So I won't try to give some kind of integrating teisho to end these seven teishos. But I'd like to speak about a number of things which maybe will... help us initiate a feel for the field of mind. But I would like to talk about a few things that might help us to initiate a feeling for the field of mind. and the experience of ourselves, as I emphasized in the first teisho, as a location.

[01:02]

So let me continue somewhat in the same vein as yesterday. Because when we're talking about causal centrality or foreground causality or something like that, we're talking about something that uses the same words as overlapping meanings, but the differences are such that the dynamic of each is a little different. And one doesn't exclude the other, but one can be more of the dynamic of the situation than the other.

[02:26]

Okay, so let's take straightening the incense with the stick. Also nehmen wir das Beispiel, das Räucherstäbchen irgendwie gerade zu richten mit einem anderen Stäbchen. Whoever is putting it down wants to put down the incense so it effectively burns and etc. Jeder, der diese Räucherstäbchen da hinlegt, möchte das so tun, dass es effektiv ist und das gut brennt. And you'd like it to be straight. But you accept what happens with your hand and you don't make an extra effort to straighten it. Yeah, if you straighten it with your hand, you try not to have your hands covered with ash and you know, etc. So usually you do what you can with your hand.

[03:32]

You get good at it after a while. But with either approach, the goal is more or less the same. But one has an emphasis on doing it in a context and the other has the emphasis on doing it correctly. Okay. I'm always straightening things as everybody who's ever been Eno here to their annoyance notices. And I forgive you for your annoyance. But one time, when we did sashins in the early days,

[04:37]

You couldn't lie down and you had no break periods. Well, there were break periods but they were just not very long and generally you stayed in the Zendo. But you could get up and go to the toilet or come back or whatever. I remember I was sitting once and I always sat with my knees up during the respiration. And Sukhirishi during the respiration was sitting on the altar And I got up and I walked to the back of the Zendo. I haven't told this story for a while.

[05:57]

And there's a big painting there by Kiji Kiyokawa, an abstract painting by a Japanese person. Well... But that's all right. That's good enough. Ichi, kichi, ku. Anyway, I went up, and it was a little crooked, and I went and straightened it. And Tsukuyoshi, after a little while, got up to go to his office. And he went by the painting, he made it crooked again. Anyway, I was sufficiently chastised. I have only a vague idea what it means.

[07:02]

I cannot translate it. Put in my place, it means. Okay, so anyway, but the thing is that on the altar, the idea is the altar is the one place. If anything's taken care of and exact, it's the altar. The center of Johanneshof is the Zendo. And the center of the Zendo is the incense burner. And the incense burner is located between two noses. Now some people just seem to put the incense burner up there. It sort of belongs up there if I put it there.

[08:03]

But it belongs in a context. And the context is established by you standing there at the back of the bowing mat. And in your mind drawing a straight line through your nose down to your front across the thing and up to the Buddha's nose. And that line turns into a hose and the Dharma comes flowing through. No, I'm just making that up. Anyway, so you place the incense burner so that the front leg is right in the line of the two noses. Some people get the front blade pretty much.

[09:06]

Since you've been Eno, it's been pretty exact, I must say. Thanks. But sometimes they get the back legs, they turn this way, but the front leg is in the right place. Okay. Now we have this new black Buddha out in the garden. It's a cousin of the Black Madonnas. The Buddhist cousin. Well, maybe we shouldn't call it the Black Buddha.

[10:08]

Let's call it the Garden Buddha. But Atmar built this wonderful platform there that just kept saying, bring me a Buddha, bring me a Buddha. Yeah, exactly, I heard it all the time. So I kept my eyes open and I found this guy in Freiburg. In a shop, a guy, Roland is his name, he's become sort of a friend of mine. And that big vajra on the altar comes from him. And also this great Vajra on the altar comes from him. So anyway, I told him, his wife had me speak to him, and his wife is Tibetan, I guess, and he said, oh, for you, 300 off.

[11:11]

So... His wife, who I think is Tibetan, said, yes, you both have to speak to each other, and then he said, oh, it's for you, yes, then 300 rabat. So I haven't found out from him yet whether it's Chinese or Korean, but it's one or the other, I'm pretty sure. Anyway, so I think that we ought to at some point find an incense burner for it. And sometimes we could start outside walking there or end it there or have a work meeting there. I think the back needs to come forward a couple of centimeters so it's more straight. But basically we just put it there and it's fine. Okay.

[12:20]

Now, I mentioned the story last night of Longya asking Dongshan Liangzhi Asking, what is the meaning of Bodhidharma coming from the West? When in this context, meaning means something like signify or involve. And that means in this context, to describe or involve? What does it involve or what does it signify? Okay.

[13:23]

Now, I'm trying to give you another example of contextual centrality. Because the two stories definitely mean that there's no meaning to Bodhidharma coming from the West. No big meta meaning. But it is part of a context. And Longya is part of that context. So he's not saying until the East, when the East River runs uphill, I'll tell you. He's not just saying, well, the East River is never going to run uphill, so it means there's no meaning.

[14:30]

No, it means that in this context of practice, of which Bodhidharma is one part of the spectrum, and Longya is another part of the spectrum, from this point of view you might Take a walk and you might see your Zen teacher sitting on the park bench nodding off on a sunny afternoon. And you might walk by and say, hey, what the heck is the Bodhidharma doing here? And your teacher might answer, oh, he's enjoying the next nine years.

[15:37]

Okay, any case. So what does he mean, what is he trying to suggest by saying, when the East River flows uphill? Well, we have to assume that in some way, Longya, in asking his question, had the feeling that Bodhidharma is somewhere out there and it means something. And that perhaps it's flowing toward Longya and Dongshan in some meaningful way. Now this is Chinese culture. which is much more about energetic dynamics than our culture.

[16:58]

And there's a tradition in China established in the poetry to talk about everything through nature. So he's saying to Longya, When you reverse your energy, you'll understand. Presumably at that moment, he understood that, and it reversed his energy, which, as Hakuin says, when you turn around your energy, that's called enlightenment. The last part with Hakuin I didn't quite remember. Hakuin talks about enlightenment or a realization experience as reversing your energy. So then when he brings the same story up to Linji, the founder of Rinzai, Rinzai Linji,

[18:11]

We have to presume that Linji could see easily that Longya was already enlightened. So in a way he takes the Zafu, which is also to say meditation or something, And sort of hits him with, you bad boy, why are you asking me this question? You already know. Yeah. And he says, well, you may just hit me like that, but I know there's no meaning to what you said. So this is kind of Serious playfulness. Okay.

[19:28]

Now, I don't know why 40 minutes seems so short in the Sesshin. Okay, so a number of you seem to have a problem with getting a sense of what I mean by a field of mind. I've been speaking about it pretty specifically for numbers of years now. But I think perhaps in the past it's been more in a context which made one aspect of this clearer, clear. And now I'm maybe speaking about it in some wider sense, so I'll try to review a bit.

[20:33]

First let's use a very simple example. You've got a book and there's words on the page. And you read the words. But the words do occur on the page. But we usually ignore the page unless it's a fine edition with nice paper or something. But the words do occur on a page. And your thoughts do occur somewhere. So we could say the page of the mind, maybe, instead of the field of the mind.

[21:46]

Now, if you do stop and look at the page, which I think everyone who reads does sometimes, You can sometimes see the spaces between the words as kind of rivers or channels between the text. But when you do that, you actually have to kind of like take your mind, your attention away from the words. Or kind of squint or refocus so that you just see the page as a whole. Now, this is a, you're changing how, you do have to change a bit how you look at the page to feel the page rather than the words.

[22:49]

Now you may... So anyway, in order to make that shift, there's a physical change, physical perceptual change. Now, you can get a feel for that physical difference. Okay. Now, you might say, why do I do something so artificial? Well, I mean... Your ability to read is sort of artificial.

[23:59]

You've learned how to do it. Yeah, my daughter Sophia, she's not dyslectic, but she processes visual information in a way that makes her a little slow at reading. And Katrin used to run a school in Frankfurt that taught kids how to improve there who had these problems. Okay. And Terence Deacon, a wonderful man I know who's written a book which demonstrates very clearly that the human brain over generations has developed because it reads.

[25:08]

Yeah. Anyway, it's very convincing. I'm quite sure he's correct. So our reading is actually something we've learned to do over generations. So there's nothing new or special about changing how you perceive. And that changing how you perceive, as I've said, changes you. And the kind of changes and emphasis I'm mentioning change you in a few months or certainly in years. You don't have to wait generations.

[26:10]

Okay. So you can learn to make this kind of shift. And as I've often said, you can try to make it when you enter a door. You use the door to cue a certain kind of mindfulness. A kind of dharma enactment. Okay, so you stop at the door. You stop your thinking. And you just feel the room like you might feel the page. And then you go in the room.

[27:26]

Yeah. And you know how you can sit on a bus and here in the field of conversation, you can identify one conversation and focus on it. And one can get better at doing things like that if you want to. Well, in a way, too, you can develop the sense of a field of mind and It's a physical feel. And you can learn to hold the field and yet pay attention to certain parts. No, you're definitely holding what we could call contextual centrality or something like that.

[28:46]

You're teaching yourself, which is a yogic skill, to notice context. Yeah. And I also suggest you develop the ability, as I do when I'm talking to you, Go from the particular to the field, from the field to the particular, etc. And I'm speaking to the field of you that you generate with me. And I feel I'm speaking to all of you at once. Now, Dogen says when he gives a lecture, I didn't translate that part correctly. I mentioned that part before when I quoted Dogen saying to be steadily intimate with the field of mind.

[30:03]

He speaks about establishing different modalities of mind from which he speaks. from which he speaks. And I establish a field of all of you at once to which I speak. And then I feel a kind of topography in that field, which leads me to say certain things. It's kind of standard Taisho skills. Or establish the samadhi of which there's no outside, etc.

[31:25]

Okay. So this emphasis on knowing... A sensorial and mental field is at the center of our Buddhist culture and practice. Yeah. And... Yeah, one of the ways to kind of look at it is it goes back to the Ayatanas. Yeah. Which we've spoken about years ago, the Amidara and all that stuff.

[32:25]

There's the eye. There's the object of perception. And there's the field of sensing that occurs in which the two... So there's three things. The object, the sense organ, and the field that's created. And that's called Ayatana. And there's twelve. for each object of the six objects and the six sense organs. Now, that's again a contextual perception.

[33:44]

You're not perceiving the object, you're perceiving the sense organ and the field that's created. That's a contextual perception. And this all strengthens right brain activity. Now this field of mind doesn't exist like some big piece of saran wrap here in the room. Or some kind of movie screen. The screen that's already there. No, you're generating this field of mind. Which also has a spatial sense. And I think of constellation therapy in which somehow these strangers, often strangers, establish a constellated field where there's information.

[35:07]

We could even consider this a kind of constellation, what we're doing right now. Man könnte sogar das hier, was wir gerade tun, als Aufstellung betrachten. Yeah. You're Longya. You're Linji. Du bist Longya und du bist Linji. Yeah, et cetera. Und so weiter. Okay. Now, again, this is enhanced if you fool around, play around with experiencing yourself as a location. A location where you feel just now everything is originating. Yeah, or everything just is, just is. No meaning, just is. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And a location, of course, is spatial.

[36:31]

So you begin to develop a kind of spatial way of feeling the world. So after a while you get a feel of the field of mind. Yeah, there's a feel of mind. Not unrelated to the shift to see the page and not the typefaces. And what I'm suggesting is you try these things on when you've got nothing better to do. Waiting for the dentist. Makes it much more interesting for the dentist.

[37:33]

than those dumb magazines they have or taking a walk like that this is called the easy zen way thank you very much

[37:50]

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