Do you have anything you'd like to say or could you contribute to our discussion? Yes. After the operation, I couldn't sit in my chair any longer for 13 years. And I've been trying so hard to play in a place where I was completely lost. How can I support you so far? It seems to me that you've changed a lot. Yeah, I mean, you just have to learn to sit in a chair. And during the time you When you're sitting in a chair, as sitting, it's best not to lean on the back.

[01:06]

It's best to sit down. They have to explore how to, you know, where your feet are and so on. But if you can sit on a chair, mostly people can sit, you know, Cesar, this... Like you're sitting. Yeah, I mean, I did... I leapt down a flight of stairs, believe it or not, onto a stone floor when I was in college. You... I mean, I may have landed once, but I don't remember. All I know is that at the top of the stairs, there was a policeman chasing me. And at the top of the stairs, I jumped the whole flight of stairs onto a stone floor.

[02:08]

And this knee went... And I was carried heroically through the crowd to the local, to the college infirmary hospital. And it was nothing. I was not doing anything except participating in the spring college riot. Which was a tradition in the college I went to. It was kind of fun, it was kind of silly. I started it actually and I didn't mean to. In those days I tended to work at night and sleep during the day.

[03:09]

And somebody came in and squirted me with a water pistol. College students, they're adults, right? And I leapt out of my sleep and started chasing this guy and pretty soon the entire freshman campus was in a riot. So ever since then, I've had quite a lot of problems with this leg. Sometimes it's better or worse. It's worse the last few years. Actually, my knee goes out of joint when I put it up, and I have to kind of fiddle it back in joint a little bit now. So I may be joining you on a chair soon. Okay, what else? Yeah. Yeah. I don't really think it's fair that you expect me to do all the talking.

[04:31]

You're not stupid people. You must have something to say. What? I said you're not stupid people. That's what I said. I didn't say you're stupid people. No, I didn't. Okay. But I would do want to at some point have some feeling about your experiences of practicing meditation, and if it relates to what I've been saying. Yeah. Yeah.

[05:36]

When I started practicing with the three marks, I used to think, I used to try and think my way through experiencing. It feels like you're saying it's possible It's possible to sense it without thinking. OK. The question is, can there be recognition without thinking? Well, I mean, if I slapped your... I mean, I would never do this, but if I slapped your face... But there's recognition without thinking.

[06:56]

And if you start thinking after being slapped, then you're not a real disciple. If you start thinking why and what then, you better, you know, practice with someone else. This is not an excuse for unbridled violence. It just, you know, it just happened. Oh, there was a slap. Yeah, I remember I remember. I used to. You know, I'm a busy type person. So when we left the Zendo, we all filed out and went through his little office and bowed to him and then went out the little office door.

[08:13]

It was all one little corner. And put on our shoes and left and went to our job or whatever we did. I was sort of president of the Zen Center and things like that. So I always had to talk to people. So many mornings I would go out the other door, talk to people, and then get back and whine about him. And one day, I was gonna go back in line, but instead he came out the other door and he grabbed me like this and he threw me down and began beating me with a stick.

[09:16]

Oh, you sounded fierce. And, you know, he was about this big, except in photographs, I was this big and he was this big. I mean, he felt this big to me, but in photographs he was about this big and I was this big. Yeah. So I was actually on the floor and he was whacking me, you know. He was shouting, you should understand under my anger. And I was there thinking, well, this is happening. Yeah, it was like, okay. Yes, I knew he was actually talking to someone else as well as me.

[10:26]

Who probably would have argued with him if he'd done it, so he did it to me instead. Yeah, it's actually quite interesting. It's a fond memory of mine. Yeah, I really felt his energy. Okay. So there can be recognition without thinking. And of course we also maybe will get to the point, which I didn't get to the point of last night in speaking about thinking, Yeah, the kind of like when you understand something in a flash. When there's a thinking that's wrapped up in a feeling and comes out at various times. Okay. Okay, unless somebody else wants to say something, I'll start from there.

[11:47]

No, you've already spoken. Yeah, I think that what I'm trying to do now is present the introduction of this posture on a regular basis into a personal life and one's culture without teaching beyond enough teaching to learn the posture. Shall I start over? We'll try. Sounds good. So I think that if you do sit down and sit regularly, you do begin to notice the difference between sitting mind and waking and usual mind.

[13:06]

Now, if you have any existential or scientific curiosity, you kind of explore that. And you can explore it without much teaching. Although it helps to be practicing with a teacher or with a sangha so you can have a feeling you get a feeling for the posture and the practice. So I do think that you that just the introduction into your life of sitting, regular sitting, begins to restore the balance of waking, dreaming, and sleeping mind. My experience, I remember, was I... You know what flying buttresses are?

[14:19]

They're the stone things that hold up the Gothic cathedral's walls. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I used to feel that when I started to practice, all the flying buttresses that were supporting a kind of sense of self and etc. were taken down and the walls began to settle into a non-Gothic configuration. Yeah, I mean I created all kinds of ways to make my personality and my imagined life work which weren't realistic.

[15:22]

Of course I And again, this is personal. In this I might be somewhat different, because I decided very early on to accept nothing from culture or society that I didn't check out. And I was a person without any obvious societal ambitions. I decided that our culture was corrupt People killed each other. They went to war. I didn't want any part of it. And I remember when I was in college, everyone was discussing what they wanted to do after college, what their ambition was.

[16:31]

And they asked me, and I said, I mean, quite honestly, I said, well, it would be nice to design my own house and have fresh flowers in it every day. And I did sort of achieve that. So that meant that my exploration of Zazen was inseparable from my exploration of the society, at least. And so I had a kind of, what could I say, bohemian attitude toward life and the world. Yes, but anyway, because it does restore, I think, looking back on my own practice and looking into others' practice.

[17:52]

I think it does restore sort of the balance of mind, body, waking, sleeping, and so on. And I think it stabilizes you in your personal history. And I think it stabilizes you existentially in the world. And that would be part also of beginning to see suffering, non-self and impermanence. And be settled into things without lots of alternatives.

[19:04]

Now my point here is to speak about this without much teaching. That's what I'm emphasizing on. What the still sitting posture itself can reveal. So just to get people to sit, to create opportunities for people to sit, is a big part of Then practice. Not to teach them anything. Just give them the opportunity to sit. Okay. Now, Dogen says somewhere, that's a statement I've been repeating quite often in the last few months. He says the continuous practice which actualizes itself is your practice right now. Now I'm not speaking about this first sentence. I'm not commenting on this first sentence.

[20:31]

But we need it to understand the second sentence, which I am commenting. So again, the continuous practice, whatever continuous practice is, that takes teaching. Continuous practice which actualizes itself Is your continuous practice just now? When is that the case? He said, the now of this continuous practice, the now that one realizes through continuous practice, the now of this continuous practice is not originally possessed by the self. Okay, now that's an extraordinary statement to me.

[21:36]

It means the now that we live in really doesn't belong to the self. We may project self onto it. But it's not originally possessed by the self. So now we speak about the four marks as also non-self. Through the process of sitting. And coming into a relationship with your own personal history. Your own infusions, suffering and so forth. Grief, longing. You begin to find yourself in a wider... territory of existence.

[22:41]

And that wider territory is not originally possessed by the self. And without taking all day to talk about it, the identification of everything that happens through the self gets much less. And you do see, because you're now more in the midst of your own event, your own experience, you see that things are changing and permanent and so forth. You're more in the midst of the unpredictability of

[23:48]

your perceptual world than its predictability. In my opinion, this does happen just through regular sitting. And becomes the basis not realized through some teaching, but the basis realized through your own experience, on which the teaching can build. So the teaching is not rooted in a revealed teaching. The teaching is rooted in your own experience revealed to yourself. It's one of the reasons that it is strongly recommended you not study Buddhism before you start sitting satsang.

[25:01]

And if you're in a monastery, you just cannot... Most people would spend... Oh, two or three years, pretty much continuously in a monastery. And if you're serious about making this your life or being a teacher, a minimum of ten years. And I'm not recommending it, but I have a sign-up sheet. In a way it's wonderful because if someone chooses to do it, you get to live with really nice people for ten years. And when you're in the monastery,

[26:55]

you don't have a, you know, pretty regular hours. You get up, you know it's still dark, and you go to bed when it's dark, and there's no time to read, and there's no lights for you to read by. So when I was, I sat in a Rinzai monastery for about two and a half years, And when you went to the toilet, you found little matches. Now, the matches were not to eliminate the smell. Because you're basically outdoors in this little toilet anyway. The matches are to light it so you can read something, so you can prepare for your doksan and koan study. Now, they don't have western toilets, they have squat toilets.

[27:59]

So you're sitting over a little a rather large opening full of shit. I mean, I'm just telling you like it is. And you're trying to read a book while you're holding a match and not fall in or lose the book. So you can see that study is seriously discouraged. Because they want you to get as much as possible out of the simple act of sitting before you study anything. Otherwise, you try to make the shoe fit. If you have that expression?

[29:11]

To make the shoe fit? No, I don't think so. But I know what's meant. A friend of mine used to do the tarot deck. A poet, Robert Duncan, used to do the tarot deck and tell fortune from the tarot deck. And I said, how do you do this? He said, it's completely easy. You can say anything. People are so ready to make the shoe fit. You're the kind of person who, oh, yeah. Anyway, so if you study the teaching too much, you try to make your experience go in that direction. When it doesn't go in that direction, you feel like a failure or whatever. Yeah. So I'm always trying to create a disappearing teaching. Disappearing.

[30:25]

Teaching. So I'm trying to not send you in the wrong direction. You're not living in a monastery for ten years, so I try to say things you'll forget. Yeah. It won't cause you any trouble, I hope. Okay. Now, one of the things you... What time are we supposed to have lunch? One o'clock. Oh, it's coming here? Oh, that's all right. Now, one of the things that I think fruits of... this sitting, let's call it just simply, sitting without teaching, is that you begin to sense what I've called the background mind.

[31:36]

Yeah, which I think is in the current Zen or the previous Zen. I said something about it. Okay. You begin to sense that your experience is arising on a field, a background. And I remember the initial time I tried to describe it in words. I was at a friend's college class or seminar that he had meeting in his, Houston Smith, and he had them, students were meeting in his living room. And he invited me to come by. I'd been practicing two or three years or so. He invited me to come by and say something about it. And I found myself saying that doing Zazen is a little bit like driving along a highway.

[33:04]

And it's covered with billboards on both sides of the road. Which is quite common in America and not common in Europe particularly. I told you my former wife was here for a couple of weeks, and the first thing she said, there's no advertisements everywhere, no billboards everywhere. What a relief. So at first, when you're doing satsang, there's all these thoughts, moods, emotions, and it's like billboards. And after a while, if you sit regularly, the billboards start having spaces between them. My experience was you see between the billboards into a line out of which the billboards were made.

[34:08]

Why do you see trees, forests that became the wood for the billboards? So some images like that made me have the sense that there's the foreground of my mind is thinking but there's a background that's not thinking. So I think you begin through this sitting without teaching to have a feeling of Zazen mind is different from daily mind. And within Zazen mind there's a feeling of a presence of a deeper or background mind. And I think the last thing I'll mention is you learn to follow thoughts, moods, emotions to their source.

[35:54]

Now maybe it helps if this practice is pointed out to you. But I think you can just discover it because more and more you see spaces between the billboards and some billboards appear and you say where the heck did that billboard come from? Okay, so say a certain mood arises. Or you might have a headache. Or you might have, you know, the flu coming. Yeah.

[36:56]

You might be anxious or angry. And you notice you weren't anxious before. Now you're anxious. What made me anxious? Well, I, yeah, yeah, I know, thought of, you know, you notice your pattern of thought before the anxiety appeared. And then you trace that back. And you eventually, usually in three or four or five steps, you find, oh yeah, I thought of that letter or that person or I had that image. I started feeling anxious. Now, if you do that regularly, If you get in the habit of following moods, emotions, thoughts to their source.

[38:11]

And it's a skill you can learn. And it's really a skill no one can teach you. Except to point out that it's possible. And then you have to try it yourself. But if you develop the skill at it, So first you're developing the skill. Yeah, we could say the second step is you get very quick at, oh yeah. I saw a man in a green coat. Somehow, oh, I remember a few weeks ago, the green coat made me anxious. Maybe something like that.

[39:16]

You basically notice the trigger that causes the train of thought that leads to anxiety, anger, bad depression. The next step, and a much more fundamental or transformative step, is you begin to be present when the trigger happens and not when you feel angry. So let's use the simple example of the man in the green coat. Kind of like the name of a movie. Sounds interesting.

[40:23]

The man in the green coat. So let's say you notice that as a trigger for anxiety. There's some association you have in the past with, I don't know, whatever. But every time you know that something like the man in the green coat or some kind of quality occurs, you feel, I might get anxious. and where in the past the triggers were buried under lots of things and so you didn't notice it and the triggers are more on the surface and you can immediately say okay I'm not going to I'm going to change my posture, change my breath a little.

[41:26]

Yeah, don't get anxious. And you begin to have a very participatory feeling and participatory engagement in your life. You don't have feelings like, why am I angry, why am I sick, why am I in a bad mood today? Yeah, I mean, every day is a good day. But it's not if you aren't present at the real present. Let's take having a headache, for instance.

[42:28]

No, I'm not talking about serious things like migraines, just you get a headache. But it probably, I think it probably would, is also a practice which would reduce migraines. Usually we notice a headache when our head starts to hurt. That's not the present of the headache. The present of the headache was when you first started going toward a headache. Das war aber nicht die Gegenwart des Kopfschmerzes. Die war es, als du das erste Mal sozusagen zum Kopfschmerz hin dich bewegt hast. And I've learned, I learned I had a little feeling, a little like flick on the side of my head, which would lead to a headache. Und ich habe bemerken gelernt, dass es so an der Seite meines Kopfes einen kleinen Klick gab, der zu einem Kopfschmerz wurde und führte. Which I guess meant a little change in blood in your head. Möglicherweise bedeutet halt also eine Veränderung des Blutsturms im Kopf.

[43:30]

And I, this was 50, 50, 40 years ago, I've never had a headache since. Except a couple of times when I had the real bad flu. Pretty bad headache with the flu. But this isn't something special, really. It's just beginning to be in a particular... a participant in how you actually exist. And likewise, we're constantly exposed to flus and colds and so on. And you can get, so you know very early when you might In a couple days, begin to have the flu. But a couple days before you have it, you notice.

[44:32]

No, it doesn't mean that I never get sick. But mostly I notice and I kind of, my image is the sickness is coming down the tracks toward the station called me. And my image is that I go out on the platform and I say, no passengers, go on through. And the train usually goes through and I only have a very faint feeling of cold. So it does change your relationship to health and mental and physical difficulties, sufferings. Because your mental and physical body can be adjusted through your posture, your state of mind, your energy, and so forth.

[45:46]

Yeah, and there's still the facts of disease and genetics and stuff. But you're now not the victim of what's happening around you. You're the participant in what's happening. Okay. So that's my little introduction to What can be or are the fruits of introducing regular sitting into your life? No, I think that's rather independent of Buddhism. But in another way, not really independent of Buddhism, Because some teachings might give you the feeling you have to contemplate or you have to do something.

[47:06]

Then it just says, just sit and observe. Weil ja manche Lehren dir das Gefühl geben, du musst jetzt kontemplieren und du musst etwas tun, dann sitz einfach und beobachte. So the emphasis on an unstructured sitting or the only structure being the posture, physical posture itself, die Betonung des nichtstrukturierten Sitzens, wo also die einzige Struktur des Sitzen selber ist, is a very specifically, even within Buddhism, the emphasis of Zen, And it seems to be within Tibetan Buddhism, in the Mahamudra and Dzogchen schools, but they have Despite taking the same kind of conceptual position of Zen, unstructured position of Zen, they emphasize

[48:09]

A lot of preparatory practices. Zen is unique in really not having any preparatory practices except regular sitting. Perhaps sashin are a kind of preparatory practice. Okay. Now, the next thing I would like to, next way of looking at why sitting is that, yeah, What I've said so far, I think, is the introduction of sitting into your practical and personal life.

[49:25]

Now the next way I look at it is emphasizing, maybe we could say, your fundamental life. Not the introduction of sitting into your personal and particular life. Practical life. But the... the effect of sitting in making you recognize your fundamental life. A fundamental life hidden in but present within Our daily life. And a fundamental life you share with others. And somehow also share with this phenomenal world.

[50:49]

The protoplasmic field which we are definitions within. Now maybe I should speak about that after a minute. Vielleicht sollte ich darüber nach dem Essen sprechen. It's like the horse looking off the cliff in the cereal. Das ist wie das Pferd über die Klippe springt. Did they have serial films when you were young and German? But before the regular movie, there'd be 20-minute serials. Yeah, yeah. In Ireland, too?

[51:51]

Oh, yeah. And I always remember, there's always a horse going over a cliff, and you look like the hero's going to die, or the shero. And, of course, in the next episode, the horse would land on some kind of ledge. And in the next episode, the horse would land on some kind of ledge. So, let's see if we land on a ledge after that. Thank you very much.

[52:20]

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