Opening To Big Mind

[00:00:00] Speaker A: For more information on Ancient Dragon Zen Gate, please visit our website at www.ancientdragon.org. our teachings are offered to the community through the generosity of our supporters. To make a donation online, please visit our website. Lisa Miochin, who is with us from Ann Arbor, Michigan. She came here for the weekend to work on a rakasu in preparation for receiving the precept from the sister of our Dharma brother, Eric Schutt, Leanne Schutt. And it's been a pleasure to have you here. And some of some people have met Leanne, I mean, yesterday, for sewing and I think you'll leave us today. Is that right? So welcome. And welcome to everybody, Cloudlings and groundlings, everybody who's been coming out even in this rather warm weather, getting out of the house and coming to our little temple to sit zazen together under all conditions. This is great conditions for us to be practicing zazen. A little bit of discomfort. It is my great pleasure to introduce. You know, I always feel weird introducing someone who's been with the Songa for so long, but I just want to welcome Douglas and who's our Tonto Head of Practice and all around Grand Dragon and of the best sort. We wish all Grand Dragons were like Douglas. So thank you very much for coming to speak to us today in the midst of grandparenthood and go forth and tell us your dharma. [00:01:54] Speaker B: I can do that. Good morning. It's good to be here. Thank Hougetsu for this opportunity. As much as I find myself agreeing to give dharma talks after at least in internally kicking and screaming, I really appreciate giving them because it is the best way I know to. To really come to a better understanding in some topic. Today I wanted to talk about zazen, sort of generally. It's something I do every second or third dharma talk. Usually every third dharma talk I'll talk about, you know, there's sort of a rotation of koan, dogen, zazen. Because zazen is the foundation of. Of everything we do. It's the beginning and the end. And so I want to talk about it. It helps me work out what to say. That's very hard. How do you talk about. Express verbally something which is fundamentally not about thinking and conceptual understanding. So the temptation is always, you know, just to be quiet. But you know, Katagiri said you have. Roshi said you had to say something. So here we are, you know, the basic. Under basic idea. Underlying. Underlying ideas. Underlying our practice of zaza are ideas that we share with all of East Asian Buddhism. And that is our world is a Vast indivisible whole that contains all beings, sentient beings, non sentient beings and so on. Indivisible everything, inseparable, bound up in relationship and interaction constantly. So that it. We can't even talk about an individual thing without there being a sort of a distortion. It's entirely a hypothetical. You can pluck something out of the world and its circumstances. So that's the first idea. The second idea is that at its most fundamental basic level, our mind is in harmony with that. Maybe it's aware of that. But our fundamental awareness, our fundamental experience is the experience of being here in this great indivisible world, of interacting inseparable things, objects. So the world itself is usually called something along the lines of Buddha nature. Or in Kuan literature it's called original Face. Original nature could be dharmakaya, it could be thusness, it could be emptiness, all of those with shades of meaning, but it's really talking about that. And in more pop in, not more popular, but in less formal teaching literature, Suzuki Roshi in his dharma talks sometimes refers to the whole world as Big I because your life is inseparable from the greater life of the entire world. And Uchiyama Roshi calls it universal self. What am I? Most fundamentally, I am this world. I can't be separated from this world. And Suzuki Roshi refers to the mind that is there, that is in harmony with big self is big mind, which is also zazen man. It's a mind that has. It's an open, expansive awareness. It's choiceless, it's undirected. We're not paying attention to any one thing when you do this. And it's fundamentally not about thinking is this mind is about an awareness or an experience of everything that presents itself to us as one form of consciousness or another. So sights, sounds, smells, bodily sensations, objects of mind. So thoughts, emotions, and all variants of that. So our practice isn't a technique to get us to someplace different. It's just recognizing where we are and resting where we are in the world. In that expansive awareness, we don't have to do anything. It's just there to the extent that we have some expedient means for meditation. So awareness of breath or counting the breath, those aren't concentration practices. They're intended to. They're not techniques. They're not trying to bring about some different state of mind. They're to bring us back to this big mind and this big self, Big I. So we just sit here with whatever there is. And as everybody who's started doing this finds it's usually pretty shocked by our part of that awareness is all the wild activity of our mind. Just the flood of thoughts and feelings, emotions, judgments, plans, memories and so on that come up. But we're not engaged in thinking. There are thoughts, but we're not engaged. It's not an activity that we're intentionally engaged in. And that's not a problem. Thoughts, emotions are not a problem in zaza. They just come and go, come and go. They're just part of what's here. And they don't distort big mind and are sitting in awareness of big self. We're just here. It's not some exotic state of mind. It's not some change thing. It's not some mystical experience. It's just being here, not thinking about it. Just the awareness or the experience of whatever awareness is here right now. The interesting thing, kind of interesting is that as we sit and we are open and receptive to whatever is going on in this moment, and as we're letting the thoughts go and go and go, we're sort of sitting there, you know, with our clutch pedal down. So the engine of our mind is, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. But nothing's happened. It's not engaged. It's not. It's not causing us to act. It's not doing anything. But at some point, we get caught up in a train of thought, and that's when things become a lot more complicated. And we have an experience of the world that's very different from the experience of big mind. So we get caught up in thinking, and it's complicated because what goes on is that a thought is a sort of somewhat complex fabrication. You know, with every thought, there's an underlying concept. And with the concept, there is some object that's referred to that could be just an object of imagination. It could just be some conceptual thing. It could be something physical and linked to that concept. And the object is a subject. We experience. We have a thought. We experience an object that that thought is referring to. And the subject is me. It's having that thought. And the same is true of all the other activities of our mind, such as thoughts. Suddenly I'm a thinker, I'm a seer, I'm a doer. I'm an observer, I'm a meditator. But, you know, that subject that I. That we become aware of when we're. Once we become caught up in thinking is a fiction. There is no such I. It doesn't exist anywhere. It's. It's a ghost. It's a mirage, but it has very substantial effects on, on the experience of the world and our thoughts and our speech and our actions. Because when we have that duality, that dichotomy set up of me and that object out there that I've named with some word or that I'm thinking about with some train of thought, that self feels, the existence of that self feels very fragile. We feel very vulnerable. And so our relationship to, to all these, the world, all these things that we've pointed out, these separate individual things, is all about protecting ourselves, gratifying some need, gratifying some desire, protecting ourselves from those things that might harm us or bring about some sort of loss. You do that and from there we unspool a whole train of thoughts about explaining what this thing is that we've seen, how it works, where it came from, how's it going to satisfy us, how's it going to harm us, how am I going to plan to make sure that the good things happen and the bad things don't happen? We get caught up in that and anything except for the object of thought or emotion and his sense of self. This focus on myself and how I'm feeling, what my sensations are, what am I perceiving, Everything else sort of fades into the background. It's suddenly grayed out. You can look around and you can see it, but that's not what we're aware of. We're aware where our attention has now become directed and captured and these thoughts come spooling and spooling and spooling. That happens until for some reason is an interruption and we find ourselves back right here. That doesn't mean that the thinking and emotions have stopped, but they're back in neutral again, in whirling, whirling, whirling, whirling. But we're not caught up. We're back in big mind. And this experience goes back and forth. The experience of Zazen is back and forth, back and forth. Big mind, small mind, clinging mind, striving mind, mind that's trying to control our experience, protect ourselves, get what we want or feel we need. The good thing is that as we sit in big mind with these thoughts whirling, whirling, whirling, they discharge energy, they lose force, they slow down, they become more transparent. It's in the thought energy of all those mental objects, mental operations gets converted into energy of big mind. A more vivid, clear sense of awareness of just being right here. So that it becomes over time, maybe within a single sitting of Zazen, our mind quiets down it slows down, we open up. We settle into this vivid resting in this vivid awareness of just being here. It's just ordinary. This ordinary circumstance right here. So it's pretty hard to tell someone how to do zazen. It's not like, well, do this and do that and do that. And you're going to see this because you're not going to see any specific thing. You're going to see an experience. Whatever is here right now, what's going on right now, in a minute, that's going to be something different. There's no fixed awareness. There's no fixed big self. Big self is not an object. It's not an object that can be perceived. It's just this. It's just a mode of experiencing what's there. And what's there will exist whether or not we're aware of it. Whether or not we're caught up in the small needy mind or we're here in big. But we can open ourselves to that experience of the world and big mind just by being here and distracted. And I'll just go back to small mind again and just note that that's very different. Small mind is very different in not only the fabrication of this world of separate things that we. That have captured our attention, but in the fact that we have. We have adopted that view of the world and have gotten caught up in this experience of thinking. I'll come back to that. So there's just not a whole lot to say about what to do with Bazasan. You know, it really is just sit and let your mind do the rest. Don't direct your attention at anything. Don't try to achieve anything. You know, once you're trying to achieve something, you've started thinking again. You're in. You're into small mind again, you're into delusion. When you enter into this world of concepts and thinking, it is the world of delusion. So we can say it's the world of delusion. But it's a different experience, a lived experience of small mind. Because when we experience those things out there and we see them as something that I like or I don't like, that's right or wrong, good or bad, there's an element of emotion or desire or aversion to them that fixes our attention, our focus on this thing, that gives our perception of those things heft and substantiality, just. It's the creation of our thinking that does that. But at the same time, there's this mirror reflection. If there's a thing out there that they experienced so vividly. Now my sense of self is also a bunch. So what do we do? Well, we don't. We can't stop thinking. Right. We can't stop feeling. We can't say, oh, I'm going to, I'm going to. Oh, by the way, Douglas, you feel like, Douglas, you feel like some self back here. You're this ghost in the machine sitting back here who's having these thoughts. You're, you're in charge of whatever you're doing. You're having these emotions, you're perceiving these things. You're doing things. That's just getting caught up in the same dualistic conceptualization. It's the problem in the first place. Suddenly, suddenly, oh yeah, I'm here. You may think about Zazen. I'm here doing Zazen. I have this idea about Zazen and I am doing it. Yeah. I've just transcended the duality of Samsara. Yeah, maybe not. So what can you do? You can only sit with it. When you become aware of it. You can sit with it and let things, let the world unfold. So that's pretty simple stuff. There's not much more I can say about it. But I did want to talk about because there are some people here, I don't know, just some problems that we have in Zazen. People have in Zazen. Nuts and bolts kind of stuff. I mean, the most common problem people have in Zazen is posture. Sitting in these cross legged or kneeling postures, excruciating for many people. What do you do about that? If you can't take the postures and there's some posture, posture taking these traditional positions is not the important thing. They're good because they allow you to sit without shifting around and fidgeting for extended periods of time and to do it comfortably without a lot of strain on your body. If you develop the flexibility and if flex while you're developing flexibility to sit in one of these postures, you can sit in a chair, you can kneel on a bench, you can kneel on a zafu, whatever. But it's important, these postures, having a good posture, stable posture, relaxed posture is important because it allows you to not be distracted just to be here and it allows you to relax, it allows you to breathe. So the key thing about posture is not how your legs are crossed. Although I will say that if you're really tight and your knees start drifting up, up, up, then you're going to start hunching over. It's going to be very uncomfortable. Your back will get tight. The important thing about posture is to find a posture on a cushion, on a bench, on a chair that will allow you to sit upright and balanced and to put a little curve around the area of your waist. A couple of ways to do that. One is just sit and sort of push your pelvis forward a little bit. Or what I prefer to do is just lean forward a little bit, keep my bottom on the cushion, keep it there, and then allow my head to come up as if there's a thread on the back that's pulling toward the ceiling. And I can find this point of balance. So I'm not going to have to use any muscles to keep myself in where it is. But having that slight curve and not an exaggerated curve, you know, it's, you know, it's sort of a sensation that, oh, this is what my body must look like. It's just, it's a slide curve. So you're sitting, you're sitting in front of these bones in your bottom. And if you just sit up perfectly straight, you can butt cheeks clenched and some bones there, the bottom of your pelvis, you're just going to dig into the cushion. That's very uncomfortable. So having your hips rotated forward also provides support from the muscles in your lower back so that you can. Your upper body really just sort of floats there without effort. And it also opens up your abdomen so you can breathe from your diaphragm. It's a very traditional point that's emphasized in Zen, in Japan and, and in China, Korea, South Vietnam. Sometimes people say, well, Suzui Roshi didn't talk about breathing like that. If you go do a search, it's in my beginner's mind, not always. So be yourself. He talks about breathing from the hara, that area in your abdomen all the time. He thinks it's very important. So you just have that bend your diaphragm. It's. Your diaphragm is. Your abdomen is opened up so your diaphragm could get involved in your breathing. You inhale, your diaphragm falls down and it feels like, feels like the air is coming in and is going all the way down to your lower abdomen and underneath your navel. It's not obviously it's gonna be up here, right. It's gonna come to the bottom of your lungs. But that's not what it feels like. It feels like it's going all the way down. And it gives you a sense of, not only of having enough airache, helps to provide a sense of rootedness. I'm right here, I'm stable. I'm not going to fly off anywhere in my imagination. You know, adopting these postures and maintaining them for a long time or learning to get them frequently involves pain. I think sim practice is very intertwined with physical discomfort. You sit a retreat, a sashim all day, sitting three day, sitting five days, seven days. At some point you're gonna have knee pain. And that's not a bad thing. I mean, it's actually fairly important to learn to have this pain and just have it be present in big mind, have it be part of what's present to us, the sensation, what. At the same time, what is important is to avoid injury. So you will have to decide when it's too much that you think you're actually hurting yourself, doing damage to yourself. And I think the traditional advice that I give to people is if you feel burning sensations in joints, especially your knees, or sharp stabbing pains, don't keep doing that move so that you don't tear a ligament. Sort of a related problem is legs falling asleep. Legs tend to fall asleep. They can fall asleep for two reasons. One is this posture will sort of restrict the flow of blood to your legs and feet. Or you can be sitting on your sciatic nerve, which would create numbness all the way down. You know, it's not legs falling asleep is not a big deal. It's like discomfort. It's a form of discomfort. Sit with that. If your legs are so asleep that when it's time to do chin hin, you know, you know, you bring your legs up, kneel in front of your cushions, you arrange your zafu, you still can't stand up because your legs are so asleep. Then it's time to experiment with different postures. How high do you need an extra cushion? Do you need a lower cushion? Do you need on a sit on a different part of the cushion? Do you need a different posture? Should you be sitting, kneeling or sitting on a chair until things change. And similarly, I think you really don't want to enter to irritate your sciatic nerves. If you're feeling that kind of pain, you figured out that there's some pressure against your sciatic nerve. Then experiment with ways to sit again with the postures where the cushions, where you're sitting on the cushions. The other big problem that I think we all run into is sleepiness. The great Mahayana philosopher Shantideva in the path of the Bodhisattva, the Bodhicayavatara refers to sleepiness as the great enemy of spiritual practice. And there's there no great. There's no perfect way to deal with it. Right. The easiest thing is in if you're falling asleep on your cushion or just kind of nodding off and getting clouded over. When Kinhan comes, walk around, leave Kinhen. Go walk around a little more briskly. Go wash your face with cold water. And during the zazen period, some traditional things that Dogan or Kazan, Senchi or other great ancestors would recommend would be things for a little bit of time, focusing your attention along your hairline, or focusing your attention on the palms of your hands or the bottoms of your feet, or instead of breathing and allowing your diaphragm to your abdomen to expand when you inhale. Expand your diaphragm when you exhale and pull your abdomen in when you inhale. Do that a few times, and that may help you get awake enough to not fall asleep and dream away your time on your cushion. But then we get to the mental stuff. That's really what this all about. So if we sit, we're going to open our unconscious, our storehouse consciousness, as it's called in senpuddiswathi, to all these emotions, strong feelings that can come up about what's going on now or what's happened in the future. You know, you can sit with incredible sadness or rage. So what do you do about that? That's part of what's present to you right now. It's not a problem. It's uncomfortable, but you can sit with it and it will just allow it to be there as part of right now. And over time, it will lighten up and disappear. It could very well come back, and then you need to do that again. But over time, you will be able to sit with it as it evolves, just sit with it right here and maintain this open awareness. The biggest problems that I think people have with zazen are when they start thinking about zazen and when they have expectations about zazen. Everybody gets. You know, they'll do it and they'll get bored. Oh, I thought it was going to be a lot more interesting than this. I'm just sitting here looking at this rug or this wall and there's nothing else going on. And similarly, people get very disappointed or very frustrated. And that's just more of the thinking that's just being once again subsumed within the small mind, where zazen has become some object. And I am doing Zazen and I have all these expectations. I'm doing zaza in an order to feel better and to get calm and to have a clear mind and understand the great matter of life and death. But none of that is happening. I'm sitting here looking at a wall with legs that are asleep. I'm hot. I don't really like incense. Somebody keeps sniffing or coughing, whatever, they get disappointed. And the response is the same. Non response. At some point, you won't just be wrapped up in, caught up in the frustration, the disappointment, the boredom. You recognize it, and at that point it's lost its power because you're in big mind now. It's not pushing you around. You're aware of it, but it's just part of what's going on. That's an experience of liberation. So I think. What time is it? Anyway, I've talked long enough, so let's end it here. And I'm happy to talk to people about their own experiences as I. If they have any questions you'd like to share with folks. Thank you. Screen is a little hard for me to see. So wait, if somebody. Janet. [00:29:39] Speaker C: Thanks, Douglas. Would you say when I sit and I observe myself being in the small mind and. And then feeling like I'm stepping outside of it because I observed it. And then. Okay, I'm back to it. My biggest. My thought process, the question why is always there. And I. And I question whether why is a thought happening? Whether that's the big mind or the small mind. Like, yes, the why wants to get to the nitty gritty of she said. [00:30:13] Speaker B: This and he said this. [00:30:16] Speaker C: And stepping outside of it. But. And again, when asking the question like, why is this happening? [00:30:24] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:30:24] Speaker C: Would you say that's the big mind talking, or is that still the small mind, still trying to get to the. [00:30:31] Speaker B: Bottom, the bottom line of mind. Okay. And the interesting thing is that when we start thinking about Zazen and start commenting on Zazen, we start explaining Zazen to ourselves. I've been doing this for 52 or 53 years now. And some significant part of the time I spend on the cushion is explaining myself what I'm. Myself, what I'm doing here, which is completely beside the point. Right. I mean, the. Any intellectual understanding that you have of it is not the experience of sitting here. It's a delusion. And once again, it's split you off. I'm do. I'm doing Zazen? Yeah, it's just, you know, and judging it, always judging it. No, you're not. That was. This is a terrible period. I. You're just sitting here, you're very distracted. This is horrible. And what you really need to do is Try harder. Sit harder. Focus on something. Yeah. No, right. Any effort, any trying, any thinking is all. It's small mile. It's not saying, you know, it's not saying that we. That's not what we're doing on the cushion. When we get off the cushion, we need to think. But this practice of big mind allows us to come back to big mind more and more out the cushion and to recognize that we can have thoughts and emotions and we can act. And that occurs within this awareness of what's going on in this moment. We don't have to be caught up in small mind. Frequently we are. But it's probably easier to get caught up in small mind when you're doing some physical task or especially intellectual task. But we can do that. We keep waking up, then we can act freely. That's a. And Dogen talks about that in his instruction. Tenzo Kyokan, the instructions to the cook, where he talks about, okay, what you're gonna do is you're gonna. As you're working, you're gonna take the backward step that shines the light, which means you've stepped back. You're aware of your mind. You're aware of your thoughts and feelings, what's going on? And he says, go back to it. So he. He brings. He steps back from the small mind, and he's there in big mind. And then he. His work is an expression of big mind. We can't. This is something we can't do. This isn't just something that happens on the cushion. Long answered. It wasn't entirely geek question. Wade. Chris Cadman. It's good to see you. Where'd you go? There you are. [00:33:11] Speaker D: Good morning. So, question of the awareness of discomfort in our legs when we're sitting, that's just part of big mind. Yeah. So. So why is sleepiness such a bad thing? Isn't that just part of big mind too? [00:33:33] Speaker B: It is if you're aware of beings. If the sleepiness is. You're aware of being sleepy and drowsy. Problem is when you get immersed in the sleepiness and the drowsiness. So you're daydreaming or just actually dreaming and fantasizing and you're no longer right here. It's all a part of big mind. It's all a part of big self. But it's not a part of big mind until you're aware of it. Yes. I'm sorry, what is your name again? [00:34:05] Speaker E: Andy. [00:34:05] Speaker B: Andy. Okay. [00:34:06] Speaker E: Thank you for the talk. I really. The clutch metaphor I thought was really helpful for me. This is a very broad question, but it seems to me like the, the time when we move from Zazen to our ordinary life is a kind of an interesting moment of the day. And I wonder if you have found any, I don't know any ways to, to make that, to, to sort of carry the benefits of Zazen forward into the rest of the day or, or just anything to say about that sort of transitional time. [00:34:37] Speaker B: I think it's, it's just a reminder that you're getting up and set an intention to wake up. You know, in monastic settings, especially in Soto monasteries, everything is ritualized so that everything is done a specific way so that. I'm going to open the door. This is how I'm going to open the door. Opening the door becomes a cue to coming back right here and paying attention, being aware. When you kneel, kneel to one side of the door, slide the door open, stand up, step inside, kneel back down, close the door. You know, in householder life we can't do that sort of thing, but we can set up other cues and routines. And Tik Bhat Hun is really good about setting up things like that where you'll say, okay, the phone is ringing. Before I set up the. Before I answer the phone, you say, I'm going to take two breaths and be right here. And then I'm going to answer the phone. You know, we have, we have a relationship with Zengu Roshi, who likes to talk about having routines throughout your day that are almost like monastic routines. My shoes go here. I'm going to arrange them this way. When I take my shoes off, I put them like that. And setting up all sorts of things like that. I work with tools. You know, I do the work. I'm working in the kitchen. I clean the knives, dry the knives, put them back in the drawer. This is how I. Where I put them in the drawer. This is how I set them in the drawer. You can create all sorts of routines like that, just reminders, so sort of cues. It's sort of artificial at first because it's. Then you, oh, I'm going to achieve something here. I'm going to, I'm going to bring back Big Mind. You're not bringing back Big Mind. It's there. You're recognizing Big Milo, remembering that you're here in Big Mil. It's a little artificial at first, but then it becomes natural. And anyway, just by sitting on your cushion, spontaneously Big mind reasserts itself, recognizes a small mind. Small mind is just within Big mind. Big mind steps up and says, yep, that's small. Here I am. Hey, Sam. [00:37:04] Speaker D: Nice. Nice to see you. I really answer to an earlier question. During zazen, you'll catch yourself sometimes spending time explaining to yourself what you're doing. I catch myself evaluating the process in kind of the same way. And I noticed the tone for me often isn't a strong or harsh judgmental tone. It's a more subtle one where, you know, this only feels like I'm doing, you know, 60% zazen, or, you know, I'm doing it 60% correct. So let me maybe explain or remind myself of how to do zazen one more time. You know, as I'm. As I'm sitting on the cushion, just, you know, improve that subtly or to, you know, to remind myself. So I just really related to that, and I was curious, you know, what's been helpful for you with that. [00:37:59] Speaker B: Well, the interesting thing is when you've recognized that you've been distracted or you. You've been thinking, you don't have. You've done it, you're back. You don't have to do anything. I don't think it's problematic to quickly say, okay, you know, relax. Relax your belly, head up, eyes halfway open, stay balanced, and leave it at that. Just cues to come back. Otherwise, you know, we get up and try and get. We're trying to steer our zazen, and there are all sorts of ways you could end up doing that. You can sit there going, okay, this is all one. It's all emptiness. It doesn't look like all emptiness, all one to me. Where's the oneness? Okay, I see the oneness. I see the oneness. No, no, get that stuff out. Just let it get out of the way. Just sit here, Sit here. That is the oneness. It's just being here in this place is the oneness or non. Twoness is the traditional not one, not two. Or in a lot of the literature, it's not two. Not. Not two is the nice phrase. Sandra. [00:39:16] Speaker F: I was just going to share that. A lot of times what my. What my zazen looks like is big toe hurting, knee hurting. Thinking, thinking, thinking. Oh, really? Thinking hard. Because even the thoughts, sometimes they're just wispy. But then something will catch and it starts to have a more, you know, and if I notice that, then I say, oh, this. This is really hard thinking, oh, sleepy, sleepy, sleepy. So for me, I find that it's just really helpful to, you know, just bring myself to whatever physical, emotional, mental state is actually happening. A lot of hearing of noises. [00:40:06] Speaker A: So Anyway, great, thanks. It's a lot of time for us to end. [00:40:15] Speaker B: Did you have a question? Okay, go. Yeah, quick one and then you can answer your question. Right. You've been doing this a little while. [00:40:24] Speaker G: I think I probably know the answer already, but I'm going to ask you anyway. [00:40:27] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:40:27] Speaker G: What about pleasurable experiences in Sasan? [00:40:32] Speaker B: It is exactly the same. Yeah. I'm sorry, I don't want to get into too many details, but sexual fantasy is a big deal, right? And you get caught up in it and then you go, I'm back. And you just have to be willing not to go back into the fantasy. Right. You just have to sit and say, I'm not going to do that. Did you have some other approach? [00:41:00] Speaker G: There's fantasy and then there's also like, you know, it's a good feeling when you're able to pop back into big. I. Yeah, but it's also that sort of. They get so subtle and nuanced of like, oh, don't get stuck there. Don't get attached to that either. And that there's a. There's a weird kind of sadness around that that I find comes up for me. [00:41:19] Speaker B: Yeah, we can. [00:41:20] Speaker G: Oh, I can't even force myself to stay there if I wanted to. [00:41:23] Speaker B: And we can start thinking about big mind. Right. You can try to turn big mind into a thing. And the whole point is, no, let go of all the thinking. Even thinking about big mind is sort of what so used to talk about all the time. Put it down. Put it down. You put it down. There's this relief. You can relax. Anyway, thank you. I guess that's it.