Good evening. Thank you for being here. And most of you, or many of you, were here for the prologue day. And we... ended sort of thinking about the ingredients of mind. And I won't try to define the ingredients. But a list, you know, the ones we happened to mention just a little while ago, before dinner.

[01:10]

Yeah, there are words which you're, you know, they're English words, you know them, sort of. I said they're English words. Yeah, but the Germans won't say a word. Yeah, if they're translated. Okay. Yeah, so they will suggest, yeah, territories, possibilities. These... territories or differences we notice, but the effort to translate them is really our practice. And maybe we can try to translate or define.

[02:23]

We'll definitely try to translate. And we may try to define some of them during this time together. So, I don't know, what did I mention? We were talking about a state of mind like anger, for example. Then the state of mind you create by noticing the anger. So you've gone from one to two things. If you have two things, then you have a relationship between them, probably. And if everything's an activity and not an entity, And that's what Buddhism means by everything changes.

[03:28]

Now that's a good example. You can hear in our Western way of thinking everything changes. But you don't hear that there are no entities, there's only activity. So if you have two things and they're two activities, there's a relationship. And in fact, one of the frontiers or edges of physics in the last 10, 20 years Starting with Bell's theorem back in, I don't know, the 70s? With Bell? It was a man named Bell, and he proposed a theorem which everyone joked about first, but now it's pretty much accepted.

[04:51]

Yeah, but if you have two particles that go off like this, and they're 30-some miles apart, if you affect one, you affect the other instantly. There's no time between the two effects. And so now there's a science, a physics sort of called, I guess called entanglement, that all atoms and molecules are entangled in some way. And now there's another new theory in science called... I think it's the ancient Vasudhimagga which starts with everything's a tangle.

[05:51]

You're in a tangle. We're all in a tangle. Who's going to untangle this tangle? Who says that? It's a text called the Vasudhimagga. Vasudhi Maga. There is a text, an ancient text, Vasudhi Maga, and he says, everything is... Can you say it again, what it says? Everything is in a tangle. What do you call that, entangled? Entangled, but the tangle is like an orderly. Strict. Strict is good. Strict, yes. I should have known that. Everything is strict. Yeah, everything's in a tangle. You're in a tangle, I'm in a tangle. Who is going to untangle this tangle? Anyway, that's the idea that Bodhisattva practice is a practice of untangling this tangle.

[06:53]

Or just accepting the tango. Isn't it a dance that takes two to tango? No. I'm off to a bad start on fire. Yeah. But if everything is an activity, probably everything is in some ways entangled. Okay. How are we entangled? On what molecular or atomic or subatomic level Well, actually this is just one field of particles.

[08:17]

Yeah, and some of the particles clustered into molecular bumps and then us. So what kind of connection is there? If we are somehow entangled, it's not conscious. Or maybe we can make it a bit conscious, but it's really not conscious. Okay. So we were speaking about consciousness and awareness.

[09:19]

And Well, if we are entangled, if it's known in any way, our body is participating in it. Our mind and body, these minds and bodies, ours, these, anyway, minds and bodies are participating in it. Körper und Geiste nehmen daran teil.

[10:20]

But is there knowing of it? Gibt es aber davon ein Wissen? Okay. So I go back to my list of ingredients. Also jetzt nochmal zurück zu meiner Liste von Bestandteilen. So we've got an angry mind and we've got a space of observing it. And then we have a relationship between the two, now that we've got two. So now we've got three. Then what else we have? Yeah, I've said we have not only the contents of mind, we have the field of mind. That's where we're living and thinking. And then we have consciousness. And I said, waking mind that is larger than consciousness.

[11:30]

And then we have what I call awareness, then we have a little dispute about that. A pointed comment. Okay. And then, yeah, then we have dreaming mind, non-dreaming, deep sleep, and so forth. And then we have the body. All of this somehow happens in or within or through the body. Yeah. Yeah, Dogen makes clear, he won't say we have a body, we are a body. There's no mind without a body.

[12:35]

Well, is that true? Well, there's no experienceable mind without a body. But maybe there's no mind without a body. But maybe there's some mind here that is generated by all our bodies. Okay, so I'm trying to start us out wondering about, thinking about the topic somatic space. And I want to, on this weekend, find with you, or through you, some way we join in a contemplation about this.

[14:03]

And I'm using the word contemplation just because it was used in medieval times in Europe. About the time the vocabulary, I mean the alphabet was invented and words were separated into separate units and so forth. And there was a lot of fear, from what I've read, fear at that time that this was going to destroy contemplation. What would destroy the contemplation? The alphabet. Because the alphabet would allow you to create a written language which you could read and didn't have to speak and share with others in immediate presence.

[15:39]

And it allowed you to think through symbols, signs. And there was a fear that people would stop thinking through the body. And they said, you know, somewhat the same thing that people said when scientists, I think, in some ways stupidly invented nuclear power. And this is just my own pet. Or my own personal profound irritation. Because if you make guns, everyone will have a gun.

[16:54]

That's just the way it is. And there's a house in California called the Winchester House. And it was the widow of Mr. Winchester who invented the Winchester repeating rifle, I guess you could say. And she had a lot of money, of course. And she built a house and she kept adding rooms. With stairs that went nowhere. Because she felt pursued by all the people who had been killed by Winchester right. And what's the source of the Nobel Peace Prize? Mr. Nobel has gunpowder sold to all sides. And I'm virtually sure that nuclear weapons will be exploded in European and American cities in the next 20 or 30 years.

[18:28]

You know, if you make it, everyone's going to have nuclear weapons and that's happening now. So I don't blame greed, hate, and delusion. I blame the scientists who didn't see the point, what would happen. Yeah, my father and older brother were involved in all this, and You know, it was a job. No, I got into that. I'm sorry for mentioning all that.

[19:44]

But it's interesting to me, they had the same concern that we're going to lose the ability of body thinking, of subtle thinking, if we create an alphabetized language. Sie hatten den gleichen Bedenken, dass man körperliches Denken verliert, wenn man ein alphabetisiertes Schreiben oder Sprache entwickelt. Okay, I would say that Buddhism, Zen in particular, except this alphabetized or... as an Asia character-based language. As inevitable and so, but how in the midst of this do you keep an oral culture alive? In other words, how do you keep a body-based culture alive?

[20:54]

Mit anderen Worten, wie kann man eine Kultur, die auf dem Körper beruht, am Leben erhalten? I'm just trying to make us think about some things tonight, I guess. Also ich möchte hier einfach ein paar Sachen herausbringen, damit wir sie bemerken und vielleicht darüber nachdenken. And Plato, you know, one of the famous things we know about Plato is he didn't want poets, didn't want an oral culture. You couldn't control the culture that people knew in their body. And how do we most commonly use the word somatic? We use it in the word psychosomatic. And what does psychosomatic mean?

[22:19]

Almost always it means physical illness caused by the mind or influenced by the mind. No, we don't think of psychosomatic as a word to describe a blissed out Buddha. Yeah, the mind is radiating through the body, but no, it must be sick. So you see the bias in our own culture about the mind influencing the body? It's usually illness. It's interesting, in India, I think it is soma meant psychedelic mushrooms.

[23:19]

And it's funny, in India the word Soma means psychedelic fungus. And I should have brought my teaching staff down. I have a teaching staff of which the top of it is the mushroom that is called Soma. So we talked about the three birth minds. Waking, dreaming, non-dreaming, deep sleep. And as minds, they're quite separate. But what joins them?

[24:52]

They're not too easily joined by consciousness. But they're already joined as our body. It's our body that thinks, dreams. and deeply sleeps. Now this was noticed a very long time ago in India, long before Buddhism. And they had the question, once you see, hey, here's these parts, Und die hatten diese Frage. Und das ist klar, wenn man einmal diese Bestandteile sieht. And you look at it very simply. Und man das auf ganz einfache Weise betrachtet.

[25:55]

If you look at the basic ideas of Freud or Darwin, they're very simple. But when you see the implications, they've changed our world. Auch Ideen von Freud und Darwin, der grundlegende Gedanke ist etwas sehr Einfaches, aber ihre... Implikation hat unser Leben, unsere Welt verändert. So you've got these three, what I call birth, the minds we're born with. Und wir haben also diese drei Geiste, mit denen wir geboren wurden, die uns angeboren sind. And at the level of consciousness, they're quite separate. Und auf der Ebene des Bewusstseins sind das recht getrennte Dinge. So then the question comes, how can we... They're known by the body. Or they are the body. So is there any way we can enter into the body and open up into these three minds?

[27:12]

Gibt es irgendeine Weise, wie wir in den Körper hinein gelangen können und dann uns öffnen in diese drei hinein? That's a definition of sasen. Und das ist eine Definition von sasen. You don't know how to do it, so you sit down and wait. Du weißt nicht, wie es geht? Am I opening up yet? you don't know how to do it because you can't figure it out consciously. But if you're in an oral culture, and as I said earlier, if you know the lyre of the breath, And you know the contemplation and you know the thinking through the body.

[28:13]

Now we can look really quite simply at this famous Yao Shan or Yue Shan statement. Who lived, what, about 750 to 830 or something like that? A little while ago, but really no time ago. It's just as real then as now as then. Then as now. We are this protoplasmic field now continued. And, you know, we're what?

[29:19]

Mumps, definitions in a protoplasmic field. And we're dropping these ideas into it. So, Yao Shan is asked... by the proverbial monk. There's always one around to ask questions. When you're in steadfast sitting, steadfast? Steadfast means you can't be moved and fast means you can't be moved. Steady and held firm. Wenn du in standfesten... Meditation, right? When you're in steadfast sitting. Wenn du in standfesten sitzt. That's very funny. We say steadfast is from standing and then you say it to sitting.

[30:22]

Wenn ihr standhaft sitzt. Okay. Standhaft sitzt. Is that right? What do you think? And Yue Shan says, think non-thinking. So the monk asks, you know, a real question. How do you think non-thinking? So he says, beyond thinking. But we don't really know. Does the word thinking in Chinese mean mental activity or does it mean discursive thinking? Maybe Dieter and I can look at it later, but it doesn't make that much difference for right now. Because these people who were worried about the alphabet destroying the mutually generated culture they had.

[31:36]

Who said, even if we use an alphabet, we can still do the deeper thinking of contemplation. The critics said that. No, the people who helped create it, their excuse was, but we can still do the deeper thinking of contemplation. And those who have developed the alphabet have said, yes, although we develop this alphabet, we can still do this deeper contemplation. But very soon this deeper thinking, this sense of it was lost. So most translators And most people who translate this to thinking non-thinking, Dogen uses it.

[32:49]

Say, we don't know what this means. But I think right now, already now, you can have a feeling that it means what it means. And if you do zazen, and you do it regularly, You will have had the experience of it changing your life. And I again ask the question, how does a posture change your life? Shall I go to college or shall I, you know, sit in cross-legged for four years? I think the answer is obvious.

[34:03]

I mean, if you're going to really look at what your life is going to be and how intimate you are going to be within your own life and how deeply satisfied you'll be, there's no question. Maybe we can do both. Well... Yes, sometimes. Paul decided he couldn't do both. So he dropped out of his Buddhist study program and crossed his legs and hoped to die. And look at him now. Professor Rosenglum. Okay. Now in the ninth century in Germany, the Benedictine monks spent about a generation trying to transform German into a vessel for the holy language of Latin scriptures.

[35:47]

So they could express the Benedictine rule in German. So they could pour the scriptures, the holy scriptures, into German. So they tried to create a German vocabulary parallel enough to Latin so it could be a vehicle for the scripture. Sie haben also versucht, ein deutsches Vokabular zu entwickeln, das parallel zu dem Lateinischen bestehen konnte, um dann den Inhalt aus dem Lateinischen ins Deutsche übertragen zu können.

[36:54]

I don't know, obviously, I don't know German, so does German have a lot of Latin-based words in it? Latinate words or something? It has. With similar roots or something? No, no. It has Latin-based words. I don't have to ask Christian or Dieter. But they're not the words you feel physically comfortable with. I see. So when we translate you, we can often use the English word and pronounce it, the Latin English word, pronounce it German. You can understand it, but you don't feel it so well. I see. Okay. Is that something like that, right? Okay. I don't know. Yeah, okay. But in the church... Could you open a window back there, please? I couldn't quite hear. She said that in the church they used Latin for a long time. Oh, yes, I know.

[37:59]

Only, yes. Okay. Now, we have a similar problem. Except we're pouring Sanskrit and Chinese and Japanese and English and German together. No, we can't do that. But what we are trying to do is find out in our own experience through meditation and mindfulness practice. To find terms that we can... through which we can speak about meditation practice. So, I mean, the title for tonight is Somatic Space.

[39:10]

It's like that. We're trying to take somatic out of psychosomatic. And speak about some kind of mutually generated space. Now we do know, and I think it's been measured in real time, as I've said, that the mother's nervous system, more complex nervous system, regulates the infant's less complex nervous system. So if the infant and the mother and the infant's nervous system develops and learns to regulate itself through the mother's nervous system.

[40:32]

And we all know how to do that. We've done that once. Okay. Maybe we do it all the time. Some version of that. And it seems also, again, through the work of Alan Shore, that the right brain regulates, is the basis for all body-to-body communication. The right hemisphere brain is for the communication between? regulates or the basis for body-to-body communication.

[41:42]

And our language system and way we think gives primacy to the left brain which controls the right side. Okay. But meditation... Hey, hey, we didn't translate. I know. You thought you wanted more. No, I can do it, but I'm not from that left-right brain. I know, it's kind of dumb, but let's use it. Okay, the right brain regulates the left side. And it's the left side or the right side of the brain which supposedly is responsible for body-to-body communication. Usually in our culture, after about two years old, the left brain is dominant. In whatever way that's true, and to the extent that it's true, it's clear to me and I'm sure that meditation practice makes the right brain dominant.

[43:02]

We're really changing things when we meditate. At least if you meditate regularly and so forth. If you meditate with the regularity, but not as much as you sleep, you'll transform yourself. Then what happens? If you do that regularly, you get to be a really nice person. Your spouse might not think so. We'll continue. We'll say it again some other way. And we need to find words in order to mature our practice in the West.

[44:27]

We need some words for these things. So I could just say mind-body or body-mind. But... Yeah, maybe somatic space causes some space and soma put together. Can I speak to you with my body in a way that enters your somatic and not discursive space? Sorry. Can you? And feel this space with each person you meet, strangers and friends alike.

[45:35]

And personality and the structures of consciousness are secondary. And if you do body work, you get to know, you have a feeling for this. But is there some kind of somatic space? It's right here now that we feel it. And could we say that Sangha is some kind of mutually generated somatic space in which the teacher's teaching is most likely to bear fruit? So what does the teaching outside the scriptures mean? It does simply mean teacher-to-teacher lineage. It does not necessarily.

[46:53]

It doesn't just mean that. It means the Sangha to the Sangha, Sangha to the teacher, the teacher, etc., lineage. In these Zen stories, even if they were put together in the Sung Dynasty, about the time dynasty, They still, I think, accurately represent, in the way they present, that this is happening in a Sangha context, not just two people. It's accurate. Now, in Japanese, you have words like kiga-aru and kiga-suru. Kiga-suru. And suru, kiga-suru, just means do-ki. And it's a word that means to think or feel.

[48:19]

And ki means ki or chi. We don't have a word for it. You could translate energy, but it would be better to call it bodily aliveness. So the word for thinking and feeling in Japanese is something like doing bodily aliveness. No. If our word for thinking meant doing bodily aliveness, we'd have a different attitude about a lot of things. Yeah. And kiga aru, to have ki, to have bodily aliveness, means to be interested, to be concerned.

[49:41]

So we need words like this. that open us into practice more easily. And if we can do it in a generation like the Benedictine monks, I can't do that joke. The Benedictine monks? In any case, if we can do it in a generation, it would be great. I'm older than a generation already. So let's take as a challenge or a basis for this seminar to see if you can bring or discover bodily aliveness in everything you do for the next two days.

[51:32]

Yeah, I probably should stop. Let's explore this together in the next days. Thanks.

[51:43]

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