Good morning. It's my right to tell you to say at Toastmasters it's a great pleasure to be here so early, but it really and truly is. And he's a friend to all of us who sit here, whether we've ever met him before or not, because he's one of those people who started to sit here very early on at Dwight Way and sort of one of our founding fathers, I think. He's a man of many talents and had many careers, also having a wicked sense of humor. But if you ever have to trim candles or turn out the lights at Tassajara, you can thank him for the inventions that he did the candles just right so you could cut them or he didn't have to stand on the tongues to blow out all the lamps. And anyway, he said I could say anything I wanted about him. I asked him to tell me what I shouldn't say.

[01:12]

Anyway, here's Lou. It's customary for a visiting speaker to say how pleased they are to be in the company of such august people. And on one level, they really mean it because they become experts. They're instantaneous experts. An expert is some so-and-so from out of town. And in my case, I have the additional ability to say how truly pleased I am to return to the place where my practice began. Rebecca reminded me that Dwight Way, I don't know how many of you have seen pictures of Mel's old house where the zender was in the attic. And at the back of the attic, there were two small windows,

[02:19]

no bigger than this. And I sat by those windows because I knew if I had to, I could get out. Then as soon as the one bell rang for service in the morning, I was down the stairs, out the door to the donut shop for coffee, cigarettes, and the morning paper. Somehow or other, Mel got me to stay for service. And then one time he said, would you please move up closer to the altar? You're now a senior student. And so I did, and I got right behind the chimney because I knew that those bricks would totally protect me from anything that was emanating from the altar. And here I am offering incense, wearing these robes, and I guess it is an example of the old saying, walk long enough in the mist and your robes will get wet. Just how I managed to

[03:27]

find Suzuki Roshi and his practice and stay with it for 26 years is totally beyond me. So I would like to begin by addressing myself to the new people who are here for the first time. The rest of you can listen in or sleep or whatever as you wish. Beginner's mind, of course, if you've read Suzuki Roshi's book, is the heart of our practice. And those of you who came here today for the first time are showing us beginner's mind, that which we aspire to the longer we live, the harder it gets, because we have so many memories, so many things that stand between us in the moment. Please feel at home here, because just by coming today, you have subtly altered the universe which is known

[04:29]

as Berkeley Zen Do. You don't know how you did it. We couldn't say how you did it. But sometime down the road, you may return and remember this day and know that just by coming here, you have entered into our fellowship. You've also been given the first transmission. You have been given Sazen instruction. So that is another step into the practice. And you've taken a vow. Just now, you have vowed to hear the Buddha's words. Now, if you think that somehow or other, I have a pipeline to the Buddha, and I will therefore give out words that you can accept as the Buddha's words, and they will be the truth, you might as well put your shoes on and go home, because that's not what that means. That ability, that wonderful moment to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words,

[05:35]

is every moment in your life without the intervention of anyone like a priest, or even like a Buddha. This chance that you have is here, [...] all the time. It's never apart from you where you are. So you don't have to go through a big rigmarole in order to enter the truth. Now, the truth is not something carved in stone, or on a CD disc, or anything like that. The truth is, is your life as it is at this moment, not how it was a second ago, not how it's going to be a second from now. What is the truth of your life right now as you see it? That is what I tell you, what the Buddha tells you, what even you know or someone else tells you. What is the truth of your life? So our practice is to find a way, continually, to present ourselves with this situation. We're going to take another vow in a few minutes. Four vows. One of them is, you vow to enter Dharma gates. Now, Dharma is a big

[06:41]

word that means, for now, just let's say truth. But it's presented to you in the form of a gate. And perhaps we could begin with an actual gate that I went through once in Kyoto, that for a flashing instant gave me some insight into this practice. I've been looking forward to going to Kyoto. I thought it was a Japanese Williamsburg. Well, it's the fifth largest city in Japan. It has a horrible television tower, which even the people who live there think is ugly. And all the old things of ancient Japan are scattered around in this city, if you look for them. It was August, and it was very hot, and there was an election. And down the one side of the street, in a black suit with a red sash, one politician with his entourage and sound system, the other side of the street in a white suit with a red stripe, another politician. It was downtown,

[07:46]

where all the streetcars and buses come together. And I suddenly realized I was losing it. The wave of the Japanese was just flowing over me. And I pushed back against the wall, and it opened. And there was a little temple garden. And here was the noise, and here was the silence, and somehow or other, it went back and forth. That was a Dharma gate. It's the sort of chance that your life gives you from time to time, to step out of where you are into some new situation, without making a big fuss about it. Now, when you consider how the Zazen posture, which you have been shown, enables you to enter Dharma gates,

[08:52]

or enter into your life, a big puzzle begins to emerge for you. You cannot see how a posture would enable you to move into the depths of your life, especially when it's painful and awkward as Zazen is for a long period of time sometimes. When I first started to practice, I wondered why should I be interested in an ancient Asian arcane activity such as Zazen. You know, the Buddha did not invent Zazen. It's about 35,000 years old. Figurines of people seated in cross-legged meditation have been carbon dated to that time, give or take a thousand years, and carvings in caves show people doing what we're doing right now, 35,000 years ago. Well, what happens is that this ancient way of living revitalizes itself, renews itself

[10:01]

as it enters each new culture. The Buddha had that experience. There was Zazen in Buddha's time from the beginning of any recorded history in India. It was nothing new for him. But what he did with it was. So let's spend a moment now to realize, if we can, that our time and the Buddha's time are probably closer to each other than any other two dates you could find in the history. Consider what India was going through at the time of the Buddha, before he was the Buddha. Iron was replacing bronze. Money was replacing barter. City-states were replacing the almost New England type democratic village life where the elders and

[11:04]

the people got together under the trees and decided what was going to be done about the next day. Starvation was rampant. Wars, in the way that we know them today, were coming along with the city-states that were emerging. And there was torture. When I came across this years ago in the Pali Canon, I gave a talk and I was immediately told never, ever describe those tortures again in public. It is not proper to speak like that. But here was a reality in the Buddha's day and age. And what was the use of the torture? The torture was to maintain the caste system. And then there was the genocide of the Shakya people. You've heard this story many times. A neighboring king, he and the Buddha were princes together in the days of when they were young and free.

[12:08]

Twice marched on the Shakya territory, twice turned back, and the third time listened to his advisors who came in and annihilated the Shakya people. Genocide. The Buddha, you know, in the years before he left home, was trained to be a military man. And because he was very brilliant, he was very good at it. How to deploy your elephants, how to use your chariots, and so forth. So here is a culture that is being dismantled, torn apart. Ancient values are being destroyed, and the Buddha comes face to face with this. That was the reality of his life, just as the things happening to us today are the reality of our life. He couldn't stop that. So he said, I went against the current. And it was his discovery of a very simply stated

[13:17]

doctrine. I'll call it a theory. The theory of anatta, doctrine of no self. The bare bones Buddhist dictionary says this, the anatta doctrine teaches that neither within the bodily phenomenon of existence nor outside of them can be found anything that in the ultimate sense could be regarded as self-existing, real, ego entity, soul, or any other abiding substance. This is the basis of the Buddha's teaching. Or as it's put more poetically in the Gita, mere suffering exists, but no sufferer is found. The deeds are there, but no doer of the deeds can be found. Peace is there, but not the person who enters it. The path is there, but no traveler can

[14:19]

be seen upon it. Now that of course is nonsense. We know better, don't we? The world has known better for thousands of years. There is a self here, and there are other selves here. This morning we are together peacefully, tonight we will argue about the 49, or tomorrow we'll argue about the 49 again. We'll have elections, we'll have wars. What is this business of no self? There is where your practice really hits a brick wall, because it goes against every not American idea or modern idea, against the basic human aspirations to maintain yourself at whatever cost. If we would be able to have at least an intellectual conviction that maybe the Buddha was right,

[15:22]

maybe only then but now what he said about no self to be got at. Notice that correction there. He didn't say there is no self. There is no self to be got at. It's an important distinction to make. What could we bring to this experience of zazen from our culture and our time that would enrich our practice? I share one quality with the Dalai Lama, just one. We both are fascinated by what neurologists are discovering in the laboratory. He loves to hang out with these guys. He can't get enough of it. I'm of course just curious, but the Dalai Lama is very serious, because he has said

[16:24]

that if Buddhism and science come to a conflict and science can show that a certain situation is, as science puts it, Buddhism will have to change. For someone like the Dalai Lama to bring it to that point is, I think, very encouraging to us, because with his openness he is able to embrace anything and everybody that comes along. So let's go into the laboratory for a few incidents that might clarify what I'm fumbling for. In the earliest experiments done after zazen had become known in the West, there was an electrical encephalogram of a Roshi, his students graded according to the years of their zazen practice, and a certain number of, quote,

[17:28]

ordinary people who had never had any meditation. What they did was wire them up, you know, with a little cuticle stuck on your head through the cathode tube to the recorders, establish a baseline, and then expose everyone to a repetitive and irritating sound for 40 minutes, right? The first time the first sound was received by Roshi, students, and people, the peaks were identical on the cathode tube. No difference between those people. As the time went on, the people at the untrained edge tuned out the sound. It didn't appear. The students sort of had

[18:39]

a little spike here and there, but the Roshi, every time the beep went off, beep, the same one. He was hearing that sound for the first time, because it was a sound he'd never heard before. It was like all those others for 40 minutes, but that's an idea. The sound itself was it, and he responded to it totally. Well, that got a lot of people interested in how this zazen business is working, you know. Americans are great, aren't we? We're pragmatic people. Does it work, you know? And there was a young man at Langley Porter who unfortunately didn't stay around long enough to finish his experiment, but he showed me a number of these, I don't know if it was Suzuki Roshi or not, but the curves of his response, and showed that there was a place where it was different after the sound than all the other

[19:41]

people. The next one I'd like to offer for your amazement is some scientists took a camcorder into a delivery room where a baby was being born, and they took 15 minutes of sound pictures and went out and studied them, and what they were looking for was a correlation between a sound spoken by anyone in the delivery room, father, mother, doctor, nurses, other physiologists, whoever made the sound, and what did the baby do at the instant of the sound? To make a long story short, let's say they found these two. Every time the kuh sound was made, the right elbow would twitch. Every time the open vowel u was sounded, the left big toe would curl. They chopped up the soundtrack, pasted it together, made gibberish out of it, played it back to the kid, maybe with the cord still attached, and lo and behold, the second time around, the same response. That's how we were born,

[20:46]

with a lock between a stimulus and a muscle response. Imagine what happens when out of the vagueness, a face appears, and out of the face, a commercial runs, and then you say, that is mama, and then comes Saturday morning cartoons, and the comic books, and the movies. Maybe you're smart, you go to Stanford, get a good job down in Silicon Valley, get a good job, go over to Italy, and look up at the Sistine Chapel, and see all of Michelangelo's beauties, and all the time, you're doing this. Of course, it's not visible, but these guys and gals in the laboratories can put their machines on you, and show you, that as you're listening to me, you're making the same responses that you did the first time you heard a sound, or take me out of it completely. They can show you that's happening as you're talking to yourself.

[21:53]

It's as if your body is making a muscular response to all stimuli, including, as we just call, mind objects, things that we make up. Okay? There's another one. I wonder who these guys are, they must be writing these experiments. They made very thin metal mirrors, to which they attached four motors, and four control knobs, so that those mirrors could be distorted, not just in the obvious way at the funhouse, which you may remember, but in an infinite number of distortions. They brought in people like us, and they said, sit down, here are the four controls. When you have arranged them, so you look like you look, let us know. Some people sat down, and immediately jumped up, and ran out of the room. Other people threw up, people who tried to do it

[22:59]

after a while got sick. The few who stayed, went to the experimenters and said, please, could I look into a red little mirror? I don't know what I look. We are doing that internally. We have four controls, 400 controls, 4,000 controls, which we continually attempt to bring into alignment, so that the self is the way we remembered it. That's why we have certain hairdos, certain clothes, certain wives, certain husbands, certain jobs. All these things are to constitute an entity called us that doesn't change. Dr. Linus, Rudolfo Linus, at the University of New York, New York University, has come up with some numbers that have really, I'm sure that the Dalai Lama has studied them.

[24:06]

He has found, and can show you if you went to his laboratory, that 40,000 times a second, 40,000 times a second, the far most center of the brain sends out a wave to the cortex. It says, what's up? And the cortex replies, on the basis of correlating all of its material, whereupon the thalamus arranges all of the emotional, body, subjective responses, and then asks again, now what's up? So, all we are is a 40,000, 40,000, can someone give me the number? 40,000 times a second is how much time? I don't know. It must be very small. But that's how long you last. That's how long you last. And if you can grab hold of yourself in that time,

[25:16]

that takes a bunch of doings. Can you imagine? 40,000 times a second. Now, Kalagiri Roshi lectured about this one time, but he didn't have Dr. Milius's material to go on. He talked about super speed. I don't know if some people can remember super speed. He used the motion picture camera as an example. 24 times a second, a still picture is flashed on the screen, and you make the inference that it is moving. And he said, if you slow things down, then you can look through the space between and look into actual reality. So, here the stakes have been raised. 40,000 times a second, we come and we go. And if you will just, next time you read the Heart Sutra about the dharmas being empty, you might sort of connect, the possibility

[26:27]

of connecting what the Heart Sutra said and what Dr. Linnaeus says. They're empty of what? They're empty of own being. There is nothing there, except the flashing of these dharmas, which in themselves are nothing. Now, you might say, well, now you're getting in pretty deep here, boy. Why don't you check in with the Buddha and see what the Buddha says about this? And lo and behold, Dr. Linnaeus and the Buddha are in total agreement. Dr. Linnaeus says, your waking life is a dream, and the Buddha says, waking mind and dreaming mind are the same mind. So, we're living in a dream. No more substantial. It's different than when you're asleep, but the mechanism is the same thing.

[27:36]

At night, we're not processing too much input from the senses, so the mind can just run free and put together all of these things that we see in our dreams. Now, that's all very interesting. What has it got to do with the one thing that the Buddha taught? He said, the nature of suffering and the end of suffering is all that I teach. It's all. All this other stuff that's grown up around, like ivy around a column, the central position, the central effort that he made was the nature of suffering and how to end it. Sasuke Roshi, as many of you know, died a painful cancer death. He didn't suffer. When he found out that instead of gallstones, he had cancer, he announced, I have a new name.

[28:39]

You know, in Buddhism, when we put on our lay rockets, we're given a name. Sometimes when we put on our priest robes, we're given a new name. He says, I have a new name, Mr. Cancer. He did not keep it away like this. So when you find that an honest researcher like Dr. Linnaeus can, in his own language, say what the Buddha said 2,500 years ago, I think this is great encouragement. We are not alienated from the tradition. This is our contribution. You see, when you study the history of Zen Buddhism as it travels from one country to another, you find it takes a couple hundred years before it loses its accent and becomes thoroughly acclimated into the culture. And the Chinese were very practical people, and they had great difficulty with the thousands of

[29:47]

grains of sand in the Ganges. This was astronomical numbers. After all, you know, the people in India developed the zero concept. They had minds. So when they brought in China, they got Zen into their guts and their minds simultaneously when they realized that they'd been studying Taoism for many years before Buddhism came along, and they could understand this ancient, arcane Asian thing that they were getting from India much more clearly if they would look at it from a Taoist position. It comes to Japan, and Shinto, which has no books, which has no theory, which has nothing but the actual experience, dropped the center of gravity down to the higher. So now it's come to this country, and I'll go out on a limb because I'm not going to be around much

[30:49]

longer, to say that we will bring it back up. Do you see the Hubble pictures? Did you see that fantastic picture of the birth of the stars? That's us. Every proton in that magnificent thing came into existence with every proton in our body. We are identical with the universe. We're not alienated from it. We are part of it. And so when you sit and zazen and just let it happen, what is at the moment, you join up with all of these things. And this gives us a sense, I think, of great familiarity. Buddhism is not strange at all. It's as natural as your breath. So I wish I were years younger so that I could get into more of this and maybe bump into the

[31:55]

Dalai Lama someday at a neurological convention and talk about this with him, because this is how I was raised. When I was, let's see, I was born, I was born, that was conceived in the year of the assassination of the Archduke, Sarajevo. I was born at the time that Einstein's first special theory on relativity was transmitted through the lines of the battle of the First World War and was studied by Eddington and other people in a conference in London. When I was 14, the Copenhagen conference on atomics was done. When I was 17, I studied quantum physics, and when I was 26, I came this close to the atomic pile in the Chicago University football field. There was a wall that I would walk along going to work,

[33:01]

and just on the other side of the wall was the first pile. That's how close. So, coming from that world into the world of Zendo would seem to, was for me very difficult for many years, because I felt alien, not just because of Japanese aspects. I mean, that's just the wrappings. I mean, that's not where the difficulty lies, is could I accept what I was asked to accept? Namely, that from the beginning, as the fifth Chinese ancestor said, from the beginning not a thing is. So, two monks were discussing this question, and the first monk says, six Chinese ancestors says from the beginning not a thing is, and I say that's why we make it all up. What do you say? And instantly he said that's why we have to make it

[34:10]

all up. And what do you make up? You got to make up something. You make up Bodhisattva. That is what we make up, and I think that's a good place to stop. I understand you have questions and answers here and not someplace else. Does anyone want to muddle the situation any further? Seeing that you addressed, and this is a question that's often asked to me, what is a Bodhisattva that you can explain to someone who's never heard the term? Well, I'll start out by saying a Bodhisattva is a Boy Scout that gets no merit badges. Look, I'm an old man. In those days, we didn't worry about that. Yes, go ahead.

[35:18]

No, okay, that's a good question. Because when we bow to all of the ancestors in whatever form they are presented to us, they are just mirrors in which we hope to see ourselves. And what we are, when we become Bodhisattvas for an instant, are those aspects of ourselves which we deeply cherish and would like to pass on to other people. We, as Mel tells you, I'm sure, quite frequently, the parameters are not something that's laid on us. They are internal expressions of what we most want for ourselves. And when we are able to bring them

[36:24]

up for ourselves, then other people can respond to them. And at that moment, we act as a Bodhisattva. Wow. Yeah. The making of a construct of reality, that's the way our mind works, has to do that. You can't stop it. It is not possible. So, what I'm wondering is, where does such a notion come from, of the Bodhisattva notion? Where might that, how might that get put together? Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. That's not said facetiously. I'm sorry, that's the only thing I could come up.

[37:25]

Yeah. Well, if there really isn't anything at all and we make everything up, sometimes it seems to me that it's actually the other way around. But the question is, why is there something rather than nothing? Or to say that we, that all this stuff all over the place is just something that we make up, it's great hubris. I mean, we're not really responsible for making up everything, are we? It is a principle of more than Buddhism that we don't know anything except our ideas of it. So, if on that level I would say, yes, we do make everything up. The difficulty is not that we do that, but that we take it for real. We identify that which we've

[38:45]

made up as being it. That's the difficulty, not the making up, but that we con ourselves into believing that it has substance, that it has continuity, that it has, in the common ordinary everyday language, reality. That's where the error is. And this is why it's so difficult. I mean, I could, if this was a therapy session, I could recount a number of experiences on my life where I was suddenly aware of the fact that what I had made up did not exist in the way I wanted it to. And it was devastating because what was devastating, what was devastating was that one who made it all up was now exposed as a fraud. I mean, we're in a very difficult thing here. As soon as we establish any kind of thing, internal or external,

[39:47]

the world begins to creak. It begins to grind. All these things are said, just as a teacher once told me, most of my life is spent trying to find metaphors. But soon as you make a metaphor that has a certain good quality to it, it immediately attracts all kinds of other things around it, and then it is lost. This is a metaphor. Making things up is a metaphor. But how else are we going to transmit the possibility that life is different than what we have thought all along? And Zazen does it for you. I mean, you don't need to have anyone tell you about your Zazen because it's yours. You can watch it. You see it happening. That's why when we go to Mel or a teacher, he helps us notice this, notice the making up and

[40:49]

the falling away of the making up and doing it all over again. It would be nice if there was... Somebody once said, the time will come when they will have all these lasers and all these things and they'll be able to zap you into enlightenment. No, I've heard that by serious people, and I can't wait for that, so I have to see Zazen. Well, I guess maybe it's different to acknowledge that I make up everything, but then when somebody else says something to me, it's not so good for me to say, you're just making that up. I mean, like you're stepping on my toe, somebody says to me, and I say, that's, you're just creating this reality. That's comic book Buddhism. Of course, we step on people's toes. Of course, we crash our cars into somebody else's cars. The area I'm talking about is not in that gross level,

[41:52]

because, but I think it can come at it this way, because we make it all up, we therefore have to be very careful what we make up, and I think this is where our practice comes in, that careful attention to the most minute thing that Suzuki Roshi and Mel and other people have urged on us. To do one thing totally is an expression of the fact that, yes, we make it all up, and I am making up as best I can. If it doesn't work, all right, but you've at least tried. In everything, in every breath. I mean, this is not something that just happens in a zendo, you know? I was wondering what you see as the relationship between Western psychology, the notion of a self, and its relationship to Buddhism, and how they work or don't work together. Well, I didn't plant her in the audience.

[42:57]

I'm glad you asked that question. I came here at the recommendation of a therapist. Blanche and I, 25 years into our marriage, were having difficulties, and we went to this therapist and that marriage counselor, right? And we came to this Dr. Colt, who was an anthropologist at the UC Berkeley, who took mescaline and dropped acid and suddenly realized, finally, he knew more about what he was supposed to be teaching than he did when he started out, dropped his profession, became a therapist. He was dying of lymphatic cancer, so he was in a hurry. He took you six weeks of classical therapy, took you on a mescaline trip, and that was it. I wanted my money back. I mean, I didn't have money enough to do it on my own. I wouldn't

[44:04]

do drugs because my kids were up on the avenue maybe selling the stuff. If there was a chance for me to have a mescaline, I was cold, I was tired, and I saw stick figures. That's all I saw. None of these growing things. So he said after, when he said no, he said, you need a religious discipline. There's Vedanta, Baha'i, there's various yogas, and there's a new one in town. It's called Zen, and I don't recommend it. That's the hard one. So within a month, I'm on a cushion, right? So I've told that story many times, and it got back to the young man who would have been Dr. Cole's Dharma heir, had Dr. Cole that he was training him to do the work, and Tom laughed. He said, you go back to and tell him this story. When Dr. Cole and I were discussing what we should recommend for him,

[45:08]

Dr. Cole said, you know, Lou belongs in Zen, but he's such a stubborn son of a bitch. Perfect teacher, he told me not to do it, and I wouldn't do it. Okay, you got it? That's good enough for that level. So I am doing very well. My smile is broadening. My empathy is deepening. My loving-kindness is increasing, right? So the abbot takes me aside one day, and he says, Lou, he said, you've been practicing psychotherapy with us for a couple of years. Why don't you try Buddhism? That was a cartoon where they hit people with a 2x4. So I said, all right, I will. So I tried Buddhism, and trying something for me meant reading about it and studying about it. That was very smart, and they made me head monk down at Tassajara. And since I'm an older person and had training in telling stories in my profession, my first

[46:08]

shuso talk wowed them. I mean, it happened in the palm of my hand or on the floor. Either way, she won. So the next time, well, she asked me, what are you going to talk about, Lou? And I said, well, not so much what I told them last time. I mean, I didn't tell them all that I would like to tell them. This time, I'm going to tell them what I didn't tell them last time. He said, no. He said, that first talk just lets people know how you got to sit in the first seat. Well, I don't have much change, but it must have stuck out, because he said, oh, that's all right. It's OK. You're the head monk. You can talk about anything you like, but stop writing the book. I was preparing to write a book about my Zen experiences as if it was on the radio with no Buddhist jargon or anything in it. I have never been so angry in my life. I was consumed with anger. But I wasn't angry at Roshi, strangely enough. I walked to the Zen dojo. I walked past the Zen dojo. I walked out the gate. I had on these silly clothes, plastic slippers, no money.

[47:11]

I was free. I got up as far as the first culvert, and then I hear, oh, oh, oh, oh. I said, those kids are not going to realize why the head monk didn't show up for the second lecture. So I came right back. But I was free at that time. And what the anger was, not with Roshi, the anger was with myself, that I got calm into wanting to write a book. All my life, I've been wanting to write a book. He cut me free of the need to write a book, and I was gone. So what we've got here is something that someone has said, before you can be nobody, you've got to be somebody. And I think that's where therapy in its infinite variety in this country and our practice for a moment are on the same level. We are troubled people. We are troubled, separate, individual selves. And out of that,

[48:12]

we come to this practice, maybe a little differently than I did. But it was pain and suffering that drove me to the therapist, and the fortunate karma that had him. Can you imagine a therapist saying you should have a religious discipline? That was pretty far out, wasn't it? But I held on to that for a couple of years. There was another senior monk down at Tassajara who asked me, what are you doing here? You know, that's a classical... I didn't read koans and those things, but that's a classical statement. And I said, well, I'm here to become a better father and a more loving husband. He said, no, you're not, because you're here to find out who you are. And that finding out who I was was awful, because I had to look at myself as I really was. And the practice has been for me continually

[49:18]

to not let go. I never let go of anything. I'm a stubborn son of a bitch. How did it rip it out of me by events and other people to see that I am not what I have made up? And what I am, I'm not going to tell you, because I don't know. But there is a level there, it's the level of suffering. And maybe therapy has to be done. The thing that we tell people, I'm sure it happens here in Berkeley, before you continue practice, I think you need some therapy, right? There are people who have gone through therapy, and it's not enough, and they come to us. I mean, listen, you're going to hit me with that stick? You want me to use it for that thing? Who's the tenant? Oh, one of those guys, huh? Well, I don't care. I can do this.

[50:25]

Let's end, and we can ask one more little question. Who are you? Who are you? Diamond.

[50:39]

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