of shit, my own shit, and I didn't want to put it there because it was warm and it was mine, you know, and the fact that it was heavy, you know, and it stank didn't matter. It was, and I, you know, it felt protected right here in the middle of my body. I felt safer doing that. It was a real physical experience of that. And I think that's the human condition. I don't think that was anything in the slightest remarkable.

[23:28]

It was just kind of fun. That's right. So the five aggregates. which you also know from the Heart Sutra. Form, feelings, perceptions, formations, consciousness. Form is that. It's that which has some solidity of some sort. though it also includes, he describes in there air, you can read the description that he gives in the stuff I gave you, it's quite graphic, he talks about the watery substances in our bodies, and he talks about pus, you name it, synovial fluid. That's form, and it's form, this body form, but also forms as offers in the bookcase, the mountains and so on.

[24:29]

It's all form. The other ones are mental formations. Feelings. Feelings we think of, in this terminology, this is Buddhist psychology, feelings are pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral. And that's it. and that's usually our first experience, before we start making something of it. We just have that. Think of it, well let me talk, the next one is perceptions, which is how we organize our experience. And again, in perceptions, there's not usually a clinging yet, there's just an identification of something. In the form there's an eye, E-Y-E, and an object that the eye sees.

[25:34]

And the way that functions is there's the eye and the object and contact between the two, and then eye consciousness arises and sees something, and then it's perception that organizes it. that says that's a Zafir or that's a dog. You ever see that Oliver Sacks or read that Oliver Sacks article in the New Yorker about this guy that he was blind and he had surgery so that he could see but he saw shapes and movement and he couldn't organize it unless if he he would see a dog but until he touched it he didn't know that it was a dog because his brain hadn't been educated. The causes and conditions for him didn't arise, so that his perception was different. So I think, in a way, that's kind of how we see things.

[26:39]

You can kind of see the color and the shape or something, but until a perception arises, you don't really understand it. Well, that's a whole, that's taking it down farther along, yes. This is all, everything, everything is conditioned. There is nothing, including the Buddha, that's not conditioned. Everything arises from causes and conditions. So your perceptions are going to be colored by your experience. And part of the problem is that we We reify them. We make them into our experiences into something concrete. We give them inherent existence. We impute it to them. We fantasize it. And then we put so much, so many ideas onto that experience that we kill it.

[27:45]

And we believe the stories that we tell ourselves about. And this happens possible. That's how our minds, that's how our perception works. There's the eye and the object and the contact and the initial perception. But in that, even the initial perception, there's some idea. I might say yellow and somebody else would say orange and somebody else, I would say orange and somebody else might say red. Just because we have different ideas about it. But It's, we do that all the time. Tia taught about something called the 30 Verses Festival. It's 30 verses about, it's about this process. And she was using the example of a duck. And you see this, you see something, you know, and then you say, That's a duck. I know what that is, that over there.

[28:48]

So there's all this separation and this ego comes up. It isn't something that we do consciously, and it's not quite so exaggerated as that, but that is the process. I know what that is, that over there is a duck. And then all these ideas about ducks. Mallard, and Duck a la Rage, and whatever. You know, I remember seeing, when I think of ducks now, I was up in Washington State with Nancy Park, and we stopped to walk the dog near this lake. Well, the whole hillside leading down to the lake was covered with, you'll pardon the word, turks. And they were big. And we finally realized it was Canada geese. And it was amazing. I had no idea. And now whenever, when I see a Canada goose, that's what I think of. You know, I used to think they were pretty.

[29:50]

Well, no more. I think they're disgusting. And I even, when I tell it, saying that about the duck, that's one of the things that came up for me. So pretty soon, it's a dead duck. I don't see the duck. I see all my ideas about it, and it can go on and on, and we do that constantly, constantly, and very, very quickly. And it's actually part of the process, and what we need to do is remember that we do it, confess it, and then, if we can remember that we're doing that, we won't believe it so much, we won't hold on to it. Which is, in a way, this is actually another description of the first three of the Noble Truths. That's the process. But I'm getting ahead of myself. well there's we do we have to do this because we just have in order to survive in the world you need

[31:26]

this ego process to organize your experience. And you can't just live in emptiness where there's nothing but shimmering energy or something. You have to deal with the fact that this feels, this bookcase feels very solid. Maybe it isn't. Ultimately it's not. Both in terms of modern physics and in terms of Buddhist analysis. But I have to live with this. I have to live in the world, not just of the ultimate truth, but of the relative truth. And the relative truth is, this blue case feels very solid, and if I walk into it, I'm going to hurt myself. We do need it in order to be able to communicate. That's right.

[32:28]

And every time we open our mouths, of course, we're expressing delusion. But we have to do that. Suzuki Roshi talks about it in Branching Streams, and one of the questions and answers is, well, it's just misleading, but I have to say something. Okay, so form, feelings, perceptions, formations. Now formations is complete ego drift, as you would say. Formations is another word for karmic effects. Karma, in the actual Buddhist understanding, Buddha says karma is called choice. What people usually refer to as karma is actually the fruits of karma.

[33:32]

Karma is volitional action, or the exercise of choice. I want that. Maybe. I don't know if there's free will or not, but we experience ourselves as having it. No. It's choosing things and actions in order to get what we want or to avoid what we don't want. And to, in order to protect, ultimately, especially in order to either protect our, to protect our sense of self or to promote our own ideas of things. Yes, karmic activity, but it's this choosing that's, I think of it as, it's subtle, you don't go around thinking like this overtly, but it's when it's saying, I do, or I want, or I think, or I don't want, or I don't think, or I don't, when there's an I involved, capital letter I.

[34:52]

that usually has karmic consequences. And he calls it formations because these karmic choices have effects in the world and they form our experience, they form our bodies, and they form our experience, they form our habits, and so on. Buddha says that his actions are non-karmic, and the Theravadin view would be that an arhat would have burned out karma, so an arhat would act without karma. The Zen view is that even an arhat cannot ignore karma. So, probably a Buddha would not engage in ego-based activities, wouldn't act from either attachment or aversion. In other words, maybe I should talk about feeling a little more.

[35:58]

You think of it, a simple way to understand feeling and then taking it beyond that is if you were in a hot garden and a cool breeze came on, that would feel good. And Buddha would also feel good. Buddha would enjoy that. But what most of us do is say, oh, thank God, I want more of that. And, or, oh, it's so great, it's so hot here, I thought I was gonna die, and that's so great to have that cool breeze, and then it ends, and you think, oh no, I don't know if I can stand it. Maybe there's some ice water somewhere, and on and on. So that we take it from simply the pleasure to wanting more of the pleasure, and for wanting to avoid the difficulty, instead of simply experiencing it. as pleasant or unpleasant. So presumably the Buddha would just enjoy the breeze and be free ascended. Then the Buddha would just be hot food without a lot of stormy drama.

[37:08]

So these formations are constantly creating the sense of self. karmic actions are what make our view of the world. And that's where those, what Lynn was talking about, this and I have, we have ideas about things, that's part of where they come from. Our karmic actions form our habits, our habitual approach to the world and so on. Oops, I skipped over consciousness. Consciousness is the last one. So the last one is consciousness. And that's usually thought of as the consciousness that has to do with, like I mentioned before, when the eye sees something and there's a contact between the two.

[38:16]

and an I-consciousness arises. It's not some kind of ultimate consciousness that's sort of like a soul, maybe. Sorry. No. No soul, no spirit, no nothing. Forget about it. It's simply the awareness that arises when there is contact. An I with an object, a nose with a smell, a finger with a touch, with some kind of experience of touch, an ear with a sound, and a mind with a thought. In Buddhist psychology, the mind is simply the sixth sense organ. More interesting word, sex organ. That's form. So, it's just, Uchiyama Roshi talks about thoughts as brain secretions. It's just another organ.

[39:19]

It's not something special. That's just what brains do. Mouths taste things, brains think thoughts. Perception is like organizing that consciousness and saying, that's yellow. And consciousness will just see. collect the information in a way. It's like turning on a switch. But it's the perception that organizes it, and your perceptions are a lot colored by the karmic formations, your experiences. So the formations that you are now engaging in karmic activity and creating future formations, but I think when we're talking about a human being right now, the five skandhas are like a photograph of what it is right now, so in a way it's the fruit of all the past actions, innumerable past actions, and not just anything you could think of as yours, setting aside whether there's anything that continues.

[40:40]

but there's also your parents' past actions and your society's and so on. You think of, like, I think that Japanese people are getting, are bigger nowadays than they used to be 50 years ago because they're eating better. So that's a, that's a societal thing that affects what their bodies look like. So it's, I think of it as kind of systems analysis. Who knows what all the causes and conditions that make you, you are. But they're all formations. They're all conditioned. So this process, this is what a human being is. A human being is not other than these five aggregates. And you look and see if you can find something to hold on to.

[41:43]

You sit Zazen and look for a mind, look for a soul, look for a self. It's ungraspable, but the process gives rise to the sense of a self, because because of these formations I have an idea that I exist as a separate one because I see that color as yellow and Andrea sees it as orange so I think I'm a separate person and that there's this view that defines me. I remember reading a story, gee, probably in Seventeen magazine many, many years ago. And this girl was kind of trying to figure out who she was and she said something and her mother said, but you like orange juice.

[42:45]

You always liked orange juice. And she held on to that. That was something, oh, I like orange juice. This was something she could see out that she was becoming a person, a separate person. Well that's a process, that process of defining our experience, this rise to this sense of self. Buddha talks about the conceit I am, which is a wonderful phrase because conceit means different things. I mean, we think of it as somebody's conceited, right? That they're full of themselves and they think they're really hot stuff. But conceit also means kind of a closely held idea. The intellectuals conceit that they understand the world better than other people.

[43:51]

It just means an idea. So the conceit, I am, that's the problem. And out of the interplay of these five aggregates, the five skandhas, arises the sense of self. This will become clearer also, next week we'll talk about the 12-fold wheel of existence, which is kind of like a dynamic description of this same process. And it may be a little easier to see. So, is this clear? Do you have questions? I'm seeing some faces that look kind of perturbed here. Yes, that's right.

[45:04]

But it's even more basic than that. because we are attached to ourselves, and yet I think on some level we know that there isn't anything to get hold of, and we want there to be something to get hold of, and that's an uncomfortable experience. And it's the ground of our experience, and we're not usually conscious of it. And sometimes when you sit zazen, you do become conscious of it. And then some fear may arise, and then if you can stay with it, then there's actually great joy, I think. And also what Andrew was talking about, the sort of sense of like, oh, oh well, okay.

[46:11]

Sort of, somebody was telling me the other day that as he sits and settles, And I talk often about this sense that rather than I am breathing, there's just breathing. And he said that he was feeling a little disappointed. And it's, you know, that's not an uncommon response. Disappointed because he wasn't breathing? No, disappointed because there weren't like bells and whistles or something. Oh, I see. But yeah. But it's not so easy to let go of this sense. It's impossible to completely let go of the sense of self because of what Ann brought up before, that you have to have, you have to have enough, some sense of self. What is it? It's after some fiddling. So wait, just let me just finish that because I'm probably thinking about somebody listening to this tape. That Mel talks about that the ego, not that we do need it, but that the difficulties arise because we have it right in the middle, and what needs to be kind of off to the side, and then it can do that job of organizing our perceptions.

[47:30]

Now, yeah. In a way, it's kind of a relief, though, because to the extent that one can say, you know, the world's just out there. I mean, I remember being a great elite when I realized I didn't have to be in charge of everything. You know? I mean, when I've had very visceral experiences of that, that, you know, I don't have to monitor everything. I don't have to keep track of everything. I don't have to, you know, just take care of itself. I mean, actually, it's a big relief. It is. It is a big relief. And you've got to worry about it so much. That's right. I keep trying to tell myself, don't worry about anything unless you know it's going to happen or it's happening now.

[48:30]

Otherwise... But this sense of self can be insidious. So we drop it. and we drop it, and we drop it, but it's still, it keeps coming up. There's this great, this classic example that Lou Hartman talks about it. At Green Gulch Farm, they have, they use what they call Marley Mugs, those glass mugs, and everybody takes them from the kitchen to their room and to where they're working and so on. You walk, you get a cup of tea and you walk out the dining room door. And then every so often at work meeting there's an announcement, please bring back the Marley Mugs. We don't have any Marley Mugs. Please get the Marley Mugs. So you're down in the fields and you're coming back up to the dining room. And so you start collecting them from off of, you know, this little stand and that little stand. And you go through the garden and you pick them up and maybe you go through the student living area and you pick up some more.

[49:35]

And then you're walking along the path towards the dining room, and somebody sees you with eight Marley mugs in your hand, and they say, wow, you were really hoarding a lot of those in your room, weren't you? And immediately the ego comes up, like, I was not, and I'm a good person, and da, da, da, you know? It's like, it's really something. And we all have had variations on that experience. Just when you have this idea about yourself, is you're really being a good Samaritan. And then it gets challenged. And on my mind, it's really something. But yes, in fact it's true, setting aside as a rule. But we don't remember that. very fundamental truth of Washington and Christianity at the same time. No good deed goes unpunished.

[50:51]

Where does self-esteem come in? It interests me tremendously that in the sutra and in this life of the Buddha, often Buddha refers to himself as things like the perfect one. He talks about himself in these terms. But I don't think that it is out of pride or ego or conceitedness. It simply is true. And he's simply putting his truth out there. And I guess, for us, the job is to simply care for ourselves. Because how can you do this work if you don't take care of yourself, if you don't have some love for yourself, if you don't have some self-esteem?

[51:56]

I don't know how you can do this, how you can, because what we're talking about is looking at this one, and it's not so easy all the time, to look at oneself, to turn the finger from blaming to looking at yourself, and so in Al-Anon we talk about going from I am a mistake to I made a mistake, so we need to have enough ego strength, enough self-esteem to be willing to look, and to not be afraid to set down that sack of shit, because it's difficult work. It is difficult. So it doesn't preclude taking care of yourself. You know, there's the, Duncan talks about in the Bodhisattva's Four Methods of Guidance, about kind speech, about saying to one another, please treasure yourself.

[53:02]

And that's what we are, one of the things we're talking about. You need to have that kind of caring for yourself. And it's a... People forget to study the Self, forget the Self. Oh yes, I'm not talking about being preoccupied with it, but a level of self-esteem is required to be able to get connected. So we need to stop momentarily, but are there any other questions? You OK? All right. One question I have is the question of why that seems to come up a lot.

[54:07]

Because if we were to get into why is it like this, and how do you get around it? To quote Reb Anderson, I don't answer why questions. I don't think it's useful. No, I don't think he does get into why. No. And then it stops. It's like speculating about what happens after somebody dies. It's not useful. Right. It's interesting. Yes. Right. And you do have to come to terms with it. Okay, so, um, let's, we'll get closing.

[54:40]

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