So what have we got here so far? We have a distinction between discursive thinking and non-discursive thinking. And we've refined that to non-discursive noticing. Now this is all related to Nagarjuna's two truths. In other words, I would say that Buddhism is rooted in the single idea that absolutely everything changes. That change itself changes. There's discontinuity Okay.

[01:04]

Now, from that comes the idea that there's no inherence and there's no permanence. And then, related, is that everything arises through interdependent causation. Then we have Nagarjuna who says, if everything arises through interdependent causation, You can't assign any nature, permanent nature or inherent nature to anything. So in the most fundamental sense, everything is empty. So Nagarjuna brought into Buddhism very strongly the concept and experience of emptiness.

[02:21]

The concept and the experience of emptiness. He tended to emphasize the philosophical and conceptual side. and the schools that followed from his teaching and he's sometimes called the second Buddha and because we're all involved in this creative process maybe we can call each of you the third Buddha If you actively at least engage yourself in practice. Okay. Now, from the Okay.

[03:40]

The later schools emphasize not the philosophical or conceptual side. The later schools derived from Nagarjuna emphasize the realization of emptiness, the practice of emptiness. What do they emphasize? the practice and realization of emptiness. And the fruits, the fruitfulness of noticing emptiness. And emptiness is really just a way to say interdependence. But it means the mental and physical the experiential noticing of emptiness. I should have said the experiential noticing of interdependence.

[04:42]

When you really notice how interrelated and interdependent everything is, There's no fixed point of view you can get hold of. So it's a non-reference point world. Except you establish a reference point all the time by your own location. But I have this location in my own experience, in this experience. But Otmar has a different sense of my location, because you're in between. And Peter has a different sense of my location.

[06:11]

Sometimes a monk is called a cloud water person. The word unsui, which means monk in Japanese, means cloud water person. The freedom of, you can't find a reference point in water, or a cloud is there, or is it there, you know. A no-reference-point world is kind of scary to us. But it's actually at the center of a kind of extraordinary freedom. Okay, so Nagarjuna brings in very strongly the concept of emptiness.

[07:16]

Okay, now that then leads to the idea of the two truths. And the two truths, although they develop from the idea of everything changes, the two truths become a kind of more subtle way of understanding the dynamic of change. It creates two levels. One level is emptiness. The other level is the apparent existence of things. The apparent truth.

[08:34]

So we could call it the principal truth is emptiness, no reference point. And the apparent truth is things are predictable, yeah, implicitly permanent. And we function and live in a world of apparent truth. And that's practically we need to have a certain amount of predictability. I'd rather the roof didn't fall in right now. And that's the way consciousness works. The way consciousness works, that mind you wake up into in the morning, the job of that mind is to make the world predictable.

[09:38]

It doesn't really notice what's not predictable. It doesn't notice a lot, actually. When you really start looking at consciousness, there's whole dark areas right in front of you. Most obviously is the way the many connections are present, but we see separation. So we have these two levels. The principal truth and the apparent truth. Perhaps in the afternoon I would like to say something about how later schools, including Zen, then further develop the two truths as a practice.

[10:49]

Now, without going into the details of the koan, the koan clearly says there's two levels. And this is related to Nagarjuna's two truths. Okay, so in some way there's a relationship where you can say the busy person is the apparent truth. And the unbusy person is the principal truth. Okay, so that conceptual framework is present in all of Buddhism. But since it's not philosophy, this is practice. The different metaphorical examples of this concept actually lead, develop our experience in different ways.

[12:07]

So we have in this one who's not busy the sense of two levels, a busy person and a not busy person. You know, we take, in English, we take the word person to mean something real, but you know, persona actually just means mask. Maybe we could say the busy mask and the unbusy mask. Just to play with the lack of a fixed identity. Okay, now what I said in the first part of this morning was the way to enter into the connectedness between these two truths because all of practice, Mahayana practice is about

[13:27]

how to know these two truths and how to bring them together. Okay, so one of the main ways to bring them together is to cut off discursive thinking. Now, I'm suggesting you practice this, try this out, for, you know, homeopathic doses. Yeah, a little bit more than a homeopathic dose. Ten minutes at a time or something like that. Every now and then. So, now you need a tool to do it with. And the tool I've offered you today and yesterday is to pause for the particular.

[14:46]

And just this. Okay. Yeah. So now if you do this, you do it now and then. What you'll discover is a mind that is generated when there's non-discursive thinking. Non-discursive noticing generates a different mind than discursive thinking. And I said practice is not so much about understanding, a new understanding, but a new mind which understands. Okay. So you're practicing non-discursive thinking. Or let me say more exactly, non-discursive noticing.

[16:04]

Just this. Whatever it is. Just this. Now what are you doing when you do this, as well as generating a non-discursive noticing mind? You're also letting, in this case, the bell striker, appear from its own side. Now, if you look at a tree and you want to really... Feel the tree. You've got to stop thinking about the tree. Stop calling it a tree. Yeah. If I just don't, I don't call this anything.

[17:18]

It's actually, I heard it say it. It says, don't call me a bell striker. I'm more than just an ordinary bell striker. I'm a piece of red brocade cloth from Japan. I'm a one ear plug. So the bell striker, you let it appear from its own side. And what happens then? It doesn't happen through discursive thinking. It happens through non-discursive noticing. You increase the interweaving, you increase the connectedness with the world. Okay. So non-discursive noticing increases your connectedness with the world.

[18:46]

This, this, when you get in the habit of it. And you get to know this mind, in other words, this mind that is generated by non-discursive noticing. begins to be present. It's just, you know, part of the surface of discursive mind. A little bit like the page is present in between the typefaces, the type, the words in a book. You know, if you do zazen regularly, and then you get used to the experience of zazen mind being part of your daily life. There's this kind of foreground-background relationship.

[20:10]

It starts being the background of your daily life. Sometimes it moves into the foreground, etc. And if you stop doing Zazen, Or a couple weeks for some reason. It's Christmas, I don't know what, you know, you're on vacation, you're in an airplane. And this Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to Denver, you can't even put your legs down, let alone cross them. It's for legless passengers, I think. So you haven't been sitting for a while and you see that actually Zazen mind sinks below the surface of your daily life. And when you start doing Zazen again, then after a few days, the Zazen mind begins to be the background of your daily life and sometimes the foreground.

[21:26]

And mindfulness practice allows also this zazen mind to surface in our life. And non-discursive noticing allows Zazen mind to surface in our life. And let's call Zazen mind a different name now. Let's call it the one who's not busy. So non-discursive mind, non-discursive noticing our mind lets non-busyness surface in our life.

[22:31]

Now, you know, I live in the Black Forest, so I'm addicted to cuckoo clocks. When in Rome, do as the, you know, the Hudson plots does. There's an expression, when in Rome, do as the Romans do. So I said, when in the black forest, do as Hotzenplatz does. So everywhere I live, I have a cuckoo clock. Even my wristwatch, no, it doesn't. Cuckoo! But what I've noticed is, I'm sleeping.

[23:41]

And at some point I hear the cuckoo clock. And I hear the last three or four cuckoos. Say it's eleven o'clock. And I... What did you say? I said say it's seven. I don't know where the seven came from. Oh, 7-11, it runs. There's a grocery chain called 7-Eleven. Okay, he wants to know what's going on here. he's beautiful isn't he he or she she's beautiful she thinks she's on a runway okay so I when I hear the cuckoo clock

[25:00]

with the kind of consciousness that's appeared, and let's say it's eleven, I start counting at seven. Good. You know, actually, I can just shut up and she can give the lecture. She's a little ahead of me always. Okay. And I start counting 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. But I counted the first 6 or 7 while I was asleep. So something counted which wasn't consciousness. Now again, if this were a ball, I threw it to one of you. Without any thought, you would put up your hand and catch it.

[26:41]

Well, that's actually quite a complex calculation of the speed and the arc and so forth. You need a computer to do it. But your mind does it without it being conscious. And if you talk to artists, they almost invariably say, I have to shut off discursive thinking in order to do art. And creative research scientists have to do the same thing. And there's many anecdotes about it.

[27:46]

And if you talk to pure mathematicians whose job is to solve problems which haven't been solved, a pure mathematician, they gather all the information they can And then they stop thinking about it. And then? possibilities pop up from somewhere. And they have to depend on this popping up, or they can't solve what has, nobody has been able to think their way to the answer, so they have to wait for the pop-up effect. Well, Zen says, think this way all the time. Because actually the world is changing in a way, you're always in the midst of something that hasn't been solved.

[28:57]

If fundamentally the world is not predictable, it means we could also say we're in a situation which is always not solved. Dungsan was asked, to simplify the question, Dungsan was asked, What about the world that doesn't fall into, what about the world that doesn't fall, what about phenomena, let's put it that way, what about phenomena that doesn't fall into any category? He said, I'm always close to this. It's actually a perfect answer.

[30:06]

And it's an answer that is also an acupuncture phrase. A wisdom phrase. So you can work with, I'm always close to this. What is this? Just this. I'm always close to this. You're on the threshold of otherness. Okay. The threshold of otherness is also connectedness. Now, if we use the metaphor of the ocean and waves... So there's waves, and it's clear that all the waves are trying to return to stillness.

[31:10]

That's, you know, the curve is like that of the wave, and then it wants to go back to stillness. That's what defines the wave. So not only is the water still at some deep level the nature of the water is still. Now this is a wonderful metaphor but the problem with it is and we have to be careful about it It implies an inherent nature of water. So instead of thinking about the nature of water in this metaphor, let's emphasize the function of water. So if you imagine water If still water came up in a strong current, it would smooth out the waves.

[32:28]

If you look at the Rhine down here, when there's particularly in the spring runoff, it's fast and smooth. Everything is smoothed out by the current. Okay. So for us, the current is connectedness. And the more your attention is present in the immediate situation, with discursive thinking held back and self-referential thinking held back that allows connectedness to be present as the mind itself And that is a kind of calmness.

[33:50]

Now, Marie-Louise is a volunteer firefighter. In Creston, Colorado. In Creston, Colorado. She knows how to use a chainsaw. I'm scared of her, actually. She has a helmet and big boots, you know, gosh. Okay, now, in, you know, it's just it does do crazy things like crawl along the floor with smoke and, you know, something you have to breathe in, etc., right? I feel safe going to sleep at night with her. But I don't know. I fought a forest fire for two weeks once. California, a huge forest fire. My experience is the firefighters who are the calmest are the most connected.

[35:14]

They notice the most and at the same time are the calmest. Okay. So what I'm trying to say here, just as we're about to end, I think, is this practice to pause for the particular. And just this. To cut off Discursive thinking. To allow a non-discursive noticing to come up. To allow a new mind to be generated. Which allows a continual flow, really, of intuitive thinking. The kind of thinking which the mathematician wants to pop up.

[36:32]

Or the kind of counting of the cookie clock while you're still asleep. I don't have quite a word for it, but that deeper integrative thinking which goes on, which is all involved with surprising connections, not predictable connections. is better able to know the world itself, which is surprising. Now, you'd think that the one who's not busy goes to a monastery or cuts off all that busy world.

[37:47]

And there's no question that non-scratching zazen and time in a monastic practice helps you to establish the presence of the one who is not busy. The emphasis in this teaching is the busyness itself is an entry into the one who is not busy. And rather than cutting us off from the world with meditation or monastic life, the teaching of this particular story is, it's not about, it's about, yes, it's about cutting off discursive thinking,

[39:01]

But it's not about cutting off connections. It's about being open to connectedness which which How can I say it? Which is the connectedness itself is a kind of stillness. Because each thing is just as it is. And you feel are weaving the world and being woven by the world. And so this is also the one who's not busy.

[40:06]

In the midst of being busy. Okay. So we have a minute or two. Now you see there's no point of view. That clock says we have two minutes, this clock says we have half a minute. And this clock says, listen non-discursively to the bell. Da Wu said to Yun Yan, too busy.

[42:43]

And Yun Yan said, you should know there is one who is not busy. This is quite knowable in your life. If your intention to realize it is strong enough. And you understand the practices, the craft of the practice which can realize it. The mind which is not really disturbed by things.

[43:46]

The spirit that is not really disturbed by things.

[44:18]

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