The Shuso came and mentioned to me today, among other things, that he felt it would be good if I spoke about the two truths. And then the translator in another context mentioned to me, I ought to talk about the two truths. So that makes two truths, so I guess I have to speak about it. But the word I brought up yesterday, yesterday, day before yesterday, Whenever it was.

[01:02]

Meaning non-comparative thinking or non-comparative noticing. We can understand as a dynamic of the fruition or realization of the two truths. Yes. Well, first let me say that, you know, I'm very happy, as all of you know, that we have these facilities to do the practice period now and to, I think, establish practice here for the long term.

[02:31]

Yeah, more likely establish practice here for the long term. And what I hoped for was a more articulated and developed space to meet with practitioners. And a better space for the residents in which to live. But what I didn't expect is it's related me to the larger Sangha much more intrinsically and extrinsically.

[03:35]

I wasn't testing you. I was just kind of letting my mind wander. Wandering in the forest of words. Black forest, no. Because, you know, to do this, it had to be an action of the whole Sangha as much as possible. And by any comparable measure, it definitely has been an action of the large part of the Sangha. But it's meant that many more people...

[04:59]

write me and email me and so forth about practice than they used to. And as I start to think about how to continue the teaching, think about it as instrumentally as I can, Und je mehr ich darüber nachdenke, wie ich die Lehre weiterführen kann, auf eine so instrumentelle, anwendbare, umsetzbare Art und Weise wie möglich. I wonder always about the big question in what we're doing. Da stelle ich mir immer die große Frage, was wir tun. Oh, yes. Sorry to say it again. How can it primarily... lay Sangha living all over the place, pass the lineage teaching.

[06:16]

And I suppose it's not so important to many people, but to me this is my job and what I really want to do. Yeah, so I've been thinking about what teachings I've been giving are useful and so forth. So I wrote a letter to, I don't know, maybe somewhere close to a thousand people. And I said, what aspects of practice over the years have been important to you? And several other questions, but basically that. And I've gotten a lot of answers.

[07:18]

And Wonderful letters. Once I get them translated. And I've got way more translated than I can read in months or weeks anyway. So it's made my schedule rather different than it used to be. Plus, we're in a successional change in Creston, which I have to engage in pretty clearly so that it's supported in a way that it will happen. And they're in a rather significantly different time zone.

[08:28]

So that's made my schedule kind of funny. Yeah, I'm just trying to give you a feeling for what I'm trying to do and be in the practice period. Not as thoroughly as I was last year, but as much as I can. And now that we're in a somewhat related topic, there's been... Here I'm asking you a question. There's been quite a lot of talk over several years now if I would video my lectures as well as audio them.

[09:47]

So someone made a video The first one I've ever said yes to, really, in Crestone a few months ago. So I haven't even had the nerve to look at it yet. I saw five minutes or so, and I thought, this is enough. But I sent it to a friend of mine, an old friend of mine, who actually, I think, created the word intermedia. Intermedia? Yeah. Do we have that? Intermedia? We don't have it? Then you may have to explain it. Intermedia, meaning... Between the medias.

[10:50]

All the different medias. Yes, okay, I see, yes. His email is even intermedia. He was the first one to do light shows with all these things flashing at once, which became a rock and roll standard. Yeah, so I asked him, I said, what do you think I should do? And I asked him, you know, what equipment would be needed? How would you like it with the camera sitting back there now? He wrote me an email the other day which said, well, you know, this lecture is not bad that you did, but it's... I like your other lectures I happen to have come to which are more formal. And what he seems to mean, I have to think about it a little more, is when I just present a teaching, he likes that.

[12:12]

But when I say, well, I'm thinking about how to teach this and maybe I could use that word or something, he doesn't like that. And that's interesting to me. Because for me, I do that to communicate to you that that's what you should be doing. Because to just present the teaching doesn't mean much to me. What's interesting is to explore it in a way that lets you explore it. So that would make me probably, maybe if it was videoed, I might speak a little differently. For example, before I was audio lectured, I would speak about controversial things.

[13:44]

For example, My friend Gerd, who did this intermedia, was the first person to ever film Alan Watts. And part of what made Alan Watts famous. But if I'm speaking about Alan Watts... You know, I knew very well and did his funeral and so forth. I might speak about him differently if I wasn't being recorded. And I would, sometimes I used to say, would you turn off the recording now and I'll say something and then turn it back on now.

[14:54]

But I never do that anymore because I just edit myself inside so thoroughly that I don't even have to bother turning off the tape sometimes. I don't think you've lost much. But it is different. So I don't know. So you can see there's an implied question here. Now let's speak about Hi Shi Ryo. Where this is most famous is when Yao Shan is asked by a monk what he's doing.

[15:58]

He says, I'm practicing not thinking. And supposedly the monk says to him, what's not thinking? How do you practice not thinking? And he says, non-thinking. And I guess this is a bigger distinction in English than it is in Japanese. Or Chinese. But the word fu shiryo means not thinking and hi shiryo means non-thinking. So there is a distinction in Japanese.

[17:05]

And shirio means thinking. But it's not the usual word for thinking. And the real part means to measure. So shiryo means measured thinking, basically comparative thinking. No, I don't know how close to Chinese kanji are the same as the Japanese kanji. I don't know. You all know the word kanji, right? Characters. Um... But in any case, we could say it's immeasurable or unmeasured thinking.

[18:23]

Now, let me come back to that in a moment or two. And start out with the two truths. The two truths is a way of looking at the world, which has been pretty much from very early Buddhism. But as a primary articulated practice, Nagarjuna is the one who emphasized it. If we are going to practice with this the first step is to really get it conceptually clear. And it's easy to understand conceptually, at least mentally conceptually.

[19:44]

Okay, so Buddhism says everything is interdependent, changing, etc. But... The way consciousness works is to make things implicitly permanent. So you have to get used to this difference. And we could even in the language we've developed in the Dharma Sangha say it's a difference between awareness and consciousness. And what I was told is this has come up in the discussion groups and seminar days. And somebody, I guess, even wondered how during Christmas rush shopping do you practice the two truths?

[21:05]

Observe but don't buy anything. Well, no, that would be the ultimate truth. And when it's called relative and absolute or ultimate, this is a Buddhist mistake. Because there's no absolute Buddhism except that there's no absolute truth. or absolute truth because in Buddhism there is nothing absolute except there is what? The only absolute is that there is no absolute. And the only absolute is that there is nothing absolute.

[22:09]

Now the Yogacara divides these two truths into three. And our ancestors, Dongshan and Zhaoshan, and our ancestors, Dongshan and Zhaoshan, divided it up into five. The five ranks and the the same teaching, basically, of the two truths. Different ways, sort of different experienceable realizations of the two truths. Okay, but let's look at the the Yogacara making it three.

[23:22]

They divided the relative into the illusory and the relative. Now again, we're trying to find words in English and German that we can practice these teachings with. And maybe instead of relative and fundamental, it might be good to use functional and fundamental. And functional is fairly explanatory, but fundamental, we have to have some, what the heck does fundamental mean?

[24:23]

But, you know, unless you look at these things in some detail, you just have an idea about it, you don't really, it doesn't really affect you. So, the word relative already implies the fundamental. Because relative means already they're interdependent, relative to each other, etc., And Einstein's theory of relativity. That's the world we live in now. But Einstein did think there was a real world out there of mathematics and so forth. Yeah, but then you have Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

[25:30]

And Niels Bohr complementarity. So this is an idea that's part of our science now, that everything is relative. So, since basically the word relative means emptiness, because if everything's relative, there's nothing to grab onto because it's always changing and related. So the recognition that everything is relative leads to the teaching of emptiness. But once you have the teaching of emptiness that it points back to relative in a new experiential way. Am I going into this in too much detail?

[26:47]

It's okay. I sound like a textbook. Okay. All right. So... What Yogacara does, which is basically Zen as a form of Yogacara practice, an expression of Yogacara practice, is to divide the relative into illusory and relative. sometimes it's imaginary imaginary, relative and fundamental okay, now this enters this makes, turns it from in Nagarjuna's teaching more of a philosophical abstraction.

[28:05]

In Nagarjuna's presentation, it's more philosophical and abstract. And Yogacara makes it more practicable, actionable. Why is that? Okay, because when you go through the effort to notice that everything's relative, To notice that really it's only activity, there are no entities. This is a big effort we have to make. And this is the difference between generalized practice people do and adept practice. The adept practitioner makes sure they never see the world as entities.

[29:16]

Der fortgeschrittene Praktizierende stellt sicher, dass er oder sie die Welt nie als Entitäten oder Einheiten sieht. And that's a huge step to do. Das ist ein riesiger Schritt. Because we, particularly in our culture, we grow up and bodily treat the world as if it were a bunch of entities. And in English, a non-entity means a completely inconsequential person. Oh. I've got three people working for me, but one of them is a non-entity. I shouldn't even pay him. So there's no positive meaning in English to a non-entity. If some other group said that Baker is a non-entity, if you took it seriously, you'd leave.

[30:43]

And people heard I'm teaching non-entityness. So I think I'm going to have to stop in a moment. So you're going to have to have a part two. Well, there's two truths. This is part one, the illusory part. So, in the Yogacara formulation, you think of the, when you think that things are permanent or entities, this is a delusion. it's only an imagination.

[32:06]

There's no such thing as an entity. So you somehow have to root that habit out of yourself and the hardest place to root it out of it is in your bodily sense of the world as essentially permanent. So it means that you have to for several months at least and just some of the time all the rest of your life Remind yourself that there are no entities. So on every appearance, when there's a tendency to name the appearance, to give it a concept, The concept you give it is activity.

[33:27]

That's the best distinction in English I've ever come up with in half a century. Sorry, it's not very good, but it's the best I can do. So here's the dynamic. Do you know the word seesaw? Like a teeter-totter, but a seesaw. And I think seesaw was Sawyer's a Sawyer is a person who saws Like a carpenter when they would saw that used to be a refrain see saw see saw to kind of work together and Or I could use a more technical word like oscillate. And then we have the possibility of talking about vacillate. To vacillate is to wobble or waffle.

[34:51]

To be doubtful. Should I? Should I? So you want your watch to oscillate but not vacillate. Chief watchers, they vacillate. Okay. So if you really notice your experience, you'll notice that you bodily have a habit of seeing the world as permanent. you walk on the floor as if it was a floor.

[35:55]

And you don't sense it necessarily as a bunch of boards supported from underneath and could collapse. And there's all kinds of ways you want to develop to notice things are activities and not entities. But one way in which this is a practice because if in your feeling mind and you have developed a mindfulness sufficiently that you're present in the feeling, thinking, emotional process. So you notice that you basically think relating to the world as entity.

[37:03]

Und du bemerkst, dass du im Grunde genommen dich auf die Welt als Entitäten beziehst. But you've made the conceptual intention to remember its activities. So you go back and forth, seesaw. You see it as an entity and then you remind yourself and you say, oh, it's an activity. And you try to act in relation to it as it was an activity. But then you go back to seeing it as an entity. Then you go back to seeing it as an entity. Then you go back to seeing it as an entity. And you build up a charge. If we put illusory or imaginary here, Then we put relative here.

[38:32]

And then we put fundamental there. Most of us go back and forth between relative and entities, relative and illusory. Someone said the lotus needs the mud. So here the illusory is the mud. So you're going back and forth between you notice you see it as interdependent and then you notice you see it as permanent. So here the Yogacara and Nagarjuna are working with the dynamic of appearance. The appearance goes back and forth between being relative and...

[39:33]

entity non-relative and if you keep going back and forth you notice you're doing it and you feel it you're building up energy because every time you go this back every time you go back and forth, you're kind of building up a charge. And then at some point, when the non-relative rejects that, you shoot right across relative into the fundamental. And that can be an enlightenment experience.

[41:01]

But it's built up by really noticing when you see things as activity and when you see as entities and feeling the difference until finally you only see things as activities. It's fine. We're not going there. So that dynamic is why Yogacara divided relative up into two. Not because it's philosophically more accurate, because as a practice it is truer to the realization of emptiness. Until finally you rest in the stillness of the fundamental, Okay.

[42:20]

Meredith Monk, who's a singer, experimental singer, composer and stuff, a woman. Her pet is a turtle. But she's allergic to cats and dogs and things, so her husband gave her a turtle. But for her, the turtle becomes the fundamental. Because it's at an entirely different pace. It's living in a different world than she is. and going back to Christmas shopping. If you become a Zen turtle in the department store and you're at an entirely different pace but you're completely present but at a different pace The clerks in the department store will notice it.

[43:42]

They'll feel something intimate is happening. They'll be a little, what's going on? This person relates to me at some other level. Occasionally I've seen a clerk in a busy time of day in a store. And his or her spouse or lover or friend comes in. And suddenly there's a different space between the clerk and the friend that's different than with the clerk and the customer.

[44:45]

You said different space at different time. different space. You can feel it immediately. And there's that kind of difference if you can practice the two truths in the midst of Christmas shopping. I wish I could go shopping with you. We'd have fun.

[45:18]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_70.94