I'm very pleased to be here with you. And my body, for some reason, feels very good. But I would like you to imagine that I'm speaking to you here from my nighttime mind. Aber ich möchte, dass ihr euch vorstellt, dass ich hier zu euch von meinem Nachtgeist ausspreche. Because it's almost night time where I came from. Denn jetzt ist es fast Nacht dort, wo ich hergekommen bin. I flew here just before the Sashink. So maybe I'm not still in Colorado, but somewhere over the Atlantic. Stuck somewhere in the stars. So maybe I'm speaking from my nighttime mind.

[01:20]

But I'd like to bring you in to share with you your nighttime mind. The sender in the morning, we don't want it too dark. It was a little too dark this morning. Yeah, but we want it dim, dim to dim enough that we feel our nighttime mind. And I want us to really understand that we're talking about a different mind here. That's not our usual consciousness. I think you all know this.

[02:43]

But so often it's hidden from us, perhaps mostly by habit. Or we don't want to. remind ourselves of it. Yeah, and I said this morning, I thanked each of you for coming here. And continuously thanking you. And I said, yeah, mostly we usually come for our own reasons. Und ich habe gesagt, dass wir meistens aus unseren persönlichen, unseren eigenen Gründen kommen.

[03:45]

Aber tatsächlich kommen wir wegen der anderen Menschen. Yeah, you didn't come here to sit in an empty room. You came here to sit with others, actually. But somehow, what's foremost is we... usually think we came here for ourselves. But why is what's implicit that we come here for others? Why is it implicit and not so explicit?

[04:50]

I think in some sense we come here to use the presence of others. But if we're using the presence of others, others are using our presence. Yeah. And we... We can make more explicit that we're letting others use our presence. Bringing this to the surface is to bring the mind of compassion more to the surface. So often the deeper reasons, more fundamental reasons we do things, are implicit, not so explicit.

[06:05]

Why is that? It's worth considering. It's almost too like this... The choosing to be here for others is almost like something in our nighttime mind. I would say it's almost the thinking of another mind that's really hard, difficult to get into our ordinary conscious mind. Ich würde fast sagen, es ist das Denken eines anderen Geistes, das schwierig ist, in unser bewusstes Denken hineinzubringen.

[07:11]

Remember in the commentary of the Blue Cliff Records 51, where it says, in the depth of the night. Erinnert euch im Fall 51? 51. In the depth of the night together, we look at the snow on the thousand crags. What is a poetic statement like this? Now implicit in Chinese philosophy is always the motivation of integration and completeness. Yeah, so that... It's assumed in most Zen statements that the motivation, the background is to realize completeness or integration.

[08:36]

So... There in the depth of the night together we look. Now, perhaps I should review, you know, starting with Sashin, the practice of stillness. You know, if you take any aspect of, almost any aspect of Buddhist teaching, If you look at it closely, look at it closely, carefully, all of Buddhism, almost all of Buddhism opens up from it.

[09:47]

Yeah, I would say that's Perhaps it's part of this Chinese philosophy of integrating everything. But it's also that these teachings are always practiced. So practice itself is always connective. So anyway, let's review this practice of stillness a bit. And what you need, I mean, this philosophy of stillness is not a philosophy.

[11:02]

It doesn't work as a philosophy. It works when it's an actual experience of stillness. And the more you become familiar with the territory of stillness, the more your practice will blossom. So stillness is practically for us, psychologically for us, stillness is the ability to face anything.

[12:04]

It enters us into our psychological territory, our personal history. Like a bathysphere? Bathysphere? That's that metal thing that you can drop down in the ocean and peer through little windows, that thing? I don't know that. Must be the same word in English. Bathyscaphe? Submarine? I like a submarine, but they drop it down from a boat to explore deep. Bathyscaphe. Yeah, okay. Bathyscaphe. Yeah, why not? Yeah, okay. Sounds right. That kind of bathyscope that you can drop safely down into the territory of your terrors, your hopes, et cetera.

[13:22]

Because when you can learn to learn to sit For a specific length of time, without acting on what comes up. So the specific length of time is important in developing this skill. Whether you like it or not, you're going to sit 40 minutes or 30 minutes or something.

[14:27]

And you don't let other things make you get up. Oh, I've got to do this or that, you know, so you decide to sit only ten minutes. Of course, sitting at home, we may do that sometimes. In the Zen though, it's a little harder to do because you're sitting for all these folks on both sides of you. But even though we may do that sometimes, it interrupts our sitting. Basically, we want to learn to sit for a specific length of time, no matter what. Perhaps if your house is burning down, you might get up.

[15:47]

Because once you know that, really know that, that you can... Break the connection between thought and action. It's the most powerful psychological tool of exploration. dann ist es das machtvollste psychologische Werkzeug, sich selbst zu erkunden. Yeah, really, for the most part there's nothing to fear. Eigentlich gibt es nichts zu fürchten, oder meistens gibt es nichts zu fürchten. But we still have some fear, or it's a little disconcerting or something.

[16:48]

Aber doch haben wir hin und wieder eine Angst, oder disconcerting. Disconcerting means it's disturbing. Concert is to do together, to break doing together. Disconcert. Once we know that, this nighttime mind can be present in the daytime. As the stars are out now, it's just the light. Because of the light, we can't see them. The stars are always out, but the light of day or consciousness hides them. Die Sterne sind immer da draußen, aber das Tageslicht oder das Bewusstsein verbirgt sie.

[17:57]

And really this nighttime mind and dreaming mind are present all the time. Und dieser Nachtgeist oder der Traumgeist sind wirklich ständig gegenwärtig. Dreaming mind is one version of zazen mind. Der träumende Geist ist eine Version des Zazen-Geistes. But dreaming mind doesn't have the structure or discipline or awareness we can bring to Zazen mind. So zazen, in a way, is a dreaming in a wider awareness. It's not only that, but it's also that. Hmm. So I'm also asking us, Sashin asks us to dream.

[19:04]

To dream our fundamental dream of being alive. The courage to come back into this fundamental dream. So strangely, just the experience, the tool of being able to sit without acting on what we think about, creates a whole new psychological and spiritual territory. And a fearlessness. Or a loss of fear of ourselves.

[20:06]

But it's the beginning of a deeper fearlessness in life itself. Fearlessness is not reached by our thinking. I know lots of smart people who are quite fearful, can't think their way to fearlessness. But it's here in this experience of stillness. And once we know the stillness in ourselves, first stillness allows us to break the connection, the habit of the connection between thought and action.

[21:26]

It creates a wide territory where we can just feel things and not suppress them or act on them. And just feeling things is, yeah. Such a strength, such a territory. I would say that we feel most alive when we touch our fundamental emotion. Not the motions in the service of self.

[22:36]

Greed, hate, and delusion. But our fundamental emotions, really the mind of compassion. That come out sometimes in, you know, that's maybe the main point of art. Poetry or painting or sculpture. Or nowadays movies, cinema. Which the better movies, the subtext is to open us to our deeper emotions.

[23:48]

The motions that... You know, sometimes they're scary. Scary sometimes just in their intensity. And in the deep discouragement we can feel about the condition of this world. And yet there are the emotions that make life really worth living. Where we feel most deeply connected and resigned to this life, in its and our own imperfection,

[24:57]

And can take refuge or resource in the intent to do something about it too. To both accept and to act at a deeper level. It's hard to sustain this feeling. This contact. But sashini practice helps us. Yeah. And the experience of stillness also opens us to the stillness that's already there.

[26:14]

The nighttime mind that's present in the daytime. As I've said, to feel this, you know, when you look at a wave, the shape of the wave, an ocean wave, is its effort to return to stillness. So somehow the experience, really touching into our own stillness, excuse me, the ability to touch into our own stillness, the experience of that, allows us to feel the stillness in objects, in other people.

[27:17]

The tree is simultaneously moving and simultaneously returning to stillness. This kind of feeling is the is the territory of Buddha mind. And we can start to feel this stillness in each person, or Buddha mind, we can say, in each person. Because we can feel it and taste it in ourselves. because we can feel or taste it in ourselves. And stillness is also a kind of pipette. Pipette? Pipette is the little, in chemistry, a little glass tube.

[28:36]

It's a kind of, or like the little separation in hourglass between the two bells. So what is that? No, no, no, the beginning of your sentence. The stillness is also like this pipette or the... neck of an hourglass. Somehow one kind of time blows into another kind of time. through the narrow opening of stillness. Narrow only because we only experience it briefly, usually. But stillness is the wider experience of the world.

[29:41]

You know, when you're in a room where everyone is silent, The silence of a room full of people is different from an empty room, the silence of an empty room. Some mechanistic view of science might say, well, you measure the silence as the same, whether there's people in the room or nobody in the room. There's no needle registering. But we know it's different. We know the silence of a room full of people is different. We can feel the difference.

[30:45]

The fullness of the stillness, the fullness of the silence. Now, you know, sashin is a time to be both silent and still. So you get enough of a taste of this silence and stillness. so that you can discover it's always there, even in the midst of your activity. And the main way you can feel the practice of another person, the mature practice of another person, Did you feel their stillness in the middle of their activity?

[31:57]

Maybe it's almost like the Sand of the hourglass stays in the little narrow neck. And something opens up from there that neither of the two bells... A wide stillness and timelessness of the world itself. Eine weite Stille und Zeitlosigkeit der Welt.

[33:04]

I speak of timelessness and I look at my watch. Both are possible. Ich spreche von der Zeitlosigkeit und schaue gleichzeitig auf meine Uhr. Und beides ist möglich, gleichzeitig möglich. And I also think this has a physiological... Reality, actuality. Und ich glaube, dass dies auch eine physiologische Realität oder Tatsächlichkeit hat. Yeah, to put it on a physical basis. Und das einmal auf eine körperliche Grundlage zu stellen. It does seem that the right brain, if we go into that mythology and fact, Has little sense of time. Little sense of chronology. So I think through practice you're actually changing the emphasis between the right brain and the left brain.

[34:16]

You're changing the functioning and even the structure of our physiology. Du veränderst das Wirken und sogar die Struktur unserer Physiologie. And in Zazen Sitting we're trying to create a kind of bodily sight. Sight location. I try to notice when you start thinking outside this bodily sight. And bring your thinking back to this bodily sight. And most easily again into your breathing. And mind begins to alight on us, alight, land, like a bird alights and bird lands.

[35:44]

Mind begins to alight on us. Usually I speak of mind as generated. But now I'm speaking of mind as, you know, we can look at it more carefully another time, but mind as a lighting. And the concepts we have of mind shape our experience of mind. The most obvious delusion is delusion. the concept of mind in the world as permanent, continuous.

[36:55]

And that predilection shapes our experience of mind. So let's try on, you know, for this sashin that mind alights on us. And you know that the word sashin means to gather mind, to locate mind. And my mind is here in this room. I can't really say it's mine. I mean, if it's yours, it's also mine, then. And my mind is not just mine, it's also yours.

[38:16]

And your mind is also mine. Each something, the silence in this room is different than the silence of an empty room. The minds in this room are different from an empty room. In practice, we're gathering not only our own mind, but allowing the mind of the Sashim to alight within us. Sammeln nicht nur unseren eigenen Geist, sondern erlauben dem Geist des Geschehens in uns zu landen. Like what? A seed that takes root? Wie ein Sammel, der Wurzeln schlägt.

[39:24]

And that's a field that alights and extends. Und auch wie ein Spüren, das landet und sich... And through stillness we create this bodily sight on which mind alights. The space and silence of the body. Yeah. I think that's enough for today. Thank you very much.

[40:10]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_77.29