Good morning again. If I have it straight, this is the last day show. So goodbye. Peter saying, sweetheart, this lovely day has flown away. That was from when I was in eighth grade. Yeah. He doesn't care when I was in eighth grade. He wasn't even born. The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell us. The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell us. We must get up and take that in. Einnehmen.

[01:12]

Aufnehmen. We must get up and take that in. Wir müssen aufstehen und das aufnehmen. The wind that gives us life. Der Wind, der uns Leben gibt. Breathe before it's gone. Atme, bevor es vorüber ist. Don't go back to sleep. People are already going back and forth across the door sills. People don't go back to sleep. People are already going back and forth across the door sills. Where the two worlds touch. The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell us. You must ask what you really want.

[02:23]

You must ask what you really want. That, of course, is a poem of Rumi, not me. But I think it... captures the implicit teaching of this week. We've been immersed For almost a week. In practice. And I think it even has a timeless feeling. Yeah, but what have we been doing? In this basic teachings and practices of Zen.

[03:42]

You've noticed that I haven't spoken about the five skandhas, the six paramitas, the eightfold path, the fifteen blah blah. No. Yeah, why not? I don't know. I mean, that's what I was led to do by you, Amir, by me or something. It was a kind of calm tornado that said... Let's just speak about the life we are given. And the world we are given. So... So I haven't emphasized analytic teachings, teachings that arise through analysis.

[04:56]

But rather I've tried to emphasize, I've discovered, I've noticed, I've tried to emphasize teachings that are just... part of the life we're given. Yeah, that are just open to awareness. But then we have to ask, what is this open awareness? And there's, yeah, we could even say there's a kind of hermeneutic hermeneutics of open awareness. Okay. In other words, there's open awareness. Just part of the life we are given. But unless you look carefully... Let yourself into this open awareness.

[06:09]

You don't notice or you don't discover what happens, for example. When you not only discover bring attention to things, but you bring attention to attention itself. That's given to us. I mean, there's no difficulty. You don't have to study Buddhism or know any special anything to bring attention to attention. But I think it takes the sensitivity and the power Of noticing what happens when you bring attention to things.

[07:14]

And how that begins to form your life. Yeah. I have a friend who is a well-known popular singer in the United States. And somehow it just occurred to her, she says, when she was three years old. I want to be a singer, or will be a singer. Her family sang a lot and stuff, and she decided, well, I'm going to be a singer. And everything she did the rest of her life kind of fell into that, fell, came out from that intention. So she noticed at some point what happens when you bring attention She became a singer.

[08:20]

And she doesn't particularly like being a popular singer or she doesn't like performing. But she loves singing so much, everyone asks her to sing. And she has to struggle with touring and performing. So you can on your own notice the power of attention. I read somewhere that when you measure the energy of dogs and cats.

[09:24]

How much energy have you got? My cat's got a lot of energy, more than me, it seems. But only about five or six percent supposedly goes to the brain. And in monkeys, about 9% goes to the brain. And in us, supposedly hairless monkeys, but we actually have more hair, 20 percent goes to them. Twenty. Who knows? Twenty-three point seven. But there is something to it in the sense that I think one of the things that practice does, I hope anyway, is to take us out of the brain, out of the activity of mentation primarily.

[10:29]

into the systemic intelligence of body and phenomena. One thing I've noticed, I mentioned it once when I found myself in a herd of deer, But I've noticed it. Quite often this last practice period. If I'm walking up to the log house where I live. If I'm just, you know, kind of nice little walk through a little bit of forest. And it's all uphill. So I'm walking along. If I... Just walking along, concentrating on my breathing.

[11:45]

Not even thinking about concentrating on my breathing, actually. Just walking along is breathing and walking. With virtually no thinking. I find I... Quite a number of times, suddenly there's deer right beside me. They look at me, and I look at them, and they've got bigger eyes than me. But I still look at them. A little jealous of their big eyes. And yeah, so I walk on and they just stay there nibbling at this and that. But I've discovered if I'm thinking as I walk up the hill, By the time I get near the deer, they're already moving off.

[12:59]

This is not a very scientific example. But it certainly keeps being reinforced that somehow animals... I don't know if I... I wonder if I was a vet. If I could use the opportunity to notice how my state of mind relates to the animals I would have to treat. Okay, so again I'm speaking about the life we're given. Yeah. The practice of the life we're given.

[14:00]

In the world as it is. Is as it is. Now, it doesn't mean we can't change things, but that's one basic attitude. It is as it is. Sukhiroshi said somewhere, you don't have to concentrate on things, you just have to be ready to concentrate. Suzuki Roshi has said, you don't have to concentrate on the things, you have to be ready to concentrate on the things. And that's rather different. The feeling of being ready to concentrate. On what? On just the life we are given. So I've spoken about, again, attention to the spine.

[15:15]

No, that's part of the life we're given. We just have these two ingredients, the breath. attention, spine, three ingredients, we can bring them together. It's a kind of primordial practice. And Zen wants to be a primordial practice. At base Zen wants to be a nothing added practice. Just the ingredients we're born with, discover in our living. Well, of course, to really practice Buddhism fully, It's really wonderful to bring that primordial awareness to the sutras.

[16:26]

And if you do do that, you see that ultimately or basically the sutras also arise from primordial awareness. And then with that feeling, you can feel like you could write the sutras yourself. And as I've often mentioned, Dogen says, don't let the sutras turn you, you turn the sutras. Now, primordial, I said earlier that ordinary, ordinary life, ordinary order means to weave.

[17:47]

And primordial, das ist sowas wie vor... Vorbewusstsein. Das bedeutet die Dinge zusammenweben. And primordial means the first weaving. Und primordial... Again, it's amazing how much wisdom is in words. Because we take primordial to mean very early, long time ago, basic. Weil wir eben das verstehen als eine lange Zeit vorher als Grundlage. But the word tells us it's not just way back there in the beginning. It's when things first interconnected. Und das Wort sagt uns, es ist nicht nur weit da zurück, sondern es ist, wenn die Dinge zum ersten Mal sich verbinden. And in that sense, primordial can be now. Und in diesem Sinne kann das eben jetzt heißen.

[18:50]

What are the first... Connections. You connect breath to the spine. You connect attention to the breath. Yeah, the breeze at dawn has secrets to tell us. You know, the word aura, the aura of something, means the breeze, a gentle breeze that surrounds things. Yeah. And the first koan of Shoyoroku starts with breathing, the breeze, the loom, etc. And aura is also, the etymology also is breath.

[19:58]

And so the breeze at dawn has secrets to tell us. We must get up and take that in. The wind, the breeze, the aura that gives us life. Breathe before it's gone. Yeah. Each breath before it's gone. And, you know, in Zen, one of the, unique things to Zen is this practice of the Enso, the circle. And this is a part of trying to emphasize a primordial awareness or primordial practice.

[21:09]

Yeah. And some people, their practice or part of their practice is every morning they... get a brush and make a circle. I knew someone else, a person in the United States, in San Francisco. Every morning his practice was to paint the sky. And so he had little sort of canvas squares. And whatever the sky was, he'd paint it. Well, San Francisco, it's often foggy. So there's days and days of his little cardboard canvas things, which are just kind of gray. But he got extremely skillful at making subtle modulations within the gray that almost became like space.

[22:23]

I know this because I had him paint my ceiling in San Francisco. I noticed that because he painted the ceiling for me in San Francisco. Victorian times, eh? painted ceilings and so I thought we have this Victorian house or apartment there. So we painted the ceiling with this guy. But he was wonderfully good at painting the sky. You can understand why. That's not so different from the impulse The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell us. Ivan Illich told me once that Greek and Etruscan cities, when they founded a city, they where they wanted the city to be located, they plowed a circle, a furrow.

[23:50]

And then, if they could, they plowed all the way around what they thought would be the site of the city. And they thought of it as a kind of marriage. Where two worlds met, where two worlds touched. In Kyoto, I know, and I think in general in Japan, the idea was you, if possible, founded a city where there's a watershed. Makes sense. Once they founded Kyoto, in this watershed, they made a big square platform.

[24:52]

where the watershed, if it turned into some kind of anthroposophical, anthropomorphic deity, it would have this square to come down and dance in. wo diese Wasserscheide sich verwandelt hat in eine anthroposophische Gottheit, die dort hinkam zum Tanzen. Yeah, and they would do very slow dances there to sort of imitate or call forth the watershed as a personification. This is also some kind of looking in some depth at primordial awareness. We're going to make a city here. We're going to make a circle.

[26:17]

And you can see that in much of what we do, there's that circle, that Enso is in going up to the altar and back. We make a circle. We make a circle the way we hit the bell. And many teachings are in the implicitly are rooted in the idea of a circle. And part of this sense of an Enso is that you feel the world in a circle. This primordial awareness is then conceptualized as a circle. dieses vorgewahrsein ist im konzept ein kreis and uh you know there's a little call on uh

[27:33]

encounter that I've mentioned to you. Feng Shui goes to see Nan Yuan. Feng Shui goes to see Nan Yuan. And when he comes in the room, Nan Yuan says, you should deal with the host. And Feng Shui says, please make a definite distinction. Please, teacher, make a definite distinction. Well, Nanyuan did not mean, I'm the host and you're the guest, so please respect me. He meant something more like, when you step into a room, respect the primordial awareness. The awareness or space before anything is in it. Yeah, and he also meant, if you come to see me, I want to feel you come to see me with a respect for this person.

[29:01]

circle of awareness. So another way to say it is to have a sense of the field of mind as the basis of mind. I suppose we could say the basis of identification. And not the identification with the contents of mind. No, we've been speaking about practices related to that this week. But now I'm saying, this is just part of the life we're given. The mind, as Sukhiroshi says, that's always with us.

[30:11]

The mind that's always with us is emphasizing primordial consciousness. or open awareness. And one way to kind of actuate that is to feel each situation as a kind of circle. So again, when I come in to give the lecture, Nochmal, wenn ich also hier reinkomme, um einen Vortrag zu halten. And already you've been going across the door sill where the two worlds touch. Und ihr seid bereits über diese Türschwelle gegangen, an der sich die beiden Welten treffen. And I enter the room. Und ich betrete den Raum.

[31:12]

I feel a circle you've already made sitting here. Dann fühle ich einen Zirkel, den ihr bereits macht, indem ihr hier sitzt. And it's a little scary. You know, I have to walk very carefully. I don't know if I want to step into the circle. And if I do, I have to give a lecture. I think maybe I'll go the other way. But, you know, I come in and I step in the circle to see what it feels like, like into a pond or something. And I step in rather gently not to disturb it. And then after I get a few steps into it, I let myself become part of it. And then I bow and I ask the Buddhas to join the circle.

[32:25]

And I sit down here and hope they help me. Or hope you help me. What to say in this last day? So if I just... Excuse me a moment. If I just try to... Thank you. Hello. If I just try to think about

[33:26]

What kinds of awareness have we emphasized? One is attention. One is attention to attention, attentional awareness. Yes. and one we could say is sameness, sameness, is that on each object of perception, Each object is characterized by mind. So there's a kind of sameness. Each of you is different, but... In my knowing of you, there's a quality of sameness too, because each of you are known through my mind and senses.

[34:35]

And that's not just... Das ist nicht nur eine Idee. Wenn du anfängst so zu fühlen und die Welt so zu bemerken, dann erscheint alles in dieser Gleichheit. which is experienced as everything arising in familiarity, arising in familiarity makes us feel at home. So you know when one of the signs of this practice maturing When you start to just feel in every circumstance at home, and feeling at home, there's a kind of ease.

[35:50]

At home, I can relax. So there's a kind of, let's call it now, I'm using the word first weaving or primordial ease. A kind of primordial relaxation. And that's related also to the kind of awareness that arises through zazen. Which is the awareness that arises through bodily stillness. Discovering bodily stillness.

[36:53]

But bodily stillness is part of the life we're given if you decide to discover noticing it. And then there's the vividness and clarity that arises, I can say, in the context of this week is through the mind of no other location. The mind of no other location is is the life we're given. You're born in this century.

[37:54]

or last century, or you know, you're born. In this particular historical time. And in a particular country, in town, with particular parents. And at the moment you're born, there is no other location. If there's another location, you'd be twins. And when you die? Isn't it wonderful that I can tell you there will be no other location? What about discovering no other location in between birth and death? It's part of the life. It is the life we're given. If we notice it. And when we notice it really everything becomes bright and precise and clear.

[39:17]

bright, precise, and clear. This is also the world we're given, which is waiting for this preciseness and clarity. As I said last weekend, it shimmers in the field of mind. When you identify with the field of mind and not the contents of mind. And then I don't know, I can't probably name all the kinds of open awareness or given awarenesses that we might.

[40:27]

But another is the world as display. And the play of display is not the same play as play. Again, please. The play. Of display is not the same word in English as play. The play of display is like ply to fold, to unfold. Entfalten. Entfalten.

[41:27]

And the dis is to scatter or spread out. Und dis, das heißt übrigens, das heißt dann auffalten. And it feels like that. It's like things are just spread out, scattered, playfully. Und so fühlt sich das auch an. Spielerisch entfalten sich die Dinge. Unfold. Entfalten. Ah ja. And that's a mind of awareness, a kind of awareness in contrast to sameness. So here it's a display of difference, of possibility. And we can have an open awareness that lets the display of the world inform us. And I think that's enough. We have one discussion left of this afternoon. And maybe some of you have some feeling for

[42:29]

a sense of awareness or openness that is, for you, part of the life you're given. How do we... practice the life we are given. Nothing special, just what's given. The open awareness that opens us to, enriches us through the world as it's given to us. So again, the breeze at dawn has secrets to tell us. We must get up and let it in. Take it in. The wind that gives us life Breathe before it's gone.

[44:07]

Don't go back to sleep. People are already going back and forth across the door sills. Where the two worlds touch. Don't go back to sleep. The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell us. You must ask what you really want. Thank you very much.

[44:36]

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