Well, Taya, you really do a den show. That's colloquial English. You really do a den show. I mean, with vividness and rhythm. I almost jumped out of my skin. Boom, boom. It was great. Yeah, so I want to introduce, continue to introduce... concepts, practices, which will be useful to you, I hope. And in particular, today maybe I will speak about, as I've been indirectly and directly speaking already, about the role of concepts in practice. And somehow I think I need to make that clearer because we don't want to practice inside of concepts, contained by concepts.

[01:06]

But we do want to practice in ways that concepts can refine our noticing. So something I've spoken about very often with the majority of you is that views are prior to perception. Now, really, even if you've heard me say that before, if views are not prior to perception, then there's no real transformative practice. So, My usual example is pointing out that we have the cultural view, most of us in the West, which we take for granted that space separates.

[02:13]

Okay? But space also connects. Now, in our view, we mostly speak about it as, think about it as separating. In yoga culture, the emphasis is more on that space connects. And you can see it in concepts like ma, which I won't go into what ma means, but you can talk about it another time or speak about it in seminar. Or the way houses are designed. They're designed with an assumption that space connects, not that space separates. Okay. Now, of course, we don't know what space is. I mean, what is space? Dark matter? Vibrating strings in 10 or 12 dimensions? Multiple universes? Parallel universes? I mean, the mathematics, contemporary mathematics and physics assumes something like this is true, but we have no ability to perceive it.

[03:25]

As I say, we have no ability to perceive the many cell phone calls and movies that are in this. If we had the right tuner, if you had the right mobile phone, you might be able to watch a movie while I'm talking. Anyway. Okay. So, but the degree to which, or the way in which space connects is not so, is pretty much unobservable for most of us. And as I spoke about, I mentioned the other day the electron microscope because I find it interesting that Newtonian science completely said the unobservables are irrelevant. even though more and more evidence accumulated for unobservables, molecules, radio waves, atoms, and so forth, there was schools of philosophy and science, let's call it Newtonian science primarily, which denied that unobservables, unobservables were relevant.

[04:43]

Of course, a lot of evidence accumulated that wasn't so, and then finally electron microscopes colliders and so forth, proved that unobservables were observable. Well, my feeling is that, as I said the other day, meditation practice, as I said, not all meditation practice, but what I call meditation practice, I think is probably going to re-envision the Western worldview. I think it's going to re-conceptualize what we think it means to be alive. and I think it's going to reposition the individual in relationship to others and to phenomena.

[05:53]

I actually think that's the main way Buddhism is going to influence the West, not so much through ideas of Buddha nature and so forth, which conflate into versions of ideals we have already now, Okay. So if you have a view of space connecting, and by repetition you introduce that view, both repetition and you create it as an underlying assumption, an intention, a repeated intention, an underlying assumption, it takes a position in effect prior to perception, prior to the functioning of the senses, and you will begin to notice space connecting.

[07:01]

Particularly in, excuse my terminology, right mind-bodied awareness. Right mind-bodied awareness, which in Buddhism, Buddhism is often identified with emptiness. Okay. So I was speaking about this because I find it useful to take four words, scanning, identifying, associating, and vowing, and repeat them Yeah, repeat them, bring them into appearance, bring them into attention on each appearance or whenever it happens to occur to me. Now, again, as you know, and I'm trying to build a vocabulary and a familiarity with this with us, this saccadic scanning occurs

[08:17]

at fractions of a second, way too fast for our senses. At least our conscious senses. Our consciously confined or constrained senses. And consciousness is, for the most part, constrains the senses to see what's predictable. So one of our practices is happening through more evolved mindfulness practice, is you're freeing, by coming in more and more to a field of mind, freeing the senses from the containment, constraints of consciousness. Now I'm saying all this too to kind of lay some groundwork, groundwork?

[09:21]

Space work, I don't know, for your practice here during these already disappearing 90 days. So this saccadic scanning, which happens much too fast, If you begin, I find, if I begin to use these concepts, scanning, what's a concept? Identifying, associating, vowing. Actually, I begin to feel this happening. It's not entirely outside my senses, outside my, the mental sensorium. Now let's just take, for example, looking in a closet. I mean, I practice with this all the time. I mean, often. But let's say you open your closet.

[10:23]

It's a bit dark, maybe. And there's immediately a scanning that goes on. Where the heck is the samway or the kimono or the jacket? So at a kind of gross level, not a subtle level, there's a scanning going on. Where are my clothes? And then there's a process or the activity of identifying, oh, there's the samoy. Samoy is this monk's working coat. Oh, there's the samoy. And then associating, oh, must be lunchtime. Usually I wear the samoy when I go to lunch. So there's a process of scanning, identifying, and then associating with lunch. And then, in effect, vowing. Now, vowing, as I said the other day, is when we say something's a tree, particularly when we point out generalizations, we're vowing or we're making certainties.

[11:28]

So I create certainties. It's lunchtime. I'm going to wear some way. I have to go down the stairs to the dining area, the main hall. And that process of creating certainties, you basically, I'm creating a landscape so that I can walk through or process, I can go downstairs. I know it's lunchtime, you know, for the day. Yesterday I came down and it was already lunchtime and so I went back upstairs. So now in the closet, you can see it mechanically. Because, you know, you are simply doing a process of scanning, identifying, associating, and creating a certainty, like it's lunchtime. But in the closet, it's obvious, as a mechanical example, but you can more and more, by using four words like this, I don't care, you can pick any words you want for anything you like, but this is what I have found useful.

[12:40]

Maybe in German different words would work better. But the presence of those words begins to articulate the activity of perception. Now I'm not saying you're going to start seeing vibrating strings or multiple multiverses inhabiting the very space we live in. But within our lived, living life, we can get pretty subtle about what we notice and what we allow and the pace, the pace that begins to influence how we are within phenomena and within the world created by us together now someone reminded me today of the bodhisattva Fugen Samantabhadra and I've always been very fond of Samantabhadra and usually I define Samantabhadra as the bodhisattva that enters without taking a step so we have three primary bodhisattvas that are used in Zen practice Manjushri

[14:13]

Avalokiteshvara and Samantabhadra. Now Samantabhadra is usually shown on an elephant, but Mayumi, being the compassionate feminist she is, who wouldn't have Samantabhadra stand on an elephant, has Samantabhadra in the atrium riding a bicycle with the elephant sweetly on the handlebars. Maybe so many women seriously practicing Buddhism, we're really going to change it, you know. No more lions and elephants we're going to have. I don't know what. Elephants on bicycles. This is good. A vehicle. And the Vajradhara, which is the Tibetan name used by the Tibetans for Samantabhadra, that tanka on the right in the main hall, opposite Kannon, is Vajradhara or Samantabhadra.

[15:29]

You know, the black Sambhogakaya body of total absorption. I like that figure. Yeah. I wish I could manifest it during Tesho and just disappear. Disappear. But we can think of the mudra of the Kuan Yin, the Kannon, that's there, as a Samantabhadra mudra. In the sense it's a kind of, she's holding, much like this, the lotus pod. I mean the lotus embryo and the pod and... And she's got this hand like that.

[16:32]

And she's in, she's entered without taking a step. Or she's in the midst of. The unmoving midst. We could call that, that's mudra, the unmoving midst. So although she's depicted as this beautiful woman's face, depicted as Kuan Yin or Bodhisattva Compassion, her mudra, if you stand in front of her and absorb the mudra, it's basically the mudra of unmoving in the midst of, the unmoving midst of, So it's also then a characterization or Samantabhadra is characterized as being manifesting unlimited time or timelessness.

[17:37]

So for us, this may be the best bodhisattva to practice with in practice period. To feel you're in the unmoving midst Now I think you can take this mudra as your own kind of right mind-body awareness. Just as you can bring these scanning, identifying, associating, vowing into Unfolding space. You can bring this sense of unmoving midst.

[18:48]

Even in the midst, of course, of going and so forth. It's unmoving midst. In every situation. I like the word, sorry, words interest me. I like the word fargo. Fargo means a jumble or a mess or something like that. But actually fargo means, the root of it is a mix of grains or seeds. Like you're going to thresh your seeds, but all the seeds are mixed up, wheat and oats and so forth. So if we think of the I might put that in my book and no one would know why I put Farrago in. But I put Farrago in because if I describe the muddle of mind and body and emotions and so forth, which I described the other day as the contextual flow, it has the idea of the

[19:54]

Alaya Vishnana in it, because the Alaya Vishnana is where the seeds of everything are kept. So far ago are all the seeds of your immediate situation, which are a muddle. But depending on the teachings you bring into that muddle, the seeds begin to find soil, begin to sprout, and so forth. So these ingredients... of this each moment's contextual weaving are seeds. And if you can enter without taking a step, if you can be in the unmoving midst of this far ago, how far will it go? Oh, no, no, I shouldn't say that. I'm sorry, I shouldn't. Oh dear.

[20:57]

So these words that I enjoy point but don't describe. So I can point out practice to you. Samantabhadra, Vajradhara can point to practice for you. The various statues we have here can point to practice for you. Can point to your own body your own extended body. But you have to find yourself in the midst of and find out in the midst of how sentient, insentient beings are being. Just beginning to notice the spaces puts you in the midst of calls forth the mind of Samantabhadra, which enters without taking a step.

[22:09]

Thank you very much.

[22:15]

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