Oh, there's the gap. Maybe the gap is good. Okay. Now, normally Zazen is taught by, through images. Not yet explanations. Images like, don't invite your thoughts to tea. And that's a, you know, when you really, when that keeps coming up, it's very clear. It points to the If you can not invite your thoughts to tea, it means there's a mind bigger than thoughts. And it suggests the dynamic of mind. which is you're not throwing the thoughts out, you're not saying, get out of my house.

[01:09]

You're just saying, well, you're here, but I ain't giving you any tea. Yeah. But when you really explore it, it's got a lot of teachings in that little remark. Or don't scratch. Or sit like a stump. Some things German says so much better than English. And the primary way sāsana is taught is by the example of your teacher. You feel it. And it's shown sometimes.

[02:18]

And sometimes we say, why do you revere your teacher? Because he only showed me half. Think like that. But still, the emphasis is on showing and showing sometimes and not other times and so forth. So you begin to know the difference. So the overall... Sazen is... First of all, an attitude. And to some extent I talked about this in the Sesshin we recently did together. It's first of all an attitude of acceptance. So let me try to give you a non-image-based explanation of zazen for you who are practicing zazen, perhaps, on your own for the most part.

[03:43]

First of all, it's very simple. It's the operating, we call it the operating principle. That's uncorrected mind. Or we could say the immediate activity of acceptance. In other words, you just try to keep accepting what appears.

[05:09]

That means you even accept non-Zazen mind. Like you were saying, when you were doing Zazen this morning, you had a lot of tension in your body. You say, this isn't doing Zazen, I better get up. If you're serious about this, you just stay. If you find you're involuntarily flying through the room, then you might as well do something else. Right. As long as it's somewhat voluntary, you stay there. Now, if you don't hold to this attitude of whatever is there is what you accept, you'll never understand God and mind.

[06:11]

because this attitude to accept whatever it is, this attitude is more powerful than the experience of sasen mind. So you really want to cultivate this attitude. And if you do cultivate this attitude, then When sasen mind is more like what we expect sasen mind to be, it will also be open to a non-selective process. In other words, it can start to go places that aren't tension, but aren't what you expect of size and mind either. Does that make sense? And also, our ego really doesn't like size and mind. I mean, if you really start doing it, the ego thinks, you know, this is dangerous.

[07:32]

This practice makes me sick. Okay. I think I ought to stop it. This is threatening my existence. So let's start thinking up very interesting things for you to do. So fängt das Ego an, sich ganz interessante Dinge auszudenken, die du jetzt machen solltest. Aber je mehr man denkt, dass man wie ein Baumstumpf sitzt, man sagt, oh Gott, ich kann dich nicht bezaubern mit irgendwelchen interessanten Dingen. And then it starts telling you, Who wants to be a bomb stump? Your parents bring you up to be a bomb stump.

[08:52]

What would your friend think? Well, if you just keep sitting there, you know, not a green leaf appears on the bomb stump. Then start thinking about what the other word for bomb stump is. It's crazy. You, I think this is going, you may be coming crazy today. That's the real last powerful threat. She's going to make you crazy. And this occurs for two reasons. One is because the ego really is threatened. And when the ego is threatened, it feels it's not crazy. So it's not just a trick. The ego is tricking you, but also the ego actually feels it going crazy.

[09:53]

And then you're also entering states of modes of mind which you can't you've ever had before. And you begin to have experiences that are not communicable or you don't dare communicate them to anyone else. It can be true when it starts changing your mind. No, it is possible to go crazy. And if you're a borderline personality, you know, playing around with the edges of the mind and so forth is a little tricky. But usually you know that you're probably not going That's the last threat, usually, of the ego is that you're going to go crazy if you continue this path.

[11:14]

As long as you practice within the realm of well-being, deepening your state of mind, deepening calmness and so forth, these challenges don't usually occur. But when it becomes genuinely or potentially transformative, you can actually be threatened by this. I think Kant himself says the real measure of mind is that it's shareable with others. What sanity is. And I mention this not to warn you particularly or make this sound very serious.

[12:25]

does happen to some meditators, not just people who meditate a lot. Sometimes it happens to somebody, it affects them in such a way to a certain point in their life where it is genuinely transformative and genuinely threatening. You might be just surprisingly gifted at meditation. you didn't know what your career should be, and suddenly you find you're surprised when you get to the meditation. So anyway, that's the operating principle, we could call it, and then we could call it the concept. The basic concept of an absorptive state of mind is this inclusive acceptance. Now again, that's a kind of another attitude.

[13:36]

But these attitudes are kind of the dynamic of the practice. Now the condition, the condition of zazen, mind, is that it points to money. When you're doing zazen, you tend to notice the condition of mind as well as the contents of mind. That makes sense? You begin to notice mind itself, not just what you're thinking. And So we could say the capacity of mind, thousand minds, is the ability to shift to the field of mind.

[15:20]

That's the capacity of the thousand minds. And then the head In other words, and this is imperatability is like don't scratch. And imperatability is also when you decide, well, I'm full of tension, but I'm just going to sit. And even if it's not zazen mind, whatever it is, I'm going to do this every day or five days a week or something at this time, not some other time.

[16:53]

If you want this unit of zazen to reach all of your life. It's important to do it for the same length of time than the same time each day. It's not like an exercise. Well, I tell them the mode for exercise and so on. No. You do it whether you feel like it or not. That's the only way everything can pass through. So Zazen isn't Simply the experience of sitting, it's rules like to do it at the same time, at the same length of time. Just sitting cross-legged, practicing uncorrected mind, when you happen to feel like it, is not zazen.

[17:54]

The effort to bring the whole of these teachings into this little practice, this practice has a lot of attitudes and rules built into it. Also diese Bemühungen, diese ganzen Belehrungen hineinzubringen in eine kleine simple Praxis, dann sieht man, dass diese Praxis sehr viele Regeln auch in sich birgt. Now it's very useful to say, very easy to say, shipped to the field of mind from the contents of mind. But you can't do that until you have a certain instability or imperturbability of mind. It's a little, but here's the contents of mine. This is the angle of imperturbability.

[19:16]

And when you have that physical confidence in this, that you can really sit through anything, then I have the confidence to pin it on that imperturbability into the field of mind. Now the last one I'll mention, the dynamic, is the movement or inclusivity. And that can be calmness, clarity, Clarity. A bit like water. No. Water doesn't do anything.

[20:17]

It just keeps moving lower. When I hiked over the ridge here, the top of the ridge is quite soaked, and there's little rivulets here and there. They're quite big streams that you're sitting beside. So we can say the dynamic is, although it's acceptance, you're moving toward acceptance of calmness, stillness, more inclusive state of mind. Does that answer partly what you brought up, Siegfried?

[21:31]

So there's a kind of movement, but the movement is toward away from distraction, toward stillness, toward calmness, toward wider, brighter, clearer states of mind. And then you have to basically trust your gut instinct. One of the big subjects in Buddhism, again, since there's no Archimedean point, what is a valid cognition? How do you decide for yourself what's wholesome and unwholesome? And you begin to... feel when something is a valid cognition, a valid intuition.

[22:35]

So in this process of this water of the mind sinking deeper, You also have to trust the kind of things that pop up that seem like distraction, but sometimes you follow them. And the more you can really sit still in an absorbent state of mind, the intelligence of the body itself begins to teach. Now I say body, but it's the body permeated by mind. A kind of subtlety starts appearing. that words and concepts are too gross to distinguish.

[23:53]

So it's for these reasons, this kind of dynamic, that Dogen says, this is the center of Buddhist practice. Now, part of zazen is also bringing attention to your breathing, and so forth. But that's a practice that develops this, but it's not really part of this. I should be bringing my attention to my breathing right now. Not just in Sazan. And all Buddhist practices involve breath practice. But this understanding of Zazen mind is particular to Zen, and in fact even more particular to the Dumsan lineage.

[25:04]

Is this a little too much detail, or is that useful? Yes, it's useful. And you see, normally, if we were all, say, on a daily basis, practicing together, it would be very easy for them to be nonverbal and outside the scriptures when we're together every day for ten years. So she comes up to me. What was your first name? Maggie. Maggie. She speaks to me and says, I felt this tension when I was sitting, and maybe I just run my finger down the back, and that's enough. Or maybe I move my shoulders back, just to have that tension under. Oder ich würde meine Schultern zurückfallen lassen, um vorzuschlagen, dass man das machen kann.

[26:49]

Oder ich würde ein Ohr flüstern, Baumsturm. Nichts davon muss in der Art und Weise, wie ich es getan habe, erklärt werden. And also, we're beginning to get the physical bioentrainment of practicing together. Bioentrainment means why two bicycle racers go faster if they're next to each other. Or women in the same community tend to have a period at the same time. And in the Zendo, they've measured it. Everybody who's sitting, people who are sitting in the right and left lobe begin to pick up the same brain pattern.

[27:56]

And then they've only studied it up to about 18 people. But up to that number, everyone's brain waves start being the same within a very short time. So that condition is part of it. in almost the most basic way Zen is used to be taught. So this new adept lay practice challenges the way Lufthansa is used to be taught. Yes?

[29:19]

If you're practicing some other kind of meditation, for instance in the tradition of Theravada Buddhism, or a Christian practice of contemplation, or something else, And you're practicing long enough? I would be interested whether you think that this kind of practice just happens at a certain point. Or can other practices inhibit and prohibit that, that that happens? Well, I would say that, and I'm speaking, I'm thinking about it, but also from a lot of experience with people who have various, and that is another problem with lay practice. If so many people have got ten teachers and five different practices and, you know, there's no base to work from.

[30:28]

Of course this occurs sometimes. But it most commonly occurs on people's Sunday. You know, you're worshipping the great sun god, O-Ten. O-Ten me. [...] But that doesn't really make it Zazen. Zazen is when these attitudes are held over a long period of time in everything you do, not just Zazen.

[31:34]

I don't ask that because I have an answer in the Internet. I'm not asking this question because I would be interested in trying another practice. But I ask myself the question whether you just land on this here when you just very seriously do one practice. Help me. So I compared it to sports. So I thought that maybe if you're doing sports very seriously, then still you can distinguish between a guy who plays basketball and football and swimming and so on.

[32:45]

So they all are serious in the sport. And a lot of martial art people practice meditation. And in Zen-type meditation, but they really have very good luck. There are a lot of people who practice martial arts and they also do some meditation and meditate, but they have little knowledge of meditation. Well, it's also important for you as therapist because if somebody comes to you and they Nowadays, I suspect a significant percentage of clients know something about meditation or have meditated and so forth. But what you introduce them to or how you understand what they're doing is important. But this is a very finely nuanced teaching. As far as I know, it's the most formless of all meditation practices.

[33:48]

Most of those meditation practices need the most fine tuning. So most of the meditation practices fit into this. fit into it, but mostly very hard to get out of the room of that meditation. One of the most kind of sheerly talented people I practice with, He's not only very intelligent, but he's got an unbelievable willpower and a kind of daring. And he's been practicing with me quite a long time, maybe six years or seven years.

[34:56]

And he's been coming to Sashins and listening to my lectures and so forth. But he started practicing years ago and went through certain very elucidating crises in his practice. which depended really on his amazing, compared to anybody I know, willpower. And he's able to, if you say, flip like a bombstone for two or three days, what? thoughts go, he's just there, right? But this amazing willpower actually was interfering with the creativity of his meditation practice.

[35:57]

So he followed all instructions so well, he was able to do it, but he never something was missing in his practice. And to just really let the formlessness really be formless, he only got recently. And he called me up recently and told me what a huge difference it's made. A whole bunch of stuff's opened up, but it took years of listening to lectures before he suddenly realized what I'm doing is different. And it was hard for me to see it because he was... capable of such amazing concentration.

[37:09]

It was hard to me to find an entrance into that because what he did was so good. So even somebody like that who's practicing a lot and hearing a lot gets stuck in a particular kind of practice. So it seems to be hard to believe it, but do we really want to eat again? So, I think that's enough on mind and mind in general. So, let's sit for a couple of minutes.

[38:10]

The key to practice is not particularly dependent on your intelligence or talent or something like that. It's dependent on the depth of your intention. The thoroughness of your intent. and a general and realistic understanding of practice. Have you amplified what I said in any way, or is it just a description of what I've said? One part that's not there is the way in which there's a circle this way. Oh, this?

[40:45]

It's the most important part. Yeah. You can make it with your living. No, this is good. I like this. Thank you. Great. Lieben. Leiden and Lieben. They're very close. Liebenschaft. Okay. Okay. Since we're trying to leave today, I didn't ever sit so long.

[41:50]

And I didn't touch again on background mind. But when I say background mind, which is often something I do say, I'm using it quite loosely. In other words, I'm not being so rigorous about just what a mind is. It's like the back of a house is not the whole house, it's just the back of a house. So I often use the example of a woman who's pregnant. And she does her daily life, but in the background of her mind is the fact that she's pregnant.

[42:54]

And what she does during the day is also with a sense of how it's affecting the baby. And I've often carried analogy further and say that we should become pregnant practice in that way. But this isn't really a mind in the sense of original mind or Buddha mind or something. Yet it's laying the ground, it's laying the, it's basically in the ballpark, as we would say in English. In the ballpark means it's in the game, it's in... It's a baseball term, in the ballpark. Yeah. And the more one develops the kind of parallel background mind, we all have such a thing.

[44:17]

I mean, some people have it to a kind of neurotic or... Psychotic degree. But anyway, this is just the sense that you develop a practice, develop a way to be present with something while you continue doing other things. So that's where you start out, putting a koan or some phrase you're working on in reminding yourself. Like just now is enough. Is that clear enough? Now, the fact that This background mind, which when you start doing zazen, begins to develop a kind of presence of its own, which almost becomes more present than foreground mind.

[45:31]

And just developing this background mind becomes a way in which zazen mind becomes your background mind. This is a kind of way to add a lot of words to something that's fairly natural. But when in zazen mind you develop the field of mind, which is isomorphic with, you know, the background mind, the ordinary mind. That field of mind in Zazen, this space, this character in Zazen, is the gate to Dharmakaya and Sambhogakaya and so forth. So I think that we, most of us have the sense of this language, so you can understand what I just said.

[46:33]

Ich glaube, die meisten von uns haben ein Gefühl für diese Sprache, sodass sie versteht, was ich meine. So, enough from meins. Die Not von diesen meins. What's the word for intention in German? Wille. Oder Absicht. Absicht. Absicht. Well, I don't know, but in English, if I say to you intention, or maybe in German, absicht, it's okay. But if I say to you in English, Achtung, I mean in German, or attention, your body comes into it as a response, as a physical response. So if I said to an English, you know, intention, they'd say... But if I said attention, their body moves, right?

[47:48]

So what I'm saying is that, like in those two words, one is a mental posture, one is a physical posture. They're just words, but one has a kind of physical side, more mental side. And basically you're working with this kind of nuance when you bring an intention to bring attention to your breath. Intention is, we could also say intention is one of the roots of all of Buddhism. Nothing happens without intention. And intention is again this basic movement or directionality of the mind.

[49:01]

So what your intention is, is much of what your life becomes. But... You hear what I'm trying to do is, you know, sorry I can't do it. It's nice that English is a dialect of German. With 50% of its vocabulary coming from French. But all the basic words, mother, water, father, they're all German. So perhaps these things work in German well. But I try to find words which we can take out of language, out of grammar. But carry some of the power they've developed at being part of the language.

[50:17]

And use them as openings into our practice. I mean, I see... sentences necessarily as having a forward motion, meaning that every word in the sentence has to contribute to the direction of the sentence. But I think of each word, too, as coming out at you. So coming out of the sentence. And sometimes I think of words as holes, and I try to stuff the practice through the hole of the sentence. Sometimes I think of words as tunnels.

[51:18]

Anyway, so I take, if we take a word like When you bring... Intention is a... You intend to do something, I have an intention to do something. That's different than intent, which is settled, sure to do it. And I see intention... Well, attention equal intent.

[52:37]

In other words, you want to make attention as a kind of physicality to it. You really want to make a physicality of intention. Intent, it's, you know, you can't take an intent out of a person. I mean, that's the feeling I want. I think I know what I'm doing here. I don't know. So the directionality of our mind becomes intention.

[53:42]

It becomes intent. Maybe I can discuss something how to translate that in German. Okay. Yeah. Intent and will, where is the... Intent is also will. Will. So maybe we can translate intent as will. It's also vow. That's why the vow is so important in Buddhism. Intent, I have an intent, it's a now. Okay, so we have... Absicht und Aufmerksamkeit werden zum... Was haben wir gesagt?

[54:46]

Wie? Wie war das? Ja, gut, dann... I'm just working. I'm really fun. Yes, right here, the new vendors. Okay, and I, what can I, try to think of a word here.

[56:18]

The, what's it called, locality. But these are the two basic motions, and I could illustrate these with the bodhisattvas Manjushri and Abha Kittishvara and so on. There's a basic directionality, and there's a locality. And there's also directionality inward, And a locality in. And you can understand many of the practices of working with this. Pulling you all in or manifesting, releasing out. Okay. Now, if I practice the sense of locality, just now arriving, I bring the attention to this point.

[57:49]

So everything stops. And that's different than the directionality. Now, faith, I would define faith in Buddhism as faith. Now, faith means to wait. And it's the same root as the word your fiancé, as someone who waits for you. Okay. Faith and known potential.

[58:52]

And faith and doesn't. Both the physical and the faith in practice, and the physical practice and mental practice. So faith in Buddhism works, but it works through faith in a known potential. And faith is this sense of directionality. Now somebody can tell me, yes, this is what we've been doing all along in groups. Then, in addition, we need a grounding in what is ascertainable.

[60:10]

Ascertain means to make certain. It's a word like intent. Ascertain means you've made it absolutely sure. It can't be checked up on. Man kann es vergewissern. Man kann es vergewissern. Thank you. And grounding what is ascertainable is usually direct perception. Und die Verankerung in dem, was vergewissert werden kann, ist die direkte Wahrnehmung. And a And in an ascertainable continuity.

[61:31]

And then grounding is locality. Now grounding in what is ascertainable, I mean something like the tissue of sound. Now we generally our sense of continuity is not in something ascertainable. Your thinking can't be checked up on. It's very kind of elusive. And if it is ascertainable, it's always future-oriented.

[62:32]

So grounding in something ascertainable is like moving your sense of continuity into your breath or your body or a sense field. And, you know, I use the example of if you're under a lot of stress or something, often people wash the dishes. Even men suddenly find themselves washing the dishes. Just to do something ascertainable. So here we have the same kind of pattern, which is direct perception is locality.

[63:51]

So you find your what's ascertainable, I just look at you and, you know, it's something I can really sense. Or I look at the distant clouds. Or a flower in front of me. And I can just rest my attention on it. Now these are When you begin to allow yourself to have experiences that aren't ordinary mentation, or you let go of the unity of your narrative, it's pretty hard to do without that entirely. So you substitute for the loss of your narrative as your continuity.

[65:07]

You develop a habit of direct perception and tracking your continuity through a sense field or in your body. Now, for instance, that very stormy day in your VW bus with the top. You could, it's easier to do if it's a very stormy day. You can just feel yourself through the wind and the storm and so forth. And of course that's happening in you as well as outside. And you, as you described it, had a real sensation of that.

[66:09]

It wasn't just outside. You could really feel it happening in you. But even on a gentle day, particularly if you live where there's the influence of the outside, you can find your entire... entire continuity in one sound after another. Birds, leaves, probably the hum of a computer, the refrigerator, whatever. The constant weaving of sound. And with a little effort you can train yourself to pay attention to that. To give attention to that.

[67:19]

When you do that, and you really do it, you're actually taking this physicality of attention and putting it in this continuity. And if you want to work with the vijnanas, you do this with each sense. You can do it one sense at a time in an hour walk. After getting a little bit better at that, you can work with one sense for like a month. One of the most interesting to work with is taste. You track the world through the feeling in your mouth. And you begin to know pretty quickly why taste is used for painting and music and so forth.

[68:23]

You just notice what happens in your mouth when, well, perhaps you look at different paintings. It's a little kind of barometer of wetness of touching and so forth. And you can feel different people. in the way your taste feels. I think that animals do this all the time. In fact, I was going to say this this morning, but I... passed by, but when you asked about yesterday, I guess, the bliss of a child. I think that animals are probably always in their bliss body.

[69:34]

It would be awfully boring to be an animal if it wasn't the case. But just because they don't have the interference of thinking and a lot of choices, they're probably in a kind of bliss body. I'm often very jealous of these Scottish cows out in front of Johanneshof. They do just what I'd like to do. They walk around. They stand still a lot. Sometimes in the storm, the wind's blowing, they just stand there and their hair blowing. Whenever they're hungry, they eat. That's how I would like to live. It's sort of how I do live. So we have a lot more difficulty coming to realizing this bliss body with the kind of complexity we are as human beings.

[71:00]

Okay. Now, I thought I might tell you a little personal anecdote. In my early 20s, I had quite a difficult time. And to... to give you a sense of how difficult I found it, I often said to myself that I would exchange any physical pain for the mental pain I felt.

[72:08]

But I was able to function and do things, but it was pretty bad. And I won't tell you what, no reason to go into what perceived triggered this. But during this time I moved to San Francisco. And I started practicing. And one day I was walking along, I don't know if I've ever told you any part of this, and I was walking along and I decided to have a cigarette. Somewhat like Clinton, I'd never inhaled, though. It was always too harsh.

[73:17]

I mean, I don't know how people inhale. It feels awful. But I do admit to inhaling marijuana, but not cigarettes. Marijuana is much milder. How would you know? Anyway, so... So I'd never inhaled, but I had developed a kind of oral habit of smoking, you know, to kind of distract myself. And... So I was walking along and I was feeling this, you know, general misery.

[74:19]

Kind of unrelieved depression, grayness, so forth. Or I had to think through everything and make myself do even the simplest things. You probably had clients like this. Anyway, so I lit this cigarette, right? It was windy and the match went out and it burned me. Anyway, somehow it burned me, Slayton. Not seriously, but you know how a match can, if you stop it, can burn you.

[75:21]

In the moment it burned me, I felt good. For just a moment, it was about, you know, that big. And It was the first time I'd had a kind of bright moment where I felt good in well over two years. And at that moment I also said to myself, If I can feel good for that long, I can feel good the entire year. If it's possible for me to feel good even for a moment, There's no reason that's not possible every moment.

[76:29]

And soon it was true. Maybe one year later or so. That's what I would call faith. because it was a known potential. I actually had the experience of feeling good, even if it was only, you know, like that. So anyway, that's what I mean. That's at least the first step of what I mean by faith. Now, I don't think most people, if they feel good for a moment, suddenly they have this conviction that, okay...

[77:33]

I can feel good all the time. I mean, I don't think most of your clients think that problem. Your profession would be over quickly. Okay, so why was this able to work for me? First of all, there's a little bit of... poetry here, imagery here. I'm a little embarrassed to tell you this. But I was standing beside, when this happened, going down the street, a building I particularly liked, a rather nice modern building.

[78:38]

It was the fireman's fund insurance company. So when I burned myself, I... On some kind of intuitive poetic level, I thought, well, there's insurance for problem techniques. LAUGHTER Yeah. And believe it or not, the way my mind works, there's also a sense of it's a match, there's a match between this and getting well and the fireman's fund insurance company. I mean, my mind works this way with language. What was the third thing? Man, the match became a match to, I didn't say, it's practice, it's the fireman's fun, don't worry about it.

[80:09]

As the student holds, would it turn him for gay? If I looked at this from a Buddhist point of view, in relationship to faith and the teaching and so forth, I've been practicing now for, I don't know, by this time, I don't know, eight months to a year. And they say you have to practice as if your head was on fire. And I was pretty much practicing that way because I was pretty desperate. And so... I had been practicing. I knew what practice was. And I had faith in Suzuki Roshi.

[81:12]

That's Buddha. And I had faith in this moment that had reality. That's Dharma. And I had faith in Sangha, which is the Fireman's Fund Insurance Company. Now, in other words, it really was important because I thought, well, people do try to take care of these things. Now, I was a person in the situation I was in because I was so convinced our society was corrupt, I didn't want to have anything to do with it. And I thought anything you did contributed to the corruption. And so I refused a college degree. For instance, I walked out of college just before my degree. And then another stage, I refused a doctor's degree.

[82:25]

And I refused to have regular jobs. I worked in warehouses and on ships and things like that. So it was a kind of big jump for me to have this feeling, well, somewhere people do intend well. And that came out from this feeling with Suzuki Roshi, like even a thief steals for his mother or something like that. Because it's very difficult to live in a world if you don't think the world is livable. So somehow Suzuki Roshi gave me the feeling, as also did a woman named Charlotte Silver, that the world is livable.

[83:27]

So I had this faith in Zazen and physically and mentally. And I had this faith in the teaching and Suzuki Roshi and Buddhadharma Sangha and so forth. And knowing Suzuki Roshi is also to have faith in a known potential. It was really, I'd known three people who at that time in my life who were realized. One is a person that I now guess, in retrospect, was a Sufi master of some kind in Iran. Named Shukrullah Ali. Who I used to, when I was on ships, I used to be in Iran, and I met this guy and would hang out with him, and he was...

[84:47]

Something uninteresting. And he just was this guy in Banda Shapur, this little town, you know. working to make money for his family. But he allowed me to see Charlotte Selver, and Charlotte Selver allowed me to see Suzuki Roshan. But I began to think, maybe life is something you can put your energy into. And then to realize this faith, I would say I built my whole life out of this little moment.

[85:53]

By the continuous grounding in what is ascertainable. But if I really give you a Buddhist interpretation of this, I would say that at that moment was the first moment I had a clear, unhindered, unimpeded, In other words, I would say that all moments of my mind before were moments in which mind included my father and mother. And my culture and friends.

[86:57]

And that mind was so kind of bleh. That I, yeah, good. I, you know, it didn't allow me to feel my energy.

[87:03]

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