Good afternoon. I would like to dedicate our sitting for the next few minutes to the overwhelming relief I think many of us feel about what happened yesterday. And I was talking to some of my friends here at Green Gulch, some of the older students have been around a while, and we were saying how there's some shift in our bodies. It was amazing that all of a sudden, like, someone said we could exhale. We could exhale. So it was wonderful to hear words like empathy and compassion and kindness and taking care of others from the president-elect and the vice president-elect and such a lovely people. And everyone on the news seems to be smiling and telling jokes, which I haven't seen for a very long time. So anyway, I want to join in the revelry this evening. hopefully for many years to come as we all go to work, a lot of work to do.

[01:56]

So anyway, why don't we just sit for a few minutes and enjoy our exhalations. Just take a minute to look around and let's become familiar faces.

[08:19]

Oh, I forgot to ring the bell, sorry. You'll just go on meditating. Good evening again. I hope you're all well. And we just had this miraculous hailstorm here at Greenwich. The first rain of the season was a big downpour of ice, very cleansing feeling. So again, I just wanted to proclaim what an amazing transformation, kind of a sea change that's going on in our culture. Hopefully we'll continue to go on and we'll find a way to something resembling civility among our fellow citizens. be lovely, wouldn't it? So what I've been starting to talk about the last couple weeks is a wonderful teaching called the Dara teaching.

[09:26]

I wanted to begin tonight with a quote by Master Dogen. The one great matter is nothing other than Buddha's darshana. Darshana means vision. The one great matter is nothing other than Buddha's darshana. That is opening, displaying, realizing, and entering the reality of all beings. You must now believe that the Buddha's insight is nothing other than your own mind. That's a pretty good opening for mind only teachings. So mind only, the Yogacara is one of the two major schools that underpins the Zen tradition, as I've mentioned a few times. The other one being the middle way school and Zen master Nagarjuna. So this focus in the middle way is in the emptiness teachings and the mind only is on the teaching of mere consciousness or mere thought, mere concepts.

[10:30]

The great genius and champion of the mind only school in the focus of our study right now is Vasubandhu. 5th century scholar monk who himself, as I said, had been converted from the old wisdom or Theravadan tradition of early Buddhism to the Mahayana. And he wrote definitive texts in both of those traditions that are still influential to this day. So, and I recommended to all of you the practitioner's guide inside Vasubhandu's Yogacara by Ben Conley, which is kind of my personal Bible for Yogacara teaching. I always... I feel very grateful to Ben for the work he did, writing this very readable and accessible book. And then last week, I also mentioned a number of concepts that are, I think, useful in coming to understand the core message of this mind-only school. Just to review briefly, once again, these three turnings of the wheel.

[11:31]

So the first turning, being those earliest teachings given by the buddha to his new young disciples as they came out of the forest since began to sit around and listen to him teach that were collected in what became known as the pali canon so the collection of his sutras his lectures of his rules that he gave to the young monks to guide them in their practice and of a later uh collection of and more like commentaries that were written to try and explain what the Buddha had been saying in the many years of his teaching. So the primary focus of the early teaching is on causality. So the cause of suffering is ignorance and desire, wanting things to be different than they are. I think that was probably the source of my tension for these last four years. I just wanted things to be different than they were. Great suffering right there. So the cause of suffering is ignorance based in desire.

[12:34]

And the cessation of suffering is caused by the way you live your life, the Noble Eightfold Path. So cause and effect. In other words, these teachings were basically about how goodness leads to goodness and evil leads to evil. So it was a lot about behavior and deportment and knowing the difference between good and evil and so on. So the first turning, the emphasis of the practice was on the path, traversing the path, the Eightfold Path. So how you see the world, right view, your intention in life, how you make a living, how you speak, how you conduct yourself, your behavior, your effort, your mindfulness, your meditation. The Eightfold Path is basically lifelong, lifelong devotion to living in a certain wholesome way. So basically the By avoiding these unwholesome dharmas, unwholesome behaviors, you will also then dispel the forces of kind of pernicious behavior that are based in greed, hate, and delusion.

[13:41]

The toxic poisonous, the poisonous snake, rooster, and pig at the center of the wheel of birth and death. Greed, hate, and delusion. Pathological emotions, as the Dalai Lama calls them. The focus really on the early teachings is on transforming your bad behavior into goodness, into good behavior. So the trap in this teaching is the possibility of falling into a belief that these substantiated and purified elements of existence, the wholesome elements of existence, would lead you to become a purified, basically a no-self self. You'd be empty of your selfishness. You would be free of unwholesome behaviors. as though one could in fact separate oneself from the world with all of its turmoils and enticements, avoiding unwholesome behaviors and unwholesome situations and so on. So this is referred to critically in the Mahayana as both the philosophical and practical limitations of personal liberation, you know, just you alone becoming free.

[14:48]

So the second turning are the teachings given by the Buddha on Vulture Peak, to his senior disciples. So once the younger disciples had really practiced for quite a while, had basically their deportment was good, their behavior, their thinking, and so on. They had done a lot of purifying work, not perfection, but purification. He then taught the Prajnaparamita, as we'd been studying in the past from the Heart Sutra, with the emphasis on the emptiness and dependent core rising. So the two truths. Now, the trap in this teaching is the possibility of falling into nihilism or nothingness, also known as the Zen sickness. So this seemingly is not such a difficult trap to fall into once you've heard the second turning teachings, the Prajnaparamitza, such as the Heart Sutra. I mean, if there's no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, no suffering, no cause of suffering, no cessation of suffering, and no path leading to the cessation of suffering,

[15:53]

then what's a girl to do? What's left? So a lot of the practitioners of the second turning basically kind of ran out of some kind of moral compass. Well, then what do we do? How do we practice if there's none of that, none of that, and really none of that? So the first turning was basically devoted to the path. There was a path. Second turning, no path. Okay, so now what? So along comes the third turning, being the teachings of the mind only school, which is considered within the Mahayana tradition to be a corrective to the mishandling of the emptiness teachings that Nagarjuna had warned us about, you know, like handling the poisonous snake badly. So the emphasis in the mind only teaching is on caring for the mind, and how the mind functions to create this illusory world which we have come to inhabit. The trap in this teaching is the possibility of falling into the extreme view of eternalism, as if the mind itself is a substantial existence that goes on forever.

[17:01]

So each of these turnings has its own challenges. So our job, really, with these cautionary notes in hand, is to enter into the study of the Buddhist teaching using our own good sense. and our own experience, our embodied experience, in order to find ourselves, as the Buddha encouraged us to do, our own path of true freedom with our one and only precious life. So each of us has this assignment, which of these can help me and how can I help others as a result? Am I free? Am I finding my freedom? So that's really for each of us to discover. So whereas the second turning teachings basically pulled the conceptual rugs out from under our feet one by one, concepts by which we tend to know the world and ourselves, the third turning redeems the use of concepts. This is a really important point, and the use of logic.

[18:04]

So that's called the conventional truth, language, while maintaining at the same time an understanding that logic is ultimately completely without any basis in reality itself. And that's the realm of the ultimate truth. So we have this logic that we can use to navigate our lives, and then the realization that it's empty of inherent existence. So that's kind of the kicker at the end of the Yogacara. So Yogacara is also an emptiness teaching, but it goes about it a little differently. It begins with the person. and how the mind of the person functions, teaching us about our mind, and how we mistake, you know, that there's a famous metaphor of the monk coming across a rope and he screams because he thinks it's a snake. So and then he realizes it's a rope and he laughs. So how do we not mistake the rope for the snake? How do we project our ideas on the world and realize it's merely that it's merely our projection that there's a snake, you know, or a self.

[19:10]

So as a kind of synthesis of the first and second turning teachings, the third turning basically honors words and logic and concepts as being very useful and very beneficial for guiding us along the path to no path. So this is more like a ramp up. We get to use concepts and logic and understanding and teachings that make perfect sense to us in the conventional world and the world that we live in and are used to. And then it kind of drops us off the end. But by then we're ready for it. We've already chanted the Heart Sutra a few thousand times. So thereby taking both the ultimate truth and the relative truth seriously. So the two truths are both held with equal valence in the Yogacara teaching. So I think you may all have heard the Zen, kind of famous Zen story of the mountain. Like when I first began practicing meditation, mountains were mountains. It's conventional truth.

[20:13]

A child of four can tell you that, right? After I had a realization of the true nature of reality, I saw that mountains were no longer mountains. The ultimate truth. And then I realized, as my practice matured, that mountains were mountains again. This is taking the relative and the ultimate seriously. Mountains are mountains. Mountains are no longer mountains. Mountains are mountains again. So that's kind of a good summary of the three turnings. So the third turning uses the magic of logic that mountains are mountains again, by which mountains are then free of being either mountains or being not mountains. Either way is okay. It's okay with me. It's a mountain or it's a no mountain. It's fine. Just talk. Just thought. Just mere concepts. So Reb has this nice quote in his book. He wrote a book on the third turning of the wheel, The Wisdom of the Samadhi Nirmachana Sutra, which is one of the foundational texts for Yogeshara, along with the Lankavatara Sutra.

[21:20]

So those are the two teachings of the Buddha, attributed to the Buddha, that are kind of wonderful to read, but really hard to kind of penetrate if you don't have some commentaries. So I think Reb's commentary is really, really helpful, as is Ben Connelly's. Both of these teachers have done a nice job of introducing these texts to us. So Reb says the third turning protects us from a dangerously narrow understanding of the second turning, offering a systematic path and a conceptual approach that is free of both a real self and real objects. It's a kind of test to see if we are truly free of our conceptual approach. Therefore, we make good use. He's talking about here. Zen center. We make good use of signs, of schedules, robes, gardens, and vegetarian feasts. And we make good use of the Buddhist tradition so that we can refute the whole thing. There's no Zen center here. At least nobody has ever found one.

[22:21]

And we take care of Zen center just so someone can ask us, is this the Zen center? A question we can eventually answer with a smile because we know there's no Zen center. And yet we are the ones who are very happy. about that realization. So the Yogacaric teaching is not geared toward explaining the nature of reality or of the universe, but rather toward explaining the nature of our experience. What's happening? What's happening with us? What's going on? In particular, as it relates to our suffering. Why do we suffer? What's going on here? How does the mind work? You know, psychologists really like the Yogacara because it's all about the working of the mind. And it's quite resonant with modern psychology. It's remarkable how these meditators were able to simply look at their own experience and come up with some very accurate descriptions of what's going on here. Why? How is this happening?

[23:24]

How are these optional sufferings taking place? What is it that's causing us to suffer? Yeah. So basically this teaching is telling us that we don't know anything that is not mediated by consciousness, mind only. And that working with the way our consciousness operates is the best way to promote the cessation of suffering. So in other words, working with the clockwork of our mind is the true pathway to liberation. And moreover, the freedom that's found within the clockwork itself is the same for all of us. We all have the same clockwork. It's the content of our individual minds in which there are no two minds are ever alike, as we've seen and see all the time. It's amazing what people can think about the same thing. You know, like, it just seems so obvious. And then we argue. But the mechanism of arguing is the same.

[24:26]

How we come to see the world is the same. Same clockwork. So before discussing the verses themselves in Ben's book, the 30 verses, I wanted to offer to you an exercise that Ben suggests that we do in the opening chapter of his book, which is called, the chapter is called Self and Other. It's kind of the core focus of mindfulness. This idea that self and then there's other, the splitting of the world into two. So if you would like to try this, we just take a few minutes to notice the experiences that you are having right now. You know, perhaps a sense of being in a particular location. The feeling that you are somewhere. And then notice the sensations in a body. that you think of as yours, my body.

[25:27]

So you can scan the visual field a little bit around you, you know, including those things you can't see, but you can feel like the back of your chair if you're leaning back or the back of your body. Can't see it, but kind of suspect it's still there. The bottom of your feet on the floor, if they are. Lots of terrain. surrounding this impression of a location and of a body. A lot of tingling. Like, ooh, where do I look now? Elbows and back of the neck and back of your ears, your ribs. Like one monk said, the greatest pilgrimage of my life was my body. So then notice the way in which you think of those things You're experiencing as either inside or outside of what you call yourself. It's a little harder.

[26:35]

What's inside? What's outside of myself? And notice that there's an imaginary center of that experience that we call me. You know, so somehow I'm tucked in here. I'm pretty sure of that. I'm tucked in here. I talk like that all the time. That's me. This is me. So what is that? It's a sensation. So the experience of self-centering goes on all day long. We're always self-centering. And the problem that this causes and the possibility of transcending those problems through intimacy with them is the principal subject of the 30 verses. We're going to take this apart. That's what this teaching is all about, is take it apart. You know, the self-object division, which is a total fantasy. But unless we see that, our assumptions, our training, and our normal way of seeing the world is very convinced that I'm over here, and all of you were over there, and so is everything else, is outside of myself.

[27:43]

So the outcome of this exploration may allow us to realize that we imagine the consciousness that experienced things to be the self. And the world that is experienced is the other. So awareness, we think of awareness as the self. And what I'm aware of, what I just said, what awareness is aware of are objects. So in the first verse, of the 30 verses, Vasubandhu offers another possibility. It's kind of radical. He says, whatever is conceived of as self or other occurs in the transformation of consciousness. That neither the self or the other is consciousness. They are each mere conceptions that occur within a fluid process of consciousness. There's this fluid kind of river flowing. Yogacara often talks about consciousness as a river that's just flowing, continuously flowing.

[28:51]

And within that river, there is momentary notions of a self and there are momentary notions of other. They're all just kind of floating along side by side. So whatever is conceived of as self is not a fixed entity, but a mysterious process of transformation. a wondrous flowing, unfolding, continuously unfolding. So yoga chara is very liquidy. You know, as you begin to enter into the imagery of yoga chara, it's a very like experientially liquidy, like allowing your mind rather than to become, you know, substantiated, like the self to become a thing. It's just this part of this flow of impermanent sensations and concepts. So there's a classic Tibetan verse from the 37 practices of the Bodhisattva. Whatever arises in experience is your own mind.

[29:52]

Dogen just said, it's your own mind, is the Buddha's darsana. Whatever arises in experience is your own mind. Mind itself is free of any conceptual limitation. Know that and do not generate self, other, Attachments. This is the practice of a bodhisattva. Whatever arises in experience is your own mind. Mind itself is free of any conceptual limitations. Nothing sticks. Just a river. Mind is free. Know that and do not generate self-other attachments. Trying to grab a hold of those fleeting notions. Mine. Me. Own. I own that. This is the practice of a bodhisattva. So Ben says that the mind-only teaching proposes that the perceived split between the object and the subject is the ultimate aspect of our consciousness that we must see through in order to find peace and joy at the heart of our life as awakening beings.

[31:11]

We have to see through this split, this fantasy of separation between self and objects, both of which are mere concepts. He goes on to say that the Buddha called himself Tathagata. That was the epithet the Buddha used for himself. I am the Tathagata, meaning that which is coming and going. That which is coming and going. The river comes and the river goes. And we're kind of sitting there at the shore just watching the show. a mere flowing occurrence, and that the outward form of such a realization of ourselves as tathagata, coming and going, is a calm and steady and generous and compassionate human being. So these teachings of consciousness only give the practitioner a ground on which to do our practice, including the practice of realizing that there is no ground.

[32:13]

can hear the heart sutras. It's still beating. It's kind of beating in the background. No ground, no ground. But here's the ground, but it's no ground. The ground of no ground. It's non-dual, right? Ground, no ground. Non-dual. Doesn't mean we can't play with it, because it's language. It's just language. We're just talking about how it is for us. And hopefully, language can be liberative. It can also be cruel, divisive, you know. We know that. Horrible. The 30 verses focuses on a two-fold model of practice and understanding. So 30 verses are neatly divided into 15 verses in front and 15 verses in back. And the first 15 are discussing the functioning of consciousness, the clockwork, how consciousness works. And it's really an amazing system. It's a little, you know, sometimes you kind of, people hear this, teaching a yoga chart and they go, oh, no, no, no, that's too complicated.

[33:16]

It's a little complicated, but it's not complicated. It's not complex. It's just a little bit like there's a lot of parts, but they're simple because they're parts that you learned when you were a kid, like your eyes and your ears and your nose. So when I show you the model of the consciousness, all of it's familiar because it's us. It's how the clockwork of our experience works. It's an unusual way. of looking at us. Maybe not for a neurobiologist, but I think for most humans, it's like, what? So the first half of the book is the functioning of consciousness, the clockwork, and the second half is very interesting. It's the nature of phenomena. What are we seeing? What is an object? How does an object come into being? How does consciousness create objects? So it's like the mechanism of delusion, how we do this trick. It's a trick of the mind. It's a good one. It's gotten us pretty far, but it's also not going any further.

[34:20]

So the appearances within consciousness, so that's the second half of the book, that comprise our experience of ourself and of the world. In other words, how we think, first half of the book, and what we think, second half of the book. So again, this is all about how we think, how we conceive of reality, and how it both is liberative and Trapping, you know, suffering. So in the first half of the 30 verses, Vasubhanda uses what's called, this is where it gets, some people go, no, no. Vasubhanda uses the eightfold consciousness model. So there are eight pieces of our consciousness that we can look at, we will look at. I'll show you in a minute. Eightfold consciousnesses model. of experience to teach us how to practice with and understand the functioning of consciousness in order to liberate ourselves from the afflictive or pathological emotions of greed, hate, and delusion.

[35:21]

So there's a method to this madness. This is to help free us. The second half, as I mentioned, of 30 verses, Vasubhanda uses what's called the three characteristics or the three natures model, which teaches us how to let go of delusion. So we have the eight consciousnesses, is the first half, and then we have the three natures, the second half. So that's really all we have to deal with, eight and the three. And we'll look at those later. The Yoga Chara tradition in this way aims to treat what it sees as the two primary barriers to the cessation of suffering for a human being. The first one is the barrier of our afflictive emotions, the conventional truth about ourselves and our lives. How we think about the world. How we treat the world. How we think about ourselves. All these harmful ways that our thinking can lead us into suffering. So that's the first barrier. Afflictive emotions. And the second barrier.

[36:23]

So that's the first barrier. This is called the two barrier. Double barrier. This is kind of a famous thing. Sometimes in Zen koans you see they'll talk about the double barrier. The first one is the self creating suffering. by greed, hate, and delusion. That's one barrier. You get through that one, that's pretty good. The second barrier is the barrier of delusions, the ultimate truth in which no separate self can ever be found. So that's the emptiness teachings. So first you got to deal with what you think is there and how you see it and how you take care of things. And then you deal with the fact that it was never there in the first place. It's a dream. Buddha talks a lot about dreams, dew drops, lightning flashes. So perhaps you can see how these two barriers that are outlined in the Yogacara tradition reflect a synthesis that has been forged by the authors of the first and second teachings.

[37:24]

You know, the first turning emphasizing the shedding of afflictive emotions, the path of purification, the sorting out of good from evil. So that's the first turning, the early Pali Canon teachings. very important, and the second turning, emphasizing the shedding of delusional concepts altogether, the no mind, no Buddha, no suffering, and so on. So those are the two barriers, first turning, second turning. This is the synthesis of those. The initial approach the Yogacara tradition uses for freeing us from suffering is to draw our attention away from our habitual tendencies to try and possess And exert control over what appear to be external things. I don't know about you, but I've certainly spent a good part of my life doing that. Trying to exert control over what I believe to be external things. People, objects, you name it. Out there. If they would only... I haven't quite gotten over it yet.

[38:28]

So, exerting control over what appear to be external things... And so turning ourselves away from that, that addiction to controlling things, toward the workings of our own mind, consciousness only. I remember walking with my teacher some years ago when he first brought these teachings here, because they only recently translated the Sandhinarachana Sutra. It was in Tibetan and Chinese, but not in English until maybe 20 years ago at most. That's pretty recent. So we had this initial access to some drafts of that translation, and then we actually got the text itself, and we were able to study it for a while. And I remember as we started to study this idea of turning your attention towards your mind, I said to Rev, this is the first time in a very long time I've actually been interested in what's going on in here. How does this work? So one of the...

[39:30]

One of the amazing qualities of this particular teaching is it actually can begin to transform the focus of your intention onto, what am I thinking? Did I think that? Is that true? Just because I thought it, does that make it true? Most likely not, as it turns out. Most of what I think isn't true. It's just kind of throwing darts at a dartboard that isn't even there. No, not really. So consciousness only, consciousness only. So basically you stop the car, you know, you stop the car, you take your hands off the wheel, and you look under the hood. How does this thing work? So Ben says, Ben Connolly says, consciousness only is also sometimes called mere consciousness or merely consciousness. To remind us that whatever it is about which we are becoming agitated, irritated, overjoyed, overwhelmed, or aggrieved is just consciousness.

[40:37]

Not a real thing, but a projection of mental tendencies. As is true of everybody else as well, and yet, as we all know, mere consciousness has a great power to cause terrible suffering in this world. So it's not just a parlor trick. I mean, it is a parlor trick, but it has incredible consequences for our lives and for the lives of the people we love to say nothing of the people we hate and who hate us. So the next thing I want to do is to show you, give you a kind of a taste of the eight consciousnesses model because you're You're going to be hearing more about it if you keep coming back. I hope you will. The eight consciousness model is what we're going to be looking at in the 30 verses. So this is the drawing. I made an illustration here. I'm going to do a screen share.

[41:39]

Let's see. How do I do that? I know I might do this first. Okay. All right. Oops. And you all disappeared. Okay. Now. Screen share down here. Bingo. Okay, here we go. There we are. This is it. Nice, huh? I tried to, I'm missing some things. I needed a pen. I tried the pen, but it wouldn't really work. So I'll have to tell you what's missing from this. So this is an illustration of the Eight Consciousnesses Model, the first 15 verses, and this is what Dasubandu goes through in some detail. So this dotted line, can you see the arrow? When I move my arrow, does that show? Yeah? Oh good, okay. So this dotted line...

[42:40]

is like above the water and below the water. So very much in keeping with modern psychology. So most of what we are is below the water. Much of what we call myself, my heartbeat, my blood turning, my cells trying to make antibodies, all that stuff that's going on is unconscious. If it had to be conscious, we'd be long gone. We couldn't possibly control all the different parts of our life. So luckily for us, most is unconscious. Like there's just the tip of the iceberg that sticks up. And it's very momentary. That tip of the iceberg is very momentary. And it takes the form of these six, as I said, very familiar forms of consciousness. So there's smell. These are your senses. We're conscious of smell, of taste, of sound, of sight, of touch. So the five, what we teach the kids, you know, five senses.

[43:44]

And then they add, very importantly, this one is added, awareness itself. Awareness of, so when you smell something, that's a direct experience. You smell something's burning. You forgot to turn off the pot in the kitchen. And you smell it. And for a moment there, it's like, what's that? You know, sometimes we'll smell smoke here. And for a while, it was like, oh, my God, you know, California was on fire. Sometimes it's just my neighbor has built a fire. So you smell something and then you try to figure it out. What is it? What is that? So we add words, awareness of, and then we name it. So you could say that this number six is naming. This is where the naming comes in. So we have a taste and then we try to figure out what is that? What's in that sauce? You know, we try to name that. Give names to everything. We like to name things. It's a big part of what the mind is doing. Sounds, sights, and tactile sensations.

[44:46]

So these are the big five of our sense consciousnesses. Very hard to say consciousnesses. And then awareness itself. Okay. So that's what we're conscious of. Very quickly. These things happen fast. You know? Sound. And we switch around, there's a function of the mind called manaskara, which means averting your attention. So like we have a little like a laser pointer, you know, and if I say, you know, pick out all the all the things in your room that are red, very quickly, you can do that. How about blue? You know, so we have this amazing kind of laser fire ability with our minds to direct our attention. So all of this stuff here is going on very fast. It's transient. You know, sensory experience is very brief. And it's the story making here that gets us into trouble. Okay, so we tell stories about what we see. And we also have feelings about what we see.

[45:49]

So it's a combination of thinking, feeling, emotionalized conceptualizations. When you add a little feeling to this, I don't like that sound. I don't like those things over there. That doesn't feel good. I love that taste and so on. So this is how we move. I like it. I don't like it. I'm not sure. And that's another focus of Zen training. It's like, what is with that like it, don't like it? What are you doing? John Cage said this great thing. He said, the composer, he said, I realize if there's something I don't like, if I just wait and I just wait and keep paying attention to it. After a while, I realize. that there is no reason whatsoever that I don't like it. The reason just evaporates. So he's an interesting Zen teacher in his own right. I really appreciate John Cage. So that's above the water.

[46:50]

We got six of them. So you already got six of the eight taken care of right there. And below the water is the big iceberg. This one here, Alaya. It's also called the storehouse consciousness. So the storehouse consciousness is number eight. And number seven is this little Sanskrit term called manas. Manas is kind of the troublemaker. Because manas is also called the lover, which is why I used a heart there. Because manas, this function of our mind, it somehow has this experience of the unconscious. as this kind of vast reserve. I mean, can you sort of sense that about yourself? That there's a lot of you that is not being, you're not aware of right now. Like maybe you speak French. Where are you keeping that? You know, or you know how to cook lasagna. Where are you keeping that? Where are you storing all of that stuff that you have learned and that you know, and all those vacation trips you took and you name it, your third grade experience, you know, your friends in eighth grade, that is all stored in here.

[48:00]

It's unconscious. And sometimes it pops up. One of these things will pop up into present time awareness. Like, wow, that's interesting. I just thought about third grade. Why did I say that? You know, I just said it. That's so strange. Third grade pops up. And I have an idea about that. Maybe an image comes to mind. So this is a really important, this storehouse consciousness, because it's also our conditioning. So like our racism is stored in there, how we were conditioned as children to think about other people, you know, our preferences, our identity as females or as males or you name it, all of the ways we've been conditioned to think of ourselves and how we, our parents influenced us, our culture influenced us. You know, I'm speaking what we call English. That's in there. That has a long history. So that whole history of the creation of the English language is in here. And it comes from the past.

[49:02]

So my conditioning is from what we call the past. And it's carried along in this river. This is a river. It's not like a bag of stuff that you carry around like Santa Claus. It's this river of these conditioned, our past. This past is being carried along. Our conditioning is being carried along in our consciousness, in our unconscious. And it determines our future. So how we've been conditioned in the past and what we do now based on our current experience. So if I start training, so this is the field of training. This is where Zen training happens or any kind of training happens. We practice with these various features of our conscious awareness. And in doing so, we influence, we send new material down into our storehouse consciousness, which becomes our future. So this is our inheritance from our past, behavior, whatever, regrets, talents.

[50:06]

And then we can develop these or reform them into something more... that we like better and that others might like better as well by utilizing our conscious awareness. So this is why training, this is how the training happens. Otherwise, we'd just be doomed. We just always would have the storehouse of unconscious tendencies that could not be changed. But the teaching is they can change. In fact, this dissipates with enlightenment. It disappears. And what's left there is basically the Dharmakaya, the mind of the Buddha. It's a very spacious, wide open welcoming, like I described earlier, the tathagata, thus come, thus come, thus go. The river flows without being caught, without being stuck and without creating a sense of a separate self. So the freedom, alaya is both very beneficial because it helps us to engage in practice. And it's also the end game is the dissipation of alaya.

[51:12]

It will vanish. So then that leaves number seven, manas, the lover. The manas has this sense of the alaya as the self. That's what it makes the self. The manas, this little quality of our mind, is what thinks of this alaya as itself. Not only that, it loves itself. There's four qualities that manas has. Self-love, conceit, ignorance. And I forget the fourth one. But it's all that same thing. It's like all about me. All about me. It's like this little reflective, little mirror of self-love or hate. I mean, love and hate are really just two sides of the same thing. Self-absorption. I am really important. I'm the worst person that ever lived or I'm the greatest person that ever lived. Either way, it's false. This is just your storehouse consciousness. But it's tricked. into believing that this is yourself.

[52:14]

So that's where that idea of this self is, according to this teaching, which is pretty helpful, actually. I think as hopefully you spend a little time with it, you begin to see that this is a really helpful way of understanding. I found it really helpful to understand racial conditioning. We're conditioned for generations. We've been conditioned. We keep conditioning the future. If we don't change it, we'll condition the future. We got to do it now. We got to do it in the present. We've got to alter the course of our lives, each of us. These are individual consciousnesses. Collective is a whole other thing. But a lot of the collective consciousness shows up in here too because we're not separate. The way I came into this culture, this culture was kind of here when I arrived. I didn't make it up. So we're also products of the collective consciousness, like what we collectively believe to be so. Okay, so I'm going to stop there and open the, let's see, I gotta get rid of this thing.

[53:22]

And I'm happy to have your questions or comments or like, oh noes or whatever you got. Let's see, where are you? Okay, good. Lisa, thank you. Yeah, I was a student who sat in the front row all the time too. What is the, is it the manas that creates the sense of separation between self and other? Yeah. That's where it happens? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It falls in love with itself. And it's just, it's not even, it's not even. You know, it's just this big bag of stuff. It's hardly worthy of that much adoration. I think we sense that, you know, it's like, who? You know, we're born with it.

[54:25]

It's not a fault. It's more like, okay, this is what's happening. This is the clockwork, right? And then once we get the clockwork down, we can begin to tweak it. It won't go away. You know, when we become Buddhists, that'll be nice. But meanwhile, we can... We can not fall for it. You know, falling for it's the whole problem. Belief is the linchpin. Like, you know, I can think something. If I don't believe it, it's just fine. It doesn't hurt anybody. But if I believe it, it's like, and then I take action. You know, then I start, I think something, I say it, and then I do something about it, you know. So that's karma is action. So we want to slow it down, stop the car, let go of the wheel, and look under the hood. So will this then align with the skandhas in some way?

[55:26]

Yes. And I would say we'd have to look at the 12-fold chain to see where the development of the skandhas connects to consciousness. Consciousness doesn't really get elaborated in the traditional 12-fold chain. It just says consciousness. And then it has the, yeah, I think the five skandhas are next, or name and form, nama rupa, the five skandhas. So it's a product of this process. The five skandhas are basically embodied self. You know, it's already pretty put together. And it's kind of the 12-fold chain is not a good process. It's a process of self-making as separate and my feelings as separate and my actions on my feelings as a determinant of my outcome of my actions. So that's the cycle of suffering.

[56:29]

12-fold chain is suffering. So the five skandhas are an illusion and very powerful illusion. So he will. I'll have to review where in the 30 verses. If he brings up the five skandhas, I think so, but I'm going to have to look at that. We may see it. Or if not, I'll find out exactly what the link is. But it is the next link in the 12-fold chain is the five skandhas. Thank you. Yeah. Sorry, I couldn't do a better answer with that. Thank you. Anshul. Hello, Fu. Good to see you. Hi. A few things I wanted to share. I guess the first one is a question. I don't hear you yet. There you are. Oh, cool. Perfect. The first thing I wanted to share is a question, which is related to the diagram you shared earlier.

[57:38]

There's different things that are numbered. Yeah. Number one through five is perception. Your senses, your five senses. Right. Six is a different category. It's more... Awareness. Awareness itself. Awareness of your senses. Right. The sixth consciousness is aware of contact. Sensory contact. And it names it. So it's a languaging function. And then number eight is more of state, right? It's related to its memory. All of that. Yes, memories, training, skills. If you can do a backflip, that's in there. All of those things you've learned. All kinds of memories, essentially. Yeah, body memory.

[58:40]

Everything that's stored in the body as a state, right? Yeah. Not sure. You can't get in there, really. I mean, I don't think neurobiologists are getting in there either. How's this working? Where's your backflip stored? So it's not quite clear. The inner workings of it is kind of miraculous, really, that it works. Yeah. But it does. And the theory, without having neurobiology to utilize the science, they basically were looking at the experience of it. Something's happening here. I go to sleep at night, and I wake up, and I still know how to do a backflip. So something's being carried along. It doesn't just stop. Right. So this is their way of understanding. It's a theoretical model. This is just a map. Just a map. Not to be confused with the territory.

[59:44]

Right. So where would you put thinking in this model? Six. I see. So awareness includes thinking as well. Yeah. Words, language. Yeah. Naming, labeling. So above the water, above the line are present moment. And then it's very mysterious. I have a little trouble understanding. I think they had a little trouble theorizing exactly how we carry along to make a whole sentence. Present moment has to be kind of wide. to get a whole concept in there. But I think I've read somewhere that, you know, our train of thought is about the length of a tunnel, you know, and not a very long tunnel. But if you go into the tunnel, and then you come out the other end, like the one here in San Francisco, after you close the bridge, tunnel, cross the bridge, you know, it's about how long we can actually, you know, hold a thought that then doesn't become the next one.

[60:58]

So maybe that's kind of the presenting. It's about that long. Thank you. I appreciate that. The other thing I wanted to share was what you mentioned earlier about bringing the subconscious or the unconscious into the conscious. I read something around psychoanalysis, which is very similar. At least Freudian psychoanalysis is very similar to this in that. It's about bringing the unconscious into the conscious so it can be processed and then forgotten. And it's also very similar to what Dogen says, which is you study the self. So the first step is the study, which is essentially bringing the unconscious into the conscious. And once you can bring that, then you forget the self by bringing it into the conscious. Yes. I appreciate it. I was appreciating. Yes. in all these different viewpoints.

[62:03]

Yeah. It's ancient medicine. You know, these meditators really knew how to help themselves. They found a cure, you know, for human suffering. Calm down. Don't believe what you think. Be nice. It was pretty simple. You know, it still works. It still works. It's a good formula. So it's nice to see the resonance with modern psychology, although they think they invented it. It's nice to have some attribution, like all the mindfulness is going on all over the place. It's like, why don't you just once say that the Buddha taught? Just give a little credit, but it seems like it's become secular. That's all right. As long as it works, as long as people are becoming healthier, it doesn't really matter. Yeah, I think you'll enjoy this. I've really enjoyed the Yogacara. And there's also the Sandhi Nirmachana Sutra is an even more intensely and kind of delicious dive into this wisdom teaching.

[63:12]

So if you get intrigued by the 30 verses, that's where he gets his material. That's where Vasubandhu got his material from the sutras. Same thing with Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna is riffing on the Prajnaparamita sutras. And Vasubandhu and Asanga are doing the same thing with the Sandhi Nirmachana Sutra. Sandhi Nirmachana means knocking out, untying the knots, untying the knots. It's quite wonderful. It takes a little doing. It's nice to have some company when you're looking at that sutra. I think we spent about a year walking through it and looking up references and stuff. But it was quite... Yeah, well, it's all good. Dharma is at the beginning. I'm sorry, what did you say? I was just saying I'll be sure to hit you up if I find myself. Yeah, good. Please, please, please. Yeah, I'm very easy to hit up. No problem. Very easy to find, especially these days. I haven't left my house in a long time.

[64:16]

Anyway, be happy to do anything you like in terms of study. We appreciate that. Thank you. Okay, it's either Bill or Kelly. Hey, it's actually me. Oh, hey. Sometimes there's two of you on the couch. You guys switch it up a little. So I was wondering about if there's any... Well, one of the things I was wondering is if there's any good reading material about the 12-fold chain, anything you would recommend? Yeah. Which, I mean, you could get back to me on that, I guess. You see all these books here? Most of those. No, actually, the Dalai Lama, I always go to the Dalai Lama because the Tibetans are really good scholars.

[65:23]

And his writings on the 12-volt chain are very accessible. You know, he teaches in public so much that he's made a lot of those teachings much less esoteric. So I would start there. And in fact, the best thing to do really is to get the diagram, you know, the illustration. Because myself, I'm a very visual learner, so that's why I draw all this stuff. You know, there's pictures of each of the steps that helps. Like the first step, ignorance is a blind person with a cane walking across a log over a cravice. You know, so that's ignorance. And then the next one is a potter. It's karmic consciousness. It's tendencies of mind that are being carried by the alaya are things you did in the past, and you're doing the same thing over again. So all the pots look just the same. So that's the making things, constructing things. out of habit. So that's a picture of a potter is just making all these pots and they're all identical.

[66:26]

So that's the second picture. So you go around the 12 and each one of them has an image, which is fun to draw. I did actually, you might like to do that too. Make your own 12-fold chain. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting that about the potter, because it seems like, I mean, I can observe that in myself a lot, just like I'll come to a solution to some situation. and then try and use that solution on anything that I might think is similar when instead of having to like actually investigate what that is like in that moment, trying to like save that energy. And I guess that's also just like when we see a tree, it's a lot easier to just like reference it as like a tree, like this idea of a tree instead of actually like being in awe of what it is because that takes more time. You know, we don't have time to be in awe all the time. Right, a lot of trees. Right. Yeah, but it's also fun to, you know, pick out a tree and then walk up real close to it, put your nose on it. Is this the tree?

[67:28]

It's like mountains are no longer mountains. Trees are no longer trees. You know, what is this? It's really nice to work with your senses and let them break up the set of conceptualizations. You just can't hold it. It's like, I don't know what this is. Mm-hmm. When I, you know, or when I just hug it, there's a really interesting parable from old sutras about the blind men and the elephant. You know, there are five blind men who were introduced to an elephant. And so each one of them takes a different part of the elephant. So one takes the ear and another one, the tail and another one, the trunk and another one. I forget the hide, I guess. And so the guy with the ear says, oh, yeah, it's like a plantain tree. And the guy with it, he said, no, no, no. It's like a rope. The guy with the tails, that's a rope. Elephant's a rope. No, it's not. It's a tree. So it's kind of like us. We have these amazing concepts for things. But the more we get intimate with them, the more we see the concepts just don't hold. It's just this thing we do.

[68:30]

Like snails make slime and humans make thought. We just lay down a trail and we walk on it. We slide on it. But as soon as you start to break that up and play with it, which I think artists, that's what artists do, right? Play with it. It begins to be much more awesome and awful. Both, you know, it's like awe. If you're not in awe, you're distracted. You're making things up. Well, I was wondering about the alaya as well and how... like if there's any sort of directed ways of working with that. I mean, I know like some of the stuff I've been reading about like somatic work, My Grandmother's Hands is a really good book. I don't know if you've read that. And so just like thinking about how, like with the process of sitting too, it seems like, and like sometimes

[69:30]

some of that subconscious stuff is just sort of flowing, like when, and almost like processing itself when I'm getting out of the way. But then other times it seems like really directed sort of work is necessary. And I guess. Yeah. Well, that's what therapists I think do. They stimulate your unconscious and kind of draw up various things. You know, who does that remind, therapists used to say all the time, who does that remind you of? Like, Oh no, not again. Well, not again. You know, it was pretty clear who it was reminding me of over and over again. Mom. What a surprise. So, you know, we all have our conditioning from our past, and it's blessed, and it's also, you know, it's also something that was confusing when we were kids. So, yeah, I think skillful summoning, conjuring. Yeah. of our unconscious. This can be wonderful. My therapist was actually a hypnotherapist.

[70:32]

So he would use the material that was hurting me and he'd give me a different memory. You know, it's like linguists. It was a neuro-linguistic programming where you take a memory and then you turn it pink or you turn it upside down or you can do that because they're just memories and you can actually re-vision them. And now when I think about certain memories that I had, his, you know, hypnosis, his suggestion is there in front. Much nicer than the one behind it. So, you know, there's magic. It's magic how we can heal with the right, you know, with the right help. So that would just, like, heal the emotions around the event? But then, like, leave your... memory of like the specifics intact, but like, just kind of like change the emotional context of it. Like the hypnotherapy stuff. Well, I mean, I'll give you, I'll give you an example.

[71:35]

So I had this ongoing, I had a vision or memory or an image in my head of being locked in a, in a desert kind of castle, which the sandstone lattice work that I was looking out at the desert through this sandstone lattice work. Do you get that image? Mm-hmm. Yeah, I was like this desert phase when I was maybe in my 30s, just longing for the desert, you know, and being trapped behind this sandstone wall. And my therapist, I tell him these great tragic images, and he said, maybe that's an ice cream cone. Yeah, exactly. And now that's there. So I get this ice cream cone. And it makes me laugh. It actually, a lot of what he did for me and with me makes me smile. You know, like, thank you. So, yeah, I think gifted teachers, gifted therapists, and so on can really help free us.

[72:44]

I think this I Ching has that quality, too. It's very freeing. Thanks. Yeah, good to see you. I'll see you too. Okay, we'll let you go. Hope you all rest. It was a long four days, wasn't it? Just glued to MSNBC. Anyway, something's passed. Something that needed to pass is passed. How grateful. Okay, all of you, please take care. Enjoy yourselves. Yeah, bye-bye. You're welcome to unmute. Thank you so much. Bye, everyone. Bye, everyone. Have a great week. Paul and Kate. Snow. Did you guys get snow? No, lots of snow. We got hail. I thought of you.

[73:45]

I thought, oh, that must have put the fire down. It did. That was a... There were two changes that happened on the same day. Yeah. The election and the snow. Oh, blessings. Yeah. Double blessings. In both places. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cooling down. As Biden said, we got to cool down. Get the rhetoric. Cool it down. Well, I'm happy for that. Yes. Glad you're safe. Thank you. Thank you. Goodbye. Goodbye. Hey, Drew. Thank you, Boo. Thank you. I'm driving, so I can't visualize, but I appreciate it. I can see you with your baseball hat, your Giants cap. That's good. Thanks so much. Have a good night. Did you say you're a neurobiologist? Me? Yeah. I taught... I'm not an official...

[74:46]

You know, practicing neurobiologist. I taught neuroscience for a while. So this stuff must be interesting to you. I mean, it'd be great to hear your like, well, I don't know about that or, you know, whatever you think, how it fits together with your own understanding. I actually find it sort of trapping when you have a very mechanistic view of how, say, what sensory perception is. I have trouble letting go of that to work with other models. Yeah. Well, that's part of what you want to see is how does your mind get trapped? That's the mechanism. What trapped you? It's just a concept, just a map. So that's what we're studying is how do we get trapped? How did that happen? So I think I'd love to hear more about that because I think that maybe it's like – forget the fish trap and go after the fish.

[75:47]

I mean, that's the Zen thing, right? Don't bother with the models. In fact, they criticize Yogacara for making a thing, substantiating the mind. But then they redeem themselves at the end of the 30 verses rather nicely. You know all that stuff we just told you? So it's... Yeah, you know, I don't know, it may be hard for other people. The Western view of thinking as being very separate from sensory perception. So for that to be, you know, number six, for it to be the sixth sense. Yes. That one's very hard to put together. Well, the way, so the sense, every sense, it only has any... meaning in terms of an object of sense, right? So smell doesn't have any use if you're not something to smell, if there isn't an odor.

[76:52]

So those are not separate. That's part of what this is walking us to, is that what you see and what's seen are not separate. What happens with the sixth sense is what you think, and this consciousness is sort of like the nose smelling. That sixth consciousness is picking up on thinking. So it's analogous to the other senses. So Buddhists add, okay, you have a mental sense, a sense that is paying attention to thought. So they just make it into one of the sense organs. So you have six sense consciousnesses. One of them is consciousness of thought. So when you get down to thinking about the sort of the mechanistic neuroscience, the way... I think of it is that there are odor molecules that hit the receptors in the olfactory epithelium that hit the sensory organ or light hitting the retina.

[77:54]

And then there's a lot of processing that goes on. And the processing then is the various levels of getting it to something where you can put a label on it. Right. Pulling all of the strands together where you can snap the label on it. And so what, you know, so thinking about thinking is that sixth sense. It's not the odor molecules hitting the epithelium, but it's rather the neurons just sort of firing up there randomly and then that coming to awareness. So maybe that's a way to think of it to, you know, I always want to make things parallel. Well, I do too. That's why I was curious how you would see it. I'd be very interested as we go through this, if you continue to bring your critical neurobiological thinking to it, it'd be very helpful. I think if we can, you know, see where this thing, this model, which is really, again, it's not science because they didn't have any science. They couldn't really do it.

[78:55]

It was really experiential. So they experienced the thinking consciousness as being aware of thought. So they just, you know, they experienced, they didn't have all those Neurons and olfactory blah, blah. So they just had the nose and odor. Like a kid, you know, the ear and sound. And they're separate. How could they be separate? How could the experience of sound be separate from the sound? Which I think is valid for neurobiology too, right? Yes. Oh, yeah. Because there's a distortion of perception. Yeah. Yeah. And the other one to put in then, to think about... Where the judgment piece comes in, the like it, don't like it, like it, don't like it. I would see this little judge sitting here with a hammer saying, like it, don't like it. Yeah, yeah. When those sort of models are presented, that's always early in the process.

[79:58]

It's right in the middle of the wheel, 12-fold chain. They have the snake, the pig, and the rooster. Greed, hate, and delusion. Greed, I like it. Hate, I don't like it. And delusion, I'm not sure. So they're the primary forces. Greed, hate, and delusion are beginningless, as the Buddha said. Beginningless greed, hate, and delusion. You come in with it. You know, the Big Bang comes before that. Greed, hate, and delusion are primal forces. yeah you know and they're of course evolutionary too i mean you're not going to make it through the around the planet very very well if you don't avoid or attract you got to have sex and you got to get food so that's you know yeah so it's and run away from the predators so it's pretty much wired in right to our mammalian so i don't think there's a real question about where's that come from as much as we got that You know, that's kind of important.

[81:06]

I think where I'm, you know, my question is, where does it, I mean, maybe I'm thinking of this the wrong way, but I'm thinking about this, you know, that you start with form and you go to perception and you work your way to consciousness. And maybe I ought to take the arrows out of there. Yeah, maybe so. I read this thing once. Rather than the 12-fold chain being 12 separate things, it's more like you take each one of the squares and stack them up and put a pen through it. They're all happening at the same time. This way of understanding it is really some way of trying to parse it down so that you could have a sense of how the sequence, how you're trapped in the sequence. Because really, pretty much, it all happens really fast. You're ignorant of non-separation. So that's where it all starts because you think you're separate. That's a mistake. It's wrong. So that's what we're trying to correct right here. That collapses the 12-fold chain, which is what the Buddha was doing.

[82:09]

He was collapsing the 12-fold chain. He did it backwards, and he saw, oh, if I go backwards, I don't get in all that trouble. So then he did it forward, and then he did it backwards. And he said, oh, doing it backwards is the freedom of suffering. That's how you end suffering. And, you know, in a practical way, the way I think we train people here is to stop at feelings. Because that one we can catch. It's hard to stop at ignorance because it's so inborn, inbred. This dualistic notion about separation, separate self is really hard. This book is going after that one. But most people can recognize a feeling. And when we say stop at feelings, we mean zazen. sit with it do not act on it do not feed it do not take the next step like i'm gonna have to do something about that so you know we work with elemental things like itches and i'm hungry i want lunch and boy i wish the lights were brighter or whatever you know so and you just have to go 40 minutes you don't do anything yeah and so you're training your reactive system you're training your mammal and

[83:24]

to sit and wait. And that's kind of magic that you can do that. That you can, yeah, you can really observe it and see the pieces start to fall apart. Yeah, you don't have to be compulsive. You don't have to reach for it just because you want a cookie. You don't have to have a cookie. It's not cookie time, you know? Cookie time is at three o'clock. I have to say, Zazen and staff meetings, they're both good training. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree with you. Don't have to say that. That's right. Well, nice to see you, Lisa. I'm glad you're coming. Thank you for coming. Appreciate it. This is so wonderful. It's the crash course in Buddhism. Yeah, the one for me too. I'm so happy to be able to go over all this material because I've had these files around forever and I thought, what am I going to do with all this stuff, you know? I mean, I teach a class twice a year or something like that for six weeks. And then that's it. And I thought, I could do it every week.

[84:25]

You know, my sense, though, is it's only going to be a week. Can't we sit here with this? I can see you sitting with that sutra for a year. I know. It's so good. And, you know, I'm going through these. So I got a method to my madness. So you got, you know, the Buddha and then Nagarjuna. So middle way and then Vasubandhu. And next. we get to Bodhidharma, who brings this training, these two schools embodied, he doesn't have, we're not going to get into them again, to China and starts teaching mind only. He starts off with the mind only text. And for five generations, that's what Zen was, was mind only. So then we get to see how these teachers were teaching mind only. And then all of a sudden, sixth ancestor, kabom, prajnaparamita. So, I mean, I like, Getting the background of these two, because they're going to show up as Zen, as we go forward into the Zen ancestors, we're going to get to visit how they were basically carrying and teaching those with Zen koans and Zen stories, which is what makes it really fun.

[85:33]

It's like, oh, that's a Yogacara thing. So you look at the koans and say, oh, this is emphasizing emptiness. This is pulling out the Yogacara teaching. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you can see it. You can feel it. Like I was saying that quip, like when the babies are crying, this very mind is Buddha. That's Yogacara. Oh, no, it's okay. You're okay. And then when the babies stop crying, no mind, no Buddha. You know, so that's the emptiness teaching. And they're both good. They're both medicine. And that's why they're compliments. They really are needed. They really did need to come up with Yogacara because the emptiness teaching by itself was too stark and prone to nihilism. Okay. Even though that's not correct, a lot of people make that mistake. It's easy. What is it?

[86:35]

The idea of a near enemy. Exactly. A near enemy. of wisdom is ignorance. It's the far enemy and the near enemy. That's right. It is all around. Bye. Thank you so much. See you soon. Take care. Bye-bye, Drew. You drive carefully. Hey, Fu? Yeah. Hey, it's Jenny. Hey. I just wanted to say quick, I just sent an email out, but I don't know if you're going to Zazen tonight. I went for a hike, and I caught a really bad chill, and I have not been able to warm up. Did you get caught in that? I did. I did. I was out way up on the ridge and got dumped on it. It was terrible. It must have been a little painful, huh? It was painful and very cold, and I don't feel very well afterwards, so I think I'm not going to make it to Zazen tonight. No problem. You take care of it. But in case, I just sent an email to Julian.

[87:37]

I don't know if he ever checks his email at night. I can get incense. I know where to find incense. You know where it is? Okay. I know where things are stored around here. I've been in Gisha. You know what's going on here. I know the territory, yeah. So take care. Don't get sick. And thanks for letting me know. Okay. All right. Thanks, Fu. Thanks for hanging on. Yeah, no worries. You can leave, you know. You don't have to. I don't know how the recording goes. Like if I leave, does the recording stop? Or I need to find out about that. Well, maybe you could let me know because I'm the co-host, right? So then just inform me and then I can let you go. You can go and then I can, if I'm going on like just now. Okay, no worries. All right, thanks. See you soon. All right.

[88:25]

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