Evelyn, thank you so much for making or having made that beautiful drum stand. It's really great. It looks like we're a real Buddhist monastery if we have a drum stand like that. And the drum sounds good, better than the one we had. So, anyway, thanks. And I'm sorry about my more irregular than usual participation in the session. But I have these tired days, which are kind of, they're a funny feeling. They've only occurred since I had radiation treatment a few years ago. And they may And they're getting less.

[01:20]

They used to be almost a few days a week, and now it's a day or two every two or three weeks. And I just had a fairly thorough physical exam, and the doctor says I'm very healthy. Some of you will be glad to hear that. Yeah, I couldn't resist saying that. Maybe not. Anyway, but it's funny. It's like I'm made of lead. Or sometimes it's like I haven't eaten for four or five days and I simply can't even get up from Kinyin. I can't put energy into my body to get up from Kinyin.

[02:23]

To get up from Zazen to do Kinyin. The Butoh dancers, again, one of the things they say is it's... You're trying to find the body like a corpse standing up. Yeah, I want to come back to the butoh a bit, because it interests me. First, let's see if we can get on the same page again, as we say. I think we all understand that perception is primarily for most of us top-down. That means the brain for most people does most of the work. There's a tiny little spot in the middle of your retina that supplies you with most of the visual information you have.

[03:45]

And it does it, as we've spoken of before, in these little brief saccadic scanning. Which are 20... 20 milliseconds to 500 milliseconds, no, 200 milliseconds long. So the maximum there about a fifth of a second. And during those saccadic scans, you're actually blind. If you try to watch it happen in the mirror, you can't see it happen because you're not seeing during the times it's scanning. So you've got, you know, you basically, nobody understands it exactly as I, from my trying to read about these things.

[05:17]

But it seems that most of the visual field is supplied by your short and long-term memory. And if you do funny things like, they've done it probably with Harvard students, but in the streets of Cambridge anyway, Mass, Massachusetts. Harvard University. Cambridge is in the town of Cambridge. And they stop somebody and they ask them directions. And the person, you know, starts explaining easy where to go to the museum or something.

[06:23]

And then somebody comes down the street carrying a painting or something like that. And they push between the two people. and then they switch people. The person carrying the painting takes over and the person they were with continues. And the new person is taller, dressed differently, has a different voice. Sixty, seventy percent of the people don't notice it. They just keep on... Sixty to seventy percent of people don't even notice. They go down here and there. Because, you know, we've formed a person, you know, enough information and we start talking to this. The same, you can do the same with speech.

[07:34]

You can take a sentence, like a Japanese researcher took a sentence, do you understand what I'm saying? And then he cut chunks out of the sentence and he put silence in place. And people couldn't understand the sentence at all. Then he substituted white noise for the silence and it was perfectly clear they heard every word. Or they can do what's called, I think it's called sign speech. S-I-N-E. And it sounds like some electronic noises or whistles. But if you turn on your speech-receiving channels and say, I'm going to listen to that as if it's speech, then there's words, very clearly.

[08:56]

Okay. So I always say that consciousness, the job of consciousness is to make the world predictable. But it's also the case that the job of the brain seems to be to make the world predictable. Yeah, for a quick assessment. Yeah. Flight or fight. Yeah. But practice, we're trying to reverse this direction. We're trying to make perception bottom up instead of top down. Yeah.

[09:57]

Is this... Have I said this in a way that's clear enough for everybody? Yes. At least one hand shakes their head. Are you shaking your head for everyone? Okay. Okay. Again, one of these, Hijikata, I believe, one of these people who created this Butoh dance. Hijikata, I think. You may have seen photographs of these people. Japanese men, all painted white, mostly naked, you know, those are butoh dancers.

[11:03]

And like manga, the Japanese comics, it's actually complexly related to the West as well as a Japanese tradition. And like manga, the Japanese comics, it's related to the West and it's a Japanese tradition. And actually, Buto has a lot of resonance or similarities to Body-Mind-Centering, which you've studied, of Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen, right? Yeah. And Eureka Dillow has studied it. As one of these practitioners said, the Western dancer seems to start with his feet on the ground. But the Butoh dancer is trying to find his feet.

[12:08]

And really the sense of, you know, you can do Zazen with that. This is quite related actually to Zazen practice. Let's see if you can find your feet. Sometimes when we practice, we try to find the silence under our feet and bring it up into our feet. In Kinhin, for example. Buto actually means something like to dance and stamp the feet, to seal the spirit in the ground and bring it up. And puto means to stamp the feet on the ground, to seal the ground, and to bring what up?

[13:19]

And bring the spirit up into the body. To seal it and then bring it up. And the spirit, that's what it means. What word? I don't know. And to bring the spirit up through the feet. And it's related, I'm told, to the German Neu-Tanzer. It was inspired partly by Neu-Tanzer. Is that how you pronounce it? But it's particularly like manga, very Japanese. And I would say very Dharmic. I read this interview with these... There's some point to my talking about this. Don't worry. I mean, or worry if you'd like. It's a manga artist. It's called a mangika. A mangaka. And I read this interview with these two quite unusual people.

[14:39]

And one had been a butoh dancer and artist, conceptual artist. And he would, like, stand on a stage when he was, you know, 20 or so, stand on a stage, and it would take him an hour to move his arm up. He said, after a while, I realized you could hardly call this dance. But you can understand it's not the same as doing it by yourself. If you're in a group of people all and you do something like the field of the people is part of it. And that's something like I'm kind of speaking about this mutual bodily presence. That, you know, I think sometimes you may feel with other Sangha members or with the teacher or with me I certainly feel it with you.

[15:59]

And when I feel it, I know what your practice is. And it's not unrelated to trying to find the self. It's not unrelated to trying to find the feet. Or the practices of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness when you explore your body from inside. So this guy who took an hour to raise his arm, or just breathed on stage, became one of the, I think he's the most awarded manga artist.

[17:02]

What strikes me when I, you know, I used to watch the When Sally was now 43 or so, when she was five, we used to watch manga cartoons on Japanese television, living there. And when you live in Japan, when I lived in Japan in the 60s, you know, everyone reads mangas. It looks like a fixture of Japan. Fixture? Fixture is like Doors, windows, handles, something that's always there.

[18:03]

A fixture of a kitchen is... A fixture of a sink is the faucet. A fixture, something that's fixed, it's always... But when you look at the history of manga, it's very modern. It only started in the Second World War and is at its height right now. Sorry, when you look at what? When you look at the history of manga, these cartoons, say that much. It's actually really started with the occupation after the Second World War. And American comics were a big influence. Even in Dogen's time, though, in the 12th century and with Hokusai, there were sketchbooks of artists which have some similarity.

[19:10]

But manga are also called komiku, which is the Japanese way of pronouncing comic. So it's this funny influence of the West in a very Japanese way, which I would say is a very Dharmic way. For example, as one of these manga artists says, If a Western cartoonist shows somebody going through the door, they show the door and then the person's on the other side. But the Japanese manga artist shows the hand moving toward the door A hesitation.

[20:16]

A saccadic move toward the eyes. A little bit of the forehead in the next frame. And then moving toward the door again. And etc. So it's in many little kind of physical, proprioceptive spaces. When I used to watch Sally's cartoons, it was a little girl, volleyball player, soccer player, soccer player called, ready? Ataku number one, number one.

[21:18]

And her trainer would kick the ball at her. And you saw his foot through a whole bunch of stages. And you saw her flashback to her. By the way, this guy, this artist said, you have to draw all these little drawings, which a Western artist doesn't have to do, and it's tiresome, he says. One of the styles of manga is four-frame manga, four pictures. And it says it takes him 12 hours to draw each frame. So four days of 12-hour days to draw four frames. So anyway, the trainer kicks the ball.

[22:29]

And you see the ball going through the air? Then you see this little girl named Ataku number one. And she sees gorillas and tigers in the ball coming at her. And sometimes it turns into the Russian flag. Because she's going to play the Russians and the Americans. And then it turns into the American flag. And then the growling face of a tiger. And finally it hits her and knocks her down. And she gets up with this kind of fierceness.

[23:30]

Really, I used to watch I used to watch this. And, you know, the whole half-an-hour episode would sometimes be 10 to 15 minutes on a volleyball going across the court. Whoa! And I don't know if it's the same now, but, you know, between programs... You know, like a minute to 12 and a minute after 12 when they have a program? Advertisements? Can you guess how many advertisements they have in that little space between programs? Well, I would try to count them.

[24:36]

It was usually 50 or 60. And my daughter used to memorize them all and sing them. It's a different level of attention. And it tells you a lot about the difference between Japanese culture and Western culture and the car industry and so on. And if you read about this, they say, oh, they're imitating movie frames. Might be partly true. But it's really not what's going on. It's that they're drawing dharmic frames physical sequences.

[25:39]

They're almost little saccadic scans. You see a forehead and then you see an eye in the next picture and then you see something else in the next picture. Little tiny moments, one frame after another. So as we spoke in the Hanover seminar, which the topic that Andreas gave me was the four foundations of mindfulness, so I dutifully followed his instructions. And she dutifully translated. Okay. I spoke about an attention agenda. Yeah, or sight-centered attention. And we can understand the Four Foundations of Mindfulness in its meta-entirety is reversing the flow of attention, reversing the flow of perception.

[27:01]

So that your brain isn't supplying most of the information. As much as possible, the situation is supplying the information. Yeah, now, one of the Butoh actors say, one should be afraid. He said, people have anxiety because they're avoiding being afraid. There's a lot of truth to that. And the second foundation of mindfulness of feeling, not emotion, but it means to be in an emotion as a feeling. If you're afraid, don't let it turn into flight or fight.

[28:19]

You stay in the fear. You even exaggerate the fear until you find yourself on the other side of it. Sondern du bleibst in der Angst und du übertreibst die Angst sogar noch, bis du dich auf der anderen Seite davon befindest. So you really get as angry as possible, but you can remain completely still in the middle of it. Also wirst du zum Beispiel so wütend wie möglich, aber du bleibst inmitten davon vollkommen ruhig. And this kind of thinking motivates the butoh dancer. Und diese Art zu denken motiviert auch die butoh dancer. But it's straight thinking. Second foundation of mindfulness practice. So, sight-centering agenda. Let's try that one on. Or sight-centering attention. This is all about attention.

[29:28]

Where you put your attention. How you can live inside your attention. Attention within consciousness. Now, I think I don't have time in this day show to distinguish between attention and consciousness. And I'd like to also distinguish between the experience of an observer and the experience of a decider. And the unity of experience between the decider and the observer. Okay, like you're doing the bell rings.

[30:28]

Maybe you don't want the bell to ring. Then you'd just like to keep sitting. Okay, that's the observer. But the decider decides it's Kenyan time, so you get up. I'd like you to explore the difference between the observer and the decider and see what the unity of experience between the two is. Ich möchte, dass ihr den Unterschied zwischen dem Beobachter und dem Entscheider untersucht und schaut, was die Einheit der Erfahrung zwischen den beiden ist. Or, as in our service, at each moment you center yourself in the site, wherever you're standing, whatever you're doing. You make your agenda, the situation, And you get the habit of bringing your attention to and centering yourself in the sight.

[31:50]

This craft is at the center of our practice. And it's what the rehearsal of our services is trying to do. Then all the little details, like bowing to your cushion, turning around and bowing, sitting down, etc. All these are sight-centering rituals. And at each one of those moments, you find yourself fully in that moment. As if nothing else existed. That's enough for now. Okay.

[32:49]

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