I apologize for not speaking German. I should now. I have a... almost 15-month-old half-German daughter. So she's teaching me a little German. She understands much more German than English at present. So if we grow up together, maybe next time I come, I can speak German with you. And you know, I've been doing this pretty long time. Can you hear me okay? Can you hear all right? No. No? Okay.

[01:01]

Now, can you hear me okay? Anyway, I've been doing this a pretty long time, 40 years. And it would seem like it would be easy to say something about Zen. But watching my little girl learn to, well, she's been walking now for, I don't know, let's see, five months or so. But she hasn't figured out how to jump yet. And it turns out it's pretty complicated to jump. So I'm watching her learn to walk. Then she learns to walk by walking.

[02:21]

And you really learn to practice Zen or you discover the practice of Zen by practicing Zen. So again, what can I say about it? We have this title, the languages of experience. And first of all, language and experience are different. So what would be a language of experience? To listen, if we could, to experience rather than listening to our thinking.

[03:24]

Well, my daughter's name, this little girl's name is Sophia. And if she's learning to walk by walking... Yeah, on rough ground, various situations. But if she wanted to be a runner, she'd have to have some training. Well, there's an aspect, of course, of Zen practice, which is something like training. Because if I say to you, I ask the question, what is Zen? And I say, well, it's still sitting.

[04:32]

Sitting with some kind of outer and inner stillness. At least that's the origin, source of the understanding that we call Buddhism. But you all know how to sit. You're all more or less sitting right now. And how is what you're doing right now The same or different from Zen practice? Well, I mean, this evening I would say it's learning to listen to your experience.

[05:35]

Your experience is a kind of language. So one suggestion I would make is that you put your body first. Yeah, that's some kind of training instruction. So what could I mean by put your body first? Again, this might seem a little strange to you.

[06:38]

And I hear some of you are here because your friend said... Why don't you come? And you don't know anything about Zen. Except it's a word that appears in newspapers and magazines. Its popular use doesn't have much to do with the practice of Zen. So it's actually, yeah, we all have world views. Wir alle haben Ansichten über die Welt.

[07:42]

I was just in Austria the last couple of weeks. Die letzten beiden Wochen war ich gerade in Österreich. And struck by that both Arnold Schoenberg and Robert Musil both were asked themselves the question, what is the difference between a world view and a true view of the world? So we all have from our culture, our personal history, world views. But is our world view a true view of the world? How do we discover that? Now certainly one aspect of Zen practice is asking yourself such questions. Or asking yourself questions you can't answer in the usual way.

[09:09]

So Zen is something about another way to view the world. And the historical Buddha's first teaching, his earliest teaching, starts with views. What are our views? Because everything that happens to us, perception, conception, thinking arises out of our views. But how can we possibly change our views? Mostly our views are invisible to us.

[10:10]

They're just the way we see the world. And we're not aware there's alternatives. But you can play with your views a bit. And one way to do that is, I'm suggesting, is to put your body first. How would you do that? We have to find some opportunity to do it. So I would suggest maybe like when you first come into a room. Maybe when you come up these stairs. You use the threshold.

[11:41]

I like the word in English, entrance. You use the entrance. Entrance. to some things. You see, some things aren't translatable. Yeah, especially what I'm trying to talk about. But let's say you use the end trance. Or you come up to the top of the stairs. And you stop for a moment. And you put your body first. You don't think of what to do next. Ihr denkt nicht daran, was als nächstes zu tun ist.

[12:58]

Ihr haltet an und hört auf euren Körper. Denn wenn ihr euren Körper an die erste Stelle setzt, dann müsst ihr eurem Körper zuhören. Und wie werden wir das machen? Well, first of all, you have to pause. Mental time is very fast and operates on actually very little information. And it's operating on old information. Your memory of what it's like to to enter a room.

[14:04]

Sometimes we have to change that. Or experiment with changing that. So you come up and you stop for a minute. And you'll have to find out how long to stop. It might at first be a noticeable pause. And after a while, it's maybe not noticeable, but still there's a... And you wait for your body to tell you what to do. Yeah, and then you... Follow what your body suggests.

[15:14]

This would be an experiment in following experience rather than thinking. How your body knows the room that you're entering. And our bodies are I won't try to demonstrate it this evening, but extremely intelligent. And much actually much quicker than our thinking. If you fall down, your body catches you, usually so you don't hurt yourself, much quicker than you could think your way into that. But the body takes in actually much more information than your

[16:22]

At least the information of an immediate situation. We have to let our shoulders listen. Let our stomach listen. In such a way you can kind of like try it out now and then. You enter a lot of rooms. Try it a few times a day. And after a while, as little Sophia learns to walk by walking, you can learn to listen to, in this pause, listen to your experience.

[17:33]

Yeah, you won't walk into the wall too often. Usually something happens that makes sense. And that making sense becomes more subtle. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I'd like to talk more, but I don't have time this evening, about how I'm watching little Sophia go from names to words. She names things. She actually names activities, not things. But those names are a pointing out and a... An identification with.

[18:54]

But they're not yet words. They don't work in sentences. Yeah, once they start working in sentences, they're not pointing out activities anymore, they're pointing out entities. And when these names turn into words, which is going on right now, her world's going to conflate, flatten out. It's going to become very useful for her to communicate. But it'll be kind of much more of a mental world.

[19:56]

And it'll start to take an exceptionally sunny day or something like that to make her step for a moment out of her mental world. What I'm speaking about is a feeling like every moment is a sunny day. When you start to feel your experience. And trust your experience. And that again takes time to trust your experience. How are you going to trust your experience? So again, I would suggest let's this evening get a sense of this experimenting with putting the body first.

[21:19]

And then listening to your body, listening to your experience. You know, all mental all mental states have a physical component. And you can begin to feel your mind in your body and feel the body's participation in the mind. And the participation of the body Discovering this is actually what Zen practice is. So let's say, how do we listen to our body, to our experience? One kind of method or suggestion or secret?

[22:40]

I can suggest now is to listen through your breath as if your breath was a kind of ear as if the as the medium for this sound of my voice, and his voice is the air, the sound of your experience is in your breath. So you listen into your breath. Almost as if your breath was an ear that could penetrate into your body. So what am I doing right now?

[23:54]

I'm trying to suggest a language of experience. And the language here isn't practice, like putting your body first. Or the language is the image of your breath as an ear. Yeah, maybe it's something like a dream thinking. Yeah, but we really need to... We want to use language. We want to use ordinary thinking. And our consciousness is the medium of most thinking.

[24:56]

But we need to get... you know, rather free of the domination of language. Yeah, that actually takes over. captures our consciousness. Yes, I'm trying to find some way to speak to you about taking a new possession of your consciousness. or something wider than consciousness.

[26:01]

So you listen into your stillness with the ear of breath. Now, if you can listen into your stillness with the ear of breath, A kind of stillness where you can begin to hear yourself. To hear your true, let's say your true nature. Now if you actually decided to try to listen into your stillness, or just listen into your silence,

[27:05]

experience in your body, you may find you sometimes sit down and sit still. Each of you is the most complex thing we know about in the universe. And yet most of us find we need the radio on in the car. And most department stores think you need, most buildings think you need music in the elevator. And it's actually not so easy for most of us just to sit down. We get bored. But why are we bored when we're the most complex thing anyone knows about? Because we're so identified with our thinking, you have to keep pacifying it with amusements.

[28:33]

But if you really do start to feel into your experience, your experience is so much more subtle than anything you could read or listen to. Yeah, again, I'm not saying we don't want to read, etc., listen to music. But I'd like us to have a sense of developing a third ear or a third eye. And I'm suggesting it's as simple as trying on something like Putting your body first. And then discovering how to do that. I can't really tell you. I can suggest you try it. But you're going to have to

[29:52]

As I can't teach Sophia how to walk, she has to keep walking. So you just have to try it. But I think you'll find that if you do listen with the ear of the breath, With that kind of pause, it lets mind and body start to weave together. You know, it's very interesting that lie detectors work. Why do lie detectors work? Because they listen to your body, not your mind. It's very hard for your body to lie.

[31:15]

So when you start to listen into your body, Discover some way to do that. It becomes harder and harder to lie to yourself. You start Telling yourself the truth about yourself. Can it be this simple? Yes. But you have to do it. Then we can start talking about your true nature. Because you start feeling something some kind of feeling of trust and truth in your experience.

[32:17]

You don't have to get it from somewhere else or some kind of confirmation. Just start to think things feel valid. You start to think And you're something closer now to a true view of the world. Instead of just a world view you've inherited from your culture and experience. Again, we have to become skillful at the world view of our culture. But we can also find what we feel is a true view of the world.

[33:24]

And we start feeling, yeah, yeah, there's some... truth to something like our true nature. It's not just some catchy Zen phrase. You begin to sense, yeah, maybe there is true nature, or a truer nature. And I think we do feel that just in our ordinary experience sometimes.

[34:26]

It just comes up sometimes. Particularly, hopefully, when you need it, when you're in a crisis or something. You have to ask, what kind of person am I? What really feels right to me? What feels right? Okay, deep down in me. Well, really developing that experience till it really is our nature is the practice of Zen. Mm-hmm. Now, what would I suggest would make a foundation for Zen practice?

[35:47]

Well, first I would say that I'm sort of changing the topic here. And just to give you more of a picture of Zen practice, I'm trying to find some way to answer the question, what is Zen? Well, it's the doing of it. And what is the doing of it? What would be a kind of basic practice for any one of us? Well, one is to practice mindfulness.

[36:50]

Now, mindfulness is one of those words which has jumped out of the traditional teaching And become a kind of commonplace now of magazines, psychotherapy, of business. Almost everyone would agree now it's good to be mindful. But the dynamic of how that works, say, in the Eightfold Path, to generate a truth body, Yeah, this is not so obvious. Yeah, but okay, mindfulness.

[37:58]

So you make some effort to practice mindfulness. And it's good to sort of take some period of time during the day Or when you first wake up. We have an expression, I think you have a similar one. We say, you got up on the wrong side of the bed. In Germany, you get up with the wrong foot or something. With the left foot? Left foot or something. In America, we only get up in the morning. Everybody in Germany stands up. I can't translate that. Yeah. But I like the image, all over Germany, everybody.

[39:16]

Ready to start walking. But you know, I think when we get up on the wrong side of the bed or with the wrong foot, it means we... are not mindful in how we wake up. I think it's good, and probably you do, listen to your body when you first wake up. You kind of have to let your dream body, dream mind, regather in you. Yeah, and at some point it actually feels like it coalesces. It means to come together. And then you can kind of It almost feels like you can take that and it lifts you out of bed.

[40:32]

This would be practicing mindfulness. Not just mental attention to what you're doing, but bodyful attention to what you're doing. So you try to spend, maybe you take the waking up as a little short time to practice bodyfulness or mindfulness. Then some other time like walking to work. Or, as I always say, use the stairways as a chance to practice mindfulness.

[41:36]

Yeah, mindful of your activity, of your breath, and so forth. Yeah. Anyway, so that's... Some effort to do that every day would be a good basis for Zen practice. Yes, that's one thing. Another would be that, if you can, is to sit 20 minutes, 30, 40 minutes several times a week. I find for some people it's not so difficult. They like the feeling and they do it. For some people it's harder than to get them to jog. And for other people it's more difficult than to brush their teeth.

[43:00]

To brush their teeth. [...] So anyway, if you can figure some way to trick yourself at least into it, you sit five times a week, something like that. Three or four, five, six, seven times a week, something like that. In the week? You know, there's one aspect of practice you should all, I think, know about. One way we're generating a new mind through zazen practice. And in another way, we're just letting the deep blissful mind of non-dreaming deep sleep.

[44:25]

Every night you're sleeping, as long as you don't take sleeping pills. is divided into dreaming sleep and non-dreaming sleep. And it's a necessary part of our life and our night. And we have no experience. Most of us have a limited experience of our dreaming mind. We have no experience, except we experience it, of our We have no conscious experience of our non-dreaming deep sleep.

[45:31]

But one of the great discoveries of yogic still sitting is that it's kind of like a door to this non-dreaming deep sleep mind. And if you develop the habit of sitting, It takes a while. But the non-dreaming deep sleep mind begins to surface in us during zazen, during meditation. During still sitting. are something, this is something close to our true nature, beginning to, begins to permeate our consciousness.

[46:55]

And strangely, if we don't sit, It's pretty hard for it to surface in our ordinary activity. Unless we sit with some regularity. So I know, even though I've been sitting If I don't sit for some reason for traveling or something for some days, I can feel this sink farther below the surface of my daily life. And I only touch it at night.

[48:05]

But if I sit, it begins to surface in my daily life. And I can notice it because I immediately stop needing as much usual night sleep. Once it starts surfacing in your life, you actually will find you need an hour or even two hours less sleep at night. Anyway, maybe this is enough of an introduction to Zen practice. I mean, in addition to some daily practice of mindfulness, where you actually give attention to the practice of mindfulness,

[49:18]

And some sitting practice, if you can bring it into your life. And... Particular to Zen practice is to bring some phrase, some teaching, wisdom phrase into your life. One is like, treat everything as if it were your own eyesight. It means something like if I pick this glass up, I'm picking it up almost as if I was touching my eye. That's also a practice of mindfulness. But you're bringing yourself into the practice of mindfulness through using a phrase.

[50:47]

And that practice brings you into developing a background mind. Which is kind of the precursor, the beginning of a deep, still, imperturbable mind. So the first stage of practice is something like some mindfulness and some sitting. Working with a phrase. Yeah, like the one I commonly suggest is, just now is enough. Because it isn't, and yet it has to be.

[51:51]

So what mind is it not enough, and what mind Is just now enough? Sure, that's part of practice. Yeah, there's a couple other things. But that leads to the second stage, the turning point in practice, which is this development of a background mind. But I think that maybe tomorrow, those of you who come, we can talk about that some. Or see if we can get a feel of it. if we can start listening with the ear of our breath, into the language of our experience.

[53:04]

Okay, thank you very much for coming this evening. It's nice to be here. Okay, vielen Dank, dass ihr gekommen seid heute Abend. Es ist schön, hier zu sein. I've been here quite a number of years. How many? Five? Six? I used to come regularly. In fact, I was first invited to come here to meet with some people connected with the Schweißfurcht Foundation. I like this city. It's a big city feeling. But in recent years, I've been concentrating on just being in our center in Schwarzwald, near Freiburg and Basel and Zurich. But quite a number of you make the effort to come all the way there and you said, why don't you make the effort to come all the way here?

[54:30]

So they said, we'll find a nice room. So here we are. Thank you very much. Good night. Thank you for translating. You're welcome. As much as possible with your chairs or cushions, you moved forward a little bit. The front row is okay. No, you can come forward too. It would be nice if you could come forward a little bit with your cushions or those who are sitting on the chairs. This is her Aunt Sophie.

[55:50]

I was told last night that some people expected me to have a time for questions last night. And I suppose since the subtitle of this topic is, What are we talking about? It would have made sense to have some time for questions. But I don't know, somehow I felt, just didn't think about it. I thought I said everything that needed to be said. There's actually a tradition of trying to teach in a way that each teaching covers the whole of the teaching.

[57:26]

So anyway, I guess I had that feeling last night. Yeah, and also it seemed one hour. Who wants to sit in a lecture room for more than an hour? Except for those of you who decided to come today. Mm-hmm. So maybe you'll come back at lunch, Marie-Louise? So anyway, we will have some time for some kind of discussion, of course. So looking at the topic, I thought that I would emphasize

[58:39]

Coming into a continuum of experience. When I looked at the topic, I thought I should talk about coming into a continuum of experience. Now, even if I say that, we have to ask, what the heck is he talking about? And then, of course, Christian has to ask, what is he talking about? Because he has to figure out how to translate it. And since I barely know what I'm talking about, I feel sorry for Christian. At least it takes me, you know, I have some experience of what I want to say, but how to attach words to it, I don't really know sometimes.

[60:13]

And I share this experience feeling with you. Because in your own practice you for sure don't want to identify your experience with words. This actually, you know, may sound easy, but actually it's kind of difficult. To not identify your experience with words. Eure Erfahrung nicht mit Worten zu identifizieren. Or rather I should say, yeah, maybe to some extent identify it with words, but also try not to identify it with words.

[61:18]

You know, it's taken me a long time to take for granted not identifying things with words. So I think it will take a while for you too to get the... sense of it, the habit of it. And what do I mean by continuum? Should it, do I mean continuity?

[62:33]

So I'm trying to make some distinction, at least in English, continuity and continuum. And maybe as we speak, this will become clearer. But also I would like to just simply be open to some discussion, of course. Anything you want in relationship to your feeling about meditation or practice or Zen? Or any questions you have about what I'm saying.

[63:41]

So I want to come back again to this in as practical a sense as I can, to discovering a relationship to experience rather than thinking. A relationship to experience rather than thinking. Was there anyone here who wasn't Here last night? I forgive you. Just the front line, so it's okay.

[65:07]

Okay. Well, I spoke about, again, letting your body be first. And maybe we could say a pause for listening to your body. Listening to your experience. No, I think actually last night my thing to try to listen with your ear, or listen with your breath as if it were an ear, into the silence of each moment.

[66:20]

Into the stillness of each moment. Now this kind of effort or approach is not much different than zazen practice itself. But I'm suggesting you do it in just your ordinary activity. Okay. Now, again, I said some practice of... Just sketch a picture of practice again. To sketch a picture of practice.

[67:36]

Yes, some daily time that you consciously, intentionally pay attention to mindfulness. And then in addition, if possible, several times a week at least, practice of meditation. And then perhaps during the seminar you'll find some phrase something like that that's useful to bring into your daily practice. And then I would say in addition a general understanding or general familiarity rather with the Eightfold Path. Now that's already quite a bit.

[68:49]

Even if you're not new to practice, still exactly how we practice mindfulness and all can be deepened. You know, you can sit anywhere, take your time. And then some It's good if you practice with others sometimes, once a week or something. Yeah.

[69:52]

It's a common idea in the West now that you hear about practice, you get started a little bit. And you get started somehow. And you treat it as something in contrast to your daily life, your active daily life. And it's something you tend to do by yourself. That's natural enough. And it is in contrast with your more busy daily life. But that doesn't actually mean it's best to do it alone. But that does not mean that it is actually better to do it alone.

[70:57]

The truth is that it is sometimes good to practice once a month, once a week with others. It's not easy to explain why that is, but it is so. I could try to explain it, but it might take the next few weeks. Yeah. And some contact now and then with the teacher and, if possible, a practice center. And then the contact back and forth with a teacher, if possible, or with a practice center.

[72:02]

I feel if a person does that much, they probably can develop a genuine practice within their life. And not just a practice that's added to their life. but a practice they can bring their life to. Okay. Now any of this that I've just said, I'm happy to try to give it a fuller sense for you if you ask. And I mention all that because it allows me to then say,

[73:09]

crucial to any transformative practice, is the development of what I called last night a background mind. Now, background mind is, I use the phrase because it sounds, I think it sounds easy. Yeah, commonplace. I mean, it's, you know, it makes me, reminds me of, they ask some little kids what the mind is for.

[74:25]

And the majority of the kids said to keep secrets. We can understand that. We think we're keeping secrets, but we're not. But the point is, we can have, while we're engaged in our sensory world, we can think about other things. That's the very problem of practice. But it's also the resource of practice.

[75:30]

Because what are the other things you might think about? Wisdom is to choose wisdom. what the other things you want to think about will be. Just notice what you usually think about. You think about what kind of person you are. And all kinds of variations on what kind of person I am, good, bad, or indifferent. Yeah, but why don't you instead think about what kind of Buddha you are? That would be a more interesting thing to think about. You can make this kind of choice.

[76:44]

And what would it mean to think about what kind of Buddha we are? One of the things Sukershi said that I always liked He said, we're always showing what kind of Buddha we are. We can take that point of view. Is it better to fail as a Buddha or as an egomaniac? Now we're seeing things. We're seeing things. And... Mindfulness is to bring our attention to that seeing of things.

[78:01]

And to bring our attention to whatever is the content of mind. So if you bring attention to what kind of person you are, say. Bring attention to whatever is going on. Attention and acceptance. If you bring attention and acceptance, to whatever you're doing, to thinking endlessly about yourself even.

[79:19]

You bring attention and acceptance to whatever's going on. If you do that, you're already practicing Buddhism. But maybe no reason to call it Buddhism. You're bringing it, the act, the decision to bring attention and acceptance to whatever you're doing. Is it actually, how can I put it, entering the dynamic of the mind itself. So let me give you some truisms. that I'd like to, I find it's, recently I've been finding I should bring these kind of things up in every seminar.

[80:56]

Because we need to Process of practice is reminding ourselves to practice. Sophia is learning walking and so forth by walking. So there's some basic things we want to practice. keep bringing our attention to in practice. One is that everything, the act of seeing something, the act of hearing something, And it is an act.

[81:59]

And you want to make it an action. If you hear birds in the background, that's a kind of hearing. Yeah, but if you... Bring attention to the hearing of the bird. That's an action. And that makes it a practice of mindfulness. So every action or action Every act of hearing something or seeing something points to the object and points to mind. And I really hear you should never forget that. So it really just becomes a habit. That whenever you see something, you feel your own mind seeing it.

[83:21]

That's a fact. But it's not common knowledge. It's not common experience. And strangely, when it becomes common experience, it transforms your life. That's it. Another one is mentioned last night. Every mental phenomena has a physical component. And secondly, as I mentioned yesterday, every mental, spiritual phenomenon has a physical component. And all sentient physical phenomena have a mental component.

[84:44]

If you don't know that as your experience, the mind, The idea that mind and body are related, connected, one, is just an idea. We want this to be a datum of your experience. Yeah, so part of this continuum of experience This language of experience, this wisdom language of experience, is like noticing, knowing that everything you see and hear points to mind.

[85:59]

Knowing that all mental activity has a physical component. So you actually feel the mind and the body. Ihr fühlt also tatsächlich den Geist im Körper. Und ihr fühlt den Körper im Geist. This is also the practice of mindfulness. Das ist auch die Praxis der Achtsamkeit. This becomes simply familiar to you. So the last thing of the three things, I thought I should, three truisms.

[87:00]

The last thing is mind and body generate each other. Mind and existence generate each other. Mind constructs the mind. Existence constructs existence. And mind and existence construct each other. You're not simply given an existence, you're constructing an existence. And you're constructing your mind. I can see this very clearly in little Sophia.

[88:10]

She's constructing her existence and constructing her mind. The example I used recently, when she was eight months old, she went to the United States with us And there was a lamp by the bed that is supported by a wire, a metal springy wire thinner than this. And she liked to hit it because it bounced all over the place. But when she came back at 14 months from the United States, when she touched the lamp,

[89:19]

She was genuinely terrified. There was a look on her face that I'd only seen once when she fell flat backwards off the bed. Because by this time she'd begun to expect permanence of the world. So when she touched the lamp and it... flew all over the place, she was afraid. She didn't know what had happened. And by such simple things, expecting predictability, A necessity, of course.

[90:47]

But still, she's constructing an expected world, a predictable world. And she's constructing her mind. Sukhriyashi was given a scroll by his teacher which said, stone in air. When we take a break in a few moments, you will see this painting behind you, which made me think of this scroll. And Sukhiroshi says, most of us are very skillful.

[91:52]

Most of us walk through a room without even knowing that we're avoiding the invisible stones in the air. So it doesn't make much sense to practice Or rather, if you have a feeling that mind and body, mind and existence construct each other. If you have this feeling, practice makes a lot more sense.

[93:02]

If you think there's a world out there you're stuck in and subject to, and haven't discovered that way in which we actually participate in how we know and make our world, If you think you're stuck in this world, it's pretty... feels rather futile to practice. So let's take a break in a moment. Let's sit a moment or two. Mind, body and phenomena.

[94:27]

And how do we come to be present?

[94:30]

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