Do you know the RCA emblem for the Radio Corporation of America, RCA? Yeah, they have a little dog sitting with a speaker. That's what I feel, like a little dog and I'm waiting for my speakers. Hi. Yeah, one of the things... Oh, hi. Ach, hallo. Yeah, one of the things I'm... trying to deepen my own understanding of... and your understanding of... and to... increase the awareness of its possibilities, still an unknown topic, and make it clearer what part it has in our practice.

[01:28]

Is orality an oral culture? Now I'm going to speak about somatic space. Isn't that the topic? This relates to this topic. Yeah. And so the prologue day is especially a day in which we can have some discussion. And although I know I feel a kind of debate and discussion going on in you as I'm speaking, And the kind of inner discussion stimulated by face-to-face teaching is part of an oral culture

[02:51]

Particularly if we share or have the same liar. In this case, the liar is our breath. But still, I'd like our seminar to not just be an inner discussion. I'm, of course, saying I hope there's some outer discussions. And so, particularly during this prologue day, I don't mind being interrupted and so forth. So, does anyone have anything they'd like to say just now? Ist hier irgendjemand, der irgendetwas gerade jetzt sagen möchte?

[04:29]

Yes. Remained a little incomplete for me when you spoke about informed non-institutionalism. I'll get there. Something about informed, but not about... I'll get there. Deutsch bitte. Yes? I have a question which doesn't relate to what we've spoken now. Is that good or not good? Well, tell me your question and then we'll all have a vote. In some sutra or somewhere it says don't have an idea of a life span. Yeah, yeah, that's right. This is the Diamond Sutra.

[05:49]

I'm translating in German. But at the same time we should be aware of our transiency or impermanence or something. That's all. Both are true. But they don't have to contradict themselves unless you think about them. Yeah, at this moment, there's no reason to have any idea of life span. In diesem Moment gibt es keinen Grund, irgendeine Vorstellung von Lebensspanne zu haben. And that no idea of lifespan just now is a presence which is also, you can feel, is simultaneously impermanent.

[06:52]

Und dieses keine Lebensspanne zu haben in diesem Moment ist impermanent. So they're only contradictory when you think about it. Okay. Anyone else? Yes. Mimi, that you, like a rolling stone, came all the way from Boulder. Yes. You said that the posture, the quality of posture will gradually... I forgot the rest of the sentence, but basically that the posture is interdependent to the experience of disaster. I'll try to repeat what you said and then I will have my question. Well, you've repeated it well enough, so go ahead.

[07:56]

Now what? What I am wondering, how do you realize the posture that will take you to this gradual learning? And I am almost a little bit asking this with the sensation, I was never told what posture, what was to be achieved, where to go, what not to do. So it is... We have to wait unless she translates it into French. What language will you translate this into? If you want, I can speak French, but... Why don't you let her say something in German? First Mimi tried to repeat what Roshi said, and then he said, that's about what he said, but tell me what your question is.

[08:58]

So my question is, how do I recognize this attitude? So the question is, where within this experience of sitting Do we learn these inner changes of posture? How do we realize this is the right posture, this is the wrong posture, this is the bad The first rule is forget about whether your posture is good or bad.

[09:59]

Die erste Regel ist, vergiss mal, kümmer dich nicht drum, was die richtige oder die falsche Haltung ist. Okay, but you know, are you speaking in general or are you speaking for yourself? Sprichst du jetzt im Allgemeinen oder sprichst du über dich selber? Also beides. Well, let's forget about in general. Now, you've been to enough seminars and been to Crestone and so forth that you have some feeling for the posture. So, at this point and in the context of which I'm speaking, You just take the best posture. Best posture you can, given the circumstances.

[11:17]

Okay, what do I mean by best posture? And this is a posture in which you can feel your energy and your awakeness, awareness. So, as I say, if you sit sort of like this, you don't feel too much energy. I'm a Buddha. A lazy Buddha. No. But if you sit up, if you find some kind of posture, that's the best you could do.

[12:18]

And right now your posture looks like the best I've ever seen it in the number of years I've known you. So you should have asked this question two or three years ago. Du hättest diese Frage ja vor zwei oder drei Jahren stellen sollen. Obviously you didn't need it, because you obviously don't need it. Also, the more subtle aspects of your question I hope we can get to as we go along. And these subtler aspects of your question, I hope to be able to address them when we continue to talk about it. The feeling is that time is very precious and to go and wonder where you don't know where you're going for six months while I have a teacher.

[13:40]

Do it in one day. That's why I'm married. So I agree with you that the posture does do the experience. And I can feel it, that it took me seven years to get to this outfit. Seven years, perhaps, where I've been wandering all over the place, going nowhere, basically. And I want to go somewhere. I mean, go somewhere is not the right word. I want to be... So I asked in connection with your friend what you mentioned, that you give the advice to sit for six months. But six months... So, how long have we been practicing together? Wonderful.

[15:00]

Wonderful. Anyway, and I've been sitting in front of you like this for seven years. Do I need to say anything else? Anyway, and if there's no lifespan, six months, what's six months? Let me just start. Someone else. Yes. I also feel that the way I treat my clients often helps me to feel the connection between my mental state and the way I treat my clients in everyday life. So for me, zazen and the form also of kin hin, they help me to, in my everyday life, to find the connection between my state of mind or state and my bodily posture.

[16:15]

Good. And you work kin hin in the office? And you go like this, Kim, in your office. Yes, I do that sometimes. But it's secret. I do it in a slightly different form. You carry a piece of paper. You carry a piece of paper. So. It's important to keep this in mind. To do this somehow through the breathing and the gathering. but to do something particular to get in this upright posture. And then I can do something through my breath. Yeah, so that's the... I would say in the language I'm trying to use, the way I'm trying to use words as terms, I would say in the position of walking, I mean the posture of walking and not the position of walking. So the four noble postures, as we talked about starting out in Rastenberg,

[17:17]

Aren't four positions, they're four postures in which you live your life. Walking, standing, sitting, reclining. And our practice is to find each of those a posture where we spend, you know, a big part of our life. In English you say, where you spend a big part, but maybe I should say, where you receive a big part of your life. Someone else. Oh, okay. I have noticed that when I develop a feeling for the zazen, it helps me to trust my feelings in everyday life, not so much to rule over the thinking, but really more to trust and trust the feeling.

[19:09]

I have discovered that through zazen, or zazen helps me in my everyday life to trust more my feelings so that I'm not so dominantly... solve things with thinking mind, but to follow or do it more by feeling. Yeah, that's good. Of course. Yeah, Janine? Okay, I heard you say the difference between Linji's lineage and Dongshan's is Linji, they hit people. Did you say that? No. It sounds like you arrived with some ideas before I started speaking. As far as carrying the stick,

[20:20]

In Zazen, it's pretty much the same in Rinzai and Soto. And I stopped using the stick in Germany because people had a much harder time with the stick here in Germany than they did in the United States. When a martial arts teacher in Haus de Stilla during Sashin burst into tears when he was hit by the stick, I thought, maybe it's going too far. There seems to be some cultural context here of discipline or something that is in the war or something.

[21:41]

So after a while, so many people said, a few people like it, but most people don't, so I stopped. And I stopped using the stick in Dokusan in America because some people took it personally. Yes? Does that what Yuditha said correspond to what you said about a tool of consciousness? I mean, that we should not apply it on everything? German, please. Does what Yuditha said correspond with what was said about the tool of consciousness? Yeah, certainly not to everything.

[23:05]

But I'll try to say something more about that as we go along. This cushion, I don't need to change it now, but it's a little too thick. I feel like I'm on a ski slope. So, okay. Yeah. Since the beginning of July I have to do much more practical things than I usually have to. And I have to admit that since that time I haven't been sitting anymore. No! I'm glad you're, this is confession here.

[24:14]

But I've tried to observe or study what happens then. When you don't sit so much. And I was able to again and again be upright in my posture in every day and to observe my breath and so on. And so I did observe though that the list which I have in my head of what I have to do got longer and longer and that happened very gradually, very slowly.

[25:18]

And especially the fear of not being able to cope with that list or those things, I couldn't get rid of through or by consciousness. The letting go gets more and more difficult when I do not sit. Yeah. Well, that's a good testimonial. No, it's true, you know. I have to speak later in the month or next month sometime to a group of businessmen from corporations, you know. This month or in a few weeks or so I have to speak to a group of business people from big companies.

[26:23]

And the difficulty is, you know, how do you say to a group of businessmen, okay, I'll show you how to do zazen, I'll come back in six months. Or I can say, you know, make your list shorter, do zazen. Or I can say, make your list shorter, do zazen. Okay. Someone else? Anybody else? Okay. So what's remarkable to me, you know, still remarkable to me after quite a few years of practicing, that how much the simple introduction of this posture into your life, how much of a difference this makes.

[27:26]

Now, when I started in the late 50s, early 60s, There was no cultural support at all for the idea that just sitting would be anything good, good for anything. And I literally used to get attacked by people I knew and friends for sitting. How can you do this when the world is suffering and there's so many people in trouble and there's so much to do?

[28:36]

How can you waste your time sitting looking at your navel? I never looked at my navel, but that's what they said. I said, well... It's 40 minutes a day and with service maybe an hour. How long did you spend in the cafe today? Oh, I was sitting talking with friends for two hours. How could you sit and talk when the world is suffering? How could you be in a cafe for two hours? That usually shut them up for a little while. I couldn't have asked how long did you watch television or something. But somehow, if I'm sitting Zazen, they think I'm wasting my time. I mean, it was a very deep feeling. I was actually discovering my time.

[29:50]

Yeah, so I needed the kind of presence, even though I had the idea, I knew about it, I had the presence, an example of Sukhiroshi, you know, And others helped me to keep sinning. But now there's a lot of explicit and implicit cultural support for it, so you're not probably going to have people saying that to you. In fact, nowadays you have people kind of apologizing, oh, you sit, you know, I wish I could sit. So that's actually a huge cultural shift in four decades.

[31:02]

Okay. But still, as I say, we can introduce this posture into one's life. And have it make a real difference in our life. Without any or much teaching, explicit teaching. Although you can say simple things like, you know, uncorrected practice, uncorrected mind.

[32:13]

well understood is a powerful teaching for the whole of one's practice. But in the beginning, it's not much more than to give one a feeling for how you do this without thinking too much. Yeah, so the basic instructions are sit still, don't scratch. Instructions. Yeah. Don't invite your thoughts to tea. Yeah, sit for a specific length of time.

[33:25]

Sit whether you want to or not. That's about all the instruction you need. I suppose it helps to have a somatic, a proprioceptive feel for another person's posture who's been sitting. And it also helps if you have a somatic, proprioceptive feeling, if you have a feeling for someone, if you have a physical understanding of a body position of someone else who can practice or knows how to do it. That also helps. A proprioceptive actually means, in a medical context, it means that ability to tell whether you're standing up straight or something like that. Also, proprioceptive in the medicine means that you...

[34:29]

But poets first and then philosophers have begun to adopt it as a word meaning something deeper than just touch. You know, we say there's eyes, ears, nose, touch, but touch doesn't have much dimension to it. And for them it means deeper touch. It means a kind of somatic field or the basic physical field of the world. So when I learned to sit from Sukhiroshi, he didn't have me come up and paw him and feel how his back was. I think he wouldn't have minded, but you know, I didn't do it.

[35:52]

He just was sitting there and I got a feel for it. Okay. So what happens if you introduce this posture into your life? First of all, there's the practical matters of doing it. How do you shorten your lists enough that you can find time to sit? So it's actually, yeah, a significant part of practice is the adjustments you have to make to your life to add this thing every day.

[36:54]

Or three to five times a week. Or seven times if you're a religious fanatic. Okay. Yeah. You're going to do it in the morning, you have to go to bed early, and so forth. And if you're just going to do it, whether you feel like it or not, healthy or sick, bad mood or good mood, That requires a certain change too.

[38:10]

You may have to drop some of your preferences. But if you only do Zazen when you feel like it, you'll not have much depth at all. It won't ever get at the structures of ego, self-referential thinking. So if you could make a decision Wenn du also eine Entscheidung treffen könntest... Come hell or high water. That sounds like New Orleans. Do you have expressions like that? Komme was möge. Auf Englisch heißt es möge Hölle oder Überschwemmung kommen.

[39:14]

Das klingt wie New Orleans. Whatever. I'm going to get up every morning for the next year and do Zazen. Ganz egal. Ich werde jeden Morgen... If I'm sick with a burning headache, I crawl across the floor, get myself in the posture. My back is, you know, I stay at least a little while. Such a decision really changes things. It somehow starts making everything else pivot around this strange decision. And also, for some reason, sitting begins, I don't know how else to say it, but to balance the three minds you're born with.

[40:46]

Now again, I'm sorry to point out the obvious, but the three minds you're born with are waking, dreaming, and non-dreaming deep sleep. And they're quite separate for most of us. We know something about our dreams, but not that much. We know nothing about non-dreaming deep sleep. It's where consciousness doesn't reach. But we're alive. It's part of our life. But it's a part of our life we reach only in deep sleep. I often feel sad when somebody tells me they sleep with sleeping pills because I'm sure that the sleeping pills don't allow deep, non-dreaming deep sleep.

[42:13]

And I'm always sad when I hear that someone says he or she would only sleep with sleeping pills. Because I'm very sure, or at least pretty sure, that under these sleeping conditions you can't get to this deep, non-dreaming sleep. Okay. So somehow, and I can't, I'm not, I mean, I can just state this as I, as far as I can tell, this is a way to describe what happens. Is that through sitting regularly, And sitting, whether you want to or not, outside the preferences of self.

[43:20]

The proportion, the proportionate relationships, the balance. between among these three minds that we're born with, improves. There's some kind of integration. And very clearly, consciousness waking consciousness, the emphasis on waking consciousness gets less. Or we could say waking mind becomes less dominated by consciousness.

[44:23]

Or by discursive thinking. Now, of course, I don't know. I can't tell what the implications or feel for the words you're translating, the words you're using in German. But clearly there'd be a problem for many people for me to say waking mind is less dominated by consciousness. But of course there will be many difficulties when I say, Because commonly in English, if you're awake, you're conscious.

[45:43]

Now, if you're just introducing this posture into your life, you'll discover that you you'll discover what I'm talking about and you don't need to have words for it. But the words for it are actually useful. Because the words, if we have some subtleness in our practice, The words can help us notice and strengthen the dimensions of practice. Something like that. So I'm trying to use words in that way.

[47:06]

Okay. So I suppose, I have to, because there's a lot, because to say, waking mind, not dominating mind, there's maybe two main ideas that have to be pointed out in that. One is that mind has structure. A state or a mode of mind. tends to be homeostatic and self-organizing. And again, I'm sorry to bother you with this, but like when you're dreaming, Like when you're dreaming.

[48:17]

Dreaming wants to stay dreaming. It wants to ignore the alarm clock. That means a particular mode of mind will try to sustain itself, be homeostatic. And it will tend to be self-organizing. It will decide the alarm clock is a telephone. It doesn't have to answer. Der Geisteszustand wird so tun, als ob der Wecker zum Beispiel ein Telefonklingeln im Traum ist. So if you're simply angry, you have an angry state of mind which will tend to see everything in terms of that mind.

[49:20]

Also wenn man dazu neigt, ein wütender oder ärgerlicher Mensch zu sein, dann wird dieser Zustand darum bemüht sein, So the techniques of traditional mindfulness practice is not to interfere with or block the anger. But to create a territory, a mind territory, a mental territory, separate from the anger. And Donna is simply saying, oh, now I'm angry. Now I'm really angry. Now I'm less angry. It's a simple technique that creates state of mind and mode of mind separate from the anger.

[50:42]

And when you get good at it, it absorbs the anger. The mind of observing the anger is bigger than the mind of anger. So Buddhism assumes states particular modes of mind are homeostatic and self-organizing. So Buddhism assumes states particular modes of mind are homeostatic and self-organizing. And waking mind is usually dominated by the structures of a mind we can call consciousness.

[51:42]

Wake mind is usually dominated by consciousness. Yes, by the structures of a mind we call consciousness. And I'm sorry, I really apologize for keeping reminding you of these distinctions. Maybe it's useful to be reminded of them. But we have to have a general shared views here or we can't go forward. So that The function or job of consciousness is to present us with, show us a predictable, cognizable, chronological world. Okay.

[52:55]

One second. So I'm looking at something. I'm walking along in my apartment. I'm heading downstairs. We have a green glass, beautiful green glass dish. Yeah, kind of dish, yeah. Yeah, made by some Danish glassmaker or something. Yeah, and it's quite nice. I like it. So as I walk by it, the sun is shining through it. Okay. It's quite pretty the way the sun is coming out.

[54:14]

Okay, now, if I stop and really feel this It turns into some kind of star with streaks going out. Okay, so then I decide to let the star, the star appears and disappears. No, the star appears and disappears. One way of looking at it is just a little point of light.

[55:16]

Another way of looking at it, it's like a star. Now, I notice that if I I can find a physical feeling where it stays a star. And almost immediately it will go back into being just a spot of light. But if I settle this state of mind that sees the star into my breathing, so in a way I discover a state of mind that can

[56:18]

which supports seeingness as a star? So in a sense I tune my mind or something like that until it's a star. But I can only sustain that state of mind if I bring it into my breath. Okay. So I discover then I can just stand there and it's a star filling the room. Well, I mean, it's exaggeration to say filling the room, but it feels sort of like that.

[57:43]

And everything else suddenly is bright with the sun and kind of luminosity. And everything else suddenly is bright with the sun and kind of luminosity. This is not consciousness. It's being awake. But it's not consciousness in that the world is not at this moment predictable. There's no lifespan. I think in terms of lifespan, whoops, a little spot of light. And yeah, it's not exactly knowable. I can't say I know it. I can experience it, but I can't say I know this. Luminosity.

[58:58]

I feel it. It's not sequential. It's just there at this moment. But once I have this state of mind, or I say use this spot of light to tune in a particular state of mind, a particular mode of mind. I use this spot of light to tune into a particular mode of mind. And I stay in this mind, this particular breath mind, And then I just go downstairs. I run in, I walk, I see Yedita. And she says, he's much nicer than he was this morning.

[60:24]

And I see this star called Judita. Well, it's something like this. And one we can say is consciousness. Which is organizing this awareness into something predictable, thinkable, etc. So one thing that Zazen does is begin to make wakefulness less dominated by consciousness. Well, I didn't get very far this morning. We're still beginning Zazen practice. And when are we supposed to have lunch? 12.45, right? And I've learned to follow a schedule, more or less, whether I want to or not.

[61:47]

So let's sit for a moment. It's okay.

[61:49]

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