So what we're doing is an experiment to see if we can talk about in the same context science and Zen. As far as I'm concerned, science and Buddhism and especially Zen occupy the same conceptual world. That was not very good. So basic, let me say, I would say that basic Buddhism and basic science, as I understand it, occupy, are based on the same conceptual world.

[01:08]

To put the word conceptual into some context, I would say that visual artists writers, musicians, and maybe craftsmen. Visual artists. Did you say scientists too? No, I didn't. I'm not good today. Craftsmen, yeah. Occupy overlapping experiential worlds. But not necessarily conceptual worlds. Then we of course have the practical question of whether scientists and conceptual world influences how they experience the world.

[02:35]

Whether scientists having a conceptual world based on science makes them different than their culture or different than The other day I turned my head or neck or something and my hand, I couldn't operate my left hand. Yeah, and it was kind of annoying actually. Suddenly my left hand didn't belong to me. And I dropped the Oryoki bowl into the wastewater. Yeah, I dropped my chopsticks. Cut my finger when I was cutting some vegetables. So I had to do something about it. My hand wasn't functioning. So I did a little yoga, stretching, and so forth like that.

[04:04]

And Christiane Robrecht worked on my back and shoulders. She happened to be here during the seminar. And with a little time it more or less it looks like it belongs to me now and it actually feels like it belongs to me. Yeah. And so what did I do? I tried to bring my hand back to some, what, natural functioning. But I used practices and teachings to do it. I mean, I know something about yoga and Christiana has been a practitioner with me for years. So I used various kinds of help.

[05:13]

Well, that's sort of the idea of Buddhism. How to bring our mental and physical functioning into a cooperative relationship. They can be experienced separately. And then practice is how to relate this experienceable separateness together.

[06:13]

and how to relate this experienceable separateness to successional time. Now I have to decide in the next 40 minutes or so how much Buddhism and practice I should speak about so that the basic view of Buddhism and science and in particular botany can be understood together. And I would say, inaccurately and simplistically, but not entirely untrue, that practicing Zen, you start out as a genetic animal, is to become more plant-like.

[07:38]

I mean, Animals can move around and plants have to stay in one place. And in Zen we learn to stay in one place. Now after I say something for a while and then we'll have a break. And then Peter Nick who's here And then Peter Nick, who you all know who he is because you read the announcement of the program. In any case, he's a teaching and research botanist.

[08:40]

Er ist, er unterrichtet und forscht Botanik. And Otmar will speak, I think, this afternoon. Und Otmar wird heute Nachmittag sprechen. And I hope that Otmar can relate his wonderful work in the garden. Und ich hoffe, dass der Otmar seine wunderbare Arbeit im Garten to practice. And practice as part of everything we do anyway in life. Okay. Now I said successional time. I remember. Okay. By the way, this is also an ongoing experiment in how we use these two buildings. And instead of trying to figure it out or think it out, we're just mostly trying to use it out.

[09:54]

Just keep using it in successional time and see what happens. Now, by successional time, I mean just moment after moment. I mean, I just made this up myself, so I don't know if there's no special term for it as far as I know. We do have a word, but we have to get used to it. Okay, I'm contrasting successional time with durative time. Okay, I would like to talk about this time cycle, but I understand this more than I do, what comes together in contrast to a time span that involves a longer time.

[11:19]

Okay, good. Successively. Okay, so durative time is right now what we're experiencing. The presence of a present. And primarily the presence of a presence is determined by consciousness. And it creates a spatial dimension in which we can move, etc. And there's no universal durative time. I presume a dragonfly has its own durative time. Which is quite different, has to be, from the durative time that appears through our sensorium.

[12:23]

And so, you know, Yeah, and it's hard to find words for what I'm trying to say, as she knows. But as... through meditation practice, an unstructured meditation practice is really a process of... discovering how mind, body and phenomena can work together.

[13:26]

And just to say, to show the problems in trying to think this way, If I say to discover or uncover an experienceable life outside of durative time, of durative time, You... I can't really use words like uncover or discover. Because both words imply it's already there and you're just taking the top off.

[14:31]

To some extent you're uncovering, but you're also creating. Because the interdependence, the basic teaching of Buddhism, which I can sometimes say is better translated with inter-emergence, It's a constant process of uniqueness of creation. And any serious Zen practice is to enter you into that continual process of uniqueness. So let me give you a couple practices.

[16:11]

First we need the concept of mental postures. Instead of thinking of all mentation as thinking, Fundamental mental process, particularly in the yogic world, is a mental posture you join to activity. So an intention is a mental posture joined to activity. And we can think of that as a process of incubation. we could say that we're incubating the relationship between these two buildings.

[17:34]

By not trying to think it out only, but also just letting it happen. Because if each moment is actually unique and non-repeatable. Then if you join an insight or an intention to that activity, something happens. The cosmic washing machine starts tumbling it. I don't know where that came from. Because you have top loaders. Okay, so one mental posture that's essential for Zen practice.

[18:36]

which you actually have to train yourself to do and it goes against the stream of consciousness because as most of you know the job of consciousness is to make the world predictable So now you're trying to use consciousness, the mental posture in consciousness, to see that the world may be conveniently predictable, but not fundamentally. And most of us, for most of us, our identity is based on a concept, a fundament of as if the world was actually predictable. And for most of us, our identity is rooted in the predictability of our world.

[20:14]

To really base your identity on the fundamental unpredictability of the world is a huge psychological change. So the best word I can come to in English is to see everything as activity. is that one recognizes everything as an activity. And in practice, the most basic act And if you've got nothing better to do, this kind of practice is fun.

[21:26]

Because you try to remind yourself that each moment is a separate appearance. And you do simple things. I look at Muriel and there she is a separate appearance and then I look at her father and there is a new appearance and although somewhere in my mind there is the idea that you are still there but in fact when I really am embedded in appearance as activity. When I look back at Muriel, I see that she's actually different than she was a moment ago.

[22:28]

Her posture, the musculature of her face, etc. Quite different. Now, if I do that all the time, I know something about people that is different than when you know something about people when you think they're predictable. And the dynamic of that as a practice is to go from the particular to the feel of the field, back to the particular and back to the feel of the field. Also die Dynamik beim Praktizieren von dem ist, dass man hin und her geht zwischen dem Spezifischen zu dem Gefühl des Feldes und wieder hin zu dem Spezifischen.

[23:42]

And that feel of the field integrates the particular in a dynamic way. Now, since quite a few of you, more than any summer I've ever done, are new to me, I'm giving you a short course, a condensed course and a review for others of you on some of these basic practices. So you... One practice is you begin to discover how to... discover how to locate the world as a flow of appearance.

[24:49]

And then to that flow of appearance, you bring hopefully the wisdom of various mental postures. And one is to see everything as activity. Okay, now, one very basic, the most basic breath practice, I think, has to be integrated here. If you form an intention, a mental posture, To bring attention to the breath.

[25:51]

Yeah. And you don't so much... You're not involved with, oh, I succeeded or I didn't succeed. That's pretty much a waste of time. And what you do is... primarily strength in the intention. And trust the dynamic of the intention in a constantly transforming world. And you can do this in any circumstance. But it's sure easier if you first learn to meditate. I would say it's almost impossible without learning to meditate. But it's understandable and possible. Okay, now the question is, a simple one.

[27:05]

Why is something so easy to do for a few breaths? To bring your attention to your breath. All of you can do it for two or three breaths. Maybe even for ten. But the first year or two of practice I call usually counting to one. You get to one and then you start thinking about something. Oh, oh, one, two, one, one again. Now, does your attention go back to thinking because your thoughts are so interesting? I mean, you'd have much more interesting thoughts than I do, if that's the case.

[28:20]

It goes back to your thinking because that's how you establish the continuity of your identity. You can function without a concept or experience of predictability. But you can't function without an experience of continuity. Okay. So what you're doing is you're using the intention to bring attention to the breath.

[29:29]

to shift the experience of continuity from thinking first of all to the breath and once you establish continuity in the breath And it happens almost like a rubber band. Yeah, your thinking goes back to your, your attention goes back to your thinking. And sometimes stays with your breath. But then goes back. And after a while, it starts coming back by itself.

[30:30]

And then suddenly, like a gummy band snapping, it just stays here. And attention just rests in the breath. Continuously, all the time. And that then easily becomes attention resting in the body. And that easily, then fairly easily, becomes attention resting in the environing world. The surrounding world. And that would be called in Buddhism, realized mindfulness.

[31:36]

And there have been a number of scientific, for years people have been trying to study scientifically meditation. And one of the two most recent I know about is a German woman scientist who is now at the university in Los Angeles. It says the longer you practice, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, there's more gyrification or the lining of the outer layer of the brain develops. And there's just been a Harvard-Yale-MIT study which shows that the same kind of thing

[32:47]

All three of them or just one of those? The universities did it together. To show that the brain, which normally thins as you get older, thickens if you meditate. And the longer you meditate, the more it's the case. Yeah, and it's particularly related to attentional aspects of the brain. In other words, moment by moment practice of attention in successional time, changes us psychologically for sure and in a variety of ways but it actually also changes your mental bodily structure yoga culture has forever as long as it's been around assumed the plasticity of the brain and body

[34:27]

So you're changing your attentional world by practice. Attentional? Yeah. Everything I've mentioned, appearances, activity, are all about developing your attentional world. Now, whenever I give a talk, I really feel I'm sharing a discussion with you. I'm sharing aspects of my inner discussion and I'm hoping it joins your inner discussion and we can join

[35:32]

I hope, Peter Nix in our discussion. Since I've run out of Since I am time, I can't run out of time, but I run out of time when it's shared with you. So let me just give you one more practice which I think can be very helpful. The practice of seeing everything as an activity. This bell is an activity. Someone had to smelt the metal. somebody had to make it somebody had to conceive of it and I can use it as either a teacup or a bell yeah and at a subatomic atomic and molecular level it's an activity

[37:05]

It's an activity. And in fact, I saw Higgs boson just a moment ago. Right there. There it was. It existed a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second, I read, you know. The activity of a tree. There's animals, there's trees, plants, and mountains. And trees are somewhere in between, in the middle. And it's an activity. But it usually stays in one place.

[38:28]

And tree and true share the same etymology. And we'd be pretty disturbed if you went out. after our talking, and the trees out there had moved. But they're still an activity. So it's helpful to just stand in front of a tree. Now, stillness is the dynamic of activity. Stille ist die Dynamik von Aktivität. You can really only discover activity through stillness. Ihr könnt wirklich die Dynamik von Aktivität nur durch Stille entdecken.

[39:38]

So you stand in front of a tree. Ihr steht also vor einem Baum. And you're practicing seeing it as an activity. And it's all very obvious what I'm saying. You look at the bark and it's kind of lava-like activity. And there's insects and birds which are part of the activity of the tree. And there's leaves that aren't leaving. And they're not leaving because they're attached to the branches. Oh, leaving like goodbye. Yeah. They say goodbye in autumn when they fall. So the leaves aren't leaving.

[40:40]

And because they're attached to the branches. And the branches are attached to the trunk. And the trunk is rooted in the ground. I know there's an Indian drawing on a American Indian drawing on a vase, and they asked the craftsman, what is that? He said, it's the roots of a tree seen from underneath. So that really, we could say, grounds the vase. So you have the stillness just to stay there and feel the activity of the tree.

[41:44]

And if you look at the leaves, the leaves are moving in relationship to the stillness of the trunk. So even in the leaves you see the stillness. And the space of the tree is there. And when you feel the space of the tree... If you feel the space of the tree. And if you do this enough times to really feel the space of the tree. It happens because you feel the space in yourself. And the stillness of yourself as simultaneously activity.

[42:56]

No actors. Japanese no-actors. They say the secret of being a no-actor is to, in your movement, never lose your stillness. And if you can really open yourself or sustain your stillness, while you let that fold out of you, and the world fold into you. The feeling is the whole audience enters into that stillness. And the most powerful emotions of your life can open into that stillness.

[44:22]

So part again of Zen practice is in the midst of knowing everything is activity You know that through a continuously reappearing inner stillness. And somehow that feels to me to be sort of plant-like. I mean, if I let my hair grow, actually leaves would come out. All right, thank you very much. So we have about a half hour break.

[45:19]

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