This is the last occasion for our day show this time anyway. I feel it more poignantly because I'm leaving Monday. But I'm glad I was able to travel, which I wasn't sure I was going to be able to. And have this week with you. The word occasion means to fall together. Yeah. Maybe like when two people look at each other and fall in love. Or at least bow together. Oh, excuse me for being so romantic. But it's my pleasure to be here with you. And the world falls together on each occasion.

[01:19]

Yuan Wu, the compiler of the Blue Cliff Records, says, whole essential being Ganzes essentielles Sein. That's about as big a statement as you can make. Das ist eine so umfassend große Aussage, wie man sie nur treffen kann. Whole essential being. Ganzes essentielles Sein. Appears before you. Er scheint vor dir. Whole essential being appears before you. And nowhere else. Yeah. It turns steadily and smoothly. Mm-hmm. All he's saying is everything is interdependent.

[02:39]

He's not saying it. philosophically. He's saying it experientially. The whole essential being appears before you and nowhere else. It turns smoothly and steadily. Um, uh... This great intact potential is like water poured into water. Everything is equalized in one suchness. Yeah. So height. And this is also my saying yesterday that phenomena is the medium of practice.

[04:02]

Each occasion is the medium of practice. What is an occasion? What is the site of engagement? This teaching of interdependence as a site of engagement. You know, we can't change everything. You can't change train stations into a yogic matrix unless you're a filmmaker. You can't change your office probably. But if it's really your office, you might make it more how a person feels entering it rather than how it looks.

[05:11]

Yeah. You know, when... when we're sleeping. Sometimes just the way the covers are affects our ability to sleep. they touch our chin or touch our neck, maybe we feel cut off, you know, things like that. And what I'm emphasizing again is phenomena is the yogic medium of practice.

[06:13]

And I'm trying to talk about a yogic world. Yeah, and you know, if we're going to practice Buddhism in the West, we have to absorb, look at the different the contrasting world views. And we also have to understand the subtleties of individualism and personal identity in Western culture. are going to be absorbed into Buddhist ideas.

[07:14]

And how they're absorbed is going to be important. Although we can think this through, although we can think this through, it's really going to be the presence of individual practice and institutional forms of practice, which actually bring in a real way Buddhism into Western life. Now, I just want to give you some examples of yogic culture. Yeah, and I think we've actually accomplished quite a lot this week. You know, Kentucky Fried Chicken, you know, things like that. Also wie Kentucky Fried Chicken, ja, und sowas, solche Dinge.

[08:28]

Or Yogi practice. Und so Yogi practice. So now let me speak about robes. Lass mich jetzt also über Roben sprechen. If you learn to wear robes, it's rather different. Wenn man lernt, Roben zu tragen, ist es ziemlich anders. You actually have to hold your shoulders back a bit to make robes work. What is the concept of Asian, and in particular now, Japanese clothes? Yeah, well, I guess you'd have to say that You know, we wear our clothes and wear means to protect, to defend. The Japanese don't exactly... wear their clothes.

[09:39]

They're enclosed in their clothes, but sort of like in a sleeping bag. And the body is conceived of as unclothed inside the clothes. You don't wrap the clothes around you. So that you have to stand, so that the hang from the shoulders. And hang from the hips. And pretty more, pretty much, you're naked inside. Yeah, I mean they don't wrap I mean, men and now women sometimes have a fundoshi, which they wrap around their loins.

[10:51]

And there's some expression, I can't remember it in Japanese. Basically, tighten up your loincloth, which means like roll up your sleeves and let's get to work. But the basic feeling is you're free inside your clothes. And it's obvious Issey Miyake took this basic concept of being free inside the cloth and the cloth is independent of the body. So, the kimono is just the width of the cloth from the loom. And it's not really cut to fit your body.

[12:06]

It's just, there it is, and it might be there, might be there. So the cloth is given its own freedom. And the collar is supposed to sit off the neck and not touch the neck. And it's called the Okumi Sagari. Please remember that. And this came up when we were trying to get poor Nicole Baden in Crestone robes. Because she's very susceptible to the cold. She freezes here. Even in Johanneshof she freezes. And she has serious chill blains. It's like, it's not frostbite, but it's And she's wearing something like this.

[13:23]

Poor young woman. So we'd all decided to get together and get her robes. So we got into the Okumi Sagari. Please remember it. Because And you have to be careful because, you know, the collar, if it's far back from the neck, only young girls and geishas wear their collar far back from the neck. Because the collar is an erogenous zone. Because if you look down the collar, you can see that they're naked inside their clothes. So first they made her kind of a geisha collar. We said, this is too much. For a nun.

[14:50]

So we had the more male-style monk's collar, which is a little closer to the neck. So the Japanese wrap their hara, hara maki, Maybe we can talk more about the hara for Manuela's sake later in the discussion. And stillness and movement later. All right. So anyway, we got to this a little bit better. clothing. And she noticed the difference right away. And she wrote me an email. And all this is to read it to you. No rabbits. I've also started wearing a haramaki.

[16:07]

We got her a haramaki. Old German women wear haramakis. You can buy them in Germany. And old half-German American men wear haramakis. I have also started wearing a haramaki. And that in combination with having more space around the neck Somehow centers my body differently. I now feel concentrated and centered around the hara. And wide and open around the shoulders. With the modern collar, she's now writing to the woman who made this. The modern Japanese collar sits on the neck like Western.

[17:07]

With the modern collar, as you call it, which is what I used to wear, I felt my head to be almost cut off from the rest of my body. This widening feeling around the shoulders and around the neck makes my head feel like it's I'm intrigued by how clothes can articulate different ways of feeling one's body. Now, I discovered this when I started wearing robes.

[18:21]

Actually, the clothes help bring forth the yogic body. As the Japanese house is designed to support meditation postures and ordinary activity, The clothes are clearly designed around meditation. a different concept of the body than we have. As you don't heat the house, because the house isn't cold, the body is cold. So you have ways of heating the body in the house, but not the house. It's much more carbon neutral.

[19:26]

But also the clothes are designed so you heat and cool yourself inside the kind of sleeping bag of the clothes. You don't Keep the cold out, you keep the heat in. So these are different concepts. To dress so you keep the heat in rather than the cold out. Yeah, okay. No, I am not suggesting that all of us who are lay practitioners. You should start wearing kimonos and haramakis and okumi sagari collars.

[20:31]

You get fired from your job. But it's one of the reasons it's been hard for me to give up the wearing of robes as part of my practice life. You don't feel your body tied off by a belt. And you feel your body quite independent inside the clothes. Okay, so we'll figure out what to do, you know, in coming generations. of how to develop a yogic practice within our culture. Now, if the Western dictum is to know thyself.

[21:48]

The Zen dictum would be to comparably to know the mind. How do you know the mind? Okay. Well, you join the breath to mind. You join the breath to mind. And what does that do? I mean, The attentional breath mind, attention is mind, and breath is mind. And it's both voluntary physical activity and autonomic or involuntary physical activity.

[23:02]

So for lack of a better word, by joining breath to mind, You're physicalizing the mind. You're giving yourself a way to notice the mind physically. And you're stabilizing the mind. And you're energizing the mind. Because by bringing, I mean, can it really be this simple? Can such a thing as joining breath to mind really make these kinds of subtle differences?

[24:05]

Yes, absolutely. Why didn't someone tell us earlier? Well, we only had to wait 200 generations or 2,000, you know, why not? We now know. Our culture is young, it's just getting together. On the planet. Yeah. No, I really believe that. We are in a very early stage of civilization. So if you join breath to mind, the attention is mind and the breath is physical activity. His mind and the breath is physical activity.

[25:06]

And you're physicalizing the mind... and energizing the mind, the breath becomes a kind of bridge by which the energy of the body can be brought into the mind. You can actually pour energy into your thinking through the breath. So it physicalizes the mind? stabilizes the mind because the body is more stable and different pace than just thinking.

[26:09]

And it energizes the mind, as I said. And it engages the mind with the breath and with phenomena. Whole essential being appears before you and nowhere else. It turns smoothly and steadily. Like water poured into water. This is like breath and mind and the whole essential being appearing before you, stabilized through the breath.

[27:12]

So, we join to know the mind. You join breath to mind. This is considered the most effective way to do it. So that's first. So please do that. Get used to that. Join breath to mind. Is it your birthday? That's my birthday present. Every day your birthday. And then... join the breath mind to phenomena. Join breath mind to immediacy. Begin to know the present, not in the categories of present, divided from the past, but as immediacy.

[28:35]

This intact great potential Yuan Wu says, is ready made for you. It appears nowhere else, is ready made for you, and turns smoothly and steadily. This all is a statement about the alchemy of breath, mind and phenomena. Yeah, it's almost like you explore the cave of immediacy with the alchemy of the breath.

[29:47]

Or you open immediacy into the wide sky of the sun, something like that. Through this alchemy of of attentional breath mind joined to phenomena. Then phenomena becomes the matrix of practice. For each moment, whatever it is. Over generations it begins to affect how you dress, how you design your houses and so forth. Because this experienced concept of the body is supported by how you enter and transform immediacy. Is that enough?

[31:02]

Yeah, time is running out. We spent too much on Akumi Sagari. We spent too much on Akumi Sagari. Anyway, I want to fall into this world, this yogic world with you. And I'd like to feel that you're continuing it in your life. And I like it that sometimes Husbands and wives come here to the seminars.

[32:09]

Maybe it means this teaching is affecting breakfast table conversation. This is great. So when I come back I can fall into the yogic world with you again. So we still have this afternoon. Okay. Thank you very much.

[32:36]

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