Thanks for being here. And so we're starting a seminar this evening on why sitting. No, it doesn't sound like a very interesting topic. But I think it's, yeah, an axial point, to use Carl Jasper's term, an axial point in our civilizational shift that's going on right now. So it seems to be an axial point in terms of a shift within our civilization. And, yeah, but I'm not going to talk about that this evening. That's a bit too big a topic and I don't even know if I can do it tomorrow.

[01:02]

But today we had the kind of pre-day of, you know, about half of us. Yeah, just to have some opportunity for discussion. And what we discussed turned out to be memory and thinking. So this evening I'd like to continue the topic of thinking. But thinking as related to meditation practice and mindfulness practice. A larger topic in the sense of how is the body brought into thinking?

[02:22]

Now, we don't emphasize it so much in our society, but in ancient times in the West, you know, taking an oath, giving your word was... job, extremely important. And somehow, even if you were a military person and you got your troops to all say, we swear to stay with you, and somehow the words made a difference. And generally, when you took an oath, you repeated whatever was said, whatever the oath was, was said by one person and repeated by the person taking the oath. And we still do that when we take precepts in Buddhism as a lay initiate or as an ordained person.

[03:24]

The precepts are, you know, I'm doing the ceremony, I... say the precept, and then the other person says the precept. And then the precepts are meant to be bodily held, bodily, bodily, bodily held in your activity. This actually is a form of thinking. Yeah, and I'm not practicing with all of you, and some of you I won't see ever again.

[04:31]

Maybe. But it'd be nice if there could be something you take away from this evening that... is present in your activity, present in your thinking. I know one of the precepts I like particularly is do not take that which is not given. Now, yeah, that's sometimes translated simply, don't steal. But, yeah, that's a kind of, yeah, rule. Yeah, you can follow that as a rule, I mean, if you're honest. But it's a much more complex intention to not take that which is not given.

[05:44]

And you have to sort of, yeah, try it out. I'm speaking right now. You can take what I'm saying as you wish. Because I'm giving it. But sometimes when you're with somebody, a person, a friend, where's the line between they're giving you or you have to just wait? And some people ask me questions sometimes which are really... I haven't... It's not something I'm giving or ready to give.

[06:48]

But the person might think, well, everything's open, everything, why can't this be given right now? But it's much more subtle if you wait until it's given. And then there's a mutuality in the giving and the receiving. So let's just take this phrase again. Do not take that which is not given. You hold that in your feeling, in your activity. As perhaps, yeah, a kind of wisdom. And You can hold it, I think, in your activity the rest of your life.

[08:02]

And you won't use it up in the next hundred years. It's still, meaning will still, oh yes, what's given, what's not given. And how powerful it is when you take that which is given. Okay, so such a statement becomes a form of thinking. And that depends what we mean by thinking, of course. It's not discursive thinking as we usually Yeah, think of thinking. No, it's not. It's not logical thinking. But it does, well, the word think actually means, it's the same root as thank and thought. Thank, to be thankful. And its roots are like methinks.

[09:24]

Methinks in Old English is, it seems to be so. So, at least in English, and I suppose since English is a form of German, isn't it? A lot of French vocabulary. Yeah. That thinking suggests a territory of gratitude, of accepting, And it points to an aspect of thinking that we don't notice much. Which is, thinking is a process of gathering.

[10:40]

Yeah, I mean, if you, you know, linguists have shown, if you don't have a lot of information about words and associations with words and the use of words, Just strictly speaking, the sentence means almost nothing unless you bring a lot to it. So when we use a language, we're using the language to gather. Okay. So if we take this precept idea, Do not take that which is not given. And we repeat it between ourselves as a form of vowing. And then we hold it in our activity, physically hold it as a presence. It gathers associations.

[11:54]

Perhaps makes us more subtle and subtle in our actions. Okay, so I would say you can call that a kind of thinking process, a mental, physical process that leads us into A deeper knowing. Now it always amuses me when I install new software on my computer. Or updates. They always have a little licensing agreement that you have to click on. And they used to do it, at least some years ago, you just, you agree and you just click the second time and you agree.

[13:13]

But now they make you lift the cursor up and you have to go to another box, dialog box, and click it. Well, that's like raising your hand and putting your hand in the Bible and say, I agree. Someone has decided we've got to make him at least move the cursor. So you clearly have to have made a decision, a mental decision and a physical movement. You have a keyboard with the cursor. to agree that you've accepted the software, license, or whatever it is. So even now in our cyberspace, there's the idea that thinking is connected with a physical gesture. Now, the usual way in which the

[14:26]

The kind of the thinking process that's emphasized in yogic practice is primarily intention. Now, Dogen, the 13th century Japanese Zen teacher, he says discriminating thinking is very important. to come to the point that you make a decision to practice. But in practice, discriminating thinking isn't so useful. Okay, so discriminating, to discriminate, to think logically is useful in lots of ways. Practice emphasizes this thinking through an intention.

[16:01]

Okay. Now the example that I use most commonly. Is my teacher's most common zazen advice again? Do not invite your thoughts to tea. Okay. So you just say, if you have never sat before, don't sit much, you try it. You sit down, get your posture sort of reasonably straight. Now let me divert for a moment and just say that it's assumed in a yoga culture, of course, that posture is... big part of your state of mind.

[17:09]

So, I mean it's very clear if I by lie down, I'm much more likely to be able to sleep. So clearly the mind of sleeping is connected with this horizontal posture. Mind of waking is connected to the vertical posture. But this obvious difference, this obvious difference in posture, in yoga culture is refined into a highly tuned way to bring in states of mind. Various kinds of waking mind.

[18:12]

Confidence and awareness. And various minds which gather associations in different ways. And we learn these things, get a feel for these things, more likely through Zazen meditation practice than we will any other way that I know of. So you sit down. You can imagine it's very easy not to invite your thoughts to tea. We can all do that.

[19:29]

Okay. But what about the thought not to invite your thoughts to tea? We had to invite that one to tea so we don't invite the others to tea. But that's not a... You know, we have so few words for... the mind and for the activity of the mind that we just use a few words for a lot of things. Like emotion and feeling get conflated and thinking covers a whole wide territory. Okay, so here what we have is a distinction between discursive thoughts that you're not inviting to tea and an intentional thought which does the not inviting.

[20:37]

Okay, now the difference is is not just that one's an intention and one's discursive. Okay, now I'm assuming you all sort of know this. And some of you know it. Clearly some of you have a feeling for it. But I think that we it's helpful to really get the picture clear and we can develop it more in the spectrum of our own activity.

[21:39]

Okay, so we have discursive thinking, one thing after another. Yeah, there's the sound of the train and the train, I was on the train the other day and The train's going to Oldenburg, you know. And such thinking gathers attention into its process. Mm-hmm. So it generates a particular kind of mind. Now again, I'm sorry to bore you, but dreaming mind is one kind of mind, waking mind is another kind of mind. Dreams don't appear in waking mind much. And Conscious logical thinking doesn't occur in dreaming mind much.

[22:58]

Okay, so now we have a very important idea in yogic thinking that the field of mind generates the dreams. And the field of mind generates conscious thinking. And the trick in going to sleep The trick when falling asleep is that you let the field of consciousness shift into the field of sleep. We all know how to do that sort of thing. Every night you have a chance at it. And in meditation practice you learn how to get the field of consciousness to shift into the field of meditation, which is neither sleeping nor waking.

[24:00]

And then you hold that field, which is neither dreaming nor waking. Man hält also dieses Feld, das weder Torn noch Wachsein ist. So dass man eine Art körperliche Fertigkeit erwirbt, also dieses Feld, das weder Wachen noch Schlafen ist, eben auch körperlich zu halten. So it's one of the reasons why the most not necessarily the most joyful but the most effective time to sit is in the morning when you're not yet fully awake. Because you begin to know the overlap of these two minds, waking and sleeping.

[25:12]

And you begin to learn a territory. You kind of push sleep away and push waking away, and you're in some other kind of So you're sitting up, the upper part of your body is awake and the lower part of your legs are asleep. I'm joking, but it's often the case. So you're trying to find this posture is a posture developed, you can try other ways, but developed so that you can be in this posture in a mind which is neither waking nor sleeping. Okay. So the intention to not invite your thoughts to tea is on the one hand not inviting your thoughts to tea, it's doing an action.

[26:30]

And by staying with the thought, the intention not to invite your thoughts to tea, you're generating a field of mind that's not conducive to or doesn't support Discursive thinking. Okay. So an intention, I mean, to not invite your philosophy and discursive, they're all mental formations. But let's call them mental formations, but let's call one discursive, and let's call one an intention. Okay, now, when you generate a state of mind rooted in an intention, generated through an intention,

[27:55]

your attention is more widely diffused than focused as in discursive thinking. Okay, so, Okay. Now, if you're working on a koan, which is, most of you know, a kind of Zen statement. Yeah. I don't know. Let's just take one. Just now is enough. Just now is not enough if you're hungry. Just now is enough, in fact, because you have no choice. All you've got is now. It has to be enough. Okay, so generate the intention or the phrase, you hold the phrase, just now is enough.

[29:17]

It can generate a mind Yeah. Where just now is enough. And it gathers information through your activity that supports that. All right. Again, use the most obvious ones I usually use. Yeah. we have a built-in assumption that we're separated from each other. You're over there and I'm here. And so we have a basic cultural view we're already separated. Right. But we're also already connected.

[30:24]

Now, if you take the view as an antidote to already separated, already connected will begin to bring, show you the information in how we are connected. Already, a phrase like this, an intention, as in the Eightfold Path, right views come before, perfecting views comes before perfecting speech and perfecting behavior. So views are prior to perception.

[31:33]

Discursive thinking is after perception. Now, so if you have a view already connected, your senses will tell you, excuse me, if you have a view already separated, your senses will confirm that we're all separated. But if you have a view of already connected, your senses will begin to show you a way we're already connected. So from the point of view of yogic thinking, the most fundamental aspects of thinking, what that, the intentions and views that thinking is rooted in. Okay. So again, intentions are at the center of yogic thinking.

[32:49]

And so then part of the formation of intentions is what kind of intention can you actually hold? And if you study the development of oaths and vows back in the Middle Ages or in Asia, it was really worked out that grammar and And the alliteration in a phrase that you could say it and remember it and physically feel it. Yeah, so some phrases, as intentions, work, have a physical presence, and some don't. Part of this process of thinking

[33:58]

is to form an intention you can physically feel. Yeah, and this has to do with our friendships, our jobs, our trying to think through something complex. You'll find ways that this is Okay, now, there's a... Okay, what we bring our attention to who gathers associations. Okay, so now one aspect of this yogic thinking Now, we're talking here about yoga meaning posture, physical postures and mental postures.

[35:18]

And also perceptual postures. Okay. So I can look at all of you. And I can look at you and sort of feel you all at once. Or I can look at some particular aspect. Might just be your glasses. Might be your green shirt. Okay. Then I go back to the field. Then I go back to the particular. And then I go back to the field. And that's a kind of perceptual process you can train yourself in or get in the habit of.

[36:18]

And you can sort of do it with your breathing, too. Okay, now what are you doing when you do that? When I'm looking at the particular, I'm generating a certain kind of mind. And it gathers information, associations. When I look at the field of you all at once, I'm gathering associations in a different way. And this gathering of associations is a process of thinking. Okay, so just imagine a photograph where we have a skill at this is in advertising. So you look at a photograph.

[37:33]

It could be anything. Notice where your noticing goes to. And you can pull your attention away from that spot, try to look somewhere else, and it usually goes back to the first spot you noticed. Yeah, and I began noticing this kind of stuff years ago when I was in high school, because I noticed that if you saw the advertisement flat, There was a lot of stuff they had going on between the people. If you saw it in three dimensions, yeah, it just looked like a group of people standing there. Okay, but the advertisers, and I know this from the fact, they get part of the message or part of your attention in the flat surface while you're thinking the three-dimensional surface.

[38:54]

They're trying to, of course, sell you something. First trying to get your attention and then sell you something once they've got your attention. What is a guy? Where your attention goes to is a kind of thinking. Well, if I notice something here, and then that leads me to notice that, and that leads me to notice that, yeah, that's a kind of thinking. It led me somewhere. Okay. So I think that's without getting into more

[39:57]

for more technical yogic detail, the process of sitting still, of discovering a kind of silence, and I read a while ago that the Kabbalists, ancient Hebrew way of looking at it, Kabbalist way of looking at the alphabet. Aleph, A-L-E-P-H, was not a sound, it's the position of the larynx before you speak. It's the bodily position from which all sounds can come. So it's a kind of, it is silence. Yes. And in meditation you're coming into a bodily silence.

[41:19]

And it really is and can become A silence or stillness, physical stillness, same word, stillness and stillness. From which thinking, activity, feelings arise. So here we have, if I look at the particular and then the field, the contents of mind so I can look at the particular and then all of the contents at once and then take the contents away and just have the field before contents arise.

[42:20]

So it's a kind of physical feeling you can have. And if I look at the contents of any mind, whatever I'm thinking about or looking at, whatever I am observing, and I keep the feeling, but I hold back the observing. In a way, think non-observant. In that thinking, non-observing, there's a kind of field from which things can arise. And this evening I'm partially or maybe mostly commenting on a famous statement within Zen practice.

[43:28]

A monk asked Yue Shan or Yao Shan In steadfast thinking, what do you think? Actually, what is meant by steadfast? Steadfast means fast means in one place, like you pass in something. And stead means to stand still. Yeah. So stead means... Yeah. If you're steadfast, I can't move you. That's right. Oh, you're steadfast. Standfast. Yeah, steadfast. We have a similar word. When in steadfast thinking... Sitting. Sitting. What do you think?

[44:28]

Yeah. Think non-thinking. And the proverbial monk says, well, how do you think non-thinking? He says, beyond thinking. Okay, so... Most translators don't know what to do with this. They don't know how to translate it or explain it. But if you just stay with the fact that you can observe the contents of mind, then you can hold back that observing. That would be non-thinking, non-observing. And you've almost created a surface where fish can come up to and birds can come down to.

[45:32]

You've kind of created an intuitive field which is filled with associations in the phenomenal world and in the inner world. And thinking can appear from that. Okay, so that's something like thinking, non-thinking. Okay. So now I'll just tell you two anecdotes which I happened to think of recently. Yeah, so I was... So I was at the University of California at Berkeley. I was working there organizing conferences for them in 1962 or three or something.

[46:32]

Yeah, so I was going home late and there was this auditorium which I organized meetings in very often. And it was full of people. So full I couldn't get in. It was a big A bunch of people around the door. So I went around to a window, which I knew in the bushes, where you could climb up and sit on the windowsill. So I was sitting on the windowsill, and here was this little guy sitting over there where the painting is. With half of Hawaii around his neck. And he was smiling away and stroking his beard.

[47:37]

I had no idea who this guy was. He smiled a lot. And shortly after I climbed on the windowsill, whatever was happening ended. He was speaking in Indian-British-English. Anyway, so then he went outside and somehow the crowd carried me along. I ended up standing sort of this distance from it. And they were having some conversation as far as I remember about going to Canada or something. And so, yeah, I was just standing there sort of watching. And suddenly I thought, This guy is pretty good.

[48:47]

And I wondered where that thought came from. I hadn't been thinking about this guy as far as I knew. And I hadn't been thinking about him, but I'd been breathing about him. Without knowing it, noticing I'd done it, I coordinated my breath with his. And by that time I'd been practicing two or three years, and I'd learned to coordinate my breath with the person I'm with, without even knowing I'd learned to do it. And it's one of the teachings of how you're with somebody when they die, is you coordinate your breath with them and stay with the breath. You can slow their breath down or go with it, etc. So, I realized that as soon as my breath was in coordination with his, I felt his mind, and I, yeah, he's pretty good.

[50:03]

And I found out later this guy was called the Maharishi. Of Beatles and other fame. George Harrison. And I think it was his first visit to the United States. Now the other story, which is somehow similar, I'm coming down, but let me say that this thought, that he's pretty good, is a thought. It's a conclusion. And it came through a breath-body process, not a thinking process. So in Crestone, I live about 10 minutes or so from the... Six or seven minutes if you're racing to get to the Zendo.

[51:37]

And ten minutes or so of normal walking. But this particular night, night, I mean morning, 3.30, it would, you know, well before the sun came out, and it was really that night, that morning, totally dark. And for some strange reason I didn't have one of my two or three flashlights. So I had to start out in the dark. And it's rather, there's no real path and there's places where you just go about this far different. You end up in these rocks and... It's down in the mountain.

[52:39]

So I'm going step by step, making sure I'm not going to fall. I go down and make the turn, and then I more or less make the correct turn there. And then somehow I'm supposed to go under the arch of the tree branch, and I instead went just about half a meter to the side, and I'm going down into a little kind of grove. And I realized after a minute that I was in the wrong, a little off, but I could probably get back. And then I suddenly realized I was in a biomass. I was in some kind of quivering field of warmth. I was in a kind of vibrating field of warmth.

[53:58]

Maybe some of you already know that. I haven't even thought about the story for a long time. And I was in a herd, the midst of a small herd of deer, about 15 deer that used to hang out together. Ich war jedenfalls inmitten einer Herde, einer kleinen 15-köpfigen Herde von Rehen. And they were closer than you. They were just like right here. I could feel their warmth. Und die waren noch enger als wir beiden, und ich konnte ihre Wärme spüren. They were behind me, and to my side. Somehow I'd step right into the camp. Hello there. And they're right here and right here. And I thought, so I stood there, you know, maybe half a minute, sort of, a little more. This kind of feeling, it felt sexy. It felt like, wow, these guys, whoo.

[55:03]

And there was an immense feeling of trust. Because if I'd been walking down there in a day or a normal mind, they would have all moved. But I was walking with my breath very carefully and then I found myself breathing with them. And you know that one of the reasons lie detectors work quite well is it's very difficult for the body to lie. So they were kind of thinking, breathing me, and I was kind of breathing them and then thinking them too. If I'd been thinking about what I'm going to do when I get to the zendo, they probably would have run off.

[56:10]

I was just thinking breath step at a time and there was this Trust. They trusted me. So, you know, after, yes, I said half a minute or a little more, I started walking again and somehow I went right in between them and... Back to the Zendo. Yeah, and then I sat down in the Zendo with a bunch of other deer. Deer friends, anyway. And there was this feeling of not so different from being in the herd of deers. When you're in a sesshin, you're sitting next to somebody, silent for seven days, and yet in that silence, there's a tremendous kind of knowing.

[57:31]

Okay, that's enough on... the yogic thinking of breath and body. And we can end now, or if anybody wants to, if you come back in five, ten minutes, we can have some discussion. Or is it too late? Should we do that? No? Okay. Thank you for translating.

[58:01]

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