I think I partly want to have a start, get more into the gear of Sashin that's coming up and ask you to spend the next 24 hours settling down to, clarifying, settling down. In the next 24 hours, I'd like you to, I ask you to settle down and clarify your intention for the Sashin. I might suggest that during the, maybe during your small groups, you might, that might be a topic you want to consider is your intention for your practice during the Sashin.

[01:05]

And I have that in mind as I'm talking to you about this text still. And I guess the word in the text that I'm struck by or speaking about tonight is the word in the title of the text, Siddhi, S-I-D-D-H-I, Siddhi, which means, sometimes means accomplishment or mastery, but sometimes also translated as supernatural or magic, magic power, mastery or magical power, magic power. And I have the word across, another word that came to my mind was miracle, el milagro, el

[02:14]

milagro. And so in some sense, this Vijnapti Matrata Siddhi is the magical power or the miraculous, the miracle, the miracle of mere concept, the miracle of the mind terminating in mere concept. When the mind terminates in mere concept, it is a miracle and also your understanding and my understanding of what a miracle is, is also completely miraculously transformed and one understands that your previous idea of miracle was just an idea. And now you understand, which is not just an idea, you understand that everything is a miracle. Terrible things, wonderful things, good things, bad things, living things, sick things, dying

[03:17]

things, being born things, everything is a miracle, a total cosmic miracle. And el milagro, milagro bean field wars, right? Anyway, I like that word, el milagro, I don't know too much Spanish, but I know that one. So, this miracle, the miracle of totally revising our understanding of what miracles are, which you all know a lot of stories about people who had one idea of miracle and that idea of miracle made them feel lousy because the miracle that they thought was a miracle never happened. They were waiting for this miracle but that one never happened, but all these other ones

[04:18]

kept smashing them in the face, saying, no thank you, no thank you, I don't want that, I'm waiting for this other one. There's one miracle that will not happen, that's for sure, that's the one you're waiting for. All the other ones will happen for sure, but who cares, not the one I want, darn it! So, the miraculous transformation here in this text is this reversal, right? We take our seat, and at that seat we turn around, at that seat there's an inner conversion, an inner revolution, an inner initiation.

[05:19]

And basically, you know, it doesn't matter what it's to or what it's about, the point is it's a revolution from misery to something else. And guess what it is when you turn away from misery? I found this pencil which I borrowed from the phone booth, it said, guaranteed joy and freedom or your misery back. I wanted to share it with anybody, thanks for making me not a thief. At the end of class I said last time that I spoke about this process of refining steel, burning off the impurities, the last impurities, with this oxygen lance, it's high-powered

[06:30]

blowing this pure oxygen in on the steel to burn away the last little residual impurities, and I said that the oxygen lance was sitting still, but I would say that the oxygen lance is actually dependent co-arising. So the sitting still, you provide the material, the seat of the steel, and then dependent co-arising the nature of things, burns away the impurities. So, and also I want to say, you know, Buddha's slogan was Pratītyasamutpāda, dependent co-arising was Buddha's slogan, and you know what slogan means? Slogan is a Scottish word, it means battle cry. So the battle cry of the Buddha, I would say, the battle against self-clinging, against

[07:40]

this mind which constantly turns towards misery, or the sources of misery, the battle cry, the slogan which we carry is dependent co-arising, that burns away these impurities. So I'm talking about now learning the backward step, right? Learning the backward step which turns your light around and illuminates inwardly yourself. And the way you turn this light around is to confess that you're a human being and you're caught in conceptual activity and you believe what you're thinking, and then the other part of learning the backward step is that you have deep faith in studying the

[08:48]

dependent co-arising of this concept and the belief in the concept. Deep faith in dependent co-arising, after admitting that you don't believe in dependent co-arising, first of all, I don't believe in it now, I put them all, I make it my highest priority to look at things in that light, in that reversed light, in my light reversed. So in terms of this discussion of consciousness, the function of the mind where the concept is construed as a self, the function of mind where the concept is construed as substantial, the concept of mind, the process of mind where the concept that we're aware of is construed as inherently existent, the concept is construed as substantial, all that stuff, that's manas,

[09:57]

right? We call that manas, the always reflecting manas. Manas is the locus, the locus of this activity of projecting self. I won't say that manas does that, because to say that manas does that is another self-projection. We don't say manas does this, because that would say manas all by itself did that, but manas doesn't do it all by itself, because manas depends on alaya, manas depends on what is reflecting, manas depends on lots of things, manas doesn't do it by itself, it's at that function of mind that's the address of this defiling projection of limitation and miserliness onto things. This is the center of miserly projections on what's happening. However, from the point of view of dependent co-arising, manas is not doing this by itself,

[10:58]

that function of mind does not do it by itself, it's just that this is a good place to catch the defiling process, and at that point where defilement is focused, that's the place where we're bound and that's the place we're released. So manas is that it's good to have your seat at manas, take your seat at manas or have manas at your seat, because that's where you get hooked and that's where you get released. You're hooked if you're learning the forward step, you're released if you're learning the backward step. The forward step is I practice zen, I open the door, I'm talking and so on. And that's jack and that really is jack and so on, that's the forward step. I confirm that that's jack, I confirm that that's not jack, I mean that's not jack.

[12:04]

I practice and confirm everything, I practice and confirm zen, I practice and confirm Christianity, I practice and confirm everything. Speaking of jack, you've all been waiting to hear this I suppose, he went running with me today, he's quite a good runner, a little secret he kept from you guys. So if he challenges you to a foot race, don't put any money down on him, unless you bet on him. Anyway, he not only can run, but he gives me little talks while he's running. I'm like going, and he's going, well, he said, last class, we had a little southern baptism, a little southern baptist revival there, he said, Mara and Buddha, you know, and then

[13:12]

he translates that as God and the devil, right, and I thought, hey, maybe sometimes people think I'm Mara or Buddha. If I was acting that out, maybe they thought for a second there I was being Mara and sometimes I thought I was being Buddha, and that's my problem. And sometimes you people think I'm Mara, or sometimes you think I'm Buddha and then you realize that that's Mara, and then you think I'm Mara because you thought I was Buddha, you thought I was impersonating Buddha, so you say, oh, it's Mara, and they say, oh no, he's not Mara, so maybe he's Buddha, anyway, sometimes that happens and you people get tough on me for that. It's plenty of work just keeping up with you being a rabbit. So anyway, I want to tell you a story about Mara and Buddha. First, I'll tell you a story about me, this is going to break your heart, so hold on to

[14:16]

your heart. Thay has said to me, Thay has said to my wife in my earshot, he said, a lot of people don't like dad. She actually said that. Now where did she get that idea? She wanders around in places where I'm not, people are talking about that. She knows that she doesn't like me. Anyway, when Jack was talking to me, that story came back to me because I realized that the reason why people don't like me is because they think I'm Mara. So anyway, Mara goes to Buddha and Mara says, okay, okay, I quit, I quit, I'm doing my best and what do they do for all this work I do, trying to get them to make all these wonderful illusions and stuff and they fall for them, but then after they fall for them they get

[15:17]

mad at me, after I provided them with this great stuff to believe in, then they get mad at me and they call me bad names. I quit, trashing me left and right, you know, I'm like the lowest thing, even though I'm so powerful, yeah, but still, I quit. Buddha said, wait a minute, you can't quit. I got to go around being this great guy and giving them all this great advice and teaching all this stuff and they don't practice it, you know, and I'm not going to quit, so you can't quit either. You just keep being Mara and I'll keep being Buddha. But of course, on days off in Tassajara, we have Mara and Buddha show, right, anyway, the backward step is Buddha, the forward step is Mara, right, but again, you know, it's just called Mara, there's not really such a thing as Mara, okay. So, the forward step is, I do all these practices, I carry the self forward and practice and

[16:18]

confirm everything, that's Mara, right, called Mara. To turn the light around and have everything come forward and then there's me, that's Buddha, or it's Bodhi. So, the backward step is to go to your seat and watch and witness and confess that you're carrying yourself to your seat and you're having yourself sit in your seat and then you're having yourself do your thinking and you're having yourself not do your thinking and you're having yourself do this and do that and breathe and move and you're doing that, that you confess, you confess that that's delusion, and at that same place you sit there and you watch and you can witness that all of a sudden things can shift and all things turn around and come towards your seat and then there's you. Now that's learning the backward step, is learning to get to your seat and then sit

[17:21]

there and watch and learn this reversal, which is a reversal of the function of this defiling part of mind called manas. And again, manas doesn't reverse by itself, it doesn't create illusions by itself, it reverses, you know, you can say whatever you want, by causes and conditions and the causes and conditions partly that it reverses by is by the kindness of all beings and the kindness particularly and compassion particularly of all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas throughout time and space that are helping the person who's willing to sit there, allow their mind to be reversed, allow their mind to learn this backward step, allow this mind to realize this city, this miracle, to switch from carrying this existence self around to see this self become a dependently co-arisen self, to go from a self that can't learn anything to a

[18:26]

self that can learn. And as Mr. Nagao, Professor Nagao says, the primary thing, the world of the dependently co-arisen is first and foremost and above all it's a world of beauty. The self that dependently co-arises is always a beautiful self, a docile and radiant self. I don't mean to say that as a promise. Now before I go on I want to say something which I may say again and again and that is that allowing this shift to happen at that seat, that seat you know that place you sit, well the zendo is called a dojo, you know, do-jo, jo is a place and jo means attainment, it's a place for attaining the way, no, excuse me, do means the way and jo, is that right?

[19:34]

And jo is what? Way place. Yeah, and it's a translation of bodhimanda, which means kind of the circle where the bodhi happens and your seat, everybody's seat up in that dojo is also a bodhimanda, a place for realizing the way, the bodhi. Sitting at that seat is a place where we're initiated into the Buddhist path, of course any place you are is like that too. And part of this initiation, what happens here at this initiation is a separation. See you actually have to separate yourself from that other mode, that stingy miserable mode you have to separate from. Okay. And I think it's interesting because you separate from your ordinary world of misery

[20:42]

and an ordinary world of misery is the world where you have learned, all of you have learned pretty well, and sometimes you think you could do better, but anyway you've learned survival skills, all of you have, you've survived quite a while, you were taught how to survive and look what it got you. Now the question is can you shift from that world of misery where you know how to survive and where you can survive longer to another world which will require new survival skills. And the survival skills in the new world and also the initiation into the new world is learning this backwards step. But part of the shift from the self-centered world to the community-centered world, from the I do things to everything does me, that shift, is a separation and kind of a loss,

[21:47]

loss of your childhood, a relinquishing of your survival skills temporarily, and that makes it hard. That's part of the hard thing about learning the backwards step is you have to separate from your very powerful skills of forward stepping. And another difficulty here is that in this culture many people have not yet been blessed with blessing, with the blessing that says you have good survival skills, good enough now so you can throw them out the window temporarily. This separation is separation from what you're bonded to, it's separation from what you're skillful with. So part of the tricky thing is that some of you may be uncertain whether you have bonded

[22:49]

enough with the world to let go of it. It's tricky. And sometimes Zen teachers have pushed people to let go, either not at the right moment or when the person wasn't ready or whatever and it hasn't worked very well. So I'm not exactly going to push you or me to separate and give up your old survival things and learn this backwards step, but that is necessary if you want to learn the backwards step, I'll tell you that, but I'm not going to push you. I would encourage you to go right up as close as you can get to the backwards step and think about how you feel about it and see if you feel scared and if you feel scared and think you haven't bonded enough with the world to separate from it, well I'd be happy to

[23:51]

hear what you're afraid of and if you tell me a certain story I might say, yeah, maybe you're not ready, maybe you should get a better grip on your world before you let go of it. But I do not yet know that anybody is not yet ready to make the move, but I'm not going to push you. Even Hakuin, you know, a great teacher, great teacher, even Hakuin says, I made a mistake, I made two mistakes in my teaching, I taught many people, I made two mistakes. One, I met this guy, his name was Chodo, and he studied with Kogetsu, Master Kogetsu, and when he was with Master Kogetsu he had some attainment, what they technically called, he realized the state of nothingness. I don't know what that meant in that particular temple, but anyway, he did. And then at that time Hakuin was very well known and Chodo told Kogetsu that he wanted

[24:51]

to study with Hakuin, Kogetsu said, I don't think you should, and Chodo didn't listen to him, and he went to Hakuin anyway. So Kogetsu said, okay, well let me write the letter of introduction. So this guy took the letter and went to Hakuin, and Hakuin was in the bath when he came, and the guy barged into the bath and presented himself in a very dramatic way, and Hakuin said, well if you're like this, we may be able to work together, so come back later, go relax for a while, see you later. So then he came back and did the usual formal introduction and gave him the letter, and Hakuin read the letter, and the letter said, this young fellow has some attainment, but actually he's pretty inexperienced and uncooked, please deal with him expediently.

[25:52]

Hakuin immediately said something like, you're a person of shallow capacity and inferior potential, how dare you come here and try to call this complete attainment, and the guy immediately went mad and never recovered, and he left Hakuin and went and built himself a little zendo, and then at Rohatsu Seishin time, like this, he would go and collect young monks from around the area and force them to come and sit with him, and also he'd force cats to sit with him, and when the cats ran away from their seats, he would run after them, catch them and beat them. Hakuin said, I made two mistakes in my teaching, Chodo and one other one. So, you know, it's dangerous to push people, actually, like that, so I don't have the

[26:55]

skill to push any of you into this reversal, really. You're going to have to decide yourself, if you want to go and turn around, I'll hold your hand and go with you as far as I can go. I might get scared too, but I'm not going to push you, I don't think, unless I really know you well. So, it's up to you to decide whether you want to make this reversal in your mind and turn around. Now, again, this is not something you think about, it isn't like you sit there and you're questioning you discursively, how am I going to turn Manas around, how am I going to shift from carrying myself forward and confirming things to, you know, having things come and confirm me. It isn't by discursive thinking or intellectual analysis or anything like that. It's first of all by sitting still. And then, not just sitting still, but just sitting still.

[28:00]

And just sitting still means you don't sit still promising yourself that the Manas is going to turn around, you don't sit still trying to get something out of sitting still. Of course, before you sit, you're always thinking of what's beneficial to people and you sit in order to help people and you can sit and think about helping people too, that's fine. But fundamentally, you give up. Even though you think of helping people, you give up thinking of people. You relinquish all your mental activities, all your emotional activities, you relinquish them, you let go of them, you renounce them, even though they still go on, you also don't try to push them away because that's not renouncing them either. That's not just sitting, that's another obsession. You give up your obsession of getting rid of your thinking, you give up your obsession of improving your thinking, you give up your obsession about everything, you give up your obsessions about analysis and discursive thinking and figuring things out, including figuring out cause and effect. Giving that all up is what's called deep faith in cause and effect.

[29:05]

The proposal is by relinquishing everything that you're attached to and just sitting still and allowing what you're attached to to manifest, the cause and effect there is that that itself is a total reversal of your whole karmic patterns. That in itself is completely different from what we usually do and that is not doing anything. And that is Vijnaptimatrapta Siddhi, that is letting your mind constantly, your mind is constantly dealing with objects, you're sitting there object after object you're aware of. Everything you're aware of is an object and you just let your mind be aware of object, let your mind be aware of object, let your mind be aware of object. You just sit there at that seat and let that happen and it will, don't worry, or worry, and let your mind terminate on the concept of worry, that's it, with no gaining idea. The process goes on and you let go of the whole process, that is a reversal, that is

[30:15]

turning the light around and illuminating the self which will be standing up saying various things and sometimes getting the attention of our awareness and appearing in the form of a concept, a concept saying, I'm scared, blah, blah, blah, I'm wasting my time, I can't do this, or just don't do it and go do something else. But no matter what happens, to turn the mind from all that multiplicity and to realize that one thing is always going on, dependent co-arising. Everything is, there's tremendous variety, wonderful, wonderful, miraculous variety, but it's always dependent co-arising. All forms of our life are dependent co-arising. If through all the changes, all the miraculous changes and wondrous changes of appearance before us, you can never be moved, never swayed, always remembering that what's appearing

[31:21]

before you is the cause and effect, that is the reversal, that is a reversal and that is a major separation from our usual way and there is a death there and there is a shift from childhood to adulthood and there is a shift from the world of misery to the world of the triple treasure. And this whole course of study, this whole practice period is to get to this point, to be thorough in the next seven days about your practice, to go all the way, to sit still and to give everything else up by just sitting still and letting the mind terminate in the concept. I rest my case.

[32:28]

You can read poems now or you can ask questions. The people who don't want to ask questions want to hear the poems, rather than those dumb questions sent to other people. Just kidding, just kidding. Most of these poems you've already heard many times, so this will be memorization work. These aren't really poems, these are just words, but if you concentrate they'll turn into poetry. I never heard it before. But I hope it's in accord with the ancient tradition. All you need to do is sit still long enough in an attractive spot in the mountains near

[33:48]

a hot springs. And all the inhabitants of the mountains will exhibit themselves to you by turns. Thorough. This is what I believe, that I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods and goddesses, strange gods and goddesses, come forth from the forest into the little clearing of my known self and then go back.

[34:50]

That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind or womankind put anything over on me. But that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods and goddesses in me and the gods and goddesses in other men and women. D.H. Lawrence. You do not need to leave your seat. Remain sitting at your seat and listen. Do not even listen. Simply wait. Do not even wait. Just be quiet and still and solitary. And the world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked.

[36:00]

It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet. Kafka. The road to Citron is hard. Alas, behold, how steep, how high. The road to Citron. Actually, it's a shoe. That's the old name for it. It is hard. Harder than climbing to the heavens. The two kings, San Sun and Yu Fu, opened up this land in the dim past.

[37:04]

48,000 years since that time. Sealed off from the frontier regions of Qin. The great white peaks blocked the west approach. A bird track, just wide enough to be laid across the top of Mount Gume. Earth tottered, mountain crumbled, brave men and women perished. And then came a stone hanging bridge, sky ascending ladder interlocked. Above, on the highest point, the sixth dragon peak curls around the sun. Below, the gnashing, churning torrents turn round and round. Wild geese cannot fly across. Gibbons, in despair, give up climbing. How the mud mountain twists and turns, nine bends within a hundred steps, zigzagging up the cliffside to where one can touch the stars, breathless.

[38:09]

Beating my breast, I heave a sigh and sit down. I ask myself if you expect to return, traveling so far west. Terrifying road, inaccessible mountain peaks lie ahead, where one sees only dismal birds howling in the ancient woods, where the female and male fly around and round, never meeting. One also hears cuckoos crying beneath the moon at night. Grief overfills the empty mountain. The road to Shu is hard, harder than climbing to the heavens. Just hearing these words turns one's cheeks pale. Peak upon peak, less than a foot from the sky, where withered pines hang inverted from sheer cliffs,

[39:15]

where cataracts and roaring torrents make noisy clamor, dashing upon rocks and thunderclap from ten thousand glens. An impregnable place like this, I sigh and ask why anyone should have come from so far away. There the dagger peak stands erect and sharp, with one man guiding the pass. Ten thousand people can't advance. Should those on guard prove untrustworthy, they could have turned into leopards and wolves. Morning, one runs away from fierce tigers. Evenings, one turns away from long snakes. They gnash their fangs and suck human blood, and maul people down like him.

[40:17]

The brocade city might be a place of pleasure, but it's far better to hurry home. The road to Shu is hard, harder than climbing to the heavens. Sideways, I look west and heave a long sigh. Libua I never said it was easy. It's simple, it's not easy. So Buddha says, You must train yourself thus, in mere concept. In the seen, there will be just the seen. In the heard, there will be just the heard. In the reflected, or the imagined, there will be just the imagined.

[41:25]

And in the cognized, there will be just the cognized. That is how, dear Zen comrades, you must train yourself. Now, when there is in the seen for you just the seen, and there is for you in the heard just the heard, and there is for you in the imagined just the imagined, then friends, you will not identify yourself with this concept. When you do not identify yourself with it, you will not locate yourself in it. When you do not locate yourself therein, it follows that you will have no here, or there, or in between.

[42:31]

And this would mean the end of suffering. Any questions? Any questions? I'm not talking about any other societies. I think that, when I mean our society, I'm talking in pretty big terms. Yeah, I think there may be some societies where there is a high percentage of, you know, bonding to the family and the home,

[43:34]

and to basic survival skills, and people feel, you know, that it goes pretty well. But I'm willing to entertain the possibility that, although that may be true to a great extent for a lot of people, that they were forced to separate from their family before they even got a hold of their family, that their family was ripped apart before they even had a chance to use their family to what they needed a family for. And people that had that experience may or may not be able to learn this backward step. That's why I'd like to hear what your reservations are about going forward on the path, because maybe you do need to do more bonding work before you separate. I don't know. You have to go case by case. I mean this as gently as possible, but it's been my experience from the time that I've been here,

[44:39]

and the summer camp you take a few seriously, but it was certainly my first experience, my first view of this, that, in my perception, there's a gathering of sleepers here who have come to learn the backward step. I can be blushing, people who are, you know, drawing a line in the dirt, and who, to my thinking, myself first in mind, are extremely reluctant to cross it. It's almost as if we've come this far to do this practice, to come to this valley. We've come this far, but we're not quite willing or able to take the backward step yet. It's almost ironic to me in some ways. Well, I wouldn't say almost ironic. I'd just say plain old ironic. But irony is the most commonly used rhetorical device in Zen. So it is ironic that we, of all people who have made such great efforts,

[45:45]

like, I often tell the story, you know, I gave up, you know, pretty much, not everything, but I gave up a lot to come to study Zen. And then when I got there, I gave up a lot to be able to not only study Zen, but be as close as possible to Suzuki Roshi. I did what's called post-practice. I became a post, a piece of furniture in his life that he'd have to, like, touch to turn corners. I'd be there all the time, you know. And after a while, I did become a piece of furniture in his life, and he did, like, sit on me, you know, and pile books on my head and stuff like that, you know. And if he needed, you know, if he had any problems with his TV, he would call me, because he thought I was a TV repairman. I didn't exactly say, Suzuki Roshi, if you have any TV problems, I want you to know I'm a TV repairman. But, if he did have any TV problems, I would volunteer to fix his TV.

[46:47]

And he learned that I could usually fix his TV. So, whenever he had problems, he called me. Now, fortunately, most of the problems he had were not complicated ones, like, it was unplugged. So I very skillfully, in a very high-tech way, you know, crawled underneath the bed and plugged it in. Or sometimes the aerial was not connected either to the TV or up on the roof. Not every time. Like, if I went over to his house and sat in his kitchen, and Ok-San was serving me all kinds of delicious stuff, he was usually pretty, you know, he was also distracted by the food. It wasn't that difficult. But that wasn't actually what I wanted either. I wanted to be with him alone, where he was, like, you know, teaching me special stuff. But every time he taught me special stuff, I split. He wouldn't let me sometimes, but I'd try and try again, and finally he'd let me get away. Ironic, huh? Ironic. You know why I wanted to get away? Because the road to Shu is hard. It's hard.

[47:48]

It's hard to be. It's hard. It's hard to shift from that world to this other world, to shift to the world that I wanted to shift to, that I got into the room to shift to the room, and there it was. A hairsbreadth deviation. Very hard to cross over that. So I appreciate what you said. I think we all, or a lot of us anyway, really understand what you're saying. We're so close. Here we are. And so we have seven days to come right up to that line and see if we can just chicken out. And admit that we're chickening out, and at least admitting that you're chickening out, you're there, being a chicken. And if you can be a chicken completely, without trying to be a chicken completely to get something out of it, you know, or Rem said, if I'm a chicken completely, I'll be, you know, I'll turn into a phoenix. No, just be a chicken completely. Totally stupid, like you couldn't think of anything other than being a chicken.

[48:50]

Just be the chicken. If you happen to be a chicken. Or whatever you are. Be that completely with no agenda other than that. This is called relinquishing everything. Relinquishing all mental activity which could do something besides be what you are. It's very hard to do that. We're very close to [...] the mind terminating on mere concept. We got the concept. The mind's aware of it. If you can just completely just stop at that point and drop everything else. Now, Tio has left. But even though he left, he did a good thing in his life. He said to Arlene, Arlene, if you don't follow the schedule, you can't drop body and mind. And he said that to her when she was in the kitchen

[50:01]

and she was in a trance from kitchen work. So what he said was a post-hypnotic trance which she remembers in the morning when she sticks her head out of the sheets into that cold space and starts saying all kinds of things to herself about how stupid it would be to get out of bed. Wait, wait, wait. Then the words of this chicken come to her. Arlene, if you don't follow the schedule. This is stupid. I'm going to stay in bed. This is a crazy place. Everybody knows it's stupid. Arlene, if you don't follow the schedule, you will not drop body and mind. And then she says, and then the leg goes out. Arlene starts with the leg. This is, this is funny. It really is funny. What we're doing here is funny.

[51:03]

You should understand it is funny that we're doing this. It is funny. It is fun. It is a miracle. But that talking like that is like forgetting about another world where what I'm saying doesn't count and is not true. What I'm saying only counts in this strange world of Dharma where the person is not there anymore. Where the person who says how stupid it is has been forgotten. And we just get up and go running through the cold to the nice warm zendo. Remember how warm the zendo is. How nice it is there. And if you stay in bed, if it really gets cold, it's going to get cold in your bed eventually. We're going to come in there and lift your sheets off. And blow cold air. It's going to be oxygen plants. Okay, any other questions? I appreciate your comment and your comment. And we're very close,

[52:04]

so let's just go all the way, okay? If you want to. Aren't we all the way already? Yes. You're welcome. Congratulations. And as proof that you're all the way. I'm going to prove you're all the way. The way you prove you're all the way is step off the pole. Since you're all the way, you can now do this complete reversal. It's possible since you're all the way. You can really practice. You can really do it. I mean, it can happen. I mean, you can't do it, but it can happen. The conditions are good. The conditions are good. We have... We have an opportunity to do something very simple. To just sit with no gaining idea for seven days in the midst of the road to shoe. In the midst of rough stuff that might happen.

[53:06]

Cold and pain and confusion and doubt, hatred, rage, fear, jealousy, stupidity, hypocrisy, despondency, slothfulness, enmity. All this stuff could happen right at your seat. This seat is a, you know, highly endowed place. All you got to do is this very simple and difficult thing called reversing the whole pattern of your existence since the eons. Any other questions? With the true merit of Buddha's way,

[54:08]

beings are numberless. Ah.

[54:13]

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