You can't take that. They want, you know, it's a way to get them around. And some people just die that way. I mean, some people just die very ethically and financially. not so much from the . You know, they just, you know, they can't . But a lot of times, that question is just a way of asking how to do the right combination of significant others. You said significant others. Yeah. Yeah, I really appreciate that attitude. I just got curious with a friend of mine who has cancer of the colon, cancer of the womb, and it's just merrily invading her whole situation.

[01:02]

Just a fantastic woman, feeling so sorry for herself, living at Ari Bahar, the Krishnamurti Foundation, where everybody's so nice. Nobody's touched her body once. There she is, going, well, I guess there's nothing to do. Wah! I mean, I have been rude, really, just rude. You know, we think being spiritual means to be nice, but sometimes you just get your, you know, bod your mama going. You just get your sword out. I mean, get done with, you know, wit, love, excuse me for it. But, you know, one of the things I want to say to you is that the people who were referred into our program agree, no matter how depressed they were, to take LSD, okay? And some of these people were bored, apathetic, and horribly depressed. And the great advantage, of course, is that the Vajra Mama there is the substance. It's so crazy, the situation. So much gets exploded into conscious awareness that the apathy kind of disappears rather rapidly.

[02:06]

But the first step, of course, is the agreement of the individual to do that. Besides becoming like a Garuda, if you will, crazy with somebody like that, or through love, connection, inspiration, I don't know of any strategy to offer you As a matter of fact, to be perfectly frank with you, I think all strategies are absurd, ultimately. That there's no cookbook for working with dying people. That ultimately, you know, I can tell you story after story of things that have been done, pain, depression, people who are medically difficult to manage, and all sorts of, you know, fusion, so-called fusion therapy of You know, lying in bed with somebody for ten hours, holding them, breathing with them. Great. Beautiful music, meditation, you know, the Heart Sutra, wonderful. But it's all phony.

[03:07]

It's all empty. If your situation isn't present, I mean, it's just another technique. Ridiculous. Hollow. Yeah. All right. Actually, no, I'm not saying that at all. What I'm saying is this, that where you started with yourself, okay so you're not working out of a technique or a cookbook or what you're told to do when your situation is correct when your condition is correct then you can open up your you know you know what to do this correct action now it's extremely handy to know Sometimes you're so enlightened, it does not happen to be my case or the case of most people I know, but some people are so enlightened as to know exactly what to do.

[04:17]

But when you have a certain correctness about your situation and your condition, it can be extremely helpful to know that telling people in certain conditions who are suffering from pain to go into their pain can help alleviate their pain by increasing it to the point where it moves from agony into ecstasy and then into emptiness, where you move from bliss into nothing. Or it's extremely handy to use music when time can be very dragging. Oh, I'm telling you. Talk about a problem with dying at times. Now, for somebody who wants to move their consciousness away from, you know, charting every little second that moves, music can be fantastic. A person can give their awareness over to music. It can be incredibly inspiring. It's wonderful. Or the Heart Sutra. There are moments when the saying of the Heart Sutra, the correct situation for the recitation of the Heart Sutra is so perfect.

[05:27]

It's not like you're saying the heart sutra just to say the heart sutra. That's not perfect. To condition the person into that situation. I mean, it's said with a kind of awareness of that field where there's transmission. Not conditioning, but transmission. So it's good to know how to do a lot of things. Laying on it. i mean i'm just awful i'll boy i i have this sort of attitude of just trying anything because the thing you know laying on of hands divine light i'll do anything you know if i'm guided somewhere by the situation in my heart to do it it's okay and generally it works really well Because you're not trying to figure it out. But it's great to have a wide range of possibilities available to you, which is why you go to school and get an education. And then, you know, the technique comes through, that technique, but it's not hollow.

[06:32]

You see what I mean? How do you think the situation is approaching to that from the patient's version of the whole hospital system? I'll tell you, I have had nothing but fantastic experiences working as a doctor. And let me tell you, I have worked in some horribly concerning... The University of Miami School of Medicine, Jackson Memorial Hospital. Forget it. It's backwoods. You know, Miami Beach Doctor of Consciousness. All they want to do is become a doctor so they can have a lucrative practice. Huh? In the meantime, you know, people are going crazy. They're suffering. And the thing that I have seen almost without fail is that if you're not walking in with some kind of preconception about how terrible doctors are and nurses are and health care professionals and you've got the answer, that we're all in this thing together and we're trying to find a way.

[07:42]

And that's their way. And you have a way. That other person has a way. Frequently, you know, in anthropology they have things called cultural brokers. Anthropology is such a great profession. They have all these cute terms. Now, cultural broker is a person who moves on the interface of systems of cultures or a medical system and the so-called outside world and finds the connecting point between these systems to make things work, you know, to get a deal going. if you will it's a terrible term but you know Eric Wolf thought of it and if you just want to play in that sort of metaphor okay what you want to do is get a good deal going to get something correct happening not to look at the medical profession as a bunch of bandits and demons and insensitive people but to actually when you look There's a higher rate of suicide. There are more crazy, miserable doctors than there are, you know, crazy, miserable and suicidal. I mean, you know, it's a terrible profession to be in. Hell, alcoholism, drug abuse.

[08:43]

I mean, these people have problems. It's very hard to work in medicine. So when you sort of look at it from their perspective, you come, oh, they're disadvantaged frequently because they've been in the sciences probably since high school. They've marched right toward their medical degree, right through an educational system which has not allowed B values, being values, meta values to come through. They've had no experience in spirituality or very rare in any kind of spiritual discipline. And they've been conditioned in a rather dehumanized way. But that doesn't mean they're not humans. I mean, it's true. Oh, well, let me encourage you to do it. No, you're in the perfect position to do it. Great. Great. Once you're in this position, what you actually do with the situation is very much restricted by the

[09:46]

No, it's not. But not entirely. But you can't do it. Absolutely. I think that they do care. I think not only you can, but you're enormously advantaged because you have the skill to be a scientist, in addition to have compassion. Then you come to a very simple understanding that being a so-called scientist or in the helping the healing profession, a medical doctor, doesn't mean that you have to be heartless or neurotic.

[10:50]

And I'd like to cite Paul Brenner as an example. I mean, there are hundreds of people that can be cited. The thing is that most people don't have the opportunity to explore life sufficiently before they enter into medical training, so that when they hit it, they're not prepared at all for what's going to happen to them when they have contact with so-called patients. And the result is, as I saw it anyway, in working in a medical school, it's a very defensive posture, immediately becoming a doctor, you have all the behaviors, and that's just an incredible defense. And that you don't have to dance that way, nor do you have to be weird as a doctor. You can be a fantastic doctor and be right, like many family doctors who are coming back happily. had that, you know, that thing going. And what I see, you know, when I was at the medical school in Miami, they introduced humanities and social sciences into the medical curriculum intentionally.

[11:52]

So as technological as medicine is getting, the complement is also very powerful in your training process. But you're so lucky to have this experience, which I presume you're in, because you wouldn't be sitting here now, as the foundation for your further education. To become a skilled technician is great. It's why I have respect for medicine. I just want to be sure I have a doctor who's loving, who's not going to try to do something to me that's not necessary, and who's going to inform me about my situation so I can participate in my therapy. It's great. I've had some wonderful experiences. Good. Do it. Yeah. Oh, it's so frustrating. I mean, your question is like, it is the worst. It's the worst.

[13:07]

It's like trying... You know, you drag the stone up the hill and it just rolls down. You're going nowhere. But I'll tell you, we don't have... I live in a place where there's no electricity, so there's no television. So every once in a while I come out into the world and buy a Time magazine to see how they look at the world. So I bought this Time magazine and I read the most astonishing article driving up here about work with coma patients. I'm sure somebody else read Time magazine, I hope. I said, great, because I've worked with people in coma, and they've come out of coma, and they're there, and talk about apathy. That's sort of the ultimate apathy. I mean, that's not only psychological apathy, although they might be struggling to break through. That's total physical apathy. And the thing that is sort of hard is that we literally become discouraged. We lose our courage because we have a view of somebody not being home or being so depressed that you can't move them.

[14:09]

And you think that for your gratification, you need to see progress. You need a reward. I don't want to talk about service now. I just recently decided that service is bad. Because generally, people who are in the serving profession do it for a reward. They want the gratification of seeing the response of the individual in relation to what they're doing or how they're being. So if you're beyond the place of wanting a reward, then so what? You do the best that you can and don't abandon the person because they've abandoned themselves. And something can happen at the time of death, which is truly magical. As I said, you don't have the so-called hallucinogen to explode the process, but the process will probably explode at the time of their death. It's not unlikely that that could happen. And you can be there for something miraculous and provide the context for that transition.

[15:18]

But we mostly give up in situations like that. Any more questions? Yeah. OK. All right. All right. Sometimes, you know, actually I was staying at a friend's house last night who had a terrible life experience and we talked about it quite a bit. She flipped out. She's a very confident woman and she said, gee, I wish somebody had told me about this before it happened to me. And I said, well, sometimes I don't like to tell people about what is probably going to happen because it'll help it happen and maybe it doesn't have to happen. So there's this kind of fine line. Are you programming somebody? Are Or are you, you know, the better part of wisdom, helping them develop an understanding of what is happening at the time it's happening by giving them a position of witness?

[16:30]

A wonderful analogous story is of the Yakut shaman who's initiated, and the story is that they cut off the head of the Neophyte shaman and they place it in the uppermost plank of the yurta from where it watches the chopping up of its own body. Okay, there's the witness. The person's not sitting there with a bag over their head. Oh, is this how they're dismembering me? They've got the map through the mythos, through the mythological transmission, and they're also watching. The witness is engaged. And there's a point where the witness disappears, but most of us, as I said, aren't enlightened. So it's handy to have your witness around. Let me tell you. So by telling somebody... Now, statistically speaking, or generally, or it is not infrequent, or I've seen this on a number of occasions, that some, you know, when in the LSD sessions, or when you're dying, or in this situation, or that situation, it comes up that you have what we call a crisis of trust. And it's an existential crisis where you feel as if the whole world is against you or you're being poisoned or you're in danger and you become very frightened.

[17:39]

It's kind of like a paranoid experience like that, sort of like that. And in the LSD work, we'd say it's not, and it wasn't, it was not uncommon that this experience would arise. And so I'd say to the person, it's not uncommon that that happens. And if that should happen, one of the ways that we can resolve it in terms of our relationship is for you to say, I'm not trusting you and what's going on here. And then I'll say to you, do you remember we spoke about this? This is not uncommon, and we call this a crisis of trust. Will you look within yourself for this source of distrust that's arising? And I'll help you in any way I can. Do you remember we spoke about this before? Well, let me tell you, it's very helpful in those situations. It's why mythology exists. If you're in the dark night of the soul and, you know, think John hasn't written about it, and you think you're the only one, you might hurt yourself.

[18:42]

Really. But if you realize, wait a minute, this is the part, this happens, this feeling of, in the case of the dark night of the soul, you have a map. there's where i am okay i can then let myself go more deeply into the experience thus knowing as dean said you know bring the cameras back you know back into his experience thus knowing when you're in hell thus knowing you're dying symbolically in the lsd work or in psychosis or or die Just knowing that there's a map, there's a sense of transformation, of movement, of journey. Somehow, then you just can go much, much deeper into it. Plus, knowing that, you know, everybody's going to do it. Millions of people have done it. You have a sense that, you know, you have lots of company. ... Absolutely.

[19:49]

Yeah. In the Upanishads, they talk about two birds and one tree. One eats the fruit. One watches the eater. There's the experiencer and the witness. Great birds are the friends of these two birds. Now, there's a point, you know, when you become one, when you obtain enlightenment, where there's no subject, there's no object, there's no witness, there's no experiencer. Great. You get an annual report card if you're there, but mostly, you know, we're not there. So developing or allowing the witness to arrive by virtue of the cartography being disclosed is very, very helpful. I mean, every Tibetan knows about the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It's very handy to have that map. The lama also is saying it in your ear. What you are probably experiencing is... And he's telling you. You're not telling him. He's observing physiological signs.

[20:51]

Clamminess and changes of breath and smells and so on. He's coding your experience, but he knows. He's giving you, you know, the steps in the journey and helping you deepen your experience. The primary clear light. Don't turn away. Face it. Go into it. Become one with it. It's really helpful to do this with... A teacher, a sitter, a facilitator, a foundation, a connection. A mirror. I mean, you know, a teacher is not somebody who's guiding you, per se. It's basically an individual who's so sensitive and so wide, and their mind is so still that they're reflecting. What is that to you? It's more of a praise and trust thing than anything else. The meta-level, what we're saying is the person is in a so-called paranoid experience. The meta-level is that you come out of the experience to say, essentially, by saying, I don't trust you, it's a paradox.

[21:59]

Right. I trust you enough to say I do not trust you. All of a sudden, you're in your experience of distrust. You're at another level of trust. Okay? Okay. It's a beautiful thing. It's really. And it never doesn't work if you do it authentically. OK? Yeah. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to tell you before you drink or if I wish to. Very similar. I mean, let's just say Stan once compared, Stan Grof, once compared LSD to like a radar, a scanner of the unconscious. You know, you have this, they call it unspecific amplifier.

[23:02]

And if you've had... I mean, I've had a lot of LSD. Not anymore. I doubt if I'll ever take it again. And actually, it's been a number of... several years since I've taken it. It's like, enough of that one. It gave me up, thank God, for small ailments. But in any case, it's very curious because it sort of scans the unconscious and it picks up all that sort of emotionally, karmically charged material and explodes it into conscious awareness. It's called unspecific amplifier. Now, in the LSD sessions at Maryland, There are two major kinds of psychedelic psychotherapy. One is called psycholytic therapy. It's a small dosage from 50 to 100 to 150 micrograms which are given in serial sessions, which slowly let the stuff be pulled up to the surface or the defenses break down and it comes up. The other is called psychedelic psychotherapy, and that is a single overwhelming dose, so to speak. When you're working with dying people, generally you only have time for one. You have a lot of work to do. I mean, if your objective is for that individual to die clearly with their family business cleaned up, their psychodynamic situation clear, their perinatal situation clear, their karmic situation, their whole transpersonal realm clear, so they're not going out in some dream space or another, it's a lot of work.

[24:25]

It's not a very popular form of therapy. It wasn't even at the time because the session day starts at 8 o'clock in the morning and finishes generally at midnight. It's a long day and it's a hairy one frequently. A lot of work. Plus there's the preparation and then there's the whole follow-up which you do. Now, oh yeah, in terms of ritual in other cultures, rites of passage, about which I spoke earlier, is the closest analog to... When I was at Maryland, I had done all this... When I got out of computer anthropology, I went into the field, okay, and I studied rites of passage in Africa. And I was there for a year going, huh, oh my dear, isn't this interesting? And then I was at Miami and I was looking at indigenous healing systems, its rites of passage, and the medical system and doing, you know, magic there. Then all of a sudden I'm doing the LSD work and I thought, now what's going on here? And then suddenly I realized, this is a rite of passage. It had every element that Van Hennep describes in terms of separation, transition, incorporation.

[25:28]

It's completely that, but it's not designed to be said to be a spiritual or a religious event. But the curious thing about mind, or about the human mind, is that when activated in a certain way, one of the features, the qualities that comes up is a sense of... I mean, a mystical field can awaken within the individual's experience. And again, in The Human Encounter with Death, which is not a spiritual book at all, but we have a number of accounts of people who had profound mystical experiences, which I can talk about, ad nauseam or ad infinitum, really amazing understandings and illumination, which changed not only their priority of values, but the values they were prioritizing. I mean, they were in what Maslow called B values, being values. It was fantastic.

[26:30]

Now, another one of those crazy things that, you know, comes through the cosmos, I gave a lecture at Duke University on death and dying in the Department of Psychiatry, and I went back to the motel, and I turned on the television to escape, and Billy Graham was on, and there was one line, right? I went, you know, I was about to turn it off. Thank God I didn't. He said, I never saw Hearst with a U-Haul behind it. I turned off the television. I went, thank you, Jesus. You know, I thought, that's great. Because talk about priority of value. How many darn people that we worked with prior to their values getting rearranged? They're worrying about their bank account and their taxes. It's crazy. Instead of getting their money matters straight and clear, they're creating chaos. Because what you want to do is die clean. Part of dying clean is finishing up your old business. You know, get your life in order, for God's sake. And part of the work we did, I mean, I just got very practical.

[27:31]

Dying is very practical. It's a very humorous side, too. I mean, I had some of the greatest gut laughs I ever had. I had with people who were dying. At that point, you know, why not? You just get down with people after a while. I mean... Believe me, it can be kind of awful sometimes, but it can be totally hilarious. Is it? Okay. Yeah, for me, the problem with LSD, every psychedelic drug, any psychedelic drug, is it's a bit like a Mack truck. And I personally, I decided to give up psychedelics rather recently.

[28:38]

I spent 10 years, I missed the whole psychedelic era. You know, I was in the computer laboratory at Columbia University and then in Paris at the New Zealand and then in Africa, you know, being ambitious. And then this thing happened in my life, which was facilitated by substances. Then I got attached to the vision, which was, you know, great. Now I got crazy with it, and then all of a sudden I said, wait a minute, hold on here. You know, this is not a good way to stay in the body, I realized. And not only that, I had a lot of suffering, abysmal amount. So one of the things I began to understand is there's a sort of natural dynamic to the unconscious, which is just fantastic. It lets the deep stuff leak through in the dream field at a nice handy rate. However, I hate to tell you this, but you already know it. Most people don't even bother to remember or can't remember their dreams. Second of all, even if they can remember, they don't give them any credence, value, pay attention to them or work with them.

[29:41]

And third of all, there seems to be a periodic exorcising of deeper energies. It's almost cleansing in nature for some individuals. And this is basically what these rites of passage function to do, to allow for this deeper unfolding to occur. Now, meditation practice, as I understand it, but only superficially, allows this to happen. You know, one is first not clear, so to speak, when, you know, one watches the mind. One isn't diverting the mind into, you know, in Zen, as I understand it, into a mantra or getting attached to the form, so you're not in this sense of mindfulness. And in so watching, a level of the unconscious can unfold after the chitch comes down, which is very much in the realm of illusion, dreamlike fantasy content, all right, free association, all that kind of stuff.

[30:45]

It can be extremely instructive to give to pay attention to that material, to give it some value in the sense that, yeah, it's coming up, uh-huh, I'm noticing, kind of thing. Because by not noticing, at least in my experience, not paying attention to that, it doesn't necessarily die of attrition. It just kind of comes back, you know, and you notice it, but then you don't. It's just And the LSD work taught me that, the people more than me, because I mostly didn't want to look at all the painful stuff but had it shoved in my thing. The reason why I don't like LSD and psychedelic drugs is that someone once called it a rape of the unconscious. There's a violating quality to the experience when you're hitting painful levels. And I don't want to talk about all the beautiful... transcendental things, I'm just talking about the hard stuff, okay, that can be extremely problematic.

[31:50]

And as I once said to Dr. Groff, quite frankly, sir, the treatment is more traumatic than the original trauma. Quite frankly, sir, the treatment is more traumatic than the original trauma that you're working on. And he's like, ah, terrible. And I also feel that almost every human being I've ever encountered is a rather tender thing, you know, when you're in a nice relationship with them. I don't know how to say it, but you know. And that you don't need to sort of hatchet your way through your defenses. In fact, I think your defenses can be your best friends. And becoming an ally with your defenses, you're able to control them to a certain extent. You know, what's with the door? I mean, you've got the door barred up ten times because you've opened it too fast and all this stuff has flooded out. But you're able to open it up in a way that's correct for the rate that you're able to integrate experience. And I think, in a way, that's why meditation is such a powerful process, because that's one of the things you learn to work with.

[32:58]

Maybe that's not right. Yeah. I live in Ojai. What's all this done for my life? I don't know. But I live in Ojai. on 40 acres of land that's a non-profit educational and wasn't until yesterday a service foundation. It's wonderful. I'm also the president of it, but actually that's just ridiculous too. And it's my life is, I'm having a great time. I mean, you know, my life is healthy as far as I can tell. My body is healthy and I feel a lot of joy and I feel useful and I practice every day. I'm up at 4.30 and I sit just like, you know, probably everybody here, but not as neat as you all do.

[34:03]

And the community in which I live practices every day the same way I do. Simple. It's at Krishnamurti land, and actually the land in which we are was the land that was originally given to Krishnamurti, and he didn't like it because it was too hard to get to. Praise the Lord. Where he is, everybody is, and where we are, it's easy to get to, and we're there. Yeah. Annie Besant, his spiritual mother, bought it in 27 and had a vision about a particular kind of thing happening there. And we're the first tiny, humble, kicking up of the foot. We're not even a step yet. And it's very humble. It's very much in nature. And teachers come there who are academics and so-called spiritual teachers. It's great. We have not a permanent structure there. We have no electricity. I never dress like this, you know. Everybody would laugh. Sometimes I come down the hill because I have to go to L.A. to talk, and everybody applauds and laughs and makes fun of me. It's kind of coyote land. There are lots of coyotes and deer and cougar and hawks and skunks and raccoons, and it's just, you know, it's really nice.

[35:12]

It's not very fancy. I wish some of you all would come down because it's, you know how it is. You probably don't know. How big is my truck? Oh, great. No, I'd love... We work a lot with a real crazy Zen master called Sansani who helped my life a lot. He's a 10,000-carp monk in... Oh, boy, I won't tell you tons of these stories tonight. But in any case, he's helped clean up. He's not helped clean up. He's helped me clean up my act considerably because he makes me laugh so heartily. I mean, he's just so crazy that life gets more delightful. I mean, it's something just sort of loosened up where I could actually forgive myself for having done so much damage. Truly. And that's been a great relief not to be guilty and angry to the degree to which I was. And living in nature is very powerful. Ultimately, I suppose the most powerful teacher I have is nature because it doesn't talk back, and actually I feel like a fool talking to it.

[36:14]

And so that the instructions of living in the way that we live, we spend a lot of time in the wilderness taking people back, It's a total rip-off. You know, we take people into the wilderness, and then we tell them to go off alone. We're not telling them how it's like to be in the wilderness. We're just saying, go. But the going is... It's in a way like Vipassana going. You know, we stress mindfulness. A lot of them are psychologists or psychology students, graduate students. And it's just fantastic. They know notebooks, all right? I don't even want you to tell me your experience when you come back. All I want you to do is to be mindful. Just be there and see what happens. Indeed. And, you know, and you don't have to go on top of the mountain and cry for a vision, you know, seeking the vision. Everybody's seeking these horrendous ordeals. You know, it's like seeking blizzards, seeking ordeals. You know, what happens, happens. Perfect. So there's a kind of simplicity in what happens there.

[37:17]

And sometimes it's complicated, too. And it's also a nice thing about being a woman. One of the reasons, this is the sexist invitation. I was asked here because, 50%, because I was a woman. because i heard that mostly men come here and speak and um actually so reb told me and he's right you know mostly men get asked to go and talk because they really are profound And since I'm getting less profound, I'm sure he regrets his decision. But it's true. I must say that even as all these things are happening in the world that are so dreadful, and I feel a lot of, you know, my heart really hurts a lot. But even as much as I feel terrible for what happened in the world, there's just nothing else that's coming through, too. You know, this doom and gloom and holocaust consciousness, the denial of life that seems to pervade a lot of people in despair today, which immobilizes them completely.

[38:20]

I mean, I just can't buy the program. I mean, it's a terrible... There is so much dukkha on this planet. It's just incredible. But, you know, I've had enough dukkha already. So, you know, I just feel like doing whatever my job is, you know, whatever it has to be. And part of it is in the foundation, it's very feminine. There's no game plan. There's no, you know, this is the vision that we're marching toward like soldiers. It's a much more kind of existential quality. And, you know, things change and turn around a lot and come up and go down. And, you know, as it comes, you go with it. Yeah. What is the program? Program? Well, we have... You don't want to hear this. Anyway, you know, Native American medicine people and Zen masters and tulkus and wonderful teachers who come who basically are characterized by the quality of coyote. You know, if they are wonderful teachers who have a sense of laughter about them, since I generally invite the people to the program, since I'm trying to laugh more because I'm finding it very healing, those are the kind of people who come.

[39:30]

So some really profound people come and it's wonderful. You know, it's very, uh, sometimes, I mean, you know, the thing with Samsoni, this crazy Zen master, you know, he walked, we, our, our sanctuary, my friend, it's not a beautiful hall with wooden floors. It's a teepee in a Canyon. So little Sansanine in this gray clown outfit, you know, he has little white rubber shoes, and he's all shiny, you know, and he comes shuttling down the path, and he looks as if he's never seen a teepee before, and he goes, oh. He steps into the teepee, and there we are all in our zafus, you know, sitting on our little black tills. trying to look like the then, and he goes, oh, wonderful, natural style then. She points up at the apex of the teeth, and he goes, one point. Or we did a keto. We should be talking about dying.

[40:33]

It's terrible, but I'll tell you one more story. We did a Kido, which is a chanting, which means energy way. And you sing this mantra in Korean. You know, I have such a prejudice against Koreans, really. You know, you could tell when I was born, I love Koreans. Anyway, it's just fantastic. So anyway, Kido, and we're singing, Hwang Saem Bosol, which is the name of the Bodhisattva in Korean. I just loathe chanting, but you know, it's great. Just chant in Korean. So there we are, Kwon Sam Bo Sol, 4.30 in the morning after you get your 108 full prostrations, you're blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and Kwon Sam Bo Sol, and you're beating your moktak, and then you're walking around until 10 o'clock at night, right? Because I think it's totally hilarious at times. What? This is ridiculous. You're walking this tiny teepee round and round, beating these instruments, chanting. It's not a very compassionate thing to do, ultimately, to yourself or others. So there you go. Anyway, you do this practice in order to increase what he calls special energy.

[41:37]

You know, right? Special energy, actually, it's universal energy. And what I learned in shamanism, and this is all hocus-pocus, but I found out it exists in certain forms of Buddhism, and then it's one of them. This universal energy is great stuff. It doesn't belong to you, but it's everywhere. And once you, you know, sort of opened yourself up to it, actually, it's very healthy. You just, I mean... It's terrible to say, but one of the things that I feel great, you know, physically, and my energy, I, you know, like it a lot nicer. And part of it is this practice of Zen that I do. I'm terrible at Zen. But anyway, and it's special energy. So I'm just thinking this is absurd. But anyway... So we're, it's a full moon night, and we're Kwanse and Bosali, you know, down this ridge to go to the dining dome, because we can't do the real special energy practice in the teepee because it's too small. So we get to the dining dome. It's a huge dome, and there's hay all on the floor.

[42:39]

And what happens is it's all the students are chanting. By this time, you know, it's like the third day, and you've been doing it for hours and hours every day, and you're beginning, you've given up. You're simply the chant at this point. I mean, you're being chanted by the Bodhisattva's compassion. At this point, you're just sitting there like an idiot, hitting your mug talk and chanting the chant. And it's fantastic. So, you know, one student after another goes up and stands in front of her, him, it, like this, you know, with your gassho. Okay, great. not moving, and everyone is chanting, beating. It's crazy. It's like a carnival. Korean instruments behind you. And then all of a sudden, you're not only being sung, but you're being danced. And it's amazing. You know, you're dancing this sort of zen dance. Now, I saw one old woman with a bilateral mastectomy in her late 60s. who used to practice here, but now does it with the sansanine, jumped five feet off a floor doing this practice, and her mind opened up.

[43:43]

And she... She doesn't have cancer anymore. She got special energy. And special energy just means that, you know, just... It's a funny thing. I can't describe it. But it's very powerful. And then when you sort of come down, you become kind of simple-minded. You know, you're just an idiot. No, really. You look around, and the world is alive, and you're alive, and you're all part of this thing, and you're very peaceful, you know? And at, so in the dining dome, somebody flipped on the hay. And the next thing I thought, cause I'm sitting beside something, he's covered in hay. He's like that sort of bundle of hay and laughing. And it was absurd, but the sense of, of child, but child, not of childishness, when it, when all the noise stops and you, you hear in a way you've never heard before. Your body feels very peaceful, and you look around, and there's a sense of, I don't know, like empty bliss.

[44:51]

And it even, you know, sort of stays around as a tone of your life. It's not bad. Interesting. So it's coyote there. And I imagine that someday... somebody from the moral majority will come and protest and just find us, you know, the trickster element, the element of the fool, the wise fool who comes back, you know, free of earthly attachment to dance in the world, which is probably what Zen in part is very much about, free from all that to do the work of reflection, to take those blind fools and hopefully transform them into wise fools. It's a little bit of what we do, but much humbler. some people have been there we started two years ago and they're still there and some people come through and it's not correct for them to be there it's not a place for everybody it's like this is not for everybody for sure so that easiness this is not necessarily for everybody is very much part of their trying to get people to go there though I would like to see more zen

[46:05]

quality there, because I have such a respect for that way of being in life. It's helped me so much. It's been bitter, but good medicine. I found some wonderful being of you all. I really enjoyed the questions. And I'm leaving early in the morning.

[46:36]

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