Thank you for being here and joining this practice period. And thank you for joining us. I gave, at the beginning of the practice period, in the opening ceremony, I suggested we think of the four construction sites, think of the world as four construction sites. Think of our presence in the world as construction sites and sites in which we are constructing our own world and our own experience. Now, I think that's actually pretty accurate about what we're doing, but I said it in a kind of funny way. Maybe construction sites sounds kind of funny, but my intention is to say it funny so that we notice it funny.

[01:06]

Well, more actionality or relationality. Not reality, relationality or actionality. And last teisho I gave you two categories I suggested you notice. of wholeness and whatness. And again, I think they're real categories and they're experientially accessible. So my point was to create categories which we don't usually notice things in, and then but categories which we can notice and feel. If you're a meditator, you can feel the shift from a wholeness category to a whiteness category.

[02:07]

And so I've been trying to... I mean, I would say the last nearly ten years, my daily... My daily occupation is how to approach immediacy. How to... I mean, immediacy, of course, there's no duration, measurable temporal duration to the present moment. But we experience the present moment as a duration, and you can see it in the road map the dharma map of the four dharmas. There's an appearance or a birth, a simultaneous birth. There's duration. And then there's dissolution.

[03:16]

And then you're releasing it. So you release it. In a way, you're a partner in all four, but you're almost the only partner in the fourth, releasing it. Because whether you release it or not, dissolution will happen. And there is some experiential duration. What is that duration? That duration is what we call the present. And what happens in that present? And is it just a sheer appearance that we're thrown into the world or it's given to us? The word present, there's quite a few words present, which have different etymologies, but the word present, meaning the present moment, present time, means something that's put before us. But put before us, is it just put before us or how did it get there? Now, when I say things like that, I realize I'm really talking, speaking a kind of philosophy, and I always feel people are scared of philosophy.

[04:23]

I suppose I have been in the past. I'm not so scared of it now. But our world is, our experiential world is located in words. We aim our attention with words. Even if you say it's not located in words, not located in words, or words saying it's not located, you know. Be quiet, okay, but to be quiet is, words put us in the context of being quiet. So how do we deal with, I think we need the pick and ax. of philosophy for the archaeology of the present. If we're going to dig into the present, past the categories, past the words or through and around the words, we have to sort them out. So, immediacy.

[05:29]

Immediacy means no medium. Well, The present is a medium, so it's a mediacy, if not an im-mediacy. So even our words are confusing us. So the present is a mediacy. How do we enter into that mediacy? And the etymology again of a mediacy is no medium, but it's meant usually, I mean, What etymology suggests is you know something just face-to-face, no separation. But there is a separation. You are here, you experience, and how can you have no media? There is a mediasy. And what is that mediasy that we call the present? This is, again, a kind of philosophy, but it's unavoidable in a world not rooted in belief.

[06:29]

If it's rooted in belief, you just believe and And you go along with the cultural assumptions, the religious assumptions. But when there's no creator and it's just, it's stuff, we're in the midst of it. You know, and we're in the midst of it in words. Mentation is inseparable from experience. So how do we, you know, it's a kind of, I said, archaeology. We need philosophy to dig at it. And this morning during Zaza and I said, we are in a version of the past, a version of the past becoming the future. Often we are. I mean, and I think again, if we're going to explore it now, Buddhism isn't just Zen, isn't just philosophy.

[07:36]

It's maybe there's a certain amount of philosophical thinking that gets us to say, for much of the time, we're in a version of the past. becoming the future. And this wholeness is at the center of this version of the past becoming the future. And what's interesting, now that you know these distinctions of wholeness and what-ness as experiential distinctions, now we don't simply have the philosophy of the presence of the past, a version only, it's only a version of the past, that we are the turning point for it becoming the future.

[08:37]

Because now that you know and you maybe have some actual experience of the distinction between wholeness and whatness, you can feel, hey, this is, you know, you could even think of it as an airport. The past is landing at the wholeness airport. And then it's going to take off for the future, an imagined future, hoped for future. But the control tower is the, at the Hoonis Airport. And if you take the Hoonis away, now that you can experientially sense it maybe, then there's the what-ness and there's no place to land. Or it's all landed and all taken off, or something like that. I mean, I'm just making categories with my words. Now, in this approach to immediacy and to the present, we live in the present moment, but is the present moment just the past landing and the future taking off?

[09:51]

Yeah, so what struck me years and years ago, and I've spent a lot of time using it as an example, is, for those of you who've heard me speak about this often, Don't be patient. Just be patient. Bird song. And gardens are meant, Zen gardens, Japanese gardens, are meant to be places for sound as well as plants. And birds are considered an important part of the sound of a garden. And the birds singing in the morning... And in monastic life, you know, we get up ideally before the birds and before the sun. So we don't get up because the rooster crowed. We don't get up because the sun... We get up because we crowed, or we're the rooster, or we're the bird song. So ideally, you get used to getting up before dawn, and then dawn happens...

[10:59]

We get up because we get up. The sun gets up because it gets up. The birds sing because they sing. We do, you know. It's not all causal. There's a causality and an independence. We're not just caused by the sun getting in the morning. We're caused by this cause, which is also our own sunness, maybe. Maybe. Yeah. Okay, so you hear a bird. And at some point, particularly if you're meditating, and you're not just hearing the bird and giving cognitive, conscious acknowledgement of, oh, that's a bird, a plane, Superman, And we hear the planes too. And can you take the, as I often say, can you take the name plane off the plane you hear?

[12:06]

We don't hear them much anymore. We're on the route between here and Los Angeles, New York and Los Angeles. And there haven't been many planes during the pandemic. But you hear them. Is it a plane? No, just peel the name off. You just hear the sound. A kind of music of the spheres. And this kind of experience is typical of Zen practice because something happens when you start doing Zazen and you find yourself in an awareness which is not cognitively trapped or articulated or explained away by the brain. well, the brain's functioning, but still, you're just noticing that, you're noticing, noticing.

[13:10]

You're aware of awareness. And as soon as you're aware of awareness, your awareness that's aware of awareness is not entirely brain-formed, consciousness-formed. So you begin to notice something outside the categories that consciousness wants to place the world, does place the world. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So at some point you hear the birds. And my experience was sometimes it was blissful. It makes me think of Sukhiyoshi saying, when is a tree a tree, and when is a tree a poem? And I think that's a useful question to put to yourself, because what kind of present are you in?

[14:14]

Are you really more in the durative present when the poetry is released of the world? So at some point I noticed that I felt this unusual bliss. You know, I'm feeling, oh, it feels kind of nice, you know. Actually, it feels more than kind of nice, you know. Because my brain would say, oh, yeah, what's that? It's just something happening. But no, no, after a while it was a transformative feeling of release, of this somehow makes your liveness be way more than worthwhile. Worth while. So, and then I noticed that when I felt this bliss, it was because when I actually, my brain told me, hey, you're not hearing

[15:24]

a bird, you're hearing your own hearing of the bird. Because I can only hear what my own hearing allows me to hear. And I think Kant said something like that, Immanuel Kant. I think he said, the senses are not showing you the world. The senses are showing you the world which the senses can show you. So I gave you the first, I suggested the first construction site was how your five physical senses, with a little help from the mind, are showing you the world. So Kant says, you know, your senses are not showing you the world, they're showing you what the senses can show you of the world. Now this is not in a world of... belief in creation, this isn't a world you're in the midst of. And if there's any creation, you're involved in this creation process.

[16:34]

We, you, me, all of us together. Together and separately and separately and together and so forth. So after a while, you know, you get used to it, you hear the birds and you sometimes feel this bliss and you notice that actually somehow released by the experience of knowing you're only hearing part of what's going on because birds have, I always point out, have much more complex ways to hear and ways to sing than we do. So they're hearing something. They're hearing Bach and you're hearing, you know, I don't know what, the Beatles. Well, the Beatles are okay, you know. So what is going on here?

[17:38]

So you notice, in such a simple experience, you notice you're hearing what you can hear of hearing, and you notice when you can notice what you're hearing of hearing, and you don't confuse it with hearing the bird, you're hearing the offering of the bird to you. There can be a kind of, not just kind of, a real sense of bliss, of a of an occasion of being in the world in a really new and full sense. So that's one thing you notice. First you're only hearing what you're own hearing, and then you notice that there's a kind of bliss that accompanies that, and then you notice there's a mystery out there. The world is only, as Kant said, I think, if your senses are only showing you the world your senses are showing you, can show you, then there's a whole lot of stuff going on that is outside the senses.

[18:50]

So first you, again, recognize that your senses are only showing you the world. Second, you recognize there's certain feelings accompanying that that you didn't have before or are kind of unusual. And third, then you recognize, hey, I'm in the midst of a mystery all the time, a mystery that surrounds and penetrates the world of the five senses. So that's a very different world than a creator world. You're in this world of of a mystery which you're part of. And then you notice that the world is in categories. that the way we function is to notice categories, and that's in philosophy and language and views. And as I say, Buddhism is not a vocabulary, it's a view-cabulary.

[19:56]

All the koans are... a collection of views which you can place in your sensorial apparatus, placed before sensing, and that view before sensing transforms sensing or changes sensing or makes it predictable or whatever. So now we're trying to look at this construction site of the senses and we found ourselves in the midst of the construction site. Now I don't know if it's Kant, but someone else says we can imagine taking the objects out of space and time. Take this. Take the microphone. Take all of you six folks.

[20:58]

Take the floor. We can imagine taking all the objects out. But we can't imagine taking space and time out. I mean, we can't think without spatio-temporal categories. There's no way to imagine taking it. Well, but Buddhism says, original mind, emptiness, maybe all categories can be removed. How do you start playing? How do you find yourself in a trance dance of category-free trance dance, playing with categories? dancing, trancing with categories. Yeah, so I've said, you know, and being, Buddhism being and Zen being particularly experiential doesn't try to understand the world just cognitively and in no way thinks the limits of cognition are the limits of the world.

[22:15]

No, no. So we use, we play around and say, okay, when you take the setsu out, the spoon out, you're lifting up the space too, as I said last time. So you're not only lifting up this teaching staff made from manzanita at Tasahara. Joe Cohen made it for me. I love it. It's quite nice, wonderful to feel. And so we can imagine, as I said, the space of this stick. And Joe had to imagine a space to carve it. And so the imagination of Joe is somehow present. It became the stick, but it's maybe also present, like the imagination of your spine is present, which is different from the 33 or 24 vertebrae.

[23:23]

And as I said, the imagination is what activates spine as part of knowing our existence. So it's actually, you know, It's what makes the spine not just a skeleton. Something happens. I mean, we'll all be skeletons at some point. At least for a little while. But there won't be any spying mind to the spine then. The vertebrae. Okay, so we can say, all right, cognition says you can't take... I can take the objects out of space and time, but I can't take space and time away from space and time. But maybe if you're in a Buddhist practice where beyond cognition is experience, then you can begin to experiment with feeling space

[24:42]

feeling the space of this Joe Cullen stick, copied after Tsukiyoshi's stick. So maybe it won't seem so strange to you that, yeah, can space and time be removed? Well, I'm picking up space and time all the time, all the time picking up space and time. There, yeah. Yeah. Things are space and time. As they say, the Big Bang didn't happen in space. It created space. That's the concept. A very Buddhist concept. Who knows? It's harder to believe in God sometimes. So we can also take a phrase like Only here.

[25:44]

Every time you see something, you say, only here. You're using two words to take away time. Only here. There's no next. There's only here. And there's some kind of experience that goes with only here. That goes with taking categories away. Now, how are we doing? How am I doing? Well, good enough. So there's one of my favorite koans, and I've been wondering if I can do something about koans on streaming. Merit streaming. Let's call it merit streaming, because as I said, streaming is a form of sharing merit. So merit streaming. sharing the Dharma or something.

[26:46]

So I don't know if I can approach koans through merit-streaming, but I'm considering it. Because people have asked and I'm considering it. But anyway, one of my favorite koans is koan 20 of the Shoyuroku, where Dijang, famous Fayan, amazing, amazing Zen master, Dijang, Fayan's going to leave and go on a pilgrimage. You all know the story. We know the story. And so Dijang says to him, where are you going? And Fayan says, I don't know. And so Dijang says, Not knowing is nearest. And that's one of the powerful Waddell phrases, not knowing is nearest.

[27:53]

And you apply it to everything. Not knowing is nearest. I know this. I remember Joe Cohen made it. But not knowing is nearest. But then you should put it in a practical category. What if you said to your brother or your parents or something, I'm going... Outside, where are you going? Yeah, I don't know, California, Nevada, I don't know, Texas, you know, Guatemala. And your mother said to you, well, not knowing is nearest. Or your brother said, hmm, I don't think they would say that to me. Or I'm quitting my job and I'm going to, are you going to look for another job? I don't know. Not knowing is nearest. You have to put it in very ordinary categories and think, this is really kind of a weird remark. Are you looking for a job? Maybe, I don't know.

[28:55]

Not knowing is nearest. Okay. So, in this koan, not knowing is nearest, it has a wonderful section on the five senses. And I thought I actually printed it out because it's kinda fun to read something sometime and I can bring a different kind of energy to the reading than I bring to letting it appear and finding a way to speak about it. So let me just I guess probably end our seminar with this So it starts out and it says one face, one big face. Big as a slat or big as a slate, like the slate of the floor here.

[29:56]

No definition. A slate you can, like a blackboard, what's it called? Anyway. What? No, no. What? What? A tabula rasa, yes. Tabula rasa. Rasa always sounds like red to me, and then it's not. It means to erase, but an erased tabula. Thank you, Brian. One big face, tabula rasa, big as a slat. And then it says, eye, ear, eye, ear, nose, tongue, Distinguished territories. Okay, that's true. So I have asked you, think about the construction site of the five senses, five physical senses.

[31:01]

And here this koan is dealing with that. It says they distinguish territories. So not only are there things outside the sound we can hear, But between the five senses, hey, there's a whole lot going on in between the five senses which we can't get at. But can we somehow, again, we don't feel limited by the cognitive limitations because we know there's experiential limit, experiential potentialities, tentacles that reach into What's beyond the senses? And that's in one poem, poem 48, I think. There's a snake which appears, as I've said before, with a jewel in its mouth. Well, this is like things are happening out of sight, and they're happening in ways that may give you a jewel.

[32:09]

So they're just territories. They distinguish territories, and the implication there is, ah, the territories are much bigger than these five. So now, for a Zen practitioner, you have to really let that into yourself. You're in the territory of the five senses, and whatever we're in the midst of, it's way bigger than the five territories or the five senses. And then this little poem or statement in the koan says, inside the skull, no knowledge at all. Inside the skull, no knowledge at all. Where the categories are sitting around waiting. I leave you to the outside. How can you hook up some wonders?

[33:15]

Like belief in this or that. Belief in the nation state. Well, okay. If you realize it's a belief and has to be actualized. So I leave you to the outside. Poor fellow. You don't have this in you. innerness evolved yet. So I leave you to the outside where you can hoke up some wonders. Hoke up is from hokum. Something fake. Hokum. I leave you to the outside. How can you hoke up wonders? Let you hoke up some wonders. Then imagines a dialogue. Mouth, mouth, ask the nose. Eating is up to me.

[34:19]

Speaking is up to me. What good are you that you're above me? Why are you so important that you're above me? Because I'm speaking, I'm eating, this is necessary. Who puts you in the central position? Ah, the nose says yes. Among the five mountains, the central one occupies the honored position. I remember when I first heard this, I thought, this is pretty corny, but it really is asking, what are these categories? The five senses are dividing the world into five categories. What are these categories? Well, they're as weird as the nose says. Why? Are you, you know, etc. And then the nose asks the eyes, but why are you above me? I'm in the honored position. Why are you above me? And the eyes say, we are like the sun and the moon.

[35:26]

Truly, we have the accomplishments of illumination and reflection. So we dare to ask the The eyebrows, what the hell are you doing above us, eyebrows? It doesn't say hell. What virtue do you have to be above us? And the eyebrows say, well, we really have no merit. We're ashamed to be in this highest position. But if you let us be below you, What kind of face holes would you be with the eyebrows below you? So this is, you know, taking what are, here's these five categories. And see, let's switch them around.

[36:27]

It sounds crazy. We'd not use this. The eyes here and the eyebrows up here and We could make Halloween masks, we could all have a Halloween party and all do masks based on this koan. I'm not sure it's a good idea, but if any of you remember this next October. But what's going on here? The meta message is, beware of categories. Something happens when you use categories and something happens when you take categories away. And you can't think your way to being free of categories because thinking is categories, but you can experience your way to discovering, ah, the bird song is bliss. if I can take away the five categories, if I can take away space and time, that's what emptiness is about, if I can take away space and time, if I can take away the five categories, something happens.

[37:38]

Find out. Thank you very much.

[37:44]

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