Thank you. Thank you, each of you, for being here and practicing this way, exploring how to practice this way and to bring practice into your own life. And yesterday in the seminar, we kind of fumbled around with the, you know, questions. These questions, what is true? What is real? And what is a refuge? How do we find a refuge or peace of mind or freedom from suffering or equanimity? And these three questions are the dynamic, I would say, within the development of Buddhism.

[01:01]

But they're also, prior to Buddhism, they're bigger than Buddhism. And although it may seem a little silly somehow, or sophomoric as I suggested, still I think we want to keep bringing our life explicitly, not just now and then, or by happenstance, or implicitly to these questions. And then, yeah, corollary is how do we exist with others? How do we exist in this phenomenal world? Now I started out the first lecture really saying we're something like a body sponge which absorbs our activity, absorbs our life, absorbs what happens to us or rejects, you know.

[02:02]

Even rejecting is a kind of absorption. And yet we, you know, usually we don't know how to process it. So we act out of it And try to act our way out of it and act out of it in the sense of from it. But practice says, you know, have this stop, the stop of practice period, the stop of zazen, the stop of non-conceptual mind. in which again our karma slides forward into our life. So usually the first part of practice, I'd say the first couple years of when a person starts to sit are filled with karmic driftwood, bric-a-brac, and so forth.

[03:10]

Yeah, and you just live in the midst of it, get used to living in the midst of it. But as I said, you develop, hopefully the body becomes a stand for this, for a certain kind of physical stability and then becomes a mirror and then transparency of body, mind, transparency, mirroring and also transparent in this world Now in some schools of Buddhism they list 16 forms of the subtle self. And one of the 16 is to see existence from the object's side. To see existence from the side of the objects of the world. Now often I... emphasize practicing with these tools, these surgical tools of the four marks and the five dharmas, which some of you may not be familiar with, but I think it's important to be familiar with these tools.

[04:31]

And they allow you to see how the mind works, how we function, how we create consciousness, how we create our narrative identity and so forth. And you can see the process and interfere with the process, alter the process. You can't do, can't, I mean, the craft of practice is to, is to have a tool like this in which you can enter into the, you know, the habit pattern of the mind. Now, the last, you know, weeks or months or fairly recently I've been emphasizing now how we exist in the midst of objects.

[05:41]

Now the Sixth Patriarch, you know, took this, I've used it several times now, this phrase from the Diamond Sutra, let the mind flow freely without dwelling on anything. Well, it might be more accurately stated, without dwelling in anything. Because the objects of the world become places we dwell. And in simple ways. Again, trivia, three roads. Trivial things, small things are where you have a chance to make a choice. So, if you say you're always trying to do things right, that's a good thing to try to do things right. It sounds like it's the right thing to do to try to do things right. But the problem with trying to do things right is you're creating the karma of wanting appreciation for having done it right. You want some reward. Now, sometimes when you do things right, you're trying to do it out of respect for the object or respect for the person, and you can call that doing things right.

[06:55]

But in the sense of trying to do things the right way and not the wrong way, it often creates a karma of expecting some good to follow from doing things right. Or if you do things in a rushed way, or quickly, or something like that, it's often motivated by wanting to do things better. And right, it's the same. You want to do it better than someone else, or you don't want to be last, or you're, you know, something. So you're always paying attention to the next thing rather than the thing you're doing. I mean, little things like that. I'm just giving simple examples, childish examples. But our karma, our mind is gathered in these little things. And you can... And you want to notice as much as possible. If your mindfulness allows you to notice mind moments, notice, take an inventory, as I say, take an inventory of how many mind moments you're comparing yourself to others in some worrisome way.

[08:05]

Or... or superior way. All those, that's not dwelling on anything. That's dwelling in these mind moments in some comparative way. And you're generating karma. Sticky mind. Now, early Buddhism emphasized the emptiness in the sense of no permanent self, etc. But later Buddhism emphasizes as equally the emptiness of phenomena, emptiness of the world, impermanence of the world, too, in the sense that we lodge our We dwell in the objects of the world.

[09:10]

The territory of the mind is the objects of the world. So how is this territory of the mind the objects of the world? Can you notice how the mind sticks to, rests in, etc., the objects of the world? So I gave you this little practice yesterday. Something I think I first mentioned in a seminar in Kassel. I think Craig was there. And I said, whenever you look at an object in a contrived way, as Brendan said, it's also called indexing instead of contrived, In a contrived way, you notice an object and you notice it as a... You just remind yourself. You notice it as a construct. You notice it as an activity.

[10:14]

You notice it as perception. And what was the fourth? And interdependent. And you can take them in any order you want. I mean, it's just whatever you happen to first look at an object, you notice it's resting on the floor, or you notice it's constructed, or you notice that's a chair that's used as an activity, etc. Now when you do that, that's also an Abhidhamma practice called indexing. Because you index, index, make a reference to the substantial, the habit to view it as substantial or permanent or predictable or something. So you take the habit of the mind to see predictability or permanence and you index it to a teaching, index it to a practice.

[11:24]

And when you index it to a practice in this way and you notice the object and you take away its entity-ness, you take away its implicit permanence and predictability, etc., you're not adding something, you're taking something away. And when you take something away and you get in the habit of doing this, you let the mind flow freely. Though we can just take this little statement of the Sixth Patriarch and the Diamond Sutra and find, you know, much depth and practice in it. So what you do in a way, we could say you generate a twin mind stream, a conceptual mind stream and a non-conceptual mind stream. Now, the conceptual mind stream is generated by the habits of consciousness and so forth to see the objects as predictable or implicitly permanent and so forth.

[12:35]

And the wisdom of practice, you generate a non-conceptual mind stream where you take away its sense of being an entity and permanent and so forth. And when you do that, you also take away the dwelling for your narrative personal history. In other words, your personal history, you know, needs these objects as... The objects can reference your personal history, or they can reference, be indexed to reference not your personal history, but indexed to reference... emptiness or a teaching of impermanence and so forth. So in a way you develop two mind streams and these are the two truths, so-called Nagarjuna's two truths, the famous two truths of Buddhism, that there's a conventional or apparent reality and absolute emptiness.

[13:53]

And it's not the habit, the natural habit of consciousness to do this. So you have to kind of interdict or excise the usual habits. You know, someone likened Buddhism to, you know, teaching you surgery. teaching you how to be a surgeon, teaching you surgery, but you have to be the surgeon. You have to perform the operation on yourself. So it's a kind of surgery, a moment-by-moment surgery of taking away, and you take away the way, the subtle self, dwells in objects and where our narrative history dwells, locates itself through objects. It doesn't mean you don't have a narrative history of yourself or all that stuff, but it means that you are finding a way to let the mind flow freely.

[15:12]

Now this isn't just to be in the world in how it actually exists or how it The way it's true is not philosophy. It's also salvific and soteriological practice. Now I use these two words because they're good examples of the problems in English. I use salvific to mean safe, a refuge, to find freedom from suffering or safety. Salvific means safety. But in... Christianity, it means, one of its meanings is the doctrine that only the male form can truly incarnate God and be a means of salvation. So that's the rationale behind male priests. So that word salvific is really leased out to Christianity, rented, leased,

[16:18]

owned by Christianity. So can I use it to mean freedom from suffering? And then soteriological means to realize salvation through the teachings of Jesus. But now soteriological is usually used in Buddhist texts by scholars to mean it's a teaching that leads to enlightenment. So this little process, this little activity of taking the permanence away from objects, taking away how our personal history lodges in objects, is a practice that leads to enlightenment. generates a Buddha mind. When you generate a mind that's simultaneously conceptual and non-conceptual, you're tasting the mind of what we mean by the mind of Buddha.

[17:32]

I said to somebody recently, maybe an inter-subjective dharmic practice. And maybe we have to have an inter-objective dharmic practice. A sense of how we are in the midst of objects. You know, somebody said, what do we do about the world? The end of a koan, as I've referenced often, is what do we do about the world? And the teacher says, what do you call the world? What do you call, what do you think the world is? This world we want to save. What world we want to save is, yeah, makes all the difference in the world and how we go about it. But I think if you really feel this teaching of our engagement with objects, not to do them, let's say, not to do each thing right or each thing in comparison to others, but to try to do each thing carefully.

[18:58]

Let the object itself tell you what to do. I mean, you can practice this, the Yogi practice is great, to just do each step carefully, as if no other step existed. And yet at the same time be aware of the whole intersubjective field. So when it's time to serve or be served or something, you're already there. And that to do each thing carefully and let the object tell you what to do is also an entry into thusness. Just a simple habit like that makes you more and more open to the thusness of such a simple act of knowing things from the object's side

[20:08]

opens you to, allows practices to flow into that space. So this has a psychological and instead of using sociological let me say psychological and spiritual a change in our life. It changes, it's not just true, it changes how we exist in this world. And the mind will flow freely without dwelling on anything. So again, in such simple practices, we can really actually change how we exist and open ourselves to the wisdom that that arises from mindfulness practice and arises from zazen to find its expression, flow, presence in ourself.

[21:13]

So there's this inter-objective existence and our inter-subjective existence with each other. And the more of this you feel this, you feel that somehow the activity of your life got you to this point. You can say, oh, by chance I'm here or something like that. But some actually, it's better to look at it as the whole of your life somehow brought you to this point, brought you to each point. It's almost like whatever the situation, and it may not be the best point, this point or any other point. But it's the point you're in that you work your way, find your way, live your way through, in and out of, or on. So the world, whatever this world, what we call the world in its fullest and most immediate and real sense is just this situation always.

[22:29]

And whatever you want to do, in the end, from a Buddhist point of view, is just about how you exist on this moment. Not what you accomplish, but how you exist in what you accomplish. And only, really, if some people do this, will it be possible for the world to do it. Okay, thanks.

[23:05]

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