First, I should introduce you to my friends. Jack is the new dog outside. And Helmut is a friend of my friend Earl, and he's, by training, an Austrian filmmaker and screenwriter. Is that right? Okay. And he asked... They came by somewhat for me by surprise. I didn't know really when they were coming. I was supposed to know, but I didn't. And so last night, Helmut asked if he could come to the talk. And I said, sure. And Earl said, I better not come. I'll laugh. I've known Earl for almost 40 years. And when I left college and went into the merchant marine, I just took a job on a ship.

[01:06]

He had to be on the same ship, or we got on the same ship. Actually, he finagled me onto the same ship. So we sailed two years before the mast together. And I've learned a great deal from him, and he's been a very good friend. A kinder friend who... when you're in trouble, you can always call on. One thing I don't understand is, over the last nearly 40 years, I've been in trouble more than he has. But thank you for helping me so often, Earl. Now, what I'd like to talk about is, and it's... You know, what we've been talking about, if you haven't been participating, is quite technical and rather at some distinction to our usual way of thinking.

[02:16]

But I thought I should pursue this idea of this experience of different bodies. And although you can talk about these bodies as mind, really it's more accurate to speak about them as bodies. What makes our body a body, you know, something like that. Now the will body, which I discussed two days ago, is characterized by intention and by not being involved in picking and choosing. And it's not exactly involved in our personality.

[03:21]

You know, your legs are not involved in your personality. Oh, they may be, but usually they're not. And, I mean, most of us learn toilet training, as I said, which is a kind of will body from our parents. And usually, it depends how we're taught and so forth, but usually it's not such a psychological thing, though it can be. It's just something we learn. But anonymously, or in some contrast, the will body, what we mean by the will body, or what I mean by the will body, is also what holds our personality in place. It's not exactly of our personality, but it's the basis of our personality.

[04:23]

Now, there's various ways in which... Now, I could talk about bodies that are interior and bodies that are exterior. And I have to say, what do I mean by that? An exterior body would be, for instance, a body of grief. Is that you have, from many experiences, experiences of loss, of belief in permanence, When Piaget exclaimed, Eureka, when a blind child the next day found its toy, he is emphasizing our sense of the permanence of things. And so if you're brought up with a feeling of some kind of permanence, you are brought up probably with a sense of grief.

[05:44]

And that grief comes out almost at the drop of a hat or under certain circumstances. So that's a body I would say we could say I would call an exterior body because it's created from exterior experiences. No, it's said that the Buddha has no body of grief. It doesn't mean that a Buddha or an awakened person doesn't experience grief, but they don't have an accumulated body of grief based on past experiences. And even how they express grief might be in some context where it doesn't look like grief. What I'm saying is it doesn't cut you off from experience to have no body of grief. It's just you don't accumulate from exterior experiences a body that's there. Or we can have a body of anger.

[06:50]

And when anger is present, our body, our exterior body is actually different. We think differently. And there's a cultural support for a body of grief or a body of anger. And our society, our culture makes use of this. I mean, patriotism is probably a body of anger disguised as love of country. but very quickly turns into anger at anybody that messes with your territory. Janie right now is arguing with Jack about who belongs here. Then there are cultural bodies, like in Japan there seems to be a body of nostalgia. In Europe, at least, Ivan Illich feels that he's Austrian.

[07:54]

He feels that particularly Germans and Austrians have a body of yearning, yearning being empathy or a feeling of pain or a desire for looking to the future for things to be different. And nostalgia in the Japanese, it's a longing for your home or your parents or longing for things that have gone. And the poetry of a culture is based on this background. Perhaps when a poet like Rilke is a seminal poet and things change in poetry after him. I would say I would have to read Rilke again to say for sure, but it seems to me he's brought some of these basic attitudes into a modern context. So there's these different kinds of bodies that we embody.

[09:07]

Now a body, an interior body, would be a body, shall we say, created by non-referential joy. That non-referential joy means a joy that doesn't arise from outside experience, but arises from existence itself. And I think some of these children that are interested psychologists that grow up in abused families and yet seem to have forbearance and good humor and carry on despite their families. And I would say that somehow such a child has realized some kind of joy in existence itself. Now, all of us feel this to various degrees, but it's usually not the basis of our personality.

[10:23]

Now, I would say his son, He, maybe from childhood and also perhaps from, and certainly from practice, he established a body, we could say a body of non-referential joy or joy that went through all circumstances with him. And my daughter Elizabeth recently said that a close friend of hers a woman who was a mother of a close friend of hers, but a woman who Elizabeth saw very often and was almost like one of a group of mothers that shared in the mothering of the children that everyone knew. But this woman died a while ago, and Elizabeth said when she died, she disappeared. But Issan, who she didn't know,

[11:28]

That well, she saw him quite at significant times, but didn't spend a lot of time with him. Issan, she thinks of every day. And somehow, Issan's, we would say, technically, sort of, Issan's body of bliss, bliss body, was transferred to Elizabeth. And that's what friends do. Friends transfer their bodies to us, or we share in something from each other's. And this kind of experience exists here. So as I've said, if you have children, what... One thing we can do for them, as I've mentioned, is not educate in educating consciousness, not educate awareness out of them. And if possible, find some relationship to their will body.

[12:34]

Now, when your father or mother says something to you like, someone here, their father said to them, if you, anything you want, if you want it enough, will occur. Now it's probably not the wanting that works, but that the father or mother in saying this conveyed this hard to see reality of a will body, which is a kind of wish fulfilling gem, to the child. And I know several, I know a number of people whose lives have been shaped in this way. So the Eightfold Path is a practice of developing your intention, developing your views, seeing your views, and through developing intention you develop the basis

[13:38]

and then in concentration and consciousness of a will body. Sometimes you can even see it in meditation when you have a... Sometimes you may have a kind of feel-seeing, where you see an image but feel an image that's very steady, undifferentiated, and yet as soon as you see it, you feel your posture becomes very clear and even immovable. And whether your legs hurt or don't hurt, etc., fades into the background. It's not that they stop hurting, it's just that whether they hurt or not, because in the will body there's not much feeling of picking and choosing. Doesn't mean you don't make choices. But the choices, if you find yourself making choices or you feel ambivalent, it's because probably you're in some major transition in your life.

[14:45]

The future is calling you in a certain way or the realities of the present are affecting you. It's not ambivalence coming out of past habit, energies. So once we experience the will body, it never goes away. But if you don't cultivate it, it doesn't find its possibilities in your life. So here again I'm talking about cultivation and not enlightenment. It's quite separate, and yet at the same time we can say you're cultivating the manifestations or bodies of enlightenment. And both are true. And there's also, I guess, we could say a body of space where you drop the images of body and mind.

[15:47]

Now usually, although you can experience this in your zazen, Usually this experience is rather unsteady or unpredictable or wavering, quite delicate, very easily dispersed or lost. Sometimes that occurs just because through meditation the press of this possible way of being takes us over. or sometimes through practice we actually, for a moment, for a little while, through actually sometimes a distraction in the middle of concentration, we drop images of body and mind. But this body of space or emptiness can be, again, quite steady and present in your life all the time, but only when you have, when your images of body and mind are no longer the foundations of your personality or yourself.

[17:01]

So that means that your images of body and mind have moved, have become fluid images of body and mind in your will body. So this is actually a kind of territory you can through practice begin to experience and feel and have some control over the shifts from these different kinds of expressions. Now in meditation if you're meditation is deep and concentrated enough, many possible ways, many possible bodies can pass. If you know how to look, how to notice, many possible bodies can pass before you and you can decide or create the conditions for a decision to happen on which one you cultivate, how you shape it, how you manifest it.

[18:09]

A particular culture emphasizes one and then the other possibilities become hidden. In Buddhism, we're trying to open you up, free you from bodies of nostalgia or grief or yearning and then bodies of anger and so forth that are embedded in your personality and move that requirement really that we have or function through images of body and mind but move that into this less personal will body as a kind of fluidity this is called in Buddhism sealing yourself sealing yourself with intention sealing yourself with lineage and this becomes a new basis for personality for expression

[19:19]

That's something you feel in your body, in your backbone, in your breath. Now, your body is explored in this way, or you begin this process through, you know, in this adept practice. Now, I'm talking about adept practice here, but I don't, when I say that, When I say adept practice, I mean when you're adept at it, it's adept practice, but it doesn't mean when you're not adept at it, it's not accessible to you. Or you can't intimate it or have some feeling of it or even know, oh, I already have those experiences. But those experiences are, again, rather isolated or occasional or some kind of the first day of spring or falling in love or something like that. So there needs to be a revolving of the basis or a shift of the basis on which our manifestations, our personality rests.

[20:38]

So in practice period, you're trying to do that. When you practice with the five skandhas, you're shifting the way you see mind and body work together in perception and impulses and so forth, feeling. So to review a little bit, working with the five skandhas and then the eight vijnanas, you begin to see mind and body begin to deconstruct and reconstruct how mind and body work and express themselves and how the phenomenal world expresses itself. And through the four elements, which some of you have practiced with and we've talked about in Europe. So through this way you begin to find an articulated, develop an differentiated, articulated background mind.

[21:50]

And again, what I'm trying to do here is, yesterday's lecture was, I felt, quite simple. how to concentrate on and practice with not being separate from others and the world. But here I'm trying to create an articulated basis for practice, or articulated in Western and language and Western experiences familiar to us and so forth. So by practicing the five skandhas, working with the five skandhas, working with the vijnanas, you begin to develop, as I said, a differentiated background mind.

[22:55]

And that background mind is manifested in a different kind of analysis, a different kind of thinking about apprehending the world. And that background mind can manifest is one of the ways, along with the Eightfold Path, that leads into the development of a will body. And also through mental stabilization and physical stabilization, you create the conditions for allowing a will body to come in place in your personality and in your general functioning. And the will body is different from the background mind, although in a way we can say they're two aspects of each other. The will body is what, again, holds being in place, holds the world in place, and allows the world to move.

[24:07]

Heidegger says somewhere, in a book called Basic Concepts, actually, he says, if we move around in the if we move about in the customary beliefs about being, if we move about in the customary beliefs about being, we are in effect treating being as indifferent. We are in effect treating being as indifferent, and this is an avoidance of being. So here what I'm saying is if you move about, to rephrase it, if you move about in the customary beliefs of the images of body and mind, if you move about in the usual images of body and mind, you're treating them as indifferent. You don't actually recognize their force in your existence.

[25:14]

And it's a kind of avoidance. As I said this morning in zazen, our body is girded, girded means belted, wrapped around with karma, physical and mental karma. And in meditation, the first year or two probably is just allowing this to loosen up. and beginning to have some experience of yourself when this is loosened up. And loosened up you can begin to see actually the images of body and mind with which you contain yourself and manifest yourself.

[26:18]

And you can begin to see that everything actually changes, even images of body and mind changes, and there's a fluidity possible. And if there's a fluidity possible, there's different ways to reformulate how you function and manifest. Now the one other body I thought of mentioning, the main ones, some of the main ones in Buddhism, though there's many possibilities and there's more than just a few, but another is a body of connectedness, different from the body of space and the body of the will body.

[27:29]

The body of connectedness is one aspect of the sambhogakaya body, the body of bliss and reward. And you can feel when this body of connectedness comes into play, there's a kind of tingling or feeling in your body in various places, particularly if you've experienced after a while you hear. And when that kind of feeling happens, You almost feel as if you're being touched by and touching what's around you. And this feeling tells you what to do. You don't think about what to do. This feeling tells you what to do. And I'm sure writers and painters and so forth, whether they articulate it this way or not, stop thinking, I mean I know painters turn on the radio to occupy their mind, and they let something else paint.

[28:33]

Buddhism would say this is a letting another body do the painting. So you can begin to find out, actually there's quite a few of these different possibilities, And you can't make them happen exactly, but you can let them happen. And in certain situations when this feeling is there, you can trust that feeling to So again, the will body is not about will, power, but a willingness and acceptance that is outside of picking and choosing. And when you're sitting, zazen is the best kind of test tube, laboratory to begin to feel, allow a...

[29:40]

decision-making to occur that's not in your personality always, or not in your thinking, or not in your analysis. And you have to recognize it and you can trust it when each of these has its own cohesion. So you may find in even forty or fifty minute period there may be three or four different, or one or two different ways in which a kind of cohesion happens, which you can stay with or let it move into another kind of cohesion. And again, of course, returning to earth here, the gate is always attention, mindfulness, and breathing. And until you develop a continuity with mindfulness, a continuity with breathing, with your breath, these practices can't be adept, they can only be occasional.

[31:00]

And occasionally, though they give us some faith, some confidence, I think that's enough for this morning. And Earl didn't laugh. Later he'll laugh. Okay, thank you very much. May our intention, ye believe, and trade every being and place with the true merit of this way. Amen. Should your head say, God, no. Oh, you should say, God, no.

[32:06]

Satsang with Mooji Satsang with Mooji Vah-reh-mah-rah-rah-rah-rah-rah-rah-rah-rah-rah-rah-rah. It doesn't surpass this penetrating and perfect dharma. It is very lady and met with even in a hundred thousand million countless.

[34:32]

How do we get to see and listen to? Do we have where we accept? I believe if I want to taste the truth of that, it's to talk it to us first. Yeah, I don't want to say too much because I don't want to put you under any pressure.

[35:59]

I know you're You must really understand as the basis always your own deep freedom to do as you wish, pretty much as you wish, especially in this day and age. But sometimes also we don't see the value, I mean most of the time, we don't see the value of what's right in front of us. And I occasionally like to say that how lucky we are to be practicing together. And even over millennia, how rare it is to find a chance to practice with others. You know, we have many ideas about things and we have our personality based in various things, which is not false.

[37:24]

In fact, it's usually the root of it and the strength of it is that it's based in love or wanting to love or thinking it must be possible to love or parents, friends, our society, and so forth. And from that we create a world that we live in and have hopefully genuine work to do. But at some other level, some deep level of our truest nature, I would say, what Sukharshi would also say, your innermost request, the chance to practice with others may be the deepest possibility for realizing our Self.

[38:29]

So I, you know, am unceasingly grateful for this chance, you know, we have together. And the various fields, relationships of people which have made this possible. Which are making this possible. Now this is the first sashin that We've had together, most of us, ever, where we've entered, come into it from a practice period, and we leave the sashin into a practice period. So it's not such an abrupt transition. You don't have to pack your car tomorrow and drive somewhere. Maybe you do, Tim. I don't know. When do you leave? Oh, good.

[39:33]

Give us at least one day. Anyway, it's quite a difference to enter a sesshin from a practice period and leave into a practice period. So the sesshin isn't ending this evening as usual and also the practice period doesn't end with the sesshin. We still have another week and the Shosan ceremony and various things that we will do together. Tomorrow, if it doesn't decide to have a blizzard, we'll have a picnic. for Buddha's birthday, and I think that Robert's preparing 2,546 candles. The problem is not the candles, it's lighting them all. And getting to the last one before the first one's burned out.

[40:37]

But lots of us will work on it. And some of you still haven't really learned, understood the importance of not talking so much in sushim, that your mind and your personality can flow together in speech without any break. Buddhism is sort of in the category of oneness, you know. And religions in contrast, non-dual religions in contrast to European and Western religions of Christianity, Judaism and Muslim, Mohammedanism, which are seen as more dualistic.

[41:46]

But if you study Buddhism, it's really about separations, differences. And if you go around with a mind of looking for oneness or something like that, or looking for some experience, really your mind has shifted to a kind of level of generalization which is not intimate with the physical world. And I think some of you have discovered in this sashina a new intimacy with the physical world, a taste at least, an experience of this intimacy. David Chadwick, who you've met, used to speak, talk incessantly, just incessantly.

[42:54]

So I asked him one day, I think it was 1972 probably, I said, David, I would like you to stop speaking for six months. You know, I mean this was considered by asking the Grand Canyon to fill up or something like that. No one believed it was possible. I still have never forgotten Beate's remark. She came to visit once, and we flew over the Grand Canyon, and we kept flying. There were only certain parts of it over the public. We kept flying over it, flying over it. She finally said, this is bigger than Bavaria. Like this valley out here is bigger than almost anything. So I asked him, and I would like to say that he, as I said to him, I would like you to

[44:03]

not speak for six months without even a twinkle of the eye, his mouth closed. But I think we probably talked a little bit about it, but he said, okay. And I knew something had to be done. Because he was running at the mind, running at the mouth. It was a kind of diarrhea. You know, it was wonderful and funny and great, but it was a kind of... And if he wanted to practice, he had to do something like this. So I said, I think in retrospect, I think it's quite daring of me to ask somebody to not speak for six months. And people tease him about it today. They say, that was the loudest six months, the loudest silence I've ever heard. Because, as I've told some of you some of the stories before, you get very adept at speaking without speaking.

[45:10]

I mean, he'd have conversations on the telephone. until he got you to say what he wanted you to say. He'd draw it. Once he even announced a fire in a bar. Wouldn't speak, he came in. Fire trucks were called. But he learned something that I wouldn't have expected. didn't quite understand what he would get out of it. He did do it for six months. And for him it was another kind of speaking, but it was a real practice. We talked about it a bit when I was here. One of the things he noticed, he'd go into a bar saying he wanted a drink. And there was one bar he'd go into where it was... It was a totally grouchy bartender.

[46:13]

Grouchy means, you know, kind of sour, unfriendly, etc. But the first time he went in and couldn't speak, he was trying to point to what he wanted. The bartender became extremely nice. helpful, and which would you like? This one? No, no, no, okay. And then started giving him free drinks, you know. So it brought something out of this bartender that, you know, our usual way doesn't. So a certain kind of helplessness is helpful. to give people the opportunity, and I think it falls also in the category of when I talked about in the Sashin some years ago, years ago, a few months ago, and I was just still a... and I said, don't do things correctly.

[47:24]

Do things a hundred percent. As soon as you do things correctly, No matter what, I mean, it may feel good. There's always an implicit comparison with others. And people feel it. And they feel corrected by your correctness. And then they feel a little inferior, and then they don't want to help you, etc. It's much better, as David learned, to just do things 100%. and not worry about whether it's right or wrong. You just do it completely. And I think Robert's teaching us that in the kitchen. It's very different. You actually, if you start doing things 100%, whatever that is, What is it that Dogen says?

[48:29]

Each thing exerts itself fully on each moment. If you just practice that simple thing, you enter a quite different world. You'll find out. But David also found out, well let me say that When you chant, maybe you could notice this, that if you chant a word like mon, it's shaped by the lips, mon, or at least the final shape is given by the mouth, mon. If you chant ya, the mouth isn't necessary almost, just can be open, ya, ya, and it's shaped by the vocal cords. but you can actually move it below the vocal cords into the bronchi, the wind pipes, I guess.

[49:32]

It doesn't really hit the, I don't know exactly the physiology, but it doesn't seem to me it's hit the, the, the, voice box yet. And then you can move it up into the mouth if you want. Now if you make a mistake, as sometimes I do, and I can feel a whole group of syllables coming up that aren't what everyone else is chanting, Or I somehow clicked in at the wrong point or something. And I can feel my mouth rushes to reshape the sounds before they get out. My mind and my mouth try to... And it's not really possible to change them. They're already pretty shaped. But you can sort of change them so they don't sound too different from everyone else's chanting.

[50:36]

And there's a palpable... length of time between the feeling of it and its passage through the mouth. And you actually have some time to fiddle there, if you can slow down time a bit. One interesting thing about slowing down time, it's quite nice, but you still want it to pass. I mean, you don't want it to slow down so that it's stopped entirely, otherwise you might perish. Anyway, you can slow down time or feel time very slow. You can feel this palpable, it's a kind of wonderful word, it means from the Latin meaning as quick and gentle as an eyelid moves. Touching as gently as an eyelid touches, as quickly. That is a palpable... What's the word for butterfly in Japanese?

[51:43]

I know the word. Sorry. Flap enough, maybe it'll occur. I think it's similar. So if you notice that, you can see that the words that you're speaking are formed in the mind and body almost instantly, and if you're forming it down here, it's down here somewhere, and then it moves up into your windpipes and into your voice box, larynx, and then into your mouth. But the word is pretty much complete down here. And it's just being shaped on its way up, given a little more definition so we can understand it. And the more you're speaking in your mouth, the more it's mostly mental, not physical.

[53:00]

The more you move your speaking down into your body and feel it in your body, your body is more engaged and you're actually, by that practice, joining. It's one of the alchemistries of joining body and mind. Now, when people have studied gestures and speaking, they have noticed that gesture usually precedes... The gesture which expresses a meaning is usually ahead of the words. And you can try to make it the same, but the body is way ahead of in its formation of exactly what you're going to say, the next syllables, before that reaches the mouth. And David learned something like that. He learned that his body was actually speaking words, not just body language.

[54:05]

That the words form, and you don't have to speak them, you just let the words form in the body. And the other person's body ear, maybe we could say, the other person's third ear hears. So David now, most of the time, is practicing silence. He speaks a lot. It's his nature. But his first communication is from his body. And I didn't know that's what he'd learned. in his six months of silence, of his loud silence. Now I found when Earl was here yesterday, it affected the way I speak with you, not because, just because Earl was here, but because somebody who's not part of our field was here.

[55:12]

And so he not only knows me in an entirely different way, and for a long time, but he also has actually no connection with what we're discussing or interested in at all. So he kind of has an intuitive understanding, but basically has no connection. So anybody, any person who has no connection makes it hard for me to hear all of you as I'm speaking. So yesterday I had to give the talk from my memory of having heard you. So the source of the talk yesterday was quite different. It was from my memory of having heard you, not from hearing you as I'm speaking. I'm talking about this to try to give you some sense of what I'd like to call today is Path Mind, and also I'm talking about the gate of Manjushri.

[56:19]

I've been talking about these three gates. And it's interesting, there are three gates. and three manifestations in this. We could have many. But again, here we have Buddhism dividing things up. You may experience them together, but still we know them separately. If you know the visionas, as I said, means to know the parts separately. And visionas is one of the words for mind. If the speaking you know, the speaking, the different parts of the speaking, separately. And dharma, we could say the definition of dharma is, which means to hold, basically, but it's to know things separately.

[57:30]

To give the opportunity for separateness to have its simultaneity or something like that. And that's the experience in a changing, of everything changing, of a kind of identity, of being. Heidegger says somewhere, I'm actually following from a poem of Holderlind, how do you pronounce it in German? Holderlind. Holderlind. wouldn't it be surprising if this nothing that we fear is being itself? So here I'm speaking about Manjushri's gate is the gate of emptiness, but it's at an experiential level the gate of intimacy with the physical world. or what I would call path mind.

[58:35]

Path mind is a kind of modesty, kind of never separating yourself in your mind, not in your actions only. Never, as much as possible, avoid separating yourself from others in your mind. Very difficult to do. And this is where practice is really difficult. Learning the three bodies, no, that's not so difficult. Experiencing the three bodies is not so difficult. Actually not separating yourself from others in your mind is quite difficult. Something we can, you know, gives us something to keep us busy the rest of our life. So it's a kind of modesty, kind of Sincerity, kind of real sincerity, not fake sincerity.

[59:40]

And serendipity. Do you know the word serendipity? It's actually Horace Walpole, who wrote the first Gothic novel, coined it. I think it's based on an ancient word for Sri Lanka. He had the princes of serendipity who kept finding things that they didn't expect to. So serendipity is the word he coined and means to find things completely that you didn't expect. And one of the things that qualifies past mind, not qualifies, but that... Why did I say qualified? One of the things that is the quality of PathMind is that it... that what you experience is not and cannot be within the definitions of what you're looking for.

[60:47]

At a subtle level, if it's within the definitions of what you're looking for, you've already found it. I mean, not. I've lost my checkbook. I know I'm looking for it. And it's within the definitions of what I'm looking for. Dropped out of somewhere yesterday. But I'm talking about something else. So it's not within the definition of what you're looking for. It doesn't mean you're looking for the unimaginable or experiencing the unimaginable, but you're looking for the unimagined, that which you are unable to imagine.

[61:58]

Now this is a pretty hard practice and I think Jeffrey Hopkins in his book Emptiness Yoga has got a pretty good description of it and he's talking from his own experience. Get back in New Jersey in the 60s with Geshe Wangal who was also the teacher of Bob Thurman. And in the 60s, really only two real practice places going on, I think, were Sukhirushi and Keshiwon. In the States, anyway. And Jeffrey talks about the unfindability. Unfindability. There's a quality of unfindability, but if because things are unfindable you get discouraged, then your practice, you know, is not going to go very far.

[63:12]

It's strange, you know, kind of quite strange. Now, unfindability doesn't mean it's non-findable. I don't know what these words mean, but I think you get the impression. that, for example, you can't find the inherent existence of anything. You can't find yourself except in some provisional way. Now, because of that, you give up. Because it's unattainable or unfindable, you will not realize path mind. Path mind is to stay in the state of unfindability. that your natural tendency, as we've been taught to find things and get discouraged if we don't find them and try again, etc., or look for something else, usually, look for objects that can be found. Here we're looking for something that can't be found.

[64:18]

So you don't then go to something that can be found, but you stay in that state, willingly stay in that state of non-finding, of not finding. That's actually a very vivid state of mind. And in that state of mind, sometimes that which we do not expect, the serendipitous, appears. And it appears in the most unlikely, it can appear in a matchbox. It appears in a physical object which opens a path. The most modest physical objects. Now this path mind, this is Madrasri's gate, this intimacy with the physical world, a kind of intimacy with the physical world through a state of mind I'm here describing as that rests without feeling rejected, without feeling you're wrong or failing,

[65:42]

in a state of non-finding or un-finding. Then there's nothing wrong with spending your whole life not finding. If you put a date to it, if you're not willing to spend your whole life not finding, you won't find. You say, oh, I'm not going to... Actually, maybe I'm exaggerating slightly. It's kind of good to put a date sometimes. You know, say... Okay, I'll stay in this state for one year. This is more possible for us. But if you get used to staying in the state of not finding for one year, then you can extend it. So you trick yourself. Actually, you're tricking yourself. Okay, I'll do this for three months. How many of you tricked yourself into thinking you were only going to come here for three months? or try this out for three months. And yet, this possibility of practice opens up within us.

[66:49]

So here I'm talking about how to continue this in the practice period, after Sushin, and from up till now through the practice period, and also when you return to Boulder, Santa Fe, Wiesbaden, cussing, and so forth. Or when you return to your usual state of mind, wherever that is, it's always where you are, it comes back. And I would emphasize practicing stopping and, you know, stopping, dharma stops and level stops. Something like that. Breath stops. But this sense of bowing, which you change levels, is very good.

[67:54]

So inside, as I've said often, when you have to create some kind of reminders, you look out a window, you inside bow to the sky or identify your mind with the sky. So you find various ways to stop and come back to your breath or stop and identify your mind with another level. And these dharma stops is the definition of dharma, these little stops where you find you're taking little tiny vacations It really does make a difference, too. Because your energy doesn't... If you do these little Dharma stops, your energy starts to flow through your background mind instead of through your personality, through your... What I've got to do now, and that I've got to do next, and then I've got to do that.

[68:58]

We think that way, but your energy doesn't have to flow through that. That can happen while your energy is flowing in another dimension of your existence. Not to turn a phrase, any phrase. Jeffrey Hopkins, when he was practicing Keshi Nwango, repeated to himself, I'm wrong, I'm wrong, I'm wrong, I'm wrong. Meaning that every time he saw something, he defined it from his own side. or he defined it without being able to really see things from the point of view directly of emptiness. And he didn't, as he said, take pride in being wrong.

[70:06]

You just, I'm wrong, I'm wrong, I'm wrong. And whatever phrase you use can be, the phrase establishes a background mind and the phrase keeps catching you, nipping in the bud, our usual way of thinking. So you move out of the thought as an object of thought into the source of thought. Emotion as an object of your personality, your identity, into the source of emotion. This whole process of creating a background mind, which is pretty basic practice, changes the dynamic of your personal psychology. So you need to find some way to weave these Dharma stops into your daily life. It's pretty hard to practice the continuum of mental stabilization.

[71:10]

But you can weave into your daily life these dharma stops which can suddenly shift the stream bed. Like your life runs through one stream bed, suddenly it runs through another stream bed. Like hanging all the pictures upside down in the room or putting your sandals on your head. One of my favorite stories was the story of Seppo Shueifeng and Yen Do Ganto that Sukhirish used to tell. And he used to tell these stories, you know, as a way, I mean, you felt like he was telling you a story that happened to friends of his, and in fact, yes, friends of his, and happened a few days ago or something, and missed the story of uh... they were yendo and huifeng uh... went around a lot i told you the story about the vegetable leaf but they went here and there and they got stuck in a snowstorm for several days in an inn and in those days too i was uh... pretty very completely new in california you know the whole

[72:40]

outdoor hiking movement had started with hiking boots and and uh sleeping bags and all that stuff was before it was all like army equipment and you needed a mule to carry and uh but that all started in the early 60s and uh sierra designs and north face were all companies started right around by people uh that I knew in San Francisco. The people who started North Face ended up starting Esprit. They went from North Face to Esprit. Anyway, I bought my first tent from the guy who founded North Face. Then he borrowed it back because he bought such a nice tent and he used it himself. He gave it back to me after his trip. Anyway, so in those days I was hiking quite a bit in the Sierra. So this story of these folks out hiking was struck home in many ways.

[73:52]

But anyway, they holed up in this inn. I always imagined them being on a second story. I guess I was imagining some kind of European inn, but probably. In any case, they stayed in this inn somewhere for a several days, and Seppo, Sri Fung, was always sitting. And Yendo, Ganto, was a little more relaxed, and practice and realization was much more natural for him. And he didn't struggle so hard. He'd go to bed and wake up in the morning, and Sri Fung would be sitting through the night, you know. And Shui Fung had a very deep way-seeking mind. And later he was one of the great formative Zen masters who also always liked working in the kitchen.

[75:00]

He was called the kitchen monk a lot because he just felt this is the best way to immerse yourself in the intimacy of this physical world. and to be useful to people. So anyway, and later he had, I don't know, something like a community of 1500 people. Yendo also went, they separated, they went to see Linji and they heard Linji died. They decided to separate at that point, and they went different places and lived alone, and people came to them and got them to establish temples, and they did, and Yendo's temple became quite large too, but then he was killed, I told you, by these marauders, probably pretty much like the guys in the Seven Samurai, terrorized villages.

[76:02]

Came down and terrorized this village, and all the monks fled, and he stayed, and cut him up and he shouted. I'm sure he shouted a kind of mystic shout from here. It was heard at great, felt at great distance. It was his last word. Or was it? Anyway, so Xue Feng is sitting at the second or third night Yindo said to him, what is the use of studying, practicing what you hear in lectures, what you hear in lectures and what you read in sutras? Only what you realize from the bottom of your own mind moves heaven and earth. And it's on that statement that he was enlightened, not with Deshan, not with Dungsan.

[77:10]

It's his friend who said that. And somehow, this story, Sukhya, she told it with such intimacy. And I was sitting a great deal then. As I've said, I think in five years, I didn't miss a day of sitting. And I got up earlier and would sit If I went places with friends, I'd get up at three or four in the morning, go out in the fields and sit, and then they'd get up at five, and then I'd sit with them, stuff like that. I was a little determined. So I identified with Shui Fung. And I really listened to Sukershi's lectures, and I studied sutras, but this story really didn't stop me from listening to Sukershi's lectures or studying sutras. But I really knew that it's only what comes from the bottom of your own mind, your own freedom, your own findability, that moves heaven and earth.

[78:24]

And mostly, I can't teach you anything. I can only create the conditions for realization, the conditions for understanding. Because if I explain, you say, oh, that's not possible. Or I don't believe you. So I can't tell you much. It's only what you discover from the bottom of your mind, even these words are inadequate, something, where's the bottom, where's the mind? It's only what you discover from the bottom of your mind that moves heaven and earth.

[79:24]

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