existence, they have extended from the past to you and will extend into the future with some direction. But this sense of a dharma posture or position is it all kind of disappears at this moment. It all merges into non-duality and to merge into non-duality means that It can't merge unless you experience phenomena and yourself as empty of inherency or permanency. There's no merging. And when there's merging, there's emptiness. Things flow together, and part of this sense of coming back to the emptiness of self and other, emptiness of self and phenomena, is that this merging is perfect. It's not just a weak... We don't have a permanent nature, but nothing has a permanent nature.

[01:06]

And when you... The importance of this is not just... that it's philosophy, it's philosophical implications, but it's living implications in that if you have this view as intrinsic to and implicit in your thinking, it changes how you think. What can I say? Say you like meditation. I don't know. This is a terrible example. You like meditation sort of like eating ice cream. Well, as long as you don't eat too much, you probably feel good. But this experience of emptiness isn't like eating ice cream, although you may feel very good. But it changes you into an ice cream machine. Or it changes you into a snow Buddha. I don't know what. You don't want to be an ice cream Buddha.

[02:09]

But there's There's an alchemy to it. In other words, this isn't just ice cream or good, healthy food. This is a kind of nourishment which is not chemical, but alchemical. Alchemy. So by taking this dharma posture, you create a dharma body, and the dharma body is likened to space. You can liken it to space in the physical sense, but that's a little bit deceptive. But a spaciousness, you feel a spaciousness in a malleability. It's as if, again, past and future are all kind of pouring into a point here. So things aren't coming to you.

[03:16]

I don't know how to give you a feeling what I mean. It's like they don't exist there, but as they come into you, they come together and change you. Yeah, I'm already saying too much about it. So I'll change the topic and say, I'll have to figure out how to say more about it.

[04:26]

All the basic practices are to bring you into the possibility of this dharma posture where you begin to open into what we call a dharma body. And that includes coming back to your breath, finding on your cushion, exploring the possibility of really trusting yourself, having faith in your just being alive, finding ease in each situation, nourishment, as I say, in each situation, And trusting when you, again as I always say, when you find yourself being depleted and not being nourished, you stop. And try to move into whatever you're doing in a way that continuously and on each moment nourishes you.

[05:42]

That has to be a high enough priority that you sacrifice what you might accomplish by depleting yourself. At least, you know, maybe you have to get in the habit of it. But once you discover this, I don't think it interferes with what you have to do. But at first it may. to have the rigor or priority of nourishing yourself and this Dharma body. And really noticing whether you have a kind of subtextual mind that is continuous throughout day and night. And I can say is imperturbable, or approaches imperturbability, not through willpower, but some kind of spacious, accepting, undisturbable qualities.

[07:00]

And I think it's possible to practice this way in our daily life. It may be difficult to practice this way here. But first you have to have the priority of this kind of realisational practice. They are in tension, they're leaving, [...] they're leaving. They are in tension, they're leaving, [...] they're leaving. See, then it's true, it is inspiring enough, Joseph.

[08:29]

I'll add a little bit more about what you wanted to say to them. Did you have any of the things that I'd like to discuss with you all? I'd like to make a big reply to all of you, and I hope you enjoyed it. I'd like to make a big reply to all of you, and I hope you enjoyed it. I'd like to make a big reply to all of you, Satsang with Mooji Thank you. Wow. [...] It is rarely in that way that we appear in the 100,000-million compass.

[10:12]

I have a tendency to listen to him, to remember and accept. I am one of those who takes the truth about part of those words. This is likely to be the last tesho, I think, of the practice period. But maybe we'll find some excuse to meet again or something, I don't know.

[11:17]

And I hope we do have a chance to meet sometime before we finally discuss how you'd like practice period to be the general, because there's some decisions we could make that may be a little different, depending on how we have the whole schedule and how people are, and who comes and so forth. I started out emphasizing from the first day, this emphasis, an emphasis, emphasizing, bringing our attention equally to whatever appears. And I've continued this throughout the practice period. and to notice how our attention usually goes to our emotions, moods, feelings, etc., and see if you can bring it back to your... and your energy back to whatever appears equally, without discriminating.

[12:41]

I mean, doing this you notice where your attention usually is, That's okay. Your attention can be anywhere you want. That's up to you. That's your personal choice. But you should know that your attention makes your life. Wherever your attention rests, that's the life you're going to create. If I can remember, Baudelaire said something like, we wend our way through a forest of symbols and they look at us with their familiar faces. We wend our way through a forest of symbols and they look at us with their familiar faces. Now, meditation practice and what we're emphasizing in

[13:46]

The practice period is of course meditation, sitting meditation, seated Buddha practice. And although the fundamental practice of all of Buddhism is mindfulness, and that's the most basic practice you should bring into your life is mindfulness, still this is a kind of concentrated practice of mindfulness. and a way to delve into and open ourselves into our... There's no word for it, the mystery of how we exist. But in all circumstances, you can find some way, whether in sitting meditation or just your ordinary activity of delving into your experience.

[14:54]

Now if we talk about sitting meditation, we try to find a good posture, lifting, as you know, through our back, back of our neck, tongue at the roof of our mouth, Resting our mind in our breath or counting our breath. Really letting ourselves come to rest. And the shikantaza we can understand as radical acceptance or we say just sitting, but just sitting as accepting whatever appears through the act of sitting. And noticing that this posture, as I've said, is big enough for two. It implies seated Buddha. It awakens this possibility.

[16:01]

It's as simple, too, as coming thoroughly to rest, letting everything settle, physically and mentally, and noticing when it doesn't settle, noticing what prevents it from settling. And then, so then you need some more insistent or laser-like practice. But let's, you know, just keep it simple. You're sitting down, see if you can come to rest, to see if you can be at ease. It's okay if you want to be at dis-ease, it's okay. But if you want to be at ease and also if you see how you're being at ease, not only it's good for you, but it's actually very good for others. if you find your own composure.

[17:15]

Okay, now this is a Buddhist practice, and as a Buddhist practice we're not just sitting in nowhere, we're sitting in the midst of a teaching about views and intentions. Because the more you see the way you're either at ease or not, you see how views and intentions affect what is an intention to be at ease. It's not so easy. We wend our way through a forest of symbols. and they look at us with their familiar faces. I think when you start to sit, you find out you are in a forest of symbols, ideas about this, that, and other things, and your perceptions themselves are baggaged with ideas.

[18:33]

So we practice, as I've been saying, emphasize that with the jnanas And skandhas, as I again mentioned to someone this morning too, because when you begin to see how you function, you know, if you want to cook something in the kitchen, you need to know how the stove works. Our stove doesn't work very well. The oven is off and the burners aren't very warm. I mean, if you put your hand in them, they're quite hot, but they don't work so well for cooking. So you really have to know this stove well because it's full of, has its own views on how things should be cooked. This is hot enough, don't bother me. But if you want to cook your karma, as you know I always say, you're either going to be cooked by your karma

[19:43]

or you're going to cook your karma. So if you want to cook your karma, you've got to know how you work, what your own burners, so forth, how they function. And those burners, or whatever we want to call them, are your senses and how your mind functions. And this, you know, It is, to me, so accurate, so accurate that the first teaching of the Buddhism starts with right views, first of the Eightfold Path. Everything comes back to right views. It's our hope and our plague.

[20:45]

Not only are we rooted in our intentions, but our whole society and culture is rooted in intentions. And they are amazingly hard to see and persistent and very often delusive, and if not delusive, mixed up. Topsy-turvy. When Sukershi first translated the Heart Sutra, we used to chant, Topsy-turvy views. We took it out later. It sounded a little too colloquial. Maybe it's good. Topsy-turvy views. I'm sure Sukershi looked it up in a dictionary or something and said, Topsy-turvy. So he wrote it down. So we used to chant it. So, it's very hard to see them.

[21:50]

They're delusive. We believe them. That's why they're delusive. They're mixed up, topsy-turvy. And yet at the same time, they're our hope. Because you can change your views. All of Buddhism has thought just about that. You can change your views. And a society can change its views. And a society can only change its views, though, if one person is able to change his or her views. It can spread. It's a very powerful thing if a person is sane with different views than other people. One person makes a huge difference. Two or three or ten or a sangha I mean, it's unbelievably powerful. Ten or fifteen people clear about something in a society of a million can change a million who aren't clear, even if they believe the other views.

[23:04]

I have this kind of vision, and for me it's not vision, it's knowledge. I know this That's what I feel. So we want to, you know, we practice, we develop the skills of mindfulness. And we develop the skills of sitting practice. And then we begin to notice what prevents us from being completely at ease. Why not? I mean, why not live your life at ease? It doesn't mean there aren't things to do, etc., and effort to be made.

[24:11]

But one of the best teachings, because she ever showed me, was working in the stream. That time, under the bridge, which we rebuilt all the rock work, because there was a big storm that winter in Carbarga Creek. Is it still called Carbarga Creek? I told how it got named by What was his first name? Tom. Tom . In the Introduction to Phillips book. So all these stones washed out. There wasn't much of a bridge. That's a new bridge we put in. And Sekirshi loved to work with stones since he was down there. And he would outwork us, and I tried to understand how, and it was simply, he was at ease.

[25:17]

He would push the rock, and then he'd be completely at ease. Everybody else is sort of, he'd just be standing there at ease. Then he'd have to do something, he'd do it, and then he'd be at ease. Between each moment of effort, he was at ease. This is a fruit of practice. It's real simple, but not easy. And all the complexity of Buddhism arises from being at ease is not easy. It's teachings about why it's not easy. And tomorrow we have a ordination ceremony. Walt's ordination ceremony and lay ordination ceremony, I think at 11.40 p.m. When was that?

[26:21]

Two years ago? Three years ago? Yeah. No, I don't think so. I'd be ready for anything. There's an old tradition of being ordained at midnight, so... Yeah. Dan is going to have his ravioli or something? Lasagna. Lasagna ready at 2 a.m. Between 2 p.m. and 3 a.m. See, we have no schedule here, really. We can do what we want. Mm-hmm. But the most important thing, I mean, it's great we're taking these vows, these vows of basic humanity.

[27:21]

And that tells us something, because this is really not about Buddhism. Or rather, the vows we take aren't really Buddhist. But the act of vowing is rooted, is the root of Buddhism So what's important is that you're taking the vows. This is right views and intentions. The second noble truth is intentions again. What does it mean to vow? It's like if you decided to take the names off everything in the world and rename them. That's vowing. Because every time you name something, you're vowing that it's a tree. This is also Baudelaire wending our way in the forest of symbols.

[28:32]

For us, trees, you know, they're trees. So a Buddhist, we could say, takes the names off everything and renames them But out of compassion gives them the same names they have. Because everybody else knows those names. But you actually know that that's not their name. Like I know this is Randy or sometimes Randall. What was that cowboy star named Randall? Randall Scott. Randall Scott, yeah. You have a little Randall Scott about you. But I know that even if you're a little bit like the other Randall in the movies, still it's just a name your parents gave you. It's funny to me when people change and name themselves as if there's a real name for themselves.

[29:36]

From a Buddhist point of view, this is pretty delusive. And some people really want, they call themselves something else because they didn't like their name. Well, it doesn't differ. Provisionally, Randall. That's all. And so we give them a Buddhist name, provisionally a Buddhist name. The Buddhist name is just an encouragement. So Buddhists are people who take the names off everything and out of compassion put the same names back But know that the names mean almost nothing. It's a convenience. But naming is vowing. It's an act of vowing. So you and I all know what a tree is when we talk about it, or what Randall is. But if you look at Randall, the more you know Randall or Randy, hmm, I don't know if there's any category he fits. It's something particular.

[30:40]

But that particular isn't limited to infinity. It's amazing that we live in this world and each particular is infinite. There's infinite possibilities in German. There's infinite possibilities in English. But they don't overlap always. The two infinities don't overlap. So tomorrow we take this act of changing our intentions, or recognizing our intentions, or recognizing our views, or changing our views. So the most important thing is the act of changing your views, and what do you change them into? vows of basic humanity, to just be a human being.

[31:44]

So we rename, we re-vow ourselves to be a human being. But we've taken possession of the act of vowing. You take possession of your own views and intentions. That's what the ceremony means. You take possession of your own views and intentions. So tomorrow is the beginning of the practice of the Eightfold Path. Okay, how do you work with intentions? Well, what do you do in martial arts? Don't you turn the energy or whatever of the person approaching you back to the person or something like that. Well, not that society is our enemy or language, but language is the main way we vow that the world is a certain way.

[32:54]

So we use language in a sense, against language. And as I say, you take language out of its syntactical context, keeping some of its semantic power, and you use it in a mantric way. That sounds complicated, maybe, but I'm just being precise. Take the language out of its kind of web of meaning, What did you say, Renée, that words in German are already leased or occupied or something like that? You said it's hard to translate Buddhist terms into German words because they're already occupied. Isn't that what you said? That was good. But English words are occupied too. So we have to kind of drive the tenant out.

[33:54]

No. or move over, this word is big enough for two. But you do that, if you take it out of its syntactical context, you begin to empty it a bit. And then you repeat it. Now, I've been emphasizing the difference between physical, physical space and mental space. And all of us mostly live in mental space and language almost locks us into mental space. Now what I mean, it's a little difficult to explain what I mean, but for example, Sometimes I'd go into the doksan room, here, or at Yohanneshof, and it was most noticeable at House Distilla, and sometimes at Yohanneshof, because it has to be reset up every sashin.

[35:18]

So I'd sit down, get ready to do Dotsan, I'd reach out to hit the bell, and the bell is set so I'd have to hit it like this. Because they just put it beside me, but they don't think of me hitting it. And I always used to think, doesn't, I mean if the person can't see the space physically, then they ought to sit down and try it out. Or they have the bell so far away, or various things. But I've got to be able to pick it up with my right hand. Sometimes when I go in here, the stick is, I'm right-handed. Unless you know I'm left-handed, the stick that goes is there, but sometimes it's this way. So if someone does that, it means they're not in physical space, they're in mental space. They see, oh, the stick goes in between. But that's mental space.

[36:23]

That's the space of sentences. So, now, physical space. What happens when you take a word and you take a phrase or a word, what I'm calling wisdom phrases, and you use it mantrically, you move it into physical space. By repetition you move it into physical space. So, if we take a phrase that we've been discussing, so I will go through this a little bit since I've mentioned and I asked you what kind of facts are these.

[37:31]

Let's just take this phrase. The blue or green, the blue green or blue mountains, you can translate it either way. The blue mountains are always walking. We should not doubt that this walking is different, is the same as our walking. The Blue Mountains are always walking and the stone maiden gives birth to a child in the night. Now that's meant to be understood in physical space, not mental space. If you take a stone maiden gives birth at night. As mental space, as a sentence, it's wrong. It's not understandable. And when you read it, a stone maiden gives birth at night.

[38:35]

Wrong. It's not conceivable. Hmm. It's not understandable. It's not believable. But if you repeat it, it begins to be stone maiden, stone maiden, gives birth, gives birth, at night. What do we have? We have three units. Two of them are true. Do you see the difference between mental space and physical space? In mental space, it's a unit, syntactical unit. A stone maiden gives birth at night. It's not true. But if you start saying it physically, which is what Dogen intends and our Buddhist ancestors intend, oh, it's two-thirds true. There is such a thing as giving birth.

[39:38]

It's true. And there is such a thing as nighttime. It's true. The only part that's not true is the stone maiden. But there's such a thing as stone maidens, it's just they don't usually give birth at night or at any time of day or night. But now we work with that it's two-thirds true. Okay. Well, it's not understandable, but is it believable? Well, it is believable that there is such a thing as birth. And it is believable that there is nighttime. And much of what happens in this tathagatagarbha, this womb, is outside our perceptual and conceptual cognition. This means a kind of night, or sometimes we talk about utter darkness.

[40:43]

You know, some teachings always emphasize the clear light and bright light and luminous experience. Zen also emphasizes the darkness. This room is penetrated by darkness right now. Much of what's going on here is going on in a kind of darkness. So if you work with this phrase, you start coming into the night or the darkness. Branching streams. Say again. Flow in the night. And giving birth. at each moment, as we are emphasizing, this infolding and unfolding as birth.

[41:44]

But a stone maiden? So if you start working with it this way, you begin to say, well, the stone maiden isn't believable, but is it really believable that we give birth? if you've ever been present at a birth, it's pretty darned unbelievable. Here's a woman there and suddenly she kind of goes to the toilet and a baby appears instead. A whole human being appears. It's quite magical. Where did it come from? So a statement like this begins to make us question to find equally unbelievable the believable parts. Are you following my converse logic? So when you start working with a phrase like this physically, mantrically, each part begins to influence the other part, not in mental space, but in a kind of physicalized mental space.

[42:56]

I don't know what to say. And then you begin to study birth. What is birth? What is birth? Because the stone maiden part puts the whole question of what kind of birth is meant. Doesn't just mean the birth of a human baby, but what kind of birth? And what kind of branching streams flow in the darkness? So you see, if you're studying Zen or you're looking into Zen and you read a phrase like that, a stone maiden gives birth to a child, and I think, yeah, that's typical Zen. I don't know what the heck it is. But you've given, you've only seen it as a symbol. You haven't spent any time on it. You've understood it in the categories of other things you understood, and it's exactly what Baudelaire meant.

[43:57]

We wend our way through a forest of symbols. And they look at us with their familiar faces and we don't see anything. Because the phrase, a stone maiden gives birth at night, blocks us from understanding it. Because we understand it as a mental statement that we understand that quick or not. This is practice. This is mindfulness. This is maybe the mantra of being alive in a world constantly appearing, continuously appearing and disappearing. In such a world, maybe even a stone maiden gives birth at night. And the Blue Mountains walking, always walking,

[44:59]

Okay, what's walking? All right. If you, again, work with this in physical space, walking, walking, walking. What's walking? As I've said, it's a word for movement. And we have Samantabhadra who enters without taking a step. This is also walking. It's an interesting way to put it. He doesn't say, stand still. He enters without taking a step. If you're standing here in service, like this morning I'm doing doksan, I'm a little late, or even if I'm right on time, still we stand there for a little while. I think you have to keep reconstituting your standing. It's not like you are a fixed object. You have to keep coming into standing, even though you're standing. You have to keep coming back into standing.

[46:04]

It requires a kind of attention and energy. Quite difficult, actually, to stand for very long. So standing is a kind of movement, not very different from walking. So if you begin to loosen up your sense of what this word means, you peel the name walking off of walking. Don't doubt that it's the same as our walking. So what is it that a mountain, what kind of movement? So here we have Dogen's idea of the mountain is mountaining, or Heidegger's idea of the world worlding. A world whirls. The mountain mountains. You, you. This is Shikantaza.

[47:05]

Just sitting. But this kind of coming to ease as just sitting, as you, you-ing, takes, look at what I've had to say to get around to this. So we feel the aura of the mountain in our own aura, with or without external walking. Going back to Baudelaire, who Walter Benjamin, how do you pronounce it in German, Benjamin? He calls Baudelaire the poet of high capitalism. And Baudelaire was a poet, I think he lived 1821 to 1867, was a poet who was the first time, the first poet of lit cities.

[48:14]

And what do you have when you have lit cities, gas lamps, the city lit at night? You have crowds. because people have leisure time after work and they're wandering around the street. So it's the first time you have large crowds in cities. This is what Baudelaire kind of registered, this tremendous change where you have lots of strangers looking blankly at each other. And the crowd became the muse. Goethe, I think, defines love as that which knows no distance and comes flying to stay in the spell. Something like that. I can't say it in German, obviously. That which abides or knows no distance and comes flying and willingly stays in the spell.

[49:24]

And what Baudelaire noticed was the aura was lost in human interaction. Strangers look blankly at each other with neither distance nor nearness and are somehow, what is shopping all about, some kind of place other than what you are. You shop to imagine yourself somewhere other than where you are. So the whole phenomena of shopping, malls, the first covered streets and shopping malls were in Baudelaire's time. So we find our safety by being at a safe distance. We are rather afraid of the spell, or we think, this is dangerous stuff, the spell of aura.

[50:31]

Of the eyes which establish aura. Of the mind's eyes which establish aura. of a knowing that establishes aura or is rooted already in aura. This is a different kind of knowing. And I would guess it's the knowing most people knew when they all knew each other. But the whole phenomena of so much of our lives being defined in a public space where we remain strangers I think has a deep effect on how we, what views we have of the world and what our intentions are. So I also think that not only is Zazen practice the great practice for our age, as far as I understand things, Zazen and mindfulness practices, but also is Sangha.

[51:45]

Because it's an attempt to re-establish the aura of knowing Which means knowing has to function at some level other than some kind of competitive psychology. Otherwise there's no aura. You know, there's people nowadays who very often you read, as I've said a couple of times before, they look at Dogen and they say, Well, he was competing with this and that and his idea was this and he hid his sources and he did this and that, blah, blah, blah. All as if he was completely motivated again by some kind of ego, competitive mentality. Well, he did have to function in the world, a pretty tough Japanese society.

[52:50]

where often the monasteries were armed and fought each other and people were assassinated and so forth. It's a tough scene. We don't have that problem here, not yet. Yeah, you could look at what he's done that way, but my opinion is anyone who says, who can say, the blue mountains are always walking. A stone maiden gives birth to a child at night is not motivated primarily by ego. Such a person is motivated by wisdom where they wouldn't know this or be able to say it. I don't think we have to get trapped in this kind of level of competitive personality.

[53:54]

Yes, we have to function that way. It's part of the language and the naming of the world. But we can also come into our own wisdom, I believe, I know. We can use these wisdom phrases to delve into our own experience, these mantric wisdom phrases to delve into our own knowing, our own presence. And we can use these mantric koan phrases to delve into the teaching and open up unlayer this wisdom, which Dogen and others have tried to store for us in these phrases and these koans and in these practices and in this Sangha life.

[55:07]

The configuration and layering, it's hard to see at first, of this Sangha life. Thank you very much.

[55:21]

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