Experiences which are not very strong, not very pleasant reaction. From other people. From other people. And therefore, I am not very satisfied with this general remark that we should trust these feelings because of these experiences I get, or these reactions. It's not only an interaction or relation with other people. The point is so. Although you have, of course, a relationship with others, So the point is that although it looks so natural and so organic and it looks so harmonic and it looks as if it would be the thing to do, so it somehow creates the opposite of what is intended or what I would intend.

[01:11]

And if you ask, for example, so, if something arises, you know, in the action, you talk to people, and it can have various non-reactions, or sometimes you are in a situation, you have a terrible feeling of this life, of this one, and you feel this suffering, I wouldn't expect that following this feeling to do that, for example, escaping the situation, or the intervention of the special one, or doing something. It is a surprisingly strong reaction. It's not only to express something. This is my experience. And the point is not that I have experiences, but the point is, Changeable youth seems to be the biggest trust.

[02:16]

People mean, this is not the first changeable youth. Oh yeah, I understand. This is a good point. Okay, but I would say that the alternative of distrusting is not right, it's not good. I think if you have an experience, you have an experience. And I think you have to trust the experience. But I don't think you have to believe the experience. So, I would say, for instance, if I am with people I've practiced with a long time. I can not only trust my experience, I can find ways to express the experience I have. But if I'm with people who don't practice, and I have some experience with them,

[03:20]

or the situation, I know very well I probably ought to be very cautious. I better not express it or act on it. Also not act on it? Yeah, I better not act on it, because often it doesn't, it's out of, it's in the wrong framework. I also think this bird is probably dying. But I'm going to not act on it. I'm going to let the bird do what it does. Maybe it will recover. But where all these things, you know, it's a kind of craft, you know, whether you, what attitude, feelings you take toward these, this kind of experience.

[04:51]

Someone else? Petra? Yes. So I made it into a habit to use a certain physical feeling I have in my diagnostics during my work. Yes. So often it's the case that from the pictures I got from radiation or whatsoever, that there are somehow clear facts, but somehow I have a strange feeling or an exciting feeling is racing in my body.

[06:17]

And I made it into a habit to exclude this case from my usual routine. And usually then I'm waiting and I wait and see what kind of feelings or ideas are coming up during the night about this case. And often it's the case that not something is wrong with our diagnostics or with our examination or with our interpretation of the picture, of the image or whatsoever. ... But it's often the case that the way the patient was treated, there was something wrong in the way the patient was treated, but not in the way medical treatment, but in the way... Treated by the technician or something.

[07:40]

And I asked then, I asked... Yeah, so the patient management wasn't working very well. And then I asked, for instance, the physician who refers his patient, sends the patient to me, and then something turns out, which is useful for the patient. Yes. And also Kalinde can testify that I wake up during the night and I have to write it down just to get rid of this idea so that I can continue my night sleep. And sometimes this intuition or this idea I have turns around the whole case or the interpretation of the case and it's quite a different thing than afterwards.

[08:43]

Can you give or make up an example? So basically, we become a two-way song with the So, for instance, we get a patient with a certain question, and we are going to carry out this examination. And the letter from the physician who asked for the question, for instance, was not written by the physician himself, but from his secretary. Is it like, does this person have cancer? Does this person have bone damage? What would be an example of that? What would be such an example?

[09:59]

Yes. Because the question is put in a certain way, we are carrying out a certain examination, but we miss a certain examination we would have done otherwise. Do you see the patient or only from the pictures? We see the patient in the pictures. Some have those fingers hanging around and... then sometimes we get information that the question we were asked was not, didn't fit. Yeah. Okay. Now let me ask you a question somewhat related.

[11:03]

You've been doing this diagnostic radiology and MRIs for many years. Now, when you first meet a patient, just by being present with them or talking with them or feeling them, Do you sometimes have a feeling for what the MRI or the x-rays are going to turn out to be? Okay, so in other words, the MRI or the x-ray is giving you information from its imaging. But you've been doing this long enough that you notice other information that points to the same thing. Okay. Do you sometimes have a feeling about someone and then the image doesn't confirm it?

[12:26]

And then do you trust your feeling enough to try to think, maybe I should do a different test or maybe I should look at the images again more carefully? So that's a kind of knowing based on familiarity which we can't really explain. I would say we can feel it, but we can't We don't have the categories to explain it to ourselves. Have we felt it with our stomach? Did we smell it? We don't know.

[13:26]

And it's outside the categories language supplies it. I like this story about the smelling of the DNA. And I've told that before. Well, they noticed that mice won't mate with a female mouse, won't mate with another mouse who has a similar DNA configuration to the father of the female. So, in any case, they've noticed that regularly... Female mice will not mate with another mouse which smells like their father.

[14:35]

Or that has similar DNA to the father. So then they determined that if the mouse could smell the other mouse, they made this decision. Don't you have some German expression like I don't like his smell or something like that? So then they noticed... Excuse me, my legs aren't working too well these days. But then they noticed that... Well, at first they thought, well, geez, these mice have very sensitive noses, like dogs or something. And then they thought, well, we probably don't have such sensitive noses. Then they noticed the lab technicians who... All I know is they happen to be female.

[15:46]

We're able to predict which mice would mate with which mice. So it seems that the female lab technicians could smell also the DNA of the mouse. But they don't know exactly how they do it, but they just say, this mouse is not going to mate with that one. So that's a category of noticing that we can't conceptualize. My first experience with that was I was working in a warehouse in New York. It was a book distributor for publishing companies. And I noticed I had a whole bunch of pieces of paper, things stapled together, in those days mimeographed.

[17:06]

Chester Carlson, who invented xerography, had not yet thought of it. I mention it because Chester Carlson happened to be the first Second big supporter of Buddhism in the United States. Carlson invented Xerox. Anyway, so it was mimeographed. What is mimeographed? So, yeah, it's a, you know, you have a role. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Spiritus Matrice. Okay. No, I'm not so... I mean... No, you're not. When I was a kid... Yeah, you had... They had it in the museum.

[18:18]

They had airplanes too, didn't they? Yeah. Anyway, so... So I had these things, and they were 65 pages. And they were stapled together. But some pages had 66, some were 67, and some were 68. And the ones that had more pages had graphs in the middle, mimeographed graphs. So I had a big stack of them. And for some reason I had to sort them into 65 pages, 66 pages, 67 pages and 68 pages. So I would flip the pages with my thumb and see how many graph pages there were. So I'd flip it and count it.

[19:21]

After I'd done about 10, I knew as soon as I put my hand on it how many pages were in each page. Now, I don't remember if I lifted the page a little bit with my thumb so it could tell the weight. Ich weiß nicht, ob ich es ein bisschen angehoben habe, sodass ich das Gewicht checken konnte. As soon as I touched the edge, I might have known. I don't remember that. Also es könnte sein, dass ich sobald ich irgendwie nur den Rand berührt habe von diesen Seiten, dass ich es gewusst habe. An das kann ich mich nicht genau erinnern. But I do remember that if I thought about it, I couldn't do it.

[20:22]

Aber ich weiß genau, dass wenn ich darüber nachgedacht habe, konnte ich es nicht tun. I'm sorry to use the word trust again. But if I just touched it and trusted it, I put it in the right pile. As soon as I thought, which is it, 66? It was just too clumsy, I could not tell. So I played with that feeling of... Knowing without thinking. And if I could hold myself from thinking about it, I was right every time. And it's experiences like this that led me to practice. Last night somebody asked me why I started practicing. I said it was the Second World War. Which is also true.

[21:38]

Yeah. Because we heard the news every morning and every night about the war. And I, every day, was so shocked that people did these things to each other. I didn't want to be a human being. I didn't want to participate in this culture. However this culture allowed this to happen, I didn't want to be part of it. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out, is there some other way of being human than the one that seems to be, I'm asked to join with a career and everything. So that was one kind of lineage. There's another lineage through Paracelsus and alchemical ideas that appear in poetry and...

[22:43]

What age was I then? Yeah. At which, when I did the papers? In the Second World War, how old have you been? Eight years? Oh, in the Second World War, I was five or six or seven or eight. I'm 67 now, so 36 I was born, so in 42 I would have been 6. So, yeah, 6 and 7. I was in first grade for part of it. Yeah, so, but anyway, there's a number of lineages, but one of the lineages is these unusual experiences like this one. You know, I had a mother who was sort of a poet. I had a father who was sort of a scientist. But nothing in either world or the world of my schooling showed me anything about why I should know how many pages are in this book.

[24:00]

So I thought, there's something people aren't telling me, or there's something people don't commonly know. And those experiences and other things, as I said, led me to practice. So relieved when I found practice. So delighted. begin to find the kind of being that knows these things. Yes. Ah, Petra. Yes. So it's more about the feeling I have when I am in groups and my family, my children are not present. ...

[25:46]

I have the feeling something opens in me, but I cannot control, I cannot steer how much it opens, the extent to which it opens. And there is always a fear, anxiety, more anxiety. So I'm quite insecure when I have certain experiences. For instance, what happened some years ago, during such a group, I was lying in bed with the group. So I somehow cannot control my thinking.

[27:18]

It's as if there is my thinking and then something else opens. It's like a hole. And in this hall there is suddenly a very strong physical experience and feeling. And also the body starts, for instance, to vibrate and to shake, and I somehow have the feeling that I also have to fix or to control and to stabilize my body. Yes.

[28:25]

So and I had this feeling I was lying in bed and I had this feeling and then outside there was a car moving by. I slowly heard it coming and moving by. ... And then I cannot distinguish very clearly whether I am this person sitting in this car moving by, or whether it's a different person sitting in this car. So it's somehow melting together or floating together. And these kind of experiences are frightening me because I think, okay, what do I have to do now?

[29:46]

Yeah. And luckily there are not so many chances that I am alone without my family. So your definition as a wife and a mother kind of hold you in place. So deine Definition als Ehefrau und Mutter halten dich irgendwie, stabilisieren dich. How's the bird doing? Wie geht's dem Vogel? What? He flew away. Oh, good. He had a good rest, I hope. Die Betten waren schlecht. Er hat schlechte Betten gehabt. It was the cup of water that encouraged him. Okay. Do you have this experience sometimes when you're not with your family and just alone but not with a group?

[31:00]

Hast du diese Erfahrungen manchmal, wenn du ohne deine Familie bist, aber alleine und nicht in einer Gruppe? Es kommt darauf an, es kommt auf die Umgebung. Zum Beispiel dieser Platz hier könnte gebärdigt werden, auch vielleicht ohne Gruppe. Also wenn zum Beispiel Natur, das ist der Charakter ist. Aber ich glaube, es kommt darauf an, ich weiß es nicht. I don't know. I think I didn't have it alone. But for instance, this place here could be very dangerous because nature is so strong here. Yeah. and it doesn't have it's not any group where this could happen but it's more group where which have a kind of dense feeling like Siegfried Essen's meditation group but also this group here or also this practice week we had in Hamburg together and in Hamburg in Haus der Stille there are these ponds

[32:28]

I can now, as every child, [...] Yeah, and what also frightens me very much are these ponds in Haus der Stille, where I got this idea or this feeling that, like Jesus, I could walk on the water, but on the other hand, there is simultaneously, there is this knowing that it's impossible to do it, but this feeling of it's possible to do it is also very strong, and that's even stronger, and even stronger than that. And different. It's different. Yeah, it's a kind of knowing that it's possible, which somehow has a different feeling than knowing that it's impossible.

[33:36]

And that's frightening. I understand. Yeah, I can understand it being frightening. You know, there's scientists that they made a movie about recently at Princeton. What's his name? Everybody see the movie? Dangerous Minds? I forget his name now. But I think he's one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the last century. He's still alive. And he said what led him into... anxiety and eventually into craziness, is the feeling he had which led him to make mathematical discoveries no one else had made.

[34:51]

And when he trusted that feeling, it was a kind of genius. But when he had the same kind of feeling in other circumstances and he trusted it, he became crazy. So he had to learn, he became sane again when he learned to discriminate between when those feelings could be trusted and when those feelings couldn't, what context they could be trusted in and what context they couldn't be trusted in. So when you have the definition of boundaries, of your family life, your access to this kind of experience is much less or not at all.

[36:05]

And when you're by yourself, usually you don't have this kind of experience. Not every passing car gives you this experience. But when you're with groups involved with meditative experience or some kind of density, as you said, Your boundaries get less or get different. And you experience things. Now, Elizabeth Bishop who's a poet. If I happen to have the poem here, I'll bring it and read it. But it's basically an enlightenment poem, which I'm sure is the turning point in her writing poetry.

[37:14]

But basically she's a little girl, I don't know how old, age or something. And she goes to the dentist with her grandmother. Do any of you know the poem? Yes. You do? I bought it once, yeah. And she's sitting and she's looking through a National Geographic type magazine. And she sees, as they have in such magazines, women, bare-breasted women. Some other kind of thing, you know, kind of, I don't know what, some kind of distortion of the body.

[38:16]

Yeah, in those days you could show people you didn't identify with in ways you wouldn't show your own self. And she heard her grandmother, aunt or great aunt or something, in the dentist's screen. Screaming? Scream, make a noise from the dentist. And then at some point she realized she was screaming at seeing these pictures. But she lost her borders and she didn't know whether it was she screaming or her grandmother screaming or what.

[39:19]

Now, an experience when you lose your borders can be very disturbing, but it also can be a kind of enlightenment experience. But we do need to have borders. Yes. And you have to be able to return to your borders. That's a skill. Okay. Now, If you're a person who has some reason, for some reason, this capacity more available, but you don't know much anything about practice or other modes of mind, and When you also in addition feel your borders are different,

[40:31]

It gives you a certain feeling of power. A deep power of being alive in a new way. And then you funnel that sense of power into something, some idea. Excuse me, Lord. funnel that sense of power into some... It can be very unrealistic. Or it can be inflation. So somehow one has to be able to feel this without turning it into ordinary consciousness power or some kind of what. That's one reason.

[41:33]

If you're going to move into this territory, we learn to sit through pain and difficulty and so forth, so you can let yourself feel something, but absolutely trust you don't have to act on it. I said this morning that we want to somehow see that there doesn't have to be a connection between knowing and thinking. But there also has to be a connection breaking of the connection between thought and action. If your thoughts are too connected to acting, then you only have thoughts you can act on. Okay. If you get so that you can think, because each of us, as I say, has within us every human being and all human beings in history.

[43:12]

We're not all murderers or saints. But these are all potentials within us. Okay. So... Strangely, if you learn to let yourself feel whatever is there, and learn not to act on it, and that's a bodily learning, because you're breaking the connection between thinking and action. And that bodily learning is a tremendous freedom. I don't know how one would learn it except in extreme circumstances, extreme sports or something.

[44:16]

Or you learn it through meditation, Sashin type practice. But strangely, when you learn it, you after a while no longer have any thoughts you couldn't act on. Anything you think usually is something that's possible. But now the thinking is so grounded in the body, you simply don't think things that aren't possible. And you know when things aren't possible. People tell you this or that, you think, You just know.

[45:19]

So somehow it seems that when you're with a group of people, like we talked about, The shared mind allows you to loosen your own borders. Or you feel a kind of trust in the situation, like you trust your family, you trust the group to feel more freedom. And you're speaking about the bird being alone and dying.

[46:25]

It reminded me that the root of self is also solitude and solo, being completely alone. And there's some, Samuel Barber put some, you know monks illuminate manuscripts, right? And someone has collected the little notes that monks write, or poems, on the side of the illumination when they're bored. You know, they're tired of them, so they write a little something. And Samuel Barber, who's a composer, set a number of these to music. And they're quite nice.

[47:26]

And one of them is Alone I came into the world. And alone I shall go found. Well, you don't exactly come into the world alone. I think your mother's there. But somehow we also come in alone. And we leave alone. And one of the good areas of practice in meditation is being completely alone. It's really feeling completely alone.

[48:27]

And no one's going to help you. People do help you, but in this experience, no one's going to help you. There's no God to cry out for anything. You're completely alone. And this also, strangely, creates a very deep security. then alone I shall go from it. Okay, so I said we would speak about this last thing, continuity. And I am slightly organized, so I remember. Okay. Certainly one of the functions of self is establishing continuity.

[49:38]

And if you lose the sense of continuity from moment to moment, it can be a nervous breakdown. It's one of the experiences that... people having a nervous breakdown have. Or drug experiences. I mean, if I look at you and I turn this way and I can't remember that and I don't know where I am, I'm in trouble. Where am I? So I look here and then I can't remember that. We need continuity. And most of us establish continuity in thinking. Between here and there is thought. I mean, I'm not looking at you anymore, but in my memory, in thinking, I know you're there.

[50:39]

That fundamental continuity or that experience of continuity, we have to have it. And we mostly establish it with thinking and perceptual continuity. Okay, now there's a technology To transform that. Or a craft to transform that. And that mainly is working with the breath. So you may think that or know that The self is impermanent.

[51:55]

But, okay, let's go back. It's very easy to bring your attention to your breath for two or three breaths, ten breaths, a minute or two. But very quickly, usually our attention goes back to our thoughts. Okay, so we can ask the question. Why is something so easy to do for a short time, but really impossible to do for a long time? And there's various reasons.

[52:56]

But I think the pivotal reason is that we establish our continuity in our thoughts. And we can't stay with our breath too long because we have to go back to our thoughts. And that is an implicit belief or an implicit functioning through a sense of the permanence of self. So you may think the self is impermanent. But if your attention keeps going back to your thoughts, it means implicitly you think this is where the most permanence is.

[53:58]

Now in Buddhism, that would be a delusion. But how do you break such a habit that if you don't have it, you feel like you're going crazy? Well, you create an antidotal habit or a new habit. This is one of the central functions of developing breath attention. So you bring your attention back to your breath. And after a while it gets easier. And you can bring it back fairly easily.

[55:03]

And after a while it comes back by itself. Just like the practice of one-pointedness. And finally, without any effort, your attention rests on your breath. Now, you may think that sounds impossible. I mean, it sounds conceptually possible, but for most people it's rather difficult to do. But you already learn to keep your attention on your posture all your waking time. So part of the work is done already because most of us know our body posture all the time we're awake. It may not be a vivid knowing of our body posture, but we know it. Es mag kein sehr starkes Gefühl für unsere Körperhaltung sein, aber die meisten von uns wissen es.

[56:26]

It's once you know, once your attention will stay with your breath, it's as natural as your attentiveness being with your posture. But it's actually a big shift when you establish continuity in your breath and body and phenomena. Because you moved from moved from identifying yourself with past and future, in the past and future is the main territory of play of the self.

[57:32]

Who I've been and who I will be is the territory of the self. It's also the cage of the self. And so when you can really make this shift and feel continuity in breath, body, and phenomena, Which is one way of establishing these deep boundaries. Then we are identified with the... I could say the present, but that's not right. We're identified with the presence of the present. The immediacy of the present.

[58:51]

So our continuity is always Our presence. And it's not in past and future. We can certainly think about the past and future. But we no longer identify with ourselves as past and future. And that's a very different kind of self. That's enough. Let's sit a moment and then have lunch, dinner, supper, right on time.

[59:52]

Yes, we have a past. And hopefully we'll have a future. I certainly hope each of you does. But our past and future aren't immediately nourishing. When you establish your continuity in breath, body and phenomena, you tend to feel continuously nourished and vivid. And a power in simply being alive.

[62:06]

In a shower. In a thunderstorm. Or just sitting here together. Sitting completely alone. Absolutely independent. So there's interdependence and there's absolute independence. Thank you very much for spending the day with each other and with me.

[64:09]

And it's been one of the best discussions I had about practice I've ever had. Thanks to you. This building. Our host. And the power of nature, as you said. It's somehow chilly and hot at the same time.

[65:49]

A 16th century Chinese Zen master named Ji Bo, said that the wisdom of Buddhism and he meant the wisdom of impermanence and we could say in the light of this The title of the seminar, the wisdom of self and non-self, can only be known through deconstructing

[66:51]

the mind as it's played out through the senses, or the mind as it's constructed through the senses. And most of what I've been trying to speak about for years Many years now, ever since I first came here in, when, 80s? When did, 89, was it? Is how we how we enter into this process, but also how we, first we need to recognize that the self is a construct.

[68:16]

A construct that we participate in. Even Karl Marx, So got Karl Marx. Unusual reference nowadays. Even Karl Marx. Nowadays, yes. Known for his shaping and misshaping of our economic life. said that the forming of the five senses In Buddhism, we'd say the six sense. Because we include mind. But he said, anyway, the forming of the five senses is a labor. Now you know it's Marx. is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present.

[69:36]

That was in 1844, he said. And he thought Really, believe it or not, that we shouldn't live just as economic beings, but as sensual beings. But he did have this remarkable, I think, Aber er hat diese, denke ich zumindest, bemerkenswerte Erkenntnis, dass sogar unsere fünf oder sechs Sinne, die wir haben, eine Konstruktion sind. the labor of the entire history of the world. So I think we have just

[70:36]

ponder a statement like this not only that he said it and this side of Marx is not known is not well known for sure But also we ourselves take the world known through the senses for granted. We think that the way we see the world is the way the world is. Yeah. Even though we can... as some koans point out, recognize that there's a lot of the world that doesn't fall into the five or six pieces of pie that we call the five senses or six senses.

[71:52]

Yeah, for example, an example I usually use is right now there's cell phone calls in the air here. And unless you're bionic, you don't have a sense for it. So there's much that occurs between the senses. And the way the senses present the world to us is something we've learned. And the domination of the visual sense is something we've learned. You know, I'm struck by the shift when you

[73:01]

when I go to Zurich. Because they have all these Protestant towers. With huge clocks. And before the Protestant Reformation, And before the Protestant Reformation, I would think Europe lived more in an oral, A-U-R-A-L world. And Oral. A, you are hearing. Ah, okay. And perhaps there was a shift with the Protestant clocks to an oral world. At least there was a... shift to a world defined through primarily reading and thinking.

[74:28]

Just imagine if you only knew what time it is, what was happening through sounds. It creates a much more fluid world and a much more intimate world. immediate world. How do we talk about it? We can say you don't know the time, you feel the time. Now we have to... If you're going to practice... Zen and enter into the way the world appears through meditation.

[75:42]

We need to find, we need to feel how we've constructed the world, and feel our way into other possibilities. For the way we construct the world through our senses, is the territory of self and of how we know things. We discussed today during what I call the prologue day, Self as both a function and a dynamic of... a dynamic of interaction, where what we know either extends toward ourselves or outward.

[77:10]

But all of this comes down to, as we spoke about, to really accepting impermanence. But that boils down to the point where one says one accepts the permeability that things are impermanent and changing and we are participating in that changing And how we participate in that changing determines how we know and how we function as a self. So that recognition itself is not an entity and permanent. It means you have to begin to see how in the particulars self functions.

[78:17]

Now the development and painting in Italy of The Middle Ages of single viewpoint perspective. Also historically has created a sense of the world as pictorial. A sense of the world that we don't feel in the dark. And our sense of self is so tied to consciousness that we don't recognize ourself at night. We often don't recognize our dreams as ourself. Although psychology tries to recognize, see dreaming at least partly as

[79:18]

uncovering the self, we ourselves don't experience a continuity of self through the night. And we spoke today also about the sense that we can bring And throughout the day, we know our posture. And as part of practice, we can also, in a similar way, know our posture. breath as attention. And as we've talked about in the past, when you can shift attention to the breath, body and phenomena,

[80:32]

You effectively free yourself from the self of past and present. You free the present from its juxtaposition between past and present. In a way, the experience is something like you free the present into your immediate into your history, into your activity in a new way. And when you do free yourself from the past and future, In the immediacy of the present.

[81:48]

Now, of course we have a past and future. But, yeah. It influences us and we have things we want to do. But our physical and mental nourishment can be discovered in the present in a new way. As I said, you find your stability and continuity through the immediate situation. And in a fluidity, Of selves. And in a fluidity, [...]

[82:53]

Self releases itself into each situation. Appears and disappears. As self, you release self into someone ideally, into the relationship with someone you love. But that releasing of self can occur in any situation or with any person. And self, you don't have to worry about self disappearing. When you exhale, you don't worry about inhales disappearing. And self loosens its hold on our senses. when it's not so tied to the future and the past, loosens its hold on the present, and the present, as I've said, becomes presence.

[84:42]

The present is known Whatever you know is the mind. When you know the world through the six senses, and it's amazing that we forget, in a way, ignore the sixth sense and talk about five senses, as if the mind was somehow separate from the five senses. That's if the mind was a different thing or more permanent or something. But

[85:43]

you only know what you hear through the mind. So each sense is associated with the mind. And the mind has its own way of knowing, which is not tied to a particular sense. So when we feel the presence of the presence, we're feeling the presence of mind, of our own knowing of the present, which is our own knowing of mind itself. So there's an immediate intimacy, We don't feel separate from what's happening.

[87:00]

At the same time as it's not a thingness, a present. But only a presence we discover through memory associations, language, percepts, activity, and all of it. Together is the present. You can't separate those things out. What we know as humans are is the presence of the present. We can feel the ingredients.

[88:01]

We can feel our participation. And that we call mind. We don't call it self. What can we speak about when we say the wisdom of the self and the non-self? Is the wisdom of non-self when we have the wisdom of mind? Mind that's knowing without the habits of self. A mind that's knowing, to some degree, free of our personal history. And certainly impermanent. Because a We have a direct knowing of impermanence when we feel the presence of the present.

[89:17]

No. Something that struck me recently. Trying to think about what's really going on with Zen practice. How does it function? Why does it function? Well, recently I was reading something and heard a lecture by someone which talked about the growth of the brain.

[90:18]

Anyway, I'll go ahead on this. The dramatic growth of the brain from something like... 400 grams to over a thousand grams. From the third trimester, in other words, just before birth. to about 18 to 24 months. 24 months. And most of that time, the baby is, it's after birth. And there's a maturation and structuring of the physical brain at that time.

[91:24]

And, you know, I'm not much interested because I heard it too much during the 60s, right brain and left brain stuff. But if you look at the brain from above, it is two hemispheres. And it does seem that according to this real-time imaging imaging the brain during the interaction particularly the mother and the infant that the right brain is dominant until about 18 to 24 months.

[92:31]

Until language, the brain, left brain with its emphasis on language, begins to be dominant. Now certainly watching Sophia, there's been the shift I talked about today and last year. From signs, let's call it signs, she made to differentiate the world. And as she began to be able to shape words, and she's still learning how to shape words, and she's losing, unlearning the ability to speak Chinese.

[93:18]

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