Well yesterday I wandered into the wilderness of the topic. And by the end of the day, we, I think, found a clearing. But today, I think, I ought to locate ourselves more precisely, if I can. In this topic, the quality... of being. Yeah. And one thing we discussed yesterday was that the title is located both in our usual way of thinking about things and also in

[01:04]

Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. I joke that if we had a Buddhist Zen title, it might be the no quality of non-being or something.

[02:22]

But we have, you know, I find these recent years, I start with the, I work with the, start with the topic much more than I used to. To try to locate this practice somewhere. It's a practice for your entire life, but at each moment we have to locate it somewhere. So the quality of being, at least quality in English, is the Q-U-A part, is like who, what, what the heck is it? And the quality of being, at least quality in English, is like who, what, what the heck is it? What kind of thing is this?

[03:23]

This being. Becoming. Maybe if we really want to think of it in more Buddhist practice terms, it would be beingness. Could you translate that? I don't know. I don't know what I'm saying. He doesn't know what he's translating. Okay, you better find out. It's like being in the painter's brush. We don't know where we are. Like tree, treeing and tree-ness. Now, what I'm doing, of course, with this fiddling around with language like this, Is trying to play with and change how we locate ourselves.

[04:31]

And how we locate the objects of the world. Okay. So if our beingness is going to have some quality, what is it? We need some reference point. So when... Andreas told me that topic was the quality of being. And as I mentioned yesterday, he also told me that he found just saying the words located him

[05:32]

in his active life in a more satisfactory way. And we discussed that the fact in Zen words are often gather attention, focus attention not just something you think about. Instead of thinking about what is quality, what is being, you just say the quality of being and the words bring attention to the immediacy of your situation. And this use of words to direct attention is characteristic of Zen practice.

[06:55]

And Buddhist practice. And I find it myself quite remarkable that words can direct attention. I mean, I've... Often mentioned how? If you say, who am I? Or you say, what am I? I mean, you know, there's not that much difference between the word who and what, and they share the same root. But there's quite a different feeling to who am I and what am I.

[07:58]

So we have a choice. And that choice is... We have a choice because in Buddhism there's not a sense of a fixed nature. Yeah, we have, you know, a genetic and cultural... inheritance and evolution. But still, at each moment, the situation is actually quite fluid. And many of us have rather parallel different lives. Obviously, work and home is the most common example. So you've taken the fluidity of our lives the potential fluidity of our life and you've diverted it into two stream beds created or joined created two stream beds or joined two already existing stream beds

[09:26]

And this fluidity flows into this pattern or that pattern? And for many of us it's two or three more tributaries. Buddhist practice emphasizes the fluidity that is the immediacy of each moment. Before there are string beds. Yeah, and to notice that momentariness the fluidity of momentariness.

[10:57]

No, why to do this? Why bother with this? That's always the question I ask. Why bother? Why am I mentioning this to you? Why waste your time? Sorry. Well, I mean, I hope that by... tomorrow afternoon or lunchtime today, it does make sense why we make these distinctions. Yeah. Okay. But even if the situation is, and it's useful to envision the immediacy of each moment as also a fluidity, to think of it this way.

[11:59]

And if you think of it this way, thinking of it this way begins to make it happen this way. Auf diese Weise zu denken fängt an, es auf diese Weise geschehen zu lassen. discover you're experiencing it that way. So, if mental formations, if you have an idea of fluidity or immediacy, those are mental formations. If mental formations actually shape how we exist. And not only shape how we exist over long periods of time,

[13:07]

but shape how we exist momentarily, then it makes a difference what mental formations we choose to inhabit. Now, some mental formations work and some don't. Some have a negative effect, some have a positive effect. Some are a waste of time. Some are distractions and so forth. Okay, so what mental formations are most important? accurate to how we actually exist. How we experientially exist. This is the question Buddhism asks itself. Now, as we also discussed yesterday, I don't like saying that Oh, by the way, if any of you think there are

[14:46]

aspects of what we spoke about yesterday that ought to be or could usefully be reviewed for those who arrived today, please mention them to me. And it might even be good for us who were here yesterday to review some of these things. Because what we're trying to do is to understand the dimensions of practice clearly enough, that the understanding is in fact instruction. that allows us to practice through this instructive understanding. And this is especially true in what I'm calling always, often,

[15:52]

an adept lay sangha. Because most of us don't or can't or are not likely to practice in a monastery. And a monastery is designed to do a lot of this stuff for us. There's an advantage there. Not always it's being done for you. You can forget about it. You can just kind of like... There's going to be three meals a day and there's going to be somebody rings a bell and it's time to go to bed. You don't have to think about anything. It's great, I like it. I don't think, what am I going to do? Okay, I go to bed. But sometimes it's really nice to stay up, of course.

[17:19]

Sometimes it's nice not to have anybody ringing bells. But there's an advantage to just abandoning any thoughts about what you have to do, and just letting things come to you instead of you coming to things. In lay practice, we have to be more motivated, more instructed, structured, instructed. I always like to challenge my knee. It sounds Italian. Okay. Because we need to bring these mudras into our daily life.

[18:43]

I mean our... There's atoms, there's molecules, things like that. And somehow, on top of all that, there's social life. Institutions, governments. And they're all based on words and thoughts and agreements. And if you decide not to cut your fingernails, You may find it hard to get a job. Because the agreement is we cut our fingernails. Yeah, et cetera. These are agreements. And all of us live in a pattern of agreements.

[19:48]

If I go to a Rajneesh disco, do they still exist? Is there one in Hanover? Well, you go in and it's thump, thump, thump, funky, funky. Well, that's an agreement. So I go, well, okay. If I go into my hotel's dining room, it's Chicago, Chicago is a wonderful town. This is a different agreement. Yeah, I mean, probably I don't want to eat But we can also bring agreements wisdom agreements, something like that, into our daily life.

[20:59]

And there are some agreements we can bring into our daily life which are felt by others. which interact with others agreements. Okay. But we still need a reference point. So when, again, Andreas told me the topic is the quality of being, I always forget, you know, what the title is, even when I choose the title. Why did I choose that, if I did?

[22:00]

I did it all the time. Well, I don't plan ahead for anything. I just sort of wait until the seminar. Oh, okay, I have to do a seminar, it says on the schedule. The bell rang and now I have to go to a seminar. I don't like to think ahead. I get confused. It's just too complicated for me. So, So, Andreas said the quality of being. And I think what is an experience of beingness, or is there some quality to being that this title makes me notice?

[23:00]

Well, in my life, I would say that the most The strongest experience of a quality of being that I have doesn't come from other people, although the connectivity of that one has with other people. Yeah, I like the connectivity with my teacher, Suzuki Roshi. Or the connectivity or connectedness I have with those I practice with. It's certainly the

[24:21]

I can't make comparisons. It's an extraordinary satisfaction. But also, for me, at this point in my life and for many years, in fact, it's simply doing zazen. Now, not doing zazen for results, but just the experience of doing zazen. Okay. And, you know, it's maybe learning to sit is a life skill, let's call it that, which is rather unrelated to Buddhism.

[25:29]

Well, I can't say that. I'd say not necessarily related. Certainly the teaching of Buddhism depends on the spacious non-conscious mind that arises through zazen practice. The mind behind the mind the mind behind the mind that gathers and notices differently than consciousness. Yeah, variations in this happen to all of us. Yeah, you're right.

[26:32]

During the day you do numbers of things, of course. And you're speaking to someone. And you, for example, I said that Proust's father, Marcel Proust's father, was one of the first people, he was a pioneer of public sanitation. He noticed and figured out that cholera followed certain patterns of... and was passed from person to person, often in unsanitary conditions. Although you don't need to know this, I was interested in it because Freiburg, where I lived part of the time, was settled by people from Hamburg

[28:09]

often coming during a cholera epidemic in Hamburg. Anyway, so in speaking to a friend of mine who's a botanist, a botanist, like he's a botanist, Oh, I'm sorry, yeah, a botanist. Yeah. You've heard of botanist before? No, before. Okay, a botanist. And I realized in the middle of the night that I'd said to him, typhoid, And what I meant to say cholera. So the mind behind the mind was paying attention to my whole day and somehow without my even knowing it was reviewing everything I said and said oh to this scientist I said

[29:17]

I misspoke and said typhus and typhoid instead of cholera. So next time I saw him, I said, you know, that really was, he said, yeah, I thought so. All right, so one of the things Zen practice is trying to do is to bring this, what I'm calling today, the mind behind the mind, into a more active presence in our life. So what happens at night? What happens at night? What happens to you? What happens tonight? What happens at night? There's a kind of spaciousness to dreaming mind.

[30:55]

Things are rather disorganized. And things appear from different time zones. In different parts of your life. And they kind of relate and don't relate to each other. In other words, there's a kind of mental spaciousness that allows your world to diverge but within this mental space. During the day, consciousness makes everything more or less converge. And fit together.

[32:00]

But you only notice what fits together. And when things don't fit together you may feel uncomfortable but you don't know why it doesn't fit together. But the dreaming mind allows in the divergence allowed in the spaciousness of the dreaming mind More subtle relationships and more related to feeling than thinking appear. No. What Zazen does is enter you into this mind behind the mind.

[33:14]

That's one of the things it does. Until you get really bodily familiar with the mind behind the mind. It doesn't just happen in the gathering process of dreaming. It's going on during your day, whether you notice it or not. And the practice of Zazen makes it happen more often during the day and makes it happen independent of the psychological dynamics of dreaming. And it in effect becomes a way to think creatively.

[34:17]

You want to think more creatively about something you have to do. Go do Zazen and sit. That's good. Gerald McBoing-Boing. None of you know what that is. Probably some of you might know. Do you know Gerald McBoing-Boing? It was a famous cartoon in the 60s or something. A little guy with a little hat. Okay. That was the spaciousness of mind. Gerald McBoingboing came with me.

[35:19]

I noticed yesterday we talked about Gerald Geralding. Because this is not gerald, this is geraldic. But I can't say Neil is kneeling. Not at the moment. Heinrich is Heinriching. Anyway, okay. But to sit for that reason, which I do quite often in fact, I have to solve a lot of problems a lot of the times and I solve them in Zazen mind much more effectively than in thinking.

[36:22]

The specifics I may use thinking as a tool. But the overall situation and the way it can be turned usually appears to me much more effectively in zazen. I suppose that depends on a certain comfort and being used to sitting. But when I speak about the satisfaction of sitting, I don't mean sitting that has some result. I mean the simple experience of aliveness, simple experience of the body, the aliveness of the body when you sit.

[37:39]

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