Potentialities are there. As in stillness, the potentialities of movement are there. And it's also a kind of identification. If I feel, I think if you feel the stillness of the tree even in its movement, You feel a kind of bridge to the tree. A bridge from your own stillness to the tree's stillness. Or your own fullness. Potentialities of of less boundaries. And the fullness or potentialities of the tree, the stillness of the tree.

[01:05]

So I would say that the stillness is also a kind of bridge to the world or a connectedness. Or a sense that this is my identity. I can feel tactilely feel a connectedness or identification with the world. And here we have another word. We have psyche and soul and spirit, et cetera. Identity. Yeah. And what do we, how do we What do we identify with?

[02:11]

How do we find our identity? I'm playing with these words to bring us into a field of relationships. which can't really be captured by words. Now, Yuan Wu says, when you can concentrate continuously without breaks, This is the womb of the sage. The womb, the embryo, the womb of the sage.

[03:12]

So the word I'm looking for is here, is fullness, is stillness, is bridge, is womb. Because what Yuan Wu means, when he says concentrate, He doesn't mean focusing your mind on without breaks. But he means that you feel continuously this stillness in everything. And really it's not hard to do. No. A sense of disbelief appeared in my translation. What's hard is the getting the importance of it, first of all. And actually feeling the possibility of it.

[04:49]

And then if you really get the importance of it, you bring it into your intent. to notice when you happen to notice this stillness as a bridge or as fullness. And once you've noticed it, once or twice, it's simply possible most of the time. And it's a kind of noticing it once or twice as a promise, a kind of promise.

[05:55]

Yes, this is now your potentiality. So Yuan Wu was the famous Zen teacher and compiler of the Blue Cliff Records. carries it one step further and says when you can feel this stillness continuously this fullness and you know the word sunyata meaning emptiness actually means fullness Sunyata means we translate as emptiness for various important reasons. But the actual word means the fullness of being without boundaries.

[06:56]

So when boundaries recede, we begin to feel a fullness. And when we have a continuous sense of that, this is the womb of realization, the womb of the sage. So I'm not talking about fancy things, some kind of out-of-reach thing. I'm talking about something that's within the potentialities of our experience. The first step is to grasp this potential, this possibility, and to get a taste of it. And the rest follows from continuous practice and intention.

[08:03]

So I think that's the best I can do in language. To aim at it with these words of fullness, stillness. Womb. Bridge, identification. And I think you can imagine that you look at a tree. And instead of seeing its branches and its leaves and so forth, you let yourself in your own stillness feel its stillness.

[09:04]

And now you know this stillness isn't just about the tree not moving, or sometimes not moving. But it's also the womb of the sage. No. Is the stillness in your own mind the womb of the sage? No. The stillness you feel in relationship to phenomena, to people, is the womb. It's when the stillness of this all opens up to you, not just your own mind, when the stillness of this all opens up to you. We can call this the womb of the sage.

[10:12]

Okay. Okay. No, I think that we ought to talk more together. But I think I ought to introduce again, as I believe I did last year, the four marks and the five dharmas. And I think my companion teacher, Paul Rosenblum, he did a seminar here recently in this ancient city, nearby city. And didn't he emphasize the four marks? Did he speak about the five dharmas as well, or mostly the four marks?

[11:33]

Okay, we could say the five dharmas are the practice. And the four marks are the phenomenology or the experience. So let me just put them on the flip chart here so that to remind you and so that in this seminar we can feel the glass through which you can see the silverware under the suds of the dishwater. Felix is looking at me. to look under the suds of consciousness and see the silverware of the mind.

[12:39]

My lady's going to look at Claire and say, used to, since I had all this medical treatment, But they're getting better. Do all of you know I had all this medical treatment? Well, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer in December. And I did it to give the Dharma Sangha scare. And make them get worried and pay more attention to the teaching. Yeah, well, that wasn't quite the way it went.

[13:40]

But anyway, it was quite virulent. It was eight on a Gleason score, one to nine. So I was going to go back to the States and do something about it, but everyone thought I had to do it here. And not try to find doctors, take the time to find the right doctors in the States. So a group of the doctors in the Dharma Sangha researched who I should see and so forth.

[14:42]

And they said if you do it here we'll find a way to pay for it all too. Because I don't have insurance in Europe. So somehow it's you know I don't know what But I did all this thing. And I'm a person who, I've said before, but I virtually never had a dental x-ray. Dentists are always trying to talk me into having dental x-rays. And they tell me, it's no more exposure than you get on a flight to New York. So I say, well, okay, then stay in the room with me when you x-ray my teeth. Why are you leaving? So anyway, dentists get mad at me, but I say, just drill somewhere.

[16:07]

And I've really taken an aspirin about four times in my life. And so this is quite an introduction to the medical techno world. But to make a six-month story short, I had first an endoscopic operation where they removed my lymph nodes. And my daughter helped us. She called me up. I think I told somebody, but she called me up and said, Dad, get your feet on the ground. I came for you. She said, none of this Zen healing stuff and being an example. She said, I know you meet people at Esalen and discuss survival after bodily death.

[17:20]

But I don't want to meet you after bodily death. Get your feet on the ground. So I said, okay, okay. So I had this operation January 7th and January 9th. I had a perineal radical prostatectomy. We basically cut off my bottom and sewed it on down. Which made it quite difficult to do zazen for a while. And they cut all the nerves in the process. And they're still in the process of heating. And then more or less, more as a precaution than anything else.

[18:27]

I did seven weeks, actually two months of daily, weekday radiation. So Gerhard Schwarzel, who's our Linz radiologist, wasn't that the last time? He thinks he was one of the advisors. These doctors I saw, I thought I was a little nuts because somebody was calling up almost every day, how is it, what's going on, and tell me the treatment. We just signed Gerhard the job because too many people couldn't call. So he called surgeons every day. What happened today? And David Beck was a doctor and was on his way to Crestone to be the head monk.

[19:28]

He postponed going to Crestone for a week or so and came and was at the hospital during the operations to translate if necessary. And the doctors here who are not so worried about being sued and all that stuff, if they are in America, they invited him to be present at the operations. So he was present at both operations. And they liked him so much, they said, you can come back anytime you want and join our operations. So the surgeon says to me, before the second operation, you'll see me tomorrow. And I said, no, you'll see me, and you'll see me in a way I'll never see myself again. And I won't see you.

[20:54]

But anyway, I seem to have recovered. And Gerhard thinks I have about a 97% chance of no reoccurrence. Let's assume he's not being optimistic. Anyway, I feel good enough here. But somehow it made me a little tired after the radiations. But it's nice if I can take a nap now, once a day or something. And it disrupted the habits I learned when they took me out of diapers. They're quite old habits, actually.

[21:56]

But they're returning to normal. So that's the story. But my legs don't work so well when I sit, but they're getting better every day. So the five dharmas are appearance. Anybody remember from last year? Oh, you're going to look it up. It's okay. Naming. Naming. Discrimination.

[23:04]

Unterscheidung. Right knowledge. Richtiges Wissen. We could say wisdom. Oder wir könnten sagen Weisheit. And it doesn't. Okay. That's the dharma practice. So this just means that your mindfulness has deepened enough. It's stable enough. is that you can see the mind in the process of perception.

[24:10]

Okay. So let's just kind of enact it, though that's a difficult word to translate. Okay. So let's say there's Walter sitting there. And Walter doesn't like to be noticed too much. I'm teasing you. So we'll notice Walter. So I close my eyes. And I open them and Walter appears. Now almost immediately, like the airplane, I name Walter. or even if I don't name him, all the familiarity I have with knowing you and seeing you for quite a lot of years appears.

[25:11]

All that identifying process is named. And then I discriminate about it. Yeah, as I said to Walter a little while ago, he looks very well. So I think, oh, Walter looks well, he must have been a good year, etc., It's normal. It's a normal thing to do. But right knowledge or wisdom would say, okay, but don't discriminate. Don't even name it, if possible. Just let disappear and feel its presence.

[26:25]

Feel the presence, the shared presence. Feel the mind as presence. If I do that, feeling the mind as presence, it doesn't. Okay. So why I call this a practice is because you get in the habit of noticing the process which goes on all the time. No, what's surgical about this teaching, no reason for that word. I've used it before. Oh, but I should say, my lymph nodes were clear, my bone scan was clear, etc.

[27:25]

So I'm just saying that to confirm that the prognosis is pretty good. Okay, so, but this is a kind of surgical teaching. And the main thing is to catch yourself at name. It's another way to look at the thought of, oh, that's an airplane. So you can use that very noticing that it's an airplane to catch the mind before it starts discriminating and allow fullness of mind to appear.

[28:45]

But if naming does turn into discriminating then you have some kind of you want to transform discrimination into right knowledge. Which, as I said last year, is to break habit permanently. Okay. So a phrase like notice without thinking. You name something and then you start to discriminate it, discriminate the process of discrimination, which is a habit from before you're out of diapers. Sophia isn't quite completely out of diet right now.

[29:49]

So she announced recently at a restaurant She said to some woman, you don't need dieters. A woman said, well, yes, I don't. That's true. She likes men, by the way. There's a lot of attractive young men at Johanneshof, and she has them all wrapped around her fingers. She goes in the restaurant, she sees an attractive young man, she walks over to him and says, hello, man. Yeah, but anyway, this time she said to this woman, you're not, you don't use diapers, do you? And she said, Sophia doesn't either, which isn't quite true.

[30:51]

And then she announced in a loud voice, but my papa uses diapers. But I'm almost finished with diapers too. Anyway, so this teaching is turning discrimination into right knowledge. So these gate phrases are to enter the habit of discrimination, which is what I'm saying. Sophia already has this habit to start discriminating. You don't wear a diaper. And to interrupt this with a phrase. Like notice without thinking. Just now is enough. Just now arriving. Breaking the habit of permanence.

[32:24]

Something that changes your discrimination into wisdom. So you have two chances at Nathan. We have a chance at appearance, of course. And there's substance. Now we can ask in relationship to the theme that seems to be developing here, What does thusness have to do with self and identity? Okay, now let's try the four marks. The four marks are nearly the same. Appearance again, but this time it's usually said birth.

[33:42]

And then duration. And then dissolution. And then disappearance. Now in a sense you only need this. Because in fact, when you know this carefully, everything that we know appears, lasts for a moment or longer, and dissolves.

[34:55]

Because if you're not perceiving entities and investing them with permanence. If you see the activity of the tree, not the tree as a permanent entity, it's all interchanged. The only thing that remains the same is its stillness. But that stillness is always being interrupted. Or being expressed. Okay, so that's... The next moment is a new uniqueness. So then this would be just a simple phenomenology.

[36:02]

It would be a simple objective description. But disappearance is there because you're involved. You make it disappear. Du lässt es verschwinden. So you participate in its birth. Du nimmst teil an seiner Geburt. Now, Dogen's most famous classical is called the Genjo Koan. Also Dogen's berühmteste Schrift wird genannt als Genjo Koan. And the center of his teaching, the fulcrum of his teaching. Und das Zentrum seiner Belehrung. is this phrase, which you could translate as Genjo, as to complete that which appears.

[37:04]

So you're not just passively letting things appear, you're completing their appearance. So you feel their appearance and you yourself are feeling a complete appearance. Du lässt Dinge nicht einfach nur in Erscheinung treten, sondern du vervollständigst das, was erscheint. Und du hast Anteil an seiner Dauer. Und du bemerkst nicht nur und lässt verschwinden. Mehr als das, du lässt es verschwinden. Du kehrst zu Null zurück. You let the traces go. It's like you erase the blackboard each time. So this as a... We can also call this a practice. This is a practice. Here or here or here. There's appearance and then duration.

[38:09]

And dissolution. But if it goes beyond that, then there's no discrimination and you have to turn it into justice. No? If appearance is before marks, There's birth, duration, dissolution cycle. But if you interrupt that process, you can't participate in that process. Your mindfulness isn't that rich. That's naming occurs. And discrimination occurs. then in naming and discrimination you have the possibility of gate phrases or some other way to transform it into wisdom.

[39:12]

Now, justness is one way to say, often said, to be the highest teaching in And in Dzogchen and Mahamudra too. So he called us the four-step program to thus. I understand that joke. It's amazing that right here in this little experiential But it is interesting that in this small, experiential story, where we can share and what we can notice, the fruit of it is this. Right here, not after 20 years of practice.

[40:12]

Right here, where we enter the five dharmas and the four marks. Yuan Wu said, wisdom is right here before us. Without exception, always present. Okay. So I talked enough. Is there something you'd like to say about these two teachings or about anything we've talked about?

[41:36]

Yeah, the craft of this sudden practice. Okay, yes, Ulrike. When you talked at the weekend? No. Last year? Sometime, somewhere. You talked about the Genshukohan where you complete every moment and you look In that sense, yes.

[42:40]

Yeah. Yes. No? Mm-hmm. Yeah, you can understand it that way, yes. Yeah, sure. There doesn't have to be a fat guy that arises. There doesn't have to be a fat guy that arises. And then you can also use the sign language.

[43:57]

In the chapter, it is also a little bit like in chapter 8 and 10, in the chapter 8 and 10, where you stay and then you go on the trail. And sometimes the technique is that you don't have to go to the other side of the road and you have the right to live. And that's how it developed. If your starting point is thusness, then what appears is consciousness. So if I'm looking at Walter, from thusness, then it's not Walter that appears. It's consciousness that appears which then lets Walter appear.

[44:58]

So consciousness itself is an appearance. It creates the possibility of appearance. And then self appears. Okay, someone else? When no one says anything, I think, oh, I talked too much. And everyone wants to return to silence. I understand. Usually I have the feeling I have to hold on to something.

[46:06]

I'm here. Thank you. Maybe it's possible not to hold on to something and just be in these four marks, just to disappear, to dissolve. And maybe it's also possible not to have anything to hold on to, but just to be in these four characteristics and to dissolve and to disappear. That's what this imperturbable or feeling of a basic mind is about. You feel anchored in that.

[47:01]

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