As many of you know, I have been focusing this year on the teaching about the mark of impermanence, that everything has this mark of impermanence. And for those of you who haven't been here before, you'll wonder, I'm sure, what's going on at the far end of that altar over there. Skulls and rotting corpses of mice. uses a very ancient bouquet of jasmine. So just in case we didn't have enough inspiration for the meditations on impermanence, Betty discovered these masks from Mexico, which have mirrors in the back of them, so if you hold it the right way, you see your own eyes in the skull.

[01:07]

I don't know if I can do it, but I thought we could put one for the men on the bathroom wall, standing up in front of the toilet, and one for the women on the door. See what happens. Anyway, I think they're quite wonderful. The universe has been providing the Dharma in abundance. And while I'm in the announcement phase, a friend of mine cuts Buddha images into crystals. He just made out of pieces of paper. beautiful.

[02:11]

And I was particularly touched to see what he had done because when I sit with people when they are dying, very often the person wants to hold a crystal. So it's perfect. So, Bill and I were in It is a big apple. So interesting to go from the madness of Friday afternoon, midtown, Manhattan traffic, at about this time yesterday, and to drop back into the dark, quiet of Goat in the Road last night and this morning. And I love both. I think at this time of year, and I was really struck by this during the last few days when we were in New York, that this is a time of year of enormous expectation and enormous suffering for many, many, many people.

[03:31]

And that if we are one of those people who suffers at this time of year, who can sink with the tone and emphasis of the holiday season, we can very easily forget that we have some choice about. But of course, as the great practitioner Shantideva pointed out, our so-called obstacles or difficulties can be our teacher. And if we allow ourselves to know in particular what our difficulties are at this time of year, it is possible to turn this

[04:37]

But we have to be clear about our intention and shrewd about what we do with ourselves during this time of year. It's a great time of year to stay home. Or at least out of the maelstrom. So for some years, I've used the period of time between Thanksgiving and New Year's as a time for focusing, first of all, on gratitude. Some weeks of focusing on paying very close attention to as much as possible that I can bring myself to awareness with that I'm grateful for. A friend of mine who I've known since 1972 and who is in remission with throat cancer and who has in the last two and a half years himself begun to do healing work with people with terminal illnesses was talking the other day when we were having lunch together about his own experience when he was sick

[06:24]

going through treatment for his cancer, how much what he had to do was to begin to understand the generosity of allowing others to help him, to be the recipient of the generosity of the world, and how hard that was for him. He's very good at helping. But he said, you know, I was too sick to fight my friends' kindness and generosity. And I needed their help. So that's an interesting aspect of this, called an action of generosity. So I'd like to tell you a story that is about generosity, the generosity of

[07:27]

friends and those we don't know. And also a story about the Dharma abides everywhere in all beings and all friends and all circumstances. On Tuesday night, we had plans to have dinner with my daughter-in-law and son-in-law and a dear friend of ours. And we were going to eat at Michael Jordan's restaurant in Grand Central Station because we had been told that the view of the newly washed ceiling was superb. What I didn't take into account was that the menu was entirely what some 22-year-old who was going to go out and play basketball for six hours would eat. Apart from that, there was one vegetable dish on the menu.

[08:31]

A delicious creamed spinach. Anyway, we were to meet Stephen Eleanor and our friend Tony at 7. And we received a message, very clear instructions from our friend Tony, meet me. in the rotunda or whatever they call it, you know, the great big wonderful open space at 5.30. I thought, what on earth are we meeting him at 5.34? Anyway, interestingly, although I had that question, I didn't, I don't think I actually expressed it, and Bill and I dutifully showed up at 5.30, not having a clue what our friend would want us to do. So he had this mischievous look on his face and took us to what looked like some kind of office space, but nobody was in there.

[09:34]

The windows were all dark. At the head of track 25, banging on the door, nobody answered. So then Tony said, ugh, the surprise is slipping. And he said, well, I've got this guy's pager. So then he called the pager. Anyway, after a little while, we ran around for a little bit. And then we went back to the same office. And again, knocked on the door. And this time, we went in. And of course, it's Operation Central with windows that you can only see out. You can't see in. And there were three men in there. our surprise guy who is the superintendent of operations. So he's in charge of all that craziness that goes in and out of Grand Central Station. And he had said when our friend set this up, oh rush hour is the best time.

[10:39]

60,000 people go through Grand Central Station between 5.30 and quarter to seven. Come on in. So we came in and got low seats and watched while these three men shuffled problems. They had three trains that wouldn't work. And our guide, Dave, said, two trains is pretty bad, three is a nightmare. But he didn't look like he was in a nightmare. He looked like every ounce of his energy was focused on, well, what are we going to do? How do we get the people we've got to move onto these trains into trains that run? And at one point I thought that I was watching people dancing. There was this incredible flow of energy and information.

[11:49]

A little Rube Goldberg in the technology department, they did have a couple of monitors with tracks and train numbers that flickered around and there was a walkie-talkie and a couple of phones, but it wasn't high-tech. So at a certain point when it was not at all clear that the problem was solved, but certainly when one of the three men clearly had some ideas about what to do, how to get the trains that were broken out of the way and the trains that would work put together so that they could accommodate everybody, Dave turned and said, well, you want to go up and see the big board? So we then wound around and up the elevator and went up to the sixth floor where there was this very long but relatively shallow room, maybe 50 or 60 feet long.

[12:55]

And on the wall was a map of all the tracks that feed into and out of Grand Central. Basically three lines but a number of tracks. with little lights that would indicate, would have a number in the lighted area indicating which train was being moved along. So we could actually watch Stephen Eleanor's train from New Haven to New York as it went along, where they were and when they were being switched from one track to another, etc. It was very beautiful and amazingly dense. And then in the foreground were two tiers with people sitting at banks of computer monitors, which had replicas of that same grid on their computer monitors. And each of them was managing a train.

[13:59]

And then we have the yard master. So we got to listen to a dialogue between the guy who runs the whole thing, the boss, and the yard manager. I thought I'd died and gone to Zen heaven. Bill laughed at me partway through. He said, I could just see buzz, word, click, lecture material. Dave, the boss, is this tall, thin, wiry guy with lots of energy, who clearly loves doing what he's doing, and is doing it whole hog. Which is a good thing, because it looks like he does it for 10 or 12 or more hours.

[15:03]

I said, how many days a week do you work? He said, oh, six or seven or more. So at one point, I was pretty dazzled by all this technology stuff. And one of the questions we asked was about what was the impact of all this technology on the actual work of having the trains run. And I think it was the train, the yardmaster who said, we don't need any of this stuff. We don't need all these monitors. At that point Dave said, the yardmaster has to have in his mind at any and every time of the day and night where every train is on the track.

[16:08]

So as we talked more, what I realized was about was their having developed their capacity to hold process and an enormous amount of information on relationships in a very physical, body-oriented way, that they had developed enormous amounts of mindful awareness. And at one point, as we were talking about this, I think maybe Bill asked Dave a question about, you know, how do you get this to happen? How do you teach somebody to be able to do all this? And he yelled, fear! And of course, I've been crying in my milk about the use of fear in the training of the young llama who lives with us, age four and a half.

[17:16]

and the degree to which fear is used in many traditions in spiritual practice. Here it was again, only these guys are really, you know, they had a different face to the benefits of fear. The young yardmaster said, yeah, you don't make the same mistake twice. He must have fired me 20 times. But what was clear was that there was a relationship between the two of them that was about some shared adventure. And that Dave's strictness was in service of this young yard band being becoming having the capacity to hold in his both waking and sleeping mind where every train is at every point in the day or night.

[18:30]

And to be involved in the kind of dance that's called Dave had some reasonably uncharitable comments about all those commuters on the New Haven line. He said they have far too much discretionary money. And they yell the most when anything goes wrong. But he said, you know, the other thing that's interesting is that if something goes wrong with a train on a certain track, and we then have to schedule their the commuter train they're used to getting on, leaving on a different track, they scream and yell because they go to the track they've gone to every night at 5.45 and the train isn't there. And they get furious at us because they miss their train. And we say, well, did you look at the board?

[19:35]

Nope. I've always gotten this train at this time on this track. Where is it? Why isn't it here? And it's clear that this whole train business is another instance. I'm not sure who was the instigator of this notion that maybe if you had the train run off a cliff, as long as it was leaving from the right track at the right time, would everybody get on it? Dave said, sure. Like lemons. Anyway, there were a couple of pithy quotes, which I madly scribbled down. One of my favorites was, technology does not replace supervision.

[20:42]

Isn't that great? So, what are the elements of supervision, you know, in terms of how this story might be relevant for us? I think about a lecture that's in Zen Mind Beginner's Mind where Suzuki Roshi talks about the way to control your sheep or your cow is to put them in a very big pasture. And then he goes on to talk about how important it is using this analogy with the student to, although the student is in a very big pasture, to watch to bring that mind of open attention and interest. And of course, this is exactly what we have a chance to do when we are practicing the various practices that we practice in service of training the mind, studying the mind, and training the mind.

[21:53]

I hadn't thought about this model of being a trained supervisor. But watching Dave, I thought, I could learn a lot from him. And in fact, in the hour and a half that we spent with him, I did. At one point, he did crack this joke about, well, it is a kind of Zen thing we're doing. He's right. It's about attention, the cultivation of attention, awareness, flexibility, ease, bringing your full energy to whatever arises. And although he did say that the training program revolved around fear, I actually didn't feel anything like fear in him as we sat in that dark little room while he began to grok the fact that there were three trains there.

[23:08]

Without quite realizing it, he knows about Shondi David's teaching. Sure, come on. I'll take you on a tour between 5.30 and a quarter of seven, when there's the most intensity, when the most things that go wrong will have the most impact. Come on in. Let's see what's happened. I felt a kind of warm-hearted, energized delight. from spending time with this man and the people he works with and the world they live in. Even in that big room with all of the technology that was displayed there, I had a sense of some subset of relationality among the people working in the room.

[24:16]

with each other, their relationship to the trains, to the schedule, to the people who ride on the trains, to the tracks, to the weather, to the time of day and night, to everything. Some surprise. I'll read you a couple more pithy quotes from the Zen man Dave. What the timetable giveth, the train dispatcher taketh away. And I think my favorite was, we manage by exception. So here's a business that is everything about expectation.

[25:17]

And here's a guy running the show who understands where to put his attention. Not on what should be, but what is. Playing with ricocheting hot coals. And of course our lives provide us with exceptions all the time, right? Surprises. I found myself afterwards, as I was thinking about our experience behind the scenes at Grand Central Station, Thinking about Shantideva's great pointer about our enemies and so-called enemies and obstacles are our teachers.

[26:29]

Which is of course really at the core of what Dave was letting us see. A kind of a deeply developed appreciation that, oh, here's where we're at. Here's where we get to see what does and what doesn't work. One of the stories you told us that told me a lot about the system that this group of people have together has to do with train accidents that happened for a long time because that worked for trains that had a different wheelbase than trains have now. And where the trains would go along and then they'd jump off the track.

[27:35]

And Dave said in describing this situation, that they had a lot of accidents. And he said, nobody wanted to admit that the accidents were happening. So there was this big cover up. And he said, we actually attacked the problem and really looked into it. Now, what's going on? Why is this happening? Studied the problem in order to figure out what the causes and conditions were. and out of that were able to eventually figure out a solution. And he said it was only when people running train systems in other parts of the country heard that we had found a solution that we then began to hear, oh yes, we've had a lot of accidents in that set of circumstances also.

[28:42]

But he said until People in other places around the country knew that we had figured out what to do. Nobody wanted to acknowledge that there was a problem. Isn't that interesting? Can any of us think of situations in our own lives that are like that? Me, have a problem? Everything's fine. I found that story very telling. There's a kind of courage that is sponsored in that particular system that is operating with the group of people that I was working with that leads to that capacity to acknowledge what is said over against

[29:49]

seems to be the challenge which is on our plates collectively these days. One of the things I love about going to New York is that We have some very dear friends there, and I always love seeing our friends. But also, this is the place where I can get the most concentrated exposure to people working in the arts who are really working some of the same edge that we're working in our meditation practice. working this ground that has to do with being awake to what is self.

[30:59]

And we had a very intense dose of those kinds of experiences. including sitting in these two remarkable public spaces, Grand Central Station and the reading room at the New York Public Library, where there was great sense of spaciousness and generosity and beauty. And in the reading room, a great stillness. It's quite wonderful to see the evidence of a time in a society where there's an active form given to some sense of generosity for the greater good.

[32:15]

For anyone who likes to read a book, it's heaven. Good lights, comfortable chairs, nice big tables, beautiful environment. When all else fails, you look up and there are clouds painted on the ceiling. They scraped away all the years of bubble gum from underneath the table, cleaned up the lights so they give better light. Our version, perhaps, of what I have experienced in Japan when I've gone to see tea plantations. The saying in Japan is that it takes three generations of a family to cultivate a tea plantation. It's too complicated and too vast for a single generation to do it.

[33:36]

And I think the New York Public Library is the work of So easy for us to look to other cultures as having done it right and not know the ways in which we, in our own culture and time, are doing it right as well. And I think it's important for us to, particularly at this time of year, allow ourselves to see what is so and to allow ourselves to know what is working and to experience the blessings that come from the great kindness and generosity of others over a long period of time. The world is filled with people who have, even if just for brief moments, a capacity for generosity.

[34:47]

allows me to see that and experience that quality in others. People giving us a hand along the way. The ease of our exit provided by the man who was taking care of our suitcases. And we dashed in to get them to take the cab out to the airport. He saw us, you know, with the cab waiting. You stay there. He came out with these ridiculously heavy suitcases. The cab driver, who was very skillful, downtown New York is no small feat.

[36:04]

The great abundance of those incredible museums, large and small, Just before we left we went to the Japan Society where there's a quite remarkable exhibit of art from Zen people in this century. Just thrillingly beautiful exhibit. Clearly the work of a number of people, not just the artists. The people who thought of the show and the energy and effort to create a space filled with ponds and bamboo and calligraphy and dead sticks and chin rests.

[37:15]

So I want to recommend to all of you that you think of this as a time of the most important and intense spiritual cultivation, which is, of course, what it's supposed to be. But to reframe and refresh and renew your own relationship to this time of year as a time when it makes sense to go to bed when one can have some quiet time, not just the intensity of the season. And to pay attention to all of the small moments when there arises some opportunity for generosity, both from each of us

[38:35]

whatever is in front of us, but also the generosity of receiving kindness from others. That cultivation is not ever going to take place in general. It will only take place in little tiny ways, moment after moment after moment. That's the only way change occurs. It's the only way transformation occurs, is in the details, is in particular. Right now, Are you sitting in a way that has the quality of generosity for your body?

[39:43]

Do you experience the generosity of the chair or the cushion? What would be a kind way to sit? for a while, so that you begin to discover possibilities you didn't even know you had. So I'd like to dedicate my remarks this morning to the great kindness of our friend Tony. who had the audacity to tell us to meet him at the train station an hour and a half early and knew that we would.

[40:48]

Who had the kindness and good heartedness to know that he would absolutely thrill both of us with this great gift. and also to Dave and the people he works with. I always feel somehow reassured that the insights that are articulated in the Buddha Dharma abide everywhere, not just under the guise of official card-carrying Buddhist teachings. I find this experience at the train station very reassuring about what is sound and what is so and what leads to joy and generosity. So, we have some time if any of you has a

[42:07]

question or something you want to bring up for us to talk about? Jane? On your lecture today was delicious food for thought in the process of training the mind and the thing that really struck me was the notion about the role that fear can play in that cultivation of mindfulness and you know as I talked about last time I just recently received this diagnosis of being diabetic And at that time, it was just one week into this month-long period in which the doctor had given me the opportunity to get my blood sugar down by diet and control of the food that I ate. So, those first two weeks were really horrible and were quite... I mean, I thought I was in a hell realm. I mean, I was sure I was in a hell realm. And... On Tuesday, when I went in to have my blood test, there was a great deal of fear that was going on in me this whole month, because if I didn't get this situation into more balance, I had the fear of going blind, or having to take insulin, or having all the consequences of this particular hormonal imbalance wreak their havoc on me.

[43:34]

And I got very good news in that I had reduced the amount of my blood sugar from 186 to 124, but it wasn't still within the range of normal for a person. And there was a part of me that was really disappointed that I didn't, you know, I thought, you know, I'm going to crack this. and when I got that word I was elated that this diabetes can be treated by diet but I was disappointed that I hadn't gotten it back into a normal range and I had the rest of the week to think about that and to contemplate that and what I realized was that that actually was a blessing because if I had gotten it back into the normal range within this first period of time, knowing my mind stream, I would have thought, okay, I cracked that, I don't have to worry about this anymore, and I could go on and do what I was getting ready to do.

[44:43]

And I thought it was quite inconvenient of the universe to give me this diagnosis right before the holidays, which is my favorite time of year, because of all the taste and the smells and all of the social activities that go on around it. So it actually had a very positive effect on me that I needed to continue to be aware of everything that I do related to nurturing my body. And I had a big challenge yesterday. Yesterday was a very special day at the company where I work because it's the day that we distribute Christmas gifts to all of our employees and we had 315 gifts to distribute and I always hire Michael Pritchard to come in and be our Santa Claus and, you know, he gets the president of the company to sit on his lap and it's a great day of celebration with the real spirit of the season. And I always have the food service program department make eggnog and apple cider and we bring the children from the daycare and

[45:54]

One of my favorite things at this little event is the gingerbread men and the snowmen cookies that they make with, you know, white sugar icing on it and everything. And I knew it was going to be a hard day for me because it's such a ritual, this event that's been going on, you know, so many years. And I got really weird. I mean, I could feel my body getting uptight and my back started hurting and You know, I was nervous and I found myself being a little snippy to people who were taking too long to get their gifts. I had to kind of calm myself down a little bit. And just at the time that one of the women was bringing in this huge thing of these delicious cookies, one of the chefs from one of the other restaurants, we had three restaurants that were, arrived with a box of baked fried chicken. And she came over to me and she said, I know that you can't have your beloved cookies today, but I wondered if you would like to have your favorite fried chicken that I had cooked on their menu for the day.

[47:10]

And she handed me this chicken. And this was like right in the middle of all of this madness. And you talk about generosity. I mean, I just, it just totally changed my whole thing for the whole rest of the day. And I had my chicken actually last night because I had something else already planned for lunch, but that dependent, you know, I... Something that I remember Suzuki Roshi talking about a number of years ago, that for anyone who has some chronic condition or weakness or physical difficulty, that that was a great blessing because out of that condition would come a certain kind of strength and cultivation that would be less likely to be developed without that kind of so-called adversity.

[48:13]

It came up in the context of his talking about his lifetime of struggle with anger. He was actually quite famous as a young Zen person for his quick anger. But by the time I knew him, he was someone who had cultivated patience to a remarkable So, you know, it's in that sense that I think Shanti David is pointing to looking at what seems like a difficulty and seeing how here is exactly the place where we will get to see what's so about our mindstream. And if we stay open to ourselves in that process, discover how to work with in this case, your love of the delicious gingerbread cookies, to find a way to open up and reframe your reaction and response in that situation.

[49:24]

And in particular, your insight about, oh, it was probably a wholesome thing that And our experience of so-called adversity changes tremendously when we can have some insight often enough to see that what Shantideva is pointing out is really as accurate. Karen, do I see a lurking, cluttering hand there? We were talking about solving the problem of the train accidents and people recognizing that those problems existed here and there and everywhere, once the solution had been found.

[50:27]

And it struck me, both in a personal way and I think in a learning way, that the fear of not having the answer, the fear of not having a and seeing what is as it is. And the courage to go ahead and name what is without knowing how to deal with it in any way is what really struck me. Well, and I think particularly given our culture these days, we don't have a lot of conditioning for the wholesomeness of that mind of don't know, the amateur. One of the things that was quite striking to me in this exhibit of Zen paintings and calligraphy and all, there were a number of paintings of Bodhidharma, the great patriarch from India who brought Buddhism from India to China.

[51:34]

And he's much revered in Japanese Buddhism and particularly in Zen. There were a number of paintings that were called One Line Bodhidharma. Some of them were really marvelous. And I was thinking about how coming from Bodhidharma, the story about Bodhidharma when he meets the emperor. And the emperor is just knocked out by the dharma and keeps asking, you know, Bodhidharma, all these questions, and finally asks him, well, you know, who are you? And Bodhidharma says, don't know, and leaves town. You know, the emperor was knocking himself out to get Bodhidharma to hang around, you know, be a jewel in my court. Bodhidharma said, don't know, and left.

[52:37]

This mind of don't know is a treasure in a way that is easy to not see, and when we see it, to forget. To forget the benefits of that kind of spacious, open, what is this? What's going on? Where am I? What is this? And I think it's very, very, very easy to lose track the deep penetrating possibilities that arise from the cultivation of that quality of mind. The resistance to the grasping for the knowing or the answer or the resolution is sometimes, it's palpably difficult. You know, you really just, I want to have that in that other place. How did you find the answer?

[53:48]

To set as a kind of contrapuntal to yesterday. In the morning, Bill cajoled me into the armor show. Not an exhibit I would have gone to on my own. It was extraordinary. Some Italian guy, whose name I don't remember, was this incredible incredible helmets, etc. I mean, just the work itself was beautiful, but on many, many, many of these helmets, what is depicted on the two sides over and over and over again are victory and Victory and fame. I thought, hmm.

[54:51]

Big trouble. When what we're going for is victory and fame. You need a lot of armor. I think so. I know I'm fascinated with the fame trap. Particularly because in Buddhist psychology the articulation is that it is only when you reach the second or third highest level of enlightenment, it's right up there. fame persists as one of the traps until the second or third highest level of awakening, of realization.

[55:58]

I thought, this is to be paid attention to if it's that long lasting. And when, you know, just listening to you just now, Karen, I think The mind of don't know is not the mind that's seeking, you know, victory and fame. I also think, you know, in terms of what you're bringing up, I'm struck by how often, if we just dig deep enough, what we come to is fear. I think that's often the quality that keeps us from really rejoicing with, I don't know, I don't know. There's a fairly new edition of Lectures by Kadagiri Rishi edited by one of my Dharma brothers, a man named Steve Hagen.

[57:12]

The book is called, You Have to Say Something. It came out of a dialogue between Steve and Katagiri Roshi in which they had come to some shared understanding about the nature of things. And Steve had come to the place where he realized that what he was beginning to have some understanding of, he couldn't say anything. I can't say anything. some sense of what this ground is, this underneath language. And Kadagiri Roshi's response is, yes, but you have to say something. That's a very interesting edge with this cultivation of keep the mind of don't know and, well, you have to say something. Am I willing always to just keep sticking my neck out?

[58:16]

Keep... Say something. Rather than hide. Rather than go for looking good. You know, I just do this. Patricia. I probably mentioned in here that about three months ago I had a very, very unpleasant experience with an architect who was designing an addition for my house. And the real stumbling block was that he was a friend of, he and his wife were friends of 37 years. And I knew that I didn't want him to oversee the construction, which isn't going to happen until next spring. But I didn't know how to go about dealing with it without putting it out of my heart.

[59:19]

I just didn't know. And so I didn't do anything. It isn't like I had to do something immediately. But as Karen was saying, that I have a real compulsion often to want to fix things right now. And I would think about it, and I'd think, I have to do something. And then I didn't, because I just didn't know. So last Sunday, we happened to both be at the same party. And it was large enough so I didn't have to bump into them. In fact, I avoided it. And I was talking to somebody, and suddenly his wife was beside me giving me a big hug. And then he came over and we just chatted. And I can't tell you how I felt a healing in my heart.

[60:22]

And I know now what I can do to talk to him about it, to separate business and friendship. But I couldn't do that before because we've had such a acrimonious this talk. And then the next day I realized that, well I didn't realize it, I thought about the fact that I had taken on the practice of patience at the New Year's retreat. And even though I didn't consciously say, I'm going to practice patience, it was working inside me. You know, it somehow, that practice kept me from having to the act. And also the practice of patience has humbled me all year by seeing my inpatient. So I had a lot of gratitude. And I saw how important intention is to take on one practice.

[61:32]

Very powerful. So that even when we have not kept the intention right here. As you say, there's a way in which the intention has dropped in and is cooking. Yeah, I think that particular practice is really remarkably effective in penetrating And I think that's what I'm really suggesting is that during this time of year, if you are interested in taking on the practice of setting your clear intention to this focus on cultivation of generosity and kindliness, you may be surprised if you keep bringing that focus into the specific details, there is a kind of, energy that arises that you're not even aware of having arisen.

[62:35]

But isn't it interesting how uncomfortable we can come to be when we're in a situation where we just, we know we don't know what to do, I don't know what to do. And how hard it often is to just keep in that spot if that's where I am. the kind of respect for a certain state of mind that I think many of us have schooled out of us, the possibility of respecting. Yes, William. In the same field, the other end, another dimension of watching the people in the big training room as well as in room 25 work was the degree of confidence, self-confidence, each of them had. Yes. One of the things David said about why they liked their jobs was because they get to make decisions.

[63:43]

Of course, a faulty decision can result in a train wreck, so there's a lot riding on the decisions. But there was that element as well, confidence and personal authority, and what they did mattered. Well, what's also interesting to me in watching the faces, the yardmaster and the supervisor, Dave, the young yardmaster had that quality of confidence also. He knew that he had come to the point where he knew And he was quite open. I mean, yeah, you know, he fired me at least 20 times. I mean, he wasn't hiding anything. He wasn't talking about something he was ashamed of. This is the facts. And self-confidence, when it's not false, self-confidence which is authentic,

[64:55]

is crucial in our spiritual practice. I think it's crucial in our lives, but it's particularly crucial in spiritual practice. Cliff? I was reflecting on my fear as a training while you were talking. I'm a teacher and I was just trying it on. that that seems to arise out of in your stories, that there's real consequences. And then I noticed that a lot of times I don't think there's real consequences to my actions. And that's a little bit of self-perception that I could probably pay attention to. But that's where the training is. And then in a larger sense, maybe my theme right now, that the consequences of coming to my death unprepared for it.

[66:03]

And that's the big consequence, and that's the one that's very easy to just I don't know if this tendency towards claustrophobia is increasing as I get older, but I noticed going through the Holland Tunnel. Is that the tunnel you were in? Yeah, you also had the elevator. I also had this elevator episode where I was going to see some friends, and the elevator stopped between the 10th and 11th floor. And the inside door opened, but the outside door wouldn't open. And it was a small elevator. And I was impressed by how quickly I got panicky.

[67:05]

And using those experiences as a way of studying the edges in terms of our mental habits, Our friends who live in the building with the elevator, later I got this whole little pep talk about they would know you were in there and somebody would get you out. Well, fat lot of good that did me for the five minutes before somebody got the thing to move. But the edge, I think, is completely the edge you're describing. Because our conditioning is so strongly aversion to fear, turn away, distract, avoid.

[68:12]

And when we can change our relationship to fear, then the whole landscape, in my experience, becomes radically different. To be present with, hang out with, fear arises. Not fun, but truly liberating. And you know, here's the place where I'm at. Pretty good. We were looking at one of those allegorical paintings. Prudence. Prudence. That was a painting of Prudence. And Prudence, beautiful Prudence, had a skull that she was holding like this, and then this little cherub type

[69:20]

I have some more things to add to the impermanence altar, but I have to make more room, you know. A beautiful wing feather somebody gave me a long time ago, which some bugs got in and munched away, so all that's left are the ribs. But of course, that doesn't challenge my mind, the way of being stuck in the elevator. It's just child's play, just fooling around. being stuck in the elevator is, that's really it. And I do think, you know, your focus on actions have consequences is enormously fruitful, especially for those of us who grew up Of course, what's implied and really what is at the heart of the whole teaching on karma, that actions have consequences.

[70:46]

So, you know, when Dave said he uses fear in training the yard man, maybe that's what Not just that he's going to fire him from the job, but there are real consequences in the business that way. Absolutely. We celebrate the great awakening or light arising from the Buddha's enlightenment.

[71:48]

It somehow seems fitting at this time of year. Light and darkness. But I don't think we can really enjoy darkness. So I hope you all have a good season in whatever way you come to it. Good in a sense of wholesome and full of surprises that will keep you on your edge so you don't fall asleep. And I look forward to seeing you I don't know where the duck basket went.

[72:55]

It's lurking in some cabinet. But please leave your check or whatever under a rock there for the front. And if any of you is here and is not on the mailing list, if you want to be, leave your name on the list.

[73:11]

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