Well, we took this title or theme of basic basics. And we could have said basic, basic, basics if we want. Let's stick with basic basics. I guess I thought of this for a number of reasons. You know, partly, you know, shoot me for mentioning it, you know, but I'm aware that, you know, that I'm getting older. So it's some sort of return to the basics. I took my daughter, who's 15, and with my wife.

[01:18]

Recently we were in Vermont and Maine for a few days, a week or 10 days, while my daughter looked at schools. So I have a good visual memory and so we went to Biddeford, Maine where I was born. And I drove up this little street unerringly. Like without mistake. Without unerringly, without mistake. And... I drove in in the driveway and I said to Marie-Louise and Sophia, this is the hospital where I was born, Troll Hospital.

[02:24]

Sophia is in the back seat, not paying much attention. And I said, this is the Troll Hospital. And Marie-Louise said, it says Troll Old People's Home. Yeah. So Marie-Louise said, jeez, I can bring you back here. So this is back to basics. What goes around comes around. Okay. Yeah, but what is a basic of practice? It's obviously in Zen, it's sitting practice.

[03:44]

And sometimes I think that's bad news for people, that sitting... I kind of would like to say it's all mental or spiritual or something, and it's not actually also a physiological thing. And if you don't do it, Yeah, there are certainly benefits to practicing, but it's not the same as if you enter into the physiological act of sitting. Yeah, and if you don't sit and continue to sit, the teachings may still be present with you and benefit you, I hope benefit you.

[05:09]

It would be like exercising and only thinking about exercising and not actually exercising. Yes, so I... So all these years I've really wanted to be able to talk about practice without necessarily saying you have to also sit. And in all these years I've always wanted to talk about practice with the feeling that you can talk about practice without actually sitting.

[06:19]

But if I do go back to basics, I'm afraid at this point it's clear in 55 years of practicing that without sitting, practice doesn't evolve. And one of the characteristics of Zen practice is that it evolves through sitting. I mean, if you look at other, as many of you will have done, look at other teachings, Tibetan, Theravadan and so forth? Oh, one thing that characterizes them is they tell you stages.

[07:27]

You do this first and you go through the first jhāni and then you have certain signs indicate and you go through the second jhāni and so forth. But Zen just says, sit down. I say a little bit, like, pay attention to your breathing, maybe count to ten or count to zero. And I've actually had people come to me and say, you know, I stopped practicing Zen after some years because there were no stages. I need some structure. But of course there are stages to Zen practice.

[08:47]

How could there not be stages to Zen practice? But they're not pointed out because we don't want to make the shoe fit. Do you have that expression in German? It's not really the same, no. To make the shoe fit? I'm wondering if we have something else for the glove fit. And you want to have the right prescription of your glasses. Zen might say, well, maybe the Theravadan prescription doesn't fit you and you can't really see through those glasses.

[09:57]

Zen tries to be personal for you in your life and you write your own prescription for seeing. And you may establish a practice that works for you quite well, but it won't evolve, unfortunately, unless you sit fairly regularly. And it's hard for us Westerners, I think, to really get it that body posture makes a difference. Und ich glaube, es ist für uns Westler schwierig, das wirklich zu kapieren, dass die körperliche Haltung einen Unterschied macht.

[11:26]

I mean, we understand it's quite hard to, as I always say, to sleep standing up or sitting up unless you're driving or doing zazen. Ich glaube, wir haben schon ein Verständnis dafür, dass es ziemlich schwierig ist, im Stehen oder im Sitzen zu schlafen, es sei denn, man fährt Auto oder man sitzt zazen. Or your horse. Horses sort of seem to sleep standing up. But we sleep, and the first class in airplanes, business class, knows the difference, and they charge you a lot of extra money so you can lie back in the seat. So the airlines... earn a lot of money knowing that posture makes a difference.

[12:33]

We somehow don't get it that this posture is... What's different than standing up and... But somehow this posture, folded, with folded legs, and I can't even do it very well, makes a different mind, a different body, a different beingness. But for us it's somehow still difficult to really understand. What difference does it make whether I'm standing or sitting here? But just that this posture with folded legs, with folded hands, to sit upright, that really makes a difference. And I can't even do it particularly well. And the popular idea that enlightenment, you know, is sudden and does it all and then you groove.

[13:37]

And enlightenment experience do make a difference. And some of you who haven't had big enlightenment experiences or even modest enlightenment experiences can take some consolation or a lot of consolation in the fact that many times enlightenment experiences are incremental and we can hardly notice them. And those of you who maybe haven't had a huge lighting experience yet, or, let's say, a modest lighting experience, you might be able to... What's it called? And that's really what enlightenment experience is, is a shift in direction. And Dogen says that the first enlightenment experience is your firm decision to practice, because that is a shift in direction that somehow has happened to you.

[15:14]

So if enlightenment is a shift in direction, and if it's a real clear shift in direction, It does change your life. No question. But still, you have to go along the direction that's being pointed. If you don't go along the direction that's being pointed, you don't get anywhere. You've had, all of us have had, years or decades, for most of us, of naming the world. of thinking the world.

[16:27]

And what's that done? It's created neurological pathways in the way you function. Language not only shapes the brain over centuries as a species, language shapes our brain. But also just in our lifetime, it creates pathways, sensorial pathways. And those pathways for realization and wisdom to take hold of your life have to be reformed, restructured, redirected.

[17:58]

Redirected, restructured. You have to go from GPS to BPS. From a global positioning system or something like that to a Buddhist positioning system. Or better, in the sense that Zen really emphasizes finding your direction through the intuitions realizations of sitting itself. We could call it a ZPS, and you can imagine what the Z stands for. Okay. Now, the very act of naming establishes, is the kind of entry into the pathways that have been established culturally and personally.

[19:35]

Let me say something that just popped into my head. I was in Switzerland a while ago for a few weeks, standing at a friend's place. Ich war vor ein paar Wochen gerade in der Schweiz, das ist mir gerade eingefallen, und habe da bei einem Freund von mir übernachtet, dort gewohnt. And I noticed the Swiss are friendly to you in a different way than the Germans are friendly to you. Und da ist mir aufgefallen, dass die Schweizer auf eine andere Art und Weise einem gegenüber freundlich sind, als die Deutschen freundlich sind. It's one of the first things I learned when I moved to Germany. I'm very familiar with living in Japan and Japanese people are friendly to you in a quite different way than German people are friendly to you.

[20:37]

And if you don't get a feel for how, say, Japanese people are friendly to you, the taxis won't stop for you. You just don't raise your arm quite the right way. That would be nowadays true in the countryside, but not in urban cities because they know Europeans and Americans tip. But I realized that Swiss is a tribal culture. And I discovered that because I realized suddenly, it dawned on me, that you can't learn Swiss from books.

[22:04]

You have to be part of the culture by association to learn Swiss because there's no Swiss textbooks. Du musst Teil der Kultur sein und dann durch Assoziation lernen, weil es keine schweizerdeutschen Textbücher oder Sprachbücher gibt. So in Switzerland, they don't feel, oh, this is an outsider, he's not smart. What's wrong with him? He's not smart enough to learn German with me. In Switzerland you don't have this feeling that someone is from the outside. What's wrong with that? Why can't he learn German like me? So when I'm sitting in a restaurant in Switzerland outside in the summer day on a bench or something, and you obviously are not Swiss, we have to be friendly to outsiders.

[23:19]

And when you're in Switzerland, for example, you're sitting on a bench in the summer, and there's the feeling that if someone is obviously not Swiss, then they think, we have to be friendly to the foreigners outside. There's no expectation you should know the language because you couldn't unless you grow up or spend time in Switzerland. And Zen is sort of like that. It's a tribal culture. We develop it through practicing together and the experiences that arise through practice. So now I'm trying to speak to you in ways that those of you who are part of the tribal culture of Zen will understand. And those who are not so located in the tribal culture of Zen.

[24:43]

So to go back to name. Now Theravada Buddhism uses naming against naming. Okay, so Theravada Buddhism, one of their basic practice is to name only and not think about it. Eine der grundlegenden Übungen im Theravada Buddhismus ist, nur zu benennen, ohne darüber nachzudenken. You get in the habit, through naming only, of interrupting the narrative stream itself. Du gewöhnst dir an, indem du nur benennst, den Strom des Narratives, den Strom der eigenen Geschichte zu unterbinden. And it's quite interesting, it's such a simple technique. can be so physiologically even, changing the neurological routing to name only.

[26:03]

So to name only locates you also in a mediasis. So if I'm practicing name only, I say, oh, glass. Or noticing glass. That's a kind of naming. Or bell. Yeah. York. And I don't think about it. I just... She needs to see you, so grown up. Stop. See, there's a physiological process that's taken over her pathways.

[27:05]

And by sitting in this posture of small percentage of the day, 30, 40 minutes, you actually change the physiological pathways. Yeah. Now, what is the effect of naming only, again? This is extremely basic, extremely simple, and you can develop it in meditation practice or satsang practice, and you can also weave it into the details of your daily life.

[28:07]

Yeah, so if you name only, and you don't think about, you're indulging yourself with the sensorial instinct to name things. The habit. And yet you're stopping it at naming. And you then notice how effective that is. Can you stop it at naming? Oh, yes, that's a glass. Oh, nice, it's not plastic, et cetera, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, that can also be a kind of just naming.

[29:26]

But, you know, some hotels give you plastic things you can't even get out of their plastic wrapper. And some hotels give you an actual glass and you can start thinking about, geez, they could have given me a glass. And then you start thinking about your budget and why you can't afford a better hotel and, you know, stuff like that. and then you're in the narrative self-referencing stream so so to not only practice naming only You also notice when it doesn't work.

[30:30]

You notice what kind of time of day, what kind of mind, what kind of mood. You can actually name only for a while without getting caught up in the self-referencing narrative strings. And you can also then notice how many how many times you have to name only or how long a time of naming only begins to locate you in immediacy itself. Because the trick here is you want to locate yourself in immediacy as your experience of continuity and not in your narrative stream.

[32:05]

There's not much development or evolution of practice if most of the time your established continuity is your narrative stream. Yeah, and so the real trick, if we want to look at a kind of big overview... I must have been looking at maps to... I mean, computers too much. I'm not part of any... social network or anything, but I sometimes look at Google Maps and I was just going to say, like a Google Map view of Hamburg,

[33:13]

Wenn wir mal so eine übergeordnete Übersicht bekommen wollen, und vielleicht habe ich mich in letzter Zeit zu viel mit dem Internet und Computer beschäftigt, obwohl ich bin nicht Teil von irgendwelchen sozialen Netzwerken, aber es ist so, wie wenn du auf eine Google-Landkarte schaust, sagen wir mal eine globale Karte, in der du Hamburg teilst, von der Hamburg ein Teil ist. So if you want to look from some distance at all Buddhist practice, practice, not the teachings, etc., but actual practice, You said not the teachings, but just the practice? Yes, the actual practice. All the practices turn on shifting your potential stream out of self-referencing consciousness.

[34:24]

I mean, the fact is we need an experience of continuity. Es ist eine Tatsache, dass wir eine Erfahrung von Kontinuität brauchen. Okay, but that experience of continuity that we need, or we feel crazy or lost, etc. Aber diese Erfahrung von Kontinuität, die wir brauchen, weil wir uns ansonsten verrückt oder verirrt, verloren fühlen würden, doesn't have to be a self-referencing strength. Some people can hardly believe that. And they clearly have not had any enlightenment experiences, incremental or otherwise. Because we don't know the world through our self-referencing stream.

[35:33]

But we know our location in the world. And we can't imagine there's another location. Now, when the 9-11 happened in New York, so many people had spoken to me who were there at the time the Twin Towers going down. A huge event. I mean, this was like one of the biggest events ever. It made many people feel outside their self-referencing street. They felt connected to other people and in the world in a fresh new way.

[36:42]

And it was a kind of delicious feeling caused by a horrible, horrible event. And people reported that they suddenly felt incredibly connected to the other people and perceived the world as something completely new. And that this was even a pretty disgusting feeling that was triggered by a very terrible experience. And I've even, I've heard soldiers speak about this. Their time in the military was a time of an intimacy that was new, that was never recovered in their daily life. But what Buddhism would say is, let's use wisdom and not some huge storm or a terrible event to shift us out of our self-referencing.

[38:10]

And shift us into immediacy. Because the sensorial experience of immediacy is actually where you're living. weil die sinnliche Erfahrung der Unmittelbarkeit tatsächlich der Ort ist, in dem du lebst, an dem du lebst. And if you can shift your feeling of where you're located into the intentional stream, the intentional stream that's possible in immediacy, this is actually something like realization. Und wenn du dein Gefühl davon, wo du verortet bist... You know, I'm very right-handed.

[39:12]

It seems like there's more left-handed people than the average in the population who practice Zen. But anyway, I can't bring, I could never really throw a ball with my right hand. My left hand. If I did, I'd probably hit one of you with it. So my attentional functioning flows into my right arm, doesn't really flow into my left arm in the same way.

[40:15]

And it's as, maybe practicing Zen is like as hard as to throw, to move your attentional stream into your opposite arm. All of practice, real practice, is how to shift your attentional stream into immediacy. Okay, so let's have a break and then after the break I'll try to talk about anything you want to talk about but also how we can shift our attentional stream out of self-referencing consciousness into sensorial immediacy.

[41:30]

Because all the beginning practices and all the advanced practices are about making this shift and developing this shift. I hope I've made a slight introduction to the Zen tribe. I hope I can give a mild or a light introduction to the Buddhist or Zen tribes.

[42:31]

Okay.

[42:32]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_76.55