Good afternoon. And it was nice to hear the Taisho drum. We used to find a good location for it and stuff like that, eventually. Now we have a kind of hybrid Sashin here. Do you know what I mean? It's sort of part of the practice month and sort of an independent Sesshin. And some of you were here, have been here, and some of you just arrived. But we're all here now. This is good. Mm-hmm. And that's basically practice, to find ourselves here, now, without any comparison.

[01:09]

And I think I said this morning in Zazen... Just... Find yourself at home on your cushion. That means also to find yourself at home in your posture. And in your body and mind. I think when we hear the phrase to find ourselves at home, we understand some feeling like that. I'd like you to be able to find yourself at home in each particular situation.

[02:12]

But when I say that, again, we're moving into something very specifically Zen practice, yogic practice. Let me just say about your posture. The most important thing is, of course, how you feel your posture from inside. And not so much how it looks from outside. But it's also hard to separate how it looks from outside and how it is.

[03:28]

There's an inner posture, but also your posture is also your body. Quite a lot of you have your head back a bit. And some of you have your head rather forward. And the people have their head back, I adjust it, and a few minutes later it's back. So I have to remind you that your posture is as finely tuned as acupuncture points. And if you can think of your head as a dimmer switch, as I've said quite often, the more the switch is back, the more you're thinking. And the more it comes forward, you're in some sort of groggy state.

[04:49]

So you have to sort of... You have to tune your dimmer switch. If you like to think, you can just sit like this, you know. They just don't even pretend to be so, just, you know. They don't even have to pretend to be so, just, you know. But it's nice to think. It's nice to be groggy too. I was kind of groggy this morning. But you keep wanting to find this location of verticality in your posture. Now I'm wondering how to, what I'm wondering is how to speak about what I'd like to speak about.

[05:50]

It continues from the practice month. Yeah, but also makes sense to all of you. And so I want to find various ways to approach a number of themes. Now in the lecture today, Sunday, yesterday morning, yeah, wasn't it? Yesterday morning? Seems like a month ago. Some of you didn't know that the five ranks is usually taught with a series of circles. And the poems and the commentary are really commentaries on the circles.

[07:17]

And the circles represent, the drawn circles represent the practice. A kind of map of the practice. Now, Patanjali lived, I don't know, second century B.C. Yeah, a pretty long time ago. He talked about practice in much the way Zen talks about the keeping to the one. As an intensity of attentiveness. To be attentive, to pay attention to.

[08:24]

Aufmerksamkeit. That's it, aufmerksamkeit. An intensity of attentiveness within the field of consciousness. You already have two things here. You have several. You have attentiveness and then you have an intensity of attentiveness. And the feeling of that being within the field of consciousness. Now that's often practiced as a kind of one-pointedness. Das wird oft als eine Einspitzigkeit praktiziert. But Patanjali says it develops into a non-pointed attentiveness. Und dann sagt Patanjali, das entwickelt sich in eine nicht mehr einspitzige Aufmerksamkeit.

[09:30]

Now this is exactly what the early Chinese Zen teachers were speaking of. To maintain an awareness within the field of consciousness. An actual practice and the way it's thought of it may be it's a little different. But for us amateurs, we can take it as nearly the same. To develop a continuity of awareness within consciousness. And merge with that. Okay. So maybe I can speak about Zen gardens. Vielleicht kann ich über Sandgärten sprechen.

[10:57]

If we put a sand garden out here with nice rocks and raked sand. Wenn wir hier einen Sandgarten anlegen würden mit schönen Steinen und das reichen würden. That might be a symbol of a sand garden, but it wouldn't be a sand garden. Dann wäre das vielleicht ein Symbol eines Sandgartens, aber es wäre kein Sandgarten. So if we were to try to look at really what a Zen garden is, a Zen garden is, can I say, a Zen garden is A Zen garden is the making of a Zen garden. And in that case, it would be us making it. But it's also the making of it when we look at it.

[12:03]

Now, there's a word shime in Japanese, S-H-I-M-E, which means a tide thing. Something tied together, yeah. So you maybe marked your property or marked something like that by taking grasses and tying them together. And the binding of grasses, bushes and trees was what's called shimei. Is it making a string out of these things? If you take grasses, you make a rope out of it. If you take a bush, you maybe shape it in some way. Or it would be like tying a rope around a rock or around a tree.

[13:21]

And you can see that practice in... Shinto shrines today, they tie ropes around trees and rocks and things. And then they often in ceremonies would tie these grasses together and then burn them. Because then what they tied together would be dissolved. Okay, so the word shime turned into the word shima, which was an early word for garden. And finally turned into, in Japanese, the word meaning island. Japan has lots of islands and it's a kind of island in a wild sea, wilderness sea.

[14:33]

So a garden was a kind of collected landscape. As if we took the landscape around here and collected it here on the hillside. And somehow collected the building into the landscape. So they particularly liked the right angle right in the middle of the garden. Because that brought the human sense of, you know, making things into nature. And these sticks they make, you know, teaching staffs.

[15:56]

Originally, as most of you know, they were back scratchers. And because they reach anywhere, they are teaching staffs. But they also like to take the grain of the wood and then cut it so you can see a human intervention in the grain of the wood. So they make the grain completely straight and actually good sticks are supposed to stand up by themselves. You can see the layers of the grain right through there like that. So that's meant not to be a curve, but to show the presence of human intervention.

[16:59]

That's different. Yeah, and then they even take the curve. It's better than spoon bending. Excuse me. So like a window collects a landscape. So wie ein Fenster eine Landschaft sammelt. Like these windows collect this garden. So wie diese Fenster diesen Garten sammeln. Or my window upstairs, my door upstairs is like a postcard out there. Oder wie mein Fenster oben, das ist wie eine Postkarte. Black Forest. Schwarzwald. Schwarzwald Postkarte. There's out every window, there's a Schwarzwald Postkarte.

[18:13]

Hier aber ist jedes Fenster eine Schwarzwald Postkarte. So they particularly like to put windows on and various ways to play with right angles against the garden. So the idea was to collect the landscape and collect the architecture together in some kind of dialogue, correspondence. So if we did a garden here, part of the garden should be fields like we see around here. As in Japan, when they had a garden, they would put rice paddies or little examples of rice paddies in the garden.

[19:16]

They even had ideas which are expressed in the spring equinox ceremony in Buddhism. They express this idea, which I will now explain. That you somehow call the wild mountain seeds down to the fields to be planted. So it's called the flower ceremony, and it's also connected to Buddha's birth. But originally it was kind of like you called the mountain spirits, guardian mountain spirits out of the mountain.

[20:22]

Down to the fields in springtime for planting. And then the gardens were their kind of vacation place where they stayed till they went back to the mountains. Und die Gärten wurden dann ihre sozusagen Ferienorte, bevor sie dann wieder in die Berge zurückgekehrt sind. When they weren't planting and harvesting. Wenn nicht gesät und geerntet wurde. So a garden for a Zen temple. Also bedeutete ein Garten für ein Zen temple. The first garden makers were Shingon or Tantric Buddhist monks. Also die ersten... And then it became the work of Zen priests primarily. And then professional gardeners.

[21:38]

But the sense was, if we were going to make this place into a garden, Somehow to collect the landscape, the trees, the plants, the landscape we see, the Alps in the distance. and to create some feeling of it here and in a way that you can't conceptualize. In other words, at one point in the garden you can't imagine what the rest of the garden would be like. So sometimes in these sand gardens they put rocks, but you can't ever see all the rocks at once. Whenever you are, one rock is hidden by another rock, whatever position you take. So I'm speaking about this partly because we started making a garden here.

[22:42]

And it's got a little New Age art and stuff in it. Some circles and things like that. But that doesn't have much to do with Zen, but someone liked the idea of putting them there, so that's okay. And that we want to make a garden at Crestone. So I'd like us to understand what we're doing when we make a garden as practice. And it's somewhat parallel to this sense of seeing, like right now, seeing this room as a circle.

[23:45]

And knowing it's a circle, like a field of consciousness in which our attentiveness is present, You can pull this field into a point. You can release the point back into the field. This actually is in... Western architects are interested in this idea of the ma-point, M-A, ma-point. The point in any situation, which is a Japanese word. Ma is a Japanese word. The point in any situation which collects a kind of wholeness.

[24:47]

And this movement, again, is, as I've often been speaking, part of practice, the moving things inward and releasing them outward. Okay, so when I talk about this, feeling this room as a circle, breathing as a circle, is, what am I doing? I'm suggesting a kind of visual meditation. Visual thinking.

[25:54]

So what am I doing when I have visual thinking? Was mache ich also, wenn ich dieses visuelle Denken habe? It's a substitute for or an alternative to language thinking. Es ist ein Ersatz oder eine Alternative zum sprachlichen Denken. And when I speak about mindfulness thinking, holding something in mind, Without yourself thinking about it. But letting the world think through it. Since everything is changing. This is also an alternative to language thinking. And mantra like Phrase practice where you repeat a phrase or a word is also a kind of substitute, is a substitute for language thinking.

[27:22]

You're trying to recapture the word from language. And when you pull a word out of language, pull it out of the syntax of language and put it in the context of your body, through repetition, or in the context of mindfulness, or simply to have this image thinking, is again trying to get out of your culture, out of the self embedded in language.

[28:25]

So all these practices that you might do or try are trying to make them more, as we say, living words or words that have returned to their source. So that's also like if you can feel at home here on your cushion. What I'd like you to do, as we've been doing in the, I suggested you try in the practice month, just to really see if you can bring your attention to this location.

[29:32]

This place this week. And when you say walking on the stairs, you bring yourself just to the location of each step. Now a garden, a Zen garden, will try to make the steps, each one different. Occasionally they're fairly straight. But the ideal path makes you have to pay attention with each step. And makes you adjust your pace as you walk through the garden. So this is all conceived of as practices to to find yourself just in each location.

[30:59]

That to find yourself just in whatever location you're in. The feeling is maybe a little like being in a dream. You know how, I mean, I suppose you have dreams where you're, say, on a staircase. When you go up the stairs and you're in some other kind of room. Maybe if you go back down the stairs, it's a different room than was there before at the bottom of the stairs. You feel you're in a particular place, but the conception of the place seems to change around you. Or a little kid playing in this building. They might never get straight which stairway goes where. And why you go up those stone steps and you end up in nearly the same place as up the wooden steps, but...

[32:12]

Now, I like architecture. So I have a habit of trying to imagine the overall building from my, when I walk through a building. That's kind of fun to do. What I'm suggesting now is you drop the conception of the building and just have the location. It might be in a dream. So somehow all roads in this building lead to the Zendo. and then the zendo doesn't lead anywhere and it just opens into this garden you should probably block it off so you never can find this garden if you walk outside unless you come in the zendo that's the kind of thing you might do if we had enough property to do that

[33:46]

Das wäre zum Beispiel etwas, was wir hier machen könnten, wenn wir ausreichend großes Grundstück hätten. So you'd always wonder where this garden was. You couldn't find it when you walked around outside. Dass man sich immer fragt, wenn man draußen herum geht, wo dieser Garten eigentlich ist. So I'm trying to get you in to feel just being in a location with no comparison. Also ich möchte, dass ihr einfach euch in einem Ort befindet, I'm trying to de-center you. Derail you. Out of language and self. We have some help, you know. I mean, Einstein did an interesting thing. He really took the ideas of wholeness, symmetry, et cetera, and said they don't really make sense.

[34:57]

And Euclid's idea is that the angles of a triangle always add up to 180 degrees. In Einstein's physics, they don't. They're not flat, they're bent. So what Einstein's relativity physics did It didn't say that Newton and Euclid are useless. But he said basically they're languages. So there's not that Newton's wrong, but there's more than one physics. So if you have Newton's language, you don't have the truth, you have one world described by his language.

[36:15]

So what Zen's trying to do is get you to un-language the world. Even Freud helped us. Because before Freud, consciousness was some kind of like this was the world, what we were conscious of. After Freud, consciousness is just a kind of location within a topology of consciousness and unconsciousness and pre-consciousness and so on. So your consciousness is just a sight in a larger mind. But this sight can be given coherence.

[37:35]

Freud thought that too. But from practice we see it in a similar way, but somewhat different. We can find ourselves in these particulars and without conceptualizing it as one continuous world as if it was all Newton or Euclid or something but rather leave it a kind of fuzziness. But for this week, leave your whole life a kind of fuzziness. But in whatever your location is find a kind of coherence.

[38:54]

Or just accept whatever your location is. If it's the stairs it's the stairs. If it's the threshold of your room, it's the threshold of your room. If it's your bed, it's your bed. If it's your cushion, it's your cushion. If it's the karaoke bowl, it's the karaoke bowl. And as much as possible you've suspended conceptualizations. And you just keep finding yourself only in your location.

[39:56]

As home, perhaps. For this week, for these days, for these hours. and see what happens to you if you can establish this continuity of attentiveness that opens to each location whether a mental or emotional or physical location, opens to it and lets it spread through you. And then you release it. Thank you.

[41:28]

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