Yeah, some of you know Lou Hartman, and he seems to be on his deathbed right now. Quite a few people are sitting with him. He's old, 80s, 90s, been around a long time. He was a sort of leftist political radio commentator years ago, I think. And Blanche Hartman, who's his wife, has taught many of us how to do sewing, you know, for robes, boxes. Anyway. Wonderful. Cranky guy. I'm, oh, I'm glad each of you is here. And Nikki, I missed you.

[01:02]

Here you are, back, good. Even though you're hiding behind Damon. Yeah, you know, I enjoyed, or rather, I rather liked the other, the second tissue. This is the third. because I, you know, I discovered things, and I, you know, for me a tesho always is a kind of, I don't speak about what I know, I'd speak about what I'd like to know, or something like that. So now I discover something when I have to give a tesho. What I discovered last time, what I enjoyed, appreciated for myself. But I felt, I actually let the topic get a little away from me, and must have been a little difficult for you, because I really was going to talk about, if I had a plan, I was going to talk about something else, but I got started on these nuances of mind and it just led me here and there.

[02:09]

And I realized I conflated a lot of things that weren't very, perhaps, helpful. So, could have been presented a little more systematically. So today I'll try to be a little more systematic. And I'm still thinking, what is a 90-day practice period? You know, we have Dogen's, Ryujin's, and others' descriptions. And we know what a sashin is. Most of us know what a sashin is. And sashins fit in with people's lives. It's only a week, but Practice periods don't fit in. You really have to change your life quite a bit to do a practice period. And that's much more inconvenient for lay people, and so you get all kinds of so-called short practice periods, which aren't practice periods.

[03:10]

But a sesshin is designed to kind of force you into... a kind of attentive, an attentive awareness that surpasses willpower. Something like that. But practice period, it's much more relaxed than a sushim. And you have to make, it's an opportunity to make an effort. And the effort I emphasized in the first tesha was uninterrupted mind. Okay. Uninterrupted mind. Now, let's sort of like play around and feel out what that could mean. It certainly means attention to the mind or attention to what appears as mind and everything that appears, appears as mind because that's how we know things.

[04:19]

So I'm trying to speak about. So for these 90 days, these three months, you have an opportunity to approach, to explore, to maybe realize, hopefully realize, to some degree or to a great degree, uninterrupted mind. Okay, so what do I mean by uninterrupted mind? Well, I mean, you can't practice uninterrupted mind unless you have some experience of mind. So I'm trying to find what ways I can speak about the experience of mind, to experience mind. Maybe to experience mind maybe like a surface with impressions. Like if you were a mirror that could feel the images on the mind, on the mirror.

[05:30]

If the glass or the silver backing or whatever could feel the images, that would be like, yeah, part of what I'm speaking about. To feel, you look at the mountain and you feel the mountain change. on the surface of the mind, something like that. Now, what I'm going to say may sound, and I am often a little afraid it sounds, awfully complicated. But it is complicated when I speak about it, and I speak about it to give you suggestions, but if you start doing it, If you can find an entry to the feel, F-E-E-L, feel of the field, F-I-E-L-D, feel of the field of mind. If you can find an entry to the feel of mind so that everything you see and hear, taste, you feel mind.

[06:38]

Now this is one of the, you know, to know this is one of the turning points or catalysts like to have continuous or nearly continuous attention to the breath. It's one of the big watersheds, catalysts. And to be able to feel mind and everything is another. Okay, so let's leave it there. That's one sense entry. A second is you begin to feel, know, observe the contents of mind. You just don't feel the surface of mind, the tree or the mountain or a person. You begin to feel, ah, tree, mountain, person. You feel the contents of mind. Now, I'm just saying these things because they're obvious, but also because... They're just ways to notice.

[07:44]

You know, you can't stop a content from its contextual flow. But you can use this concept of contents to notice, oh, there's content. Right now there's contents. There's a whole room at Tantso and for all contents in this mind. And you are present too in this mind. So there's this mind which is receiving these impressions, sensorial and mental, and there's what the contents are. And there's a different topography, you know. My mind feels different as it feels you than when it feels the tansu, the cupboards. Hmm. You know, the feel of a tree in the mind is different than the feel of a mountain in the mind.

[08:51]

Now, the more you can know the topography, let's call it that, of the mind, the more it becomes possible to have an uninterrupted mind. the continuity, the continuousness of an uninterrupted mind. Now, since we have Christian and Nicole under the tutelage of, you know, studying accounting, and Eddie is an accountant. You're an accountant. And so maybe accounting, and it's the first time I've ever had four people doing accounting in a TV show, you know.

[09:58]

But although accountants' interests are not usually too interested in Zen, this is a demographic fact, I believe. However, Maybe I would think that the detailed attention that accounting requires is similar to the detailed attention that software programming requires. Because we have a lot of software programmers in the Sangha, particularly in Europe. Not so many accountants, but with starting, Eddie, you're leading a trend. Wherever you are, he's not here today. Eddie, you can tell Eddie I spoke about him fondly. Because doing something like, I don't know, chess or software or accounting, music, is actually you're articulating the mind.

[11:01]

I mean, let's just, again, state that all of this talk about you know, brain plasticity and all. Yoga culture assumes for centuries the neurological plasticity. But it doesn't happen overnight. It's great that there's plasticity that's not plastic. It's great there's plasticity, but it's, you know, it's better than non-plasticity. But, you know, if you know there's plasticity, you relate to things differently. A very simple example is Japanese and Chinese assume plasticity so they make as complicated a language system as possible because they know the language system educates the mind. Changes the mind. MacArthur tried to simplify the whole thing to an alphabet. It's like... I mean... You know.

[12:06]

I mean, he just didn't know. Simple is better. It ain't true. Complex is better. So this practice assumes a plasticity, a neurological plasticity. It takes time. But somehow over now well over a thousand years, two thousand years probably, it's thought that somehow ninety days is a unit. If you make an effort to establish an uninterrupted continuity of mind, it's a unit in which there can be actually some shift in the neurological plasticity. It really depends on you.

[13:12]

Your cooking depends on the attention you bring to the cooking. Even our famous Austrian, Arnold Schwarzenegger. I saw him the other day at the inauguration. He said, a pump with a mind in it is worth ten without the mind in it. Simply, you know. I mean, he created bodybuilding as a world sport. But he did it by knowing that, partly by knowing that the pump with the mind in it is worth ten without the mind in it. Probably steroids are part of it too, but you know. So far there's no Zen steroids that we know about. And if any of you know about them, keep it to yourself.

[14:14]

I've given you a concept of attention to the mind as a surface. If you know that, it's different than not knowing. MacArthur didn't know. Yoga culture does know. that if you know something, it affects how you bring attention to things. So a certain kind of knowledge, a certain kind of conceptual knowledge, is inseparable from mature, developed and developing Buddhist practice. So I'm saying know, maybe it'll be helpful to know, try to notice, know and notice the surface of the mind. I mean, you can just think it, and if you think it, it starts to happen. And when it starts to happen, the happening takes off, goes places.

[15:26]

So then there's the contents on the surface of the mind. And then there's the contextual flow. You begin to notice. It's a little bit if you looked at a stream of water, a nice clear stream of water, as if your mind could go down and be on the surface of the water and then into the water and feel wet and maybe even under the water a bit. So if somehow the attention of the mind, your attention could go into the water. That's like if your attention can go into the contextual flow of the mind. In the mind, looking around. Whoa. Pretty neat. And that's what zazen is like.

[16:30]

You allow yourself to sink into the contextual flow of the mind. Now, in this, it's helpful to identify, how could I put it, is to identify you-ness, me-ness, me-ness, you-ness, with attention. Advantage of that. I mean we're trying to hear when we talk about this is make the experience of self more Interesting more complex more detached Because if you think all observing is is you observing this isn't correct it's a conflation of a whole lot of experiences into This is self, this is me doing it. If you maybe shift the sense of self to attention, you'll see that attention is sometimes something like me doing it, but often it's something like the world doing it.

[17:46]

the mountain is doing it to attention, and you're doing it to attention, and it's not a simple self. It's more complex than just me looking at the mountain. The mountain is also looking through attention at you. Or looking through attention at what a mountain might be. So now another, the third example I'm giving is to notice the contextual flow. Now we can make it a little more complicated. It's complicated because it's one more thing I'm saying with my flapping lips, but it's not so complicated when you're doing it because If you spend some time in the contextual flow in zazen and mindfulness practice, if you get your feet wet, your mind wet, attention wet in the contextual flow, you begin to notice the flow has certain kind of patterns.

[18:58]

And we could say the patterns are planes and layers. Now, what's the distinction I'm making here? There's layers. There's a kind of contextual layer, then there's some sub-layer, and there's a sub-layer, a sub-sub-layer, and there's et cetera. So there's different layers. And the layers sort of relate to each other. Now, if I say planes, I'm using planes to mean that the plane itself is kind of self-organizing. Once you're on a certain plane of mind, you stay there. It's hard to, you know... So the mind appears as different planes that are self-organizing and mind appears as different layers and the layers are interrelated. No, maybe it sounds complicated as I said, but actually when you find yourself in the midst of the contextual flow of mind and somebody, and you tried to stop in the middle of it, freeze frame and look at it, you say, oh, actually, it's a contextual flow, but there's layers here.

[20:09]

One layer is going faster than the other, etc. Hmm. So then we have a more, let's take it to next. Once you have a feeling for the contextual flow and the planes and layers of the contextual flow, then there begins to be a spatial sense. I talked yesterday, and that was part of the conflation. I talked about soft space, but I didn't get there in a way that maybe helped you too much. This morning somebody sneezed over here, coughed. And then I coughed, and then the doan coughed. We were all listening to each other's throats. Who's going to cough next? And we've noticed that. The movie theater, somebody sneezes, somebody else sneezes. Well, we don't... It's not conscious exactly that...

[21:17]

we're somehow connected with the other persons in this way, we can see it appear that way. But one of the things that happens when you practice 90 days in a context with somebody which is not social space, And one of the aspects of it being not social space is, of course, you can't get away from the other people that are there. You work with them. And in fact, if you design, as this Zen does, designed a certain way, if you design monastic grounds, you design the paths so that people have to pass each other as often as possible. You don't design the paths so there's shortcuts. You know, you get Americans in a Japanese monastery, and I'll take shortcuts, you know. In Japan, you have to go certain directions, and then you go a certain direction, and then they'll put a couple steps up, because then you have to slow down, go up, and then you put a little step down.

[22:21]

It's all to engage you in the process of going somewhere. The building's over there, but you go that way, and Yeah, and I'd like to do that here more. So that when you were there, there was very far away, because you could only get to over there by going around Dan's garden or something like that. So if we're together, and the design of a practice period is to make us together in some ways where we can't avoid each other, which you can in social space... begin to feel each other in a way like the sneezes and coughs and things that, you know, again, it's not conscious.

[23:47]

You can't grasp it. If you try to grasp it and say, what is this feeling, you know, of our shared throats, coughing and sneezing, what is this feeling? You can't grasp it. But someone sneezes and it happens somebody else sneezes. But after a while, if you begin to let yourself out of social space and otherness space, that you don't think of others as really other. But maybe you can take a phrase, also me. Every person you see, you say to yourself, also me. Also me. That kind of noticing can help. So the otherness, the obvious degrees of otherness begin to slip away, disappear. And you begin to know, for instance, if somebody in the zendo sits well, if their body and breath are of a certain synthesized, synchronous pace.

[25:05]

It affects everyone in the Zendo. It affects everyone in the Zendo as surely as the sneezes affect everyone in the Zendo. And you begin to know this non-conscious mutuality, mutual body, which you can't know in social space. And we like social space, not only because it separates us from people we'd rather not hang out with, but also because it defines us as, you know, separate and maybe nice if people would only notice. So the separateness, the experience of separateness allows us to hope people say we're a nice person and so forth. And we need that. Our separateness needs that. But you need it less when everyone you see is also me.

[26:09]

Also us. Yeah. So this wider sense of... The interactive sense of our sensorial and mental spatial body happens the more you're in the contextual flow, the planes and layers of the contextual flow, that begins to make clear how much this contextual flow is actually part of the nearby, part of the near, part of the nearby. Now if I add one more thing, going back to Basho.

[27:26]

Now when Basho said When you think something, you should feel the moon rising. When you see something, you should feel, see a flower opening. Where does that come from? What mind and body is saying this? Well, it's a mind and body, called basho in this case, but a mind and body which sees the world as activities and not as entities. This is also a basic practice. Get in the habit of seeing everything as an activity. Every beach stone or mountain stone is an activity. You can see it in the lines of the stone. You can see it by picking it up or throwing it or kicking it or leaving it sit there.

[28:32]

Bounced down the mountain at one time. So you just get in the habit of seeing everything as an activity. So what, and not an entity. So what happens if you see everything as an activity? What happens? Is you begin to see relationships. And what happens when you begin to see relationships? Relationships bloom. When you watch the moon rise, we've had this wonderful moon the last night, the full moon. You watch the moon rise or watch and look at the full moon, it enhances everything. The outline of the trees, the twinkling rhythm of the valley lights, the brightness of Venus, your own feeling.

[29:36]

Everything is enhanced. So when he speaks about the moon, he's speaking about the feel, not some image of the moon or some philosophical connection with wholeness and roundness or I don't know what. It's just the feel, you feel, in your wider sense of your associable mind, associative mind. the feel of the moon rising. Of course, we live indoors so much. I mean, not here in Crestone, but most of the world, most of our urban Western world lives indoors. People like Basho were out walking. They didn't have cars. They didn't have radios and cars. and so forth. So they walked places, they did things, and the moon was part of their life. They knew, I mean, they'd go on and say, he got up and shook out his sleeves and went out the west door.

[30:42]

Well, they know where the west door is. Or they walked in the room to the north. And going to the north means something different than going to the south or east. But we don't have a sense that if I go out that way, I'm saying something. But if you live in the context of the stars and the moon and the weather and the directionality, you feel, you feel where you are. So somehow he means that when you really think of something, when you think of anything, it's relationships. And in those relationships, they come together for you in a way like you feel the way the moon enhances everything. Or if you come down in the morning to breakfast or look out in your garden or are out in your garden, some flowers have bloomed.

[31:50]

or the bloom on your table, flower on your table, the bloom makes you feel something. But that's relationships, and those relationships... So he's speaking about seeing the world as relationships, as flowering, the moon rising. All of this flows and is developed through The yogic practice, in this sense, our 90-day chance to develop an uninterrupted mind. Try it out. Thanks. May your redemption equally penetrate.

[32:48]

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