This is a sort of a title called Zen Meditation on the Body. There is a teaching which was given in a scripture around 1700 years ago in India, and the name of the scripture in Sanskrit is, the short name of it is Samjnirmocana Sutra, and that could be translated as the scripture revealing the thought, and the thought being the thought of the Buddha. It's a scripture which is showing,

[01:02]

not mentioning many of the Buddha's teachings, but also showing what the Buddha was intending by various teachings. And in that scripture, one section of it teaches the characteristics of phenomena. And it says all phenomena have three characteristics. So, the body is a phenomena, so the body would have these three characteristics, but everything, all phenomena have these three characteristics. There are various ways to translate them into English, but one way for starters is, the basic characteristic or the basic nature of all phenomena

[02:10]

is called the other dependent nature, or the other dependent character. And the next, or another characteristic, is called the imagined character, or imaginary character, or also imputational character. And the third one is called the thoroughly established character, or the reality character. So, first one is other dependent, next one is imagined, next one is reality.

[03:13]

So, it's proposed that all phenomena have these three characteristics, or these three natures. So, the body will too. And a book has been recently published, with my name on it, which talks about this scripture. And in that book, I kind of offered another rendition of the three characteristics, which I think was the dream nature, the mysterious nature, and the absence of the dream nature. So, everything has a basic nature, which is that everything is dependent on others.

[04:17]

Everything depends on others for its existence. Nothing exists all by itself, nothing makes itself. And the way that is, is mysterious. The way that things are other dependent is mysterious. Or you could also say inconceivable. You could also say wondrous, and marvelous. And inconceivable, also you could say it's unknowable to ordinary perception. That's the basic nature of everything, of all phenomena. The way they basically are is unknowable. But living beings, who also have these three characteristics,

[05:22]

when it comes to living with phenomena, they feel uncomfortable with things being inconceivable. What I've said so far may, to some of you, be almost inconceivable. But if you think what I'm saying is inconceivable, it's still conceivable that you could think that. The way I really am, and the way what I'm saying really is, and the way you are, and the way our bodies are, are basically too vast and marvelous and inconceivable and beautiful to be grasped by consciousness, by discriminating consciousness. And discriminating consciousness is the same way. The way everything depends on other things for its existence

[06:29]

is inconceivably wonderful, inconceivably beautiful, and mysterious. Again, sentient living beings have a problem with that. They feel uncomfortable with inconceivability because they're into conceivability, they're into conceptions, they're into ideas, they're into images. So, because of that, all phenomena gets projected on it, images, so that living beings can know them. But what they know is not the basic way things are, which is mysterious and inconceivable. What they know is their imagination about the things. So, the inconceivable way we are is not an appearance. The way we basically are is not an appearance,

[07:34]

but we make things that aren't appearances into appearances and then we know them. But how do we know them? We know them as appearances, not the way they basically are. The way things are that supports the concoction of appearances is not an appearance. But these appearances are based on something, something really inconceivably wonderful, our basic life. But again, in order to get a hold of things which can't be got a hold of, we put an image out there and grab the image and think we got the thing. We didn't, but we feel good that we got something. What we got is just our imagination of the thing. The third characteristic of our life, of everything, of our body, the third characteristic, is that basically, no matter what,

[08:37]

it's always free. All phenomena are free of our ideas of them. We have ideas of people and ourselves, and with these ideas, with these images, we feel like we can get a hold of what people are and what we are. We misconstrue the basic nature of things as what we impute to them. But actually, even though we impute it to them, our imputation never touches anything. And basically our life is always free, never not free of whatever we think of it. So if you think you got a lousy life, then you know you have a lousy life, because you think so. Or if you think you have a lousy life and you're not sure, then you know that you're not sure. But at least you know that. But even though you think you have a lousy life and you're sure,

[09:39]

or you think you have a lousy life and you're not sure, actually your life is completely free of whatever you think of it. No matter how bad you think your life is, that bad judgment does not ever reach your life. Your life is always free of everybody's idea of it. And no matter how good you think your life is, your life is free of that too, which you may or may not like to hear that. Basically, however, another teaching is that if we do strongly adhere, which we do, not just sort of think that maybe what I think of people is what they are, but usually we think strongly that what we think of people is what they are. When we strongly adhere, if we weakly adhere to our ideas of things as them,

[10:45]

we still don't feel like we know them. So we strongly adhere to them so we can actually get some traction. And when we strongly adhere to our mysterious, inconceivable life as our imagination of it, when we do that, this is the origin of affliction. All afflictions come from this basic misapprehension of our life, of converting an unknowable existence into a knowable existence and holding to the way we know it to be it creates stress. And all kinds of unfortunate things follow from that stress. And, yeah. So, it's possible, however, to study this process in such a way that we realize

[11:46]

that our life is free of our ideas of it and then we abandon, we abandon our ideas of our life. We don't throw them out the window, we just abandon them as being our life and then we become free of suffering. So our life actually has a kind of defiled aspect and a pure aspect and another aspect which is both defiled and pure. Our basic life is both defiled and pure because it embraces illusions about itself and freedom from illusions about itself. The ideas we have about our life defile it. If we hold to them, we have suffering. But actually the freedom from our ideas about our life is pure and our life has both sides. Our basic life has both aspects.

[12:53]

Our basic life is defiled by fantasy and also it is pure fantasy. So this applies to the body, which is what we're going to focus on here this time. A basic teaching from the early days of the teachings of the Awakened One in India 2,500 years ago. One time he said, What's the body? No, excuse me. He said, What's the world? And he said, This six foot body is the world. So I would propose to you that the body in one sense is,

[14:05]

in one sense it is our sense capacities. For example, our capacity to be sensitive and responsive to what we call light, what we call sound, smells, tastes and tangibles. The physicality which is sensitive to those forms of physicality. That's one way to talk about what the body is. But that way of talking about it isn't complete, I would say. Because being sensitive doesn't really count except when sensitized. So the capacity to be sensitive to light, for example,

[15:10]

the capacity to be sensitive to electromagnetic radiation, when it's not actually responding to that, the capacity is just potential. So the actual body, the actual living body is the body that's actually in a reciprocal relationship with another kind of physicality. It's a material sensitivity that's in a reciprocal relationship with another kind of materiality. Which I wouldn't call insensitive,

[16:12]

but I would say that that kind of materiality... I don't know what to say about it right now. When the body is interacting reciprocally, I say reciprocal because it isn't just that light touches the body. I would say it's not just that light touches the body. It's that the body explores the light

[17:16]

and also the light kind of beckons the body to receive it. They're kind of in a dance with each other. And when that dance is occurring, that dance is consciousness. You could say, one might say, I might say, that consciousness is the body dancing with the physical world. It's the physical body dancing with the physical world. But it's also the physical world dancing with consciousness. Consciousness is not just the body doing this thing, it's the thing doing the body. It's reciprocal, but it's not symmetrical. Electromagnetic radiation isn't the same.

[18:20]

It's physical, but it's not the same kind of physicality. It's a wave, right? It's not the same kind of physicality as, for example, the retina and the way the retina gets grouped into nerves and gets collected into the optic nerve and enters the brain and the rest of the body. The consciousness is this interaction and this consciousness then, this interaction, which is this dynamic between these two kinds of physicalities, is consciousness. And in consciousness, all kinds of images arise. Part of consciousness is the ability, consciousness comes with imagination. The body, the dancing body, the dance of the body in the world has an imagination.

[19:24]

The physical world, the mountains and rivers, and our sensual body dancing together, that dance has an imagination. The body has an imagination and the mountains have an imagination. But the mountains, without having light bounce off them and touching a body, the mountains don't have imagination then. And the body doesn't have imagination either. It's when they dance together that we have a mind and the mind has an imagination and the mind imagines, at a certain point, the mind imagines a body. And that's where the imaginary version of the body, that's a story of how the imaginary version of the body arises.

[20:27]

So the body which has arms and legs and fingers and fingernails and hair and all that, we know that body. We can see that body. We perceive that body. And that is an imaginary body. The imaginary body has the, you could say, advantage that we can perceive it. As a matter of fact, it is a perception. It's a perception. But there actually is a body there, but the body that's there is not a perception. It's a physical sensitivity in a reciprocal relationship. And the way that reciprocal relationship works,

[21:31]

that's the other dependent character of the body. That's the mysterious aspect of the body which we don't know. I'm talking about it. And my words may support you to have images of this body, but that body is inconceivable. The other dependent character of that body is inconceivable. The conceivable version of the body is the body most people think is the body. But when the Buddha said, when he said, what's the world, he said, the world is this six foot body. He kind of compromised, I would say, in that expression by half talking about how inconceivable the body is by telling us that the world is our body. But then he put it into the image form of it being six feet. He didn't say, what is the world?

[22:34]

It's this body of infinite extent. He didn't say that. It's a body of inconceivable extent. It's the whole universe. So another teacher said that the entire universe in ten directions is the true human body. I would say the entire universe in ten directions is the other dependent character of the true human body. I wrote this down earlier today, the structure of the inconceivable arising of perception is the reciprocal relation

[23:39]

of the body of sense organs and the non-sensual but interrelated environment. So before I was looking for some way to talk about the sense data and I couldn't think of a word for it. Now I would say maybe to call it non-sensual. The mountains are non-sensual. When I see you, the way light bounces off of you, the way sound waves bounce off of you, the way they emanate from you, allow me to be aware of you and then when I'm aware of you I make up an image of you and then know you. But the way that physical things inform me of you,

[24:48]

inform me of your body, is not sensual. The way light bounces off you, sensual beings, is not sensual. The way gases emanate from you and move around you is not sensual. However, all those things dance with my sense organs. So your body is the way you're in the world where I can know you and my body is in the world in a way that you can know me. But my body is also in the world in a way that I am participating with you and vice versa. But the way my body dances with you is my body doesn't dance with your sensuality,

[25:51]

it dances with your non-sensuous materiality. And that interaction gives rise to fantasies about your body, which I know. But aside from my fantasies about you, I have this mutual relationship with you, where our bodies are dancing together, but the way they're dancing together is I'm dancing with the non-sensual part of you, my sensual part is dancing with the non-sensual part of you, and the sensual part of you is dancing with the non-sensual part of me. Bodies do not sense other sense organs. Bodies do not sense that somebody else is sensitive to light.

[26:58]

For example, my eye cannot sense that your eye is sensitive to light. But when light touches your eye, or your face, and comes to me, I am sensitive to that light, and by being sensitive to that light, I am aware of your face. And then I can make up a story that can help me determine whether or not you can see. But I can't see your capacity to see, I can just see the way light bounces off your face and by the way you move, I sometimes can tell whether you can see or not. I think Walt Whitman said something like,

[28:17]

well somebody said, Walt Whitman said, we don't have bodies, we are our bodies. I don't know if Walt Whitman said that, but somebody said he did, and I thought, well that's close to what I understand, but I wouldn't say exactly, I would agree, we don't have bodies. It's not like I have a body. But I would say a little bit more, I would say, we are our bodies, yes, we are our bodies, in relationship with the whole world. We're not just our bodies, because our bodies are in relationship. If they're not in relationship, if our bodies weren't in relationship with the world, we would have no consciousness. We are our bodies dancing with the world. And I think I'm almost quoting this right,

[29:27]

Whitman says something like, you want to see the soul? And then to shorten something else he said, the soul is your body. Now, in Buddhism we don't usually use the term soul, but I think that, for me, what I think people are talking about often when they say soul, is they're talking about the other dependent character of phenomena. Which is kind of like, in some sense, the holiness or the divinity of our being. It's the way our being is in cooperation with the whole universe, and the way that cooperation, it isn't that the universe animates us and gives us life, it's the way our body is dancing with the universe that is our life.

[30:33]

So you want to see the soul? And he says, the soul is the body. I would say, differently, I would say, you want to see the soul? You cannot. You cannot see the soul. But what is the soul? The soul is not the body. The soul is the body dancing with the world, and you cannot see that. But you can realize it, because that's the way you are. And how do you realize it? Well, you realize it by applying these teachings to what you can see. And you apply these teachings to what you can hear. And you can hear me give you these teachings, and then you can apply these teachings to what you hear me say, and what you see me as. And you can talk to me about it, and you can become free

[31:34]

of being trapped and compulsive about making your body into something you know. This weekend I'm offering a retreat on the middle way of freedom from addiction. And the basic addiction, perhaps the basic addiction, the basic compulsion of living beings, is to make things substantial. To make our life, which is not substantial, substantial. Our life is not substantial. Our life is not imaginary. Except that we're constantly making it so, so we can know it. So we talk about addiction to substances, but it's really addiction to substance. It's really addiction to imagining substance.

[32:39]

And because we imagine substance, we become addicted to other things too. Because we feel stressed when we imagine substance. And so we have, in the realm of imagination, we have an imagination of our body, we have an imagination of our mind. And the imagination of our body and the imagination of our mind are productions of our mind, and our mind is a production of our body. But not just our body. It's not just that our body makes our mind, it's our body in relationship. Our mind is a production of the world. The whole world makes our mind, together with the way the world interacts with our body. That interaction makes the mind,

[33:43]

which dreams of a substantial body and other things. So, fortunately, teachings are coming to us. The world is, yeah, like for example, we hear the people talking in the parking lot, we hear the train whistles, the train horns. Are those horns, would you say, or whistles? Are those train horns? Huh? Whistles. Whistles. We hear them, you hear my voice, you hear my voice, and when you hear my voice, I get words out of my voice sometimes. And by letting those words in your mind, you now have the three characteristics. You have a suggestion that the body you know, that the body I know, that the body that appears to you, is just a conscious construction.

[34:46]

And not only that, but it's an image, it's a conscious construction of an image of your body. And you also have conscious construction of images of how to treat your body, so that you can realize the abandonment of the image of your body as your body. And realize that your body is free, that your body is free of the ideas you have about it. And then realize your actual, you could say, holy body, the soul of your body, the way your body is not by itself, but is always in this inconceivable, other-dependent dance with all beings. The way our body becomes alive and supports consciousness,

[35:59]

the way that that happens is the way of enlightenment. Buddhas didn't make that up. They discovered it and became completely intimate with it. So in this class I wish to guide us to the realization of our soul, which is our other-dependent nature. I read in a Bible in a hotel one time, a Gideon Bible, they have summaries at the beginning, and I looked up the word soul and it said, the soul is the animating principle of something. And I think it was life or the animating principle of the universe, but the animating principle of life.

[37:02]

In this teaching, the animating principle of life is other-dependence. That our life doesn't make itself, and it isn't made by one other thing. There isn't like one maker of life. Life is made by an inconceivable network of conditions. And I'm focusing on this body with this complex, sensitive organism interacting with this infinitely complex universe in this way we call inconceivable mutuality, giving rise to an inconceivable mind in an inconceivable process of origination. And it produces a mind that turns away from the inconceivable wonder of life and makes life into ideas so that it can grasp it, and so on.

[38:03]

And I said that, but the way that actually works, even that is inconceivable. The way all things actually work is ungraspable. Still, we can't get introduced to this process of meditation without converting the teaching that's coming to us into conceivable entities so that we can apply practices to apply these teachings. Well, I have this thought that some of you might be a little surprised by what I said and maybe have some questions about that, or comments which you care to offer. Yes? I have a copy of your recent book.

[39:07]

If I was to look in there for a chapter or section about this, is there a particular part of the book that might be good to study? I think the chapter that talks about the three characteristics would be good. And then the next one is about how these three characteristics are also three different ways of insubstantiality. So these three characteristics are teachings which are given to us so we can prepare ourselves to open to the insubstantiality of our life. So these three characteristics help us enter that and each one of them are slightly different types of insubstantiality. And the next chapter talks about that. Yes?

[40:09]

I don't get what helps with the definition of nonsensical. Why are you bringing that up? Did I say nonsensical? Did you say it? I don't know if I said it. I don't remember saying it. Nonsensical. Nonsensual, yeah. You know, when electromagnetic radiation touches a mountain, it has some consequence. But to a great extent, what it does is, for example, when light touches the mountain, I don't know, physicists can tell me, it kind of bounces off. We sentient beings cannot see light. We can only see it when it bounces off something. But I'm not proposing, and I haven't heard people say that

[41:13]

mountains can see light, but light touches mountains, but they don't respond to it. They don't come alive to it the way a living being does. However, although they don't come alive to it the way a living being does, still, the life of a living being arises from the interaction of that physical energy, that radiation. But not just the radiation. It's when the radiation touches the mountains that we come alive. So the mountains and the radiation together touch our body in a way that gives rise to consciousness. If the radiation just came straight at us, it doesn't give rise to consciousness. The way it does when it bounces off something back to us.

[42:15]

So the mountains are not separate from the birth of the mountains. The existence of the mountains is not separate from our existence. But the way electromagnetic radiation lives is not the way the sensitivity of a living being to that radiation lives. But the consciousness is inseparable from that radiation. Because you cannot have a mind without a body that's been stimulated by the non-sensual physical aspect of the universe. So your sensual abilities do not touch my sensual abilities. Your ability to see light doesn't touch my ability to see light.

[43:23]

Light bouncing off your eye into my eye, that gives rise to my life. But bouncing off your eye is the same as bouncing off your nose. It's not your eye that wakes up my eye. It's the energy touching you and coming to me. And that energy is different than my sensual response. But you cannot say that life is just the body responding because there's no body responding aside from that other type of physicality touching it. So the body is actually the whole universe. Really. But it's not just the whole universe in the sense of this whole universe is just sitting there. It's the whole universe in this dynamic dance. That's the body. And that body is a conscious body.

[44:26]

And that body makes up stories about the universe which are conceivable. However, most of the conceivable stories are being refuted now by modern physics. They're more and more admitting that the way the universe actually is, it isn't just sitting there dead, it's jumping around all the time in this very dynamic reciprocal way, which is inconceivable. Yes? So there's a saying that the eyes are the windows to the soul? The eyes are windows to the soul, yes. I was wondering, so, do you agree with that? Would it be because if the eyes are the most permeable to less substantial,

[45:31]

I would say fine, the eyes are windows to the soul, but I also would say the ears are windows to the soul. Music, what's that about? Say again, you look at somebody's ear. Well, each one is different, but when you look at somebody's eyes you can actually see their brain. When you look into somebody's eyes, you're actually looking through their optic nerve into the brain.

[46:33]

You can see, you know, when the doctors, they have special equipment to look more, they have lights and stuff, but they look into your eye and they look into your optic nerve, which goes right back into your brain. So the eye examinations can sometimes disclose other brain diseases. And also, the way we're built, human beings are built, is that when we're growing up and we look at our caregivers, which are sometimes our mothers, we look at their eyes and when we smile at them, or not even we smile at them, but we look at their eyes sometimes and we see in their eyes that they think we're pretty neat. And when we see that they think we're pretty neat, our eyes change. I think one of the things that happens is our eyes dilate.

[47:39]

But it often goes a dilation with a little smile or a big smile. And when the caregiver sees that dilation, when their eye sees that change in the eye and that smile, the caregiver's eyes light up a little bit more and the caregiver gets a little bit more happy. And the baby, looking at the caregiver getting more happy and being even more interested than she was before, the baby gets more excited. And then the caregiver gets more excited, and then the baby gets more excited, and then the caregiver gets more excited, and so on. And they get to a place which is described as perhaps the highest level of neural excitement that we experience in life. And that level of neural excitation seems to be necessary in order to initiate other brain developments. So the sad thing is children who grow up without having somebody giving their kind of attention, they have little gaps in their development

[48:40]

because they don't have that intensity to turn on these processes. So that particular eye-to-eye thing is very important in the development of our brain, and also you can see the brain through the eye. The mother can see the baby's brain, and the baby can see the mother's brain. The baby can tell that the mother thinks you are the neatest thing in the world and you're just like me. That thing is very important. But also the ear, and the nose, and the tongue, the basic sense, the most primitive sense is a sense of touch. The other senses are modifications of touch. So the eyes are a modification of touch, basically an enfolding of the surface of the skin. The sense organ goes inside,

[49:42]

the ear, the sense organ goes inside, the nose, the sense organ goes, the skin goes inside, the skin goes inside, the skin goes inside, the skin makes a cavity and develops special things for different stuff, for liquids, for gases, for mechanical waves, and for electromagnetic radiation. But the skin, before you have those, you have the skin, which is sensitive to all that stuff, but not in such a specialized way. The skin is sensitive to electromagnetic radiation, it gets tan, it gets warm, it gets cold, it's sensitive to mechanical waves, it hurts when they get really strong. They not just hurt your ear, which is specially suited for them, but your skin can hurt too. From mechanical waves. Your nose, all your organs, but your skin is sensitive to gases, liquids,

[50:46]

mechanical waves, and electromagnetic radiation, and of course what we usually call tactile, pressure and temperature. So early organisms are just a skin, right? A cell membrane. And then you get development, the skin gets developed into these cavities, which are specially suited for these different types of physical data, bouncing off the rest of the world, coming out of people's throats. So all these organs are windows to the soul, they're windows to the dependent co-arising of our life, because our life arises through all of these, and each in a spectacular, in a spectacularly different way, which we can see,

[51:49]

but also in an inconceivably different way. They're all doors to the soul, they're all doors to how the world's interacting with those doors. The way the world interacts with those doors is our life. It isn't exactly that our life comes from that, the way that dance is our life. But again, it's inconceivable, but don't worry, we're not stuck in that inconceivability, because the way things interact with these doors gives rise to a mind that can dream up stories about it and make it all conceivable. Non-stop. Except when brain damage or special yogic states where you turn down the imagination for a while.

[52:53]

But I'm not talking about turning it down, I'm talking about study the imagination, study these teachings, and we are now using our imagination to receive these teachings and think about them. Anything else about this? Yes. I was just thinking about the eyes, and what you were saying about, I think, and then your thing about the children. I think there's maybe something about, I'll put it in terms of imagination, that by contact we somehow imagine the other person's attention. I think animals do this too, it's kind of a special way of communicating. Supposedly wolves, you know, and it's dawn, it's completely, they're pausing the other thing, and they'll stare in their eyes at me, or gorillas, you know, it's like they're staring. So, I don't know what it is, but maybe, you know,

[53:54]

kind of when we're talking about animal development, maybe there's a special way that, I was thinking that we, you know, we know other people are paying attention, that they're in this community, we know there's something there, or they're speaking to us, but there's something about eye-to-eye contact that we kind of really imagine someone else is there or something. Mm-hmm. Well, what do you call it, there is some racist, there is some, what do you call it, what's the word, organ racism, there's some organ racism going on, even in the Buddhist tradition, that they sometimes do, they say sometimes, well, that the eye is the sense organ par excellence. I've seen that in some Buddhist texts, sort of favoring the eye.

[54:55]

The category of experience which includes all material interactions, both the subtle material, which is the organs, and the gross material, which is the field that the organ dances with, the sounds and so on, that whole thing is called rupa, which is the word for sights. So rupa, which is the word for sights, is applied to all, it's the name of the category which includes sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touch, and tangibles. So there is some kind of like, I'm sorry to say, in a way, favoring of light and colors among all the other things. But I think that's kind of a human tendency to think that seeing is a big deal.

[56:04]

And we stand upright, it has a lot to do with seeing, and we don't hear better standing upright necessarily, right? But we stand upright so we can see. You might hear better, but you probably don't smell better. The champion smellers keep their nose down near the ground. To smell stuff? Not to look? Well, yes? No. One's life is not totally imaginary. One can say that, I shouldn't say you can't say it, I would just say this teaching is saying your life is not totally imaginary,

[57:08]

your life just has an imaginary nature, along with the way it really is, and the way it really is, is it's free of your imagination. The imaginary side is the side that causes the trouble, if we believe it. So you could say the suffering primarily comes from believing the imaginary as being something more than imaginary. But our life is actually always free. You don't have to make up freedom. It's always like sitting there, right? Freedom is always right there in our life. But the imaginary side, we're addicted to the imaginary side. We're not addicted to the freedom side. We're not addicted to the freedom from our imagination. It's right there all the time, but we can't see it because we're so much into the knowable, which is the imaginary. Yes?

[58:12]

Can one what? Use? Yes, that's what this class is. This class is to use the imaginary to become free of the imaginary. That's what this class is about. Hm? Yes. Yes. That's what this class is about. I'm talking to you and you're imagining what I'm saying. And you can use what you imagine I'm saying to liberate yourself from your imagination. And all your problems occur within imagination. Your problems are not just imaginary though. Even your problems are free. But if you don't give up your addiction

[59:13]

to your imagination of your problems, you won't be able to open to the freedom of your problems. So the problems that come from our addiction to making things knowable, which means that we believe our imagination because our imagination is what makes things knowable, that addiction encloses us in an imaginary world that we believe, and that's where all our problems are. The only place we have any stress. And we're addicted to that, but we're not addicted to the absence of our imagination in the way we really are. Even though it's right there, just equally there. We keep looking. We ignore it. We are ignorant of it. We turn away from it towards where we think the goodies are. But actually, it's not that there aren't goodies there, it's just that being addicted to those goodies makes it hard for us to see freedom. And freedom is the freedom of our life

[60:16]

from the way we make it knowable. So now we're receiving material that we imagine and we can use our imagination of this material and our imagination of everything else in our life. That is the way we become free of imagination, is by using imagination. That will be the way. There's no beginning to this process. Because beginnings, again, are just fantasies, are just thought constructions. But living beings that we have now seem to arise because in the past they have had difficulty facing the inconceivable. And you could say one of the things

[61:17]

that they might be uncomfortable with the inconceivable is because maybe they're afraid of it. The freedom is also inconceivable. But the freedom is in some sense, in a way the freedom, I should say not so much the freedom, the freedom comes from seeing the absence of the imaginary in the inconceivable. So we can be afraid of freedom, we can be afraid of the absence of our fantasies, and we can be afraid of the marvelous, inconceivable nature of our life. We can be afraid of all that. And I think, yeah, I can imagine, and it seems like other people can imagine that people can be afraid of all of those things. And people could even be afraid of making things substantial

[62:21]

once they find out that that's the troublemaker. So we can be afraid of almost everything. But most sentient beings are not real comfortable living in a state of inconceivability. However, when you're concentrated you actually open to a situation where you open to letting your conceiving capacities calm down a while, and you find out that it's not so bad, actually it's quite comfortable to turn it down for a while. And then after you feel that, then you feel more comfortable opening up to the teachings which tell you that that's the way things are all the time, not just when you're concentrated. You said, why would we? But again, we don't do this on our own.

[63:21]

This thing happens with bodies relating to the world. Bodies relating to the world have given rise to consciousness. And then the consciousness, and you might say, why did consciousness come with imagination? And for us, you know, for us humans, science, philosophy, music, technology, and technology means cooking, sewing, weaving, house building, all that stuff requires imagination. So living beings who have imagination seem to thrive. And non-humans who have imagination also seem to thrive, and seem to have imagination.

[64:22]

So once you have imagination, basically you're in this game of suffering. So for the sake of biological flourishing, I would say the powers of imagination have arisen. That would be a story I would tell. And then once the imagination developed to a level of linguistic powers, it became possible to become even more aware of the problem. And become more aware of ways to relate to the problem that would be skillful. And the science that's facilitated by the imagination could also be applied to the problems that imagination engenders. So part of the theory here is that when some beings learn to use their imagination,

[65:28]

I'm saying that as a biological evolutionary thing, imagination has arisen because it was a service to biology. Many biologists look at simpler forms of life, and they say if you look at the way that functions, you can see that eventually the origins of the idea of self are in simple animals and plants. Simple organisms seem to be able to tell. I've heard that the cells in the thinnest roots of redwoods can tell the difference between those very hair-like fine roots from their one tree. They can distinguish it from their own tree and other trees.

[66:30]

That when they touch the roots that are coming from the same basic trunk, they can tell that that's from the same trunk. And when they touch from the root of another redwood tree, they can tell. And one of the definitions in the dictionary for self is the way a cell can tell what belongs inside of itself and what's from outside. That's one of the definitions. So this idea of discrimination and imagination seems to be very easily drawn from life. So the story would be also, though, that once life started to develop, it realized that there's some stress in this whole process. And some beings studied this and used their imagination to become free of their imagination by doing certain practices, which we call bodhisattva practices.

[67:32]

They applied these practices to the imagination process. Shukrachi, would you get Barry some water? And you can just cough away until you get it. Don't worry, we're okay with your coughing. No, here, he can have mine. Do you want to drink mine? It's quite handy. So this is where imagination comes in handy. But it also has drawbacks, because we sometimes believe our imagination as something more than that. We sometimes think our imagination is our actual life. So again, some people learned how to use their imagination to become free of their imagination, and they became free, and then they started sending messages, they're sending word back to us from freedom about how to become free. And one of the messages back from the beings who have become free is,

[68:36]

all phenomena, the body has three characteristics. This teaching is given to you to liberate you from the way you make your inconceivable life conceivable. Yes, Helen. I'm sort of following this to the point of the imagination, but I'm thinking also that just pure imagination can cause sensation. You know, when you have a thought, it seems like that in itself can cause a sensation. That's, you know, like anxiety. Did you hear what she said? She said, like anxiety. Yeah, like anxiety. That's where anxiety comes from. It comes from pure imagination. But that's a sensation, right? It's 9.15.

[69:46]

So next time, if you remind me, we'll talk about what sensation is. Sensation usually comes in positive, negative, and neutral. None of those are anxiety. And you can have anxiety about all three. So we can talk about that next time. When you have... Yeah, I'm not so much of an anxiety person. I'm more of an emotion person. And then, you know, a sensation seems to be able to be initiated by your imagination. A sensation is initiated by your imagination. Like a feeling, like an emotion, I guess. All afflictive emotions are initiated by your imagination. But that is a sensation. I mean, that's how you express emotion. Well, I think we have to... This is a kind of... Maybe to agree on terms. We can work on that next week. Thank you very much.

[70:51]

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