Since there's two or three people rather unfamiliar with my teaching or Buddhist teaching, maybe it's a good opportunity to review, look at some of the basics of our practice. Is this perhaps a good opportunity to look at the foundations of our practice again? It all begins with asking a question. It all begins with asking a question. Yeah, the first question has to be something like, what or what is it?

[01:03]

And I think we all ask this question at all ages. The time when it seems most painful to me seems to be for teenagers. Any teenagers present here? Anyway, teenagers often seem to me, not you, quite lost.

[02:06]

And there really seems to me everything they're doing often is asking the question, what is this life I'm in? The problem is most of them don't know they're asking the question. Because they constantly give themselves rather narrow answers, except the rather narrow answers the culture supplies. An old friend of mine who is actually on our Dharamsanga board As a religious practitioner and anthropologist. Named Houston Smith. His parents actually were Chinese, were missionaries in China, Christian missionaries in China.

[03:09]

And he's pretty old now. He's in his 80s. And he just sent me his book, which he wrote to me. He said, my clothes down, my last work. And the book is called Why Religion Matters. And his main point I've got by just looking at it for a few minutes this morning At least one of his main points is that the tunnel vision of postmodern culture needs some alternative, and the only place to find such an alternative is religion. So we ask this question.

[04:48]

We don't usually know how to answer it. Now we have, you know, my continuous study is Sophia. Ihr kennt mein unaufhörliches Studium, das ist Sophia. And she's asking, continuous, what is it? Und sie fragt ständig, was ist es? Whatever it is. We went to a hotel the other day to see some friends off in Zurich at the airport. And she found it fascinating to scan the hotel room. As long as she could keep her head up. Hours. What is this place? It looked like a pretty typical hotel room to me.

[06:14]

Yes, so we ask, what is it, what is it? How do we answer? Now, the stance or the sits that Buddhism takes the sitz point, the stand point, that Buddhism takes in, is that we have to find out from within ourselves, or from within our situation, Because culture and, I mean, for some reason, Buddhism had a very rather modern anthropological view of culture.

[07:16]

They got it not because they must have lived in China, which they thought was the center and whole of the world, So they got it not from studying other cultures as contemporary anthropologists, but from the contrast between their meditative experiences and their experiences in the consciousness of their culture. You know, again, using Sophia as an example, as I pointed out before, they say that a child can learn up to about a year old the sounds of any language. And after that, they can only really say the sounds of the languages they've heard growing in the first year.

[08:38]

So Buddhism would ask, what about all the languages? What mind is discovered in? Each language. Is it the same mind? Yeah, and what about languages that haven't yet been discovered or created? What about the unknown possibilities of mind? Yes, so Buddhism asks these kind of questions. And one of the philosophical assumptions and experientially arrived at assumptions, is that different languages or different cultures are not in the end all the same.

[10:08]

So can we find some truth for all people or all situations? Now, if we're going to cut ourselves loose from the We're going to float free from our own culture. From our own language and our own culture. psychological habits? What's going to give us any, how can we find any stability? If we don't locate ourselves in our own culture, if we try to float free from our own culture, we still need some kind of stability, particularly in the beginning of such a practice.

[11:36]

We need a kind of sea anchor. You know, a sea anchor is one not stuck in the mud because there's no land far out at sea. It's an anchor which holds you in the ocean itself. So if we're going to have the renunciation of not our particular worldly way of life, if we're going to renounce in some ways not our worldly way of life, but the structures of mind, the habits of mind, that lead us into a deluded worldly life. then we have to have some kind of sea anchor in this process.

[12:58]

In this process. The sea anchor was discovered long, long before Buddhism. was this sitting posture. Now, strangely enough, the sea anchor is not the body. The sea anchor is the posture. Because your body itself is always caught up also. that your body itself is caught up in the same mind and culture. If you want to free yourself from the kind of turtle shell of culture, the scales...

[14:03]

Scales are like scales of a turtle or a snake or a fish or something, like encasement. Yeah. Those are part of our body too. As we've often talked about, we have a mental sheath. We have a mental body, not just simply a physical body. As I've illustrated by this kid's thing, you know, which finger is which, you know. If you don't touch it, it's very hard to know which finger to move if someone points to a finger.

[15:23]

And that's because we have a mental, but we know our body mentally, so which finger? We have to think. So it's not the body, it's the posture. Posture allows us to anchor ourselves. And through the posture, anchor ourselves in our body and our breath. And we need some mental postures for that as well. The two main ones are one-pointedness and the other a non-interfering observing consciousness.

[16:27]

Now, one pointedness is not concentration within... One pointedness is not concentration within consciousness. One point of this means you can put the whole of your mind anywhere. And it just stays there. And other things disappear. You're more in awareness than you are in consciousness. And that skill also develops most quickly through sitting practice. And now also a mind which can observe without interfering.

[17:37]

So you can even, as I said, have a samadhi, a mind free of thoughts, and you can observe it. And you don't lose that mind free of thoughts. It sounds strange, but it's possible. To understand that, you have to recognize that Minds are like liquids again. Like you can have an ocean of cold water with a warm current in one part. So you can have a calm, clear mind and still observe it without that... gently without that calmness and clearness disappearing.

[18:41]

You can have a calm, clear mind and observe it gently without losing that calmness and clearness. So these such skills allow you to start asking the question, what is it? But the assumption is somehow that if there are answers, you must be the answer. So the teachings of Buddhism aren't the truth. The teachings of Buddhism are just something or ways to help you find the truth. What you experience as the truth. And what? What seems to be the way things actually exist. Can we prove this is actually true?

[20:04]

Well, philosophically, probably not. Because there's no outside point of view to prove it by. Mm-hmm. But then how do you prove the outside point of view is true or false? So Buddhism comes down to not good or bad, but rather wholesome or unwholesome. Wholesome.

[21:04]

What tends toward health or wholeness? Heilsam oder nicht heilsam. Yeah, like we know whether water is hot or cold or wet or, you know, etc. So wie wir wissen, ob Wasser heiß oder kalt ist und dass es nass ist. We know after a while what hinders us, what makes our body feel not good or what makes it feel okay. And not just temporarily but in some deep way. So you're trying to answer or approach at least this question, what is it?

[22:08]

How do things actually exist? How should I exist? How do I exist with the things of this world and with other people? So you see you have to maybe try to be free at least from the patterns of your particular culture. And see, you have to come back into those patterns of your culture to live with others. But you know they're conditional or relative. They're a way of communicating.

[23:34]

They're a language. Just like in German you can't say some things you can say in English. And vice versa. Whatever is true is somewhere not wholly in either language. Okay, so can you have a state of mind or being relatively free of language, cultural forms, mental habits? In Buddhism this would be called in Zen something like original mind or pure consciousness. Original mind or pure consciousness.

[24:52]

Something that might be more or less the same in any culture. I don't think it would be exactly the same, but it would be... Because if you enter formlessness, the form you enter it from affects your experience of formlessness. But the formlessness is still something close to formlessness. When I think of, say, my teacher, Suzuki Roshi, or the Dalai Lama, or other Buddhist teachers I know, among the good ones, they're more like each other than they're like the culture from which they're from.

[25:59]

Yeah, Mumon Yamada Roshi or Sukhi Roshi are more like the Dalai Lama and each other than they're like their other Japanese and other Tibetans. The first name is Yamada Mumon Roshi. Suzuki Roshi. Then they're more like each other than they're like the cultures from which they're from. And such teachers have found it very easy to be in Europe and America because somehow they don't come as a Japanese or Tibetan. They come as somebody relatively free of such cultures. And these people found it easy to be in Europe or America, because they did not come as Japanese or Tibetans, but rather free from these cultures.

[27:19]

Okay, so you've got some kind of anchor now through sitting posture. And you're able to try to ask the question, what is it? Now, not asking the question just about culture, you're asking the question about your experiences that are more and more free of culture. Yeah, now we could talk a lot about these yogic practices, but let me, such a short time, let me stop at that point. When you do begin to have this sea anchor of sitting postures, What do you find?

[28:30]

You find you have a mind that doesn't know itself. Yeah, you have consciousness. But you also dream sometimes. And you, you know, traditionally there's consciousness, dreaming and non-dreaming deep sleep. We notice these three minds that we're born with. And again, we watch Sophia. She seems to already have some kind of dreaming mind going on. It seems to have increased now that she has more to dream about. She has five, six months to dream about.

[29:32]

But we noticed that our Dreaming mind isn't fully available to us. But if you meditate, you let go of consciousness. And you enter Freud's free association, associative mind. And after a while, the associative mind becomes less strong. And you're more in a mind of of particular perceptions without so much sense of past and future.

[30:40]

You can still be an associative mind if you want and see all the connections. But it's also very refreshing to spend some time in percept-only mind. And there's a kind of clarity. And if you go to a movie, You can't isolate a single frame. The previous frame and the next frame all flow together. So you can't see one frame separate from the frames on either side. And this is something Wittgenstein, anybody who goes to movies can think about this, but Wittgenstein pointed it out.

[32:05]

But most Western, no Western philosophers up until now had any yogic experience, training, because you can actually pretty much stop each frame. Perception only you begin to pretty much without the associations of past and future, you can pretty much stop each frame. You can even go into what we call the second skanda, but there's not even perception on these.

[33:12]

They're just non-graspable feelings. And this becomes a territory in which you can ask this question again, what is it? What is it just now? As I say, not here and now, but the here cracked open. And now lost. So what is it? And one thing we notice is how absolutely unique each moment is. How mind arises through the objects of perception. So this mind I have right now, Because this is a particular day and we're a particular group of people.

[34:30]

I've never had this mind before. I'll never have it again. And through yogic practice you can be free of the push toward predictability. which ignores the absolute uniqueness. So now already through this yogic practice, this sitting posture, We have at least some kind of a feeling of some part of an answer. One answer is it's always unique. Never the same.

[35:39]

But it's made up of mostly the same ingredients. So now we begin to see it's possible maybe to have a fourth mind. a mind that's not waking or ordinary waking or dreaming or non-dreaming, deep sleep, but a mind that overlaps or includes those three minds, includes Unconscious and conscious. First it's only a taste.

[36:41]

It only occurs sometimes. But more and more we come into some soft kind of mind which lets the Many aspects of mind be present all at once. And we begin to get some kind of what? A cozy feeling. You know how you feel when you're... Well, I look and I'm sorry to bother you with this poor little Sophia all the time. At present time, she seems to like pretty much everything. If it's raining and stormy outside, she thinks it's quite interesting.

[37:45]

If it's a nice day, she seems to like that. If it's a loud noise, she thinks it's quite interesting. The only thing she seems to not like is the bright sunlight hitting her quickly in the eyes. As I told you, I even gave her some ginger... What's it called, that kind of ice cream? Sorbet. Sorbet the other day. Ich habe ihr neulich ein Ingwer-Sorbet gegeben. She's never had anything cold like that before in her life. Noch niemals in ihrem Leben hatte sie vorher so etwas Kaltes. And she's never had any ginger. Und noch niemals hat sie ginger, Ingwer gegessen.

[38:48]

And she's only had breast milk. Sie hatte nämlich nur die Muttermilch getrunken. So I thought, why not introduce her to cold food now? So she went... On the first bite. And on the second bite, she just... One and some more. It was perfectly trusting and everything's okay. And on the third bite, she looked at me with huge eyes. What is it? What is it? What I see is some kind of cozy feeling she has. Everything's okay. Somehow through this practice, We come into some kind of, everything feels, while unique, at the same time feels familiar.

[39:58]

Something soft and part of us. Even the heart feels also soft. Even the fast feels also slow. And the question, what is it, seems to not have so much urgency anymore. Yeah, so anyway, this is a little taste of how I would say yogic practice. Which arises from not knowing how to answer such a basic question. and not looking to any teachings from the past.

[41:16]

Right now, how can I answer this question myself? I'll just sit down and quit distracting myself. I'll just sit down and quit distracting myself. And this process begins then. Yeah. Thank you very much.

[41:42]

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