To live in these things, these little tiny openings, particularly in California, you can sort of understand it, Minnesota. The other thing is that people sit in tubs full of dirty water. It's very peculiar to take a bath and sit in your own water after you've been in Japan for a long time. In Japan, of course, you wash, the whole room is a bath, and you wash on the floor, and rinse off on the floor, and then you get in the water and soak. And now I have to heat this hot, once all the water's gone. Yeah, 100%. When we built the baths, I think we built it in Japanese style. Yes. And it's the best bathing in the world. The best worked-out bathing in the world. See, my Dutch ancestry is coming out of this.

[01:01]

I'd say Debra isn't here, right? Oh, you got here. You decided to come here. No, I waited. Keith is here. Do you want me to sit? Well, there's a few people. There should be a few people left out. It wasn't the tape. I don't know. I looked at it before. Do we have, for the kids here, Tylenol, Liquiprin, and baby aspirin, both? Yes, yes. We do. What we just found out with Elizabeth, who has a temperature of 104.5, that for some babies, Tylenol works, and for some babies, aspirin works. It's not necessarily the same. It won't work with both, with all babies. For sure.

[02:48]

Jeff Anderson says, and I've found this true of Timmy, if you bathe their feet in cayenne pepper and hot water, as far as they can stand, their temperature drops down. That's interesting. You bathe... Say that again, you put... Cayenne pepper and, you know, a hot foot bath, cayenne pepper, and it knocks the temperature down. I wouldn't have believed him, except I'm proud of you. What is, how is cayenne pepper any different from any other pepper? It's supposed to do whatever it was, you know. Do we have cayenne pepper here too? Tylenol and cayenne pepper. A little garlic. Anybody, any other suggestions? Anyway, standard medical procedure, these other things, I'm sure they work, is I guess because babies get convulsions. I remember we had to rub Sally down with alcohol in the hospital on a cold metal table. Boy, was she screaming. But Elizabeth, we've had to do it for three days now. Every three hours we have to rub her down. Well, I guess in the morning she's better, but at night time she had another hard night.

[04:02]

You've all met Murayama-sensei, or Shoki-sama. I can't resist telling you the story of how I first met him, which is when I was at Eheji. He became such a, you know, high-ranking character, you know, I never saw him. until we went out baking one day. And I was supposed to go baking two or three days later. Some of you know part of this story. I was supposed to go baking several days later, and there's this little chant you have to learn, but for me not knowing the meaning of it, and it's not usual Japanese, I have to sort of literally memorize it syllable by syllable. And it would have taken a few, a little while, But they told me I was going right away, and you have this big mushroom hat you wear, like in the movies. I don't like it, I hate you too. And that's okay, and lots of monks wear it. And the sound of monks begging is really wonderful, I know. I wish we could do it. Maybe we could, can't. I got two hats.

[05:45]

the first few weeks it was in the United States, decided it didn't work. But that was one of the first experiences I had in Japan. It produces a nephrocitive memory that you don't lose. Anyway, suddenly in the midst of the sounds of the city, you hear this kind of moan, this approaching moan. And they kind of call out as they go along the line. And it's not much different from the sound of cars and horns and tire sounds on the street and so forth. But it's more persistent and it gets closer. And hearing it... And, uh, should smile at me. And, uh, hearing it, you get up from what you're doing, you go out, and sometimes they come roaring by before you get there, because they move along pretty fast. Anyway, they come on, and you come out, and they come right by your house, and you put something into their bowl. I carry the begging bowl, or the eating bowl, it's also the begging bowl, name bowl, Buddha's head.

[07:15]

So anyway, I was supposed to go out and I didn't know this chant. In the last minute they said, you're going to go today. And I didn't know whether it was because somebody wasn't going or my friends wanted me to go with them or something. Anyway, so I did. They gave me you know, what I needed to go out, and he told me this chant, which I couldn't remember, so I quickly wrote it down on a piece of paper and I glued it in the rim of my hat. I could see it. So then whenever we were going along, they would give me things and I could read it. So I managed to be able to read it that way. Anyway, we were in this small town, I don't know, not too big a city, small city or big town. begging with about 30 or 40 or 35 or so monks, I think. And at some point I had to go to the toilet, but there was no toilet, so there was a vacant lot or something, I found, which is permissible in Japan, men and women, for men and women both, but men more commonly. I can remember once seeing a newsreel, a movie, here in America. It was sort of peculiar because they never would have done it in Japan. They were showing a movie

[08:31]

newsreel, a Japanese newsreel, along with Japanese films, and a Japanese theater, just Japanese people. And in the United States, they showed this, there was some kind of festivities going on, and suddenly the camera, somebody walked away from the festivities, back by the tent, and the camera followed him, he went back and he urinated and the camera watched him. And an American newsreel would somehow wouldn't do that, you know, loony tunes. Anyway, so I went over and urinated and came back and everybody was gone, I was lost. I don't know where they'd gone. And then suddenly I saw this Roshi come along with his attendant monk, his Jisha, and they'd also urinated, both, you know. And they were lost too. He's bored, he's heard this before. So, I uh, I uh, he said, do you, there we were, we didn't know where to look, so he said, you go ahead, in Japanese, you know.

[09:34]

So I said, all right, I did the best I could, and I'm going along, you know, looking wonderful. And I saw a monk off to the side, down a side street, so I turned down that way, and we got up close to him, and he was a Nichiren, or a Shingon Shu. In a different school, we were kind of horning in on his act, so we turned around and started up the street again. And I really didn't know where to go. I mean, I was in this strange little town, and lost, and not knowing the language, really, and barely able to speak to to the two people I was with. So finally I turned to him and I said, you go ahead, in Japanese, the best Japanese I can imagine, you go ahead. I don't know where I am, it's your country, you go ahead. And Jisha's not supposed to go ahead of Roshi, but he went ahead and we started off. We got about three steps and suddenly in English he said, we are three little sheep. we've lost our way and i regained my i regained my composure and said

[10:46]

And then we walked along singing. I mean, to be so lost and then suddenly have this English song from a college I'd never heard of before come out. Anyway, so then he took me sightseeing. We said, heck with all of you. So we went. I was undernourished from eating, not being able to metabolize all the rice you could serve. So we got some milk and I drank several containers of milk and then we went and looked at a castle. And then we phoned where we knew they were going to be met, where they were supposed to go to have a meal and a dinner or a lunch or something. Anyway, so we phoned and they said, where were you? So we found our way to that house. And I found out he sings, as you may have found out yesterday, he knows all these songs. Muriel says he knows all these songs in Spanish and English and so forth. So I haven't seen him in about eight years. He visited me once

[12:07]

When Sally was eight, he visited me once in Kyoto with a friend. He showed up in San Francisco. Is there something you'd like to talk about? Several times a day. Will we give away merit? It doesn't seem to me there is any merit, so what do we give away? You mean you're translating the echoes? That's why I haven't translated them, so I won't confuse you. You're not supposed to read those translations. It's a problem with the echoes. It's one of the problems I face when we I try to put them into English, which I keep planning to, each fall practice period. Well, I'll talk about it sometime. There is merit. We do give it away.

[13:29]

It's one of those... Merit's one of those... He's going to stop and I'll say one thing about it. Merit's one of those ideas which you can simplify and call it a thing, but it's more like an absence. And so it's like a... And we can understand it some simple way, but to actually understand it so it makes sense, if you want to be rigorous about it, it's... it's... I don't know quite how to explain what I mean. It's like... I don't know if this makes sense, I don't think this is exactly related, but... When a person goes to the movies, they may go to five or six or ten different movies, they don't know

[15:12]

they think, I went to this movie for this reason, and I went to that movie for that reason, and I went to this other movie for that reason, and they think they went to all the movies for different reasons. But, if you look at it in terms of the movies they don't go to, they went to all those, all those movies have one thing in common, they're not the movies they don't go to. And that's style. A person's style is more defined by what they don't do than what they do. And you can't say the weather has style. You could say a particular storm has style. Or you could even say this planet has style, but if you do, you're comparing it to Mars or something else.

[16:15]

So I remember someone told me once when I was young that I didn't have any style and it took me the longest time to think about it. What am I? What don't I have? And it wasn't, you know, the idea isn't clear until you realize that style actually describes what you don't do more than what you do. And merit is, I don't know if it's related, but merit is a word which And for lack of anything, there's all these things which we can talk about, which merit is a kind of link between them all, but merit doesn't describe anything in itself. Anyway, I'll try to talk about merit some other time, when I have a chance to put it into context. after a certain point you come to the shorthand use of the word merit to describe the effects of practice.

[17:42]

everything thoroughly, at least when I try to do that. If I'm really trying to do something thoroughly, I usually lose my state of mind in details. So I didn't imagine that's what it is. What's wrong with losing your state of mind in details? What's wrong with details, and what do you mean by losing your state of mind? In other words, I'm just trying, you know, running here and running there, trying to get everything done and taken care of, and the way you approach what you're doing is completely off. Well, it depends where it's organized, you know. Obviously, as I've often said, you can't pick up every piece of glass in the streets of San Francisco. You have to draw a line somewhere. I remember when I was in the merchant marine, they'd ask me to sweep something, you know. I'd talk about sweeping. I'd really sweep. They'd come in, are you still sweeping up there?

[18:58]

quite mad at me, but I was doing it too thoroughly. Also, when you come in on a ship, you paint the ship, paint right over spots of rust, so when the ship gets into port it looks nice. And it seems a little dishonest because there's a ship and it's got all this rust. Sometimes the rust is so bad on the ship that you can poke your finger through the hull into the water. You can certainly push a screwdriver. You can be down in the edge room, you just take a screwdriver and go right out into the ocean. Because these big steel plates are rusted through. But you know how the whole structure of ships are. Sometimes a plate, you know, the hole appears and you patch it up. You just keep painting over it. But up above, I mean, normally down there, eventually you get the hole redone. Reinforced. It doesn't need to worry people because the structure of the ship, the ocean doesn't ever press on one point. But sometimes ships do break apart because of that.

[20:18]

It seems dishonest, you know, maybe to paint over the rust, but to me, I think it's also actually thoroughness. Because you're making a statement about, well, as soon as you get out, you uncover it again, scrape the rust off and paint it properly. But you're making a statement about, you know, where does the cleaning of the world begin and end? Now, if you... Do you wipe your counter? Do you wipe the walls? Do you wipe the garden? Do you wipe the trees? So it's really, we're doing it for each other's state of mind. And so you are thorough in the context of it, it's organized within our states of mind. You do have to pay attention to the actual object, because that's what we're referencing, but really it's how we feel about it, how it looks. So I came to feel it's okay to paint over the rest. To be concerned with the look of it is also to express your intention that you're taking care of it. So I think that when one does a job, one also wants to do the job so it looks like it's done. Which may seem, again,

[21:45]

Not some public relations type effort, but it's just, I think it's a form of criticism. I've been thinking about ideas, you know, somebody in the, I gave a couple Thursday lectures and I was up there, and I even talked to the a social studies class at the Damophyus High School. And somebody said in my lecture Thursday night, because I did talk about the pines and the Tara and other things first, but I only had about 10 minutes to squeeze a month into. So it was a little dense. But somebody afterwards said it was intensely boring. I have trouble eliciting these responses from people, but I prod and I get them. Somebody else said they used to like my lectures better when I talked about retrieving the jewel from the dragon's mouth, and things like that. But ideas are... It's necessary to look at how we practice. I mean, going back to the movies, if you don't see that

[23:01]

What links all the movies you go to is... You can see it by looking at the movies you don't go to, that they're all definitely not... all definitely movies you don't go to. They're all definitely movies that you... that are not movies you don't go to. So there may be different reasons for each movie you go to, but one thing links them all, isn't there? Isn't there? Not movies you don't go to. That's an idea though, you know, it's not tangible, it's just an idea. But until you can see that kind of idea, you can't really see anything outside your own context. So ideas are necessary in our practice and I do notice that if I give lectures on ideas, to demonstrate a point like that, I think maybe it's not so true here, but it's interesting. The new people who come to lecture at Ringo's, particularly the theologian types, and there's a whole group of Christian theologians afterwards, they say to me in discussion, well, we'll have a little Christian debate today, and they come in. Usually they don't say much, but those people and a lot of sort of

[24:28]

businessmen, professor types who come, they all like lectures that turn on ideas because, you know, that's where their mind is at. But a lot of the, some of the older students, particularly those who practice in a kind of faith, they've decided this is what they want to do and they do it and they don't question it. that aren't interested, that they don't get a sense, they don't have a tangible, physical sense of ideas. But as a result, those people often don't, their practice doesn't make much headway because they are always practicing actually just what's convenient for them. Can you separate the idea of respect from some feeling of admiration or understanding of something or someone? Why would you want to? Well, I mean, I guess I feel like sometimes respect is called for in situations. Either things that you're taking care of or people that you're dealing with.

[25:49]

situation demands respect. And even though sometimes maybe it's not possible to find that feeling just as an inspiration in yourself, you know, it still seems like it's called for. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I suppose you could distinguish like that. I forget the story. I think it's... I think it's Gregory Bateson who told me the story about the Japanese young woman who, I can't remember how it goes because the turn of it in language just makes it clear, but roughly it's that she told all these stories about respect, in effect, she told all these stories about how she expressed respect for her father. Finally, Gregory, or whoever it was, asked her, well, do you admire your father? Do you like your father, or something like that? No, I don't admire him much, or something like that. Well, then why do you treat him with so much respect? Because, and she said something to the effect that, to know how to respect. And that's how we treat the altar. And why you don't cross in front of me when you bow for the meal.

[27:12]

No, you don't come. He said, in Kadagirishi, when he was here recently, he made quite a thing of it. He said he didn't like, even when I wasn't there, people carrying the stick across, in the city, across where the abbot sits. Because there should be some feeling of respect for that place, not because the abbot's good, bad, or indifferent, but rather because we need to Well, I'd say practice, respect, what it means. That's not... It's more than practice. Well, another idea is that, you know, when you... You know, people who move in zazen,

[28:26]

Quite a number of people have movement in zazen. The difficulty there, one of the difficulties there, several difficulties there, is that as long as you move in zazen, you can never have the real kind of calmness that is characteristic of zazen, because physical movement habituates response. In other words, if you have a visceral reaction, physical reaction to a sound, the third or fourth time you don't hear the sound. You tune out. But if you don't have a visceral reaction to it, you hear it the same way, moment after moment. And that was one of the things that characterized the difference between when they did kind of And one of the reasons we keep our eyes open and so forth is when they did those brainwave tests on the Japanese monks, Zen monks, wired them up, you know, and with the Hindu yogis, one of the differences is that the Hindu yogi is interested in a different kind of, you know, I don't know Hindu yoga well enough to say, but it seems that they're interested in

[29:55]

particular kind of experience separate from other experiences. So that like Kriyananda meditates in this room he goes into which is a completely black box with insulation and soundproofing and opens it up and seals himself in it so there's no stimulus coming at all. And the idea is to be able to shut down the sensory apparatus sit too. So that when a stimulus comes, the Hindu yogi has a reaction, goes, wow, the needle goes, and then the second one does it a little less, and the third one does it a little less, and the fourth one does it a little less. But with the experienced Zen people, when there's a stimulus, the needle goes up, down and returns to the line. It doesn't go like this, it doesn't have a kind of wavy effect. It's just heard. Goes up, down, returns to the line, goes like this. Then the second time the sound comes, it goes up, down, returns to the line. Third time, up, down. And the hundredth time, it's the same reaction. You just, you hear it, and there's no reaction. There's no physical reaction, no visceral reaction to it. And, but I think, one of the things that I think happens is, is,

[31:19]

these people who move a lot in zazen, is that certain kinds of things happen in meditation which they are unable to cut that link between visceral reaction and experiencing of it in some other way. And so this movement thing starts which in a way prevents them or protects them or keeps them in this world of habitual experience. but also the kind of readiness necessary in practice. And that readiness, even though you don't have a visceral reaction to every tree, leaf, and so forth, to awaken that kind of mental state is, again, similar or the same as a vow.

[32:20]

I've seen Elizabeth. Elizabeth has a vow to be an adult. And there's no question about it. She has this vow to be an adult. And I think all kids do. And I think that the parents do them a disservice when you too much enter their world without realizing their world is all involved in being an adult. It's not involved in being a kid. Being a kid is wanting to be an adult. And when you play, you play. We call it play, but you're playing with miniature adult things. Elizabeth comes in when I brush my teeth, you know, she comes in and she, if I'm brushing my teeth, she wants a toothbrush. And not only does she want a toothbrush, she wants toothpaste on it. And then she kind of smears the toothpaste on it. And she doesn't even have any teeth. So, there's no, you know, there's no logical reason, you know, there's no kind of, you know, you can't sort of sit around the dinner table with some professorial types and discuss you know, the logic of ... this is no logic in it except intention. I mean, there's no teeth, there's no way there's a toothbrush. But, because she has this vow to be an adult, she's going to figure out what we do and she's going to do it whether it makes sense or not. You know, so I brush my teeth, she's going to brush her teeth and she doesn't know, she's going to brush something, you know. And she's really, I mean, there's a fierceness in the degree to which she wants that toothbrush to do what I do.

[33:49]

no reason at all except the fulfillment of her vow to be an adult, to be like us. She says, these gigantic people around have all the advantages, my God, she's so tiny, she can't do anything. Naturally, she wants to be big like us. Not so great, she'll find out. So a vow, when you have a vow like that, you make use of everything. If you don't have teeth and you don't know what to do with it, you still do it. You just make use of every opportunity. It's like every tree is hiding a gas station. Well, that kind of readiness is necessary in practice to make use of everything, to make use of every toothbrush and every tree. Whatever that has to do with what anybody asked me. Yes. As I said, there are days when it's extremely difficult to empty your head of thoughts. Have you got anything to help you? Because I mean, even, you know, breathing, suddenly you find out that you are breathing deeply and counting and thinking.

[35:10]

Now, what is the best way to get away from that? Well, if you were 20, I would say, just keep trying. and eventually you'll get rid of thoughts. But actually, since you're not 20, I'll tell you that, well, one thing that's sort of traditional stories you say to a student, this is a kind of story, but I mean it's a story that's example of an attitude, which is somebody comes to you and I want to get rid of those thoughts. So you don't come back and see me to get rid of those thoughts. So two or three years pass and finally the student has not gotten rid of the thoughts and finally just comes back and says, I can't get rid of the thoughts. Though he'd been told not to come back until he gets rid of them. And when he comes back you say, oh all right, now we'll see what's next. The thoughts are not so much of a problem if you don't identify with them. What you want to work at is removing your identification and

[36:30]

energy in your thoughts, as the Kriyayoga would always say, don't invite them to tea. It's also like the ocean, you know, if you're in a little boat on the surface of the ocean, the waves are quite bothersome. But if you're down seven miles deep at the bottom of the Pacific, it doesn't matter about the waves or how many boats there are. So that after a while, as you're It's very good, you know, just the ability to begin to have an awareness which includes the counting of the breaths and that you're thinking and a sense. That awareness is like a wider awareness or like the ocean or sky in which there's thoughts and there's this and there's that. The more familiarity we have with that wider awareness, the more it becomes unimportant what the thoughts are, how many waves are on the ocean, because you're down in the center somewhere where it's quite still. And the more you have that wider sense, the more your thoughts tend to, the waves tend to flatten out. But there's some, as long as we're alive, there's some mental activity.

[37:47]

But it's a long, you know, it's a pretty long process, I mean, particularly when we have habits of linking thought and awareness and attitude and mood all together. It's a long time before... Does it happen that you just sit down in the Zen and you can cut off completely and there you are? Well, what you just expressed just now is a thought. The effort to sit and think, I would like to stop thinking, is a thought. So if you're really going to stop thinking, you'd even have to stop the thought that I want to stop thinking. So, it's not so easy. You see, if I want to be strict, I don't answer that question because that question is also a thought. This is also an idea someone said to me at a discussion in the city.

[39:17]

Now it's what you're talking about, negative space, I was talking about, Rev talked about negative capability, Keats mentioned, which I think is a good term, and he said, so somebody afterwards, and I mentioned what Keats says, negative capability, and then this woman said, I'm an artist, she said, what you're talking about negative space, and she pointed to a scroll of Yamada Mumon Roshi. Now is negative space like the... I said, what do you mean by negative space? She said, I mean like there's the black character and there's the white space around it. Now white space, the shape of the white space is negative space. And I said, well in Zen, what we mean by emptiness or negative capability is more the white space that's around the white space. The white space, it's more around the black and the white. It means the black is surrounded by the white, but the black and the white are surrounded by utter darkness, or white. Now that's also an idea. But unless you can grasp that idea, you can't grasp what we mean by emptiness, which is not a background, not a background-foreground relationship.

[40:33]

So the vow, you know, that accompanies the section in the pancha, Gonzales, that we bat around some mornings, is about superpowers. See the trouble I have with thoughts. I mean too much Zazen, you know. Either your brain sort of just blurs and everything or your grey matter starts dribbling out your ears. Is that Aside from, how does it go, aside from, apart from, the Bodhisattva does not, apart from his attention to all knowledge or the knowledge of all modes, create a will for psychic power or create a will for

[42:04]

or create a desire for a will or create something like that, or the cognition of others' thoughts. Well, that's exactly why a bodhisattva, aside from his attention, apart from his attention to all modes, does not create a desire for the stopping of thoughts. And this is very, very difficult to do. This is shikantasa. which is to actually just sit in appearances without any desire to change the appearances or the thoughts. And this effort is the effort to which leads to the stopping of thoughts. Yes Catherine? Well you'd have to have an awful lot of trust in that or you'd get scared just before, yeah, you'd sort of mess it up, smear it a little bit. That's what we all do, we smear it a little bit just before. Anything happens that might affect us we smudge it a little bit just in case. After all we want to remain in control. Or at least outside. Somebody might shut the door on us.

[43:30]

be a Buddhist stuck. Yes? Where did that moment go? You were worried about me and Mariama Sensei. Mariama Sensei. I don't know. But, you know, it's like I didn't have, I don't remember hearing another thought or something. It just, it disappeared. But then it came, you know, the next thing came back. But, what is that? Sometimes we, you know, our mind works, we have little mechanisms, you know, in our mind are reminders, and the reminder only clicks once. So if you use up your reminder on two syllables before, then you're going to pass right where you're already. The reminder is a way to allow ourselves to have our train of thought undisturbed.

[45:00]

And so that we're not caught in our undisturbed train of thought, we put these little reminders up, which when we hear that, we'll better stop that train of thought and get ready to do something. But if you use up the reminder too early, or you're too intensively drawn back into your train of thought, the reminder goes click, click, and then you'll be back into your train of thought. If you don't recognize the train of thought. Like, there's sometimes where you can hear the buzz. You don't recognize that. You know, what kind of buzz? The old Columbus fluorescent light problem. You know what I mean? Well Columbus you know I've been talking about Columbus and it's not so interesting just that he noticed ships disappear from bottom up but that millions of people didn't notice it. I mean millions of people may have noticed it but they didn't act on it.

[46:11]

noticed it enough to actually ask Queen Isabella for a few ships. You know, I mean that's important. When you're practicing Zen, who decides? I mean, at what point do you say, okay we're actually going to do it? You know, I can remember Graham Petchy's. Among the group, no one, the idea had not occurred to any single person in the group, as far as I know, in an effective way, that they would, of course, practice all their life. And that meant, why not be ordained if you want? And Grandpachi was the first person I know to express it. And I can remember him saying, well, of course, I'll practice all my life or I'll be ordained or I'll become a priest or something like that. And until then, it just didn't dawn on me as a possibility. But you could actually act on an interest like this, which was so, at that time, you know, Tsukushi was probably going to go back to Japan.

[47:13]

momentarily. It wasn't the support for the possibility that there is now. And also the fluorescent light is that, you know, the fluorescent light is only on half the time. The other half the time it's off. And so if you do that you don't get the same effect with the fluorescent light if you do that, you know. Your fingers get very Off and on it's like a strobe light. You've danced in a strobe light haven't you? Young people of the 60s. So until you do something like that which we could call an idea, I mean if you don't do that and grasp it as an idea you'd never know that a fluorescent light is on half the time and off half the time because you only perceive it's on. There is no way you with your sensory apparatus can perceive that it's off, except doing something like this. But that requires intellectual thought. I mean, that requires an idea to get it. It does not, it's not, you don't get it by just, well, I'm funny, apparently I'm funny. But unless you think about it, it wouldn't dawn on you that the fluorescent light is off half the time. So that's true for most of the things we

[48:38]

do. We barely perceive the percentage of the time we're on, let alone find a way to notice the times we're off. And that's what I'm talking about with style too. And there's a tape that goes along in all of us which says, I'm okay, I'm not okay, I'm okay, I'm not okay, I'm okay, I'm not okay. Most of us don't notice it at all except that we do perceive flashes of anxiety or exaltation. We don't know quite why but suddenly we felt a little twinge. We felt awash in good feeling. We don't know quite why but somehow the dish it reflected the light or something happened or somebody said something, the phenomenal world happened to catch the tape loop at the moment and said, I'm all right, you know. So mindfulness practice is the effort to not just bring you into the timeless presence, I have to call it the timeless presence,

[49:42]

But it's also a formidable technique to get you away from that tape loop which you can't perceive. So you're always bringing yourself into the situation where you're not perceiving the phenomenal world only as it reinforces or contradicts your tape loop. But you're just saying, this which I perceive right now, what Some people call it the art movements of the, looking at some magazines, art movements of the early 19th century. Factualism, that these are the facts, but in Zen we'd say more they're the appearances. But this is all appearances, there's no appearance which is not fact, that in the appearances you rest. And so that at this moment I'm a person sitting in a chair, another moment I may be a husband, another moment I may be

[50:47]

a walking something and to keep bringing yourself to that kind of and only that kind of identification especially you don't need to make any identification but you do need to for quite a while when you can't make that identification of mindfulness again like I'm getting angry or I'm angry, not at all that you don't want to be angry, just I'm getting angry, I'm angry, I'm not so angry, whatever. That effort moment, repetitious effort moment after moment is really the only way to get at this tape loop which you don't perceive. You know it's there but you don't really perceive. You only see it in your moods. You only see it in your disrupted fingers. You don't know why your moods go this way or that. But you do know your moods, don't you? Can you have that feeling that you're moving yourself? You're moving. Sometimes you move and sometimes you don't move.

[52:07]

Yes, in other words, you mean, can you have that same kind of detachment from your movement the way you can from your thoughts? Yes, but is that a way also? Is that a mode? It would be a way. The question I have about movement is not that it is. Are you trying not to move? Are you trying not to move? to include everything until you realize, until you actually can see how you're discriminated by movement. Isn't the way to work with that just to move and notice that? See, like if you just try to stop your movement, isn't that more disruptive than...? Maybe. Sometimes we try to stop, sometimes we let it happen. The problem is, is that is that we are also physiological beings. And if you get punched in the nose, your nose bleeds. Or may. And so the process of being detached about your physical movements is similar to the process of being detached from your thoughts. But physical movement is a more sculptural, massive,

[53:38]

concrete form of a thought. So by the time you're actually physically moving, your detachment, the power of your detachment as a mode is much weaker. So it works with thoughts pretty well, it doesn't work much slower with physical body movement. But it's the direction to go in, it's the attitude to have about it which is, I think, most likely to slowly free you from visceral response. But the physiological fact is, I believe, with visceral response, you habituate. And it tunes you out. That it's just like having blood flow when you cut your blood vessel. It's a physical fact. So, as long as you're moving, you can't really get that stillness. possible in sitting and as long as you're thinking you can't really get that stillness because as Freud rightly pointed out that a tremendous percentage of our energy is tied up in thoughts, repression, so forth. You just have far more energy if your mind is calm.

[55:03]

And if you can notice it, you can just notice how your breathing and heart can slow down, your heartbeat can slow down. And notice, as soon as you start thinking how your heartbeat picks up, your heart just got to pump energy and oxygen up there to that brain. And if you get anxious or there's something your mind is racing at, your heart will pound. I wish I could get some more time to jog because It seems hard to do it, but I've done it five, six times this year, or this summer, is that if you do jog, jog does exercise the heart a lot, so that every time your heart pounds, you're using up one of the beats you've got, you've got an allotment, That's strange when we're counting our breaths, because we're actually counting what's left. Every time you count one, you lose one. There goes another. Anyway, I'm not trying to depress anyone. So, but when you use up your heartbeats jogging, you don't use them up.

[56:31]

because what you're actually doing is strengthening the heart as a muscle so that when you're not running your heart beats much slower so runners have heartbeats which are a good jogger has a heartbeat in their resting time you can count it just before you wake up in the morning which is very very slow and I wish I could jog enough to We have a pronounced difference between them. To lower my heartbeat considerably, because I'd like to see how it affects zazen, because one of the things that happens in zazen is if your heartbeat is going very, very slowly, you can sit more still. But these are just physiological facts. We're emphasizing capacity, the universal way in which we're one, not our competency. But still, there's necessarily, as we are physical beings, there's some competency involved. Roshi, are thoughts good for something or are they just completely worthless? No, I just said lots of things are good for. They're good for noticing that.

[57:59]

Einstein said that thought was good if it took the major interest away from the momentary and merely personal. It's quite true. I mean, it doesn't mean much to say that thoughts are not useful for anything, because we think the characteristic of a human being is like saying a nose is useless, Well, you could probably breathe with just two pig holes, you know, but your friends would look away every time. But it'd be hard to function though, it'd be donut-like, you know. Like drilling a hole in a block of wood. Thoughts are not useful if you think thoughts are your life, because thoughts are about thoughts. If thoughts are about thoughts, thoughts are quite useful. But if thoughts are, if your thinking is only in thoughts, and your reality is actually thoughts, then you have some trouble. Because thinking itself is no problem.

[59:26]

Identifying yourself with thinking is the problem. And that's a thought. I mean, what I just expressed is a thought, and I think useful. Yes? Keeping on the same subject, what's confusing me a little is that there's thoughts. What I'm thinking about is actually analyzing Habits. Oftentimes we have habits for particular reasons. And although it might be like the letters against the white, these thoughts, and just actually not identifying with them, but they do have a power, especially when you're just seeing them. And if you want to call the power habit, in this case, anyway, analyzing them, seeing where they come from, is there any, use within practice for that? You mentioned Freud, so that would be in the same way. Yeah, anything that works is useful, you know. You can try it out. But the analysis of thoughts, to get at their source, eases your reaction to it, changes your reaction to it, but doesn't end your reaction to it.

[60:56]

And to end your reaction to it is when finally it's like in a movie which you have no interest. The images are there, but, you know, you're trying to read a book with light reflected off the screen. But to analyze them, especially the more deep-rooted habits, takes a lot of work, it would seem. Yes, it does. And there's not some... I guess you can do... Well, I guess we all do it casually now, you know, trying to figure it out at the moment. It's a whole practice within itself, but it seems to be a practice also of calling within this practice. During Zazen isn't the time to do it. It seems to be something else. Joe, Zazen, you can do it during Zazen. Well, I do do it during Zazen. I think it would be impossible, because the thought also includes the analysis of the thought, where did it come from, why did I feel that. expand on that a little or not, but I think when things that stand out as disturbing or something, we may want to analyze them. And if it helps, please do it. But you'll find eventually that that's not where to put your real energy. The real energy is not in the projector or in the film that's in the projector, but being able to walk off the screen.

[62:25]

And eventually, when you get settled enough and mentally and physically consistent enough, then you just start putting your real energy and walking off the screen. Freud's an interesting message, you know. Freud is a... The message to Freud is... One message to Freud, or Freud is, in terms of Victorian era, was, you don't know what you're doing. It's a tremendous... In some ways, it's a tremendous attack and control, you know. Somebody who wants to... I mean, I think that lots of psychoanalysts and psychologists go into it because they want to control people. Because if you can say to somebody, you don't know what's going on, but I do. I mean, you just completely un-pulled everything out from underneath of you. Yes, what do you want? Please, you know. But also, I mean, in other words, what I'm saying, I guess, is that Freud and psychology is not a fully developed system because it doesn't have antidotes for some of its problems. But it's only a hundred years old or something. We're very caught up. I mean, Freud changed the world view, at least the Western world view. I mean, there's nobody...

[63:53]

Maybe he wants to go jogging. Hmm? Maybe he'd like to go jogging. He loves it. This is the slightest idea of him going jogging. Runs up the road and looks back at me. But the other message that Freud gave is we ought to look at what we actually are. We ought to look at our anxieties, look at our angers, look at our things, and define ourselves by those things. That's very Buddhist. Anyway, it's interesting the degree to which Freud, one person's ideas can influence the Western world. All of us have a sense now that we don't entirely know what we're doing. And that's post-Freud idea. Somebody in the audience, somebody over here. To ask about, talking so much about zazen and moving, to ask something about sleep, which is... I remember the first number of years I sat, three years, four years, I thought, sleep, sleep, you know. It started to come, I would just, it would be very easy to fight it. And then I came to Tassajara, I just went to sleep. It's just phenomenal.

[65:22]

Actually, it seems that in some way, the more you sit, the more you are prone or have a propensity for falling into the black hole. I don't know, do you think about it as resistance? Someone came up to me and said, the other day, You know, am I all right? I don't sleep in Zazen. They said, I've been here seven or eight years and I still don't sleep in Zazen, and all the advanced students do. And they said, I remember when so-and-so told me, who was a new student, and they were already sleeping, and I was so jealous. Well... You shouldn't sleep in that. There's a stage which is pretty hard. Part of it's resistance. Part of it is just...

[66:43]

getting over the mechanism, because our mind is very... I've talked about this a lot, but you know, some of the basic ideas are... There's a mechanism that we have from childhood, which... Just thinking about baby... Mechanism we have from childhood, which... A certain state of mind, as soon as it comes, it's only available to us when we sleep. and it clicks in, and the more you approach access to that, to states of mind which include that as one aspect of it, your body just says, well it's time to sleep. So it's not entirely resistance, in some ways it's resistance, partly it's just that there's a certain old bump that you've got to get over, which is a signal to your body to be asleep in order to allow that mind to happen. But when it does happen, you've got to release certain, to have it happen, you have to release certain control mechanisms having to do with ego. Or to have it happen, or to have a more undifferentiated and varied content occur, you need to release ideas about yourself.

[68:01]

because we wouldn't let them happen otherwise. So they happen in dreams, the kind of things that happen in dreams. And as long as there are things that happen in dreams which you still don't identify with or know don't happen in your conscious life, then you'll continue to be a person who attempts to reconcile them. because there's still the usefulness to you of allowing, like getting drunk. Going to sleep is about getting drunk. It allows you to do things you wouldn't do in your normal state, or awake state. But again, awakeness in Buddhism does not mean awake in contrast to sleep. Anyway, and also you get, the more relaxed you get sitting, the easier it is to go to sleep. So until your energy is really rising in your, if we want to be technical, your chakras, it's very, very difficult to stay awake and sleep. But anyway, if you're sleeping, it's just, you're just, I mean, zazen, just you're alive and if you are exhausted, you'll tend to sleep more.

[69:14]

in zazen. You particularly tend more to sleep in lecture than in zazen even. Because lecture, it's harder to stay awake in lecture than it is in zazen. If you're at that stage where you tend to fall asleep, it's harder to stay awake in lecture than in zazen. Because lecture ties you to a verbal state of mind which, if you're tired, is not a state of mind which has much energy in it. So you tend to go to sleep. Or if you one part of your body goes to sleep. For instance, if your leg tends to go to sleep when you're sitting, your leg will put the rest of you to sleep. So if you have some part that goes numb or something like that, it'll tend to drag all the rest into sleep. It's just like if you sleep with someone and you wake up, it's much harder to get up, not because it's just cozy, But because the other person, if they're not getting up, the other person's rhythm is... And you're trying to go... I mean, their rhythm is very part of it. It just pulls you right into it, you know. And you say, goodbye cruel world.

[70:30]

It's a German warplane, isn't it? It's flying around. What is the Junko doing? A lot of my attention often is trying to stay up relative to either wanting to be hit or not wanting to be hit, or whatever, and often there's no Junko walking around, which we have some periods. I'm still making an effort, but the effort is much more concentrated in my own energy pattern, you know, I'm trying to stay awake, and it's not because of outside interference or... I just... I wonder if our intention is pretty strong to wake up those of us who are sleeping anyway, I mean, are we going to sleep longer without? What is the energy that's going around? Well, I think if you're sleeping, if you tend to be sleepy, I would ask for the stick every time. Oh, I ask for the stick, you know, three times in a row, just boom, boom, boom, boom. But also, I realize I have a lot of energy to stay awake when the jungle's not there, but the focus is different, you know, where I'm paying attention to. The stick helps. I mean, I, you know, basically, you know, I used to sit

[71:53]

at Entaiji and at Daitoguji. And at Entaiji, everybody faces the wall, and there's no stick used. And I used to go there to sashin sometimes, and everybody's asleep in the zendo. I mean, everybody's asleep in the zendo. Uchiyama Roshi and everybody's asleep. And I'd be sitting there, and I'd look around, and everybody's, you know, fifty people all going, all day long, every day. Everybody, you know? And I said, jeez, jeez. But I went to Daito-guchi and sat, and as you know, they really hit in Daito-guchi. I mean, they really hit you. And it's nothing like we do. I mean, they use a great big stick, much bigger than we use. I've told you this before. But they hit you two times on both shoulders in the summertime. and four times on both shoulders in the wintertime. You get eight hits, and they hit you really hard. I mean, really hard. And I can remember the monks coming up to hit you in your face, and you'd bend down, and they would put the stick back and would touch their bottom, and they would be up on their heels. And it was so hard, it would knock the breath out of me. I mean, actually, it would knock the breath. If you have any resistance to the blow at all, I would just go...

[73:19]

You know, that's on the first hit. You know? And there's seven more to go. Blam! Blam! Blam! And the rest of the period... And also, there's only ten monks in the Zen Dojo, and two junkos. And you can get hit over and over again in one period. You could get hit ten times in one period, so that would be forty hits. And one monk that I know quite well, he used to get hit constantly, and I don't see how he physically sustained it, unless he had a bulletproof vest on. What? He did this. Because he just got hit all the time. In fact, he's the one who, I told you the story, I believe, that one day the Jiki Jitsu got up and he was walking out, you know, everybody bowed, and right after the bow, this guy fell asleep. And he bowed, the Jiki Jitsu was walking out.

[74:34]

He was coming across this endo, and suddenly he just took off, you know? And he went right at him with both fists like this, and hit him, full fist, running right in the chest. The guy was sound asleep. He got lifted off his cushion up in the air and just splattered almost to the floor. And then he just walked on out. But he said, then he went back to sleep. I mean, you know, he was going to sleep and he didn't care. And everyone used to sleep through Tay Show. I'm not recommending this, but everybody slept through Tay Show all the time, but they were alert. You couldn't catch them off when the bell was supposed to ring or something like that. But that's generally true of older students. I've told you the story of trying to catch one person who slept continually when I was And I would sit there, and he would be asleep, and he would be, you know, way down. And I'd be sitting there, and he'd say, Shuso, what are you doing down there? And so I would try to get my stick, and I'd move my hand like this, and as soon as I did that, he'd wake up. I mean, it was amazing. I kept trying to fool him, because as soon as I'd do anything, he would wake up. It was interesting.

[76:01]

who are quite awake, you can walk up and hit them over the head with a sledgehammer, you know, you're coming, you know. So there's some difference. But this poor guy, I shouldn't tell you his name probably now, don't you, because he'll probably come visit someday, like Murayama Sensei came, and then he'd be embarrassed. He used to just, finally the jikijutsu sometimes would say to him, right in the middle of zazen, he'd start shouting, get out of the zendo! And the guy'd get up and you'd have to take the, sometimes it'd be snow out, and you'd have to go out with your cushions and sit outside. And if he didn't wake up, he would just send him out of the zendo, packing. I will say for all of this treatment, that I sat at Daito-Kuji about, I don't know, regularly for a couple of years, and I believe after the first few weeks, I don't think in two years I was hit once, because I learned to stay awake. I was pretty good at staying awake anyway, but there's a tendency sometimes, particularly if you're tired, and I got so I took at least a five minute nap before I went down there, because if I'd been up all night or something,

[77:08]

you know, the tendency to occasionally sleep is removed when you get hit that hard. And it was a nuisance to get hit that hard. So, it does help, but I'm not recommending that we do it that way. And a lot of us don't hit very well, but people who hit well and firmly and fairly accurately, it's very helpful. Yes, pretty accurate. But also that hitting is a little different. You can hit anywhere across the back. Did you get hit? I remember Sugrivaji hit my ear once. There are two schools of hitters here. One, they hit you when you're actually sleeping.

[78:10]

That's it again, they hit you, they... Well, they... you sleep. Yeah. And by them approaching, you wake up. Yeah. And it's very obvious you woke up and they still come and they... That's right. Well, that's the instruction you get as a Junko, though, is that you're standing at the end of the line, and you see someone sneaking, you decide at the end to hit them. Yeah, it doesn't make... Regardless of what they're doing when you're there. If a person's only awake when the Junko's walking by, they should be hit. I mean, I get up sometimes and I'll see there's a whole bunch of people asleep, and they won't be asleep when the... If it's consistent, it's not... If it's occasionally, I don't pay much attention to it, but if there's a person who, like in the Greengill Center, there's two or three people consistently asleep, and they tend to wake up with a junk of sleep, I just get up and I don't care whether they're awake or asleep. comes and it's just completely disturbing. Well next time don't be asleep earlier. Next time don't be asleep earlier. And if you don't want to be disturbed when you're awake...

[79:42]

It's better not to have been asleep earlier. I mean, it's just one of the... You've got to keep sleeping. Yes, just keep sleeping, right? And you'll be disturbed when you're sleeping. I mean, it's not going to be perfect. And I think that it doesn't make sense to have the jungle only hit. If you had the rule that the jungle only hit if you're asleep, when the jungle's going by, everybody would be awake for the moment the jungle goes by, and then go right back to sleep again. Actually, experience when you're Junko is that if somebody is asleep, and they wake up when you go by and you don't hit them, and you start standing by the next row, they're asleep again, almost immediately. They wake up just as you go by and ignore it. If you get hit, and it makes you mad, you may stay awake. Well, also, I think as long as you have some emotional feeling, I didn't like that and they hit me as revenge or kind of makes me angry. You should ask for the stick regularly until you get rid of that feeling because the mode is to be helpful. Now there may be other emotions involved but the overall mode is to be helpful and there's no need reacting to minor themes.

[80:58]

you know, the major theme is. And it's just healthier, I mean, just wiser. In other words, to react to people's major themes anyway. If you react to people's minor themes, you're always engaged in controversy and arguing with people. Tangriyo is at Deheji where they are the hardest on you. And I was in Tangriyo about ten days or so, something like that. And there was one guy, when I was at Deheji, I don't remember his name, but he would come One of the things they do is they drive the stick underneath you, so in case either ankle is down, you get it. And so you come up and suddenly there's a stick underneath you. And the other thing is, is this guy, he would come in, he felt like he had a mean streak, but anyway, he would come in and he would literally come in. And he'd still be there. You know, completely silent. And everybody would be sitting there, you know. And, you know, really you wait ten or fifteen minutes, you know, to see if he's there or he's not there. And this guy would wait no matter how long, you know. And finally somebody down here would move. And they'd change their position slightly.

[82:27]

do anything. And the guy in there would change his position and nothing would happen. So the guy next to him would change his position, the guy next to him... And after about three people would give him, then suddenly he'd go... But that style is sort of hazing. I mean, I think that's more like fraternity. Not necessary. But tangario has a purpose. And we talked about that last time, so you don't have to do it again. To change the subject slightly, I told you about that. Is there anything... We're thinking of shifting the schedule so that there's emphasis on Zazen in the evening rather than the morning. But we haven't done it yet. Because of planting? No, no. To discuss the reasons would take no particular reason. Anyway, it's... Everyone's been talking about it at Green Gulps and everybody has different ideas about it. It's kind of hard to encapsulize in one or two ideas. I was going to read you a review but I don't have it with me in the restaurant because some of the things we talk about, some of the ideas we're expressing are interesting. It's interesting to me.

[83:50]

I feel that some of the ideas Buddhism is presenting in our society have an extraordinary import. I mean, I don't know if there's the import of Freud had on the Western world, but probably, at least, maybe. But it's hard for people to notice them. But the restaurant gets the kind of attention I think some of the ideas that Buddhism expresses should get. The restaurant gets all this attention, a tremendous amount of attention, it's amazing. but to embody a very simplified, you know, in a very minor aspects of what we're doing in the restaurant in a little different way than people are used to seeing a commercial expression. It's quite amazing. I don't know what... The response to the restaurant is quite amazing. It's now called the outstanding success of this year and stuff like that. This year, I mean, this decade. I don't know. I'm kidding. But anyway, it's getting a lot of attention. I don't know what dinners will do. Dinners may bomb because it's very hard to make a vegetarian menu for dinner. Can you give us an idea of what kind of menu you're making? Oh, I don't know. Nobody knows. Deborah doesn't know either. She has dinner in about two days.

[85:13]

Well, she's probably honing in on it right now, since the day after tomorrow is the first night. What else is going on? We're moving ahead on the Tara. I think that the Tara will probably at least come into the building in a week or two. I mean, in a week or so. And Pines, I don't know about, we're moving ahead on that. I worked very hard on the book contract. It's a big job. And then the contract between the public... You know, a simple thing like a book contract is... The problem is, is that... The way I understand it is, is that all the book contracts now available that everybody uses were designed, I don't know if this interests you particularly, but were designed in the 30s and 40s for a time when the advantage to the publisher was to have a good relationship to the author. And so you could have a contract with a publisher and author in which you could trust the publisher to do their best by the author.

[86:27]

But because the only way a publisher sold books was by an author building a reputation, book after book after book. So it was to the advantage of the publisher to have a relationship with the author where we'd keep bringing successive books and build a reputation. But now the reputations can be built through advertising, media, television on a single book, having not much to do with anything except the ability to advertise it. For instance, there's one man who does covers, the guy who does the covers for the books of Bernie Gunther, the Esslin books on sensory awareness and stuff, he did one of his books, I believe, or two. He's done other books, they're kind of format books. He gets paid, I believe, $50,000 a cover, because any cover he does, no matter what's between them, sells enough copies in the first few months to pay him his $50,000. And that has nothing to do with the content at all. So now that that's the case, the whole contract, religion, is in turn to really take advantage of the author. So to really rethink a contract, I had to spend a long time on it, trying to rethink it, so it really protects the author. It took a long time. And then to coordinate that with a co-publishing contract.

[87:45]

This is for the I Ching book of Lama Govinda's and Timeless Spring book and the Shoryo Roku, the book of equanimity, all which we're publishing, and Harry Robert's book on Yurok Tales, all which we're going to try to publish. So, we have to have a contract and then in addition that contract has to be coordinated with a co-publishing arrangement with Weather Hill or Harper & Row or anyone else. It's very complicated, one of the things I worked on. And somebody gave us $10,000 for the water project, just by chance. Well, not by chance. It's somebody who has been interested for several years, and finally, surprisingly, called. In fact, poor Ed Satterson was over, and he was saying to me, just before I was leaving, he was saying, we've got to, he says, we're going to really, we're really, I mean, financially, we're having a very hard time right now.

[88:47]

And it's really going to be bad when the bills start coming in for the water project. And I said, well, I thought our agreement was when we don't have money for a project, we stop. He said, yes, but can we stop the water project? You know, Paul Haller and his Irish battalion out there, you know, working on it. And I said, well, I don't know. How are we going to pay the bills? He said, well, I thought you said you could raise the money. I said, I didn't say I could raise the money. I said, over the year, I thought we could raise so much money. I didn't. And I think we can cover Lindisfarne House and the Tea House, maybe. But I don't know about all these other things. You have to make them into a target. I said, Ed, it's your job. So he went down the stairs. And then by chance I might notice that so-and-so called you a few weeks ago and wants you to return the call. So I said, all right. And I called up and this person said, I'm so grateful for all the help you're giving Alan Chadwick and that you're willing to have him come. I want to send you a check for $10,000. But it's for you, not for Alan Chadwick. And I said, you wouldn't mind it being for the Water Project, would you? And the person said, no, that's all right. So because the person really wants to help Green Gulch and the vegetable and the plant, that's what this person's interested in. Yeah. Alan's going? He may. He may.

[90:14]

He may. Didn't I tell you that? The whole thing in Virginia has gone bankrupt, so he has to leave. And he's been very ill, but according to the letter I saw the other day, he thinks he's recovering, but he almost died a few months ago. So I've invited him. And just by chance, actually, a letter I wrote him a year ago, still in draft form, and I discovered that my assistants had pushed it on me. So I finished it, and in the letter I volunteered to send him $250 as a contribution just to the project there. I didn't see any reason to change it, even though it's a financially difficult time. He's even more... So I said, here's $250 to help you with the transition. So that went off, and then three days later we got this call, by chance, offering us $10,000, partly for Helen, but partly just to help Green Gulch. So I called up Ed, and I said, I don't want you to think I'm a fast worker, Ed.

[91:16]

It actually was just either by chance or by a rather long relationship. Anyway, I said, it doesn't get you off the hook, you have to come up with a matching grant. Because it will take about $20,000 for the water project. Anyway, that helped. It means the water project will last for a little while longer. That happened. What else? Is the TELS about to go up? The TELS will go up sometime in November. We worked out how to We're going to do it the cheapest way. If we do it the expensive way, it'll cost, I don't know, $4,000, $6,000, $7,000 to do all the grading. $500 a day for the bulldozer and more money, more hundreds of dollars per day for the operator and more money for the truck to carry it away. We're going to have a huge pile of dirt. And I just think The cheapest thing to do is we dig it out, rent a machine, run it ourselves, and pile the dirt up. It's going to be this big, big pile of dirt. But I tore out of some art magazines some contemporary minimal art sculptures of dirt piles. So I'm sending those sheets up to Bruce Fortin and saying, I hope this gives you some ideas. Is it still in front of your house?

[92:37]

It will be there. It's really like cement, it's like digging cement. And then we'll have this, the way they were going to do it is they were going to just dig it out and then you just have this big moat around it because you kind of dig the space for the planting at least up close to the building so once the building's up a backhoe doesn't come in and knock it down. And then you'd have this moat that would soon fill with water and we'd lose a few children in it and dogs, cats and things. So we're going to try to put at least fill in the moat so that it won't be dangerous. Fill in the moat with the dirt? Yes, but there's no point digging it out then, because what you're taking out is basically stone, gravel, and fill, and stuff. So we had to put... If you put it out on the first field, take out some of that good stuff that we've been working on for 10 years, it's really in good shape. And Bruce had to almost have a physical fight with Wendy to get Wendy to release any nicely composted dirt.

[93:38]

We're not planning so. What dirt? You mean in the garden? Yeah. What dirt? In Wendy's field. It's taken a few years. It's taken all the years we've had Greenbelch do it. Well, the first year I was work leader, I counted truckloads, and we put 300 tons of manure on the field, not to mention all the gardens that we mixed with the compost. Right. Why don't we do that again? Well, we will be continuing doing it, but it's still three years of work dug off the fields. It means the fields need another three or four years of work to get back to where they were. I don't understand. Also, what I don't understand is why don't we just do that process around the teapots? Because the ground is... Well, because the ground is solid. It's pavement. Basically, you have to think of it as cement. It was the parking lot. It's filled. He brought in stone and poured... See, that used to slope down differently. That whole thing is just... You can't even break it with a pickaxe. There's nothing you could do. I mean, you could compost it over a century. It's a little slower pace than even we want to go.

[94:48]

And the Lindstrom Hall, is that what they're working on? They're working. We've got lumber. They're planing the wood. There's things going on. It looks like we're working on an option on the property, the first step of the pines, the becks. I don't know whether that'll all happen yet, because it looks like a tar is going to happen, because it looks like we have contributions and loans enough to cover it. Pies we don't know yet. Yes? We hear a lot about Green Gulch, and we hear a lot about the Nistra. I don't know how to frame this question exactly, but what does it feel like at Page Street? Uh-huh. Quite good. Tanahashi-sensei's teaching there, the classes go on. I don't know, it seems it's a little... it's much more diffuse in the city, but it feels really good in the building and everybody... most of the various pressure to find spaces for people settled, either people have found their own places or moved in. One of the changes that's occurring is

[96:08]

It looks like we've worked out, it looks like, first of all, that we're going to be leasing the building across the street from the grocery store, right on the corner, that beautiful Victorian building. Prices in our neighborhood are really staggering. The building, the rather schlocky building, right down below the guest house, the next building down, which was really in bad shape, and they fixed it up mostly with coats of paint. And it's not painted very well, not fixed up very well, and basically it's not much of a building. We paid $175,000 for the guest house. about a year and a half ago or two years ago, whatever it was. They want $315,000 for this house. That's as much as all of Page Street, as much as all of what, four years ago or so, we paid for 20 units in 340. We paid $300,000 for 340. This is $300,000 for a little house.

[97:09]

Which isn't very well built. What? It's four units or something? No. What? That house? No, it's just one house. Just like the guest house. It's one house. Upstairs and downstairs. $315,000. Anyway. Looks like we'll be leasing the house. We considered leasing it. And one to buy it because we wanted to have some people move into it. But lease it with an option to buy it. The amount of money they want to monthly rental is to lease it, to buy it. So anyway, it looks like we're going to lease the house across the street from the grocery store. And it looks like the lawyer's in it. What we finally did is we made a letter which just accounts for the actual costs of a house like that. And they accepted it. They seemed to think it was perfectly all right. too much, but they accepted it. The ones who were dubious about staying decided to stay. And it looks like, so it'll be half lawyers, and then there's about three or four offices available, which then the Senate and Treasury Department will move into. And we need to have somebody live in the building. So if possible, something like Tommy Dorsey or something might live in the building. Because somebody, it's just safer, and the lawyers want someone to live in the building.

[98:33]

And it's not clear where the woman who's living up in the attic will stay, and it's also not so safe living up in the attic. You've got to make sure that she can get out in case of a fire. It's also a very easy place to start a fire, because there's no sheep locker. So that's happening. It's already one continuous period of time. It may, it may be fine, just spinning like a prayer wheel. But, I don't know, building always feels great. You know, it's hard to... to characterize it in terms of projects or work and things like that. The main thing that happens is the lesson goes, the service happens, and the study center's going. And that's where a lot of the work goes on, like trying to do the... It's where everything seems to happen out of, but it's harder to define it. Okay. I think that's enough, at least for today. Thank you very much.

[99:51]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ