When I first get back to the United States, I have to get used to not pausing for translation. Well, I get back here, I have to remember to pause for translation. And I wondered what's the topic today, so I looked on the internet. It didn't say anything. It just said weekend seminar. Do you know by now? You can just translate that. Maybe the basic topic is just to be together with you at least once a year. So then they, Christina and Eric, think I'm getting old, so they drove me up the hill.

[01:24]

But they were driving anyway, so without feeling humiliated, I rode with them. Yeah. And so I asked Christina, there's no title for this seminar. And she said, oh, yes, there is. We had a long debate about it. Oh, yes, that's right, we did. So the topic is continuing practice. But how are we going to continue practice? I mean, this is my last seminar here. Maybe it means I have to say enough in these three days that you can continue practice for centuries. Centuries, since we're generational beings, everything's really in terms of generations.

[02:36]

And what was the subtitle? Undivided activity. Und der Untertitel lautet ungetrennte Aktivität. Yeah. And something I have been emphasizing for... I don't know how long. Maybe ten years, maybe five years, I don't know. is that everything is an activity and not an entity. There's no entity-ness.

[03:40]

There's only activity-ness. Now, I mean, a little sort of... And I say something about the history because your own practice is, does, and will have a history. And a history of recognitions and a history of resistance to recognitions. And when there's a resistance to a recognition, it's often the sign that you have to find a way into the recognition. Because I've been practicing more than half a century, I early on understood that everything's an activity.

[04:57]

And there's really no dharmic word for it because it's just assumed in yoga culture that everything's an activity. And also the word activity is so general, you know, the activity of, it didn't have any power as a word for me. That basic Buddhist premise, the fact that everything is changing, means everything is an activity. But to say that everything is changing is sort of abstract.

[06:18]

And to say everything's an activity relates us to the change in the word, in the English word at least. I don't know what it's like in German. Yeah, but I... Anyway, but finally after, you know, 40 years or so of practicing, I thought... I can't find another word. I'll just use activity. But I realized I could give it power by contrasting it to entity. And it's strange to me, because Zen is described classically as a teaching outside words and letters. But it's a fact that when I used activity in contrast to entityness, not only saying it to myself, but also saying it as part of practicing with others,

[08:04]

shifted my own experience of the fact, which I'd known for decades. And I was startled by, you know, a friend of mine, who I know happens to be a neighbor in Freiburg, is a one of the leading botanist researchers in the world, actually. Just by chance, he lived next door. And I just had dinner with him the other night because I arrived a few days ago and I had to do something in Freiburg. And he said again to me, which he said several times, how transformative this concept was that everything's an activity, even as a botanist, when it's obvious for botany that everything's an activity.

[09:44]

And I guess it's a... The degree to which you really apply it to everything. With no exceptions. It then starts opening things up. I mean in simple ways. There's no It means there's no universal time and space. Until Einstein and a few others, we all lived in Newtonian space, which assumes universals of time and space.

[10:53]

But if everything's an activity, then really, and you apply that, then space and time are activities, and then they're not universal, separate from us. And even now, if you understand that, if you agree with it, if you think space is outside you, You implicitly are in Newtonian space. It starts outside of you. But if right now you feel space starts inside me, And space, if it's an activity, is always everywhere.

[12:21]

It's starting. So when you start having a conception that everywhere space is starting, it's not already there fundamentally. Yeah, this is hard to get one's mind around. But it's interesting to try. Yeah. And one advantage of trying is that If we're practicing awakeningness, the experience of awakening arises usually from a shift

[13:26]

But you don't experience a shift until you're stuck on one side of the potential shift. And you don't even know it's a shift. You're just stuck... So the job of the Zen teachers, as I've said recently, is to create stuck places or potential shifts And the task of a Zen teacher, as I said before, is to create such places where you remain stuck and thus create possible shifts or differences.

[14:49]

You're stuck, like you find it difficult to imagine... Space starts from the center of you, wherever that is. And usually, or often, metaphors reach farther than words and syntax. Und häufig haben Metaphern eine größere Reichweite als Sätze und Syntax. Because our language, our usual language isn't completely inhabited. Our culture inhabits our language. Weil unsere Kultur, unsere Sprache komplett bewohnt. So sometimes you have to get a metaphor that doesn't inhabit our culture.

[16:03]

So the metaphor I would use now is if a swimmer created the water in which he swims in by swimming, swimming creates the water you swim in, that would be how we create space. So this room that Giorgio designed, has created this space that we're sitting in. But each of you, the presence of each of you, creates this space too. And the presence of each of you, let's say right now, starts from this space which starts from within you.

[17:08]

Yeah. Let me leave it there. To be continued. But if we're going to continue these seminars... Which is also implied in continuing practice. Do you think we should just stop them now? I mean, because I really mean it when I say this is my last Rostenberg seminar. I'm sorry. Rostenberg seminar. I mean, maybe if someone else does them, I might look in on it now and then. Who knows? But then who would you like to have continue them? Should we ask, when I ask Paul Rosenblum, Roshi, to do it, if he wants to or his time?

[18:53]

Or should we ask David Beck, Roshi, or Otmar? Or Nicole? Or Christian? Yeah, or you? Anyway, this is some question we can ponder. Whether we maybe should just stop. Stopping is good, too. If Rostenberg will let us keep using the space, maybe we should. Aber wenn Rastenberg zulässt, dass wir den Raum weiter benutzen, dann sollten wir das vielleicht auch tun. And the title, the subtitle, the undivided activity. Und als Untertitel dieser Titel, ach so, nein, als dieser Untertitel ungetrennte Aktivität.

[20:01]

So we have to figure out or explore, find out how to explore what could undivided activity mean. Und wir müssen... Now what I'm finding, I don't plan much. I sort of feel my way. day-to-day. In fact, I've often made an effort to feel the world and not think the world.

[21:12]

To be guided by how I feel rather than how I think. And to do that I've had to interrupt thinking. So now I'm pretty good at doing it. I feel my way into this room when I just arrived. Yeah, and almost as if I was in the dark and had to feel my way in the dark up the stairs and so forth. And that interrupts the... interrupts the habit of thinking the world. And once you think the world, you end up with the... self which animates thinking.

[22:35]

Okay, now I've introduced another possible shift. is to shift from thinking the world to feeling the world. Now we know, even from experiments, that the body anticipates what you're going to do before consciousness notices it. Wir wissen aus der Erfahrung, dass der Körper weiß, was du tun wirst, noch bevor das Bewusstsein das antizipiert. And really part of yogic practice is the noticing of that and then letting the body lead the thinking, lead the activity.

[23:42]

But this also takes quite a shift. And because we trust our thinking because we kind of like make sure everything's all right before we leave. But to find little ways in which you let your body choose, like what shirt you wear or what coat you put on. And I think you yourself will notice sometimes, well, am I planning to go to bed or am I planning to go out to dinner or something like that? Or am I planning to take a nap or shall I go out to dinner? Something like that. And you notice that you either thought of or you actually maybe even took a coat out of the closet an hour ago.

[25:07]

Your body has decided you're going out to dinner and doesn't want to take a nap. And if you start being alert to these kind of things, bodily signs, they're really present more and more. And usually we don't notice them, but when you start noticing them, they increase in number. Und wenn du beginst, wirklich achtsam für diese körperlichen Signale zu sein, dann geschehen sie öfter und öfter. Also normalerweise bemerken wir sie nicht, aber wenn wir sie bemerken, dann erhöhen sie auch ihre Häufigkeit. Now, I feel like I'm probably sounding like I'm looking at this very philosophically.

[26:25]

And yeah, maybe that's true. But for me, I'm looking at it as a craft Practice is a craft which is powerfully affected by the attitudes we bring to the activity of the craft. And maybe I'm thinking of stopping formal teaching because I really want to really like to stop talking about it. But if I'm really committed to helping us as a sangha continue to practice,

[27:29]

I'm convinced we'll only, this will only be a multi-generational practice if we embody, discover how to embody and realize the yogic worldview. It's a moment of inertia situation. Yeah, when you're in a practice center, when you're in a saschin or doing zazen, some momentum can be physically given to the yogic worldview, let's call it, But if all your other situations, your job, your daily life, you're taking a trolley in Graz or Vienna or somewhere,

[29:08]

The inertia implicit in the worldview you were born with just takes over. And when I look at other practice centers, very quickly they're taken over by Western worldviews. Because people, that's what people feel comfortable with, and so forth. I know I was lucky somehow.

[30:15]

When I started to practice, you all know this, this story. But I knew that when I started practicing in 1960 and 61, Aber ich wusste, dass als ich 1960 oder 61 begonnen habe zu praktizieren, da war ich Mitte 20. Selbst wenn ihr diese Geschichte kennt, erzähle ich sie trotzdem, weil sie für mich immer noch frisch ist. You know, I'd graduate, sort of graduate from college. I say sort of because I walked out of college because I didn't want a college degree because I wanted to start without any advantages.

[31:18]

Ich sage so mehr oder weniger, weil ich keinen Abschluss haben wollte, weil ich starten wollte, ich wollte loslegen, ohne irgendeinen Vorteil zu haben. Aber du musst immer noch dein Leben auswählen in diesem Alter. Was sollst du denn sonst machen? And I could feel the momentum of my generation going a certain direction. And you were supposed to get married. You were supposed to have a job to support your family, etc., And so you were supposed to go somewhere and do things. And I very powerfully and decisively felt I didn't want to go anywhere in our Western American society. I could feel everything in my family and in my education.

[32:36]

And then my sister said, you have to do things, you have to accomplish something. konnte spüren, dass alles in meiner Familie, in meiner Ausbildung, in der Gesellschaft mir sagte, du musst jetzt etwas machen, du musst Dinge erreichen. And the society measured what accomplishment was. So I decided, I've got to get rid of this idea. So I trained, literally trained myself in a Pavlovian sense. Does a dog have a Buddha nature, you know? Every time I thought I had someplace to go,

[33:37]

I counteracted it with no place to go. Now, I was recently married and had a little baby. She's now 50. I don't know, some 50-something. Terrible, I don't know. And I had a job at the University of California. And I was a graduate student in Asian Studies, all simultaneously. So I had a lot of things to do, a lot of places to go to. Yeah, but I still decided I have to break this pattern of thinking I have somewhere to go and something to do. So somehow, intuitively, I hit upon I've got to stop this pattern.

[35:10]

So I really decided every time I think I'm going to go somewhere, I'll say no place to go. And every time I said I have to do something, I said, there's no place, there's nothing to do. And I noticed that when I did that, and really developed the habit, I felt a little bubble of freedom when I felt, okay, I actually have nothing to do and I have no place to go. I had no, I guess I was supported implicitly by the presence of Suzuki Roshi. Because my practicing with him by practicing with him I internalized his own spatial presence.

[36:28]

Indem ich mit ihm praktiziert habe, habe ich seine eigene räumliche Präsenz verinnerlicht. And by internalizing his own spatial presence, that's the best I can say, when I felt this moment, little bubble of freedom, actually, I don't have a place to go and nothing to do in a fundamental sense. It was confirmed, experientially confirmed, because I could feel its resonance with the space that I felt in my love for Sukhirishya. And I didn't realize, of course, too, that I was inhabiting a classic Buddhist path, Zen path, When you're given something to do or you find something to do which you don't really know the consequences or the reason, but you do it.

[38:13]

The reasons and the consequences are beyond your thinking and consciousness. Yeah, so I was by the decision to interrupt everything I'd grown up to progress it through. Progress through? Progress through. Okay. had to be interrupted. But to interrupt it, I had to develop attentional skills I just never had before.

[39:34]

So my attentional skills had to develop sufficiently to intercede with, intervene in my ordinary thinking. Also mussten meine Aufmerksamkeitsfähigkeiten sich so entwickeln, dass sie in der Lage waren, mit meinem konventionellen Denken dort zu intervenieren und sich dort dazwischen zu stellen. Und ich hätte wahrscheinlich nicht So those of you who have heard versions of this episode in my life before know that it went on for a year and a quarter. The temporal aspect of it was I continued for about nine months

[40:50]

noticing every thought, every moment, and interrupting it when it had any concept of doing or going. So I was trying to interrupt my worldview. Also ich habe versucht, meine Weltsicht zu unterbrechen. Aber was ich gleichzeitig damit gemacht habe, war, die Aufmerksamkeit, die Kunstfertigkeit der Aufmerksamkeit und die Aufmerksamkeitsfähigkeiten zu entwickeln. Also ich habe jetzt die Aufmerksamkeitsfähigkeiten And I'm developing the attentional skills which aren't least rented or shaped only or primarily by my culture.

[42:51]

So I'm developing attentional skills that aren't tied to my own usual thinking. Because they're interrupting the usual thinking. And I somehow intuitively knew this was or discovered it was possible by feeling in Suzuki Roshi his attentional skills. This is what's called in cliché mind-to-mind transmission. So I think that's enough for that little anecdote. And... Somehow I feel a little embarrassed to be telling you these things.

[44:06]

As if my life and practice are important. But I guess what I'm really saying is that yes, there's Buddhism as teachings and theories and philosophies and practices. But actually, transmitted Buddhism has nothing really to do with thinking and philosophy and stuff. It has to do with actual contact with another person, which is past generation life. That there is a history, in fact, that through which practice evolves. So if you read the koans, every koan presents, well, he studied with this guy and for a while then he met this woman in a cafe and then he studied with somebody else.

[45:48]

And the emphasis here is not just what this history was, but that there was history. And if your own exploration of your history that unfolds through your activity Because Zen practice, Buddhist practice, isn't about knowing yourself. Zen and Buddhist practice is about exploring your experience, not about knowing a damn thing. How do you develop the feel for the exploration of your experience?

[46:59]

And how do you create the territory of experience which you explore? Okay, thanks. Danke. Thanks for translating. You're welcome. Sounds like you're good at it.

[47:26]

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