Well, I'm glad to be back, even though I've only gone two nights. Yeah, I feel like I felt like a fish out of water. Somehow we begin to create a kind of water or shared field in the Practice period, it's quite noticeable when I leave for a couple of days. But I had this Implant, impacted implant, or implant pulled out.

[01:03]

So I lost a tooth and came back with a friend. Somehow I stayed in connection with her since the early 80s. Mm-hmm. came all the way from Ireland to see, check up on us. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, as is obvious, I'm trying to make sense of my own practice experience and my shared practice experience with you. And your practice shows me what's possible.

[02:05]

Yeah. But I also am trying to include the treasure of our Dharma ancestors' teachings. Yeah, who worked very hard, really, to transfer the teachings to us. die sehr gründlich oder sehr viel dafür getan haben, diese Lehren an uns weiterzugeben. In a way, I like the word transferal better than transmission. In gewisser Weise mag ich dieses Wort transferal, ich sag jetzt mal weitergeben, das gefällt mir besser als das Wort transmission, also Übertragung. I mean, transmission, it can be very close to broadcasting. And I'm more and more aware that the teaching is transferred, not transmitted.

[03:25]

And it's passed on. Sounds like I have a list. That makes no sense. It's weighed out. No. Okay. You know, I used to think the biggest, one of the bigger calamities or sufferings or unpleasantness of the crisis I went through with the San Francisco Zen Center in the early 70s, say 80s. Is that perhaps a chance was lost to participate in developing a shared view, understanding, practice of the Dharma?

[04:57]

But now I really feel more that it's so much a function of us, of each of us, of you. The path doesn't really have a reality, actuality, outside our unis, our shared path. Maybe it's good we're called Quellenweg. Or should we be called Quellenhof? So really, what's going to be possible is what we make possible, and it's not going to be broadcast.

[06:41]

And it's what other lineages or paths make possible. Yeah. Now I've been, ever since my observation, as I've mentioned every now and then, when I was, I don't know, 10 years old or so, that there's no such thing as 12 o'clock. That it's a minute before 12, and a millionth of a second before 12, and a millionth of a second after, and there's no 12. And as you know, I said that to my father. He said, we can say something exists if it's approached and passed.

[07:59]

I would call this at that time an observation. For me, a rather interesting observation. But it became, I would say, trying to find words for these things, I would say it became an insight. And it became an insight in the sense it became how I began to see into things, not just noon or eight o'clock or something. And I would say it became a kind of seeing into or seeing through or seeing behind and then around again.

[09:12]

And I would say it became something through which I could look inside, or maybe even through which I could look around, or through which I could look around and then come back. This is a nyoi which Sukhiroshi gave me, which belonged to him. And it's shaped a little bit like the back bone. And one of its names in China is the as-you-wish stick. Because if you have an itchy back, it reaches and it's a good back scratcher. It does as you wish. So somehow that got turned into the wish-fulfilling stick. As a teaching staff. Yeah. And, you know, if I hold it like this,

[10:36]

you could say it's fairly still. Well, it's not really still. In fact, it's moving in an infinite number of directions. It's moving with the rotation of the earth. And it's moving with the moon in the sense that the moon affects the earth, actually, and erupts it a bit. And if the moon can move the ocean, it can move the earth and move this stick. High tides. And it's moving with the... and the entanglement of seemingly infinite numbers of galaxies.

[12:01]

Mm-hmm. And what I'm saying to you is factually true. I mean, it's pretty much factually, we can say factually true. But of course, why does it look still, still as I can hold it? Well, obviously, because we're all moving together. We're all... in the same movements together. And this was an early insight in my own practice, and I've seen it in other people's practice too. Here we are, What's holding it all together?

[13:19]

At some point, through practice, you begin to shed views and habits and so forth. And you see that the There's kind of nothing that's holding you together. We're just all falling at the same speed. So this sort of insight that we're all, observation insight, that we're all falling at the same speed. Mm-hmm. We don't think of it in terms of the galactic blah, blah, blah, but we're just, you know, Rujing, you know, Dogen's teacher.

[14:20]

He said, life and death entering a painted picture And as you know, Otmar and I did the internment ceremony for Dear Neil on Saturday. And there were his ashes, which we made a paper cone and put individually and together under the stump. And there were recognizable pieces of bone and a piece of skull. And Neil used to think it was his.

[15:24]

Like I think this is my skull, I guess. Or maybe it's just skull. We discussed my stomach versus just stomach. The difference between my stomach and just stomach. Yeah. But if Ru Jing said life, and I mentioned this at the funeral, at the interment, life, death, entering a painted picture. We could ask, who painted the picture? Or what painted, or what is the paint? There was a song when I was in eighth grade, something like, The old master painter from the faraway hills.

[16:50]

I doubt if it was popular in Germany, even with your parents or grandparents. But the old master painter from the far away hill, he painted the violets and the daffodils. He put the purple in the twilight haze. And then did a rainbow for the rainy days. I don't know any other verses. But as usual, the first verse is the more real one. But I would say this is actually somebody's insight which he dressed in Christian clothes.

[18:07]

Yes, and the later verses get all about God and stuff, but the question is, who put this all together? How did it get all put together? In the later verses, it's about God and so on. But the question is, who painted it? Who and how did it all come together? And I would say, Lise, from a yogic point of view, it's not just exactly that we're all falling together. This is falling in its own way. And each of you and each so-called thing is falling in its own way. Each of everything, or each of each thing, has its own fingerprint. I mean, it's the eachness of the own fingerprint of everything that makes the world go round.

[19:36]

Now, since that observation when I was I've actually in some ways been working on what the heck is immediacy. And over the years, you know, I've had a number of recognitions, observations about it. And there's the old here and now stuff, or here-ness and now-ness. And immediacy, whatever it is, no im, no middle, is really the If there's a main subject of Buddhism, that's what it is.

[20:54]

And so I've been trying to, the last year or so or more, I've been trying to pin down immediacy. Or at least get some traction in immediacy. Now, if we look at the statement the other day I read from the name and introduction of the Suram Gama Sutra, or no, the One Entry Sutra, And I had two sutures yesterday in my jaw. I could feel the putnam. He thinks he numbed me, but I could feel the needle going through and he was sewing.

[21:55]

I said, are you a tailor? And suture and suture, suture are the same, basically the same word. A suture is when you sew. The suture is if you have sewing of a wound, it's called a suture. And it's the same word as suture. For Canadians at least, I don't know. And the Irish and, you know. Yeah. Even a limey over there. I'm not supposed to blow my nose for a week and you can imagine that's going to be very difficult.

[22:59]

So what does that line say? The meditator meditates from within. And his or her realization comes from meditating from within. And they had the same problems in a different cultural frame, same problems we do. How the heck do you talk about these things? And they had the same difficulties as we have now, even if they were from another culture and other connections.

[24:04]

But the question is, how do you talk about such things? How do you talk about these things so you don't sound like some kind of superficial mystic? So it's coded enough so it's really probably only going to be understood by people who are close to realizing it in their own practice. So the realization is the meditates from within and from within is discovered by the attentional bodily functions. Now I've been emphasizing aliveness as a term. And not just a word, you know.

[25:04]

This is alive or not alive. But aliveness as a term, because it's a reference point, a vector. Now, as a reference point, it means you have to keep making it a reference point. And then it's also a term because it's in contrast to the word being. So to make the Aliveness as a practice term work, you have to shed the idea of being.

[26:24]

Notice when you really are thinking in terms of the continuity of being, the exclusivity of the continuity of being. And in order to make vitality as a term for practice, to make it effective, you really have to erase the idea of being and always notice when you start, So you're shifting from the exclusiveness or exclusivity of continuity to the inclusivity of aliveness. The paratactic aliveness of moment after moment, moment, moment, moment. Yeah, and there's really no to or following or... Moment after moment, it's just moment, moment, moment.

[27:42]

Yeah, I'm trying to say it in these various ways to get it into, so it sneaks into our already habituated views. So, from within is code for aliveness. but a liveness that is vectored from or located through the experience of our body in its functioning.

[28:47]

Can you say that again? Aliveness is? It's a shift to aliveness as the internal functioning of the body. But this coded from within, becomes an insight when you let it start unfolding your experience. Which takes some unique repetition. And from within means you're shedding the reference point of the outside experience of the body.

[29:56]

In a way, if you can become naked in immediacy, then you begin to really feel this in its own movement, and you're moving with it, but it's all a shared movement with no outside. And how do you get there? I mean, without being crazy or drugged or something. Well, first of all, it's nice the word still is there.

[31:12]

Is this still enough? The more you have an imperturbable confidence, inner stillness, So your repeated reference point is aliveness. And just please get in the habit of that. And your repeated reference point also is undisturbed stillness. which is discoverable. And the reason practice periods are three months long is that the experience of people who have been doing this for a long time is that somehow something happens in that length of time with enough meditation

[32:20]

that you begin to beat that stillness. Just as each wave is returning to stillness. You really feel each breath returns to stillness. And this is this from within. Mm-hmm. Okay, I said I'm trying to pin down immediacy.

[33:25]

But of course you can't pin it down. It's always slipping away. I'm trying to get some traction in immediacy. And it definitely helps when you have some stillness, because then you feel, as we've talked about before, the field of immediacy within the senses. And you know the word Dogen used, Juho-hi-i? No. I don't. We talked about it in the Dharma Wheel. Oh, yeah.

[34:29]

Oh, yeah, that was about six months, a week ago. Which means sort of Dharma dwelling site. Yeah, maybe we could say situated time site. Am I testing you today? Let's just assume they all speak English well enough. I don't speak English well enough. Okay. Yeah, so one of my words now for immediacy is situated immediacy.

[35:34]

Niederbemassen? I even sent you that word. And it didn't help. Sometimes when I know I'm going to use a word, it's going to be hard to translate. I'm overwhelmed by kindness and I send her a little email which says, you better find out what this word means. The hardest word I gave her today was a tesseract. Yeah, still waiting, because I know what that is. Oh, okay. Do you all know what a tesseract is? Well, it can't be visualized. But if you take a square, you can turn it into a cube. If you take a cube and you do the same thing to a cube, it increases dimensions in the same way.

[36:48]

It becomes a tesseract. It was a word coined by C.H. Hinton in 1888. But it is really a fourth dimensional concept in the sense that the fourth dimension isn't sort of like time added to space. The fourth dimension is things happening simultaneously in another dimension. And it's really a concept, a four-dimensional concept. And not so much in the sense that time is added to space as a fourth dimension, but really in the sense that the fourth dimension is a dimension in which the things in which the fourth dimension, the dimension in which things happen,

[37:54]

where change happens simultaneously. So one way to visualize it, to try to get a feel for it, is you have a cube and that cube is surrounded by a cube. And the inner cube keeps unfolding into the outer cube, and the outer cube folds into the inner cube. Well, actually, that's the best image I can come to for what situated immediacy really is. Um... Because you get so that you can hold, find yourself dwelling in the dharma of immediacy.

[39:11]

In a time which is not sequential time and not a cumulative time. If time is a sensorial, durative moment, which is always changing, like this is moving in all directions at once, then that situated immediacy is folding into the whole context of immediacy. There's actually a word, tessellation, so we could talk about it as tessellated immediacy.

[40:17]

Now, I'm trying to say something within our little sangha, something about my experience of practice and immediacy. which I didn't think my way to, I practiced my way into. And what's interesting, and I've been trying to find ways for some months now to speak about it, because I find quite a few of you are having the same experience, similar experience. We get used to the dirt, momentary duration of immediacy as appearance.

[41:44]

And after a while we begin to feel ourselves like the appearance isn't just happening out there, like I said with a flashlight the other day. You are tuning the experience and the experience is tuning you. And it's not just some object of perception or something around you. It's an orchestration of immediacy. And I'm saying these things probably because if you begin to have this kind of experience, yes, it's confirmed by your own inner confidence.

[42:49]

But it's also very helpful. You can move into it with authority when you realize it's also a shared experience. And shared by our Dharma ancestors, sharing with us way into whatever future we happen to be, by saying, from within. Some within immediacy. Naked within immediacy. Having the inner immediacy. power to allow conceptual reality to shed itself, to be shedded.

[44:12]

So first it's a from within. And there's an inwardly, an unfolding of inwardly to outwardly. And outwardly and inwardly keep changing positions. And you feel your inside appearance, an appearance anywhere like that. And it's a relief you didn't know was possible because you didn't know what it was like to feel you really are home.

[45:19]

Home in how things actually exist. In this wonderful, inclusive, sorry to say, blissful, tessellated immediately. And even though I have four more minutes, that's enough for today. I can't seem to keep this thing under control. Thank you very much.

[46:15]

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