Then of course the third stage is that you, it's safe to do it here although I wouldn't do it in the streets of New York, you do what we did with your glance while you are walking. So you have, you try to grasp what transpires behind what appears.

Now I must say that this is easier to do with a flower than it is with the trees because that's where the quintessential nature of the plant bursts forth, in beauty. And so there aren't that many flowers about, but this one you can remember to do. There are different techniques I hope you know them now.

One is a Zen practice which you could do with an object. One says the word object. There's no such thing as an object, but still. I would take for example a vase. And you know how we shift our glance when looking at an object, left and right, and up and down and so on, and that's even deflecting our glance away from the object. Where as here, what the Zen masters do is just zoom on that vase and stop any impulse to shift one's glance left or right or above and below. And concentrate on it for twenty minutes. And then, when you start looking around you, that vase seems to be floating in the air.

In contrast, with the way that things look, ordinarily one is shifting one's glance when looking at things, and so the contrast between that kind of perspective and the way that a vase looks is of course enormous face-typing. And then you do the same thing with a flower. That is instead of looking at the different petals and so on, you just keep your glance at the whole flower, the holistic flower.

And then you start, after twenty minutes, it might take longer, it might take about half an hour. And then you start moving your glance around. Gosh that flower is really alive. Incredible. You have a real one-to-one communication with that flower. It's worthwhile spending half an hour to do that if you can find a flower. And of course later you do that with a human being and then you really start to get into the being of that human being.