Did you all take a walk this afternoon? Wow. That's good. And last night we had such, did you all hear, incredible thunder. Best I've heard in a long time. Sophia is rather scared by it, but I'm not. I said this morning that each of us has our own reason for doing this sashin. Are some conditions in your life brought you here? And it's good to let those conditions rise to the surface.

[01:06]

Und es ist gut, diese Bedingungen an die Oberfläche kommen zu lassen. Und ein Sashin kann das oft bewirken. It ought to do that. But you didn't come here just to do the Sesshin all by yourself. I think it'd be pretty hard to follow the schedule all by yourself. So you came here to do the Sesshin with each other. Let's really do it with each other. And I think it would help if we had at least one practice we all were doing. I don't mean there aren't other practices you might do or practices you're already doing that you continue.

[02:20]

Ich meine nicht, dass es da nicht Übungen gibt, die ihr schon tut oder die ihr fortsetzt. But let's try one practice. Aber lasst uns eine Übung mal ausprobieren. A kind of acupuncture sword. Eine Art Akupunkturschwert. Now I'm also commenting on, yeah... two koans, two zen phrases. One is piercing and penetrating on level ground. Yeah, and so I ask what does a Zen phrase like that mean to you? What could it mean? Yeah, and another is a story of when Feng Shui first went to visit, meet Nan Yuan.

[04:00]

And when Feng Shui entered the door, he didn't bow. And when Feng Shui entered the door, he didn't bow. And Nanyuan said, when you enter, you should first pay respects to the host. Yeah, what did he mean? Mm-hmm. Now, you know, we're here practicing Buddhism. Well, you're getting a taste of Buddhist practice, at least.

[05:02]

And Buddhism is an extraordinary scheme. Scheme is the... It's not important, but it's when... A yarn or something is woven up on a reel, like for a sewing machine or something. So it also means when a lot of things are all tangled together. A skein of ideas. A tangle of ideas. Wasn't he... Buddhism is a tangle of ideas. And a very persuasive fabric or text of ideas. And persuasive because I think it's non-theological and it parallels so much current scientific and philosophical ideas.

[06:10]

And psychological ideas. But the word Buddhism itself was created by Westerners, Europeans in around 1800, I guess. When British colonials and others were trying to find a word for this reverence for this guy called the Buddha. And these British colonials were trying to get India, because they knew about archaeology and anthropology, were trying to get Indians to respect their past. And they didn't even know that the religions of Thailand and Burma were anything like this ancient religion of India.

[07:26]

And it's called a religion, but it's really the only category the West head for. It's not exactly a religion. I'm just creating a general picture now, if I can. And in 1844, a Frenchman named Eugene Bourneau, I think his name was, And in 1844, there was a Frenchman, what's his first name? Eugene. Eugene Burnock, I think his name was. Wrote a book called The History of Buddhism in India. This was the first presentation of Buddhist ideas, really, to the West. And it immediately influenced lots of Western thinkers.

[08:42]

First of all Schopenhauer, who influenced Nietzsche. And Jorge Luis Borges, if you know his work. And in around 1844, it was also excerpted in the Dial magazine in New England. Which had a big influence on the transcendentalists, Thoreau and Emerson and so forth. And later William James and his varieties of religious experience and so forth. And then later, William James with his book, I don't know the title in German, The Multifaceted Religious Experience.

[10:06]

And interestingly, Sivirishi, when he first came to America, said, I need to find a student who grew up in New England. And he said that my life will probably not be long enough to really train someone, so I need someone who's already prepared. And transcendentalism is probably the best preparation in the West for understanding Buddhism, he said. And by some lucky chance, I was a New Englander who had a background in Transcendentalism and wandered into California. So I think he thought, well, I could probably have found someone better, but I'm stuck with this guy.

[11:10]

Anyway, he chose to try to teach me Buddhism. And I chose to try to learn. So in historical terms, this is all quite new, you know. this guy who wrote this book in 1844 and transcendentalism and Sukhiroshi coming and us all sitting here. And Buddhism has had a immense influence on Western thinking. But on Western thinking. It's persuasive and insightful ideas turned a lot of thinkers around

[12:27]

But it made Buddhism ideas part of their thinking. And it often got pretty distorted. And what they didn't do is they didn't practice. And that's what we're trying to do here. Sitting here in this rather warm but cool compared to last week's Zendo. Sitting around here all day following a rather stupid schedule. Maybe it's not stupid. It's carefully thought out anyway. Now we try to not give you too much sleep. Probably we should have a little less sleep than we have.

[13:50]

And because, I mean, yeah, there's various reasons, but the one I'll speak about today is, you know, we have these two kinds of sleep, REM and non-REM sleep. In other words, rapid eye movement sleep, mental activity sleep, dreaming sleep. So this dreamy sleep, how do you call it in German? The fast eye movement. Yes, the fast eye movement. Probably most animals, 85% of animals, take naps. They don't have nights of sleep. And probably, likely, that most of human history, as hunters and gatherers, we did primarily...

[15:16]

napping type sleep. And well suited to napping type sleep if you can get used to it. And what happens if you do napping type sleep Supposedly, and this is my experience for sure, that short naps, even a few minutes, five minutes, three minutes, or 20 or 30 minutes, you primarily do non-REM sleep. And that's the sleep we most need when we're sleep-deprived. And that's the sleep that's closest to zazen.

[16:40]

We're trying, especially getting up in the morning, to find a mind that's somewhere still in the realm of sleep, but also in the realm of waking mind. And you want to keep that, yeah, you want to kind of keep that feeling of this, what I'll call it today, non-REM sleep awake in you. I didn't get the last. Awake in you.

[17:40]

We could say technically maybe Zazen is waking up in non-Ram sleep. Now there's a Buddhist idea of mind in what I'm saying. Mind and minds. Probably these sleep researchers. See sleep as a brainwave activity. Slow wave being non-REM and active wave being REM sleep. And when you have you know, one you don't have the other.

[19:16]

But Buddhism would more feel that these are minds that are present all the time. And the brain activity indicates that they've been called forth only. In this way of thinking, you're always asleep and always awake. It's like you always have the flu, only sometimes you don't notice it. Sometimes it surfaces and then it goes away, but it's down there somewhere waiting to come back.

[20:19]

And if it's not waiting, the flu isn't waiting in me, it's waiting in you, or... Our neighbor. So the flu is sort of present in one of us and it moves around. But these various minds are present in us or present in one of us. And we call them forth in practice. So in that sense, Non-REM sleep, I'm just trying to make an example here.

[21:27]

Non-REM sleep isn't just a brain activity. It's a... something that's carried somewhere in us. And it doesn't have to appear only when we sleep. It doesn't have to appear only when we sleep. We can wake up, just trying to stay within the context we're talking about. We can wake up, non-dreaming, deep sleep. Wake it up into a new kind of awareness.

[22:33]

That's one way to understand what we're trying to do in Sesshin. And that informs the wake-up time. and informs the rhythm of the schedule, zazen, out of zazen, into zazen, into meals. Yeah, you're surfacing into your usual mind and then somewhat moving under into another mind. Ihr kommt an die Oberfläche eures gewöhnlichen Geistes und dann bewegt ihr euch hinunter in einen anderen Geist hinein.

[23:39]

And so we even eat in this zazen posture. Und so essen wir selbst in dieser zazen Haltung. And a different mind is eating. Und ein anderer Geist ist da. food you might find pretty boring with your usual mind is extraordinarily delicious. With zazen in mind. Or it doesn't make the job of the cook any easier. The cook can't just feed us any old thing. They don't like it if they're sitting zazen. Now the cook has to cook a cook sort of for Zazen mind. Yeah. Now some of you may have seen this often reproduced photograph from the Hubble telescope Of the eagle nebula.

[24:55]

Of the eagle nebula. Yeah, which is 7,000. When you say Adler, I always think it's a pension somewhere. You're all called Adler or Löwe. Who wants to sleep in an eagle or a lion? I don't know. In England and Ireland, they do the same thing with pubs. Well, this would be a hard, rather distant pub. It's 7,000 light years away. And the photograph I've often seen is this column of interstellar hydrogen gas and dust particles. And this particular column in the photograph is...

[26:07]

one light year long. This is all unimaginable. The myths of the Chinese and the Greeks and others about the cosmos were much simpler. And in this column a light year long hundreds of stars are being formed and and uh perhaps something like earth and perhaps sentient beings. Because from a Buddhist point of view, non-theological point of view, this stuff is somehow us.

[27:31]

This is extraordinary stuff. And the only way we earthling scientists can study it is to study at a very particular level. At the level of quanta. The smallest unit of independent So this unimaginable, virtually, vastness can be reached only by this very particular observation. Now I'm not saying that dharmas and quantas are the same.

[28:49]

But poetically they're the same. Analogically they're the same. And our practice is like that. Whatever this immensity each of us is, Buddhism has decided that the practice is to enter at a very particular level. A very particular level informed by a vision of this world.

[29:51]

And that's what Buddhism could be called if they hadn't called it Buddhism, but Dharamism. For Zen, it's more Dharamism than Buddhism. So a dharma is the smallest noticing we can notice.

[30:53]

So the practice I gave you the other day, I want to give you again. Which is the phrase, I can only say it in English, you can say what you want in German, just this. It's a kind of acupuncture sword. Or a Or a dance. Why do I say dance? Because when you dance, to dance, the music has to be something that your hands, feet, body can move to.

[32:03]

Yeah, and so we take a phrase, find a phrase like just this. And as a mantra, which mantras have to fit the breath and the body. A mantra is an activity of the mind which fits the breath and the body. So gate phrases or wado or turning words that are at the center of koans are like a little dance of the mind with the world. Because words are the fabric of the mind.

[33:25]

Particular stitches perhaps we take out and thread into the body and the breath. And just this also works because it cuts off discursive thinking. Dieser Satz funktioniert auch deswegen, weil er das diskursive Denken abschneidet. And it's not just this and that and those other things also. Es ist nicht genau dies und auch jenes und auch all die anderen Dinge. It's just this. Es ist nur dies. Whatever you notice. Was immer ihr bemerkt. Right now it's the palm of my hand on this stick that Sukershi gave me.

[34:27]

That's the feel of my breath. Or speaking and now speaking. So if you develop the habit of just this, eventually it just is gone. a dance of the mind and the breath and the world. It's again a kind of acupuncture sword or needle. Manjushri's sword, which cuts off afflictions and so forth.

[35:39]

Afflictions. I just don't get the word right. I know what it is. Yeah, bad things. distractions. So here we are in our ordinary activity. And we come down to the most particular, and mindfulness practice refines this, This quantum or dharma that we can notice We discover a pace of the world and the body and the mind.

[36:53]

Maybe a slow wave dance of the world and the body and the mind. And you'd be surprised that as you know in physics if you look at these very particular things it opens up into a very wide view. And although I'm just using, I'm not trying to talk about physics, which I don't really know much about. I'm just trying to present an idea. If we have the so-called four and now five forces. Gravity and the light, that's so far, I don't have to name them.

[38:09]

Now they think of vacuum force or vacuum energy that makes everything expand. They now think that at a certain temperature, like the Big Bang temperature. Those forces are all one. But at other temperatures, they separate into something different. But Buddhism is very much like that, has that idea. Buddhism would say, actually, as they say, you're always enlightened. They would say, you're always concentrated.

[39:26]

You don't have to try to concentrate. You have to let your concentration appear. You have to stop interfering with your concentration. Like non-REM sleep is waiting to appear. At a fundamental level we are concentrated. Auf einer ganz fundamentalen Ebene sind wir konzentriert. And you can't in Zen way of practice, you can't do that concentration. Und auf dem Zen-Weg in dieser Art von Praxis, da kann man diese Konzentration nicht tun. You have to let that concentration appear. Ihr müsst diese Konzentration erscheinen lassen. You have to have the confidence it's already there.

[40:32]

Ihr müsst das Vertrauen haben, dass sie bereits da ist. Like you have the confidence enlightenment is already here. So this practice of just this goes to the heart of the matter. It's a way, it's a... The idea and the experience is through Dharma practice, we can enter the mind that unites all our minds.

[41:36]

Perhaps with just this, we find the temperature at which all our minds interfuse. So when Feng Shui visited Nanyuan, He didn't bow when he entered the door. And Yuan said, when you enter, you should first pay respects to the host. And he didn't mean, oh, you're in my temple and I'm Nanyuan, I'm the host.

[42:55]

He meant the practice of this. of just this, of particularly characteristic of Zen practice, of using a door to notice without thinking, That's also just this. And the bow is this maybe acupuncture sword. So Nanyuan meant feng shui? Of course. Bow? Recognize, respect, fundamental mind on each moment.

[43:57]

Nanyuan mainte, feng shui, say it again, please. recognize, respect, recognize fundamental mind on each moment. That's what we're trying to do. We're trying to create the conditions for this. And we can each really help each other. If we try to create the sashin we each need, and you need, And we try to find some practice to bow into, to remind ourselves of fundamental mind. And I'm suggesting in this sashim, Okay, thank you very much.

[45:08]

O Lord, I thank Thee, O Lord, I thank Thee, O Lord, Mojo, sedanjo, i vedo lesen sensalos, ich gelobe sie zu gleiten. Die Begierden sind unterschafflich, ich gelobe sie aufzugeben. Die damasch ores sind unmesslich, ich gelobe sie zu durchschreiten. Erweht es brutalist und übertrefflich, ich gelobe ihn zu verdächtigen.

[46:31]

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