Thank you for still being here. You know, I always have some kind of feeling I come back and everybody's gone. It's all disappeared. But I knew that you were probably sleeping during the night, so I didn't want to wake you up, so I didn't bring my luggage upstairs last night. Then about 2.30 I realized I needed something, so I went down and tried to go through the kitchen area, which is not so clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk down the hall, and got things and came back up. I hope I didn't wake anyone up. But at 2.30 p.m. I realized that I needed a few things and went through the kitchen, because it doesn't work that way when I go there. I took my things out of the car and went back upstairs.

[01:02]

I hope I didn't wake anyone up. I'm sorry to keep you waiting so long. Maybe I should have nothing to say so we can end quickly. I'm sorry that you had to wait so long. Maybe it would be better if I didn't have anything to say, because then we could stop early. But I'm a little discombobulated being away and I need a few days at Tangario. You know, I'd kind of like to comment on a line from a Chinese poem. Other life not predicted. Not predicted? Yeah. But just simple. Other life not predicted. And then the next line is, this life stopped.

[02:03]

And then it says, beat the wooden clocks. And I keep liking to start at the beginning. Re-beginning. Discovering how to operate the practice. I spoke about that in Hanover and there's two or three spies from Hanover here. Yeah, but somehow I'm going to have to say a few things related to that because it was quite a... I found myself able to speak about things with such a nice reunion of near about 100 people.

[03:16]

I was able to say things and I felt in some ways more fully than I usually am able. Ich hatte dort das Gefühl, dass ich einige Dinge vollständiger ausdrücken konnte, als mir das normalerweise gelingt. But they were sort of goodbyes, so they ought to be complete. Aber das war ja sowas wie ein Abschied und deshalb sollte das sich vervollständigen. So the other life not predicted. Das andere Leben nicht vorhergesagt. This life stopped. And we're always in some kind of condition like that. You don't have to be old like me. We're always in some sort of condition like that.

[04:19]

And we can even understand the Buddha's enlightenment experience in that way. And it's kind of useful to look at the Buddha's enlightenment experience because it's sort of all of Buddhism in a nutshell. Do you have that expression? Well, I think so. In a nutshell? Well, in a summary. Okay. Because it comes from supposedly Pliny the Elder said an entire copy of Homer's Iliad could be in a nutshell. That's what the reference is. There are similar references. in Buddhism of the entire everything rolled up into a little point.

[05:33]

Yeah, and then where do you put that little point? Okay. Well, anyway, the Buddha realized... usually described as dependent origination. Or we could just say the Buddha realized relationality. The 3,000 causes of each moment. But in the descriptions of the Buddhist enlightenment experience, it says, but before he realized relationality, he had to realize the ignorance of reality.

[07:00]

But in the description of the Buddha's experience of enlightenment it says that before he could recognize the mutual relationships, he had to recognize the ignorance, the blinding of reality. We could say, in other words, he had to realize the falseness of the world created by consciousness, the luminescent screen, the luminous screen. And as I pointed out, many of you, many of us, start practice a really The shift toward practice comes when we have some non-normative, or paranormal even, experience.

[08:07]

that makes us recognize that most of what we're told is a kind of convenient story and it isn't our actual experience. We try to make it our actual experience. It's like you're given these clothes and you try to put them on. You put them on and put them on, but they somehow didn't quite fit. Das ist so, als würdest du Klamotten geschenkt bekommen und du versuchst, die anzuziehen, aber irgendwie passen die einfach nicht richtig. You can give up and pretend they fit. Du kannst aufgeben und so tun, als ob sie passen. Or you can live inside them not fitting and feeling kind of lost. Oder du kannst in ihnen leben, während sie aber gleichzeitig nicht passen und dich dabei verloren fühlen. But the practitioner says, I want a life that fits me.

[09:23]

So I have to start somewhere with experience. So the first step is seeing through the world created by ignorance and the assumed predictability of consciousness. And one crack in that wall is enough for most of us to say something different has to be possible. And some of us keep clustering up that crack, but it opens up again. So it takes some courage to say,

[10:25]

Everyone says it's this way, but really it's not. So you really have to recognize your own reality in contrast to your own relationality, in contrast to the reality that is presumed. Also musst du wirklich dein eigenes Bezogensein erkennen, um die scheinbare Wirklichkeit, um dich mit der scheinbaren Wirklichkeit, um dich dagegen zu setzen, die von allen angenommen wird. But that can be scary, because how can you be right and everyone else be wrong? Aber das kann einem Angst einflößen, weil wie kann das möglich sein, dass du recht hast und alle anderen haben unrecht? So then you live for a while with, well, you all may be right, but maybe I'm right too, and I'm going to deal with that tension.

[11:52]

And then you start noticing there's other people who also have the same feeling. You can spot them sometimes. They live in relationality and not in reality. And the Sangha is those who have discovered each other, who live in relationality. And then you realize actually everybody, because the fact, the facticity, let's not call it the truth, the facticity is relationality. So because the facticity is relationality, everyone, even if they're ignorant of conditioned reality,

[12:58]

a conditional world, they still in many ways live in relationality without actually acknowledging it. Und so lebt jeder oder jede selbst, wenn die Person die tatsächliche Welt nicht anerkennt, trotzdem leben sie in diesen Beziehungsgeflechten. So the practice of things like your practice of compassion, but the more practicable things like the four Brahma Viharas are ways to discover, ways to explore how to be in relationality with people who it's part of the facts of their lives, even if they don't think so. I defined the other day one of the key differences between the Taoist and the Buddhist.

[14:23]

The Taoist wants to live in a groovy world. The Taoist finds a beautiful place in the black forest with a little stream and cows nearby. And perhaps a waterfall and you make a cabin beside the waterfall. But the Buddha says, I'm going to build my cabin where there's a problem. Show me a problem and show me people who don't understand anything. I should be there. Yeah, so then you have a problem. Yeah, and that's our problem because we don't have a waterfall, but we have a nice little stream.

[15:52]

So the Buddha first frees himself, himself, I don't know, him herself, frees him herself from the ignorance of reality. You said reality, no? Yeah. The ignorance of reality. And then realizes, and that dawn, morning star and all that stuff, realizes relationality. Now, what comes in later Buddhism is the further realization of the field or presence of mind. You actually begin to feel the field of mind.

[16:57]

And you feel it full of categories and free of categories. And we could say that Zen Zazen, the Zazen meditation practice of Zen, And we could say that Zazen, the meditation practice in Zen Buddhism, is to keep trying to give us, have the opportunity to notice the mind full of categories and the mind sometimes with less categories and sometimes with virtually no categories. Well, that's a kind of knowledge, a kind of realization, a kind of recognition that you can't get by thinking it. You can conceptually understand it's possible, tabula rasa and all that, but you've got to know it. You have to have the experience of erasing tabula rasa, erasing the tablet,

[18:28]

And letting the tablet fill back up and then erasing it and then seeing in between the categories and so forth. Yes, you're trying to do something. Finally you feel the mind with categories and without categories. Okay, then we could say you're able to explore the creation of categories themselves. Because, you know, to have no categories is to have a category. So there's no way you can get free of categories.

[19:51]

As soon as you see something, there's a category. Okay, so I found myself in Hannover speaking about, for the first time in some years, and speaking about in some detail for the first time in some years, And speaking about the five dharmas. Which is the primary conceptual tool of the Lankavatara Sutra. Yeah. Okay, and the first of the five dharmas is appearance. Again, that doesn't mean anything just to say it. You actually have to practice experientially, knowing the field of mind, when things appear and when they disappear.

[20:55]

So the noticing of appearance, the duration of appearance, and the releasing of appearance. And that's basically the teaching of the four marks, which establish a dharma. When you experience appearance and you feel the duration of appearance and you release appearance, that's the four dharmas. It sounds like three, but it's four. And that's to give you the actual experience of conditioned facticity. So you don't just know about conditional, I know, you don't just know about conditional reality, you feel it by working with appearance, its duration and its release.

[22:29]

Also, es ist nicht nur so, dass du um die Bedingtheit weißt, sondern du arbeitest direkt mit ihr, indem du ihr Erscheinen, ihre Dauer und ihr Loslassen untersuchst. And it's four because there's the disappearance of appearance and there's the release. The fourth is the release. You release it. You don't hang on to it. And all this talk about not being attached and so forth like that, well, that's true. But really, non-attachment means you recognize nothing is graspable. The experience of the categories is always changing and disappearing. Yeah, like that. So then the field of mind, the presence of mind, the appearance within the presence of mind, and the constant release of it, which is called suchness, you release things into suchness.

[24:03]

You release them back into their Okay, so the first is appearance of the five dharmas. The second is naming. And that's appearance conditioned by naming. Und das ist die Erscheinung, die durch den Namen geprägt oder bedingt ist. That means appearance, you have to sort of feel appearance before you name it. Es bedeutet, du musst die Erscheinung spüren noch bevor du sie benennst. And that is a while where you notice how quick you name. You can hardly notice appearance before you name it.

[25:05]

It's faster than an email arrives from the next desk. It's so fast and you have to find the attentional skills to be there before an appearance or as appearance changes into naming. The flower is not red, nor is the willow green. That's a little Zen couplet. which shows it's an antidote, a corrective.

[26:08]

So you notice the flower is red, but then you say, oh, it's not red. So you're reversing naming when you do such a little simple couplet. And you're just feeling the tree, the willow, whatever, before it becomes green. And there are actually so many colors. You just sort of bathe in the suchness of the tree. So here is the five dharmas again. The appearance, the conditioning of naming.

[27:21]

And then the discrimination that occurs as soon as naming occurs. Sentences, thoughts, associations. So the five dhammas are a surgical tool which you have to be quick enough to operate. But once you perform the operation a few times, It's like the crack in the wall, but you can't plaster up. Once you've actually, what do I say, in homeopathic time, you feel this surgery which separates the suchness of appearance from naming and discrimination.

[28:39]

So this is a very powerful conception, but at a gross level, but it's as fine as we can make it. Our actual experience is so much more quick and so much more refined than the five diamonds. They're like a clumsy five-legged elephant. They're like a five-legged elephant. Our actual experience is so much finer, so much more subtle or more diverse than the five Dharmas. The five Dharmas come more like a chubby, five-legged elephant.

[29:46]

We are going to have a very refined elephant. Even the elephant is suddenly going to see, oh yes, appearance. Naming, discrimination. And then right knowledge or wisdom. I sometimes call it wisdom instead of right knowledge, but right knowledge is actually more useful. And right now it means nothing is graspable. You can't grab the name, you can't grab the associations, it's all just relational. And then that is folded into suchness, which is actually the beginning of appearance too.

[31:03]

So here's this sutra, the Lankavatara Sutra, which says, practice the surgery of the five dharmas. And open yourself up to the experience of the Buddha. Okay. Now the seminar in Hanover was called Here and Now. How could I have such a dumb title? But I'm told that I made the choice. But a buzzing fly has no here and now. Aber eine summende Fliege kennt kein Hier und Jetzt.

[32:19]

A buzzing fly is only here and now. The buzzing fly, well, am I here or am I now? You can't, the buzzing fly can't make such a distinction. I can't. You're interfering with my here-ness now. So it's quite interesting that the buzzing fly, which is us two, you know, we're all... The allness of the buzzing fly. It only has here and now and doesn't know it. So maybe it's buzzness, the suchness of buzzness. But we do make these distinctions. Aber wir treffen diese Unterscheidung.

[33:24]

We turn the beating of the hand into a now, which is into a here, which is disappearing in now, or vice versa. Wir verwandeln das Schlagen des Hands in ein Hier, das in ein Jetzt verschwindet, oder umgekehrt. So I've been trying in the last few Teishos and in the Hanover Seminar to speak about, let's create some categories that create an experience of time, the experiential dynamic of time. I've tried in the last few Teishos and also in Hanover to ask the question or to give the order, let's create categories that So the three initial categories I think one has to get really used to are within our activity, as I've said, sequential time,

[34:30]

A cumulative time. And paratactic time. And again, we've gone over that in earlier Teishos. But I suggest that when you're walking, wherever you go after the Teisho, Feel, if you're only in sequential time, one step after another. And there is a sequence because the left foot may go ahead of the right foot, and then the right foot goes ahead of the left foot, and so forth. So there's a natural sequence there. Actual experience. And feel yourself in that sequential time.

[35:50]

Yeah, and then if you see somebody or you're going to the work meeting, you may feel you're in accumulative time. So notice that shift from just sequential time, why no worries, just walking along, and the cumulative time. And then maybe you sit down and you look at the Buddha across the stream if you happen to be down there. For a while it was a stream enterer, and then we got it out of the mud and put it on a stand.

[36:58]

And now it's on the other shore. So maybe you can just sit there on the bench or whatever and you can be in paratactic time. There's just appearance. Then there's the connectors between them. They're hardly noticed. So just with these three categories, you've begun to find categories that open experience to you. And experiences that you can notice how paratactic time just can open into suchness. And into profound immediacy. But that's, oh yeah, that's where we can start next time if I happen to remember.

[38:33]

But I said, this life, the other life is not predicted. Life has stopped. Beat the wooden clock. Thank you.

[39:01]

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