Now everyone knows, I think almost everyone knows that the word Sesshin means to gather the mind. Yeah, we might as well start there. I would say that we are at this stage of our practice, our maturing practice. Is that we're refining our practice. And making it more accurate. So in this spirit I want to speak about gathering the mind. And of course, how do we gather the mind? Well, we sit in one spot for a week. That's obvious.

[01:03]

And we sit together. And we chant together. And we eat together. Yeah, I mean, so we're gathering mind in the context of other minds. And we, I think we can say we're also gathering to some degree a mind that we come to share. So if you didn't see each other for quite a while you might, and somewhere in Europe or somewhere, you might meet them and suddenly realize you share something about mind because you've done sashins together.

[02:12]

Yeah, can you hear us over there? Not so far away? Okay. This is the right number of people for this Zendo. Really, we don't quite fit in the Zendo for Sashin, but this Sashin, there were quite a lot of cancellations, so it's just right. Yeah, I mean, to gather the mind doesn't mean to cram the mind together. We'd call that sardine mind. You have that expression in German, too? Okay.

[03:23]

So let me, from this point of view, describe zazen. Zazen is the posture you find by filling the body with attention. So I'd like us to experiment with this. To fill the body with attention. In a way, for some reason it seems to work from bottom to up. Yeah. You pull attention into your body. Fill it. You can try it various ways, but mainly it's filling it from the bottom up.

[04:28]

Yeah, maybe it's because the head's up here and it's doing the pulling. I don't know. I mean, these little distinctions, actually, I'm playing with them because they're important. And when we do kin-hin, one of the ways to conceive of kin-hin... is to imagine your breathing from your heels. And there's actually a sort of technical Buddhist Zen term, heel breathing. And of course, the feeling is, it's feeling, is you're drawing the breath up from below. And it's also a way, heel breathing is a way to feel the energy of the earth coming up through you. Now one conception is you're pulling the attention and your breath up through your heels.

[05:59]

Through your spine. And then down through the body as you step forward. Yeah. Another way is as you lift your heel, you again feel you're pulling attention and breath up through your body. But in this way, there's less sense of a forward motion. And you're just filling the body with attention. and then stepping forward.

[07:15]

And that would be a description of the two different ways that Sekirshi taught me to do kining. And the second one is actually quite a bit slower. For some reason, I've been going back. It's more or less the first way Sukhiroshi taught us. So recently, I've been doing Kenyan more that way. Yeah, but the way you described second. Second, yeah. Okay. Which was the earlier way, Sukesh. Is filling the body with attention and then stepping forward. Also den Körper mit Aufmerksamkeit anfüllen und dann einen halben Schritt vorwärts machen.

[08:30]

So in this way, in this way you, in the way attention defines the posture. Und so wie die Aufmerksamkeit die Haltung definiert. So both kin hin and zazen posture are defined through attention in this way. Now, what I'm asking you to do here is to bring basically attention to attention. Now, as I've said a number of times recently, Consciousness notices the contents of consciousness. Sounds obvious. Consciousness notices the contents of consciousness. Well, why not? Yeah, but it doesn't notice that one of the contents of consciousness is consciousness itself.

[09:51]

So one of the ingredients of consciousness is consciousness. Another ingredient of consciousness is the structure of consciousness. Without, I shouldn't say much, but you all can notice when you wake up how the structure, consciousness becomes structured and you decide that you better go to Zazen. Now the structure of consciousness, particularly the built-in views that are prior to perception, are Because they're prior to perception, they're not perceived.

[11:04]

They can only be perceived by noticing that they exclude a lot of things. So here I'm just asking us to accept that Consciousness doesn't notice usually that consciousness itself is a content of consciousness. And this is the technical English term for it in Buddhism is self-reflexive consciousness. So, for example, in English, myself is a reflexive pronoun.

[12:08]

Myself. Okay. So again, one of the marks of mature practice is that you always notice consciousness as a content of consciousness. You get so you can feel it. So what I'm speaking about today again is the, let's call it attentional attention. Okay, so, and how to explore this, I think, in Sashin, is to bring attention

[13:24]

into your zazen posture, and to discover your posture through attention, the posture which you can most fill with attention, we can call zazen posture. Die Haltung, die du am meisten oder am besten mit Aufmerksamkeit füllen kannst, die nennen wir Saseinhaltung. Okay, now I'd like you to, it's good to explore. Und jetzt möchte ich sagen, was nützlich ist zu erforschen. Is to feel the relationship between breath and attention. You can use breath as kind of the engine of attention. So you can feel if you bring breath up at the same time into your body as attention.

[14:58]

You can feel that breath pulls attention along. And also attention pulls breath along. And you get a kind of breath attention which can permeate the body. So you can explore this relationship between breath and attention and posture. And, you know, just bring attention to breath, attention and body. Bring attention to breath, attention and body.

[16:21]

Now, I said bring attention. So there's some kind of you or I or me bringing attention. So there's some kind of you or I or me So there's a relationship between attention and the I or the me. Okay. So you can notice that attention is a form of the experience of I-ness. So you can notice that attention is a form of the experience of I-ness. If attention is functioning within the I, within the, I don't know, I'll just call it I. I do it, I want, yeah.

[17:50]

Okay, so let me kind of step back a little and start over. What I want you to do is to experience yourself as a location. Because if you're going to gather the mind, where are you going to gather it? And once it's gathered, what is it? Let's call it a location. And one of the things that Sashin does, which Zazen doesn't do specifically, is really give you an opportunity to experience

[18:57]

yourself, yourself, experience yourself as a location. Yeah, because you're first of all a location. Self comes after location. When you're born, there's not much of a self there yet. There are a lot of instincts and things, but not too much of a self yet. But you are a location. And hopefully your parents like the location very much. And most of us were a very cute location. Well, we got a lot of good attention, I hope. Well, you're still primarily a location, first of all.

[20:04]

But it gets harder and harder to really experience that and notice that. And you're a location in a location. And for this week, your location is primarily going to be this Zabuton. And can you adjust to being a location in this location of the Zabiton. I hope you can, because otherwise you're going to have a hard time during Sashin. No, you can just really be this location.

[21:06]

And need almost nothing else. This will be a great treasure for you throughout your lifetime. Yeah, okay. Now, what makes it difficult to be, just be in this location? And why do we have to create a sashin to give us this experience? Because I would say that mostly because we really like our self-referencing sensorium. By sensorium I mean the world that's offered to us by our senses.

[22:25]

And this world defined by our senses. is often a large part of the time self-referencing. And I'm not using the word self pejoratively. Okay. You know, the whole of once your parents... They and all your friends and relatives and schools have all been trying to turn you into a self-referencing sensorium. And doing your self-referencing sensorium well can be quite satisfying.

[23:36]

You can have a lot of happiness. You can also be governed, controlled and criticized. But anyway, it's where we imagine most of our life should be and our pleasures and so forth. Though the self-referencing sensorium loves activity. And we're very strongly defined in relationship to this SSRS. self-referencing caesarean.

[24:57]

And to really be a location, you have to kind of let that be put aside. And to gather the mind and to gather attention in a Sashin is to become a location. And when attention is inside of self, We call that small self. It's like self is functioning and attention is inside it doing what self wants.

[26:05]

But when self is just a function of attention, We can call that big self. So when you bring attention to the body, usually that you is a big self. Now, these are all just a little bit slippery words. And there are small differences, like the difference between drawing attention up your spine and kin in, or drawing attention up through the body and kin in. But if the words I'm using can make you during Zazen help you during Zazen

[27:11]

to notice the relationship between attention, the breath, the posture, and the eye, which sometimes is a small eye and sometimes a big eye. Mm-hmm. Anyway, the more you can get a feeling in this process, for attention to attention, attention to attention, which is sometimes I, attention to attention, which is sometimes posture, and attention to attention, which is sometimes breath.

[28:49]

This, to be really familiar with this, will be a big step in your zazen and in your practice of your life. It's the kind of subtlety that you really can't notice without doing zazen or sushins. You know, two Russian physicists who live in Holland and England just won the Nobel Prize in physics. haben gerade den Nobelpreis in Physik bekommen.

[30:05]

For their work in creating graphene. Für ihre Arbeit, in der sie Graphene kreiert haben. And you probably read about it before Sashin. Und wahrscheinlich habt ihr vor dem Sashin darüber gelesen. And it's only one molecule, one atom thick. Es ist nur ein Atom dick. So they actually describe it as having only two dimensions because you can't really measure the thickness. And that's one of the most extraordinary objects in the world. One gram of it could cover several football fields. And I read that if you put it over a coffee cup, it's the ultimate saran wrap.

[31:16]

Do you have saran wrap? Instead of just wrapping your cheese, you can wrap your kitchen or your house. But supposedly if you put it over a coffee cup and you put a pencil on top of that and you put an elephant on top of that it won't break. And it's just atoms which don't touch each other even. Well, attention to attention is something like that. Okay, thank you very much.

[31:59]

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