Thank you for meeting with me again today to discuss, explore the Dharma. I'm feeling a little tired today, so you're going to get a tired lecture. And what I thought I should speak about is the territory field, territory of practice. Now, let's again start with, start again with, don't invite your thoughts to tea. And I'm using this over and over again recently and over actually some months off and on because it's a good example of the territory of practice.

[01:02]

You have this thing, don't invite your custody, which is easy to understand. Understand is like to get under it, to get inside it as if it were standing still. To get inside it as if it were standing still. That's not what we want to do, but we start out that way. We get inside it as if it were standing still, and we enact it. And it's easy to enact. As I said the other day, you establish your posture, and you have this mental formation, this intent formation, to not invite thoughts to tea. find that the thoughts, as I think I said, almost like they're coming from outside your posture, and it's fairly easy to not invite them.

[02:05]

But, again, you've been, you're used to being, you're used to your thoughts. They're your identity, they're your thoughts, they're how you locate yourself, And so forth, and they start to woo you. Woo? Do you know the word woo? Woo is like to woo your wife or your friend or your husband or your boyfriend, to woo somebody. Valentine's Day is all about wooing. So your thoughts begin to woo you away, and pretty soon they win. And... you're off in thought somewhere. And what's it like to be off in thought somewhere? Well, it's a bit like, you know, you're sitting there and thoughts, and suddenly you go through this tunnel and you come out in my blue heaven.

[03:12]

Now, I don't know why I... When I thought of this, I thought of it because that was a big, popular, hugely popular song in the 20s for my mother and in the 50s for me. Fats Domino made it famous. My Blue Heaven. I don't know why it's My Blue Heaven, but anyway, you think it's heaven, but you're always blue. You think it's heaven, but you're always sad. And it's mostly constituted by what you have to do, what other people think of you, and what you think of yourself. That describes most of the content of My Blue Heaven. Or if you open up into this. Okay. Now, what's happening when you do this, and you notice it, we're now not understanding this teaching, we're incubating it.

[04:15]

And much of practice is about noticing and drawing consequences, seeing the consequences, and deciding there are choices. And this is what Nicole, in her first Yuso talk, knowing at the time as a young person, nothing about Buddhism. She did notice her experience, and she did see the consequences of her experience, and she did somehow think there was a choice. Now those factors, which she called way-seeking mind, you know, basically, it's those factors to notice your experience, to see the consequences of your experience, and to believe you have a choice. Without that, you can't proceed in practice, really.

[05:20]

So I think all of you are here because you notice your experience, you see the consequences, you feel the consequences, and you think there's a choice. So you've made the choice to be here at Crestone Mountain Zen Center. Usually your choice was a little more deeply grounded than a brochure that happened to fall into your lap. But in any case, however it happens, I'm glad we published that brochure that year, you know. Just by chance. I'm not into mailing lists and brochures particularly, but hey, now I know they're important. Okay. Okay. So if the territory of practice is to be able to notice the incubation of a teaching, you know, for example, a couple of people have spoken to me about out-there-ness and in-here-ness. And it sounds, as it was pointed out to me, rather dualistic.

[06:29]

But if you practice it, I think you'll find it's not dualistic. Certainly what I mean by in-here-ness is non-dualism. But non-dualism, you know, it's just a generalization. It's an unenactable concept. So I keep trying to find inactable, experienceable concepts. So in-here-ness So by in-hearness, I mean you shift your location, your sense of location to an in-hearness. Now, I used in-hearness instead of interiority or inwardness. I don't mean inwardness. Now, again, I just have to use language. I'm stuck with language. I have to find... Basically, the whole is unnameable.

[07:34]

And the parts of the whole are unnameable. Really, basically, they're unnameable. And they don't add up to a whole, and they're always changing the whole. W-H-O-L-E. So I have to find parts among the unnameable parts that are nameable. So I inwardness, no. Interiority, no. in here-ness, because here is a location which includes here and there. I mean, here is a place, right? So it's a place that's in here. An in here place. And an in here place which includes Everything. Because there is no experience you have that's not in here-ness.

[08:40]

Because where else? I mean, you know, you're not... Sometimes people say of somebody, well, he's a nice guy, but he lives about four feet from his body. You know? Well, maybe that person doesn't have an in here-ness, but our practice is always to be located in the context. So, spatial immediacy, perceptual immediacy, are all ways, phrases, that you can use to establish a location of in-hearness, because whatever it is, mind, sensorium, It's not somewhere else. So when you shift, not inward, but if you can feel, and I, you know, again, you have to make these words work.

[09:47]

I can only kind of throw them out there. You have to incubate them. You have to sit on them like an egg. The whole world's an egg. That's what Tathagatagarbha means. coming, going womb embryo in a world, in our conception of the world as Westerners as primarily separated unities, entities. But in the yogic Buddhist world, everything, as I say, over and over again is an activity, and as an activity, the most fecund, fertile, conceptive way to describe everything is everything is simultaneously womb and embryo, coming and going. The Buddha, historical Buddha, supposedly, well, no one knows, supposedly didn't say I, my, or myself. He said when he had to use language in such a way that he had to use a pronoun like I or my, he used thusness.

[10:57]

meaning something like, this one in suchness, the suchness, the thusness, thusness says, thusness is tired today, and so thusly you will get a tired lecture. With the sense that simultaneously I'm arriving and departing. I don't sound so tired right now. And each moment is simultaneously embryo and womb. We're living in a womb. We're living in a stomach. It's fertile, interpenetrating interdependence. Or maybe we should have a new word, interemergence. Intermerging or interemergence. Everything is emerging.

[12:02]

Inter-emergence. How is it to be in this inter-emergence? Well, how is it to be in this inter-emergence? Well, first of all, you have to have some sort of concept of it being like that. You know, consciousness is lazy and predictive, as we know. So somehow wisdom has to get a little dynamism into the situation. So instead of just looking at, oh, this is a really nice envelope we live in, container, to say, hey, hey, it's a field of inter-emergence. Things are emerging at all.

[13:04]

Well, that's also what I'm trying to touch on by saying in here-ness. Okay. So let's go back to you've located, you have located yourself or something in this intent formation, this mental formation, don't invite. And thoughts sort of outside that. But then your thoughts, which you're so used to, woo you away. Woo you away from what? Woo you away and win your attention. And pretty soon you're in discursive thoughts. Now, if you incubate this, if you can notice this, and part of it, I mean, most people practice, they follow the instruction, and they hope something happens.

[14:16]

But if you incubate it, if you notice it, maybe notice spelled, this is just English, G-N-O-T-I-C-E, because gnosis, no, G-N-O is wisdom. And of course, know and notice comes from G-N-O to know. Maybe we spell it in your mind, gnosis. That's easy for Germans. They say gno anyway, don't you? Well, we gno. In America, we can gno too. But we can't let the Germans and the Swiss and the Austrians get ahead of us with gnoing. Is Rosa sick? Oh dear, let's do that. Okay. So you gnosis, you gno, you notice that the you of discursive thinking is different than the you

[15:31]

It's not inviting. Now, if you really get this, it's revelatory. Already you have the necessary insight into what Buddhism means by the freedom from self. But most of us, we don't notice it. We just, you know, don't invite our thoughts to tea. But if you notice that actually There's three yous here. There's the you of discursive thought. There's the you of not inviting. And there's the you that observes both. Just from this so simple instruction, you now, like Western philosophies at a hard time with all this stuff, you're right in the midst of being able to experience it.

[16:40]

Through this simple and easy to enact instruction, but not so easy to incubate with intelligence and awareness. and consequence. Okay. But, you know, you do notice these things implicitly. But, and the implicit noticing, the implicit noticing does affect you. I mean, it means one year of practice is 15. If you notice it explicitly, and that's what I'm trying to help us do, is notice it explicitly. It took me 15 or 20 years to notice these things, or 30 or 40. But now that I've noticed them, I can speed up, jumpstart, perhaps, your and others' practice.

[17:46]

It takes time to notice what is not in familiar categories. to notice what was never noticed before, which isn't actually noticeable in the way we think. I mean, we have a generalization of you or you-ness or me-ness. From your point of view, it's me-ness. Let's call it you-ness. There's a you-ness that you take Yeah, you sort of think, well, sometimes it's a little different, I feel a little different. But basically you think there's a core, inherent you-ness. And you have the experience of, throughout your life, a kind of you that establishes continuity and so forth. But now,

[18:51]

This is all torn apart if you really notice that there's a different you of discursive thoughts than the you of not inviting. You also might notice, now by the way, along the path, along the incubatory path, you also might notice that don't invite Well, if they're words. And in sentences, I mean, every word has a mass and a charge. And words accumulate mass through your experience and charge. And so a word in a sentence, sometimes whole paragraphs turn on one word that's somewhere spreading its mass and charge throughout the paragraph. And certainly every sentence turns on one or two words that the mass, all the words take their power, directionality from one word usually or two words put together.

[20:04]

So we know that in language words have mass and power and charge, mass and power, but it's usually dispersed throughout the sentence and the text. But you can also notice through this incubatory path, if you take the word don't, you know the main instructions in Zen are don't scratch, don't move, don't invite your thoughts to tea, at least in our way of teaching. There are three don'ts. Sorry, maybe I could be more positive. But this is Nagarjuna. What happens when there's a don't? What appears to a don't? Now we're working with don't invite. Okay, you take don't out of sentences. You take it out of the instruction. You take invite out of the instruction. And instead of putting it in a sentence, you put it in the spine, in the body.

[21:11]

And again, I think as I may have, I suggested you practice with don't invite in your body and what happens is somehow words put in the body and the syntax of the body instead of the syntax of the sentence gain more power. They have power and they gain power from the body and it begins to affect your posture. It begins to affect your mind. It begins to affect your feelings. So the phrase, the words, don't invite. Given flesh, given bodily presence, create a location. Create a location.

[22:13]

So what you're doing with this don't invite thoughts to tea, you establish, you discover that you've established a location, you've established a posture of not inviting, you've established a mental intent, intentional formation, and attention is located in it. and it's established through attention, so it's both a mental posture and a physical posture, an enacted posture, and it becomes a location of attention. Okay. So you can really work with that. It's a location of attention. The words don't invite. the intent not to invite, the mental posture, create a location which can occupy attention, hold attention, and I think you'll see that a particular bodily posture is established through the words don't invite or through the mental intentional formation to not invite.

[23:44]

Now I want to make this point. You've created a location, a physical, mental location which occupies attention. Now you notice what happens when your usual thinking, discursive thinking, self-referential thinking, woos and wins your attention. Attention goes off through this little tube. Expands into my blue heaven. And your posture slopes. And you're thinking. And you're enjoying thinking. Why not? Your blue heaven. But what you notice is attention pulled Eunice with it. So now you've noticed there's a really powerful connection between the experience of you or me, me-ness or you-ness, and attention.

[24:52]

If attention goes with discursive thinking, you goes running after it. You joins it. The experience of you, I mean, it's like maybe the posture's like a dock and a very nice boat comes up with sirens and Ulysses, you know what I bring and Attention gets in the boat and you get in the boat off you go and the dock The dock gets to starts to sink in the water And then you're located in the boat in the succession of discursive thinking Now this you can you can This takes a lot of incubation What is the you of the boat of discursive thinking? And where's the dock? Is the dock is where you're located or anchored? Is the best anchor in discursive thinking?

[25:56]

Or do you sort of not like the you of discursive thinking? It's sort of like somehow you don't feel as vital. Somehow you feel kind of stuck and that's where fears and anxiety and competition and comparisons and you feel kind of down. But then how do you get the boat back into the harbor? Okay, don't invite thoughts to tea. Now, what you've discovered here if you've discovered, if you've noticed, is that there's some kind of mental formation in which attention can be located and a different kind of you appears in that location than the you that appears in discursive thinking.

[27:00]

the you that's indulged by discursive thinking, but you get a stomachache. So now you can see the difference, feel the difference between the you of discursive thinking and the you of this mental formation. Now, this is what I've been describing is the territory of practice. Now, what is, well, let's just go a step further. This territory of adept practice, this territory of incubatory practice can flip into, can become the territory of adept practice. And what is the characteristic of adept practice? If you meet someone, or I meet people all the time, we're practicing, right away it's clear an adept practitioner rests most of the time or all the time in their breath.

[28:21]

So, I mean, it's just one of the signs. They just do, you know what I mean? That's one. Another mark of an adept practitioner is they are always located in in-hearness. They're always located in mind. They always know what's happening is mind. You can feel it the way they are. And third, they're located in imperturbable mind. Not just the fact that everything is constituted in your experience of mind, but mind is imperturbable. Mind is stronger than circumstances. Mind, the mind of an adept practitioner includes circumstances, circumstances,

[29:29]

but is more powerful or more stable than circumstances. It's very... the fact that it's not disturbed by circumstances makes it possible for it to be inclusive of circumstances. So in the kitchen, in the zendo, in the brahmacharya, in the paths, walking. The mind fills the circumstances, is the circumstances, but is not disturbed by the circumstances. is more stable than the circumstances because maybe we can say because the mind is located in the field of the circumstances and not the details of the circumstances the details are present but they're present within the field and that field is undisturbable pretty much undisturbable and

[30:46]

One of the marks of such a person is mostly always in good humor. Doesn't get angry, things like that. They feel everything that could make them angry. They just stay in the situation. And anger isn't one of the things that happens. Or, you know, when it's... You don't put yourself down. You don't put yourself up. You just... Yeah. Yeah. And it's not because you're so noble, perhaps. It's just because you're identified with the field of mind, not comparative, not the contents. Okay, well, so I can say that imperturbable mind is a big word. I don't know, it's a little too strong, but I can't, don't have another one. Why is it imperturbable?

[31:50]

Well, one of the reasons is because it's located in a mental formation, an intentional formation, which it doesn't stray from. It doesn't stray into comparative, discursive, etc. thinking. I mean, we may think that way sometimes, but it's a kind of practical matter. It's a habit, but not a habit we identify with, you know. So this insight that there's a different you in discursive thinking than the you of the imperturbable or don't invite or don't move posture, you discover that this dock for your attention and you, and you see the link between the you-ness and attention, you just discover how to have attention always in breath, mind, and big mind.

[33:03]

The functioning of mind and the imperturbable big mind. And this becomes possible, really, through noticing the difference between the you of discursive thinking and the you that appears through the wisdom of intentional mental formations, compassion, the Brahma-viharas. These are all forms of intentional mental formations, in which when attention is located, this is the craft of Zen practice. There may be enlightenment. There is enlightenment. I drove Sophia to school today because Marie Louise has gone to Denver to meet with the Colorado Department of Education and other meetings and things.

[34:16]

And as I'm going by our local Protestant church, it says, that's a sign. I really don't like these, but sometimes they're kind of funny. This one says, if you're waiting for an invitation to heaven, register here. I thought we maybe should put a sign outside. Crestone Mountain Zen Center. If you're waiting for enlightenment, sign up here. Wouldn't that be weird if we did that? A lot more students? Yeah, it might be. A lot more disappointed students, too. I only want students ready for disappointment. So there's enlightenment, and enlightenment has many forms, but we also have the craft of enlightenment, and the craft that opens up enlightenment, and this craft of being located in intentional mental formations that are expressions of wisdom.

[35:42]

is the craft of Buddhist practice. And we can discover this craft incubating such a simple phrase as don't invite your thoughts to tea. We pay our attention to believe and pray.

[36:18]

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