Well, with you, with being with you, I feel on the edge, a little over the edge, of discovering how to think about and experience aliveness. I mean, we're born, and so you're alive, at least for a while. But I think there's also simultaneously... Aliveness not as a given but as an art. Aliveness is maybe an ancient art. In our own western culture. And also for sure I know in Buddhist culture.

[01:02]

Now, the Greek word for being, as I've read anyway, was presence. Now, if... But I had no idea if the Greeks meant what I am trying to present as presence here. Nor what Dogen meant by presence. But he spoke about the freely using and totally exerting the nirvana of birth and death.

[02:29]

Okay, now, what he meant by the nirvana of birth and death is that we're living in this display of interdependence, of intermergence. And this display, I don't know, display of birth and death. Of interdependence of things appearing and disappearing. And he's assuming here that your experience of interdependence is not just some phenomenological or scientific sense of the world is changing.

[03:38]

It's not just that. But that you are changing. Kanagiri Rinpoche used to say, he had a phrase, to settle yourself on yourself. Katagiri Roshi was one of the two Japanese monk priests who came to San Francisco to help Suzuki Roshi. Anyway, Katagiri Roshi... very common phrase used to be to settle yourself on yourself. Now, he didn't mean to settle yourself in clock time.

[04:58]

He meant to settle yourself in what I'm calling performative time. And I'm also calling durative and sensorial phenomenological time. So I'm trying to find experiential words, experiential access to time not as clock time. But also what Dogen calls being time. Uji, being time. And it's interesting, the woman who's supposedly the best contemporary translation in English of Heidegger's Being and Time.

[06:16]

Her name is Joan Stanborough, something like that. I have to visualize it and I can't quite see it. Anyway, she also wrote a book on Dogen called Impermanence is Buddha nature. And it's quite interesting how she relates, having spent years translating Mammoth Being in Time of Heidegger, And this little thin book called Impermanence is Buddha Nature. And the latter part of the book, the last chapter, makes a direct comparison of Dogen and Heidegger's sense of being and time.

[07:39]

And they're different. And they're also very similar and also overlapping. Dogen immediately goes into experienced time and being, and Heidegger stays more in trying to stay in a philosophical realm, being in time. Okay, so Norbert used to tell me he likes hearing this three times. He hears his own translation.

[08:45]

He hears your translation. He hears me. Yeah. Yeah, whatever is happening is somewhere in the middle. So if we, let's go back to Katagiri Roshi saying to settle yourself on yourself. And I think if we try to bring that out into consciousness, language in a way we can access it he means to settle your self point your attentional self point in the continuum of self, in the self-continuum.

[10:00]

Okay. Now, instead of speaking about the continuity of self, maybe and self and non-self, Maybe it would be useful for us to think about a continuum of self, a self-continuum. A territory, a continuum like a stream or even a field, in which the functions are, as I often say, junctures, of self appear. Or the territories of self appear in the continuum of self. Okay. Now I've been teaching for many years the four functions of self.

[11:03]

And just so that those of you who are new and the rest of you are reminded briefly of it. And I guess I don't need a flip chart, but... It's only four things, but sometimes four things are clearer when they're written. So it's separation, connectedness, continuity, and contextual relevance. Or I sometimes just say relevancy. It has to be meaningful.

[12:22]

It has to be somehow in the context of your life. Now, what I'm suggesting is if you're engaging yourself in the very fundamental and basic practice of looking for self or at the non-self, you need a sort of target of where to look. So that maybe the continuum of self, as you feel various aspects of self appear in you, is a target. Or perhaps within that continuum you can notice experiences of continuity. Or separation, etc. or being separated, and so on.

[13:37]

If the Self is anything at all, then it is the way in which we bring our experiences and bring our experience to the world. But it's not just bringing our experience to the world. It's bringing the world into our experience. So we could also see these functions as we need to have in order to survive. We could see these functions also as junctures. points at which, openings at which, where two things join is also an opening.

[14:48]

Yeah, so the four junctures where the world flows into us, Yeah. Okay, so we could say that Katagiri Roshi is saying to settle yourself on yourself is to settle the attentional point of self. In the continuum of self. But now that also means, as I said, not clock time, but what I'm calling performative time.

[15:53]

Now, the word perform is quite useful here, I think. Because as I said yesterday, it means to completely enact, completely do something. Yeah. And performative time is also durative time. Und diese Zeit der vollständigen Ausführung ist auch Dauerzeit. And I'm sorry I'm saying these things over and over again sometimes, but each of these concepts needs to have a real location in your mind.

[16:57]

conceptual patterns, structures. So your activity and noticing and thinking flows in relationship to these structures. So durative time being the... the experience of a present as having a duration when in fact it doesn't. Now once you realize your presence, your present is a presence, and is the presence that we can call durative time then again its duration can be various.

[18:02]

You can bring your attention to something you're working on for instance And sometimes accomplish more in a few minutes, five, ten minutes or less, than you would in half an hour in some other circumstances. Because you've made durative time more absorbent, more porous Sometimes time just sucks us into the world.

[19:05]

And sometimes time flows into us. Now, this territory of experience is what is implied and pointed out in all the koans and dogen and so forth. But it's not experiences we're born with. Now, we might be born in a culture that emphasizes more or less these things. I don't know. But basically it's considered an art. An art, we can say an art of aliveness. An art of knowing things as they are. Or an art of knowing the is-ness of things, the thus-ness of things. Being as thusness was a question Heidegger I guess never really answered, but it's certainly answered in a Buddhist way.

[20:31]

Okay. So performative time, I'm trying to give us a sense of performative time. As I've said, durative time, but also as sensorial, phenomenological time. Because it's completely engaged with the display of interdependence. So it's not only a phenomenological experience integrating the world phenomenologically, we could say, We can also say it's an epistemological way of being.

[21:45]

Now, by epistemology, I'm just happy to use this word. meaning to be able to discriminate between what's true and what's just personal or prevalent views to know what's authentic knowledge and to know what authentic knowledge is. If we just take philosophically authentic knowledge and talk about it, it's a big argument, but you can have the experience of authenticity.

[22:49]

But we're also not just talking about the world as phenomenologically out there in the senses. But also as the out there in the senses becomes the in here of beingness. She's doing okay though, right? So maybe to throw another big word in, a technical word, maybe we're doing something we could call ontophenomenology.

[24:06]

Meaning, onto meaning the study of being in relationship to the sensorium or phenomenology or something like that. And I'm again using these three words, three technical words. To suggest that somehow what we're talking about in Buddhism also has locations we can find in Western philosophy. So again, coming back to performative time. As the main operative name I'm giving to time. Operative name. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know what I mean. Okay.

[25:26]

Why not? Okay. Say that you're again working on an essay. For publication or for university or course or something. And you have to finish it by tomorrow. So you're completely engaged in that topic, how to write it out, how to think it out. And when you go to sleep, It's still working in you. And maybe, and if you work like I do, all distractions, all confusions, all happenstance is part of the process.

[26:35]

It's a field of engagement. It's not just focused on this topic. The number of the bus which just went by you somehow is part of the process. this kind of engagement is, I would call, performative time. Now, if you took the topic away and you would just perform the time in that way, That would be something like what Dogen means by the total exertion freely using the nirvana of life and death.

[27:47]

Nirvana, what? No, I'm looking. I used the word for exertion that I haven't used before that I really liked, and now I forgot. Ausschöpfen. Ausschöpfen. That's the one. Okay. So when you're walking, for instance, I'm just trying to suggest the sense of performative time. When you're walking, the foot is performing footing. And I know a number of people with problems in their feet. Catherine's big toe doesn't work very well. She can't bow. Your feet don't work so well sometimes. Yeah, my feet are getting old.

[29:13]

Anyway, you experience footing. And you experience the floor flooring. Because it's all more participatory. Flooring and footing. And you feel you're in the midst of this footing and flooring and the impact of the feet going up the spine and through the head and so forth. And there's a kind of vitality to this. In fact, Dogen calls this vitality. Dogen says to freely use and exert. And he defines use as both use and surrender to.

[30:18]

He talks about this total exertion as a way to freely use everything that appears as body, mind and phenomena. And simultaneously fully surrender to body, mind and phenomena. I think you can feel the dynamic of that. It sounds like a contradiction. But to freely use and simultaneously fully surrender to this beingness, Okay, is that enough for this morning?

[31:49]

Are you full enough before we have a break? You know, for me, when I try to say this, I have to fully exert myself, too, and freely use whatever's happening. If I try to say that, then I have to completely exhaust myself and at the same time also go completely. Yeah, and then I have to fully and freely use my translator.

[32:51]

And I hope there's enough sense of it to give you for now the feeling of performative time. And now, even in the context of Buddhism, the sense of the skill or the art of performative time is developed, it evolves. And so it's something that you find yourself performing sometimes. But that performance, even if brief gives you a definitive touchstone of aliveness.

[33:58]

You feel yourself immersed in a non-dual aliveness. Being a particular being in a particular context, Being a particular being in a particular context. Circumstantially, particular circumstances. And simultaneously, being in a beingness we share with all sentience. Because we are simultaneously a being and also beings. And it's you. Each of us is an individual being.

[35:35]

And the fact that I'm speaking language, and language is something beings have created. And all the beings that preceded you and are presently in your life are part of you. So part of being is to feel this being and beings as a simultaneous interaction. As a being, you're performing beingness. Yeah, beingness is performing itself through you. I'm not just trying to be difficult.

[36:43]

I'm trying to have fun. All right, let's have a break.

[36:48]

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