Of course I wonder what can I say that makes it worthwhile for you to be here. And worthwhile for those of you who are new to practice I assume some of you are new to practice and those of you who are more experienced and I thought maybe what I should speak about is the could speak about is the shift from mentation to bodily attentional location.

[01:03]

I should have offered incense before I sat down. Could you offer incense for me? I'm not supposed to speak about Buddhism until I put on Buddha's robe to show that it's not just me talking. And then if we have an altar here, I should offer or help someone offering something. And if there is an altar, then I should also create a smokehouse or help someone who does it. So if you bring, right now, or when you sit in meditation, if you bring your attention to your breath, you're also bringing attention away from meditation.

[02:38]

I assume that most of us or many of you right now are located in your thinking. It's almost impossible not to be located in your thinking. But it is possible to make a shift and discover ways to make shifts into the body. Which again is not only a shift into the body, but it's a shift out of the mind. Or since mind is such a big idea, out of the mind as mental activity.

[03:55]

Yeah, and here I'm not, I mean, yeah, sort of speaking about Buddhism, But I am really speaking about something very practical to us as bodiful or mindful beings. Each of you, from the others who are in the room, we see you as a physical location.

[05:00]

But again, most of us are, many of us, if not most, our internal location is mental. So again, we can bring attention to our breath. And while it takes a while, after, if you repeat it, I call it these days, unicking, because it's not a simple repetition, it's a unique repetition. So if you feel it, you intend it as a repetition but if you're sensitive you can feel each repetition as something unique.

[06:03]

And part of what you're doing when you do something like this is you are actually developing your noticing. You're refining your noticing and finding ways to establish what you notice. For Buddhists and for Zen Buddhists especially, there's no outside, there's just inside. And really our experience is so contextual, it's hard to say what's inside and outside. And to be philosophical for a moment, outside requires some kind of universals of time or space as separate from us.

[07:26]

And we take it for granted, and science takes that for granted. But for practitioners, we need to keep reminding, re-minding and re-uniquing our experience. So we feel how Hanna and Christoph made this space. And then share it with the Sangha, so we're making the space. And for me, the space wasn't here until I walked in. And walking in and starting to speak with Christina translating. We're actually, strictly speaking, from the point of view of practice, this is already something unique we've made.

[09:11]

And if you're defining yourself through your mentation, A meditation and consciousness doesn't work without beginning and end points. Strictly speaking, there's no end points, beginning and end points. Practically speaking, we function through beginning and end points. But actually it's just middles, repeated middles, over and over again, unique middles, unique middles. What the hell am I talking about? What did he talk about?

[10:19]

Uniquing middles. Oh, really? But at least in English, and I think in Deutsch too, the words we need to describe experience, which is a series of nows, we don't have the language for it. So now usually we talk about, and it's very commonplace now in psychotherapy and psychology and business seminars to talk about mindfulness. And in English, I don't know how it works in German, but mind is a great word. It covers a lot of territory. But what mind means for us in the West is again some kind of in the head location

[11:37]

from which we are alert and attentive and so forth. But mindfulness in a yoga culture like Asia and Japan, China, Korea, means something much more like bodyfulness. And if you practice, I'm just suggesting, we try to practice something like bodyfulness. So if you bring tension to the breath, it's not exactly your breath, it's just the breath, the breathing. You can also bring tension the breath through attention because when you bring attention to the breath you're not only bringing attention to the breath you're also bringing attention to attention

[13:33]

dann bringst du auch Aufmerksamkeit zur Aufmerksamkeit selbst. And you're developing attention. Und du entwickelst Aufmerksamkeit. And in this case you're taking attention out of mentation. Und in diesem Fall nimmst du die Aufmerksamkeit weg von der geistigen Aktivität. Now, unless you are practicing for a while, it may make... What the heck are you talking about? Taking breath out of meditation? Too many distinctions. But practice really is a process of noticing and noticing in a way that you make distinctions. But if you can't make a distinction between attention being located entirely in your thinking.

[14:44]

And attention being located in your breath. Now, I'm going to bring up what I mention every now and then, a simple and really profound question. Why is something so easy to do for a few breaths so difficult to do continuously? If it's so easy to do for one breath, ten breaths, five breaths, Why is it so hard to do continuously? No. I can't. I mean, I'm not trying at all, really, believe it or not, to teach you Buddhism. The best I can do is to teach you how to teach yourself Buddhism.

[16:08]

So if you take your attention out of meditation, You're beginning to, you're making a distinction. And the distinction allows you then to notice when your attention goes back to thinking or then back to your breath. And practice is to study that distinction. And I can point, as any meditation practitioner can point this distinction out. But it's your noticing and noticing and noticing this distinction and incubating and I say hibernating this distinction which results in the alchemy and transformational

[17:25]

Dimension of practice. Just know that or understand that means even less than nothing. Because if you think you understand it because you understand it, that's less than nothing. You really have to decide there ain't nothing but this and this is the life I have and I'm going to study the life I have. And so you bring attention to this distinction. And you end up studying attention as well as what happens when attention rests in the breath.

[18:51]

Now, I would say, of course, obviously, that most people universal shift in attention is to the breath. Okay. But what I'd like to emphasize, particularly for those of you who practice zazen or sitting meditation, It's equally important. You can't really compare them to bring attention to the spine. And bringing attention to the spine and bringing attention to the spine and discovering attention in the spine, is transformational in a different way than bringing attention to the breath.

[20:15]

First of all, just in your back, in the musculature of your back, And the kind of fascia structures of your back are all storage areas for traumas, experiences, points of view and so forth. And as long as your back is embedded with karma in that way. Which often bends our back, twists our spine, and stuff like that. It's very difficult to find an opening, a spine that opens up to attention.

[21:17]

Now, I think in ordinary circumstances of lay life, it is very difficult to develop the skill of an attentional spine. And I remember somebody I practiced with, a student of many years ago in San Francisco. She was I don't know what percentage, but 95% blind or 80% blind or something. Legally blind. But she could sort of feel space and see a tiny, tiny bit. And she would go to work on the bus in San Francisco. And even on the bus, when she was pretending to be a seeing person, everyone treated her like a blind person.

[22:56]

Yeah, and she suddenly realized one day, when she stooped and didn't stand up straight, that then people treated her as seeing. Maybe it's sort of like a dog to show submission, puts its tail between its legs. People, we all kind of stoop slightly to show we're not aggressive. If you stand up really straight maybe people will think you're blind. So she learned to stoop and then people treated her as a seeing person. So I think if you walk through your office if you

[23:57]

work in an office, with your back straight and your full power, people will be, what's going on with this person? But in Zazen you can really explore your spine and your neighbor doesn't even know you're doing it. Well, no, they probably do, but they're not bothered by it. So I'm suggesting that when you, those of you who sit, you when you sit down, one of the first things you do is lift up through your spine. And the spine is the main posture in Zazen. The crossing our legs, if we can, gives us stability.

[25:21]

And then if the pillow is the right height, you can lift up through your spine. And if the pillow is too low, this pillow is a bit low for me. I can't fully lift through my spine easily. But over a period of the first 10 or 20 minutes of zazen period, your spine begins to be able to be straighter. And there's not only a spine of vertebrae. Yeah, okay. You didn't know your spine was at vertigo?

[26:38]

No, I'm kidding. It's also a feeling. Because, you know, the spine stops here at the beginning of the neck. The base of the skull. And then there's no spine in the middle of the head. Yeah, not in my head anyway. But I can feel the spine all the way up to here. So the whole thing about chakras and kundalini and all is really about this feeling spine. which you think it's helpful in practice to awaken the spine. And again, it doesn't happen all at once. In fact, all the stuff embedded in your back can take your lifetime, but ideally it usually takes at least a year or two before your back really opens up and is soft and relaxed all the way.

[28:05]

Okay. So again, every time you sit down, you see, you try to lift up through your spine and feel a tension in your spine. And And bringing attention into the spine is something, once you're familiar with it, you can do any time during the day. And you can develop ways to remind yourself to bring attention back into the spine, spine into the back, back into the spine. So now what you're also doing is you're developing attention in ways that attention not only is part of the breath, but now attention is part of the spine.

[29:51]

And breath attention is a little different elixir or chemistry from spine attention. So it's a way you're almost spreading some kind of elixir through your body by having a tension rest in the breath. Or another kind of medicine or tonic through the awareness reaching through the body from the spine. Now I'm trying to take these usual categories we live in,

[30:56]

What's the big category? Time. But clock time is planetary rotation time. So I remember Ivan Illich said he liked hours which had lost their clocks. And I would like all of you, because it's such a wonderful experience, to lose your clocks. I mean, we need to be able to shift in the clock time to do things with other people and get to work on time and so forth. But clock time is a social convention. And fairly recent in human history. So what I'd like to say tonight, maybe we can discover spine time.

[32:23]

Maybe you can feel your spine as determining your pace and your movements. No, in recent, I don't know, last year or two, I've been emphasizing developing this feeling of an attentional spine. Then developing an attentional location Now, let me make this distinction again. There's the mental interior location we usually have. What you may, some of you, be in the midst of right now. But you can also... Any of you, each of us, can shift out of it into our breath.

[34:10]

And it's different. And you might even feel a relief, a kind of relief. head full relief of not being located there anymore. Now, a mature practitioner is located in the head only when necessary. All the rest of the time he or she is located in the bodyfulness, in the tensional bodyfulness location. And when you bring attention out of thinking, And begin to locate the feeling of attention in the breath.

[35:17]

Or the feel of attention in the spine. You can begin to literally kind of fill the body with attention, as if you were pouring attention into the body. And all corners of your body, inside and outside, feel full with attention. As if you could breathe the tension into all parts of your body. And it's useful to breathe the tension into... Here's this glass in front of me. I can breathe my... this attention... fully around and through and in the object.

[36:25]

So I can make it maybe like an attentional glass. And an attentional glass begins to affect my own attentional space. And that sense of really in yoga culture of even the glass is an attentional glass is the common place that you do things with two hands. because your hands are a way of directing attention you're enhancing the whole spatial feel of attention which is our body So as I started to say, I often emphasize bringing attention, opening up through and lifting through the spine.

[37:44]

And then kind of spreading that attention into the breath. So now spine attention and breath attention are working together. And then you begin to feel the mind as part of this spine breath attention. And then this mind, breath, spine attention becomes the space you're creating all the time. Now, what I'm saying is really beginner's instructions. It's that usually we don't notice that when you start to meditate, this is what's happening.

[39:15]

And if you really start noticing what your meditation practice is, it's what I'm describing. And since I don't see you very often, and some of you I'm lucky if I see you once a year, I could go into some more detail about this bodyfulness attentional location. And the difference between an attentional, bodily attentional location and a mental location. I mean, we all see you. as physical locations.

[40:29]

And as practitioners you can make your internal location also a fully physical location. It's good for the state of mind and it's good for the body And it is good for your mental state and it is good for your body. And it is good for your friends. It is pretty good for almost everything. Okay, so that's probably enough. Fifty minutes, that's terrible I talk so long. Does anybody have anything you'd like to bring up? Sometimes we stop and those who want to leave as fast as possible can leave. And those who stay, we can have some conversation.

[41:32]

So maybe some of you have to leave and you're not just escaping. So why don't we take a couple minute break and then we can, who's still here, we can talk. Mm-hmm. Two machines. Hmm. Since Marie-Louise is here in Austria with me so seldom, I asked her if she'd participate in the question and discussion part.

[43:03]

And it may be after the talk, if you tell her it wasn't too bad, she might come back more often. So does anybody have anything you'd like to speak about with me or with all of us? Did all this talk about bodyfulness make any sense? Yes. I arranged for him to ask. I arranged for him to ask. So it's more like two questions and I'm wondering if you could please speak about pausing because for me I noticed that pausing is very helpful.

[44:17]

in order to get into my body. He means like pausing for the particular. The other thing that came to mind is that one isn't always located in the mind or in thinking. Where are you located when it's not in the mind or the body? Oh, to get the skill of being able to move from one to the other. Oh, yeah. That's good. I have proof. So can you speak about those two things?

[45:38]

Oh, really? Okay. Well, obviously, to pause offers a chance for noticing, for transition. So obviously, to pause offers a chance for noticing, for transition. And the phrase I've often offered you in English is to pause for the particular. And sometimes I say to pause for the pause. And I think this is one of those lucky phrases that is almost, let me just say, essential to develop your practice.

[46:41]

We have good translation. Oh, we do? Good. Good, okay. So please practice it. Consciousness functions through predictability, Through a beginning point and end point kind of thinking. And all that's part of assuming a continuity of person. Yeah. And we can't function without an experience of continuity. But as strictly speaking, the cat which jumps off the couch is not the same cat that lands.

[48:01]

Even though the cat that lands knows you as well as the cat that jumped off the kitchen. This is a point that Nagarjuna makes, who's called the second Buddha. My daughter is downstairs, our daughter is downstairs studying and she's 14. She'd love you to talk about her. Don't tell her. It's a secret. I will cross my heart and help you. Okay. I'm in my 80th year. The 14-year-old I was is not continuous with the 80-year-old I am.

[49:23]

And when she's 70 or 80, let's hope, or older... she will not be the same person she is at 14. And strictly, if I hadn't met Suzuki Rishi or hadn't started to practice, I'd be a different 80-year-old now than I became. But even became has a sense of continuity in it, which strictly speaking isn't there. Okay. Okay, now, most of you simply don't believe what I said.

[50:45]

You might hear it, but you really don't believe. You know it's the same cat that jumped off the couch. It's the same cat that landed. But if you can bring into your viewpoint this other alchemy of maybe it's not. Maybe it's not. It's an alchemical transformational view. You won't notice it, but your friends will say, why have you turned to gold? Alchemy is to turn lead to gold. Obwohl du es nicht merken wirst, während deine Freunde sich wundern, warum du dich in Gold verwandelt hast.

[51:57]

Diese Lehre ist in diesen Satz eingebaut, Because the more you get the habit of pausing for the particular, it opens you to appearance, moment after moment appearance. And it opens you to the absolute uniqueness of moment after moment appearance. And to know the alchemy of that. while you simultaneously function in the assumption of continuity, is called the teaching of the true satchas, or the two truths.

[53:19]

which is attributed, though it existed before Nagarjuna, it's attributed primarily to Nagarjuna. But that profound and difficult to fully realize teaching and practice is built into the little statement to pause for the particular. Okay, would somebody else ask a question or say something which doesn't require such a long response? But I can make anything into a long response. Hi. Who's Scott? Who's Scott, yeah. This is a good Austrian Christian, I mean, Buddha say.

[54:35]

Be careful of the scroll behind. One area where you can locate yourself other than meditation and body are the feelings. Yes, the motions. Maybe not too much or not too often because it can be exhausting. Yes. I'm asking if in Zen there is a place for that. Is there traditionally a place for that?

[55:39]

And what do you mean by an emotion? To actually feel what you feel. Do you feel feeling itself or do you feel an emotion like anger, love, jealousy? I'm thinking of the complicated emotions like anger, sorrow and so on. Okay. The way I'm presenting Buddhism and trying to make distinctions in English, feelings are not emotions.

[56:51]

Emotions are like anger or love or jealousy or something like that. And in English, the two words have been conflated, but they're not really the same. I asked for a short question. Oh, yeah. I know. I'm sorry. Okay. Okay. To practice with emotions, I recommend that you notice exactly what emotions you feel I don't know what the word in German is, but in English it's E, motion.

[58:10]

It's directional. And it's usually directional outward. Or directional inward. But when it's directional inward, it's often not very good for you. So what I recommend and what I practiced myself Yes, first of all, not only when you sit, when you start meditating, do you notice thoughts?

[59:13]

Okay, so let's... I'm sorry, if I'm going to respond to this, I have to respond to it. Suzuki Roshi's most common Zazen definition was don't invite your thoughts to tea. I think everyone can have a feeling for that. Okay, but when you start noticing, when you think about it, the, to not invite your thoughts to tea is a mental formation.

[60:14]

So you're using a mental formation to not invite other mental formations to tea. So they have to be different kinds of mental formations. Also muss es unterschiedliche Arten von mentalen Formierungen geben. Die mentale Formierung, Gedanken nicht zum Tee einzuladen, das ist eine Intention. Und eine Intention ist etwas ganz anderes als dieses diskursive Denken oder Mentieren. So practice is rooted in developing intention and attention, and shifting your experience to intentions and attentions,

[61:25]

and ceasing your identification with discursive and comparative thoughts. So what happens in the first years of meditation? And depending on the depth of your commitment and intention to practice, you become aware of a panoply of discursive thoughts. What's a panoply? An array of discursive thoughts.

[62:43]

They establish a continuity in consciousness. But now you're beginning to feel a continuum that's deeper and more body and contextual. And that's not located in discursive comparative thought. And then you notice, if you practice anything like mine, that you feel better when it's in this continuum of what I call awareness and not in a continuum of consciousness. When you identify with a continuum made up of discursive thoughts,

[63:50]

You don't feel so good. At least I didn't feel so good. I liked it. Whether people like you or don't like you or how you feel about this or what you want... It's a kind of... Just a minute. I'm okay. It's a kind of... And you're not from London? No, I'm from Graz. Yeah, okay, yeah. And it's... the more clearly you have that experience, you just find out how to drop the identification with discursive thoughts.

[65:08]

Then you find out how to drop the identification with these comparative thoughts. Then you also notice that a lot of emotions are tied up with and meshed in these discursive thoughts. And some discursive thoughts draw up all kinds of physical chemistries, biology, panic attacks, all kinds of things. Some thoughts. Some thoughts are hooked into your adrenaline. And that's even more troublesome. Okay, so my practice was then to call up as many emotions as possible. Feel them as strongly as possible.

[66:23]

If you have a problem, you start out planning to use a machine gun. And then you realize that makes such a mess. Made or... Would make such a mess. So machine guns are out. And after a while, anger is out, etc. And you can practice with anger by finding ways to express it So conversationally, and often at a later point, it's good to be able to express it, but not with the feeling, the adrenaline of anger. Then you learn from the anger that you can express it later in the conversation without this feeling of anger.

[67:38]

But the adrenaline of anger and certainly of outrage, and sometimes we meet the world, requires us to feel outrage. Empörung ist auch etwas, was wir manchmal in der Welt brauchen. Okay, so eventually you get so that if you do want to bring adrenaline in, you bring it in intentionally as a kind of a communication. Okay, so that's what I would say about emotions. Because one does need to explore them, and I think, and to really fully experience them.

[68:46]

And my emphasis was to really feel them, I would exaggerate them. And then sometimes I'd find the exaggeration was how I really felt. Okay, so now let's go to feeling. And I think the important aspect of feeling for practitioners is non-graspable feeling. And all mental and physical activity is accompanied by feeling. No.

[69:47]

Every mental posture is accompanied. All mental and physical activity is accompanied by feeling. A sentient physical activity. Even if you're in a coma or if there's some feeling, you're probably still alive. So right now in this room there's a feeling. As I often say. And most of the real information in this situation is in this non-graspable feeling. And as soon as anything happens, there's a slightly different feeling. Now, practice is to begin to feel the field of mind, which is feeling.

[70:55]

A statement of Dogen's I've been giving you often is he says, sometimes, and we happen to know enough about Dogen to know he means among the various times I can manifest, I'm picking one. Also wir wissen genug über Dogen, dass wir wissen, dass er sagen würde, unter den verschiedenen möglichen Manifestationen von mir wähle ich jetzt eine. And then he says, I, Ehe, giving the name of his temple. Und dann sagt er, ich, Ehe, und das ist auch der Name seines Tempels. Like I could say, I, Johanneshof. Wie ich sagen könnte, ich, Johanneshof. Or I could say, I, Crestone. Or I could say, I cottage gasse.

[72:18]

And each is a little different. And then he says, I ehe, enter an ultimate state. Ich ehe, Nehme einen höchsten Zustand ein, oder betrete einen höchsten Zustand. Okay, so what he means is, he enters a samadhi. Und was er damit meint, ist, dass er in samadhi eingeht. But we know he doesn't really just mean one of the many samadhis, one can answer. Okay. He means at this moment there's potentially an ultimate state that arises from all of us. A non-thinking, non-graspable feeling state which joins us resonantly at this moment.

[73:35]

A non-graspable non-feeling non-graspable feeling a field of mind which resonantly connects us at this moment and then he says from this I offer you discussion and then he says to the group and all I want from you And the only thing I want from you is that you simply remain steadily intimate with your field of mind. Now, to really get the import and the difference in such a statement, just imagine, did any of your college professors ever say, I just wish you to be steadily intimate with your field of mind?

[75:00]

Probably not. So if it's so different than your usual experience, something different is going on. So he's not saying, understand me, think about what I'm saying. No, just be intimate with your field of mind. Now, I could have said earlier in the talk Ich hätte am Anfang des Vortrages sagen können. There's mindfulness. Es gibt Achtsamkeit. There's bodyfulness.

[76:03]

Körpervollheit. And in a yoga culture, mindfulness really means a subtle bodyfulness. I could have also said a feeling-full-ness. And really what practice is about and what Dogen is talking about is a feelingfulness of this non-graspable awareness. And that's your default posture. That's where you live and rest. And you can bring in emotions, bring in thinking, let it happen, etc.

[77:13]

But there's this absolute stillness where you live. All right. Ushi. Everything clear. Thank you very much. You can come to any of my lectures. I'll always ask you the last question. Thank you very much. Thanks for trusting me.

[78:02]

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