Just about, I guess before I left for Europe, Gerald mentioned to me that, he pointed out to me how different he felt my lectures were here in Crestone during practice period than they are in Europe. So when I was there, I was wondering what... What does he mean? And I, because I have the experience of speaking about the same thing, pretty much, and each situation draws, you know, a little different dharma out. But then I, so what I noticed, I would say, is that Like if we imagine a painting in Europe, I tend to speak about the painting, the content of the painting, maybe the composition of the painting, something like that.

[01:11]

But then I thought, what do I do in Crestone in practice period? Actually, I think what I'm talking about is the brushstrokes. We almost take a magnifying glass to the brushstrokes. And we create, in practice period, we create some kind of mutual mind and body. I mean, more than you actually realize, I think. And as I mentioned recently to a couple of different contexts, I'm sorry we can't be here, each of you can't be here a minimum of two years. Now, I know some of you immediately think, oh my God, I can barely handle three months. But actually in the 70s, in San Francisco, I wouldn't accept anyone for Tassajara who couldn't stay at least two years.

[02:21]

If they didn't have the money saved for two years, I wouldn't accept them. Because something happens. Two years in Tassajara would be four practice periods. Something happens. We really need to break... break change, alter our habits, and allow ourselves to disappear. I mean, you really want to get to the point where everything you do is interesting. Any situation you're in is interesting. It doesn't matter whether you're sitting on a stump in the woods or I don't know, on the toilet, or eating boring food, or good food, whatever. And, you know, I've been talking about this, I've been promising you something like Dharma surgery for several shows now, and it doesn't, Dharma surgery is nothing.

[03:39]

to interrupt and divert our thinking, or our mind, or our views. Not to stop or suppress or get rid of or something, but rather just interrupt and divert. But man, where are we walking around when we do that? You know, I remember reading many years ago that uh... you know somebody makes these whoever thinks these studies made a study and how do you actually make such a study i don't know but uh... writers supposedly had the highest anxiety of any profession i remember thinking at the time if this is the case it must be because writing more than anything else playing with language using language

[04:44]

you're really kind of playing with the way the mind is put together, particularly if you want to come up with something original, particularly like poetry or something. There's probably some truth to it, at least. But in any case, if I start talking about Dharma surgery or interrupting and diverting our mind, I think we are walking around in some kind of potential realm of anxiety. When we start stepping around or outside and in the mind of our society and culture, or the mythic mind of our society and culture.

[05:46]

And if you know, we actually only really have Dharma friends or spiritual friends when we're able to see past the mind of our society and culture. You know, as long as we're in the mind of our society and culture, some people are interesting, some people are not interesting, we like some people, we don't like... We can't view everybody the way we view a baby. But it really is possible to view every human being like you view a baby. Wow, what an incredible creature. Until the baby starts having the mind of its society and culture, then you start thinking, well, this baby's a little bit stupid, or this baby's a little... I mean, this... Big baby is a little bit uncultivated or crazy or something. You know, and I think this image I come back to often of the baby and the bodhisattva, baby-sattva, you know?

[06:56]

The fact that we can view each baby for your puppies as a wondrous creature means it's possible to view each human being Are we there? Can you get there? Do you want to get there? You don't want to dumb yourself down to get there. But if we can have one foot outside the mind of our society and culture, we begin having spiritual friends, or truly Dharma friends, and everyone starts being a Dharma friend. Even people opposed to us. Something good happens. Now, I'd like you to keep in mind Dogen's phrase, statement. Everything exists in its own phenomenal expression.

[08:00]

There's certain things we can keep coming back to. This is one. It's a view phrase. I don't know how some of you, I could say, watermelons are green on the outside and red on the inside. I don't think that's a view statement. And it wouldn't be very useful to turn that into a mantra. Watermelons are green and red. Well, if you said watermelons are green, that might be a view statement, because you know inside they're red, and what is green anyway, and so forth. But maybe everything's a view statement, but some things are more obviously a view statement, in that they contradict or support our views. And they allow repeated observations, like art. Art is something you look at over and over again and it's new. So, everything exists in its own phenomenal expression.

[09:03]

Now, I think we want to take some of these things Dogen said. I keep coming back to it. I'm working only with Zalmay O. Zalmay because of Dad. Put some of these statements together. Now, let's see, because I was... Because of what I've been reading lately, I want to bring up again science, and this time I think maybe I mentioned Max Planck. What he did, it seems, is put together two observations that everyone knew about. One observation meant just that things went like you take a piece of metal, heat it up, it's dull red, bright red or red-orange, and white-hot. In the case of stars, it gets into a blue spectrum. Everyone knows it. And also there was what everyone, scientists knew at the time, that a black body, a completely black body like soot, seems to absorb electromagnetic radiation evenly.

[10:17]

Now, this is against the background of Newton saying and society assuming that electromagnetic radiation was continuous. Planck put these two observations that everyone knew together. Everyone knew it. Put them together and he saw that electromagnetic radiation occurs in packets. He called it packets at first. And he named it quantum eventually. It broke up the world. Changed the world. We have computers, all kinds of things because of this. But at the same time it's interesting that Gorky, Picasso, and Braque broke up the human figure into cubist, into cubism. Do you know this anecdote about Second World War and camouflage? Can I ever tell you that?

[11:21]

Picasso was walking along with somebody in Paris at the beginning of the Second World War, and he saw a camouflaged truck go by. And he says, I invented that. And the guy said, well, it's just basically Cubism. And they looked it up, and a French, kind of minor French painter had been asked to camouflage trucks. And when he interviewed, he said, oh yeah, I just got it from Cubism. So something happens when we break up the human face. I mean, look, this is not small stuff. It's changed art, led to abstract painting, all kinds of things. So something happens in society, and what we're doing, really, I suppose, is Buddhism breaking up perception itself from the seeming seamlessness of perception

[12:23]

into units that we call dharmas. And you are pioneers in doing it. In our culture, we're the first group of people doing it. And I would say that most of the people practicing Buddhism actually aren't doing it. They practice Buddhism in a way that I think is mostly in the realm of their conventional life. an extended conventional life, but they don't actually perform Dharma surgery. It's just that Buddhism isn't quite mature enough to get there, and you have to be pretty good at Buddhism to get there. But I think we're at the point now where we find ourselves observing ourselves from an observer that isn't exactly our usual sense of me.

[13:26]

We may assume it's our usual sense of me, but if you look closely, like Dogen says, hold this insight, maintain this insight, and investigate thoroughly. Right there. There's a lot right there. That whole text is based on these two statements. There's an insight, maintain the insight, and within that insight, within the light of that insight, investigate thoroughly. It's pretty hard to do unless you have some kind of stabilized, established, it's the same word, background mind. It's actually sometimes a Buddhism called the feminine principle. Because from this womb mind, background mind, the Buddhas are born, we say. From the prajnaparamita, the background mind of emptiness, the Buddhas are born, the world is born.

[14:30]

It's a kind of, we could talk, we don't talk in that kind of language, establishing feminine principles. But it's not so easy even to notice or to handle the noticing of yourself in some different way if you don't have a stabilized clarity, stabilized background mind. But the more we do have a kind of background line that slips out of the complicit permanence of me, we begin to see different kinds of me, or different kinds of... You know, we feel a little differently. This morning I spoke about soft air. This morning? Yesterday morning?

[15:32]

Soft space. Or soft air. Where each pine, each tree has its own place. Everything exists in its own phenomenal expression. Each needle has its own round. I don't know if I know, if I can give you a feeling for what I I know when I first noticed this, and it's not something I could think my way to, I suddenly felt everything's a stomach. I'm in a big stomach. This is like, what would it be like to walk around in a stomach? Well, it's something like walking around in this. It's some kind of interior with a continuous moment-by-moment opening.

[16:37]

What kind of interior is this? What kind of room are the Buddha's ancestors? Now, Dogen says this is different. Know that this sitting is different than any other work. So, this stomach, soft space, yeah, begins to be different than your usual world. Now what are we interrupting? What if we're interrupting? Now I can talk about Dharma surgery using the four marks, etc. And, you know, we may have some kind of intuition or opening, but just kind of like log ahead with your come on, you know, move, move, move.

[17:43]

Yeah, that's okay. It's a powerful way to do it. It's kind of a heavy-handed way to do it. That's good to do that too because we want to put ourselves on the edge, in the sudden, on the edge where things happen. Either shift or they don't. But also there's no reason not to use the teachings. These wonderful teachings of the five nama, four marks. How quickly we get to suchness. Just, you know. Appearance, naming, discrimination. The shift, right knowledge, that's where the surgery comes in. the interruption, the diverting, and suchness. And yesterday I mentioned that you could substitute for the me observer, yesterday before yesterday, substitute for the me observer an ancient Buddha.

[18:53]

This is Dharma surgery, to substitute an ancient Buddha for the me observer. Or, if you practice the vijnanas step by step, and instead of just seeing the object, you begin to see the mind which accompanies each sense activity. The mind that accompanies hearing, that allows hearing, and the mind that accompanies seeing, and begin to feel the difference between the mind which accompanies seeing and the mind which accompanies hearing, and the mind which accompanies tactile, proprioceptive knowing. You begin to see also that there's a different mind with each object.

[19:57]

A different mind appears on each object. And this is also you know, generates this kind of soft space. You begin to hear, feel this soft space. Where you feel maybe all alone, you are, we're all alone, but somehow wound around with familiarity. So where do we, what do we interrupt? What do we interrupt? I mean, you can just say, okay, just interrupt your thinking. Okay, yeah. Interrupt the process of naming and discriminating. Yeah, okay, that's good. But actually we interrupt quite a lot of things.

[21:02]

I try to name them or bring us into the territory of Dharma surgery or what we interrupt. Well, one is our views. There we have the Eightfold Path. The Eightfold Path is all about interrupting your views. That's really exactly what it is. First knowing your views and then interrupting your views. Observing your views and interrupting your views with mindfulness and concentration. So, your view. That's one thing we interrupt or perform surgery on. If you're ready. A stabilized background mind which permeates the foreground is a kind of prior condition. And then there's the me observer. And the feeling of the me observer that you are now is the same me observer from the past and will be the same me observer in the future.

[22:18]

As long as you have that feeling, you don't get very far in practice. There's some interruption of the me observer, but the me observer is being interrupted all the time. When you go to sleep, the me observer is interrupted and you start having dreams and strange things happen. That's because the me observer is interrupted. But we wake up and we try to put the dream back together and interpret it in terms of our me observer, which is a big mistake of psychology. To keep trying to interpret dreams and stuff really in terms of the me observer. or just to expand the me observer. Let's just really think of it, a me observer is interrupted, interrupted, and then what erupts? Soft space. So we interrupt the me observer or notice that the me observer is already interrupted or is often interrupted or the me observer is actually discontinued.

[23:28]

Maybe the quantum me observer, the quantum observer. Enter little packets of observer, little packets different with each object observed and each mind from which we observe. So we don't only just interrupt our thinking, we interrupt the mind of thinking. We only interrupt our thinking, we go back to thinking. How do we get to non-thinking? And we interrupt permanence, implicit permanence, assumed permanence. And we interrupt an assumed future.

[24:29]

What's the experience? Yeah, some of you know it already. You suddenly have no future. You can't imagine a future. You're going to have to force yourself into imagining a future. Yeah, it makes life a lot easier if you have no future actually. The future causes us a lot of problems. Anxiety. Yeah, but you can't... There's lots of things that go with just this simple thing, which is part of the interruption of breaking the habit of permanence. You know, you're going to have an implied, I mean an assumed future. As long as you're really unwilling to die. As long as you're not ready to die.

[25:35]

It's hard to get there. I mean, when you're young, your biology just throws so much stuff toward the future, you can't imagine you're going to die. Marie-Louise says it's good to be married to an old guy like me because she sees she better take care of her teeth. She thought her teeth were going to last forever. Now she looks at mine and she says, hey. So it's harder to be young. When we are ready to die, it's easier to be free of an imagined or hoped for or assumed future. But in any case, often When you can begin to notice the mind in packets or units, you begin to see, actually, in fact, sometimes you cover it over quickly.

[26:43]

It's like a crack, you know, and you sort of step over the crack. Actually, we do have a mind which knows no future, doesn't assume a future. If things are really changing and unpredictable, then in a fundamental sense we don't have a future. We don't know what it will be at least. It's certainly not predictable. And the more in your own body you feel the unpredictability of your future without any particular concern for what kind of future you have, whoa, does your chest open up, does your body open up. So what's another thing we interrupt in this process of breaking the habit of permanence? Well, we interrupt our habit mind.

[27:44]

No matter how, you know, whatever our views are, we just have a habit. We have a habit of thinking, a habit of mind and body. habit mind is one of the things practice period tries to get in and you know bore you and stuff like that our habit mind wants excitement or something interesting we should make services three hours long and do the same chanting over and over again to you kid why am I here at some point being Whoa! It doesn't make any difference what you do. I actually find the longer services much more easy to do than the short one. When we have a short service, I have to admit it, I confess, I'm thinking about when will it be over.

[28:49]

It often occurs to me, when will it be over? This is a short service, it's going to be over quickly. And I can go do something else. But if it's a long service, I think, I don't know, this takes forever. I can't even think about an implied future after this service. And I just relax and service goes on. I could go another 45 minutes. I wouldn't really care. So I find short services longer than long services. Sounds like a Zen thing to say, but it's my actual experience. Short services are longer than long services, which is short. In my experience, that's the case. Because I care, you know. Okay. Now the sixth thing we can interrupt is our referential mind. Our mind referenced through others.

[29:50]

Our mind locked into others' minds. Which on one side, from the bodhisattva side, is compassion. We can practice the conventional mind because that's how we join with most people. That's not the same as when our own mind is actually referenced constantly through others. Teenagers have nothing but a Barbie doll referenced mind. Referential mind. I mean, not all teenagers, but teenagers are most susceptible to having a mind referenced through others. It's terrible years for some people just because of that. hardly know who they are. They don't know who they are. Trying to find out through others all the time. But we carry quite a bit of that in our status thinking and stuff. All the way up through our, you know, through the lengths of our life.

[31:00]

So this is looking at the brushstrokes, looking at the shuttle. You know the shuttle? Shuttle's what goes through the wheat, you know. The warp and the whoop and the shuttle keeps moving through it. So in a way we're looking at the brushstrokes, but this is a painting or a fabric that we look at with a magnifying glass. that's actually always in the process of weaving, like in some fairy tale. It's always being woven and unwoven at night and rewoven during the day and unwoven at night and rewoven during the day and continuously rewoven as if it's going to be some kind of pattern in the future. But with this needle, with some kind of mental structure, with some kind of shuttle that carries the thread through, we actually begin to interrupt the weave, or look through the weave, look through the fabric to this prajnaparamita mind, this background mind, this mind which moves toward less structure, moves toward emptiness.

[32:32]

You know, now do we stabilize ourselves? How do we feel comfortable now? Because, you know, this can be quite a loss. Nothing to depend on. What do we take refuge in? Put it down in Sangha. Oh, thanks a lot. Standing right here, what do we take reference in? But you kind of have to start practicing impermanence. One way to practice impermanence, a very basic way, is to see everything as a construct. So when you're walking, you see the earth, okay? There's the earth. Dirt, stuff. You see that as, oh, that's prior construct. We tend to think it's always there. It's prior construct. What's our stepping? Present construct. Something. You have to work some kind of structure, often through language, like As you say, prior construct, present construct, prior construct, present construct.

[33:36]

That's like the shuttle. You're beginning to change the weave. You're using soft state. Everything's a stomach. We're inside a stomach. Or everything exists in its own phenomenal expression. Or there's a koan about it. Three by three in front, three by three in back. This koan tries to reach into what I'm talking about here, if you want to study that koan. Three by three in front, three by three in back. Yeah. Everything exists in its own phenomenal expression. Dogen, yeah, he couldn't have existed in the 10th century.

[34:50]

He could only existed in Japan in the 13th century. He wasn't a pure Buddhist. Buddha? Yeah, maybe he was. Maybe the culture allowed him to be something close to a pure Buddha. But he still was a pure Buddha because he was able to push the envelope of his own culture. Yeah, that's like being outside your house. You're still related to your house. You push the envelope, you're still related to the envelope. So Buddha belongs in 12th, the 13th century. That's why also Honen, Nichiren, Shinran, those are historical facts. Those people were possible in that century. None of them were possible two centuries earlier. So how is Dogen free of his culture if he's so much part of his culture? How is he part of the mythic Ah, mind of this society and culture.

[35:58]

Are we right? But he, his wisdom took advantage of an opportunity. And our wisdom can take advantage of an opportunity. And your wisdom is now taking advantage of an opportunity. You're actually pioneers in this practice. We don't know quite how to do it, but you have to have the stability of your own observing mind. I think you do. It takes time. Take confidence in simple things like your breath mind. Everything exists in its own phenomenal expression, and that's okay. Thank you very much.

[37:08]

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