Well, as most of you, all of you know, I'll leave tomorrow, late afternoon sometime, fly the next Thursday morning. There's Thursdays out there, you know. On to San Francisco. To do a seminar. Started out to be, as you know, my old friend most of you know, Michael Murphy, who founded Esalen on his family's Big Sur summer place. And he was the most naturally gifted meditator I've ever met. From sometime around 22 to 23, something like that, to about 35, he just meditated eight hours a day, seven days a week. And he would just, but it was Hindu-style meditation, but basically he would just sit down all day long and sit.

[01:09]

And I often stayed in his house when he had a house. Now he has an apartment. And he just gets up in the morning, he sits, and sometimes people come in and paint around him. I mean, you know, painting a room or something or repairing the electricity. Very fun. Thank you. And he switched, because we sat together now and then, he switched more to a Buddhist style of meditation, but his view of the world is more Hindu. Anyway, Everything he does seems to turn to success. And one of the things he did, I don't know how long ago, 10, 12 years ago or more, he founded with his friend George Leonard, who was one of the leading Western Aikido teachers, most well-known, a practice called ITP. Integral Transformational Practice, ITP.

[02:14]

Anyway, they published a book, The Life We Are Given, and it's got... kind of groups all over the world, really, but I think primarily the United States. And anyway, Michael speaks to... And somehow, I guess he quotes me a lot. I don't know what. But anyway, they've said over the years, can't we get that guy to come and meet and visit with us? So last fall, I said, well, I don't know, Michael, I could do it maybe in mid-March. So now it's mid-March. I thought it was going to be a meeting just with his students. He meets with once a week or something. And they do a kind of mixture of meditation and martial arts, kata forms. And anyway, it's very popular.

[03:18]

So it was going to be just, I thought, just my meeting with his students a day or two. But somehow the IT, the international ITP, board, wanted to make an event of it, so suddenly it's in this hotel. I almost tried to, I mean, I did try to suggest they cancel it a few weeks ago. But now there's a lot of people coming. And from what I hear, a lot of the people are former students of mine from years ago. San Francisco, Zen Center. So it makes me stop and sort of review, what the heck have I been doing all these years? And what is the, the question I found myself asking, what is the medium of practice? And of course that's always in the context for me of, you've heard me talk about this a lot, but I,

[04:19]

You know, you each will practice in the context of your own life, and my practice has been in the context of my life. And from the very beginning, this issue has been the relationship between lay and monastic practice. And as you know, Sukhya Rishi, his vision was to emphasize lay practice, but he found it wasn't working until there was monastic practice. It was the founding of Tassajara which transformed the practice, the people, etc. So I'm still trying to figure this out, as you've heard me talk about. One thing that's interesting is a lot of the people I practiced with for five or ten years, twenty-five years ago, have finished careers, or they've had careers, You know, one started a software company.

[05:21]

Many people started plumbing and construction companies because they learned plumbing at Tassajara, stuff like that. Like Steve Haynes learned plumbing, practicing with... D'Affrigione, yeah. And... So... They've come back to practice. Now they want to maybe teach and stuff. But the problem is, it's this 10,000-hour problem. Practice evolves through the situations of your life. Now, I would say monastic practice I would describe as an autodidactic apprenticeship. meaning there's an apprenticeship, but you learn from that apprenticeship on your own.

[06:22]

Now, for the layperson, there isn't this intimacy of an apprenticeship where you don't have to do so much, just being together mostly. So what's the... You know, it's even more autodidactic, but the teacher then is situated immediately. And the teachings and attitude and intention you bring into a... Knowing the world as a situated bring into an experience of the world as this term I use situated a means Now from the very beginning starting to study first China and then Japan What was clear to me and watching Suzuki Roshi because I saw in Suzuki Roshi this the cultural difference between

[07:33]

of Buddhism and Western culture and Asian culture. So I started out noticing that and observing it a lot and studying it through observing it. That's been a kind of major study of mine. People often used to get me to come and give a lecture just on the differences. But then that evolved for me into yogic Asian culture, and that's evolved into a yogic practice culture. And that's, maybe we could also say, dharmic yogic practice. Okay, now what's that? Now, if I take it, because this happened because, of course, Asian culture, within Asian culture, there's yoga culture, which is much created by Buddhism within Asian culture and other things, but probably the major creator of the yogic dimension to Asian culture is Buddhism, and pre-Buddhist, etc.,

[08:55]

Now, in early Buddhism, I would say the sutras and commentary and so rather established yogic culture. But later Buddhism, like Song Dynasty and Koan practice, which basically, as you know, I was primarily studying Chinese Buddhism, I would say, Song Dynasty Buddhism. By that time, the yogic culture, the medium of yogic culture was taken for granted. It's just implicit or even, not even implicit, it's just assumed to be there. They don't have to make it implicit in the text because it's assumed to be there. So in other words, if you and I are practicing Buddhism, Somehow I think, I know, we have to bring this, you can't just study Buddhism, you have to study the context of Buddhism, the context that's assumed and implied.

[10:03]

Okay, so that's much of what I'm doing often is to try to recreate for us the yogic context of practice as a medium of practice which the koans assume that you live within already. Understand? Okay. Now, we have another medium which is the disorder at the border, at the borderland, at the borders. It sounds like border is related to order, but it's really not. Border means edge or seam or side. So these two cultures overlap and are compatible, mostly incompatible, or in significant ways not really. So there's a dissonance in the non-compatibility. So that's an advantage we have at a transitional historical period because there's a tremendous creativity.

[11:09]

I mean, things evolve, as I've spoken about before, evolve through disorder. the right amount of disorder. So the more you study Buddhism, you also find yourself in this kind of medium of dissonance, this borderland where it's not our familiar Western culture, and it's another way of being in the world. So in a way, the medium of my practice, and I think the medium of at least you and maybe a generation or two more of practice, will be this simultaneous medium of finding, entering into a yoga culture and the dissonance of the borderland, the dissonant borderland of the two cultures.

[12:10]

And I'm partly unprompted by this because Christian and Nicole have asked me to look at what I wrote for the topic section on yoga culture. So yoga culture, of course, is the dynamic of Well, let me go back. So we have Asian, Western. Then I began to see it as Western and yogic culture. Then Western and a yogic practice medium. And that also became a body-mind culture. And that became awareness consciousness. So all of that was a kind of evolution of my own practice finding this medium, this borderland medium, or something like that.

[13:24]

Body, mind, consciousness, awareness, etc. Now, as you know, again, consciousness, as I put it anyway, you know that I put it that way anyway, consciousness, the job of consciousness is to establish predictability. So we can order our world. Okay. Now, even as we do know about impermanence, we're going to die and be sick and change, etc., consciousness still is trying to ignore that, mostly, knows about it, but at the level of a perceptual cognitive dynamic, it's ignored, and predictability is noticed. How do you make that shift? Making the shift away from that to awareness, making the shift away from that is this area of borderland disorder, and it's also entering the medium of the yoga culture.

[14:34]

Okay, so it's very simply yoga culture, the worldview assumes that everything changes. Okay, everything is impermanent. But what happens when you start noticing impermanence? How do you notice impermanence? What's the dynamic of noticing impermanence? Now what happens when you notice impermanence is if you don't assume predictability, if you're not finding yourself located in predictability, okay, Then you're finding yourself located in where, if everything's changing? Well, in what holds. That's the simplest way to put it. And the word Dharma means what holds. So basically Buddhism is everything changes and the Dharma is knowing everything changes and the experience of what holds in the midst of everything changing. That's basically Buddhism. So then what holds, as well as what changes?

[15:42]

Now, I think the easiest way is to illustrate that. Because again, as I say, it's to see activity and not entities. So what happens when you see activity? And then what holds in the context of seeing, knowing, perceiving, etc., activity? Well, let's just take a tree, and you have to experiment with this. And again, Buddhism really is not about being understood. The practice of Buddhism is about, I think the best word to use is incubation. Now, I think we can look at I think we can find something out just by looking at the difference between the words to incubate and to understand. Understand, the under of understand doesn't mean beneath.

[16:48]

It means in the midst of. So understand means to separate out and put together. So you have a place to stand. Well, that's not exactly, that's not what incubate means. Incubate means to separate. literally means to heat in the right conditions, to heat up in the right conditions, optimal conditions for hatching an egg or whatever. But it has a meaning going back before brooding eggs and so forth. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Both. The context came first. So incubate, in this case the heat is a tension, and the optimal conditions are something like not too much disorder, etc.

[17:50]

That's exactly what the word evolution means. So things evolve and don't develop. Again, I'm just using these two words to try to get us into the medium of the medium of yogic practice culture. Now, in the word develop and evolve, you can hear the same E-V-O-L, which means to roll out. But when you add des to it, or de-velop, the unrolling of evolve becomes to wrap up. Because the DE or DES part means to undo. So undoing the rolling up is to wrap up. So to develop means to wrap things up, wrap things up. And that's really, again, characteristic of our more discursive mind culture, if we want to kind of make these distinctions.

[18:58]

And evolve means to continuously roll out, just keep rolling it out. and in the flow of contextual change. So how do you just keep rolling out your experience in the flow of contextual change? And that's what, unfortunately, I mean it's great these, quite a large number of people have their career, come back at 50 or 60, decide to practice again, yet they haven't got the 10,000 hours. They haven't had not only the time in which the rolling out of practice in the minutia of everyday life happens, but the crises of everyday life, they didn't maybe the old age crisis that led them back to practice, but the crisis they went through in everyday life weren't usually resolved through practice, which is, you know, I mean, many times people have AIDS or decide to commit suicide and then decide not to because they realize it's not the body that wants to die, but something else going on that wants to die, and they walk away from it a new person.

[20:19]

So there's many experiences that are part of the medicine or the evolution of practice. Okay, so we can learn from this. And not to discourage us, oh, well, geez, I'm 45 or 55 and I'm just starting. No, but rather, how can we, in our life, in our lay life, create, establish, locate, germinate the medium of yogic practice, the context of yogic practice. Can your life become the context, or even better, medium of yogic practice? Yeah, I mean, it's again, it's, you know, like let's take a tree. Rather than see the entity, what does the yogic practitioner see?

[21:32]

The yogic practitioner sees, first of all, as I point, treeing. I'm sorry to keep coming back to this, but, you know, treeing can be an example of everything. Pillowing, lamping, etc. Speaking and meeting. Okay, so you just really train yourself, get yourself into the habit through a locked-in intention to see activity, to see treeing. And you can just experiment with an object. I find trees quite useful. Activity is the bark, the insects, the birds, the movement of the leaves, etc. But what holds? Simultaneously, what holds is the stillness of the treeing. And it's the root, the trunk and roots of the tree, which are the stillness of the tree, which shape the movement of the leaves and the branches and so forth.

[22:34]

Just like I've often, often, often said, the wave is shaped by the stillness of the water. The stillness of the water is the attractor, and it attracts water. the movement of the water in the wind or whatever, the moon, back into the stillness. So the shape of the wave is the stillness of the water. The movement of the leaves is the stillness of the roots and trunk. I'm not trying to be scientific here. I'm just trying to say you feel in the movement the stillness. That's dharmic practice. That's dharmic yogic practice. To feel what holds, and what holds is the stillness. In the same way I said the other day, the words are pulled out of silence, silence sticks to it, and the words are pulled back into silence. So you feel the silence in sound and in speaking.

[23:40]

And also with going back to the tree, you feel the space of the tree. So this is your practice. You feel the tree, treeing of the tree, the activity of the tree. Then you kind of just grok the space of the tree. Yeah, and the space of yourself and the space you and the tree make. That is, you know, a way of speaking about awareness. Non-discursive awareness. So you begin to establish a non-discursive awareness when a discursive mind is interrupted by the space of non-discursive awareness. And what holds them is the space of non-discursive awareness. You feel it holding in yourself, too. And you know that feeling, and if you don't do zazen much, you practice mindfulness, you don't feel the stillness of the tree if you don't feel the stillness in yourself.

[24:53]

I mean, think about it. So you feel the space of the tree, the activity of the tree, the stillness of the tree, and the field of mind of awareness, the field of mind that arises from the particularity and space of the tree. Now if you get in the habit of that way of knowing, So, I mean, like now, maybe in my speaking, I hope, and in my own feeling of speaking, I can feel the words kind of appearing and wanting to go back to silence. And I'm pausing not to think or anything like that. I'm pausing just to let the words go back to silence.

[25:56]

And then some other word comes up. It just appears. Some other word appears. It goes back into silence. And that's partly just because of my long experience of, you know, over and over and over again, retreating, receding, disappearing into over. necessary and restorative silence and stillness. So if you view the world as not something you're trying to wrap up or understand, but to view the world as something that you're unrolling in a constantly transforming context, and you trust the incubation of your practice, not trying to understand, separate out and put together of your practice, but rather just keep putting it back into the incubator

[27:18]

of situated immediacy. And your practice will evolve. It will devolve through activity, simple activity of your life. Buddhist teachings help, but primarily it's going to be autodidactic experience of entering the details of your life through the medium of yogic practice. I think you, and I think not only can you, you need to have the catalytic, the catalyst of trust process of incubation incubating your life incubating practice and that way You're validating your life through Zen mind That's interesting it's a kind of adventure it's very hard to tell your uncle or aunt what you're doing What are you doing?

[28:33]

I'm incubating my life. Oh great. Why don't you get a job? Well, I have a job, but I'm incubating at the same time. Oh, really? Are you a chicken farmer or something? What's wrong with you? So sometimes this kind of has to be a kind of hidden practice. Because your life can look normal to the outside. But inside you're incubating your life, trusting this process of incubation and evolving, incubating your life in the medium of yogic practice. Okay, thanks. In your attention, believe and trade every being and place.

[29:40]

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