Does anyone want to say anything? Oh, okay. I would be very grateful for the technical instruction when you say that you take problems into zazen and the separation between taking a problem into zazen and working with it in zazen or just sitting and problem, problem, problem, you did in life, intruding into zazen. I would make that distinction. Okay. Someone else? I won't forget. Someone else want to say something? And even if you don't want to? Yes. And I was impressed by the poem of Rumi that we're just the paintbrush of the painter.

[01:04]

And when I listen to you saying that each moment is the fluidity of each moment, then I ask myself, what is my, how, what possibilities of acting do I have? Or is this just an illusion that I have a possibility of acting, a range of acting choice? Like the rain on the roof, you have a choice of... On the leaky roof, you have a choice of going down the holes or down the drain. Yes. Yes. were somewhat contradictory with both poems. I could take the first one well, to be the brush with the painter painted, but that I lead the rainwater around was somehow strange.

[02:36]

I don't know. For me, these two poems were a little contradictory. I could agree to being the paintbrush of the painter, but the leaky roof, there was some opposition, let's say. There was the actor, the acting person whom I could be, I felt some contradiction in that. Yeah, I believe so. But when you choose to practice wisdom, And not just let anything happen. You're either choosing the leaky holes or you're choosing the drains.

[03:40]

Let me just say that this little poem I mentioned yesterday of Rumi's because Heinrich put the book on my chair. It's his fault. It's his fault. It's very simple. We're not ahead. We're behind. We're not above. We're below. Like the brush in a painter's hand, we had no idea where we are. I think that little poem can be a kind of icon for what we're talking about. I am quite lazy and I would like to ask if you are interested in whether you can perform on the Zen path if you don't read so much.

[05:06]

I'm reading lazy. I want to know, can you really make progress on the Zen path if you don't read that much? And what I found a bit disconcerting was that when I read something, there was so little personal experience in it, I could find. Well, if you want to read, you want to be able to tell the difference between... an author who has personal experience and one who doesn't. And most people who write about Buddhism don't have much experience. But you can be reading lazy. All you need is ears. I like reading lazy.

[06:26]

That's why I'm here. So reading lazy can have something to listen to. And the practitioners traditionally are called the listeners. Because the face-to-face experience of listening is... at the center of how Buddhist practice works. As I say often, if you look at the koans, what are the koans basically about? Meeting and speaking. That's what we're doing. And yes. And during the talk, an aspect of what we talked of yesterday came to my mind.

[07:29]

That's when you were saying when you talk to the person, you talk to, you address the stillness. The aspect of noticing stillness within activity. Well, someone said before, I don't have that much experience, but I'm touched by the atmosphere here. And as a picture, we often have affinities to primordial landscapes like the sea or mountains or so. And probably it might be that

[08:42]

my mind behind the mind is sort of aroused or addressed through this affinity when I'm in such a situation. I hope so. And of course you can't really feel the stillness in another person unless you feel it in yourself. Oh, your next question. At least in your seminars. But last year, when Paul was in Berlin, there was a lot of discussion whether it would be recorded or not. But does it make sense to record seminars or not? What is your fundamental opinion on recording? The principle... What do you think...

[09:57]

Yours are being recorded, your seminars and what is teaching. Yeah. They are? Oh. Last year in Berlin, did a seminar. We had a lot of discussion about should this be recorded or not. So what is your, what's your feeling or your position to this? Does it have any value? Do you think we shouldn't record? Last year it was a quite funny moment because it was so a habit to record and I'm used to listen to it, but the questions were present in the room, is it of any use or should a lecture or a seminar be one-to-one? So I would be interested in your basic meaning. Yeah, okay, it's a long story. I'll try to make it short.

[11:13]

Traditionally, you don't even take notes during the lecture. There's a story, I can't figure out how it would have worked, but about a Chinese monk who wanted to take notes so he had a paper kimono. Maybe just one sleeve was paper, I don't know. But since they didn't have man and he... What are they called in Japanese? A manenhitsu, a 10,000 year pen. Which is the Japanese word for ballpoint pen. Since they didn't have ballpoint pens, He's mixing ink, he's got a brush, and the person lecturing doesn't notice.

[12:16]

So this is a good trick if you can do it. Anyway, I took notes in Sukhiroshi's lectures from the beginning. So both Sukhiroshi and I resisted his lectures being recorded. Because we thought, and I thought, you should develop the ability to listen in the situation and not have notes or anything. Yeah, so, but in those days they had wired recorders and Recorders, big reels of tape, you know. But when the little cassettes came in, in the 60s, you had people recording, you didn't even know they were recording because they had it in their paper sleeve. So pretty soon there were recordings, whether we authorized it or not.

[13:37]

So sometime in the mid-60s we... decided, okay, we'll record Sukhriyoshi's lectures. And I think when I first came to Europe, I don't remember, were they recorded from the beginning? I don't remember. Pretty much. But anyway, I didn't know. But I've gotten so used to it, I hardly know what's happening. And I've gotten so I unconsciously or non-consciously edit what I'm saying. I don't tell stories about other teachers particularly.

[14:39]

I don't talk about students as an example without even naming them who are not here, but they might listen to the tapes another time. Yeah, and when I do meet person to person with people, which I do, of course, in Doksan, But in the transmission teaching process, we don't record this. And there's a tradition of what's called kirigami. which means cut paper. So it means that there's an oral tradition of passing the teaching to your disciple orally.

[15:50]

And the disciple can take notes. And then once the notes are very clear, The teacher authorizes them. But they're called cut paper because you don't pass them to your disciple. So it's a process of an oral transmission that is confirmed by seeing that you can really put it down in writing. And that's just between the two people, so that's not recorded. But I think You know, I think if I was just in a monastic setting, I would probably actually prefer not to be recorded.

[17:09]

But in a lay sangha, it seems to make a difference that people can listen to the tapes later. MB3s or whatever they're called nowadays. MP seven and a half. No, three. That's a protocol. It is? All right. Someone else. Yeah, oh yes. You spoke earlier about points of reference, and you mentioned points of reference for wisdom that are needed in our age. You specifically mentioned points of reference for wisdom. You talked about wisdom points and how we relate on the relationship to them. You talked about the reference points we need in life.

[18:13]

Yeah, okay. To this point, you mentioned we do have to have... No, we have to develop wisdom points as a layperson. I would like to know more. Okay, so that's the idea. So let's see what we can point to during the seminar. And you were going to say something? You talked about the mind behind the mind. The connection with dream and dreaming. And Arnold Mandela described three steps related with that topic. Daily consciousness, dreaming and the dream world. Und es hat mich sehr daran erinnert, weil er sagt, unterhalb unseres Tagesbewusstseins gibt es die Aktivität des Träumens, aber darunter gibt es diese Traumwelt, zu der wir lernen können, Zugang zu bekommen.

[19:57]

And below our daily consciousness there is the world, the activity of dreaming and below this is the dream world where we can get access to. He describes it a bit like a primordial, I can't quite agree with him, He describes it as a sort of arch ground which I can't agree to completely. But would that go into the similar direction what you are saying about the spaciousness of the mind behind the mind? Well, on the whole, I like Arnie Mindell's ideas.

[21:05]

But why do you bring it up? Is it consonant with your experience, or are you interested intellectually? It's more the attempt to Try to bring this open dreaming mind, the dream world mind into my Daily consciousness, yeah. For my practice, it's to get a good access to this. That's a background. I did this remark right now. Okay. Well, I think...

[22:07]

One of the things that Zazen does is regular Zazen allows you to develop the ability to be awake during sleep. Once you have the skill of being awake during sleep, you can be asleep when you're awake. Well, that's not quite what I mean. When you're awake, you have access to what's usually unconscious. So the associations that arise through the free association of Freud, etc., those associations are much more present during the day. You don't save them up for nighttime. Yeah, so we have, as you all know, and it goes back to pre-Buddhist time, we have waking mind, dreaming mind, and non-dreaming deep sleep.

[23:42]

And Zazen actually creates a fourth mind. And not a mind you're born with. So you can call it a wisdom mind because you... Basically, through sitting, create this mind. And it's not only a fourth mind. It's also a mind that overlaps in various ways and to various degrees with the three minds you're born with. And when this fourth overlapping mind is established bodily and phenomenally, And I say established bodily and phenomenally because it actually

[25:04]

arises also with the phenomenal world and in fact Dogen calls it the ocean mudra samadhi which is the fascicle of Dogen's teaching now we're getting rather technical here Too technical? Oh. I have a question. Yes. You're still dreaming? And if you're dreaming, how many minds are with you? I've never stopped to count. I've never stopped to count. Well, let's go back to Julio's comment and question.

[26:30]

Julio's. Julio's comment and question. Yeah, and in the... I mean, I've been practicing with almost all of you for... If we looked at the total number of years, I've known you 5, 10, 20, 7, 3, 2, we've got a lot of years of shared experience here. In one seminar a few years ago, which is Larger than this seminar, I counted 2,000 years of shared experience. And I think there's only one or two new people. Like you and you. Oh, and you, three. Yeah, that's right. But you're already feeling less new. Okay. But still, in public seminars, semi-public seminars, whatever this is, I have a resistance to speaking technically about zazen.

[27:56]

Yeah, but it looks like I'm going to have to. Okay. So if you're not someone who wants to sit regularly. But I still think it can be useful to know something about the potentialities of sitting regularly. And sitting, particularly when you first begin to sit, has certain, you know, effects.

[29:07]

And you begin to notice you feel differently during the day and so forth. And some people notice other people start relating to them differently and so forth. So in the first half year or two or three years there's noticeable effects. Now the problem with that is the effects are interesting. And they're somewhat satisfying. But then you enter the more dry period. In which the learning curve is mostly downward or flat. And what happens when you sit is a process of really some years which nothing seems to be you know maybe there's something but basically it's just flat but for some reason you keep doing it and there's no results and most of us we can say we don't care about results but we do

[30:39]

And what happens during that, basically you just have to have faith in the basic sense of this fourth mind of beingness. You've had enough experience to have... Buddhism makes enough sense that you have faith in it. God's belief, exactly, is just your faith. You know, it's... It's a kind of dynamic that works. And if you do continue during this period, what happens, it seems to be what happens, is that there's very small incremental shifts. And you really reconstitute yourself.

[32:11]

And the effects of developing let's keep it simple, a fourth mind, begins to be integrated in the whole of your life. So this is not the period of change that occurs through zazen, but the period of transformation that occurs through zazen. Now I'm using change to mean change within a familiar context so you can see the change. Because the context remains the same and the change is different. But when there's no contrast between context and change,

[33:12]

When the context itself is changing, you can't see that anything's happening. Okay. Now, one... dimension of this, aspect of this, is expressed in the rather famous Zen statement. As I think I mentioned yesterday, the jewel hidden in the mountain of form. But the practice of this phrase is that the mountain of form is the jewel.

[34:38]

So the jewel is hidden because it is, it's hidden as the mountain of form. Now, this is somewhat related to what I said about practicing with no sense of idea of results. And it's encapsulated. Encapsulated? In-free-lated? In what? It's encapsulated as a word. So it's not, so it's infreelated. It's given its freedom. In phrase like, no gaining idea. How do you practice no gaining idea?

[35:44]

Well, I mean, Dogen puts it in his fascicle in the Ocean Mudra Samadhi. When the elements appear, I do not appear. Or I do not say that I appear. And when the elements disappear, I do not say that I disappear. Now, that's exactly the same as the mountain of form is the jewel. Now, how is that the case?

[36:45]

This is quite slippery because words are making distinctions and I'm taking away distinctions with words. Now, we're beginning to look at practice here under the microscope. And to be able to look at your own experience under a microscope, so to speak, which requires a kind of resolved, articulated attention that can be fully engaged with the details of existence. As if you had a camera which could focus into every detail.

[37:57]

Yeah, I could see all the details including the threads of the fabric and of the... Okay. So... Dogen says the Buddha said. Dogen said the Buddha said. I do not say I appear when the elements arise. Okay. So, this is related to the practice of dharmas. Yeah, and so I want to stay with this until it, or it will slip away.

[39:00]

So the practice of dharmas is to allow things to appear. To notice the arising. Okay. Now, if there's a I that notices it, there's a separation between what's appearing and the noticing. Okay, so if there's a separation between what appears and what is noticing, there's a separation. And where does the separation occur? You have to make the mark somewhere. So there's a mark being made or a signification being made that's separate from the horizon.

[40:20]

And if you feel that's the case or you... act as if that's the case, then you're basically living in a container and you're outside the container. So how do we actually take the container away? So the jewel is the mountain of form. Or appearance is swimming in appearance. You are also appearance. Okay, but how to practice this?

[41:22]

It's hard enough to actually understand. But how do you actualize? But it's interesting that Dogen says, at least in translation, I do not say I appear. So if we put it this way, there's at least the practical sense that you're making a choice. But you don't confirm that or think that as I appear when things appear. Or I disappear when things disappear. Okay. Now, if you want to practice this, you have to notice in the minuteness of your own experience that there's appearance That's already a big step to see things as appearance and not as entities.

[42:40]

But you're experiencing things as appearance, but you yet separate yourself as if you possess them or make use of them or something. So the distinction between my consciousness and my dreaming and so forth has to disappear. And the more that does occur, there's an immense satisfaction in zazen. To locate zazen is one of the reference points. Now, I don't know what, of course, you're what result or what word you're using means in German, in Deutsch.

[43:55]

But in English, result means to spring forward. From this point, you spring to this point. So in effect, you're going from A to B. To a goal or to some result. But practice in the deepest sense, you're always going from A to A. In other words, you're concerned with your condition and not result. You're looking at your condition. Du betrachtest also mehr, mit anderen Worten, du betrachtest mehr deine Kondition, also deine Konditio eigentlich, als das Ergebnis. I suppose if you, being a doctor, if you ask a patient, what is your condition, it's different than whether he wants to be healthy or not.

[44:59]

You're just asking him, what is his condition? Ich glaube, als Arzt, wenn man seine Patienten fragt, So, in a way, we're asking over and over again, what is our condition? What we're asking over... No, no, no, I understood. I'm not finding the perfect word for condition in Deutsch. In English, condition means to speak to yourself. Condiction. To speak to yourself. To talk with yourself. I don't know what... What's your present situation? We have a term for that, that is more about how your feeling is. Good, I like that. How do you find yourself? So to say.

[46:16]

Now and then? That's what you ask. That would be what we were asking, not what you want to be. So when you're sitting Zazen and you're not concerned with any results or anything not thinking creatively or mind behind the mind, you're just sitting there. When really all associations, et cetera, are mostly off stage, off stage, And there's just the body in its aliveness. Like it might be before you die. There's just simple aliveness.

[47:27]

And you can feel all the parts. And there's quite a lot of practice in how you feel all the parts. And when you feel this way, you actually feel your bodily brain. I mean, I don't know if most of you feel your brain. But they're feeling your brain. It's sitting there, standing there, looking there. I don't know what it's doing. Nothing's going on. It's quite happy. And if thoughts come into it, you can actually feel the thoughts coming into it. You can feel a headache appear. Okay. Okay. And the body just feels clear and open.

[48:50]

And emotions are gone, there's just feeling. And the mind as activity is just at rest. Okay. This is extremely satisfying. At least my experience is. That's like when Anita says, you hope the bell never rings. There's no thoughts. I hope the bell rings. Except you hope it doesn't ring. What's happening here is you also are, this is related to the experience of unstructured mind. And the more unstructured your mind is, the more things just pop up.

[49:57]

And there's degrees of non-structure. And that has to do with the maturity of your practice. Now, so let's talk about, we could, okay, I'm speaking about our beingness. I'm speaking about our body and our mind. And as I did yesterday, I spoke about body, speech and mind.

[51:03]

And I asked the kind of basic question everyone should ask, who practices these things? Why these three categories, body, speech, and mind? Speech seems quite different than the categories of body and mind. And why is this covers everything, body, speech and mind. So you want to explore for yourself why such a teaching of these... exists as these three categories. Okay. Or we can ask, why do we even divide things up into this, that and the other? Okay. Okay. Now what we're practicing here is the mountain of form.

[52:20]

Okay. So let's now be a little more technical about zazen. Zazen practice... I would say the simplest description of Zazen practice. As you find a posture, as I said to someone recently, which you can fill with attention. And that primarily, yes, When I meditate, I pull this mountain like a boulder. I don't know if it's right or wrong but my practice is when I'm sitting I put my

[53:20]

posture, my body, that's on a hanger. I don't sit like this, but like that. And then it gets clear and empty. And this is my practice. Sounds good. Like on a hanger. It's clean, good. So, where's the hook? What's that happen? No. Yeah. It's clean. Yeah, okay. Yeah, alright. So you put yourself on a but one knot that lifts your shoulders up. And you see if you can fill your body with attention. And as I say, if I sit like this, And as I said, if I sit like this... I look like a flat tire.

[54:48]

But if I fill myself with attention, get my bicycle, my Dharma pump, you fill up with attention. You should always have a Dharma pump with you. In case you're feeling flat. Geraldo has one scrapped to his leg just like on a bicycle. When he's Geraldo. Okay, now. And usually, and the most important aspect of sitting is the posture of the spine. And we can even think of the spine as a mind of its own, the spine mind. And you want to arrange your legs so they allow you, your spine to be lifted up. And the best way to arrange your legs is so you can fold your heat together, which is usually cross-legged sitting.

[56:24]

Although, of course, many of us, and it's quite useful, can sit with our legs back. This isn't quite energetically as satisfying or complete, but it does work. Now, let's just keep this basic idea present. You've filled the body with attention. And you will notice in the beginning parts of sitting is that attention doesn't reach everywhere. If you kind of suspend thinking, you can feel dark and light areas in your body. Maybe while you are imagining

[57:26]

getting a feel for light and dark areas and it's useful to use the opposites light and dark because we generally think through contrast and polarities Yeah, so the way the mind works, it's easier to notice light if you can contrast it with dark. So you notice somewhere where there seems to be light. And surprisingly and very traditionally, often it's here. Okay, so now your attention has noticed light.

[58:51]

And attention can be here quite easily. So then you notice where attention can also be quite easily. And if you explore this, you will discover the chakra system. Because you'll find some areas are more susceptible to feeling light. Between light and feeling and being light. Both light and bright. You know, light as weight and light as light. And maybe your spine will feel more light. But you'll find some of these so-called chakra areas you can't feel into, you can't bring attention into.

[60:14]

So now you're familiar with light. You try to bring attention to every place in your body. And you find maybe In this corner of your shoulder, it's quite dark. You can't bring attention there. So you try to lighten that up. So you create a certain drill. Drill? Yeah, certain way you do things. Routine? Yeah, routine. And the drill might be, every time you sit, check out the darkness in the left shoulder. And you get kind of friendly with it.

[61:36]

It's dark. It's still dark. Open the window. And then after a few months, it really takes a long time. A little window opens in the left shoulder. You can see what's going on there. Anyway, so things like this happen. And then pretty soon you can find, you can bring attention to under your toenail of your big toe. You can feel around all of your organs. Now, Yeah, we could talk about this for the next week.

[62:48]

How to develop channels of attention and move your attention through your body, etc. I'll just leave that up to your own experimentation. Okay. then you'll find that actually the space around you, around your body, is dark or light. You'll find that maybe on the right side of the body there's more light than on the left side of the body. Then you play around with that for a while. You try to switch the light on the right to the left, and switch the left to the right, and click, you know, etc. You've got nothing better to do. You don't have to go to work until, you know, an hour from now.

[63:52]

So you might as well experiment with switching the light around your body. And then you can get more psychological and Freudian if you want. Where's Mama? She's on the left. Where's Papa? Oh, he's up here. And you begin to see that your space around your body is psychologically popular. And if you try to switch Mama over to Papa's side, it often doesn't work. So you develop a whole process, a psychological process that's probably at least less expensive than being on the couch. And eventually the space around you psychologically clears up. And all these associations are kind of left behind.

[65:26]

Now, just to finish this so we can go to lunch. A traditional approach is to experiment, to play with, practice with the four elements. I'm using the word elements because Dogen and the Buddha supposedly used the word elements. But really what's going on here? I'm dividing my experience up into parts. And then I'm calling those parts elements.

[66:35]

And to call them elements means they're ingredients in a construction process. Basic elements. So we could say parts. So what you're doing is you're developing, you're practicing, experiencing yourself in parts. In other words, the meta-practice is you're dividing your experience into parts. The micro-practice is it doesn't matter which parts, you know, there's traditional parts you use. The micro-practice. The micro-practice, it could be any parts.

[67:37]

We know that watermelons and pumpkins wouldn't work as well as earth element and water element. Which part of me is Kürbis and which part of me is watermelon? That would be... It would work, but it's kind of silly. So the tradition is to divide your experience up into the earth element, the water element, the fire element, and the air element. Yeah, and that goes back to pre-scientific Asian and European ways to divide the world up. So very simply, the earth element, you, it's stuff, hardness.

[68:40]

So you begin to notice the bones, the structure of you, the toenails. And again, to use a contrast, you can use softness. What parts are soft? What parts are hard? And this is really very simple. Hardness, your teeth, your bone, blah, blah, blah. So you begin to feel the... The materiality of yourself. Or I say materiality of self, but materiality of the body. But then you work with the water element. And it's useful to contrast

[69:55]

fluidity with cohesion. And again, there's nothing magical here. It may become magical, but right now you're just noticing the blood in your body, the air flowing. And the contrast of things still stick together, they still cohere. You can feel the circulatory system passing into your arms, fingers, etc. And you can tend to open up. You can have the thought of opening up the circulatory system and actually affect it through the words which direct attention.

[71:17]

Wo du kannst den Gedanken haben, dein Kreislaufsystem zu öffnen und tatsächlich den Effekt auch davon zu haben. Und kannst davon sehen, wie das den Effekt hat, wie du mit Worten einen Effekt erzielst. And you can then use fire. Dann kannst du Feuer. And that you'd explore with, obviously again, hot and cold. You locate areas of warmth in your body. And coldness. And you can actually affect your health by becoming sensitive to territories, areas of warmth and cold in your body. But people often remark that my hands are always warm.

[72:20]

I guess it's the case. I mean, people mention it. I don't notice that they're just there. And I don't go around holding everyone's hand. I'm happy to, but you know... But I do notice that as soon as I feel coldness on my fingertips, unlikely to get the flu or cold within three or four days. And if I work on warming my fingertips, the cold passes through the station and doesn't stop. No passengers get off. Now these things are different for each of us, but Zazen begins to create a fourth body and mind. And then fire is also the mixing.

[73:28]

Fire mixes, destroys boundaries. So you begin to feel the mixing, the energy, a kind of electric like particles and then the air so called air element which you experience is the inhale the pressure of the breath exhale and the holding of the body and movement of the body with the... Okay, so something like this is called the practice of the four elements.

[74:37]

It's part of jhana practice, and jhana is basically the word for Zen. Jhana, Zen, Chan. Okay, so what are you doing when you do this? You're experiencing yourself in parts. You're lessening the tendency to experience yourself as a separate person. So if there's a moment by moment fluidity, The fluidity of appearance Which means appearance is actually appearing in parts. Appearance is parts.

[75:39]

The world is diverging and converging. And it's converging in an appearance. But the convergence is convergence of parts held momentarily. In the durative present. If you are experiencing yourself as parts, those parts tend to create a field of connectivity. Now, even if you're not going to look for some alchemical transformation,

[76:39]

just as the experience of stillness helps you to notice other people's stillness even when they don't notice it themselves their mind is in the leaves of the tree and not the trunk of the tree when you feel yourself as Parts being put together at each moment. As we say the six objects. Because every object is a nose object, a mouth object, a... body object, mind object, taste object. In other words, each object fits into the categories of our six senses, including mind. Okay, so the more you experience yourself as parts, you can experience the world in the details of its parts coming together as appearance.

[78:16]

And the basic dharmic practice and dharmic experience Of receiving and releasing. Being open to receiving appearance in all its details. And releasing the appearance. Without an eye releasing or an eye appearing. then Dogen would say, we feel like we're swimming in the phenomenal world. This is all quite simple. In other words, if you start experiencing yourself as parts you experience the world as parts.

[79:20]

When you experience your solidity you feel the solidity of other people. When you feel your own flow and softness, you feel the flow and softness of others. And you might even be feeling hungry. So let's have lunch. It's 12.36 or something like that. So should we come back at 4.36? 3.36? 2.36? 3? 3.15? Well, it gives us two hours. Oh, more. 2.45. 2.45, then you don't have to break the arms of the waiters to serve you.

[80:36]

I like our secret attendees. I like our secret attendees. I've had, over the years, women often speak to me about how, when you can really sit comfortably, the baby starts moving. Doesn't have to adjust to your moving anymore, so you're sitting still so the baby can really kind of fly. Wake out.

[81:19]

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