I was, I'm back in the saddle again. I don't know for how long, we'll see. Out where a friend is a friend. Remember the song? Where the longhorn cattle feed on the lowly gypsum weed. Gene Autry. That was my parents' cowboy singer. I mean, I don't think they liked him, but I remember the song. It also says rocking to and fro, but, you know, that's not so good for back on the cushion again. Well, I'm sorry I missed all these lectures of the last 10 days or so. But really, I think this is the longest I've ever been sick, except when I was in the hospital with prostate cancer.

[01:05]

But thanks for taking care of me. And definitely I feel a lot better than I have. So I think the last talk I gave, this is about the ninth taste show or something like that, the last talk I gave, I spoke about ingredients. And I'm still, you know, interested. And using that word, ingredients, ingredients means, you know, you'd think you'd all know what it means, but it means what enters into something, what enters into something, and what you enter into something. Then I'm looking for a word for the world. And what you call the world. And that's the line from a

[02:15]

well-known and one of my favorite cons of the book of Shoyaroku, the Shoyaroku, the book of equanimity or serenity. And it's the case number 12, I think. And it asks, thanks for being with me, Nikki. It asks, a Dijon asks Shushan, who shows up at his monastery temple in the north, says, Where do you come from, Dijon? You know, the standard pattern. Where do you come from? Shushan says, From the south. And Dik Chang says, how is Buddhism in the South these days?

[03:18]

And there was some difference between Northern Buddhism and Southern Buddhism. But fundamentally, I mean, the concept of Buddhism, the thrust of Buddhism, the modus operandi of Buddhism is how to save the world. or how to free the world or free individuals or free yourself, first of all, from mental suffering and realize a world based on enlightenment. First of all, your own, based on enlightenment within your own world, within your own life. So, Let's assume, Dijang is assuming that this Shushan monk or practitioner is practicing for these reasons.

[04:24]

So he says, you're from the South? Well, how is Buddhism there these days? He says, there's extensive discussion. Maybe not different than us. What are we doing? Our own extensive discussion. Yeah. And so D. Jung says, how can that compare to me here, planting rice, planting the fields and cooking rice? How can that compare to me here, planting the fields and cooking rice? And Xu Zhen said, well, what do you do about the world? And Di Jiang says, what do you call the world? And I find this, you know, at the center of life, of an individual life which conceived of as a path.

[05:37]

I mean, all of us have the dynamic of these two questions. What do we do about the world? Well, what do you call the world? Yeah, what do you do about the world? There's a movement, a post-environmental movement. a post-Greens movement called the Dark Mountain, out of Tolkien, Mordor or something. And the Dark Mountain says, it's over, it's finished. Industrial world has the resources maybe to do something about the environmental crisis, but they're not, they won't. They don't even have the will to enforce regulations so that British Petroleum doesn't pollute them. They're not going to do it. The environmental world is still the biggest polluter. I mean the industrial world is still by far and away the biggest polluter.

[06:44]

We in the United States cut more forest down than does the Congo. So the dark mountain says, we just gotta, the dark mountain movement says, we just gotta wait for industrial society to collapse and hopefully speed it along its way. So yeah, what do you do about the world? I mean, the people in the so-called dark mountain movement are asking themselves, what do you do about the world? Who's gonna do anything? Well, what do you call the world? It's just us here sitting Zazen, lazily watching the white ox on an open field. That's how Zazen or Zen practice is described in this koan. What we're doing is us and lazy, isn't that something, I love it.

[07:48]

Lazily watching the world, the hell with it, goes to hell in a handbasket, as Philip says, Wayland. And we lazily watch the white ox on an open ground. How to pass the days. It's also a line from the poem. We're alive, what do we do with this life we have? How to pass the days. Well, what do you call the world? Well, the world, I mean, the world is primarily a Germanic word meaning old and virile, strong. So it's old, strong, and middle enclosure. It's the middle enclosure. The middle enclosure where humans, it's kind of German mythology, the middle enclosure where humans live.

[08:51]

What are we going to do about this middle enclosure? Maybe the middle enclosure is the dark mountain. The dark mountain movement. So world, I mean, it's... Yeah, we call the world the world, meaning the physical... the physical world of humans. Yeah. Universe, that's another thing we call the world. And I think, you know, we want to pay attention to what we call the world because we call forth the world. Whatever we call the world, we also are calling forth a particular view of the world. and universes are most common Western sense for everything. But universe actually means to turn things into one, unis and verses, to make things together as one, to turn things into one.

[10:05]

And that's what the West has been doing, I mean, philosophically, how to establish oneness even. Einstein's looking for the universal equation or the universal explanation, how everything's united. But Buddhism is rather difficult, how to release things into diversity. Well, if implicitly in the back of your mind is how to make everything one, how to make everything together, we're not very successful at it for sure, but how to make everything together, if that's in the back of our thing, that really shapes how we function in the world, how we establish a path. But what if our view is more how to release everything into...

[11:06]

diversity, how to release everything into interpenetration, inter-emergence. So one of the main big concepts of the world in Buddhism is Tathagatagarbha. As you all know, most of you know at least, Tathagatagarbha, that's a conception of everything in its momentariness as being simultaneously a womb and a embryo. And the movement of that. Because Buddhism always has at least the fourth dimension of movement. It's not a static Euclidean world. It's a world that's always distorting the triangle. recognizing that movement, that everything's flowing in the movement.

[12:18]

And the movement, we don't know where it's going. And we're along for the ride, or do we know what we're riding, or are we along for... We have no choice. What's her name? Mary Baker Eddy, who founded the Christian Science Movement, said at some point, I accept the universe. And somebody said to her, well, you better. What else? Anyway. So what is this world? You know, you come from Martin and Tom just came from Frankfurt. What's going on in Frankfurt? Extensive discussion. And Yanisov, Hotzenholz, etc. How does that compare to us here, lazily watching the White Ox?

[13:25]

What do we call the world? What do we do about the world? Well, I think Tathagatagarbha is quite a fruitful, fertile idea of seeing the world as, at each moment, something which is a seed and the conditions for the ripening of the seed, the incubation of the seed. And what choices are we going to make? And what choices are we making? Now, in a more philosophical description of Buddhism, you might say that everything is a compositional factor. I mean, all these whatever's here is part of the making the world.

[14:33]

And we're in the midst of that making. We're not an outsider in a container. We're in the midst of that making. And I like compositional factors too because I like it in the end it says to compose and also it has there to be composed in the midst of everything happening to be composed. That certainly ought to be a fruit of our practice no matter how terrible it gets and no matter how complicated and but we find our composure in each situation. And this practice period has had quite a lot of strains on it. People leaving and Dan is so sick and still not well. And your old habit looks more like Costello. No, that's too dated for most of you. How are things in the South?

[15:48]

How is Buddhism in the South? There's extensive discussion. How does that compare to me planting fields and cooking rice? What do you call the world? What do you do about the world? So I'm suggesting we think of the world, if we call the world, think of, because you're always, you have these, we have these visual sensorial habits, we look at things. You know, I was really struck the other day reading, you know, the man without qualities, Musil, there's a scene where he's looking out the window at a demonstration and a demonstration which Ulrich, in which there's a protest about the Austrian Empire.

[16:52]

I mean, there was the British Empire, the Austrian Empire. The Austrian Empire fell apart not very long ago, fell apart. So Ulrich's world, or Robert Musil's world fell apart in front of him. He watched it fall apart. And Proust, the other great novels about France and Europe falling apart. Falling apart and he's standing there in the window and behind him is an empire, empire desk and other furniture. And the way Musil writes it, the room in a way represents him too. His desk, furniture, the culture that created him, etc. What makes the world, what his path was, or how do you locate yourself in the world? Well, your clothes, your furniture, what your friends do.

[17:55]

We dress so that we look acceptable to others, etc. And he's standing there at the window and he sees the world coming apart, falling apart out the window. And there's all this stability behind him that he allows him to sit down and write and work. And he was very sensitive and understood furniture and et cetera. And suddenly it all turned into a flow and flowed through him. The street scene flowed through him. The furniture, the room flowed through him. And he kind of dissolved and had no identity for a while. It's clearly... Lucille's talking about an enlightened experience of his own. His whole world flowed into, liquefied into these ingredients which really weren't holding anything. They weren't holding his life together and they weren't holding the life of the Austrian Empire together.

[19:04]

If you survive it, we call it enlightenment. So in a way I'm suggesting look at everything around you just as ingredients. As I've said before, it's already a very big step because you're not looking at the things you see as kind of self-referential objects, objects that are going to show you who you are, what your fate is, what your path is. It's all liquefied. Well, it's just ingredients. So I've got this M1, it seems, M1N1 virus, which, you know, I spend a lot of time in pigs. He's taken up residence here and moves around among humans too and so forth.

[20:11]

And that's one of the ingredients. One of my ingredients. Senescence, that means the disabilities of old age. Senescence is knocking at the door. Not too loudly yet, but knocking. So I'm... during the last 10 days outside a few times and the moon was so beautiful and individual trees each each in its own time and it's there as much the mountain as the mountain is the tree I mean it's each and is it in its own time a tree mountain or a virus taking hold in my, this body. And I love the clarity. I mean, Anne, who had virtually the same thing, I think, said that when she finally felt better, it was like being after Sashin and everything.

[21:24]

She really appreciated how everything looked after being So we could offer people sachins or M1 virus. I don't know how we'd manage to pull it off. But yeah, I loved the clarity of each thing. At the same time, feeling so unable to function, I was not able to take hold of it really or do anything, but still the clarity I enjoyed. So everything's just ingredients. Some of the ingredients are making the moon and trees and the viruses and so forth. And some of the ingredients are becoming my senses, my sensorium, my mental furniture, my attentive senses.

[22:31]

my attentional body. And there's a technical term in consciousness studies, heightened extended awareness. Yeah, and we can, at each moment, we can actually practice. If we just notice the ingredients, that's all we've got. As I called it, and I think you discussed in the seminars, it's a site of engagement. whether it's a thagatagarbha or just ingredients, it's a site of engagement. Some of the ingredients you can't engage, but they're there, they're making the world function. And some of the ingredients you can notice. And with heightened extended awareness, more of the ingredients are present, and present in their own power within you too. When Ulrich had this enlightenment experience, or Musil as Ulrich, the ingredients flowed through him.

[23:39]

They were him too. I mean, you can't, you're not separate from the ingredients through which you decide your life, create your path, etc. So again, I'm suggesting you See if you can get in the habit of whatever you name, whatever you notice, you think of it as an ingredient. An ingredient of what? An ingredient of the world? An ingredient of your life? An ingredient of this moment which you're composing? And that is the practice of the path. And now we pass the days. Okay, thank you very much. May our intention equally penetrate every being and place, with the true merit of Buddha's way.

[24:51]

Jog on and stay at home. Alleluia [...] I believe I will move to seek them. If I leave this world, I will be exhausted. I believe I will move to put my eyes to them. I believe I will move to put my eyes to them. I believe I will move to put my eyes to them. This way sounds surpassable.

[25:59]

I do not know what you mean.

[26:03]

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