Part of what I was speaking about before the break was simply what we call in English, probably the same expression, to put all your eggs in one basket. Do you have that same expression? No. What do you say? We put all your money on the same horse? On the same card, actually. On the same card. We have a horse, too. You don't have eggs, okay. We don't have eggs. But, you know, when I buy a dozen eggs in Germany, I get ten. Wenn ich ein Dutzend Eier in Deutschland kaufe, dann bekomme ich zehn. Meaning what?

[01:05]

In America, a dozen is 12. No, it's 10. Oh, they're usually packed as 10. If you want 12, you have to buy a pack and... And you know Do, Zen. Zen Do. So it sounds like a high stakes game. And it would be a high stakes game. It's zazen and what flows from zazen wasn't so satisfying.

[02:13]

And it's lasted and it's probably the oldest institution in the world, monastic, Zen monastic, Buddhist monastic practices. Really not because of its social role or belief or its institutional, organizational skills or something? But really because a significant percentage of people find it so satisfying. And it tends to make everything else so satisfying. It's really simple like that.

[03:21]

I mentioned earlier the nuclear family. It's something like group of people bumping around in the dark. And you're not supposed to turn the light on. And I suppose constellation work and psychotherapeutic work is in significant ways to turn the light on. But if I continue with the image of darkness, and if you really find the world, experientially find the world, know the world as unpredictable.

[04:33]

Not just an idea that might happen in the world of predictability. But moment after moment you find Things appear in a form and color which is quickly gone. These words don't have much experiential approximation. These words don't have much experiential approximation. But it's the feel of appearances. And this is a kind of darkness.

[05:47]

Because really when the world is not predictable, you're kind of going on trust. And I suppose that's why in calamitous circumstances sometimes people are quite happy. If it's really serious, all you've got is your happiness. Everything else is taken away and it tends to make you happy. Okay. And it's interesting how Tibetan Buddhism is always talking about the clear light and Zen is always talking about utter darkness.

[07:00]

They're not mutually exclusive. But they sense that you're living in a kind of darkness. That's just a momentary light you're in. That we call the perdurant present. But there's also this sense of the hidden landscape. I mean, it's called, in Chinese poetry, it's talked about as a hidden landscape. And it's also, you know, when you... Bodhidharma, again, we mentioned, supposedly said, if you want to see the fish, you have to watch the water.

[08:18]

And that's the sense of looking at the, as I said, to some extent. Is looking at the water to see the fish. If you're going to see a fish. He means something like the fish is the The fish is the medium of the water. In other words, if you know what water is like, you can probably figure out what a fish is like. I mean birds and fish sometimes look a little bit alike, but birds are clearly wind beings.

[09:38]

There's two Hawks, I guess, just below my window in the Schloss. You know, I'm up above the tops of the trees and they're always sailing around. And the wind just makes the distance between the trees longer or shorter. But they're wind beings. And the The medium tells you something about what birds look like. And then there's the sense, too, of the doves that cry in the bushes. The doves are the birds.

[10:58]

So you feel the... It's like a tracker, you know. I've occasionally been with a tracker. It's fantastic. They walk along and say, oh, there was such and such an animal here two days ago. It's not like it was two days ago. It's like the space somehow includes time. And you feel the activity of the landscape, and most of it's hidden. And you feel it too.

[12:08]

Like I said, you hear a bird, but you're only hearing your own hearing of the bird. Nagarjuna and Dogen both said, firewood is not the past of... Firewood is not the past of ashes. He said, they said, firewood has its own past, present and future. Ashes have their own past, present and future. The past of firewood is not a forest. Once it's firewood, it's part of our human history. The use of wood is firewood. So the sense of this kind of comment is the bird singing within its own past, present, and future, its own history, which you are not part of.

[13:33]

Yeah. Yet the sound of the bird is part of our past, present and future and poetry and so forth. So the mind of appearance is occurring in darkness. And it's a feeling of simultaneous different worlds. Interpenetrating without obstruction.

[14:49]

And we are creatures of our medium. So our medium is mind in the largest sense. And when I'm speaking now, meeting and speaking, here we are, speaking is drawn out of silence. I spoke about this in our last recent practice period. And speaking is, and when you draw speaking out of silence, I would say not so much discursive speaking, but intuitive speaking. When speaking is drawn out of silence, some silence sticks to it.

[16:07]

And you can feel the silence in the speaking. And there's this concept in Japan of maa. And ma is close to actually a kind of gestalt. In other words, the ma of this moment is kind of the gestalt of this moment. Or... Uh... Um... Dogen is saying to complete that which appears.

[17:08]

Is in the, at each moment of appearance. In this undulating sea of change. At each moment of appearance. That appearance is interrelated with all kinds of other things. Interdependent with and interpenetrated with. And you... And you find yourself in feeling not separate from, not other than.

[18:16]

And thus you are a part of the gestalt of this moment. There's no way you can know it independent from yourself. And so the sense that it has at each moment its own organization or something like that, its own gestalt, is part of this experience of non-duality. That it has its own organization, gestalt, is. part of what is meant by experience of non-duality and this ma or gestalt this ma is drawn out of chaos because this order is always appearing out of something on the edge of this

[19:28]

freeze-thaw landscape, fitness landscape. So some chaos or darkness sticks to Ma. Etwas von diesem Chaos, dieser Dunkelheit, hängt diesem Ma an. Die Gestalt ist permeated by darkness. Die Gestalt ist von der Dunkelheit durchdrungen. And disappears back into disorder, only reorder again and appear. Und verschwindet zurück in die Ordnung, nur um in einer neuen Ordnung wieder aufzutauchen. So let's imagine this accumulated, incubated experience.

[20:48]

which is a kind of swimming, something like that. Stepping with not knowing if the floor is going to be there. Or swimming as the image I used the other day, swimming in the shimmer of consciousness. Or finding you don't need consciousness to breathe and you can let yourself sink deeper and deeper into this world of knowing. that's also utter darkness. And if you read koans, practice koans, If you realize that people in these, well, maybe constellations we call koans, constellations, are speaking and they're meeting and speaking, they're assuming that there's a darkness that clings to their meeting and speaking.

[22:24]

And there's a feeling that the world is appearing momentarily. through their speaking and eating, through their speaking and meeting, through their medium. Now there is in chaos theory and emergence, you know, ideas of emergence.

[23:33]

There's the idea of an attractor. Yeah, it's like, you know, the water, the stream's going along and it falls over a cliff. And water's going in all different directions, but... Really there's an attractor called gravity and it's all more or less in the same direction. So an intent you have, a vow you have can be an attractor. Or it can be part of the dynamic of awakening an attractor. In the way I'm speaking, silence or chaos is a kind of attractor.

[24:41]

Silence or chaos. Order appears, but it's... Order is an attractor and it's again attracted into disorder. And Zen practice is to find your balance And unbalance in this situation. To find your location in the firmness of your spine and the activity of your breath. Which is no location at all. But it's location enough. Okay. Things appear.

[26:14]

Things appear as contents of mind. But we could say that the field of mind is an attractor. So things appear but they are attracted back into the field of mind. Okay. So we could say then, if we can say the field of mind is an attractor, emptiness then is an attractor. If emptiness is a subtle and experiential word for interdependence, then we can say interdependence functions creatively because of the attractor of emptiness.

[27:17]

And all these ideas and experiences like the hidden landscape are all kind of resonant and awakening with each other. Okay. So... So if emptiness is an attractor, if you practice in such a way that you really are... moment by moment, within the feel and field of interdependence, then emptiness is an attractor. Things depend on emptiness.

[28:34]

And as soon as the emptiness is not the attractor, Then things start sticking together and no longer appearances. In this sense, emptiness as the attractor allows everything its independence. Okay, now we can also talk about emptiness as the shape which has no shape. Or what body does not fall into any category? He didn't say anything, but he said, I'm always close to this. Okay. So let us imagine that we have some idea like the shape which has no shape.

[30:10]

That's a way to describe the experience of emptiness. But the sense that emptiness is form is emptiness. Form is the shape which has no shape. And the shape which has no shape, you find your own shape within that. There's a calling forth of some great shape. It's like a calling for a great shape. And in Buddhism, the term that's used for the experiential field that I'm trying to show and describe, it's called the great image.

[31:21]

The great image. And the great image means that attractor which is most deeply what this world and you can be. So let's not make emptiness too empty. Emptiness is form. And within form, emptiness is the attractor of form and form is the attractor of emptiness. And implicit within the experiential field of emptiness is the shape which has no shape. And that calls forth as an attractor the deepest image of a feeling of knowing of ourselves.

[32:38]

And that great image we call Buddha. So the experience of Mind as appearance. Mind as emptiness. Appearing in emptiness, appearing in darkness. Appearing in a knowing without categories. calls forth the most fundamental category, which we feel ourselves called into. And this is a way of understanding what we mean by Buddha. Okay. I think that's enough.

[34:06]

I don't think there's much left for me to say after that. But what an extraordinary pleasure it is to be able to say it to you. That somehow in this mutual incubation is the field of a Buddha.

[34:43]

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