Sometimes I just want to talk, speak nonsense to you. Well, not exactly nonsense. That would really have no point. But maybe my point is I'd sometimes like what I say not to have a point. Did I say it elegantly? My goodness. Yeah. Because, you know, if I give a talk, partly part of the talk will be to, yeah, make it hold together in some way, to have a point.

[01:14]

But, yeah, and I don't feel, if I give a talk which I feel I didn't have a point or I didn't make some kind of point clear or some new point clear, I don't feel so good. But still, there's something artificial about having what I say or what we observe make a point or make sense. But nevertheless, there is something artificial about it, that one tries to describe something so clearly.

[02:23]

I've got really problems translating this. Okay. How would you translate this point into German? That's something specific. Because certainly practice and part of the discipline of practice is just to notice without trying to make sense of what you're noticing. I mean the trouble with trying to make sense is you do make it make sense and then it doesn't make sense. You miss what's new. You know, I spoke, I think, in the last Johanneshof seminar about the idea of the future as something that comes toward us.

[03:34]

You know, we tend to think, as I said, if we're going to Freiburg, we have to aim toward Freiburg. So we, at least in English, say, and I know in German you have a little more, a couple of ways of saying it, but in English we say we go into the future. And the whole idea of going into the future means that we want the future to be predictable. And the whole apparatus of European and Western European and American culture is to make the future predictable.

[04:42]

And boy, I really could start talking some nonsense here. Yeah, and I think that part of existentialism, certainly part of the novels of Camus and André Gide, André Gide was their experience in North Africa. Where the future is, I don't think, predictable. What their future wasn't predictable.

[06:11]

The experience in much of Asia, and I think in North Africa, is you're in an unpredictable world. I think French intellectual life was very influenced by this presence of North Africa. Where the future is in the present. Yeah, it's like, what's the joke in the Irish bar? Tomorrow all beers are free. But go there tomorrow and you don't get a free beer. So we think of the future as receding and being replaced by the present.

[07:13]

But if you feel the future in its unexpectedness, and you're not trying to make the future a predictable present, Then the new parts of the present, if I'm making sense, are actually the presence of the future in the so-called present. If you live in a culture which assumes that the future comes towards you instead of you going into it, the idea of security, social services, insurance, it's going to be all different.

[08:37]

No, the only thing I'm doing is trying to use an example of a difference in views. And in the background of what I'm saying is what I started a couple of days, a week ago or so. It's the experience of aliveness itself. Without having to add something to it to make it interesting.

[09:47]

To see if in Zazen you can just have an experience of aliveness. Almost no thoughts. Or if they're thoughts, they just appear and disappear. They appear and disappear as sort of mental objects, not as discursive thinking. But if you can get that feeling and finally in fact find the location of this aliveness, in more what we could call the field of mind than the contents of mind.

[10:56]

If you can get a feel for the field of mind, And in a sense, disappearing into it. Then you're about as close as you can get, or you have the basis for being free of your birth and bread culture. You're closer to knowing things as they are. Or having the means to know things as they are.

[12:05]

Because again, in the background of what I'm saying is, if our physiologically and mentally we're shaped by our culture, How can we possibly be free of our culture? But the capacities of mind and body as they can be mold themselves into whatever culture you're born into. The capacity to be free of that mold is also present. And knowing that deeply is called enlightenment.

[13:07]

And accepting that as possible is the basis of Zen practice. So what are the What is the word for the means to get free of your culture? And the word in Buddhism is wisdom. And what is wisdom then? Wisdom is a combination of the analysis of things as they are Weisheit ist eine Kombination aus dem Wissen um Dinge, so wie sie tatsächlich sind, und der Erfahrung von den Dingen, so wie sie tatsächlich sind.

[14:21]

Und diese Analyse und diese Erfahrung Or as we say, wave follows wave and wave leads wave. Teaching leads the practice and the practice leads the teaching. Analysis leads the experience, etc., You know in the 50s and 60s in San Francisco even, there were virtually no Japanese restaurants. There were several.

[15:30]

Actually, there were several in one street in Japantown. I remember in the late 50s I looked for a Japanese restaurant in New York and I couldn't find one. Way uptown I remember I found a a Japanese, sort of Japanese grocery store that sold me what looked like spaghetti, but, you know, you had to cook it differently. Yeah, but because I started seeing one or two samurai movies a week, B-grade samurai movies.

[16:41]

Or D- or E-grade samurai movies. I started eating almost every evening in Japanese restaurants. I brought my first wife on her first date to a Japanese restaurant. She couldn't deal with it. And I abducted my first wife at our first rendezvous in a Japanese restaurant. Instead of invite, I said captured.

[17:42]

It's just the prefix difference. Well, trying to eat yudofu, which is hot tofu in hot water with a chopstick, was quite beyond her. But when you talk to people about sushi, eating raw fish, everybody was, eww. So there was almost no way to explain to people that, no, you should try raw fish, it's quite good. But now Europe and America are robbing the seas of fish. Because it's become such a fashion. But it became a common way for many people to eat, often to eat, is because of experience.

[18:47]

They tried it a few times. It took a few years, quite a few years before people actually generally began to accept sushi. The point I'm making is simply most new things you enter through experience, not through analysis or knowledge. The only way I've ever gotten anybody to enjoy Japanese food is by repeatedly trying it. And so really, for just such a simple reason, here's why the Zen school emphasizes Zazen, Zazen, Zazen.

[19:56]

Und ganz einfach so ist auch der Grund, weshalb die Zen-Schule immer wieder betont, Zazen, Zazen, Zazen. Yeah, right. That's it. And because only through Zazen can you begin to experience perhaps things as they actually exist. Denn nur durch Zazen und kann man vielleicht entdecken, wie Dinge tatsächlich existieren. Okay. So, perhaps experience and analysis, knowing about the opportunity to have sushi and the experience of it together, it's a wave follows wave, etc. No pun intended. But this example I gave you of noticing without trying to make sense of Really developing the experience of uncorrected mind.

[21:28]

And uncorrected posture. Marie-Louise told me the other day she had gotten the sense of uncorrected mind, but she thought she was still supposed to keep correcting her posture. Sorry? And I still thought... You thought you were supposed to correct your posture, if not your mind. Okay. Marie-Louise had... Well, maybe she didn't, but that was my impression. You thought it was important to maintain a certain posture. Yes, I understood you put yourself in the perfect posture and then you don't correct it. That means you stick in there. Yes, that's the opposite. That's interesting to me that it's the opposite. It never occurred to me that you could understand it that way.

[23:09]

Because if I correct it, it kind of hurts me. I correct it to this, you know. Oh. For me, to say, don't correct your posture... For me, it means that... If you sit, you find your posture. After a while, you start to slump or something, but you don't correct yourself. Maybe once or twice during a period of zazen, it's okay to correct your posture. But in general, you just accept whatever happens. Yeah, but then also you don't stick into this one. You can also come out of it again, right? Because then he says, you can improve your attitude twice or so, but in general you stay in the attitude.

[24:10]

Well, it's a kind of subtle negotiation. I mean, if you find yourself sitting like this, you don't then freeze in that posture. I'm not going to ever correct it. I am. I'll never succeed in teaching. Okay. So the problems, the wisdom is also to know the obstacles. And as I've often said, one of the obstacles is consciousness. The consciousness itself.

[25:21]

Because the job of consciousness is to, as I always say, to make the world predictable. So, you can then have the alternative way of knowing what I call awareness. Or in addition, we can restructure consciousness. Take away from consciousness its habit of trying to make the world predictable. Oh.

[26:43]

You know, at Crestone, I'm the national park and wilderness area and preserve are surrounding us. Maybe it's... Well, and the thinking, because what shapes consciousness as well as its function, necessary function, our views? And one of the views that I've given you as an example is to view the future and present differently. To expect the unexpectedness instead of to plan for the predictable.

[28:01]

Und zwar, dass man das Unerwartete erwartet, anstatt das Vorhersagbare zu planen. It doesn't change what we do much, but it changes what we notice. Das verändert nicht wirklich so sehr das, was wir tun, aber das verändert die Art, wie wir bemerken und was wir bemerken. And this really maybe has no point, what I'm saying here, but since I started, I'll continue. The national park system in the United States is a new park that surrounds Crestone. Views No, there's a whole history behind this huge national park system in the United States.

[29:23]

And these parks belong to, these lands set aside are to protect them and that they belong to everybody. Now, they're seen as a kind of commons. Common property. Yeah. In Britain or in America, the idea of the commons is the village square. But the ancient idea of the commons was not the village square. And in Europe, too. Was... It's hard to say, actually.

[30:45]

It was to... As an icon, you know, a Christian icon, is not a representation of Christ or a saint, but a window into the... A window into... A window to Christ, not a representation of Christ. So, the view of landscape or an object or a tree as a commons is to awaken the ancient wilderness in us. It's like in Japan, you have the An ancient tree, and it's just, they put a rope around it, a little fence, and it's there as something that is a window to our own wilderness.

[32:18]

Und in Japan gibt es das. Da gibt es irgendwo einen uralten Baum, und da hängt man ein Seil um diesen Baum, oder macht einen Zaun drumherum, und der ist dann wie ein Fenster zu unserer eigenen... You know, Ivan Illich speaks about something close to this. And he makes a distinction between the world as resource and the world as commons. I don't know if I get the comments translated correctly.

[33:22]

You just try. Okay. And he says, but the idea is so subtle that it can't be put into paragraphs or into law. It can only be known through use and experience. And that's what we're trying to protect at Crestone. But there's almost no way to describe it to the Park Service. Aber da gibt es fast keine Art, wie man das diesen Parkinstitutionen erklären oder beschreiben kann.

[34:27]

Denn zeitgenössisches Denken geht davon aus, dass man den Park als eine Ressource versteht. The higher number of visitors, the better the park is. The more hunters, the better. If you can actually do some mining and logging, that's even more. You're using the resources of it. But if you speak to each of the forest ranger types, park ranger types, They went into this work because it represents mostly somehow their own inner wilderness.

[35:30]

But the thinking behind the legislation and the finances is resource. So to see in the more ancient idea of a commons is to You look at a mountain, say. And it's in another weather, another time. And there's a solitude or seclusion that's possible in the forest and the mountains.

[36:46]

And it's the reason why religious and monastic practices have tended to locate themselves in the wilderness, in mountains and forests. That you are looking not just at nature, but something like into the realm of God. Dass man nicht einfach nur auch in die Natur schaut, sondern auf irgendeine Weise auch Gott schauen kann. Or looking into, if you're more of a pantheist and not more of a pantheist.

[38:02]

Wenn man eher ein pantheist ist. You're looking into your own ancient nature. And it awakens a lost part of you, often lost part of you. And it's one of the reasons we do satsang. To find that unpredictable, ancient wilderness, primordial nature. That we may feel sometimes, like in that great electrical storm we had the other night, Or you'll hear an unexpected wild animal, a bird.

[39:08]

When the world moves us instead of us moving the world. when the past appears in the present. So we could say, practice is when the past and future appear in the present. both its ancientness and its unexpectedness. Well, I didn't get quite as meaningless as I'd like, but I made some approaches.

[40:10]

Thank you very much. Thank you.

[40:28]

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