Well, tomorrow, because we're only five days, we'll start Dokusan tomorrow morning. And I hope to have a little time with each of you, at least. That's why I'm here, to have a little time, or lots of time, if possible, with each of you. Das ist der Grund, warum ich hier bin, um mit jedem, jeder von euch ein bisschen, wenn nicht sogar viel Zeit zu haben. Of course, just practicing together is time together, too. Natürlich ist einfach das Miteinander-Praktizieren auch Zeit-Miteinander. And I'm sorry this room is hard to ventilate and more than a little stuffy. Und es tut mir leid, dass es so schwierig ist, diesen Raum zu lüften und dass der mehr als nur ein bisschen stickig ist.

[01:05]

And maybe we accepted too many persons, but there's still more people on the waiting list we didn't accept. Und vielleicht haben wir zu viele Leute angenommen, aber es gibt immer noch Leute auf der Warteliste, die wir nicht angenommen haben. We have to find out. But how do you turn a carpentry hall, a cabinet-making hall, into a zendo? I mean, you want a space, you want to create a space which allows a sense of a field among the persons practicing to develop. So I mean, we're actually moving a pillar next door. They put the pillar in the new pillar at what seemed to be the most important structural point.

[02:26]

And the wood joinery carpenters thought, well, it won't be noticed, it's only a little bit different. But Ottmar and I looked at it and we said, uh-oh. And the carpenter said, no. And they said, it can't be moved. So I anguished them. worried and said, we're moving it. So the local wonderful carpenter Peter Bellen came and jacked up the, so now we can move it.

[03:29]

Because once the towns are in, the meditation platforms, and people are sitting, it will be very noticeable where the pillars are. But also you're trying to create a space which works for the sixth... What can I call it? A successional... The mind that appears in a line of people doing kinhim. And to do that you have to have a reference point. So one person, usually if it's Atmar, is the... Yes.

[04:51]

Are we supposed to do something? They're playing my song. Yesterday morning, it was the size of my foot and the pace of my breath established Kinyin. Gestern war das die Größe meines Fußes und das Tempo meines Atems, das das Kin-hin-Tempo hergestellt hat. And this morning it was the size of his foot and his pace. Und heute Morgen war das die Größe von seinem Fuß und sein Tempo. That reminds me. You know, my parents were both atheists, but they thought I should be socialized, so they sent me to church. And I found the sermons and all that pretty boring, but they had me sitting up and I kind of... I don't know, some sort of...

[05:56]

benches beside the priest where we listened as young parishioners. We listened to the sermon. People, what? So it was kind of interesting that, you know, I was bored. I was very interested in the church bill. I was supposed to be up there. I actually snuck back, went up and climbed in the tower and found the rope and started ringing the bell. During his sermon, just like now, the bell started to ring. And I guess they noticed I was absent.

[07:25]

So I got a talking to. I'm learning to behave since. They ring a bell now, I respond. So if we have so many people who don't fit easily and everybody can't get in one line here in the middle of the room, So then we have to stretch out. But then somebody has to stay still, otherwise it doesn't work. So usually it's the usual time, it's Eno or Sashin is the person leading the Sashin.

[08:38]

So the person who's the reference point establishes the pace by his or her walking and breathing. And ideally you can feel back into the line because after a while when the line begins to share a pace and breath, you can feel the whole line. And that requires a reference point. Okay. Now, it sounds a little mysterious to say you can feel the line. Das klingt etwas mysteriös zu sagen, man kann die Reihe spüren.

[10:03]

But, yeah, that's my experience. Aber das ist meine Erfahrung. But I notice also if I'm doing service, for instance, I can feel if someone in the room is kind of looking around. I turn around and I see that person immediately is looking around. I don't care, you know, but you can feel that the field isn't intact. Now, some of us don't like to merge into the field because we feel we're losing our identity. And others feel it as a kind of power, like being out in nature and feeling one with nature.

[11:05]

And you can feel both, your individuality, your unitary existence and your shared existence. So a Zendo, ideally, we design a Zendo so the people practicing together can enter that and develop that field. And the room also, which this doesn't really, the room also allows a kind of long-line field of kinem. Now, if it's a smaller number of people sitting, then each person is in their own individual kin-hin.

[12:24]

I mention these things to say something about what goes into trying to turn carpentry halls into zendos. And how the space is our individual and our mutual practice space. And you're practicing here in this five-day Sashinan And our practice period are actually reference points for our whole Sangha. There's quite a lot of people who may not have too much relationship to us in an active way, but they feel they're part of this Sangha, and then they feel that

[13:43]

practice period, the Ango's going on, and Sashin's going on, and so forth. So it becomes kind of presence within the larger Sangha. I mention this because it's reality of our practice. The spectrum of the field flows into our individual practice, and our individual practice flows in various ways into the larger field of practice. Now I mentioned yesterday I started saying I was speaking about the basics of practice.

[14:54]

And the basics of practice is also a ripening of practice in you. A distillation of practice in you. Yeah. And Dogen speaks about ripening time. And he means by that that circumstances, the flow of circumstances is part of time. And the flow of circumstances, daytime, nighttime, etc. all kinds of things, isn't simply clock time.

[16:24]

But by ripening time, he also means the time it takes for practice to ripen within you. Okay, for example. Say that you get into the habit of bringing attention to your spine and body points, etc., Now your spine is your backbone. It's always there. I mean, I don't think any of us lose it. But it's literally a backbone. It's in the background of our life. But in English, or in German, it's almost literally something like a backbone, a backbone.

[17:47]

It's in the background of our lives. But it's funny, if you do a simple thing like bring attention in Zazen and in your activity to your biological and subtle body, your heart chakra and so forth, What you're doing is you're bringing the background into the foreground. And it takes a while to get used to that. It doesn't happen just because you happen to know it's possible. You have to develop a feel for the presence of the spine mind. in zazen and then touch that spine, mind, field in your daily activity.

[19:06]

Du musst ein Gefühl für die Gegenwärtigkeit, die Präsenz des Wirbelsäulengeistes im zazen entwickeln und dann dieses Gefühl in deiner täglichen Aktivität berühren. It brings you more into a kind of postural attentiveness. Das bringt dich eher in so eine Art Haltungsaufmerksamkeit hinein. You become more sensorially alert. Du wirst dann in den Sinnen wacher. And I think more mentally present. Because by bringing this background that's always there, always there, into the foreground, you push the, what Rumi called the traffic of thoughts, drängst du das, was Rumi den Gedankenverkehr genannt hat, das drängst du so wie in eine Parklücke hinein.

[20:24]

Der Hintergrund beginnt dann, den Vordergrund oder zumindest einen Teil des Vordergrundes zu besetzen. Then you begin to share the stage. The staging of your lived life is shared now by this more biological and subtle body presence while you're also conscious in the usual way. and the stage landscape of your... And it moves you into the pulse, pushes you into the pulse of immediacy So it not only makes you more attentive, more of an antenna, but it changes or widens the field of

[21:46]

of attentiveness from your personal narrative to your personal circumstances. And it makes you more, maybe a little bit more like a wild animal. More, Tsukiroshi used to say you should have a ready mind. You want a mind ready for anything. And that, by moving more into the pulse of immediacy, heartbeat, breath, and more subtle... movements yeah you're really kind of in a new world it's like you've discovered an inner twin which was born with you but never born in you and now it's beginning to be part of you

[23:11]

You find yourself in what I called a liminal world, a world with one foot in this subtle world and one foot in this usual world of her comfortable, caring sense of how to be with others. And then you find yourself in this border area, as I called it, where you have one foot in this subtler world and one foot in this area in which we feel comfortable and take care of the world. Oh, it's kind of... What is like an alchemy is that you actually do nothing more than bring attention to something that is in the background and then bring it to the foreground. And that can be an exciting experience sometimes, too.

[24:40]

But it's really when it ripens, when you get used to it, when the background is now also always part of the foreground. And that can be an exciting or interesting experience, but it's really about when it ripens, when you really get used to it, when the background is always part of the foreground. Then the practices and the basics begin to ripen and mature in you. Now, one of the things I said yesterday was that consciousness, your conscious posture, your conscious feel for the world is a mental posture.

[25:47]

That doesn't mean it isn't important and wonderful. But if you can not just know, well, maybe it's something like a mental posture, but feel it as a mental posture. I can remember practicing at Tassajara. When you're in 350,000 acre wilderness, we can't quite achieve that in Harishrit. Yes. But we had no phones and no electricity and kerosene lamps and so forth.

[27:02]

And if you were in there for two or three months and you didn't leave, you almost didn't know what century you were going to come back into when you drove up over the 5,000-foot ridge and down into Carmel in California. I'd be so used to putting out kerosene lights from a distance. You can go like this and put out a kerosene light. For the first few days, I'd go to an electric light. I mean, really, I was thinking, oh. So if something does happen to you, you're House burns down, as happened to my son-in-law.

[28:18]

Wenn dir was geschieht, wie zum Beispiel, dass dein Haus abbrennt, ist zum Beispiel meinem Spiegelsohn passiert. Or you're forced to move or something like that. Oder du bist gezwungen umzuziehen. Or you, you know, after college or something like that, you go back to the house you grew up in. Oder wenn du nach der College-Zeit zurückgehst zu dem Haus, in dem du aufgewachsen bist. The nostalgia, of course, is a kind of feeling of something lost. Es ist natürlich eine Art Nostalgie. Heimweh, isn't it something like that? Hey. Es ist natürlich so eine Art Nostalgie, das Gefühl von etwas, das man verloren hat. All right. But if it's like these sad and tragic refugees from Syria and Iraq, I mean, they may never have anything to go back to.

[29:23]

So they have to recreate or start anew? And perhaps they feel what they left was a mental posture, as Nabokov felt leaving Russia. The writer, he felt always it was, he couldn't go back to it, but he somehow wrote his way out of it. The point I'm making is that if we do imagine our conscious life as a mental posture, Doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it.

[30:33]

But you begin to find your lived life in a wider field and wider sphere than the conscious home we've created. Aber du kannst beginnen, dein Leben in einer weiteren Sphäre, in einem weiteren Feld zu finden, als das bewusste Heim, das wir kreiert haben. And maybe we're all partly foundlings. I mean, maybe you, every one of us who is practicing, in some ways found, how did I end up in this family? I guess I was born into it, but why this family? Or maybe this culture, why am I...

[31:34]

In this culture, if I'd been adopted into a Chinese family, you know, I would be culturally quite different. Yeah, I mean, iconically, mythologically, it's not incidental that Moses or the Abrahamic prophet was found in the rushes. Yeah, when Pharaoh's daughter supposedly pulled him out of the rushes, she said, a child of the Nile coming from water. And then there's Superman. He was born on Krypton.

[32:49]

Which means a hidden place. Mm-hmm. It was born, I mean, the planet Krypton was created in 1938 when I was two. And it was the home planet of Superman and Supergirl, who later became Superwoman. Politically, correct. But he had superpowers because gravity was different on Krypton. Like on the moon, we humans can jump great distances and Superman could do the same on Earth.

[34:05]

And, you know, this is carrying us a little too far, but the inert gas Krypton wasn't discovered until 1898. And it wasn't discovered with magnetic, you know, microscopes, I mean electron microscopes or anything. It just takes a Bunsen burner, a heating pad and some glassware. But it did take a shift to seeing the world as interactive

[35:12]

interdependent activity. Before chemistry there was alchemy and they thought the world was just everything could be created from everything else. Before chemistry, there was alchemy, in which it was assumed that everything can be produced from something else. And my point here is that it is a shift in worldview, not a shift in technology, to just let somebody discover this gas which is everywhere. Jill, what I'm trying to do here is encourage you to really look at what happens to you in practice. What happens to you in Zazen?

[36:53]

What happens to you when it's particularly painful and you don't know if you're going to be able to last until the bell rings? Maybe you get to a point where you don't care whether you live or die. And somehow there is a continuity of consciousness, but you wish it would just be regular continuity. Ideally, this kind of, you know, and it doesn't really, you know, it's interesting, I know a number of people have no pain in Zazen, and they never really shift their worldviews, usually. The difficulty of staying in one place and not moving for five days or seven days, a large part of five days or seven days,

[37:54]

Where we can't go to our comfortable mental posture for relief, We can't distract ourselves in the usual way. I just have to find some way to just be alive. Often at that time our world views are realigned. Because right here in the midst of our activity There's a potent, various worldviews are possible.

[39:21]

And a worldview in which everything is an activity, everything is changing, which is, of course, Buddhism. Alles ist im Wandel begriffen und das ist natürlich buddhistisch. When you find yourself in the pulse of that immediacy, wenn du dich im Puls dieser Unmittelbarkeit wiederfindest, you can find yourself actually a kind of reborn person. Dann kannst du tatsächlich das Gefühl haben, ein neugeborener Mensch zu sein. Or a person willing to be reborn immediately. as these changes, as this wisdom ripens in you. So I think to some of us this concept of being a foundling, we weren't really born into this family and culture.

[40:25]

Yes, we were, but at the same time, somehow we don't quite fit. And I think for some of us, this idea of being a findling, where we have the feeling, yes, somehow we were born into this culture and this family, but we don't fit in completely. And a practice like Sashin allows us sometimes to find a deeper fitting for our true life. Bringing the background into the foreground changes the foreground. Let that mature in your practice. Okay, thank you very much. Amen.

[41:29]

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