Good morning. Well, it's Christmas time, and my Christmas gift to you is probably going to be a short lecture. Christmas, for a number of years now, hasn't meant a whole lot to me. I haven't done very much. But last, I guess it was Thursday, we don't have a television set. And don't take a daily, well, we take the Wall Street Journal, but that doesn't give you all the spectacular news about Christmas shopping ads and all that, so. I've been kind of out of touch, but this Thursday, I had to go down to Home Earth Access. Yeah, right, yes. It's always a little busy down there, but it was sheer chaos. It suddenly occurred to me, oh yeah, it's Christmas time. It's really Christmas time.

[01:02]

And then the traffic has gotten worse, and we went down and took some gifts to family and things. So Christmas started to come up a little bit for me. Then I found out that I was going to be giving this talk, and I thought, well, you know, I can remember how the minister used to bore me when I was a boy with the Christmas servants, so why can't I do that to you, right? I should be able to talk about Christmas. Last week, Mel talked about Christmas a bit and about it being a Christian holiday, that we could participate in that. And I think that's so, you know. What I'd like to do is talk about Christmas, but from what I think is probably a Buddhist perspective. And one of the lines that has always been associated most with Christmas for me is, peace on earth, goodwill toward men.

[02:14]

That always seemed to pretty much sum it up for me. That was, I thought, very good sentiment. But I didn't see a whole lot of it, you know. And I always wondered why that was. So when I started to look at this, I started looking at goodwill toward men. And I thought, well, what is goodwill? What is goodwill? And I think that Maybe one of the ways that it can be looked at is as compassion. I think that's something we talk a lot about, is compassion in Buddhism, and I think it fits pretty well. So I got the dictionary out again. And they have a little definition like this for compassion. They have a big definition for sympathy, which is sort of a synonym. And I boiled it down or took the best definition I could find.

[03:18]

And it says, a sympathetic consciousness of others' distress together with a desire to alleviate it. A sympathetic consciousness of others' distress together with a desire to alleviate it. And that's That's pretty good, I think. That's a nice dictionary definition. And I began to think more about that, and I realized that in order to feel goodwill, I think there's a lot of, there's some prerequisites to really understanding compassion, goodwill. And one of the basic Buddhist teachings is the three marks of existence. And those are impermanence, suffering, and no-self. And impermanence is kind of, well, it should be obvious to us, you know. Everything around us is impermanent.

[04:21]

Not too long ago we had warm sunny days and now we have cold sunny days. The flowers, I was looking at the tomato plants out in the garden and they're all turning brownish black and kind of drooping and falling down and the tomatoes aren't going to get red. The green tomatoes aren't going to get red now. So there's some impermanence to that tomato plant. And when I think of impermanence, I always think of an old folk song lyric that says, there's changes in the weather and there's changes in the sea, but there ain't no change in me. And the first time I heard that, yeah, right, right. The first time I heard that, I thought, well, you know, that man's not very happy. And I don't think he's got too good a grip on things. You know, there's no change in me. That's pretty rigid. And, of course, he was singing about the girl that had left him, and I can understand why she might have. So, impermanence is something we have to deal with all the time.

[05:28]

Change goes on all the time. Everything changes. And we have to understand that in order to live our lives in a realistic way. And suffering, we know about suffering. Everybody knows about suffering. And basically it comes from our desires, you know, you're either grasping, we want to hold on to things, we don't want to let go, you know, this is really good, I don't want to let go of this. Or, not that, I don't want that, keep it away. So we have some aversion. And again, we're just trying to stop change. We just won't accept change. So we suffer. And no self is always a tough one. That's one I think that most of us have the most trouble with. Because, you know, I know I change. You all know you change. and everything changes.

[06:30]

And yet at the same time, I'm still Bob Paulson. I've always been this. This has been the name they gave me when I was born, and I've had it all along. And so I'm not the 12-year-old boy that I remember rather fondly. golden age for a boy where your parents will still feed you and take care of you and give you an allowance but they'll let you go places on your bike you know and you can get off and you can get away from everything and at the same time for most of us anyway, most men, boys, hormones have not started their onslaught, and so girls are, you know, not the problem they later become for us. And for girls, it just happens a little earlier, and the opposite way around. But it's a nice age. But I'm not that 12-year-old boy anymore. But yet I am. You know, that 12-year-old boy is still there. And the same is true for all of you, you know. You're something new. but what you've been also.

[07:32]

And so no self is very difficult to grasp sometimes because it looks like there's this great continuity. There is a continuity there. But at the same time, there's been this big change. I think it only looks paradoxical unless you realize that that's the way we are. And if you understand impermanence in the sense that you know, a no-self in terms of impermanence and change, it's just the way our lives are. There's nothing paradoxical about that, it's just that we're not used to seeing it that way. You know, the Buddhist, sort of the standard Buddhist definition of that kind of thing is that the flame on the candle is the same flame as when that was lit about half past nine this morning, but yet it's not the same because the wicks burned down, the wax burned down, so it's a different flame, but it's still the same flame. So the three marks of existence, basically they're always talking about that. They're always talking about the way things change. Nothing holds still for us. Everything shifts constantly.

[08:34]

We have to watch out for that. And if we're like the guy in the folk song, and we won't go with that, and we won't live our lives in accordance with that, then we have a tough time. Then we have a really tough time. But if we can remember that, then it makes a big difference for us, I think. Because when we see that, then maybe we have a little bit of an experience of our fundamental nature, what it is we really are, basically. And we all have these experiences. And if we realize that, if we understand that somehow, then our attitude begins to change. Our whole attitude toward everything begins to change, toward ourselves, toward everybody else, toward cats and dogs and rocks and, you know, cooking dinner. Everything begins to change. This came up the other night when I started to think about this stuff, before I knew I was going to have to talk about it, actually.

[09:43]

I was back in my 20s. One night I went up to San Francisco with another guy and we started drinking. We wound up in the Tenderloin. Lord knows how we ever got there, but, you know, I think it was misguided innocence. And we went from, you know, we were going from bar to bar, and we walked out of this one bar, and as we were walking down the street, this man came up to us on the street and he said, this is just like the cartoons, he pulled up his sleeve and he says, you want to buy a watch? And he had watches all the way up his arm. You know, a whole bunch of wristwatches, all the way up his arm. I looked at him and I said, no, I don't want to buy a watch. And he just said right away, no, I don't want to buy a watch. And right away I had this mirror right in front of me and I thought to myself, my God, that's how he saw me. That's what I just said. But I didn't really realize what he was doing for me. And I don't know, maybe I wasn't sure enough of myself or something else. I just walked away. I didn't want anything more to do with this guy. I mean, after all, the guy had an armful of stolen watches probably, and he was kind of a pariah. You don't want to mess with that guy. And I walked away, but it's always stayed there.

[10:47]

Every once in a while that memory comes up about that man with the armful of watches and the way I treated him. And I thought about that. I thought about that a number of times. And I think basically what happened there was that when the man came up to me, I knew I was in the tenderloin. I wasn't really too pleased about being there because I knew this wasn't the greatest place in the world. And then this guy comes up and tries to sell me stolen goods. And I just kind of, reacted to him. And my attitude was, I don't trust this guy. I don't trust anything around here. Really, this isn't a good place to be. Well, I think the basic difference now, maybe, with my attitude is the fact that I do trust. It's the way we have to be. If we're going to be really in tune with things, we can trust each other. In fact, I don't think there's any other way we need to be, or should be, or can be.

[11:48]

I think anything else is a mistake. So we have to trust that we all are Buddha nature. Now this does not mean a very naive kind of trust, but a trust nonetheless. And I didn't trust that man. Boy, I didn't trust that guy. So if we have a trust in sort of our collective Buddha nature, then our attitude is different. And with that attitude, we begin to function a little differently. That doesn't mean you should go stick yourself in bad situations. Avoidance is a pretty good method. I don't go to the Tenderloin very often anymore, although what brought this up for me was we were over there the other day, we walked through it from one shopping area to another. There's something called the threefold resolute faith. Not A, but threefold resolute faith.

[12:49]

And what that is is the first one is we aim to benefit ourselves, one's own self. Aim to take care of ourself. And the second one is to benefit ourself and others. And then the third one is to benefit others. And I think you can see the progression in that. And the last one is pretty much like dropping away body and mind or something like that. Anyway, no self comes into it pretty clearly where you're not too concerned about how you're perceived or what you're doing or anything else, but you're mostly concerned with what's out there, whatever you're dealing with. And I think we do this. I think we have to keep on doing this because, you know, we can't really take care of someone else unless we've first taken care of ourselves. I think that's sort of a truism. And so, you know, we're going through this, we're practicing the threefold resolute faith time and time and time again.

[13:54]

Take care of ourself and then we can give to others. And we can forget ourselves. We really forget about that. And that's very nice. And that's a part of our attitude. It's the way our attitude works, I think. And I said, you know, we should trust. We should really trust. And I think that's so. And I said, not naively. With some people, you know, you have to dig pretty deep to see Buddha nature. At least it seems that way. You know, it seems that way. If you go to buy a used car, I think that it's nice to trust the man, but I think it's also nice to be skeptical about some of his claims. But that doesn't mean you think the person is, you know, no good or something, but you understand that we all have these problems, you know, with the three poisons, greed, hate, and delusion or ignorance. And none of us are free of that. And some of us carry a pretty heavy load. And so we just have to kind of recognize this and try to understand where we are, ourselves and others.

[15:01]

Where is everybody with this? So goodwill, it seems to me, is compassion. And it's what the Metta Sutta talks about. You know, we chant that on Monday mornings here. The Metta Sutta says, may all beings be happy. And I think that's partially what The medicine is talking about, you know, goodwill. It's saying, I, the person that's chanting this, have goodwill, have compassion for everyone. I want everyone to be happy. And somebody gave a talk here the other morning, and it was really nice. He sat up here and he said, I love this place and I love all of you." That was great, you know, that was really great. He had a great deal of trust, you know, to say that. And he could see, I think, he sees people that way. So goodwill toward all men, that part of it anyway, it seems to me, is just to be trusting and to try and take care of things and try and take care of people.

[16:13]

and take care of yourself. And we always come to that part of Christmas, you know, which is the giving part. And that's the part that gives us a lot of fits sometimes, I think. I read in the paper the other day a quote by Ivan Boski. I don't know if you know who he is. Well, obviously some people do. This is a man who's a billionaire. I mean, that's with a B. I mean, this guy has lots and lots of money. And he's been convicted of insider trading and all kinds of shady stuff. The Wall Street Journal was very funny. They called him Ivan Boesky, moral philosopher and inside trader. I thought that was great. And where they got the moral philosopher from was the fact that in 1986 at UC Berkeley Business School commencement, he gave the commencement address. This was obviously before he was indicted, I think. But maybe not. Maybe not.

[17:15]

Maybe not. But at any rate, he gave the address there. And he said this. He said, greed is all right. I think greed is healthy. Well, I think he and that guy in the folk song got a lot in common. They're both pushing their own views pretty hard right there. And there's a little bit of self-justification going on, maybe. But when we give at Christmas, when we're little kids, the greed is pretty obvious. But later on, I think we all understand that greed isn't what Christmas is about. So giving is something that, it's the dana paramita, that's the paramita of generosity or giving. And Mother Teresa, when I was, before, when my wife, my wife was in England, we used to correspond, and I'd send her some Buddhist book or something to read, and she wrote back this letter and said, well, I don't see any talk about love in there.

[18:19]

Where's your talk about love, you know? She was, you know, she was really asking a question. She asks good questions. And so I said, well, I think if you take giving, the Dhanaparamita, with compassion, then your action is going to be no different than Mother Teresa's action. She's a very generous person, a very giving person. She's always out there, and I think most of us have either seen the film or heard something about her. So that kind of giving is very important at Christmas. And this goes along with the second or third Resolute Faiths, to aim at the benefit of oneself and others and to benefit others. And that kind of giving is what we're looking for. In the old days, in Buddha's time, you know, monks would give teaching, and people would give back, you know, material support, food, shelter, clothing, whatever, you know, whatever was necessary. In this country, it doesn't work that way, and that's okay, because I'm not so sure I could make a living, you know, giving teaching.

[19:28]

But at any rate, Giving has always been something that people understood, have always understood that giving is a really good thing to do. And Christmas has a lot of that in it. Well, the other part of that little saying that I like, you know, is peace on earth. Peace on earth, goodwill toward men. And peace on Earth doesn't look like it's too attainable. You know, we have Beirut, Central America, Panama, Romania, Berkeley. Not a whole lot of peace anyplace, and I don't think there ever has been. You read history, you find out there's never really been a time of peace. Even the Pax Romana, you know, was not a time of peace. It was a time of stability, and for some people, great prosperity, but for those that Rome didn't like, it was a time of oppression and there were revolts.

[20:35]

So it wasn't really all that peaceful. So I suppose what that really means is that maybe we ought to differentiate between the kind of peace that's possible between countries or neighbors even. and the kind of peace that we can come to ourselves, an inner peace. And probably, until we get that inner peace, we won't find that outer peace anyplace. And that's both individually and collectively. Once again, you know, the three poisons, greed, hate, and ignorance, We seem to be, that seems to be our condition. It seems to be what we're subject to. And so if we're greedy, we're always going to want to be getting more. There doesn't seem to be a bottom to greed.

[21:37]

It just seems to go on and on and on and on. It never seems to stop. Ivan Boski is a wonderful example of that. These guys have billions of dollars. They have more money than many countries. And still haven't got enough. And hatred, we all get angry. We all get angry. And all of this stuff comes from ignorance. So the more we work at this and the more we understand where our ignorance is, probably the more peaceful we're going to be. I don't know that we'll ever get perfect peace. I don't know. I read the old stories, but I've only got my own insides to look at, and it doesn't look too hopeful for real peace right now. I read an article, too, about a man named Simpson. At this time of year, there's a lot of human interest stories come up in the newspapers.

[22:40]

And this fellow Simpson was a black man in Washington, D.C., who had a job working for the Defense Department as, I think, a maintenance man. And he was doing okay. Then he began, he lived with this woman and then they had a baby. And the baby was born with cerebral palsy. It's very difficult for these two people. And so they began to use drugs to get away from it once in a while. And then apparently the woman began to use drugs a lot of times. And they had another baby. And the second baby had cerebral palsy. And the older, there were two boys, and the older boy was eight years old and still needed diapers and only had about three words that he could say. And they apparently really loved their father. They really, really loved their father. And he really seemed to care for them, too.

[23:44]

He seemed to take better care of them than their mother, who was really having a terrible drug problem. She even sold the diapers for drugs. And the man was using drugs, too. He wasn't blameless in that. They wound up in a city shelter, which was a pretty awful place by all accounts. And finally, I guess it got so bad that one night, the man, Mr. Simpson, reached under his bed and took out the knife he used for self-defense. I mean, that was how they had to live. And he killed the two little boys and tried to kill himself. Two little boys died, but he didn't. And so now he's serving 30 years to life in prison. And his wife has just disappeared, or the woman he lived with. And so you look at this and you say, well, that's pretty awful. That is a terrible life. That is a really terrible life. And I think it is. I think it is a terrible life. And I don't have any answers for people like Mr. Simpson because I don't know if it's possible for them.

[24:53]

I don't understand that sort of thing. It's a basic injustice that seems to exist everywhere. But when you read about Mr. Simpson, you see that in many ways he had a great deal of ignorance because drugs are no way out. And his whole life was pretty messed up. And he can take credit for some of that. But he just had a bad life. He just had a really bad life. But at the same time, if you look at Mr. Simpson and you read what he said, and you read what some of the other people said about his behavior with the two little boys, you see that there was a very loving person there for all the awful things that happened. There was a person who had a lot of good in him somewhere. And that's heartening. That's heartening. And perhaps with a little different attitude, you know, perhaps if we can just get a little different attitude and approach our lives a little differently, then maybe those kinds of things would be a little bit more rare. I don't know.

[25:55]

I don't know. But I know that our attitude seems to make all the difference in the world. And if we just, you know, if we just trust ourselves, and trust each other, not naively, but just trust each other, then we begin to function differently. This is basically what I've, you know, what I've been thinking about this Christmas is just that, you know, just trusting each other, just trusting each other and having that attitude and carrying that attitude with us whenever we can, you know, and then when we forget it, come back to it. It's just like Zazen. You sit there, and the thoughts come up, or you go to sleep, and you realize that, and then you come back to your breath. You come back to your posture. That's the way our lives are. We're always losing our balance, and then we're always finding it again.

[27:02]

It's very important to remember that. Lose your balance, find it. As another teacher said, The beauty of a flower is in its fading away. You know, we're back to impermanence again, but we're back to balance too. Everything is balanced. I'm not, I don't know, you know, you can't see the balance a lot of times because we're very limited, but it's there. It's there. So when I, when I think about peace on earth, I have to pretty much think about myself and I have to come back to the three marks of existence, remember what it is that my life is, and then try to live my life in accord with that. And, you know, we have a lot of help. We've got the three marks of existence, which kind of define us, or our lives, the four noble truths, we have the precepts, a lot of things that help us, give us guides on how to live our life, give us some pointers.

[28:11]

So I suppose that, you know, basically I feel that maybe the best way one can live one's life in that sense is to do one's best not to cause suffering or to add to suffering, and whenever possible, to alleviate it. And remember, that was pretty much the definition of compassion, which was sympathetic consciousness of others' distress together with a desire to alleviate it. So when I go back to peace on earth, goodwill toward men, I think maybe the phrase is upside down. Maybe it's through goodwill toward men we come to peace on earth. And it's not a permanent state. Something we have to keep going back to all the time. We have to keep renewing our vows.

[29:19]

We have to keep renewing our attitude, coming back to our attitude, coming back to our intention. And not just at Christmas time, of course. Every day, all the time, never stops. And moment by moment, this happens to us. Attitudes change. It's, you know, it's... I suppose the best place for me is to test this is in an automobile. I'm terrible in a car. Absolutely horrible. My wife does not like to ride with me, I don't think. Because I get really angry. And it's because I lose my trust, I think. I think I don't trust the other drivers. In fact, I know darn well I don't. But I think we can. I think we really can. And as Manuela said, If we trust ourselves, our own Buddha nature, we trust all those other drivers, they're too, they are Buddha nature.

[30:28]

We have that kind of trust, then we're in command of the road. No matter what's going on out there, we're really in command of the road. And I think that's true in our lives. I keep trying to practice that. It's a little difficult for me, but I keep trying to practice that. I don't have much more. Comments? It's a little tricky to... And they sort of built up this thing about it.

[31:38]

For a comfortable layout, you still have to be a little arbitrary. And I don't quite know how to do that. Keep your eyes open. I keep somehow coming back to feelings of trusting both of them and encouraging trust

[33:40]

I tend to err on the naive side and I'm trying to stick up for myself and really see clearly what's going on and then I find I tend to mistrust people and I found myself in a situation yesterday and I felt so badly because I had bought these vitamins and it turned out they had tryptophan in them and I thought why is this person selling me this stuff because I didn't know that it had this So I went back there and I said, you know, I'm rather surprised that you're selling this stuff. But Chip again was very offensive and very angry at me. And I thought, gosh, why did I ever say anything? Well, yeah, maybe he was defensive, or maybe actually I was right, but I don't know, because I don't know so much about criminal justice.

[35:39]

And also, my boss, who I'm always endlessly having problems with, really tried to call him on his stuff as it happens, or as I think it's happening. And yesterday, once again, I found this great opportunity to call him on his stuff, so I did. messed up at all, it's always broken and I immediately feel separated and separate and like I'm just sticking up for what I think is right in my way and not really seeing the whole picture. So it's a little tricky. Sure. It's always tricky. Yeah. When I felt connected, it's almost seemed to be something like a field of connectedness, and it has to do with surrender, and I'm not familiar with actually how it comes about so much.

[36:47]

I mean, we can kind of talk about it, but I don't know how that happens, and I'm wondering if you have anything to say about that. How surrender happens? I'm not quite sure I... Well, I'm describing my own... when I have experienced that feeling of connectedness, it feels like it happens after some sort of a surrender. And I'm wondering if you have any... because when we talk about it in terms of day-to-day kinds of things, it doesn't really work to describe being connected in that way to me. Yeah, I think I know what you mean. I think, basically, what my feeling about that is, is that, you know, when I come up against a situation like that, the surrender is the surrender of me, you know, dropping that, forgetting about my agendas or things like that, and trying to take care of the situation, whatever it happens to be. And that means approaching someone with an attitude of, yes, you know,

[37:50]

you are Buddha nature, but at the same time you're selling this stuff with tryptophan in it and it's not such a good chemical, apparently. And I want to know, you know, why are you doing that? So if I come there with that attitude, I think basically, if I come there with an attitude that says, you just sold me some poison, even if I don't say that out loud, somehow the person's going to intuit it, I think. I think we do that. On the other hand, if I come there with an attitude of, Well, you know, what is this? You know, is this okay or what's happening here? What's going on? I'm not quite sure I understand. Then they intuit something different. Doesn't mean that I might get too different. I might get exactly the same reply from the person. But then again, I might not. My own experience has been that I don't usually. That I usually get a little bit more moderate reply from somebody. If I come there not, you know, banging on them, but coming there trying to actually understand what's going on, you know, not coming there with some sort of idea of it, other than the fact that, you know, this is what I see.

[39:03]

What do you see? That's what I meant about not being naive. There are people that sell us stuff that's not good for us. There are people that do things that aren't good, and those people you have to watch out for, and you have to deal with them, and you can't deal with them in some sort of sappy, you know, oh, aren't we all wonderful, wait, it just doesn't work sometimes. But the basic attitude still has to be there, underlying it all, no matter what action you have to take. And that's the tricky part, because when you have that attitude, I think that gets rid of a lot of your own stuff, you know, what we call ego with a small e, maybe. Does that make sense to you? Not easy, though, is it? Yeah, there's a big difference.

[40:14]

Codependence, as I understand the term, means that I need to fix somebody because I need to do that to make myself feel better. And on the other hand, compassion, forget about yourself. What's necessary here? Maybe nothing is necessary. Maybe the best thing is to just let the person stew in their own juice. Maybe something is as simple as handing somebody a quarter. Or maybe, you know, you have to spend a few months or years being with a person. But the point is, forget yourself. Codependence deals with you. And compassion deals with others. And you don't enter into it. It's simply an act of giving. It's unselfish. It's very much just giving. Okay? No? Hmm. No. No. I can't always see the difference either.

[41:15]

But I think if you can, you know, if you can kind of Keep that in mind. Then you'll know when you're doing something because you're going to feel better about it. You're going to feel good. It's simply the old story about giving alms. If you give alms to a beggar so that you can gain merit and feel good, then you're not giving alms to the beggar. You're really giving alms to yourself. And that's not really generosity. It's generosity to yourself, but that's not what you say it is. So you have to just see it for what it is. And trying to see things for what they are is what we spend our whole lives trying to do. It's why we all sit in this zendo, you know. It's why they stick me up here every once in a while, so I can make a fool of myself, you know. It's just the way it is. Yeah? Would you please say a few words about forgiveness? Yeah. Sure. Once a month we have a bodhisattva ceremony here. It's a repentance ceremony.

[42:16]

And we say, all my ancient twisted karma, I now fully avow. And that's the beginning of forgiveness, forgive oneself. And if we can do that, and if we understand that there's no difference between self and others, then we've forgiven everyone else also. We are independent and interdependent. Once again, that kind of paradox. We're all very much the same. We all have Buddha, we all are Buddha nature. But at the same time, we're each unique. You're very different than me in many ways, I'm sure. And so, consequently, we have to see this thing which looks paradoxical, but isn't. And so, when we forgive ourselves, we're forgiving others. We forgive others, we're also forgiving ourselves. Forgiveness is, I don't know, it doesn't seem to be too hard to me because there isn't much I want anymore, you know. But it's kind of hard, I know.

[43:18]

Yeah, it used to be pretty hard. I bore grudges for a long time. My father was good at that. My father bore grudges pretty well. He didn't speak to his sister for 30 years. He was good at it. Yeah, he was good at it. But he wasn't too happy being like that. I don't know, maybe you should come to a bodhisattva ceremony once in a while. Well, they have them other places too. And I think almost every religion talks about repentance some way or another. And even if they did, in a sense of evil and maliciousness, then I'll be able to keep my center.

[44:21]

But it's a very, very difficult, very difficult thing to be able to do that. And if I can't, it's like, you know, the compassion is on the other side of the wall, but forgiveness seems to be that door. And if I can't find the door, all I do is keep hoping That's really a nice metaphor. Now, I guess, again, you know, it's basic attitude, and it's understanding that people do things, you know, from ignorance. And those can be very evil things that people do, but they're doing it from ignorance, and there is a cure for that. Well, it's what the Buddha taught, you know, fourfold, four noble truths, the Eightfold Noble Path. all of these things, you know. That's what Buddhism is trying to teach us all the time, it's just that sort of thing, just what our fundamental being is like and what our lives really are like.

[45:24]

And once we understand those things and begin to work on those things, then a lot of this other stuff kind of, you know, It gets a little bit slower, it gets a little bit lower key. And so forgiveness then isn't something that we can really give to people, it's just something we feel. It's something that, you know, I can allow myself not to be angry, not to hate that person because they're ignorant. I wonder if that was a comment. Well, it has emotions involved with it and feelings involved with it, sure. That's what we are, we are feeling emotional beings. You don't think so? That's one aspect of us. Yeah. No, of course it isn't the only aspect, but we can't ignore that. How is the dilemma of trying to try to say something unpleasant and then get this awful reaction and then feel like you're disconnected and you draw on this thought?

[46:51]

That's really difficult. In one sense, it seems like the need to always be connected is a kind of a greed, to feel good. And that some sense of detachment from having everything always been wonderful, and have other people always react to you wonderfully, is actually, in that situation, it would not be bad if that's what happened. And your ability property or whatever is, is to transcend that and not to feel that I've got to get back to that sense of connectedness because that itself might be a kind of

[47:41]

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