Do we know yet if the baby was born or did they get to the hospital? Well, let's phone Hans or his wife. Heike. Heike. And find out. It might even be a new Sangha member. Eddie did that. They made two new Sangha members. We have to be great, great from within. So today, I guess, Inosama, you centered us on one side.

[01:04]

So that's okay. Yesterday we were centered more on the Akshobhya. So tomorrow, let's be centered on Amida Buddha. As you can see, I'm a person who tolerates a lot of change. But also, as I'm saying, we're creating this space It's also nice when we get used to a certain way the space is. And if we feel located in our space, we feel more located. When I have to travel, which is a little more than I like, I try to get in Wien or Kassel, the same hotel room every year.

[02:16]

They even know, they keep a little record. That guy wants the same room a year later. And then when I reach out for Kleenex tissue, as I do often, my hand knows right where it is. And when I grab a Kleenex bag, as I do very often, my hand knows exactly where I can find it. And when I'm in another hotel room, and sometimes they want to do something good for me and upgrade me, but that doesn't work for me, then my hand doesn't know where the Kleenex is. Now I'm asked now and then, and was again yesterday, please say something about how to notice mind on each appearance.

[03:38]

And every time I'm asked a question like that, I realize what an inadequate teacher I am. And here I'm trying to establish a multi-generational Sangha. And I can't even establish a contemporary Sangha which knows what to study. Yeah, but it goes against my grain, whatever that is, to have a syllabus. Syllabus?

[04:42]

A syllabicism. A curriculum. Because I feel if I do that, I'm robbing you of the creativity of putting the parts together. So my intuitive or whatever, you know, natural, intuitive way of presenting practice is to present various... teachings at different levels simultaneously. And leave a lot of gaps between beginnings and ends. And then I feel it becomes more your own practice because you have to fill in the gaps.

[05:58]

And that's how I had to practice, so it makes sense to me. But it's good to fill in the gaps sometimes. Now, there's a tendency to... I mean, Buddhism does not particularly like reductive thinking. Not so much because it simplifies what you're trying to observe... But because there's an implicit or explicit bias that earlier or the source is better. and then if the source is better, there's a theological bias there.

[07:06]

So if you get everything reduced to a source, then you say, hey, where did the source come from? Oh, God. And so Buddhism has said, well, we don't know what the source is, so let's just say something always existed. And the always existing is just going on. Yeah, and so that really makes a difference in our emphasis because we're involved in a process without goals. So there's a process, we're entering it, but the process itself is the goal. So this basic way of looking at things... translates into our everyday practice as the process itself is the goal.

[08:52]

And then the path itself is the goal. And then Dogen can say Zazen itself is practice or is realization. Und so kann Dogen sagen, dass die Praxis selbst Praxis und Verwirklichung ist. So these basic ways of looking at things translate into the particular in different ways. Und so übersetzen sich diese grundlegenden Sichtweisen in die Einzelheiten hinein. So I know where this Kleenex is.

[09:52]

Only in my right sleeve. And the wastebasket is my left sleeve. And I'm glad my... And I don't want three sleeves, you know, it's bad enough. Two. Okay, so what the heck am I talking about? Okay. So both Buddhism and Western thinking have been, often have atomic theories. Im Buddhism und im westlichen Denken gibt es also oft haben sich oder es gibt Atomtheorien. Wir reden über Atome. The word atom means not dividable.

[10:55]

Und das Wort Atom bedeutet das nicht Teilbare. Unfortunately contemporary science wasn't smart enough to keep it undivided. Und leider war die zeitgenössische Wissenschaft nicht klug genug das Atom wirklich ungeteilt zu lassen. Yeah, and so there were atomic theories, and you have a later version in Leibniz in the West. And his idea of monads was, I guess, somewhat more sophisticated than the idea of undividables in a neutral space. By mentioning this, to respond to this simple question, how do we notice mind on each appearance? So the basic question is, how do we get to the idea of appearance?

[12:03]

And the fourth century BCE, before our common era, And in India. They had an atomic theory something like similar to Aristotle's. We don't say before Christ anymore because we're being polite to the rest of the world. Yeah, we aren't, unfortunately. We say before Christ. Oh, you do. In English we say before the common era. The sea and the Christ and the common are the same sea.

[13:03]

You see that. That was his gemeinsame Zeitrechnung. That was his gemeinsame Zeitrechnung. That was his gemeinsame Zeitrechnung. Well, you guys straighten that out, and I'll sit here for a while. Okay. Can I go ahead? Yes, please. Yes, ma'am. Okay. So, but around Dignaga's time, and Dignaga in the 7th century CE, our common era, They didn't want to give anything substantive, any way to describe the world in a substantive way. So they emphasized basically movement moments.

[14:08]

That's where they got to, movement moments. There's a lot of thinking. These are generations of hundreds and hundreds, even thousands of people in each generation thinking about these things. And thinking generation to generation, speculating together. It's taken a long time to make these distinctions. So by Dignaga's time, and he's a crucial turning point for us in Zen Buddhism, And many things that Indian philosophy at that time brought up into Buddhism, which were ignored by Chinese Buddhism.

[15:32]

So we have to weave into our Chinese inheritance the Buddhist discoveries of Indian Buddhism and unweave some Chinese presuppositions which are in our Zen practice. And we don't have a sacred text, you know, Really, Buddhism is a construction project under construction. You know, before Dignaga with Vasubandhu, his teacher,

[16:33]

The sources of true knowledge were evidence, sensorial evidence, logic, and the sutras. And Dignaga said, can contrast to Vasubandhu. But, you know, various different schools understand the sutras and the teachings of the Buddha differently, so let's ignore that. So, Dignaga said, The only sources of true knowledge are evidence and inference and logic, inferential logic.

[17:49]

So that puts the whole thing in our own hands. Where's the evidence and what's the logic? So, Dignaga emphasized in others at his time that there were durationless energy points. You could almost translate them as qualia. They're not the same as Leibniz monads. Because here they're ungraspable, timeless energy points. That's what makes up our world, our experiential world.

[19:10]

So the emphasis is on an experienceable world, not a conceptual world. Can concepts follow from experience and not vice versa? Okay. Now, so it's up to us to divide experience into appearances. Now, partly it's just a memorization project.

[20:11]

Whenever somebody speaks to me about this kind of thing, I think, isn't it clear that this is simply partly just you memorize that appearance is accompanied by mind? Like there's no secret to seven times seven is 49. Yeah, you can take a bunch of sevens and find out that it's true. And seven times eight is 56, and seven times nine is 63. And you just memorize those. You don't have to... Das erinnerst du einfach.

[21:19]

Du musst nicht jedes Mal das ganze Zeug rausholen und dir sieben und sieben und sieben hinlegen. Das erinnerst du einfach. Und das Gedächtnis ist teilweise eine Gabe und teilweise aber auch eine erlernte Technik. And it's kind of interesting to study memory palace ideas from the Middle Ages. But in any case, so that after a while, if you know your multiplication tables, I can remember Sophia trying to learn them. If you see a 56 somewhere, You immediately know it's also seven eights. There's no secret to this.

[22:21]

You memorized it. Okay. So you're trying to memorize that on every appearance mind is also an appearance. Okay, but then we have the, probably the real problem is that we don't have, we have given units, ones and sevens and things like that. We don't have given appearance units. Now those Buddhists in Dignitas time called these experiential moment movements Yeah.

[23:36]

Dharmas. Or guna dharmas. Okay, so they call them dharmas. We're involved in dharmic practice. Creative dharma practice begins when you begin to experience things in units, dharmic units. Until then, the path doesn't start creating itself. When you embody appearance units, internalize appearance units, the path has its own momentum and begins to create itself. That doesn't become the case until you develop the first memorization of that product and then the memorization that they are accompanied, dharma and appearance and mind.

[25:08]

And until you start noticing the world as a series of appearances. And this is often likened to a lightning flash. And I think Suzuki Roshi in Zen Mind, Beginning Mind, speaks sometimes about the world is flashing into existence moment after moment. That concept goes way back into early Buddhism in India. Now the problem here is not that we've run out of time yet. The problem is that the brain gives us a seamless appearance.

[26:10]

Das Problem ist, dass die Welt uns eine nahtlose Erscheinung vorgaukelt oder gibt. And as you all know probably about saccadic scanning. Und wahrscheinlich wisst ihr alle von diesem saccadischen Scannen. Discovered in the 1880s I guess by a French ophthalmologist. And he did a very simple thing. He put a mirror beside himself and watched himself read. What's interesting to me is it's so simple. Why didn't anybody do that before? Because before then, I would say, everyone really believed in God. And no one examined how we actually exist.

[27:30]

In the 1700s and 1800s, people began to look at and wonder, why is it like this? Why is this vertebrae different from that vertebrae? Or this skeleton different from that, etc. ? Maybe creation is an ongoing process and we're participating in it, etc. So, Emil Jamal Appen just decided, look at how he reads and watch it. And Emil, his last name? Emil? Saval. Saval. Saval, yeah. And the word saccadic comes from the French word, which means jerky.

[28:36]

And he noticed there were coordinated jerky eye movements of both eyes. He also, if you try to look at it yourself by looking in a mirror and you look back and forth, your brain hides the saccadic movements from you. The brain's job is to present us with a seamless, functional world. So as a practitioner, you do not want to be fooled by your seamless brain. Otherwise, your practice will always be conceptual. In the realm of the understood, but not the incubated.

[29:50]

Okay, so you... So the idea was you had, and they were a more bodily culture than we are, You had to study perception in bodily units, not mental units. And so what I have discovered and would suggest is you have to develop a breath-body wedge. Again, I decided to go into such detail because I realized I've never made this clear enough.

[30:51]

And it relates to practice as a craft. And it's implied in how you do zazen, how you do kinin, how you step forward, you know, heel and so forth. That's all to shift our attentional realm into the body and out of the brain. So it's very convenient that our brain gives us a seamless... seamless... appearance world. And of the two truths, that's the functional truth, but not the fundamental truth.

[32:14]

The fundamental truth you discover through this, open it up through this breath-body wedge. Now, what I'm suggesting is you have to actually kind of teach yourself the way an athlete might or a mountain climber might to really feel how this amazing guy climbed the most difficult cliff in the world in Yosemite, all by himself with no ropes or anything in one day. A friend of mine was one of the first to climb it, but they took about four days to climb it. But anyway, this guy is virtually fearless.

[33:33]

He's not the world's best climber, they say, but he's fearless. And I'm into this anecdote. So there was a person who's considered a better climber was being instructed by this fearless guy how to get across this thing, and he fell twice. But in that, or in many athletics, you have to feel experience in physical units. So maybe if you have athletic experience, you can transfer that to your dharma practice to feel the world in physical units.

[34:48]

But you have to actively decide not to be fooled by the seamless brain appearance. And another way to look at it is to not notice, to not think the world, but to insist on feeling the world. Feel each unit of each perception. Don't think of perception. To feel the unit of each perception, to feel each perception, each quali, And not be satisfied with thinking it.

[36:16]

You have to kind of immerse you, push your mind, push yourself, your attentiveness down into the body. Until appearance is like a physical breath unit. Maybe like on the bicycle, every pump, your feel is in the breath, I presume. Okay, so now once you've got the feel of the physical bodily feel of appearance. So you've created a bodily feeling. And you just develop a sense of walking to a room, walking, as I said, each step is that you're making space.

[37:34]

You're not thinking your world. you're feeling your world. And as soon as you start thinking your world, you cut it off. And then you enter the world that you feel, which then it feels even wider than the thought-defined world. So you're simply a physical presence. You're no longer the idea of even who you are, name and stuff. Your physical presence of movement moments.

[38:38]

As I say, see everything as activity and not as an entity. And now that you've really, after a while, it takes, you know, years or months or, you know, a while, to really feel the world as physical units. First, it is in fact physical, sensorial units. This is part of the Buddhist, one of the conditions for Buddhist teaching is that it's as close as possible to how we actually exist. How we actually exist is in these physical moment movement units.

[39:42]

And the more you internalize that conceptually and then embody it experientially, The more you internalize that conceptually and then embody it physically, you turn the path into a runway in which you take off. No, well enough. You start taking off. So your question wasn't so simple after all, was it?

[40:49]

But we need a context to really, what I decided today was we need a context to really get it, why you have to shift into bodily appearance units out of the seamless brain appearance units. But first we have to create a sense of connection. We have to really understand why it is necessary to shift into physical units of movement and into ourselves and out of this seamless brain experience. This bodily movement unit appearance prepares the soil in which the teachings take root. Until then, it remains two easily nice concepts. So you really are changing how you exist.

[41:58]

Isn't that interesting? What more can I offer you? Thank you very much. Thank you.

[42:22]

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