Oh, we just chanted, an unsurpassed penetrating and perfect dharma is rarely met with, even in a hundred thousand million kalpas. That's not very encouraging, is it? An unsurpassed penetrating, unsurpassed, not You can't compare it to anything. Penetrating. Perfect. Perfecting. Complete. Completing. Dharma. Dharma. Dharma. Reality. Dharma. What is Dharma? Is rarely met with. Yes. We live here in this contemporary world, and I'm of course interested in this contemporary world. I mean, this is where we live.

[01:01]

And there's no reason that ancient wisdom isn't also our wisdom. I mean, this now will sometime be ancient times. But still, this ancient wisdom of which we're practicing may be more radical than you want, may not make deep enough sense to you because you have such a sense of the world already that you can't shift your viewpoint sufficiently because wisdom is about shifting your viewpoint. Shifting the direction of mind is what from ancient, ancient times, pre-Buddhist times, is known in wisdom. Shifting the direction of mind. Yeah, but that's quite a thing to shift the direction of mind.

[02:08]

Quite a thing. Takes a huge teaching like Buddhism and a huge practice what you do so many moments, moments, moments. Kshanas. kshanik moments over years to shift the direction of mind, the intentionality of mind. In the end you may not like where it takes you or you may not want to. It goes against your grain. So Although you might have some deeper feeling that, yes, it goes against my grain, but yeah, the grain can change. It's not hard to also keep trust in a deeper feeling when the direction of life and your thoughts is different.

[03:26]

And this morning I said something like, this fleshy world we live. I asked, and Mark actually, he sweetly comes by every morning, asks what I'm doing, if I need anything. And I said, what did I say this morning? He couldn't remember and I couldn't remember. And actually, I actually don't want to remember because I want to say it again anew. It doesn't interest me actually what I said. What interests me is trying to say it again. This fleshy world... For us, this is a fleshy world. Fleshy world. Which strangely penetrates the space around us. Which includes, is the space around us, and... And it's not quite fleshy anymore, but yet it's our fleshy world.

[04:36]

And also penetrates within us, so we have some experience of interiority. A kind of space within this, or as this fleshy world. And I said, what is it? What is it? What is the center of the universe? We can ask ourselves such questions. What is the center of the universe? What is the origin? We may not know anything about the origin of this world, but we can know something about the origin of this moment, each moment as us. Some of you have two ideal, most of us probably have two ideal, an idea of what practice is and what monastic life is and so forth.

[05:37]

But I think if you look carefully at this semi-monastic life, I think it is the ideal life. Maybe I'm wrong, but I like to think it is. I think if you examine other places too, you might, maybe they are also the ideal. But I think this is the ideal life, and that's why I'm living it. What I'm saying here is, please don't use your ideals to distance yourself from your immediate situation. Your ideals should bring you into contact with the immediate situation and with others. So this is actually an example of what I mean by this other, this viewpoint that may not suit us.

[06:51]

If we assume that this is the ideal life, that's like assuming already connected, already the ideal life, then our viewpoint of how to proceed in this life is different. So the sense of ancient wisdom is, yes, we have our intention to do something, to be something, to practice well, to create some kind of security, good relationships, so forth. That's intention. And we have the intention of our innermost request, as Guruji says. I mean, all of Sukershi's Buddhism rests on a number of points.

[07:55]

One of the points it rests on is to know, to recognize, to trust your inner request, innermost request. I didn't even know when he first started speaking about it that there was a word innermost because I always said inner. I looked it up and there it is, innermost. I'm sure as a Japanese student... Because we don't use, in common language, inner most much. We used to say inner. But he brought forth this inner most. But even that isn't what is meant by... That's a function of wisdom, but it's not what is meant by intentionality and directionality in... in the most fundamental sense in a wisdom practice. Maybe it's better to use the word direction instead of intention to change the direction of our mind, to change the structure of how our mind produces directionality.

[09:07]

I've been talking about this in another way by saying to dissolve the present moment's duality. To dissolve the duality of the present moment. I don't know, do it any way you want. Find your own practices to do it. All the practices of Buddhism are to dissolve the duality of the moment. Why? Yes, okay, it changes things. we feel certainly a greater immediacy. And as I pointed out, one of the reasons is part of the directionality of our life is our past, our associations with the past, our comparisons with the past. And those come in, as I've been saying, to the present, arise in the present moment differently when we dissolve the duality of the present moment than if we

[10:16]

reify the duality. Now this is not so hard to do in practice, it may be hard to get a conception of it, but I'm trying to give you, us too, me too, I'm trying to discover this for myself, a conception of it Because it, I think, increases the power and faith with which we can practice the simpler practices of realizing it. The practices are usually simpler than the conception. Sometimes the conception is necessary to give the power and intention to the practice. Because the practice is simpler, but it also can be swayed by this or that other conception, our habitual conceptions of in anticipating a future, and how we anticipate a future, not anticipating it through the immediacy of the present, but through our train of thoughts.

[11:25]

If the ground of being is thought, is the continuity of thought, then being will be ground up into thought. And if we grind the world up into thought, by making thought the ground of our being, a lot is left out. Now I'm trying here to take us to a place, take myself to a place which is I don't know quite, I haven't been there before, I haven't been there in language before, and I'm sort of trying to stretch and pull that language to snap us into someplace. I'm cut. Now I'm free. Just like that.

[12:30]

So again, I don't know, you know, quite how to approach this. What is this fleshy world that extends within and without? One... When we... There's various things I can say but I don't know if I can find... I'm trying to speak about how we imagine this...

[13:53]

present, this here and now. It's been a useful phrase in American New Age Buddhist and so forth thinking, the here and now, but it's a very thin phrase. And it doesn't have a sense of how it functions in this. So this, let's see if I can go back to, well, we have this sense of non-duality. is dissolving of duality as an activity and we have the sense of directing ourselves toward the field or into a field of mind. And this is a practice of noticing how each object is constituted. By constituted it means you de-objectify the object. We tend to speculate and objectify. This practice is to de-objectify the object by seeing how it's interdependent, how it's dependent on our senses, how we know it, and how it then appears, is marked by consciousness, marked by mind, and marked by emptiness.

[15:20]

And this is, you know, not such a big deal. It's a simple matter, really, of reminding yourself to see how objects are interdependent, how they appear in your mind, how they appear through your senses, how you know objects. And you just get in the habit of bringing yourself into the activity of knowing. and maybe I should say the activity of experiencing, because knowing is also rather thin. We're not attempting to accumulate knowledge, like accumulate the knowledge of what I said this morning, exactly how I said it, but rather this world of Buddhism and more ancient than Buddhism, which is also often lost, and maybe only a few people do it, because it requires the wisdom of practice.

[16:34]

It can spread out into the whole society, but to really bring it into the flow of living, maybe not too many people do it, because why bother? Why bother? I am asking you, why bother? If you have the sense of a head looking out at the world, seeing everything out there, this is not wisdom. If you have a sense of a private interior in which you know things, this is not wisdom. Wisdom in Buddhism is something like feeling the world dissolve into the soup of experience. Does that make sense? I'm having a hard time finding how to say this. The world dissolves not into knowledge but disappears into the soup of experience.

[17:43]

Sometimes you have to make things articulate to know them, but mostly the kshanic moments. I mean, you know so little when you try to make it knowledge. You're living, skating on the surface of things. The present isn't where you live. The past appears in the present, but flowers in the future. Our practice is the past appears in the present and flowers in the present. And the future flows into the present. The future keeps flowing into the present. Dogen says future goes from future to present to past. This is what we start to experience. The future flows into the present as the past flowers in the present. So I can say these in words, these kind of words, but how do we bring this into our experience?

[18:46]

How do we make our life experience in this fully flowering sense where we sing the horizon at each moment? How do we deliver the present to ourselves? To deliver the present to ourselves is to restructure knowing, or consciousness, or functioning. To restructure functioning. And then to see what this restructured functioning brings us, maybe it's a little like imagining a train engine that lays tracks as it goes. And as it lays tracks as it goes, the tracks get wider and wider until the entire scenery is the tracks, are the tracks.

[19:58]

And by laying the tracks as we go, we begin to notice the scenery change. This is one way I could say to be on the path. To be on the path of our ancient ancestors and to see the same views they saw. They are seeing, because you're also our ancient ancestors. You know, this morning I had to do, it was fun, have cho-san. went on quite a long time. We almost didn't, some of us didn't get to Zazen almost. Maybe some of us didn't die. But that's, you know, in that mind I have to, maybe we have to speak practically, you know, realistically.

[20:59]

But now I'm trying to have another kind of realistic realism, the mind of our ancient ancestors in this present now. to let the world dissolve, melt into our experience, disappear into our experience. So there's a kind of intentionality which changes our tracks, changes the structure of how we know, which is what our practice is, that's what you're doing. And then to know what appears through this changed way of being in the world. It's like, very simply in a way, our usual way of thinking is we focus time on space. I'm trying to think of some ways to speak of it. In practice we focus, no, our usual way is we focus space on time.

[22:07]

We see space in the framework of time. Our practice is to focus time on space, to see time in the framework of space. That's what already connected is. The difference between already connected and already separated. Already separated is when we're focusing space on time. So if our continuity again is in thoughts, if our ground of knowing is in thoughts, we live within the image of man, of being, of deities, in thought. We live in the image of Buddha. That image immediately shifts into the dharmakaya, is the dharmakaya.

[23:15]

And the dharmakaya is the all-at-onceness of everything at once. All-at-onceness of everything at once. And that's only, we can only know that through our heart and the hara. Can't know it through this observing snorkel of the head, you know. which kind of views the world like this is all underwater, you know. Well, there's another submarine over there. I'll torpedo it. And when you feel this shift, you feel actually the world is coming in through your hara and your heart, these two spots particularly. It's as if your senses make it possible for the world to come in through your hara and heart and you feel the world flowing up into your head, not flowing from your head.

[24:17]

It's really a different physical feeling. Not to protect ourselves so much anymore. In Japanese Zen they speak about solid thoughts and atmospheric thoughts. If I hold the stick up, that's a solid thought.

[25:22]

If I think about holding the stick up, it's an atmospheric thought. And we spend a lot of time in atmospheric thoughts. And this sense of the present as experience where there's no inside and outside. When you find yourself in the experience of this world of, as I say, hara and heart, the sense of an inside and outside disappears. There's a sense of the field of mind turning toward the field of mind or the field of the present, turning toward the field of the present. You have, I don't know, again, an embodied viewpoint rather than a mental or thought-based viewpoint.

[26:26]

And that embodied viewpoint is inseparable from the present. It feels like you flow into the present and the present flows into you. Everything changes. Every particle of you starts to relax. I know this feeling. I want to live in a way that I know this feeling more thoroughly, more deeply. It feels like everything breathes, everything is breathing. And I know each of you, we have tastes of this, but maybe we don't know how to actually savor the taste. Maybe we grasp at it with knowing instead of letting it disappear into our experience until

[27:41]

Knowing is a flow of insights instead of a flowing flow of knowledge. Knowledge, you try to grab the insights. This changing the direction of how we know is to move into, is to move, to deliver the present in its uniqueness. We can't experience the absolute uniqueness right now. I want to keep coming, I always like to every lecture come back to the absolute uniqueness, the non-repeatability of right now. Right now is already wrong. Because we don't feel it because we're trying to know it or have it as knowledge. We can't let go of knowledge. We grasp at insight with knowledge rather than letting insight flow, disappear into experience.

[28:49]

Not knowing is nearest. And when you can really trust the mind, big mind like this, and trust the nature of There's no leakage. You stop leaking. You stop feeling depleted. When you have a wisdom viewpoint, everything is marked by emptiness. Everything dissolves. When you have a compassion viewpoint, you constantly feel forgiving and accepting. not comparing. Comparing and that kind of discrimination comes much later in the process of being. Now, to be fully alive in this way

[30:07]

Well, I don't think it's really possible because we have to be alive in the way each person we meet is alive. So don't worry, other people will help you get out of this strange ancient wisdom site which sounds so scary. May sound so scary. But as you know, But if you deeply taste it, deeply begin to feel it, you can be in the space of others and simultaneously be in this space, grounded not in thought, but in the present. And the present not as a mental thing, but as an experience without inside or outside. If you know this, you'll know it in your stomach, you'll know it in this fleshy world.

[31:28]

That concludes. Thank you very much.

[31:44]

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