I'm very appreciative that so many of you could take this week off and come here to practice together. And I think most of you know some of the new people just come may not know that I, sorry to tell you all this, that I had early January operation for prostate cancer. And I had it from the perineum, which means I'm completely was cut up from underneath. the place where much of my practice life is centered.

[01:08]

So I feel a little like that Buddha all buried in snow. Anyway, don't look. So it's quite rather difficult to sit so far. And also the last five or six days I've had the flu for some reason just to complicate things. Marie-Louise had it before. This last seminar and at some point I got it too. So I've kind of shittled frost. A new word I've learned, shittled frost. It's a nice word.

[02:14]

It sounds kind of funny. It's a shittle roast. But don't think I shouldn't be doing this. I can shiver my way down the cold halls to find you. And I have to be alive somewhere, and I'd rather be alive here than upstairs in my bed. Yeah, I feel good being here with you. But I probably, because I seem to need more, quite a bit more sleep. The doctors warned me, get more sleep. And I seem to need more sleep, and so I probably won't come join you in meditation in the morning. Yeah. Okay. Now, of course we have to start with this title, The Wisdom of Not Knowing.

[03:35]

This is a terrible title. How did I get stuck with it? I must have agreed, I guess. But how can I speak with you about not knowing? The whole idea of not knowing is I mean, in a kind of simple but accurate sense, it means that everything is so far-reachingly interdependent. So we can't know all the aspects of any situation. And everything is, Mahayana Buddhism is understood to be also interpenetrating. And how things are

[04:46]

all aspects of things are also here in some way. It's also outside our usual way of noticing. Another aspect is when you work with the actual way we know things, And you'll find, somebody just pointed it out to me recently, but It's the case that if you practice following your thoughts or moods to their source, They often start with a physical event, a sound, a smell or something. A movement of the body.

[05:56]

And this sensory event triggers a lot of associations. And this event, this sensory event, triggers a lot of associations. So we can study the associations and we can study the trigger. But our senses are only five, or if you count mind, six slices of a cosmic pie. There's a lot happening between the senses.

[06:57]

not in the range of our sensory apparatus. Yeah, so not knowing also means to be to act within the mystery of what's left out. What's left out by our senses. Yeah. So it sounds impossible. I mean, to me anyway. How do we practice with something like the degree to which everything is interdependent and interpenetrating? These are important root ideas in practice, but they're not things we can practice exactly. Das sind wichtige Wurzelideen, aber wir können damit nicht direkt praktizieren.

[08:24]

We can notice, but that itself helps. Wir können das wahrnehmen und das alleine hilft. Okay. So I thought maybe I'd just change the title and... Refund your money and we'll talk about something else. Or maybe it'll be a better topic so the cost goes double. But somehow I want to find a way to speak, if possible, about knowing and not knowing, as part of however we talk about practice this week. No, not knowing also means emptiness.

[09:39]

And Herbert Günther translates emptiness often as openness. And we can translate and we can take openness of not knowing as a way to look at And I think, for me, that this text of Zammai, O Zammai, probably the most useful overall text for Zen meditation practice. And I also want to continue some of the themes that I spoke about during this three-day seminar that just ended. And quite a few of you were here for that seminar.

[10:51]

What does Dogen say? Did you all get this thing for study period? You have it memorized or at least read or something like that? We'll chant it after the lecture. It's Sanskrit. Okay. He says the world of sitting practice is different from all other worlds. Okay, so let's just take that. The world of sitting practice is different from all other worlds. And that would be the openness of not knowing.

[12:05]

You don't really know what it is, so you enter sitting practice with not knowing. If you bring too many expectations to practice, It's not so easy. Sitting practices can sometimes overcome one's expectations, but it really helps to let go of your expectations. So the world of sitting is different from all other worlds. And he also asks, at the very moment of sitting, Is it vertical or horizontal?

[13:29]

So this question is meant to cut through the most basic things of up and down and so forth. And implied here is that sleeping mind is horizontal and waking mind is vertical. But does sitting mind fall into the categories of sleeping mind or waking mind? Yeah, hopefully not. That's why we encourage you not to sleep during satsang. But I must say, just to support you, it's better to sleep during satsang than to be consciously awake all the time.

[14:29]

The ability to fall into zazen is very close to sleep, and you have to learn how to bypass sleeping and go into a kind of clarity. That's not ordinary waking mind or sleeping. And to come into a kind of clarity, neither sleeping nor waking minds. But he says, Establish yourself in the posture, sitting posture of mind. Establish yourself in the sitting posture of mind.

[15:34]

That alone takes some while to do. What does it mean, sitting posture of mind? Is that somehow different from body? Then he says, establish yourself in the sitting posture of the body. And of course we start with the body. There's no alternative. If you're going to sit down and cross your legs and so forth, you're starting with the posture of the body. But what does he perhaps mean by the sitting posture of the body? Certainly it is the posture in which sleeping mind and waking mind disappear. Yeah. And you can tell when sleeping mind and waking mind disappear from the posture of the body.

[16:56]

Und ihr könnt wahrnehmen, wenn der schlafende Geist und der wache Geist von dieser Sitzhaltung weggehen, verschwinden. Wenn ihr eine bestimmte Kraft in eurer Haltung findet. And clarity. And you get to know that feeling after a while. As Paul Rosenblum said during the seminars he did here. Let the body of your practice lead you, not your thinking. And Dogen also then says, establish yourself in the posture of letting go of body and mind. So how do we get to there?

[18:25]

Well, first we have to establish ourselves in the sitting posture of body and the sitting posture of mind. He doesn't really tell us what that is, or sort of he does. Certainly it is this openness of not knowing. And once you've established the sitting posture of body and mind, you can usually discover what it means to let go of body and mind. But before he gives you this advice to establish yourself in the sitting posture of body and the sitting posture of mind and the sitting posture of letting go of both, And he asks a lot of questions. What is sitting within sitting?

[19:28]

What the heck is he talking about? Well, he has some meaning, some reason for saying this. Let's at least have sufficient openness of not knowing. To feel open. possibility of sitting within sitting since he mentions it. And he not only says at this very moment of sit, very moment, are you at the very moment of sitting? He says not only

[20:29]

Is it vertical or horizontal? But he says, out of nowhere, is it the graceful somersault of an acrobat. And is it the darting of a fish? Well, the darting of fish is more like we experience mind. And the graceful somersault is vertical or horizontal. It's more like we find all the postures of the body come into this simple sitting posture. All possible movements.

[21:47]

And he asks, is it doing or not doing? So I'm suggesting that you start out your practice and your sitting with a feeling, as I say, of the openness of not knowing. And sit with the presence and denial of these categories of body, mind, etc. And sit with the presence This is also what I mean when I recommend uncorrected mind. We just see what appears.

[22:48]

But what appears is in the context, always, if you're sitting, of the sitting posture of the body and the sitting posture of the mind. Now, we have again the title, The Wisdom of Not Knowing. No, I don't think the title, I don't know how it would sound in German, but in English it would be an impossible title to say, The Wisdom of Not Understanding. I don't know how it would sound in German, but if the title... would mean the wisdom of the non-knowing, then it would sound impossible. The non-understanding, yes. That would make no sense. At least in English it makes no sense.

[24:03]

How does it sound in German? The wisdom of not understanding. Sounds like a kid who doesn't want to go to high school. Yeah. So then knowing, what is knowing? Before we talk about not knowing, let's talk about knowing. Now linguists point out, contemporary linguists quite often, that you can't really understand a word in a language without a lot of background context in your own mind. And although I'm interested in some sporting events, I'm not addicted to the sporting section of the newspaper.

[25:10]

A lot of people are, but I know. They turn to the sports section first, the financial pages second, The movie's third. And then they check out the front page to see if the world is still here. But... So I look at the sports page sometimes. I tell you, most of the time I can't understand what they're talking about. It's all a special language, at least in English.

[26:14]

All kinds of athletes are named only by their first name without even telling you what sport they're in. Yeah, so it's a little difficult for me to read the sports page because I simply don't have the context for the words. What I'm trying to point out in this is that Our knowing is dependent on context. And I spoke about this during this last seminar. Well, what is the context of our knowing?

[27:24]

Mostly... Now, I often use the term background mind. So I don't want to use that term because I've given it a specific meaning. Or maybe we could say, so maybe we could say to distinguish it from background mind, maybe we could say grounding mind. Um es nun vom Hintergrund mind zu unterscheiden, könnten wir vielleicht sagen, gründender Geist. Is it something you can say in German? Difficulty. Yeah. Or Urk. the Ur-Ground, to show you I know something. So I suppose the, you know, a baby I mentioned the other day, an infant,

[28:31]

produces in the first few months millions of neuronal synaptic connections. And by the time the baby is a toddler or walking, half of those synaptic connections are gone. You might see some little scientists inside the baby's head counting them. One million, ten million. Mm-hmm. So how I understand that from practice is maybe the most fundamental sense of an Ur-Ground is these millions of synaptic connections.

[29:39]

And by the time the baby's walking, they've reduced to reflect the actual physical world the baby lives in. And the baby's actual physical activity in the world shapes the mind. So there's a circularity between environment and mind. let's assume that at least a lot of this shaping of the mind, if not all, comes from, a large percentage, comes from sensory input.

[31:04]

So what is this... Well, let me say that this grounding mind, which I don't have on the sports pages, But in a more fundamental sense, we have through growing up in a language and growing up in a particular culture, in a particular cultural environment. Now, once we start thinking

[32:05]

I think this grounding mind becomes a passive backdrop, like in the theater a backdrop. for thinking. And we hardly notice it anymore. And it doesn't change too much anymore because our sensory sensorium is subsumed into primarily seeing consciousness. It's absorbed, absorbed into, seeing consciousness. Okay, so now we're back at a very basic Buddhist and Zen practice.

[33:42]

To practice the separation of the senses. Nämlich dies Praktizieren der unterschiedlichen Sinne. True, like in a week like this. Und während einer Woche wie dieser. Actually spend some time emphasizing one sense over any of the others. Athletes too? Who does? Athletes? No, us. Oh, us. In the seminar. Athletes too, why not, you know. I knew an astronaut who also had prostate cancer. So we've been talking about it. And he was the first astronaut to walk in space. And he was so used to seeing the world vertical and horizontal, that he spent a vacation on a boat on a lake, arranging to lie backwards and look at the world

[34:55]

upside down for most of the week. He was just trying to experiment with can he turn the world around and let it turn around. I'm not suggesting any of you lie in the snow upside down or anything. But I do suggest you take one sense and emphasize it. And the easiest, I think, to start with is sound. So you try to give priority to the fabric of the sound world. Without discriminating it. Without thinking, I like this, I don't like it, it's too noisy or something.

[36:14]

You just let yourself hear the fabric of sound, which is always present. If you spend much of a day trying to do this, Hear the sound of everyone's feet and things like that. You're touching the counter in the kitchen, things like that. And if you get a feeling for it, even momentarily, It will be much easier to then try each of the other senses. Taste, touch, smell, feeling, touch, seeing. You leave seeing, you're lost. Okay, that's enough for now.

[37:42]

And we can look into this more carefully this afternoon during the seminar. And you have something to practice until then. I look forward to joining you again. Thank you very much.

[38:02]

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