Now, can you say something, Nicole? Yes, hello. Okay, so now I can hear her now anyway. There may be a chance I'm going to lose the ability to hear you because the battery is running out. But as long as I can, otherwise I'll have to look at you carefully to see if you've stopped translating. Okay. We did that once. I remember, yeah. Yeah. Okay, good afternoon and good morning and hi today. It's lucky we found out last night that you're on daylight saving time already. Or whatever it's called. Es ist ein Glück, dass wir herausgefunden haben oder beziehungsweise die angefangen haben, darüber nachzudenken, was die Konsequenzen davon sind, dass wir in Deutschland die Uhr umgestellt haben letzte Nacht.

[01:07]

Die Übersetzerin ist ja in Deutschland, also müssen wir der deutschen Zeit folgen. Yeah. I'm feeling like celebrating today. I don't know quite why. So I wore a celebratory raksu of Suzuki Roshi's. It was quite big on him as a celebration, but it's quite a little bit small on me. Okay. So I've been approaching and trying to speak about for some Sunday lectures and the Tuesday lectures the path of interiority.

[02:15]

And these attempting to share and practice these things with you is always a challenge I enjoy, but a challenge. Suzuki Roshi, no, in this case, Dogen said, the worlds of sitting meditation, the worlds of Sazen, are very different from other worlds. And this is my experience that the world of Zazen, the maturing and evolving world of Zazen, is different from other worlds.

[03:18]

And this is also my experience, that the worlds, to develop and mature the sitting practice, that this is really a different world than other worlds. Yeah, when you describe it, when you use words to describe it, it sounds the same, but it doesn't feel the same from inside, or it doesn't feel the same in the outside. When you try to describe it, it actually sounds the same as when you describe other things, but it feels different from the inside. It feels different from the inside than how you would look at it from the outside. And because the words are the same and the descriptions are the same, this is why I keep trying to change words a little bit, like from reality or humanity to humanality.

[04:35]

And especially because the words sound like other words, because the descriptions sound like other things, that's why I play with the words so much. For example, instead of reality, I speak of humanality, of the human reality. And I try to find metaphors which I can tune to metaphors or metaphors which I can tune to East Asian and between East Asian and Western worldviews. Yeah. Max? Yeah. And because, as I've said quite often, we... Buddhism itself is tuned to East Asian yogic worldviews, and so we have to keep adjusting things to find descriptions that we can inhabit.

[06:06]

And as I have often said, Buddhism itself is based on East Asian worldviews, so that we always have to find new descriptions in which we can live. Everything okay? Uh, yeah, I don't know if you guys are, your sound is really not so good. It was good in the sound check, but now it's like, there's your sound isn't good. So I just told our tech team, but I guess they say that Keith already knows. So are we able to improve it? I mean, it's, you're understandable. It's just a little like not pleasant. Yeah. The amateurs, I mean, these guys are good, but I'm an amateur at this.

[07:17]

Is that any better over there? There's actually, now that we are taking time for it, there's some background noise. There's some background noise. Maybe the wind. No, it sounds like a UFO is landing behind you, but that's not happening, is it? A UFO is landing behind me. Really? Yeah. I mean, strange things happen in the Zendo, but so far we haven't had that. Torsten says to turn the microphone around for some reason. Torsten says to turn the microphone. Yeah, it's okay on our side. All right. Well, I can handle it. I mean, we can clearly hear you. It's just that background noise. All right. It is getting cold and windy out here. Okay. The 9th century Zen and Huayen thinkers and practitioners within Chinese culture tried to establish, using Buddhist ingredients, a new worldview

[08:25]

in China itself, within Chinese Buddhism. So this is not just a question between Western worldviews and East Asian worldviews. Even in China, they can establish within East Asian views a new worldview. Also ist es noch nicht mal nur eine Frage zwischen ostasiatischen und chinesischen Weltsichten, sondern darüber hinaus auch noch so, dass selbst innerhalb der chinesischen Weltsichten neue Weltsichten etabliert werden können. So this is what we in effect are doing, establishing a Zen Buddhist worldview within Western worldviews. And so today, in a way, mostly I'm talking about substituting the word aliveness for being or replacing being with the word aliveness.

[09:41]

Now I'm astonished what a difference this shift can make between emphasizing giving a definitive aliveness as a definitive reference point instead of being as a definitive reference point. So I've been talking about aliveness a lot. Now he's gone. You can't hear me? Okay. I can hear you. Okay, now you're back, hello.

[11:14]

Now I'm back, okay. Yes, okay, good. Yeah, these things don't bother me much because it's amazing that it works at all and the Atlantic Ocean isn't interfering. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, I often emphasize that to use aliveness as a reference point, and that's simply when you inhale and exhale, you're experiencing aliveness. But in order to approach speaking about the path of interiority, Aber um uns dem anzunehren, nämlich über den Pfad der Innerlichkeit zu sprechen, musste ich mir Lebendigkeit als unkartiertes Land vorstellen.

[12:35]

Das unkartierte Land der Lebendigkeit. Brian's little son here who's turning from a baby into an infant and running around with huge energy, he's exploring aliveness big time. Brian's little son, who is now growing up from a baby to a little child, he's constantly running around here with a lot of energy. And what he's doing is he's exploring life. Yeah. And now these Atsung Mi and other 9th century, in the common era, Chinese Zen and Huayen practitioners, They tried to establish what we can know.

[13:36]

So they decided on a limit. And the limit is what you can know and what you can't know. And I think of the wonderful Korean teacher Seung Sang Sunin, whose main teachings seems to have been don't know, don't know, don't know. So these 9th century guys said, okay, we can't really know what reality is. Yeah, and we can't really know the source of humanity, source of humanality or humanity.

[15:06]

But we can notice that the, but we can know that humanality begins with noticing. Noticing and aliveness are, you know, the baseline. Yeah. So, whether there's reincarnation or not, they decided that's outside of what we can know. And they didn't want a Buddha which is way in the past or in some kind of remote heaven.

[16:21]

So they wanted to establish a realm of knowing which included knowing knowing what the possibilities of awakening, of the transformation we call enlightenment or realization. So they, again, are emphasizing a kind of Yogacara phenomenality. What we can know through the senses and developing the acuity of the senses.

[17:28]

So that's the traditional emphasis of Buddhism and the Abhidharma on how we know. And then, what can we know? Well, let's say what we can know is the uncharted territory or field of aliveness. And this uncharted field of aliveness is identified with emptiness and original mind. Dieses unkartierte Land oder Feld, das wird gleichgesetzt mit ursprünglichem Geist oder ich sag dann immer ursprüngendem Geist, Ursprungsgeist.

[18:52]

Again, Brian's little son. Nochmal zurück zu Brian's kleinem Sohn. He's born into a field of aliveness. From a Buddhist point of view, he's not born into a field of an ongoing being or an identity. Aus buddhistischer Perspektive wurde er nicht in ein fortlaufendes Seinsfeld oder Identitätsfeld hineingeboren. And we can see there's ancestry there. I mean, I can see Brian's smile in his face and Lindsay's feel and how he does things. Und da gibt es schon... But again, these thinkers and practitioners drew a line and said, we can't really know that much about the ancestry, but we can know that he is

[19:54]

alive and noticing things, and noticing he's noticing. Now, in this uncharted field of aliveness, if he was born in China, he'd be becoming Chinese. Or in ancient Greece, a Greek of ancient times. This is all pretty obvious. All the potentials of what human beings have been, culturally and in their languages, are possible in this field of uncharted aliveness. Es ist alles ziemlich offensichtlich, dass all die Möglichkeiten, all die Potenziale, was Menschen werden können und was Menschen bereits geworden sind, dass all das Teil dieses unkartierten Landes der Lebendigkeit ist.

[21:43]

And in this field of potentialities, all the future languages and cultures are waiting there to be articulated. The potentials are waiting there. So this sense of the potentialities of the field of aliveness are captured in phrases like original mind or the mind before your parents were born. So this, again, uncharted field of aliveness And I keep coming back to these phrases because I think, at least for me, it's been important to capture certain phrases that allow me to use them as lenses to look at the world.

[23:09]

So this uncharted field of aliveness is a field of potentialities. Yeah, and in that sense, it's identified also with the Tathagatagarbha. Yeah, so the Tathagatagarbha means the womb embryo activity of aliveness. So it's also the biggest name for Buddha.

[24:16]

So what was working in these guys was a sense that the noticing of the infant even is the seed of the noticing and awakening, which is a Buddha. It's a way of saying or theorizing that we're already Buddha or the potential of Buddha is in us in this uncharted field of aliveness. So again, they drew a limit, and then they emphasize that there's noticing, and then they emphasize what you notice.

[25:40]

So for the practitioner today, you and I, we can really look at and develop and evolve our practice through Discovering how we notice and what we notice. Und für uns Praktizierende heute, wir können unsere Praxis wirklich einfach dadurch entwickeln, indem wir uns anschauen und entwickeln, indem wir entwickeln, wie wir bemerken und uns anschauen, was wir bemerken. And how we notice is evolved in a Buddhist sense through the wisdom of practice and the successional paratactic field of practice. That was how or what?

[26:53]

How did you start the sentence? And how we practice is how we notice within a in the successional paratactic field of... Yeah, path. Okay, nice. Okay, so how we practice is the way we follow each other in this path of the moments, which Roshi also speaks of as a paratactical path, where the individual moments are next to each other, how we notice them. Yeah, this is pretty simple what I'm saying, actually. But the words don't quite, it's hard to make the words shape what I'm talking about. What we notice also can include this uncharted field of aliveness.

[27:58]

Yeah, and so Zazen practice and somatic practice is to keep opening yourself to the potentialities of this field of aliveness. And it's named original mind or emptiness. And, um, Okay, and how does this... Let me see how I'm doing here. Pretty well. So how does this relate to the path of interiority?

[29:18]

Well, the word I'm... The best word I can find is an experience of the world through insideness. Now what, okay, insideness. Difficult for me to distinguish from interiority in German. Okay. Yeah. I think I should have said interiority as an inwardness, and then insideness as already inside. Does that make sense? Yeah. When I say interiority, I mean knowing the world...

[30:20]

not in its separateness, but in its shared interiority. Wenn ich das Wort interiority benutze, dann meine ich damit, dass wir in der Welt nicht die Trennung sehen, wie alles voneinander getrennt ist, sondern eher sehen, wie in einer Innerlichkeit die Dinge oder alles miteinander geteilt ist, zusammenhängt. And the realization of that and the practice of that is the emphasis of Hua Yan teaching. And as I've been mentioning in the Tuesdays and Sundays talks, that's usually characterized as the world as interpenetrating. And I don't really, I don't think that's such a, I've never liked the, this term interpenetration.

[31:35]

I think a better word, the best word I can find right now is maybe interlapping. Instead of overlapping, interlapping. Interlapping. I don't like to cause problems for you, but there's a little problem, I'm sorry. Yeah, it's okay. But it's like if you're standing at the beach on the edge of the water. The waves are coming in and underlapping at the same time as they're coming in and going out at the same time. And at this point, the waves come in, and at the same time, the lower water is pulled out again.

[33:00]

So a part of the water overlaps, while the other part simultaneously overlaps. So this world as an interlapping activity, process, You can see that the world of still sitting, the world of Zazen, is different from usual worlds. And how to find words to suggest the difference is not so easy. So if the world is still, If we just use this as a metaphor, if the world is actually not just interdependent,

[34:05]

when we feel the world is interlapping, it then starts to give a feeling for sometimes the unusual ways we know things. sondern wir betonen, dass die Dinge wechselseitig unter- und überlappen, also interlappen, dann betont es eine bestimmte Art und Weise, wie wir die Dinge manchmal empfinden oder spüren können. Okay, so now let me go to my use of insideness as an experiential or sensorial term. Now, Anne, who's sitting here in front of me, has a cat named Rahu, right? And Rahu is a kind of special orange cat. And they have an experience between each other I can only call insideness.

[35:32]

And they have an experience between each other I can only call insideness. Rahu and Anne know each other through an insideness that they both share, and Rahu waits outside the right door for her to come out of the main house and so forth. Now, I know Rahu moderately well, but I don't have this experience of insideness with Rahu. And I think probably all of us have noticed people with their pets, sometimes a horse, sometimes a dog, they have a shared insideness, which is, you know, quite unusual.

[36:41]

And it's a shared insideness you can't share with others. Und wahrscheinlich haben wir das alle schon mal bemerkt, bei uns selbst oder bei anderen, dass Leute eine besondere Beziehung mit ihrem Tier oder Haustier haben. Manchmal ist es ein Pferd, manchmal ist es ein Hund, wo die Person eine Erfahrung von Innerlichkeit mit ihrem Tier, eine gemeinsame Erfahrung von Innerlichkeit mit dem Tier hat, das von anderen Leuten nicht in der Form geteilt wird. And this shared insideness is something Dharma practitioners often feel with each other. And practice within a Sangha and between teacher and disciple and disciple and disciple often develops through this noticed and acknowledged and sensed

[37:45]

and not made too much of, a shared feeling of insideness. And one thing, when asking ourselves, okay, we just lost ourselves. I just lost you. You can hear me? I can't hear you. Maybe you'll come back. I can see you. Shall I continue? Yes. Okay. I will just continue. And I should stop soon, too. So part of what monastic practice has developed, is evolving, is this experience of a shared insideness.

[38:55]

Please open your hand for me when you are through translating. Ah, good, thanks. Give me five or four or 10 or 17. Okay, so then the challenge is, can lay practice develop this shared insideness? Und dann ist die Frage, ob man in der Laienpraxis dieses Gefühl von gemeinsamer Innerlichkeit entwickeln kann. The four Brahmaviharas, or Unlimiteds, are ways to develop a shared insideness. And awakening this field of uncharted aliveness, of the potentialities of aliveness. Now I can hear.

[40:20]

It's kind of exciting to speak into emptiness. And you were responding within emptiness, but now I can hear you. This is nice, too. Anyway, I think that's enough. What I've tried to establish is this, that aliveness and not being and identity, aliveness is the reference point. And then the next step for the practitioner is to recognize how you notice, how you establish notice aliveness. Der nächste Schritt für den Praktizierenden besteht darin, zu entdecken, wie wir bemerken und wie du das bemerken.

[41:41]

And what intention you bring to the evolvement of aliveness. So the teachings of Buddhism are suggestions of what it's fruitful to notice. And what it's satisfying and nourishing to notice And then to notice within the field of potentialities, that's open-ended potentialities, which is called also emptiness or original mind. And Samadhi is a practice to stay in touch with this uncharted field of aliveness.

[42:48]

The field before your parents were born. Yeah. Now I'm going to have to wonder if I made this make sense. And if I feel I didn't, I'll come back to it. So thank you for translating for me. And I wish I could see everybody, but it's nice to see you. Well, thank you. Yeah, you're welcome.

[43:45]

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