Thank you very much for being here for these days, weeks, part of a month. And it's nice to see you, Ulrike, ringing the bell on this part of the planet. Usually she's ringing the bell at Creston. But somehow we can appear into this practice. Yeah, as you're doing here, appearing into this practice. And let me say what this experiment is, as you know, and you know what this experiment is. So let me say what this experiment is, and you know about this experiment, but I still want to say it.

[01:13]

Which is, how do we combine lay practice and monastic practice? It's a practice which this place, what this place is about. An experiment. And it's an experiment and hopefully an experience as well for you too. And as I started the last 10-day session, what we're doing, first of all, is just going through the day. Maybe it's, you know, like... a platform.

[02:20]

A platform, like a railroad platform. Or perhaps a pier, like a pier in a lake. Yeah, so we start, let's say we're all starting to walk across the lake or the pier. And the water, yeah, the water is very beautiful. It's a beautiful lake. Yeah, it's okay for the first few, maybe even a couple of days. But, you know, then you look back and actually the pier is disappearing behind you. Yeah, so you have no choice, but you've got to continue on this pier that's disappearing behind you.

[03:25]

And sometimes, you know, if you've ever lived on a lake, there can be pretty stormy storms on a lake. And perhaps sometimes the water is coming over the boards of the pier. And the boards sometimes are getting kind of slippery. So, even though the lake is beautiful, maybe even the storm has its beauty. You still have to watch your step. You have to walk rather carefully on a pier over a long, week-long lake.

[04:26]

And yes, maybe you have to have some sort of stable attention. mind or consciousness to walk on the lake, walk on the pier. And we stabilize ourselves in consciousness. And you know, if you have, you know, say you have a bad dream or anxiety, sometimes it's, you know, you can just, just to wake up and be conscious stabilizes the mind.

[05:32]

So part of what I'm speaking about is now and maybe this week is how do we stabilize our mind? And part of what I'm talking about now, and maybe during the whole week, is how we can stabilize our mind. Or we can ask, what mind are we stabilizing? Or what part of the mind do we use to stabilize the other parts of the mind? Yeah, this is the territory of mindfulness practice. And usually if we know, you know, we're just involved in our habits, you know, it's hard to actually notice our mind. So the first part of any monastic-like practice time

[06:46]

Is the schedule. And whatever the schedule is, it probably shouldn't be your ordinary daily life. Just like I don't think your daily life is walking across a lake on a pier. So we should define the schedule here so it's something different than your usual life. When you get up, what you do. And the schedule really is about, you know, you've chosen to do this, but once you're here, you just do the schedule.

[08:02]

You don't have much choice about it. And that not much choice is also quite interesting. It causes some difficulty, some tension. But as long as you're alive and as long as you're breathing and your heart is beating, what's the problem? Really, why can't you just be in any situation as long as there's enough air to breathe and your heart's beating? What's the problem? As I said the other day, if you hold your breath for a while, it becomes a problem.

[09:05]

And then when you stop holding your breath, it feels good to breathe. Yeah, and during this, Sophia, you have to be quiet. Please. During this kind of life we have here, you want to find if you can just have the ease or even laziness. Or pleasure of just being alive. Or just breathing. But if we're usually in, let me call it the usual map of our mind, it's pretty hard just to enjoy being alive. But the basis of any wisdom is, first of all, just enjoying being alive.

[10:37]

If you can't find that, if you can't find, just feel just the joy of being alive, it's pretty hard for any, without that foundation, it's pretty hard for anything to really be developed. So what mind enjoys finds the ease of just being alive. That's also our practice or a kind of challenge. And it's certainly one of the ways we stabilize our mind.

[11:59]

To just be able to rest in the look, smell, sound, feel of things. And the wisdom sutra, the prajnaparamita sutra, the heart sutra that we chant every morning, it's really asking us to first of all stabilize our mind Yes, and the simple ease or pleasure of the look, feel, smell, taste of things. And strangely enough, although we want to make choices about our world,

[13:12]

And you're coming here certainly making a choice about your world. But you're also choosing a choiceless world. Now, do you have that word in English when you say something is really beautiful or special, it was choiceless? Hmm... Well, in English we say that. If something's really exceptional, we say it was choiceless. We say it was without comparison. That's a similar idea. It's so great or nice or beautiful that you don't need to make a choice.

[14:40]

But it's funny that when we have no choice is often when the world most moves us. Again, we want to move. It's our life partly to move the world. But it's also, think about it, when something deeply moves you. When you're moved by the world, it's not when you're trying to move the world. When a mountain moves you, or a beautiful or ancient tree, you're maybe taken a little by surprise.

[15:56]

Or when a movie moves you. You might be skeptical, you're sitting in a movie, suddenly it moves you. So I think we all know this mind when the world moves us. And I don't mean, again, we don't make choices, do, etc. But how can we discover this mind that allows the, through which the world moves us? How do we discover this mind through which the world moves us? And that's also practice.

[17:21]

And our mind is also stabilized by other people. So if you Again, let's imagine you have some kind of bad dream or anxiety. Yeah, we try to use ordinary consciousness, you know, to stabilize our mind. As Sophia said once, about scary dreams. When you wake up or when you become more conscious, they're just air ghosts. And we do, yeah, so we use consciousness, usual consciousness, often to get things in order, to stabilize ourselves.

[18:29]

Und wir verwenden häufig das gewöhnliche Bewusstsein, um Dinge wieder zu stabilisieren. Yeah, and we use other people, we use other minds. Wir nutzen auch andere Leute, andere Geister dazu. Our minds aren't just here, they're intersubjectively related to other minds. Our minds aren't just here. Ja, unsere Geiste sind nicht bloß im Kopf. They're intersubjectively related to other minds. Sie sind intersubjektiv verbunden mit anderen Geisten. This intersubjective just sounds nice, doesn't mean much to me at least. Okay. Well, if it sounds nice, that's a start. Wenn das Wort euch gut klingt, dann ist es ja schon mal ein guter Anfang. Yeah, throw a big word in, you know. But what other minds and how do you use other minds to stabilize your own?

[19:38]

One, of course, is, again, sitting Zazen together. Also einer natürlich, ein Weg ist, gemeinsam sasen zu sitzen. Gemeinsam am Morgen zu rezitieren oder Nachmittag oder Abend. I'm often amused or, you know, amused, bemused by the experience we often have when we do walking qin hin during sashin. Und ich bin oft amüsiert und auch... It seems sort of dumb. You go out, instead of just walking on your own, you're walking behind ten people, and ten people are more behind you, and... Why do I have to take a walk like a schoolchild?

[20:39]

And you can, of course. It's wonderful to take a walk by yourself. Natürlich ist es etwas wunderbares, auch alleine spazieren zu gehen. But there's actually something interesting that happens when we do walking outside Kenyan during a Sesshin. Aber da ist etwas Interessantes, etwas Wunderbares, das geschieht, wenn wir gemeinsam während einem Sesshin gehen. Somehow one's mind settles into the both limitations and openness of the other minds. And the presence of the others somehow makes us notice things. Yeah, we may just notice a bush or a leaf or a tree or hear something.

[22:04]

In a way, somehow, we don't usually if we're walking by ourselves. You can't run because the guy in front of you is there. And you can't stop because the guy behind you is there. But somehow it stops thinking and replaces it with noticing. So what kind of mind, now we can ask again, what kind of mind notices rather than knows. So one of the things we're doing in practicing is really

[23:10]

Yeah, for a while, restructuring the mind. Restructuring this consciousness. Restructuring this consciousness which we use to stabilize ourselves, let's say, after a bad dream. And I think you'll find out that the mind, the consciousness that notices, actually stabilizes us more than the consciousness which knows. So what is the consciousness which notices? Yeah, and we're talking about very basic things here.

[24:56]

Basic aspects of Buddhist and Zen practice. But we should start with basics when we're starting these ten days or so together. Yeah, and also we need to practice is really to keep going back to the basics in more and more thorough ways. Praxis bedeutet auch immer wieder zurückkehren zu den Grundlagen, aber jedes Mal auf viel gründlichere Weise als zuvor. Also schaut einmal in diesen zehn Tagen, ob ihr einen Of course you can't completely separate. But you can, you know, increase the amount and percentage of noticing.

[25:58]

And lessen the mind of knowing planning, doing. It's a little bit like you're peering under a rug or peeking under a rug. You lift the rug a bit and you can see the floor and the floorboards. So practicing noticing you kind of lift up one surface of consciousness and you see, yeah, a wider sense or different sense of consciousness.

[27:04]

noticing is a kind of wedge. You know the word wedge? It is like something under the door. Yeah, or that you wedge something open. So noticing is a kind of wedge which separates the layers of consciousness. Or maybe we could have the image of it's a wedge that holds a door open for a while into somewhat different feeling of consciousness. And the main practice, you know, traditional practice of that is called this practice of noticing. It's called the five dharmas. And they're very simple, appearance. Naming.

[28:28]

Discrimination. Right knowledge. Let's call it noticing. And suchness. So it's a kind of road map within consciousness to suchness. And what is this suchness? Maybe you come back to that. And I think, you know... Ordinary consciousness is, I would say, knowing consciousness, doing consciousness. Ordinary consciousness, knowing, doing, planning consciousness. It's a little bit like a flat map. You can get to the one end of the map very quickly. And then there's contour maps which show you the lines of the elevation.

[29:45]

And then there's relief maps which actually... have the mountains as bumps. And then relief-artige Karten, die zeigen die Berge und die Täler und so. So dreidimensional. The mind of knowing is more like a flat map. And the mind of noticing is more like first a contour map and then a relief map. And you're actually increasing the area of consciousness. On the first step, the first suggestion, the first wedge, is appearance.

[30:58]

You just let things appear. You let things appear in your senses. And the second is names. But you don't go to names right away. You let them appear in your senses. You let the names appear in your senses, you let the things appear in your senses. We say, you know, we have a little Zen saying, the willow is not green, nor is the flower red. We could say it the reverse.

[32:02]

The green is not a willow, nor is the red a flower. Man kann es auch umgekehrt sagen. Das Grün ist keine Weide und genauso wenig ist Rot eine Blume. This is to peel the names off things. Und das ist das Abziehen der Namen von Dingen. To just let the sound appear, the color appear. And that's a noticing consciousness. And you have to let noticing happen. And initially noticing is a three-step process. And it happens all the time.

[33:13]

But it happens. Usually we barely notice it. But then we can ask, what is the noticing of noticing? Now don't think of this as something separate, an observer. But you let the objects of the senses appear. Yeah, I mean, my eyes are filled with not only you and the feel of each of you as a kind of aura, auric space here. But I can point out to you There's also bamboos and grasses and flowers and so forth.

[34:25]

The pebbles of the path. But for me they're not pebbles or bamboo or grasses. Yeah, I have some feeling in the background of the difference of each. But mostly there's just different kinds of green. And colors. Various colors. Shapes. So that's letting appearance appear. Without naming it. That's step one. And step two is you feel the mind of the senses.

[35:27]

Yes, I always say you hear hearing itself. So that's the second step. And the third is a field of arises through the mind and the sense object. And then usually naming appears. And then discursive thinking. Okay, so this practice of the five dharmas is to enter you into the noticing. Looking into the depths of the structure, wideness of consciousness.

[36:32]

That's sort of like lifting the corner of a rug, maybe. Yeah, yeah. We're looking at the layers as Sophia was doing earlier. A napkin, peeling off the different layers of a napkin. Paper napkin. Or maybe it's like looking into the weave of a basket. And first you mostly just see the weave. And then you begin to see between the weave and the openings between the weave, what's woven get bigger and bigger.

[37:37]

And that's letting things appear. Appearing in three ways at once. The sense object. The mind. The field that arises, particular field, particular to this sense object and this mind, this sense. Yeah, and that takes a moment. And you begin to feel the contours of consciousness. And then if you go to naming, You can use naming to release yourself back into non-naming.

[39:00]

Naming can lead to discursive thinking. Or you can use, with a slightly different feeling, naming to cut off discursive thinking. So the five dharmas are a very basic, ancient way To shift consciousness from a knowing consciousness to a noticing consciousness. And a noticing non-discursive consciousness then to get more used to that, to develop that.

[40:14]

And a noticing non-discursive consciousness. To get more used to that. Yeah, familiar with it. And then begins to let you look into the structure of mind. And it's a step toward restructuring consciousness. So consciousness can more deeply stabilize us. Okay, that's... the car mechanics of Zen.

[41:23]

Well, maybe something like that. But it's certainly the craft of practice. And we have a chance in these days to learn something about and more deeply, thoroughly Get a feel for the craft of practice. Thank you very much. Thank you for translating.

[41:52]

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