I won't grade the papers because I don't know how to grade in the context of your customs here in Europa, but I will read the papers and make comments on them. And I guess I will supply you with some questions at the format for the paper later in the week, I mean later this week. Sometimes, you know, a paper might not be very good. But if it has one point you understand it, it's not workbook papers. That makes it hard for me to grade paper. But some other paper might be very good and really have no understanding of practice, and then I hardly read it. So. Now, I would like a lot of help from you during this seminar, because I have no interest, very little interest, in the intellectual content of Buddhism or Zen.

[01:13]

And I don't think it's very useful for practice unless, I mean, if you know a great deal about Buddhism, that intellectual content can make your picture work. But if I'm only speaking about practice and relationship practice, then the more feedback I have from you, questions or whatever, the easier it is for me to discover what we should talk In general, I want to talk about what we agreed to is Zen practice in particular and Zen practice as a Buddhist practice. I mean, every school that's like, but I very definitely do not think that Zen is somehow separate . Nor do I think it's the essence of all religion.

[02:18]

And this is actually quite common in the West. In Europe, there's quite a movement that said it's the essence of all religions and then is taught as a practice within Catholicism that to some extent . And I think that's great that teachings and practice can be part of. Christian teachings. But I don't think that's Buddhism or Zen. For me, Zen is Buddhism. So that's the point. Now, I don't know, again, how familiar, but I suppose it takes you a little older, all of you, to meditate continuously.

[03:21]

Usually, outdoors, we get to it quick. No? Is anybody here unfamiliar with meditation? Oh, good. I like a few. Get at least a meditation. So either you can count the several people who might want to come and speak to me, and I'll give you some meditation instruction. But also, I hope I'll be saying things that make . Excuse me for being stuffed up, but I think you can still understand. So what would you like to know? Nothing? Well, it's already made some progress here. How great.

[04:24]

If Zen is Buddhism, then why make a difference in the name? Yeah. Sometimes, mostly I say I'm teaching Buddhism. I don't even say I'm teaching Zen. But there are various schools of Buddhism. I mean, there's schools of are more philosophical, and they're philosophical not only that they emphasize an understanding of the teaching, but they also emphasize bringing all the teachings together in some system. So the philosophical schools also include elements of Zen. And then there's schools that fall into more the category of faith through a practice of repetition. which is so different than Zen, but yet it's more simplified and based on faith. And then there's schools which emphasize enacting, which emphasize enacting a divine or ideal form of being.

[05:36]

And there's Zen which emphasizes meditation primarily. can, for example, very little emphasize this enactment through visualization and sound. But because all the schools are very related, it does in effect practice and enact. OK. Anyways, and Zen has some unique aspects of it, as Western Buddhism will, I'm sure, end up having unique aspects. That comes to my question of what is different or what is wrong with Western or American Buddhism? Were you here last night? Yeah. No one knows.

[06:51]

The biggest difference seems to be one of the biggest differences is who practices. A much wider, a much larger number of people have the sophistication, education, leisure to practice. In Asia, ordinary people could be part of the Buddhist world. But to take on practice when you're, you know, dizzy, hurting your living, without much time, is more difficult. The other is that women are playing a role in Buddhism in the West that was not true in Asia. And that's very good and will make changes.

[07:56]

The danger is in which I had thought implied it was applied last night is that there will be a tendency for us to um make blues and western too quick and there's also a kind of contemporary arrogance that everything modern is best that somehow we There's some kind of progress. We are smarter and more evolved and developed than previously. I don't think it's true. I wouldn't go the other way, which in Asia, in general, it's thought the ancients were more evolved, intelligent, and so on. That's also not true. But there's truth to both views. There's no question that in the West, in the middle of the so-called Dark Ages, people were in many ways more subtle and complex of the world.

[09:12]

But there's a... An inherent problem, which is common, that I mentioned last night, is that in order to study Buddhism, we have to find points of correspondence with ourselves, something that resonates with us, that we feel connected. And if you don't have those points of correspondence, It's impossible to talk about. If I speak with you now and 80% of what I tell you is new to you, you're going to be exhausted by new. Not that it's hard to understand, it's just too much new stuff that exhausts you. So mostly if I'm speaking to you, I have to speak with you about things that are new to you. So that's just the way we have to teach Buddhism and have to discover Buddhism in ourselves.

[10:27]

However, then we use that as a starting point to join it to psychology, our usual ways of thinking. But that Buddhism very rapidly ceased to be an ingredient or part of psychology. So we also have to keep in mind what the difference is. So I think that the struggle, I'd say, in Buddhism in this next period is not introducing it and discovering similarities, but staying aware of this, having the modesty to stay aware of it. Does that answer your question? Or would you like me to say something else? Well, if you said that in the East there is no time, it seems to me that one of the biggest American Western problems is the busyness of life at that time.

[11:36]

And I just wondered how you really argue about that. Well, in fact, we have a lot more time. I mean, if you watch a Japanese farmer, seven, six and a half, seven days a week working, no one will stop it. It's not the same. We have, we stop it by, we make it. That's another problem. We have . I mean, if you lived in China in a place that had a lot of snow in the winter, you had a long leisurely time meeting people and so forth. But in general, we have, I think, more time to practice. But we could if we want to make the time. And the result of that is change the democracy of practice. In other words, who practices in a society changes the practice.

[12:42]

If it's only aristocrats, that's a different kind of practice. If it's only celibate monks, that's a different kind of practice. When you start having middle-class lay people practicing, it will change the demographic location of practice in a society. It will change the practice. So the demography of the practice has changed. How do you recommend we achieve the aspiration of connecting with or hanging out to the tradition while the demographics enthusiasm about the new place forms? Well, my own conclusion, after doing this about 40 years, is that some kind of monastic practice, some type of monastic, semi-monastic practice is necessary.

[13:55]

Typically, if you want to teach or really realize Buddhism from within yourself, so you're recreating Buddhism, not just practice. And that's necessary partly because you want the conjunction of the tradition of rubbing it up against your own habits. And that kind of time may be necessary. I mean, the main thing about monastic practice is not that it's Asian, but that it's different than your usual habits. But how do we get that? Saying that, noting that, that means that as a layperson, you have to think about how you practice in a layperson that allows you to stay in touch with the Christian. You know, it's an open question, but my conclusion is, and that's why I concentrated in the United States, not just at Cresta,

[15:04]

And why I do things like this not very often. And why in Europe meditation is happening. Just practitioners from Presto have gone to Europe now and . Yeah. I'll come back. Yeah. I'd like to see more of your care, more fun, and flourish on Shabba. Yeah. I don't know if that makes sense. It's a very special meditation. Speak to me about meditation. Yeah. Speak a little bit of posture.

[16:07]

Sure. Yeah, yeah. What's up? Anybody else that you want to watch? I'm interested in the connection between sitting meditation practice like therapy and if through the practice itself, the same kind of practical results come from, say, catching stuff out. Is it too completely separate? to the same kind of realization of that? Everything is different. But there's a lot of similarities. And as Taoism was one of the entries of Buddhism into China, psychology, psychotherapy, it's one of the entries of Buddhism into .

[17:11]

Certainly, psychology and Buddhism share an interest or a commitment to study the mind. And there's also a similarity in the historic development of psychology in the West, I think. But in a lot of key points, psychology is conceptually quite different from Buddhism. For one thing, there's no psyche. no idea of the psyche or a narrative self, which is rather unimportant anyway, your narrative self, the story of who you are. But now if we just separate psychology from psychotherapy, there's more connection to therapy than there is to psychology. Because I think the craft of therapy, which is always a craft that develops in the interaction between two people, It may have a starting point within psychology, psychiatry, but develops its own mode of practice and understanding.

[18:33]

Psychotherapy is closer to Buddhism than psychology. OK. Yeah. Yeah. Me too. Yeah. And I really want to speak with you about these things always in terms of how we practice. OK. I started last night, and I'll try it.

[19:35]

take it as an entry to the seminar, starting rather independent, starting just with you. And I think this is actually quite characteristic, also, of Santa Fe. And I would guess that there are It's not just that it's a pure form of Buddhism that developed, one of the possible pure form of Buddhism, but it also developed through the historical context, I think, of coming into China, which was a highly literate Burmese culture. so in a way zen entered by simplifying itself and starting not bringing a whole lot of buddhist teachings into the culture which then had to kind of clash with the uh already established culture but starting from some zero is sneaking in it's like uh

[20:56]

And that's what I think the advantage of Zen is in the West, is you can teach it and look at it just from the point of view of, here you are, now what's here? What are you going to do about what's here? And as soon as you ask the question, what's here, you're asking a very powerful and somewhat destabilizing sometimes question. Practice, you could say, comes down to that you happen to be the kind of person who can ask this question, stay with the question, not accept easy answer, and face the consequences of the question. So if you just did nothing else but ask yourself, what's here?

[22:04]

We're willing to do that because you have some intuitive sense. I don't think it can just be philosophy. You have to have some intuitive sense that there's more, that there's something other to it. That you're trying to satisfy yourself in the usual ways. Somehow you end up not being quite done. There's always a gap. And I think we intuitively practice. And practice is the most common word in the idea of practice. And it's developed its own identity as a word, which is different than by practicing the piano. It has more the sense of the practice of music. where the practice of music as a whole sound, bringing the whole sense of music into your life, changes your life.

[23:14]

That's a little different than just learning to play the piano. The word practice means the English Roots of the word, the practice, that are closest to the Buddhist idea is to enable or to enact. To enable yourself or to enact yourself. Now, when I was a kid, I spent a lot of time on the roofs. I climbed up buildings, fire escapes. I didn't live in Boulder, so no. In Pittsburgh, you know, I did go up the face of the building, but can't stick in the... And I used to, and you could say, certainly there is a certain sense of climbing up the face of a building or a fire stick or whatever.

[24:17]

There's a certain adventure and empowerment and things like that. testing your capacity. But really, to me, I actually think it was an intuitive struggle to discover meditation. Because, you know, for instance, one of the things I'd do is I'd look at those trees out there and take a really nice tree, a big poplar or something like that, and I'd climb up as high as I could. And I'd climb up to the point where the branches were so tiny that if I breathed heavily, I would fall out of the tree. I could turn my head to look down, you know, if I looked down like this. Well, this isn't just about this. It's actually pretty much like meditation.

[25:17]

And to get to that point, where very delicate changes in your posture, your mind, your breathing change everything. And then I would come down to the trip. It would be great. Then the other thing I used to do is I used to love train whistles and boat whistles. Not so much siren and car horn, but there was something about them that would take me out of my ordinary consciousness. And again, I would almost try to stay up late to hear it. It's such a great sound. You don't want to die on such a sound. You die for such a sound. I didn't realize as I was saying last time, you know, it's a way of hearing your own sound outside to carry me.

[26:26]

And of course, it's connected with travel and all that stuff. But basically, it moved me. It created a feeling of bliss. And one of the, you know, again, Buddhism has no sense of public science by which you verify the truth. What does that mean you have developed? And Buddhism rests on, one of the things it rests on is that you have the capacity to decide for yourself what's wholesome or unwholesome. Not just what your culture says. What this means if you decide, as I point out, You decide for yourself what's wholesome or unwholesome. That isn't so much morality as it is freedom from your culture. It means your culture doesn't tell you what's wholesome or unwholesome.

[27:30]

You decide. The practice needs to put yourself in a place where you have the capacity, courage, whatever, to decide for yourself what's wholesome or unwholesome. And one of the characteristics of a valid cognition is that it's accompanied by wisdom. There's a sureness that you feel so sure that you give wisdom. So I noticed that on these trade whispers, I would give this blissful feeling that What I understand now is it was awakening some truth body in myself, free of our culture, to this dreamless psyche.

[28:32]

When I started to meditate, I found that all of a sudden, but I couldn't find that love. At least I wasn't. And likewise, I noticed when I'm planning these buildings, particularly times when I needed to rethink something to get out of this, have a different perspective of what I was doing. I did this from the time I was a kid up through college. I knew the town where my college was. I knew the rules of almost every building. But I wouldn't do it now. I mean, I hardly leave my room now. I just stay at my room. What are you doing up there? I hear something. So we can say that practice arises from an intuitive sense of some

[29:46]

deeper light, deeper system, truer body, truer mind, that of an obscured person. And if you accept that, then you really immediately have the question, is it attainable? And do I work with the obscurations, or do I work with realizing? this experience itself, which then will, on its own, dispel the obscurations. And then you could start looking at Buddhist schools in terms of whether they emphasize the obscurations or whether they emphasize the experience that dispels obscured frustrations. Am I making enough with sufficient sense that I can continue? Okay, so there's you, there's me, and here we are.

[30:58]

As I said last night, we sit down and we can say to ourselves, you know, what's sitting here, what's this moment, and the advantage of that is that when you look at it this way, is it pretty hard to do that if you're involved in your activity? So to step outside of your activity means to sit down. You sit down and almost you leave yourself up there. When I'm standing myself in the world of my society, it's not, of course, true. But there is that sense when you sit down outside yourself, outside yourself. So what's here? Now, you could take your own inventory.

[32:05]

And I'd suggest that you take your own inventory. But just to take your own inventory and think that's valid is already a two-distance. Because you have to feel there's some point, or that you have the capacity to decide. If you think that you're a person with an inherent, permanent energy that started in the past sometime, and you're sort of like it, just manifesting this thing, then what point does it take in the time? You might want to calm yourself down a little bit. Whatever. But to actually think. that you can look at what your constituents are and have something to say about those constituents.

[33:08]

It basically . So already we have something that you have to kind of fundamentally recognize if you're going to practice, is that there are constituents of mind and body, and you or something whatever this view is, can say something about these conditions, how they're put together, how they function, how they could be transformed. Because change also means choice, transformation, suffering. So what's here? What are the constituents that's here? I'll make an inventory. You can make your own. Obviously, your body.

[34:09]

I mean, something called body. And not just the body as corpse, but the aliveness that makes the body. What else is here is some kind of mind, consciousness. It's something called consciousness with mind. Now, excuse me for sounding so kindergarten, but to really notice that you have some kind of consciousness of mind, and a body. I talk a lot about my friend, too much. He's, I don't know what he said, but it's that. He figures out, I mean, he's exploring his body, the world, stuff. and exploring his expression, which makes it . He's not very physically capable.

[35:18]

He can dance, sort of, crawl quite fast, but really can't do much, can't beat himself. But boy, can he take a whole group of people and command their attention. So he gets everyone to do everything for him. And then what else? We have our sense. I would make a category. I'd say we have our sensate work. The world of sound, smell, taste, touch. What else is in this category? Father Pete.

[36:27]

Relationships. feeling the depth of another person's life. Sometimes the way a person looked at you once many years ago is informing you all the time. And then there's time and self-change, interdependence, accidents. that there's a succession of moments, and those moments aren't predicted. So that definitely would agree in what's happening right now. Another would be, I think we'd have to say this,

[37:30]

What is not understood? I mean, we know more than we understand. And we often understand less than we know. But there's also that which cannot be understood, or that which is mysterious and will always remain mysterious. And that kind of chaos, unpredictability, also part of life. If you try to eliminate that, you kill yourself. That's why death is so . And finally, in my inventory here, is teaching. I mean, one of the ingredients that's right here is, with each of you, is what you've already learned, just given to you by the Parasite, but also what you can study.

[38:52]

Now, if we look at these... We take your inventory. And this would be a, this is pretty, I mean, what I'm talking, I'm putting this in the context of a kind of common sense. Practicality. Kind of in-depth practicality. But it's also what I'm talking about a second, is looking at another point. So then we can go back to each of these categories and look at, can we take an inventory within each of these categories? So look at your body. I mean, your body is physical stuff, but really it's what makes your body alive.

[40:08]

I mean, for example, we tend to think, in our language, we tend to think of the body as a brewing vat. And supposedly, the root of, I'm not sure, but one of the roots of the word body is a brewing vat, like making beer or something. Now in China, In Asia, they tend to think of the body as a share of the whole, not as a container. Now, if you think of your body as a share of the whole or as a container, you're already thinking of your body a very different way. These two ways are different. So already we have a different way of looking at the body. And because we look at it as a container, when a person is dead, we say, oh, there's their body.

[41:23]

But we wouldn't say there's their body because the container is that person. There's some stuff there. But the body is what, in Buddhist terms, body is a kind of sense of own organizing quality, which has vitality, which makes that stuff alive. OK, when you define body as an own organizing vitality, you're studying this thing at this particular moment. There are many dimensions of own, organized vitality. And that own organization can occur from several different points of view. So in other words, if you get into it, you'll discover you have several bodies. If you think of it as a container, you have only one body. But if you think of your body as a share of the whole, already there's different ways you're a share of the whole.

[42:30]

that you're emphasizing the interdependence, that you're emphasizing the independence. This is why the eightfold path starts not with practice, but with right views. Because views affect everything. You can all synthesize what you like. But it may be therapeutic, and it may make you feel better. But it isn't Buddhist meditation, lest it be spoiled by Buddhist view. No, we could say, OK, so yeah, so I don't want to be natural. I don't want any Buddhist views. I used to. Okay, so what is the good answer to that?

[43:34]

Then eliminate all views. Cut the view of no views. See what that means. It interacts with you as a child, as a human. Already those of you who are in a kind of bioentrainment and they're being passed, as I said last night, does my little grandson think there's an outside and an inside? Or is he reaching out into a sphere, an extendable inside? If you think you're reaching out into the extendable inside, You're in a very different world. And if you think, I'm here, that's up there. And you have a very different relationship to possession, to government, et cetera. And this inside-outside distinction is endemic in our society, just a distinction of public and private. We take it for granted.

[44:39]

Outside, we dress one way. Not necessarily so. Public and private, the Western distinction. You can see countries like Bali trying to create a tourist industry by trying to create a public space which foreigners can enter, like hotel rooms. This is the British creation, more or less, a Western creation, hotel lobbies. You know, places where the public can congregate independent of culture. And the tourist industry depends on creating public-private distinction. So the tourist industry, whether they understand it or not, has to go into culture and create the idea of a public space. My classic comment.

[45:43]

An example of this, which I hate to repeat myself, so those of you who don't know me, is in the Japanese airport until about 20 years ago, they wore their underwear in hot days. Because you didn't dress differently in public space. You dressed differently if you were going to meet a friend or go do a certain kind of activity. But there wasn't outside your door is public space. So it was warm. Wear your underwear at your house. Wear your underwear at the airport. But it startled foreign tourists. So the Japanese learned to put on their clothes at the airport. But in villages in the country, they still, in the summer, they put on their clothes at the house. And there's very little inside-outside distinction. So from the very beginning, we have teaching or we've been taught at a very fundamental level what's here, what's there, what here and there are.

[46:56]

So practice, and how do you notice that? I mean, there's almost no way to notice that unless you have something to compare it with. Meditation is a different mind and a different body. So now that you're recognizing, you've come to the point to recognize. If the body is a share of the whole, then we can share the whole differently. We can see that when you're practicing meditation, you have a different body. You'll notice that you make decisions. That's also intuitive. The person said, I don't want to sit down and think this through. Well, basically, it's a kind of meditation. When Freud had people lying on the couch and re-associating, basically, he's using a meditation pot. No one knows what got it. No one's worked at it. But basically, he is bringing yogic sense of mind into Western culture through re-association.

[48:06]

And then he developed a lot of cigarettes, which is not quite brilliant. Now, if you recognize that when you meditate, you have generated a different mind and a different body, which is not waking mind, not dreaming mind, not deep sleep. So in general, we have three states of mind we're born in. Dreaming, not dreaming deep sleep, and waking. As soon as you sit in an upright conscious position and allow yourself to some extent to fall asleep, but stay awake, this is already a cultural argument. It's something, I mean, you might discover it on your own.

[49:09]

People do. They go Sunday. That's discovery on your own. Or they stand on a roof building, edge of a cliff or something. But to really notice that, zazen line is a different mind. and it's worthwhile to interject this different mind into your daily life on a regular basis, this would be hard to come to on your own. You might intuitively do it because of psychological pressures, necessity might find you're so nutty that it's the only way to survive, or it's a issue with me. But still, to really see it, it's worth doing, And then to explore that mind is Buddhism.

[50:10]

Already now have a teacher. And that teaching then begins to teach you. Because teaching is not just be willing to have a teacher or to learn from others, but it's also willing to put yourself in a place where the teachings fall within you and teachings then teach you. So good teaching may come from others, but good teaching then starts to teach you. So this state of mind, which is neither waking, dreaming, nor not dreaming, deep sleep, has the potential to unite these three or to be more inclusive of these three. and already begins to interact with you in a different way. Because what we've got here is not the contents of mind, but the field of mind.

[51:16]

So we're not concerned so much with the train as we're concerned with the tracks. If you want to study a village, It's more interesting to study the paths, but who's on the path? Well, who's on the path? Well, somebody's carrying some wood here, and there's somebody carrying a baby that way, and somebody else going this way. But that's interesting. But if you look at the paths, you see a pattern that's gone back for years of behavior. So what we're looking at is the paths of our mind, not just the thoughts, but patterns of our thinking. If you want to find your fish, you need to look at the water. But then you ought to also pay attention to the water, because the water inside would cut fishing. So we're looking at our mind to see what kind of fish would

[52:22]

When you change your mind, you change the fish. Different kinds of thoughts appear. Different kinds of water. Different relationships. Because basically, you can think of mind as a liquid with a certain viscosity, temperature, et cetera. And when you change the liquid of the mind through meditation, You change what floats in it, what appears in it, and how it's transformed in the process of being in that liquid. One liquid cooks, one liquid freezes. So you're actually transforming just by entering meditation a certain amount of time each day, or mindfulness. You are actually changing your memory. You're changing how your memories relate to not necessarily the facts, but you're changing access to memory.

[53:27]

You're changing what you remember. And you're changing how that memory is restored to memory. So just by changing, recognizing that you've changed your state of mind, you start changing memory. So in our inventory we've got, we haven't got very far, but. So you can see this simple inventory opens you up into a lot of possibilities. What's here? What is this home? So let's say if we wanted to get something like that. Then we'll have to break. No, I don't know how much the city would like to do.

[54:57]

Where's the woman who said she wanted me to go? There you are. Hi. She's sure. So if you and a few other people want to, maybe at the end, before lunch, after you've provided it, discussion about practice and sitting practice, and it's not limited to... anybody who wants to find a bit of a refresher. I need a refresher. You know, if you feel uncomfortable with... It's hard for me to force anyone to sit. I think sitting should be a pleasure. Or you should understand the value of discovering that you can sit through anything.

[56:03]

And so if you start feeling uncomfortable, I start feeling uncomfortable, and I ring the bell. If you're comfortable in lying, don't talk at all. That's it. Maybe you should get a little more religious, yes? This is Western Zen, this is Asian Zen. So what would you like to, how would you like to bring up?

[57:21]

Yes? How it's possible to be in a state of mind where you're entirely eligible, just sitting and being and observing and bringing that into driving your car and going to a supermarket And actually, how, to me, they feel, I'm wondering how, how they think about it. Yeah. Did you hear what she said? Yeah, of course, that's the big question. And the more your practice develops, the more you're aware of the difference between tazen mind, sashi mind, and so forth. But you also increase the capacity for developing or discovering that mind in your everyday situation.

[58:26]

But I think it requires patience and faith and intention. So if you have the intention that this will happen, but your patience and faith that will happen. It will. Because the discovery of how to do it is, if there's a tension behind it, you will discover how to do it. I cannot simply suggest, but really the intention opens up what's possible. Someone else had a question about meditation. Yeah? What do you suggest for ? Can you hear what he said? Yeah. Well, it tells you something about mine.

[59:41]

It'll tell you something about our culture. And you could also just sing along. Sashini, you see if anybody else got the same song, go ahead. You? Hearing the same song. Okay. You know, in Japan, they require you to sit in meditation. Traditional Japan, they require you to sit in meditation posture. And how do they do that? No furniture. And in fact, Lenny Brackett, who's head of East Wind Construction, building this house for us in Japan, Crestone is Dover's son, Abbott's house.

[60:42]

It has a completely Japanese house, the Sierra, and he just got a call yesterday from the house sitters. They said, we just know what house sitting meant. We're used to furniture sitting there. And they refused to stay in the house. So they said, we'll watch it. We can't. We just can't live all day long with no furniture. But I think that our culture, you know, we seek something like that through genius. track of songs on the radio or television. So if right now we're in this room, if you only have a chip, you're... So it tells you something about the state of mind people need when they're distracted and they want to change their distraction.

[61:47]

The easiest entry is love. And then if the word love occurs a couple of times, then the rhythm... So people tune into this other state of mind. So when you start zazen, you tune into your music track. Very common. Because your culture has taught you to get out of your usual state of mind through music. And it's of use, but you also would like to get through the music or to the space. I mean, we could think of practice as like meeting a basket. Each moment, there's various parts to the basket. But there's spaces between the we. So what we usually do is we fill our mind with something else to change our mind. That's okay. Then look at that process of reaching. Me, different state of mind.

[62:49]

Then look between the we. So again, take some patience. The music barrier is not as difficult as the boredom barrier. Because there's also, each of you are the most complex, extraordinary event in this cosmos that we know about. But you're all very easily bored. There's totally no reason to be worried about yourself. And the only reason is you're stuck in a threshold which our society probably doesn't, or you yourself, don't want to go beyond because it turns you into perhaps an unmanageable person. Or it turns you into a person who comes out of their own motivation. Or you are afraid

[63:53]

who you might be if you weren't in control. So that's one of the advantages of learning to sit still, because when you really learn to sit still, you discover that you can sit through anything that immediately breaks the easiest connection between thought and action. As long as you think you might act on certain thoughts, you will be afraid to have those thoughts. And even if there's no thoughts to be afraid of, we imagine there might be thoughts to be afraid of. So we glue them to other mental activities, music, or something like that. But you have to have this courage to face unusual states of mind, or states of mind you've never had before, or you don't know anyone who's had them. And that courage is simply developed most directly through learning to sit through the pain of your legs, the distraction of your mind, and so forth, till you know, hey, throw the worst at me, baby, I can just... A certain kind of pedestrian warrior spirit.

[65:13]

No, pedestrian, that's walking. Sitting warrior spirit. Yeah. I don't know if I'm able to talk about that. I've had the experience in the last few years of being able to sit during periods of pain or mental pain, physical pain or mental pain, in and out of the circuit. They invite watchers who've been involved in some of the human, some of the international work, and catching myself not acting for when it first evolves. That's very powerful. Something I probably would still do is You can't, at one level, sit through any day, including whatever activities, what they're like. But there are also times when you have to act. And it's sometimes hard to know when a situation requires action and when it's something that you might just sit through. Yeah, generally we act from our thinking. But if you start practicing, you discover that that's not a reliable place to act from.

[66:20]

So you're actually discovering a different place to act from. But it takes time to enact that. Yeah? Is following up chairs helpful to practice? Yes. I would recommend if you seriously want to learn to sit, you make your desk a book. Or you put someplace where you tend to sit a book. You know, it's interesting. One of the things they do from the 60s, which is, I think, probably the most important thing they do, other than it's a beautiful place, but that's actually quite distracting, as hot as it's even more distracting, but is that they don't jump any chairs.

[67:24]

So all the seminars, you know, Business people come and everything. They have to sit on the floor. It changes everything. All these people trying to get millions of Christians. It changes the discussion. So, it, uh, like I was just in a meeting, I was in a man chair. I was in a man chair. I guess it's hard now. But, um, I mean, it's not necessary to sit on the floor, but it's helpful to learn to sit on the floor. And there's an energy type Taoist practice, and we can't sit on the floor. And it demands a certain yoga posture, and it demands you to use your back. One of the ways to find yourself in practice is, what I did, was the main posture of Zazen is your back.

[68:26]

The first years of practice, I never leaned back on a chair unless it was embarrassing to others. You know, sometimes if you sit too straight, you look like you're blind. Blind people are very straight. You remember I said, when a train or bus goes by, you tell it why. And they learn to look sighted by students. We don't have a tail, so it's stupid to show what read them. But when it's possible, you're not disturbing you by being too straight. I always sat in restaurants and trains and things as much as possible straight. Because that straightness of my back, which is called a bandai, yoga, locks in a certain kind of energy. But it doesn't mean you want to do it rigidly or something.

[69:29]

Find certain things like that to help remind yourself. Okay, one more. Yeah. I have a question about studying. Last night you were talking about the issue of the U.S.A. It's supposed to be democratic. Sibling culture. Yeah. Um, it doesn't seem like we have three. Is that a secret power of Buddhist study? Study of Buddhism? Study of Buddhism. What happens if you have four? Last talk about six months. Did I say six months? Some months. Some months. Some weeks. What? Well, I don't know how to answer your question, Marie.

[70:36]

I'm here. All these people are here. And there are places in Boulder and Crestow and other places that you can go and practice with people. And mostly, practice is an intuitive process. You can learn stuff about it, but you have to get the feel of it. If you want to be with someone, and with some others where you get FEMA. So I would like to go on with the inventory. But maybe I could tell you an exact story now before I continue with the inventory. I guess we're going to have lunch now. And by the way, we sat this morning for 25 minutes. So anyway, I'd like to continue with the inventory.

[71:52]

And what I'm doing also is I'm trying to emphasize initially this weekend what is specifically Zen practice. Not only the specifics of Zen practice, but the conceptual framework of Zen practice, which is also what we're doing here starting from zero. Recreating the possibility of practice for ourselves. But I would like in the afternoon to to look at those practices or tools which allow you to study your inventory. So far we've just looked at the inventory. And my implication, specifically I've given you some of the tools, like learning to sit through boredom or mental, physical difficulty, anxiety, and so forth, is one of the tools. But I'd like to speak more specifically about the four foods, which we could say is a Buddhist practice, and five practices which are more specifically Zen.

[73:03]

But let me tell you a Zen story. This is one of the Zen stories I tell most often. And I would like to illustrate, either to illustrate three points. And I think it's useful to come back to these stories because you want to discover these stories as archetypal incidents in your own life, almost as if they happened to you. I mean, I think what a great novelist does, for me, Proust has been a great novelist, and I just started rereading Proust recently, and I discovered that in the first... you know, pages, first section, first few pages. There were innumerable lectures of mine embedded in the text. They were starting points, which I no longer recognized until I read Prusin.

[74:11]

I was 20 or so. I no longer recognized where it came from. But he's such a, I wouldn't say a great novelist, that his experience has become my... So it's really quite extraordinary, and that's one of the things I think novels have done in Western culture, is widen what our actual experience is, not just a fiction. Because if the novel is good enough, you experience it. So you might experience it as called fiction, but if you experience it, then you're experiencing it. So these Zen stories are meant to be archetypal experiences, that you begin to notice these experiences in your own situation.

[75:11]

And this story is very, very simple, so it doesn't require you to know anything about Buddhism, which refers to something I said last night. Okay. Here it goes. Heard it before. Yunyan is... And his brother, who's his brother, actual brother, and his daughter's brother, comes up to him, and a little smarter, or at least seems to be cleverer, and says, too busy. And Junyao says, you should know there is one who is not busy. Dao says, aha, Dao Lu. The only holds up the room. He said, is this the double room? OK. So what does the teaching present in this story?

[76:13]

What is the difference between simultaneous, let's say, calmness and sequential calmness? That's what I mentioned last night. But generally we think of meditation as, the common way we think of meditation is you're distracted, busy, and there's periods of calmness that we need. This has taken off the model of sleeping. We're busy and active, but we need to take a nap, or we need to sleep. And conceptually, meditation falls into the category of religious nap. But truly, meditation is simultaneous nap. So instead of thinking, as I said, using the image of water, which is so useful as a metaphor for mind and its possibilities, is that we may notice that the lake is calm one part of the day and choppy another part of the day.

[77:36]

But if you look more carefully at that choppiness, If you look more carefully at that choppiness, the shape of the wave is determined by there's stillness already in the water. That's real sin. The water is already still. The shape of it. But the water itself, not the wave, is trying to be still. And that's what makes a wave. So, how do you get to that point with this point set? How do you get to that point where you know simultaneous stillness and not sequential stillness?

[78:40]

How do you discover that way in which you're already still even when you're acting? I mean, sequential stillness is great, but it's not set. If we were to define Zen, if one said it's less, we could say Zen is silent discovery and realization, simultaneous stillness. Simultaneous life. So Dalu says, aha, double moon, meaning, oh, then there's you and then there's this other reality. There's some reality outside this, where one is busy or one is still.

[79:43]

And Da Wu says, emphasizing, and Gu Nian says, emphasizing simultaneous stillness, and says, is this a double, isn't this both busy and still? Isn't water both busy and still? And what he's pointing out by this also is knowing there's not anything outside the system, knowing that is a way to discover simultaneous . Because if you think that, if you have an idea that there's something outside the system, then you have the idea that not everything is here. If absolutely everything is here, then there's nothing outside the system.

[80:50]

Okay? And an understanding in faith that absolutely everything is here, knowing there's no outside. It's all inside. It's all here. It hasn't all been here. It means you can have faith in that it's all here. Which means that whatever you need has to be here. And if there's stillness, it can't be there. Yes, on some level there's a different kind of, but that stillness has to be here. There has to be that kind of radical faith that it is all here. So there's two points in this poem. One is that simultaneous stillness. And the second is that there's nothing outside the system.

[81:53]

And that nothing outside the system, as the teaching means, knowing that creates the condition for understanding, realizing simultaneous stillness. No. Another thing characteristic of this koan, the way it's told in koan in general, is it attempts to, as a dialogue, bring you to a critical point. So third point of this koan is a critical point or a, we say the sharpness and the swiftness. Now last night I spoke about that this moment, whether you know it or not, is absolutely weak and . And timeless.

[83:02]

It gets to, you know, it's five minutes to 12, two minutes to 12, one minute to 12, half a minute to 12, half a second half a second after 12. 12 never existed. It was approached and passed, but it never existed. You can't grasp 12. It's always a moment before or a moment after. So there's no capacity we have to notice anything except in relationship to something else. But things also exist independently. At that moment, 12 somehow existed, but we can't grasp it. We can only talk about it as before or after, right? So we can say there's no such thing as 12 o'clock. That means there's no such thing as any particular one o'clock 12. There's no such thing as a moment before 12. So that means that timelessness is a fundamental part

[84:08]

It's the fundamental reality. And that timelessness is also the non-repeatability and absolute uniqueness of your soul. How many practical terms? No one else in the world is sitting where you are. You're absolutely unique. No one else is sitting there. There's no complete, absolute unique person. And in that unique person and in that uniqueness is exactly the way you are most like everyone else. So when we enter that uniqueness, that timeless, non-repeatable moment that cannot be grasped, yet we can discover a mind which lets it happen. Because it exists, it's just that our conceptual mind can't. described notice that absolute uniqueness is also that state of mind which we call sharpness and swiftness.

[85:24]

It's absolutely sharp and swift and there's no dimension to it and yet that's the moment which we're most likely to understand. So the koa is always trying to suggest this sharpness by, oh, too busy. Should know which one is not busy. Ah, double moon. Is this a double moon? So this kind of conjunction is that part of this dialogue is to try to bring you to a critical point. So part of the characteristics in teaching is to develop a mindfulness that's not just attentive, but also there's a mindfulness that brings you to timelessness or a critical point. Now that critical point should, in a good teaching, correspond to who you are at this moment.

[86:33]

So it depends on who you are at this moment in a real dialogue, teacher practitioner. But it also should correspond to your potential . So it's that point where you and possibly being a Buddha and and freedom from inherent permanent identity, absolute independence of time and space. So one thing that's characteristic of Zen practice is to create that critical point, not only in dialogues and collage, but to create that critical point in the way that you practice. And if it doesn't make sense or it doesn't seem attainable or possible, just have then now the faith that it's always going on or not going on.

[87:47]

It's actually the water in which you are living, but you only see the waves. So you want to develop a mind that that sees the wave, allows the waves, and kind of drops out of the waves, as I said last night, into a non-object-bearing continuum. I'll give you an example of when your hands disappear in meditation, when your body disappears in meditation. Has your body disappeared? No. That continuum of mind which supports objects disappears. And in that continuing mind, you see everything, but things appear in their absolute uniqueness and non-reveal. And in that, it is so swift that we say, not a single thing exists. Now, through practice, you can work with a phrase like that.

[88:50]

Not a single thing exists. I can look at you and I can fully see you, but I can take to you. Just take with me. Okay, so that's it. And you can find when you're sweeping or doing or driving, you can feel, hey, there is one who's not busy. In the middle of however busy you are, you can simply use language to remind yourself, which is also a rather unique emphasis in that practice, is to use language to point at what you want to realize. Just use a phrase to point at the one who's not busy.

[89:56]

And if you just keep repeating that, in the back of your mind, you're feeling, there's one who's not busy. It creates the condition to realize that just by pointing at it too much. Yes, and that probably should call up a second meeting. Well, it's about a year.

[90:42]

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