Now I've been trying to speak about the mutual space of mind and phenomena for decades now. When I have spoken, you know, as a way to kind of get started, because here we are, separate and yet not separate, I would speak about space connects. Yeah. and to create some dissonance with our usual idea that space separates. So the dissonance became an edge. And then I would speak about already connected. And using, in this case, the mental activity and mental focus possible through words, like already connected, to try to bring attention into this immediacy.

[01:19]

And again, already connected is working with the dissonance of we're not already connected and our habits of thinking we have to establish connection. And it's very different to not think you have to establish connection, to assume the connection is already there. Now that's a really big shift, that's an enlightenment shift or at least a satori or kensho shift if you really get free of the idea the connection is not there and you assume automatically the connection is there this is you actually this is one of the doors to a different world now i'm responding to uh in this day show to uh yeah everything we've been doing of course but in specific to uh this morning i asked Craig and Dan, what shall I talk about?

[02:24]

What do you want in Teisho today? And of course they had immediate suggestions. Craig said, can you talk more about how embodiment, how we practice embodiment or how embodiment is the immediacy or immediate situation or something like that. And Dan wanted me to speak about more of this weaving of dreaming mind and in our activity. Now the whole question of dreaming mind, I think we have to wait till we're ready for another installment. We've had three installments, that's enough, isn't it? It's all paid for. But I can say that normally on every moment There's mem signs, right? Memory signs, mem signs, I call it, in which we know this is a door, say, and that the door handles usually at a certain height and blah, blah, blah.

[03:29]

So we function through, even if you're not discursively thinking, we function through these signs, mem signs, which tell us what the world is. Now, there's also, we could say, dream signs. And I think I shouldn't say dreaming mind so much. I should say dreamtime mind now, dreamtime mind. Because while mem signs tell us it's a door, dream signs, I don't know what word to use yet, tell us it's all the doors we've ever walked through. And we know that immediately if we take some Rumi's poem, I don't remember how it goes, but I've knocked on that ancient door, knocked on that ancient door, and finally, when it opened, I found I was on the other side. I was already on the other side. That's the door of all the doors of dreams and so forth.

[04:30]

Now, situated immediacy is another way of saying already connected. But I'm trying in recent years, I'm trying to not speak so much metaphor, not emphasize the metaphoric, although the metaphoric particularly enclosed in, encased in, not yet embodied in perhaps a phrase A phrase, as I've said, with an implicit dissonance built into it, but basically still a metaphoric practice, can open up experience. But there's a limitation to how you can use metaphor. So now I'm trying to find experiential ways to speak about this, because there's no doubt

[05:37]

But enlightenment and realization are connected with, are most deeply expressed through the experience of the mutual space of mind and phenomena. That's why the Dharmakaya Buddha, the highest Buddha, if we call it the highest Buddha, the Buddha that you can't even offer incense to because there's no location, that's the Buddha's space. Or this staff. What's this staff? I've told you many, many times we have the lotus pod and bud and lotus pod, rather, and the lotus embryo. And where is the embryo? In my hand. This is a metaphor. In my hand. It fits right in the palm. It's designed to fit right in the palm of the hand. Hey, must be some meaning to that.

[06:42]

But again, as you know, two stems. Two stems represents not only the backbone, but in this case, it represents the two streams or two channels of the chakras. So this is some kind of, represents some kind of subtle body. But, as you know, I've told you of it, in the Kuan Yin there, in the Kuan Yin back, in the Kananda and so forth. So here, where is the blossom? Above the muddy water. And Buddha himself said something supposedly, something like, somebody asked if he was, I don't know, sage or something. He said, I'm a I'm one who sits or lives like the lotus above the water. So the blossom, as I've pointed out often, of course is us looking at it.

[07:50]

We make the blossom. The blossom's implied, but you have to make it. And who stands on the blossom? The Buddha. So the whole sense is, if you make the blossom, the Buddha appears standing on the blossom. Now, this is actually, on some intuitive level, deeply physiological, neurobiologically intentional, or something like that. Because if you look at, as a neuroscientist would look at the brain, say, nowadays they can do all these things, is if you look at the human brain, the entire body of the human, of the entire actual physical body is represented in the brain.

[08:52]

But it's not the shape of the actual human body, physical body. It's not the topography of the human body. For example, there's a great deal of the brain is devoted to the fingertips. And a great deal of the brain is devoted to the mouth. But very little of the brain is devoted to the large area of the skin of the back. So the shape of the body in the brain That makes sense. The configuration of the body and the brain is very different than our physical body. It does influence us. We walk around the world looking at phenomena as if it were a glove. The fingertips of our brain are saying, we are working. Oh, what can we eat? Tongue and the mouth respond. So the shape of the body, let's put it simply in the brain, is not the shape of the body, the actual physical, the externalized body.

[10:05]

So it's very easy for us to mostly think mentally and think through and make use of the shape of the body and the brain, but not the actual physical shape of the body. Now, I would say that what we're trying to do in practice is the senses bring lots of information from phenomena, as phenomena means the world as perceived through the senses, the word means, etymologically. But anyway, all of this material, all this information, fingertips, mouth, eyes, ears, nose, all that sensory information is brought into the body. I mean brought into the brain through the senses. And then we think about it and function, blah, blah, blah. I would say practice is something like reversing that or adding to that movement back through the senses to phenomena.

[11:18]

Okay, what do I mean by that? Well, if I'm walking to the altar, like I just did, I'm walking, actually, in my brain's mental representation of the space. Okay. So basically, I'm creating, I'm walking within the mental representation, and as I walk in that mental representation, it's actualized by phenomenon itself, agreeing, yes, your mental representation is pretty good. Okay.

[12:25]

So in fact, when I walk in this room, I'm making this room. The room's there waiting for me to make it. But through my mental activity and sensorial activity and physical activity, physical activity, I then actualize the room. Now, a lot of that is assumed in practice. It's one of the reasons when you come to Doksan, you bow to the room. You think you're coming to see me. I mean, I don't know. Maybe I shouldn't be there sometimes. Once I had a big statue, a life-size statue that's now the main figure in Green Gulch, a little bigger than life-size, actually. And I had to, until I figured out what to do with it, I had one end of the doksan room, and new people would come in, sometimes they'd start bowing to the statue. They'd be so kind of nervous and not squinting and not looking.

[13:31]

They'd look up and I'd say, I'm back here. So they bowed to their mental representation. Okay, so I think if I could stop there, and I would like you to imagine or feel yourself walking in your own mental representation and feel it being actualized by phenomena. If you do that, you're going to find a certain kind of pace, which is one of the things we mean by embodiment. You're literally embodying the space by actualizing the space through your actions. So again, when you come to doksan, you...

[14:32]

And every room is different. Doksana is done not by some rule, it's a general rule, I mean general attitude, but it's shaped by the architecture. And, you know, I saw a few, the way one does Doksana is somewhat different. So here we come down the hall. Come to the room, whoa, the situation, part of the situation. Then you turn, oh, there's somebody there. He doesn't look like a statue. And you bow to the person. And when we bow to each other, passing, you're stopping and bowing to the mutual space that you're generating. Go again. You want to practice with the feel. It's actually what's happening, so it's possible to feel it. First, you may have to imagine it. The actual feel that you're walking in a mental representation, and the spaces, the actual physical world is confirming it.

[15:45]

If you try to do in a dark, strange room, there's no light, and then you have to be more like a blind person. Sometimes, I mean, it probably happens too. Most of us, when we're in a new hotel room, sometimes the hotel room doesn't actualize your mental edge. The door isn't there. And why the toilet? You peed in the bathtub. I don't know about that. But something like that can happen. I had a roommate in college who peed in the closet. He was drunk. The doors were right beside each other. So it's something like feeling yourself in the dark without too much discursive or sensorial thinking and feeling almost maybe like a

[16:48]

If you're an architect, you can make drawings, and then the computer can open up those drawings into spatial representations from flat drawings, and you can almost feel yourself walking into them, and they have computer programs that give you that sensation, etc. But that's what you're doing, so you can feel it, and at first you have to feel it at a certain pace, like you can feel a room in the dark, Like a blind person would have to. You get a physical feeling of the space. You can get a physical feeling of that space that's actually more complex than your senses are supplying you. Supplying to you. So I'm trying to go very slowly here to talk about situated immediacy. To really bring it into our experience. Okay. Now, so you're taking this brain-body image which is different from your actual physical body.

[18:10]

And I think if you'll notice in Zazen, when the boundaries of the body kind of go away or stretch out or disappear or aren't locatable anymore, actually the body you feel when the image, when you shed the thought body, as we say, the heart is the circulatory system. The lungs and kidneys and everything, they sort of like are located in, depending on your state of mind, your bodily organs are in space in a different way. And the space that you feel you occupy isn't the same space as your actual body. Well, that's not so different than the space and configuration of the body being different in the brain. And the space and configuration of the body is different in the experience of Zazen mind. What have you got left if your body and your kidneys floating up here and your lungs are over here?

[19:23]

I mean, all you've got is your breath. The breath is so important. It's the needle and thread and shuttle and all that stuff. Okay. Okay. So let's look at appearance. When something appears, where does it appear? Okay. It appears, obviously, if I hold this up, it appears in my hand. This hand. But it's obviously appearing in your mind, too. Otherwise you wouldn't see it. So it appears here, and it appears, well in my case, here.

[20:24]

But where is this here? This here is actual mutual space of mind and phenomena, or mind and space, let's use it that way, space arising simultaneously. Because this appears in the space of the room, And this appears in the space of the mind. And if I can experience the space in which it appears in the mind, it becomes one space. It becomes a mutual space, let's call it. A mutually created space. So not only are you, when I'm walking to the altar, walking in my own mental representation and actualizing it, the phenomena is actualizing the space simultaneously.

[21:26]

The floor is appearing, the stick is appearing. Now that's all easy enough to understand if you want to. But to experience it takes, you have to discover a certain pace. Now again, along with already connected, I used to pause for the particular. These phrases, you never come to the end of the use of these phrases. So sometimes I say pause for the pause. That's important too. This is getting yourself into the topography of dharma, of the dharma, of dharmic topography or something like that. And the pause is the key. to let things happen. So if we say, sometimes I say, to enter through attention, if you enter through attention, let's say first welcome, that's a door.

[22:30]

Welcome and then receiving and then attunement and then coherence and then dissonance or not. So the field of attention then becomes, and the attention to the field of attention is another way to enter the same thing as the mutual space of mind and phenomena. Now immediacy, if we use the word, let's use the word. Immediacy, the etymology, originally meant not half. Im and mediate was half, so not half. Not half, what's that mean? Non-dual. And immediates come to mean in the middle.

[23:34]

And immediacy, immediate has the meaning too of near. It's an immediate vicinity. It's used with a lot of other words all the time which then Contribute like you say he immediately understood So the fact that we have phrases like that when you have a phrase like That a word that comes after another word all the time it contributes to the meaning of a word so immediacy implies also understanding Now, I could also say unique, transient, etc. Each moment is unique, each moment is transient, but that's different than immediacy. Well, it's the same thing, but it's different. It's experientially different, because if I say unique, that's important, that's novelty, newness. I'm emphasizing that it's unduplicatable.

[24:38]

You're my favorite. No, that was yesterday. It's unique. And if it's transient, it's only there for a moment. But immediate is almost like an object that's not there. It's in the middle or it's not half or half. He immediately understood the reasons, and masters in stories always want an immediate understanding, no hesitation, is they want you to be in this immediacy and not step out of the immediacy thinking, I better answer that smartly because I'm a certain kind of person and I should look good to the teacher. I don't know what you think. But then you've stepped out of immediacy. And the teacher wants the disciple, the practitioner, to act within immediacy all the time, or otherwise you're basically acting through self-referential, self-referencing. It's better to be dumb and immediate than smart and delayed.

[25:48]

That's very hard for us, though. Okay, so immediate is no other location. We'll never meet this teaching in another 100,000 million kalpas. 100,000 million kalpas is no other location. So again, I'm coming back to this no other location mind, which is also what immediate means. No agency, nothing in between. Nothing in between is also the meaning of immediate. No agency. So how can you be in a no agency or nothing in between situation? Situated, so I say, situated or situate immediacy.

[26:54]

And I think the way to practice that, the easiest way to practice that is to, in a sort of deep way, is to feel the space of mind when something appears, and feel the space that arises through the object. This object has a space, right? And we ourselves have, you know, peripersonal space. If you could, you all know this, but I'll say it again. If you did a brain scan now of me with this, my brain would indicate my arms this long. That's peripersonal space. So you drive a car that way, so you know the shape of the car and so forth. So, but it's not, so already if I bring tension to the breath and tension through that to the body, I'm immediately actuating, perhaps not actualizing, actuating peripersonal space.

[28:18]

But my senses are being awakened, activated, through the phenomena, through the situation, whatever it is. And the situation has some kind of immediacy and coherence and connectedness, because the word immediacy suggests there's some kind of non-separated connectedness, not halved. Which is, again, a word that's, I wouldn't say situated uniqueness. because then there's no situation for uniqueness or transience. This is a kind of location, a kind of locus of immediacy. Okay. Now, what does it mean to say that Zen embodiment is sight, situation, what I don't know, I said immediacy, sight, situation, embodiment, something like that, I said.

[29:25]

It means you need to, because this is what's going on, but is it going on for you? And the trick is, or the skill is, the craft is, to find the pace of situated immediacy. to find the pace of appearance. Maybe we can say pause for appearance, or pause for the space of appearance to appear. Don't just pause for appearance, pause for the space of appearance to appear, and a pause for the space of mind to appear. What we do in the Zendo is all designed to give you that pace, to show you that pace. It's almost impossible to learn in ordinary active life. Nothing allows it. But once you discover it and you really embody it, it's everywhere in active life.

[30:32]

It's in every bus and subway station, it's in every conversation with somebody, it's there, it's the fundamental space. But until you find the pace of its location or something like that, you just don't know it. It's mentation all the time and not embodiment. And what you have a chance to do here is you have a few weeks, a few weeks in your life, a long, long life. You know, you think life is long. I always think of Mick Jagger said some recent song. You look away, and you look back, and you're old. I know, it happened to me. Suddenly, how the heck did I get to be so old? I was only 60 a few days ago. But still, it's a rather long life, and a few weeks now, nothing.

[31:40]

But they can be life-changing. They can be everything. If you discover the pace of this space of situated immediacy, which is the actualization of brain, body and phenomena, once you know it, feel it, walk in it, actualize it, it never goes away. I mean, you may have to nourish it now and then. Remind yourself that basically it's there, sometimes maybe like a ghost, but it can be brought back to life. And the altar, the altar is to give us this feeling.

[32:41]

We try to approach the altar, as I've been speaking about the altar, we try to approach an altar, and the altar is designed to ask us to find the pace of situated immediacy. And the altar is a sacred space, we call it a sacred space, sacred meaning dedicated to a single purpose, etymologically. which also means no other location. So you come to the altar and you try to let breath pierce the situation, let breath draw in the situation, let breath release the situation. Use your breath as the crutch of, you know, the cripple's way, a cripple's sensibility to stand up and find the space of immediacy of no other location.

[33:48]

And of course, the space of the altar is in you. So when you find, when the phenomenal world arises in a mutual space with you, and that's what you're experimenting with with an altar, You're offering the incense to yourself, too. You're putting that incense right down in the mutual space of the Buddha and you. It appears on the lotus. Like that. Like this. Okay. Thanks.

[34:49]

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