You know, this concept of imaginal space, which we confuse when I speak about it with imaginary space. It's not imaginary, it's imaginal. This concept? I don't expect you to really see the distinction yet. But of course, as I've said, when I bow there on that, I open up into a mandala. And I'm wearing Buddha's robe. This is an imaginal space. And when the rule, when it's possible, when you put on your okesa, you stand facing a Buddha.

[01:30]

Yeah, so I tend to try to have a Buddha somewhere near where I put on my robes. If not, I turn to any object or anybody who's in the room and treat them like a Buddha. And then I put on my robe. Clearly, the... The concept here is that you're dressing the Buddha when you're dressing yourself. And the Oryoki bowls, the first bowl called the Buddha bowl, and that's why it has no base for the monk's bowl,

[02:34]

And the oriyoki shells, so this first shell, is called Buddha's shell. And that's why she doesn't have, at least in the monk's oriyoki set, she doesn't have a stand. Yeah, it's called Buddha's skull. So you're eating with the Buddha and you're eating as he did and now once a physical being and now just a symbolic, imaginal skull. To say something more about imaginal space, Mayumi Oda, Japanese born but most of her adult life living in America, a woman.

[03:50]

And she's the artist who did the flute playing woman on the ox that's in the entryway of the Hudson House. Sie ist die Künstlerin, die diese flötenspielende Frau auf einem Ochsen gemalt hat, die im Eingangsbereich im Hotzenholz hängt. Nearly the last, one of them the last prints, she had a pretty big one, that size, I think probably that same size, of Manjushri riding on a bicycle and Samantabhadra riding on a bicycle. They're both worth quite a lot of money now.

[04:51]

I mean, like, more than a... Well, about the same as an average good car. And particularly because of the last silkscreens of that she has. And so the elephant, which is usually, and I said last night in the hot drink, riding... On riding with Samantabhadra. Yeah, anyway, she gave them to us as a present for what we've developed here. So she and her son sent them to me in America, and I fit them into my suitcase.

[06:03]

And when we can afford it, we'll frame them and put them somewhere. I don't know where yet. But the bicycles and the female figure, they're both female figures as Manjushri and Samantabhadra. This is already a shift. Yeah, they're usually male figures. And then the fact that she's not standing on the elephant, she's giving the elephant a ride on her bicycle.

[07:09]

This is the beginning or an expression of the transformed imaginal space in our culture, Western culture now, of the woman. And the bicycle is a big symbol in the women's movement of women's freedom. Because women, when bicycles came in, weren't dependent on their husbands' horses and later cars and so forth. They could just ride around town on their bicycles. Shocking. Spirit with a glowing in the wind. So the imaginal space in my lifetime of the women's roles, since I have three daughters, I'm very happy with this, women's role in society has changed considerably, dramatically.

[08:19]

And today's Me Too movement I should wear it, Me Too is completely is a successional reciprocity from women getting the vote in the 30s. And it logically follows, but you wouldn't have necessarily predicted it. And now the imaginal space in my more recent lifetime, adult lifetime, has dramatically changed for how we understand gender.

[10:08]

So when you begin shifting the imaginal space, things begin to fill that space. And we're trying to, here, what we're doing with these buildings and things, is trying to create an imaginal space for Buddhism in our society. And what we try to do here with these buildings and so on is we try to create an imagination space for Buddhism in our society. Now, I often say that I'm not really interested in Buddhism as a religion at all and that I'm presenting Buddhism from my point of view as a science, a kind of science.

[11:17]

Or as a transformative phenomenological practice. Okay. Yeah, but then I'm in Buddha's room. But this is something like a religion. I mean, if scientists all dressed like Einstein, you could start saying, hmm, is this some sort of science cult, or is this a science religion? Yeah. And we'd chant and say, Einstein's bowl.

[12:18]

And I happen to know a lot of physicists and some of them, one of them who's one of the And I happen to know a lot of scientists and one of them who... But you'd have to create an Einstein who was a combination of Newton and a whole lot of other scientists in order to create the kind of image the Buddha represents. In any case, we are here trying, in our society, using these buildings and our practice and through our commitment to practice and through our using practice to find...

[13:34]

actual experience of our lives. Only if we can bring the actual experience of realization into our lives is there any chance, really, for a transformative practice to become part of our society. Just before I came here, I got an email from Giulia. Pecci, Graham's daughter.

[14:54]

Yeah, and she said, I mean, emails, the instantaneousness, the instantness of emails is quite amazing. I couldn't have imagined this when I first knew Graham. That his daughter Julia would be saying, I'm holding Graham's hand right now as he's dying and reading your hot drink poem to him again. And I think his son David, who's exactly the same age as my daughter Sally. Sally's not present there, but she... sent an email to Julia and me, and David is present there, but he also sent an email.

[16:07]

And Sally is not there, but she sent an email to Julia and me, and David is there, and he also sent an email. All present at his deathbed. They are all there at his deathbed. I'm sorry I'm being a little schmaltzy and romantic, but we actually practiced together, breathed in the conspiracy of Buddhism together. Conspire means to breathe together. You always sat much better than I did. He never moved.

[17:10]

And I remember Sukhiroshi once, you know the story, some of you, left us sitting for two and a half hours on the third day of Sashin in the afternoon. And in those days, you only had carbon copies, right? And they were printed on onion skin, thin papers. You could make several copies at once on the typewriter. Did you call it onion skin in German, too? I called it Zwiebelpapier. Okay. Not that that means anything in German. Okay.

[18:10]

Well, anyway, it's very crisp, noisy paper, and the schedule would be on onion paper, and Sukhriyashi, after an hour, 15 minutes or so, it's supposed to be a 40-minute period, he'd walk in, we'd hear him outside the door, and he'd walk in and pick up the schedule, look at it, and Go back out. It was supposed to be a 40-minute period. And on this day, Suzuki Roshi, we could hear him as he went down the stairs and then came in. And then he made this paper that made very loud noises when you took it in your hands and it was crackling. He took it up, looked at the schedule, crackled with it, put it back down and then went out. And then 20 or 30 minutes later, he'd come in again and pick up the schedule, rattle, rattle, rattle, and go back out. I completely accepted that Graham sat better than me. much more stable.

[19:22]

And I wasn't competing with him at all during these two and a half hours. He was sitting to my left. But I was in another state and I just gave up and died. And he once leaned forward like this and leaned back. And I thought, hey. Anyway, but we both... And when Sukershi finally came in and rang the bell, the whole Zendo started laughing. What choice did we have? So what we're trying to do is, we could say, is accumulate, this sounds funny, but units of actual experience.

[20:35]

What I'm calling a small enlightenment experience is a unit, I'm also calling a unit of actual experience. It's like a stone, as I said, put in the stream of life and your life flows around it and over it and through it. And samadhis are units of actual experience, we could say. And we develop a kind of, I don't know what word to use for it, but maybe within a marginal space, we create a spiritual organ I'm not sure I got that straight.

[21:49]

A spiritual space of organs? Within a kind of imaginal space, or an imaginal space, we create a spiritual organ of stillness. Oh, sorry, okay. Why not? It's not ordinary anatomy, so it's understandable that you... And maybe it has some of the dynamics of what people mean by soul. Perhaps this is one of the dynamics of what people mean by the word soul. You know, when they first began looking at bodies as if they were animals' bodies and dissecting them, one of the first things they did centuries ago, not too long ago, was try to find the soul. But the soul is an imaginable organ that you can create a whole society around for centuries.

[22:54]

So that some of the potentials of this imaginal organ, of course, can be part of our experience as Buddhists. Now, this... spiritual organ. I'm trying to find words for what doesn't exist, or does exist, but not in language usually. This stilled organ, this organ of stillness, is something, it's sort of sponge-like.

[24:14]

Excuse me for saying it, sponge, it's kind of spongeable. And it's kind of scrunched up. And this is so ein bisschen, meaning dry? Is that dry when you take a sponge and you squeeze it, you squeeze all the water out? Ja, und das ist so wie ausgefrungen. This is still a little wet though, it's not dry. Okay, es ist aber kein trockener Schwamm, sondern ein feuchter Schwamm. We're talking about something real. Da muss man klar mit umgehen. And once you've developed this spiritual organ of stillness, when there's a chance for stillness, it opens up and absorbs activity and everything becomes still.

[25:18]

So for the experienced practitioner, you develop this dharmic organ, this spiritual organ, It's just there. Often it's kind of scrunched up, but as soon as you go to the doctor's office and you have to wait, I don't care. Do I have to see the doctor? No, I'm just... I particularly like going to my dermatologist in Freiburg because I guess she must be the most popular dermatologist in Freiburg at least.

[26:26]

She's Korean, married to a German man. Dr. Hong. And every day she just tries to see everybody, anybody who practically wants to come. So generally you wait half an hour, but sometimes I've waited two hours. So when I have an appointment for her, I think, hmm, a little samadhi, this will be fun. So I bring a book and sometimes I read and sometimes I just sit there. Because the appointments usually need to be made in German, she usually makes the appointments. And everything I'm saying is true, isn't it?

[27:29]

Yes. Dr. Hahn speaks some English, enough. Very, very nice, intelligent woman. Okay. So you, as you extend your experience in Zazen and in Zen practice and in mindfulness practice, you're accumulating experience. What we can call actual lived experience. And as the word samadhi means something brought together. And I mean the etymology of the word.

[28:44]

These somatic experiences also can be brought together with other somatic experiences, sort of like painting by the numbers. You're still with me? So imaginal space is some kind of painting, and there's all the numbers, but some of it's filled in with junk. And anxieties and times you were offended and all kinds of crap. I mean, not crap, but you know what I mean. And as, I did not say that. Okay, but as you begin to practice, and now I've jumped from the second, the physiological body to the imaginal body,

[29:55]

We'll come back to the physiological body, which I'm quite excited to see if I can speak about. But the imaginal body is like when you're sitting. Occasionally you may have a feeling that your spine just comes into place with your neck, crown chakra and so forth. And that becomes a kind of dharmic unit or unit of actual experience. And other times your shoulders may just kind of relax. Or your stomach releases. I used to think my stomach was relaxed, but I remember it took me

[31:10]

I don't know, several years, at least three. And one day my stomach just went... and relaxed. I didn't really make those noises. It felt like it. And I had no way to know it wasn't relaxed because I had no way to compare until it relaxed. And that became a unit of my experience. Or as I spoke to someone this morning, shooting the spine becomes a unit of experience. And every time you sit down, you have these various units of experience of the ideal posture that you sometimes experience.

[32:26]

And these units of experience are sort of like building blocks They're part of your inventory of experience. You can start putting them together. And the ideal imaginal body begins to get filled in. Again, maybe like painting by numbers. You paint some actual experiences in here and there, and they begin to affect your whole body. All your experience in every circumstances, is part of this potentiality of actual experience.

[33:48]

Yeah, when you feel integrated. And that integration creates a feeling of appreciation. And that appreciation appreciates. I don't know if you have the word. Appreciation means it gets bigger as well. And that appreciation makes you feel accepted and and able to appreciate our existence and others. And so zazen, what zazen does, all your experience can be this appreciative units of experience. But somehow the context of Sashin and Zazen practice create more vivid experiences sometimes which begin to shape the stream of our life.

[35:25]

And this imaginal body then starts becoming part of our realized body. Okay. Tomorrow we'll go back to the four physiological bodies. To be continued. Okay. Are you all okay? Yeah, okay. Thank you for translating. May God bless you.

[36:36]

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