If we're really going to be meeting with an unsurpassed perfect Dharma, together we have to do the meeting. Maybe most of the meeting has to be done by you. You know, Toyota has a thermometer in the outside in the bottom somewhere. And when I, like today, drive Sophia to school, it's maybe 16 or 18, maybe 18 I think this morning, up at the log house, and then down here, I stop for a moment, and it's 14. And then I drive to the school, This morning it was 10, but some mornings it's zero. It'll be 16 here or 18 and zero at the school.

[01:03]

Look, the temperature drops. Isn't Mark Jacoby's house higher than ours? Than we are here? Maybe not. I wonder where, at what point the temperature starts dropping again as you go up. Can't just keep getting warmer forever. It's a drop somewhere. Anyways, we're in the sunbelt here or something like that. But whatever the temperature is, it's what it is. What do they say? Warm Buddha, cold Buddha, hot Buddha. Any case, it's what it is. And we have this location, you know, and there isn't, I mean, the most of what this is, this practice, is we have 90 days, 100 days, three months of a schedule, food, and a bed.

[02:10]

That's basically what it is. And practice is to make the schedule, the food and the bed, which is provided. We provide it to ourselves. You don't have to think about it. That gives you a freedom to Observe what happens when you don't have to worry about food, a bed, and the schedule, what to do. And as much as possible, you just let what appears appear. Now, I mean, you hear versions of this when everybody gives a lecture.

[03:11]

You know, I'm sorry I missed Christian's lecture the other day. I got a He gave me a disc. I asked him for it this morning, but I didn't realize you couldn't play it. And I tried to play it when I took Sophia to school, but it doesn't play because you need a computer or you need something more complicated than the player in the Toyota. So I only heard the first few words, but He quoted me as saying something like, to abandon yourself to zazen, zazen without structure. And I'd like to come back to that. And I seem to have chosen a theme of Chendong Ru Jing's statement that The practitioners, the 90-day practice period, form the true, the structure of true practice and make a cave in emptiness.

[04:29]

I always say, in my mind, I say, carve a cave in emptiness. And, you know, I've known this statement for many decades even. But because Russell nudged me about it, and because I said it in the, as I usually do in the opening ceremony, somehow it, yeah, can, it's just a, it's become for me not, I didn't choose it exactly at all, it just, it's been in my mind how to, how to speak about a structure of true practice. And it comes from Dogen's teacher. And I don't know really much about Ru Jing, you know, how many disciples he had. I know he had at least one or two others. What happened after to his lineage in China.

[05:33]

I mean, I can't remember what I know about it anyway. But Dogen, of course, has given us a teaching of such depth and You can ask, was it there in Rujing? Well, for Dogen it was. So, you know, sometimes it's not obvious that a teacher like Rujing is great. It takes a great disciple to bring out, discover the teaching in a teacher. Some teachers like Dogen really try to put it out there. And other teachers, yeah, that's not what they do. They're there and they let you. In a way, being a teacher is to allow a person to discover teaching through you.

[06:37]

And survive the process of allowing yourself to be a teacher. So, again, we have a schedule, food, a bed, a location. We have this location. And it is what it is. So I would like to try to speak about, again, something in one sense I've often spoken about, non-comparative mind, non-conceptual mind, and non-associative mind. But now I'm speaking about it in a different way than I ever have because I'm linking, in my mind again, I link them as the three non-minds, just because non-comparative, non-conceptual,

[07:39]

and non-associative. And... because I'm linking them together not to... usually I speak about them in the context of practice that these minds appear or developed or something but now I'm saying Let's find, let's think about them as part of the structure of true practice. And what you want to do, what we want to do is see if you can identify them. Now, I spoke about this a little bit at the end of the last lecture, which I more, you know, tried to give you a feel for practice more than a articulation of practice. So this te shos may be somewhere in between. Now, in order to practice, you have to have a steady mind.

[08:49]

In order to have a steady mind, you have to have a steady body. I mean, really, I mean, yeah, maybe it's not entirely true, but mostly. You need the yogic skill of a still body in which rests a still mind. If you don't have, if you haven't discovered stillness in your practice, and then in that physical stillness the mind settles itself into stillness, it's very hard to develop the yogic skills of, say for example, just noticing appearance. Your mind has to be kind of blank or zero or space in order to notice appearance or otherwise appearance is appearance in the mind and everything is all at once and yeah, it's just a movie.

[09:52]

It goes on. You can't stop the frames. There has to be this space this pause what do I say sometimes to pause for appearance or to pause for the particular you have to find this pause and to find this pause you really have to have enough hours really kind of cushion hours flight time in which Your experience is one primarily of pause and not of, more of pause than continuity. And in the pause things appear. It's almost as if you can just, the breath helps,

[11:04]

What can I say? It's as if you can take hold of the world and put it into a breath and it disappears. Put it into a breath and it disappears. And to know that way in which you can just make the world disappear You first have to discover how the world can disappear in zazen. So that if you're going to notice non-comparative mind, say, you have to notice appearance.

[12:22]

You have to notice when things appear and then when you make a comparison. So the practice of appearance is not simply that the world, item by item, unit by unit, particular by particularity by particularity, appears, but rather the mind itself appears. So the mind itself wants to notice its own appearance. Now you're trying to practice something like bare noticing. Here we are. We have this location, this temperature, this schedule. It appears. And for three months you're attempting to see if you can not have much else on your mind but that.

[13:25]

In your mind, through your mind, but just what appears in the schedule, in the daily routine, and so forth. So something appears. And do you make a comparison? A few. And so you want to sort of like start seeing the topography of the mind or seeing the mind as a surface, a surface of consciousness in which things bob up into it. Bob? Do you know the word bob in German?

[14:27]

What would it be? Like a cork. What? Of. A cork floats up to the surface. Okay. So you notice something and then you compare it. So what you're noticing is whatever appears and then you're noticing what you bring to it, that you make a comparison or you make a criticism or you have various stories associated with it or you have preferences, etc., It would be great. I mean, it would be really great if you could have virtually no preferences for three months. But at least it's possible to notice every time you have preferences and not get caught in the story of, oh, here comes a preference. Now you're trying to discover if it's a true practice, you know, a structure of true practice.

[15:31]

You can use these three minds, three non-minds, non-conceptual, non-comparative, and non-associative, as a way to notice what bobs to the surface of the mind itself. So you're now noticing the... structure your mind already has, that which we're not calling the structure of true practice, we're calling the structure of the mind you already have, which tends to compare, tends to criticize, tends to have a story about, usually self-referential, self-narrative story. So what the practice period is about, I mean, one of the main things it can be about, or should be, could be, is about, is to not have anything more than the schedule of bed and food and this location, which is not bad as a location.

[16:35]

It's got a particular temperature, but you don't compare it like I just did. Down below it's colder and up above it's warmer or something. Just this temperature. That's all. Today it's colder than it has been. So, the yogic skill you'd like to develop during the practice period. is to notice appearance, phenomenal sensorial appearance, and the mind's simultaneous appearance in reference to the phenomenal appearance. If you can find the mental space to do that, the somatic space to do that, and I said somatic and I think in some of the text I gave you I spoke about some, I'm using this term somatic mind to mean the particular kind of modality of embodiment that Zen is teaching and attempting to find a way for each of us to practice.

[18:08]

My point there is, of course, that there are various ways to weave the inseparable mind and body together, which are experienced separately. In a sense, a particular way. Now, it's... I think it's... If you sort of think, oh, there's one way to weave mind... This is a little aside within the teisho. If you think there's one way to weave mind and body together... basically you're believing in God how do I make that leap because if you think there's one way then you think there's a nature or something there there's some ingredients there that have an inherent nature and you're discovering the inherent way they go together like all religions lead to the same goal which from a Buddhist point of view is nonsense different is different different is different There may be a sameness in the experience of difference, but different is different.

[19:16]

So, you are choosing unsurpassed perfect dharma. Well, it's a choice. If you choose it and perfect it and complete it, in the sense perfect means to complete, Yeah, it's unsurpassed. You can't compare it to anything else. It's the choice you've made. You and the situation and the context of your life, everything which has settled you here at this time, this place. So you're choosing, and it's you who are doing it as the agent of this practice, to weave mind and body together in a particular, as I say, modality, particular way, which results in an experience of the world as, as I wrote,

[20:48]

in unison, in parallel, or inside each other, working together, or working as one, or seemingly stopped, as if everything is in place and is just as it is, a wholeness. Or dissonance, always there's dissonance. And you begin, again, if you have a steady enough mind and body, a spacious enough mind and body, you experience the dissonance or the otherness, the world as other in opposition and conflict. So things work together, they seem like they're one, and they are other, they're conflict. And those three phases of mind. Experiential phases of embodiment is the process of the embodiment of situated immediacy.

[21:58]

I think I have to use these terms because I don't know any other way to get the words to take hold of enough of the world to put it together in our mind. So I think it's fairly easy to notice associative mind. If you notice appearance, little space, pause, notice the associations. Of course, there's always what a men signs, a minimal associative, like you know it's a floor, you know it's a door or something like that.

[23:04]

but associations beyond the minimum. Let's call associative mind. And it's fairly easy to notice when you make a comparison or criticism. Criticism is a kind of comparison. Preference, preferential comparisons. And you can see how often in the topography of the mind, in the surface of the mind, When it pops up, you know there's an underlying structure there, like there should be a lighthouse there saying, no ship should pass here, no appearance should pass here, you're going to get stuck on all this stuff just under the water, just under the surface of mine. A buoy, a buoy, [...] they say. Bong, bong, you know, don't go here. Because underneath the surface is all this structure, which... like icebergs or something like that, excuse all the metaphors, pops up into the surface of the mind.

[24:10]

So after a while you begin to chart your own, the topography of your own mental surface, conscious surface. And then it makes you, I hope, quite aware of the structure beneath that. So if you get a sense of the topography of the surface of mind when there's this mental appearance and phenomenal appearance, then into your zazen you can begin to see if you can let yourself down, let some kind of observing function down below the surface of, underneath the surface of consciousness. It's up there like a shiny thing, you know, and you can begin to see these structures rooted often in childhood experience and insecurities and, you know, all kinds of stuff. I'm not trying to be Freudian here or psychological.

[25:20]

I'm just trying to talk about practice as to find the true structure of practice, you need to find the structure that's already there functioning in the mind and appearing in the surface consciousness. And you can use these three minds, non-conceptual, non-conceptual, non-comparative, non-associative, as ways to begin to notice this simultaneous appearance of mind and phenomena. Now, I've really only spoken here about non-comparative and non-associative mind. because non-conceptual mind is a much harder category to speak about and harder to notice because, and I think because everything is, the way consciousness functions, it doesn't notice anything unless it's conceptual.

[26:32]

Very difficult to just have sensorial appearance only. Now, it's on your cushion, I think. There's almost no other way. It's on your cushion that you can begin to experience non-conceptual mind. And the entry there is non-category. To stop thinking in categories. The body itself is a category. This would really be to abandon yourself, to practice without structure. But I think it's too much to try to go there today. So perhaps if I ever give the teisho again, which is actually quite likely, I will come back to non-category practice without categories.

[27:40]

Think. There's an adventure ahead. Thanks.

[27:51]

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