Well, thank you for still being here on the seventh day. And for practicing with us and yeah, and making this each time more of a practice place. And I think Yeah, maybe in this last tesho of the Sashin I can again try to just bring some feeling for this other culture, or specific kind of culture, based on a certain view of the world, that is Buddhism. I suppose I wear these funny robes, you know, sometimes I wonder, why the heck am I wearing these?

[01:01]

It certainly is not contemporary. Or maybe it is contemporary these days, I don't know. But in any case, I guess I do it because we've got to have some way to see a little shift, a little difference. And if I go in Europe, I usually accept it. The center, I usually just wear regular clothes but even so it's some like at the Boulder seminar but some still there has to be you know catch some difference and I was thinking of how you know in practice centers in Japan you can't go in the zendo unless you're initiated and then allowed to go in the zendo And it's like it's not, it feels like, well, it's something secret or something, but that's not about it. It's the zendo is not a building.

[02:02]

A zendo is a use. And it's use-specific, if that makes sense. So the zendo doesn't exist except in the practicing of it. If you go and look at the building, you think you've seen the zendo. No, the zendo exists, like right now, this is not a zendo, this is a dharma hall. Took the chair out and do some small things to make it It's turned this way now. The doksan room is the same. You're never allowed in the doksan room in a monastery or a practice center except when doksan is happening. Its identity is when is a doksan room not a doksan room when it's not a doksan room. I mean you can see Zen, this sounds like a Zen-y statement but you can see it's a kind of fact. Yuan Wu, you know, the compiler of the Blue Cliff Records, is really one of the great influential creators of our language, our practice.

[03:07]

He said, don't set up here and there. Don't set up before and after. Hmm, okay, yeah. I mean, you could see those words together, and maybe... You know, you can get a feeling for it. As I say, you know, one of the entry experiences to meditation is perhaps sunbathing. In sunbathing, there's no perhaps before and after, until after you're burned, or here and there. But in any case, on the one hand, it's not so unfamiliar. Don't set up here and there. But on the other hand, can you in your ordinary activity, right now for example, have a feeling of no here and no there? So that what you experience is nearness. Only experience nearness.

[04:11]

Whether you look at the velvet sky at night and stars or the layers of mist in these mountains and trees, it just feels near. Whatever the experience of nearness is, it's near. I don't know. It's a kind of prescription. It's kind of like you went to the Zen pharmacy and they gave you a prescription. Don't set up here or there. Can we actually do that? Does it make sense? And part of this is that not only are is much of the practice of Zen and much of the experiential realm of Zen dependent on the realization of prior teachings. But it's also dependent on the realization of prior experiences.

[05:13]

So in a funny way you can't see into your own practice future because it's just not there until you have certain kinds of experiences. So you could, I mean, some academic might say, well, those Zen folks are just trying to befuddle us and get power and they manifest their authority through koans or something else which no one understands anyway and you just, you know. You know, there may be some of that. But if you're in this practice, it's not like that. These things unfold, and what's interesting is the unfolding is largely not predictable from the previous fold. It's what makes it exciting and interesting and mysterious, actually. Whoa! When I said that, it made me think of Sophia.

[06:19]

She's always looking at everything. Everything is a kind of whoa to her. What's the German word? Ha. What's the German word they say? Exclamation. Hoo. What is it? Hoo. All of that. Hoo. I don't know. I can't remember how it goes exactly. Anyway. Whoa. Hoo. I can end the lecture right now. Here it is. Hoo. Whoa. Can it really be like this? Yeah, some kind of prescription like when you really can find the mind which doesn't set up here and there and rest in it. And, you know, someone brought up what's the difference between the consciousness of consciousness and awareness?

[07:27]

Well, you know, again, these are words. What am I trying to do? Cook with our words. Yeah, awareness, I would say, is a condition like consciousness. The consciousness of consciousness, which I tried to say the other day, is a kind of location within mind. a location, it's almost like you can take this consciousness, I'm seeing you, I'm seeing this room, you know, and peel off a layer of it. So there's no longer an emphasis on the contents, but rather just the consciousness of, the experience of consciousness. There's content

[08:29]

But there's a sameness to the content because all the content is characterized by consciousness itself. Now that's a kind of location you can feel in your body. In your body, in yogic practice, your body gets to remember this peeled off layer of consciousness which is suddenly very, very wide. And from that, if you can like be in a room of the mind, or a room of the mind without walls, or a location, a mode. From there you can go into awareness, or into not knowing as nearest, various ways in which you can frame things. You know, I saw an interview with some young women, young pretty women.

[09:39]

I don't know, they were in an airplane or something. I can't remember what it was about. It was in Europe, on TV. But it was on CNN or something, American, English language TV. I mean, maybe you could say these girls were, young women, were bimbos. I don't know if there's a German word for that, but anyway, bimbos. But they were pretty... I don't know why, they must be intelligent, they're complex human beings. But listening to them talk, I mean, I thought, oh my God, these people are so simple. Our culture has so simplified them. Maybe two or three attitudes framed all their conversation. I could just hear what they were saying, look at them, I could see, like, two or three attitudes, everything was coming out of it. That's all they are, is some very simple... attitudes, which they have framed their consciousness, their experience, their hopes around.

[10:41]

And I just, it made me extremely sad, because these are not, obviously not stupid people. I mean, they're but as, but culturally they're but as smart as dogs. You know, excuse me for, I don't mean to insult them, but our culture simplifies us. Most teenagers are unbelievably simplified out of the potential of what human life is. Yeah, it makes me sad. Yeah, there's lots of possibilities around, but these folks are closed to those possibilities often. So how do we... I don't know. I'm not going to try to solve that problem right now. So the Diamond Sutra starts out with what's called a formula, actually, like once upon a time.

[11:48]

Once upon a time, blah, blah, blah. The Diamond Sutra starts out, I don't know if we talked about this at one point, you know, starts out with the Buddha went into town begging and returned. He puts away his bowls. And sits down, washes his feet, sits down, lifts up his body, lifts, brings his body upright, and intently establishes mindfulness. And then begins to speak this sutra. this formula may be the most important part of the whole sutra. You know, it's tacked onto a lot of sutras, but it's a kind of alchemical formula.

[12:53]

It's a kind of lens. So you have, he goes to town, he returns, he puts away his bowls, he washes his feet, lifts himself upright. Yeah, and it already means he's not always mindful in the same way because at this point he intently establishes mindfulness. You can almost see it kind of a lens. His body turns into a lens. And he teaches. So it's almost like daily life goes through this lens and becomes the Diamond Sutra. the formula means if you're going to study and read the Diamond Sutra, you also have to establish this lens. And it's such that, you know, a scholar can't, you know, I'm not putting down scholars, it's just that by scholar I mean, because some scholars do practice and meditate, but just from a scholarly point of view, unless you have the meditation experience that the Diamond Sutra is talking about, you can't understand the Diamond Sutra.

[14:09]

just the way it is. So this formula at the beginning, this alchemical formula, is also the gate to the Diamond Sutra. So if you want to study the Diamond Sutra, read it. We rotate it in our chanting some mornings. You should actually sit down, cross-legged, establish, lift your body upright, establish the vitality, the vigor of intently fixing, establishing your body and mindfulness, and then read a few sentences at a time. Now this mindfulness, which is, you know, each of you can practice.

[15:15]

I do want to come back, Mark asked me, you know, I can't do everything Mark says, but, you know, we did take care, try to look a little bit as Cohen, you know. He's got both ears, actually. going to and from here and he wants me to talk again about the fourth foundation of mindfulness and I think I should because the depth of this practice has got to be gone into it more and more mature stages of practice. But anyway I'm just talking about mindfulness in a more usual sense of bringing your attention to things but also bringing your attention to like what we could call invisible objects So you bring your attention, as we've talked about before, to the space of a flower, not just a flower. The space of a tree, not just a tree. Funny, if you get in the habit of doing that, you begin to be, you know, it's an outer habit, an outer activity.

[16:24]

And in your zazen it begins to allow you to see the space of the structure of your own mind. Space of the structure of your consciousness. You can start seeing around and in between what we call consciousness. Certainly the contents of consciousness. It's not just a field, it's a kind of structure with space around the contents. And there's a kind of coherence that happens. Coherence, I don't know, that's the best word I can think of. A kind of coherence. There's a feeling of coherence. And that feeling of coherence as well as, you could say, clarity, begins to happen in your daily life too.

[17:29]

If you look at things, your overall experience of things is a kind of clarity, not just the object. The object induces a kind of clarity, preciseness, even brightness. It's like you see the shine of mind on everything. Yeah. Now that's assumed that this is the mindfulness of the Buddha in speaking the Diamond Sutra. Yes, your mind and my mind too One of the things that Zen assumes, I would say Buddhism assumes, but Zen specifically assumes, is that each... We could think of this as a way of talking about everyone's already enlightened, everyone else potentially a Buddha, or everybody's already a Buddha in some way.

[18:40]

All that kind of thinking that's characteristic of Mahayana and changes the relationship of the practitioner to each person, to every person. We can Think of it in a kind of instrumental sense as that there's a fluidity to consciousness. There's a fluidity to consciousness not only because there may be a kind of physiological fluidity to the complexity of the brain and the many ways it's interconnected and so forth. It keeps developing and restoring itself. But there's a fluidity to the structure of awareness, consciousness, and so forth, and that the parts can be moved around. Parts can be in slightly different relationships to each other, like thinking of things as use-specific, instead of, oh, that's an object, that's a room.

[19:41]

No, it's not a room until you use it as a room in a certain way. Or don't set up near or far. Strangely enough, you can take a phrase like don't set up near or far, and to really feel it, there has to be some habit of setting up near and far that changes. And when you kind of change that habit, there's a shift, a shift in consciousness itself. the structures of consciousness. And that happens, most likely happens. So there's an integration between your daily practice, wisdom teachings, and your sitting practice. And these shifts in the architecture of the mind and the structure of consciousness itself are more likely to happen, or do happen, You know, it's like you shut down stores to take inventory, you know?

[20:45]

No customers allowed and you see everybody in the store moving things around. It's like that. You do zazen and there's a kind of inventory going on or things are being moved around when you come into a certain kind of ease and stillness. Yeah, and I want to say that you know, it's nice to have some new experience or something new way of looking at things. But the expectation of something new or expectation of some insight or something is actually a kind of problem. If you want an expectation, maybe it's an expectation of new kinds of satisfactions. That's related to the sense of ease and trust and relaxation throughout the body and mind. But I could say that one thing that I would say is characteristic of meditation practice that actually takes a little while to get the hang of is kinds of satisfaction that you can't imagine existed.

[21:59]

They're not in any dictionary. They're not in any category of experience you've had from other people. Kinds of satisfaction. Again, I'm sorry to keep using this example, but I think the only thing for most of us when we enter into new levels of satisfaction is when we fall in love. But that is actually quite a limited range compared to the satisfactions that arise through Somali's meditation practice. immeasurable satisfactions. Those satisfactions also seem to be, are an ingredient in the transformation of consciousness, awareness, personality, and so forth.

[23:07]

Seems like certain levels of satisfaction You know, we come back to this phrase that I use all the time, just now is enough. Just now is enough is also a satisfaction. When you actually feel just now is exactly enough. That's one kind of satisfaction because the feeling is inseparable from a kind of deep okayness, satisfaction. I don't know what to say. So again, as your practice matures, you find sitting brings forth unexpected, fresh dimensions of satisfaction. So, going back again, Zen assumes, Zen Buddhism assumes, that each person's mind consciousness has a fluidity or has the capacity to be fluid, and that fluidity can change through

[24:37]

critical mass-like changes. Like water can be, as I said, snowflakes. Water can be ice or mist. Steam. So that, you know, ice looks, you know, in the I like it when you... One of the nice things about some contemporary cars, the Volvo we have in Germany, it's got this computer on board. And it tells you the temperature on the road. And the Black Forest is very useful because we're a thousand feet, I think. A thousand meters. Higher. A thousand meters, I guess. Higher than the Rhine. So the Rhine will be a month earlier, like it'll be autumn on the Rhine, and it'll be winter up 1,000 meters.

[25:51]

And as you go up, the road ices. And you can watch the thermometer. It's, you know, one degree above freezing. And suddenly you see it freeze. And at that moment, you can feel the same road is suddenly icing. And so there's some kind of assumption, and I say this because I know, as much as I know anything, I know it's true, but it's also a kind of hopeful thing. But how do we find this actualization point, as I said yesterday, this acupuncture point, where things are rigid and then not rigid? To know this point is the subtlety of bodhisattva practice. And it doesn't come easy.

[26:52]

It's helped by things like everything feels near. Such conditions, like everything feels near, allow one to feel these actualizing points in situations and in each person. You know the word ningen in Japanese, which means person, means actually person space. The gen part is also ma. Ma, the ma point. Like in this situation, I've often said there's a ma point. All of this is interconnected and there's a ma point. So a person isn't a thing, it's a person space. And that person space has a fluidity. So first of all, there's this assumption that human beings are fluid, that each person, even old fogies,

[28:05]

their mind, or bimbos, their mind has some kind of, just around the corner, the potential to realize Buddhahood. Well, and the second point I'd like to make is that another assumption is that mind streams, minds are matured through other minds. Bodhisattva practice assumes that you can't really mature your mind all by yourself in a cave. Minds are matured through other minds. So a wise person knows this and acts in such a way that their mind is more likely to be matured, that's also Bodhisattva practice.

[29:21]

It's also assumed that Society itself will evolve through the maturation of individuals. That there's no hope for society. I always often think of, you know, I can remember back when I first noticed this, how fast a good joke would get from New York to San Francisco. And how long it took a bad joke took television and comedians saying it. Still nobody wanted to remember it. But a good joke told in New York within days is being told in San Francisco. There's something that just passes through the society. And it's funny. I hear somebody, I'll talk to somebody, you know, tell me a joke, current joke about Bush or something like that, you know.

[30:32]

And two or three days later, I'm in Marie-Louise's home, and her German uncle comes up to me and tells me the same joke. And it clearly was dependent on actions of just a few days before by Bush. How the heck it got to Germany into this guy, I don't know, Ludwig. Ludwig tells me this joke. Oh, I actually heard that in a phone call from him. So actually wisdom travels like that too, faster than jokes. You know, we resist it, but it goes by. So it's assumed also that society itself is surprisingly fluid, surprisingly rigid over generations, but at each moment there's a kind of infinite culture in society, fluidity.

[31:35]

You know, I mean, one of my favorite examples, I guess, is back in 61 or 62, I reviewed, actually. I had a little publication called the San Francisco Bay Area Science Guide, which I got out as part of the university. And I reviewed, John Martinson and I reviewed Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. We got to the point immediately. We thought, will our society ever get this? Well, within 10 years, it was all over the world. The whole idea of environmental interdependence. And as I say, nowadays, every government, everybody has to at least pay lip service to environmentalism. So that's a big change. Ecology is a great big change from the 50s to the 60s, the idea of ecology. And the idea of ecology and environmentalism actually opens the way to a lot of Buddhist ideas too, although we don't want to use science or ecology as a Trojan horse for Buddhism.

[32:53]

But I think there is a tremendous fluidity. And I think one of the things going on right now is no part of the world can hide from the other part of the world. So everyone knows how everyone else lives. And this also causes tremendous tension. So we have this society, it's assumed by Buddhism, will only evolve through the potential of Only the potential of individuals, realized potential individuals, makes it ever possible in a society. If you have a society of numb skulls, they're going to remain numb skulls. If a few people are quite so numb, maybe the skulls change. So anyway, Buddhism has that view.

[33:58]

Zen has that view. And the most active way to manifest this vision, to act on this vision, is compassion. The view of compassion, the view of human beings through compassion. Now, compassion is a practice, not compassion. Anyway, we'll come to that some other time. You know, cooking is contemporary. But we can't imagine cooking without the history of cooking. Cookbooks. Farmers figuring out how to plant this. It's amazing how, you know, Dan and I know this well, how a few restaurants, actually almost one person, Alice Waters, making use of

[35:01]

The fact that California has year-round ingredients and the awareness of using fresh ingredients and so forth. How quickly her and a few other people's vision of cooking spread. And it's transformed cooking in the United States, so there's... But still, it depends on, as I started to say, on farmers planting certain things, etc. Well, already, in all of the United States, you have farmers planting things just for restaurants. What do they call it? Antique heirloom tomatoes and things like that. And I remember Alan Chadwick ranting.

[36:09]

He started French intensive gardening in the United States. This was another thing that happened. This new kind of gardening happened. And Alan Chadwick was a friend of mine, came to Tulsa, and then he started our gardens at Green Gulch. And he used to get so upset, like there used to be several hundred kinds of apples in the United States. And people would go sometimes hunt for an apple tree in some Virginia backyard because there was nothing but these kind of supermarket apples, you know, Macintosh and two or three golden delicious, which weren't delicious, you know. It's like Kraft cheese without Kraft. And those ideas came into our culture in the 60s and 70s and now there's a whole Thousands of people involved in finding apple trees, developing, etc. So how quickly it could happen.

[37:10]

And you have farmers now planting things nobody ever planted before. Not in the United States. I don't think the analogy between cooking and restaurants and food changing and environmentalism is so different from the idea of Buddhism or compassion or an understanding of compassion as a practice coming into our society. So cooking has a history and it's also contemporary. People developed the right utensils which plants work best, and so on. And, you know, languages like that, too. We have a contemporary English, but it's unthinkable without all the poets and writers and philosophers and novelists, etc., who've written

[38:17]

So these are ancient ingredients and contemporary ingredients. And this practice is an ancient practice. It's also a contemporary practice. And the ingredients are right here. And the ingredients are mindfulness, meditation, finding your own alchemy of mindfulness, the alchemy of a kind of lens of practice. We don't know where we're going, but the ingredients are here and the ingredients are you. Mindfulness, meditation, and you. We have all the ingredients we need right here. For the fullness of Buddhist practice, Buddha's practice, May our attention equally penetrate every being and place.

[39:28]

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