Among all things that people unconsciously, the basic idea itself is the most subtle and most unknown to people, in my experience. In general, I've seen people are extremely unaware of their generosity or their stinginess. Some particular person might not really be in the dark about some aspect of the personality, but generally across the board, people have the most difficulty being aware of their sense of independent existence. And this thing is the most important thing to bring, and Buddhist meditation is the most important thing to bring forth, to have reflected, and to develop a way of meditating on in a balanced little way. This particular episode

[01:01]

of the personality is the more influential, the more rigidified. It is like the paradigm for all rigidity. When we understand this, all the goodness and all the skillfulness and all the unskillfulness are uncovered and revealed for what they are. When we understand this one aspect of personality called the sense of self, when we understand it, then we understand everything. Then we understand that stinginess doesn't have the quality of a self, of an independent existing thing.

[02:10]

Stinginess does not have this independent self. Generosity doesn't have an independent self. Patience doesn't have an independent self. Impatience doesn't have an independent self. Skillfulness doesn't have an independent self. Unskillfulness doesn't have an independent self. And at this point, I think you start to see where the meditative study of the psychological process, the meditative study of personality, so-called Buddhist meditation starts to move a little bit beyond what most psychotherapy is concerned with. And the way it moves beyond is that whereas what I was describing before are ways to work with someone to help them work with themselves in such a way as to release the natural skillfulness

[03:17]

which is hidden in the normal personality, particularly normal personality, in all personalities, to liberate these skillful needs and to help the person find these skills, which then they apply to themselves and to others. Okay? And again, that's part of Buddhist practice, too, of Buddhist meditation, is to... bring these qualities of a human personality out, to develop them, and also to use those qualities of the personality back on the personality to continue the process of bringing these skillfulnesses up. The thing I've added now is this another, the central project of bringing the sense of self out, because when that is studied and understood, that thoroughly releases even the skillfulness of any kind of rigidity.

[04:22]

Because the skillfulness, all the different kinds of skillfulnesses and all the different kinds of unskillfulnesses, none of them have this inherent nature, inherent self. But even if you have brought out skillfulness and it's working quite well, if you have not understood the self, then this misunderstanding, the misconstrued self is projected onto everything, including projected onto skillfulness. So there's still some rigidity or some separation between skillfulness and unskillfulness. Which brings me back to the example that Patty brought up last night of what if you're opposed to war, And generally speaking, being opposed to war, or certainly, what if you're opposed to cruelty and murder? Some people feel like war sometimes isn't cruelty.

[05:26]

Well, let's say you're opposed to flat-out cruelty and murder and injury to life. Let's say you're opposed to that. Generally speaking, I think the Buddha would say that's a skillful agenda. To be opposed to violence, particularly to be opposed to harmful violence rather than the violence of having a baby, to be opposed to cruelty, this is the Buddha way, definitely. And that's skillful, to be opposed to cruelty, to protect and care for all life. This is a skillful agenda, okay? which maybe you have sometimes. Right? Yeah. And to want to be cruel and harm beings is unskillful. In other words, it harms beings. If you have that agenda, it can harm beings. But it harms you more than anybody.

[06:29]

If you want to do something mean to somebody, that may hurt them, but it hurts you much, much more. So it harms everybody. Buddha strongly encouraged us not to be cruel. However, the Buddha also taught us to try to learn that there is no such thing, ultimately, as cruelty or kindness. But first of all, he taught, please, If you are my disciple, you do not hate people, you do not harm people. You must give up harming beings if you're my student." But then he taught what the self is. And when you understand the self, you understand that although we're totally devoted to all beings and to avoid harming them, we also understand that there is no such thing as harm and there are no such thing as beings. And if you want to help beings, We need to understand that there aren't any. Now, you can help beings somewhat if you still think that they're beings.

[07:34]

In other words, you can help beings somewhat with compassion, kindness, patience, generosity, enthusiasm, carefulness, concentration. You can help them somewhat if you practice these things. But if you think they're other than you, I think there actually are some other beings. That belief and holding to that belief will undermine significantly your ability to help them, especially your ability to help them in the most complete way. So back to this example Patty brought up last night. If you have the agenda of not harming beings and you meet someone who is harming beings, and you don't understand that your agenda has no self, has no inherent existence, and that their cruelty has no inherent existence. If you don't understand that, then you think you really do have this value, and it really is something, and you can't help but grasp it.

[08:41]

And you think they really do have that value, and that really is different, and you can't help grasping that, and you're stuck in that opposition. But if you have the agenda to protect all beings, and then you are free of the idea that there are actually things called self and other, then you can actually enter into a way of being with this other person that liberates them and you from your agendas. You get liberated from your agenda of doing good and protecting beings. and you help them become liberated from their agenda of harming beings and doing unskillful things. You both become liberated from your agendas and in that liberation beings are protected and not harmed. So you accomplish the agenda of protecting and promoting all life, but also you take the protection and promotion to the ultimate of liberating the beings from the ideas of what a being is.

[09:51]

And you liberate yourself from your idea of what a being is, and you liberate yourself from your idea of what is good. And then you realize completely what is good. So if you want to harm being and you become liberated from your idea of what harm is and what non-harm is, you can't harm them. Too bad. If you want to help being and you become liberated from your idea of what help is and what harm is, you can't help but help them. So you're happy. So Buddhism is kind of bad news for people who want to cause trouble, and good news for people who want to be beneficial. But to be ultimately beneficial, we need to bring this sense of self forward, look at it, understand it.

[10:55]

And what you see when you understand it is that the idea of an inherently existing self is incoherent. In other words, it won't hold up. In other words, you'll see that there is no such thing as an inherently existing self. There is a sense of self, and there is a sense that the self is inherently, independently existing, but that's all it is. It's just an idea. It's just a conception. If you understand that it's just a conception, and not the slightest bit more than that, then you can become free of it. Yes? I think that the psychotherapy just came from moving around and talking too much about bringing these thoughts forward. Is that because generally speaking, it doesn't involve itself? And whether there is self-discipline itself, or does it look like there are people who appeal to that?

[12:01]

Other than that, You never study what in psychotherapy? Yeah, right. But in psychotherapy there is some study of what the self is and what the ego is, right? But it isn't so much that it's brought that you want to understand that, but you don't necessarily want to bring a sense of ego. Again, what you usually want to do is have the unconscious things brought out into the ego realm rather than bring actually the ego out to be looked at. So yeah, that's right. I think not so often in psychotherapy. Now, one way to talk about this and the reason for that is that what psychotherapy is about is, again, to... work with the personality and work with the sense of self in order to make the personality in the sense of self healthier to work on relieving kind of these unconscious conflicts

[13:11]

by making some of these unconscious things more conscious, and thereby we can maybe negotiate, like I was talking to Betty last night, respectfully negotiate with some of this stuff, make some deals with the unconscious, but in a more conscious way, and that makes a more harmonious situation. We know we've got stuff on the table, so to speak. We can negotiate more reasonably, especially with some assistance. So to some extent, someone might say, well, psychotherapy is just concerned with the initial phases of happiness and liberation. And that once you do that work, you might be ready to do this more subtle and difficult work of looking at the core problem of misunderstanding of the self. Because in some sense, that is the most subtle and most difficult work, because that work means dealing with the place where the real terror is living. And you have to be pretty healthy in order to work on that.

[14:19]

You have to be able to love yourself and take good care of yourself and feel supported by quite a few other people, starting with your therapist or your teacher. And being maybe a little bit considerably broader than that, too, that you feel a lot of love coming towards you and you feel a lot of love towards yourself and others in order to go and face that. So some part of psychotherapy may be to start to develop confidence that it's okay to love yourself, love your therapist, be loved by your therapist, love your family, be loved by your family, and gradually work up to loving all beings, being loved by all beings, loving all Buddhas, and being loved by all Buddhas. When you feel that much love, then you can go down in what we call the green dragon's cave and face this dragon, the dragon of the self, the dragon of the belief in inherent existence, to become intimate with the core ignorance of human existence, which is actually pre-verbal.

[15:27]

And so in some sense you could say maybe psychotherapy is like just getting people healthy enough to do this spiritual work. this work of understanding the entirety of the personality down to the most, the darkest, subtlest thing, which is this belief in inherent existence. Judy has a book over there. What's that book you have, Judy? What is it? It looked like a book. It looked like a... Did you lose it? What is it? Yeah. Can I... Could you run it to me for a second? This is the... This is called Versus from the Center. It's a new translation of an important Buddhist text. How did you happen to get this, Judy? How did you get this?

[16:31]

Okay. So this is called Verses from the Middle. Another translation of this is Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way by an Indian Buddhist teacher named Nagarjuna. And the subtitle is Buddhist Verses on the Sublime. And the In the beginning, the first verse, actually three verses in the text, goes something like this. The dharma taught by the Buddha hinges on two truths, partial truth of the world and truths which are sublime.

[17:36]

Hear that? Those are two truths. Partial truths of the world and truths which are sublime. Another way that's translated is conventional truths and ultimate truths. And then there's without knowing how they differ, you cannot know the deep. And without relying on convention, you cannot disclose the sublime. Without intuiting the sublime, you cannot experience freedom. So in some slightly floppy way, I think one could tentatively put in parallel conventional truth and psychotherapy, or conventional truth and studying the personality and studying the ego or the self, the conventional truth.

[18:54]

And the other truth is the truth that there really is no such thing as a personality. or a self. Ultimately, there's no independently existing personality. There's no independently existing components of the personality. But if you take extractions from the sublime, if you freeze the sublime, you can get a personality and a sense of independent self. And the conventionalities, the world of convention, hide and reveals the sublime. The conventional sublime are locked together. So the understanding that there isn't an inherently independently existing person, or there isn't an inherently

[20:08]

and the independently existing flower, that understanding is right next to the understanding that the ear is an independently existing self, and that the ear is an independently existing flower. They're very close. But to try to understand the no self before you understand the self, to understand, to study no self, to study the sublime before you study the conventional is not appropriate. You must thoroughly understand the conventional before you can understand the sublime. But understanding the conventional is not enough for freedom. You must understand the sublime in order to be free. Sublime, by the way, means to be lifted up. Uplifting. So there's a truth which is uplifting, and there's a conventional truth which is down.

[21:16]

It pulls you down. We are all down. We're down because of conventional truth. We share certain conventions, and that makes us down on the earth. If we study these conventions, understand them thoroughly, like the conventions of self and other, the convention of this is mine, not yours, the convention of I'm not you, you're not me. And we can study, be ready to receive the teaching of you are exactly me, and I am exactly you. And there are ingredients in the conventional, which brings us down. There are ingredients in there. which facilitate the realization of the sublime. And if you study the conventional, which actually brings you down and keeps you in bondage, if you study them thoroughly, you will see right in them the very way to be released from them.

[22:31]

Both the sublime and the way to the sublime are totally inseparable from the conventional world that we were brought down. Like that story I told many times about this guy. He was a Muslim, and he somehow got put in prison And his friend sent him a package. And he opened the package, you know, hoping that there was a file in there, or a sword, or keys, or hashish. But it was a prayer rug. And he was kind of angry that the person sent him the prayer rug. He didn't get anything to distract himself in the misery of being in prison, and he didn't get anything to violently get himself out of prison.

[23:37]

He didn't even get a gun to shoot himself with. He got a prayer rug, and he stayed in the prison cell. And eventually he thought, well, I've got nothing better to do. I might as well use the prayer rug. So he started to do prostrations on the prayer rug. And gradually, as he did more prostration, he started to notice and become familiar with the pattern, the design of the prayer rug. And then he gradually noticed that the design of the prayer rug looked like a diagram of a lock. And then he thought maybe it was the lock of his cell. And it was. And so he got out. So right in your cell, right in your imprisonment, are the ways to get out of it.

[24:42]

So we need to help ourselves, we need to help others, and we need to be helped by others in order to bring our attention to our imprisonment, to see the pattern pattern of the imprisonment. And seeing the pattern of the imprisonment, we see the pattern of release. And again, one of the differences between the way some people do psychotherapy and the way many people practice Buddhism is that in psychotherapy, you may think that the study of your imprisonment is for you. It may not occur to you that it's for your therapist. It may not occur to you that it's for your whole family, but it might. It may not occur to you that it's for the whole world. And it may not occur to you that helping others do psychotherapy would be part of your psychotherapy.

[25:45]

But many psychotherapists are people who did psychotherapy, found it helpful, and wanted to help others to do it. Where Buddhism started from the beginning, as soon as people can be open to the idea, is that we're not only getting help to study the patterns of our own psychophysical experience in order that we can be free, but we're getting that help so we can help others be free. And we want to help others get the same help. We want to support them to get the help. And eventually, we want to be part of giving them the help. And we see that as another dimension of our own freedom, our own transformation. Here, a quick question. Most personalities, not all, but many personalities and most personalities have accrued a component called a sense of self or a sense of I. Some personalities do not have this component

[27:17]

And this component also, the sense of I, is conscious. It's a conscious element. The unconscious sense of I is also a component of the personality. But what we usually call ego is the conscious sense of I. But there's also an unconscious sense of I, which is more subtle. Unconscious. Well, I would say that there's a very subtle form of, there's a very subtle sense of self which most people are not aware of. And by working with what you're conscious of as yourself, and studying it more and more in Buddhist meditation, we use that as a starting point to bring out this very deep and subtle version of self.

[28:29]

The very deep and subtle version of self is the one that I would say is innate. It's pre-verbal. And your conscious sense of self, the conscious sense of self that a lot of people have, is not that subtle. And it can change. It's more confused. And it's a kind of conventional sense of self. So you may have a conventional sense of self, which you would tell me about. And I would say, yeah, that's Betty. But your innate sense of self is basically the same as my innate sense of self. And that is not Betty. And that's not Rev, even though we both have it. What it is, it's a basic belief that something can exist in an isolated way. It's a fundamental sense. And that gives that growing thread, or that poisonous thread, it's growing in the sense that somehow it's very precious.

[29:32]

It's a basic belief that something can exist in an isolated way, that fundamental sense. And that gurgling thread, or that poisonous thread, It's golden in the sense that somehow it's very precious and doesn't get tarnished and is very durable. And it's poisonous in the sense that it is a source of our suffering. That gets woven into the conventional self. But by studying the conventional self, the one that you can talk about and so on, to some extent, we can gradually find out the deep and relatively unconscious and very subtle sense of self. That's the one which Buddhist meditation is ultimately trying to bring out, look at, and refute, disprove, let go of. But the conventional self we need to know about too.

[30:46]

And the conventional self is part of the personality. But we have different conventional selves, which are part of our different personalities. And a personality that doesn't have a sense of conventional self is a personality of a person that probably can't function in normal society. They probably have to stay home all the time, be cared for by their parents, or be in a special institution because they don't have a conventional sense of self. And if they're organically incapable of developing one, then that's a lifetime thing. And if it's an emotional problem, then they can have therapy to develop that conventional thing itself. And then they can suffer like ordinary people do. And then again, we start the process of psychotherapy. It also could be called psychotherapy to help them find the conventional things itself.

[31:51]

If we have time, I will talk about how these various senses develop. I don't know if that was clear what I was just talking to Betty about. Was that clear? Now I would like to do an exercise which I usually do at the beginning of retreats. the ritual of actually expressing yourself and being recognized or reflected. And I wanted to wait until about now to do that, because what I'd like it to be, which it usually is, as an exercise in getting a little taste of your sense itself. All of you now are sitting around the room.

[32:56]

You need to. You have some sense of self, I suppose. But maybe some of you don't. But when you do this exercise, you probably will get a sense of self. It'll change. I think you'll find it changes. Maybe it won't. Especially if I talk about it a long time before we start. You'll start to feel it before you do your part. Actually, you do your part both when you're expressing yourself and when you're recognizing it. So we're all doing our part. But you notice it'll change. The situation will change. I'd like you to watch for how it changes. And I'd like to change the way we do it to slightly accentuate this sense of self. So what I'd like you to do is stand up and say your name. And then everybody will say your name. OK? And then I'd like you to stand up, but I'd like you to, as you stand up, I would like you to be aware of how you feel when you stand up.

[34:03]

I'd like you to be aware of how you feel when you stand up. In other words, I don't want you to stand up without noticing what it would be like to stand up. I want you to miss that part. That will be an important thing to feel. You'll feel something, maybe. Maybe you'll feel more than you want to feel. And when you feel more than you want to feel, you maybe try to let you not feel it. But I encourage you to stand up. And try to see what that's like without indulging in self-mortification to distract yourself, like, oh, I'm too fat, or I'm too skinny, or I'm too clumsy. That's a way of distracting yourself in what it's like to stand up. Or indulging in some sense pressure, like, oh, this is really groovy. But just experience what it's like to stand up in front of this group of people. And then when you stand up for a moment,

[35:07]

Before you say your name, see what it's like to arrive at standing posture. And feel that. And then actually be there for a minute before you say your name. Be there in a fully erected being posture. And then when you feel that, after you've felt that, then say your name. And then, of course, listen to see what that feels like. And then don't sit down right away after you hear your name. See what it's like to be standing after hearing your name and what that feels like. And then sit down. And see what it feels like to sit down. See if there's a different feeling of going down than coming up. And then, after you're sitting down, see what it's like to feel back on the ground. And then the next person.

[36:12]

And I like to do this. And I wonder if that's OK with you to do this exercise. So I have the idea that it would be a good exercise. And usually, we just go around the room. I think that it's a little easier if you don't go around the room. So I think I know better to go around the room. It accentuates this sense of self-concern. Maybe it doesn't. Anyway, I would like to do it by going around the room, OK? We'll start with the inner circle. And we'll start here. Natalie.

[37:22]

Natalie. Mr. Crixman. That was fine. Ben. Ben. Pa. Pa. Hey.

[38:29]

Hey. some exposed or unconscious subject, a subject of speaking, a subject of standing, a subject of being seen and recognized by others. This is your ego. And that phenomenon is also associated with That project is associated with some controlling of the body and mind.

[39:40]

It's some controlling of the psychophysical personality, controlling, associated with a controlling element in the spirit of personality. But there may be something that controls the standing and the sitting. So there's a little confusion there for me, because the conscious subject is not the same as the controlling activity. There's often a lamination of those two. The ego in psychoanalysis is the conscious subject, or the sense of the conscious subject, but also used to deviate from the emotional control.

[40:51]

that we are pivoting to the personality, the style of functioning, that to some extent, modular emotional expectation. We know how, most of us know how to do that to some extent. For example, looking at somebody in the face, looking in their eyes, Still, even though I'm an adult, I'm like, well, I'm trying to go and find a company that's on a question. And that's the time I start to sit. You know what I mean? And if that person were to smile at us, and we were to smile back, and they were to smile more, and we would admire more, our excitation level might increase.

[42:06]

If they were to crown, also our excitation level might increase. If they're not either crowning nor smiling, higher predation level might increase even more, because we might be afraid of what, you know, certain people are important to us. If they don't give us clear information, we might be quite concerned. And many of us have the ability in situations like this to look down, look away, to say something to modulate the level of excitation. This ability to modulate a level of excitation This is a story that developed between six months and a year and a half in North Germany, especially in the case of a community that has plenty of interpersonal interaction with someone who tells them for and about them.

[43:34]

And what happens there is that babies at six months, although I tell the story of the babies at six months and before, still have this construction of an human existence. In other words, a little baby, even in the womb, I would say, that human beings have a concept of an human existence. At six months, the babies, however, do not have a cell in the environment or separate from the mother or the child with it. However, we do have, I'm telling the story, we do have in our brain neural mechanisms which can support the conception of self and other, of the separation between self and other.

[44:45]

And the development of this form of the self-other pattern and develop through interactions with another pose. Interfacial interactions are necessary for this way of seeing them to arrive in a person. And therefore, are necessary, these interfacial are necessary to create a level of intent to be, or keep, a level of excitation in the brain in order to create a certain high level of excitation in the brain under which our neural mechanisms are initiated by which the infant

[45:54]

his young child's own experience, the mind, as creating the sense of self reflected from the other. The sense of self is a self that arises out of a dialogue, inter-facial dialogue, of a very intense and pleasurable type. And not only that, but in this interface of dialogue, the child also learns, starts to learn how to modulate the level of integrity. They allow, by continuing to look at this other face, they allow the political intensity of looking at another face, intently looking at your face, will allow them to build, or they don't. and they learn how to allow it to build or not.

[47:00]

And you learn whether you learn to allow it to build or not just by looking or looking away. If you look with the other face, look back, and when you look in the eye of the other face, there's a light. And this is the light. In one sense, it's the light of the brain of the one who's looking. It's the light of the brain of someone who thinks that they're looking at something very interesting and very delightful. And it's also the light of a brain that knows how to modulate the level of excitation, or in particular, the level of carbon excitation. And one of the ways that the adult does this is by looking at the baby. And the adult knows that looking at certain babies will be very pleasurable.

[48:05]

So they do. And then sometimes the babies smile. And when the baby smiles, often the adult experiences a bit more pleasure, thinks it's very cute. And then, because they think it's so cute, they think it's cute up in the bone, or just much of the mind is cute, and that appreciation goes right out the eye, and the baby sees it. And the baby feels that it's being appreciated, This light, the baby likes to see that light, and the baby smiles a little more, or in a slightly different way. It makes me feel all found out there. And then the light gets stronger, and the baby finds out it's morning, and it gets more exciting. And this baby finds out it's morning, and it becomes more light, and the baby gets more exciting.

[49:10]

And you have a certain point that they do. I don't know. because the baby's on the verge of passing out. And so the baby looks away. So the baby, it feels great pleasure in looking at it close, but it won't feel great pleasure in looking at it close. And in that expectation, the brain develops certain neural processes are developed and initiated, which make it possible for the baby to start imagining that that person is other than them, and they are other than that person. We start to be able to imagine that that person is looking at them. We start to imagine what they might look like to the other person. And also they learn how to modulate their level of emotional excitation by doing things like looking away or looking back.

[50:18]

That's why they like to play it. They like to play it because they enjoy knowing how to modulate their experience by learning that it still works. Try it. It actually works. I mean, it does change. Well, how would we connect to you? Doesn't it do something? Something happened. You know? Well, you'd be looking just like a blue-eyed person, and you'd be wanting to change your level of excitation, go like that. And you'd die. Doesn't it? Now you can imagine if we would just turn toward each other and just stare at each other for a while, and get really excited about being [...] excited

[51:36]

And a baby is at risk if the caregiver won't let them look away. And some caregivers don't have trouble letting the baby look away because of their own insecurities. When the baby looks away, they try to get the baby to look back. And then the baby will get in trouble because they aren't allowed to look away. And then they're not allowed to learn how to do that. Second of all, they're forced to stay at a high level of excitation. I'm afraid that we want the baby to keep doing that. There's so much time, and that's not so hard. Part of what a healthy situation involves is that pregnant women let the baby look away. So anyway, this is, you see, part of the confusion, the macro confusion in our development between the sense of self and control.

[52:46]

They're not the same. But the sense of self, especially the sense of self and others, develops in association with emotional control. But they're not the same. You can see they're two different operations. And you can see how they look at you because I've been to self-developed an association with the inconsolute that comes around learning how to modulate intensity. Plus, the person is looking at it. They're looking at this person rather than themselves. And the eyes look different when they look at the person rather than themselves. But they also have the same confusion, probably, between control and self. So one of the main techniques and medication instructions to study the self is to develop some difficult what's happening, which, in a lot of cases, you can do.

[53:58]

For example, when you're talking to someone who you have worked out certain environments, you have a relationship, you have a certain understanding about how you're going to work together and what your commitments are, that can be a therapeutic situation or a diamond study situation, where you agree on what you can show and how you can handle that. And you can expand that with different kind of control. Now, then there's the point combination between modulation and control. We can modulate. what happens to us, to some extent, that we can't really control it.

[55:01]

But it can be modulated. Again, the easiest way to modulate is modulated by, and certainly the most successful way to modulate the courses to control is distraction. And how we can be fairly successful at distracting ourselves from what's happening. We can't find any self-motivation. We can't find any sense of pleasure that's trying to distract ourselves. But we still feel the pain. Anyway, we're trying. We often try to control. We really can't control. But as a meditation instruction, to give up trying to control is not only another way to be, but it throws itself, which is strongly associated with control, out and brings it out. Again, I think Roy felt that.

[56:07]

You know, while doing the control, I think that that's a confusion. If some person isn't doing the control, at that point the subject is not doing the control, but it's very strongly associated with the controlling of various things, especially controlling assets. It's not the same function. And the controlling of assets can happen without the person being there, as it does in a little body. They start to modify and modulate emotional excitation before the sense of self is there. The sense of the self, other, personality, self. However, the belief in the existence of something is in the background and that can be brought up and applied to the sense of self and other. That's why, you know, the exercise we did when you want to do something, you know, giving up the show.

[57:14]

You know, you gave yourself a little exercise, and you know, some extent, I've been trying to show what happened to you, like there was some kind of show involved in stoning up your stoning up, but I can't remember, there was some kind of show there. But to some extent, you were letting yourself do whatever you thought and letting yourself be involved in that kind of exercise also lets you deal with your sense of self. Whereas if you don't, if you do want to, do this retreat, and you didn't want to do that exercise, and you just withdrew yourself, moved yourself away from the exercise, you had control, but you may not even notice the self that's associated with that sense of control. You may not notice that there is some sort of self trying to protect itself, and so you're trying to explain it. You just avoid it and don't give it anything.

[58:17]

You're not doing something like that. there's more situations that you can't possibly learn anything. But when you give up the control, you kind of like, something can give you a split between self-conscious subject and peak calling. And they really are two different aspects of the question, even though they're said in psychoanalysis. But critical of the social, they're almost predominantly And the ego alone is given the job of controlling the relationship with the head and controlling the relationship with the superego, or, you know, making a deal with the God or anything else in the world. But a lot of those negotiations are not a self-conscious subject. They're not the same as self-consciousness. They're a different function of the person's world. But I don't think there's some merit in putting together the point They are associated. And one grows, one has a development like the other. But when you stop indulging, when you control them, the fear that usually surrounds the ego is also revealed.

[59:33]

and then that indication of fear that surrounds the rigid structure of the personality is revealed. This rigidity of the personality and the isolation of the self are constricting, are life-diminishing, are painful, is that the idea of letting that stuff drop away and not may just be clear found. And before you can contemplate the idea of letting your stuff melt, there is an ongoing sense of threat to this little empire. because it is isolated from the other, and the other may or may not support it.

[60:44]

When we're maintaining the structure, we've been threatened by everything that's not included in it, which is most of the world. I'll go on, looking at the person already. which might be in this confined space surrounded by threat, there are the elements of your personality which develop the ability to look at the personality, to look at the threat around the personality, to be able to be comfortable, relatively comfortable, relatively comfortable, more and more comfortable with the threat, more and more comfortable studying the personality, And that study might lead to the personality melting. And leading also to the understanding that the personality melted, the growth would not increase, would not inundate the field.

[62:00]

As a matter of fact, gradually the personality melts, so they grow. Not that there would be nothing left, but just that the rigidity, the conscriptions in the field would drop away, and we would do a relief of cleanliness to life researchers. But at least our bond being in our separate compartment, for them all being our researchers for life. You could say your life, but anyway, you're now in a realm of life where all the different beings are the resources of the life that you're involved with. It's not yours. It's not theirs. It's just a life where everybody likes to contribute, even though if you say, I do not want to contribute to your life or that life, which is all of us.

[63:06]

I'm speaking my own to myself. I don't trust you to be the life you're talking about. But even there, we don't want clarity. We're actually making a unique, unviable contribution, which you can see as your life. You're delighted at the possibility of meeting this person who's totally trapped in a little box which completely covers And in it, all their tremendous potential is alive and compassionate and completely fit for them and not for you. And you look forward, not exactly forward, but you appreciate the community, the country only that got to be the limit. It went wrong for you. pulls you through there, become known to the person that you're looking for.

[64:07]

So, and rather than feel like, you know, rather have all these little videos you're not giving them to them, you feel like, rather have all these videos and you want to be great when you're learning about it. And then you don't do it personally, it's like, it gives you life. It gives you life, because you are a creature. It also affects you if you don't feel unwanted to see it, and what you don't want to feel. But, but, but, I feel fulfilled that you live kind of like that's where it is, and I kind of like, what do you call it, I'd like to make a virtue of yourself. It's not necessarily that I like making a virtue, but I'm happy. to have this pain that I feel when I see someone who doesn't realize that I'm beautiful. It's like I have no other youth to support somebody or not.

[65:13]

I get 20 youth. And she, well, she's a very beautiful person. And she's a beautiful, certain type of beauty. She's got a 14-year-old house. And, you know, she's got her own particular style of beauty. It's quite a passion for me. And I'm very happy that I get to see her working. I always think I'm doing it because she's beautiful. And that's what she thinks. She's ugly. And I always ask her how serious she is about this, but she seems pretty serious. I'm pretty afflicted by thinking that she's ugly. And she walks around thinking that she's ugly and thinking that other people think she's ugly. And it's not that I don't think she's ugly, but I tend to not feel like I've got to be very careful because, you know, maybe too much for me.

[66:18]

They call her beautiful. She's too dramatic. That's better. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. When you read it, don't tell me that we live in a sick little world that's being ugly. Don't ask me that. I'll tell you how beautiful I am. But God is wonderful. I hope I've been using We don't have a block over here, but there's a toning fork.

[67:22]

Oh, there it is. Could someone put it someplace? Actually, bring it to me, would you? With a point. So the text I want to write is a text for enlightening me. Or sometimes I wake and we've heard of the old poem, Sir Corrie. You think it's very bad, wrong, right? That's what I think. So the first level, to the degree that we got the post-immunology

[68:26]

From the next instruction, if the subconscious project is running the person in the way, is running the body, is doing the practice, is living real life. The way I love words is much more complicated than you think it is. But it is being learned very nicely, a lot of the time, and then probably, but we think the knowledge in it. Thinking the knowledge is one of the main things that makes it not wrong for us. And then the ,, the most level of space of the garden is that we have to understand the thoughts and definitions of it all. And that usually means I'm loving it. I'll take care of it. That's the point. And if it's one more big step, it's a blessing. Can you hear it?

[69:50]

No? Who can't hear it? Who couldn't hear? This doesn't work. Hold it. It doesn't work too well, but... No, no, it's okay. I just want to say that in this situation, when we do this, people start feeling uncomfortable because they think that I'm Oprah. You know? Or like, I worked in England recently, and they said, I feel like I'm on an American talk show. And I said, I can see that. But people think, oh, studying Zen, that's not like being in a talk show, right? Well. OK. All right. I felt really connected to everyone. That was the important part. Because I think my story is one of being an only child and feeling very separate and feeling disconnected often.

[70:59]

So when I thought about my story this last year and thinking about it this weekend, then I think the issue of self being separate has been kind of uprooted. So coming here and being in this big group, like this morning, we came together. And so I have an observation. Can you guess what it's going to be? Hmm? What? You would? What would you guess? That's part of my observation. You guessed right. So my observation was going to be maybe it's the case that when you really express yourself, you know,

[72:04]

When you express yourself fully, you open to how we are connected. If you feel like an only child, and most people do feel like an only child, even people with siblings basically feel like I'm an only child with invaders. Who left these people in here? Taking up my parents' time. taking my time with my parents. So anyway, such a part of it feels like an only child. Not only an only child, but an only child who rejects their parents. An only child who's not dependent on their parents. An only child independent of their parents. When you express that child, When you begin to and you anticipate expressing that child, you may be entering into a state of hell because you know that being an only child is very dangerous.

[73:15]

Being an unsupported only child is very dangerous. Now, we're not unsupported only children, but we had that idea. And when we kind of like try to express that, we experience something like sometimes terror. But when you sit in the middle of that terror, you have a chance to realize that it's an illusion and really you open to how you're connected to people. Right. Just like it's a real feeling that we're, a real idea, I mean, not a real idea, but it's a, it's an idea that we grasp that we're independent and not supported by people and that we're, and then so to show ourselves we'd be dangerous And it is. To some extent, it seems dangerous and it is dangerous. But we do it anyway. When we open to that, we also open to the fact that we're not independent.

[74:20]

So this was a simple little exercise. But the point is to do it over and over and over and over. And each time you do it, you get a new testing of what it's like to have this view of independence and opening to what independence is like. It's also opening to what interdependence is like. So we feel independent, but we're closed to what it feels like. Opening to what it feels like, you're open to what counts. So the basic thing is opening to the fear of our belief in independence opens us to opening to the fear and pain of believing our independent opens us to the freedom and enlightenment of our independence.

[75:26]

We have to exercise it. We have to, like, put it into, like, anybody else want to tell me anything about the, anything? Yes? You want to do it? Okay. Anurag? Anurag. Or? And there's one other person in our group who I met at breakfast, and I told him about this exercise, and he didn't come. His name's Gary. Huh? Yeah, up there. Gary. Gary. Where are you? I guess I scared him away, and he couldn't make it . By the way, this person's been wanting to join me.

[76:38]

Gary, welcome. Huh? Oh, Carl. Carl, Gary. What? Gary? Oh, Garrett. Garen. Carl Garen. We got that straightened out. So we were just talking about this. I said, I met you at breakfast, and now where is he? I thought maybe I scared you away. Yeah, he told me he was going to come. So now we know. He'll be coming to all of our meetings, right? Whose deed is this? Where is she? She's late. Where is she? Huh? Oh, yeah, I know.

[77:46]

I'm not talking about Kay. I'm talking about Renata. Is it Renata? Kaynata. So, Kaynata is taking a walk. Okay. Anybody else want to say anything yet? Yeah, please. Well, I thought I would be embarrassed, but I was very calm, and I felt my thoughts, you know, get up and say to myself, and I'm surprised that I didn't get embarrassed because he did that too. And so what I thought about that was that when you really are with yourself, then you're not embarrassed, but when you are with yourself, you're still embarrassed. Could that be the case?

[78:46]

Well, that's what came to me. I think maybe that's cute, that there's little ways of waking yourself. And that's part of the key. Like, of the current approach, they were not with themselves. They were, like, scared of what was going to happen to themselves. That's someone who's been up there, stood there for 20,000, 20,000 years.

[79:17]

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