The “paradox” of self, other, and Interpenetration

*transcript produced by AI

Welcome, everybody, and thank you for practicing today.

I’m excited to start exploring this new open door zen sutra book with you as we kind of figure out our way of moving through the ritual service.

And now we’re here for Dharma discussion.

I think, Cass, you said you had something to kick us off with.

Yeah.

So it was kind of coincidental.

So we were sitting doing the 30-minute silent sit.

Usually I have trouble just focusing on my breath.

My mind wanders a lot.

So what I ended up starting to do was like a compassion meditation, which was sort of like a loving kindness thing, except like, I wish for you to be free of your suffering and blah, blah, blah.

And then we did the sutra, or the chants, and it was like, we don’t rely on concepts of self and others, and we just rely on pure selfless awareness.

And I kind of thought about how a lot of those common, like I didn’t come up with like meta practice and stuff, you know, like it’s very common to have like, oh, I wish for all beings and myself.

And it’s kind of like a concept of self and others was kind of built into that.

And then I was thinking, I guess, about the difference between being aware that this is how the world around us and the people we deal with conceptualize things and working within that framework and relying on that framework, I guess.

Does that make any sense?

And I guess that was the comment that like popped up is like, how do I better become cognizant of, you know, interdependent kind of sunyata reality and I guess kind of find that middle point between pure selfless awareness and the social realities we have to navigate in life.

The fundamental question, yeah, and it was as well-framed, right?

And we see this, we see that actually this contradiction kind of, well, the so-called contradiction or so-called paradox all the time in our practices, right?

And doing metta, loving kindness is certainly a wonderful thing to do and I encourage anyone to do tonglong practices or metta or anything like it because of all the powerful qualities that it brings to our lives and the positive effects, right?

But then we have this, the truth that nothing’s really separate and we have the realization that our boundaries are completely arbitrary and that I don’t exist without you, you don’t exist without me and this we space only exists because both of us are here, right?

And it’s like, whoa, what the heck?

And so the way that I’ve kind of come to recognize it is that it’s really about seeing through, right?

So it’s like, and what that does is it just breaks down any rigidity that forms when we rely on frameworks.

So it’s not saying don’t have concepts of self and other that appear, concepts of self and other will appear as part of the unfolding of reality.

And one way to talk about that is the difference between being and becoming.

So since being is a moment of pure awareness, there’s movement, movement creates a subject and an object that’s witnessed, that witnessing creates an eye structure, which includes certain things and a you structure or a not eye structure that includes everything else.

And then we go through a process of having a preference and having an emotion and having a behavior and having our thoughts and doing our actions in the world.

So that’s all part of the becoming cycle.

The actions happen in the world and it falls back into that pure moment of experience, which is pure selfless awareness, which is the interconnected truth of all of this just kind of divine interplay of light.

And then it sprouts another seed and it becomes a whole becoming process, right?

And that’s happening thousands of times a second.

The frame rate is so high that it seems like there’s never really a being because we’re always becoming.

But when we slow down in our meditation, we can see the being moment and we recognize that that’s what’s going on, right?

So we have this process.

And basically, kind of a long way to get into my response to your question, when we know all that, right?

What we’re asking ourselves to do is to rely upon or to integrate that realization so deeply into our consciousness that while we’re in the becoming part of things, while we’re in our daily relative interactions, we are aware of the totality of reality all the time.

And so we rely upon the truth.

We rely upon the insight that’s gained through practice.

And we don’t forget that in favor of all of the stuff that’s going on.

And that’s kind of the balance that we’re looking for is to integrate that insight into our relative consciousness.

So our relative consciousness functions from the place of insight.

Okay, I just want to make sure that I’m conceptualizing this right, or that I understood what you were saying, right?

It’s basically like, yes, there is the pure selfless awareness, which we rely upon, but that relying upon that doesn’t make it so these other structures of self and others don’t manifest necessarily.

They’re still there.

It’s just that I am not making them the basis of my understanding.

My cat’s being a little bit of a brat, right?

Can I share a short Vanka thing that comes to mind with that?

Like an image in a mirror appears, but isn’t there in the mirror projection, fools all see their double.

So that for me is like, sometimes helps shatter the fabrication, getting stuck in a subject object situation when I think about it that way, seeing my double.

So it was pure awareness, seeing your double as far as pure awareness, the mirror.

Realizing what is my projection, realizing what is your projection and how can you remove yourself from your projections?

Well, there’s nothing to remove.

It’s just a different way of seeing, I suppose.

You said a second ago, it’s seeing through it.

It’s there, it appears, exists, but it does not exist, but yeah, I can see through it differently.

At least that’s, I mean, it’s like a chapter behind where I am in the Vanka, so it’s still fresh.

And when I sit, that has like reverberated in some of my sets recently, but yeah, that’s kind of what it does to me is like, is like to help drop into that vision of seeing through the cognizing of duality, I suppose.

Yeah, and exactly, the Lanka is teaching us that liberation is in understanding the mechanism by which reality unfolds.

And now that we recognize the mechanism by which reality is unfolding, it no longer traps us and no longer creates the same suffering, right?

And so the mirror analogy, and it was well said, how do you escape your projections, right?

I was actually hoping for you to say some asinine crap, but you didn’t.

You said, well, no, I mean, it’s just recognizing that that’s what I’m seeing.

I’m just, I’m just seeing me in the mirror and now that I see me in the mirror, I relate to it entirely differently because there’s the confusion, the illusion hasn’t sucked me in, right?

And that’s it.

It was really actually quite simple.

Oh, that got me thinking of like something else that I do a lot where I’ll be reading a story or watching a movie or something and I’ll be like, man, why does this character feel like it’s insulting me just by existing?

And it’s like from him talking just now, I was like, oh, because I’m projecting myself into it.

How do I stop myself from doing it?

I don’t need to do that.

I just need to recognize that it’s just a projection.

And so that was like a little thing that just clicked from that exchange for me.

Yeah.

Love it.

What a great domain of practice, you know, when we get sucked into a movie or a story that we’re reading and just like having that moment where we get to snap back out of it and then realize, oh, that’s.

Are you lagged?

I think it’s frozen.

Yeah, I froze.

I don’t know.

You said get sucked into this moment was the last thing I heard, you get sucked into this moment and you can do the same thing as you snap yourself out of the illusion, you snap yourself out of being so enmeshed, boom, detachment.

Now we’re no longer dwelling.

Now we’re liberated.

Now we can make skillful action.

And for my experience, that requires great discipline and practice because of our sitting practice meditation, because otherwise.

It’s so easy to just fall back and becoming completely consumed and absorbed by your story, your identity.

So it’s remembering.

Remembering why we do this and do it.

So you can snap out.

Yeah, I don’t mean to cut you off there, sorry.

No, it’s all right.

I love that because it’s contextualizing sitting practice is so important.

Why do we sit?

If we’re sitting for state experiences, then we miss out on the practical function of sitting, which is attention training.

That’s why I prefer concentration meditation so much more than open awareness meditation, because an open awareness meditation, you can spend your whole time daydreaming.

Right.

And in the Jhanas, the Jhanas are great because they really teach us, they refine our concentration by going to increasingly subtle objects and having to hold our mind concentrated on things that are increasingly.

Attenuated, right, which is very difficult and it really hones our attention, but and then we get these awesome state experiences, too, which is super cool.

But the point of the Jhanas isn’t the state experiences, the point of the Jhanas is the honed concentration so that you choose how enmeshed you are.

You choose where your attention gets grabbed.

Right.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And without that framework, we can sit for a long time and not have any liberation whatsoever.

We might be somewhat awakened.

There are opportunities to awaken without having that context, but there are very few opportunities for liberation without that context.

Lower version of your regular crazy, a lower order version of the regular crazy.

Awakening without liberation, that’s about what it is.

Right.

One thing, like one cue that has stuck with me that like, you know, it’s good for like kind of cutting through like the momentum that conceptual consciousness can can get for me is something Lock Kelly says, he goes, it’s like, what does it feel like when there’s no problem to solve?

And so like that kind of like, you know, is like the challenge of like, you know, like, what is it like to be able to solve a problem?

And so like that kind of like, you know, is like the checkmate move of my conceptual consciousness, and all of a sudden it goes, oh, and then it’s quiet, you know?

And again, like, like training the monkey, you know?

I like that one.

I mean, I’ve never heard that one before, but my immediate reaction was, well, when there’s no problem to solve, my mind will just create a new one.

Well, because it’s like, I don’t know, it’s it’s such a weird thing.

Like having no problem to solve is more uncomfortable for me than being in a disaster, because like being in a crisis is such a constant thing in my life that at least in that mode, I feel comfortable and I know how to confront it.

Whereas if there’s no problem and all I have to do is just sit, my brain, my brain just freaks out.

It’s like alarm bells everywhere, like, what am I not seeing?

That’s a problem.

And it’s like, I mean, it’s an anxiety disorder, obviously, but but it’s just so weird to me that like being comfortable and being happy and having nothing to deal with.

Feel scarier to me than everything crashing down around me, and I like that just was such a cool realization that just hit me, it’s like, I don’t have to do that, I can just stop, you know?

So this is this is a fascinating intersection of what is bound by karma and what is not bound by karma, OK?

And because of the work that we do, this is a really critical distinction.

Your nervous system is bound by karma.

Which means that it has to go through its cause and effect cycle, it has to bear the fruit of what was previously planted, right?

Your mind is not bound by karma, so you can make the realization that I don’t have to do that in your mind right now and mentally never do it again.

But your body has to go through an acclimatization process of getting comfortable in peace, and so your nervous system is still going to feel like it’s freaking out and then your mind is going to be like, well, we’ve chosen not to do that anymore.

And your body might take weeks, months, years to actually downregulate into a place where it’s comfortable without having a conflict.

Right.

And so so many times in practice, we hear this kind of like radical transformation, and that’s true, too.

It can be radical.

Right.

But there’s also just the truth of the fact that your nervous system is entrained to a certain state and your mind can make decisions about that.

But your emotional cycle still lasts 90 seconds.

You know, if you don’t feed that emotion, it’ll go away pretty fast.

But when you have all of that somatic experience of agitation, it generates mind activity.

That’s the relationship.

And so it takes like exceptional discipline and really like a huge amount of grace with ourselves to say, OK, I have to go through a process.

It’s just kind of like going through any other addiction where we have to get used to not having the thing that we feel normal doing.

I guess for me, the realization was when my body starts feeling that anxiety, I don’t have to pick the anxiety up and run with it.

I can just be like, yes, that’s anxiety.

I’m feeling it.

We can let that go instead of like, oh, I feel all this anxiety.

I need to help manufacture a problem to justify the anxiety so I can go solve the problem and make the anxiety go away.

Does that make sense?

But yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

And that’s kind of that’s what I’m trying to really like tease out here because that process of sitting with the somatic experience of anxiety, right, is going to like there’s you got to give yourself a lot of grace for that, you know?

Yeah, I kind of I get what you’re saying.

It’s like even if I’m going to break this down into another neuroscience term is a system one and system two thinking, even if like my intuitive or my logical system to thinking knows that picking it up and running with it is a problem, those intuitions are still going to arise and I’m still going to feel them on a visceral level, even if mentally I know to respond to them differently than I have been.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it just takes time.

It’s great to know where it arises in your body, but if it’s tension in the diaphragm, tension in the shoulders, because then you have something to do.

But instead of externalizing the problem into something that you can artificially resolve to temporarily relieve anxiety, you actually de-queue the system.

Right.

So it’s like I get tension in my diaphragm a lot.

And now instead of interpreting the tension in my diaphragm as a bracing against conflict, I don’t go create conflict to brace against.

I consciously release my diaphragm.

So now my system one still has something to do with the experience, but it doesn’t translate into something that system two knows is a bad idea.

It also has helped me to reframe the feeling of the physical response.

It’s like an analogy that I can use there is like, like in my yoga practice, like when the moment finally clicked for me that like, 75% of the way through the practice, and I get into a more challenging or a deeper version of a pose or something like that.

And then that’s when like, the real like fire starts in the body and like the resistance in the mind and and stuff like that.

It’s like, once I finally clicked it, like, that’s the reason I’m here.

It’s like this, this now came forward, it’s like so I can experience that panic, you know, and that like, urge for my to change pose or to, you know, to relieve whatever is in pain.

It’s like, that’s why I’m here.

It’s like, did all that work to get to this one spot to feel that just so I can go, it’s okay, you know, and just be with it.

So it’s like, all those negative emotions that could be reframed that way for me, where it’s just like, okay, great.

It’s the whole reason I’m here, like for this to come up or for me to like, process it differently.

So the next time it comes up, it’s not as, I don’t know, not as much of a panic.

I don’t think it is a negative thing, not necessarily that it’s a positive thing, but it’s just like, just to burn something up, I guess.

Yeah, I love that, Matt.

Yeah, that’s definitely my experience when pushing myself to change myself.

Pushing myself physically, you know, yeah.

Experiencing that panic, you know, whether it be yoga or on my bike and recognizing like, oh, yeah, here it is.

This is why I love this hill, because there’s the part of me that absolutely freaks out and thinks I’m going to fall over and I have to stop and I get to quiet that and keep going.

Yeah.

Yeah, not that it’s all nonsense.

There are some things that guide us and protect us, but in a controlled or semi-controlled environment, I suppose, we can play.

Yeah, well, and the thing that comes to mind is like, yeah, sometimes my anxiety is helping me predict something that I need to be aware of.

Like if I’m not, my rent’s going unpaid and I need to take care of that, like, OK, maybe I should be a little anxious about that if it’s motivating me to keep a roof over my head or like my anger.

Maybe it is keeping someone who’s trying to hurt me away.

But stepping back and looking at how many times is that the case?

Like my cat was earlier, was sick earlier this week, and me and my family were all fighting.

It’s like, how much is me worrying about my cat really fighting the infection?

Like it’s I mean, the doctor already gave me the meds.

Me sitting here ruminating on my cat being sick is not going to help her get any better.

So why do I do it?

Or me yelling at my family?

It’s just going to make them yell back at me.

And it’s just then I’m going to yell back at them and we’re all just going to keep going until everyone makes each other so angry we can’t leave our rooms.

And it’s like, so how much like, yes, these emotions can have helpful applications, but how helpful are the applications that I’m using them for is something that I have to look at a lot, because like even if like on some philosophical level, I’m right to be angry.

Is screaming really helping me get that problem solved?

You know, it’s like and so that’s why like and I mean, screaming might make the anger feel better, but that moment of relief is what makes the anger addictive.

So do I really want to go through that and like further reinforce the act of anger in the future when it’s this unhelpful, you know?

Yeah, absolutely.

And that’s that’s where I like just really getting concrete about what skillfulness is.

It’s like, am I being who I want to be while I’m doing what I choose to do?

And is it having the desired effect?

You know, these are three totally concrete questions that you can that you can check yourself against to determine if something was skillful and then it and then it kind of doesn’t the rest of it just kind of doesn’t matter.

It’s not high minded.

It’s not philosophical.

Am I being who I want to be while I did what I chose to do and did it have the desired impact?

If it did, it was skillful.

If it didn’t, then it wasn’t.

If it didn’t, then it wasn’t.

It doesn’t matter what your emotions are.

It doesn’t matter what you thought about it.

It doesn’t matter what your plan was.

It was or it wasn’t right.

And and then.

It’s amazing how fast that can help shift things.

It’s been fun to recognize when I’m not being who I want to be and be able to take a step back and see that like, yep, yep, here’s the habitual self.

Here’s the batshit behavior and be able to.

OK, I need to switch, be who I want to be.

And with practice doing that, it becomes easier and easier to do.

That doesn’t mean that I still don’t like melt into a puddle, but it’s less frequent, which which is fun.

It’s fun to grow up.

And and then it’s like if you melt into a puddle, if that’s who you want to be and what you chose to do, it’s having a desired impact.

Well, then you can say it’s skillful, right?

But there’s another part of looking at that, which has to do with, you know, a meta awareness over time.

Like, yeah, that was who I wanted to be.

That is what I chose to do.

And it did have the desired impact.

And there’s the meta question of like.

When I pay attention to my environment, is that really the path that I want to continue walking, you know?

Get a little bit more.

Well, let’s go.

Yeah.

I’m glad to hear that you’re practicing that and you’re noticing that it becomes more available.

Spaciousness, who knew?

I think so.

This could potentially sound like we’re wavering away a little bit, but I want to bring this back to something that all of you I know of her, which is practice is realization and realization is practice.

And what that really means is the way we live our life is our realization and our realization is in the way we live our life.

Practice is life, right?

So often our context for what practice is gets blurred.

And we think that like having a regular sitting practice is realization or we think of, you know, some particular subset of things as having a practice as like what that means is the way we live our life demonstrates the depth of our realization and our realization is only a realization if it shows up in the way we live our life.

That for me is a wonderful mirror because I could be saying that I have had this realization, but then I look at the way I interact with this or that and I say, well, clearly I haven’t actually had that realization because my concrete behavior is distinct from what I’m saying I know.

So then I need to go do some integration work.

I need to look at that.

I need to figure out where the disconnect is.

What’s a cognitive structure that isn’t actually manifesting in the way that I live, right?

So anyway.

I think, well, just the thought that comes to mind for me, the most pervasive rationalization I use is this person is telling me that what I’m doing is wrong and I know what I’m doing is wrong.

So obviously they understand it’s wrong, but they’re also doing the same thing.

So I’m going to show them that I can be worse just to show them how they need to be better first.

This kind of two wrongs make a right.

And it’s like, I’m never going to convince them to be their better selves by being my worst possible self.

And they’re never going to do the same.

So one of us has to stop eventually.

And it’s just such a when I break it down into all its parts, it’s just the way I rationalize being angry when I know I shouldn’t.

That’s beautiful because you get to see that moment and then you have the power of choice Actually, fuck it, I’m going to be my worst self this time again, at least you chose.

Informed consent and all that.

Hey, you’re planting cactuses.

So later on when you get pricked, you’re like, yep, that’s what I did.

I planted that cactus right there.

All part of the plan.

Yeah, I knew that I needed to get stabbed a lot more times.

And I think this is, you know, there’s there’s this teaching about like a stream entry or seven times return or once return or non returner, right?

These like stages of your progression and the path and are hot.

And over time, they became these metaphysical structures about how many times you reincarnate before you actually achieve liberation.

But when I look at the phenomenology of practice, and you all can probably relate to this, I think it might be more true that the benefit of that teaching is recognizing where we are and the number of times and like, how often do we do that?

And like, how often we forget the truth.

And the non returner is the one who’s just constantly recollected to the truth of the way reality works in this projection mechanism and all this stuff, and therefore, skillful.

The once returner is the one who kind of like, forget sometimes, like the practice has developed enough where they like, don’t really get caught up in anything too often, but they forget like once in a while.

Right, and then your seven times returner is the one who like, who really knows it, and can maybe have like, two, three, four months of living it.

But then they have like six months of not living it, and they have like a week of living it, and they have like two weeks of living, not living it.

And then, you know, they’re bouncing back and forth all the time.

And your stream mentor is the one who’s like, heard about the stuff.

Oh, yeah, I’ve heard about that stuff.

I would like that stuff.

But my reality is that I don’t actually know that yet.

I haven’t viscerally realized any of these truths.

So I’m just kind of like, in the water playing with the big boys.

But you know, kind of like that.

And from a from an actual phenomenology of practice, and the way we understand the boomies of the bodhisattva path, and when we look at the whole Mahayana context and Theravada and Mahayana context for Buddhist praxis, I just found that to make way more sense than worrying about the number of times that we reincarnated.

The rest of it doesn’t really quite track with the whole idea of like, the Eightfold Path is liberation.

So let’s Eightfold Path in this life, but then still have to reincarnate seven times because like, the cosmology just doesn’t match that way.

Well, and I mean, I think looking at well, you actually explain this concept of reincarnation, where it’s like, in every moment of becoming we are reincarnating in that moment.

And so it does, what you just said does vibe with that kind of rearranged concept of reincarnation.

And just for me, the idea of I need to reincarnate seven more entire lives that are each 90 years long after this or whatever.

The problem with that is, I’m now kicking the can down the road.

I’m not actually saying I’m chasing liberation here and now.

I’m chasing it at some imagined future life that I’m never going to actually experience.

And when I’m doing that, it feels like I’m deferring responsibility off myself for working in the moment.

Does that make sense?

If I had an emoji, that would be that red 100 one with the squiggles under it.

I need to get cards.

The Olympics.

Yeah, no, precisely.

And thank you for bringing up that idea of reincarnation for each becoming cycle is an incarnation.

And those are happening.

Click, click, click, click, click, click.

So yeah, we can live billions of lives.

Hey, there’s that.

Yeah, that’s in the reaction.

It took some work to find it.

Oh, but now it’s in my freaking leaves.

Yeah.

How are we doing?

I mean, anything else alive for anyone or are we all incomplete today?

Yeah.

Matt, it’s been a while since we heard from you.

Just want to check in specifically.

As a closing check in.

Oh, there’s a just to reinvite you into the conversation.

You’ve been in listening mode for a while.

I’ve had enough of those like half moments where I’m like, I could say something, but is that just me saying I could say something?

What’s the word?

Well, you’re invited to say the things now if you like.

Yeah.

No, nothing.

Nothing like really subtle.

I mean, nothing really like concrete to, you know, I was just kind of bouncing in different directions as Cass was talking about the concept of reincarnation or about like that ability or that possible result of being a procrastinator with the Dharma by reading that stuff, you know, but like, I don’t know.

It’s like, yeah, seven more 90-year lives.

It’s like, well, that’s an assumption.

It says it’s going to be a human birth.

Sometimes I like the way that speaks to me a bit is like, you can see it in some people, you know, I mean, I have had family members, you know, I’m sure we all do where you can kind of see it’s like, there’s so many layers of shit, like the real hope in this life that in this lifetime is like, is dwindling, or I’ve got a grandma’s like this close to passing, you know, like, and it’s been that way for like, three years.

You know, and he’s still like, you hold out this little like that she’ll have some sort of release, you know, that she needs.

And, you know, so it’s like, yeah, like, okay, like, there is this process of like, it pop up, you know, and it actualizes or doesn’t and, you know, try again, try again, you know, however, you know, what’s the roomie like, come, come again, right?

How many times you’ve broken your vows type of thing.

Anyway, so that was just what was running through my mind as Cass was speaking.

To toss out maybe a content, well, this is a little bit late in the game, given the time, but like, you know, to what’s the word you usually use?

Like spitballing, or just getting stuff rolling, riffing on stuff.

A fun thing that I never really got, like to any sort of conclusion or didn’t play the whole thing out.

It was just something that came as I was on my flight across the Atlantic Ocean that I thought was fun to play with for a bit, but I was contemplating the five skandas.

And, and that idea that popped up was like, well, and then I kind of wrote like a step progression of getting there.

At first, it starts with like, well, like the main point of it is like, is it not all just contact?

And because it started with looking at like perception and mental formation.

I can understand each of those, like in their definition state, but like, when you try to draw the line of what’s perception and what’s mental formation, like in a spectrum, it gets blurry in the middle.

And obviously, there are not clear divisions of these things.

But then that got my, it got me thinking.

It’s just like, well, it’s like, I, then I went back to, to sensation and to, and to form.

And I was like, well, is there, you know, are those not just forms of contact, like contact with the eyes, you know, with a certain vibration, contact with the ears, with a certain vibration, touch as a contact.

Then I was thinking about like the perception is like, is that just a primitive form of a mental formation?

You know, and then thinking about mental formations is that’s just like contact of thoughts, repository consciousness, that’s like contact with a memory, you know, so there’s like this formless contact and this form contact.

So, so yeah, just, you know, I was like, well, is that just like, is that just a form of just, and that went into some other ways that were like really more difficult to understand.

It was more just a feeling.

But, but yeah, even like, even our, like the, even just consciousness itself, is that like some form of contact as well?

Like, so I don’t know if that does anything for anybody, but I had fun thinking about the skandhas in a different way or playing with it.

I know ultimately, like, this is all just like, these are like fabrications of the mind, but I thought it was fun.

Well, they started out as skillful means to get people to realize the truth of interpenetration.

Right.

And so when you engage in such an investigation, you integrate into your intellect a realization of interpenetration.

And that sounds like that was working for you.

And so that’s good.

Wonderful pastime.

Good way to spend an airplane ride.

Yeah, what else am I doing?

Talking about not procrastinating.

So thank you all very much with that delightful invitation to contemplate the skandhas.

Let’s go ahead and do a round of closing check-in.

I’ll start with Robin, then Cass, then myself.

Robin checking in on a fall morning that unfortunately stopped raining.

I was looking forward to a rainy day.

Now I feel the pressure of sunshine.

Very grateful to be here.

Wonderful to see you, Cass.

You look great, by the way.

It’s been a while.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Many things going on, lots of pots in the fire.

And it’s wonderful to have a space in the community to take some time to slow down and remember our purpose.

I’m in.

Yeah, Cass checking in just outside Cleveland, Ohio.

Yeah, it’s good to be back, first of all.

So I mean, I guess for me, I mentioned my cat getting sick conflict between my family.

It was a week of chaos up until about Wednesday or Thursday morning.

And I was talking to Dan, and he just happened to mention.

And I was like, you know what?

I do feel like that all this and how poorly it got handled by not just my family, but also me primarily, because that’s who I need to look at.

Because I can never control anything they do.

So it was like all this and the messiness and unskilledness of it, I feel like was a call to get reconnected with communal practices that I’d kind of let fall by the wayside when my life started improving.

It was kind of like a warning shot.

Like, if you don’t handle this now, the next time this stuff happens, it’s going to be a disaster.

So I was like, you know what?

I need to get back into that.

So it’s good to be here.

Yeah, it was nice.

I definitely feel like I’m leaving with a lot to think about and maybe reinterpret different situations that I find myself enmeshed in as I go throughout my life.

I’m not just at home, but just in general, just a lot of new lenses to look through, which I always enjoy.

So, yeah, feeling optimistic.

I’m glad to be here.

It’s good to see all you again.

You look great, too, as well, Robin.

And yeah, I’ll pass.

I’m not checking in.

Cass, great to meet you.

Great to practice together.

Yeah, I can’t help, but kind of, and then this has been present this weekend specifically.

It’s like, I can really feel the descent into the darkness and to the cold and knowing that we’re going to the journey around the sun.

And the timing just feels so perfect.

I’ve done some running around and went to the other side of the planet for a bit.

And yeah, the rest of this year, aside from, which is also perfectly integrated with this feeling of our taking our plunge into silence in a few weeks here in session.

And so, yeah, all that’s kind of present.

And it gives me this feeling of peace, of this returning to quiet and to turning inwards and reflecting when there’s not the sun that’s showing us everything outside as much.

Yeah, and grateful along the way to be able to sit with you all this morning.

Thank you, everybody.

And I’m in.

Let me check in from Columbiana, Ohio, where it’s getting ready to down board.

So that’s exciting.

Yeah, always delightful to share in the Dharma.

Thank you all very much for keeping this practice close and convening and being together in the Dharma.

On we go.

I’m in.

Have a nice week, y’all.

Hi, everybody.

Bye.