There's a simile image from very early Buddhism, I think Buddhist time, historical Buddhist time, of three acrobats, One standing, and I think the second one standing on the shoulders of the first, and the third one is upside down on top of the... standing upside down on the top of the second one. A picture of three acrobats, one standing down, the second on the shoulders of the first, and the third upside down on the shoulders of the second. And the historical Buddha, I think, used this image to suggest that we should protect each other.

[01:05]

Because all three of these acrobats in this image are dependent on each other's balance Each is protected by each protecting the other. And, you know, we commonly in English-speaking Western Buddhism say to save all sentient beings And if we changed it to this earlier idea to protect all sentient beings, we wouldn't quite understand what it means. We wouldn't understand that to protect others is our way of protecting ourselves.

[02:15]

Or to maintain the balance of others is to maintain our own balance. I'm using this simile just to illustrate that the word protect and the word save in English neither reach into what this simile of shared balance means. And the historical Buddha uses it to suggest that, to say that, not suggest, but to say that Our life with others is a precarious balance.

[03:39]

And it's incumbent upon, required, incumbent upon each practitioner to maintain the balance of each other person in order to find their own balance. Yeah, and the word balance itself has its own dimensions. So I'm using words here, and as I said last night, speaking easily often misses the mark.

[04:43]

And Mark is met through your own experience. And I also yesterday said in a teisho that the tabula rasa is an erased slate. Meaning in our practice, no matter how free we think we are from our, or I may, our western culture in which we have grown up, or grown down, or over, Cannot be fully erased. So I ask this, I think, perplexing question. If that's mind...

[05:52]

How do we feel it as mind? And so I have this, I think, surprising, not surprising, but, how do you say, a question with which you have to deal with, if that is the spirit, how do we feel it as a spirit? And feel, not just understand it, feel. And feel, not just understand it, but really feel it. So I'm trying to Yeah, I don't know. Maybe we can reach into deployment of that idea. Unfolding is deployed during this session. And in the end, overall, what I'm saying here is that Mark for us is the... What is decisive for us in practice is experience.

[07:42]

And in the end what I'm saying here is that the essential for us or the decisive for us in practice is experience. And experience which belongs to us has to be discovered by us each. But this discovery of what's veridical, veridical means coincides with reality. We have to discover what's veridical for ourself, but it then has real power when we discover that others have discovered the same veridicality. And a shared sense of truth is what Sangha is.

[08:47]

I also said yesterday we come together as family and we come together as community and society, even a so-called civilization. But we can also come together and I think we long to come together in a vision of truth. And that's where religion comes in. What is the source of religion, I would say. And because it's believed to be true it's the source of a heck of a lot of the problems in the world. But because some truths seem to be rather untrue doesn't mean we are still not drawn to the truth.

[10:08]

What's true for us and what's true for our life, within and as phenomenality, Yeah, and within and together with and as others. So that's what we're trying to do here. So we have a dharma hall, a buddha hall and an absorption hall. These allow us to step out of our usual familial, societal and community definitions and discover what might be, I hope, true for ourselves.

[11:33]

Now, It's difficult to say something about what's not erased from the slate. But one thing is that we tend, we Westerners, tend to take the measure of truthfulness is consciousness. Experiencible and controllable consciousness.

[12:40]

And as someone pointed out in the last session, that which is not within that consciousness is the realm of Lucifer, of where the devil has his or her power. Nowadays, we have to be careful that the devil is just male. So we're rather scared of, deeply built into the structures of how we function in the world, rather scared of what we can't control within consciousness. So we emphasize, we Westerners, we Westerners emphasize the nature of the world known through consciousness. Wir Westler betonen, die Natur der Welt, so wie sie durch das Bewusstsein gekannt wird.

[14:02]

Das chinesische, ostasiatische, yogische Maß stellt die Frage, was ist die Natur des Bewusstseins und nicht, was ist die Natur der Welt, so wie sie durch das Bewusstsein gekannt wird. And the criterion or the decisional dynamic is experience. Empiricism. Yeah, I'm not really trying to be philosophical or something like that here. I'm just saying that after all of my more than a half a century of practicing here in the West, I keep seeing that the main problem is what's not fully erased from the blackboard.

[15:10]

But it also can be an advantage because it gives us something to work with and around. Aber es kann auch ein Vorteil sein, weil uns das etwas gibt, mit dem wir arbeiten können und um das herum wir arbeiten können. Okay, so let's go to this now, to the translation of the word sashin. Lass uns jetzt mal auf die Übersetzung des Wortes sashin schauen. Now, we're all doing a sashin. Wir alle machen ein sashin. And what do we know? How do we know a sashin? We know it's a schedule that we follow and that we follow with others. And that it sometimes includes painful knees and legs. And it sometimes involves a sweet, bitter and sour experience.

[16:21]

That is not just sometimes remembered, but relived. So we enter it and the structure of Sashin itself helps us gather the mind, if we use the translation of gather. So the structure of the sashin itself gathers something over there. I don't know if it's mine, but it gathers something. It gathers a lot of pain, but often it must have... You come back for more, I don't know why. There's some kind of purification or something that happens. But if sashin, if we translate sashin also as to touch the mind, what does it mean we're touching the mind?

[17:46]

And that's more up to us. The sashin isn't going to do that for us. And that's up to us. The Sashin will not do that for us. The Sashin and the Buddha Hall and the Dharma Hall and the Absorption Hall all give us the opportunity maybe to touch the mind, but it's up to us. And I would say that depends on two things, mainly the refinement of our attention. And the courage of our intention to know ourselves in our aliveness and with others. Okay, so touching the mind.

[18:54]

Now, do I mean essence of mind? And some translations in English are to know the essence of mind. Yeah, I think that's not a good translation. Or indication. It's probably a translation, but it's the wrong indication. For example, the essence of water would exclude Coca-Cola. Sugar water is also, you know, is not the essence of water. But what I'm trying to say is, let's look at not the essence, but maybe the essentials of water, if I'm just using water as an image, analogy.

[20:04]

Well, I mean, the essentials or essentiality of water for us would be like, well, for us anyway, wetness, maybe not for a frog, but for us, wetness. Or it fluidly takes any shape. And it shows us always how things actually exist. It shows us gravity. So we could say these are the essentials, sugar water or not, the essentials of this, what we could call, what we call water. Okay, so what are the essentials of mind?

[21:11]

Okay, again, we have this sashim, which is gathering mind for us. And we're sitting here in the Zendo on the Tan, on the platform. And there's some kind of mind going on, or mental noticing, knowing going on. And then you notice a difference. So let's see, I last Sashin mentioned, a tractor comes by. And as I said, in Crestone, it's the Los Angeles, New York flights that come over.

[22:12]

Other than that, it's silent. Except for birds and things like that. But here, I don't think we hear the airplanes in the Zendo, but we do hear the tractors and cars and things. So you're sitting and you're kind of like ignoring the pain. If you happen to have pain. And you're not thinking at all. You're refraining from thinking about when the bell might ring. And maybe you notice the difference between the mind that can't stop thinking about when the bell might ring and the mind which doesn't care whether the bell ever rings. Or only occasionally cares.

[23:30]

When will that damn bell ring? Then you go back to not caring. Now, are these different kinds of minds? Are you touching two different kinds of, two kinds of minds here? One which names immediately whatever comes by the tractor. And our usual conscious mind, just automatic, we don't even notice it's naming tractor. It's named tractor before the tractor even is much perceptible. So maybe in this mind which isn't concerned with whether the bell rings, Yeah, there's a tractor coming.

[24:55]

When you notice its sound as well as its potential to name it. And as Atmar has said, you sometimes notice its oiliness that the smell even reaches the Zendo. Now, maybe you can hold a distinction here between and feel a distinction here between the mind that almost immediately names and the mind which Yeah, maybe it won't name it as a tractor, it's just some kind of sound. Now, the yogic skills of meditation, you know, there's all teachings of this and that, jhanas, etc.,

[25:59]

But really it comes down to your teaching yourself through noticing these distinctions. And you notice the distinction between the mind which names and the mind which doesn't have to name? and the mind which simply doesn't name. Now as I pointed out a few times that in yogic practice all mental phenomena have a bodily component and etc. and vice versa. I have to mention that because we're Westerners. For an East Asian Buddhist yogic culture, everyone knows that. You don't have to mention that mental phenomena have a physical component.

[27:20]

in an East Asian, yogic, Buddhist culture, everyone knows that. You don't have to mention that spiritual phenomena have a physical component, and vice versa. So you, in this settled state, You can notice the distinction between the mind which thinks about or names, the mind which doesn't have to, and the mind which really doesn't. Now, would you give these different names?

[28:45]

For your own benefit, would you call one mind or one awareness or one consciousness or one non-dual consciousness or one non-conceptual consciousness or non-conceptual knowing? For yourself, would you name the consciousness, the non-dual consciousness, the non-conceptual consciousness or the non-naming spirit? How would you name them all? Or will you give them each a color? This is the blue and this is the green mind and this is the chartreuse mind. Or it's just a feeling the body knows and can hold. And here's this holding again, which is the root of the word Dharma.

[29:52]

So Zazen, at least in Sashin Zazen, and Sashin Zazen allows you to establish a non-dual, we could say, which is more doing, or non-conceptual, which is a more form, mind. Non-dual is a form of doing, acting in the world, functioning. And non-conceptual is a modality of mind. Okay. Now, all of the Abhidharma and the teachings develop from people making these distinctions. And using some sort of meditative practice, and usually with others, and the Chinese emphasize that with others has a more expeditious power.

[31:21]

effective okay and then you get so you stay let's say we pick the mind which doesn't have to name which arises in a pretty bodily, mentally still modality. And then we notice that that still bodily and mentally still mind, has a spatial feel to it.

[32:25]

And it can name or it can refrain from naming. And when it refrains from naming or when it's held experientially, Who you are in your memories begins to take new forms. Experiences which called forth when you weren't even noticing this kind of mind years ago as a kid looking over a fence at a cow or something. In fact, you find that this mind which doesn't have to name has a secret history in your own experience which begins to surface.

[33:30]

It's so hard to discover this in daily life, because daily life calls forth the mind we've developed in the seamless brain-formed consciousness. So we have this Dharma hall, this Buddha hall, and this absorption hall to give us a chance to investigate our aliveness. and to touch the essentials of mind. Okay? Are we all ready to go? I mean, stop? Thank you.

[34:41]

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