Yeah, I think it's, of course, appropriate to speak about zazen mind at the beginning of a practice period because, again, of course, this is where I hope, in any case, you live four or five periods a day. Primarily live in zazen mind. And the rest of the day, hopefully, is organized so you can within the precision of the schedule and the precision of your own acknowledgement of the schedule and moving within the parameters of breath and particularity, allows then zazen mind to be a presence during the times we're not doing zazen, and a presence in your sleeping.

[01:25]

Now I, you know, in my talks I give a lot of attention to non-dreaming deep sleep, the mind of non-dreaming deep sleep, and in the monastic seminar in the fall here at Crestone, we spoke about wisdom, and I think it was very fruitful. And And one of the things that the seminar brought up was how wisdom is not a condition of accumulated experience and age and so forth, but rather rooted in an experience which is quite independent of accumulated experience and independent of age and so forth. And even when, which we didn't go into, wisdom is a condition of functioning, it's still always rooted in experience or an extrapolation of the experience into our ordinary activity.

[02:45]

Now, to speak about this, I'm going to have to speak in some simple categories. Now I said last time, or I wanted to say anyway, that something we could say no category mind is the really non-conceptual mind, but even no category mind is really the most fundamental and deepest mind of zazen and most fruitful. But I think we're not ready yet to discuss that. But, so, in any case, but I'm speaking in categories. For instance, I would say, fairly simply, that wisdom is the presence of non-dreaming deep sleep.

[03:51]

in ordinary activity. Now that is too bare-faced, bald-faced, bald a statement. But as a way of looking at it, as a way of your noticing your own activity, it's I think useful to say, okay, wisdom is the presence and activity of non-dreaming deep sleep in our ordinary life, usual life, everyday life. No, you might say, you might have an objection, so a non-dreaming deep sleep, it's nothing, it's just, you know, non-dreaming deep sleep. There's no met conscious activity, no dreaming activity. How can it do something? Well, DNA doesn't do anything, it does everything. DNA is a non-dreaming, A kind of non-activity, but it affects everything.

[04:55]

Just as an example. So somehow the presence of the non-doing, of non-dreaming deep sleep, a lot of nons in there, does something. Now again, you hear me speaking as I just am right now about non-dreaming deep sleep, but I don't speak much about dreaming mind or dreaming sleep. So I think I should give dreaming sleep some attention. Again, we could, making simple categories, we could think of non-dreaming deep sleep as a treasure chest way down near the bottom of the ocean or something like that, that we pull up by doing zazen, certain mindfulness practices and so forth, into our everyday life.

[06:01]

I don't think it's like, it's the opposite of Pandora's box. When you open it, wisdom comes out instead of insects, maladies and things. And somehow the water, this water of non-dreaming deep sleep, even when it's brought up into waking mind, stays dark. It stays still. It doesn't lose its stillness right away. Now we, again, could say that Zazen... Trying to give some categorical, category-like descriptions of zazen. We could say that zazen is a mind unglued from self.

[07:08]

A mind loosened from self. A mind not glued, maybe the way to put it is a mind not glued together by self. Now, practice in general is not about getting rid of something. It's about shifting the emphasis. It's much better and much more instrumentally understood if you think of it as a shift in emphasis. So, somehow, when we do Zazen, ideally, I mean, again, I'm being very simple and speaking in and more specifically categories we can compare and move around. Zazen, you sort of take consciousness, you put it a little bit of a side, and you take associative mind and self-narrative, put that a little bit aside, and you begin to have a mind that's not glued together by self.

[08:17]

self-referencing, etc., etc. So I'm trying to speak about this instrumentally so that you can, although you may understand it, you can get a feeling for it as if these were units you could move around. Now, it's sometimes, particularly if we're insecure about ourself, very difficult. That insecurity never lets go. Insecurity is more powerful than self. An insecure self, it's very difficult to let go because it always feels weak, trying to take hold of things. Somehow if you have... and you can see if self keeps coming up, if distractions keep coming up, if mental... discursive thinking keeps coming up, can be assured that somewhere you've got some sort of feeling of insecurity.

[09:20]

That you've got to kind of, like, let go of. And one way to let go of it is what I call non, no location mind. No location mind. And I was going to Come back, speak about that later or come back to it, but let me speak about it now. What do I mean by no location mind? Well, one of the things we practice with is just this, this very mind. Okay? And you practice with it in various ways, like saying, Yes to whatever comes up and then later saying no. Yes, I'll go to the movies, but we don't have a movie theater in Crestone. I'm sorry, I can't go. I would have been willing to go with you if there was a movie theater. And if it was the end of practice period. So you say yes first.

[10:25]

Oh, let's go to the movies. Oh, sorry. Can't do it. So, or welcome. You say welcome to everything. So welcome is a way to kind of trick yourself into acceptance. So now you can use these words to kind of get at, you know, when I'm speaking about something, I am speaking from an experience I can feel. And part of what I'm speaking about today I haven't spoken about before, so I have to kind of feel the experience and I have to kind of drop a word onto it. and see if the word sticks. And then if I lift the word up, some of the experience comes with it. Like taffy. Molasses. I don't know what the words in German are for that. Or it's like a ball of yarn. You see an end sticking out and you take the end.

[11:26]

And I don't know if it's going to work. But words like welcome or yes or receiving or acceptance are all words that... allow you to kind of like touch an experience. The experience is much bigger than receiving or welcoming or something like that, but you can use the word to kind of like get yourself close to the experience. So you can say just this. You know, it's quite good. If you say just this, and it's strange that Strange to me, anyway, that saying a couple words, you know, with your lips and your bodily feeling for a word, J-U-S-T, unjust this, just this, this, just this, the S's stick together, can actually put self-referential thinking somewhat aside.

[12:33]

Because just this doesn't allow, I mean, it's not just this plus self-referential thinking, it's just this. So there can be a process of, you can try various words, see what works for you, you know, to kind of emphasize attention to the immediate situation. Just this, welcome. And then there's You accept, you receive and accept. Let's say accept first maybe and then through acceptance you find yourself receiving and then we need another word, attunement. But every situation may be just as it is but you don't always feel attuned to it. Now, attunement is an important function of wisdom in our everyday activity. Again, maybe I try to come back to that later.

[13:37]

Attunement. There's another word you can use, which is acceptance, but how do we find ourselves? Well, one of the ways is in each situation, there's functioning coherence, incoherence, when we can say, inherence. You're ignoring inherence. If you find yourself thinking about things having an inherent nature, you kind of ignore inherence. You notice incoherence, things are falling apart, or they're not working together, they're in conflict, they're otherness. And there's, in some ways things are fitting together. And we can call that coherence. So in a situation where it's just this, this very situation, this very mind, this very location,

[14:44]

You receive it, and then what parts do you receive? Because you can't be attuned to all of it. So you try to find the coherence in the situation with which you can attune, find attunement. Now that's a big order. I mean, most of us don't get there, at least not for a long time. It takes the... proverbial now, newly proverbial 10,000 hours of practice to really bodily get the feeling for these things, where the stillness of mind, the stillness of body, a kind of water of zazen. We could say stillness is a kind of water. If I can find a certain kind of stillness, enough stillness in you while I'm speaking, I can float the boat of the Teisho.

[15:53]

But if you guys are distracted, the boat goes and it sits on the bottom like this, you know, tipped over and there's no water. So then somehow we have to pump some water into the situation, wisdom water. That's Dan's parakeet. Not a parakeet, what is it? A cockatoo. Dan's good, he's not really imitated. Anyway, that's wisdom water. So, part of practice in zazen is to see if you can generate enough, locate it, locate your self at enough bodily stillness and mental stillness that wisdom mind starts to flow. Now, if you can, this process of

[17:09]

noticing something so you know it's invisible how you grasp it or whatever you know so in visible as a situation and the distinction between receiving and atoning and what's coherent what is co what is coherence coherence functioning and income that takes quite a lot of mind from respect that's fairly developed you have to And you're very difficult to be there unless you have this experience of no-location mind. But just this, or this very mind, or this very... Only this location is different than no-location mind. Because only this location has a kind of entity-ness to it. It's like something you've made into an object. It's this location, but only this location.

[18:14]

So at least in English, if you say no location, you take a, but this location, or that's even too much. No location mind, it takes away the emptiness of just this, and you have a kind of Extraordinary openness. And I think if we go back to the story of, which I told last time, this is the third day show I've given, right, I think? Fourth? I lost one. Okay. Four. Well, in one of these times, I told about Lenny's goshawk. Remember? That extraordinary... While I'm on the phone to him, the Gosok comes to visit, and then he tells me about a few days earlier when Gosok sat on his knee, and he was in this really an ecstatic state.

[19:18]

Ecstatic, you know, in English, it's out of stasis, out of ex, outside state. That's a no-location mind. He was entranced in this ecstatic and entranced in this wildness of this goshawk. And what is the characteristic of wildness? No location mind is one of the characteristics. When you look at these deer, they're half tame almost, but still they're wild. I mean, they have to sleep in the winter, in the snow, find food, and nobody's helping them. There's no wood stove for them. I think when you look in the eyes of the deer, you'll see a no-location mind.

[20:22]

And Charlotte Silver once who taught, I think it was Charlotte, who was my teacher for a long time, and a wonderful friend taught sensory awareness, they called it. She described various Zen teachers she knew. There's something about them. They're kind of wild. There's some wildness about them. Well, I think that what she's seeing is a sense of no location mind. which is the best way I can describe a thorough or even profound openness. But it's practicable. I mean, I've given you these three words. Know, location, mind. Categories. A category. You can emphasize. You can see if in your activity you can allow a know, location, mind.

[21:30]

Know other locations. So your mind doesn't go to future, past, whatever, blah, blah, blah. Somehow. And it's a kind of energy. And I think that it's interesting how much in all of these Buddhist lists, blah, blah, blah, is vitality or energy or something. And we don't really have a way to speak about it. It might be called vital presence or something like that. But it's a vitality that you take from each, that you find in each situation. It's a vitality in your own body, but it's not simple energy like you've eaten well and you're feeling energetic or something like that. It's a kind of vitality. I often find I discover the feeling of it with the little phrase, the yoga of this very moment.

[22:35]

It's something I often say to myself. You know, I'm pretty primitive. I've been practicing a long time, but I'm still pretty primitive. I walk along and I have to say to myself, this, the yoga of this moment. And suddenly I feel energy coming from the situation. Not my energy, just energy, the presence of energy that I can tune into the way you might tune into sunlight or tune into air, I don't know what. So all of these practices fit together, mindfulness, zazen, et cetera, using phrases like welcoming, welcome, or no-location mind, et cetera, all depend on each other.

[23:45]

So you can try them out, see where you're inclined to put your energy, put your attention. So I said I was going to speak about dreaming and we're running. The dream clock is going away. And dreaming mind is a kind of timeless mind. It's a way of bringing a timelessness into your mental and physical activity. Now, I don't know if it's clear. It's not immediately clear, I think, what I mean. But, you know, I talked about non-dreaming deep sleep. The mind of non-dreaming deep sleep is being hauled up from the depths, the still depths of the pond or ocean.

[24:51]

Are you a pond or ocean? Drawn up. And it somehow holds much of its stillness in your activity. Now, dreaming mind is sort of like in between non-dreaming deep sleep, if we think of it as a layer. Waking mind is the top, it's a surface of consciousness. Only certain things, I mean some, what's his name, Gassinger, something like that. Hispanic name. He says about 98%, he guesses, of the brain's activity is accessible to us in consciousness. well, whatever that means, still a very large percentage of our knowing, interacting behavior, behavior and knowing, appears in consciousness, a very small amount. And the whole idea of these three birth minds is, can we overlap with?

[25:56]

I mean, the process is fairly simple. non-Buddhist India, pre-Buddhist India rather, these three minds were acknowledged. Well, it's obvious, isn't it? But there's something dramatic happens when you acknowledge it. Possibilities occur. You've got these three categories. I don't think in Western culture they've ever been acknowledged in the way that allowed you to build a civilization on it, for sure. Not that they're not noticed, but they're not quite an idea. So once you see, oh, maybe there's these three categories, okay? Then you can say, why can't we have a fourth category? Or can we overlap those three? That's an idea. So then you sort of say, how the heck can I overlap those three?

[27:03]

Well, let's create a posture like zazen, a posture like sleeping, but in which we're awake. And you could just say that's what a zazen posture is, a posture in which has the qualities of the posture that induces non-dreaming deep sleep and yet allows awakeness because we're upright, etc., in the clear sense of posture related to modes of mind. Okay, once you've got the idea that there's these three and there could be an overlapping mind, well, then you think, could there be a fourth mind? A fourth mind that overlaps these three or something like that. Well, once you think that there could be a fourth mind, Hey, why couldn't there be a fifth, sixth, or seventh mind? Then you're very far away from any created theological nature ideas.

[28:09]

Natural. It's all there when we're born. Ah, no. We can create minds we're not born with. Fourth, fifth, sixth. Or whatever. If you're not tied to a theological explanation... You can suddenly ask questions about these categories and imagine generating minds that you're not born with. Minds human beings don't necessarily have unless they generate them. And Zen practice and Buddhism is a way to generate minds you're not born with. Minds your parents didn't give you. So we've got this dreaming mind. And it's, let's say, it's in between, again, simplifying our categories, in between non-dreaming deep sleep and waking mind, and it could overlap a bit.

[29:14]

It does overlap a bit. And what happens when you do zazen and you put consciousness aside a bit and ordinary associative mind aside a bit? You're allowing... dreaming mind to begin to overlap and be in the background of conscious, of waking mind. And I think you'll notice in zazen lots of different kind of images come up. One of the states of mind of zazen that you can hold with a certain kind of stillness, if you find a certain stillness, You can find yourself in the middle of images that you can actually explore with a gentle intention. You can go into the images, you're back there in the distance. Somehow there's a kind of space. Some things are far away, some things are near. You can begin to feel.

[30:15]

You can start to make tactile the space itself, the mind, far away and near. You can pull it up closely and examine it, let it go. Now, dreams in Buddhism are not meant to be understood through consciousness, which is most of dream interpretation, etc., which is okay, I'm not putting it down. It's just not an emphasis in Buddhism. Buddhism doesn't say, let's pull these dreams into consciousness and see. As soon as they're in consciousness, it's like contemporary science. As soon as you observe something, you change it. Looking at it in a microscope, the microscope changes what you're observing. How can we observe it without changing it? Well, you want dreaming mind to function within.

[31:17]

You don't want dreams to be interpreted in consciousness. You want dreaming mind to function within consciousness. So Zazen In a way, it gets waking mind used to the edges, the overlap, used to dreamlike mind being present. Now, for the sake of ending the teshel pretty soon, Let me just say, you know, I have tried to give you an example of what I mean by the timelessness of dreaming mind. Dreaming mind is not glued together by self, by narrative history, not glued together by referential history necessarily.

[32:19]

It's not in a historical context. It's why, you know, you dream about your grandmother's house Living and dead persons are present because it's a kind of timelessness. It's as if one aspect of your life was all rolled up. All the different aspects are rolled up in one ball. And when you unroll it, there can be 10 years ago can be present and five years ago can be present, all in the same kind of dream present. And what dreams do is, I would say, is they recontextualize things. Okay, now I'll just try to use two examples that are my own experience. I have a place I live. Really.

[33:22]

I've never been there. It doesn't exist. But I live there. It's where I feel most at home. It's both a refuge, a cave, asylum, mental asylum. It's a place of asylum. It's not a mental asylum. I don't think. No. I don't think this. It is this. It's as real as any exterior, consciously apprehendable world. And sometimes it's on a beach, sometimes it's on a lake, sometimes it's in the woods. And I have specific paths. I can bring people to it, and I know exactly where you turn, what tree you turn right, and then you go into the wood. I mean, I really, I can go there regularly, and sometimes I bring other people there. But it has a certain quality of home. Hmm?

[34:24]

It has a certain quality of home in many different contexts, but all the contexts release this feeling of home. And when I feel at home, the place has some of the feelings of this home. location which only exists in my interior experience or something like that. But it's such a powerful feeling of home and I want to bring everyone to it to share this intimacy of home. It guides my design of Crested Mountain Zen Center. It's that real that when I design custom, where you put the buildings, oh, there's traditions I follow, and we do geomantic, you know, feng shui, blah, blah, blah.

[35:31]

But one layer is I try to make it reach into that sense of home, which has many contexts. In my experience, from the time I was, any memories occurred, It's like an all rolled up and dreaming mind unfolds and unrolls some of them a little bit. I also have to give you one more example. I've done Zazen on lots of locations, right? The best location is always Zendo, I find. And when I sit, I always feel I'm going to the mountains or I'm going to the beach or whatever. Whatever I want to do, whatever I imagine that I would like, I find myself having the feeling of doing it on the cushion.

[36:33]

Yeah, so I've sat on mountainsides and fields, on beaches, on rocks and hotel rooms and zendos all over the place. And I sit here. And now here. And all of those sittings are in a variety of contexts. Now the iconic context that appears in dreams for me, dreams are Zazen. For me Zazen is very much a non-self-glued realm of images. But images makes it sound like it's images. It's images in a wider sense of imagination? No, images of feelings. Because the atmosphere is not just images. The atmosphere is also a certain feeling, tangible feeling.

[37:40]

So it's more than just images. And sometimes it's words, and sometimes it's statements, but never discursive. Okay, so all of these places I've done zazen, the kind of folded, rolled up together contextual, iconic context is I have some sort of platform or bed, which is about two tatamis wide or a tatami and a half wide. And I'm used to sitting on it. And when I do zazen here, sometimes that image, that feeling of being on that platform, which isn't this platform, appears. It's I settle into a zazen here, into that image, which doesn't exist in the world, except in this dreaming mind context of feeling and images and blah, blah, blah.

[38:49]

And in that situation, there's a white object here on the left of the sitting person. There's a white object here, and that white object is like a mound of ice and snow in a cave or something like that, or a kind of altar, or a skull, or something. Well, not only do I find that image appears in the background of things, and even in conscious mind, that background of this timeless, multi-contextualized images or feelings. Russell Asianga will know I have that on my desk. I have a little wooden board. I have Bodhidharma on it that Paul Rosenblum gave me.

[39:55]

And I've got three figures that someone else gave me. Kaz's wife. Peter Coyote. And something I got in, a little Buddha figure I got in Iran in 1980, 1950. Seven. And at the end of it, there's a little white stone and a white skull. So I organize these things that sit on my desk over the decades aesthetically. I like them this way, that way, but they, a certain pattern establish itself, which is not aesthetic. It's related to this level of rolled up images which I recreate on my desk and then, like a Buddha, it represents zazen for me. Now, I don't know if the rest of you have similar experiences, but I think this kind of experience becomes, one becomes more a participant in it and aware of it

[41:14]

as dreaming mind becomes a mind that's present within waking mind, a kind of background of a waking mind, of not exactly associations, but an unfolding of context. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you.

[41:50]

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