I'm a great believer in social space, particularly when faced with so many oxymoronic and paradoxical ideas. So that's why I sort of like longer breaks. Napping space is okay too. Attending space, you know. Perhaps it's good to mention that the continuous practice can go over in the break too. Yeah, I hope. Now I'm assuming that this, that you're may work or will start working as a therapist, but you're also, I guess all of you are business consultants, husband and wives.

[01:20]

And so you're in some sense, dealing with something that's related to this. What is the now we're in right now? And do any of you know the work of Ted Hall, Edward T. Hall? I would say you ought to. When my daughter went to college, she went to Brown, I gave her Ned Hall's books. He's somebody I'm not a close friend, but I think he must be dead now. But Edward T. Hall, I gave her her books and said, his books, I gave her his books and said, these books will teach you how to think, or can teach you how to think. He's a pioneering social anthropologist. He's written books on the German and Japanese and American business approaches.

[02:29]

He's done a lot of work for corporations on things like what's the distance between people in different cultures, how they stand, and so forth. Some of his books are done with his wife, Mildred Hall. one of the things he points out is, talks about, is a Japanese business term called harage. You know what harage is? Well, to try to give you an idea of what they mean by harage, it's H-A-R-A, hara, and I think G-A-I. And it means belly talk or stomach communication. And it is actually not so different from this. You know, it's a kind of cultural version of Buddhism.

[03:31]

So if we imagine a Japanese business meeting, there's a table. The German and American and Swedish business folks are sitting around it. Volvo's trying to buy Toyota. And the Japanese would make sure that every place has a yellow pad, a pencil, a glass of water, etc. For them, these are all semiotic symbols for Western businessmen to make them comfortable. It's a kind of, from their point of view, a kind of trick. Because they have no interest in such things as yellow pads and pencil. And they would make an agreement between themselves, among themselves, okay, we don't want this to be brought up on the agenda. And we'd like really to concentrate on these topics.

[04:39]

So they would try to control the agenda, for instance, with their stomachs under the table. But then what's going on is under the table, stomach to stomach. And so afterwards, we can imagine, I'm just making this up, but afterwards, you can imagine the European businessman, you know, we really should have talked about this point, but Every time I tried to bring it up, it slipped my mind. I just didn't feel, you know, I just didn't have the energy to bring it up for something. But the Japanese would say to themselves, boy, they got close to bringing that topic up, and did we ever concentrate on the table to keep that topic from coming up? Well, that view of the world... It's based on a sense that the now is not a container, not a shared space. It's a created space.

[05:42]

You can influence how it's created. Okay. So I'm trying to... Any suggestions you want to make or comments, but I'll try to... find a way into describing what Harge is in a sense and what Dogen is speaking about. Do you know the word Saccade? S-A-C-C-A-D-E. And it's a technical perceptual term. It's pronounced like sack and the codfish, sack cod. But it's spelled S-A-C-C-A-D-E. And it means the scanning process, primarily a visual scanning process, by which we decide whether we like a person or don't like a person, etc.

[06:46]

But, okay. Okay. Why is there a present here? We take for granted there's a present here. But we actually are on a knife edge of time. Everything's immediately past. I mean, there's no duration. It's five minutes to twelve. It's one minute to twelve. It's half a second to twelve. It's a millionth to twelve. It's a millionth plus a second after twelve. There's no twelve. There's no twelve of that. That's one of the ideas of emptiness. There's no 12 o'clock. It's empty. Why do we experience? Well, it's obviously created by us, created by our brain, created by our body. How do we create it? One of the main ways we create it is a scanning process. In other words... Right now, a psychotic process is about three times a second or faster.

[07:55]

I'm going like this. And if you measure what I'm doing, I'm actually scanning. And if you can scan a... When they have tried to mark with, I don't know, they use lasers or something, what pattern people scan is they primarily scan another person's eyes, back and forth across the eyes, down to the nose, mouth a couple times, up to the mouth, and then they get the proportion to the face. And you immediately know whether you know this person or seen this person before, usually, even from years before. And because the neocortex stores all this information. So when you go down stairs, you expect in most parts of the European and American world, stairs to be a certain height. If they're not a certain height, in America you can sue the architect or sue the builder because you step down and you fall.

[09:01]

So when we do things, mostly everything we do, where we reach for a door handle, whatever we do is a scanning process, which has nested with memory, which tells us the step is going to be this distance, the doorknob's going to be here. If you went into a person's house and moved all their doorknobs an inch, what's that damn doorknob you know so actually memory is a this this memory of how the world is is part of the conceptual fabric of consciousness dreams don't have it in dreams things are strange doors are where they're not supposed to be and you're Okay.

[10:08]

So the present is created, I would say, the easiest way to understand, yet to accept it, is the present is a scanning process by which we get a lot of information and create a sense of duration. Duration is created by us. And then we can enact, so we create a conceptual picture of the situation, And that conceptual picture is, first of all, organized through memory, and second of all, organized through enactability. We can act in it. Okay, does that make sense? I don't know how you say enact. There's a, my daughter, in our house in Creston, we have a swing that my daughter has. It's in the kitchen, you know. It's a kitchen, dining room, living room. And there's a swing in there. For me, it's just a couple of ropes. To me, it's nothing. I don't have any physical relationship to it, particularly.

[11:14]

But Sophia, she swings on it all the time. So when she sees it, it's a concept she can act within. For me, it's only a memory. I know it's a swing because, you know. So, okay. When you wake up in the morning... You basically are going from dreaming mind to a conceptual mind. So the concepts of what you have to do that day start shaping. I have to do this, I have to do that, etc. Once the concepts of your day kind of start linking together, Then, as I said earlier, pretty much pretty difficult to go back to sleep. And then, often, there's a little shudder or you stretch in bed.

[12:19]

That's at the moment where this conceptual nested tapestry of memory shifts into an inactable space. and you can get up into it. Now when we go to sleep, if you try to be attentive to when you sleep, usually, as you're going to sleep, uh there's a point you know when it's very difficult to some but for somebody to fake sleeping like if you go into your kid is asleep pretending they're asleep you know right away they're not asleep because their breath breathing is not involuntary you can tell immediately when breathing is involuntary and when breathing is conscious so the kid is blind it's not you know They're not wheezing or snoring or, you know, it's voluntary, it's conscious. Well, you can, if you can notice, if you can kind of find that consciousness, which either narrows or widens, depending on how we think of it, and allows you to go to sleep, at the point where your own breathing becomes involuntary, there's usually a little physical shudder.

[13:38]

Because you release... the body sheath. You release the thought body. And if you can go past that little shudder, and then be awake, you can hear yourself snoring. That must be me. Then you can actually, that is actually the quality of mind, which is called lucid dreaming. then you can bring that lucid awareness into your dream. You can actually kind of take conceptual consciousness and bring it down, go through this little narrow channel into sleeping and widen into another kind of mind, which can be aware of your dreaming and so forth. Okay. So we wake up in the morning and there's usually a physical stretching or something and we enter into consciousness.

[14:45]

And entering into consciousness and inactable consciousness, the word inactable doesn't exist in German. One of the hardest terms to translate for people. But to act within this conceptual consciousness. Okay. Okay. Now, much of what's happening is we're, as I said, we're scanning. Is there, I wish I had some water. Is there a glass nearby or a sink? Bottled water. Oh, bottled water is just fine. That's sweet of you, thanks. Okay, now, when we are with another person,

[16:05]

saccadic scanning is just underneath the surface of consciousness. We're not aware we're doing it. But we're aware other people are doing it. Actually, there's a... I don't know if research has been done on this, but this is my own... Some of what I'm talking about is research that I read about. Much of what I'm talking about is my own experience in using a technical term like psychotic, not psychotic, to try to find some way to speak about this. When you're scanning another person's face, or body, we do all of it, they're aware you're doing it, aware subconsciously.

[17:12]

And so you actually, most people, interfere with it. And you can see different cultural interference. In Ireland, people allow you to scan them in a way Germans won't allow you to scan them. Germans tend to... We have German wives, right? We know how they allow us to scan them. Yeah. When I first was in Germany, I couldn't figure out why I was treated so badly. And I'd go out to get some bread in the morning, pastry or something. I'd come back. It was such a bad experience in the bakery. I just didn't get it. And in Japan, the ideal human being is a baby. So in Japan, if you act like a baby, everyone helps you. I mean, they'll bring you home. They'll buy you a house. I mean, it's amazing what people do for you.

[18:13]

In Germany, the ideal human being is an adult. not a baby. So I'd learned a certain kind of behavior in Japan, and I'd go into the bakery kind of helpless, you know. They didn't want a helpless American in the bakery. So they treated me kind of rudely. But then I learned they want an adult who's German. So now, you know, I don't know a word of German. I have a bad ear. I'm not very smart. So, you know, I can't remember a sound without seeing it written down for some reason. I've been translated for 20 years now, regularly, and I don't The teacher of my daughter who came with her has been here two weeks. She knows more German than I do already. Anyway, so... I go in and I just say, I would like that roll dry. Dry or wet. Eins, zwei, drei. I'll take... They love it. If I'm confident, I'm sure of myself. Oh, here comes the foreigner. We're going to have an adventure. So...

[19:16]

But in general, if you ask, if you stop a person in the street in Hamburg, say, or Freiburg, where, how do you get to so and so? Why don't you know, is the first thing Germans feel. And then Germans have a sense of protecting their private space. You respect each other's private space. So if you're in a restaurant together, in America, people, if you and I were sitting at two different tables, we might say, oh, what are you having there? Germany, nobody does that. They wait till you've finished the meal, and there's no chance for conversation, and then as you're leaving, they say, auf Wiedersehen. So they wait until the end. So actually they've been paying attention to everything, but they don't say anything until... The Americans would say something too soon and too much right away. Okay. So some kind of interactive scanning process, depending on the cultural background, is going on all the time.

[20:21]

And if two people are flirting, they open their face up and body up to mutual scanning. If you kind of want to keep a little distance, you resist the scanning of the other person. Okay. Now, this space that we create within the framework of conceptual consciousness has no externality. Now, I'm just introducing this to kind of emphasize how much this space we're in right now is a mutual construction. And we can participate in it or not participate in it, but not participating in it is participating in it. So you can't not participate in it because not participating is a comment on, even if you don't even know anything about it, you're unconsciously not participating or participating.

[21:27]

So the idea of the Buddhist adept is that they are fully participating. or deciding not to participate, but they're involved with the feeling of the shared mutual interiority. There's a mutual interiority being created. That's extremely important for therapy. And how you establish that mutual interiority with another person, how you first, we could say, there's first a kind of mutual psychotic scanning or something that goes on while you establish some kind of safe territory. Now what do I mean by no externality? Translation. Mutual.

[22:29]

Mutual? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. You can ask me, you know. I'm not your husband, but I can, you know. With that word, it's perhaps better she asked her husband. Oh. Mutual. Let me see it. Okay. There's an insect flying around you today. Yeah, behind you. Okay. An insect has multifaceted eyes, usually on both sides of the head. And it's creating a world with its eyes, right? It's doing its own psychotic scanning, right? It's creating its present. So it's... That space has no externality. That's the insect's space. We can't enter it. We can't know what it's like.

[23:30]

Do you see what no externality means? It's a space, particularly that insect, that that insect is creating right now, and it will live and die in that space with its lifespan. We have no idea whether its lifespan is long or short. From our point of view, it's short. From the insect's point of view, it might be nearly an eternity. We create the same kind of space, which has no externality, just like the insect. But we don't think of it that way. We think we and the insect are in the same space, but actually we're not. So no externality is a very basic idea of emptiness in Buddhism. In a way, Buddhism rests on the idea of emptiness, which really means everything. Simply is a developed version of the idea that everything's changing. Okay.

[24:32]

So, Dogen says, the continuous practice which actualizes itself Actualize itself means, well, you can have the continuous practice of bringing, having intention to bring attention to your breath. At some point, that continuous practice, when it becomes continuous, actualize itself, and you shift to a, um, present, which you are generating continuity within through the locus of breath, body, and phenomena. Okay. So that means that Whether we know it or not, each of us is generating a space here that we're either, you know, there's an expression, he lives about three feet from his body, you know.

[25:47]

Well, you know, ideally, you don't, but when you're in a mental space, you're thinking about the future, you know. Okay. Okay. So if you, let's just try to use that as the example, if you can finally bring attention to your sense of continuity established through breath, body and phenomena, that would be an example of your practice actualizing itself. Once again, if you can bring your attention on a continuous... So you're not establishing your continuity in your thinking. You're establishing continuity right now. Thinking is a tool you use, but it's not how you identify yourself or establish continuity.

[26:52]

Now, when you're with people, you can feel, if I'm going to be in tune with this person, I have to shift to establishing continuity in my thinking along with their thinking. But you have the power to withdraw it back to your body. Now if you're a martial arts person, that's exactly what you'd want to do. You'd want to establish, encourage them to establish continuity in their thinking. and then to just cut their head off while they weren't looking. Now, I'm only using martial arts because it's one of the ways, the acupunctural ways, along with food culture, that Buddhism is actually, basically Buddhist ideas, are entering Western culture through the martial arts. And the martial arts have made use of such ideas because if you really have to be in a serious situation, a life and death situation, hey, it's much better to be situated in immediacy.

[28:01]

So Dogen means when you're situated in immediacy, this immediacy is not self-referentially generated. So the now we share right now is something we're generating. Now the more you know that the present is not a container, but something you're mutually generating, you can begin to Now, if you're motivated by self-interest, there's an implicit conflict. in being motivated by self-interest.

[29:05]

You can't establish connectedness in a deep sense. Because you could look at this, hey, this is a great martial arts and business technique, and I'll fool them into signing a contract. That would be like trying to get the guy drunk before he signs, you know, something like that. I'm going to try to speak about it in a business context. But the more you're motivated... for the sense of the mutual benefit of the situation, the mutual truth of the situation, or something like that, the more it's possible to establish this connectedness. So, when, just as I noticed, sorry, I'm not equipped here, Anybody have a Kleenex tissue? Thanks.

[30:18]

I have a slight allergy to air. I don't know why, but I have to pull up my nose on a regular basis. Probably to make you conscious of your breathing. Yeah, that's right. It's a breathing practice. So now I think, I don't know how clear this is, but the now... that he's talking about, he's defining now as a generated, not a natural or not a container, something we generate and it doesn't exist before continuous practice. In other words, if a person, remember when I said, meeting the Maharishi, I finally coordinated my breath with him. When you're with a person who's dying,

[31:22]

Part of the practice is you, without saying, you bring your breath into rhythm with their breath. And you're just there. You may touch them slightly or something like that. I mean, in a sense, we're born and we start dying right away. But the last few weeks or days are... one in which we often spend time with a person and you can really help a person if you bring your breath in relationship with theirs because very often people start to panic and their breath goes like this and you just let your breath go with theirs but their breath you follow their breath but then you can actually catch their breath and slow them back definitely slow their breath back down but we don't have to talk about such extreme situation we're doing it all the time And the more one's own breath is clear and related to one's own body, and when I'm speaking right now, my breath is speaking.

[32:30]

And in a way, I'm not even thinking. It's my breath and my body which is speaking. So your breath is to have attention to your breath, also means you can feel your breath in your speaking. So if my breath is in my speaking, that itself establishes a connectedness. So if you're a therapist or consultant or a friend or a lover, exactly how you're present with the other person Now, I don't want to make it sound so conscious because you, yeah, you know, I'm trying to find ways to speak about the more, if we'd all been meditating together for some time, it's much easier to speak about these things.

[33:34]

So I'm trying to find words for things. There's a man named Leavitt, Benjamin Leavitt, who in the mid 70s, discovered for the first time, I think, for, I call it Levitt space, that if you're, if I decide to pick up this glass of water, my body, if you wire me up, my body has decided to pick it up before my mind makes the decision. Okay. Now this is something I just noticed from practicing. And so when I read the research of Leavitt, who was a San Francisco research psychologist by chance, I said, oh, geez, that's interesting. That's what I've been experiencing through meditation practice or through mindfulness practice. So consciousness then becomes an editor more than an initiator.

[34:41]

So consciousness has the experience that it initiated, but actually it only decided to do it or not to do it. It doesn't mean we can't consciously or have an intention to jump in an ice-cold swimming pool. Our body may say... I'm taking an example. My daughter, I was in Italy at a swimming pool and Sophia said, Papa, jump in the swimming pool. It was ice cold. They hadn't heated it. I didn't really want to go in until I got here probably. She was waiting for her father. My body was saying, you're not going to jump into that pool. Papa, are you going to jump? In that case, consciousness made the decision. But most of the time, consciousness is an editing process. So if consciousness is deciding with your business partner or lover or whomever, oh, I'm going to move this and move that, and then at the dinner table and the candles, it's all going to be a good contract that's going to be signed, or whatever.

[35:55]

It's like the voluntary breathing. You can't fool the other person. The person can tell you're awake. But when your intention is this folding out, when your intention is this folding out, knowing that this is a mutual interiority that's being established, then both parties have a sense of, oh, we thought of this at the same time. You know, that's exactly what I wanted to talk about, etc. And... So, basically, that's a way to say something about, does this make more sense now? Or not make sense? So... I don't think we heard a response. Some of it makes more sense to me. Yeah, definitely.

[37:00]

It relates to, well, I relate to a concept that we related to earlier as when we say there's no such thing as, well, the map is not the territory. Yeah. And it's also what you were saying was, well I don't remember right now, but what I connected it to was that we have a saying, you cannot not communicate and you cannot not influence people. Yes, right. Same idea. It relates to each other in a way. So put certain concepts together and it'll make sense in the end. Well, he goes on, because he's talking about Buddhism, is that when you really know this now, which doesn't belong to the self, that is the seed of being a Buddha, or being enlightened. So the more you get used to inhabiting a now that's mutually generated,

[38:03]

the more you're free of the self. So it's not like, geez, I have a self, which I'd like to get rid of. It's like understanding the self swims in a certain kind of water. Let's change the water. Then the self doesn't function very well in it, and some other kind of, which we would call Buddha, or the seed of Buddhism, or something like that. Okay. This is not so easy to talk about. Well, and one thing, one way I try to understand it is that most of the time when I notice my own thinking, I am either in the future or in the past. And the way I figured, the way I understood what you were saying was that to be able to be a creator of the now.

[39:05]

I have to practice. It's not just that I have to realize that, oh yeah, I was thinking about the future, and oh yeah, I was thinking about the past, well now let's start thinking about the now, and then I'm there. I have to practice, and that's where the meditation and the awareness and the intention of the attention of the breathing comes in. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's helpful to recognize that this is a craft. And you learn to work with the craft of it. Somebody else want to bring up something? It helps me if you say things. I was just thinking along the same lines that you can sit and discuss this forever and ever, but you need to practice it to really get this sort of thing. Otherwise you can just talk about it.

[40:06]

Yeah, so I'm trying to talk about it enough so there's sufficient understanding that if I suggest some practices, the practices will function in an understanding that supports the practice. For me, I can really... I like and I'm attracted to the idea that the now is not in the self. It's created by us together here. We can create an entirely self-determined now, but then people don't like us, etc. And for me, if you look at the statements, I can take part of it from the second sentence now. But the first sentence, Why is that there? Why doesn't it start with that?

[41:09]

Why doesn't it start with the continuous practice for Jaisalmer? Can I say something? Sure, of course. I think what he's talking about there is the continuous practice which actualizes itself is the intention. We're moving away from discursive self when we're in a continuous practice. For me, the way I understand it, the awareness of the now can only take place when we are not limited to identifying with the discursive thinking processes. And that's the continuous practice which actualizes itself, is one that's outside of the discursive process. Yes, because that's the guess I have. It's also that one of the things emphasized in Buddhism in many different ways is continuous practice. And so he's taking a basic Buddhist idea for practitioners and saying, okay, you accept this continuous practice.

[42:14]

You want your continuous practice to actualize itself. And in fact, whatever you're doing now is inevitably that practice because there's no alternative to the now. And what is the now to which there's no alternative to? If you're going to actualize yourself, it's only a now which is not formed through self-referential thinking. Does that shift clearly? Yeah. Thank you. And if it doesn't refer back to the self, it refers back to... It's the reference point that you begin to establish is this situated immediacy. Okay. that you're born in and you die in and it's not the whole of reality but it's a reference point the immediate situated immediacy I try to put words on this it's when my thought travels along the continuity because it has to exist

[43:27]

But if I could be established and see that I'm traveling along, I don't have to travel with it. I can stop it. And then I refer back to the momentum now that we create. Right. Now, when you're riding your bicycle for 300 kilometers, you better be in a situated immediacy. Yeah. Or you're going to fall off your bike. Yeah. So many people, but there's a kind of exhilaration to situated immediacy. It makes you high. That's why people climb melting glaciers. You've got to get down before the sun comes up because the glacier is melting under your hands. We like that. After 9-11, when you talk about 9-11 in New York, everyone says, wow, did we all feel good afterwards. Because there was a sense of disaster, of common feeling and so forth. So we ride a bicycle or we climb a mountain to get that feeling, but that feeling is right here.

[44:30]

That's also the actualized moment. But if we identify with our thinking, we lose it right away. It's like to identify that I'm thinking. When I realize I'm thinking, then I stop thinking it. And then I'm here and now. But on the bike, I'm sort of forcing myself to be here and now. Otherwise, I'm... The bike forces you to do it. Yeah, but it was a funny phenomenon. The closer to the other bike I was, the more present I became because it was going 40 kilometers per hour this close to another one. And I was a dependency on each other. Yeah. which I had experienced before, but it was fun. Yeah. Okay, thanks. Yeah. I keep thinking about compassion, and I wonder how and if that's connected to... Well, from the point of view of Buddhism...

[45:33]

Compassion isn't a moral thing. It's not a good thing. It's simply non-self-referential connectedness. Okay? And you can call it compassion. But you feel compassion. You feel with the other person. Okay. So now we can talk about, I mean... Oh! You see, I'm 28. You know, if I'm in a sashin, which is a seven-day period of sitting, I give one talk a day for about 40 minutes. What? 45 minutes to 50 minutes. Yeah, sometimes an hour. You get very tired legs. Yeah, I know. But it... But sometimes I've talked an hour, an hour and a half, but in general I try to talk somewhere between 40 and 50 minutes.

[46:41]

You know, I bring up a lot of things, but really what we've explored just now, I might explore in seven days. But there's a different pace here. And although I'm not going to see you, so, you know, I put some seeds out there and maybe... It's great. Yeah, it is great. So, a practice one can use... is of what I say is to pause for the particular. In English, just for the alliteration, pause for the particular. Or you can say pause within the particular.

[47:47]

Or pause for the pause. Okay, now what does this mean? What is this idea? This idea is that, okay, you've got this ninth edge of the present, right, which has no dimension except the dimension you give to it, the duration you give to it. Now, children have, when you think about your childhood, depending on how old you are, your childhood was a half your life. I'm watching my daughter grow up, and it's real fast. She's six now, she'll be ten soon, and then she'll be sixteen, and But she experiences this a long period of time. That's not just because you're a child. It's really a different time. But it's not a time that's only available to you as a child. In meditation, through meditation, you can make this duration like the duration a child has.

[48:50]

Suddenly time slows down. 10 or 15 minutes can seem like an hour. Or 10 or 15 minutes or an hour can seem like a flash. So the idea of clock time is really, it kind of exists. It's some sort of shared kind of time. But time in a yogic culture is ripening time. When do things ripen? And what is your relationship to time that lets them ripen and you know when something's ripened for another person? So this sense of ripening time is also in this sense of what is this that we think of as time. It's actually a kind of spatial extension. Okay. Okay, we've got the knife edge of the present. We can create the duration.

[49:53]

We create the present. Basically, we create the present. It doesn't exist, and even what we create has no externality. I think an idea like no externality, you've got to just let it float in you. And at some point, to really recognize it isn't an enlightenment experience. Many things require a kind of shift in your worldview. So it's in some contradiction to our habits. I could bring up so many things at once. Let me just bring up the idea of the two truths. We'll start on that. Basically it's an idea emphasized by Nagarjuna. The two truths are very simple. It's a version of there's a difference between sasa and mind and our usual mind.

[50:55]

I said all the Buddhism comes out of noting the difference. What's interesting about that there's a difference between zazen mind and usual mind is that we call them both truths. And Nagarjuna emphasized them as both truths. In other words, the conventional truth is that we have to function as if things were permanent, as if things were predictable, You don't want the tree in front of your house to be gone the next day. You want it still there the next day, and you still want it on the left side of the front door, not moved to the right side of the front door. And if it had moved to the right side, it would be quite disturbing. So the job of consciousness is to make the world predictable. And when it's not predictable, we're disturbed. But in fact, the world is not predictable.

[51:58]

There might have been a storm. There might have been some vandal cut the tree down. You don't know. But we want it to be predictable. Okay. The two truths are that simple. It's not predictable, but we need it to be predictable. Okay. That simple. All right. But there are two truths. One's called the conventional truth. One's called the fundamental truth. Okay. Now, in the Lankavatara Sutra, supposedly the Buddha, and who knows what the Buddha really said, but the Buddha said, I give advice to children, I give tenets to practitioners. Now what he meant was, a tenet, T-E-N-E-T, is something you hold to as truth. Okay. So the two truths are called tenets. which means it's not advice, it's that this is the way things are.

[53:04]

Now, how do you bring yourself in a relationship to the way things are? And one is the conventional truth and one is the fundamental truth. So if you're a practitioner, it means while you know the world as predictable, as a container is the conventional truth. The fundamental truth is that it's each moment unique, each moment changing, each moment a construct, each moment an activity and so forth. How do you bring that into your daily life? And that's the fundamental truth. So the adept practitioner makes that his or her fundamental truth and makes conventional truth the way they act with others to support a kind of compassionate view, a shared view of the world, etc.

[54:09]

So it's a tenet and it's not philosophy that you know about it. No, it only really has any meaning if you actualize it, if you practice it. Okay, so this is this sense of actualizing. So how do you make a, how do you make it a continuous practice that you notice everything is unique? That you notice everything is unpredictable? When you're on the bicycle, you know, the guy's going 40 kilometers beside you, you know things are unpredictable. There might be a stone there, etc. But mostly, we don't function that way. Okay, now, I think one suggestion I can make is you're sitting on a chair, for instance. I remind myself when I see an object that the object is interdependent.

[55:13]

I notice it's sitting on the chair. So, and to notice sitting on the chair, to notice the chair sitting on the floor, I mean, is to notice interdependence. I also notice that it's an activity. I can go move it. I can take this bell and I can use it as a teacup, put some water in. So I can use this in various ways. It's only a bell if I use it as a bell. That means it has no inheritance. The basic Buddhist idea is that there is no permanence and no inheritance. Inherence means that you inherit. Like, as a child, you're going to fulfill certain patterns that are in you. There is some degree of truth to that. But basically, things have no inherent identity.

[56:15]

They have no permanent identity. And they're a construct. And they are also, they're only mental. Now, this actually exists. But it exists in my, how I use it. You know, a teacher might say to a practitioner, stop the sound of that bell. Now, if that would be an adequate but insufficient answer, If you relate to the bell as an entity, you think, how can I stop the bell? But if you recognize there's no entity, it's only an activity, your answer might be already stopped.

[57:19]

Because just listen to the bell. While it's going, it's stopping. The nature of the bell sound is it's stopping. So an alert student would say, already stopped. It's already stopping. It's already been stopped. The nature of it, it's stopping. So if you think in entities, you say, I'm not going to stop that sound or stop the bell. But if you think in activities, the sound is an activity and it's stopping. Now this may seem like an exercise in some sort of futility, I don't know. But when you are in the world this way, it makes a difference. I think it's important to see entities as activities. That things are not entities, they are activities. That things are activities. Yeah.

[58:20]

So this glass is a glass because it's an activity. And this exists. but it has no externality. In other words, if I take this and throw it up in the hillside, it's eventually molecular compost. It turns into molecules, it turns into the hillside, it becomes part of the soil. It has no existence as a glass except in the space we create. So the glass is empty. and half full. So now you understand better why Buddhism says this is empty. Because it has no existence except through our use. Do you understand? It has no existence except through our use. I can use it in a lot of different ways. Okay. Okay. So the pause for the particular.

[59:26]

All right, let's see, where should we go before we... There's the two truths, yes. The Buddhist, just to repeat, the Buddhist way is to... sort of go for the fundamental truth that is socialized with the conventional truth. That would be a simple way to put it. And a good entry, you have to find an entry, an entry that you understand and feel for. And also the thing about there are no entities, there are just activities, it's also related the way I could agree to the fact that the people that we tend to meet and me, myself, define ourselves sometimes as being a state, like we make the state that we're in into an entity.

[60:32]

That's right. so it's not very it's making sense what I'm saying is making sense that's what I'm trying to say right now thanks well it's probably making sense for you but it's also making sense if you look at sort of a I call it a therapeutic process. Sometimes when you think of the conventional truths, they make big problems for people. Sometimes just to make them think a bit more fundamental about that sort of issue sometimes helps them. Absolutely. I'm thinking about the works, for example, as an example of a therapeutic process where You can try to make some shift thinking about a certain issue that might help you. I was thinking of the fundamental truth and the conventional truth.

[61:34]

And the fundamental was built upon the ever changing, always changing. And conventional is more non-changing. That's the way I want it in order to be predictable. If I use the paradox, because I go along the same, they sort of meet each other. But it's a play of words, because it is always changing. It's not changing, because it's always changing. So in one way, it's the same thing. Well, you can use words on whatever perspective I come from. Yeah. But that thing's always change is not the same as saying there's no change. That is what I'm trying to figure out. Because it's always changing, is it non-changing? Because it's not always changing the same way. If it always changed the same way, maybe you could say, hey, this is predictable. So in the non-change of saying it's predictable, it's not the same thing as non-change, always changing.

[62:37]

Thanks. But you can see you're attempting to understand the fundamental truth with the conventional. Yeah, I know. I go from one perspective to looking at the other with two different types of glasses. And I try to get them together. But I see when it's always changing, it's not the non-changing. Permanency. Permanence, yeah. So let's look at the idea of otherness. Now, some of these ideas, I'll have to, I'll see it in the next couple of days, we can develop, so you can feel them, because I'm only interested in doing this if you can feel it or practice it. I'm not interested in philosophy. Right. Right. Sukershi was asked, if, my teacher, if a tree falls in the forest, and there's no one there to hear it.

[63:40]

Is there a sound? She said, it doesn't matter. So much for that item of venture policy. Okay. Okay. So I'm going to just say something about otherness and maybe we can come back to it. Right now, you are other than I am, right? It would be nice if I could feel you from your side.

[64:21]

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