I noticed in this room when I came in yesterday to look at it last night, there was a Buddha sitting here. And then in the little room I was given upstairs here, I went in and there's a Buddha in the room. Yeah, so I asked, is this a Buddhist seminar house? No, I was told no. So this is quite interesting. You know, Buddhism is so... Yeah, in the air these days. I mean, you go past shops, jewelry stores and things, there's Buddhas in the window. They're not selling Buddhas, they're selling watches.

[01:03]

I don't know. Yeah, so maybe we should know something about Buddhism. Yeah, even if you don't plan to practice, it's... may be useful to know something about it. My main interest is, of course, I think it's, of course, the practice of Buddhism. How many of you, can I ask, we've never met before? Never met before. Quite a lot of you, yeah. How many of you have never practiced Zen before? Only one of you? The rest of you are all pros.

[02:19]

So I don't have to say much. My feeling was from what Andreas said that I probably should introduce Zen practice in some basic way. Maybe it still might be good to do something like that. And I apologize, sorry, to not know German. Yeah, I have a 19-month-old daughter who already knows more German than I do. And I often wonder myself why I'm so stupid. Yeah, partly actually I like not knowing. Yeah, I like not understanding.

[03:37]

I might as well be in Budapest, you know. I just came from Budapest and I had the same problem. How do you order something? The whole world becomes much more exotic if you don't understand. But also, even if I knew German pretty well, I could not really teach Buddhism in German. And I can barely do it in English. And I have need helpers to do that. And because strictly speaking, Buddhism is somewhere at the edge of language. My little daughter is quite alert.

[04:38]

And she, I call her an acrobatic scientist. Ich nenne sie eine akrobatische Wissenschaftlerin. Because she climbs everything and tries to find out about everything. Weil sie klettert auf alles und will über alles herausfinden. This morning she climbed up on my lap like a monkey up the back of the chair and suddenly she was in my lap. Ja, heute Morgen kletterte sie wie ein Affe auf meinen Schoß. And she knows that she's not supposed to play with my computer. So she showed me both hands with the fingers calmly rolled up.

[05:40]

Yeah, well, her elbow was trying to push the keyboard in our side. My point is she's quite alert. And I've spent millions of moments with her. But if I died today, when she's ten or so, she'd say, I never knew my father. She wouldn't remember anything. It's called, I think, technically infant amnesia. Yeah, it interests me because she's so alert and in a way remembers things. Yeah, and I don't think it's any point for us to go into the the technicalities of what she remembers.

[06:58]

But my point is, she's extremely aware, but she's not conscious. There's no conscious framework yet that retains memories. So that tells us something about the possibility of mind. You can be very aware, alert, and not be in the realm of what we could call karmic consciousness. So what kind of mind is possible through practice? What is the nature of consciousness? Yes, something like that is the actual subject of Buddhism.

[08:19]

Mm-hmm. Yeah, and how do we observe consciousness? Mm-hmm. Now, there are certain rules or grammar, shall we say, to Buddhist practice. And if you don't know those rules or that grammar, it's pretty hard to, like it would be to speak a language. It's pretty hard to have a framework for practicing meditation, practicing mindfulness. Now, the... first assumption, shall we say, of Buddhist practice, as most of you know, is that everything changes.

[09:43]

Yeah, so practice, we're always talking about practice. Practice, we can say, simply means the recognition that everything changes That everything's changing. And that response to changing. Since everything's changing, one's practice is continuous because change is continuous. Yes, so first of all you have to get used to the idea that you're going to have some kind of fluid state of mind.

[10:44]

Now I'm imagining, you know, what would you like to know about practice? Now I can, of course, imagine, yeah, I started once, and I remember what struck me when I first started. And I know what has helped me over the 40 years or so I've been practicing. I shouldn't tell you I've been practicing 40 years. I should tell you I've been practicing 10 or something like that. 40 years, I should really glow. And I'm still fumbling along here trying to find out what practice is.

[12:05]

So I'd like to, you know, hear also from you today and during the seminar what you'd like me to speak about. Now, this is, you know, I don't know how it was announced in the brochure or whatever it was. But generally, in the last year or two, I've been doing this pre-day, before Friday evening. So we can speak about some things without going anywhere. And just because we're... practice is a kind of cooking. Yeah, but first we have to assemble the ingredients. Yeah, so the pre-day I just kind of assembled some irrelevant ingredients.

[13:26]

Or some background that might be useful during the seminar. But, so I hope most of you are going to be staying through the seminar. I heard a few of you might leave. If I know some of you might leave, I have to say something that might be useful for just one day. Yeah. Now, Zen practice is a... Zen is a yogic practice. And it's based on a kind of yogic view of the world that existed before Buddhism. And Buddhism, a yogic culture assumes a relationship between the body and mind.

[14:37]

And assumes that you can cultivate that body and mind relationship. And the main tool of that cultivation is attention and breath. Now, we experience mind and body separately. But we can deepen that experience of mind and body. When a cat stretches when it wakes up or even before it goes to sleep. Or we stretch.

[15:47]

We're basically doing a yogic act. If you're in a bad mood and you take a cold shower to improve your mood, that's a yogic act. You know intuitively that you can change your state of mind by a cold shower. So the cat stretches, but the cat doesn't study that stretching. In practice, we notice change. We notice change itself. We relate to change itself rather than permanence. So we have a habit of wanting things to be permanent.

[17:07]

And practice is to change that habit. So you notice change more than you notice permanence. And that's practice, to notice change more than to notice permanence. Well, it's easy to see change. It's rainy today in the weather, etc. But the walls here don't change too much, at least we hope during the seminar they don't. And a lot of things fall into the category of the walls. But You know, I don't want to bore you with this point.

[18:23]

But if you notice change, well, maybe the wall doesn't change much. But the way you notice the wall changes. How do you make yourself open Because the habit of mind is to see permanence. Yeah. Yeah. It's a... Yeah, I'm trying not to talk about my little daughter's name is Sophia. I'm... I'm trying not to talk about her like some kind of enamored father.

[19:26]

So I'm only speaking about her because she's a good example. Yeah, and I'm watching her. Really, in the beginning, she didn't name entities. She named activities. A bird was called... Because that's the noise that blue and gray jays make in Crestone. Ja, weil das sind die Geräusche, die diese Vögel in Creston machen. But she didn't just name the bird, she also named the shadow of a bird going over the yard. Aber sie hat nicht nur den Vogel benannt, sondern auch den Schatten, der dem Vogel folgte.

[20:32]

So any kind of activity associated with birds took on the name Creston. Good translation. Yeah, and now she's in the process of those words, let's say names, they're names, not words, These names as activities are collapsing into words. Yeah, because if she wants to say the bird flies... ...or the shadow of the flying bird... ...if she names activities, it would be... ...because if she only names the action, then it would be this sequence of...

[21:44]

We're in kindergarten here, I'm sorry. Because she has to distinguish between bird flying and shadow. Weil sie fängt an oder sie muss unterscheiden zwischen Vogel, Schatten, Fliegen. Yeah, that's a requirement of the structure of language. Das ist eine Bedingung für die Struktur der Sprache. Yeah, so the names have to become words and fit into sentences. Weil die Namen müssen Worte werden und sich in Sätze einfügen. She's very close to making sentences now in both languages. Ja, also sie kommt dem schon sehr nahe, ganze Sätze zu bilden in beiden Sprachen. Sometimes it's very poetic. Und manchmal ist es ganz poetisch. She knows her godmother is named Kamala. Ja, ihre Patentante heißt Kamala. And lives in New York.

[22:54]

Und lebt in New York. Yeah, so she calls her Kalamama. And she says, she wakes up in the morning, she says, sky, clouds, airplane, Kalamama. So she knows there's some kind of sky bridge, you know. Yeah. So that's a kind of sentence. And when she collapses names into sentences into words and into sentences she's creating the structure of consciousness. And soon she'll have a sense of before and after. And here and there.

[23:56]

Now you take it for granted that there's a there and a here. But how we make that distinction is a social construct. But how we make this distinction is a social construct. Yuan Wu, one of the creators of Zen Buddhism, says, realize enlightenment just where you stand. Now we should go slowly with something like this. We shouldn't take for granted anything. What is to realize? What is enlightenment? What's he talking about?

[25:13]

And then he says, reign in your thoughts. Like a horse, you reign a horse. The reins are the... Those are called the reins. Reign in your thoughts. Establish a mind Which has neither before nor after. Nor here nor there. What would that be? What would be a mind with neither here nor there, nor before or after? Wie wäre denn ein Geist mit weder hier noch dort, noch vorher noch nachher? Es hilft zu wissen, dass das ein Konstrukt ist.

[26:15]

Dass unser Geist Struktur besitzt. Und dass diese Struktur erschaffen wurde. Yeah, who creates this structure? Well, the society creates a lot of the possibilities of it. It's so funny to be here and everyone talks German. The grass looks the same as in Hungary. You go to Hungary and everybody talks Hungarian. Which is even more difficult than German, I think. It's very strange. And then I was in Venice just before Budapest. And as they say, the streets are full of water.

[27:16]

Sophia thought it was great. And everyone speaks this other language. I think it's all Italian. So we have these different really social constructs that we are born into. And we pretty much accept them. What can we do? When we're accepting them, we're only about two years old, so we don't have too much choice. And it structures our mind. Our mind is pretty unstructured at birth. And we give it structure. And you have to give it structure.

[28:25]

You can't communicate to others or participate in the life of your society. It's an extraordinary thing, language. Yes. And I think it's pretty clear that it's speaking that actually weaves mind and body together, primarily. So that causes me a problem. I spoke about it, I don't know, recently somewhere. But I'm still kind of puzzling with the problem.

[29:26]

Because if Zen practice is raining in your thoughts, are not identifying with your thoughts, then how can we be free of thoughts if it's thoughts, speech, thinking, which has created the relationship of mind and body? Okay. No, I confess this interests me. Because I'm trying to find out how to teach and practice Zen in the West.

[30:35]

So I have to start in a very basic way. Because over there on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, I'm not in America. I mean over there on the other side of Russia and China, it's where China and Japan, et cetera, are. They speak different languages. And in significant ways, conceptual, rooted in a different conception of the world than our Western languages. Yeah, and they have this yogic culture. which assumes a mind-body relationship in quite a different way than our culture.

[31:44]

So to just transpose the teachings To the West. My experience is it doesn't work. We have to think of it in relationship to our own culture. And we have to think of it, since most of you aren't monks, as a practice for lay people, too.

[32:52]

And we also have to think, even if we do create some kind of circumstances where we can learn Buddhism in an Asian way, That may actually interfere with our ability to mature ourselves in our own society. So I guess I find myself now speaking to you In a way that you can continue this investigation by yourselves. Thank you. Do you know why she said bless you? Other than that she's polite? It's quite a good example of the difference between Asia and the West.

[33:59]

We say bless you because your heart skips a beat when you sneeze. So your soul, supposedly, comes out as you start to die, and you say, bless you, and it pops out. Yeah, so you're safe. Thanks. Yeah. But in a yoga culture, it's considered to be an interruption of consciousness.

[35:01]

So it's considered to be a small nirvana. And Dogen speaks actually. He's a famous Zen master of the 13th century in Japan. Ja, und der berühmte Zen-Meister Dogen im 13. Jahrhundert in Japan, der sagt, Ja, der klassifiziert ein Niesen als eine Erleuchtungserlebnis. Meist zu schnell für uns, um es zu bemerken. So if she was Chinese, she would have said when I sneezed, congratulations. Yeah. So we have that kind of difference. It's actually a big difference. So if we know that, you know, we know intellectually, but really sense that we live in a structure our society with our cooperation has generated.

[36:36]

Also, wenn wir wissen, ja, und intellektuell tun wir das, aber wenn wir wirklich spüren, dass wir in einem... And we know that a mind is possible outside that structure. Yeah, let's just take Sophia again. She basically has a mind at present that's in significant ways outside the structure of German and English culture, English language culture. And probably more than most babies because... Marie Louise, but especially myself, treat her in a yogic way, not just a usual way.

[37:48]

The way you just lean down to look at a baby begins to shape their space. I think one of the fascinations and charm of a baby is because they're outside our cultural space. They do things in such an amusing way. So, I think the information we need, you don't have to get it in a Buddhist sutra, The information we need to recognize what Buddhism is about is all about us, all around us.

[38:59]

The cat doesn't study why it stretches before it goes to sleep or gets up after it gets up. Also die Katze, die untersucht nicht, wieso sie sich strecht, bevor sie aufsteht oder sich schlafen legt. But we can study how we exist. Aber wir können untersuchen, wie wir existieren. And the decision to study how we exist is what's called Buddhism. And I would say that certainly not in any Western sense is it a religion. It's a, yeah, kind of. I don't know.

[40:16]

We don't have a word for it. Maybe a kind of science. It's an experimental science of the unpredictable. Western science is primarily an experimental science of the predictable. Also westliche Wissenschaft ist zumeist eine Wissenschaft des Vorhersagbaren. But we don't really have some word for it, but it's a, let's say, a study of oneself. Wir haben kein wirkliches Wort dafür, aber sagen wir mal, es ist eine Selbststudie. We should take a break soon. Wir sollten bald Pause machen. Maybe we can sit for a minute before we take a break. You don't have to adjust your posture much because we'll only sit for a few moments.

[41:19]

I hit the bell usually three times to start and once to finish. All of you are welcome to sit in chairs and things, whatever you want. The main posture of sitting is your backbone. I could explain something about that, but let's just accept it's mainly your backbone. And just as posture, just as the horizontal posture is almost most of the time a sleeping posture, And a waking mind is a vertical posture.

[42:34]

So this mind is something other than waking or sleeping. You're not asleep. But you're not in the usual way in a mind of consciousness. It's been discovered It's that you need a posture that's neither the posture of sleeping or waking. To discover and make your own.

[43:35]

To discover and embody. To discover and embody. A mind that's neither waking nor sleeping. So to sit is to move into that territory that's neither waking nor sleeping. At first it's a physical territory. And pretty soon it becomes a mind territory.

[44:30]

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