Now, of course, I'm interested in your discussion, but yesterday afternoon. How can we integrate it with the seminar this morning? So I hope those of you who were here have some feeling of how you can join yourself and the group into our discussion. Yesterday, after lunch, before the small groups, By the way, not that you want the latest news, the cremation went very well.

[01:17]

It did what it was supposed to do and they're collecting the ashes this morning. Yeah, but we're among, as I said, the not yet gone. Not yet, anyway. And while we're not yet gone, we have these ingredients of our lived experience. which we will notice to some extent through a decision to practice meditation.

[02:21]

And maybe I say, you know, I don't know what I say. I listen to what I say and I think, why did I say that? So I can ask myself, why didn't I just say, When you practice meditation, why did I say you made the decision to practice meditation? Clearly, I mean, and it felt better to me to say it that way, Because it's not just the activity of meditation which is beneficial. It's also the decision to practice meditation which makes meditation effective. Es ist auch der Entschluss, Meditation zu üben, was das Meditieren, was zu Auswirkungen beim Meditieren führt.

[03:44]

And I think there's quite a lot of people since it's sort of a fashion now to practice meditation. Und ich denke, das machen ganz schön viele Leute, da das jetzt irgendwie auch Mode geworden ist, zu meditieren. People think sitting down now and then or regularly is meditation. Yeah, but I think it requires a decision to practice meditation. And sometimes that decision takes a time, maybe a long time coming. And that you make a decision that this is part of my life. Yeah, like I made a decision, in Georgia's case, to be an architect. And there's something that happens when you decide to do something.

[04:51]

So if we're making a decision to practice meditation, We may more likely notice that meditation brings new ingredients into our life. And then if you follow up on that decision and say, heck, you know, people have been doing this for in this particular approach for more than two and a half millennium. And I know I'm the smartest person in the contemporary world. I'm the smartest? Well, I said that.

[05:51]

But I meant for you to take the credit. But probably there were a few smart people in the past too. So maybe it's worthwhile learning from them too. They had 2,500 years to fool around. So I start looking at the tradition and tiny little experiences I may have had or hardly noticed Turn out to be whole territories of a lived life. Okay. So I think yesterday afternoon at least what I hope is we discovered together the medium of inner attentional space.

[07:39]

Okay. Now I didn't call it a medium yesterday, but I think through our entry into it, through being together and my speaking, We may begin to feel it as a medium. And a medium in some provoking contrast to outer attentional space.

[08:41]

Provocative contrast. Okay. Okay. You get up in the morning in a hotel room. And you went to bed in the hotel room late in the evening. And you took a look around the hotel room unavoidably, maybe somewhat intentionally, but unavoidably too. But in those few minutes before you've gone to bed, you may have interiorized the space of the hotel room. Yeah, okay.

[09:49]

So, if you get up in the night, in the dark, to go to the toilet, say, you might just find yourself walking in that dark dark in that interiorized space of the hotel room although completely now dark. Unerringly you may put your hand on the bathroom door handle And sit down on the toilet and not under the sink. Somehow the things are located in an interior space.

[10:53]

Okay. Now that's a... I use the hotel room because, you know... We've never been in that hotel room again before. So it's easier to see that we interiorize the space. But you may wake up in your own bedroom that you're completely familiar with and you may not notice because you're so used to it that actually waking up in the morning you again interiorize the space of the room.

[11:58]

Now, what am I talking about? I think I can convince you that what I'm talking about is real. But real, who cares? It's too subtle to be of any importance. But if you actually interiorize the space, when you get up, you are making the space by getting up. No, I expect being an architect. Excuse me for using you as an example, Giorgio, I don't know.

[13:07]

I assume being an architect, an architect can interiorize a space he's not yet drawn and then draw it. Ich nehme an, ein Architekt kann einen Raum verinnerlichen, den er noch nicht gezeichnet hat, und ihn dann zeichnen. Okay. So this is actually making use of inner attentional space. Und das ist jetzt diesem inneren... Making use of inner attentional space. Es ist diesem inneren Aufmerksamkeitsraum verwenden, Gebrauch davon machen. Okay. Now, as I use the word decisional, decisionally, I'm intentionally using potential. Because you can almost have a caressive, caressive, A caressing or caressive feeling about this inner attentional space.

[14:16]

As if you're caressing yourself from the inside. This space which also is the space in which all your organs function and so forth. And you can use this inner attentional space in past seminars I've occasionally talked about. You can also use the experience and being able to hold in place an inner attentional space Now again, the ability to hold in place an inner attentional space is what is meant by discipline in Buddhism.

[15:22]

The ability to give shape to the mind which shapes the world. This is all, as we were discovering the other day, in English we say, you know it by heart. In German you say, you know it from inside out, I learned. Yeah, but now that we've had that useful formulation, I can say the whole territory of the lived life of a Buddhist yogi is from the inside out.

[16:27]

Okay. Now, as I started to say, you can be able now to hold this interior space so it is simultaneously space which is also attention. You can bring a little kind of do a little detective work with the flashlight.

[17:28]

And with the flashlight you can explore this inner attentional space. Oh, that must be what I feel is the stomach. Look at that. but it's not exactly you know the feeling of it and the look feel of it by examining it from inside it's not exactly the same but it's interesting yeah and it's sort of like Google inner street view. You can go, oh, look at that. There's an artery going down that way. Now, to give some actual reality to this, first of all, conceptual approach,

[18:34]

You have to do it quite a lot. But if you've made a decision to practice zazen, you've got a few thousand hours ahead of you. Yeah, and you can explore. More and more you get familiar. So your body just doesn't feel like legs and arms, but it feels like the organs. And you can feel the organs in their place. And you can feel how the lungs, for instance, function up into the shoulders and so forth. And how the spine carries holds the body together and carries it and carries it upward and in carrying it upward there's a kind of

[19:53]

mental space that goes with this carrying upward. But you simply get familiar with all these things. It's part of what's called, as I've said, the ordinary food and drink of the patched robe mug. So when the heart is felt as the whole system of the vessels and arteries and the pumping and movement, And you regulate and part of the discipline of Buddhism also. is to learn to regulate your diet and breathing and so forth by knowing your organs from the inside.

[21:21]

Now this inner attentional space can not only be a space in which you can examine your, investigate your inner tomography or topography, it also can be just an open space as if nothing's there. A kind of visual space that somehow exists independent of your eyes. And I wonder, I'd like to discuss with a blind person sometimes. What they experience if they've been blind and not been with Twitter, will there be some comparison?

[22:38]

If they have an inner visual space, even though they have never seen or used to see or something, my inner inner my own experience of an inner visual space i call it visual because i feel i can move around in it and bring things into it and go up closer to things and pull them away so Is this just an experience of spatiality? Here I'm just wondering, I don't know, I'm just wondering. Is this a space of spatiality? like a blind person can find his own way around a hotel room?

[23:48]

So do I call it a visual space only because I'm used to the volumes of the space that I see with my eyes? In other words, we may have a spatial experience that we call visual, but actually it's maybe more fundamental than whether it's visual or not. Yeah. Okay. Now, so this inner attentional space, the space caressed and created by attention, And developed by attention.

[25:05]

And more subtly articulated by attention. And in turn articulating the inner intentional space. educates attention. Your attention itself becomes more subtle through developing inner attentional skills. And you're also turning that inner attentional space into a kind of medium. I've often spoken about how you need to think of different modalities of mind, of consciousness, awareness, etc., as liquids with a certain viscosity.

[26:24]

Yeah, as consciousness sinks in the dreaming mind. Out of sight and sometimes wonderful involuntary images of dreaming appear. But when you really wake up the viscosity of these mind liquidities Shift and dreams sink out of sight. And this is kind of fun in the morning to play with getting them to float back up and sink again.

[27:30]

You learn a lot doing that. This is a lay practice. You don't have to do zazen, just lie in bed and explore the mind. You're laying practice. But not laid out, that would be for cremation. Now, I'll stop in a minute. But this inner attentional space as a medium, you can begin to feel it almost as a granular quality. You've all heard of the middle way.

[28:32]

Well, maybe this is the medium way. And I like it because medium sounds like not very good. It's mediocre, you know. But maybe we can get an insight into the middle way by changing the word to medium, which also means middle. So here we have the medium hot way. And this inner attentional space has a certain temperature or a certain almost substance to it. Now you can experience, begin to experience, is the substance, substance, I don't know, I don't want to use the word, but I'm using it, the substance of outer attentional space.

[29:53]

In other words, it's not outer container space that's just there and was there long before you. This is outer attentional space that you're creating at this moment with your attention. And that very attention becomes a bridge which outer attentional space and inner attentional space can flow and transform together. Yeah, okay. Now what's the point of my saying these things?

[31:02]

And it's interesting, you know, I've never said any of this stuff that I've said now, very little of it, ever before. And so if there's anyone to blame for this, it's you. Because if you weren't here, I would never sit down at a keyboard and type out all this and there's no space. Yeah, it's because I yesterday started feeling this space with you. So I saw the possibility, so I thought, okay, let's go there. And thanks to Adi, it's been recorded. But What does it mean that it's been re-corded?

[32:20]

Re-corded, re-woven, re-hearted, cord also means heart. It, you know, I find words of wild jungle and I get lost in them. Oh, there's another one. Woohoo! But I wonder if anyone listens to this. Perhaps if you listen to it, if you happen to, you'd say, oh yeah, I can call some of that back.

[33:21]

And maybe if you gave it the MP7 or MP3 or MP5 to your uncle or aunt, they might feel something. So maybe there is some use of being recorded. I mean, I'm bringing this up because it's a continual part of my exploration of what is lay monastic practice. And if we were here for the next three months, and I haven't asked Giorgio's permission yet, And if he could lock the gates out there, you know, like in the old days, to keep the enemies in.

[34:35]

Yeah. Then perhaps we could discuss this with very few words. But still, even if this might be useful to somebody who wasn't here, The existence in us of this exploration of inner attentional and outer attentional spaces has been completely dependent on our being here together, face to face, body to body.

[35:45]

Okay, again it's about time to have a break. So maybe after the break we can have some discussion about whatever. But at least how these you can imagine these could be or already are ingredients of your lived life. Because the big basic question is always for Buddhism, what is this lived life? The lived life, inevitably including others in various ways, and inevitably engaged with phenomena.

[37:14]

Okay, thank you very much. Thanks for translating. Thanks for abandoning translating sometimes. This is good.

[37:30]

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