Okay. Good afternoon. 32 parts of the body. The entry, first of all, just to notice the parts. And as I said, when you have the feeling for that, I said earlier, you actually feel each part of your body does its own zazen. Yeah, you release the glue. Yeah, you release your body image. And we say the thought sheath. The thought sheath. The sheath is what you put a knife in. Thought coverings.

[01:04]

Yeah. And the easiest entry I have found to exploring the interior of the body Yeah, I'm probably different. But it's to bring attention to the mudra. And to the thumbs. And the lightly touching thumbs. And then to move that attention up the arm. And for some reason I almost always do it with my left arm. And then the attention to let the arms slide up. And for some reason I always do it with my left arm. Yeah, and you know, so I feel or explore with my attention the bones of the hand.

[02:08]

They're fairly easy to feel, easier than, you know, some other bones. And it's sometimes, and it helps to have an anatomical image of the hand. In fact, sometimes when I've tried to physically cure something by intention, the anatomical image has helped me focus on, you know, what I happen to do at that one or two times. Yeah, this is correcting minor things. I mean, well, not entirely minor, but it's at the advanced level of Tom Sawyer. Because if you've read Tom Sawyer a long time ago and Huck Finn, they would wish and tend their warts away.

[03:21]

Do you read these books in Germany? Yeah. Of course. Well, that's because you went to school in Texas. In Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta, Georgia. I'm sorry. Exchange student. Atlanta, Georgia. Is that right? Atlanta, Georgia. Yeah, and you know, I used to be able to do that quite well as a kid, but now I'm not so good at it. It's a sign of getting old. In any case, you can focus attention and change things a bit. So although the anatomical image is useful sometimes, you shouldn't hold to it. You will imagine an automobile. Which had a computer in it, let's say.

[04:55]

And the computer, excuse me for another riff, the computer could keep track of all the points that there was pressure or stress or something like that. So the computer would know where the tire hit the ground, where the suspension was affected when the car went over a bump and so forth. And it might measure where the bottom of the driver was pressing into the seat. Or the hands on the wheel and so forth.

[06:07]

That would be a different image of the car than you see in advertisements. But it might be a very useful, you do software, you know that, it might be a very useful image of the car to kind of study how you design the new car. You're struggling and you're great. You're just so patient. Willing to do these things. Okay. So when you do Zazen, you have to have some skill at it, I guess. You drop your body image. And your body or what you experience as the territory of being alive begins to have its own shape.

[07:13]

Yeah, sometimes it's quite big, sometimes it's small, sometimes it goes one direction or the other. Sometimes it's just a bunch of parts lying in a pile, not accumulated in the body image. And as you sit and sit several periods, like in the Sashin, the pile changes. Perhaps it's not accidental that the five skandhas, skandha means piles, heaps. So the bell rings.

[08:20]

And you're sitting there. And your body is in a pile somewhere. And it feels great. You're just sitting there and, you know. But then, you know, you have to get up. That's part of the practice. So you have to sort of like, okay, come on back. All the parts get reassembled into what we call the usual body. So from various points of view, the body has a different extensions, territories. And it's part of the reason probably we could say that like when you do zazen you might make a different decision than you would in ordinary consciousness.

[09:23]

Because the parts The interdependent parts are now looking at things differently than when they're usually assembled. Now, this kind of experience is probably enhanced by the practice within the four foundations of mindfulness of studying, examining, noticing the interior elements, the interior aspects, parts of the body. So I find if I... You can start with my left hand. It's sitting on top of my right. Of somebody's right. Yeah. And then I extend into the wrist... And I go slowly because it feels good.

[10:50]

And because, you know, it's a new kind of territory to feel into the joints. And the fascia. Ooh. I studied BMC, I know. And some people think that acupuncture works through the fascia. This fibrous material that surrounds muscles and connects muscles and separates the soft parts of the body. And it seems to be, it's a connective tissue throughout the body. So you begin to, you really kind of feel your way into the fascia. And up the bones of the lower arm. And the elbow and then the shoulder. And somehow I find the shoulder a way to enter into the interior of the body, the lungs and so forth.

[12:15]

And once I have an exploratory feel of the lungs and opening the tips of the lungs up into the shoulders And then you can start going around the lungs, into the lungs and so forth. Initially this is, you know, a good part imagination. Now you can move this ball of attention. It's like a little flashlight sometimes. You can feel pretty precisely, you can feel a difference between being in your shoulder, say, or your left or right hip or something.

[13:21]

So you develop some skill at moving attention around within the overall areas of the body. And once you get the hang of that, the feel of that, And this takes, I would say, 10 minutes of 100 zazen periods. I just made that up. I don't know. You don't do it the whole zazen. You do it for a short period during zazen, and you develop your exploratory skills. But I've never had anybody come to Doksan and say, I spent the last three days with Sashin with my kidney. Yeah. Okay. So as you develop your exploratory skills and try them out now and then when you feel like it, now, one of the things that goes along with, now I'm slightly changing the subject, is seeing the parts as causal.

[14:58]

Is that you have to begin to trust what appears in the mind stream. As I said earlier, a kind of spontaneity. You trust that everything has a cause. Yeah, and so that whatever appears, okay, that's what I'll stay with. And this is, again, one of the, staying with this theme, one of the basic, particularly Zen, emphases on concentration. You don't concentrate in a way that excludes things. There's no harm in practicing that way. But it doesn't have much transformative power. More powerful is to concentrate on whatever appears, even the lack of concentration.

[16:26]

Yeah. So you're now, if you've developed this attentional attention, you bring it to whatever appears. So I often characterize Zen Zazen practice, as the most fundamental advice, is uncorrected mind. So you don't correct things, you just bring attentional attention to whatever it is. It's like there's a train going along. A train of thought or a stream of thought. And you kind of, as the train slows down, attentional attention jumps on. And it goes along. First it's the passenger, then it's the conductor.

[17:29]

Then it's the engineer. And pretty soon it becomes the train. Pretty soon everything stops because scenery, train, mountains, rivers are all moving at the same speed. And the train disappears. And we could call this, excuse me, not duality. Okay, so you develop your, back to the other topic, you develop your exploratory skills. And then you can begin to find the details of your body. Yeah, and let's just again use a simple example. Say that you try to discover the heart. And you know, funny, sometimes when you do it, it starts making you nervous.

[19:03]

The heart skips beats and it sort of says, oh, there's an intruder here somewhere. You've spent a few decades not noticing me. Please, leave me alone. And it's also scary because you think, ooh, it might stop. You feel how fragile you are. From one beat to the next. Yeah. And your heartbeat is often minor. It's in various ways irregular. That's a little like, oh. Hey, ship up. Yeah, okay. So, but when you begin to notice the heart, very quickly you shift to noticing, feeling the whole circulatory system.

[20:05]

Because the heart isn't just a heart, it's actually the circulatory system. And at that point you may begin to feel colors or something like that, like synesthesia. Very simply, at first I think you'll find some parts of your body darker than others. And some parts quite impenetrable. And you have to be patient, because after a while, if you have a kind of background intention to reach into the areas that are impenetrable, eventually you begin to be able to bring this exploratory ball of intention into it. And after a while the whole body begins to feel kind of transparent. aware, conscious, lit through and through.

[21:58]

I mean, I'm looking out at the, how clear it is out there in that beautiful little garden. And that kind of clarity feels like it's all through the body too. Not, I don't mean I can see organs of the body where I can see the bamboo, but you feel a kind of clarity and openness throughout the body. So now maybe you can feel more this monk, the adept practitioner, well established in the four frames of mindfulness. This clarity and transparency of the body, I don't know what other words to use, seems inseparable from mind, thinking and so forth.

[23:08]

So that's an opening into the practice called the 32 parts of the body. Okay, now I think we have to go because Neil is still here and, you know, we have to talk about feeling. Because in and out of the seminar he's asked me about it. Then he twisted my arm and said his whole discussion group was concerned about it. I'm exaggerating, but anyway. But he's my friend, so... Okay. Well... The distinction between feeling and emotion. Whether... We're not talking about the five skandhas, but in the five skandhas... Emotions belong in perception.

[24:46]

And feeling really belongs in the second skanda, feeling. And here, the essential sense of it is non-graspable feeling. And the example I always give is there's a feeling in this room right now. And we can't say what it is, and it's always changing slightly. Anybody who walked in the room now would walk into a feeling. They'd feel something by walking into this room. And all of that feeling contains most of the information what's going on. And to keep that feeling alive, we have to... It kind of gets taught, and then it has to relax, and it has to get taught, and it has to relax.

[26:04]

Taught. T-A-U-T. Like, tight? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Um... Okay. But if you try to grab hold of it, it's gone. It's not graspable. Okay. Now, when more traditionally they talk about Pleasant, unpleasant, and neither. Now, neither is expanded into indifferent. And into equanimity. In other words, you get the adept practitioner Starts out with, I like this, I don't like this, this is pleasant, this is unpleasant.

[27:22]

But after a while, unless somebody's hitting you with a hammer and they don't stop, You know, it's just a sensation, you know, not to worry about it. It's one of the essential skills of Sashin. Oh, it's just something going on in my knee. And it doesn't flood the body anymore. And so the more you have that kind of equanimity, the more you have the feeling that you're in the territory of opening into non-graspable feeling, more subtle feeling.

[28:25]

So that's one aspect of bringing attention, physicalized attention to feelings. Now, another aspect of this feeling foundation is you want to know the feeling. Now, this is in contrast to noting an emotion. Okay, so in the third foundation, the states and modes of mind, The states of mind, modes of mind, the qualities of mind, one of the qualities or modes of mind is anger or passion or whatever.

[29:45]

As I said earlier, when there's anger, for example, you just note it. Yeah. Now, in the foundation emphasizing feeling, you look into the feeling of anger. Yeah, I mean, let's take, I mean, I think fear is a good example. Say that you're afraid. Something's happened. Or you have psychological fear for some reason, a panic attack. Your equanimity doesn't suggest flight or fight. So instead of a reaction like flight or fight, as we say in English, you two, really, you're almost the same person.

[31:10]

Not quite. Thanks. She's blushing. Instead, you just see if you can enter into the center of the fear. And just stay there without flighting or fighting. fleeing or fighting. Until you really, it can't harm you. And in this practice with this frame of mindfulness, It's good to exaggerate when you feel strong enough to exaggerate these feelings.

[32:20]

So you can begin to see these four foundations also have crisscross. You can apply... number four to number one and number one to number three and so forth. It's a rather wide field, territory of practice that you come back to in various ways over years. And as I do, every time somebody talks me into teaching it. So that sometimes in zazen, if you feel some kind of anger, aversion, disgust, envy,

[33:44]

You use the psychological strength you have gotten by knowing you can sit through pain without moving. Then you develop the ability to sit through discomfort of pain. And you know you don't move. It's a tremendous psychological strength. And then you can begin to explore envy, anger, lust, you know, etc.

[34:49]

So you're not noticing it, you're knowing it. You just stay in the middle of these big serious feelings that shape our existence. It's similar in that you're not trying to get rid of it. But you are trying to know it. Just stay in the middle of it. Yeah. I mean, let me just say with some caution... You have to have a sense of your own strength. And you turn toward these things, but you don't turn so far it overwhelms you.

[35:54]

But you're developing an emotional strength. Again, we can understand the adept practitioners whose mind is established in these four foundations. Now the contents of mind, or to see everything as a Dharma, to see everything as known by the mind, is the fourth foundation.

[37:07]

Very simply, as I again am looking at you, and physically and proprioceptively present in this shared body, neutral body, Yeah, I know you're out there. But I also know that all I know of you is what my mind and body senses are presenting to me. And I don't think about what's being presented to me. As I say, the we of us is silent. So on every perception, I know I'm perceiving. I experience my mind knowing you.

[38:12]

That's a basic habit that all adept practitioners should establish. You don't deny the externality of the world. But you know everything you know about the world is internality. And believe it or not, one of the ways you know it, one of the measures or signs that it's happening, Is a feeling of bliss. Feeling of nothing left out. And the simple example I give is like in Zazen, if you hear a bird, It's a content of mind.

[39:28]

And you simultaneously hear. And when you just hear your hearing of the bird, knowing that's the fullest you can hear because it's what your organ, the organ of hearing does. Und wenn du diesen Vogel hörst, dann zu wissen, dass das das Vollständigste ist, was du hören kannst, weil das eben genau das ist, was dein Hörorgan tut. It's often accompanied by a feeling, or the sign of it is a feeling of completeness and bliss. Dann ist das Zeichen dafür so ein Gefühl von Vollständigkeit und Glückseligkeit. Sounds good, doesn't it? But it's just a territory of experience you can begin to find out because it's how we actually exist. Yeah, I mean, dear Heinrich is external. I only see you once a year.

[40:41]

But at the same time, my experience of you, and from last year and other years, is, to me, internal. Yeah, that's just a fact. And when my, my, uh, uh, experienced knowing of the world rests in that fact. I don't feel anything's left out. There's no loneliness. It doesn't mean you don't have grief and pain of various sorts, but it's rooted in these four foundations, anchored in these four foundations of mindfulness. So now I want to touch on one last thing and then we'll stop. You can see that this practice deepens your relationship to your body and mind and activities and opens you up to a great familiarity with body and mind.

[42:12]

And anchors the mind in body, breath and phenomena. So you feel located. As I said, it's a kind of sight-centering awareness. And you can even, at least I don't know in German, but again in English, I could take a phrase like sight-centering awareness. And in each situation, I can feel through the phrase, right now I'm going to establish sight-centered awareness or consciousness.

[43:32]

It's a feeling of relaxation inside and of everything coming towards you. What does Dogen say to... to something to the myriad things, to the 10,000 things, to convey the self to the 10,000 things. And you realize that, though it's usually translated as myriad or many, 10,000 things is more It's real.

[44:49]

There can be 10,000 ants out in the garden. 10,000 is like... real parts of the world, not just a generalization myriad. So to convey the self to the 10,000 things is delusion. to externalize your perceptions and delusion to let the 10,000 things come forward and cultivate and authenticate the self is enlightenment so it's actually the word used in Japanese means cultivate and authenticate So to cultivate and authenticate the 10,000 things by conveying themself to them is delusion.

[45:54]

Now, of course, this is a different self that's being referred to. To let the 10,000 things come forward and cultivate and authenticate the self is realization. Now do you see where that comes from and how we got to that point through the four foundations of enlightenment? It was a slip of the tongue, I trust. As Freud even taught me. Okay. Yeah, now this has been on my mind, so I will do a little short riff on it.

[46:57]

And it's a question someone asked me. So again, the four foundations give us a new kind of sight-centered presence and mind. Give us a new... New kind of sight-centered mind. And you developed an attentional attention which is joined attention. Now I call this attentional attention non-personal. Because it's free of what we called the six animals earlier as part of an old idea. The six senses pulling in different directions.

[48:28]

And self-referential thinking. So you've developed an equanimous attentional attention. that isn't pushed around by the senses and not captured by self-referential thinking. And it becomes and can become one of the ways in which one comes to the Nagarjuna's idea of the two truths. It's one of the ways one probably got to Nagarjuna's, how Nagarjuna got to this idea of the two truths.

[49:37]

So the two truths are that the conventional world Which we see as permanent, predictable, and so forth. Which we have to function in, in that way. So it's a truth. Okay. And then there's the knowledge, first of all a knowledge, that everything is momentary, Present is only a duration within our own senses. There's no entities. It's empty lessness and empty lessness is also emptiness. So you need what I call a dual continuum.

[50:54]

Or I make up the word simultaneous. Or I make up the word simultaneous. Simultaneous continuum. Where you simultaneously know the world as conventional and as empty. And the strength and possibility of that is developed in large part, significant way at least, through the four foundations of mindfulness.

[51:59]

And we can also say, and I'm not going to develop the distinction, but I often make the distinction between awareness and consciousness. We can function through simultaneously awareness, be aware of awareness bringing things up, bringing things up outside of consciousness, while at the same time we're functioning within consciousness. This ability to establish a simultaneous I act like it's in the dictionary is in significant ways rooted in the practice of the four foundations of mindfulness.

[53:09]

Although this isn't exactly an example, people brought me cookies. Every day I found a new bunch of cookies on my table. Yeah. And so with my tea in the morning, I would have a cookie or two or three. And they were piled up, you know, sort of like this, right? So my eye would send my hand out toward the cookies. I was just fooling around watching what would go on my hand would you know in my mind I was going to reach the nearest cookie But my body knew the nearest cookie was underneath the other one.

[54:35]

So my eye would send my hand out and my hand would go right over the pile of cookies to the last one and pull it out. This is nothing, no big deal, I'm not ending the seminar with the cookie dharma. And Kickstarter. Yeah. You can have your cookie. But it was interesting to watch, you know, because on a thinking level I was going to get the near one, but my body knew better. And that kind of way in which the body acts and the mind acts and deeper things act simultaneously, we can become more aware of.

[55:36]

So let's have the pleasure of sitting for a moment and hearing the bell. Thank you, each one of you, for being here.

[60:23]

Each one of you makes a big difference to me. Thank you for organizing this again, Andreas. Should we do it next year? My northern, my northern Germany, central, so... This and Rastenberg in Austria are the only outside seminars I do. Thank you, Heinrich, for making this our northern Dharma Sangha home. I like that orange shirt. And thank you for translating. You're welcome.

[60:59]

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