As you can imagine, I'm not used to giving talks in tents. Can you hear me over there somewhere? Okay, good. But didn't Eric and Christina, didn't I give a talk in Poland in a tent once, freezing cold? They loaned us coats. And I, you know, we're basically a lay practicing Sangha. So it's a little funny, maybe it's normal to be in a tent, a little funny to be in robes. And wearing robes is sometimes like being in a tent.

[01:02]

But, you know, we wear robes to show that this is not my teaching, but a teaching I've inherited from his father, actually. by Suzuki Roshi's father. Yeah. And then we usually, I didn't think there was going to be an altar or a place to bow. So I was just going to bow to you. We bow customarily to the Buddha to say I'm entering Buddha's mind. So I had the feeling I will bow to you.

[02:17]

With the feeling that I'm bowing to your mind, which also... might be Buddha's mind. Anyway, thank you for coming. Greetings. Thank you for joining us. I'm As you know, I always consider what we're doing an experiment. An experiment in answering an inner request.

[03:18]

Answering an intuitively felt inner request. and to some extent a request that sometimes we feel we can't refuse, ignore, which is an intuitive sense that personal transformation is possible. It's not only a personal transformation that's possible, but it feels like it's also related to our family and friends and our society. So the question I have, if this is an experiment, the question I always have is, what are we doing here?

[04:46]

And part of tomorrow morning will be a panel in which we, several people respond to think about what are we doing here? What are we doing here practicing Zen in the West? In my case, here I am dressed up in robes and everything. I wouldn't even wear a tie in high school and they wouldn't put my picture in the yearbook. And now I'm And I saw some photos being taken.

[06:14]

Now I'm nothing but Thai. I don't know exactly what happened, but here I am. Or here someone is. Yeah. So the question of what are we doing here Practicing Zen in the West and Europe and in America and Crestone and so forth. Well, I think And just amazingly, this little farming hamlet village here tolerates us. And when we got this new campus property, our neighbor farmer gave us a piece of land for one euro so we could attach the property. So again, somehow it's okay with the neighbors, but still, what are we doing here?

[07:28]

Well, of course, I do think each of us individually joining in this experiment together is responding to some inner request of your own. and somehow finding, again perhaps intuitively, that responding together with others to this inner request is beneficial. Now again, you know, I'm still, you know, I've been doing this 55 years now. And I'm still asking the question, what am I doing?

[09:02]

I know I enjoy what I'm doing. I know something about what I'm doing, but really I don't know. But Together we're convincing me that maybe it's okay. And this is the best way to know people I know, so I feel so good with you as friends, so I continue. The question is, you know, again, what are we doing here? And also there's a question, who is it that's doing something here? Also die Frage nochmal ist, was tun wir hier?

[10:08]

Und dann gibt es auch die Frage, wer tut hier etwas? Who is doing what here? Wer tut hier was? Well, if the who who's doing this practice here, wenn dieses wer, das diese Praxis hier tut, is responding to an inner... request or a sense, a feel for personal transformation. But then if that's the case, what we're doing is something close to becoming new persons. Now I find it, for some reason I find it rather daring, daring, even a little scary to say what we're doing here is becoming new persons.

[11:09]

Are we expecting a dance party? Yes, we are. Well, I'm glad we haven't turned that on yet. That'll make me a new person. Well, really, why do I feel it's daring to say so? Because it's obvious. Somehow we know, we feel the possibility of personal transformation. But maybe I feel it's daring because we only partially realize what it means to possibly become a new person. And what do we mean by new person?

[12:35]

What about the person we already are? We do have an experience of being located in the world in a particular way. Now, excuse me for mentioning Heidegger, but Heidegger spent quite a few hundred pages trying to first of all say we've forgotten the meaning of being. We take it for granted that we know what being is, but in fact, for hundreds of pages, he tells us not very clearly what being might be. Partly he says being is a challenge to be being.

[13:47]

Something like that. You can do it. Now, how do we answer that challenge? Now, I think that that what's precious to us really And what defines the quality of being most essentially in my feeling is our sense of continuity.

[14:52]

And I think what we value and what, in the most basic way, defines our feeling of being is our feeling of continuity. Our feeling of continuity from childhood to now. But the Diamond Sutra says the Bodhisattva has no concept of a lifespan. Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the most interesting, fascinating, challenging statements in the whole Diamond Sutra. How is it possible to have no concept of a lifespan and yet at the same time have a feeling of really needing this experience of continuity?

[15:56]

Wie ist es möglich, gleichzeitig kein Konzept von einer Lebensspanne zu haben und trotzdem dieses Gefühl zu haben, eine Kontinuität wirklich zu brauchen? No, I mean, no concept of a lifespan would be something like being an immediacy of being, being nothing but immediacy itself. Und dieses kein Konzept von einer Lebensspanne, das wäre so etwas wie die Unmittelbarkeit selbst sein. Yeah, that's a... If you know that feeling, it's pretty good. But it doesn't allow you to hold a job probably. Or accomplish most practical things. Yeah, so let me reassure you that really through Zen practice you don't lose your experience of continuity. Also lasst mich euch noch mal versichern, dass durch Zen-Praxis ihr euer Gefühl oder eure Fähigkeit zur Kontinuität nicht verliert.

[17:15]

Aber eure Erfahrung von der Kontinuität, die verändert sich. Sie erweitert sich. Und es It's like a stream which has tributaries coming into it. And in English we have the word distributaries, streams that leave the mainstream and don't return. And then there's deltas. A delta is where the streams leave and then come back. So somehow, I'm just using this metaphor to find some way to speak to you about this so you can get a feel for it.

[18:16]

So through your sense of continuity, you begin to feel the streams from other people and life and your culture, your experience coming into you. And as your life evolves and you know more complex situations and people and so forth, There's these distributaries that flow from your life into their own lives. You know, an obvious example would be if you have children, one of your child is, we could say, is a distributary. It goes off on its own. And we could even say the people you practice with, your disciples, are discipletaries, distributaries.

[19:48]

I'll resist another new word. And we create kind of deltas here and there and then they flow back into us. So practice becomes the experience of a multistreamed continuity. And some of the... No, sorry, I forgot something. Multistreamed continuity. Okay. A multistreamed continuity.

[20:51]

And some of the streams are flowing beneath conscious perception. It's obvious. I mean, we don't tell people what we really think about them often because some of that is stuff that they don't want to flow into their consciousness. So it's obvious to all of us that each person we know has multiple streams that aren't always obvious to the individual themselves. Und es ist offensichtlich für uns, dass jeder, jeder Einzelne von uns diese vielfältigen Strömungen hat oder Flüsse hat, die offensichtlich für uns sind, aber nicht immer offensichtlich für das Individuum oder die Person selber sind.

[22:09]

Yeah, and what Zen practice does is it makes you get a feeling for these weavings and streams that are beneath perceptible consciousness. And this isn't just unconsciousness, it's a kind of non-consciousness that's really part of our life in the fullest sense. The Tendai Buddhists have a concept of each immediacy is three thousand, three thousand could be, three thousand coherences. So there's not only causation from past, seemingly past to future.

[23:17]

Your continuity, conscious and non-conscious, is flowing into an immediacy which is characterized as 3,000 coherences. How do you find yourself? How do you locate yourself in such a complexity? Findest du dich? Wie verortest du dich inmitten einer solchen Komplexität? How do you participate in, orchestrate yourself in such a complexity? Und wie nimmst du teil? Wie dirigierst du oder stimmst dich ein inmitten einer solchen Komplexität? The musicians know what I'm talking about. Yeah, well, again, this is, believe it or not, what practice is actually about. Now, let's again use the concept of a string.

[24:36]

And what is the concept of zazen? Or what is the activity of zazen? It's a particular posture where you don't have to use much musculature to support yourself. in which you can let yourself and get very used to letting yourself sink away from or out of or under consciousness. in der du unter das Bewusstsein oder aus dem Bewusstsein heraus sinken kannst oder ganz vertraut mit diesem Gefühl werden kannst.

[25:49]

And you get very comfortable and familiar with this non-conscious awareness. Und du wirst sehr vertraut oder... You get very comfortable with it. Okay, so your one concept is the physical posture. I'm calling it a concept. It's a posture, but it's a posture in which you lift through your spine and so forth. And the understanding of how to articulate your posture is a concept. And the other concept is what I call the mental posture, don't move. And what does the mental concept don't move do?

[27:05]

Well, it's something like a dam in a stream. It blocks... your usual consciousness, conscious continuity. It's really that simple. I mean, because you want to get up, you have things to do, etc., etc., but you're supposed to sit there for 40 minutes, so I don't know. And you're supposed to not move. And as you develop the craft, the skill of not moving, and discover the stillness in which Consciousness can dissolve.

[28:25]

Basically what you've done is you've taken the agency of attention. Agency of attention? Yeah. The agency being the I-feeling, I'm doing this, etc. So the... the agency of attention is usually experienced as virtually identical to consciousness. But in fact, it's not. And you don't really discover that mostly unless you are a meditator. So you're not moving.

[29:36]

And the agency of consciousness is, you know, So what happened? Again, it's really simple. The attentional agency is diverted into the body. The attentional agency is diverted into the body. So your sense of continuity continues but now it's a bodily mind continuity. Now, if you really get used to this shift, and you incubate this shift, there's a kind of, I mean, maybe the word animality isn't so pleasant for us. Animality like animals.

[30:54]

Yeah. Maybe we could say, to make it more pleasant words, a sensorial physicality. So you develop a kind of sensorial physicality. physicality in the world. Like dancers may have or athletes may have, German and Italian soccer players may have. You feel And not only feel, you are in a field of sensorial physicality. Now, I think I'm just shifting slightly here, or yeah, more than slightly maybe.

[32:00]

I would say there's three assumed universals we have to examine in this practice. And just to keep it simple, one is space. We assume space is a universal. It's somehow out there, it's a container we live in. In German, the word for space is also the word for room, right? You know, when I was young and had my first daughter, child, Sally, who's here somewhere, there she is.

[33:20]

She and her mother, Virginia, we were kind of, the first people in San Francisco insisted on I could be present at the birth. At that time, the hospitals would not allow you to be present at the birth of your child. I said I'm the dad. So I said to the doctor you're either going to let me do it or I'm going to handcuff myself to Virginia. And the nurses were all, you know, they said things to me like, you know, I have brothers and I understand about the... Meaning they know boys or something like that.

[34:25]

Mm-hmm. And they kept saying to me, don't you want to go out for a cup of coffee or something? I said, are you trying to get rid of me? But what got started from those others like myself who did this was something called rooming in. So when Sophia was... Rooming in. So when Sophia was born, she's not here. She's on a computer somewhere. The hospital said, of course you want rooming in. Da hat das Krankenhaus gesagt, also sie möchten selbstverständlich auch das rooming in.

[35:41]

And we accept it. Und das haben wir angenommen. So rooming in may be the best word I can find for the space that's not outside us, but that we're always making. We're rooming in the space we're living. Und dieses rooming in, da bräuchte man jetzt vielleicht ein deutsches Wort, das ist Is there a term for this? It's called rooming in. It's called rooming in. Hey! Okay, so space isn't a universal. It's like, again, the Big Bang supposedly didn't expand into space. It made the space it's expanded into. Also nochmal, Raum ist nichts Universelles, so wie der Urknall, also dem Konzept nach, ja nicht im Raum stattgefunden hat, sondern den Raum, in dem es stattfindet, selbst geschaffen hat.

[36:48]

So we're always making the space we're roaming in and roaming in. And if you don't get a feel for this, your practice won't incubate. And we think, again, time is a universal. It's somehow inexorably going along independent of us. But by diverting the agency of attention into the body, you start living in bodily time.

[38:01]

Do you remember what childhood time was like? It's obviously different than your present time. Why is it only available to children? What's the deal? It's available to any practitioner. Bodily time draws the circumstances of the world and others and otherness into your inner knowledge. So what we're doing here is trying to explore our life thoroughly enough and widen the streams of our experience sufficiently

[39:04]

that we can feel the world as bodily time bodily mind time you can't be out of time because you are timed Du kannst nicht keine Zeit haben, weil du Zeit bist. You can be out of time in comparison to what you have to do, this and that, but still, when you know bodily time, you're always within time, if not in time. This is actually a new person. So if you widen and discover if you become a multi-streamed being, located in bodily time, and in rooming in space, and

[40:52]

You have a baby rooming in space and the baby might be a Buddha. I'm not kidding. Okay, so that's at least how I would describe this evening. Tomorrow might be different, what we're doing here. And it's not about believing something. It's about experiencing this diversion of continuity into the body and into the world. It's about diverting the experience of continuity into the body and into the world and then in such a way that it's inclusive of also consciousness at first you discover that well mind and consciousness consciousness let's say consciousness has its own knowledge

[42:52]

And body, the body has its own knowledge. This morning I took off the rope I wear around my koromo. And for some reason, typically today, there were a lot of interruptions. And suddenly, I couldn't get the rope back together the way I usually put it. And I couldn't, I kept I couldn't think my way to how it's supposed to be. So finally I just undid the whole thing, tied it, and it appeared just my hand knew how to do it.

[43:59]

So there's lots of micro-gestural dimensions of our world. We live in a sensorial physicality of microgestural communication. And it feels pretty good. You feel located. Yeah. And so the term that Suzuki Roshi used often and made well known in the West is big mind.

[45:03]

Yeah, which becomes, which is a translation of Daishin, big mind. But big mind is a wide field that incorporates bodily knowledge, and conscious knowledge, which incorporates knowing and acting and functioning, into a larger sphere we call in Yogacara Buddhism the Alaya-Vijjana.

[46:11]

But I think tonight, in the tent, I won't try to talk any more about the Alaya Vijnana. But really, if you paid a little bit of attention, I told you everything you need to know. So thank you very much.

[46:38]

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