Now, I've been practicing long enough to be able to say something about zazen, about meditation, and to say something about mindfulness. But to say something about meditation and mindfulness, Their relationship and their differences. And a deep enough or thorough enough understanding of their relationship that we know how to emphasize mindfulness and meditation in our practice.

[01:04]

Okay. So tonight, I mean, we have to find some way to start or have an introduction. And today, during the prologue day, which many of you were here for, I started this introduction during the day. Now you have to start again. So meditation, zazen. Zazen is, yeah, let's go. say that the word Zen means absorption.

[02:07]

So what we want to do in Zazen is create an absorptive mode or state of mind. On the first level, that's a mind of accepting. And one or two of you brought up today the idea of the practice of a phrase-like or attitude-like to welcome that which appears. Let me say that today I asked everyone to think of, notice, or remember, or Something in their experience.

[03:14]

Or what in your experience. Yeah, it's brought you here. Or helps you continue practice. So what insight or what practice or what So what insight or what sentence or what helps you to practice the practice? And I also said, let's not limit this to Buddhism. Let's also look at what makes us feel most alive. Or most at ease. Or most willing to be alive. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[04:24]

And to recognize we have a choice about our life. So it's quite important to notice what makes your life worth living. I mean, we have responsibilities and duties, and yeah, that's important. Yeah, but duty alone shouldn't be the reason we stay alive. Our basic decision, our basic vow is to stay alive. But how to stay alive? Okay, so I ask those of you who are here this evening, do I have to ask tomorrow morning? Some people come. I will see. But anyway... Yes, bring those things up into your attention for this seminar.

[05:43]

Yeah, no, of course it's, I think, obvious to do that requires mindfulness. To just notice what happens to us To really notice what happens to us. And not just be caught up in our thinking. It's mindfulness practice. Mindfulness practice is not to be just caught up in our thinking. And to be able to notice. Noticing might be the most important word here. Not knowing, but noticing. I can use the word knowing, and I think knowing is actually a bigger word than consciousness or awareness.

[07:04]

But the dynamic of just to notice without even knowing, this is important. So now I've come to some kind of definition of a beginning definition of mindfulness. So let's call it for now noticing without knowing. Sounds terrible. I mean, no, maybe it does. Just to notice. Just to notice. And we're also wanting to come to a, what word should I use, a baseline of being. What's our...

[08:05]

reference point we come back to. To make our world real or satisfying or acceptable. Now, you want to be able to ask yourself fundamental existential questions. But what's the chance, what's the hope of answering fundamental existential questions? Answering them or acting on them? Because it's not just answering. Sometimes you don't answer at all. You just find yourself acting within these fundamental questions. So we could say that practice is always rooted in the willingness... and the courage to ask ourselves fundamental questions.

[09:26]

And to expect that We can ask them in a way that we can act on them or act within them. Now, the practice of mindfulness and the practice of meditation, we can understand as a way to be open to fundamental questions. And the hope or faith... meditation and mindfulness create the possibilities of acting through, with, within these fundamental questions.

[10:32]

That's a way of describing all of practice. Can we ask ourselves fundamental questions and hope, believe that our life can be shaped by them? Okay, so let me go back to a simple definition of zazen. I said, let's think of zazen as sitting absorption, or still sitting, but sitting absorption.

[11:33]

I mean, za means to sit. This is a za fu and this is a za butong. And zen, I think the best translation in English is absorption. So still sitting or... sitting absorption. So a beginning is to have a mind that welcomes and accepts. And I always say turn toward your problems. Turn toward your anxieties. But don't turn toward, not overwhelm yourself.

[12:48]

It's simple advice. So, you know, if something's bothering you, Don't turn away, then, you know, that weakens you, but you don't go too far. At least turn toward. Why do I think there are problems on your left or right? Turn this, I always do it this way. Why is that? I'll have to work on that one. Is it because I'm right-handed? Or right-brained? But of course, also you can examine the space in meditation around you. The haunting. I mean, not only is consciousness, as I said earlier, haunted, so is... Meditation haunted.

[13:53]

Haunted. It's like Otmar. Yeah, you're glad that he got out. Yay! Is it like the haunted house? Yeah. You just, you know, boosted Otmar a lot. They're spooky, you know. That's true. But it's hard to translate it. Yeah, Zazen can be spooky sometimes. Okay. And strangely, if you ask yourself when you're sitting, what's on my left or What's on my right? You'll find actually the space around you is populated. I bet you if you ask yourself inside, where's my mother? Alive or dead.

[15:09]

She'll be either on the left or right. And she'll either be near or far. This isn't serious. This is serious. This is Anseft. And... Sometimes your father will be on the same side or the opposite side. You can start placing archetypal friends and things. And you can see which side actually is lighter and which side is darker. And often you can find one side of the body is darker than the other side of the body.

[16:17]

And amusingly enough, you can sometimes simply reverse it. You can feel, oh, this side is dark, and this side feels lighter, and then you can say, reverse it, and... one side, the opposite side will become light. And this is exploring the psychic space, your psychic space. It's a kind of psychological practice, of course, as well as zazen practice. And if you're a very advanced practitioner, there's nothing but bodhisattvas surrounding you.

[17:18]

And they're patting you and fanning you. Thank you. And if you're a very advanced practitioner, then there's always bodhisattvas around you who stroke you and tickle you. You don't have to beat them or get away. No, but I'm mostly joking. But there are some people who, when they practice this, they really do feel the experience of Bodhisattvas around them. So you're welcoming whatever's there or turning toward whatever's there or here. Now, again, I don't mean just accepting or welcoming.

[18:20]

I also mean absorbing. Now a sponge, you know, if it sits on the sink, it's just sitting on the sink. But I'm talking about a sponge absorbing. There's a feeling of... penetration or transparency. One thing to do is when you sit and you find yourself in some kind of posture, Bring your attention to your posture.

[19:28]

Now this is just an exercise. You bring your attention to your posture. And you bring your attention to your breath. I always hate it when I say bring your attention. You bring someone's attention. You bring attention to the breath and the body. And if you can keep bringing attention Hold the attention to the breath and to the posture. Without letting thoughts creep in, thinking creep in, Sometimes there can be a shift and suddenly you're in a field of awareness, not consciousness. And that field of awareness is which isn't limited to the shape of the body.

[20:50]

Yeah, it is more absorptive. Things just seem to pass through it and be part of it, as you did imagine earlier. So now as part of our introduction to the seminar... Part of a review of things we've often talked about. But to get us on the same, as we say, page. We now have These terms, consciousness and awareness.

[21:58]

And we have consciousness which shifts into awareness when attention is brought in to the body and the breath, or the posture and the breath. Now, is this attention belong to consciousness or does it belong to awareness? Yeah. Now, once you restrain attention from going to thinking and so forth, You've restrained attention and kept it sort of hitched, tied to body and to breath and posture.

[23:06]

Ihr haltet Aufmerksamkeit zurück, ihr zügelt sie sozusagen und lasst sie sozusagen angebunden an Körper und Atem. Then there's a shift into the field of awareness. Dann ist dieser Übergang in das Feld des Gewahrseins. And then strangely attention can explore the field of awareness. Und dann kann seltsamerweise die Aufmerksamkeit das Feld des Gewahrseins erforschen. Without without You're losing this field of awareness. Yeah. Of course, attention can explore what you think about or your fears, your desires, without losing consciousness also. So attention can function in awareness and attention can function in consciousness. But attention is also the... It can explore both and it also can be the shift from one to the other.

[25:03]

Now we can ask a fundamental question, but a question in the context of practice. And we've created a context where we can maybe answer the question. Is this attention which can cause this shift? Is this attention self? Or what is the relationship between self and attention? Or self and intention? Are attention and intention simply activities of the self? Or is self, a spook, a ghost, we add to attention and intention.

[26:25]

In this context, now that you know this feeling of awareness and consciousness, and you have this experience of attention being the shift, Now you can have the context in which you can explore in a limited way, a way that you can, limited enough that you can get some answers. What is self? Now I'm always making a distinction these days between observing mind and observing self. And the secret or a big help in answering this question is to see what the distinction is between observing mind and observing self.

[27:34]

Aum. I was wondering how he was going to translate that. He did perfectly. No, I'd like to go where that leads, but maybe we ought to wait till tomorrow morning. So let me use this as an opportunity to clarify again for those of you who have been together all day and for the new people. I suggested three exercises to ripen mindfulness. Ich habe drei Übungen vorgeschlagen, um Achtsamkeit reifen zu lassen.

[29:09]

Now let me go back when I first started practicing. Lass mich mal dahin zurückgehen, als ich anfing zu praktizieren. One of the things he said was what we've been discussing is Don't invite your thoughts to tea. Yeah, I understood that immediately and could practice it. It took me a couple of decades to unfold it completely, but... I could practice it immediately. He also suggested that we bring our attention to our breath. Yeah, I could pretty much do that, at least for periods of time. And bring our attention to our activity. And it seemed obvious, but it was one of the most fruitful things I did.

[30:12]

And my practice... was transformed by, first of all, finding I could over a period of months and months have my attention with my activity. And as you know, during that time, I hit upon the dual phrase. Because I happened to be extremely busy at the time. Yeah, I was a full-time papa of a tiny baby.

[31:17]

trying to support a family with no money and I'd always decided never to be part of the system and never have a job. But with a wife and a baby, you have to compromise sometimes. And I was a full-time graduate student at the University of California. And I was assistant head of engineering and sciences extension at the university. And I was more or less head of the Zen Center. About two or three hours a night I was sleeping. Sometimes I remember I would wake up in the morning, I just wouldn't get dressed all day, I'd just be on the phone.

[32:33]

So the only way I saved myself is I said to myself, there's nothing to do. And I always had to go places. I said, oh, there's no place to go. So somehow this simple-minded, you know, like, To survive, I had to say, I've got nothing, actually I've got nothing to do. Yeah, so nothing to do and no place to go. In this field of mindfulness that I developed, mindfulness to my activity, Yes, this somehow was fruitful. As someone said earlier, really, when they heard the phrase, the one who is not busy, I didn't know that koan yet, but that was really the same thing.

[34:02]

One who's not busy and no place to go and nothing to do. And as I've told you, we're counting this, after about a year and a quarter, suddenly there was no place to go and nothing to do. And all the things I had to do just appeared in space somewhere. I did them, but they I don't know. It was different, very different. So I tell that story partly just to illustrate the power of simply creating a field of attention related to your activity, and bringing a phrase, a gate phrase, into that field of attention.

[35:19]

In my opinion, this is alchemy or this is magic. Yes, I mean that you can just take attentiveness and a phrase and put them together and change your life. Yeah, but I started all that because I want to tell you, Suzuki Roshi also told me to put my mind in my hands. And as I told you before, I really had no idea what the heck he was talking about. When he said, don't invite your thoughts to tea, yeah, I got that. At the same time he said, put your mind in your hands.

[36:24]

I mean, I really didn't get it. This is good not to get it. It stayed there. What could he mean? What experiential, what is this? What is he talking about? What kind of mind can you put somewhere else in your body? Did he just mean attention? No, he didn't. I mean, he could have said, put attention in your hands and keep that, too, in the mudra and all, but that's not what he meant. Okay. Now to practice meditation and have an absorptive mode of mind, one of the prior conditions is you freed yourself from the squirm factor.

[37:46]

It's the squirm factor. I have to test you. The squirm is like a worm squirm. Yeah, like that. Or you're sitting thinking and you think of something and you go, ooh, that's the squirm factor. Sich winden, ja? Wenn man sich so windet wie ein Wurm oder wenn man sich windet, wenn man an was Bestimmtes denkt. While you're sitting, you think, did I really say that to him? Or you remember back when you were a kid, you told somebody, I wouldn't be seen with you in public. Why could I say that to that person? So the best antidote for the squirm factor is the precepts. You take the precepts, you hold the precepts. You know you're going to do your best.

[39:03]

You commit yourself to right speech and so forth. And believe it or not, the more you really feel deeply, you're just going to follow these basic human precepts. Nothing to do with Buddhism. You're going to start out your practice as a kind of basic human being. The way you know. human beings ought to be. They ought not to lie, steal, and so forth.

[40:03]

The more you really accept that, that you're going to do that, when you think of things that would have made you squirm before, You can more just accept them or absorb them. Yeah, I was like that. I'm like that sometimes. And the precepts then become the basis for the decision not to be like that anymore. So the precepts Freeing you from the squirm factor. Allow you to develop your meditation practice and your mindfulness practice.

[41:16]

Now I started to say I would give you three exercises for ripening mindfulness. To bring awareness Yeah, that I mentioned earlier. And one is to bring attention to attention. And the second is to bring attention to discontinuity. And the third is to bring attention to So if you do that, if you take that on, if you try it, yeah, it ripens your mindfulness practice.

[42:29]

And it creates a mind which can understand the teachings. Now I've also, and here I'm really talking about exercising Consciousness and awareness. And now, if you're not going to, you know, not believe in God, and not believe in natural or inherent nature, If you have a view of some kind of inherent nature, you're not going to want to discuss exercising consciousness. You're going to want to find your innate nature. But if you just say, look, I've got muscles, I exercise my muscles sometimes.

[44:07]

No, I seem to have consciousness, I can exercise consciousness. And consciousness is the field we live in. The way we know things. Yeah. Can we know the subtlety of this world we live in? Just as we learn to read and we learn to think. we can also learn to know the subtlety of the world. And this I give you the exercise I've often given you, to go from the particular to the field. The field is just, you sense it all at once, then you go to the particular.

[45:20]

Then you sense it all at once, then you go to the particular. You just get in the habit of it. Like right now I... feel one of you, but in a very particular way. And I tend to go from particular to particular. And I go from particular to particular. Just what the senses reveal, show, appear. How it... And then I go to the feeling of you all at once. And then a particular. And then all of you all at once. And this as a habit. opens the world to you differently.

[46:40]

Yeah. Thanks for coming all the way from the capital. But what did they say? If Berlin had a mountain, it would be the highest? You've never heard that? No. I've heard that. Berlin had a mountain, it would be the highest mountain. I have my two translators from Berlin today. And we'll start again tomorrow.

[47:12]

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