It's a balance of a different game that I had in a group where I picked it up on the bottom line. Today, this is a scenario that they need to not break it, but they need to not control the system with the people that want us. That they need to see the animals that's not to the room. It's going to break all my brains except. I didn't allow my words to kiss the pure of double hours and to power tell us the words. I can listen so bad to others as a matter of the end of the end and so fairly well and long. If any of this is everything you need in my head to anything, it isn't in my mind to be balanced and gathering out of places. I hope you get to see and listen to the room. If you're living in the library, it makes sense. I'll be able to find a moment to face the truth with all the other things that we tell the stories.

[03:42]

And everyone's so proud of us. You know, if you're living in the library, what does one call? If you're living in the library, you're living in the library. You're [...] living in the library. So, good morning everyone. Welcome to Green Gulch. And one of the themes for this talk is that Zen has a lot to do with being responsive.

[04:43]

So it doesn't seem quite right that I just start off and talk about something without knowing who you are, something from you. How many of you are new to Green Gulch? This is your first time. Welcome. And how many of you are new to Zen? Like haven't really been to like a Zen thing before. A few of you, welcome. And how many of you have done a sashin at Zen centers? That's impressive. Thank you. I did my first sashin where he's sitting. That's the spot. I have all these memories. That was 46 years ago. And so here I'm back. So the topic is around stimulus response to

[05:58]

take careful attention to this area of human life that there's a stimulus and then we have a response can reveal some really profound aspects of life. It's kind of like one of the things that opens up into the Dharma world for sure. And what makes it particularly poignant that I want to emphasize today is the pause between the stimulus response. Gap or the space that can be provided between them. And we often need space in our life. We often need to pause our daily activities. And I imagine that for a number of you here today, it is Sunday. What it means is that it's not a work day, not a school day. And it's kind of a Sabbath day for many people. It's a day off. And human beings generally need days off, need times to pause, to regroup, to rest, to recover from the activity of work, for example.

[07:07]

And the people who don't recover, people who just work 80 hours a week, we have examples now on the national level of people who are working nonstop and causing seemingly lots of chaos. And so it worries me when people work nonstop without a pause. There's a lot of stress that builds up, a lot of cortisol that builds up, all kinds of things that build up. And there's not a chance for renewal. So here we are. Many of you have decided not only maybe it's your day off, but you've also decided to come here to Green Gulch. And Green Gulch and this amazing room... It used to be a hay barn. And now for probably 55 years or something like that, 54 years, there's been thousands and thousands of people who've come here to meditate in this room.

[08:14]

And for me, it's filled with this Dharma atmosphere. And to come in here... is partly not only a pause from work, but maybe a pause from activities, values, orientations in our society that you'd like a break from, that you'd like to kind of pause and maybe come into a place where there's some stillness, where there's some kind of presence that represents different kinds of values that are often championed out in the wider popular culture. And so Sunday, here we are. And this idea of a pause, this idea of a rest, the idea of refreshment, the idea of something deeper can well up from within is one of the principles of zazen.

[09:20]

That zazen is a phenomenal pause, in a sense, from the daily life busyness, running around, doing a lot of things. But not just the activities of the body, but it's also as a pause in the activities of the mind. And so the normal spinning of the mind, some minds are constantly going with thoughts of desires, thoughts of fear, thoughts of planning, thoughts of resentment. just spinning and spinning. And some people that pay attention actually say that they're exhausted by what their mind is doing. And it's nice to come to a place where that can somehow settle, quiet down. Some people will try to take a break by going onto their phone to look at news or their device. And that keeps activating a certain kind of mental activity which is not restful.

[10:20]

And to come to a place where there's no devices for the most part here, and to let that part of the mind settle in quiet is a profound thing. So what we're doing is there's a stimulus to the world, and there's a kind of a pause that happens here. And the pause has a profound opportunity. More often than not, it's not stimulus response, it's stimulus reactivity. That the ways in which we are responding to stimulus is an automatic pilot. It's out of habit, it's out of stress, it's out of automatic kind of just reactivity that goes on. And if we live a stressful life, if we live a preoccupied life, if we live a life that's filled with desires of a particular type, particular kind of thinking, particular kind of orientation, and there's no pause before we react, we can make big mistakes.

[11:33]

We could make mistakes socially with our friends. We can make it with our life in general. Some people, it doesn't take more than a few seconds to ruin a life. For many years, I would go once a year to St. Quentin to visit a program there where a group of about 30 men would gather to a year-long program where something that arose out of this Buddhist practice was offered to them in a non-Buddhist way. But when they first would show up, these men, to do this year-long program, they would first ask them to add up how many years, collectively, the 30 of you, do you have to serve? And the number would be something like 800 years. It was, you know, a big number. And then they introduced him to the idea of, I think it was called the moment of danger, the time of danger.

[12:36]

How long were you in danger of committing the crime that you committed? And that would add up for the 30 men, something like, for all of them together, something like seven minutes. And they'd hold this contrast between 800 years in jail and seven minutes is what brought them there. So one of the things they're taught there is to know the difference between stimulus reactivity and stimulus response. One of the things that I learned is to pause. Let there be something there. And in zazen, here is a big pause. But what's possible in that pause? What's possible in everyday life if you pause? One of the things is that you can start seeing your reactivity. You can see the impulse to speak, the impulse to act, before you actually speak, before you act.

[13:41]

And you'll learn a lot about yourself that way. And I was sitting here in the Zendo and I had all kinds of reactivity, all kinds of things I would have acted on and said automatically, but you kind of weren't allowed to here. You were supposed to sit quietly here and sit and just be with what is and see it clearly. So I got to see my reactivity and I got to see that I had a choice. I had a choice to give into it. I had a choice to leave it alone. And that made all the difference to leave it alone. Because then the reactivity, often if it's reactivity and it's built on stress of some kind or other, it actually perpetuates stress. The reactivity perpetuates reactivity. Then one triggers the other. Anxiety makes us feel very anxious, which is the cause for more anxiety. If we're angry and hostile, that tends to produce more of the same.

[14:49]

But if we can see what we're about to do before we do it, there can be wisdom. There can be a choice. And sometimes the choice is to do nothing. And the choice to do nothing is an act of freedom. is an assertion, is a claiming of our capacity to be free in a certain kind of way. So I would say that it's been invaluable, the pause, to be then stationed, be sitting in a way that allowed, gave enough time to see what the reactivity was, what the impulses were, what the drives were, that can be so strong. To start seeing what the beliefs are that are operating. There were so many beliefs that I got to see more clearly than ever before, maybe some I never saw before, until I was meditating. I have all these memories for things that happened here in this room. So it just was a different time than the first time, but I was sitting at the far end there once during a sasheen.

[15:58]

And I was pretty quiet, so the pause was kind of long and still. And sometimes when you have a very still, quiet, long pause before anything happens next, you can see what's going to happen in the greater clarity. And I saw that I had this belief that in zazen, in meditation, if it was happening to me, it was not the real thing. I had no idea what the real thing was. I had no idea what that was about. But I just had this policy, this principle that I was living on. No matter what it was, if I was breathing, it was the wrong breath. If I was calm, it was the wrong calm. If I had some kind of insight, it was the wrong insight. If I was in a posture, well, usually my posture was wrong, technically. And I saw this was a really deep, deep, quiet...

[17:06]

subterranean foundational policy belief that my mind was operating under. I had no idea it was there. Seeing that liberated something. Seeing that, I'd say, oh, this is not true. I don't have to believe that. And that made a huge difference. But that was years of practice to be able to see that. And many of us have these very quiet beliefs that underlie how we see the world, how we interpret the world, how we see ourselves, that are operating with bias, operating with selectivity process, that sometimes are not very healthy for us to live with. And that one wasn't particularly healthy to live with for me. So the pause allows us to see. The pause also allows something different to happen. And I can't tell you how many seemingly uncountable times I've had in the conversation some totally confident idea of what I should say, what's supposed to happen.

[18:14]

And something inside of me said, wait. Don't say it. Don't blur it out. Don't interrupt the person to say it. Pause. Wait. And that allowed more information to come in That allowed the person to speak more. That allowed me to feel what's happening inside of me more. And lo and behold, the response that wanted to come was radically different than what I first wanted to say. So a pause allows more processing, more information to appear, a deeper wellspring of feeling, of knowing, of intuition, of memory, all kinds of things that come into play so that we can then respond more wisely. To have a pause between stimulus and response also allows for something very profound to happen.

[19:17]

And this, I think, is kind of one of the hearts of Zen practice. And that is, one way of understanding Zen is Zen is all to do about the response that arises from deep within. That Zen is not about attainment. It's not about some particular privileged understanding. It's not about some privileged kind of wonderful meditative state of being. But rather it's an expression that wells up from within, that comes from a source, comes from a way of being that's radically different than the kind of what arises out of stress, what arises out of anxiety, what arises out of greed, hate, and delusion, that arises from the intellect overthinking things and conceptualizing about things.

[20:29]

And so the pause is a chance for something to deep from within to well up. And what is it that can well up? What is there that can happen? Well, first we have to appreciate more of the pause. What stops? What can be the fullness of that pause of what's possible? So I evoked at the beginning of this talk that today is Sunday here. in this part of the globe. But Sunday, I mean, like what is that? It's a convention that we're kind of sharing, so we know to come to Green Gulf today. And it was really eye-opening for me to train at the Zen Center Monastery at Tassajara on many ways. But one fascinating thing was that they didn't operate on a seven-day week.

[21:31]

The other weeks can be different lengths. And at Tassara, the week was five days. We worked for four days and had a day off. And because then it wasn't following the seven days, it wasn't like we were off every Sunday. So we had to figure out the different name for the day. So the days off were called four and nine days. So any day with a four in it was off, and any day that had a nine in it was off. And then we kind of work in between. And so, Banta Sahara, I wouldn't even know sometimes what days of the week it was because the days of the week was irrelevant. And so the word Sunday, you know, like that's just, you know, I kind of knew what the word meant, but I couldn't point to you. I couldn't tell you when the next Sunday was or what day of the week it was.

[22:34]

It was just a three-day. It was a four-day. And so this idea of Sunday is kind of like an arbitrary idea. And in ancient India, they kind of measured the weeks by the lunar calendar. But you know, there was a time when this globe of ours, this Earth of ours, didn't have a moon. So I guess there was no one around then, but there would be no lunar calendar to go by. So even that is kind of like provisional. So what is, without the words of the week, without the dates of the calendar, without the moon with its rhythm that it has, What is the original day?

[23:37]

Does the day itself, what's a day? Does the day care if it's Sunday? The original day, the day before there was language, the day before there was a moon. You say, what is that like? And so there's something about the mind getting quiet and still, this long pause, where we're no longer operating through the lens of a lot of ideas we have. And we start appreciating how a lot of the ideas we have are provisional, they're conditional, they're contingent, they're functional. But we don't have to live in them all the time. It's okay to take a vacation. It's okay to quiet the mind down enough. And this is one of the radical things that's possible to discover is how much the mind can become quiet when it's no longer projecting ideas onto the world.

[24:58]

In meditation, one of the many people, one of the great discoveries, is how much we project onto ourselves. We project all kinds of ideas about who we are, what we are, what we're supposed to be doing. And some of them are accurate enough. But, you know, to go around thinking about it all the time. So I'm usually a glass wearer. So that's one of my identities. And if I spent, you know, six hours a day thinking about myself as a glassware, not a very good glassware, I could be a better glassware. It's very important to me what people think about me because I'm a glassware. I mean, you start doubting my mental health.

[26:04]

That's a lot of wasted time in a certain way. But I think many of us have our comparable thing we do like that that gets repeated over and over again. And you might have some truth to it, but repeating it over and over again? One of the great experiences for me when I was... at the monastery at Tassahara. I worked for a year in the kitchen. I was kind of the head of the kitchen for the summer, the Fukuten. And I thought I was a pretty good cook. So one of the premier jobs was to be what back then was called the summer guest cook, who makes really special meals for the guests. So I thought, well, I'm one of the best cooks here now, so certainly they'll choose me to be the guest cook the next summer. So we would sit and have our meals in the meditation hall, like I'm sitting here with you here now, so in meditation posture, three meals a day this way, sitting in meditation posture, and they would serve us, and I'd be planning menus for the next summer.

[27:20]

You know, I'd taste the food and wonder, you know, what should I make, and I'll make this great stuff, and this and that. And I did it innocently, maybe. And then the day came when they were going to sign their jobs for the next summer. And it was done kind of in a ritual way in the meditation hall. We're all standing there, and the new assignments in the monastery are just read out. And I was not assigned to the kitchen. I was not made a guest cook. And as soon as I saw that, Gil, what have you been doing this last year? All those hours, I could have been meditating. This repetition, you know, being caught in something and on and on and on. So to have all that stop, go quiet, we're allowed to have a vacation from our thinking.

[28:29]

We're allowed to have a sacred pause where we're not seeing our life through the lens of all these thoughts, ideas, some of them inherited from our society, family, religions. We can let it all go. And what happens? So that's an extended pause. And what is available? What happens then? And this, for me, was the remarkable thing about Zen practice. was that's not just a blank. From deep within, something wants to come out. Something wants to be expressed. And when it first started occurring to me, the best way I could say to myself was that just like a dancer dances to express themselves, just as a painter paints to express themselves, That's what's the expression coming out of them.

[29:34]

So I said zazen to allow some depth inside of me to come out. I was making room for something that was profound. And so the fact that we have no Sundays anymore in zazen, deep zazen, because Sunday falls away. The fact that I'm no longer a glasses wearer, in deep meditation, because that's no longer relevant. How much can fall away? How much are you willing to allow for an extended, and I would call it sacred pause, sacred quiet, so that whatever stimulus there is, maybe there doesn't have to be a response. It's wonderful to be here in the zendo early in the morning, like I was this morning. And they ring these bells The first sitting in the morning, there's all these bells and drums and sounds.

[30:35]

The soundscape of Zen is fantastic. And it's sitting in meditation and have these sounds occur without a reaction, without a response. To have a thought arise, and just a thought that arises and floated away. No reaction, no response. Doesn't get picked up, doesn't get re... There's no need to accept it and no need to reject it. It's just a thought. To have a feeling arise. Let it be. There doesn't have to be a reaction. There doesn't have to be a response. It's what arises in the sacred pause, the sacred space. And it turns out that there's something very profound that wants to be born inside. Something very profound that can be expressed. Sometimes in Mahayana Buddhism it's called Buddha nature.

[31:37]

Sometimes in Zen they talk about opening a Dharma gate for repose and bliss, joy and delight to come flowing out. Sometimes they talk about it as your original face, kind of like I was talking about the original day. Or they say sometimes, your face before your parents were born. Isn't that kind of crazy idea? But I love it. And have you ever tried without a mirror, just like you can do now, take a good look at your face? Most of you probably can't look at it. I can see the tip of my nose. But that's about it. But my face is kind of invisible. I've tried to look at it. It's kind of like I know I have a face. I'm not that ignorant.

[32:42]

But I try to look at it. There's nothing to see. What is that nothing to see? Could that be the original face? been nothing to see. It happened before my parents were born. In a certain kind of way, it's happening now. And it's kind of nice. I've spent enough time in my life concerned about my looks. Some of you have probably done it accidentally. But to kind of not be involved in the construction of self and image and appearance, to not be living in it or looking at it, but looking at something deeper. So sometimes it's called the original face. But I like the idea of Buddha nature. Sometimes it's called the womb of the Tathagata, the womb of the Buddha, or the womb from which the Buddha emerges.

[33:49]

In the earliest Buddhist tradition, the word they used for it is kind of like womb, It's the Indian word yoni. And yoni is not quite, for a human it's a womb, but it's for wherever the source is for any life at all. So a egg is the yoni for a chicken. And so there is something profound within us that's a source for a profound way of relating to the world, a profound way of reflection, of contemplation that arises from this inner depth that's maybe similar to the place that creativity or intuition comes from. In India, they like this metaphor of the womb or the yoni.

[34:51]

In modern English societies, maybe a more apt metaphor for this profound place is heart. What arises from our hearts? And that could be a lot better. With this sacred pause, we can have an empty mind, but a responsive heart. But maybe it's even deeper within us, the source of some kind of thing. In the early Buddhist tradition, the simple way in which they talk about this is that there's a distinction between what is wholesome and what is unwholesome. That what's wholesome arises from this depth within. There's no ego involved. There's no self-assertion involved.

[35:53]

There's no attachment to self involved. There's no clinging involved. There's no greed, hate, and delusion involved. There's no anxiety involved. This profound place of well-being, of subtleness, of being at home in. And from there, something comes. And that's where the responsivity of Zen is. That Zen is an activity more than anything else. An activity that... is the enactment or the expression or the fulfillment of this deep source within. And that's available here all the time. It's here. But we don't realize it because we're kind of preoccupied. Or we have filters, like, if it's happening to me, it can't be the real thing.

[36:53]

And so we... We filter it out. So to begin practicing this pause, this gap, this quiet between stimulus response, stimulus reactivity, gives room for something new to occur. Something that maybe you could never have planned for. something that arises out of the moment, that's appropriate to the moment, that's suited for what's happening now. And the idea that we have within us, this amazing, positive, wonderful capacity for wholesomeness, for goodness, for Buddhahood, for the expression of Buddha, not the attainment of Buddha, that it should be within us. And we can sit in a certain kind of way that allows that to show itself, to reveal itself.

[38:04]

It is a phenomenal thing that we have as humans. And one of the things that might arise from this profound place within is to call today Sunday. It can be related to what's profound within us. Because the reason we have the word Sunday is so that human beings don't have chaos. It kind of gives a certain order to the day. Everyone shares that day. Enough people share that day. This is Sunday. We know Monday. We know Saturday. And so we can kind of coordinate and come together. And the way that it can arise from deep within, we understand that these words that we speak are connecting words, the words that connect us to each other.

[39:06]

Otherwise, they have no meaning. It's a way of cooperating and working together and living together socially. And so to use the word Sunday out of this deep place can be we're using it as a manifestation of compassion. We're using it as a manifestation of our friendliness, a manifestation of our profound care for the world. I believe that this profound source, the Buddha nature, the yoni, the womb, that we can make space for and allow to reveal itself and move through us, is profoundly connected to some of the best qualities of a human being, the qualities of friendliness, kindness, the qualities of respect, qualities of care for each other as human beings, as kin in this world.

[40:19]

that what comes out of this profound place is joy and peace, happiness and well-being. What can come from all this profound place is the desire. There are profound desires that don't come from our neurosis, don't come from our greed, but come from our wisdom and care and compassion. Compassion is understood to be a form of desire. to allow these to come forth into our life. And it animates our life. And to have our life animated from this source is very different than having it animated from the surface mind, where many people spend most of their time. And so something like zazen is a time to pause between stimulus

[41:21]

and response, stimulus and reactivity. And eventually what you discover is that that pause can get longer and longer. That in a certain way, you're living in that pause all the time. And you're talking and thinking and taking care of your life. But more and more of it is coming from this place deep within. There's certain pause in the reactive mind that's no longer operating. There's a new way, a profound way, to be in this world. So I think that the idea is now to take some time for questions. Is that right? We have time for that? So if you have any questions or comments you'd like to make about anything at all that's remotely related.

[42:27]

Thank you. So I, in my personal life, am struggling with hope and what is just the state of our country on a societal level as well. And maybe I'm too attached to the idea of hope, but I'm wondering in the spirit of the pause, what is the relationship to hope? I think it's reasonable to have hope. I'm kind of an optimist, so I guess that's kind of a hope, I suppose. But hope can be naive, and hope can be with an expectation. that you can be disappointed. And hope can be passive, where we just hope someone else is going to do it for us, fix it for us. And I think one of the principles of Zen, don't wait for anybody else.

[43:29]

The world begins with you. And if you want to live in a different world, start with yourself. And I hope you can. Thank you. Hi, Gil. It's such a pleasure to see you in person. I've been listening to your 7 o'clock programs and many other programs and really want to thank you for what you're doing for all of us to help us with these issues. One thing that I've been thinking about, which in our... world here that i've learned about in the san francisco zen center is the very deep place of vow that from the deepest place we can have a vow and it doesn't have to be really formed with words and it's usually not about action it's not like i promise to do this or that or this or that but it comes from the deeper places where it might be being kind or

[44:41]

making space for a pause as a part of love and care. So could you talk a little bit about that, the idea that vow might have? I think of it as a little different than hope, maybe, but a deeper place where we don't have to know what we're doing. We can say, I don't even know, but I have this yearning or this vow. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. I love this topic and this question, and vow is a very important part of Buddhist practice. And how I understand the word vow is that it's not necessarily an obligation or responsibility you take on to promise to do something, but rather it's a recognition that the way that you want to live your life, that what feels the most true way to live, The most beneficial way to live or the most meaningful way to live is something you want to commit yourself to.

[45:43]

You want to try to live it. This is the orientation you want to have. Not even you. It's the whole system, the deep system, the profound system that says, yes, this is the way to live. This is what stay in touch with. And we lose it easily. We lose that profundity. But at some point we feel like this is home. This is the right place to be. This is the right, most meaningful way to be a human being. And so the vow is an expression of that recognition and an aspiration to live by it. I want to thank you for your beautiful translation of the Dhammapada. Could you stand so I can see you? I'm sorry, if you don't mind. Handicapped. Is it possible? Handicapped, okay. Well, then I'll listen. One second. Ah, thank you. Your beautiful translation of the Dhammapada.

[46:44]

I've given many copies to young people who are struggling with the challenges of life. It's a powerful tool. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for telling me that. Letting me see you as you speak. Make me feel more connected. Thank you so much. I have a lot of trouble with the first vowel. the vow that says beings are numberless, I vow to save them. Because I don't feel I can save anyone. I'm not sure I can save myself. I can make a vow that says I vow to awaken with them.

[47:45]

Very nice. But I have trouble with any time I've tried to save anyone. It often has a... Maybe it's my intention or my... ego intruding into that but that feels very willful and I wonder if you could help me with that yeah thank you so those of you who don't know he's referring to a very important set of four vows that's important at Zen Center and Zen Mahayana Buddhism called the four bodhisattva vows the first one is beings are numberless I vow to save them all I think literally it means to cross them over. Save in English has very, in any kind of Judeo-Christian culture, has a very strong overtones. But I think the original was the crossover, crossover the floods, crossover to freedom.

[48:45]

And so this idea that we have a profound source within means that for each of us, it's our own source. Trust it. Let it be your vow. Let it be your movement, your response. And so the fact that you have a different vow, that you word it differently, I think that's quite amazing and wonderful and should be celebrated. And you could just short your shoulder when they do Save All Beings and say, well, I've got them... I hope it's good for them. And I know what it's good for me. I know it's coming out of me. That's one way to do it. The other way to do it is to reinterpret what they say at Zen Center here. And one of the important Chinese teachers in our lineage, the sixth patriarch, he interpreted that line to mean that...

[49:53]

I save all beings in my own mind. So exactly what that means, I don't know. But I thought that was profound. You know, it's in my own mind. And one way of understanding saving all beings is that you're actually saving them from yourself. And if you're projecting, if you're biased, if you're expecting and wanting and asserting yourself, there's all kinds of ways in which we interfere with people's lives, our judgments. And so... maybe your idea of awakening all beings is synonymous with saving them from yourself. How's that? I guess I was just... curious um because i think for a lot of people like accessing that space is a difficult thing to do and you know the reactivity is so ingrained in us um and just how like do you have any suggestions for how to begin to find that space or to begin to you know be able to create enough pause to not react i think you have to figure out some way

[51:23]

on a regular basis, have these sacred pauses. And I use the word sacred as an evocative word. Maybe you don't like the word sacred, but there's evocative words in some special way, not an ordinary pause, but it's something positive that carries greater meaning or value or connectivity for you. So, you know, some people in Buddhism are going to a meditation seat. is kind of sacred or special. Like that's a place where that's a whole different kind of pausing happens here than if we're simply pausing drinking a cup of tea as I have tea or go for a walk around the block to cool down from my whatever's going on. But in a regular way, have this kind of sacred pause. And so meditation is one possibility. Sometimes I call it contemplative space. Give time for contemplative space. And the other thing is that it's valuable to do. for some of us, is get an overview of your day, of your life, and decide whether you really need to do all the things you're doing.

[52:27]

And maybe a wise contemplative life that allows this possibility to surface, you actually should do less than you're doing, which is a kind of a... offending thing to say in the way our society is run these days. Thank you. Hi. I'm Jennifer and I often listen to you 5.30 in the morning. Dharma talks on Dharma I forget what you call it. Audiodharma. Audiodharma.org Thank you for that. And in 2018, I dove into Buddhism to help me navigate. I was really ill. It was wonderful. There were some phrases. There was a phrase that Sharon Salzberg came up that really resonated for me.

[53:33]

And I learned that I suffer myself. There's more harm with my thinking than the outside world. And so I had to really quiet my mind. And I did it with walking meditation and tai chi and a lot of meditation. It's just simple sitting. Once I got my mind quieted. So, see, the phrase was, may I be safe from inner and outer harm. That's the biggest one. And then may I be happy and feel joy. Not only my joy, but other people's joy. And three, may I be healthy and strong. And four, may I be at ease. And so I just chant that over and over again. It was really quite helpful. Fantastic. The four Brahma Vaharas really helped me through.

[54:35]

Yeah. The loving, taking care of myself, loving myself. And through all of that, I pulled through it. Congratulations. I'm delighted to hear this. Thank you. Those of you who don't know the Brahma Viharas, they're sometimes translated into English as the divine abidings. It was kind of, you can abide in this very sublime state. There are four kinds of love. The love of kindness, the love of... compassion, the love of appreciative joy, and the love, certain kind of love called equanimity. And there's ways of practicing it. There's meditation practices on these that she was referring to, Jennifer. And in one way or the other, I suspect something deep in your source recognized that there was another possibility, another way of living that touched you deeply and was needed. And I'm glad that you listened to that and found your way.

[55:37]

Taking deep breaths helped a lot. A lot of them. A lot of them, yeah. Thank you. I was handed the mic, so I'll just say one thing that came to mind. I've been attending sound baths. Can you hold it up? I've been attending sound baths. I was invited by my neighbor, and she plays Crystal Bowles, and her husband plays the keyboard. You lay down and just completely relax into the sound and the vibration, and I have found that to be extremely helpful in finding the pause. And I found that the vibration of sound shifts my perception differently, to a deeper place, naturally. It's like shavasana in yoga, but with vibration.

[56:39]

And I've just found that really profound. I haven't researched sound baths in depth, but just wanted to share that as another tool of healing that feels like it's a way to access the deeper self, just naturally. Very nice, very nice. I'm glad you found it. And in a certain kind of way, bells and drums they have here in the morning are kind of like its own kind of sound bath, the Zen sound bath. And the idea here is that even with the sound bath they offer here in the morning, it stops at some point. So at some point, you want to have it stop so you're really left with yourself. You're not relying on anything externally anymore. But it's very helpful to do those kinds of things and other things like this. Remember, at some point, we want to not rely on anything but what arises from within. So the woman here was trying for a while, right?

[57:44]

No? Weren't you trying? Oh, okay. Thank you very much for your talk. Something you said struck me. You said compassion is a form of desire. And I was wondering if you could expand on that a little bit. I kind of thought of desire as something, some form of attachment. So would then compassion also be a form of attachment? No, no. The word desire in Buddhism, as I understand it, is a broad term, it's like an umbrella term for a whole range of things. And some forms of desire involve clinging, addiction, craving. attachment. Some kinds of desires, like a vow is kind of a desire, an aspiration is kind of a desire. Compassion is a kind of desire, a desire for the suffering to end. But the source where these come from are very different within us.

[58:48]

It's almost like we have two different operating systems within us. And we have a surface operating system. And this is that I think of as the operating system that works for short-term survival, where you have to act really quickly. You have to fight off the mountain lion or save the mountain lion from the dog. No? Oh, you shouldn't fight. Oh, I see. There was someone apparently last night who maybe was kind of threatened by a mountain lion and her dog. And so there's reasons to act quickly and maybe ferociously, maybe even with greed if we're starving and poor in order to survive. And that works for short-term survival. But many of us are locked into the short-term survival mode all the time. Usually that's very stressful.

[59:48]

It's usually stressing in our muscles. Short-term survival requires a lot of muscular activity. The long-term survival is a different operating system. And that comes from some, again, this deeper source. And if you spend a little bit of time with brand new parents of like little, teeny little babies, or even better, if a newborn is handed to you to hold, you probably will have desires for that person's well-being. but it'll probably well up from some deep place inside. The love, the care, the tenderness, the one to nourish, to support. And it's that, for human survival, over the long term, it's this deeper source of nourishment, nurturing, of caring, of loving, that carries the day.

[60:49]

The short-term survival operating system doesn't work very well for long-term survival. And so we're trying to shift. In this practice, we're shifting from one operating system to another. And so they don't call it an operating system in Buddhism, but they're Buddha nature, not our clinging nature. Good. Well, thank you, everyone. I appreciate it. It's really nice to hear some some of you and your questions and concerns and have a more sense of you. I appreciate in the beginning I tried to get a little sense of you with those questions I had. And I thank you for being here. Oh, wait. Because you're ringing the bell, right? Yes. I've been sharing a good way this time to every medium and place.

[62:07]

I really think that you would like to do what you have to do, but I don't know what you have to say. [...] We are going to show that this is not what we are going to do because it's our disposal. We are going to show that this is not what we are going to do. [...] The beginning is now that I'm not going to be able to do this. I'm not going to be able to do this. I'm not going to be able to do this.

[63:07]

I'm not going to be able to do this. [...] We had a lot of ourselves, and we had a lot of ourselves, and we had a lot of ourselves, and [...] we had a lot of ourselves, Thank you.

[64:02]

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