You know, for me there's a kind of a, I don't know what word to use, but self-joyous or spontaneous joy in practicing together, practicing with you. That's the pleasure of this week and I'm But I'm also aware that in a couple days, three days or so, most of us separate. But even if we separate and I don't ever see you again, I still want to keep practicing with you somehow. So that's a kind of koan for me. Or practice with you because you continue practicing.

[01:04]

Or, I don't know. If I say any more, it sounds kind of weird because there's a lot of things to do in this world other than practice, so I don't want to burden you with some sort of trip. Anyway, that's how I feel, so. Yesterday I was quite amused by our inability to swallow the gnocchi, or at least my inability to swallow the gnocchi, and in the evening our inability to get the hot drink out of the nozzles. It made me think of the hungry ghosts. Hungry ghosts in Buddhism are are people or spirits or whatever, which have such thin throats, they're like needles. There's lots of food there but they have these tiny throats and they can't get anything in, you know. And we're sort of like hungry ghosts.

[02:07]

Everything is here, you know, and yet Everything we need is here and yet we can't taste it usually, can't be nourished by it. This is the week of, this is Rohatsu, the sashin that celebrates Buddha's enlightenment. And December 8th is the day, Bodhi Day. which is actually only Bodhi Day in Japan, but since every day is Bodhi Day, it's all right. Japan celebrates it on this December 8th. The rest of the Buddhist world has picked May something. And they've tried to combine all the, as if Buddha was enlightened, born and died on the same day. In Japan, they celebrate three different days. But in any case, every day is enlightenment day.

[03:11]

But if we're all enlightened, why do so few of us realize it? This is my other koan. But we have so much wounded karma and we've been taught to view ourselves and our career and our achievement and our arrival and identity in such a narrow compass that it's very difficult to shake out of it. I could say so few people realize enlightenment because they don't want to.

[04:18]

That's certainly true if they really wanted to. But it's not that simple. Because some way, somehow, everything we are implies the realization of enlightenment and the desire to realize enlightenment. I think of when I first met, actually I think I only met Jack Herrick once or twice, once for sure. I remember other times, but I was in New York at the time he was there sometimes. I think this was in 59 or 60, maybe. And I was at a kind of gallery party, some sort of party of the art world, private party. And this guy kept reeling around through, and that was Jack Kerouac.

[05:19]

He was quite drunk. At some point, he reeled up to me about for the fourth time and gave me a little sketch he'd done. He drew a little picture of me. He said, you look just like T.S. Eliot. which I still have somewhere as a bookmark, some book that's in some box somewhere. There's a woman in Santa Fe who makes pillows and she wants to, Fairleigh Getty and various people, and she wants to do a pillow based on this sketch, but I can never know if I'll ever turn it up someday. If I have space enough to unpack books that have been packed for years, I'm pretty sure it's in a book somewhere. Once when I was extremely broke in Japan, someone gave me a hundred dollars and I put it in a book. I found it four years later. And I kept thinking, God, I'm so broke. If I could find that hundred dollars. Then one day when I didn't need it, it just appeared.

[06:20]

I opened it. Ooh, look, a hundred dollars. Hmm. Anyway, he was quite drunk. And then when I went to San Francisco in 60... I think November of 60, maybe. Must have been. I met Alan Watts, and we became kind of friends, associates. And I, as some of you know, I performed his funeral. I was with him. We went up to look at this temple I... built in uh the sierra which now is gary snyder's and uh nice little temple called shobo on just like shobo genzo true eye hermitage i miss it but i could just physically can't couldn't get there very often so gary has it now and uh his new wife and uh

[07:30]

We went up there together. He went up with me to sort of do a little opening ceremony for it. And when we came back, driving in the car, he asked me, he said, I want you to do my funeral. I said, a hundred years hence? He said, I'd like a funeral for an abbot. He wasn't an abbot, but it's all right. He didn't have to be an abbot. He was more than an abbot. So I said, okay, I will. And I think just two months later he died. I don't remember exactly. I did a very big funeral for him. I mean, it was a huge funeral with hundreds of people. I think it's the most formal funeral ceremony except for Sukhiroshi's I've ever performed. Anyway, both Jack Kerouac and Alan Watts were drunks.

[08:37]

Serious drunks. Alcoholics. Died of alcoholism, really. And I bring it up because I'm talking about enlightenment. And I think that there's a You know, alcohol does move us into, at least out of daily life consciousness. I'm not sure it moves us into non-daily life consciousness, but it does something for us. And I think both Alan Watts and Jack believed in enlightenment. No, I don't know. Let me say it that way now. Believed in enlightenment. and yet didn't have the possibility of probably, of really practicing in a way that that realization, that belief can become realization. And there's a fine line, you know, there's a certain demand on teachers to

[09:51]

or for somebody like Jack as a writer, to work with non-daily life consciousness. And it's hard to do, you know, particularly when it's expected of you. So coming back to our Sushim, Thich Nhat Hanh, he's got these amusing little ways of putting things. And he said, there's Father's Day and there's Mother's Day and he said there's Earth Day. He said people have founded an Earth Day so we can be mindful of the Earth. He says, and yet, every day is Earth Day. There's no special day. I mean, every day is Earth Day. And are you only going to be mindful of your mother on Mother's Day? Every day is Mother's Day. So he suggested people form, gather together to have a special today's day.

[11:02]

When everyone would practice celebrate today's day. And I think we are celebrating this week's week. And the idea of Sashin is, and I, you know, it also amuses me that you guys come to Sashin. I don't know why you come to Sashin. It's crazy. Your legs hurt, you get desperate on the second or third day. I mean, even maybe the fifth day. Some of you are desperate. I don't know. But you come to Sashin. I don't understand it. But I love to see you, so I'm willing to have a Sashin party just so I can see you. I could throw another kind of party if you'd come, but most of you come to Sashin parties, so this is the kind of party I throw with the help of my friends here. So this is this week's week

[12:04]

And as I said at the beginning, it's a week to practice to see if you can not be drawn into daily life consciousness. And it interests me how hard it is for you to actually see the point of actually not talking. Or reading. And, you know, I have a lot of sympathy for it, too, because I can understand, at least what I understand, is a kind of need for a certain continuity and familiarity, and we get into practice, and we have some sense of a treasure in practice, and that's enough. You know, that's good. So we talk a little bit. I also feel there's a desire... to create Sangha.

[13:10]

And I think in Sashin we also, as well as getting seriously annoyed with each other sometimes, we also fall in love or want to establish some friendship with someone. I don't know, was it Jack Kornfield who said in retreat you fall in love with someone's socks? I don't know, anybody leaving old socks around? Or Joseph Goldstein said that? One of those Vipassana teachers, I think. And I see a kind of desire to recognize another kind of friendship when you meet somebody in Sasheen. And all of you, as soon as the Sashin party is over, you all leave very rapidly instead of staying around as a little longer as I wish you would.

[14:18]

No, I'm leaving, I'm sorry. But there's other nice folks here, you know. So I think the desire to form, whether you recognize it or not, there's a desire to form Sangha friendships And certainly one of the ways to continue practicing is to find people, not necessarily friends, but also friends, who you can practice with once a week or so as keeping some sense of Sangha to support your own practice and to support others. Now, enlightenment, or I don't know what we should call it, it's such a problematical word, as you know, as we've talked about before, and it has some

[15:29]

I mean experientially or phenomenologically it's very close to, sometimes close, the experience is sometimes close to Protestant conversion experiences. And all of us, I mean basically why you can't practice enlightenment or anticipate enlightenment or grasp enlightenment is because it's dimensionless. It's a turning, it's a change in direction, it's a turning around. And as I spoke in Castle, there are many aspects of practice, many of them gradual, and the maturing of living enlightenment is gradual. But the actual experience is a turning around experience. But we all have turning around experiences. Each one of us does. And even the tiniest ones are actually enlightenment experiences, at least if they fall on a heightened awareness, a potency of consciousness. kind of potency.

[16:32]

Even, I guarantee you, the decision to come to this sesshin is an enlightenment experience. The decision to practice is an enlightenment experience. But it has to fall on a certain ground, this turning around, or it soon is just a little nodule of light floating in a sea of darkness or floating in a sea of other interests, which are completely valid. The model, I mean, the metaphor or analogy is a little bit like water waves and the surface of the water, one I've talked about before. The waves are our personal history and our story, our separate identity, our need for friendship and so forth.

[17:40]

And the water is the ultimate dimension where nothing is needed because it's all water. You don't need some special kind of friendship and things like that. Except to recognize each other's water. And the surface, the surface mostly thinks it's a wave. And we're the surface. Sometimes the surface might recognize that it's water. And that little shift is what practice is about. And non-daily life consciousness is that surface consciousness which is aware that it's water, or more likely aware that it's water. So that's why in Sashin, Sashin is designed

[18:43]

to, in every instance possible, to turn you away from daily life consciousness toward non-daily life consciousness, away from being a wave toward being water. So we do as little as possible in Sashin to remind you that you're a wave. And sometimes your desire to recognize your friend or your new friend as water actually becomes out of habit, recognizing your friend as wave, but mostly turning yourself into a wave again. And I think for most of us, you know, especially those of us who are practicing seriously, it's not so much a wounded karma or narrow compass, but rather simple habits that keep us from realizing the way in which we are water.

[19:53]

Realizing the this of this room. The word thus, thusness, which means the water, is the same word as the and this, etymologically. So we have this room, the thisness of this room. And in practice you have your body, And after a while you have the body. You're not sure whose body it is. You wish it was someone else's sometimes. And then the body turns into the, the, the body, thusness body. And once you're into making that shift, you're into Buddha's body. So strangely, it looks like you're becoming impersonal, the sense that it's your body to the body, but then the, the, thus, this.

[21:09]

And that's the Tathagata. Tathagata means the body, the thusness body of the Buddha. And Tathagata is the biggest name for the Buddha. And this is, on the altar we say the Dharmakaya Vairochana Buddha. Dharmakaya is the thusness. Vairochana is that Buddha on the center. In fact, we have the three bodies of Buddha on the altar. The center, the Vairochana, is the biggest concept of Buddha. And that's the Dharmakaya Buddha. And then on the right we have in the little black box, Fudo Myo or Achala, the immovable Buddha. the fiery Sambhogakaya body of bliss and manifestation of subtle body. Then on the right we have Suzuki Roshi, on the left which is the Nirmanakaya body.

[22:13]

Now the image of the Buddha is obviously a very powerful one and you find it in jewelry stores among the watches and It's everywhere around. I mean, there's more Buddhas around in shops than Christ figures. You wouldn't put a Christ figure in with the watches. They'd be sacrilegious, for one thing. Yet somehow Buddhas sort of... You can stick him anywhere, you know. And he's okay. Or she's okay. And I think it's... I would say that it's because Buddha is a very powerful image of our identity. And I think when you recognize that you live an image of your identity, which you get from lots of sources, your parents, friends and fashion magazines and the chic person you saw walking down the street the other day, which you think, ah, that was a nice color on that person or something like that. So then you go out and buy a sweater with the same color.

[23:19]

So those things are all, you know, little things that actually shape our image of ourself in the way we feel comfortable in daily life consciousness. But when you look at the image of yourself in non-daily life consciousness, hey, you know, it's... but very likely that guy, that... It's one of them. There may be others, but it's definitely one of them. And its ubiquitousness suggests that it's actually, you know, an image of you. It takes generations to create such images. And the posture and the hands and the way the jewels or the clothes activate certain parts of the body And it's created by our society.

[24:21]

And it's a powerful image in any society, any culture. So I think when you look at the altar, you can look and say, hey, that actually is one possible, in fact, probably is already one image of me. A workable image, a working image that you can use and feel. And such an image also seals non-daily life consciousness, like I talked yesterday about using a sense of doing each thing completely as a way of sealing your experience. And yet leaving it open at the same time. Now mindfulness practice, developing a sense of the continuity of mind, big mind, that's not limited to, that carries daily life consciousness.

[25:39]

And as you get to practice mindfulness, and the best way to thread mindfulness into the objects, into shining your light on everything that appears, knowing it's your light and more than your light. And what a wonderful treasure just to have this phrase, to shine your light on everything, to shine the light on everything, to let the light of everything shine on you. But to enter that kind of beauty, we need not too much distraction, not too much discursive. We really have to be in today's day, this week's week. And we carry certain coordinates, you know. When you experience things in terms of ordinary daily life consciousness and space and time,

[26:49]

tomorrow, the next day, and space separating me from the altar and so forth. I mean, in yogic experience, we have to keep coming back to space connects. Space connects. Space doesn't just separate. In the undivided world, in the world of non-daily consciousness, space connects. And time stops and we have this week's week, this day's day. And when you know that, it's not, again, you don't have to, it's not a prison. You can come back into daily life consciousness. The more you know that, it's like you slip out of the wave, out of the surface, into the water. and you get thoroughly wet. As I said in that little poem the other night, muddy and wet, muddy with the world and wet with this ultimate dimension of our existence which is always present.

[27:58]

And so one of the key factors in realizing enlightenment is to believe in enlightenment, to know this water is, I mean it's not tomorrow, This, you know, what can I do? Bang on the thing? Do I have a big staff? And shout? There's no, I can't say anything. But if you believe, yes, it must be so. If you get discouraged, you don't believe. If you get discouraged, you're anticipating, you're wanting it, you want it in daily life consciousness. Non-daily life consciousness doesn't care whether it's enlightened or not. Because it already is, of course, but also your experience within non-daily life consciousness is not one of wanting or not wanting. So the problem with many people practicing is they, after a while, get discouraged.

[29:34]

Hey, this big, the ultimate goody, the world's biggest cookie, was promised to me and it hasn't arrived. I haven't even had a nibble, not a crumb. So you begin to think the whole Buddhist thing is a shuck. You've been sold a bill of goods. These are colloquial expressions. I'm sure you're not familiar with ordinary German-English. But anyway, you get the picture. And I don't want to sell you a bill of goods or a cookie in the sky. But I can only ask you, you know, practice non-daily life consciousness. I mean, mindfulness of daily life consciousness is very important.

[30:35]

And mindfulness of daily life consciousness turns the surface so you begin to see the reflection of the moon. And yet, really what we need in Sashin is mindfulness of non-daily life consciousness. And as I said, the coordinates change. When you are in a world of tomorrow and yesterday and space separates, it's in your body. It's in a kind of inner geometry of your body. And it connects everything and connects you to everything in a certain way. And when you begin to enter non-daily life consciousness and experience and find space connecting everything, nothing feels outside you, nothing feels separate. Time seems stopped and living and dying is irrelevant. You make friends differently. You're just the littlest ball and you've made a bond with someone.

[31:38]

You don't have to talk with them to establish Sangha. So if you trust this process of shining your light on everything, if you trust this process of enlightenment, trust this process of non-daily life consciousness, the desire to talk to somebody or to establish Some friendship with someone will occur in non-daily life consciousness even more powerfully. So sometimes we can use daily life consciousness. It's like patting somebody who needs a little help. We should do that. But in Sashin, see what you can do with NDLC, non-daily life consciousness. I'll give you a degree afterwards. But it has session completed and DLC. Doctorate in loving care.

[32:46]

DLC. Because there's a potency to mind. As I started to say, mindfulness can carry an object. So you thread breath into the world, thread breath into your consciousness, and that mindfulness of breath then can start being mindful of the body, can start being mindful of your feelings. So in a way, mindfulness of the breath, realized mindfulness of the breath begins to carry the world. You can bring it to your posture, you can bring it to your pain, you can bring it to your wounded karma, all of our wounded karma. And that capacity, if you just do it, that same mindfulness can start to be mindful of non-daily life consciousness and carry this sense of the water, of the ultimate dimension of our existence, the thusness of our existence into daily life.

[34:04]

Then if you have a turning experience, a tiny turning experience, it falls on such an aroused potentiality that you turn around in the very deep seat of your being, turn around your life, and we call this enlightenment in Buddhism. And thus Buddha taught us, and so many people have spent their entire lives trying to make this possible for you and for me. Thank you very much.

[34:52]

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