Someone asked me yesterday. I always say, or I often say, all in yogic culture, all mental phenomena have a physical component. And also all sentient phenomena human physicality as a mental component. And he asked, can you give me an example? And I didn't wrestle him to the ground as Changsha wrestled Yangshan to the ground. When Yangshan said, give me an example.

[01:06]

Who wrestled Changsha? Changsha wrestled Yangshan as we spoke in the last seminar. Sashin. I didn't even try. I mean, although he would kindly have let me wrestle into the ground. So I said, it's easy and not so easy to do. And the elephant in the room, as they say, and what we're talking about during this session, is interiority. And I want to... I want to approach this throughout the Tei Sho, to the extent that I can, this experience, practice, lived world of interiority.

[02:26]

Okay. And I'm trying to show and these, again our Dharma Buddha Hall and Absorption Hall are trying to make possible this interiority. Now the Chinese character for sincerity Is a person standing? On the left side and the right side is a mouth emitting words up into the air. No, this could be easily translated or imagined pictographically.

[03:40]

It's meaning veracity. A man stands, a person stands by his or her word. And that would be truthfulness or let's say veracity. Veracity and veridical both etymologically are true to your speaking. But veracity has come to mean, despite the shared etymology, to stand by your words, to be true to your words.

[04:42]

Aber dieses Wort hat sich dahin entwickelt, dass es jetzt bedeutet, zu seinem Wort zu stehen. And verticality has come to mean to be true to reality. Und wahrhaftig, ja, verradicality im Englischen bedeutet jetzt der Wirklichkeit gegenüber im Einklang mit der Wirklichkeit zu sein. Now I'm pointing out that these are both really different. I will try to make that clear if I can. But what I'm also trying to say is you really have to find this out for yourself. You can't trust the words. Even the English and German words don't quite touch what we really want to. Don't really touch our fundamental aliveness, I think.

[05:59]

And so, and then the words translated from Chinese and Japanese and Sanskrit and so forth really are in another realm. And we try to match them to our words, and it's pretty clumsy. And again, I'm saying something equivalent to what Dogen said. Don't let the sutras turn you, you turn the sutras. Don't let the teachings turn you, you turn the teachings. And the main theme of what I'm speaking about is how to turn the teachings into you.

[07:27]

As a kind of aphoristic aphorism I used for starting this second half of Johanneshof Quellenweg. It was to create a location which locates you. And I'm trying to find ways to, for my own sake too, because I want to locate myself in my own practice, but also I want to locate my practice within your practice because it enhances, it deepens my own practice.

[08:35]

I can have various ideas about what I might speak about before I come. But I know that when I start speaking to you, there's going to be a narrative that appears through being here that really changes almost completely sometimes the narrative I imagined. Okay, so here's this kanji or this character again of the person standing beside the mouth speaking. And I would say in yoga culture, it doesn't really mean the person standing by his or her word.

[09:57]

It means something more like the person being entirely the interiority of their actions. Yeah, why should I bother with all this? Because for me it's exciting. Look, we grow up and we're living in some sort of place and then, hey, there's these other ways to imagine beingness. Other ways of imagining living, not just imagining, imagining and living beingness. And Buddhism gives us a lot of tools, technologies for discovering this.

[11:13]

Yeah, so last session we emphasized appearance. Which isn't as obvious as it appears. But I don't think I can come back to that in this session. But let's speak again to this question. What is an example of a physical component to a mental phenomenon? Well, there's easy examples. There's subtle examples. There's examples that you create. And there's harder to describe examples. Well, that should keep us busy for a while.

[12:27]

Well, an easy one is the feeling, the bump, which we've talked about, in which you go to sleep. This person said to me they have a little cough or breathing shift and then they feel themselves going to sleep. That's a a shift from one modality of mind to another. And again, when you become really aware of this, you can help create the circumstances which allow it, you can't make it happen, but which allow it to happen. then you can start creating the conditions that allow this to happen.

[13:38]

You don't make it happen, but you allow it to happen. Yes. And relate for me, I would say that there's a kind of integrative shift There's a shift from the lighthouse sensorium You know what a lighthouse is, right? Well, the feeling of up here, it's kind of, I don't know what to call it. And being physically integrated through that lighthouse sensorium. And then there's a shift into an integration in the torso, maybe.

[14:42]

And a metabolic and breath shift, integrative shift. Yeah, and that usually is, I'm well into going to sleep as that happens. Yeah, and I know, you know, my body knows this, and it sort of can do it or allow it to happen. Mein Körper kennt das und kann das tun oder kann zulassen, dass das passiert. Das ist ein einfaches Beispiel. Und das kann auch auf Zazen angewandt werden. Because I would say, I think the best description of Shikantaza is that it's a, when the body establishes a non-conceptual modality of mind.

[16:00]

It's not just as commonly loosely described as just sitting. It's a just sitting which allows a non-conceptual mind to just take hold. And like when you go to sleep, you go from a consciously voluntary, seemingly voluntary state to an involuntary state of mind in which the body and dreaming, etc., takes its own course. And when this non-conceptual mode of mind takes hold, is established, takes hold and establishes itself,

[17:07]

Establishes itself. Yeah. And when we could say... when there's a shift into the body, and you, I guess I'm repeating myself, but you let that take its own course. But by sitting still and by letting the mind sink into the body, you increase the immediacy of this metabolic and breath shift. Now, I'm also trying to speak here these days about the bodyfulness of phenomenality.

[18:51]

Now the bodyfulness or mindfulness of feelings the second of the four foundations in this case feelings means emotions like anger So the bodyfulness of the emotion of anger is a practice of noticing but not engaging. So you notice your anger. I can use any emotion, but let's use anger. Or you notice your annoyance or you notice your displeasure with someone.

[20:07]

You just notice it. And then you notice its intensity. Geez, now I'm more annoyed. Now I'm really, where's my machine gun? Now I'm really angry. But you're noticing it, and while you're noticing it, you're also creating a bodily field which isn't disturbed. Aber du bemerkst das und indem du es bemerkst, erschaffst du auch ein körperliches Feld, das nicht gestört wird. Dieser einfache Akt, das zu bemerken, ohne danach zu handeln, stellt ein getrenntes körperliches Feld her, das nicht der Ärger ist.

[21:08]

okay once you've made that distinction and you can feel that distinction and here we have another mental bodily component dynamic the more you play with this and explore this And you have a little extra time when you have a little extra time in Sashin, you can just aggravate yourself. I mean, even more than you're aggravated already. Think of something that really annoys you when you are seriously betrayed. And then exaggerate. And then feel that field that's not disturbed, that surrounds it. Once you really know that distinction, you can shift your location to the field that's not disturbed.

[22:40]

The skill to make this shift is the main point of the teaching of the mindfulness or bodyfulness of feeling and emotions. Now again here, are you touching the mind in this? Is the field more the mind or the anger more the mind? Or is the wider field that observes the field and the anger the mind? This is a craft and you have to decide those things for yourself. Okay, now we have the bodyfulness of the fourth foundation, the bodyfulness of phenomenality.

[24:17]

The bodyfulness of the dharmas. Now, why is phenomenality actually the bodyfulness of the dharmas and not just the bodyfulness of things? Because the practitioner is turning all things into dharmas. No, now I'm into appearance. Now I said I wasn't going to do that. Okay. What's a dharma? It has four marks. Yeah. Wir alle kennen die, glaube ich zumindest, und haben die praktiziert, diese vier Kennzeichen.

[25:23]

Das echte Geheimnis dieser Praktiken. is it's uninterruptedly applied. That's what makes lay life more challenging. You really get the momentum of it over a certain period of time in a practice center more easily than in your daily life. Yeah, so, you know, the early texts say, on each inhale, you bring attention to impermanence. On each exhale, you bring attention to impermanence.

[26:34]

This isn't, on each inhale, I bring attention to impermanence, and now I understand it, so the rest is all repetition. And I keep saying, and I'm embarrassed too, by saying, please don't confuse understanding with realization. And it's the weakness of smart people's practice. Because they're used to understanding, being convincing and working. And probably understanding is worse than not understanding.

[27:48]

Because once you feel you've understood, you stop practicing. You have to have a deep existential angst or something, or fear. continuously, uninterruptedly faced by the stupidity and suffering in this world. And that you feel how superficial and ineffective understanding is. Except in the seamless sensorium the brain supplies us. And I mention this because it makes me really sad to see how often I've gotten caught and others get caught by understanding. So the body forms of phenomenality.

[28:53]

And dharmas have four marks. One is it appears or it's born. It has duration. Momentary duration. And it dissolves. And then It disappears. And that, the fact that we could say it arises, it has duration, it disappears, it disappears. Why do we say it disappears twice? Because it's clear, it's an enactment, it's a gesture, it's a practice. If we were just talking on some subatomic particle level, particles which are non-particles, we don't even have to worry about duration.

[30:42]

It's virtually immeasurable. Does solution happen all by itself? But this is not a practice at that level, it's a practice at our human level. We have to start with the conception that things are momentary. And then we have to train ourselves to notice that momentariness. That momentariness which is also interdependence and impermanence and so forth. This is all interactional, it's all relational.

[31:48]

The only thing that actually exists here are the relationships between the floor and the platform and cushion and me and... Those relationships will have a causal effect, but everything else is just stuff. Diese Beziehungen werden kausale Wirkungen haben, aber alles andere ist nur Zeug. Again, we're talking about this as a serious way you can enter into how things actually exist. Und wir sprechen hierüber als eine ernsthafte Art und Weise, wie du in die Dinge eintreten kannst, wie sie wirklich existieren. So, you... You develop ways to notice at the macro course level at which we live within things. Du entwickelst Möglichkeiten oder Fähigkeiten zu bemerken auf dieser makro Ebene auf der wir existieren.

[32:57]

You notice things have an appearance and they have an appearance in your sensorium. And you experience that appearance with its boundaries. And then it changes. Your sensorium changes. And then you intentionally release it. So the four marks are basically a practice of receiving and releasing, receiving and releasing, receiving and releasing. And there's a pulse there. And so there's a pulse of receiving and releasing, which is what phenomenality is. I think that's enough.

[34:10]

I got about one third of the way along what I thought I might project. But I got farther along inside the short way I went better than I thought. So there's a pulse of receiving and releasing. You know, when I was a kid, of course, all of us, I think, went to school, and they ring a bell, at least in the schools I went to, to signal the beginning of a class or the end of a class, etc., And this requires a... It asks for a mental response. Well, now it's 10.40, it's time for geometry or something. And now it's 10.40, time for geometry.

[35:33]

But as you notice here, we do a Han, 15 minutes Han of three rounds. When I do the Doksan bell, which I'll start Doksans tomorrow, I hit the bell once. Then I don't know, maybe I'll hit it again, and then I hit it again. It's not done by a machine or metronome. It's just how I happened to feel at that moment. Sondern einfach, wie ich mich in dem Moment zufällig gerade fühle. And then the person coming to Dokusan reflects that sequence. Und die Person, die zum Dokusan kommt, sollte diese Abfolge spiegeln.

[36:35]

So we could call these sequentials rather than signals. Also könnten wir das Abfolgen nennen. Lieber eine... Each sequential goes with an attitudinal mode of mind. And as I always say, you never hit the bell twice. You always hit it once and once. And it's always an attitudinal conversation.

[37:43]

You're not ever even hitting a bell, you're hitting a context. Every morning when I offer incense here at this altar, I look at Suzuki Roshi, my teacher. And I mean, sometimes I think, hi there. How are you? But if he actually reappeared, I would just look at him. And that's every morning, I just look at the picture. then it has a certain duration and I release it and that's an attitudinal modality of mind and that's part of the expression of interiority okay Thank you very much.

[39:02]

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