So I'll go to the topic of attentive attention. And I think it's okay if we keep this same way of sitting, is that all right? And if there were questions, you know, not understandings or useful not understandings or whatever, whatever that came up, where'd my water go? There it is. That came up yesterday. If you bring them up, I'm happy to speak about them if I'm able. Okay. So attentive attention. This is often, this is obviously about a The possibility of refining attention.

[01:23]

But refining attention requires refining noticing too. And refining noticing helps to refine attention. All of that is obviously true in a world when you're emphasizing, as Buddhism does, interdependence. And the more dynamic dimension of interdependence, what we can call inter-emergence or inter-emergence, Now you know from studying the Vijnanas that mind accompanies each sense.

[02:42]

But I think maybe we should understand that to mean feeling, feeling and particularly non-graspable feeling accompanies each sense. Because to really notice, find distinctions, it can't happen consciously so much, but in your feeling. As I said, I think in the young, winter branches when I first arrived from Colorado. I mean, I'm there in Johanneshof or here now and it's somewhat sunny. And the leaves and trees are all quite clear and present to me. But Creston is what, at 4,500 meters about?

[03:56]

And it's thin air and it's dry, very dry air and high air. And things just in that kind of air have a preciseness, a kind of, you know, when you start nursing, it's almost overwhelming how precise each leaf is. I mean here all the pine needles and leaves are immersed in a kind of wet air. But a leaf against the crust on the sky looks like a piece of sky has been cut out and a leaf fit into it.

[05:10]

And it's almost the sky and the leaf have been stitched together. But my experience overall is it's clear and bright here and it's clear and bright there, but when I really look, it's a different kind of brightness and clearness. And that's what happens, something like that happens when you begin to refine your attention and refine your noticing. It's hard to explain to anyone. But you yourself may feel, after I'm practicing now and everything is in its place and everything is so clear.

[06:31]

And also we could say everything feels at rest. So how do you teach that? How do you teach to notice everything feels at rest? It simply needs to happen to you through your practice. And one of the main ways this happens is you're evolving and maturing meditation practice. Because meditation practice develops as you can begin to concentrate a little more. You could begin to stay with your breath a little more.

[07:40]

You could begin to stay with the spine, mind and breath a little more. And all those things accumulate to give you a It's really a new way of being in the world. But the real shift is when you begin to find a stillness in your sitting. When you sit down, it's almost as if there's a stillness waiting for you to distill yourself. No, no. Distill yourself in. You know what distill means, right?

[08:41]

Yes. All right. And that stillness, like my friends leaning forward and saying, listen to the wood of the bar, that stillness begins to pervade everything. You notice the stillness of a person before you notice anything else about them. Even if they're in the midst of activity, there's stillness there. So as you come to one of the entry at Dharma doors here, as I just gave you before lunch, as we're all familiar with, is the Four Marks.

[10:06]

So the four marks are more of a description of a dharma. And you begin to notice appearance as a dharma. But the five so-called dharmas from the Lankavatara Sutra are more of a wisdom practice. And while the five dharmas begin with appearance, And then, as you know, naming. And naming occurs very quickly.

[11:07]

And I gave you that piece from the Lankavatara Sutra the other day. And how we can peel the words off things, find ourselves in an unworded world. And so here we notice right away with appearance, you notice the instantaneous habit to name. And then immediately with naming comes the third of the five dharmas, discrimination. And you have to catch that process right away. And so you use the instantaneous habit of naming.

[12:23]

Now it's very difficult to break the habit of naming if you really think the world exists out there. Independent of you, you're in a container, as I say. So when you begin to see that space and time, as I've always said, are not universals, and are aspects or parts of your activity, as this room, we've shifted it around, the space of this room is our activity. And it was Giorgio's activity and cultural activity. So when you begin to feel your, when you begin to know that you're in the midst of activity, And an activity which is creating the world as you go along.

[13:47]

It becomes easier to stop the appearance turning into a name right away. So the habit, the built-in habit of naming, and that's part of how we have developed this biologically and culturally, When you name something, it becomes an alarm bell. Oops, stop naming. But if you don't hear the alarm at naming or when you start to discriminate and make associations and so forth, and you try to

[14:52]

Then you use the discrimination as an alarm bell, a wake-up call, a heads-up to stop discriminating. And so that alarm at naming or that alarm that arises at discrimination It arises from right knowledge or wisdom. And the fourth of the five dharmas is right knowledge or wisdom. And the fifth of the five dharmas is suchness. And suchness is the realization of non-duality.

[16:13]

So that's the shortcut to suchness. Yeah, and you can practice and use this shortcut to suchness on every appearance. So you want to really get familiar with these four marks and five dharmas that they just are part of your noticing appearance. And the four dharmas start, I mean the four marks start with, I say appearance, I think I said appearance, but actually usually it's called birth.

[17:19]

Because from the point of view of Buddhism, the world starts with appearance. It's born. As a philosophical theorist of physics says, named Barbour, B-A-R-B-O-U-R, It says, it is nothing but nows. There is really no past. It's really gone. And we don't actually know exactly what the future will be. So there's this arrangement at this minute, and that's it.

[18:19]

So the more you can have that deep Buddhist view of this, just an arrangement of this minute, It helps you bring your vitality and energy into the four marks and the five dharmas. I spoke to somebody the other day who was doing the bells. And this person has gotten pretty good at the bells. So there's pretty good clarity with each hit and so forth. But this person sort of thinks the job is to hit the bells at the right places.

[19:31]

And that could barely even be called passive Zen. The point of the job of dog, which not everyone really gets, is you bring your energy to the seat. There's nothing but this arrangement at this minute, so all there is is your energy in it. So it means that you're not only refining attention and refining noticing, you're refining your ability to have attention filled with energy. You don't have to be too obvious about it.

[20:32]

I mean, you don't have to look like a volcano. This little ant here who lives in a wordless world, look at his energy. He's nothing but energy. He or she, I mean, I think that's a she ant. So the point of being dawned Is to get good enough at the bells and the mokugyo and so forth that you can push your energy through the bell and drum into the group. So that it's good enough with the bells and the mokugyo to become that you really put your energy through the bells and the mokugyo into the group.

[21:39]

So I said to this person, just put your energy. She said, I don't feel any energy. I kind of shook her. Even if you've got nothing left, do it. But still, there's stillness in it. And being rooted in stillness allows this energy. Yeah, so, okay. So I mentioned this morning, entireties. Entire, you know, entire is all of it, all at once.

[22:43]

And so all, maybe, sometimes I say all at onceness, but right now I'm saying entireties in English. In contrast to entities. Entities are static. You know, Aristotle, it's interesting that Aristotle did a lot for Western philosophy and thinking in trying to analyze and notice perception. And the problem he confronted himself with is quite interesting, was your senses perceive various properties.

[24:00]

Color, smell, so forth. So he asked himself, how do we put that together into an object? So you have the smell of the flower, the look of the flower, the look of the leaf, etc. But then we name it a particular leaf, a flower. How does the What function? That's where he came up too with the idea of the common sense as being all the senses working together as almost a new sense. So anyway, from what I've read, he not entirely adequately tried to figure out how the separate senses, each for a particular sound, smell, taste, touch, puts it together and makes a comprehensible object.

[25:17]

And it's interesting that Buddhist philosophers, at the same time as Aristotle's life, We're trying to do almost the opposite. They were saying, okay, this object has all these properties. And it's just a made thing. So let's take its seeming existence, madeness, out of... Let's take the properties away from it.

[26:19]

All you have is separate properties. So there's no object there after all. It's just a bunch of properties glued together. So that's the whole dynamic of Buddhism was, like the skandhas and so forth, to take the properties away and then say, oh, It's empty. As these differing dynamics, one of how is the world put together, or how do we take it apart to see that it's only put together? So the emphasis in Buddhism has been, through meditation practice and so forth, to experience the put-togetherness as including everything.

[27:46]

You are part of the putting together. And it's this dual sense of every object is also the appearance of mind. So these are examples of small differences. Like a small difference between there and there is a pretty big difference by the time it gets over there to all of you. But those small differences don't become big differences until you start uniting them. I like the word unique.

[28:59]

Because strictly speaking in English you can't modify it. If it's really unique, it can't be modified. Like very unique. Something can't be very unique. It's either unique or it's not. Because if you say it's very unique or really unique, You're putting svabhava into it. You're putting a sense of permanence into it because it's... there's something that is a little unique, or more unique, and that's a svabhava, or a sense of permanence.

[30:04]

So if we recognize that unique can't be modified as an English word, and if we recognize that unique can't be modified as an English word, It can be an example for us of actually we can't notify anything. Maybe we can add and subtract. Okay, so now I'm still trying to speak about entireties. So one of the things I've, the example I've used quite often is, let's look at a tree. We've got a lot of them here. If you look at a tree as an activity, whatever a tree is, it includes all its activity.

[31:05]

So, like a good environmentalist, you notice that there's birds and there's insects and there's lichen. And there's movement. But the movement is also only possible because of the trunk and the roots. If there were no trunk and roots, there would be no movement because the leaves would all fall off or fly away or something.

[32:11]

So it's the relationship between the stillness of the trunk and the movement of the wind that allows movement. So when you start feeling the field of everything, And there's no entity out there called tree. In fact, there's only an activity What happens in a field, in an overlapping field with other trees, and what's interesting about noticing that and it becoming a habit of your noticing that, It turns you all into poets.

[33:16]

Sukhiroshi said once, when is a tree a tree and when is a tree a poem? If you get in the habit of feeling the tree as an entirety and not an entity. The generative or inter-emergent quality of the experience. And you're part of the emergence of the tree. And you feel yourself as a field interacting with the field of the tree. So beginning to bring your attentive attention to each usually what we call an object as an activity,

[34:29]

It immediately engages you as an activity. And you begin to feel yourself in a field. floating, kind of floating in a field of activity. So this kind of experience arises out of unique-ing for a while, The practice is as simple as the four marks and the five karmas. And also a teaching, an implicit teaching like the twelve sense bases. Each of our interior senses.

[35:55]

And the basis for that in the so-called external world. And that's called sad-ayatana. Ayatana is the field that's the sense organ and the object in the field that's created by the relationship between the sense organ and the object. These are all practices. The vijnanas turn into the practice of the ayatanas. And we have no words for this in English, so now I'm using these Sanskrit words.

[36:58]

And then the practice of noticing and experiencing the field of each sense, which includes the world and becomes the, the ayatanas become this, this little wider word, sad ayatanas, mean you feel the world, as twelve bases for knowing the world. You feel the intermergent cooperation of the world in sensing the world. And as I'm describing this,

[37:59]

This can arise simply from taking the poem of attentive attention and following it as you explore your own attention and attention to yourself or to And then that turns into, out of a Buddhist context, then turns into specific Buddhist teachings. Like the skandhas and the vijnanas and the four marks, the five, etc. And it transforms your world. So now, the last thing I'd like to bring up here What are you bringing your attention to?

[39:33]

Now, from what I'm saying, is you're bringing your attention now to things as entireties. Okay, space is not a universal. It's always being generated. You feel yourself, as I do right now, in a generated space. But this space that is happening through this activity,

[40:33]

is of course not separate from my feel of the space of your activity. And as I say too often, the space that each of us is And here we have thusness or isness. The isness of each of you is more accessible. We're more accessible to each other. We're more intimate with each other when we're in this space of isness or thusness. And in a way, I could say, strictly speaking, the Sangha is those who share this isness and recognize this isness in each other.

[41:56]

Okay. No, but we still, we do have to function in the world. Yeah, so we have the teachings of the two truths. I think that the word is sakhyas. And it is not only a word for truth, it's a word for what's most real or reality. So I think it's kind of great that it's called two realities, two truths. Sometimes the Yogacara sets it up that there's three. And the first is when you really live in a deluded world.

[43:09]

I mean, you really think you're living in a container. But then the relative truth at least knows that things are relative. Yeah, and that's called something like... Samuyaya, I forget the word. And the ultimate one is called Paramatha. Okay, so what is the difference between these two? They're both truths. One we call the conventional world in which we can act. And one we call the fundamental world in which we can also act.

[44:11]

So I've been trying to think of how to speak about this. You know, if I take a glass of water and I put a pencil in it, it looks like the pencil's bent. You put it in part way, right? So our senses tell us it's bent. So our senses tell us it's bent. And the word change actually means bent. So that's, maybe we have to use the word everything exchanges and not everything changes. Because changing is more than bending.

[45:16]

Okay. But anyway, if I put that, I'm not sure I want to drink this and stir it with this, but why not? Anyway, in the water it's bent. But it looks bent to my senses. Es sieht gebogen aus für meine Sinne. I can know it's not bent. Ich kann wissen, dass es wirklich nicht gebogen ist. But if I put it all the way in the water, a dolphin coming by sees it as straight. Aber wenn ich es ganz in das Wasser hineinstecke und dann kommt ein Delfin vorbei, der sieht den Stock nicht gerade. Da ist irgendwo ein Delfin drin. Also der See-Delfin she sees it as straight. So the diffraction rate is different. Water is clear and air is clear. But they diffract light at a different rate.

[46:20]

The stick doesn't change. But what happens in the sense of the two truths is everything, it's still the same world. But when the predictive rate is different, am I making any sense? If the predictive rate is very slow, then you're in the conventional world. Because even in the conventional world, you know that things change. But you think they change rather conveniently and slowly.

[47:26]

And some things don't change. Time and space are universal and so forth. But in the fundamental world Change is instantaneous. Everything is unique. And the attention of a realized or mature practitioner knows both at once. It lives in a world with a slow predictive change and an instantaneous predictive rate. in which there's only a middle and no endpoints.

[48:39]

So you have to work in a world of beginning and ends and conventional world, and you live in a world where there's no endpoints, only a middle. And those are all functions of developing your attention. Now I was asked and I was thinking about how to speak about what we might call nescient knowing. Nescient means it's a synonym with ignorance. Okay. Science is knowing. Net is to not know. So nescient means not knowing. Okay. I don't know, maybe it doesn't have an equivalent in German.

[49:56]

But just means can't be known or not knowing. So we could say or knowing. When you take all the properties away from the object, And you unword it, unname it. The end point of that in the spectrum of knowing is not knowing. And so one of the ways we work around our tendency to know It's as Regina said yesterday or earlier today.

[50:59]

She lets her body make decisions. And that's one that... At least for me, practice is more and more developing the skill of when to let my body decide and when to make a mental decision. Most decisions are, the majority of decisions by everybody are made by your body, hearts beating, bones. But various cultures emphasize decisions being brought into mentation. And when I was young, I tried to bring all decisions into mentation.

[52:03]

It almost drove me crazy. So I think it's useful to let your body start making the decisions that it can make without too much bad consequence. Like you might wear the wrong tie in a second... What I'm interested in right now, though this is not so much fair seminar, If our memory works by storing experiences and objects as names,

[53:14]

I mean, if you see a piece of metal at the end of a stick, a big piece of metal at the end of a stick, you can probably guess that it's a snow shovel. Yes, or if you know the name of shovel, you remember the name, you can use it as a shovel. But if 20 years ago somebody had shown you an iPhone, Or a DVD disc. You would have had no idea what it is. This isn't a phone. It's just a flat piece of shiny stuff. So we make use of the phone because we know its name and we have a memory, a recollection of using it as a phone.

[54:41]

But if a big part of the dynamic of Zen practice, of Buddhist practice, is to take things apart and know them not as entities but as a lot of particulars, even unrelated particulars. How do we store our experience in such particles or bytes? How does it come together through working with a field of mind rather than a focus of mind? This is not a question Aristotle asked himself. I can tell he didn't have any concept of the field of mind.

[56:08]

But anyway, I told you, I'm always having a question I'm working on. This is the question I'm working on right now. How does the Alaya-Vijjana work in an unworded world? In a world of Nescient Samadhi. Could we leave that as a place where we stop? I hope I didn't get incomprehensive. I think it was pretty comprehensive. Maybe pretty irrelevant, but I think it was comprehensive. So let's sit for a few moments. Please, let's each of us start with embodied attention.

[59:17]

Practice opening up your body to attention. And have the feeling of literally filling your body with attention. And noticing where attention won't reach. And by reuniting this attention Over and over again. Seeing if you can fill the body with attention. From the soles of the feet to the top of the head.

[60:20]

Glowing in your skin. glowing, shining, and filling the interior of your body. this fully embodied attention becomes the basis for really bringing attention, the world into attention, And it seems a bit strange, but this embodied attention, this fullness of attention, is most fully arises when there's a fundamental stillness in you.

[61:45]

It may sound strange, but this full-bodied, this feeling of the body with attention, will then happen completely when this silence is there. Dharma siblings.

[62:24]

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