Air is plant excrement. Hmm. So rain finds its natural place in big plants, in small plants, in flowers, in the glass of water by your bed. So rain, understood this way, is seeking its natural place, including the glass of water by your bed. This is maybe more poetic than saying gravity, but it's also, I think, at least as accurate. Now the Lotus Sutra says the same thing. Buddha's teaching is understood as rain falling like clouds in rain. And Buddhist teaching, like rain, is one way in one plant and one way in another plant.

[01:16]

And this is what Dogen meant when he said, I go out to meet someone and I meet someone whose essence is the same as my own. What his teaching has found its way in this person, big or small, and in me, big or small. This is also Buddhist friendliness. Hospitality, which is characteristic of practice places. If you need a place to sleep, you know, traditionally you went to a Buddhist temple and they always let you sleep under the eaves or in a guest room.

[02:20]

So, So the teaching of Johanneshof, of a practice place, should be to create the conditions for friendship. Sukershi said, we are not Soto school. That Soto school is some group. Groups are, you know, not Buddhism. We are a Sangha. He had an interesting way of understanding history. He felt that since the 1800s, with the Industrial Revolution, militarism has taken over.

[03:31]

That the Industrial Revolution allowed societies to become military in a new way. And he told the story of a soldier when he was in the Manchurian War and when he was a chaplain. And he said that the soldier said to him, you know, the sutra says we must understand the meaning of life and death. And the soldier said, I can't understand the meaning of life and death. But he said, I can easily die at the front. And Sukhir, she said, well, with the sound of... with trumpets and drums and guns and war cries, it's easy to die at the front.

[04:51]

But it's hard to understand the sutra. And he felt that, you know, with status and fear and salaries and songs, We join the groups and institutions of society and we hear nothing We only hear the life that our society at this time wants us to have. And we're so concerned with how people understand us and how we are seen in the eyes of society. that we've forgotten to know, to listen to our true nature.

[05:58]

We've forgotten how we've lost the ability to hear ourselves. We can't understand what Yueshan meant when he said time stands at the top of the mountain. And lies at the bottom of the ocean. So let's try to think of time as experience. If we can see time as experience, as what both Einstein and Dogen are pointing out, Yes, Dogen himself in Uji says, you know, we just, as I happen to say at the beginning of this Sashin, we are time.

[07:12]

You are time. There's no time apart from existence. Yes. So if we can begin to take this, absorb this, remind yourself that you are time. You may find out many things. In the no play, on the stage of the no play, as I pointed out a few times in the past, there's a kind of invisible line on the stage. And when the actors are in front of that line, they're in the time of the audience. And when they step behind that line, they're in... Timeless time.

[08:24]

When all their past, present, and future is experience, their great-grandmother might be present. Not as in the past, but in the present time. I think it would help if you... if you remind yourself that dreams are actual experience. From a Buddhist point of view, dreams aren't something unreal in comparison to something real. Or dreams are not comments on our real life. Dreams are also our real life. They are realms of experience. What you experience in dreams is real experience.

[09:25]

And if you have this understanding, I think you'll find your dreams become more tasty particles. Your dreams become something more tasty and maybe more scary. And you may find you yourself sometimes can step behind this line into timeless time. And your own experience of the past will be in the present, and can be a new experience again, and a new kind of experience. So we take a baby's hand. So if time is continuity, is the experience of continuity, die Erfahrung von Kontinuität, dann kann Zeit auch Diskontinuität sein.

[10:57]

And though some of you are philosophically minded, let me footnote that and say that doesn't actually mean that discontinuous time is space. Und für diejenigen, die philosophische Ambitionen haben, nur eine kurze Fußnote, das bedeutet nicht, dass Zeit, ah, that doesn't mean that, The discontinuous time is space. We can't make that separation. Discontinuous time is related to time. So it may be experienced as as though it may be experienced as space. So, again, if we know time as the experience of continuity, Not as a generalization. Not as something the clock is ticking off.

[12:00]

But as your actual experience. That experience then has a topography. And I like the word tomography. A medical word it means. planes within the topography. So time begins to have depth and texture. Now, these are words I'm dropping here in the middle of the room. So how can you know when you are in this kind of experience? So I'm trying to bring us into that with this example of the baby's hand.

[13:10]

So you reach out and take Julius' hand. or Pauline's hand. At that moment, your continuity becomes inclusive of theirs. At that moment, your continuity goes together. If you were in a car, a plane crash or something at that moment, the person's hand you're with, your time would stop together. So at that moment you have the fragile time of life and death And the baby's hand is very soft. Now, some babies don't let you into their time. I remember, I may have mentioned this story before, but I had some more contact with the story recently.

[14:29]

A friend of mine, I was visiting this friend of mine who I was in the merchantry with. I sailed on merchant ships in the 50s. And this friend of mine and I went to visit my family when the ship was in the New York harbor. And there was this little kid who was his baby sister had recently been electrocuted at a light socket. And there was something wrong with this little kid. And when he throws stones at you He was only four or five, but he'd come out and throw stones at you and shout.

[15:43]

He was quite closed off to time, expanded time. So we were walking along, and I warned my friend. I said, this kid is really a nuisance, but, you know, he was throwing stones at us. So we got about, I don't know, 20 meters past this kid. Like somewhere almost to that wall, maybe. And my friend turned around suddenly and got on his knees. And just opened his arms like that. And this little kid looked at him and looked at him and then just ran straight into his arms.

[16:54]

So somehow my friend was able to expand time for this little boy. So I saw my friend in New York recently. Last week. And I told him, reminded him of this story. And my friend said, Well, how old would he be now? Do you suppose he'd still run into my arms? And I said, I don't know. I'm going to see my 90-year-old mother tomorrow. I'll ask her. So my mother and my sister were there. We were sitting by Long Island Sound. I took them out to lunch.

[17:59]

Yeah, so I said, whatever happened to that little boy? And my sister remembered that as a teenager he tried to commit suicide. But he's now supposedly got some job and doing... doing okay enough, I guess. So just let's imagine that when you reach out and touch this baby's hand, and the baby receives your hand, And here's this soft little hand in your hand.

[19:02]

And your time expands. No, I think one way babies make sure they're, or try to make sure they're brought up properly, Is the little Julius, for example. He says, well, it's okay, Eric and Christina, that you can be on Sangha time. And maybe you have to work on the computer. But mostly I want to drag you into my time. And Eric and Christine are constantly dragged into Julius's time. And not exactly kicking and screaming. Do you have that expression?

[20:09]

To be dragged kicking and screaming? Something like that. They go quite willingly. And so sometimes I go in the office and Christina is supposed to be working on the computer. And instead I find Christina and Eric and Julius all on each other's laps. In front of the computer, and the computer's got little games going, little songs. So Julius has transformed the computer. Now, So I think you know what I mean. But sometimes, particularly in the space of Sashin, in the being time of Sashin,

[21:13]

body, mind, matter of Sashin, your left hand can be as surprised by your right hand as if it were a baby's hand. As if your left hand has a different time than your right hand. And your left hand can greet the softness of your right hand. Usually we hardly notice because we have a generalization, two hands, one body, blah, blah, blah. Wir können das normalerweise nicht feststellen, weil wir haben eine Verallgemeinung, zwei Hände, ein Körper, bla bla bla. But when your time slows down, or rather your time becomes your own time, you'll find that actually your left and right hand are different times. And you'll notice other things.

[22:21]

For example, you know how bodybuilders learn how to identify each separate muscle. And then they bulk up each separate muscle. And this was taught to us by the world's most famous Austrian. Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was great. I think that's good. You're embarrassing. Just because you haven't bulked yourself up. Don't be embarrassed, you look good. This same friend of mine who put his arms up, this little boy, He once said to me, I'm so glad I'm getting older.

[23:27]

I don't fall in love so often. And I said, I thought you'd only fall in love a few times in your life. He said, are you kidding? If I'd only fallen in love a few times in my life, I'd look like Arnold Schwarzenegger today. He said, why do you think I'm such a wreck? He keeps me amused. When I'm bored, I call him up and I say, what's going on? And he tells me something like that. Why do you think I'm such a wreck? Yeah. So through sesshin and through practice, we learn not so much how to bulk up each muscle, but how to relax each muscle.

[24:51]

I met once a person who was considered to be... He'd won sort of the tight... Tai Chi sort of something, and his daughter had won some sort of national Tai Chi Chinese competition. And he was this completely soft guy. He'd shake your hand and it felt like you had a Kleenex in your hand. And he was a total... And his daughter was a very beautiful young woman, but you wouldn't want to mess with her. And I knew a Dr. Yu who was a medical doctor trained in Germany, but also could throw people with his mind.

[26:05]

I watched him do it many times. And they would just move his shoulder, and he's met great martial arts people go... this guy. His wife could do it too. They were great. Actually, we had our Zen group sponsored them so they could get visas to the United States. I'm sorry I'm so talkative, this Sashin. I don't know what's going on. It's because I have such a good translator, maybe. Did you forget how to translate? And when you begin to discover how to relax different muscles, you begin to feel, find different parts of your body relaxing.

[27:20]

relax at different rates. Even after years, parts of your stomach are still coming down. Parts of your shoulder are still coming down. In some ways, your shoulders often belong to the future. And your back, many parts of your back belong to the past. Different parts, different muscles in your body are in different times. And you can even find that parts of your body have been rented by your mother. And parts are rented by your father. And parts are rented by old or recent lovers.

[28:31]

And practice is kind of paying the rent. Actually, a good teacher... Am I getting too crazy? A good teacher borrows your body and gives it back to you. Sashin, the first three or four days of Sashin, borrow your body. That's why there's so much pain in the system. You say, I'm not going to lend this body out again. But the rules are you have to follow the schedule.

[29:35]

So pretty soon you say, all right, take it. And then the last three or four days, Your body, the sashin returns your body to you. Somewhat refreshed. With some of the rent paid. Yeah, and the pain is different. You begin to feel into the landscape or topography of the pain. And you can find a new kind of being time. on each moment. So that's what Yue Shan meant.

[30:38]

And Dogen. And that's what Suzuki Roshi meant when he said, on each breath there are many kinds of time. And our practice, our zazen, like the rain, finds its natural place in our body. And our relationships to others. And the phenomenal world. Thank you very much. We are in transition, so that we may be able to go to every other place. With the help of the Holy Spirit, we will go to every other place. We will go to every other place. Aum omryo sehyam gapu, buddho mojo se gancho.

[31:52]

Die grünen Wesen sind sorglos. Ich gelobe, sie zu retten. Die Dekirchen sind auslöschlich. Ich gelobe, ihnen herrliche zu bereiten. Die Dialogs sind grenzenlos. Ich gelobe, sie zu beherrschen. Der Weg ist oder ist unerlässlich. Ich gelobe, ihn zu erreichen. Zung-ho-jen-jen-vi-yo-no-wa-ya-ku-he-ma-no-yo-ko-to-ka-ta-shi

[33:45]

Varema tennoji juji surukoto etari, negawa kuwa myorai monoshin jetsu yokeshi takematsuran. I believe we will never talk from now until we shake him down for commoner dharma. Felix is going on a thousand-million-carousel check-in. Nobody can say they don't have a real agreement on America. The only way she'll buy it is to tie it up to her phone. Are you ready?

[35:36]

Yes. Well, I'm not. I can wait. Oh. Hey, I can't win. That's good. So how do we end this session? What we need is another practice week now, where we can all have this discussion about what we've talked about. Because although I've been trying to listen to you, I would also like to hear your voice. And, you know, we can't come to a practice place or to Johanneshof for answers. I hope to come here to start a process of of discovering how we exist.

[36:45]

So I would like to try to sum up a little bit how far we went along in this process this week. Let me say a couple of things. When you hit the bell, we never hit it twice. If you have some idea of hitting it twice, your idea steals the second hit. Twice means once and once. So you should... This is the way ideas affect us.

[37:51]

If you think twice, you don't hit it once and once. And some of you, I think, feel that this idea of deeper connectedness we can discover means that then we know more or everything about each other. But that's translating the idea of connectedness into our ordinary idea of separateness. In other words, the connectedness that we can't see Once we allow that, we don't hinder that connectedness. We discover what we don't see. We don't discover those things we can know through

[38:53]

you know, our ordinary sense of what we want to know or desire to know. I'm sorry. We don't discover what we know or desire to know. Yeah, that's kind of like trying to take a spiritual practice and turn it into something convenient for our benefit. Yeah. There are benefits that occur, but mostly the practice, the deeper practice moves outside the realms of our ordinary knowing. And if we have a need to know, it robs us of what we really know.

[40:10]

Is there another monastery nearby? These rainy days are great. The sound of the rain, it's maybe better than sunshine. But of course I've just come from a place where it has 340 days of sunshine a year, so maybe. But I love these rainy days, bright green rainy days. We're announcing a lecture.

[41:41]

Let's all go over. But since we weren't invited, we'll have to listen to this lecture. I think it's difficult to function without some idea of what kind of world we live in. And it's pretty hard nowadays to have an idea of what kind of world we live in. We have remnants of our religious beliefs from previous centuries. And we have the rigidity of fundamentalism. And we have various kinds of scientific views.

[42:50]

And then in the midst of it we get a Buddhist view. And the problem is that, you know, in general, The Buddhist view has not been examined for centuries. It's pretty much by most Asian teachers taken for granted. So the Asian teacher mostly can invite us into the house of Buddhism, show us the rooms, and then show us how to live in those rooms. But this house of Buddhism doesn't exist in the West. We're living in some kind of half-Gothic, half-Romanesque, half-modern building. And if I make a try to make some kind of Buddhist invisible building here for us.

[44:19]

And some of us have gotten somewhat used to living in this some kind of invisible Buddhist building. When you step into it, you actually start building it yourself too. And depending on your taste and habits, you may build something that's actually modern or baroque or whatever. So when I look into this building that we're doing together, I see Gothic rooms and modern rooms and Baroque rooms and a few Buddhist rooms. And it's clear we're not all living in the same house. This invisible house. Someone said yesterday that they were outside and they heard us chanting.

[45:26]

It sounded just like the Catholic Church in here. Somehow, when we start chanting in German, we fall into... you know, the patterns of the church. Oh, it's good we chant in Japanese sometimes, just to, you know, to stir it up. So, What do we know? First of all, we have to know how we know and the boundaries of what we know. The Buddhist image is something like, okay, we need to know the boundaries.

[46:35]

So we go down, we discover that the edge of Europe is somewhere in France and Spain and Portugal, and there's an ocean out there. So we build borders. We make our plans to farm and build roads, etc., which take into consideration that you have to stop at the edge of France and Spain and things. You might think of what's at the edge of the universe. He said if you come to the edge of the universe and you throw a dart and it goes straight through, then there's something on the other side. And if it stops and doesn't go through, you know there's something on the other side that stopped it. We're stuck. I mean, we're not stuck. I mean... What do we do?

[47:56]

So Buddhism says, okay, we don't know what's on the other side. And what we don't know that's on the other side is also on this side. Does that make sense? That the ocean that's on the other side of France is also on this side of France. Peter, that's because your name means stone. Yeah, on this... On this rock we founded Johanneshof. All right, look. If we don't know what's on the other side of this boundary, it's a mystery.

[49:06]

We have to take this mystery into account. Okay. If we don't know what's on the other side of the boundary, we also may not be able to observe that it's already on this side of the boundary too. And that's called emptiness. So it's not a simple view like this boundary. It's more kind of multispherical. It's folded outside our perceptual capacity. It's like everything you see is the beach. Everything you see is the shore. We call it form. Everything you see is an edge.

[50:11]

Everything you see is the beach. And the ocean is everywhere at the same time. And it penetrates right through us. It's just not at the edge. So, Gisela is the beach. And she wishes it were summer. She'd have her sunglasses on, her straw hat. But I see that in her. But I also see the ocean passing right through her. She's manifesting at this moment as Gisela. And I say the word gisela, but it's just a word. It's just a sound. It doesn't have much to do with her.

[51:12]

Something's manifesting there that's far more than the word gisela. And I can say there's this three-dimensional body and things. But actually, as we said, there's 10 to the 14th power of combinations in her nervous system. She is the most complex thing we know about in the universe. Well, there's others of you too, but... She's not the only one. I think Otmar has 10 to the 15. That's why we're so nervous. Okay. The vision of Buddhism is something like this.

[52:30]

We live in an immense complexity. And I don't think the word oneness helps. I would work with the word allness. So how are you going to find your place in this all-at-once-ness? You notice the tapestry of just what appears at this moment. Okay. Right now, there's a coming into presence of this situation. Everything in it is equally important. So that's the kind of mind we want through practice.

[53:34]

An open awareness in which there's a coming into presence. And that coming into presence includes... Everything I see, the patterns of what I see, and the presence itself in which it arises, and the space in which the presence arises. The space that allows this to arise. We call that emptiness. And that emptiness means that it's not fixed. It's always changing. If you think of it as without emptiness, then it's some kind of fixed pattern.

[54:38]

And there's no infinity. there's no infinity, then everything can be known. And everything can't be known. So to locate ourselves in such a world, you begin to accept everything as it appears. And you just get in the habit of accepting everything that appears. In this moment, this tapestry. with its patterns, its colors, its threads, the space between the threads, your own mind in which it arises, and the space of the emptiness of the whole thing in which it arises.

[55:43]

And you can feel this with your body. So allowing this to arise, we could call allness or all-at-onceness. But at any particular moment, it has a kind of own organizing quality, self-organizing quality. And we call that wholeness. And you can feel that wholeness. And the more you're open to that wholeness, it leads to the next wholeness. So it's to perceive, to know this way, That we try to be free of identifying with our thinking. It's not that our thinking is so bad. Distracting and debilitating. It doesn't sound too good, does it?

[56:47]

But that's not, we can deal with distraction and debilitation. Yeah, we do it every day. We have a beer and watch TV. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. You guys have distracted me today. Yeah, I can't figure it out. They enjoy each other every day. The real reason we want to be free of identifying with our thinking der wahre Grund, warum wir frei sein wollen von unserer Identifikation mit dem Denken, ist es, offen zu sein zu der Alles-auf-einmal-Jetztheit und der Ganzheit.

[58:08]

Es wird nicht in einem Geist funktionieren, der It won't function in a mind that's conceptual. You can use concepts like allness or wholeness to open yourself to it. But these are big concepts that are antidotes to comparative concepts. If you just take a word, I don't know what word you'd use in German, but some word like allness. Just try to bring all your thinking and concepts into this word allness. And I think you'll find your shoulders come down. And maybe different parts of your body enter a more common time.

[59:12]

So we have, I'm trying to suggest that we have this concept of allness which is big without boundaries. And then we have wholeness, which at this particular moment has some integrity. And Freud's free association is just an attempt to use a kind of meditative technique to get at what's in between our thinking. So free association is to try to get more into the wholeness of this moment. To get past our editor.

[60:25]

Doesn't mean you don't have a need, an editor, for, you know, to keep your job, not get fired. But we practice zazen so that we begin to know this mind of allness and wholeness as a continuous presence. Just what appears. Now to work with... You already have a conceptual framework. It's operating all the time and controlling your perceptions and thinking. How to cut through this? One of the simplest ways is to say on each perception, just this. It's like a sword that cuts through your habits of thinking. Just this. I look at Gisela without any ideas about Gisela.

[61:58]

As if I just met her, I say just this. And then I feel Dogen's And then I feel Dogen's radiant moment. There's a radiance to Gisela when I say just this. As soon as I start thinking about it, I have habits and I know what Gisela is like. The radiance is drawn away. So our initial perception, our initial mind, is this radiant mind of just this. You could practice it. If you practice that the next year, hey, you don't even have to apply for next year's Sashi. Just walk in, we'll make you the Eno.

[63:15]

Just this. It's tremendously freeing. Now, if you move into, in English, thus instead of this, thus. So you say, instead of this, you say thus. Thus is to move into how the mind arises on each moment. This cuts through our obfuscation of concepts. Obfuscating means blocking. And this cuts through our concepts and thus points to the mind. So you can use, I don't know what in German, but something equivalent to this and thus.

[64:24]

Now, you're at the center of what arises. This which is arising in this room, for me, I'm at the center of. What's arising in the room for Gisela? Gisela's at the center. And as for each of you? So in this room, there's 30-some realities. or thirty-some presences arising. And this is reality, not some common fixed thing. How do you center yourself in this reality of which you're the center? Are there two kinds of breath? Your actual breath? Your inhale and your exhale? And I would suggest that you Pay attention to the sensation of breath.

[65:53]

The delicious sensation of breath. It caresses the central channels of our torso. And the more we can just abide in our breath, there's some, I'm sorry to say so, ecstatic feeling connected with it. And what we perceive abides for a moment. Everything is appearing and disappearing, but it abides for a moment. And it abides for a moment in our breath. But as I said, there's many kinds of time in our breath.

[66:57]

And that brings us to the second kind of breath. What's called subtle winds or subtle breath. And wind means in this case, what makes a system alive. So in Wang Anshi's poem, where he says the spring wind by itself makes the south shore green. He's directly pointing to this chakra understanding of the body. Where That out there and this in here operates by the same principles. As the tiny winds make the water and air and everything work, Now yesterday I tried to give you a feeling of those tiny winds.

[68:07]

When I said that each muscle can relax. Each organ can relax. Your shoulders can come down. Your back can relax. Many, many different parts of your back can relax. When you begin to let yourself enter the mind of relaxation, there's almost a kind of fluid of awareness that you can feel moving throughout your body, spontaneously relaxing things. This fluid of awareness is also called subtle breath or wind. And the more through actual breath we discover this subtle breath, the more we really can open our body

[69:12]

at the center of this coming into presence, to the dynamic of wholeness and the complexity of allness. Okay. That's the Buddhist view of the world. Okay. And you're at the center. And you said you'd say Trump. So these ideas are actual physical experiences of openness, allness, wholeness. In contrast to the constricting idea, reductionist idea of oneness, inform how we practice with our breath. inform how we practice with our breath and how we practice mindfulness and how we discover a deep confidence in each moment because the arising

[70:39]

into presence of each moment is our personal all. You can deepen how you know things, but still, whatever arises into presence now is everything. So it gives you a sense of completeness and wholeness. And friendliness, again, is this gift And friendliness is this gift to others and to each situation. This gift that arises spontaneously, coming into presence as we say. So how could I simplify what I just said now?

[72:32]

As much as possible, from now on, discover a way to Remind yourself to abide in your breath. And abide in your breath with as much openness as possible. To each moment as it arises. One song says, when affirming, affirm totally.

[73:36]

But don't settle down in affirmation. So everything appears, you affirm it, but you don't settle down in affirmation. So I'm just sitting with you for a moment. Each of us is the beach on which everything appears. and everything and each of us is the ocean into which everything is absorbed

[74:56]

And this non-conceptual awareness is most easily discovered through bringing attention to our breath. So always there's 84,000 verses that can't be explained. Everywhere there's the water of mind in which surprisingly we can breathe. Thank you very much.

[77:03]

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