You know, every time I'm giving a tea show, so often, right? And then so I can see you all, and I'd like to see you all. I have to sit on this platform. I have to climb up. It's getting higher every time, you know. But at the same time, I actually hate being the center of attention. A form of hell for me would be to be a celebrity. So I handle it by feeling, we'll centralize attention. And I guess that's the topic of today.

[01:02]

And I realize, again, by the comments and jokes on and otherwise and before, that I have to go back to basics. Because, you know, simple things like how to trust your body, quite a few people, what I mean by that, I have not been able to make clear. Okay. So, we're in a practice which assumes that Noticing the world is more fundamental than thinking the world.

[02:28]

Wir befinden uns in einer Praxis, die davon ausgeht, dass das Bemerken der Welt, die Welt zu bemerken, grundlegender ist, als die Welt zu denken. So, and let's put it another way, that when you experience, when you assume the world is an in-here-ness, You're in a different world than when you assume the world is an out-there-ness. The word about literally means the outer part of a house, etymologically. So to think about literally means to think about what's out there. So the... culture which assumes the world is an in-here-ness will emphasize attention, and a culture which assumes the world is an out-there-ness will emphasize thinking.

[04:02]

So what are some examples of the difference? Okay. The first instruction of our dear Buddha, which we will have to practice his, have a little ceremony for his enlightenment tomorrow. Or a big ceremony, at least a ceremony. The reason this Rohatsu Sashin starts on December 1st and ends on December 8th. Because the Japanese still keep December 8th as Buddha's Enlightenment Day. Well, much of the Buddhist world decided on some other date for his enlightenment.

[05:07]

So we have Rohatsu Sashin. It starts on December 1st, which is rather inconvenient for some of you. But here we are. Inconveniently related to the Buddhism life. And for many of you, the sashin is... Sort of the real thing in the ceremony is sort of a nuisance. Yeah, but some of you like ceremonies. Some of us like ceremonies. Yeah, so when we do the ceremony, let's have a feeling of celebrating the fact that enlightenment is possible.

[06:26]

But really, again, as I said yesterday, we should call it Buddha's awakening ceremony. Yeah, an awakening, again, is a path process, not an event. And just thinking about the world as a path process is already something different than we're used to. Now, we certainly practice attention in our Western culture. In unserer westlichen Kultur praktizieren wir ganz sicher Aufmerksamkeit.

[07:31]

It's a way to focus in order to study and learn. Es ist eine Art und Weise, sich zu fokussieren, zu konzentrieren, wenn man etwas lernt. That's the way you play sports or do crafts and so forth. Es ist eine Art und Weise, wie man zum Beispiel Sport macht oder eine Handwerkskunst lernt. But it's a kind of focus event. It's related to a focus. Yeah. But in, I'm sorry to keep saying Western and East Asian, but really, I don't know how to, I need to point out the difference. If the world is an in-here-ness fundamentally a sensorial experience simply recognizing a simple thing like when you hear a bird you're not hearing the way Another bird hears the bird.

[08:47]

You're hearing it within the capacity of your own ear. So was einfaches. With a hearing aid, some of us. So was einfaches allein festzustellen. Wie zum Beispiel, wenn du einen Vogel hörst, dann hörst du den Vogel nicht so, wie ein anderer Vogel den Vogel hören würde, sondern du hörst den Vogel innerhalb deiner eigenen... I think it's great that Paul's new hearing aids are relational. They relate the information and so you have a more complex experience. And he can hear everything. The touch of a teaching staff. So when the world is an in-hearness, you develop attention. And if you look at Japanese culture, for example, Korean and Chinese, the culture is designed to develop attention.

[10:22]

Wenn du dir die japanische, koreanische oder chinesische Kultur anschaust, dann siehst du, dass es in der Kultur darum geht, Aufmerksamkeit zu entwickeln. The clothes are designed, as I pointed out, to require attention to wear. Die Kleidung ist so geschneidert, wie ich das schon gesagt habe, so dass man Aufmerksamkeit braucht, um sie anzuziehen. Chopsticks require a certain kind of attentional skill. And to write with a brush full of wet ink requires attentional skill. It's not a ballpoint pen. And to have a language which requires you to know Five, ten, twenty, thirty thousand separate kanji requires bodily memory, not mental memory.

[11:48]

So if you ask somebody, a Japanese person, for instance, what is the kanji for something? They go, oh, that one. Because their body knows it, their mind doesn't know it. So it's just true. I even noticed when I first went to Kyoto, lived in Kyoto in 68, I guess, Before some of you were born, before some of your parents were born.

[12:50]

I was playing around in Kyoto. We were waiting for birth. I couldn't get taxis to stop for me. Of course, in those days there weren't many foreigners in Kyoto, especially in the winter. But then one day I noticed the taxi started stopping for me. So I tried to study, what was the difference? So I tried to imagine, how would I stop a taxi in New York? You signal the taxi. And in Japan, you gesture to the taxi. And in Japan, you make a gesture to the taxi.

[14:07]

So you feel the taxi coming and you put your hand out in a way that sort of says, Hey, taxi driver, maybe you see my hand. Wouldn't it be nice if you stopped? And then they stop. And part of the reason was is that Foreigners never know where they're going. They have an address, but like my house in Kyoto was the 31st house built historically in that neighborhood, but the house next to me was 1185. Well, how's a taxi driver supposed to know that? And so one reason why the taxis don't stop is because foreigners never know where they want to go.

[15:15]

They might have an address. But for example, my house in Kyoto, that was the 31st house that was built in the neighborhood. But the house next door, for example, was 1185. And how should a taxi driver know that? I mean, the Japanese sort of feeling is, if you don't know where you're going, why are you going there? And when department stores send something to you, they can't send it to you. They have to send it to somebody in your neighborhood who then re-delivers it to you. Only neighborhood people know the neighborhood. When I was first in Kyoto, there were, in English language newspapers, there were stories about, should we build sidewalks? And even now if you go to Kyoto, almost no side street has sidewalks.

[16:35]

And even now, when you go to Kyoto, there is still almost no side street, a citizen's path. And cars and bicycles are all roaring down, and kids, and a couple of kids were killed by taxis or something like that. And so there was this issue. And finally, the newspaper said, there's been a careful sociological study, and what we need to do is teach children to be more attentive. We don't have to build sidewalks. And then it came up that a few children were playing on the streets, children and all kinds of people go along and the children play. And then there were accidents that a few children were overtaken by cars, by taxis and so on. So the idea that stairs should be the same way is like in a skyscraper maybe, but you want stairs to be different because it requires attention. The stairs higher and the stairs lower and so forth. And Green Gulch is given into building codes, so everywhere in the garden they now have to have where you can walk without

[18:12]

Any problems and wheelchairs can go, so... Anyway. You can't hardly design a Zen garden if you need a wheelchair to go everywhere. So a lot of the things in gardens are developed To make you feel you're up above a tree or underneath or something like that. To play with perspectives. Okay, so what is the point? Let's continue. The point of bringing attention to the breath. Fundamentally, it's to develop attention.

[19:41]

So you develop and why the inhale and the exhale? And why the activity of the inhale and activity of the exhale, bodily activity. Certainly, you're developing discriminative attentional skills. Because you can't think your body, but you can feel your body attentionally. So you use the activity of the body to develop attention. And attention is a form of mind. It's the advanced guard of mind.

[20:43]

Advanced guard? Is that a joke? No. It could be. Advanced guard is those who go out first to see what the territory is like. Oh, okay. Yeah, we have people like that. Okay, also, Aufmerksamkeit ist eine Form des Geistes. Aufmerksamkeit ist sowas wie, wie sagen wir, die Vorboten. The Vorboten, yeah, I should have told you that. Yes, you should have. Vorboten des Geistes. Winterschlaf. That's one of the few words I know. Very good in some contexts. Not in this one.

[21:45]

So you're developing a discriminative attention. And you're also then developing an attentional body. Because you're developing the ability of the body to not only receive attention, but absorb attention. Yeah. And of course you're then also developing the ability to sync the body and breath. Sync the body, synchronize the body and the breath and attention.

[22:53]

den Körper und den Atem in oder mit Aufmerksamkeit zu synchronisieren. And you can see that our orioki practice requires attentional skills. Und du kannst sehen, dass die orioki praxis Aufmerksamkeitsfähigkeiten braucht. So that Zen is developed as part of a culture which emphasizes not thinking, but attentional skills. But attention, the concept is that you're not born complete. You're born half-formed. Now this is understandable in a world of in-here-ness.

[24:12]

But Japanese people simply cannot understand things like anti-abortion and things like that because the baby is only partially formed when it's born. It's the parents and the village which completes the forming. So if you read about Basho and his writing haiku The first beginning of his journey is he abandons a baby he finds abandoned. We couldn't do that. And I couldn't do it. But he says, the village won't take care of you.

[25:12]

Your parents won't take care of you. How can I take care of you? He puts the baby back beside the road. Yes. I'm not saying it's perfect. Okay, good. It might be you. But Basho's act is only understandable in a culture which assumes you're born incomplete and it requires people to complete you. So our Zen practices assume that attention is part of the most significant part of the way you complete yourself.

[26:33]

So you're bringing attention to the activity of being alive, So bringst du Aufmerksamkeit zur Aktivität des Lebendigseins. And you're bringing attention to the particularity of appearance. Du bringst Aufmerksamkeit zu den Einzelheiten der Einzigartigkeit dessen, was erscheint. So these phrases like to pause for the particular or just this are clearly meant for you to develop attention for attentional appearance.

[27:33]

You know, I'm trying to find a way to talk about this, so I hope you can... Be patient. So, attentional appearance develops a nowness, a nowness, a nowness. Aufmerksame Erscheinung, was das entwickelt, ist ein jetzt und ein jetzt und ein jetzt. Here-ness is more like being. Hier sein, das hat eher so eine Qualität von so wie sein.

[28:35]

Now it's more like here disappears and you're just this, just this. And my opinion is, this actually makes you smarter. You know, if you look at, I don't know, I think IQ is a measure of how fast you can be ordinary. What? But if you look at the IQ curves, our IQ curve, the bell curve, is at 100. Japanese is somewhere up 130, 140. And Korean is the same. But the too far ends are populated about the same, but the middle is populated differently. They may.

[29:50]

We're biologically different, different noses and all that stuff. We may be biologically more or less smart, but probably it's mostly the emphasis on attention, which is actually the mind. The mind is attention. So the assumption in mindfulness practice is your mind is incomplete and mindfulness practice develops the mind fully. Now, when I first went to Russia, again,

[31:02]

My good friend, Michael Murphy, all his life was interested, all his life he's been interested in extra normal experiences. So, one of the reasons we went is because he was interested in meeting somebody who could move a cigarette package across the table with his attention. And the Russians are really into that. And the American CIA is too, but they keep it a secret. Because that's their job, is to keep secrets. Die amerikanische CIA findet das auch ziemlich interessant, aber die halten es geheim, und das ist ja auch ihre Aufgabe.

[32:28]

But coming back from one of our trips, we stopped in Cambridge to take a break after the oppression of Russia before the wall came down. And I ended up in Cambridge. It was just by chance. It was the International Psychic Association or something was meeting. So, you know, I'm walking down a hall in a building and I'm with Michael and somebody else and myself, and three or four of us, and somebody opened a door and said, Oh, a Zen teacher, come in here, we're having a spoon bending party.

[33:39]

And then suddenly someone opened a door and said, Oh, great, a Zen teacher, come in here, we're having a spoon bending party. After So I have no interest in these things. I mean, I've had various experiences, but I have no real interest. I'm interested in Zazen. But I found I could bend spoons. So since this is the topic today, I surprised everyone because even forks bend twice anyway When I showed these to Brother David, he said, all religions are the same.

[34:55]

I said, well, I don't know. But this is an intentional skill which you don't have to develop. I mean, I've taught a few scientists to do it, actually. And some people are scared. I don't show it to people very often. If none of you have seen this, a few of you. Some people are scared. The occult. Some people are scared because it looks like a sect. That was really as good, isn't it? I've been to about 50 or so, but I'm not too interested. And one thing I've discovered which is interesting, if I'm in a room with a lot of people, hundreds of people, or a restaurant or a lecture, and there's a communal feeling in the room, I can bend a spoon much more easy, much easier than when there's not a group of people all on the same wavelength.

[36:31]

I wouldn't have expected that, but it's the case. And it's the easiest time to teach somebody how to do it. And one thing that I find interesting is that when I'm in a room full of people, 100 people or so, and it's a meeting where it's about this, then I notice that, or where there's a common wavelength, then I notice that it's much, much easier to bend a spoon. And these are also the circumstances in which it's much easier to teach someone else. When I first was doing it, they told me to try to bend the spoon. I said, okay. And I noticed I had to concentrate without looking at it. And I noticed that I'm just pressing on the spoon. And I noticed... a certain point at which I'm used to from zazen when I feel most concentrated when I began to could bring myself to that point the stone would feel soft and would move and at first I noticed that I was simply putting a little pressure on this spoon and then comes this point that I know from zazen when I feel the most concentrated and at this point

[37:55]

So in a way, we could say attention is like the outering of mind. Innering and outering. Veräußerung. Ja, und wir könnten sagen, dass Aufmerksamkeit so etwas ist wie die Veräußerung des Geistes. I'm sorry. That's good. Okay. And so mind is more an innering of attention. Und das Geist eher die Verinnerlichung der Aufmerksamkeit ist. So like you can, once you get part of... part of bringing attention to the breath. You're beginning to infuse the body with attention.

[38:58]

You keep pouring attention into the body like it was a sponge. So you're not just Developing an attentional focus in zazen when you're paying attention, bringing attention, giving attention to your breath. You're making the body more and more able to absorb attention. And then you're developing an attentional body, an embodied body, an intentionally embodied, embodied body. And then that attentional body, which is almost like filled with the fluidness of attention, can more easily be understood as how it flows up the spine.

[40:04]

And then the attention is almost like a string you can follow. You're following it this way, though, towards yourself, like a string of beans in a fairy tale or a string. You're following it, and you can follow attention back to mind at source. You're following it inward. Inward, and what you find is mind, and then you find mind, what I would call mind, is rooted in stillness, not in thinking. So the mind-to-mind transmission means when teacher and disciple and Sangha and this centralized, resonant, fielded Sangha

[41:43]

When that attentional stillness or that mind stillness knows another mind stillness, there's a kind of knowing which is called transmission. And all the teachings and practices are developed to make that more likely to happen when we just simply practice together. We don't say that's what's happening because then you start thinking about it, but we're doing it. And if you think about it, it loses its energy. All the teachings and all the practices are designed to make it more likely that this will happen.

[43:05]

But normally we don't say that this is the case, because if we say it, then we start thinking about it. Instead, we just do it. It's a kind of apprenticeship. It's a kind of teaching. It's a kind of apprenticeship. Okay, so then what I would call, what I've been calling the six stations of mindfulness. Why is that funny? Because I just looked at the clock, you're starting now. Will the train just stop? I think I can. I think I can. We Americans understand that, right?

[44:09]

Yeah, but we'll be brief. I'll just sit ganz kurz. We'll get on the train and it'll tip. Okay, so the first is attention to breath. But it's a process, an operation in which you're developing the body and the mind to function through attention. Yeah, that's good enough. So the first is attention to the breath. And that's beginning to relate mind, body and breath. The second station is you're developing an attentional body.

[45:14]

And it's the attentional body that you trust. Es ist dieser Aufmerksamkeitskörper, den du vertraust. The vital body. Der vitale Körper. I choose what teaching staff to pick up. I don't think about it. I never think about things if possible. I just reach out and what I pick up, that's what I use. When I have to wear ties, I don't think I just take the tie I reach for. I will not edit it. But of course I have a certain strategy. The ties I might wear are here. Well, you have to do a little thinking.

[46:24]

If I have to choose a slipper, I just let my hand grab it and whatever my hand grabs, I ask for it. And I will not work out these decisions, they are not made retroactively. But I have such a small strategy, namely the slippers that I want to wear, they also hang on the 21st. But that kind of skill also, the development of that kind of attentional skill is what allows you to decide, I'll get up at 6.08, and by gosh, you wake up and the clock says 6.08. And the body seems to know whether the time zone has changed and which clock, you know, etc. I'm always astonished at how accurate it is. Yeah. So I can't trust my legs anymore to jump from stone to stone on the beach.

[47:51]

Ich kann meinen Beinen nicht mehr vertrauen, von einem Stein auf den anderen zu hüpfen am Strand oder so. I can't trust my body in that way. I'm getting too old. But I can trust my body as a notitional intelligence or something like that. Is it different from noticing? Just noticing. So I, for the last some years now, have made a point of never making mental decisions, just making bodily decisions. So I keep training my body to use its inherent intelligence. And over many years I have now taught myself to make almost no more mental decisions, but always physical decisions and to encourage my body to use its internal intelligence or much more its learned, its acclaimed intelligence.

[49:15]

So I don't think, I mean, I sort of have a general idea of what I might say. But when I'm sitting here, I just look at what appears and I say whatever appears. I don't think I should say this. I just say what appears. And I trust my body to present what I might say. It might be wrong, but I trust it. So it's attention to the breath, attention to the body, and then the third attention to attention. And an example I used on practically the first lecture I ever gave is if you concentrate on this. The first skill is developing one-pointedness. And that's a process which takes a while.

[50:34]

I can hold this up, but that's a thinking act, not a process of act. Okay, you can bring attention to the stick. And then you think of something else. And then you bring attention to the stick. And then you think of something else. Okay, eventually you bring attention that tends to stay. That's the second stage. And then the third stage is, you bring attention to, and it goes away, it comes back by itself. This is standard traditional Buddhism.

[51:39]

What you're expected to learn if you're going to practice Buddhism. And eventually, not only does it come back by itself, if you put attention there, it just rests. And that's only possible when you've developed an inner stillness. So this simple exercise develops an inner stillness. And it's called one-pointedness. And you can see it throughout the teachings, one-pointedness, one-pointedness. But you're really developing a field of mind, not simply one-pointedness. Okay, now say we're all concentrated on this. We've developed a concentration on this and concentration is just resting. Wir haben eine Konzentration darauf entwickelt und die Aufmerksamkeit verweilt.

[52:54]

Now you have the ability, wherever you put your attention, don't just stay there. These are the explicit stages that you develop in yourself, that they're there, but we don't point them out usually. Now, We're all concentrated on this stick, right? Let's assume. Now I take it away. But the concentration remains. What are you concentrated now on? You're concentrated on attention. This is attention to attention. So now you know the field of mind. So the first three stations of mindful attention, not mindfulness, mindful attention...

[54:03]

The first three stages are attentional stages. Now that you know and you can feel, bodily feel, the kind of fluidness, fieldness, the feel of, the field of mind, So that's the fifth station, the fourth station. And then the fifth station is when you feel mind as a partner. No, actually, the fourth is the mind of the partner.

[55:04]

So every time you see an object or see a person, you feel your own sensorium and own mind as part of the experience. So every time you see a person or an object, you feel your own mind as part of the experience. So the practice of developing the skill of attentional appearance is the practice of developing the skill of the appearance of the phenomena and the appearance of simultaneous appearance of mind as the partner of the appearance. And then, Fifth is when you feel the field of mind primarily and not the contents, and the contents arise within the field.

[56:24]

And studying Picasso's paintings, I would say Picasso's enlightenment, which he kept painting over and over again, my impression, is he experienced the partnership of mind And Matisse, I would say, his enlightenment experience was, though he kept painting in various ways, but he experienced the field of mind in which contents arise. And he kept painting the space which produces the objects.

[57:27]

So we could also call these realisational stations. And then the sixth is... mind only, mind as information. And that seems to be hard for people to grasp. But again, the slates in the Zendo, they're physical objects in the world, some millions of years old, compressed clay. And they're, but from one point of view, they're squares.

[58:30]

From another point of view, they're diamonds. And whether they're squares or diamonds, it's just information. So it doesn't mean that the slate tiles aren't there. But the sensorial experience of them is their squares or their diamonds. And that's only information produced by your mind, by your experience. Another culture might call them something else, rectangles and, I don't know, something else.

[59:34]

When you experience mind as information only, completely insubstantial, dissolves, and you're left with a world with no distinctions, which we can call a direct experience of emptiness. When you experience mind as pure information, which dissolves again and again, then... And that last sentence would be an ideal way to end a Sashin's lectures. So let's pretend this was an ideal Sashin. But that's only information. Thank you very much.

[60:30]

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