500 years or more. We can call this the ancestral mind. It's not a mind you were born with. It's a mind you generate in your practice. It's a mind you receive through your teacher. Your teacher should give you the feeling of it, show it to you. How does he show it to you? He has to show it to you in silence. He has to show you when you're not looking. So if you ask, show me Buddha mind. No, that doesn't work.

[01:05]

I can't show it to you here. A mind that asks such a question can't... It has to be asked in silence. So the question is also, show me this Buddha mind. I can't show it to you here. How do you express it? Three coins in the fountain. No, it's not that. Isn't that a movie from the 50s? Yeah. Under my bed at night, I lost three coins. It's just going to happen again.

[02:10]

I always know what time it is. What's wrong with this session? I can't seem to express anything, you know, in a limited amount of time. We have a saying, the mind before your parents were born. We can understand that to mean the ancestral mind of the ancestral mind.

[03:10]

The transmitted mind. Not the mind you were... Not a mind you were born with. Okay, so... You know, to get ourselves located... We have the mind of waking, dreaming and deep sleep that we're born with. But we're not born with Zazenma. We've got to do Zazen. We're not born with the ancestral mind. We need a teacher. It ain't natural. It's a heresy to think, oh, I'm just going to be completely natural and I'll realize Zen. Please go somewhere and be completely natural.

[04:29]

I wish you luck. Yes, it's a kind of naturalness a kind of relaxation a kind of normality that opens you to this transmitted mind now consciousness ordinary consciousness no one can explain it someone said to me today or yesterday Be realistic. Plan for a miracle. Yeah, that's another one of those one, two, three jokes. Be realistic, plan for a miracle. Well, I could say, be realistic, it's already a miracle.

[05:30]

It's already a miracle. And there's all kinds of people in various fields of science now trying to explain or explain why you can't explain consciousness. Yeah, and awareness can't be explained. Awareness is harder to explain than consciousness. And so dreaming is not explainable. And so, and et cetera. Et cetera. Okay, how much more so is this transmitted mind? This fourth mind. Yeah. The mind you're not born with. The mind from before your parents were born. So when you begin to experience this spacious mind,

[06:53]

You're looking back into a very ancient mind. Perhaps we could say the original heart. Of many people who've committed themselves. To transmit this mind. If it's not transmitted, the surface ices over real quickly. Okay, so what do we call consciousness? We call it by its contents. Thoughts, thinking, the activity of thinking. Most people don't even realize they can realize the field of mind.

[08:11]

Most people, most psychologists and so forth are trying to work always with the contents of your thoughts. It's a pretty sophisticated therapist who says, okay, shift your attention from the field, from the thoughts to the field of thoughts, the space of thoughts. And see what happens when you do that. So the client says, but you know, I can't do that. And they say, I need the tools of Buddhism. So the therapist says, well, go to Johanneshof. But we call, we point out consciousness by pointing out its contents. It's very hard to point out the field of consciousness, the empty field.

[10:05]

So it's very difficult to point out this spacious mind. Okay, and we're just beginning to know this spacious mind. We haven't stabilized it yet. We haven't shifted our identification to this spacious mind. But we know it's some kind of fact. Okay, so what we can do is notice the gates of this spacious mind. I'll say, so what are some of the gates?

[11:21]

Silence. Zazen. So sometimes we call it Zen mind. Manchmal nennen wir das Zen-Geist. We can see what allowed us entry to this mind. Also wir können beobachten, was uns diesen Zugang zu diesem Geist erlaubt hat. So it's unnameable, this garden. Es ist ein Garten ohne Namen. But we can name the gates to this garden. Aber die Tore dorthin, die können einen Namen bekommen. So, what are some of the gates? Well, your teacher may be one of the gates. So we call it the ancestral mind. Zazen may be one of the gates. So we call it Zazen mind. Bliss may be one of its gates.

[12:25]

When we find our location is blissfulness itself. When we find we can resist the tug of time. And drift into a kind of blissfulness. Well, we don't even care about the other short. then bliss is a gate of this ancestral mind. So I have to use one gate to call the other gate. So blissful mind is a gate to ancestral mind, and ancestral mind is a gate to blissful mind.

[13:48]

You can't say what it is. That's why there are so many names for this mind. Another name for it is, well, I'm using spacious mind. And so what are some of the marks of that? You feel boundarylessness. You lose the usual location of your body. You begin to have a freedom from differentiations. Okay. So in order to stop, I'll just say a couple things. Okay. If we can see what the gates are,

[14:51]

Then you can answer the question, how do I continue this mind or realize this mind in ordinary circumstances? There's another little poem. Our Buddha ancestors Unsere Buddhavorfahren, die haben immer gesagt, bleibt in den Bergen. Die haben die Buddhisten in der Stadt nicht respektiert. Jeder Fluss, der in die Stadt reinfließt, der wird unweigerlich schmutzig. Wie kann man denn this pure water of mind, this pure water or pure mind. So if you can see what the gates of this mind are, the gates are everywhere.

[16:11]

the gates of non-differentiation. So we'll speak about those gates, maybe tomorrow. Or the day after, if you want. There'll be some silent teishos next week. Yeah. So one of the names in this story of this mind is silence. Because you find when you're still, there's an integration that happens. And this ancestral mind appears. This mind you weren't born with.

[17:31]

And it opens you to the silence of everything. The streams of silence that flow in all activity. And the silence with which the mind is transmitted, teacher to disciple. So it's in this context that the monk asks. Ask this teacher. How do you express silence? I believe to be able to overcome my end.

[19:15]

The darkness is limitless. I believe to conquer it. The greatest joy is the inevitable duty. I believe to reach it. Satsang with Mooji Satsang with Mooji

[20:34]

I am a man of faith. I am a man of faith. I am a man of faith. I swear to you, [...] I swear to you I've been wondering why this session, my lectures have been bubbling or at least flowing over the time.

[21:58]

And Not as bad as in Maria Lach, where I remember some lectures really went a couple of hours, if I remember. Isn't that right? Something like that. But I think it's, you know, that I'm so grateful to be back practicing with you. In this first Sashin of this year in Europe, it's not so easy actually to be so many months in the States and not able to practice with you. Mm-hmm. So for some reason I chose silence as a way of speaking about practice, this Sashin.

[23:16]

Michel Foucault says that at some point he met a filmmaker who he never met before. And they found very quickly they had nothing to say to each other. And they... spent, he says, about 10 hours together with less than 20 minutes of talking. He spent the day and they cooked a little and ate and etc. He said, but afterwards it formed the basis of a lifelong friendship. Which we ended up having a lot to say to each other. And maybe that's something like Sashim. Seven days sitting beside people, silently. And somehow we start feeling some connection. Now, all of Buddhism comes down to the individual consciousness.

[25:00]

Now, all Buddhists practice anyway. And it starts with the individual consciousness, your consciousness. So as a practitioner, you really have to kind of redo, rediscover Buddhism for yourself. You have to rediscover Buddhism for yourself. So we try to create the situation where you can study yourself, study your consciousness. Now the questions that you ask and what Vasubandhu asked himself and so forth,

[26:05]

are obvious. But if you actually ask them of yourselves, the answers are not so obvious. What is consciousness? What are the contents of consciousness? How do we notice consciousness? How did the contents get there? And what part of the world can consciousness know? And what's left out of what consciousness knows. So those questions are implicit in our practice. And it's been discovered through the centuries of practice that it's useful to concentrate on what consciousness leaves out.

[27:36]

dass es hilfreich ist, sich darauf zu konzentrieren, was das Bewusstsein auslöst. So when we practice sasin, we could say that we're concentrating on what consciousness leaves out. Und wenn wir also sasin machen, konzentrieren wir uns auf das, was das Bewusstsein nicht mitbekommt. Now, I said yesterday, I called this mind we begin to know in practice. I called it spacious mind. Because I think one of the first things we notice is a kind of spaciousness. And And as I said, to a lessening of boundaries.

[28:54]

And again, as I said, this is in the end unnameable. But we can name the gates. And one of the gates again is silence. And because we feel the integrative quality of silence in our practice, in our experience. No, we're pretty, you know, for the most part silent during Sashin. And tonight sometime the Sashin will end. And there'll be quite a bit of talking. And I think you'll notice the difference right away.

[29:57]

It's something different. Immediately, there's already less of the feeling of this spacious mind. And silence is also a metaphor for big mind. Because when we practice, when we realize we need to stop leaking, we learn what it's better not to talk about. Or what of the world it's good to leave alone. Okay, when you do ask yourself these questions of what is consciousness, you notice that

[31:24]

that consciousness is a construct. And what we also notice is that it's not only a construct over time, but it's actually a reconstruction each moment. I mean, excuse me for illustrating it. Yeah, but if I look over here at Herman and each of you, immediately some kind of consciousness is constructed looking at you. If I look at the green out there, a different kind of consciousness is constructed.

[32:34]

Now, through the practice of meditation and mindfulness, it forces on the... Buddhist practitioner, which it hasn't forced so particularly on Western philosophers, the immediacy of this constructing process, In a way we see that this spacious mind is lost or created on each moment. And because in zazen we stop a process of constructing it's a kind of slowing down. What kind of space occurs?

[33:53]

We move away from differentiations. An important thing to understand is we're not talking about absolute no differentiation and differentiation. We're speaking about a movement toward differentiation or a movement toward less differentiation. If you struggle with having a somatic mind with absolutely no differentiation, You're going to be practicing with a sense of failure for a long time. But if you notice that the movement toward differentiation itself creates a samadhi. And the movement toward less differentiation itself creates a samadhi.

[35:03]

So when we do zazen, particularly in a sashin, this whole thing is designed to kind of force you to move toward less differentiation. And the verticality of this posture somehow is a kind of acupuncture-like tuning into a body position that supports less differentiation. I suppose we could say when the critical mass of differentiation is at a particular point, suddenly we can snap into a samadhi.

[36:11]

And it takes various forms. One of the nicest forms is suddenly there's an absence of pain. And sometimes that's the kind of form we want the most. And what's wonderful too is sometimes even though we desire it the most, it still happens. Because the desires are only a small part of your differentiation. But it's an amazing lesson I think you should all really get. You're full of misery, pain, Ready to leave, Sashin.

[37:21]

I'm sure this is one of the most stupid things you ever did or anyone ever did. And you sweat and stink. And if you're not like me, your hair is totally greasy. And worse, the two guys on both sides of you stink even more. And suddenly, oh, there's Buddhas all around. And you feel, this is great. Unfortunately, it probably only lasts two or three minutes. What you know it will come back. So people have studied this. Why does it happen? Why does it come back? And the key is this move away from differentiation.

[38:38]

It's hard to believe it's this simple. But it is this simple. So here we're not just talking about not thinking. Or not identifying with our thinking. But having a mind moving away from differentiation. But a mind that can freely move into differentiation. But has a practice stabilized enough that it keeps returning when differentiation isn't necessary. it keeps returning to non-differentiation.

[39:42]

So one of these practices, again, is to notice when you leak. Because you leak non-differentiation into differentiation. And when you start learning how to not leak, non-differentiation builds up a kind of vitality and starts to seal itself and doesn't leak anymore. You almost get a kind of unleakable big mind.

[40:45]

And this is what I mean when I speak about the difference between armoring yourself and sealing yourself. You become sealed but not armored and deeply stabilized in your big mind through the practice of non-leaking. Which is really, at first, just a practical matter of noticing when you leak. And now moving toward not leaking. And like moving toward And it's like moving into a kind of settled silence.

[41:54]

You start feeling this integrative silence within you. Yeah, I like in Muslim prayer rugs. There's a space, an oblong space usually, that has no differentiation. And what's oblong? Like a rectangle. And it's called a mirab. I'm sure it's the same word in German. And it's the space that you turn toward Mecca when you put the prayer rug down.

[42:56]

And in the mosque, they'll have a niche in the wall, which is a niche facing toward Mecca. So it's a little space that's not differentiated. that it's kind of like a little timeless space. Now the way they locate it in Muslim practice is that it's fixed toward Mecca. But it's outside of usual time and space. So we, in practice, big mind can be considered a kind of mirror. A kind of feeling in ourselves that's free of differentiation.

[44:03]

That's free of a kind of... that's based in a kind of silence. And space itself feels silent. If there's no activity, space is silent. And as the relationship here in the Sashin is rather silent, You find the relationship with the teacher in Zen is not a guru relationship, but a kind of friendship rooted in silence. There's some kind of activity and conversations and so forth.

[45:20]

But the main feeling is that there's so thoroughly already a connection, nothing needs to be said. That opens up the relationship to a kind of silence. For the relationship is the teacher. And that relationship also is kind of, that silence is absorbed into your own silence. So I'm trying to give you a sense of why this monk again asks, how do you express silence? And why silence, and this is a metaphor for big mind,

[46:21]

And for this ancestral mind, or transmitted mind, this transmitted mind is transmitted by Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. To take refuge in Buddha, Dharma, Sangha means to take refuge in the third noble truth. What the four noble truths are about is about the third noble truth, the freedom from suffering. No, I've tried to create a vocabulary in this Sesshin, which allows us to speak in a fresh way about the Dharmakaya. The accessible Dharmakaya in our own practice.

[47:45]

The Dharmakaya rooted in the physical experience of bliss. Because for some reason, the more you have a mind free of differentiation, The more you begin to have a physical experience of bliss, and the more you begin to feel the shine of mind, And one of the marks of the Dharmakaya is you begin to feel bliss, particularly when you're relaxed. Particularly when really you have no place to go and nothing to do.

[49:00]

I don't mean really in the world, I mean really in your mind you feel you have no place to go and nothing to do. And this undifferentiated mirab opens up. And all directions are Mecca or Buddha lands. And we feel a silence pervading the world. Now the thorough noticing through mindfulness and meditation practice that this constructing of consciousness the constantly constructing of a world which is what being is

[50:03]

occurs most profoundly and usefully in each moment. At each moment, you, all the causes converge You put the situation together with views, associative thinking and so forth and all the karma that arrives at this moment all the associative thinking and so forth, you either loosen or reify. Now, normal consciousness which created the karma in the first place, reifies, continues it, even strengthens its patterns.

[51:26]

Now if you can bring big mind into each moment, you loosen the patterns. You create a kind of karma fluid zone. This is the secret of Yogacara practice. Creating a karma fluid zone. Or even karma free zone. We may put a sign up outside. Karma-free zone.

[52:29]

So this moment, the potential of this moment as a karma-fluid zone, Also das Potenzial dieses Momentes als eine Karma flüssige Zone. Is called a what? Ist ein, wird was genannt? A Dharma. Ein Dharma nennt sich das. All Dharmas are marked with emptiness. Alle Dharmas sind durch Leerheit gekennzeichnet. as the Diamond Sutra says, and the Heart Sutra says, and some of you have pointed out to me. So, ordinary moments aren't dharmic moments. But when you can feel, be present in an ordinary moment, With a movement toward non-differentiation.

[53:41]

It's a dharmic moment. Because it's a movement toward non-differentiation. It's marked with emptiness. And because it's marked with emptiness, there's a karma fluid zone. So instead of studying this week why this guy lost three coins under the bed, why his coins moved toward non-differentiation, They're not very useful under the bed. Yeah, and since you've lost them, you can't spend them anyway. We could have also talked about all dharmas are marked with emptiness.

[54:45]

So the monk might have said after he said, oh, last night I lost three coins under my bed. The monk could have said, aha, all dharmas are marked with emptiness. And then he could have said, silent. You've said too much. Okay, so if this major discovery, particularly of the Yogacara school, that each moment is the moment of death, that each moment is a karma-free, potentially a karma-fluid zone, How do we recreate that in our life?

[56:09]

Yeah, back in Münster, Berlin, or München. Yeah. I think there's karma-free zones even there. Even in the midst of the muddy rivers. Actually, the lakes and rivers in Germany, my experience, are pretty clear and clean. One way is, of course, to stabilize big mind in your practice. To stop leaking. To feel the presence of big mind under your activities. So that it's always present, pressing upward a bit.

[57:09]

And also to get the ability that every time you lose it, you can bring it back. So you can keep bringing it back up into your life. And one of the reasons it's so useful to do zazen every day And one of the reasons why it is so useful to do zazen every day is because this big mind begins to sink out of sight farther and farther with every day you miss zazen. Maybe it's close enough to the surface for three or four days that you think, hmm, I can go another few days. Four days later, you notice it's out of sight. It's in an underground channel that's not accessible. It might have even dried up. But two or three days, I'm sorry, that's... And fertilizing the garden of your life.

[58:53]

Okay, the other way is to deconstruct a moment. Die andere Art, wie man das machen kann, ist, einen Moment zu dekonstruieren. How do you deconstruct a moment? Wie dekonstruiert man aber Momente? One of the ways is, Buddhism has created kind of polar concepts. Also ein Weg ist, dass im Buddhismus sich diese gegensätzliche Konzepte entwickelt haben, aber polar, also in einem Moment. To see the world in contradictory, simultaneous contradiction. Dass man die Welt in like term like mu shin which means no mind. Or the simple practice of repeating mu. Which you can understand as emptiness or no.

[59:54]

Or little poems like, the flower is not red. Nor is the willow green. But when you say the flower is not red, what do you experience? Redness. Nor is the willow green. I never know what time it is, but I do. I forget the time, but every time I look, it's five o'clock. Five in the afternoon. Garcia Lorca has a beautiful poem. Five in the afternoon. In Spanish it sounds good. That's a serious poem. Or We don't say oneness, we say not one, not two.

[61:27]

So you look at one, not one, not two. This is what I call a polar concept. You have both poles. So not form and emptiness, form emptiness, emptiness form. This is a way of dissolving differentiation. of deconstructing the moment. How at the moment of death When you have decided, well, it's about time to die. Yeah, this old body ain't going to last much longer. I'd like to participate in the death.

[62:32]

So you begin the process of dissolving the constructs. you intentionally dissolve the four elements and the vijnanas and the skandhas. And the person helping a person die can help them with this deconstruction process. And this process, if you believe in reincarnation, is supposed to prepare you for a good reincarnation. But in any case, it makes your death your own. And if you move toward less differentiation, you move to the blissful empty mind,

[63:46]

Yeah, that's why in Buddhism you ask, did she die with a smile on her face? Because you can see on the body often whether they entered this blissful mind. weil man an dem Körper sehen kann, ob sie in einen glückseligen Geist hineingestiegen sind. Aber man muss doch nicht nur warten, bis man stirbt. Dieser glückselige Geist ist doch hier mitten unter uns. Und wenn ihr einfach euch in Richtung weniger unterscheidend bewegt, Now the simple practice of this is the pause. We try to teach this in monastic life. Like every time you see somebody, you walk past somebody, you stop. I mean, you can rush by with a quick kind of bow.

[65:10]

But ideally, you actually physically stop. And there are other practices, like stepping through a door with the leg nearest the hinge of the door. Or at least know which foot you step through the door with. Isn't there some famous phrase, the pause that refreshes? Maybe not. We have the purple pause. The purple pause. What's that? No, this pink, the purple chocolate is called lila pause.

[66:12]

Oh, lila pause. So we have in Germany the lila pause. Yeah. In America we have Coca-Cola, the pause that refreshes. So these advertisers, they often get close to the truth. So we can practice Zazen. And we can practice mindfulness. Mindfulness. And a kind of deeper mindfulness, we can practice the pause. And the pause is when a Dharma comes in. The pause is a way to kind of physically deconstruct. The pause is to stop and see the surface of the moment.

[67:24]

And the surface of the moment suddenly is like a little garden. It's not kind of paved over from the previous moment. The pause breaks up the pavement of karma. And it's a little surface in which things can grow. Or in which you can see to the bottom of the lake. So you learn to find this little pause. You can begin to find it, bringing your attention to your breath. Or getting a feeling of the pause at the top of the breath. Or you can stop for a moment and realize.

[68:25]

And the pause at the bottom of the breath where you can also stop and realize. So you can get more and more familiar with the pause. Or a stop or a little gap. It's a pause like a blind man. A blind person has to pause in each situation. Or like... If you're blind at each moment, you have to kind of stop and assess what's happened. And traditionally in Western culture, blind people are supposed to have oracular powers.

[69:53]

What? Like oracles. That comes from this, I think, blind person has to pause. Or as I said, it's like washing your feet in the dark. Up down there disappears. Is it your feet washing your hands or your hands washing your feet? So subject, object disappear when you're washing your feet in the dark. And I find you wash them more thoroughly, too. It takes a while to explore the whole foot and the foot to explore the whole hand. So there's a movement right there toward subject-object dissolution.

[70:57]

And in the sense of hearing, there's more subject-object dissolution. Near and far merge. So if I experience separation, I don't have to create connectedness. Dann muss ich nicht Verbindung versuchen zu schaffen. I can move toward dissolving separation. Ich muss nur in Richtung Auflösung von getrenntsein mich bewegen. Move toward dissolving the subject-object distinction as we feel it come up in a conversation. Dann müssen wir nur dort uns hinbewegen, diese Subjekt-Objekt-Beziehung

[72:16]

And emptiness comes in, or big mind comes in. Or the bright shining mind comes in. The mind reflected from the field of mind. Not from the contents of mind. The more you have a sense of non-differentiation, you open yourself to suddenly feeling the field of mind. And you have this sense of mind as kind of shining. This is not far away.

[73:23]

I'm not talking a bunch of stuff that you have to practice 50 years. I haven't been practicing 50 years. Only 40. But you have to have faith that this is not far away. You need faith and trust that the gates are everywhere. In this now, where else could it be? So, now what I've again tried to say here... As we can have a lot of pedagogy of Zen, and a lot of thinking about what is consciousness, etc.

[74:24]

And it can be based on realizing the shining quality of mind. Or, and the power of that. Or it can be based on realizing the emptiness of the alaya vijnana. And whatever these teachings are, they can be brought down into single practices. A single practice that contains the teaching. And your practice should be a series of these single practices. It might be a phrase. It might be The breath throughout the day and night.

[75:37]

It might be the pause. The pause as the manifestation of Dharma. And what I've been speaking about this session You don't have to understand any of it. Just practice the pause. It's silent. It's practiced in silence. It's only known through silence. It looks like you're talking and involved in activity. And each moment you feel the silence of a pause. And you know that each dharma is marked with emptiness. Thank you for translating all this.

[76:46]

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