You know, I'm trying to understand this practice myself. I mean, I think you are too, and I'm trying to. And I'm always trying to find ways, of course, to... to make practice accessible, understandable enough so that you can do it. Yeah, and part and parcel of that is to find ways to share what I know and what we all know. And for some reason, for an obvious reason, because I'm writing this book, I'm thinking about this connection with hunting and gathering people.

[01:17]

What about the hunting and beveling people? Sharing something. And because it seems to me that yogic Buddhist practice preserves perhaps something from pre-agricultural times. or awakens us to a mind that has some similarities to that of hunting and gathering people. It's almost as if through practice An ancient but equally sophisticated mind is awakened in us.

[02:33]

And what I find is that I'm going to, by the way, in a few minutes ask you if you have any questions or comments or discussion. I'm not suggesting you get ready, but, you know, maybe. Yeah. So I first noticed this similarity. Years ago, when a good friend of mine was a man named Harry Roberts. Harry. Harry Roberts. And he was the... See, I can notice a few things intently. And he was... A white man, but brought up with the Yurok Indians.

[03:47]

Yurok. Yurok. I-U-R-O-C-K. And they live up in the northwest of America. And he was trained, actually, by the last medicine man of the Yurok tribe. Anyway, Harry was a great guy and person and we, the Zen Center, we supported him the last ten years or so of his life. And in our discussions of what he knew of medicine training, as they call it, it was surprisingly similar to yogic training practice. And one aspect of it is to awaken a shared knowledge.

[04:49]

Now my understanding is western culture really extraordinary success of western culture is this may sound strange to you at first but the ability to preserve speculation In other words, instead of having a dogmatic culture, have a culture in which you can speculate. And through writing, write down that speculation. And over generations, you can continue that speculation. Without that, there's no science or philosophy. Because each generation then can deal with the speculation of the previous generation.

[06:13]

So that's a way of preserving in writing and so forth. Conscious knowledge. But how do you preserve knowledge which isn't conscious but is stored in awareness? I don't know if I'm saying this in a way that's as clear as I... experience it, understand it perhaps. And I've never spoken about this in this way before. But I think what we do in this process of seminars, of going over familiar and new things, is we awaken things we know in awareness that become more that are brought into a greater clarity because mostly my assumption is not that I'm

[07:39]

telling you things you don't know. Mostly I think I'm talking about things you already know. But I'm trying to see if we can put them into the framework of practice. Well, that is enough of the little introduction. I'd like to see if anybody has something they'd like to bring up. I gave you fair warning. I wonder what the language is to share experiences in practice experiences versus talking about the theory.

[09:07]

Deutsch, bitte. Ich suche nach der richtigen Could you give me an example of what you mean? I find it very difficult to share with others what I experience when I practice. I think everyone has that problem. It's like, how do you tell your uncle why you're sitting zazen? They usually think you're crazy. Particularly when I started. I remember people would really get mad at me.

[10:09]

They'd say, what are you sitting around for, wasting your time, staring at your navels? I never once stared at my navel. And what was funny to me is that maybe I spent 45 minutes or an hour and 15 minutes a day meditating in those days. And people thought I was wasting my time. But I looked at them and they spent two hours sitting around the cafe with a cup of coffee and they didn't think they were wasting their time. Or another hour and a half in front of the television and they didn't think they were wasting their time. But I spent 45 minutes not looking at my navel and I was wasting my time. So partly I'm saying people don't want to understand.

[11:23]

It's rare to find somebody who's open because it makes them a little nervous. And especially if they see that it's changed you in any way. Because they don't want to lose you as a friend. So they're afraid you're changing too much or something, you might change too much. So my life is trying to in fact talk about meditation experiences and make it somehow sensible. but practically I think you have to just say it makes me feel a little better or something like that yeah I don't think you can do too much more than that okay someone else I want to come back to this that we are a society that is based on speculation.

[13:01]

Isn't? at least as an adult, the process of learning something new or experiencing something new or finding out something new, like a speculation ahead, I try to explain how, let's say, if I want to know more about satsang, I have an idea about satsang, I have a hope towards satsang maybe, my change in my life, whatever. It's a speculation. So, whenever I'm experiencing something new consciously, I go into a situation, I don't know how to have an idea of something that has the quality of speculation.

[14:09]

Otherwise, I wouldn't do it. Maybe I'm wrong. Well, it sounds, I don't know. If that's your experience, it sounds right then. May we can say in German? Yes, please. I thought about this concept of Washington that our society is speculative and is not here a process in which I learn something new, at least as an adult, that I can go in Well, what I mean is just like Freud not too long ago said that the mind is divided into the id, the ego and the superego. Yeah, and infantile sexuality is the driving force or something like that of much of our actions.

[15:14]

So he put his ideas out there. And then they've been developed, changed, denied, etc. So that's really a process of speculation over generations. In other words, but you can't speculate over generations unless you have a way to store the speculation in the society. There has to be a memory of it. Science develops, so there are more scientists alive today than all scientists of all previous generations. And they speculate about these things in journals constantly and so science actually develops quite rapidly.

[16:24]

And we're doing something similar here. But our storage is a storage in our activity and our awareness. As you know, it's hard to write it down or tell anybody what you mean. But if you meet somebody else who practices, you can feel it usually. One of my first senses of that, I remember sitting in a cafe or something like that with a number of people, wasting my time. And there was some, I don't know, song in the distance. From another room.

[17:36]

Let's imagine it was the Beatles, Sunday, Sunday, something like that. She thinks she sings worse than I do. I don't write like that. So I'm having a conversation with a group of people there, and at one point I said, well, I mean, it's actually Monday. And all the practitioners in the group knew exactly what I meant because they'd heard the song while they were talking. Everybody else hadn't heard the song. So a kind of different kind of awareness starts, a more... feels like awareness.

[18:44]

And how do you explain that to your uncle? Did you hear that song just now? I'm just joking. Okay, someone else? Yeah. You said that... You said that in zazen awareness arises as a different kind of liquid next to consciousness and then you can then start to study awareness how do you study it how do you study awareness without falling back into consciousness okay okay let me keep that for a minute and see if somebody else has something they want to say

[20:05]

Yeah, I have to speak all the time. Why don't you speak? I get tired of hearing my own voice. I'll give you another chance later. Just to put your voice into our discussion is good. Okay, let me speak to what Christian brought up. And in the context of trying to look at these teachings in a very particular way,

[21:14]

Okay. So how does, in a way you're saying, how does awareness observe awareness, or how does awareness observe awareness without changing into consciousness? This is a simple question, but it strikes to the heart of what practice is. You could say very simply, how does the eye see the eye? Okay. Now sometimes, or often, images carry much more information than simple language statements. So if I say,

[22:30]

Don't invite your thoughts to tea. And I bring this up because I spoke about it the other day, I guess in Sushin, was it in Sushin? Because what's wonderful about such this simple instruction, which was the first Zazen instruction Sukhriyasi gave to everyone and to me, is it's loaded with particular information. If you say don't think or stop thinking that doesn't have much information in it. I mean, really, it's a kind of... It's like hitting you with a hammer.

[23:46]

Stop thinking. Yeah. But don't invite your thoughts to tea. Already this says there's two minds. There's the mind of the thoughts and there's the mind that doesn't invite the thoughts to tea. What's the difference between those two minds? That's a very deep question. What's the difference between the mind that doesn't invite the thoughts and the mind that produces the thoughts? If you can fully answer that question, you know, you can go home, you're a Buddha. Yes, so I mean practice is really in some ways that simple, to take a fundamental question like that and really with your life try to answer it.

[25:03]

But what's also interesting is we all pretty much understand that immediately. We can have the experience of not getting engaged with our thoughts. So, Christian's question, we could reframe as what kind of mind can observe thoughts without getting engaged with thoughts? Okay, but the thought to not invite the thoughts to tea, is that a thought? Well, that's a nice good thought. We don't want to stop good thinking. That's... That's not a good enough answer.

[26:39]

Who's deciding which are good thoughts and which are bad thoughts? So there must be different kinds of thoughts. Okay, so let me move the territory slightly. Okay, you're doing zazen. Mm-hmm. And an airplane goes over here. Yeah, it can sound beautiful. It has a beautiful sound sometimes. Or the sound of car tires, rubber tires on a wet road. And you just hear the sound. And again, one of the things that happens through zazen is you also come into the texture of the sensorium, the texture of the, the sensorial texture of the mind.

[27:53]

Right now, there's my voice and there's her voice and there's various street sounds and it's raining. We can call it a kind of texture and text. Okay. Now, if I hear a sound, and I say, oh, that's a car, that's not a thought. In Buddhist terms, that's not a thought. It's like something, maybe we could call it a name.

[28:54]

Your mind is naming the car, naming the sound, but you really don't have to. You don't have to think about what kind of car it is. Oh, that sounds like a Volvo tire. Or a Michelin or something. That would be great if you could do that, wouldn't it? That would really be knowing the particular. You'd have to be a real hunter of cars. Yeah, I can tell. Or you don't have to think from Johanneshof, the planes are either going to Basel or Zurich.

[29:54]

But I might notice that's an airplane. I'm not going to think, is that one going to Zurich or Basel? But if I start to think about it and think, oh yeah, on September 8th I have to fly from Zurich That's thinking. That's discursive thinking. And discursive thinking generates consciousness. Okay, so simply naming something or noticing something and happening to have some language with it doesn't generate consciousness.

[30:59]

When a thought doesn't generate consciousness, we don't call it thinking. Yeah. What does that mean? It just means we don't have the language distinctions for these things. We know that daydreaming is different than dreaming. And daydreaming is different from sleeping. And meditation is different from all of those. Although it has similarities. Those are real distinctions. But when we look at consciousness and thoughts and things, we don't have many distinctions. If we had clearly different words, we'd have less problems. If we had words for a thought that doesn't lead to consciousness and a thought that leads to consciousness, then we wouldn't have the question so much.

[32:12]

And a non-conscious thought, a non-consciousness thought is very easy to peel off what you're noticing. like a label you can just peel off. So that kind of thinking is actually a useful tool and allows you to penetrate below consciousness. So you begin to get a feel for a way to notice that doesn't lead to consciousness. And that's part of the craft of practice.

[33:14]

Okay, now I can say a little more about it. One of the truisms of yogic practice, let's start there again, is that all states of mind or modes of mind have a physical component. And all sentient physical states have a mental component. In other words, a thought, a non-consciousness thought has a different feel in the body than a consciousness thought.

[34:34]

And through meditation, you're actually beginning to notice the way your body feels in awareness, which is different than the way the body feels in consciousness. And if you maintain that body state feeling you can non-discursively notice things. So now, if you came to, again, keep it in beginning terms, But not, you know, when I say beginning, I don't mean it's, you know, for beginners.

[35:38]

It's just looking at things in a fundamental way. When you have what you imagine is samadhi in your sasen, you have a mind which... seems to have no thoughts in it. And then you notice it has no thoughts in it and then it has thoughts in it. And there goes samadhi out the window. But after a certain amount of skill you can notice a samadhi state and actually think about it without losing it because you can hold it physically. I knew a businessman in Boston once years ago. He's now dead, but I know his son. And he was the founder of Fidelity Mutual Fund.

[36:59]

And he was, his father had been a reluctant businessman. And his father studied Zoroastrianism and Buddhism and Zoroastrianism? Zoroaster? It's the Near Eastern, I don't know, don't worry about it. It's something starting with Z that's not Zen. And that's not atypical of New England families, which... usually have an interest in transcendentalism and nature and things, and then some of them are business people. But Mr. Johnson was fully, you always called him Mr. Johnson, was like Herr Johnson. In America we always call people Ben or Bill or something, but he was Mr. Johnson.

[38:03]

He was great. I really loved him. She doesn't translate things like that. But he was interested in how his mind worked in picking stocks. And he was one of the great stock pickers and he produced Fidelity Mutual funds during his lifetime. And he said, what he used to tell me, is he developed the ability to make his mind completely blank. And then let one thought come in and then examine it thoroughly. If it stood up to this mental, physical examination, he bought it.

[39:36]

And I've met quite a few people like that who have some sort of intuitive gift to make their mind work a certain physical way. Now, I'm not saying by practice you're all going to get rich. At least I certainly haven't gotten rich. But I have a wonderful life. Is something, is it okay what I said so far? You want to add something? Okay, all right, good. No, I said to make your mind physical.

[40:37]

So maybe we can just start from there. as a way to enter again into the particularity of practice. Okay. Now, when I started to practice 40 or 45 years ago, I mostly it was thought that mind and body had very little relationship to each other.

[41:40]

And I can remember some scientist, I don't know, Edward Teller or somebody, he was the inventor of the hydrogen bomb. He or someone like him said he'd be happy just to be a brain in a bottle. He didn't need his body. Since he was about this fat, you can understand why people would prefer a bottle. But no one would say that nowadays. Because it's too well it's cultural knowledge that mind and body are not independent of each other.

[42:48]

Although they're not separate, we can experience them as separate. And that experience of them as separate also separates them. So one of the subjects of meditation practice is what is the relationship of mind and body? Your relationship of mind and body at this time in your particular life and what are the difficulties in this relationship, the blocks and openness. And also, how can this relationship be cultivated or developed?

[43:50]

So we can say that meditation practice is a particular way to cultivate the relationship of mind and body. Music is another way to cultivate the relationship of mind and body. Now let me give you an example of a different, of two viewpoints that are different. General MacArthur, American general in the Second World War, was clearly an extremely intelligent person. I think he was the star student at West Point of all times, the military academy.

[45:17]

But when he was responsible for Japan after the Second World War, He tried to simplify the Japanese language. He said, you need an alphabet like us. And he tried to limit, reduce the number of characters, kanji, you needed to know to read a newspaper. So they simplified it to, under his direction, partly to 2,000 characters are needed to read the newspaper. It's still quite a lot. I mean, we have, what, 26 letters in the English alphabet. Is it 26 in German, too? You've got umlauts and things like that.

[46:27]

Anyway, the Japanese resisted it. Although MacArthur was a very smart man, he had a very simple idea, very simple world view. which is to make things easier, makes people function better. But even the average Asian has the idea that A complex language produces a complex mind. And you can demonstrate that with kids now by real-time imaging.

[47:27]

As they learn language, their brain develops. So the Japanese said, if you simplify our language, you're going to simplify our mind. And the Japanese have something like an average IQ of 140. Our average IQ is 100. But to take the lowest and the highest points in IQ are about the same. It's just in the middle the dip is higher. So I don't think this is a difference probably in genetic material.

[48:27]

It's a difference in the way the genetic material is developed. So they don't view the infant as being born with the brain that they're going to have. No, the brain has to be, as we now think, the brain has to be developed. So, through practice you're making a particular decision of how to weave mind and body together. And even if you're not an infant anymore, how your own mind and body in relationship to each other continue to develop at any age.

[49:29]

So you're in effect making physiological changes in yourself through practice. Okay. Okay. Now if your thinking has a physical dimension, it needs to have, at least for a while, a clearly physical pace. So if I am speaking now about again today the particular we need some way to notice the particular.

[50:45]

Yeah. It's particularity Its separation as a particular thing. What its parts are. And how it's connected. And how it is also your own perception. Okay. Now you... This is one of the centers of practice. And how are you going to get there? It's really quite simple.

[51:47]

You pause. You pause for the particular. You pause to let things speak to you. He's paused to feel something's particularity. So the mind isn't just rushing along. The stream of consciousness. It's a little bit like the stream comes to a rock. And it doesn't just go around it with a swirl. It's almost as if the water becomes very still around the rock for a minute.

[52:49]

And then it goes on. Maybe it becomes very still around the rock for a moment and bows to the rock. Hi, rock, how are you? And the rock bows back and says, yeah, I'm fine. This bowing actually that we do a lot is rooted in a pause. A pause when I bring my two hands together and acknowledge you and that's at a physical pace. What is your name?

[53:55]

Peter. Peter. So I just go, hi Peter. That's okay, but that's not our practice. It's more like even Peter disappears because I don't know quite what... You're not like the other Peters I know. So you have a very particular presence that's different than every other person here. And you're not a generalization person, human being, or something like that. You surpass and don't fit into any definitions of human beings. I mean, sort of, but you're not a Martian. Also, du bist kein Marsmensch. So, if I stop and pause, I just, what is this?

[54:59]

I have this feeling there. Oh, okay. Also, wenn ich jetzt innehalte und schaue, ja, was ist das? If I know what it is, it's less. If I say, what is this, it's much more open. So I have an attitude meeting the particular of what is this. My 28-month-old daughter always says, this is, which means, what is it? Whatever comes up, she says, This, Papa, this is... And then she wants me to finish the sentence.

[56:12]

And then she learns the word for it and so forth. But I want to encourage her not to be satisfied with the answer. This is called such and such. Das nennt man so und so. So we have an attitude of what is it. Wir haben also diese Haltung von was ist das. We have a pause where we stop. Like maybe all the swirls around a rock in a stream. Or actually, all the little molecules stopping to bow. It looks like a swirl dust. It's actually lots of little molecules bowing to the stone. Yeah, it might be true, actually. Okay. Now, Let's try to make it more physical by connecting the pause to the breath.

[57:36]

So you can practice between now and when we come back from lunch. Is to pause for the particular with the breath. Now is that a thought? It takes the form of words. It's a phrase produced by thinking. But its function in your using it as a reminder It's technically speaking not a thought. We can call it an intention or something like that.

[58:41]

So it awakens an intention to pause within breath for the particular. Mm-hmm. I think that's enough for this morning. And what do we need for lunch? A couple hours? So we come back at three? Yeah, okay. Okay, let's sit for a moment and then... And if you do it, you'll find you enter the stillness of the world a little bit.

[59:49]

And it's a practice which is one of the ways we weave mind and body together. Enter the texture of the world. And begin to be able to read the text of the world. Thank you.

[61:28]

Thank you very much for spending the morning together with each other and with me and with my voice. You're getting better at translating all the time. Thank you. You're welcome. Not that you were ever anything but good, but... A group, maybe you saw it, launched a group of five or six acrobatic flyers or flying formation. There are red and white planes.

[63:02]

I guess it must be the Swiss Air Force. Yeah, there's an aviation show this afternoon. Oh, good. Maybe it's the entire Swiss Air Force. But they're very dramatic. Well, we're doing something. Are we flying in formation or sitting in formation? So I'm trying to with you look closely, accurately at Zazen practice. And I'm trying to look with you closely at how we describe Zazen practice.

[64:20]

And I'd like us at some point, a little bit anyway, break up into small groups Maybe four groups of seven or something like that. But you know how much space you have. Maybe there should be five, three groups of seven. Well, four is seven apiece. I'll let you decide. Okay.

[65:23]

But first let me speak a little bit more about Sazen practice. You know, I'm Yeah, just trying to create the feel for it, give you a feel for it. And also I'm trying to suggest, show that it takes a little, a shift in attitude, a shift in mind to really, for your zazen practice to bear fruit. Now, the most common question asked me actually is, how do I continue this practice, particularly after sashin, in my daily life? And actually what I said just before lunch, that to practice

[66:38]

A pause for the particular within the breath. When you have a chance. When it happens to occur to you. And practicing in that way is more important than forcing yourself to do it. The mind is freer if you just, now that I've mentioned it, do it when it happens to occur to you. And doing a practice like that occasionally actually penetrates into the whole of our activity after a while. And when you pause for the particular within your breath,

[68:06]

You touch a kind of silence or stillness of the mind. Now let me speak about concentration. Because if you want to understand what concentration means in Zen practice, you have to think about it a little differently than we usually think about concentration. Now, I often have used, and it's a traditional example, but an example of the ocean wave or any wave is the attempt of the water to return to stillness.

[69:34]

I have often said in the example of the ocean and the waves that it is the attempt of the water to return to its peace. If you analyze the shape of the wave, the shape of the wave is formed by the effort to return to stillness. And when we say water seeks its own level, you have some expression the same. I don't know. We say water seeks its own... It always is going to the lower place or... Okay. This is the water trying to... Yeah, this is an... The water trying to return to stillness.

[70:47]

Okay. What this means, you can understand it to mean the water is already still. And if it does nothing, it returns to stillness. You can stir it up, but if you don't stir it up, it returns to stillness. So concentration means, you know, we say don't concentrate, don't make any effort in your practice. Or I say, profoundly leave yourself alone. So you have the problem in meditation, yeah, the basic instruction is don't do anything. Of course, there's things you can do.

[71:57]

You can concentrate on your breath and things like that. I shouldn't say it that way. I shouldn't say you can bring attention to your breath. That's better to say than concentrate on your breath. Or just leave your breath alone in the field of attention. Because the worldview, the yogic worldview is that you're already concentrated. Like the water is already still. If you leave the water alone, it returns to stillness. If you leave yourself alone, you return to concentration. Now if you concentrate intentionally, you actually interfere with returning to concentration.

[73:24]

This is exactly the same instruction and concept as you're already enlightened. Enlightenment is the basic condition of things. By trying to do something, we lose that. So the craft of practice is how to Enter practice, sit, try to sit with some calmness, ease. But actually also at the same time to accept yourself and to leave yourself alone. With the understanding that in some sense the concentration is already there.

[74:41]

And usually if you have a certain willingness and not will, you discover the feeling of it, it begins to emerge. Yeah. Now that's a different way of looking at concentration than, oh, concentrate, make an effort. And sometimes concentrating, making an effort, can start you. But at some time, you have to drop the effort. I can remember when I first started practicing. I'd be making an effort. Yeah, counting my breaths. My exhales.

[76:01]

To ten, you know, tradition. I'd be following breath, bringing attention to the breath. And sometimes I just forget about it. And my mind would drift a little bit. And then suddenly I'd be concentrated. Far more concentrated than I was when I was counting or following my breath. Like I was in a big clear field which included everything around me. Now that kind of experience is one of the centers, we could say, of what Buddhism means by concentration. So maybe a better instruction would be, let yourself return to concentration.

[77:17]

Because if you do it, you return to consciousness. Consciousness then generates discursive thinking and so forth. Or it's again like the instruction, don't invite your thoughts to tea. Clearly there's a host mind and a guest mind. And the guest mind thinks. But that's not where your home is.

[78:21]

Your home is in the host mind, which doesn't think. Or it thinks in some other way, because it's still mind. And Dogen tries to get at this by saying something like think non-thinking. So the host mind notices, is aware and so forth. But and is aware Your home, we can say. And your thinking is something useful to do, but it shouldn't be where you live. And the teaching in this is, don't identify with your thoughts.

[79:23]

If you identify with your thoughts, which we virtually all do, then the host mind pretty much is out of sight. And it's our consciousness which is that our thoughts are a function of consciousness and self, the sense of a self-identity in a particular sense is a function of consciousness as well and usually identified with our thinking. And the thinking we've accumulated as our personal history. And that self is a useful self.

[80:35]

It's necessary to function in the world. And it's where your karma is most prevalent, present. But it's where you're most likely to feel anxious and not most likely where you feel deeply at home. So practice means how do we find this host mind Also bedeutet die Praxis, wie können wir diesen gastgebenden Geist finden? So wie wir annehmen, Ruhe ist schon da, ist schon gegenwärtig.

[81:40]

Diesen gastgebenden Geist, bei dem wir uns zu Hause fühlen. Yeah, and to come to this requires you look closely at your zazen practice and the instructions you bring into zazen practice are not based on ideas and conscious ideas. but are based on the actual experience of this realized mind. Okay. So I think that's enough. So you can figure out how to break up into small groups and we'll meet again, have a break afterwards and meet again.

[83:00]

Okay, thanks. So that would be when? Now. No, I mean when to come back to. Oh, I don't know. I'll walk around and see what I think. Okay. Or don't think. See what I non-think. Which book invites you? See what I notice. Okay. And you can have, of course, a short break now.

[83:39]

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