So we are entering this field of practice together. And entering is also exploring and discovering the field of practice. finding a clear enough feel for it that we can intend to practice in all the circumstances of our life. If you have any sustaining sense or genuine engagement in practice, you know that it belongs and can be in all aspects of our life.

[01:06]

Now this morning you saw that I'm continuing my experiment to see how I can participate in this session. Now at my age, etc. In the 100 or 200 or so sessions or more I've done, What a poor result, I'm sorry. I shouldn't say that. Yeah, okay. I don't think I've ever missed morning zazen before. Except a few times when I didn't come to the first couple days of zazen. So, anyway, I'm exploring. I gave you yesterday this phrase of Dogen's as the hot drink statement.

[02:31]

Yeah, within the gates and gardens of the monastery. Sometimes I offer you my own style of practical discussion. Now, it's very interesting to study the various ways to learn about the various ways Dogen or somebody that we know quite a bit about engaged in his practice life. Yeah, so sometimes he just offered his own style of practical discussions. And I brought that up because it's not so different than what we're doing.

[04:04]

I mean, just yesterday, when did I speak about the altar? Yeah. And the altar as not existing and how it's not existing can be a starting point for our participation. Now again, I'm speaking about, you know, in a way, I've spoken a lot about the sense of Ma, the sense of space. And the space isn't just some kind of universal nothing. Space has acupuncture points.

[05:21]

And standing in front of the altar is a kind of giving rise to an acupuncture point, shall we say, something like that, appearing in this situation. arising in this situation. So if I understand, if I feel how everything is at this moment appearing, And appearance is always a matter of acceptance. You're not going to get anywhere if your first, your initial, your most basic reaction is acceptance.

[06:25]

You're not going to get anywhere unless that's the case. So I suggest in English at least you practice with yes or welcome or hi there. Ich schlage zumindest im Englischen oder im Deutschen vor, dass ihr mit Ja oder Willkommen oder Hallo da drüben praktiziert. You're allowing acceptance. Ihr lasst Akzeptanz zu. And allow actually means, the root of it is gratefulness. It's not just neutral, oh, something new has appeared, but a kind of gratefulness for what appeared. And the refinement of that as an attentional skill is... essential to developing your practice.

[07:55]

So now, often I get the comment that, you know, we have a rule that you should follow your breath. When you don't follow your breath, you feel you're failing. I know when I hear that I just feel so sorry to me. We feel we fail over nothing. How can you be a failure because you didn't follow your breath? I mean, everybody on the planet is not following their breath. It's a very elite form of failure. Jeez. But also, the practice arises from intention and trust in the secret working of intention. In the secret working of intention.

[09:16]

Faith, trust in the secret working of intention. In other words... Practice arises, develops when you see the point of it. And through that, you develop an intention to practice. Okay. Now, if you don't develop an intention to practice, that's your choice. But if you trust an intention, you can't fail in application. Because if intention is clear and strong, it secretly works in all the crevices, nooks and crannies and interstices of your activity.

[10:19]

I was wondering how you were going to translate that. I threw that nooks and crannies in just for the hell of it. Thanks. Nooks and crannies. Okay, um... Yeah. But it is interesting, of course, that something, as I have said many, many, many, many times, That's so easy to do for a few breaths, it's so difficult to do continuously. And that very question becomes profound discussion, internal discussion.

[11:39]

Yeah, I mean, as I've been saying recently, emphasizing that I cannot teach you Buddhism. I can only help, I hope, teach you how to teach yourself. And as I've been saying for a while, I can't teach you Buddhism. I can, I hope, I can help you to teach yourself how you teach yourself. Yuan Wu says something like, Etabliere dich in deinen fünf Skandas, in deinen fünf Aggregaten. Without interruption. Hey, that's impossible. Without interruption. Ohne Unterbrechung, und das ist unmöglich, aber ohne Unterbrechung.

[12:43]

For 20 or 30 years. Über 20 oder 30 Jahre hinweg. Yeah, but then he says, but if you think of practice in any temporal mode, how, when you can practice won't work. So his 20 or 30 years means just timelessness. You don't think in terms, when will my intention bear fruit? You just hold to the intention and trust it. It's a kind of heroic act, a bodhisattva act, a kind of Strange courage.

[13:46]

A trust in our deeper bodhisattvic Buddha possibility, identity. And you can't rush it. All you can do is nourish the intention. But what are the reasons, some of the reasons anyway, that your attention does go back to your thinking? As I say, it's usually not because your thinking is so profoundly interesting. It's just fast food thoughts. Junk mail. Spam. It's just a lot of spam. Delete, delete.

[15:05]

Löschen, löschen. Yeah. So... But we do establish our continuity in our thinking. Aber wir stellen unsere Kontinuität im Denken her. And if you disturb your... If you use drugs or something, if you used drugs to particularly... break your experience of continuity, most people can't handle it. And if I look here at Atmar and then I turn here and I can't remember what I just saw, pretty soon I'll feel pretty weird. If I don't know my way back to my room, you know, this is Alzheimer's or something. But back in the 60s, they did tests with people, and when they disturbed that sense of continuity, airline pilots were lost, but you're glad they were lost.

[16:31]

Airline pilots, when you disturb their sense of continuity, they really freaked out. Okay. This was a surprise discovery because they thought airline pilots would really be in control. But when they weren't in control, they really were disturbed. But you want your airline pilot to know where he's going. But when they did the same test with artists sometimes, oh, this is groovy. I don't know where I am. I feel good.

[17:33]

My heart's beating. Yeah, what's the problem? Thump, thump. Okay. Okay. So you notice, you can begin to notice that you need continuity. Then you can begin to explore other ways to establish continuity. I can't teach you. I can only hint at it. And you have to teach yourself how to establish other ways. forms of continuity.

[18:36]

Okay, so the need to establish continuity is one reason we go back to our thinking. And we establish it in predictive consciousness. And because we establish in predictive consciousness, that's one reason why dreams seem so different. But as the stars are You know, it's cloudy, we don't see much, and a little dark in here, but the stars are there.

[19:38]

And behind, underneath, around the clouds of consciousness, dreaming is occurring right now in each of you. Okay. Now another reason we go back to our thinking. Because a lot of us are made up of various kind of traumatic events that surface in various ways. And not knowing how to bodily resolve them, we just compulsively think about them. So if that is what you notice, then you say, hmm, what triggers that?

[20:49]

How does that appear? And this is a form of doing psychology within yourself. And if you notice that, then you can ask yourself, hmm, so what has triggered this and that? How does this appear? And to deal with it, this is a way of doing psychology within yourself. And this becomes a kind of psychological practice that you can develop through Zazen. Now, another reason is many of us, unfortunately, believe ultimately we're failures. Yeah, or geniuses. I mean, it's the same problem almost. And we're always looking for confirmation that we failed. So if you start noticing when you look at your breathing, the first thing you try to notice is that you failed.

[21:59]

Okay, you need a little inner help. And when you notice that, like with breathing, for example, we are constantly looking for confirmation. And when the first thing you notice with breathing, oh, now I have failed again or something, then you need something like inner help. Or you start looking for confirmation. that you're exceptional and you don't find it, so then you feel like you've failed again. So those kind of observations arise from trying to deal realistically with the existential question why something so easy to do for a few breaths is so difficult to do continuously. Now, fourth reason is we simply lack the attentional skills to know the joys and depths of immediacy. Und der vierte Grund ist, dass uns einfach die Aufmerksamkeitsfähigkeiten fehlen, die Freuden und Tiefen der Unmittelbarkeit zu spüren.

[23:34]

Sounds good. So I translated Dogen's statement last night. within the gates and gardens of the monastery. And sometimes I offer my own style of practical discussion. Like I did yesterday at the altar, about the altar. And simply wishing that each of you freely knows the depths and joys of immediacy. Okay, so here I get to this, I think, interesting point, and we run out of time again.

[24:51]

Okay, but I'll say a little bit. Now, what do I mean by the depths and joys of immediacy? Okay, so one simple example is, I'm standing in front of the altar. And the altar is a, any appearance, again, is a point of participation. Because you're inside every situation, there's no outside. And to choose to be outside is a form of participation.

[25:51]

So now if I stand at the altar yesterday as I did, and I start from the altar doesn't exist. That's my energetic starting point. Okay. So I'm putting, as I offer incense, I'm also establishing the whole altar. And I'm doing what I've been calling recently, I'm uniking. I'm not repeating, I'm uniking. Sorry. So I'm not looking at the altar in any way like I expect it to be the same. I just don't have that habit. So people think I'm finicky. Finicky?

[27:08]

Yeah, fussy details. And they may be partly right. Okay. But I go to offer incense and I see the incense burner is turned entirely backwards. Because I'm placing the incense burner and the incense simultaneously. So the single leg is always toward the front, and I see two legs, what the hell are you going to do? This may be a little finicky, but it's also just the depths of immediacy, the attentional skills that bring you into things appearing. Okay.

[28:15]

Now, Otmar cleared a beautiful... I found that... Chinese stone flute player in a kind of... shop in Freiburg that has very inexpensive Chinese things. I don't want to think about who made it. Like we have that curved stone bridge and an alligator, a crocodile in the stream. We have the curved stone bridge right in the parking lot and the alligator in the stream. Stone from China Carved stone from China

[29:24]

It's cheaper than the stone from the quarry across the road. This is a store we go to. Unbelievable. Anyway, I'm glad this Chinese flute player has found a nice home. We're not sending him back to China. It doesn't help. But we were wondering where to put it. And I noticed that Marhai had cleared that spot for some reason. No, this campus is a configuration of buildings and spaces. Yes, sort of started really by Wolfram Graubner living in the same rooms that I lived in over there in Johanneshof when he was 18.

[30:54]

And looking out at what he might do with these empty fields here. So he created a configuration of the building. And now there's trees and plants and Thankfully gardens. Beautiful open to the hillside gardens here and beautiful closed gardens in Johanneshof. And within this configuration or articulation There are kind of acupuncture points.

[32:00]

We can use the word I used yesterday. There's articulation, which is to divide things into parts. And there's reticulation, which means to see the network of things. energy or nerves, it connects things, the connecting pattern. Yeah, just as we have lungs and legs and ears and feet and so forth. We also have a fascia energetic acupuncture sort of system. Which both expresses our energetic existence and is an entry into our energetic existence.

[33:00]

Now, to see that in people and to see that in situations is what intentional, the depths of immediacy. And we know that exists, but how do we open ourselves to it without interfering? Yeah, okay. One last thing and I'll try to be quick. Because even the most basic topics we brought up, we'll need another seven days in addition. Because I want you all to leave prepared for your challenging lay life. This is just a Dharma vacation. Okay. When you do Zazen, often images arise.

[34:31]

And often there's a visual quality to those inner images. Now, I'm convinced that if I became blind, I would still have that inner visual space. But I can't think of any way to find out if a person born blind has a different kind of inner visual space. I don't know if there's any way to find that out. Okay, so an inner visual space appears. And it has foreground and background. And when you get your attentional skills get, you know, better. The body-mind plasticity, which can be endlessly developed almost.

[35:46]

You can begin to hold in place an inner image. Dann kannst du beginnen, ein inneres Bild an Ort und Stelle zu halten. And explore it. Und es zu erforschen. And you don't think, oh, well, it's just like a dream or it's just inner visual space, you know. So what? Und du denkst dann nicht, oh, das ist nur so ein Traum oder es ist irgendein visueller innerer Raum, was soll's. No, you can really explore it. Oh, there's several layers of background way in the distance. Then you can wonder, why is that in the background and this in the foreground? And then you can get out your inner telescope and pull the background forward. And there's not only layers of background, there's first floors, second floors, third floors, you can find the stairs and etc.

[36:57]

And you develop a skill of holding these images and exploring them, and they just arise almost from nowhere, but you created them, and you're participating, but you don't know them. But this is the same modality of mind that dreams. And if you develop that inner space in zazen, you transform your dreaming. And the dreaming then becomes much more present in the day. Because the modalities of mind that dream and do zazen overlap and can be developed. Okay.

[38:05]

Thanks.

[38:06]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_73.91