So I find this Sesshin as I try to sense what we can know together through practice. I find myself interested in small spaces. And of course if we sit in Sesshin, one of the things that... tends to happen is that we have a kind of sedimented, sedimented attention. After a while our body gets, you know, just kind of alive. And And I think sometimes we come to Sashin to restore a certain aliveness to the body and a certain freedom from context.

[01:19]

And you do come to Sashin in a way it's good if you can uncouple yourself from your personal story. But of course when you go back to up older, or Europe, or wherever, your story comes back again. But I think you can make best use of sashin, as I've been implying yesterday, too, if you can uncouple yourself from your story, unhook yourself. It's funny, you know, I said yesterday, I wait for translation. I also notice I... Wait for... I try to find words that can be translated. Because I can't speak so freely in Germany, because I have to... I can only speak words the translator will understand. So uncouple, I was thinking.

[02:22]

Maybe they'll think that has something to do with marriage. But anyway, uncouple. So that's why I added unhook. yeah, if you give a few hundred lectures, you know, in being translated, you sort of, it takes a while to shift into using English differently. There's a story, I think, Evelyn, Evelyn, Evelyn, that James Joyce wrote. And, um, In it there's a woman who has a kind of brutish father who is transferred, after the mother died, transfers his brutishness to the daughter.

[03:25]

And she needs to get free of her story, so she adds this sailor to her story called Frank. And it's very important as the way Joyce presents it. She, her story, she can begin to accept her story only by leaving it. So the sailor she meets and seems to be having an affair with, invites her to go to Australia with her. And she agrees to go and is all excited. He's going to have a house for her and everything. And it puts her story in context. And then the day comes they're supposed to debark and she stands at the ship and can't do it. She looks at him passively and without any feeling and finally he jumps on the ship and he goes. And so she needed the idea of leaving to make her story

[04:30]

to accept her story, but in the end, she couldn't end her story. Frank seems to represent something like Joyce, who was able to leave Ireland and look at his story. She couldn't look at her story. She couldn't see her life was a story. So Joyce, but Joyce, like the Frank in the thing, wanted to bring in Irish wife with him to Europe, to mainland Europe. So he brought his story in Nora, his wife. So we, I think, enter our story, leave our story, but can we see our story? One of the things I think in Sashin that's helpful, even if you re-enter your story, is to be able to see your story and how your story works for you, shapes what you're doing, makes sense of this practice or prevents you from understanding this practice, if it makes you think you're going to end up in Australia or perhaps in a Zen monastery or some other kind of life.

[05:55]

But, you know, even though it might beckon you, because for me, of course, I'm committed to this story. I left my story and I'm committed to this story of this teaching in the West and of this lineage. But I don't think we all have to, we don't have to leave our story. Although there is the problem in Zen practice, I think, that if you do leave your story or see your story and see it's not the story you want, you then look to the teacher and tradition's story. And that's different than, I think, projecting onto a teacher or projecting onto this practice, this tradition, but rather You jump from one story to the next.

[07:01]

Sorry I mention that only because I think the dynamics of how such a powerful story as Buddhism in the West now, how does it enter our own story? How can we enter this story It's all stories. It's all stories. We have to shape our lives through some kind of story. How can we enter this story and yet also swim in the story of our own culture and your own particular life? Anyway, I remember Suzuki Roshi used to give us kin-hin instructions quite often, walking meditation. And he showed us about three different ways to do it. One was extremely slow. You'd lift your heel and step forward and pause with both feet together and then step out.

[08:14]

Finally, we decided on the way we do it. I think we do it. So we inhale with lifting the heel and step forward and exhale as we step forward without really a stop with both feet together. Though we do have a stop with both feet together. I was just talking to Eno, Wayne, about it. When the bell ends, King Hen, you if you're in the middle of walking you put both feet together that's a little stop then you bow and we all do this kind of bow together and then everyone moves at once it's not you wait till a person in front of you moves if the person in front of you doesn't move you just bump right into them you know I mean that's the feeling anyway okay so the kiyoshi used to stop, I don't know, stop us every, I don't know, Prickly in a Sashin, maybe every Sashin, but every couple months or so, too, he'd stop us and we'd do Kenyan.

[09:25]

We might spend a whole period of Zazen kind of fiddling around the room doing Kenyan. Trying it, going and he'd go and we'd stop it. But what it did, it did, is it entered me into very small spaces. I don't know if I can tell you what I mean by that. I think of somebody I knew once, his father was a surgeon, and his father could, this guy said, I presume it's possible, I never saw it, could tie a knot. Are you a surgeon? No? Could tie a knot with two fingers. He could take his thread and just make a knot, like if he was sewing up somebody. Sutures, not suturing. And I suppose a surgeon must get in another state of mind if you're actually moving people's organs around. But that is a kind of space that I think has to do with mindfulness, really, and can come up in practice.

[10:38]

I don't know if this can make any sense. I saw this year they passed out little sutra cards and they're in German so I look at them and I looked for the sutra card and I couldn't see it because there was a shaft of sunlight across the sutra card and across the Zabaton and across the boards of the floor and I couldn't find it all I could see was this pattern But I knew the sutra card was down there somewhere, and so I had to kind of bring in the concept of a sutra card and look, and then the concept of a... The Zapaton, this is a Zapaton, this thing is a Zapaton. Then I could see the sutra card and get my fingers under it, pick it up.

[11:43]

But at some point it was just decontextualized. There was no context till I brought concepts into it. What I was seeing to give some... to give it enough context that I could find the sutra card in this pattern. And that's part of what I mean by sedimented attention or an attentiveness, an attention to something mysterious. I think it's more mysterious than thinking. One day, I had to watch the baby because she might fall out of bed. She's asleep for this. And we at least got up and the baby was sound asleep. But I decided to look at her So I just looked at her.

[12:45]

After a while of looking at her, she just turned her body toward me. I didn't touch her. I just looked at her and she turned toward me. And then she put out one hand right into my mouth. So somehow it was clear, and I've seen this enough with her now in other situations too, like when you feel someone looking at you, that attention is a kind of force we can't explain. It's clear to me she felt the attention, and even sleeping, turned toward it by the force or magnet. This puts AI, artificial intelligence, into... You can't have artificial attention. You might have some kind of artificial thinking processes, but you don't take attention. I don't think a machine can give you attention. I can give machines attention. But...

[13:52]

So part of uncoupling yourself from your story is uncoupling yourself also from the habits of attention. And that's part of what unstructured zazen or uncorrected mind means in zazen. You're rather letting things, the structures, get less. And it becomes a kind of force and even a disintegrating force because it disintegrates our usual way of seeing and thinking. So you need a kind of sea anchor. Sea anchor, you know, an anchor you can't reach, touch the bottom of the ocean, you have to have an anchor you stick out and hold the boat even in water. So sitting and A certain kind of attentiveness, too, is a kind of sea anchor if you develop a certain kind of attentiveness in your sitting and in your posture.

[15:08]

And I suggested to some of you the other day one way to mix mind with the body and go against the usual way we conceptualize the body and then experience the body in terms of those conceptions, is to do something like feel an invisible line in your body, or feeling line, from your, let's say, right sit bone, as I said the other day, right sit bone up to your left shoulder, and then your left sit bone up to your right shoulder, kind of stretch that line in your body, And then stretch it up to your ear. And then up to the other ear. You can bring them both together simultaneously or one at a time up to the crown of the head. And you can even feel that almost fanning out, making a circle.

[16:13]

Or a column. Or again, as I said, you can feel your... begin to sense your thumbs that's in a very minute but huge space in a way of attention. Where are your thumbs? Are they touching? There's almost a column you can feel. When they're not touching, you can move in and out of the column of your thumb, even if they're not touching. So the practice of mindfulness of the body, which we discussed quite a bit in July, didn't we, those of you who were at the July seminar, to really bring attention to the parts of the body and the interior of the body so you feel the body. from inside, you feel mind, something like mind within the body.

[17:21]

It's also a little bit like if you're bringing attention to something, it's not like you're shining a light on it, your eyes, it's kind of part of your brain or something, but rather the object, the activity or mind objects themselves more like begin to glow. Now you might say, oh no, we can look at something, but the objects themselves aren't going to glow. But the objects are in your mind anyway. I mean, you're seeing them. The objects a camera sees are in the camera. So there's more a feeling of when you bring attention, there's a kind of, you can really stop like, And a lot of the details we do are this kind of stopping, this kind of pause. I can keen in to stop. And then... And we each move independently. There's a kind of autonomy or independence of the movement.

[18:26]

So you just go and the next person goes and you hope they go because otherwise... Anyway, there's that kind of feeling again. So with this Kinyan instruction, Sukhiroshi somehow used it as a way to generate a feeling of very minute spaces, like almost spaces of the bones, or the organs, or some kind of space much more refined or fine than conceptual space. And in little ways the orioke is like that. I don't know how many orioke meals I've eaten, but probably a thousand or something like that. I still get mixed up.

[19:29]

But by the end of sashin, the orioke kind of stands out. And still, really I haven't penetrated. fully the possibilities of this little thing of how we eat. And it's meant like that. It's like the tea ceremony is meant like that. And little things like you hold the wiping cloth in your hand while you do other things. You have to have your hand is used one way but another part of your hand is doing something else. So a lot of things in the tea ceremony you pick something up like this while you do something else like that. And it starts to bring you into another kind of space. And the word for it in, there's actually a word for this in Japanese Buddhism, Kyo-gai, which means consciousness as place. Originally it meant place, but it comes to mean also consciousness in Japanese Zen Buddhism.

[20:32]

Yamada Umanoshi said that only, was my teacher in Japan, only a Sparrow knows the kill guy of a sparrow. It's only each of you know the place-based consciousness of you yourself at each moment. So there's a kind of privacy there, or uniqueness, privacy and uniqueness, alone and March working on it. VCR, Blue Cliff Records, 26, by Jung, alone on great sublime peak, sitting. I mean, it's a kind of absoluteness. And I'm trying to approach in various ways a sense of the absolute, first of all, just as an experience, not as an idea.

[21:35]

And this kill guy is that kind of absolute uniqueness and there's no entry to it. It's just the kill guy of a sparrow or Wayne or Mark or me or you. And to feel that you've got to let your You've got to sort of de-contextualize your consciousness so that you don't de-conceptualize your consciousness. I keep giving the example of if you do, like kids do this, and then you try to point out which finger. If you point and you don't touch it, it's very hard for people to figure out which finger to move because you have a mental body. you actually are looking at your body mentally from outside, not feeling it from inside.

[22:40]

Such little games show that we have this, what Buddhism calls a thought sheath. One of the things that happens in practice, sometimes through the pain of sitting actually, it's one of the aspects of the pain of sitting, is this thought sheath cracks open. And you don't know anymore front or back, before and after. It's the thought sheath that gives the body mental conceptual context. I'm thinking about these things too because, you know, I find myself helplessly or inadvertently studying, observing Sophia. And some people have told me that there's now a whole some sort of school of psychology or a theme in psychology now and some books written on watching children, observing infants.

[24:00]

They've given me some names. I haven't looked at them. I don't know. I don't know if I want to look at them because I'm interested in Just looking from the context of practice. And I think this Buddhism, as I said the other day, starts out with this idea of tanha or thirst or hunger for not less than everything. That's the basic. The Hobbes and Mills and such folks had ideas. We were born evil, we're born good, born basically something. Buddhism just says you're born with a thirst for not less than everything. And that flow is shaped by your culture, you yourself, by your parents and so forth. So I'm watching this thirst and And not wanting to interfere with it, and yet wanting to participate in it, and by necessity shaping it.

[25:13]

And I don't want to start training here. If you read baby books these days, they're all about training. The baby has to sleep separate from the mother so they don't learn dependency and they learn their independent self and all kinds of things and you have to let them cry. I don't know. For 100,000 years or whatever, 25,000 years, many years, people have slept with their children. Maybe it's wrong, I don't know, but it's very nice. So anyway, I don't want to train her, but of course, I keep saying inadvertently, but necessarily you are shaping this thirst. So I'm watching, where is she going to docket her experience? Docket. What port, what place is her experience going to lodge, which creates a sense of self? So I'm watching her, you know, I think probably in July, last year when she was six weeks old, last year, this year, my last year, because it was before I came back here.

[26:33]

For me, I have a year in Europe and a year here. Anyway, last spring in Boulder and then in July here. I spoke about watching her get consciousness into her arm. Her arm's just kind of banged about, you know. Pretty soon she could reach into her arm with a kind of awareness and consciousness and bring consciousness and receive through it. And that she put her consciousness together and her sense fields together. That's all pretty together, no? She still hasn't quite fully got this. Putting thumb and forefinger together. And that seems to be very close to being able to stand, free stand and walk. As I said the other day, this little calf that was born while we were over there when she was seven or eight weeks old, started walking immediately, but she doesn't walk yet.

[27:38]

Because it's clear the calf wobbly legs. Poor Janie's wobbly legs. I think Janie's saying goodbye. And she's not eating now. Seems to be not eating for a couple days or two or three days. I couldn't get her to eat anything. This little newborn calf's wobbly legs It's like the riddle of the Sphinx, right? This newborn calf's wobbly legs, immediately whatever consciousness, neurological development or whatever the calf has functions right away, but it takes quite a long time for a human being to put this all together. So for me it's so clear how the body and the mind are inseparable. Walking and crawling are part of the development of consciousness.

[28:43]

Anyway, so what I'm noticing these days from my practice, and I'm noticing differently than I noticed with my first two daughters. I was practicing then too, but my way of noticing was different. But she... She... I think the first sense of self is that she's developing, and I'm kind of trying to watch, does she develop different kinds of self? And I'm not really talking about Sophia, I'm talking about, I'm trying to see if my sense of how the mind and consciousness and awareness and so forth work or function is held up, is supported in how watching a little baby develop. So far, so good. And I don't, as much as possible, I'm not trying to impose my way of thinking on it.

[29:48]

I'm just, as much as I can, just observing. And I'm noticing things I didn't expect to notice. Like there seems to be a difference between the self that arises through seeing you can cause something to happen and the self that arises through communication. So she's been playing games with this for quite a long time of making noises. I introduced a noise to her from Vietnamese, from knowing Vietnamese people. There's a lot of in the way Vietnamese people talk. So I introduced this sound to her. And now she does it all the time. And if she talks to me on the phone, she'll go, because she knows that's a way to signal me. There's all kinds of little noises. She clearly signed signed like deaf people sign. She signed before she spoke and signed with quite a bit of communication.

[30:49]

And so these games, and then the games turn into, she initiates it and then she terminates it. So she'll initiate, I'll imitate her and then she'll stop and she'll see if I, what I do next. This definitely establishes sense of self, establishes some ability to affect me, and she's in control. So she has a sense that she made it happen. But I think it's different than when she, like, grabs hold of a ribbon on some flower someone gave us and the vase topples over. And she's quite thrilled with that, too. She thinks it's one of the great events. So, I mean, I see that we can actually stop her from a sense of making things happen and emphasize an inner subjectivity of making communication. Or we can let both go. So I see there's a kind of

[31:54]

self that she's developing through seeing she can make things happen. And a self she's developing through a kind of inner subjectivity or communicative thing, which could become dependence. I can see it could become dependent on us. Or it could become compassionate or empathetic. Today, for the first time, she very consciously shared. She had a teething biscuit and she took it and she wanted us to try it. So that's a kind of, this is what I call the self, the docket of experience arising in a communicative framework. And then there's this sense of she can make things happen, you know, push a door shut, things like that. And I don't think that's the same. Doesn't seem to me to be the same. She also learned the word nine, I mean, in German, You know, no is nine.

[32:59]

It's softer than no. But we were surprised she learned nine, because we never say no or yes to her. But I guess Marie Louise, who speaks German to her, she now knows all the German words for, if you say something about your mouth, she knows where her mouth is. Although she can't say them, she can identify it. She knows the word. But... I was in a doctor's, no, optician, I was getting some glasses, and the baby started going toward this plant. She's this kind of jet crawler, she shoots and puts it on the floor. And she went to this plant and started eating some big rubber plant or something. And I said, nine. She stopped. And I said, how the hell did she know this word? But I guess Marie Louise, sometimes she'll see her doing something. She'll say, 999. But we didn't intentionally say anything about no or yes to her. But she picked it up and she stopped.

[34:00]

And then she crawled around the other side and looked at me and was going to try it again. That's where I couldn't see her, behind the plant. This was a couple months ago. So somehow she's got to... But I think this is this intercommunicative... It's not just about making something happen. She wants to make it happen with us interrelated. And she's also developing a self in the sense of her emotions. Because sometimes she likes something or doesn't like something. Here we have the second foundation of mindfulness, pleasant, unpleasant. And how do pleasant and unpleasant become likes and dislikes, which then lets karma in. and neutral instead of neither. And how does that turn into greed, hate and delusion? That's this range I think we have to keep looking at because in there is one of the biggest secrets of practice.

[35:05]

So some things are unpleasant to her, or she doesn't want to be interfered with, and she has emotions about it, right? This also gives her a sense of self. And it gives her a sense of a separate self she does not want to be interfered with. So that also can be a docket of experience of what she's going to make her story. And finally, there's a kind of what I'd say is not exactly separate or communicative, but just autonomy. And I would say our culture tends to emphasize with babies, if I look at what they recommend, both autonomy and separateness. But the autonomy is like when she has the thrill of crawling for the first time. Or standing up and not touching anything and finding herself freestanding. And I think it's a kind of, as I said the other day, a kind of enlightenment experience.

[36:12]

Because you feel so empowered. So these are areas I see in which she's developing self through communication, through cause and seeing that she can cause, make things happen. Through establishing differentiated emotions and through autonomy, a kind of separate power. I don't know, maybe I'll... I don't know what else I'll notice. But there's also... Oh, yes, I wanted to say there's also... I think some of you noticed it today out there with Janie. She has little exclamatory cries. The first time we... When it snowed here, she'd never seen snow before, I took her to the window, and everything from yesterday, which was green, was white. And she looked out the window and went, But she does the same thing if we show her a deer.

[37:16]

She saw her first deer. She's done it with babies. First time she sees a baby her age. And also cats and dogs. Animals particularly, but the white snow did it. To me, you know, being a romantic, I would say that's the root of poetry. A little awe and a little exclamatory... That's not quite the same as these four dockets of self. So I will... Maybe the one closest to Sashin is in decontextualized attention is a little exclamatory cry. Because when we have that kind of... that uniqueness of each moment and place, maybe inside there's a little something like an insight, something like enlightenment experience.

[38:33]

So, you know, you're this little infant like each of you, those of you who have children, putting together a world, which by the time we're adults, often it's kind of stuck and bent. Maybe coming to Sashino, we're kind of trying to unbend it or unstick it, not for a new story now, but just to enter this realm of perhaps little exclamatory cries. Or like I would say this word, kill guy. Like, yeah, you've got it. And the non-duality of a child, decontextualized, seeing it's close to non-duality, is different than the non-duality of an adult. This is not just an idea of philosophical way of looking, way of talking.

[40:00]

Okay, thank you very much. May our intention equally penetrate every being and place.

[40:21]

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