The German bourgeoisie, you get this hatred of the English industrialized classes and supposedly impoverished working class, and you get all that mixed together with a desire for equality and moralism and wholeness and spiritual, and you end up with a horrible situation. So I think that we have to be careful in our practice that this practice is understood where it exists. You can't force people to do it. You can't create governments to enforce it. Or you end up with a horrible situation. It doesn't work that way. Excuse me, my sermon.

[01:05]

It's Sunday. It's Sunday, all right. Okay, good. So one of the practices of Zen certainly is the move toward wholeness, and wholeness is virtually synonymous with emptiness and completeness. And in practice, you're attempting to mature your conventional self in such a way that it relates compassionately to the experience of existence being larger than self and experiences of wholeness and totality, but not trying to bring that experience of totality and wholeness into the individual ego.

[02:21]

Because the individual ego is not whole, it's separate, it sees things, it works that way. It gets angry. So if you try to use spiritual insight to push your ego around, you're going to end up in psychological trouble. And I think we get ourselves in trouble pretty quickly because I think what's the oor of society, I would say, is compassion and love. But pretty soon it turns into watching your neighbor and making sure your neighbor does this and that and so forth. Okay, we have to stop pretty soon, but shall I start with saying a couple things about breathing? Yeah. So that's quite a bit about self, actually, Western self. I don't think we can go for a walk today unless you have your sand boots, wet sand boots.

[03:53]

And would it help if we ended at, if we started at two and ended earlier than starting at three and ending later because we have to drive places? Anybody? Make any difference to anyone? Okay. Okay. What? Okay, so if we start a little earlier, as we did yesterday, maybe 2.15 or 2.30, we can decide at lunch. Then it gives us either a longer afternoon or an earlier afternoon, so that you can make your dinner plans and so forth. Now as I said to you, the main gate of practice, main activity of practice is bringing your mind, first of all, your attention, first of all, to your breath.

[05:12]

And that's usually done by the most traditional way, though this seems to be actually come in rather late in Buddhism. But it's now part of Zen Buddhism, at least how to do this, is that you count your exhales. And the most stable kind of breathing, it feels like your breath is going out this way and coming in from the bottom. And the way you breathe, it feels like it's filling up from the bottom. where your diaphragm works and where your breath works. Now, you can't exactly force yourself or teach yourself this. You have to discover this. When you do this, your breathing's quite stable. And one thing you want to do when you're practicing is to notice the different ways that you breathe. When you first sit down, when you get up, when you start thinking, sort of.

[06:20]

So you count your exhales. And encountering your exhales, you're bringing your attention, you or some experience of yourself as intention. Intention brings attention to, and I can say you or me or I, but I say it provisionally. I know when I say I, I'm saying it provisionally. But intention brings attention to the breath. And many things follow from that simple thing. Finding out that you can't count means you've started zazen mind. So when you can't count to ten, it means it's good. Because zazen mind has started, which doesn't know how to count. So many people punish themselves, I can't count to ten, I'm a terrible Zen Buddhist.

[07:29]

No, no, it's quite good you can't count to ten. So then you have the practice of counting to one, I call. So you practice counting to one. You start one. Oh, one. During that time, it lasts a while, many of your, you're getting familiar with yourself. And in zazen mind, things start coming up and occurring that you've forgotten, that you don't, associations, memories, and the more you, and it's really free association, a kind of free association. And it's, I mean, Freud... Free association. Yeah. Free association. Free. Free. Yeah. Yeah. No tickets required. And when Freud used as a psychoanalytic technique free association, he was using a meditation technique.

[08:31]

There's some speculation of where he got it or whether he thought it up himself or whatever. So you're just allowing this stuff to happen. And eventually it begins to settle. Now, one thing that happens is with insight meditation, vipassana, inner sight. Because you're not having insights. Oh, that's an insight. It's an inner way of seeing, which is what is meant by vipassana, or inner sight. So as this stuff begins to, you know, you count to one or two, and then blah, blah, blah. All this stuff. After a year or two, and it takes time in the mutation, a discriminating wisdom or a subtler way of seeing begins to feel larger patterns in this. Larger patterns than just self-unusuality.

[09:34]

So it's kind of boring, but it's a way of putting yourself under the microscope or in the bathysphere or something like that. And looking out into the ocean through a little porthole. Ooh, that's tough. That's me floating out there. So there's the practice of counting to ten, and there's the other practice of counting to one. So there's those two practices. And eventually, as you become more stable, and the stability and calmness and equanimity, which is also a kind of indifference, and at this point you're not involved with like or dislike, you're just present in situations. And again, Heidegger uses the word logos in the meaning he gives it of letting things spread out before you. Letting things come into presence.

[10:38]

Letting things be spread out before you and gather themselves. But this state of mind, when you're in your conceptual state of mind, you can't let things gather themselves. You have to do this and you have to do that and you want this and you have likes and dislikes. But when you can have more, the word for equanimity and the word for indifference is the same word in Buddhism. Equanimity. Equanimity. Anyway, counting to one, counting to ten, and as you become more stable, calmer, have more equanimity, then it becomes counting is, counting happens in a big field.

[11:52]

See, counting, you can't count to ten when it's against what's happening. After a while, you're counting to ten like the whole field is counting to ten. And things can, it doesn't interfere with, In fact, everything can be absorbed into the counting. There's no need to have ambivalent, distracted mind anymore. So that's the practice of counting and counting to ten and counting to one. The next practice is touching. beginning to touch your... no, the next practice is following, beginning to follow your breath. And the third is touching. But the practices of following and touching we will talk about after lunch. And we only have another hour and a half or two hours or so, so anything you'd like to talk about I would be happy to try to include.

[12:59]

Would this also apply to thinking, like noticing first and then being able to follow without getting identified? I mean, one of the practices, one of the basic practices, there are five or ten basic practices, one of them is following thoughts to their source. And following thoughts to their source is closely related to being able to follow your breath. You can't follow your breath, you can't follow a thought to its source. It's unlikely, they're closely related. And if you can't follow thoughts to its source, you can't be in the present of the present. And anybody who wants to know what I mean by the present of the present, you can ask me right there. Thanks.

[14:04]

It's really fun to be here with you guys. You know, there's a... Let me say one more thing. There's a kind of... I tried to talk about it in a lecture. I'm here in space. And I can move my arms in space. It's a But I'm also here in being space. And I can sense, feel being space when I'm more at the level of the feeling in this room. No? There's a feeling in this room. There's a feeling between you and me right now. That's not the same as air. Okay, when I move my arm, I'm moving my arm in that space. And I'm calling that being space. So when I say, like, I really like being here, what I mean is I feel I can swim around in the being space that you guys are creating.

[15:09]

I can swim over in Anna's direction. I can side stroke. But it's a kind of, you begin to find, and this is what part of the bodhisattva practice, is the bodhisattva, by developing mindfulness practices, finds mind full, includes, and is moving in being space all the time. If the bodhisattva moves his arm, the arm reaches to, the movement reaches to mind. And if Mike moves, it reaches to me or to you. Because we're a being space that's activated at a non-graspable feeling level or the level of the presence or experience of impermanence. We're all living in this being space. This is where we live.

[16:12]

That's not always so easy to notice it or accept it. before I thought the koan is to destroy your way of thinking. But now you said it is to, you have to approach with a feeling, or you have to handle it with your feeling or something like that. So that's my question, if I understood you right, how to do with koans, how to work with koans. Yeah, that's right. But koans are, a language of Zen Buddhism based on Wayan, Majamaka and Yogacara teaching. And they're meant to teach you the language of the Absolute or the language of enlightenment.

[17:22]

and to introduce it to you so that it is mixed up with your own language, even identical with your own language, and in some ways divergent from your own language, but so that you begin to find your own language as Koan language. In other words, Koans teach you a kind of language so that you think about the world differently. For instance, I mean, just simple things like I said, leaving the pronoun I off, or knowing that the subject in a thing like on South Mountain, why use South Mountain? But the subject isn't that South Mountain is real, but South Mountain is a construct. So we can say here in the sand dunes.

[18:28]

But do we mean that the sand dunes are real? The sand dunes are our way of talking about this particular landscape. So it's actually a kind of language designed to become mixed up with your own language and turn your own language into spiritual language. It's not about destroying your thinking. It's about getting you to not identify with your thinking. Is that too long an answer? Too long? Yeah. Oh, okay. Because there's about ten answers in that. You can take your pick. And how do you work with it? What do you call that? Well, there's the kernel of koans is what's called wado, or turning word practice.

[19:34]

Turning word practice means that you work with certain phrases that stick with you. And they can be questions from your ordinary life or questions about practice. And you find a way to stay present with those questions like the one who is not busy. Well, so you stay present with the one who is not busy as a kind of mantra. But this practice of keeping something like that speaks both of the divided world and the undivided world, or if I say, just now is enough, that speaks, or it's a language from the divided world pointing out the undivided world. So you stay with a phrase like that, just now is enough. You know, there's many such examples in koans. Matsu's famous phrase, this very mind is Buddha.

[20:38]

That's a turning word in a koan used like a mantra that points out the undivided world with the language of the divided world. So somebody went to him and said, I hear you're giving as a koan. This mind is, this very mind is Buddha. And because this person was turning that into something, he said, no, no, no, no, I'm teaching. This very mind is not Buddha. He got it wrong. So then that was brought back to the first guy, and the first guy said, Matsu may be saying that now, but as far as I'm concerned, I'm practicing with this mind is Buddha. They're all right. Okay, something else? So you're practicing to get in your mind why you are going through the day, for example. Something else?

[21:46]

Okay. Breathing. When you bring your... First you sit down in zazen. Now, breathing practice is more fundamental than zazen practice. But zazen practice, it's such a powerful shortcut and introduces you so directly. Pretty hard to do without it. I don't know if this is a good example, but being alive is more important than having a mother, but without a mother it's pretty difficult too. Maybe your zazen is your mother. Breathing is being alive. So when you sit down, you, intention, you or slash intention, brings... Well, first you sit down and you bring your attention to your posture.

[23:16]

And as I said, you know, this place, this day, this cool, cloudy day, and these... By the way, if you ever want to sell this place, let me know. If you ever want to sell this place, let me know. Well, maybe we could buy it as a Buddhist meditation center. Anyway, you sit down here. First of all, when I started out, I tried to bring your attention to this place and to this room. So you found this room, a place where you could exist. And then you bring your attention to your posture.

[24:18]

I say you, maybe I should say intention, brings attention to your posture. Then once you're settled, you then bring, or intention then brings, attention to your breath. And as I said to you, Usually from your attention to your breath by counting. Your exhale to ten and then start with one again. And within that is the practice of counting to one. Just becoming familiar with the many things that appear. Then you begin to follow your breath So you see, it's sort of like riding, surfing, riding the waves, but it's just staying with your breath mentally.

[25:31]

So you follow the exhale. You follow the inhale, and you feel all the little particles. You know, the word for evening in English from the French is crepuscular, or crepusca. It means the light is granular, the granular light of late afternoon, early evening. And there's almost a granular, crepuscular quality to your breath. And you can feel this grainy quality of your breath. So you follow your breath in this way. And you can more or less reside with your breath. And as we were saying before at lunch, that this is closely related to being able to follow a thought to its source.

[26:34]

So when you have the kind of calmness that you can follow your breath, you can begin to see a thought arise. and be present in its appearance and dissolution. And sometimes a thought or a mood or feeling or emotion will be there and you can notice, gee, where did that come from? And you can follow it from a feeling into two or three thoughts and then into something you saw or something you heard. And you can usually identify when that first popped up, usually from an outside physical source. Something you heard or something happened or you did something with your body that made you think of San Francisco or Zurich or something.

[27:46]

And then things fall. And when you can do that, this practice of following your breath, because breath and mind are very closely related, breath and thinking, and you learn, you know, when you first learn to speak, your mother and father are leaning over, looking at you and poking you and breathing at you and saying words and flapping their lips and you don't know what's going on. you begin to pick up the pace, the mother's tongue, the breath of the language. So you literally learn a language on your breath and on your mother's breath, father's breath, and brother's and sister's breath. So you're bringing your attention to your posture, then you bring your attention

[28:47]

you bring attention to your breath. And what happens is one part of your mind is bringing attention to your breath, and then by bringing attention to your breath, another part of your mind is uncovered. So by bringing attention to your breath, you're bringing attention to your mind through your breath, and discovering mind in a whole different way. You couldn't do just with intention. Now, just counting your breath is just a practice of concentration and pace. You're beginning to make your breaths pace. Your breath is a kind of metronome, and it's responding to your body and your mind. You get nervous, your breath goes faster. If you go running, your breath goes faster. And your breath is very responsive to your physical and mental state.

[29:54]

So you can use your breath to bring your mental and physical state close together. And that also is called concentration. So you're not concentrating on something. But concentration arises when the mental state and the physical state are closer together. And that you feel a kind of So when you follow your breath, you're not just establishing a concentration, but you are following your breath allows another kind of mind to arise through breath and allows you

[31:03]

to begin to negotiate the topography of mind. In other words, with breath as your sort of dolphin, or inner tube, or friend, you have sort of one arm around your breath. Oh, there's an emotion. You swim through the emotion. Oh, that emotion just went through this little tunnel and became a thought. And then it becomes a more general feeling and then it becomes very bright. So you can use breath as a kind of means, kind of golden thread, a kind of strand. Like in the fairy tales, you follow a golden thread back to the princess who lives out somewhere. So you can use breath to kind of follow. into the topography of your mental and sense field mental activity.

[32:10]

So you can become quite familiar after a while with how things become emotions and feelings and how, you know, there's no line between emotions, feelings, thoughts. They all kind of merge into each other. You say, is that a thought? There's an atmosphere of feeling around it. When there's almost no thought, that's all feeling, and sometimes it's all thought. So it's just a way of getting to know yourself. In a way it has nothing to do with Zen Buddhism or religion or anything. It's just a teaching based on the worldview of Zen Buddhism, using Zen practices. But it's really kind of common sense. And I suppose it requires some people to have done this to point out the value, validity, of looking at the world and acting in the world and knowing yourself through the mind that arises from your breath.

[33:18]

So in following your breath and becoming familiar with the topography of your mind, it's a lot like being in a house where emotions generally are this part of the house, feelings down here, and thoughts are here in the kitchen or someplace, and so forth like that. And of course in doing that and being able to stay with your breath and hence stay with how your mind appears, you're becoming much more friendly with yourself and you have to accept yourself. If you're in the midst of this and you're saying, this is not, I'm not a good person, you know, you're in a very small part of the house. You have to be willing and have the courage to look at yourself.

[34:42]

And that's one of the reasons we sit still. Because if you sit still, and you can actually sit still, then you're not afraid of your thoughts. And we have a pretty deep fear of our thoughts built into us, a lack of trust of our thoughts. It also comes out of... Christianity and confession and that your thoughts can be to work with the devil and so forth. You have to be suspicious of your thoughts. Maybe you're going crazy and maybe thinking bad thoughts. So you have to get a kind of inherent, intuitive trust of your thoughts. whatever whatever is present is there that's it that's the way you are tough shit good luck or whatever you know that's the way it is so you get kind of used to that and in that you find that nothing remains the same everything's changing you have this compulsive thought that keeps bugging you but there's so many other things there's so much space in this territory it's not a sequential world it's a world of a lot of simultaneous

[35:55]

The very thing you're most afraid of is existing alongside of many other feelings and attitudes. You begin to see the underside of something, often the very thing we feel worst about. The other side is a kind of distorted version, or a way we can't see something where our motivation is quite pure. Sukhya used to say all the time, a thief is always stealing for his mother. You know, it's not true, but it's kind of true. He didn't mean that psychology. Just motives underneath us. We can respect, actually. Okay, so that's the practice of following.

[36:58]

Now, practice of touching is very similar, except that you actually feel yourself touching your breath. So that this sense of... of... Find your breath is now that you're inside your breath. You're no longer following it. You are your breath. So as you develop this kind of intimacy with your breath that you can… Just relax into your breath without needing any other kind of stimulation, and that breath begins then to connect you to the phenomenal world.

[38:08]

Because you're not just following your breath. By sort of residing in your breath or touching your breath, it touches other people. It allows you to touch other people. It allows you to touch the wind. So by touching your own breath and feeling intimate with your own breath, you then feel much more intimate with other people. Somehow there's a connection between being able to touch and trust your own physical this dustness Now that touching occurs often in a particular spot, so you can feel the breath touching you somewhere. Now there's certain places where it'll touch more than others, but actually the place it touches will move around, and that place it touches is kind of like another place from which you can find your identity.

[39:18]

Like when you say something like, my feet are way down there, my feet are down there, it means you think you're up here. But where, in your eyes? Now what the chakras represent are other places that you can locate yourself other than up here. So you can actually have the feeling of being here looking up at your head instead of always being in your head looking down at your body. And breathing allows you to do that. So when you begin to feel this touch of the breath, you're beginning to have the inner, the connection with interiorized space in which you can find your identity or location outside of thought.

[40:21]

Now, these practices are also considered practices of purification, that you don't have to do special things to purify yourself. And I don't mean purify, I mean, I don't like the word purify, but let me use it, that by practicing and with your breath in this way, it's like you keep washing yourself. Like you're taking a shower, being out in the spring rain or something like that. Something refreshing is happening. It's also like you're watering yourself, watering the flowers. So by beginning to touch your breath, allow your breath to touch you, you begin to find not just the topography of mental and spiritual, emotional, sense, feels, activity, but you begin to locate yourself in various points.

[41:47]

So you can, if there's a particular emotion, say, you can actually locate yourself in the emotion and stay there. I mean, in a simple way right now, there's this wonderful wind, and the pine tree is outside. In fact, let me give you a little poem. If you want to... This is a poem of Han Shan's, and it's in this poem. If you want to find a place to rest, if you want to find a place to rest your body and mind, Cold Mountain is such a place. The subtle breeze blows through the dense pines.

[42:55]

From up close it's even finer. From up close it's even finer. Under the trees, an old man, graying furiously, is reading Taoist texts. It's ten years since I came here. And I've forgotten the road by which I came. Now, if you analyze that poem, the way, as in Buddhism would, using such a poem and a poem. It's a pulse of the undivided self and the divided self. The divided self, if you want to rest your body somewhere, you want to find a place to rest, cold mountain's such a place. That's intention. That's the person deciding they'd like to do something.

[43:57]

The subtle breeze blows through the dense pines is now talking about breath or the inner person, the one who is not busy, but from the point of view of breath. From up close it is even finer. That means you've gone from the third state of breath or breathing to subtle breath that's subtle winds. Up close it's very fine, moving in your backbone, not in your lungs. Then it switches back to the person, ordinary person, who has his or her ordinary life at the same time all this is going on, and they're sitting under the pine trees reading texts and getting older. Like all of us. And then it switches back. Ten years I've been here. Ten years since I came. And I've forgotten the road by which I came.

[45:03]

That's again the undivided world. You don't know where you are. You don't know where the road is. You don't know how you got here into the sand dunes. And Elizabeth has thrown all the maps away. And the cars are parked outside that gate. And we can't get to them. We're going to have to stay here. We've forgotten how we got here, and we're all going to be living here together for the next ten years. Could be worse. I mean, could be worse. As our cooks are here. Okay. Okay. So here, when the breath becomes like the subtle breeze in the pines and in Anshan, you forget where you are.

[46:08]

Time stops. This is when the turtle heads for the fire, the place before time. We say, before your mother and father were born, which means outside of time. Okay, so this is the next kind of breath, touching, and the ability to touch and rest on cold mountain or within the topography of your mental, emotional, spiritual territory, realm, the realms of being. And that ability then to move that sense of touch to another person, or to the sound of these. Like right now, you can move this sense to the threshold of your ear and be nothing other than this breeze there in the dense pond.

[47:20]

Actually, when you're good at it, actually many Zen teachers die that way. They're quite old. They know they're going to die in a few weeks or sometime soon. And so I might, if I was a good Zen teacher, I might get you all together and say, you know, I'm going to perish soon. And it's really great to have been with you. And please remember not to put any heads above your own. Let's sit together a little bit. I'd bring myself to that stop, and I'd slowly stop the processes. And if I'm sitting well, I'd stay sitting up, and you wouldn't know when I died. One of you would finally say, your legs are killing him, push him over. Let's see if you do it. That's not so an intolerant way to die for a Zen teacher. No, that's a bad joke.

[48:37]

I was going to say, a sage in Asia instead of a youth in Asia. Okay, so stopping means that you can bring yourself to a point and just rest there, and then your breathing becomes very slow, virtually stops. And from that stillness, you have the next phase of breathing, which is called contemplating, which you can begin to contemplate and explore your own physical body, the organs of your body. But from that stopped point, you can open up into your stomach, into your lungs, and also following and touching healthier, you can begin to go down inside your skin, around into your legs, into the tips of your toes.

[49:39]

Now, you can do it visually, and you can do it by feeling, and you do it by imagination. You first imagine this happening, and you begin to find that it's more than imagination. Actually, you can feel tingling at your toes, a life moving in your body. You can begin to feel your bones. Actually, sometimes if your state of mind is right, you can hear your bones when you're walking. You can hear it inside of your body doing things. And sometimes to check something out, you know, if you want, you can move yourself to a certain height and locate and say, okay, what color is this? You don't know where you are. And a certain color will appear. Then you move yourself somewhere else and say, what color is this? And it'll be a different color. So when you do that, you're beginning to learn a way of looking. And sometimes, you know, when I say, as I always said earlier, when you're doing sazan, you feel your body's way out here. You may feel you're handling part of your body out here. In other words, the way in which this exploration of your body as color or tone, sound or shapes, those physical shapes aren't the medical shapes.

[50:55]

In other words, something that's this big medically or biologically may be this big in your territory of experience, and something else may be quite small, And you can begin to see things, kind of blood and breath and things moving as pulses in a kind of spatial territory. So you can... And, you know, the acupuncture points were discovered from inside the body, not by poking lots of places until... Well, yeah, it's a good place, but... And they often appear as itchings. you'll begin to see that these itches you had during zazen are actually acupuncture points each. And then if you scratch this one, it appears over here, and then it goes up to here. And then the final practice is bringing your breath together with the world.

[52:11]

Often it's the kind of, you now can concentrate this feeling of breath into a jewel. And the jewel in the Buddha's hand and some of the statues represents various things, but this is one of the things it represents. The ability to take a feeling or breath and bring it together and then move it. So the thought of enlightenment or the compassionate desire to realize wholeness with each person you meet, if you have a desire to realize wholeness with each person you meet, which is the same as the vow to realize enlightenment, that becomes a kind of jewel which actually enters your subtle body. And so the thought of enlightenment, bodhicitta, is a breath jewel that actually you put into your body and that's when subtle breath starts.

[53:22]

And so the next stages of breath have to do with breath in your backbone and breath in your... movement in your body in a more subtle way, but you come to that subtlety through gross breath, and then mind on breath, and then into something... And that is the kind of breathing that is trying to be taught in this koan. And which allows the world to be, the whole world to be the I of the student, so forth. And which allows you to see the world from interiorized space, which you generated and entered through breath. And that's why it's called the hinge post, because the divided and the undivided world turn here.

[54:28]

It's kind of like the swinging door again. But I think it's a strange and vivid kind of image to actually imagine this is a hinge post And you have a very graphic image. But that's what it says. I mean, I'm not kidding. I didn't make it up. Yeah. Put up my greedy glasses. Fuck. getting old here. If you want a place to rest your body, Cold Mountain is such a place. A subtle breeze blows in the dense pines. Heard from close by, the sound is even finer. Underneath the trees is a graying person, furiously reading Taoist books.

[55:33]

Ten years I couldn't return. Now I've forgotten the road from which I came. So in the subtle round mouth of the pivot turns the spiritual works. If you can bring your attention to your breath in this way, that you can pivot the world. The pivot is called the hinge nest, the door hinge, blah, blah, blah. It says, the armored one, the world-armored one, the Buddha, acted before being directed, turned spontaneously without being pushed. It means you're connected to the world in such a way you don't have to be pushed. The world is responding in you. So the later forms of breath are also called spontaneity.

[56:34]

What is called spontaneity? The later stages of breath are sometimes called spontaneity because you become so responsive. And it also talks about here breaking the double enclosure. The double enclosure means mind and body. So you begin to have your existence, you find your existence is larger than the double enclosure of mind and body. And myriad circumstances and so forth. We've gone through this column pretty thoroughly. And now you understand better what I talked about breath as a jewel, which becomes some place where you can stop and a place where you can enter a more subtle breath or wind or energy.

[58:00]

So you can see here how it says, a priceless jewel is hidden within the pit of the clusters of being. Flip that through for me. Are these stages of breathing sequential in that you have to be able to do one in order to be able to do the next? Usually, yeah. But they're not sequential, they're simultaneous. And you don't have to practice in any particular order. You can counter wrestle a bit and follow and touch. They're all interrelated, but generally. You can't fire your breath until you've developed the ability to count your breath. But you go back and forth. I mean, you don't have to say, okay, one year of counting my breath, then six months of following my breath. Okay, that's...

[59:04]

I think I've talked about most of what was the sort of stated topic here of mindfulness practices related to bodhisattva practice, and now through the practices of mindfulness, which include breath, the bodhisattva, as a possibility of each of you arises, and arises through, we could say, a Buddha body, or a body that is initially interiorized, seeing and knowing the world as interior. And that creates the means the Buddha fields or the field of being in which the bodhisattva knows other people's suffering.

[60:17]

Because it's not known conceptually, it's known through this, because I know you through... So a bodhisattva in a sense is emptiness looking at form. In other words, a bodhisattva is one who decides not to enter nirvana, but turns his or her back to nirvana, but from nirvana looks at the world. Well, anything you want to talk about? Yeah, I have a question about the pressure in your belly. Oh, yeah. Okay.

[61:28]

You can do it. To do it is not... Some Zen teachers teach it. It's not central to Zen practice, I don't think. But it's a kind of way of focusing yourself and increasing a certain kind of power by doing that. When would I do that? Because I do do it sometimes. I guess if I was focusing my energy, that's what I would do. I mean, say that right now I have to drive to Heidelberg. I might get everything ready, packed, sit in the car,

[62:29]

put my energy here, start driving. And of course one of the basic practices is to put your mind in your stomach. That's another like following your thoughts, another basic practice, put your mind in your stomach. And you do that for a bunch of reasons. It's the way Graf von Durtheim became famous with his book Hara, putting your mind here. allows you to move your, again, sense of vocation and identity and so forth out of your thoughts and into your body. This is the most receptive place to locate yourself. This is the most... These are the two main areas you can locate yourself other than in your eyes and head. And this is... I mean, like Sufism almost entirely emphasizes this. But Buddhism emphasizes this more. But for Buddhism this is a territory of knowledge, of touching, receptivity and so forth.

[63:40]

And this is an area of energy and focus and so forth. So that this is considered not a strong place to locate yourself. A very powerful place, but not strong. Stronger to locate yourself here, And also this becomes the home base for opening up the chakras. Because your energy goes this way and this way. And this is the place you begin to feel that. That's the easiest one to feel first. What about the legs? What about them? Oh, you say you circulate your breath. I think it comes from here. What about the legs? The complex you feel is the urge, and breaking your breasts down into the urge. Well, then you're talking about martial art practices, and some of these are Taoist and Qigong practices.

[64:50]

Sukershi told me to, for instance, breathe through my feet. But these are refinements I decided not to get into. But in any case, there are ways in which you imagine yourself breathing through your feet. And then there are practices with keen hand. They're standing, standing like this, where you begin to feel an energy and breath coming up through the ground into your hand. But we don't emphasize that very much in Zazen, except in, like if I saw a person who could have access to that in Kenyan or standing, I would suggest that they, I might do track to suggest while they're standing, they find out how it's happening. But again, it's something I... I'm mentioning it here, but something I wouldn't mention to most students, but I might mention to some if I saw that it would help them or something they could have access to.

[66:01]

Something else? No, sorry. You're saying all these things are, I thought, very sensible. Joseph, I'm saying all these things are part of Zen practice. but they're not necessarily emphasized or taught to everyone. But they're used in martial arts and in Taoist practices which emphasize healing and health because they work. It's just that Zen practice doesn't emphasize that side so much. It doesn't mean they're not there, it's just that martial arts have taken that and developed it more. I don't see any problem with practicing and it may be helpful. The present director of Crestown, Randy Fox, has been a Tai Chi teacher for many years and practices Tai Chi every day.

[67:09]

it's pretty clear to me that his ability to practice and understand practice quickly has come from his many years of doing Tai Chi. Yes? mental construction, bringing them into the... Seeing that they are in. Seeing that they are in. Okay. It's okay. It's done. So do I feel. But there are also many things When I think about it, I'm really in a shock. I get to see wonderful things. It's also the other way. Art is really one of those things. But thinking, voice, writing, those silly, wailing things, it pushes me angry.

[68:19]

So what do I do about it? Because I don't feel well. Most of the time, I don't. And also, we are connected in life with God, and we continue to do that. It means that I'm also responsible. Yeah, I think so. Well, you have to learn to live with that responsibility and not deny it.

[69:25]

And I think part of, I mean, what you say is right, not only is if you are more, by opening up your interior developing interior space, big space, you open yourself up to a lot of suffering. And that's okay. And the bodhisattva practice is, I mean, the sense of, the simple superficial sense of healing that we have in the West is not so in Buddhism. In other words, there's so many people say, well, this has happened to you, you should do something to heal yourself.

[70:29]

Well, that's not so much true in Buddhism. You leave all the open wounds open. You just don't always live in the open wounds. And some people's wounds are, you know, there's smart things you can heal, but often healing is a form of covering over it. I mean, being in Europe and knowing people who went through the war, and knowing people who went through the war in Japan and Vietnam, they don't heal. And so you learn to live with this, but that's not the only place you live. So one of the characteristics of a bodhisattva... Now, when I say a bodhisattva, I don't mean, again, some saintly person. This is a possible way of being for each of us. And to describe it, I say this way of being is called the bodhisattva.

[71:31]

And the bodhisattva way of being is characterized by simultaneously being in the midst of suffering and joy. Now, you can't help anybody. If you want to help somebody and relieve them of their suffering, it doesn't help for you to suffer too. Because what they want is their suffering to be finished. So you can suffer with them, but you also have to also be joyful. So this is something, again, that this would be a whole different seminar for me to try to create the territory where you could get a feeling for joy and suffering, the territory of this. In addition to this capacity to allow suffering to exist but not necessarily live in it.

[72:35]

You can go into it, you can come back out. Like maybe there's a sunny sunshine and a lake or a swamp. You go down in the swamp and you can come up to the surface on your lotus pad. You can fly or you can go down in the water. So part of this teaching of non-self is to be able to have a participation where you locate yourself. Ultimately it means no location. Also I think to practice you need, as you become more open and you become more vulnerable, you have to have practices which seal you. and not armor you. And this comes up, I'd say this topic of sealing and armoring comes up at half my seminars, because so many people are motivated to practice from compassion and sensitivity to others, or motivated through their own suffering.

[73:53]

and they find the practice opens them up in ways they just don't want to be so open and like to shut down. And most of us narrow our focus pretty much. And there's also this coercive sense of humankind that I think is a I've talked about this before, but I think humankind is one of the great creations. And I think it's a creation of Western civilization. And it suggests there's a larger identity of human beings. and that takes precedence over our individual identity. It seems to have developed in our society as a kind of balance to the individuality that's emphasized.

[74:55]

And I think our contemporary democracies arise out of, I think the root of contemporary democracy is both Greek, but it's also the Christian sense of a individual relationship to God. In Asia and in Buddhist countries, there isn't a sense of humankind. There's a sense of all people. But all people is much more each person you meet. So the vow to save all sentient beings, which is usually translated in the West with a feeling of meaning humankind, doesn't mean that. means to say something more like to realize Buddhahood with each person you meet. Because there isn't a sense of all human beings. There isn't a sense of this generalization of everything all at once.

[76:03]

So that you don't define yourself always in terms of this immense thing you can't deal with. The emphasis in And I'm not saying this is good or bad. I'm just saying this is the way of functioning. And I'm not saying it's true or not true. Are you following my English okay? The emphasis in Hinduism, maybe, and in some religious mystic, Christian mystic practices, is to merge, for the drop to merge into the ocean. But in Buddhism, it's for the ocean to appear in the drop. So you're always responding to the ocean appearing in the drop. Right now, this room is full of all the suffering and the joy I need. If I meet somebody else, and my students run a hospice for people with AIDS in San Francisco,

[77:10]

I was just on the phone yesterday about two people dying of AIDS, one in New York and one in Santa Fe, and somebody's going to visit them and so forth. If they come into contact with me, on the telephone even, I do try to respond and do something. But when they're not in contact with me, I don't think about it. I relate to what's in front of me and comes to me in some way. And this is interesting, this kind of thinking, and again, I'm not saying it's the right way of thinking, it's just... But you don't have a sense in a city like Kyoto that there's the best restaurant in Kyoto. Like in America, you know what the best restaurants are and the best restaurants in San Francisco and the best cooks work in the best restaurants. You don't have that feeling because there isn't a sense that Kyoto has a best. So you could be a very good cook, as you are, and you might, in Kyoto, you might be really probably the best cook in Kyoto, if there's such a thing, and you'd have a little tiny restaurant as big as this corner of the room, and you'd have six or eight customers who came regularly, and two or three strangers every night, and that's about it.

[78:28]

And you'd never want to be known outside your neighborhood. Because you don't think of the world as beyond your neighborhood beyond the people you're in contact with humankind is a very powerful idea and i think we've got to move from humankind to gayakind and gayakind is a kind of recognizing that the phenomenal world is also our larger identity So far, we've been exploiting Gaia kind at the expense of humankind. We've been exploiting the planet to protect human beings and make sure people have enough gasoline and everything. I think my, I mentioned the lecture the other day, or I don't think it's here, but my example of the way humankind is coercive is often people speak to me when they meditate of the fact that they start thinking they're wasting their time or not helping people or they should be out helping people and not meditating.

[79:49]

And you think, I'm just here contemplating my navel and I get criticized. I say, aren't you contemplating your navel? I say, Well, no, I've never actually contemplated my navel. Cleaned it a few times, but never contemplated. And they say, well, you should be out helping people. But the people who say you should be out helping people don't say that when they're at the local bar. They only think of it when they're meditating. So somehow this sense of humankind is a societal identity that doesn't want us to have an individual identity independent of society. So Western individualism is a footnote to social identity. That your individual identity is defined in terms of the social identity. And I think we have a lot of psychological problems because of that, because if we start thinking things other people don't think, we think we're crazy.

[80:57]

And that means you clearly give precedence to whatever people think over what you think. So Buddhism clearly moves you into locating an identity that's independent of society, or could be. And it can be very scary. People go to meditation and feel like going down a long tunnel, or they're going into darkness. And they want to grab a hold. And one of the first things people say when their meditation starts working is, have other people felt this? Well, at a certain point I'll say, yeah, I don't worry. But at some point I'll say, no one's ever felt this. You're probably going crazy. And I've got to push the person to do it. Be willing to trust that they can sit there, and if they go crazy, where are they going to go crazy to? Right here. It's all right. I mean, people do go crazy. But I think when you fear your own thoughts, you're more likely to go crazy than when you don't.

[82:02]

I think this sense of humankind and the suffering of the world and all that can be more... is sometimes more of a... it's sometimes a subtle mode of social control. If it also comes from the communication... Oh yeah, I mean, know more, sure. In fact, I mean, you can handle the idea of humankind when you only know about what's happening around 200 kilometers around you. When you start knowing everything, the time somebody falls off a building in South America, I mean, more than we can handle. The fact is we live in this world where people could die, die and get crushed, and wars happen, and I don't know, and... Okay, sealing instead of armoring.

[83:08]

Arming is to shut out. Okay? Sealing is not to leak. So, what do I mean by not leaking up? I could do a whole seminar on sealing. There's so many practices associated with it. one of the ceiling practices is actually putting your energy here, pushing down on you. Again, the common experience of leaking is where I first noticed it is I began to feel something from being with Sukershi, or being a Sushim, like I feel being here with you. Then I go down here into the local restaurant or something, and people say, what are you guys doing up there in that spiritual center called Eel Nail Owl?

[84:17]

They're too old. So I say, Well, we've been doing something. I don't know. We liked a zit size. I don't know. But I don't say, well, we've been talking about how to identify yourself with the day at a level of feeling and not thought. Because for one thing, they think I was rather peculiar or something like that, but I would leap. I would find something was going out of me doing that. So you may find, if people ask you about the seminar, why did you do this thing with this guy with no hair for two days? And if you try to tell them why, you may not... It's better just to say, oh, I don't know, my friend, my boss got me to do it.

[85:26]

Or, you know, I had to do something this weekend, so I drove up here from Cologne. And... You know. So that's, you can begin to sense leaking. Well, the other side of leaking is being nourished. And within the Buddhist terms of right speech, right livelihood, right, etc., it means do things in which you don't leak. In which you feel complete. And all words in, all Buddhist words in English should be gerunds. should have IMG on it. There's not the word enlightenment, it's enlightening. There aren't trees, there's treeing. There aren't, you know, so forth. So, because everything's in process.

[86:27]

So, uh, you begin to see, find that what you do in speaking or completing, you're always not complete, you're completing, completing, you begin to feel nourished. So right speech also means when I speak to you and the first level as I learned to speak so I didn't leak. And when I talked to somebody and I felt like I was leaking, I would notice it. Well, let's say, I'm keen to tell you my own progress. First I noticed I leaked. Then I noticed that I could do something about that. Then I took a little pride in the fact that I could do something about that so I could leak like mad and then recover. So I used to pride myself in being able to leak more than anyone and then repair the damage really quickly.

[87:33]

Then I decided that was kind of stupid. And so then I began to find out that I would just stop speaking. I would change the topic or do something else if I found myself leaking when I was speaking about something or leaking when I was doing something. It's not so different that, like, when you're driving and you usually drive at, say, 100 kilometers, and some days you just don't feel comfortable driving at 100 kilometers. You feel comfortable driving at 80 kilometers. And the next day you feel comfortable driving at 120 kilometers. I don't know why, except it's like that sometimes. You better drive where you feel comfortable. You start looking. So it's that kind of difference. You notice it's like the difference when a painter knows when to stop a painting. You better stop now and everything else you do is when to stop. So it's that kind of thing.

[88:37]

I began to know when to stop and I stopped leaking pretty much. Then the next stage I began, the next is I began to find out not just that I didn't leak, that I was being nourished. So for instance, when I'm speaking with you, I feel I'm not leaking and I feel most of the time that I'm being nourished by the relationship. When I start feeling, for instance, sometimes I'll be speaking to you and I'll feel like I'm not being nourished, and I immediately know I've gone too far or said too much or it's not clear or our connection is not there or something. So if you practice this sense of being nourished in what you do, you don't deplete your basic energy. When you don't deplete your basic energy, you can allow people suffering

[89:41]

But when it depletes you, you can't do it. If you're a psychiatrist in a mental hospital, you either have to be sealed or nourished or armored. Depletion? If you If you don't know how to seal yourself and you're open and not armored, everything will deplete you. You'll get burned out very fast. You're blocked in the day, and by the mid-afternoon, your day and your job is... You need three beers or a vacation or something. So I feel that you can actually, if you get a sense of what I'm talking about, my own experience is that you can begin to see the suffering of the world even in a way that nourishes you.

[91:09]

And always, of course, we're not very far away from that, ourselves. but for a little chance. It's funny, I always feel, I see sometimes, twice recently I've seen truckloads, not truckloads, vanloads of impaired people. Just saw a whole vanload in on the Baltic, I was, out in the pier. And one person after another goes by you, completely distorted, you know, laughing. And what's great about them is they're not socialized. They have no sense of how they appear, and they laugh at you, and their teeth are coming out, and their ears on the end. But I always feel closer to them than ordinary people. And I think you may have the same experience. Sometimes you just recognize, they're but for a strand of DNA, go I.

[92:11]

And those people are not very far from us. I always want to give them hugs, but they wouldn't understand. Sometimes they laugh. Sometimes I have a great time with them, but they start laughing with me because I start laughing with them. And their keepers are trying to get them to go along and become kind of crazy like them. Something else? I'm still having children.

[93:24]

Well, it's like using a... I try to figure out for myself. Yeah, I wondered myself. Well, it's just...

[93:36]

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