Okay, I don't feel I've been clear enough about this sense of a self-body or body-self. Or maybe even, if you can say it in German, bodily self instead of body self. And since I feel this is so central, particularly to see the craft of this in our own Western culture, It's so central to realized practice that I hope if it isn't clear yet, the seeds of this are in you.

[01:09]

Why is this important to me that you understand? Well, I don't want you to waste your time. And yeah, I like you. Is there some word stronger than that, without going too far? But it's also that whatever understanding I have, I don't have it. To the extent that there is some understanding, it exists in the context of situations. So if I have some understanding, let's say I have, it's not like a possession.

[02:29]

It's something that comes out sometimes in the context of myself, and my own context is always changing. So now I want to see, I want to feel what understanding or... Realization there is in the context of us, us, not some other group, us. Sukhiroshi said in 1971 or so, Kasahara, somewhat not too long before he died, Yeah, something quite simple. The nature of thinking mind, we can also say the nature of consciousness, the nature of thinking mind is to limit reality.

[03:39]

realität einzuschränken, damit wir diese verstehen können. Glaubt ihr, dass das wahr ist? Yeah, I would not only think it's true, I feel it's true, I know it's true. At least it's true in the context of my life. And I think probably because you're practicing, you also know it's true in the context of your life. The nature of thinking mind is to limit reality. To make it easier to understand. So that we only know a shadow of reality, he says. Yeah, now do you take that to be the case?

[05:19]

So that we only, in fact, know a shadow of reality. Okay, and then he says, so if you don't depend on thinking mind... If you don't depend on thinking mind, then you can know things around you as they actually exist. Okay, now what does it mean not to... Now, all right, let me just say, whatever that... That statement, that simple statement of Suzuki Roshi's, is one of the assumptions of Buddhism.

[06:23]

So, this simple statement is one of it. Yeah, Buddhism is based on this idea. If you don't really... No, that's true. Almost none of the teachings make sense. And much of the world doesn't make sense in my opinion. Okay. So what does it mean not to depend on thinking minds? Now, first of all, let me say, thinking mind or consciousness is the medium of self. From the point of view of Buddhism, self is a creature of consciousness. It's self swims in consciousness and

[07:28]

dries up and dies on the beach of reality. On the beach of what, sorry? Reality. Thanks. Yeah, the sandy beach of too much talk. Okay, there are other things that we can call self in our culture, our psychology, but from a Buddhism point of view, we should have a different name. Okay. But this continuity of self, of thinking self is, yeah, what Buddhism means by self. Now I find it easier to practice these teachings, these views, insights, in transitions.

[09:03]

So when I'm crossing the street to go to the bakery or something, cars are coming. Yeah, they do. Autos come, yeah. And I think, is myself crossing the road or my body? Well, myself has some idea that it's going to the bakery. But if my body doesn't cross the road carefully, it's unimportant where I was going. But still, I use the road as two experiences. To what extent is my body crossing and to what extent is myself crossing?

[10:14]

Okay, now when I do the service, I had mentioned this before. One aspect of the service is that each aspect is separate. I don't want myself to go to the altar. Buddhism doesn't care about myself. Of course I have some habit of how to get to the altar, you know. But I actually feel I don't know every time. I step back and then I, what's next? And I actually don't know.

[11:23]

And sometimes I step back on the bowing mat and bow again. That's not what I'm supposed to do. But I don't really care. That's what I did. And then I step back again. And then, you know, I know the ritual, so I step to the... Jeez, which direction do I step? I guess I step to the left. Then I get to the corner of the bowing mat. And if you look carefully at my body, there should be no indication in it which direction I'm going next. I ought to be in some version of non-habitual body space.

[12:27]

And certainly non-self body space. Sure, then I proceed up the highway here. Yeah. Like that. The altar barn. Okay. Okay. Now, if I look at Frank Gehry's drawings, the architect who did the Barcelona, is it? Museum. Bilbao. Bilbao. Yeah, and I, you know, I don't know him. I actually used to know somebody who worked with him, another architect in Los Angeles. And she used to tell me a little bit about how he worked.

[13:46]

And I have a book upstairs that his parents gave me, actually, after visiting him. And he does sketches. I mean, really, if you're not Frank Gehry, you have no idea what these could be sketches of. He just kind of goes like that. Then he does another one, he goes like that, and pretty soon some kind of form appears. And Marie-Louise said that he spoke at your architecture school, taught there, and the students were, what, about process?

[14:53]

He also taught at the university where I studied in Zurich, and... Und die Studenten sind so zielorientiert. Und das hat ihn ganz wahnsinnig gemacht. Das sagt er, Architektur ist ein Prozess. Ich habe manchmal nicht einmal meine fertigen Häuser angeschaut. Also das ist doch unglaublich. Also er entwirft ein Gebäude und schaut es sich nicht einmal an. Yeah, this is great. I like it. This is the body self. The body that knows. And you have to find out what the body knows. And the famous French mathematician Henri Poincaré said, who did incredible work in almost every field of science, mathematics, physics.

[16:01]

He had a similar process of doodling. He was at the apex of French science, so he had to go to a lot of meetings and administrative stuff. Supposedly he did it very well, but he always doodled during the meetings, sometimes solving equations and playing with equations. So this is something... The body that Poincaré and Frank Gehry assume they're living is the same body that, as far as I can tell, that practice assumes we're living.

[17:21]

Okay. So the purpose of what I'm calling, yeah, again, a paratactic pause, I'm sorry for these weird words, Also dieser Zweck dessen, was ich diese parataktische Pause nenne und entschuldige, dass ich immer solche Worte verwenden muss. Aber ich bin wirklich glücklich, dass ich dieses Wort entdeckt habe. Denn noch einmal, das bedeutet einfach bloß, Dinge nebeneinander bestehen zu lassen. So now what's the purpose of this pause? To let this non-thinking mind body to come out.

[18:42]

nichtdenkenden Geist hervorkommen zu lassen. Pause sounds like you sit down and do nothing, but we have a more elegant word than stopping, so it's a kind of sustaining or something, I'd rather say. Ja, innehalten oder anhalten ist besser als Pause, weil Pause klingt so... Yeah, pause is like... You just let go of everything. When you do kin hin. Well, one way of doing it. But there's a break, okay. So in English, a pause means like to stop between words or something. Like he paused for a moment to gather his thoughts. So you use whatever in Holden, that's fine. Okay, so I would like you, maybe the entry to this, what I'm talking about, would be to really get in the habit of this pause.

[20:05]

Now, almost all the teachings, you know, the Skandhas, the Diamond Sutra or whatever, they say, hold the teaching before you, hold the teaching. Hold the teaching means to incubate it. As I said earlier, the teachings of Buddhism are written to be incubated, not to be understood. So, in the... So, if you... Or a phrase, like it's come up several times now, already connected... And as I often point out, views exist before perception.

[21:24]

Our perceptions reinforce our views. So you're trying to hold a view or a phrase, a gate phrase, In your intentional mind. Not your thinking mind. Your intentional mind. And you're holding it and letting it incubate. Okay, now do you remember when I told you that about my dental tragedy. They yanked this poor old tooth out of me.

[22:26]

And the dentist said, you want it. It's got some gold in it somewhere and stuff. I said, take it away and let it wait for me in heaven. And the technician came with a paper towel and picked it up. There's a lot of parts up there waiting for me. Wisdom teeth. Fingernails. I'm sorry. No, me too. But I had to get the territory of the tooth, the systemic territory of the tooth, Yeah, to get the what?

[23:41]

To get the... To discover... Oh, you don't need a verb. Why do you... Yeah. The Germans all put verbs at the end. It's too paratectic to translate. Hey. Okay. So... to get to this systemic constellation of the tooth, I had to notice my way to it. Now remember that the most enlightenment experiences one has the feeling of during and after, hey, this is how things actually exist. During the experience and after, you have the experience, you have the feeling, hey, this is true, this is how things actually exist.

[24:44]

And these scientists, like Poincaré, when they get free of the container of views, And they see something new mathematically or in terms of physics. They feel, hey, this is true. And enlightenment is about how we actually exist and how the world actually exists.

[25:48]

And when scientists describe their process, they often describe it as unconscious in various ways. I actually don't think they have the vocabulary to describe the process, most of them. But I think what they're actually doing is exactly what Buddhism means by holding a teaching before you. You're incubating something in intentional mind. But even if you're not incubating something in intentional mind, Something specific. You're incubating the body self in this non-thinking mind.

[26:49]

Körpergeist in diesem nicht denkenden Geist. Because although you chess players they say can know about six moves ahead. Also man sagt, dass Schachspieler ungefähr sechs Züge im Voraus im Geiste halten können. And I believe they can't, even Big Blue, the computer, they can't program it to know more than about six moves ahead because there's too many hundreds of millions of possibilities with each move. But you can, what we call it intuition, But I wouldn't call it intuition.

[28:21]

Or it's a more developed intuition is what we mean by Buddhist practice. To know simultaneously how to let something incubate that in fact in your ordinary life you're already incubating six moves ahead, something like that. And there's a danger, because if you're in a container, You can't, you don't want to know the next six moves. The next six moves might violate the rules or change your job. So Buddhism has, you know, A lot of the teachings are about how not to be afraid to be out of the container.

[29:38]

How do you find your... your balance, your integrity when the container is gone. So to let the systemic tooth in, to my noticing, I had to engage in a noticing process. I noticed one thing and I let it lay side by side. Didn't think about it. And then I noticed something else. In my shoulder, what makes my shoulder got to do with my tooth? And then I notice something else.

[30:47]

And then I notice something else. And after a while I notice this, as I said, this flattened sphere. And then I notice that up here in one side of the flattened sphere was the center. If I move the center around, I move the whole sphere. And if I concentrated on the center, I could feel, it felt like my tooth was healing faster. And I could shrink the sphere from this point. Shrink it into that point. Yeah, like that. Now, whether this is all, you know, this is my experience, you know, But I'm using it as a point that we need to notice the world without views.

[32:14]

Notice the world without views. Denn wir müssen die Welt kennenlernen, bemerken, ohne Sichtweisen. That is also the purpose of the pause. Das ist auch Zweck dieses Inhalts. You stop for a moment. Moment by moment stops. Also man hält an, Moment für Moment. And you let a noticing process occur. which Dogen calls to complete that which appears. And you don't think what you notice, you just notice. So in each situation, In every situation there's an infinite number of aspects.

[33:27]

But you only notice certain ones, connect lines with certain ones. There's a kind of pattern arises from noticing. if you're continuously in thinking or continuously in self, this noticing doesn't occur. You do not know, as Sukhira, she says, the true nature of things. And when you let the true nature of things or things to come forward, Now, to give you the second half of Dogen's parallel statements, to cultivate and authenticate the self, to cultivate and authenticate the ten thousand things,

[34:30]

by conveying the self to them, is to get lost in things. It's not the world as it actually exists. To let things come forward. And cultivate and authenticate the self. Is realization or what? Okay. This pause is to let things come forward and cultivate and authenticate The incubating true self.

[35:55]

Can you make this a no sentence again? To... Okay, why not? I could say it a thousand times, and each time it's different. To... Let the 10,000 things come forward. How do you do that? That's finding this... I let things come forward to show me the system of the tooth. Okay, to let things come forward. The 10,000 things to come forward. And cultivate and authenticate the self. And to cultivate and authenticate the incubating true self. To cultivate and authenticate the incubating bodily self.

[37:11]

Is creativity for sure. And sometimes enlightenment. This is to live in the world as it actually exists. Not as a thing, an entity, but a process. What a relief. Thank you very much.

[37:47]

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