here, and especially when there's no seminars, there still ought to be some teaching schedule for the residents and for those of you who have made the commitment to move into the neighborhood. And I suppose we'll have to play it by ear of when it's possible. So we can, you'll have to be on a phone list. I see, you're here, so you didn't move into the neighborhood, you are the neighborhood.

[01:03]

And anyway, so... And... the residents and many of you have made a pretty big commitment to practice. So I thought maybe I should try to give some kind of simple overview of practice. At first, zazen and mindfulness, we could say, carry our practice. Yeah.

[02:12]

I don't mean it's passive, but... The decision to practice mindfulness and zazen carry us in our practice. And we see some effect in our life. Sometimes it's in zazen and sometimes it's just in our daily life. And sometimes it's not so visible. But if you stop practicing for a while you start feeling a little out of tune or something like that. At some point, though, that practice zazen and mindfulness will carry you for, I don't know, two or three years.

[03:20]

Then it's perhaps your view of practice which now has to be the basis of your practice. And to describe that view I would say that now instead of... Yeah, instead of... practice being something you do. But practice becomes something more like where you live. You feel you live in your practice, zazen and mindfulness, and the enfoldedness within the world that occurs more than you live in your usual sense of consciousness.

[04:52]

No, I mean, maybe it's not for, you know, those of you who are making a life commitment to practice. Maybe this isn't so important to talk about. On the other hand, it's not fair for you not to have a sense, I think not fair, for you not to have a sense of the overall larger territory of practice. Because when you make a decision when you make a decision to or find yourself living within your practice.

[06:14]

Consciousness isn't any longer the privileged place for the definition of your life. Now, I don't think in just this evening, 40 minutes or so, I can explain what I mean by that. But let's say, let me just say, like Robert Musil, the novelist, He says that life creates a surface, consciousness creates a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise.

[07:17]

So we could say that Freud not only discovered, made known to the world the sense of an unconscious, By pointing out how much of our life is involved with or carried by the unconscious, He implicitly made the statement, or clear, that consciousness isn't the entirety of our life. Consciousness is the container we feel is our life, but it's not the whole of our life.

[08:37]

Now the unconscious in a Freudian sense is a rather narrow idea from the point of view of Buddhism. But even as a narrow idea, it's still clear that consciousness, the surface of consciousness, doesn't carry the entirety of our life. So would you say Buddhism says very simply, do you want to live your life through your consciousness, or do you want to live your life more fully than that? Or do you want to live your life through consciousness or more fully? Now, I mean, this is another, this is a huge question.

[10:08]

What would be more fully than living our life in consciousness? Probably in this 40 minutes or so, the best I can do is give you some questions to ponder. Yeah, and maybe you're very happy living your life in your consciousness. Then please continue. But if you feel it somehow... isn't resolving the fundamental questions in your life. If you're often somewhat conflicted within your consciousness, do you try to solve the problem in your consciousness? Or do you try to solve the problem by living your life more fully in which consciousness is only a part?

[11:33]

And not the most privileged part. No, what do I mean by that? No, I mean, again, I'm sort of going along here and I think what I'm saying is simple. But grasping the import of it in our culture and in our personal life. Import is important? Yeah, the weight or importance. Actually takes some years of getting used to. So what do I mean by privilege? Let me give you an example. When it's assumed that dreams, for example, tell us something about who we are consciously,

[12:36]

And because of that we interpret dreams in terms of consciousness. It's like we try to take the dream and open it up into the surface of consciousness. Yeah, but most of the dream just is gone because it can't open onto the surface of consciousness. But we... if we think of consciousness as the privileged place that defines our life, then everything else is in the service of consciousness.

[13:58]

But even a famous psychologist therapist, analyst, philosopher of psychology, as James Hillman, Jungian analyst, says that we do great damage to dreams to interpret them in terms of consciousness. But certainly Buddhism would say that even more strongly. Dreams are enfolded. I would use the word enfolded instead of unconsciousness. Dreams are enfolded in a way that you can't unfold.

[15:16]

You have to know them through their enfoldedness, without trying to unfold them. Then we know each other, if we're sensitive enough, through our mutual enfoldedness. And we know each other and our enfoldedness with the world. What happens when we start discovering our life in the territory of practice? But more fully than just the word practice, in the enfoldedness that can't be unfolded, then consciousness is a wonderful part of our life, but it's not the whole of our life.

[16:49]

And it's not in a subtle sense where we ultimately define ourselves. Yeah, now someone asked me this morning, well, you know, this evening, why don't you speak about the golden wind? And sure, I think to myself, well, why not? And even when I think to myself, why not, I realize it's an impossible task. And then when I start, like now, I find, oh, it's yellow. The start is at least a few months. Because it's a revolution in how we think about ourselves.

[18:09]

But that's what enlightenment is too. It's a revolution in how we think about ourselves. And most of us don't have this, even if we practice a lot, don't have this elusive experience of enlightenment. Even if we practice a lot, you can't get hold of it. It's always escaping. Even those of us who practice a lot don't have this elusive experience of enlightenment. Mostly because we're unable to imagine our life outside of consciousness. Enlightenment can't happen in consciousness.

[19:33]

It turns around somewhere outside of that and then turns around consciousness. It turns around somewhere outside of consciousness. And then turns around consciousness. Turning around means it changes it or it flies around? Okay. Maybe I'm being gentle by not emphasizing enlightenment much. But it's like some sort of secret wish is the big goody. But if you're defining your life and you stick to defining your life in consciousness, by definition you exclude yourself.

[20:38]

Then... You say it again, it's not well said. Well, that's all right. It wasn't well said by me either. So we have the monk ask the question. What about when the tree withers and the leaves fall? Was ist, wenn der Baum welkt und die Blätter abfallen? And young man says, the body exposed in the golden wind. Dann sagt young man, der Körper ist entblößt im goldenen Wind.

[21:45]

Yeah, not surface. It's like all Zen stories, like Zen questions. Usually, it has a very simple surface meaning. The tree withers, the leaves fall. And the body is exposed in the golden wind. The air is full of leaves of red and gold. But if that's all there was to the story, it wouldn't be still around after a thousand years. A body exposed in the golden wind. Hmm. Benjamin Leavitt in the 60s in San Francisco. I may have mentioned this to you before.

[22:51]

Discovered that consciousness is tardy. Late. If you wire someone up. And the arm starts to move before consciousness knows it's going to move the arm. It's about 500 milliseconds late. The consciousness notices it's going to move the arm, 500 milliseconds about, after the arm is already starting to move. Now, that's pretty quick.

[23:57]

But in molecular time or neuronal time, it's... Eternity. Because most things are happening at one or two milliseconds. Or less. So something... So we think of consciousness as the decider. But it's actually the referee. Referee is the... like in a football game, fußball, the guy who says... The judge. The judge, yeah. Klauschusen decides whether to let the arm move or not, but it didn't make the decision for the arm to move.

[24:59]

Again. Consciousness decides to let the arm move, but it didn't make the initial decision. You can experiment with this. Let's say you have two toothbrushes. Don't decide which one you're going to use. Let your arm decide. And you'll find your hand goes to one of the toothbrushes. The softer one or the harder one or the older one, I don't know. And after a while you can begin to try to let The body, the body, what body? The body, some body, a body decide things. If you have to wear a tie, let your body decide which tie you wear.

[26:03]

It's probably good to have a fairly conservative selection of ties then. A conscious selection. Depending on what your job is. If you work in a bank, you don't want to come in with Mickey Mouse on your tie. Or you can let your hands decide, which many of us may do already, decide what clothes you're going to wear. Believe it or not, this is a small craft, but it's a craft which develops. If you keep doing it, you find more and more you can turn out over to something that's not consciousness. Whether you believe it or not, this is a small craft with which you can give yourself something that is not consciousness.

[27:23]

Let's say you've made a decision to find yourself living within this enfoldedness. When you walk across a room, you don't feel your narrative self walking across the room. You only feel, I don't know how to describe this, but a sensation of walking across the room. You can feel you've left behind who I am or what I'm supposed to do. You can feel that you have left behind who you are or what you should do.

[28:56]

when your practice is no longer carried just by mindfulness and meditation, but your practice is now carried in the experience of living through practice, through this enfoldedness, when now your life is carried not through not by consciousness or by mindfulness and meditation, but carried through your decision to live within practice or within enfoldedness. It's like when you decide to go to Zazen in the morning. You're not deciding, I'm going to go to Zazen.

[30:06]

You're deciding, this is where I also live. Like when you go to bed at night, you're not deciding, now I'm going to bed, you decide... This is where I also live, in sleeping. You know, I mean, do you decide to go to bed? Well, you referee it. But try to stay up indefinitely.

[31:08]

Try not to go to bed. Eventually the referee gives up. What's a referee? Do you get a nicer word than that? We call it a judge in football. In football it's the judge? And you just will go to sleep. The referee just is fired. Yeah. To continue here, I have another few minutes.

[32:42]

We somehow have to hold this sense of being able to live in enfoldedness rather than in consciousness. And consciousness is a part of that. An enfoldedness, as I say, which we don't try to unfold. And the feeling is, you know, if a blind person sees something, I mean, wants to know something, it has to feel it with its hands. When you've made this, when you feel, when you go to sleep, this is where I also live. And zazen is where you also live.

[34:00]

The word world itself means something like human being old, vereld. The word Welt in English means something like So it really means something like old, meaning where you mature yourself. The world is the place where you mature yourself. And Buddha nature in Sanskrit is Buddha datu. which means Buddha realm.

[35:04]

But in Buddhism, everything is a verb. Everything is an activity. There's no nouns. So realm is a cause. So where we are is what matures us or transforms us. And when you live in this enfoldedness, And when you simply don't, when you learn not to scratch in Zazen, When the consciousness body slides off and you don't scratch anymore. And you can just be completely still.

[36:10]

You've broken the connection between thought and action. And when you've broken the connection between thought and action You can be in a space in which you don't have to act or repress. And this is also exposed in the golden wind. But this golden wind is also when the senses itself Can I describe it? When the sensorium itself is a topography. The 20th koan in Shoyaroku says the five senses are five territories. There are only five pieces of a big pie of many pieces.

[37:31]

And there's much outside the pie as there's, as I've said, handy telephone calls in this room. So, how much is going on in this enfoldedness outside these five pieces of pie, which our senses define? First, when you walk across the room and you're not in a narrative self, You also begin to, your eyes feel the world as a, almost as a blind person were feeling objects. Your ears hear the topography of sound. Sounds don't just merge together.

[39:01]

Each sound seems to be a kind of architecture, like you are looking at a building. It's like some people... have a tongue which can feel into the topography of food. Can tell you what the ingredients are. They can feel the enfoldedness of whatever the cook has presented. So when you're not defining yourself through the narrative self, which is primarily defined through consciousness, within the medium of consciousness, You begin to find yourself in a topography of the senses.

[40:22]

When the narrative sense, when the narrative self subsides. When the narrative self subsides. And your... Slides away, goes away. And your sense of continuity is the location of the world in your senses in the enfoldedness of oneself with others and with the world. This is the body exposed in the golden wind. Then you're dreaming into your dreams in a whole different way. And waking into your waking life in another way.

[41:35]

And waking into your dreams and dreaming into your waking. You feel you're in one big fabric, enfoldedness, in which you find your life. Yeah, that's... I got started anyway. Yeah, that's... I got started anyway. And Frank just didn't move at all. And you weren't asleep?

[42:23]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_74.41