I think in these transformative practices, it's useful to have a conceptual understanding and it's assumed in There it is useful to have a conceptual understanding and in a mature, mature Buddhist practice it is assumed that conceptual understanding is necessary. And a conceptual understanding is expected simply because it's useful, necessary. But within transformative practices, within the activity of transformative practices, there can be so many resistances going on that it's useful to have, I think, something simply mechanical to do.

[01:26]

It's really just shifting the ingredients a bit. Changing the pot you're cooking in or changing the temperature of the burner. In this case, I gave you something mechanical to do. I think I keep doing it myself. To remember, to remind yourself. that mind appears with every appearance. So that's the main mechanical thing I mentioned this morning.

[02:48]

And you will be surprised if you do it regularly. What a difference it makes. Now, so that's, you know, I've just said that much. Is this the kitchen crew that arrived? I think that the schedule is too limited. If we have a half hour break and a half hour of sitting, there isn't time to have lunch by 12.30. So we have to have lunch at... At one. At one? Yeah. Oh, it does. My schedule says this ends at 12.30 and lunch is at one.

[03:49]

So we need to probably go until 12.45 or so. Yeah. Or one. Because it's already 1. No, I mean it's already a little after 12. Anyway, it's in the afternoon the same problem. Unless we eliminate the break. You want to eliminate the break? Or eliminate the zazen? Or eliminate me. Goodbye cruel world. So does anybody have anything to say about this mechanical thing I've suggested or anything else? Does anyone have something to say about this mechanical story or about something else?

[04:56]

Because I need your participation. Yes. I wonder if there's a difference in seeing. If I pause to let the world come forward, then for me that's a different kind of seeing. For sure. It's different than if I try to see mind. If I try to see mind, then it's as though I place the object in front of me.

[05:57]

But if I let things come forward, then it's as though I am withdrawing myself to let the thing come forward. Okay, I understand that. But still, what comes forward, and the word in English, event, means what comes forward. Event from French, what comes forward. So when something comes forward, it is an event and it appears. And as soon as you notice it, mind is what's noticing it. So I think it's exactly the same. But the directionality is significantly different. This comes from yesterday we took a quotation of Dogen's.

[07:16]

Which I think again we should establish as a reference point in our Dharma Sangha practice. And that statement of Dogen's is to cultivate and authenticate. I need more. You need more? Greedy. to cultivate and authenticate the 10,000 things. Oh, you have to start with the 10,000 things. I cultivate first and then I look around for the 10,000 things. Can I stop you for a moment?

[08:22]

There are all these translators and the way you've chosen to say this now in English is the hardest way possible to translate as far as I'm concerned. Well, how would you say it in English? I try to avoid it. Why? Because you don't want to correct me? No, no, no. No, I don't. It's a very good way to say it in English, but in German it's very difficult to translate it that way. To cultivate, to authenticate and to convey, all three of them are difficult. Could we say to make them authentic? To make them authentic? That's what authenticate means. So that's okay. It's for the translation. That's what I mean. To make them authentic. To make the 10,000 things authentic. In English it's great, in German it's a little, it doesn't... That's to confirm. Yeah, confirm is okay.

[09:22]

That would work very well in German. All right, well, confirm away, you know. Okay, confirm is good. And cultivate, could I say develop? That's more like develop. To cultivate is like to plow, to cultivate a plant, to cultivate the earth, to develop. I guess you can say develop if you want. Because those are words that work with things. All right. Well, if we're going to make this a reference point for our Deutsche Dharma Sangha, we better get it in good German. I know, I know. Well, we have the translating team here. Goethe said in his word imperturbabilität. That's what you sometimes use. Imperturbability. That's a German word Goethe used. Well, that's nice. I use it too. Imperturbabilität. Yeah, but we're not talking about imperturbable now.

[10:30]

I thought the word didn't exist in German. I know English is just a dialect of German. Are we ready to go? Now we're there. Okay. I'll say it in English. You do it in German now. To cultivate and authenticate, make real, the 10,000 things, By conveying the self to them is delusion. Now it's worth just thinking about that. Do you make sure the world is real and develop your relationship to the world

[11:33]

by thinking of things in terms of the self. If you do, and if you notice you do, you can say to yourself, Dogen says I'm deluded. And then you can look around and say, Dogen was wrong. I am not deluded. But then you can say, well, why did he say that then? Was he right? That kind of inner dialectic needs to be part of your practice. Why did Dogen say that? I think he's wrong. Well, maybe he's right. Diese Art innerer Dialektik ist notwendig. Vielleicht hatte er Recht, vielleicht hatte er Unrecht, und darüber nachzudenken.

[12:56]

Then he said, but to cultivate and authenticate, no, to let the ten thousand things Come forward and cultivate and authenticate the self is enlightenment. Now again, you can sort of like poke around in that. Do I feel? Do I do that? Can I let things come forward? And yesterday I suggested, instead of saying to pause for the particular, I suggested we use a phrase, create a phrase for ourselves to wait for the particular. Wir halten inne für die Einzelheit, könnten wir so einen Wendesatz schaffen, indem wir sagen, ich warte auf die 10.000 Dinge.

[14:19]

To wait for the 10.000 things to start walking around. Zu warten, bis die 10.000 Dinge beginnen umherzuwandeln. Or to wait for the 10.000 things to start talking to us. Oder auf die 10.000 Dinge zu warten, bis sie beginnen zu uns zu sprechen. To wait for the 10.000 things to... Because each of the 10,000 things is an activity. Okay. So you've got that statement. You can explore it. Now, what I said to Dorothea is that it's a shift in direction. What she knows, she understands. There's a big difference in looking at the world, it's out there and real. And the parts that are important to me are the parts that relate to me, my history, my future, etc.,

[15:26]

That's defining the world as out there. Okay. And to define the world as out there assumes that the world is real. Existing separate from you. In two universal categories. Time and space. But for a Buddhist, for a yogic practitioner, time and space are not universals. Okay, now again, rationally we can understand pretty well that time and space are, maybe they're not universes.

[16:49]

But that really doesn't become real for you. until you embody it. Okay. Now, what I've been saying in the last year or so is let's forget about, as a practice to free ourselves from the assumption of universals, which are really, from a Buddhist point of view and a yogic point of view, alienating universals. So I've suggested that we start with noticing bodily time and if I just run through that briefly for the sake of its rational presentation if you say something like I have no time

[18:06]

Wenn du so etwas sagst wie, ich habe keine Zeit. This is completely a comparative statement. It's only in relationship to other people and things you have to do that you have no time. Das ist voll und ganz eine vergleichende Aussage, weil du nur in Beziehung zu anderen Personen und in Beziehung zu den Dingen, die du tun musst, sagen kannst, du hast keine Zeit. In fact, you are time. You'll notice that a few minutes before you die. Hey, I'm running out of time. The clock is still going, but I'm running out of time. So in a fundamental experiential sense, time is your heartbeat, your metabolic pulse, your breath, and so forth. And any yogi lives within his or her bodily time. And this is, we know this from yoga practice, we know this from the martial arts, from all the things that have come to us from yoga cultures.

[19:48]

And I think if you're an athlete, or a musician, you probably better function entirely within bodily time. And if you're fully in your thusness as bodily time, Then you can adjust and feel yourself within the field of others' bodily time. Then you can relate to clock time. Which has to do with the declination of the earth in relation to the sun and so forth. But that's planetary time, not your bodily time.

[20:58]

Of course it does affect us. I arrived here a couple of days ago from the United States. And until this morning, part of me was still over the Atlantic. Trying to wonder what planetary time is. Okay, so that's bodily time. And this is another mechanical, kind of mechanical thing you can do. Feel yourself in bodily time. Don't rush. And when you rush, rush in accordance with bodily time.

[22:04]

If you can, again, try to notice when you lose your sense of bodily time and when you have it and you try to, as a yogi, Zen practitioner, you try to keep relocating yourself in bodily time. So time is not a universal thing. And even in our planetary system, it's established by the planets, not by some universal underlying order. The only underlying order is, in this case, this particular sun and this particular earth and so forth. And your bodily time, your time starts with this body in relationship to other bodies and this physical world.

[23:11]

These are the same ingredients we live by, live within, but we are shifting the way we think about them. And shifting the way we think about them and experience them. Now let's take space as a universal. I think that conceptually Ich glaube, der vom Konzeptuellen her einfachste Zugang ist das Konzept von Urknall. Der Urknall ist nicht im Raum geschehen, sondern der Urknall hat den Raum, in dem er passiert ist, geschaffen.

[24:23]

And we're living in that, as far as our measurements tell us, within this space, in this part of our cosmos, cosmetics, cosmos, that, it's the same root, that is understood as the Big Bang. It's a kind of ornamentation. Fragrance. Yeah. Okay. So I said yesterday we can start with illuminating the spine. Awakening the spine.

[25:35]

And feeling the awakening of the spine awakening into awareness. You're bringing attention but not consciousness And I don't know if just between now and tomorrow we can really make this distinction clear. But in any case, you're bringing attention but not consciousness to the spine. And for those of you who weren't here yesterday, please just accept for now that consciousness is not the same Attention is not the same as consciousness.

[26:38]

Attention is a dynamic of consciousness. But it's also a dynamic of awareness and even a lucid dreaming. So you're bringing attention, a physical feel of attention into the spine, usually from the bottom of the spine up. Segment by segment. And I would say that for the yogi, maybe it's equally or even more important than bringing attention to the breath as an initial practice. Because it also is a way to bring attention to the breath.

[27:43]

As you bring attention and awaken awareness throughout the spine, All the way through the head to the top of the head. You can also extend that to awakening breath. Which flows subtly as real breath and as so-called subtle breath parallel to the spine. And then that

[28:43]

awakening of the spine and the breath extends easily to the feeling of mind. Mind now is a knowing awareness but not a thinking consciousness. And that extends to space. And space that you are generating. Like the big bag. Here's the little whimper. The little blip. Wie der Big Bang. Du bist dieses kleine Blip.

[29:57]

Blip. Fitzelchen. TS Eliot says the world ends not with a bang, but a whimper. Wimper, I don't know. Weißt du? Wimper. Wimper. Oh, TS Eliot sagt, die Welt wird nicht mit einem Knall enden, sondern mit einem Winseln. Yeah, so... It's the whimpering Dharma. Okay, so, but if you have this sense that in fact you're generating space, which is a fact, I'm telling you it's a fact, and you know, Anyway, let's consider the fact. Und das ist eine Tatsache. Ich sage euch, das ist eine Tatsache und also lasst uns das als Tatsache behandeln. And the room is generating space. And boy, was it a different space before we put in the floor.

[31:03]

And the curtain. And laid the tile over there. And built this stairway. You couldn't even get upstairs before. Now we can use this stairway as an entrance. We can come down the stairs. So we've completely changed the feel of the space. And before we had it as a space, it was a carpentry shop, and Wolfram Graubner and others created this space, which was different. So don't think of space as universal. Right now, we're in a complex, overlapping space, each of you generating space.

[32:05]

And we pick certain rooms and design certain rooms to help us generate space much in the way that a concert hall is designed for the French horn and the violin and the cello. My impression is that the Oracle at Delphi was in a cave because a cave creates a sonorous voice. And I think Romanesque churches were meant to amplify the voice of the priest. Yeah, so that you, well, they didn't have amplification in those days.

[33:40]

So you had to be able to develop so you could speak in the space which helped you speak. And then they got all excited about Gothic cathedrals, and they got bigger and taller and longer, and no one can speak in them. Because there's so much echo. But it lends itself wonderfully to Gregorian chanting. So as I understand it, the long intervals of Gregorian chanting develop for Gothic cathedrals. And the same kind of thinking, what rooms... lend themselves to samadhi?

[34:46]

What rooms lend themselves to hearing the cello of every heart in the room? So there's no universals. You're generating space and you're establishing bodily time in relationship to other temporal, other durative experiences. Okay. I don't know where that came from. I was thinking of talking about this stone again.

[35:49]

But Dorothea just threw me off. Okay. But if we get it that there are no universals, then you actually get it how important appearance is. Because every appearance occurs in the field of mind. And when you let things come forward and identify you, because these appearances are real in your reality, If everything is an appearance, even terrible appearances, they're appearances within your own experience.

[36:59]

So you may hate them, but you don't feel alienated by them. Because they aren't alien. They can't be alien. They can only be different or unusual or new. Okay. Now, just before we go to lunch, Let me say that this stone I've got here, I grew up partly on the beaches of New England and I love beach stones. So in this Stone is on my desk or now in my hand.

[38:05]

It has the associative appearances of bead stones I've collected endlessly. And it also is an oval, which has to do a lot with the inner mathematics of the body. But in any case, if a dragonfly came in here and flew past this stone, the stone would exist for the Lubella. but not in the way it exists for us. The Lubella wouldn't go by and say, oh, that's a beach stone. Not true. The Lubella would say, that ain't food. I have no idea what the Lubella would say. But the Lubella would definitely say,

[39:10]

the appearance would be different. So the stone is in some sense out there for the Libella. And it's out there in my hand for us. But for us in our human world, this is only an appearance. And even if somebody throws it... I have a hard head, you know. Even if someone throws it at me... It's still an appearance. Okay, so what is amongst a number? What is a significance of knowing it as an appearance? Of knowing everything as an appearance. Where does it appear? It appears, as I've been pointing out, in the mind.

[40:43]

But how does it appear in the mind? It appears in the mind through the senses. So this is a sensorial object. If you get in the habit of treating, discovering, knowing, everything as an appearance, you're making a shift from a world of mental continuity One of the things consciousness does is our defining medium of knowing. Is it pours out continuity. And imagining constantly a future, a predictable future or a scary future.

[41:46]

The senses don't do that. The senses are discontinuous. I see it. I even can kind of listen to it. I feel it in the hand. Yeah, like that. Like this. So, if I... If... if I establish everything as a unique appearance. And you can see that this has changed over the centuries a lot.

[42:49]

It was once a mountain. Or at least a cliff. And it's been worn down to an oval. And a geologist could tell us something about how it's layered and pushed together and so forth. But it's nothing but slowed down activity. And it is still an activity in my perceiving it. My perceiving is an activity. My picking it up and Feeling its weight is an activity. And watch it, how active it is. It just did it all by itself. So gravity is a form of activity. So it's an activity.

[43:50]

In my perception, in my picking it up, in its relationship to gravity and so forth. And gravity is an activity of this mammoth earth. So I train myself to notice everything as an activity. I see the activity embedded in the stone. Ich sehe die Aktivität, wie sie in den Stein eingebettet ist. And I feel my activity in noticing it. Und ich spüre meine Aktivität, ihn zu bemerken. And so forth. Und so weiter.

[44:50]

And what does that mean? Was bedeutet das? I'm shifting my pace. That's a hard word to translate. Yes. Sorry. That's okay. Ich verändere mein Tempo. My gait, my tempo, my pace. Out of the flow of the thingness of consciousness, into the dynamic flow of everything as an event, known through the pulse of my senses, Because each appearance is unique. And each appearance occurs in a sensorial moment which releases. And to locate yourself in those sensorial moments

[45:53]

is Dharma practice. Those sensorial moments are dharmas. What we mean by dharmas. So please do it. So we can have dharmic fun together. Or live in this same yogic, in fact, planet. And Fritz, I didn't forget you, but we're going to have lunch. After lunch? I mean, she just sent me off in the wrong direction. You would have sent me in another direction, I'm sure. Thank you very much.

[46:53]

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