My pleasure would be prologue day. I think of you as still lay persons with not under the influence of Zazen. Of course I know it's not really true. But I think of it that way. So we can just start out sort of like, what the heck is all this about? Yeah. And the large sutra on perfect wisdom in 25,000 lines It says something like the Bodhisattva dwells in thought as exploration. In thought. In thought. And it's interesting when you go into such a big sutra, not... you know, pages and pages.

[01:29]

There's a much more complex presentation of the potentialities of our human experience. So it doesn't just say free yourself from discursive thoughts. It also says dwell, you know, I don't know what the heck the word is in Sanskrit, but dwell in, reside in, discursive thought, thought discursive and contemplative as exploration.

[02:34]

Yeah, and the exploration transforms what we mean by thought and contemplation. And I think we have to approach this topic in this kind of exploratory way. Because we have this title, Zen in the Western World. I mean, who knows what that means? I don't know how we get stuck with that.

[03:36]

I presume I had something to do with it, but I don't know. So, I mean, what's the Western world? I mean, we don't know what the Western world is. We are in the Western world. Most of us are in and part of the Western world. I remember once when I was, after my first year of college, And I can remember after my first year in college, I was working in a restaurant on Cape Cod. You don't need to know where all that is, but it's outside of Boston. And we had a dormitory, a kind of house across the street from the restaurant where we slept.

[04:42]

And about, I don't know, 11 o'clock, 11 p.m. or 4 a.m. or something, one of those memory units of time, I woke up like a bolt. Yeah, I just sort of... I immediately sat on the side of the bed. And I said to myself, I am an American. I had no idea what the heck was going on. Except that, you know, from high school through latter years of high school through first year of college. These are a time when you are kind of letting go of being a youth and starting being an adult.

[06:02]

So you're trying to... what you're letting go of and what you're starting to be. And in that process I was in the sort of or could we say consequential dreaming mind that's behind our daily mind as the stars are behind the sunlight. I was asking myself questions. You're supposed to decide to do something. How do you know what to do in the future when the future is not yet here?

[07:20]

So I was somewhere churning over Who am I? What is this? I had no answers. Until suddenly, I stepped bolt upright, legs down on the floor, somebody in the cot above me. Who either wasn't there or didn't wake up, I don't remember. I thought, I'm an American. And at the same moment I thought that, I realized I didn't know what an American was.

[08:27]

How could I know what an American is? I'd never been anything else. I remember I had a Japanese teacher at college and people would ask him, what is it like to be Japanese? I don't know. only been Japanese. Yeah, so I... But this experience, This experience had the characteristics of an enlightened experience. What are the characteristics of an enlightened experience? And here I'm trying to bring an enlightened experience down to earth. I mean, no. That... Great Chinese Zen master had the enlightenment experience when he realized he was Chinese.

[09:30]

It doesn't make much sense. Well, big deal. I think I'll study with someone else. I knew he was a Chinese before he said so. All right, so... Okay, so why do I say it had the characteristics of enlightenment experience? Because I was never the same after the experience. Yeah, and because it had the sense of absolute knowledge. Weil es eben das Gefühl hat und gibt des absoluten Wissens. Und was ist denn absolutes Wissen? Als ich auf der Kante meines Doppelbettes saß, das absolute Wissen war, dass ich nichts wusste oder dass ich es nicht wusste.

[10:31]

And that has been with me ever since. That you start with, what I recognized at that point, is you start with not knowing. And you don't cover over the not knowing, you stay with the not knowing. Okay. So the problem is, you know, how does the eye see the eye? How do you get perspective on yourself? Okay. So again, let's go back to the question. Did you ride your bicycle? I passed through Göttingen yesterday and I waved and I went...

[11:53]

Going back to the question. Zen in the Western world. Zen in the West is one or two generations old. And we hardly know what we're doing. I think it'll take two or three or four more generations until... We maybe have a physical hang of it. The hang of it. The hang of it? The feel of it. The hang of it. We get the bang of it, but not the hang of it. The bang of it means experience. I did a bang out of Zazen, you know.

[13:18]

Not everyone does, but I do. Was würde man denn auf Deutsch sagen dafür? No, I was asking around what would we say, I get the bang of it. I get a bang out of driving my motorcycle every Sunday afternoon with 15 other motorcycles. Why do motorcyclists always like to ride in... Warum fahren Motorradfahrer gerne immer so in Roten? Somehow the separate cars make them want to stay together, separate vehicles. It's a togetherness on separate vehicles. Every Saturday and Sunday I see them from my window, Elon, I thought. Well, the individual is a western creation. So maybe the motorcycle is the ideal vehicle. For a car so small that you can only get one or two people in it. He picked me up yesterday at a...

[14:20]

A Mini. A BMW Mini. And I used to have a Mini Cooper in the 60s. You had to keep your elbows like this. I liked it though. So we went to the car rental place here and there was the exact same car, a bit newer, sitting right in front of the window. So I said, I'll rent that one. And now we have two Mini Cooper convertibles. And when I return it on Sunday, we're going to switch license plates and I'll give him the new one and we'll return his old one. Anyway, I always wanted to drive a Mini. A new Mini. So I get to drive from here to the hotel on the corner. Okay. So it's going to take, as I say, some generations before we really know what... have a bodily intuition that guides us in Zen.

[16:15]

And there's not much... For most of us as practitioners there's not much understanding of the Buddhist literature. Yeah, these days you can be a scholar or a practitioner and it's very difficult to be both. So my point is that we don't really know we're discussing something, this topic, which we don't really know much about. And, you know, even though I've been doing this Zen practice for 50 years, don't try to look at me to see if it's had a good effect.

[17:17]

But I'm still at the beginning of practice. Okay, now what I'd like to explore as well during this seminar is what we mean by self. Because I think if we use the... discursive and contemplative thought and explore it as a way to explore self. It may be the catalyst that we can open up what we mean by self.

[18:32]

the Western world, and Zen as a representative of the yogic Asian world. Okay. So the question of self and no self, et cetera, has to have been from the beginning of my practice a catalytic problem. And there are tensions within Buddhism itself about what is self.

[19:46]

And you could say, as I've mentioned before, that the history of Buddhism Is the history of trying to define self out of Buddhism and it sneaking back in every century? The history of trying to define self out of Buddhism and it every century sneaking back in? Ah, yes. Thank you. The story goes like this, that it has always been tried to define itself out of Buddhism and to let it slip back in. Yes.

[20:46]

So if we have these three days together, I would like us to use them to explore our own experience of self. And it's interesting that parallel with, almost exactly parallel with the introduction of Buddhism into the West and as a practice, Philosophy and cognitive neuroscience are focusing largely on what is self, the What is the neurobiology of self and consciousness?

[22:06]

And what is the relationship between consciousness and self? And this is perhaps the main work of the adept, mature practitioner. And of course, as you go about your life, your life is in fact this exploration. Okay, so when I was starting to practice in the Beginning of the 60s. 61 or so. With Suzuki Roshi. I had to wonder what all this stuff is to be free of self.

[23:09]

No self? How could that be? And it took me, I don't know, five or ten years before I started dealing with category of non-self instead of no-self. You read this stuff I listened to Sukershi's lectures several times a week. Twice a week. And just everything turns on. What kind of experience you have of self or the lessening of self-referential thinking.

[24:22]

But even to get to the idea that there's sometimes more self-present and less self-present took me a long time. To really get... the sense that what it really means to think of self as an activity and not as an entity. And can you substitute self-activity for self-entitiness? Can you substitute self-activity for self-entity? Okay. Is any of this important to us as... in our lived life?

[25:27]

Well, I mean if we accept that Good self is probably a delusion. Or if not a delusion, at least deluding. And if we see that much of mental suffering and frustration comes from the way we conceive of Then we might want to have some feel into the territory of self. Now let me ask again a very simple question.

[26:57]

Or have you asked yourself the very simple question? Who is breathing? Who is breathing? And then ask yourself, what is breathing? What is breathing? Now, at least for me, this is a very different feeling, this question, these two questions. Again, they're both short English words starting with W. But when I say who is breathing, well, I don't know who the heck it is, first of all.

[28:00]

But I feel sort of, who is breathing? There's a spy or something. And if I say, what is breathing? I feel more some bigger space. Yeah, and can you replace who is breathing entirely by what is breathing? I don't think so, but we do have to... I think it's important to see the difference between those questions. So we can ask, what is self? And not who is self.

[29:15]

And if self, then, if we say what is self, then immediately we're implying that self is a construct of some kind. And if self is a construct, what is it constructed from? Richard Feynman said, Nobel laureate theoretical physicist. Who is a very brilliant, imaginative, funny guy, womanizer. Yeah. Anyway, he said, I don't understand anything I can't make.

[30:18]

And I thought of that this morning as I looked out my hotel window. Because there are There were the early morning cars of Hannover. I don't really understand what makes Hannover such a big city. What do people do here? And I could see the lights of the downtown, the towers. And there were three bright stars, probably planets, that were still visible in the morning light. Yeah. Venus in the morning and the evening star in the Evening.

[31:23]

Morning star and evening star, they switch identities during the night. But Mercurius is the bright one too. Anyway, I have information about those star planets. What if I apply Richard Feynman's At that level of understanding, I don't understand those star planets or the lights of Hanover. I understand my toothbrush because I probably could make one. So I went and brushed my teeth. Okay, so what is this real not understanding?

[32:30]

Self and consciousness. And the Western world or... Buddhist world. And I think that again what I'm trying to suggest here is that we have the opportunity together these days To let ourselves into this exploration. How we are a particular person in the West. And how we are exploring what it means to be a person through practice, through meditation practice.

[33:38]

And if self is a construct, and in fact if we can let go of some kind of identity and fate We're created. And let go of that meta vanity. And just for a few days, have the freedom of... Maybe self is just a construct. And if it's just a construct. Maybe not just a construct. is superbly and wonderfully a construct.

[34:46]

Can we participate in that construction? And if we can participate in that construction, who's going to do it? Or what is going to do it? What is the process of participating in the construction of self? And how can the eye construct the eye, let alone see the eye? Actually, Buddhism tries to give us the tools and vision to do that. So I think it's time to have a break. Thanks a lot.

[35:42]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_71.52