Well, for our Benedictine, and excuse me, I can't resist, Zenedictine visitors, let me say, it makes me think that about, you know, you are examining your own religious practice, in being here in this place, Crest Town. And so naturally the question of how Zen might fit in or relate to your examined or unexamined Catholicism, since most of you are Catholics who are visiting these two days, Three days.

[01:02]

I would say that, you know, by the dictionary definition of Buddhism as a dictionary definition of a religion as most of the definitions imply a relationship to a higher being, in that sense Zen is not a religion. And for that reason it might fit in and does seem to fit in in a lot of Catholic monastic practices, brings and practices in. But I think basically it is a religion because people need religion. So we can call it a human-made religion. It's not a revealed religion, but we need religion so we create a religion. I mean, I don't think it's It's not iconogra... There's no iconographical, I don't think, connection between Kannon and the Virgin Mary.

[02:07]

But there's an isomorphic connection in that they're very similar, although they have different histories. And I think they're similar because a female presence is necessary for us human beings in our spiritual life and in religion. So Abalokiteshvara in China and most of East Asia evolves into a feminine figure, which we have this kanon figure in, in the kanondo, in the main house there where we're eating. As the Virgin Mary or Madonna, not the movie star, not the singer, She's practically taken over the word, hasn't she? Shows you the power of media. Catholic Church can't resist such a figure. But, of course, Madonna is a name for a married woman, I believe, isn't it?

[03:10]

In Italy. Or an unmarried woman? Anyway, it's not used anymore, but I don't think much, but in Italy... Madonna was a more common term, not necessarily limited to that. And she's Italian, I believe. In any case, Christianity in Europe, certainly over some centuries, emphasized the Virgin Mary almost more than Jesus. So there's a similar process of creating for ourselves a divine figure divine feminine figure. Now I would like to speak, because this is the beginning of the practice period, about some basics and also for our visitors too.

[04:13]

But mostly because of two reasons. One, it's very important to constantly, often, go back to the basics because it's only through the basics and really understanding them well that we can straighten out, keep straight all the teachings based on the basics. Now another reason is, particularly for us in the West, is that it's at the level of the basics that we also see our own basic assumptions and how our assumptions differ or are the same from this teaching which is not Asian but has been primarily developed in Asia. I mean if you look at the roots of Christianity Buddhism, they both go back into India and the Near East.

[05:16]

But one was developed in Europe, primarily, and the other was developed in China, primarily. China and India. Tibet. Okay. So, the basic I want to speak about is breath. Breathing. And breathing is... Well, of course, we're not so concerned with breath as the air you breathe in and out, your breath. We're concerned in practice with breath as a physical act which can be conscious. And the ingredients of breathing are you have an exhale and you have an inhale. And you have a pause at the top of the inhale and you have a pause at the bottom of the exhale. And you have the rhythm of your breathing.

[06:20]

Now those are the basic ingredients that come with breathing. Two pauses, an inhale and exhale, and a certain pace or rhythm. So what are we going to do with, what are we going to cook with these ingredients? What do we do with these ingredients? Well there's quite a few things we can do with it, but the main thing we do is we bring our attention to our breathing. Now our breathing is also closely connected with our emotions. If you're upset or agitated or calm or at ease, this will be reflected in your breathing and of course your physical, outer physical activity also reflects your breathing, if you're running or walking, etc. We talk about Buddhism, the four noble postures, reclining, standing, walking, and sitting.

[07:29]

And in fact, you can understand the morning from the time you wake up until the end of service, as a practice of these, a ritual practice in a sense, ceremonial practice of walking, standing, sitting, lying, reclining. Now they're called noble postures because they're where we live. Jogging is, by the way, a subset under walking, moving. flying on a trapeze. Now, I did that this Christmas time or New Year's. I don't know if that's a subset of sitting, maybe. In any case, these four postures are where we live. Walking, standing, sitting, reclining. But they're also noble because, like breathing, they not only reflect our state of mind, but they're accesses to our state of mind.

[08:37]

Just as breathing reflects our emotions, breathing can be a way to affect our emotions. So breathing is an autonomic physical activity that can be conscious. And I would say almost all the wisdom teachings of Asia turn on this, breathing can be conscious. including most of the martial arts. Perhaps all of them. I don't know all of them. Breathing can be conscious. So how do you make it conscious? Again, it's an inner-outer activity. Now, our inner metabolic activity of our organs is not

[09:41]

accessible to ordinary consciousness. It is accessible to intention and consciousness, but it's not accessible in, at least for most people, in a very conscious way. But breathing is an inner-outer activity which can be conscious. Now we bring, one of the most basic ways is to name our breath. It's a long breath, a short breath, and so forth. And in naming it but not thinking about it, you're teaching yourself many things. And I won't go into that. And you're also not only naming but taming the mind. By naming the breath, you're taming the mind. You're massaging the mind. When you bring your attention to your breath, you massage your mind and body. And this is the main practice really of of physical, mental practice.

[10:46]

Buddhism is this breathing practice. And your breath can be a bridge, a shuttle, and a gate. Perhaps, I mean, if you don't This is really quite simple, what I'm talking about. But if you haven't thought about it, such a simple thing as this breathing you're doing all the time has so many components that are accessible to practice, to intelligence, to observation. I mean, breathing begins at birth and ends at death. I mean, we expire when we die. Obviously, the words... inhale, exhale, hail, meaning healthy in a sound way. Inspiration and expiration show that our languages, English and I presume other languages, acknowledge a deep connection between breathing and our life and our death and our creativity.

[11:54]

Now characteristic of Buddhism because it, you know, when the Buddha died he supposedly said, put no heads above your own. So here we don't have in Buddhism a higher being, we have a wider being or a greater being. It's a religion in the sense it's about wider being if not a higher being. So this emphasis to put no heads above your own is to, you have to discover, in a simple sense, what this life is, what the ingredients of your life, because that's all you've got. And this turning point ingredient, this hinge, Sukershi called it a hinge, but this door of breath is the main gate of in which you discover how to weave inner mind and body, inner and outer mind and body in the phenomenal world together.

[13:08]

So in this sense, breath is a shuttle. Now you bring attention to your breath and you bring intention to your breath. And intention and attention are your most vital powers. Everything stems from intention and attention. The depth, the accuracy of your intention and the consistency of your attention. These two things, intention and attention, we can make our life. No, most of our intentions are pretty much unconscious, but Buddhism says examine these intentions that are, these assumptions that are unconscious. So when you bring your intention, you intend to bring your attention to your breath, you're bringing your most conscious

[14:14]

most powerful forces you have, ingredients you have in your life to your breath. Now one way, again I said, is you name your breath. You just notice it, what it's like, agitated or short or long, etc. And parallel to this kind of practice, it's good to take, as I always say, a general inventory of your breathing. Without trying to change it, just notice how you breathe in different situations. We hear when you're walking, when you're sitting down, when you're first sitting down, when you first wake up, See if you can remind yourself to notice how you're breathing when you first wake up. Notice how you're breathing when you go to sleep. If you actually, practically speaking, notice what kind of breath puts you to sleep or occurs as you go to sleep, you can put yourself to sleep very quickly.

[15:23]

Because you just recreate the feeling of that particular breathing which you notice as you go to sleep, and you'll go to sleep quite quickly. You don't need a sleeping pill. Which, anyway, makes you think you went to sleep. It doesn't really put you to sleep. And it stops your thinking. Okay, now Zazen Meditation creates the ideal conditions to study your breath because you're less likely to be distracted. And you can stabilize your mind and body and pay more attention, give more attention, spend more attention on your breath. And inversely,

[16:28]

It is breath which creates all the organic conditions of practice in your zazen. So breath begins at birth, ends at death, and re-begins all the time. It's always re-beginning. Right now you have a new beginning of breath. So you constantly have a new beginning. bring your attention, your consciousness to your breath. Now the most basic way in Zen practice to bring your attention, give your attention to your breath in Zazen is to count your exhales. Usually we count to ten. and start over again at one.

[17:36]

Count to ten, start over again at one. Now this also gives you the opportunity when you count your exhales, begin to notice your exhales as distinct from your inhales. Begins to allow you to notice your breath as a physical activity. Now there's four stages, more or less, of breathing practice. The first is it's an autonomic activity, mostly non-conscious or unconscious. And second, you make it conscious in your daily activity or in your meditation practice, and the making it conscious interferes with it. So the next step is you beginning to develop a consciousness which doesn't interfere. One of the most basic things happens is this subtlety of a consciousness which doesn't interfere with what it is observing or examining.

[18:49]

It's a very important skill and again learned, come to, felt, through at the most basic level of practice. And mostly people just pay attention to their breath, but aren't so aware they're learning such an immense amount. But I'm pointing it out because I want us to see how these basics bring us to another kind of instrumentality or dynamic of how we exist. So noticing the physicality of breath, exhaling, inhaling. Well, I didn't finish the four stages. First is it's autonomic, mostly not conscious. Second, it's conscious but interfered with.

[19:52]

Third, it's conscious but not interfered with. And fourth, it's a gate or a bridge or a shuttle. It's when you begin to have a breathing that breathes itself but still carries you like an invisible rider into the realms of mind and body is when practice begins. It takes a little while of paying attention to your breath and It takes quite a while before you can actually stay with your breath. And then the next stage of subtlety is to be able to stay with your breath without interfering with it. And basically it goes back to being autonomic, but now has this invisible rider of awareness that accompanies it. Now when you notice that it's a physical act, where you become aware of it not just as a physical activity which can be conscious, and a physical activity which reflects your emotional and physical state, but it's a simple physical act and it has different ways, there are different physical ways you can breathe.

[21:17]

What you want in meditation, and there's many reasons why this is important, but what you want in meditation is you want a way of breathing that doesn't stop if you become concentrated. Because if you become concentrated and you stop your breathing, which is common, I mean, the example I always use is like a watchmaker. If you look very carefully, observe something, you often stop your breathing to look at something. It's very common, you stop it right here. But if you do that, you change the chemistry of your brain and you'll get images and distractions and disturbances. So you want your breathing to continue even though you're deeply absorbed maybe even not conscious in any normal sense, usual sense, you want your breathing to continue. Now sometimes in Zazen breathing will become very slow, maybe one or two breaths, or three, two, a minute, say.

[22:21]

It's almost stopped, but it's not stopped actually, it's only going very slowly. We won't talk about a practice of stopping your breath, which is more yogic and Hindu, but can be done too. So in Zen practice we may breathe very slowly, but we want our breathing to continue. As your mental activity gets less and your body is relaxed, you don't need much breath. you can become quite concentrated. So you want your breath to continue. And if you want your breath to continue, in my experience, as far as I know, the best way is to breathe, the most beneficial way is to breathe so that you're, for the most part, your chest and stomach area is not moving. Now what's happening when you breathe this way is your...

[23:28]

You have to breathe through your diaphragm then, and not with your chest. So the way we do that, and I think the simplest way, and there's reasons for this too, which is you start out with imagining a circle or an oval in which your exhale is coming out and outside your body and circled back in way down in the lower part of your belly. Now, when you exhale that way, there's a pressure you're pushing down in your lower belly, which actually is pushing up your diaphragm and expelling the air. And when you release it, it feels like, physically, like, because of the release, that the air is coming in from down below. It feels like it's coming up and then going out again in a circle. Now if you get familiar with this physical act of breathing, and finally it becomes natural, feels natural, this image, holding this image is useful.

[24:43]

And you're beginning now in this basic practice, working with holding an image that is parallel to and simultaneous with a physical act. This is bringing mind, this is another way of bringing attention to your breath. You're bringing attention with your counting, You're bringing tension with your naming and actually the dynamic of naming is different than the dynamic of counting. And the dynamic of a visual image accompanying your breath is different. You've actually got a different kind of soup here. One ingredient is naming with language but not thinking. Another is counting. And the other is a visual image. These are all like putting garlic in your soup or pepper or carrot or something. Now the visual image will help stabilize your breathing. And this sensation of the breath coming up from the bottom.

[25:54]

And now this starts a pattern in your body of a feeling of a rising with your inhale. And going forward like this of the circle with your exhale. This image and this feeling of the circle in your breath becomes part of a gate to a more subtle breathing practice. So one is it stabilizes your breathing, and two, it creates a gate for a more subtle breathing practice. Now the pauses I mentioned, you can sometimes practice with just resting for a moment at the top of your exhale.

[27:06]

Even a feeling sort of disappearing at that moment. And then you can rest again at the bottom of your exhale. And that's the feeling sometimes of absorbing the world. And now, that kind of feeling can also be very, it's not just kind of arbitrary poetry. There's a gate there. Now as your breathing becomes stable and your posture becomes stable. Now in the traditional meditation manuals and instructions it will speak about to make the mind stationary.

[28:19]

This is also sometimes understood and people say don't have any thinking or don't think and I want to advise you not to try to stop your thinking. Just remove your identification from your thinking. Whatever happens, happens. It's fine. This is what we call the practice of uncorrected mind. but you withdraw your identification from your thinking. So what you're doing here is moving your identification to your breath, breathing, your sense of continuity. Again, this is familiar to most of you, but the basic functions of self, establish connectedness, establish separation, what belongs to you, your immune system, etc., and establishes continuity. And the important dynamic in shifting how the self works is you shift how continuity is established.

[29:27]

And if you establish continuity in your conceptual thought, you have one kind of self formation. If you establish continuity in your breathing or your body, you're actually changing the way, in a very fundamental way, the self works. Because one of the functions of self is to establish continuity, who you are from moment to moment. If your continuity is established on your breathing and not in the story of yourself, you actually still have a story and you're still that kind of self. But the dynamic of the self when continuity is in the breath or body is different than when the continuity is in the story. The story only becomes now an aspect of our larger way we discover who we are You know, sometimes we wake up in the morning, mostly we wake up in the morning and we're, maybe we could use the image, we're a driver.

[30:39]

We get up and we drive our life and drive our body around and so forth. And sometimes we wake up in the morning and we're a car. We're an automobile. I think a lot of teenage boys wake up in the morning thinking they're a car. Anyway, you wake up in the morning and you don't like the driver. You can't find the driver. So we have this experience. Are we the body? Are we the mind? Is the car, some part of the car become the driver? Can we change who the driver is? What's the car? Is the car just our body or is the whole world? this kind of conception of how we exist can be scary to play with but perhaps if you meditate we find if we meditate we have a security.

[31:49]

Part of that security is bringing your sense of continuity to your breath so the way you think about things doesn't make you so anxious because it doesn't threaten your continuity. If your whole identification existence is in your thinking, if your thinking is challenged or you have a... I mean, nervous breakdowns are often just a challenge to one's thinking of who one is. So you're much more, I think, psychologically secure grounded, literally, when you're grounded discovering continuity in the ground of our phenomenal world, our body and our breath. The more you find this... Well, let me... How much time do I have here?

[33:02]

The more you... Okay. Generally, when we try to pay attention to our breath, we wander. We wander. And then sometimes we don't wander so much and it gets easier to stay with our breath. And sometimes you don't even have to make an effort. It's not even easy. It just comes back automatically. That's third and fourth. Your mind and body, your mind and breath just are so joined. They're virtually always together. It doesn't even come back. Those are four stages of accomplishment and practice. It wanders all the time. It comes back easily, it comes back by itself, and it's always there. Those are four stages of accomplishment in breathing practice. When you get to the point where it comes back easily or is mostly always together, joined, intention, attention, and breath,

[34:21]

you have discovered a new instrumentality and dynamic of being. And it allows you to begin to explore your body, explore your emotions. It allows you to discover, I think what we have to say is, interior consciousness. Now, consciousness can be structured, something very basic. I have a little grandson, you know, and I just got a call from my daughter in Portugal. She lives in Portugal. I sent them a 22-foot-long tent. Him. He's 17 months, I believe. And he likes books, and he likes creating little spaces. So I sent him some books, and I sent him this tent. I saw it in the catalog. And you open it up and you glue it together and it's red and yellow and blue and green and stuff. And it folds up in a little case like a soccer ball or a basketball.

[35:27]

And you can open it up and it has tunnels. So he's already, they called me and said, he's already piled books in different parts and toys and he's going through the tunnels. But when you teach a kid to count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or A, B, C, D, E, F, G, the alphabet, you are teaching the child to create an exterior consciousness that can be structured. So I can know that Tom is there, John is there. I can hold that separation in my mind. It's not muddled up. I can tell apples from oranges and I can tell five oranges in a row and I can tell that's over there and this is here. This is a mental structure, it's not a given. It's a... our mind has to be taught to make these distinctions.

[36:32]

And it's important whether we emphasize the relationships or the differences. Different cultures make different emphasis. But that's all an exteriorized consciousness. It's absolutely necessary. So I always say, if one of you throws an apple at me, I have to be useful if I could know that it's also outside me, so I might duck or catch it. But in fact, it's entirely a mental experience. I mean, my mind is tracking the apple, making calculations of the arc of it, and telling my body where to put the hand. It's entirely... interior, but I have to know it also has an exterior reality. But it is in fact interior. And we forget that. And in fact, I would say our culture, for some reason, has sacrificed the development of interior consciousness. Or ignored it.

[37:35]

Or perhaps it's not a sacrifice, it's just that exterior consciousness is so productive that let's, hey, base our whole civilization on a highly articulated and evolved exterior consciousness. So we have literature and poetry and the sciences and logic and language and so forth. But if you begin to develop an interior consciousness and one of the things you see when you count your breath while you're so distracted is in your interior consciousness everything's muddled up. You can't tell the difference between an emotion and a feeling and background mind. You can't see layers of mind which evolve at different rates. Mostly it's a muddle. And our dreaming is mostly a muddle. The more you... bring attention, intention, attention, and breath together, you create a stationary mind, which is also like stationary that you can write on, something that's still enough you can begin to see what's going on and begin to actually influence, begin to have access to your organs, your immune system, your

[39:03]

So now intention can, through bringing attention, intention and breath together, can begin to relate to our most basic functions, our metabolism and so forth. And you can begin to see your mind over there, here, apples and oranges. You can begin to see the way the mind has a dynamic and you have an instrumentality to enter into that dynamic simply through this joining of intention, attention and breath. Now this isn't just interesting, you know, a new sideshow or better than MTV or something like that. It is satisfying in your activity and in your meditation to be able to see clearly the aspects of mind, perception, states of mind, feeling, emotions, with the kind of preciseness that you can see the altar table, tongue, catrin, etc., tape recorder.

[40:18]

That's interesting, but it's not just about interest, because it changes how you function in the world. changed how continuity, connectedness, and separation, interdependence, and so forth, are experienced. And it begins to establish a different kind of presence. In Tibetan Buddhism it's called Rigpa. different kind of presence in which such things as form and emptiness, emptiness as form make an entirely different sense because they're now happening in an interior, exterior consciousness establishing a presence which is not the same as when we are functioning through a driver trying to operate through conceptual thought with the waves of feeling and emotion kind of lapping at the sides but mostly trying to be If that image was a little bit fast there, it just popped into my head.

[41:27]

I'm sorry. So anyway, this lecture was back to basics. Looking at simple things like the ingredients of breathing, inhaling, exhaling. The pauses, the rhythm, bringing attention to it. bringing intention and attention to it. And how that begins to create a new understanding of how we exist. Okay. Thank you very much. They are intention equally.

[42:15]

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