You know, one of the reasons I do this, come to Johanneshof in February, February, March, every year usually, It's of course because I want to see you. I like to see you. And I like to practice with you. But also one of the reasons I do it is I want to keep the I'm always developing the teaching, at least our lineage teaching. And I want to keep able to speak about similar things in both places, Crestone and Yonassol. Yeah. And one of the wonderful things for me about the Dharma Sangha is that most of us have been together for so long.

[01:27]

And we've developed a practice and teaching together. And somehow we have to develop this in ways that allows somebody who's new to the teaching to enter. Yeah, but it's not so easy because I'm not talking about information. You know, when I'm speaking at Crestone in this time of year in the practice period, I'm speaking with people I'm going to be seeing most of the days of three months.

[02:33]

And to two persons who are doing about five periods of zazen a day. And being in a context of quite separated from conventional life and pressures. So I can speak in Zazen release capsules. Time release capsules. So whatever I say gets five periods of zazen a day, attending to it.

[03:42]

But here I'm seeing you only for today and tomorrow. So, you know, I always feel... I mean, you've heard me speaking a lot and you think I know what to say, but actually I never know what to say. I feel like someone trying to fly without wings. And I need you to give me wings. Or I feel it's a little bit like... trying to make a boat float. Is there enough water in the room to float the boat? So I'd like those of you who were here yesterday to, after our break, if you would, say something that brings the new people, new and

[04:50]

the first really new, and then people have just joined us today. Sort of up to date, or what we talked about yesterday. It brings some water into the room and gets off the bottom. Okay. So again, we'll start with the topic, Zen mind. And as I said yesterday, that means we have to ask, answer, respond to what is Zen. And what is mind? Something the world's neuroscientists can't agree on, but we have to decide by tomorrow.

[06:07]

Or you have to have some I want you to have some sense of entering mind through practice. Okay. As thick as a mattress. Now, partly behind the title when frank and i spoke about it was maybe we can speak about zen mind and beginner's mind as part of in reference to sugerishi's book and um

[07:14]

But you know, the title of his book is Beginner's Mind. It's the publisher, or me, that added Zen Mind. I mean, Meredith Weatherby of Weatherhill, the publisher originally. Said we have to have the word Zen in the title. Because it was originally going to be Beginner's Month. So I don't know. I pondered and I was in Japan. I wrote to Suki Roshi or called him, I don't remember. Yeah, and so finally, sort of inspired perhaps by Paul Repp's book, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, I decided on Zen Mind, Beginners Night. Does the title in German feel okay?

[08:46]

Is it okay? Yeah. You re-edited that whole book. Yeah, it was a good occasion. That's the only reason you can translate for me. You were already translating before that. So the only place Zen mind is specifically a title of a section is in the epilogue. And the epilogue wasn't part of the original group of lectures from Los Altos. There's no reason you need to know this, but anyway, I'm telling you as an anecdote. So anyway, the epilogue was made from... two lectures I sort of put together.

[09:58]

And in the epilogue, he says, bring, he says, Just bring attention to your breath and your posture. To watch your breath and watch your posture. This is your... true nature or true mind. There's no other secret beyond this, he says. No, I think a statement like that needs some Yes, I'm looking at. So that's one of the things we'll try to do these two days.

[11:00]

Now, yesterday, I mean, the most essential way we can bring attention... Watch our posture. Is to bring attention to your spine. And yesterday we started out speaking about mind but we ended up speaking about the body and in particular bringing attention to the spine. We started out speaking about mind.

[12:00]

We ended up. So I suggested to each of you yesterday, and I suggest it now to each of you today, To form an intention to bring attention to the spine, your spine. Now, I often have said in the past, bring it from an intention to bring attention to your breath. Yeah. So, Sukhiroshi says, bring attention to your breath and your posture. And in the context we're speaking about, the most fundamental way to bring attention to your posture, other than general awareness,

[13:11]

is to bring attention to your spine. And I said, I wouldn't say to bring your breath mind to your posture, to your spine. I would say bring your attention to your spine and your breath to your spine. And I think you cannot bring your breath to your... You can't bring your... breath to your spine until you bring attention to your spine. Now I think beginners in practice, at least it was true for me in the beginning of practice, I couldn't feel the whole of my spine.

[14:28]

With the sense, I don't know, with the sense that, I don't know, how do you make these distinctions? I could feel that I was bringing attention to my lower spine. But my upper spine was sort of part of my back, but it was kind of in the dark, interior darkness. And it took quite a while before there seems to be a kind of clarity from the base of the spine to the top of the head. And strangely, the more attention can be received by the spine, And simultaneously be present from the base to the top of the spine, even the top of the head.

[15:37]

Is something that happens through... Yeah, some sort of continuity in meditation practice. And it changes the whole energetic kind of field of the body. Now, the more attention feels received by the spine and also... returns attention to you through the spine, the more you can feel a kind of breath presence throughout the spine.

[16:43]

I said yesterday almost like little soft hands holding the spine. Okay. So anyway, here we are again, talking about the mind through the spine. Through the body. And the spine is, in fact, a kind of mind. But when attention is... resting in the spine.

[17:55]

And you can just feel, I mean, the sea is... see as much as you can what that feels like and what the result of that feeling is during these days. And this is equivalent to using a phrase wisdom phrase. So, again, as I said yesterday, you want to sort of lock in an intention. And then let the subtlety of a held intention do the work.

[19:00]

An intention held in the mind and body is more subtle than willpower, effort, or something. So, again, you're not pushing yourself to bring attention to the spine. You're rather developing the intention to do so and then letting it happen when it can. If you can get the intention in place, Yeah, that can be there all your life. And then you have your life's practice period.

[20:02]

A thousand, thousands of days. To let this intention mature in the minutia of your activity. Okay. So in this I'm also trying, in speaking this way, to give you a kind of, as I say, on the same page, and remind you of the kind of, bodily attentive world you live in through practice. Okay. Now I'd also like to try to Zen mind through, let's say, we can call wisdom mind.

[21:05]

Now, the word for wisdom in Buddhism is prajna. Okay. Now, Prajna in Hinduism, or it wasn't Hinduism, but pre-Indian thinking, philosophy, pre-Buddhist Indian thinking. There's no pre-Indian, that would be really long time ago. Prajna is... non-dual reality. Or in experiential terms, it's mind in which all activity has ceased. Now, It's not so important whether that's absolutely true or not.

[22:25]

The idea that non-dreaming deep sleep, which we have no conscious activity access to, is is identified with wisdom and then influence the development of practices based on meditation. And Santarakshita, the 8th century Bengali Buddhist philosopher who helped develop the Yogacara Madhyamaka school thought that only through non-conceptual meditation could you know reality.

[23:31]

Okay, so now we have something introduced here. Was that there's some concept of some reality, or not real reality, but some fundamental way things exist? And that cannot be known conceptually. But of course, to not know something conceptually is a conception. But still, Something is meant by non-conceptual. And identifying meditation as the way to know non-conceptually. Are we talking about Zen mind now?

[25:06]

Or wisdom mind? Okay. Now again, let me... I have some resistance to speak about things I've spoken about often before, but I think we've got to look at the fundamentals or basis of what we're speaking about. And pre-Buddhist India and Afghanistan and that whole area, they had the idea that there's these three minds that we're born with. Waking mind.

[26:19]

Dreaming mind. And non-dreaming deep sleep. Okay. I mean, I can say this to Sophia, my daughter, who's seven now. And whether she lives up to her name or not, It's quite easy for her to understand that there's these three minds of dreaming, etc. She has no I mean you have to have the idea introduced to you that there's non-dreaming deep sleep mind because you have no conscious access to it. But supposedly, I mean to the extent that you can measure dreaming sleep and non-dreaming sleep, When you wake, I'm told, when you wake people from non-dreaming, what seems to be non-dreaming sleep,

[27:34]

They still, they'll say, oh, I had such and such a thought occurring the moment you woke me. But the influence of this concept is independent of whether there's thoughts. But the influence of this concept is independent of whether there are thoughts. The concept is that there is a part of the day when there is no mental activity. Okay. So, Sophia can understand that there's these three. It's easy for her to understand that there's these three. It's easy for Sophia to understand.

[28:47]

And it's easier for you to understand. I thought there was... Yeah, I don't know. It's easy for her to understand that there's these three. But, When that's a cultural awareness of large numbers of people, somebody says, hey, why are the three minds separated? And what's the difference between the three minds? And why can't we have a mind that overlaps the three? And that simple idea leads to yogic culture. That you that there must be a mind, there are several ideas operating here, which in the West we mostly thought we could know through thinking and through knowledge. Yogic culture or even yogic civilization developed with a root idea that you can't know fundamentally through thinking.

[29:53]

They developed a root idea that you can't... They have a root idea, the root, that you can't know how things actually exist through thinking. And that very subject is the subject of Zen Mind Epilogue of Zen Mind Beginners Mind. Okay. So we have at the root of this other civilization that we are interfacing, inter-bodying with, that we But the most fundamental way we know the world is not through thinking.

[31:18]

So Sukershi would say something like, you can bring attention to your breath, bring attention to your posture. That's the way of knowing, of letting knowing happen. Okay. Now let's just take this simple idea again of these three minds and the idea that develops from it. Could we have a mind that overlaps these three? And how do we develop such a mind? Well, The answer was meditation.

[32:27]

Okay. Now, if then we can develop a mind that's not a mind we're born with, Nun, wenn wir also einen Geist entwickeln können, der ein Geist ist, mit dem wir nicht geboren wurden, heißt das, dass wir, wir selbst können einen Geist erschaffen, den wir, Well that simple idea shoots the idea of some inherent nature to pieces. If we can create a mind If we're not born with, then there's clearly no inherent nature. Well, and then the next idea is, well, if we can create a fourth mind, what about a fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth?

[33:39]

So then you have the whole development of Buddhism right there. Okay.

[33:42]

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