Well, as you know, I've been saying, give yourself over to the inside of the practice period. Yeah, and some of you have brought this up to me in Duxan and other occasions. And I would like to use it as an example of the craft of practice. Because it doesn't have much meaning just as a series of words, sequence of words. Unless you feel it as a kind of, the craft of it.

[01:09]

Yeah, I'm a little sleepy because I woke up at 1.30 and I got up at 2.30 and I thought it was 3.30. So I thought, oh, wonderful, 3.30, I can have an hour of zazen, so I sat for an hour. And then worked for a while, and then came and joined you here in the zendo and duksan. But for some reason, after all that, I found myself a little sleepy. Yeah, I noticed. Yeah, anyway. But a writing schedule doesn't fit very well on your schedule. But I've been putting off writing for 55 years, so I feel I have permission now.

[02:26]

I mean, not so much because I want to publish anything or write anything, really. It's just kind of my present craft or practice. Not so much because I want to publish something or write something specific, but rather because this is my practice and my craftsmanship. Michel Foucault, one of the most insightful guys around for a while, He said, writing writes writing.

[03:27]

And what he meant was, the craft of writing writes writing. Now, one of the problems with smart people is, The first one is they're smart. Usually they're not smart enough to understand the importance of craft. Most of their success in life has been based, especially in our culture, on understanding. And that's the real problem. I think that's the nub of the problem of how our lineage is going to be also a lay lineage. The nub of the problem, like the core or something?

[04:36]

Yeah, the nub means the point at which it turns. Okay, okay. And I think that's the turning point in the question or in the difficulty of how our line will also be a line line. Yeah, if your whole life has been you're rewarded for understanding, naturally you think, yeah, I've understood this. But the problem is the craft of practice is what brings us to where thinking can't reach. And I would like to try to give you some examples. And, you know, again, people come here and they say, oh, this is interesting.

[05:45]

And, you know, and they look at it. And lay people tend to look at practice from within what makes sense to them. And they don't look at it from the point of view of what makes sense from the point of view of the tradition or the practice itself. maybe even the teacher. And most of us have had bad experience with, or often not too good experience, with, for instance, this friend of mine who decided the story of Christianity didn't work for her anymore when she was told her beloved dog would not go to heaven.

[06:59]

Her dog was real to her. The story of Christianity was not real to her. And once she realized her dog wasn't going to join her or get that they're ahead of her and prepare the way. One of my two or three best friends Maybe he was really the best of the best friends. At least the one among those who have died. But he had a missing finger here.

[08:00]

This part of his finger was missing. So he would... When kids would, you know, how you do this thing and you show that your fingers, you know, he would do that and they would think he was fooling and then he would show his finger and it wouldn't... And the kid would say, where did it go? What happened to it? And he would say, it's waiting for me in heaven. Okay. Yeah. So, I mean, we know, most of us, That maybe the five-day, having a five-day sashin in the middle of the practice period is more than we need.

[09:27]

One day, midday practice day is probably enough to deal with the middle. But for the person who practices a craft, yeah, for a moment you notice that, but you say, you're... Feeling is what's going on here. So your mental observation is Yeah, we kind of lost it after. Some of us kind of lost it after the Sashim.

[10:28]

We found it during the Sashim, but lost it thanks to Atmar. But we lost it sort of after the Sashim. Well, that's just a thought for a moment. You don't let the thought have much effect on you. You just enter into the practice spirit. Turn yourself over to the practice spirit. You want the activity of the practice period to shape you, not your thoughts and observations about it. Du sollst machen, dass die Aktivität der Praxisperiode dich formt und nicht deine Gedanken oder deine Beobachtungen darüber.

[11:33]

But we really do have to have some maybe instruction about the craft of practice. Aber vielleicht brauchen wir so etwas wie Anweisungen oder eine Instruktion darüber, was diese Kunstfertigkeit der Praxis ist. I had a friend in the first year of college, became an architect. His name was Gene Lu. He was Chinese. But he had a real feeling for the craft of mathematics. And I had two roommates, for some strange reason, who were both sort of scientist types, and they were number two and three in my college class.

[12:39]

And their grades... I wasn't there. I was somewhere else. But when these two persons Neil and Austin and the other person, I can't remember his name, had a math problem, they'd call up Gene and they'd say, we've got this problem and there's these equations and there's this, that, and the other thing, and we don't know what to do. And Gene would just listen and he'd say, try that. And they'd try that and the problem would be solved. And when Neil and I don't know what the other one's name was, when they had a problem where it was about mathematics, then they, although they were so good themselves, called Gene and said, yes, we have this and that problem and so and so, it doesn't work and so on.

[13:44]

And then Gene just listened to it and then said, okay, try this. And then normally the task was solved. It's just... feel for a moment from what they were saying reached farther into the problem than their thinking. Yeah, and you know, when you graduate, if a person graduates from medical school, They probably know quite a bit about medicine, I hope. But they don't usually have a feeling for the craft of medicine. Artisanal craft of medicine. And Hans-Jürgen and I had a sort of conversation about that, indirectly about that the other day.

[14:48]

And he said he started out thinking about being a scientist, but he decided to be a doctor. And for him, being a doctor is the craft of being a doctor, if I may sort of quote you. So the problem for our lineage and what we're doing, if it's going to be primarily populated by lay adept, I hope, practitioners, How do they bring the craft of practice into lay life? Because what the monastic practice does is push you into, immerse you into, drown you in,

[16:14]

Suffocate no more in the craft of practice. For reasons you can't really understand usually. So most practitioners, in fact, I think, are really believers. Maybe evidential believers, realistic believers. But they explore the practice through their understanding. Okay, so if we want to really continue the lineage, we're going to have to find ways, and maybe the way for an individual, primarily layperson, is to take at least one aspect of practice and bring it into their daily life in this craft-like way.

[17:26]

Now let me give you one of the simplest examples I can think of. I suggest to you that you the phrase from many years ago, to pause for the particular. Now, an attentively smart person can see that to pause for the particular contains other aspects or is based on other aspects. So the word pause obviously implies the alternative of an experience of continuity.

[18:31]

Das Wort Pause oder im Deutschen Innehalten, das impliziert natürlich die Alternative dazu, nämlich das Weitermachen oder die Kontinuität. So implied in a little phrase like that, to pause for the particular. Also es impliziert in so einem kleinen Satz wie diesem für die Einzelheit. Innehalten, ja. I have different letters, but I can't. Yeah, okay. Cool. That's very sweet of you to have different words. Okay, so it means that you... The first aspect of practicing with such a phrase is to notice the various ways in which you feel your life is a continuity. So you're repeating the phrase. That's the craft, to repeat the phrase.

[19:43]

But then sort of part of the field, the periphery of the practice is to notice, you know, when you feel the continuity that ought to be interrupted, that leads to the pause. So pausing the repetition of the phrase, to pause for the particular, sort of flushes out of your behavior or surfaces in your behavior various continuities. One of the more subtle continuities that might be surfaced is that the concept of being, I be, I is, is a delusional concept.

[20:58]

It's delusional because it's not true. We actually are moment by moment beings, not continuity beings. But because it emphasizes continuity, The concept itself locates you in the past and locates you in the future because that's what continuity is. And you just sort of go right by the present without even noticing it.

[22:19]

Was that a train station? But you want to get, maybe you get sick in the present or you get happy in the present but still you want to get past that and put the sickness behind. But the more crafted practice is to be sick when you're sick. And you're all having this experience or something, isn't it? Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[23:20]

Okay, so you notice these different experiences of continuity. Now, the phrase, as writing writes writing, the phrase phrases the phrasing, and the phrase creates the practice. But you're already involved in the craft of practice just by repeating the phrase. As I said to someone this morning, if you're going to do calligraphy, Yeah, before you do the calligraphy, you have to have a brush.

[24:23]

And you have to sort of, you can't just magically make the, I mean, maybe with AI now, you can magically produce the calligraphy. But as a craft, you have to have the brush and you have to figure out what to do with the brush. And Opmar and I have spoken about it, and Paul and I noticed that the brush, you hold the brush more or less straight usually, but it's not a ballpoint pen. And it makes a difference how you hold it, the angle. It makes a difference where the ink is inside the bristles. And you can have water and ink in different parts of the bristles.

[25:34]

And part of the craft is making the ink. And you have a stone. And somebody's doing... made the stone, and often there will be a signature on the stone. Somebody went to an effort to make the stone which you're going to rub, create the ink. And part of the... Of the ink is this kind of motion where you're rubbing the ink against the stone and you're rubbing the, yeah, the sort of cake of ink against the stone with some water.

[26:53]

Cake of ink? Well, it's not liquid ink. It's a block of ink. But what are you doing when you're doing that? This may start sounding a little crazy to you, but you're changing your frequency rate. Now all motionography, that's what I call motion, moving picture photography, motionography, All motion photography is time-lapse photography.

[27:58]

Time-lapse photography is like these wonderful little movies of a flower that takes several days to bloom, blooming in a few minutes. extraordinary movement of the clouds over a mountain and slowed down and speed it up, whatever you want to look at it. Or the guy I don't know who it was, who was doing a study, which I've told you about it before, where he photographed an audience with a speaker and he slowed it way down until people's emotions were like that, right?

[29:36]

No, if anyone... If anyone who was in that audience looked at it, it didn't look like the experience they had, which they were just, you know, moving around and listening and so forth. But it didn't look like the present they had experienced. But it actually was one dimension of the present they experienced. Because once the speaker established in a field a coherent field, mutual field, everyone's movements began to be coordinated.

[31:01]

A person way over here who couldn't see a person way over here, the person way over here was lighting a cigarette in those days, and the person over here was blowing his or her nose. So zum Beispiel, wenn eine Person ganz da drüben im Saal saß und eine andere Person hier und die einen da gar nicht sehen können, dann konnte man auf dem Film sehen, dass der Moment, in dem die eine Person damals noch eine Zigarette zum Beispiel angezündet hat, die andere Person ihre Hände hochnahm und ihre Nase geputzt hat zum Beispiel. But all of their movements were choreographed as if they actually were in a shared field with the same frequency rate. So it was slow motion photography. And wasn't their present conscious present, but it was their physical present.

[32:14]

I mean, that's extraordinary. Yeah, I remember I did some... I would practice what I call direct perceptions. It was my way of bringing practice into daily life. And I didn't understand about frequency rate or frame rate and things like that at that time at all. I mean, I didn't have those terms at least. But I, you know, synced my... attention with my breathing is what practice was in the first year or so of practice.

[33:22]

And while Virginia or whatever was making breakfast or doing something, I would just sit there a non-conceptualized attentional field. And I began to notice that the flowers in the vase, if I put water in the vase, I could see the flowers responding to the water. And I could see that, you know, I've never told anybody this before, though I started trying to think whether I should write something like this for this essay I'm doing.

[34:29]

And I noticed other mornings that if a flower was wilting, it actually was wilting before my eyes in nanosecond units. So I realized that I was tuning in an attentional field with a different present than my usual conscious present. No, I could never have thought my way to that. Because also I found, after a while, that once I entered this attentional field, which the frequency rate was different, Weil ich auch gemerkt habe... You're all doing that, whether you notice it or not, or know how to tune it yet.

[35:43]

Weil ich dann auch gemerkt habe, dass wenn ich das eine Zeit lang gemacht habe, und ihr alle macht das, ob ihr das bemerkt oder nicht, trotzdem schwingt ihr euch alle auf einen Frequenzbereich ein, der anders ist als die bewusste Frequenz. I have such confidence as a translator. I feel I can say the weirdest things, just throw it out there, and then you deal with it. Yeah. That's what I do. Thank you very much. Yeah, very much. Okay. I mean, I don't make them better, but... We don't... I don't know. You might know. I can't tell. I assume it's better. Um... But then I noticed that actually I was in an attentional field where everything was slightly slowed down, including the people. I could begin to see facial impressions and movements and body movements in a different kind of present.

[36:50]

It is the present, but a different kind of present. And from that experience, I immediately understood Ned Hall, Edward T. Hall, who used to live in Santa Fe. I mean, he lived in Santa Fe, he's now dead. When Sally, who's now 55 or so, went to college, I gave her several of Edward T. Hall's books and said, these might teach you how to think. But you're brilliant, sweet, nice guy.

[37:55]

Anyway, he's the first person to write about Harage. that I know about in English. And Haragé means literally stomach art, but it's usually belly talk or stomach talk. But it's so taken for granted in Japanese culture that it's a business term. But basically what it means is your body talks to other bodies in a different frequency rate than conscious mentation does.

[39:02]

So it means that when you're with another person, you can tune in, or a group of people, you can tune in to their stomach talk while you're also listening to their mentated talk. And there's a sine curve or a contrapuntal effect And so you can, so if you're with, if I'm with you, I am with you, hi.

[40:20]

And I feel you're speaking to me from the horror. This sounds nuts, but this is fact. I will say something vague. instead of clear, which forces you to notice my stomach feelings, which I want you to notice, if I say it too clear mentally, you won't notice the stomach talk. So you play with the different frequency rates of the talking and the stomach talk, and that's part of normal, subtle communication. And so if I want to talk to you about the hair, then I would, for example, say something vague, something that is not so clear mentally, so that you are forced to let yourself in on the stomach level, on the stomach level.

[41:34]

So now I've said this in a way that may be understandable to you. But you can't get there without practicing the craft of realize, of embodying this. Now to go back to pausing for the particular. The phrase has opened you up to different flows of continuity in which you can pause or not pause. Der Satz hat sich für unterschiedliche Strömungen von Kontinuität geöffnet, in denen du innehalten kannst oder nicht innehalten kannst.

[42:43]

And some experiences of continuity will make you feel like, this doesn't compute, I don't feel good in this continuity of maybe unpleasant thoughts. Und einige Kontinuitäten, da hast du vielleicht das Gefühl, daran fühle ich mich nicht gut, sagen wir mal, in unangenehmen Gedanken. So you find you pause for the particular. You find a particular to pause. Oh, hey, there's a nice particular I'll pause. Or you find some kind of really nice sort of sensuous feeling is in your breath and in your torso somehow. And you learn that as soon as you feel that, if you then find a particular to pause for, there's a relief or some kind of stillness or blissfulness. And anyone can learn these things or discover these things just by repeating the fruit.

[43:50]

Und jeder kann diese Dinge lernen oder entdecken, einfach nur indem wir den Satz wiederholen. But these phrases again are processive and they are deployed and operated. Aber nochmal, diese Sätze sind auf den Prozess selbst bezogen und sie sind zum Anwenden und zum... Now, it took me years to find words like deploy and operate in relation to a phrase. I had to really be in the craft of phrasing till I saw how they can be deployed and operated. Okay, now is deployed, I just said something like deployed and operate, operate as being deployed over and over again, or is it different? Deployed is where you place something, where you locate it, how you use it.

[45:05]

To operate is how you, like, operate a tractor or something like that. It's not important. We're doing well. By deploy I mean you bring the phrase in certain situations and not others. where you decide to use it. Now, operating the phrase would be noticing the different kinds of continuity that appear through the use of the phrase. And operating den Satz würde bedeuten, dass du die unterschiedlichen Arten von Kontinuität bemerkst, die auftauchen, wenn du den Satz eben anwendest, deploy.

[46:14]

Mud, yeah. If you're operating a bulldozer, you have to know what kind of mud you're in or something. Wenn du zum Beispiel einen Bulldozer fährst, operate, dann musst du die unterschiedlichen Schlammschichten kennen. I just saw... this guy who's lifting... What's his name? Matthias. Matthias? Oh, that's Matthias. Lifting with this beautiful new machine, lifting all those branches. I'm a boy, and I'd like one of those machines. I asked already the director if I could get one. Oh, yeah. She said no. I said next year. All right, okay. Anyway... But if you keep deploying or operating this phrase, after a while, it turns into pause for the pause. You're not pausing because of continuities, you're pausing because you see opportunities to pause, which are like little Dharma doors that open up when you pause at them.

[47:40]

Now I'm a kind of Not very closeted homophone. Not very closeted. Sorry. Sorry. A homophone is someone, in my case, who likes words that sound like each other. Yes. Okay. So, like, effect and affect, or they are there, and their book, and they are reading their book. All those words have similar, they're not etymologically or grammatically related, but for me they have overlapping meanings.

[48:43]

So when I say pause for the paws, I see a cat pawing a door. Because his paws are on the door. I'm just playing around to... share with you a kind of field, a field of, a shared field of knowing. Like when everyone's movements start coming together. And when you start operating this phrase so it's now pausing for the pause and the pauses are pausing at Dharma doors or a kind of acupuncture like Dharma doors.

[50:10]

Now, this is the landscape or dharmascape that you can only get to by the craft of practice. Now after a while, of now pausing for the pause, Dharma doors that opened through the pausing for the pause, Suddenly particulars start grabbing you. The particulars pause you. You've reversed the whole phrase. Now everywhere you go,

[51:17]

Particulars pop out of immediacy. Und wo immer du hingehst, springen Einzelheiten aus der Unmittelbarkeit hervor. Und ergreifen dich. Und machen die Welt ganz präzise und glänzend oder scheinend und klar. And your new habitation of developing a frequency rate, which is like another kind of slow motion or time-lapse photography, And dein neuer Wohnort, wo du jetzt einen Frequenzbereich bewohnst, der so ist wie zum Beispiel eine Zeitlupenfotografie. Immediately becomes a slow motion experience and a time lapse experience.

[52:34]

Da wird Unmittelbarkeit zu einer Zeitlupenerfahrung und vielleicht zu einer Zeitraffererfahrung. Und in diese Unmittelbarkeit kommst du durch eine Erfahrung von Kontinuität nicht hinein. And this would be like the tantric side of soto practice, which we don't, like I'm doing, you don't usually talk about because you expect people to feel you and discover it and practice it through their feeling and not need it to be pointed out. Das ist die tantrische Seite der Soto-Praxis. Und normalerweise, ich mache sowas, normalerweise würde man niemals darüber reden, weil du erwarten würdest, dass die Leute beginnen, dich zu spüren und das für sich selbst bemerken, und dass es keinen Grund gibt, darauf explizit zu verweisen. So a big dimension of our lineage is secret practice. Und eine wichtige Dimension unserer Lehrlinie ist die geheime Praxis.

[53:40]

In other words, It's secret. You're doing it, you're not telling anybody, and other people pick it up, and then there's a kind of secret society of practitioners who are feeling each other's practice. And one of the first things I notice when someone comes to practice here is whether they're capable of secret practice or not. I can feel it instantly almost. And one of the first things I notice when someone comes here is whether someone has the ability to participate in such a secret practice. And I notice that almost immediately. So when the particular begins to pause you, the world becomes bright. Die Einzelheit beginnt, dich innezuhalten.

[54:46]

Dann wird die Welt strahlend. Now that, again, you can only practice, only the craft of practice can take you there. Und nochmal, nur die Kunst, die Kunstfertigkeit der Praxis kann dich an diesen Punkt bringen. Now that's only path I can take pave with words. There are other paths that happen through these phrases that I can't pave with words. Now, I've run out of time. Time ran past me. I'm over time. And I wanted to talk about the six stations of mindful attention. And the first three are breath attention. Die ersten drei sind Atemaufmerksamkeit.

[56:05]

And the second is body attention. Zweite ist Körperaufmerksamkeit. And the third is attention to attention. Dritte ist Aufmerksamkeit zur Aufmerksamkeit. So if you're going to try to create this as a craft, like you're learning a brush, not because it's interesting, but you might have B-A, B-A, and A-A. Wenn das als... Breath attention, body attention, attention, attention. And just as a way to kind of like get yourself into the craft of a practice or is this BA or is this, you know... Baba, Papa, Mama. So that's the first three.

[57:05]

And the second three are MP, MF, and ME. Okay, MP is Mind, Eye, mind partner. And the second one, the fifth one, is mind field. And the sixth one is mind emptiness. Now, the question built into these six is why is there a shift from attention, attention, attention to mind, mind, mind, and what's the difference between attention and mind? That's implied in the... that's configured that way so the practice of it makes you try to deal with that question without anybody explaining it to you.

[58:18]

Okay, so my question underneath all this, since so much is built into the craft of practice. How do we bring the craft of practice, which is dependent on basically monastic practice, How can we find ways, creative, inventive, innovative ways to bring craft into lay life practice? Now, if you're not a regular practitioner, you may think, oh, this is all kind of... But it only makes sense if you're practicing and finding it changes how you live.

[59:30]

And I guess that's enough for today, right? And I'm going to leave, right? Will I have another chance to give a lecture before I leave? Well, you could give a lecture on the 17th, for example. But I thought the 17th was her ceremony. Yeah, if it's too much. I could do it in the morning. We could test you in the afternoons. Okay, because I was trying to squeeze everything into this lecture. Thank you very much. Vielen Dank. List out. Thank you.

[60:45]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_77.86