Yeah, when we're practicing here, I have a feeling for your practicing here. Present, as I said last time, in this schedule, which is not your own choice. You know, let me just say at this point, we often say, which is also true, I have no time for this or I have no time for that, etc. But in a more fundamental sense, you are time. You are the time of your life. We have an expression in English, to have the time of our life means to have a good time. Again, you are the time of your life and it might as well be the time of your life.

[01:05]

Also, du bist die Zeit deines Lebens und die soll doch, wenn schon, denn schon auch eine tolle sein. And that is a shift from, you know, being in the schedule and feeling you have no choice. Und das ist so ein Wechsel vom... to, you know, I am time itself. It doesn't matter what I'm doing, something like that. And to get that, As an insight. And to get it even more as an experience.

[02:20]

We can call this one kind of Kensho, one kind of opening enlightenment. So even the simple struggle with a schedule with a certain kind of openness of mind, can be enlightenment. So still, again, we're in this schedule, it's not our choice. And we're in the service, which if you're not familiar with it, with the chanting and bowing, what the heck am I doing? Well, not at much. I hope none of my friends see me do this. But, you know, we're in the context. We're talking about bowing to the Buddha. We're chanting the Buddha's words or the teachings.

[03:27]

And we're experimenting through sound and doing similar things, finding some kind of common mind together. And that's what music does and art does. It often introduces us to a mind we're not familiar with, but suddenly we find ourselves in a new shared mind with the artist and with others. Yeah, and Atmar mentioned to me that in this seminar you spoke about two ways of saying noticing. What were the two words? What were the two words? Bemerken und erkennen. Yeah, okay.

[05:04]

And which one is more like I'm speaking? Yeah. How would you translate that wahrnehmen? Wahrnehmen is actually perceive, and it's the same word, but it also has the meaning like truth and to take. Or to take hold of, or put in place, or something like that. It just means you sit there and it comes somehow. It's somehow the root of, also the root goes back to awareness, which we translate as gewahrsam. So it comes out of that too. Okay, well it's something like this if we take this word. To keep, maybe. Yeah. To keep in place, to hold in place, something like that. Yeah, to carefully keep something that doesn't get lost. Okay, so, again, you know, I ask myself, what am I talking about?

[06:09]

How can I talk about this so it makes sense? Because the... The wonderful thing about this is that this is, what I'm talking about is familiar to us. It's our own keyboard, like on a piano. We may not see it as a keyboard, but it is a keyboard. And we can play it differently. And the theme I seem to have taken, I find myself taking for these talks, is how to stabilize the mind. is how do I stabilize the mind? Or what is it that stabilizes the mind?

[07:14]

How can one part of the mind stabilize another part of the mind? Or what kind of mind can stabilize the whole of the mind? Yes, stabilize so it's It's ready but not frozen. And we really have to look at the details of our experience. Well, so the good part is that we already know most of this stuff. Also der gute Teil daran ist, dass wir fast alles davon schon kennen. Yeah, well you might have a piano, but if you don't know how to play it, it doesn't help much. Also vielleicht hast du ja ein Klavier und wenn du es nicht spielen kannst, nützt es dir ja nicht sehr viel. So we already know this stuff, but there's also the problem that we know it, so we think we know it.

[08:16]

Also wir kennen diese Dinge und glauben, dass wir es können. No, say it again. The problem is... The good part is it's familiar to us. If I use completely strange words or Sanskrit words, you really don't know what's going on. So we have more chance of understanding it if we use familiar words. But in an unfamiliar way. So again, to stabilize the mind. How do we even see the mind? Yeah, as Wittgenstein himself pointed out, in this scene I'm seeing right now there's nothing, no information in it that tells me a mind is seeing it.

[09:29]

That's something I have to remind myself of, that there's a mind seeing this. You know, I grew up on a lake and you could look sometimes into the water and it was so clear you couldn't see the surface of the lake. And to see where the surface was or how deep it was, you sometimes had to get a certain angle so you could see a reflection off the water. So how do we get a reflection of our own mind? So that we can see what we're doing. so that we can see what we are doing.

[10:42]

And that's what practice is. This morning I was amused by Sophia, my daughter. I'm always amused or sometimes irritated. She threw quite a scene this morning. And in response, Marie-Louise and I threw quite a scene. And finally she went downstairs crying and tried to come out of it. But we waited it out until she decided to start acting in some sort of somewhat civilized way. And when she got past it, she was the most charming she's been in weeks. Okay, so she was putting maple syrup into her cereal.

[11:50]

And she usually, one of the things she fusses about, if you put maple syrup on her cereal and it disappears under the cereal, she won't eat it. So she somehow wants to keep the maple syrup on the surface because it makes her feel the maple syrup is there. So it seems to me that somehow she stabilizes her mind by connecting her mind... with the continuous sight of the maple syrup. But this morning she said, Even if the maple syrup disappears beneath the surface of the cereal, I can find it with my tongue.

[13:06]

And it seems that her stable mind was connected with the sight of the maple syrup But she changed her view today. Yeah, she changed her view. And now her view is the maple syrup is still there, not in my eyesight, but it's there for my tongue. And then to show she got it, she stuck her tongue out. It reminded me of a famous koan where the monk answers so well that the roshi doesn't know what to say.

[14:14]

He just sticks his tongue out. Those are congratulations beyond words. I remember also my daughter Sally, who's now 43. We took her to the beach in California. We got a little bathing suit for her and everything and she wouldn't go in the water. And we went in and Sally, you can come in. No. And suddenly I realized we taught her not to get her pants wet, not to wet her pants.

[15:15]

So I told her, you know, that's a bathing suit and you can get that wet. It's not the same as wetting your pants. But wetting your pants with pee in your pants? Yeah. Yeah, pinking, yeah. And I'm learning that from my daughter. So she changed her view. Her view kept her from getting in the water. And she changed her view. As soon as she changed her view, she could get in the water with and get her bathing suit wet. So views float in our actions, around, shape, control our actions.

[16:15]

Also die Sichtweisen, die treiben herum überall und die formen unsere Handeln. And so I'm really speaking about views, attitudes. Also ich spreche hier wirklich über Sichtweisen, über Einstellungen, Haltungen und so weiter. And as you know, the eightfold path starts with right views. Wie ihr wisst, beginnt der achtfache Pfad mit richtiger oder rechter Sichtweise. Yeah, and the five dharmas I gave you the other day. And it is appearance, naming, discrimination, and then basically right views. Discrimination, we can say, is habits of thinking and noticing. And right knowledge means views, right views.

[17:33]

Views that can counteract or antidotes to habits of discrimination, habits of thinking. The right here is practice. What are right views? Yeah, okay, you know, I mention this every now and then. Years ago I saw an anthropological number on television They had a classic little white Australian girl with blonde hair. And an aboriginal girl who had black hair and black skin. And they brought them to a stump about as big as Frank. As Frank's cushion.

[18:48]

And they had all this stuff piled up on the stump. A lot of branches. And some stones and feathers. Yeah, a lot of stuff just piled up on the stump. And they walked these two little girls up and then they just brushed it off the stump. And they said, put it back. It means you can imagine the little white girl couldn't put anything back practically. The little black girl put it all back as if she had a Polaroid picture in her mind of it. All intertwined. Now, we could say this is a mind of noticing. We're not going to get there.

[20:06]

It's too late for us. We can't, I don't think, develop that mind. Maybe if you're a CIA agent and 10 years of training. Mm-hmm. But we can go in that direction. Now, do I mean that this little aboriginal girl was enlightened because she could do this? No. But I would say that she probably had perhaps a calmer mind than the little white girl. And certainly she had a more observant mind. Now, what do we have here?

[21:08]

We have a difference in structure. Now, I discussed with somebody a while ago why I use the word structure. Und ich habe vor einer Zeit mit jemandem diskutiert, weshalb ich das Struktur nenne. And again, I have to ask myself that question. Why do I pick the word structure? Und das muss ich mich auch selber fragen. Weshalb wähle ich das Wort Struktur? And then of course I have to be aware that in German you might want to use some other word. Und dann muss ich da... drüber nachdenken oder aufpassen, ob ihr im Deutschen nicht ein anderes Wort eher dafür verwendet. But maybe not, of course. So many of the most basic words in German and English are the same etymologically. Aber so viele der grundlegendsten Worte sind im Deutschen und Englischen etymologisch die gleichen. But, you know, I can't use form, really, or shape.

[22:11]

Also form oder... Form, yeah, okay. But what's the form of the opera? What's the form of that room or that building? Yeah, how do you form that? Well, that's okay, but it's not what I mean by structure. The word structure literally means to pile up so it stays in place. Yeah, or to make an inside, like with stones. Or to arrange things. arrange things so they stay together.

[23:22]

And structure is the same, the root of structure and sternum is the same, the breastbone. And the word structure and sternum The structure of music, the structure of a building. So what I'm saying is your mind, our minds have a structure. And they're continuously in the process of being structured as well. And they're in the process of being structured all the time. And if they can be structured, they can be unstructured.

[24:38]

If the mind can have a structure, that structure can be taken away. Or it can be changed. The structure is not fixed. But it's somewhat fixed. I don't think the structure of the mind of the little Aboriginal girl and the little white girl are quite different. You don't think it's quite different? They are quite different. And when we learn things, we're structuring, but mostly fine-tuning, refine-tuning the structure. And trying to deal with Sophia's fit this morning. is to try to find some way that we can all structure our minds together and come to some kind of shared behavior.

[26:02]

Now I'm speaking about this in such a basic way. because practice is working with our mind and body in a very basic way. Okay, is the little aboriginal girl enlightened? No, I would say again. Nein, möchte ich noch einmal sagen. But she has a mind more conducive to seeing things as they are than a thinking mind, a usual thinking knowledge-based mind. Aber sie hat einen Geist, der mehr zugänglich ist zu einem Sehen von den Dingen, so wie sie tatsächlich sind als...

[27:14]

Then what type of mind? Then a knowing or knowledge-based mind. Okay, now let's see. I don't know. I only have about ten more minutes. I'll see if I can get something across here. Okay. I would say that this noticing mind of the aboriginal girl is a mind in itself, a way of knowing in itself. But it is also a mind which serves as an understructure for other minds. Aber das ist auch ein Geist, der als Unterstruktur für andere Geiste dient.

[28:18]

Also sagen wir einmal, wir akzeptieren die Sichtweise des Buddhismus und in diesem Fall ist es auch meine Sichtweise, dass ein wahrnehmender Geist is more... gives a better foundation to all of our minds than... that it can be one of the foundations for all of our minds. Now we know we can change our mind. We go to sleep, we change our mind. We take an ice-cold shower, we change our mind. Yeah, you take a long walk, you change your mind. Is it the walking that changes your mind?

[29:34]

Or the repetition of walking which changes your mind? Well, taking a walk in a nice place in a forest near here, yeah, it can change your mind. But the real dynamic of it is the repetition. What does music do? Structured music is, first of all, repetition. Die Struktur von Musik ist in allererster Linie einmal wiederholen. Some kind of beat, some kind of, you know. Ein Rhythmus zum Beispiel. One note is not music. Denn ein Ton oder ein Klang ist noch keine Musik. I'm good at one note, but not two or three. Also ich bin ganz gut mit einem Ton herzustellen.

[30:35]

Because I have very little musical ability. Zwei oder drei, weil ich wirklich sehr wenig Musikalität besitze. I'm in trouble on the third note. Okay, so the repetition, let's call it that simply, takes hold of the mind and the body. And once the repetition has hold of the mind and body, it can calm the mind or introduce the mind to a new territory of sound and feeling or excite the mind but first it takes hold of the mind You can think of it as a kind of magnetism or gravity.

[31:44]

A way of winnowing the mind. To separate the layers of the mind. I was reading the other day a description of the, you know, Big Bang and why there's galaxies and so forth. It's interesting that basically you have this information and then we apply to it the concepts that are rooted in the way the mind works. You have a certain amount of information about the red shift and all that stuff.

[32:47]

And suggest that there was this moment where it was all in one tiny spot. Hard to believe, but... We have information, but then we apply concepts to it to make sense of it. And there had to be small irregularities in the initial moments. Like the uncertainty principle or other things. And those slight perturbations are... in the very beginning get magnified over repetition into galaxies and us.

[33:58]

We're only a perturbation But it means the initial phase has an effect on all the rest. And if we want to stabilize the mind, It starts with the initial phase. Thank God, I thought it was the big bang that we lost. It was the big bang this morning with Sophia and me. There was a big bang with Sophia this morning. If we want to stabilize the mind, it starts with

[35:00]

So practice always begins with acceptance. With your irritation with the schedule. With your anxiety. With your fears or concerns. whatever. So at first in practice, every time you kind of enter into practice again, in a new way, in a seshin, or just every day, or just in the morning zazen. Start out with, what a shit I am. Or, you know, what is this thing called love?

[36:08]

This thing called whatever I'm called. So you start out with the initial state. And you accept it. Which means you are willing to live it for the rest of your life. That's the first step in stabilizing the mind. Now of course one or more parts of you don't want to be in whatever unpleasant state you're in. But if we want to stabilize the mind, we have to start with accepting whatever state we're in, moment after moment.

[37:10]

And we can begin to see with time, with acceptance, the structure the constituents of our state of mind or body. Over time you can see that. You can't see the mind unless you first of all accept it. You know, we have so little time in these. I'm so sorry. There's about three more things I'd like to go into. But I know if I go into them, you probably won't hear them.

[38:31]

Because you've heard enough already. Yeah, and I have to sort of think about, notice, like, I say ten things, which ones did you hear? So I notice there's the things you hear, there's the things you don't hear, but they're on a shelf somewhere. Then if I talk too long, there's the things you start rejecting. And if there's too many, there's the things that drop into a black hole, not onto a shelf. Yeah. Yeah. Yaoshan, who was an 8th and 9th century Zen master.

[39:39]

In Japanese, Yaku-san Igen, we chant him in the morning. Igen Daiyosho. He's one of our ancestors. Some monks, it's like a joke, a monk asks, Also, es ist wie ein Witz. Ein Mönch fragt... What do you do? What do you think about in steadfast sitting? Was tust du? Worüber denkst du nach in standhaften Sitzen? Worüber denkst du nach in unbeirrtem Sitzen? And Jaushan said, I think, not thinking. What is this thinking, not thinking?

[40:49]

How is that maybe a way of stabilizing the mind? And how is that related to the Aboriginal girl? And how is that related to the practice of noticing? Those are the questions I'd like to come to in the next teshu? And what way does the practice of sitting itself, zazen itself, contribute to stabilizing the mind? And when you're not in zazen, what kind of Mind stabilizes mind.

[41:58]

How does the mind see the mind? How do we participate in mind and accept mind at the same time? It's all possible. If you get the idea and you get a feel for it. And the idea of it, the view of it, And the feel for it begins in itself to winnow the mind into its more stable way of being.

[43:05]

Yeah, that's enough for today. And that's enough for today. Thank you very much. Thank you for translating.

[43:24]

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