I'm allowed to blow my nose now. Not that you really need to know that, but it was observed. Anyway, and the dentist says, you've got a resourceful community. Just have someone in your community pull out the stitches. Is there a doctor in the house? I'm glad someone who's never been here thinks we have all these resources. Yeah, and when people, when you come to Doksan, sometimes, quite often, a person says to me, well, I have these feelings, and I don't know how I can save them. And I have that feeling with every Teisho.

[01:12]

Maybe I'm doing Dokusan with all of you. It's kind of like that. Yeah. So I try to find words that say something about what we're doing, that show something about what we're doing. And I say that over and over again, but I say it to myself when I start wondering what to talk about. What words can I use? Sometimes I have to make up words, as you know. But sometimes there's words that really are quite good, but we don't use them very often because it's not something where we live very often.

[02:20]

And like there's a word synonymy, like a synonym. A synonym is two words that are different, but they have the same or similar meaning. And the word synonymy, which probably none of you have heard before, means to live in harmony with your environment or to live with the feeling of your environment being part of you. And this word synonymy, which maybe no one of you has heard before, means to live with the environment or with the environment in harmony or to live so that the environment is part of everything.

[03:39]

And it can be translated simply as resonance, too. But I like finding words like this that happen to me because I want there to be a kind of problem in understanding what I'm saying. Maybe that's not... That's easier. In language processing, there's a phrase used, the wrap-up effect. In linguistics. In linguistics. And it's used in a couple of different ways, but I think they're basically the same.

[04:43]

And it's done by people studying how people read. It's noticed. If you read a complex sentence and the clause is at the end or the clause is in the middle, it takes a moment to integrate it. And the other way it's used, which I think is similar, is there's an implicit poetry or prosody in language that you feel the poetry, the language, and you have to let that happen. And that's also called the wrap-up effect. And the other way around, it's not wrapped up yet.

[06:01]

I'll wrap it up, baby. That didn't help. That didn't help, she says. Well, then just rap. And then what if the poetry speaks to you then? In language is an implicit poetry. Yes. A rhythm. Yeah. But it takes a moment to feel it. Yeah. So like in medieval times in the West, they didn't punctuate things because you could feel the punctuation. They didn't have to punctuate. Poetry was often just written one line after another, just looked like a block of pipe. But when it's translated nowadays, they always put it in lines as if it was a poem, but originally the poetry had to be felt and discovered in the reading.

[07:26]

And in the past, poems were always written in a text block, so just until the line was over and then the next line, just a block. And nowadays, when it is translated, then the poem is always divided into lines. But back then it was simply assumed that when you read it, you feel the lines. I mean, I understand that Chinese is much like that because you can't tell whether a word's a noun or a verb or what it is. You have to kind of make feel whether that's a verb or a noun. So this is the different kind of, again, an example of a different kind of world, a world which designed, it doesn't make sense unless you feel it out, not think it out. And I'm not one who's against thinking, obviously.

[08:36]

But we don't want to just think the world. We also want to feel the world. Now, I've been speaking pretty much since the beginning of the practice period. What I would call the flowering of immediacy. Or I could even say the petaling of immediacy. Like the petals of a flower. I mean, the word petal, the etymology is it just spreads out.

[09:42]

It's something that spreads out. So the flower spreads out in its petals. So I hope that the roadblocks, the mind blocks, I put in how I speak about things. Even for those of you who don't know English very well, I hope that German is just an additional roadblock. Yeah, because I want us to get stuck in these things. He said, you have to feel your way out.

[10:43]

Richard Feynman, who was one of the great one or two physicists of the last century, Richard Feynman, einer der größten Physiker des letzten Jahrhunderts. And if you haven't read him or seen a YouTube of him, it's quite good, useful to do so. He's great. Und falls ihr noch nichts von ihm gelesen habt oder ihn noch nie in einem Interview gesehen habt oder so, es lohnt sich, sich den mal auf YouTube anzuschauen. Er ist wirklich großartig. When he died, written on his blackboard was If I can't create it, I can't understand it. And that's really the same as Dogen saying, don't let the sutras turn you, you turn the sutras. So everything I say underlying it is trying to show you and find in myself a way to recreate the teaching, not just teach you the teaching.

[12:16]

Okay. Now this flowering, the peddling of immediacy, It starts with the breath. I want, although I do create a kind of maze-like presentation, I really want you to get the beginnings so that you get there through your own practice.

[13:19]

Like the word visit. Okay. The word vivid, it's just a word rooted in the word to live. Aliveness. But nowadays in English, it mostly means to see things clearly. They're vivid. But again, you know everything's an activity. Which is also a way of saying everything's a process. Und das ist eine andere Art zu sagen, alles ist ein Prozess.

[14:33]

Yeah, and processes overlap. Und Prozesse überlappen. So, teaching is a kind of seeding, C-S-E-E-D-I-N-G. You're seeding, you're planting seeds. Und lehren ist so eine Art zu säen, also du sähst Samenkörner. So the teacher can give you the maybe, the beginning of the process, but the planting and the cultivation and the incubation are up to you. Basically, the teaching should not be understandable. And that's a problem with smart people. They think they understand things and they get things quickly, but they get them conceptually and they never incubate it.

[15:39]

And the problem with smart people is that smart people understand things quickly and then they have the feeling of having understood it, but they never grow out of it. So if a student, somebody who might be a young person, comes and meets a young man or woman who might be a good student, If they're real smart and talented, I think, no, they're going to end up in a bank or a university. So I prefer the dumb ones, like us. I always like it that... Da Wu and Yun Yan, Yun Yan's our lineage and he's the dumber one between the two brothers.

[16:43]

If you're a little dumb or a little slow, you have to incubate things because you just don't get it. Otherwise. So if you happen to be real smart, please learn how to be a little dumb. Now, a zafu is an activity. If everything is an activity, a zafu is an activity. And I'm using this as an example after several years of observation. If the cushion I usually use is taken from this end to here, what you're taking is the activity of the cushion, not the cushion.

[17:50]

But even if you take a cushion from this pile up over there somewhere, say, it's also an activity. It hasn't been used for a while. It might have a cobweb on it or even a spider. And you have to go, okay. That's part of the activity of the cushions. Even if you take a pillow from over there from the corner and it has not been used for a long time and even has a spider net or a spider on it, then it is also part of the activity of the pillow. And you always sit on pillows, at least most of the time. Sometimes the spiders and sometimes overweight people like me. And the kapok gets compacted where you sat. So I switch my cushion back and forth. So before a lecture, when I leave my cushion, I always leave it in a way that I would like it to be placed here.

[19:07]

So I've been watching for some years to see if anybody ever brings the cushion to me the way I'd like it, or they just happen to put it down. But that's, you know... I'm doing these things not to create puzzles, but to see if we can actually feel into everything's an activity, even the Zafu. So if you do feel it that way, you say, oh, That's how he just sat on it, or that's how he placed it. That's part of the activity of the Zafu.

[20:17]

You know, he pays attention, so maybe he placed it in a way he'd like me to place it on the thing. You know, like that. Look, um, Yeah, there are lots of examples. Many things are simply not taught, and they wait. Practitioners of Sangha, the more experienced of the Sangha, and the teachers wait to see if you pick up on it on your own. And the degree to which you do pick up on things, then lets the teacher pick up on the teaching possibilities in new ways. Okay.

[21:30]

So I said start with the breath. And for years I've been emphasizing the separateness of the inhale and the separateness of... It's not breathing, that's a generalization. Inhale. Exhale. Then, when you look at it that way, it begins to be a process. So let's call it a process of articulation. Now, articulation just means joints, where two things are joined. A particle is a little part or a little joint.

[22:45]

And, you know, like we have the word atom, right? And we have the word atom. And the word atom means cannot be divided. That's its etymology. But when you begin to look at particles very carefully, atoms very gently, they're actually joints. They're little joinings. They're jiggling joinings. And at the level of jiggling joining, there's actually no past, present, and future. There's just jiggling joining. Yeah, but at our level of structuring, there's sequence.

[23:57]

Yeah, breathing is a... Yeah, I have to... Let me come back to how to say that. But, okay, so we're articulating our breathing. So I would like to make a word. Breathiculate. To bring your attention, our attention to... I'm breast... What are you doing? What the hell are you doing? I'm breast-ticulating. But now we have a... Another word, which we don't use very often, reticulate.

[25:22]

It actually exists, reticulate, we just made up. reticulate means what happens when an articulation spreads out. And So the articulation is an activity which spreads out. In other words, when a river or stream goes down through a field and it comes into something and starts spreading out in many little canals, that's its reticulation. In other words, when a river or a canal comes to a point where a lot of small deviations from it occur, then this is the deflation of it or the reticulation.

[26:35]

And it's often used in the design of pottery, porcelain, because when you create a design that spreads out throughout the plate, it's called the reticulation. And this word is often used in tapestry art, because when you make a design, something that spreads over the entire ceramic or the entire piece of tone, then this is called reticulation. So, if we emphasize each... exhale and each inhale, each hail. What are you beginning to experience? You're beginning to experience attentional realms. The attentional realm of the inhale. In the attentional realm, she thought it was predictable.

[27:50]

She thought there was going to be an exhale came, so she didn't translate the first thing. That's not what happened, but sure. Well, good. I'm glad you're agreeable. Okay, so there's an inhale, which is a particular attentional sphere. And the exhale is a new and somewhat different, very different attentional domain or realm. So your breath is turning into two petals, shall we say. And you're beginning to feel that. And that's like, we can ask ourselves the question, how does the activity of aliveness live alongside the continuity of being?

[29:06]

Der Kontinuität des Seins. Yeah, because being is ising, it's continuity. Weil sein ist isten und das ist die Kontinuität. But activity or aliveness is not continuity. Aber Aktivität oder Lebendigkeit ist keine Kontinuität. It's one instant, instantiation at a time. And we need to, not from moment to moment, but just moment to moment, Okay. The from is something extra that we add. Now, if you from infancy, your mother and father, looking into the crib and picking you up, treat you as a moment-to-moment event, this is going to be different than they treat you, oh, you've got to be a nice little baby and stop crying or whatever, you know.

[30:32]

If you, from a child's age, if you are in the cradle, your parents are in a relationship with you as a being that exists from moment to moment, I have some reservation about saying that with a young mother in the room. Because we probably, as a parent, shouldn't mess with the basic way we relate to a child. And it's been studied and it's very interesting about how the baby and the mother in Western culture synchronize and then desynchronize and then resynchronize.

[31:39]

And that process develops the relationship between the mother and the father to some extent and develops the... is a part of the way the brain itself develops and the nervous system develops. And it's interesting how in Western cultures, everything has been studied and examined, it's like in the development of a child, the child and the mother sink into each other, synchronize and then disconnect from each other and then sink into each other again. And this also happens a bit with the father, but that's the way the whole nervous system and the brain develops. And we should probably let our embodied wisdom do that with our baby and not, well, now, as I did with my first child, I tried to reform how I related, not intuitively, but I thought from wisdom.

[32:44]

I'm not sure it was a good idea. And I have the feeling now that we should make this out of our embodiment, out of our physical intuition, how we relate to the child. Unlike when I did it with my first daughter, I had the feeling that I didn't want to do it intuitively, but out of wisdom. And I'm no longer convinced that it was a good idea. But my point is, this is very, very basic, what we're doing. We're rebirthing ourselves, actually, something like that. If you start now articulating, rearticulating your experience in terms of each inhale and each exhale, Wenn du jetzt beginnst, deine Erfahrung in Beziehung mit jedem Einatemzug und mit jedem Ausatemzug zu artikulieren.

[33:54]

When you're doing the Orioki. Wenn du das Orioki machst. Reticulate with the Orioki. The whole thing is you're dividing things into parts. When you do the orioki, it's dividing things into parts, three bowls, and how you pick it up, etc., It's designed for full attention. You can see it in the little paper lacquered table the monks' bowls have. You can see it in the little It's intentionally too small.

[35:11]

So it makes it a little difficult to fit the bowls on. Yeah. And the under-folding or, you know, you fold things so that the folds are... disappear underneath. So if the top doesn't look folded, you don't see any of the edges on the top one. And this is just part of this sense of the world, where the world is seen as something that's folded together, but on the surface it just looks like one thing. And such ideas come from an understanding of the world, where the idea is that the world is something that is folded together, but from the surface it just looks like one thing.

[36:21]

Okay, so you articulate the exhale and you articulate the inhale. And I always find that early, one of the main often examples in early Buddhism is of a butcher who's dismembering, butchering an animal. And it's in real detail. It goes on for pages. And for a vegetarian practice, why would they use this gruesome example? But they go into detail how the butcher knows just where to hit so the joint comes apart at the knee or at the elbow of the animal.

[37:23]

The point is that we ourselves, our body, etc., it's all jointed, and you should know the joints and know how it's put together. Recreate the sutras for yourself. One of the most fundamental teachings of Buddhism, we could say, Buddhism doesn't exist without the teaching of the two truths. Now, the two truths, you think you can understand it intellectually.

[38:29]

And the simplest way to practice with the two truths is to know that the world is predictable and unpredictable. When I say that, I think of two friends of mine who... One was sitting on the train in Germany and he just had a heart attack on the train and died. And the other, I'd seen him fairly recently, was just walking on the street in New York, had a heart attack, fell down the sidewalk, dead. And my stepson, Elizabeth's husband, Jason, his grandfather just died. And he was in his late 90s.

[40:05]

And he was just a wonderful, generous, really kind of perfect person. See? grandfather of several generation California families, and there aren't too many several generation California families, unless you're a Native American. And his large family, which really loved him, was all sitting around the bed, And he kept waking up and looking around saying, what's going on here? I'm supposed to be dead. And this happened several times.

[41:05]

Am I still here? Oh, gosh. And finally he died. Just all afternoon. It makes me think of his son. He sat up or opened his eyes before he died and he said, Is someone dying around here? Because everyone was standing around the bed. So the two truths are not true unless they're experienced simultaneously. Die zwei Wahrheiten sind keine Wahrheiten, es sei denn, man erfährt sie gleichzeitig.

[42:07]

And that can't be understood. It has to be experienced, felt, done. Das kann nicht verstanden werden. Das muss erfahren, gespürt und getan werden. So every moment, if you're going to practice with it, you have to practice first with how you feel the world is predictable, like the next... I mean, inhale and exhaling is an exercise in predictability. Because there's going to be, there's an exhale, and maybe there won't be an inhale, but usually there is. And I think that's why people like sports, because they're exercises in predictability and unpredictability. I mean, you have two teams, and one team's trying to make the other team unpredictable.

[43:12]

You're trying to be predictable, and the other team's trying to make you unpredictable. And golf, which people like to play alone, the unpredictability is in the weather and the mood, and you've got this dumb stick. You hit a ball with that stick. Peter, among many of us, has been a runner. And Peter, like many of us, was a runner. And even if he's running all by himself, it's still, how fast will I do today? I'd better time it. In Tassajara, I started something called the no race. I think it still exists. It was everyone who could went up to 5,000 feet, I think is the top, and back down.

[44:36]

But you weren't competing, but still some people did compete. Somebody like me, I just, you know, stole along. But still it's an effort to get up all the way up the hill on the dirt road. Everyone who could, they should go up 5,000 feet somewhere. How do you say that? A gravel road. [...] A gravel road up. But you shouldn't measure yourself in the process. Okay, now we just did the shoe-sew entering ceremony. Now how do you bring predictability and unpredictability into the ceremony? Because if it's, now the rehearsal, I don't like rehearsals. And the middle of the word rehearse has hearse in it, which means what you carry a coffin in.

[45:45]

Oh, wie heißt das auf Deutsch? Haare, vielleicht? Okay. What? Da gibt es einen Anteil des Wortes... What do you call those black cars that carry a coffin? Leichenwagen. Leichenwagen, okay. Ja, okay. Well, rehearsal has Leichenwagen in the middle. It actually means a... Well, you get my point. You can kill the ceremony by rehearsing. Because really the participants should not know what to do. This goes against everything that we've been taught, almost. If you hear Bach and there's a symphony, you want all the players to know what to do, more or less. If you hear Bach and it's a symphony, then you want all musicians to know more or less what they should do.

[47:00]

Jazz might. But now there's some movie directors, for instance, who really do not let people rehearse. They have people come in and say, okay, you do this, just do it the way you want. And then they film it. It doesn't mean you don't practice. In the no play, you know, N-O-H, no, N-O. They don't rehearse a performance. But all the different participants practice a lot. And in smaller parts they may practice, but they don't practice together at all.

[48:10]

And it's designed to have a spontaneity or unexpectedness in it. Yes, so in the symphony you'd have to have... Well, you can imagine, but I'm running out of time, so I won't go into those possibilities. But I really saw this vividly for the first time when Sukhirishi had a woman who was the main tea teacher. a tea ceremony teacher in San Francisco, a Japanese woman. And she did it very beautifully, and it was kind of like a dance. Everything was done very, you know, beautifully, elegantly. Now I knew that Sukhiroshi knew a lot about the tea ceremony and had practiced.

[49:19]

But when he got there in front of it, he was like, what am I doing here? And then he had to get a ladle of water out of this container. And then he said, like, is there water in there? Oh, yeah, I can feel the surface. And then he felt the ladle going down, and he felt like, oh, the middle water is different than the bottom water, and the temperature is different at the top water. You could feel, and he was sort of sorting which water to take out. And he took it out, and boy, it just released you.

[50:22]

You just watched him, and you felt released. Und dann konnte man sehen, wie er da herumstockert und schaut, das obere Wasser fühlt sich anders an, hat eine andere Temperatur vielleicht als das untere Wasser. Und wie er herausstört, welches Wasser er mit nach oben nimmt. Und dann hat er seine Schopfkörbe gefüllt und in die Teetasse getan. Und das einfach ihm zuzuschauen war eine riesige Erleichterung. So we don't have some tradition like that. So I try to fake it. Like we just had this wonderful opening. I thought it was a wonderful opening shuso ceremony. What did I do? I put three different versions out. So like when Uli said her part, she said the version from the first version.

[51:26]

As Uli, you mean Evelyn, I think. Evelyn, yeah, I mean Evelyn. When Evelyn spoke... Yeah, Eno, she was just Eno, now Evelyn's Eno. When Evelyn was, her role as Eno spoke, she said an earlier part, not the more recent part. And when Evelyn said her part as Eno, she said something from an earlier version and not the last one, the last version. And Evelyn seems to, when she came to the sweet chamber, had forgotten to circumambulate this room too. So she did it after she did the sweet chamber. And I'm supposed to make my speech a little bit after you do your three bows. But then I felt like saying it earlier. So I do it in the two parts. I said one before you bowed and I said the other part after you bowed. And I said at some point while we were rehearsing, rehearsing, almost killed me.

[52:40]

I said, no, we should have started yesterday. But I didn't really mean we should start today. And that's a problem. People then later say, well, you said we should start the day before. No, no. In that context of Vicky's ceremony, I said it to cause a little confusion about how we're going to do it today in this context. You can translate yourself on that one. Okay. Yeah, because we don't have this tradition of how the... So you have to... You know what you're going to do, right?

[53:45]

The floor is there. It's predictable. Also, wir haben so eine Tradition nicht. Der Boden ist da, das ist vorhersehbar. But maybe the foundation of the floor, kind of weak, and like there's a whole skyscraper in San Francisco, that it's cracking and sinking. It's huge, and it sinks about 12 inches now. They don't know what the hell to do. Okay. And it's, you know, 30 or 40 stories tall or something like that. Yeah, so when you step on the floor... You step on the floor like maybe it's there. And that's a good practice to walk as if the floor might not be there and feel it coming up to support your foot.

[54:53]

That's a very basic Zen practice. That last month, half the world, at least in America and Greece and other places, was burning. And this month, half the world is flooding. And you do the ceremony like maybe the floor is flooding and you have to walk kind of carefully or you might slip. That's practicing the two truths. Because you're acting as if it's probably predictable, but maybe not. And it's not just in relationship to the floor, it's also in relation to the other participants. So, Shugetsu Sambo is going to be the shiso and I'm the abbot.

[56:07]

And here I am. Oh, yes, he's here. God, he hasn't died. He's still around. And you might even feel, geez, he might even die during the ceremony. This is practicing the two truths simultaneously. If you live in a predictable world, your dharma is going to be predictable. And boring. I mean, no, no, no, no. Thank you very much.

[57:03]

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