Hello, everyone. I apologize, as usual, that I can't speak German. But luckily, I have a very good friend who speaks German better than I speak English. Now I suppose I'm supposed to introduce you to Zen Buddhism in some way. And I just found out a few minutes ago that this lecture is introduced as the miracle of consciousness.

[01:02]

It's not my fault. I live in America. I don't know what you mean. Hmm. But it's a fairly safe title because this is a miracle. And there's some kind of consciousness here. In fact, our life, I would say, Well, Ulrike and I had a discussion about this word today, driving here, but our life is confounded in mystery. And I'm using the word confounded to mean

[02:04]

founded in mystery and founded through mystery. And of course I should say what I mean by that. We have a very productive kind of consciousness. It builds civilizations. And the effort of our consciousness is always to understand and make clear to To understand and make clear.

[03:29]

But when we dream, things are not so clear. And there's a sense in which Zen could be understood as trying to make everything clear. And there are practices in which you begin to be able to stay in your dream time and not move it into your conscious time. And so it looks like in a way that the effort even of Zen is to make everything, to make understanding reach to everything. And that is also sometimes implied by Buddha as being called all-knowing.

[04:46]

And the emphasis on wisdom, which is seen as a kind of knowing. But it's not the kind of knowing that most of us mean by knowing. So what I again said that our life is founded in or confounded in mystery. Because the very nature of our productive consciousness is it's quite narrow. If we imagine some great sea creature, some whale, and some people say that whales and dolphins may never sleep,

[06:10]

They live on a waterbed. They're always supported by this water. So they don't need to sleep. They're living on a waterbed. So if we imagined such a water creature, which didn't have to sleep, we might think that their consciousness was 24 hours like our consciousness. But I think their consciousness would have to be different. So I guess what I'm saying here is that it's the nature of human beings, not being water creatures,

[07:31]

That the price of our consciousness, which is so productive, which produces civilization, can't understand everything. The kind of consciousness we have can't understand everything. And the attempt to bring everything into this kind of consciousness is a mistake many of us make. Part of the mystery of our life is that we need this other consciousness of sleep. Okay. So now what Buddhism has done as chosen to do as essential to life

[08:57]

is to introduce another kind of consciousness. Maybe a kind of whale consciousness. And I think that's one reason we like our pets. Because it's a kind of alchemy of looking at your dog and feeling another kind of consciousness. Which often calms you down. I mean, life looks so simple to a dog. Or a fish, you know. So when I met Suzuki Roshi, my teacher, it was sort of like I was meeting this wonderful dog.

[10:22]

I'm sorry, Suzuki Roshi. I never thought I'd call him a dog. A hund. Om maybe, but not hund. Om ah hund. You don't need to translate that. Or maybe he was like this fish swimming through the life I began to see in San Francisco when I met him. So he not only taught me quite a bit about meditation practice, about the spiritual craft of Buddhism, But it introduced me to another kind of mind that I'd never met before.

[11:44]

That I'm still studying. And it's a kind of mystery, this other kind of mind. And it's a kind of mystery, this other kind of mind. Now I remember as a kid when I used to wash the dishes quite a bit. That was one of my jobs, I had to wash the dishes. And then I grew up to be a kind of monk. And really being a monk is learning how to be a housewife. And so you continue washing the dishes. But when I washed the dishes, I used to become quite fascinated for some reason with the silverware underneath the soap suds.

[12:51]

and they all thought I was procrastinating because I would take hours to wash the dishes and they would come in to see what the heck I was still doing out there And I was supposed to be doing my schoolwork or going to bed or something. And I would have two water glasses looking through the suds at the silverware. And I also believed that I was procrastinating. But at the same time, I was somehow caught by looking through the suds at the silverware laying rather motionless at the bottom of it.

[14:07]

And I realize now I was looking at another kind of mind. But the certain quality of the water, which is like this other kind of mind, the water that in this case just accepted the silverware, And it just remained there very still. Now when I come to do a lecture like this, of course I'm invited by Uwe and Zeitloss because supposedly I can bring you something. And I have spent quite a lot of time practicing and thinking about Zen, so I can bring you something.

[15:24]

But mostly when I come here, to come here like this evening to give you a lecture I kind of check my understanding at the door I sort of leave it there with my shoes they told me not to bring my shoes in here Because for me, practicing Zen is being... It's not that I practice and bring you something. Being here with you is practicing.

[16:33]

And being here with you is finding out something with you, within you, about Zen practice. Now if we don't have the idea here of, and I'm using the English word, understanding, We have something more like maybe in standing. Everything that happens is inside your life. There's really nothing that's outside your life.

[17:53]

When you die, you die inside your life. Death isn't something that comes from outside and takes you away. You die inside your life. My senior disciple just died in September of AIDS. And he was head of a hospice for people, a home, and he called it Maitri, a home and hospice for people with AIDS. And when at some point we realized I came back from being in actually Asia and Europe and came back in early September, I think.

[19:06]

And he... They had certain things to do. We had to pass on the succession and the abbotship of this place to his disciple and my disciple. So then we did those things. And then he had, the feeling we had, he and I talked about it, was that this was the end of dying. Dying being a language, it's a word. And once he finished the things he had to do, dying as a word was over.

[20:25]

And then he faced the mystery. And he did it within intent, not within cognitive thinking. And the intent moved, worked, existed right under the cognitive thinking and the medicine he was taking. So we finished the ceremony on a Saturday, I believe, of succession. And then he sat up in bed on Sunday I spent with him with our disciple, his disciple and mine.

[21:32]

And then Monday, he sat up in bed on Tuesday and just greeted. I mean, people were waiting from, you know, eight or nine in the morning till three in the afternoon to be in line to see him and say goodbye. And he smiled and said hello to everybody and it was quite wonderful. And Sunday at one point I was sitting beside his bed and he seemed to be sleeping. And I said to him, I sort of murmured to him, I wish there was something, is there something I can do for you, Issan?

[22:39]

Is there anything I can do for you? And a pause, and then his head came up. He said, you mean something more? And another point I said to him, I wish I could trade places with you. He said, you'll get your chance. and the last day in the afternoon on Wednesday after he did the things he had to in the morning he rolled over in bed and began concentrating

[23:39]

Er rollte sich im Bett auf die Seite und fing an, sich zu konzentrieren. And you could interrupt him, but basically he just concentrated. Und man konnte ihn zwar unterbrechen, aber im Grunde genommen tat er nichts anderes, als sich zu konzentrieren. Just as he decided to do. So als hätte er wirklich den Entschluss gefasst. To live within his own choice. Innerhalb seiner eigenen Wahl zu leben. within his own choice and then within the mystery of this life. So he concentrated and this concentration, this intent, which is not willpower, a deep intent, by midnight he died. Around six in the afternoon, he had to go to the toilet. He got up, he started to get up, and he looked and his whole bed was surrounded by people. And he looked around and he said, is someone dying around here?

[25:07]

And then he laughed and then he went to the toilet and came back. And his humor never left him. And then just before he died, he sat up, looked deeply in people's eyes and died. You're in this place now. You don't know it, most of you, but that's where you are. This kind of maybe deep consciousness. So I guess I'm trying to give you a feeling for this by saying you're standing in your life. And sometimes I talk about space connecting.

[26:41]

I say that's an important sense. Not that space separates us, but space connects us. But what I'd like to say this evening is that space belongs to you. Doesn't just connect you, it also belongs to you. Mm-hmm. So the question, who am I, doesn't interest me as much as the question, what is life? What kind of I do I need to look at the question, what is life? Now I think that the better word than understanding, if I don't use instanding, is perhaps acceptance.

[28:01]

Now not accept, and I don't know if I can give you a feeling of this acceptance, it's not acceptance as you just accept anything. Or you're subject to anything. I came in here yesterday from the United States and landed in Frankfurt. And we drove, Ulrich and I, drove to Weimar. And I got to see Goethe's house and things like that. And see what the world looked like in 1920 and 1930. I hope former East Germany has sense enough not to change everything.

[29:17]

You'd pay a fortune in New York for a facade like some of those buildings have. If there's a treasure over there in East Germany. A time warp. Yeah. Yeah. And driving from Weimar this afternoon here, there was a lot of fog. Fog and pollution and smog and so forth. Schmutz, ja. A lot of schmutz. I see I know a few words.

[30:31]

And we saw, my gosh, four accidents at least with six or eight cars and trucks and everything. And the fog was pretty thick. And when you could see a car, when there was a car ahead of you, you could see its taillights, you felt like there was some kind of definition to where you were. But sometimes there was no car ahead of you. And you couldn't tell whether the fog was thick or thin, so you didn't know whether there might be a car only 10 feet ahead of you that you couldn't see, or 100 feet ahead of you that you couldn't see.

[31:36]

No, this has something to do with the what is seen as the essential nature and miracle of consciousness in Buddhism. Now, as long as I was able to have a subject-object relationship of myself and the car ahead, I had a feeling of location. But when there's no car out there, I didn't know where I was. Now, in In the West, we have a kind of principle of logic called the excluded middle.

[32:57]

It's either this or it's that. Buddhism says, uh-uh. Buddhism says, no, no. Buddhism is the law of the included middle. It's this and that's not so important. It's this middle which you can't exclude. If you take this and that and push it far enough away into the fog, You don't know where you are anymore. And you have no ability to define where you are. Buddhism says this is the essential nature of consciousness. This is what the middle way means.

[34:13]

It's not a harmony of opposites. The middle way is to be in the middle where there's only suchness. Where you can't reach very far into the mystery. And where you can find your comfort without anxiety in this included middle. Which we call suchness. Or emptiness. And emptiness, although it's trans-sunyata, sunyata is translated as emptiness, it means something more like the fullness of indeterminacy. Does that make sense? Mm-hmm. You're not trying to fix yourself by the car ahead or the car behind or some subject-object relationship.

[35:34]

You're not trying to understand everything to make it clear. You're interested in being vivid in the middle of the fog. You find your own vividness and clarity in the middle of the fog. And these moments of consciousness... when you find a kind of vividness of being alive without the need to hold this or that, is dharma or emptiness. And this requires a kind of acceptance. Acceptance in the sense that you're not grasping to try to understand or hold on to.

[36:49]

And you can let go to that extent without anxiety. Or you can handle the anxiety. But the anxiety becomes the water you swim in. Mm-hmm. Your own discursive, discriminating thoughts become the path. When you really realize you can't get hold of these things anyway, even if you're anxious, you swim in that anxiety. So that One of the great obstacles of practice is we call delusion.

[37:56]

Delusion or ignorance. And ignorance or delusion means that you take the world as being permanent in some way. That each thing has an inherent mark or an inherent existence. That the world exists out there somewhere. And you're only a visitor in it. And this is called the imaginary world or delusion in Buddhism. And that's to try to make things determinate. To try to make things determinate.

[38:57]

So, instead of indeterminate. From your own vividness you make things clear for a moment, but everything is only clear for a moment. But the clarity is you, not what you see. You're like a light that shines on things. So one is delusion, is one of the great obstacles of practice. Now the other... obstacle in practice is the frustration of existence.

[40:08]

Because disillusionment. So first you live in an illusion that everything is fixed and permanent. But finally you open your eyes and you see the world as it is. And you see what we human beings do to each other. And you see the suffering. And the poisons of greed, hate and delusion. It's better to be deluded. To not see. And when you start to see, it's very disillusioning. So how do you found your life not in delusion and not in being disillusioned once you open your eyes?

[41:10]

Because you don't want to close your eyes to this world and what we human beings do to each other. But at the same time, you owe more to yourself and to your friends than disillusionment. Now, there's no easy answer to what I've just presented. There's no formula in Buddhism or in Zen that makes us all work out. Formula. Formula? Formula, like a chemical formula. There's no formula. Will you say that? Oh, okay. Okay. Well, I don't know as much German as... So a kind of... You need a kind of deep trust in this life, deeper than the frustrations of this life.

[43:11]

But you don't jump to conclusions too much. You have a kind of deep patience. But you can endure this life. Mm-hmm. On the one hand everything is empty. On the other hand we're giving form to things all the time. We have to endure both the giving of emptiness and the giving of form. And in Buddhism we think this endurance is a kind of acceptance or patience. almost as if you are willing to swim in non-understanding.

[44:31]

You don't have to understand all the time. That's why we sleep. We need a break from understanding. Because the kind of productive consciousness we have makes us suffer. Denn dieses produktive Bewusstsein, das wir haben, das führt dazu, dass wir leiden. But this kind of productive consciousness we have isn't all of life. It's a very narrow view of life. Aber dieses produktive Bewusstsein ist eben nicht das ganze Leben. Das ist etwas sehr eng begrenztes. So sometimes you let yourself out of this productive consciousness. And you're not going to go crazy. Though sometimes craziness is defined when you lose touch with your controlling productive consciousness. But that's one reason you do meditation, because you begin to have a kind of trust in the stuff of us.

[45:53]

And a funny way you, first stage, rely in your own body. Not in the thinking, but just the stuff of you, the precious stuff of you and the world. So, again, as if you could let your... I don't know why Jesus uses a fish. Is it because he's a fisherman or some other reason? But in any case, in Buddhism, the fish or animal consciousness represents another kind of depth that's in human consciousness that animals give us a sense of.

[46:55]

They don't read the newspaper. So we think they're lesser because they don't read the newspaper. They just may be smarter not to make newspapers in the first place. or maybe they just don't need to come out of the mystery but our genius is that we can come out of the mystery and coming out of it makes us suffer Now there's a story in Buddhism that there's a turtle seeking enlightenment.

[47:59]

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