Tomorrow we'll start at 10 and not 10.30. And we'll start with 30 minutes of approximately zazen. And today I suggested that we start as, usually I want something like this on so-called pre-days, is that we just start without meditation. And the reason I do that is, although we did, most of us, do zazen this morning, And the reason I do that is because I want as much as possible to at least symbolically, if not in fact, start with our usual mind arriving from somewhere.

[01:15]

And already just the fact that I do that implies that there's a difference between the lay person's mind and the meditator's mind. And not just mind, but mind, body, view of life, etc. experience of aliveness and so forth. Now, most of this needs to be your participation

[02:18]

not just that you're here and I'm saying something. It's that we are in fact participating in what it means to be a practitioner of meditation in primarily our lay lives. Now, this I've been talking about in various ways for the last two or three years. And it's been the unavoidable subject of my life for fifty years. So in various ways, in your daily life you're going over this question.

[04:11]

And maybe if you're aware that you're going over this question, it'll make the question more fruitful. But these days, these months, these years, we've been going over it more precisely. And yesterday, four of us met with Wolfram, Heather Wolfram Grabner, that started the process of our purchasing the property next door. And March 1st, we'll meet with the notar before I return to the States.

[05:18]

And I'm returning to the States to be in a 90-day practice period with a number of people there, including Niko's wife, Beate, or Beate's husband is here. I don't want to be sexist, so I have to say it both ways. So why is that? Why is he here and why is she there during a 90-day practice period? It may end up to be she just says, this was dumb to be away from Nico for three months.

[06:28]

And Charlotte's partner is there too. And what the heck is he doing there and you're here? And I heard he gave an extremely good lecture the other day. He's the Ino in charge of the Zendo during the practice period. Okay, so right in the middle of our family, our families, we have this division. I can't... It's a fact of my life that we're doing this.

[07:30]

that I've done it and others of you are willing to do it, want to do it. And I say it's a fact of my life because it's obviously a fact. But I can't say I understand it. You know, I can give you some thoughts about it. I would say that our confrontation with our meeting, this meeting between East and West, I would say our confrontation or the meeting of East and West. Or this meeting more specifically of our Western scientific culture in present day at least.

[08:51]

and Western implicitly theological culture with yogic culture, Asian yogic culture. which is, from the Western point of view, non-theological. Now, we happen to be involved in that. And I would also say, of course, that the lineages, lineages that brought us to meditation practice are probably more in the West than the encounter with Asian yoga culture.

[10:01]

In other words, it's Western influences that brought us to meditation more than our encounter with Asian culture. I had a conversation with Peter Nick the other day who will join me in doing a seminar later in the year. And he's a botanist who's head of the department of an institute of botany at the University of Karlsruhe. And he said that he basically I mean, so far as we can tell, and I spend a fair amount of time with him, we have identical views about the world, pretty close to identical.

[11:17]

He doesn't have them because of a practice of meditation. He has them because through his practice of science. Just a simple example. This glass is an activity and not an entity. And the ramifications of that are extraordinary. So if we want to really look at the challenges of lay practice and monastic or yogic practice, We will have to look at the implications of this shift from entities to activities.

[12:39]

Then we will have to look at this translation, which is based on the fact that one translates from entities to activities. And what Peter Nix says is that contemporary science, at least that he knows, he's a pretty well-known researcher and he's going to China next week, because he's got teams of people working on things in China. And Peter Nick says that in modern research, and he is a very well-known international scientist who is going to China next week. With basic concepts, science agrees. This is an activity on the entity. But he also says that the methodology of science is not yet there. In other words if you You can think these ideas, have these ideas, but if your methodology isn't based on these ideas, then you don't get results that reflect what's happening.

[14:17]

But zazen is a methodology that brings us into this world of non-entities. And I think the result is going to be that we're going to have to re-envision our world views. Reconceptualize what it means to be alive. And reposition how we experience being with others and within the phenomenal world. So what I'm saying is that Mars is right here.

[15:42]

We're actually on Mars now. Or we're at the depth of the ocean looking at funny fish that no one's noticed before. No. A sashimi does most of the work for you, or a lot of it, 80%. The schedule, the way we eat, the way we, you know, et cetera, shapes most of what we do. In a practice period, it's really, you do most of the work, but the opportunity is there. In my emphasis now in doing practice periods, is really to develop, encourage ways to utilize, to make use of the 90 days.

[17:01]

Okay. So here we have what I call our lay adept sangha. And it has a monastic component. Just like being here now for a few days. Or coming to Sashin, etc. Now, the title of this seminar is The Challenges of Lay Practice. Now, just the idea of the challenges of lay practice implies monastic practice as well. In other words, since this tradition has been primarily developed through monastic practice, how are we going to have a lay practice which...

[18:09]

which has, let's say, all of the power of monastic practice. And are there aspects, are there ways, are there Are there aspects of monastic practice that aren't reproducible in lay practice? For example, Neil lives in Berlin. His daughter, where are you? Oh, you're hidden there behind Paul. Okay. His daughter, somehow wandered into practice as a teenager. But you don't live in Berlin.

[19:42]

But if your father hadn't been a practitioner, you probably wouldn't be practicing now, but maybe. But do they have the same understanding in practice? Yeah, I don't know. I appreciate both of their practice, but how similar are they? And have each of you gone through and realized the same practices like the skandhas in the same way? Or here's Paul O'Leary, a wild Irishman who lives in Austria. Who's been practicing quite a while. But do you three have the same understanding of practice? but you three have the same understanding of practice, etc.

[21:04]

So if my job is to continue this teaching indefinitely, in perpetuity as we say, perpetually, And I say, okay, Paul, Neil, and Carolina, and a few others of you pass the teaching. You'd have to have a meeting to say, what teaching shall we pass? And do we understand the teaching the same way? Well, that happened after the Buddha's death. There were, over a period of centuries, big conferences.

[22:09]

What the hell shall we pass? How do we understand this? Who's going to agree? You know, if you have three books, There's six ways to arrange them on your shelf. Three times two times one. If you have 15 books, that's 15 times 14 times 13 times 12. You have 1.3 trillion ways to arrange your books. No wonder I have trouble finding books on my shelves. If you have a hundred books, supposedly the numbers of ways to arrange them exceeds the number of atoms in the universe, estimated as, and nobody knows, right?

[23:11]

Of course that's a false comparison conceptually because you're conceiving of atoms as units and you're conceiving of the books as relationships. My point, of course, here is that if everything's changing and everything is interdependent we really are dealing with relationships, not entities. If the world is actually all these relationships, which it is, how do we act in it? In a world that's interdependent, how do we act equally interdependently? In a world of interdependence, how do we act, participate inter-independently?

[25:04]

Can you translate inter-independently? The other day I was in Boulder and Denver. I had a small... And some close friends of Marie-Louise were in Vail, the Austrian Disneyland ski resort.

[26:05]

Have any of you been to Vail? These developers made it, I don't know, some years ago, quite a while ago. It's one of the main ski resorts in the United States. And a very large percentage of the buildings, if not all, are made to look like they were Austrian ski resorts. I couldn't find a single person in any of the hotels which spoke German. No, they even advertise in Austria. And there were some German tourists there, but Marie-Louise's friends at least were there. So we went there and saw them for a couple days.

[27:42]

And it was rather pleasant, actually. And then I drove Sophia to school and Marie-Louise went somewhere else, I don't know, to Denver or something. So anyway, Sophia is sitting beside me and she took my iPad. Sophia sat next to me and took my iPad. And Steven Jobs, who more or less conceived of it, as most of you would know, is a Buddhist, or was a Buddhist, and used to go to Tassajara, etc. And Steven Jobs, who created this, was, as you may know, a Buddhist. And so you have just partly influenced Buddhist machine that my daughter is playing with.

[28:44]

I've never played a computer game in my life, so I have no idea what it's really like. But she immediately, in fact, she may have even bought the computer, apt the computer game. I don't know, she asked if she could play a computer game. I didn't know there was one on my machine, but she played. So I'm driving through the mountains in a rather cliffs on the side of the road, et cetera, through the mountains down toward Creston. And beautiful, old, beautiful road. And old, abandoned sawmills. Which I too abandoned.

[30:00]

Driving past them. And Sophia's playing this computer game. And I really don't know what she's doing, but there's all these electronic shapes moving around on the screen I can see. And it wasn't apparent I couldn't exactly tell why, but she identified with one of the electronic shapes. And as far as I could tell, the electronic shape that she identified with was constantly in danger. And all the other electronic shapes were against the electronic shapes she identified with.

[31:02]

And every 15 minutes, 30 minutes, she'd say, I'm killed. Oh, really? Well, she started over again. This went on for four hours. She was completely interested in this electronic shape. It was constantly in danger. And of course I am not too dumb and I realized that somehow this electronic shape she identified with as herself. And it occupied her attention for four hours.

[32:10]

And I would say, look at that beautiful sawmill that's abandoned. No. Look at these mountains. Extraordinary views. Now, from the point of view of a Buddhist, we have a problem here. Why is it so interesting to identify with yourself? And is yourself defined by the dangers that are constantly organized around it? Now, what Charles Taylor, who wrote a book called The Secular World, he calls the world we live in the North Atlantic world.

[33:17]

Er nennt die Welt, in der wir leben, die Nordatlantische Welt. Okay. And the North Atlantic world has created a very attractive secular culture. Und diese Nordatlantische Welt hat eine sehr attraktive, säkulare Welt geschaffen. Now, in the early days of China, when Buddhism was first coming in, From many points of view, it was the only game in town. I have to avoid colloquial expressions, right? Yeah, it's difficult. The only game in town. I don't know what another expression would be.

[34:40]

Okay, but since there were games before. Yeah, but the only game in town means like now smart people can be physicists or entrepreneurs or whatever. In those days in China, the only game in town was Buddhism. It was the only thing. It was philosophy, it was science, it was everything combined. So it attracted what we would call the artists, the intelligentsia, etc. And it developed like science. It was an accumulated teaching, like science is an accumulated teaching. And Buddhism has developed like the sciences, where one builds on the other.

[35:47]

And so we have inherited a teaching here, which over 2000 years But it also, because lay life was not so attractive in those days, and for a lot of people, living in a monastery, you got food, you know, there's a roof over your head. So I would say the majority of the monks lived there because it was the best game in town, too, for making sure you got fed. And if the Republicans have their way in America, excuse my political comment, and they take away the social net in America, the so-called social net,

[36:54]

We may have some more monks coming into the monastery, because there's food, you're taken care of, and so forth. Yeah, so... I mean, it is a fact that our North Atlantic lay life is interesting, attractive, complex, and more satisfying sitting around the monastery. But this attractive lay life mostly supports a self not much different than the computer game self. Now that's too harsh a statement. So after the break I'll soften it. I think it's about time for a break.

[38:13]

Thank you very much.

[38:15]

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