Thank you. Thank you, each of you, for being here. Can you hear okay way back there? No? Oh, it's okay. It always makes me happy to practice with each one of you. In fact, much of my life has been about Sashins. And trying to find places in which we can do Sashins. I remember it. In Tassajara in the 60s, sitting in a sashin. Sukershi had me sitting on the altar and he was gone and it was break.

[01:06]

It was the break, but I continued sitting. So the Zender was empty and I sat there and I thought, oh my God, I may have, I mean, oh my Buddha, I may have a lifetime of Sashins ahead of me. And I almost got down and left and just escaped. But I don't know. Then I stayed. I don't know why I stayed, but I stayed. And here... I'm still staying now with you.

[02:09]

Of course, you're not here just to please me. You're here to perhaps enter into your own experience in a way that's almost only possible in sashins. Or perhaps to enter under your experience. Or perhaps to enter beyond the beyond the edge or anticipation of your experience.

[03:12]

Or perhaps you hear just a periodic flushing yourself out. Yeah, cleansing yourself a few times a year of the selfness that sticks to us. Yeah, and perhaps all of those things involuntarily happen during sashing. And as I've said before, I often wonder whether, I wonder if Socrates, Plato and Aristotle had known about Sushines. Wouldn't they perhaps have addressed the exhortation, exhortation?

[04:20]

Statement. Demand. To know thyself in a different way. It's been such a definitive and defining and important term for the entire Western classical tradition. As far as I think history knows, it has its origins in Egypt before Athenian Greece. Athenian. Athens, Greece, Athens.

[05:26]

And it supposedly was written in the forecourt of the Apollo... a temple, a Delphic temple. So when you are entered, the first thing you saw, know thyself. And... Yeah, Plato has Socrates saying, dear friend, don't expect me to answer these foolish questions about mythology and so forth and on, when I don't even know myself.

[06:30]

As the Delphic oracles urge, how can I bother with such foolishness? And we tend to think of Socrates as probably someone who knew himself. If Socrates didn't, who the hell, I mean, heck did. But Plato has Socrates say, when I don't even know myself, how am I to concern myself with questions about mythology? And the early Upanishads, even pre-Athenian times, say something quite similar.

[07:39]

But... But Rumi, he says, what does he say? He says something like, how am I to know who I am in the midst of this train of thoughts, traffic of thoughts, he says. But Rumi, he says, how am I to know who I am in the midst of this train of thoughts? And that's more like our Sashin practice in the traffic of thoughts. Who's there? And Rilke wrote in his diary something like, I only recently discovered that I have another self, a secret self, an inner self.

[08:54]

Und Rilke schrieb in sein Tagebuch, ich habe erst vor kurzem entdeckt, dass ich ein weiteres Selbst habe, ein geheimes Selbst. But all of these questions or exhortations are part of intuitively why we do a Sashin. Aber all diese Aussagen oder Aufforderungen sind intuitiv Teil Yeah, and I think the Upanishads say self-knowledge is the source of all knowledge. I wouldn't say that, and I don't think Buddhism would say that. But in any case, when you do something like a sashin and you just sit down in the first period, you are entering something that's been very basic in every culture.

[09:59]

Aber auf jeden Fall, wenn du ein Sashin sitzt und du dich in der ersten Periode niedersetzt, dann trittst du in etwas ein, was in jeder Kultur eine grundlegende Rolle spielt. Wie du dich selbst kennen kannst. Was bedeutet es, dich selbst zu kennen? Was bedeutet es, dich selbst zu erfahren? And how interesting it is that we can explore such basic questions within our multiple cultures by just still sitting, sitting still. We don't need the caves of the Greek oracles and the psychotropic fumes often that were part of those caves. Yeah, I mean, all we need to do is, can we believe it?

[11:20]

Sit still. Sit still. But maybe our question shouldn't be to know thyself, but something more like to know thy aliveness. This is a more biological entreaty as well as psychological challenge. Entreaty is the same as exhortation, a command, a demand. What is aliveness? What is our aliveness? I don't think we can ask relevantly, who is our aliveness?

[12:34]

Who is our aliveness? Geez, I don't know. Or maybe we could ask, within our aliveness, How does who-ness appear? Aber ich glaube, wir können uns die Frage stellen, wie erscheint innerhalb unserer Lebendigkeit das Wer-Sein? But at least the first expectation of Sashin practice is to sit down in the midst of and investigate your aliveness. Maybe we should put in the coat room of our zendo, fully know thy aliveness. Probably nobody would even see it.

[13:44]

They'd just hang up their coat. Know the dimensions, dynamics and domains of thy aliveness. Domains, dynamics and dimensions. Know the perhaps the layers and filaments of thy aliveness. Know thy is necessary. Mm-hmm. So we're sitting down and upright into our aliveness. And if you're going to know your aliveness or thyself, you have to generate an attentional stream.

[14:50]

And that attentional stream is first established in our initial sitting down. And that attentional stream is first established in our initial sitting down. Recently, as I've been more aware of the endgame, maybe it'll be a decade or two, but it's still, not two, but it's still the endgame. Vielleicht wird es noch ein Jahrzehnt brauchen oder zwei, wahrscheinlich nicht zwei, aber es ist so oder so, es ist das Endspiel. I find myself looking more at the rudiments, the basics of practice.

[16:04]

Da merke ich, dass ich sehr viel mehr auf die Grundlagen, die Wurzeln der Praxis schaue. So as you know, Zazen is a is establishing an upright posture plus the mental posture of don't move. I've always, you know, from the beginning when I started practicing in the beginning of the 60s, I was aware that Buddhism, Zen practice was a form of yoga emphasizing mental postures which were encompassed by, enlivened by, a bodily posture. And idealistically and somewhat experientially, this posture is thought to, felt to

[17:05]

experienced perhaps even as containing all yoga postures, all postures. The concept is the same as AUM, which is actually AUM, contains all possible sounds. And our universal mudra is called universal because it's thought to contain all the spatial postures of the hands. But it's strange how practice unfolds as you repeatedly or repointedly do it. Mm-hmm. And so it's only actually recently I really recognized that I have to emphasize mental postures more.

[19:00]

I think it's, you know, I don't want to go into it, that's another taste show, but I think it's because we so identify with our comfortable attitudes caring consciousness mind. That we don't really, can't really grok, to use a science fiction word, grok that Our comfortable conscious identity is only a mental posture within a much larger field, wider field of being.

[20:05]

Dass wir nicht wirklich grog, also intuitiv erfassen können, um ein Science Fiction Wort zu verwenden, dass wir nicht wirklich intuitiv erfassen können, dass unser wohliges Bewusstsein eine geistige Haltung ist. So the upright posture plus the mental posture don't move begins is the basic conditions for establishing an attentional stream. When you first sit down and you try to find your posture, And the old ancient instructions say swing to the right and swing forward and back, but that's just code for adjust your posture.

[21:25]

It doesn't mean you have to swing or not swing. Too often we read something like that and think it really means swing. It just means you yourself discover your posture. And it's okay to move in the beginning when you're trying to find it before you sit still in not moving. So when you first sit down and you're adjusting you're discovering your posture What's guiding those adjustments in tuning is trying to find yourself within an attentional stream.

[22:44]

ist der Versuch, dich in einem Aufmerksamkeitsstrom zu finden. Almost as if the attentional stream is already there and you're trying to locate yourself in it. Fast als ob der Aufmerksamkeitsstrom schon da ist und du versuchst dich darin zu verorten. At some point you feel as best you can that yes, the attentional stream is possible now. And you can relax those adjustments and your muscles and so forth and just let yourself move into that attentional stream. Move with that attentional stream. This attentional stream, which can belong to us, is the only way we can know oneself, know thyself, well know our aliveness.

[24:03]

And this aliveness, again, is a biological fact as well as a psychological challenge. No, I often am concerned that I don't want to emphasize too much that you have to learn how to sit. But I'm actually... I actually can't emphasize enough that you have to learn how to sit. The biology, the neurology, the electrology, the... etc., all of those things that happen, that actually change the physicality of who you are, happen only through sitting.

[25:47]

Suzuki Roshi was asked to give a talk at Stanford University once. A religious philosophy course. And he looked at all the students and he said, could you all push the desk to the side of the wall? Please, and then sit down, best you can, and don't move. And then he sat there for 40 minutes with them and left. I mean, it's somehow difficult for us to get, I mean, it's taken time. forty or fifty years of my life to have people keep saying you have to exercise, it affects your health.

[27:06]

It took ten years before anybody started jogging. Somehow it's not really graspable for us that we have a multi-dimensional, multi-layered body. And Zazen is a kind of bathysphere. That thing that you go down deep in the ocean and to look at fish that live under... Tauchglocke? Tauchglocke, okay, yeah. Okay. Zazen is a kind of bathysphere... It lets you deep down into the multi-dimensioned aliveness.

[28:14]

And Zazen is so eine Tauchglocke, die dich tief in die Vielschichtigkeit der Lebendigkeit hineinführt. This is a level that... This other bodily level is one aspect in which Asians have more intuitively than we do. And so this is good in a way because we have to bring a new intelligence and awareness to the body, open up these enfolded dimensions. So let me just say, recently I've spoken a number of times here and in Kassel about Body points.

[29:35]

And you know I've spoken about it before, but since I only see you intermittently, I can't make a continuity with all of you. And the most traditional formulation is seven body points. But I find, in my own practice, eleven is more useful. Yeah. Because you can just find your own. But then whatever they are, some people say, well, I can't make it stick or I don't have any feeling for this. Yeah, that's on one hand understandable because we want our practice to be experiential. So it makes a difference when you feel something sticking or staying with you.

[30:53]

But at the same time, it's not much of a practitioner who says, oh, since it doesn't stick, I'm not going to do it. That's not the way to go. If you're going to practice wisdom, you have to try it out until it sticks. Wisdom is a kind of... Repetition. Now, I don't like the word, and I don't know German, of course, I don't like the word repetition too much, because it means to go back to something. Repeat is back. Und ich mag dieses Wort, ja, Wiederholung.

[32:00]

To go back to what was before. Im Englischen das Wort repetition nicht so gern, weil es bedeutet, zu etwas zurückzugehen, was vorher schon mal war. So wisdom is a kind of pointer. Also weisheit ist eher so eine Art... and practice is a re-pointing it's not going back to what was before but going perhaps forward to what's new and what seems the same So I find it useful to point, when I establish the mental posture and discovering a posture in which I'm not likely to have to move for the period, I also have to find the upright posture which supports that mental posture.

[33:21]

And one of the things I do after establishing this beginning attentional stream, I bring attention to 11 body points. So some of you know them, just let me go through them again. I start with the sacrum and coccyx as the first. And then I go up through the whole length of the spine, the lumbar and thoracic. And I feel the length of the spine sort of uncoiling upward. Uncoiling, like unwinding or something?

[34:45]

And then at the, what is it, the thorax, the axis and atlas vertebrae, Where the head sits. And allows you to turn your head and so forth. I rest for a moment. I point to that point with attention. It's so interesting that it makes a difference when you bring attention to something. So that's one, two, three, and then the fourth is the crown chakra. You're opening up, awakening the subtle body when you do that actually too.

[36:03]

And you're already taking the body out of the self-narrative of consciousness. And you're now more into a biological aliveness. And then I bring attention to the hands, two hands and two feet, that's four. And they are the kind of articulation of our spatial presence, field.

[37:06]

Even folded into the lotus posture and the universal mudra. There's a presence and power to each hand and each foot. Then I bring attention to the tongue. To the wetness of the mouth. to the tongue resting on the roof of the mouth in Zazen.

[38:09]

And you can even try looking at the sky or a flower or something with the tongue resting on the roof of the mouth. And I think you'll find, even in ordinary circumstances, that your attention is different. And I think you can even look at the sky or a tree or a flower Yeah, and there's a preciseness to the touch of the tongue, the wetness and touch of the tongue. And that precise point focuses all of the body points, brings them together. And then I go to the heart chakra, which somehow opens the warmth, the feel of the immediate space.

[39:17]

And then what I do anyway, for the 11th, I go to the harem. The power of the hara as presence, which organizes the whole of you as presence, And it's strange that these body points, whatever ones you decide to develop, articulate, not only bring attention out of the narrative, self-stream into a biological and subtle attentional stream

[40:57]

Somehow, I don't know why exactly, but bringing attention to these bodily points opens the bodily mind to the flow of the circum field. Circum field, which is the condition for anything approaching non-dual experience. Okay, I hope this gets you started in sitting practice.

[42:06]

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