Now Frank brought us earlier for the break. As how he would like, he was interested in, yeah, how these phrases led him to see the world as activity. Now, if I don't quite cover what you... said, please add something or tell me. Yeah, and Katrin and Peter spoke about how Turning words or pauses make you notice yourself, your activity, etc.

[01:09]

Yeah. Now, one of the things is... You know, I point out regularly, particularly the last couple of years, to get in the habit of seeing the world as activities, activity and not entities. Now, it took me a long time before I was willing to use the simple word activity. I was wanting something more parallel to entity. And we could have entitylessness.

[02:17]

But that's not the same as contrasting entities with activity. Now, I'm not an assiduous student of Greek philosophy. Sidious means concentrated, careful, hard-working. But just out of context Aristotle said that there are only three dimensions. Yes. one dimension is a line and two dimensions is a surface or a plane and three dimensions is a body.

[03:23]

And he said, there are no other dimensions. Well, he was wrong. I hate to say it. I mean, who am I to say Aristotle was wrong? But why not? I mean, we're just here together. We can say these things. But there is no such statement in Buddhism. Because there are at least four dimensions. Buddhism never leaves out change, movement, etc. From the Buddhist point of view, everything is change. Everything is exchange.

[04:36]

Exchanging. Yeah. And there's no other world. Okay, now if you imagine, if we try to take... Maybe we shouldn't call him Aristotle because he's such a big figure. Let's call him Arnie. So Arnie said, there are only three dimensions and no more. Well, if Arnie sees himself as being born into a container world, that's there before he was born, and there after he dies, and, yeah, it's out there. Well, It's not only out there.

[05:57]

So to see the world as entities is also to see the world as a container. And it's very difficult not to see the world as a container. I recently spoke about this very example in Crestone. And I said that it's very hard to see that this room is not a container. And to see it as an activity. Okay. Now, from the point of view of seeing it as an activity, that's this kind of thing I pointed out quite often. If you enter this room from this door, it's a different room than if you enter it from that door.

[07:08]

And how you'll feel about the windows and the shape and the space and your mood, depending on the door you enter. It's part of the activity of the room. And of course we also know that it's an activity because Otmar and many of us have worked on this room. Putting in a new floor. Lights and so forth. Plastering. And we're using it right now as an activity.

[08:19]

Tomorrow it may be used the same way. Tomorrow it might be where we have lunch. So if you view the room as an activity, you kind of let go of the experience of it as a container. there are no container entities that exist. So, but you can't come to that really without the practice, the repetitious practice. The intentional noticing of the world as an activity.

[09:20]

Even if you pick up a beach stone or a mountain stone. Just look at it. You can see the activity of the formation of the stone over a time frame much longer than our life. So geology is not the study of stones or something like that. It's the study of the activity of stones. Now, excuse me for speaking about the obvious. But we, in our culture, Everything is implied, a container is implied in everything.

[10:40]

We don't say in English, rain rains. We say, it rains. I mean, as if there's some it out there doing the raining. No one has ever found the it that rains. The weather is a combination of activity that leads to rain. Okay. Now, I said, when I gave this example of the room being, et cetera, in Crestone recently...

[11:48]

I said, if you're in a yogic culture, Buddhism is a yogic culture. And it helped develop East Asian culture, particularly Japan, as a yogic culture. Buddhism is one of the main things that turned Chinese, China, Chinese culture into a yoga culture. With other influences from India. Okay. I said, if... I said, for example, in a Japanese house... A Japanese house is...

[12:54]

designed, built by persons who don't think the house is a container. This building was built by somebody who thought the world is a container. Now, if you get to contemporary architecture, one of the most well-known examples, Frank Gehry, He does not see buildings as containers. Sometimes I'd prefer if he did see them a little more as containers. But when these ideas start reconceptualizing our spaces, we're living in a changed world. Okay, so one of the practitioners in the practice period came to me in Doksan.

[14:21]

And very nice. Serious, earnest person. Fairly new to practice, but very committed to practice. Came to me and said, I don't really understand how a house is not a container. Not conceived of, basically, as a container. I don't understand how... I don't really understand how it's not conceived as a container. He said, I don't understand how a house can be conceived of as other than a container. Well, where I do doksan is in a Japanese... Completely Japanese wood joinery building.

[15:33]

Built by my former brother-in-law. Not for me. He's still my brother in love, at least. At least we're very close, for sure. And he built this building for me. And the interior of the Zendo. But I also introduced him to this kind of architecture and to the Zen teachers and carpenters who became his teachers. So there's a long shared life history that led to this building. So this is where I'm sitting in Doksan.

[16:47]

There's a wall here. And the person coming to Doksan comes in through a door back there. And they take off their shoes, ideally, inside by the little step. A large percentage of people don't. They take off their shoes outside the outside door. And I tell them very clearly, this inside is outside. And they say, oh, really? But that's outside and... And when you step on the step, now you're on the inside inside. Anyway, so then they go down the hall and then they come in and they come and they greet me with, wow, I bow to them.

[18:00]

And so this person sits down in front of me. And he asks me this question, how can a house not be conceived of as a container? How can a house not be conceived of as a container? Well, the wall here is just sliding paper doors. So I just slide it open. Yeah. And then there's another set of doors. I can't quite reach them without getting up, but I could have slid them open too. And then there's a garden. And then there's a stone lantern, which I brought from my house in Kyoto.

[19:11]

And the stone lantern is more or less the outside of the house. Und die Steinlaterne ist mehr oder weniger das Äußere des Hauses. Because it's where activity ends. Das ist nämlich da, wo die Aktivität aufhört. So the garden is considered part of the living room. So dass der Garten betrachtet wird als Teil des Wohnraums, da wo man wohnt. And what happens when you move the doors and move both sets of doors, etc.? Was passiert, wenn man die Türen bewegt und den nächsten Satz von Türen schiebt und bewegt? you're returning the house to space. The space it was built in is kind of still there. There's no sharp inside, outside. And if you begin taking all the side walls and all sides, you end up with a kind of roof And nothing else.

[20:15]

So the conception of the Japanese house is not simply that it is not a container. Or that non-containerish containerness is expressed by the walls all moving. And expressed is there's no clear outside, inside place you can find. And that you can feel the space in which it was built.

[21:17]

And when you, in the summer or the winter or the weather, etc., you're constantly recreating the space in various ways. Now, my point here is, that when you have a simple, different view, the world is activities, the world is not entities. It's expressed in the architecture, in the clothes, how you speak to another person, how you stand in front of them. And basically, as I've said many times, you assume The assumption is connectedness, not separation.

[22:34]

Now, if you understand that the yogic person's assumption is connectedness, It explains, makes clear much of the culture of interaction and so forth. Yeah, in the West, we tend to assume separation. This makes a big difference. And I often, often, often have given you the turning word already connected. Now, just one more little example.

[23:41]

If you're living in traditional Japan, traditional houses, the way I did when I first went there in the 60s. You have to get used to the fact that they don't heat the houses. As we experienced the last few days here. It only got warm last night when you guys started to come, most of you. And typically in a Kyoto house in the winter you can see your breath on the cold air of the house. And if you said to a traditional Japanese person It's bloody cold in here.

[24:47]

Why don't you heat your damn house? That's how you feel when you first get there. They look at you and they say, heat the house? Is the house cold? no your body is cold so they heat the body and they've got wonderful little techniques to heat the body they have tables with a heater underneath the table. Sometimes you go to somebody's house and you want to visit with them. And no one answers. Nobody answers. That's what you say, you don't knock, you speak.

[25:52]

But you were told for sure that the woman of the house would be there, say, the wife, mother. So you poke your head in the house, you know, you cannot just, hello, hello. And from under the table, the woman appears. She's gone under the table, put the blanket around her, and she's sleeping under the table. That's the only warm place in the damn room. And she apologized and says, oh, I'm sorry, it was cold. And you also have hibachi. And you warm your hands. And if your feet are warm under the table and your hands are warm, it's quite healthy. You feel really good. And if you get really cold, you go take a bath.

[26:54]

And the bath, you don't wash in the water. You wash outside the tub and then you get in the water and soak. Sometimes with sake cups floating on the water. No, no, I mean... Okay. Because really, the idea of heating a house that's cold because the house isn't cold is real clear for them in those days. Okay. Now the... My eyes get farther away too.

[28:07]

The three, we could say the three dimensions of the world the three dimensions of the experienced world in Yogacara Buddhism are personified as Manjushri Manjushri Avalokiteshvara and Samantabhadra. Now they're personified because they're different realms of being. And if you see them, feel them as personified, because in a way they're philosophical ideas, they're experienced realms of noticing and knowing.

[29:34]

But if you also personify these ideas and experiences, you can feel yourself in this personification and can begin to live out these realms of beingness More fully than if they were just mental exercises or mental formations. So some of the things that are pointed at by words, and again we're not emphasizing words here as definitions, But words as directions.

[30:50]

As a way of pointing. I mean, Buddhism is very skeptical about words as definitions unless you also feel the space or emptiness at the same time. But there's no problem with words as directions. Where is the zendo over there? Where is the freedom from entities? By noticing everything as activities. Okay. So sometimes these turning words or directions are actually personified as bodhisattvas. Now, these three experienced, these three experienceable dimensions of beingness are feeling the world folded in

[31:58]

Feeling the world as folded into awareness. Now, I think you can actually get a sense of this folded inness. I saw it once, I mean many times, but I remember really being struck by it. being lost somewhere and wanting to stop and ask a jogger where the heck this house was. And it was clear he was in a state of folded inness, probably timing himself, And he did not want to stop and exercise consciousness.

[33:28]

Well, okay, it's down there somewhere in the house. And when Atmar speaks about just sitting, he's speaking about a folded inwardness, which you get used to, you incubate. It becomes more and more familiar. You don't understand it, it just becomes more and more familiar. More and more an embodied realm. and we call this folded inness wisdom because this realm of folded inness not only is folded in a way out of the

[34:34]

predictability, predictableness of consciousness, but it's also folded into this associative mind, the creativity and possibilities of this associative mind. And then the even more direct knowing of of a freedom also from associative mind, in which there's an embodied knowledge that you allow to take over.

[35:56]

And that embodied knowledge that you more and more trust and an embodied knowing or knowledge which incubates through meditation practice. which we call wisdom. Okay. Now the outfolded dimension of beingness we call compassion. or relatedness. I mean, compassion in Buddhism really means profound acceptance of relatedness.

[37:07]

experience of relatedness. Now, compassion is a way to enter this profound relatedness. Compassion is the expression of of this profound relatedness. But finding yourself in a world of profound relatedness is actually a wider experience than compassion. I mean, if you're immersed in a world of profound relatedness, there's no alternative to compassion.

[38:21]

Now, I feel I'm getting too deep into all this. I don't have boots on or anything. But I'm going to continue. And we're going to have supper it looks like. Thank you Simon. Okay. Now the third personification of this these three dimensions of beingness?

[39:21]

I must have asked something. Yes. When you say beingness, sometimes you say being and beingness, where would you... Well, I've stopped saying being. Oh, I see. I only say beingness now, mostly. How should I translate that? I don't know. It's your job. Okay. Seinsheit. Seinsheit. Seinsheit. Seinssein. We experiment with it. It's quite easy. Because being has the sense of a person, a being. Also sein, not in German. Not in German? No. Oh, well then you can say whatever you want. Also being, um es nochmal die kurze Gespräch zu geben, being im Englischen und beingness ist das, was Roshi letzter Zeit sagt, weil er sagt, er hat aufgehört being zu sagen. Ein being ist ein Wesen, ein Sein.

[40:25]

No, no, I just wanted to make the difference. A being is what we would call a being in German. It is also in the being. It is not the being, but also the being. Isn't it fun? We know something's there and German doesn't quite get it, English doesn't quite get it. Yeah, it's great. Being also has the sense of doing something. In English. What are you doing? I'm being. I'm going. I'm being. And becoming has the sense you're going somewhere.

[41:35]

So contemporary Western philosophers and sociologists go sort of back and forth between being and becoming. So I decided on beingness just to be original. Okay. So the third... of our experienced, experienceable world is personified as Samantabhadra or Vajradhara. Vajradhara.

[42:37]

Yeah, that guy. That girl. Yeah. Vajradhara is a very important guy, a girl, a gal, person. I mean personification. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Now, those of you who know the main house, Kanon Do, on the right side of the Kuan Yin is a beautiful Tibetan thangka of blue-black vajradhara. There is a beautiful tanker of a black-blue Vajradhara. And in the atrium There's Mayumi's Japanese Fugen Bosatsu.

[43:47]

And Fugen Bosatsu is in Japanese for Vajradhara. Or in Sanskrit Samantabhadra. But Mayumi, the artist, naturally being a woman, is sensitive to traditions like Fugen standing on an elephant. The silkscreen we have out here is also by Mayumi. So Mayumi has Fugen, Samantabhadra, sitting on a bicycle. Not standing on an elephant.

[45:02]

And she's giving the elephant a ride. It's on the handlebars. And the mudra of the Kuan Yin of Bodhisattva... compassion, Avalokiteshvara, has the Samantabhadra mudra. Okay, I'm just saying all this for the heck of it. But also to illustrate how Buddhism tries to exemplify these three dimensions of beingness. The folded inness, inwardness of Manjushri or wisdom and the folded outness of compassion and avalokiteshvara.

[46:17]

Now this is not the folded outness of a container world. The externalized world of the container. can't be folded in or folded out. So the experienced practitioner, by letting loose of a container world, and as Frank says, develops the The wisdom habit of seeing the world always as activity. The geology of the beach stone as activity. And the activity of your picking it up. Or the activity of looking at the mountain.

[47:28]

So this flow of seeing the world as activity. Now Samantabhadra and Vajradhara which is the a simultaneity of awareness and emptiness the simultaneity of emptiness and awareness is the bodhisattva who enters without taking a step. The bodhisattva that enters without taking a step. The modality of being in the midst of

[48:34]

Not retreating, not going forward. Just in the midst of. Not folding out, not folding in. Simply in the midst of. In the midst of difference. Gregory Bateson said, defining information. Information is difference, which makes a difference. And I'd like to actually speak, I don't know if I can speak about information theory. But if everything is changing, everything is different. And it's differences that make the difference. And as Peter Dreyer pointed out earlier, sometimes you push the pause button. The two little lines that meet in infinity.

[50:11]

Anyway. You push the pause button and you stop. You get off the train, have a smoke, take a walk. Or you get off the train of your mind and in the stillness of entering without taking a step. And in many situations, This is the best approach. To stop in the midst of. In the midst of difference. It's almost as if you're facing the world in its locked, sometimes locked dimensions.

[51:14]

You know, if you have a bunch of keys. And if you usually go unlock a series of doors at your office or someplace in a regular sequence. and your hand just knows which key comes next and whether it's turned T-side up or T-side down And even in the dark it goes right into the lock. It's a kind of embodied knowledge. And one aspect of practice is more and more you trust this embodied knowledge. And it sounds like here you're really in a world controlled by your habits.

[52:26]

Yes, maybe we could say shaped by your physical embodied habits. But quite free of your mental habits. And that opens you to things. Okay, so we can imagine Samantabhadra, Vajradhara, has stopped for a moment in the midst of the situation, in the midst of the differences, And some situations require this aside that you might emotionally and spiritually and so forth require it because it's almost like you're the key the world is the lock and

[53:42]

You're waiting to hear the tumblers fall. The tumblers? The levers? Yeah. I mean, locks are either levers or tumblers. I knew somebody who was quite a friend of mine. He could really pick locks. He wasn't a criminal either. He just liked doing it. He was one of those people who had certain uncanny senses. He could take a paper clip or something and go into a lock and he could feel the levers or the tumblers. And then the door would open. He also had a funny skill of always knowing what time it was.

[54:57]

You'd spend the afternoon with him. Yeah, and you'd say, what time is it? And you'd say, well... When did we last know the time? Well, we left the restaurant at 1.20. And he'd say, oh, it's 5.40. That's incredible. He had yogic skills I don't have. Yeah. Okay, but sometimes you're in a situation and you need to be in the midst of the difference. The difference, I won't say anything important.

[55:58]

I don't believe you. You don't believe me. Isn't that a sweet compliment? I always say things that are important. So in the midst of differences which make a difference if you can pause like Peter says feel the pause in the midst of appearance that waits for appearance and sometimes you can feel the tumblers fall. Or the levers open up for the key way. And the situation opens itself. And I think we're in some kind of situation like that with Hotzenholz.

[57:08]

It's a very complicated situation. And I don't really know if we can... One part of me is clearly for it. But that doesn't mean I think we could or should do it. So in the midst of all these situations, I also feel waiting to see how the levers or tumblers fall. And whether this extraordinary possibility will open up. So those are examples of folded in-ness, folded out-ness, and unmoving in the midst.

[58:10]

Bewegungslos in der Mitte. And my response to Frank and Katrin and Peter's questions or statements. And a little extra thrown in. Okay, let's sit for a few moments. I like these new platforms. We could find you the new platforms. Room for the bell and everything. I'm moving in the midst.

[60:19]

Entry without taking step.

[60:28]

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