Good afternoon, everyone. You know, for one lifetime I've been doing this a pretty long time. And yet it seems like I'm always doing it for the first time. I don't mean that that's because good practice is doing everything, yes, etc., beginner's mind. I don't mean that. Yeah, I mean that there's such, for me anyway, such depth and enfoldedness to this practice that it always seems like the first time. I mean, for me it is... Life itself.

[01:05]

Or maybe I could say it's a path through life itself. And it's a path that gathers life itself. Gathers, reveals, opens up life itself. And I'm very happy, deeply grateful to be able to do it, practice with you. No. I think this is the next to last day. Maybe tomorrow is the last day. Isn't that right? Tomorrow. Okay. So I think you understood probably well, feels like you understood well the idea of an activity stream.

[02:10]

A concept and practice formed activity stream. And I think that's a useful concept in itself. to feel our way in our own life. I don't think it's a concept which limits our experience, but rather a concept which gives us the gift of experience. Yeah, and I think with a sense of that you can feel your own culture. And hence then you can feel how the stream of practice flows, meanders across the stream of your own culture.

[03:24]

And I think with such a concept you can, with such a feel, a concept, you can, yeah, understand what the Diamond Sutra is talking about better. So again, what I mean, if you took... Well, a concept and practice formed stream of activity. So, if you took the ingredients, I'm sorry to go back to Japanese cooking and all that stuff. But it was fun. It was. And today, they were the easiest to pick up cucumbers I've ever had. I'm glad to see there's small influences.

[04:40]

Cucumbers cut parallel. Yeah. I tried to squirt a few, but I couldn't. So if we took any kind of the ingredients, the edible ingredients of the world, and we put them in this attention stream with the gate of the narrow gate of the chopsticks and you add the concepts of mostly the food the emphasis is on Mixing the food in the eating and not in the cooking.

[05:47]

Yeah, so it's presented and presented in a way that you can eat it immediately. You don't have to cut it, stuff like that usually. Now, if we take this concept of the emphasis on eating that is mixed in the eating, Which is an observation of Suzuki Roshi. His other observation, two other observations, where one was that Japanese cuisine is built around a home food.

[06:49]

Now, the staple food in most of Asia is rice. The staple food, the basic staples of wheat. So the staple is rice. But it's its concept as a home food that shapes the cuisine, not its presence as a staple. In other words, every meal you should have an interplay of difference of familiarity. And so rice should always be present in various ways in the meal. Now, we followed that in here. we would have rice in every meal.

[08:02]

If we did it the way the Japanese do it, there'd be rice three times a day. When I was a kid, it was potatoes. We would always have meat, potatoes, and vegetables. Yeah, but The meat could be various meats or it could be chicken or fish or something. And the vegetable could be various vegetables, but in the middle was always potatoes. Spuds. It's a name for potatoes. And in earlier Zen centers, I tried to get the kitchen to develop potatoes with gnocchi and things like that, but it didn't work. I couldn't make substitute potatoes for rice in our cuisine. That's one reason we have mashed potatoes. Anyway, because I like them too. Okay. Okay.

[09:19]

The third concept is that the eating is done with two hands. The third observation of Sukhiroshi. If you add that it should be done with two hands so the bowls don't have, cups don't have handles and things. So if you took any kind of edible ingredients, put them into this activity and concept stream, home food, mixing it, etc., you'd end up with Japanese food. Okay, so if you have a particular activity, concept, and let's call the chopsticks a practice, the mixing and the eating a concept. So if you have a concept and practice... defined activity stream.

[10:36]

Those concepts and practices will form the outcome. So if you plug in feed into the stream. You can think of it as a kind of electrical conduit, you know, a wire or something. Feed into this stream. A concept like permanence. or entities, it's going to shape all your worldview. All your activity, attention, will flow into implicit entities.

[11:38]

If you put in the continuous creative presence of God, That concept will form how you attend to the world. Okay, so Buddhism would say, as practice, we're talking about rather advanced practice. Which you're all actually involved in. I mean, there is a real difference between how we can practice with together from when I started in 61 or 60 That's 1960.

[12:41]

Or the way we practice here now since, what, 20 years? I've been practicing in Europe since 1983. There's a real visible change in what I can talk about. And it's interesting because Because there are so many senior people who have been practicing, some, Gerald, and since 1983 we've been together, right? So when you have enough people practicing together, the new people very quickly catch on. So, I would say, the practices I'm speaking about now, is to notice that you are in a concept and practice formed activity stream.

[13:45]

Now that's already a step in advance of entity thinking. Okay. So now, a number of you have spoken to me already in Doksan about this sense of really, let's call it not just habit energy, but habit entities. When you look at something, you're noticing the activity. Trying to practice this mindfulness of noticing activity. But in the stream of this noticing, entities keep forming and blocking the stream.

[15:14]

As someone said, you notice the activity of a bird and the entity of a bird keeps appearing in the activity of the bird. This is exactly what practice is about. You want to turn on the TV? You use the impulse to turn on the TV to direct that attention into your activity. So, you turn the... You notice... that in the midst of noticing activity, you have an entity formation. And that gives you a useful shift. You can feel the entity and you can shift back to the activity. And you can use the appearance of entities in the stream to strengthen

[16:34]

the attention to the activity. So this shift then, noticing this shift is practice. And you don't want to do without entities entirely. As I said to someone else, if you're driving along the highway, you want to remember the tree's an entity. Or you'll become part of the activity of the tree. Yeah. So you want a little entity formation in the activity stream so you can negotiate your driving. But driving is, you know, the way we drive is really we're immersed in an activity stream.

[17:52]

We know this and that, but... I could say we enter through particulars. The sensuous massage of the particulars. Okay. Now, if you put impermanence into this the concept of impermanence or the absence of permanence into this stream. This has a different effect than if you put the concept of permanence into the stream. Okay. So let's go back to the bird.

[19:11]

Noticing the activity and noticing the concept of the bird. So what do you have here? You have the activity stream shaped by or even stopped by concepts and practices. In Buddhism we wouldn't call it a path if you're jumping from stone to stone, from entity to entity. We would not call it a path. You're noticing the steps and not the path. Okay, so if you're just able to watch... Pay attention to emphasize the activity of the bird.

[20:33]

Until that's more and more your habit. It just becomes the stronger habit than the... entity formation. And you're changing your habit in this kind of practice. Habitation, where you live. So you inhabit the activity stream more than you inhabit the appearance of entities. Now, instead of having a concept and practice formed activity stream, attention stream, now instead of having a concept and practice formed attention stream, activity attention stream, now you have a non-conceptual and practice formed activity stream.

[21:43]

And now we're back to the Dhyana Sutra. No concept of a self. No concept of a soul. No concept of a lifespan. Doesn't mean we don't have a lifespan. We function, we have the function of a self. But it means that realization is this flow of a non-conceptual life. attention, activity-attention stream. So this is a new Buddhist term. Now it sounds in German. It sounds okay. A non-conceptual attention-activity stream. Ein nicht durch Vorstellung gebetetes... That sounded okay.

[23:10]

Ein nicht durch Vorstellung gebetetes Aufmerksamkeitsaktivitätsstrom. If you take that... As an intention or a sense of the path. In your life. Again, in English we'd say a non-conceptual. You're kind of like letting go of the entity formation. You see them form and you don't emphasize them. Im Englischen würden wir sagen, non-conceptive, also frei von Vorstellungen. Man sieht die Dinge und lässt sie. And you try to bring attention now and then, when you can, to activity. Man bringt hin und wieder, wenn man kann, wenn es möglich ist, Aufmerksamkeit zur Aktivität. It can be the activity of breath, breathing. It can be the activity of breathing. A bird? Activity of gardening?

[24:10]

Digging out of that stump? Cutting horizontally. If you practice that. you begin to reform the mind. Now, let's look at the introduction to the case 55 of the Heikki Ganroku, the Blue Cliff Records. And if we call the case the disease, Or the problem.

[25:21]

Then the medicine or the prescription is very often the introduction. So the introduction starts out with secure and stable in the whole of reality. Now, let's take this seriously. Can you imagine? Let's imagine that. Secure and stable in the whole of reality. Actuality. I know some of you already have quite a strong feeling and experience of that. An imperturbable, yeah, something close to an imperturbable, the presence of an imperturbable mind. Mm-hmm. able to enter the flow, realization occurs here.

[26:40]

Able to enter the flow and turn things around. and thus assuming responsibility, you've entered in, you not only have this stable, secure feeling of the whole of reality, but you're also intimate with the flow. And here we mean this, in this case, non-conceptual activity stream, attention stream, which now you understand. and experientially you can feel it when entities form in the activity stream.

[27:47]

By feeling the concepts in the attention stream. It gives you a feel for the non-conceptual activity stream. So able to turn things around. Directly responsibility is assumed. Directly responsibility is assumed. This means you are in the midst of life and you... in a fullness which allows you to take responsibility for what you're doing.

[28:48]

And how we actually exist. How we are formed through how everything actually exists. And not through superstitions and delusions. And in that we feel we've entered into a responsible life. Then there's a part of the introduction which says, you know, Cutting off attachments in a lightning flash.

[29:56]

A tiring mile-high cliff. Riding the tiger's head and holding his tail. I don't know all that stuff. And the introduction says, let's put that aside for now. So I agree, let's put that aside for now. That's a different level of the koan. And it says, taking this responsibility... Can you let out a path for others? This is the Diamond Sutra again. How does a son and daughter of good family set forth on the path? Well, they form a non-conceptual attention stream.

[30:59]

And this sounds like a contradiction. And they bring into that the concept In whatever realm beings might be conceived of existing. So your attention stream is now flowing through and around in whatever realm beings might be conceived of How alive everything becomes. And with form or without form. Hey, that's like Conception stream and non-conception stream.

[32:13]

With perception or without perception or with neither. Mit Wahrnehmung, ohne Wahrnehmung, oder ohne beides? So we have the... Hey, doesn't this sound like form and emptiness? Heißt das nicht, Form und Leerheit? The actual practice of form and emptiness. Das heißt, die tatsächliche Praxis von Form und Leerheit? The conceptual stream and the non-conceptual stream braiding around. Und ein Vorstellungsstrom und ein Nichtvorstellungsstrom, die sich sozusagen umwinden... Now, some of you have the experience, I think we all have the experience maybe, yeah, well, of course, bringing attention to breathing. And as you know, the question that really gives power to this, why is something that's so easy to do for a short time so difficult to do continuously?

[33:30]

But after a while, you can do it pretty continuously. I've answered that question too many times, so I won't answer it today. But we do get so that our attention rests in our breathing more and more. So at first, before we start practicing, mostly our breathing is autonomic. It's just going along. We don't notice it. And then somebody tells you, hey, you want to practice Buddhism, you have to pay attention to your breath. So you give it a shot. And then you're interfering with your breath.

[34:35]

Your breath was sort of natural before, no problem, and now... You're interfering with it. But your breath went along and supported emotions, fear, anxiety, anger. And by noticing the breath, you begin to create this other space where you kind of peel the breath away from the emotions. And the breath becomes the instance, the opportunity for this stable, secure mind to find its own space. But still there's some sort of little wrestling match going on between the breath and the tension.

[35:46]

You put your hand in a stream and the stream keeps bouncing around the hand. The hand is your attention. And you can direct the stream various ways. Then the stream gets a little irritated. And it suddenly gets a big bunch of water and just pushes it down and pushes your hand right away. And the breath is more fundamental than your attention and it takes over. But at some point, breathing, breath, attention just rides the current of the breath. And we have this experience, which I started to say, many of you have had.

[36:51]

Breathing begins to breathe itself. It's not the same as breath when it was just autonomic. Und es ist nicht dasselbe, als der Atem noch ganz autonom war. Und es hat jetzt auch Aufmerksamkeit, beziehungsweise Gewahrsein ist Teil davon. Aber der Beobachter der Aufmerksamkeit verschwindet. And breathing walks itself, breathing breathes itself. Okay. This is actually quite an important step in practice. The collapse of the observer. But at some point also, this has a wider sense in your practice. Walking begins to walk itself.

[38:03]

All your activities begin to... do itself, do themselves. Your thinking begins to think itself. And we call this actually non-thinking. Now let's just try to keep this within the range of graspable experience walking walks itself when you shift from into walking walks itself Everything does itself.

[39:08]

This is what would be called intimate with the whole of reality. It's almost like space changes its viscosity. Space changes its viscosity. And a continuous path is opening up that you can feel and others can feel. And it's... It gathers the world into the path. Yeah, so that's a kind of brief commentary on the introduction to this case, this Blue Cliff Records case.

[40:17]

In relationship to the Diamond Sutra setting forth on the path. Yeah, and there's other things I wanted to speak about, but probably your legs are saying no. Okay, thank you for...

[40:39]

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