Hello Nicole and hello all of those of you who are out there somewhere on the planet. One of the huge things that happened in the West in the conceptions we have of the world in the West, is that God didn't make space. So as that kind of seeps in and is kind of recognized underneath our thinking and then in our thinking, we naturally ask or question ourselves, well, who made space then or what made space?

[01:15]

And the more that seeps into us or somehow penetrates into us, the more And I would say, in a wide sense, we're at one end of these 200 years, let's call it, and we're trying to answer that question. I will probably, every Sunday, be trying to answer that question. And one of the Names in yogic culture, Zen yogic culture, and yogic culture, East Asian yogic culture, one of the names for space is the 10,000 things.

[02:29]

And one of the names in yogic culture, in East Asian yogic culture, for space, one of the names is the 10,000 things. Yeah, now that takes a little development in yourself. Why, in effect, a word for space is the 10,000 things. And I think of the question Shi Dou asked Laman Pang, Shi Dou lived from 700 to 790 in China.

[03:33]

He lived from 700 to 720, only 20 years. 790. Oh. 92. Oh, it's from 7 to 790. Okay. From 700 to 790. And he asked, and he asked, He asked Laman Pang, who is the person who does not accompany the 10,000 dharmas?

[04:35]

A complex question like this needs a little attention. Now, I don't usually bring in traditional Zen stories into these Sunday talks. Yeah, because I'm really not trying to teach Zen so much as trying to share with you the different world that's possible in our immediacy when we live with attentionality.

[05:41]

Because I don't necessarily try to teach Zen, but rather to share this completely different kind of world with you, which becomes possible when we live with attention. Now, attentionality is not really the same as attention. Yeah, it's difficult to do in German, but Aufmerksamkeit. Well, let me explain the difference. Attention is something you do, like turning on a flashlight. Aufmerksamkeit ist etwas, was du machst, so wie zum Beispiel eine Taschenlampe anzuschalten. Attentionality is a condition. It's like an inner light that's always turned on.

[06:52]

Attention is certainly part of it, and it's developed through attention, but attentionality is a shift into another way of being in the world. Attentionality is something like a shift, a change in how we are in the world, a different state of being in the world. Since I'm stuck in English and I can't get out of it, maybe you guys are going to have to, like you translated, are going to have to use sometimes English words as if they were universal words. Like Dharma is now sort of universal. And using Unusual, unfamiliar words in new ways is part of the practice I'm speaking about actually.

[08:20]

So just let's look at the word 10,000. 10,000 is a countable many. And etymologically, etymologically, myriad, the English word myriad, actually means ten thousand. And generalized as myriad, it loses its accountability. Yeah, so 10,000 things... means an experienceable number of things.

[09:39]

I mean, 10,000 is a lot, but there's 10,000 things in this Zendo right now, easily. And 10,000 means that it's an experienceable number of things, even though 10,000 is a lot. But there are also 10,000 things here in this room right now. So it's an experienceable many. Es ist ein erfahrbares vieles. So, and dharmas, instead of saying in this case, Shido said dharmas, he didn't say things, as the story is related to us. Now, dharmas means, and things too, but particularly dharmas means the experienceable units of knowing in the successional path. So the question means, who...

[10:56]

is the person who experiences the 10,000 things as units of experience. That's the best I can say. Also lautet die Frage so ungefähr, wer ist... So then again, who is the person who does not accompany the 10,000 things? He's not just a person who does a company, but who is the person who does not a company? The 10,000 dharmas. knowing them as dharmas.

[12:42]

And this is a famous story within the Zen tradition, and Laman Pang, as is common in these stories, has an enlightenment experience. Und das ist eine berühmte Geschichte in der Zen-Tradition. Und so wie das in diesen Geschichten üblich ist, hat der Laie Pang daraufhin ein Erleuchtungserlebnis. And acknowledges and expresses his enlightened experience with a rather famous poem. Und er bringt sein Erlebnis durch ein ziemlich berühmtes Gedicht zum Ausdruck. Maybe next Sunday I'll talk about the poem. You really get that cliffhanger down. Okay. So now if this question could enlighten

[13:46]

Laman Pang, it could enlighten you, why not? So what's in this question? What makes this question a question which could enlighten him and could enlighten you? So I'll leave that with you for the next 30 or 40 minutes or lifetime. Okay, what makes a question like this enlightening or transformative? Well, the simple first answer is repetition. Die erste einfache Antwort darauf ist Wiederholung.

[15:17]

Now I'm speaking as I sort of tended to last Sunday and kind of promised to this Sunday, Wado-Practice. Und ich habe letzte Woche mich in die Richtung von Wado-Praxis gesprochen und habe versprochen, dass ich das diesen Sonntag weitermache. Now, Wado practice was codified and developed real specifically as a Zen practice by Dahui, who lived from 1089 to 1163 AD. The Wado practice was really very special as such, shaped and codified by Dahui, who lived from 1098 to 1137. And it may seem like a long time ago, 1089, 1163, but that's really only 10 of my lifetimes.

[16:24]

Let me try the numbers again. I know, you know, you do it differently in German. I can't think that way right now. 1089. 1-0-8-9. 8-9 to 1-1-6-3. Und 1-1-6-3. Jetzt ist es besser. Okay. And that's only 10 of my lifetimes. 10 lifetimes. That's practically yesterday. I mean, really, we think this is long, but we're practicing Dahui's practice and developing his practice right now by talking about it.

[17:28]

Yeah, now, Wado is a term which is taken to mean to go to the source of words. Or it's a liminal practice or a threshold practice. Liminal at the edge of things. And it is understood as a threshold practice or a boundary practice, a practice that takes place at the edge of something. So let me use an example or think of an example.

[18:32]

Let's take the word percept. That's all I got. And the etymology of percept is to take completely or take hold of completely. That's if it was really real. Yeah, that's easy in German. We really think that. So let's substitute the word percept with, in English, I'm sorry again, mind-a-cept. Maybe I should have warned you earlier, I guess.

[19:43]

I was just going to complain. Okay. Okay. But maybe mindset is close enough to a general familiarity with English that you could feel that. So if what I'm suggesting is we live in a flow of perceptions of percepts. Usually they're, you know, all the time. Yeah, and so if we, every time we have a sense of, you know, if you're practicing Zen, you should ideally have a sense of this

[20:53]

articulation, one unit after another, articulation of the world as percepts or as dharmas. And when you practice Zen, you should ideally have such a feeling for it, that in your experience, you articulate this feeling that it is one perception after another, the articulation of individual perceptions. You know, one can only take in so many new things at once, even if they're simple new things. But again, this is related to the assumption that you're on a successional path. You experience time as a series of presence, not a series of pasts leading to the future.

[22:17]

And again, all that we say here, it assumes that you are on a journey, in an experience reality, in an experience reality, a journey of successive moments where you experience one moment after the other and don't have the feeling that the past always flows into the future. Sounds like you said more than I said. Yeah. This is good. This is good. So what I'm trying to do here is establish, by repeating and coming back to, the successional path is the path in which Buddhism assumes it functions. And it's up to you as a practitioner and hopefully an adept practitioner to begin to feel the difference between a cognitive path and a successional path.

[23:19]

You have to find it in your body and in your experience. So we could say much of the first months, weeks, years of Zen practice is really discovering you're primarily or virtually all the time on the successional path. And we could say that the first weeks, months, years of Zen practice could be devoted to the fact that you really always have the feeling to be following each other on a path. Now I'm trying to establish, as in the last couple of Sundays or so, the gestural path. And everything is an action, an activity.

[24:36]

And we can call or notice and experience that activity as a gesture. And every action Activity is not only its present activity, but its potential activity. And if potential activity is a kind of energy, this presence in the presence is what is meant by calling it a dharma, is the presence of energy, potential energy, potentiality in every percept, I'll say now. No, wait, you started with activity and now you're ending me with percept.

[25:51]

Sorry. So every activity is is Okay, so every activity is an activity and at the same time everything we do is what we do and at the same time it is also what could be done. It is also the potential of the activity. And that is really Nagarjuna's tetralemma. It is, it is not, it is both, is and is not, and is neither, isn't it? That is really about the potentiality of each moment. And that's also in Nagarjuna, where it says, okay, it is what it is, it is not that, it is both, it is that and not that, and it is neither in all these four possibilities. That is really, there you see the potential of every moment, what the moment is and is not and could be, and so on.

[27:01]

Okay. Okay. So I suggested how the is a different gesture than a. And if you ask yourself, who am I? And then you ask yourself, What am I? You can feel the different gestural path in what was different from who. Und wenn du dir die Frage stellst, wer bin ich? Und das dann vergleichst mit der Frage, was bin ich? Dann kannst du spüren, wie dieses Wort wer oder was, wie das eine andere Art von Geste dir selbst gegenüber ist.

[28:03]

This is not being caught by words and letters. This is feeling the experience of a word which calls forth an experience of what is space or who am I or what am I? And it's really worthwhile spending in the background of the mind and in the foreground of the mind sometimes. What am I? [...] And who am I? Who? You feel the wholeness. The wholeness. The wholeness. Yeah.

[29:05]

Or whatity and who-tity. Or reality or relationality. I'm just trying to... I'm sorry, Nico. You can translate yourself next time. She just told me I can translate myself next time. Well, unfortunately, that's not possible. Yeah. Yeah, the Lankavatara Sutra, which I studied extremely carefully, once sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph over a year or two. And it talks about the syllable body and the name body and the sentence body.

[30:12]

And I'm speaking about this to really make us feel we don't have to go to Mars. There's a different world right here for us. So if you look up the word syllable in an English dictionary, it says it's a unit of pronunciation. Yeah. So, um, And so if you read this sutra and it talks about the syllable body and the name body and so forth, you think, what is the meaning of the syllable and something like that?

[31:45]

Yeah, but it's really that the syllable is part of the gestural path. So as typical for evolved Zen yogic teachings, the implied and unstated is also part of the teaching. So we can experientially make this practice our own by first imagining the no syllable body. Wir können uns diese Praxis uns in der Erfahrung aneignen, wenn wir uns erstmal den Nicht-Silbenkörper vorstellen.

[33:04]

And then there's the syllable body. Not the syllable mind. You can say syllable mind, but syllable body is more effective. So there's a syllable body. And then there's a word body. And then there's a name body. And then it becomes cultural. And then there's a sentence body. And then there's a phrase body.

[34:13]

How is the phrase different from the sentence? A sentence is made up of phrases. Just now is enough, or just saying just this, or just saying this is a phrase. Okay. Okay, so if you are practicing with mindset, say, as a new word, what happens? And you keep repeating it until it loses its meaning. It becomes a fog word. And you repeat it over and over again until it loses its meaning, until it becomes such a foggy word.

[35:21]

And you feel my mind. That's easy to translate. And maybe in mind, you hear my mind, that syllable body, that's the syllable begins to have a wider sense of space and presence. Okay, and when you now speak English and practice with mind, then you might hear the word my as a syllable. And there you are, when the sound accompanies the word, that is the same body. When the sound accompanies the word, then it is the same body. Awesome. So if on every percept and you, as a part of the successional path and the gestural path, you've gotten so that you're feeling each percept as a dharma, it appears and disappears.

[36:31]

Each moment is held and released. And mind-cept, because it doesn't fit into the framework of consciousness in the usual way, Just by repeating it now, Dao Yi felt that Wado practice, going to the source of words, It's not only the kind of practice we do in monastic practice, where you have 24-7 to concentrate, as I said, but in lay practice, this happens.

[37:40]

Wado practice can be done underneath everything you do and within everything you do. Das ist eine Praxis, die du nicht nur im Kloster machen kannst, wo du 24 Stunden, sieben Tage die Woche Zeit hast, dich zu konzentrieren, sondern das kannst du auch im Laienleben machen. Das kann eine Praxis sein, die unter deiner Aktivität die ganze Zeit stattfindet. And one of the secrets of this practice is holding it in mind as consistently as possible, forming an intention to bring attention to the phrase. And so you keep coming back to the intention, you're not so much worried about the attention, You keep coming back to the intention and so it starts working within everything.

[39:17]

And you keep nourishing the intention. And letting the attention happen more and more by itself. This is the way also, the yogic tool that allows you to work with the big questions in your life. Who am I? What am I? Why does anything exist, etc. ? And this is a yogic tool that can also help you with the big questions in your life. Who am I? What am I? Why does anything even exist?

[40:19]

Now let me say one way to define zazen or meditation is to call it to yourself consciously the daily dissolution of consciousness. Now you're doing zazen not to accomplish anything except to allow a daily dissolution of consciousness. And the daily dissolution of consciousness awakens awareness and activates the absorbent mind. Now, unconsciousness is what doesn't fit into consciousness, so it's sort of part of consciousness. Das Unbewusste wird verstanden als das, was nicht ins Bewusstsein hineinpasst.

[41:36]

Also ist es unter dem Bewusstsein. But the concept we have in yogic culture is the absorbent mind is under consciousness and not part of consciousness. Although there's a communication. Wait. No, no, no, no. We need to start again. Unconsciousness, how did... Unconsciousness as Freud, and in general it's emphasized, is what doesn't fit into consciousness, but is still part of consciousness and is not fitting in consciousness. Okay. Repressed feelings and so forth. But the absorbent mind, Zen meaning absorbent, the absorbent mind is under consciousness and is a much wider field than consciousness. Aber der absorbierende Geist, das was ich jetzt als absorbierender Geist im Zen sage, ist ein Geist, der so wie unter dem Bewusstsein ist und wesentlich weiter als das Bewusstsein.

[43:01]

And we usually think of knowing as something we think about or can think about. But the under-consciousness of the beneath-consciousness of absorbent mind notices and knows but doesn't think about. So as I said last Sunday, these concepts of an absorbent mind that's under consciousness It's very helpful in beginning to feel the power of just simply dissolving consciousness in your morning or evening meditation.

[44:04]

Und wie ich letzten Sonntag schon mal gesagt habe, einfach das Gefühl zu entwickeln von einem wesentlich weiteren absorbierenden Geist, der unterhalb des Bewusstseins ist. At first, absorbent mind, when consciousness dissolves and absorbent mind is present, it feels like nothing's happening. And it takes a while before you feel the knowing that's happening through absorbent mind. First of all, when we dissolve the consciousness, then it can feel as if nothing is happening at all. And it takes a while until we start to notice the kind of knowing that takes place in the absorbing mind all the time. So we could say one of the primary definitions of Zen practice, realisational Zen practice, is to awaken absorbent mind.

[45:16]

We could say one of the definitions of realisational Zen practice is to awaken the absorbing mind. Yeah, so a phrase like, so zazen is one way that this can happen, zazen, but also using a phrase until it turns into a presence, it settles out of consciousness as a presence and begins to function as an intentionality in the absorbent mind. Okay. And Zazen is one way of awakening the absorbing spirit, but another way is to use a sentence, a turning sentence, to use it for so long until it also begins to work outside of consciousness, until the sentence becomes a kind of intentional presence that overflows the absorbing spirit all the time.

[46:23]

So between now and next Sunday, you notice the unit flow of percepts in the successional path. And then you begin to intentionally name each percept as a mind-scept. And then you begin to intentionally name each percept as a mind-scept. You're now at the liminal edge of consciousness, how consciousness recognizes the world. And you're at the source of words which begin to take meaning.

[47:27]

And a funny thing happens. It's sort of like superposition in quantum mechanics, quantum physics. It's the word mindset begins to superpose or take many positions at once in language begins to influence all words a bit. Superpositions can mean many positions at once. And so just a new word like mindset begins to influence the whole fabric, the weave of language. It's exciting. This word, superposition, means something that takes many positions at once.

[48:48]

And a word like spiritualization, to apply it again and again, it starts to work in all possible aspects of your mind, to take many positions at once. And this is exciting. So, what is happening when every percept becomes a mind-decept? Pretty soon, this is very, very, very basic practice, every perception brings you into the field of mind and you're living in the field of mind and not just the 10,000 objects as out there. And that's part of why Yuan Laman Pang was enlightened by this phrase, because suddenly he got it. Just as he was about to speak, Shido put his hand over his mouth to stop Laman Pang from speaking.

[50:06]

That's the gestural path. And imagine how intimate that is. This person is near enough to put his hand, I'm not wearing a mask, hand over your mouth, and his body heat is right next to you. It's tremendously intimate. It's not just stopping you from speaking, the syllable body, etc. It's engaging you in the warmth and presence of another body. And I know you're out there somewhere on the planet, but I feel somehow we're in the warmth and presence of our mutual body.

[51:32]

Und ich weiß, ihr seid irgendwo da draußen, aber gleichzeitig weiß ich auch, wir sind in der Wärme und der Präsenz unserer Körper. Thank you very much, dear Nico. My pleasure. Thank you. Okay, yeah, wir treffen uns in zehn Minuten, das wird wahrscheinlich fünf Minuten später, um 17.05 Uhr deutscher Zeit. So let's meet in ten minutes at five past five. Thank you. Oh, English time. I mean, American time. I don't know. I don't understand.

[52:38]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_79.75