I feel like, don't the British all talk out of one side of their mouth? Maybe New Zealanders don't. Have you ever noticed that? And with a McLean beside me, you know. But I won't forget you over here. So I can't, you know, obviously, this is what, the eighth teshu of these practice weeks. Yeah, I can't review everything. But perhaps I can have some digest or condensation. Mm-hmm. What we've been looking at is this phrase of Dogen's teaching, a sentence, two sentences of Dogen.

[01:18]

Continuous practice, which... actualizes itself, is no other than your practice just now. And the now of this practice did not originally belong to the self. is not originally possessed by the self. So maybe as a way of having a digest, a condensation, is to slow down the way we could in a practice period at home. or practice time at Creston.

[02:24]

And just look at this statement carefully. And let me add something that Ivan Illich said. Funny is, half Jewish and as Catholic as he was, I find his observations, his insights, always extremely close to Buddhism. So he says, this self, when examined by the light of day, cannot exist without the text.

[03:31]

And he means the text of memory, of narration, of story. Now this is very close to what Dogen is saying, actually. Okay. Now, what I've recommended, suggested is that you practice noticing. Now, I find myself when I say it, when I look at how it sounds in the words I'm using, It's hard to get my mind around the idea that it's something important. We're always noticing things. How could the practice of noticing be any different than just noticing things?

[04:45]

Then why would noticing make a difference in our life? Well, it's very difficult to really feel the importance of it in words, at least in speaking to myself. But in my experience, my daily experience, I fully know the importance. Now, how do I make something that's, you know, So familiar it's obvious. How can I make clear its familiarity actually hides the fact that it's not obvious?

[05:52]

Okay, so say you're walking down the hall of this building. You've got a portable TV on your cosmic watch. You have. One has a portable TV in there. And you're walking along. Oh, that was really nice to see that. What's the weather like today? You're looking and you're watching. And you're hardly noticing the hall. Or you're talking on your cell phone. Or you're just thinking about things. You're thinking about what a good person you are. Or how you're going to solve such and such a problem. You don't notice the hall much. Now agreed, this is not the most interesting hall around. It's a fairly boring hall.

[07:15]

But it's a lot more interesting than halls in most of the hotels I stay in. When I walk down every day with the Jisha, back and forth, I get lost without the Jisha. And every day I go back and forth with the jizha and I go without the jizha or the jizha lost. Yes, they are always fine, quite interesting things. Then I always find very interesting things. So, here I'm speaking about noticing being in the foreground of our mind. As an intention and as a practice. Now, if you're driving, if you're doing highway driving, most of it is, you know, you just have to sort of pay attention. you can think about a lot of different things.

[08:21]

But if you're driving your car, or better, a motorcycle or a bicycle, on a bumpy road with a lot of stones, you can't think about other things too much. You really have to have paying attention. in the foreground of your mind. So, Maybe I'm suggesting you think of the bumpy road of the present, you know, instead of the predictable road of the present. Because as I've been pointing out recently, while we think of the present as, I mean the future as something that we want to be predictable, Buddhism emphasizes the unpredictability of the future.

[09:30]

The future that's coming toward you all the time. You're not going into the future. The future is coming toward you all the time. And it's coming toward you in its unpredictability. Now, if you have a concept of unpredictability, more than wanting things to be predictable. You'll live in this so-called present in a different way. No, but now let me say this. Maybe we can say there's no such thing as the present. But there's an overlap of past and future. There's an overlap of memory. Overlap with anticipation. desire curiosity it's a and there's almost no present there it's the text of memory and anticipation okay so you're again you're walking down the hall walking here in the garden

[11:05]

And say you take on the practice of noticing. The craft of noticing. Going up the stairs, there's palings. The railing is this way, the palings are this way. And you notice them. Now the palings, probably most of you didn't even know the word. We're not originally possessed by the self. Yeah, there's a story about a man who promised his wife on his deathbed that he would not remarry. But then after a year or two, he remarried. And the ghost of his wife kept visiting him. You promised not to remarry. And he tested her because she knew everything.

[12:17]

She knew what he was going to do next, what he'd just finished doing. And you said so-and-so to your new wife, and blah-blah-blah. So he went to the... These things happened in China as well as here. So he went to his Chinese Zen master. And the Chinese Zen master said, oh my God, another question like this. Oh my Buddha, excuse me. But he said, Yeah, this ghost of your former wife knows everything, doesn't she? Yeah, I can't hide anything from her, he says. So he says, take a handful of beans. Like we had soup today.

[13:39]

It was very good soup. And when she appears, ask her how many beans are in your hand. Now, the beans are in his hand. They're part of him, in a sense. So he said to the ghost, how many beans are in my hand? She didn't know and she disappeared and never came back. So, I mean, this is quite a ridiculous but profound little story. Because the ghost couldn't exist outside the text of self. The beings are not in the memory. The palings are not in the memory. The now of continuous practice did not originally belong to the self.

[14:41]

So noticing begins to change things. If you make noticing the front of your mind, the foreground of your mind, This morning I went into the kitchen and I asked the kitchen crew, what shall I speak about today? And one of the questions was, one of the suggestions was, I can speak about bringing awareness into daily life. And I think I've heard that question before. For 50 years I've heard this question.

[15:42]

But it's still an interesting question. And I said, in the daily life, and this person said to me, well, yeah, even like into the kitchen. Oh. Okay, so it's such a perennial question. But what's behind it? It doesn't mean that you've heard about awareness in lectures or reading. It means you've heard about awareness. I mean, you've had some experience of awareness. You haven't just heard about it. Or you've had some experience of awareness, like in Zazen.

[16:42]

But not just in Zazen. At other times you've had experiences of awareness. But it's sometimes somehow in a special category. A special category that's not your daily life usually. It's outside your timeline. It's somehow outside of your usual time. So you don't know how to bring it into your usual time. When I thought about it, it reminded me of a story I used to tell my... I made up for my daughters. I don't know if it applies to here, but somehow it came to mind. This mole was swimming by the seashore. And he found an old piece of glass that was embedded in the cliffside under the water. And he cleaned this muddy glass.

[18:06]

And he could see swimming in the ocean a seal. And the mole decided he wanted to be a seal. Yeah, I don't know, but maybe sometimes in Zazen we look into Buddha land through a muddy glass. We feel like a mole that wants to be a seal. But how do we bring into the light of day the text? Or the self? Well, you know, if awareness... Our experience of it is maybe in Zazen, or maybe in some special open space that's not our usual life.

[19:18]

So we have the experience of it, but we don't sense it as, what can I say, a condition. The experience seems to be isolated in Zazen or... Or in the mind of the mole. So how do we get familiar with it, but it's also a seed? So we get familiar with it, but we don't know how to plant it. Well, actually, the craft, the practice of noticing, in contrast to knowing, where you're not noticing, the practice of noticing plows consciousness.

[20:30]

It's a kind of plowing of consciousness. So the seeds of mindfulness, the seeds of awareness can be planted. And then our familiarity with awareness in Zazen and other times That awareness helps the seed, that familiarity of awareness helps the seed of mindfulness and awareness grow in our daily activity. So the more you develop the habit of noticing as the front, as the foreground of the mind, you're actually a plowing consciousness.

[21:46]

You're opening consciousness to the seeds of awareness that you discover in Zazen. And you're pushing self-referential thinking into the background. Looking at the palings of the Stairs, there's not much self-referential thinking there. The ghost of the self doesn't know how many beans are in the hand or palings under the railing. So you just really actualize noticing On the bumpy road, perhaps, of the present.

[22:47]

The surface of things becomes more subtle. The surfaces of the world sort of rub against us as we walk in the garden or down the hall or just sit. And I think that a culture, for instance, where noticing is in the forefront of the average person's mind... will have more interesting architecture, more interesting city streets. Interesting in English, inter-asked means to be in the middle of is-ness. So the is-ness of the hallway, the is-ness of the street.

[23:53]

And you can see when you go into people's apartments whether they're a person who notices or doesn't notice. So if you do develop noticing, you change the architecture of your world and of the mind as well. Such a simple thing as practicing noticing. You're not changing, you're not some psychological understanding of the self. Yeah. You're simply moving the self out of the dynamic of the present.

[25:07]

The self isn't gone. It's just that you don't keep planting it. in the present. And the overlap of past and future begins to be pushed aside. And you have a new kind of space, a more interactive, intersubjective present. So memory and self-referential thinking, the text of memory and self-referential thinking, are out of the dynamic of the present, less present, in the present. The text of memory, but also the text of self-referential thinking are less present in this present.

[26:14]

So the practice, the plowing of notice. changes many things. It even changes how you breathe. So you're developing a noticing of the breath. In mindfulness practice, traditional mindfulness practice starts with and is based on noticing. Noticing our walking, noticing our breathing, noticing our immediate situation, noticing sensorial space, not thinking space. So you begin to change the basis of consciousness. You're restructuring, plowing, restructuring and plowing consciousness.

[27:47]

Such a simple, really simple practice. So you really come to feel what Dogen meant. And what he means by continuous practice. That this continuous practice which arises from a now that wasn't originally possessed by self. This is the continuous practice which actualizes itself. No, we can take these simple two sentences and looking at them very carefully. What kind of mind says this?

[28:52]

What kind of realized world is Dogen imagining or presenting to us? If you really look into these two sentences, you can feel Dogen's own mind. Hmm. That's probably enough for today. Yeah, I just really want to point out not a lot of stuff you have to study, but to look carefully at just two sentences like this. Now, the other thing I suggested was to imagine when you're doing zazen that you're just a lump. And to notice whether this lump is coincident, coincides with the body or not. And if it's defined the way we think of the body

[29:53]

And think of our eyes and so forth. When you do something as simple as this, you're going back behind the whole... western history of the development of self through biographies and so forth. There is a history of self. And that history, you want to get behind it in your zazen. Before it. So these two practices, imagining yourself as just a lump in zazen, and practicing noticing, in contrast to knowing, Im Gegensatz zu Wissen, die pflanzen diese Samenkörner des Gewahrseins.

[31:32]

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