But this teaching prevents murders. This teaching makes us disenchanted about things and therefore we're not excessively involved with them. We don't care too much or too little about anybody. In other words, with this teaching there's nobody. If you let this teaching sink into you, there's nobody you don't care about. And there's nobody that you care about way, way, way more than anybody else. The more it sinks in, the more people become similar. Because they're all impermanent, unstable, unworthy of confidence. But that doesn't mean you don't love them. It just means you don't try to we call it, corral some and exile others.

[01:03]

Or if you feel a tendency, you just notice that the teaching hasn't really totally sunk into you all the way. Just to support your saying. It's like you don't attach to their behaviors or their reactions like you were saying for your grandson. You don't react if he shuts the door in your face. But you have, there is a sense of humor at times, I think. Like you can see the variability of the personality. Yeah, he thinks it's funny. But don't you? Or do you get hurt? Well, I get hurt, but I think, you know, I wouldn't be telling the story if I didn't get hurt. So it hurts, but I, and then if I think, okay, you just lost your grandfather, then I get the sense, then I usually get the joke then. But some grandfathers stopped going to visit their grandchildren. They can't see the infantile nature of them.

[02:08]

They take it personally. They can't see the infantile nature of their reaction, too. So then the grandfather becomes an infant. And this man slams the door back. And the grandfather says, okay, I'm not going to visit you anymore. But this teaching, you won't abandon your grandchildren for slamming the door in your face. You can play with it. You can say, you know, okay, I'm going away. Bye-bye. You know? And fortunately, the mother says, let him in, let him in. Yes? Could you say something about the role, if any, of faith in this? Faith? Faith. Well, I like to start with faith in the place I started this morning.

[03:09]

Namely, what is it that you think and feel is the most important thing or the fundamental thing of your life? Like, if you're going to die today, What is the most important thing to you for the next few hours? So I don't know what it'd be. You might want to call your husband and tell him that you love him and how wonderful you think he is. But I think that it's not so much what you want to do today But how do you want to be today? And the way you'd want to be probably is you'd like to really be loving to at least one person. And probably you'd like to be loving to more than one.

[04:12]

Probably you'd like to be loving to a lot of people. Maybe. I don't know. That's part of what I'm asking you to check out. if you had only a few minutes left or a few hours left, what's the way that you most would like to be, the way you'd like to be? And that way which you discover, if you could discover it fairly deeply, that would really be your faith. In other words, that would be what you think would be the most appropriate way for your life to be. That would be your faith. Now, if your faith was that you'd like to be, that what you'd like to be is that you'd like to actually care for all beings, really, and actually be happy to give your life for all beings, that you'd like to be able to be happy giving your life for anybody. You'd like to be able to meet any person and not be afraid of them.

[05:16]

Or even if you'd like to be such that even if you were afraid of them, you could get over it and laugh it off. Let's say this is things that you looked inside yourself and you found in yourself. How about that? That you'd like to be able to really be fully alive with each person you meet. This is something you might find if you ask yourself those questions. In a sense, that's your faith. And having that kind of faith means that you kind of have faith in Buddha. Because what we mean by Buddha is being like that. Somebody else would say, well, that's what I mean by Christ. Because, you know, Jesus was kind of like that too. Didn't Jesus wash people's feet? He said Jesus wasn't afraid of dirty feet on other people, you know. He wasn't queasy about people, right? He had this love thing down, apparently.

[06:22]

He was happy to see people generally, wasn't he? He sometimes got exercised about them, but basically he was up for meeting people, is my impression about the guy. He wasn't afraid of people, was he? I never heard a story of Jesus being afraid of people. And Buddha wasn't afraid of people either. In Buddha... Okay, so if you want to be fearless and be able to meet everybody you meet wholeheartedly, that's kind of your faith, I would say. The next level of faith is, was there anything in which, the next level of faith might be that I think, another aspect that I, another thing I think would be really good is if I could be honest. And part of my honesty, I have just realized, and part of my honesty is to say, I haven't yet realized what I really would like to be. In other words, I'm being honest right now when I said that, but I'm still a little afraid of people.

[07:23]

There's a few people I'm afraid of. Or there's some people who, when they're acting a certain way, I'm afraid of them. Like that guy, I'm not generally afraid of. But when he gets drunk, I get afraid of him. So I must confess, I'm not yet the place I would like to be, okay? But you might then, the next part of faith would be, what practices, what disciplines would promote me becoming the person I would most like to be? So those things then, they're part of your faith too, but it's kind of experimental, I would say. I have a kind of experimental attitude towards Buddhism. I heard stories about Buddhas and disciples of Buddha, and the way they were was the way I want to be. That's my faith. Then I heard about ways that they trained, that they shared. So I thought, well, maybe if I did the training that they did, I would become like them, because they did that training so they could become like the big king.

[08:25]

So that's another aspect of faith is what practices, what exercise programs do you think might be conducive to what you most want to be in this life? You're not so sure, actually. You know you want to love people. You know you don't want to be afraid. You know you don't want to hurt people. You know you want to cure disease. You know you want to be able to be intimate with everybody and be kind to everybody. You know that, but you're not sure exactly what will promote that. So you say, well, various religions say, well, this will promote it, this will promote it. You might think, well, that one seems like it might promote it, so I'll try it. So you try it for a while and see if it does. And for me, I saw what I wanted in life. Partly I got the idea from other people. Sometimes I didn't even know what I wanted to be until I saw somebody do it. And I saw them do it and I said, I'd like to do that.

[09:30]

That'd look cool. A human can do that. I want to do that. Then I found out the training that everybody that did these cool things had a training program that they used to be part of. It wasn't a matter that people got to be this way totally by a gift. They somehow had the... It was a gift and yet they somehow were also given the opportunity to train, to learn, to go to school. They all had teachers. Buddha had teachers. Not in... The Shakyamuni Buddha didn't have a teacher in his life as the Buddha, but he told us that he had Buddhists who taught him in the past. Did you know that? So people say, well, why do you need a teacher? Buddha didn't have a teacher. Well, Buddha didn't have a teacher when he lived in India 2,500 years ago, but that Buddha told us that he had lived previous lives and he mentioned the names of his teachers in previous lives. He had previous teachers.

[10:31]

Once you have trained with an actual Buddha and that Buddha has predicted you, then you can be reborn and not have a Buddha around. But if you haven't had that experience yet, you need a teacher. So anyway, they had teachers. So I thought, well, I should get a teacher then. And I'll do the meditation program. And I would say that after trying the discipline for some years, I am closer to being the way I want to be than I was then. Now, we don't have a control group of another guy named Reb who didn't practice Zen who might be more developed than me. But I have a suspicion that the guy who I was at that time, if he hadn't been training the way I had been training, or some other way that's even better than the way I had been training, but if he didn't enter a training program, I think he would just be kind of like the other people at his high school reunion. Probably.

[11:39]

Probably be. Well, look, not very well developed. But maybe I'd be better off. I don't know. But anyway, I'm pretty happy with the program so far. But you should check out for yourself. First of all, what is it that's most important in the little bit of time you have left with this body? What do you want to accomplish and what practices would help that? And then try them and see if they do. And if they don't, check out with somebody who teaches those practices to see if you're doing them right. Because sometimes you think you're doing them, but you're doing them wrong. The person is telling you, it's not that way, it's this way. You say, oh, okay. And you try to say, oh, it works this way. Like sometimes people think practicing the precepts should be done self-righteous. But it backfires when you do them that way. The teacher could say, no, no, those precepts are fine. It's just that they're not your idea of what they are. Your idea is just your idea. You need to practice them by letting go of your idea of them.

[12:42]

And you try not to say, hey, they really work better this way. And then your friends say, yeah, they really do work better this way. Please keep it up. You know, like some people go to a retreat. And when they come home, their family says, That was a waste of time. You're worse than when you left. But some people come home and they're kinder and more patient and more grateful to their family. And they say, you should do more retreats. When you do the practice, other people like it. Generally. Except for like gangsters and stuff. You know, if you're, if most of your friends are drug addicts and you come back from retreat and you don't want to take drugs anymore, they say, well, that was really bad. Don't go to retreats anymore because now you won't take drugs with us. And then, you know, you may say, well, I'll take drugs with you if you'll stop. So,

[13:45]

That's something about faith. Okay? It's kind of the basis. You have to sort of say, what is most important? And then does Buddhist practice augment that or promote that or support that? If it doesn't, what does? And so when people come to me, I ask them, what is it? And if they tell me, and then I say what practice would facilitate that, And it's something other than Buddhism. I said, well, you should go do that then, because that's what will promote what you want. They may be back later to practice Buddhism, but temporarily, maybe something else they should do than formal practice. The way you're describing faith, it's not really faith, but it's a much more experimental kind of attitude. Faith is, at least my conception of faith, is belief that something will happen even though you don't have the experience of it happening. Yeah, it's kind of like that, though. It's belief that something might happen.

[14:54]

In other words, you want to be happy and kind, then you hear about this practice of being happy and kind, and you think, well, maybe that practice would promote this. So there is a certain element of that, but to be sure about it is too much. And the Buddha said, here's a teaching, about how to be happy, but don't practice it just because I said so. Check it out for yourself. See if it works. If it doesn't, come back and tell me about it. Maybe I'll change the teaching. Maybe I got it wrong. But usually when people came back and told him about the teaching that wasn't working, he usually said, no, that's not the right way to do it. Try it this way. And then they would try it. And usually, of course, maybe people forgot about the example of where Buddha didn't succeed. But there are some examples where people heard the teaching incorrectly, and he couldn't turn them around. There's a few examples of that.

[15:57]

But usually when they practiced it the way he taught them, it worked. In other words, work meant it worked for them being free, fearless, kind, happy, helpful beings. That's usually the story. But, you know, oftentimes it's not that surprising, you know, what it was that was conducive to these results. It's not necessarily that surprising. The hard part is to do the practice. But, again, it's also sometimes hard to find out what it is that you most want. That sometimes is hard, too. Sometimes it takes people months of meditating for the answer to come up. And if you don't ask the question, well, years and years can go by and not know the answer to it. Once that answer's there, then what's the practice? Once that's clear, then it starts to work, which is not necessarily easy. But at least you know what the job is.

[17:03]

So then it starts the hard thing of arranging your life so you can make the effort that seems probably conducive to what you want. And it's experimental, yeah. But based on some reasoning and some deep feeling, I mean, based on the deepest feeling that you're capable of, the most intimate, true thing for you about life that you know so far, what to make that come true, to be realized. That's the practice. For you. Is that enough for now? Yes? OK. So I would suggest for now, just for the rest of the day, I would suggest you continue to do the tranquility meditation.

[18:12]

And maybe after tomorrow's talk, if you want to start switching to the insight, that might be possible. I want to give you more instruction before you try to do the insight meditation. Unless you're already doing it anyway. Okay? And this is the best penetrating and perfect dharma. is rarely met with, even in a hundred thousand million kaphas. Having it to see and listen to, to remember and accept, I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Yesterday afternoon, when I started to talk to you about wisdom meditations, I thought some of you

[19:35]

later I thought about what some of you said, and it seemed that you were noting that, let's see, one person said, I think Matt said, that if you are listening to the teachings about the nature of phenomena and they make you less aware less sure about what's real or something like that, that it might make it harder for you to practice precepts. Do you say something like that? And Tim also talked about how these wisdom teachings as he thought about them, they made things seem less real. And some other people spoke about some kind of fear that might arise as your sense of the reality of yourself starts to change, as your sense of how yourself exists

[20:54]

starts to shift, that may be difficult to adjust to. And then if you're having trouble, if your sense of the way you exist is shifting in that changeable situation, it may be difficult to continue to take care of some other things that you're used to taking care of. on the basis of your old idea of yourself, which you're losing. And in particular, you might be harder to take care of certain kinds of attention to ethical considerations. Another Another way to put it is that sometimes if your sense of the reality of certain things starts to be eroded or shifting, you can sometimes shift into saying, well, I guess nothing matters then.

[21:57]

Since what I used to think was real may not be really so, then I guess what I thought mattered doesn't matter too. One could jump around to that kind of conclusion. And so again, I say again that the wisdom and enlightenment, especially very complete wisdom and enlightenment which go with complete freedom, must be based on complete commitment to ethical discipline. And if you start practicing wisdom and you start to feel like your ethical practice is getting weaker or dislocated, undermined in some way, that it may be that you need to take a rest on the wisdom practices until you can get your footing again in ethical practice.

[23:15]

It's also the case the other way around, that the authentic understanding of ethical practice is based on wisdom. But you can practice ethics, just to a great extent, you can practice ethics without much wisdom. But you really can't practice wisdom very well without ethics. And I said without ethics, but I actually mean more ethical commitment, because some people are fairly ethical but don't have ethical commitment.

[25:02]

They just happen to be fairly ethical at a particular point in their life. Ethical commitment or moral commitment is more important than actually the practice of morality and ethics. Of course, the practice of ethics is important, but the commitment is more important than which I think is kind of a surprising idea to some people. So, for example, today you may be honest. You may tell the truth all day long and not tell any lies, which is good. It's good, but if you tell the truth without commitment,

[26:09]

then tomorrow you may lie. However, if you lie tomorrow, although it's not good, you didn't make a commitment to tell the truth, so you're not violating anything, you're just lying. But if you make a moral commitment to tell the truth, and today you tell the truth, then you're fulfilling your commitment. And tomorrow if you don't tell the truth, you're not fulfilling your commitment. So today you'll be happy for two reasons. If today you tell the truth, you'll be happy because you're telling the truth, but you'll be happy because you're fulfilling your commitment. Telling the truth is good, but to fulfill your commitment to tell the truth is... I would say far better, far more happy. And then tomorrow, if you don't tell the truth and you haven't made a commitment, it may bother you a little, but not necessarily.

[27:19]

But if you make a commitment to tell the truth and tomorrow you don't tell the truth, you will be unhappy. And you should be unhappy because you're not doing what you said you wanted to do and what you committed to do. So actually, the moral commitment is more important than actually moral behavior. However, the moral behavior is important, it's just not as important, which is similar to, you know, Being Buddha is pretty important, but in a way it's not as important as wanting to be Buddha. Because in fact, you already are Buddha, but I don't know if you all want to be.

[28:23]

You actually are already free, but I don't know if you want to be. And if today you're free, That's nice, isn't it? But if you want to be free, and today you're free, it's even nicer. And then tomorrow, you're not free, and you don't really care about whether you're free or not. It doesn't matter much. So the commitment is somehow very important. And so we have to have this moral commitment in order to be free, in order to practice wisdom. So if you're practicing wisdom and your sense of the world starts to shift, and you notice that you're not living up to your moral commitments, that commitment will remind you to get back to what you're committed to.

[29:46]

So somehow you have to find a way to continue to practice ethics. You're driven to continue to practice ethics even though you're developing understandings of the nature of things would change your whole perspective on ethics. The terminology of tranquility and insight are not usually seen explicitly in Zen teachings either in China, Japan, or America.

[32:19]

However, I I am proposing to you, I propose to you that the actual function of tranquility and insight are part of traditional Zen practice. And traditional Zen practice, again, as I think I mentioned to you yesterday, It's hard to say what traditional Zen practice is because different Zen teachers teach differently. So it's really that there's many traditional Zen practices and many traditions of Zen practice. And they have some commonalities you can find, but in a sense, each person that you meet who is in a Zen tradition is in a particular lineage

[33:24]

of one teacher to one student to a next student to a next student to a next student, if they're in lineage. So what I'm telling you is, I'm telling you that that's the way I see all these different lineages, but I'm just one lineage telling you his view of a bunch of other lineages, namely that they're all a little bit different. And my understanding is that many of those lineages understand that there's other lineages. And quite commonly among these lineages is the understanding that each lineage is different. And that part of what this is about is getting a particular person's understanding of their lineage. And it's not somebody else's understanding. There's something about that that's fairly common among Zen lineages, that they're aware that you're really learning a particular person's understanding.

[34:31]

Not even that you're learning a particular person's understanding, but you're learning from a particular person. You're dealing with their understanding. You may not get their understanding, but you're dealing with one particular person. So when people say, what does Zen say, or what does Buddhism say, they sometimes say that to me. And, you know, I sometimes think, well, I'll just start talking. But then I also want to say, well, I can't tell you what Buddhism says or what Zen says. I can hardly tell you what I say. But I can tell you about what I say. But I'm not really telling you what Buddhism says or what Zen says. I'm just telling you In a way, hopefully actually, I'm just telling you my current understanding. I'm not even telling you what I used to think or what I used to understand, because that's gone. This is an implication of teachings about the nature of phenomena.

[35:42]

So the understanding of any particular teaching in the Buddhist tradition and the understanding of any particular teaching in the Buddhist tradition, and there's many, many teachings, all those understandings that have ever existed are gone. All the ways people have understood Buddhism in the past are gone. They're not around anymore. All the ways you understood in the past anything about Buddhism or Zen, they're gone. The understandings of how to practice the Buddha's teaching that exist today have never existed before. The way you understand how to practice today is today's understanding.

[36:46]

It'll be gone later today. Your understanding is a phenomenon, something that you're living with right now, and it's changing right now. Maybe you can even sense that it's changed in the last few minutes. I don't know. If you can sense that. One time I was talking about insight practice, and a person in the audience said to me that Zen is not analysis, and that Zen meditation doesn't involve analysis.

[38:47]

And when he said that, I thought that, yeah, I think that is commonly thought that it doesn't involve analysis, but actually I think it does involve analysis. But again, the way it's taught is that it's not easy to notice that. Many of you may have heard a presentation of Zen meditation as sometimes the student is encouraged to sit upright and follow the breathing or count the breathing.

[39:57]

And then sometimes after they're able to do that quite well, or rather after they become calm from doing that kind of exercise, then they're sometimes given koans to work on. And after they practice koans, they're sometimes given what's called just sitting. And just sitting is sometimes pointed to, at least in Soto Zen, as the essential practice. But I would propose to you that that particular scenario is a scenario where you're first being told to practice tranquility, and then when you're being told to practice the koans, you're being taught actually to practice using your thinking to examine the thinking process and understand it. And then once you have insight, you practice just sitting.

[41:02]

In other words, this practice of just sitting actually depends on understanding the nature of phenomena. And that's a very quick little presentation, but I just wanted to say that to you who are familiar with the term just sitting. Because it sounds like just sitting there would be no, you know, you just sit, you don't have to think. You don't have to, just you can give up your thinking, which is, which is true that you can give up your thinking, but you can give up your thinking because you have previously trained your thinking. So just sitting actually is based on already having realized quite a bit of insight. We have records, you know, written records of teachings from hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years ago in this tradition.

[44:03]

And so in some of these records, some of these texts, the way that they present the practice is first to practice ethics. First, discipline yourself in relationship to moral precepts. Then after you get pretty skillful at moral, personal moral discipline, then start practicing tranquility. And then after you get quite good at practicing tranquility, then start practicing insight. And then when they introduce insight in these texts, the way they usually start introducing insight is with what we call mindfulness practice.

[45:19]

And in mindfulness practice it's interesting the way they often do it is because actually the way that they train, they offer to train the mind in tranquility is actually by meditating or being mindful of the breathing process. So mindfulness of the breathing process If you do it, if you're involved in mindfulness of the breathing, and you're mindful of the breathing in the way I was talking about yesterday, namely you let go of your thinking in relationship to your breathing, you give up your discursive thought in relationship to the breathing, the giving up of discursive thought comes to fruit as tranquility. But again, I stress that it's the giving up of discursive thought in relationship to whatever you're experiencing that actually is what is calming.

[46:45]

But rather than mention that, which is a kind of a sophisticated presentation, people just say, be mindful of your breathing. And then as the person is mindful of her breathing, the teacher might help them to relax with their mindfulness of the breathing, without mentioning that it's the relaxing with the mindfulness of the breathing that actually is what calms you. And then when they start to introduce mindfulness practice under the insight, sometimes you use the same sort of focus as you did when you were developing tranquility, namely the breathing. So when they move into mindfulness practice in these texts, they sometimes present mindfulness under four headings. Mindfulness of body, mindfulness of feelings, mindfulness of consciousness, and mindfulness of dharma.

[47:51]

And dharma there means both phenomena, but also teaching about the nature of phenomena. At the beginning, though, of the Foundations of Mindfulness practice, you're meditating on the body, and the first meditation on body is on body posture. And it says, you know, I'll just say it's on body posture. And the second one is on breathing. So you move from sitting upright, being aware of your breathing and relaxing with awareness of your posture and breathing, which has come to fruit as tranquility, then you move into being mindful of the same thing, but now you're just practicing mindfulness of it, however you're calm.

[48:54]

You're in a calm state, being mindful of your posture and breathing. But now it's an insight practice. The same kind of topic is being noticed, but it shifts from tranquility to insight. What's the difference? The difference is that when you're aware of your posture or aware of your breathing and you're giving up letting go of your thinking about your posture and letting go of your thinking about your breathing, that way of being with your posture and breathing comes to fruit as tranquility. But when you practice being aware of your posture and breathing as a mindfulness practice, as a wisdom practice, you're actually not giving up your thinking about the posture and the breathing.

[50:13]

You're actually now thinking about the posture and breathing. You're actually going to analyze the posture and the breathing. That's the difference. Same topic, same phenomena, posture and breathing. And it could be other phenomena too. It could be your thinking. You could be looking at your thinking. However, most... Actually, I'll just make it simple. You could be thinking of anything. Keep you thinking of posture, breathing, the sound of children's voice, the sound of a fan, the color of a rug, somebody's face, pain in your knees, pain in your back, pleasure in your knees. You ever heard of that? Pleasure in your back? You could be meditating on anything. In other words, you could be aware of anything.

[51:17]

And giving up your thinking about anything comes to fruit as tranquility. Then, if those things that you're talking about are like conceptual versions of your body, like a body that has arms and legs is actually a conceptual version of your body, If you're meditating on that kind of a body, or if you've been aware of such a body and relaxing with such a body and become calm with such a body, now you can become mindful of that body under this heading of mindfulness of body. But now you're going to actually start by just being aware of what position your body's in, be aware of your breath, and be aware of what kind of breath you've got. But you're actually going to think about it now. You're going to think about and be aware of whether it's, for example, an inhale or exhale.

[52:39]

Now, before you were aware of inhales and exhales, but you weren't particularly noting that it was an inhale or an exhale. But you were, you actually, when you were inhaling, maybe you were dealing with the inhaling, meeting the inhaling, but giving up your thoughts about it. When you were exhaling, you were meeting that exhale, but giving up your thoughts about it. When you were sitting up straight, you were dealing with that upright posture, but giving up your thoughts about it. When you were standing up, you were meeting that, you were aware of that phenomenon called standing up, but you're giving up your thoughts of it. and that becomes calm. Now you're going to actually note that you're standing up or you're sitting down. You're going to note that. You're going to be aware of that. You're going to think about that. Also, you're going to be thinking in the sense that you are going to be being mindful and remembering a teaching which says, think about what posture you're in.

[53:44]

You're going to be thinking about a teaching which says, be aware of whether you're inhaling or exhaling. You're going to be thinking about a teaching about how to be aware. The other case, you're going to be thinking about a teaching about how to let go of your thinking. and you're actually going to be letting go of your thinking. In this case, you're going to be using your thinking. But you're working with the same stuff, namely, your experience. In both cases, you're working with your experience. But in one case, you're working with your experience and relaxing with it. The other case, you're working with your experience and tensing up with it. I'm just kidding. But you're kind of tensing up, a little bit. It's a little bit like tensing up, but it's not really tensing up. And it works best if you're relaxed. That's why they often teach the relaxation and tranquility first is because when you start meditating in an insightful way or the insight-generating way with what's happening, it's good if you're already relaxed and calm to some extent because then you're going to learn

[55:02]

this wisdom practice better if you're relaxed. Now just to sort of leap into the practice, the The first foundation of mindfulness is about the body, the second is about feelings, the third is about consciousness, and the fourth is about so-called dharma. And this dharma teaching involves, for one thing it involves an analysis of whatever kind of experience you're having. It's teachings which provide you analytical presentations of your experience. And it also includes teachings like the Four Noble Truths. These are wisdom teachings. They're teachings which help you see the nature of reality, the nature of phenomena, the real nature of phenomena.

[56:08]

So when the Buddha first started teaching, the first teaching the Buddha gave was the Buddha said, ìI found a middle way.î And the middle way he spoke of was a middle way between addiction to sensory indulgence, sensual indulgence. That was one addiction he mentioned. And the other addiction he mentioned was addiction to self-mortification. And he said, I found avoiding these two extremes, I found a middle way. And in other occasions he talks about finding a middle way between existence and nonexistence.

[57:20]

So he's basically teaching us a way to be that avoids extremes, ways of being, and then he also talks about a way of seeing which avoids extreme ways of seeing or understanding. And the middle way of seeing the way things are is that things are dependent co-arisings. Things arise in dependence on things other than themselves. In a sense, what's the middle way? The middle way is, first of all, dependent co-arising. That's the way he taught.

[58:31]

And he also taught the Four Noble Truths, and the first Noble Truth is the truth of suffering. And oftentimes the truth of suffering, people say the truth of suffering the way they say it is, that the first truth is that there is suffering. But there is, you see, this is a wisdom teaching. And I'm saying to you, the first noble truth is not that there is suffering. The first noble truth is the truth of suffering. The truth of suffering is not the same as the truth that there is suffering. The truth of suffering is the truth actually of how suffering actually is.

[59:35]

And the way suffering is, is that suffering isn't really, it isn't really that there is suffering, it's that suffering actually exists in a middle way. The truth of suffering is that truth, is that suffering exists in a middle way. What's the second truth? The second truth is that suffering is the truth of the origin of suffering. Again, it's not the truth that suffering has an origin. It's the truth of the origin of suffering, or it's the truth of the arising of suffering, or it's the truth that suffering arises. In other words, it's the truth that suffering is a dependent co-arising. Yes. Are you saying dependent, co-arising? Dependent, co-arising. Dependent, co-arising.

[60:39]

Dependent, co-arising. Arising, yes. In other words, all things arise in dependence on things other than themselves. The teaching of the First Noble Truth is the truth of suffering. It's the truth about suffering. He's teaching you about the truth of suffering. How is suffering truly? What is truly what suffering is? If we can understand the truth of suffering, then we will realize the truth of the cessation of suffering. That's the third truth. The third truth is what we will realize by understanding the first truth.

[61:43]

But the first truth is elaborated by the second truth. The second truth says the truth of the origins of suffering. In other words, suffering has an origin It has an origination. It arises in dependence on things other than itself. It exists in a middle way, in this subtle middle way of depending on things other than itself and not making itself happen. It doesn't have a self. Suffering doesn't have a core. Or, and again, suffering doesn't have a core. It's not dependent core arising. It's dependent core arising, therefore it doesn't have a core. Suffering doesn't have a core. Nothing has a core. Nothing has a core, nothing has a root. When you realize that suffering doesn't have a core, you realize a cessation of suffering.

[62:53]

And the reason it doesn't have a core, the basic reason why it doesn't have a core, is that it originates in dependence on things other than itself. It doesn't make itself happen. If it made itself happen, then you see it would be correct to say the first truth is the truth that there is suffering. or that there isn't suffering. But the Buddha wasn't teaching that there is or isn't suffering. He's teaching you the truth of suffering. He's teaching you how suffering really is. And the way suffering really is, is that it dependently co-arises. And because it dependently co-arises, it has no core. And because it has no core, we can be free of suffering. And we can be free with suffering. We can be free with suffering because suffering doesn't have a core.

[64:03]

In other words, we don't have to be with suffering in any fixed way. We can be happy with suffering because of the way suffering actually is, is that it exists in a middle way. And when you're with the middle way of anything, you're free. So the wisdom teachings are to teach us the middle way of whatever we're experiencing. The middle way it is. And the middle way it is starts out, the beginning of the middle way that things are is that they depend on things other than themselves to exist. So the initial way that the Buddha taught and the initial way that I'm suggesting to you to enter into wisdom practice is you practice mindfulness of what's happening, just like you do with tranquility practice.

[65:13]

You practice mindfulness. But now, rather than just giving up your thinking about what you're mindful of, You use your thinking to remember the Buddha's teachings and apply the Buddha's teachings to what you're aware of. And the Buddha's teaching you start with is to apply the teaching that whatever you're experiencing, always, if anything's happening for you, it is a dependent co-arising, which means that whatever's happening, it's happening under the influence, through the support of things other than itself, and not at all through the support of itself, by itself. So that's wisdom practice in the beginning of applying, using your mindfulness to apply a teaching to what's happening.

[66:16]

You're actually thinking about what's happening by thinking about a teaching and thinking about how that teaching applies to what's happening. And then you can also think about and be mindful of how your attitude towards what's happening starts to change because of the way you're thinking about it now. You also can be mindful of that. It's another phenomenon is that you start to change, you start to be different with things when you practice wisdom, which is what some of those people were saying. They were feeling scared. They were feeling like the reality of things was cracking or getting looser. These are things that start to happen to you when you apply these wisdom teachings to the phenomena that you're experiencing. Yes, Will? Yes. You can ask a question.

[67:17]

Could you describe your stream of consciousness in applying that practice, as if you were doing zazen, applying the mindfulness practice, thinking of dependent core rising? Could you just describe, even approximate, like the stream of consciousness? Did you hear what he said? He wanted me to apply my stream of consciousness or he wants me to describe my stream of consciousness in words, how I would apply the teaching? Okay. Sound of, well, sound of, I guess it's a, it's a lawnmower, and also sound in my voice. And Jim's face. And the fans spinning around. And the lawnmower. And the sound of my voice.

[68:21]

And Eric's face. And Lisa's face. Are you Lisa or Lynn? Lynn's face. And not Lisa's face. And Eric's smile. And Will's wiggling. and lawnmower, these are the things, okay, that's stream of consciousness, all right? That make sense? That was stream of consciousness? Now, it's hard, it's a little bit difficult to say the thing I'm aware of, but anyway, let's just say that I was, I'm going to go back over that stuff now, but I'm not going to say exactly what I'm, the different things I'm aware of, but it'd be kind of stuff like that probably, all right? I'm not going to say lawnmower. I'm just going to say I'm aware of something. Again, this is a lawnmower, but anyway, maybe I will say lawnmower. Lawnmower. And this lawnmower, the sound of the lawnmower, I mean, exists in dependence on things other than the lawnmower.

[69:33]

I see your face now, and this face exists in dependence on things other than the face. I see your body, and your body exists in dependence on things other than your body. That the way you exist, basically, in this middle way, is not the way you appear. I'm looking at, I'm hearing a teaching about how you are, which I can't actually see how you actually are. But I'm listening to a teaching which tells me that you're existing, that you're, I should say, that the appearance of you to me, that the way you appear to me, comes to me, is based on the way you're actually happening in dependence on things other than than what I can see. And I just do that over and over, moment by moment.

[70:47]

I should say I'm trying to do that moment by moment.

[70:50]

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