Good morning. It's a lovely fall morning. So we are right in the middle of our aspects of practice period in which we have been, the senior students are leading and giving talks and classes and we're drawing our selections from the book Zen Mind Beginner's Mind by Suzuki Roshi, kind of a seminal. seminal work around here. And I think we've all, many of us have experienced this thing where it's, you know, you read it and it sounds so smooth and you take it in so easily and then it's like we could have subtitled the practice period Zen Mind Beginner's Mind. What'd he say? Because there's just this what? when you try to actually drill down and talk about it or think about it. And yet there's kind of also a common thread, I think.

[01:04]

So I picked the, somewhat at random actually, picked the chapter naturalness. And I've really been hearing all the talks that other people have given, some common threads. And in fact, I had the experience, which I don't always have, but it was everywhere, that kind of thing, where suddenly once I committed to, okay, I told the other senior students I'm doing naturalness, and then it was just The word was everywhere, in every class for sure, but also just on billboards. I really thought I would remember them all, but I can't only remember one, I'm sorry, which was the license plate for Arkansas, Arkansas, the natural state. What does that even mean? And it's just been a busy time, and so I want you to know that I've had really brilliant thoughts on this topic during various periods of zazen that I've been sitting, and you'll just have to take my word for it.

[02:16]

But I want you to know. So, oh, I'm missing page one. Whoops. So the shape of my talk is, I think I just didn't print some, it's fine. The shape of my talk is gonna be kind of like an argument with Suzuki Roshi. So I'm gonna give him the first word here. Naturalness. Moment after moment, everyone comes out from nothingness. Everyone comes out from nothingness. This is the true joy of life. There is a big misunderstanding about the idea of naturalness. Most people who come to us believe in some freedom or naturalness, but their understanding is what we call jinen ken gedo, or heretical naturalness.

[03:22]

Jinen kengedo means that there's no need to be formal, just a kind of let alone policy or sloppiness. This is naturalness for most people. And when I was thinking about this this morning, I was remembering that Suzuki Oka-san, Suzuki Roshi's wife, told me once that she used to wash people's feet. Like, you know, the hippies who came to the zendo in the early days, like they're just going around barefoot and then they go into the zendo with their dirty feet. I never heard that from anyone else, but she was like, I used to wash people's feet, and her facial expression was not like, oh, I have to wash people's feet, no. So that's kind of an example of the other kind of heretical naturalness. But that is not the naturalness we mean. It is rather difficult to explain, but naturalness is, I think, some feeling of being independent from everything, or some activity which is based on nothingness.

[04:30]

Something which comes out of nothingness is naturalness, like a seed or plant coming out of the ground. The seed has no idea of being some particular plant, but it has its own form and is in perfect harmony with the ground, with its surroundings. As it grows, in the course of time, it expresses its nature. Nothing exists without form and color. Whatever it is, it has some form and color, and that form and color are in perfect harmony with other beings, and there is no trouble. That is what we mean by naturalness. For a plant or stone to be natural is no problem, but for us there is some problem, indeed a big problem. To be natural is something which we must work on. When what you do just comes out from nothingness, you have quite a new feeling. For instance, when you are hungry, to take some food is naturalness. You feel natural, but when you are expecting too much, to have some food is not natural. You have no new feeling, you have no appreciation for it.

[05:32]

The true practice of Zazen is to sit as if drinking water when you are thirsty. There you have naturalness. So... I want to say, so I don't think we can call a whole set of things that we're built to do unnatural, right? So, you know, natural selection, natural selection. So there's things we're built to do. We're built with a sense of identity and a survival instinct, a strong sense of identity and a survival instinct. We're built to feel anxiety when we feel threatened, when we're threatened. We're built to feel things when things happen. We're built to feel feelings when things happen. And the sex drive, there's a reason why the sex drive is so strong.

[06:38]

We can do many things with sex and express it in many different ways, but the reason why it is so strong, i.e. the reason why it feels so good, is because it's tied to reproduction. It's nature's plan. And that's the reason why it can be really a great thing and also why it can be a really bad thing. because it's fundamental to our nature. We're built with an us and them, actually. I mean, if you've read the book Buddha's Brain, it's kind of hard to accept, but our sense of us evolved in tandem with our sense of them, so our altruism feels really good, we feel the best, supposedly, when we're with our group defending against them, against the other. We are more willing to sacrifice our lives and ourselves and various things for the group when there is a threat, when there is an other that's keeping that other side.

[07:52]

This is, it's how it evolved. And, something I was gonna say about that. So anyway, these many things are, they're natural. They're natural feelings and frames of mind and instincts and such. So I don't, want to frame those as, I mean, this is different from going barefoot and wearing your bare feet into the zendo or being sloppy or laissez-faire or something. This is, to me, it's different. So he posits his naturalness, emptiness against this kind of sloppiness, but I want to posit it against natural selection and how we're built and also how we're trained. Like what happens to us in our life from childhood on is a strong influence on what we do, how we think, how we frame things.

[09:05]

So for example, if your mother or father or second grade teacher was super critical, that didn't feel good, But you were trained with the idea that that was normal or that was even what love feels like, possibly. So everything that happens to us, and we're trained unconsciously mostly. We're trained unconsciously. We're trained in this us and them thing unconsciously. So I also wanna say, that that's natural. It's natural that we're built that way. We're built to receive the training as children of our environment and to create an understanding of the world through that experience. So now I'm going to take Suzuki Roshi's side of the argument because there's other things about how we're built that I think are more in line with what he's saying.

[10:08]

So for example, I was thinking of lie detector tests. Like a lie detector test is noting physiological changes that happen when we tell a lie, when we tell something that we know is a lie. So to me, that says that there's something about how we're built that that is this idea that the precepts are natural, that they're coming out of emptiness, they're coming out of some natural truth, deeper truth perhaps. So you might end up in a situation where your survival instinct is pointing one way and telling the truth is another. But in any case, it affects us. So it's written in ourselves. I've been working with veterans. I work for this veterans organization now and I've been reading a bunch of stories of veterans and one common thread

[11:14]

is people go in so young to be veterans, they're so young, and it's often an act in a way of... actually breaking out of, for some people it's your family, we're in the service and so you do. But for some people, they're feeling lost or their life is spinning out of control and this seems like an option to do something meaningful, to be of service. It's sort of like out of what you plan to do and you're very young and it's very much predicated on this us and them quality. So to serve your country. to, which feels good. We're built for that to feel good. And you are also, you're young, you're learning how to do something, usually something very specific, like the machine part of this blah-de-blah. You're built to make something work, to learn how to make something work.

[12:15]

And that something that's working might have to do with armaments or weaponry, but your focus is on learning how to make this part work. So you're like 21, 22, you're being kind of a grownup for the first time. You're trying to learn how to make this thing work. It's really important. You feel strongly this us and them thing. And then it works. And you suddenly realize that a bunch of people died. I've read this in several different people's stories. And at that moment, Pretty universally, there's a feeling like one guy described as, wow, that's messed up. It's like you suddenly aren't, they aren't them suddenly. And you couldn't help, you can't help that. And it probably doesn't happen for everybody. Maybe some people are able to keep it as them, them, them, you know. But for a significant number of people, that moment, in that moment, you realize they're not them. It comes from inside.

[13:18]

So that's another example. I was also thinking, you know, just the upright posture. So we're built to have an upright posture. And various things about how we're trained might have us change our posture, but it's not how we're built, and it's not good for us. It's not healthful. It's not wholesome. It doesn't work well. Even though it's natural in a way, if you're scared to hunch your shoulders, it's also natural. The deeper or, you know, I'm getting into the tricky area here, but the natural or naturalness is to have an upright posture. I've been, you know, I kind of, I've had some difficulty with my back. And I learned some new back exercises. I want to share with you one of them. So there's this whole thing about the core, engaging your core.

[14:25]

So this new kind of back exercise is all about how your back is part of your core and what they call is to wake up the posterior chain. which sounds very abstract but it's and you know but the thing is Zazen is actually all about the posterior chain and I think one of the reasons I had such a dramatic response to these exercises is because part of my back has been trained already with an active posterior chain and somehow I just I lost the lower part somehow so what they describe to do, which I found very useful, is to imagine that there's an umbrella inside your chest. And you're going to lift and open it. So it's in there. Your lungs are going to expand in 360 degrees. So on the inhale, you're going to lift the umbrella and open it. And then on the exhale, keep it open, keep it up, and

[15:29]

Exhale through your lower abdomen and push your lower abdomen against your spine. And then on the next inhale, open it, lift it up more and open it up more. And then push it out from here. But keep it up. And then open it up on the third one even more. And push it out. And then relax. But I found this, I mean, you know, you always need a little bit of a new way, because we always lift the sternum, lift the sternum, you know. This is the same thing, but this is sort of, I like it because it's got some imagery. So this is how we're built. We're built to be upright and hold our bodies upright. And you know, we can make those analogies to upright life, too. Let's see how far, let's see. I don't remember where I was going to go after that.

[16:34]

So I'll just read the next selection. If I forgot something, so be it. So he says, this naturalness is very difficult to explain. But if you can just sit and experience the actuality of nothingness in your practice, there's no need to explain. If it comes out of nothingness, whatever you do is natural, and that is true activity. You have the true joy of practice, the true joy of life in it. Everyone comes out from nothingness moment after moment. Moment after moment, we have true joy of life. So we say, shin ku myo yu, From true emptiness, the wondrous being appears. Shin is true, ku is emptiness, myo is wondrous, u is being. From true emptiness, wondrous being occurs. Oh, just wondrous being. From true emptiness, wondrous being.

[17:40]

Without nothingness, there is no naturalness, no true being. True being comes out of nothingness, moment after moment. Nothingness is always there, and from it, everything appears. But usually, forgetting all about nothingness, you behave as if you have something. What you do is based on some possessive idea or some concrete idea, and that is not natural. So when we have something, It's like we're carrying things over from the previous moment, right? That's the training, that's how we're built. Things roll out from one previous moment to the next. So how do we find this, what he's talking about, this naturalness that's coming out of emptiness? Alan and I, took, oh, before I say that, I want to say, back on side one, or maybe side two, I don't know which, my side, as opposed to Sudhir Rishi's side, I think the core of my point with that is that I don't think we should be super blamey about how ourselves or other people are unfolding according to how we're built and how we're trained.

[19:07]

Like that's just normal. It's like everything, this moment is coming to us from everything that's happened before. And you know, you just have to accept it as it is, which doesn't mean accept it as okay. It's like to not blame is not to exonerate, right? There's a little gap in there. You just are getting out of the game of blame. And I think it's an important first step to just receive the world as it is, and then take a breath. And maybe this is how you find the emptiness, you know. We actually, we react. We can't change that. We're gonna react. Don't, that's not where you put your, your practice, you react, and then, according to science, they say, no, there's a 90 seconds of a response is gonna last 90 seconds, period.

[20:16]

It's not gonna be shorter than that. If you keep revving it, it will go longer, but it's gonna go 90 seconds. So take 90 seconds to take a breath, and turn your attention to what's going on in your body with friendliness. And then maybe this appropriate response will come out of the emptiness and we can't say what that's going to be because it's coming out of that moment. And it's going to only express itself in this world of how we're built and how we're trained. So Alan and I took a road trip recently and we were listening to Bob Dylan's theme time radio hour. I don't know if you're familiar with it.

[21:17]

It is so awesome. It's so awesomely amazing. I highly recommend it. And two of the most amazing ones, I think, are the one, he has these, they're all songs by theme. So the theme of the devil, which I wouldn't have even listened to if I wasn't just listening to them consecutively, and eyes, really good ones. And I noticed that there was a song called The Devil Ain't Lazy. And, you know, we don't have the devil, but we have... how we're built and how we're trained. We have habits. We have habit energy and delusion and confusion and the discrepancy between how we're perceiving things and how we actually are. Like that's what we have instead of the devil. Maybe. I pause it. And so in this song he says, the devil will turn you any way but loose. And I was thinking that that sense of looseness to me is a little bit,

[22:23]

of where I go when I think about this emptiness. Like, the moment arrives, whatever's going on, there's perfect freedom. You can do anything. You're not controlled by anything that's happened before. So I just want to give a few examples, different kinds of examples, and then I hope there's plenty of time. I want to hear your examples, too. So Alan and I did this trip. I can't really go into the details, but we had a thing we were doing, and it involved going door to door. we in another city, you know? And it really doesn't matter. It could have been anywhere, and it could have been for any reason. For my story, it doesn't matter.

[23:26]

In fact, if there had been no reason, it would have almost been even better. And going door to door, most of us don't like it. And as Alan put it in a meeting, he said, I love to talk to people. But I don't like thrusting myself on someone's notice when they haven't invited me. That's kind of what it feels like to go to a... So we're in the car. We're trying to find our way around the new city. I'm trying to learn. I have an iPhone with Google Maps. He wants me to use his Android with Waze. I'm trying to learn how to use his Android and Waze, and we're bickering, and there's all these... leaflet material, flyers going everywhere, and the clipboard with the address, keep losing the page, and you have to pee, and you have to figure out where you're gonna pee. I mean, it's so uncomfortable. And you're doing this thing, and no one's home. It's not bad, but it's not that comfortable. In fact, it's very uncomfortable.

[24:27]

But then maybe three quarters of the way through the first day, I'm like, I think I'm enjoying this. And it's almost like there's two levels of feeling sometimes. I don't know if you have that experience, but there's the, if you can, if you can, if you can, what's the word? Include how uncomfortable it is. Just accept how uncomfortable it is. And let that be true. It's not like we papered that over or something. then this other feeling is underneath there. And it was somehow, it was the feeling of being out with everybody. Like the parents are getting their kids ready for Halloween, and they're doing their thing, and I'm doing my thing, and we're all out in the commons or something. And like I said, it would have been even better if we were going door to door and saying, what are you going through? Of course, that might have been very scary for people who knows.

[25:29]

Even creepier maybe. But I think we've all had the experience where we have a conscious intention and then the unconscious intention takes over. So you could have a conscious like, you know, I'm going to the Pollock, but I'm only going to have one cookie, or I'm not going to have the chocolate. But then you go to the potluck and something else takes over and that's just what happens. Like you may have had a conscious intention but the other conditions were not contributing. So you just, but another thing I've noticed lately is a couple times I've had the opposite where I'm consciously being stingy and then my mouth opens and it says the generous thing. It's like weird, you know? So like at the senior student meeting one time, Jake's like, well, who's going to take minutes, you know? And I was like, I'm not me. It's not my turn. And I have to go find something hard for the person to write. And I was like, I'm not going to do it. It's not my turn. And then I come home and say, I'll do it.

[26:31]

My mouth just opened and it said, I'll do it. Completely separate. And, you know, that's just happened a couple times, a few times. I was also thinking that I think that when I first got into cooking, cooking has been like a thread through my life. I worked as a cook and restaurant cook at different times. I was about 21 or 22. I think my feeling is that for me, cooking, getting interested in cooking or learning how to cook was like, it had nothing to do with how I was built or how I was trained. I don't know where it came from. And you know, of course, in the meantime, it's become a thing of training. You have to learn how to cook. But I think my first impulse, if I think about it, it has that feeling of something loose, you know? Like I stepped through an invisible door or something.

[27:35]

And so I'm worried about setting up a dichotomy here between what you could say, how we're built and trained. And then our vows, you know, we're on the other side. Because actually vows are just more about how we're built and trained. And Buddhist teaching, you know, like you heard Buddhist teaching, you decided to try it, you came here. You were curious and then you sat some zaz and so, I mean, you've accepted us as a part of your training now. Coming here and doing this is part of what's training you. And so most of everything is all on the side of that. The world as it is and as it's unfolding is all about this, how we're built and how we're trained and how everything is built. And so he's putting emptiness, that seems to be the safest thing to put on the other side, form and emptiness.

[28:50]

That seems to be where we come down. Maybe I was thinking, well, what's on the other side? Like, maybe basic goodness or basic sanity or intuition, you know? In hypnotherapies, there's this thing about your higher power. That's sort of on the side of emptiness, maybe. Or, you know, I remember Ron Nestor, is Ron here? One time you said, maybe it's a lower power. For Zen students, it's maybe more of a lower power. Something like that is on the side, but the only, you know, basic goodness or basic sanity or emptiness or higher power, higher self, lower power, it can only manifest through form, through what's happening, through how we're built and how we're trained.

[29:50]

There's no manifestation outside of that. So we have to manifest that if we want it to become manifest. You know, it's like, what's it say in the Lord's Prayer? It's like, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Or it's like, basic goodness made manifest in the world. There's no other place to manifest it. It's gotta be manifest through us, through our vows, through our activity, based on vow instead of based on these habitual, trains of, you know, chains of reaction that we have. Let's see. Oh, right, and so there's this, it's the perfect freedom, the freedom, there is some kind of looseness or freedom that we can experience, and I want to hear your stories if you've ever experienced it, even if it's a completely different way than mine.

[30:55]

You can do anything in this moment. There's nothing controlling it, even though this whole thing is built. And once it happens, you see how it was in line with everything that came before. But still, there's some moment of freedom. And you can, you know, put your sandals on your head and walk out. Or you can, you know, these are stories from Zen stories. You can make up a story about a dead fox that you see to teach your students. Or you can turn your back on the emperor and walk out. You can do that. You can do anything. There's nothing stopping you. But did you think of doing it? Did it occur to you to do it? Did you remember? Did you have an intuition? Did something come over you to do it, to remember friendliness? And if you're not sure what your vows should be or are, we've got so many lists for you. You can look at them all, you can try them all and see if any of them feel right for you. So many, I can't even start. I'm not even gonna start.

[32:01]

And the question, so how do we find this? I think that it's, we have to train. We have to train in this. We have to train in emptiness. We have to train in stopping and returning to emptiness and just feeling the loose, you know. What is loose? What is everything that the devil turns you every which way but loose? What is loose? How do you train in that? It's really not easy to understand, as he says. Very hard to talk about. You know, it's not hard to train, I don't think it's so hard to train in vows exactly. So like, you could come in here very easily without risking anything and say, okay, I'm gonna sit still for 40 minutes or 30 minutes or 20 minutes or 10 minutes, whatever it is.

[33:11]

Like, that's a vow, you could make that vow. I'm gonna go in that room and I'm gonna sit still for 10 minutes without moving. Although you get to lift your sternum if you have lost it. In fact, a big part of my zazen is like the battle between who owns this part of my body, right? Do you have that? Lift, is it owned by my vow? My vow is to lift, to expand, to relax, relax my belly, open my breathing. Or is it being owned by the habit that comes in too? It's like a little battle going on all the time. But that's the training, you know, that's the training. And just sitting still, which is unnatural, seems unnatural for us. But when you settle, when you settle with it, there's something loose about it. It's hard to explain, hard to describe. Or, you know, I'm gonna be in a room full of people and I'm not gonna talk.

[34:15]

That's a vow you could make. I'm gonna go into a room full of people and I'm not gonna talk. Of course, when you're new, it's not as hard. When you've been here a long time, it gets really, really hard. And if they give you a job, it gets really hard. Really hard fast. But these are good things because they're sort of low consequence. They sort of, you know, it's a little training ground, you know, where instead of like learning how not to lash out when you feel threatened, which is a really good thing to learn to do, start with something kind of easy and you get it sort of into your body then. And then maybe you can not lash out the next time you feel threatened. Or like me, if you withdraw, that's what I do when I feel threatened, I go inside. Maybe I won't do that next time if I can keep training, training myself in looseness or emptiness.

[35:17]

So I'm going to let Suzuki Roshi have the last word and then I want to hear you too. I hope there's plenty of time. I have no idea how much time is left. Whatever you do, this attitude is necessary. Sometimes we say, I think that he uses Japanese in this chapter a lot, and I think that's That to me is indicative of that he can't explain what he's trying to say in English. So it's sort of, I don't know, it's a little thrilling to me. Niu nan xin means soft or flexible mind. Niu is soft feeling. Nan is something which is not hard, and xin is mind. Niu nan xin means smooth, natural mind. When you have that mind, you have the joy of life. When you lose it, you lose everything. You have nothing except everything, BTW.

[36:21]

Although you think you have something, you have nothing. But when all you do comes out of nothingness, then you have everything. Do you understand? That is what we mean by naturalness. Yes, John, and then? The thing that comes to mind is a certain training I've done with myself, talking about the call of nature. I had a girlfriend that noticed that every time we sat down to dinner, I had to run to the bathroom first. Okay, so it seemed natural, but clearly... Going to the bathroom, what could be more natural than that? Clearly there's something going on. Unless you're going door to door. I realize that there's an anxiety about going to dinner, there's an anxiety about different things that cause me to feel like I need to urinate, okay? Nature's calling, natural activity. But then I realize, no, I can look at it, oh, am I thinking about X or Y?

[37:24]

And the answer is yes. Suddenly that urge is dissipating, okay? When I'm sitting and want to cough. I recognize, oh, it could be bringing up grief in something in my mind, and that's Chinese medicine, why we would cough. Oh, I can just embrace my sadness, and then the cough resides, and I don't cough. Nature's calling. Yeah, thank you. Jeff? What came up for me when you were talking is, no, not natural. No supernatural, no not natural. All is natural, right? Uh-huh. returning to the original self. We talk about stripping away causes and conditions. Each moment is both conditioned and unconditioned. From what do we respond? We talk about the seed story, we talk about the seven, eight levels of consciousness. Right. Where do we act from? So this is the difference between the sloppy naturalness, sloppy naturalness, which comes from operating from causes and conditions, not being mindful, not being aware.

[38:32]

For me, Whereas if self arises and passes away in each moment, and each moment is new, arising from a place of balance, which is nothingness, what do you see? Who are you? What will you do? This is the difference. Yes, it's natural to respond to a condition of war and PTSD, but that's a conditioned response. Harm comes from that. We can also train to be good. We can learn about generosity and learn about the feelings of how it feels to treat each other with equanimity and with grace and with compassion. That can be a learned behavior too. What arises from nothingness? If we think about the koan where the guy is hanging from his teeth by a branch and some moron comes along and tries to get him to talk about Bodhidharma coming from the West and the guy can't talk because he'll die. How did he get there? What happened just before that moment? Sometimes for me, we don't know what happened, he awoke there.

[39:36]

You find yourself doing something. That finding is like being possessed. What are you possessed by? Where do you act from? When we think about intent, when we think about the arising of behavior, people talk about here how we carry an intent before us and we find the precepts arising as a condition of our practice. Where did that come from? That comes from nothingness. So when I talk about naturalness, I have to associate with nothingness. That's kind of what it means to me. Yes, I can be trained, but there is also a stripping away. There's also a remembering balance and remembering nothingness. Do you have an example for us? Totally. When I first started coming here, I came to treat my cancer, right? And I had all these ideas about what Zen was going to do to help me drain my cancer cells. But what I learned was, is that the most natural thing was what cancer was doing.

[40:39]

So many people treat cancer as if it's a violent fight, as if it's a war, as if it's a battle, as if it's a struggle. It's not. Cancer is as natural as breathing. So what happened for me is I lost my fear of death. I remembered that the process of living is the same as the process of dying. They are exactly the same. That wasn't a training, that was an arising. I didn't think that, it just happened. Thank you. Judy, then Mary. to stay in my heart and articulate my experience right now. And it's been hard to stay present during your talk.

[41:43]

It's been an incredibly encouraging talk and I really appreciate your encouraging and light-hearted tone and all these wonderful examples of really bringing to life some being with what is naturalness. And at the same time, early on in your talk, when you talked about sexuality, I experienced a lot of pain in my heart because of what I heard in terms of framing sexual drive and sexual intimacy in terms of reproduction. And so I... No, I wasn't going to get away with that. You know, and I, and there's, you know, I have so many friends who are gay, who are bi, who are, you know, and then there's gender identity, and we could go on and on about all the ways that we, that I make an other of someone unconsciously.

[42:51]

But I have to stay with, you could call it vow, you could call it what you were talking about, of what it means to really turn towards that and not turn away. And so, ironically, or maybe very naturally, for the rest of your talk, I've had to really just keep returning to. And so, for me, what I'm noticing is that naturalness or freedom or looseness is to not bypass the pain that arises. Right. knocking on the door, you know, right here, you know, inclusivity. What is that? What is that? And so I guess what I want to say, I don't know if it's really a question, but it's that I really want to meet you in a place where I can voice the pain that actually is a bridge to including whatever you were really going

[44:06]

That's great, thanks. I would like it if we talked about it outside rather than that becomes the topic today, if that's okay. Well, it's a concern to me because I think that sometimes I find that I voice what others in the room might be thinking or feeling in some other frame, maybe a different storyline. And so I'm left with this con of what does it mean to really dialogue in a community around conscious and unconscious inclusivity and exclusivity. Yeah, I think it's a good question. If anybody else has this topic, let's get together afterward. We can all do that at the same time. Mary? Thank you. And thank you, Judy, also. I didn't notice that moment in myself, but when you talked about it, I did. But that's not what I wanted to say. I wanted to say that a number of years ago I experienced a kind of turning moment here when Sojin said, self-consciousness is the experience of being separate from I. Which I've been working on for years.

[45:37]

And it seems to me that that is about what you're talking about in terms of what we get out of the we-they thinking. versus what we get out of realizing there's no way. And I was thinking about your argument with Suzuki Roshi, maybe not exactly an argument, so much as an agreement with how hard it is to talk about it because it's almost impossible to talk about it without going dualistic. And that's what you did. There was a way in which it sounded like he was going dualistic and you were taking up the weight, there's no bad side. And so, How do we keep alive the bridge between how we have to manifest and also what the other reality is that isn't we-they? I don't know how to talk about it. I think it's a really important point that a big part of the looseness is the interconnectedness, which I meant to say and I forgot to say.

[46:40]

A big part of how you get to the looseness is to get out of the separateness. Yeah. Thank you. I think that's a really important point. Yeah. Jed? It's quiet over there, you guys. Or am I just not looking over there? Oh, oh, OK. Go ahead. You know, we both have kids that are in their 20s now, and my kids are actually a little older. The thing that occurred to me about your discussion about training and us and them is that our kids are going to have to be dealing with the consequence of climate change.

[47:42]

Yeah. And I wonder if you wanted to talk about that or maybe we should just think about it. Yeah, that's well, it's a different time. I mean, sadly, We're not the first species whose, I don't think we're the first species whose waste products have created an environment that it can't live in anymore. Like, that's basically, I think, what's happening. So what could we do to change that outcome? I don't know, but yeah, it's going to be over on the looseness. It's not, you know, because the habit, everything, the climate change is only about how we're built and how we're trained. I mean, it's nothing else. So yeah, that would be amazing if we could turn that around. Yeah. I wanted to mention one thing I forgot, which is a little bit off topic, but in my examples of us and them, I've been thinking a lot about this book, Toni Morrison's book, Playing in the Dark.

[48:54]

I don't know, I read it so long ago. This is where I've gone with what she said there, I don't know. But it's like, for the founding fathers, how were they free? It's like they tried to be free, but they were more free. that it was a, you felt more free if there was someone who wasn't free. So like, I mean, there was some way that slavery was, in a terrible, awful way, it was like the way people could prove that they were free. If they weren't, if they actually, when they got over here, they didn't probably feel that free. You know what I mean? So I just think that's a really interesting example that she brings up. It's like unfree makes you feel more free, definitely in the deluded sense. So can we compare the feeling of being for the Cubs and the Cubs winning?

[49:59]

You have to have someone lose to win. Can we compare that feeling, us and them, whatever it is, our religion or something, the feeling that we're all one family, this is one, you know, all living beings are one family, which gets to, you know, it's like, what does that feel like compared to my family, my religion, my group, my, you know, like, feel into both those feelings and how are they different? They're two different kinds of feelings, I think. Yeah, this, I'm sorry, Paul. Our last one. Yes. I just wanted to say that I thought Judy's comment was very brave and important. And I personally felt that your response, that it wasn't relevant to the larger discussion, felt like it was designating separateness. Okay, I'm sorry. It's not about apologizing, it's just something that I felt because, you know, no one can assume which issues are relevant to everybody or nobody, and actually the problems or challenges of what might seem like a minority, whether it's

[51:06]

sexuality or gender or race are actually relevant to everybody, in my opinion. I agree. I agree with that totally. And thank you. That was also brave of you to say.

[51:18]

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