Well, it just proves what I'm talking about, that we're relational objects. We're breathing the same air and sharing the same viral body. And we do much more than we allow ourselves to notice share the same body. Since we're starting that way, I can give you that same quote again. Heaven and earth and I share the same root. Himmel, Erde und ich teilen dieselbe Wurzel.

[01:03]

Myriad things and I share the same body. Myriaden von Dingen und ich teilen den gleichen Körper. So our practice is always, you know, we could say that our practice is always to make sense of a statement like that. Und unsere Praxis ist immer herauszufinden, was so eine Aussage bedeutet. Maybe sense is the wrong word, but to feel or live how that is true. Let's not say how it's true, let's say how it might be true. Because truth is something where whatever truth is, it's... something we're always in the process of trying to find out. And, you know, in Zen, there's actually nothing to believe.

[02:07]

So Zen is something we do, it's not something we believe. You could even say Zen is the practice of asking what is going on. How do we ask this question, what is going on? So in these first lectures of this practice month, I'm trying to look in a very basic way at what our practice is. So one of the things I've been speaking about implicitly and explicitly is that there's no objects, everything is a relational object.

[03:36]

No, I think probably most of us understand that. But is it a view that's really the most fundamental view in our thinking and acting? Or do we know that sort of, but in fact act and live our life with the feeling that, yeah, there is an objective world and so forth? And I want to be careful when I say these things. Because in lots of ways we come into Zen practice because we just want to live in this objective world.

[04:40]

Yeah, wash the dishes, look at the world without too many ideas and so forth. When I walk down the hall in this building, What am I doing? Walking down the hall in this building. Sometimes we can feel that more fully in a movie, in a film, than we can in our own activity. Say that a movie opens with a camera somehow going down a hall. And you feel the... And you wonder what's going to happen next.

[06:03]

Basically, you're asking the question, what's going on going down this hall? And if it's a good movie, the plot isn't predictable. So you feel going down the hall because you don't know what the plot is. So can we do something simple like walk down the hall in this building? Free of our plot? Our narrative self? You're just walking down the hall on this planet, in this building. So what are you doing? On this planet, in this building.

[07:05]

You're not anywhere else. Nirgends anders. This is real simple stuff. Das ist wirklich ganz einfaches Zeug. You're not anywhere else. Nirgends anders seid ihr. Can you actually feel that? Könnt ihr das eigentlich spüren? Can you have then the... You might as well. If you're not anywhere else... You're not anywhere else. Nachdem ihr ja nirgends anders seid... So you might as well have the fullness of your life at each moment. I mean, wherever you are, that's where you are. So wherever you are, you might as well have the fullness of your life. Or you're not thinking the fullness of your life is somewhere else. I can make you a little promise that if you find the fullness of your life wherever you are, When you're in that place in the future where you think your fullness of your life is really supposed to be, it'll be even better.

[08:47]

Because you'll get used to the fullness of your life being present all the time. And the fullness of your life is much more likely to be present if the plot is unknown. Of course, on some level, we know the plot. We know what we're going to do. We know where our car is parked. It reminds me of when Marie-Louise's car was stolen. In Rostock. Parked in a parking lot, a company parking lot next to the security car. And we were gone 20 minutes or something like that.

[10:20]

And we came back and the car was gone. And I said, we must have parked somewhere else. And Marie-Louise said, no, the car is gone. She was much more zen than I am. Because I still had a plot in my mind that the car has to be somewhere. She was much quicker to say, uh-uh, it's actually gone. That's where we parked. Yeah, so we never actually know what's going to happen. Yeah. And the biggest word for Buddha, as you know, is tathagata. It means something like everything all at once. Most specifically, it means the one who comes and goes.

[11:22]

And the one who comes and goes and knows everything comes and goes. So how do we discover this mind, which really is created through everything coming and going? And yet find some way to live in this world. Going into Zazen, I said, you know, we want to, I said the other day, we want, we discover it's a space, a space of experience. But again, we can't say quite what it is and we want to drop our ideas of what it is.

[12:28]

Another kind of time. And again, another kind of self, not our usual sense of self. We can ask, how are things glued together? So you can ask, what's going on, what's not going on? Or what goes at a slower speed, maybe, some question like that. What's going on and how are things glued together? Was geht vor sich und wie sind die Dinge miteinander verklebt? We take for granted everything's glued together.

[13:43]

Wir gehen davon, nein, wir nehmen das selbstverständlich für selbstverständlich, dass die Dinge miteinander verhaftet sind. We're all stuck to this floor. Wir kleben ja alle hier an diesem Boden. And this remarkable body we have all works miraculously well. Und dieser wunderbare Körper, den wir haben, der funktioniert auf wunderbarste Weise. But in another sense, we are all falling in space, but we're all falling at the same speed. That's a kind of fact that we're all falling in space. But at the same speed. But even this gravity that glues us together is a relational field.

[14:49]

We know it's different on the moon. We saw those guys jumping, you know. So everything is relational as a way of saying everything's changing. So how are we glued together? And we're not on the moon, but maybe in zazen things are glued together differently. Certainly in dreaming we are glued together differently. Sometimes we fly. Sometimes we can't make phones work or cars to start. Yes, so things are glued together in dreaming differently than in waking mind.

[16:00]

So what kind of mind are we in zazen? Yeah, maybe it's a little bit like the moon. We can jump a little higher or we can imagine different things. Or we can imagine things that we can realize that our waking mind wouldn't imagine. So Zazen, you know, if you get... So that Zazen is something you want to do, you do. It really works, not so much because you do it, but that's part of it. You do have to just do it.

[17:15]

But you continue it, and when it works, it's really just a place you live. Aber ihr setzt es immer fort und wenn es dann funktioniert, dann ist es wirklich ein Ort, an dem ihr zu leben beginnt. Also so wie schlafen, ihr macht nicht euer Schlafen, sondern ihr schlaft einfach. Sleeping is one of the places you live. And if you really find this practice real for you, it's just one of the places you live. And it often feels like taking a bath, or better than any bath. You put all your baggage down. You live in the house of Zazen. You don't bring your furniture, you don't bring your clothes. Even the house is baggage.

[18:34]

You feel quite free. There's no plot. You say, what's going on? And you can bring other questions to this, what's going on. Because if there's no plot and everything changing... Denn wenn es keinen Filmhandlungsablauf gibt und sich alles immer ändert... Then you know all plots are tentative. Dann wisst ihr, dass alle Handlungsabläufe tentative? Yeah, they might happen. Dass die alle nur unsicher sind? Are we okay?

[19:38]

Okay. Thank you. But to know that all plots are tentative, if you're really then trying to make it as real as possible, that's very different than knowing all plots are tentative. while at the same time with a simultaneous mind, a fundamental mind, which has no expectations. Which really doesn't even care what happens.

[20:40]

Even, well, you care about terrible things happening to other people, but to yourself even, oh, whatever happens, somehow it is okay. It's a kind of trust maybe in the future instead of plotting the future. You like the simple practice of walking as if you're not sure the floor is going to be there when you step out. It's usually there. Going down the hall, you step out, and surprisingly, the floor usually comes up to meet your foot. So you have... So you walk with the weariness or aliveness, perhaps more like an animal.

[21:50]

Which is wary and simultaneously reassured because usually the floor is there. Living in a relational world is more like that. It's really in your body. You live like this in your body? It's in your body. You know, I was, of course, I had to get ready for this ceremony yesterday. And then I have to get, you know, make ink and all that stuff, you know.

[22:54]

And it reminded me of the, yeah, even kanji, Japanese, Chinese characters. are relational objects. Now, I'm not promoting Japanese and Chinese culture. All cultures that I'm familiar with are warped into the service of some form of ego. But of course, because Japanese culture in particular, but much of Asian culture, developed in relationship to Buddhism in very important ways, and as much of English developed through Shakespeare,

[24:01]

Much of Chinese, the language, developed through the immense Buddhist translation projects, which were like Max Planck think tanks. So hat sich ein Großteil des Chinesisch entwickelt durch diese immensen Übersetzungsarbeiten, die man sich fast wie Max Planck Denkinstitute vorstellen kann. Now, if I said to you, kanji, this kind of language, they're called kanji, the characters, probably makes you smarter. You might think this is a little odd. But it's been established in Western psychology, et cetera, how much our brain, actually our physical brain, develops in the relationship with the parents, primarily the mother,

[25:28]

Aber das ist etwas, das in westlicher Psychologie und anderswo etabliert ist, wie sehr sich das Gehirn des Kindes in Beziehung zur Mutter und so weiter entwickelt. So the brain itself is a relational object as well as a genetic object. Somit ist das Gehirn selber ein Beziehungsobjekt, sowohl wie ein Genobjekt. And somehow that's understood in the culture. in yogic culture. And when MacArthur... Are you all too young to know who MacArthur is? He was this... Anyway, MacArthur. He tried to simplify the... Japanese language and turn it into an alphabet. After the war. After the Second World War. So MacArthur, an American, tried to simplify the Japanese language after the Second World War.

[26:35]

He wanted to put it in alphabetical order. And he wanted to limit the number of characters. He said, you'll be more efficient and more modern. And the intelligence of the culture said, but we'll also be stupider. Just in a simple sense, characters like this use both sides of the brain. If we have a car accident and lose our speaking, we lose all language functions. But with a kanji-based language, they may lose their writing, but they don't lose the speaking or vice versa.

[27:42]

In any case, there's a clear sense that the complexity of the language creates a complex intelligence. So I'm getting ready to do this ceremony. And you can now buy bottles of this black ink and just pour it into the... the place where you put your brush. But actually, you know, the preparations are part of the ceremony.

[28:54]

They're not preparations, really. They're the foreground of the ceremony, not the background. So when the Doan or the Ino starts making the preparations for the ceremony, which flowers, and ideally some of the flowers, would just be picked? outside. And when I start, you know, what name shall I give you? I don't start this six months ago. I started within the frame of the ceremony.

[30:07]

And once I started, I'm in the ceremony. So I start with your given names. And I go through a process of What are the traditional names? Who had these names in the past? And so forth. And each one of these syllables, as you've noticed, has many meanings. Because each syllable is a... relational object. The Lankavatara Sutra even says, when you're in the midst of language, you have a mind through the syllables, a mind through the word,

[31:09]

Ein Geist durch die Worte. And a mind through the phrase. Und ein Geist durch den Satz. You don't just hear the phrase, that's a plot mind. Ihr hört nicht bloß diesen Filmablauf. Nein, ihr hört nicht nur den Satz, denn das entspricht einem Filmablauf. You also hear the word itself. Sondern ihr hört das Wort an sich. And you feel the different memory, the different... meanings of the word, not just the meaning in the context of the sentence. And then you hear the sound itself, the syllabic, the stream of syllables. So I'm talking about these things.

[32:23]

I'm all trying to introduce us to this yogic world out of which Buddhism is a part. in the yogic body, in the yogic world of which Buddhism is a part. So you actually mix the ink. You have a little hard block of ink. And then you rub it on a stone with some water until some ink appears. And it takes 10 or 15 minutes before you can make your first brush stroke. And again, it's like the Sencha tea ceremony I've used as an example. Und das ist wieder wie die Sencha-Tee-Zeremonie, die ich schon ein paar Mal erwähnt habe, dass wenn man, während man den Tee ausgießt, da wartet man, bis wirklich jeder Tropfen herausgetropft ist.

[33:46]

Das dauert ewig. Man quetscht nicht den Teetopf, das würde ja auch nichts helfen. You just wait. It establishes a certain pace of the world and establishes the pace in which you drink this tea where you're drinking very tiny amounts of tea. And as I've said, the matcha tea ceremony establishes a different pace related to the way you drink and taste that tea. So a ceremony like yesterday has certain, we call them preparations. But they establish a certain field that is the field and pace of the ceremony itself.

[34:50]

And the pace which allows me to choose a name. And then to write it and put seals on it and all that stuff. And then an origami like way to fold the papers. This is all in this yogic culture which finds all objects, relational objects. So maybe in the seminar you can review the four foundations of mindfulness. Or start, at least, with the beginning. Because mindfulness, how we enter into this question, what's going on? You know, cooking is more than just bringing heat to the food.

[36:15]

It has to what kind of heat you bring to the food. And is it with water or butter or olive oil? So mindfulness isn't just bringing attention to the world. So what kind of attention do you bring to the world? Is the attention joined to the breath? How through each sense do you gather the fruits of the world? If you're asking what's going on, what kind of attention do you bring to this what's going on? That's almost as if everything you looked at was fruiting and you gathered the fruits in the looking and hearing.

[37:49]

But in what mind, in what pace of mind do the fruits appear? And do we find them gathered in ourselves? Thank you very much.

[38:22]

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