Yeah, so we have been meeting yesterday with about maybe two-thirds of you and exploring aspects of this topic of inside practice. and what inside might mean. And of course, in today's thinking, inside and outside, it's not a very clear distinction. But it's certainly useful. I mean, we feel, as we talked about, as Suzuki Roshi emphasized, knowing our innermost request.

[01:05]

It's a useful distinction. For example, Suzuki Roshi emphasizing knowing our innermost request. And though you might feel what my innermost request is before I do. Someone else, you, might feel my innermost request before I do. You might intuit it from my actions. But I'm not ready to connect the points, but you can sometimes connect the points before I can. And all of us may have, most of us may have

[02:10]

very similar innermost requests, which are something close to knowing something true for ourself. Yeah, but as... Our organizer Andreas here who brings us together once a year said yesterday maybe he follows a feeling of what's nourishing. And to feel and to have your sense of priority nourishment.

[03:23]

Yeah, this is something different from feeling what's true for me or true about me. So the process of discovering one's your, my, innermost request is influenced by how we conceptualize it. First of all, just to imagine there is such an innermost request. And then to imagine, yeah, realizing it. And of course, the realization of it is an inner experience.

[04:38]

Although you might intuit my innermost request before I do, that intuition is not my inner experience. But there's something we can call usefully inner. But how does it contrast to outer? Outer is a word based on the idea of inner. But what is this word pointing to, outer? I mean, I'm looking at you now, feeling you now, being present with you. And you're kind of out there.

[05:57]

But of course, teaching Buddhism and ordinary phenomenological practice makes clear, shows us, that my experience of you is interior. This is my experience of you as outer is an inner experience. And that's one of the most important conceptions to remember. in practice. There is no understanding of mind if mind is the transmission of mind in the Buddhist lineage.

[06:59]

there's no experience or ability to investigate mind, unless you're intellectually well aware that everything you experience is interior to mind. So I said, what I said was intellectually known to you as known to you in that way. But that's just a bare beginning. It needs to be experientially known to you on a moment-by-moment basis.

[08:22]

And how to know remind yourself that the knowing of phenomena is an activity of your interior mind. So the external is also somehow interior. Yes, and this craft of practice is to find ways to remind yourself so thoroughly that it's always where your mind, so it's always the habitation of your mind, the domain of your mind.

[09:32]

My cheeks here, these things, are outer. And the inside of my mouth, excuse me for saying such things, is inner. And my lips are somewhere in between. Maybe that's why people like to kiss. So in between. Anyway, but really, the inside of my cheeks is just the inside folded, the outside folded in. I mean, actually everything is kind of an outside folded in or an inside folded out.

[10:48]

An important point in my practice years ago was to imagine the world the out there as a kind of inside an inside that I was inside I remind me My main imagination was everything was a big stomach. And I was inside this stomach being slowly digested. I'm at the latter end of the digestion process. Salting myself, you know. Well, we talk about inner tubes to exist anymore.

[12:11]

Tires don't have inner tubes anymore, do they? Bicycles. Bicycles, they have inner tubes. One of the simplest ways to be on a lake when I was young was in an inner tube. They were all over the place and free. Now if you look for an inner tube on eBay it's probably expensive. I want an inner tube. But an inner tube isn't inner, it's only inside the outer tube. So anyway, what we mean, what really is inner and outer needs to be studied. Yeah, now I We had a lot of fun yesterday.

[13:27]

At least I had a lot of fun and some of you had fun with me. Because I don't want any of you who weren't here yesterday to miss anything. Though I know some of you were already saying you didn't miss anything. But let me pretend you missed something. So if some of you feel that who were here yesterday That it would be useful to bring something up for those of you who weren't here yesterday. Please do. One of the things I spoke about also yesterday was... basic but unusual zazen instruction.

[14:40]

And we spoke about the difference between the mind of verticality and the mind of horizontality. The simple fact available to all of us that we spend part of our life vertical and part of our life horizontal. And that the Zazen posture is some sort of attempt to combine the two. The mind of dreaming most likely appears when you're horizontal. Der Geist des Träumens wird am wahrscheinlichsten eintreten oder auftauchen, wenn ihr liegt.

[15:55]

What we know as consciousness is the mind that appears when you have to stand up and not fall down. and function within the activities that are possible through consciousness. Now the mind of consciousness though prevents us from knowing the mind of dreaming. In my experience, the mind of dreaming is going on, continuing, underneath or aside from or some other territory than consciousness. In my experience, Although, just like now, the stars are there.

[17:01]

It's just a cloudy sky. northern European day. But I'm pretty sure the stars are there. It's been one of the ways for as long as something like human beings existed. that we imagine something permanent. Astrology is some sort of version of looking for your innermost request. Except that's conceptualized as an innermost fate.

[18:06]

Conditions you don't have much to say about. But the innermost request is a re-questioning, a query. To try to make certain by looking again. Now, in the last few days, supposedly, we've been in the midst of a shower of falling stars. And they're supposedly only visible really from about midnight to 4 a.m. We're in the midst of a comet that comes around every now and then. But neither Freiburg skies after midnight nor Hanover skies yielded a single falling star.

[19:44]

But I'm sure in Crestone, which is a high desert climate, there were thousands. This is all to say, you know, how do we establish the understanding that consciousness, knowing consciousness, interferes with knowing. No one touched. Uh-huh. Blocks, obscures, yeah. So how are we going to free ourselves from interference of consciousness?

[21:08]

But certainly to make use of consciousness, it's very useful, particularly if you're crossing a busy street. We can start this study we can begin this study this investigation by noticing What happens when we fall asleep? And where do we fall to when we fall asleep?

[22:14]

Do you fall asleep? What do you do in Germany? I know in the morning you don't get up, you stand up. You go in sleeping. You sleep into. You sleep into. You sleep into what? Oblivion. One of the images I have in Germany is, you know, in the morning, everyone in Germany stands up in bed. And they're at work before anybody else in Europe. We just get up, usually on the wrong side of the bed. Do you have that expression? Anyway, at least in English, when we fall into sleep, falling into sleep is to fall out of consciousness. And you go over a little bump.

[23:27]

And the bump can be a kind of shift in your breath. The breath pattern changes. And it's useful to kind of study this bulb. Because you're conscious and you're conscious and then something, whoop, and the breath changes. And you can usually tell when someone's asleep. And you can also notice it in other people when someone is asleep. It's like when children pretend to be sleeping at noon and you can clearly see that they are not sleeping.

[24:34]

Now what are you two joking about? This is a private joke? No, no. It's recognition time. All right. So if you study that little bump with it, you need to develop an attentional point. An attentional point that's made out of consciousness. but isn't conscious. Because the attentional point can go over the bunk and stay aware into sleep. If attention was simply consciousness, you couldn't have lucid dreaming. You wouldn't remember dreams if if dreams were remembered in consciousness.

[26:05]

So the kind of attention that knows dreaming can kind of be brought into consciousness, but usually then part of the dream disappears. Oh, okay. For what I'm trying to get across here, we have these words. Using these words, I'm trying to get something across. That we notice consciousness. Something we can call consciousness. That keeps us awake in the middle of the night sometimes. And in Zazen, when you're sitting in meditation, you're either falling asleep or falling up into consciousness.

[27:20]

And the craft of Zazen practice is to not fall asleep and not go into consciousness. So I can speak about these things by pointing at them with words. Ich kann also über diese Dinge sprechen, indem ich mit Worten darauf zeige. So you've got these categories, consciousness. Also habt ihr diese Kategorien, das Bewusstsein, dreaming, das Träumen, attention, Aufmerksamkeit, and the activity of falling asleep, die Aktivität des Einschlafens, Or the release of activity to fall asleep.

[28:24]

And if you want to know yourself or know the mind, these are things one should study. They are the domains in which you live. And my naming of them is not a description, really, it's a pointing at. We can point at each other's consciousness, but what this consciousness is and your consciousness is, you know, particular to you? So when you do zazen, you're basically attempting to not be conscious and not fall asleep.

[30:01]

And so the instructions for zazen are about how not to fall asleep and not to fall into consciousness. And the most basic instruction is uncorrected or non-corrected mind. And there's a kind of wonderful little Chinese poem. Excuse me, it's actually Japanese, it's Basho. Sitting quietly, doing nothing. Spring comes. Grass grows by itself. Mm-hmm. Now one of the characteristics of this poem and of Basho, basically the creator of the genre of haiku poems, is the poems are

[31:31]

in a simultaneous time and not a sequential time. It's not about one thing following another. It's all of these things at once. They're sitting quietly. And that sitting quality, sitting quietly, is doing nothing. So a particular kind of experience is described as both sitting quietly and doing nothing. And simultaneously spring comes. And simultaneously grass grows. And simultaneously grass grows by itself.

[32:47]

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You didn't have to do anything. The grass grew by itself. This is also rooted in a yogic culture which emphasizes the simultaneity of interdependence. You know, there's a lot of ideas woven into what I'm saying.

[33:53]

And those ideas are rooted in worldviews. Yeah, and although I hate to quote Einstein because it's too obvious, let me quote Einstein. He says something like, once the validity of a way of thinking is understood, once the validity of a way of thinking is understood, He probably said it in German, of course, so I'm sorry. You have to get it back into Einstein's German now. It's easy to understand. He even says a graduate student of moderate intelligence can understand it. I suddenly feel like I may be a graduate student of moderate intelligence.

[34:59]

Yeah, maybe, yeah. I haven't passed my abitur yet. In any case, he says, it's easy to understand once the validity of the thinking has been established. But he says, the years you spend in the dark, wondering, losing confidence, sort of understanding, not understanding, that's something else. And if you're going to enter into the incubatory process of worldview changing, You have to be willing to be in the dark for quite a while. You can hear it, but it doesn't really compute.

[36:16]

You know, Basho also used to compete in poetry contests they had in Japan. And in one competition in which he also happened to be one of the judges. In this case it didn't help because his pawn lost. And he said about his poem, he said, well, he basically said it deserved to lose because it was not well tailored and the dyeing wasn't good, dyeing the colors.

[37:34]

So it's clear from this statement that his conception of a poem is something you wear. It's not, he didn't write a poem he expected you to understand. He wrote a poem he expected you to wear. sondern er hat ein Gedicht geschrieben, von dem er erwartet, dass du es trägst. And well tailored enough and nicely dyed. Und zwar, dass es wohl genug geschneidert ist und schön gefärbt ist. So you got used to wearing it.

[38:45]

Damit du dich daran gewöhnen kannst, es zu tragen. And it began to be part of your life. Und somit Teil deines Lebens wird. So that's writing a poem based on simultaneity. Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, grass grows by itself, all happening in the same time. But when, but then the written text written giving you simultaneous time, but assumed that it will be worn in future simultaneous time. I said yesterday that I can't think of too many great things about America these days, but one of them is summer vacation.

[40:09]

Because it's three months long and it really is a powerful experience. And again, Andreas said to me yesterday, How do you say it? Can you say it now in German? about trees and didn't matter? Yes, I found it very helpful yesterday when Roshi said that in childhood we often live in a different quality of time or experience. And that I can remember that there were moments, especially in nature, where the support of the other tactics

[41:11]

often that I remember times when the world was as still as it was. So, that you mentioned that our childhood experience other kind of times and I do know that I remember that being outside in nature where which supports a different kind of pace or beat. I did experience Timelessness. Everything was just fine or good with no reason. It was fine and for no reason. And this even in a kind of a bad, different outer. You lived in an orphanage for a while and all that stuff, right?

[42:21]

Only partially. But still, in that you had the trees and the now time which didn't... had no reason. And yet it stays with you today. So it's a time which had no reason, but maybe its reason was it stays with you today. So there's something about this simultaneous time that it stays present. in our future simultaneous times. The Yen Buddhist conception of time is ten times. There's the past, present, and future of the past.

[43:43]

And there's the past, present, and future of the present. And there's the past, present, and future of the future. And all of those are present all at once, and that's the tenth time. And if you, I mean, even if you try to mechanically understand this, you can go back to before you did your Abitur, say. Change the numbers. No, no, no. That's a script for a dumb movie. A sequel. If you go back and imagine that, there were various futures you imagined at that time.

[44:50]

Which weren't the future that happened, but they were present and a dynamic in your thinking. So this is a conception of the all-at-onceness of time and not the flow of time. Where what is past is gone. And the future is not here yet. Dogen says the future flows into the... I can't remember exactly how I said it, so I won't try to say it right now. Okay. Okay. I have to feel this sudden appearance of this experience in childhood only through longer experiences of Zazen got accessible to me again and then it was there and it was clear that it was true

[46:16]

Well, Zazen, because real Zazen is an entry into simultaneous time, the memories that Times of simultaneous times in the past often come forward during zazen. Yeah, I mean, I think I've spoken enough about zazen now for a while. Various bodies appear in zazen. The bodies of our parents. The bodies of our experience. Yeah.

[47:39]

And the body free of the body. Yeah. So let's have a break.

[47:44]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_76.02