So nice to be here with you again. And our experience is a shared field of mind to some extent. And I noticed some of you during the meal or service and things like that are looking around a bit. Now the Ino has to do that sometimes to make sure everything's okay. But we hired Dieter to do that. So you don't have to look around. And I think it sounds like it's one of those rules and rules. And it is.

[01:12]

But it has some purpose. Which is during Sashin, your commitment is to attentional interiority. As much as possible, you want to only have attention on your attentional interiority. So viel wie möglich solltet ihr eure Aufmerksamkeit allein auf diesen inneren Aufmerksamkeitsraum oder diese Aufmerksamkeitsinnerlichkeit richten. And I think, I mean, I could make a case for one of the most significant differences between Western and yogic Asian culture is simply this emphasis on intentional interiority.

[02:24]

You're trying to get used to for these seven days never leaving attentional interiority And then to see how you can, working in the kitchen classically, how you can bring that attentional interiority to what you're doing without cutting your finger. For example, right now, my attentional focus, interior focus, is on the actual sensations of these words being spoken by my mouth, tongue, chest, and so forth. Zum Beispiel gerade jetzt ist meine Aufmerksamkeit innerlich vollständig auf der Empfindung von diesen Worten, die gesprochen werden, durch meinen Mund und meine Zunge und so weiter.

[04:02]

Auf meiner körperlichen Erfahrung dieser Worte. I suppose a singer has to... is to have their attention in the physicality of the words as they sing them and as we chant them. You're basically trying to get consciousness under control. By shifting your experience of continuity from the mind to the body. If you get the feel and hang of, sense of doing that, you don't have to ever come to Sashin again or see me again. You know, goodbye, goodbye. But I'll miss you, so please come back.

[05:04]

Okay. Now, you heard my suggestion last night in the hot drink. Ihr habt meinen Vorschlag gestern Abend im hot drink gehört. Gazing, which has a somatic sense. Gazing at the stream with Heraclitus. Den Strom mit Heraclitus beschauen. Und dieses Wort beschauen hat eine somatische Bedeutung. And wondering who you are. Und zu fragen, wer ihr seid. And gazing at the stream with Atmar and forgetting who you are.

[06:05]

And gazing at the stream gazing at you. So, I mean, we have this stream here. One moment. Yeah, go ahead. Did you say gazing at the stream? Stream gazing at you. Stream gazing at you. Yes. And der Fluss... Well looking at the donkey. Und der Fluss beschaut euch. Ja, okay. All right. And we have this stream for this very purpose. I mean, we checked up with Heraclitus and he said, put a stream on the grounds. Actually, it's said that the Buddha, before he sat under the banyan tree and then a bodhi tree, which is a fig tree, That must be the same word.

[07:10]

Banyan trees are those ones with all the complicated roots and like that. Anyway, the myth is that he saw a village nearby And there was a beautiful spot of land near the village. And it had a garden and a grove of trees and an orchard. and smooth banks of the stream going down to the water. My college had a campus, a moderately big river, pretty big river, right through the middle of it, and smooth banks

[08:29]

on both sides where everybody gathered. And it's where... The geodesic dome, what's the man who invented that? I forget the name. Mr. Fuller. Yeah, Bucky Fuller was sitting on those very banks and had an enlightenment experience. And after that, he thought up all these things like the geodesic dome. And Buckminster Fuller, for example, who sat on such banks by a river and allegedly had a kind of enlightenment experience there, and then he came up with all these things, like, for example, what is it called in German?

[09:36]

Geodesische Kugel. Okay. So there has been an emphasis... in East Asia that Buddhist monasteries should be in a kind of grove of trees. It's ideal. And the supporters often gave orchards and gardens to the monasteries. And there is an East Asian tradition that the monasteries on the site should have tree settlements. And the supporters, the donors for the monasteries, often even have... Is it called fruit trees? Fruit plantation? The orchard? It's a fruit... It's a gathering of fruit trees, right?

[10:37]

Fruit garden. An orchard is where there's apple trees and cherries. Sorry to use such obscure words. No, it's okay. Orchards. I thought that was pretty common. So what we're doing here is really part of this tradition. And this morning, driving with Atmar, he mentioned he'd like to attract wall-dwelling birds. What are they called? Wall-sailors. You know this bird? He'd like to attract them to our garden. So he's in the tradition of how you create a nice place where Heraclitus or Buddha can be enlightened.

[11:38]

So I mentioned in the hot drink talk statement last night Let's not leave it, think of it in the past. We have a stream right here. And we can imagine, maybe, Heraclitus standing by his river, his stream. Yes, everything's changing. But how do I turn this into a practice? I notice it, but how do I practice it?

[12:47]

How do I cultivate it? And in this axial age, at about Jasper's idea, axial age, at about the same time, the Buddha would have answered, About, I guess Heraclitus was actually lived in Turkey, but about six or seven thousand kilometers away the Buddha would have answered. And Heraclitus lived about 6,000 or 7,000 kilometers away from him at the same time. And the Buddha had answered him. It's the constituents of the stream which are flowing. One moment, I need a better word. Constituents. The ingredients?

[13:47]

The constituents of the stream are flowing. So look at the five skandhas. These are the constituencies of our beingness. I think that one of the great problems, you know, our Western culture has been amazing in what it's done, developed, created, et cetera. But one of the differences between the two is implicit in almost everything in Western culture is that we live in a created world of things. And you can modify them a little bit, improve them, but basically that's as much as you can do.

[15:05]

Now the basic assumption in the yogic world is the process of creation is going on all the time. There was no beginning point. When I offered incense a few minutes ago That offering incense is called a Ketgai. It means creating a starting point. It means there's no starting point but you create a starting point. So for a moment we create a starting point and I do the bows and we're here and we have a certain Mind is created together by having a sense of a starting point.

[16:28]

So Heraclitus might have bowed to the stream just to create a starting point. And then he might have said, I think I'll be a stream enterer. Didn't I hear that from 6,000 miles away? But we, at least now, are hearing this suggestion that we become stream-enterers. Yeah. So let's look at the skandhas. Most of you are familiar with them. But let's talk about them as a way to enter zazen, enter meditation.

[18:00]

Now that you have a developed, experienceable, attentional interiority, in which your continuity is resting, abiding inhabiting so when you come to sit you're fully clarified within consciousness And you experience the consciousness that brought you to the Zendo and is now sitting you down. But it's very simple, really, what happens. You've decided to limit yourself in time and space.

[19:18]

Okay, but consciousness, you know, it only thrives in time. So if you emphasize stopping time, stopping in time and space, the fourth skanda, associative mind, begins to appear. Because associative mind, like dreams, are rather free of time. So after you sit down a little bit, you find yourself in associative mind. And things are just kind of appearing. And it's related actually to what I think and at least to what Nietzsche called it-thinking.

[20:24]

By it thinking he meant, some people call it aphoristic thinking. Kind of intuitive thinking that just pops up. So Nietzsche didn't think it was his thinking, he thought it was it thinking. Nietzsche did not believe that this was his thinking, but that it was his thinking. And Wittgenstein also experienced this kind of thinking and wrote something like, I sometimes have the feeling as if my pen was guided by something.

[21:25]

And Nietzsche always had pen and paper on his bed. Because he said those rare and fleeting thoughts of the night can't be found in the morning. So he'd wake up enough to write these things down on paper. I read that he also kept a little blackboard at some points. And he trusted this thinking more than his conscious thinking. And dreaming is a kind of somatic state. Sleeping is a kind of samadhi.

[22:25]

And this Samadhi, the Kanika Samadhi I mentioned yesterday, is also called non-referencing Samadhi. And clearly related to the Japanese word Hishiryo. Which I've been mentioning quite often recently. And again, Dogen says it's maybe the most important word in Zen thinking, Zen teaching, practice. And my way to practice this word Kishiryu, which is usually translated a non-thinking. The practice of it, I feel quite clear, is to notice without thinking.

[23:35]

Without thinking about. Now this noticing without thinking the habit of developing and noticing without thinking. And Kanika Samadhi is also called non-referencing Samadhi. which the Buddha entered supposedly in relationship to the Heart Sutra. This isn't some magical back there. You can practice non-referencing samadhi. We, man, you.

[24:37]

Noticing without thinking. Okay, so I'm trying to get at what was the difference of Buddha standing beside Heraclitus at the stream? Buddha, I would say, from my experience and practice, and let me say that I, you know, there's a whole system of samadhis in Buddhism. And often over the years people say, what about this Samadhi and Hinduism and Buddhism and so forth. And as I told someone today, mentioned to someone today, I am not interested in those systems. You can read about them.

[25:47]

Okay, read about them, but you've got to de-institutionalize them, de-systematize them. And make them your own experience. They're meaningless unless they're your own experience. So what's important here is you get a taste of samadhi. Start sunbathing, not during Sashin. But notice the peripheral of sleep and going to sleep and waking. Notice when there's a shift, when you stop in time and space in zazen.

[26:48]

Notice how associative thinking, which is time-free, mostly time-free, begins to appear. past and future and Various images and stories all appear in the same field. And you can begin to feel the texture of the field, whether it's a story or an image, whether the field has a different feel to it. Now, one way I use mind, and I don't know if You may have to use mind.

[28:00]

I don't know if it's... I don't know. I don't know German. That's very obvious. If it translates into German. Because mind in English as a verb means attentive caring. You say, mind the baby. Do you say, geist the baby? No. Geist the baby, please. No, thank you. The baby doesn't want to be geisted. But those associative meanings in English, it's attentive care, mind your step, be mindful, keep it in mind, means to take care of it in a mental space.

[29:04]

That gives the feeling of mind in English all its flavor. aber diese assoziativen Verbindungen, nämlich mindful, also wie das Wort Achtsamkeit, oder mind the step, also achte auf die Stufe, oder mind the baby, also kümmere dich um das Baby, diese assoziativen Verbindungen geben dem Wort mind im Englischen seinen Geschmack. Now, I know that, I mean, I've read that there's an archaic German word related etymologically to mind called minne, M-I-N-N-E, and it's sort of loving memory or something. It's loving memory. Do you have something to say, Dieter, there? Well... Okay.

[30:16]

Am I talking too long? All your legs are beginning to say, stop talking. When you begin to feel your knees are in your ears, tell me and I'll stop. That's what makes Trabi so quiet, right? That's a joke I heard once. That's free association. Okay, so your associative mind Also, du bist im assoziativen Geist. And it feels different. You can feel mind.

[31:16]

The field of mind. It feels different than consciousness. Consciousness wants to go somewhere. It wants to do things. It wants to think about you. But An associative mind is kind of just relaxed. It sort of allows things to appear. And your body will tend to relax too in associative mind. Now, much of Freud's idea comes from this meditative state, semi-meditative state of associative mind, free association. Because this associative field of mind is also the field of intuitive and aphoristic or it-thinking.

[32:22]

Denn dieser assoziative Geist ist auch das Feld der Intuition und des Es-Denkens. We can also call it Alaya-Thinking. Das können wir auch das Alaya-Denken nennen. I mean, we've been studying the Vijñanas recently. Wir haben ja jetzt die Vijñanas studiert. And the Alaya-Vijñana is a very mysterious, much debated topic within Buddhism. But experientially, it's very simple. When you feel your body is telling you to do something, or there's an intuition, that's the alaya working, that's the alaya functioning. It's a thinking and knowing occurring outside of consciousness. within and through and around consciousness.

[33:33]

Now I wanted to go through all five skandhas now, but maybe I should stop and let you guys rest your legs. In any case, what I'm suggesting so far is that you use the stream and wonder, who am I? What am I? Who and what? When you look at the sky, what do you see? A blue sky. If you're an astronaut looking at the earth, you don't see a blue sky. What is the blue sky if the astronauts don't see it? What is the stream?

[34:37]

What are the skandhas noticing the stream? When you yourself are a stream, when you sit and you feel the transition out of consciousness, into the more allowed permissive field of associative mind and you can begin now to feel not the consciousness that wants to do things but the associative mind which wants to allow things And the associative mind that wants to that is letting you feel the medium of mind itself.

[35:38]

Mm-hmm. So Buddha brought this kind of thinking to the stream. This kind of it thinking and somatic thinking. And from that way of being, which you now can practice and experience, all of Buddhism developed. Because this is not just, you know, I had a big insight or I had a shift in an enlightenment experience. This is not something just in my power.

[36:45]

This is a cultivated field of mind. It's one of the parallel reasons why gardens are cultivated. The grounds of a practice Zen and like we have, are cultivated. So Samadhi isn't just, it is also something just gifted to us genetically. Samadhi is not just oil, it is something. It is something gifted to us. And it seems to have been gifted to Heraclitus. But the Buddha said, cultivate this gift cultivate this somatic mind and cultivate it with others and together the bodhisattva can appear you know one last thing you know it always interests me that all over the world women are called mothers when they have a baby

[38:26]

The babies don't want a Janice or a Nancy for a mother. They want a mother who also happens to be called Janice or Nancy. Why in every culture, every language, there's something called mother and father, I hope, now and then. So you become, you cease being Janice or Nancy and you become a mother. And that's so deeply important that you become something, this thing that all of us have the capacity to become, a mother or a father.

[39:27]

That's also what it means to be a bodhisattva. Thank you very much. Yes. Müll über unsere Absichten, die gleichermaßen jedes Leben rückt

[40:02]

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