Okay, so let's start with anybody who wants to share something from the discussion yesterday. Even if you don't want to, it helps others if you do. But you don't have to necessarily bear your right shoulder. Oh, well, I don't intend to. Many sutras start that way. Oh, really? Yeah, because the Buddha has nothing to say unless somebody asks him a question. So somebody comes forward, bears his right shoulder, and says something. The Buddha says, okay, now, okay. And then he says something. Not that I'm the Buddha, but... And not that you need to bear your right shoulder, but it would be good if you said something.

[01:02]

One of the reasons we wear the Kesa this way. And there's certain ceremonies in which you wear the case over both shoulders. But that's not the city path. Okay, so. Yes. Yes. I would like to ask my question again. Okay. If I understood this correctly, what you said is that the dynamic between the two truths is different in the West than it was at Nagarjuna's time?

[02:06]

And I think you wanted to say more about that. Does that mean you'd like me to say more about it too? Yeah. Oh, okay. Well, we don't have, well, first of all, as you probably know, but it's no harm in saying it again, The two truths are one of the most basic formulations of later Buddhism. That's an attempt to deal with the practicalities of our ordinary life. In which you have to assume the world is predictable. And sometimes this is divided up into three. The formulation is three-parted. And the first is the imagined, the deluded.

[03:35]

And what you really think the world is permanent. And actually predictable and faked and so forth. and that it is actually predictable and determined by fate and so on. And the second part is the person who knows it's impermanent but functions as if it were permanent. Okay. And we have to function as if things were relatively permanent. So the first is called the imagined.

[04:37]

Yeah, and that includes everything you imagine that might happen but won't if you die today. So the imagined is also the imagined future. Okay. So such a teaching, such a, to state it that way, means that it makes a difference if you really relate to the future as imagined. Really relate to the future as only imagination.

[05:37]

And how you feel today, you mean, if you knew maybe there's no tomorrow. Isn't there a song like that? There's no tomorrow. Yesterday. The wisdom of popular songs. Okay. And the second is the relative. To know that the world is... not permanent and yet you function most of the time as if it were. And in Yogacara Buddhism, which is also Zen, the problem is not whether we know the world is permanent or not. The problem is consciousness itself.

[06:58]

Because consciousness itself is the main mental modality. Our job is to make the world predictable, chronological and so forth. chronologically. Yeah, and so the fundamental truth, which is that the world is impermanent, is to pierce the veil of consciousness. is to see the world through consciousness, but to know the world is lying to you, or consciousness is lying to you. Okay. Okay. So then what's the fundamental truth?

[07:59]

Well, that the world is impermanent and interdependent. And momentary. Okay. Now, knowing this means extremely little. Okay. What means something is effective is if you can live, function within momentariness. Live within experienced momentariness. And not within implicit permanence okay so yeah so how do we make this shift there's a number of a lot of the practices of Zen Buddhism are based on making this shift

[09:37]

One is to interrupt implicit permanence. To interrupt predictability. Okay. Okay, how do you do this? Sorry, it takes some time to answer your question. It might not be okay with everyone else. So how do you interrupt implicit permanence? And why bother? Well, because it creates a different body and mind. In simple terms, it causes a left brain, right brain shift.

[10:41]

And you begin to see things in uniqueness. You don't see things as implicitly permanent and predictable. You think uniqueness folding out of folding into uniqueness. Now that's not just words. Dogen says to identify to cultivate and authenticate myriad things, by conveying the self to them. Thanks, Dogen, for giving us a way to talk about this.

[11:44]

Danke, Dogen, dass du uns eine Möglichkeit gibst, darüber zu sprechen. I interrupted there to soften the blow. Und ich habe da jetzt eigentlich nur unterbrochen, um die Stoßkraft oder den Windstoß dessen ein bisschen zu mildern. Is delusion. Das ist Verblendung. Okay. I'm not that deluded, am I? Ich bin doch gar nicht so verblendet, oder doch? And the word in Japanese is one word, but it means both to cultivate and authenticate. Now I'm supposed to be having a discussion with you this morning, not giving another taisho. I'll only continue if you promise to discuss a little bit later.

[13:02]

Do I hear a chorus of promises? Tara just promised I know. Okay. Okay. So to cultivate, to authenticate and cultivate all things, myriad things, Now she anticipated me because she translated myriad as 10,000. See, I'm listening here. Because myriad or many is, of course, a generalization. Denn so etwas wie eine myriade oder ganz viele, das ist natürlich so etwas wie eine Verallgemeinerung.

[14:21]

And 10,000 is also a figurative way of speaking. At least it means something specific. It's not a universal, it's a specific. And there are at least 10,000 things in this room. In fact, there's an infinite number. We can start here. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, etc. So 10,000 means to really feel the presence of all the particulars and all the particulars that are interrelating. It's very different than many. There's many things in the warehouse So to cultivate, to authenticate and cultivate.

[15:29]

This means to make the world real, to validate the world through conveying the self to things. So when you convey the self to things, think of things in relationship to your past, present and future. Whether you like it or not, or whether you have some idea, it's relative. In fact, you're authenticating the world as implicitly permanent. And related to you, your past, present, future, of course.

[16:35]

Now, Duggan says... When the 10,000 things advance, come forward, and cultivate and authenticate the self, This is enlightenment.

[17:40]

Or this is wisdom. Okay, so this is just to say to know the world is permanent, semi-permanent, or to know the world is impermanent. Okay, but the way Dogen says it, we can start, it's like a map, an experiential map. We can see and feel the difference. Now, what is Dogen talking about? This really depends on a lot of yogic skills. How do you let the 10,000 things come forward and cultivate yourself, cultivate you, develop you? Incubate you moment after moment.

[18:50]

And authenticate your life in this way. Okay, now we... function as individuals. I'll just use that word to mean person and so forth. Yeah. We function as individuals through an accumulated past. I can interrupt my knowing this as a bell, but I'm interrupting my knowing it as a bell.

[19:57]

If I don't know it's a bell and drink tea out of it, it'll taste pretty strange. Although I interrupted the cognitive, etc. Okay. If I let all things come forward, let me go back to the memory. So you function through a sedimented experience. Through the experience you've laid down. It's primarily for most of us connected and should be connected by our experience as a self.

[21:13]

But we also have experience which is accumulated when there's less presence of self-referencing. We also have sedimented or stored experience of the world as appearance only. als Erscheinung, als nur Erscheinung. Wir haben auch Erfahrungen von uns selbst gespeichert, Erfahrungen von uns als ein Buddha. Because a Buddha is a person who has certain experience that results in their way of being in the world.

[22:34]

A Buddha is a person When I say person, because person means mask, I sort of, can I say he has a mask? Anyway, a Buddha is a person. He or she has a way of being in the world that's evolved through their experience. Er oder sie hat eine Art und Weise, in der Welt zu sein, die sich durch seine oder ihre Erfahrungen entwickelt hat. Und wir haben auch solche ähnlichen Erfahrungen. Das ist einfach eine Tatsache. Wir haben nur die einzelnen Punkte dabei nicht verbunden. Und kannst du diese Punkte verbinden? Well, one way to connect the dots is to let myriad things advance, come forward.

[23:42]

And cultivate the self. Okay. This is a different self than in the first sentence. This is a cultivated self. self which is free from self-identity, the way of functioning. And if you start functioning through this self free of self-identity, Let's call it the functional self in contrast to the personal self. You call forth another layer of accumulated experience. Yeah.

[25:03]

If you have one way of being in the world, you call forth the experience of the world that way. And your immediate experience and your accumulated experience authenticate the world as thus. And if you function in the world with the self as functional, in the way of having a location and so forth, and you function in the world as momentary appearance, you also call forth the experience you've accumulated to that, like that, So then you begin to authenticate the world as appearance and your experience also authenticates the world.

[26:31]

Okay, so it's a shift to cultivating and authenticating the world in a different way, and calls forth layers of experience which aren't accessible to consciousness. So we have lots of experience that's not unconscious. And that in some sense Freudian sense is pushed out of consciousness because it doesn't belong or we can't handle it or something like that. We have accumulated experience that's experienced, that's accumulated independent of consciousness.

[27:33]

And that accumulated experience is available to us if we begin to function in another way. Okay, now, I'll get more specifically back to you in a little bit. Now, it can be quite scary to let all things come forward and cultivate and authenticate the self. This is my glass. Well, it belongs to, I think. But someone gave it to me at the beginning of the seminar.

[29:05]

And I've been drinking from it. All known germs that belong to my lineage are accumulated on its rim. And she has her glass. And she might not want to drink from this, though in an emergency and it's still enough, she might. And these are my glasses. I remember Sukhirashi said once, putting on his glasses, and he said, these glasses belong to you. And I remember Sukhirashi once saying, when he put on his glasses, these glasses belong to you. But you know about my tired old eyes, so you let me use them. And these glasses do belong to. They were, you know, glasses were developed maybe in the 14th century in Italy, of course. And they extended the work life of Europeans considerably because they could work for another few decades after otherwise they couldn't see to do accounting or something.

[30:27]

So a whole lot of societal work went into producing these glasses. So they belong to society, but you know about Marte, etc. These two books belong to me. The Kleenex I'm willing to share. But in other words, I'm conveying myself to these things. All the time. And if I don't know where these borders are, it's, yeah, probably a little crazy. Okay. Now, if really I let all things advance, suddenly your notebook becomes mine.

[31:39]

It's advancing forward. Each of you belong to me. I'm intimate with each of you. The actual experience of what Dogen's talking about is you cease to have boundaries. And you can be sitting in a cafe and you don't know whether you should leave your glasses on the table or take them or whether you should just leave your money on the table or keep it. You don't know. You really don't know. And everything looks so brilliant and shines and each appearance is... You don't need anything else.

[32:40]

And everything is uniquely shining. Why do I need to call any one of these things mine? I'll just walk off into the, you know, et cetera. and get arrested. Where are your clothes, sir? Oh, I left them in the cafe. So when you start having experiences like this, you have to start reorganizing how you identify your boundaries.

[33:44]

This isn't real. I'm not talking nonsense. Yeah, you can read a book about it. What's this book? Oh, all of Buddhism. But anyway, Jill... who was a Harvard brain scientist who had a stroke which completely incapacitated her left brain and she could only function through her right brain. And she was blissed out for nearly eight years but didn't know how to function. And this book again, actually the whole Buddhism writes about it, but there is this one book by a scientist, Jill, whose surname I don't know, who had a stroke and her left brain, her left brain didn't work that way anymore. And then she was, for eight years she dwelt in bliss, but could not function particularly well.

[34:47]

So there are physiological differences. But there are, it's not just that you're going to be stuck in the right brain and you don't have access to the left brain. But let's just, you know, the word human and humanities means those who know the world through reading. The humanities are taught in school because we learn to be a human through reading. And we begin to locate ourselves with a certain kind of thinking. And when we can no longer validate our life through this thinking, we suddenly have a kind of a panic attack.

[35:55]

And that's one reason we have monasteries. Where you can have controlled panic attacks. You know that there's somebody going to feed you and the bell will ring and you just follow the schedule. But it allows you to let go of your usual way of organizing self. Okay. Now back to the two truths. Okay. My point is there's a difference. There's a real difference between the two.

[37:05]

And they differently authenticate your life. And they differently cultivate your life. But how do we bring these two different ways of authenticating and cultivating our life together? Because this is a dyadic truth. In other words, it's one truth divided into two parts. And what one part is like affects what the other part is like. Okay, so if we have a different sense of what how consciousness functions.

[38:15]

Yeah, and my opinion is Freud didn't notice how consciousness has always been. He noticed how consciousness is since the Industrial Revolution or something like that. And for the sake of the productivity and the exclusivity of consciousness, people started repressing some things. So even if you're practicing Buddhism, you still are part of our Western consciousness. And you're in the West part of identifying yourself as an individual. And again, I would say the main dynamic of the idea of individual is that somehow independent of society, which of course it isn't.

[39:33]

But we think of it as originary. We think of it as a starting point. I don't know if this makes sense, but if you go into a cafe in Japan, Should we be having a break now? The word cafe made me think maybe we should have a break. And then your question was going to take all day. She's very pleased. Yes, let's have a break. Or would you want me to go on? The cafe.

[40:40]

The cafe. Okay. I am capable of coming back to it. But anyway, okay, if you go to a Japanese cafe, they think that the cafe is advancing and identifying you. Okay. that somehow there there's a cafe and you're lucky to be allowed in. And often in Japan stores, the customer isn't right, the store tells you what to buy. I didn't want that. Well... They have a street in Kyoto with 13 blocks of thread stores. And they have one store which only has silk thread in shades of purple. So you go in and say, I don't like this purple.

[41:56]

They say, for 32 generations we've been developing colors. You're going to take this one. Then they say, what? We could develop another color for you, but anyway, like that. And of course, it's not a simple picture of black and white. But I think if we get up from our sleepless night, a dream-turning night, and we kind of like, okay, we go out to the cafe. And there's no one in it.

[43:10]

So it's not yet a cafe. And when you step in as the individual who's independent of society, You turn it into a cafe. And the employees are very happy, finally, now, good, now I'm in a cafe. And you have your cup of tea or coffee or whatever. And you left most of your dreams behind in the apartment And you're glad the world is in place and the employees are there and saying, it's all okay, we're still here. So even though the individual, the word means can't be divided, Our experience is we are somehow prior to society.

[44:27]

But our excitement is to be within society. So the Siddhi practice is somehow the individual practice. a separate unit within society. And in that way we cultivate and authenticate our individuality. And cultivate and authenticate our individuality. implicitly permanent world. Now, how are you going to be free from that? Or interrupt that? To sit zazen is an interruption of our usual bodily processes. What kind of process?

[45:41]

Usual bodily processes. If you sit zazen, sometimes front and back sort of disappear. Up and down are coming towards you. The boundaries of your body don't seem to be at the physical body. So we can think of negation as an interruption. So you're negating your usual body, but also we can just say you're interrupting your usual body. As I said yesterday, if... Like Aristotle or like the Chinese think, Aristotle thought the originary unit of society was the city.

[46:56]

We're defined through the city and through our culture. Which is, of course, true. But it's... a sense of the point of origin, true or not. Our point of origin is the individual, not the city. So we can vote and change the city. Well, if you see yourself as the point of origin, Wenn du dich selbst als den Ursprungspunkt siehst... How you interrupt the way we usually authenticate and cultivate the world is different than in fourth century China.

[48:00]

Wenn du der Ursprungspunkt bist, dann ist die Art und Weise, wie du die Art und Weise durchtrennst, wie wir normalerweise... And this is one of the reasons we have an adept lay practice that's much larger than the adept monastic practice. Numerous. And why the teachings that make this shift from the relative way of understanding the world to the fundamental way have to be different nowadays. So in Buddhism, there's no absolute truth. The two truths are also relative. And we can't think, oh, it's all been discovered back there.

[49:21]

We have to keep rediscovering it. And we need new idioms. Idioms. It's the same word. And we need new addresses. In the sense of how we are in the world. Now can we have a break? Thanks.

[49:55]

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