I want us to, one thing, the basis for practice and what I'd like to see again is that you really feel the possibility of a choice. As I said, in what mind we choose to live the world through. Now I tried to give you a I gave you an example just moments ago, a while ago, of shifting from a mind in which you think about the world, to a mind in which you feel the world.

[01:17]

And once you get a feel for the mind in which you feel the world, and you, somebody like myself or through your meditation practice tells you or you get a sense of that these kinds of distinctions are worth paying attention to. And they're not just distinctions that fly away with the wind. You can hold them through the body. And again, the word dharma really means

[02:20]

Something like to hold. In everything changing, what holds? Then what do you choose to hold? And I watched when we were back in, yeah, sometime in around the turn of the year in Creston. I watched, I think I may have mentioned, Sophia compose herself. She was just learning to... Yeah, she was getting used to... speaking English.

[03:35]

And, you know, we have this big dog, this great Pyrenean mountain dog whose father is named Horse. Yes, I said, you know, the old joke about, you know, Mama, Papa and I caught a big fish, didn't we, Daddy? He kennt den Witz. Mama, wir haben einen so großen Fisch gefangen, nicht wahr, Papa? Well, it's sort of like this dog, you know, it's really big. Also so ist dieser Hund so groß. And Sophia hadn't seen him for some, I guess this was November maybe, he was just getting used to him again. And I was asking Sophia something.

[04:38]

Marie-Louise from the kitchen was saying something to her. And at the same time, the dog was racing toward her and his tail can knock over lamps, chairs, you know, whatever. I kind of watched Sophia pull herself up. Literally, much as we would do in Zazen practice. It's kind of like she brought her energy up into consciousness. It was a real, a kind of physical act. And once it was nearing completion, almost complete, then she related to the dog and to Marie-Louise and myself. And at that time she was still experimenting with the templates of social behavior.

[05:51]

Templates. The form you use to make templates. She has one template for me and one for Marie Louise. And she really tries them on and then reverses them and, you know, not sure she wants to be trained yet. Looks like she clearly was willing to take on a persona, a role. And willing to resist it or reverse it too. And she plays around with, of course, as kids do, imagination. And she says Marie-Louise is her baby and she's the mother.

[06:59]

And sometimes I'm also the baby or I'm the mother. Sometimes we're all three cats. So she, you know, like that. And at nursery school she's a big girl and at home she's a baby. Yeah. And you might say that, well, she's an imaginative kid, like most kids. But when we say that, it implies there's a Sophia who then is imaginative. I think the whole thing is imagination. Sophia is an imagination.

[08:00]

She's trying on being a girl, being Sophia, being our child and so forth. But when I look at each of you say with the feeling of just your presence, I definitely feel something. But you're not, you may only partially be the person you imagine yourself to be. Or I imagine you to be. And we're all aware that at work you're one person, at home you're another person. So what I'm emphasizing here is that it is all imagination. And so Sophia is going to get, she's going to choose the roles as herself that she gets the most reinforcement for.

[09:17]

She doesn't get much reinforcement for being a cat. She gets a certain amount of reinforcement for being her dolls. I didn't say popo. Puppe. Doll. No, no. But with Sophia I say popo quite often. Puppe. Doll. But she announced to us the other day that the doll doesn't die. And she says, I will die. So other children can play with my doll so my doll lives when I die.

[10:19]

But she was really quite thoughtful that her doll doesn't die and so other kids will play with it. She better treat it a little more carefully than she does. She expects it to last. But I have a dictionary of Suzuki Roshi's, which has written on the side, this dictionary will outlive me. So she's going to she's going to take hold of the roles which she gets more reinforcement for. In nursery school she's a big girl and so forth. So what does that tell us? That our roles or our imagination or our intention

[11:21]

is going to take hold if we have more experience of it. So we could say monastic life in Zen is to reinforce a particular kind of role. I think even coming to maybe Andreas and Josef were just at Johanneshof, coming to Johanneshof reinforces a different kind of role than your usual life. So if you say you want to try on this field of mind, It's probably easier to do in a practice center than it is at your job, say.

[12:47]

Not only just because it's different at work, but you do have to relate to people in terms of the way they expect you to relate to them. Yeah, and if you care about people, you want to relate to them in ways they feel satisfied. And if you're relating them in any obvious way to their presence, which has a tremendous intimacy in it, Intimacy in it. It may be disturbing. And one of the aspects of practice in the West Sangha practice, there's often an intimacy that's not erotic, but an intimacy that we aren't familiar with.

[14:13]

I don't mean it might be erotic, but that's not the point. The point is it's an intimacy mostly in categories we're not familiar with. So naturally enough, Sophia at nursery school and kindergarten acts in a way that's appropriate to the kindergarten. And we wish she would behave that way at home. She's much more well behaved at the nursery school. So how, if you're a lay person, And as I am committed to finding out how lay practice can work in the West, you need to find a way to bring to let

[15:35]

Experience take hold. A new kind of experience take hold. For example, let's stay with this example of field mind in contrast to the particular. You have to do something like I did on the train. Kind of abstracting myself, but really paying attention to everything in the train and what was going along outside. By abstract, I don't know, I feel very completely complete or completing and yet at the same time engaged.

[16:56]

So I'm practicing like you might, taking an opportunity. I don't have to do much in the training except sit there. I take the opportunity to let things just be side by side. See if I can let that clarity take hold. And if I can let that get the experience of letting that clarity take hold, then at lunch, like today, and taking a walk afterwards, I find myself in the same place. and this makes more sense as practice, if you really do accept, understand,

[18:10]

that the emphasis here is not in having some inner nature or fate or destiny. But there's aspects of destiny in our life, that's true. But even those aspects where something seems to unfold that's almost predictive, This even is transformed when you have the view of... that you can choose what mind you want to live the world through. And your practice is a kind of research to find what kind of mind you feel most at ease in or complete in.

[19:58]

This can be the basis of how you live your life. But it doesn't mean you're forcing something on your world or on situation. You're still letting things happen, and particularly, for the most part, nothing is predictable. So this kind of background is in the background of the idea of Buddha nature. You've got to loosen up your sense of a particular self. And maybe you even have to sort of find a way of freeing yourself from self-referential thinking.

[21:38]

Now, last week I spoke about this question, What is reality? And in many ways, the question what is reality and what is Buddha nature has the same background. And so very easily, trying to explore it, I could explore it in a very similar way, but then Andreas and Josef would leave. I've never handcuffed anyone in a seminar. I could be sure. But there's a similarity.

[22:46]

So at least at the beginning here I'm speaking about some of the things we talked about last weekend. Okay, somebody wants to bring something up. Does this make any sense to you, what I'm speaking about? It really is something, again, each of us has to explore, get a feel for it. It can't be just my talking about it. So I would ask you to imagine what makes your life worth living. What moments or times or experiences do you feel most alive or most, yeah? Satisfied with being alive.

[23:57]

And in the various situations you are, always your mind is present. In what mind are... feeling, a bodily state, do you feel most like life is worth living? It's not even worth living, you just simply are alive. Then imagine this can be in some way how you are alive most of the time. If you dare to imagine such a thing, what do you have to do next?

[25:00]

You have to, I mean, you have to imagine it's really possible. Really, you have to know it must be possible. Yeah. And then you have to intend it. And intention will have more power if you realize that intention is a different kind of mind than discursive thinking. It's almost like you have two liquids and they're Occupying the same space, sort of.

[26:05]

But one liquid functions differently than the other liquid. Last night, Carlotta and Josef went with me or were there at the... when I spoke to the Ayya Khema group. Yeah, it was fun to speak. It was a nice evening, didn't you think? It was fun to speak with him. Andreas, you weren't there, but I'm sorry. I snuck it in on you. And I use the example of Sukhiroshi's saying, don't invite your thoughts to tea. One of his most basic meditation instructions. But if you practice this thoroughly, not just, oh yeah, I know what that is, I can not invite my thoughts to tea.

[27:21]

But if you practice it thoroughly, it has tremendous depth as a practice. Okay. You don't invite your thoughts to tea. Again, we all can quite easily say, oh yeah, I don't have to. I can imagine not getting caught up in my thoughts. Yeah, but wait a minute. Isn't The idea that you're not going to invite your thoughts to tea, also a thought? So you have a thought that you're not going to invite your thoughts to tea. How does that work? Either you couldn't do it at all because you couldn't invite the thought to tea that wanted to not invite anybody to tea.

[28:35]

So there must be some... Something different about the thought which doesn't invite the thoughts to tea. Well, this is also just the problem that English doesn't make subtle distinctions about many important things in Buddhism. In the English language, they're all mental events called thoughts. But the mind is not a mental event. It doesn't make any sense to say so. And what would be the difference between the thought that doesn't invite the thoughts to tea? Well, I think we can just simply say one is an intentional thought and the other is a discursive thought.

[29:50]

And you have an intentional thought not to invite discursive thoughts to tea. The discursive thoughts come and go and they do this and that. But an intentional thought is the same thought, same thought, same thought. And Okay? And in fact, the intentional thought is the expression of an intentional mind. It's an expression of an intentional mind and it generates an intentional mind. So the thought to not invite your thoughts to tea actually generates a different kind of mind.

[30:51]

And the discursive thoughts, what you're really doing is not inviting the mind of discursive thoughts into your meditation. What you're doing is you're It's not just that you're not inviting discursive thoughts to tea. You're not inviting the mind of discursive thoughts to tea. Okay, now you have a very basic Zen Buddhist idea. There's a host mind and a guest mind. And if you read koans, particularly in the Blue Cliff Records, there's technical terms, guest mind, host mind.

[32:13]

And if you practice thoroughly such a simple term, advice that Sukhiroshi gave us, you arrive at, just through those instructions, that instruction, you arrive at the experience of host mind and guest mind. And again, Let me just for this seminar bring out the truism. All mental events have a physical component and all sentient physical events have a mental component. So you can feel physically the bodily sense of a host mind and guest mind.

[33:21]

They're different. And they're like two different liquids in the same space, host mind and guest mind. And if you can feel them physically and breathe them, We need a word maybe like breath hold. Like we have household. Now household we say non-family households. So the family, a household is those who live together, the servants, the aunts and uncles and so forth, the people you rent a room to. Yeah, so maybe we have a breath hold.

[34:29]

That the breath holds a number of things together that live together. And you can actually use your body and particularly your breath to make a choice of which will be your initial mind. And one way to do more adept practice is you choose What your initial mind will be in each situation. You can choose it as an initial mind. You feel a person or a room before you think it. Then you think, think whatever you want, but your initial mind in each situation or in each perception, you feel it before you think it.

[35:42]

And if you practice that, When you can, in homeopathic doses, as I say. Eventually it starts to take hold and it becomes a background mind. And once it's a background mind, always in the background, can easily shift to being a foreground mind. In this way, there's a kind of craft to Zen practice. And you can choose the mind you want to live the world through. And that yogic skill or ability or capacity is part of the idea of Buddha nature.

[36:45]

Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you for joining me in the pre-seminar day. But now we're going to have nothing to say tonight and tomorrow.

[37:28]

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