So, when you practice with the five skandhas, you're attempting to slow down the five skandhas. You're attempting to slow down the perceptual process. Now, the best minds of India for some centuries tried to understand how the world existed. And again, as I've talked with some of you about, instead of looking through a cyclotron for the ultimate particles of existence, Instead of looking outside through cyclotrons and electron microscopes

[01:01]

They looked inside through meditation. And they looked inside particularly through shamatha and vipassana. Okay. Maybe you could say shamatha is like a very clear mirror. which you can see things reflected very clearly and stillly. And vipassana is like a lens in which you can look very carefully and clearly at something magnifying it. Now, it just so happens that this civilization... tempted to find the ultimate particles of existence inside.

[02:26]

Now it's a very interesting question why our culture looked outside and their culture looked inside. But that doesn't concern us now so much. What concerns us now is that we are at the bridge of two great civilizations who've taken a different way of looking at reality. And you're sitting, you, through your own secretive processes, have discovered yourself in the middle of these civilizations. And I bet most of you, even if it's the first time you've come here to meditation, there's been other intimations of this in your interests in the past.

[03:51]

For we're part of a larger cultural process that we don't entirely understand. And I think although you are in service to yourself, you are in the service of primary processes in our society. And some of you through your sensitivity are in the service of secondary processes in our society that aren't so visible. And I think out of your deep intimation of these secondary processes, and out of your kindness and compassion although really you're probably too modest to admit it's out of your kindness and compassion you've come here now what happened What happened in India these centuries just before the beginning of our era?

[05:29]

They thought that the self was impermanent. They thought the five skandhas, which functions as a self but doesn't have the idea of self in it, Basically, the five skandhas serves as a self without having the idea of self. Okay, we can talk about that another time if you want. but both self and the five skandhas the five aggregates are seen as impermanent okay but the effort was to find some perceptual unit like an atom that was permanent

[06:35]

And this whole Abhidharma teaching attempted to locate a unit that was permanent. And it parallels remarkably modern physics. As you probably know, the word atom means can't be broken. Or maybe don't break. But we broke it. And we changed the world. And when we begin looking at these atoms, we discover that they are made up of finer and finer and more and more momentary particles.

[07:54]

And we discovered that the instruments you use to look at it affect what you see. Effect what you see, determine what you see, and change what you see in the process of observing it. So if you look with the kind of microscope that Jung looked with, you find a Jungian self. Or Freud or the new feminist-based psychology, so forth.

[08:57]

You find something different depending on what you're looking with. So, the self you will find through practice will be affected by the instruments you use to look. Okay. So they began, these guys back there in India began to see this. And they originally thought that there would be a perceptual unit which would have a distinctive and permanent mark It would have a shvabhava, I think.

[10:02]

It's called an own being. And the more they examined it, they found that there was no own being at any point. And the more precisely you look, the more you're involved in the whole of the phenomenal world. Okay. It's like the car out there in the fog and you. So if you perceive something, there's an object of perception.

[11:06]

So any perception requires an object of perception and the subject. And then it requires the field that's created between subject and object. So they tried to find out the basic unit of this subject-object perceptual field. Okay, so they've discovered that, and they said a dharma was something like one thirty seconds of a second. And then they discovered, by the way, whatever they came up with, whether it was 1 32nd or 1 200th of a second, I don't remember, contemporary experimental psychology has come up with almost the same number. You can analyze a perceptual moment from the point of the presentation of an object perception and the recognition of it by the subject, and that formulation takes a certain amount of time.

[12:36]

Oh, but what's been discovered by them and discovered by these guys back in India is that this perceptual moment if you meditate gets shorter and shorter that even today a modern meditator measured by modern science can cut the length of time this perceptual moment cut down by many factors. Okay, so it came, they concluded, there is no unit anywhere in the phenomenal world or in you that has any permanent existence.

[13:43]

And so you drew the conclusion from this that neither in the world of phenomena nor in oneself exists any unity that is fixed. Now this is not Barclayism, you know Barclay, the English philosopher, Barclay, or Berkeley, it's spelled like Berkeley. It's not his philosophy of nihilism that everything is purely, doesn't exist. Buddhism doesn't say this world doesn't exist. This world definitely exists. We just don't know how it exists. We can't grasp how it exists. We can't get a firm hold on how it exists. So the conclusion these guys came to is if you can't really get a hold on how it exists, you should learn to live in such a way that you don't try to get hold of how it exists.

[15:08]

And this insight produced Mahayana Buddhism. which really got put together about the beginning of our common error. And the fruition of that is probably tantra and zen. Now, is that assimilable? Now, I'd like to try to give you a sense of what that means and its implications.

[16:27]

Ambitious. What took a thousand years, maybe we can do it. 20 minutes. And what's taken me 30 years we can do in 20 minutes. But it's really... Yeah. And I'm still in the midst, you know. And I'm still in the midst, you know. But at least I'd like to, you know, give you a feeling. Okay. So there's a bell and there's a stick.

[17:29]

A clipper and an ein clipper. There's a relationship between the stick and the bell. And the basic sense of this is, in Buddhism, is that no matter how thoroughly you examine this bell, there's no way for language or logic to grasp its identity. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, it's empty of being a bell, but it's full of everything else. So you can't find anything that's intrinsically bell here.

[18:52]

It's a bell when I ring it. Until I ring it, maybe it's a teacup. Or something. Okay, so if you accept by inference or logic, that there's no inherent reality to this bell. No matter how much you divide it down, there's nothing bell-ness about it. The same applies to this and me and you and so forth. You're not going to find any self. But finally, I know myself.

[19:52]

I know myself. You're not going to... You may have the sensation of knowing yourself, and that's great. But there's nothing you've got hold of. Okay, now, some of you know this already. It's common sense. But it is not our consensual reality. And there's not too many people you can share this with. And if you share it with people, it's still in a pretty superficial level because your guts and your life are in another world.

[20:53]

Okay. So, if this doesn't have reality and this doesn't have reality... That does. The interaction of the bell and this has reality. But would you please try to grab that sound? It's fading. Come back, little sound. But it can reappear. Now the symbol of yab-yum, or male and female, joined in tantrism, is used to symbolize this because although the union of male and female produce what we know of the world, the male and female remain separate bodies.

[22:07]

And if they produce a baby, it's a third body. Okay. So, the bell and the stick are about to have a baby. Okay. Okay. Your karma exists here. So, A doesn't exist and B doesn't exist, but AB exists. And BA exists. You already said that. No, I didn't. No, you didn't? Okay. AB exists, and something that's different, BA exists. Now, if only AB exists, the world would only exist from your side.

[23:32]

But the world also exists from the side of BA. And BA and AB are not the same. And never will be the same. What's left out? We don't know. And this second baby is different than the first baby. So AB prime is different from AB. And BA prime or two is different from BA three and BA four and et cetera.

[24:32]

Okay. So what's the conclusion? You're living in a world where space and time don't exist outside you. You live in a world in which space and time are discontinuous. You can't say things like, I have no time. In terms of consensual reality, you have no time, but in fact you are time. And you are space. And whatever this is right now, there's a consensual reality in which space and time are something we're existing in. But in a fundamental sense, in a spiritual sense, this room is something we've created.

[25:46]

Each moment is, let's say, each moment is an empty canvas. Except there's some sketching already been done on the canvas. Somebody sketched this room in. And someone, in fact, Berlin, with its funny blocks and interior blocks, has sketched in the way this building is. And someone sketched in the way this building is. And you came here already quite sketched. And all of us are sketching here on the canvas.

[26:51]

But the sketch is not complete. And if you think it's complete, you're living in a different world than the Buddhist world. And if you act like it's complete, from a Buddhist point of view, you're only half alive. And you're missing a lot. But we don't miss it, but we don't know how to assimilate it because we're actually in this room and it is partially sketched whether we think it's fully sketched or not. But you're not participating very well in the sketching process. And you feel isolated by the sketching process. And threatened by it.

[28:02]

So if a leader comes along who's really good at sketching, you get sketched in very quickly. And unless you know that this sketching process is going on, you're easily controlled by someone who sketches well. So you want to get involved in your own sketching process. Okay. So far so good? You okay? One more little shot here. The Japanese have a word that comes out of Buddhism, which is ma.

[29:10]

And ma can be rough. Yes, good. Ma can be roughly translated as, the functional moment of space-time. Okay. How do I get to that? Once these Mahayanas saw that there was no indivisible moment of reality, They saw that it's all interrelationships. There's no individual moment. But these relationships create a kind of self-organizing system.

[30:24]

Okay. Okay, now this self-organizing system is called a mandala. So instead of seeing atom-like moments, they saw mandalas. Okay, now a mandala has a center. And a territory. The center expands into territory, and the territory closes in on the center. Okay, now what do I mean by a mandala? The best example I can have come up with, it's graspable immediately, is the way a gardener sees a garden. If you're not a gardener or not a horticulturalist, you just see plants and bushes and it looks nice.

[31:29]

And if you're Monet, you may see the garden in such a way that it produces a painting. And if you're walking with a close friend, you may see the garden in such a way that it produces falling in love. Or you may just see a bunch of bushes and some bees that scare you. But what the gardener sees, he sees an individual plant with all the things which produce the fertility of that plant. What's the angle of the sun? What the soil's like? What insects come? Yeah, what in some insects stay away from some plants and are attracted to others? and some plants grow near and help the plants help each other and so forth so the gardener sees the particular fertility of that flower

[33:18]

And everything that goes into that flower is the mandala, fertility mandala of that flower. And that's a self-organizing system. It has its limits. I mean, what's happening over on the other side of the mountain doesn't have that much effect. So it has boundaries. A kind of boundary. And this plant has one mandala and this plant has another mandala. So there's two mandalas right there. And with each plant there's actually an infinite number of mandalas in one garden. Okay. Now, if you're cooking a meal, there's a certain time that goes with cooking that meal.

[34:28]

Also, wenn man kocht, braucht man dazu eine bestimmte Zeit. And the time you feel at the beginning of the meal, when you have time to decide to use this or that, and near the end of the meal, when everybody is waiting to be served, the time is different. Und zum Beispiel, wenn man anfängt zu kochen, hat man oft das Gefühl, man hat viel mehr Zeit, als wenn schon die Esszeit näher rückt und man weiß, man muss das Essen jetzt in einer bestimmten Zeit fertig haben und alles wartet schon. And you do things differently. You penetrate that time differently at the beginning of the meal and at the end of the meal. Isn't that right? Suddenly just what you need is there and you make decisions differently. It's a different kind of time. The clock shows the same kind of time. The clock is wrong. Your experience of the time is more accurate. In any functional sense of time. Now, clock time doesn't really exist.

[35:47]

It's a consensual reality. And if you get out far enough in the universe, you can see it starts bending. We don't see the bend close in. But actually you feel it when you, the difference between cooking a meal and the beginning and end. Now, when you do zazen, it's a different kind of time than your usual time. Now, you're back there, you asked me, how do you plan your zazen time when your life gets you to do other things? You asked something like that.

[37:11]

Part of the answer to that question is, is that from consensual time A, usual time A, it's very hard to plan for zazen time, which is a different kind of time. And when you're doing zazen and 20 minutes seems like an hour, it's an hour. And when you're doing zazen for an hour and it seems like two minutes, it was two minutes. A special kind of two minutes. Now, sometimes you're cooking this meal. And you really... the soup doesn't taste right and you need something and you reach up and you pull out a cookbook and it's ten minutes before you have to serve everybody and you open the cookbook and it's exactly what you need how do you do that?

[38:39]

Have you had that kind of experience? We try to explain it mechanistically. Or it's chance. But you've entered another kind of time where the usual rules of how you find something are different. Yeah. So sometimes, particularly artists know this, they create a certain state of mind, they don't know how to solve something, and in a certain state of mind, the solution is there. Ordinary logic does not work. So you want to deny it and say it's something, you know, I don't know. Let's wait till the scientists prove it before I experience this. But probably the scientists are behind you in this.

[40:02]

In fact, they might like to study you. Okay. Almost done. There's a certain kind of time that we're supposed to end at six, so I'll give this another five or ten minutes. There's another kind of, I'm worried about the time, and your ability to be in this time, but you can stand it for another few minutes.

[41:02]

Whatever we have created here has a continuity in time and space. That leads to the next moment that contains all of us. Now you have one stream of time that's running through you that we could call like a secondary process. That you'll be glad when this is over. Even though you're glad to be here.

[42:03]

And what you're planning to do this evening. And so forth. Now, that's your own separate streams. And none of those are measured by the clock, although you'll fit them to the clock. Yes. But there's also a time, a kind of time to our seminar, which is like cooking a meal. And just as there's a kind of time that has a beginning and a middle and an end for cooking a meal, and there's a quality to that unit called cooking a meal time, That leads to the afternoon or the next day and the next cooking a meal time.

[43:07]

Now what a really good cook does is really knows how to move in that time. Particularly like a cook in a restaurant. Okay, there's a time to this seminar, which is like cooking a meal time. That leads to tomorrow morning. that is the stream of time and space that we've created that leads to tomorrow.

[44:13]

And that is called maha. So it's like each situation has its own time-space mandala That leads to the next continuity. Okay. It's a little bit if we imagined that we tied ribbons between each of you. And we tied ribbons to all the objects in the room. Pretty soon there'd be literally an infinite number of ribbons, but thousands of ribbons connecting, and I could pull on this one, pull you, and... Although you don't see it, those ribbons are there.

[45:18]

And we're affecting each other on many levels. And those ribbons all together have a kind of point where they come together. And ma means the ability to know just where to hold the ribbons, where they all meet. Now that's a very sophisticated idea of time and space. It's an interactive idea of time and space. And it has to do with perceiving through pauses. In other words, if I look at you and I look at you, I'm not pausing. But if I look at you both and stop for a moment, I feel something.

[46:36]

Now that gets me closer to ma. The particular ma, that's the two of you, I can feel if I pause for a moment. Now, if I come in here and I sit with you, I straighten up and look at you. I stopped inside for a moment And I can feel these ribbons. That's Ma. And that way of perceiving arises out of deciding that this has no existence and this has no existence.

[47:42]

You've got to perceive this. Diese Art von Wahrnehmung entsteht jetzt aus der Einsicht, dass beide Objekte einfach nicht aus sich heraus existieren, sondern nur was zwischen diesen beiden existiert. So you begin to perceive, so you don't look at this and you don't look at that, you get in the habit of looking at both at the same time. So man macht es sich zur Angewohnheit, beides gleichzeitig zu sehen. A way of looking at the room at the same time. So wie man jetzt den Raum gleichzeitig ansieht. All of that falls into the category of worldview. If you change the worldview, the basic way you see things, you really change the world. You begin to perceive differently. And the word tantra means a weaving.

[49:00]

And so you're constantly seeing a weaving. And finding yourself in the middle of the fabric. And in the spaces between the threads. And you're one of the threads. And you're the spaces between the threads. And it's okay. I don't know if I can... That's as much as I can give you a feeling for now. But getting used to this way of thinking and feeling is what is meant by the Buddhist formula. Form is emptiness and emptiness is form. It's a way of perceiving. It's not an intellectual philosophical idea.

[50:03]

That's only one little surface of it. It's form. Then the form of all the ribbons. Then they're not graspable, empty. And yet you give it form. And the first two paramitas, generosity and conduct, means in the most deep sense you're giving emptiness all the time. And you're giving form. So I look at you and I'm willing to give you the form you want me to have. That's generosity.

[51:19]

What is your name? Hans. So I look at you, Hans. I accept you just as you want to be Hans. And I feel my body say, Hans. But I also know Hans is just an idea. So when I look at you, I see Hans and I see no Hans. Yeah. Who's that? I see many Hanses appearing and disappearing. And sometimes I see which of the Hanses you like the best. And I have to decide which of the Hanses I want to react to.

[52:20]

And mostly out of kindness we react to the Hans the person wants us to react to. And sometimes we react to the hands you'd really like us to see. And we allow these many selves of ourselves to be perceived by others. So you begin to feel at ease without everything being fixed. And even to see the phenomenal world as an uneven and weaving tapestry, which is sometimes continuous and sometimes discontinuous, And when you can get used to that, that's good.

[53:36]

Okay, thank you very much. And we don't know. And they don't contradict each other. And they both need space. So this evening and until tomorrow morning, please, if you can, stay with the feeling of knowing and not knowing. Good practice is, what is it? So you look at something, you say, it is what, and what is it?

[54:37]

Mm-hmm. Please, please take your time and stretch a little and come up close and let's sit together.

[55:58]

Thank you. Good morning. Good morning. Now, as you've heard me say quite a few times, I'm always in the dilemma about to teach people who are serious about practicing, but they only see a kick.

[57:52]

Yeah, we should talk about And I need your help in this too, for you to let me know what works and what doesn't work for you. Because there's also no tradition of teaching the things I'm trying to teach in the context of people you don't see very often. But if I respect, as I do lay practice, then I don't want to dilute the teaching for you. Now also where I have great sympathy for the people who are just starting.

[59:05]

Partly because I've been just starting for 30 years. To keep starting over. At the same time, the people who have been practicing more, I can hear them, what they need more with my body. Because they've been practicing longer, so I can feel their communication more clearly. That makes sense. So one thing I do sometimes is I take one of the sticks I have and beat you up. And this one was given to me, most of them were by Suzuki Roshi.

[60:34]

Actually, this form has two sources. One is as a back scratcher. And because it can reach anywhere, it's a teaching staff. And if it's, You can scratch my back, you can scratch yours. And also often this shape is a mushroom shape. Is that a mushroom?

[61:34]

Pills? I'll go into a bar and they'll give me a mushroom. And the mushroom built way back when it represented a transcendental experience through psychedelics. So in a way, what Buddhism has decided has made a decision. In fact, it was made in India prior to Buddhism. In the lineage developed in Buddhism.

[62:37]

It's decided that any experience is a capacity of human beings not related to thinking, thought, or psychedelic. And it has to do with the way you view and experience the world. Anyway, sometimes I take a staff like this. And I pass it around. And I ask each of you, when you get the staff, to say something. But this many people, if I start still this evening, that's what must happen. Still I might do it. Maybe not all at once.

[63:41]

Now one... one koan, one of the key phrases in koan, is, and a very common statement within Zen Buddhism, is this matter is not within words and phrases. But without words and phrases, you'll never understand. That's the basic problem with teaching.

[64:46]

So I guess the, Certainly one of the main things I can give you a feeling for in practice is the degree to which the past is the body. And the degree to which the mind is body. And the degree to which the mind is discovered most easily through the body. Another phrase, key statement from a poem, Here's a question.

[66:02]

In what world will you place mind and body? What world do you place mind and body? Can you determine it? Now, a phrase like that is not meant to be understood. right away. Someone asked me actually to speak a little bit about koans. So I think the easiest thing for me to do to respond to that question is to give you some phrases from koans. So a phrase like that, can, in what world do you place mind and body?

[67:06]

Is a statement you just state. Kind of in your background mind. And you have to have a certain amount of faith in it that it makes some sense somehow. I mean, the first thing is most of us might respond. I didn't know I had a choice in what world that place might apply. So practicing with the koan in the most fundamental sense It's really just a way of looking very thoroughly at a phrase or at yourself or at the world.

[68:26]

And the assumption that while there's a phrase, you can't eat painted cakes. You can't eat a painting of cakes. But then it's also said, oh yes you can, painted cakes are delicious. And the idea that you can separate The world in parts is not correct. So painted cakes means words. But words also are part of the work. So how do you enter those words at a level that you understand differently than just ordinary thinking? You know, it's funny, it bends us and your mouth becomes calm.

[69:44]

When you're thinking or feeling or understanding something, it tends to rise into words. And if your mouth is calm, doesn't need to speak, that understanding rises toward words, goes back into another kind of understanding. I'm using that as an example to show you how physical this practice is thought to be. So when you're sitting, when you're practicing, and you are paying attention to your breath,

[71:35]

Let me say something about your posture for a moment, so just straight forward postures. In general, you're sitting pretty well. I would suppose the main thing I notice is we must have your arms too far forward. If your arms here, it closes your chest in. And if your shoulders are forward, or your arms are forward, it pulls you forward. Maybe you put your arms to your back like that, Then you bring them forward and see if you can let them come straight down from your shoulders.

[72:40]

Then so your elbows are beside your body. And there's a little space between your arms and your body. Then your hands go again. Once you actually interfere with the way you breathe. But when you are sitting in sasen, And you brought your attention to your breathing. You're trying to, you can try to locate in your breath a point that's a kind of stillness.

[73:46]

You feel a kind of physical stillness in your breath. For example, if right now in this room, and I stop for a moment, there'll be a moment of stillness in this room. It's there for only a moment and then it's gone. Could you feel it? It's like that kind of stillness, but in your body. So you're sitting and you breathe and it takes a while to get settled. And bring your attention to your breath.

[74:53]

And then you feel a suddenly little moment of stillness. You try to stay in that moment of stillness. But if you try too hard, you won't be still. But some subtle matter of noticing and not interfering with. So one of the basic simple things in practice, which takes a long time, is to sit and actually relax in yourself. A lot of people are 30 or 40 or 50 years old and can't relax enough to go to the toilet.

[76:03]

They need three cigarettes, a closed door and two magazines. So it actually takes us a long time, decades, to learn simple things like how to go to the toilet. So how do you learn how to sit on the toilet of your cushion? And let everything go. So really your practice is as simple and as difficult as just relaxing on your cushion.

[77:11]

And the attitude of koan practice, which is not different from any other kind of Buddhism, is really a skill at noticing that point where you don't feel at ease and yet you can almost find peace. And I suppose the style of column practice is to notice that point and then to stay with that point in the difficulty of it and in the possible resolution. And though yesterday I likened to this practice to the examination of the world and matter that physicists do.

[78:29]

Basically, Buddhist practice could be more likened to a naturalist or biologist studying an animal. Or you just watch an animal in the woods, a badger or something like that. Or is it Jane Goodall who watched girls? Jane Goodall. Watched women? Watched girls, chimpanzees? You just watch the chimpanzee that you are. And the badgers running around in your body. You don't think about them too much.

[79:31]

It's in this koan where it says, this matter isn't This is not fundamentally a matter of words and phrases. This matter is not found in words and phrases. But without words and phrases, we'll never understand. It also says, Don't bring your own understanding to words and phrases. It means look at the words and phrases as if they were a strange creature that just came out of the woods that you don't know what they are. So don't bring your own meaning, stick to your own meaning, words and phrases.

[80:42]

Okay, this is a typical example of the emphasis on emptiness or indeterminacy when you look at the world. So in koans, for example, always the context has more power over the words than the words have over the context. And they'll typically use a word that means the opposite, but they'll put it in a context which forces its meaning to be something else. And the woman kind of really use words like that commonly when we're in love. You might call somebody you love either a very endearing name or a very shitty name, but you both mean, in both cases, you mean you love the person.

[82:08]

I don't know what she said, but it sounded good. Dear, I'm so helpless among you, but you all understand English and Jerry Leonard. With such sympathy, kindness to this dumb American Buddhist. She didn't translate that. So you have to read koans and study Buddhism a bit like you are in love with it. It's a little like, you know, if you're not in love, you hear the songs of, all these love songs are constantly on the radio.

[83:36]

And they sound completely grippy. Grippy and grippy. Schmaltz. But then when you fall in love, they say, oh, that's the most powerful thing I've ever heard. So you have to sort of fall in love with koans, or otherwise they just sound pretty good. So you're just trying to sit still enough to watch yourself.

[84:39]

And what you will begin to find, because I think it helps to have some suggestion about what you will find. Isn't this a very strong, indivisible relationship, although it's not immediately apparent, between your body and your thinking? It's almost like first you notice thinking like seeing a beam of light. Then you notice you don't see the beam of light until it's shining something. Hitting something.

[85:47]

Hitting the air even. And then you see that you can actually make a mirror or lens and the light becomes much clearer focused. And that your body in its stillness and locating kind of point of stillness becomes a kind of lens that focuses this thinking. Then after a while you notice that the lens and the thinking and the light, all are the same thing. And you begin to find out that you think

[86:55]

differently and you absorb what you think differently depending on how you allow your body and state of mind to cooperate. I hope that makes some sense. So that's in practice if you do it a little bit every day. And this morning we sat almost 40 minutes. This is about as long as anybody ever sits. If you do practice a little bit every day,

[88:06]

you become very familiar with yourself. And it's important not to interfere too much. Not to try too hard. You sit down in the larger context of trying, But in specific, you don't try. You sort of leave yourself alone. And you don't want to sit too long. Now, one of the reasons we sit as a habit 30 or 40 minutes I don't have my little bra this morning because I danced at a disco again.

[89:34]

Oh, there it is. Oh look, I've got all kinds. The way when you do zazen, if this is your primary process here, as I said, Your sense of location might be down here. Okay? Sense of location may be here. Not always in the primary classes. And you have a rubber band that catches it here. .

[90:38]

Now, this sense of this rubber band becomes, as you practice, and you become more familiar with yourself, you can actually attach this rubber band to emptiness. You don't need something to attach it to, and yet you can locate yourself. But at first, when you're practicing, you find you can move this around, but you keep it attached to your primary process. Okay. Sometimes you can go all the way down here, here, over here.

[91:54]

Move it around. Well, one of the reasons we sit 30 or 40 minutes as a habit is there's a certain reality associated with your simple physical habit. That's why people commonly, when they're really under a lot of stress or having an anxiety attack, go and wash the dishes. Do you understand what I mean? You're kind of stressed, so you just wash the dishes. You know, wash your face, take a shower. So there's a, when you do zazen and you have the habit of sitting always 30 minutes or 40 minutes, once you really have that habit, even if you sat three or four hours, which after a while you can sit for hours if you'd like,

[93:02]

There's still a rhythm of starting zazen, letting go into letting lots of things just float up, and then after 30 or 40 minutes, reattaching to your regular physical physicality. So I know some people, when they meditate first, often it's beginner's view is more and more adept people. if I really concentrate and lose my ordinary sense for instance a common experience is you after a while can't tell where your hands are

[94:29]

Or if your thumbs are touching or not touching, you're separated.

[94:35]

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