Good evening. This has been the loudest night. When I came in and, you know, it's nice to look around here and I asked, Galen said she was thinking about recording it, so we did record a little bit of it. The lecture will be the general bubble of the creak of voices. So, early on in the week, the first talk, we talked about, I talked about inmost request, which I think is, you know, Suzuki Roshi's kind of simple, down to earth description, rather than saying way-seeking mind or aspiration for enlightenment, which all sound so, a little highfalutin. What about your inmost request? And that this is clearly different than, our inmost request is not that we are perfect

[01:04]

or that we are famous or that we have lots of money or that people like us, but our inmost request is something more simple, that we like ourselves. And sometimes it's hard to like someone, you know, such as me. You've had that experience. I mean, all those other people are okay, but I could like them, but, you know, I have this kind of problem that they don't seem to have, or I have to live with myself and they don't or something like that. But there are many ways to talk about inmost request, and as I mentioned before, I think it's useful if each of us, you know, if you come to your own, in your own words, what your inmost request is. But again, for tonight, I wanted to suggest some traditional kind of language that expresses

[02:05]

something in the vicinity of inmost request. Very simply, may I be happy. May I be happy. May other beings be happy. May I be healthy. May all beings be healthy. May I be free from suffering. May others be free from suffering. May I not hurt others. May others not hurt me. May I forgive others. may others forgive me. May I grow in compassion. May I attain liberation. Now we're getting into something a little more complex, a little bit more mystifying. So I'd like to say with something simple, may I be happy. May I trust myself. May I trust others. May I love myself. May I be willing to be me directly and immediately. May I breathe easy. May I rest assured in

[03:17]

my being, that it's okay for me to be here. You know, without any doubt about it. And not be too concerned about, overly concerned about, well it's only okay for me to be here if I do a good job, if I get praised. Well, if everybody else likes my cooking, I guess it must be okay for me to be here. If you think like that, which I have at times, then you know, if you've examined that at all, that your next meal tomorrow has to be better than the one you just did. Or how could you like yourself anymore? How could others still like you if they're liking you because of how good your food was? So every day you have

[04:18]

to outperform. When we start to think like that, we have to outperform. We're only as good as our last meal. And tomorrow has to be better. Actually there's a saying, you know, old Chinese saying, before the food comes, tell the cook it has to be better tomorrow. So that's working right into this tendency that we have. That we're only a good person, or we're only lovable, or I could only like myself if I can get others to praise me, others to admire me. Then I must be able to like myself. But then after a while, you know, does it ever work? I never found it to work. What I noticed is they liked my cooking. I couldn't tell that they liked me. They liked my performance, but they didn't really know me. And if they knew me, they probably wouldn't like me. That sort of thing. So there's these various kind

[05:22]

of traps we get into. When the inmost request is something much more direct, may I love myself, may I be happy. And we don't have to have a fame or gain in order to be happy. Our happiness is, if it depends on the fame we have or how much people like our cooking or whatever it is we do, we won't be very happy because it's not a very trustworthy thing to base your happiness on or your self-esteem on how other people are receiving your performances. So, we started out these talks and then we went on to talk some about faith or the aspect

[06:23]

of enter into your own body. When you cut the carrots, cut the carrots. Entering into your body, entering into your being, entering into your activity. And the kind of concentration that's involved with this absorption of not being careless with one thing and disdainful of it. Careless with one thing and careful with another. Treat each ingredient the same. Don't consider some ingredients better and some worse. And so, this is good for me. I'll be careful with this and careless with that. Don't discriminate between fine ingredients and coarse ingredients and don't criticize the quality of ingredients that you receive in your life. Just work with each thing that comes up. So, tonight we're shifting over a little bit or going on and considering another aspect of this kind of effort. Last night we were looking more at the fact that this takes us beneath the surface of our life and to the underneath where there are various kinds of problems that we have. We have anger

[07:28]

and greed and it turns out that I'm like that after all. So, tonight I wanted to go on and talk a little bit about joy and ease. Are you ready for that? So, joy and ease are classically two aspects of concentration or absorption. Entering being in your being and a wholeness of being or a completeness of being. So, it's not only integrating what we were talking about last night of integrating in some way, integrating in problematic emotions and things into our life and into our being. Inviting anger to help us cut the carrots when we cut the carrots or inviting laziness to help us cut the carrots when we cut the carrots. But also then there's some joy and ease that comes in this kind of activity and if we do things just seriously, we can't concentrate very well because then we'll start thinking

[08:30]

about how nice it would be to be outside, how joyful it would be to be at the narrows. So, if there's no joy in cutting the carrots when you cut the carrots, you'll start thinking about going somewhere else where you can get some. It's pretty simple, don't you think? If there's no ease or sense of well-being where you are, you'll start looking somewhere else. So, of course the question comes up, is there really somewhere else? Earlier this week we talked about how this other place doesn't really exist, but we imagine it does. But every place we go, we're going to be there when we get there. And we imagine the place where we could go without us being there, so then it's easy to think that when we get there it would be different. I've used this little thing before, but I like this very much. It's from the end of

[09:35]

a talk that Wendell Berry gave in St. John's Cathedral in New York City. It's about work and the dignity and pleasure of work. But it's also, for tonight, exemplifying something else because the main character in the story is a young girl. And so it shows how when we're young we have this kind of quality that I'm going to be talking about tonight. Ultimately in the argument about work and how it should be done, one has only one's pleasure to offer. It's possible, as I've learned again and again, to be in one's place in such company, wild or domestic, and with such pleasure that one cannot think of another place that one would prefer or of another place at all. One does not miss or regret the past or fear or long for the future. Being there is simply all and is enough. Such time

[10:40]

give one the chief standard and the chief reason for one's work, to be that completely involved in one's work with such pleasure. Last December when my granddaughter, Katie, had just turned five, she stayed with me one day while the rest of the family were away from home. In the afternoon we hitched a team of horses to the wagon and hauled a load of dirt for the barn floor. It was a cold day but the sun was shining. We hauled our load of dirt over the tree-lined gravel lane beside the creek, a way well known to her mother and to my mother when they were children. And as we went along, Katie drove the team for the first time in her life. And she was proud. And I was proud of her. And I told her that I was proud of her. We completed

[11:40]

our trip to the barn, unloaded our load of dirt, smoothed it over the barn floor and wetted it down. By the time we started back up the creek road, the sun had gone over the hill and the air had turned bitter. Katie sat close to me in the wagon and we did not say anything for a long time. I did not say anything because I was afraid. Katie was not saying anything because she was cold and miserable and perhaps homesick. It was impossible to hurry very much. And I was unsure how I would comfort her. But then after a while, she turned to me and said, Wendell, isn't it fun? So, I think, you know, we've all had some kind of experience like this where we've

[12:55]

been involved, engaged in something, whether it's, you know, work or pleasure or swimming or jogging or making love or cooking. Sometime when we have this kind of sense of well-being and fully being in the moment and, of course, so in the sense of not being able to control the ingredients, somehow we don't get enough of those times and then we think we can only do this on those certain times and not the other times. And so we kind of decide even ahead of time, I couldn't do this in meditation, could I? Or meditation, you have to be serious. In the kitchen, we have to get things done. We don't have time for joy. Cleaning cabins, it's too dusty to enjoy it or it's too hot or, you know. So there's some problem about why we couldn't have joy and there's little distractions that we get, you know, that get in the way of our joy or our completeness and our completely being in the activity and

[13:57]

we let those put us off. And also, of course, I have some other things here I'm going to share with you, but, you know, our culture kind of preys on this. I want to just go into a little bit more of the kinds of things that we're prone to get involved in. And I thought this is interesting about advertising and publicity and I have something here about Macy's, which kind of shows what happens to us and how we get away from a simple kind of wholeness in our activity and how we get away from being in our own body and we start thinking we need something outside of us to complete us and to give us our self-esteem. So, this first piece is from a book called Ways of Seeing by John Berger and there's

[15:00]

various essays in here, some about oil painting and some about advertising and some of them about how they're the same in a certain way. But this is a little part about advertising and what it does. Advertising proposes to each one of us that we transform ourselves or our lives by buying something more. This more it proposes will make us in some way richer, even though we will be poorer by having spent our money. Publicity persuades each of us of such a transformation by showing us people who have apparently been transformed and are, as a result, enviable. The state of being enviable is what constitutes glamour and publicity is the process of manufacturing glamour. The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product.

[16:07]

She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself. One could put this another way. The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is and offers it back to her for the price of the product. So, in our own little way, we each do this too. We have a performance to give. We have a dinner to make. And right now our self-esteem is not so great, but if we make a good dinner, we can have it back at the end when we have completed our accomplishment. And people thank us and praise us and then we can have our esteem back. So this isn't just advertising. Advertising prays on this, but if we all weren't doing

[17:13]

this anyway, there would be nothing to pray on for advertising to pray on. So we need to look in a simple way. How do I do this? Do I do this? Is this what I do? This next piece I enjoyed very much. It's about Macy's in New York City. This one starts out, there's a long section here before this about this person is coming over on a container cargo ship from Britain and two of the big containers on the ship say Macy's on them. So finally when he talks, he has quite a description about the voyage across the sea and they kind of got into part of a hurricane and it was pretty dramatic and various things. And then when he gets to New York City, one of the things he does is to go to Macy's and kind of see, well, what's happening at Macy's? So this was what had been in the container billed as bric-a-brac on the conveyor's cargo manifest. There

[18:21]

was a new life waiting in America for all the rubbish in the attics of genteel England. Macy's must have ransacked half of the old rectories and mulberry lodges in Cheshire in order to assemble this horde of moth-eaten Edward Anya. The rubbish apparently served some alchemical purpose. After a day or two spent in the company of a croquet mallet, a hunting flask, a box of trout flies and a pair of old stirrups, an ordinary white shirt would, I suppose, begin to stiffen with exclusiveness and nobility as it absorbed the molecules of stables, servants, log fires, field and stream. Certainly the shirt could only justify its $90 price tag if you were prepared to pay at least $50 for the labor

[19:21]

of the alchemist and not to be overly fussy about the standard of the shirt-making. The crowd poured on to the escalators. When Macy's opened in 1902, these escalators were woodblocked with their woodblock steps had been the latest thing. Now they were of a piece with the antique luggage and the wind-up Victrola, valued the more highly for being old than being new. They rumbled up through the timbered paneled shafts. We piled hip to haunch on this creaky Jacob's Ladder talking in Spanish, Haitian, French, Brooklyn, Russian. There was a noise, a noisy elation in the crowd as if the act of going shopping was working like an inhalation of Benzedrine. We climbed through a cloud bank of bras and negligees. A meadow of dresses went by. Suppose you just arrived from Guyana

[20:30]

or Bucharest. Here would be your vision of American plenty, the brimming cornucopia of the fruits of capitalism. Here goods queued up for people rather than the other way around. Here you were treated as an object of elaborate cajolery and seduction. Nothing was too much for you. At every turn of the moving staircase, Macy had laid a new surprise for your passing. Would you like to see the inside of an exclusive club for Victorian gentlemen? We built one. A pioneer log cabin? Here it is. After the log cabin, a high-tech pleasure drum of mirrors and white steel. And after the pleasure drum, a deconstructionist fantasy made of scaffolding with banks of VDU screens all showing the same picture of beautiful people modeling leisure wear. The whole store was wired for sound and each architectural extravagance

[21:33]

had its own musical signature, Duke Ellington, Telemann, Miles Davis, Strauss. Macy's was scared stiff of our boredom. This was a world constructed for creatures with infantile attention spans, for whom every moment had to be crammed with novelties and sensations. Here was a place to be so babied and beguiled, all for the sake of selling skirts and jackets, sheets and towels. It was gross, even by the relatively indulgent standards of London. Many of the people on the escalators were fresh from that other world of clothing coupons and short rations. Had I been one of them, I'd have been swept by a wave of blank helplessness in the face of all this aggressive American fun. To get by in Macy's, a sturdy sense

[22:39]

of selfhood was required. Everything in the store whispered, for you, just for you. And you needed to love yourself a very great deal to live up to this continual pampering, for there was insidious coda to that message, whispering, are you sure you belong here? So again, this is something, you know, the key line here for me is Macy's was scared stiff of your boredom. And most of us are pretty scared stiff of our boredom too. And we would like something to be entertaining, something to be rewarding, and it should come to us without our working at it. It should be given to us in some way. Or maybe we could buy it. And we don't always remember that this is work, to go through the boredom, to

[23:44]

work through the boredom to the place where we can be absorbed in what we're doing and experience the joy of the activity we're engaged in, cutting the carrots or sitting quietly having a cup of tea. You know, we forget that we need to work to do that and to make this effort to enter into our body, enter into our life and our activity. Because if we don't, we'll have the same sort of feeling of, am I sure I belong here? I'm not sure I belong here. Maybe I better be somewhere else where I'm more wanted, where things are more inviting to me. But, you know, it turns out we're the ones who in some way have to make ourselves at home where we are and find out how to be there. There's one more little piece in this vein, which is kind of curious, and which again exemplifies for me something of a tendency we all have. And here again, it's presented

[24:49]

in kind of the extreme, so we can kind of laugh at it and think it's funny. And this is interesting because it's about a car, but you know, it could be, you know, somebody who is incredibly wealthy. But, you know, it could also be about spiritual practice or, you know, I was talking with someone this morning who said that she knew some people in Boulder Creek who were very, quite fundamentalist Christians and they've been doing their prayers a lot. And it was really upsetting to them, that earthquake last year, you know, which was so devastating in that area and maybe to their home. And they saw all these things happen and, you know, what about all those prayers? You know, wasn't that supposed to give them some kind of security and safety and some kind of exemption from this kind of event happening to them? So this is somebody where money is supposed to do that, instead of prayers. But, you know, spiritual practice is supposed to do these things for you.

[25:51]

So this character is living in Texas at this point, and I don't think I really need to tell you, you know, what's going on in this story. It's just a little section of this story. It's a novel. It's from a novel by Larry McMurtry called Some Can Whistle. I think this was Some Can Whistle. The main character is saying, no, his friend says to him, even a $60,000 car needs to be driven once in a while, Godwin pointed out. Once it has been determined that the Mercedes definitely had no intention of starting, I sat in the driver's seat in a state of deep gloom. From time to time I turned the ignition key, hoping a miracle would happen. After all, it was a very expensive car. Maybe it was just hibernating. At any moment, the powerful German engine might roar into life. It was ridiculous to be even mildly

[26:56]

depressed, and I knew it was ridiculous. After all, I had neglected the car for six months. It had a perfect ride not to start, and also, of course, by any rational standard, it was an extremely minor problem. There was a filling station only seven miles away. If I called them, they'd be at my house in ten minutes, and the Mercedes would be purring like a tiger long before I could get myself shaved, bathed, dressed, packed, and in a fit state to proceed to Houston. Unfortunately, the knowledge that I was dealing with a problem that was very minor, circumstantial, and in no way life-threatening didn't make me feel a bit better. If anything, the very triviality of the problem contributed to my destabilization. I was a very rich man. Al and Sal, the sitcom I had created twelve years earlier, was the top-grossing TV sitcom of all time. Worldwide, it had earned over a billion dollars, nearly a third of which was mine. Al and Sal was far and away the most popular show in syndication on the world

[28:02]

market and another billion dollars in earnings projected over the next decade. So not only was I very successful, I also had a lot of money. And in the particular world in which I became successful, the world of entertainment, or to be precise, the world of television, no illusion is more crucial than the illusion that great success and huge money buy you immunity from the common ills of mankind, such as cars that won't start. The maxim, the golden rule, the first motto of the world in which I achieved my success is, all things are supposed to work instantly. If they don't, then what's it all for? The fact that you might have to wait ten minutes to get your car jump-started like any ordinary slob calls a whole value system into question. If you don't have total immunity, then why bother?

[29:03]

So he decides to call up the Cadillac agency and order a Cadillac. But again, I think that's another one of our tendencies and it takes us away from ourselves and just relating in a simple direct way, entering into our activity. The quality of joy is a quality of resonating with the object of your activity. Resonating with your movement, with the things, in some way, you know, resonating, harmonizing. Dogen Zenji says, let your mind go out and abide in things. Let things return and abide in your mind. So when we practice meditation,

[30:07]

the object of meditation is to follow in the breath. So we let the mind go out and abide in the breath. To do that, your mind cannot be, you know, thinking about something else that would be more fun, more amusing, less boring to do. The mind has to be willing to go into the breath and then some quality of being soft enough or supple enough to harmonize with the breath or to resonate with the breath, to move with the breath. So the very activity of having your mind or allowing your mind, letting your mind do this, bringing your mind to this activity will help, you know, will be conducive to joy, a kind of quiet joy. Because your awareness, and then pretty soon your awareness is with your breath and then

[31:09]

it's resonating with your breath. And your awareness is not now any longer locked on to what's wrong with me. How do I, what could I get that would make me feel better? What could I accomplish that would be good enough for me to like myself or for others to like me or for others to approve of me? And boy, I'm not doing this meditation very well. I'm supposed to be behind my breath. And just back to your breath. So the mind goes out and abides in the breath and you let the breath return and abide in your mind. There's a welcoming of the breath. It's not, the awareness is not some objective cold kind of awareness to your breath of what are you doing here? But welcoming your breath, letting your breath abide in your awareness in your mind. So this is a kind of effort that is conducive to joy. Because joy is this, when we resonate with something. And to do that resonating

[32:15]

we also need to know some of the other aspects of concentration like that we bring our awareness to the object. But there's this quality of resonating, harmonizing. If it's an activity of movement or yoga, stretching, again there's harmonizing or letting your awareness actually fill that pose, take that pose, be in your body, be in the extremities of your body. And that opens up our mind. Because our mind tends to shut closed down and get very kind of involved. How am I going to get immunity? What could I do? How come I have all these problems? What could I do that would save me from these things? We get so absorbed in all this stuff. So in a simple way this is suggesting over and over again to come back

[33:18]

to the activity and let it resonate. Let our body and mind resonate with the activity. Sweeping or peeling a carrot. Very simple things. Our life is mostly all these simple things. And I think we want very deeply, I know I want very deeply to be in my body in this way and to accept and resonate with my body in this way. It's also the quality of things moving you. Can things move you? Can things touch you? And it's very tempting for us to, because there's enough things out there that if they touch us they would be painful. We tend to not want to be touched by anything. Or we're going to be very careful about what touches us. Because it might hurt. And we've been hurt. We've all been hurt at some point. So again this is a kind of work and an ongoing kind of effort to, as I was

[34:21]

mentioning yesterday, my telling the cheese wrapper to open up. I'm the one who needed to open up. To open up and allow ourself to be touched. To be touched by our breath. To be touched by the feeling of the sunlight on our body, on our face. To be touched by someone we meet. To be touched by our hand. So very simple things in our life over and over again can do this, but we have to make some effort in a certain sense. And a kind of softening and receptivity. Letting the mind go out and abide in things. Letting things return and abide in the mind. So our mind has to be, to be touched, our mind has to be soft enough to be touched and receptive enough. And be willing to kind of vibrate or resonate.

[35:24]

You know sometimes something, you know, I find anyway in cooking, you know, the vegetables and the fruits are very touching. You know, they're so sincere. They're so willing to be blueberries, even if they're a little squished. They're so sincere about being squished blueberries. And the peaches, they're a little moldy or squishy some place. They're still very sincerely like that. It's very heartwarming. And that resonates, that touches. Because I'm not a perfect blueberry, I'm not a perfect peach, you know. That's, you know, when you see all this stuff about the tomatoes that ship back and forth across the country and you can throw them against the wall and, you know, and nothing happens, right? Now is that a tomato that can touch you? You know, it's hard for a tomato like that to

[36:29]

touch you, but one that's, you know, ripe and fresh and juicy and kind of falling apart, that can touch you. Anyway, it's hard for the other one, you know, to be touched. I don't know about that. You know, it's concrete, those things, it's hard, isn't it? To resonate with concrete and big glass buildings and asphalt sidewalks, you know, the pavement. It's hard to, you know, allow yourself to resonate with all that and those wires and the buses and sirens. Because our nervous system isn't exactly built for it, but anyway. I think that's part of what happens when you come here, right? You can relax and you can be a little open and begin to resonate with the crickets and the trees and the sunlight and the blue sky and the hillsides. And in this little valley here, we can be that way and we can relax and be soft and have a soft awareness.

[37:30]

Suzuki Roshi used to make that distinction between hard mind and soft mind. It was interesting. He had talked about that for a long, you know, over and over again. And one day when he said it, my mind softened. And I understood what he was talking about. You know, it gets hard again, but it's not perpetually hard now anymore. There is this initial kind of softening. So we need this, you know, as much as anything is to soften our mind, soften our mind. And then we can receive things and be touched by things and we have this joy in our activity, the kind of ease and well-being, feeling at home and place. And again, it helps to be someplace like Tassajara or have your place, your home, and you can do it at your home and feel at home and make yourself at home. And sometimes when you do it that way, then you can go out

[38:33]

in the world and you do it too and you take your home with you. And meditation then is a way to be at home in your being with your breath. And the breath seems to be a particularly, you know, a particularly good object or vehicle for this, because the breath is already so soft. And to follow the breath then helps us, you know, soften our mind. And for it to be, to bring our awareness into our breath is also then our breath will soften our body and undo our body. Because as we follow our

[39:37]

breath and soften our awareness and stay with our breath and let go of our breath, then that breath begins to go into parts of our body that it hasn't been for a long time. And it can be all throughout our body. The breath isn't just a little bubble in some little section, but every part of us is a little bit of breath there. And we have a kind of wholeness then, immediate kind of experience of wholeness and a kind of simple joy. Those of you who know, I mean, you know, have been to a meditation and you know how, and probably others of you have had, you know, some experience of this. Sometimes when, you know, if you go jogging for a couple hours or an hour or so, you get, you know, things touching now. You've been breathing. You've been following your breath. You've been in your body, in your breath. And you look around and the colors are so bright. You've got so

[40:39]

much more oxygen and your whole body has been breathing and jogging. And things look bright and you feel good. And little things can touch you again. I'll give you a poem that I used sometimes for this talk. I think I probably used it last year, but not so many of you were here probably last year. So what the heck. This is one of Rilke's sonnets to Orpheus and it's about, it's clearly someone has been, you know, resonating with things. He's let his mind go out and abide in things. He's let the things return and abide in his mind. Here's a description of it. Round apple, smooth banana, melon, gooseberry, peach, how all this affluence speaks death

[41:45]

and life in the mouth. I sense, observe it in a child's transparent features while she tastes. This comes from far away. What miracle is happening in your mouth? Instead of words discoveries flow out, astonished to be free. Dare to say what apple truly is, the sweetness that feels thick, dark, dense at first, then exquisitely lifted in your taste grows clarified, awake, luminous, double-meaning, sunny, earthy, real. Oh, knowledge, pleasure, joy, inexhaustible. Here's to one last example now of joy. Somebody who enjoys what they're doing and has worked

[42:53]

at it. This is New York subway violinist rises to the occasion. You remember this? It was a few weeks ago. This was in New York. After 20 years of playing his violin in the subway, James Grassic surfaced last night for a performance at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall. It's a dream come true, said Grassic, who usually plays Beethoven over screeching brakes or performs Paganini on a packed platform. But at the same time, the main thing is I've worked very hard to develop a report with my New Yorkers. A little resonance there. Those New Yorkers, 1,096 of them at $16 a pop, bought out the hall. I'm not sure how many New Yorkers which Grassic had rented for $5,000. The violinist planned a 75-minute program of classical music

[43:56]

but played at least a dozen encores. Most were excerpts running no longer than three to five minutes, the length of time you'd be waiting for a subway train. I learned these things from James Grassic. He told his fans with a grin. After the show, he hung out with the audience in the lobby. Elaine from the World Trade Center stopped. Glad to see you, he said, hugging one strap hanger fan and waving to another. Hey, Bob, I'll see you on the Long Island Railroad, okay? Lillian Binder said she knew him from the Broadway Lafayette Fiat stop on the D line. I can't tell you how many times I've missed my train listening to him, she said. One time I was late for work and told my boss, I'm sorry, I was listening to this guy playing

[44:59]

in the subway, playing Scheherazade. And my boss said, oh, I know that guy, he's great. Everyone in the hall, with the exception of my family, is someone I've met playing on the street, said Grasick. Grasick had studied at the Julliard School of Music in New York and also taught school for a few years in Columbus, Georgia. His initial mass transit performance came in 1968 on a Long Island Railroad car, Grasick said. He made $10 in five minutes. These days a subway performer can make about $100 a day, said Grasick, who also does some freelance orchestra work. At first I did it just for the money, he confessed, but the applause and the smiles made me feel as though I was reaching the hearts of people.

[45:59]

And it's become a very spontaneous and very communicative. I buy it in that moment, which is kind of soft mind, welcoming mind, receptive mind, resonating mind. You know, it's possible in a way, you know, to, if not exactly to work at this, at least to invite it or not dismiss it if it happens to arrive. You know how that works sometimes. I did that for many years in the meditation hall. I thought this place is a serious place. Pretty easy to get that idea, don't you think? You see all those black robes, there's that bell, there's that altar, and of course in those days there was a big stick, to kind of convey the impression, this is serious.

[47:05]

But, you know, the meditation hall is as much a place to have this kind of feeling as anywhere, and not to be caught in that so much. So there can also be, you know, just because, you know, the meditation hall, the seriousness of that is that we're not caught by ideas about going somewhere else, but we're willing to stay a while with our breath and be in our being and find some joy there in that simpleness and find, you know, our capacity to love ourself and to be kind to ourself, to resonate in our own being. So it may not always be so easy, but at least not to put it off and not to say, well, no, this is a serious place. You know, some people actually practice this kind of, you know, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese

[48:12]

Zen teacher, actually, you actually, he actually asked you to practice smiling, and a little smile, you know, the corners of your mouth, it's not that big television smile, but just a little smile. Pretty soon, you will begin to feel the smile in your whole being, you'll practice a little bit. And he says, if you're not smiling, you're wasting your time. He's rather serious about that. And he won't do retreats anymore at Green Goats because they're too serious, the Zen students are too serious. They don't smile enough. What about Tassara? Tassara, he hasn't been here for quite a while, but I don't think he has, you know, I haven't heard that he has the same feeling about Tassara. Tassara, people seem to smile pretty well. I don't know, that's what I feel this summer, I don't know.

[49:15]

So, it is possible to practice it, but sometimes it feels a little silly to practice it, so I say, at least don't tell it to go away when it comes. All right, well, may you all be happy, healthy, and free from suffering, and enjoy ease of well-being. Thank you. Thank you.

[49:41]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ