To remind yourself that you're also seeing mind. Eventually you have the experience of shifting, so the mind is based in the field of mind itself and not in the object of perception. And once you do that, or you have that experience, it's characterized by a feeling of real ease in your body, a kind of pliancy. Do you feel very soft and receptive? Like the world could blow right through you. And everything is very precise and bright.

[01:02]

And at some point, it's so bright, you're seeing a kind of light, and this is called, in some traditions, clear light. Because you're seeing the mind itself. And sometimes there is an enlightenment experience. But there's a difference between an enlightenment experience and enlightenment. Because you've come to this point, now is, do you make this the continuity of mind? Because what is the continuity of mind is what is the dynamic that most changes you. In other words, you can have this experience and that experience, but if what supplies your continuity of mind is the usual way of looking at things, that actually is always cooking your stove a certain way.

[02:28]

So I'm giving you a sense of the craft of practice that is behind the way a teacher does this and then does this and then suggests this koan or that koan. This first rung is to recognize the vijnanas and the skandhas and to use them to explore the way you see mind as well as the object. And then beginning to see mind as well as the object. And then shifting to mind as the basis for perception. And then seeing mind itself more than seeing the object.

[03:44]

And then making that seeing of mind the continuity of mind. Now I think if you understand that picture, it will actually give you a kind of context to practice mindfulness in a deep sense. For the practice of mindfulness is not just to bring your mind into the present moment, be here now. But also to see mind itself and make that the continuity of mind. And if you understand that, you can also read the koans and feel that coming through in different practices and teachings. Now, to do that you have to have a quite settled mind and body.

[05:02]

To come to the coherence of that. And so I should talk about those practices which are probably the level most of you are at. And me too, that's where I'm at. I'm trying to... The longer you practice, the more you have a taste and realization of these things, but also the more, unless you're one of the eight of the five Buddhas, you're still practicing the beginner stuff too. And it's not really beginning, it's just part of a spectrum. Shall we turn on some lights or is it nice in the dark?

[06:40]

Nice in the dark. It's okay, I don't mind. If I slowly disappear, you know, I'll wave here from the shadows. That's actually an old tradition in a lot of German families, at least I've just recently talked with some people about it, to practice and celebrate this Dämmerstunde, where this day and night meet. The shift, yeah. The shift, yeah. That's a very special... Okay, I'm happy. I'm becoming half German and half Japanese. And I had a bratwurst last night. Yeah, I believe. Okay. So this is simple. I'll stop at this point. When you see something, also see mind. Remind yourself. Okay, now back to the alchemy of the five elements.

[07:53]

And before, when I talk to you about the five elements, or usually I say four elements, I have emphasized them as a way of exploring the stuff of you. And now I'm emphasizing or speaking about the five elements as a way of exploring the shared stuff of us, phenomenal world and you. And I'm emphasizing it partly because it's part of Buddhist medicine. And I think if you understand it, you can actually, just practically speaking, keep yourself a lot healthier. So the third one is water or fluidity.

[09:03]

And part of this is feeling not just the solidity of you, the bones, the stuff, but the fluidity of you. And the pliancy. Now when Randy, every morning he has been a Tai Chi teacher. At Crestone we have a five day week there. not connected to astrology as our seven-day week is.

[10:06]

And on certain days, 0, 2, 5 and 7, I think, 17th, 25th and so forth, we have a kind of Tai Chi or Qigong exercise class in the morning. And he keeps emphasizing, let everything sink, let your whole body feel empty. It makes you feel very soft and natural, but it's not natural really. It's a teaching to let everything sink and feel empty. And this is related to the process of fluidity and pliancy. Because what is the nature, shall we say, of water?

[11:18]

It's clearly not only fluidity, it's clearly stillness. What is water always trying to do? Be still. The biggest wave crashing on the beach is attempting to be still. If it wasn't trying to be still, there would be no wave. So the water, the surface tension, it's always trying to move back into stillness, and it gets pushed by the wind, and it resists the wind and tries to move back into stillness. And if you take the wind away, the moon away, it becomes very still. And of course you can't take the wind away and the moon away. Because the moon is its own space.

[12:36]

Wind is its own space. The wave is its own space. But the movement of the water is towards stillness. So you begin to feel that in yourself, the movement in yourself towards stillness. You say things and talk, and then you move towards stillness. Man sagt Dinge und redet und wird wieder still. We usually get caught in an activity and ignore or feel it's more productive to ignore the movement towards stillness. Und wir werden oft gefangen in Aktivität und ignorieren dann diese Bewegung in Richtung Stille und halten sie für weniger produktiv.

[13:39]

And part of the practice of Buddhism, the craft of Buddhism, is to begin to recognize this movement towards stillness. Now this would be part of this deeper practice of mindfulness in your daily life, is to notice this movement towards stillness as well as bringing your mind back to what you're doing. And the movement of the mind itself towards stillness. Now, when we first went down to, when we first got Tassajara in 1966, 67, Suzuki Roshi, we decided to rebuild the stream, had nearly wiped out the bridge and the kind of rock walls that controlled this one stream going into the bigger stream or river.

[14:57]

And I mention this because it was a rather big experience for all of us. At that time we knew Suzuki Roshi, but in the context of living in a city and living in this little Kafkaesque tower in this former synagogue, Yes, and it was a pretty strong experience for all of us, that's why I'm telling it, because at the time we only knew Suzuki Roshi from the city, and we lived in this almost Kafkaesque room or tower room in this synagogue, in which this Japanese community, their temple, But suddenly we were down there and he was working with us, sometimes all day long from early in the morning till evening, moving these great big rocks and building this wall and so forth. And we were in our 20s and 30s.

[15:59]

And he didn't ever get tired. And we had about three shifts of young men trying to keep up with him. And he just worked all day moving these stones. And pretty soon everybody was exhausted. We'd have to send in a new crew, you know. And some people would say, well, he's enlightened, he's a superman, you know. So, you know, we can't, you know, et cetera. They couldn't feel close to it or identify with it. But if you watched him carefully, he was always relaxed. He'd be using a big crowbar or, you know, a big piece of steel to move a stone and adjust it when it could roll and crush your feet or body.

[17:29]

And he would be making effort at those moments, but as soon as that effort was over, he went to stillness. And it's almost like through his own practice of the five elements, when he was working with the stone, he became the stone. And his unmovability equaled the stone's unmovability. And then there was complete softness. So it wasn't exactly anything special. It was just this practice of the five elements or practice of knowing how activity turns to stillness.

[18:44]

And this is feeling this energy or fluidity in you which can be very strong and still. So again, continuing with this teaching, you feel this in yourself, this movement towards stillness. The thoughts come in, things disturb you, you hear some bad news, you open the letter and you feel sort of anxiety and your heart beating. But even in the midst of that, like in the midst of a wave, there's a movement towards stillness. So the next one is fire.

[19:45]

And fire means transformation. Two things becoming a third thing. Miraculously born. There's a certain fire in you you can feel sometimes where there's a kind of something happens inside you and you can really feel you change, you turn. And you can feel somebody says something to you, say, or whatever, you know, there's some input, somebody says something to you, and there isn't just a simple reaction, it actually changes you, you make a decision.

[20:55]

And that's often connected with a kind of heat and concentration and emotional coherence and so forth. Now these two I've just emphasized again. You not only feel them in yourself, you feel these things in the world. And the last one is space. And that's the feeling that everything is pervaded. There's a pervasive feeling. That the ten directions are empty. There's really no north or south.

[21:56]

Those are just ideas. Or in Zazen you feel a boundarylessness in your your experience, your field of consciousness. Now in experiential physics, not experimental physics, in experiential physics you say, if I feel a kind of space that touches and connects everything, You don't say to yourself, oh, that's just an experience. If you say that, you are just accepting your cultural way of defining things. Just an experience means it's a way of protecting yourself from it.

[23:13]

It's a way of taking the guts out of it. So you don't say it's just an experience, you say it's an experience. At first you don't know what it means. But you find it comes to you more and more. And you begin to find, if I close my eyes here, I can feel a difference between Neil and Hermann. It's nothing I can grasp, but there's a kind of space that has a certain quality. It's not undifferentiated. But it's also empty and non-graspable. This is more the emphasis of the practice of the Yogacara school that emptiness is form.

[24:29]

That I can experience this emptiness or experience this space. So if you become familiar with these five elements, you become... And I've tried to give you small tastes of them so that you can use those tastes as practices to open up these in yourself and in your relationship to things. You begin to feel a way in which you're connected to the world or part of or inseparable from You don't think of this as the house you live in, but rather you're also the house.

[25:52]

The house is in you and you're in the house. Now, Maybe that's enough. I mean enough to absorb. You begin to discover these five elements. Bring your, breathe into them.

[26:54]

Bring your mind into them. I'd like to go back to this word I use quite often, nourishment. When you can rest in a state of mind where you feel nourished. One example of this nourishment is when you feel a balance among these five elements.

[28:10]

Now I don't know much about acupuncture but I would guess that different ways of acupuncture emphasize different of these elements. And you'll find if you practice with these things For example, say you feel you're getting a cold. If you start getting a cold, it's quite useful to emphasize the solidity element. So you locate in yourself what stays in place.

[29:24]

And you locate in the physical world what stays in place. And you start adjusting What stays in place in yourself, you kind of coordinate it with what stays in place in the world. Everywhere you go, walking down a hall, sitting at a desk, You relate what stays in place in the phenomenal world with what stays in place in you. It will make it much more difficult for the cold to take hold. So you begin to notice when you feel out of balance, it's usually one or two elements that are out of balance and not the others.

[31:03]

So then you begin to find out which element is an antidote for the one that's out of balance. And you again, not only strengthen that element in yourself, you strengthen it through relating it to that element in the world. We can say this is the practice of Buddhist medicine. And also one practice of mindfulness and kind of, what's the word?

[32:06]

I don't have a word, worldology. Mind, body, phenomena, cohesion. You can practice with it right now.

[33:36]

Feel the space in your lungs. The space in your breath. Feel that continues with the space around you. And feel that moving into the topography of the space of all of us. And allow yourself to be adjusted by that space. Allow your thoughts and brain itself to disappear into this space. And let go body and mind.

[34:55]

You can come back into your sense fields or release your sense fields. This is one of your homes. I can feel the metal of the bell in you.

[36:44]

There's the bell and there's the sound. And you can feel both. And the sound comes from the bell, but the sound is quite independent of the bell. And the sound rings you. So we have here cause and effect, the bell and the sound. And we have freedom from cause and effect. The sound is quite independent. And you can stop the sound or open up the sound.

[39:06]

Sound belongs to you as much as the bell. A bell and a mokugyo, the wooden fish.

[40:35]

And the bell sits on a big stand. So it's changed the Doan job entirely. Everyone's developing big, strong right arms from hitting the mokigyo. When Gisela did it the first time, she was so out of breath, she couldn't chant. And this bell is like a big person. It's sort of bigger than you are. You could take a ride in it down the river or something. And so it really, you really have to kind of put your whole body there to hit the sound, to make the sound. So it's quite, you know, it's quite nice. It changes the whole presence of the chanting and so forth.

[42:07]

It's almost like an aerobic exercise now. So we really feel the person who's hitting the bell and everything about them on the sound of the Mokikyo and the bell. I have some pictures, maybe I'll put them out tomorrow. And we're also trying to get a large Kannon figure, Kuan Yin or Avalokiteshvara figure. And I'd like to tell you for a few moments something about it. It's about eight feet tall.

[43:13]

It's a very good figure. How big is that in meters? And we have a mathematic genius sitting here. And there's only two of them of this particular one in the world One of them is at Hiroshima as a memorial to the dead from the nuclear bombs America dropped. And I guess that when you cast such a big figure it's often easier or somehow they cast two and not one. Maybe one's a test or something, I don't know.

[44:15]

But anyway, they made two. One is in Hiroshima, and the other somehow ended up in Colorado Springs. That is quite mysterious. He's been over there for a while and he keeps Crestone and he keeps hollering. We particularly like it because it's the feminine form of Avalokiteshvara. And as you know, I really want more feminine qualities in Zen Buddhism. And I feel I'm very close to achieving that myself, but no one else does. You know, my dream is to become grandmotherly.

[45:36]

So it looks a bit like a kind of big Virgin Mary. And it's taller even than Gerald. It's quite big. That's a very nice face. And I checked with a friend of mine who runs a foundry for artists in Santa Fe and asked him how much it would cost to cast such a large figure. Foundry? A foundry is where you cast metal, bells. He said the minimum cost just to cast something, he doesn't know how complicated it is, but at least $30,000. She says more. It has cloth and lots of detail.

[46:45]

There's been another estimate, much higher, that someone else made. And I know in Japan, my guess is, such a figure would cost... And I know in Japan, my guess is such a figure would cost $50,000, $100,000 or something. But it's owned by this shop and this Italian man who is a designer and he loves it and he wants it to be in a Buddhist place. So he's willing to make a contribution to us, which we then pay the shop, and we buy it for maybe $20,000 or $15,000. In any case, he is ready to make such a deal with us that he will make us a donation, I assume, that he will then deduct from the tax somehow and that we then the money, what do I know, and so let's say a price of 15 or 20,000 dollars should come out.

[48:13]

So this is a little fundraising exercise right here. And I'm mentioning it because it's actually a tradition to make contributions to buy figures in a temple. It's different than trying to raise money for other things. It's because you feel you're part of this figure if you make a small contribution, you know. We're not talking about a lot, ten dollars or fifty dollars. It's more a feeling of participating in it, not just in actually buying it. So I thought if you ever think of coming to Crestone and you wanted to feel part of this, you could make a small contribution to it.

[49:18]

Anyway, somehow we're going to get it and he is going to let us pay for it over some time. So, you know, whether you... Like fundraising or not, you don't have to worry about it. We're going to try to get it. And I think it will really change the feeling at Crestone. We are always willing to buy it. And the owner will also allow us to buy it. And somehow we will get the money together. And it's clear whether you like it or not when I bet. So I don't know yet whether it will go in the Zendo with the bell and the mokugyo and so forth or whether we probably will put it where the old Zendo was. So it may go in where the living room now is in the former Zendo.

[50:23]

It would reach almost to the ceiling. So I also like it because not only it feels good to honor or recognize what happened at Hiroshima with the sister of the one that's there. But there's also Dogen's first zendo, traditional. He brought the first, started the first traditional zendo in Japan. with raised meditation platforms like we have at Crestone.

[51:27]

And Crestone Zendo is really first truly traditional Zendo in the United States. And Dogen started this first traditional Zen-do at a little village south of Kyoto in a Kannon-do, in a hall devoted to Kannon. So there's a tradition of the Manjushri being in the Zendo and Kannon being in another room where there's a more relaxed atmosphere among the practitioners. And I really feel my own experience in practice is that a good figure of the Buddha or a Bodhisattva is really helpful in practice.

[52:42]

We even have a little one on the dashboard of our car. You do too. And it helps me drive. And we passed the red Volvo, we had this old Volvo for a while, we passed it on to Pir Vilayat Khan. Sahir and Pir Vilayat Khan had bought this old red Volvo. Ja, das war ganz lustig. Also, Sahir, der, ja, so die rechte Hand, der mit Pierre Villayat in Paris wohnt, war, maybe I should tell the story for a moment, der war zu Besuch bei mir im Januar in Schriesheim, weil das Leitertreffen des deutschen Sufi-Ordens fand witzigerweise in Dossenheim statt.

[54:02]

Ja, bei den Monier, ja. Und ich habe dann dem Sahir den Roten Volvo gegeben zum Rumfahren, so wie Gerald Giesler ihn auch hatten. last year and somehow I noticed that he really enjoyed it and said he always wanted to have a Volvo, a Pier too, and somehow the old Mercedes bus that the Pier had is no longer so comfortable to drive around and so I gave it to him then, but the condition was also that the little Buddha stays in it. I said the condition of the deal was that the little Buddha stays in the... So now Pierre is driving along. So should we take a break now? And then finish? Okay. Is there anything you'd like to talk about? Elke mentioned, once you say what you said, you said how difficult it is.

[55:18]

Yes, I thought it's quite overwhelming, the lecture you gave us. She's overwhelmed. But you also said you thought it was so difficult. Yes, difficult. I think it's well to think of all of that, of course, the four elements, and if you try to work with it, Well, I think I have to listen to it a couple of times to really get it, to think it out.

[56:22]

Do you want to say that in German? Yes, I think that the lecture that Rosi gave us, Pater Toberkirchen, I think I have to listen to it a couple of times to let it sink in. For me, it is difficult to work with the four elements and to feel them. For example, to see someone and at the same time to see the spirit and the mind. Uli is looking at what I have just said. I didn't understand the stuff with mobility. Motility? Motility, yes. You said this is the second element. But which element does the motility correspond to?

[57:39]

Movement. Movement. Wind. Oh, wind. Yeah. But all kinds of movement, like a good gardener would see that this flower is not only form, but would also know the movement of the water in it and whether it needed water or didn't and so forth. When you say it's difficult, does that mean I shouldn't give these talks or does it mean I should still do it? You know, many... Maybe we just need seven days, you know, where we can let these things sink in. That's why I live in Crestone. But since you can't come, you know, I'm here.

[58:41]

You know, sometimes when I'm talking about something, it's both in Asian culture and Western culture, it's equally, you know, difficult or easy. But this is something that's quite far out for us, but much more commonplace in Asia. The most ordinary doctor in Asia would look at if the elements in you were in balance. And you understand that in Asia, in yoga culture, health is equated with intelligence. They don't at all have the sense there's a universal medicine that can be applied to everyone equally. That health is a function of consciousness, awareness and intelligence.

[60:17]

And more healthy people are usually more intelligent and more intelligent people are usually healthier. Because you have living in a physical culture that you know even the Buddha through your body, you take care of your body in a much more developed way than we do. Maybe I should tell you something about Nakamura Sensei, who I've mentioned to you before. Because I just wrote a short piece on the teacher-disciple relationship in Buddhism for Shambhala magazine in the United States. And I found myself describing my relationship to Nakamura-sensei.

[61:30]

My example of the difference between cooking together and eating together comes from that little piece I wrote. But I remember what struck me was when I moved to Japan, this woman came along with a house. And she lived upstairs from us. There was one room upstairs in our house. And she'd always do this, no theater, no play, chanting. And every day I realized this is a more and more extraordinary person.

[62:50]

I mean, the gift of Japan was in her. And she, I found, not only studied and taught Noh, she also studied and taught Ti and Zen. And slowly I noticed she began to teach us. And when she was in her 70s, I believe, her no teacher, who was in his 80s, died. And immediately, without hesitation, she began the search for a new noh teacher. And she found a teacher who was in his 40s, which I'm quite certain she knew much more than he did. But the mentorship dimension of life was so important to her, it's better to have a teacher who knows less than you than to have no teacher.

[64:07]

And that's something we don't get. We think if you're dumb or don't know something, you have a teacher, but once you're really together, you're beyond teachers. But the feeling in Asia is if you're, the greatest gift you can have in life is a teacher. If you're lucky enough... you can develop that relationship with one or more people. And you might study anything with such a person, but it's really a life mentorship, not a craft mentorship. And there's almost a kind of agreement.

[65:20]

I'll take in your laundry if you'll take in my laundry. So I'll be your teacher, you'll be his teacher, he'll be my teacher, etc. When I decided to move, or I had to move because Sukhiroshi was unwell, back to the United States, we developed an unspoken teacher-disciple relationship. And she gave up Japan and everything in Japan to move as my teacher to America disguised as the family's grandmother. It took me a while to recognize it and realize how lucky I was.

[66:24]

So she moved to the United States with us and basically lived with us for 25 years or so. 20 years. And one of the things she did is she took care of her health. And now she's 95, I think. And she made little brews all the time. And she tried to get me to drink them. Sie machte also den ganzen Tag irgendwelche Gebräue und versuchte mich dann dazu zu bringen, sie zu trinken. Also diese Wurzel oder dieses Blatt und es wurde dann wirklich zusammengekocht.

[67:26]

Und jeden Tag war es ein bisschen anders. Man ist nicht so wie ich, der dauernd irgendwelche Vitaminpillen einwirft. five elements. Then she decided which herb and which strength and whether the morning or afternoon and so forth. And it was clearly inseparable from her intelligence and her awareness and what she did. You couldn't tell her what to do. She knew exactly what to do. And she'd been taught all her life, grew up knowing these things. So this is a different view of medicine and health than we have. You learn to take care of yourself in a very developed way.

[68:40]

But the first is being able to read yourself and adjust yourself. And then using small things to fine-tune that adjustment. Now let me give you an example of how this applies to practice. As your sitting develops and you become more settled on yourself, You begin to feel this, let's say the five elements moving in you or present in you. Or you just begin to feel an openness or blockedness in your body. Now, there's two ways to approach this.

[69:57]

One way, which you also do in this kind of Buddhist medicine and meditation practice, Which is closer to our Western way of thinking is you find the spots that are blocked in you. You may find your energy kind of stops here or something like that. You can feel a brightness in your right side of your body, but there's a darkness in the left side of your body. And you can begin to work with that. But another way of working with it, which is more characteristic of yogic culture, is you don't pay much attention to the parts that are blocked you discover the parts that are open that feel bright or clear and then you spread that feeling throughout your body

[71:09]

And you assume that if you take care of the parts that are always good, already good, they will change the parts that are bad. You don't have to concentrate on the bad parts. You can see that they both make sense. It's thought in Buddhist medicine that working with the good parts makes more sense than working with the bad parts. And I'll add one more thing, is that one way you enter this kind of practice is through your feet and through your hands. So you keep your hands warm and flexible. So if your hands feel good, you can spread it into your body. And you don't keep your feet locked up in hot leather shoes that are too small for you.

[72:37]

And as much as possible, you keep your feet real flexible and warm and soft. And you actually work with your feet sometimes to kind of wake them up. But it's thought that the energy and relationship to the physical world comes through most directly through your warm, open, flexible hands and feet. I must be under the spell of these two doctors here. I keep talking about medicine here. Three doctors. I must be under the spell of these two doctors here. So coming back to, just to say a moment about it being difficult, I think there's a saying that the bodhisattva who progresses with the idea of difficulty is no bodhisattva.

[74:12]

The imagination of difficulty is already an insurmountable problem. So you don't think that way, you just say, I've heard this. Maybe I'll notice this. Maybe I'll realize it. And suddenly a tile turns into a jewel. Okay. Something else? Yeah. Yeah. Five elements you described, are they the same as the five elements in the traditional Chinese medicine as they are called differently, like earth, wood, metal, fire?

[75:21]

The way I'm teaching it is a little different, but it's closely related. And the way I'm teaching it is also closer to wayward. It's also part of Chinese medicine, and that's a different when you deal with the minerals and the elements in that way. And also in the Middle Ages, which I am a great believer that The Middle Ages in Europe were quite fantastic, if you were at least not starving. Yes, and as I said, the five Chinese elements also differ a little from this almost mineralistic point of view about these five elements. Yes, and for example in the Middle Ages, and I am a big fan of the fact that these were not dark times, but that it was really a wonderful, fantastic time when one was not just starving, And I love seeing the more medieval parts.

[76:22]

I mean, you look at these medieval villages and they're so much more complex than our, you know, 7-Elevens and warehouses and jeez. It stirs the heart. And these villages did not grow topsy-turvy. There was a subtle planning of them going on. It looks like they grew topsy-turvy, but I'm quite sure they didn't. And they had a teaching of the elements and the humors, which I don't know how closely it related to the Buddhist teachings, but I'm sure it overlapped. But Buddhism has its own way of doing these, like Buddhism has its own I Ching, which is different from the standard I Ching.

[77:38]

Yes. Yes. Yes. It's very difficult for me to accept your connection between health and intelligence because if I look at handicapped people and the kind of growth or development or change that's possible for somebody who carries some kind of sickness or the kind of change that's possible for somebody, for a family to be taking care, being caregivers. And I just refuse to think that somebody who's sick is stupid. I didn't say that. I mean, we're sick for all kinds of reasons.

[79:02]

the part of what I'm talking about actually relates to a koan which starts out, the whole body is sickness. Whether you have, through unfortunate circumstances, karma or genetics, a disease, At that point, intelligence functions in how you deal with the situation you find yourself. And little, the small Buddha over there, Janice. Janice. Yanis, is, you know, my feeling is, and I've also read this, but I feel it, is that babies develop more health, intelligence, and so forth if they're touched a lot and rubbed and so forth.

[80:16]

So as much as little Yanis will let me, I've been rubbing and poking him. And I can see him growing more intelligent under my hands. No. Yeah. And smiling is a kind of intelligence. So I mean, you know, anyway, that's enough. Maybe we should go back to use the word wisdom, because I think especially in Germany maybe the word intelligence is quite burdened. It's only used actually to honor some kind of intellectual, rational, almost like behavioristical.

[81:20]

Yeah, because IQ of course is a measure of how fast you can be ordinary. So I don't mean that kind of intelligence. Yeah. Besides working with the good parts or with the bad in your body, I have a strange experience by working with the bad part, like with the tension or so. If I try to change the tension, just by putting my mind to it, that doesn't work. It works better if I just watch it. I don't know whether I shall do it for all things, just only watching it and not try to change it.

[82:22]

In general, I think that's best, but Deutsch? Apart from the fact that it is cheaper to always work with the healthy parts of the body, there is an observation of mine that when I somehow have a tension in the body and I try to just release the tension, so I focus my consciousness on it and try to relax it, that somehow it doesn't work, so sometimes it gets worse. Okay, when you just, I mean, This is a practice, not just an attitude. Now, as an attitude, it's a fruitful attitude to leave things alone, and that's the paramita of patience, to allow things to speak to you, to leave them alone.

[83:38]

But also, when you observe something, you bring a subtle heat to it. And again, it's like a pump with the mind in it, it's worth ten, etc. So when you just observe something, you're doing something. You're bringing awareness and a kind of, again, heat to it or movement to it. But I would suggest what you also try now. It's just using the example that you've brought up and the way I've spoken.

[84:40]

Is it noticing a place in your body or in your mental space where there's tension? Find a place in your body where there's no tension. And emphasize that instead. and have a feeling of spreading that throughout your body, not directing it at the tension, just spreading it or identifying with it. And you can notice that feeling in the environment or phenomenal world too, where you feel tension or not, etc. Okay, well, we should go downstairs in a minute, but I want to say one last thing. I keep wanting to give you experiential clues for these practices. And this sense of...

[85:46]

Of the middle way, where you're not caught in alternatives. Or this sense where everything is its own space. Which means you're not walking in a mental space where you're predicting the environment all the time. You start feeling that everything is speaking to you. Or responding to you. It's almost like when you walk on the floor here, I step on this, sit down, it feels a little rubbery almost. The floor doesn't feel like something dead out there that's metal, I mean that's mental, but rather it's something alive you're walking on.

[87:05]

And there's always an element of surprise. You are in this room and you're walking and the space is quite big. And when you walk into the smaller space there where the toilet is, there's almost a feeling of surprise as it closes down on you. It's not something you predict because your mind is, everything is surprisingly being created as you're walking along. Because that space isn't just there, it's being created by you as you walk into it. So it closes down, then you feel the wind as you open the door. And you step out in the hall and it opens up, goes up the stairs and it goes down.

[88:21]

So, again, you begin to have an immediately responsive and sort of non-repeatable uniqueness to every little thing you do. And this isn't, again, so unusual, or you can have a feeling for this. And you don't have to start thinking you're crazy. We have an expression, the walls have ears, you know, because people are listening, you know. And I always imagine the walls saying, no we don't, no we don't. So you don't have to think you're crazy. It's just, there's a kind of immediacy to situations that you actually get used to and feel.

[89:27]

It makes life, things quite fresh. So you discover these things through noticing little experiential things and sort of enjoying them. And so let's have dinner together. I would like to end with this little story, if I may. Yes. Yes, please. Yes, I think that fits quite well at this point. A friend brought me something from a trip and said, just close your eyes now. And I didn't know that he brought me something. Just close your eyes and stretch your hand out. So I did that. And you probably can tell by the story I'm telling. And I just felt a very gentle touch He closed his eyes and then...

[90:28]

I noticed that there was something very warm in my hand, and I had no idea what it was at all. I wondered what it was, and it was changing, and it became warmer, and it was expanding, and I wondered if it was an animal, if it was a small bird, and at some point I had the feeling that I was holding a beating heart in my hand. It was such a warm, pulsating mass, My opinion is... That this person was not just passing a Bodhi leaf, he was passing his heart to her.

[91:39]

And that's what she was feeling. Okay. Now I tried to use this question or statement of dropping body and mind. To give you some feeling, sense of Dogen's teaching.

[92:45]

And also to give you a sense of the practice and thinking of Buddhism itself. So first we have to... So I'd like to review a little bit what I said yesterday. I'd like to tease you a little. It's okay. I deserve it. Last night, Arika decided that there was a new way or old way to drop body and mind as quickly... As quick as a schnapp. Came upstairs and said, I've lost my job.

[93:55]

I'm going to have to wash dishes for Laura. I'm going to a girl monastery. But you seem all right today.

[94:01]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_74.29