As I said yesterday, for Zen, monastic life is not a way of life. It's a way of practice. A monastic way of life you can't bring easily into a lay life. But monastic life is a practice. The practices can be brought into lay life. And in fact, sashins are conceived simultaneously as practices integral to monastic life and a part, a essential part of adept lay practice.

[01:25]

And of course the 90 day unit, is harder to take time off to than a Sesshin, but it's still a lot easier than moving to a monastery permanently. And as some of you have managed to do, in fact. So as usual on Saturday afternoon I would like you to have some discussion in small groups. And I would like you to discuss the various ways in which lay practice includes the presence of monastic practice.

[02:43]

And monastic practice, particularly if you only do it for a short time, is not so different from lay practice. Your heart beating, your breathing, yeah, not much difference. Perhaps the adept practitioner doesn't care where his heart is beating and his breath is breathing. Yes. And I suppose, as Christina suggested, the Austrian Extended Practice Seminar,

[03:56]

I mean initially it was it's nothing else an agreement among people that we're doing something together And you might explore what that togetherness entails. Well, we all agree that everything changes. We all agree that that means everything is interdependent. We all agree that it would be good on each moment to experience interdependence. I mean, interdependence is just a word for everything changing.

[05:24]

But it's experientially a different way of looking at it. And we can start making use of the words because there's not just interdependence, there's also interindependence. And that interdependence isn't just things are juxtaposed, they are actually affecting each other. They're not just dependent on each other, they're changing each other. And so maybe we need a word like inter-emergence. Inter-emergence.

[06:24]

Because we have the word now from chaos theory and stuff, emergence. And inter-emergence is actually a more subtle translation than interdependence. And so we might, sometimes I say simply inter-emergence. So one of the topics could be, hey, do we all agree that something like inter-emergence is going on and we are participants in it? Now Buddhism assumes from the get-go, the very beginning, from the Buddhism assumes from the get-go, the plasticity of mind and body.

[08:06]

That means that practice is about the plasticity of mind and body. That means that it's likely, well, that means that, from my experience, it's a fact that practice emphasizes the right-brain bodiness. But you don't change. A big enlightenment experience doesn't make you right-brain body. move you in that direction maybe. But if monastic experience, a monastic turn, is designed to make you more right brain body.

[09:18]

Is that possible maybe even in the Austrian winter practice extended term? This sounds rather technical. Yeah. But it's something one can You know, it is amazing if you have an intention and you hold that intention in the infinity of momentariness. Through the... participation of momentary circumstances in everything you do, because practice is not, our life is not just the agency of self.

[10:35]

It's also the agency of circumstances which are the condition and the participants of everything we do, and the more those conditions are infused with your intentions, compassion, wisdom, and so on, You're creating a little portable monastery to carry with you. Hmm. So I would like you to discuss in your small group this interfusion or inter-emergence of dynastic and lay practice.

[12:11]

And such topics like which could be part of the extended practice seminar. Like how do we practice inter-emergence. If we all agree that's a basic view of Buddhism and So should be also something we can practice. Or if we took these three words, sensation, perception and conception.

[13:11]

And while we might not do it in a monastic setting, we could easily create exercises to work on this. Because if you can't do something like this all day long or every day in any way you want, you create units of time in which you can do it intensely. So a group of people get together and they all decide for a while, let's see if we can notice only sensations. Then you discover it's actually rather difficult to distinguish between a sensation and a perception.

[14:27]

So this becomes something you kind of discuss and work with. you can do it on your own but it also might be let's have a sensation perception party and then have a melange afterwards and then really have a blast with conception I mean no, no, that's too much He stopped before I even, okay. So some kind of, like I did exercises like that with the ayatanas years ago in Berlin and in Kassel and other places.

[15:33]

Where we worked on everyone, doing a kind of slow key-in through a park and so on. only experiencing one sense at a time. And it's this Austrian extended Sangha practice seminar. I'm trying out different versions. Really developed and began to have a constructive and beneficial identity, it might be a model for Berlin or Boulder.

[16:39]

We have to do something. Like I said to Christian last night, I was still rather jet-lagged and I went to bed early. And he brought me my wedding dress. I have to marry Neil McLean and What is her name? Antje. Antje. And I usually have a white koromo I wear, so I look prettier than the bride. So I've forgotten it, so Christian brought it. So he knocked on the door and said, I've got your wedding dress.

[17:44]

And I said, I've gone to sleep already. We can get married later. And I said, you know, what I would like is that sometimes like in a Friday evening when we don't have a lecture. Some of you might just get together and kind of review what happened during the prologue day. And invite the new people who have arrived Friday evening to join and then my life would be easier on Saturday morning. But you guys have to figure out the permutations.

[18:48]

Now we could say that Dharma practice is very simply to experience things in parts. Dharma parts. Because we know things are momentary. You're born, you die. You notice something. And immediately it's past. The future isn't yet. And so forth. So we know things... The best we can say in our language and within our experience is that things happen in parts. So I often suggest that you pause for the particular. So Dharma practice is, as I said this morning, to be able to come into an experience of the parts.

[20:18]

And although it seems You know, it sounded maybe a little crazy at first. The more refined your participation in the parts and your ability to create an attentional body, which... manifest the parts. surprisingly, the more joy there is in your life.

[21:25]

And the more freedom from mental suffering. And we could say this is the practice, the craft of incremental enlightenment. And if I dare say so, My life was changed by a number of enlightenment experiences years ago. But the revelation of practice for me has been Revelation. The revelation of praxis was for me, really, this not gradual, as I said earlier, this incremental enlightenment.

[22:37]

Yes. And the practice of articulating Dharmas is a practice of incremental enlightenment. Now let's just imagine, you know, like a camera making a film. A film, if you slow it down, it's in these stills. Now, I don't know how to explain this. A camera can't both show the continuity of the continuity of the film and the stills at the same time.

[23:50]

We are a little more complex than cameras, even modern cameras. Yes, and As we are people, individuals, who can really experience something like our life flashing before our eyes in a crisis, our whole life, something close to that happens sometimes like that as you're going over the cliff. The subtlety and complexity of experience is something that practices about opening us into. Not that we need to jump off cliffs though, some people have those practices with a rope tied to their ankle usually.

[24:56]

We can do what cameras can't do. We can experience the stills and we can experience the movement at the same time. I mean, with your consciousness you can't. But with body-mind, right body-mind awareness you can. So we could call this is also something like the two truths. The fundamental truth. Knowing the world in its fundamental sense, dharmic sense, and knowing the world in its conventional sense.

[26:14]

And one of the things that Bodhisattva does, as Brother David and I spoke about yesterday, is live in the conventional world and support the conventional world with people but also able to slow down some of the frames and show the person in the conventional world the fundamental world simultaneously. But you have to be able to move in your horror-centered auric body. And this world of two truths simultaneously.

[27:25]

And now if I were a filmmaker, I'd want to play with the film in this way. I mean, some filmmakers do things like this, I guess. But I'd like to, you know, slow down the sequence take some time, speed it up and stop it and so forth. So that you experience the medium itself. And that's what painters have been doing for some decades now.

[28:27]

And I think I saw a beautiful painting by Manet of a dead or dying bullfighter. And the blood was clearly paint. Red paint. He didn't, I mean, I can't explain exactly, but he clearly made you see that it was paint and made you see that it also represented blood at the same time. Yes. And Cezanne painted the movement of perception. I would say Picasso painted the aura of objects.

[29:31]

I would say Matisse painted space which emerges as objects. These are all painters I studied actually very carefully for years, sitting in front of the paintings. Now I'm mentioning it because I really believe most of us are practicing Buddhism because of our Western lineages and not because of Asian teachings. It's Western lineages in poetry and painting and Rilke and so forth.

[30:36]

Artists who who in order to make their own experience coherent, had to move a little bit out of Western culture. And in New England, I guess, probably in Europe too, the most refined things in most houses were oriental rugs. And I don't know if this is the case in Europe, but in New England it was the case that the refined things that existed that were not western were actually oriental carpets. Yeah, and the Schloss here has a Chinese a la Japanese root. So there's been a lot in Western culture and in Western philosophy, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and so forth.

[31:44]

And definitely in more current French philosophy, which presages, anticipates Buddhist ways of thinking, as does contemporary physics. So for many of us when we suddenly encounter Buddhist ideas and it's often a very opening We feel strangely at home in a foreign culture. It's because our own lineages in art and philosophy, etc., in the West have been leading us there. And these lineages are often come very close, but they're fragmented because they don't have practice.

[33:16]

One reason Graf von Durkheim is so important for many of us He brought the concept of practice, and in particular Hara, into the Western Dialogue. So as painters experiment with showing you the medium of paint when they paint, the Bodhisattva experiments with showing you the fundamental truth in the midst of the contemporary truth. Cameras take pictures.

[34:28]

My eyes are looking at things right now. But cameras don't suffer. But If you could give consciousness to a camera, it would immediately start suffering. Because it would recognize that the consciousness is temporary. Oh, it's not going to last forever. And then the the camera would start accumulating as consciousness accumulates and then it would have all the problems of the things it wasn't too happy with. and then the camera would start having the comparisons of consciousness that picture could have been better it wasn't as good as last week

[35:41]

And then the camera would have the suffering of distance. I can't be with all other cameras all the time. I'm separated from other cameras. So I didn't plan to say all this. I was just going to say a little introduction to small groups. So let's count off and have a break.

[36:27]

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