It's quite an interesting obstacle course to walk across this room. Well, you know, since I started on this immediacy stuff immediately... I think I ought to try to finish, and maybe we'll have some discussion, because I'd like some discussion about it. It'll have to be tomorrow, I guess. So we left off with... The earthworm enjoying his hipless environment.

[01:03]

His what? His what? Earthworms have no hips. Oh, hipless environment. We stopped with the earthworm, who enjoys his hipless situation. And trying to give some traction for ourselves too immediately. Yeah, and so I said that my experiment was to, you know, emphasize attentional spatiality. and attentional, there's no such word, but patiality, and since our consciousness always wants to make things that I've been saying predictable,

[02:07]

The third of these three tractions has to be, from my experience, indeterminacy. In other words, to enter yourself, my own experience is, to enter yourself into the texture of immediacy. In other words, Like the earthworm feels its environment as it goes through it. The textures are spatiality and patiality and indeterminacy. I mean, unless you really feel anything can happen at any time, you're not really in the midst of immediacy. In other words, if you don't really have the feeling that everything could happen at any moment, as long as you don't have this feeling, you're not really in the mediocrity.

[03:59]

So you begin to feel immediacy as a kind of tissue or texture. And that opening pointer I gave you from column 55 of the Blue Cliff Records, And if any of you have an aptitude for reading koans and having fun with them, it's about these two fellows and they go to a parishioner's house and who's died. And when they go in, there's a cop in there or urn. And one of them knocks on it and says, alive or dead?

[05:03]

And the other guy says, I won't say, I won't say. And then later they're walking home and he says, what do you mean you won't say? I'm going to hit you if you won't tell. He says, I won't say, I won't say. And he hits him and then he has to leave the monastery because he hit the teacher. So the phrase from this koan is, I won't say, I won't say. And the sentence from this koan is, I won't say, I won't say that I won't say it. Or just a repetition, I won't say it, I won't say it. Okay. Whatever you say.

[06:33]

Well, is that in English, I won't say... It sounds to me, the English sounds to me as if it could also mean I won't say that I won't say. Is that also in there, or is it just a... Yeah, that's implied. Okay, good. Because that is in German, impossible to say the same thing. I see, I won't say. say but he is saying well let's not go there okay so then it says later in this secure and intimate with the whole of relationality knowing in the midst of the flow able to turn around in the flow. Yeah, that's enough. And then it goes on to say,

[07:42]

Forget about the heroics of enlightenment. Or the fearless power of realization. What about letting out the continuous path? Does it help anyone? In other words, let's forget about trying to create the probability of enlightenment. And, or realizing fearlessness. Can you just let out a continuous path, and here we can say something like the tissue of immediacy, the presence of immediacy. Does that help anyone?

[09:07]

Okay. So what I'm trying to speak about is what is this continuous path of relationality? The experienceable relationality of immediacy. So the first I'm emphasizing is your own experience, because you've created it yourself, as Feynman says. You've created it yourself so you can feel duration. You can feel the experience of duration because you've made it. Now, here and now is not over there in this way of looking at it.

[10:11]

Here and now are this immediate environment. So it's not just duration. You're also experiencing your environment as a medium. So here and now become a medium. Yeah. Okay. And now, again, there's no words for what I'm talking about, but I'm trying to find ways to speak about it. And the best word I can come up with, which probably none of you know, is reticulation. I mean, I've been speaking this language for quite a long time, and I only found out this word a little recently.

[11:38]

Unless you're a ceramicist, you probably wouldn't know the word. Ceramicist who makes ceramics? Yes. Anyway, reticulation means like when a river goes down and spreads out into many little streams to make a delta, like that's reticulation. Then it's become a word for ceramicist, meaning a kind of articulation of the ceramics. So I'm using the word to suggest me that when you begin to feel secure and intimate with the whole of relationality,

[12:51]

Und ich benutze dieses Wort, um damit zu sagen, dass wenn du dich sicher und innig vertraut mit der Gänze des Beziehungsfeldes fühlst. Secure first, because it means you just feel you're in your place. All the time you feel you're located and there's not much danger, you're located. If you like, located in your own aliveness and not in any outer perception. So you know what fear is and anxiety, but at the same time you feel profoundly secure. Okay. And then intimate with. Now, intimate, what this is trying to say here, is you're intimate and with immediacy in the way that immediacy opens up to you, opens the world up to you.

[14:27]

In general, we feel something like time is flowing past us. We're trying to keep up with it or something like that. im Allgemeinen haben wir vielleicht so ein Gefühl, dass die Zeit an uns vorbeizieht und dass wir versuchen, ihr hinterherzueilen oder sowas. But what I mean by this reticulation or this intimacy with immediacy, instead of the world flowing by you, it begins to flow sideways into you. So that your usual time is stopped or slowed down or is kind of moving around you. So dass deine gewöhnliche Zeit angehalten ist oder verlangsamt ist oder so wie um dich herum fließt.

[15:40]

And it's bringing things from the tangential or synchronicity of the moment into your situation. Und dass es Dinge aus den angrenzenden Berührungspunkten, aus dem Moment heraus bringt. Excuse me. It's tangential. Yeah. Right? And synchronicity, that's all. But it's flowing into you. Yeah, it's coming. Yeah, it's simultaneously with you, and it begins to be part of you. So the simultaneity of the environment begins to be your own environment. I'm doing the best I can. And so, for example, this feeling that what's the duration of the present that I mentioned earlier I had.

[16:51]

That stays present in the environment around me and it's always present, simultaneous with me. So because someone said some kind of fake but true statistics Supposedly a woman, a physicist or a mathematician, maybe a mathematician said, it's just made up, said at any one moment in the human body, More is going on in any one moment than all the communication of all people from the beginning of human history. Now, no one could actually measure that.

[18:24]

But I'm sure it's true. I mean, there's just more happening in this body by a... Way more than every word that's ever been spoken. And there's so much going on that's outside of our usual knowing. And as you know, because I've pointed it out often, this word that Dogen says is the single most important word in Zen Buddhism. And this word that Dogen says is the most important word in Zen Buddhism.

[19:34]

The word Hishiryo, which is translated almost always, I think, as non-thinking. But that doesn't mean anything, non-thinking. We have to have a translation that you can practice. And the praxis translation is to notice without thinking about. Or we could say knowing without noting. Or we could say That doesn't make any sense. Noting is to make a notation. Knowing without noting. You know something, but you haven't made a notation. And we have the experience that we don't know something unless we make it conscious somehow.

[20:35]

But that blocks all kinds of other knowing that's going on that doesn't become conscious, that can't become conscious. So non-thinking really is a bad translation. What it really means is you notice things, but you don't think about the things you notice. So much of Zen practice and Dharmic practice and Samadhi practice is to let knowing happen without needing to think about it. Das Erkennen, geschehen zu lassen, ohne das Bedürfnis zu haben, darüber nachzudenken.

[22:02]

And much is going on in sort of clusters of interconnectedness that can't be worded, it's not wordable. Und unglaublich viel geschieht in... And that knowing is part of us. This is what the teaching of the Ilana Vijnana is trying to make clear. But you have access to all this experience which you've accumulated but doesn't come into consciousness by locating yourself within the tissue of immediacy.

[23:02]

I think of some basketball player, I can't remember his name, famous basketball player, who had this unusual way of leaping up and putting the ball in the hoop. And somebody said to him, how do you do this? How do you know what you're going to do? Do you know how you do this? He said, hell no. If I knew how I did it, my competitors would know how I did it. So every time he did it, it was like, oh, okay. So how to function in this not knowing outside the predictable way we usually function? This is also waking up the reticulation of immediacy.

[24:31]

And, you know, there's a Any of you know what a tesseract is? It's a great word. What? I just translated. That's all I did. And what did you translate it as? Four-dimensional hypercube. Oh, this is good. Okay, I have to say no more. As a cube is to a square, a tesseract is to a cube.

[25:43]

And you can make a model of it, and you can find one on the computer if you want. Because it's a complex shape which keeps turning inside itself. The outside becomes the inside, and the inside becomes the outside. Well, when you start practicing immediacy in the way I'm talking about, I said there's vividness one, vividness two, vividness three. And then there's exponential vividness. And I don't have any word. There's multidimensional vividness. And as I said earlier, partly because it's easy to say, you feel yourself, there's no explanation, but you feel yourself part of the dimensionality of everything you look at and are near and around.

[27:14]

So maybe instead of immediacy, we have circummediacy. And vielleicht statt unmittelbarkeit, that works in German. Oh, goody. I'm so proud of you trying to deal with all these things. I can barely deal with them in English, and you have to deal with them in German. Du musst jetzt nur genau hinhören. Statt unmittelbarkeit, ich würde sagen, ummittelbarkeit. Yeah. Yeah. Good. All right. So because the world exists, something like that, in this complex dimensionality, which we are part of, but consciousness just doesn't. That's not consciousness's job. You can practice this in simple ways. And you can practice it in simple ways.

[28:31]

And I always think trees are one of the best ways of practicing. And I've been saying for many years, and those of you who haven't seen for years and have shown up for the first time in decades, you'll remember. I used to say trees are treeing. And even those of you who haven't seen trees for decades, you'll remember that I said trees are trees. Maybe I should do a posthumous seminar. And wow, maybe really a lot of people will show up. And I get to see you all again. So first of all, you've got to get rid of the word tree. And the tree is treeing. It's doing its thing. And the insects in the bark are part of it.

[29:34]

And the leaves moving on the branches are part of it. Yeah. I immediately thought of the word the word for word In Japanese, I'm going in another direction for a moment. The word for word, kotoba, in Japanese, means the sharp tip of a leaf. In other words, words are something, again, that you pull out of the field of potentialities or probabilities.

[30:37]

And you pull, what you're really pulling out is only the sharp points of the leaves because the whole rest of the leaves in the tree is still in the field of potentialities. So East Asian yogic culture would not say in the beginning of the word. They'd say in the beginning there was an infinite potentiality and we can pull little parts of it out and give it some kind of articulation. but it's only the sharp points of the leaves you notice. You don't notice the rest of the tree. So here's the leaf moving on the branch, the sharp point of it as well as the stem.

[31:42]

But until autumn, it usually hangs on to the, the leaf and the branch hang on to each other. And the movement of the branch is the stillness of the So in the movement of the leaf, you can feel, because the way it moves, you can feel the stillness of the leaf and the trunk in its movement. And of course the roots too, there's a kind of stillness, but the roots are actually very sociable and they're talking to all the other roots of the other trees and plants and things.

[33:04]

We have a botanist here. The roots are really talking to everybody. They've got all kinds of communicative devices. Right? I know from where... No, I don't. He knows. I just talk about it. You've measured it. Oh, good. With other roots and with the soil and the fungi, yeah. So somehow, when you start locating yourself in a mediasis, secure and intimate with the entire reticulation of a mediasis, You start feeling, I don't know why, I notice it and I say, what the hell is happening here?

[34:23]

You start feeling the tree as if you were also the tree. But of course, trees and lettuce and food and air, it's just one big environmental event and you're just one part of it. And while consciousness is showing us one reality, this other reality is actually part of us. So that's the third aspect of immediacy I wanted to bring out, this reticulation. We could say, in order to give you some way to kind of metaphorically imagine it, you're now in the midst of time sideways, and time is talking to you sideways, from the side.

[35:31]

And then there's an English word called syntony, S-Y-N-T-O-N-Y. Yeah, and syntony means to be in resonant harmony with the environment. And you do feel simply in some way located. Yeah, so we have this overall successional time. And things happen in succession.

[36:55]

And then we can look more closely and we can see things happen sequentially. One thing is related to the other. And we can feel what it's like when we just notice the sequentiality of time. Okay, excuse me. And then when you look more closely at the sequentiality of time as an experience, you can see that there's also a cumulative time. And then you notice how self-referential time is for you.

[38:00]

And then you notice how self-referential time is for you. More karmically loaded than you need. And then you look at it again and you can see that there's a paratactic time. You can just look at the sequence and forget about the connectives. You can free yourself from the accumulations. And things just happen, one thing after another or beside another. And early Buddhism emphasized causality.

[39:10]

But later Buddhism, Mahayana Buddhism, and particularly the Tendai school, which Suker Dogen Zenji studied, It says at any one moment there's 3,000 causes. That's just a way to say you can't really single out what the causal connection is. There are so many causes at each moment. Just immerse yourself in the 3,000 causes. So the 3,000 causes each moment is a way to say the non-causality of paratactic time. The non-causality of paratactic time.

[40:30]

Now, what I'm trying to say here is, When you practice meditation regularly and it begins to actually physiologically change you, neurologically change you, it's not just like a big sudden nice experience. Those aren't too bad. It's actually changing your wiring. And especially for us Westerners, because we're already wired into the Western worldview, and you're shifting into another kind of wiring.

[41:37]

So there's enlightenment experiences or insights which are transformative and then there's incremental realization. Okay. So again, I'm saying all we have is our experience. But our attentional practice can start transforming experience. And it doesn't just transform practice in the kind of mental realm, mentation.

[42:47]

It begins to neurologically, biologically reconfigure you. So you're actually in the world in a... Nobody notices it much, but Maybe sometimes other people notice it more than you do. You just find, for instance, you can let your body make all kinds of decisions because it's much quicker than your mind. So you can begin to let the environment circum-immediately talk through you. So that Okay, so we have successional time, and I've separated it into noticeable sequential time.

[44:04]

Noticeable accumulative time. And you can take responsibility for it and begin to make shifts so you're not accumulating in the usual way or the way you were. And then you can shift out of accumulator time into paratactic time. And it might make you want to write a poem. I should suddenly feel conjunctions in a way you hadn't felt them before. Weil du auf einmal Verbindungen und Konjunktionen siehst auf Arten und Weisen, wie du sie zuvor nicht gesehen hast.

[45:13]

Or you feel the world is at war, even if you don't write one. Oder du hast vielleicht das Gefühl, die Welt eines Gedichts zu spüren, selbst wenn du es nicht aufschreibst. And then you notice this durative circummediacy, circummediate time. Which opens you to time as a sideways event. Yeah, things aren't things, they're events. Everything's an event. And the events begin to operate on you. And you feel located in immediacy, which is constantly talking with you. That's the best way I can say it.

[46:19]

And I'm five minutes late. Ivan Illich used to say, he had a poem he liked where he says, I have... clocks which have lost their hands. Well, I'm sorry for all of that, but, you know, it's hard for me to say these things without letting them happen. Because it's taken me a long time just to notice these for myself and to try to find a way to notice them with you.

[47:22]

You make it possible, thank you. and your patience and presence help make it possible.

[47:39]

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