Yes. What you said last, namely entities as actions or activities as entities, that really appealed to me. I think a lot about action at the moment. Action and about who the action is. what you said about seeing entities as activities spoke to me because I am at the moment pondering about acting and handeln. And who is the actor? Acting in like the theater? No, just acting. Just doing things. And who is the doer? Who is the one who is doing it? You don't want to ask that question.

[01:07]

Let's leave that for a while hidden in the mountain of form. Okay. Doing... Doing things as an entity makes it easier for me. Because entities arise. They arise, they're activities. But then it's not so much that I... I connect to the activity as the actor. It just happens. To have this kind of habit and to develop this kind of habit must be good.

[02:09]

Yeah, okay, good. Hmm. Heinrich not only supplies us with the building. Is that like supplying the bird with the wind? Anyway, he supplies us with the building. And he also slips a copy of Rumi under the chair where I will sit. So he's trying to guide me to speak in a way that's interesting. He's actually the power behind the cushion. Do you have that expression, the power behind the throne?

[03:29]

Something like that, yes. Anyway, so I opened the book. And it says, I opened it and it said, we are not Ahead, we're behind. We're not above, we're below. Like the brush in a painter's hand. We have no idea where we are. That's good, huh? Like the brush in a painter's hand. We have no idea where we are. This is the mountain of form. And I opened another place. And it says, we are like the rain that falls on a leaky roof. Let's not go down the holes.

[04:42]

Let's go down the spout. Let's not go down the holes in the leaky roof. Let's go down the drain spout. Yeah, it's like that. We do have a choice. A kind of choice. Within the circumstances of the roof. Okay. Now, at the level at which we're practicing, which is not just the accumulation of zazen practice, but the practice of working with worldviews within our And this requires an intellectual dimension.

[05:57]

Because these pillars we don't really see as activities. They're hard to see as activities. We know they probably weren't here in the original farm. What were they? So to make this room, you had to do things. So the two pillars represent activity, which you would know you had to pay for or arrange for somebody to come and put them in. So you had to make a lot of decisions. You, an architect, or a friend? And Arthur would know very well, buildings are activities. Yeah, and it does something right now. Thank goodness. But, you know, we have to remind ourselves that it's doing something.

[07:10]

But that takes a kind of... thoughtful process. To know it's doing something is an intellectual, it's an idea, a concept. And to notice that I am perceiving it and there's a shiny light streaks there and different kind of shiny streaks on it from the window and those and the columns do look slightly different every time I've been here and look away and look back so they represent activities within my sensorium.

[08:19]

But I have to remind myself I have a little Buddha as an intellect reminding me, hey, they're activities, not entities. How do you see a stone as an activity? Sukershi said once in a lecture, a stone on the top of the mountain is different than a stone at the bottom of a mountain. And if you're just looking at the stone, it's hard to see why the darn stone's in activity and it's different at the top of a mountain. Of course, it's very unlikely to see the stone at the bottom of the mountain fall up. So that's already different.

[09:23]

Shown at the top. Crestone, we live, you know, the mountain behind us is, what, 4,600 meters or 500 meters. And we're living at about... 2,500 meters. And there's big stones everywhere. And I haven't seen any of them arrive, but they did arrive at some point. But again, does it make any difference? The brush in the painter's hand.

[10:27]

The mountain of form. How do we practice with a mountain of form? Well, I think the easiest thing, and I think I've even run through this riff here in this room, but it's the best example that I have developed to manifest the difference between seeing things as activities instead of entities. Now in English, the word entity means something that's separate from everything else. Not interdependent, but separate. Of course, no such thing exists.

[11:36]

Of course, no such thing that's independent of everything else exists. But we tend to see things through our habits as entities. So let me give you my tree riff. So instead of seeing a tree, You see, treeing. And you develop the habit of avoiding nouns. You add ing to everything. For example, I don't know Geralt. After decades. What I know is Geralding. There he is, Geralding again. Geralding. Wouldn't you stop growling?

[12:55]

And there she is Ulriking again. And Ulriking in, you know, woo! A commonplace magical event. Yeah, but this is the first time you've Ulrike-ed like this. That I know of. Okay, so you look at a tree and you say tree. And you maybe should stand in front of a tree long enough to feel it as tree. Is this trunk really an activity? Well, yes, look at all the insects. And there's still wet here and not wet there.

[13:59]

And the different grays and browns and so forth that I perceive. And the leaves are moving. And the leaves are moving. Okay, so I'm starting to see it as an activity. I also see that the activity is occurring within a field of stillness. And right there we have the basic worldview of Buddhism. Which is that things are diverging. And the activity of the world is converging. Or your perception is converging to turn this into treeing and then into a tree. So that this is all there is.

[15:14]

This mountain of form which tends to diverge. And if we live enough millions of years and you looked up at the sky if the earth is still here there would be almost no stars. Because the universe is expanding. The stars are getting farther and farther away. At least that's the current theory. I doubt if any of us will be here. Yeah. So everything from the Buddhist point of view is diverging and our activity creates convergence.

[16:33]

And when you perceive things, when you have a durative presence, When you feel things as an appearance, momentary appearance, if we try to take words, we can say the momentary appearance is a convergence. Now the world is much more complex than convergence and divergence. Or entities and activities. But I have to find some words to use to draw us into the spectrum of experience within some of the nuances if we can't know all the nuances.

[17:42]

So I begin to feel the stillness of the tree. A stillness located in the trunk. And a stillness located in the roots. And the leaves of the tree are moving around. But as soon as there's less wind or no wind, they become still. They keep returning to stillness. So even when the leaves are blowing, they're trying to return to stillness. So in the activity of the leaves, you can feel the stillness that they're trying to return to.

[18:55]

And of course the trunk and the roots aren't really still. They're doing all kinds of things to keep the tree alive. But still, they're relatively still in relationship to the leaves. Okay, so now if I perform this little exercise of feeling the treeing of trees and discovering that I feel the activity and the stillness that's implicit in the activity. And then, Because I do this often enough until I really feel the simultaneous stillness of the activity.

[19:59]

I begin to feel the... the brush in the painter's hand. Or I feel the presence of the tree as simultaneous stillness and activity. So now I know something about samadhi. Because samadhi is the silence It's not just the absence of thoughts or something like that. It's also the silence which inhabits all activity. Okay, so discovering that the activity of the tree is the presence of the tree. And the presence of the tree field of the tree is most sensed through the stillness of the tree.

[21:19]

From this I may begin to relate to the world differently. I may see Martin. And he is a very smart fellow. And his mind is pretty busy often. But I also feel the stillness of mind. And if I feel Martin's stillness when I'm with him, even when I'm talking with him, I'm relating to his stillness. He may be relating to his own stillness, more or less. So as I feel his stillness in his activity, he may also then feel my stillness in my activity.

[22:23]

And this kind of way of knowing the world can arise through simple experiments of practicing with the difference between seeing things as entities and their activities. And to feel the stillness of Martin or the stillness of the tree we could also say as Dorothea has pointed out the tree as Dharma. Because I'm seeing the tree in its momentariness. In fact, I'm participating in articulating the momentariness of the tree in speech. So I feel the momentariness of the tree in a larger or inseparable from the stillness or space or emptiness of the tree.

[23:41]

The emptiness or stillness in the brush in the painter's hand. Yeah, so in this sense, you're articulating the momentariness of the world rooted in emptiness, and we could call that a dharma. Was that crystal clear? Or clear enough? Someone want to say something? Are you growling again?

[25:11]

Can't help it. Can't help it. The man can't help it. Isn't there a song like that? The girl can't help it. I mean, the girl can't help it. What you say really means that we are different. We are always active and wish to be still. We are always active and long for stillness. This stillness we expect in the evenings, in the weekends and the holidays. When I look at the picture you have presented to us, I can say, When I'm starting from the picture you presented, could I instead from going from the activity to the stillness?

[26:18]

Could I use stillness as a basis, go into activity and return to stillness? That means my actions and my activity are completely identical, only the view is different because I take the silence and not the activity as the basis. My activity is the same, but it's so far different. It derives from a different source, which is stillness. So the base is stillness, it's not activity, and it returns back to stillness, instead of longing for stillness where I'm active. Yeah, right. But the activity looks exactly the same. Well, you know, it doesn't look quite the same. I mean, we can call this originary mind. Originary mind would mean at each moment the mind originates from stillness.

[27:27]

And that's one of the things you're trying to get, and one does somehow, get a bodily, embodied feeling for. by doing Zazen. And you can't really do Zazen satisfactorily repeatedly over years unless it's deeply satisfying. Because there are no results to Zazen. There are results But mostly, the results are not the reason one continues. One continues zazen because just the act of doing it is so satisfying.

[28:30]

And it's satisfying because the body and mind and emotion keep returning to stillness. And that... That which allows you to continue zazen as a life practice is the satisfaction of of fundamental stillness. And that's why really we don't, the word zen doesn't mean meditation, it means absorption. And absorption means samadhi. So zazen, that really functions, keeps absorbing you in samadhi. And that absorption in samadhi in that absorption in samadhi the world keeps arising arising and settling

[29:53]

to get up and to let yourself down again in Samadhi. Okay. But then you have a moment when you feel like standing up again in Samadhi. That's what I didn't understand. But then, when you are in Samadhi, you feel a moment when you don't want to stand up again. But then when you're in Sa, then there's that moment where you don't want to stop or get out of it. Yeah, it's really nice, isn't it? You're showing me, right? Yeah, there's that damn problem. You're sitting in a monastery and they ring the bell. Just what you really, really just say. That's the problem with the monastery. When you're sitting so beautifully, then the damn bell rings. And if you're the abbot, you have to get up when everybody else gets up. Sometimes you just want to sit there, blissed out. But there's something that you learn by getting up and then... Is that enough for today?

[31:33]

Too much? I'll try to be better tomorrow. Let's sit for a few moments. I'm glad when it's too much. I mean up to a point. Because then it might be just enough for someone. Thank you.

[33:17]

In this spacious tapestry of sound, we're not ahead. We're behind. We're not above. We're below. Like the brush in the painter's hand, we have no idea where we are at all. Just the rain on a leaky roof.

[35:53]

Looking for the spout. Thank you, each of you, for being here.

[37:43]

And thanks for the discussion. It helps me a lot. And I think it helps each of us.

[37:51]

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