An unsurpassed, penetrating and perfect dharma is rarely met with, even in a hundred thousand million kaphas, having it to see and listen to, to remember and accept. I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good to see everybody. Is my voice loud enough? Thank you. So good to see you. So when I spoke before, maybe about a year ago, I talked about the Heart Sutra. And I'm still thinking and wanting to talk about the Heart Sutra. The Sutra, we chant every day at Berkeley Zen Center.

[01:03]

Every time, actually, we're together for... For service, we chant it. And it's chanted by people at Buddhist centers and temples around the world every day. I want to talk about the core meaning of the Heart Sutra, what we call emptiness. All things are empty of their own inherent existence because all are subject to or inextricably part of their causes and conditions. And I want to talk about emptiness in relation to the interdependent web of all existence and to our practice of Zazen. This requires a leap. Spiritual emptiness, the kind we practice with here, is different from scientific emptiness, the kind studied by physicists, ecologists, and others. For me, they merge.

[02:03]

Because non-scientist that I am, I look at scientific understanding with a spiritual lens. Technical mistake, though this may be, it is what I practice with. Emptiness is a confusing term unless we use all those connecting words. Empty of inherent existence, empty of causes and conditions. Empty usually means empty, nothing there. And the Heart Sutra, emptiness means the opposite. Everything is there. The clearer expression is in a newer translation of the Heart Sutra by Joan Halifax and Kaz Tanahashi, using the term boundlessness. There's a link to this version in the chat box. Here are some excerpts using their words. Avalokiteshvara, who helps all to awaken, moves in the deep course of realizing wisdom beyond wisdom, sees that all five streams of body, heart, and mind are without boundary.

[03:10]

Form is not separate from boundlessness. Boundlessness is not separate from form. Boundlessness is the nature of all things. Boundlessness is the nature of all things, from the scientific point of view, as well as the spiritual. There's a personal history, of course, to my deep connection to the Heart Sutra. I was immersed in a childhood family where what was true was not well represented. My parents were extremely dedicated to making things look good and to silence about things that weren't good. So I grew up determined to find out and represent what really is I was offended and distressed about obfuscation. How I love that word, obfuscation. I grew up in the 1940s and 50s, active in liberal Protestant churches, believing the version of the stories of Jesus and God that they taught.

[04:15]

In a Bible literature course at a liberal arts college, I learned about the lack of verifiable historical basis for those stories and found that Not just my parents, but the Congregational Church of San Mateo couldn't be relied upon for the true story. To step back, I was fortunate as a child to live in places where nature was a refuge. As a very young child in rural Michigan, I was allowed to spend much of my time in a wild field next to our home. I made nests in the tall grasses and was enchanted by field mice. who I must have attracted by bringing along snacks to share. When my mother wondered where I was, she would find me by looking out an upstairs window. A move to Detroit wrenched me away from that wonder-filled place, although in Detroit were child-sustaining features of other kinds. Years later, a move to San Mateo gave me access to what was then much wild land

[05:23]

on my long climb between our neighborhood and Crystal Springs Reservoir, something I did for a period of years almost every Saturday. And shortly after we moved there, I began to have annual trips to my heart's home, a Girl Scout camp in the Kit Carson Pass, where I still go and immerse in a red fir forest with wild lake on one side and granite slabs leading up to a volcanic peak on the other. Here too, as a child, I found nests to be in and felt close to the wild world. In this natural safe place, I could find stillness and take in what was around me, lichens, trees, squirrels, birds. Others have spoken here in our Zendo about what is called the wood wide web, the way we now understand that underground is a network of fungi that connect with the roots of trees and other plants.

[06:30]

This network carries water and nutrients throughout an ecosystem, not uniformly or randomly, but in accord with purposes little understood. And it's sustained by what the trees give to us. All this is continue to be observed by instruments that see smaller and smaller, making clear that as small as it gets, the interdependence endures. And now, as a grandma with a camp name of Mama Bear, I go up there to that camp and encourage young girls also to immerse in, to see up close, the wondrous details of an ecosystem typical of this altitude in our Sierra Nevada mountains. I encourage them to see lichens, moss, granite, tree bark, and needles up close at 30% magnification with a jeweler's loop. If you've never done this and we get to be together again, please ask me to show you something with a jeweler's loop.

[07:36]

It's amazing. The thing about doing that with these girls is that you wonder, are they really seeing? Are they really seeing what we want them to see? And I know they have, because when they get that loop up to their eye and they get very close to the whatever it is, there's a sharp intake of breath, and they say, oh. Ah, that oh, is a first step to inquiry, to understanding, to appreciation. Philosophy of science. and particle physics for which I feel awe have long seemed to me a route to take to understand what is true about life. Early in college, before the concept of ecology reached me, I became enamored with Alfred North Whitehead's concept, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The fallacy in the way we humans misuse abstract concepts

[08:39]

as if they are accurate descriptions of reality. Whitehead wrote in 1929 that a concrete physical object in the universe does not possess the character of simple location without reference to its relations to other objects. And to think of a spatial point as being anything other than an abstraction is a mistake. Isn't this boundlessness? For years, I was in something like a marriage with a geocosmo chemist who analyzed the composition of rocks, of meteorites, samples of rocks extricated in Sweden in a four-mile-deep drilling into the earth, and in rocks brought back from the moon. Over dinner, I wanted to hear his stories. All these rocks, meteorites flung down on earth from space, those embedded in the moon surfaced, way out there in our solar system, and rocks from deep in the Earth, representative of the beginnings of planet Earth, are samples of the formation of the solar system and the processes that have followed out in space, on the moon, and on Earth.

[09:55]

The Big Bang is a theory of how our universe began. About 13.8 billion years ago, all matter was compacted into a very small, very dense and hot ball. Over millennia, it decompressed, interacted, and became planets, plants, and all of life. Learning more by replicating Big Bangs in tunnels under the ground, particle physicists are looking for the smallest unique particle in nature. As they keep doing this more and more powerfully, they find smaller and smaller particles and small strings. I once was fortunate to accompany my partner to an evening program at Argonne National Lab, which sits on top of a particle accelerator. I had a sense of a sacred quest going on there, an awe-filled sense of entering a vast cathedral with way stations where you could peer down into the deep accelerator tunnels.

[11:03]

This is the way it is for me. not scientists confirming a spiritual truth, but scientists, many of them unaware that their work merges with the spiritual. Unitarianism became my first religious solution after my departure from Protestantism. As a person who found comfort, solace, joy, and adventure in wilderness, and in calling to mind Whitehead's fallacy, I was moved by the Unitarian principle that we are all part of an interdependent web of all existence, a concept I embraced, and felt a lack as Unitarianism provided no way apart from thought to practice with that interdependent web. For me, Buddhism provided that practice. What we do here is that practice, and the Heart Sutra is central to that practice. The Heart Sutra comes from way back in the first century BC, before written records about its history.

[12:12]

What is thought is that early Buddhists, monastics, attempted carefully to describe reality, thinking that to specifically define was to see clearly. Later Buddhists in the south of India wrote and studied Prajnaparamita Sutras as a way of... negating that limited specificity of all those descriptions of separate parts of reality. Instead, they articulated that all things are empty of their own inherent existence because they are all relative to causes and conditions. The early Indian Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna articulated this. The short version of those Prajnaparamita sutras we chant, the Heart Sutra, negates all the specifics that early Buddhists used to get close to the reality of all existence. No eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, no object of mind.

[13:13]

To me, another way of articulating the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Emptiness is fullness, everything inextricably connected to every other thing. Our practice here is the current result of the revolution in Buddhist understanding that the first Prajnaparamita Sutra brought. Perhaps the fact that South Indian society in which those sutras arose was matrilineal was influential. I wish we could know more, not for lack of trying. Those sutras, including the first one, the sutra in 8,000 lines, were brought to China and studied there, and someone in China, as I talked about before, composed this short version, and a young monk's epic journey and devotion to translation of Buddhist sutras brought our Heart Sutra to be chanted worldwide. The Heart Sutra means the world to that truth-seeking, nature-loving girl, now woman, because it is an amazingly prescient description

[14:24]

of what our modern particle physics and scientific ecology also teach. It seems to tell the truth as we can at this point know it. Not science proving scripture, but scientists on a spiritual truth telling quest. Chanting the Heart Sutra, our bodies feel the rhythm, the sound of words that negate separate specificities. and come free into boundlessness. Avalokiteshvara, who helps all to awaken, moves in the deep course of realizing wisdom beyond wisdom, sees that all five streams of body, heart, and mind are without boundary, and frees all from anguish. Boundlessness is the nature of all things. The Heart Sutra ends with all mere words can do with boundlessness, sounds of gate, gate, para, samgate, bodhisattva, sounds that go beyond words that resonate with our spirit.

[15:40]

Our daily zazen, too, goes beyond words and opens us to presence, to respect, to the possibility of being with all that is. After long sessions, we notice that the world we re-enter is in sharp focus. Bright, crisp, and clear. We sit still and know. Feel that we are sitting. Feel the weight of our bodies on cushion or chair. Hear sounds. tune into our breathing, note thinking, return to our bodies and our breathing. In stillness, we receive what is around us. Day after day, we enter a body-mind way for seconds or for longer, a way where boundlessness can be approached.

[16:43]

These are my experiences with the teachings of the Heart Sutra, often referred to as emptiness. teachings I prefer to think of as fullness, full of no separation, of total interconnection, of boundlessness. Other humans have other ways of tuning into the vastness of boundlessness. Ancient peoples, unencumbered by human-created mediations of boundlessness, had profound understanding of the night sky. John Muir, alone and unencumbered by stuff, deeply saw the rocks and the living beings in the high Sierra. Poets, quiet, see and capture. Humans in quiet, joined we meditators and particle physicists, paying attention and hearing. I like to hear the poet David Wagoner

[17:48]

inspired by what the white South African Lawrence Vanderpost learned from the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert. When Lawrence Vanderpost, one night in the Kalahari Desert, told the Bushmen he couldn't hear the stars singing, they didn't believe him. They looked at him, half smiling. They examined his face to see whether he was joking or deceiving them. Then two of those small men who plant nothing, who have almost nothing to hunt, who live on almost nothing and with no one but themselves, led him away from the crackling, thorn-scrub fire and stood with him under the night sky and listened. One of them whispered, do you not hear them now? And Vanderpost listened, not wanting to disbelieve, but had to answer now. No. They walked him slowly like a sick man to the small, dim circle of firelight and told him they were terribly sorry.

[18:58]

And he felt even sorrier for himself and blamed his ancestors for their strange loss of hearing, which was his loss now. On some clear night, when nearby houses have turned off their visions, when the traffic dwindles And when through streets are between sirens and jets overhead are between crossings, when the wind is hanging fire in the fir trees and the long-eared owl in the neighboring grove, between calls is regarding his own darkness. I look at the stars again as I first did to school myself in the names of constellations and remember my first sense of their terrible distance. I can still hear what I thought at the edge of silence, where the inside jokes of my heartbeat, my arterial traffic, the sea above high sea of my inner ear, myself tunelessly humming.

[20:02]

But now I know what they are, my fair share of the music of the spheres and clusters of ripening stars, of the songs from the throats of the old gods, still tending, ever toned up creatures, deaf creatures through their exiles in the desert. So this is what I think, and I'm done talking, and I'm so very curious to hear what you think. What is your experience of the Heart Sutra's words, of the experience of zazen, of how we practice, if we all practice, with the interdependent web of all existence. So please do let me know. We invite your questions. Please raise your digital hand, and we'll call on you and spotlight you.

[21:05]

Heiko? Thank you, Hannah. I am not wiping my eyes because I'm enjoying the tears you've delivered to me. Thank you. And I wanted to say that, to answer your question, how I see, well, it won't be the same after this. I really appreciate that door, that opening to the depth, the poetic beauty, things that we've all touched together, I think, in various ways. past, and then a little bit about the boundlessness. My goodness, just thank you. And I won't look at it the same way after this. I'll continue working at it. Thank you. Look forward to keeping on sitting together. All right, me too. Ben? Am I calling on people, or are you? We can try to go back and forth. How about we do this? If you see somebody's actual hand,

[22:12]

Feel free to call on them, and I'll call on the digital hands, Hannah. Okay. Does that sound good? I did see Ben, yep. Okay. Hi, Hannah. Hi, Ben. Thank you so much for your talk. It was wonderful. Wow, that poem is something else. I don't have much to say, but I'm thinking about what the Heart Sutra means to me, and you've... I love all that you've shared. There's one line that sticks with me a lot, which is far apart from every perverted view one dwells in Nirvana. And I don't know if you have anything to say about that or if someone else might have something to say. So thank you. I think our usual views of separating everything is the perverted view. Just not that way. Yeah. kind of a loaded word, perverted view.

[23:13]

Now I'm curious to rush to the new translation and see what word they had. I'll check it out as soon as we're done with this. I think SFCC's translation they use is inverted view, if I'm not mistaken, which might be clarifying. It's also not very poetic, so I'm... I guess I really like that idea that it's only... my limited or distorted view that keeps nirvana away. There's something, there's a strong trust or faith there that comes out of that that I really appreciate. Yeah, and to get to the very specific, if you take that jeweler's loop, have you ever done it? And you go and you see the thing in front of you at 30% magnification, it is just like, oh, there's a whole world. a whole world, and, of course, there's a world beyond that world, you know, that those particle physicists are trying to see down in those accelerator tunnels, you know.

[24:21]

Quite amazing. It just goes on and on. Blake, I pass to you. Rondi. Rondi. It's Charlie Rondi. It's Charlie. Hannah, thank you so much. I am amazed at the correspondence between something I read last Sunday and your talk. And I just want to give you two sentences from a book review by a Nobel laureate in particle physics. Okay, the number of atoms in a single human body is roughly 10 to the 28th. That is one followed by 28 zeros, a million times the number of stars in the visible universe.

[25:28]

Okay. Thank you. That's it? That's it. Thank you so much, Charlie, as always. Anne? Hi, Anne. It's been a long time. Unmute yourself, please. There. Am I unmuted now? Yes, you are. Excellent. Okay. Thank you so much. Your talk really, really, really hit me at a deep level. you work with children, with Grandma Bear, and show them the loops to show how small, I mean, you know, you look at some pieces of soil, even, or a tree, and you can see the life within that at, you know, magnitudes they couldn't see before, and how you connect that with the spiritual world. Thank you so much. And hopefully those children will grow up to be adults who understand the interconnectedness of everything, which is one of the things that this practice does for me, you know, and hopefully for more people, too.

[26:44]

So thank you. I'm getting all emotional about it now, but thank you so much. Keep it up. Sometimes I think my camp naturalist job is a kind of a sneak attack of Buddhism on the Girl Scout camp. Yes, yes. It's not a secret. Thank you. I would like to thank Dan Hardin and Linda Hess for providing translations of... the Heart Sutra in the chat, so feel free to open those and save those. Hi, Hannah. Hi, Ed. Well, good to see you. Good to see you. I really appreciate your talk a lot, and just because I remember as a new practitioner to Zen Center, I was so confused by the Heart Sutra. I said, why... Why are we saying know this and know that?

[27:45]

And I spent so much time trying to understand what that was about. But the idea of boundlessness makes a lot of sense to me. And emptiness was also a loaded word for me. Empty of what? So what's empty? Why isn't it full? And I guess what I thought was, well, maybe it's empty of meaning. And that seemed to help a little bit. So I really appreciate you offering your understanding of that. And I wanted to know if you could say anything to maybe new people to Zen Center about dealing with the understanding the Heart Sutra. Well, that's... what I was trying to say, because I think it's really, I think the word boundlessness is a much better word for us than emptiness.

[28:49]

So I would say, think boundlessness, think, think no separations. It's, you know, I, other words are kind of, I tend to sometimes fall back on, it's all one big schmear, you know, but of course, schmear is, um, very gross way of expressing this. It, I think, you know, zazen is a big help when you sit and you really sink into being right here and you can get, sometimes we're lucky and get really quiet sitting there and, and are more open to the whole rather than all those little thoughts and all those little details and all those little separate things which are really delusion.

[29:55]

Yeah. Operate with them. Is that? Yeah, I also think that the idea of boundlessness feels inclusive to me. Yeah. And sort of looking at it from a, point of view of inclusiveness rather than the negative. And I think that that was one of the things that made understanding the heart suit to heart for me. Well, thank you. Thank you. Jeff, let's give it one more try. This is a recurring problem, as Linda has reminded me of sometimes you just, for this meeting, either you have to leave the meeting and come back when the mute button or just not speak. But Jeff, try it again. Okay, Jeff is left. Linda Hess, please unmute yourself and ask a question. Hi. Thank you, Hannah. That was really beautiful.

[30:57]

And you asked what Heart Sutra has meant to us, and I would like to say briefly that from the very beginning, whether I understood it or not in any way I could explain, the Heart Sutra meant and absolutely captured me. It meant wisdom and compassion. Emptiness meant some kind of enlightenment about, you know, beyond our usual. But then, that could lead to some deluded rejection of everything and a deluded kind of detachment. Form meant you and me and every single thing. And so you could never escape. Every time there was emptiness, there was form. Every time there was form, there was emptiness. Marrying those two together completely gave me...

[32:02]

an experience of wisdom and compassion that I adored. That's probably why I stuck with Zen. So that's one thing. But then I have a question. This is a little strange. It's a question for somebody else in the group. On Thursday evening, when we were hearing more shared remembrances of Sojin, Karen Sondheim, excuse me, Karen, if I'm shocking you by calling you forth like this, but she included in her remembrances that when she first heard the Heart Sutra, she didn't like it. Just didn't like it. Too many know this, know that, know this, know that. And she told Sojin she didn't like it, and he invited her to a long series of one-on-one meetings to study it. And I just, I don't know if it's possible, Karen, or even if it's fair for me to ask you, but is there anything you could share with us briefly about... what he changed for you or what that changed for you about your dislike of the Heart Sutra and it's all, it's no, no, no?

[33:05]

I could share that when I started, I thought also that emptiness was a thing. It was a place you go to free from suffering, that it took a lot of work, and that... the more concrete things like intrusive thoughts and feelings, that they wouldn't be there in emptiness. So I remember when Sojin and I met one to one, he insisted, emptiness is not a thing. It's the places you don't like. The real question is how you relate to it. whether you get caught in your dislikes or your cravings. So that comes to mind. Do you mean emptiness, you said, is what you don't like, but do you mean includes what you don't like?

[34:15]

It includes. Just like Hannah was saying, it's boundless, but the boundlessness includes Thank you. As for your patience, Peter Overton, please unmute yourself and ask a question. Hi, Hannah. Thank you very much for your talk. I found it really interesting. And it occurred to me, this analogy sort of popped out in front of me just a minute ago. about how Zazen is the jeweler's loop. That shows us the nature of our existence. And if we can just be patient with it enough, we can turn things around for something. Anyway, I just wanted to share that.

[35:15]

I wonder what you think about that. Actually, you moved me to tears. Thank you. It's beautiful. Thank you. Hi. Thank you so much. Beautiful, beautiful. I just wanted to mention that when I started sitting many years ago, I immediately sort of glommed onto the heart suture without understanding it at all, and I memorized it. right away, and I would say it to myself all the time, wherever I was going, and I somehow, and this has remained true, even though I didn't understand it, I found it just hugely comforting. It was like a prayer or something, and the most stark, the starkest line of all, no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, that was the one when I first heard it, that was just

[36:23]

Well, how can you say that? Here I am. Somehow it comforted me. I don't know. And when I'm afraid or if I'm on a bumpy airplane or something like that, I'll say the heart suture to myself. And even this very last night, in the middle of the night, I woke up and had a minor attack of insomnia and worrying about one thing and another, which occasionally happens. And I lay in bed and said the Heart Sutra to myself, which is maybe, I don't know if that's kind of a very unspiritual way to make use of the Heart Sutra, but it just really helps me. And I said it out loud. I thought, well, I'll just say it out loud instead of in my mind. And in the meantime, I've come to understand more thoughts about it and ideas about it and what does boundlessness mean. I love Red Pine's commentary on the Heart Sutra, but I still, there's this basic kind of mystery of it also that allows for everything somehow that I find really, really helpful.

[37:38]

And the fact that it is all about interconnection and that I'm not alone somehow. So anyway, I just wanted to honor it for its kind of mysterious help that it also can extend to us. Thank you. First, Diane Ritchie and then Hosan Sensei. Diane, please unmute yourself. Hi. I really liked your talk and I love, love, love the Heart Sutra. And I guess my, the two comments I wanted to make are my understanding of the Heart Sutra was really, I really got it a lot better when I thought of a teacup, you know how a teacup has space in the center.

[38:43]

I don't know if you can see my hands, here we go better. And yes, there we go. And it has that, emptiness in the center, it's got that, it holds everything. And that's how I could understand emptiness. It's not nothing, it's everything. It's the possibility of all things. The good things, good things, and the bad things, all the things. And I guess, for me, I am that teacup. And when I'm sitting in Zavon, I'm holding space for all the possibility. And, in fact, just living, I'm holding all the space for all the possibility.

[39:44]

So that was my experience of the Heart Sutras. It's so, it's a visceral, it's a visceral thing. And then I love Lawrence Vanderpost. My two favorite books in the world are a story like The Wind and A Far-Off Place. And he talks about San Forshman tales. It's really, it's a good, good story. But I want to say thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. I really love this sitting zazen feeling like the cup. Thank you. Hannah, can you remind us of the title? Oh, we just got it. Again, thank you, Linda Hess, for dropping the title of the poem in there. I haven't read the link, but it's in there. Hozon. Hannah, do you have a... Hozan, please unmute yourself and ask a question.

[40:47]

Thanks so much, Hannah. It was wonderful. There's so many resonant points. I feel that I was very fortunate. Really soon after I began to practice and we were chanting the Heart Sutra, I went to a session with a student of sojourns from Mexico. This was at Tassajara in the dining room. And he did a couple of afternoon sessions on the Heart Sutra. And the way he explained junyata, or emptiness, has always stuck with me and completely resonated, which was empty of self, empty of independent self. which means full of dependence, and that everything in our world, including ourself, is, as Thich Nhat Hanh says, made up of non-self elements.

[42:00]

And so emptiness is sort of paired in certain aspects of Buddhist philosophy with which is suchness, which is a fullness. So that really, that resonated with me. And I was never troubled by the kind of via negativa of the nose. I always took it as a, no, you don't really have the whole view here. And, and would point me back towards it. So that's one comment. Comment two is you asked about the far apart from every perverted view, right? You mentioned that. Well, the term that Kazan and Roshy Joan use is confusion, far apart from confusion.

[43:07]

I think that the Sanskrit word is chitavarana, which basically, my understanding is it means mind hindrance. And frankly, I like that a lot better because it doesn't carry a kind of, it's not mushy and it doesn't carry a pejorative implication. It's just that We have these hindrances, we have these coverings in our mind that don't allow us to see emptiness. Don't allow us to see the full, the fact that everything is interconnected. So I think I'll stop there. And also just to say I really appreciate this idea of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. We talked about this a little.

[44:08]

from Whitehead. And there's correspondences between Whitehead and Buddhist philosophy that are very clear. And there's lots of papers and stuff about this. But I think he's coming at it from a Western perspective, which is part of the same self-discovery that our Buddhist ancestors did. So we should keep exploring the way these philosophical concepts are actually useful. The fallacy of misplaced concreteness, to me, is like the tendency we have to think that what we're thinking and seeing is real. Which is not to say that it isn't, but we should We should stop a minute and look.

[45:09]

I think that's what the card suture is saying. Just stop fearlessly and look around. Take the loop. Take the loop and look really closely. Or take a telescope and see what's happening at a distance. Optically, they're the same kinds of mechanisms. So thank you. Khabir, and then Jeff, and then Jeanette. Hi, Hannah. Thank you so much for a beautiful talk. Hi. What emptiness meant for me, when I was about four or five years old in Afghanistan, I went to some of my friends and I asked, show me Allah. And they say it has no form, has no gender. You can't see it, but it's everywhere. And everything comes from it, and it's a creator of all.

[46:13]

Well, when I came to America, well, 20-some years later, when I met Buddhism, and they started talking about emptiness, I've got my answer. So, and I started running around and telling even some of my Muslim friends and relatives, and they just didn't take it too well, but I just kept going. Recently, I was listening to Alan Watts, and he named it the unshakable shaker. So that's what emptiness means to me. And when I went to Canada many years ago for a Tibetan retreat, I met this Muslim Pakistani girl that she was also there at the festival. And she looked at me and she said, Kabir, Allah is emptiness. That's what it is. And so that was a bit of confirmation.

[47:15]

So sort of surrendering to the idea of emptiness and letting go of this concrete feeling of things are solid and exist from their own side. Emptiness sort of just pulls the rug under me and shows me that there's a bigger problem hand in play and in this theater of consciousness. So that's what emptiness means to me. So thank you. Thank you. Jeff? And for the final round, am I on? Yay. Yeah, I hate Bluetooth. I'll be very brief. Hannah, that was a wonderful talk. So many paths into reality and into understanding that you share. And that's really what I love, right? I mean, the ideas that everybody has shared are like a jewel that can be turned.

[48:17]

How do we understand emptiness now and now and now? And for me, the independent on causation, independent of existing self is a great operative formula for me. but also the presence of everything. And boundlessness is a wonderful association. Thank you. The thing that I wanted to point out very briefly is that in particle physics, as you get into smaller and smaller and smaller spaces, non-duality begins to express itself. And what we find is that the location of any particular particle is both extant and predicted at any one point in time. You can talk about where the particle is, but it's not correct. You can predict where the particle is and understand it as a prediction, which is closer to how reality really operates. And we don't really understand how to reconcile those two concepts, which is fine, but both things are true at the same time. We don't know where it is, and we do. Thank you so much for a wonderful time. Wow, thank you.

[49:25]

Jeanette. Jeanette. Thank you. I'll knock. Thank you for boundlessness, for the very moving singing of the stars. I have a poem called, My Cup is Half Full of Emptiness. Are you going to send it to us? Joe Buckner, as the final questioner for the day, Joe Buckner, please. Thanks, Hannah. Thank you, Joe. I'm a pretty negative person, so I like the no's. The no's really, really caught me, and I enjoyed them.

[50:27]

And so I wanted to share how... Since I am negative and sort of inversion of your jeweler's lens. And I live up in the hills and I like to walk up to the math sciences and space sciences lab. And you can see the entire bay. You can see Richmond Bay Bridge, Golden Gate Bridge, Oakland Bay Bridge and down to towards the south of San Francisco. When I go up there, I think of everything that's going down amongst these million-plus people out in front of me. And someone's overdosing. Someone's being sexually assaulted. Someone's just got a promotion. Someone's making a new friend.

[51:33]

Someone's crying. Just all of life is going on down there. And yet when I'm up there, you can't hear a single thing. There's no cars or nothing. You just hear the wind blowing in the trees, and it's totally calm and totally peaceful. And you look out in front of you, and there's all these cargo boats and cars and everything. And to me, that expresses... Emptiness is form and form is emptiness. Just that instead of taking a closer look through the jeweler's lens, for me it was stepping back and seeing this huge, wide, grand picture and just a relative glimpse of boundlessness. And, you know, when astronauts are up in space and look down at the Earth and how moving that is for them, So I just wanted to share my sort of inverted view of the jeweler's lens.

[52:37]

Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all. So let us I posted the. I thought I had posted the. Let me post the final chants. And then we will go ahead and chant the vows. Ah, yes. There we go. Thank you so much. When Hannah Mera puts her hands in Gosho, we will say the vows one time through. And I invite you to unmute yourself. And please follow along with Hannah's voice. and her lips. And so we can meet in the middle somewhere. Beings are numberless.

[53:43]

I vow to awaken with them. Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. Our gates are boundless. I vow to enter them. Buddha's way is unsurpassable. I vow to Pretty good.

[54:36]

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