Good morning. Good morning. So you can hear if I talk like this? Can you? I'm just talking quite quietly. You can hear in the back, huh? That's nice. I just got back from Minnesota where I gave a series of talks on the psychological teachings of the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni. And I'd like to continue talking about these teachings this morning and also we're having a class on this all summer here.

[01:52]

But before I go any further, I'd like to mention also that when I was in Minnesota, I went to a lecture. It wasn't a lecture, it was a conversation. Is that ringing me? Or us? Yeah, it is. No, it's not? Well, anyway, I went to a conversation with a man named Noam Chomsky. It's ringing. Can you hear the ringing? Excuse me for a second. Maybe it's the lights. So this is back on now? Can you hear me again in the back? So I went to this talk by this man named Noam Chomsky.

[03:02]

Noam Chomsky is a I'd say a language scientist, among other things. A couple of things he said that I wanted to mention at the beginning of my talk is, first of all, that language human language anyway, is not designed for utility. It has built into it design flaws such that the information that we attempt to convey with it doesn't work. It's non-utility. It can't process certain kinds of information. He said that language is not a utility system for processing information so much as it is primarily a way of expressing thought or feelings and for maintaining social relationships.

[04:26]

And he gave some examples of some sentences which don't make any sense but that are perfectly good sentences. For example, I think the sentence the horse rode the horse rode by fell," something like that, which doesn't sound like a sentence, but if you hear it as, there's a horse and this horse was ridden by, that horse fell. It's a sentence, but when you hear it, it doesn't sound like a sentence. There's lots of things like this that just the way the language is built doesn't make sense. And towards the end of the talk, at the end of the talk, I got to ask the last question. And my question was, I said, it sounds to me like language isn't for communication, but its main use, its best use, is to get people interested.

[05:38]

And he agreed that that was. That's the main use of language is to get, if you speak or if I speak, we use language to get people interested. And language can be used for communication. He didn't say it couldn't be. But the parts of language you use for communication are little subsections of it that work for communication. And we learn which parts of language you can use for communication, and we use those parts, and we convey information to each other with those parts that work. And sometimes when we give classes or talks, We spend quite a bit of time trying to convey information, which is fine, but then we miss, I think, the main and most effective use of language, and that is to get people interested in something. So I'm trying... I was trying before that, but his language got me interested.

[06:50]

in trying to use language more to get people interested rather than me giving information or communicating. He didn't say that we aren't interested in communicating or that we can't communicate. It's rather that language is not the way to do it. But you can use language to get people interested in communicating. I remember many years ago, Suzuki Roshi said, a Zen teacher's job is to get people interested in Zazen. That's what he said. Now I'm saying, it's not to tell people what Zazen is, because no one can tell you what Zazen is. It's like no one can tell you who you are. But a Zen teacher, a Buddhist teacher's job is to... is with language or whatever means possible, but particularly with language, to get people interested in zazen, to get people interested in themselves, to get people enthusiastic about studying what's happening with them.

[08:09]

Not to tell people what's happening with them, but to get them to look back at their own stuff. So I'm sort of communicating something to you, but I hope I'm starting to get you a little interested in yourselves. Another thing he said, quoting a friend of his, at the beginning of a class, the man would say, it's not so important what we cover in this class, but what we discover. So there's some material to be covered And that's maybe very interesting material, but more the teacher's job is to get the students to look at the material and to discover something there which no one can teach you.

[09:13]

I remember when I was in college, I had a a friend who took a class, and she invited me to this class. I wasn't actually taking very many humanities classes, but that was a class on various classics, one of them being Don Quixote. And the professor was, his name was John Berryman, John Berryman, some of you know, he's a poet. And after I had him as a teacher, he won a Pulitzer Prize. And then a little while after that, he jumped into the Mississippi River and died. I didn't intend to talk about him today. But anyway, he was a man who, while giving a lecture, when the bell went off to end the class, He could barely stand that bell. It would reduce him to almost a nervous wreck when the bell went off.

[10:21]

He'd just shake and quiver. He was an alcoholic and an extremely sensitive person, and little things weren't little to him. He was reading Don Quixote, and he read, I think, like the first page of the prologue. I think it says something like, I can remember it some years later, 25 or 30 years later, I can remember it said, in a, something like somewhere in La Mancha, there lived a certain gentleman, rather over 40, something like that. And he read that and he said, he said, I can't do it. I'm not warmed up enough. But anyway, he said, did you hear what he said? He won't tell us how old he is. And they won't tell you where he lives in La Mancha or his name right away.

[11:36]

But the fact that he wouldn't tell you how old he was was something that he got me interested in. And I thought to myself, boy, if I could be that interested in every little thing in the book, what a book it would be. And he was sincerely interested in that fact. And I imagine now, if that guy can read that whole book like that, it must be, what a life that would be. And actually, it was too much of a life for him. He couldn't stand it. So maybe that's not a good example. So I'll try to cool it about this scripture. There was once a man who wasn't an alcoholic.

[12:37]

His name was Shakyamuni, also called Gautama. And he woke up at some point and became very, very happy and became very, very helpful to all other living beings. And so we're still practicing his practice. And he talked a lot to get his disciples interested in life. He wanted them to get interested in life. I said this last time I talked here, and I'll keep saying it over and over, and that is the Buddha did not say that life is suffering.

[13:38]

He didn't say life is suffering. Can you hear that in the back? His enlightened view actually was that life is incomparably, indescribably, that's it. And so he said sometimes, when he wasn't speaking declaratively, he just said, wow. Wow. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. It's wonderful, not only for me, but for everybody. That's what he saw through his eyes when they were opened. And he just tried to convey to people his enthusiasm for this life. And he saw one problem in life. The one problem was that there is, for many of us, a lot of the time, misery and suffering.

[14:47]

But this has a cause. And if you understand how it happens, you can see how wonderful it is. That life is not necessarily painful, but rather, under certain conditions, it's painful. And he described those conditions, and those are the conditions that I'd like to bring up today. We don't usually mention this thing about the historical Buddha Shakyamuni, but when he was seven days old, tradition says, he lost his mother. And many of the great teachers from his time to the present, in Buddhism or other spiritual disciplines, have lost their parents early. He was a very bright boy. He didn't miss the fact that he lost his mother, he noticed.

[15:51]

They quickly replaced him with a very nice aunt, and he grew up very well. And his father, I think partly because of this initial shock, his father made every effort to protect him from any kinds of suffering. And I also agree with that. I think children should be protected as much as possible from suffering, that they should be given as much love and nourishment and protection from difficulty as possible. And partly because it's just nice to do anyway, but also because they'll grow up to be strong and sensitive. And then they will be able to see what Shakyamuni Buddha saw when he grew up, namely, well, many things, namely, everybody, he noticed everybody grows old, gets sick, decays, and suffers.

[16:54]

He noticed that. He also noticed that common people, uneducated people, do the same, and that they, without any education, even though they know that they grow old and they get sick and they die, guess what? They find the same process in others disgusting. Strange, huh? Shakyamuni Buddha said, also knew that everybody gets sick, grows old and dies. And he himself also noticed that he was disgusted with the process and others. Except in addition to that, he felt very ashamed of himself for feeling that way. Very ashamed that he would find disgusting a process that he himself is going to go through and that everybody goes through.

[17:58]

So losing his mother, being raised very well and being very sensitive, and being easily hurt by the facts of existence, not being a numb person, and also recognizing and being ashamed of his own relationship or his own response to disease, decay, and death, he made a great renunciation. and left his usual social life and entered another social life. And there he immersed himself in old age, sickness, death, and shame at being disgusted at these things and other people, and so on. And also remember his early loss of his mother. All these things were his motivation to study himself very deeply and finally understand and be happy.

[19:10]

Now this historical, this story about him can be understood as, well, it should be understood as his story. And it can also be understood as a psychological metaphor, namely that there is a time when we are connected with our mother. There is a time when we know a bliss of oneness and interconnectedness. And this we lose. It's a kind of innocence, a radical innocence that we lose. We all lose it. And when we realize we lose this, this is something we also can realize other people lose, and then start in a process back to this union. But not through regression, but rather through understanding the situation of what it's like to be separated from it.

[20:22]

So the Buddha teaches that if we can illuminate the situation of this pain, of this frustration, of this loss, of this broken heart from which everything starts, if we can illuminate that, we can become free. If we try to illuminate something else, it just turns out not to be as good a place to put our searchlight. It might sound like a better place. I often myself have been impressed that the area that Buddha chose to or encouraged us to put our vision, our attention is not an area that's very attractive. At least it didn't seem to be to me. Wouldn't it be better to meditate on the vastness of consciousness or something like that.

[21:35]

Or... Or a golden Buddha. So there are meditations of meditating on golden Buddhas, and they're perfectly good meditations. But the historical Buddha, his early instruction, his first instructions were to look at something rather unattractive, namely... the origins of frustration. Which reminds me of a joke which doesn't really apply. But that's okay. One day, Mutt and Jeff were standing on the street and they were looking down in the gutter under a streetlight policemen came up to him and said, what are you guys doing? And one of them said, we're looking for his watch.

[22:41]

And the policeman said, oh, did you lose it around here? And one of them said, no, but the light, we lost it up the street, but the light's better here. So I don't know whether we Maybe we lost our watch, and usually we'd like to look at it where there's already a nice light. Maybe that's how it applies. But actually, we should go up the street where it's dark, because that's where it actually is. Maybe that's how it applies. Because for most of us, maybe where there's suffering and frustration, it's kind of dark there. There aren't nice Christmas tree lights around it. Or around the suffering, there's not a beautiful golden aura with lots of nice songs and beautiful people sort of saying, come, look here. But actually, that's where our watch is.

[23:44]

So we can scout around in some really nice locations of our psyche and have a good time with the light around us and so on, and policemen will come and ask us what we're doing and so on, but it may not be where our watch is or where our... What did we lose again? We lost, I guess, the happiness of being alive. However, I also want to mention, I think I have to mention, that the happiness of being alive, which we know when we're young, which Shakyamuni Buddha knew before his mother died, this is bliss, it is happiness, and we are alive. However, we are not conscious of it. And part of our necessary development is to not only have a great, loving, blissful heart, but to know it, to be aware of it, to recognize it.

[25:01]

And it turns out that the only way we can recognize it is to lose it and find it again. When we first know it, it's a dark bliss. It's a dark, unconscious happiness. But our full assignment in life as humans is to not voluntarily, don't worry about it, you don't have to give it up voluntarily, it gets taken away from you, and then you find it again. And when it's taken away, at that point you start to know what you lost. And then gradually, through the suffering of being separated, through the yearning for union, to find it again. So it's almost time to stop. I'm ready to get to the text, the little phrase I wanted to give you. And that is, Buddha did not say that life is suffering.

[26:04]

What Buddha said was, in many different ways, something like this. And I'll say it in Sanskrit, or at least a rendered Sanskrit, said, Upadana, pancha, skandha, dukkham. Upadana means clean. Pancha means five. Skandha means aggregate. And dukkham means pain, frustration, dissatisfaction, uneasiness, misery, those kinds of things. So clinging to the five aggregates, that's the definition of dukkha. Clinging to the five aggregates is really the only problem in life. If you don't cling to the five aggregates, life is wonderful. What? Yeah, what are they?

[27:06]

That's it. You're interested. There's five. And number one is called, in Sanskrit, rupa. I'm telling you the Sanskrit so that you won't be turned off and get disinterested later when you find out that there's a Sanskrit word. Rupa means form. And form has basically five, ten types. Color. Color. Sound, smell, touch, and taste. Those are called the five sense fields. Then there's the five, what you might call sense capacities or sense playmates. Also sometimes called organs.

[28:06]

The organs are the, there's five of each. And they match exactly, one, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four, five. The organs are called eye organ, ear organ, nose organ, tongue organ, and body organ. And those organs are sensitive to and respond to these other phenomena called the sense fields or the sense data. So like the eye organ is something located around a living being that responds or is sensitive to or is affected by color. So that's the first aggregate of a living being. All living beings, all living beings, all living beings have that aggregate. There's no living beings who don't have, who aren't responding to physicality. And the next one is called feeling, vedana, feeling.

[29:16]

And the next one is called, and it's basically just three kinds of feelings, feeling pain, pleasure, and confusion about which it is. The third one is called conception. and conception means that when you turn things into concepts and as in our actual aware life we're always dealing with concepts of things concepts of colors and also composed concepts like men and women right and wrong, left and right these are concepts good and bad enlightened and unenlightened. The next aggregate is one that has many different kinds of elements in it. It's called the formations aggregate or composition aggregate.

[30:21]

And in there, you'll find lots of individual things like anger, confusion, lust, faith, concentration, diligence, shamelessness, shamefulness, fear of blame, lack of fear of blame, many, many possible psychological states, each one of which, and all of them together, have a tendency to condition the ones I just mentioned, they have a tendency to condition the first one, the form skanda, the form aggregate, the feeling aggregate, the conception aggregate. And also they condition or modify or habitize the fifth one, which I didn't mention yet, which is called vidnyana skanda, which is consciousness or awareness. or cognition. Those are the five.

[31:25]

All living beings are a composition. I should say all living beings are just those five. No living beings have any other kinds of experiences other than these five types. And a moment of life is composed of these five aggregates or these five sources. To get familiar with these, that's what we're going to be studying this summer, and that's what I've been studying for many years, is how do these five, what are they really, how do they happen, how do they work together to conjure up what we call this wonderful thing called life. Now Buddha said, he didn't say that those five things are suffering, those five things are life. What's suffering is to cling to those five things. That's suffering. Because to try to cling to those five things is like trying to cling to a group of five kids.

[32:31]

Five teenage kids, five three-year-old kids, five one-year-old kids, or five drunk 49er football players. To try to control a group of five of any vital, constantly changing, dynamic entities, to try to control them will be a frustrating experience. These five things are things that are happening every moment, every moment they happen, all five, with total creative energy, fully realizing themselves instantly. and then they go away. And then bam, another five come. You can't control them. It's ridiculous, and we try. And so that's the basic problem in life is we try to control something that nobody, including Buddha, has the slightest chance of controlling.

[33:33]

Just to somehow let them happen is beyond good and bad, is beyond pain. It's just this thing called life. I remember I was driving down the Green Gulch driveway about five or 10 years ago when Governor Brown was still governor. And I heard an interview on the radio. And he said something like, I'm just a ping pong ball on the top of a fountain. You picture there's like a fountain going up like this, and a ping-pong ball bouncing up on top of it, and somehow it doesn't fall off too much, or if it does, they pop it back up there. Okay? I thought, that's pretty good. And that's a really good example of what Buddha teaches. In other words, what the governor was describing is very close to the definition of suffering.

[34:38]

To make the ping pong ball is extra. Life is actually just a fountain. There's no ping pong ball on top. Or just the surface of the fountain, just like if you take one snapshot of the top of the fountain, just the globe of water just forming the surface of the fountain, you know, just at that moment, that's a moment of life. No ping pong ball on top, no person in addition to that. Or have a fountain of ping pong balls, take your choice. The ping-pong ball is, in some sense, is something maintained up there. Or another way to say is to try to grab a hold of the top of the fountain. Well, you can't grab a hold of it. You can disturb it. But if you actually want to get a hold of it, you're going to be frustrated. And even floating on top isn't good enough, because eventually the ping-pong ball will try to get control.

[35:47]

This is a waste of time, and there is no ping-pong ball anyway. It would be more like some parts of the water in the fountain trying to get control of the other parts of the water in the fountain. Human beings can try. I mean, human beings have the audacity, have the imaginative power to dream of trying to control something uncontrollable. This is a basic definition of suffering, and this is basically the only problem in life, this one. This is what he said. Upadana pancha skanda dukkham. He didn't say that fountain was a problem. It's trying to control the fountain. So human beings are not too good at controlling themselves in their own experience. And I say not too good, but basically I would say we're very poor at it. We're not good at controlling our experience. We're not good at controlling our life.

[36:48]

As a matter of fact, the name for how we're not good at controlling our life is suffering. And also, the problem doesn't even stop there. It gets worse because since we try to control ourselves, we also then try to control others. And they are also, as I've mentioned before, out of control. I've tried for many years to control Zen students in groups of one and up. You can't control one, you can't control three. They resist control. I gave up a while ago. Occasionally, the infection reoccurs and I try again, but it doesn't work. There are some things which we are good at. We're fairly good at ordering. Ordering is not the same as control.

[37:49]

For example, to clean your desk off, have nothing on it, and then look at it, that's not a controlling act. Because while you're trying to clean the desk off, you may get lots of frustration. Telephone calls may ring. Your children may come and climb on you. A lamp may fall over on you. You may forget in the middle of doing it that you want to do it. All these kinds of things might happen. That's a matter of control. But if you want to clean your desk off, someday you may be able to. And when you clean it off, you did a good job. It's clean. It's ordered. And you can take a book and put it down there, or even just a piece of paper that said, Upadana Panchaskhanda's Dukkham. And just look at it. And then after you look at it, take it away and just remember that here you are sitting there with a desk in front of you. And what's your life about? So I myself put quite a bit of effort into order, and I try to put almost no effort into control.

[38:56]

If I put a lot of effort into ordering, I realize more deeply what a waste of time control is. For example, if I sit here in this seat in the morning, and if I just try to sit still, I don't try to control myself into sitting still. I try to sit still as an ordering activity. I can't actually control myself into sitting still. I cannot sit still, in fact. The only way I can sit still is if everybody in the universe makes me sit still. All of us together, all of you are perfectly in control of me. But not one of you is in control of you, and not any one of us is in control of any one of you. But all of you, plus everybody else in the universe, is completely in control of me. You have me completely under your control. What I am is actually what you have made.

[39:59]

In that sense, each of us are under control. The entire cosmos is controlling us. But individually, we cannot control anything. So when I sit still, actually I find out that I can't sit still. And the stiller I sit, and after many years of practice, I can sit more still than I could before. The more still I sit, the more deeply I realize that I never can sit still. And also the more deeply I realize that I always was sitting still in the sense that all living beings make me sit still every moment. Every moment I'm completely still. But the kind of still that I try to make, I can never do. By ordering my life so that I can attempt to sit still, I realize that control is a waste. The ordering helps my realization of the futility of control. And also the ordering facilitates or supports my realization of what I am good at.

[41:09]

And what I am good at is I'm good at being me, moment by moment. And what I am is like a fountain. I am simply a moment of spontaneous, universally determined creativity. I'm not in control of this creativity, but I am the site of this creativity. Pure, universally connected creativity. And each one of us is such a site. Each one of us is a fountain of the universe. Each one of us is a place where the universe is expressing itself at a location, at a living location. I am not the creator of this fountain. The creation of the fountain is my life.

[42:15]

And if I order my life, I can see that fountain. Or rather, not even see it because there's not a person out here looking at the fountain. Rather, there just is being a fountain. There just is the life of the fountain. There just is life. Not somebody watching life, but life which includes the observer. And now it's 11.05, and I'm wondering if I can give an example of how to study one of these skandhas a little bit. How's your attention span going? You want to scream or something? So I thought I would talk about the first aggregate, the form one.

[43:20]

Now what we're looking at here is a psychological process, a psychophysical process. Same thing, psychophysical. Suffering is psychophysically based. You see? The definition of suffering is the psychophysical base. So Buddha, you see what Buddha is recommending and his disciples also recommend is that the place where Buddhas wake up is in the midst of psychology. The way they also say it, I slipped and said awful say it, the way they awful say it is that Buddhas wake up in the midst of delusion. Psychological processes from the point of view of life itself are just illusory processes, processes by which illusions are conjured up.

[44:25]

We live in illusions. So Buddhas wake up in the middle of that process of illusion. They don't wake up in the middle of enlightenment or in the middle of empty space. What they wake up about and in and through is delusion. That's where they wake up. That's their home. That's their food. the five skandhas, the five aggregates. That's where they wake up. They wake up in that fountain. So the form, take the form one, for example. So Buddha says, why do we say body? One is affected. Therefore, we say body. It's too late.

[45:29]

But maybe in question and answer we can go into it more. Anyway, what he's saying is that what is meant by body is being affected. That's what he means by body. Body is not a thing. Now, one time I said this, one time I quoted Buddha saying this, and I said, body is that which is affected. And someone pointed out that that's not a good way to put it. It's not like there's a thing, a that, which is affected. Like, here's a body over here, see? Arms, head, legs, torso, and that gets affected. That's not what he's saying. five feet nine, or, you know, whatever, or the arms and legs, and so on. And this is affected. And this I move around through time and space. This is not what Buddha means by body.

[46:36]

This is not life as the body. Okay? It's a perfectly good experience, but it's not a bodily experience. Can anybody guess what kind of an experience that is in terms of the five aggregates? Yes? It's a concept. Most people walk around thinking that their body is a concept, or they think of a concept and they think that's their body. Even some athletes, fairly good ones, not the real good ones, but fairly good ones, run around these hills or go swimming in the ocean or work out on Nautilus machines or whatever. And what they're doing is they're taking their concept and throwing it into the situation and working that concept. And they hurt themselves because of it. And the more they work out with the concept of their body, the more hungry they get for physical experience because they're starving. Not because they're not having experiences, but because they're not having physical experiences.

[47:42]

The problem is of the confusion of bodily experiences with conceptual experiences. The body, actually, Buddha did not say it has arms and legs. He did not say that. In fact, arms and legs are concepts. They're not physical things. Physicality, the body, is being affected. Being affected how? Being affected by heat. Being affected by cold. Being affected by pressure. Being affected by things like hard and soft and rough and smooth. Being affected in that way. Being affected by gnats and mosquitoes. This is the body. So a couple things are going on in this way of teaching what the body is. Number one, he's saying, what I mean by body, see if you can find physical experience, which is actually physical experience, not conceptual experience.

[48:52]

And also, two, start being able to notice the difference between conceptual experience and physical experience, and see if you can not get confused between the two. Charles, who'd been doing workshops here on sensory awareness, they often just teach what the body is rather than what the concept of the body is. As I say, most of us go around with a concept of the body, and when we try to get into a car, we've got a concept of a body, and because of the concept of the body, you have to figure out how to get into the car using the concept of the body. This makes getting into the car just a little bit or a lot more difficult than getting the body into the car. The body is actually a location where you can be affected physically.

[49:52]

But we carry with us this extra thing. Moment by moment, we carry this extra thing called the concept of the body, which makes everything physically more difficult. Great dancers, when they fly up in the air, I think as they're flying up, and certainly when they're in the air, and also when they land, they don't have a concept that they're sending up in the air and bringing down. If you have a concept of your body when you're up in the air and you're landing, the concepts are going to make it harder for you to land. Because it's not the concept that's landing. It's that which is affected. And again, there's no problem with having a concept. It's just that it makes everything more difficult. I should say, the only problem with it is that there's a problem. The only problem with it is that it causes suffering and frustration. So when you sit in the car, if you have a concept of your body, it just makes it more difficult to figure out how to move into the space.

[51:00]

Or if you've got the problem of landing on the ground from three or four feet in the air, It's actually being affected. It's the way you're affected that you're going to figure out how to land, how you're affected by the earth, by gravity, by pressure, by heat, by cold. Those are the data that you're going to use to land. If you have in addition to that a concept of the body, which you had perhaps even before you went up in the air, it just makes landing all the more difficult. As a matter of fact, some people don't even pay any attention to how they're affected when they land, and it's only the body that starts to land. The same kind of problem is with all the other aggregates of existence. of not dealing directly with them. And so I'm partly giving you a, just looking a little bit into that first one to see how you might work with the other three, other four.

[52:12]

If you don't quite understand what I'm saying, I don't either. And it's quite a different way of approaching the body than we're used to. I find it quite different. So in other words, could you imagine... operating in the world from being affected physically rather than from carrying a concept of the body around. Rather than negotiating this concept through space and time, can you imagine shifting your orientation to operating from being physically affected? Now, there's other elements of existence that also will help you. But I think a lot of people are afraid to try on such a new concept because they wouldn't believe that they... I shouldn't say new concept, but to let go of the body concept and try to move because you might think, well, how would I get down the stairs and things like that?

[53:26]

Or how would I get food into my mouth? But don't worry about that because you still have all these body concepts are still going to keep coming up. You're still going to get concepts of spoon, hand, oatmeal, mouth, distance from the mouth to the spoon. All that stuff, all those concepts are going to keep coming up. So you'll still be able to eat, walk, and so on. But could you shift over to try to find out what it's like to have a body? Namely, to live from how you're affected physically. And again, I would say that that's pretty difficult to do unless you order your life. For example, say, for the next 10 minutes I'm going to maybe just sit here or for the next 10 minutes I'm going to walk slowly and I'm going to not be doing anything fancy like driving a car or balancing knives on the tip of my finger or something like that.

[54:35]

I'm going to be in a situation where I feel safe and I'm going to try to see if I can see what Buddha means when Buddha says the body is being affected. That that's physical life. And in that way also order your life so that you could make a space where you could study each of these elements. of your life, where you could spend five minutes or ten minutes saying, what kind of feelings are happening? Am I having pleasurable feelings, painful feelings, or confusion? And so on. You need to order your life so that you can actually examine the elements of your experience. And one final example. As I said, Buddha is being greatly awakened in the midst of delusion or confusion or these elements.

[55:46]

And here's an example of what it's like to look. This is an example of a little awakening. This is an example of a tiny one. But you can see here, I think, the process. I was with this little girl one time, and she had a friend staying overnight. And when the friend's mother came, the little girl went and sat on her mother's lap. Little girl number two sat on her mother's lap. Little girl number one felt like little girl number two was intentionally excluding little girl number one. by expressing love and affection and cuddling with her own mom. So later, when little girl number two left with her mom, little girl number one said to her mom about feeling like she was being excluded, like her friend was intentionally excluding her. Then little girl number two got on her dad's lap, and the mother of little girl number one said, are you intentionally trying to exclude me?

[56:58]

And little girl number one said, no, I'm just hugging my dad. So then number one realized that hugging your mom or dad is not necessarily a way to exclude your girlfriends. So she said, okay, I'll give her another chance. I'll give her one more day. I'll watch her. so she went to school the next day and she watched her friend all day and she came home and she said i noticed that i was getting angry at her for what i thought she was doing or rather i noticed i was getting angry at her by the way i was thinking the way i was thinking about her made me angry this is an example of a little insight a little awakening that happens when you turn around and look at how your feelings and conceptions and so on, how they work, what they do.

[58:05]

Even a child can do it, but you have to order your life by something like, okay, I'll give her a chance. I'll look tomorrow. That's an ordering attitude. It may not be successful, you may forget, but still you can do it. You can order your life to look at yourself and then you can learn that whenever you suffer, it's from trying to cling to that spontaneous, uncontrollable activity of your life. And if you just are the spontaneous, uncontrollable activity of your life, there ain't no suffering. Plus, also, you won't try to control other spontaneous living creatures and you won't cause any trouble to them either. However, they'll still try to control you Unless they are also doing their work. But just keep doing the same practice to yourself and they won't hurt you too much. Because you realize they can't control you.

[59:07]

So what can they do? Okay?

[59:12]

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