Such a lovely day today. And I've been thinking of reviewing where we've been. Been? I don't know. Been anywhere. Where we could have been in what I've been talking about. It's nothing special. No, that's not right. It's nothing complicated, but I think it would be useful to sum it up a little bit because it is so important to get the picture, get this picture of practice, I think, at least that I've been trying to present. But I'm not going to do that. At least today. That's what I was thinking of. But then in Doksana this morning I spoke to somebody about the importance of pausing.

[01:02]

So I thought maybe I should amplify this pausing. And again, all these things are so difficult to talk about because the words slide around. For instance, what I'm going to be talking about today basically is the pause that refreshes. But this is one of the most famous advertising lines in the world. Coca-Cola. Isn't that right? Isn't it for Coca-Cola or Pepsi-Cola or something? Which one is the pause that refreshes? Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola. Thank you. Yeah, I guess. And also I could say, you know, I follow, I try to look at what I do in practice and these things, and I say, I always do what interests me. But interests me?

[02:06]

No. I always do what involves or implicate it. It's something different. So I, we have to, you have to hear what I say the other day, to know before speaking is called silent discourse. So perhaps there has to be a certain amount of silent discourse here. Where we see not just the small situation, the small context, but the big context. As often I, I was... We speak to each other, and sometimes, particularly in practice, in which we look like we're speaking in a small context, but we speak in a big context. And sometimes it's not easy to notice, but we should notice. That's where practice begins. One of the places practice begins. And also, I happened to cross an early, you know, back in

[03:10]

Sixty-one or two or so, and Sukesh was talking, you know, about one of my favorite koans, you know, the baijang and matsu and the geese. When have they ever flown away? Indeed, have they flown away? But he has an introductory word that's different than in the Cleary translation, and one of the things he says is, The ancients, from what place did their restfulness arise? So that caught me, that way of putting it. It actually catches me in a way, the way it's presented and clear as it's, where do the ancients find their rest? It's rather different to say, from what place does the restfulness of the ancients arise? So we have a worldview. We're all involved in a worldview.

[04:13]

We know that. And that worldview flows in the flow of mentation. We know that. You know that. You may not care about it. You may not be able to do much about it, but I think you know that. Will you do anything about the flow of mentation? Probably not. It's too nice. But maybe you will Okay, what can we do about the flow of mentation? Pause. And what happens when we pause, or can happen when we pause, if our mindfulness is sufficiently developed so we can pause, not just have a break or a comma? There's a break in our worldview. if the pause breaks the flow of mentation.

[05:17]

And so what we've got, you know, in practice is what I'm trying to present to you over and over again in various ways and present to myself is this worldview based on the Four Noble Truths, based on absolute and relative, based on Buddha nature. So we get familiar with this worldview of Buddhism. But how do we, you know, we use phrases, we use zazen. Zazen really isn't, unless it's powered by phrases, mantra-like phrases, and wisdom teachings, zazen is nothing but a kind of upright nap. I mean that's not bad but it's not Buddhism either.

[06:19]

So I'm trying to find also in speaking about this a way to make complex teachings easy to practice. So let's say you have sufficient awareness of the teachings. sufficient interest in the teachings to hold them in view. Okay, let's just take the Four Noble Truths. Let's start. Basics. An object, and it's impermanent. That's the first Noble Truth. The objective, impermanent reality. And you let that establish itself. Objective, I mean, these are practices, I know. And you have to do them. All of Buddhism is a kind of mantra. It's an enactment, a repetition on each moment until each moment is maybe the only moment.

[07:27]

Rhonda's one breath from birth to death. I see her breathing every now and then. So first... Objective reality and it's impermanent. Again, if you want to practice these truths, sorry to sound like a Buddhist primer here, but you just remind yourself, objective reality, impermanent. Next noble truth, you remind yourself that it's caused and that it's modifiable. So you simply remind yourself, it's caused, it's modifiable. It's caused means it's modifiable. So suddenly you're standing in an impermanent, modifiable reality. Third noble truth, it's at rest.

[08:30]

It doesn't need to be modified. That's also a reality. And they're contradictory, but you allow that contradiction to be there. It's objective. It's out there. It's impermanent, though. Your relationship to it is impermanent. It is impermanent. You feel that. It's modifiable. It's caused. It doesn't need to be modified. And those three you can let, you can just actually practice with a mechanical pause. Let me do it a few times a day and finally do it every moment if you can. You just pause and in that case the pause is the path.

[09:34]

So the Four Noble Truths, the fourth is the path. There's an end to suffering. We can understand the pause as the path. to make this past real for us. So you pause, and in that pause, mechanical pause, you feel permanent, modifiable, at rest. And you allow yourself to be at rest in the pause. Now also if you can, you let this pause be a moment of the ceasing of mentation and this is again something you know hopefully from Zazen practice when mentation does cease. Now here we're not again talking about stopping your thinking but knowing the feeling of stopped thinking.

[10:41]

And knowing the feeling of stop thinking, Yogacara practice to know the feeling of states of mind, you bring that feeling into the pause. So each moment is actually a tiny pause. You can practice the paramitas in this pause, you can practice patience, you can practice being ready to give everything away at the moment of the pause, that would be the practice First paramita, generosity. Because we're also trying to get out of a static worldview in which you think you can possess it or reject it or not notice it. These are the four, you know, greed, hate, and delusion. Greed, hate, and delusion? That means you think you can possess this static representation. So if you can get out of representational thinking, And you can see yourself involved in representational thinking.

[11:45]

You know, you have to see yourself as a fluid experiment here in this kind of practice. Again, you can't do it all the time, but you can take moments and do it. It's a practice. So you can notice that you tend to think of things in terms of whether you want them or not or have them or in control of them. And we have such a deep urge to control and, as someone says, to get the upper hand over materiality. Getting all these things in order. This is somehow trying to get the upper hand in the material world. Sometimes just Just let it be. Sometimes we do things, sometimes we let it be. So if we look at the practice of greed, hate, and delusion, it's the practice in each moment is the sense of a world we can have, not a sense of the world we're implicated in.

[12:57]

as I said earlier. So generally we have some sense of this is something we could have or something we want to control, or we have the feeling that it's something we want to push aside. This is greed and hate. That you can get rid of something or that you can have something. Or we don't notice it. We just put it out of our vision. That's delusion. Every time you kind of put something aside to not consider it, that's delusion. Okay, so now we're using the pause as a moment of totality, a moment of all-at-onceness. And you're letting the force kind of flow in, non-graspable feeling. So now you know the stopping of mentation. stopping of the flow of mentation, the physical feel when mentation is stopped, and that's replaced by non-graspable feeling.

[14:09]

Feeling you can't get a hold of, but it's everywhere present. And non-graspable feeling is the root of compassion, of caring. It turns compassion into the operating principle in your life. the organizing principle in your life. So here we're trying to get at the root. Buddhism isn't really particularly interested in intelligence. Intelligence just causes a lot of problems. We're doing things well. Buddhism is interested in wisdom, emptiness, and compassion. You can be intelligent over here, sort of, but the way you lead in the world is through compassion. which means through feeling, and rooted in not feeling that makes distinctions, good, bad, etc. So non-graspable feeling, the second skanda, or whichever way we count, if we call form the first, then non-graspable feeling is the second skanda.

[15:24]

So now also this practice of being able to stabilize yourself in the five skandhas comes into play, into place, where you can settle yourself in the stopping of mentation. Not that you stop it, it's just you know the feeling of it being stopped. And when you know that feeling, non-graspable feeling replaces mentation. Now this is a moment of creativity. of the pause that refreshes, of fresh eyes. And if you get in the habit of this little pause as a way of practicing, a little pause that you let the worldview of Buddhism flow in, a little pause of patience, it's also a moment of breakthrough. It's like, you know, steam pipes, I think, don't they have a little... bulb in them sometimes to take out pressure.

[16:30]

The pipe goes along like this and they go and it continues. Well, this pauses that like bulb in the flow of mentation. It's also like the kabuki pause. If any of you have seen a kabuki play, there's actually, I much prefer no plays to kabuki, but kabukis have some great things about it. It's real. That's where they wear it. Huge orange hair, white hair and stuff. Sometimes I wish I could dress like that. David Bowie and I would get... And I remember I took Nakamura Sensei to Tassajara once. She was this tea teacher, a woman, a Japanese woman who lived with us for 20 years or so.

[17:35]

I can't remember now exactly. But anyway, she died unfortunately in 99 or so. Something like that. And I couldn't take care of it the latter part of her life. It's one of the sadnesses of my life. I didn't have the resources to do it. Because I did take care of her for years. She left a a not very nice Japanese husband who was head of the Fuji Bank. She was one of the first women who was college-educated, French literature, read Proust, and just said, I'm not going to live with this guy. And she went and lived on her own and was ostracized. Bob Strickland took her in, and Gary Snyder, and then we took her in. She was just fantastic. She's definitely one of my teachers. And she lived pretending to be my grandmother, or my kid's grandmother, but really she was my teacher. And I took her to Tassajara once and she felt, this is too wild. She said, I start feeling this orange hair coming out and fangs and horns, you know, because she was really quite taken over by it.

[18:43]

It's too wild. She didn't want to go back. It's okay in no place, in Kabuki place. But anyway, in Kabuki there's a long Like if you're the audience and this is the stage. And I told you of this line that's in no place where there's a line where when you're in front of the line, you're in the world of the audience. And when you step behind that line, you're in a timeless area where your grandparents are present, Nakamura sensei is present, and so forth. So the absolute and relative and time world and timelessness are right there in the theater. The whole audience knows it. I mean, a person will be talking, and then they'll step back, and then their voice changes, and something, you know, you can, oh. But in the kabuki, they have, you know, the audience like this, and they have a platform that goes off that direction. And it reaches way back, it goes two-thirds of the way through the, to the side of the audience. And the kabuki actor's, you know, doing his stuff.

[19:47]

And then he makes his exit. But as he leaves... At some point, he's moving along real rapidly. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, you know, because they walk from their horror. So they shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. And then suddenly he'll stop and assume a pose like that, which contains the whole play. I don't know how he does it. He gets the whole play in that stop. And people go, you know, in the audience. People are just gasped. You know what's coming. You know he's going to do it as he walks down that platform. And he gets there and he takes this pause and everybody's, you know. That's also a pause that refreshes. When somehow you catch the all-at-onceness. So this little pause you can, you know, and this kind of thing, like the kabuki actor doing this, comes out of a dynamic sense of a dharmic present. A dynamic sense of an inclusive dharma present. Oh, just not here and now, you know.

[20:48]

How can I say it? Again, in a new way, a dharmā, dynamic sense of a dharmic presence, an all-at-onceness. So in each situation that you can find the ability to pause for a moment, you know, there's not a lot of length of time. At first, mechanically, it's sort of about length of time. But after a while, it's something more subtle. It's a kashana. One eighty-fifth of a finger snap, remember? Or the time it takes to scan the sky and notice one star. In a kashana you feel a resonance with wholeness. And this is a function, a kind of function of non-graspable feeling. Because the flow of mentation, you don't get any sense of wholeness.

[21:55]

Again, I'm not knocking the flow of mentation. I'm saying the flow of mentation should be interrupted sometimes. And ideally, in the Dharma practice, is to have that interruption at a kashanic pace. In your breath. Your one breath becomes the whole landscape. It's a different kind of mind. You can be in it, people are in it just before they die sometimes. People are in it in meditation sometimes. It's something we know, but we usually are paved over by karma and by the flow of mentation, particularly into a representational world that we can have, reject, or ignore. And the first three noble truths are a direct antidote, medicine, for to have, reject, or ignore.

[23:09]

where you allow everything to be, accept everything at rest, not ignore, and simultaneously fluid, modifiable, and impermanent. So you can feel this brilliance and yet shifting sands of the present moment. And when you pause like this, it also is a pause in which you can, what's the phrase to translate, to light up your mind. So you can feel when this pause is present in the way you experience things because you feel lit up. Lit up, that means you're drunk. Maybe drunk, lit up, boy is he lit up, whoa. That we shouldn't be that way in the party. Pixelated perhaps. Most of you don't know the word pixelated, but it's probably to be like a pixie.

[24:16]

It's devious, but maybe a little drunk too. So lit up. So we can have ordinary mentation, we just see objective reality, but when you see objective reality and simultaneously you feel it's impermanent, simultaneously you feel it's modifiable and caused, and simultaneously you feel it's just simply okay, something lights you up. This is better than tranquilizers. It's allowing the worldview of Buddhism, which is closer to things, I can't say it's absolute, the way things actually exist, but it allows you to be closer to or open the door to how things actually exist, And when you do that, you light up in wholeness. You light up in some kind of resonance with wholeness, of light up in the kind of resonance with how things exist.

[25:17]

And this resonance is compassion. It's actually the function, the way compassion is actually present in our activity, not as a good idea that we should be nice, which is okay too. Got to start somewhere. So this little pause, isn't it amazing? A little pause. How we can see a little pause when we have some skills at practice, at mindfulness, at allowing non-graspable feeling to flow into each moment and replace mentation, the flow of mentation, momentarily and find ourselves lit up in a way that opens the potential of each moment. There's suddenly... creative possibilities. And we can experiment. There's an experimentation.

[26:18]

We can decide at that moment whether to say something negative or whether to say something positive or whether to allow ourselves to be lit up or whether to allow ourselves to be dragged down. And that's where these terms rising mind and sinking mind come up. Practice is to put yourself in a situation where you feel rising mind and sinking mind. And where you feel this intimacy like we talked about in the Sandokari, the intimacy of the one and the many, here you have the intimacy of knowing you're the whole and knowing you're also only a part. Because when there's a resonance with totality or all-at-onceness, let's call it, a resonance with With non-gressible feeling and no mentation, you just feel each context, feel each occasion, and you feel a kind of resonance we can say with all-at-onceness or totality. And there's suddenly a sense, again, that you can experiment.

[27:30]

It's also the territory, as I said, of insight and breakthrough. in the structure of each moment, in the openness and freedom of each moment, in the intimacy of feeling. On the one hand, you're a part. On the other hand, everything is implicated in you. So now you can follow your interests because you're implicated in everything. Guilty of karma or dharma. And so it's not just simple interest. You follow the way through the pause. You're actually involved, implicated in everything. Yeah. So this, I mean, if you try to imagine, oh, could I be this way all the time? Well, yes, it's possible if we slide food under the door and keep you in the monastery.

[28:33]

And maybe with the power of your intention you can carry it more deeply into much of your activity. But basically it means at moments to practice it. And it is so deeply rooted in the truth that if you practice it at moments it becomes the implication of each moment. You can't entirely ever be free of it again when you practice it in some moments because you know it's always possible and it beckons you to the truth. It beckons you for the relief of resonance with how things feel really. So through this habit of a pause, first mechanical and then more non-graspable feeling is the pause, and then this sense of, in the immediacy of absolute and relative, in the immediacy, intimacy of being, part and whole simultaneously, which is the activity of wisdom and compassion.

[30:06]

Thank you.

[30:12]

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