How is Gisela today? She's like yesterday, I think. About the same? Yeah. I hope she's getting some rest. She does, yeah. I think Gisela's operation is the, at least in the smaller Sangha of Dharma Sangha. It's the first really major kind of life threatening challenge to someone. And actually it's important that we stay present to Gisela's situation.

[01:09]

The early Zen Center in the 60s had a number of events, illness and death, that shaped the Sangha and we've been lucky I mean we're a smaller Sangha but we've also been lucky but I think the way to feel about it is if I may say so is to respect that this is Gisela's time to go through something like this. And we support her in going through this.

[02:22]

You know, I've had a few, a couple times I've had small things done right in my eye. Nothing serious. But still, it's really, I mean, have sharp objects in your eye, it's quite disturbing. But to have your, excuse me for saying so, Carol, but to have your skull cut open and everything. And the layers, five layers between the skull and the brain? Three? No. Several layers. Three. Three. Peeled back. Yeah, between the brain itself and the other skin. Yeah. And then the tumor cut out and then all of that put back.

[03:39]

No matter, I mean, it's amazing how skillful the surgeons are. But no matter how skillful it is, this is an incredible challenge to the body. To the emotions and to one's sense of self. So if we really know this is Gisela's time to go through this, to face this, I think it also opens us up to

[04:41]

it may be at some point my time too. One of the teachings of, you know, early Buddhism, Patanjali and others, is simply what can happen sometimes does happen. And everything happens to one of us. Each of us is such a one. So each of us will have our own time. And right now we have our own time. And how do we bring ourselves into our own time?

[05:54]

Und wie führen wir uns hinein in unsere eigene Zeit? Not passing lightly over things, trying to get to the good moments. Nicht wie wir an der Oberfläche über Dinge hinwegkommen und dann gute Momente suchen. But our own time just now. Sondern unsere eigene Zeit gerade jetzt. Where life has brought us. where our sense of a path has brought us or our sense that we haven't had a path. I feel sometimes I have to fish very deeply to find out where we are Manchmal habe ich das Gefühl, als ob ich sehr tief unten fischen muss, um herauszufinden, wo wir eigentlich sind.

[07:11]

We create a kind of, in a Sechin, a kind of sea of experience. In einem Sechin schaffen wir so eine Art Meer von Erfahrung. And I feel I have to fish pretty deeply. And one of the expressions in Zen is a probing pole, which you probe down into dark water. Probing is testing. Probing is something you're probing. If you reach a spoon into a soup, you're probing down into it. Exploring? You could use an oar to find the bottom of a pond or something. Or you could use an oar to find the bottom of a pond or something.

[08:15]

But when you probe, you know, one of the images in Zen is when you're probing, you're often in your shadow. But sometimes you can use your shadow to see more clearly. And in Sesshin we can use our shadow sometimes to see more clearly. So I've been speaking about this bright clarity of space. What I called an embodied mind space. that is neither within nor without.

[09:23]

And I'm repeating again, so you get it, that is an actual dimension. A dimension that can transform our life. And a dimension in which our life appears. Okay. Now what about the ordinary kind of murky, cloudy space of zazen mind? There's some German words I like a lot. Schmutz is one of them. It tells what it is in any language.

[10:46]

I'm all covered with schmutz. Oh, yeah. Poor guy. Mm-hmm. So let's not just try to replace, let me call it murky consciousness. Let's not try to replace murky consciousness. Yeah, let's recognize this embodied mind space. When it appears. When there's an intimation of it. And let's let our body remember this mind space. But mostly, just let it appear or disappear.

[11:59]

You have to be fairly experienced in meditation to kind of intentionally establish it. But it will appear more often if you notice it as an actual dimension. And you get a feeling for it. You get familiar with it. But what we're almost all familiar with is murky mind. You not only need a probing pole, you need large Klieg lights. And in this murky mind, much of our many things come up.

[13:29]

So what I want to speak about today is the sense of stories that come up. And this, we're not trying to replace this mind. You want to get used to murky mind too. See if you can swim it. I think of James Joyce going to Jung. Ich denke an James Joyce, der zu Jung ging. Because James Joyce's daughter was under analysis with Jung. Denn James Joyce's Tochter unterzog sich Analyse bei Jung.

[14:31]

And Jung went to see Joyce, Joyce went to see Jung And said, well, what's wrong with my daughter? She's just like me. Typical blind parent. But Jung said, yes, she's like you. But she's drowning in the waters in which you swim. Yeah, well, this is an extreme situation. But we don't want to drown or get ears and eyes and nose filled with this murky water. We want to find some way to swim in this murky mind. Or to observe this murky mind. Okay, so one of the things is to notice, you know, I'm again sticking on this today, to stories, to narratives, is to notice what comes up.

[15:57]

And you want to try to notice it Maybe as if you were someone else than the protagonist. Memory creates a kind of micro world. Yes, something like dreams too. Where time and space are condensed. Where you can have some experience. As strong as you can to an event in your ordinary life. If I mentioned, I don't know, a few months ago, there's a particular scroll I loaned to somebody a long time ago.

[17:13]

And they told me they loaned it to someone else who they think loaned it to someone else. Since that time I found out where it is. But for some reason, every time I thought of it, it disturbed me. And you know, I'm getting old and tired. I don't get disturbed very often. The world can go to hell in a handbasket, it's okay. Yeah, I'm just going to sit here in the garden and enjoy practicing with you guys.

[18:26]

Younger people have to save the world. Or something, I feel something like that. So why was I so disturbed by this darn missing scroll? It's one that Alan Watts, the early Zen proponent in England and America, gave to me once. He was one of the people who made Zen well known after D.T. Suzuki and English speaking world. So every Zazen I brought the scroll up to mind. I brought it up in a way that made me feel pain, painful.

[19:33]

Schmerz. That's almost as good as schmutz. Anyway, so I would bring it up and I'd say, why is this causing me this kind of wound inside? Okay, so what was I looking at? An event. So I've said, for example, classically, use the five skandhas to open up consciousness. To see into the construct of consciousness itself. So now I'm suggesting to see into your stories. To don't just tell yourself stories or distract yourself with stories.

[20:40]

Or be the victim of a story. See if you can open up the structure of a story. Okay, so what you want to do is pick something that tends to bother you. You can do this with the entire narrative of self. But it's easier if you take a little episode. It's convenient that so many words are similar. Episode, things like that. Okay. I might even increase my vocabulary. You don't know what to know already. Okay.

[21:59]

You pick a little episode. Like I did with this scroll. Now the scroll in narrative terms is an event. An event is like it can be a raindrop. Or it can be the death of a parent. It can be tiny or big. But it occurred in time and space. So in your narrative, you try to identify events. So someone gave me the scroll. That was an event. I loaned it to someone else. That's an event. And the person told me, I don't know whether she did or not, but she told me she loaned it to someone else.

[23:07]

So these are three events. And immediately they call forth a lot of things. They called forth a lot of things in me. So at first I identified the events. And I found that if each time in Zazen when I wanted to explore this, I just had to call up one of the events to have the whole narrative appear. Now in this mental micro-world, Self, oneself is always present.

[24:25]

It's this space of this world. This whole world? This micro world in which the story is. The air itself of the story, the space itself is self. And you can feel the story rubbing against you painfully. Or in some good way. Now, when Dungsan, one of Dungsan's early encounters, conversations with his teacher Yunyan, said, he asked Jun Yan, what practices should I complete? And Jun Yan said to him, what have you done before you came here?

[25:25]

And Jung Jan said, I have not even practiced the noble truths. And Jung Jan said, Was this non-practice joyous? And Dongshan said, it was like sweeping up shit and trash and finding a jewel. So you have to recognize that there's a lot going on in a simple story like this. Once I asked Suzuki, or she... after we'd been practicing together for many years. And I was already going to be his successor. And I said to him something like we were sitting in his cabin.

[26:52]

Did you, when we first met, did you have a feeling that all this was going to happen? And he didn't even look at me and he certainly didn't answer me. And because I cast myself in the role of a story, in some kind of special relationship to him, and he just didn't even say no. He just ignored, as if I hadn't spoken. And I remember Sukhiroshi often told the story when he was much younger. I mean, like a teenager.

[28:07]

His teacher told him, Sukhiroshi was quite a handsome, you know. And women like to hang around him. And his teacher told him, you know, you have this, some disease, I don't know what it is, where your bones grow. And you soon look like Frankenstein. I don't know. I've known one person who had the disease. Just keep, your head gets... Pretty weird. And you have to remember, in those days they didn't have any kind of medical diagnosis like now.

[29:13]

I had no understanding of such a disease, I'm quite sure. What caused it or how to diagnose it? So it just happened to some people. So when your teacher and your Zen master tells you, very seriously tells you, I'm sorry for you, but you have this disease. So every morning she should look in the mirror, checking his bone structure. But Suzuki Roshi's teacher put him in a story. And let him suffer with it. What kind of person am I, etc. So in a way, Dung Shan's asking a similar question. But Dung Shan is asking it with an edge.

[30:42]

Is it almost like a trap in edges? Yeah, an edge, a trap. What practice should I complete? Seems like a modest, nice question to ask your teacher. What do I need to study? But it also casts you in the role of someone who can be completed or something like that. Aber das stellt einen auch in ein Licht, dass man jemand ist, der wirklich vervollständigt werden könnte. Yeah, so he, so Yunian bit. Und Yunian hat angebissen.

[31:57]

Yeah, I mean, that's what we do. Yeah, a bit. I mean, and that's what you do. You know, somebody plays with you, so you play along. What did you do before you came here? I didn't even practice the noble truths. So now we have a shift. Jetzt haben wir hier eine Verlagerung. Und Dung Shan sagt also, Ich habe überhaupt keine Bemühungen gemacht mit der Praxis. Except to be present to whatever happens. Außer dass ich dem gegenwärtig war, was einfach gerade bloß war, vorgefallen ist.

[33:02]

So, what is Jungian's measure? Woran oder wie misst jetzt Jungian? What is Jungian's measure? It's not, you should practice the noble truths, of course. He just asked, was it joyous? And so you can know something about your own practice and mind when it's joyous and when it's not. Also kann man darin etwas über seinen eigenen Geist erfahren, wann ist dieser froh und fröhlich und wann nicht. And the more you're in a narrative, the less joyous you are usually. So when you begin to look at an episode, see who the protagonist is. And if there's a person involved in the story, like the person who borrowed the scroll, they're then a causal factor.

[34:11]

And they represent motivation. They cause something to happen. They motivated something. And you can look at your own motivation. In this story, did you succeed or fail? And what kind of mind appears around this story? And here you can really feel the current of continuity sweeping you into a particular mind. You can begin to see that as soon as there is an event and a protagonist, and a cause or a motivation.

[35:33]

And usually there's a particular space in which this occurs. And the time between these events is often unimportant. They might have been a year apart, but in the story they're right next to each other. And if you take such episodes, it's just as part of your practice. Within the slowed down space of zazen mind. When you can feel yourself around and in all parts of a story.

[36:37]

You try not to let the story just sweep you off. but you just try to look at it as if you were a child or an impartial observer as if it's happening to someone else Yeah. And you try to see the structure of the story. You try to see what role the events play. And what happens when you connect the events. All that happens when you try to change the connections.

[37:38]

And most important, you see what mind comes up. And if certain events and how they're connected produce a certain kind of mind, that mind soon produces a whole bunch of other stuff. And what's interesting about such stories in a way, is they're so often about the ways we're inadequate. And they're not so often about the ways we're adequate. And in the stories which demonstrate our inadequacy, we spend a lot of time trying to prove to some invisible audience that we were really adequate.

[38:48]

No one's listening, but we're trying to prove something. It's interesting to watch this process. One inadequacy after another we try to prove it wasn't the case. Also, eine inadäquate Sache nach der anderen versuchen wir als adäquat zu beweisen. You know, if you really just recount these stories, wenn ihr also wirklich nur diese Geschichten erzählt, it sort of after a while becomes like debris that flows to the surface of the sea of awareness. Dann wird es einfach so wie Scherben oder Bruchstücke, die an die... and drifts off to sink somewhere. And you don't connect them so much anymore.

[40:13]

And you don't let events and their connections in this mental micro world Drag you into sinking minds. You can feel them in your body. You can feel these murky, sinking minds in your body. You can go right down into them. And all kinds of events appear that prove how inadequate we are. Or you can just feel a certain clarity in your body and let them dissolve. And if you go into them, go into them not to prove you're inadequate or adequate.

[41:20]

Not to prove you're inadequate and then If you're ever asked, show how you were really adequate. Get yourself out of that. Just look at the habit and structure of the story. We can recapitulate, recount so much of our life this way. And to free ourselves from much of our karmic patterns.

[42:24]

This old, stinky, mildew, wet towel which the story of our life is written on, gets spread out and hung up. And so Sashin is a good time to do your karmic laundry. Okay, thank you very much.

[43:11]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_72.21