I might never have believed if 50 years ago or so I'd thought and told or something that we'd be in Germany chanting this little chant in Japanese and then in German. I mean, in Japan they only chant it in Japanese. I don't know why we keep doing it. Maybe because there hasn't been a rebellion yet. But also, you know, I sort of like it. Maybe we all sort of like it. It certainly reminds us that this is a translation, first of all a translation, What I'm speaking is a translation too.

[01:09]

My experience, etc. But it's a translation and it also makes clear that it's bigger than our culture and doesn't just belong to our own culture. But it is a translation that also shows that the whole thing is greater than our own culture and that it is not only within our culture. But it belongs to two cultures and many more cultures. And yet it is something that we cultivate within ourselves and with each other. I got a letter from a professor, email actually, the other day. His graduate student wants to, you know, etc. He sounds like a nice guy. And he says, you know, the assumption is that Zen is a new phase in America and the West, etc.

[02:27]

New phase, phase, new stage, PH. New face, too. Big noses. You know, when the Japanese, when we imitate Asians, you know, we go like this, right? You know what they do? They go like this. When they imitate us, they say... But I don't think what we're doing is so different. I mean, I'm definitely not teaching Japanese Buddhism exactly.

[03:38]

Because I'm teaching, I'm practicing Japanese Buddhism maybe, but I'm teaching within the paradigms of the West. So I think we're practicing very traditional, really Chinese Buddhism within the paradigms of the West. And as I said in this session somehow, I want to examine with you the sense of self. And I think we have to examine the sense of self before we can even begin to talk about in a real practice way what it means to be free of self.

[04:46]

So what I want to get to, which I haven't gotten to yet, is for us to examine, notice the Unity of experience and the continuity of experience. So I'll say this so you can maybe notice it when you notice it. Because at each moment there's a unity to our experience. And that gives us a sense of self. And there's also a continuity of our experience.

[05:52]

We remember who we were last week and we think about who we will be next week. Now, isn't that unity of experience, which we have to have, we can't function without it, and that continuity of experience, isn't that sufficient to say there is a self? And even if it's not sufficient to say there is a self, isn't it so darn convincing that you don't care about whether there's no self? Because it's extremely convincing. And for most of us, maybe we practice a certain degree of freedom from self-referential thinking.

[07:03]

But all our basic personal and psychological behavior, clearly we assume deep down there's a self. I'm selfless, you jerk. Idiot? Yes. You idiot? I'm selfless. This is really selfless. Then also I mentioned yesterday the sense of An observing mind. And the sense of a decider. And the decider gives us the sense that what we decide about belongs to us. Every time you decide something, you separate a little chunk of the world out and say, it belongs to me.

[08:17]

I decided to take this subway. This is my subway. So we get, you know, and then there's a unity of experience with the experience that the decider is shared by the observer. Do you know what I'm talking about? Anyway, go ahead. So the sense that the decider has that parts of the world belong to him or her is then shared by the observer. Do you know the word protagonist?

[09:25]

Yeah. Okay. It's the same word. It's the same word? Yeah. Do you know the word deuterogonist? No. Testing her. That doesn't exist. Good thing I said no. No one knows the word deuterogonist. But it's a real word. It means the second most important. Deut is two. Deuce. It means the second most important. The protagonist is the main person. The deuterogonist is the second person. Okay. You passed the test anyway. Good. I can't even remember the word. Deuterogonist. It's like protagonist, but it's D-E-U, deuterogonist. Anyway, in a way, the decider is the protagonist.

[10:40]

And the observer is the deuterogonist. He's the second most important. He, she, it, the field of mind is the other part of the activity. Now, the problem I've been having, the problem or whatever, you know, the problems produce the teishos. The problems I've been having, except it's hard to call them problems because the problems produces the teisho. If I had no problems, I'd know teisho. Right. Now the problem I've been having is how to talk about this in the way I think would be effective. Also die Schwierigkeit, die ich hatte, besteht darin, wie ich darüber so sprechen könnte, dass es effektiv ist, wirksam ist.

[11:56]

Und dann habe ich aber herausgefunden, dass wir zunächst einen kleinen Kurs in Sachen Buddhismus brauchen. Zumindest so, bis ich spüre, dass ich so ein Territorium habe, in dem ich darüber sprechen kann. Now, it's usually assumed, it's been assumed by mainstream Western science anyway. But the brain is pretty much hardwired. Hardwired? Hardwired? Not hardware, hardwired. How do you say that in German? Good question.

[12:57]

You mean wired through neurons, right? Hardwired means it's fixed. You've got a wire attached to this and a wire attached to that. Okay. And when I went to college, people just assumed that human nature has always been the same and every culture really has the same human nature as, you know, For some reason I thought this idea was nuts, but because no one else agreed with me, I thought I must be nuts. Nuts? Yeah, okay. Yeah, you mean you're crazy in German the same way you're crazy in English? Nuts means crazy, yeah, okay. Okay. Good to know. Um... So, you know, it's sort of assumed that the brain is the essence.

[14:21]

And, you know, if the nose smells, you can't change the way the nose smells. And the elbow doesn't smell. And the brain is, you know, the way it is. But, of course, now most of you would know that recently there's this whole new understanding of neuroplasticity, the plasticity of the brain. Maybe the skin does smell in some way. And maybe if we change the input, we actually change the soft wiring of the brain. We can probably just say hardwired and softwired, right?

[15:28]

Now, mindfulness assumes the brain is softwired. If we say the brain is hardwired for quick response in situations, Yeah, I mean, you need it. And every day, you know, walking down the street in Freiburg, if you can't jump out of the way of bicycles, you're in trouble. Yeah, competitive sports, everything, much of our life requires this.

[16:29]

quick response. Yeah, and my... My point is that this can be changed. And the reason I brought up yesterday and the day before the manga and Butoh dance, etc., One person said that they had trouble studying something like Bhutto dance at some point when they were asked to dance like a pillow. Or be a pillow. But I think sometimes it's good to be a turtle in Zazen. And your head is in the shell. I feel like that's in a big shell here in Zazen. And my hands, my arms are kind of loosely hanging out of the shell.

[17:57]

It's all dark in here. That's how I meditate. So, in this shell, you know, it's quite interesting, it can be quite big. And my whole body sense can be quite different. So, the eight vijnanas, Let's imagine them as if they were an hourglass. Okay, so you have this basic teaching that you have eye, visual, the sense of vision.

[19:04]

Also ihr wisst ja diese grundlegende Lehre, dass ihr das Auge habt und den Sinn des Sehens. And you have hearing. And then you have smelling. Und riechen. And you have taste. Und Geschmack. And you have touch. Und Berührung. And then you have mind. Perhaps we could say, use the Sanskrit word cheetah. Und dann habt ihr Geist. Und vielleicht kann man dafür das Sanskrit word cheetah benutzen. Sort of thinking mind. Also denkender Geist. But also noticing mind. Aber auch bemerkender Geist. And associative mind. Various kinds of functions. And it's also the mind that accompanies each sense. Because when you hear something, as we talked about yesterday with sine wave hearing and so forth, Signed wave speech. Your brain is part of your hearing. No, no, this is just, this is a model from 1500 years ago at least. That each sense is simultaneously has a brain part to it or a mind part to it. So in Buddhism there's six senses, not five.

[20:34]

Five physical senses and mind as a sense. Mind accompanies each sense, each physical sense. Der Geist geht mit jedem körperlichen Sinn einher. Und der Geist ist für sich genommen auch ein eigener Sinn, weil der Geist bemerkt und Assoziationen macht und das auf eine Art und Weise, die an sich nicht unbedingt in Beziehung steht mit dem körperlichen Sinn. Habt ihr das Bild? Ist das klar genug? The next is mind again. There's two minds here. There's citta and then there's manas. Yeah, and manas I'm defining more as the editor. And it decides what... It's a selective process.

[21:36]

It selects and it edits. And the bottom part of the hourglass is the alaya vijnana. And Manas decides is where the decision what gets in and out of alaya vijnana happens. Okay. But manas we can also identify with the brain. And the brain which then supplies the missing parts like in you cut the words out and the brain supplies the words.

[22:39]

Or the brain supplies a great deal of our visual experience. Now, that's assumed in the practice of mindfulness. Because in the way I'm presenting it the last two or three days, as I said, if our brain-dominated sensorial world is top-down, You can shift that and make it bottom-up. And mindfulness practice is to softwire the brain. Und die Achtsamkeitspraxis besteht darin, das Gehirn sozusagen weich zu verdrahten.

[23:58]

Ist to with the senses massage the world. Besteht darin, mit den Sinnen die Welt zu massieren. Okay, now, I've often, or recently, I've given you this practice I call yogic seeing or yogic noticing. You go from the particular to the field. It's a yogic craft of practice. And for various reasons which I... no reason to discuss right now. I've decided to teach it more. It's been more something I didn't teach but practiced or only taught in certain circumstances. And it's, you know, a version of to pause for the particular. Or even to pause for the parts of the particular.

[25:11]

So, like right now, what I'm doing is I let particulars be noticed Like the flash of this little machine in front of Frank. Or Frank's shiny head. Or your shiny head. Or whatever. I just notice particulars without thinking about it. And I immediately go to the field. Okay, now I've mentioned this a number of times recently, last year, six months or so.

[26:13]

But what do you do when you do this? In the way we've been speaking, you're interrupting saccadic scanning. Because the scanning process, the saccadic scan, is where all of the long and short-term memory brain information gets transferred to the visual scene, or oral scene, or AURAL. So you're locating yourself in the physical situation more than the brain projected situation. Do you understand what I mean?

[27:17]

Any problems? It's simple. But somehow it sounds difficult. In other words, the brain we've already talked about is establishing most of what we see and hear. You want to change that. So to change that, you have to interrupt the process by which that happens. So if I just look at a particular and then look at a field, look at a particular, you interrupt that process. that flow of stored visual and sensorial information. You're doing pretty well there. I can tell it puts you in another state of mind and it begins to wire your circuits differently

[28:42]

It's not just that the receiver determines what's received, the receiver being the brain. But if you begin to put more sensorial information into the system, it widens the system, the receiver. So if you really, you know, one teacher was asked, what's the secret of Zen practice? What's the secret of your realization? He said, uninterrupted mindfulness, period. But this is hard for us. But uninterrupted mindfulness is, you know, the big secret.

[30:01]

And self interferes with this. All these little sort of belongs, this belongs, this decision interrupts mindfulness. So this is also a way to alter our relationship to self-referential thinking. So you're literally shifting from top-down to bottom-up sensorial... You're... engagement with the world. Sounds like you're trying to teach a child how to dress. From the top down or from the bottom up. So you can use words, because words help us shape our mental and physical energy.

[31:15]

So you can try something like, just use the word each. I wonder if it's the same etymology. Yeah, I'm not sure. I mean, each in English, the root means alike but different. So, and I would use the word, I would look at Frank and I would feel primarily each. Yeah, I might sometimes say, each and all. And all this makes me go to the field. So it's each, all this. Each, all this. Yeah. And sometimes it's just each.

[32:38]

It's like with each each I massage my senses. Yeah. You change your pace. And if you look at contemporary stuff, some of them interest me, Antonin or Antoine Artaud, the theater and its double, and I don't know if you're interested in those things, Robert Wilson's work, Jerzy Grotowski's work, all are about slowing your pace down and how you enter the world. Your pace of doing what? The pace with which you engage the world. When athletes speak about in the zone, Or I think psychologists speak about flow activity.

[33:54]

It's basically a mutual samadhi. So, last night I said, what about when mind, objects and self are all forgotten? Even if it's very quick, it feels like everything's in slow motion. When, you know, I've discussed this with athletes, when tennis players feel they're in the zone, the ball is coming really slowly across the net to them. Your senses are so locked in that everything starts being slow. But strangely enough, at least in Zen practice, this arises from particular, particular, particular, particular.

[35:24]

It's like you can feel underneath your activity a kind of samadhi or kind of ready to be mutually engaged in the world. So you're shifting from a kind of quick response mind To a mind which, I don't know how to say, but massages, the senses massage each object of the senses. We try to slow, in this life we're leading here, we try to slow ourselves down like that. For example, the simple practice of bowing to each person when you meet them.

[36:39]

And as I said, if you really do the bow, you actually physically stop. Or you know that feeling. And that feeling of catching the subjectivity of the hands between your hands. You bring that up along the same line as you've drawn when you're sweeping. And then you bow in that space to the other person. But it's also like, you know, you dropped a chopstick during the orioke. Bad girl. What did you say? I just corrected you.

[37:54]

I dropped only one. A chopstick, yes. Didn't I say a chopstick? It would have been worse if you dropped both. I know. It would have been twice as bad. But it's actually part of the service. It's part of the ceremony. It feels like us that we made a mistake. We weren't, you know, whatever. But from the point of view of the Uriyoki service, it's not a mistake. We have a ritual to take care of it. The soku comes over If it's particularly out, you know, at Crestone we have no chance because it falls down, you know, 10, 15 feet. You can't real quickly get it. So the soku comes, gets it, takes it, cleans it, and then brings it back, offers it to the Buddha and gives it back to you.

[39:00]

This is part of relating to the particular, including what we might think are mistakes, but they're not. We all do it sometimes. Okay. So again, stop. What I wanted to say, again, speaking about the Bhutto and the Manga, although these are not Buddhist practices, they're definitely influenced by Dharmic thinking, Buddhist Dharmic thinking.

[40:14]

And they can produce a whole kind of range, you know, I mean, You don't need to know this, but some manga bookstores in Japan have 500,000 copies in them. Yeah. Anyway, this can be part of a culture. And this Butoh dance is trying to dance into this other kind of movement. We're starting out feeling you're dead, a corpse, and then say, oh, look, it's alive. Look, it's alive. I'm not a turtle. No, I'm a turtle. So, it can be comic books, it can be our life.

[41:14]

If we can bring Dharma practice into manga, we can bring Dharma practice and softwire, rewire ourselves. And it creates the basis for knowing self and other in a new way. Okay. Best I can do today. Thanks.

[42:19]

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