So we joined here to do sashin. Yeah. I think you have to speak a little more loudly. Yeah. Did you hear him when he spoke? Maybe your voice is like my mother's. My mother could whisper in the movie theater. In the far end of the movie theater, they'd say... Quiet down there. It wouldn't be like that for me. It wouldn't be like that for you. Okay. No, really. She'd say, Dickie. Dickie. So anyway, we're here in the middle, oh no, the beginning, isn't it? The beginning of this session. And what have we got ourselves into? I mean, what are, you know, I always like to, for me, it's always helpful to Start at the beginning.

[01:11]

And the beginning means for me usually an inventory. Yeah, what's here? Well, we've got a building and beautiful weather. I'm already missing the rain because I have to go to Colorado in a week or so and it never rains by comparison to here. And I'm just hoping it rains and rains before I leave so I can store up the experience. Yeah, so we've got the weather, the garden, the cushion, food. Yeah, work, the body, the schedule. Yeah, we've got air.

[02:15]

Air, the mind, various feelings. And the schedule will more or less push us through the week, you know, if you let it. Yeah, and the cushion and the... push of the schedule and somebody serving you food or you serving food. We'll probably all end up at the other end of the week. And even just doing that, sashins are usually quite powerful. But it will be more satisfying if you can find your stability at each moment.

[03:34]

In the midst of the schedule, the building, the walls. Yeah. There's some kind of living activity that you represent, or you are in the middle of this. And Sashin gives you one of the great opportunities to observe this living activity. To observe, to be in the midst of. To accept. To authenticate. To cultivate.

[04:47]

I took these two words from Dogen, cultivate and authenticate. There is an exact word, I think, in German. Authenticate literally means to author the world. Like you're the author. To validate, to make true the world. Yeah, I think in Japanese it's one word, but in Japanese it really means in English these two words. The oneness of practice and enlightenment is actually the oneness of cultivation and authentication.

[06:14]

And maybe there's more access to, at least in English, access to practice and enlightenment if we think of it as cultivation and authentication. So the phrase of Dogen's is to convey the self To authenticate and cultivate all things by conveying the self to them. is delusion.

[07:33]

And for all things to come forward And cultivate and authenticate the self is enlightenment. Okay, so what I'd like to try to get at is what Dogen means by all things coming forward. What kind of worldview, what kind of experience is this? Well, the Sashin is, you know, there couldn't be a better... opportunity to try this out.

[08:38]

Or to see if he can find it out, find out what he must have meant. Now this teaching, these two phrases of Dogen, it's not a turning word, a wisdom phrase. It's really a prescription. Or a map to the moment. A map not to somewhere over there, but a map to... How one can be here. Yeah, there are somewhere Berliners. I don't know if I spoke about this catchphrase, be here now. Sounds good. But how many kinds of here are there here or possible?

[09:44]

And how many kinds of now are there? Yeah. And, of course, be. What is to be? Be, live, here. Now, I'm not trying to give a language lesson here. The problem is with words. The mind just skims over, skims through them. Slides through them, skims. Why not? Yeah. And and apprehends the world mentally then.

[11:05]

Yeah, and the way we usually, you know, the world is part of a sentence. To practice, you have to get back into each word as a physical act. And to practice, you have to go back into every word or enter it as a physical action. What is actually the physical act of being here? What's the physical act of now? Now isn't just mental. It's got to be a physical act if you're going to practice. Wenn man das praktizieren will, dann kann das jetzt nicht nur ein geistiges Ding sein, sondern es muss was physikalisches sein.

[12:17]

How do you perform now? Wie handelt man als jetzt? I've been using the word perform recently because I rather like it. It means in English to perform. Furnish, form, was what it needs. So there's the form, the floor, the walls, the air, etc., And the lived body, what does all this need? Does it need anything? Or we could say, instead of perform the now, how do you actualize the now?

[13:23]

I mean, it gives you a chance to fool around like this. You don't have to live at your job, mostly, or whatever you do. You usually have to live in a mental world. What you want to do in Sashina is use the opportunity to live in this, let's say, a physicalized world as you can. Feel each foot on the floor. including all the emotions that go with the posture.

[14:26]

And just let that those ingredients bathe you. Now the idea of bathing a phrase is really assumed as the activity of thinking that is wisdom. And as I said the other day, Confucius says, is in English a joke, Confucius says, all men are smart or something.

[15:40]

Confucius says, be good. I don't know what, you know. But it's so simple because Westerners, when they looked at his so-called wisdom, didn't realize that he meant take this phrase, And live through it, like you were taking a pill or something. And see what happens through living through that phrase. And in some ways you can bathe better in some phrases than others. And often a simpler phrase is the one that bathes you better. So there was no attempt really in much of, and in Zen thinking for sure, to convey the, to contain the understanding in the words.

[16:44]

The understanding is not in the words. The understanding is the words are just to get you a little bit wet. And then it's up to you to expand in a way this bathing, this wetness. To find out how to act within a phrase, within a teaching. Through a teaching. Now, Dogen surely understood what it meant to convey the self to things. He knew what it meant to cultivate and authenticate things by conveying the self to them.

[18:17]

He could not have made up this phrase used this phrase unless he knew what it meant to do that. So for sure he knew what the experience was to authenticate the world by conveying the self to it. Yeah, so we should start where Dogen started. And really notice what it's like, take an inventory of how and when we cultivate, we convey the self to the world. And really do this inventory and really see how it is when we bring it to the world ourselves.

[19:31]

Yeah, you just have to start again, taking an inventory. When you notice something, think about something, look at something, do you think, I like this or I don't like it? That's conveying the self to the things. Do you think, I'm doing this chopping of turnips or whatever? If you do, you're conveying the self to the carrots or the turnip. Okay.

[20:34]

If you wonder what, when you're doing something, if you're doing it well because of how you'll be seen by others or etc., that's conveying the self, do you think? So you've got to kind of like imagine you're a sociologist with a little button, a thing in your pocket, and every time you notice you think of something in terms of the self, you push the button. And see at the end of the day how many times you push the button. Or some kind of sense of really what quantity of my thinking and feeling is involved in conveying the self to things. So that's probably the first thing that Dogen noticed.

[21:48]

How often he in fact was conveying the self to things. And he probably also noticed next that by conveying the self to things he authenticated things. He, in a way, authored each thing he saw. And he also noticed that, I'm sure, that this act of noticing through the self actually cultivated the self. And cultivate means plow. kill the soil.

[23:16]

It means to loosen the soil around a plant so it can grow. Dogen noticed, I'm sure, that when he did that, he loosened or perhaps tightened up the soil in which he was living. And he certainly also noticed that when he did that, that he loosened the ground, possibly also thickened it, in which he lived. And thus strengthened the plants of the self. Yeah, but then his next experience must have been how fragile the self is. If you keep interpreting the world Authenticating the world through the self.

[24:24]

The world's actually a big, strong place. Been here a long time. It'll be here after we go, but we're making a mess of it. It'll be here after we go, but we're making a mess of it. But when this big strong world is defined through, cultivated through, authenticated through the self, this big strong world becomes as weak as the self. Our world, the world can fall apart if our self is challenged. And all our personal history and karma comes piling down on each moment on the self.

[25:27]

The self is the back door of the karma. Open the back door of the self and all your karma keeps piling in. So Togan said, yeah, we have to have some kind of self. What kind of self? And what the genius of his remark is, he saw that the weakness of the self, the fragility of the self The vulnerability of the self to all kinds of personal crises is not because it's the door of the karma, but because

[26:30]

It has been the means to authenticate the world. So the problem of karma and all that is one problem that Dogen dealt with in other ways. But the first step The most actualizing step is not to convey the self to the world and thus cultivate and authenticate the world through the self. But much wiser in this inner map Is to let things come forward. And authenticate and cultivate the self.

[27:44]

So he said all things come forward. The first he called delusion, but this, when all things come forward and cultivate and authenticate the self, This is enlightenment. Now, is the self that's cultivated through all things coming forward, The same self which cultivates all things through your karma and habits and things. Of course not. It's a different self.

[29:14]

So the kind of now you actualize cultivates a different kind of self. Okay, now, what is this all things coming forward. So first again I suggest that you start where Dogen started. Really noticing how much of the time, in fact maybe all the time, we authenticate the world through the self. Maybe you should exaggerate it.

[30:31]

Exaggeration helps in practice. Try on... conveying the self to everything, really emphasizing, noticing things in terms of your likes and dislikes and who you are and all that stuff. And see how it makes you feel. Is this a wide world which includes others or is it a pretty narrow world that sees the world only through yourself? People feel about you and how you feel about people, etc. And see if this isn't... tighter, narrower, more fragile world.

[31:33]

Doesn't mean you won't and can't easily go back to cultivating the world through the self. All your habits and your context of your ordinary life will easily support you in doing this if this has been your habit. Your habit, what you inhabit. But in Sashin we're trying, we should try on changing our habit, changing how we inhabit. This lived body, this living, this lived activity. So you try on, in contrast after a while, maybe the sixth day of Sashin, or maybe the

[32:38]

Maybe sooner. How do you try on letting all things come forward? Huh? I think probably the best thing to do is imagine the air is a liquid. You know, there's solids, liquids and gases. And gas expands and contracts and disperses. And the liquid flows and doesn't disperse. And the word gas actually comes from the Greek word chaos. Meaning emptiness was coined by a Flemish chemist in the 1700s.

[34:09]

But he took it to mean really nothing. And we don't, in general, unless it's Windy or breezy, air is just something we don't see. It's misty or foggy, we see the air full of water. But after a good rain and the mist and fog, you know, usually gone and air is very clear. We don't see the air in effect. So we think there's nothing there.

[35:19]

If we think there's nothing there, if that's our habit of thinking, it's hard to imagine how all things will come forward. Yeah, I mean, if you're standing in the garden, a bird or a bee or a fly can come forward to you. But the trees don't come forward to you. You have to go to them. But if you imagine yourself underwater in a dream or in fact... There's more of an experience not only of a fish or seaweed coming forward, but of the liquid itself coming forward with the seaweed or the fish. Now I'm trying to find an image that allows us to bathe in this phrase.

[36:25]

So I made up this idea of feeling everything as liquid. Which is actually an experience, sometimes a realization experience in meditation, when suddenly you feel some kind of medium connecting everything. So, dogging somewhere there, where when All things come forward. That's where Dogen's at, right? In that kind of experience. So, when do all things come forward? What kind of world view or world experience do we need to feel in the midst of all things coming forward.

[37:56]

Or a real tactile feeling of being in the midst of all things being connected and could come forward. This isn't something you can think. you really have to have the feel of it and without the feel of that you can't understand what Dogen is talking about it's fairly easy if you want to make the effort to see how often you authenticate the world by conveying the self to it You just need some mindfulness practice to notice that. You don't need much yogic experience. But to feel in the midst of all things Coming forward is yogic.

[39:18]

It arises through yogic experience. And to feel our particularity in that. To feel our stability in that. To... allow that to happen. You can't make it happen, maybe, but you can at least be ready for it to happen, allow it to happen. So we're back to the phrase I often give you, to pause for the particular. And? To pause for all things to come forward. And the word pause in its Greek original just means to stop. And in practice, everything's changing. We're in a world where everything's changing.

[40:43]

So there's this basic act to stop. When everything's changing, that stop is a pause. To pause for all things to come forward. And the pause is also the door of enlightenment. The door of emptiness. To stop outside of meditation. To find the world, to give the world the opportunity to come forward.

[41:45]

To find the world coming forward. Well, that gives you something to do for the next couple of days, or something not to do, because pause is also a kind of, for a moment, not to do. that lets all things actualize themselves and cultivate and authenticate the big self. Yeah, okay. Thanks a lot.

[42:45]

Dankeschön.

[42:46]

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