You can have three roads if you want to try that. Since I'm married to a fireman, I mean a firewoman, I hear that we're going to have 60 mile an hour winds soon and 6% humidity, which is extremely high fire danger, and maybe a snowstorm tomorrow. Anyway. So those of you who are entering this session and haven't been in the practice period, of course are entering into an already, into the middle of an already developed and developing dharma. through the Taishos and the seminars and so forth.

[01:10]

So you're going to have to kind of feel, I mean, there's no way to just not include the middle that we're in. And so you're just going to have to feel your way into it. Of course, there's no, we're always in the middle, there's no There are no beginnings and no ends. There's beginningless beginnings, maybe. But we're always in some kind of middle. And entering the... Sashim puts you in some kind of middle, a middle of yourself. And then, too, those of you who aren't familiar with the way I teach, you're going to have to get a feeling for how I try to feel my way into the words with which we describe practice. Because even fairly accurately translated words from Japanese or Sanskrit, et cetera, scope out a different territory in English and in European culture.

[02:18]

So that's just going to be the situation. And of course you're entering Sashin. And Sashin should be demanding enough, even for those of us who've done many Sashins, it's still demanding. and takes us past the backdrop of our life into the background of our life. And the foreground of our life gets kind of mixed up with the background or disappears. And we find ourselves in the midst of stuff.

[03:21]

stuff we some stuff we wish we could forget anyway perhaps but it comes up and uh things that make us wince wince what's the word for wince in german squirm feel uncomfortable nobody knows anyway in english you when something comes up that makes you think oh i wish that hadn't happened I wish I hadn't done that. That's to wince or squirm. And pains, sufferings, infelicities, and so forth. And how do you cope with that? I mean, Sashin brings this up, brings these things up, because the consciousness... the control of consciousness gets less or disappears.

[04:25]

I mean, staying in one place, which happens in Sushim, not moving, not able to go anywhere, forces us, actually forces us into awareness. I mean, if you're going to cope, it forces you into awareness. Now, this distinction of awareness consciousness, which I've been making for years, I find that even people who have been practicing a long time with me don't really have the distinction clear. And I think you can only... Get the distinction clear if you feel it clearly.

[05:27]

So one of the things I'd like to do in this Sesshin is continue to explore the territory of this distinction between awareness and consciousness. And as I say, Sesshin itself pushes you into what I would call awareness. I mean, especially if you're going to cope with, I mean, you've got to create, if you're going to cope with and really allow happen to you the life that's brought to the fore through sashim. I don't know. We've been here for seven days. It's like a magical time. Something happens. You create it, but if you create an allowing... forbearing, accepting space. Yeah, these various things can just come up and just be accepted, looked at.

[06:35]

And the more you can take away some kind of feeling of condemning yourself or others or comparing yourself with others, the more that can come away, you enter a more, a kind of moral... ethical space because you'd rather some things hadn't happened but you'd rather you could your visions and and hopes and things you wanted to have forgotten you wanted all of that becomes a way that we make decisions about our life. Our priorities get, in Sashin we discover priorities we've forgotten, or priorities get mixed up. But generally if you can create this accepting, forbearing, feeling space, which is really what Buddhism means by, as I've said often, patience,

[07:50]

But the word patience just doesn't convey this accepting feeling space, which I think we can say is awareness. Awareness in contrast to consciousness. As long as there's a kind of narrative self in it and so forth, then it's consciousness and not So here you see, by speaking about that you're entering Sushina, I'm also trying to define consciousness. I mean awareness and consciousness. Yeah. And I'd like to give you a little awareness exercise.

[08:58]

Call it that. Often when I go around and do the Jundo in the morning and people have their hands up, often people have their hands this way. And so I let it go usually the first two or three mornings, but if it's practice period, I might let it go for the first few weeks. And at some point, I reach over and I push people's thumbs up against their hand. And what I'd like you to... And that increases the power of the hands. And, you know... I'm trying to reach into why the posture of the hands in all these depictions of Buddhas, sculptures, paintings, etc., is as important as the posture of the body.

[10:09]

What's this about? Is it just symbols communicating? No. So I'm trying to give you a way to enter into the mind of the hands. And I think the easiest way to do that is to use the gassho. And of course the gassho in our school is held up about this high, about that far away. And your thumbs are more or less... And then I'd like you to feel you have a little egg in there that you're incubating. And you can feel kind of warmth between the palms. Or maybe a little chick. There's a little chick in there. And then... And then once you have that feeling in your hands from the gassho, you get so that whenever you do anything with your hands, an attentional awareness goes with your hands.

[11:22]

So this could be a practice during this sashin, that you feel an attentional awareness being transported with your, transporting you, transported with your hands, carried with your hands, almost maybe like a kind of taffy. You have taffies? This is my living dictionary here. Taffy is this stretchy candy. No, you don't know? Toffee, taffy? Toffee. Toffee? It's also called toffee in Europe, maybe. Taffy. Anyway, that you feel, so it's almost like your mind, your hands, your mind is like taffy and your hands stretch it out to things. Like the hands of healers and body workers have this kind of feeling, I think.

[12:29]

So just as an exercise, you bring an attentional awareness an attention, what's called an attentional awareness, to each of your hands and you feel your mind being carried by or expressed on, expressed through your hands. And if you do this and you can maintain to some degree an attentional awareness on and through your hands, this will pretty much enter you into awareness somewhat independent of discursive consciousness. And I think you'll feel your way in the world a bit differently.

[13:43]

It's a small thing to do, but it's basic to the concept of a yogic body and mudras and so forth. So we're trying to get a feel for what it means to awaken a yogic body. And when you have your gassho and you release your gassho, open your gassho, it's kind of nice to open it from the bottom and let the feeling you've incubated in your hands move down into your heart and hara. And if you get that feeling more distinctly, it then moves up your spine through your eyes. So this is the body.

[14:46]

These are not things you can write down in a book, but these are the kind of things that one finds out by practicing together within a particular lineage and within face-to-face Buddhism. Now, again, awareness is a bit hard to notice. I mean, we can notice consciousness pretty easily. You wake up in the morning, you notice you've become conscious. It's pretty easy to notice dreaming mind, but it's pretty difficult to notice non-dreaming mind. Difficult to notice non-dreaming deep sleep or non-dreaming mind, although you can get a feel for it. And you can bring the feel of... Basically, it's a kind of non-conceptual space.

[15:58]

And as I said the other day, like in Zazen... If you don't know where you are when you are sitting, you're rubbed in, massaged by, bathed in a perceptual space, the six senses. But you don't have a conceptual space. I mean, you vaguely know. I mean, I have it all the time. I don't know whether I'm in Crestone or, you know, Yonisov in Germany. And when I'm doing Kenyan, I could be walking anywhere. I don't know where the heck I am. It's such a relief. I mean, sort of I know. I don't want to fall off the deck and stuff like that. But you allow yourself to be, you replace conceptual space with being bathed in perceptual space.

[17:04]

Now, these are the kind of shifts you make in yogic practice, from feeling located in, defined by conceptual space, to kind of like somehow letting those structures go. They're invisible, but they're there. Letting those structures go and replacing it. Maybe that's a good way to move into this awareness, is you replace it by feeling bathed in perceptual space. bathed in the senses. Yeah. Your walks at midday can be like that. I mean, we need conceptual space now and then, blah, blah, blah. But it can be just a useful matter when you need it to be mostly in a perceptual, bathed in a perceptual space.

[18:06]

his awareness, and is awakened so many things. And this perceptual, non-conceptual, perceptual space is much like a non-dreaming mind. And I think you'll find, and I don't want to speak about it today, but I think you'll find that you sleep differently in Sashin. Maybe you'll find you sleep in two layers. One layer is an observing layer, and another layer is images, feelings.

[19:16]

You can decide to stay asleep through certain images while the observing mind, even as, you know, tracking when the wake-up bell's going to ring. So this mind that observes but allows sleep to happen and even chooses what image to focus on is awareness. You know, in recent years, cosmologists, astronomers have decided that there's no way to explain the structure and movement of galaxies with the gravitation of atoms and molecules. So they've come up with, because they can't perceive directly by light-gathering telescopes,

[20:20]

The ways we have to gather information don't work, but by implication we can see that something's going on in the universe that ate atoms and molecules or there's some other kind of mass. And they call these things, as you probably know, I don't know much about it myself except what I can amuse about it, dark matter and dark energy. Well, the present universe supposedly Dark energy is about 70% of our universe. Dark matter is about 20%, 25%. And the atomic world we know is about 5%. We just don't have the means to measure these things, but we can indirectly feel it. So when you look out at our brilliant night skies here that are so clear and the Milky Way across there, it's a kind of fluff of atoms and molecules floating primarily in this sea of dark energy and dark matter.

[21:42]

And our life is a bit like that. Conceptually, Zazen brings us into not darkness in a negative sense, though Zen certainly emphasizes utter darkness or something like that over light. A lot of religions emphasize light and non-light. But Zen, you know, those experiences are there, experiences of clarity, luminosity, and so forth. But overalls and says, feel what we can't grasp, but a kind of non-consciousness that goes beyond Freud's unconscious, way beyond, it's most of our life. And if you can sit in this wide, accepting, feeling space, You can begin to feel the presence of your life moving in realms, moving in currents that consciousness can't notice, but you can feel indirectly, and consciousness can feel indirectly.

[23:03]

There's, you know, trying to find words again, it's not... Maybe we live in the present through consciousness. But through awareness, we live in the presence of the present. And the presence of the present, yeah, I mean, I think of Picasso. He, for example, why not? He said he starts to paint. And by the end of the painting, he realized he wanted to paint that little red barn over there. But when he started to paint, he didn't know that. But it's clear everything he painted was leading toward painting that little red barn. He said something like that. The experience of awareness, if you can begin to feel awareness, feel the presence of the present, within the presence of the presence is the presence of the future.

[24:15]

That like an artist can kind of suss out. Suss out means, comes from suspect. Suss out is to kind of sense your way into something that you feel how things are going to happen. I mean, I'm not getting into some New Age stuff and predicting the future and fate and all that stuff. This is not Zen and not Buddhism. But that the... Not only is the past... here with us, but the presence is forming now and you can begin to feel that presence forming and participate in that forming through the presence of the present. The awareness of the presence of the present.

[25:18]

And Sashin gives us a chance to enter into this, to let this happen, to begin to feel this movements that we can't normally perceive moving in our life, moving in our life individually and in many ways now this week together. Oh, marvelous. Oh, marvelous. Thank you very much.

[25:52]

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