I don't know if I like these one-day practice time. You know, I'm very strong in resisting attachments, but I don't resist entirely. And I'm getting attached to all of you. And especially those of you who haven't seen for so long. So I would rather that we're meeting tomorrow too, so I could kind of resist my attachments tomorrow instead of today. Okay, is there anything you particularly like me to speak about, for us to speak about? Please say something or forever hold your peace.

[01:03]

You have that expression in German? I've been trying to speak about basic basics, but within the basic basics there's quite a lot of more advanced teaching required. or advanced practice required. For example, naming only is a very basic Theravadan practice. And on the one hand, Zen practice is considered the most Theravadan of the Mahayana schools.

[02:26]

But it's also the most like, in Tibetan practice, the Mahamudra and Dzogchen teachings. Okay, so naming only is something that's fairly easy to do. And you just practice a very simply naming and seeing if you can go from name to name without thinking. Which tends to locate you in a means. Okay. Now, there's another practice which is very similar, called Hishiryo in Japanese. In the last few months I've been, I don't know, half a year, I don't know how long, I've been speaking about this word Hishiryo.

[03:57]

And it's usually translated as non-thinking. And it's the turning phrase in a very famous koan. But just to call it non-thinking, you know, there's thinking, there's no thinking, there's non-thinking. I mean, it doesn't give us any entry, any purchase, purchase. On a practice? Purchase is like, do your feet feel the floor? Do you have a way to take hold of something? So I've been trying over some years, because Dogen, for instance, good old Dogen, says, hysteria may be the single most important, significant word in Zen practice. And Hishiryo literally means, the etymology of it means, unmeasured thinking.

[05:13]

So I've been trying over some years to find words that give us a purchase on the practice, a hold on the practice that we can bring attention to. And I've, after some years of trying it myself, I've come up with a very simple phrase, notice without thinking about. And again, this is a bodiness practice, a physiological practice. And it only has a purchase on you, a hold on, an effect and affect on you if you repeat it.

[06:42]

I like it when you struggle, because I don't know what you're saying, but I feel the struggling. Okay. So, and you can just, again, like these, it's useful just to practice it mechanically. I noticed that lamp between the windows back there. Ich bemerke die Lampe zwischen den Fenstern dahinten. And I see it, like stopping, I notice, and I just don't think about it.

[07:55]

I just notice. I let it, I feel the noticing of it, but I don't think about it. So here like naming I could name and name but now I'm not going to name I'm just going to notice. So this isn't really, although it sounds very similar, it's not just a naming that cuts off thinking. It's a noticing, I sometimes spell K-N-O-W-T-I-C-R-N-G, connoticing. Like gno, so I connotice. And connoticing awakens a knowing which isn't consciousness.

[09:15]

And so if you, again, as much as possible, To notice. Without thinking about it. Now, why I call this a more advanced practice than naming only, because it's really rooted in Dharma appearance. Okay, what is a Dharma? Maybe the simplest example to give you is a musical note.

[10:16]

And I've talked to musicians about this. So a note has a beginning... A duration and an end. And the four marks of a dharma are birth, duration, dissolution and disappearance. And this is a kind of Dharma surgery. You're performing a surgical operation on the continuum of consciousness. Okay, you're noticing that there's a starting point.

[11:25]

Everything's changing, so there's a starting point. And in a way, you arbitrarily, through your senses and thinking, establish a starting point. Wait. Through your senses and your... Everything else. Okay. So... Generally, there's an overlapping blur of continuity. Everything's changing, but it blurs, smudges into a single string. . Alles ist in einem Strom und verschmiert sich der Kontinuität.

[12:47]

Okay, so it looks like this room is sitting here, and you're sitting in this room. Sieht so aus, als ob dieses Zimmer hier steht. But from a physicist's point of view, it's appearing and disappearing, but so fast that it's just here. And the brain's job is to make it look like it's all happening. But actually, not only is it on some physical level, a physicist, a constant reappearance of molecules, particles, so forth. But in fact your perceptual process is also a process of moment-by-moment scanning. And visually, it's called saccadic scanning.

[14:05]

And a rather brilliant or innovative or creative French scientist, ophthalmologist maybe or something, in the 1870s or so, discovered this simply by putting a mirror beside his eyes and watching himself look at things. And he watched and he was actually scanning. It wasn't continuous. It was a continuous momentary scanning. And an innovative or creative perhaps optician, a French optician or scientist, noticed this by simply holding a mirror next to his eyes and watching how he looked at something. And then he noticed that he was not continuously It's like a camera, a movie film, you know, or whatever. It's really just a series of still shots run together and it looks like it's moving.

[15:21]

But what you're really receiving sensorially is a bunch of still shots. And your brain is saying, I was born in Hollywood and I'm going to make it look like a movie. So it looks like a movie. Somewhere along the line, some kind of crazy Buddhist or crazy Indian guy Or just discovered. Gary Schneider's idea is hunters discovered it because they had to sit still and wait for the animal.

[16:26]

And they began to know, they could feel the animal appearing before it appeared. Today's hunters even have experience like this. And Gary Snyder, the poet, believes that hunters actually discovered it, because the hunters have to sit still for hours and wait for the animal to appear. And then they feel the appearance of the animal before they can see it. And nowadays the hunters still report it. Gary's academic training is actually as an anthropologist. And his theory is he's also a Zen practitioner. One of the Dharma bums. In Jack Kerouac's book. In the book he's Jaffee Ryder. Okay, so one of Gary's theories is that waiting for the animal and having to be still in order to survive by hunting, and not agriculture yet,

[17:45]

And one of Gary's theories is that while hunting and while you're waiting for the animal, where you have to stay completely still all the time so that you can survive the hunt and where there was no attack yet. That stillness introduced you to a world where you knew something about the plants and animals and so forth that you didn't know consciously. And some of those hunters were better at it than others. And the sandrish who were really better at it sort of turned into shamans. Because they not only knew more about moose and mammoths than other people. Asian. Okay. One of those guys.

[18:59]

They also knew more about other human beings. So people, man, going to them for advice and so forth, hey, let's call you a shaman, you're a medicine man. And the Buddhists came along, or proto-Buddhists came along and said, well, we don't have to hunt to do this, we just have to sit still. And the proto-Buddhists came along and said, okay, we don't have to hunt to do this, we just have to sit still. But requires to do this practice at the level where it really changes you.

[20:00]

And I will finish in a moment. Let some of you have to go. You have to begin to notice appearance. and we see it as a continuous moving. So you have to bring yourself surgically into seeing dharmas. So you begin to feel sensorially when you can feel a beginning. It just can be looking at you. That's a beginning. I'm not going to shift to Sylvia. That's another beginning. And you can practice it just mechanically like this. Yeah, so this thing in front of me, which I don't even want to call your, just something's there.

[21:19]

I feel the presence. And then practicing this, I shift to Sylvia. And I let you disappear. You're gone. I'm sorry, York. And I only feel Sylvia. Okay, now I go back to York. Now, if I hadn't done that, I'd think York is the same person before and after. And actually, when I go back to Jörg, he's a slightly different person. He's heard my words, he's understood them, or felt himself react to them in ways that makes his facial expression, his whole face is slightly different.

[22:21]

So I no longer have my brain telling me it's the same old yord, it's actually different yord, teachable. I mean I'm really talking what I've actually experienced. So I've known many Jogs over the years. And I like all of them, actually. I'm impressed with all of them. Okay. So... So you begin to notice appearance. And now there's another surgical process here.

[23:24]

This is a basic teaching here. And it's what's called the five dharmas. And dharma says, the five dharmas, the first one is appearance. The second is naming. The third is discrimination. And the fourth is wisdom. And the fifth is suchness. Okay, you just internalize those. And you begin to notice something you're going to call appearance, a beginning. And it has a duration that you start to name. Just like the four marks, it has a duration and you start to name it. And then you study. You can feel the difference between the appearance and the naming. And you begin to go back and feel like turning from page 100 back to page 99 and back to page 100 again.

[24:33]

You begin to feel the difference between the appearance and the naming. And then it helps to have a developed attentional stream. And then you notice naming leads into discrimination, thinking about it. And then you notice, oh, I won't turn that page. I'll turn it back to just name. And then that's called wisdom or right knowledge. And you can even fold it back to appearance.

[25:38]

And you have appearance only, and that's it.

[25:40]

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