Some guys have all the luck. How come you guys get a chair and I don't? Barbara, see what you started? You think because I've been doing this all these years, my legs are made of rubber. Maybe a chair would be good though. Yeah, I'm always so grateful that, We're able to practice together and we have this place, magical place. I don't know how we lucked out. And through your, so many of you, all of you's great generosity, we look like we're going to get this peace. I'm quite sure we will. this piece of property here. And as you know, I believe it will make it more likely we don't fall into ruins too soon.

[01:06]

We might have to give up this other piece, but the main piece we're going to get, I'm quite sure. And now we have the zendo, and turn on the tap, and water comes out. It's amazing. And we have Geralt back to make sure when you turn on the tap, water does come out. Thank you, Geralt. So, you know, sometimes I feel like I'm talking about a tree to someone who's never seen one. I don't know, somebody grew up in the sand of the Sahara Desert or something, I don't know. And they see the tree in the winter and they say, you try to tell them about leaves and fruit and they can't imagine how this bunch of sticks has anything to do with leaves and fruit.

[02:16]

Yeah, so I had that experience yesterday. And when I have that kind of experience, I wonder. You know, maybe you don't have the experience in a lecture like that yesterday, but I have an experience of I'm talking too much to myself or I haven't found a way to make, connect what I'm speaking about to our experience. And I realized that I made too big a jump. At least it felt to me like I made too big a jump. from understanding something like everything points to mind to the world as a keyboard. Maybe that was too big a jump. Yeah, so... So it's not difficult to understand at least that

[03:32]

Well, the best example is usually sound. You've got a chair, too. Boy, I didn't realize it had gone to both sides of his end, though. I think you're brave, actually, to sit in a chair. To use the best example is sound. You know, again, what the sound a bird produces is not what we hear. We hear what our ear hears. I've said that. My mother used to say, if I had a nickel or a penny, I think in those days she said, if I had a penny, later she changed it to a nickel, for every time I cleaned up spilled milk.

[04:41]

I don't think she would have been rich, but she would have had a savings account. If I had a penny or a nickel, a fennec. Fennecs are disappearing, I guess, now. No more fennecs in Germany. You know, they've done a study of how fast the coins in Europe are designated by the country of origin, but the paper money is not, is that right? The paper money is just the same all over Europe, but the coins are German coins or Danish coins or whatever, you know, right? On one side, yeah. Yeah. So they've done a study of how fast they've appeared in other countries and which denominations. So, like, in some part of Italy, a whole bunch of German coins appear. Or, you know, in Norway or someplace. And then Norwegian coins appear. You know, that kind of thing. Maybe I could get a fennec for each time I speak about hearing-hearing.

[05:54]

they'd probably be worth a lot of money after a while by the pile of phoenix. So your ear hears only what your ear can hear or permutations of what you're. So you hear permutations of what the bird made or some version of it, but you don't hear what sound the bird made. Maybe the sound the bird made is only designed for one lover's ear, bird lover, one love bird's ear. But you know, that's easy to understand. Next is you apply it to all the senses. that when you see a tree, you're only seeing what your eyes can see of the tree.

[06:58]

What's the importance of that? Well, you've got to keep practicing that as a kind of mantra till it's part of your way of seeing. As I pointed out to a number of people, when we hear The idea of impermanence is built into hearing. The idea of impermanence is not built into seeing. In other words, when you hear a bird or any sound, you expect it to have a brief duration to be impermanent. And when it's not impermanent, like a car alarm siren, it's extremely annoying. Please be impermanent. But we don't have impermanence built into the other senses in the same way. So sound, as the Suram Gama Sutra says, is the main entry among the senses.

[08:07]

Also, when we hear, everything is near. Everything is impermanent and near. You hear a sound at night, it's always near. When you see something, it's near or far. So if you get into the mantra-like habit of building this wisdom into your perceptions, that you are only seeing what your eyes allow you to see, only hearing what your ears allow you to hear, what happens? Well, there's five or six, if you count this mind, keys, in a sense. And our ordinary consciousness is keyed to those five notes. what we hear, what we see, etc.

[09:13]

But the practice of, the jnana practice of noticing the particularity of each sense and the awareness that we are only noticing a part of it, only what our eyes can see or ears can hear, so there's a missing part. So you're always aware, if you practice this in a mantra-like way, that there's a missing part. When you see something, you're only seeing part, and there's a missing part, a missing link. And you begin to feel the missing mystery. Or you begin to feel the missing part as a mystery. A kind of ally, actually. Some kind of affiliation or affinity. So with each perception, by practicing the Vishnayana, you come to feel the mystery on each perception.

[10:27]

the mystery on each noticing. And the mystery when you see someone. You feel the mystery of the person as really more fully than you feel what you can determine or think about. Now, when I was a kid, you know, I grew up... Did I grow up? I don't know. I was a kid anyway. And something happened. And I was in a very non-religious family, as I mentioned. No idea of God. Just out of the question there was any idea of God. But I felt something. I remember I used to have some kind of relationship to nature. And I had a particular place I liked to go. I didn't know why. but had a kind of shape or blade, circle, tree, an opening.

[11:33]

You'd go up to these kind of woods and you came into an opening. And I used to go there and... Yeah, it was something like I experience in Zazen now. But I had lots of... I expected something. And my expectations... Or it was too much about me. What will I experience? Or... I tried to have a similar experience to other times I was there. I don't know, it didn't work very well. It took a lot of zazen, without any gaining ideas, as Sukershe always said, before I got past things being about me, or having some conditions for the experience. Now in Taoism, nature is very central to the practice.

[12:33]

Zen too, in a somewhat quite similar way. But nature is, let's try to define nature. Nature, you know, what's nature? I mean, New York City is as much nature as an anthill is nature. Just what we human beings do. Nature is something in a Taoist sense that you engage with without conditions, without expectations, without measure. It's just something you engage with. Now I think you'll find if you go back to these basic practices like the vijnanas and you get in the habit of the vijnana mantra, So that you feel the ally of mystery on each perception.

[13:38]

It opens engagement without conditions. Something else is, I can't say exactly, but something you don't feel. You feel unseparated. You know, simple things like this. Now, we have some kind of, all of us have some kind of enlightenment experiences, small or big. Do they mature in a context of Dharma? Do they unfold and open up in a context of Dharma? I like in the Avatamsaka Sutra says, Avalokiteshvara practices immediate compassion without delay. Avalokiteshvara doesn't wait around for enlightenment or something, some experience, just practices immediate compassion without delay.

[14:50]

Let's get down to business, to heck with this. some idea about us or me or something. That's also like just engagement. What is this mind that just engages without conditions or expectations or self-importance? So one stage of practice, you know, I'm always talking about acceptance as the kind of dynamic of our practice, the basis of our practice, fundamental dynamic of our practice. At some point, a kind of stage of practice is everything is just as it is, except there's no self-importance. It isn't the same when it's like that, but yeah, still, it's just our human situation, but without any self-importance, any expectations.

[16:04]

An engagement is now possible. So what did I mean by a keyboard? A yoga posture isn't any posture. A yoga posture is a posture which has, let's say, an upward movement in it, not a downward movement. Yoga posture is a posture that is simultaneously a posture of rest and a posture of an upward movement. Upward movement, I mean it moves you to a better state of mind. more feeling of vitality. Okay, so you can, I think you can see the connection that what you, we can see the connection that what we hear

[17:10]

is what our ears allow us to hear. And we can see that from that we enter into an alliance with mystery. The world is so much softer and something multifaceted, more dimensions than just our senses. But to get to the point where things are a keyboard, I don't know. I don't know if I should even talk about that. So let's go back. Several people have asked me, you know, to speak about sitting, as I mentioned yesterday. well I think what I'm being asked when that's in that case those cases is that go back to something you know basic or fundamental well most fundamental is just our human condition the path is your life whatever it is

[18:38]

whatever you've been given or whatever you find yourself in. And you can't find yourself without, you know, starting with acceptance. So acceptance is all of these things are things you just put in front of you. We accept, but we actually don't accept. somebody who, in practicing a long time, mentioned to me recently, looking in the mirror, he saw himself for the first time without a lot of ideas. So, just accepted what he saw. Almost as if an ancient Buddha or another person was looking at this image. So we have to keep putting ourselves just to face acceptance, even if we don't accept.

[19:51]

As I've said often, to face wisdom even though we don't, or enlightenment even though it's right here, but where is it? So the pedagogy of sudden enlightenment which is the fundamental posture of Zen practice, is to just put yourself to face these things without swerving. And we call Buddha nature not, we say Buddha nature not just the qualities of a Buddha. You know, the qualities of Buddha are important, and it's quite a A jump. I mean, it's extremely important that a Buddha is not a particular person, but the qualities of a Buddha. And you can have the qualities of a Buddha. So it means you can be a Buddha. But it isn't a particular person like Jesus.

[20:53]

But it is the qualities that this Shakyamuni had. But these qualities we can all have. And we all have them in some kind of, you know, some kind of form. Dharma practice is to nourish those qualities. But also we don't just talk about the qualities of Buddha, we talk about Buddha nature. And Buddha nature means that somehow these qualities are in themselves also a nature and begin to speak to us and have some activity within us which can give us faith in just facing or waiting. Waiting not for wisdom, but waiting in wisdom. So we have this sitting posture.

[22:10]

And we have this sitting, our practice of mindfulness. And phenomenologically, sitting, our posture, our body, our emotions, our feelings, our mind, very hard to separate them. But we can look at sitting in terms of entries or access or marks. And one access to sitting in the wide sense of, as Dogen defines it, as being in the room of the Buddhas and Buddha ancestors. He sort of says, it's not about sutra chanting. It's not about special practices. It's not about offering incense.

[23:14]

It's not even about the teaching. It's about directly sitting in the room of Buddha's ancestors. Where's that? And he says, investigate thoroughly this moment of sitting. What is this moment of sitting? You should investigate. So I always say, the moment of going to sleep, the moment of waking up. Please don't limit your practice to Sazen. So we want access... is our physical posture. And it's a mark of sitting, too. You know, I... Quite a few of you have a habit of sitting with your head forward. And it's important to at least some of... I mean, if you get tired, your head goes forward and so forth, but it's important to... It's interesting that a good posture makes a real difference in practice.

[24:29]

You know, I... After 40 years of practicing, you'd think, oh well, that's for beginners to think about. But I'm still amazed how you can feel in the results of fruition of someone's practice. You can see in their posture. Just the energy to maintain posture is quite extraordinary. to settle into a posture. So one access to sitting practice is posture. And you can try to, you know, improve your posture or feel a lifting feeling through your posture. Feel settled in your posture and so forth.

[25:34]

And it's, you know, for you to discover. Water is wet or warm or cold. That's for you to decide. Another access is your breath. And you know I say so often, when you can just feel your breath continuously, like you feel your posture, it means you've pretty much freed yourself of the implied permanence of thinking. Otherwise your attention goes back to your breath, back to your thoughts. And attention is another axis. You can bring attention to And those four foundations of mindfulness are profoundly effective practices of bringing attention to.

[26:48]

What are the targets that you bring attention to? Seems obvious, but it's quite an accomplishment of the tradition to show us what targets are most fruitful to bring attention to. Another access is relaxation. You just try to find out to what degree you can be relaxed, or you notice the degree to which you're relaxed or not relaxed. What interferes with relaxation? All of practice can be thought of through any one of these terms, but relaxation is what? Relaxation could be your main focus in practice, in which all the rest of the fruits of practice, seeds of practice, bear fruit in this soil of relaxation.

[27:53]

Another is friendliness. Just to be friendly with yourself. That's not so easy. Just to be friendly with yourself. Not comparing yourself to others, not measuring yourself by others, not thinking about it. Just friendly to yourself. And friendly to your situation. And friendly to the people who figure in your lives. In your life. So friendliness, which is also a kind of ease. So now we have, I would say, not relaxation, but ease. And ease in the world. In your world. Another access is clarity. You feel a certain clarity appears. So you can notice in your own practice this access to sitting practice, relaxation of breath or attention, friendliness, ease, attention, clarity, so forth.

[29:17]

Now, again, going back to the yoga posture. Now you're trying to find Two words I use very often are nourishment and completeness. You've got to have some way within your own experience to discover a dharma, the dharma, a dharma. The two most accessible, experiential doors of the dharma, of dharma, of a dharma are, I think, Nourishment and completeness. So you feel some nourishment. So when you're finding your posture, some postures feel nourishing and some don't. Some postures feel complete. And when there's a feeling of completeness, like you're kind of settled in completeness, lots of scales fall off.

[30:27]

I can't say exactly what your posture should be, but you can say from within your, through yourself, yeah, today I found a posture in sitting where I really felt nourished, or at ease, or complete. So that would also be what you mean by an upward movement in a posture. There's a feeling of nourishment or completeness or ease. Now, so we design the day. For example, this shashu position. We hold our hands this way and we put them together like that. We put our hand like that and then we put it here, a little space there, and then you turn up for a... Okay.

[31:40]

So what we've determined so far is that everything actually is mind, in the sense that it's what you know. Everything is an object of mind. But maybe if I try to make a distinction, everything is not a mind object. Not everything... A paper cup is an object of mind, I mean, or an object of attention at least. Someone made it, you can drink out of it, you know, etc. But it's not really a mind object in the way I'm trying to find some way to determine something, because you can't pour much attention into it. It doesn't return much. So if you have your hands just any old way, it's like a paper cup. But if you put your hands this way and turn them up slightly, there's some vitality. This is maybe too rigid, you know? This is too relaxed.

[32:43]

There's some vitality when you turn it up. You can find your own posture. The point about this kind of posture is to not exactly doing it. If you have a series of postures, you can just do them and not have to think. But they don't have to be exactly. It can be how you find vitality in it. So a yogic posture or a mind object, not an object of mind, a mind object, requires attention and usually generates vitality. Also this posture, though you might be interested, is, we don't, I've mentioned this occasionally again, but we don't do it, but in a monastery in Japan, you have to hold your hands in this posture all the time.

[33:49]

It's a fantastic way to soften the back. It's what I call a clear hold. And they make the sleeves so long that you can't put your hands down. Only the teachers can have short sleeves. The monks have to have long sleeves so they're cleaning the floor if they put their hands down. So you have to put your hands up. And if you hold your hands this way all day long, your back starts feeling like there's knives in it. So one has to give up the clear hold or the obstructed holds have to give up. And eventually, if you keep doing it, suddenly the whole back just floats free. It's cheaper than psychotherapy. It's a kind of self-massage. So these postures have quite a lot of intelligence built into them.

[34:53]

Some vitality, kind of clear hold that counteracts the way so much stuff is built into our back, particularly our back. Or we stand with our legs, our feet, a fist apart. Or we stand with our, put our hands, a fist apart. Yeah, you could choose something. You could say, I'm going to put my hands this way, this distance, and you can walk around like this if you want. You'll be a little cockeyed. But the point is, you create something that requires attention, and if it's the right posture, it generates vitality. Now, Sukhya Rishi used to say, Oh, dear. Sukhya Rishi used to say, You know, we can play. We can have any schedule we want.

[35:55]

We can change things around. There's no rules except your legs. Chairs for everyone. Don't know what to say yesterday. Can't stop today. Take your issues to say. Usually when you see a tree, you see a tree. This is one of my favorite things he said. Sometimes when you see a tree, you see a poem. What's the difference? Well, I think you don't want to go around seeing a lot of poems all the time in trees. You'd be kind of boring or a nuisance. But I think when you pause and look at a tree, Particularly if you have an ally in the mystery, the missing part, the mystery of the missing part.

[37:04]

You feel something like, you feel the tree from its own side. You almost feel what it's like to stand up in the air and the wind. That branch is coming out. Maybe you feel the tree as a poem. Now that's like a keyboard. When the tree is a poem, it's a kind of note or chord. Now I like the word chord. Instead of being in accord with the world, we're cording with the world. A chord just implies some kind of harmony which seems a little too fixed. I don't like the word harmony. It's more an engagement, a cording. A kind of music appears. So the phenomenal world is a kind of yogic keyboard. We dance through the world finding the tree's poems or finding each situation nourishing or complete or at ease with or friendliness

[38:20]

So these qualities, these marks, this access, both marks of practice and access, practice that I mentioned in sitting, are also the world itself. I had the majesty of a whale with its baleen, you know, going along taking in plankton. So I saw Sashin as a great kind of baleen whale taking in nourishment with mind object templates. Baleen was like mind object template, accumulating mind without thoughts power. But actually it was a little bit of a confusing image. Set me off on the wrong track.

[39:23]

I think a keyboard is better than Baileys. But as time is not clock time, as we've often talked about, time is ripening time, is our experience of time. So the phenomenal world is also a kind of keyboard or strings. And the keys are hidden. The keys are hidden, the strings are hidden, the chords are hidden. But one access, one opening, It's when you begin to know the mantra of the missing part, the ally of mystery in all of your knowing. Yeah, that's enough for today, probably.

[40:26]

Thank you very much.

[40:27]

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