The schedule is a little too tight for me, and I appreciate your patience with me. But it works for the overall day quite well, I think, so I'll keep trying to work with it. What I mean by it's too tight is for some reason the way I function. I need a certain amount of time to let Things kind of fly together, come together. So I can, in this case, give a teisho.

[01:02]

So four o'clock would be much better for me, but here we are. Well, maybe it's good because, you know, at around four, I could probably give what I would find more satisfactory as a teisho. But maybe the more rough, unfinished teishos I've been giving have their own advantage. So if I kind of let what happened in the discussion this morning kind of find its place and start an interrelating process, I have to kind of suspend ordinary, usual thinking in some way and let something happen.

[02:17]

It takes a little more time than until 3.15. And here I'm mentioning it partly just because I'd like to share with you what my own process is. Und das sage ich euch einerseits deshalb, weil ich mit euch teilen möchte, was hier mein eigener Prozess ist. And this process is not unrelated to Abhidharmic mindfulness practice. Und dieser Prozess ist nicht unverwandt mit dem Abhidharmischen Prozess. No, just as I was coming downstairs, starting downstairs, Sophia said to me, On such a beautiful day, why aren't you meeting outside?

[03:21]

I said, well, because it's harder to hear outside. And I said, because we offer incense to the Buddha. She said, why don't you move the Buddha outside? And I said, well, I could offer incense to a tree. Maybe we should try that. Okay. Now, one of my weaknesses as a teacher is I try to make the teaching interesting.

[04:27]

You know, I could try to make it interesting, but I might have no one to practice with. So I've chosen to try to make it interesting. And Suzuki Roshi also made his lectures interesting. But not always. And he also felt you don't want to make practice too interesting. But I remember if there was some stranger or some new people in a lecture, I would think, I hope he gives an interesting lecture. Sometimes he didn't at all. I didn't mind, but I felt it wouldn't encourage people to practice.

[05:36]

But I'm pretty good at resisting giving persuasive lectures. I'm not trying to persuade you to practice. Many of you don't want to practice. Please, go do something else. Okay. Now, I can't say much in seven days. Maybe the best I can do is to give you some categories of practice. Yeah, we can discuss aspects of practice, maybe in some depth this weekend. Vielleicht können wir Aspekte der Praxis mit einiger Tiefe besprechen in dieser Woche.

[06:52]

You have to bring that depth into your activity. Aber ihr müsst diese Tiefe in eure Aktivität hineinbringen. But even though I can't talk about much during these seven days, your activity, your life activity, continues after the seminar. I mean, I think it does. So if you have some aspects of practice you can bring into your life activity. Bring it in in a real way. Then I think, yeah, this Abhidharma practice will open up for you. I hope so, anyway. And I see it is.

[07:56]

I mean, I see that your practice is, for the most part, all of you, pretty mature, quite mature. Now, what's the problem with making it interesting? Now, this is something I actually think about quite often. Because it seems when it's interesting, it appeals to you in an interesting way. Then it stays with you as long as it's interesting. It really, it takes your interest to make practice work, not that it's interesting. If you're going to be here, you have to be still.

[09:04]

They can't hear. She can't hear? They can't if she bounces around. I know. Anyway, whether you can hear or not, I don't want her to bounce around. Sophia decided she wanted to play the violin. That's very interesting. But she didn't decide she wants to practice. Which is not so interesting. But somehow your interest has to be strong enough to bring at least significant times into your life practice. Now, I spoke today about the first of the four marks as birth. We could define that in a more abidamic way as initial cause mind.

[10:09]

Now, if I just say initial cause mind, what the heck is that? That doesn't have much sense meaning for us unless we're in the midst of seeing not only that we have various states of mind, you know, clashes, poisoned, contaminated states of mind, And you wonder where they came from. Now, if you tend to be depressed, this is a real question. You tend to be crazy or real anxious.

[11:30]

This is important. And some people who have practiced really well are motivated by trying to see into their craziness, into their persistent anxiety. Into their compulsive thinking. Or to hate them. Yeah, or into their depression. And? Practice can do something about these things. Not as a psychology, but as a mindology. It's, you know, basic, simple questions. I'm not always depressed.

[12:32]

Sometimes I'm less depressed. I'm not always so anxious or conflicted. When am I less anxious? What's conflicted? Conflict. You're conflicted with yourself. Ambivalent. And you begin, so you ask a simple question. If I'm not always depressed or not always ambivalent or anxious... And a basic kind of simple conclusion can come to you. If there are even fractions of a second where you're not anxious in a year, it's possible to be not anxious all year. This kind of decision...

[13:38]

Or clarity is at the root of practice. If you're in a lousy state of mind a lot and you just go along with your lousy state of mind, this is me. Take it or leave it. I've got a lousy state of mind all my life. Well, if you take that view, your Abhidharma is not going to be much use to you. You say to yourself, if I'm sometimes not in a lousy state of mind, or anxious or whatever, it must be possible to widen that state of mind of when I'm not anxious. Sometimes it's good to have a problem like that because it really can make you practice.

[14:56]

And you can solve through a problem the problem of mental suffering. And there's an expression in China that the Securists used to like. That the person with one thing wrong with him wins the race. What he meant is, the person with nothing wrong with him just runs, you know. The person with one thing wrong with him takes care of that one thing and in the process takes care of everything and in the end wins the race. Yes, it may not be kind of true, but it's a saying that has always made sense to me too.

[16:15]

So if you have such a motivation, or even if you don't, don't try to make yourself depressed in order to motivate yourself. Then you have to look more subtly at the problems of suffering in this world and how you affect others. Let's go back to the more obvious example. You're in a lousy state of mind or you're anxious a lot or depressed. And then you notice you're not always so anxious or always so depressed. It's Sometimes more, sometimes less. And if you're lucky, there may be moments in which you're completely not depressed. No, I know that, you know, bipolar, et cetera, is chemically based in us, et cetera. And I'm not saying you can solve all such problems.

[18:17]

But having practiced the number of people who were very thoroughly depressed most of the time, and I've seen them with practice change that, I know that to some extent it's possible. So this has to be rooted in the awareness that if I'm sometimes less anxious or less depressed, it must be possible to be less anxious or less depressed all the time. If you feel that way, then you have to start monitoring your behavior moment by moment, not every day, moment by moment. If you see or feel it this way, then you have to monitor your behavior from moment to moment and not just from day to day.

[19:32]

Micro moment by micro moment. Micro moment by micro moment. you notice that it's possible sometimes to have such attentiveness and sometimes not. If it's possible sometimes to have such attentiveness, why isn't it possible all the time? Because you know it's a possibility, why isn't it a possibility more of the time? This race, this is, this... This kind of thinking and decision-making, existential decision-making, is at the root of how the Abhidharma developed.

[20:40]

And you can develop the Abhidharma in yourself. As we say, wave follows wave, wave leads wave. So you notice you'd like to be more attentive in each moment. That's one wave from your own experience. Then the Abhidharma gives you a push of how to do it with the next wave. You notice that you are sometimes able to be attentive. And you know it's a possibility. So that's a sort of wave of experience. And then if you're in the middle of practicing, you can study the Abhidharma and the wave of a teaching can help you in that very point.

[21:49]

For example, we have initial application of mindfulness and sustained application of mindfulness. You can say initial application of attention or initial application of mind mean nearly the same thing today. Okay, now you cannot... develop a sense of initial cause mind without initial application of attention.

[22:53]

Also, man can keine auslösenden Geist entwickeln ohne eine auslösende Attention. Attention. Intention is the background. Attention is the action. Knowing it's possible is the intention. Okay. Now, Say that you're seriously enough, seriously anxious enough. You're anxious enough that you think you might go crazy. So it's a matter of life and death, a living death or a living life.

[23:57]

It's a matter of life and death. With that kind of motivation. As Sukhirashi used to say, Buddhism has been developed for people who there's no other hope for. For people too extreme or too complicated or too crazy. Not because practice is so difficult, but because the motivation is difficult. The practice is really fairly easy. It's just that you have to be motivated. Okay. If it's a matter of life and living death, Then you may learn to monitor each moment of consciousness and watch when it turns terrible or when you can have an antidote.

[25:11]

Okay, now... If you can monitor each moment, feel present in each moment, and notice the difference between a resultant mind and an initial cause mind, You wonder why you feel happy sometimes and you don't other times. Sometimes a spring day or a certain kind of sunlight or It just makes you feel happy. You know this happiness is a capacity of mind and body. Some people say, oh, it's more important that my parents think well of me.

[26:12]

It's more important that I'm successful in the way my aunts and uncles are. Or brothers and sisters. I mean, I'm just giving examples of people I know who've decided they're not going to practice because it's more important to them how their family thinks about them. But nobody on this planet is going to be happy unless some people are happy. By happy in this case, I mean feeling at ease. Finding satisfaction in each moment of being alive. Aliveness.

[27:37]

You may say, oh, this is some romantic, crazy idea. I mean, we human beings, this is how I mean. This isn't what life is like. You have to grit your teeth and do the best you can. Well, you can make that decision. But do we want to live in a world where everybody makes that decision? So somebody's got to do it. Why not us, us happy-go-lucky types? Okay, so you begin to really notice the mind, the mood that arises in each moment. And at some point, you experiment with how bad it can be. Manchmal kann man damit experimentieren und zu gucken, wie arg es denn sein kann.

[28:50]

When you feel strong enough or even before, you make fear so strong, it's tearing the skin off your face. Du kannst, wenn die Angst schlimm wird, sie so arg schlimm machen, dass die Haut von deinem Gesicht abgezogen wird. I mean, you get also, one is to go to the end of negative or deleterious emotions. Okay. Okay. So this is rooted in monitoring each moment to see how your mind arises. Yes, how the mind arises. All the forms of mind.

[29:51]

Once you can begin to monitor, be present, often, and approaching all the time, This is Dharma practice. This is when you can begin to transform, to participate in, your states of mind. And when you can begin to see the structures and habits of mind. And this is, again, where the Abhidharma comes from.

[30:53]

To know the difference between an initial cause mind and a resultant mind. Now I want to speak about the This was only an introduction to speaking about the process of manifestation and duration. But that would be when the tesho starts. And I think now is a good time to stop. All right, so thanks for your patience.

[31:54]

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