I vow to taste the truth of the Tartartus words. Good evening. Good evening. As some of you may know, I had this sort of medical procedure yesterday. Not sort of, medical procedure. And I will spare you the details. But anyway, everything's okay. I just got the word that the biopsies were all negative.

[01:05]

So everything's fine. And it was very interesting to go and do this procedure, which is kind of routine now. It's a colonoscopy, and the machine was just invented about 20 years ago. It was a Japanese machine. Pretty amazing, this little camera on the end of this thing. So I wasn't too worried, but I had had this other procedure. This is my 50th year. I turn 50 next month, and somehow I've had a lot of these different procedures. And when I did this other one a couple months ago, I had to sign something that said about what the risks were, that I knew what the risks were. And I was reading along, and it said, and some people have died having this procedure. And as I read that, I thought, gee, I'm not ready to die. I've got laundry to do, and I've got to pick up the idiots.

[02:06]

I really wasn't ready. And I felt the same way with this. I figured there probably are risks involved. So what I found myself doing while I was waiting, there was an hour or so to wait. I had a time just taking refuge. What other shape would I want my mind to be in other than taking refuge shape if I was going to die? So I was sitting there taking refuge, and this person came in, and they introduced themselves as Ron, the nurse technician. I think that's what he called himself, a nurse technician. And he said, I have some very powerful questions to ask you. So I said, okay. And then he said, what are you doing here?

[03:13]

No, no, he said, what are you here for? What are you here for? So I said, a colonoscopy. He said, right. And then he had some other powerful questions like, do you have any allergies? And then he told me afterwards that he had peeked at my paperwork where it said what your profession was, and I always write down Zen priest, so he was kind of, I don't know what he was ready for. Let's see. So being in my 50th year, the other day, Sunday night, I went to see this play called Having Our Say.

[04:20]

The first hundred years of the Delaney sisters. Do you know about this? These two black women who, well, one just recently passed away, I think, at 106, and her sister is 104 now. I think, is Christina here? Did the older one pass away or the younger one? The older one is still alive. The older one is still alive. So the younger one, 104, passed away, and her older sister is 107 now. Anyway, I thought it would be great to see what hundred-year-old women talk about their lives. They had a lot to say. For one thing, they said they eat about seven vegetables a day, and their main meal is at noon, and they only have like a milkshake for dinner. This was, you know, just one thing they said. So looking at my life up until this point,

[05:34]

and thinking about what the next however many years are left will be, you know, kind of looking at my practice, and what is the most important thing, what am I emphasizing or practicing with? And at the Women's Way workshop that Pusan and I did this weekend, I talked about this in the lecture that I gave there. The Women's Way workshop was very nicely attended with about 27 people, and it was interesting how synchronistic it was. The people that came, maybe some of you heard about this, there was two mother and daughter sets. There was two people who had gone to the same college and hadn't seen each other in years and years. They were there. Two other people whose, each of them, their boyfriends,

[06:36]

had chronic fatigue syndrome, and it turned out after talking that one of the women knew the other one's boyfriend and her boyfriend. The three of them had been best friends about five years ago, and they lost touch with each other. They were there. Then there was, where's Jeanette? Then there was a woman there who was from the same village that Jeanette grew up in in East Germany. So there was somehow this concentration of people who came together. Some, they didn't exactly know how. I think they took a wrong turn, basically, and ended up at the retreat. So in talking with a group of women, I had a certain angle, I guess, or way that I was coming at the group with what I wanted to say,

[07:39]

but there were some things that I forgot, and I wanted to bring them up here. One has to do with the fact that when I first came to Zen Center, I was told by one of the teachers, whose name I won't mention, that women could not really ever sit still because, they said, of the constant drip, drip, drip of, they didn't really say of what, but I assumed it was menstruation. That's what I assumed they were talking about. And I remember thinking, sort of like, what are you talking about? And also, how dare you? It was very difficult to hear it, but I also realized at the time I didn't have a real quick rejoinder.

[08:42]

I wasn't able to say, well, this, that, and the other. It was sort of like, you know, I had just gotten there. Got into Zen Center, and well, maybe women couldn't sit still. I really didn't know. I wasn't sitting still particularly. So that was one image that I kind of had implanted. And then after practicing for a while, another, or anyway, a teacher also said to me that I was very much like a cement swimming pool. You know, the image was so dead. It was like this cement pool, this squared, with this chlorine water, just sitting there in this pool. And that's what they said I was like. Which also was very, I mean, I thought, well, maybe they have some insight into how I am, you know.

[09:44]

I didn't have much insight at the time. But the image was so, you know, there was nowhere to go with it. It had no life. It was just dead. It had this deadness to it. So I'll come back to those. So one of the main things I feel that I'm thinking about right now, working with, is integrity. What is integrity? Can you hear me all right in the back? The word integrity is a very interesting word in that it only comes in a noun form, whereas in terms of sort of human virtues, integrity, the other ethical words have an adjectival form.

[10:48]

For example, prudent and prudence, virtue, virtuous, patient, patience. But integrity doesn't really have an adjectival form. One has integrity. One can be integrated, but to be integrated doesn't exactly carry the same meaning as someone with integrity. I mean, it's close. It's kind of in the ballpark, but to have integrity, the full kind of meaning of that doesn't carry, or to say someone, you know, there's integration, you know, to have integrity, it carries a lot, a different meaning. This is, by the way, from this book that I've been studying called Integrity in Depth, which is a fascinating book by John Beebe, a Jungian psychologist. So integrity, in this way of studying it,

[11:55]

has three parts to it, parts to the definition. The first is an inner psychological wholeness. And the second part is an alignment with this inner wholeness and one's outer expression of that, the inner and the outer in alignment. And the third part of it is that that is sustained through time. So an inner wholeness expressed ethically or through our outer actions sustained through time. So in reading about that or practicing with that, it really resonates with me, with the precepts and karma and our practice. So the importance of having one's own inner intention

[13:03]

and inner sense of inner understanding, having that be able to be expressed thoroughly in one's actions of body, speech and mind, for me, seems very important. What you see is what you get, or to not have some big discrepancy between inner intention and outer actions of body, speech and mind, to have that be in alignment. But that may be very difficult, or I find it to be difficult, where I may have and cherish and care very much about the precepts or practice Buddha's way,

[14:06]

and yet find that I'm not able to thoroughly express that. There's a gap there, which is very painful. So our karma, and I took this karma week workshop with Rem, a lot of other people did as well, and one of the main, well I got so much out of it, and Rem's been talking about this as well in lecture, but the understanding that the smallest, a small action done on a wholesome action, or a small action, either wholesome or unwholesome, has enormous effects, like a seed growing into a giant redwood tree or something,

[15:08]

it has effects beyond which we can measure, measureless effects. So having this intention to be the kind of person, Socrates said, make yourself into the kind of person you want others to think you are. Which is very simple, you know. We want other people to think we have integrity, that we're, I should say usually, we want people to think we have integrity, and yet how do we make ourselves into the kind of person we want others to believe we are, without any kind of faking in there, or fooling ourselves or fooling others. So in the Fukan Zazengi,

[16:20]

where it talks about universal admonitions for Zazen, it talks about taking the posture and leaning neither to the right nor to the left, nor forward and backwards, and then it comes to that part where it says, think non-thinking. Think not thinking. How do you think not thinking? Non-thinking. This in itself is the essential art of Zazen. So this point in the Fukan Zazengi for many, many, many years has eluded my understanding. And in this Karma Workshop I got a glimpse, and maybe those of you who were there also got a glimpse, into what it is to think not thinking, or non-thinking, what non-thinking is. So I just, for my own edification,

[17:22]

and I want to just go over it, because it was so clear to me during that workshop, and I thought that point might be useful to just go over. So our karmic consciousness, or when we have karmic action of body, speech and mind, the mind takes a particular shape, and the character for Chaitanya is the rice field over mind. It has a shape. So when it's wholesome, when we have wholesome actions, the mind takes this shape. If you were to imagine it, it takes a shape that tends towards wholesomeness. And when we do unwholesome actions, the mind takes a shape. And if you were to look at it, you could see that's tending towards unwholesomeness or harming. So in terms of think not thinking,

[18:27]

this in itself is the essential art of Zazen. Zazen mind is not karmic mind, which means that it doesn't have a shape. It doesn't have its own shape. If you were to look at Zazen mind, it doesn't have a particular shape. It's the shape that takes the shape of whatever it is that you're thinking, or whatever it is that's going on. So to think not thinking is to think about the mind that is thinking. And what is that shape? So the non-thinking mind is thinking about these shapes that are being created, that your mind is taking. But the mind of Zazen itself has no shape.

[19:32]

Its shape is only the shape... It has no shape of its own. It's a formless shape. That, somehow, when that came in during this... Now, was that clear? Were you saying that this mind of not thinking is aware of the thinking mind? Yes. It's not thinking about it, but it's aware of it. Yes, yes. And as that thinking mind, or karmic consciousness, takes all these different shapes, moment after moment, the mind of non-thinking is aware of that, completely. Let me finish, and then we can talk lots more. So, I'm not sure if it completely digested this, but all the way through the Fukan Zazengi,

[20:35]

thus sit upright in bodily posture and so forth, everything is very clear until we get to think not thinking. How do we think of not thinking? Non-thinking. This, in itself, is the essential art of Zazen. So, this intention to live a life of integrity, or the inner and the outer being in alignment, there's an image that was brought up, and it's the image of Tucha's sieve, which I talked about on Sunday. So, Tucha was a Vesta. She served Vesta. Vesta was the goddess of the hearth in Rome, and Hestia in Greek. And in everyone's house, they had a fire, a sacred fire,

[21:43]

the hearth, and this was Vesta. And before anyone ate, they would offer something to Vesta. And she also had her own temples, and the Vesta virgins tended the sacred fires in these temples. So, Tucha was one of the Vesta virgins, and the word virgin means one unto herself. The original meaning was of wholeness. Integrity means wholeness, honesty, perfection, entirety. The word integrity comes in an integer, in numbers that are integers, those of you who are mathematicians know, but these whole numbers, integers. So, integrity means wholeness. And virgin means one unto oneself. It doesn't necessarily mean that one has or has not had sexual intercourse,

[22:46]

but means that one is whole unto oneself, and I see it as not looking outside oneself, or seeking for approval, or validation, or from outside. One has wholeness. So anyway, Tucha was one of these Vesta virgins, and she was accused of not carrying out her duties. I think of, I don't know exactly what, but of not being a proper Vesta virgin. And to prove that she was, she took a sieve, and she went to a river, and she dipped the sieve in the river, and the sieve held the water. It didn't leak out, and she carried it back, and holding the sieve, which was not leaking. And this proved her integrity, that she was speaking the truth.

[23:49]

This proved to everyone, this kind of miracle of Tucha's sieve. And in looking at this, this image, which is a miraculous image, of carrying water in a sieve that doesn't leak, I had also the image of Zazen, and Zazen Mind, which is being completely able to hold within Zazen Mind whatever needs to be held, without leaking it all over the place. Meaning action, you know, having to do action, feeling impelled or compelled to do something. The Tucha's sieve, or this, how I've been equating it with this Mind of Zazen, has the living water of the river being held completely

[24:50]

in, where you can say, awareness, or not thinking, or mindfulness, but being able to hold it, hold everything. And what struck me was the contrast between Tucha's sieve, that image of this miracle of this living water being held, and the pool, the cement pool, you know. One, and in some ways you can say, well, they resonate in some way, you know, water is being held, but one has this deadness to it, it's not living water, it's chemical, stagnant, you know, no fish would live in a chlorine pool, and the other is living water, dipped from the river and being held. So, our Zazen mind and our Zazen practice,

[25:55]

being able to hold everything that needs to be held, all of our life force and energy, and all of the karmic consciousness that arises, you know, in our thinking mind, this karma of mind, basically, but also body, speech, and mind, it all comes up in Zazen, although we're pretty silent, but being able to hold this without doing anything, without acting it out, without having to express it, but it's not repressing and it's not suppressing, but it doesn't have to be expressed, it can be held, this life, living water.

[27:00]

So, another thing that I've been thinking about a lot is how we hold this living water within our community life, without kind of leaking. The term leaking is a technical term, basically, which means that we think dualistically, self and other. To leak means that you think in dualistic terms, self and other. So, to be not leaking, and we can think of it, I mean, I think of not leaking self and other as being the ultimate understanding of emptiness, you know, or prashna paramita, not seeing self and other, and yet saving all beings with compassion, those two things. But there's also the leaking of inappropriate speech

[28:13]

or inappropriate action, or the leaking of possessiveness or intoxicating self and others, meaning the leaking of observing the precepts or not observing the precepts in a dualistic way is also kind of leaking. So, how is it that we create in our community a way of holding our life force without necessarily repressing, without suppressing, and without necessarily expressing it unless it's a benefit to others to express? I'm not against expressing, by any means. And this goes back to the drip, drip, drip. Let's see how we're doing here.

[29:15]

So, in our community we have forms, you know, and being in alignment, having our intention being in alignment with our forms, the inner and the outer, is extremely important for harmonious living together. And so we have... Well, before I talk about what we have, I just wanted to say that the fact that we see dualistically, there's a theory that I find quite interesting, which I'll just pass on to you, which is that before we actually saw self and other, before the consciousness became vijnana, meaning vi is vi of cut, or like vivisection, you know, cut or self and other, before that time there was a kind of wholeness of consciousness

[30:19]

that didn't see things outside itself. And there's a theory that the point at which human consciousness began to see self and other had to do with... Because as animals we did all sorts of things for thousands and millions of years like other animals, but at a certain point we began to have a different kind of consciousness than animals and began to see things outside ourselves, which is a kind of major problem, right? And also a major... created all of our culture and the world we know. So this theory is that this consciousness occurred in this way, and this is a theory, so you can, you know, I just, just, you know, take it in and whatever.

[31:21]

I don't think there's... We don't have to... I don't think it can be proved or disproved, it's kind of an interesting theory. The theory is that women, these women animals, you know, human animals, when they menstruated, it was dangerous because it would bring wild animals to where they were. So they were put, they would climb up in trees and in the primordial forest, you know, the earth, which is covered with forest, so they'd be up in the trees and maybe the forest cover was so thick that you could barely see any light even coming through because the leaf cover, the crowns and all were so, they were touching. And so, and also the women probably in these bands of animals probably had bioentrainment, or they had their cycles entrained,

[32:24]

which happens, I know it happens at Green Gulch and at Tassajara, living closely together, women's cycles get in sync with each other. So anyway, so up in these trees where they were kept safely for five or seven days or so, women noticed, this is the theory, that the moon, that there was some correlation between when they were bleeding and when the moon's cycles were, because those cycles are 29 and a half days, those two cycles. And they made this correlation between this outward thing, which was this light source, and what was happening with them, which was the first kind of break of consciousness between seeing self and other. So, be that as it may,

[33:28]

this was the moment of this vijnana, this consciousness that cut between just animal life, instinctual animal life, and something outside, outside of self, and correlating. And the word for menstruation means measure, and moon, month, measurement, all those words are cognates. Now, also, in other languages, and this I find very interesting, which is what I want to come back to, what I was saying about our community life together, having some harmony, and all religious communities have this kind of thing, they set up certain, what are called rules, like the rule of Saint Benedict, or, we don't like the word rule, but I just want to unpack, as they say, unpack the word rule. So the rule is a way of deporting oneself

[34:36]

in a religious community that tends towards harmony, that takes the shape of harmony among people. And the word rule means, you know, like a ruler, a straight line, and it also, in other languages, European languages, means menstruation. So in Spanish, the word for menstruation is las reglas, which also means the rules. And in French, it's règle, and in German, it's reggel, who's here from Germany? Regge. Regge, which means menstruation, and rule, both. So there's this kind of combination of the rule, or this way of, this kind of harmonious and natural measurement, and also this, coming from this word, are like arithmetic, rhythm, ritual,

[35:39]

this, and also regalia, and rex, and ruler, and re, you know, roy, the word king, or ruler, regina, and so forth, all comes from this same word, which has to do with well, for me, it's not rule in terms of this is the rule, but it has a kind of natural, what comes out of people living together, which is the most harmonious and the most beneficial to the group, and, you know, takes this wholesome shape. I was just going to say something which is slipping my mind. So the word integrity, so integrity has to do with it's not like at the expense of the individual

[36:43]

you kind of raise the banner of integrity, and I have integrity, you know, at the expense of your own personal expression, or your personal individuation, or your personal actually, the understanding is that finding what is finding one's own integrity is what was described as a delight. It's a delight to live in this way. It delights, it's an inner delight for self and other to live with integrity, this kind of inner and outer alignment is a delight, rather than you know, like this oppressive thing that you've got to kind of hold up. And that's how I think about the rule, you know, it's more of a delight, because it's

[37:44]

taking one's own understanding and being able to express it outwardly in form. So, let's see if there's anything I'm missing. So the word religion means religare or to bind, comes from to rebind, and so to be religious, and also religion, the word has a kind of bad rap, doesn't it? But anyway, religious means to bind, and to, I feel it has to do with restraining. So it's a refusal to,

[38:45]

in terms of integrity, integrity is this harmony of the parts, and it's likened to ecology, where no, and the importance of harmony in ecology, where nothing gets extra weight, you know, where it has to be in harmony. If it's out of balance in that way, there's, the system goes awry, you know, so religion as restraining or this binding to to this harmoniousness, or ecology of mind, or ecology of mind and body, where nothing is given more emphasis than another, way more emphasis. Now, you might say, well, we give emphasis to Zazen here, and so you could say that the rule here, or the way we understand harmony here is, it's not just Zazen, it's Zazen, it's mealtimes together, it's

[39:47]

rest, it's work together, it's listening to the Dharma, it's talking about Dharma, there's a lot of things, we don't just say it's Zazen only, you know, it's actually, there's a balance there, and if people begin doing something that's way, looks like they're kind of out of alignment, you know, then we begin to feel there's something not ecological, you know, the integrity has been lost somehow, this harmony of parts, this wholeness. So, maybe, I've been yapping away here for 45 minutes, and I did want to stop at 8.30, so I think that's all that I had to say, although there's other, a couple of things, but I'm interested in opening it up for discussion. Did you say you were going to come back to the image of the

[40:52]

cement pool? The cement pool? Well, I was contrasting the image of the cement pool and the chlorinated water being held with no, as if, if that was an image of my practice, there was nowhere to go, you know, there was no way to develop or to live from that, or so, as opposed to this other living water in the sieve, you know, that image as, it had life to it, for me, but also other images of water, oceans, and, you know, dream images I've had of swimming, which I enacted for the retreat last year, you know, immersing yourself in the living waters, entering deeply in the merciful ocean of Buddha's way, those two, those images of water and the cement chlorinated pool didn't, one, maybe I should say one image, the cement pool is

[41:53]

not, for me, was not a helpful living, practicing image, it kind of stopped me just cold, I didn't know where to go, I thought that was it, I was a, might as well, which is what I said, you might as well just turn me out to pasture or something, I have no, I can't work with, there's nothing there to work with anymore, like that feeling, very um, closed down feeling, and, um, so, I kind of lived with that for quite a while, I mean, it was an image that was offered in Doksan, you know, that I couldn't work with, so, but water as an image is very, I find, very um, feeds practice for me, rather than stops it cold.

[42:54]

How is a rule not like a cement pool? Well, rule, as I understand it from menstruation as rule, to me is, um, there's this living event, you know, that's um, powerful, and has sacredness to it, is involved with birth and death, and so out of that, knowing that, we beings create ways of taking care of that, by either putting people in trees for safety, or, you know, there are these, in terms of those rules, for example, this um, having people go into, women go into seclusion during their periods, um, to

[43:58]

honor that time, not to um, and then, this is the origin of temples, from this theory, then they would bury their menstrual pads in moss, or whatever they were using, all around that secluded place, and then all the land around that became sacred, which became like temple grounds, you know, these sacred places. So, that's how I see it, as um, las reglas, you know, the um, um, creating forms that that express truths among human beings, for their benefit. I just, I was thinking, like, with rhythm and cycles and things, there's so many factors that, to have one constant something, like if you always put the women in the trees, you know, for safety, say there's a, you know, hurricane, or something that happens, where maybe there's a predator that lives in the

[44:59]

trees now, or something like that, where you'd want to change it, or be able to have that flexibility. So, um, it doesn't seem so, a rule, just in I see how you're understanding of it, and from the root, it seems more flexible and more living, but, I think, in general, um, how I met rules and things like that, they don't seem so alive, they seem like, you know, and they don't seem as, like, in the moment, or very necessarily true, you know. I mean, each one's different, but, um. Well, I think there are rules that we've all come up upon, you know, come upon in our life, or have been, um, made a grid on top of us, you know, that have been that way, and I think that's why they have a bad rap, you know. But, um, my feeling is that the rules are living, and, for example, um,

[46:01]

like we used to carry the stick, and this just occurred to me, you know, and we used to carry it, there used to be, every period we would carry the stick, and sometimes there'd be two people with the stick on each side of the Zen Dojo, and it was just constantly, you'd hear the noise of people being hit, and, you know, right now, when I think of giving Zazen instruction, we always used to have to add, one of our practices is, you know, being hit on the shoulders if you were asleep, and people would sort of, you know, they'd blink like, really. Anyway, we dropped that, you know. During the Gulf War, you probably noticed that we decided to drop that practice, which is an ancient practice, very old, has been carried out through China, Japan, and we dropped that. Why? Because the living reality of our life in the 90s, the 80s and the 90s, in America, men and women together with our backgrounds, it was not, it didn't have guidelines or forms, our life and our open to

[47:05]

discussion and change. In German, actually, the word Regel means rule, also as an illustration, I think, in the way it's used as an illustration, it means regular, regular. So it means to continue with something which is happening again and again and again in a kind of regular rule. So it's not like law or this sort of thing. So the cyclical nature of it, yeah. You were mentioning the pattern of a wholesome mind as being a rice field superimposed over... I was describing the character for the word Chetana, which is a rice field pattern. The character has that pattern of rice field over mind.

[48:08]

Over mind. So the two together is Chetana. And Chetana is volition. We translate it as volition or will or this karmic action. Does that relate to the fact that the robe is the rice field? Yeah. I was just wondering about that. That just came up in the robe ceremony. And I thought that was just such a gorgeous thing. You know, I don't know about the origin of the character and the correlation with the... Galen, to you, or may I? Chetana and the rice field with... Excuse me. Yes. I think that character that you're describing is the character that was used to translate the Sanskrit term Chetana into Chinese.

[49:09]

So those didn't... That and that character and the pattern for the robe didn't arise simultaneously. It is not an etymologically integrated meaning of Chetana. It was how the Chinese understood. A way that the Chinese had to express their understanding of Chetana. As this shape of the mind, this order or shape of the mind. And there was some cognate function, some oral cognate function between how that character would sound in Chinese. Do you know how it sounds in Chinese? Chetana? I'm sorry, I don't. I don't recall what the sound was. But that's like a translation function rather than the description or the simultaneous arising of the Buddhist robe and Sanskrit term.

[50:10]

I think the rice field probably has been a source of a lot of inspiration. Yes? I'm interested in what you said about women noticing their cycle and the moon together. And how that has the birth of separation. But it's interesting because that seems like a pretty positive realization. And there's this whole separation concept has a real negative connotation to it. Separation causes suffering. And then it also seems like noticing that correlation between the rhythms would be more of a feeling of unification than separation. I think it's a positive thing in that

[51:13]

everything that follows from our way of thinking that things are outside ourselves and all the things that we do and think which really separates us from other life forms. And there's an enormous amount of suffering caused too. I think there's both things that arise from that. I think I'm not saying necessarily whether it's positive or negative. I think our inability to drop that or to understand how it's a construction is a source of pain. What was your first question about the moon? The first thing was that it was a negative thing.

[52:16]

The second thing was that it seems that realizing the correlation of the cycles would be more of a feeling of unification than separation. Well, you know, if you could imagine sort of animals, mammals in the wild giving birth and nursing their babies. Because somebody, when I talked about this in another context, said, well, what about giving birth? I mean, that would, once you saw that, you would know separation. But animals, mammals give birth all the time, you know, and instinctually you take care of them in certain ways and you protect them and you feed them. And there may not be this thought the way we think of separation. And in the same way, the theory is, this was this first instance of, there's something outside, you know. Because the coming out of this what's that word I can never pronounce? C-H-T-O-N phonic, you know, the coming out of the

[53:17]

wholeness or unified instinctual world, you know. It's like Psyche, you know, the myth of Psyche where she marries Eros in the dark, you know, and she doesn't know him as her husband until she brings the light, you know. And she looks at him and she sees him. And then it's like she's broken out of this unconscious realm and sees something outside. So I think it's like that, kind of this unified way of living and then it breaks into self and other. That's this theory, you know. Right. It sounds like there's something to it. Yeah. Katie? How can anyone speculate as to that being the first occasion and why bother? Why bother? Why bother? Why bother? Well,

[54:21]

it kind of goes back to this drip, drip, drip, you know. Because you have drip, drip, drip, you can't, you really can't be still, you know. And that kind of thinking, and also, you know, you can read that the Buddha's enlightened ones do not take the woman's body, you know, you can find those things. So, you know, to be told that as a new practitioner that because of this form that you that karmically, this is who you are, that this is an obstruction, you know, to your understanding thoroughly. So in the same way, I think the person who, there's this book that takes this and takes off from there. It's called Blood, Bread, and Roses, How Menstruation Created the World, basically. And

[55:22]

it goes from this one insight into all of culture and all of, it's fascinating, absolutely fascinating as I know those of you who've read it, some of you have found. And it gives, you know, if you've inculcated or kind of, what's the word not inculcated? Incorporated? Yeah? Internalized? Internalized! If you've internalized this view that somehow your, you know, your body is not, you know, up to snuff or these kinds of things that get internalized, you know, to kind of read this particular book where it all gets turned upside down. It's very fascinating and very kind of honors. So in that way it's very useful for kind of overturning some really old and useless denigrating

[56:23]

kind of thinking. Linda? That's what I was saying. I was thinking about the possibility of in that perception of self and other in the womb and the cycles of women and perhaps there was that perception of self and other but also the connection between self and other and not just through the separation but through the realization of interconnection as well. Which I think is what David was saying too. Yes, I think so. That feeling part of larger cycloid. Let me just look at the clock here. It's already after 8.30 and

[57:24]

I would like to stop on time. Is there anybody who's just really dying to say something? Nancy is dying to say something. This is our last one. I feel like there's something underlying this talk. Maybe it is too late to ask this question. But is there something specifically that inspired you to give this talk this evening? Or is there something maybe something within just I was wondering why this talk? Let me ask you something. Did you feel that it was sort of beside the point or kind of didn't meet you? No, but I feel like speaking about I feel like there's a whole other level that we could get to in this discussion about roles and community.

[58:24]

Yes, yes, and I know that something came up at the residence meeting which I wasn't at and I hope with Norman's back we actually make time for that full discussion about some of these topics that have come up. I think for me I think that's one of the conditions of bringing up what I brought up. And then in this workshop and also looking at what integrity I mean that's that I think was the kernel this integrity. Thank you.

[59:07]

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