Good morning. We're in this world together. I'm very glad we're in this world together. In fact, you are my world. I'm not just being facetious. I'm here in Europe because of you. I came for a visit because this physical place Europe exists. Ich kam zu Besuch, weil dieser physische Ort Europa existiert. But I come back because of you. So we're in this world together, but also you are my world on this planet and in particular in Europe.

[01:06]

You are my world on this planet and also in particular in Europe. Yesterday afternoon on an early Colorado morning my daughter Sophia called me up And she said, out of the blue, I just picked up the phone. It was too early for them to call. And this sweet young voice said, Papa, thank you for making me. And I said, making you what? She said, making me.

[02:12]

I said, well, you're 10 years old. She said, no, no, not till 451. I said, well, you're welcome. I said, that was a big job making a whole human being. She said, well, thank you. I said, but your mother did most of the work. I could have said labor. Anyway. But certainly, I am her world. And she's very much, not all of my world, but very much of my world. But the sense... But I'm trying to get across here. And we just had this seminar this weekend, What is the World?

[03:21]

And I could have said the yogic matrix of practice. In other words, the world is the matrix of practice. I form myself through the world. Can you give me a glass of water, please? Sorry. Sorry. Okay. So I'm trying to describe in this seminar, this practice week, the yogic body, but in a larger sense, what is yogic culture.

[04:31]

And in trying to describe that, what am I trying, what are we trying to do? Yeah, I'm trying to describe the world that arises through practice. Here comes the water. Thank you so much. I said nothing important while you were there. Mmm. trying to describe the world that arises through practice and then that world once arisen becomes the matrix of practice becomes the matrix or conditions of practice through which we mature

[05:55]

our practice. Create the conditions for realization and a freedom from mental suffering. Now When I attempt to or do during these days describe this matrix of practice. Which again arises through practice and becomes the conditions for practice. I'm I'm picking out salient, salient, the most important, salient features to describe.

[07:27]

It's sort of maybe it's a little bit like an architect's rendering of a building with fake people standing in front of it. The whole thing may look better than it will when it's finished. But it certainly looks less alive than when it will be finished. So all I'm doing is pointing out that a description like I'm making may have a kind of interesting vividness, but it's... When you live it, it's not so different than anything else.

[08:36]

What does lebendigkeit mean? Don't suffer. No. I wrestle. You wrestle. Okay. Being living. Beingness. Aliveness. Aliveness. Okay. Sounds nice when you say it. So I wondered what was happening. It's a nice feeling anyway. Yeah. How are you? Okay. Okay. Okay, so we have several assumptions.

[09:51]

I've suggested that our characteristic of a yogic culture One is that most immediately important for our practice is that all, as I said so often, all mental phenomena have a physical component and all, etc. And the second assumption I mentioned is that change engenders change. You use change to affect change. And to decide, as I said yesterday, to change your state of mind.

[10:52]

By taking a cold shower, this is a yogic act. To decide to come to Yohanesan for the weekend or the week because you know you may feel a little better or different afterwards. Or to sit down and do zazen. It's really of course it's an assumption that doing something will change us. But this is so thoroughly understood to be the case in yoga that it assumes the plasticity of the neurological... neurological brain body system.

[12:02]

A fairly recent assumption of contemporary science and popular culture is this plasticity of the brain, etc. That's assumed from the beginning by yogic culture. A recent example of it in Japan is they stopped teaching people the mental soroban or abacus. A recent change in Japan was that they stopped teaching people the abacus calculator. In Japan it's called a Soroban.

[13:14]

And the mental Soroban is you teach kids and they can do it from kindergarten. You teach kids to use the abacus. And then once they're reasonably good at it, but not... Great, just pretty good. You teach them to visualize it. And then they do it in their head. And it's amazing. They have competitions. Can you do 250 numbers in a row before you make a mistake? Or only 180? So, you know, somebody will say 180 plus 362, 432 plus 712, and they just listen to that, and then at some point they'll say 17,744. It's right as with a calculate.

[14:28]

You didn't really have to translate the numbers exactly. I am very inexact. All right. But what they know it does, and they can see it does now, it develops right brain-bodiedness. The external abacus uses the left brain and the internalized abacus develops the right brain. And they noticed that by stopping But training kids to do this and using calculators, kids were losing the subtleness, which is really important in Japanese culture, of right brain thinking.

[15:35]

And to use the abacus, in other words, to use external phenomena as a yogic matrix is a yogic view of the world. Okay. Now, when we talk about, as we, as an implied part of what we're doing these days because of Hotzenholz, and our own, and of course, long before that, our relationship to Crestone and practice period and so forth, And what is the relationship of monastic and lay practice? Don't get tired of my talking about it. And one of the Perhaps the main thing we emphasize is the incubatory, not the understanding that develops, but the incubation of the teachings which happens in a monastic context.

[17:20]

That happens also by our coming here regularly. And it happens by your bringing these teachings into your daily life. But another thing we're doing that's particular to us the presence of this yogic practice in Western culture. We try to, in Johanneshof and Crestone, create a yogic matrix. The phenomenal world As a yogic world.

[18:27]

Yeah. I can't say it better than that, I don't think, or simpler than that. Okay. Now, so that's change affects change. Now what we spoke about yesterday was the posture as an activity, a yogic posture as an activity. And it almost sounded like, and maybe it is like, that a yogic posture is two postures at once. And certainly when we think in our entity-based language, yeah, it comes out like there's two postures at once.

[19:28]

But it's really just an activity. So what could we call it? I mean, again, what words can I use? Maybe active cusp posture. A cusp? A cusp is where two circles meet or a spear point or in mathematics where a curve changes direction. A cusp. In architecture it's where In architecture, where like petals would meet. A cusp, it's just a point. A point where things change. Change. Change or meet.

[20:31]

And or meet, yes. I thought that would be probably the same word in German. Cusp. What? the mathematician here teaches excuse me the mathematician the mathematician says this is where a curve becomes a point and loses its properties as a curve well that's ok too one would understand that in German as a non-mathematician so the word is difficult sorry ok When Charlotte Selver, who was German-Austrian and part of the German physical movement before the Second World War? In Germany, before the Second World War, after the First World War, there was a whole movement of body culture and nudity, etc.

[21:40]

She was part of that. And she moved to the United States and she started the sensory awareness movement or teaching. And she was a teacher of mine. from almost exactly the same time as I started practicing with Suzuki Roshi. And she said to me once, I mean she said to everyone once that we're sitting with her. She said, come up to standing. She didn't say stand up. She said, come up to standing. And this changed. the way I stand up for the rest of my life.

[22:56]

Because I felt myself come up through a trajectory which eventually ended up with standing. And at each moment in that coming up, were lots of little possible postures. And that trajectory we could say is a yogic posture. Not so different from throwing a piece of wadded up paper in a wastebasket. You experience the trajectory as a series of possibilities. And the trajectory establishes what kind of standing you have.

[24:10]

And then the standing itself is a continual adjustment. So if I say, give you a turning phrase like just now arriving, That is a statement characteristic of yoga culture. That you're in the midst of arriving with every step, with every whatever. Okay. Now Dogen said somewhere, arriving hinders arriving. It would be like saying, movement hinders stillness.

[25:17]

Or stillness hinders movement. So here I'm trying to find a way to say that this sense of posture is an activity. And the yogi feels him or herself always in the midst of the activity of posture. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I have a question. Does everyone else then get a chance to? No, go ahead. How's the relationship between activity and stillness? Tomorrow.

[26:19]

It's too simple and too difficult a question. How are we doing here? Okay. Another assumption is that we use breath that we weave body and mind. Body and mind can be woven together. And primarily we weave body and mind together with the attentional breath. But before I say more about that, which I don't have too much time left, Let me say that there's also the practice of making use of the partnership of the body in relationship to the mind.

[27:47]

Which is part of weaving mind and body together. But it's also... articulating the difference between mind and body. So my simple example at the level of taking a cold shower is choosing a tie. I choose a lot of things every day, but I don't choose ties anymore. When I used to go to the university, when I worked for the University of California, I wore a tie every day.

[28:49]

And... I never chose them. I mean, I might have on some occasion, but basically I never chose them. Using this as a simple example. I would take whatever tie first appeared in my mind. And rarely did I go against that choice. Okay, so now I've developed this so much that I hardly think about anything. I just do whatever first appears in my mind. It could be dangerous. But what I'm going to talk about, what I'm going to wear, whether I get an airplane ticket or not,

[29:57]

I wait until it appears in my mind and then I do it. And this is part of that intelligence and knowing of the body which is absorbing more information than consciousness. And as I've learned to trust this process, I've found that this, whatever first appears in my mind, is 95% of my decisions. And I trust it the way people, we spoke earlier, trust their intuition. Sometimes I have a sense that it might be wrong. But even then, mostly, I want to train my body thinking to be more subtle, so I let it be wrong and I make the mistake.

[31:19]

I order in restaurants that way. I dial phone numbers that way. Oh, it's wrong. What the heck? Now, it is clear to me that this has developed through my yogic practice. And it's clear to me that ten years ago it wasn't as... effective and accurate as it is now, or useful. And it's clear that at some point I had to make a decision. To trust this bodily intelligence almost 100%.

[32:26]

And the trust of this bodily intelligence, more than I trust consciousness, except for consciousness to think things through logically, is a characteristic of the arts and crafts of Japan. And characteristic of how you design a life in which you allow, which is, you design a life in which bodily attention can function most fully. Now Now I would like to talk about the alchemy of attentional breath, which burns self-referential thinking out of the world.

[33:38]

But unless you want to stay here for a week, I'd better wait till tomorrow. Because I have to sort of see if I can edge ourselves into seeing that. Isn't this fun? To explore the world this way? And I can do it because you are my world. May our purpose be in every way and every place.

[34:23]

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