So two topics emerged in the first teisho. And I would say that the two topics are the spine and chanting. And it was in the context of what I'm trying to discover in practicing with you. It's the space of the spine or awareness of the spine and the space of chanting, or the kind of awareness we have of the space of chanting.

[01:03]

So, And I would like, if you can, when the seminar is coming up, I'd like you to see if what I said and what I might say now has relevance for you or makes sense. Okay. Now, so the question I have is, Basically, what difference does it make to us in our practice, in our lived life, how we define the space between the words of chanting?

[02:19]

The sounds of chanting. Okay. So... I think you can understand, and I guess I'll be going over what I said the other day, that the space between the sounds, among the sounds of chanting are created by the chanting. dass der Raum zwischen den Tönen, innerhalb der Töne, im Rezitieren, dass das vom Rezitieren geschaffen wird.

[03:25]

Das ist im Grunde genommen dieselbe Idee wie das Konzept von Work Night. which is that the Big Bang didn't expand, explode into space. Its expansion created the space which articulated it. But its expansion created the space which articulated it. Was that clear enough, what I said? For me? Yeah. For me, it was clear enough to translate, yes. Oh, goody. Was it clear enough, what I said? All right. Thanks. Now, I would like to spend in various ways, in various ways I'd like to assure you that this distinction is important.

[04:50]

And in fact, our understanding and living the distinction together is important. Because, I mean, not only will it be, is it important, significant for us in our own individual practice, and and in our shared practice, mutual practice, but also in our societal practice. Because we could define Buddhism as the effort to live the worldview of wisdom in the context of most people's usual worldview.

[05:58]

So the most basic compassion would be to live the worldview of wisdom be able to live the worldview of wisdom within the relative worldview of most of our society. And it's our mutual practice of this worldview which gives it reality. And it is our common practice of this worldview that gives it reality, reality, or reality.

[07:07]

Like the Beatles were creative together, not so creative separately, and so let's be creative together. Yeah, and... While we're together. While we are together. Okay. Okay. So I have to have a little debate with ourselves about it. Ich muss da so eine Art Debatte mit uns selbst darüber führen. Is the space between the sounds and chanting the same space as the space in the room in which you're chanting?

[08:09]

From the point of view of experiential Buddhist practice, it's not. And, okay, so that's easy enough to define. But again, why is it important to define it? Okay, so the space within the sounds of chanting are created by the chanting. The space in this room is created by the walls and our bodies and so forth. Now, okay, if we take water, water is endlessly useful. I think we can think of space as being endlessly useful.

[09:27]

But we don't have much problem thinking that the water in rain, the water in ice, the water in a pond, the water in mist, the water in our bodies... Yeah. Pawn, ice, your body, etc. They're clearly different. And even if you have distilled or double distilled water, Yeah, you can create that, but it's mostly an idea. Suzuki Roshi used to say, dragons can't live in pure water. Suzuki Roshi has always said that dragons cannot live in pure water.

[10:46]

There are no nutrients or you could not have an aquarium in distilled water. The goldfish would then die. Okay, so it's fairly easy for us to see the endless possibilities of water and yet still see the various ways water exists as different. But if I said the water in a pitcher, you pour water into a pitcher and you pour water into glass, and then I say those two waters are different. You'd say, well, they're a different shape, but they're not different.

[11:47]

But we are saying that the space of a glass and the space of a pitcher are different kinds of space, are different spaces. Now, I think if there was a whole series of rectangular rooms of various sizes and you walked through them, Your body would actually be affected by and shaped by each successive room.

[12:49]

So at least we can say they're experientially different. The different spaces are for us living beings, they're experientially different. Okay. What I'm trying to establish here is that there are no universals. Time and space are not universals. Most of the science of contemporary science, until recently, has been a form of Newtonian mechanics.

[13:55]

And Newton's science depends on his view that time and space are absolute constants. They remain the same. But Leibniz, who had nearly the same lifetime in the 1600s and 1700s as Newton, basically identical to Buddhist, that space is only the relative placement of bodies, and time is the sequential placement of bodies.

[15:01]

Okay. Now, it's a very strange idea. I mean, maybe we're so used to it because basically most of us function in our visceral or somatic worldviews are Newtonian. Okay. But it is a very strange idea, really, if you kind of like think about it. There's a joke that someone told.

[16:21]

Two young fish are swimming along and an older fish swims by them. And the older fish says, good morning, how's the water? And then he swims on and the two other fish swim a little ways. And one of the young fish turns to the other and says, what the hell is water? Because, you know, you live it, you don't notice it. We don't know we live on a curve, but we live on a curve in curved space. We're not living on a sheet of paper. And Euclidean geometry is on a sheet of paper. And we think that sheet of paper then represents the world.

[17:38]

Because triangles have 30 degree angles and all that. Yeah, okay. Now I'm beating, I feel like I'm beating a dead horse. Do you have that expression? No. No. The horse is already dead and you're hitting it and saying, get going. In Hungary they have this expression. It's not that you're dead horses, it's that my own ideas are dead horses. Okay. But it's a very strange idea that we live here in our activity. And somehow time and space aren't part of us.

[18:40]

We live in the midst of it, but our lived world is shrunk. It's in the context of time and space, but it's not part of time and space. What did you say? It's in the context of time and space. But it's not part of time and space. Now there's a young German philosopher, born in 28, named Hermann Schmitz. Who's written, I don't know, 30 volumes or some huge amount. And none of it's been translated because I guess nobody thinks he's that important. But his ideas are very close to Buddhism and very close to what I'm talking about. Yeah, yeah, he's of considerable interest to Christian Dillow. And I have only found one essay that's translated into English.

[20:17]

But he's trying to say something like I'm trying to say. I don't know him well enough to know how much we're in agreement. So I'll try to come back to once the horse gets up. and I can beat him again. So let me talk about the spine. Okay, now I said the other day, and I hope you get the point, that having a spine is not the same as the appearance of a spine. That just would be part of the yogic worldview. Okay, so when you're sitting zazen, at some point, after you sit down a little bit,

[21:22]

you may have an experience of your spine now it appears in awareness but not in consciousness now again I'm making distinctions which I don't know they're small and huge at the same time But I'm trying to get at where the Buddha or enlightenment exists in the midst of our world. Okay. So it took me a very long time, at least in my life of practice, to completely understand oh well, let's say completely, from my experience, awaken my spine.

[22:45]

It began in my lower spine and would go a few vertebraes up And when I noticed it happening, because I never thought about it much, but I just noticed it was happening, then I thought I'd help it along. So I would bring conscious or sort of conscious attention to the spine. And what was interesting is that I could bring attention a kind of light or a kind of translucence or something like that. Up the spine, a few vertebrae.

[23:54]

And the lumbar, the thorax, and those various sections of the spine. And what I noticed was it would only go so far. And I found the fact that it wouldn't go very far. Quite interesting. So I, you know, every Zazen period, there are many Zazen periods, I would notice where it was. Sort of a vertebral Google map, not yet in focus.

[24:57]

So anyway, a few months later I could see, oh, I'm up an inch or so. So often I would put attention at the point at which it stopped and say, hey, go up and over. What's going on? Then I'd forgive her. I would say that this took, I don't know, four or five years even before it really felt completely almost like a highway opened. Autobahn, that's a little big, but you know. And it wasn't an Autobahn, it was an awareness-bond. It wasn't by the autonomic nervous... Autonomic highway, yeah, right, okay.

[26:20]

Okay. So at some point, it just became just like a... just a clear, like a kind of tube... and ending, sort of ending, where it would end if the spine continued up to the top of the head. Now I don't discuss these kind of things usually. Because I don't want to discuss, and one of the rules of Zen is, you do not talk about anything that everyone mostly can't experience. It's one of the failures of Zen, too, that it does this.

[27:22]

Because if you don't know what you're talking about, if you only talk about what you know and your experience isn't very developed, then pretty soon the generations go downhill. Because very few people, practitioners, practice with full intention their entire life. The way, I mean, I've recently been wanting to use examples of artists. So wie ich seit kurzem gerne Beispiele von Künstlern verwende. For example, Cezanne and Matisse both, up until the last day of their life, were trying to solve certain problems in their painting.

[28:43]

Most people practice four to eight years, and that's enough, you know. It's longer than graduate school. So if I look at photographs of dharmasangha or practitioners in America, the farther back you go, the less people are still practicing in the photographs. But I'm convinced, and I know in fact, that for those persons, their practice was a very real and very successful part of their life. But sometimes their practice is good enough for their life, their lived life.

[29:46]

And they don't have this drive or intention to... completely articulate the worldview of Buddhism in themselves and with everyone they meet. And the teaching is transmitted through generations, primarily by persons who have this kind of intention. But the whole context, including the people who practice four or eight years or so, is also part of the transmission.

[30:54]

So as I say, I don't usually talk about this kind of thing. But right now I don't see any way around it, so I'm talking about it. And some of you I know already have discovered in certain states of mind or sometimes some may feel a kind of tingling up here or almost sore or something like that. And that's more or less just where the spine would end if it continued up through your head. And then, in a way, it... It does continue beyond your head, but it continues as a kind of invisible flower.

[32:27]

And you can see both Buddhists have this bump on their head, which represents what I'm speaking about. It wasn't just an accident and they have a band-aid over their head. Somebody hit the Buddha on the head and he got black and blue. He's there for a reason. To give you a hint. All right. Okay. So there's the spine appearing as a low highway. And there's also the spine that just appears in your noticing when you're doing zazen.

[33:29]

They're interrelated. And when the spine appears in your zazen, it appears as an awareness But it not only appears in your zazen so you can lift up through your spine and discover even vertebrae by vertebrae how to sit when you're not too sleepy. there's an awareness that that appears as well as the spine.

[34:58]

Now here we're back to the concept of the Big Bang. The expansion of the Big Bang creates the space in which it seems to expand into. And so the appearance of the spine produces the awareness of the appearance of the spine. So the appearance of the spine in zazen, or any time, but in zazen, begins to create the somatic awareness. The somatic awareness of the body, within the body.

[36:08]

this, it's a kind of, this appearance of the spine is a kind of door into a somatic awareness. And the more you get used to the somatic awareness that appears with the spine, the more you begin to feel the viscera, the organs of the body. the lungs became like, I don't know, two little sweet babies breathing in there. You can feel them in a kind of inner visual space. Yeah, and you can feel your pelvis, the shape, feeling of this pelvis.

[37:42]

So you begin to feel an integration with the body. It's really part of the process of embodiment. And so it begins to... You begin to feel an integration with, because this is so important to you, you've forgotten it. Isn't that true? I know. You begin to feel an integration with the whole of the body by awakening the somatic awareness. Okay. Now what's interesting about it is this awakened and awakening somatic awareness. begins to actualize your lived body in your environment.

[39:04]

You begin to actualize your environment. Du beginnst dein Umfeld zu aktualisieren, umzusetzen. So difficult, your action. We'll come back to it next time. Anyway. You know, when we do simple things like serve the soup in Oryoki, Yeah. As I told someone recently, reminded someone recently, it's a gesture. You put the ladle in and you take from the bottom. And then you put the ladle in and you take from the top. And you're not thinking about it.

[40:19]

You don't think, oh, I want to get some more carrots in there. I mean, it's impossible not to think that, a little bit. Particularly if you know the person you're serving is a rabbit. Right. Or it really is somebody who really likes carrots. out of compassion you're trying to get two or three more carrots but basically as a practice it's a gesture and if you get a lot of stuff fine if you don't get any stuff fine You just do it. And it's a kind of practice to not think about it. To just trust the gesture.

[41:21]

And trusting the gesture often you begin to know more and more about what's going on when you lift up the ladle. So the way you ladle becomes more sensitive, but becoming more sensitive through a somatic awareness and not a thinking about awareness. Okay. So when you stop chanting, and now you're going between the buildings or standing in a room or whatever you're doing.

[42:30]

And you know now there's no universals, no absolute constants outside of you called time and space. Time and space are you. The artists really got to this. Well, it's not too bad. Picasso said, for instance, the... My inner self is bound to the canvas because I painted it. And Cezanne described his paintings as not paintings of nature, but pieces of nature. And I don't have time right now to try to suggest why this came about.

[43:42]

Part of it was the effect of photography and cinema and nobody believing in a God realm anymore. Teil dessen, woher das kam, war die Auswirkung der Fotografie und des Kinos und der Tatsache, dass niemand wirklich mehr an ein Gottesreich geglaubt hat. Anonymity, I don't understand. Nobody knew them. Anonymous. They all became famous and became separate, but at that time they just had overlapping lives. And much of their creativity was their overlapping lives supporting a worldview which almost nobody else in the West had.

[44:47]

A simple thing Cézanne did is he didn't draw lines. A line was made by two planes of color coming together. There was no line. It was just two colors coming together. So the world isn't in containered Containered lines. Containering lines. There was no time and space. There's just things all next to each other. But you could call it time and space, but basically it was just the activity of this flow of activity.

[46:03]

What we are, we could define ourselves as of a flow of articulated space. And the flow of articulated space is called time. Und der Fluss des artikulierten Raumes wird Zeit genannt. But for us it's not time, we accept it comparatively, it's a flow of articulated space. Aber für uns ist das keine Zeit, außer vielleicht in vergleichendem Sinne, sondern es ist einfach artikulierter Raum. Now I'll tell you for me what's a funny story. Ich erzähle euch was, was für mich eine lustige Geschichte ist. And Katrin was sort of part of it. I was concentrating on practicing with the concept of a flow of articulated space or flow of multiplicities or a flow of unfoldings.

[47:12]

So I put on my underwear. And I always wear a haramaki, a stomach sweater. And I remember that I had the concept of a haramaki when I put it on. Then I started putting on my kimono. And it was just a flow of unfoldings. Getting the juban so it's up above the kimono and so forth. Den Juban so hinzuziehen, dass er etwas über den Kimono hinausschaut. And then putting on the obi and putting on the clip. Und dann habe ich den obi angezogen und dann die Nadel, die Halternadel. But I completely did it as a flow of particulars or of foldings.

[48:30]

Aber ich habe das vollständig als einen Fluss von Einzelheiten gemacht oder als einen Fluss des Faltens. Now, you're going to think this is just old age, but I think it was something else. I went into my closet to find my kimono. Because I'd never had the concept I was putting on my kimono. I just had a series of steps I did. So then I thought, where the hell is my kimono? So I began looking for my kimono. Did I take it off somewhere else? Remember I told you. I said, I can't find my kimono. She was downstairs. Could I have taken it off in my office? So I went in my office. And one grammar school joke is, you always find something in the last place you look.

[49:40]

But in this case, I was repeatedly losing it in every place I looked. Aber in diesem Fall habe ich den wiederholt verloren an jedem Ort, an dem ich geschaut habe. Und dann habe ich gedacht, oh je, jetzt muss ich meinen weißen Kimono anziehen, den ich ja eigentlich nur in Zeremonien trage. Und dann habe ich gemerkt, dass ich meinen Kimono anhabe. Early onset Alzheimer's. Not so early. And I thought of the Buddhist story of a guy looking for the jewel while it's sewn in his clothes. But then I realized I had just never introduced into the sequence of... the flow, the sequential flow of particulars.

[50:52]

I'd never introduced the idea of kimono. So I was functioning in awareness, but there was no conceptual, you know, kind of like a marker saying, kimono. But the Oryoki meal, where we pass the food down, etc., it's really a flow of particularities, not this bowl or this is soup or something. I mean, we have to have some conceptual understanding of what we're doing, but mostly it's just a flow of particularities. So the way monastic practice or intensive practice, mutual intensive practice, is to locate you in this flow of particularities, of unfoldings, without any universals or absolute constants that would isolate you and turn the world into objects.

[52:29]

that are outside you. There's just a flow of multiplicities or particularities that you find a way to swim in the midst of these which it totally includes your environment as your water and space and so forth. Well, that's the best I can do today. Make another shot at it another time. I mean, it interests me, so I'm trying to see if I can get it across. Thank you very much.

[53:20]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_75.35