Well, people have been coming here for many years now. I don't know how many years we've been doing it. Twelve? Ten? Eleven? Ninety-two. Okay. My goodness. What? Eleven years. Yeah. We skipped a year or two, I think, though, once, didn't we? So those of you, some of you have come to every one of the meetings. If you have something, since this will be the last one, if you have something you'd like me to speak about, I'll see if it's possible. Like, for example, something that might have been, let's say, useful to you. but you'd like to kind of give it some shape again or some direction we haven't gone in and if those of you who are newer would like including anything to do with dance is alright except I don't know too much

[01:32]

But I do like to dance. So anything those of you who are newer would like to... I don't know. be spoken about, I'll also make an effort to see what we can do. And as for me, I have some feeling of something I'd like to speak about. But it would take some cooperation among us or some field among us for me to find a way to speak about it. Because there's some things you can't speak about unless there's participation with the people you're speaking with.

[02:57]

Yeah. You know, for me, just hearing your voices and sitting here with you begins a process for me of seeing how I can come closer to what I feel that would be nice, good to speak, interesting. So let's start, though, with any ideas you might have you'd like to bring up. Oh, I'm translating. Oh, excuse me. Go ahead. There's something which I'm just dealing with for some time, and it has to do with the self.

[04:11]

I think there are, self is culturally shaped. And it's shaped by the way we are raised, or just grow up, and it's also culturally shaped. And I see in our culture as it develops, I see a certain kind of self which is emphasized a lot. And it has to do with, I mean, the topics, the top words are accept money, the top word is success. And I see a special kind of self as it is culturally formed. And besides the word gain, the second top word is success. And if that is so, if a self is culturally shaped, my question is...

[05:19]

what kind of answer is necessary from Zen teaching to that kind of self? Because I noticed that for me, it's... It's easy to misunderstand Zen in a certain way. Because I try to, from my way I was brought up, I try to be... I'm eager to do things right. Von der Art, wie ich erzogen wurde, bin ich bestrebt, Dinge richtig zu tun. And from my cultural surrounding, I try to be successful. Und von meiner kulturellen Umgebung her bemühe ich mich, erfolgreich zu sein.

[06:23]

And I see in the traditional way of saying there is some It's possible to misunderstand Zen in a way that you try to be right and successful also in that kind of practice. My question is, how can the teaching answer to that misunderstanding? Dilemma, yeah. So you could be a success in the world and fail at Zen and be perfectly balanced? And there's not much consequence to failing it then, so this is good. Okay. Anybody else have anything to say along these lines?

[07:24]

Not in this direction, but answering the question what I'm interested in. Yesterday I gave much attention to when you said that mind, consciousness, self are functions. I understood that it's important to make clear that these are not entities or substance. There's no substance. And in different traditions there are descriptions that there are actions or functions, energy movements or relations.

[08:59]

I would like to hear more about that, to be able to somehow root that in my thinking that we are not talking about entities. Mm-hmm. In my work, I deal with the fact that both realities concern me and my clients. Both realities concern the relative being, the act, the thinking. In my work, dealing with these two realities. The one reality of thinking and acting, relative reality.

[10:25]

Well, some kind of... Okay. and the other of simple being within us, the deeper kind of reality. And I try to work with my clients in a way that allows them to experience both realities at the same level, at the same importance somehow.

[11:33]

Not the same, but equal. So they are free to have a choice. I don't know how this is expressed in Zen, this way of, this approach. So you, the two actualities One is bounded by language and thinking. And the other is something not bounded by language and thinking, which you is felt by you and the client as a deeper sense of being, something like that?

[12:40]

What would be an example of a deeper sense of being? Feeling of connectedness or without boundaries? Let me just say one thing here. I don't want to respond right away, if I can. Is there certain rules in adept Zen practice? One is you only consider that which you experience. Or you consider that which someone else experiences, if it seems to be an experience.

[14:11]

Or you consider what potentially can be experienced. But we're not concerned with ideas that fit into some sort of system of thinking if they're not experienceable. So that means that there's a certain rigor in that. If you limit yourself to that, It means your own experience proceeds, your own thinking and understanding proceeds always related to experience. So that's just a comment. Yesterday you spoke about that in Buddhism the idea of permanence is questioned.

[15:21]

A big no-no. The big no-no. On the other hand, especially in Zen, the everyday practice is based on rituals that stay the same, that are the same, again and again performed. You've noticed. Yeah. I mean, for me this was a really strange contradiction yesterday, which I'm occupied with.

[16:21]

Okay, okay, that's good. What's inside my heart in this? following from what Christina Siegfried said. Let me respond a little bit to what you said. Yeah. Okay. Then I would say that to think or... function as if the world was in any way permanent is a delusion. And leads to fundamental errors in one's functioning. In other words, we have two basic choices. We have the choice of a self or identity that our culture offers us.

[17:40]

And it's the non-conscious choice that most of us make. We're not even aware of it as a choice. But at some point, through your experience and your own honesty or your own sense of integrity, it doesn't work or something seems off. So then what kind of... Is there an alternative choice? If you're in a particular society, how do you have an alternative? So once...

[18:41]

I mean, we can imagine a system of thinking or view that isn't wise, but it doesn't contradict reality. It isn't wise? It might not be wise, might be a stupid way of behaving, but doesn't contradict reality. But it probably wouldn't be satisfied. But if it assumes permanence, then it causes much deeper problems than just it's stupid or shallow or something. All right. So, even if Even if an assumption, implicit or explicit permanence, is a delusion, we still want things to be predictable.

[20:03]

And as I said last night, in fact, we need them to be predictable. And as I said yesterday, we need to be predictable so that we can work at all. So in rejecting permanence, we're not objecting either in a practical sense that we need the world to be predictable, Or in a fundamental sense, that the world exhibits duration.

[21:05]

If I'm making sense here. So this is expressed in the two words karma and dharma. Karma means everything changes and you accumulate the effects of the change. And dharma means simultaneously things also hold in place. Okay. They hold in place. Okay. In what way do they hold in place? I mean, if we get just to refresh ourselves with very basic things,

[22:33]

You can't really say at this moment in the present how long the present is. My words are already in the past as fast as I say them. And Siegfried is trying to alter that with the tape recorder. Okay. And this immediate, so the knife edge of the present is very narrow. Unmeasurable. But we experience duration. How and where do we experience duration? Well, it's our experience. Our senses work in a way to create a duration over a certain period of time.

[23:56]

And the different experiences we have of time, like infancy or childhood or meditative differences, are our own ability to expand or contract this. Und unsere eigene Erfahrung von Zeit, die wir haben, über die Erfahrung in der Kindheit der Medikation, das sind unsere eigenen Möglichkeiten, das auszudehnen oder zusammenzudrücken. And sometimes we can feel the world is very slowed down or even stopped. And manchmal können wir die Welt als verlangsamt oder sogar angehalten spüren. Alles ist an seinem Platz. So such experiences as the world being slowed down or everything in place, you'd say are more dharma than karma. Okay, so the world in some sense does stay in place. And it stays in place somehow within our own experience. Now, can we emphasize that part of our experience rather than the part where everything's changed?

[25:20]

Okay. I laugh at myself trying to say these things. I don't know. Maybe I find a simpler way to say it. But I'm also trying to find an experiential way of saying it. I'm not trying to just say something about this, but I'm trying to follow my own rule, can I speak about it in terms of experience? Okay. So one of the, you could say, one of the goals of success in Zen practice is the realization of an imperturbable mind.

[26:31]

Now, this is possible to do. Or you can realize a mind that First I think you realize a kind of background mind and then a basic mind and through that you can realize an imperturbable mind. Fearless, clear, undisturbed mind that's always present. And part of the way you practice with this is to see if you can notice, see if you can stay in touch with a mind that doesn't change much.

[27:37]

Doesn't change much. Okay. So thinking mind obviously changes a lot. So it's like asking yourself to look into a body of water and look past the waves and the insects and frogs and things, and see the clear water itself. So can you look into the mind, past the thinking, and see a field or clarity of mind that isn't affected by the thinking? Now, this asks the question, does thinking condition mind?

[28:40]

Well, certainly thinking condition is thinking mind. Okay. How do you start to notice a mind which doesn't change or changes very little? One way is, let's take Sashin. You create a schedule that you turn yourself over to. A schedule that's extremely predictable. Okay. Now the act of turning yourself over to a predictable schedule and a schedule that doesn't arise from your likes and dislikes a schedule that's rather arbitrary a schedule that's rather arbitrary

[29:57]

And in fact, it contradicts your usual habit. This is one area we're speaking about where adept lay practice, it's hard to reproduce this unless you live in a monastery. And I would say that it's almost impossible and usually somewhat unbelievable for a lay practitioner to get a real feel for this mind. Because you need a physical feel for it. But if you live in a monastic situation for some months or years you just do the schedule. You don't have to think about what you're going to chant, what you're going to eat,

[31:32]

You know, it just appears. Everything appears. And after a while, I mean, if you continue in a realm of likes and dislikes, you leave the monastery. And I think it was Two years ago, didn't we, we spoke about the appearance of a body-mind and the difference between pleasure, pleasant, unpleasant, and neither. And the shift of that to like, dislike, and neutral or boring And the shift of that to greed, hate and delusion.

[32:34]

So when you begin to be able to function without delusion, that kind of subjectiveness, you open yourself to beginning to notice and evolving, generating an imperturbable mind. And a mind that holds through all situations. So you actually try to notice waking, sleeping, before and the middle of, after sexual activity and so forth.

[33:46]

Is there a mind that stays the same? Even though you abandon yourself into each situation. Is there still a mind that remains the same? And that's really one of the main focuses of Zen practice. And one of the first steps toward that is the ability to just follow a schedule that's not harming anybody, not good or bad, I mean, it's just you turn yourself, see if you can turn yourself over to it. So it's out of that pedagogical process, that small lay groups in obscure or large cities chant the same thing every day and don't know why they do it.

[34:54]

So for the small group, it may be more of a ritual than it is a practice. But perhaps if you understand the conception behind it, it makes it easier to do. Because it's outside of life and dislike. And that's one of the things, if you want to practice seriously, You have to decide to sit whether you want to or not. It doesn't mean you have to sit hours a day or anything. But you just... Decide to sit, I'm going to sit 20 minutes or at least 20 minutes a day or something, no matter if I'm sick or busy or whatever.

[36:07]

Only in that way do you have a chance to get practice outside the boundaries of thinking and self and ego and pleasure and likes and dislikes. And the more effective your practice is, the more your self, your thinking, etc., will start finding very good reasons not to do it. You have a stomachache, you might go crazy, you know, all kinds of reasons. Mm-hmm. It will make you get up late, so your whole career will fall apart if you don't go to work immediately.

[37:12]

Yes, Eric. You mean like, I didn't chant today, I'm wrong? Yes, you're wrong if you didn't chant today. Yes, of course. Yeah. Did you say everything in Deutsch? Well, you just have to be smart enough to not get yourself in that trap.

[38:21]

We certainly can fall into it, but that's stupid. Yes? If consciousness has the function of providing us in our everyday life with predictability and reliability... Cognizable, yes. This gives us some ground or something to hold on to.

[39:32]

And the way you talked about this schedule, the monastery schedule, where you have this strict thing after thing. Yes. So this structure, monastery structure, takes over some part of this predictability and allows thinking to withdraw. Yes, that's right. Yeah. If you know this, you know how it functions, then in your lay life you can sort of begin to feel that, experiment with that. Yeah, and I did it in little simple ways, because the first five years of my practice I didn't have a monastic situation. But I saw the need and I pretended San Francisco was a monastery, a rather large one, but I pretended.

[40:39]

But for quite a while, I wouldn't make a decision I tried to find situations where I didn't get caught in likes and dislikes. I can't remember all the different things. I did lots of things. But one I remember An eines erinnere ich mich im Restaurant, wenn ich anfing, was möchte ich, das oder das, dann habe ich einfach irgendwo hingezäugt und das habe ich dann genommen, egal ob es mir gefallen hat oder nicht.

[41:39]

And usually, at least in American restaurants, you aim at the left side because it's cheaper on the left side. In Europe, you might get a pre-fixed meal at, you know, 50 euro or something on the left side. Anyway, I did lots of things like that to take out likes and dislikes. Okay, why don't we take a break? Now Eric just mentioned to me at lunch at lunch, no, the break that when I sat down I

[43:22]

moved the bell from here to here or something like that. And he thought, he said, I don't know how true it is, but he used to think I was awfully pedantic. And he said, And it's true, Sukhiroshi thought so too. One time at the break in a Sushin, I was sitting on my cushion, and Sukhiroshi happened to be sitting on his cushion too, and everyone else had gone out. Yeah, gone somewhere. And at some point, there was a big painting by Taiji Kiyokawa on the back wall of Desendos. Yes, right, that was the guy.

[44:36]

A Japanese abstract painter who had given this painting to Suzuki Roshi. And it was hanging, it was quite a big painting, like much of that space back there, and it was hanging a little crooked. Got up, straightened it, went back and sat down. About ten minutes later, Sikorsky got up and went to his office. As he went by, he made it crooked again. So you and Suzuki Roshi work, right. But I also realized I didn't satisfy Eric at least in this response to him. the ritual, what looks like ritual side of Zen.

[45:51]

Yeah, one thing is, and I'm also mentioning this because involuntarily when I see you, I bow to you. Yeah, to each one of you. And I have to kind of remind myself, don't do that. And there's also, you know, there's various things in the background of this. And just, you know, and I'm mentioning it because this contrast between which I'm always in the midst of.

[46:52]

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