Hi. Hi. He looked different than yesterday. Andreas, how are you? I'm good. Fine, but sick. That was Daniel's line. I'm fine, but sick. Where are you, Daniel? Is he not here? I guess he's still sick. Oh dear. It deepens your voice to be sick. I'm glad you're not the Doan. None of us could chat. Okay. So I, as I said yesterday, I entered this teisho space through attention to a lot of details, the bowing, the sitting, the robes.

[01:10]

And the robes aren't made of spandex. And so they're meant to be inconvenient and require attention. And this You know, all these little things that require attention. Yeah, if you just accept them, it's not a nuisance. nuisance, trouble.

[02:11]

But it develops attention. So, I mean, since we have this, again, title, topic, the foundations of our basics of Zen teaching and practice. I'm trying to at least start with basics. But, you know, the level at which you're practicing makes me bring these basics to the edge of what we can understand. And I would have... I would have... The afternoon yesterday was nice, but I would have liked to have heard your answers about the oddities of my teachings.

[03:21]

But to be at the edge of understanding is also to be at the edge of disorder. And how to stay without disturbance at the edge of understanding. Now obviously if I'm going to speak about the basics, I should speak about mindfulness. And the main formal teaching of mindfulness is the Satipatthana Sutra. And the Satipatthana practice is usually to bring attention to the body. Attention to the realm of feelings and emotions. An attention to mind itself. In the simplest sense, just noticing what state of mind you're in.

[04:35]

And how that state of mind colors everything. And then the fourth, awakening or foundation of mindfulness, is to bring attention. to objects as mental objects. This is what we've been speaking about. Now, I said yesterday, the sense in this culture, this Buddhist culture, is that when we're speaking, yeah, Atmar and I,

[05:41]

Yeah, we're drawing words out of silence. But the feeling is that some silence sticks to the words. And then draws the words back into silence. Yeah. So we come to feel the space of the speaking as well as the speaking. And in the silence of the speaking, there's also speaking. And while you've drawn the words into audibility and meaning, and some silence sticks to it, you begin to have a pattern.

[07:00]

In Japanese, this pattern of things is called ma. It means space, or interval. interval. And it's a very basic idea brought into Japanese culture through Buddhism. And so Ma is the sense of Multiple meanings. Yeah, or the sense of... Vagueness or what can't be understood. And so it's this sort of sense of invisible connectedness.

[08:15]

Okay. Okay. So I just went through that to kind of give you a picture of how things exist in the particulars and in the spaces of the particulars. The spaces within and around. So let's go to the word satipatthana.

[09:20]

Now generally and usually a satipatthana practice is taught to bring attention to breath to body and feelings and so forth. And you do that. And I guarantee you you learn a lot from that. Buddha supposedly said that through satipatthana practice alone you could realize enlightenment. And one of the phrases Suki Roshi uses throughout this text we have, is the mind that is always with us. It's always with us, but we don't always notice it. So if you notice that every percept and cognition is in the realm of mind, then you are noticing the mind

[10:42]

one sense at least, of the mind that's always with us. As soon as you notice mind on an object, that all objects, and thoughts are also objects in this sense, are mental objects, Then you... you start, the more this becomes the habit you inhabit, you have a different feeling for the world. And the act of noticing The noticing which allows the mind that's always with us to appear. This experience of noticing is part of mindfulness, of course.

[12:01]

And The noticing becomes where attention is attention and becomes where attention is carried. Und das Bemerken ist Aufmerksamkeit, aber es ist auch wo Aufmerksamkeit getragen wird. And noticing doesn't carry a lot of baggage. Noticing has to be quite free. But noticing is not... Noticing is not neutral.

[13:07]

Noticing is always contextual. Noticing in a context and noticing itself as a context. And a context is always causal. And a context is always So noticing itself becomes a way of causing, of making things happen. Now, again, I think if a newcomer came in here, they'd say, boy, this is intellectual. Any of you newcomers? But I want us to have to notice our noticing with some subtlety.

[14:08]

So the whole point of what I'm saying is not to create some philosophical structure. To get to to notice the power of noticing itself, the noticing which is able to notice the mind that is always with us. So we're focusing noticing on noticing mind. And our noticing becomes more powerful and more sensitive. So you're not just Noticing like turning a flashlight on.

[15:11]

And the battery gets weaker and weaker. Every time you turn the flashlight of noticing on. The battery gets stronger. The light gets stronger. The light gets clearer. Okay. Okay. Now, satipatthana is again called the four awakenings or the four foundations. And the... when it is the foundation, it becomes an awakening. Okay, so if we look at the word Satipatthana, and this is very typical of the title for a teaching, in Sanskrit and Chinese, they tried to make titles which were the

[16:23]

secret of the teaching itself. Okay, so Again, satipatthana is taught to bring attention to body, feelings, mind and mental objects. But if we look at the title itself, the name itself of the teaching, But when we look at the title itself, the name of the teaching itself, Patana means foundation. And Sati means to hold or to hold. told near. Now foundation really means foundation. The foundation of how we exist, how we live, what is being and becoming.

[17:31]

And what the world is. And you know... Let's look at the word landscape. And let's not think of landscape as the world. And let's think of landscape as a stage. A landscape as a stage where we're weaving the stage itself, the world itself. And scape, the scape part in English means, the etymology means ship. Land, ship, a ship you can sail in. Is it the same in German? Land, ship? No, maybe not. No. Okay. It's more working in it, yeah.

[18:33]

To work. To make something. Well, that's not so different. Craftsmanship is to make something in English. So to make the landscape. And it also tends to mean in gardening you plant the trees a certain way and you make the, like Otmar has made it so beautiful around here. Did I notice a slight difference in the translation? Okay. I'm not completely dumb, you know.

[19:34]

I know. You know. Okay. So if we say this Through attention to the body, feeling, we enter into the foundation of how we exist. No wonder the Buddha said we can realize enlightenment through this. Kein Wunder, dass der Buddha gesagt hat, dadurch können wir Erleuchtung realisieren. Wir erkunden die Grundlage unserer Existenz durch die Aufmerksamkeit. Or it's better in English to say exploring our existing, not our existence, because existence is like an entity. Existing is a verb. Oder besser im Englischen und auch im Deutschen zu erklären, wir erkunden unser Existieren im Sinne von einem Verb.

[20:44]

Okay. So. Then in short, satipatthana means to hold the foundation near. Okay, so we use, it also means to hold the parts near. So, attention notices parts. developed attention holds those parts in a field. I call that, to make some difference, attentional attention. It's not just simply that you see something in the light.

[21:47]

But you hold it in the light and you turn it around and the light itself is part of what you're looking at. The light is the noticing and the looking in the mind. So now we're getting more into the more thorough experience of mindfulness. So when you use attention, you develop attention. And that developed attention, which takes some time, That developed attention can hold things and let them incubate. It's a little bit, again, It's part of the same world which says things are drawn out of silence.

[22:56]

And the silence also speaks. So this is not, again, just silence. Mindfulness practice. It is also the practice of knowing experientially interdependence. Now, someone pointed out to me in Doksan, they're feeling that when you experience a mental object as a mental object, there's a certain...

[24:03]

distance or separation. Because what you become aware of is that you only are aware of what you're aware of. And so then you become inferentially aware that there's parts you are not aware of. Okay, now that's a kind of distance. Yeah, and I use the word distance rather than separation. It's a kind of, I would say, intimate distance. And since I have to speak about this in words and pick words off this... experience and make them stand for something.

[25:16]

Stand for something. I'm using distance with the sense that it means to stand apart. Distance. And in English we have understand, distand, distance. And stand... In English, the etymology means to exist or to be placed. Just simply to exist. It's placed, it exists, it stands. But I'm using intimate distance to mean... it stands near.

[26:24]

And And so satipatthana is to hold in mind what stands near. And to hold this as the foundation. It's not just the foundation in that we penetrate the body with attention. But the body, mind, feelings, mental objects are all a field Körper, Geist, Gefühle, mentale Formationen, das sind alles Felder. Zusammenhängende Felder.

[27:26]

The more you can allow this causal field to incubate. Wer du diesem kausalen Feld erlauben kannst, bebrütet zu werden. Again, to try to use words to direct your attention. Ich nochmal, ich versuche hier Wörter zu verwenden, um unsere Aufmerksamkeit zu lenken. Elements of the field are not essences or something like that. They're pregnancies. pregnancies. Each thing is pregnant with possibilities. So to hold the foundation near in matured mindfulness is to feel that hidden landscape. What we can't quite reach with our understanding.

[28:28]

That mystery and intimate distance that we respect. Which is still part of the causative field. So mindfulness then is to hold this causative field moment by moment in place, a sort of in place. So the feeling isn't just that you live from moment to moment, but you find a kind of pace which you incubate each moment. To give each moment A little pause, as I say.

[29:39]

A little space. Maybe we could say you pause for the incubation. And when you pause for the incubation inside and outside flow together. And it's not something you can grasp by thinking or feeling. Because some of it is just intimate but distant. But you can trust this mind which notices, this mind which notices in the way I've been speaking, to be the mind of enlightenment and the mind which leads to enlightenment.

[30:51]

Okay? Okay. I think I was too short today. What is short? What is long? Yeah. Thanks.

[31:18]

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