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Beyond Self: Weaving Interconnection

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Sesshin

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This talk explores the theme of interconnectedness within Buddhist practice, emphasizing the significance of understanding forms as interconnected and interdependent. The discussion examines the concept of continuity in our consciousness and breath, highlighting how a shift in perception can alter our experience of reality. Dogen's teaching "when all things are the Buddha Dharma" serves as a focal point for reflecting on the nature of existence and interconnectedness. The talk also discusses the importance of bringing awareness to the breath and body as a means of establishing a new sense of identity beyond the self. The use of language and text as metaphors for continuity and interconnectedness is considered, incorporating ideas from Buddhist teachings and literary traditions.

Referenced Texts and Teachings:

  • Dogen’s Fascicle: Explored with the focus on the opening phrase "when all things are the Buddha Dharma," serving as a foundation for understanding interconnectedness and non-duality.
  • The Buddha's Awakening: Discussed in relation to shifting identification from the self to awareness, illustrating the concept through the Buddha's declaration, "I am awake."
  • Heinrich Heine's Remark: Referenced to illustrate cultural reflections on perception and how environmental conditions are reinterpreted, connecting metaphorically to Zen practice.
  • Dogen’s Moon in Water: Used as a koan to meditate on the nature of reflection and perception within Zen practice, aiming to understand the non-dual relationship between subject and object.
  • Concept of Text and Weaving: Language as a tool to weave perceptions, creating a continuity that reflects Buddhist principles of interconnectedness.

The audience is encouraged to integrate these teachings into personal practice, emphasizing the importance of continuity in Zen through the metaphors of breath, body, and textual awareness.

AI Suggested Title: Beyond Self: Weaving Interconnection

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I'm very happy you're all here. I was just in Vienna and Austria for, I don't know, ten days or two weeks. Can you hear him? Okay. He's usually so much louder than me, but you know, he's becoming silent. And it was sweltering hot there. Yeah, so the first thing, you know, it's been a kind of custom when I give a sesshin here, I give a lecture Friday night at the Buddhist center in Hamburg.

[01:05]

And so the first thing I asked them is, how close is Hamburg really to the Arctic Circle? And maybe here I could ask, how deep are we underwater? I can't but remember Heine's line that In northern Germany, winter is summer painted green. I mean, vice versa, summer is winter painted green. But we're lucky actually because when it's warm in this Zendo, it's quite unpleasant. Because there's very little ventilation and lots of mosquitoes sometimes.

[02:18]

So I hope we stay cool with Sashin. that we stay cool in this session. Now we're, you know, this is quite a small sashin. So we, you know, generally we can let a sashin, the flow of a sashin carry us. But in this sashin, each of you is the flow. So you're going to have to Each of you carry the sashin by yourself.

[03:18]

I know it's the Eno's job to carry it by himself, but he could use some help. So we are sitting here. And we've come here to... to find some support for our practice. And to support each other in practice. And we have certain rules that we've made up to help us sit together. And also to create a life for this week that's different in detail from our usual life. So the rules and schedule should rub you a little the wrong way because it's supposed to be different from your usual life.

[04:28]

And third, the rules, the schedule, the details are the condition and context of teaching. And in themselves become a teaching. Yeah. So if we go to basics in the most simple way, simple sense we can. There's all these things in front of us. All these things in front of us and within us. And what are they? In very ancient India, going back way, way before Buddhism,

[05:37]

They asked very simple but penetrating questions. What is this life? beyond forms pervading forms. And Dogen begins his most famous and definitive fascicle or teaching begins with the phrase, when all things are the Buddha Dharma.

[06:55]

When all things are the Buddha Dharma, then everything else follows from that. But what is... What is it when all things are the Buddha Dharma? No, I'll pick up a little bit where I left off in the seminar in Vienna just last weekend, was it? Yeah. Mm-hmm. When all things are the Buddha Dharma, all these things appear before us and within us. And looking at it again in a simplest sense, We can look at it all at once.

[08:02]

I mean, I can look at this room and I see the whole room at once. And I can look at things One at a time. And in English it's one at a time. And we could even say one thing at a time. In this sense, one thing is time. Und dieses ein Ding zur Zeit kann man im Englischen auch so verstehen, dieses eine Ding ist Zeit. So this question of these Indian folks came out of just looking very simply at forms, pervading forms.

[09:03]

Und diese Frage, die sich also diese alten indischen Menschen gestellt haben, die kam also aus dieser ganz einfachen Betrachtungsweise von Formen, die Formen durchdringen. Do forms pervade forms easily in German? I think it's harder in German. So we can see things all at once and one at a time. And we can go back and forth between that. That's quite an important movement to all at once and one at a time. The center of all mindfulness practice is bringing attention to attention itself.

[10:09]

Not just to the object attended, but to attention itself. the attention attending. So it's typical of the... Of what's behind this question of these ancient Indians. And behind Dogen's 13th century comment. Win all things of the Buddha Dharma. It's when you notice simple things like this movement from all to each.

[11:13]

And all these things, how do they exist? Well, they exist side by side. Eric and you are sitting next to each other and so forth. But Erich and Ulrich are also interdependent. I mean, they're both being rained on. Yeah. And perhaps they also interpenetrate.

[12:15]

There's some subtlety if we get past the three dimensionality of mind. Not the three dimensionality of mind, but rather the three dimensionality that consciousness presents to us. Because mind is more than three-dimensional. But consciousness presents the world to us as three-dimensional. So in this question of these ancient Indians again, what does consciousness life beyond, forms pervading forms. So even in such a simple statement, if you stop and go slowly enough,

[13:16]

We have to look at forms pervading forms. Forms just beside each other. Forms seen as interdependent. Forms seen as interpenetrating. And forms seen as absolutely independent within interdependence. So these are the various main ways we can see all these things before us. We don't really know how all these things are before us. Isn't it Schilling who said what's amazing is that there is anything at all? So given that it's amazing that we're sitting here in this room, each appearing as inconceivably as you do, still our mind functions to make some sense of this.

[14:51]

Yeah, our mind and our sensorium. And the way our mind works, it sees things beside each other, interpenetrating and so forth. And so it takes a little analysis to see interdependence and interpenetration. Still we do see all at once and each thing. And we do tend to generalize that all is somehow one and one is somehow all. And so practice is also, and some of the deepest practice in Buddhism is just sorting these simple things out.

[16:15]

What is the relationship between all and each? Like that, you know. So I often speak about noticing how we establish continuity. Yeah. And what I mean by that, most of you are familiar with.

[17:42]

But noticing that we, especially we Westerners, establish our continuity through a narrative unity. Or through trying to establish a narrative unity. And ignoring or rejecting what doesn't fit into our narrative unity. Or trying to reinterpret what doesn't fit in. Or we even deceive ourselves about what doesn't fit in.

[18:44]

So the main ways to establish a a different continuity than our usual sense of it in our thinking as a narrative story, as a narration. Thinking as a narrative. Is to move your sense of location. To your breath. Or your body. Or phenomena. or the field of mind itself.

[19:52]

Those are the main receivers of continuity. And it's quite extraordinary because you also change the Dharma receptors. or the karma receptors. In other words, if you change where you find your continuity, you change how you create, receive and recall Then you change how you receive karma and also call it out again. So it's a very, very, very, very big change when you shift from one kind of continuity to another.

[20:58]

So let's stay for a moment on the simplest and most basic practice. To find your sense of continuity in your breath. And let's just for a moment analyze that. Okay, normally you are checking up on yourself and your thinking. And sometimes you can bring, or you may, because we're talking about it now, you can bring your attention to your breath. No big deal. Anyone can do it, and you do do it for a moment.

[22:09]

And if I... I can change my breath by increasing or, you know, by inhaling sharply or so forth. But when I do that, I actually have brought my attention to the muscles that control my breathing. It's a little more subtle and a little softer target when you bring attention to the breath itself, breathing itself. that's easy to do maybe it takes a little effort to do it 24 hours a day but it shouldn't be hard why is it hard?

[23:21]

because no matter what you think intellectually you actually believe in the permanence of the self There are reinforcing reasons, habits and so forth. But if you cannot allow your attention to rest on your breath. If your attention, every chance it gets, returns to thinking, and returns to your favorite subject, which is usually you, it simply means that no matter how much you've heard the Buddhist stuff about impermanence of self,

[24:31]

In fact, you believe in the permanence of self. As soon as you truly don't believe in the permanence of self, As soon as you've truly got rid of this false idea. Which is intellectually easy to expose. Mm-hmm. it's easy to keep your attention on your breath. But we go back to our breathing, our thinking, because we think that's where we live.

[25:33]

And the more you think that's where you live, there ain't nobody home here. So let's look at this a little carefully again. Because it's good to see the ingredients, the actors. The elements. you've decided something is, let's call it you, you have decided to bring your, whose? Your attention to your breath. Okay, so there's a witnessing, some kind of witnessing mind that says, oh, maybe, I think I'll bring my attention to my breath.

[26:40]

And then you bring a sense of location to your breath. But let's make clear that that sense of location is not a sense of identity. Even though you bring a sense of location, to your breathing, the breathing. The sense of identity, of identification stays with your thinking. And so as soon as you're not paying attention, From your thinking, your sense of location snaps back to your sense of identification.

[28:10]

So we've already got a rather complicated picture here. Even in a simple act of bringing your attention to your breath, there's a number of actors. There's a witnessing function. There's a sense of location. And there's a sense of identification. And there's actually some relationship between those three. They affect each other. So what you... what you're doing when you bring your attention to your breath.

[29:23]

You're bringing the sense of location to your breath. You feel down. Here in my breath. And then But it takes a while before you can bring the sense of identification to your breath. But when you do bring your sense of identification to your breath, somebody asks you, who are you? You might not say Ulrich. You might say, oh me, me, me, breath me, like some American Indian in a cowboy movie. Yeah, just me, breath me.

[30:26]

Because you've forgotten that you were Eric or Neil. Because you've so identified, gotten used to identify with the breath as actually what you are. That really your first sense is, let's breath me. Now the Buddha said the same thing. in a sense. Someone asked the Buddha, who are you? Because he was, we assume, quite an extraordinary fellow. And it's quite famous and you may know. He was asked, you know, who are you? Are you a sage? No. Are you a king? No. What are you? Who are you?

[31:32]

And the Buddha said, I am awake. That's exactly the same answer as breath me. Because he felt his sense of identity in his awakeness, in his awareness. So there's nothing else without doing a little thinking, sort of, you know, borrowed thinking. There's nothing else he could say. What he was at that moment, awake. So I would love it if all of us came to the point where somebody asked us, who are you? You said, I mean, breath.

[32:53]

But we have to be polite and conventional, so you have to say, well, I'm Eric. Maybe you can joke a little and say, sometimes I breathe that I'm Eric or something. Whoever sits in front of me gets to be the subject of my lectures, I'm sorry. Okay, so you've got the idea of continuity, I think, of shifting your sense of location and identity to a new vehicle of continuity.

[33:57]

And this is a description, this shift of... Shift of what you take as continuity describes all Buddhist practice. And especially the four foundations of mindfulness, for example. Okay, but what I would like to speak about with you this... or at least part of the Sashin, is the sense of continuity as text. There was a fellow at... You know, I myself,

[35:16]

the day or so I was there before I came up here. And he, his name was Ishi, which means stone. And he does some sort of combination of Tai Chi, I believe, and... a traditional Japanese dance. And he came over. He's Japanese and it's a Japanese dance. He came over for lunch, as I said. And he talked about the farm the forest is. And he sort of browses, you know, at least in English, cows graze and deers browse.

[36:26]

They eat bushes and stuff. Yeah. So he was assing around the... forest near Johanneshof. And he was picking plants, some of which he then soaked or cooked with ash to get the poison out. And I remember Sukhiroshi doing that. We'd go out for a walk and he'd pick little things and some things, particularly a little fern, a cute little fern. And he would soak it in some kind of mix, take ash literally from the incense burner, soak it and then he could cook it.

[37:39]

And Gaurav said, you know, How do we know to do that? How do you figure out that you have to cook it with ash? Well, I don't think our ancient ancestors learned it by a hit or miss technique. I don't think they learned it by hit or miss. I mean, I think some probably did that, but they're no longer with us. I mean, that mushroom looks good. They're not in the gene pool any longer. So I think they developed a kind of subtlety to read the text of the plant world.

[38:43]

People began to know how to what we could eat and what we could do to something to make it edible. When I see an apple, I see an extraordinary cultural artifact. An immense amount of intelligence and wisdom even, went into finding plants at the orchards, cultivate apples, which apples, etc.

[39:44]

And I'm also struck in the same way as I am with an apple with a word. Here's this language that we speak that anybody can learn. I mean, if you start early enough anyway, two or three-year-olds, yeah, they learn German or English quite easily. And yet, language has so much wisdom in it. And a wisdom that through discourse and literacy begins to reveal itself.

[40:57]

But it's there in the language of a three or four year old. So I'm sort of working toward speaking about text. And just take a simple word, a trivial word, Let's just take a simple word, a trivial word. Like trivial. Which means three roads, tri-via. So the word trivial means there's nothing trivial. That each tiny trivial detail is a choice. It's a parting of the road.

[42:01]

What three roads are. The road you're on and there's two choices. And on small, tiny details, our life changes direction. So I'm thinking also of the word aesthetic. And aesthetic means to place your attention. As you might place a teapot on a table. In this case, you place your attention on the table. In this sense, this aesthetic act of you individually placing your attention somewhere is the root of our mind, actually.

[43:20]

Yeah. So we don't have time this afternoon to go much farther. Or further. It's all right. You brought your attention to your breath. You can also bring your attention to the top of your breath. The turn at the top of your breath. And you can also bring your attention to the turn at the bottom of your breath. And at the top of your breath, let's bring a word to the top of your breath.

[44:42]

At the top of your breath, you can give everything away. So you come up to that pause of that turn. And you have that feeling, give everything away. And then at the bottom of your breath, on that pause you disappear. Now what we're doing is we're bringing a sense of text to continuity. Jesus is a literary figure. How do we know Jesus? Through the Bible. He's a literary figure.

[45:43]

We know him through the text of the Bible. We may also know him through experience. And, you know, Goethe's Faust. And Young Werther. What was his first name? Does anybody know? Young Werther. Werther. Whose first name? Young Werther. The sorrows of young Werther. What was his first name? Wilhelm. Wilhelm. Ah, okay. Thanks. Or in Shakespeare, King Lear or Hamlet or... These are figures that exist like archetypes in our language. And when you look into the water of the mind, As soon as it ripples or as soon as there's waves, those waves make patterns.

[47:21]

And as we're human beings, we begin to see ourselves in those patterns. And those patterns, even if you're not a reader, those patterns will still have archetypal figures like Faust or Hamlet in them. Thus Freud chose Oedipus for the Oedipus complex. And Jung looked into this water of the mind and he saw these Greek and other archetypal figures. But this is the human capacity to look at all these things and make a text of it.

[48:23]

All these things that appear before us and within us, all and many and each and etc., interpenetrating and interdependent, given the kind of capacities we have as human beings, we begin to weave them together. And the word weave is also text and textile. And the word subtle means sub-till or sub-plowing. Sub-till or sub-plowing. To till the soil is the same as text, the same word as text.

[49:43]

So something subtle is something that's underneath the tilling. In English, at least. No. I mean, English is only a German dialect, right? With a lot of French vocabulary. So we human beings have this capacity, tendency, to look at all these things that appear and weave them together.

[50:46]

How you decide to weave them together determines who you are. What we're asking in Buddhist practice and in this Sashin is how are we each going to weave things together. Individually and together. And that's what Dogen meant when he started out, when all things are the Buddha Dharma. When all these things that appear before us and in us, the fern, the apple, the observing mind, are woven together through their relationships as the Buddha Dharma,

[51:53]

Then we have delusion and enlightenment. Sentient beings and Buddhas. Yeah. So instead of taking your text, this capacity to weave into thinking, we shift it to our breath. and we shift it to our body.

[53:09]

And as you need to sit still to read, we also need to sit still to be able to read our own text. And instead of fixing your attention on the words of the text, we fix our attention momentarily on the top of the breath. And the bottom of the breath. and the whole movement of the breath. And we can do that best, we can fix our attention best when we have an inner silence. So sashin is a chance to come to that inner silence, Where we can start reading the text of the world.

[54:18]

And as all writers know, writing writes writing. As the wisdom of language begins to show you When you put something down in writing, the wisdom of language begins to show you what you can say. When we begin to read the text of our body, mind and world, the world and the body And the mind begin to read us. And lead us. And this is one way to describe practice.

[55:18]

Thank you very much. Satsang with Mooji The feeling beings are countless. I pray to save them. The beings are indestructible. I pray to prepare them for an end. We are boundless to rule over them.

[56:35]

The Church of the Buddha is unsuitable for us to rule over them. Thank you.

[57:41]

You know, it's quite okay to sit in a chair if you would like. This is okay? Want to say that in German? Yeah. Please. He understands, but I still. You're not as... I saw someone in Sesshin once who finally had cushions under each wrist. But anyway, during meals and lectures, sometimes people sit on a chair. It's okay. Although no one has to. You may see me sitting in a chair soon because I'm getting old and creaky. Yeah, well, I'd like to try to talk about something that I don't know if I'm going to be able to.

[59:33]

Hmm. You know, I speak in a rather mosaic way. But actually I'm trying to give you a fairly detailed picture of practice. And I'm especially trying to do that because you're We're lay people for the most part. So if the structure of your life holds your practice together,

[60:34]

Practice can be presented to you in bits and pieces. But if your daily life doesn't hold your practice together, Then I think you have to have a better understanding of the whole of practice. Because then you can refer your daily situation to this more complete understanding of practice. The bits and pieces approach is more traditional and may be better. But I know it doesn't work very well for Leapy.

[61:52]

So we'll try this, keep trying this out. Speaking of trying this out, Frank and Angelica want us to come back next year. I think they'd like me to come back even if I'm here all by myself. Everyone said, I mean, many, many people say to me they want to keep doing practice and sashins here at Haus der Stille. But... As we say, people are voting with their bodies. I guess in German it's voting with your feet. Or voting with their crossed legs. Because, for example, the Sashinan Johanneshof is full already.

[63:03]

So we could skip a year and do a commemorative Millennium Sashin in the year 2000. Big posters everywhere, Sashin 2000. Yeah. But it's nice just being here with us 20 folks. Two score. One score, yes. Well, anyway, we can, by the end of Sashin, when we have our meeting, if you have any ideas about what to do.

[64:08]

We could require a sign-up a year in advance. Then we'd know how to cancel eight months in advance. Anyway, we'll have to figure something out because, you know, I don't know. Okay. Okay. Now, what I want to speak about is our practice, of course. But I find myself coming into statements like Heaven and earth and I share the same root. Myriad things and I are the same body.

[65:21]

This is a famous statement in a koan. But really, what does it mean? Now, I'm of the school which... believes and experiences Buddhism as quite different than our Western way of thinking. That Buddhism is quite different than our Western way of thinking. This must be obvious to you that this is my understanding.

[66:33]

And although I look for similar ideas, I look for resonant ideas and experiences. I avoid making equivalencies. And I think that now that Buddhism is not exactly introduced, but A lot of people are trying it out now in the West. The greatest danger is that it's going to be assimilated too quickly. We'll use science and psychology as Trojan horses to... sneak it under the door of our culture.

[67:49]

Your culture is a big word. It's a danger we'll find too easily, see it as a form of psychology and so forth. And the real excitement and the power of it as an enlightenment practice is its difference. And the real excitement is its difference. So I'm working with this idea of continuity and connectedness and texture. And I gave you this phrase last night, this statement of Dogen's.

[69:07]

The moon in the water. The reflection of the moon in the water. The moon does not get wet. Nor is the water broken. Now just practically speaking the way you work with such a This practice, this kind of practice unique to Zen within Buddhism, is you repeat the image like you might repeat a phrase or a word like Mu or something. In other words,

[70:07]

you hold the image before you. You let the image permeate your thinking. Permeate your seeing. And you just shape it the way you want so you can make it a mnemonic device. So it might just be moon and water. Not wet, not broken. So whatever words you use to develop the image, the picture, ideally you hold it as an image which fills your body. Mm-hmm. Or you hold it as words, if that's the easiest way for you to do it.

[71:27]

And you repeat it or bring it up mechanically on each moment. And you repeat it or bring it up mechanically on each moment until it's just there without effort. Now again, this is something that's fairly easy to do, like keeping your mind on your breathing. But in actual fact, most people don't do it. But when they do do it, they find it quite unproductive. Yeah, so how can I make it more productive for those of you who find it unproductive? You're trying to worm something into your thinking.

[72:37]

Or weave it into your thinking. Now let's just go back for a moment to being here in Sashim. It's pretty hard to be in Sashin unless you just settle yourself on yourself. Unless you just are able to find yourself here. with really nothing else to do. We have an almost inherent mental and physical restlessness. And Sashin is an attempt to break the back of your mind. mental and physical restlessness.

[73:56]

So you can just sit here with ease and strength and composure. But as soon as you think And mostly the problem comes from thinking of alternatives like the bell could ring. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure it's a thought we've all had. You know. But it is still just a thought. If the thought didn't come up You didn't think of alternatives.

[75:01]

You could just die here. We'd come in in a month or two, you'd be sitting here all covered with moss. Like a, what is it, a bomb stump? Yeah, a tree stump, a Baumstumpf. Like a dead stump, a Baumstumpf. Sorry, ein toter Baumstumpf. Yeah, this is better in German than English. Baumstumpf. Das ist mal ein Wort, was besser im Deutschen als im Englischen ist. Dead stump now, Baumstumpf. Not a single leaf sprouting, you know. Kein einziges Blättchen, das mehr austreibt. You know, even if you taste that just for a moment in sashin, it's such a relief. It's like you put down decades of baggage.

[76:02]

No place to go, nothing to do. But you see, Dogen says, this is the Dharma position. This is the position of each moment. He has certain terms like that. Now we have established more, I think, more rather than less yesterday. That we have two, we have this double identity, this problem of a double identification. We identify our thinking as our self.

[77:11]

And we identify the world through our thinking. Now the test of the degree to which you do that is if you're thinking, as soon as you're not paying attention, I didn't say that right. If your sense of location and your sense of identification, as soon as you're not paying attention, returns to your thinking, it means that you basically function through the sense

[78:24]

Das bedeutet, dass ihr prinzipiell funktioniert mit dem Gefühl eines permanenten Selbst. Dann nehmt ihr Zuflucht zu der Wiederholbarkeit des Selbst. Der zweite Test dann. as long as you don't find this moment as absolutely unique, and unique in two ways, non-repeatable, in other words, This just sitting here, as I always say, I always say, but each moment it's the same. That this particular time right now, whatever it is, will never be repeated. So when you actually feel that, you know the world is impermanent.

[79:36]

When you don't feel that or you don't really believe that, in fact, you think the world is permanent. Or you don't know what impermanence means. Now, it's also unique in that this particular moment is our only life space. The only place we will ever live is in a particular moment. Yeah, if you're learning the piano, Try tomorrow again. So there's various things we can do that we have another chance. But as far as our life space goes, it is only in each particular moment, each unique moment.

[81:01]

In the triviality and uniqueness of each moment. So these are two tests. The more you sense and feel each moment as unique, and the more your sense of location will rest easily in your breath or your body or phenomena, then you're beginning to know the meaning of everything is impermanent. everything is changing.

[82:06]

This, as an experiential reality, is very different from just understanding it intellectually. Whew! It's actually hard to, I mean this is obvious what I'm saying, but it requires for me quite a lot of energy to try to make this clear so you actually feel it. I'm hoping you're feeling it. And if our translator understands it and feels it, and I do too, we have a chance. Okay. Now there's a kind of sequential consequentiality to this.

[83:37]

Sequential. Sequentiality. One thing follows the next. And there's consequences that arise from one thing following the next. If you fall in love, things happen as a consequence of that. And it's not always predictable. And that's what falling in love with this world we live in is like. And I suppose I'm asking you to fall in love with how we actually exist. With your breathing, with your body, with this world that appears before us, which we try to express in a phrase like heaven and earth.

[84:57]

and I share the same root. Myriad things and I are one body. That phrase too, like the moon and the water, you find a way to hold as a ontogenetic map. Now, do you have the same word in German, ontogenetic? We use it the same. Okay. Meaning... It means the development from embryo to death, or through life. Now, I am using these technical, philosophical, scientific terms.

[86:30]

Because I'm trying to find some precise language to show us how practice works. I can just say life map, that's probably good enough. But by using ontogenetic, I'm emphasizing it's something that evolves our very living over time. But when I say ontogenetic map, does that mean or describe something that develops in our being over time? It is a dramatic thing to come in to this moment as your only alternative.

[87:33]

And somehow you have to sort of believe it first. Now to just sit here with the real feeling of no other alternative. Of course you know there are other alternatives. But it's a different kind of emphasis. That there are other alternatives are second and third priority. Look, if you're close to death, you'd have less problem with this idea. you don't so easily think there are other alternatives.

[88:44]

That's what's so scary about dying. It's not that the experience of dying is so bad. That only lasts a moment. And during half of the moment you're dead. So it only lasts half a moment. It's gone very quickly. You're there one moment and gone the next. But the idea that we're completely out of control and we can't go to our counselor and ask for a change. Okay. Life is short and death is near. I said this at Yanisov the other day and somebody said, boy, I can smell the sulfur.

[89:54]

Giving a fire and brimstone talk, you know? Like a television preacher. But somehow, maybe a good phrase is, life is short and death is near. I mean, it's too bad we have to force this recognition on ourselves. I mean, we have lots of alternatives. But it's really helpful to know that this moment is our life space. Where everything happens. It's the only place anything can happen.

[91:07]

Dogen calls it something like the stage of the present moment. Now a phrase like that is different from just calling it now. Now is... Kind of passive. And now is so quick you can hardly take an inventory of what's now. But the stage of the present moment has a feeling of, it has a certain duration. And we can decide what's on this stage. When you know this unique non-repeatable moment is the stage Let's call it the stage of the present moment.

[92:26]

Your energy flows into it. Instead of your energy being concerned with the next moment. And what you're going to do. It's fine to have next moments. I have a lot of them. But for the most part, I try not to let my basic energy go into that. I want to open up this stage of the present moment. open it up by pulling my thinking aside, and recognizing the absolute uniqueness and non-repeatability of this moment, Which is the only moment I'll ever have.

[93:33]

And exactly the same moment, kind of moment on which I will die. This is what Dogen's trying to do. get across by saying the Dharma of the present position.

[94:00]

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