I rang the bell a little earlier than half an hour. Because I would like us to continue our discussion in small groups. Yeah, because we had such a, I think, good discussion before lunch. We were a little rather behind schedule. Behind schedule. How do we ever get behind schedule? Anyway, but before we have a break in small groups and blah, blah, blah, I think it's my turn to say something. And I thought, again, in this context, I would review what I consider the most basic lay breathing practice.

[01:23]

Of course the most basic attitude for Zazen I say of course but at least it's what I emphasize is the attitude of uncorrected mind. And the most basic practice of zazen is bringing attention to the breath, to the exhales from one to ten. It is It's all so simple.

[02:26]

As you know, it's not so easy to do. It's very simple. There's somebody sent me one of those jokes, you know, the Internet jokes. It was advice, you know. And it was breathe in, Atma ein. Breathe out. Atma aus. Breathe in. Atma ein. Breathe out. Atma aus. If you forget that, enlightenment is the least of your problems. Anyway. But, obviously, you're not breathing, you're dead. or soon to be. So when you bring your mind, your attention, through counting to your breath, you're entering into the most accessible basal or basic rhythm of being alive.

[03:51]

You're beginning to attentionally participate in how you exist. It takes a while before you can fairly easily rest your tensions in your breath for ten exhales, one after ten after another. And then in zazen there's other practices of following your breath and so forth, not counting but following. Or bringing attention to the crest of the breath or the depth of the breath.

[04:56]

Yeah, it really does have a transforming effect on us. Okay, I'm talking now and emphasizing today practice that doesn't depend on Zaza. So I'm now speaking about what I call lay breath practice, or let's say daily breath practice. Now, daily breath practice, bringing attention to the breath in the midst of your daily activity, is certainly helped by developing the skill, yogic skill, of bringing attention to the breath and zazen.

[06:06]

It's very helpful but not necessary. Okay. Okay, so You don't have the context of zazen to remind you to bring attention to your breath. So you have to form an intention to bring attention to your breath. And to make that intention, you have to, yeah, it's like any intention or New Year's resolutions.

[07:33]

And intentions to exercise or whatever. How do you get yourself to do it? And so in a way, part of the practice becomes noticing when you can hold an intention and when you can't. So the important thing is not how much you fulfill the intention, but how permanently it's present. The most basic intention is to stay alive. And unfortunately, some people stay alive without that intention.

[08:45]

And they don't realize a lot of their problems are they really haven't made an intention to stay alive. They're staying alive by default. But anyway, ideally you make it deep and I think one of the things you want children to child in the earliest time to do is to really consciously have this intention to stay alive, not just instinctive. And then there's refinements, how to stay alive, why to stay alive. But to some similar depth as the vow to stay alive, you make a vow to bring attention to the

[09:59]

If you do that, it will eventually happen. The intention to bring attention to your breath And that's kind of hovering in the wings, the wings, the wings of a theater. Hovering in the wings of your millions of moments. Hovering is a wing. We'll actually begin to make it happen. Now, a simple question. First, it's very easy to bring attention to your breath for a few breaths.

[11:23]

But almost impossible for most people to do it continuously. aber es ist fast unmöglich für die meisten, das andauernd und länger zu machen. So this crucial question, crossroad crucial question, also die wesentliche Frage is why is something so easy to do, so difficult to do, continuous? Wie kann es sein, dass etwas, was And I would say, and the answer is partly, probably stronger in our own culture than Asian culture, is that we establish our identity in our thinking. We establish our continuity in our thinking.

[12:43]

And you cannot function as a human being if you don't have an experience of continuity. Okay. So your mind, your attention, excuse me, maybe on your breath for a while, momentarily, moments, but then goes to your thinking. And it's certainly not because your thinking is all that interesting. Any old thinking will do the back of a cereal box. I mean, yeah. But if you have this intention, And it's really there.

[13:59]

And so one of the things you're developing in this practice, the ability to really install an intention. And the ability to install intentions is critical to being able to transform structures of mind. Okay, it's only an intention so installed which has the power to change the structures of mind. In this practice, you're usually working with having noticed, just let me say, simply working with your worldview.

[15:18]

Okay, now you've got this installed intention to bring attention to the breath. And through that you'll learn one of the most fundamental yogic skills, which is one-pointedness. In other words, I can bring attention to this stick and the attention goes away. And I bring it back. It goes away. You don't have to translate everything. And at some point, it gets a little easier to bring back. It goes away, but I can bring it back.

[16:20]

At some point it starts going away, but comes back by itself. This really happens. It comes back by itself. Then at some point it just rests there. And that's called one-pointedness. You can place attention anywhere you want and it stays. Okay. Now, in a similar way, an identical way, eventually the breath just starts, tension just starts resting in the breath. At some point, it's just like a gummi band breaks, and it just breaks.

[17:24]

Okay, now what is the result of that? You now are bringing, now your breath, your attention is resting in your breath. I mean, right now my breath, I don't know who owns it, but it's in my voice, it's speaking. And it certainly affects how I'm speaking. Yeah. So, once your attention is resting in your breath, it's also resting more and more in your body.

[18:35]

And bringing the body into a relationship with breath and attention. Now, if you have any treasure, the biggest treasure you have is attention. And attention is what you bring attention to will become your life. Or where your attention spends its time. Now, it ought to be clear that attention is not simply a form of consciousness. In other words, I can be conscious of this room right now. And I can bring attention to you while I'm conscious of the room. I can hold attention on Elizabeth, even though I'm looking somewhere else.

[19:50]

Or I can shift attention to where my eyes are. Or I can take attention and... Let it go through the little opening into sleep. Then you have lucid dreaming. And that's not consciousness anymore. You're sleeping and yet you can have attention in your dreams. So attention is a dynamic of mind not confined to consciousness. And attention is the way we engage, particularly through awareness and attention, engage the whole of our body, physiology, our health, phenomena, etc.

[21:17]

So you're doing a lot with such simple tools. I mean, they're not simple tools. Extraordinarily complex tools, easily available. And to recognize, it's already a big step, to recognize their tools and not just your nature. Okay, so what have you done when you brought again attention to the breath? And the body. You've taken the experience of continuity

[22:18]

outer thinking into the body. So now you've established the experience of continuity in the body and not in thinking. That also greatly reduces the click, click, click of self-referential thinking. Do you say click differently in German? Yeah. So that's why I don't click in German. Oh, excuse me. Wow. This is a big, big thing.

[23:39]

If you change how you establish psychological continuity. And the self is a construct of consciousness. Not all aspects of the self, but one of the main dynamics of self is a constructive consciousness. You simply reconstructed the self. That's not small. So now you have established moment by moment continuity which we have to do to survive. In the body. You've changed your relationship to separation. Du hast auch deine Beziehung zur Trennung verändert.

[24:50]

And so forth. Now you've also established the basis for attention to a phenomena. Und damit hast du auch die Basis geschaffen, dass du die Aufmerksamkeit dem Phänomen geben kannst. Now the present doesn't exist. Die Gegenwart existiert nicht. In a temporal sense. It only exists in experiential sense. As I said to my father once in an early insight, I said it's a minute to twelve, and then it's half a minute to twelve, and then it's a millionth of a second before twelve, and then it's a millionth of a second after twelve. And I said, there's no 12, Dad.

[25:51]

What do we do? That was about 12. And he said, well, something that's approached and then passed can be said to exist. Temporarily. I thought that was a pretty good answer. Very useful. But it's immediately passed, right? Now, why do we have an experience of duration? This is actually quite interestingly examined by some recent French philosophers. What is the experience of duration? Now, the experience of duration is a... You know, we have psychotic scanning to see things, right?

[27:01]

You're going back and forth so many thousand times a second or something. Hundreds of times a second. And your brain puts a picture together. And the process of putting that picture together is an experience of duration. So the present is actually an attentional phenomena. And if you bring attention to that attentional phenomena, You change your relationship to the present.

[28:02]

You're generating the present. Buddhism teaches everything's changing. Which means also that everything is interdependent. So Buddhism is the teaching of interdependence. But a better translation or a better word for what's meant by interdependence would be inter-emergence. Because it's not simply just independence, things next to each other, resting, this bell is resting on a pillow.

[29:06]

Actually, the present is an event. It's not a container. It's an event. Event means E is to... Outside and vent is like vent, veneer, the French word to come. What comes into the outside. So the present is an event. So the present is an event. And it's an event in which you were born. And it's an event in which you will die. And each moment this could happen. So to be attentionally present In the presence of the present as an event is how you actualize your life.

[30:22]

To be intentionally present in the present as presence is how you actualize your actual life. Thank you. You still have the anticipated future, as I said this morning. But you now anticipate it differently. It's a little bit like instead of driving through the present now, you're not even on a bicycle in the present, you're walking in the present. You know, at least in English we say we're going into the future, we go into the future. In China, they say, the future is coming to us in its surprise.

[31:42]

Yeah. So you don't prepare for the future in China. We prepare for the future. They're ready for the future. We are preparing for the future and the Chinese are ready for the future. The sort of yogic impulse in Chinese culture. So these slight differences of way to put things represent very different world views. So this daily breath practice changes your relationship to the continuity of self and changes how you actualize the present. I can't think of anything more important, I could say.

[32:54]

Except that it's time for a break. So there's a basic Zen breath practice for you to breathe on. And I'll leave it to Atmar, the kindergarten process of creating a small group.

[33:21]

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