Tonight you are to pay attention to what I have to say, that Dharma is rarely met with. And this evening will not come again. Well, since we don't get to do the chant here in the Dharma, we haven't in general. Good evening. Okay. Question please. Okay. Last night we talked about kindness, joy, generosity, patience a little bit, and how important this is in terms of our own well-being and happiness

[01:02]

and the well-being of those around us in the world, and that we have, all of us, a deep yearning for this kind of, to be able to express ourselves in this way and to be in touch with these kind of feelings. Not as something that is just a dictum given to us, where we tell ourselves, be kind, be generous, this is what you should do, and then we're saying, well, you know, do I have to, and so on. But that we, at times, actually have these feelings awakened in us, and once they're awakened, we can extend the kindness that we feel towards someone that we very much love and appreciate, we can extend that kindness to people we feel indifferent about and to people that we actually feel hurt by. And this is a traditionally very integral part of Buddhist practice. I came across a story recently,

[02:02]

I was reminded of and thinking a little bit about last night's talk. There was a Tibetan father and son, and the father was a well-known teacher, and the son studied for many years with his father, and then his father said, you know, I can't, there's some things I can't really teach you, and I would like you to go and study with this other teacher. It turned out this other teacher was a peasant farmer, and this was a little bit, the son used to a little bit of a higher class life, didn't take so readily to the idea of going to study with a peasant farmer. He thought he was a little above that, but he eventually took his father's suggestion and went to study with his teacher, and he met this person finally on the road. The farmer was riding on a horse and introduced himself, and the peasant farmer said, and when they greeted the Tibetan son,

[03:06]

bowed to the peasant farmer and said that he would like to study with him, and the farmer said, you didn't bow low enough. And so then the son bowed a little bit further, and the teacher said, it's still not enough. And then he bowed down to the horse's knees, and the teacher said, not enough. And then he bowed down to the ground, and the teacher said, not enough. And then he bowed, prostrated himself completely on the ground, and the teacher said, your training is finished. You can go home now. So this is a very important kind of thing. I think we'll see how perhaps this relates to the talk tonight. It turns out we've had... To bow in such a way is to let go of how you see yourself,

[04:09]

how you see the world, and how you see yourself in relation to the world, who you are, who the other person is. So it's a little, no longer acting on what one already has known, or thinks who one is and who the other people are, and so on. So it's going beyond what this person has understood up until this time. All this week, it turns out, we've had something of a theme, which seems to come up night by night, and I finally realized tonight what it is, and it's the subject of my... I mean, I realized before what the theme is, but I realized another name to call it. I mentioned, when I mentioned last night, each time I've talked about mindfulness and concentration and joy, we've noticed that these feelings, whether it's being aware of something or being absorbed in something, is not dependent on the object, it's not dependent on the thing. We have a cup of water, a cup of tea, a meal, a person in front of us. These things are not naturally absorbing.

[05:11]

These things are not things that draw our attention, deepen our mindfulness. And we're the ones who awaken mindfulness or develop mindfulness, and develop our capacity to be absorbed by seemingly insignificant things, like a cup of tea or our own breath. And that this capacity, so this capacity for absorption, mindfulness, the kindness, it's not something that's dependent upon the object. This is an extremely important point, and tonight I realized it's called wisdom. It's called insight, and it's called liberation. The fact that actually our mind is already liberated from things and is not dependent on things. And the problem we have then is thinking that our mind, our state of being, our absorption, our mindfulness, our kindness, our joy is dependent on the object, and then we have to start manipulating things so that we have the objects that will produce the desired state of mind,

[06:15]

and we can avoid the objects that will make us have other states of mind. So this is our usual way to go about things, and then consequently we have endless suffering because the objects that we like we can't always have, and the objects that we don't like we often get. And so it's endlessly frustrating, and then we wonder, why can't I develop better skill at getting the things I want and avoiding the things I don't want? What's wrong with me? And so on. So this is a very basic insight that we can have, not necessarily just once, but over and over again, that actually our well-being, our calmness, our generosity, kindness, patience, absorption, mindfulness, is not dependent on the object, and we don't have to manipulate things so that we have these objects that will induce the desired state of mind, that we simply, moment after moment, practice having the desired state of mind,

[07:15]

even if it's in a rather awkward and silly way, and it feels sort of dumb and stupid and just clumsy, to try to have kindness for someone you dislike. It's just kind of awkward. So there was a, I forget exactly what that Zen teacher said, but he said something about being tripping and falling awkward, ungainly in a hundred ways, awkward in a thousand or something, still I go on like this. Even though it has this quality of, it sort of feels like you ought to be more skillful at it if you're going to do it, but actually the only way you do this is by willing to have this awkwardness and be able to do that. Okay. So I think you understand this point. We've been talking about it all week. And I thought I'd read you a couple of things

[08:21]

that I have this sort of feeling. One is something I came across by somebody named Brother Lawrence, who I've never heard about before. Maybe somebody later can tell me who Brother Lawrence is. But he said, I possess God as tranquilly in the buzzle of my kitchen, as if I were on my knees before the Blessed Sacrament. It is not necessary to have great things to do. I turn my little omelet in the pan for the love of God. And when I can't do anything else, it's enough for me to lift a straw from the earth for the love of God. So there's that quality, that it's a very simple activity. It doesn't have to be great deeds, great actions, but in that very simple activity, having some warmth, compassion, love of God, however you describe it. Another example of this that I like is in Rilke's letters to a young poet.

[09:28]

This is a young man who apparently sent his poems to Rilke and asked for advice and so on. And there's a number of letters that have been preserved that Rilke sent back to this young man. So here's just a little short passage. Here, where I am surrounded by an enormous landscape which the winds move across as they come from the seas, here I feel that there's no one anywhere who can answer for you those questions and feelings which in their depths have a life of their own, for even the most articulate people are unable to help. So what words point to is so very delicate, it's almost unsayable. But even so, I think that you will not have to remain without a solution if you trust in things that are like the ones my eyes are now resting upon. If you trust in nature and what is simple in nature, in the small things that hardly anyone sees

[10:34]

and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable, if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor, then everything will become easier for you, more coherent, and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind, perhaps, but which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge. So when I read this, I was particularly struck by that. If you trust in things that are like the ones your eyes are now resting upon, and if you trust in nature and what is simple in nature, in the small things hardly anyone notices. that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable.

[11:35]

And this again is what we've been talking about this week, when Dogen says, handle each ingredient with sincerity and wholeheartedness, regardless of quantity, quality, handle it with respect, with care, and so in that sense, even if you're sorting the slime from the spinach, it's not as though one is more precious than the other, it's just our activity in cooking to do that sorting. So I think you can see how this involves some change, basically it involves this kind of bowing down, and the bowing down is actually letting go of our ideas of what is what, that we're so convinced of and so fond of, we know so well just what is what.

[12:39]

We know who is a likable person, who's a nice person, who's not nice, who's a mean person. We know what we like, we know how foods taste, we know that going for a walk would feel better, we know that this makes us feel bad, and so then we're always acting then so much on what we know, on what we think we know. And in this way, then becoming quite involved in manipulating, the manipulation of phenomena, and by that trying to induce or produce feelings, sensations, sensory experiences and mental states that we would like. So this is based on what we call knowing, in other words, we on the whole find it difficult to conceive of the possibility of going into a situation

[13:40]

and not knowing what to do. When it comes up all the time like in meditation, what do I do if my legs hurt? Like, when your legs hurt you should know what to do and you should have the answer already, ahead of time, so when the situation comes up, you won't be at a loss, you'll know right away what to do. And then you can just do the thing that you know to do and that will take care of that, and then you can go to the next thing and it isn't that nice. So, what about being in a situation and not knowing what to do? So this is a quality of bowing down, being in a situation, you don't know what to do and being willing to be in that situation. So I'm going to read you a little thing, I'll read you a couple of things from Thich Nhat Hanh here, the Vietnamese Zen teacher. This is from The Sun in My Heart.

[14:41]

Reality is transformed by our looking at it because we enter it with our baggage of conceptions. Modern physicists know this. Some of them have readily abandoned concepts that have long formed the basis of science, ideas such as cause and effect and past, present and future. But it's not easy to abandon concepts. We think that penetrating reality without arming ourselves with ideas is like going into battle empty-handed. The armor of a scientist is his or her acquired knowledge and system of thought and it's most difficult to leave that behind. I believe that the scientists with the greatest ability to abandon that armor are the ones who have the greatest capacity to make discoveries. Religious seekers have always been reminded that they must let go of all their concepts in order to directly experience reality. From the concepts of self and other to those of birth and death,

[15:50]

permanence, impermanence, existence, non-existence, if reality is described as inconceivable, the tool to directly experience reality must be a mind pure of all concepts. So this is a quality that I've been bringing up some this week. And it's in Zen. It's sometimes called the mind of not knowing. Not knowing. There's a Korean Zen teacher who always says to people, just don't know. Just don't know. And has a book called Not Knowing or something like that. I think of it also as the mind of finding out. Finding out. Being willing to be in a situation not knowing and then finding out. This is also what Suzuki Roshi called beginner's mind. Not being an expert. Today in the kitchen we constructed a couple of sauces

[16:53]

and we just did it by adding one ingredient at a time and seeing what happened with that one ingredient. And there's some sense of sort of, you know, some possibilities. But we didn't have exactly knowing just what to do. We're putting in things and tasting it and finding out what ingredients does, what the effect of each ingredient is. And we didn't have already, we didn't know what was going to happen. How it was going to come out. And one of them came out pretty good and the other one came out kind of so-so. So one of the things that happens when you don't know, it means, you know, you're not guaranteed great results. But this is the way it is. I want to give you, I want to talk a little bit more about this not knowing or what it is.

[17:55]

You know, various, a few examples of this kind of... Well, anyway, I'll talk about them. First of all, I want to tell you a story. When I was working in the kitchen years and years ago, about 20 years ago, in that little kitchen over there. It's hard to believe, you know, 20 years has gone by. You call it 20 years, it's... But I was working in the kitchen and we were making lunch and I was feeling quite very, very anxious. Things weren't going so well, everything's sort of in a mess, people are working, it's not exactly happening, maybe it's going to happen. And, you know, here, the meals are always on time. I mean, you don't, you know, that's it. Where I was back in Vermont in a Tibetan place, you know, an hour or two hours can go by,

[18:57]

you know, people just wait. I mean, you know, the meal's late. But here, it's kind of like, you know, when the time comes, it's supposed to be ready. And so, you know, you kind of feel this kind of pressure to make sure that it happens. And, you know, the guest bell, we can hit the guest bell if it's late, but in practice periods, and people are waiting in the meditation hall for the food. Anyway. So I had a few disasters. The biggest one was the time I, we served, you know, rice almost all the time, and then one night I tried to serve baked potatoes. I didn't realize that when you have an oven stuffed full of baked potatoes, it's going to take two or three times as long to bake as when you just have two potatoes in this, you know, oven. And, of course, the meal has to be ready on time, so people ate some potatoes that were kind of crunchy. But this one day I was in the kitchen

[20:03]

and I was really kind of anxious and worried and, you know, stressed. And then I heard this voice. At some point I heard someone's, you know, a sound that was Ed. And I thought I heard a sound that said Ed. I wasn't sure. And then I heard it again, Ed. And then I looked up and there was Suzuki Yoshi. And the thing, it took me a little while to realize that it was, that I was being called because the sound of the Ed was a, it was a very nice person, a very calm and peaceful person who was being addressed. You know, I couldn't sort of put it together with who I thought I was, who I knew myself to be, you know. And this just, it wasn't, you know, it didn't fit, you know. So, at that time, I was clearly being addressed.

[21:06]

And so I decided to, you know, take advantage of the doubt that I was in fact being addressed and, you know, responded to this person, yes, can I help you? So, in that moment, you can see how much, you know, knowledge or the concept of who I was. I am, I was a stressed, anxious, you know, worried person. And all of a sudden I wasn't. Or I wasn't just, and then I'll just sort of figure it out, it was like clouds, you know, a storm just blowing by and then there's this blue sky. Oh. And I had never, it had never occurred to me that I was also that person. So, sometimes this sort of thing happens, you know, to some extent we can practice letting go of who we think we are

[22:08]

and then sometimes we have some experience that, and we see more than we understood or more than we thought we were. One of my favorite passages in Dogen and I told some of you about this, is the passage, it says, when a man or a person, nowadays, you know, we say a person, the person gets in a boat and rows out to the middle of the ocean where no land is in sight and looks around and whichever direction the person looks, the ocean looks circular and doesn't look any other way. But the ocean isn't round or square, the ocean isn't circular or angular, it only appears circular or angular as far as your eye of practice can see. The ocean has infinite characteristics and boundless virtue. So, in addition to the apparent circularity or angularity,

[23:10]

remind yourself, if you're interested in studying the myriad things, remind yourself that in addition to the apparent circularity or angularity, there's this tremendous depth to things that we don't know about. This is, in a sense, to caution us not to respond just to the apparent circularity or angularity and not to get too caught by the way things appear, the apparent phenomena. Now, I know for myself, over the years, I know who I am and then I also have had... lately I kind of feel less like myself than ever. It's kind of strange not knowing who I am anymore because I've had a pretty good idea for many years and then I had, based on who I thought I was, of course, I had a strategy for what to do about that.

[24:12]

You know, so I said things to myself like, what's wrong with you? And, why are you still making mistakes like that? And, so I had some tendency to belittle myself and criticize and berate and you really are a lousy Zen student, aren't you? If you were a good Zen student, you would have done this or said that and, you know, this kind of thing. Well, at some point, you know, I think it behooves us to kind of, you see, now, this is all... the way I'm talking to myself is based on who I think I am. You have to decide that I'm this kind of a person and that's all there is to it. Right? I'm a depressed person or I'm an anxious person or I'm this kind of a person and then, what do you tell a person like that to do? You know, I'm lazy. I'm a lazy person. Then, you better shape up. Huh? I tell myself, because I think I'm a lazy person, you know, am I seeing that in addition to the apparent laziness

[25:16]

or energetic quality, there's more to it? Not especially. You see? I'm talking to just the apparent laziness, the apparent anxiousness, the apparent lack of judgment, the apparent lack of good intention and so on, you know. So, one of the things I would practice is, hey there, wait a minute. Now, there's more to it than that. You know? I also have some good intention and even if I can't see it now, there's infinite virtues and infinite characteristics and boundless virtues. Even if it's not apparent to me, it's there. So, I remind myself like that. Okay? And then, further, I finally sort of had to... Now, wait a minute. Has this way of talking to myself worked? You know? I've been berating myself and criticizing myself and bad-mouthing myself and telling myself to shape up for, you know, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35 years

[26:19]

and have I noticed any improvement in all that? You know, is this strategy and this way of going about things working? Like, does it work? Can I notice, you know, definite improvement, definite, you know, now I'm not so lazy, now I don't say the wrong thing to people as much, now I always express such pure, you know, and loving kindness, I don't do anything selfish. You know, now I've noticed there's been this just tremendous improvement and this is really worthwhile to berate myself like this. And, no, actually I couldn't. I hadn't noticed it had any effect at all. In fact, the main effect I noticed is that I was tremendously discouraged a good deal of the time. So what is the discouragement based on? Is there anything real that this discouragement is based on? It's just based on this whole, you know, made-up thing that I called myself a lazy person, I've neglected the fact that there's more to it than that

[27:20]

and then I told this lazy person what to do and then I can't talk back to that person who's telling me to shape up and say, wait a minute. And so one of the things I did, I finally did start talking back, I said, well, wait a minute, there's more to it than just being lazy. Are you seeing the inherent virtue in this? So, anyway, you can see how this kind of strategy, you know, in the way about going through life, this is like endlessly frustrating, this endless quality of, you know, never getting anywhere, you know, and still going on berating ourselves and criticizing ourselves and feeling badly about ourselves and then, you know, but it's not actually producing any results, you know, we're not actually getting it, so it's this endless quality of what basically can be viewed as a poor strategy, but being very devoted and attached to this pure strategy because we know, because we know, it's based on our knowledge,

[28:20]

you know, we know who we are, we know what you do about these things, right? And so then, you know, we have to keep putting into practice what we know, because we wouldn't want to be in a situation where we didn't know what to do, we didn't know who we were, you know, and have to be sort of at a loss and then sort of find out, okay, now what do I do? Now, who am I? You know, if it's not so clear, you know, I'm this lazy person, I'm this other guy here, you know, and if I didn't know who I was and how to talk to myself and how to talk to this other person, and I didn't know, you know, how you treat carrots and how you treat garbage and, you know, this stinks and, you know, I want that and I don't want that, if I didn't know, then where am I? I'm going to be lost, see? And yet the fact that we know reduces this endless suffering, because we know just what to do. Endlessly frustrating, you know, we're either involved in manipulating the circumstances or we're involved in this kind of endlessly feeling badly about things

[29:22]

because we don't get anywhere and we don't change. We're still using the same strategy, though. So, at some point, and there's the possibility of stopping, there's the possibility of having this kind of insight that this is not dependent on the object, that every object has this infinite characteristics and boundless virtue that we can begin to relate to. It has that even the person is extremely upset and angry and stressed, there's some blue sky there. And we can have this quality of bowing down and letting go of what we thought we knew. So I'm going to tell you a couple of little stories about this. One of my favorite ones is a story about Suzuki Roshi when he was a young man, a young boy, apparently around 10 or 12, and his father had sent him to study with his father's disciple. His father was also a Zen teacher and had trained someone else as a Zen teacher

[30:27]

and he sent his son to study with the man who was his disciple. And Suzuki Roshi lived then at the other temple for several years and there was a number of young boys who were there. And one time, in the spring they used to make pickles. And daikon, the long white radishes, the daikon pickles. And you put the daikon, you get them washed up and then you put them in a barrel. We did this once, we tried to test it hard. You get a rice bran, Japanese called nuka, and salt. You mix the rice bran and salt together and then you layer in rice bran and salt and then you put in the radish and then more rice bran and salt and then radish, rice bran and salt. You layer it up like this. And then the salt draws out the moisture from the radishes and eventually it all gets sort of wet in this sort of paste. And you dig down the paste and pull out radishes and rinse them off and cut them up and you have your pickles. So there was a particular barrel of pickles that didn't make it. They didn't put in enough salt.

[31:29]

And so they kind of rotted. They kind of got pickled and they kind of rotted. They didn't smell very good and his teacher served them anyway. Well, you know, if you're 10 or 12 or 13, you know that this is not something to eat. Even if you're a little older, you know this is not something to eat. But if you're 10 or 11, you say, yuck, and we don't eat that and then the other things, we leave the pickles. Well, then his teacher served them again and they still didn't eat them and then he just served the pickles and not the rest of the meal. And then they didn't eat anything. And that night, Suzuki Yoshida thought, this is enough of this. And the teacher said, well, we're going to have to eat the pickles before you get to eat. And Suzuki Yoshida thought, enough of this. And he got the pickles, took them out to the far end of the garden and buried them. This is what you do with something that is distasteful, that you don't like. You dig a hole and put it in there and you put dirt above it.

[32:35]

And as you know, with things that are treated that way, they don't always stay there. So mysteriously enough and surprisingly enough and shockingly enough, to this young man, they were back on the table the next night. So at this time, the young boys decided there was no choice. And they ate the pickles. And Suzuki Yoshida said this was his first experience of what it means not to think, not to already know. Because if you had the slightest thought, this is good, this is bad, I like this, I don't like this, this is pleasant, this is unpleasant, this is distasteful, I hate it. If you have any thought, you spit it out. You're not going to keep that pickle in your mouth if you have the slightest thought.

[33:41]

So he said, just chew and swallow. So this is a kind of fun story. I know stories, which I'm not going to tell you tonight, more extreme examples of this. But this is pretty good. And I don't think this means exactly that we need to go out of our way to have unpleasant experiences. You can get kind of mentally unbalanced by thinking that's the thing to do, to go out of your way and seek out unpleasant experiences. We had a student one time in Cincinnati, which is in a kind of difficult neighborhood, and she used to walk the four blocks to one of the most dangerous intersections in town because this is important to do this kind of thing, to face things and to have this kind of experience or something. I don't think that's exactly thinking fairly or exactly the point of it.

[34:50]

But I think you get the point of the story that, in this case, there is more to things than they appear. And somehow we need to be able to touch or experience what's beyond what we already know. We need some way to let go of knowing already exactly what's what and to be able to find it out on each occasion. To be able to experience it with some degree of intimacy so that we experience very clearly what it is. And that the apparent characteristics are just the apparent characteristics. There's still, whether we call it food or we call it compost or trash, that each thing has its own inherent virtue. And we appreciate that in each thing, even though it doesn't mean that we have to eat everything. Obviously in eating, we sort things out and we eat some things and we don't eat other things and then our body keeps doing that, sorting out what's going to get absorbed in the body,

[35:53]

what's going to be passed through the body. This is something to do with food and eating, that this happens. But it's not always so obvious what is going to be nourishing. Another story I heard last fall, somewhere about in this kind of vein, when I was at IMS in Berry at the meditation retreat, one of the teachers told a story about a Tibetan monk who had visited there a few weeks before or a year before that. And they were all very struck by this Tibetan monk who had a very, extremely calm and peaceful, powerful, energetic presence. And at one point they asked him, Well, what happened? What happened in your practice? What's the secret of your practice? And he said that when the Chinese had invaded Tibet, he had become a guerrilla and taken up arms

[36:55]

and that he'd been rather successful at it for two or three years and that he'd killed a number of Chinese and that he had been involved at times in capturing Chinese and torturing them. And eventually, after some time of this, he was captured. And when this happened, he said, he made one decision, and that was he decided whatever happened, he wouldn't hate the Chinese and he wouldn't hate people who held him captive. And then over some time, he was in fact tortured and in various difficult and painful circumstances. But he kept this one vow, not to hate. And then after he was finally released, he became a monk and then apparently he had very rapid progress, so to speak, in his meditation practice.

[37:56]

And then, I didn't meet this person, but apparently he was very, as I said, strong, energetic, peaceful, calm presence. Yes? Well, basically, it came out of his earlier experience growing up in Tibet that this kind of, you know, the Dalai Lama says the same thing. And he refers to the Chinese as, my friend, the enemy. And they have a very strong sense that an enemy is someone that you're to be grateful for and that it's very important at that time not to hate your enemy, who's already having enough trouble with the fact that he's doing harm to you. And that if you hate the other person, then you're doing harm to yourself by the hating.

[39:00]

And you're not particularly, as in my earlier examples of how I talk to myself, I hate the way you do that. And if I tell myself that, I don't improve, I don't become a nicer person. So they have a culturally pretty strong understanding of that at the same time that, you know, some of them did engage in armed resistance. Because although they have the understanding, they also think, you know, it's appropriate to take up arms and then at some point they're caught and then they're sort of falling back on the other understanding. And that's not working. Does that make sense? So again, I think it's that kind of thinking that's involved in... On one hand, we know this person is my enemy, this person is hurting me. But on the other hand, there's also knowing that if I hate this person,

[40:01]

I'm doing myself harm in the hating. Because I don't feel good when I hate. And also, I'm not accomplishing anything. I'm not helping this other person to be kinder by hating this other person. So that there's some clarity there or understanding, and in that sense, wisdom or insight that this is not... To hate somebody in that way is not effective, it's not appropriate or useful to... either for myself or for the other person. And so as much as possible, I make this decision not to hate the other person. And it's based on... It's not because of some kind of... You know, you grow up and then mom and dad say, it's not nice to hate somebody or whatever they say, you know. But it comes out of this kind of clarity. It comes out of kind of esteem. If I hate somebody, it hurts me. It doesn't help the other person become a nicer person, a kinder person. So I ought to... So I am... I want to behave in a way that does not harm me

[41:02]

and helps the other person become a kinder person. And as I told the story last night, you know that this is not always immediately effective and your head can explode. And on a number of occasions, you get another head, you try again. You continue this kind of practice for perhaps a very long time without having necessarily the immediate results to show for it. Let me read you another passage from Thich Nhat Hanh. I don't remember what this is about exactly, but perhaps it's relevant now. I think it applies to...

[42:02]

Understanding. Understanding is the word that Thich Nhat Hanh uses for realization or insight. He likes the word understanding. Understanding is not an aggregate of bits of knowledge. It is a direct and immediate penetration. In the realm of sentiment, it's a feeling. In the realm of intellect, it is perception. It's an intuition rather than the culmination of reasoning. Every now and again, it is fully present. It's an entity which exists independently of its object and which resides in our brain, making brief excursions into the outside world to see what's happening out there. I love it. But anyway, it's not quite that simple, is it? One of Thich Nhat Hanh's wonderfully simple examples is take a look at your hand. Is it inside you or outside you?

[43:07]

Most of the things we look at, we always think, well, it's outside me if I see it out there. So there's, by the way, a simple example of is it inside or outside. Inside... It's not exactly just the skin. I'm in here and not out there. And the objects that appear to be out there are certainly in my perception, in my seeing. By the way, I see all of you. When we say things like that, I see you, we can't actually experience an eye that's separate from the seeing. We have an experience of seeing, and then we say, well, there must be... I must be doing that. But we can't actually get hold of it, what that eye is. It must be... I must be the one doing that. I see, and then you.

[44:11]

And you is already in the seeing, too. So where is the seeing taking place? Is the seeing taking place inside or outside? So, pretty quickly, we get to unable to describe it. I wanted to tell you something along the lines of our two-year-old, Maggie. She's almost three, and just the other day, she said... We were just sitting there, and she said, I can't see my hip. And she said, I see my hand. And she looked at me, like, help me. And she looked at me, and sort of startled me, and said, I see your hand. And I said, good. That's a pretty cute realization. Well, I don't have a lot more to talk about tonight.

[45:31]

I mean, I had a whole lot of things to talk about, about wisdom, or insight, and et cetera. But I decided to have sort of a simpler talk. Let's just jam too much into it. But I can tell you a poem or two. The first poem is... I don't know, it may be the only one. This poem is called The Illusive Ones. And it's a poem by Sufi poet Rumi. He said... They're lovers again, sugar dissolving in milk. The sun is the moon, an amalgam. The gold and silver melt together. This is the season when the dead branch and the green branch are the same branch. The cynic bites his fingernail because he can't understand.

[46:33]

Omar and Ali on the same throne, two kings in one belt. Nightmares filled with light, like a holiday. People and angels speak the same language. The illusive ones finally meet. The essence and the evolving forms run to meet each other, like children to their father and mother. Good and evil, dead and alive. Everything looms together from one natural stem. You already know this. Everywhere you look, it's the same vision. You already know this, I'll stop. Everywhere you look, it's the same vision. Your body is a candle touched with fire. There's another one, which is another Rumi poem,

[47:53]

which is somewhat the same feeling, and very definitely the sense that this kind of insight that we've been talking about of things not having inherent being, that's clearly definable. Especially the first part, the first part of this poem, you get this right away. Lovers think they're looking for each other, but there's only one search. Wandering this world is wandering that. In here, there are no dogmas and no heresies. The miracle of Jesus is the man himself, not what he said or did about the future. Forget the future. I'd worship someone who could do that. On the way, you may want to look back, but if you can say there's nothing ahead, there'll be nothing there. Stretch out your arms and take hold of your clothes with both hands.

[48:54]

The cure for pain is in the pain. Hmm, that's a nice line. The cure for pain is in the pain. It's something like... It's something like good and evil, good and bad. Everyone has good and bad. If you don't have both, you don't belong here with us. Something like that. When someone gets lost, he's not here. He must be inside us. There's no place like that anywhere in the world. And again, a little bit of that feeling. Lovers think they're looking for each other during each other all along. Oh, it's ten o'clock anyway, so...

[50:07]

Thank you. Please...

[50:11]

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