On the one hand, I want to say that, oh, good afternoon. On the one hand, I want to say, I don't know which one, this hand. On the one hand, I want to say that what we're talking about, I would like to say is nothing remarkable. It's just, you know, a kind of minute description of how we, I think, actually function. On the other hand, I want to say, I feel, anyway, that it's completely remarkable that we can talk about this. And on the other hand, I would like to say that it is also totally remarkable that we can talk about these things.

[01:03]

I think ten years ago we couldn't have done it. I wouldn't have been able to, but I don't think you would have been able to hear it. For even though it's basically quite ordinary, it takes a... Yeah, if you're a gardener, it takes a sensitivity to the plants to know which one to plant where and when and so forth. The plants are pretty ordinary. You see them often, but if they're planted at one time or next to something else, etc., it all makes a difference. And we're beginning to be able to feel those differences.

[02:14]

But in a way we ought to be, because just in this room we have several hundred years of shared practice. But in a way, we should also be able to do this, because we alone in this room have several hundred years of common practice. And that's mutually enhanced. It supports each other. I don't know what she's talking about, but it's great. She sounds good, so I trust it. Well, let me give you, first to start out, I want to continue the review I started yesterday. But I'd like to start out with giving you a simple Zazen instruction.

[03:27]

Which is to sit in the satisfaction of sitting. That sounds like a circular argument. But I mean, don't have any other goal. Except to sit solely in the satisfaction of sitting itself. In English, the word satisfaction, satisfy means something like to perform completeness. To fully complete.

[04:36]

To comply with how the world is. That's all in the etymology of the word satisfy. And to feel satisfied may be something beyond happiness and usual goals. So... So, if you do sit, discover the satisfaction of sitting itself, and to sit within that satisfaction, that enoughness, that completeness,

[05:47]

There will be small movements that refine your sitting. There will be a little... you'll find it feels a little more complete, probably, for example, if attention is on the body or on the breath. Yeah, I hear there's a new sort of self-powered chip, electronic chip, you know, It doesn't need a battery. I only recently heard about them, but some of you are pros and you know all about these things.

[06:56]

But for instance they're mounting them in bridges and they're powered by the movement of the traffic over the bridge. And you can And they can communicate with chips put all over the bridge in various places to see if the bridge might, like the one in Minneapolis, St. Paul recently, that collapsed last year. Or you could have them, they think, in smoke alarms and they could all never have to never have to change the battery because there's no battery. And they'd be powered by the kind of movement in the house itself.

[08:12]

It's sort of like a perpetual motion machine. Which I... I was trying to invent when I was a kid until my father told me it's impossible. But such a chip would be powered by the movement of the cosmos itself. But something like that happens when you're in the sitting within the satisfaction of sitting itself. You don't do anything. And yet there's movement that deepens and deepens the satisfaction of sitting. Yeah. Now let me launch into this self-powered, other-powered body cognitive process.

[09:38]

I don't really know if I have the words for this yet. But I should make, between now and tomorrow, I should make some more reaches into it. Okay. Now the Laya Vijnana is, you know what the Laya Vijnana is, all of you, right? If you don't, it's too bad. It's the storehouse. No, not the storehouse. Because it's not a container. It's all of your accumulated experience.

[10:38]

And almost all of it is outside of consciousness. It's stored in your activity, in your body, in your mind, and so forth. Now, this is considered to be a flow of instance. Okay, okay. moment, a flow of momentary instance. That's the same word as German. Okay, I'm becoming German. Slowly but surely. I'm a German who can't speak a word.

[11:39]

Kasper Hauser. He just didn't expose me to any, you know, You sat on the train next to somebody who claimed they were Kaspar Hauser, right? She reported him to the conductor. He must have been very old. No? No? Okay. Not very crazy. More like that. Okay. Now, I asked you to play with, feel yourself into the word continuum. or the sense of continuity.

[12:51]

And the world keeps reappearing as it is, as it does. So there's some kind of continuity there. Now we could say there's a flow of continuity. But this is assigning a word to it that's a constant. In other words, we have this flow, and we say it's a stream or a flow. But the word implies some kind of continuity. Yeah, and there is a kind of continuity. But from a Buddhist point of view, you'd have to say there's a flow of alterity. Okay.

[14:06]

Is there such a word in German? Well, that's the philosophical term. That's just technical. I mean... Yeah, this is what I'm talking about is technical, too. Okay. So we've got a flow of alterity instead of a flow of continuity. Let's just use alterity. Okay, and if we hear that, we can hear in it, it's a flow of alternatives. It's a flow of uniqueness. It's a flow of otherness.

[15:06]

Okay, now that puts a whole different cast on the situation. Do you understand that expression? A whole different cast on the situation, yeah? To think of ourselves as a flow of alternatives. Or a flow of otherness. It means that right now as I'm speaking to you, yes, you can, I mean, I'm more or less the same person moment after moment. But if you could examine me very carefully, in a very mechanical way, if you took a film of me right now and slowed it down and looked at each frame, You'd see there's a flow of difference.

[16:11]

Not completely the same as the previous frame. But not completely different. But definitely not the same. So it would be a flow of not completely different and not completely the same. Yeah, now the adept practitioner feels this. This would really be the medium of mind. Okay. Now, can we feel this? Yes. Okay. Now, two things that people bring up to me in Dzogchen.

[17:17]

One is, what is the experience of this medium of mind? Okay. Now, the best example I have been able to think of that's accessible is when you smell a flower or a leaf or... Sodden path. Sodden means wet. Pass, like the path out here we were walking this morning. It smells actually of stones and dirt and things. It's quite interesting if you live in the wilderness as I do and have for many years off and on in various places. You can follow a path by your nose in total darkness because the path has a smell which the grass and leaves on either side don't have.

[18:32]

It's like a dog, you know? My little asides take so much time, excuse me. So if you smell a flower, you can really particularly bring it up close, you can really feel it in your nose. So you know that this is a physical thing happening in your nose. In California, there's a lot of native bay trees. Bay, like bay leaf in cooking. And if you take a leaf and break it in half, a fresh leaf, and smell it, it gives you an immediate pain in your head.

[19:52]

It gives you a momentary headache. So it's clear that this sense is happening in your nose. And I think for many of you, many of you have the experience, particularly in Zazen, of sounds being interior. Sounds happen in a space that really doesn't have the feeling of distance in it. So they're more quickly or easily experienced as interior. Okay, so now the harder one is seeing. Because we externalize seeing. Well, we have to walk in and out of a room.

[20:53]

But you can try to get a feeling for it as mind. If you can get a feel for your mind constructing the space. Because whenever you go in a room, you actually construct the space in your mind. The space is there, but you reconstruct it in your mind so that you can walk around in it. So you're walking around in an interiorized space. If you have to sleep in a lot of hotel rooms that are totally dark and you've only looked at them once, it's amazing. In the middle of the night, you can get up and walk in the interiorized space and not see a thing.

[22:20]

And you can do it in your own room. So familiar with it, you can walk around in the dark. So in the dark you can maybe notice that you created this space as interior and you're walking in an interior space you put out in front of you. But that's happening all the time whenever you are anywhere. You're actually creating the space you're in. Now, I'm mentioning this because I want you to be able to get a feel for now and over time

[23:23]

That you're living within the continuum and medium of mind. It doesn't mean the world is made of mind but it means your world is made of mind. There's the physical world which is just stuff. There's the phenomenal world which means the world of the senses. Then it's the phenomenal world we live in. Okay. Now, I'm also mentioning these things because these are... important distinctions for you to feel and know if I'm going to talk with any preciseness about bodily cognition.

[24:42]

I mention this also because there are important differences that you have to know if I only want to talk about the body cognition. Now I don't know how far I can get in this, not probably very far today. So I talked with Atmar and we're extending the Sashin by two days. I actually haven't talked with Atmar yet. But Dieter agreed. Now, you know, Kinhin is an interesting transitional space. Yeah, we do Zazen and then we do Kinhin.

[25:43]

And I heard Dieter had you running around outside this morning. It's kind of great to hear the stones going through. Das war schön, die Steine so klackern zu hören. But somehow in Zazen and in this transitional space, we're often faced with actually what is a kind of ethical problem. Aber es ist so, dass wir oft im Zazen und in diesem Übergangsraum mit... We're faced with what? A kind of ethical problem. Because if we are not talking about a flow of continuity, but a flow of alterity, I mean, a flow of alternatives, But I like that, the flow of alternity.

[26:52]

That's sort of related to infinity or eternity. And that I'll explore in some other session. That's how these things happen. Eternity, alternity. Anyway, excuse me. If it's a flow of alternatives... It's a flow of choices. And one understanding of suffering, dukkha, in Buddhism is the subtle suffering of choices untaken. The lives we could have had. Even the talents and capacities that shriveled up because we never used them.

[27:52]

And many of you, every Sashin, particularly in Doksang, speak to me about this. about, you know, here you feel one way about how you'd like your life to be. And at home you feel differently. Or you, after a while, feel differently. This is the body thinking. In the context of being at home, the body makes different choices. In the context of being at home, the body makes different choices. Your life at home, work, whatever you call it, is presenting you with a flow of alternatives. And when you're here, you're presented with, oh, you know,

[28:57]

You're more precisely presented with practice as a path. I'm imagining locking the door and keeping you here for a few months and then it's over. But the consequences I was imagining didn't look good. And it causes a kind of suffering. You feel a certain satisfaction in Kinhon or Zazen. But how do you make this your choice? Sometimes it feels like the choice you want to make.

[30:09]

Yeah, but how do you... can that be integrated in your daily life? These problems are considered to be subtle suffering in Buddhism. And I think it's good to recognize them as a kind of suffering. And it's one of the reasons we take vows. A vow is to choose one of the trajectories. Trajectory is the path of something. Like if I throw a ball, the trajectory is where the ball goes. Yes. It must be a German word.

[31:10]

You throw balls in Germany? Fluglinie. Fluglinie? Okay. Weil die Gelöbnisse eine mögliche... Die mögliche sind eine... It doesn't work for... Kraftlinie. Dankeschön. Sehr gut. Weil die Gelöbnisse eine Art von Kraftlinie sind. Okay. So you can feel we could even say... as one scholar uses, a projectory, something you project into the future. And you have to help the body's thinking with phenomena. You have to help the body's thinking with phenomena.

[32:12]

In other words, Johanneshof is a phenomena. A kind of phenomena. It's a building with walls and all that stuff and a practice. Yeah. Okay. So if you're here It supports the phenomenal world, supports the body to think about practice. Yeah. So I'm talking about this very specifically, but I'm also talking about it as a foreground, which I hope doesn't become a background for tomorrow's lecture. remains a foreground. And because I want to keep speaking about this, but I have to find a way with you.

[33:14]

Now, the basic goal in Buddhism is to have no goal. How do you trick yourself into that? You give up the goal, but you choose to live within a methodology which has a goal. In other words, you've got a goal to realize enlightenment and lessen suffering. But psychologically, that won't work if you hold on to that goal.

[34:18]

So you go to Crestone or Hanesov and you say, I'm going to give up my goal here because you'll take care of making sure I've... So Sashin and monastic life are designed to let you give up your goal while the situation itself carries you forward in the goal. So you come here, some of you, many of you come here, and you can feel that goal taking form here, but you go home, and the situation doesn't support the goal. So the dynamic of the vow in Buddhism, taking the precepts and so forth, because it's a way to function within the flow of alterity.

[35:21]

And seeing that, you know, what you have to do if you really want to continue the feeling you have here, if you like it, The interesting thing is not to say, oh, I'm going to go live in Crestone or Johanneshof. The interesting thing is for most of us is we have a particular life. How does it work in our particular life? Yeah. And of course we can change our life and do something radically different. But more subtly, we change our situation to support our sense of the path.

[36:55]

You've got to get the phenomenal world and your body to work in your favor. Because there's no flow of continuity. You can't take a continuity and make it stick and push it forward. There's a flow of alterity which you have to keep the focus and these choices which keep occurring. That must have been terribly boring. I mean, I don't find it boring. But somehow, all these details, I said, oh, gosh. I didn't say, oh, God.

[38:12]

I said, oh, gosh. Yeah, but we don't have that. You don't have gosh? No, we don't have gosh. I worship gosh. It is a euphemism. It's true. Yeah, yeah, okay. I was taught not to swear, even in translation. Anyway, I hate to stop. Because I want a flow of alterity. I mean continuity. But I'll let you continue the alterity. Thank you very much.

[39:09]

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