human life. How do we get along with each other? Or what is the human space, I don't know what words to use, but I'll say human space we live in. We don't only live in it, we are generating it, manufacturing it all the time. What kind of Well, let's put it this way. Is there only one human space that we live in? Is the human space between the mother and the infant the same in all cultures? Well, I mean, there have been some studies done, but my guess would be...

[01:03]

In some ways it's extremely simple, extremely the same to care for, etc. It's extremely the same? everywhere the same, which is basically to care for your infant. But what kind of, sorry for using the word again, space or continuum actually cares for your infant? And we know from neurobiological studies that the brain, not only the brain of the infant, but also the mother, has a Mother too has a remarkable degree of plasticity.

[02:14]

So we're creating some kind of mutual biological space. Yeah. Now, as Roland brought up, how is this embodied space? How is self and separateness? How do we embody self and separateness? And succession, continuity. And meaning or... Appropriateness, context.

[03:29]

How do we embody that so it benefits us and others? And always there's the implicit idea of what's beneficial or not beneficial. And whether something is beneficial or not beneficial is not, at least in Buddhism, what is meant by dualism. It is what is meant by Buddhism. It is not what is meant by Buddhism. But we have to accept, because things are always a mixture of beneficial and not so beneficial. And detrimental.

[04:30]

And also harmful, damaging. Abandoned children. have a terrible time being alive. Psychologically, emotionally abandoned children have a terrible time. So how do we create a human space and at each moment you're with somebody you're experimenting with what is this human space? Space we can beneficially inhabit. Now in the Sashin we just finished, I spoke about sitting solely for the satisfaction of sitting itself.

[05:45]

Sitting solely for the satisfaction of sitting itself. Sometimes I say sit with an uncorrected mind. But now I'm saying sit within the satisfaction of sitting itself. Now somebody might say, geez, what are you doing in life? You don't do anything. You just sit around. Yeah, and you... You're just alive. Is just being alive enough? But the experience of aliveness itself is difficult to achieve and subtle experience.

[06:54]

I would say that Buddhism would say that the Bodhisattva presumes that the base of our living and doing is fundamentally aliveness itself. Yeah, life and body all mean basically how do you preserve the body, how do you continue the body. If you look at the roots of words, to live is to continue the body. You know, when I was, I don't know, long as I can remember, I asked myself the question, what is the meaning of existence?

[08:03]

Yeah, you know, you find, all of us were born, we find ourselves alive, we wonder, what the hell is, how heck is this? And... And always there's the awareness that life can end at any time. We may not be so consciously aware of it, but in our actions, how we cross the street and so forth, we're always aware of it. So we're all on this kind of edge of, well, we're alive, we're still alive. And I asked myself some sort of question like, what is the meaning to this existence? At some point I gave up the question of meaning. It immediately seemed to draw me away from the experience of being alive.

[09:22]

So I shifted, really, to asking myself, what is the experience of being alive? What is the experience of aliveness? So, I really couldn't feel a bodily satisfaction with this question. I could not feel a body. Until I began to do Zazen. And in Zazen I spent a lot of time trying to notice my thoughts. I spent a lot of time.

[10:32]

Yeah, letting go of my thoughts and giving attention to breathing and so forth. But a certain kind of feeling of sitting kept developing. At some point, I sort of began to sit just within the feeling of sitting. And it was satisfying the way being in a hot bath is satisfying sometimes, or having a good night's sleep or something. Yeah, and then of course I discovered that the satisfaction of sitting itself.

[11:36]

And satisfaction means something like completeness or fullness. So it wasn't a small thing to... feel completeness. Completeness or fullness or something like that. I used the example, they have these new chips that are powered by movement, not by a battery. It seems like they're powerful enough that if you have them in a smoke detector in a house, there's a movement in the house itself sufficient to keep powering that chip.

[12:46]

And enough power to communicate to all the smoke detectors in the house. So if one goes off in the bedroom, they will ring in every other room in the house. With no batteries. It made me immediately think of the fact that in sitting... within the satisfaction of sitting itself. There's small movements toward greater satisfaction or less satisfaction. A deeper ease, less ease. And And there tends to be a movement toward a more complete ease or fuller satisfaction.

[14:16]

It takes hold of the body in a way, body and mind, and just don't want to move. And I found that becoming to be very familiar with that feeling of satisfaction which I would describe as a satisfaction with aliveness itself and in this experience there's no idea of a life There's no idea of a lifespan, as the Diamond Sutra says. It says in the Diamond Sutra, the Bodhisattva has no idea of a lifespan. Okay, so are we... You can notice... When your thinking and ideas are about your lifespan, it's your life, we would say you're not quite on the path yet.

[15:39]

Yeah, if that's how you identify yourself, I mean, we do have to make practical decisions about what we're going to do tomorrow, etc., But when aliveness itself becomes your satisfaction, it comes to, I mean, you're alive as long as you're alive. It becomes almost immaterial when you are no longer alive. Because as long as you're alive, you're alive. You may not be. In that sense of aliveness, there's no idea of a lifespan. Okay, now, I'm just presenting this. I'm not asking you to accept it. But I'm asking you to kind of wonder about it.

[16:55]

Well, we're not talking about ideas here. As an idea, it's irrelevant or irrelevant, who cares. But an experience of aliveness which is so powerful dominant, is that you may prefer to do this or that, you know, talk to this person instead of that person, or have this food or that food, or a movie or film instead of that one or something. But it's almost It's quite unimportant because your overall feeling is the satisfaction of aliveness itself. And nothing exterior to this aliveness itself is really amounts to much.

[18:06]

And it does amount to something when it arises from this aliveness itself. And it does amount to something when it arises from this aliveness itself. So this experience of aliveness itself, resting in this aliveness itself, And discovering the feeling of it and being familiar with it. In your activity, you don't stray from this aliveness itself. This is something like saying, attention is always on body, breath and phenomena. which you all know shifts your attention from discursive thought to body, breath, and phenomena.

[19:22]

Yeah, but now we're speaking about attention... attention... which is inseparable from aliveness itself. It's not that attention is on aliveness, like attention on your breath. Attention is aliveness itself. Now, it interests me that the word feeling means the original meaning of to feel is to touch. It wasn't until, I don't know, the 17th century or something like that, 1700s, I don't remember, when feel came to mean sympathy or compassion or feeling in the way we use it.

[20:32]

And it got there through the word feeling, meaning originally in Greek it meant to pluck a harp. And to touch gently. To stroke. And American teenagers, when they're necking, they spend a lot of time feeling each other up. American teenagers. Teenagers. They spend a lot of time feeling each other up. And they don't know they're using the word in the most ancient sense.

[21:50]

But feeling came to mean something like feeling through the senses as a whole. Feeling as a whole, not a particular sense. And as you know, at least I point it out occasionally, that common sense used to mean in English To know the world through all the senses at once. It was a kind of common... It was a... A sense common to all the senses.

[22:54]

And it's come to mean, of course, in English, something like something everybody knows. When it used to mean something like intuition or a sixth sense, something you know through all the senses. And feeling. in its progress to starting to mean empathy and sympathy and so forth. It went from physical touch to a touching felt through all the senses. In those days, crying meant you understood. When you understood something, you felt it, you cried.

[24:03]

Yes, I think we do in the privacy of movies, but not in a meeting with our fellow... And often, I mean, you can read in the sutras, sometimes it'll say, and then such and such a adept or bodhisattva began to cry at hearing these words. And this is then the bodily sense of feeling through the senses. The bodily experience of feeling through the senses, touching through the senses. Now I'm trying to say that the compassion in a Buddhist sense is something very close to this, the presence which arises through the experience of aliveness.

[25:30]

that arises through the experience of aliveness, the presence of aliveness. So a person's presence is related to how fully they're located in their own aliveness. And you can see it. You can see a group of people. And one person seems to have a big presence. And if you, my experience is, they're usually anchored in their own aliveness.

[26:34]

Which we experience as charisma or And I think the word charisma is related to the Christian idea of charisms. And charisms are the Christian equivalent of siddhis, special powers. And the sense of the bodhisattva being able to gather people into the path I think we can understand through practice.

[27:37]

There's not some magical genetic configuration. But simply... For some reason, some people are, some people aren't, the person is rooted in their own aliveness. And their own aliveness is satisfaction enough. And unfortunately, though fortunately or unfortunately, such a person doesn't have any needs. They always feel complete. And so they attract people who have needs. Yeah, but of course, Some people have this rooted in their own aliveness, but their personality is not so rooted, and they, you know, and et cetera.

[28:59]

Then there's problems. Okay, but anyway, I'm trying to find a way into the way of the Bodhisattva. And to find a way through this Friday, as I often do, to kind of swim and find a way to... get enough liquid in the room to swim in it. By liquid I mean some kind of mutual recognition Mit Flüssigkeit meine ich so viel gegenseitige Anerkenntnis, that we're all talking about the same thing.

[30:03]

Yeah, so I find myself paying a lot of attention, of course, especially in the beginning of a seminar, to words. Because I want to make this... be as sure as I can that my words mean something. Yeah, and in contemporary usage and in more traditional uses where they're rooted resonantly with other words. And then see if we can get to a place where we're all using at least some of the words the same way. Because words focus our attention and generate mutuality and so forth.

[31:20]

Yes, so now I'm suggesting I'm trying to give you the feeling for to sit in the satisfaction of sitting itself. And hopefully discover the sensitivity that that satisfaction is self-correcting. Satisfaction correcting. Well, anyway, self-correcting. Because sitting in the satisfaction of sitting itself is a both a process of knowing and learning, which the root of to know, G-N-O, means simultaneously to know and to learn.

[32:38]

G-N-O. G-N-O is the root, Gnosis, is the root of to know. Also das Wort G-N-O, also die Wurzel, das die Wurzel ist, das Knowing and learning. It means inseparably to know is to learn and to learn is to know. But real knowing is a process of learning simultaneously. And this satisfaction, this moving toward completeness in... sitting, becomes a process of both knowing and learning simultaneously. And the experience of sitting and the satisfaction of sitting itself becomes a guide in a teaching. And opens you to that...

[33:40]

embodied space represented in the thousand arms of the Avalokiteshvara. The bodily space that we that we live, transformed into compassion. And that bodily space we can discover with each person we know. And what Yvonne Illich would mean by being able to know each other face to face. And he and I often agreed that Buddhism and his understanding of Christianity was a search, as I've said often, for ultimate friendship.

[35:20]

Some approach to complete friendship. Yes, we have phrases like, I'm almost close to this. Because there's a big difference to moving away from the completeness of friendship and moving toward the completeness of friendship. Knowing that friendship is incomplete But knowing the movement toward the completion of friendship.

[36:28]

Because the practice of friendship is certainly the Bodhisattva path. And mentorship in Buddhism is the... movement toward the experiment with another person toward this completing friendship. The bodily space or aliveness, that one actually, if you don't have a good conscience, now bad, good, etc., but if you don't have a good conscience, whatever that means in English,

[37:34]

You don't feel satisfied by sitting itself. If you don't have a good conscience, you can't sit with within the satisfaction of sitting itself. Because you can't move toward completeness. And when you don't have a good conscience, it means you can't be aware in this sense of moving toward completeness. So this experience of sitting within the satisfaction of sitting itself, Moving toward that allows you to study what actually bothers you and what doesn't.

[38:41]

And do these things bother you so you don't feel satisfied, you don't feel at ease? So the unease allows you to study your own behavior. And the unease would also be called a dharma. Now, I'm not calling it dis-ease, because that's the realm of you doctors. Uncranked. Crank.

[39:41]

We'll see. But unease and disease do have some relationship to each other. Surprisingly, the less unease you have, usually the less disease you have. Okay, so unease, let's go back to that point. We could call it dharma. It's a unit of experience. Which you can see. But that actually arises from false view that I've adopted from my family or culture or something.

[40:55]

Because you can see it very clearly and see from where it arises. So conscience is also socially embodied views. Conscience is also socially embodied views. But it's also more fundamental in that you have harmed someone else or harmed yourself or something. You've lied to somebody when you thought you were telling the truth, but when you look carefully, actually you're kind of lying. And the word conscience also means to be truthful. So when there's self-deception, you can't really be at ease.

[41:56]

So this practice of sitting within the satisfaction of sitting itself, And finding your ease or not in that satisfaction, we can understand as a kind of big wide open door to the path of the bodhisattva. And from this point of view, the person you like or don't like or Genghis Khan or whoever it is, if you're rooted in your aliveness itself and the person who in the situation that hurt you recently, Nicole, if you're rooted in your own aliveness, anchored in your own aliveness, then your experience of the other person is predominantly their aliveness,

[43:44]

And whatever happened is a small percentage. And this mutual aliveness or this aliveness can call forth our mutual aliveness. Okay, let's just start on the path of the Bodhisattva. So, let's sit for a few minutes. Your legs aren't perfect yet. Nearly. You're moving in the direction of perfection.

[44:54]

Quite. In the koan we discussed in Sashin.

[46:54]

Case 46 of the Blue Cliff Records. Yeah, Ching says... It should be easy to be clear. It should be easy to say it clearly. But it's difficult to say the whole of it. I wish it weren't so difficult to say the whole of it. But let's see if we can move in the direction of the whole of it.

[47:53]

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