Does anyone have anything you could add, would add to the discussion we had before lunch? I say discussion because I feel I'm discussing with you. I'm doing most of the talking. And I say discussions because I have a feeling that we are discussing this together, even though I'm actually speaking most of it here. Yes. I've got a short question. I think you have discussed this before, probably in Kassel, and I can't deal at the moment with the term leak.

[01:05]

Oh, leaking. Like, Does the hat have a cover? It never leaks. The hat has a cover? That was the question. Remember? What's the hat? In a violent storm, it covers me. And then he asks, does the hat have a cover? And he says, it never leaks. Okay, so he asks about leaks. Is that right? Well, it's just a term that means pretty much what it sounds like. That you're leaking energy or something like that.

[02:13]

And I think when people are most vividly confronted with it which is after doing a sashin where you Yeah, as I said in this recent Sashin. Because you can't do the usual things to distract yourself or move or force the doan at gunpoint to ring the bell, things like that. Why should I ring the bell? Because I'm going to shoot you. You, um, you're, um, your conceptual structures by which you function in the world kind of collapse.

[03:39]

And you're sort of thrown onto your own resources or just being alive again. But that experience is one of really... living in the midst of your own energy. Yeah, I'm just giving a longer answer than this needs. And then when the session's over, When you kind of re-establish your usual conceptual structures, you feel like the energy that's built up during the week suddenly disperses.

[04:41]

So that experience, which I think most of us have vividly after Sashin, most likely, becomes a characteristic experience or sign characteristic experience of when you lose your attention. So you're maintaining your awareness of something and then you start thinking about something, you feel you've lost your centeredness or lost your energy. So in this little story I told where the hat the cover of the hat never leaks.

[05:51]

He would mean something like, when your mind doesn't lose its concentration, on space, say, you notice it right away because you feel like your energy is leaked. Now let me speak in a moment to what you asked earlier about your eyes. Practically speaking, I mean the most basic Zazen instruction, is to have your eyes down a little and about the height of your body if they were focused on something. But you reduce don't focus on anything.

[07:12]

And you move the attention, which usually follows the eyes, you move the attention to the back of your eyes. And I guess in martial arts it's called soft eyes, where you see the whole field. But that soft eyes, where you see the field but don't focus on anything. is pretty much the same as merging the mind with space. So you have soft eyes and your eyes are a bit down there and a little bit open. But once you get used to that feeling and that

[08:18]

eye posture, let's call it. You can also let your eyes close softly. And then have the feeling of that visual focus at the back of your eyes be in the center of your And then that joins with the feeling of energy coming up the spine. And becomes part of the focus of concentration that It's most characteristically felt by lifting through the spine in sitting. So now I'm going beyond what you asked.

[09:32]

But in effect, and this is more technical for people who want to develop their zazen, you have in effect folded the sensorial fields into the body and the subtle energy that accompanies the visual fields, and the subtle energy that accompanies the breath, into the spine, which then you can feel that focus becomes the top of your head and a circular movement in the body. As I said this morning, you asked a simple and complex question.

[10:50]

And that's what I meant, that you asked a simple and complex question. Anyone else? Nico? I saw her spine glowing here, and I said, it's good. Turn off that light. That's Tara. You talked about it that compassion is sort of anchored in the intestine. Yeah, I think so. Well, you know, I have to debate these questions myself. Yeah. And then you talked about compassion together with aliveness, as I understood it.

[12:13]

And then you talked about compassion together with aliveness, as I understood it. And then you talked about compassion together with aliveness, as I understood it. And then you talked about compassion together with aliveness, as I understood it. For me it helps to locate myself somewhere. And my question is, has this to do with life energy like it is also known in other cultures? And in culture? You mean like chi or ki or something like that? Yeah. That is this culture, but anyway, yeah, go ahead.

[13:15]

Was diese Kultur ist, ja. In diesem Gespräch, wo ich die Frage gestellt habe, habe ich gemerkt, ja, der tiefe Schnellstehen von Flindern ist eigentlich wirklich der, wenn ich mich nicht lebendig fühle. talking about this this morning, I noticed that the deep pain I feel is in fact that when I'm not feeling alive enough. And I would like to ask you, and I'm sure you will continue to do the same, on what level is this vitality actually so hurt? And I have to do a sort of research myself for it on which plane this energy is being heard, has been heard. That's where my focus fell on this life energy or chi.

[14:30]

That's where I focused. And my question is, are there, or can you say something about connections between this life energy and vitality, aliveness? Well, I mean, I think you're experiencing it. Yeah, and so when you notice when you notice when the aliveness is less or affected by something, you'll move your... I mean, you don't have to, but you could try various things. But one thing certainly to try is to move your attention to that point of aliveness. And I practice with that myself with a phrase that I say to myself.

[15:34]

rather clumsy, but I say the yoga of the present moment. So as I'm walking somewhere or doing something, there's always a little shift in one's energy and mood and state of mind and clarity and so forth. Whenever I notice, there's shifts. that I particularly shift that I don't quite appreciate. And I say to myself the yoga of the present moment. And the immediate situation somehow flows into me and my posture, mental and physical posture, changes. It becomes more in tune. And It flows into me.

[17:03]

The immediate circumstances flow and affect my positively affect my mental and physical posture. No, that phrase might mean nothing to someone else, to my grandmother, you know. She has a yoga of the present moment, rolling down her front, you know. Excuse me, I've got this little scenario going on. Dickie, it's so nice of you to say that. Anyway, for me, the phrase immediately affects my mental and physical posture. But it is really parallel to what I said this morning.

[18:03]

The quotation, the statement. When you're make your mind or when your mind is open, clear and undefiled and you are master of yourself borrow a light to create facilities borrow a road to go out on or a slew on, merge your mind with space and merge mind with myriad circumstances.

[19:09]

To merge mind with myriad circumstances would be the yoga of the present moment. So all these little phrases that each one are little practices you have to kind of Find the territory of it. And you're finding them. You're doing half or 60% of the work. 90% or something. Find them. Finding the need for something like that through your own experience. And then, when you're familiar with various teachings, suddenly you see, oh, that's what that teaching means. That's how I can apply that teaching. Merge the mind with myriad circumstances.

[20:15]

Okay. You're good. What? Enough for now. Thank you. You're good. Did you understand that this koan, Yonyan asking, why does the bodhisattva of compassion have so many hands and arms? It's like looking for your pillow at night. That in the Zen way of Koan language, Koan thinking, this, I mean, again, The ordinary sentence we read in a book or whatever, as

[21:52]

Lakoff and others have shown, but it's obvious anyway. You have to bring a lot of conceptual background to any sentence to understand it. Very simple sentences somebody from a very different culture would have no idea what it meant. So what a sentence does in German, I'm sure, and in English, it makes use of content we already have. It makes me think how streams, you know, a mountain stream, you know, 60, 70 percent of it is often flowing underground. It's not on the surface of the bed. And you can notice, because like in Crestone and Tassajara, sometimes the stream disappears, and then, you know...

[23:11]

Quarter of a mile later, it reappears. Same amount of water going along. So in a way, When you read a sentence, the sentence is like the bed of the stream. But much of the water of the meaning of the sentence is flowing underneath the sentences. And surfaces in the sentence. Okay. Now, koans are written so that the content of your usual mentally framed experience, the water of your experience, the mental water of your experience, doesn't flow through the sentences in the koan.

[24:29]

The Quran doesn't make sense. The water, it's not a riddle. It's not a riddle. That's what people say, the riddles are not riddles. And the water just disappeared. The next sentence seems irrelevant. Okay. However, if the more practice experience you bring, not your usual mentally framed experience, or the more non-conceptual experience you bring, bring to the koan or we all function through non-conceptual experience of course and the question is if you're overly if you're an overly planning, overly nervous, rational person, you block the flow of your non-conceptual experience in your activity.

[25:53]

Yeah, and often then you make mistakes or... aren't very inclusive in how you think of things. But the koan is written from non-conceptual practice experience. In this case, you know, a thousand years ago. And our non-conceptual practice experience is so similar or virtually identical that if you... that when you read a Koran, the Koran suddenly makes sense as it did a thousand years ago because you have the same non-conceptual experience flowing through it, into it.

[27:20]

Okay, so it means that if you work with a Koran, Like, okay, why does the Bodhisattva of compassion have so many hands and arms? Now, the Bodhisattva you know from knowing something about Buddhism. One understanding is that bodhisattva is the life of the Buddha before he became the Buddha. So the bodhisattva before enlightenment, the practitioner before enlightenment. whose practice predicts enlightenment.

[28:24]

Yeah, and probably in Pali, the word bodhisattva, or whatever the word is, equivalent word, satta instead of sattva, probably means the one who is committed to enlightenment. bedeutet möglicherweise derjenige, der sich der Erleuchtung verpflichtet hat. But in Sanskrit and with the Mahayana, it becomes not the one who is committed to enlightenment, but the enlightenment being. Okay, but both are dynamics of the path. So you can feel yourself as one who is committed to enlightenment.

[29:27]

And when you practice Buddhist teachings and practice wisdom, you're practicing enlightenment because it's teachings and wisdom, at least hopefully, usually has risen from enlightenment, or based on the experience of enlightenment, Yeah, so that when the Diamond Sutra says the Bodhisattva has no idea of a lifespan, no concept of a life, no idea of a lifespan, that doesn't make any sense. I mean, when you ordinarily think of it, no lifespan, of course we have a lifespan. Everything I do is based on having a lifespan.

[30:34]

Yeah, I mean, I Whatever I talk about, it happens. Some things happened when I was 40, some things happened when I was 4. And I'm expecting a few things to happen when I'm 104. Well, I don't want to be pessimistic. 124... However, if I'm on the path of the continuity of intent, I notice when I am most fully within that continuum of alterity, the idea of lifespan or any comparisons like that simply are gone.

[31:39]

Course mental structures simply fade away. And And when I have an idea of a lifespan, I immediately feel leaking. So when I feel, and they talk about the wisdom seal and things, when I feel sealed from leaking, there's no idea, no comparative thinking, no idea of a lifespan. But if I'm really sealed in wisdom, sealed not armored by, but sealed within wisdom, I can think comparatively or think about a lifespan there. my daughter's lifespan or whatever without losing without leaking and these are all yogic territory of yogic practice okay okay

[33:03]

So, no idea of a lifespan, no concept of a lifespan. Immediately, the experience of practice flows into that phrase. Okay, so if you, again, are Practicing with this koan. You can't read it the usual way, letting mental formations carry you along in it. These are metaphors, the Bodhisattva with a thousand arms, that's a metaphor or... And metaphors are very often images. And the mind flowing through images is very different than the mind flowing through images. thinking.

[34:31]

And it's no accident that the scientists I know about and know always say their thinking, their original thinking and their thinking about a problem flows through metaphors and then goes into the goes into the language or the mathematics. And so what you have here is an image of compassion. Image of compassion. of all these arms and hands and eleven heads or one head depending on this image and you just sort of

[35:34]

It's a powerful image. And you kind of internalize it or feel it. And it's presented to you too as all those hands and arms. And you feel your own arms and hands. And you feel, okay. I've got at least 50. One, two, three, four, five. Every position of your hand is like another hand. So you have a feeling of... The relationship of the body to the space around it. Or the space that is it. Is the body. As you said earlier, this... felt like we make a mutual body.

[36:45]

So then the question is, why is compassion represented As a thousand arms and hands. So the question is, why is compassion represented or represented as a thousand hands and arms? Now, you can think about it, it means the hand can do, help various people, etc. But as an image, it's a kind of germinal space. Germinating, germinal. Okay, so... Da Wu says, well, it's like reaching for your pillow at night. This is another image.

[37:48]

And it's meant to take you to the image of your experience of reaching for your pillow at night. Yeah. And at night. So when you go to bed tonight, you can go to bed and you're going to sleep on the right or left on your back and you feel how the body locates itself. And even while you're asleep, You know, and if you sleep with a baby, as we used to sleep with Sophia, you are very aware of this baby even during the night. Keep sure it's covered and stuff. And it's done without waking up.

[38:50]

And although we use this mind... perhaps with our child sleeping with us, of not waking up but being somehow conscious. So night then in this koan represents a way of knowing without being ordinarily conscious. And again, if we go back to Sashin, which is so often the seed of yogic knowledge, some of you find in Sashin that you...

[39:56]

Find you're basically awake all night but fully asleep. It's almost like you were at the roof of the room you're sleeping in, say, or visualizing the room. And you can feel everybody sleeping. You can kind of see them in the mind's eye. And yet you're completely asleep. This is like when you are in a room and see how everything... Excuse me. You can... Where did you get stuck? On the roof? No, the image of seeing everyone asleep. So you can see as sometimes as if you were at the top of the... on the ceiling. Like it happens in operations sometimes when somebody's suspended, they... They tell you afterwards when they were supposed to be dead that, oh, I saw this guy do this and I saw that guy do that.

[41:08]

And... And this is a yogic mind not usually available to us without a considerable yogic experience. Yeah, okay. So you have this experience of... It's almost the whole room is visually held in a kind of stillness while you're asleep. And you can say later, oh yes, I saw you come in at a certain time and leave, etc.

[42:13]

And the person says, jeez, you were asleep, but I saw you come in and leave. And if during Sashina I had to speak to somebody who was asleep, I know which, I could feel which person I could speak to and they will answer me without waking up. Now, you know, I could go up to Otmar, for instance, and speak to him, and he could just completely talk to me without waking up. But if I asked him, what are you going to buy at Aldi's tomorrow, then he would probably wake up. He likes to shop at Aldi's. Okay, so the use of night here refers to a particular kind of mind that you'd only know if you practice. So for a scholar it might be a kind of code.

[43:15]

The scholar might become familiar over sometimes that, oh, night is mentioned in these circumstances, and now I see it's a code for a certain kind of mind. But it's not really a code. And I mean if you wrote koans with that kind of code they would end up being lifeless. Like a lot of the Brookshin that's been frozen before you buy it in the morning. Excuse me. I'm sorry, I'm going on. Shall I finish this before... So night is a mind that knows outside of consciousness.

[44:40]

Okay. All right. It's like reaching for your pillow at night. Okay. And Yunyan says, I understand. And Daowu probes further. What do you understand? The whole body is hands and eyes. And hands and eyes. So it's not just doing things. It's seeing like the eye in the palm of the hand. It's seeing through these bodily eyes. And so this clearly again references this... Night eyes.

[45:54]

Knowing outside of consciousness. Non-conceptual knowing. So, then Dao says... Yeah, that's pretty good, but you only got 80% of it. Well, elder brother, big shot, what would you say? The whole body is through and through, hands and arms. And this is actually saying, yes, you're right, Yunyan. It's just confirming. It's the same thing. But what is 80%? What is 20%? 20% is the night eyes. If he got it 100%, he'd be completely wrong. So the 80% is the night ocean glinting with light. The 20%.

[47:12]

The 20%. Thanks for correcting my math. The 20% are the night ocean that glows with lights. So the 80% is a praise of Union's statement, not a criticism or correction of Union's statement. He might have said, that's too much. Can't you say 60%? Okay. Okay. And that night eyes is the borrowed light to set up facilities. It's the borrowed road. Because you may know 80%, but you have to borrow 20%. Okay, so let's take a break.

[48:25]

And as you know, I'd like you to meet in small groups, discuss it in Deutsch. It always makes me happy, and afterwards you're always... You may think it's kindergarten, but you're always smarter afterwards. Yeah, so you do the kindergarten count-off, boss. Okay.

[48:48]

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