There is a very famous Zen Cohen in Rinzai-Zen Buddhism.

They give people of these kind of paradoxical riddles which are meant to challenge the rational way

we interpret life and open the minds to solutions that are beyond the

strict limitations of the rational logical left atmospheric, problem solving, bind.

And one of the famous Cohen's that I'm going to be sort of using as a frame for tonight's talk is the one that goes if you

see the Buddha on the road kill him.

Sounds like a really mean thing to do, right?

Poor Buddha walking on the road.

Why would you want to do such a thing?

So I'm going to leave that there for a while and then I will circle back to it after I've introduced some ideas that hopefully will be worth reflecting on.

And then when we return to the Cohen, maybe we'll have an interpretation of it that will

be worthwhile, or at least in some way thought-provoking.

So putting that aside, all human beings according to two famous psychologists,

Heinz Kohath and Ernest Wolf,

Ernest Wolf, sorry, who wrote a series of papers in the 1970s

that were very influential in developmental psychology, propose that people need three things to wind up with

a healthy self, a healthy psychology and adult life.

The first is they need to have experienced something called modeling,

which was we need to have had a caregiver who posits a positive example of how to succeed in the world,

how to get one's needs met,

how to confidently pursue goals.

So a figure that the child can look up to

...