It's what you said, and you said you decided to listen to life or to things. So it's helpful if you have like that popped up or you had that feeling. So practice again is to sort of trust that kind of feeling that comes up. And then to make, in a way you make that a kind of form you pour your attention in. Like to just listen. I read the other day, you know, that Wittgenstein said that he, I believe it's at the end of his book, a book he wrote, He said this book is in two parts.

[01:14]

Something like the only important part of the book is the one I didn't write. That's a very interesting idea. The only important part of this book, the other half of it, is the one I didn't write. You could even take that as a kind of phrase. You can look at everything and say, this is the book I couldn't write or didn't write. Yeah, you know, I made a decision at some time to sort of pour my life into this posture.

[02:20]

Yeah, I'll probably die in this posture, why not? So, you know, I just made that sort of decision. I do have other postures. Some of them are a lot more comfortable. But the posture in which I define I feel life in its most definite, defined form is in this posture. So each moment has a kind of form, even if it's the book I didn't write.

[03:25]

I know that well. So you all recognize that at the center of practice is mindfulness. But that mindfulness always has a feeling of form or the form of the book I didn't write. And part of, I think, the developing one's practice is to feel that form. And to settle then into that form, which appears through settling in.

[04:31]

With the feeling that you don't need anything else. Yeah. So whatever our body is, whatever posture our body is, that's the form we pour our life in. Yeah. And... Since you mentioned music, I wanted to tell an anecdote. Really, in the very, I don't know, months, beginning months of my practicing, I helped organize the Pablo Casals, he was a cellist, master class.

[05:37]

It's the same guy that she was... No, no. Why do you say that? Because you could translate it both the same way, that name. Yeah. This is easier, Pablo Casals. And he did three things that I recognized were practice. There were just a few students drawn from all over the world, mostly the United States. And one of the students had just won second prize, I guess, in the thing in Moscow, which Van Plyburn won.

[06:43]

I don't know what's it called in Moscow. Tchaikovsky. Something. Tchaikovsky. Yeah. Der eine hatte also gerade den zweiten Platz in diesem Ding da in Moskau. The thing in Moscow. Yeah, yeah, okay. So anyway, first of all, before he came out to start, he just sat for like, he'd come early, half an hour, and just sit on a chair. We just sit there on a chair, anyway. And then when somebody said, everyone's gathered, you just get up and go out. And at one point he said to people, You should really hear each note.

[07:43]

And he said, I think you think you do, but I'm not sure you do. He said, what I mean is what I'm playing... I notice what the people in the front row are doing. And I can tell what the people up on the balcony are doing. And I can feel the sweat running down under my arm. But I hear the one note. And that sense of a field in which you have a tremendous particularity, I recognize from Zen practice. And this fellow who just returned from Moscow was playing.

[09:03]

And Pablo Casals said to him, you know, you're hitting the note right, but your hand is not beautiful. And he moved his fingers around so that he was touching the same strings, but in a way that his hand looked beautiful. And he said, if your hand is beautiful, the note will be more beautiful. So I would say practice is the book we don't write.

[10:23]

And couldn't write. Because it's so particular and so full that it couldn't be written. And also practice... One of the forms of practice is practicing with others. It's a kind of form like this posture or like mindfulness. And the fact of that and the taste of that is what we're doing here. And I'm very grateful we join each other in this effort here. And we have this place in which to do it. And we take care of it somehow. So thank you very much.

[11:25]

Vielen Dank. Choir singing. Thank you. Uh...

[12:31]

I know you as well. I know you as well. I know you as well. I feel a little nuts sometimes trying to define something as simple as the body.

[13:52]

Because we all have Because we all have definitions of what the body is. And our experience of our body is closely related to the received definitions. But then sometimes I feel like I'm swimming upstream against our culture. But then I remember and feel that your actual experience, I think, is close to what I'm talking about.

[15:06]

So I think, if I can speak about... the body in some way that catches, touches your actual experience. Makes you notice your actual experience. Yeah. Yeah, then we can begin to talk with each other. But then we also have to ask, why bother with some unusual or new definition of the body?

[16:06]

Well, I can try to answer that to some extent. Let me say, I realized that what I said the other day was a little confusing sometimes about practice period. For example, when I said that in practice period, I meant actually, this is not a practice period, I meant Crestone. But I also meant that this practice month is something similar to a practice period and has some similarities. And what I meant to say is that in practice period, I feel more contact with everyone who's there.

[17:29]

But the people who are there often feel less contact than they might, as I said, in a seminar. So it's not that there's less contact, it's just that there's a different kind of contact. There's more or less three months of contact. And I think you can understand it in kind of, you know, if you've done a sashin, most of you have done sashins. Yeah, you've never met this person before, but he or she is sitting beside you. but at the end of the seven days and you haven't spoken a word, you have some, you have a feeling of knowing this person.

[18:38]

What is this knowing? Mm-hmm. So in practice period, in a way, we're limiting ourself to only that kind of knowing. But if you're in the midst of talking and walking around and thinking, it's hard to stay with that kind of knowing. And your personality begins to want the usual kind of knowing. So that's a kind that we can understand as a model for everyday practice.

[19:52]

How do you Keep that kind of knowing that you have in a sesshin. Even if you're in the midst of talking and working and so forth with people. By... stillness and relative silence of a sashin, by the stillness and relative silence of a sashin, you're brought into or pushed into this kind of knowing.

[20:53]

But How can you, yeah, how does your, body sustain that knowing, body sustain that knowing, in the midst of ordinary circumstances. Now, why is Buddhism so peculiar? Sometimes I just feel it's peculiar. But if I tried to answer that question, I would say it's rooted in and sourced from the meditative experience of zazen.

[22:06]

It's almost as different for Japanese and Asian people as it is for us. And I find that realized people are more like each other than they're like the culture they came from. And so, you know, I... through listening to Sukhiroshi, or being in the presence of body, speech, and mind with him, um,

[23:30]

There were often insights just listening to him. Why was that? Because he said things in a funny way. Because he was actually using English? He got pretty good at English. But he used English in a way that was... The words were tied to his experience. They were always contextual. So you couldn't even necessarily compare a word he used in one context.

[24:56]

The same word in another context would have a different meaning, somewhat different meaning. In the koans, that's called a saindava. Saindava is just a word. Yeah, it's like that musician. And the word sandava means both horse and salt. It's used to mean that words... really depend, first of all, on their context. And so sometimes a koan will take a word, take a context, and put the wrong word in the context.

[25:57]

So you have to kind of figure out why is that wrong word Because the context suggests another word. So I'm just trying to talk here, give you a feeling for this. not so much how to study Buddhism, but not to be fooled by the words with which you describe yourself. For example, Sukershi, he never said this, but he could have said this.

[27:02]

As sound resides in the ear, So the mind resides in the heart. Now you can't actually ask what that means. Because that's the clearest way it can be said. I might say it in some subtler way, like the sound of the heart. But I tried to find the most mechanical, clear way. Yes, the sound, the form resides in the eye, so the mind resides in the heart.

[28:04]

Yes, so these are again, you have to, this is, opens itself through experience. Yeah, sometimes you have to say a word. You know, if you say a word in one way over and over again, it just becomes a kind of clunky sound. And it has no meaning at all. It's just this clunky sound. Like a lot of German words sound to me. A sound with a lot of bumps on it, you know? Yeah. But for you it has lots of things go with that sound.

[29:31]

So maybe we could say practice is to is to go in the direction of the feeling that goes with the sound, but you drop the... You drop the word quality and go with its wider feeling. You drop the word quality and go with its wider feeling. So we want some experience. We want words to be contextual and experience, experiencing, experience.

[30:35]

And you want to go slow enough, so that's the case. And our mind is way too fast. Our thinking is way too fast. It gets way out ahead of our body. So you want to kind of rein it in. Rein, R-E-I-N, like reining in a horse. Yeah, maybe so. Whoa. Bending. Yeah, so it's like the ten oxherding pictures, you know, how do you get this ox of the mind to actually be in its field?

[31:47]

How do you get this ox of the mind to actually be in its field? So you want to rein the mind in with the breath. The more your thinking goes with the breath, your thinking begins to penetrate the body. and your body begins to permeate your thinking. Now that's kind of like the first condition of being able to use the mind as part of your practice.

[32:59]

And I think if you could study insights or enlightenment experiences, hook you all up with wires and have you walk around the hall dragging a monitoring machine, What are you doing? Hook you up with wires. And then have a monitoring machine dragging, monitoring your breath and your brain waves and things. We all look like Sophia and Claudia, I mean Pauline and so forth, dragging something around. The neighbors would even think we're stranger. But probably we find at the moment we had an experience, that was a moment when breath, mind and body somehow were opened up a little channel because they were suddenly together. So if you're interested in a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, do you have a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow in Germany?

[34:30]

We do. I don't have one, but... In Hungary, do you have a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? What? You don't know. That's why you're here. That's what they say. If you could find the end of the rainbow, there's a pot of gold there. Yeah, but if you're interested in that pot of gold, perhaps it would be good to bring your breath and mind and body together. Maybe some kind of rainbow would appear. All the colors would begin to separate and be clear. So I'm trying to create a very basic situation here.

[35:50]

Yeah, looking at the body. You know, Sophia, you know who she is, right? Sophia, you know, her nose gets stuffed up sometimes. And it was quite hard to clean her nose up. She hated us putting our large fingers up her tiny nose. So we had to have these rubber things that you squeezed down and she hated that too. I bet you don't know what I'm talking about.

[36:54]

Anyway, so now you can say to Sophia, up your nose, you know, there's a whole mess, would you get it out? She gets it out and she's very proud of herself. Is it the same nose? She doesn't mind at all cleaning her nose herself with her own finger. So she knows that This is a nose, and Marie-Louise has a nose, and stuffed animals have noses, and so forth. But her nose is the same word. Ihre Nase, das ist dasselbe Wort.

[38:03]

But it's not the same nose. Aber es ist nicht dieselbe Nase. Yeah, okay, so Philip, poor sweet Philip, was dead, is dead. Well, nobody anymore. yeah as i said that's not a body that's stuff and it's i think a very big mistake of our language to call the dead body a body as well as the live body a body. It's a profoundly confusing use of the word body. We think of the body as a place. A kind of platform from which we view the world.

[39:15]

And if we view the body as a kind of platform from which we observe things? Then space becomes something kind of frozen, too. Yeah, and it'd be good to loosen that up. Yeah, so... Okay, if the body of Philip is not a body but just stuff... And everything's changing. In what direction is Philip's body changing?

[40:19]

And, you know, going toward dirt or smoke. In what direction is your body and my body changing? Yeah, and for Sophia, my nose is not so different from Philip's. It's just stuff. And when I try to clean out her nose, It's not so different than if I tried to clean out dead Philip's nose. Philip would like it to know that I'm still talking about him. Shortly before he died, I told many of you this, but shortly before he died, Somebody said, how do you want to be cremated, laid out?

[41:38]

Kurz bevor er starb, da fragte ihn jemand, wie möchtest du eingeäschert werden? Wie sollst du da aufgebahrt werden? He sat on a bed of frozen raspberries. Er sagte, auf einem Bett gefrorener Himbeeren. So we brought lots of raspberries. Wir brachten also eine Menge gefrorener Himbeeren und haben sie um ihn herumgelegt. Yeah. So when I try to clean Sophia's nose, it's a kind of, her nose is a kind of stuff. It's an object. But when she cleans it, it's not an object. Yeah, so that's the kind of thing you have to kind of, stupid things like that, you have to kind of explore. What is the body? What's the difference between the stuffed body and the living body?

[42:46]

Where do you look for the body? In the mind Where do you look for the mind? In the body. You know, I can move my arm. Is that my body or my mind? Can anyone answer that question? Is it my mind or is it my body? Or it's both? But where's the boundary? Yeah, but is there... Why do we make a distinction between body and mind? Mm-hmm. So that's my mind.

[43:55]

If I, you know, I have some thinking or feeling or idea, then my mind moves. I mean, my body moves, my arm moves. And it's mine? What does mine mean or something like that? It's not Christian's arm or Sophia's arm. So what is the body? Why do we make a distinction between body and mind? Why do we make this distinction between body, speech, and mind? So if everything's changing, we look for things in the relationship. If you want to define the body in yogic sense, you have to look for the body in its relationships.

[45:15]

And the relationship we're looking at now Is the relationship of body, speech and mind. Now the teaching of Buddhism is, if you want to define the body, look for it in the speech. and in the mind. Now, does speech mean just speaking? No, we can't use words in such a narrow way. So, speech means all the places where body and mind relate.

[46:21]

So if we're looking for the body in a relationship, in its relationships, you can look for him in all kinds of relationships. Then you can look for him in all kinds of relationships. Jogging, swimming, sleeping. Jogging, swimming, sleeping. You know, any activity. Standing in front of another person, your body is something different. For the body in speech and mind. So I'm speaking now. And is it my speaking, my body?

[47:36]

I could hardly speak without... My body. The whole apparatus of the throat, mouth, lips, this is necessary. Stephen Hawking, a British physicist, he has to have all kinds of apparatus to substitute for it. So, when I'm speaking, what is the body? What is the mind when I'm speaking? We have this kind of noticing we want in yogic practice. Now, this is a kind of vitality or energy.

[48:41]

So when you sit zazen, You're kind of, if we're emphasizing the body, there's a kind of absorption. Okay, now if the body is this, if we're looking for the body in the mind, We're looking for the body in the mind. Sophia is looking for the mind in her nose. Her nose. Out of context, that would sound rather funny.

[49:45]

So it takes taking quite a while before she's able to look for her mind in her nose. Yeah, okay, so this is not a platform. Okay, so I was recently in Vienna. And, you know, if I'm out at three in the morning or something, the city's pretty quiet, two or three in the morning. I close my eyes. Yeah, I feel something.

[50:45]

I'm not thinking, but I feel something. There's some presence of a big city like that, even in the middle of the night. Now, if I go in one of these dense canyon forests here... canyon forests, these dense forests that are in these canyons. And I stood and closed my eyes in a similar way. He has some different feeling. Or in the middle of one of these big high fields. A different feeling. From a yogic point of view, those different feelings are also the body. Why isn't it mind?

[51:50]

Is this mind or body? Where is the boundary? Where is the boundary if I'm standing in the middle of one of these high fields again? Wo ist die Grenze, wenn ich in der Mitte eines dieser hochgelegenen Felder stehe? Is the feeling I have mind or body? Ist das Gefühl, dass ich habe Geist oder Körper? In yoga culture practice we've decided to call that more the body. In der yogischen Kultur haben wir uns entschieden, das mehr Körper zu nennen. It's a kind of directionality of body. of movement inward. So we can't say where the boundary is of mind and body here.

[52:57]

But when we feel a kind of movement inward, we can call that the body. But when we feel a kind of movement inward, Movement outward we can call actually speech in this case. So when you practice as in you're in a way returning mind and speech to the body. It's a kind of silence. You might be talking in things, but everything's moving into silence. And that movement, that directionality, then, because everything's changing.

[54:09]

So things aren't us. Our body's not a platform. Our body is always moving. And that movement can be a movement towards stillness or toward definitions. So the practice of body, speech, and mind is to come into knowing this movement. You cannot draw a line between where the body is and where the mind is here.

[55:13]

You can't find the body as a kind of separate entity, separate from the mind. If it's separate from the mind, it's dead, none of this stuff. Yeah, if you can't find it as an entity, then it's always in relationship. Oh. To answer the question, what is the body, you have to explore its relationships. as it moves into relationships or away from relationships. Now, if you develop the sensitivity to do this,

[56:26]

This is the same sensitivity that allows you to really notice your zazen practice. To notice this just under the surface sea of insights and realizations. So the stillnesses of zazen is to awaken and manifest the subtle body. The body that doesn't fit the category of stuff. Yeah, and this is a lot like the book Wittgenstein didn't write. This can only be known through your experience.

[57:58]

So the body is a kind of unfolding. Folds in and it falls out. Folds out and it feels the city of Vienna at night or day. Or it falls out and feels the presence of others. I said too much, so that has to be enough. Thank you very much. May our intentions pass through every being and every place with the true merit of the Buddha-Vishnu. śūjñāṁ mūhaṁ sevāṁ bho bho namaṁ jīṁ sevāṁ tāṁ The visitors are countless, I pray to guide them.

[59:53]

The desires are unquestionable, I pray to give them up. I believe in you. [...] Satsang with Mooji Alright.

[61:00]

Thank you. Thank you. So I guess this is, and Dieter said it probably was, the fourth Teisho. Yeah, and we've had one seminar together.

[62:29]

And we've had a couple seminars when I wasn't there. And you had one afternoon meeting. I wish I'd been there at the afternoon meeting. I'm sorry I wasn't. I was thinking we didn't do much in this last, what, Seven days? Ten days? How many days has it been about? No one knows, not even me, right? But actually we've done quite a bit. But I don't know how far we've gotten along in body, speech and mind. I guess what I'd like to try to do at least for this, because you're leaving, many of you, some of you are leaving tomorrow, is that right?

[63:57]

In Zen we're not supposed to show emotion, some of you think so. That's as much emotion as you'll see. How to speak about body, speech and mind? What I'm trying to do is establish for us the nature of a topic like this. Yeah, the nature of a teaching like this. And the way in which a teaching is meant to cover all teachings.

[65:11]

So you practice any one teaching or any of the main teachings as a door to all of the teachings. It is a door to the world and life. So how is body, speech and mind like that? Okay. Now I said earlier, Buddhism is based on everything is changing. And it doesn't change in isolation. So it changes in relationship to everything else changing. So if each thing is changing... Where do you find its identity?

[66:36]

Now, if you want to practice in this way, you have to kind of follow the logic of some statement, like everything changes. And bring yourself back to that logic. Yeah, because we're locked into a logic that's mostly unexamined. which we haven't questioned. It's outside our root of inquiry. But you see in this Samay-O-Samay of Dogen's he says investigate this first moment of Zazen. How can you ask of the first moment of Zazen, what is it?

[67:49]

And then he says, as I pointed out the other day, something so far out, is it a leaping acrobat? Who would look in that category? Now someone brought up recently again, you know, the Heart Sutra says the five skandhas are empty. The five skandhas are empty and knowing this we are freed from suffering. And when we know that, we are freed from suffering. That's again a big one. Yeah. Whoa. Is it that easy?

[68:51]

Well, let's leave it freezes from suffering aside. And just look at the five skandhas are empty. Okay, so what is that like? It's not like saying a room is empty of giraffes. Or empty of asteroids. Yeah, or leaping acrobats. Yeah, or it's more like saying it's empty of furniture. And we can feel, you look at a room that's empty of furniture, and you can feel the room is empty of furniture.

[70:05]

It's empty of furniture. furniture and we are empty of the five skandhas. We are empty of the five skandhas or the five skandhas are with us empty. Why don't you say it the way I said it? It's hard to say. As the room is empty of furniture. Okay. Sounds right. Okay. So we're empty of the five skandhas. Again. Yes.

[71:15]

The translator is not supposed to make comments, you know. To say the room is empty again is also not like saying the room never existed. I think we often misunderstand emptiness to mean something like the room never existed. I don't know exactly where I'm going here. I'm just trying to find some way to speak about body, speech and mind.

[72:19]

Now, we assume the world exists. We normally don't even assume the world exists. Because it's in our actions that the world exists. We don't really usually ask if the world exists. But what Dogen is saying is that we actually ask if the world exists. We treat it as an assumption. And if we treat it as an assumption, that's the practice of emptiness.

[73:20]

So Sophia now, you've gotten to know her a little bit or a lot. She's gone from naming activity to now naming entities and finally now naming actions. She's very excited at this moment where she's shifting from names to words and words which are actions. But still everything is unsure in her life.

[74:29]

The only thing close to surety is her, her mother. I don't know if she knows the world exists. So certain assumptions you can see in her actions. But the practice of emptiness in the Eightfold Path of beginning with right views But the practice of emptiness implicit in the practice of the first of the eightfold paths is to question our most basic assumptions.

[75:32]

This is the practice of emptiness. So what does exist? Going back again to everything's changing and there's only relationships. So what exists is relationships. So we must look for the identity of the world in relationships. So if we look for the body, as I said, Is my lifting the arm the body or the mind?

[76:44]

Now we look for the body in the mind. And we also look for the body in the relationship of the body parts to the body. And that's the practice of yoga. You put your body into various postures to discover the body. So you're not asking what is the body really, you're asking where is the body. That's a very different question. I think we get confused by trying to answer what is the body. So you say, okay, where is the body?

[77:53]

Where do I look for the body? I look for the body in the mind. Already this is quite a transformative question. So where do I look for the mind? In the body. And where do I look for the world? In speech. So through the body we discover the mind, through the mind we discover the body, and through speech we discover the world. Now, what does it mean to discover the world through speech?

[78:57]

Now I'm trying to say, okay, we take this teaching in a real exclusive way. For now, nothing exists but this teaching. We try to find everything in it. You don't assume anymore that the world exists. And as I said, sometimes we practice with stepping forward as if the ground is not going to be there. That's the practice of emptiness. You're challenging this assumption that we make every time we take a step. So... Now, sometimes when we, if we, or rather as we practice...

[80:48]

And we have some developed practice of mindfulness. Again, let me go back to Sophia. She has to learn. She wants to be an adult, right? And she's quite impatient with her small body. limited mental skills. Yeah, so she races up chairs and up chairs onto tables and tables onto windowsills and things like that. Yeah, we have to make sure the windows are locked. She's not going to let her small body interfere with her getting anywhere she wants to get.

[81:57]

But to listen to language she has to hear the sound she has to try to give it some sort of shape She has to connect it to an object. And she has to connect that object to an action. And all the time she has to watch me and Marie-Louise and other children and other people And try to see how all this fits together. The sounds, the actions, what the people are doing and so forth.

[82:59]

And within this there aren't too many assumptions. I think this is actually a good description of mindfulness practice. If we could get ourselves back to that kind of alertness where what is all this stuff and there's no assumptions. So the more we practice in this way and practice is a kind of two pedagogic maneuvers. To create sort of jolts, mental jolts. And to hold back from usual emotional satisfactions.

[84:05]

As I said, in such a short time we can't really deal very thoroughly with the practice of body, speech and mind. So I'm trying to seed our our practice with certain jolts. And another aspect of practice is to set aside ordinary emotional satisfactions. And I think that's one of the hardest aspects of practice for the layperson.

[85:21]

Because you almost can't do that as a layperson. And that requires some kind of relationship. Yeah, and you can see that. Someone asked me to speak about the relationship between Daowu and Yunyan. They keep setting aside in these Dharma brother-brother monks Because they set aside expected responses. Yeah, they set aside the... Because I think one of the barriers in our practice is we're willing to accept that there are different modes of mind that arise through practice.

[86:42]

And we're willing to accept that we might, yet we can get free of negative emotions. But we don't really... imagine that we actually get rid of or set aside the way we are usually are satisfying emotions. So we're happy to put aside, get rid of negative emotions, But we still look for the satisfactions in practice in the realm of our usual satisfying emotions.

[88:01]

But part of the job of the teacher in a monastic situation or practice situation is to not is to disaffirm or not respond to or not acknowledge the need for the usual emotions. Yeah, but except for a general support. You want to create a situation of general supportive feeling and trust.

[89:22]

I don't know quite how to explain this. We hear the church bells. It's beautiful to hear the church bell. But perhaps we hear beyond the church bells. As if the church didn't exist. Or that church bells only might exist. Or many things might exist and it just now happens to be church bells. So this is also a way to describe the practice of emptiness. Somehow the usual satisfactions are in the confines of the world.

[90:33]

An assumed world. But in a world we don't necessarily assume exists. But in a world we don't necessarily assume exists. The kind of satisfaction we have is different. So we can understand speech in body, speech in mind. Speech as a meaning caring. And caring meaning heart. But it's still not the usual category of satisfying emotions.

[91:50]

Yeah, and if we practice again for a while, You may notice, if you're lucky, you may notice. There's little shifts in your personality. Might be in your eating habits. Might be in what you like. It might be in what time of the day you feel most comfortable. Yeah, and there may be shifts in what emotions you find satisfying. It's like the furniture in your room is suddenly a little different.

[93:02]

One chair is gone. Unless you know the room well, you don't notice the chair is gone or has been reupholstered. But if when you look at the room you feel it empty of furniture, all of the furniture just appears. And you're much more free to begin to feel shifts in the furniture of your life. Something like that is the practice of the body, speech and mind. You find the mind and the body.

[94:05]

You find the mind and the body.

[94:08]

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