Well, it's something of a miracle that we're still meeting together after years. And to commemorate the event, I even have a shirt from the 70s on here. It's the last one left, I think. And it's great that Christian could join me, too. Christian could join me if I'm Christian. Now I feel obligated to bring you full circle or something like that, half circle at least, to what I started with you last year about starting with bodily time.

[01:12]

I feel a certain obligation to connect and then to complete, at least to and you know it's I've been in effect unintentionally but rather naturally I guess developing the idea over the years And for those of you who are in the practice period, I spoke about it there. Sorry. I'll try to make it interesting if it's familiar. The reason I think I should bring it up here is not just because I started it here last year,

[02:22]

I think I started from the germ of it was Dogen's statement. was that he said, sometimes, and you may remember this quotation, he said, zu einer Zeit, und vielleicht erinnert ihr euch an dieses Zitat, zu einer Zeit, ich ehe, und dem Seminar, das wir vor ein paar Tagen hatten, da habe ich das auch erwähnt,

[03:43]

Sometimes I enter an ultimate state. and offer you profound discussion and offer you profound discussion only hoping that each of you remain steadily intimate with your state of mind. Und hoffe dabei nur, dass ihr... You said state of mind?

[05:00]

Field of mind, yeah. Und hoffe dabei nur, dass ihr... with your spiritual field, in intimate, we have to look at how to put it, in a familiar, close relationship, Okay, I think this statement itself is worth examining. And as I said in the past, we know enough about Dogen to know when he says, sometimes, he means there are various times which we could choose, kinds of times we could choose, And I'm choosing one of them. Then he says, I, ehe, which is also conceptually similar.

[06:20]

In other words, he could say, I could say, I, Rastenberg, or I, Crestum. Also, then he says, I, ehe, and that would be like if I would say, I, Rastenberg, or I, Crestum. And I could say I, the Dharma Sangha seminar, or now I can say I, the seminar with you guys. And even though I will be speaking to some extent about what I have spoken about, I think if those of you who were at the seminar we just finished, give closely held attention, which is a technical term. Thank you. I have to see how to translate it. I think it will probably become the case that I, this person, is a little different than the person who did the seminar a few days ago.

[07:53]

And Dogen would be assuming that when he says, he's not only because he happens to be speaking at that time as head of a Heiji temple, He can say that because he also knows it's the people he's speaking to which changes who he is speaking. Which is, you know, I mean, we all know that. We feel differently at a party, one party than at another party or a dinner event or something.

[09:11]

But I don't think we notice it so consciously or nourish it or develop it so consciously. And then he says, enter an ultimate state. And offer you profound discussion. And hoping only that you will be steadily intimate with your field of mind. I think it's helpful to

[10:39]

To contextualize a statement like that, I mean, sometimes I say jokingly, you know, no one ever said that to me in college. That's not me. I don't have such an unusual ring. This phone has terrible rings. This is the best one of the Jews. That's not very good. You mean Austrian phones, rented Austrian phones, sound like that, huh? Yeah. He didn't even know what it was. This is Creston calling in sleep.

[12:00]

But power off. My daughter Sophia, about 13, she gets my phone and changes the ring ring. And I don't know what it is, but I thought, is that Sophia? Although, as I started to say, I say jokingly sometimes no one ever said that to me in college before. I think it's useful, actually, to, you know, not just as a joke, think about contrast that to or imagine some college teacher saying that to you. So somebody comes in and says, Looking at this particular time, I, the sociology professor, I'm entering an ultimate state.

[13:27]

What the hell is he talking about? You simply wouldn't have someone say that. And you'd think, you know, I've got to take a different class. And then he says, I'm going to offer you a profound discussion. Yeah, but I don't expect you to try to understand it. I'd only like you to be steadily intimate with your feeling. And then you'd have to say, he doesn't want me to understand it, but he wants me to be steadily, what the hell is it to be steadily intimate?

[14:45]

And he doesn't say, just pay attention to how you're thinking. Or he's not saying, just pay attention to your own mind. He's saying, be steadily intimate with it. What is this intimacy? What is this? with your, not your mind, your field of mind. What the heck is Now, if you don't put these kind of statements in a perspective that astonishes you, or at least is in contrast to your usual perspective, familiar perspective,

[16:18]

you're not really likely to get a feel for, we'd say, where Dogen is coming from. And where does he get off, saying, I've been offering profound discussion, blah, blah, blah, And even if I say this to you, even with the permission I have from this centuries of lineage I'm trying to represent, I might say, more likely, I'm going to offer you some discussion which some of you might think is a little bit profound. I would say, yes, well, I will enter into a conversation with you about which some of you may remember or believe.

[17:43]

If it has a depth, I would be more modest, a little more modest in speaking. I was just in... Two or three days between these two seminars I was just in Wien. And in Wien you must have a large percentage of all the tourists in Europe walking down the streets. Yeah, and every restaurant has every sidewalk filled with seats. And just, obviously, lots of persons. You know, one of the great things about a novel, novels are, if they're a good novel, they bring you kind of inside a person.

[19:06]

I mean, I rather, I almost never see movies except on airplanes. And recently, I don't even want to see the movies. I don't want to be inside the people the movies are representing. But so I usually choose documentaries. That's why I usually watch documentaries. And they are often very good. But a good novel does bring you inside. For me, it brings me inside a person.

[20:09]

And I would presume that for those of you who are therapists, you often find yourself inside another person, life, their history, etc., And by the way, in the way I'm speaking, I notice that I have four plus days with you. So I can look at a statement that Dogen's here with much more detail than I would in the previous seminar. Which we had a smaller number of people Friday, but mostly we just have Saturday morning.

[21:25]

small groups and then, yeah, there's not much time to look at the syllabic details of statements. So already the kind of time we have together is changing the time of my sentences. Anyway, going back to novels. I remember a novel of Le Carré, which starts with an old lady coming out of a nondescript building.

[22:36]

And she's rather a nondescript elderly woman. Kind of stooped and carrying a bag. And, yeah, completely unspecial sounding looking woman. And then, you know, but he describes her as, although stooped and walking slowly, rather alert. Yeah. Stooped and?

[23:46]

Rather alert. And she's doing out for a necessary shot. And it turns out that this unusually alert, you begin to find out things about this woman. It turns out that it will turn out in the novel that she was a crucial part of some turning events in East Germany and Hungary. And some people still think she knows too much.

[24:52]

And why she's doing necessary shopping is because she can't go out very easily because people are trying to find out where she is and kill her. And so, you know, in this episode, I remember it, iconically how this novel starts. I can't remember what novel it was. But it makes me feel, and of course I know quite a lot of people who practice pretty well, And so when I see somebody sitting on a bench or in a restaurant near me, I often think of

[26:18]

a person like that, this woman, sort of stooped woman, who some of the events of her life were crucially affected, the political events, etc. So I start feeling, if you could really know each of these persons, they have some kind of generations of genetic history, but also a personal history, which, I mean, you can't see it on the surface of them sitting there having a melange. Also, I think What? This woman still had to do necessary shopping.

[28:05]

He had to walk down the street. Taking steps. And at some point, resting on a bench. Checking out the area. So when I look at all these people in Vienna, I notice at least what clearly we do share that's obvious is they're taking steps. Yeah, and they're sitting down on a chair near me. Or someone sits next to me on a chair.

[29:08]

And as I said last night at Cottage Castle, I gave them a little talk. French, English, or something rather, cottage. There's a big chain of discounted stores in America called Target, and people call it Tarjay. It's a little better than most of the discount chains. So, as I said last night, Each of us is in the activity of, as I said, the activity of space expressed as gravity.

[30:38]

And they are sitting in various ways in relationship to their gravity, their spine and so forth. And that I clearly share with each, not that my sharing is important maybe, but I clearly share that with each person, no matter what their different history is. Now, in the yogic culture that Dogen grew up in, lived in, When you don't have a worldview in which there's a concept of a possible creator, I mean, it has a

[32:06]

changes the directionality of everything. I mean, simple things which I take, I think arise from this difference. We say, and I grew up saying, north, south, east, west, etc. And But in China, in Japan, I know I'm not sure about China, but I'm pretty sure it's the same. The sense of the directions is the directions aren't out there, they're coming towards you. So north is coming towards you.

[33:33]

The way the weather comes towards you. South is coming towards you. And And in Asia they say ten directions, not four. Yeah, which is north, northwest, east, east, etc. All of those. And then there's up and down. But again, up and down are coming towards you. Yeah, so that sometimes Zazen instruction can say, you're supporting heaven and earth with your spine.

[34:35]

In a Sāsana instruction, for example, it can be said that one supports heaven and earth with the spine. Yeah, and that doesn't mean it's extending up. It means heaven and earth are meeting in your spine. Well, again, there's no outside space for a creator to happen. The unfathomable, which is also part of our experience of a creator, The unfathomable is without belief, it's just part of everything now. And again, we count, at least I learned to count as a kid, one, two, three, four, five.

[36:10]

And as soon as I got to Japan, I was like, one, two, three, four, five. They bring their fingers in. So there's a kind of the world view becomes a feeling of a directionality towards And there's nothing that's not connected to you because everything is interconnected. So the... I mentioned... In the last seminar, Chandrakirti says, proceed from, begin from bringing attention to the, to fully bringing attention to the body.

[37:43]

And he doesn't mean the concept of love. He means that which you can notice. So it's not a thought of the body. We don't really know what the body is. What is your body? A cheek or the stuff of you? In a similar vein, A corpse is not a body in this culture. The body is what makes a corpse alive.

[38:52]

So the word body is used in many contexts to mean what makes a situation alive. So if what something is is what you notice about it and not its concept separate from you, Dilgen makes statements in the vein that I've been making. And he often would say, observe this and investigate it carefully.

[40:21]

Carefully, thoroughly or carefully. And if you observe and investigate carefully, the emphasis that things are what you notice about them, not a concept of them or a name, So a tree would be what you notice about it. And of course what a botanist would notice or a gardener would be different from what I would notice.

[41:33]

We'd all call it conveniently a tree. We'd all call it conveniently a tree. Or actually in this culture, the yogic culture, you'd call it treeing, not a tree. But it would still be a convenience to call it a treeing. No, no. And you would know that calling it treeing or a tree is just a convenience, it's primarily a convenience of communication.

[42:44]

And you know, really, that a tree is what you notice about a tree. So you enter into the experience of something through what you notice. And so that means there's a great pressure expectation that you increase your ability to notice. That you develop your ability to notice. And one last probably stop in a moment.

[44:05]

One last quotation I can give you. Again, which I think we have to maybe I'll emphasize this During our time together. To observe and investigate. With closely held attention. Held attention. The statement is, the bodhisattva does not contemplate the physical body.

[45:07]

Now that sounds like contradictory to all the popular mindfulness practices these days. Let the statement, he goes on to say, the bodhisattva does not contemplate the physical body. The bodhisattva contemplates the physical body in relationship to the inner attentional body. Now that's obviously a much more complex statement. You're contemplating the physical body only when you feel a relationship to the inner attentional body.

[46:27]

It's these simple statements observed and investigated And investigate in English, the etymology is you follow the footsteps of someone. You follow where your investigation leads. Man folgt dem nach, wohin die Untersuchung einen führt. We have the excitement, the adventure.

[47:34]

For me, it's an adventure. Looking at some of the possibilities of being alive, And discovering possibilities, at least I'm always discovering possibilities I hadn't imagined before. And possibilities developed within a tradition whose main purpose, the main purpose of which is to free you from mental suffering. I'm able to offer you some, after years looking at these teachings, some of these statements which I think are most effective for, maybe ineffective, I hope, and effective for us to examine closely.

[49:14]

Can I show you these cards, which I hope are effective? You want them to be ineffective? Ineffective. Oh, contagious. I want them to be effective and contagious. Yeah. Ineffective? No. I mean, they may be. On some level, yeah. And then we have this guy who's been doing this a very long time, well, offering you these statements in Deutsch. And both of these, the English version and the Deutsche version can be Dharma doors. And I'm looking forward to going through a lot of Dhamma-turing with you this week.

[50:20]

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