First, thank you, Gerald and Kristine, for translating for me. And, you know, putting these platforms in front of Sukyoshi's altar, at first I felt a little funny. But we don't have too much choice in this small room. So then I thought, I feel like it's the old days when I used to sit on the altar with him. So when I look over, maybe I see Sukhiroshi and not just Christina. You're a little taller. Yeah. Hmm. So yesterday I spoke about, in the afternoon particularly, about these two fundamental observations that Buddhism is based on, that everything is changing and yet at the same time there's some order or pattern that stays.

[01:42]

This is the most basic recognition of Buddhism and everything in Buddhism develops from this. Now there are certain principles in the way Buddhism analyzes things and looks at things. And the most basic principle is to divide or to separate and join. This is a way of analysis and a kind of and a certain discipline, because you only separate in ways that you can rejoin. And it's thought that there's a benefit in separating and rejoining things.

[02:58]

So we notice that there's what stays and there's what changes. So it's considered within this kind of dynamic or logic that it's useful to notice in yourself what changes and what stays. So as I said, we practice with noticing how we can sit still, how our posture can be still, and how our breathing changes. Now, we don't notice this just to internalize some philosophical principles or observations, nor to internalize them or to establish some way of acting in the understanding in the future.

[04:33]

Now let me say, as I repeat, as I did yesterday, that there's various ways to notice what stays and what changes. One of the most inclusive and basic ways is to notice it, as I said, in terms of body, speech and mind. Because, you know, our practice is to find how body and speech, body, speech and mind are intimate with each other. Now, I should say something again about body, speech, and mind, which is that it's considered a kind of alchemy, body, speech, and mind.

[05:59]

So speech, it writes, true speech is speech in which you can feel both mind and body. So speech is really speech when it brings together the physical and the mental aspects of ourselves. I mean, as is... I mean, it has to be to some extent always the case because your lips are moving and your tongue and, you know, your teeth and all that stuff. It takes a physical apparatus to make sound. But a lot of us kind of like use our mind to order the physical apparatus to move as if it were kind of a telephone or something.

[07:08]

And there isn't much body in our speaking. I just remembered, Jacqueline, didn't one time I drove you up this crest town from Santa Fe and we went up to this funny waterfall up in the mountains? And then when we came down, you told me about some museum show that blind people had put together where you walked in the dark. Is that right? I went to Creston with Jacqueline once. We were at a strange waterfall. And when we came down, you told me about a museum that blind people had put together and where you could walk around in the dark. So you sort of led me down the mountain as if we were in the museum in the dark. You went between the trees.

[08:08]

Yeah. I remember that quite visibly. Yeah. Yeah. So if you practice with speech in a Buddhist sense, you practice with feeling your breath and your body in your speaking. Then your speaking is not just expressing some mental idea, but it is checking out those mental ideas with your body. And it's practicing a kind of alchemy of joining, of merging body and mind. And I... As I said yesterday, you can use your body because it's faster and often smarter than your mind.

[09:39]

For example, I noticed when I was... In the first years I was practicing, and this is something I've mentioned before to some of you, but I noticed that occasionally I would bite my... my cheek or my tongue. And I noticed that sometimes, for no reason, I would stumble slightly on a sidewalk, a flat sidewalk. So I began to try to observe this as a pattern. And I discovered that when I had some thought that I felt uncomfortable about because it was egotistical or because it was put someone down or was sloppy thinking,

[10:47]

I would tend to stumble or bite my cheek. Particularly if I started to say something I wish I hadn't, I would kind of bite my tongue. So I decided to take a vow, because my tongue and my cheek and my teeth seemed to know when I was going to say something before I did. So I took a vow, for instance, whenever I praise myself, the seventh precept is not to praise self, by implication to put someone else down. So I take a vow that whenever I break the seventh precept, I will bite my cheek.

[11:52]

So I noticed that... I mean, I took what seemed to be happening anyway slightly and I made it more intentional. And as I'm embarrassed to admit, after a while my cheeks were in shreds. People say, why is your mouth full of blood? Are you a vampire? No. Anyway. And then I found that as I practiced more and the grosser forms of breaking the precepts stopped, and smaller and smaller infringements caused me to bite my cheek or to stumble. And now, every now and then I reactivate this vow to see what shit my mouth will be in afterwards.

[13:31]

Every now and then I reactivate this vow to see what effect it will have on my poor cheeks. Okay, so anyway, I'm just telling this to again illustrate this funny relationship of body, speech, and mind. Okay. So now we can understand... Intention as speech. Intention is formed in language. And attention we can understand as mind. So if you bring the intention to sit still, Through attention.

[14:43]

And you sit still. This is joining body, speech and mind. And you can find many applications of this where you can see how intention and attention work together. Now, again, we open ourselves to these two basic truths that things change and yet things stay. Again, but we don't just open ourselves to them to get some kind of intimacy with these philosophical principles or observations. When you discover a staying in your posture and I'm not using the word stillness because it has another sense so I mean like still but not necessarily silent like a still pond or a still rock

[16:09]

in the sense that it stays in place. When you discover this staying in yourself, you are also opening a door to your wider identity, as you are when you bring attention to your breath, you're opening a door to your wider identity. Now, I should explain this a little more. How real for us who practice this yogic kind of practice, how real the sense of a macrocosmic, microcosmic relationship is. Now again, if it's all inside, if it's all imminent, if the ocean is in the drop of water,

[17:25]

then how do we know this wider nature? Now, if we thought of You know, as a child, I thought there was this circle that went out. If I use this image, the circle that went out. And if I learned how to behave ethically and morally, I would be able to be more connected to others. And through that, it would then make me more developed as a person. It would develop me more as a person. I mean, I would... Hmm. And then that, if I had happened to believe in God, which I didn't happen to, I mean, my family was an atheist as well.

[19:20]

I would have thought more like some friends of mine did, that this then made a circle that would make me go to heaven or something like that, you know. Okay. So now, if I try to use a similar image in how I would see this in yogic terms, it's more like, if you follow the precepts, If you open the doors to how we actually exist, and the precepts are not just to become a better person, but also to open the doors to how we exist, It's almost like you, instead of not just generate a circle, you generate a spiral. A spiral that goes and joins you with other people. And through being joined to other people, that spiral gets wider

[20:27]

and joins you with the phenomenal world. Because in the sense of everything is imminent, then everything is created together. We're not a separate creation. So we can eat those plants and things like that. Okay, now this sense of a spiral is also that it's a three-dimensional spiral in that it spirals out into other people and then into the world, but simultaneously it's a spiral which goes up and down. That includes heaven and earth. Myriad things and I share the same nature, which is a saying in Zen.

[21:55]

Now, this is not just like, do I go out in the woods and become one with nature. That's a very nice thing to do, actually. And Germany is the most popular country I've ever been in for walking. You can't go anywhere practically in the mountains without finding people walking, often couples, often older than me. If I go out in the mountains in America, I only see people younger than me. And I think that we do in some... If you take a walk, partly you're just enjoying the different context, the nature, but probably, I'm sure, there's also this sense which I'm trying to express.

[23:42]

Which is, what could I say, to know things in their all-at-once-ness. Now, all-at-once-ness is a very important idea in Buddhism. Can you say all-at-once-ness? You can't even say it in English, barely. It's a phrase I made up. What? All-at-once-ness. We can also use English all at once. In my computer, it's A-A-O.

[24:47]

So I could just say, ow. And all at once, this is a simple idea, which is that, for example, each of you is here as a separate person. But there is also a quality to this room right now which has to do with exactly this group of people. And if Nico and Beate had not left with Paulina and they were here, it would be different. So I should know the all-at-onceness of this particular group of people as well as each of you individually. Now, the more you enter into, consciously enter into the experience, open yourself to the door of all-at-once-ness, the more you are actually entering timelessness.

[26:08]

Because all at onceness does not occur in time. So it's related to this, what I mentioned this morning, this tender, baby-like mind. Yeah, some unguarded mind. This mind in which enlightenment can occur. The mind in which you can take the precepts without saying, oh, well, these are impossible, etc. You just say, yes. And that when you say that, yes, it's a feeling for the whole of your life, not those particular moments when it'll be too complicated to have something like that.

[27:34]

So we're trying to discover here a different kind of time. Because we exist in different kinds of time. We don't just exist in sequential time. In fact, in the most fundamental way, we exist in simultaneous time. What time? simultaneous time. You can't really say simultaneous time, but, I mean, I said it, but I'm not clear what it means. So, now for some reason, and I have to assume that it's because in these yogic cultures there was the emphasis on

[28:45]

always bringing body and mind together. The rules in which they thought were things should function through body and mind simultaneously. And there was no outside creator. And so you had to account for how we exist without putting anything outside the system. So they tried to look at Everything is belonging to us. Now, I'm kind of pondering these days this whole sense of ten dimensions and string theory.

[29:54]

String theory, yeah. Because the world clearly isn't three-dimensional. That we can tell with our three-dimensional thinking. But what's interesting is that when you begin to explain things through more dimensions, which are mathematical, And up to ten dimensions, everything becomes quite simple. There's a tremendous simplicity to how things exist if you have ten dimensions. But we can only experience three. Or three and a half or four and a half or something like that.

[31:07]

Because these dimensions are folded into each other outside of our sensory fields. Now Buddhism has assumed that something like that is the case. So not knowing or not knowing is nearest, etc. The variety of such phrases mean to also have a mind that's open to a world that extends beyond the three-dimensional picture our mind gives us. So that which is beyond our perceptions is also our identity. Because if the world is that way, we are that way. So if you want to practice this thoroughly, you have to open yourself to That you are more than you can know.

[32:25]

But that there are ways to act in this beyond what we know. And technically that's called great functioning. When in koans the phrase great function occurs, it means functioning beyond ordinary knowing. Yeah. Hmm. Are you enjoying yourself?

[33:27]

I hope. Hmm. Now, one of the ideas that was developed, and particularly in China, to account for another dimension of all-at-onceness was the idea of qi, or in Japanese, ki, as in akido and so forth. But qi in the larger sense is not understood like some kind of self-improvement system. In the West, we often understand enlightenment and qi and things like that in the martial arts as some kind of progress or self-improvement.

[34:38]

Soon we won't be sick and things like that. This is partly true, though. But the more Buddhist understanding of chi is it's like water. Like water is always happy to take the lowest place. And water is always quite soft, doesn't resist anything. And yet it always surrounds and penetrates. So this opening the doors through knowing in yourself what stays and what changes,

[35:40]

to open yourself through attention to staying and changing, you also open yourself up to an almost unknowable flow of qi. chi as a kind of essence of timelessness and all-at-onceness. Now, such ideas as this are part of what we think of in Buddhism as a person. Now, person might be not the right word, because it means mask. But, you know, I think the word person in Christianity can refer in English to the Father, Son, and Holy... It should be Mother, Daughter, and Holy Ghost. Um... Mother, or parent, child, and Holy Ghost.

[36:57]

I have to be accurate and politically correct, too. It is more accurate. Anyway, so they're the three persons of a Godhead which joined them. They're the three persons joined by a Godhead. And there's a similar sense of Buddha nature as being that which joins. So Buddha nature is sometimes called Dharmakaya. And Dharmakaya means the all-at-oneness body. So how do we open ourselves to the all-at-oneness body? Now, I think I'm going to have to speak about and continue what I mentioned a little bit here in February and also in Kimse.

[38:24]

You were in Kimse, right? Is this... sense of an interior consciousness which is not an inward consciousness. Now, I would like to take some time, maybe this afternoon or tomorrow, and say this is a distinction I'm making in English. But what we call our inner consciousness is not considered an interior consciousness in Buddhism. It's considered an outwardly based consciousness. inward consciousness. It's not truly interior, it's only inward in the sense it occurs in our brain or something.

[39:29]

And an inward consciousness is not open to our larger identity. Now, as we've discussed also in the past, the practice of the four elements or five elements, noting our solidity, our fluidity, etc. are also doors, doors of our wider knowing and being. So through this bringing our attention to our breath and bringing our attention to our posture,

[40:42]

Und die Aufmerksamkeit zu unserer Haltung bringen. It doesn't mean you have to be rigid all the time and still all the time. Boy, that guy really stays. You can't get him to move. Go do the dishes. Das bedeutet nicht, man muss immer still stehen. Ihr könnt auch ruhig den Abwasch machen. But when you stay, you should stay like an old stump or a stone. Aber wenn ihr euch hinsetzt, dann solltet ihr da sein wie so ein alter Baumstumpf. And when you... I like Germany. That's a lot of energy in it. So when you sit like a stone... Or Sukhya should just say, a stone on the top of a mountain is not the same as a stone in a valley. Yeah, maybe you sit like a stone on the top of a mountain. Maybe you only feel that in a moment of baby-like time.

[41:50]

But homeopathy works in even finer distinctions. So acupuncture and homeopathy work. You can just have these small tiny moments and they can transform you. Or they can begin to work in you. As when we discover also the stability of being with our breath. And other pulses in our life. So we make these things clear and separate. And we bring them together. And we feel quite refreshed and solid. You know, really deeply stable we can begin to feel.

[43:14]

And in this stability we also open ourselves to our wider identity. At first we can't notice it coming in. Though other people will notice. And you'll see some tonic-like change over time. Tonic is a medicine that works over time. Yeah. So please sit with this sense of stability and openness of letting everything in. So, thank you very much.

[44:16]

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