The other day Marie-Louise said to me, you know, when I first listened to your lectures, that, and I always thought, there's so many things to do, I can't, you know, I don't know what to do, I'm lost. I don't know how she put it exactly, but she said, but now I see that you're just describing a path, and just because you say you turn left at the green roof, I don't have to become a green roof. And I don't know exactly how she described it, but something like this. But now I can see that you are simply describing a path. And just because you say that you turn left at the green roof, it doesn't mean for a long time that I have to become a green roof.

[01:06]

Yeah, or if you describe something with a tail and a long nose and big ears, I don't have to become an elephant. But rather just that if I have this experience, it might feel like I have big ears. Anyway, something like that, she said. Yeah, I find such comments, even though I don't understand them very well, useful. Because, as you know, I keep saying this is all an experiment for me, how to bring this practice into focus. But to bring this into the world that a practitioner most usefully inhabits,

[02:10]

And I don't mean to say, you know, partly it's to say that you can inhabit a different world than you usually inhabit. Und ich will damit nicht sagen, oder nur zum Teil will ich damit sagen, dass du eine andere Welt bewohnen kannst, als die, die du normalerweise bewohnst. But really what I'm saying is, I want us to discover how to inhabit the world we actually already inhabit. Sondern was ich damit wirklich sagen will, ist, ich möchte, dass wir entdecken, wie wir die Welt bewohnen können, die wir sowieso schon bewohnen. No, I'd like to give for Dagmar and Guido and Susanne a short review of where we've been so far.

[03:30]

And really to find my place again in the way, path we're inhabiting. And maybe we can all locate ourselves on this path again. So one of the things I've mentioned several times is that when you first sit down to do zazen, bring your attention to the spine. And you feel the spine appear.

[04:38]

And then to notice that what's happening is you brought attention to the spine. And when you bring attention to the spine, The spine appears. And an awareness that accompanies the spine appears. So you have three things that you can notice. You've brought attention to the spine. And the attention has generated the spine as an appearance. You can feel it. And the feeling of the spine is an awareness of the spine. And the awareness of the spine isn't the same as the attention you originally brought to the spine. Now, maybe, I don't know, I mean, when I say these things, I think this is totally normal and natural, and then I think maybe I'm crazy and it's too much detail and blah, blah, blah.

[06:04]

But even if it is crazy, I like it so much, I'm going to tell you more. Okay. Okay, so now you've got this appearance of the spine and awareness of the spine. Now you can move these two or three together up to the upper spine between your shoulders. So you're moving attention and the awareness of the spine and the appearance of the spine higher up in your back. Now you can move the awareness that arises with the spine up through the head

[07:32]

and into this crown chakra. Now the awareness that appeared, arose with the spine, It's no longer connected with the spine, but now connected with the top of the skull. And that awareness can stay there and cultivate a little kind of feeling, even if you take attention away from it. So what we're doing here is refining and articulating our The actual tools with which we know ourselves.

[09:15]

Die tatsächlichen Werkzeuge, durch die wir uns selbst kennen. Okay, okay. Now say that you, either you happen to or because of practice, you have lucid dreaming more than you, you have lucid dreaming. Now I'm going to assume that all of you have some experience, at least some, of lucid dreaming. Okay, now we can describe lucid dreaming as a... sphere of lucidity, I can describe it, and I hope that you can too, as a sphere of lucidity, in which the dream occurs without being controlled by the sphere of lucidity. in der der Traum stattfindet, ohne durch die Sphäre der Lucidität kontrolliert zu werden.

[10:41]

Although with lucid dreaming you can, and that's another thing, you can affect the dream. Obwohl du durch das lucide Träumen auch den Traum beeinflussen kannst. Das ist aber ein anderes Thema. But really the... the most powerful characteristic of lucid dreaming is you're aware you're dreaming, but the dreaming goes on as if you weren't conscious of it. So what's happening when you... get more and more familiar with lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming then becomes a capacity of attention which is integrated with but also inseparable from the dream.

[11:57]

Now, what's happening here again, again, we're not fixed entity beings. with a given genetic IQ. So IQ is intelligence quotient or something like that. Which I often describe ironically as a measure of how fast you can be ordinary. Which I'm afraid that's what it is mostly with these IQ tests. But we also have an AQ, an awareness quotient. And other quotients. Okay. So whatever your genetic IQ, if there's such a thing, you are, during your lifetime, you're developing these quotients, your awareness quotient, your attentional quotient, and so forth.

[13:36]

Es ist so, dass du diese Quotienten im Laufe deines Lebens entwickelst, also den Gewahrseinsquotienten und den Aufmerksamkeitsquotienten und so weiter. And I think a better way of saying than the word concentrate. And I think a better word than the word concentrate. It would be to say to inhabit your attention. Das wäre zu sagen, die Aufmerksamkeit zu bewohnen. If you inhabit your attention while you're studying math or Buddhism or the piano. Wenn du deine Aufmerksamkeit bewohnst, während du etwas studierst, wie zum Beispiel Mathematik oder Buddhismus oder du spielst Klavier. This isn't coming from outside, it's coming from inside. Dann kommt das nicht von außen, sondern das kommt von innen. Yeah, and, you know, Yuan Wu, one of my favorite people to speak about, says, like, turn the five physical senses inside out.

[14:38]

Inside out. I understand. It's very difficult to say. Danger. Whenever you say something difficult to say, I suddenly imagine no one in Germany ever has this experience. And I can't believe that's true. Well, like you take a sock and you turn it inside out. Yeah, but do you turn it outside in or do you turn it inside out? In German it's hard to say. In German it's... We say to turn it left or something. Turn it left? Suddenly the direction moves. Turn the wrong side out. Turn the wrong side out, oh.

[16:01]

So Guan Ru says make the wrong side the right side. If when you hear a bird you hear the bird and it comes inside you from outside and what Yuan Wu means is turn the five physical senses inside out. Say it in English. Is to hear the bird from inside toward the out. Yeah, okay. So I'm afraid what I'm speaking about now in the time I have is going to be more of a collage or a mosaic.

[17:05]

Okay. So... So the the becoming more and more acquainted with and not allowing consciousness to interfere with the sphere of lucidity, the sphere of lucidity which observes but doesn't interfere, what happens is that increase in our attentional awareness skills, integrates our dreaming mind into our life in a new and deeper way.

[18:39]

You know, novelists sometimes say that, I read a number of times, novelists say that they start writing something, it's going to be a short story maybe or something, And then the characters in the story begin to tell them what to do, tell the novelist what to do. And the short story turns into a novel. Okay, so we have a situation where the consciousness of the novelist And the awareness of the novelist and the attentional skills and his experience, his or her experience. Produce the text of the novel, of the story, or whatever it is.

[20:14]

But then the text itself becomes a new complexity. Which has its own directional interplays. And takes its own direction. Now, it makes me think of a prism. And you put light through it and it turns into the five eye lights, the five... lights which the eye can see, wavelengths which the eye can see.

[21:17]

Yeah. And believe it or not, before Newton, Isaac Newton, Everyone thought that light, that the colors in a prism were produced by the glass and not in the light. But Newton was a very smart fellow and could think outside the prism, I mean box. And he thought, well, maybe they're actually contained in the white light. So to test it, he did a very simple thing.

[22:29]

He took a second prism and ran the red part of the light through the second prism and it stayed red. I mean, anybody could have done that for centuries, but you know, it takes somebody who can think outside the prism to do it. So in a funny way, I would say that when the novelist writes a text, he produces a prism which breaks light up in his consciousness up into many wavelengths.

[23:40]

And not only the five eye-light wavelengths, eye-light means ones that the human eye can see, I think our word for it is Grundfarbe, is that right? What is it? Augenlicht. Also, what the eyes can see is already something different from the Grundfarbe. But Augenlicht is... We know the wavelengths that see the eye. But Augenlicht is... Yes, you're right. But the five wavelengths that the eye can see. But the eye can see infinitely many wavelengths. It can't just see five. It's not like it can only see five. I think it's... It's a bandwidth. It's a bandwidth, yes. But these are ultimately the five basic colors, I thought. I can take a vacation and you guys can just discuss this. Okay, anyways, but we understand the problem, right?

[24:40]

We understand the problem. So anyway, in addition to the five colors of the rainbow, There's infrared and ultraviolet and gamma rays and microwaves, radio waves. So a good novelist not only sees the five colors of consciousness, the consciousness can see in his playing, in his text. She also sees the gamma rays playing in the text and ultraviolet rays playing in the text. Er oder sie kann auch die Gammawellen und die ultravioletten Wellenlängen sehen, die in dem Text präsent sind.

[25:53]

But they're not within the range of the five colors of rainbow language. Aber die sind nicht innerhalb des Textes der fünf Farben der Regenbogensprache. Okay, now, good old Yuan Wu again. he says the inexhaustible treasury is the inconceivable reality. It's the inconceivable In other words, he's saying reality is inconceivable. The five senses only know five pieces of an infinite pie, a huge pie.

[26:56]

So unbelievably to me, Yuan Wu, way back in centuries and centuries ago, said that to locate yourself in the feeling of an inconceivable reality becomes the basis for realization. Sorry, I think I missed something. Can you say it again? It's inconceivable, I'm sorry. No, but it's repeatable. Oh, it's repeatable. Maybe. To locate yourself, to locate your feeling being in the sense of an inconceivable reality.

[27:59]

transforms the fundamental basis of each and every person into the field of realization. Okay. So let me tell you about St. Augustine. Maybe one of my confessions of, et cetera, one of my favorite writers. He was a reader. And Marie-Louise became quite good friends with the head of the Dricung Cargill Order.

[29:10]

And she dug out a book she'd had for a long time of his life that he dedicated to her. So I started reading it. And the first thing his teachers taught him was how to memorize it. Okay. Now, Augustine at some point speaks about he happened to look in on one of the cells and there St. Jerome was reading. I mean, I have not looked in anybody's room here and seen St.

[30:12]

Jerome, but... I've seen St. Earhart. And he was reading silently. And supposedly St. Augustine was quite surprised because you didn't read silently. So for Augustine in those days, though he does speak about reading silently sometimes, he thought that reading required the realm of the words to be made present And to be read and to be made present, you read them aloud. Because in reading them aloud, the voice was present.

[31:17]

Yeah, and the tongue was present. And the feeling, as he put it, the heart feeling was exploring the text through the sounds and the movement of the mouth and so forth. And simultaneously, there was the process of storing it as memory. And simultaneously storing it so it could be restored or recalled. Yeah, and remembered. Now, remembered actually is the etymology of something like remind, but remember is also your hands and legs and arms.

[32:52]

And so for me, I like to think of remember as to give arms and legs again to memory. So Augustine's sense was, if you read a text and you read it aloud and you read it with your voice and your tongue and your heart and all that, And you read it with an attentional exploration, which also... stores it as memory, then it becomes a text that's always present to you.

[33:54]

And it's working in your life. In some painting that you can see of St. Augustine, I'm told, In the picture there's his tools of reading. And there's a revolving lectern so he can read several books at once. Lectern? A stand on which you can put a book. And in 1588, someone invented, some Italian guy, a, named Gita, no, it wasn't named Gita, invented a rotating reading desk. So you could read ten books at once.

[35:02]

Here, reading is a real art. To develop the attentional mind So the text of the mind itself is awakened through the texts you read. Now something like this is assumed in Yuan Wu in how you study and read and practice with a koan, for example. Okay, so let's just go to one more thing. If someone comes into some local people or somebody or other comes and they want to see our Zendo, we show them the Zendo.

[36:05]

And then we show them the Zafu and then we sit there, we say. So they go and sit down and, you know, etc. Okay, but we wouldn't call this zazen, meditation exactly. Okay, but so if we go and sit down, we, as is our custom, we bow to the cushion. Now, as I said, as the spine appears when you bring attention to it, when you go to the cushion, the cushion appears when you bring attention through the bow to the cushion. You've already started zazen.

[37:27]

And by bringing attention to the cushion, the cushion has appeared. And your presence to yourself has appeared. And a kind of attention, awareness, has appeared simultaneously. That's what I'm saying, like three things. Then you turn around, go out of the room, and then you sit down in the midst of this initiated attention. Now what I'm bringing up as a question is what is the difference between the neighbor who comes in and goes and sits down on a cushion and wonders what this is all about

[38:40]

And he could be sitting anywhere, except it's rather uncomfortable. And the practitioner who has a route to the cushion, and the route includes bowing and sitting down, etc., And the word dojo, which is now used for martial arts mostly. What's originally a Zen practice center word. And in Japanese monasteries, it's still used, the dojo. And dojo means way, do, dao, way, place.

[39:43]

And more instrumentally, it means root place. It's the path you take which makes this room a room of potential realization. So that your path to the cushion is a path of suchness of when you're touching everything, touching the floor, touching the appearance of the cushion, touching your own presence,

[40:48]

and for the most part not straying from that you're generating inhabiting and releasing these three words I've given you But you can play with them in your breathing, for instance. With an inhale, you can feel inhaling and inhabiting, inhaling and inhabiting the inhale. Exhaling and releasing and inhabiting the releasing. Now, something like this attentional sphere is what St. Augustine meant in our culture, our Western culture, meant by reading. And now we have our three months or our time here to see if we can be in this world where

[42:23]

Suchness is touching everything. Now there's about, I really didn't talk about much of anything that I had a mind to talk about. And it was supposed to be a review. And I think most of you have never heard any of this. But St. Jerome got into my text and he began leading me somewhere. So I'm glad he's joined the practice period. Thank you very much.

[43:26]

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