Now, I would like us to... Oh, good morning. Good morning. Now, I would like us to... have a shared feeling of what... Yeah. I experience a somatic space. Not so much that it's my experience, if my experience is anything unusual or particular. It's particular, but not necessarily anything else. Just because it's your experience. No, I haven't said why yet.

[01:03]

Okay, thanks. I was trying to find something. Oh, yeah. Because, really, we have to start somewhere. And we do share the space of this room. Yeah, in some kind of factual sense we do. But how do we share the space of this room? Or do we experience it? the space of this room in the same way or at all? And this topic is so big it covers the whole of Buddhism.

[02:06]

That doesn't help us so much. We still have to find some particular entry. Last night I tried to jumble up a Jumble up our usual ideas. Jumble up. Jumble, mix up. Because, you know, maybe I have to do that some more. Partly just to feel where we can, where is there a point where we could come together on this? Because we could say whatever the Buddha is as our starting, the historical Buddha is as our starting point.

[03:18]

He represents some mind space that has continued until today. Continued in various ways and continued in various ways to practice it or realize it. And I've talked about this so much, you know, in the last couple of years especially. I guess we're going to have to review to some extent. But maybe together we could find some new entry point or new way to get a sense of this.

[04:41]

Yeah, not just Our own experience, but a shared sense of it. And last night I said, wasn't it last night, I said a kind of bodily aliveness. Let's start with a bodily aliveness. No, we could have some problem with what does bodily mean, what does aliveness mean. But I'm avoiding the word energy because, well, there's lots of reasons, but energy is one of those big words you can dump all kinds of meanings in and who knows what it means.

[05:49]

So bodily aliveness is liable to be, I think, more a shared sense of what that might be. And of course you have to discover, feel out what, for yourself, in your own inventory of experience, what is bodily aliveness. And of course you have to find out for yourself what physical vitality means to you. And as yesterday in Wenxin I tried to speak about, I did speak about how just starting to practice Zazen without much teaching already is transformative.

[07:01]

In just bringing this posture on a regular basis into our daily life, begins to balance, let's say, the three birth minds, waking, dreaming, non-dreaming, deep sleep? But could these three minds also Overlap or be co-extensive.

[08:02]

Können diese drei Geiste aber in irgendeiner Weise überlappen? Co-extensive means what? It means share the same space. Können sie den gleichen Raum miteinander teilen? Well, not perfectly, but more than they do when consciousness dominates our knowing. You don't know that quite perfectly, but you know it more if the consciousness is not our They can do it better if consciousness doesn't dominate our mind. Or it happens as a territory that seems weird to us and not something that's unique but still familiar. Or it happens to us and feels weird, like weird dreams that don't belong to us.

[09:08]

But instead feels still unique or... Yeah, unique, but still... It's us. It's familiar. Now, one of my points was that it probably takes what I'm calling institutional practice, like sashin and monastic practice, And teaching to create the conditions where these three minds actually become a fourth mind. So in effect, what I'm saying is you generate a new mind, a fourth mind or a wisdom mind.

[10:26]

A mind you're not born with. It's not all there in the beginning. Of course, the possibility is there in the beginning. But that's not the same as it being there. An infinite number of possibilities. We're in our young civilization and young wisdom practice. picking certain things to emphasize. And as I've said, much of teaching is, well, first of all, attention is our most precious resource. Aufmerksamkeit ist unsere kostbarste Quelle oder Fähigkeit.

[11:45]

Treasure? Yeah, it's the source which I have problems with. I didn't say source, I said resource. Okay, that's... Like a treasure. Ressource. Ressource. Yeah. Danke sehr. And what we bring attention to shapes our life. So first of all, we bring attention, as I've said, to attention itself. And then beyond that, what are the fruitful targets of attention? Über das hinaus, was sind denn jetzt diese fruchtbaren Ziele oder Zielscheiben von dieser Aufmerksamkeit? Many targets within those four.

[12:49]

And one is that when you bring attention to your walking, you're bringing attention to the activity of walking. And as an object of experience. That the walking is an object of experience. So we're beginning to articulate the territory, the lived experience. We're articulating our lived experience. So the kind of attention that usually goes in our educational system into how you think, logic and so forth, in Buddhism goes into

[13:52]

how you bring attention to things and what happens when you do. How you live through and transform how you live through attention. How you live through Okay. You should say Christian if you want him to ask. Yeah, he's going to wink when he's not happy. It's okay, because it's attention, we have to... It's so close always, the word with attention and awareness or something like that, that I sometimes get kind of screwed up.

[15:06]

It's okay what I've done. They're content with the word. So can you say the last bit again? Sorry, it's gone. We understand. Tension that you... Anyway, it's not important. Oh, it's extremely important. We'll let it be. It'll come back. Okay. Now, what I mean by activity being an object of attention or an object of experience, I'll try to come back to that. How activity can be an object of attention, I would like to come back to that. Okay.

[16:22]

As I said last night, we have one, and then we have two, and with two we have three, etc. So we have three, I'm calling them birth minds, and through practice, particularly Sashin and monastic practice, we can generate a fourth mind. Which partially is inclusive of the three birth minds. and yet also is a new mind which is different from the three birth minds. This is not a matter of uncovering what's already there, this is generating something new.

[17:26]

If you have the idea you're uncovering what's already there, then this is kind of a theological way of looking at the world. It's all there from the beginning. And there's nothing new. But if there's evolution, there's something new. There's chance, accident, randomness. So as I say in Zen, Buddha is the beginning of our practice, not the end of our practice. Yes. It's the beginning of our practice, not the end of our practice.

[18:29]

So we may, and I say sometimes, we may experience things, and we do experience things the Buddha never experienced. So we are profoundly, thoroughly responsible for this practice. Okay. Now, what Whether we have three minds or four minds, what is the basis for these minds? The body. No body, no three minds, four minds, or ten minds. I have a head. Cut it off and there's no longer an I to have a head.

[19:42]

So maybe we should, whenever we say I, we should say the body says I have a head. So we don't get in the habit of thinking, I is some kind of separate thing from us that's controlling things. Isn't there a game in America that says, Mother, may I? You don't know that. Every time you do something, you say, Mother, may I? Mother, may I take three steps or something? The kids. Somehow that's like the body says, I have a stomachache. I'm okay. Okay, now I'm not trying to create some kind of philosophical system or intellectual system.

[21:13]

I'm trying to create kind of experiential territory that's woven and mixed up. I mean a hillside with all kinds of plants, little plants, big plants and insects. Animals and so forth. It's all woven together and changing. And depending on whether you experience it as a plant or as an insect, it's a different world. And if you have a different mind, you experience... the hillside which you are in a different way.

[22:15]

And if you don't think a different mind is possible, Just remember what it feels like to be in love. It changes everything. Objects, the world looks different. No, but unfortunately it doesn't last. But in the brain, it's different than eroticism or sexuality. You look at neurobiologically. When you look at love neurobiologically, it's not in the same territory of the brain as sex. It's the same territory as hunger, thirst, and things like that.

[23:29]

The sexual part is in the hunger part. No, the love is in that. Sex is in the chocolate part. And it can become deep-seated, hopefully often, attachments. I mention that because this is not necessarily dependent, this experience which we call love, is not necessarily dependent on being in love. It's an experience the body and mind is capable of.

[24:38]

Like you take a walk in the woods. Most of us like to take walks in the woods, and there's nice woods around here. And certainly, taking a walk in the woods affects us. The context we're in changes our feeling, our mind, the speed at which we walk, and so forth. Yeah, no, you can't exactly sit on your zazen cushion and take a walk in the woods. But the experience of taking a walk in the woods can also be It's an experience that you can come to in more circumstances than just the woods.

[26:01]

Okay. Now, I'm saying these things just to open up the territory in some way together of what is experience. Okay, so let me go back to the vimuti magga. There's the vasudhi magga, which is the path of purity. Das ist der Pfad der Reinheit.

[27:06]

Which is a post-canonical work of Buddha Gosha, Theravadan work, written in about the 5th century. He had too many words in there. It's a canonical work, post-canonical work of the Theravadan school, written in, I guess, the 5th century by Buddha Gosha. But 400 years earlier, the Vimuthi Maga was written. Vimuthi Maga, M-A-G-G-A. I always have so much difficulty, and she makes so much fun of me, when I can't pronounce even the great composer Bach's name. So at least I can... Yeah. Pocking up the wrong... Anyway. So anyway, the Vimuti Maga was written in Sri Lanka.

[28:33]

And it's much more a straightforward manual of meditation. And people think probably this was a model for Buddhaghosa's work. And he wrote it. A Sri Lankan monk, they think, wrote it. A Sri Lankan monk wrote the Vimuddhimagga in the first century CE or AD. No, no. In the first century of the Christian era. Now we've got all that straight. And only, as I said, a Chinese translation exists. And an English translation.

[29:47]

Now, it gives breathing instructions. Breathing in. And breathing out. Experience the whole body. Erfahre den ganzen Körper. Experiencing the whole body, breathe in and breathe out. Erfahre den ganzen Körper, atme ein, atme aus. What is experiencing the whole body? Was erfährt, spürt den ganzen Körper? Now, we know there's various definitions of the body. And we know that, as I've mentioned many times, that the etymology of the word body in English is of

[30:55]

brewing that, like for beer or something. Where there's a clear inside-outside distinction and what's going on inside is very different than what's going on outside. Some image of the body Something like this is part of our culture. OK. So the Mudimaga goes on and says, well, then what is the whole body? It says that it's experiencing the body as non-confusion and as an object. And what does it say as non-confusion? I think we could say free from delusion.

[32:22]

The mudimaga, it means the path of freedom or liberation. The sudimaga is the path of purity. Okay, so this is the path of freedom, of liberation. Okay, what is to experience the body free of delusion? It means that on the out-breath and on the in-breath you experience the contact of the breath in the chest or in the nostrils or the tip of the nose.

[33:38]

So you've made the breath, the perception of air arising, an object of attention. An object of attention. And you've made that more specifically an object of attention, where you feel it in your chest or nostrils or wherever you feel it. And to illustrate this, they use an ancient example of somebody sawing wood, doesn't pay attention to the whole blade, he pays attention to where it's touching the wood.

[34:48]

So let's say it's your chest or your nostrils. And you feel some bliss and joy on that point. You've made that an object of attention. And in making that an object of attention, there's a feeling of buoyancy or joy and bliss or ease. points when you have an uplifting feeling.

[36:03]

OK. Okay. And when you experience this bliss and joy on the object of attention, there is no delusion. They must be younger than us. So this is a definition of freedom from delusion.

[37:09]

This is a definition or a prescription for noticing joy and bliss. And it explores a possibility of breathing. Yeah, what you do all the time. Now, I think we ought to take a break. So that's somewhere in between an inhale and an exhale. And the arising of bliss.

[38:10]

So, let's have a break.

[38:12]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_75.96