I spoke to a number of people, persons, after the seminar you had yesterday, yeah, recently. And it seems to me that we have a feeling for this bodily space, but also it's not, we don't have a, it's not so developed as it might be. And so I'm trying to speak about something that we have a bodily experience of and a mental experience of, body image and so forth. And we have language for it. And the language reinforces our... Yeah, the... The concretization, the concreteness of our experience.

[01:04]

The believableness, the definiteness. And we also have a certain degree of experience, depending on how much we've meditated, of a different kind of bodily space. And yet, we don't really have a different kind of vocabulary for it. So it's the descriptions to ourself, if we happen to speak about it, or if you hear me speak about it, like the word manas is the word in Indian. Thinking and Buddhist thinking for mind or one of the words for mind But it doesn't really mean much in relationship to our word for mind and yet You know it falls into the category of mind and so it begins to draw forth. It's a we have a So I am not yet. So I decided maybe I should say something fairly basic about the spatial sense of our experience to see if we can more experientially identify our experience even if linguistically it's difficult to identify our experience because it doesn't fall into linguistic character.

[02:33]

I mean one of the there's repetition and difference, right? Difference is always different. Different is inexplicable by definition. Different is always slipping past. If it's different, it's not actually completely definable. It's different. Different is inexplicable. different slips past the explicable. So if it's really different, as each moment is really different, it's always slightly within the realm of what can't be explained. Yeah. So now, of course, and always when I'm speaking, I have to kind of speak within our language, within our familiar experience, and within our unfamiliar experience,

[03:36]

different and not really explicable. You know, I say all that so that maybe it sensitizes you, makes you more sensitive, you're noticing more sensitive, and to make your noticing outside of the categories of language. Let's say you feel, you get so you can feel things first and name them second or not name them at all or point at them with a few words but don't think the words or the mental categories capture the feeling. Feeling is more sensitive than thinking and feeling is always present. We always feel something. Now again, the word feeling falls into categories that you're used to, and feeling starts being like something like emotions.

[04:47]

The word emotion and feeling have been conflated in English. They're not the same at all, but they've been conflated in English. So I'm speaking now, I decided I should really call this Zen yoga, or a Zen yogi, because we're really talking about the emphasis in Zen practice on what I'm calling yogic culture. Okay. Which is to know, I said very simply, the body as space. And the world as space. And what's the difference between a spatial knowing of the world and a temporal knowing of the world? And the key difference is the use of attention as the dynamic of knowing rather than thinking, rather than language.

[05:58]

So Zen yoga is to develop an attentional body and the refinement of an attentional body over time through the practice of mindfulness, of mindful attention. And the dropping of categories in Zazen, Zazen we could define as, I often say it's the practice of uncorrected mind, but we could call it the practice of dropping categories so you're not, so you can experience the different, the differential world. Categories you can't, the thousand grammars, as Gary Snyder says. Hmm. Okay, so let me start with something pretty basic or fairly recent as in, you know, contemporary science is peripersonal space.

[07:08]

Okay, peri is peripheral, peripheral, personal, the space, peripheral. I mean, it's in magazine articles and, you know, et cetera. And we've talked about it for off and on for some years, peripersonal space. So the peripersonal space is if I have this stick, my brain feels that my hand reaches to the end of the stick. It creates a receptor field in which the firing of neurons indicate that my arm reaches to there, something like that. So when you drive a car, your peripersonal space reaches to the fenders and the tires and so forth. I mean, if you're a least good driver. And when you're bumped, you feel your personal space. It's not just that your car is damaged.

[08:11]

That's a nuisance. But you may also feel offended because your space has been violated. There's a brilliant... Social anthropologist named Edward T. Hall and Ned Hall, who was a pretty good friend of mine who lived in Santa Fe and Mildred T. Hall, who worked with his wife and who's since perished. And when my daughter, Sally, went to college, I gave her his books and I said, study this and you'll learn how to think. And Ned Hall, as a social anthropologist, you know, his books are fun to read. He's real clear. But anyway, he talks about intimate space, personal space, that would be peripersonal space, social space, and public space. And of course, different cultures, you can tell it right away. In Europe, you can walk up to a French person, an Italian person, a German person, and an Asian person.

[09:15]

The space is quite different when you start, in Japan, The intimate space is, intimate and personal space are not the same as in Europe. I mean, for example, you can walk into an elevator with a completely strange woman who you've never met before, and she's pregnant, and you can put your hand on her stomach and say, oh, is it your first baby? You would not do that in Germany. 9-1-1. Because you can just walk right up. In fact, there's almost in Japan... Intimate space starts where you can feel the other person's body heat. You know, it's interesting to me. I do... Kinhin in the morning.

[10:20]

Jundo in the morning, walking around. And I can feel the warmth of each person as I walk by. And smell. Sometimes, you know, it's more pleasant than others. But I move through these little fields of warmth. And particularly when you bow to somebody, you suddenly feel their warmth come toward you. Overlap with your warmth and move away. So this is intimate space, personal space, etc. Okay, you know, let me just say a completely different theme here. how powerful worldviews are.

[11:25]

So let me just make a big statement. A yogic worldview destroyed General Motors. Why not? General Motors was the biggest car company in the world, maybe the biggest company in the world. I think General Electric is presently the biggest company in the world and doesn't pay any taxes. That's another problem. The biggest, what is the difference? Well, American cars were designed to get the car from point A to point B. Well, it makes sense. But the Japanese began designing cars to get people from point A to point B in a car. It's completely different. I saw a thing on Starbucks recently.

[12:29]

And Steve Donovan, who some of you know, used to sit here. And we sat back there or something like that. Anyway, he came to Sashin for years. He's now got some kind of disease, maybe from taking too many drugs in the Polynesian Islands. He's not sure whether it's some kind of motor disease that was genetic or it's from... 10 years of his life. Anyway, he's a wonderful guy, old, old friend of mine. And he was one of the founders of Starbucks. So I've been kind of interested in Starbucks. And because of that, though, he was a minor, one of five founders, but the person to put the least money in, but it made him rich. Anyway, the Starbucks started to go downhill and

[13:33]

And Howard Schultz, I think his name is, who's the founder of Starbucks, went back into the company a couple years ago because it was tanking. And... He described his business a little bit like I described General Motors. We're not in the coffee business serving people. We're in the people business serving coffee. One is a yogic way of looking at the world, and the other is not. So what did he do when he went back into the company? One of the first things he did He took away all the stuff on the counters that block the view between the customer and the clerk. So when you come into a Starbucks now, supposedly I haven't been in one for years, but anyway, when you come into a Starbucks, you and the clerk are in a bodily relationship to each other.

[14:43]

There's not a big coffee machine there, etc. So you had to redesign coffee machines and things like that so they weren't stood up so high. But that's a yogic way of looking at the world. The bodily presence of the clerk and the customer is more important. It's not different from Tsukiroshi, as I pointed out many times. Somebody asked him, what do you find different in America? The person asking meant something like the big California pine cones. Pine cones in California are like this big, and in Japan they're about this big. Things like that. But Tsukiroshi said, it's that you do things with one hand. So then I began to watch Sukershi and he passed everything. If you asked him for the salt, I've told you this many times, he passed the salt with two hands. And he turned his body to the person. He didn't just hand it. He turned his whole body to the person. So there was a bodily connection.

[15:44]

So the salt was simply an excuse to be in the people business. And that's how, you can see, that's how the Oryoki is designed and how in the Sashim, why the serving of the food is as much a definition of what's happening as the eating of the food and the making of the food, the making, eating, and so forth. In Japanese restaurants, I don't know where Howard Schultz, I don't know the guy, got the idea, but in Japanese restaurants, the cook is the waiter in most of them. Because the person is cooking for you and turns and hands it to you. And a friend of mine, John Nathan, made a Mayumi's Oda, who we have some of her art here, did the big Tara in the Kanondo. Her husband, when they first lived in Japan, made a movie called The Colonel Comes to Japan.

[16:49]

When the Colonel Comes to Japan, it was a movie about Kentucky Fried Chicken, opened a fast food outlet in Tokyo. So he filmed it. What did they do? They taught every, I watched the movie. Maybe I should get the movie. I have it somewhere, but gosh, nowhere. But they told the, so say that you're the customers and I'm the clerk. And they told the customer, say they order something, you turn back to the counter, you get it ready. And then you take the whole thing and you come and you face the customer and you hand it to the customer. It's to do things with two hands. They taught everyone to do everything with two hands, to take a kind of pace, an object bodily pace with each person so there's contact between the persons and they're not just getting the food.

[17:57]

So, you know, Ray Kroc, excuse me, what am I talking about? All the space. Ray Kroc, who founded McDonald's. What's the basic idea behind McDonald's? He happened to notice that now they had all this equipment that prepared food very fast. So he simply said, let's serve it fast. So he started serving. Before that, you'd go to junk food stores, you know, companies like Denny's and stuff, which was one of my favorites. I used to stop there with Tsukirushi. There's even a Denny's in Tokyo. But they pretended they were a restaurant when they're making the food instantly with all these microwave ovens and prepared and it's ready, right? But they didn't serve it fast. Ray Kroc served it fast and became a billionaire and his wife, Died recently. Funds left wing causes. Interesting, huh?

[19:05]

Okay. So it's quite interesting to see the Colonel Thumbs of Japan because they really do take each thing, get it together. I mean, I took Sophia on Sundays. I take Sophia to a cello class. And... They set a metronome, beats per minute, BP, M, I guess they call it. So they're deciding to, they kind of like play together. You know, just make, what's the word? Anyway, they just play whatever together. And they set a metronome. At 80 or 60 or something, they decide. And then they play. Well, there's some kind of feeling I felt in Kentucky Fried Chicken or doing the... You feel a metronomic kind of feeling in each metabolic entrainment, in each metabolic field, which also has a kind of extrasensory perception in it.

[20:18]

There's a kind of sensory dilation, like your eyes... or sensory stereophonic sensorium, when you catch the metronomic metabolic entrainment. True. Each restaurant or each space, the metronomic field is slightly different. So the yogi gets it, or ought to get it, and knows the field I used to do in my early days of practicing I would be with folks at a table I've told you this before too but it always struck me as interesting we'd be somewhere and there'd be in another room music playing you know we're talking about and I would say there's

[21:22]

They're playing in the other room. I heard it on the grapevine. So while they're playing that in the other room, I'm talking and I say, you know, well, let's string to, but I, you know, I really didn't hear it on the grapevine. I just throw that into the sentence. And the Zen practitioners at the table all say, hmm, okay, because they heard it. The non-Zen practitioners didn't hear it. They shut out the song in the other room. And I could spot right away who practices and who doesn't practice. Simply by do they have a field awareness or do they have an edited brain thinking awareness? Or are they primarily in their front brain stream? Okay. So yogic ideas, a yogic way of looking at the world also influences Starbucks, General Motors, Kentucky Fried Chicken.

[22:38]

How you conceive of your spatial identity. Now, in practice, in Zazen practice, I said you're dropping categories. Well, one of the categories you drop is your body image, how you see yourself. Now, it might be, and I don't know, you know, I'm not one who thinks that we should wire ourselves all up in the Zendo and have somebody monitoring machines and watching what happens while we do Zazen, though, you know. But maybe we create a presence which is like the end of a stick here, and maybe we begin to feel our peripersonal space, not with a tool, but with an extended presence.

[23:48]

And you know, soccer, football players, and... American football players and so forth, practice with running up to an object. Here's a soccer player. I don't know if this is right. They run up to an object and stop and pull back because they've got to feel the presence of another person. They've got to feel the objects, the proprioceptive space. So maybe in Zazen, like in athletics, you begin to develop a proprioceptive field which is related to mirror neurons and your body schema, they say. That's your postural model of space that knows where your limbs are, knows where my arm is, and is always updated by movement. So your body schema, which has been studied along with peripersonal space, knows where your legs are, but we fold our legs in

[24:53]

And we're updating with movement? No, we're not. We're not moving. But maybe by entering into stillness, we awaken another kind of space. Space of metabolic entrainment or something like that. Now, I'm just talking here, you know? trying to create some categories in which we actually function, peripersonal space, body schema, body image, and so forth like that. That is, in fact, how we do function. There was a kind of scientist during the 19th century named Tyndall, who said, as the liver secretes bile, the brain secretes the mind.

[25:57]

Yeah, okay. This is the brain-mind idea. And Plato creates a lot of the categories in which we think thought of the body as interfering with the mind with kind of bodily desires for food and so forth. And it was always interfering and misleading the mind. That's not a yogic view. And the five skandhas are much more graded, like form, feeling, perception, impulses, associative mind, consciousness. You can't say, where does body-mind start? Where do the senses come in? It's a kind of, it's not a clear distinction. It's much more fuzzy. Yeah.

[26:57]

At the tip of a hair, I used this expression of Kusan Roshi the other day. Tip of a hair. Now, what is such an expression? It's not a philosophical idea. It's an experienceable idea. It's suggesting the dilation of your senses, your stereophonic senses should now be so precise. I mean, there's one, I think the Buddha says something, that something or other is the 16th of a hair. And they describe a yogi as someone who feels, and it says, a healthy yogi in a field full of stars, which we have here quite often, in a field full of stars on a clear night, feels all the stars, is one definition of a yogi.

[28:11]

Well, you do. Go out on a night like that and you feel a difference. If there's really like many of them, pinpricks everywhere, you feel it. If the sky is not so clear, it feels different. So on some level, we really feel all these different grammars. The tip of a, the sixteenth of a tip of a hair. What is this talking about? It's talking about that, okay, we train the brain with language, speaking and reading. And it's quite clear, I think if you read Terry Deacon, he's a also happens to be a friend of mine, wonderful book. He pretty much shows how Darwinian evolution is also, we're shaped by the use of language and specifically by reading.

[29:18]

So reading and speaking are built into us. And we learn, and with mathematics too, quantities, proportions. We learn to think through learning math, learning to read. But what does a yogi learn? The yogi learns the dynamic is attention. the yogi develops an attentional body. And you use the attentional body to train the mind. The attentional body teaches the mind to include mind and body, and to include mind, body, and phenomena, and to include others as non-other. So you begin to experience others as non-other.

[30:29]

This just doesn't come naturally. I mean, to some extent it comes naturally. Babies, they know, et cetera, the mama, you are mama. But language doesn't come naturally. We have the capacity to learn language. It's amazing. Language is one of the most complex things ever. With its etymology and the fibers that connect words and all. But children can learn it. Amazing. But it's still taught. and has to be taught. And the attentional body, the yogic body, the attentional body has to also be taught to include mind and body and phenomena and otherness as non-other. And this develops a spatial sense that when you drop the body image and when you drop probably peripersonal

[31:39]

neural fields as well, some kind of presence, extended bodily spatial feeling comes. And you know, if you try to say, do I know myself, where my chest is, where my arms, where your arms are and chest is and thumbs are, everything's kind of gone. But you're in a, you feel a territory of aliveness that's not simply the same as your body image. And developing that territory of aliveness and that feeling that's present in ordinary circumstances as well is also what Zen yoga is about. Again, as Kusan says, or Kusan Roshi says, let me call him that,

[32:46]

We use, he says that quiescence, let's say stillness, has to work in your perceptual field. And he says it's stillness which allows you to control movement, appearance. So being able to have a bodily sense of stillness in the midst of appearance allows you to know the world. So the Upanishads say something like, the self will never be known by the weak. The self cannot be reached by the weak. What self is that? Well, perhaps it's also the self which knows appearance through stillness.

[33:56]

Or the self which is the mind which includes mind-body phenomena and the non-otherness of the world in what we simply sometimes call big mind. Okay, so there's some basics for you. Thanks a lot. May our intention equally penetrate every being and place.

[34:34]

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