Student:What is living and dying? Master:When thoughts go up and come down, this is one small process of living and dying. Our thoughts are habits.  Our feelings are habit. If we want to really have freedom, we need to start to have freedom of your thoughts. If you don't have freedom of your thoughts, you don't have freedom of your actions, your behavior, and your life.   We are the ones who generate thoughts. But we cannot control them most of the time. When thoughts go up and come down, this is living and dying. The moment that you were born here till the moment that you pass away, this is also living and dying. Just like a whale comes up from the sea and goes down into the sea, this is one second of living and dying, one second of lifetime and all the particles are one moment of this lifetime. We come up from the self and it goes down to the self, no more and no less. As a Zen practitioner I always tell students you don't need to have a fear of your living and dying, of your future. I advise students, one thing you should be afraid of is the creativity within you. The creativity is always there. That means you can always have thought.  You can always have your different feelings.  You can always have a different life. But if you don't know how to use the creativity, you don't know how to master your mind, and you will have countless suffering in the future. You can think.  I can think. The thinking ability, nobody can figure out it comes from. We have a brain wave, when you have different thoughts you have a different brain wave. A machine can only register when you have a brain wave but a machine can never realize where the thought comes from. The thought isn't coming from your brain.  The thought isn't coming from your heart. The thought is not coming from self. Brain is energy.  Heart is energy. Physical body is energy. Everything you see, you feel, they are all energies. But they are created from where? Different religions have different explanations.  But let me just put it this way, every single thought is created by your self, but the self has no form. So you can think, I can think. If you are thinking wrong you will go to the wrong place. If I am thinking right then I will go to the right place. So everyone can think. But the problem is, what are you thinking right now? Can you handle that, or not?