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Timeless Zen: Embracing Root Time

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In the February 2001 talk, there is an exploration of the concept of time within the framework of Zen practice, contrasting the conventional understanding of chronological time with what is termed as "fundamental time" or "root time." This discourse emphasizes the unique temporal experience of each being and thing, suggesting that perception and mindfulness practice can allow one to enter into and be aware of these distinct times. Dogen's teachings, especially the ideas presented in Genjo Koan, are central to understanding how differing perceptions of time impact one's consciousness and the experience of Zen practice. The discussion further elaborates on how meditation, particularly through zazen, cultivates awareness of these temporal experiences, supporting the idea of ripening and coalescence as pathways to realization, akin to practices of sudden enlightenment.

Referenced Works and Texts:
- Dogen's Genjo Koan: Discussed as a pivotal Zen text that underlines the concept of different kinds of time, emphasizing the practice of recognizing and experiencing time beyond the standard sequential understanding.
- Nagarjuna's Teachings: References to Nagarjuna's expression that firewood is not the past of ash, reinforcing the idea of each entity having its own temporal existence.
- Suzuki Roshi's Commentary: Mentioned regarding firewood having its own past, present, and future, connecting to the notion of temporal independence in objects.
- Buddhist Sutras (e.g., Diamond Sutra, Heart Sutra): Echoed in the discussion to emphasize the idea of "no coming, no going," which is central to perceiving and experiencing time beyond linear constructs.

The talk encourages participants to engage deeply with these teachings to transform their understanding and experience of time through Zen practice, enabling a more profound connection to each moment and its potential for insight and enlightenment.

AI Suggested Title: Timeless Zen: Embracing Root Time

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Well, yesterday afternoon I spoke about what would be a classic approach to Zen teaching, which is to present views that... or in some disjunction, dissonance with our own views. Like, you know, that you feel your feet are down there, or you feel your body has no up or down, left or right. Most people never examine, even think about the fact that they feel their feet are down there.

[01:05]

They don't think it's strange, it's just the way it is. But when you Here, find out that it's possible to experience your body equally all over. You can feel yourself within a view. Within an experience, resting on a view or a view resting on experience. And if I point out there's nowadays the what was for many centuries recognized by women as the quickening of a life within them

[02:26]

And now it's not only do women usually not notice it, I think, but they're told it's not the case by the medical establishment. So I'm pointing out, now that's quite real. I mean, every woman who's pregnant may have some such experience. It's quite real, but still denied. So denied that the word is dropped out of English usage. So how are we going to notice the quickening of the subtle body within us?

[03:29]

Another kind of consciousness. So now I'm suggesting that there are experiences in meditation and mindfulness... That are strangely similar to experiences like Marie-Louise mentioned. Butterflies, running mice. There's some sort of softness we feel in our body. Some overall softness. Or pliancy. Yeah.

[04:47]

Or there's other traditional things. You can even find lists of things that suggest that your meditation is progressing. But they're not in the category of things we usually notice. Nor do we know how to... establish ourselves in these subtle feelings. If you discover how to do it, usually practicing with others and being alert, your practice develops much more quickly. it's not always hidden in the details we usually notice, hidden in the details of our ordinary, usual way of perceiving our body and mentality.

[06:23]

Okay, so to present something like this or show something like this, is this classic way of teaching Zen? Where you present a view that's in some disjunction with your habitual view. No. If you're a real practitioner... No, I don't mean that as a... really as good or bad. I mean, some people have either an interest or talent for practice.

[07:30]

Perhaps a talent for practice would be to see this dissonance of views as to actually experience the dissonance. And to see it as interesting as part of some kind of inner request to find the truth of ourselves. Okay, so then I really appreciated the discussion you had, at least what you shared with me I appreciated. And I appreciated the feeling among you. And as I said, it was a sophisticated conversation.

[08:38]

But in its ability to resolve itself, it was fairly primitive. Yeah, but maybe, you know, we have to be primitive, maybe. We have to fiddle around with our own ways of describing things. And to recognize we don't have a refined way of noticing and describing our practice. Yeah, no, I shouldn't maybe say experience, or practice, I should just say experience. Because whether we practice or not, we can notice this kind of experience. Now, what's the difference if we practice? Well, usually we notice it, particularly if you do sitting practice, you notice it more often.

[10:03]

Then you don't always notice it in your zazen. A common experience is you notice something new or some insight in your zazen for the first year or so. Und häufig ist es so, dass ihr während des ersten Jahres etwas Neues in eurer Zazenpraxis bemerkt. But after a year or so, your Zazen may become pretty boring. Aber nach so einem Jahr oder so, dann kann es sein, dass eure Zazenpraxis ziemlich langweilig wird. You complain, nothing much happens in Zazen. Und ihr fangt an, euch zu beschweren, also da passiert nichts mehr so richtig. But you notice things in your ordinary life. Little insights occur. And if you stop sitting, they stop happening in your ordinary daily life. For some reason, it pushes, Zazen pushes this kind of noticing into your activity.

[11:07]

And as you begin to change in relationship to these insights in your activity, then that takes maybe a couple of years anyway. And then it begins to come back into your meditation. There is some sort of phases in practice like this. Okay, so as you said last, yesterday afternoon, we talked about not naming our experience.

[12:30]

Unnaming our experience. Having experience we have no words for. Or no categories for. And yet also the use of words in giving us permission to explore. Permission, hints, even guidance. Yeah, so... Okay, now the problem is that we're kind of stumbling around in the dark. Why are we stumbling around in the dark in this kind of primitive exploration?

[13:33]

Because we don't have a base. basis in the absolute. We don't have a basis in the exact nature of reality. So we're exploring this using words and thinking, etc. That's partially a recognition of some deeper yogic experience and partially a recognition of, partially based on our usual experience. It's hard to sort it out. Well, you know, if you keep doing it, something happens anyway. But for adept practice, this exploration is your activity and responsibility.

[14:45]

Now, certainly, The explanation, the exploration needs some kind of established basis. It's really difficult to do it if you don't do zazen and practice mindfulness. It gets lost in all your other observations and thinking. then some deep insight is lost in the back of a cereal box. Do you know what I mean?

[16:01]

You read cereal boxes, you read this, you hear that. You may have some insight, but it gets lost in all the different things you notice. But the more you have an established, stabilized mindfulness, and stabilize still sitting, these are the main tools and platform from which to study, with which and from which to study consciousness. Now, implied in this Genjo koan is another kind of time. Now, I'd like to speak about this other kind of time. And this other kind of time is... Yeah. Yeah, it may sound like nothing at all. But if you can get the feeling of it as being a different view a different view of time then you can open yourself up to another experience of time.

[17:42]

Okay. It may take a while to take hold, but it does take hold. Okay. So how do I start? First I'd like you to recognize, as I implied earlier, spoke about a little bit earlier, recognize that the time of, for example, your childhood is different than the time of your adulthood. How long were you a child? Maybe, if you're not too old, it maybe seems like half your life. Can you trust your own experience? It's a different kind of time.

[19:19]

You have a child beside you. Maybe growing up a friend's child or your own child. That child is in a different time than you are. You don't share the same time. They overlap. Yeah, but they're not the same. So again, as I said, I probably will be a parent pretty soon. And my job as a Buddhist parent... is to enter into the time of the baby. Of course, as soon as I do, because I'm a clumsy guy, I will impose my time on the baby.

[20:19]

But I can try to dissolve my time and not impose it too much. Who knows what kind of time it has now, all floating around. Like an astronaut or something. And now, soon we have to lift its own arms and stuff like that. It's going to be strange. And it'll be in a different time as a crawler and toddler than it is as an infant. Yeah, but you know, each of you is in a different time.

[21:24]

We're not in the same time from my point of view. Each of you are almost as different time as if you were an infant. Dogen says something like, time doesn't fly. It arrives in each object. Now you might say, oh yes, I understand each of us is in a different stage of development. And different age. We all recognize that.

[22:24]

So why does he say, why do I say, that it's a different time? I'd actually like you to experiment with not just being the usual view of we're each in a different stage of development, But rather that we're in a different time. Now we can negotiate the general time. So we can have schedules and time to do things together. But that's a practical negotiation, not from the point of view of experience, reality. Yeah, okay. So let's call the time of each object Fundamental time.

[23:41]

Or root time. Dogen speaks about firewood is firewood and ash is ash. This is also Nagarjuna says this. Firewood is not the past of ash. The forest is not the past of firewood. As Suzuki Roshi would say, firewood has its own past, present and future. Yeah. I can make that easier to understand.

[24:46]

Some people have trouble with understanding it. For some it's not so hard to understand. But maybe I shouldn't make it easier. Just you sort of ponder it. Firewood is firewood. It has its own past, present and future. This floor has its own past, present and future. We make use of it, but it's not in our time. Mm-hmm. Dogen and even Chinese culture in general had some idea of time closer to this. A sense of ripening time or maturing time. And Dogen carried it to... The cultural idea in Dogen's is not the same.

[26:08]

But somewhat closer than our sense of general time. So how can I give you a sense of this difference? Okay, so I have to go up to the altar all the time. There's our 500-year-old Buddha. And the incense burner. The stick of incense and so forth. Candle. The flame. For me, each of those things is in its own time. I feel it rubbing against me in a different way. Yeah.

[27:14]

And I feel each drawing me into its time. Now, this doesn't make too much sense unless you feel the arising of each situation. Each occurrence. So if I look at you sitting here in front of me, now practice, the world of practice is the world of the exact nature of reality. And when I look at you, some kind of experience arises that you participate in. Yeah.

[28:17]

So there's a particular, I mean, I just don't see and hear you. Seeing and hearing you arises through seeing and hearing. So if I look at this, a kind of consciousness arises. It's a different consciousness than when I look at you. If I think it's the same, I'm... You don't have much experience of your consciousness if what arises when you look at this is the same as what arises when I look at you. The whole idea of practice is to notice the different consciousness that arises on each occasion. Consciousness arises on an object of consciousness.

[29:21]

And it's not the same consciousness that arises on different objects of consciousness. If it's the same consciousness that for you arises on every object, You're living in an envelope. And you're going to be prone to depression, boredom and other things. Mm-hmm. Now samadhi is consciousness which arises with the object of consciousness being consciousness itself. As I give the example, if I look at this, a certain consciousness arises.

[30:44]

And a stick of consciousness. And if I take it away, I can still stay concentrated. And what is that consciousness? Now the object of consciousness is consciousness itself. And that's called samadhi. So then I can bring this back up into it and observe it from a consciousness concentrated on itself. But even that samadhi will have some difference on each occasion. Okay, so the fact is that your consciousness is different on each occasion of consciousness. I think that's a fact.

[31:53]

Now, you can notice that through practice. You can develop that through practice. The Kenjo Koan assumes you're doing that. Or you can, through your own habits or needs or defenses or whatever, minimize the difference. Okay, so the more you feel the different consciousness that arises on each object of perception, you're more able to feel the different time of each object. and enter into the time of the object. Now, if you go to California and you go to Muir Woods, say, and visit the giant redwoods,

[33:12]

You know, you feel like maybe you say, oh, this is like a cathedral. It's not like being in a forest. It's like being in a cathedral. That would be a kind of naming it, but naming it different from a usual forest. And then maybe you take the cathedral away and you find yourself in the presence of immense trees. Or trunk after trunk is as big as here to the window. So such ancient trees and the whole atmosphere they create forces you into another time. But if you awaken yourself to fundamental time, a single flower is like a redwood tree.

[34:48]

Okay. So we can call this, I call this, sometimes people call it fundamental time, sometimes I call it root time. You know, they say, again, going back to the old Big Bang, the Big Bang didn't explode in space. It created space as it exploded. It also created time. It didn't explode in time. It created time.

[35:50]

So whatever that means... Buddhism always assumes that each of you is time. You're not in time, you are time. Okay, so if each of you is time, what is this Simultaneous time. Okay, let's call it then simultaneous time. So we have a second kind of time now. I'm suggesting we have root time or fundamental time where we can feel the time of each person, each object.

[36:56]

and each object pulls us into their time as the baby pulls you into its time. We like to pet Charlie because Charlie pulls us into its time. Okay, so let's see if we can imagine for this week that each of us is time and is a different time. and is maturing within our own time.

[38:08]

Okay, so much of Chinese culture and the background of Dogen to I Ching and so forth is to know the ripening of time in each moment. And to know to act in the ripening of time, not just in general when it's time to act? By schedule? No, we do have to have scheduled time. But we shouldn't be rooted in scheduled time or general time. At least from the point of view of practice, we should be rooted in root time or fundamental time.

[39:10]

Okay, so now we have simultaneous time. Each of us is in our own different time. And we're simultaneously in our different time. Now, if you can get it, that's not the same as general time. All these different times create a simultaneity of time, but that's not general time. When you say general time, it suddenly becomes flat like a map. This is a complex topography. When it's simultaneous time. It's like taking a drug on each object. You take a drug and you enter into another time.

[40:27]

But that's present all the time. Something like that's present all the time. Okay, so then we have simultaneous time. And within simultaneous time we have the occasions of time. Occasions, a situation. So maybe we have situational time. Now you don't really get situational time unless you understand simultaneous time. And you don't get situational time unless you understand feel fundamental time. Okay, now, what do I mean by situational time? At any particular moment, There are situations arising within simultaneous time.

[41:47]

There are various ways we feel about each other. There are various possibilities of practice in each of us right now. So we have an overall situation here of this practice week. And within this situation of the practice week, We have sub-situations, other situations. And each of these situations, at each moment, has the possibility of maturing. Of ripening. They don't necessarily ripen in the future.

[42:55]

All of this is headed towards some future. Each situation has the possibility. What makes a situation is it could ripen right now. This is the when of when all things are the Buddha Dharma. So you could say, when is this when now? How is this when now? This is the background of Dogen's first word, when. The understanding that that when also ripens now. zu verstehen, dass dieses Wort, wenn, in diesem Moment jetzt reift.

[44:15]

Wenn ihr auf irgendeiner flachen Karte der Zeit seid, dann könnt ihr das nicht sehen. Aber die Zeit, die in sich verwurzelt ist, matures through itself. Yeah. So I think I've said enough about all this. There's a couple more ways, two more kinds of time. Maybe we have time for that some other time. Mm-hmm. Thank you for your patience while I tried to make this clear. Part of my point here is that if you, once you find yourself located in fundamental time,

[45:20]

and not in the averaging of simultaneous time called general time. Now, we need to live also in practically general time. But you don't want to identify yourself through such a flat, dead time. You want to trust your experience of the actual time you experience. And know even that this infant time you think you've left behind is also still within the topography of your own time and often discovered through meditation practice. Thank you very much.

[46:39]

I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know what to say. I don't know what to say. Ameen.

[49:10]

I hope you enjoyed this video. If you liked it, please subscribe to my channel. Sometimes I wonder why I speak about some particular topic.

[51:03]

If I intellectually think about what should I say if we have a topic of study in consciousness, Yeah, there's so many things I might think about talking about. Yeah, but then I, in fact, find myself speaking about this experiential sense of time. Do you say experimental or experiential? The experience, yes. The experience part of time. It's experimental too, but... It's also experimental. But Togen, you know, says that if we...

[52:11]

don't find ourselves inside time, we are unlikely to experience realization. Because we'll be caught in the coming and going of of general time. And as almost all of you practiced with me for a long time know, that I practiced with this phrase, There's no place to go and nothing to do. When I got that phrase from, I think, I don't know exactly where actually, from the Diamond Sutra, the Heart Sutra, various places, you know, I could have come from. But probably more the echoes.

[53:51]

Echoes, you know, is the thing you say between sutras. It's not like the echo of a sound. It's E-K-O, echo. Where it's commonly, they say, no coming, no going. So I tried to bring, what is no coming, no going? What does it mean? I didn't really have a sense of Dogen thinking that coming and experience of coming and going is in some sort of flat time. But I kept saying it in the echoes over and over again. So I tried to bring it into the stuff of my experience.

[54:56]

And somehow it got changed into no place to go and nothing to do. And as you might imagine, at 25 years old, I had a lot to do and a lot of places to go. You know, I had a full-time job at the university. And I was a full-time graduate student. And I had a new family with a new baby. So I was pretty busy. So... And no car for most of the time, so I had to ride a bicycle to a bus to get to work every day and ride a bicycle to Zazen and across the city and so forth.

[56:10]

Yeah, it was quite good, though. But in all this activity, I kept saying, no place to go, nothing to do. No. So what's going on here? I'm hearing certain, let's say, wisdom phrases. in the morning chanting. Yeah, so I'm doing Buddhism, I might as well do it. So I'll try it fully. That's what they say, this phrase, no coming, no going.

[57:10]

I'll bring that phrase into apposition with my own activity and mental and physical. Because where I'm living is in my activity. So no matter what I think, does my activity reflect no coming and no going? Well, it really didn't. I was busy and anxious and so forth. But I kept confronting my activity, mental and physical, with this phrase. And as I've told you, after about eight months of doing it, I forgot it for two months.

[58:26]

Und nachdem ich das etwa acht Monate getan habe, vergaß ich es etwa für zwei Monate. And I remember, I mean, I really did say it all the time, almost, you know, around, underneath everything I was doing, I was mumbling, feeling this phrase. Und ich habe es wirklich die ganze Zeit gesagt, also alles, was ich getan habe, die ganze Zeit begleitete mich dieser Satz, also unterschwellig. And for reasons unknown to me, I forgot it after eight months. And I really forgot it. Maybe I was just so busy, I forgot it. And then, about two months later, it came back. And what I liked was I didn't criticize myself for forgetting. I thought, this is some progress.

[59:38]

I didn't have a sense of time. I mean, I sensed if I'm doing it now, that's time. I didn't have to think about that I didn't do it. Each moment of time was sufficient. I didn't need some other moment of time. I didn't have to compare the actual moment of time to some other. I kind of intuitively recognized this was some change through practice. Forgetting it somehow made me recognize that even during forgetting it, some change had occurred. And... And then I continued for another, I think, about a year and two months, if I remember correctly, altogether.

[61:08]

Including the two months I forgot. Anyway, something like that, maybe a year and three months. And suddenly I, one day, just, the phrase kind of disappeared and I didn't feel like there was any place to go or anything to do ever again. Let me not have things to do. But if I'm not doing them at a particular moment, I don't think about them at all. It drives people around me a little crazy sometimes. We have all these things to do.

[62:09]

Oh, we do? Oh, I don't know. When it's time to do them, I'll do them. When I'm not doing them, they're simply not there in me. That's about 98%, 99% true. I tease Marie-Louise about her planning all the time. Also, ich mache Scherze mit Marie-Louise wegen ihrem ständigen Plan. We're kindergarten for the, you know, five years. I think, stop playing. Ja, sie fragt sich wohl, in das Kind, in den Kindergarten gehen wird.

[63:10]

Und ich sage einfach, ja, stopp mit dem Plan. Just, I don't know. Läuf ich nicht. And she said to me one day, she said, the way you plan is virtually for the past. Or already for the past. Yeah, anyway, what I'm describing may not be all good, but I'm saying what happened to me. The point I'm making is it takes a lot of time particularly in the first years of practice, to have a teaching penetrate your experience. Penetrating your ideas is fairly easy. And if you think penetrating your ideas is realization or is practice, you are very badly mistaken.

[64:27]

Understanding means almost nothing. Unless it's the platform from which you change your views. And penetrate your activity with understanding. And then some also... understanding manifested in one's activity is a very different, like a palace by comparison. Yeah, what does Dogen say in the Gensokon?

[65:32]

If you sail out into the ocean where no land can be seen. He must have had this experience on his trip to China and back to Japan. He says the ocean looks round. And what you really see is a round ocean. Everything confirms that. But the ocean is neither round nor square. The ocean is a palace, he says. A realm for dragons and fishes. So, it's like that you have an understanding of everything is round or whole or oneness, but when that penetrates your activity, it's something else entirely.

[66:55]

So I'm trying to kind of muddle around in this sense of time, Dogen's sense of time, Buddhist sense of time. And I would say that this isn't just exactly a Buddhist sense of time. There's an evolution of the understanding of time as practice in Dogen. So it's not just a Buddhist understanding, there is an evolution of time. Let's see if we can muddle around in it some more. to see if we can bring it into our experience, our activity. One thing that is characteristic of Buddhism And as a distinct view in Tantrism, Tibetan Tantrism, Yeah, is to, if we took Socrates' dictum to know oneself,

[68:24]

It would be more in Buddhism something like to be inside actuating oneself. I could say to be inside creating yourself. But maybe actuating oneself is better. Because this creation of yourself is not occurring from nothing. We are actualizing the situations in which at each moment you are part of. To know oneself in some static way or even to know oneself with a feeling of knowing is something that's not very Buddhist.

[69:54]

Of course a big part of our practice should be becoming familiar with ourself with our body inside and out and with our mind and consciousness inside and out. And that's a good basis. Yeah, but something more radical than that is to know oneself in Buddhism. You know, you may have noticed in the Unfortunately, I guess most of you just have, you don't have the book it comes from, right? You just have the Xerox of the pages in English, right? Also, ihr habt nicht das Buch, wo dieser General Cohen drin ist.

[70:58]

Ihr habt nur die kopierten Seiten. Well, one of the phrases says, when you come back to where you are, it says. Also, ein Satz sagt, wenn du dahin zurückkehrst, wo du bist. And there's a little asterisk beside that. Und dort gibt es so ein Sternchen. And if you look up that asterisk if you look up where you are in the glossary what Dogen actually says which is translated as where you are is actually inside this So he says, when you come back to being inside this, in this case we also mean inside time. So again, to start, we have the time of each thing.

[72:29]

Time arrives in each thing. Time is the Time abides as the phenomenal existence, the momentary phenomenal existence of each thing. No, a key to this way of thinking is ripening. So not just sequence, but ripening. Like an apple ripens. An apple isn't just in a sequence from green to red to rotten.

[73:34]

It's ripening. And there's a moment when it's ripe. So each thing now is in its own time, is its own time. But we have a simultaneity of each thing in its own time. Now you know in Newton's time it was thought that this was an absolute thing, time. Contemporary physics would not say time is absolute. It's slightly different how you measure it and where the observers are and so forth.

[74:46]

So this simultaneous time, our experiential simultaneous time, is even more like that. It's a kind of palace or field of things in different times. I'd like you to see if you can drop some idea of absolute time And feel this fabric of different times, of the simultaneity of different times. Okay, so by getting away from what I'm calling general time, we can get a feeling through the time of each thing of a field of simultaneous times.

[76:11]

Almost you want to bow down before each different world of time. One kind of secret vow one can take is to vow to feel the magnificence of each human being. And maybe to carry that vow a step further and feel each being, each person. being superior to you. So you disappear a little bit and you feel yourself in a landscape, a topography of magnificent beings.

[77:34]

Such vows are meant to work with our habits of mind and transform openness to other ways of being with each other. So again, Buddhist texts and sutras use things like rubied palaces and so forth. The extraordinary sun shining on old oak floors. Okay, then once we get the feeling of this landscape of simultaneous times, then we can feel into the

[79:16]

momentary possibilities within that field of simultaneities. So we can bring the idea of ripening, now that we've got this idea of ripening, not just a simple sequence. but an idea of ripening we can bring into this actualizing field of simultaneities. Sondern wir können diese Idee des Reifens in dieses Feld bringen. Bring it into the field? Field of simultaneity. Also in dieses Feld der simultanen Zeit. So each moment has a chance to right. Also so hat jeder Moment eine Gelegenheit zu reifen.

[80:32]

Mm-hmm. Then you have the practice of how do you enter into this ripening. If you have too strong a sense of self, semi-permanent self, if you have too strong a sense of self, of a nearly permanent sense of self, It's very hard to enter into the ripening. Now, strangely, you know, I spoke about, as we're speaking about studying consciousness, And consciousness is your consciousness.

[81:38]

And I extended that to a field that goes beyond just conscious of, but a knowing. Or an awareness. Now I'd like to Go back to the sense of presence. Like presence in your mudra. Or the presence in the whole of your body. Now I want to connect that with, in zazen, a feeling of satisfaction. A feeling of sufficiency. Enoughness. Sufficiency. You can't say this is knowing, but it's a kind of being known, perhaps. Maybe when you're sitting, not much of anything, but you feel deeply satisfied.

[82:56]

You feel sufficient. Or ripe. You know, Iris brought up the idea of speed yesterday or the day before. And I pointed out in the past that speed, as we know it as velocity, only came in with steam engine trains. Phrases like Godspeed still have the old meaning of the word. which meant prosperity or ripeness.

[84:01]

And ripeness also is the edge of change. When the apple is ripe, we pick it When a situation is ripe, it's ripe for change. So there's also a kind of scariness in time as ripeness. Scariness, fear. A kind of even ecstasy. The more you feel like you're in this field of ripeness, at any moment everything can kind of coalesce and change.

[85:09]

And even if it doesn't, you're always in a contingency. And even if it doesn't work, you are constantly in such a contingency. That means that there is a combination of things that are not quite ready for change, but almost ready. So Dogen, by changing our view, our concept of time, by looking at what our actual experience of time is, That all of us have this actual experience of time.

[86:13]

But we haven't put it together as a view. We haven't decided which sense of time is most fundamental. So now we're trying to recognize which sense of time is most fundamental. Most radical even. in the sense that radical means to get back to the roots. So by taking our experience of time and say, hey, look at some of this suggests a view of time

[87:13]

In contrast to usual time? And can you let this fundamental sense of time penetrate your actual experience? With this idea of ripening, maturing time, but differently maturing times, brings you into a radical contingency. A kind of ecstasy. Ecstasy in English means out of place.

[88:27]

Ecstasis, out of place. You feel yourself very much in place, but the place might change at any moment. This is all done without drugs. It's done by changing the way you view your experience. So that at each moment there's the feeling of a potential coalescence or ripening and a potential change. And we could say this is the tactile feel that allows the practice of sudden enlightenment.

[89:37]

The tactile feel of the practice of sudden enlightenment. The practice of sudden enlightenment is to know enlightenment is always at each moment the ripening of a situation. Well, at the same time, feeling sufficient, not needing enlightenment. You feel so sufficient, oh, needs enlightenment. But at the same time you're right there where everything is able to change and everything is possible in this sufficiency.

[90:41]

It's a kind of for the mature practitioner a kind of continual enlightenment. Oh, I can see the legs know the time. Leg time. I'm almost done. I want to go one step further to make what I'm saying a little clearer. But we have the time of each thing.

[91:47]

And we have simultaneous time. Then we have the ripening time of each moment, situational time. And then we should throw in, of course, general time. Flat general time. Because that's part of our experience too. And then let's put in dissolving time. Because we're talking about our experience actuating each situation. Actuating, the other side is to dissolve.

[92:48]

So we're now in, let's say, the fabric of time. We feel if our experience of time, existence time, is this ripening, we can feel the potential coming together of each situation. It's not part of our activity. And it is not, and it is now part of our activity. Not outside of.

[93:40]

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