I'm a little... Good morning. Guten Morgen. I'm a little ashamed of myself because I can't participate more in the ANGO. That makes it clear. This kind of has to be my last ANGO. You may have noticed that in our ninja ceremony, which I liked so much, I didn't even know what was going on. I was so tired late in the afternoon. I sometimes don't even know what's going on. You know, when I feel that way, I wonder why do stairs have to go up as well as down? Why don't they just always go down? And in the procession, I think, only take me to stairs which go down.

[01:12]

Yeah, and the procession, you know, excuse me for being, uh, some, uh, There are people I know who would say to me, I don't need the details. But anyway, it's very difficult for me after my cancer operation and radiation treatment and stuff to actually not be near a toilet every half hour. And the blood thinners I take, which the doctors told me I should take, make it worse. So it's very difficult for me just to start a recession and come here and then do the meat.

[02:34]

You know, I can't... Anyway, you understand. I mean, you don't understand, but it's being old. Yeah, I'm a little impatient with it, but I'm trying to get used to it. Anyway, I apologize. Okay. You know, if Basel was in... in Japan. Let's call it Basel-Yama. Basel-Yama. The train announcement in the Bad Säckim station would not announce the train to Basel is arriving or something like that.

[03:39]

Denn also die Stimme würde nicht ankündigen, dass jetzt der Zug aus Basel ankommt. It would really say something like, Basel going activity is arriving. Basel ja, no, Basel jama activity is arriving. Now, sociologists call this something like the difference between object-biased language and event-biased language. Give me a moment. Objects. I don't know what that means, but I don't. Well, you could say object referencing language and event referencing language.

[04:59]

Yeah. Now why do I mention this? Yeah. And also, you know, I lived in Japan for four years continuously and off and on for 35 years. I went regularly. And I've been in many, many, many, many train stations. But I never really noticed that it was event referencing language and not object referencing language.

[06:05]

They never mention the train. They just mention the activity of going somewhere. Die erwähnen nie den Zug, sondern sie erwähnen immer nur die Aktivität, irgendwo hinzufahren. Okay. Now, I think you probably noticed I'm not Japanese. Und euch ist wahrscheinlich aufgefallen, dass ich kein Japaner bin. Yeah. And so I don't really know what it's like to grow up with an event-referencing language. And another anecdote from a book by a man named Michael Mara called Japan's Frames of Meaning, which is quite an interesting book. He tells an anecdote about a Japanese scholar talking to Heidegger.

[07:19]

Da erzählt er eine Anekdote von einem japanischen Gelehrten, der mit Heidegger spricht. And he says to this Japanese guy, what's the word for language in Japanese? Und er fragt diesen Japaner, was ist das Wort für Sprache auf Japanisch? And this Japanese fellow said, kotoba. Und der Japaner sagt kotoba. And Heidegger, always interested in etymology, said, what does koto etc. mean? Und Heidegger, der sich immer für die Etymologie interessiert hat, der fragt danach, was bedeutet Koto und so weiter. And the Japanese guy said, well, Koto means a thing or an affair, an activity. Und der Japaner sagt, also Koto bedeutet Ding oder eine Angelegenheit oder eine Aktivität. And Ba means a leaf. Und Ba bedeutet ein Blatt. Okay, so we could translate it, said Heidegger, as ding.

[08:40]

That means thing, is that right? We can translate it as ding. Language is a thing. But that's completely not the sense of it at all. Yeah. Tsukiyoshi would say, as a Zen term, koto means, and Tsukiyoshi talked about this quite often, All the things, I don't have to use the word thing, all the things you hear, feel, smell, taste, everything that's present, that you notice, is koto. And ba means leaf. But not really leaf, it means the sharp points at the edge of a leaf. So a word, words of a language, take all the things you hear, feel, see, smell, etc., and turn them into the precise edges of a leaf so you can make distinctions.

[10:00]

Because what the language does is that these are all the things that you can hear, see, feel, notice, all the things that you can perceive. And the language transforms these things into the precise, sharp points on the edge of the leaf on which you can make differences. So this is not about better or worse. This is about we grew up in one story and East Asian people grew up in another story. And I think you could say our science is the fruit of a... a thing-biased, thing-referenced language.

[11:20]

And our practice is the fruit of an event-based, biased, referenced culture. And we have a wonderful opportunity to be in the middle, in between these two. So I didn't grow up in Japan, but I have grown up much in my life practicing yogic Zen. But in all the time I was in Japan, I never noticed that they really just say, Bhavalia activity arriving.

[12:25]

And as I say, it took me decades to really recognize the importance of emphasizing activity in contrast to entity. I mean, I lived, but I didn't see how to speak about it until I saw this simple contrast. So I'm, I'm, what I'm trying to do here, uh, first of all, I want us to keep coming back as touchstones.

[13:29]

Touchstone is a, I don't know, in English it refers to the stone you use to test whether gold is real or not. A touchstone. A reference point. The reference point to see if the teaching is real or not. So the thing, the touchstone or reference point I'm always coming back, I want us to come back to is aliveness and inhaling, exhaling and allness. So when we look at a teaching, maybe we look back through the teaching as in a reverse telescope.

[14:31]

And we look back and there's big teaching and we go, ooh, right there, the tiny end way down there is inhaling and exhaling. So what if I, again, what if I... grew up in a way, I did grow up as an adult, feeling arriving activity of the inhale, departing activity of the exhale. And when I was growing up, and I didn't grow up that much, and I always felt the incoming activity of the inhale and the... So I don't have the story, the way I grew up and with my parents, never had any taste of the story of God and belief and stuff like that.

[15:58]

My parents were both completely atheists. My mother would say things. She was less atheistic, if that's possible, than my father. But she'd say things. They just misspelled the word God. It should have two O's in it. I'd say to my mom, good, good idea. Yeah, okay. So I didn't have any story except to give attention to what is or is not.

[17:05]

Let's imagine you start noticing, not breathing, again, as I've been pointing out, but the bodily activity of inhaling and the bodily activity of exhaling. Okay. Now, again, you know, these are processes. And these are processes. And the teacher or the teaching can show you the beginning of a process. But why we say realize or I say incubate instead of understand is because it only happens through incubation.

[18:13]

So I can emphasize, as the early teaching of the Buddha emphasizes, the inhale and the exhale. And not the concept of breathing, but just the activity of the inhale, bodily activity of the exhale. And to really start noticing differences between what happens in inhaling and exhaling, I have found you have to do 10 or 15 or 20 inhales, attentional inhales, and really see what the body's like.

[19:24]

And then 10 or 15 or whatever, exhales, and then see what the body feels like then. And to really notice the difference between inhaling and exhaling, I noticed that it is important to do 10 or 15 attentive inhalations and to feel how the body then feels. And then 10 or 15 exhalations, or as many as possible, and then to feel how the body then feels. And finding your own creative ways to notice the difference between inhales and exhales. And after a few years, you find each is a different attentional realm. And you also notice that the third unit here is the observing mind itself.

[20:26]

So there's the activity of the inhale, and then almost immediately the activity of the exhale. But then there's the observing mind, which isn't the activity of the inhale or the exhale. And then that's the third unit. So now you're noticing mind itself, or attention is noticing attention. So you begin to notice more and more the attentional mind stays more or less the same. It receives the inhale, releases the exhale, receives the inhale, releases the exhale, and yet this third unit stays pretty much the same. Now, I brought up the teaching and the practice of the two truths the other day.

[21:51]

And I said that two truths are only true when they're simultaneous. Okay. Now that's the teaching of the Tendai school, Tendai or Tendai, which is the most articulated Mahayana school probably. And it's the school that Dogen started in before he began Zen practice. And the Tendai school doesn't teach two truths, it teaches three truths. And the third truth is the simultaneity of the two truths. The third is the both-at-onceness. And the third truth is the simultaneity of the two truths, namely that both are one.

[23:37]

Now this experience of this both-at-onceness as also simultaneously two separate attentional realms, this... two separate attentional realms is the basis for feeling both at once. And biologically, this is dependent I would say primarily on this development of the attentional exhale and the attentional inhale. Both these attentional realms are in this mind that observes both the exhale and the inhale. Both areas of attention depend on this area of observation in which both the inhalation and the exhalation are noticed.

[25:02]

Now, Suzuki Roshi spoke about the organ body. And various Zen teachers in the past have also spoken about the organ body. And, um, okay. So if your reference point is the arriving of the breath activity and the departing of the breath activity, when dein Bezugspunkt das Ankommen der Atemaktivität und das Verlassen der Atemaktivität ist. And we have that early sutra I quoted to you earlier saying you know from within.

[26:20]

Und wir haben dieses frühe Sutra, das ich euch zitiert habe, wo es heißt, du kennst das oder du bist damit aus dem Innern heraus vertraut. Yeah, okay. So I'm I'm trying to express a traditional teaching and give us a sense of really what they really mean by organ body. And it's possible for us. you have to more and more have your reference point, not I'm breathing, but just breathing. And not even just breathing, inhaling, exhaling, inhaling, exhaling, with no generalization, breathing or me. But you have to develop more and more that your reference point is the inhaling and exhaling and not so much that I breathe in and I breathe out.

[27:31]

So less and less generalization and less and less I'm there. Just inhale, exhale. And if you try that, you'll notice it's not so easy. A sense of meanness keeps coming in. This is me breathing. This is me walking back to Johanneshof. But if you don't notice that, you have no chance. But if you notice it, you can say, hmm, there's that meanness again. Hi, me-ness, how are you? And so then you can notice the me-ness is more present when you feel a little anxious or nervous or somebody you think criticized you or something. then you can notice that this I-ness, or the you-ness, or whatever, that this is more at the forefront when you are nervous, or you are afraid of something, or when you have the feeling that someone is criticizing you.

[28:41]

Whether criticism is constructive or confrontational is something that's in your habits. So depending on what's happened recently, etc., you may feel more meanness or not, or less. So now you've got a reference point of just the activity of inhaling and exhaling. And now you have a reference point where it's just about the activity of inhaling and exhaling. And you lose it all the time. But then sometimes it's there. And you say, oh, now there's more meanness and now there's less meanness. And then you can start to notice when there's less meanness and when there's more meanness. If there's no story you're living in of God and all that stuff, and a creator, if there's only you creating, then it's...

[29:48]

You know, wonderful to have the chance to notice your own creating of me-ness or attentional inhale, etc. Okay. Okay. So you've created a reference point. We're creating a reference point of aliveness or the inhale and the exhale. And it's in the context of allness. And it's in the context of a field of potentials, a field of infinite potentials.

[31:12]

And the word koto, as a Japanese Buddhist term, means within that field of infinite potentials, what you notice. And that noticing is prior to a language. That koto is prior to a language. And it's that noticing Allness, which is prior to language, prior to words, includes your dreams, includes your anxieties, includes your past history, includes what may happen in the future.

[32:23]

includes many things you haven't noticed and not just things but things don't things are things are in our relationships. So there's clusters of relationships. And those clusters are mostly unseen and they don't fit into words and language very easily. And those clusters are in a way floating and flying around in the larger space presence of your aliveness.

[33:33]

And as I tried to say before, you sometimes pull those things into words and thoughts, and sometimes you release them back into the field. But the field of koto, of all the things you hear, see, find, is more real than the language and the thoughts which are drawn from them. So, organ, body. Okay, so this is a code for knowing from within, from your reference point being the functional activity of the body, with no outer reference point.

[34:59]

So it's from within, which also means you've dropped the outer reference point. You feel like you're just a receiving station. There's no outer body. There's no me. There's no... It's just... Yeah. Now, you can have what I would call the four elemental visualizations. Okay, now, visualization tends to be You think of it as eyes and imagining, but we could have vidification, making something vivid.

[36:20]

So you have the four elements, water, air, space, fire, and... earth, solidity. Now, a traditional Buddhist practice is not you're finding those in yourself. You're visualizing or imagining an imaginal, you're creating an imaginal body where everything is solid. So you feel your own solidness. And you feel that solidness in everything you see. In trees, leaves, water, whatever, you feel the solidness of it.

[37:49]

So you're not saying, oh, that's solid and that's liquid. No, you're saying there's a solidness to even water, of course, as ice, but also just it has a certain kind of permanence. Stay still in a lake. Now, this kind of imaginal bodies or activity or visualizations is maybe the equivalent of having a story or a belief. Because these four elemental visualizations are meant to establish your connectivity, your actual experience of being connected to everything. Diese vier Visualisierungen der Elemente dafür da sind, um deine Verbundenheit mit allem zu etablieren, deine Verbundenheit mit allem herzustellen.

[39:17]

Yeah, so then you imagine everything is flowing or liquid. Und dann stellst du dir alles als fließend oder als flüssig vor. Well, I don't know. It sounds a little strange, but the tree trunk is... Or a stone you feel is also flowing, but it's a very long, slow flowing, if it's a stone. But you can see in its lines, if it has a line through it or something, that it once flowed. But it's not so much to say, oh, did the stone really flow once when it was in a volcano? It's really a kind of code for feeling the world as solid, fluid, rusting.

[40:35]

Rusting is a form of burning. It's really a form of feeling the world as solid, fluid. It's really a form of feeling the world as solid, fluid. And solidness. Space. And space. And everything is trying to occupy space or be space. So this is a kind of Buddhist story of connectivity. Okay. So if you do something like this, you're trying to reach into a feeling that we're all, the lettuce we're eating, the tree we're looking at, etc., we're all sort of made from the same stuff.

[41:44]

then you reach into such a feeling, the salad that we eat, and that everything is made of the same stuff. And without those good carrots that I had this morning, I wouldn't be sitting here. They're flowing, they're solid, they're cooking in me now, etc. And they're occupying a reasonable amount of space. So you really begin to feel... It's all me. It's all us. So the organ body is when you feel yourself as organs that are functioning without an outer frame of meanness or a story of how we exist.

[42:54]

So we might say the four yogic conditions for a mutual being, I don't like the word human, you know, mutual being, Mensch? I didn't mention that. Anyway, there's the organ body. Yeah, just this aliveness. Just connected aliveness. And then there's the outer reference point, the context. And then there's the precepts.

[44:03]

This is a kind of definition of a yogic aliveness practice. In other words, the organ body Just breathing, inhale, exhale. Yeah, the reference point there. Then there's the other reference point, the outer situation. You're standing on the bridge here and looking at the farmland. So you know that reference point, but you feel connected with it. And then there's the precepts. Which in this case means the choice of how you behave. Now, that's a very... a precise, as precise as I think we can make it, definition of the yogic practitioner from a very traditional and ancient Zen point of view.

[45:27]

And that is a very precise, as precise as we can make it, a definition of a yogic practitioner from an ancient point of view. point of view. You've dropped stories, you've dropped outer and inner. You've dropped subject and object. And what you notice is the organ body and its connectivity. Und was du bemerkst, ist der Organkörper und dessen verbunden sein. Now, only if you notice that even once in a while, it can be an enlightenment experience. I mean, I know that for a brief moment, but the idea is you can notice that. Und wenn du das bemerkst, selbst für einen ganz klitzekleinen Moment, das kann eine Erleuchtungserfahrung sein, aber der wichtige Punkt hier ist, dass du es bemerkst.

[46:29]

And then, yeah. And then there's a reference point of the context, the situation. And then there's a reference point, what should I do? Should I walk to Johanneshof or turn back and go to Hudson House? Okay. Now, That's enough for me to say. But all of this kind of way of looking at things is rooted in seeing everything as an activity and not as a thing. But all of this kind of way of looking at things is rooted in seeing everything as an activity and not as a thing. Because the activity includes the train that's coming.

[47:35]

Die Aktivität schließt den ankommenden Zug mit ein. Which isn't really a train, it's a way to go to Basel. Das ist nicht wirklich ein Zug, sondern eine Art und Weise nach Basel zu kommen. And this activity includes everything around you. Und diese Aktivität schließt alles um dich herum mit ein. And yet there are specific things. You put your foot forward and you're stepping in an outside reference point. And you have some values or innermost requests which you're allowing to find fruit in your activities. Du hast einige Werte oder auch innere Anliegen, von denen du zulässt, dass sie in deiner Aktivität Wurzeln schlagen. No, I don't know if I made anything clearer or not.

[48:37]

I keep trying to be clearer. And then afterwards I think, was that clearer? Oh, God. Peter said maybe it was. But his name means stone. And Peter's name, he says it was Clara, but his name means stone, but we can see that he flows.

[49:02]

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