Okay, so what I'm emphasizing in this rather simple zazen instruction, simple to remember, and simple really to activate or do but not so simple to do fully. In fact, there's no end to reach the end of doing this fully. Okay, so let's You know, start again with your bringing attention, mixing attention with the body. Attention is one of the purest manifestations of mind. So you're mixing the mind with the body when you bring attention to the body, into the body.

[01:20]

As I said, you're in the craft of awakening the body. And so you're bringing now an awakened body, or the attention you've been bringing to the body, you now bring to the mind. You can come up here if you want.

[02:32]

Yeah, all right. He's got everything under control. I have to. No, come on. It's fine, it's fine. Paul. But you're not bringing it to the contents of mind. You're bringing it to the Space of mind. Or the field of mind. Field of awareness. I'm just trying out various words.

[03:36]

So you can have some sense of... what you're bringing attention to. You can bring your attention to your breath or something like that if you want. That helps physicalize attention. Yeah, and if you bring attention to your breath and the way I'm speaking about now, Then you bring attention to the space of mind itself. Or an all at onceness. You know, I have an image of a Bostonian dog going to Brazil.

[05:05]

It's never been in Brazil before. And it's clearly Bostonian. It says, good morning. That's how in Boston you say good morning. You say good morning. It's like good Morgan, you know. So it says good morning and nobody pays any attention to it. But it would like to have some dog friends. So it just sits in the park and waits. And pretty soon some other dogs come. Yeah, this looks like a nice dog. Somehow I'm Getting at Beate's funny bone.

[06:08]

So pretty soon some dogs gather. But this Bostonian dog has no control over who's coming. He just sits there and waits. Sometimes it's like giving a lecture in a conference. You don't have any idea who's coming. And you sit down like a dog and you wait. And some people show up over this. So you have some kind of image like this in your mind when you're doing zazen. Sorry, I should learn to be more serious. Anyway, so you just have this image of waiting without knowing what's going to happen. In a way, you hold your intention or you hold yourself or hold your intention in this image of waiting.

[07:14]

And you, yeah, see what happens. So something like this is a description of the practice of Shikantaza. So what you're trying to do is Do as little as possible, actually. You're taking or exploring this posture through attention. Developing and refining your attention by bringing it And then you develop your attention and refine it by bringing it into your body. And the same attention you bring into a waiting, a kind of waiting, an image of waiting.

[08:29]

Hold that, have a feeling of holding that in your body and in your breath. And then you let happen what happens. What may happen is... Peter says, you go to your thinking. But if you can not really go into your thinking too much, but keep holding this waiting, then the thinking takes hold of you less. But if you don't get too much into this thinking, but rather keep this image of waiting, or keep this image upright, then you don't get so much absorbed, so not so restricted in your thinking. Sukhirashi describes Shikantaza as sitting with no idea of time.

[09:42]

So if you have no idea of time, a kind of timelessness, you're not getting involved with the contents of mind, even if you start thinking. Or you're somewhat less involved, a little bit detached. The word we use for detachment in Japanese Buddhism is detached yet not separate from. So there's a kind of growing detachment even when your attention goes to your thinking. You're bringing your attention back to this feeling in the body and the breath of waiting. Okay. And one technique that's always useful is to bring attention to the exhale.

[10:59]

And get in the habit of bringing attention to the exhale now and then. And disappear on the exhale. Sukhir, she said something funny like, in living it's more important to die. Our fundamental vow, as I often have said, is to stay alive. And that's what I've tried to teach my daughter, my three daughters, actually. To make conscious this vow to stay alive which is also built into the infant.

[12:14]

And we have another expression in practicing with the idea of death which is to be willing to die yet gladly remain alive. Strangely, the vow to be alive becomes more subtle when we are also willing to die. And in a sense we can say we practice the willingness to die on the exhale sometimes. So as I say, this so important shift of bringing attention, the habit of attention,

[13:21]

out of thinking. Out of the thinking where you establish the continuity of self. I say this so often, it's often a kind of mantra. Until there's this shift of the sense of continuity... resides in the breath and the body. Okay, so now you're making this sense of continuity also, in fact, more subtle by giving up continuity on the exhale. So at first there's a fear of giving up continuity as established in our thinking.

[14:49]

Or a fear of craziness or something. But, you know, we can, through yogic practice, we can accomplish that. But now you've established, the Buddha has established, you've established continuity in the breath and the body. Aber nun habt ihr, der Buddha, ihr die Kontinuität im Atem und im Körper etabliert. Und nun gebt ihr, zumindest manchmal, diese Kontinuität wieder auf in jedem Ausatem. So you start the permanent vacation. Und ihr beginnt also die ewige, die ewigen Ferien. Yeah. feel like you disappear on the exhale.

[15:59]

And then the world comes back on the inhale. And this also is a practice of entering into the Dharma notes. The slowed down pace of our fundamental existence. The kind of metabolism of breath and heart and body. And almost a kind of metabolism of space and time itself. Yeah, it becomes a new location. Or self becomes more like a location.

[17:07]

So this experience of disappearing on the exhale and reappearing on the inhale It's also a kind of actual little rebirth, a ritual of rebirth. And you can feel more now into Dogen's famous statement to complete that which appears. Because you can feel this song of each momentary appearance. And you can feel refreshed in that appearance. And as I've explained before, the technical definition of joy Isn't it funny that there would be a technical definition of joy?

[18:26]

The technical definition of non-referential joy is the joy we feel on appearance. When something surprises us. The Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon? Yeah, or some little tiny thing. So in Shikantaza, in the practice of Shikantaza, bringing attention to all-at-onceness, Or the field of awareness or space of mind. The kind of theater... A kind of theater in which you're just waiting to see what will appear on the stage of mind.

[19:37]

The mind which is now everything within and around you. This is an experiential definition of Nothing but precisely sitting. The sitting is the part I'm describing. The nothing but is the empty stage. Mm-hmm. You know, and it's strangely a little like going to the movies. You know, I think we think of movies as unreal or artificial maybe or

[20:39]

But I think often in movies you have a feeling of some kind of universality or timelessness. I wish I could do that. This is good. Yeah. You know, you see the ocean or a highway or something, and it looks like a kind of highway where anything could happen. And waves come in on the beach the way they might have in ancient times or in the future, we hope. Or somebody's walking down the street in the movie.

[21:42]

And until the plot thickens, you don't know why they're walking down the street. But strangely, you're also engaged in the movie. I mean, we often are engaged in the movie and find ourselves perhaps in tears. And you have the term crocodile tears. Very thick. Watch out for the crocodile. Anyway, sitting in the dark of the theater, these are not crocodile tears. Somehow... Movie can allow us to feel things it's difficult to feel in ordinary circumstances.

[22:46]

So what certain movies do, and I find good movie directors often do, interplay the plot with a kind of timelessness that occurs simultaneously or in between events. So I would say that movies are effective. Not because they're an escape from reality or something like that, though that is an aspect. Because they're a way to present what is real. actually a spiritual state of mind or spiritual experience.

[23:52]

A feeling of timelessness in which we are engaged. Outside our narrative self. Outside of self-referential thinking. And just because of that we can be so engaged sometimes with the film. Now, there's lots of other aspects to movies and films as well. But I find that, again, the best films often engage us in this timelessness this territory where self covers everything, we would say.

[24:59]

Or when self includes everything. Self in the sense that we feel engaged and a participant. And yet it's not our usual narrative or self-referential thinking. So Shikantaza also brings us to this point of And so Shikantaza brings us to this point of timelessness, where anything might happen, and the plot is only hovering somewhere, not yet taken hold of things. So in short, Shikantaza is like going to the movies.

[26:03]

That's my shortest definition of Shikantaza. Can one rewrite a script while filming? Yeah, I suppose if you want to. You can in lucid dreaming. You can rewrite your dream if you like. It's also fun not to. Deutsch, bitte. Deutsch, bitte, Deutsch, bitte. Kann man also sozusagen das Umschreiben, hast du gefragt, kann man, sagt Roshi, man kann es insbesondere bei luzidem Träumen, kann man sozusagen den Traum neu schreiben, sozusagen, das Skript des Traumes. When we're sitting, we're hoping that, you know, by sitting you're rewriting your script. Indem man also sitzt, schreibt man sein Drehbuch neu. But practice... Let me say practice works best when you let Buddha rewrite the script. So you're sitting there saying, oh, great script writer, come. I was sitting on a lake in Minnesota once on a pier. And I had quite a good experience, actually, because somehow the water and the lake

[27:32]

began in some funny way rippling through me. And I began to have the movements going through me that I've also experienced in Qigong practice. And some of our Zen parties dancing. Anyway, finally I was sitting there fairly still. And my friend was who didn't know what to do while I'm doing this obscure thing. He was spread out on the dock like this. And I said, what are you doing? He said, I'm worshipping the great sun god, O Tanmi.

[28:38]

Well, that was the end of my satsang. So, thanks a lot for today.

[28:44]

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