A little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet eating her curds and whey. Along came a spider and sat down beside her scaring Miss Muffet away. Tsukiyoshi said, if you feel yourself alive without any idea of time. If you feel yourself alive, if you feel yourself alive without any idea of time, alive in the smallest particles of time, the smallest particle of time, this is zazen. I wonder if little Miss Muffet was doing zazen. A tuffet is like a tuft of grass or a little stool or a little cushion, maybe a zafu.

[01:10]

Kurds in way, that's cottage cheese. Cottage cheese is Kurds in way with much of the way pressed out of it. Along came a spider and sat down beside her, scaring little Miss Muffet away. Yeah, aliveness. Awareness and consciousness. We can ask the question, you know, what does it mean to be alive? Lewis Carroll has Alice say, the question is, said Alice, whether you can give so many meanings to different words.

[02:20]

Whether you can give so many meanings to different words. I would say that we don't ask the question, what does it mean to be alive, which is a good question. You know, it means to take care of your parents, or reproduce, make children, or take care of yourself, be a success, or be happy. And then I'd say it means, you know, I would say the question is, what is aliveness? Yesterday I had to write something that was very unpleasant to write. I got up at 2.30 and from about 3, for 13 and a half hours, 10 minutes for lunch, I just did this thing.

[03:32]

In the morning it was rather unpleasant, in the afternoon it got to be less unpleasant. But I found it rather disorienting. Not so much that I didn't follow the schedule with you, but that's true too, but also because it itself was disorienting. Yeah, and then you wonder how to How are we existing? How do we exist? How do we find, create, make some shape, give some shape to our life? Yeah, and last night or this morning, when I woke up, I really could have slept another hour or so, but I have chosen these forms. I mean, I inherited these forms of the schedule and the practice period, but I've also chosen these forms as a way to form my life.

[04:40]

And so I woke up and without really any thinking, I entered into the forms and I opened the door and there was a form called Christian Magicia waiting for me. He led me to the Zendo. Yeah, so here I am now, formed by these forms. But is there a formlessness also present in these forms when I choose these forms? What are the notes in the air? Dharmas are like notes that you decide to play. First you have to notice the notes. It is said that the monk practices the marks of the mind. That's for you, Mark.

[05:43]

The monk practices the marks of the mind. It means like you, if you see If you tend to see impermanence, you feel the mark of your noticing impermanence. And then you shift if you want to, if you index it that way. Index means to point out or to teach. Index or indexing. If you index the experience of permanence, which is a mark of the mind, not really in the object, It's you that decides it's permanent or impermanent or a backbone or whatever. Yeah, so if your mindful attention is rich enough, the tapestry of each moment, the threads of each moment are clear, fairly clear, And so a mark of the mind is to notice it's permanent.

[06:53]

A mark of the mind then is to use that mark to shift to noticing its impermanence or to shift into acceptance. Acceptance allows things to come toward you rather than permanence pushes them away. They're outside somewhere. And this is the territory, it's in the air, you know. Tsukiyoshi had his teacher told him something about, you know, we have to learn to see the stones in the air. You could have Magritte paint a wonderful painting of a living room and there would be a big stone suspended by, well he has such a painting almost, suspended by a string or something. But what it means is your worldviews are there and we walk around them without ever noticing that we're walking around these stones in the air.

[07:56]

How do we change these stones in the air to notes? Yeah, the other day I was so astonished. I mean, I shouldn't be astonished by such simple things, but astonished at the way Alan and Sophia made music. Now, you were there too. I mean, here's the ordinary old air sitting around in the room, you know, a little bit cold, a little bit warm. And they, I mean, Alan uses his mouth and his fingers and his training and his talent on this little recorder. And Sophia uses her chin and, you know, the bow and her chest and body and her incipient talent. Yeah, they start playing music, and suddenly this air that was just sitting around the room turns into musical notes.

[09:04]

I mean, I was really, I mean, it's so obvious we hear music, but I was stunned. How did this air get transformed into musical notes, into music? It's just air, like sitting here, and how did little Miss Muffet appear here? Just this air, this not, well, was it, was, is the music inherent in the air? Or is it generated? Was the music waiting for the air, I mean, air, or waiting for the music, the air was sitting there, please, Alan, come and turn me into music. Maybe that's what musicians feel called by the air. Anyway, they turned these. Sophia says, Papa thinks notes are black circles with sticks. Well, yeah, to me, they're like little black circles with sticks.

[10:12]

But somehow, was that a piece of Bach or something simple, Bach you were playing? Yeah, so here's this Bach, this little five-year-old who didn't exist. Well, I mean eight-year-old, who didn't exist six years ago, can look at these little black ovals with sticks, and the air turns into music. Yeah, so there's, let's say that the air, I don't, you can't say the air inherently has music in it. But there are many possibilities when you put things together. And our culture allows us to do that. So prior to Alan and Sophia turning the air into notes.

[11:14]

There's the not yet formed air. And we also have the, we can say the not yet formed mind. So here she says to be alive without any idea of time. Yeah, that's to say the not yet formed mind, that pre-languaged mind or the non-languaged mind. And if you're going to practice then, it's very good to develop the habit of peeling names and words off of things. I always say, when you hear an airplane, Peel the word airplane off it. Peel the noticing of it, of an airplane, off it. Like it was a sticker on it, you take the sticker off. And then it's just a sound.

[12:17]

And when it's just a sound, you're more in the presence of the perceptual sensorium, the sensorium. Like, I get up this morning and just let the forms carry me without thinking, almost to this point. And when we chant in the morning, again, every day we're chanting the Aryaki, Amit to the Dharmakaya Buddha. That's a note in the air. wasn't there and we chanted or sang it. Amit to the Sambhogakaya Buddha. Amit to the Nirmanakaya Buddha. Amit to the future Maitreya Buddha. Amit to all Buddhas in the ten directions. Past, present and future. These are notes in the air. They're forms that we can

[13:20]

choose to let ourselves into or not. So how do we make the shift from consciousness to awareness? Well, there's various ways. A cold shower might help. But for the yogi, the shift, one of the shifts, one of the entries is the shift to the consciousness of consciousness. When you peel the name off the airplane in any associations. This is like being alive without any idea of time or being alive in the smallest particles of time. The smallest particles of time are like granular, a crepuscular evening is the granular light as the afternoon shifts into evening and darkness.

[14:40]

There's a kind of crepuscular quality to time. It can be big spaces between the particles of time. It can be so dense, everything looks permanent. This is the territory of yogic space. Yogic space which folds out from you, folds into you, and itself folds with this imaginary line we have down the middle of the zendo that we put there so that you have some sense of the possibilities of folding space. I talked about this and aliveness in, I think, last year in the practice. Uh, the uh, liveness. The uh means within or to live your aliveness, to be inside your aliveness. be inside aliveness without any idea of time.

[15:45]

Now, when you know, I keep coming back to these particular images. Christian said it was like a textbook lecture last time. Maybe I should give more textbook lectures. I try to make these examples clear. I mean, if I can give you 25 examples or 100 examples, I must have given you many, but I mean, there's maybe 10 or 20 or 30 or something that you can really stay with, like peeling the name off the airplane, which you can use as fulcrums, as marks of the mind to shift yourself. You know, when I get up, I can do various things. I can do nothing, stay in bed. There's somebody is hitting the Han. Okay, I'll do it. The Han. So there's peeling, indexing the sound of the airplanes.

[17:06]

And the Little Miss Muffet sticks together, and it's one of the nursery rhymes, Mother Goose, I guess it is, from, you know, that I remember from childhood. I mean, I just, there's other, there's equivalents in German. But it sticks together also, the image sticks together because of the assonance of the words, the sound of the words. the dissonant and assonant sounds. A little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet. It sticks together. And yet, it's a nice little example because you never know what's going to happen next. A spider sits down beside her, and she was just planning to eat her cottage cheese. You know, one of the examples I didn't give in my textbook lecture last time was the pure mathematician, the pure mathematician who, and I knew a pure mathematician when I was younger and used to discuss how they tried to solve problems with him, and basically they're trying to solve a problem that nobody's ever solved before.

[18:28]

There have been maybe sometimes centuries of attempts to solve a problem. All they can do, because it's so far unsolved, is fill themselves, acquaint themselves with as much information about it as possible, of all the various attempts, and then allow another kind of thinking to occur, till something pops up. And they try to practice, find a technique, a state to allow things to pop up. But you know, if the world, if we make each moment predictable, and you can make each moment predictable, just like I can make predictable what's going to happen when I wake up. If I make each moment predictable, it'll be more or less predictable, unless something like a spider.

[19:30]

I have a huge spider in my... next to my desk. I mean, it's like a small mouse. Not quite that big. But it walks around. I never know. I don't want to kill it. And it's sort of, I pick up something and just... I debate whether I should catch it and put it outside or just let it wander around. I worry about it. What's it going to eat? Not me. And he hides between the pieces of paper. Usually around right down by my knee. Maybe that's why, maybe he or she spider gave me the idea for this lecture. Sat down beside him. So when you peel off, you use that as an index to peel off the name, to peel off the permanence, to practice the four marks.

[20:36]

There's only one of you. To practice the four marks. Birth, manifestation or duration, disillusion. Right in the midst of it forming, it's also dissolving. And then wipe your slate clear of disappearance. That's a form of indexing, a form of noting the marks of mind, a form of taking away the noticing through language. Did you have a non-languaged mind to rest in a non-languaged mind So when you peel off, again, the name, the permanence, the associations in the airplane, that is a kind of yogic shift into a fold, an unfolding, an infolding, an enfolding into a non-languaged mind or into the consciousness of consciousness.

[22:06]

Like the water. I mean, to know your conscious is not the consciousness of consciousness. Consciousness of consciousness is to experience the water of the mind and know when it's viscid or fluid. Viscid means thick and sticky. Self-mind, the context of self-mind is viscid and sticky. It sticks to everything. It's okay. You can plot your life through this stickiness. Sometimes we get stuck Or you can have a more fluid, unsticky mind, which is almost always a mind with less presence of self. And a non-language mind has less presence of self because the territory, the jungle gym, you know what a jungle gym is? In Germany you had jungle gyms. I mean, Austria. You know, it's one of those bars, a bunch of bars that kids climb on.

[23:13]

When I was little, they were called jungle gyms. I don't know. Are they called jungle gyms everywhere? Gregory? Were they called jungle gyms in California? That's what I remember. That's what you remember? You too? It's a universal American term. the jungle gyms of the mind. Yeah, we climb around, take away the jungle gym and there's, yeah, there's the space in which the jungle gym has not yet formed. So the consciousness of consciousness, when you Feel the water, the fluidity of the mind in which you are conscious. Like I said, looking at a stone at the bottom of a lake, you feel the water.

[24:23]

You're seeing the stone through. So you feel the mind. knowing the world through. And that fluid or field of mind can be pulled into us, as I've said, or opened out of us, opened into form, or folded into formlessness. This is aliveness from the point of view of Buddhist practice. This is not about accomplishing things, doing things. It's pure aliveness. be inside, living, and it's so satisfying. You don't need almost anything else. And when you do do something else, you do it like playing notes in the air. So the consciousness of consciousness allows you to shift into

[25:26]

the not yet formed. A feeling of the not yet formed in which knowing the not yet formed I was so surprised by how it turned into music. So if we look at the five skandhas Maybe we shouldn't say form, we should say forming. Forming, feeling, perceiving, associating, making consciousness. For forming is somewhere between not yet formed and the formed. And the first skanda is forming. It's simultaneously form and the not yet formed. You're at the threshold, not the unformed exactly. You're at the threshold of forming.

[26:28]

It's the beginning, the threshold of the five skandhas. So each skandha you can rest in. And the most fundamental is to rest in the skandha of the not yet formed forming, which is also the field of mind prior to the contents of mind, or simultaneous to the contents of mind, which we experience as awareness. Is that enough for today? Can I stop? Or do you want another nursery rhyme? Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet. A muffet is a, you know, one of those things you put your hands in when your hands are cold.

[27:35]

And it's also to, like, if you muff a cat, you... So there's this little girl who's clumsy. Muff means clumsy and try to be cozy. So it's a clumsy girl trying to be cozy sitting down on her tuft of grass. And eating the world separated into curds and way. I always liked the way because, you know, spelled W-H-E-Y, but it's like, yeah, studying the way. The way of Zen. And the curds of karma. And along came a spider, sat down beside her. If you feel yourself alive in this, without any idea of time, alive in the smallest particles of time, the smallest particle of time, this is Zazen Mind.

[28:41]

Thank you very much. our attention equally penetrate every even place

[28:58]

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