Not only do they think of many little things I didn't even think I needed till I saw. But it's aesthetically quite beautiful. The paintings, how things are taken care of, etc. Now I would like to speak about, if there's time, we can do it. What in Zen we mean by performative time. Experienced time. And I'd also like to speak about maybe we have three experienceable bodies. Yeah, and probably something else.

[01:05]

Okay. But first I'd like to have some comments, questions, how did the little exercise go? Whatever you want to say. And Aaron had something. Aaron, is that right? I had something he might ask me, and I said, hey, bring that up in the group. And Aaron has something that he wanted to ask me. I said, ask it in the large group. That's something that you said too much yesterday. The legal requirement actually means that a Japanese, when he says I love you, means something else than when a European says I love you.

[02:14]

So the question is whether this linguistic structure, when a Japanese person says, being love, whether that's really something different from what we say when we say, I love you, whether they mean something different. Yes. Is that the answer? As Wittgenstein says, the borders, the boundaries of language are the boundaries of our world. I don't think that's completely true, but it's quite true.

[03:25]

Does that mean that because of that, relationships between Europeans and Japanese people, do they work better or worse because of that? Well, I've known a lot of Japanese Western couples. And, yeah, there's problems, but there's problems in every marriage. And maybe the cultural differences are more interesting than the psychological differences.

[04:35]

But a question implied in what she said is if the If the ordinary culture of Japan, China, Korea, et cetera, is yogic, based on relationships and not entities, then what's the role of Buddhism in such a culture? Well, that's a hard question to answer. But I would say that the basic way life is, you have to survive, you have to, you know, et cetera, is not so different.

[05:37]

But the nuances are different. And I could give you various examples. But... I'll come back to it. I have to feel what the differences are. Thanks for what you said. Someone else. Yes. I have a very simple question. What's this thing that you're wearing? Well, in America, people come up and they say to me, is that your bag? And it does look a little like a bag.

[06:41]

But also the slang, is that your bag, means is that your job, is that your... But it's a small version of Buddha's robe. And so Buddha's robe supposedly was made from scraps of cloth sewn together. And now you buy expensive silk and cut it up into pieces. But the custom is that if I'm speaking about the Dharma, I'm not speaking just from my own experience, but also the tradition.

[07:56]

To make that clear, I wear a small version of Buddha's robe. So the custom is when you hear the teaching or speak about the teaching, you give it to us. In other words, I didn't make all this up. Okay, someone else? You're welcome. Yes. I have a question. You said at the beginning that there is nothing but the plus. And that is not the plus of continuity, but the plus from moment to moment. So you said in the beginning that there is nothing but the flow, and that this flow is not the flow in the sense of continuity, but on a moment-to-moment, moment-to-moment flow.

[09:02]

It means that we can't do anything else but to focus from moment to moment, even though there is always the flow, and then we come back to this feeling of the flow. Does that mean that all we can do is feeling from moment to moment and then returning to the feeling of the flow? Is that right? Yeah. Well, it's a simple fact of molecules, atoms, et cetera, that things are moment by moment. And it's a simple fact that our perceptual processes are moment by moment. And that is one way to talk about how things actually exist.

[10:11]

And one of the overriding or one of the guiding ideas in Buddhism as a whole is can we exist in accord with how things actually exist? So consciousness, the job of consciousness, is to make the world predictable. You don't want to go outside and find the tree in front of your house gone in the morning. And the world is mostly predictable.

[11:13]

At a general level, but actually it's not predictable. So how do you enter into that unpredictability? How do you enter into that uniqueness? So if it's unpredictable, it's unique. And one of the ways you know When you come into a realization of that, you're never bored. Because each moment is unique. You never know what's going to happen. Great. Okay. So how do you enter into that? And the effort is to notice the world as appearances.

[12:30]

And many of these processes you first conceptually understand. And then you let the conception whisper mental postures into your ear. And you sort of train yourself to notice the world as appearances. So I notice you. But then if I look over here I notice you and you. But I don't experience that as continuity. And I am actually physically not sure you're still going to be there when I look back. And when I see you're still there, that's really quite nice.

[13:35]

Surprise. So you have to fool around with your perceptions that way until you start noticing differently. Okay, let me speak to what Aaron said again. The simplest thing I can say about that and the question I raised in conjunction is the Japanese person, who I know Japan better than the rest of Asia, has to distinguish between the radical version of this worldview, and the everyday version of this worldview, which are often so similar, Japanese people don't see where Buddhism's coming at, it's just about doing funerals.

[14:47]

Und die beiden, die überlappen oft so sehr, dass die Leute nicht genau wissen, woher der Buddhismus überhaupt kommt, außer eben an Beerdigungsthermonien zu leiten. So we have a certain advantage practicing in the West. Und deshalb haben wir einen gewissen Vorteil, wenn wir hier im Westen praktizieren. Because the worldview contrast is quite big. Weil der Gegensatz dieser Weltanschauung wirklich ziemlich groß ist. And enlightenment basically is a worldview shift. Und Erleuchtung ist... A world view shift that stays with you and you begin to inhabit. So we have the advantage of being able to work with these world view differences. Okay, someone else. Is it possible to learn lucid dreaming?

[16:03]

Yes. Tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in. Well, I did give you some instructions. to have a physical feel of attention. But I would say that some people just have lucid dreaming. But I would say among meditators who meditate regularly, Like daily, several times a week. For a large percentage of them lucid dreaming just comes sort of naturally. For me, I've been doing this so long that night time is just another form of turning something over.

[17:13]

Not exactly thinking. But it's also not that dreams are in the service of consciousness. Maybe we could say consciousness is in the service of dreams. But the important, a different worldview is that your dreams don't just arise from your experience, they arise from a wider sense of the world. So at a certain point in Zen, dreaming becomes an important part of practice. Yeah, okay, I don't know. Yeah, you're welcome, yeah. I asked your translator a question during the break and she said I should ask this here in the big room.

[18:46]

Okay. Yes. Und das ist das Wunderbarste, sich in Assoziationen hineinzulassen und sich treiben zu lassen wie in einem Strom und das würde ich also niemals abstellen wollen, weil das einfach wunderbar ist. So you gave this instruction about how to, when focusing on the particular, how to stop, maybe interrupt associations.

[19:46]

And what I'm wondering is, I'm writing fiction, and for me that's one of the most wonderful things ever, to immerse myself in these associations, and that's something I would never want to lose. Don't lose it then. But there's another kind of association that comes up when you don't associate immediately. Just a quick look at the five skandhas. The fifth skanda is consciousness. And when you let go of the structures of consciousness, you have associative mind. And associations appear, and Freud noticed that and said, hey, there's an unconscious mind. So those associations are arising not from consciousness, but from another viscosity of mind than consciousness.

[21:00]

Then if you shift to a percept only viscosity of mind, which is more mind located in the particular, A more subtle form of associations appear. Okay, so good luck. Try it out. It's a little complicated. It's not complicated at all. Your smart phone is much more complicated. There's only three things, consciousness, associations and percept only.

[22:11]

Okay, someone else before I try something else. He's got my hair don't. This is a hair don't and this is a hair won't. But you don't say hairdo in German. Okay, so go ahead, excuse me. How do you know what level you are on? How do you know you're sitting in that chair? It's like that, just you experience it. You begin to, you begin to experience in a greater refinement and you notice the differences.

[23:18]

Again, give you a little bit of a difference. The word Sanskrit for the language. means to refine, literally to refine the mind. So language is considered a way you refine your mind. So I'm not just trying to communicate with you. I'm trying to refine my mind in how I communicate. And since we're all in this together, with my experience of five decades of practice, I'm trying to share this refinement with you.

[24:29]

Yeah, I mean, when MacArthur tried to get the Japanese to go to an alphabet, General MacArthur. I mean, MacArthur said something implicitly. You guys need five or six thousand kanji characters to read the newspaper. And 20,000 or more to be a scholar. What's wrong with you guys? We've just got 26 letters. That's good enough. But the Japanese said, the smart Japanese said, there's a lot of said, you're trying to simplify our brains. Because yoga culture has always assumed the plasticity of the brain, body and mind.

[25:31]

So the Japanese and Chinese want as complicated or complex a language as possible because it makes a complex human being. So you do these things and Pretty soon it's like clear, like you're sitting in a chair, not standing up. And what we can't see the difference now with a little more refinement, we see the differences. Okay, anyone else? If we look at the German word for future, which is Zukunft, then what you mentioned is the Chinese sense of something coming towards you.

[26:45]

That's entirely implied in the word, yeah. But we usually don't see that. And yesterday we also saw this with the wonderful father of Tom. how often the word suffering, how often we still use it, unconsciously, without us And yesterday's lecture by Thomas, we also saw how often we still use this word light in German, which is hard to translate, the body experience from within. How often that's still in various things that we stay, but we're not conscious of it. We usually think that's an old, old word and we don't really use it anymore.

[27:46]

Yeah. Well, when Suzuki Roshi came to visit me in Japan at one point, he gave a lecture to this group of kind of far out commune types who were friends of Gary Snyder's and mine. lived on Swansea Island. Anyway, he gave a talk first in Japanese. And then, and they all said, oh God, this same old Buddhist stuff And then in the evening he gave a talk in English. And they said, oh, how refreshing and new all this is. Great. So when he said it in English, same thing. It didn't disappear into their usual way of thinking. Als er das Gleiche auf Englisch gesagt hat, da ist es nicht automatisch in ihre gewöhnlichen Denkweisen hinein verschwunden.

[29:07]

I wish I was capable of continuing to refine myself through Deutsch, but I'm not. Ich wünschte, ich wäre fähig, mich immer weiter im Deutschen zu verfeinern, aber das kann ich nicht. I have no aural memory. So I try to find myself through German translators and things like that. Okay, now let me try to say something about performative time, if it's okay with you. I would like to give three names to time. Durative time. Sensorial phenomenological time. And performative time. And this is a kind of refinement or a retirement.

[30:22]

Okay. And I'm choosing three names, three words. As ways to direct our attention at the experience of time, which is usually just going on. Now, words can hardly express the subtleness of consciousness and can't almost at all say anything about the subtlety of what's beyond consciousness.

[31:31]

So the idea that you can capture the world in language is simply wrong as far as I'm concerned. Also ist diese Vorstellung, dass man die Welt in der Sprache erfassen kann oder vollständig erfassen kann, die stimmt einfach nicht. But words are very powerful tools to direct attention. Aber Worte sind ganz kraftvolle Werkzeuge, um Aufmerksamkeit auszurichten. My simple example is, if I say, who am I? I feel something. If I change that and say, what am I? I feel something different. And these are just two little short words starting with W. But what am I directs my attention differently than who am I. So I'm using words as ways to direct your attention and my attention.

[32:41]

Also, durative time. Okay. The present doesn't exist. No physicist can tell you the dimensions of the present. It's past and it's immediately future and there's no present. And as many years ago when I was a kid, I puzzled why there was no 12 o'clock. It's a minute to twelve. It's a half a minute to twelve. It's a millionth of a second to twelve. It's a millionth of a second after twelve. There's no twelve. But we experience a present.

[33:53]

Now we experience a present because our bodily processes are a scanning process. Which is well known now that actually the eye, when I look at things, is scanning all over the place, putting a picture together in the brain. And then I think there's this stuff here And this was discovered by a French psychologist just in the late 19th century. And all he did was a very simple thing. He took a mirror and put the mirror there and watched his eyes look at things. It's interesting that he did that.

[34:55]

But it's way more interesting that nobody in 2,000 years ever did it either. So there's no eye beams, there's a scanning process. So our whole sensorial apparatus is scanning the world and putting it together as a present. So I call that durative time. Because you are establishing a duration of the present. Du bist das, der oder die eine Gegenwart zusammensetzt als eine Dauer, als etwas, was Dauer hat.

[36:10]

Und wenn du einmal weißt, dass die Gegenwart nicht existiert, und deine erfahrbare Gegenwart your experienceable time has a duration. Okay, and then once you know it has a duration, you're to various degrees in charge of that duration. And it's much more understandable why sometimes one period of Zazen can be like that, and one period of Zazen can be whirled. Or when you're intensely working on something sometimes, in ten minutes, it's like an hour has been accomplished. And I think it makes it more understandable why the time of childhood is about half the life of a 50-year-old.

[37:28]

I'm a 70-year-old, so maybe it's a third of my life. Okay, so this is the difference between clock time The world out there time. And experienceable time. Experienced time. So again, durative time is just one way to look at time. As a territory of your experience. And when I'm speaking here in this field in particular part of the field I feel is the different durative times for each of you. Okay.

[38:54]

Now, there's also what the other pointing to I used was sensorial phenomenological time. As another way to notice your experience of time. And potentially transform your experience of time. Because durative time is also arising within phenomena. And the etymology, of course, the word phenomena in English, it means what you perceive.

[39:55]

But it's come to mean what's out there, independent of your perception. So, sensorial phenomenological time is the direct experience of the immediacy of the world. And I sometimes suggest to people, work with a mental posture. Of no other location in mind. Every time your mind drifts somewhere, you say, no other location in mind. Okay, now the third pointing I used was performative time. Now by this I mean durative time and phenomenological sensorial time.

[41:00]

can be performed. Now, perform in English means to completely do. It's the opposite of preform. Preform would be to form in advance. And a performance, like you're on stage doing a theater performance or you're in an orchestra, You're there. You can't get up and say, well, I don't think I'll play now. I'm going to go have a cigarette and let the orchestra continue. Und dieses Wort Performance im Englischen, also Aufführung im Deutschen, das ist so, wenn du zum Beispiel im Theater bist oder eine Musikvorstellung hast, dann kannst du nicht einfach hingehen und dir denken, naja, ich gehe jetzt mal kurz hin und dann gehe ich wieder zurück und rauche noch kurz eine Zigarette.

[42:23]

Du bist dann da und fühlst das dann aus. You're in the situation. And you perform it by living the situation. Obama did not live the situation in his debate the other day. It's a good example of hubris goeth before a fall. He thought in advance he was going to speak to American people and not debate this guy. Dumb. Each moment we're in a particular situation. Past and future are if they're anywhere they're in this immediate situation. And you perform the situation.

[43:27]

It's not theater. It's not theater. Or it's theater of a very profound kind. Maybe the experience is something like walking in the dark without a flashlight. You know, you can't be thinking about something else. You might step off into a stairwell. Okay. An opening where stairs appear. Or it may be similar to walking with a flashlight in the forest. Even though you have a flashlight, you've got to completely have your attention in what you're doing.

[44:31]

And from the point of view of a Zen practitioner, that's the only kind of time. Time you're experiencing, it's not even the present anymore. What is established here is presence. The present of the presence. And it's interesting, I don't know Greek and I don't know classical Greek. culture well enough, but the word for self and the present in Greek was presence. You can feel when someone has presence. And you can feel when they're living in the presence of the present.

[45:51]

Now we have an out there world. That the media presents to us. And an out there clock time. But the realized person is in time as a bodily mind-body presence. Is in time as a mind-body presence. And is in a presence with others. A mutual resonance with others. To which there's no alternative. And maybe it sounds difficult, but you get used to it afterwards. And you feel yourself in a familiar world.

[46:51]

Okay. Since we don't have the rest of the week, I'll bring up one last thing. Okay. And I'm trying to end when I have instructions I have to hear. Many years ago, when I first started practicing with Suzuki Roshi, I, for about the first two years or so, was the so-called go-on, the person who hit the bells and the wooden drum during morning service. So, you know, you chant the Heart Sutra. Which is the sutra where the phrase form is emptiness comes from. And in Japanese it's...

[47:53]

When you chant it, it's kan-ji-zai-bo-sa-tsu-gyo-jin-an-ya-ra. Like that. It's just that she doesn't know Japanese. All right. So I said to Suzuki Roshi, when do you speed up? He said, you don't speed up. I said, okay. You're the Zen master. So you don't speed up. So the next morning I listen. When he did it sometimes. Hmm. He doesn't speed up.

[49:29]

Okay. He's my teacher. It actually took me years to understand it. Okay. What he meant was you form a mental posture of not speeding up. You don't intend to speed up. You don't intend not to speed up. You just have a mental posture of not speeding up. But other things are going on. Everyone is chanting. And they start chanting more and more together.

[50:32]

And as they chant more and more together to respond to that together chanting it starts to go faster. But the going faster occurs through everyone chanting together more. So if I hold to a not speeding up, I let the body and the chanting speed itself up. This is one of the hardest things for us Westerners to get. Okay, so this is a bell. I hit it. You let the stick hit it. And I, most people hit it with their mind by putting their finger on it.

[51:54]

And it's a very different sound than if you let the stick hit it. Because our mind is tied to the doing of it. And what Sukhya she was trying to show me is release the body from the mind. And release the physical world from the body and the mind. Okay. Now, for many decades, I've been saying that Zen practice is one way, not the only way, one way to weave mind and body together.

[53:10]

And I would say mind and body are inseparable, but they're experienceable separately. You can experience your lungs and your stomach and your heart and so forth. So I would say that you develop, you weave together the experience of both separateness. And that's true and nothing so wrong with that. But I would say it's more subtle and more accurate. Is that through almost all thinking being the thinking of mental postures.

[54:14]

And letting the world appear to you in between those mental or through those mental postures. dass die Welt dir zwischen diesen mentalen Haltungen, zwischen diesen geistigen Haltungen oder durch diese geistigen Haltungen hindurch erscheint. Okay, so while I'm speaking to you, I allow my body to relate to your bodies without my thinking about the relationship. Lass dich zu, dass mein Körper sich mit euren Körpern in Beziehung setzt, ohne dass ich über diese Beziehung nachdenke. I think of a woman named Anita who was at the Hanover seminar where I just was. And she's been practicing with us for a long time. She said, you know, I decide I'm not going to go shopping. But then why did I put on my shoes? And so she notices that her body starts doing things that she's decided not to do.

[55:35]

And of course, Benjamin Leavitt is the scientist who in the 70s noticed that, which you notice from practice anyway, that you're body has decided to move the arm before consciousness thinks it's going to move the arm. So consciousness is more of an editor. More complex than that. I have to stop and think. Okay, so the body, what's fantastic about this is the body has its own intelligence functioning independent of your usual thinking mind.

[56:42]

And part of yogic practice is to learn to let the intelligence, the bodily intelligence, communicate with the mental intelligence. ist, dass man zulässt, dass die körperliche Intelligenz beginnt, mit der geistigen oder mentalen Intelligenz zu kommunizieren. And the bodily intelligence is of course embedded, not just in mind, but is embedded in the phenomenological world. Und diese körperliche Intelligenz, die ist nicht nur im Geist eingebettet, sondern auch in der Welt der Phänomene. The sensorial phenomenological time. So you're allowing phenomena to talk to you, you're allowing the body to talk to you, you're allowing the mind to talk to the body, etc. So there's a cooperative relationship

[57:45]

Entering into the interdependence, intermergence, interemergence of everything. Usually, what the basic teaching in Buddhism is interdependence. But we need more English words than that. So we can have inter-independence. We can have inter-penetration, which is more a Huayen tension. And we can have inter-emergence, because at each moment, everything is unique. Something new is emerging. And I call that inter-emergence. And maybe, I think, a consolation therapist is a conductor of intermergence.

[59:09]

Yeah. Okay. as allowing something to happen allowing your world to flow through phenomena flow through the body and flow through the mind and all turned into a performative presence Performative presence. Okay, so no time for exercises. No time for discussion. But let's have a bell.

[60:30]

Why don't we, oh, one question. Yeah, but I thought we'd sit for five. Five minutes more. Five minutes more. Okay. Anybody want to say something? What? Yeah. So this third form of time, could we also see that as a kind of timelessness? No. That's the Western idea of eternity or infinity, which don't exist in yoga cultures. Das ist diese westliche Vorstellung von Ewigkeit oder Unendlichkeit, die in yogischen Kulturen nicht existiert. Now, you can have an experience of timelessness. Aber du kannst eine Erfahrung von Zeitlosigkeit haben. But your experience of timelessness is not an absolute like eternity or timelessness.

[61:35]

Aber deine Erfahrung von Zeitlosigkeit ist nicht so etwas Absolutes wie Ewigkeit oder Zeitlosigkeit. And sometimes I say we need the daily experience of timelessness in Zazen. Maybe you meant everything I said. Anyone else? Yes. Only the present tense. There is no past, no future. Everything is present tense. And our idea of, for example, what is after birth or after birth, these are all just ideas. In reality, everything happens only in the present tense. Now I don't hear the present tense. I would like to hear how it fits together or whether it is three different concepts of life and tradition.

[62:40]

No, I'm surprised. I did yoga a while back, and my yoga teacher taught that there is nothing but the present. There is no past. There is future. All there is is the present. And that all of our ideas about reincarnation, about what happens after death, that that's all just ideas, but all there really is is the present. And now I'm hearing that the present doesn't exist. So what I'm wondering is, but that's... But I'm wondering whether that's two different conceptions of yoga teacher or whether that can be combined. I don't know your yoga teacher. But I'm sure what he or she meant is there's nothing but the experienceable present. Okay. Then, once you call it an experienceable present, then you start thinking what's included in this experience.

[63:46]

OK. All right. Thanks. Yes. . For me, part of the difficulty is this linguistic distinction between body and mind. And I think it's a unity. I think it's a unity, but there seems to be not a word for that which registers the entirety of body and mind.

[64:57]

Well, that's why I say body-mind or mind-body, and I mean a little different by mind-body than I mean by body-mind. I mean, we had not very long ago, maybe it was Herman Kahn. Anybody remember him? Yes. Did you ever see the movie Dr. Strangelove? He was the model for it. Anyway, he was the big fat guy and kind of like a big brain type person. And I think it was he who said, I just want my brain in a Petri dish. I don't need my body. Well, anyone who can say that and get it repeated in a culture, there's something wrong.

[66:22]

So we don't, going way back, we don't have much of a word for the unison of these things. Like the very simple word for mind in Japanese is shin, and a similar word in Chinese, which means heart and mind. So I have to say things like a separable experience that we weave together. It may be a unity, but we can experience it separately. And then how we articulate and evolve that separable experience is the difference between cultures and people and all kinds of things.

[67:55]

Thanks. So she's wondering whether in German this word Leib, now whether that's not the expression for that unity. Maybe. I don't know. You guys would have to decide that. I often use the word aliveness and beingness because the words being and so forth are selfness instead of self. Ich benutze oft das Wort Lebendigkeit oder das Wort Sein. Vielleicht müsste man dann sagen die Seinsheit oder die Selbstheit statt das Wort selbst.

[69:02]

Strictly speaking, there are no trees. Ganz streng genommen gibt es keine Bäume. There's only treeing. Es gibt nur das Bäumen. And once you know it's treeing and not a tree, Then you can feel the treeing in your own self. Because the tree is an activity of insects and wind and roots and sunshine and so forth. And you can make worldview changes by simply doing something like every time you see a tree, you say bombing, treeing. Okay. Yes, in the back. My experience with time is that the past, the present and the present are present at the same time.

[70:25]

I thought about it. If I take out the present, let's say it's just the past and the future, I came up with a picture of the emptiness of the present in the sense of a sanctification aspect. But I already have a special place. My experience is the simultaneity of past, present, and future, that it's all simultaneous. And I was just wondering if there is no present and if all there is is past and future, then what happened for me as I was just imagining that was a kind of place appeared, which maybe I would say as a kind of sanctuary for the present.

[71:29]

Good. Yes, good. When you have a feeling like that, Stay with it, incubate it and see where it goes. Because that's a bodily insight you just had. Okay, so I'm gonna ring the bell so we can calm down a little. This is so exciting with all these smart people. This will only be a few minutes. Don't worry. The toilets will still be there. I don't know what I'm doing.

[73:20]

Do you know what you're doing? But here we are. Here we is. What's this? What's this? Always sort of finding out. What's this? Thank you very much.

[74:41]

Thank you very much. It's a special pleasure to be in the field of all of you. And a special pleasure to have Bertrand.

[74:52]

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