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.

[01:04]

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 the feel 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. Let's just look at where we've gotten to so far.

[02:23]

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. Okay, so we've been aiming at, or feeling our way toward, a way of being in the world that emphasizes feeling.

[03:33]

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. 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.

[04:50]

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. You keep some phrase in mind. All right. So, of course, one physical door is this practice of bowing, as I mentioned, demonstrated.

[05:59]

Now, once I 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. 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, always use two hands.

[07:02]

But rather there's a feeling of engaging your body, the body. And even if you don't, you can 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. I'm watching our little Sophia.

[08:32]

Sometimes I get annoyed watching her. She gets annoyed? I get annoyed watching her. 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 skin. So instead of saying hello to people, or how are you? I said, don't bug me, man.

[09:48]

People come up and say, hello, Dick. I'd say, don't bug me, man. I did that really for a year or more. So people called me, 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... Yeah. I tried to tell her to stop, but I think, jeez, I used to do the same thing.

[10:53]

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. So we have already developed a sense of physical presence that's our posture, at least during all our waking hours.

[11:55]

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 in Zurich, where I usually fly to, from America. 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 stop for you without thinking, oh, he's only going to speak English and stuff like that.

[13:16]

Taxis will stop for you. When you first come to Japan, if you're in a rural area, taxis won't stop for you. You think, oh my God, look at that foreigner. Yeah, because they don't know what to do with you. And they drive past. What's this? 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 to practice, I can see it on people, this body space where there's a sense of always coming out of a pause. So, of course, what I'm talking about here is what is the self?

[14:22]

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. Because you know it's not an airplane or you know it's not a dragon, say.

[15:26]

You know it's not an airplane flying dangerously low over your head. So there's some input from this 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. For when we really come into only smelling or only hearing, And this is a gate phrase you can use.

[16:55]

Only hearing, only smelling. Or you can also, I find it useful in English to use merely hearing, merely smelling. When that practice has matured enough, You can know when it's matured enough because then percepts are accompanied by a feeling of bliss. 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.

[18:05]

Or if you lived in San Francisco, a tugboat or harbor sounds. 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. Do the ambulances, when you work in an ambulance, don't you? And do they make siren sounds just like New York and all that? Ah, I know. Even that can happen in the middle of the night, though you hope no one's hurt, can have that feeling.

[19:10]

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. 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.

[20:17]

I mean, the thought would pop up. I could die on a sound like this. I'd be happy to die on a sound. And So that made me say, there's more to this feeling than makes sense. And of course at that time, 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.

[21:23]

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 bliss, your physical presence as somehow the merging of mind and body. 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 a Buddha.

[22:50]

How could I know? And it takes a while in practice to recognize these small things and let them expand in you. Okay. 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 sound or clear day out by the sound. The sound is different on a rainy day, on a wet day.

[23:50]

Yeah. And 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.

[24:56]

It's almost like your body is transparent in the hearing. Now this is... Yeah. So you see, in the context of this, the... the noticing, the thought notice, the telegram, that it's an 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. If you think about it too much, it's gone. You have to think very gently about it. Notice it very gently so thinking mind doesn't come up.

[26:14]

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. Now let me bring up again, which I brought up two or three times in the last week, what I'm calling the Giorgio's Table.

[27:16]

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. Yeah. 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 asks, what is this? I say, it's a bell. She says, Sophia's bell. So by naming she separates it, but the relationship toward her is Sophia. Yeah, so let's call that the first step. The second step was, this is Sophia's Papa's bell, which is Sophia's.

[29:02]

So it was Sophia's Papa's 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 a little where we're staying above the gatehouse. It's like a little house or apartment. So she comes in and she says, Giorgio's house. And then she's sitting down at the table, we're having breakfast. And she says, Giorgio's tea.

[30:06]

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 opener, 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.

[31:20]

So she's looking at me with big eyes. Boom, boom, boom. But obviously what I'm trying to do is give her a little Buddhist education. It'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 can 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 the teaching of interdependence.

[32:29]

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.

[33:41]

And he had to go back upstairs. We 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.

[34:46]

Now when... I should have turned my phone off. It's probably mine. I'm sorry. Um... 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.

[35:50]

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. Now I've distinguished many times between awareness and consciousness, so I'll assume that that's fairly clear.

[36:58]

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 explore this with you. See what we come up with. So now I'd like to equate this presence with stillness.

[38:06]

Maybe when I... Could you tell me your name again? Yes. Elena. Elena. The second part of Magdalena. Oh, 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.

[39:08]

But in the stillness you can feel the trees, the leaves, readiness to move. You know, aspen trees are quite wonderful because they, as they say, quake. Aspen trees? What's that? All those trees that crest on are aspen trees. They have all these leaves and they tremble. They tremble. And nothing's happening, there's no air, but all the leaves tremble. Somehow you don't have to move the branches, they must be very loosely attached to something.

[40:11]

So even when the leaves are not moving, you can feel the potentiality of their moving. Now, another example that, again, I often use is if you look at a wave, Say an ocean wave. 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.

[41:22]

So even in activity you can feel this stillness. And I think at some point we not only can see pass the contents of the mind to the stillness of the mind. 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.

[42:25]

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. 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.

[43:40]

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. 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.

[44:46]

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. And by stillness I don't mean it's... meaning as silence.

[46:10]

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. Fulfillment. 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. And this movement toward fullness is also

[46:54]

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