I'm trying to create Dharma doors that open into non-duality. Sounds very Zen, doesn't it? And Dharma doors that disappear as you go through them. So I have to speak. I have to speak with the fullness of everything of my body and presence and so forth. But no matter how fully I speak, it's still speaking. And I have to find, as I said yesterday, words that call forth experience in you.

[01:18]

Call forth. I think usually my feeling is it has to call forth familiar experiences, which is used, is experienced in an unusual way. So often I, because we're in practice period, speak about the dawn and the bell and all that. And as Otmar says, often it just hangs in the air unless I can demonstrate it at the bell. And that, of course, makes a big difference.

[02:32]

But still, most of what I'm speaking about I can't demonstrate. You can demonstrate it in your own practice. Of course, I try to speak about it. I think that my fairly successful example of speaking about it is once and once. I think if you say that to yourself as you're hitting the bell, You won't hit it twice, sort of bing-bing. You'll hit it once, and if you'll say the word, and then the and, once, and it starts to fade, and then once.

[03:34]

Ihr könnt das so sagen, einmal, und, und dann beginnt es auszuklingen, und einmal. So these three words, I think, can call forth the experience of the sound in the dawn and let that experience be felt by the and can establish a rhythm in the phenomenal world. Okay. Now, Dogen supposedly said that the word he-shi-ryo, he-shi-ryo, He, H-I, S-H-I, Rio, R-Y-O. He, she, Rio. He, she, Rio. Yeah, okay. It's the most important word in Zen.

[04:48]

Now you finally find that out. I should have told you sooner. And Hishirio, we don't have any word that's equivalent in English. And it means to observe things without thinking about them. And the idea is that if you observe things without thinking about them, you let them work through you and in you. So this would be a door to non-duality. And the idea is, as soon as you bring concepts into observing things, you push the experience into consciousness.

[06:11]

And you don't feel it so much with your body. And the concepts turn it into an entity which has an implicit permanence. It would be sort of, I don't know, this image just appeared in my mind, as if a tiger, there's a tiger loose in Paris, I heard. So it's not so far. All these things happen, you know, even in France. It's just down the road a ways. Not Tigger. That's what, you know, Tigger is a tiger, yeah. Tigger is a, you know, Tigger. Tigger is a children's story, you know.

[07:13]

Winnie the Pooh. Winnie the Tigger, yeah. Anyway, there's a tiger loose near Paris. I don't know how it got there. So if a tiger was leaping at you and you said, oh, that's just a tiger, this would not be too good a... Oh, a tiger is leaping. This can't be happening. No, it is happening. Okay, so you get the idea. So how do you let the ideas... It's a simple thing to observe without thinking about it. Without naming and conceptualizing. Let's the world work through you. Let's the 10,000 things come forward and authenticate you. No, I can say that.

[08:23]

Dogen can say that. But is it really... Is it just words? Mm-hmm. Um... And even if it is accurate words from me and accurate words from Dogen, you really have to explore if it's the case. And my words, to try to say it in English, and her words to try to say it in Deutsch, may not call forth the experience like, say, once and once can call forth an experience. You, the practitioner, have to see what calls forth an experience.

[09:35]

But let's go through that again. to hishiryo, to observe things without thinking about them. So let's just take that part. You have to try that out. See if you can observe things without thinking about them. I mean, there's all kinds of Zen training about Zazen, Samadhi, and you cut off thinking. Yeah, let's make it simple. And that's usually an implied entity thinking because you think there's a state of mind where there's no thinking.

[10:41]

That's an entity thinking. And we're speaking about an activity where there's interplay. So you discover the interplay or the feeling of observing without thinking about it. And you see if you can do that. And you just keep trying it. And sometimes it just happens pretty easily and naturally. Okay, so let's say you get to know that experience. Then the next part of the concept is it allows the world to work through you.

[11:49]

Then now you have to explore that. You try on and you have ten minutes of not thinking about things, just observing. You can see if that affects your feel of the world in a new way. Maybe it gives you a feeling for what I've also said is to feel the world at the source of the senses. No, no, no. There's another phrase which may reach you, may not reach you, but it's another attempt. Okay. So, maybe the world does work through you, you feel somewhat more connected or something like that.

[13:19]

And you feel you can actually feel comfortable with naming and conceptualizing cut off or reduced. Now you notice how long you can maintain such a modality of being. Yeah, and then maybe you go back to usual thinking and it comes back in. Oh, you feel sick afterwards, you know. Yeah, observing without thinking afterwards, I feel kind of, ugh. How do you translate, ugh? I want to see. I leave these things to you. Oh, fine. It's a division of labor here.

[14:27]

Okay. And then you can ask yourself, you can begin, if you play with these doors, half-open doors. You can begin to discover what mode of mind or bodily feel allows this to happen. You can't make the world work through you unless you're on the edge of a cliff or something climbing a mountain, and then you do your best. Ihr könnt das nicht herstellen, nicht machen, dass die Welt durch euch hindurch wirkt, es sei denn, ihr befindet euch am Rande einer Klippe oder ihr klettert oder sowas.

[15:32]

You can only allow the world to work through you. Ihr könnt nur zulassen, dass die Welt durch euch wirkt. And then we can say that allowing the world to work through you might also be a mental posture. So you might feel, you know, I don't feel the world working through me. I don't know what the hell he's talking about. But, yeah, I'll try on seeing if I can allow, at least allow the world to work through me. And you can start with a word like allowing. Is that zulassen? Yeah. Yeah, you can say it. If you see me walking along muttering to myself, zulassen, zulassen, you'll know what I'm doing. Where is she?

[16:35]

Well, Sue's Lawson. I'm sorry. Oh, okay. They're just words to me, so they have all kinds of meanings. I mean, they're just sounds to me. They're sounds long before they turn into words for me. And pathing, I brought up pathing yesterday. And pathing, I would define pathing as... establishing a path of multiple potentialities it's not like you're standing on a path because the path again is not an entity it's an activity

[17:48]

So the path produces a certain kind of activity. And it doesn't go to just one place. It doesn't go just to enlightenment. That's why the goal of enlightenment is such a conceptual block. Pathing paths you to potentialities that you don't know what they are. Say it your own way. That you don't know. You don't know. Multiple potentialities. Now we could say, let's hope that one of the potentialities is enlightenment. But a mind of multiple potentialities is enlightenment.

[19:02]

But it's much more likely... that a mind of multiple potentialities is enlightenment. No, I'm still trying to discover some doors to non-duality, dharma doors to non-duality. And I'm still trying to give you a feeling. So say that each one of us now is immersed in a tank of water. I'm just trying on an image with us. Okay, now... Let's assume you have found a way to breathe in this water.

[20:13]

Well, you definitely feel the water all over you. Now, if you felt the water all over you, you would feel the water all over you, I'd call that a spatial posture. As I would call the practice of Hishiryo a spatial, in effect, a spatial posture. Okay, so also what we're doing here is, what I'm trying to do here, is explore if spatial posture is a useful term. It's useful for me right now, but a year from now I may have forgotten about it. But certainly, I guess you can imagine that sitting in a tank of water, you could feel, we could call it a spatial posture, because you'd feel all the water.

[21:33]

Now let's imagine a similar, an analogical way. We're all chanting in service. And you feel yourself immersed, touched everywhere by the sound as if it were water. You feel bathed in sound. I mean, you are in the air, right? Right now. But we don't feel the air.

[22:37]

Because it's, you know, I mean, you'd feel it if you're taken out of water. You'd feel, I feel the air now, it's better. And we feel the air when the room is stuffy or too hot or cold. Do you know stuffy? Yes. Oh, really? I'm very impressed. Okay. So to feel bathed in sound... without thinking about it, would be a spatial posture. That's at least as I'm trying to discover if this can be a useful term for us. Okay, another possible example. Again we're back being the Doan.

[23:48]

And say you imagine when you're a Doan that you're sitting in a circle. Or you're sitting in a sphere. And you actuate that sphere by your motions. Yeah, and right now, if I lift this, if I feel I'm in a sphere right now, I would lift this stick, feeling I'm following the contours of a sphere. And in fact, that's what I do. And when we do the orioke bowls, there's also that motion too, into the body and down and so forth. Now I would call it a spatial posture, not a mental posture.

[24:58]

So I'm trying to distinguish. There's a physical posture. And there's what starts out as a mental posture. I'm sitting in a sphere. But when I start acting in that sphere, it now has a dynamic independent of the mental posture. So I hit the bell in this posture. And the more I feel this sphere I'm sitting in, the more I can make it feel, it will begin to feel like all of us are in that sphere, in the whole room chanting or whatever.

[26:07]

And I can feel that when I bow. In Japan, though, gardeners in certain gardens that are really well taken care of, Sometimes cut down every leaf that points down. And all the bushes and trees only have leaves which point up. You don't. It doesn't seem artificial, but there's something good about the feeling. It feels so clear. It's a gardener's trick.

[27:13]

So you don't feel downward sliding mind, you feel upward. There's something nice about that bush. So the effect of actuating a circle in how you are present as dawn And the effect of a ball to... No, is this artificial? Is this some kind of fake theatricality? If you want to be a wet blanket, if you want to be a downer, you can think of it that way. But if it actually contributes to people feeling better, then it's a subtle act of freeing people from suffering.

[28:26]

Yeah, you have a rising mind and sinking mind. Es gibt den aufwärtsgerichteten Geist und den sinkenden Geist. And if you have a sinking mind, other people's minds around you sink. Und wenn ihr einen sinkenden Geist habt, dann sinken auch die Geiste von anderen Leuten um euch herum. So a rising mind is also a bodily feeling. Und der aufwärtsgerichtete Geist ist auch ein körperliches Gefühl. So this is the practice of Dharmakaya Sambhogakaya, Nirmanakaya Buddha, Dharmakaya is entering the spatial body of all of us. Sambhogakaya is internalizing that feeling as a bliss of the world arising in you. And then the Nirmanakaya Buddha is living that with everybody else.

[29:53]

And nirmanakaya bedeutet das, mit jedem, mit dem du zusammen bist, zu leben. And uninterruptedly, this would be yuanwu, bodhisattva practice. Und das ununterbrochen wäre die yuanwu bodhisattva practice. And you don't say, oh, I can't do that all the time, I'm kind of in a bad mood sometimes. You won't, yes, but you intend to do it. And you don't say, yes, I can't always do that, I'm not even in a bad mood or something. You always have the intention to do that. Okay. So I, there's, yeah, that's enough examples for right now. And so in a way I'm trying to create zazen instructions here which are for awareness and not for consciousness.

[31:03]

Which are bulletins, do you know the word bulletin? I know the word. Bulletins or telegrams to awareness. So one might be, when you sit down, you sit down in consciousness, right? But when you sit down, pretty quickly, the fourth skanda begins to be present. Of associative mind. An associative mind is open differently than conscious mind. And you help awaken awareness by awakening the spine. So the first zazen instruction I'm giving now to the fourth skanda is a bulletin to awaken the spine.

[32:11]

And then inhabit the breath. So you sit down and you awaken the spine. You inhabit the breath. And then you establish a mental posture of ease or openness or something. And then you extend the body. Just like after a while you lose the sense of the boundaries of the body. But you do this with a little nudge, intentional nudge. You extend the body to feel the space of the room.

[33:27]

unintentional nudge, little push, as the entry to the experience of ma is to experience in-betweenness. is to experience in-betweenness. In the United Nations, I'm told, the translators are relieved every ten minutes. Sorry. Okay. And in-betweenness is always changing. There's no fixed in-betweenness. It's another entry of shifting attention from entities to in-betweenness. As the dawn can start with a mental posture, Of noticing the space between the dawn and the bell.

[35:10]

And then, as I said, allow that space to flow into the room and out of the room and so forth. And feel that as part of your body. And the dynamic of this, how it affects you, is different than if it was a simple mental posture. And some kind of spatial posture like this is necessary if you're really going to get Dogen's feeling that the 10,000 things come forward and authenticate you. Okay, so instead of starting out with awaken the spine, I'll say it another way.

[36:28]

And sometimes I remember the first letters of each word and I run through it like a musical score. Yeah. And I do it twice now, two different ways, just so you can do it your way. We can have 20 ways. Okay. So let's start with uncover. Now sitting in the fourth skandha. The spine is uncovered. The breath is discovered. The mental posture is located.

[37:29]

die geistige Haltung ist verortet. And here the emphasis would be noticing what mental posture is already there. And then the spatial posture would be open the body into the space of the sight. S-I-T-E Doing this kind of exercise now and then begins to realign how we be. And begins to let the world And people work within us, through us in a new way.

[38:46]

And this would be what's meant in Zen by non-duality. Thank you very much. It was all intentional, equally, every knowledge and every attitude.

[39:22]

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