These two lights. Ah, that's better. Thank you. Now you appear. Okay, the topic today is Zen practice. And I should be able to say something about it because I've been practicing... 40 years or so, regularly. But it's actually not so easy to say, adequately say, what is Zen practice. It's like asking, what is sleep? And I don't think any of you can really answer what is sleep.

[01:22]

And recently I've been meeting people who know very little about Zen. And they ask me questions like, why do you get up so early? Because usually we get up, customarily we get up, well, if you're a professional, 3.30 or something like that. If you're just trying to fit it into your daily life, maybe 5.30 or 6 or something. And in the back there, can you hear us okay? Is it I should be louder or she should be louder? This is my voice.

[02:23]

And they ask me, is zazen, is meditation something like being tranced out or spaced out? Yeah, again, these are not so easy to answer, what that means. We know that, I think we know, that much of our life is hidden from us. I mean, psychology, psychotherapy shows us that there's quite a lot of our life is hidden from us. And the psychedelic event in the 60s in the United States showed a lot of people that there was much of reality is hidden from us and spiritual traditions also the history of spiritual traditions assumes that much of our life is hidden from us

[04:08]

So any kind of practice, I think, like Buddhism, is trying to open us to the light that's hidden from us. So let's go back to why do we get up so early? Well, one reason is simply that it affects our day more than doing it later in the day. Now, what I'm speaking about here, doing, I didn't say. I'm talking about Zen practice as meditation.

[05:12]

As sitting, for example, in this kind of posture. Now, if you're a lay person and you want to do Zen practice, you don't have to learn to sit in this posture. you can sit in a chair or you cannot sit at all. But what I want to try to speak about today is why the sitting practice is so central to Zen practice. So we get up early because it affects our day more. But it's also the case if you have breakfast early, it affects your day more.

[06:13]

Or if you exercise in the morning, it affects your day. So what other reasons can we give for sitting down like this for 20, 30, 40 minutes in the mornings? What is assumed to be hidden in Buddhist practice is a, let's call it a fourth mind. We know the minds of waking and dreaming.

[07:13]

And we don't always dream when we sleep, so non-dreaming deep sleep. And so the question that was asked even before Buddhism developed is, Is there some mind which unites these four minds, these three minds? These three minds were given, but don't really know each other. So the sense of it was to try to find some way in which this fourth mind can appear in our life.

[08:30]

Now we can ask if there is, let's assume that there is some kind of fourth mind as part of our life. Then we have to ask, like, is it already there? Or is it a potential that we generate? Or, of course, a combination of such. Yeah. Is it something, if it's already there, that we uncover? Or is it something we unblock? And in the basic, if you want to look at how Zen practice is developed, I think you can understand it best. if you think that there is such a thing as a fourth mind, and that the best way to know it is to unblock it.

[09:55]

Okay, now, are there ways in which this mind let's call it for the sake of this talk, fourth mind already present in our life. Well, one traditional assumption, which I agree with, is that it's pretty much the same as non-dreaming deep sleep. A mind that's the background of our dreaming and the background of our waking. And in the background of our waking. So that's one example.

[11:12]

Another is what I would call awareness rather than consciousness. Awareness being like at night you might decide to wake up at a particular time in the morning and you wake up at that time. Und gewahrsam, mit gewahrsam meine ich, dass wenn man sich abends vornimmt, zu einer bestimmten Zeit morgens aufzuwachen, dass man dann tatsächlich zu dieser Zeit auch erwacht. You've been asleep. You've been asleep during the night. Sie haben während der Nacht geschlafen. And more or less non-conscious. Und mehr oder weniger nicht in einem bewussten Zustand. But something you can, usually many people can almost set a clock and wake up at a particular time. So let's call that awareness, at least in English, instead of consciousness. So I think all of us have somewhat similar experiences. So I would say that's another example of this fourth mind, some aspect of this fourth mind appearing in our ordinary life.

[12:35]

Another example is perhaps daydreaming or sunbathing. I think when people sunbathe, they kind of forget the time and their senses become a kind of wide field. And another is enlightenment. And I think enlightenment experiences are pretty common. They're not the monopoly of Buddhism. My own theory and feeling is, when I look at painters and poets, for instance, is that they had a particular enlightenment experience at a particular age, which usually they open up the rest of their life in their work.

[13:43]

And I think when you're more familiar with what enlightenment experiences mean in Buddhism, you notice that actually you've often had enlightenment experience, but you didn't know how to open yourself to them. Okay, so let's go back to the question, why do we get up so early? Okay. So, one reason is it's the transition between sleeping and waking.

[14:46]

And you want to sit down in a posture that's neither a posture of waking or sleeping. So if you're trying to say do Zen practice on your own starting tomorrow morning, Yeah, I would suggest, if you don't want to try this and, you know, I'd suggest you find some posture which isn't waking or sleeping posture. A posture you have to make an effort in, the kind of effort that keeps you from falling asleep. But at the same time, a posture you can relax in.

[15:48]

Now that's really the main reason we sit this way. It requires a certain amount of effort. But the architecture of your body supports you. And yet you can, once you're used to it, completely relax in it. So, you know, anyway, I'm trying to introduce you to this strange yoga culture, at least strange in the West still. So if you... probably wouldn't at first want to try to sit this way. You might see if you can sit in a chair with your back pretty straight.

[17:05]

And your legs down or partly up or whatever you'd like. And see if you can He's right. And see if you can stay that way, sort of maybe with a lifting feeling through your back for 10 minutes or 20 minutes. And try not to do anything. And that's pretty hard for us. We're so motivated to do things. Yeah. But the main block to this fourth mind surfacing in us is thinking and ordinary consciousness.

[18:18]

In exactly the same way, thinking and ordinary consciousness block dreaming from you. If you wake up and you start really thinking about your day, you can't easily go back into the dream you just left. So this is teaching. Much of this teaching arises from such simple observations as the way consciousness, thinking consciousness, takes over from imagistic dreaming mind.

[19:20]

So we're trying to sit in a chair or however you're sitting in the morning or anytime to see if you can not only relax But at least for a few minutes let your thinking subside. There's a tremendous power in thinking. But there's also a power in letting thinking subside. I mean, the world isn't going to go to hell in a handbasket in 10 minutes or 15 minutes without your work. There's an expression, go to hell in a handbasket.

[20:24]

I mean, the world probably will get along without you for 10 minutes or 20 minutes or something. So you can give yourself a kind of little vacation for ten minutes from life. And what happens and what should happen or can happen Is this fourth mind begins more and more to surface in your life? I was surprised walking along the lake last night after I got here. How clear the lake is.

[21:31]

You can see, at least last night, you could see right to the bottom, everywhere along the shore. And when you're thinking doves subside, you have a feeling of some kind of clear... water, maybe, clear mind surfacing in this posture. It's like sleeping posture is lying down, et cetera, allows sleeping mind to come up. We could call the usual postures of our day consciousness postures. So we're trying to find some posture that allows this fourth mind to appear. So you can think of this posture, or whatever posture you choose, as a kind of interruption.

[23:02]

So you can also think of it as kind of uncovering, as if you looked down through something and saw this clear water. And partly it's like that, but it's much more like you're unblocking something that's moving, like a stream that begins to flow up into you. Okay, so now we get up early. Okay, we get up early so that we're sitting at a time when normally we'd be asleep. Yeah, so you get up a little earlier than you would normally get up. There's a bonus in it later. Because 30 or 40 minutes of sitting substitute for something like maybe two hours of sleep.

[24:07]

But let's not worry about, you know, promises. So we sit in the morning usually. It could be any time of day though. To have this overlap of waking and dreaming. And to begin to feel a mind that penetrates both into waking and into sleeping. And we actually get a feeling for it. After a while you know this mind which isn't exactly sleeping and it isn't exactly waking.

[25:23]

And you develop a physical feeling for it. And that physical feeling for it lets you begin to know it and stabilize it. Now, if you're just doing your daily life, this kind of mind might appear to you. But it's very difficult to really get a physical feeling for it and stabilize it. So this is not a teaching or posture or mind given at birth. Though it perhaps the case, and I think it's the case, that infants, before they have a language with past and future, are actually much of the time in this kind of mind.

[26:35]

But still, it fast disappears. So we can consider this a kind of wisdom mind or wisdom posture. because it is the result of many people over a long period of time noticing this possibility and developing a teaching about it. Now, you know how little kids... Don't like to take medicine. You give them a, not all kids, but a lot of kids.

[27:40]

You try to give them a pill. And they won't open their mouth. Or you give them the pill and they hide it in the corner of their mouth and spit it out later. Some kids even vomit and so forth. So I found in my hotel room this morning this beautiful vase of flowers that Gunda and René, I guess, had put in the room. So I looked at the flowers a little bit. And I thought of them giving it to me and how nice that was. And I looked a little bit at the composition of the flowers and their colors in relationship to the room. But mostly I just let my mind rest in the flowers.

[28:51]

Doing what it wanted. Sometimes looking at parts of the arrangement or individual flower and sometimes the whole. And it was a kind of resting for my mind. And then I thought, well, now I could bring a more intentional practice into this. Because in addition to this posture as an interruption of our usual consciousness, I can use a phrase as the interruption of our usual consciousness. And one typical one from Zen teaching is not knowing is nearest.

[30:08]

So I look at the flowers and I say to myself, not knowing is nearest. And I find it's like a little gate. And through that gate, this calmer mind begins to surface. I not only am resting my mind in the flowers, but I'm also... this gate of this phrase lets this deeper mind surface in my resting mind. Okay. I've been doing this, you know, as I said, 40 years or so, so it's not so hard for me to do this.

[31:12]

And I've been doing it long enough that I can use this phrase not just when I look at flowers, but when I'm looking at you right now. I can have this phrase in the back of my attention, not knowing is nearest. And when I look at you, I don't know, you might all be Martians. Yeah, I don't know what you are. If I have this not knowing mind, it's just something beautiful is here in front of me. Even better than those flowers. Now, but imagine there's some busy person. Or angry person. And you say to them, remember, not knowing is nearest. Yeah, and they spit the pill out right away.

[32:47]

Or you say, rest your mind in the flowers. So you usually can't give this kind of medicine to people unless they've already stabilized their state of mind. The more you know this state of mind, it actually can be present in your ordinary mind. Okay, so again, this kind of posture allows this fourth mind, calm, deep mind, to surface in us. And we can begin to stabilize it. And we actually begin now to generate it, now that we've discovered it. Just as the consciousness any of us have has been generated through our family, parents, our education and so forth.

[34:12]

So just as our usual mind can be generated and developed, we can also generate and further develop this fourth mind. And as you get used to it it begins to weave itself together and into our other three states of mind. And when it's more integrated with our usual minds, we can begin to mature our mind together with this so-called fourth mind. And this is what we could call Zen mind. So Zen practice is a way to make this possible.

[35:29]

You can think of your sitting posture perhaps as a kind of bedrock. You know how a stream in the mountains often will disappear for a while and then reappear later. And I'm told that a large percentage of a stream actually flows underneath the stream bed. But in the mountains in the Sierra and the Rockies and so forth, where I'm familiar with mountain streams... When it comes to bedrock, all the water of the stream appears on the surface for a while. So you can think of this posture again as a kind of bedrock. and so you get the ability to sit still without moving much for a while 10, 20, 30 minutes and you do it regularly it's almost like you're shall we say

[36:55]

this deeper mind, says, oh, this guy has decided to be a quellen. Spring? Yeah. Yeah, so you're Urgeist or something like that. So it says, ah, he or she They want to be a spring. And then it begins to every day surface in you more and more. It really does feel like something like that happens. No. Now there's other ways which I don't have time to go into. Yeah, using a kind of philosophical investigation and so forth.

[38:27]

Or generating more emphasis on generating this as a potential. But if you want to understand Zen practice You can see that it's conceptually based on the idea of interruption. Of interrupting a process is there, but you have to interrupt it so it appears on the surface. And there's perhaps three main ways of interrupting in Zen practice. One is this sitting down in the middle of your life. Und eines davon ist, in der Mitte ihres Lebens einfach sich hinzusetzen.

[39:38]

Mit der Weisheitshaltung. Weisheit deswegen, weil es eine weise Wahl ist. To not only be in the postures which induce sleeping or ordinary consciousness. Nicht nur in den Haltungen zu sein, die Schlaf hervorbringen oder wachbewusst sein. and a posture which then allows this mind to be woven into your life. And after you get used to it, if it surfaces in your life in the morning, it's more likely to keep flowing throughout the day. Now, another way to interrupt your ordinary consciousness This is not to get rid of your ordinary consciousness.

[40:46]

We need that to live. This practice is not about not thinking. It's about not identifying with your thinking. And not living only in a mind generated by thinking. Of course, we don't live in a mind only generated by thinking. Who we are and what we are goes far beyond our thinking. The problem is we tend to identify with who we are through our thinking. So we can also understand Zen practice as a way to widen the way you identify yourself. Okay.

[41:52]

And a second way to interrupt your ordinary consciousness is to practice mindfulness. And mindfulness just means to bring your attention back to what you're actually doing. To your walking, to my talking and sitting right now, for instance. And especially to your breath. So again, it's been discovered that the most effective way to bring your attention to the immediate situation. Ja, is to bring your attention to your breath.

[42:55]

Now, the breath is a physical, semi-conscious act. And of course the words spirit and spiritual are all words meaning breath. So when you bring your attention, your mind, to your breath, you're bringing breath and body together. And body and mind is a relationship we can cultivate. So every time you bring your attention to your breath, you're developing the habit of not developing a habit and skill or power, of being able to bring your sense of identification away from your thinking,

[44:16]

Bring your sense of identification away from your thinking. And you can let it go back to your thinking. And even if you don't let it go back to your thinking, it will go back to your thinking. This is something amazing. It's extremely easy. Anyone can bring their attention to their breath. You can all do it right now. Maybe for two or three breaths. It's very, very difficult to do it for ten breaths or all day. That's quite interesting. Interesting like the distinction between waking mind and dreaming mind. Why something so easy to do a few times is so difficult to do repeatedly? Wie kommt es, dass etwas, was für das ein paar Mal zu tun so einfach erscheint, so schwierig ist, es wiederholt zu machen?

[45:49]

I think the simple answer is, let's keep it simple, the simple answer is we find our continuity and identity in our thinking. But my continuity and Gunda's continuity is also right here. So this bringing your attention to your breath... begins to fill your body and situation with aliveness, with presence. As you find your continuity flows in your body and in the immediate situation as well as After 10 or 15 minutes, we'll have some discussion.

[47:04]

So I'll ring a... I don't know why I brought this, but since I have it, I'll ring it, the bell. When the break is over for those who are still here. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you. I hope you didn't all come back to listen to someone else's question.

[48:11]

Okay, so what shall we talk about? Yes. You suggested that with this practice the consciousness is being interrupted. And what do you suggest to do when after two or three breaths consciousness starts to appear again? That's the trick. The problem is, if you do something consciously, then you're, well, that's obvious, you're stuck in consciousness.

[49:21]

So ideally, you don't do anything. But not doing anything is even more difficult. So the things that you can do which help are to bring your attention back to your breath. And every time you happen to remember you bring your attention back to your breath. Or you just follow your breath, bring your attention to your, without, you know, just be present to your breath. You don't have to count your breath necessarily. But it does help to count your exhales. It also helps to visualize your breath as coming out like this and coming in from the bottom.

[50:34]

Because that stabilizes the breath and creates a kind of wide feeling. and makes you do more diaphragm breathing than chest breathing. But you can also bring your attention to a phrase. Anyway, you can experiment. And the experiment the experimenting interferes and some experiments interfere less. So mostly there are general rules about how to do this, general instructions. But much of this depends on your own creativity and your intention. If your intention is there you'll find some way to do it.

[51:56]

And intention is deeper than thinking. You might form an intention in your thinking but holding an intention is deeper than thinking. Okay. Yes. Well, I'll start there. I want to kindly comment on the difference between practice, Tibetan Buddhism, that's a bit of a big topic I think that if you know something about Tibetan Buddhism you can see the differences.

[53:07]

The Tibetan Buddhism and Zen Buddhism, I mean, Tibetan Buddhism is a wide subject. The Tibetan Buddhism, which is most similar to Zen, is still based on a slightly different conception of how you realize this and mature this fourth mind. But both Tibetan Buddhism and Zen are based on the same basic teachings. Kind of late Mahayana teaching. And Zen, though, emphasizes this sitting practice as an interruption, rather than generating through enactment this fourth mind. To enact something is to do it, to make it happen.

[54:25]

In a sense, the difference is an enactment rather than meditation. It's pretty simple, but it's something like that. Yes, what else? Yes. When you're involved in problems and the thoughts go around in a circle, is it a good idea to practice them? To create a distance to that. I don't think... Well, first, is it good to practice Zen in such a circumstance?

[55:28]

Yes. But if you only practice Zen when you're in trouble, it doesn't help that much. But it's normal. That's what we do. And does it distance you from your problems? Then it wouldn't be Zen practice. Zen practice would be to widen the way you experience your problems. And so that you can accept your problems. And see them from this fourth mind rather than from your usual mind. It's a different... I'm using this term fourth mind, but it's that I've made up more or less.

[56:41]

But the fourth mind thinks differently and sees things from other perspectives. But I think a common thing people do when they're upset, say, They wash their dishes. Or they go jogging or something. Or they take a cold shower. Or a bath or something. And all of those are intuitively to bring our sense of continuity back into the immediate situation. So if you're washing the dishes, you have to more or less be present to it. So actually, we find our continuity in our physical immediacy. So the wise approach to Zen practice is seeing its value.

[57:57]

You find a way to develop a wide sense of immediacy all the time. but let me just say I mean you asked is it a good thing to do it's not a good thing to meditate too much I would say that for a person outside a formal practice situation with a teacher Probably it's enough to sit one or two or at the most three periods a day. your practice should be integrated and in a dialogue with your ordinary life and consciousness.

[59:09]

And if you have a particularly weak sense of self, You don't want to sit too much. Because you want to strengthen your ordinary self in ordinary interactions with people. And one or two periods a day allow you to get a perspective on yourself but not hide from yourself. And too much meditation can be a kind of way of hiding or not maturing your ordinary identity. Okay. I'll try to give shorter answers. Yes. I have continuously the same experience when I meditate.

[60:33]

The quieter the more my body calms down, the noisier, the louder my mind becomes. I know. Well, usually if you really develop a habit of meditating and the more it's a habit just like waking or eating or sleeping just something you do your mind becomes louder and you can observe it. But if you do, say, keep bringing your attention to your breath You eventually get underneath your thinking. And the use of a phrase. Let's see. Maybe you could take something like behind my thinking or under my thinking.

[62:03]

Or just, you know, just now is enough. Or I used to use, there's no place to go. And nothing to do. Because when you use a phrase like that, you develop a background mind that balances the foreground mind. A little bit like perhaps a woman who's pregnant is always aware she's pregnant, but she does the things she has to do during the day. You can become aware of this deeper state of mind the same way.

[63:06]

So maybe you can say Urgeist. Try something. Well, I didn't succeed very well at giving a shorter answer, but next. Yeah. You're welcome. Thank you for the lecture. I have a question concerning that Urgeist. If you find that or develop that, unfold it within yourself, do you stay with a tiny little bit of consciousness with that Urgeist?

[64:08]

Oh, you stay with a lot of consciousness. Yeah, it's... What could it be like? Water images are often used. You know, waves are like consciousness. The water is like the Urgeist. So whether the water is still or busy, the water is still there. So you could say that practice, first you begin to identify with the still water and not the waves. But after a while you don't identify with whether it's still or moving, you identify with the water itself. And then it doesn't make so much difference whether you're busy or very conscious or etc., because you find yourself in the water, not in the waves.

[65:10]

This kind of analogy is actually quite good because it really does feel like that. Okay. Something else? What do you mean by identify? Deutsch, bitte. Shit. I can't. Well, see, I don't exactly know how it comes across in German, this idea of identify. But... I think one of the keys is to notice how we find our continuity. In other words, say you're sort of, when you think about, well, who am I?

[66:36]

What kind of job should I have? How do I get through this stressful situation I'm in? You might think, I'm a person who can go through this kind of stress. That's your identity. And it's usually closely connected with a sense of continuity. So one of the things that can be a little scary when you practice meditation. You find your continuity more in the immediacy of situations rather than time-based. And that can be a little scary. Because we're used to thinking, finding ourselves in our thinking.

[68:03]

But if people who know you well they might say you're a little different on Sunday than you are on Monday. Or in the afternoon than the evening. Or in the afternoon You know, at work and on vacation. And when you practice, you begin to notice how different you really are in different situations. Like I know the kind of person I am right now is the kind of person that comes out through being here talking with you. So, anyway, I think if you work with a sense of continuity and how you identify yourself, You can try to answer the question for yourself.

[69:07]

Because really we have to answer these questions for ourselves. For example, I often say in English, most people don't know the difference between a feeling and an emotion. People say they feel bad. I say I'm feeling bad, I'm angry. But actually feeling is quite different than emotion. but the dictionary doesn't help us too much you have to actually examine yourself what is the difference and what's interesting when you do look at the dictionary you find that the words reveal a much more complex human being than we are

[70:08]

In other words, these words have been developed because they reflect the complexity of human beings. Yeah, but most of us simplify our sense of who we are all the time. And most of us simplify this sense of who we are. Yes? It's possible to somehow integrate Zen practice sitting into, let's say, other integrated parts of the spiritual path that are not necessarily dedicated to Zen practice. Yes and no. Yes in the sense that you can take a few English words and throw them into German. But I can't really speak... In other words, to say what I'm trying to say in English, I need every bit of experience I've had in English to try to find a way to say things.

[71:44]

And it's part of the fabric of English, not just individual words. And that fabric has to be very closely enmeshed with my experience. I don't have that experience in German. A hund just doesn't look like a dog to me. So nothing but a hund dog. So I think that you need a kind of root teaching. Yeah, or you can't, and probably, yeah, one kind of root teaching and lineage.

[73:03]

Once you have that, then you can bring other teachings in. And certainly if you're practicing another form of Buddhism, you could bring Zen-style meditation more into it than they might meditate. But, you know, it's like, you know, if you read books on, if I read books on Zen, ninety-eight percent really don't know what they're talking about.

[74:05]

They can be interesting and useful to me, actually, because I like the information and the insights. But I can tell the person is informing me it's not coming out of him or her. And it's so clear to me how much Zen practice depends on your creating it yourself from the beginning. So I'm very careful when I speak about another form of Buddhism or Christianity, for instance. I only know this from inside. So I can't really speak about any other teaching.

[75:09]

Intellectually I can, but with real feeling and understanding I can't. Okay. What about up there? Anybody here? Are you just trying to stay out of range up here? Oh, let's start back there. I missed the beginning. You spoke about four states of mind. What are the three others? Oh. The ordinary minds were given at birth waking, dreaming, and non-dreaming deep sleep.

[76:15]

And Buddhism basically asks itself the question, is there a state of mind that underlies these three or includes these three or is wider or different than these three? And the practice is to find your own answer to that question. So we have two more and then we'll stop. Yes? What do you think about Ken Wilber's books? Do you find them more entertaining? Well, they're a lot more than entertaining. I know him. I've known him not really well, but off and on for years. He's a major player in contemporary thinking about how we exist.

[77:26]

From my experience it's a little too systematized. But I'm kind of a disorganized person. So his books are great and wonderful to read. And he has a haircut I like. Okay, so the last question was here somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. In your Zen Sangha, in your Zen path, what place do you have children, families, and maybe professional engagement?

[78:36]

Big place. A grossen Platz. A grossen Platz, yeah. I mean, if Zen practice doesn't work with having a job or a family or children, it doesn't make any sense to me. Perhaps true Zen practice is how to be one with your child and not interfere with your child. How to practice with a family and children and a job is a complex question. But Zen practice is just about this life, whatever your life is. So let's start there. Thank you very much.

[79:35]

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