Well, we've arrived at the famous or notorious third day. Yeah, it's just another day, but somehow it's a little different. A sashin falls into certain patterns. Dass Sashin zerfällt in bestimmte Muster. Even though we're quite individual, obviously, we're still a Sashin. Something happens to us in Sashin rather together, actually. Obwohl wir natürlich alle Individuen sind, geschieht im Sashin etwas mit uns, etwas Gemeinsames geschieht mit uns. Ja, I want to continue talking about self, as I said I did.

[01:03]

But today I think I should speak about, yeah, sashin and self in relationship to that. You know, in a way we're sort of swimming in this sashin, but most of us are swimming underwater. And I'd like us to swim to the surface of the sashin and see what's going on. Someone sent me a postcard from Italy recently. Called the Tomb of the Diver. And on one of the walls of the tomb is painted this picture. And this, it's a male, looks like a male anyway, is standing on some sort of pedestal pretty high up.

[02:07]

I mean, he was standing on a pedestal. And he's diving, beautiful body, diving into Hades. Hades. That's hell. I mean, you know, the underworld, Hadis. Yeah, of course, Hadis. I should have said that. See how much German I know and I don't know I know it. Anyway, it's a beautiful memento mori. And what's beautiful is not only does he look beautiful, it's intentional. We have the teaching of the five fears. Fear of loss of reputation.

[03:37]

Fear of unusual states of mind is one of them. And unusual states of mind means zazen but also means the moment of death. It means we fear the unpredictable, uncontrollable dimensions of mind. Yeah, so this fellow is diving into the The passage to the moment of death. And intentionally. Both Buddha and Christ are persons who could die.

[04:38]

And in both the Western and Asian traditions, the intentional conscious death is very important. Western and Asian traditions. I forget everything. Well, that's what happens when you die. The conscious, intentional, aware death is part of the traditions of both Asia and Europe. An awareness of when you're about to die and making the choice. When you know you're dying, no longer holding back. When you know you're dying, no longer holding back. No, I don't mean to dramatize Sashin, but Sashin's a little practice at that.

[06:11]

Sometimes you just don't hold back. You don't know what's going to happen exactly. And it's not Sashin is... Not just more zazen. It's not just that we're doing more zazen than usual. It's the whole context of zazen. And it's not just that we're doing the zazen. And it's being done to us. but we are literally doing the sashin that's done to us. This was actually has been a crucial point in the development of Dharma Sangha in Europe.

[07:14]

Because when I was finally convinced after some years to do a Sashin in Europe, when we really found a home for the Sashin, until we found here, it was at the Haus Destilla in Roseburg, near Hamburg. And they said, oh well, we'll cook for you and we'll take care of everything and you can just come here and sit. They were surprised because that's how they usually did things. And I said, we can't do it then. And they were very proud of their kitchen and doing their own cooking for us.

[08:31]

Which was also their private kitchen. We said, we have to take over the kitchen and we have to do our own cooking. Because we, I mean I didn't spell it out like that, but we have to do this to ourselves. Yeah, and that's really what led also to Johanneshof. Because... of all the complexity of trying to set up this other place, three weeks a year, so we could have all the dishes and serving pots and a refrigerator, everything we needed. So really, Yanisov came from wanting a place to do sashimi ourselves. And now, as we've been discussing, and some of you know, we have to find a way to make the practice work for the people who live here as well as for the people who come to Sashin.

[09:50]

So what happens when we do sashins, surprisingly often, is that as we settle into the sitting, And as we settle into the schedule and kind of give up our resistance or give up at least some of our resistance our karma begins to come up. Very strange. In a In a situation where we don't have choice.

[11:04]

When we're in a non-arbitrary space. For some reason the bigger choices in our life come up. then for some reason the greater possibilities that we have encountered in our lives come to light. And it's interesting that it doesn't really happen in the same way and not so vividly when we sit Zazen. It's, yeah, unique to Sashin practice. Nearly unique to Sashin practice. And again, it's not about the larger amount of Zazen, it's about the context, the schedule, etc. Yeah, and, you know, we can see our self, we can see the self,

[12:06]

Ourself, the self, trying to complete itself. Because a lot of, I think for some reason in Sashin, unfinished business starts coming up. There are uncompleted things in our life. If you're younger, it's better because you don't have so many uncompleted things. But then you have all the things you want to complete. So there's these loose ends, these things that you ought to have some closure on. And sometimes you can tell when a person's going to die. You know, even a year or two or so before they die.

[13:20]

with their body sort of knows they start taking care of things straightening out old karma writing letters things like that so these uncompleted things come up Or things we wish we'd done differently or hadn't done at all. And the things, if they come up in the middle of the night, they can wake us up and make us toss and turn. Do you have that expression, toss and turn? No, but I can say it. You can say it, yes, of course. She can say anything. Yeah. But what's interesting, what does it mean when we toss and turn? There's some mixture of memory, karma, emotion, and the body.

[14:34]

And we feel ill at ease. Often it's an opening for our immune system to let one of the guys hanging around in. So you can see, when this happens, you can see a certain dynamic of the self wanting to give meaning to what our life is and has been so far. And often we find we're in an argument with ourselves. You know, it's sort of like nobody's there but us. We're in the inner room of the inner room of the mind.

[15:53]

And nobody's listening but us. But we start lying to ourselves. Or kind of lying. Well, I didn't really do... I mean, you start telling your story to yourself as if the public was listening. As if, yeah, a very skeptical person or a critic was listening and you, well, I really meant to do it this way. So it's sort of your public self and your private self in a little argument in the inner room. And it's not just that you're, you know, basically dishonest and trying to put the best face on things. Rather, it's very clear that the self is shaped by its public associative dimensions as well as by private experience or personal experience.

[17:19]

So you're not just shaping a self you can live with. And this is one of the most important jobs of Buddhism, can I really be saying this, to shape a self that you can live with. But we also have to shape a self through which, within which, as which we can live with others. So this is a really important negotiation that we can be in the midst of, especially in Sashin.

[18:20]

Watching the self we can live with being shaped by the self we can live with others and vice versa. Yeah, and part of what's happening is this mind of tossing and turning. Yes, it's sort of some mix of emotion and the body and memory. And the public dimensions, aspects of self. He's kind of entering the truth machine of the still mind. Yeah.

[19:37]

That's right. Thanks. And we find a stillness in our sitting. And often if you don't find that stillness, it's pretty difficult because then your karma joins up with the pain and then you have trouble. And if you don't find this silence, then you have difficulties because your karma mixes with your pain and so on. And now one of the most basic and simplest Zazen advice. It doesn't scratch you. Yeah, and if you scratch, you let karma in. Because the mind that doesn't scratch is quite sealed from the disturbing aspects of karma.

[20:43]

And you begin to find the... A wider sense of your karma, wider than the public self allows you. It's like the conscious mind is this kind of room with all kinds of boxes and papers and projects sitting around. And then zazen, we do zazen, especially a sashin. And somehow the projects and the boxes disappear. And the choices we didn't have conscious time for begin to come up.

[21:50]

So when we're in a choiceless situation, in English, choiceless has two meanings. One is that there's no choice. The other is, this is so good, it's the best of all possibilities, it's choiceless, it's really the best. So there's this point at which having no choice allows the... the more fundamental long-term choices to come up. And the whole point, we could almost say, the whole point of Sashin is to shape this particular kind of still mind. A clear, accepting, still mind that can look clearly but isn't easily disturbed.

[23:09]

So it almost doesn't happen if you have too many choices. And this Sashin which we do to ourselves takes our choices away. And the Oryuki meal is a good example of that. We're propped Well, in a traditional Zendo, you're propped up on a platform, but you're stuck behind your bowls.

[24:13]

I mean, that's by design. That's intentional. You've got these darn bowls in front of you, and if you have to pee, you don't know how the hell you'd get up to go do it. And then there's a whole bunch of Buddhist police watching you with bowls. And then the head servers over there kind of... So we make the meal and the cooks serve the meal. So we're doing this together and we take turns serving the food. And the, you know, particularly if you have the monk's bowls, the little lacquer paper table is a little too small for the bowls.

[25:23]

They've known for 500 years how big the bowls are, but they make it a little too small. So you can't quite fit them on. They're bumping, you know. And then, you know, by the third day you're maybe even in some discomfort while you're sitting there. And then you're supposed to take the hot water and hold a stick in the water and move another bowl and pour it all at the same time. And it's easy to make mistakes. I mean, I'm amazed how seldom we make mistakes. I've been doing this for hundreds of years, you know. And every time I pick up that damn boy, I say, well, I've got to be real. But then I know that mistakes are part of the Oryoki eating ceremony.

[26:48]

You should all know this. Please don't clean up your mistakes. That's what the head servers do. He's got nothing to do but watch for your mistakes. But it means they're not mistakes. It's just what happens. Sometimes accidents happen. So you drop your chopsticks and somebody comes and gets them and brings... Here, of course, the Crestone, if you drop your chopsticks, they're about six feet away. I mean, you can't... Someone has to come and get them for you.

[27:59]

Then they take them in the back and wash them and then they bring them to the Buddha and offer them. So it establishes an alert, still mind. You can't really do the Uriyoki unless you're fairly wide awake. And it's shared with each other, serving, etc. And we all eat at more or less the same rhythm. And we share even the water at the end is shared sort of with the powers, oh spirits and powers we say in Christian.

[29:03]

And maybe we should start doing that. Here, if we change practice a little, we offer a little rice on the end of this thing and somebody takes the rice and we dump the water into the white bowl here that people bring. And it's sort of an environmental act and a kind of sense of mystery. You offer something to the rest of the world that needs to be fed, the planet, the garden. So you dump 60% or 70% or 80% of the water in and then you save 10% or 15%. I actually save 30% for myself. So this is when the water goes, it's sort of like something, yeah, it's an act.

[30:23]

It means something wider than just this situation. So you give some of it away and you drink some of it. And so the head server is the kind of the conductor. And the head server rather establishes the rhythm of the Oryoki meal. And the... And the doing of the bowls and all is a kind of spatial activity.

[31:41]

So we're very involved with the bowls. They're not just sort of plastic cups, you know. Mm-hmm. So the whole Uriyoki meal engages us in a certain way. And asks of us a certain kind of mind in order to eat in this way. So of course the Doan leading the chanting The chanting, which is, of course, the kind of breathing together.

[32:44]

Our metabolism is not far behind. Yeah, so the head server, the doan, the ino, the work leader... the tenzo and each in their own area are establishing the rhythm and pace or rhythm and mind of the sashin. The mind that can dive into our karma Yes, there's a kind of renewal in this too. So anyway, Sashin helps us find a mind which relates to our karma differently.

[34:02]

And finds some way of accepting and finding closure to many things in our life. So something like that happens the first three days. Three or four. Yeah, as we settle into the sashin and settle into our karma. Während wir uns in das Tashin und in unser Karma hinein niederlassen. Und wie werden denn jetzt die nächsten drei Tage? Ich habe jetzt einen vierten extra hinzugetan. Also wie werden die nächsten vier Tage? Denk bitte nicht drüber nach. Thank you very much.

[35:13]

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