How are we doing? I always think I'm waving at the Audubon when I look at this. tape recorder because I meet so many people who say oh I listened to you on the autobahn which stow are you in now I'm not in a stow I am a stow So you can have an enlightenment experience which you bring into your psychology in a way that's destructive. So enlightenment doesn't necessarily mean that your psychological situation is cleared up.

[01:05]

So enlightenment does not mean that your psychological situation is somehow clarified and clear? And I think most people, as soon as you say, I'm enlightened, this is psychology, that's not enlightenment. As soon as you want an enlightenment experience, this is psychology, not enlightenment. Rinzai, Linji, all of these teachers... say if there's any trace of enlightenment in your enlightenment there's no enlightenment so there's various experiences that can make us feel good or refresh us or turn us around But as long as those are part of who we think we are, this is not really enlightenment from a Buddhist point of view.

[02:07]

So let's, if we define enlightenment as a... freedom from identification with our thoughts, that's one aspect of enlightenment, one angle of enlightenment. So the more we have those experiences, the more likely it is that we can free ourselves from our psychological problems. So enlightenment as a process, a wisdom process, not enlightenment as an event, but enlightening modes of mind enlightenment should be a gerund not a noun like a tree is a noun treeing is a gerund so

[03:28]

So when you see a tree, you see treeing, not a tree. And to see treeing is to be more free of conceptualization than when you see a tree. So it's better to say a bodhisattva is enlightening than enlightened. So enlightening understood as a process as well as specific clear experiences can definitely help us with our psychological problems. But that's not really the point of The point of Buddhism is to help us with our psychology, but that's not its main point. And anyway, we Buddhists do not want to put psychologists out of business because so many of our practitioners are psychologists. So we have to keep the psychologists in business.

[05:13]

So if a practitioner has psychological problems, we send them to the psychologist. If the psychologist has psychological problems, It never happens. What else? Now, how can we make this more practical for you? We have this story.

[06:20]

Let's go back to this story. Mm-hmm. How is it when the tree withers and the leaves fall? So where does this question come from? Mm-hmm. Now, you have to work with a koan like this. You have to kind of put yourself in the situation of the person asking. Can you imagine asking somebody that question? Say you're practicing with someone. A teacher. A teacher. And you're trying to, you notice things, we have to assume you notice things happening to you.

[07:22]

More and more things are falling away. And you know when winter comes and the leaves fall and there's the tree stark against the sky. Bare and simple. And there's this movement in practice. Now there's always movement. And Zen emphasizes developing bringing these movements into two basic pulses. An outer pulse entering the world and an inner pulse entering a freedom from distinctions. And one is called the activity of compassion.

[08:34]

And the other is called the activity of wisdom. So a big part of practice is this turning inward to a freedom from distinctions. And while zazen or meditation at first is becoming familiar with your karma, in the mind of sasen eventually when that clears up and you in effect re-parent yourself you can begin then to drop or free yourself from distinctions free yourself as a process from conceptualizations in a sense you're putting your baggage down and it feels something like that you're carrying around all these things all the time gaining ideas what kind of person you are how you're inadequate

[10:04]

And in the framework of time, you're stuck with these things. You can't put them down. You open your hands and they're still stuck to you. But at some point you have some experience of timelessness. No, when I look at you and I don't have conceptions and I don't think of you as and I don't think of you as male or female or young or old or having a lifespan or no idea occurs to me that you were ever born, or that you'll ever die.

[11:09]

And that's just what the Diamond Sutra says. When there's no idea of self, no idea of lifespan, What are they describing? Not that you're going to live forever, but that way of being, knowing, free of conceptualization. And when you have that kind of feeling, We call that timelessness. Is it really free of time? No, you're still probably going to perish. But practically speaking, the more moments of timelessness in your life, the less you will age.

[12:17]

And the more healthy you're likely to be. So it's not just some kind of mental trick that okay, now I've dropped conceptualizations and I'm free of time. It's like time and space. Time and space are separate distinctions. But they can't be separated. There's no possibility of the concept of time without the concept of space. And vice versa. Yeah. You can't imagine anything in time without imagining space and vice versa. So, although you can't separate them, they're still separate distinctions.

[13:20]

And we can experience them separately. And the more you experience space, the more less you experience time. So timelessness is not to be free of time, but to experience space primarily. And conceptualization ties us into time. So if you take away conceptualization or it's lessened or less identified with we suddenly have this experience blissful experience And we suddenly find we've put our luggage down.

[14:30]

And if you do that often enough when you pick it back up suddenly it's very light. And it's easy to carry on. I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding. So we have to presume this lay adept was feeling this, the way he usually found himself living, or herself, was withering. And most of the baggage and suitcases and leaves are falling. It's stripping away. So this guy, like Giulio says, What happens when everything's stripped away?

[15:35]

Is that all Buddhism is, is stripping away? I liked some of those leaves. And particularly there was this wonderful sunset effect. They were so colorful just before they went. What's going to happen to me? I'm just a bare tree in the winter sky. So maybe he has some feeling like this. He's having this experience. I remember I went and asked Suzuki Roshi once that I experienced this field and I couldn't decide whether the field was coming into me or whether I was generating it. It's a similar kind of question.

[16:46]

And often you have to work with a question in a kind of image. But it's easier to image than to conceptualize. So this lay of depth says... What is it when everything is stripped away? The baggage has been put down. The leaves have fallen. Even the tree is withering up. You can feel everything going into emptiness. Is this all there is? And young man says, exposed in the golden wind. Staying in this place, something happens.

[17:47]

The wind blows conceptions away. And a different kind of being, a process occurs. basically the same kind of question as the other koan I gave you what is the pure body of reality again what a question and young man said the flowering A flowering hedge. So here's not the tree stripped away, but a flowering hedge.

[18:48]

But this is like the experience if you've been meditating particularly, or just something, you know. And then you go outside and everything is so clear, precise and fresh. Each leaf in its kind of glowing specificity. And you feel completely some kind of inseparable from this. This is another very similar image actually to the tree withering and the leaves falling. What about this? How does one go on then? and Yanmen said a golden haired lion and here a lion represents the courage of wisdom but it's also an image in Huayen Buddhism where every hair of the lion reflects

[19:56]

Millions of other lions. So what it means is when you go on in this way, you find yourself in a inner penetrating field where everything reflects everything else. So this is just the other side but very similar to exposed in the golden wind. This isn't much different than if you're talking to somebody or with somebody and you Say to yourself no self, no other, no self, no other. And you feel the glass walls or the conceptions which separate us come away. And you're talking with the person and listening to what they're saying but on another level you feel

[21:17]

naked, exposed in a kind of field of awareness. And this kind of activity is bodhisattva activity. You find yourself simultaneously functioning in the world and feeling profoundly connected. Okay, so what I suggested earlier, if you simply work with some effort like, what really is my innermost request? How do I really want to live? If I had the... superfluity of choice, if I had an abundance of choice, in the best of all possible worlds, what would I do?

[22:36]

Asking yourself such a question requires you to put a lot of baggage down. Do I really want to do this or not? Well, you put it down for a while. Maybe you pick it back up. Yeah. And pretty soon you're able to only pick up the one or two or three things you really want to do. And you can leave the others on the ground. And the minute you decide to leave the others on the ground they So this is also coming into the process of the leaves falling and the tree withering. So, can we sit for a little bit?

[24:02]

But I'm happy to have a couple more questions if someone has... Can we sit for a while? I'm happy if anyone has any questions to answer. No, yes, yes. You haven't said anything the whole time yet. I'm sure a few thoughts have occurred to you. Thank you.

[25:41]

Just doing zazen is a kind of exposure to this golden wind. You loosen just a little bit at least your connection to your thinking. And thoughts blow in and out rather freely. You may feel like this autumn tree.

[27:31]

Thoughts blow in and out and more of them just get blown away. You may feel some clarity or purity of the tree just sitting here without leaves. And the main effort in sitting is just lifting up, lifting through your backbone, back of your head.

[30:17]

And at the same time sitting by the feeling of relaxation. And the deepest reaction, relaxation, is to rest in this primordial mind. This mind just before it turns into concepts? All right. All right. I'll let you take it.

[33:10]

Thank you. So maybe you can feel

[35:01]

this more timeless feeling sometimes. And it's quite nourishing for us to be able to move into this timeless feeling sometimes, even a little each day. And then into our more familiar time-formed mind. And the more you become familiar with this timeless feeling, which is also like being exposed in the golden wind, but this tree with no leaves is a tree free of time.

[36:05]

The more familiar this timeless feeling is for us, and the more we find ourselves nourished by it, the more it can become present in the midst of our time-formed mind. Mature practice isn't just to realize timelessness, but to come into a time-form mind, inseparable from timelessness, to come into this kind of communication to reach this kind of communication.

[37:38]

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