..續本文上一頁 your children and their children. Taking one spoonful of food, you know that you are feeding all your ancestors and your children and grandchildren. It is just like walking. All my ancestors walk with me.

　　When you are in your sitting position, and enjoying breathing in and breathing out, try breathing for your mother, your father, your grandpa, your grandma, or anyone. This is very pleasant to practice. Pick someone, call his or her name: "Mother, please breathe with me." And that is not a visualization, that is the truth. When you breathe, your mother in you breathes also. When you were a tiny living being in the womb of your mother, every time your mother breathed in, you breathed in; every time your mother ate, you ate. The same thing happens now, every time you breathe in, your mother breathes in, your ancestors breathe in, and your child who is already there, or who is to manifest later, they are all breathing in with you. That is the way to breathe in order to touch the nature of no self. People talk a lot about no self, but they don”t know exactly what it is. Here we are not talking about no self, we are living the reality of non-self. When you breathe, you breathe for all your ancestors and your children.

　　Every thing you do, you do not for yourself alone, you do for us all. And walking like that, breathing like that, listening like that, you are touching the nature of no self. And when you touch the nature of no self, you touch the ultimate dimension. There is no "I," there is no "you," because I am in you, and you are in me. We inter-are. That is not only true with Peter and Blanche, but it is true of everyone else.

　　Eating in the ultimate dimension, you maintain alive all the generations of ancestors.

　　You allow, you help coming generations to find a way to go up.

　　"To go up," means to transcend suffering, to transcend discrimination, to liberate ourselves, our situation and society. We are still caught up with many negative things: discrimination, violence, hatred and so on. So eat in such a way that you can open the way for future generations to transcend all these negative things.

　　When I sit with you and I eat my meal, I practice that. I chew with these words: I touch deeply the food, I touch deeply the Sangha embracing me, the Sangha in which I take refuge; I allow my ancestors to eat, my children and grandchildren to eat at the same time with me, and I touch the ultimate dimension during the time of eating. Those are the first four lines. The next four lines: eating in the ultimate dimension, you chew in the same way that you breathe, with real rhythm.

　　You chew and you are aware of what you are chewing. You are aware of the food in your mouth. You chew, and you touch the very nature of the food in your mouth. Eating mindfully is to be aware of what you are eating. If you are mindful, then you can discover the true nature of the food, which is also the nature of interbeing.

　　Yesterday I talked about the milk we drink every morning. Drinking the milk, you know that it is not only sweet, but that it is also somehow bitter, because of the way we raise the cows, we treat the calves, and so on. We can be aware, when we chew the food, or when we look deeply into the food: we can see the ingredients, the elements that have come together to produce that food. A piece of carrot, a piece of string bean, a piece of tofu, a grain of rice, all these things contain the whole universe, and if you look deeply, you can see the lives of other living beings in it. You can see the compost, you can even see the dry bones of other living beings in the refreshing piece of tofu. A piece of tofu is not only vegetarian. The dry bones of tiny living beings have become compost, and the grain of rice, the piece of tofu, the piece of stri…

《The Nature of Self》全文未完，請進入下頁繼續閱讀…