Thank you for being here this morning. I know you don't have much choice, but I'm still glad you're here. Often I take a nap before I give a lecture, 10 minutes or 20 minutes. Even if I don't need to take a nap, I sometimes take a nap or just lie down on the floor or something. You know, I don't have time to really go into zazen. And what is it? Why do I do it? I mean, do it because one reason it helps me eliminate unnecessary thinking. And another is it... Often I find the fulcrum for the elect fulcrum, the point. I can turn a lecture. The fulcrum of the lecture I find in the nap. And sometimes I find the path through the lecture. And in other words, you know, before I give a lecture, when I have to give a lecture, it seems like every five minutes, every day almost.

[01:12]

So I trust that what comes up, because it comes up in the context of the situation and practicing with you and... And so whatever comes up, I feel, oh, this is part of the lecture. But I don't see why it's part of the lecture often. I don't, why is this part of the lecture? I just assume it's part of the lecture. Could be part of the lecture. But I don't see the through line. I don't see the connection. And sometimes it helps me to have five or ten or twenty minutes, sort of out of context, which is sleeping, or kind of sleeping. I feel my body, I know, something I do, I've been doing so many years, there's a kind of metabolic There's a dispersed metabolism. Let's say something like that. And if I lie down for a few moments, or sometimes a minute, half a minute even, suddenly all the metabolic rhythms, this is what it feels like, come together in one kind of throb, one kind of motion, movement.

[02:32]

It can take seconds or it can take five or ten minutes. And then I'm, yeah, and if that happens, I feel rested. It's like, again, the example I used of the balloons come back into the hand of the mind that have been out there floating. And then I feel this, often I then feel, you know, what is the path through these things that have come up? Or what is the fulcrum that connects the things? You know, like that, something like that. Yeah, and then if I can keep the nap mind until I give the lecture, this is good. It's like I'm sleep talking or sleep walking. If I can keep the feeling of the nap mind which showed me the through, the path. Yeah, so it's a kind of half present and half inward mind.

[03:41]

Yeah. Now often when I speak, particularly to new people, I use the example of something moving like that. Thinking about it, I even prepared myself. This is one of my favorite beads. So if you're These beads, they're skulls, little carved skulls. If they're like this, it's hard to see them, hard to see that they're skulls. And then if I'm moving too, you know, then you really can't see what the hell is, I mean, heck is that? So I usually say if you can still the body, you can begin to see this more clearly. And then the still body, begins to still the mind, and then pretty soon you can really see and it opens up.

[04:52]

Now that's a metaphor. And one of the things I'm trying to do in this somehow, particularly recently, is to have us notice how we think through metaphors. You know, like Shakespeare's, all the world's a stage. And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and entrances. And each man plays many parts. Shakespeare had this unbelievable ability to say things very simply that just seemed true. All the world's a stage. And all the men and women players, they have their exits and entrances. And each man plays many parts.

[05:58]

And then later on in this little, as you like it, soliloquy, he says, and then he goes through a different infancy and youth and schoolboy and so forth. And then he says, and then the soldier seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon's mouth. Couldn't be said much better than that. And then the soldier seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon's mouth. Now, this is, you know, this whole, you read the whole thing, it's long. The play, as you like it. It's like, you know, could be completely a Buddhist text. But we examine, if you're practicing Buddhism and we use a metaphor to think into the world through the metaphor, and metaphoric thinking and image thinking, let's call it, is not discursive thinking.

[07:12]

more closely related to dream thinking, nap thinking, and it's more related to the bodily thinking of Zazen, which is really my topic. Now, if you were going to use a metaphor in a Buddhist sense, we'd say, all, all the world's a stage. Well, all the men and women is... How thoroughly can you apply this? And then each have their exits and entrances. So for him then, when you're exited and not on stage, where are you? Buddhism would think of it this way. You have your entrances and you have your exits, but where are you when you're exited? In Buddhism it's something like zazen.

[08:15]

Now, when we think through metaphors, it just is the way we work, I think, most profoundly as a thinking being, knowing being. And now we're also talking about Dogen's, when is thinking knowing? The knowing of thinking. And then non-thinking. So we get some number of categories here. I'm asking you to observe or... muse on, mull, mull over, mull through during the practice period of non-thinking mind, the thinking-knowing mind, things like that. Because what we're doing is, you know, practicing zazen, you kind of slow down this and you begin to, you know, feel the layers of your experience. And sometimes if I can give you a kind of word or phrase or metaphor, you can begin to peel up the layers, see into the layers of experience, into the layers of mind and body.

[09:32]

Hmm. Hmm. But again, we have to be careful with the correspondences because metaphors are so powerful and convincing that sometimes we think the metaphor is exactly and it's usually not exactly. And so if you're wary of the similitude of the correspondences, then you can begin to use the differences to peer more carefully into that. layers. The word metaphor means something like to carry the in-between. So what's in-between or what's in the midst? How is it carried? Okay, so if we look at this metaphor again of the, you know, the

[10:32]

The implication can be that when it's still finally, this was a staff of securities, when it's still finally, the movement's gone. But that's not really what happens in zazen. When the mind becomes still, the movement of the mind is still there or the capacity to move is still there. It's not like the inherent nature is stillness. That's not form and emptiness. There's no basic place which is still and everything else is in movement. The stillness and the movement, the form and the emptiness are simultaneously present there. Capacity. And the word capacity I use because it doesn't necessarily, though it's often translated as a kind of inheritance, but actually it just means spaciousness.

[11:40]

The ability to hold something. And I also like the word behold because the B in the behold means to surround something. to be on all sides, and to hold something, hold, like the hull. The hull or hold of a ship is something that's capable of containing, carrying. So I'm working with behold here. We could even have hull, like the hull of a ship, or be hull. We could make a new word, be hull. Just so we don't get confused by other meanings of behold. But I'm speaking about absorb here. Behold as a form of absorbent, just behold. You're not grasping, you're just beholding everywhere present. Absorb is, the word Zen is best translated, not as meditation, but as absorb.

[12:50]

And the word absorb in physics means when something like sound or radiation is completely absorbed and not reflected or transmitted. So what I'm getting at here is when the mind, the movement of the mind and body becomes still, that movement, that gesture, that capacity to move becomes the stillness. So when I started out the first teshel of this practice period, I said, we're constructing a posture. And part of constructing a posture is to construct a posture which can absorb without any transmission or reflection, absorb the movement. The movement becomes the stillness.

[13:53]

Does this make sense? It's something with tremendous vitality. You're not just becoming calm. This is superficial Buddhism. To become calm, to become still, to be a nice guy, to be a cow. This is something... Yeah. There's an image... There's an image... that Sukershi always used, that I always liked. And it's that there's a yoke, you know, like an ox's yoke or something. And a yoke is not just a, it's a metaphor of culture, of society, of form. It's what made one of the first big things that made civilization possible, because once you could yoke

[14:59]

a horse and not just have a rope around the horse or the ox. Once you could yoke a horse or a ox, then you could create more food for people. So the yoke was a very powerful metaphor, symbol, in ancient times. So this yoke is floating on the sea. I have a scroll in Otawan, which is the scroll of the first emperor of Japan. A mythical emperor. And I love the scroll. I found it somewhere. I stopped in some little town to get coffee or something. Driving up to the Yeah, the ocean facing, the Japan Sea facing China. And there's a little shop next to where I, next to the coffee shop, had this fantastic scroll.

[16:05]

I mean, I never, I kept stopping there. Usually if I find something somewhere, I find other things there, because the guy, whoever it is, usually has similar taste, but never found anything else there, I don't think. But it shows this guy, and he's clearly a shamanic, Shaman of some source, and he's got a bear tooth necklace around his neck. He's got weird ears like Dr. Spock. And he's got feet that are kind of furry and turned up. And yet he's sitting on a stump of a tree. And clearly the stump of the tree, the tree cut down in civilization, When you clear land, you've got civilization. You've got people. Eventually, you've got electric lights and things like that. So here's this first king of emperor of Japan sitting on the stump of a tree, but still a shaman. So this yoke is floating in the sea, tossing and turning.

[17:14]

And there's a one-eyed turtle. Of course, a turtle represents something close to never dying. I think they found turtles that are close to a thousand years old. They seem to die by accident, not by old age. But anyway, it represents something very ancient. This one-eyed turtle, poor guy, he had an accident. every hundred years swims to the surface of the ocean to see the heavens. But he has to, and then it says, the story metaphor says, how, what chance does this one-eyed turtle happen to swim into this yolk tossing in the turbulent seas? And then it says,

[18:16]

So rare is the chance to be born a human in order to study the Dharma. So one should view this chance that you somehow have appeared in this body and mind as as rare as a turtle which one every hundred years might have chance to see And it also then, what are you going to do? If we use this metaphor to have a sense of the, I mean, we're destroying the planet. This is how powerful we are. I mean, the masses of us, there's more people alive today than have ever lived. All the dead people aren't as numerous as the people alive on the planet today.

[19:23]

And yet still, even in our numerousness, what are you going to do with this opportunity? This is the practice of Buddhism, the bodhisattva practice. And so this image is also used for the image between the worlds of zazen, the worlds of sleeping, napping, zazen, and the worlds of Awakeness of consciousness, of usual mind. So this is also a metaphor for when in zazen, every time in zazen, this yoke floats to the surface closer. Sometimes you see it way distant in a kind of distant light. Sometimes it's closer and sometimes it's right here. And this is kind of like, you know, the blind seer. But this is a one-eyed turtle seer.

[20:29]

Now when you do zazen, and when you construct a posture which can absorb movement, absorb the mind of consciousness. I used to live in the winter on a lake, and in the summer on the ocean. In fact, where I lived on the ocean, there was a lake behind the house in the ocean in front of the house. And I got quite used to it, you know, sort of. And in Maine, New England, where I lived on the ocean, it was my grandmother's house. It was the world of nine generations who hadn't left New England. It was my kind of familial past. And Indiana, right in the Midwest, was diluted societal contemporary culture. My father's work and so forth as a teacher and a scientist.

[21:38]

So somehow the lake and the ocean were connected with me sort of in a mythopoetic way. And the lake you can usually see to the bottom. It's clear. At least the lakes in my youth were still clear. The ocean, if you swim out far, you don't get caught by the riptide. It's scary. Or if you swim from a boat out at sea, it's this vast. I mean, I find it scary. You could get lost. You could never be found. It's not aside from sharks and things like that. It's just this huge space. But, you know, right here in this air and sky, it's also a huge space, but it's the realm of our familiar senses. Unless you're up in the mountains lost in the dark, then it may be. And there are still animals here. And of course, not more than a few hundred years ago, there were many deep forests and animals and so forth.

[22:49]

Zazen is, maybe it's like, you know, rock climbing or something, I mean, where everything counts. And Zazen mind is a mind where everything counts. And you bring, and that mind is part of our daily life. I mean, you can sit back and relax and put your feet up and step out of the mind where everything counts, where each handhold you drop off the cliff. With each handhold you could drop off the cliff. Well, we can step out of that. But the default mind, the allocated mind, the reference mind is this mind where each thing counts. Again, I think of, and I tell you the story again of Jerry Rice, you know, this one of the best of all receivers in seconds.

[23:55]

in the seconds at the end of a game, receives a pass from Joe Montana, brings it down, and then what does he do? He's got the ball, he's got to decide in fractions of a second what to do and if he can make a touchdown. He looks up into the spectators. Changes his state of mind and then he knows what to do. And that's a kind of default position or an allocated mind, a mind where you decide a reference point mind. And one of the things we do when we practice zazen is we change our reference point mind to zazen mind. So here what you discover, you know if you're practicing and finally your body and mind become still, takes a little while, misses the backbone, And the mind comes into the backbone, as Nagarjuna said, says putting a snake in bamboo is quite difficult, you know.

[25:07]

And he means putting the mind in the backbone. So we put the mind in zazen, in generating, in constructing a posture. We construct a posture where the mind can come into the backbone. And then What else are you? I mean, again, if I'm observing this, it's the mind observing the mind, and so what part of the mind is observing the moving, the monkey mind, the delusory mind? What mind, the mind that's caught, the frantic mind, the mind that loses its base? What is the mind that loses its base? So now, if you use this metaphor, you start to have some categories here. there's the still observing mind, the mind, the still mind, which is an observing mind. Now, the observing mind can be a vehicle for the self mind and the non-self mind.

[26:19]

So just in this little example, little metaphor of slowing the, mind and body until we can study the mind and body, kind of like scientists of our life, you begin to find, oh yes, then there's an observing mind that observes the moving mind. And what is the observing mind? How does that... Okay, so we establish a still observing mind And we find that can be a vehicle for the self-mind and it can be a vehicle for the non-self-mind. So one of the things you're doing in Zazen is establishing an observing, a still observing mind, which you discover is sometimes ridden by the self and sometimes manifests non-self.

[27:22]

And you begin to be, have a feeling for that. Eventually you establish an observing mind which does not lose itself, does not become a monkey mind, does not get distracted. And part of the way you generate this observing mind that is not distracted and that isn't always the vehicle of self It's by absorbing the movement. Absorbing gestural mind. And I don't like the word dynamic, it sounds too much like a generator or something, but into a dynamic stillness. And as we get older, this vast, I mean the big, so-called big mind is big, not only because it's inclusive, but also because it has a kind of vastness of depth.

[28:29]

And as you get older, all of the stuff that you have done over the years, I mean, you know, not just the things that have happened to you, but also the space in which they happened, the kind of vastness in which they happened. And you find in that space, which you become familiar with through Zazen, things still happen. So really, as you begin, even in the initial stages of constructing a posture, you're laying the, creating the possibilities, laying the foundation for a new kind of life. A life that nobody in our society tells us much about. It's not part of our education. And in the mouth of the canon where we want reputation, it's not there.

[29:31]

But not many of us can give up or step aside and out of the canon's mouth. the society's expectations. Yeah, and sometimes live the society's expectations, but also to be free of it is at the center of our practice. Again, I just got started, but that ought to be enough for a while. Thanks. May our intention equally penetrate every being and place.

[30:19]

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