Again, I feel very fortunate to be here practicing in the field of all of you and each of you. And just as some of you know and some of you were there, I was just in Rostenberg. And there I find I'm speaking to the conceptually, psychologically sensitive, academically trained minds. And it does make a difference if you are kind of professionally trained to think conceptually. And here I find, you know, I find what is called forth is the, from you,

[01:24]

From the Sashin mind. And some of you were at Rastenberg, as I said. But here what I feel is the... What did I say yesterday? The... Microgestural topology of Sashin mind. You didn't say that yesterday. Oh, I should have said it yesterday. What I feel here is the micro-topological... Microgestural. Yes. Microgestural topology of Sashin mind. Maybe mental graphology. Maybe... You see, it's not just that I'm word crazy.

[02:43]

It's that I'm trying to find words for what I experience and much of it there's no words for. So yesterday again I No, day before yesterday we did the first two or three skandhas. And then yesterday we progressed to the first skandha. Looking more carefully at its topography or tomography. I actually don't know what the difference is between... Topography is the outer surface and tomography is the inner surface. It's a more medical term. The person who would be an expert at it is Gerhardt.

[03:50]

His job is tomography, right? Please? A cutting image. So the surface and the cutting image. I say topography and then I feel superficial because I don't just mean the surface, so I add tomography and I know that, you know, then you have a problem. Okay. But now we're progressing to the drive on Saturday to the Sashim. Because I'm trying to find ways to speak about together the transitions between modalities of mind. And I think you all hear that, but I think sometimes you wonder how to notice these things.

[05:08]

Und ich glaube, ihr hört das alle, aber manchmal, glaube ich, fragt ihr euch, wie kann man diese Dinge bemerken? Because it's not in the usual categories of noticing. Denn sie sind nicht in den gewöhnlichen Kategorien des Bemerkens. It's noticeable, but not nameable, exactly. Es ist bemerkbar, aber nicht direkt benennbar. So I imagine you're driving here. Also ich stelle mir vor, ihr fahrt hierher. And you know the difference between your mind of daily life and Sashin mind. And if you didn't, you wouldn't be coming. You would have stayed home. Or at least you're imagining the Sashin mind when fully assimilated, realized and accepted. So you're driving toward a future mind, or an imagined future mind. Yeah, but you might also be driving with a certain anxiety about the Sashin.

[06:28]

I mean, a few of you have mentioned that that's the case sometimes. Maybe so, you're considering turning back. I don't have to drive in this direction. What's wrong with me? I'm free. Hey, look, there's a road that goes that way. Okay, but after a while you notice that you have... been listening to the radio and enjoying it, but suddenly it becomes kind of uninteresting.

[07:38]

It's even a little distracting. So you find without thinking you've turned it off. Mm-hmm. Just because German requires more words than English doesn't mean you have to go faster. And then you find you, for some reason, moved your car seat forward a bit. And you think, hmm, I must be getting ready for Sashin. And then you notice somehow your breathing has become more regular.

[08:41]

And you find you're even bringing attention to the breath. And for a few of you, it might be the first time since the last sashin. But in any case, you're noticing that your body is preparing for the Sashin. Or your mind is preparing for the Sashin. Or your body is expressing for the mind, your body is helping the mind get ready for the Sashin. And this is reversible. In other words, you can decide, I better get ready for the Sashin, so I move the car seat a little forward. Or in other words, you can think, oh, I should rather prepare for the show, and that's why you move your car seat a little further forward.

[10:10]

And then you think, oh, the news is so distracting, so you turn the radio off. So by these gestures, you're getting the mind ready for Sashin. Now this is every day, everyone does these kind of things. But the entire Dharmic gesture, gestural rituals of Zen monastic life are rooted in this mind-body topography. I root it in. No, I need the noun. Gestural ritual.

[11:10]

Gestural dharmic topology. Let's try that. I don't know. That was too much. Sorry. Oh, well. There's more coming. Okay. Okay. Because when you do something like this, obviously it's a way of articulating the relationship between mind and body. And of course, whatever you do is developmental, so it's also developing the relationship between mind and body.

[12:14]

And they're all forms of Ketgai, creating a starting point. I mean, in these oceans and streams and currents and clouds, of interpenetrating dharmic circumstances, you are creating a keg guy. You're creating a little point in these oceans and currents and streams.

[13:28]

Again, from the point of view of a physicist, there's no present. There's no length to the present. And again, from the perspective of a physicist, there is no present, there is no duration of the present. But as I always point out, the present exists as a durative scanning process in our sensorium. And to recognize that the present is something we're creating within our sensorium. It's always helpful to notice how things actually exist. And, you know, there's books called Ordinary Mind is the Way, Ordinary Mind is Zen, and so forth. But this is ordinary mind in its ordinariness.

[14:46]

Ordinary means how it's woven. That's a word meaning woven. Aber damit ist gemeint, der gewöhnliche Geist in seiner Gewöhnlichkeit, oder das Wort ordinary im Englischen, hat die gleiche Wurzel wie das Wort der gewebte Geist. So the present is being woven in your sensorium, in fact. Sorry, I mean you might want a different present, but that's what you got. Once you know that, and you experience that, this embodied immediacy of the present, it's not a mystery why your experience of time as a child is so different from your experience of time now. then it's no longer a mystery or nothing mysterious why your experience of time as a child is so different from your experience of time now.

[16:06]

It's a function of how you weave the present in your sensorium. And zazen and practice is a practice of being present within, participating in the weaving of the present. Now your attentional skills may not be acute enough to notice this, Deine Aufmerksamkeitsfähigkeiten sind vielleicht nicht präzise genug, um das zu bemerken. But practice is the development of attentional skills simultaneously. So sometimes in zazen, in a seshin particularly, where you really zazen mind begins to take over,

[17:09]

You may feel your back in childhood time again. And what's interesting is when you're back physiologically in childhood time, it often calls forth memories, experiences from childhood. And it's a way of reviewing your past lives in your present life. So Sashin, a period of Zazen becomes a a different time dimension differently as time.

[18:16]

So by the Kekkai, by creating a mind-body gesture, You're creating a momentary structure in the flow of a mediascape. And I often feel this like, yeah, inner tubing. Inner tubing? When you float an inner tube in the water? These big rings? Yeah, of a car. You're sort of inner tubing along the stream, etc. So don't worry about it. Boating in the ocean or flying in the clouds, it's all the same.

[19:17]

And where were we intertubing now? In the stream of life. Tubing along. Then... Fliegen wir durch die Wolken oder flossen wir oder schwimmen wir durch den Strom des Lebens. So we need to create these. It helps to create. Since the present is being woven by you. Da die Gegenwart von dir gewoben wird. How do you locate yourself in life? the present. You cannot locate yourself at all and just let the whole thing float into another kind of immediate samadhi. Du kannst dich gar nicht verorten und die ganze Sache einfach in eine Art immediate... Samadhi.

[20:24]

Immediate means no in between. No media. No in between. Also in eine Art unmittelbares Samadhi verwandeln. So maybe we could have, using English, no in between Samadhi would be an immediate Samadhi. You know, English, of course, is a dialect of German. But it's got about 200,000 more words. They're mostly nouns. German has more verbs than English. And English is freer in how you arrange the things. It doesn't have the strictures of grammar. So I know that I create an impossible problem for you. But it's not entirely without fun.

[21:26]

Okay. I probably, if I knew German, you know, at all, I wouldn't do this, because I'd say, oh my God, that's too, and I would, my English would be much more restricted. So, in any case, going back to driving to the Sashim. You, um, can notice again that, you know, you're getting ready, you change your breath or change your car seat and so forth.

[22:34]

And you recognize that this is a reversible relationship. So you can... Straighten your car seat. Notice your breath as a way of getting the mind ready for the session. So the more your attentional skills are present in the present, And one of the reasons again, all of these things are interrelated, one of the reasons again that you bring attention to the breath is that attention to the breath increases the attentional skills in the present moment.

[23:45]

And the problem with the selfological stream of mind It absorbs all your attentions because you're so damned interesting. I'm the greatest. But as I said last night, you're really only the greatest in stopped space and time. And in stopped space and time, you are the world-honored one. In other words, this human world means nothing if you're not the world-honored one at that point. Yeah, okay.

[25:02]

So now you... We can notice these big differences between mind of daily life and Sesshin mind. And we can notice various transitions. And they're often gestural transitions. A gesture actually simply means, again the etymology means, the movement, a positive movement of the mind. A movement of the mind embodied or expressed. So one of the things monastic life tries to do is establish a gestural topology.

[26:06]

A microgestural field. Now, I mentioned this in Rostenberg, but years ago a friend of mine, George Leonard, saw a movie where some guy had slowed down a movie until it was like, when you're like, like that, you know. Real, really micro slow motion. And he noticed that, and it happened to be a film of a speaker and an audience, And he noticed that at some point, the entire audience and the speaker were in the same choreographed gestural field.

[27:34]

The pattern in which the speaker moved his hand was the pattern in which somebody else lifted a cigarette up to their mouth. In those days, people smoked. Now, this field, again, is reversible. If you establish a microgestural field, it exists in our embodied physicality and it exists also in our dharmic mind. And what I heard from the first practice period we did here, without my saying anything, quite a few people felt they were in some kind of resonant field together.

[28:50]

So, given that that's the case, and I think it's the case and I experience it as so, You internalize, embody the feel of that. At first it happens through everyone being together. For example, and this is not really an example, but Right here there's a space between my cushion and the edge of the platform. It can be any distance. And because it can be any distance, it can be exactly the same distance as the meal board.

[30:22]

So because the meal board is our ma board, where you step across the board into the space of zazen from the space of activity. into this field of zazen. And I'm stepping up here across this space which I've internalized into a field in which my mind changes into a mind which can give you a teisho. Okay, so now I'll stop soon. No, I promise. Yes, I promise. So not only are there these big changes between daily mind and zazen mind, zazen mind, but there's also the changes within zazen itself, from morning to afternoon.

[31:47]

From fresh legs to sore legs. From one period to another period. It can be quite different. Now, the yogic skills are for the yogi, for the Zen yogi, you notice certain modes of mind-body integration, say, that make you feel, this is how I actually exist. And feeling how you actually exist is Buddha-nature. So when you have this feeling of how you actually exist, or most fundamentally exist, you can look for the site of this experience, S-I-T-E, the physical site of this experience.

[33:20]

Or the channel. Like you were tuning in a station or a channel. So again, as I say, all mental phenomena have a physical component. Maybe not easy to notice in the way we usually notice, but it does have a physical component. And again, it's reversible. All physical, sentient physical phenomena, human physical phenomena, have a mental component. And you can learn these sites, these dharmic channels. And you can literally tune the mind and tune the body.

[34:55]

So the shared gestural space of monastic life is literally A way to discover that we can all tune to the same dharmic channels. Of course not exactly the same. Unsurprisingly similar. It's almost like... mind-body reading. And when you really have this embodied, it's transferable to the clerks in Kaufhof. dann kannst du das übertragen auf die Angestellten bei Kaufhof.

[36:05]

If you want to be experimental, find when you're standing in front of somebody in Kaufhof or an apotheker or something, and change your posture slightly and watch them change their posture. The more powerful your tuning is, the more it will be realized by others, felt by others. Je kraftvoller deine Feinabstimmung ist, desto mehr wird es auch von anderen bemerkt. Messner hat es wirklich ausgenutzt und hat sich von seiner Macht mesmerisieren lassen. Das war jetzt genug Spaß für heute, oder nicht? A little Dharma anyway.

[37:11]

And I feel good practicing with you. Thank you very much.

[37:14]

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