In the morning we chant the and now I now we open Buddha's robe. A field far beyond form and emptiness. And then we fold it around ourselves. Yeah, now much of Zen teaching is is really wrapped up in how we do things. It's not externalized or intellectualized. It's wrapped up in how we do things. Dharma is not a what, it's a how. Hmm. And then I fold my legs.

[01:20]

In one sense, it's a symbol of folding this space back inward. Yeah, but it's not just a symbol. Or even an image. It's an actually physically doing of it. So I come here and stand at Baal. I open this space created at the altar. Together with you? And then I fold myself back into this space. and in the same space you are also folded. So why in Teisho in general do we fold ourselves into the same posture? If we change the body image,

[02:22]

If we change the boundaries of the body, we change a lot, even maybe everything. Yeah. You may feel that you're just sitting here in this posture because it's expected of you. But it might be the major part of the lecture. Yeah. Yeah, now I'll come back to this. But let me say again this using a phrase.

[03:41]

which can be used, as I said, as a friend, applied to anything. And as I said, it teaches us, one of the things it begins to develop in us, which I call a factic unitary consciousness. consciousness as a pulse and not as a continuity. We don't want to waste continuity on consciousness. The mind that can really established continuity is much deeper than consciousness.

[04:54]

The dharmic power of consciousness is when it's a pulse. So percept objects are actually not objects. They're a grouping of objects. I mean a grouping of associations. the table, something sitting on, as well as the object, etc. So you begin to experience things in groupings. And each of this, for each of us, this unitary pulse. The unifying pulse will group things differently.

[06:05]

And as your practice develops, you will group things differently. No, while I don't think there's any inherent truth in this practice. But still, the more mature a person's practice is, the more I find they group things the same way others of equal mature practice do. So I recognize somebody who's been practicing a long time. We... group the world into percept objects which are very similar.

[07:11]

The big difference is, of course, how much self influences the grouping. The more self is part of the grouping, the more we're living in our own world, connected primarily by social conventions, We have the experience of being in a private world with a kind of outer conventional world.

[08:12]

But once your practice develops, you enter into the world of practice. And you're willing to enter into the world of practice. With the courage it requires. You feel you become transparent. Yeah, maybe not transparent to everyone, but Maybe not transparent to everyone. But there's a feeling of... Yeah, you're not exposing anything.

[09:14]

But you no longer feel you... are an interior walking around in an exterior. You feel interior and exterior are one shared territory. This is referred to in many columns and phrases like nothing is hidden. And you feel tremendously relieved, I think, when this sense of interiority bounded, fortified interiority Fearful interiority melts. Portified and fearful.

[10:16]

Yeah. Schmilz. Melting. I know, sounds good. Schmilz. It's the same word. This is when we change our body image. When we change our sense of boundaries. A visually determined world. And a visually defined world has a sense of distance and walls. Things are like fixed and in a kind of box. Dharma practice changes this. Yeah, space feels like something you can pick up, as I said, and open and draw in.

[11:33]

Now, if you build up a world from a from the mind, and from a dominant visuality, then you live in the world that most of us that our culture expects us to live in. We don't always live in it. We don't always live in it. But we're supposed to. We feel like secret agents sometimes of another world view. When... People are wearing athletic shoes into the office,

[12:47]

This is a real shift in worldviews. You're no longer confining your feet to the conventional leather shoes. Mm-hmm. You're saying, literally, from the ground up, I'm defining my world through the body. When you start wearing spandex to the office, athletic suits, this may be going too far. This is... Yeah, this is now a new kind of symbolic behavior.

[13:52]

It always surprises me how much of this stuff started from San Francisco. Not Los Angeles. These companies, North Face and all this athletic equipment, actually the first versions of it were in San Francisco. Yeah, and much of our electronic industry came from the area. It was really rooted in a new kind of worldview. So, from the point of view of Zen, we build up our image of the world. From the body. From the senses. Mm-hmm. And then into our activity.

[15:12]

And then into the mind. So that and we're always in the process of doing that. At each moment you find your posture. And find how you gather the gather the body and the senses into a world. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. A vase doesn't have a posture. A vase just has a position. At least most vases. Yeah, they contain something. grain or flowers or something.

[16:20]

But a tea bowl, actually, a good tea bowl has a posture. Because it affects your posture. It contains space in some way that echoes your own posture in space. When westerners, most westerners, imitate tea bowls, they kind of make it irregular. They don't understand it has a posture. this dharmic yogic body, this dharmic or yogic body, is continuously coming into presencing.

[17:33]

And again, we can feel that in each other. And one of the, you know, you get addicted to it after a while. It sometimes gets boring to be with people who aren't practicing. Because they They don't come into presencing and so you don't feel the same kind of intimacy with them. I'm still trying to understand what 10,000 people in masks in Basel means. But David helped introduce me to it. 10,000 people in masks, this is a madhouse. I said... I said, only the Swiss could organize a madhouse like this.

[18:44]

And Charlotte said, no, only the Baselers could do it. Anyway. So you get in the habit of this Pulse of the particular. The groupings of the particular. Yeah. pause within the particular a particular at each moment you are generating it's not the same particular as for the bird or the fly in your room and it's not the same particular for another person in the room It's always other and your own.

[19:52]

It makes the most ordinary situations exciting and surprising. It's like you're always in sort of water of changing color or something like that. So you get in the habit of this pulse of the particular. And you are the pulse. And you can change the pulse. Enter more deeply into the pulse. Release the pulse. There's a kind of converging of the grouping, a converging and a releasing. You know, there's two words, Dharma

[21:09]

And Adharma. And Adharma means chaos. And within the concept of Dharma, in Hinduism, there are two different ideas. Sort of two different ideas. Dharma is a way of establishing order, and Adharma is chaos. Dharma is a way, is a way to establish order and Adama is chaos. Yes, okay. But within the Buddhist idea of Dharma, of converging and releasing, there is implicitly the idea of chaos or adharma. So it's in a way you're gathering the world out of chaos, And releasing it back into chaos.

[22:16]

So if you want to be in control, you can't really practice Dharma. If you want to be in control, then you can't practice the Dharma. Adharma means to release control. To take a chance. I practiced for a while with assuming that I would be crazy every morning. In other words, I went to bed at night saying, I may wake up absolutely nuts, but I'm going to go to sleep anyway. And then I practiced, when I wake up, I may never wake up, tonight is the night I'll die. Until I no longer care whether I died or not.

[23:18]

or was crazy, I just was going to go to sleep. So you really have to give up control. Converge and release. And you don't control the release. It's a kind of adventure. It's for a warrior mentality, actually. Fearless mentality. And it's not that, oh, because I'm a strong person, I become fearless. No. And that is not that you say to yourself, I am such a strong person, I have no fear anymore. That is because the practice of Dharma makes you fearless. And fearlessness is one of the big steps toward freedom from mental suffering.

[24:41]

So as I said, you know, you, again, get in the habit of the pulse of the particular. It's almost like jumping from stone to stone in a garden path or stones placed in a stream. So you say that you bring this... attention to your, this phrase, to your breath as you're going to sleep. Here's this friend, just this. And so your Just this is on your exhale and then your inhale, etc.

[25:53]

And your attention is in the pulse itself, not just the breath. So your breath changes. As you... Usually, as you go to sleep, there's a little change in the way the breath goes. And then this... just this jumps to the new breath. Like jumps to the new breath. stone in the stream. But suddenly like the world of waking is on one side of the stream and you're crossing the stream into sleep. non-relational images start coming up.

[27:04]

And you know you're actually now you're very close to or you are asleep. And now this pulse of attention can follow into dreaming with a kind of lucidness. So I'm just trying to give you an example of the kind of surgical power or, yeah, something like that, this practice of justice has. It doesn't mean, as some people joke, justice is always the same. That's the world of consciousness where everything is sort of the same.

[28:06]

The actual world is always different. So just this jumps into dreaming mind. Where consciousness as continuity can't go, you have to break consciousness as continuity to go to sleep. But this yogic awareness is in the midst of consciousness and in the midst of sleep. Yeah, you have the experience of, geez, I must be asleep, but yet somehow I'm conscious and Now another kind of consciousness is happening.

[29:16]

Oh dear. It should be ten minutes earlier. But your body becomes an instrument of space and time. This is yogic practice. Thanks. Thanks for translating. Thanks for sitting here. Thanks for talking. Thanks for talking, yeah. Okay.

[30:03]

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