So we sit together first, together first. And then we literally tune ourselves with chanting these syllables. And then, you know, in the back of my mind is always what would be useful to your practice. Useful to your practice in this third week or so or more of this Ango. And what will be useful to you in the endless time of your life, which of course will also end. And I suppose useful right now, too, to... Atmar Ikkyoroshi in Vienna with our Sangha there.

[01:24]

So, you know, I don't really know what's useful, but I always have some feeling that something happens. And my sense is, you know, for this endless time, it's what world are we practicing in? What world are we practicing in? In fact, what world are we practicing? Not practicing in, what world are we practicing? Now, one thing the sutras do, and I'm just throwing this out for the heck of it,

[02:29]

They basically conflate time. Or they index time to the time and space of the experiential space of the reader. Index? Like the index finger? Well, to index something is to put it in relationship to other things. It's indexed in relationship to all these other things. The index finger is what does that. It's interesting. It would be harder to index things with your middle finger or with your little finger. And One of the things I've noticed as I'm getting older, all my fingers are turning into thumbs.

[03:48]

We have an expression which Nicole says you don't have in Germany, but you say, I'm all thumbs, which means your hands don't really work like they used to. When I explained that idiom to her, she said, Oh, I've noticed when you do orioki, you're careful in a different way than you used to be. Which is true. I mean, gosh, what happens if I... My thumbs. There goes the Setsu. Okay, so what do I mean by conflating time? If we say the Buddha was born about... died about 2,500 years ago, we might say then, let's just say there's a thousand persons who practiced Buddhism in each one of those 2,500 years.

[05:09]

So the sutras might say, 2,500,000 Bodhisattvas gathered for Baker Roshi's lecture. And if I look carefully at you, yes, there's at least 2,500,000. Yeah. In other words, the feeling that time is... Some kind of, just look at your own time. When you look back at your own time, is it in simply years? Walter Benjamin, the German, really one of the brilliant thinkers of the last century or so,

[06:30]

Walter Benjamin, einer der brillantesten Denker des letzten Jahrhunderts, ein Deutscher, talked about the concept of history as a kind of neutral, uniform time that you can place things upon like a clothesline. Like a clothesline? Oh, like a clothesline, okay. You didn't pronounce that right. Okay. She's just tired of me correcting her. Okay. Closed line. The PH is a problem. So the compilers of the sutras thought of time as this compressible stuff which really is about the activity that happens in the time, not the sequence. Yeah, so when you recognize this conflatable and actuateable

[08:00]

sense of time. You can read the sutras like the Lotus Sutra with another sense of, they felt they were telling the truth, not just making up a myth. Okay. Now let's imagine in a yogic world you're born into a field of infinite potentials. You're born into a field of potentials. You're not born with a destiny. You're not born with a fate. Well, you're certainly born with a certain gendered proclivity, etc., and genetic proclivity.

[09:51]

But you're born, from the point of view of the yogic worldview, as a completely, given normal senses and normal bodily functions, you're born into an you're born unprogrammed in the world. The new infant kid is born, the baby is born into is so far, initially, pretty much completely unprogrammed culturally and linguistically. Das neue Kleinkind ist also kulturell und sprachlich komplett ungeprägt, komplett voreingenommen, vielleicht ungeprägt.

[11:03]

Okay, but this infinite kid, infinite kid, infinite kid, also infinite kid, dieses Kleinkind is already... with his or her senses and actuating activity. Actuating activity would mean your activity makes things happen. Ist schon mit seinem oder ihren Sinnen und ohne without actuating activity? The infant within its sensorium and within its actuating activity and through its actuating activity is beginning to potentialize some of these this field of potentials. So, and this is, I'm making this up, of course, you know.

[12:28]

But I'm making it up out of my own sense of how things are and how, what I've observed actually with newborns and so forth. And depending on their parenting and the circumstances and the energy of a newborn, They're beginning to make sense of the world before the cultural and linguistic programming begins to take hold. No, that's not true. They're beginning to... And eventually the cultural and linguistic programming begins to smother these early intuitions.

[13:40]

But some kids, for some reason, these early intuitions still function in the background, behind the veil of the muthos, the cultural stories. And these stories our cultures tell us begin to be so real for us, they can't amount to how the world actually happened. Tantamount? Tantamount means nearly the same as or taken as the same as. The myth of Amaterasu or whatever is taken as really real, the way it really happened.

[14:52]

The myth of what? Amaterasu? Don't worry about that. But if we conceive of the baby not born into a container world with a destiny, I bet if you could really look at Galileo or someone like that's childhood, somehow their early intuitions about the world were sort of still present despite the fact they were supposed to believe in God and things like that. And I would explain these early intuitions as what happens when you're born into a world of probabilities, into a field of probabilities, and not into a container.

[16:02]

neutral container. So all of these early intuitions are functioning behind the veil are behind the surfaces of our cultural and linguistic program. Now, I would say the Buddha was such a kid. He had some intuition that What was real was his experience. And he was born up according to myth in this little kinglet's family.

[17:17]

Und dem Mythos nach wurde er in dieser Königsfamilie geboren. Kinglet. Kinglet like king? Yeah, but a small king. A kinglet. Also einer kleinen königlichen Familie. Fürstenfamilie. But I would say that Actually, each one of you is probably here because of early intuitions that somehow didn't get smothered by your education and experience. So I would say over the planet there have been millions of infant kids born with the same intuitions of the Buddha. And what's the difference, what makes the Buddha different than those other innumerable infant kids with such intuitions rooted in experience?

[18:30]

Well, the answer is simple. Depending on his circumstances, his milieu, and so forth, he had followers. Without followers, he would have just disappeared as a kid who tried to survive his intuitions. But for some reason in his culture at that time, there was enough people who felt, yeah, this guy's intuitions are, yeah, they make sense. And this infant kid, who later would be known as the awakened one, the Buddha, was so somehow energetically convinced that his intuitions was the world.

[20:04]

that other people became convinced with him that, yes, the world is the world of experience. And then Okay, so if all that exists is what we observe, and I enjoy and am amused by, but not, yeah, enjoy and amused by the conceptual analogies with quantum physics. Yeah, we're not practicing physics, but conceptually it's analogous. In other words, what a physicist would say, that all we know about the world is what we can measure.

[21:19]

Until we measure it, it's only a probability. So we don't really know what the world is. All we know is that when you measure it, you get this kind of information. And that means we don't really know what the world is. All we know is that until we measure it... It's what you measure. If we measure it, we get this kind of information. Well, this is exactly parallel, conceptually, to the yogic worldview, is all you know is what you can experience. That is what the world is. What you can think about the world might be relevant, might not be relevant but it's not necessarily substantiated by experience.

[22:36]

Yeah. So what I'm saying is, please trust your experience. Trust your experience in life, and in Zazen, and so forth. Sukhiroshi says at some point, each of us is a steep cliff which no one can climb. Which means you really have to get used to being alone. And surviving in your aloneness. And you survive in your aloneness by stabilizing aliveness. stabilizing yourself in the direct experience of aliveness.

[24:06]

And even though you're a steep cliff which no one can climb, you're in a whole range of mountains of steep cliffs. And somehow, in our aloneness, we're with others simultaneously in profound ways. We're steep, but we're made of the same stuff. So this kind of metaphors are useful in trying to locate ourselves in relationship to our own experience and our shared experience. Okay, so this infant kid recognized and became the awakened one.

[25:09]

Recognized that the world is his own sensorial and and actuated experience. In other words, it's not just the sensorium like a photograph, it's the photograph which is, the photograph is making the world itself change through being photographed. You know, if you have one of these radio clocks, which clicks, I remember the first ones I saw were in train stations. The first ones I saw were at the station.

[26:25]

And it would click away, and I'd watch it, and it would go like this. Then it would go like this. Then it would go like this. Then it would go boop, boop, boop, because it would correct itself. I thought, what the hell is going on with that clock? But it was usually right. I guess back in the... 70s or whenever that was, nobody had radio clocks except train stations or something. But let's imagine that the clock is clicking for each second. And it's stuck between each second. Okay, so what is the clock? It is simultaneously activity and no activity, because all the in-betweens, it's just a circle with nothing happening.

[27:37]

So the clock is half the time still, And half the time moving. And we are like that if you can begin to notice your stillness. There's an in-betweenness which is also a kind of measure of the two or three truths. Okay, so you notice that what you experience is your world. And you're willing to make that your determinative reference point. And you're willing to shed the stories or take the stories with lots of grains of salt.

[28:56]

Do you have that expression? Yeah. Oh, do we? Yeah, I know what it means. So your determinative reference point is your aliveness and or your sensorial and actuated experience. Now, if you're not born into a story, you're born into your experience. But let us now all be reborn into our experience. What you notice as you get older and as you know other people, your experience is only a part of the pie.

[30:12]

Your experience doesn't extend to the whole of the pie. So then a methodology begins to develop of how you enhance and extend your experience. The world is our experience. That's what the world is. But how the world is, you recognize... Your experience can be extended and evolved and explored and so forth. Your attention can become an intensity. I love your expression when I say something like that.

[31:28]

Her face goes... Can you imagine what I have to cope with all day? The rest of the day, yes, you have real work to do, not just... Intensity, okay, can you explain? It's a combination of attention and density. Okay. So the Abhidharma is the methodology that was developed by his ardent followers, which we now still practice. How to develop our attention and our sensorial field, not just object, but the field that arises through a sense object. Wie wir unsere Aufmerksamkeit entwickeln können, und nicht nur unsere Sinnesfelder, sondern... But also the... Field that arises through the sense object.

[32:47]

Sondern, okay, wie wir unsere Aufmerksamkeit entwickeln können, und auch das Feld, das durch den Kontakt mit einem Sinnesobjekt entsteht. And how this field, which is not permanent, is... in a kind of joining, jiggling process with everything else. So this infant kid's early intuition that things are really, the world is just our experience. That's all we can know about it. It's not only our experience, but it's all we can know about it. Die Intuition dieses Kleinkindes, dass die Welt immer unsere Erfahrung ist, dass das nicht die ganze Welt ist, aber dass alles, was wir von der Welt wissen können, das ist, was wir erfahren. But our experience can be enhanced and extended. Aber unsere Erfahrung kann verstärkt und auch erweitert werden.

[33:53]

And conceptually, in a way, that's all you need to know about Buddhism. It's about how you enhance and extend and evolve and transform your experience. So all this stuff is developed, like hanging out together for 90 days. I'm carrying a staff which has the lotus of the embryo, you know, where my hand goes. And the bud of the lotus. And the seed pod of the lotus. So we have the bud, we have the embryo, and we have the seed pod, but where's the flower?

[34:56]

Of course, you're the flower. So making an object like this is part of the methodology of extending and enhancing and being suggestive about our experience. And my own feeling is that we are formed by our culture, our language, also by these early intuitions. Or nowadays, present intuitions. Mein Gefühl ist, dass wir geprägt sind von unserer Kultur, unserer Sprache und aber auch von diesen frühen Intuitionen und auch von Intuitionen, die wir jetzt haben.

[36:04]

Which function in unwordable clusters that kind of float in the psychic or present space that is clustered around us. in unspeakable And when you begin to sit still in zazen, and you can really sit still in the hands of the clock, the time, the activity of the clock begins to disappear and all you have is the stillness of the clock. These early intuitions begin to seep into your But Zazen, the still sitting, allows these early intuitions or present intuitions to seep into our experience.

[37:18]

Then these early intuitions begin and Zazen makes this possible, gives room for these early intuitions or our present intuitions to seep into our experience. And they seep in in sometimes deformed ways because they've been hiding out there in the outskirts offstage, obscene. Obscene means offstage, obscene. And they'd been distorted by waiting so long for you to notice them. Why didn't you start Sazen earlier? And they begin to take kind of funny shapes. Like somebody from Star Wars. What's that funny blue guy?

[38:29]

The kind of dwarf guy? Yoda. No, not Yoda. Do you know that Yoda is partly based on Suzuki Roshi? Because George Lucas and his wife both used to go to Suzuki Roshi's lectures sometimes. And they had this feeling, you know, anyway. But I've never seen Sukiroshi lift a car out of the mud. I've done it once and it sprained my back. Yeah. And trauma functions the same way. Sometimes trauma is just outside our consciousness, outside the way we've determined how to live, but yet you start zazen, and these stuff starts, or you're sleeping, and these things start coming in.

[39:31]

Trauma is also something that exists beyond the way we have decided to live, and which then sips into us, and sometimes even in sleep. So maybe floating in this space around us are not only traumas, but truthmas. And these truthmas Just made that up. These trusmas are your early intuition or present intuitions which can only find their unwordable presence in your zazen or samadhis. And these truths, these early intuitions can only find their form in the zazen. You know, when I was younger, I never liked the distinction inside and outside.

[40:39]

And I didn't know what to do with my discomfort with it because, you know, it's built into our language, etc., And my unease, not yet a dis-ease, I didn't know what to do with. But when I started practicing Zazen, I began to feel trapped by the distinction. I began to feel trapped in the outside, surprisingly, not in the inside.

[41:45]

I was trapped in an outside of how I was supposed to look at myself and how other people looked at me and so forth. And I couldn't really experience something separate from that outside determination. But I did notice, because of Zazen, that I felt trapped in the outsideness of the outside-inside distinction. So at some point I had an intuition during Zazen, hey, Maybe it's all inside. There's no outside. And so I really felt, oh, it's all a stomach.

[42:50]

We're living inside of a big stomach. And all this digesting is going on called change. Okay, so that was a very useful distinction for me to begin to live as if it was all inside that freed me from the prison of the outside and opened me to the inside to include the outside. And that preluded was a prelude to my understanding what Sukhyoshi meant when he said the organ body. Das ist meinem Verständnis vorausgegangen, was Suzuki Roshi meint, wenn er vom Organkörper spricht.

[44:11]

So from this tradition, which is really one person extended over 2,500 years. Und aus dieser Tradition, wo wirklich das Verständnis ist, dass das eine einzige Person ist, die sich über 2,500 Jahre erstreckt. this infant kid called the awakened one, his intuition has been productively reproduced by men and women since. And it's really... in some sense, some kind of sense where time is conflated, all of us, each of us here is that extension and enhancement of Buddha's intuition that all is fundamentally our experience. The world is fundamentally our experience.

[45:13]

And that enhancing of attention, enhancing of the methodology of developing and evolving the experience of what we can experience, Because, again, we're not... It's a kind of delusion to say we experience the world. We experience what we can experience. My common example is, usual example is, when you hear a bird, the lovely sounds of the birds in the, particularly the warbling birds of the early morning,

[46:28]

You're not hearing what the bird... hears your hearing, what your hearing apparatus allows you to hear. And when you recognize that all you're hearing is your own experience of the hearing, for some reason it's blissful. You're not hearing what the bird hears, and you're not hearing perhaps what the bird intends another bird to hear. They just have much more complicated and duplicated oral systems, A-U-R-A-L, than we do. But when we have the recognition that we're at the limits and only in the midst of our own experience, it's blissful.

[47:40]

Okay, so the organ body. Okay, so once you realize you've stabilized yourself in aliveness, and the more you can stabilize yourself in your own aliveness, The more you can face the various ways we fall apart and get challenged and harmed and so forth. Every day I hear about someone that has had a stroke or something, fallen off a bicycle and they can't function. Every day I hear. I mean people I know, not just in the newspapers. Jürgen Petasch, whose desk used to be there when he was head of this shop, the whole place.

[48:56]

When he comes in here, he says to me, that was my desk, was it over there, my table where I worked. And he built our altar and many things. The door, the pear wood door to the Hudson House. His wife, they went on a vacation. She fell off the one of their bicycles and then later in the vacation had a stroke and it sounds very serious. I tried to reach him recently and he said, I'm going on vacation and I'll get in touch with you as soon as I get back.

[50:06]

He's in Paris now with his wife who's French. So staying within a world actuated through a field of potentialities Has led to us this long, American Indians call it the long body, this extended body from the Buddha. have now, and me too for the first time, made use of this term, the organ body, which is metaphoric code for being stabilized in aliveness. Okay, we can find ourselves stabilized in aliveness, but then how do we function?

[51:31]

Well, there is still externality, so-called externality. Circumstances. Nagarjuna calls it the illusory world we create. Nagarjuna nennt das die illusionäre Welt, die wir erschaffen. So there's the organic, the organ body. Es gibt den organen Körper, die gefestigte Lebendigkeit. Then there's the illusory world, which we have created to live together in. Und dann gibt es die... Die illusionäre Welt, die wir gemeinsam geschaffen haben, um darin zu leben. Which allows millions of people to live together in some kind of togetherish way. Die es möglich macht, dass Millionen von Menschen in mehr oder weniger gemeinsamer Art und Weise zusammenleben.

[52:54]

So that becomes a second referential. Und das wird zu einem zweiten Bezugspunkt. And then you have to have a modus operandi, an operative modus. How do you step forward? What do you do next? Would you call it the precepts? So I call these the three referentials. The organ body, the illusory external world, and some way to function them, an operative modus. And then a way to function, a mode of function. These three arise in us and me and Sukhira. Guru saying the world isn't only what we experience, but what we experience is our only world.

[54:03]

And these three, they arise through Suzuki Roshi, through me, through us, that we practice. And that is by saying that the world is not only what we experience, but that what we experience is the only world in which we live. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.

[54:33]

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