You know it so well now that it only takes a small cue or just a thought. Yes, it would be a relief to be in Sazen Mind. And the small cue may be just straightening your back a little bit or sitting up away from the back of the chair. Or as you pick up anything, a wine glass or your silverware, you make that touching of the silverware the center of yourself. If you do that, you probably won't need much wine.

[01:03]

In the 60s, you know, I started practicing with Suzuki Roshi in 61 or something like that. And in the 1960s, In the late 50s, when I was in college, some people came back from some... Oh, they began to experiment with LSD at my college when I was a sophomore or something like that, second year. And about that time I, this is 57 or so, I discovered you could get, by mailing to Mexico, you could get little caps of mescaline, you know. So we, you know, this is great.

[02:58]

We don't know what it is, but we hear it tastes like shit. But, you know, we'll mail off these old things. So it came back, you know. What do you mean mailing? You ordered it? Yeah, you ordered it through the mail because you couldn't send it to Mexico. And these little green cactus things came back. And you did have to have a certain amount of mental discipline not to vomit when you ate them, but you know. Yeah. But some of my classes were like that too. Anyway, I tried this several times and it was an interesting mind and familiar to me at the same time. And wild dogs seemed tame.

[04:21]

Anyway, so then in the 60s, I could feel all this stuff happening about LSD, so I organized the first, only, I guess, LSD conference in the United States in 64 or something like that. But by that time I decided to put all my eggs in one basket. So even though I organized the conference and was one of the editors of the Psychedelic Review, supposedly I never took LSD. So I'm mentioning this because before you When you take something, when you smoke marijuana or take LSD or something like that, there's the decision to take it first of all.

[05:40]

And at the moment you have that decision, you have a kind of entry into this forest mind or psychedelic experience. But you lose it very quickly unless you smoke some grass or take some psychedelics or something. And if you do that then for some length of time, it keeps you in that state of mind. Didn't you tell me you didn't know how long it was going to last or something like that when you first took it and used it?

[06:45]

Yeah, when I first took it, I had no idea what it was. I just took it. Nothing happened, so she took some more. So nothing happened, so you decided to drive home? And then hell broke loose. So... But I felt That the problem, I mean, at the moment you make this decision is a desire to be in a non-ordinary state of mind or not your social mind.

[08:09]

So how do you stay in that state of mind if you decide not to take a psychedelic or not to smoke grass or something? Well, you can, and it works more than you'd guess. You can say, okay, I've had this interest, now pretend I took it. You have to decide not to enter social mind and somehow find the resources within yourself to keep opening up this initial decision or need to be in another kind of mind.

[09:16]

Ja, einfach die Entscheidung zu treffen, nicht in diesem gewöhnlichen Geisteszustand zu sein, und sich dann zu öffnen für diesen anfänglichen Impuls, in diesem anderen Zustand zu bleiben, und dann einfach das in sich öffnen zu lassen. And there are many minds available to us that are all lying in venture schlaf right here. sleeping and waiting for you to wake them up. And artists wake them up by starting to paint and then they can maintain this mind that their particular intimacy And all of us find this quality too, as I've been mentioning, like walking in the forest or in the mountains. Or as I applied yesterday, a trip to Heidelberg on the bicycle is very different than a trip on the car.

[10:43]

I find different things and shop in different stores and so forth. How much more so when you bring zazen mind to everything you do? So we could say practice is the discovery of sasen mind by being open to yourself. So concentration in zazen is not so much an effort, but a release of effort. Being open to your perceptual fields. Open to your body. I often say, let your legs do their own zazen.

[11:44]

And the parts of your legs, knees, ankles, feet, etc., do their own zazen. Yes, you let each part of the forest do its own thing. And it's interesting, the more complex the forest is, the more lives can be lived in the forest. So there's these kind of lives going on in you too. And you have access to these different lives through your different minds. So as, again, as we begin to know, as the forest teaches us a forest mind, and then we can begin to know this forest mind and bring it to the forest,

[13:02]

And then the forest teaches us a deeper forest mind. We have an expression in English for a gardener who really makes everything grow as if by magic. And we say it's the green thumb. Do you say that in German? I think a green thumb is a word for a garden mind brought to the garden. Who sees deeply into the garden from the garden's side, from the garden's own point of view. From the many points of view of the garden. So that's, you know, what I'm calling forest mind and zazen mind. And if you're sitting, I hope you discover this mountain mind or forest mind of sasin, which itself begins to instruct you.

[15:03]

It does mean we have to do some practice in learning how to sit and sit still and so forth. Entering through some choices, entering a realm of no choice and openness. When you stop interfering with your breath and with your mind and with your body, a deep concentration just sets in. You can create certain concentrations and that's helpful. But it's nowhere near as deep as when you stop interfering and concentration just sets in. We could say that concentration is a default position when everything else is taken away.

[16:15]

We could say it's a natural state when we don't interfere with ourselves. Now, walking meditation has a quality of this kind of natural state or default position. It doesn't mean that everywhere you go you walk in walking meditation or practice walking, walking practice. Now, Thich Nhat Hanh does. And what's interesting about spending time with him, he's decided to have no social space at all in his life.

[17:40]

He almost does nothing in social space, no smiles, know what we consider ordinary behavior at all. He drove our guides in China crazy. They expected not only social space, but a lot of visits to restaurants and stores where they got commissions, kickbacks. So we would be going to, say, train, to meet a train or a plane.

[18:51]

And the train would, you know, we have to go down here and up here and up there and up to here. And it leaves in 20 minutes. In Japan, they really do leave exactly when they arrive three minutes before they're supposed to leave. And the doors open for three minutes and shut and... So the guides are walking with their little flag, you know. And Thich Nhat Hanh is walking. And nothing, nothing stops.

[20:03]

But really nothing stops. We'd go to these temples in China that are controlled by the government usually. Where they collect a fee. And they have these great big gates with wonderful things written over them. And to the side of the gate they have a little door where there's a person collecting money to go through. And the guide would want to drive us up to the temple gate But even if it was like blistering hot, he would ask to be let down in the town or way at the far edge of the temple. This is just an anecdote I'm telling you.

[21:16]

But anyway, we'd start our snail walking. We'd start our snail walking. And it was a little bit like a mountain rolling forward. So, you know, in China, as you know, there's lots of people, thousands of people everywhere, you know, doing this. And there's our little group. Usually there were some extras who were with us, but it would be 10 or 12 or 14, 15 people.

[22:18]

With the guides and so forth, about, say, 15. And the guides, by this time, have given up and they're kind of... They lost all their commissions. They lost everything. They're in a deep default position. A kind of bankruptcy. One guy became a Buddhist by the end of the trip at my funeral. So anyway, we were walking along, you know, going in the midst of all these people very slowly.

[23:21]

People would stop and look at us. They couldn't believe this little brown group. We were all dressed in brown going along. And Thich Nhat Hanh, growing up in near tropical Vietnam, is always cold. So even when it's unbelievably hot, he's wearing a little wool hat and clothes with tension. So many of his disciples do the same thing and they have a little wool hat. So it's not exactly an elegant group. But the word begins to spread, you know.

[24:34]

We can see people. what is coming? And nobody knows we're coming, but the word starts to spread something like the king is coming. Nobody walks that slowly. And honest to Buddha, this really happened. A number of times. Now, if I went to a temple, I would go and wander about and be a tourist and wonder where the monks were. Because I would enter the social space that's required and behave normally. But he doesn't enter the social space at all.

[25:36]

So by the time we're, you know, 50 meters or so from the temple, And we're heading straight for the huge closed doors. And we can see the Chinese government official looking out. What is coming? And if we're 50 meters, it's still going to take us 20 minutes. So really, by the time we're going up the steps, the big doors swing open. Like some MGM movie, you know.

[26:48]

And then standing on the other side of the door is the abbot and all the monks. So first of all, we don't have to pay. And we go in and meet the abbot and we have tea and we get, I mean... And this happened repeatedly, that we would go to a temple unannounced and the abbot would meet us. By the time we got to the door, the abbot and the monks were assembled. So now I'm not suggesting that you, if you learn walking meditation, you always do it.

[27:52]

He has decided to almost always do it. And his whole life is designed to support him always doing it. And it's wonderful and remarkable to see this and to know this. And such deep practice is available to us too. But there's also an advantage or a way to practice secretly so it's not so obvious that you're always also committed to deep practice. So the idea of these four noble postures are that in each of them you can find a default position or a forest mind. And you can, mostly without much instruction, knowing this, you can find it in sleeping, and being in Sashin helps to find it in sleeping.

[29:33]

And you can find it in standing. And I had to practice standing a lot in China and Japan because often we were, for some reason or other, on train platforms for sometimes an hour, an hour and a half waiting. Or we were in temples where we, Thich Nhat Hanh would often, usually gives a two-hour lecture. And usually we, particularly in the Chinese temples, were standing on cold, damp stone floors during that time. And you can find a way

[30:47]

to hibernate in standing or to stand virtually an indefinite length of time. So these four postures aren't just an inclusive description of the four ways that we live. But in each of these, we can discover the forest mind characteristic of each question. So when you're standing, What helps is actually often to bow your leg, to bend your leg slightly. Which is also a basic martial arts and Qigong posture, which you let the energy, you discover your original body.

[32:14]

And all Indian dance, South Indian and North Indian dance, is all based on learning. If you stand in this posture long enough your social body disappears and your original body starts coming up through you and from the earth through you. And then the very floor, the earth, starts to nourish your standing. And then the ground or actually the earth begins to nourish and carry your standing. And the people discovered these things. And someone told me recently that during the war, when there was not much to eat, everyone was actually quite healthy.

[33:26]

Often when we have less choice, like you don't have any choice about whether you stand somewhere a long time, it actually teaches us things. So you can't force no choice on yourself, but you can discover the realm or mind of no choice. So let me say now, since we're going to, after the break, practice walking. Let me say what the basic idea is. This is quite simple. You are trying to come to a place where your breath and body feel one.

[34:45]

And your breath, body and walking feel one. And your breath body walking in the world feel one. So the way to discover that feeling is quite simple. I think there's two main instructions. And the way to discover this feeling is quite simple. There are two main instructions. One is to walk. It's different than walking in zazen, where you're in the zendo, where you're doing kinhen, where you're continuing the mind of zazen. And this you're walking... Not that slowly, and you're walking usually two or three or four breaths, two or three or four steps to an exhale, and then two or three or four steps to an inhale.

[35:53]

So if you are exhaling, it would be like one, two, three. Inhaling. two, three, exhaling, one, two, three. And it might be four, it might be two, depends on how fast the whole group is going. So that's one instruction. The other instruction is to walk as if you're in paradise. We didn't lose paradise, we just forgot we were in it. So you walk as if each step is in the pure land. In Buddhism we say pure land, in Christianity we say paradise. So if this isn't the pure land, where is it?

[36:55]

That little fluff ball of a frog knew where the pure land was. So you step with the feeling of, and you actually just imagine it, that this is the pure land. Each step makes this the pure land. And your arms can be anywhere you like. Now, why I'm emphasizing this as a default position or kind of forest mind of walking is because when you have a chance, you just walk this way. When you have no reason to go anywhere fast, you just walk out to your car this way or walk to your kitchen or up your stairs or whatever.

[38:13]

Or during the seminar, you can try most of the time walking this way. I mean, it won't make you very late to dinner or lunch. It's not too far to go. So that's walking meditation. And the sense of it is to find that forest mind in walking and then have it available to you anytime in your walking. And it may take some time before through walking practice you actually discover it and you may feel it right away. It's not getting from one place to another.

[39:16]

It's discovering the forest mind of walking. So let's sit for a few minutes and then we'll have a break. We want to sit for a few minutes and then take a break. Is that my glass? The deep forest of your being is somewhere right here.

[45:13]

The birds are calling to you to recognize it. And there are deep callings in each of us asking us to recognize it. For ourselves and for our true love for others. for ourselves and from our true love for others.

[46:03]

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