It's wonderful that you're all here again. That you... I mean, I'm kind of sappy, you know, sappy? Schmaltzy? Yeah, I'm a little schmaltzy. Oh, come on, you don't... You have inside information. Oh! I remember that Buddha is peeking out there. Buddha, look out there. You're each so extraordinary that you come and join all of us, each of us here to discuss this, to practice this way. Yeah, something... Wonderful and extraordinary.

[01:02]

And I'm not here, you know, this is only the second time I've been here, I think, at Christmastime, at New Year's time. Usually I'm in Crestone at this time of year. But anyway, I'm here this year, so I'm very happy to be here. And as most of you know, I like my seminars to be an exploration of practice. And an exploration that we don't finish. Because the exploration is, unless you just want to take this as a received teaching,

[02:04]

Finding the path is the way to be on the path. So I want the exploration to continue when you leave. So I think for me a good seminar is we discover some things together and individually. But some things are started that we don't complete and that we complete later or come up later. But this is Christmas and New Year's. So I feel really what I'd like to do is just give you a present of the one who's not busy.

[03:22]

Or a New Year's gift. But it doesn't work that way, unfortunately. So we have to explore this topic. Mm-hmm. And I've decided that I'd like to do it, as I said, avoiding the idea of Buddha nature. One of the first kind of turning questions I asked Sukhiroshi And I remember standing... The center was in an old synagogue.

[04:34]

And... standing out in the morning after Zazen in front, I said, what is this something like? What is this Buddha nature stuff? Are we back with soul and spirit and things? And he said, well, it takes a year or two to get a feel for it. Well, that was... What can I say to an answer like that? I'll see you in a year. But it was true. And if you... If you practice Zen rigorously... Kraft, is it rigorously?

[06:03]

Okay. Anyway, you have to use Buddha nature in a way that you don't feel there's something inherent about it. And this was an important point There's something called, I don't know how to pronounce it actually, Ikhantika. And in Ikhantika, one of you in Ikhantika, an Ikhantika is someone who can't realize enlightenment.

[07:05]

Sorry. And this was an Indian idea and... It was debated in China. And finally, because China wanted there to be universal enlightenment, everyone was already enlightened. Finally, it was decided there's no such thing as an ikantika. I've never seen one anyway. Because they wanted this idea of some inherent enlightenment that we uncover. So I think that if we're really going to practice that in the West, we have to, in a sense, purify Zen of these ideas.

[08:29]

And strictly, in a rigorously practiced Zen, doesn't have these ideas. That's my opinion. You know, and it was vividly presented to me when I was first practicing sukiyoshi because one person practicing with him went completely crazy. Not because he was practicing, but he just went completely crazy. And some people felt, you know, Sukhiroshi should be able to free him from his craziness. But, you know, this wasn't and isn't possible. A person who has advanced Alzheimer's, they can't practice.

[09:38]

Although I think, and I think I've seen an example, if you have Alzheimer's long after you have mature practice, you handle it in a different way. So I'm just pointing this out to say that there's an unrealistic aspect to everyone is already enlightened. And the pedagogy of practice is different, whether you assume we're already enlightened or we don't. Okay, so in this one who is not busy, I'm in, not that it's important to most of you, but I'm avoiding the idea that the one who is not busy is some kind of inherent identity.

[11:05]

It's already there. like the oak tree is in the acorn. Okay. I mean, there's two main ideas, two main tenets of Buddhism. That there's no impermanence, there's no permanence, and there's no inherence. that there is no constancy and no inherentness.

[12:08]

And Chinese Buddhism took further as tenets that there's some kind of all-pervasive mind and enlightenment that's present. As an approach to how we exist, it's not so bad, but as a tenet that you have to stick to, it's not correct. Now again, this probably isn't so important to you, except that in all of us, there's a tendency to want things to be somewhat permanent and we have, yeah. And we feel often we have some kind of inner nature that we're trying to fulfill.

[13:17]

And we feel often we have some kind of inner nature that we're trying to fulfill. Okay, now we probably won't have break up into small groups in the afternoon as we usually do in a seminar. Because we have no place where so many small groups could go. So we'll probably have small groups in one big group. Okay. We'll see. If you all clamor, we might change our mind. Clamor means you all shout for some position. So I'm saying that because it's important to the seminar and to me that we have some discussion among each other.

[14:23]

Among each other as well as with me. Okay. So now I want to go back to this phrase which I've decided to use to pause for the particulars. So I want to suggest that you try on for these days until Sunday, until tomorrow afternoon. A little bit of monastic practice. But you try in what you do to pause for the particular. It's carried out in lots of ways. When we do qin hin, when the bell rings, if your feet are like this and you're supposed to bow, you don't bow like that.

[16:03]

You bring your feet together and then you bow. And this pause for the particular is also related to feeling a completeness at each moment. So just in the way you can without driving everybody you're talking to crazy, I'm pausing for the next word. You don't want to do that. Yeah, but if I pick up this glass of water, it's not just that I pause mentally, I pause physically. I feel myself coolness of the glass and picking it up.

[17:15]

And in all this body culture, this is home base. Your chakras are home base. Home base, that's a baseball term anyway. Home base. Excuse me. So you bring the glass up to here. Yeah, I mean, that's the custom in yogic culture anyway. And then you drink.

[18:17]

But each thing has a particularity to it. Now part of the discipline or practice of working with this phrase to pause for the particular is that you don't add anything. And there's lots of additives we usually have. It's beautiful, it's not beautiful. I like it, I don't like it. It's important, it's not important. I didn't do this right. I didn't pause the right way. Those are all additives. So you want to find a way to cut off the additives. One way to cut off the additives is to add a second phrase to this phrase. Which is, in English, would be just this.

[19:33]

And it's no accident that the book, the, this, thusness, are all the same word in English. At the center of Mahayana Buddhism, Nagarjuna rooted practice in the idea of emptiness, It's the idea of thusness or suchness. But it's implicitly and secretly present when I say the bell, the Nicole, the glass.

[20:35]

Es ist implizit gegenwärtig, wenn ich sage, die Glocke, die Nicole, das Glas. So instead of discriminating, I say, da. Da. Wow. Doesn't work as well, but I can hold on. Also statt zu unterscheiden, sage ich einfach, das, oder das, oder das. Yeah, so you drop, I mean, So when you pause for the particular, if you're going to have a tendency to add something, add just this. No. What happens when you do this? You're cutting off discursive thinking. And opening yourself up to, well, we could say intuitive thinking.

[21:57]

Now, when Otmar asked me yesterday afternoon about how thinking works in practice, something like that, he said, How I understood what he meant and in the context in which we were speaking, I found it actually a little difficult to answer. Because I haven't thought through how to speak about the particular way it came up yesterday. Because I do have to think these things through. I think them through by sort of throwing words at them.

[23:20]

You know, I don't know how to say something and so I just, any word that comes into my mind, I type or I write and I get a long list and then I sort of pick one of the words that feels better. So I don't do it by discursive thinking, I do it sort of by maybe a kind of aesthetic thinking, what feels right. And then I see if I can find a way into it. Because I know clearly what I feel, but I don't know how to express it. So yesterday I didn't know quite how to express what I felt. And the best I can do today is a kind of... Let me say the only term I can find for it is non-discursive thinking.

[24:41]

Or maybe better is non-discursive noticing with and without thinking. Yeah, like you hear an airplane. While you're sitting, say. You notice it. There's noticing of it. Not you notice it. There's noticing of it. If you notice it, that's something added, right? So it's just noticing of it. The senses notice it. And then there can be, oh, it's an airplane. That would be non-discursive noticing with thinking. Das wäre nicht diskursives bemerken, mitdenken.

[25:48]

Or with mental formation. Oder mit mentalen Geburten. Or you just notice it and you... If you do say the word airplane to yourself, you peel the label airplane off. Oder du bemerkst es einfach für dich selbst und wenn du dann auch die Bezeichnung Flugzeug bemerkst, dann ziehst du die Bezeichnung ab. Okay. If you want to know the one who's not busy, if you want to know yourself and your wider sense of self, that knowing in a yoga culture means you notice how you function, how there is functioning. good you said it both ways that's good um because you know you're living your life all the time you're living and noticing etc this is at the center of what and who we are

[27:04]

So mindfulness practice, the partner of meditation practice, is to develop the skill of noticing. I said to somebody the other day, a subtle IQ test would be to notice how much you notice. For example, if if I were giving you an IQ test. It's too high for me, your IQ.

[28:05]

Anyway, so while I'm talking to you, I ask you various questions. I pick up a piece of paper and I just start folding it in half over and over again. Just like I'm playing with a piece of paper. Then after, I suddenly say to you, how many folds were there? I didn't warn you in the first to count them, but did you know? Some people can say right away, 14. And some people have to stop and kind of imagine because they didn't have energy present in the situation and noticing. And Lama Govinda, who was a great person, I liked him. His books are good.

[29:06]

He says in one of his books, matured Buddhist practice makes you a genius. I'm waiting. But, you know, this is not true, but there's some truth to it. Okay. Because you do increase your general intelligence if you can bring energy to each situation. Not thinking energy, noticing energy. If you think, you interfere with the noticing.

[30:08]

You notice far more than you can think. There isn't vocabulary for all that you can notice. Yeah, that's why I have such a problem when I know something, I notice something, I notice a feeling, and I try to find words for it. Mostly there aren't. I have to stick words together, you know, in a Heideggerian fashion. Yeah, so one way to bring more energy... Attention is the most powerful thing, most important thing in your life. Where your attention is, is where your life is.

[31:23]

And where you bring your attention over time, shapes your whole life. And attention and energy are closely related. So we're talking about how you bring attention and energy to each situation. The technique, the approach in Zen practice And really in all of Buddhism. Is to find a way to cut off discursive thinking. Not the thinking connected with noticing. But maybe we need a different word than thinking. Yeah. So these two phrases that function in intentional mind, not discursive mind.

[32:46]

To pause for the particular. And after a while you can feel yourself pause for the pause. Because you'll start to notice there's actually existence as a series of pauses in which then you let things happen. To work with yourself in this way, to notice yourself in this way, is to enter into the very fabric of the mind. The very fabric of mind and phenomena interwoven. And to enter into the structure of mind in how it allows or interferes with this interweaving. and how the structure of the mind supports or interferes with this interweaving.

[34:07]

And then, of course, once you've got that down, Then you notice when self-referential thinking comes in, preferences and things like that. Okay. So you're entering into how we exist in an interdependent sense with phenomena. You're not dealing with an inherent nature, an acorn, which ignores the surrounding. Yeah, well, there's some kind of acorn.

[35:17]

But in each situation, the tree grows more trees around it, few trees around it, water, not water, etc., Sorry, I didn't get the sense. She didn't get that the acorn at first was no relationship to the other world. That's the one I didn't get. We're not talking about as if there's some inherent nature that we're fulfilling independent of what's going on around us. So there's some kind of acorn, we can say. You have a genetic and cultural personal proclivities. Proclivities, tendencies, direction.

[36:28]

But here we're emphasizing the moment by moment interweaving as being more important. Okay, now my own feeling is that the moment-by-moment interweaving requires a break. And I only got about a fourth of the way, maybe a third of the way through this initial topic. So I think we'll have to come back. So I'll see you later. Thanks for translating.

[37:21]

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