Let me just say about questions, because it's occurred in my mind several times. Yeah, I can keep saying the various secrets of practice are... One of the secrets of practice certainly is the... use and presence of questions in your practice. So, Dogen's entire practice from beginning to end was animated by one question. What was his question? Why do we practice? Okay. We can all ask ourselves that question, why do we practice?

[01:03]

But he had a certain twist to it. Why do we practice if the teaching says we're already enlightened? So you have to ask the question in some framework that it grabs you. Yeah. So for him, if you study Dogen all the way through, he's answering this question his entire life. Why do we have to practice if we're already enlightened? Now, did somebody give you this Zanmayo Zanmay? Did we do it yet? Yeah. Well, we haven't gotten it yet. Okay, when you get it, you might look at the first paragraph and ask yourself, what questions is Dogen asking himself?

[02:10]

because if you don't see what questions Dogen's asking himself in that first paragraph, the rest of the fascicle don't make any sense. So one of the differences in Western practices is the two of you, for instance, are asking yourself different questions than any Asian practitioner probably ever asked. Now, I tend to take a rather scientific view of practice. Norman Fisher told me the other day, or not the other day, some months ago. My daughter says it's very Portuguese.

[03:14]

You say the other day, and it means any time in the last five or six years. Anyway, Norman said to me that he doesn't know any other Buddhist teacher who emphasizes the methodology of mind or the structure of mind as much as I do. So there may be, you know, this emphasis may be useful, but it also may miss something. But I feel it's my job to try to establish the best I can. what our Buddhist ancestors were really talking about, what they assumed. And that's more of an emphasis of mine, really, than trying to look at how to apply it in the West.

[04:15]

That's more of an emphasis of mine than trying to think of how to apply it in the West. I'll let you apply it. I'll just try to find out what it is. Of course I'm always talking about how to apply it too, but still my emphasis is uncovering what it's really about. Okay. So let's just say that you assume, this is all to get to the point to say, that we assume that everything that we are is generated and not given. It's generated and not given. We manufactured it ourselves. Okay. Now, the extent to which I feel this is actually not accepted by a fair number of Zen teachers in the past.

[05:53]

For example, it's very common in both Tibetan Buddhism and Zen Buddhism to take original mind or some kind of intrinsic mind as already there. And practice is simply a way of uncovering this intrinsic being. Yeah, it's probably not a bad way to teach. Yeah, but it's, I think, not right. Okay. Okay, so let's start from the assumption that everything is generated.

[06:54]

How do we generate it? Okay, first of all, through our perceptions. And our process of forming the world. Okay, now I'll give you a kind of truism, I think, of at least the way I'm understanding practice. And I think we can hold this in mind during the seminar. The mind constructs the mind. I'll just use the word construct like an engineer. Und ich verwende das Wort, konstruiere, so wie ein Ingenieur. And existence constructs existence. Und die Existenz konstruiert Existenz.

[07:56]

And mind constructs the mind by constructing existence. An existence constructs existence by constructing the mind. Okay, now that's exactly what I see Sophia doing. I'm not assuming at all that she's starting out with a soul or anything. She's certainly starting out with certain genes and certain verve. Verve means something like a certain approach or energy or quality.

[08:59]

Okay. Now, if that's the case, then our perceptual process is extremely important. Okay. So if your perceptual process is characterized by clarity, and you think of this whole thing as a construction process, that if every perception has a quality of clarity, of preciseness, a feeling of it is what it is, with no fear involved. Okay, so I look at, I don't know, the landscape. Or this green chair up there.

[10:15]

Just there, it's a green chair. Okay, so Christiana Turn put me up in the, what she calls the Wurstschloss. This little gate house. Quite a nice place to stay actually and I was able to set up and work there. But if there's ever going to be a place where I see a ghost, it's likely to be there. And the thing is full of strange noises at night that you can't explain. But I had exactly, I think, the same feeling. Okay, I hope I see a ghost as seeing that green chair. I was really ready to see a ghost. Why not? What else have I got to do at night?

[11:17]

So I think if a ghost appeared, I would look at it with exactly the same feelings I look at that green chair. It's something appearing in my senses. And I don't think I'd have fear. I'd be a little startled. Okay. Now, if you, through practicing with the visionaries, which is a practice how we know things, and inseparable from the practice of the limits of knowing things, Now I'll probably come back to that if we continue to talk about Emptiness.

[12:32]

Okay, because the Vijnana practice is a practice in its most fundamental sense, not about knowing, but about the limits of knowing. Okay. So if you're, okay, so now let's go back to the pause for the particular. Now you train yourself, part of wisdom practice is to train yourself to feel a little pause on everything you see or hear. It just becomes natural. The body, there's a kind of moment in which the body resolves itself simultaneous with the perception. The body feels completed through allowing the perception to have its own pace of absorption.

[13:54]

In other words, there's a physical... Again, yogic truism, there's a physical aspect to all perception, all mental activity. Okay. So, you've got to let... You don't have to let, but... In yogic practice, you let every perception and every thought have a physical basis. Now we're back. I can go through kind of the riff on speaking in the Eightfold Path. Now again, if I speak about this, we're into the brush strokes, really, not the painting.

[15:17]

So I ask your permission to go into the brush strokes a little bit. Okay, so I'm speaking now. And part of practice is in the Eightfold Path, the secret of the Eightfold Path, is basically you have these ingredients of speech, behavior, and livelihood. Followed by effort or energy and mindfulness. And then the dynamic of the practice of the Eightfold Path is how you apply energy and mindfulness to speech, behavior, and livelihood.

[16:27]

So this alchemical or catalytic process is how you apply mindfulness and energy to these three targets in your life, three activities of your life. And one of the ways you bring attention, let's take first of all, as I said, is to your speech. So what's the main way we bring attention to our speech? What's the overall teaching of mindfulness? You bring attention through the breath.

[17:29]

You physicalize attention. Mindfulness is physicalized attention. Okay. It's all right. I'm bringing attention in the breath to my speech. But speech is already breath. I can't speak unless I breathe. But lots of us talk, so you can't feel the breath in the people's talking at all. All you can feel is the mind racing along. No, if that's what you want to do, that's fine.

[18:36]

It would be interesting to have a conversation with Robin Williams. Do you know who he is? An actor? An actor, a comedian. Yeah, that's right. I've brought some Europeans to see Good Morning Vietnam. who know English well and they couldn't understand a single word. Because he's speaking a kind of black disc jockey way of speaking. He was also Mrs. Goodbar, was that her name in that movie? God and Doubtfire? Yeah. Anyway, I saw a little... He once spoke to my... daughter Elizabeth I was at a restaurant out in kind of restaurant place north of San Francisco and Elizabeth was maybe Elena's age Elizabeth at that time was Elena's age and we were having breakfast

[19:56]

And Elizabeth was running out in the garden, and I was saying, come on, Elizabeth, come back here. And this guy was sitting having breakfast with somebody, and he said, don't do it, little girl. I looked at her, it was Robin Williams. It's very characteristic of him, actually. But he spoke the other day about, not spoke, I read the other day, he's now touring again. And he's, if any comedian in America has genius, he probably is the one. And he says he gets out there in such an ecstatic space that the whole group starts generating. He doesn't know what he's doing. He just flies, he says. He has no plan about what he's going to do or anything. Okay. I would like to enjoy talking to him about to what extent breath is part of this, or is he just letting his mind go?

[21:20]

I've gotten to know John Cleese quite well, who's the comedian in Fawlty Towers, do you know? I don't know if these people know this. Fish Call Wanda, Monty Python. And The Life of Brian. Anyway, he's very funny. But he really wants to practice Zen, and he's quite interested in this whole idea of speech and breath, and I just spent a week with him the other day. The point I'm making is there are some people who are really out there with language, but I guess the ones who are most grounded in it actually are grounded in their breath. But the point I'm making is, if you're going to realize this practice, You have to make a series of vows.

[22:47]

Or you have to put yourself on the line. In other words, you make a kind of vow or decision. I will ground my, for example, I will ground my speech in my breath I'll even ground my thinking, unspoken thoughts in my breath. And when my thinking is not grounded in my breath, I will notice it. Unless you make certain determinants like that, your practice doesn't mature. Sorry. It's a little bit like writing poetry or something.

[23:48]

If there isn't some kind of form you're following, the poem doesn't happen. Okay, so, all right. If you do bring your breath to your speaking. Now we're getting to where I said that we weren't going to get about 10 minutes ago. If you do bring your breath to your speaking, your attention to your speaking through your breath, what does it do? it allows the body to come into your speaking.

[25:03]

The breath sort of creates an opening for the body to become part of speaking. So what happens when your body is part of your speaking? It's actually a process of weaving mind and body together. So one of the reasons speech is the third item in the Eightfold Path because it's the initial and most fruitful territory for weaving mind and body together. And the fruition of the Eightfold Path assumes the weaving together of mind and body. So the Eightfold Path is not just a kind of light way to practice as a Lakers.

[26:11]

It can be that, but as an integrated teaching, it's a demanding yogic process. Now, should the phrase demanding yogic process scare you away? Well, I don't know if you want. But it's no more demanding than the adventure of bringing your breath and body into your speaking. Now, why do... do lie detectors work?

[27:23]

Yeah, they work a large percentage of the time. Why do they work? Because the body doesn't lie. It's very difficult to make the body lie. So when you begin to bring the body into your speaking and your thinking, You don't lie anymore. Or lying is different. Makes you sick, maybe. Or you know when you're lying. Or the world itself feels more truthful. Oder die Welt selbst fühlt sich wahrhaftiger an. You feel there's a kind of truth in what you know, think, and feel.

[28:26]

Du fühlst, dass da eine Art Wahrheit ist in dem, was du fühlst, denkst, und siehst. Now, I noticed in my practice, one of the first ways I got onto this, eine der ersten Wege, wie ich da hineingekommen bin, One day I realized everything I think I can do. Whatever I imagine is possible. Now, I could tell when I imagined something that was sheer fantasy. But I had to make a kind of effort to do that and I couldn't feel my body and But when I imagined something, even in the middle of the night, and I could feel my body in it, I knew this is doable.

[29:29]

Because this is actually no small thing when mind, body, and speech and thinking are woven together. So the idea of a truth body is not a euphemism or a generalization. It's an actual experience, generated experience. Okay. All right, so now if the sum of your perceptions... tend to have a quality of clarity about them. even of brightness or luminosity. But let's just say initially a kind of preciseness and clarity.

[30:34]

Everything feels just where it is. Yeah, and there's a kind of trust, a feeling of trust or truth in it. If that is the fabric of your perceptions, it begins then to create a general feeling of trust. And that then begins to affect your emotions. Okay. Now, so that's approaching emotions from the context of, first of all, how we know the world through perceptions. And so, yeah, that's enough for now. Okay.

[31:34]

Okay. I have a question. I feel most connected to this weaving of body and mind through my experience of Brett apart from speaking. In the sense of this background mind through the idea of not interfering with my experience. And I... can feel something about the breath in speech as another dimension of hooking in thinking to that warp and woof.

[33:00]

And I'm curious for you, To explain more about the usefulness of bringing in speech to the mix of following the breath, which is a way of bringing together body and mind. Could you repeat? What's the usefulness of the additional dimension of speech as an expression of mentation or thinking? bring that element into something that... From one point of view, practice is a hyperdimensional fabric. Mentioned dimension.

[34:28]

Because it's more than three dimensions, so I use a mathematical term. And yet there's a custom in Buddhism that each teaching is taught as if it covered the all teachings. The four foundations of mindfulness, the five skandhas, are all taught as if that's only teaching you practically need to know. So there's a tradition of the one teaching that covers all teachings. And some of this is sometimes carried to ridiculous and... ridiculously simplified attempts. As I said the other day, like one minute of Zazen is one minute of Buddha.

[35:31]

As I said, you need about a million practices to make that work. Okay. And I would like at some point to maybe, if Paul would be willing and you'd all be willing, is to actually turn this seat over to Paul for an afternoon or a day or something and let Paul share his way of thinking about these things. But if we do look at this, what I just said about speech, at least historically, this is not bringing in speech in addition. The Eightfold Path is the Buddha's earliest teaching.

[36:40]

And the teaching of the Eightfold Path is the primary way to weave body and mind together is through speech. That's why speech is in the list before behavior. Das ist der Grund dafür, warum das Sprechen in der Liste vor dem Verhalten steht. Because it's a natural. Speech is breath, and attention can be breath, and when you bring them together, you open the body into speaking in mind. Is that too much? Also, Sprechen ist Atem, Aufmerksamkeit ist Atem, und du bringst das zusammen mit Körper und Geist. It's so simple. It's just a matter of intending it, and that's the second of the Eightfold Path. I'm sorry.

[37:44]

Since I just taught the Eightfold Path at Rosenberg, it's... And I'm boring you and Christa because they went through it. Because you've got it down now. Well, we've opened up a lot of paths here, haven't we? It's interesting that when you taught the Eightfold Path before, you mostly taught the first, the views. And now it's different. I decided to be more traditional.

[38:48]

The views are the most important part of the Eightfold Path. That's what the Eightfold Path is all about, is views. That's what all of Buddhism is about, is views. And how they function. But the traditional teaching is that you enter the Eightfold Path through three, four, and five. Three, four, five, speech, behavior. So I decided to look at it that way this time and then show how that leads to working with your views. Well, most of what I imagined I might speak about this morning is being pushed into a perhaps imaginable future.

[39:53]

Let's sit for a few minutes. I'm sorry, I was a bit slow getting back. I fell asleep. I waited up for Marie-Louise and the baby until about midnight, and then we talked for an hour or so, and then... But I'm awake now, or something like that.

[41:17]

Does anyone want to bring something up from our discussion before lunch? And if it bothers you, Sophia running around, we can banish her. Actually, I was going to speak about... Sophia a little bit, so maybe this is a good time to do it.

[42:28]

Because I think last year I mentioned this idea in Buddhism that you're born not good or evil, but with tanha. And tanha is a, we could translate as a thirst for not less than everything. And I think she's a good example of a thirst for not less than everything. Yeah, so what I would like to speak about is watching her it seems to me, construct her existence.

[43:38]

We could say in the light of I'm speaking about in the light, particularly now, of trying to be clearer about a background mind. Now, Marie-Louise is observing the same things I am, though she may have a slightly different, some different take on it, so if you do, you can just chime in. So what I watch happening now is what I would call a conflation into words.

[44:41]

She has sort of words for things, but they are, I would say that Up until now, she mostly has words for activities, not things. At lunch today, some of you have heard some of these versions before, I'm sorry. Today she noticed a picture of ducks on the wall and some other bird. Pointing at the Enten, she said... Which is her word for birds.

[45:55]

At least I thought it was her word for birds. Because she... picked it up from the gray jays and blue jays at Creston. And they make a kind of crow-like sound. So we noticed whenever she saw any bird really, she made this noise, we saw her imitating from the jays. And then one day I noticed that looking out the window with no sound of birds, A shadow of some kind of bird, way up high, went across the front of the house, the lawn, the yard.

[47:08]

And she went... And she went... Good translation. And I thought, this is pretty good tangential thinking. Tangential means you see this, but you think of all the side things that relate. It's a technical term. Here I'm speaking in a way about the Eightfold Path views. In other words, the concept I had that she was, this was a word, influenced what I saw. But then I, when she named the shadow,

[48:09]

dawned on me that she was naming activities, not entities. Everything associated with birds, she called... What else became... Is there anything else in that? Yeah, okay. The fishes she called... Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm. What? Good work, kid. You're a good part of the lecture. Yeah. What do you call an activity? You mean, because a bird has a broad range of activities. I mean, a bird can jump, or he can fly, or he can pick, or... She has a range of activities and calls it... Anything associated with birds. Anything a bird can do and she has a thing a bird can do.

[49:32]

And swimming and flying is quite similar. Okay. Okay. And she now says baby very distinctly when she sees a baby or she sees a photograph or a drawing of a baby. But only a couple of weeks ago, baby meant acting like a baby. When she was fussing and crying and wanting something, she'd say, baby, baby. So at some point, baby describing a kind of baby behavior shifted to being an entity called a baby.

[50:46]

And this morning she discovered she could turn the light switch on in the wall and the light would go on and on. And this morning she discovered she could turn the light switch on in the wall and the light would go on and on. And when she turned it off, she waved bye-bye to the light. We must have said something, the light went away or something, and so she waved to it. One last example is what surprised me is... There's a lamp by our bed in Crestone, in Johanneshof. Both? In Johanneshof. Which is on a long, thin wire.

[51:54]

And she touched it and the whole lamp bounced away. And when she was eight months old... It looks solid, but it's not. It's suspended. No, it's on a wire. Like this, it's standing on a wire. Except it bends way over. It's a wire about as big as a foot. Very flexible. So she had played with this a great deal when she was eight months old, but now at 14 months old, when she touched it and moved away, she looked terrified. Because at eight months, she just, whatever it was, it happened. But now she's trying to find things that are consistent in the world.

[53:15]

And she expects lamps to be solid. And it's not solid. She looked actually the same look on her face I saw when she fell backwards off the bed. So she's creating a reality where she expects certain things to be solid. And she's now trying to, she sees a difference sort of between say a glass water pitcher, a glass vase and glass. And she can play with a glass full of water differently than a glass that's empty. Those are actually fairly complicated distinctions. But if she can't turn her overlapping sense of the world that she's naming with sounds.

[54:30]

Names are not yet words. A word has to function in a sentence. A name doesn't have to function in a sentence. So if she's going to be able to say something to us or understand us, all these things have to turn into entities. And she does now understand a great deal of what we say to her, though she doesn't say much back. So again, what I see is this sort of way of imitating the sounds of the world, and not seeing things in the grammatical units we call words, is now in the process of shifting rapidly.

[55:44]

Mm-hmm. Okay, so basically she is spending most of her energy not really on learning language, but trying to make the world something that's predictable. And she did a funny thing this morning. She found where I put the laundry. And she brought me yesterday's turtleneck. And it partly was that she wanted me to get out of bed, so she brought me my clothes. But when I didn't put it on, Marie-Louise noticed that really a shirt should be put on, so she wanted me to put it on because she wants the order that a shirt belongs on.

[56:59]

So I followed Marie-Louise's suggestions. And put it on but stayed in bed. And I saw her in bed with this old shirt on. And she felt much better. Things had taken a certain order. So it's what I'm seeing, and I'm sure sociologists or child psychologists have studied this all much better than I have. But what I see is this process of making the world predictable and ordered actually is preceding language. And I think when she's got that fairly straight, she will start speaking.

[58:02]

And then she'll find it's... the world becomes very effective through speaking. I'm surprised now, you know, Out here I said watch out because of the street. She immediately stopped. Or she's crying and Marie-Louise says it's time to sleep and she kind of stops crying. So I'm really surprised that she will so quickly modify her actions with a few words.

[59:03]

And now, once she learns language, the whole world's going to come into an order determined by language. And in a sense, the background mind is read out of the picture. Yeah, erased. And she'll now find specific words for different activities. So this is what I meant when I was speaking yesterday about repetition.

[60:07]

She'll be doing nothing now until she's the rest of her life, through all her education, et cetera. Authenticating the world as entities. It's almost like a mantra she'll repeat. Every time she speaks, she'll be turning the world into entities. And I think this kind of background mind, what I'm talking about, shrivels up to the extent that it's there in her now. Most of us have such a habit of seeing the world in entities that we have no real sense of this field of mind as an energetic field.

[61:16]

reality. So it's actually quite an effort in practice to in a way re-energize this potentiality. The instruction to not correct your mind in zazen is an effort to let background mind come into the fore. Yes. Okay, so that's just that riff. Now, does anybody want to say anything about that?

[62:41]

Or Marie Louise? I would like to say. Sure. During Sassen, there was... I don't know, I think either police car or ambulance car were rushing streets, two of them. And what was so amazing for me is that it's it's so hard to skip this picture of the ambulance car. I just hear the sound, but I hear, ambulance car, there's an ambulance. And you cannot take this picture away. It's almost impossible. And then you came in, and Sofia came in, and she must have had any toy or something. There was a rattle or something.

[63:42]

And I heard this sound and there was not such a strong connection between the picture and the sound. So it's quite interesting that there are certain things where sound and entity is so strongly connected and it's almost impossible to separate it. So today, while we were sitting, these rescue cars passed by, and it's so insanely difficult, or almost impossible, that the idea immediately comes up that it's a rescue car. And it's not possible to separate from this, that this is a rescue car. It can be something completely different, or it's just a noise or something. And then Sophia came in with some wooden toy and it made a noise and the connection was not so strong. It was possible to open this noise and see what kind of noise it was. Without immediately having any thoughts. It was an interesting observation.

[64:43]

Of course, the job of an ambulance is to establish such a reality if you're driving in front of it. Of course, it's the job of an ambulance to establish such a reality if you're driving in front of it. You talked about, in the morning you talked about the background mind starts to be a little idol, a little idol that then brought a piece of land in the mind. Yeah. Now you talk about that you suppose that there is a background mind in the mind of little babies.

[66:00]

Did I understand this? Well... In the sense that she's naming activities and not entities, she herself is generating a kind of background mind. So maybe we, as a child, have such a thing as a background mind. And then we more or less redevelop it in the same process. So between these two points, there must be little islands of background mind in the normal day-to-day life without any touching sandboxes. Is that possible? Yeah. Because for years I have such small pieces that not even can read what it is, but they are very crucial for

[67:06]

for my life, for making decisions. Because these are such, I also think, I can put it in language, what I'm encountering in this moment. Is that what you're talking about? Deutsch, bitte. Ich habe in meinem Deutsch, in meinem Deutsch, in solchen Situationen, Yeah, I understand. By the way, you know, I could give the seminar in the middle of the street in the middle of New York City and I wouldn't be distracted. Yeah, because I'm nothing but distracted. But maybe for you this is distracting.

[68:34]

Would anybody admit it? Okay, okay. Well, I think that what you said is what we should all do. In other words, I think that if you're going to try to practice these things, you've got to notice them or notice the territory already in your own experience. I'm sorry, I lost it. Yeah, okay. You're distracted. I know. A little bit. But I just wasn't thinking. No, no, I was just thinking. Okay. Just thinking, yeah, that's a danger. Depends on... Hi, Sophie. Hi. Mm-hmm.

[69:34]

Good, thank you. You put it back together. Put it back together. Put the bell on. Put the bell on here. Your hand isn't big enough to do it that way. Yeah, that's right. Okay, that's good. Now, go see your mom, please. Go see your mama, please. Thank you, danke.

[71:12]

Sorry, I got distracted. Or something else. So I think that we do do that, and you reminded me of a man that I knew in Boston named Mr. Johnson. And he was head of a big financial, he's dead now, head of a big financial empire. And he'd learned to, he told me, he liked to talk about these things. to clear his mind. And then let one or two things at a time seep in. And then he'd watch them interact.

[72:35]

And on that basis he'd make decisions. So it was something like you're talking about to some extent. And I think... When we daydream, it's something like this. And the example I usually give that I find quite convincing to myself anyway, for myself, is sunbathing. You're often awake, you may not go to sleep, but you're in some kind of wider space. Yeah, you hear sounds and things, but there's no distance. It's all in a field. Okay. So, somebody else want to say something? Okay. I was thinking about therapeutic work, when you sit with somebody counselling him or her or talking, yeah, listening, yeah, listening.

[74:16]

Then I have somehow the feeling that it could also be background mind or this is also an aspect of background mind to move in this field of undetermination. And that's somehow connected to something floating or something more liquid and not with something solid. And somehow I have the feeling that although it's nothing fixed, it's also something solid. It's somehow like an anchorage, like an anchor, which inhibits that I am floated away by the stories I'm told. Mm-hmm. So that I get somehow ideas how the stories that I have been told can also be changed a little bit.

[75:45]

Or that an idea pops up somehow or appears, arises, what can be done with these stories. Okay. And then it would be somehow like a pendulum. Yeah. Okay. I think that's right. I would say that's a kind of... That's the territory of what I'm suggesting we enter by background mind. And it... It has qualities that you just mentioned. It has openness. And... yet it has a kind of solidity. It's both transparent and open and yet solid.

[76:49]

And you feel anchored by it. In fact, when it's really stable, we call it imperturbable mind. So to the extent that you know this mind through what you're doing, practice is to bring qualities of mind like that into everything you do. Okay, so someone else want to say something about this? I think if we come to a definition through our own experience or some kind of sense of it, this is good.

[77:53]

Yeah, please. So coming back to this ambulance and to this children's toy. Yeah. So for me, it's background mind. Is it somehow an elusive term? Because it's not very clear for me. But is it what I can... The feeling I have is if I have this ambulance and I stick to this... solid connection between the sound and the noun, and the concept of an emblem and scar. So there is almost no space in between where I can see, go in between, like a cleavage or something like that, and it doesn't open. Somehow there's no space. But if there is this children's toy, I have somehow, it's as if a gate or an opening, I can... I can go in this space between what the sound is and what the concept is.

[78:59]

It's not completely deckungsgleich. Welded, wedded. Yeah, and you know, like this it doesn't fit completely together. So I can somehow move into that and then it opens up and for me With the children's toy it did, yeah. Yeah. And I have the problem with this concept of... I completely forget the word because I have the problem with the concept of the background mind is that it's completely unpredictable. You don't know what's happening in there. It's somehow the unpredictability. Why is it unpredictable? If I open myself up to what's happening, I cannot predict what will happen. Because I don't know. It's the other side of knowing somehow.

[80:04]

Ambulance is completely known. But what is outside of this, what is in this sound of the... of these children, rightly. It's not predictable. It's something to explore, to discover. So I think it's somehow unpredictable. Unpredictable. Is that bad? No, not at all. It's fun. I mean, it's joyous. It's okay. Okay, anybody else? Oh, he wanted me to translate for him. So I would like to come back to this example of this rescue car and this children's toy. And for me there is a totally rigid coupling between this sound and this concept of the rescue car.

[81:08]

And there is actually, that is totally closed, there is actually nothing to experience inside. That's the kind of coverage that you... I can't move in there and discover something in there. But if I manage to find a gap between a tone or something you hear, where you can discover something new, then for me it could be something like the spirit of the background. But this spirit of the background is a difficult term for me, because it is unpredictable what happens in there, because it moves in a territory that you don't know. Okay. Yes? I don't know how to say it, but I will somehow develop it during speaking.

[82:26]

In my life I had certain spans, sometimes hours or so, In these hours, it was as if I had, in addition to what the people spoke about so predominantly, And in this also I had somehow the feeling that what the people were talking about in the more foreground or in the front stage, Maybe the same topic, but perhaps a deeper meaning of the topic that you discussed in the foreground.

[83:40]

And at the same time, underneath or beside, when people were in the foreground talking about a certain issue, in the background there was maybe a different issue discussed or the same issue, but somewhat discussed or treated in a different way. You mean the subtext of the conversation, by implication, was a different topic? Do you think that the subtext of the conversation was implicitly different? I would say it was influenced by... So what was interesting for me was the things which happened besides or underneath, which was not always successful to me. ... So somehow in this text underneath, things were treated which are not spoken of normally.

[85:13]

I mean, you felt people in the conversation... that speaking to each other in some... Were indirectly saying something that you can't talk about. As if they were speaking to each other on this level, without knowing it. But what they were speaking had a deeper sense as the items that was taken about in the... in the normal sense. I would guess, actually, if you recorded

[86:16]

a conversation. Now normally when you record a conversation, you take out the background noise. Let's do the reverse. Let's take out the foreground noise. So what you do is you only pick up certain emphasis, certain syllables that are emphasized. I would guess that sometimes you hear a different conversation. It seems if the language which is used would be a secret language for something different.

[87:20]

But the sense or the issue which should be, is talking about is not clear for the one who is talking about. Yeah, I understand. No, I understand. Actually, some kinds of similar things like that are tried to be researched in psychic research. Yeah, some people feel that if you listen to conversations at another pace, you hear words appearing that are actually made by combinations of other words or something. Whether this is exactly true like this or not, but certainly something like this happens. Now, another aspect of background mind which Christina pointed out, is that it's actually, there's a kind of thinking that goes on in it.

[88:55]

And I would say, it's rather close to what Dogen means by thinking non-thinking. Because what you're practicing is a kind of non-thinking, but a kind of thinking appears. And I think this phrase puzzles scholars and they... But in actual practice, he's describing something quite real. Most of what we're talking about is no big deal. It's just a matter of giving it more... more emphasis in your life than you would otherwise.

[90:00]

And people in special circumstances sometimes develop these things without knowing anything about Buddhism. I've noticed something similar, of course, in people who have to be therapists. And I've noticed it in athletes. And I've noticed it in not ordinary stockbrokers, but speculators. Commodities brokers. in gewöhnlichen Agenten bemerkt, sondern in Börsenspekulanten. Where there's a high degree of risk and they don't really know what they're doing, but they do it.

[91:05]

Wo es ein hohes Grad an Risiko gibt und sie haben keine Ahnung, was sie eigentlich tun sollen, aber sie machen einfach etwas. To develop a certain kind of mind that makes decisions. Sie müssen eine gewisse Art von Geist entwickeln, der einfach Entscheidungen macht, der Entscheidungen trifft. Now I feel in a way we're wasting our time just talking about this obvious thing. But then I remind myself that All of Buddhist practice is really about establishing this always present, stable, calm mind. And if you don't do it, you're really not... I don't know what to say. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how to... You're benefiting from the gardener practice, but you're not the gardener.

[92:23]

Ihr zieht Nützen von den Früchten des Gartens, ohne dass ihr der Gärtner seid. Now let me just say again why I call it background mind. Because I noticed when I first started practicing, that when I brought a practice into my mind, A phrase, let's say, into my practice. You like the one many of you know I practiced with for a long time. There's no place to go and nothing to do.

[93:28]

That I repeated this enough over months. That it finally just became a presence that was always there in the midst of my thinking, activity, etc. And then it began influencing me, because when I did things, There was this deeper sense that even though I'm doing things and going places, fundamentally there's no place to go and nothing to do. And this is related to one of the key practice koans. There's sort of three key practice koans related to this brother team of Dharma brothers.

[94:30]

Union and Dao. And this one I mention most often is Union is sweeping and Dao says, oh, you're awfully busy. And Yunyan says, you should know there is one who is not busy. And Thich Nhat Hanh once, for instance, told me that this was a key koan in his beginning practice. So we could say in Zen practice to realize the one who's not busy is a fundamental transformative step in practice. Okay. So what we could say we're talking about here...

[96:13]

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