So I asked last night, last evening, what are we doing, what are we practicing? Is it any different than our Buddha ancestors? Are these former Zen teachers, are they our Buddha ancestors? Yeah, of course I think so. And what do we know? How does Zen work? And I also, you know, my practice I don't think is so different than it was 20 years ago or more.

[01:01]

Maybe my practice is definitely not as intense. But I would, you know, intensive is the same as intense. In German, I should say yes. In English it's rather different. Anyway, it's okay. Good enough intention. But what's the difference? I say that now my practice is more thorough. And the main difference, though, is that it's conceptually clearer. And I suppose that's at least one of the advantages, an advantage to practicing with somebody who's been doing it a long time.

[02:10]

And it being conceptually clearer is one of the things that allows me to practice more thoroughly. Okay. Yeah, but, you know, some of you are fairly new to practice. And your practice now may not be so different than if you do it for the next 30 or 40 years. Yeah, but most of us don't practice, don't make our practice continuous practice, as Dogen says. Again, if I look back on my practice, I would say that it's sashins more than anything else. which gave me a feeling for continuous practice.

[03:26]

The feeling comes first and the entering into the feeling comes first. And out of that understanding can grow. So I'm still, I can't believe it myself, still on these two sentences of Dogen. Continuous practice which actualizes itself is no other than your continuous practice just now, right now. the now of this continuous practice is not originally possessed by the self. Now, if we really look into this sentence, and we say that Dogen is one of our Buddha ancestors,

[04:29]

then we see somehow into the daily life, I think so, of Dogen. I know so. Because there's only so many alternatives. And I'm clear what those alternatives are. Or clear about most of them, a lot of them. Now we also have the Koan I've given you in February and also again I think in June here in Johanneshof. Dijang planting the fields. You know, Shushan asks Dijang, where have you come from? Dijang asks Shushan. And he says, from the south.

[06:00]

And he says, so what's going on in the south? He says, there's extensive discussion. How does that differ from me here, cooking rice, planting the fields and cooking rice? And Shushan says, well, then what do we call the world? What do we do about the world? Dijang says, what do you call the world? No, I don't expect, even though I've told you this koan many of you many times, I don't expect you really to remember it. But look at the statement, what do we call the world? How many of this world that's in front of us? How many ways can we call it?

[07:08]

And we can take this word call to mean, you know, what do we name it? How do we define it? Und dieses Wort nennen oder rufen heißt, welchen Namen geben wir der Welt, wie definieren wir, wie bestimmen wir sie? And we can also understand it more subtly as how do we call forth the world. Und auf feinerer oder subtilerer Ebene können wir eben auch so nennen, wie rufen wir die Welt denn hervor oder herbei? So, you know, the introduction starts again, scholars plow with the pen. Orators plow. Scholars plow with a pen, orators plow with the tongue. But we patched-robed mendicants and you, that of course means monk, but really it means we who've decided to wear

[08:21]

the ancient robe of the Buddha, patched robe. And not just live in the culture, our birth and bread culture, The culture we're born into and bred in. Because we know, as I said yesterday, all cultures are actually experiments. That's why there's so many different cultures. Some are centuries old, some are, you know, etc. But... Mm-hmm. What about, we could say, Zen is to experiment with a nameless culture.

[09:33]

To some extent that you're generating yourself or some... Yeah, out of how you exist, how we fundamentally exist. Yeah, so again we can ask, how does Zen work? Yeah, and what are you doing here in this session? What are you imbibing? by absorbing. Well, there's some kind of understanding behind it, the practices which you're engaged in. And just because everything is psychological these days, let me say, it's really not functionally psychological.

[10:36]

It's really rooted in how we exist in the present. No, it has psychological effects and it becomes a psychological process. Yeah, it would have to be because we're psychological beings. But it's not conceptually psychological. Okay. So we pastoral mendicants, those of us generating our own culture,

[11:37]

And what are we generating our own culture from? Yeah, our senses, our breath. The experience of being alive. What is this aliveness? So... That's what patched robe mendicants means. Those who are, of course, within a particular culture, born and bred, decide to make the existential decision To find out how we really exist, if that's possible. In the most fundamental sense. And it is a decision.

[12:39]

You may kind of be edged into the decision, you know, by friends. You may have a philosophical turn of mind. You end up wanting to make such a decision. Or you may be suffering or up against a wall. And to continue to live, forced to make some kind of decision about how to live. And or it may be all of those in some combination. We make some decision. And much of practice is how deep this decision is.

[13:39]

The more you view your world from the depth of this decision, the more you can choose continuous practice. Now at first continuous practice sounds like, oh gosh, I've got something to do all the time. I've had enough of that in my life. First of all, it could sound like, for God's sake, continuous practice. I have to do something unceasingly. I've had that enough in my life. Don't go too fast. Try. And at first you do have to make some effort. But it's not such a bad deal, you know. You're paying attention to your activity, your breath. Yeah, what's wrong? You've got activity, you've got a breath, there's no problem.

[14:57]

But nowadays, whenever I say you have to pay attention to your breath, I remember that, I think it was in Göttingen, that remark someone made. Was it in Göttingen? Somebody said, it's hard for me to pay attention to my breath because my breath is so boring. And someone said, oh, try smoking, it makes it more interesting. What can I say? Guruji reminded me that Thich Nhat Hanh said, just hold your breath and after a while you'll find your breath quite interesting. Okay. We patched rogue mendicants. Yeah. Experimenting with generating our own culture. Finally find how we pass the days is to lazily watch the white ox upon the open ground.

[16:39]

Hmm. And then it says, how to pass the days. How to pass the days is, can you make the decision how to pass the days? Are you just going to live in your habits? Now, Dogen's statement that self are now not originally possessed by the self. We can understand from this statement that for Dogen the self was

[17:46]

the self narrated through the text of memory. And again, coming back to Illich, He said that the self is inseparable from the text of memory. The narration of memory. Okay. So Illich's idea of the Western self I am quite sure is virtually the same as Dogen's idea of the self. Now, we know from contemporary psychology there's lots of ideas of what the self is. And the self is not some entity that's permanent throughout history, though some people seem to think that way.

[19:22]

And the self in Asian cultures is different than the self in Western culture. But Dogen and Illich are talking about something quite fundamentally the same. And I think you can have confidence if you see the self as the narration of memory, something like that. You can then feel, okay, that's the self that Buddhism wants us to be. We are not identified through. And this is quite simple. The world It's bigger than the self. How do we identify with a world that's bigger than the self?

[20:33]

Now, I don't know if I'm going to try to speak about this in sufficient detail that we can really see it. Now, this may be obvious to you. After all these years, it's not obvious to me. But it requires a shift in your concept of what the present is. Or maybe not a shift in your concept of the present, but... a shift, a greater clarity in our concept of the present. And a recognition that we can choose what present we want to live in. Now, Dogan is clearly pointing out that we can understand the present as having two layers.

[21:44]

One is the self-referencing present. And the other is the non-self-referencing present. Well, that's our life right here. Maybe in Sashin you can begin to see the non-self-referencing present more clearly. And maybe the pain in the legs is often connected with the self-referencing present. And sometimes if you go through pretty extreme pain, I'm not saying you have to, I'm not recommending it, but if you happen to,

[22:56]

If in the midst of it you can shift to a non-self-referencing present. If in the midst of it you can shift to a non-self-referencing present. An experiential conceptual shift. Much of the pain may disappear suddenly for no reason. Why? Where do you go? It's really remarkable that the very pain in our body is often linked to our concept of the present and the self.

[24:06]

So Sashin in its struggle with boredom and with sitting in one place for all this time is one of the experiential shortcuts into the non-self-referencing present. And we're so glued to the self-referencing present, it often takes something like physical pain to get us to see it and feel it. Now, what is the dynamic or what is the difference in concept? Well, simply again, the world is bigger than the self. How do we relate to the world that's bigger than the self? How does the world that's bigger than the self, how is it present to us?

[25:21]

You know, the kid who daydreams in school. Do you have this phrase, daydreaming? Often, you know, I've read reading biographies and things. Often scientists, successful scientists are the kid who daydreamed in school. But are they really dreaming or just looking out the window? It's more interesting. The teacher says it's daydreaming. Because you're not in focused consciousness. But I think this lazily watching the white ox is something like daydreaming.

[26:36]

Something like watching the clouds change their shape. The present comes toward you instead of you projecting on the present. You know, I've spoken a number of times about this difference in a Chinese concept of the future. We in the West think that we go into the future. And much of our culture is based on making the future as predictable as possible, ensured. And the insurance industry would be built in such a If the concept of the future does not imagine its predictability, it can be predictable.

[27:47]

If the concept of the future doesn't emphasize its predictability, you're probably not going to have an insurance industry develop. And the Chinese idea is the future comes to you. You don't go into the future. It comes to you in its unexpectedness, as I said. You don't know what's, you know, there's... Look at your life, how unexpected some things are. So in this way, which is also the Buddhist way of looking at it, the unexpectedness of the future is what's expected. And the unexpectedness of the present is also what Dogen's talking about. This stillness, I said yesterday, this stillness where all is well.

[29:03]

This stillness, kind of embedded in silence. And embedded in this stillness and or silence Sometimes the most ordinary sounds cars going by the dark rain on the roof the leaves turning in the wind in their unexpectedness are the most beautiful sound we've ever heard. So the delineations, the way it's described, the delineations of this non-self-referencing present, is it's full of surprises.

[30:27]

predictable and unique. It oscillates between predictable and unique. And the subject-object, the non-dual, it oscillates from being dual to non-dual. There's a Connectedness which is not reached by the word connected. You feel you're in a situation of which all of it is you. The Suzuki or she would say, the self covers everything. So it's funny, when you're in the non-self-referencing present, you might describe the experience of it as self-covers everything.

[31:52]

It's all... This is our house. And it's deeply satisfying. We feel in this world which comes to us first of all through our senses. We feel... engaged, connected in some kind of new, very satisfying way. And when we're not locating ourselves in the focused consciousness, and the text of memory narration, the sub-conscious streams that parallel focus consciousness.

[33:03]

In other words, if you're living in a kind of focus consciousness or self-narrating world, And you're engaged primarily in a kind of thinking world. Not a sensorial world. You actually generate a lot of parallel subconscious streams. Feeling like a victim. Feeling fearful. Feeling like you're not appreciated. These streams are only subconscious and yet they begin to contaminate our way of being. And surprisingly, when we're more in this stillness where all is well,

[34:23]

When we're in the now, not originally possessed by the self, most of these subconscious psychological streams kind of just... disappear. So the dynamic Dogen is pointing out to have what I called in February initial reference mind the basis of our consciousness and awareness, which Dogen is trying to point out how to enter. With the Book of Serenity in this Quran 12, I quoted.

[35:33]

And Dijan trying to point out. There's various ways to point it out. The self, the now not originally possessed by the self. Or the sensorial self. domain of being and that whatever entrance you can find if you can find and keep trying to stay there that's continuous practice you change the emotional

[36:33]

psychological and perceptual dynamics of being. Yeah, Illich spoke about again this text of memory. Memory text self. And he had ways that he thought we could be free of it. Dogen's way in our Buddhist practice is what Dogen's calling continuous practice which actualizes itself. Actualizes it self in the now which was not originally possessed by the self.

[37:52]

We have this chance to do. That's what a sesshin is about. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. No, I've said too many words. But if a few of them are useful to come into an ease in just sitting here, Then, you know, my effort to try to make it clear is worthwhile. You know, I... Yeah. I... Yeah, should I say I know you, I feel you pretty well.

[38:57]

There's the intimacy of conspiracy of breathing together. This world of friendship which should be, can be at the center of our world. But the most friendly thing I can do loving thing I can do to the extent that I No. Is to point out to you this now which is not originally possessed by the self. Okay. Thank you for your patience and thank you for translating. May God bless you.

[40:01]

May God bless you. God bless you.

[40:21]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_70.68