Yeah, good dark afternoon. As I said last night, the cold wind is finding our Zendo. Unfortunately, there's no snow. I'm sure those of you, well, probably those of you who have to drive... In a few days, I mean, the Sashin may never end, but if it does, those of you who have to drive may not like it if it snows. But I'm trying to reverse global warming. At least here. Was the first sashin we did 10 years or so ago in October? Was it November? Boy, did it snow. How many were at that sashin?

[01:00]

You were in Gisela and anybody else? You were there? If I remember correctly... Yeah, go ahead. When we looked out the window, the cars were just bumps. So all the time where we're trying to have our breakfast together, we're just out shoveling, you know, trying to get the cars cleared up. I also said that everything essential is within your reach. Yeah, you have to know that. I mean, otherwise sudden enlightenment, practice, so forth, doesn't make, can't make any sense.

[02:23]

And I said, nothing is hidden. Well, that of course means that everything is hidden unless you look carefully. There's no reason to bring up the idea of hidden unless it seems hidden until you look. And that's what I'm trying to talk about today. And, you know, again, sometimes I, fairly often, but sometimes I talk about something I don't really know how to do it. So I kind of dive in with some stuff.

[03:42]

And part of what I'm also trying to do is put the Buddha in our own categories. Or what's meant by Buddha mind or Buddhahood, etc. because if we have some implicitly transcendent idea of the Buddha which of course is the case because somehow Buddha is in the same category as God we've got to kind of shake the category God loose from the category Buddha And we need to bring the Buddha into our own categories. Into categories that can't... are or can be our own experience.

[04:56]

So let's start with a definition. That the Buddha... Let's start with this definition. That the Buddha is what it means to be human. Dass der Buddha das ist, was es bedeutet, Mensch zu sein. Das ist etwas, was ich kürzlich einige Male gesagt habe. Seid ihr vielleicht von der ganzen Idee des Buddhismus gelangweilt, weil ihr was ganz Besonderes erwartet? Das ist schon immer noch besonders genug, macht euch da keine Sorgen. So you also have noticed, and I talked about it yesterday, that how thoroughly we're engaged with each other in this sesshin, in sesshin.

[06:00]

We make the sesshin together. But how are we engaged? We're engaged in doing things together. There's not much, I don't know how it makes these categories, but not much thinking together. It's more doing together. Yeah, we bowed to each other in the walking around. Just notice yourself, cooking, serving, it's all physical doing engagement. And I think you'll notice that, yes, there's feeling, but it's a different feeling that arises from doing than arises from thinking.

[07:03]

So, as you know, you may sit for a week next to somebody, or at least two people usually, that you don't speak to the whole week, but you somehow know them by the end of the week. So this is also just a kind of engagement in what I call using the word trivia. Yeah, no, I spoke about it the other day, but not in this Sashin, I think. No, that was somewhere else, yeah, right on the planet.

[08:21]

Yeah, well, of course the word in English and German means three roads, three vias. So it means you've come to a fork in the road. You're on a road and there's two roads. So clearly in the originary sense, or how it was conceived originally, It meant in small things are the choices that count. And it's all your worldviews, your habits, your attitudes, all are reified or deconstructed in the trivial detail.

[09:34]

Your habits of perception and knowing are reified or deconstructed on every perception. So if you want to perplex your uncle or aunt when they ask what Buddhism is about, what are you doing? You say, I'm practicing the trivia of Dharma. Trivial Dharma. Okay. So partly the way we're engaged in Sashin is to be engaged in these... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, moments.

[10:50]

Okay. Now, when we look at something, whatever it is, The activity of noticing, associating, conceiving and so forth. It's all fused. Fused. Glued together. Fused together. And we don't see it as a... As an activity of knowing, we see it as a single moment of knowing.

[11:58]

And as a single moment of knowing, our usual habits of perception, our usual habits of knowing, control how we know. Und als dieser einzige Moment der Wahrnehmung kontrollieren unsere gewöhnlichen Gewohnheiten der Wahrnehmung und des Wissens, die kontrollieren, wie wir wissen. Then we attach the, superimpose, attach and superimpose the, the Aristotelian and Kantian concepts that define our world. Yeah, singularity, quality, quantity, etc. So we're already defining a world in which Buddha can't appear. Yeah, maybe I'm overemphasizing the point.

[13:19]

But, you know, sort of a thousand years of Buddhism trying to talk about this suggests I'm not. Because if we take right views, what feels right, as to know how things actually exist, that's the thrust of all Mahayana Buddhism. Okay, so I want to take Dogen's phrase to complete that which appears. I brought it up last week sometime, but I'd like to bring it up again and see if We can make use of it.

[14:24]

Okay. If Dogen says, this is one way to look at what he means by the Genjo Koan, that means to complete that which appears means that that which appears is incomplete. And so what are we completing? I mean, completing so that it's, you know, part of our human world. Okay, now, so what I'm trying to separate out here unfuse the single moment of perception or knowing.

[15:27]

If we do this, what I'm going to try to do is slow down the fusion, interrupt the fusion. At first it's a kind of surgical analytical process. But then you recognize it's the way we function. But then you'll say, well, I mean, I can't go through the world through a step-by-step analytical process of everything that appears.

[16:28]

I couldn't get my car out of the driveway. Now my hands are on the steering wheel. But, you know, as we say, a dharma is the length of time of a... Well, no, it's not a dharma. It's a kshana. The length of time of a the perception of a single star in a star-filled sky. And you know the difference between... I mean, we really see it at Crestone. It might be a little cloudy and you see maybe a few thousand stars. But as usual, usually there's this black desert night sky.

[17:29]

And there's thousands of, I mean, tens of thousands, I mean... you know, some big number of stars. And if you just glance across the sky, you feel them. You feel it's not 10,000, you feel it's 100,000. So the point is that if we do So we separate them into parts. Even though in ordinary perception it's a kind of what we can call maybe single moment perception.

[18:36]

We actually feel the difference. Okay. Now, one of the advice you often hear of like practicing the five skandhas is to hold the skandhas in view. Okay. And I often say, you know, hold it in view. Hold a koan phrase, a wisdom phrase in view. Do you mean in view like in your field of vision or do you mean in view as... Yeah, that's the problem. Yeah. Say it any way you like and then I'll go on. Hold in mind. But what this idea of hold means, the word Dharma means to hold too.

[19:38]

Dharma is what is held for a moment. This is a very complex idea actually, what is held. Because if everything is changing, and changing so thoroughly and profoundly that we only have moment by moment existence, And you know that sound is already past. So, and the next sound hasn't appeared. I mean, there's no... There's a knife edge of the present. And a lot of Buddhist schools are differentiated by how wide this knife edge is. Okay, in any case, we have an experience of duration.

[20:56]

In jedem Fall haben wir eine Erfahrung von Dauer. We have an experience of the present. Und wir haben eine Erfahrung der Gegenwart. And held is this sense of duration. Und zu halten, das ist dieses Gefühl von Dauer. Now, there's a number of ways we can talk about this, but I'm going to choose this to complete that which appears as the way to speak about it. That means you have to slow things down. Yeah, if you need reading glasses, look at a picture without your reading glasses. What is this? Or you get a very fuzzy Xerox fax or something. What is it? So we have this experience in daily life of occasionally not knowing what's something and it takes a while before the form appears and we can conceptualize it.

[22:35]

So if you want to slow down and practice with this, to complete that which appears, Whatever it is, you notice it. I often tell you this, but some of you I am not. This is, of course, a lotus stem. This is the lotus embryo, which you can get in some Japanese soups. This is the seed pod. And this is the bud. Sorry, I don't know what seed pod is, actually. It's where the seeds... And this is the bud.

[23:47]

Where's the flower? It's your looking at it. This is very typical imagery in Buddhism. The main part isn't there. So it's a teaching staff. So I hold the embryo in my hand and the blossom occurs if I'm teaching well enough. So to complete that which appears. So do we complete, it's not conceptually there, it's only there by inference or something like that.

[24:48]

Or it's not perceptually there. So a stick like this is very Buddhist and it plays with the relationship between perception and conception. Okay, so first when something appears, this stick or whatever it is, you see if you can just let it be in the senses. Yeah. Now, if you look at a plastic flower, there's a very good restaurant in Freiburg which has plastic flowers in the bathroom, and I think it's a terrible mistake. If they're going to make an effort for the food, they shouldn't have fake flowers.

[25:53]

But when we see a plastic flower, we think flower. What does that mean? It means the concept has been prior to the perception. We made the perception fit the conception. Because you didn't perceive a flower, you perceived a conception. But if you perceive really the flower, first you don't know quite what it is. There's fragrance, it's alive actually, it moves very slightly and it's growing and decaying. And it has a kind of bodily presence that plastic flowers don't have.

[26:53]

And when you get used to, when you get used to Dharma practice, the habit of allowing perception to occur before conception, plastic flowers are really quite disturbing. Unless they're intentionally fake, like glass flowers and things like that, then they're real in their real fakes. So first you let the whatever appears be in your senses. Now you're not doing this because it's actually absolutely true. And you can argue with it in terms of the point of neurobiology and physics and psychology, what's actually going on.

[28:20]

Yeah, it's pretty close to what actually is going on. But this approach to knowing has been developed, yes, to replicate what actually is going on, Yes, but then in addition and equally important as a teaching method. So you do it also because it's been thought through, practiced through very carefully as a way to change the categories in which you know the world. So you just do this now and then. Try it out on some object.

[29:21]

So you let it be a percept object first. And then you let it settle into the body. And you kind of feel the object in the body as if you're both physical objects in the world, which probably you are. And then you let a conception form. And then you let associations arrive. Yeah, so there's, yeah, associations may come before the concept actually, but there's some interplay of associations and concept.

[30:24]

So first you let the appearance appear in the senses. Then you let it kind of settle in the body. Yeah, as if I feel you now with my heart, my stomach, my body, not just seeing you or anything, but I have a feeling for, I know this room isn't empty, I can feel it. That's something like settling. It's settled in the body. Then it comes into the mind. And the teaching of the four marks and the five dharmas are all about when you interrupt that process so you don't enter into naming and discriminating.

[31:34]

Mm-hmm. Okay, so then it's a concept. And then it's a cognition. It's a sense of knowing it. So we have senses, body, concept, associations and cognition. Now, you may not see all these distinctions at first. You may see it much more simply than that. But when you look at it really carefully, you see that these steps are there. Now, what I'm getting at by doing this... is to try to create a real way, experiential way, we can find how function selfs, how self functions in us.

[32:55]

Now the last step in this to complete that which appears after cognition is to feel the object from its own side as if you're not feeling it from your categories now you're letting the object you're feeling the object from its own side that's the best I can say Now, when you feel an object from its own side, you drop your views, you drop your categories. Because if you feel it within your categories, then you're feeling it from your own side.

[34:04]

So when you let yourself have a moment, a micro-moment, to feel something from its own side, yeah, surprisingly you feel something. dann überraschenderweise spürst du etwas. Aber das, was du auch spürst, ist ein Nichtgefunden. Denn da gibt es auch diesen Aspekt, das Objekt aus sich selbst heraus nicht zu finden. Yeah, as Jeffrey Hopkins says, you look for something, you look for a cat. We look for Charlie, he's dead. You look for Charlie and then you have the feeling of not finding Charlie.

[35:05]

What's his name? Charlie the cat. No, no, no, the guy. Jeffrey Hopkins. Yeah, Charlie. Charlie Hopkins, I know. This is also one of the direct ways to know emptiness. It's the experience of what's not found. So it's strange that when you open yourself to feeling something from its own side, you open yourself to feeling what's also not found, not findable. and strangely you simultaneously often have the experience of the vividness of the object because you've taken away the categories the views and you both are now other and you feel emptiness

[36:16]

So this process of these five steps, I guess, of completing that which appears, enters you into how things actually exist. And if you do this occasionally, it doesn't take a lot, a few homeopathic doses. It begins to change how you notice things. And your sense of what things are. They're... Constructs, they're not permanent, they're constructs in your own senses.

[37:34]

Now we have the possibility of really knowing what non-duality is. In this star-filled sky. Yeah, I think that's enough. And I've run out of time. So maybe part two will be tomorrow. To be continued. I'm on my horse. I'm going over a cliff.

[38:07]

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