I've been speaking about, yes, very simple, basic things that we do, like putting the rakshu on our head and then chanting and pointing out again The raksha doesn't keep us warm particularly or do much of anything for us as clothing, even though it is an iconic or symbolic representation of the Buddhist robe. But it does, in the way it's treated and in how it's given to you, it does have hidden in it the Buddhist posture. Because to put it on, you're asked to put it on your head with the creases facing to the front.

[01:05]

And the things like the creases facing to the front are, you know, you can put it pretty much anywhere you want, of course, on your head. But the creases raise such a conceptual stipulation like the creases to the front are require you, the assumption is it's defined in a way that requires you to bring attention to it. And the degree of attention expected in a yogic practice context or yoga culture is I think we would have that kind of attention in an emergency where something serious was happening and everything you did counted.

[02:13]

You'd really bring attention to exactly what you did. Anyway. So it's really, again, I noticed it when I was in Japan a few years ago, it's an attentional culture, and you're taught attention more than you're taught thinking, logic, or intelligence. You're just taught to be attentive. It's built into the culture, and it's required by the culture. I mean, sometimes to really what seemed to us kind of ridiculous things, extent. For instance, when I went to Japan, the newspapers were full of stories about why should we imitate the West and have sidewalks? Because no sidewalk teaches people to be more attentive when the cars are coming and going down the street and teaches the drivers to be more attentive.

[03:14]

Well, but a lot of kids are killed. So there were articles about the kids that are killed. And then the newspaper said, well, they just weren't attentive. I mean, we couldn't say that in our culture. But in a culture where attention is required, maybe we... I mean, some of these directions for computers require more intelligence than I have, so I have to turn to my Anja and say, how the hell do we do this? So we commonly require intelligence to read the instructions for a software or something, but the requiring of attention is a kind of different spectrum. Now, why do I mention this? Well, partly because I'm trying to practice with you and practice Buddhism with you. And we've inherited a teaching which expects a high degree of attention.

[04:22]

So, yeah, and so some of the things I'd like to speak about, for instance, It's the distinction, you could make a case, fairly easily, that it's the distinction in the West, and going way back to Mesopotamia, et cetera, between the sentient world and the insentient world, which is destroying us. If there's a causal point, the Anthropocene is rooted in this distinction between the sentient and insentient. Okay, so how are we going to... I'm trying to find a way, because the distinction has always disturbed me, to, and I've mentioned this before, but to find a way to Not describe it, because if I describe it, it doesn't mean anything to us.

[05:31]

I have to find a way to conceptualize it in a way that's consequential. To conceptualize it so it is placed before us. Something like that. Okay. Now, One little thing that has interested me about the tea leaf tea ceremony, not the ground leaf ceremony, is that when you, if you're making yourself sencha or gyokuro tea in the style of the Japanese tea drinking, Of course, all the teapots and tea bowls were designed before temperature by Fahrenheit or Celsius was distinguished.

[06:43]

So the tea bowls and teapots are designed so that your hand will tell you the right temperature for the water. So even Japan takes it for granted. Well, one tea's at 90 degrees, another tea's at 95 degrees. From the point of view of traditional tea, that's nonsense. If you can't tell the difference by your hand, you're not living in an attentionally articulated world. So I always get amused. Here's this old tea shop from 1800s where it sends me tea every few months. And they send me what temperature each tea is supposed to be at. And I think . But of course that was a couple hundred years ago that people paid attention to it because tea from different tea plantations and different times of the year actually expects a slightly different temperature. You're just supposed to live in a world where your body knows those temperatures.

[07:46]

I think of, well, first let me stay with the tea ceremony, the leaf tea ceremony. You make one serving at a time. Sometimes you make a very small serving of really good tea, and it's called a sparrow's tear. So you pair just enough to have two or three drops touch your tongue, and that's enough for the hit you want. And you're buying teapots, I heard, these days. It's fun to explore these things. And you can't explore them without a teapot. It doesn't work just to put the hot water in your hand. Anyway. So when you, after you make the amount you're going to make, and you decide the temperature is okay, you turn it and you hold it until all the drops are gone.

[08:52]

Now I know this, I say this just because it sounds a little nutty, but generally you've got way enough tea to drink, maybe 10 sparrows' tears, or 10 tears of one sparrow. Anyway, but there's about 15 or 20 more drops left in it. And you just hold it until all or nearly all the drops are done. And when I first, I watched tea people do that, I was a little too impatient. I wanted to drink the tea and I wanted to get on with other things. Sometimes it's a minute or half a minute of, Okay, get on with the teapot, you know. But when you, if at some point I accepted, okay, I'll try it, it definitely slows you down. And it definitely slips you really out of the sensorial realm into the realm of the teapot.

[10:02]

The teapot has its own, just as The rakshasa has its own hidden dimensions, a posture of a Buddha built into it, and a way of folding it and taking care of it and so forth. The teapot which is made And often a couple of teapots by a particular teapot potter I have gotten a few teapots from, you can see how his hand held the teapot because he glazed around his fingers. So you can pick up the teapot and feel just how he, when he glazed it. So it's a kind of signature without writing his name. So you let the water, and at some point it becomes for me a kind of respect for the teapot.

[11:15]

Instead of using the teapot just to make some tea for myself, I'm letting the teapot slow me down and letting the teapot show me how it has its own hidden, usually, or sheathed dimensions from me. Now, again, how can I kind of introduce this? One of the hard things to introduce is, well, here I'm introducing a line between the sentient and the insentient in this simple way. The lip of the spout, by letting the lip of the spout let the tea come out, I'm now giving credence, value, to the physical object of the teapot, letting the teapot talk to me instead of me talking to the teapot only.

[12:22]

Now I know this can all sound pretty finicky and troublesome and useless, but if you just try it a few times I think you'll see that it brings you over the sentient-insentient divide into feeling, and that's one of the weaknesses of... phenomenology as perceptually, percept without depth phenomenology, which is the closest philosophy to Western Buddhism, to Zen and Yogic, Yogacara Buddhism. is that the Hirschfeld and the phenomenologists are mainly talking about this sensorial world of human beings as what's important, what we know through our senses.

[13:36]

But for yogic practice, which doesn't make this sentient-insentient distinction, except in a very practical, ordinary sense, that this... The worm on the edge of my teacup is not just schmutz, it's a bug. Oh, it's a live bug, not a schmutz. This was a German-speaking Japanese person who said that. So you feel yourself annoyed, maybe, by having to wait For 2015, drops to drop to drip. But you do notice, if you do it a few times, at least a few times, you're in the realm of the physical object and not the realm of what's useful to you.

[14:45]

So that's one distinction to kind of explore. And so I'm trying to give you ways to explore it, because when we explore it enough to feel it, it actually nudges and nudges us into another kind of world, which is existing right here with us, but is just on the other side of a certain kind of noticing. Yeah. Okay, another boundary I keep trying to talk about is the boundary between our physical body and space, which seems to start. And of course we have to contend with, even though long ago Einstein made clear that space is not a separate thing. and time is not a separate dimension.

[15:48]

So that's something Western Buddhists have to, if they're going to make use of the clues, hints, and dynamics of enlightenment, that are built into the teaching, you have to free yourself from the idea that space is a container and that time is a dimension running separately from you. So you have to figure out on your own or with my help or with the help of the teachings how to get yourself away from that. I've been enjoying my broken right arm partly because it allows me to notice and show you in my climbing onto this platform how the space that I live in is defined by the potential activity of the body.

[17:03]

So where can we notice that in ourselves? Well, if you're a basketball player, I don't think I could throw a basketball more than about four inches right now. If you're a basketball player and good at three-pointers, trays, I guess they're called, if you could... You have a sense of space that's, you know, you know, right? Okay. And it goes right bloody in. Well, that basketball player has developed a sense of space which would be basically a yogic skill in Buddhism. There's lots of ways our Western... practices, athleticism, and others. And it's Mike Murphy, this old friend of mine, who came up with the psychic side of sports and the concept of the zone because he entered into meditation practice through sports.

[18:16]

And his first book was called The Psychic Side of Sports, which was later then renamed Something else. A more common name. Anyway. So I remember the thing. You know, I used to climb buildings a lot when I was a kid. And one of the things I liked to do was jump across an alley to the other building. And there were certain buildings you were pretty sure you could do it. And there were certain buildings where you, it must be something similar in mountain climbing. And there were certain ones, but you always knew, well, if I stumbled or tripped, it's death. But still, usually I would do it. And there were certain alleys, and there was one place on the top of Forbes Field, the home of the Pittsburgh Pirates, which you jumped from one level in the stadium across a gap to another level.

[19:30]

And I was always a little bit too scared to do the jump. Partly because to get back, you had to jump up, not just down. It was a little difference. So I kept testing myself. I'd stand there. No, maybe it's not too wise. But that sense of space, the only words I have for it are haptic, proprioceptive space. Haptic means you can feel the space, like you know you can do a three-pointer, or you know you can jump across this alley, or you... feel what you can do. Feel how the... Anyway, you get the picture.

[20:32]

So here what I'm also trying to introduce is the concept of hiddenness. In Western culture, this comes from, and I'm not a professional philosopher for sure, it's an amateur sport for me, but Heidegger, the main disciple of Husserl, changed phenomenology, if we think about it, Phenomenology is the creation of his rule. So emphasizing that objects are present even when they're not present. So the floor, you're not paying attention to the floor, but the floor is present. Or you're not paying attention to the oxygen particularly, but the oxygen is present.

[21:38]

So Heidegger emphasized tools and broken tools, as he put it, meaning that objects are part of our activity, our realm, even when we're not conscious of them or noticing them, or when they're not sensorial objects. In other words, there's a whole world of objects which aren't part of our sensorial affect. Okay. Now again, this is working around the distinction between the sentient and what happens when there's an absence of the distinction between sentient and insentient. And I don't know how far I could go with this, working with this distinction with you, but we'll see today. You know, I don't know if this is so useful to your practice, but I think it should be.

[22:43]

And I actually enjoy your helping me talk about it. Okay, so this Raksu is full of five or six aspects which are hidden, which appear through the use of it. And through, you know, the teacher tells you it's Buddha's robes, and then you go, why the hell did he say that? It's not Buddha's robe. It's my robe, or my piece of cloth. But now, if we recognize that practice is processive, all practice is processive, it's a process. And it's an incubatory process. So then I think you, if you get that, that practice is an incubatory process of practice.

[23:48]

I think you will then have more confidence or be less impatient, perhaps, when a practice... What's this about? I mean, in a way you have to trust your teacher or trust the practice enough and the tradition enough that you try things even though you don't know what it's about or why it makes any sense. But when it's a process, and the raksha is opened up by every morning, putting it on your head and folding and unfolding, and after a while you begin to notice things. Like also holding the teapot enough so the drops mostly stop, or do stop. There's something that happens in that process that you couldn't think your way to.

[24:53]

Processive process, trusting practice as a process and as an incubatory process, allows you to go where thinking won't reach. Thinking can only go as far as pretty much conceptual immediacy. and a few sequential steps. It's almost like you go into a kind of practice tunnel and then the walls of the tunnel fall aside and keep opening up and pretty soon you find yourself in a valley which you didn't even realize there was an opening to. So if you begin to try to awaken yourself to the ways in which space is... You're in space in an proprioceptive way.

[26:06]

Your balance, etc., is involved. And your sense of touch, bodily touch of the world, it's not just the touch you... The touching you do do, but the touching you can do or might do, which is also part of the world. And that becomes more and more clear when you see practice is processive and you have to let it incubate and you percolate in it. Okay, I brought this up many, many times, but I will bring it up again. Birds, we hear birds in the morning. One of the reasons Zen temples have gardens is so there's birds. And perching birds are songbirds. And songbirds simply have a whole different sensorial apparatus from us.

[27:13]

They can hear between 100 hertz and about 40,000 hertz. We hear between 2,000 hertz and 4,000 hertz. And they hear like that. Some birds even have two vocal cords. They can sing two notes at once. And their ears have the ability to hear 10 times more notes than we do at any second. I mean, it's just really different. So you're not, when you hear the birds, a bird, you're not at all hearing what they're hearing, even though they seem to be singing for you. So it's easy to conceptually know that.

[28:18]

I mean, I just told you, and you can know, except just my information is probably correct, that there's a huge difference between the hearing and sound chirping of a bird from any sounds we can make or hear. Okay. Now, what's interesting about that is That you're not, two things. One is it pushes you into knowing that what you're hearing is your own hearing and not the bird. You're hearing your own hearing of the bird. And it's interesting that when you hear your own hearing of the bird, and you recognize that you're fully hearing your own hearing of the bird, it's often an experience associated with bliss. And the fact that it's associated with bliss

[29:26]

And the bliss experiences of nourishment and experience of completeness are all interrelated and allow one to actually be comfortable in immediacy without needing anything else. But in addition to locating you in your own experience as your own, knowing that it's not just the bird out there, it's the sensorial experience of yourself, you also know you're in the midst of a mystery. You're in a context which is more articulated than your own sensory. Now, that's one of the dynamics and dimensions of a ah, yogic culture is your, you feel, you don't just know you are, you feel yourself in a context more complex than your human sensorial context.

[30:45]

And the more you know that, the more you, the distinction between the sentient and insentient is just kind of a sliver, Now, this also then changes how the fourth skanda, which is an associative field, functions in you. Because you have now developed a sense of, and I, we were talking about something like this the other day, I remember John Muir. There's a famous... I came across it in reading Muir years ago. You know who Muir is. Muir Woods and the American park system and so forth. John Muir was stuck on the edge of a mountain and he didn't know how to go up or down. And suddenly his perceptions

[31:48]

got much more vivid and suddenly he saw the edge of the side of this slope in little details where he could begin to shift his weight and etc. Well, it turns out this, I read it and I liked it and I used to use it in lectures in the 60s, but it turns out it's a famous, often quoted thing from Muir. So it's kind of well known. But his perception shifted into a more detailed feel of the edge of the teapot he was on, about to be poured off it, and he suddenly realized how he could climb up on the teapot, etc. So this enhanced Tensionality, sensitivity, depth percept, not surface percept, depth perception or a kind of depth spectrum, a spectral.

[32:57]

Spectral, I like it, it means ghost and it also means a spectrum. The spectrum and the context in which you live begins to have another kind of depth. And practice assumes, and the koans assume, and the little triggers they give you are to see if they can click you into, trick you into, flip you into this... sensorial depth which doesn't have a sentient, insentient distinction. And of course, If you get there, you'll find it makes you live somewhat differently and find satisfaction in living differently.

[34:00]

And it's a lot easier to be free of suffering because the situation you're in has so much, is so multi-dimension compared to when you're suffering about this or suffering about that. Okay, that's enough talking. Okay? Thanks for your patience. Now you can all leave and I can take a little while like an old teapot climbing off this. No.

[34:35]

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