movement, walking, and so forth. Anyway, the emphasis is still on energy, but it's energy in a little different way. Maybe the emphasis is a little bit like waiting for things to ask you what to do, rather than acting. So anyway, Yeah, I don't know why we're talking about all this. But there might be some, we might discover that it allows us to go ahead in a certain way in the seminar.

[01:05]

It surprises me a little, we're speaking about this, But if we can get the feel of the world, and the emphasis on the feeling of the world, may also help us look at how mind and self-consciousness is understood in specially Zen practice. So now we've had at least some examples Okay, so let's sit for a few minutes.

[02:12]

Let's just look at where we've gotten to so far. We've been speaking really about a... Oh, thank you. You know, again, the words don't describe the experience, but they aim toward it.

[03:15]

Okay, so we've been aiming at, or feeling our way toward, a way of being in the world that emphasizes feeling. A feeling without thinking. And you might ask what... I suppose, again, if we keep this seminar in reference to the craft of psychotherapy, then I presume a therapist does something like this anyway.

[04:24]

But although it might not be immediately available to the client, I would suggest that as a practice, if it's available for you, that the client is going to feel it. Now, it helps to give yourself physical reminders. It's easier to enter into something if you have a kind of physical door. Or a physical, or rather a, it's called a phrase door.

[05:29]

You keep some phrase in mind. All right. So of course, one physical door is this practice of bowing, as I mentioned, demonstrated. Now, once I have the habit of that, Yeah, in situations where it's not appropriate, I still have the feeling of it. I still have a sense of a little pause.

[06:30]

And again, experiencing time as a series of pauses is also a way to feel Dharma practice. Now again, with this practice of two hands, I don't mean you have to slavishly. Slavishly? Yeah. Always use two hands. But rather there's a feeling of engaging your body, the body.

[07:34]

And even if you don't, even if you do something with one hand, the feeling of the body is present in the one hand. The feeling of both hands is present in the one hand. Now, you may again feel, oh, this is kind of a nuisance. But once you get familiar with it, it's as natural as anything you do already. And I think you'll find more engaging and satisfying. Und ihr werdet das dann mehr einschließend und zufriedenstellender finden.

[08:43]

I'm watching our little Sophia. Sometimes I get annoyed watching you. She gets annoyed? I get annoyed watching you. Because for one reason she's taking on a practice I didn't do until I was about 20, 25. Which is I tried to shed myself when I was about that age of all the expectations people have of you. Shed is to get rid of, like, shed your skin or shed your feathers. Like a snake sheds its skin. So instead of saying hello to people, or how are you, I said, don't bug me, man. So people come up and say, hello, Dick.

[09:59]

I'd say, don't bug me, man. And I did that really for a year or more. So people called me, oh, here comes don't bug me man Baker. Because it was great, though. I mean, there was a clear space suddenly. How are you? Don't bug me. So Sophia practices this by spitting at people. She meets some nice lady who says, oh, what a cute little girl. And she goes... I tried to tell her to stop, but I think, geez, I used to do the same thing.

[10:59]

But of course I'm watching her establish her own physical skills. And beginning to, you know, very strongly develop a sense of awareness or presence in her body at all times. Yeah. So we have already a sense of physical presence that's our posture, at least during all our waking hours.

[12:03]

And that's defined a certain way. You can see it on a person. You can see it on a person. It's defined a certain way. I can get off the airport and I don't have to know where I am or anything. I just half open my eyes and the body space of all the people is European. It's not American. I found in Japan, once I cut the body space of Japanese people, taxis stopped for you without thinking, oh, he's only going to speak English and stuff like that. Taxis will stop for you.

[13:26]

When you first come to Japan, if you're in a rural area, taxis won't stop for you. They think, oh my God, look at that foreigner. Yeah, because they don't know what to do with you. And they drive past. That means, please go away. Yeah. But once you have the body space of a Japanese, they stop immediately. So we're talking about something that we already have such a thing, we're just not so aware of it. And through practice, I can see it on people, this body space where there's a sense of always coming out of a pause.

[14:26]

So, of course, what I'm talking about here is what is the self? Let's go back to the hearing an airplane. Let's say that you're meditating. And you do hear this airplane. And as I said, you have a momentary thought of, oh, that's an airplane. Now, The momentary thought does affect you, of course.

[15:30]

Because you know it's not an airplane or you know it's not a dragon, say. You know it's not an airplane flying dangerously low over your head. So there's some input from the thought which is not thinking. But you also feel other things. You feel the sound of the airplane. You feel the air itself. You hear the air which is carrying the sound to you. And you hear the sound of your own hearing. And you feel the bliss of only hearing.

[16:39]

For when we really come into only smelling or only hearing, And this is a gate phrase you can use. Only hearing, only smelling. Or you can also, I find it useful in English to use merely hearing, merely smelling. That practice has matured enough. You can know when it's matured enough because then percepts are accompanied by a feeling of bliss.

[17:49]

A feeling of bliss. Like you might right now again trying to make it more accessible. Like at night you might hear the distant sound of a train. Or if you lived in San Francisco, a tugboat or harbor sound. Honk, honking horns. Yeah. Tutin? Tutin, yeah. Or you might even hear a distant siren, and you hardly would think it's actually Christa in an ambulance. Ambulances, when you work in an ambulance, don't you?

[18:51]

And don't they, do they make siren sounds just like New York and all that? Ah, yeah. Even that can have in the middle of the night, though you hope no one's hurt, can have that feeling. So night and darkness somehow call us into a less conscious mind. And we may feel the bliss of percept only. And I talked about this recently, I don't know where, somewhere, because I was struck when I was young by these sounds at night.

[20:12]

And I brushed them off as some kind of weird feeling, something weird about staying up late. But then I began to feel, you know, the sound would pop up. I mean, the thought would pop up. I could die on sound like this. I'd be happy to die on the sound. Mm-hmm. So that made me say, you know, there's more to this feeling than makes sense.

[21:13]

And of course at that time, you know, I didn't realize that those feelings were a little kind of surfacing of a whole world I'd enter through practice. It was an eruption into ordinary thinking of Sambhogakaya, I don't want to say consciousness, Sambhogakaya awareness. There's three bodies of the Buddha. The Dharmakaya, the Sambhogakaya, and the Nirmanakaya. And the Sambhogakaya body is called the body of bliss. That means when you feel your physical presence as somehow the merging of mind and body,

[22:18]

Mind and body. A melting together of mind and body. That itself is a way of being in the world and called the bliss body. So hearing these sounds at night of a boat whistle I didn't know I was listening to a body of the Buddha. How could I know? And it takes a while in practice to recognize these small things and let them expand in you. So you're hearing the airplane. And you're feeling the air itself carrying the sound. And you can tell really by the feeling whether it's a rainy or clear day out by the sound.

[24:00]

The sound is different on a rainy day, on a wet day. Yeah. Hearing the sound, you're also hearing the mind. And since the sound is both inside and outside, your sense of the boundaries of the body are somewhat dissolved. the boundaries of the mind as limited to the body. So you're hearing a kind of body-mind presence. There's a transparency.

[25:09]

It's almost like your body is transparent in the hearing. Now this is... Yeah. So you see, in the context of this, the noticing, the thought notice, the telegram, that it's a airplane. It's just one aspect of a realm of noticing that I wouldn't call thinking. In the midst of such a noticing, you can think about it a little bit, but not too much.

[26:13]

If you think about it too much, it's gone. You have to think very gently about it, or notice it very gently, so the thinking mind doesn't come up. Now when thinking mind, let's call it, when thinking consciousness, sort of settles out of sight, what I'll call today mind, big mind, mind, capital N, M, appears. So here I'm suggesting we have awareness and consciousness and mind, or big mind. Mind. Now let me bring up again, which I brought up two or three times in the last week.

[27:35]

What I'm calling Giorgio's table. Yeah, okay. So again, I'm watching Sophia naming things. And when she names something, she's making a distinction. In a way, the naming separates it from her. And she immediately wants to pull it back toward her. So whatever she names, she says belongs to her. So this would be Sophia's bell. She asked what it is, I said it's a bell. She said, Sophia's bell. So she's, by naming she separates it, but the relationship is toward her as Sophia.

[28:43]

Yeah, so let's call that the first step. The second step was, this is Sophia's papa's bell, which is Sophia's. So it was Sophia's Papa Sophia's was what she was saying. But now she's at the stage where she'll say Papa's. So she's beginning to move Let the sense of the relationship, the possessive relationship, go towards something else. So she came into this little, where we're staying, above the gate house. Above the gate. It's like a little house or apartment. So she comes in and she says, Giorgio's house.

[30:14]

And then she's sitting down at the table. We're having breakfast. And she says, Giorgio's table. Well, that's pretty good. Except she decided to make her bread into crumbs. And she decided to do that with a sieve and a can opener. And she's got the can and she's banging it here. And I say, Sophia, this is Giorgio's table. And I say, yes, and look, you can see it's wood. It comes from the forest. Birds used to sing in the tree that was this table. And you can see it's all smooth. Somebody made it smooth. Gave it this dark color. So the table belongs to the forest and the woodworker and Giorgio. And it belongs to the people who use it, who stay there next.

[31:41]

So she's looking at me with big eyes. But obviously what I'm trying to do is give her a little Buddhist education. He's taking a sense of possession and extending it. Away from her, but still related to the object. I'm not talking about it as a piece of furniture or something you could buy in a store. I'm talking about relationships she can see in the table if she wants to look, seeing it's wood and so forth. So what would you call this? I'd call it, you know, the teaching of interdependence.

[32:52]

But we could also say it's when you begin to get in the habit of seeing things that way. You can say it's the experience of interdependence. Because it's not just an idea, it's an experience. I think one of the clearest examples of it, as if Hiroshi once took his, suddenly in the middle of a lecture, he had to read with glasses. If you've ever read Crooked Cucumber, you know it was very forgetful. He'd take a train and go straight past where he was supposed to get off, you know. And he'd regularly forget his glasses.

[33:56]

And he had to go back upstairs. We'd hear him going upstairs. One day he said, you know, these are your glasses, not mine. They belong to you. Die gehört euch. But of course, in a sense, they do belong to society. Glasses were discovered in the 14th century in Italy, I believe, and so forth. First made. And it takes a rather large industry to produce one pair of glasses. He said, so these glasses belong to you. But you know about my tired old eyes, so you let me use them. So again, he's emphasizing this interdependence.

[35:02]

I should have turned my phone off. It's probably mine. I'm sorry. So when you experience the airplane the way I said, hearing, feeling the air, the mind, and so forth, we could say you're experiencing interdependence. The sound, the air, the mind, etc. And this very interrelationship is obviously impermanent.

[36:04]

This relationship with the sound, air, Wet air, dry air. The kind of mind and posture you're in at that moment. So we could say you're experiencing impermanence then as well as interdependence. Now I want to add to this list of mind awareness and consciousness. No, I've distinguished many times between awareness and consciousness, so I'll assume that that's fairly clear.

[37:14]

Let me add to the list to see if it stays on the list. Let's add presence. A very important idea and experience in Zen practice. But sometimes I put things on a list and then a week later I think, it doesn't really belong there. But right now I'm trying to Yeah, explore this with you. See what we come up with. Okay. So now I'd like to equate this presence with stillness.

[38:23]

Maybe when I... Could you tell me your name again? Yes. Elena. Elena. Elena. The second part, Magdalena. Magdalena. Elena. That's nice. Elena. Okay. When I bowed to Elena... Maybe I was feeling her stillness. Okay, we have all these trees here. Thank you. It's a team effort we have. Okay. So you pass a tree and the tree is still, let's say, no wind. But in the stillness you can feel the trees, the leaves, readiness to move.

[39:31]

You know, aspen trees are quite wonderful because they, as they say, quake. Aspen trees? Aspen trees? What's that? All those trees at Crestone are aspen trees. They have all these leaves and they tremble. Yeah. And nothing's happening, there's no air but... All leaves tremble. Somehow you don't have to move the branches. They must be very loosely attached or something. So even when the leaves are not moving, you can feel the potentiality of their moving. Now another example that, again, that I often use is if you look at a wave, Say an ocean wave.

[40:59]

What you're seeing is the stillness of the ocean. Because the shape of the wave is entirely determined by the water trying to return to stillness. The stillness of the ocean is like a glue that pulls the waves back into it, otherwise they just fly off. So in the shape of the wave you see the stillness of the ocean. So even in activity you can feel this stillness. And I think at some point we not only can see past the contents of the mind to the stillness of the mind.

[42:12]

But we can see in the activity of the mind and we can feel it ourselves. It makes us nervous. We can feel the mind. returning to, wanting to return to stillness. So we sleep. Often we don't sleep very well, unfortunately. But biologically we're sort of forced to return to stillness at least once every day. And meditation is a decision to return to stillness at least once a day as well. And also a giving up of consciousness.

[43:22]

But a returning to still awareness. So the stillness of a tree where you can feel its stillness is a kind of energy waiting to move. This relates to what I think Daru, Daru, is that right? And I spoke about earlier, we spoke about earlier. This, you know, we could say a practice of allowing stillness. You could feel this in your breath practice.

[44:35]

In your feeling of exhaling, feeling of returning to stillness. Okay. Now last year we spoke about the four marks and the five dharmas, didn't we? I don't know if it would be useful to mention that again, but it really allows us to see into the structure of mental events. But I think it's time for a physical event. So let's have a break. We need more words so that we can have less words. Because stillness doesn't You know, I'm not... I don't want to occupy this experience which I'm speaking about with the word stillness.

[46:08]

And by stillness I don't mean it's... meaning as silence. I mean it's meaning as motionless. Or the source of motion. And I could also say it's a kind of, I could just as easily say fullness. And I could also say it's a kind of Because this experience of stillness that I'm speaking about, it's a bit like consciousness kind of recedes. And mind appears. And mind feels like fullness.

[47:10]

And this movement toward fullness is also As in stillness, the potentialities of movement are there. And it's also a kind of identification. If I feel, I think if you feel the stillness of the tree, even in its movement, you feel a kind of bridge to the tree. A bridge from your own stillness to the tree's stillness. or your own fullness, the potentialities of less boundaries, and the fullness or potentialities of the tree, the stillness of the tree.

[48:24]

So I would say that the stillness is also a kind of bridge to the world or a connectedness or a sense that this is my identity. I can feel tactilely a connectedness or identification with the world. And here we have another word, we have psyche and soul and spirit, etc., identity. Yeah, and what are we, how do we What do we identify with? How do we find our identity? I'm playing with these words to bring us into a field of relationships.

[49:49]

which can't really be captured by words. Now, Yuan Wu says, when you can concentrate continuously without breaks, This is the womb of the sage. The embryo, the womb of the sage. So the word I'm looking for is here, is fullness, is stillness, is bridge, is womb. Because what Yuan Wu means, when he says concentrate,

[51:15]

He doesn't mean focusing your mind on. Without breaks. But he means that you feel continuously this stillness in everything. And really, it's not hard to do. No. It's not hard to do. A sense of disbelief appeared in my translator. What's hard is the getting the importance of it, first of all. And actually feeling the possibility of it. Mm-hmm. And then if you really get the importance of it, you bring it into your intent to notice when you happen to notice this stillness as a bridge or as fullness.

[52:52]

And once you've noticed it once or twice, it's simply possible most of the time. And it's a kind of noticing it once or twice as a promise, a kind of promise, yes. This is now your potentiality. So Yuan Wu was the famous Zen teacher and compiler of the Blue Cliff Records. He carries it one step further. and says, when you can feel this stillness continuously, this fullness, and you know the word sunyata, meaning emptiness, actually means fullness.

[54:16]

Shunyata means we translate as emptiness for various important reasons. But the actual word means the fullness of being without boundaries. So when boundaries recede we begin to feel a fullness. And when we have a continuous sense of that This is the womb of realization, the womb of the sage. So I'm not talking about fancy things, some kind of out of reach thing, I'm talking about something that's within the potentialities of our experience. The first step is to grasp this potential, this possibility, and to get a taste of it.

[55:28]

And the rest follows from continuous practice and intention. So I think that's the best I can do in language. To make this, to aim at it with these words of fullness, stillness. Womb. bridge identification and I think you can imagine that you look at a tree and instead of seeing its branches and its leaves and so forth you let yourself in your own stillness feel its stillness

[56:42]

And now you know this stillness isn't just about the tree not moving or sometimes not moving. But it's also the womb of the sage. Now, is the stillness in your own mind the womb of the sage? No. The stillness you feel in relationship to phenomena, to people, is the womb. It's when the stillness of this all opens up to you, not just your own mind, when the stillness of this all opens up to you. We can call this the womb of the sage.

[57:51]

Okay. Okay. No, I think that we ought to talk more together. But I think I ought to introduce again, as I believe I did last year, the four marks and the five dharmas. And I think my companion teacher, Paul Rosenblum, He did a seminar here, didn't he, recently? In this ancient city, nearby city. And didn't he emphasize the four marks? Did he speak about the five dharmas as well, or mostly the four marks?

[58:53]

Okay, we could say the five dharmas are the practice. And the four marks are the phenomenology or the experience. So let me just put them on the flip chart here. So that to remind you And so that in this seminar we can feel the glass through which you can see the silverware under the suds of the dishwater. Felix is looking at me. To look under the suds of consciousness and see the silverware of the mind.

[60:20]

My legs don't work as well as they used to since I had all this medical treatment. But they're getting better. Do all of you know that I had all this medical treatment? Well, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer in... And I did it to give the Dharmasangas scare. And make them get worried and pay more attention to the teaching. Yeah, well, it wasn't quite the way it went. But anyway... It was quite virulent.

[61:41]

It was eight on a Gleason score, one to nine. So everybody, I was going to go back to the States and do something about it, but everyone thought I had to do it here, really soon. And not try to find doctors, take the time to find the right doctors there in the States. So a group of the doctors in the Dharma Sangha researched who I should see and so forth. And they said, if you do it here, we'll find a way to pay for it all too. Because I don't have insurance in Europe.

[62:46]

So somehow it's, you know, I don't know what exactly happened, but I did all this thing. And I'm a person who, I've said before, but I virtually never had a dental x-ray. Dentists are always trying to talk me into having dental lectures. And they tell me it's no more exposure than you get on a flight to New York. So I say, well, okay, then stay in the room with me when you're x-raying my teeth. Why are you leaving? So anyway... Dentists get mad at me, but I say, just drill somewhere.

[63:52]

And I've really taken an aspirin about four times in my life. Just an experiment. And so this is quite an introduction into the medical techno world. But to make a six-month story short, I had first an endoscopic operation where they removed my lymph nodes. And my daughter helped us. She called me up. I think I told some of you, but she called me up and said, Dad, get your feet on the ground. My daughter, she's 24, and she said, Dad, get your feet on the ground. She said, none of this Zen healing stuff and being an example. She said, I know you meet people at Esalen and discuss survival after bodily death.

[65:07]

But I don't want to meet you after bodily death. Pop, get your feet on the ground. So I said, okay, okay. So I had this operation on January 7th and January 9th. I had a perineal radical prostatectomy. They basically cut off my bottom and sewed it on backwards. Where... which made it quite difficult to do zazen for a while. They cut all the nerves in the process. And they're still in the process of healing. And then more or less, more as a precaution than anything else.

[66:14]

I did seven weeks, actually two months of daily, weekday radiation. So Gerhard Schwarzl, who's our Linz radiologist, who was at the last seminar, he thinks he was one of the advisors. These doctors I saw thought I was a little nuts because somebody was calling up almost every day, how is it, what's going on, and tell me the treatment. We just signed Gerhard the job because too many people couldn't call. So he called surgeons every day. What happened today? And David Beck was a doctor and was on his way to Crestone to be the head monk.

[67:17]

He came to, he postponed going to Crestone for a week or so and came and was at the hospital during the operations to translate it, necessarily. And the doctors here who are not so worried about being sued and all that stuff, because they are in America, they invited him to be present at the operations. So he was present at both operations. And they liked him so much, they said, you can come back anytime you want and join our operations. So the surgeon says to me, before the second operation, And you'll see me tomorrow.

[68:34]

And I said, no, you'll see me and you'll see me in a way I'll never see myself. And I won't see you. But anyway, I seem to have recovered. And Gerhard thinks I have about a 97% chance of no reoccurrence. And he's probably... Let's assume he's not being optimistic. Anyway, I feel good enough. But somehow it... It's made me a little tired after the radiation. It's nice if I can take a nap now, you know, once a day or something.

[69:41]

And it disrupted the habits I'd learned when they took me out of diapers. They're quite old habits, actually. But they're returning to normal. So that's the story. But my legs don't work so well when I sit, but they're getting better every day. So the five dharmas are appearance. Anybody remember from last year? Testing. Oh, you gotta look it up. It's okay. Naming. Benennen. Discrimination.

[70:57]

Right knowledge. Or we could say wisdom. And thus. Okay. Now this is dharma practice. So this just means that your mindfulness has deepened enough, is stable enough, is that you can see the mind in the process of perception.

[72:04]

Okay. So let's just kind of enact it, though that's a difficult word to translate. Okay. So let's say there's Walter sitting there. And Walter doesn't like to be noticed too much. I'm teasing you. So we'll notice Walter. So I close my eyes. And I open them and Walter appears. Yeah. Now, almost immediately, like the airplane, I name Walter. Or even if I don't name him, all the familiarity I have with knowing you and seeing you for quite a lot of years appears.

[73:05]

All that familiarity Identifying process is called, is naming. Dieser gesamte Prozess der Identifikation wird benennend genannt. And then I discriminate about it. Yeah, as I said to Walter a little while ago, he looks very well. So I think, oh, Walter looks well. He must have been a good year, etc. It's normal. It's a normal thing to do. But right knowledge... or wisdom, would say, yeah, okay, but don't discriminate.

[74:05]

Don't even name it, if possible. Just let disappearance appear and feel its presence And feel the presence, the shared presence. Feel the mind as presence. If I do that, feeling the mind as presence is thus. Okay. So why I call this a practice, is because you get in the habit of noticing the process which goes on all the time. Now, what's surgical about this teaching, no reason for that word, I've used it before.

[75:08]

Oh, but I should say, my lymph nodes were clear, my bone scan was clear, et cetera. So it was, yeah, so anyway. So I'm just saying that to confirm that the prognosis is pretty good. Okay, so... But this is a kind of surgical teaching. And the main thing is to catch yourself at naming. It's another way to look at the thought of, oh, that's an airplane.

[76:11]

So you can use that very noticing that it's an airplane to catch the mind before it starts discriminating and allow the fullness of mind to appear. But if naming does turn into discriminating, then you have some kind of, you want to transform discrimination into right knowledge. Which, as I said last year, is to break the habit of permanence. Okay. So a phrase like notice without thinking You name something and then you start to discriminate, but the process of discrimination, which is a habit from before you were out of diapers,

[77:44]

Sophia isn't quite completely out of diamonds yet. So she announced recently at a restaurant. She said to some woman, you don't need diapers. A woman said, well, yes, I don't, that's true. She likes men, by the way. There's a lot of attractive young men at Johanneshof, and she's got them all wrapped around her fingers. So she goes into the restaurant, she sees an attractive young man, she walks over to him and says, Hello, man. Yeah, but anyway, this time she said to this woman, you're not, you don't use diapers, do you?

[78:48]

And she said, Sophia doesn't either, which isn't quite true. And then she announced in a loud voice, but my papa uses diapers. But I'm almost finished with diapers too. Anyway, so... This teaching is to turn discrimination into right knowledge. So these gate phrases are to enter into the habit of discrimination, which is what I'm saying.

[79:54]

Sophia already has this habit to start discriminating. You don't wear diapers. And to interrupt this with a phrase. Like notice without thinking. Just now is enough. Just now arriving. Breaking the habit of permanence. Something that changes your discrimination into wisdom. So you have two chances at needing. We have a chance at appearance, of course. Du hast also eine Chance bei dem Erscheinen, eine beim Benennen und eine bei der Unterscheidung, in richtiges Wissen zu gehen.

[80:59]

Und dann gibt es das So-Sein. Now we can ask in relationship to the theme that seems to be developing here. Und jetzt können wir fragen in Richtung auf das Thema, das sich hier zu entwickeln scheint. What does thusness have to do with self and identity and so on? Okay, now we'll try the four marks. The four marks are nearly the same. Appearance again, but this time it usually says birth. And then duration. And dissolution. Yeah, and then disappearance.

[82:14]

Disappear at two pieces. Yeah. Okay. Now, in a sense, you only need this. Because in fact when you notice carefully everything that we know appears lasts for a moment or longer and dissolves. Because if you're not perceiving entities and investing them with permanence. If you see the activity of the tree, not the tree as a permanent entity, it's always changing. The only thing that remains the same is its stillness.

[83:47]

But that stillness is always being interrupted. Or being expressed. Okay, so that's... But then it's... The next moment it's a new uniqueness. So then this would be just a simple phenomenology. It would be a simple objective description. But disappearance is there because you're involved. You make it disappear. So you participate in its birth. Now, Dogen... Most famous fascicle is called the Genjo Koan. And the center of his teaching, the fulcrum of his teaching, is this phrase, which you could translate Genjo.

[84:52]

as to complete that which appears. So you're not just passively letting things appear, you're completing their appearance. So you feel their appearance and you yourself are feeling a completeness. And you participate in the duration, and you not only then notice and let them dissolve, you more than that, you let them disappear. Mehr als das, du lässt es verschwinden. You kind of return to zero. Du kehrst zu null zurück. You let the traces go. Und du lässt auch die Spuren verschwinden. It's like you erase the blackboard each time. Es ist so, als würdest du jedes Mal die Tafel löschen. So this, as we came out for Paul, is a practice.

[86:07]

Paul, wir können das auch eine Übung nennen. This is a practice. It can appear right here or up here. So it's appearance and then duration. And dissolution. But if it goes beyond that, then there's an aiming discrimination and you have to turn it into lust. No? If appearance doesn't appearance is the four marks. There's birth, duration, dissolution, and so on. But if you interrupt that process, you can't participate in that process. Your mindfulness isn't that rich. As naming occurs. And discrimination. then in naming and discrimination you have the possibility of gate phrases or some other way to transform it into wisdom.

[87:22]

Now, vastness is one way to say, or often said, to be the highest teaching in wisdom. Zen Buddhism. And Dzogchen and Mahamudra too. So we can call this the four-step program to thusness. You understand I'm joking. It's amazing that right here in this little experiential we can notice and participate in. The fruit of it is firstness. Right here, not after 20 years of practice. Right here and entering into the five dharmas and the four marks.

[88:25]

Yuan Wu said, wisdom is right here before us. Without exception, always present. Okay. So I've talked enough. Is there something you'd like to say about these two teachings or about anything we've talked about? Yeah, the craft of this sudden practice. Okay, yes, Ulrike. When you talked at the weekend?

[90:18]

No. Last year? Sometimes, somewhere. You talked about the Genshukuan, where you complete every moment, and you know, arrives, yes. In that sense, yes. Yes. No? Yes. Mm-hmm. And once you're less associated with being yourself, you can also use yourself.

[91:19]

Yes. And I was wondering whether these are the pictures they made of the Oxford, because you have something rising and then you have this fat guy going to town. Yeah, you can understand it that way, yes. Yeah, sure. There doesn't have to be a fat guy that arises. There doesn't have to be a fat guy that arises. and then he takes it out and uses it for himself. And then he takes it out and uses it for himself. And then he takes it out and uses it for himself. And then he takes it out and uses it for himself.

[92:23]

And then he takes it out and uses it for himself. If your starting point is thusness, then what appears is consciousness. So if I'm looking at Walter, from thusness, then it's not Walter that appears. It's consciousness that appears which then lets Walter appear. So consciousness itself is an appearance.

[93:23]

It creates the possibility of appearance. And then self appears. Okay, someone else? When no one says anything, I think, oh, I talked too much. And everyone wants to return to silence. I understand. Usually I have the feeling I have to hold on to something.

[94:25]

I'm here. Thank you. Maybe it's possible not to hold on to something and just be in these four marks, just to disappear, to dissolve, even dissolve. Maybe it's also possible not to have anything to hold on to at all, but just to be in these four characters and to dissolve and to disappear. That's what this imperturbable or feeling of a basic mind is about. You feel anchored in that.

[95:25]

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