I think it's... You also have it down as realizing life. Yeah, that's... It's not clear what either sentence really means, phrase really means. But it's easier... grammatically to speak about the realized life. So, you know, what would be meant by a realized life in Buddhism, is not a question that would come up in most of our lives. It wouldn't have come up in my life if I hadn't started to practice Buddhism.

[01:04]

I'll try to say it. For what would be the difference between just ordinary life and so-called realized life? So if we ask ourselves some questions about this title, perhaps we can also ask ourselves some questions in our own life. Because I would say... Buddhist practice depends on your really having a questioning mind.

[02:28]

Why not just... Yeah, why not just accept things, your life as it is? Well, Chris, that's quite good if you can accept your life as it is. So if we say, again, this evening I'm just starting out anyway, raising some questions. If we accept life as it is, that's already practice. But what is life as it is? Well, the questioning, what I call the questioning attitude or mind, I think it has to arise, if the questions are fundamental, from a difference between our experience and our expectations or what we know from our culture.

[03:50]

So I think a person who practices, decides to practice, is a person who looks closely at their experience. And I think we all, you know, yeah, I think we look fairly closely at our experience. But certainly when I was 18, 20, 23, 24, I thought I was looking closely at my experience. But once I started practicing when I was, I guess, 25 or so, I found a whole new way to notice my experience. So if we're talking about a realizing life or a realized life in Buddhism, it would be rooted in noticing our experience.

[05:27]

Then we can ask the question, what does it mean to notice our experience? And again, I think one of the part of the sensibility of somebody who decides to practice They want to find a life rooted in how things actually exist. Well, again, we can ask, how do things actually exist? Now all of these questions, if we ask them thoroughly, carefully, lead to really the whole of Buddhist practice.

[06:59]

So I'd like to start out tonight in addition with some questions. with some of the basics of Zen practice because if we're going to talk about again a realized life a realized life in Buddhist terms means you do something to realize this life, the potential of this life? Does it just happen through, you know, you've had a lot of experience and the experience accumulates into a realized life? No, what such an idea of realization or realized life in Buddhism?

[08:05]

would mean to notice your life, your experience in a new way actually and to really have a sense of how your accumulated experience comes into the present. And in this sense, where Buddha's practice overlaps at this point pretty clearly with psychotherapy and psychology. How does your accumulated experience affect your state of mind, your activity and so forth?

[09:33]

In a way, we could say that's a point at which Buddhism and psychotherapy coincide. And that's a point at which psychotherapists could emphasize the skills of mindfulness So people could have a big space, a big space in which to notice their present experience arising. So there's a phrase Suki Roshi used to use quite often partly because his assistant teacher Katagiri Roshi used it quite often

[11:08]

And both of them knew Dogen used the phrase. Now, why am I telling you that Sukhriyashi used it, I used it, Kadagiri Roshi used it, Dogen used it? Dogen Roshi, that's good. Dogen Zenji. Well, yeah, he was a Roshi, so that's good. Because it's a simple phrase. And it's amazing that such a simple phrase could be emphasized for, well, from Dogen's time since 1200.

[12:15]

So 800 years or more. Also über 800 Jahre oder mehr. And it's the phrase is to settle yourself on yourself. Und das ist der Satz, sich in sich selbst niederzulassen. And it makes sense. I've always felt, okay, settle yourself on yourself. Und ich finde, das hat immer irgendwie Sinn ergeben, sich selbst in sich selbst niederzulassen. But actually I don't, somehow it doesn't really work in English. So maybe it would be better to say in English, to locate yourself in yourself. Somehow I think that's easier to focus a certain feeling or intention into.

[13:18]

Yeah. But I don't know, you'll have to decide how to say it to yourself in German. Or Swiss German, I don't know. It's a entirely different language. Maybe it's not so different. But actually these phrases work with the sound of the phrases, not just with the meaning. So a phrase works when the sound catches you physically. Und der Satz funktioniert dann und wirkt dann, wenn der Klang euch körperlich ergreift. So, yeah, it might be slightly different in Swiss German than High German. Und das könnte dann im Schweizerdeutschen etwas anders sein als im Hochdeutschen.

[14:38]

But if we say to locate yourself in yourself, if I say that... Wenn ich sage... Yeah, I think maybe you can, at least I can feel that. I'm sitting here and maybe I'm thinking about things and there's the car traffic and etc. But the sense to the extent to which I find myself a location, I can kind of intentionally or even actively make this my location. And you can also make this your location. This, you know, we have this little so-called Zabuton and Zafu.

[15:55]

And in Sashim, we make it our location for seven days. But we can, yeah, you make it your location just now. So that's also Zen practice, is to have that sense of location in your... Yeah. To find your... feeling, your mind, your thinking has a physical location.

[16:57]

A thinking which has a physicality to it. And if your thinking has a physicality to it, It has the pace of the body and not just the pace of thinking. Yeah. Now that doesn't mean you don't have visions and lots of ideas that spread all over the place. But I think productive thinking that really moves you and moves you into the world has a physical quality.

[18:16]

And, yeah, I don't have to quote Einstein, but I will. And he clearly said, when people asked him where he got his ideas from, he said, I get them from my body. I feel something in my body that's different than what I think. And I let that feeling proceed in my body and it becomes an idea. Yeah. So, such an illustrious Westerner who lived in Switzerland actually spoke about thinking in much the same way as our yogic meditative experience would think about it. Okay, so this, what I just said arose from my saying to locate yourself in yourself.

[19:32]

But tomorrow when we have more time and Sunday are you able to hear over there in the corner? Because you've got her. Are you able to hear over there on that side? You've got her. I'd like to ask you to ask me questions like, how can you say to locate yourself in yourself? Doesn't Buddhism say we are free of self? Yeah, it's a real question. Very difficult to answer. What does Buddhism mean by self?

[20:54]

What is the self that Buddhism wants us to be free from? The two biggest mistakes of, I think, of the way Zen is often taught in the West Is to teach Zen as meaning freedom from the self or no self and freedom from thinking or no thinking? Mm-hmm. Those are just thinking at that level and self at that level, just generalizations. And it leads to lots of misguided practice to try to free yourself from thinking and the self.

[21:59]

Now I'm reading a book recently, I started to read a book recently on a man who's lived with hunting and gathering people all over the world. I recently started reading a book about a man who gathered people all over the world and hunted them. Ah, about hunters and so on. So, before the settlement of people. What is it called now? Hunters and collectors. Hunters and collectors, yes. There's lots of them in parts of the country where it's too cold for ordinary white people to want to live.

[23:09]

Or too hot. So one of the main areas, the biggest area left really, is the far northern part of Canada and the Arctic. And there are some other areas. Not many left. But it's still a pretty large percentage of the world's geographical area. And one of the things that struck me in reading about them is they virtually have no generalizations in their language. Everything is particular. There's not really a generalization trees.

[24:23]

There's particular trees. What struck me is it's very similar to the particularity that's emphasized in yogic practice. And if it makes sense, that's one of the things I might speak about, would like to speak about tomorrow. But because if I start defining for you the self, what Buddhism means by the self, or what Buddhism means by, came up the other day, concentration, you may think, oh my gosh, this is just too scientific or too intellectual or something.

[25:27]

But Buddhism is really very particular. There's really no generalization. So if we don't generalize self and thinking, we have to look at what are the many kinds of thinking. Zen practice certainly doesn't mean to wipe out all thinking. So, to really get into the craft of practice, you have to look at what are, from us, technical definitions of the self and thinking. If you aim your life and your deepest wishes and feelings at a kind of big target that keeps moving, like this generalization, a word that has different meanings and different contexts, you're going to destroy your deepest feelings, really.

[27:26]

You're likely to. you're going to think this has no meaning, this is just kind of in the end, I'm doing it for years out of faith, but it's boring and I'm getting nowhere. So we want to have a real target for our practice. Or a target or a real sense of the territory in which practice functions. So such an examination or study will be necessary if we're going to imagine what is a realized life.

[28:27]

Now, since I haven't done seminars in Luzern before, I used to, for many years, from 84 or something on, for many years I did seminars in Zurich. Every year. I'm 84, so maybe for 10 years or so I did seminars in Zurich. But I stopped at some point for a number of reasons, but one of the reasons was there was no regular sitting group that continued in Zurich between the seminars. Because my experience is that these seminars really work, make sense, if there's a core of people who sit regularly.

[29:32]

If a few of you sit regularly, you actually create a mind that allows... Four or five of you can create a mind which the whole seminar can enter into. Yes, that's one of the things we can also notice in practice, that we have an individual mind and a mutual mind. And our individual mind is mostly the mutual mind of our culture.

[30:51]

But it would be nice if somehow we could find some mind that just was generated among us this weekend. So we could look at some things, maybe even feel some things which are somewhat different from our cultural mutual mind. Like the difference between really an emphasis on particularity and shying away from generalizations. Yes, so what are the basics of Zen practice?

[32:04]

Overall it's mindfulness. But we have to give the give mindfulness roots roots in our accumulated experience and roots in our physical our mind-body. So Zen would say, yeah, mindfulness is the basic practice of all of Buddhism.

[33:08]

But usually that is a kind of attentiveness. or a kind of thinking. And it's not really deeply rooted mindfulness. And to deeply root mindfulness, really most of us have to practice Cross-legged sitting. Okay, what you're doing here is all some version of cross-legged sitting. And what I meant to say was, since I haven't taught in Luzern a seminar before, and since I imagine I might do it again next year if Kunde...

[34:25]

And Rene asked me to. Yeah, it seems like a perfectly nice place to do a seminar. It's just downstairs from where they live. So if I do imagine that, then I... Yeah, maybe I should try to start with some basics. But I look around, I know a lot of you pretty well, so you don't need any basics. But it doesn't harm to review. Okay. So it's like God gave us standing and lying or Buddha gave us standing... No, God... Something gave us reclining and standing.

[36:01]

And Buddha said, you forgot something. Or I left something for you to find out for yourself. Oder ich habe etwas übrig gelassen für euch, was ihr selber herausfinden könnt. There's another posture you weren't particularly born with or know from your culture. Es gibt eine andere Haltung, in der ihr nicht geboren wurdet, oder die nicht unbedingt aus der Kultur herstand. Which is a strange pretzel-like posture. Das ist diese komische, brezelhafte Haltung. You put a little salt on your leg. Kann man ein bisschen Salz auf die Beine streuen. And of course this other posture many of you are doing, this posture, is called Seiza in Japanese. And this is an ancient Chinese meditation posture. And so important in Asian culture. So important, particularly in Japan.

[37:16]

Japan actually designed its architecture to force you, the average person, to sit meditation. So, for example, in Sukhirashi's time, living in Japan, He was born about 100 years ago. There was no furniture in people's houses. If they wanted to sit down, they had to sit. Yeah, I mean, they didn't stand all the time. So they sat down, and they sat down in this Seiza posture. And they designed their clothes also so that they could sit in this posture regularly.

[38:23]

Was there some kind of cultural decision to force everyone to meditate? And it certainly didn't produce a perfect culture. But it did produce a culture rooted in the particular in a way almost no other developed culture is. And that's why their craft tradition, aesthetic tradition is so extraordinary. And even today, where there's lots of Western furniture and stuff in people's houses.

[39:42]

Traditional craftsmen, even if he's carving bamboo spoons for the tea ceremony, say, would only sit the way you're sitting or the way you're sitting. They would just feel, sitting in a chair, their body wasn't concentrated enough in a way that allowed them to be skillful. So I'm trying to talk to you about In a detailed way, a rather different way of discovering, of realizing our life. So if you look carefully at what we've talked about so far, there's quite a lot that could be opened up.

[41:24]

What is a mutual mind that we generate now together, for example? How do we notice that or feel that or let that happen? And what's the advantage of doing that? Or maybe there's no advantage, maybe it just feels good. Or maybe it's an antidote to the habits of our cultural... mutual mind. So anyway, this practice is something really we do together.

[42:38]

And for me too, I've been doing this a long time, but I'm always discovering practice through doing what I'm doing right now with you. Okay, so one of the kind of corny phrases I use that I don't think 800 years from now anyone will remember... is you either cook your karma or get cooked by it. Probably no one will be repeating that one in ten years. But what do I mean by that? Karma is laid down, accumulated, conscious actions.

[43:46]

And those conscious actions are reinforced, reified, in consciousness. It's like your conscious actions have a hold on your present consciousness. Your conscious actions, excuse me, consciousness is a handhold for your karma. Das Bewusstsein ist so wie ein Griff für das Karma. Okay. Now, what you will find out if you practice Zazen, cross-legged sitting or Seiza sitting, is that the mind of Zazen, let's call it Zazen mind, something like that,

[44:58]

is that the sasen-geist is not exactly consciousness. You're aware, but it's not consciousness. It's not discursive thinking like the discursive comparative thinking. Now, if you practice meditation, you'll just notice that that's the case. Hopefully it's the case. Sometimes it doesn't happen to people, but usually it does. And in more experienced practice, it's good to notice what the difference is. So that's one of the first things that sitting does.

[46:10]

Is that it changes your relationship to your own past. Maybe that's a good place to stop because I barely got started. Because it's rather dark in here and I don't have my reading glasses but it looks like 8 o'clock. And so we've been talking since about 7. And you were hanging around here doing zazen from about 6.15. And I heard the reason the talk started at 7 was so that you could have dinner after the talk. So I imagine some of you must be terribly hungry.

[47:25]

And we have lots of time tomorrow. Or it looks like lots of time right now. So let's stop and Because I only got to the first aspect of one of the five basics of Zen practice. Now one of the traditions of practicing with a teacher is you try to give the lecture he's going to give slightly ahead of him. You imagine how you would talk about the same subject.

[48:26]

So you can all imagine what I might say next. And then tomorrow you can see if I fulfill your expectations or surprise you. And if I fulfill your expectations, teaching has occurred. And if I surprise your expectations surprise you teaching has occurred. But if you just passively wait till you get here tomorrow not much teaching has occurred. And tomorrow morning I might just call in one of you to give the lecture instead of me.

[49:29]

No, no one will come then. Some of you might come. Okay. Thank you very much for being here and I'll see you tomorrow. Thank you for being here and see you tomorrow. Tomorrow there will be more light. More noise. But being lost in Luzern seems to be quite easy.

[50:48]

I made the mistake of asking somebody near the hotel to point to the nearest bridge. And no one thought of the railroad bridge, so I went... Half an hour in the wrong direction. And then I realized, I looked for some guy on a bicycle who looked like he knew the city. And he took me to the railroad bridge. And then after a bit of wandering, I found you. Driving in the dark, it's not the same. Last night I drove in the dark. It would have been a more enjoyable walk if I hadn't thought of you waiting for me. Yeah, now I started last night asking, just raising some questions.

[52:24]

Yeah, in the context of practice in general. And in the context of what could it mean a realized life. Yeah, we could say in a simple sense, to realize means to make real. So for some reason, I often do, but I might now also feel like playing around with the language some. Because language shapes our reality. And reality hardly doesn't shape our language enough. So I found it necessary in my own practice to try to be very exact or to try to find what the feel of these words means.

[53:54]

Because our because most of the language of practice is meant to return us to our experience. Yeah. And In particular, to return ourselves to the experience of the particular. And I like the word particular, although it probably doesn't have the same assortment of meanings in German. It's probably rather different, I don't know. Because particular in English has the sense of, well, like you part your hair, you divide it into two parts.

[55:11]

I don't put my hair as nothing but part, I'm sorry. So the word particular has in it the sense of something that's particular to itself. And also that it's part of a whole. So that practice is, as I said last night, really looking at the particular. And again I was struck, and that's in the back of my mind while I'm speaking, how these hunting and gathering people have almost no generalizations in their language.

[56:37]

Everything is really particular and the particular in its parts and the particular as part of a whole And so that's a lot more, there's a lot more information or knowledge there than if you just generalize trees, you know. If you were a gardener, trees wouldn't mean much. You'd have to talk about specific trees, specific plants, etc. So we're somehow gardeners in our lives.

[57:51]

At least we need to have some feeling like that if we're going to make our life, let's say, more real or realized. So generalizations simplify our knowledge. And one of the things that, again, these hunting and gathering people have is they have to share knowledge to store knowledge. This guy went out with these people on his first time in the sort of tundra. This guy I read about. And within about 20 minutes, like me, he was lost.

[59:12]

And everything looked the same. There was little bumps and snow on them and things like that. It took him about as long to find his way back to the camp as it took me to get here. Have any of you seen this movie Enlightenment Reconsidered or Enlightenment Guaranteed? It's quite a good movie. I'd recommend you see it, even in German. And these two guys from Munich, first night in Tokyo, They go out and they try to, well, there's a Sony sign and there's some other sign for something else, Toyota, and we'll find our way back.

[60:20]

And after half an hour, there's a Sony sign, and there's a Toyota, and they were... They slept in the park. Yeah. So anyway, what he learned from these Inuit people, what we call Eskimo people, is they really have to be into the particular. To know their, to find their way across this land with no landmarks. And the example I saw this once some years ago on some kind of anthropological television program.

[61:24]

And I'm mentioning these examples just to suggest that there are different ways we can locate our life. They brought a little Australian white girl and a little Australian Aboriginal girl, I believe, up to a tree stump. They were about Six or seven years old. And they brought them up, walked them through the stump and there were a whole lot of things piled on it and they just brushed it off and asked them to put it back on. And at least in this, the little white girl, I'm sure she's good at other things, but she could put three or four things back and then she was lost.

[62:34]

And the little black girl put everything back as if she had a Polaroid photograph in her mind of it, exactly the way it was. About 25 things, all branches and feathers and... So this is anyway a different kind of mind. And what I'm suggesting here is not that you could do this, as I certainly didn't do it very well this morning. But you can find through meditation practice a different kind of mind. And I began to speak about what are the basics of Zen practice. And since we're starting, as I said last night, since we're starting... first time to do a seminar in Luzern.

[64:04]

I thought I'd start with some basics. So again, first of all, overall, Buddhism is a practice of mindfulness. There's no particular Yeah, there's no particular teaching beyond, we could say, mindfulness. And I spoke a week or so ago about the British colonials who first named Buddhism. Colonials, you know. Colonialists? People who worked for the, yeah, anyway.

[65:04]

Named, called Buddhism, Buddhism. They named it Buddhism. Because they didn't have any idea of a religion or something. It just was an activity. Like exercising is an activity. Mindfulness is an activity. And that activity leads you somewhere. And there's teachings about how you do the activity but not too much more than that. But in this activity of mindfulness It's fine if you want to see how the mind itself functions in mindfulness.

[66:14]

In mindfulness, you almost certainly have to do still sitting, upright sitting meditations. Now as the posture of standing, as I've said, requires us to be awake Horses seem to be able to sleep standing up but most of us don't sleep standing up. And reclining is particularly designed for sleeping This posture seems particularly designed to see into the functioning of mind itself We could say particularities of the mind itself.

[67:35]

And one of the first things it does is begin to, we could say, peel apart the layers of mind. The many ways we know things all get kind of lumped together in consciousness. And all the aspects of mind that go into consciousness serve the purposes of consciousness. Which in short, if I define consciousness, and here this is in the spirit again of speaking last night, of trying to

[68:45]

use these words in very specific ways, not general ways. And the many scientists who are now studying consciousness haven't yet agreed with what consciousness is, what they're studying. Some people call all the ways we are aware consciousness. But if you look at the function of consciousness, we try to define it in that way. The function of consciousness is to provide us with a cognizable, predictable world.

[69:48]

Cognizable, predictable and a chronological world. A world with a timeline. And, yeah, that's essential that we could do this. But not all of our experience, and the most obvious example is our dreams, occur in a simple timeline. or in fact our world is not predictable consciousness is always working against the facts of the world which is it's always changing and it's also

[70:52]

in the end a mystery. It's not really cognizable fully. So consciousness is a necessary way for us to function. And it defines the world in useful ways. But if you try to ask it to define words in, but the way it, the definition implied, how can I put it, but the way consciousness defines the world in any fundamental sense is a delusion. I think of the Japanese Noh plays, N-O-H or N-O. The audience knows that there's a line, an imaginary line down the middle of the stage. When the actors are in the front part of the stage, they are in the world of consciousness.

[72:26]

The immediate world of the present world of the audience. When they step back behind this imaginary line on the stage... They're in some sort of timeless world. Or dream world. And your grandmother can be alive in that world. Or great-grandmother. So it's a world that they try to articulate in the stage what is actually a fact for us. That we live in a world that's shaped by our consciousness. But there are many aspects of our aliveness, of our living. There are unconscious, non-conscious, dreamlike and so forth.

[73:52]

And consciousness is supposed to sort all that out or keep it separate. Yes, one of the jobs of consciousness is a certain exclusivity. But if you start looking at yourself carefully or you do psychotherapy or something, you see that consciousness is only part of the story. So when we start to meditate, We discover ourselves in a mind that is not any longer conscious in the usual sense. Begins to have elements of our unconscious and non-conscious. And we can say that awareness is separated

[74:55]

from consciousness. And I almost see if you could let two things that were looked together in water, one would settle out in one level and another settle out in another level. So let's say at first when you practice zazen you begin to find yourself in or generate what we could call awareness, which is, as I said last night, a different kind of liquid than the liquid quality of consciousness. Now that just happens if you sit. At least for most of us it happens.

[76:10]

Some people can never get out of their consciousness when they sit. Yeah, but most of us can. And then zazen becomes the study of this awareness or this difference from consciousness. And while if we... It does just happen when we sit for most of us. At the same time, if we... If a feeling for that happening, we can... We can... We don't want to do it, but we can let it happen more easily, encourage it to happen.

[77:32]

And then it's like this, we don't want to do it, but we can somehow... We can somehow... So zazen or meditation in the zen sense becomes a study of what is the mind. And that's a big step toward what is a realized life. So you've been sitting a long time, so I think we should stop and have a break. So about half an hour. So we come back at 10 to 12. And...

[78:13]

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