Thank you, each of you, for being here this week. And each of you helping me and helping each other find our way in this koan. You know, these kind of... pinball-type games, or pachinko in Japan, where a ball falls down and bounces here and there. This is these machine things, right? Yeah. So there are these machine games with balls that are played everywhere in Japan. You have to drive through these corridors, you have to roll and stuff. What are they called? Flipper. Flippa, that's what you call it? Apparently. Flippa, yeah, you have the horizontal ones here.

[01:02]

Anyway, this is koan, reading a koan is sort of gravity-defying flippa. The work with a koan is like a flippa game that denies gravity. Because instead of the ball falling down, you know, by gravity, it has to fall up. And so the koan is made of all these different things. And they don't make any sense. But then one of these balls bumps you. And if your reaction isn't right, it falls down. But if your reaction is somehow right, it bumps up into another little container. And then something else hits you, about 10 or 15 or 100 hit you, and they all fall down.

[02:11]

But then one of them, whoops, bounces up to another level. And then you hit 10, 15 or 100 and they just fall to the ground. But suddenly one comes back and he flies back up into another box. So somehow I think we managed, all of us together, to get sort of toward the top of this pinball flipper machine. I think we all somehow managed to get up to these upper levels of this flipper machine. Okay. Now I talked about the background mind as if it was some kind of stage scene. And I did that because I wanted to emphasize that most aspects, dimensions of our life are ingredients. Ich habe das getan, denn ich wollte damit betonen, dass die meisten Aspekte unseres Lebens wie Zutaten sind.

[03:18]

There is an order, an arrangement they fall into. And your culture tries to put them into an arrangement. But some of us are sort of feisty when we resist the arrangement. It says, I read, that in old people's homes, the feisty ones live longest. Maybe we all turn it into an old people's home. Feisty monks. The feisty sangha. And then like furiously reading Taoist scriptures so we can live forever. Yeah, sounds good actually.

[04:28]

But one of the most important ingredients in our life is our attitude. Aber eine unserer wichtigsten Zutaten in unserem Leben ist unsere Einstellung. Die Einstellung oder die Haltung in der, wie wir Dinge tun oder wie wir anderen Sachen gegenüber sind. Ein aufsteigender Geist und ein sinkender Geist ist eine We say more posture, attitude is more something like a kid in behavior. Yeah, he has an attitude. Yeah, well, a view then. So the situation can be exactly the same, but if you have a sinking mind, your view, what's wrong, everything's wrong, it's not going to work, etc., A rising mind, the same situation you...

[05:35]

Your attitude, I mean your view is that you sort of see the possibilities in her, you're sort of optimistic, maybe something will happen, who knows. So some of the most basic things in Buddhism is, in Zen practice, is an initial mind of acceptance. Sometimes when we hear the word acceptance it feels passive to us. The word accept actually means, I mean the etymology anyway means, to put an oar in the water. So when you accept, you put an oar in the water and pull your boat forward.

[06:55]

So this kind of acceptance and absorption of a situation is moves the situation forward. Yeah. So it's very important to, I don't know what word to use, but maybe to see things as an ingredient. Maybe that's the word to use. So background mind is an ingredient. It's also an ingredient. I'm calling it an ingredient. A stage set is an ingredient. I mean, I called it a stage set, talked about it as if it was a stage set you could move from the back of the stage to the front of the stage.

[08:03]

To emphasize emptiness and interdependence. Yeah. And sometimes I say to emphasize and understand, to get an entry to experiential interdependence. Interdependence. To get an access, experiential access, into interdependence and emptiness. I often say there's nothing but parts, there's no underlying ground of being. And the other day with my old friend Hans-Peter Dürr, I had a very long, intense, wonderful conversation.

[09:21]

And I told him that I'm going to use what you said and I'll give you credit. So I'm just giving him credit. Und ich habe ihm da gesagt, ich werde darüber sprechen, was du mir gesagt hast, und ich werde auch sagen, dass das von dir stammt. And he suggested instead of parts to use participants. And that's better, actually. Because parts imply a whole. And then you have, you know, other problems. So participants doesn't imply a whole. Each unit of experience is a participant. So here we have ingredients or participants.

[10:34]

Okay, now maybe I should attempt again or to a little bit define background mind again. First, It's, again, where you place an intention. And some people have very... Their background mind is completely unconscious or non-conscious. Yeah, I think everyone has some kind of background mind. But when you develop it so it's, if you put an intention there, it's present. It stays present to you.

[11:41]

Now let me say something again about... I just jumped to a parallel track. Okay. When you pay attention to your breathing, give attention to your breathing. Of course, sometimes it's not conscious or awareness. Your breathing is going on and you're doing things. But as soon as you aren't quite so occupied with something you have to do, your breath greets you. Inhale says, hi, how are you doing up there, you busy guy? I'm fine.

[12:58]

How are you doing? Well, I've just been under the surface. I like letting you do your thing. But when you have a feeling that it's not a surprise you haven't forgotten your breath, it just greets you, or you greet it. Then most likely you've been, you've continued attention to the breath, but it's been non-conscious. Not unconscious, but non-conscious. You don't want to think that attention and concentration only functions within consciousness. When the background mind is really working, it locks in attention into non-consciousness as well as consciousness.

[14:17]

Now, whenever I think of intention and background mind, I often think of the singer Linda Ronstadt. I don't know if she's not very popular in Europe, probably, but anyway, in America, she was quite a well-known singer in the 60s, 70s. 80s. Anyway, she's a very intelligent, fine, nice person who happened to be a very close friend of my wife. My wives. I mean, my former wife. Anyway, she said she decided to become a singer when she was about three years old.

[15:32]

And that never changed. And it informed everything she did the rest of her life until now. Yeah, and she survived being famous and so forth very well. And one of the ways I think this happened is she always wanted to be a good singer. She never had much emphasis on being a famous singer. Sie hatte nie ein besonderes Gewicht, auf das sie eine berühmte Sängerin sein möchte.

[16:52]

In der Tat tut sie gar nicht gerne auftreten, außer sie hat eine wirklich gute Beziehung zu dem Publikum. And not a well-known singer, fame found her, but only because she wanted to be a good singer. In a way, this is part of her integrity. And her surviving so well. No. That's partly an example of all of us have this, some of us more than others, this background mind that keeps something present to us.

[17:54]

And we could call it the mantra, mantric aspect of the background mind. And through practice we develop the mantric aspect of background mind. And many teachings are designed to be within the mantric continuum of background mind. Then this mantric continuum flows into our dreams, flows into our activity. So this is a development, the mantric continuum is a development of what most of us, some kind of background mind, all of us have.

[19:11]

The mantric continuum is a development of what everyone has, some kind of background mind. Okay. Now, the dimension that I emphasized yesterday in the afternoon that I found developed through no place to go and nothing to do is the continuous presence of mind. Not a mantric continuum, but a continuum of awareness. And accepting, absorbing, or absorbing, accepting, it works both ways, awareness.

[20:24]

And the practice of developing an initial mind, first encounter mind, of acceptance. So what does that initial mind do? Of acceptance and absorbing. Well, the initial mind is a mind of acceptance. The absorbance part develops. It first accepts and then it becomes absorbing, right?

[21:36]

It can work either way. But as an initial practice to learn to develop this initial mind or first encounter mind, you form the intention to have your initial reaction always accepted. And that initial mind of acceptance, one way to help develop it is to just create the word as a phrase transmitted outside the scriptures, quoting this koan,

[22:41]

a phrase transmitted outside the scriptures or something like that just use the word welcome get in the habit of Anything that comes to your senses, you say to it, welcome. Alles, was dir in die Sinne kommt, dem sagst du, sei gegrüßt oder willkommen. Your second reaction might be, ugh. Deine zweite Reaktion ist vielleicht, ugh. But your first one is, welcome. Aber deine erste ist, willkommen. Or arriving. Oder ankommen. You feel at each moment you're arriving. Dass in jedem Moment das Gefühl hast von ankommen. Such a craft helps develop an initial mind of acceptance.

[23:57]

When that initial mind of acceptance, which then is a seed of awareness, develops into an absorbent mind. And you know the word Zen is best translated by absorbent, not by meditation. Okay. Okay. So the background mind becomes an absorbent, accepting mind. And that's on a continuum of development to an imperturbable mind. And in transmission ceremony, one of the important things is the sense of an iron being.

[25:08]

That means that you have achieved or will or are close to achieving an imperturbable mind. Yeah, high school kids might say, here, she's really cool. Cool, yeah. Or, you know, business people might say, he's unflappable. Undisturbable. Okay, but that sometimes means somebody who's got a trained, disciplined consciousness.

[26:13]

Or it's just rigid and unfeeling. Nothing bothers that guy, but he can't feel anything anyway. Yeah, that's not what we mean by imperturbable mind. Okay. Because that's, you know, an undisturbed consciousness. We're talking about an undisturbable awareness. That accepts and absorbs and may act, but is undisturbed in that accepting, absorbing and acting. That's one of the main fruits of yogic practice.

[27:28]

Okay. Now someone asked me, you know, I hope you realize that the last I hope that you are aware that the last tea show of Winterzweigen is always two and a half, three hours long. So relax. Someone asked me in the discussion yesterday or the day before about where emotions come in in Buddhist teachings. But the basic understanding is everything is emotion.

[28:30]

Or perhaps we should say everything is non-graspable feeling. Yeah, okay. So the most basic manifestation of being alive is non-graspable feeling. Probably if there's no non-graspable feeling, the body is a corpse, probably dead. So non-graspable feeling accompanies every thought, every, you know, feeling. living biological activity, human activity.

[29:53]

Something like that, yeah. So the next, the further manifestation of that The next is caring. And the next is something like anger, desire, fear, hatred. Basically, attraction or repulsion or confusion. So that's greed, hate and delusion. It's usually called.

[30:54]

But it really means attraction, repulsion or confusion. All right, so even if you're angry, that anger is rooted in caring. Ist diese Wut in sich um etwas Sorgen verankert? You wouldn't get angry if you didn't care. Du würdest ja nie wütend werden, wenn es dir wurscht wäre. Now, if it's not caring about the person you're angry with, say if it's a person, you care about what it represents or the situation or something.

[31:58]

There's caring there. So the yogic adept, the yogic personality, develops an awareness of non-graspable feeling. entwickelt ein Gewahrsein für nicht greifbare Gefühle. And that's closely related to the presence of background mind, the absorbent presence of background mind. Und das ist ganz nah verwandt mit dieser absorbierenden Gegenwart des Hintergrundgeistes. Now, you see, I'm taking the ingredients of what a human being is. And we're rearranging the parts.

[33:04]

We're revamping what we are. Yes, so we're angry. But with mindfulness, mindful attention, We are present to our non-graspable feeling at all times. And we feel the caring in which emotions are rooted. So when we're angry, we feel the caring in which anger is rooted. And then even if we get angry back, it's usually rooted in caring, somehow trying to find anger in a positive way.

[34:25]

When you get anger back from the other person. No, if you get angry back... about something. If you return anger. Oh, so this what you said is the anger of other person. Or yourself or anyone. Okay. If something makes you angry, you feel the caring that's in there. Wenn dich etwas wütend macht, kannst du dieses, worum es dir geht, um diese Sorge, die du hast, die kannst du spüren. So it's not politeness or niceness sitting on the outside of your feelings like hats. Das ist nicht Nettheit und Höflichkeit, die am Rand, am Äußeren deiner Gefühle sitzen, wie Hüte. Your expressions can be very blunt or direct, but it's even unconsidered, but it's still rooted in caring.

[35:30]

And this sense of an ever-present caring is also rooted in the background mind, is also Yeah, something like that. Okay, so that's enough of a definition of background mind. Now, how do we get this stage set to the front of the stage? Now, you're not bringing the mantric continuum to the foreground. What you're bringing is the absorbent accepting awareness to the foreground. Okay, in other words, you've developed the ingredient of an absorbing, accepting awareness.

[36:51]

It's, you know, like a Michelin three A's. Absorbent, accepting, awareness. Sorry. absorbierend, akzeptierend und achtsam. Yeah, okay. This is three A's in German too. Yeah, okay, good. Sometimes I write on. Okay. You've developed this and it's now an ingredient of your experience. Also ihr habt es entwickelt und jetzt ist es eine Zutat eurer Erfahrung. But it functions in the background of consciousness. Yeah, or yeah, something like that. All right, now you begin the practice.

[37:55]

You're bringing attention to your breath. You're bringing attention to your hails. And you're actually kind of moving the scenery in the back a little forward. And now you're practicing yogic seeing. So you notice the particular and then you go to the field. And pretty soon your attention, your mindful attention rests in the field and not in the particular. What is resting in the field?

[38:57]

Your attention. Your attention is residing in the field. Deine Aufmerksamkeit wohnt im Feld. This is the, you know, cloud rhino. Your attention is residing in the field. Then the particular, as I said earlier when I tried to encapsulate this in a different way, then the particular are now participants, we could say, And the participants float in and out of the field.

[40:01]

So in other words, you've gone from the particular to the field. And that's been developed as a habit. As a habitation. And it's rather similar to the feeling of soft eyes that they talk about in the martial arts. Non-grasping seeing. And then the sense of location shifts from the particular to the field. So instead of going from the particular to the field you go from the field to the particular.

[41:21]

And now you don't go from the specific to the field, but you come from the field to the specific. Yeah, this is, I mean, maybe, I mean, I wish I was a musician that had some talent, because I have a feeling that if I was in the field of several musicians playing, the notes, the particular notes would come out of the field and not just as when you first start playing together, the notes leading to the field. Okay, so now you have developed this ingredient of an absorbent accepting awareness that functions in the background.

[42:26]

But when you start practicing until attention habitates the field of mind, You've created a kind of groove in which the absorbent accepting awareness can settle in the foreground. in which this absorbing, accepting being can be in the foreground. Is it an ingredient? And before it was one of the last things you put in the pot.

[43:44]

But in this new Dharmic soup you put it in first in the pot. So now this absorbent accepting awareness is the immediate presence of mind most of the time. No, no, no, I've lost it. The three A's are now what? The absorbent, accepting awareness is now in the functions in the foreground of consciousness and not in the background. And I just had a flash of compassion. Two and a half hours is too long. So I think I should stop it if you need me. Now, when the absorbent accepting mind is the foreground,

[44:49]

And you see the world through an absorbent accepting awareness. And consciousness functions within that. Now the three minds of Yogacara Buddhism come into focus as the central teaching of this koan. And now the three minds of Yogacara Buddhism come into focus in this koan. A wooden horse romps in the spring. It leaves no tracks. Even romping through a field of flowers, not a petal sticks to it.

[46:07]

This is when the initial and foreground mind is absorbing, accepting awareness. Well, that's enough for today. Thank you very much.

[46:29]

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