because we practice together and I'm defining our practice together to a large extent here and in Europe I have a certain responsibility to to know what I'm talking about and yet and as much as I can can be clear about what I'm talking about. I want to be clear with you. But, you know, it's very difficult to define our practice. We can live our practice. It's difficult to define it, but I also have to define it because I have to talk with you.

[01:02]

And as I say, you know, Zen is, much of Zen is meeting and speaking. The meeting is a very important part of it. Yeah. And so because I have this responsibility, I'm always re- re-imagining what we're doing. And so one of the things I'm trying to do now in a way I haven't done before is describe what I mean by yogic culture. I was reading recently about sperm whales, about whales in general, and sperm whales in particular, where you have a group of them, they kind of really live together, quite a bodily relationship to each other. There's things that the people who study whales can't explain genetically. And all they can assume is whales, groups of whales, which are genetically virtually the same, all sperm whales, have different cultures.

[02:14]

They do things quite differently. And they pass those differences on to other whales. I mean their own progeny. They communicate differently. They behave differently. They, I guess, I can't remember. I didn't read everything in it. But they hunt differently. And they can stun or damage another just because they have such powerful sonars. Sonar. ability to attack another fish and kill it with their sonar beam, sort of, they have to be very careful with each other because they can blind or deafen their own people. So they have different rules about how they, et cetera. Anyway, something like that. The point I'm making is that my experience is that Sangha is a particular kind of culture. In fact, in early Japanese culture, Heian period, et cetera, they talked about weft texts and woof, you know, wharf and weft and web, that there's, that the, what I'm calling a yoga culture,

[03:44]

was like the horizontal threads and the vertical threads are more like the orthodox culture, the normative culture. And you're weaving a different pattern if you practice a yogic culture. They're both yogic cultures. See, I don't know how to define these things. But there's a sense that you're living in the orthodox. Orthodox means a right way to say things. And normative, incidentally, means a right angle. A norm is a carpenter's square. And we are related to flatness all the time. We relate everything to flatness. But Wales, no flatness there. And maybe for us, if you really get a feel for yoga culture, there's no flatness there.

[04:55]

I mean, I don't know how to say these things. All I can do is say some things and hope you catch the feeling, even though the description isn't right. The description, the feeling of the description may be, from my point of view, right or wrong. Accurate, okay So it's a little bit from my point of view that if you really do discover this yogurt culture Which is what I think our practice is about It's like you're swimming in the world With people who have a different culture and you learn to swim in the contemporary Orthodox culture But you're swimming in different kind of water, sort of. Or you're swimming and the others are walking.

[05:56]

I don't know how to say it. If you cut your finger in the kitchen, you can say, I cut my body. And you can say, I cut my body because I was distracted or I was in a bad mood or something. So we can say that the... You can say, well, it was... My state of mind led me to cut my finger. Let me cut my body. Well, we can say that that's, you know, it's useful to say I didn't cut my mind, I cut my finger. And you can say I cut my body. And because of my state of mind. Well, yeah, those are useful. But if I really ask you or we ask ourselves to define mind, it's very difficult. And Dogen says, the true human body is not in the realm of the measurable.

[06:59]

The true human body. Yeah, so we can't really define body either. We know simply, I cut my body, I cut my finger, but... We really try to define mind and body. And even yoga, you know, I mean, yoga goes back to the Rig Veda or back to the Upanishads, and there's various myths about yoga, about its origins and so forth. But a great deal of yoga, what we know in the West, actually comes from British colonial body culture and even German body culture. So I'm defining yoga culture not in terms of usual ideas of yoga or anything, but, well, recently Nicole and I and a woman named Karen,

[08:10]

Two A's, Norwegian, I guess, way of spelling Karin, is making robes, making yukatas, no, jubans, or niko. So we had quite a discussion about the Okumi Sagari, isn't that right? Kumisagari, what the hell is no Kumisagari? So we had to sort of discuss this. And I know that the collar is supposed to sit back from the neck in the yukata and in the kimono and in the juban. So first she made a young woman's or a woman's kimono. And the neck sits quite far back. And so we had to change it to more the way a man's juban sits.

[09:18]

And so I was thinking a lot about this, the differences. And not to go into many details, but the conception of, well, and then Nicole wrote me an email and said she feels so differently when the collar doesn't touch your neck. And she said that it feels like, what, your head is floating on your spine? Well, I think this is right. I mean, you may notice that when you are trying to go to sleep, we talked about going to sleep last night, that if the covers touch your neck, You may feel constricted or they touch your chin or they... How do you feel comfortable under the covers, etc. Small differences make a difference in whether you can sleep. And I found I have a different body in robes than not in robes. If the robes are made as they're supposed to be made.

[10:20]

And we... Westerners tend to dress the body so it's protected from the outside. But in a yogic culture, the body is free inside the clothes and is understood to be naked inside the clothes. And that's, excuse me for saying so, that's why the collar and the young girl or geisha sits so far back, because you can see that they're naked under there. We have a different way of eroticizing our clothes. If that's what we want to do. Well, And these are, as you can see, these are the lengths of cloth that come off the loom.

[11:32]

It's not fit to the body. It's not spandex. And what Issey Miyake did is basically he took the concept of the body being naked and free inside the clothes and designed clothes to Western taste. And so you see in Issey Miyake's clothes, big pieces of cloth flowing around the body and the body is free inside cloth. The body, I don't put a sleeve around my arm. I put something quite loose at my arm, it's free. I can move my arm all the way inside. This is, it's this kind of difference, which is the difference in a yogic culture and our culture. Talk about it. We can't define body, really, and I can't define mind. Bergson, Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, influenced Proust tremendously.

[12:39]

Proust influenced me tremendously. I'm quite influenced by Bergson's philosophy. But Bergson considered beingness lived time. I think lived time, if we try to look at the sense that beingness is lived time, I would say lived time produces mind consciousness. Something like that. But let's imagine that the yogic experience is lived space. lived space. And I would say that lived space produces a yogic body. Lived space produces what I call a body. So how are we going to, if what we're trying to transmit, pass, etc., is the culture of lived space,

[13:51]

And we're trying to live a lived space within a lived time modality or mode of beingness. How are we going to know that? And, you know, if you go back to early Buddhism, Early Buddhism, you know, the world is defined as Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. You can think about that if you want. Early Buddhism emphasized Sangha. Dogen emphasized Sangha much later. As without the experience of the mutual body of a common, in this case, yoga culture, you can't learn it. The Dharma can be understood with others primarily, but not by yourself.

[15:01]

And one of the big changes in the West is the Dharma is seen more like philosophy or something, or science, and you can understand it by yourself. But that's a superficial understanding of science, because scientists don't understand science by themselves. They understand science with other and through other scientists. So how, what, you know, and most of us don't, and we can't all live together. I've chosen to live my life only, primarily, all the time in a practice environment. But most of us can't do that, and most of us don't want to do that, etc. So is it possible that this body that is lived space... if that's what a yogic culture is, can be continued.

[16:02]

Now in Japanese, in Chinese monasteries, let's say, they tried to, you know, the mandate of heaven and the emperor, and they tried to institutionally make monastic life fit into the institutional pattern, overall cultural pattern of China. Buddhism was supposed to reinforce Chinese culture but actually the monasteries they saw it as much more shamanic and Otherworldliness and not this worldliness and so within the monasteries themselves the monastic tradition this shamanic Otherworldly leaving the world not defining yourself through the normative culture continued and So how do we not define ourselves through the normative culture, which most of us don't really want to do, and define a culture that we can support each other in, swimming beside each other?

[17:10]

Now if we add relatedness Ningen, the word Ningen, which means person in Japan, in Japanese, actually means person betweenness, person space. Body in, as I've mentioned many times, body, if you look up the etymology of the word body in the West, in Western languages, it means something close to brewing that, like where you make beer. It's a that. It's a container. And we dress ourselves like we were containers, and we live in the world like it was a container. And a yogic world is a non-container world. How do we live in a non-container world? Well, the idea of Ningen, between this, is a non-container. It's like I said, to join the alchemy of immediacy and not the present, which has the boundaries of past and future. Alchemy of immediacy

[18:16]

a non-container world, a world where beingness is in-betweenness or betweenness. And there's a very difference between the idea of space. Space is like no things, a no-thingness thing. Betweenness, if we define space as betweenness, Betweenness can have things in it. Between me and the mountain, there's all kinds of things. Between me and you, there's all kinds of... Betweenness is this, a relatedness, a dimension of relatedness, which is like, not the carpenter's rule, not vertical, horizontal. Relatedness is a third and fourth dimension. How do we practice this relatedness?

[19:21]

So you're related to your clothes. You're not exactly... Your clothes are more like a sleeping bag. And they talk about it this way. In the winter, you close the window here. This is called the window. In the summer, you open the window. But you wear the same clothes. And you adjust your body temperature inside your clothes. I remember Suki Roshi once was really, we were in the little room that was our zendo and lecture room and all. And it was, I don't remember, it was either hot or cold and someone got up to open the window. And I was always sat in the front row. And I heard him mumble to himself, why don't you adjust your body temperature? And the whole concept of the body and the clothes in the house, I mean, if you in a traditional, I've said this many times before, if you in a traditional Japanese culture, house, like I lived in in the 60s in Japan, if you said to people, why don't you Japanese people heat the house?

[20:43]

Is the house cold? You don't heat the house. The house isn't cold. Your body is cold. So they heat your body. And you have clothes which allow you to put a little heater inside your clothes. You put it under your obi and it generates heat. You think it's cold. I'm quite cozy over here. The westerner's all wrapped up, you know. And they heat your feet. And you heat your hands. And you heat your body in the bath. But you don't heat the house. It's expensive for one thing. It's a really different way of looking at things. In-betweenness. Ningen means in-betweenness. The word for person means in-betweenness. a stick figure, and space. The stick figure represents us and space.

[21:51]

But really not space, but betweenness. And what's the word for form or shape? Katachi. It's translated as shape. But that's not what it means. It means taking shape It means discovering shape. Discovering. That's the world as activity. Everything's an activity. I mean, I really got this, and I've told you this before, when Charlotte Selver, as you know, who started sensory awareness in the United States, blah, blah, blah. said to the group of people at the same time I first started practicing with Sukershi, and she didn't say, stand up, when we were all sitting on the floor. She said, come up to standing.

[22:55]

That one phrase changed my life. It entered me into yoga culture because I found myself coming up through a whole series of tiny postures until I reached standing, and standing was a posture I was discovering. I've never been the same since. I immediately saw that posture is a flow of postures, a constant taking shape. So a posture in Buddhist yoga culture has nothing to do with any particular posture. It's a posture you're always discovering. So if you're washing dishes, for instance, in a yoga culture, you're discovering the posture where you can feel chi. And whether you're washing dishes or walking down the hall or whatever it is, your body is always moving toward, and I don't know, that's very hard to say.

[24:01]

how do I define chi or ki? It's defined as energy, etc. We can have all kinds of ideas about it, but really for our practice, maybe I could say that all movement is seeking stillness. So in any posture, you're seeking stillness. a fully engaged breathing, a mindful breathing, an attention-full breathing. Now, okay, let's just go back. If I say mind and body, really, what do we mean? Well, let's see, I can say attention. We all know what attention is. And I can say breath. We all know what breath is.

[25:06]

And so as I said last day's show, we can notice attention. We can have the experience of attention. And attention isn't simply consciousness or a mind. I can have attention right now, I can have a feeling of knowing of the space of this room and it's all at once-ness and my attention can move around. And that same attention when I go to sleep, using that again because we're exploring sleep as well as meditation, that attention can go through. the physical changes that occur when you fall asleep, and that attention can be within sleep. You can bring attention to the point, go to sleep, and the attention can continue within sleep.

[26:10]

So it's not consciousness. What is attention? Well, attention is experienceable. Breath is experienceable. So let's approach mind and body Later, more cautiously, we can bring, as I said, attention to the breath. And attention can be sort of other things too. And the more you bring attention fully to the breath, a kind of stillness in space appears. And chi is sometimes defined in Japanese culture as when you discover your original breath. What does it mean to discover your original breath?

[27:16]

Well, I think we can come close to it if in your breath you find your breath Reaches somehow into stillness folds into stillness movement We don't want to define mind as what is not body or body as what is not mind. That's too simple And we didn't want to define movement as what is not stillness and stillness is what is not movement. That's too simple But we can maybe find words that give us a feeling by saying Stillness is the source of movement And always in movement you can find stillness, and movement itself is seeking stillness. And if you seek stillness in movement, you may find chi, or what is meant by chi, the key. Well, the true human body is not in the realm of the measurable.

[28:27]

The whole essential being, Yuan Wu says, whole essential being appears before you and nowhere else. And nowhere else. They're not in the future not in the past. You know various aspects of being and thinking and appears But whole essential being which changes you which develops you which matures you appears before you and nowhere else Can you can that be your? attentional body It's ready-made for you he says It's like water being poured into water. This would be beingness as lived space.

[29:41]

If that could be our priority. Hmm. Whole essential being appears before you and nowhere else. It's ready made for you. Not for anyone else. May our intention equally be in that place.

[30:37]

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