Thầy shares a dream he had twenty years earlier. Accepted into the class of a famous professor, he learns that a young man who looks exactly like him has not been accepted, finds out that the class is music, and is asked to give the first presentation with no instrument—until he finds a small bell in his pocket.

From there, Thầy teaches the young people at the retreat how to be a good bell master: bowing to the bell, breathing with a four-line verse, offering a half sound so everyone has time to prepare, and giving people enough time to enjoy three in-breaths and out-breaths. He encourages them to make a place for the bell at home, where anyone can invite it when the atmosphere in the family is not peaceful enough. He tells of proposing the bell of mindfulness to the chairman of India’s National Assembly, so members could stop and breathe when the atmosphere grew hot, and suggests a breathing room, a small meditation hall, in every house.

Thầy looks at the habit energy of running that we inherit from our parents and ancestors, and offers slow walking meditation as a way to stop and arrive in the present moment.

Continuing the sixteen exercises of mindful breathing proposed by the Buddha, Thầy goes through the ninth to the sixteenth. He suggests keeping a list of the fifty-one mental formations so we can recognize each one by its true name, and describes the practice of selective watering: not giving the negative seeds a chance, helping them go back quickly when they come up, and inviting the good seeds to manifest and stay as long as possible. He speaks of a peace treaty with our partner, and of a husband who, after Thầy told him, “Dear friend, your flower needs some watering,” watered the good seeds in his wife on the drive home. He also explores why Buddhism speaks of the world as objects of mind, before briefly naming the last four exercises.

The talk closes with eating as a deep meditation. When we stop our thinking, a piece of bread can be seen as the body of the cosmos, and Thầy compares this with the Eucharist and with the monks he has seen in Catholic monasteries reading the life of a saint during meals. He invites everyone to enjoy lunch, fully there in body and mind.

This is the third talk in a series of five given during the Happy Teachers Will Change the World retreat in the year 2013. Thầy offered this talk at Brock University, Ontario, Canada.