In the presence of such eminent authorities on Zen, it's for Vanya and Ed Brown, I don't know if I can go on. And we only have about an hour. And in a seminar, I like to sort of allow ingredients to collect and then see if This last day we can bring the ingredients into some kind of cooking process. No, at least that you can continue the cooking. But we have two people remaining to say something.

[01:06]

I think it's better to not do it now. But I want you to, always. My question comes up from a tension between two images, pictures that you used yesterday. On one side the reality that everything is changing, nothing is permanent. I can feel that very easily in my daily life. Today maybe I'm happy, tomorrow I'm sad. And then on the other side there is this picture, this image of the man, that is a little funny, the man on the rope.

[02:20]

Whatever happens, he takes it as it is. Is there a way for me from this image of constant change, where everything can be completely different tomorrow, to this reason that I can say again tomorrow, what is tomorrow, that is good for me. And my question now is, is there a way to move from this picture of impermanence to this picture of the man on the rope being able to accept whatever changes things as it is they are? Yeah, but...

[03:44]

Let's see if I can respond to that in the remainder of the seminar. It's very easy to intellectually understand that everything is impermanent. But to make it the way you know the world is not easy. It's not hard but it takes some time and intention. Okay. What I realized in this process of asking questions is that I seem to have questions for myself. I thought I never have questions.

[04:46]

And there is a difference, do I have questions that I could ask you? That's a completely different context and there I never have any questions which I wonder about. But for myself, I seem to have questions. And the basic question is very similar to Peter's, is what struck me when you talked about this bus experience. You sit in this bus and it's in the traffic jam. My question is basically every day, how do I get there? How do I get to this place of equanimity, of taking things as they are? And then another question aside to that, that's kind of going in Ivo's direction, what is the nature of the things? What is meant by reality as it is? Is it reality that I take in with my senses? I'm working a lot on the bodily level lately.

[05:53]

Is it, well, part of my inner reality? Is my thinking, my notions? And I'm kind of trying to sort that out. Reality of other people, feeling of separateness or connectedness, this is How do I get that all straightened out? Also, mir ist so aufgefallen, dass ich auch Mühe habe, Fragen zu stellen und dass ich gemerkt habe in dem Prozess hier, ich habe doch eigene Fragen für mich, aber es ist was anderes, wenn ich Roger eine Frage stellen soll, da habe ich dann immer wieder überhaupt keine. And in the process of my own questions, it's something similar to what Peter said. What concerns me the most is the question, how do I reach this state that Roshi talked about on the bus? So really sitting in the middle of an unchangeable situation and letting yourself go and saying, now it's like that.

[06:55]

And the question that then follows is, how do I recognize or how am I on the way to see things the way they are? I am currently working on a body-related level with sensory organs, what I perceive, see, hear, feel. Yesterday afternoon we broke up into two small groups Instead of having a topic exactly to discuss, we just asked what questions arise in one's life or in practice. And then we started this morning with the discussion of, you know, about what happened.

[08:15]

And I would say just in general that if you can, is to really understand the power of intention in practice, And to trust the technique or the process of holding an intention continuously but not trying to act on it. So if you have a question, to turn the question into an intention instead of trying to answer. An intention to discover, to respond to it. to find a response, but to allow the intention to, you know, just be present in your living.

[09:37]

Yeah, the process of working on koans is the same. Or using what I call gate phrases or wados. Like you said, this feeling not connected. This is one of the most basic, common experiences. You can ask questions like, why do we feel connected to babies and not to adults? But really, there's an assumption in our culture that we're separate. Es ist aber tatsächlich so, dass es eine Annahme in unserer Kultur gibt, dass wir getrennt seien.

[10:49]

That's a view that exists prior to perception. Und das ist eine Ansicht, die vor der Wahrnehmung existiert. Flying the eightfold path, views are first. Und deswegen sind im achtfachen Pfad die Ansichten an erster Stelle. Because if you have a view that we are separate, As I say, even if that space separates us, your perceptions will confirm that. So really, more fundamentally than our psychological reasons for feeling not connected. There's a fundamental view that we're separate. And then through some effort or politeness or friendship, we have to find a connection. So in effect, we have a view that we're already separated.

[12:00]

So you can take as a gate phrase, already connected. And then in each circumstance, you feel already connected. Or you say that to yourself. So it's an initial mind So your initial mind is already connected. Now, it may not be true, you may not feel that way, but you have that intention that you hold. So if I look at you in my initial mind, that's there as you appear in my knowing, consciousness.

[13:23]

This initial mind has this feeling of already connected. Eventually I will feel, it really works, already connected when I see somebody or something, see a situation or see a person. So it's something you can try. And of course, if we feel already connected, the many ways in which we make an effort to know somebody are different. You start out from a feeling of being connected. And this changes everything. Okay, so we started out with this very simple don't scratch. Which may expose the body in the golden wind.

[14:41]

And the other simple zazen instruction is to count your breaths. To do that for a while. It's mostly a process of counting to one, but sometimes you get to ten. Now, since you already know how to count to ten, even my daughter Sophia can count to ten in English and German. Why can't you count to ten in Zazen? Well, if you can easily count to ten in Zazen, you're not doing Zazen. Because it's consciousness that knows how to count to ten. Awareness doesn't know how to count to ten. Zazen mind doesn't know how to count to ten.

[15:45]

So you're in a way, you're trying to bring attention, you have an intention to bring attention to your breath. And through that, it's actually a process of developing one-pointedness. So, you know, and eventually, if you keep trying, eventually it's not so much that you're successful at counting to ten. But eventually you find you have a mind that stays where you put it. So now let's go to the third simple zazen instruction. Don't invite your thoughts to tea.

[17:11]

Okay. Now, when you first hear that, and it was one of the most common instructions Suzuki Roshi would give us, don't invite your thoughts to tea. So I said, when you first hear that, you think, oh, sure, I cannot get involved in my thoughts. But, you know, you do this for a while. And after a while, you might ask yourself the question, isn't the thought to not invite your thought to tea also a thought. So if I don't invite the thought to tea, to not invite the thoughts to tea, then I can't not invite, you know, it's a... Okay.

[18:19]

I'll skip that, okay? Yeah, you'll skip that, okay? So it must be a different kind of thought. The thought not to invite the thought to tea is not the same kind of thought as the thoughts you're not inviting. Now in English we just don't have, maybe if you go into the etymology of words you can find these subtleties. But we just don't have words for different kind of thoughts. So we'll have to make up our own thoughts. Our own words. So let's say that one is an intentional thought and the other is a discursive thought.

[19:25]

So really the instruction is use an intentional thought to not invite discursive thoughts to tea. An intentional thought is like already connected. An intentional thought is a thought that will hold the space of mind. So you can have an intentional thought, which you just have this intentional thought, and it's the space of your mind. Of the mind, you don't even want to say your mind. And you can feel the difference when you do invite the thoughts to tea.

[20:28]

And the discursive thoughts produce a mind which has forgotten to not invite your thoughts to tea. So what you discover really is it's not just an intentional thought and discursive thoughts. But the intentional thought actually generates a mind and let's call it the host mind because what is a host someone who is always at home and the guests come and go so we say also don't just let your thoughts come and go These are the guest thoughts.

[21:51]

So then we could imagine, you know, two technical terms, host mind and guest mind. And these are different minds. And I think it was really important to recognize that we have, in practice, that we have different minds. Now, how do you say, what's a different mind? Well, the simplest definition I can say is that a mind is self-organizing or own-organizing. And it's homeostatic. In other words, it tends to maintain itself. For example, if you're sleeping and the alarm goes off, if you don't want to wake up, That's because your sleeping mind is homeostatic.

[23:09]

It wants to remain sleeping. And if it decides that the alarm clock is actually just a telephone you don't have to answer, Then it's own organizing, self-organizing. To maintain its, you know, But once you wake up, it's very hard to go back to sleep. Once you start thinking about things discursively, a mind we call consciousness is established, which is the territory of ordinary language, memory, self, and so forth. But dreams, for example, don't float in consciousness, they sink out of sight.

[24:14]

But if you can somehow go back into sleeping I mean, if you can bring back into your body the feeling of the sleeping mind and don't worry too much about the dream because the important thing is the sleeping mind, not the dream. But you can use this some item from the dream to bring sleeping mind up again. But you can't dream easily in consciousness.

[25:15]

It's another liquid, another surface. But if you can bring the liquid of dreaming, sleeping mind then the dream comes back to the surface. It might be a different dream, it might be the same dream starting up where you left off. So you can think of minds maybe as different kinds of liquids. Different things float in or work and they have different viscosities. So whether you do zazen or not, You do wake up at least once a day.

[26:23]

Go to sleep once a day. And you can feel the process of going to sleep. Sometimes you can notice going to sleep. Now, is it consciousness that notices going to sleep? Not really. I mean, you can always tell if you go into a child's room, if they're pretending to sleep, you can tell they're actually awake. Because you can feel their breathing consciously. It's very hard to consciously breathe involuntarily. But when you're sleeping, you're breathing involuntarily. And you can feel that immediately.

[27:29]

So you can actually, if you want to play with this and try it out, you can actually stay sort of awake as you fall asleep. And myself, I notice that there's a little cough I usually make and my breathing changes. Okay, so what is knowing now, what is knowing the sleeping if it's not consciousness? As most of you know, for convenience, I call it awareness in distinction to consciousness. Okay, now once you see that awareness is there, now you can ask, is awareness present at other times in our life? Where does awareness go during the day? Well, as I've often said, if you fall down with a bunch of packages in your arm,

[28:49]

and you save yourself and don't break anything, that's awareness. It appears immediately. It's much faster than consciousness. You couldn't consciously think, I better put my elbow that you can't do it. So awareness is always there. A little bit like the stars are always there, but they're hidden by the daylight. So awareness in these, let's call them more subtle aspects of mind, are hidden, concealed by consciousness. Okay, so now what I've tried to say is that to really, through your own experience, know, feel different states of mind.

[30:08]

And one of the truisms of Yogacara teaching, Zen teaching, is all mental phenomena have a physical component. And all sentient physical phenomena has a mental component. And what does that mean? It means that you can feel your states of mind. That's a physical location and feel of states of mind, modes of mind. So part of the craft of Zen practice You have to know the physical feel of states of mind.

[31:17]

There's big obvious differences. The reclining posture is the physical posture of dream sleep and non-dreaming deep sleep. Also es gibt deutliche, große, grobe Unterschiede, dass zum Beispiel die Haltung, die sich niederlegt, die Haltung ist vom Schlafen und Träumen. And it's rare to stand up while you're sleeping. Und es ist schwierig aufzustehen oder zu stehen, während du schläfst. Horses do it. Pferde können das tun. And if you're sleepwalking, you do it. I went to Japan with about 12 people, and we all slept in little tiny rooms. And the unit of a Japanese building is the tatami, which is measured by the length of a person sleeping.

[32:21]

So there's 12 of us with, I think, maybe 12 tatamis. And we had these two rooms, six tatamis each. And Mikhail Podgorech practices the martial arts with extreme intensity. Almost every night he'd get up and do sleep fighting while we were all lying down, looking knees up like this, you know. And most of us were a little afraid. What, do we get up and tell him to sleep, you know, get down? And he sort of... But Eric Griesler is his old friend, so Eric would tap him lightly and he'd get back down.

[33:34]

So here, in this case... The body is functioning in awareness and can. But through martial arts you're training yourself in awareness. So you can act through awareness. Yeah, that's enough to say about that for now. Okay, so this simple instruction of don't invite your thoughts to tea. By practicing it thoroughly, you discover there's intentional thoughts and discursive thoughts.

[34:43]

And each generates a different mind. Okay. Now, something I'm still finding out how to talk about is what I'd call the material stream of practice but also our living. A material stream we're born into, obviously. And, you know, It was Suzuki Roshi's 100th birthday recently.

[35:49]

And Michael Wenger asked him to say something. I didn't know what to say. So finally the last day, or the day of the ceremony, I guess, or celebration, I sent him something by fax. And in 20, 15 minutes we don't have time to go into it very much. But there's a sense in yogic culture of a material stream. And what I said is that Sukhiroshi brought us not only, more than probably anyone else, the physical practice of sitting, He also brought us the material stream of Buddhism.

[36:52]

Bells. this posture, and so forth. But it's really hard to get a sense of what, you know, because we don't think that way, what he meant and what I mean by material stream. The entry to the Eightfold Path is to bring mindfulness to our speech. And to bring mindfulness to our speech, we have to bring awe.

[37:54]

mindfulness through the breath into our speech. So when you find your breath in your speech, you're also finding your body in your speech. And if you, in general, Or in particular, find breath and body in your speaking. Breath and body in your speaking. You'll also find you speak and think differently. And eventually you develop, evolve, mature what we call a truth body.

[39:16]

And there's a reason why lie detectors work much of the time. Because it's very difficult for the body to lie. And you'll find, I think, if you cultivate this, cultivate this, There are many ways body and mind can relate. We experience them often separately. But it's in a relationship we can cultivate. And in Zen practice, in Buddhist practice, it's cultivated primarily through the breath. And when you weave mind and body and breath and speech together, it becomes actually difficult to lie to yourself.

[40:29]

And what you said about wishing earlier, you find, after a while, that you don't think or wish things that aren't possible or that you're not going to do. where the wishes become, yeah, possibilities, but they don't engage you until they're possible. Because you're so engaged in this material stream or body stream that everything else seems rather tenuous. You find yourself located in the world. And as I said earlier, your enfoldedness, not your unconsciousness, your enfoldedness, that relates to the enfoldedness of others and the enfoldedness of the world.

[41:41]

Now, koan that I find very important in our particular lineage is number 20 of the Shoyuruku. And in it, it says, the eye, ear, nose, tongue distinguish territories. But inside the skull there's no knowing at all. But let's look at that. These senses distinguish territories. Now, first of all, that implies that It's the five senses or five pieces of the pie, but the pie is much bigger than just the five senses.

[43:01]

Like as I pointed out right now in this room, there's many handy telephone calls, movies, and so forth. But we don't have the right sensors or chips for it. So what's implied in this koan is that We only know these five territories. But what are these territories? They're spatial. The senses are spatial, not temporal. Now I'm still speaking about exposed in the golden wind.

[44:03]

And when you are functioning through the body that may be like Mikhail Pochek. Pochek is up sleep fighting. You're functioning underneath, let's call it that, the consciousness-dominated body. The thought coverings again. It's hard to point to the finger because your body is a thought covering not felt from inside. It's a thought covering and not... Yeah.

[45:10]

And not? You're not feeling it from inside. Okay. So in a way we could say practice is to, consciousness is a survival mode. And then we've turned it into, if a tiger's in the room, you want consciousness. But maybe, maybe not. When I was in Crestov recently I had It can be really dark in Creston because it's desert black sky and there was no moon. And for some reason the little flashlight I keep in my sleeve wasn't there. So I had to walk down, it's about a 10 minute walk from the house. You were just there.

[46:17]

On a rather rocky path. So I'm kind of feeling my way in the dark the best I can. And suddenly I found myself in some sort of field of being. And there was a strange kind of physical silence that penetrated me. And I found myself actually, I realized it after a moment, I was in the middle of a herd of deer. And I think if I'd been there with consciousness, I would have been outside what I'm calling the material stream. And they would have all gone away, as I do during the day.

[47:23]

But there was this strange trust in the dark. They didn't move, and I didn't move. And so after, you know, I don't know, 20 seconds or 30 seconds of just standing there, I slowly found my way and the deer sort of moved. There was about, I think about a dozen deer. That's the usual group that's around. I stood there for about 20-30 seconds, and then I slowly felt my way through the darkness again, and the wildness moved with me. There were about 10-12 people who were normally in this order. I would say I was in awareness and not in consciousness. And the deer were in awareness, I would say.

[48:25]

And there was a trust in that. Knowing there was no conflicted thoughts, fear, etc., Clearly, there was a feeling of already connected. Okay, now when you have a sense of the spatial territory of the five senses, Now here I'm again in a kind of clumsy way trying to speak about this material stream. Each sense is a structure of the world, spatial structure of the world.

[49:27]

Like in hearing sound, say you're in a room. And there's various sounds. Yeah, maybe conversation or music or various things. Well, in actual fact, it has a structure in the room. And you can feel it three- or four-dimensionally, something like that. You don't feel you're just hearing something. You feel you're in a physical situation, a physical structure... mutually inflected by your hearing and the sound. This is the structure of the world revealed in the sound. And the structure of your own hearing revealed in hearing.

[50:40]

And in hearing your own hearing, you're also hearing or know, feel how everything is, his mind itself. And the same with seeing. You're seeing the structure of the world that light and capacity of seeing allows. That light and seeing itself allow. And tasting, some people can taste into food exactly what the ingredients are.

[51:58]

So through taste you can feel the structure of the food. So these are, this koan is emphasizing, these are five... territories. And there's a physicality in these territories, a spatial structure. And the structure of the world is known in the senses and in your body. So you feel yourself located. And it's a little, again, like the Sencha tea ceremony where you let each drop just drop.

[53:02]

And each situation tunes you to that particular situation. Now, just for the heck of it, because I knew I was going to try to make an effort to speak about this material stream, I brought my teapot. Okay, so this is a Sencha teapot. And it's obviously a physical object. And when you make tea this way, you know the temperature of the water, you can feel the, there's no handle, so your hands have to usually both be involved. And each teapot is unique and each cup of tea is unique.

[54:08]

So the sense of a material stream is opposed, really opposed to the idea of generalizations. To generalizations. To every teapot being the same. To espresso machines where you push a button and it makes your espresso. Because the process of making it is part of the drinking of it. In this pot, you see there's a little mark there. Well, that's where the potter held it while he glazed it. There's another spot in the same place there where he held it there.

[55:11]

So you feel the presence of the potter on your teapot. Now you could say, oh, this is just too Japanese. But it actually just comes out of a culture which takes for granted a material stream. The passing of objects. The passing of a way to speak with others. How to physically stand in the presence of others. And face to face teaching means the whole physicality of the process of teaching. And even in language, there's a physical gesture to words.

[56:34]

When people say, if they tend to lift their shoulders, they say, why they tend to move their head. No, they tend to tighten their stomach. Let's go, there's a kind of movement in the body. I'm not saying those are the particular ones of everyone. But when your thinking is also bodily, words are also gestures. And then the verticality of the words reaching into the world, not just horizontally into the sentence.

[57:36]

It's much more. It's much stronger. I've got about ten things in here, and then there's a rabbit here. This is a keyboard that Priscilla Duran made for me. I forget her last name right now, actually. But she's given me a couple of teaballs, and she lives in Japan and studies Zen and makes teaballs. So this is one kind of tea practice and this is the instant tea ceremony practice. But again, there's a different pace or tuning for this these physical objects as a way of doing tea and tasting it than in this one.

[58:42]

This is a world where there is no entities. We don't live in a container. We don't live in a container. The world is a container. Consciousness isn't a container we want to live in. So part of this is when you really know with your body that everything is impermanent. Each appearance is unique. Everything is always unique. So tea bowls tend to be unique, etc., when it's just the way the culture thinks.

[59:42]

So now in this ceremony, this way of drinking tea, making tea, you drink it usually, you take the bowl. First of all, there's several bowls here. There's the bowl you see from the front. There's always supposed to be a front. Sometimes it's obvious. Sometimes you have to figure it out. So this is the front. This is one tea bowl that I see this way. Okay, then before you drink, you turn it twice. Another tea bowl appears. Because it looks different from here. And then it's got tea in it. And when you drink it, often it's different once you see the bottom.

[60:58]

So that's typical of this sense of a material stream of culture in which everything is unique. Now you could also ask, why is the teapot of this shape usually? Even when they make summer tea bowls, which are shallower, they're still pretty much this shape. There's some different exceptions. They want it because they want to cover your face. So you actually, in a sense, disappear. So you drink it in three sips and a... Good translation.

[62:02]

So you drink it and then you in effect disappear for a moment. So this is also in a culture which has a sense of entitylessness as an expression of emptiness. Entity-less-ness. Yeah, I'm trying. There's no such word in English either, so... Okay. So, Nan Yue... Fang Xu... entered... when he first went to visit Nan Yue... entered the room without bowing. And Nanue said, when you enter, when you come in through the door, you should always acknowledge the host.

[63:15]

Now, again on the obvious conscious level, hey, you're just visiting my temple and you walk in without even bowing to me. But that's not really. They wouldn't have saved. If that was the import of the story, it wouldn't have been saved for a thousand years. When you enter anything, you should acknowledge the host. And the technical terms host and guest are, particularly in the Blue Cliff Records, essential pedagogical aspects of the poem.

[64:23]

Now, from... I'm going to stop in a moment. From what we discussed a few minutes ago about host and guest and don't invite your thoughts to tea... We have a sense of host mind and guest mind. So we can understand that Nanyue is saying whatever, on every appearance you should enter or Acknowledge the host. Acknowledge. Okay. So when you enter a room, You can enter feeling the room without thinking the room.

[65:54]

In English, when you come through the entrance, there's this feeling of, in this teaching, there's the sense of an initial mind. The Genjo Koan has this idea to complete that which appears. Each moment is an appearance. You complete it and let it go. That appearance is absorbed or gathered in host mind. Go in a new way. When you enter, you should always acknowledge the host. Now the other day somebody who'd been at Crestone for this practice period is now at Johanneshof.

[67:12]

And this person was saying, geez, you know, the practice is so different here. And I miss Crestone. And I was so engaged in practice and questions about practice that I disappeared when I met Johanneshof. Although Otmar, who some of you know, says for him, he's been practicing long enough, Johannes Hof is the same for him as Crestone. But when this person who complained to me or said how he missed the Crestone.

[68:21]

Passed me in the hall. And then passed others in the kitchen. Didn't bow. And one of the main things you do at Creston is whenever you pass someone, you stop and bow. And the stopping and bowing is much like that. Because you bring your presence together in your hands Bring it up through the chakras. Up to here. And then you bow to the other person. In effect, kind of mutually disappearing. This is much of what I mean by the material stream of practice.

[69:21]

Even if you can't bow, I mean, I find myself bowing at airport counters and they think, what is going on here? But you can have a feeling standing there at the counter with the person. Like the person who you lost in the woods and the person who appears and tells you how to get out. You just feel the being, the presence of the person. And that's to acknowledge the host. And that's also to be exposed in the golden wind. The body exposed in the golden wind.

[70:43]

Thank you very much. I apologize for not being able to really look at all the ingredients, but we looked at some of them. You can continue the cooking. As I always say, you either cook your karma or get cooked by it. Thank you for translating.

[71:06]

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