Or the pause at the end of the exhale. You can hold it a minute. It's interesting, and it's not quite the same as breathing in or breathing out. And it can only last a minute if you're going to continue to live. But you can let it happen in a moment. And it's almost like a little timelessness. So doing things like that, you're trying to... It's like there's a wall here, but there's a door in it. But you can't see the door. So practicing with the top and the bottom of the breath cycle allows you to start to see the door, this kashana door, dharma door.

[01:06]

And to do something similar again, like no subject-object distinction, To create a contrast the way that we usually think opens a little door. And surprisingly, a little phrase like that can open a door which allows connectedness to come in. So if you just try occasionally to pause for a moment Have a physical feeling of pause. In your breath.

[02:07]

Or just before you say something. I'm about to say something? Pause for a moment. I mean, one sixty-fifth of that. And then speak. This is a little technique. And surprisingly creative things happen. Okay, now after lunch we can discuss the pause a little more fully. Let me just say one thing in ending. is that Buddhism assumes not that there's some single point and all the causes come out from it. But there's many causes that are present in this situation. And at each moment you bring them together. Each moment of your life is, all the causes are brought together as this moment.

[03:24]

So there's a constant convergence. Reality doesn't exist this way. Each particular is a convergence of everything all at once coming here. And knowing that convergence is the responsibility of a Buddha. Knowing even the bliss of that convergence. and the complete relaxation that's possible. Okay. So we come back at 2.30? No, that's not time enough, is it? So we have an hour and a half for lunch.

[04:25]

Okay. Thank you very much. I'm so grateful to be here with you again after lunch and with each of you individually and with the presence we've created together this weekend. Nothing would have been possible, of course, without our estimable translator. Who modestly refuses to translate some things.

[05:26]

And who has to leave at four or before, if possible. And so I thought we should proceed so that I'm not tongueless later in the afternoon. Although I'm sure many of you would volunteer to start your first experience. If we decide to go on into tomorrow evening. Yeah. So I had the feeling before lunch, That I was giving you maybe too much stuff, too much detail.

[06:31]

Even a few heads are nodding in agreement. But really most of what I said was familiar. You all know you have character, personality, etc. There's the immediate situation. We all know that. What's different? Well, one is the sense that reality is constructed. You can see when you wake up every morning that you actually construct consciousness It wasn't there, waiting to be entered again.

[07:35]

It was reconstructed. Because of your habits, you reconstructed it nearly the same way as... You departed from it the day before. In a similar way, we construct the present situation, present moment. No, instead of analyzing dreams, let's analyze The present. It's very powerful to analyze something. As soon as you see the parts of something, suddenly many relationships become possible among the parts. Okay. So I've just listed some of the ingredients.

[08:44]

That is our life. I'm not telling you something that isn't you already. The players in this situation. Yeah. Character, personality. Your personal views. Personal history. That you bring into this moment. And now the possibility of adding wisdom views. Und jetzt ist die Möglichkeit, da noch ein bisschen Weisheit hinzuzufügen. If there are ingredients, you can add something to the soup. Und wenn das Zutaten sind, dann könnt ihr da noch etwas in die Suppe tun.

[09:45]

What do you add to the soup? Was gebt ihr noch in die Suppe? You've already got lots of German ingredients. Es gibt schon eine Menge deutscher Zutaten. You also have more American ingredients than you're willing to admit. Und habt auch mehr amerikanische Zutaten, als ihr bereit seid zuzugeben. Even if you don't know what a Wookie is. Next seminar I expect you all to know. And as I said, there's immediate experience. And then there's that stuff we don't see but we know about because Freud talked about unconscious, et cetera. But if we look at our own experience, it's really not just an unconscious repressed stuff.

[10:46]

It's things that are just less conscious. And it's things that are not in the realm of consciousness, but are part of our life. So let's say non-conscious. And everything's changing. So there's an evolving of our being going on. And that evolving is not just occurring in consciousness. It's also occurring outside of consciousness. And dreams are proof that an evolution is going on outside of consciousness. So, do you want to know how you exist? Why not? Maybe you'd rather say... Let it go on outside of consciousness.

[11:53]

I'd rather not know about it. I want to be in the driver's seat. In control. That stuff I can't control. Well, yeah, I can understand that feeling. But this stuff then starts controlling you. Yeah. So it's better to let it into a wider consciousness where actually you have more control, at least more participation. So, am I making sense? Well, the old pros like Martin say, yes.

[13:00]

I must be making sense because this is sensible. And I want to make sense. And if it doesn't entirely make sense, I just hope it sticks with you and begins to come together as you feel more familiar. Okay. So I'm just talking about the ingredients of the present moment which you can discover for yourself. You don't have to look up some Buddhist text. Just right here, this is the text. Wir müssen jetzt nicht in irgendwelchen buddhistischen Texten nachschlagen.

[14:09]

Der Text ist hier vor uns. And so what I'm also injecting into these ingredients. Und was ich hier jetzt auch noch injiziere in diese Zutaten. Maybe three ideas. Das sind vielleicht drei Ideen. One is, there's the ingredients. Eine ist, ja, es gibt diese Zutaten. And they're constructed, they're put together, they're compounded. To create a sense of a unity. Because we need a sense of unity, so we put these things together with a feeling of unity. In addition, I'm saying, where do these ingredients happen? They happen in the present moment. Where they're happening is the present moment. That means that every moment there's a slightly new combination.

[15:11]

So the fact that there are ingredients you can figure out for yourself if you choose to analyze the situation. But maybe it's useful to point out that these ingredients happen in the briefest of possible moments. But this is our hope. This is hopeful. Now, I'm also adding the idea that you can create a pause or a moment to notice these ingredients. Instead of saying stop or pause, I could also say gap. In Japanese they say ma, a little in-betweenness. And some Tibetan teachers speak about in each moment there's a gap that can be widened.

[16:41]

So in each moment there's this pause or gap? Okay, how do you discover it? One way that you do it in monasteries is you require a lot of bowing. Every time two people meet if possible they stop stand still for a moment and bow. It's a nice thing to do. When you get used to it it's such a relief. Everything disappears. There's nothing to do. No place to go. Only bow. And at that moment, also, we're already connected.

[17:45]

We can feel subject and object disappear. You don't kind of run by with a quick, you know... You do that sometimes. But normally you actually physically stop. One of the most interesting and annoying sometimes is the altar on the way to the toilet. You know, you put off peeing until the last moment. Because that requires you to stop what you're doing. So finally you can't put it off any longer. As we say in English, nature calls. You begin to hear the call.

[19:00]

And you start the progress toward the toilet. And then you have to take your robe and do this and that. And there's an altar and you have to stop and bow. And now Buddha calls. Say stop again. Finally this is accomplished. But actually when you get in the habit of it, it's quite interesting because you really have to make the urgency to pee disappear for a moment while you bow at this little altar. So you have to find these kind of mechanical ways, and monastic life builds them in with these little bows, to capture the pause. But you open yourself into the pause.

[20:13]

Into the gap in the middle of each moment. It's also if you can bring attention to the moment so that mentation ceases. And that's also something you can learn. It's like, you know, instant suntan. You just bring your attention to the moment. For a moment, the mentation ceases. And at that moment, character is gone. Personality is gone. Functional or dysfunctional, it's gone. Yeah. all these different processes are gone. The contents of personal history are gone.

[21:14]

And there's a momentary, uncompounded moment. An unadorned moment. Now it's helpful to have a stabilized attention, or stabilized awareness. And all these practices, while you're doing them, are simultaneously teaching you to stabilize awareness. Now, what's the problem with negative thoughts? by the nature of being negative that you're not happy with them they're dualistic they're centrifugal and I like the word because fugal means to flee from the center

[22:14]

So as soon as you have impatience, frustration, anger, fear, and your center is gone. They have a centrifugal effect. So at first our attention is somewhat fragile. We're building a kind of stability of attentiveness. It's actually a kind of light. An essence of mind, when you begin to know essence of mind, is when you look past the contents of mind and see everything exists as a kind of light. And through practice you can begin to bring your attention away from the contents of mind to the light of mind. And now things are arising in the mind, but they arise bathed in light, actually.

[23:35]

And blind people speak about their inner space being bathed in light. And blindness is a kind of pause. Like when I reach down and was surprised for a moment, what is it? That surprise existed because I actually did not for a moment know what was there. You'd think I knew that was there. After all, I put it there.

[24:39]

People start thinking I'm stupid in early Alzheimer's. But what you... But you... If you get used to this pause, you actually interrupt meditation. You interrupt representational thinking. And when representational thinking is interrupted, I don't know what's there. And it was wonderful to be surprised. So we have these ingredients that you yourself can look at. And we can bring into the ingredients the possibility of pausing for a moment in the midst of them.

[25:48]

Let me speak about another way to look at the ingredients. This morning waking up to all the birds. I just love birds and their song. And I hear them. And often I hear the doves particularly. They remind me very much of practicing Zen in Japan. There's very commonly doves near the temple, at the temple in the garden. So I'm glad I can hear because I have probably... having spent a considerable amount of time in the 60s in rather noisy discos.

[27:02]

So perhaps my ears aren't as sharp as they could be. But a few birds get through, you know. Yeah. And then I like the doves so my auditory consciousness hears the doves more than the other birds. But I did notice that first there's a few and then as the light increases, more birds join in. And finally the late sleepers are up, you know, singing. And occasionally there's even a cuckoo. And occasionally there's even a cuckoo. There's somebody who practices with us named Coco, who was the Doan at a Sashin at the House de Stille.

[28:20]

And all night some mad cuckoo bird had been going cuckoo. And we kept waiting for Coco to go cuckoo and hit the bell. Okay. And I think maybe the doves, I hear the doves because there's some similarity to the shape of this courtyard of the hotel, garden. To the space between the buildings in the garden and the temples I sat in. So I'm not only hearing the birds, I'm hearing the shape of the courtyard, the shape of the garden. And then that puts me back into a certain meditative state. Okay, so what I've just described are the three fields characteristic of each sense.

[29:50]

One of the fields is the organ. And so that my ear, because of its history and disco dancing and all that, has its own field, what it hears. And then there's the field of the audible, which includes all the birds. And what I hear of the birds, the other birds hear something else. And if you slow down bird songs and analyze it, it's a very complex sound, but our ears only hear part of it. And I'm also hearing, as I said, the shape of the garden. So that's the second field And the third is auditory consciousness

[31:01]

which chooses to emphasize the doves because I knew them in Japan. And after a while I begin to hear, in addition to the doves, many other birds. So you can see each of these fields is slightly different. And these three come together to make the sense field of the ear. The same is true of mentation, thinking in general, the same is true of seeing, feeling, and so forth. So we have these ingredients, as I've said, of character, personality, et cetera. And then we have the sense fields that each of our senses is presenting to us.

[32:21]

Which each has its limitations. And then we can bring into the situation a pause. And sometimes you can pause with the birds. And sometimes you can pause with the flowers. With either the fragrance, which I've been noticing the whole seminar. Or the colors. So you can use the ingredients themselves to help you create the pause. Okay. See if they're helping. I'm trying to think of how to give you a feeling of this.

[33:55]

So if I try to draw the parts, the nature of the parts, Maybe it looks something like this. We call the nature pause. Now what I mean by that is at the moment of the pause, you have two choices. If you don't have the pause, you just go on like that. If you have the feeling of a pause, you can bring that pause inward. And you can really make everything disappear.

[35:16]

And that means you're moving toward a freedom from distinctions. Now don't get yourself in trouble. Don't get yourself in trouble and try to think that this is some absolute freedom from distinctions. It's in the direction of a freedom from distinction. Now, when you practice a simple thing like noticing you're separated, And then reminding yourself you're already connected. Already connected is actually less distinctions, less separations than already separated. Ja, und zu sagen, bereits verbunden, ist eine geringfügigere Unterscheidung.

[36:24]

Es ist mehr Freiheit von Unterscheidung als zu sagen, bereits getrennt. Now, consciousness, this SCI of consciousness means to cut, to make distinctions. Und das SCI in consciousness, in Bewusstsein, bedeutet zu schneiden. So, when we, in English at least, so when we're conscious, we're making distinctions. Wenn wir bewusst sind, treffen wir Unterscheidungen. So you have a choice to make more distinctions or to make less distinctions. And when you make less distinctions, there's an inward feeling. When you stand talking to someone and you feel a separation and you say to yourself, no subject-object distinctions. Suddenly you're standing in a space with the person which simply has less distinctions and you feel more connected. So in many ways you can discover for yourself what happens when you make less distinctions. When you feel the immediate situation rather than think about the immediate situation.

[37:46]

And actually, in practice, this inward movement is called the bodhisattva wisdom. Manjushri. And the outward movement is called compassion or Avalokiteshvara. You generate a slightly different person outwardly and that purified would be the Bodhisattva of compassion. So there's always these directions. This movement. And practice is to bring these movements, the many movements of distraction, into an inward movement and an outward movement. A movement toward less distinctions, a movement toward more distinctions.

[38:50]

What is emptiness? The absence of distinction. So the movement inward is actually a movement toward emptiness. I mean, it's a direction. Don't think, oh, do I experience emptiness? No, you can feel the movement toward less distinctions. Then you can, during zazen, you can feel this. There's some kind of settling. Just bringing your attention to your breath, suddenly there's less distinction. How do you go to sleep?

[39:55]

You start making less distinctions. If you're lying there thinking about a lot of things, it's almost impossible to go to sleep. So when you go to sleep, you go to sleep through knowing the feeling of less distinctions. Of decreasing distinction. Once you get really familiar with that, you can go to sleep very quickly. And images start to appear. Images, when distinctions lessen, images float to the surface. And when images start appearing, you can also know you're going to sleep. So this is simple, normal stuff that you all do.

[40:58]

It's just, Buddhism says, really notice it and make it the way you practice. In other words, make the initial moment of mentation volitional. Volitional, intentional. Make this process Conscious. But not trying to control it, just more awareness. Okay. Now, we can get used to the pause. Let's have the activity of the pause. When you pause you can feel energy.

[42:12]

Let's call it energy. So when you pause for a moment and really kind of stop you can feel to take the move you have to put energy in the situation and if I practice so that I have a sense of just images if there's less associations coming into the situation Less karma in the situation. There's just simple images like the outlines of all of them. The shape of the room. Then I put feeling, images, meaning, energy into that form.

[43:18]

Okay, so energy is one thing that through the pause you can feel how you put energy in. And the second is you can see how you can see the formation of objects. Or content. Because if I listen to the cars, say, or the birds, If I pause, then I can clearly feel, oh, that many times I've heard tires on wet streets and things. And various associations come up. And I can feel, say, the doves.

[44:28]

From many places I've heard doves. So the pause lets me feel how I form the present unconsciousness. And third, we can say the pause allows you to Notice mind. And in fact, all of these then you can return to mind. So as I notice that I associate the doves with Japan, I can notice through the pause, that's an activity of mind, and I know now, we've been practicing it, discussing it, that each moment by the time I

[45:35]

Notice it is already past. By the time I look at all of you in me it's the past. You're already always slightly ahead of ahead. You're all moving into an invisible future which I catch the light from. Sometimes somehow that makes me think of another Rumi poem. He said, God knows what keeps me laughing. God only knows what keeps me laughing. The stem of a flower moves when the air moves.

[47:00]

That poem comes out of somebody who's pausing. So he's surprised when the stem of a flower moves just because the air moves. That's pretty obvious. But it's not obvious in the pause. Are you there or not? Probably the same side of the other tape. And that is the tape you have to transcribe. Okay. And that it's, each moment is absolutely unique. Each moment is dissolving to make way for the next moment. Each moment is not repeatable.

[48:03]

So Vasubandhu says, and I say, make that volitional. in other words it's all disappearing anyway make that your let it disappear participate in the disappearance so I hear the doves I hear the associations I feel I let in the associations with Japan and then I let it disappear I let it return to mind. I feel the dove sort of dissolve. It wasn't there anyway. I hear all the doves I've ever heard dissolve. Because I've created the habit of using the paws to also dissolve mental formations. And I feel fresh, you know.

[49:16]

Like a spring moment. I mean, really, this is just our capacity, our possibility. When we see the discontinuity of reality, And we intentionally join that discontinuity with practicing the pause. Opening the gap that's in the middle of each moment. And letting everything appear from it. And knowing it's all going to disappear anyway. Not be fooled by the habit of mind to create continuity and duration.

[50:20]

You say to yourself, one of the things I've learned from reality is not to fight with it. The reality says everything is going to disappear. It's the better part of wisdom to let everything disappear. And it's such a freedom. Such a deep relaxation. Okay, so that's the activity of the pause. And so what we have put something else on, here we have the space. Potentiality. Of the pause. We like circles in Zen.

[51:31]

And we can say things like creativity. Insights. All of them. You know, we say in Zen, Tung Shan Zen, do I honor my teacher? Someone asked him. Asked him, why do you honor your teacher? And he said, because he refused to reveal the teaching to me.

[52:35]

Some other teacher said, I revere my teacher because he only showed me half. Well, since we're here in the The home of the quadrinity process. I only didn't reveal one fourth. Because, you know, I always have problems with One of the things we like, because it brought us to Buddhist practice or to practice, is intuition. And, yeah, we like intuition. It's often wiser than our usual way of thinking. And it's a sense of... It's the way we recognize a sense of knowing that goes beyond consciousness.

[53:54]

But I've never liked the word intuition. I don't want to try to explain why. It doesn't feel right to me. And then I found out recently Vasubandhu says there's no such thing as intuition. Thank you, Vasu. Vasu, baby. But what is characteristic of practice is not a flow of thinking, but a flow of insights. A flow of recognition. And that's a kind of intuition, but it doesn't, I think it feels, to me it feels better to say a flow of insight. It's more like, I think I call it, it's more like dowsing. You know, when you douse for water or something.

[55:13]

You kind of have to suspend your mind. And you have to be alert and aware to the feeling of whether there's water or not, or whether it's an electrical wire or a telephone wire. But if you think about it, you can't do it. You just have to let the messages be received. And this pause creates a situation where there keeps being recognition, insights. Okay, that's enough. Where did this come from? Yeah. Well, one sense it comes from Yogacara teaching and Zen practice.

[56:19]

And another way it comes from, and I've tried to make that clear, from just what we all bring to this situation, even without knowing anything about Buddhism. It comes from just looking at the ingredients of our life. Recognizing that those ingredients We can add new ingredients to the situation. We can choose wisdom ingredients. And the ingredients are always in the moment. Seeing that, we can begin to see the pause that allows us to notice the ingredients and choose the object we see.

[57:36]

Now, you may grasp at this and say, well, but I can't really experience this. I just see the flowers. That's true. But you're in the midst of continuous consciousness. But practice with looking at, take something, just fool around. There's some flowers. So look away. And look back at And just let whatever you see be there. And look back again.

[58:37]

And if you do that, you begin to notice different things. Once you notice mostly the leaves, then you notice mostly the red. And then you might notice that some of the leaves are actually moving. So you can see, even in such a simple little experiment, that you're constructing, you're noticing, your way of perceiving constructs what you see. So you can begin to hear in a world where things are unique and non-repeatable. Now we know that when we're driving a car, you better be careful if you have an accident.

[59:39]

It happens then, there's not something you can rethink it. So you're in a way reversing the way our outward seeing goes and goes toward continuity, repetition, The security of repeatability. But we need to bring that direction back to mind. to another location of seeing, a kind of inner seeing, where we see each thing appear in mind.

[60:48]

So I don't think that Hans Joachim is just there. When I look here, the flowers appear in my mind. My mind takes the shape of the flowers. It's just like listening to the birds this morning. My ear takes the shape of the doves. and takes the shape of the garden and the building. And then as I hear other birds, my hearing field extends and begins to take the shape of the other birds. That's just noticing the ingredients of ear consciousness. And the same applies to seeing.

[61:53]

It's not just that the flowers are there and my mind is there and the flowers, I see them. No, it's much more interactive and interdependent. Interpenetrate. my mind actually takes the shape of the flowers. And when I look at Hans Jürgen, my mind takes the shape of Hans Jürgen. Knowing that, When I open my eyes again and look at you, he's slightly different. Notice when I said he was different, he started to smile. And if I have that feeling, then many Hans Joachim appear to me.

[62:56]

He probably doesn't feel that I'm seeing a predictable person. Or laying on him my predictions of him. And there's an intimacy in that. You know, one definition that Shido in the Sandokai, this book that Sukhirashi lectures that just came out.

[64:02]

Intimacy is to be in the midst of the many and the one. What this is interesting, what does it mean? There are many people here. There are many things in the world. And yet, there's also somehow a unity here. So there's There's many and there's one. You can't quite put them together. Knowing you can't quite put them together is a kind of intimacy. We know we're just a part of the whole. But we're a separate part. We're quite independent.

[65:04]

And yet we're not independent. You can't put that together. And there's a kind of intimacy in allowing it to be apart and yet trying to be together. So far, before I get Beate this time, Beate and I have known each other for a long time. And at the same time, she's a different person. At the end of the seminar, she goes somewhere else. So there's a knowing and a familiarity and a difference. And intimacy is not to make either, but to feel this kind of space which you can't make sense of.

[66:05]

If I try to make Hans Joachim or Beate predictable, there's no intimacy. I can say, I've got that guy figured out. But if I recognize there every moment another Tripansyokim appears and I don't know all of them only a few of them and his son knows some that I'll never know and yet there's some desire to know each other this desire Situation that can't fully be brought together is intimacy.

[67:07]

To tolerate it is intimacy. And that's also this pause. And perhaps when you can feel that, you're sealed and not armored. You haven't made a wall, but somehow, and there's no centrical forces pulling you apart, things are converging and yet disappearing. And you feel complete or sealed. Everything can pass right through you. Something like that is what I mean by sealed instead of armlet. Okay, so why don't we sit for a few minutes. and let our translator leave if she wants to leave a few minutes early.

[68:24]

Although I can't give you access to this sentient world, as Buddhism understands it, I can give you some, I hope, some sense of how to look at the ingredients of your world. So you can discover the world through feeling, non-graspable feeling. rather than primarily through thinking.

[72:41]

The world surrounds us like a private supply of itself. A stem of a flower moves when the air moves. Thus we can find ourselves inseparable from reality, from actuality. So finden wir, dass wir untrennbar sind von der Aktualität.

[74:15]

From this sentient world which is each moment appearing to us. Und von dieser empfindenden Welt in der jeder Augenblick erscheint. One thing I want to say is I noticed some of you sitting like this.

[75:20]

Strangely, there's such a sensitive relationship between our body and mind. You know, the kind of sensitivity we find in acupuncture points. That this almost always is accompanied by too much thinking in Sādhā. So if you sit this way, you're usually not alert. That way you're thinking too much, usually. You see, if your thumbs are just touching lightly, your hands are about like that together, That usually accompanies a pretty good state of mind.

[76:32]

But not like that. Your thumbs are mostly flat coming together. And there's a kind of oval here. Suzuki Roshi said once that we should sit with our thumbs separated by the thickness of a, with a separation the size of a, the thickness of a piece of paper. So I spent a year learning how to do that. I could feel the warmth between, over the gap. And the warmth became like a little rubber thing I could feel when the warmth was there or not. But then I discovered he actually said, press your fingers, thumbs together with enough pressure to support a piece of paper.

[77:46]

That was much easier. But I learned a lot in doing that. Okay. Is there anything? I think we, you know, I don't feel I did justice to this, but I did the best I could. This is, I would say, the front door to knowing the sentient world. But I'm happy to have any comments or questions that you want to bring up right now. Yes. I understood a bit of it.

[79:10]

When you were going to mind, suddenly I thought, oh, everything goes back to mind. And I thought, oh, continuity again. It was a bit like the track for me, because when I imagined it to bring that to mind, then somehow I constructed something like continuity again. Deutsch bitte. In the activities of the pausa, I was a bit in a trap. At first I thought, I understand something about what is happening in the area of the spiritual constructions. And when he brought everything back to the spirit, then I thought, something like a continuity is being constructed there.

[80:11]

Well, maybe I should have said bring it back to the pause. Because by bring it back to mind, I mean to dissolve the distinction. So that's an antidote to continuity. Because otherwise energy and the formation of objects, that establishes a continuity. So I let the flowers arise in my mind. And then I let it dissolve. Sounds okay to me. I remember Yamada Mumon Roshi, who was my teacher in Japan.

[81:32]

He was interviewed by a friend of mine, Ron Eyre, for BBC television. Called The Long Search. It was a series of programs on religion. And I arranged for him to interview Yamada Momon Roshi as one of the series. And he said he had this wonderful intimate conversation with Mumun Roshi who had a little white beard and kind of white hair. And sometimes I let my hair grow a little bit when I was in Japan. And I thought he would understand.

[82:40]

And when it got even a little bit long, he'd look at me and say, you're too young. But maybe if I appear with a little white hair and a little beard, you'll realize I think I'm old. But he had this intense and intimate conversation with Mumun Roshi. And at the end of the interview, and it's in the television program I've seen him, Mumun Roshi got up, turned around, walked down the corridor of the temple, and Ron said, I had the feeling we all utterly disappeared.

[83:44]

And in a sense, that's true. For Mugunoshi, when he turned around, Everything was gone. For him. And then he was in the creaking of the boards and so forth. So that kind of feeling which Ron picked up isn't just that he turned around. It's that he let everything go. One of the other, just as an anecdote, one of the other episodes in this series of the BBC. He had a long, hour-long interview with a Part of it was on this hour-long program on Judaism.

[84:57]

Was a long interview with this Hasidic rabbi. And he spoke, and he was very intense. And it went on and on. And at the end, Ron said to him, this has been extremely interesting, but is there any silence in Judaism? Judaism, yeah. And he said, of course, but we don't talk about that. Anything else? Yes Since this morning, I'm always in this calling with you.

[86:18]

Yeah, I'm thinking about it, and I'm not really clear what it means, and I suddenly got the feeling that this is an illusion, but also a choice of either being in prison or at being free. Something like, okay, you can't be It becomes . But nothing is continuous, but before that you have a choice of . Did you say in German the first part of what she said? Yes. But it sounds like you're right.

[87:38]

What we imagine, I think, is something like this. that we have some sort of continuity and sometimes we see. But if you look carefully, it's more active, something more like that. And if you look very carefully, it's like that. And, for example, I'm standing here, right? And we're all sitting here standing. And I have established a sense of the presence of this room. And I have all the ingredients of you all in here.

[88:54]

And that's actually held in my mind. Like I'm always amazed that in a hotel, I have to stay in hotels quite a bit, Without any really effort, I can get up in the middle of the night and go to the toilet without the light on. And step over where I've left clothes in the middle of the room, or a suitcase. And usually find the toilet and correctly aim. In the dark. So far I've never ruined any toilet or bathroom. Even when I go to sleep, the room is present in my mind. I've established a kind of continuity of the presence of that room.

[90:15]

So we have, and that's a very powerful sensation. We have this room in our mind. Yeah, but when we all go out that door, You open the door and you're in a different space. Although I may, since I've done it several times, also know that space. Still it might be slightly different. And in fact, there's a discontinuous moment there when I change to there. And further as I step out into the drizzly weather, and then to the street, at each time, there's actually more change than we're willing to notice. And you can actually use the stepping out the door over the threshold.

[91:30]

And subliminal means under the threshold. In German too, I believe. And there's this subliminal And in a Japanese house, the entryway is called the genkan. And that literally means mystery gate. And look at what in English the entrance is called the entrance. And we forget that these words have wisdom for us.

[92:46]

Even when you step through the door, you can feel yourself stepping through a slightly different world. And like in a monastery where you bow, stop and bow, the custom is you always step through a door with the foot nearest the hinge. So it's very funny, you have a rule. You always do something in a predictable way. I don't always do it. But it's funny that that rule makes me pause. So I'm using predictability to end predictability.

[94:05]

So the rule interrupts my continuity. You don't have to translate that. And as I do that, I open into a new trance. So when you look carefully all the way along, actually there's interruptions in the continuity. And you can turn those interruptions into pauses. Every time you go upstairs or through a doorway, good practice is every time you look out the window, identify your mind with space.

[95:10]

So, the more you do that, the more you see finally that there is involvement by involvement And you can begin to experience the gaps. As I say, instead of counting one Two, three, four.

[96:10]

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