And in a Buddhist sense, using Western words, grace is always present. But we don't always receive it. And grace is in a sense, as Michael points out in his book, is a kind of siddhi or a special ability. In other words, grace is, in this sense, grace is you feel a calling from the world. You feel the world calling you. And Buddhist practice starts when you feel Zazen calling you. Where you hear awareness or your deeper sense of being alive calling you. Or you hear being calling the self to being.

[01:14]

I'm testing you. I couldn't manage with that. Being calling the self to being. Mm-hmm. And the second aspect is you feel a companionship with the world or with your practice. I mean, it's not just that you have companions in practice, other Dharma friends, but zazen and the experience of zazen itself begins to feel like a companion. and finally as you really begin to feel this companionship you actually feel each tree is your companion these poor sometimes dying bees are your companion

[02:18]

And this is a feeling even of, you could say, goes so far as feeling blessed by the world. When this feeling of companionship is very developed, you begin to just feel blessed by things. And I think almost everyone sometimes experiences this quite intensely in Sashin. You're stumbling for no reason at all, again, non-referential. You begin to feel gratitude for, I don't know, the water coming out of the tap. It just seems like a miracle that all these people got together to create this opportunity for you to turn on a tap.

[03:49]

And you may start weeping. Your own face faucets turn on. Your face faucets. Sorry, I'm having a good time. Um, And the next thing, again, when this feeling of being called by practice in the world and then feeling a companionship with the world, and a kind of underlying gratitude and a feeling of being blessed by the world, We could say that this is a Buddhist form of grace.

[04:59]

And it opens you up to hearing the teaching of the world. Which is the third form of quality of grace is that everything begins to teach you. And in a way you could say this is what the word upaya means in Buddhism. That everything in its innate skills teaches you. And unless we're very lucky we don't feel this all the time but just to feel it some really opens up your life. So where we started out here is with an accepting attention where you begin to listen to the world And listen to your practice and have faith in your practice.

[06:12]

And it turns into a kind of grace through which you receive. Now, you could say that this accepting is the underside of passive attention. Here we have a deeper form of passive attention, as which you've broken through the surface of passivity and seen how accepting begins to work as a form of grace. Does that make a sort of sense that I'm talking about up to this point? Not everyone said yes, but I will try to go ahead. But I heard the column speak over there. The next kind of attention is the attention of interior consciousness.

[07:31]

Now, the code for it would be in my way of teaching is when you hear, hearing to the extent that you hear things inside you. So you begin to be able to give interior attention to things. Now all of these again are kinds of changes in frequency or something like that in the way you function. Now interior attention is fast the way dreams are fast. Do you understand what I mean by dreams are fast? Okay, you have a dream.

[08:48]

You wake up and you've had a little dream. Just a little vignette. So you start trying to write it down. Twenty pages later you're still, you know, writing down the dream. And it leads to more and more kind of subtleties that were happening. So when you transfer the dream into conscious mind, which is much slower, it takes quite a lot of paper. So although Zen is supposed to and does slow you down or calm you, That calmness also opens up an interior attention which is very fast. But it's fast the way Sukhiroshi used to say, when he looks up at the stars, he sees those calm, speedy beings.

[09:51]

What's that Rilke line? Those stars these thousand years are dead or something like that. These calm speedy beings are faster than life. You don't have to translate it. I thought that there were experiments done with people dreaming. And you can imagine when the REM starts, and then you wake them up 10 seconds later. And you could describe their whole life and all the different information. And when they transform that into informational parts that they still transmit at that time, you get to the conclusion that the speed to transport nothing being with the old speed.

[11:09]

Yeah, that's what I mean. Thank you. Do you want to say that in Deutsch? Okay, so interior consciousness begins to know the world faster than exterior consciousness can actually keep up. So this silence of Zen is a way of saying, don't let exterior consciousness interfere. Okay. Now the third attention, I mean the sixth attention, is what I call pedestal attention. That's the last one, don't worry. Otherwise, maybe I could make up about 40 and give you an idea.

[12:14]

What is pedestal? Pedestal, like the pedestal is the base in which a statue stands on. Yeah. Is that an elegant word in German? No. Then we can use maybe foundation attention. And by that I mean the kind of attention I was speaking of earlier, of which the pedestal, the world sits on this pedestal, or this phenomenal world of stuff. So there's a kind of... stuff-to-stuff communication. But even saying communication is too operative a word. It's just a stuff-to-stuff unitive experience.

[13:20]

So, and the word for these four realms that I brought up, the four elements, is datu. It's the same word as dharmadhatu, meaning realms. So these four elements are also four realms in which we exist. And in the teaching of the foundations of mindfulness it teaches these four realms but it also teaches two more. Some versions teach six realms. adding space and consciousness. But for now, I think this mid-week seminar, it's enough for us to look at the four realms that make up the form skandha.

[14:21]

Which make up the most basic way we can be attentive within the world. Hmm. So that finishes the six attentions. I hope it didn't finish you. The foundation attention. It's like this pillar communicating with that pillar. Or it's like, as I said earlier, my knowing what Giorgio had this skill, but my cells knowing it and not my consciousness knowing it.

[15:50]

So it's a more developed form or deeper form of what I said of accepting the world. in which the activity of acceptance is not necessary because it's already here. Now, this is expressed, the sense of grace and the sense of this foundation, attention, the best words I can come to for it, is expressed in a saying in Zen.

[16:53]

If you want to be such a person, No. If you want to attain such a thing, and here's a use of the word such to mean suchness or thusness, or this non-thusness means non-conceptual perception of the world, So if you want to attain such a thing, you must be such a person. That's the first part. If you want to attain such a thing, you must be such a person. Second part. Since you are such a person, Why bother with such a thing?

[18:03]

Since you are such a person, why bother with such a thing? Because it's already here. That I added, it's already here. Hmm. So this is like my saying that the statement about have you had breakfast or have you eaten or washed your bowl exists on three levels which don't interfere with each other. Of course you have to have breakfast. Of course you have to have some attainment. And third, no attainment is necessary. And no attainment is also an expression of grace.

[19:12]

It makes what we call this grace function. So this statement of, you don't have to translate it, if you want to attain such a thing, you must be such a person. Since you are such a person, why bother with such a thing? Just weaves those levels into one statement. and typical of the liquidity or liquidness of the use of language in Buddhism, taking the same word and changing its meaning and context. Hmm. Hmm. Now we're supposed to end at 5 o'clock and it's now 3.11.

[20:30]

And this part of this going through the attentions I've just finished, So I'd like us to get up and walk around for five minutes and sort of, you know, look at the water and then we'll sit down again. The reason I stopped is I felt we needed a break. And also, you know, I couldn't really go any deeper into or say much more that would be useful about the six attentions.

[21:35]

And I apologize to some of you because I started something yesterday which in a way I interrupted today. I started a kind of... a feeling, let's just say a feeling that I wanted to convey to you, but I'm not strong enough to do it. So today I'm conveying the same feeling I hope underneath the words. And partly in the words. But the words have to make sense in your conscious mind and engage your conscious mind.

[22:55]

And so some dissonance is set up. But again, that dissonance can be useful. Now, The quality of this fourth element is air. Or realm or datu. And this means when it's just one of the four, it includes space. And the space that allows your fingers to be separate. Without space, your fingers would be useless. And you have the space of your lungs and the interior of your body.

[24:09]

So this emphasizes this fourth element, the expansive, not the cohesive, but the expansive realm. To expand your presence, to feel your presence. To expand your presence, to feel another person. And this also then is the realm of consciousness and awareness. And also the realm of wind or movement. So this element is the element in which you discover the subtle winds of the body which open up and define your energy body.

[25:30]

Now these four realms are taught in different ways. They're taught as part of the four foundations of mindfulness. And they're taught as part of the five skandhas. And they're also taught in their own right as realms of being. But a kind of matrix or womb realm Matrix or womb realm. And this is also in this koan in the sense of wash your bowl.

[26:33]

The yoga of everyday life. How you meet in objects. But this is also like when you see something but you feel you're seeing touch what you see. So this sense of the form realm as womb matrix is how we enter the world of things in such a way that we germinate and develop. How we enter the world of things As if it were a kind of soil.

[27:48]

Or a matrix or womb. in which we germinate and develop. And we hear it in our language when we say, you know, I was touched by that. It's not that you understood it, you were touched by it. Do you have that same word in German, to be touched by something? Yeah. And so this sense of this womb matrix of touching includes basic things like your digestion. It's not just how you touch this, but how you touch your food with your stomach.

[28:53]

And how your digestion works. And it also includes how your defecation works. You don't know that word because you know. So defecation is a way in which we touch the world actually. So this ability to feel in the world, touch the world, that's often said in Buddhism. There are a lot of koans which say something like, have a cup of tea. And Sukhiroshi often used to say to us, well, come, let's have a cup of tea.

[30:01]

And it was a kind of ritual actually, a kind of nice ritual. And the most intimate time in the monastery is when the senior people have tea every morning after breakfast with the teacher. And you call it cho-san. And you offer a cup of tea to the Buddha, a little altar. And then each person is served a cup of tea and usually a little cookie or cake or something. And then there's no words. And nothing is said for the first 10 or 15 minutes.

[31:16]

And then someone spontaneously starts speaking about something. And usually Chosun lasts half an hour or something like that, 45 minutes. But sometimes it can last till lunch. And it's one of the most intimate times to talk about the Dharma and feel our existence together. So this, have a cup of tea, means how do you touch the world? What is your womb? How is the world your womb? No, this is, you know, as the phrase I gave you last night, the...

[32:43]

bones and marrow of the realm, the realm of bones and marrow or the bones and marrow of the realm beyond consciousness and unconsciousness. I think Zen has a wonderful way of saying these things in such funny words. Like they say, you know, entering no before and no after. And that actually can be a kind of turning word or mantra like koan. And so words are used as a way of getting you to touch the world. I mean, maybe it turns the words into a kind of liquid.

[33:49]

The words are kind of liquid. So if you practice with no before and after on each perception, it's a little different. It will give you its own teachings. But it's a little different than say working with the bones and marrow of the realm beyond consciousness and unconsciousness. So what I would give you as a kind of elixir of this seminar is to see if your bones and marrow can know the bones and marrow of the realm beyond consciousness and unconsciousness.

[35:16]

A teacher in acknowledging a student very deeply would say, he attained or she attained my marrow. That's deeper or somewhat different than saying that we have the same understanding or something. And I hope you realize this of touch, this realm of bones and marrow beyond consciousness and unconsciousness.

[37:00]

Because I wish you to be companions on the way With me and with everyone. And you also helped me realize the bones and marrow of the realm beyond consciousness and unconsciousness. Remember we started by opening up our bones. We started by the practice of opening up our bones.

[38:05]

So maybe you can feel our bones speaking to each other. and our common existence in these four realms. And the experience in these six modalities of attention. So this gives you some territory for practice during the next weeks or months or the next lives. And I've been very grateful to be with you this mid-week time, these three days.

[39:20]

And I'm very grateful to our hosts, Giorgio and Christiane. And to the Wiener Bande for putting this all together. So should we sit a little bit and then we can we can go home.

[39:54]

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