Yeah, in this hot weather I always wonder why do we, me for instance, and the three of us and some of us, put on these rather warm clothes just for this hour or so. And does it make a difference? Maybe I should find an old Hawaiian shirt and wear it. Would it make any difference? Would that make a difference? We do, as you know, the word sacred in English means dedicated to a single purpose. Are we gathered here in the... I'm just clearing my throat.

[01:10]

Would you like a glass of water? I have one here. No, thank you. Thank you. Are we gathered here in the practice of wisdom? Which is the source, I think, of religion. So I've been put on this robe, which Sukershi asked me to do. Yeah, meaning I'm here with you in the context of wisdom practice. Yeah, and I make a mandala with my Zagu and bow on it three times before I say something. And then I do a mandala with my sagu and bow down to it three times before I say something.

[02:17]

Are these distinctions useful? And as practice becomes, Sangha practice becomes more secularized, it will, yeah, these will become more and more real questions. Okay. One of the earliest jokes I remember from childhood or puns was when is a door not a door? war die Frage, wann ist eine Tür keine Tür? Now, this would, I suppose, not have an equivalent in German, but anyway, I would expect that Alan knows the answer. It's when it's a jar. Okay. We can have that be an English joke, right?

[03:22]

Only for Alan and me. Yeah. Ajar means it's slightly open. Ajar is like a milk jar or something like that. So when is a door not a door when it's ajar? why did this pop up in my mind as I was walking in here because I want to speak I want to go through this door and I don't really know quite how to do it so what struck me when I was young about the the joke or pun. When is a door not a door? It's a joke because of course it's not a jar.

[04:26]

But it is also true because when the door is only a jar, you can't use it as a door. So here I am, I'm talking with you and I'm talking and finding doors We know they're doors, but they're ajar. We can't quite use them as doors. You know, we have these lovely cows which are outstanding in their field. That's another joke. That one you got. Good. They're outstanding in their field. Yeah. But what are they?

[05:47]

They are grass, cow and milk. And so the beingness of a cow is grass, cow and milk. And we have Hamlet who said, to be or not to be. But probably more accurately from the yogic point of view, he could have said, do I want to continue as part of being or do I want to discontinue my role in being? And these are real distinctions. Because we think of the being of the cow. And we've been brought up to think of the being of the cow.

[07:00]

And the grass is separate and the milk is separate. We know there's some relationship. But we still experience them and think of them as separate. So as I said earlier in the Sashin, if you're brought up thinking that the world projected by consciousness is real, And that you are somehow separate from that projected world of consciousness. You can say, I don't feel part of the world. But if you're brought up with the feeling that the decisive, focal, pivotal dynamic is consciousness,

[08:25]

then you can't really say, I'm not part of the world. Because the world that you... is your experience of the world. You cannot like your experience of the world, but you can't be separate from your experience of the world. And somehow if we get that into ourselves, I can't be separate from the experience of the world. We can find ourselves engaged in immediacy in a more inextricable and satisfying way. In speaking, I'm just experimenting or exploring how to find ways that click with us, that make us feel the difference.

[09:46]

Wenn ich spreche, dann experimentiere ich einfach mit unterschiedlichen Arten darüber zu sprechen, in der Hoffnung, dass irgendwas davon Klick macht. But because the words are nearly the same. Weil die Worte sind ähnlich oder fast gleich. They're both doors. Es sind beides Türen. One you can use as a door and one you can't because you think it's a jar. Aber die eine kannst du als Tür benutzen und die andere nicht, weil sie angelehnt ist. Yeah. you don't stay with the grass cow milk as inseparable. Okay. But if you grow up with the sense that everything you see is of the nature of consciousness, as I've said.

[11:02]

You can't feel alienated in the same way. Okay, so let's go to, again, and some of this I spoke about in the last lecture, but I want to try to continue it and develop it in this session. Okay, let's again start with mind, knowing mind is inseparable from appearance. Now, first of all, we I mean, I think I should use the example of Émile Javal again. You all know this.

[12:09]

Many of you. But he just, in the 1880s in France, he put a mirror beside his thing and watched his eyes in the mirror rather than his brain experience of what was happening. In the 1880s, he simply held a mirror next to his eyes and began to observe his eye movements and not only what his brain makes out of this experience. And what he noticed were what are called now much studied in the last decades. These saccadic movements, saccadic means jerky. Okay, so what's interesting, even if you try to see them in mirrors in various ways, you can't see them yourself because your brain masks them, hides them from you.

[13:11]

Okay, so the brain wants you, let's call it brain wants you, why not? The brain wants you to see the world, experience the world as seamless. And that makes us feel it's outside of us. But we know it's inside. But we don't experience it as inside. So the question is, how do we shift this outsideness which we experience as outside, functionally, How are we going to experience it as inside? One of the first ways is to notice things as appearance.

[14:14]

And one of the first things is to notice things as units of appearance. And either you grow up always noticing appearance as consciousness, Or you, especially if we're Westerners, you have to train yourself to notice experience as in units. Experience in units. So you have to find some way to trick yourself into it. And one of the ways is we harness, like to harness a horse, we harness or entrain breath to the body. And one of the possibilities is that we bind the breath to the body or link the breath with the body.

[15:42]

The breath and the body, and the activity of the body is happening simultaneously. But it doesn't happen attentionally simultaneously. So we use the sequentials of the body to entrain the breath to. Also benutzen wir die Aufeinanderfolgen, die Abfolgen im Körper, um den Atem damit in Einklang zu bringen. Du verbindest Atem, Aufmerksamkeit, Atem und körperliche Bewegung. Ja, okay. That's simple. And that's what kin hin is. You lift your heel, and as you lift your heel, you inhale.

[16:47]

And as you exhale, you step forward and put your foot down, half a foot down. And as you lift the alternative heel, you inhale again. You're basically using the movements of the body to entrain body, mind and breath. You said mind now, body, mind and breath, right? And as I'm speaking, I'm in training body, mind and breath. I'm clearly speaking with the breath as part of each word and I feel each word

[17:49]

Physically. And I have a little yogic umpire who's saying, hey, that word you just said was just mental. You didn't feel it physically, but take it out of the talk. And that's the distinction in Zen between live words and dead words. Dead words means words you don't feel, you just think. So this process of linking appearance and interiority includes physicalizing your thinking, not just my speaking or when you're speaking, but also when you're thinking.

[19:17]

Which makes you end up thinking more in images which can be enacted like little theater pieces. So again, of course, as I said yesterday, the Han and the bell and all of that, they're all done in a bodily pace. Everything done here, putting on my robe, bowing, etc., all is done to keep establishing us in a bodily pace. In the late 70s I went to the Soviet Union several times.

[20:23]

And I liked whenever there's myself or someone else heading for the airport. Everyone is rushing around and then no one will get in the taxi or the cars. Until everyone sits down for at least half a minute or a minute. It's just restore some kind of bodily rhythm. Well, we do that big time in Sashin. Before you go back into your daily life, let's all sit down for a week. It's simply about entraining breath, body and mind. Or breath, body and attention. I don't know what she's doing, but it sounds okay.

[22:03]

Okay. So again, I'm trying to make a very simple problem here. With many solutions. The problem is, okay, we know wisdomly, I like it better than wisely, we know wisdomly that mind is an interiority. We know that the object of perception is perceived, as usefully perceived, as outside. Okay, it's experienced as outside. Es wird als außerhalb von uns erfahren.

[23:20]

But we know it's not outside. Aber wir wissen, dass es nicht wirklich außerhalb ist. Can you get it that this is a real problem? Könnt ihr einsehen, dass das ein echtes Problem ist? We know it's outside. Excuse me. We experience it as outside, even if we have the wisdom to know it's not outside. Wir erfahren es als außerhalb von uns, selbst wenn wir die Weisheit haben zu wissen, dass es nicht außerhalb ist. So, how do you shift the experience of outsideness to insideness or interiority? Also ist die Frage, wie verschiebst du die Erfahrung von außerhalb ins Innerliche hinein, als eine innere Erfahrung? The yogic practitioner experiences, if I'm a... a mature practitioner, I know you're outside sitting there. But I experience you as inside. And that means I feel you differently than if I think you're outside.

[24:22]

Because I feel my experience of you. And again, all the teachings of Buddhism assume that this is the soil in which they're growing. They're growing in the soil of an uninterrupted experience of interiority. It changes everything. There's no possibility of being lonely. You know, the kanji for Zen, the earliest version of kanji for Zen, pictograph, is a person standing alone with the sun, the light from the sun, moon, and the stars beside the person.

[25:54]

Which is taken to mean, you're practicing alone, but you're always inseparable from the light, from the sun, moon, and stars. And Yamada Mumon Roshi, my teacher in Japan, a Rinzai teacher, I mentioned this to you before. He said the single most important thing for a Zen practitioner to always be continuously aware of that all things are working together simultaneously to make this moment possible. Okay. Okay. Now, So we have these two experiential units, mind and appearance.

[27:31]

First, mind and object of perception. Also wir haben diese zwei erfahrbaren Einheiten, Geist und Gegenstand der Wahrnehmung. Now you're not going to get anywhere until you begin to experience things in units. Und du wirst nirgendwo hinkommen, bis du nicht anfängst, die Dinge in Einheiten wahrzunehmen. Changsha says, we human beings are fooled by the world consciousness presents to us. Changsha says, we humans are led astray by the world that presents us with consciousness. And they don't realize, they don't recognize that the world consciousness presents to us is the world of suffering and life and death. And he says, the stupid practitioners take this and call it the original body. This is a really perceptive statement on the part of this guy, a disciple of Nanchuan.

[28:34]

He said, these Zen practitioners, and I'm sure he meant some teachers, take the world as presented to us by our senses as real, and they call it the original body, and it's meaning it is the original body, but they don't... So we have these two units. mind and the object of perception. And you're not going to be able to bring the feel of mind on each object of perception until you really recognize each object of perception as an appearance.

[30:01]

An appearance as a concept is rooted in absence or emptiness. So how do you shift the object of perception into an appearance? The four marks. It appears, it has a duration, it dissolves, and it disappears. You have to keep reminding yourself of this. And re-bodying this. And I've used receiving and releasing. Because the four marks basically are receiving and releasing.

[31:17]

So I sometimes, on every inhale, I say receiving. And it's not just like a photograph. The photograph is being photographed and developed simultaneously. So you feel the photograph coming in, developing and coming into focus. Also spürst du, wie das Foto sich entwickelt und seinen Fokus bekommt. Wenn du das Empfangen einatmest, dann atmest du die Welt ein. Und dann lässt du die Welt los. Und du atmest die Welt ein. Und du lässt die Welt los. You breathe in all your associations and pictures and so forth and then you release them.

[32:21]

And sometimes I find it shifts so that when I exhale I'm receiving and I'm releasing when I inhale. And this, for us Westerners, can get us in the habit of seeing things experiencing the so-called outside as being received and happening inside. And that's an experience inside. Now, I hesitate to use the word inside. I'm going to stop in a moment. I hesitate to use the word inside because it always... implies an outside.

[33:30]

And there's no outside. It's all inside. There's nothing outside. Outside is a delusion. There's only inside. I can remember in the 60s, one of my insights was to practice always with the sense, it's all inside. It's all a big stomach, digesting itself. Until the experience of outside never occurred to me. You have to keep tricking yourself. Because we're so convinced this is outside. Yeah, it's outside because I'm going to go somewhere else and remain here. But in the received mind text It's inside.

[34:38]

My use of it is inside. This is my grasp. And you hear my milk. Sour milk, sweet milk. So now we know that the object of perception is experiences outside. And we've wisdomly reminded ourselves that the mind is inside, which is the experience of the outside. So the... That the mind is inside and then you said something else. Don't worry about it. Okay. So... So you need to begin to distinguish between the object of perception and the mind which receives the object of perception.

[35:51]

And they're two different experiences. They're slightly different. Like noticing the mind which... names and noticing the mind which doesn't name so you notice the feel of the mind appearing on everything in the same way das Gefühl des Geistes, das mit allem, auf allem, auf so ziemlich die gleiche Art und Weise auftritt. Und innerhalb der Gleichheit dieses Geistesfeldes spürst du die unterschiedlichen Gegenstände der Wahrnehmung, Yeah.

[36:53]

All right. So now the experience of the same, now sameness is a technical term in Buddhism, which is when you start experiencing sameness, you're at another level than only differentiation. The experience of sameness along with differentiation is an important shift in level in practice. And the word equality, sameness, equality, is a technical term in Buddhism that also means that in the moment when you perceive equality in everything and not only the difference, you are on a different level in practice. And the moment when you perceive differences and equality together is another level. So the experience of the sameness of the field of mind Functions something like a shuttle on a loom. It keeps weaving the outside into the inside.

[37:55]

Or it functions as a fishing line, sort of. I hook, with my mind experience, I hook the differentiation of the object onto the fishing line and I pull it in. So that now my entire experience is interiority. And the so-called outside is projected, externalized interiority. And so one of the main things Sashin's trying to get you to do is experience that interiority so convincingly

[39:02]

Maybe it's an example of you don't even know where you are. Which Zendo? Am I here or somewhere else? I don't know where I am. Then you hear a truck or something or then you hear the bell. Oh, this is where I am. And then you can relate the so-called outside. You can bring it into the interiority you've established. So the interiority, which is a... When you experience things as an interiority, it's an experience of bliss. When you experience the world as something you can release, there's an experience of joy. When you experience the world as complete, as everything's sort of in its place somehow,

[40:22]

Which is a kind of pre-enlightenment experience. It's a taste of feeling that everything's in interiority and so is in place because the interiority is the place where you are. Maybe I've struggled enough with this and I should stop and never speak of it again. Until I get anxious, you don't understand it. Thank you very much.

[41:18]

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