It must be the time to end. Because it's not the time yet to end. Maybe when we're not quite ready to end, I think some of us feel that. Yeah, perhaps that's the best time to end. So how shall we end our discussion, our entry practice, breathing practice. I think we've felt the scope of breathing practice. But let's start from, you know, something, you know, basic, our posture. Our posture, you know, is not a position.

[01:02]

That's the trouble with descriptions in books. It makes it look like a position. Maybe you can understand it better as a process. When we first sit down, we should sit down rather gently. Then I think of what Charlotte Silver said to me, which, you know, all these little things change your life if you absorb them. Instead of saying, stand up, she said, come up to standing.

[02:05]

So I suddenly on that her statement realized there wasn't some mental position of being sitting down and then being up and in between was just a way to get there. Or come up to standing. I felt many positions, many postures along the way to standing. And we need that kind of feeling. You don't have a mental sense of the posture that you're aiming at. But rather you settle down and to come down into sitting.

[03:25]

And then your legs are kind of being space that you kind of fold into your body. And you get to know which way your foot should be held in order to bring your leg up onto the other thigh, etc. So then you find, anyway, you find many little postures that come into the beginning to sit. And then you lift up through your back, up through your back of your neck and up through the top of your head.

[04:38]

Now at this point you're not trying to find some kind of rest or calm place. You're trying to find a place of vitality. Yes, so this lifting is really important. It's really a feeling of the world lifts up through you. And then you have a feeling of relaxation spreading down through your body.

[05:40]

Opening up the shoulders, opening up the torso, the inside of the body. And then I think it's good actually at this point to come back to your spine. Because what we're speaking about now is breath and prana. Now I'm using prana to mean the vitality of breath. The energy of the body and breath. The subtle breath. And I'm using it pretty much like chi or ki.

[06:55]

Now, your spine is important because your spine, in a sense, regulates or tunes your prana. Deine Wirbelsäule ist sehr wichtig, weil sie auf eine Weise den Atem und das Prana reguliert. And I'm trying to respond here to some of the questions, comments that came up yesterday afternoon. Ja, und ich versuche einige der Bemerkungen und Fragen, die gestern Nachmittag aufgekommen sind, zu beantworten. And your spine also... shows you the way to your posture. If you find this lifting feeling of your spine, you can mechanically check your spine by pushing with your fingertips or your knuckles up, right down from your sides.

[08:04]

Das kannst du auch mechanisch überprüfen, indem du mit deinen Knöcheln da in den Hüften, den Seiten nach runterfährst. Yeah, and that you can check now and then. Das kannst du ab und zu mal überprüfen. But easier and better actually is to imagine a spot at the top of your, back top of your head. Yeah, where the Buddha has a little pagoda, a little statue. Curl of special hair. Yeah, so you imagine that spot. the top back of your head, above your spine. And then you lift your spine up to that point. And if you find that, it then shows you the whole rest of your posture.

[09:07]

And the spine is the most important aspect of our sitting posture. So really, you want to sit in any way, legs, etc., any way that allows your back, your spine, to be lifted up in this vital way you want to that that's uh you yeah you want to do that okay okay so now let's go back to the second um Second foundation of awakening, mindfulness.

[10:23]

As I said yesterday, let's call it feel-fullness. You can bring attention to feelings. But feeling is really pretty amorphous. You have to kind of bring awareness, attention, aware energy to your feeling. Yes, but the feeling is quite amorphous and formless. And yes, it applies to this breathing. You have to bring the attention or awareness or aware energy to the area of feeling.

[11:32]

Feeling is the most subtle of our senses. And it works through so many gradations which there's no language for. Yeah, so feeling can make distinctions that language is just far too clumsy. Now let me just make obvious the clumsiness of thinking. Another example I always use is you're carrying a bunch of packages and maybe one is a glass pitcher. Yeah, you're carrying them out here to your car.

[12:38]

You slip on the ice. And you fall. And somehow you land and nothing breaks and you catch yourself and don't hurt yourself. You did a hundred little things, a hundred little movements or many more, to protect yourself. Your body knew what to do. You could never have thought your way to that. Thinking just couldn't have done it. I think I'd better move my arm this way. Okay, so we can say awareness joined to feeling performed all these subtle actions.

[13:53]

Okay, now to get a feeling for feeling Now, the obvious way is to notice pleasant, unpleasant, and neither. Yeah. And we're trying to, so you can notice when something's pleasant, you know, if, you know, I would never hit you, hit you or pat you, you can notice the difference. But also there's a big territory we can call neither. You practice your widening the territory of neither pleasant nor unpleasant. And even you're beginning to be able to feel, even in the midst of pleasant, it's

[15:06]

Okay, it's neither pleasant nor unpleasant. You have some feeling like that. It's just something that's happening. Yeah, it might be pleasant, it might be unpleasant. Who cares? Just what's happening is so much more interesting than whether it's pleasant or unpleasant. And as you well know, many things are a mixture of pleasant and unpleasant. What we're trying to get toward here is a Feeling for what I call, my term for it is, non-graspable feeling. Yeah, and you can breathe your way toward it. Okay, so let me just give my usual example of non-graspable feeling.

[16:26]

But my usual example has to be extremely particular. Right now in this room, there's a certain feeling. And it's different than the feeling before I came in. And it's different than the feeling after Maya and I started to speak. And it's different than the feeling after I said the word spine. And it's different after you've scratched your ear. And it's always momentary.

[17:46]

There's some subtle field here of feeling that you couldn't say what it is. If you try to say what it is, it's gone. Thinking is too clumsy to say what it is. And thinking changes non-graspable feeling into consciousness. Grasp it and it's gone. And this being space that we somehow are is. We can't grasp it. We can't get out of it. We can't.

[19:04]

You know, Alan Watts used some example when he spoke. He did a benefit for Zen Center. Many years ago when we were buying Tassajara. And he said the speaker of a radio is quite happy to play Mozart or traffic sounds or voices. But if you ask the music or voices coming out of the speaker, If you ask the voices or the music, what are you made of? None of them could say paper. The speaker is made of paper and the music doesn't know it's made by paper. Yeah.

[20:23]

It can't even know it's vibrations of air, etc. So we're trying by coming into non-graspable feeling to get underneath, maybe to get a feel for the air itself, the speaker paper itself. The silvering behind the mirror. So there's in this room right now this non-graspable feeling. And I think each of us can feel it. And it's where most of what's happening right now is happening.

[21:36]

It's if that feeling is there, then my voice speaks to that feeling. My body speaks to that feeling. more than to our minds. If that feeling is not there, if we lose it somehow, I can speak to your minds the same thing and your minds won't be there for it. When I told you the other day, I think I came down the mountain from the cabin where I live at Crestone. In a velvet, black, moonless night.

[22:42]

And I left my flashlight down at the main house and I had no flashlight. And I couldn't. see anything. But I know the path pretty well, so I'm feeling my way along. And I suddenly found myself, I told you already, in the midst of a herd of 20 or 30 deer. They were listening to me. I was listening to them. They heard me first. And my whole body became quite alert and my spine went... And I think none of us were listening only with our ears.

[23:58]

It's interesting, the difference between the silence of a room full of people and the silence of an empty room. It was completely silent, but it was a being space silent, not... the silence that I usually walk through in the morning. And I think through this non-graspable feeling, the deers were deciding whether to be frightened or not. And they, you know, very gently, sort of like ballet dancers, they moved here and there and made space for me to get through them. Now somebody told me, since he might be embarrassed by this story, I won't say who it was.

[25:35]

They said that they have, you know, prana contact with their dog, which is mostly wolf. The dog, just when it lies down and is about to go to sleep, goes, hmm, something like that. I thought it was funny to hear, because I do that when I'm sleeping alone, before I go, hmm. It's part of my technique. And this unnamed person decided to join his dog. So he or she put his or her forehead on the dog and they did it together.

[26:35]

The dog liked this very much, I'm told. And they could have continued endlessly, vibrating their foreheads. And this is prana. And that is prana. Sometimes we practice, you know, not so much with others, this in our body, and it brings the physicality of breath and body together. And if you'll let me go on just a little bit further about animals. I think we like animals, at least I know why I like animals.

[27:49]

Because I imagine or I think I feel their Sambhogakaya body. I think it's one of the advantages of being an animal. You don't have to think so much and your Sambhogakaya body can be more present. A bliss body that's at ease. And it's also the Samantabhadra body, or Samantabhadra feeling. You know, Manjushri represents the Bodhisattva that turns inward into wisdom. And Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva that turns outward into compassion. And this pulse of outward and inward also is dharmic breath.

[29:11]

But the bodhisattva that neither comes nor goes doesn't take a step in any direction. This is Samantabhadra. And animals sometimes feel like that. They just can be somewhere without moving. So I felt with these deer the presence of these bodies, which are so much like ours, just that they're Thinking isn't like ours. So we can, again, now I want you to, maybe it's helpful for you to think of breath as a kind of tuning.

[30:23]

You can use your breath to tune your body and mind and phenomena. Body, breath, and phenomena. I didn't wear a watch today. I thought that was even better than a watch I can't read. So we have no schedule after this. But I promise I'll stop sometime.

[31:34]

So... For most of us, daily practice is the tuning of the breath. Now, mostly this breath awareness is an underpinning. Underpinning? Something that lies underneath. An underpinning of our activity. It's not in the foreground. Like you can be aware of your mantra or aware of your gate phrase without thinking it.

[32:35]

You can be aware of your breath without thinking it. And so you can also be aware of your breath. Now that more subtle breath is also more subtly the body too. And so that more subtle breath is what we can bring ourselves close to non-graspable, through which we can bring ourselves close to non-graspable feeling. The feeling that underlies all mental and physical activity. And as I say, you can... When you first come into a room, it's a good kind of technique to feel the room first before you think it.

[34:02]

So you develop the habit of an initial mind that's feeling, not thinking. So you meet someone and you feel them first, and if you have to think them, you think them second. And as Otmar pointed out the other day, this is also this posture of not knowing. You don't know this person when you first meet them. You let yourself feel them and then you know them. And you have to be careful with this practice.

[35:06]

Because you may end up with just too many friends. You'll be swamped with people who want to stand around and let you, you know... Feel them without thinking. I mean something like that. Okay. Now do we have time to go to the fourth skanda, fourth foundation? Or should we have a rain check till next year? Oder sollen wir so einen Gutschein für nächstes Jahr? What time is it?

[36:06]

Both. Both, huh? Raincheck to you. What time is it? Wie spät ist es denn? Eleven twenty. Oh, we have ten minutes or so anyway. Ja, wir haben zehn Minuten. Okay. The fourth foundation of mindfulness is mindfulness of mental objects. Now what's a mental object? Anything you bring your attention to. Now again, what I've been saying, I've been specific, but we're now talking about prana attention too. Now, Judita yesterday said something about what's concentration or how to maintain concentration.

[37:10]

I think the basis for that would be for me to speak about the four constants again, but I don't want to do that again. Okay. But we can think about prana beginning this kind of breath, physicalized breath. As also a way to talk about concentration. Now, where you bring your attention to tends to, with attention joined to breath, brought to a certain, any point in your body, but especially a chakra, accumulates prana there.

[38:13]

First it's a kind of imagination, but after a while you can feel it. And you can notice actually with different people, you find you're speaking to them or in a group with your prana collected at a different chakra. And at first you don't try to move it around, though that can be done. Be patient. Get very familiar with where it is without you doing anything. Just noticing where it is or where it might be is part of the process.

[39:24]

And this is also part of, really, the path of the breath. Okay, so mental objects are objects you bring attention to. Particularly objects you bring prana attention to. Phenomena really means mental objects. The word in English means mental objects. It means objects we perceive. But we think of it as a word for the out there. But the out there is in our mind and body and in here. So that's what a mental object means, an in here-ness of the world.

[40:45]

And this in-here-ness of the world, the inside-edness of the whole world, the ability to know as a continuous experience this in-here-ness of the world, is based first on fully realizing the first three foundations of awakening and mindfulness. And this is said to be what a Buddha knows, what you can ask, what is a Buddha? You can also ask, what does a Buddha know? And what a Buddha knows is the in-here-ness of the world.

[41:57]

And so when you yourself know what a Buddha knows, you're close to knowing what it is to be a Buddha. So here it also means to know the world as Dharma. Dharma means the momentary in-here-ness of the world. Now also you now can have a mind clear enough to notice the hindrances. Of laziness, desire.

[43:06]

Doubt. Restlessness. Like that. And you can begin by seeing how laziness or doubt or restlessness and so forth affect us. To see them clearly against a background of mind and non-graspable feeling. And within a body in which this breath awareness prana is your body,

[44:08]

Now you may say, I can barely count my breath. What the heck is this guy talking about? But counting your breath is also part of this process which unfolds through simply counting your breath. Don't have this measuring mind, oh, I can only count to seven. You're in the process. And trust the process.

[45:28]

Whatever it is, seven, three, or nine. Nine means complete, usually. You just accept that. And that acceptance, Rumi says something like, be the beauty you love. There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground. Yeah, and whatever Rumi meant, this sense of bowing that Sukhiroshi emphasized so much. As a practice along with Oryoki practice, this feeling of in each situation you also bow into it.

[46:29]

You bow into the breath and mind of it. And when you bring trana attention to body, breath and phenomena, Begin to know the energy of the energy of the energy. I don't like the word, but energy of the world. The tension of it being an insidedness which feels outside. The tension of it being an insidedness which feels outside. That's a kind of energy action.

[47:46]

And the way the world interpenetrates. On the snow, the shadow of the bamboo is green. And how it is simultaneously your own mind and body. So this prana breath path allows us to be in the energy of the world and as I say, the more you have a mind of non-graspable feeling certainly as an initial mind And or you have a mind without preferences.

[48:50]

Yeah, neither pleasant or unpleasant. It's just what it is. The world lights up. Yeah. That's enough. Maybe there's no place to stop, right? Yes, I believe that this is enough for you. It can be a place to stop. Our intention is to be rich

[50:01]

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