So I'm actually asking your help today because on this wonderful day here, which feels like a new beginning of spring, I have been troubled by an earworm for for about almost a year and a half, and I've been trying to get rid of it all that time. And for those of you who don't know what an earworm is, it's a song that plays over in your head over and over and over. And he thought I had a disease. Yes, it's a terrible, I have to tell you about my fatal disease. No, no, it's an earworm and I just can't get rid of it. And so I thought, and so the earworm is the fool on the hill by the Beatles. So I'm gonna ask you to join me in singing that and maybe by some powerful force. No, I was thinking that the force of our energy could just dispel the song.

[01:10]

And I'm assuming there are a lot of people who were alive in the 60s. This was a song from 1967, part of the Magical Mystery Tour album, for those of you who don't remember. So maybe you could help me by singing it with me. Judy, where are you? And Alan, people who are musically inclined, please help me. Rhythm helps. Judy, you want to keep the rhythm? Day after day, alone on a hill, a man with a foolish grin is talking perfectly still. to nail him they can see that he's just a fool and he never gets an answer but the fool on the hill sees the sun going down and the eyes in his head see the world down

[02:23]

Well on his way, head in the cloud, a man of a thousand voices talking perfectly loud. but nobody ever hears him or the sound he appears to make and he never shows his feelings but the fool on the hill sees the sun going down and the eyes in his head see the world spinning round and nobody seems to like it they can see what he wants to do and he never shows his feelings But the fool on the hill sees the sun going down.

[03:26]

And the eyes in his head see the world spinning round. La da da. And he never listen, listen to them. And he, where are we going, Judy? All right, but anyway, and the fool on the hill sees the sun going down, and the eyes in his head see the world spinning round. So when I had this earworm at Sashin, at Rahatsu, at the end of seven days, you know, we have to ask a question. So I asked Sojin, what is a fool? Well, who is a fool? What is a fool?

[04:28]

Or who is a fool? And Sojin didn't say anything. I made a mistake, because any time you ask Sojin a question that begins with who or what, he says, that's a great question. He says, that's good, or that's it. Yes, that's an answer. And then I said, what kind of fool am I? And Alan pointed out that was a song also. And Sojin didn't answer. And I said, so you're not going to answer. And he said, that was very good. So he didn't help me. So I decided to, I wondered about the song. So I checked it out and it turns out that it's a real experience that Paul McCartney and a friend of his had. They were taking a walk in a hill above London. And they were getting to the ocean with a beautiful vista.

[05:30]

And all of a sudden they turned around and there was a man there with a dazed look, kind of a half smile, staring ahead. And there were no big trees or buildings. This man just seemed to appear out of nowhere. And then they turned around and walked a little bit more. And then they looked back and he was gone. And there was no evidence of him anywhere. Now, of course, this was the late 60s when the Beatles were into psychedelics and they were also visiting India a lot. And so, you know, who knows what condition they were in when they actually had this experience, but it was two people had the same vision. So Paul McCartney felt that it was kind of a spiritual experience and he said he thinks that he was writing about somebody like the Maharishi that they visited in India because the Maharishi would giggle and act silly and people called him a fool even though and they didn't understand his wisdom.

[06:40]

So that's how that happened. So I started thinking about it some more and I thought, of course, immediately of the Song of the Precious Mira Samadhi, or the Hōkyō Samadhi, that was written by Tozan Myōkai or Dongshan Liangji in the ninth century. He was, as many of you know, in the Golden Age of Zen, he wrote that song. and he was the father of the Chan school, which then was the Zen tradition. And the last two lines of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi are like, with practice hidden, function secretly, like a fool, like an idiot. Just to do this continually is called the host within the host.

[07:44]

And I thought, maybe idiot and fool weren't what he meant. So I looked at another translation, and the other translation was by Cause, and it says, some of the verbiage is different. It says, inwardly functioning in secret, playing the fool, seemingly stupid. If you can only persist in this way, you will see the Lord within the Lord. So, obviously, fool was used as a kind of metaphor maybe, but I got very interested in looking at what fool and idiot meant because in this culture, it's a pejorative thing. You're stupid, you're a fool, you're an idiot. And that cultural overtone for me You know, I wonder how that hits and it hits a lot of people at first in that way.

[08:55]

And because it's so much part of the language and the culture and the history. So I was kind of interested in that and I kind of looked it up and found out that the etymology is from Greek, the Greek. And I think it's idiotes, which means somebody who doesn't vote. Apparently there was a lot of judgment about people who don't vote in Greece. That didn't help me very much. But as the word started to change from the Greek to the Romans to the French, Um, it started taking on a different, that different term. Uh, so it started to become, uh, synonymous with an ignorant person. It meant, it originally meant an ignorant person who doesn't vote, but then it started becoming synonymous with an ignorant person.

[10:01]

Um, but it still then evolved some more. Um, uh, in interesting ways that, that may be irrelevant. Um, it's, it evolved into, um, uh, village idiot. And village idiot was somebody originally who was mentally ill or mentally challenged. Um. But in many of the societies and the cultures of the early period in Europe and England, that person actually was not shunned. That person was actually incorporated into community and became somebody who did stuff, you know, hung around and was accepted and they just had their place. and sometimes they were special. So that was actually interesting. And then the term, there was another term that evolved through this journey through cultures and people's usage called idiot savant, which is, you know, wise idiot, knowing idiot.

[11:20]

And that is where the, the evolution, at least in the traditions that we're from, not the traditions but the cultures that we're from, started happening where there was this ambiguity about what idiot and fool meant. So it had a much more complex meaning. Like some people who have autistic, autistic disease, for example, or some other mental health conditions are actually quite smart, very bright, but they appear to be not so because of the way they act, some other aspect of their personality. Some people with mental illness who are very depressed might seem like they don't know or they are not smart. So it's sort of like the hidden nature of this whole idiot, fool thing that we could take for granted the superficial and label people and have negative thoughts about them

[12:33]

But underneath, if you look, if you're open to actually seeing somebody who is different, then you might actually learn that they are not, in fact, what you think. And in fact, they're smart, right? And this actually hit home for me when I was kind of thinking about this, because I have a son who had severe learning challenges. And, um, we didn't really know until he was in the second grade, um, that he had, I don't want to use the terms, right? A bunch of labels about his learning. Um, because he would, but he couldn't read, but initially he fooled everybody because he memorized everything he heard. So he would just memorize the books you read to him.

[13:34]

And then the books got more complicated. He couldn't memorize it anymore. Or he'd watch a television show about something scientific and memorize all the things about it. So he was actually very good with memory and remembering and using his hearing. But he was considered slow in school. And then finally, they agreed to test him. And he was tested and he had particular learning problems. And then we had something to work with in terms of his learning how to read or learning how to use different techniques for learning and exposing him to that. But he was really smart. He could hear anything once and he would remember it. Um, so, but he, he's, he had a whole life full of shame because of being in the, having to go to the learning center every day. That was, that was a shameful thing, not being, uh.

[14:37]

whatever, but he was just amazing. He could put anything together, you know, if you, he, very early on, if anything broke, he could figure out how to put it together. If you've got something new that had pieces, he could, he could figure out how to put the pieces together. So there are just, that's again, a situation where, and how many people, you know, get labeled somehow intellectually inferior in school and, or, and kind of slip by and then some people remain illiterate and get through school because nobody noticed and nobody, you know, they got labeled as something and somehow dismissed as dumb. So that whole idea of the idiot fool thing being some kind of covering. And the other way, culturally, this has been used was the idiot became a court jester figure.

[15:43]

And that's another thing I noticed with my son, actually. He used humor to deflect his feelings of inadequacy. But the court jester was somebody who actually played the fool. And they were actually very active politically in the courts in Europe and stuff. And they actually often played a role in kind of checking out what was happening with the king and telling the king things the king didn't want to hear. And they were actually quite wise, but they, again, put on a covering. a covering to pretend to be something in order to get something. So it's very interesting to me, all this cultural history. And in Japan, the Japanese priests actually coined a word, baka, for fool also. And that was a pejorative kind of term.

[16:45]

The other person who talked a lot, who I think was interesting is, out of all of this, when Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst, was developing his archetypes, one of the archetypes was trickster, and that included clown, idiot, fool. When he talked about it, he talked about a trickster. He talked about an old Chinese story, which people in Zen actually tell about that from a novel for the Journey to the West when a monk was traveling from China to India to get the Mahayana sutras to bring back so they could be translated. He needed some people to help him. One of the people was a pig, who was the archetype for an idiot, who was totally lived by his senses.

[17:59]

was deceiving, deceptive, sexually inappropriate and whatever. And he had this kind of hero's journey type experience in turn and manifested then as transformed into a man through the association with this noble task and his association with the monk. So this is a trickster. This trickster fool is somebody who can morph from somebody who is initially like the definition of fool, the negative definition of fool, to a wise person who can be a monk. So there's this possibility to transform. the fool and the idiot are also transformative beings. So that all the simplistic ways of looking at them.

[19:05]

So I've just found this quite interesting as I'm working my way through letting go of the fool and the idiot and my responses to fool and idiot as somehow pejorative why in the world did they say that and so forth. I realized I had a lot of assumptions and had some underlying deep resistance or trouble with it and that's why I was holding on to this as something that I couldn't actually release. So, but it seems that by the time Tozan got hold of it, he was really using it to actually challenge people with the words.

[20:16]

to do what he wanted them to do, which was to let go of names and judgments. He wanted them to embrace the fool and the idiot rather than push away the fool and the idiot. So he kind of He kind of used the fool and the idiot as a way to talk about how do we cultivate emptiness and how do we cultivate this practice even though it's kind of counterintuitive. And so Suzuki Roshi in Zen Mind Beginner's Mind says, When you study Buddhism, you should have a general cleaning of your mind.

[21:18]

So you have to clean yourself out of your attitudes. Clean away your attitudes of what everything is. And particularly your judgments and your preconceived notions. And from not always so, I realize I didn't bring my glasses, but I think I can see if I just put it over here. I might be okay, but if you have them, I can see if they work. I had cataract surgery, so I don't use glasses that much anymore, and I forget that I need them at all. So in Not Always So, Suzuki Roshi says in Letters from Emptiness, all descriptions of reality are limited expressions of the world of emptiness, yet we attach to the descriptions and think that they're reality. This is a mistake.

[22:22]

Let's see if it works. I can see, but it's nice to see better. Many Buddhists make this mistake. That is why they were attached to written scriptures or Buddha's words. They thought that his words were the most valuable thing and that the way to preserve the teaching was to remember what the Buddha said. But what Buddha said was just a letter from the world of emptiness, just a suggestion or some help from him. This is the nature of Buddha's words. To understand the Buddha's words, we cannot rely on our usual thinking. If you want to read a letter from the Buddha's world, it is necessary to understand the Buddha's world. To empty water from a cup does not mean to drink it up. To empty means to have direct, pure experience without relying on form or color of being. So our experience is empty of our preconceived ideas. Our ideas of being, our idea of big or small or round or square.

[23:31]

Round or square, big or small, don't belong to reality. but are simply ideas. That is to empty water. We have no idea of water, even though we see it. When we analyze our experience, we have ideas of time and space, big or small, heavy or light, a scale of some kind is necessary. And with various scales in our mind, we experience things. When we empty, we empty ideas of big or small, good or bad from our experience because the measurement that we use usually is based on self. When we say good or bad, the scale is yourself. The scale is not always the same. Each person has a scale that is different. So I don't say that the scale is always wrong, but we are liable to use our selfish scale when we analyze or when we have an idea about something. So when I think about letting go of ideas as a pediatrician, I was a pediatrician and a mother.

[24:46]

When I think about this, I always try for myself to remember how children experience things. It was so always fascinating to me to watch children experience like a fool, like an idiot. They have no idea what something is when they encounter it. So they kick it, they grab it, they eat it, they shove it in an orifice. They do all kinds of things that don't make any sense because they just don't know what it is. And they learn what it is by the experience. Unless we, as parents, I see this all the time, parents try to over-educate without giving their kid a chance to like discover, you know, you can eat things that are not edible, that aren't poison, and then learn that they taste bad, you know, whatever. But, uh,

[25:49]

But it's really, to me, watching them explore, and the wonder that they have. I'll never get over watching my son make footprints with water. And he just, like, he was playing with a hose, and then all of a sudden he realized his feet were, and he started walking, and then he noticed these footprints. And it was this magical thing for him, and then he went back and he like, He just did it like for 15 minutes, just making footprints. And he discovered, oh, it was a wonderful discovery. He had joy, really joy in this simple thing that we don't even notice. So this kind of openness and joy and letting go of what, you know, why do a stupid thing like that has no purpose. It's not to gain anything. It's just a direct experience of foot in water, foot on pavement. Whoa, you know.

[26:53]

And we miss, I think we, you know, the minute we start naming and having an opinion, you know, we start losing that. We no longer just pick up something to eat and wonder. We can do it. I've been to these, in the old days, these be-ins where you would have your eyes covered and people would give you things to eat. That was more of an exercise in trust than anything else. But things would taste really great, and then you'd have to say what it was, what you were eating. And you discovered the taste of things, and you actually tasted them. You know how when you eat something and you're like, the first piece is really great, and then pretty soon by the 10th bite, you're just eating because you started eating? That's why we eat too much cake, because the first couple of bites are just great. But by the end, we're actually not tasting it. We're remembering the taste that we had. So anyway, and then that's my dietary advice.

[27:59]

So in the Jewel Mirror Samadhi, it says, like a newborn child, it is fully endowed with five aspects. No going, no coming, no arising, no abiding. Baba wawa, is anything said or not? In the end, it says nothing. The words are not yet right. So yeah, the words are not right. And the words are never right. They're just pointing and whatever. So when a kid says all these noises and points to things, they know what it means. We just don't, but we make them use a different word. Our word. And then they start naming and they're gone. So, Wednesday night we've been reading a book called The Heartwood of the Bodhi Tree by Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, The Buddha's Teachings on Voidness, which I've really been enjoying.

[29:08]

I'd never read it, actually. And it's something Sojin likes, a book Sojin likes and recommends to people. And Ann Kennedy gave it to me because I told her I'd never read it. So, in that book, It's really all about emptiness. But I thought it was interesting the way that he talked about it in the sense that he says, maybe I'll read it from the book. The first is a characteristic or fundamental nature of all things physical and mental. The first meaning points out that all words, all things are void of self, and that voidness is inherent in all things, even the study of the dharma and nirvana, even a speck of dust.

[30:20]

The second application points to the quality of mind when it is attached to anything. When our mind is not attaching, it is called voidness. So he talks to basically the idea that emptiness is out there all the time. All Dharmas are preaching emptiness every time, all the time. But we miss it because so that our job is really to cultivate a mind that's open and free and can actually experience it. Even though we say everything is empty, even though we read it and we intellectually understand it, we miss it. We miss it unless that mind, unless we really are transforming our consciousness so that when we take things in like a fool or an idiot, we actually are cultivating being a fool or an idiot because a fool or an idiot is like a child who experiences things anew or gives things a chance.

[31:33]

I would say, give everybody a chance. Give things a chance to be what they are. Give things a chance to manifest authentically rather than labeling and judging and naming right away. And that is really hard. That has to be a conscious effort. That has to be a continuous effort. So I had a interesting, I have several, personal kind of ways that I got this in different ways. Of course, I forget it all the time, so I have to keep getting it. But I used to go to Green Gulch for practice intensive, and I actually had lots of experiences there because I was It was always new to me and I was leaving my home temple, going away for three weeks. I did this for quite a few years.

[32:36]

And it would be different people, different settings. So I was primed to be open rather than closed. But one year I had just a terrible experience. I thought that all these people were stupid and annoying, and they irritated me. They were showing off. I mean, I had so many judgments, and I had just a terrible three-week period. And I thought, gee, some of these people were there before. I never noticed how awful they were. So I had a chance to reflect on that after I left and I thought, hmm, who were you when you were there? And I'd been going through somewhat of a challenging personal period, had some difficulties, and I thought, I wonder.

[33:39]

You know, so the next year, so I was thinking I would never go again. The next year I said, okay, I'm going with new eyes. I'm gonna go there and I'm gonna meet each person, try to actually seek out the people who bothered me the most, you know, have dinner with them and have a conversation with them or walk with them. And I did, and it was just amazing. There were all these nice people. And it was really quite amazing to practice that way. I said, oh, that's what they mean. It was really amazing because we are so many, first of all, we're all so many beings, right? We all are arising differently all the time. I mean, I can be, you know, lots of different beings. Some of them are nice and really great and some of them are not so pleasant or irritable or selfish or whatever.

[34:44]

So depending on what day or what circumstance you could meet me and have a very nice interaction and if you meet me in another situation, you might not think that's so great. But none of those are me. I'm just this me changing person all the time and arising in various ways. And why not give me a chance? Why don't I give you a chance? Rather than we get pigeonholed, we tend to do that. And no, the thing about a fool or an idiot just meets you for the first time all the time. That's not a bad idea. I remember there was another one of these being things I went to that where we had to look at each other directly and stare in each other's eyes. And I don't know if any of you have done this exercise.

[35:47]

And then you try to, the people who were alive when these things used to happen. And then you would have to mirror the other person's movements. And something magical happened when you did that. You were one person. So these are not abstract, is what I'm saying. This practicing like a fool, like an idiot, is not some abstract thing. It's a thing that actually, you can actually practice. At least for me. I mean, I try to take it to a way that I can practice it. And yeah, so another thing I remembered, maybe many of you here, where she sews at one time or another and you have to clean the bathroom six weeks. And, you know, I thought I was fine, you know, saying yes to everything.

[36:51]

I was, you know, been here for a long time. Of course, so, you know, I say yes, I say yes. Then I think, oh, I have to clean the bathroom every time there's an opportunity for the next six weeks. That was very interesting again, because if you, if you just do it, because that's what you're asked to, that's what's expected, that's just how it is. Ultimately, the judgments start falling away. And you pretty soon, I was kind of interested in really cleaning the bathrooms well. And like, okay, I bet no one's ever cleaned that shelf. I'm going to clean this corner. I'm going to really clean it well. And it just was how it was. And it was okay. So any aversion that I had, and I still feel that way. I mean, it kind of got rid of that aversion. I mean, maybe if it was a really dirty bathroom. I might still have that feeling. But here, at any rate, I don't feel that aversion anymore. It's like, okay, you cleaned the bathroom today, okay.

[37:51]

So I think we have lots of opportunities to work through these judgments and be an idiot, an idiot, somebody who just says yes when the work leader assigns you something. I'm sorry, John, but I know I say I have a back problem, That's true. But we can practice with our aversions and we can practice with our opinions and our attitudes all the time and remind ourselves that every time we make a judgment, we're walking away from being present, fully present. We're becoming self-referential. We're focusing inside in this bundle here and not really focusing with the broad lens that we hope to, that we aim to, that we vow to.

[38:54]

Let me see if there's anything else. There were a couple of other... Let me see. Okay, I'm gonna... I wanted to read something, I don't know how many of you read, this is a favorite, used to be a favorite around here, a book called Cultivating the Empty Field by Master Hong Xiu, The Silent Illumination. He talks about the backward step and the upright cauldron. With the depths clear, utterly silent, Thoroughly illuminate the source, empty and spirited, vast and bright.

[39:58]

Even though you have lucidly scrutinized your image and no shadow or echo meets it, searching through you see that you still have distinguished between the merits of a hundred undertakings. Then you must take a backward step and directly reach the middle of the circle from where light issues forth. Outstanding and independent, still you must abandon pretext for merit. Carefully discern that naming engenders beings and that these rise and fall with intricacy. When you can share yourself, when you can manage affairs, and you have the pure seal that stamps the 10,000 forms. Traveling the world, meeting conditions, The self joyfully enters samadhi in all delusions and accepts its function, which is to empty out the self so as not to be full of itself. The empty valley receives the clouds.

[41:00]

The cold stream cleanses the moon, not departing, not remaining. Far behind all changes, you can give teachings without attainment or expectation. Everything everywhere comes back to the olden ground. Not a hair has been shifted, bent, or raised up. Despite a hundred uglinesses or a thousand stupidities, the upright cauldron is naturally beneficent. Beneficent, yes. Xiaozhu's answers, wash out your bowl and drink your tea, do not require making arrangements. From the beginning, they have always been perfectly apparent. Thoroughly observe each thing with a whole eye. Thoroughly observing each thing with a whole eye is a patch-robed monk's spontaneous conduct. And I'm just going to do this and then we'll have questions.

[42:03]

And then he has just something that relates to the Fool on the Hill more directly. Standing solitary like a steep cliff, wide open and accessible, spirited and independent, clear and bright, all this does not slightly involve external conditions. Such activity is called the single bright occasion which arrives right along with the 10,000 forms that emerge and are extinguished. Let everything entirely fall away and put it all together without any extraneous conditions. This is referred to as the occasion of solitary glorious unselfishness." Solitary glorious unselfishness. Wouldn't that be nice? But it can be. It can be how it is. And that's what we're all here practicing, like fools, staring at walls every day.

[43:06]

In the dark, coming for long sessions. You have to be a fool and an idiot to do that. So, thank you for singing with me. Anybody have questions? Heiko? The fool that you're talking about, and the identity that you've been talking about, remind me of the each, the Tao Te Ching where Lao Tzu writes, I alone, in his identity-free space, I guess, writes, I alone appear to have no purpose. And quite a few other words that he said. Can you speak a little bit about how purpose prevents us from being the proper fool that you described? Well, gaining. Purpose gaining, like gaining idea. Yeah, I want to be, I want to get something. I want to know something. I want to be something. Tape makes us self-referential. And Buddha, in the Heart of the Bodhi Tree, the central idea is that the greatest spiritual sickness is me and mine.

[44:22]

So anything that's self-referential. And yet we can't be. There are certain instinctual things we're born with, right? We have to eat, we have to get things, we have to be warm, we have to survive, right? Those are our basic instincts. So we all come in with those basic instincts. And they keep on recurring. So it's not about totally letting go of them, but making them, but being aware of them. and working, you know, being aware of them and moving through them. Yeah, but not holding on to them. The luminous heart. the edge of a cliff.

[45:29]

That expression of wonder and curiosity and I wonder what's coming next. And for me it's the epitome of both, you could say naivety at one end, but this wonderful childlike availability for what's exactly to come next. That for me is also a workable way of thinking. Yeah. You're open when you, when you're full, um, you're totally open for what the opportunities are and interested and open as opposed to, uh, just conditioned to be afraid or whatever. Yeah. Linda. There's a collection of stories about fools and the book in English is called The Flock of Fools.

[46:34]

The first story says a rich man wanted to build a tower and in those days three stories was really tall. Don't screw around with the first floor, just get right to the third floor. That could get you into some trouble. Yeah, well, that was the third floor. Well, I mean, that guy was really a fool in the... In the true sense. In the traditional sense. Yeah.

[47:35]

Well, and some fools we use in that sense where it's kind of a jester fool type of thing where, like a comedy, more like a comedy as opposed to, and a caricature kind of than a real person. Oh, okay. Yeah, because we can get in trouble with judgments if we get caught on them. Yeah, Judy? The clowns. Yeah, it's a clowning charter, so anytime we'd be in a room that was taking itself very seriously, which they put on the clown nose, and that teaching that we can always do that.

[48:48]

And I remember, also Dostoevsky, I think, has a novel called The Idiot, about about Jesus Christ. And so, in both those situations, and particularly I'm thinking of a video that's on YouTube of when Bernie and Mr. Boone, they go down to a refugee camp, and they're with the children there, clowning around. And, you know, the teachings on that, and then in, let's say, This Idiot, or the Faithful Fools, across the way, the stream ministry and the Tenderloin, the quality of forbearance and also engaging. You know, as we say, engage Buddhism. So, I was just wondering,

[49:50]

How do you relate to both this not to practice of bearing witness and also acting? I think as long, I mean, to me, it's the bearing witness is the foundation or the place you come from and having And coming from a place of understanding, of complete understanding and wonder, and understanding the nature of reality, then you're making, you're using skillful means. You're more likely to use skillful means. So the means, particular means in particular circumstances. They might seem funny, just like the court jester who was used by diplomats to get to the king, who was getting ready to make a very dangerous decision and having the message come.

[51:09]

Or something like the fools see somebody doing something, but instead of confronting them, the skillful means, The judgment of, I need to do something here, not coming with a lot of judgment, but coming with, what is this most skillful thing? And having humor be a skillful means for saying something that maybe somebody can hear that way, which they wouldn't be able to hear some other way. We're singing it. Yeah. Thank you very much for your talk. I loved it. And what arises for me, and something that I've been dealing with in my life, is the whole area of psychiatry and the medical model, which uses, in my opinion, judgments and labeling people who don't conform to the norms of society.

[52:18]

based on their description, based on their observations of people that's put forth in science. So it's, there's an industry out there in this world that's making a lot of money and it's putting people in hospitals based on those judgments that you talked about. Putting people, concretizing. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Rihanna. Jerry, thank you so much. Would you read the Damshan sentences again? With practice hidden, function secretly like a fool, like an idiot.

[53:38]

Just to do this continuously is called the host within the host. And then the other one was practice inwardly functioning in secret, playing the fool, seemingly of stupid. If you can only persist in this way, you will see the Lord within the Lord. The Lord within the Lord. the good soldier Spike, who is an interesting kind of fool. During the beginning of World War I, when everybody's getting conscripted, he's making such goofy responses to what's going on that he's not sent to the front lines. So instead of being a pacifist, he ends up being an assistant for one of the officers or something.

[54:47]

So it's kind of like essential. Yeah. You know, like, he never says, oh, I'm going to do this. And I think there's that ambiguity with some of these other things you've talked about. Like, you could be doing this in a very, just egoistical way. Like, I'm going to fool them so that I can do this. Or you could really be that dumb, but it functions. The outcome is the same. Yeah. Yeah. Again, skillful. Well, it's not really skillful means if you're just being yourself, right? I mean, it may be. It may be, but that's a slippery slope. I'm just being myself. I'm living my own truth.

[55:47]

There's a good one. That's another talk. We're done now, I think. If anybody else has a question, they can talk to me outside.

[55:56]

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