I feel like I lifted up into the air. Not just now. Maybe just now. I flew here from the United States. Trying to go a little faster than the world was turning. And so I landed here in Germany. In Zurich or Germany? Well, here I'm landed here now. And somewhere along the way I got a cold. But I feel I landed into the middle of our practice mind or something like that. So I'd like to have this morning some discussion with you and what...

[01:19]

Realistic or any questions you have about practice? I didn't say unrealistic. I said realistic or any. Realistic or any questions? I don't know any true. But you can have unrealistic questions. He knows I could have said that just well. But so be prepared for me at some point to ask you to say something.

[02:25]

I think this morning I feel like it would be good to speak more about the four foundations of mindfulness. And we could call them as I did yesterday, the four stream beds of mind. Sometimes they're called the four awakenings of mindfulness. And sometimes I'm a little embarrassed by how simple Buddhism is. It's really just about attention. But then, because attention is what your life is, what you give attention to creates your life.

[03:47]

But what do you give attention to? Buddhism asks you to change your attention. And we can even say exercise the muscle of attention. Because the ability to give attention also develops. Mindfulness is just a form of attention. And mindfulness is a form of attention Mindfulness as a form of attention.

[05:04]

I have difficulties to translate. Translate just that much? Mindfulness. Just use the word mindfulness. Yeah. So mindfulness is a form of mindfulness. It generates mind as a tangible presence. So we commonly give attention to things. But Buddhism emphasizes giving attention to how we give attention. Giving attention to mind itself.

[06:05]

And the body itself. Yeah. So the four foundations of mindfulness, body, feelings, mind and form as objects of the mind.

[07:53]

By the way, of course I'm always happy to bow with you. But generally, if you're in the middle of meditation, you don't need to bow. The custom is, if we're just starting and someone comes in and sits down beside you, then you bow to acknowledge they're sitting down beside you. But once you've started sitting, you don't have to bow. So if I come in after you've been sitting for a while, then I feel I'm interrupting you. So... So it's pretty simple, of course.

[09:20]

But the categories are actually rather interesting. Because this is a long tradition of of saying, okay, generate attention or awareness. But what do you bring your awareness or attention to? If I bring my awareness to this stick, that's one kind of awareness. If I bring my awareness to these lovely flowers, it's a different kind of awareness. Awareness isn't separate from what it is aware of.

[10:24]

So if I take a moment and feel a connected awareness with any one of you, For each one of you, it's something different. It's not like I have a hose of awareness here and I squirt you with the same water I squirt you. As soon as I look at you, the water is... colored HP, Hans Pedro. I look at you, it's a different color. So, Buddhist practice is asking us to notice the different colors or shapes of mind depending on the object.

[11:42]

And if we put water into the earth, it comes out purified. At least it used to. And different springs, but still different spring waters have different qualities. Some are good for... Perrier and some are good for Budweiser. So if you pour mind into the body, It comes out a certain way. Purify mind a certain way. And likewise, if you begin to notice mind in feelings, then it's a different kind of mind, or purified in a different way, or affected in a different way.

[13:17]

than mind in the body. And implicit in this is that you have a choice. You're not the passive recipient of your mind. Or victim of your mind. The more you practice this, you find You're not just the observer, but you're the chooser of mind. Please let's leave the question of who observes or who chooses till Sunday. So in the category of body, so body means this thing.

[14:44]

But how do you notice your body? And this is body in contrast to the other three. Of course, it's very hard to really separate them, but you can bring your attention to one thing rather than another. For example, anger fits in the category of mind. Not in the category of feelings. But how you feel about your anger fits into the category of feeling.

[15:44]

Like you said, I like being angry. That's a feeling about anger. A kind of distinction is interesting. Because anger is an aspect of mind in this kind of way of understanding, dividing things. And feelings are how we view what happens. So really what we're doing here is we're in the middle of this world. And it's divided up primarily by our senses.

[16:45]

Into outside and inside. And to various separate people. But this way of looking at things is saying, let's divide the world into these four categories. And let's practice dividing the world into these four categories. Actually, these categories are not very clear conceptually.

[17:47]

But they're quite clear in praxis. If you practice these categories, you find there's a clarity that comes, that makes these categories clear. makes sense. If you think about the categories, you say, well, why is this in this one, and why is that in that one, and so on. Then... There's almost no use to understanding these categories. It's only useful to practice the categories. Okay, so let's go back to the body. And the... How do we notice the body?

[18:51]

And again, as I said last evening, the most basic is to notice the breath. Okay, and then... Because, you know, there's your... This funny object is breathing. Yeah. and so you also then notice your breathing but you notice your inhalation and exhalation yeah and so when we do zazen and count our exhalations, where this comes from this basic practice of mindfulness of the body. Now, we had a

[20:19]

A scientist at Crestone the other day, a few days ago, named Stu Kaufman. Who's one of the leaders in complexity theory and chaos theory? And it seems to, as Shenley agreed, I think that he's changed the view of evolution and the role of Darwin in natural selection and evolution. The role of Darwin's theories. So anyway, he came up to visit and people wanted to give a talk, so he did. And what was interesting about the talk is that he explained very simple things.

[21:42]

But he looked at them extremely thoroughly. And out of looking at simple things that mostly we take for granted, he kept unfolding layers. that then produced ideas you didn't notice. And practice is Zen. Buddhism in general is like that. We take very simple things, basically breathing, and we look at it very carefully. And we don't just look at it conceptually. We look at it moment after moment. In each moment, separately. With our attention. And this is a craft. Now you may be able to, enlightenment may help you to practice this craft.

[23:11]

Free you to the... importance of practicing this craft. But still, it's a craft we practice. And the alchemy and transformative aspects of practice, the effects of practice, arise through this in each moment bringing attention. So one of the aspects of looking at things thoroughly is that virtually any aspect opens up into the whole of Buddhism. So if we just start with mindfulness of the body and we take this posture to become mindful of the body and with the attentiveness of this posture

[24:36]

we become attentive to our breath. And if you learn how to do that, and you can really bring this, retain this attentiveness to your breath, throughout the qualities of your breath, This is almost the whole of Buddhism. So we could, you know, stop now. This could be your task to bring the attentiveness of breath into all your activities. It's possible to do, you know. If you want to.

[26:11]

Usually you want other things more. Which is understandable, other things are more interesting. But if you get so that you can do it, it makes other things more interesting. So, I don't know if this is useful, but... I was about to go off on a tangent walking with the Blue Mountains.

[27:16]

What is tangent? Tangent means a different direction. But, and to try to say something about the difference between physical space and mental space. And I think I'll leave that to see if it comes up again. But one of the things you can see in a person who practices is that they live in physical space. Well, most of us live in, I think, a mental space. And this is a big difference.

[28:21]

We say we have a technical term which means something like thought coverings. We don't see the microphone, we see the thought covering of the microphone. Or as I often say, if your arm is asleep, And you can't find it. But if you find your little finger, then you know where your arm is. That means you've found the thought covering of the arm. That makes sense. Because your arm is still asleep. But once you've experienced your finger or you've poked it somewhere, then the image of the arm comes back into your mind.

[29:25]

You can begin to work with your arm. The image of the arm, yeah. So that means what you're experiencing is the image of the arm as well as the physicality of the arm. And at some point in practice these thought coverings break like an eggshell. And you get fatter immediately. Und ihr werdet fatter. Your stomach comes down.

[30:26]

You stop holding it. Und ihr entspannt euch und euer Magen und euer Bauch lasst ihr dann los. Not you. We'd like him to get fatter, actually. Wir hätten gern, dass er dicker wird. Anyway, no wonder you couldn't translate it. I didn't understand it. No wonder you couldn't translate it because you had no experience of getting fatter. Anyway, some kind of shift occurs where you feel like your body is settled or relaxed inside. And to wind my way back to the mountains walking, Many of these phrases of, that's a phrase of Dogen, phrases of Dogen and in the koans of the Tang and Sung dynasty, are clearly written

[31:36]

in a language meant to be understood in physical space, not mental space. But you hear a phrase like... A stone maiden gives birth to a child in the middle of the night. It makes no sense in mental space. It's conceptually wrong. But if you practice with it in physical space, it's immediately two-thirds right. Because there is such a thing as the middle of the night. And there is such a thing as giving birth. And there are such things as stone maidens. It's just the relationship between the three. doesn't make sense in mental space.

[33:07]

So many of these things are meant to befuddle you in mental space. But when you practice with them, part by part, They start to reveal something. And everything starts giving birth. And you find the middle of the night right here. Right now there's a lot going on right here, but it's in the light. In the light of our senses. But there's all kinds of things going on in here outside our senses. We refer to that like the streams flowing in darkness. And this sense of the streams flowing in darkness, even in this room, are connected to this practice of bringing attention to the body through the breath.

[34:27]

Usually counting the exhales on the beginning. Now the other parts of this, other aspects of bringing attention to the body, is to bring attention to the parts of the body, and to bring attention to the four postures of the body, the four usual postures of the body, walking, standing, sitting, and reclining. Again, this is a kind of breaking continuity. Because you're noticing not the mental... streambed of thought continuity all the time.

[35:58]

But you're noticing the mind of walking. Or the mind of standing, coming into standing. Yeah, like that. And you're noticing the four elements or qualities of the body. Solidity. Fluidity. Motility, movement. And space or air. No, we don't usually bring attention to these things.

[37:04]

We don't usually bring attention to the solidity in distinction to the fluidity. But as a wisdom practice, Buddhism says it's wise to do so. To study the environment of the body and the mind. And finally, usually, the aspects of the body that we become mindful of. is that it's going to die. That it's perishing, perishable. So sometimes if you're really traditional, you find a cemetery and meditate in it.

[38:11]

Especially one full of ghosts. Rotting corpses and things like that. Howling wolves and vultures. But there's not one of those in your neighborhood. And just to notice the... How each moment is appearing and disappearing. And how each moment of living is based on this change and eventual change. So in these various ways we bring attention to the body. And your body begins to be permeated by attention. By aliveness. by the presence of mind.

[39:38]

It's a little bit like you're taking some kind of sponge and you keep pouring the liquid of mind into it. And the main way to pour is to pour through the funnel of the breath. I mean, it's pretty difficult to bring attention to the parts of the body unless you have experience of joining attention and breath. But the more you have this experience of joining attention and breath, which, as I said, physicalizes the mind, and mentalizes the body, and begins to create a kind of, as I've said, internal flashlight.

[40:56]

And you can explore your lungs, your stomach, your kidneys, your legs, and so forth. You can explore them as... They are in anatomical diagrams. And if you're a doctor, it's almost impossible not to do it that way. But you can also explore them as... some kind of mysterious shape, the kind of shape they occupy in your body in terms of energy or feeling. More health or lack of health. Or You explore their shape by their function, not by the shape of their functioning, not the shape of their

[42:22]

their physical shape. In other words, like the lungs. The lungs have a particular physical shape. At least what we call the lungs. But the functioning of the lungs reaches throughout the whole body. So to explore the lungs as the functioning of the lungs, you may find their shape is quite different. then some people will discover they have a color or sound. Now one other aspect I didn't mention of the tradition of mindfulness of the body is the bodily clarity

[43:34]

the bodily clarity of mind discovered in each activity. The bodily clarity of mind discovered in each activity. So just sitting here. There's a certain kind of clarity that can come from just sitting here. And another from doing something else. And if you can just bring your attention to your breathing, there's a particular clarity that arises through that. If you can just bring your attention to your backbone, the lifting feeling in your backbone, there's a kind of clarity accompanied by that.

[45:04]

If you just look at the flowers, and not see them or think about them. But just look at them and have the patience to let them look back at you. A kind of clarity arises through that. So part of the mindfulness of the body is to know the specific clarity that arises in each particularity. Am I getting you too much? Okay. So let me try to give you a feeling for that.

[46:16]

I'm sitting here with you. There are moments of silence that keep appearing among us. Each one's a little different. Some are very silent. Some are just a moment where we've all stopped or done something together. So I can speak in such a way, that I don't say something, anything.

[47:07]

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