Good afternoon. So maybe I should continue a bit with my outline. It's always warm in here. So I said we should practice mindfulness of our, at least my sense of it is, we should practice mindfulness and particularly, primarily of actions and our breath.

[01:09]

and to develop a daily or weekly practice of sasen. And to bring some teaching into your life, into your practice and life. Like treat things like your own eyesight. Yeah, or maybe those three minds of daily consciousness. Yeah. Three minds of daily consciousness. At least that's what I call it. And a general feeling for the Eightfold Path. An awareness of this path. as a description of your own past.

[02:33]

And then a practice with the sangha and a practice with the teacher. Some combination of it. a way of studying or observing how we actually live. And of course, doing zazen, as you know, you're developing a fourth mind. So whatever you're doing in practice, this development of a fourth mind is going on at the same time. Whatever you're doing in this combination of practices, simultaneously the development of a fourth mind is going on.

[03:34]

Yeah, and the question is, how do you really establish that fourth mind in your daily life? When you understand the fourth mind is not a mind you're born with, It's a mind in addition to waking, dreaming, and non-dreaming deep sleep. Okay, so now I'm suggesting a second stage of practice. Which is the development, first of all, as I said, of background mind.

[04:42]

A sense of continuity of mind underneath your usual mind. Sorry. Daily, usual mind. Underneath your chin, underneath your feet. I'm just teasing you. Underneath something. Yeah. No, we already have, of course, some version of that. Otherwise, we wouldn't have much continuity of lived experience. But the usual sort of background mind is very tied to our active surface mind.

[06:02]

And it's usually kind of the depository or location of our moods and things like that. And our ego observer. So somehow you're kind of shifting this. So it's a bit more detached. A lot more detached. Enabled just to observe without getting too involved in. And through zazen you kind of catch, zazen helps to catch the feeling of that. And once you sort of catch the feeling of it, You can kind of direct the flow of the potential of this mind away from being so much the backdrop for your usual self-consciousness.

[07:25]

Backdrop is like in the theater. Yeah, we could say maybe you're shifting from a backdrop mind to a background mind. Maybe we could... We could do a backdrop. Yes. In a theater? In a theater backdrop. He's a Kulissen guy, actually. Yeah. Anyway, you know, I think it's useful to kind of play with finding some language for it.

[08:48]

Yeah, because perhaps you can see that if we... can identify something. In a sense, kind of naming it. Through the identification, we can start noticing it when it appears. And then we can redirect it. So anyway, you're developing some kind of background mind. As I said, you can get the feel of. Now, what happens if you're doing zazen regularly... Is that this mind, which is not waking, dreaming, or non-dreaming deep sleep, Yeah, this, what I'm calling a fourth mind,

[10:11]

begins to flow into this background mind. You kind of create a capacity for a background mind, which then becomes the course, like the course of a river, the channel, becomes the channel for this fourth mind. So the beginning was... It's all right. I can barely say this myself. So this background mind becomes the kind of channel for this fourth mind or... And when that begins to happen, your zazen begins to have a kind of actual, tangible mind presence in your daily life.

[11:23]

Yeah, it's not a backdrop just for your mood or ego or something. Es ist nicht nur eine Kulisse für deine Stimmung oder dein Ego. I think that's an extremely important development. Ich glaube, das ist eine äußerst wichtige Entwicklung. Until that happens, your zazen is confined to your zazen. Bis dies geschieht, ist dein zazen auf dein zazen begrenzt. And until that happens, Your sāsan is merely making your sāsan and mindfulness practice, all your practices, are merely making better in some way your usual mind. There's no transformation of the actual potential of mind. Okay. The establishment again of a background mind is a really big change in practice.

[12:45]

And it's a It's expressed extremely well and can be practiced extremely well through this koan, one of the most common koans I give you. As you know, Daowu and Yunyan, Dungsan's teacher, Yunyan is Dungsan's teacher. And he's in our actual ancestry. Really, they both are, but in the official lineage, Yunyan is in our lineage. And those of you who are taking the precepts this Sunday. If you can read Chinese characters, you can find his name in your lineage.

[13:47]

So this is not so far removed from us in actual experience, even if it is removed from us in time. Da Wu says to his younger brother, And his younger brother is sweeping. He says, too busy. You're just, you're too busy. Maybe he was cleaning all the time. Take it easy. And Yunyan looks at him and says, you should know there's one who is not busy. That's a good rejoinder, isn't it? If somebody gives you a hard time, you should know there's one that's not good.

[15:05]

Chop off. The koan goes on a little bit further, but we can stop there. This is an important koan to practice with. Thich Nhat Hanh told me one day that it's one of the first koans and maybe the main early koan his teacher gave him. The one who is not busy. Okay. A second aspect of this second stage is you begin to observe, study, investigate your moods.

[16:30]

Yeah, all those flavors of mind we could call moods. And you kind of probe into those moods. To see when they arise. And particularly to notice the transitions. And to begin to kind of participate in the generation and dissolution of your moods. And this practice is thoroughly enhanced if you've developed a background mind.

[17:31]

And if you haven't developed a background mind, it's very difficult. It's much more difficult to investigate your moods. dann ist es sehr viel schwieriger, deine Stimmung zu erforschen. Yeah, you have no contrast to your mood. You're just caught in your mood. So after a while you get so you can have all kinds of moods, including being very angry, and yet in some way you're not angry, not busy, etc. After a while you can have all sorts of moods. And the dynamic of that is also expressed in the way mindfulness is taught.

[18:49]

Like you notice that you're angry. You notice that you're more angry. You notice that you're really angry. If you can keep noticing it, you actually have some kind of background mind function. And although you might say, geez, I wish I was a little less angry, that's not part of the practice. That's just an extraneous thought you might have, a wish. The dynamic of the practice is just to notice without saying, I wish it were this or I wish it were that.

[20:07]

And the background mind itself, from which you're noticing, begins to take the sting out of the anger. It's like a wave that's pulled back into the water. The wave doesn't fly out by itself. its shape is always being pulled back into the water. When that starts happening, you're not you're no longer kind of identifying with your various moods, the tops of the waves. Now this background mind is really no longer a background mind.

[21:11]

But it's really the real content of your whole mind. And all your experiences tend to be folding back into what was background mind. And this process of stabilizing what I'm calling a background mind takes some years. But it happens. And it's a good thing to have happening at any stage of its development. We even begin to have the ability to know from the so-called background mind and not know in a way that's different from knowing from the foreground mind.

[22:26]

Which is different from knowing from the foreground. Foreground. Yeah. So as soon as you can notice two things, for instance, you can begin to shift the functions of one of them to the other. This is all rooted in simple mindfulness practice. And fueled, really, by zazen practice.

[23:26]

I hope this is fun for you. It's all right. It's great. Okay. Because I keep throwing unusual combinations of words at you, and you kind of throw them. Okay, the third aspect of the second stage. Aren't you amazed I thought all this up? I said, aren't you amazed I thought all this up? I didn't really think it up. It's just what happened to me when I practiced. So the third aspect of this stage is when you can really start unfolding a teaching in your life and in your practice.

[24:35]

Yeah, and the most classic for us would be the five skandhas. The four foundations of mindfulness. No. The Vijnanas. There could be a few others, but those would be the most basic. They're all found in the menu called the Heart Sutra. Yeah, we read that menu every morning. Menu? Menu. Like at a restaurant. Yeah. And we call this the... What do we call it?

[25:47]

The Dharma Inn. It's a big sign over the parking lot, the Dharma Inn, restaurant open. Yeah, I-N-N. Dharma Pension. Sounds like for old people in America, eh? Pension in America would be where pensioners go, people who are pensioners. That may be my case, you know. Okay. Now this practice of holding and unfolding a teaching, is also much enhanced or really made possible by this presence, continuous presence of a background mind.

[26:57]

Okay. So that is, I would say, the territory of what I'm calling the second stage. Yeah. When you can really study your mind, investigate your mind, and really make sense of and make use of the basic teaching. Make them your own. Really see that they already belong to you. They're really articulations of how you're already feeling, experiencing and so forth. How you already feel, see, think. Okay. Yeah.

[28:20]

Now, the third stage is where I think we... what we're looking into now. As a dharmasanga. Yeah. Now... For some of you it's pretty new and for some of you you already have a feeling. Now the practice of Zen is the study of mind, the investigation of mind. Yeah, so what's mind? What is the mind? Now, the first two stages I've given you are the preparation, really, for the study of mind. To give you the equipment, the provisions, the resources.

[29:24]

Like what's in the pantry. the equipment, the provisions, and the... Resources. And the... Now we're not just studying our activity, In our daily life. But we're more focusing on the mind that's present in our daily life. The fabric of our life. Yeah, and... Yeah, as we talked in the pre-day to the seminar.

[30:41]

A very useful practice for this is the five dharmas and the four marks. I'm not going to go into it. But it's pretty obvious, you know. Five minutes, you can... Uh... Now, we can't study the mind without investigating impermanence.

[31:44]

You can't investigate impermanence without investigating your own impermanence. So this third stage is rooted, first of all, I think, being mindful that we are beings headed toward death. Now that's, yeah, not such a big deal. Though, as I mentioned the other day, I am struck by the fact that pretty soon I'm going to have to tell my almost a year old daughter that she's going to die someday.

[32:51]

Hey, kid. Ha ha. All this stuff you're trying so hard to learn. The fierceness with which you're headed toward life. is going to end. You're going to learn all this stuff, and just about the time you learn most of it, you die. Okay, Paul. Enough of this Zen stuff.

[34:10]

Leave me alone. But, you know, for an adult it's not, you know, it can be worse and not so bad. We don't have any problem with the afternoon knowing it's soon going to be night. Or when we're doing things, knowing pretty soon we'll be tired. The more you're used to this impermanence and these changes, yeah, yes, we die, certainly going to die. Until you're certain you're going to die. As I say, you really know there won't be an exception made in your case. Then you can practice, you can actually practice impermanence.

[35:31]

As long as you're not really aware, not really... in a very certain, ever-present awareness of your own impermanence, it's hard to see impermanence in anything else. You only want to partly see it. Okay. Tomorrow I'll come back to this, I think at least my idea would be to come back tomorrow, Teisho, to this idea of permanence, this practice of impermanence.

[36:46]

Tomorrow I would like to come back to this idea of impermanence, To break the habit of permanence. Ja, okay. And this is as big a change in practice, at least as big a change or bigger change than establishing a background life. Yeah, I have to find some way to speak about it. I'll try tomorrow. Now, I also wanted to read to you a little bit these Dogen texts.

[37:49]

Look at the course, like in the seminar this practice week. We're trying to bring a teaching, Dogen's teaching, into our daily practice, into our daily awareness. So I thought it might help if I read just a few sentences to you. So I start with a few sentences from the Genjo Koan.

[38:58]

The first line is translated by Kaz, anyway, and his helpers. As all things are Buddha-dharma. There is, there are delusion, realization, practice, birth and death, Buddhas and sentient beings. Now I think it's in a way more useful to to say, instead of as, to say when all things are Buddha Dharma. Now, if you're going to read Dogen, there's no point In going beyond the first sentence.

[40:14]

Till you really got a feeling of the first sentence. Yeah, this is not a cereal box. This is a cereal box. And it was written at a time when words and books were extremely precious. And they were meant to be meditated on or felt. You know... This is a little aside. As someone pointed out that I saw recently, we talk about subject and object, the non-duality of subject and object.

[41:23]

But in Sanskrit and Tibetan and I don't know of what, but Buddhist languages, it's object holder object. The one who holds that which holds an object In other words, there's no object holder till an object is held. Yeah. Mind is defined in... Sanskrit is something like that which holds an object. So if we say the non-duality of subject and object, It sounds like to us, well, there's a continuously existing subject.

[42:52]

And there's a continuously existing object. And they happen to meet. And when they meet, they dissolve into one experience. But the way it is in the original languages, there's no sense of a continuously existing subject. The subject appears when it holds an object. So there's an object holder, that which holds an object, and the object held. It sounds like a small difference, but it's a big difference. And illustrates the difficulty in trying to translate the subtlety of these ideas.

[44:07]

So the mind as that which holds an object, that's not the way we usually think of mind. So we could define mind perhaps with something like this. Mind, heart, moment, moment, experience. Where there's no division between mind and emotions or intellect and feeling and so forth. Emotions, intellect, etc. Emotions, intellect.

[45:00]

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