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Ignorance Unveiled Through Art and Meditation

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YR-00598
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The talk examines the interplay between ignorance and suffering, drawing from Buddhist teachings and personal experiences. It reflects on encounters in New York post-9/11, the cultural impact of Buddhism, and how meditation practices can address ignorance. Additionally, the influence of historical and contemporary art, such as Richard Serra's Zen-inspired works and Bruegel's drawings, is explored, alongside discussions on the nature of fear and precepts in personal growth.

Referenced Works and Relevant Discussions:

  • "The Twelve Links of Dependent Origination" by Buddhist teachings: Discusses the concept of ignorance as the foundational link in the chain of suffering.
  • Richard Serra's Art: Contemporary works inspired by Zen gardens, highlighting the cultural crossover between Eastern philosophy and Western art.
  • "Taliban" by a Pakistani journalist: Provides context on the political landscape in Afghanistan and the ignorance shaping extremist ideologies.
  • Bruegel's Drawings: Offers a vivid depiction of human vices and societal critiques, relevant to the discussion on human nature and ignorance.
  • Concepts of Ignorance in Buddhism: Emphasizes the need to understand ignorance to effectively engage with Buddhist teachings and alleviate personal and collective suffering.
  • Meditation and Mind Training: Explores meditation as a practice for recognizing and confronting ignorance.

Other Individuals and to Texts:

  • Conversations with people in New York City illustrate the fear and ignorance post-9/11, reflecting the global socio-political climate. These encounters underscore the need for understanding and empathy in examining suffering.
  • Discussions around cultural exhibits, such as the Asia Society’s "Monks and Merchants," highlight thematic intersections between East and West.
  • Personal anecdotes, including conversations with Muslim taxi drivers, exemplify real-world applications of compassion and non-judgment in understanding diverse perspectives.

AI Suggested Title: Ignorance Unveiled Through Art and Meditation

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AI Vision Notes: 

Speaker: Yvonne Rand
Possible Title: 1/2 Day on Ignorance & Suffering
Additional text: MASTER

Speaker: Yvonne Rand
Possible Title: Ignorance & Suffering cont.
Additional text:

Additional Info:
Additional text: after NY trip & visit to ground zero

@AI-Vision_v003

Notes: 

Recording ends before end of talk

Transcript: 

So, good morning. Nice to see you all. Bill and I were in New York this past week and what's up for me is, again, appreciating deeply the Buddha's teachings pointing out suffering, suffering, suffering, suffering suffering and ignorance and the relationship between the two. So I realized that what I'm doing is kind of a popcorn these last few weeks I'm doing a kind of popcorn focus on the twelve links, not doing them in sequence.

[01:03]

But I also have confidence in working with what arises in the moment. And of course the first of the twelve links is ignorance depicted by a blind old woman, you know, kind of going around like this. Yesterday morning, walking down 44th Street, a blind man with his stick was looking at something. Ran right into me. So was he blind or was he looking at something? So one of the signs, I'll just kind of scatter shot a little bit here and we'll get to the subject at hand. One of the signs on the subway that I took note of was, beauty is forever.

[02:11]

Is that right? Beauty is forever. Underneath that, 1-800 blemish. Major credit cards accepted. We speak Spanish. That's in the ignorance part. We flew on Saturday and Sunday we went down to ground zero where the fires are still smoldering and the acrid smoke is still coming and going and particularly difficult for people who live in that immediate area And we went with someone who is Chinese and was born and raised in Chinatown, which is right down in that neck of the woods.

[03:20]

And he talked about the two places where his grandmother, when she would be taking care of him while his mother was at work, the two places his grandmother knew to take him that she could find because she didn't speak or read English. was the plaza around the U.N. and the big area around the World Trade Center. That was his playground. And he said he was quite apprehensive about going down there. He had not gone before. And there was something for me quite a way of having a kind of access, immediate particular access to lives disrupted, lives not just ended, but lives disrupted with this young man's recounting of his relationship to that site.

[04:35]

which he actually went into in some detail. And every once in a while I just felt this kind of chill with the immediacy of that sense of disruption. As those of you who know about our periodic trips to New York, they include looking at art. And we went to see an exhibit of new work by Richard Serra, who's an artist whose work I admire and appreciate enormously. And these big pieces he's working on actually came out of his inspiration from going to Buddhist temple gardens in Kyoto, Zen gardens. He lives down in that neck of the woods around the Twin Towers site. Of course, everybody was cleared out because there was no electricity, there was no water, there was no nothing.

[05:44]

No phone. He said, I live here and I'm not leaving. He's a kind of pugnacious sort. If you know his work, you can sense that. You know, he works with sheets of steel that are, what, 13, 14 feet high and two inches thick. Doesn't make sense that he'd say, I'm not leaving. I had read a piece, I think it was in the New Yorker a while back, about someone riding in a taxi in New York and asking a Middle Eastern taxi driver about how he was doing and feeling this kind of wall drop, no more conversation, nothing. So I took that to heart because of course I wanted to know how the taxi drivers who were driving me were doing.

[06:57]

One young man from Bangladesh who has lived in the United States for eight years and has been a citizen for two. So we talked about the flooding in Bangladesh which happens so often and has caused such incredible suffering. I had never been to Bangladesh, but I'd been to India, so we talked about that. We visited the surround to discover some common ground, which was actually not hard to do. And towards the end of our ride together, We started talking about the kind of atmosphere of his life these days. And he said, you know, I love the United States.

[08:04]

My life here is very good. This country has been very good to me. And I am really scared. I'm really, really scared. Initially scared of some hostility from people he was driving in his cab, but now quite fearful about the possibility of being called in and detained by the government. One afternoon, you know, at the time of day when you just can't, finding a cab is challenging. And one cab stopped and people got out and I started to get in. The guy said, I'm off duty. I'm off duty. Where are you going?

[09:06]

I can't get across Fifth Avenue. It's impossible. I'll take you up to Fifth Avenue. So I got in, and he's Egyptian, Muslim. Part of his franticness was he hadn't eaten anything since five, because it's Ramadan, and he was desperate for a sandwich. He said, I want to eat. This Ramadan business, you can't even have a drink of water. I thought, wow, that's really tough. He said, there's nowhere I can eat. I can't park, so I can't go get a sandwich. Where are you going? You know, it's this kind of tension. So we also had one of these kind of remarkable conversations about what his life is like. And he also admitted how frightened he was, more because of his fear about what this current policy

[10:14]

from the Justice Department is with respect to people like him. And one of the questions that came up that I said, you know, I thought was a very important question for us Americans but didn't seem to be of much interest to people just over the course of the last, you know, since September 11th is, this question, why do so many people in the world hate the United States? He pounced on the question like as hungry as he was for his sandwich. Would you like me to answer the question? It's because of the United States support of Israel. That was his, and he went into great detail about that. And it was just before I got out of the cab that I asked him what was his home country.

[11:17]

And of course, when he said Egypt, I thought, well, of course, that makes his response to this question quite, makes much more sense to me. But I was struck with these conversations by how critical being able to hold as big a frame as we can, how important that is, and our ability to come to some understanding about the enormous complexity of suffering in the world. And then, of course, on the plane coming home, I started reading Taliban, which, much to my surprise, is hard to put down. Can you imagine a book on this topic by, you know, he was a journalist of very good reputation, a Pakistani, but, you know, I can't wait to get back to it.

[12:27]

It's just amazing and very important book to read if we are going to understand the suffering that we as citizens of this country are a part of. but to also really understand the relationship between ignorance and suffering, palpably the subtext. Did you know that the Taliban has come into being in the past seven years? I didn't realize that. So what are the causes and conditions that lead to? That's what this book is about. Causes and conditions. I went to see my dear old friend, Lenore Tawney, who's now 94.

[13:33]

Is that right? I think that's right. Because every time I go to see her, she's dropped 10 years. Let's hear it for yoga, Pilates, daily exercise, listening to every kind of weird chanting and sacred music and, you know, she's blind. For an artist to be blind is suffering also. But she's amazing. She has a kind of life force and is well in a way that was just wonderful. But of course suffers because she spends, she lives alone and she has people with her but she also spends a very significant amount of time alone in the dark.

[14:34]

And I was struck by how grateful she is for a visit, a present that's as much about something she can smell and taste as it is anything else. She's an inspiration to me, but also someone I've learned a lot from with respect to the edge between accepting what is so and doing what you can about the body, the aging and declining of the body. I am of the nature to grow old. I am of the nature to have ill health.

[15:46]

You know, the miserable five remembrances. And how much suffering there is when I fight the decline of the body. but also the suffering that comes when I just collapse into the decline of the body without some recognition of what I can do something about. It's tricky. Very tricky. And we can become obsessed with this body and lose track of the heart-mind. which is more important than anything else from my perspective. The morning I went to see Lenore, I was still thoroughly on California time. So getting up early to go see her meant that I was still in this kind of fog that I seemed to dwell in in the first couple of hours after I wake up.

[16:56]

And I went into a kind of neighborhood grocery store that had flowers to get some big smelly lillies to take to her. And I had this purse I love. It's just one big long zipper. It's a very amusing purse. But of course, there I am trying juggling the packages and the flowers and I forget about the purse being open, unzippered, and everything goes splat all over the floor of the store. The people lined up. And it was like everybody around me picked up my stuff and helped me get it back in my purse and in that moment I felt on the receiving end of such kindness. There's a lot, a lot of suffering happening in the world and palpably in Manhattan particularly as

[18:12]

the effect of people losing their jobs or having their work cut back two or three days than the people that they have helping them lose their job. It just exists. So there's a kind of palpable sense of this kind of suffering. that we haven't been used to now for quite a number of years. At least, many of us haven't. So the question I want to bring up, there are several, but one has to do with inviting each of us to just rest with the curious open mind about the relationship between ignorance and suffering in ourselves and in others.

[19:32]

Understanding the nature of ignorance is critical if you are going to pick up the teachings in the Buddhist tradition fully. I think you have to understand that first link in the 12 links deeply, and in particular, not in general, as always. I don't like to use the word always very often, but I do think that that difference between looking at some point in a more general way over against being very specific and in the moment is quite crucial. And what are the qualities of mind that arise as companions to ignorance?

[20:52]

Fear often arises about what one doesn't understand, what one doesn't know, what one has no sense of. The author of the book on the Taliban describes quite clearly the young boys who are the energy and the soldiers, if you will, for the Taliban, the members of the Taliban. who don't know their own history even to the extent of the culture and tradition from their own village, who have in many cases grown up without having any experience in their lives of women, many of them orphans, with no sense of

[22:02]

what has gone before them. No sense of the thoroughly ruptured but still ancient and complex cultures of their country of origin. So one of the challenges for me is to put myself in those shoes and try to imagine the world if all I know is what the teachers have told me. The teachers themselves from very limited exposure to the world. coming from poor peasant villages with very narrow range of experience.

[23:07]

But within my own life, within myself, what do I know about ignorance? And how often do I go to my conditioning to reactivity in the face of my ignorance about what's so for another person? How quickly I might go to defendedness when I feel on the receiving end of some shower of hot you know, you statements. Do you all understand what I mean by hot you statements? Leaning all over one's body and mind. What do you mean?

[24:22]

fear and heartbreak. Those are two possibilities but I think there are many more. I had such an experience this week and I was, I am stunned at how strong judging and blaming arises. You know, maybe some you statements back This is the stuff, the ground of suffering that the Buddha pointed to and that is, I think, the ground of our cultivation of attention to come to this territory of the mind. And if I can keep coming back to noticing and understanding

[25:26]

moments or extended periods or a certain circumstance or a certain relationship in which what's at play is ignorance not knowing and to be able to stay with that condition of not knowing without going into some conditioned reactive mode takes training. This is where, you know, this notion of meditation as mind training, I think, is really quite accurate kind of designation. Bill and I were going to meet at 1.30. That was absolutely the bewitching hour yesterday if we were going to get to the airport in the way in which the time in which we were expected to be at the airport, two hours before.

[26:37]

So I'm making my way down Fifth Avenue. We had gone to see the Giacometti exhibit. I was in something of a swoon, kind of stumbling my way back down Fifth Avenue. And right in front of Rockefeller Plaza with their, you know, Christmas tree and people collecting pennies for the homeless and the Salvation Army and shoppers and, you know, the whole business. Suddenly there appeared this absolutely ravishing young Tibetan woman done up in a Santa Claus hat for some kind of photo shoot. And everybody that walked by that had a camera stopped to take her picture as well. So there was this enormous plug in the middle of the sidewalk of Fifth Avenue, right at that spot. And it was like nobody could get through. Everything had just stopped with this cluster of, you know, I don't know, 20 or more people taking pictures of this beautiful young woman.

[27:49]

Suddenly, there's this voice from the back of the crowd trying to get through. Move this shit! And we all got through. What stops us where we go, oh, a beautiful young woman. Or, you know, fill in the blank. So we just don't pay attention to where we are or what's going on around us. Those moments where we drop into a kind of a state where what's operating is ignorance. How crucial to recognize when we don't know where we are?

[28:58]

And what arises from that not knowing where I am, and not knowing about the not knowing? How interested can I be in not knowing? Or do I have fear arise when I have a sense of, oh, I don't know? So I want to express my appreciation to all of you, what I call foul-weather ducks. You may have noticed our splendid rose bush. It just blew over. I've been trying to figure out how I was going to prune it. And the top is now right where I can get at it.

[30:11]

So, no problem. But if any of you want a sweetheart rose, they're reachable. Wet, but reachable. I'm, in this kind of weather, grateful to the birds, who don't seem to be slowed down by a little wind and rain at all, and by my old dear friend and teacher, Harry Roberts, who took a small group of us camping for over a year. One weekend a month, we went out camping, and it never was cancelled. Those trips were never cancelled because of weather. Because, of course, part of what he wanted to teach us was about our ability to be happy and dry, or happy and wet, but later dry.

[31:12]

crisscrossed the coast range from here to Oregon and these trips over the course of actually probably more like two years. And I remember these, we'd take a big roll of mylar and we'd cut it so that we'd have a sheet that would go on the ground up over a pole that was stretched between two trees and down with a cooking fire at the open end, big enough for 12 of us to sit in there. Rain, what's the problem? It's great and incredibly beautiful. So, thank you, Harry, for letting me discover the joy of being out in all kinds of weather.

[32:28]

The quail have been doing their thing. The frogs have been doing their thing. And the earth is just soaking it up. It's a kind of ignorance about our capacity to be out in weather of this sort and relax enough to have some access to the experiences of the day. So, that's what's on my mind this morning. Oh, there's one other thing I wanted to say. We went to the Met to see the Bruegel drawings, exhibit of Bruegel drawings, which I found... I found myself feeling quite moved and fascinated.

[33:42]

I studied the drawings on the vices very closely. Unbelievable. He's got it down about the license. One of my favorite drawings about greed was a drawing of different kinds of piggy banks and strong boxes that people would keep their money in, and they were all fighting each other, trying to get each other's contents. It was great. Anyway, when the catalog comes, the drawings reproduce quite well. And of course, many of the drawings in the show also were done in order to be engraved. And the engravings are particularly clear and easy to read. But some of you might find some of the imaging of

[34:48]

Suffering and the causes of suffering are useful. I think that was the extent of our culture glut. Is that right? Bruegel, Giacometti. Oh, we went to see pearls. That was about suffering. Suffering of the critters that make the pearls. A very interesting show at the Asia Society called Monks and Merchants from the 4th century to the 12th, something like that. Some very remarkable Buddha figures, Bodhisattvas. in this context which has been completely rebuilt at ruinous expense, very glitzy and busy.

[35:51]

It's quite interesting to have this exhibit in the middle of this very expensive, glitzy environment. I keep having this experience, but in a way I felt like what happened for me this week was going a little bit deeper about understanding what is being pointed out in the Buddhist tradition and my enormous gratitude for those, you know, Look here. Look here. Consider this. Look here. Okay. Now, if you go out this door, I'll just turn. What struck me more in that exhibit, but it was true in others, but particularly in the Giacometti exhibit, was how few people were there

[37:05]

looking at the work in an unmediated way. There were people with a docent group where the docent was telling them what was going on in the work. There were people with the acoustic guides. But to just have your own direct experience. There were, there were, there was practically nobody who didn't have that kind of, you know, help me understand what I'm looking at. Doing it right. Yeah. Tell about the Bruegel drawing of the artist and the... Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Yes. Thank you. Big drawing of a, of the artist. and the connoisseur who is all kind of scrunched up and worried and constricted and the artist who's just there.

[38:25]

The connoisseur had one hand on his money bag and had glasses on. Apparently, in the iconographic tradition within which Borgl was working, glasses represent ignorance. Is that interesting? Yeah. Because you can't see clearly. What was the symbolism for the sieve on the... Sifting right and wrong. So that was justice? Was the headpiece on... Prudencia. Prudence. She had the sieve and the column I can't remember what the other, I don't remember. I thought the thing about glasses, oh yeah, that's right, she was holding there. I thought that the, that symbolism for glasses was very interesting, but you know, well, but you know, I have mine on, but they don't work.

[39:31]

Especially when I go to a museum because the range, you know, it's fine here. I get out to here, you know, where you have to be or the alarm goes off, often I can't see. So, you know, they were, but within a very specific context. So, for me, it was, there was something right about it, but I thought, there's also a way in which glasses are supposed to help us see better. It was interesting. Maybe they didn't make them so well then. Yeah, maybe so. So, I wonder what's up for... Oh, no, I forgot about the... There's a big painting of cows, and then looking at the painting is a cow.

[40:33]

And then there are all these very serious suited guys looking at the cow, looking at the painting. No, no, no, no. Do you, do you remember who the, I don't remember who the artist is, but I did, I got the post, I got the postcard. I thought, this is, this is great. This is great, you know. With great seriousness, looking at the cow, just looking at the cows. Or the one of the bears that come up on the camper sleeping in their sleeping bags. And now let me think, what is the cat thing? Ooh, sandwiches. It was a little bit, I got into that perspective that Gary Larson is so good at at the exhibit at the Natural History Museum on pearls because, man, what happens to those creatures who are making the pearls?

[42:06]

It's manufacturing. And then the final, the final exhibit was of this pearl. It's, you know, maybe this big. What's the name of that pearl? La Peregrina. The Pilgrim. The Pilgrim. And listed all the many different owners of this pearl over the centuries. And it was given on an enormously elaborate, bejeweled presentation. by Richard Burton to Elizabeth Taylor on Valentine's Day. Well, you know, it's interesting. She had some piece of jewelry which the insurance company wouldn't insure unless she had six bodyguards with her at all times.

[43:09]

And she said, then I'll sell it. It's not worth it. Because she wears her jewelry all the time. Which I thought was kind of great. But I'll tell you, this necklace with this pearl is like... And the many, many, many people who've so-called owned it. It's just remarkable. What does happen to the creatures they create? Well, you know, they get, they're killed in order, you know, to harvest the, you know, you don't open the clam or mussel or oyster or any of those folks. And then put, you know, they close back up again.

[44:12]

I also thought it was very, very interesting. There's an area on the Mississippi River where there were freshwater pearls in extraordinary abundance. Extraordinary abundance. And, of course, not so interesting because there were so many of them. It's the rarity that's interesting. So, ignorance up for any of you, or are you all awake? I actually, when you were speaking about the weather, coming here, I recognized a very old pattern. You know, you hear voices in the morning when it's like this in the city, you have to go over to Virginia, you hear, don't be a fool. Don't do that. That's ridiculous. That's really dumb.

[45:13]

But this is where my gratitude for Harry comes because the voice I hear is Harry's voice, oh, put on your boots, get your big heavy raincoat and rain hat and go out to the beach and see what's happening out there. Has the beach disappeared yet? What's happening with the salmon? What birds are out? Well, also, having the right gear makes the voice about go out possible. The rubber boots I have are so heavy that I don't enjoy putting them on and going somewhere. I just kind of go like this. I realized how fear-driven I was. I grew up in a country where I was used to having the fear, but the voices were still there.

[46:26]

I'm afraid to go out, so don't you go out. Right. Well, then you have stories of people like John Muir. out in the wilderness, you know, in a big thunder and lightning storm, what's he do? He climbs a tree and hangs out in the tree for a day or two, lashes himself up there just to kind of, yeah, check it out. It's another perspective. But, you know, so, how much of a mother's voice with her child is coming from fear and vulnerability in the face of one's child's vulnerability. I mean, I think that's a real issue in that relationship. And how do we work with that? Well, just to recognize, oh, this is my mother's voice, can be enormously helpful.

[47:41]

Oh, well, several weeks ago, the first apple tree that was just laden, the Mutsu apples, just incredibly tasty. There were so many apples on the tree, and we'd gotten two inches of rain, no, four inches of rain in two days, the first big storm. And I went out there, and the whole tree had just gone over, because the ground was so saturated. So we took all the apples off and replanted it. We'll see. Of course, what I think of is, you know, this is December 1st and we've got this series of storms stacked off the coast. I don't know where we are on the... in the number, but when we left on Saturday, there were five storms, kind of sitting, waiting to come in, one after another. Well, if this keeps happening through this month, we're highly, it's very likely that we'll flood, as we've done twice before.

[49:14]

Well, the house probably won't flood. The Zendo probably won't flood, You know, we don't know. I mean, in 80, was it 81? The library end of the house was in water up to my hips. That was before we bought the house. Now the question is, is that ignorance? Or was that a want of ignorance? I mean, was it an informed purchase? I like to think of it as an informed purchase. I sat in the kitchen on a high stool with a thermos of coffee. Bill is dying of pneumonia. We had to carry him up to high ground. And I just sat there and watched. It was extraordinary. It was marvelous. It was thrilling, the kind of power of the water. It was coming from all three sides, all sides.

[50:19]

Just, you know, this is a floodplain. But the water came from every direction. The road going up to Muir Woods was above the tires of... One of my son's friends had a car on that road, and it was just, you know, drowned. It's wild. But it's the way the creeks get scoured and cleaned out. And, of course, in the meantime, different human beings have filled in down below, downstream, and we haven't had a good scouring. So there's a certain amount of silting in, and we're due. From the creek standpoint, it would be very good to have a really good cleaning. We'll see. But, you know, around the turn of the year, around New Year's and right after, is when we tend to get very high tides.

[51:23]

When you have very high tides, a lot of water, a lot of wave action so that the ocean is higher. All those factors come together and then you have flooding. Just in time for the retreat? Well, maybe just after. When you're still... I'm sure this building won't flood. It's up enough. The house? I don't know. So, you know, one of the interesting questions is curiosity about, well, what is ignorance? And, of course, what's being pointed out in the Buddhist tradition is the kind of ignorance that is about the essential nature of things, ignorance about impermanence, about suffering, the fact of suffering, and ignorance about the emptiness of inherent self-existence of all beings and all things.

[52:36]

Thurman's translation is unconscious misknowing, which I like a lot. I find that quite useful. And how curious can I be about what I don't know I don't know? Because that's an edge where, for many of us, fear comes up. least in my experience. I had a conversation with someone recently in which I observed that there were two layers of interaction between me and this person and that I completely accepted this person's description of his intention and what he wanted to be about, but that I also had a sense of what was unconscious but being communicated.

[53:55]

And my sense is that to not go to fear and defense in the face of, oh, you mean there's something that I'm expressing that I'm not aware of expressing, that I don't up until now anyway, have any access to. I think that's the place where having company and having essentially developing some courage about seeing what one would rather not see. Somebody I've been talking to is working with the precepts and working with seeing patterns in himself that are in conflict with his picture of the kind of person he is. So working with the precept about not lying. Well, I'm a person who's honest. That's who I am.

[54:58]

And to then discover, oh my goodness, I'm lying all the time, very little, small, but my press release and what's actually so, there's a huge gap. And for this person, a lot of struggle around not going to judging and blaming and kind of sinking the ship with all of that reactivity. And, you know, what I keep reiterating is you cannot work with the precepts. You cannot work with this pointing out and uncovering about one's conditioning and about one's behavior unless you can do it with a mind which is open and not judging and not reacting. If you're reacting to what you see that you're not thrilled with, you're gonna start shutting down at the process of seeing.

[56:04]

That's why I'm such a fan of the bare noting practice, because it's a way to note and then leave the focus before you get caught in all that, oh, I'm such a creep. Of course, what was interesting to me was that this person was somebody who'd had very high positive experience with bare noting in another situation. Bare noting, interestingly. I don't remember bare noting some mental pattern. But didn't understand, oh, if that was a practice that was fruitful in tending that habit in the mind, it might be useful here. Anyway, the bear noting practice is terrific for what we would rather not see, rather not know about, rather stay ignorant of that.

[57:07]

And I think what breeds courage is when we begin to have one or two experiences of a kind of opening with seeing. That helps build the courage to develop our ability to see where we've been committed to not seeing. And every time we just have one toehold, we can work from that positive experience of the capacity we all have to train the mind. But I think we have to have some experience of, oh, I can do this. I can actually bear to see what's so. Otherwise it's all just, you know, trying to argue, intellectually argue oneself into or out of something, which... I don't know how it is for all of you, but my experience, thoroughly, it doesn't work. It's just thinking. Thinking about.

[58:09]

Marion? I just want to comment. To be able to do that takes a lot of... But what I'm saying is that that quality of groundedness and capacity to stay present can begin with one moment of being present and with seeing clearly. Otherwise, we keep putting off the seeing until we've developed what we think is the necessary ground. And my experience is that it's the actual process of a moment of being present with what's, with seeing, oh, that was a lie. Bottoms of the feet, take a breath in and out. Out of that, I realize, oh, I didn't die when I just saw what I'm not thrilled to see. So that becomes a source of a kind of groundedness and capacity.

[59:21]

I had an experience over Thanksgiving. I don't know if that's an example of that. I have difficulty with my older daughter who's going off to college now, who has an eating problem, so she can't come to visit, not me, but the rest of the family. crabby, angry self. And my experience was, it was good for me to see her. I wanted to see her. I hadn't seen her for two months. And my experience was just very much like driving through this storm, knowing that you will pass, knowing that for however long this passage is, it can't hold up like this. It may get worse, but I can kind of bear with it. or riding a chair with a speaker on it and blowing on it, knowing that eventually you'll be over. I wonder if that's the right attitude. Otherwise, if I didn't have that attitude, it would be really exhausting.

[60:28]

Well, I think that often our capacity for remembering, oh, this also has the mark of impermanence, is in fact what makes it more possible to stay present. Yeah, absolutely. And that's true in the moment of some very intense negative emotion arising. Oh, this has the mark of impermanence also. Even though it feels like I'm going to be in this state of mind, you know, for days. Or, in this case, once child. Mothers and daughters need to take a long holiday from each other at a certain point. It's called going away to college, for example. Marth? While we're on this topic, I've been just the last 12 hours doing this thing of attachment to positive things.

[61:37]

been looking for a job and he just got one yesterday in his field and it was so exciting for him and it was so exciting for me. I realized how excited I was for him and how his career projection. Bhavana. Becoming. Expectation. Right, right. So I'm just having to... Well, but... Well, of course, I'm immediately struck with how do I deal with this? There's that wonderful word, deal. Deal with. over against being present with what's arising in your mind. Oh, oh, oh.

[62:41]

And to just stay present.

[62:46]

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