I'd like to start again with anything you might want to say. I'm going to start the… the winter branches is going to be only people who are full of questions and ask them. Yes. I don't have a question, I just wanted to share what I felt while you were sitting. Yes, please. It happened just right now, when you said you bring your awareness to the body and the And I finally sort of can leave it alone in my attention. I can lift it profoundly alone and have free gaze, so to speak.

[01:04]

Then I realize all the others are also there. And this gives the Sangha feeling. It's extremely nourishing. And this is the moment where the jewel of Sangha is sparkling. But then you're saying, Thich Nhat Hanh said maybe the future Buddha is Sangha. So now here we are, Sangha, profoundly leaving the body alone, having connected together. So where are we going now? Where do we go from now? Will it be like a holistic kind of feeling, so everybody's a little Buddha and together is a big one? And how do we come from there? Too fast? Let's wait and find out. What you said, I understand.

[02:10]

But where we go from here, I think that's too much of a question. This isn't what we want to find out. Okay, anyone else? Following the feeling of Peter's comment this morning in question, I feel there's an intending, but also there's an intending together that's happening by your bringing our joined attention to that, not just individual attention to that. Excuse me. And for me there's a different feeling when I'm sitting up in my room than when I come to sit in the center or sit in this room with others.

[03:14]

So there's something about my individual practice joining with others' individual practice. And I'd be interested in hearing what more you may have to say about joining our intention together, not just our individual intention. I didn't ask you to speak in German, I'm sorry, but I think everyone understood. Well, what Felix said and what you've said I think is the case.

[04:42]

We find that we know something. know something with each other that we almost also don't know or can't say we know. The other day I read and I'm thinking that I can't... I think it was on the editorial page, an editorial about the nose of a dog. Yeah. Anyway, dogs can smell whether a person has cancer or not. But the dog can't say, oh, my... My master, whose master, has cancer.

[06:09]

But the dog can be trained to sit down when it smells cancer and not sit down when it doesn't smell cancer. No, it just struck me, you know, that the dog... you know, one of the things that... Neuroscientists said to me in the panel the other day, was, well, we know we know, and that's what makes us humans. I think it's a very shaky standard. Because there's much that we know we know, but we don't exactly know we know it or we can't express it.

[07:10]

So let's just take Sashin, for example. During Sashin, we often have a... feeling of knowing that we know the people, the person next to us, in some rather thorough way that we may have never spoken to the person. And Felix just said there was a feeling of some kind of shared awareness here. And Paul spoke about shared intentions. Well, I think we do have to be careful that there isn't a coercion here.

[08:14]

As soon as it's too... We have to be careful about what kind of shared intentions we make They may be perfectly good, but still there's some coercive element. So we could say that in Zen practice in particular, That there's some kind of effort to find the natural man, the natural person. What do we say in the meal chant?

[09:17]

discover the natural order of mind. I don't think, you know, the original in Japanese doesn't say quite that. But that's the translation I came up with, with Sudhiroshi's help. Because we thought it was, yeah, more or less what we wanted. Weil wir das Gefühl hatten, dass es mehr oder weniger das war, was wir wollten. Because if Zen Buddhism is going to really work from Asian culture to our culture, then it's not a belief that we conform to. Then it ought to be here. Could it be rooted in some transcultural experience?

[10:38]

Now, the official academic position of most anthropologists, I think, is that there's no such thing as a transcultural experience. That all experience is culturally determined or at least culturally inflected. Now, if that's true, and that is a strong academic position that's been presented to me as Yeah, it has to be a fact. And it's been presented to me as, yes, this is a fact. No, I'm not saying we have to consider it a fact. But it's also interesting to see that people think that way, and that's very different from the idea of original mind.

[11:54]

So we should be careful that we... Don't automatically think, oh yes, original mind. Of course it's true. Because if you too easily accept it as true, it's sort of close to believing in God or something. It's like at the center of our practice can be a fact which we which we assume is true, but when we actually, as our practice develops in depth and sensitivity, it turns out original mind is just a nice idea.

[13:02]

then one's practice is likely to fall apart. So I would say it is a mistake to believe in oneness. But it's also a mistake to believe in original mind. Yeah, well, I think you have to concede a certain degree of inflection because form is emptiness, and emptiness is inflected by form. Excuse me, just a second. What's the exact inflection? Beugung. Beugung, genau. My team here. Yeah, just make it sure.

[14:23]

Yeah, yeah. I knew it was Beugung, yeah. But at the same time, I think that it's sufficiently uninflected we can say the dynamic of it is an original mind. Okay. It's sufficiently uninflected. It's sufficiently uninflected that pretty much we can say it's an original mind. Okay. This may be a rather technical discussion and not so important, but actually, if we want to think our practice through thoroughly, this is important.

[15:25]

So if original mind has some importance, Well, it obviously has an importance in the teaching of Zen But if it does have an importance in our own individual practice, or in our practice as a Sangha, then we should discover this ourselves. And not depend, oh, it's like some belief. No. What does it mean to you? Okay.

[16:26]

And if it means something to you, or if, yeah, if it is something within your own experience, or could be within your own experience, Then how do we discover that? How do we, what can we discover? Can we already notice it in our experience? And I think we can. You know, this dog doesn't know whether... knows that the smell of this person is different than the smell of another. But the dog doesn't.

[17:31]

The dog might know, let's say, let's assume the dog might know it doesn't smell good, it's sickness. And I'm not a doctor, but my guess is doctors can smell a difference between patients who are ill with one disease or another. Certainly in pronounced cases, when I've been in hospitals, I can smell myself differences. Okay, so let's say the dog has this knowledge. And the dog might even know it as... something we could call disease or something that's not right. Yeah, but the dog... I don't think... We can't say the dog doesn't know it because the dog doesn't know he knows it.

[18:35]

The dog knows it. Mm-hmm. And we, I think, in an analogous or similar way, know the feeling we have with each other in Sechin. It's not something we can grasp or identify exactly. But... Maybe we go back to Sashin as much for that experience sometimes with others as we do for the experience, individual experience.

[19:38]

So then if the experience of connectedness during Sashin is something positive, it is an experience. And it's certainly context-dependent. In other words, dependent on the situation of a sashin. But can it be free of the sashin, too, once we know it, because it is an experience? And yes, I think it's the case. Okay, so let us say that there, let's just say, since we're now, I tried not to talk about Sangha, but Felix, you made me do it, I'm sorry.

[20:52]

Okay, so let us say that an aspect of Sangha Let's say that we're going to discover a number of aspects of Sangha. This is the experience of connectedness we have or knowing of another person. That we have with somebody in Sashin. Somebody we don't know anything about. And if they haven't spoken, you don't exactly know whether they're Austrian-Swiss or German or perhaps Lithuanian. You could probably tell if they spoke a different language, even if they didn't speak.

[21:57]

But I just met an Estonian woman, I spoke... much of the week in Rome with, off and on. The wife of a friend of mine. But she learned to speak English in America and I would never have guessed she was Estonian. Okay. So you know the person in the Sesshin without knowing anything about. How do we get this knowledge? What is it that happens when two people are just in the same space together?

[23:00]

And I found this rather disconcerting when I was in Japan. Because when I was first there, the first couple of years, occasionally I would spend the day with a Japanese person. And you know how it is when... There's an uncomfortable silence. When two people fall silent and nobody knows what to say and there's a certain discomfort. Well, I spent all day with this young Japanese man. And it was nothing but uncomfortable silence. I kept quiet. And at the end of the day he said, what a wonderful day we had together.

[24:22]

And I, okay. Well, I'm glad you had a good time. But after a while I learned that the closer the friends are, the less likely they are to talk. There's very little small talk. I don't mean Japanese people don't talk, but they... but often with friends they just spend, share space together, not even time together. So then, going back to Paul's question, what vows or intentions are not coercive?

[25:35]

What vows or intentions lie at the root of coercion? art practice. Yeah, that allow our practice to develop and flourish. Well, this is, you know, Yeah, not an easy territory to discover, but it can be discovered. Es ist kein Gefilde, das leicht entdeckt wird, aber es ist entdeckbar. No, you couldn't say exactly what we do here that's different than any sort of conference center, perhaps.

[26:37]

Man könnte nicht ganz genau sagen, was anders ist, was wir hier machen, als zum Beispiel was in einem Konferenzzentrum. But what we do here does somehow help to create a Sangha. And certainly a big part of it is that we sit together. But that's not the whole of it. And now, can what makes a sangha be brought into our daily life? We have the dharmakaya. We have a sanghakaya. Okay, someone else?

[28:16]

Well, let me go back to Sazen instruction. Yeah, I think I spoke about this maybe, this way of speaking about Sazen. I spoke about it in Boulder, maybe at the bed and breakfast, or maybe at Creston. But I'm speaking about bringing this, let me start again briefly, bringing attention into the body. And knowing or having the idea, seeing if the idea is true, That you're not just bringing attention to the bell, but you're kind of ringing the body with attention.

[29:36]

And it's a process of exploring the body in the process of Finding your posture. And allowing whatever feelings appear to appear. And I think that as you... Mindfulness, we could say also, means removing the mind from expecting predictability.

[30:45]

So you don't brush off uniqueness. Or you don't get anxious or, you know, what's the word? Hypochondriac. I felt a little strange feeling in my knee, a flickering of a butterfly. A schmetterling in my knee, there must be something wrong, call the doctor. Call Dr. Seuss. You don't have Dr. Seuss here, do you? Dr. Seuss? Seuss. It's a children's story written by... You should all read Dr. Seuss, but he doesn't translate.

[31:47]

I'm sorry. It's all right. But it's the Pippi Longstockings of America. Thank you. So, every time I sit, I notice things that are unique. Some feeling. Okay. So, you're, by bringing, by sitting down, and bringing attention to and into the body, body into the parts of the body, the areas of the body. You're developing, educating the body to absorb more attention. And you're awakening the body.

[32:59]

So if the word Buddha means simply one who is awake, it also means the body is awake. And there's a gestural and postural language. Yeah, okay. And, I mean, if you notice, you can just... you know, as I've said before, I think, just take any word and let your hand do what it wants in relationship to the word. Because whatever word you say In, out.

[34:17]

There's some kind of gesture. So there's a kind of postural gesture. and gestural syntax to language and the mind. I watch newscasters. And you wonder if they're pleased or displeased with the person they're interviewing. And I noticed that a good interviewer's face is always pleasant. But if it's been a kind of unpleasant encounter, If you wait a minute until he thinks the interview is over or that part's over, suddenly there's a little negativity goes through his face.

[35:33]

So even in such with trained people, you can really see the truth of what they think about what they're speaking about often. Whether they're against this news or for this news. Now, if we went to signing, if we were learning signing for deaf people, then there's definitely not only syntax, but grammar. It's very specified. But that grammar actually probably restricts the freedom of signing. our postural and gestural syntax.

[36:37]

So much of what we know that we can't express is to some degree expressed, of course, through the body. And through practice you awaken the body to yourself, but also to others. You know, in one of the... I'm sorry to tell you anecdotes. I'm wasting your time. But they come up, so I tell you.

[37:39]

I trust what comes up. Yeah, this guy I know. There was another funny thing that happened at this conference. A young man who I came to like quite a bit came up to me and said, Oh, hello, you must be Sally Baker's father. He said, I was your... Your daughter was my first real friend at Brown University when we were freshmen. And now he's a rather well-known biologist and... who studies music.

[38:47]

But he's not the person I'm speaking about. There was this other guy. And he had these poor little animals, so he could have half monkeys, you know. Poor little animals. I can't remember their name, marmosets, maybe something like that. And he had two tunnels they could go into. And in one tunnel there was Mozart or something, you know. And in the other tunnel there was the most worst dissonant noise he could make. And he was trying to... trying to see if these little animals were like smart as plants, which seemed to prefer music.

[39:50]

But they didn't care either. They spent equal amount of time in both places. So, and he also tried silence and various kinds of sounds. But he didn't really try silence. He tried, you know, because there's a certain background noise. And, you know, if I was a wild animal, And I was up in the forest where there might be enemies. Like in Crestone, mountain lions and bears. I would be not walking in the forest with my iPod in my ears.

[40:53]

I would want to be hearing what's going on around me. So I suggested he try random sounds. Or different kinds of silence. Because I think you'll notice that just in this group there's actually different kinds of silence. There's various kinds of ambient noise, background noise. But every now and then it comes into almost complete silence and then opens up again. And what happens when it goes into various kinds of nearly complete silence?

[42:05]

And what's going on among us that we're tuning ourselves to this kind of topography of silence. So when you hear another person, you hear also not only the spaces between their words and things, but you also hear a kind of territory of silence. And what kind of acting, minute particles of time acting, is occurring during these various kinds of silence.

[43:20]

And do we breathe into this silence or find through this silence a rhythm with each other that is outside our usual knowing? Perhaps we can say outside our usual knowing, but in fact we act as if we know. Wir sagen außerhalb unseres gewöhnlichen Wissens, aber tatsächlich, in fact, we act as if we know it. Handeln wir als ob wir es wissen würden. We do things, my own observation is, we do things informed by that which we don't know.

[44:28]

Don't know we know. Meine Beobachtung ist die, dass wir Dinge tun, die also sozusagen informiert wissen von Dingen, die wir nicht wissen, beziehungsweise wissen, dass wir sie nicht wissen. Now, mindfulness practice is to bring yourself more into this kind of space. Und in der Achtsamkeitspraxis geht es darum, sich mehr und mehr in diesen Raum hineinzubringen. As a kind of baseline or baseline, baseline of the more fundamental territory of doing and mind. So you're feeling the silence and also the language and the activity. But you're feeling the silence as the baseline, not the activity and the...

[45:34]

speaking. When you do that, when you feel that, you You begin to know people differently. Some people need to fit every moment into a description. Or to express things are good or bad when they're already good or bad before the expression. To fit things into good or bad. An expression of good or bad. When they're already good or bad. Before the expression. And they have more subtlety before the expression. And there's more territory for interacting before the expression.

[46:56]

And it assumes a certain respect for the other person not to express because you assume they already know it even if they don't know it. So it's better to act within this knowing-not-knowing And it is better to act within this knowledge-not-knowledge Now what I've been trying to get at here is also the expression in Zen is not knowing is nearest. Maybe now you can have a feeling for what that expression means. It's not just a holding back and not knowing. It's an active not-knowing within not-knowing.

[48:30]

I sound like a Zen girl. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's a kind of trust. Trust in your own breathing. Trust in your own breathing with others. Which we can also call sangha. But we still also make small talk. Or create some way of speaking together. Yeah, I'm speaking with you now. Part of it, I'm just trying to say something so I can... At the same time, feel you without speaking or underneath the speaking.

[49:40]

Because if I can feel you, this is my satisfaction in practicing together. And I suppose that's the biggest difficulty of living for, say, months at a place like Creston. Is most of our... Social space, usual social space, reinforcement space is taken away. Oh, I was going to go back to Zazen instruction, wasn't I?

[50:52]

And so let's, maybe it's a good time to have a break. Let's see. We started at 2.30, 3.30. Oh, my gosh. I'm sorry to keep you sitting in this confining posture for so long. So, yeah, maybe we have a 20-minute break. Maybe we have an hour and 15 minutes. I'll ring a bell.

[51:20]

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