Oh, and there was another scene that was really good. And that was, he came home, and she was doing their accounts, their business accounts. And he didn't show any interest in her doing the finances for their household. She said, our financial security is important to me. In other words, I'm doing something that I think is important. And he wasn't interested. He's interested in some things, but not in what she's interested in, in dancing and keeping track of their finances. He didn't want to get involved in that. So that detail reminds me of a story which some of you probably already heard from me before, but I think it's a story about what establishes trust and promotes relaxation.

[01:11]

It's a story about something that started here in Texas. I don't know if it started in Houston or San Antonio or Dallas or Austin, but it started in one of the zoos here in Texas. And in this zoo, there was a whooping crane. A female whooping crane was born in a zoo here in Texas. And after she was born, the first thing she saw after she was born, you know, because sometimes whooping cranes come out of an egg and their mother's not around. When they come out of the egg, the first thing she saw was a male homo sapien. And so she imprinted on male Homo sapiens. They were like what really was interesting to her, or as we say, turned her on.

[02:12]

And she followed this male zookeeper all over the zoo, more than her mother. And when she grew up, they tried to get her to mate with male whooping cranes. Got a male whooping crane, brought her over, put them together. She was not interested in male whooping cranes. She wouldn't. She wasn't interested. They did their best, but she wasn't interested in them. She was interested in male humans. But male humans can't reproduce with whooping cranes, of course, so that doesn't work. So they sent her to a place in Wisconsin. where a guy was working on trying to take care of whooping cranes because they're an endangered species. And this guy tried artificial insemination from male whooping cranes, but her body didn't respond to the insemination.

[03:20]

And part of the reason for that, he realized, was that in the In the reproductive process of whooping cranes, what happens is that when the female and the male meet, the male does a dance. And unless he does this dance, her egg does not descend to the fallopian tube. It stays up. But when he starts to dance, she gets up and the egg descends and can be fertilized. But he has to do this dance in order for her to deliver the egg. But she didn't like male whooping cranes who do that dance. So this human man, he learned the male whooping crane dance.

[04:24]

And he put on wings on his arms, and he did the dance. And when he did the dance, this female stood up. And by the way, her name was Tex because of where she was born. This female stood up and danced with him. And the egg descended and was fertilized by male whooping crane sperm. And it kind of worked, but not Completely, because although the egg was fertilized, when it was delivered, the shell was too thin. And I think, if I got this, if I can remember correctly, that he tried, and this happens, whooping cranes are big and their eggs are big. They don't have lots of chances. Once a year, they do this. So I think this man tried this three or four years in a row of doing the dance and being somewhat successful in this process, but something always went wrong.

[05:36]

And then in the following year, he was busy for some reason. So he was a wildlife conservationist, but he's also a nature writer. So he had to take a year off, and then he decided in the next year that he was going to completely give himself to his relationship with Tex. In a parallel way to the story I told you about, he was going to get involved not just in the dance, in the sex part, but also dealing with the household finances. showing interest in all the things the text was interested in, not just the reproductive part. So he moved in with her. He made a house where they could sleep together and they slept together. She on her little straw bed, he next to her with his bed and a typewriter so he could do his typing.

[06:39]

And when she went out foraging for food, he went with her. When she went shopping, he went with her. He wasn't just there for sex. So he wasn't just there for sex. He also did the dance and he also did household things. He showed interest in all aspects of her life. And she was much calmer and more present to the relationship. And this time the egg was strong and the baby, Wolfing Crane, was delivered and grew to adulthood. This is an example of the kind of attention that makes it possible to relax and play and enter into creativity. And entering into creativity, we understand and are liberated. Here's another example.

[07:42]

There was a doctor, his name is Winnicott. He's kind of a mystic psychiatrist. And he was also a pediatrician, I think. And he was in a hospital, and a little girl was brought to him. I think she was about seven months old. And she had lots of problems, but her most severe problem was, well, her most severe problem was she actually was having fits, you know, where she'd actually go unconscious and so on. And she also was crying almost all day long. However, she couldn't sleep at night And then her mother could distract her from the fits. I mean, her mother could prevent the fits if in the early part of the fits, her attention was distracted.

[08:50]

So the details, I won't go into all the details of her condition, but basically this very sick little girl, very unhappy little girl, And he saw her from seven months up to about a year. And which was about a year when her fits had gotten. So they were having four or five times a day. And she was crying all the time. And he held her, and when he saw her, he held her on his lap. And do I remember correctly, it's something like this that She started playing with his tie. And then on another occasion, and crying while she was playing with the tie, on another occasion, she bit his knuckle very severely and started throwing spatulas, which I think are tongue depressors that doctors often have in their pocket, started throwing these tongue depressors, you know,

[10:00]

all over the room, playing at throwing the tongue depressors and biting the finger. And then another occasion also, she came and she started biting and throwing the tongue depressors around the room for about 15 minutes. And then she started to manipulate or play with her feet. So he took her shoes and socks off so she could get to her toes. And he said she seemed to be discovering in this play with her toes with immense gratification that the toes, unlike tongue depressors, do not come off.

[11:04]

You can't throw them around the room, they don't get lost. And she found this, she seemed to find this very satisfying, this surprise. The next time he heard about the girl was four days later, and he heard that her seizures, her fits, had stopped. And she was not crying anymore and sleeping well. And in 14 days, they continued to have no more fits, and she was discharged. And he saw her a year later, and she seemed to be a very happy little girl. I see in this story, the power of play opening her up to understand something about reality, which is a simple thing that toes don't come off and tongue depressors do.

[12:17]

But it was the playfulness that led to the creativity of the situation in which she understood something, which cured her of the understanding she had prior to that. Now, she probably wasn't thoroughly enlightened, but she was enough enlightened to cure her severe illness. Another aspect of what we need to do in order to trust in order to be able to trust enough to relax, is we need to know, we need to be aware of what our inner fantasies are, what our inner personal reality is, and we need to be aware of what shared reality is.

[13:23]

Because the play area is between these two. That was a big jump, I know, but I'll go over it again. In every moment of experience, like right now, each of us has our own inner sense of what's happening right now. I don't know if each of us is aware of what it is that we feel is happening right now. Like some of you might think, well, this is a nice talk. Or some of you might think, this is not a nice talk. This has been going nicely. Some of you might feel like, this is really boring. I want to leave. But we have not yet established that all of you think that this is boring and that all of you find this interesting.

[14:33]

What shared reality do we have here? Probably we could find several. They don't have to be big deals, like it can be like, do you all sort of, do we share the, do we have a shared reality that this is Tuesday night? Anybody have any problem with that or disagreement? Is that okay? Shared reality? Have a shared reality that I'm a man? Have you shared reality that this is a woman? Shared reality that we're in Houston? But each of you have an inner reality that none of us know about until you tell us something about it. Are you in touch with that? So my inner reality is that I don't know what's going on with you.

[15:48]

That's part of my inner. My fantasy is I don't know what's going on with you folks. But although I don't know, it looks like you're now terribly angry at me. But I'm not sure. My inner sense is that I don't know what your inner sense is. My sense is that most of you are sitting in chairs still. Not too many are asleep. This is my inner sense. Did you know that was my inner sense? You didn't, did you? No. When you're dancing, You have your inner sense of how the dance is going. And then you have a shared, there's some shared reality, maybe. For sure, each person, if there's two people that are dancing, for sure they both have their inner fantasies about what's going on.

[17:00]

Does that make sense? But they might not be in touch with it. So you might be dancing with someone and you're more concerned with establishing what the external reality is, which maybe hasn't been established, or if it has been established, you may be more concerned with maintaining and according with that than you are with keeping track of your inner reality. For example, you might be more concerned with whether your dance partner thinks you're dancing well. And then you might ask your dance partner, am I dancing okay? And they might say, yes. And you might say, well, would you tell me more about how that's so? And they might tell you. And you might be able to understand and say, oh, I get it. And you might really try to record with that understanding about what's the good way to dance. And you're so concerned with that that you lose track of your inner sense of what the dance is like. This is not playful. But to do your inner sense of what the dance is like, like, I'm a good dancer and you're very lucky to be dancing with me.

[18:11]

But not have any sense of whether the other person is with you on that. You're in touch with your inner sense, like, I'm just, I mean, like, I am a fabulous dancer. I mean, I'm moving so well. And my partner is also moving really well. That's my sense of how the dance is going, is we are doing really well. I could have that sense. But that's not necessarily shared unless I say, may I mention something to you? The partner says, yeah. I said, I think we're dancing really well. I think I'm dancing well and you're dancing well. What do you think? And they might say, I don't think so. But at least I'm trying to find out. I'm interested in what we are, is there anything we're sharing? And then I might say, well, how do you think we're doing? And they might say various things. And we might go back and forth until we sort of like, oh, this is how you think we're dancing.

[19:14]

And the partner says, yeah, that's right, that's how I think we're doing. You say, oh, I get it, okay. And you're tuned in that way. And this external thing is not under your control. And it's not under your partner's control. You share that part internally. And a moment later it might change, but anyway you can find it again and again. But still both of you have your own sense of how the dance is going. Your inner sense is not playing, your shared sense is not playing. Your inner sense of what's going on right now is not play or playfulness. And our shared reality of what's going on is not playfulness. The playfulness comes when you trust enough And I trust enough and we trust enough to let go of both of those. Not ignore them, not reject them, still honor them, honor both of them. They're both very important for a healthy, to be balanced. And then once you're balanced, you let go of both, and as soon as you let go of both, play arises spontaneously.

[20:20]

And it's a surprise. It's not what you thought was going to happen. It's not what you agreed was going to happen. Didn't we agree to dance like this? Yes, we did. But we're not, are we? No, we're not, but no, we're agreeing on that. We're both surprised, right? Yeah. That was my inner sense that I was surprised. Were you surprised too? Yeah. Wow. Let's keep going. And again, letting go of our surprise now, our dreams surprise, in our inner and outer sense of that, we dance again. And it's surprising again. And as we enter into this playfulness, we start to see something called creativity. We start to see how the dance is created and how we are created to the dance. And then we understand. And now you understand that we're enacting our understanding by our playing.

[21:23]

So our understanding and our playing are healing us from our basic affliction. We understand and are liberated by such an understanding, which is not my understanding, it's not your understanding, it's not our understanding, it's when we let go of ... when we let go, when I let go of mine, you let go of yours, we let go of ours, by relaxing in the midst of all of this, and it arises again and again, and we keep relaxing with it and keeping in touch with it. It doesn't mean just go mindless. You keep in touch with your mind, your busy little creative mind. You have a creative mind, you have fantasy, you have imagination, and it never stops. Except maybe in a deep, deep sleep or deep, deep trance, it stops sometimes. But basically, we're always fantasizing away heavily. We're very creative beings, but

[22:26]

We have to relax with our creativity, and we have to check out this more external reality, which is not so creative. But that's part of our life too, keeping in touch with both, keeping the relationship between these going, keeping the distinction between them clear, keeping the relationship, keeping them related, keeping them clear, keeping them related, keeping in touch with both, keeping them clear, and then developing enough trust so you can relax and let the play emerge. So again, how can we promote trust? I talked to my wife on the phone, I think yesterday.

[23:28]

And I told her that I was teaching people in Texas the word. Together. Together. Now some of you have already had a few lessons in this, so I want to tell the new people about this. I have a grandson who my wife thinks is having a very good effect upon me. And What he does sometimes, if he walks up to me and certain other people, and he's not very tall, he's just two and a half, and he reaches up, if you're an adult and you're over four feet tall, he reaches up to you with his chubby little hand and he says, let's go to the garden together.

[24:32]

And you reach down and you take that little hand and you go, together. He says, let's play baseball together. And when he does that, he doesn't do it all the time. He does it when he's relaxed. He's not always relaxed, but he's remarkably frequently relaxed and cheerful and ready to play. And when he does that, most people also relax. Let's go together. So you, let's play together. And I told my wife that. She said, like I said, she said, she's happy. He's having a good effect upon you. And she said, and I kind of warmed you up for him. 27 years she worked on me.

[25:36]

I said, you kind of tenderized me. As in meat tenderizing. You know? How can we tenderize ourselves A year ago here in Houston, I was riding a bicycle on 43rd Avenue, is it? 43rd Street. And the road was rough, so I thought I'd pull off the road and drive right on the sidewalk. But in the transition, the wheel of the bike turned, and I was thrown very fast onto cement. and broke this femur here and went to hospital here in Houston.

[26:46]

And one of the Zen students here in Houston came to see me and he told me that he got angry the other day when he was driving and somebody tried to cut him off. And I said, that's interesting because I've been driving in Houston too on this trip. Not a bicycle, but a car. And I noticed that my attitude is like driving cars and riding bicycles and stuff is dangerous. And so, like, if you have the attitude of, like, we're in this car, and other cars might smash into you any time. This is, like, dangerous, and if you can get from point A to point B without getting killed, that's great. But, you know, we might not make it.

[27:54]

So if somebody cuts me off and I don't get killed, it's kind of like, oh, that was good. Rather than I'm driving around Houston thinking, this is fate. I'm going to have no problems here. And getting from one place to the other is no big deal. And suddenly now, it's a big deal. Somebody's in my face. So that experience kind of, to some extent, tenderized me. So I'm a little bit different moving around now. It's not so much that I feel safe and I'm trusting because of that. It's more like I trust that relaxation is a good way to move through a dangerous area. That playfulness is probably... Relaxation and playfulness will probably be the way to have a good dance and understanding and liberation with people.

[29:15]

So I propose that some of it are pretty tough. And we need to think about how we're going to get the kind of help we need, the kind of tenderizing process, what kind of tenderizing processes we can enter into so that we can gradually trust that being tender is actually a good way to go. rather than being tough and controlling? What do we need to dare to be gentle and relaxed? And expressing what we need to do that, I think, is part of getting what we need. So I said in the description that this would be interactive, so maybe I've already said more than enough.

[30:39]

Is there anything you'd like to... Well, anyway, let's play together. Are you ready to play together? Are you relaxed? Do you have trust in the situation? And if you don't, can you say what would help you trust the situation so that you can relax and play? Do you feel ready to play together? Do you feel ready to hold hands and walk to the garden together? And if you don't, can you say that you don't? Do you feel enough trust to say that you don't feel enough trust to play together? I'm not saying that I'm ready to play together. I don't want to be too far ahead of you, but I am kind of... I guess I do kind of... I guess I do feel kind of relaxed.

[31:45]

Yes, do you want to play together? Okay. How do you want to play? Yes. Is there a fundamental way to let go of it, or there's no fundamental... To rely on? To rely on. Yes. What is the fundamental... Well, there's two fundamentals. One is the fundamental affliction of ignorance. As I said in my first story, that the origins of our problems in this story is ignorance. In other words, we ignore the way things are, and give them too much independent existence. We take them too seriously. We ignore the way they are. The way things are is that, you know, you really can't take them seriously because they're like, they're too dynamic to take seriously. You know, you can't pin them down to like, well, it's really like, oh, seriously, like that? No. Things are too dynamic to really get serious about.

[32:51]

It's more like things are more like challenging in order to embrace them and participate with them rather than they're really like so heavy like we make them. So that's the fundamental affliction of ignoring. The fundamental affliction is ignoring what's happened, how things happen. And then there's the other side is that karmic consciousness is trying to like fix the situation up. It's a consciousness built on all this ignorance and is trying to operate on ignorance to fix ignorance. It thinks there's some fundamental light that you're going to be able to use to fix this problem. Well, it's just one's at the level of consciousness and the other one's at the level of basic ignorance. One's at the bottom and one's at the top of the process. Yeah. And the things, the way they really are, is what the Buddha knows. So it isn't like we're going to try to get rid of all this ignorance, because it's right there all the time.

[33:57]

But if you can relax with it, like you've got an ignorant there walking by, and if you say, hey, you, and he turns his head, he's acting like a Buddha. If you say, what's Buddha, what's your Buddha nature, and he hesitates, then he's flipped back to karmic consciousness, trying to deal with a Zen master. with his consciousness, which is saying, there's the Zen master, and here I am, and this is really happening, and I want to do well. But I'm scared of what he's going to think of me if I answer this question wrong, so I'm getting out of here. Galactic spontaneity, because he, in the first case, he didn't, he just turned his head. He was relaxed, He was sweeping, turned his head. No thought, normal thing, no big deal. Even though he was a sentient being, he wasn't acting like it. He was doing the same thing in Buddha. The second case, he got scared, he got tense, and then he tried to use his common consciousness to deal with life.

[35:01]

So once we were tense, we can't play, and then we try to use power. Yes? Are you ready to play together? Oh, great. What's winning the food trust? No, it's not like that. Yeah. Yeah, we start off. So the kind of trust I'm talking about is, first of all, the trust that you could admit that you don't trust. That's the first level of trust is like, you know, I don't really trust that you would be allowed to feel that and express it would be part of the process by which you get over that kind of distrust.

[36:06]

That'd be the first step, probably. Another part of developing trust is to know that you will be allowed, that you will allow yourself and you will be allowed in some relationship to keep in touch with your sense of what's going on in the relationship. That the other person won't talk so much, so you'll be so busy dealing with what they say that you won't even be able to keep track of what you feel. So the person might not be saying to you what you think is stupid and you should shut up, but they just might be pushing so much on you that in order to cope with them, you're actually forced to give up contact with your own imagination. So that's a situation where it would be hard to relax. Eventually, if you were relaxed and playful, then somebody could be like coming at you real heavy and you could still stay in touch with your inner sense and give up your sense of what's coming at you and give up the external reality too.

[37:18]

But at the beginning, we need somebody who will let us throw tongue depressors and bite their finger and play with their tie and won't push too much on us. Like I also told the story of when I was a kid, I used to spend a lot of time by myself in my room. I had a really nice room. It had windows on three sides, and my little brother was very active, so he shared the room with me, but I often had the room to myself. This is about when I was eight years old. I used to spend a lot of time in that room, just quietly, playing with my toys, and my parents thought I was... Overly withdrawn. They were worried. I wasn't, but they were. So they had my ears checked. They thought maybe I was hard of hearing. And it turns out I didn't have a hearing problem, so then they sent me to a psychiatrist. And the psychiatrist's name was Dr. Hansen.

[38:24]

This is 52 years ago. Dr. Hansen maybe is 100 now. Anyway, I went to see Dr. Hansen, and at the beginning of the session, Dr. Hansen would say to me, is there anything you'd like to talk about? And as far as I know, every time I said, nope. And then we would play. We would build model airplanes. We'd build model boats. We'd build model houses and forts and cities. And I got to take the stuff home after we finished. Plus, and I was only eight, and he was like an adult and skilled person. So I could make much better stuff with him than I could do by myself. So I made these really neat things with him that I got to keep and take home for my brother to break. And at the end of the session, he would say, is there anything you'd like to talk about?

[39:30]

And I would say, no, thank you, and go home. So I felt allowed to not talk. And I think in that environment, I really enjoyed playing with him. So we need to know that we don't have to tell people what's going on inside. And also we need to, if we know that we can, that we're allowed to keep our inner world that we don't have to, like, get distracted from it or deny it or abandon it. That part, that will give us trust. But also, we need to know that if we share reality and building something together, you share reality. You have both of those, and trust builds in that situation. And the more trust builds, the more you relax with your inner world, like, I don't know what, what does he think of me? Am I crazy or whatever? And the external world of, like, getting the boat to be a certain way or whatever, and enter into the play space, and that's what's really healing.

[40:31]

So that's just another example of how the trust can develop. And also another way trust can develop is by expressing your inner fantasies to somebody and learning that they can work with that, and that you can get your fantasies out in the open so they don't stay in the dark. Because sometimes when you get them out in the open, you know more about them, and the more you know about them, the more you can relax with them. The less you know about it, the more you feel like you should hold on to. So expressing your inner fantasies and expressing your sense of shared reality, getting in reality checking, Reality checking and getting confirmation through reality checking and getting your own fantasies out of their closet, both of those processes help you be able to let go of both and enter the space between, which isn't mine, isn't yours, isn't ours, but that's the area where we're actually creating each other.

[41:37]

That's the area where how things happen is really emerging. That's what we've been ignoring. since birth and before. So it isn't that we blindly trust at all. It's that we trust as much as we do trust and that we express little by little, little by little and more and more we express our distrust or our differences of opinion. We express the conflicts we feel or the conflicts we imagine. And we even reality check and establish that we agree, that we are in conflict. Yeah, I think we're in conflict. Is that right? Yes. We have a shared reality even though we have a conflict. Then we can let go of our conflicts and play together without changing our conflicts. And we can let go of our inner fantasies about what we're doing, what we're playing, so our fantasies don't interfere with our creative process.

[42:39]

So we can see what's going on. We can see what's going on free of our fantasies. Because usually our fantasies get conflated with what's actually happening. So we can't see. And one of our primary fantasies is that thing exists separate from us. If we can confess that and get it out and open over and over, and the anxiety we feel about that, we can let go of it. Not get rid of it because it keeps coming up. That fantasy keeps reappearing. But we become more and more free of it by playing in the midst of relaxing with it. So we become more and more comfortable. In each of these cases, it's like trust in the situation of X Relax in the situation of X. Become playful in the situation of X. Become creative in the situation of X. Understand in the situation of X. Be liberated in the situation of X. Become beneficent and a benefit to the world in the situation of X. X is there the whole time.

[43:51]

But somehow, without changing anything, the situation changes from misery to beneficence. So it is a change, but not by messing with x, whatever it is. It's more like becoming playful with it.

[44:11]

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