Jonas from Bucharest made this stick, this gnocchi for me. And he made one for Atmar too. And it's quite nice, beautiful piece of wood. He put a very long tassel on it. It's a full-time job to keep control of the tassel. But anyway, it's great. But one thing that's interesting he didn't know... I don't know how to express it but all objects should be independent and have an existence on their own it's that kind of feel so on that point of view it should stand up by itself and he didn't get this angle right from that point of view

[01:04]

Not all sticks can stand up, even though they try, but ideally they stand up. Okay. Are you feeling better? Oh, goody. Goody. I have some qualities, nurtured and natured, which are of course part of my life as a practitioner. But they don't explain why my way of looking at practice is... my way of articulating practice is so different often than the tradition in East Asia.

[02:19]

And I try to understand that or penetrate that for my sake and also for our sake in developing a practice. Yeah. And I think it's... I can identify some things. I mean, if we grow up in a world of thingness, we tend to think, even if we know that the things are now phenomenologically, you know, interiority and all that, still we think in things.

[03:21]

Or we, to say it another way, we think in conceptions, we conceptualize a lot. And another is we think, even if we know it's not true, we think there's an outside world out there that's separate from us. So we have a feeling it's really separate from us. And in East Asia, they have the feeling it only seems separate from us.

[04:27]

That's a big difference. Yeah. And so, culturally, East Asians, and, of course, practitioners especially, perceive relationships always relationships, not things, not the distinctions between things. Yeah, and so as a result, just, you know, this is my experience, you know, I'm not a, It's a sociologist doing research. I've done my own research, though. East Asians, culturally, see, they feel the world. They don't think the world.

[05:28]

Und das Ergebnis davon ist, dass Ostasiaten dazu neigen, die Welt zu spüren und nicht die Welt zu denken. So if there's only a display of relationships... Wenn es nur ein... parade, a display, a festival of relations. Then all you can do is feel them because you can't think them because they're always changing. And I was really struck by that when I first started occasionally having Chinese and Japanese practitioners as And they only talked to me about feelings. They would say, well, at the beginning of the session I felt this way, and then I noticed if I...

[06:43]

felt that way, it changed the way I felt that way, and then that feeling changed into this feeling, and I realized I could have intended it more. Oh. They say things like, well, at first, Sounds like you translated that very well. Well done. The Buddha supposedly said, When somebody asked a question that was well developed or thought through, he would say, well done. Okay, so what I'm speaking about now is our long approach to the four postures. I did it in a few minutes in the koan seminar.

[08:14]

And now I can't get past the first posture. And it all started from my just trying to give some zazen instruction to two young new practitioners at Crestum. And usually I just give a few suggestions and then I know I'll be around and I'll make suggestions in the future. They'll discover things for themselves, etc. But because I know I'm not going to be around forever, and that their primary relationship is with Christian Dillow, I felt I had to give them a kind of package that they could unwrap over the decades.

[09:20]

So I thought if they unwrap the first posture, then they unwrap the second, that it'll keep them, you know, So this comes out of my growing up in a culture that makes conceptual distinctions. I didn't say, if you feel this way, it will lead to these other feelings. But I think we have to be aware that our conceptions and our articulations are not practice. It's the feeling we explore within the articulations. But I think we have to realize that our concepts and our articulations are not the practice, but that the practice is these feelings and sensations that we articulate through the concepts.

[10:48]

So by making these three distinctions between the physical posture and the physiological posture, And the distinction between the physiological posture and the imaginal posture. And the distinction between the imaginal posture and the realized posture. And the recognition that the first posture is a physical posture and the fourth posture is the phenomenal version of the physical posture. Of the fourth posture. The first posture is the physical posture.

[11:56]

The fourth posture is the phenomenal version of the physical posture. Okay. I said phenomenal, not phenomenological, but it'll work. Well, I understand what she's saying. Yeah, really, I don't know what the hell she's saying. And sometimes people are all laughing at her, and I don't know what the heck's going on. I accept it. She's separate. Can stand on her own. Yeah, that's their own jokes, I don't know. At my expense sometimes. Get him.

[12:57]

Okay, so because I wanted these two young practitioners to feel the shifts between the physical posture and the physiological posture. I described them in that way. But I think, as far as I know, nobody's ever described them in this way before, at least in the Asian tradition that I'm familiar with. So I was using the resources I have in developing thinking in the West to say something to these two young practitioners. Yeah, okay. So I think what's important is it doesn't arise from me being a particular kind of teacher.

[14:15]

It arises from the situation in which we are all practicing and living. Okay. So by making these distinctions, I found myself needing to look at what are the differences between the four. And what are the transitions between the four? So that made me look at the physical posture with much more attention than I would have otherwise. And here what I'm doing is trying to explore with you the activity of exploring.

[15:30]

You know, the etymology of the word explore is out and to cry out. So it's like you've discovered something and you say, Eureka! That's what explore means. P-L-O-R-E is to cry out. So you notice things that startle you, surprise you, and you act on that notice. Gregory Bateson was one of the great observers of how we exist. And we were quite good friends. He said when he was British, he said when he came to America, he had a hard time teaching English. American students, because they don't notice any distinctions, they all say, oh, groovy.

[16:58]

You don't say groovy. Anyway, he said, you tell them something that should change their lives and they say, oh, cool, yeah, groovy. They don't have any idea what's happened. OK. Now, this concept of exploring. Yeah. You know, we have this dictum to know thyself, oneself, thyself. Socratic dictum. But, you know, in Buddhism it's not to know, it's to explore. But in Buddhism it doesn't mean to know, or in English it would be to know, but it means to explore.

[18:26]

And then we can't talk about yourself in Buddhism either. Explore yourself, because there may be no self that can be explored. So we could say, to know thy knowing, or to know you know or don't. We have to have emptiness in there. To know you know and also don't. So the very physical posture that we work with and explore in Zen practice and Buddhist practice, most Buddhist practices, creates the possibility of exploring ourselves.

[19:33]

It's the sitting posture which gives us the experience of a territory to explore. If you're just running around or going around in your life, you can notice your sociology and you can notice your psychology maybe, but you don't explore yourself as a what-ness. So the posture creates the territory for exploration. This first posture, the physical posture. And the physical posture, if we're going to explore it, requires us to also explore agency.

[20:46]

By exploring this territory of our lived life, indem wir diesen Bereich unseres gelebten Lebens erforschen, entwickeln wir eine... articulation of observing. And that's the very beginning of the freedom from self. Until you begin observing, you don't see the nuances that show you that all observing is not self. You know, if I have a cell phone here, a handy, I have a handy here.

[22:02]

I have a hand here. If I had a handy here and I turn the camera on, I can, it'll observe all kinds of things. My feet, if I, you know, the floor, etc. I don't think the cell phone, despite rumors to the contrary, has a self. A cell phone. A selfie and a cell phone. Yeah, anyway... It just observes without a self. And you can just observe without a self.

[23:06]

And you discover that by observing, observing. And I know that, you know, for many decades of the decades I've been practicing, I knew with greater and greater authenticity that all observing was not the self. But I really could not find the language to make the distinction. I was locked into the view that all observing somehow is a subtle form, at least subtle form of self. So if you're going to explore your lived life using this posture,

[24:10]

one of the shifts you want to pay attention to is the observing of observing. Now another shift, which sounds the same, but a little different, is when you start giving attention to attention. And a second shift, which is a little different, is when you start to bring attention to attention. So you're shifting from attention on objects to attention itself. And the fact is, articulation and dynamic of that is built into many practices. For example, simply again, to be mindful of emotions, of feelings and things like that.

[25:27]

For example, to be mindful that you're angry. And then the teaching is simply not mindful now that you're angrier. And now I'm, boy, now I'm really angry. And now it's less or something. What you're doing is you're creating an attentional location that's not the anger. That's only possible when you really develop attention to attention. And the entry, the gate to freedom from emotional and mental suffering is when you practice repetitively enough in an incubatory fashion of observing your emotions, states of mind, and so forth,

[26:38]

that the repetitive observation creates a new location for experience. And that new location can become so clear that eventually you just shift your location, your identification from the anger to the undisturbed attention itself. Und dieser neue Ort, der kann so klar und deutlich werden, dass du irgendwann einfach deine Verortung aus dem Ärger heraus an diese reine Aufmerksamkeit selbst verschiebst. And until you can do that, almost none of the teachings really progress. And eventually, we talk about still sitting.

[28:00]

You're still sitting? No. Sitting within stillness. As I said in the last session, you create a kind of organ of stillness, a kind of generated location, almost like a physical, I mean maybe more real than a physical, physicalized location. And as I said the other day too, it may be in some ways something like how Westerners conceive of the soul. But this spiritual organ of stillness becomes so unequivocal it cannot really cannot be disturbed.

[29:06]

It becomes Yeah, and that's what's meant by imperturbable. And that's why in the transmission process, one of the key things is you become an iron person. That's just poetic language. So last night I said an iron wall, an iron ox. These are poetic terms within Zen Buddhism.

[30:20]

And they mean both we meet a wall and that we also can be so imperturbable ourselves. And invisible walls melt, really eventually, with our waking, waiting. Und unsichtbare Wände schmilzen wirklich mit unserem wachenden Warten. Or with our own imperturbable stillness which waits. So here's this physical posture we have. which creates the very territory of exploration and then in that process creates the dynamic of a nuanced observer

[31:38]

And once you've explored the nuanced observer, you realize you can also have no observer. And that you taste, and when you In Samadhi or Sazen, when you suddenly have no location, you don't know where you are, whether you're sitting facing the wall or sitting facing the room, you don't know. Now, in the interests of time and your legs, We have plant time, we have leg time.

[32:53]

Let me shift to the shift between the physical posture and the physiological posture. Now, in the physical posture, you develop a sense of bodily location. In der physischen Haltung entwickelst du ein Gefühl des körperlichen Ortes. And if you look at almost any Buddhist scroll painting statue, wenn du dir egal welches buddhistisches Rollbild oder Gemälde oder Statue anschaust, and if it's one like the one in the Doksan room of Samantabhadra on a very sweet elephant taking sort of a nap, There's a straight line that goes from the middle of the elephant right up through the figure.

[34:00]

And the figure is not... But right up through the figure you can feel a straight line to the crown of the head. So the whole... Because... Because there's not a universal out there-ness... There's a... There's an out here-ness which is shaped by our body. Shaped by our sensorial luminous screen. And we know that primarily through the, if you develop this posture, through the spine.

[35:03]

So the spine becomes a gate for our external posture. How we straighten our posture in Zazen. But it also becomes the gate to the phenomenal world as posture. Walls, ceilings, etc. I remember when I was young, I used to study a lot of architecture just with my eyes. And all the buildings I liked, or the buildings that I thought were, that architect was good, looked like buildings you could climb on.

[36:19]

And I did. So when you start seeing the world as a proportionate to your own physicality, you start making your living room and your pathways and this group of buildings differently. Or to express that. And the experience of the spine is also a gate to interiority. And it's the awakened, attentionate spine which opens the channels, energy channels. And it takes time.

[37:20]

I know in my case it took me oh, I don't know, let's say five, six, seven years to open up my spine. And it opened gradually. I could feel it going up my back. Sometimes about an inch a year. And this was waking, waiting. I wasn't waiting for anything, I was just waiting for waiting. And really I started getting different heat experiences and pimples and stuff like that on my back in relationship to the shift. So there's physical shifts that you can begin to practice as something like your spine changes and as it moves up into the top of the spine and then into the neck and head.

[38:41]

Now there's yoga and practices you can do to open this up, but in Zen we tend to open it up just by allowing a kind of wakeful attention to penetrate the body. Okay, so now you are making the shift from the physical posture to the inner, inner physiological posture. Another gate to that is this very early Buddhist time practice of noticing the separate inhale and the separate exhale. And that separate inhale and then separate exhale is the seed for knowing the world as separate dharmas.

[39:59]

Separate appearances we call dharmas. Now, just noticing your breathing does that. But breathing is a kind of generalization. The whole physiology of how the blood works and everything in oxygen is separate for the inhale and separate for the exhale. So there's more attentional power in noticing each hail individually. And again, it's really not noticing the breath.

[41:18]

It's noticing the physicality that actuates or is actualized or happens through each inhale and through each exhale. They're separate. And very related, of course. It's really not about noticing the breath, but the physicality that goes with the breathing. We breathe in, we breathe out. Yes. Different. Different. Different, but different. Okay, so I'm reaching the deadline, the live line I give myself. When two ones are lined up, I think I ought to stop. Okay, so... So now you've got this practice of a aroused, developed attention.

[42:44]

The agency of attention. Now the agency of attention not only develops by bringing attention to attention. It develops, it becomes clearer and stronger. But it also evolves. And it grows hands and legs. And it grows sensitivities. And it has a tremendous present power and articulate articulation.

[43:49]

Sie hat eine enorme Präsenz und Kraft und Artikulation. Which your past-present thinking simply is just too simple. It doesn't engage attention. It's like... Wo dein Denken in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart viel zu vereinfacht ist. Das regt die Aufmerksamkeit nicht an. So now you have this developed, evolved attentional power which says, give me something to do. Well, that's immediacy. So you have engaged immediacy or you have immediacy as a location that's really satisfying and fulfilling. Just immediacy itself. Yeah, who needs... Anyway, like that. And so when you bring this evolved and developed attention to the interiority, you recognize, big recognition, that attention rooted in the sensorial luminous screen

[45:34]

can barely reach the complexity of what's going on in our lived life. Now, as I said to someone this morning, this isn't a ground of being outside where gods live and things like that. This is a simultaneous presence that's unreachable by usual consciousness. This immediately, when you really get it, eureka, you really get it, it changes your relationship to the world that you know through the senses. Then you begin to develop a new kind of knowing of the world, which is where Yogacara and Tantra, Buddhism, goes.

[47:06]

then you develop a new way of knowing or recognizing the world. And that is the direction in which Yogacara and Tantric Buddhism go. Yes, I passed one and one. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. May our intentions be the same as always.

[47:36]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_74.81