You know I do this because I guess it's my way of being alive. But sometimes I'm perplexed by whether I'm just flailing my arms around in the air or this is sometimes useful. And I know many of you tell me it's useful. Sometimes in the present and sometimes at some later time you say it was useful. Useful in a real way, not just, you know, convenient. And sometimes some of you say, I don't understand, but I'm not good enough to understand this, and I said, but what did you experience?

[01:05]

And then they tell me what they experienced, and they don't understand what they experienced. But that's good and calm at some point. And some of you say, oh yes, I liked your lecture, but I don't feel it. Yeah, I don't think... I think liking it is okay. Maybe later the liking allows it to penetrate. But I don't... Liking sometimes is a way of, oh, it's just another lecture. For me, each lecture is a kind of... jumping into an abyss, you know. Something, not so dramatic, but something. And it's in these little things, like circling the tray, that I see your understanding.

[02:14]

And it's in little things like that, that also you can practice, enact your understanding We accumulate. I mean, who we are, each of us is what we've accumulated. And we bring all that to the present. And it's so difficult to You know I try and maybe I succeed sometimes, but actually my experience is it's so difficult to use words in ways which I want to throw out the old meaning, the usual meaning of the words.

[03:22]

And I also worry that sometimes I make this practice sound too unusual or special or something big. None of the times I feel I make it too accessible or too ordinary maybe. I mean, not ordinary to like the way we usually think about things, because it is a gate. We do say Dharma gates. It is a Dharma gate or Dharma threshold, and you need this heat, summits, patience to go across this threshold. But what's on the other side? I don't know. It's hard to say. I mean, am I promising you some kind of cornucopia? and then the horn is empty. Empty, yeah, empty. Yeah, I think we could say, to me, I'd say maybe that at least two important events of the last century or so are maybe Freud and LSD.

[04:43]

Because Freud made us aware of the unconscious, and our world simply would be different if we didn't have this sense that we aren't conscious of everything we accumulate. And LSD, psychedelics, of course Freud, didn't Freud use opium? Wasn't it opium that he used? I mean, he wasn't so innocent. He wasn't just sitting there thinking. And he used a meditative technique of free association, working with the fourth skanda. And with LSD and psychedelics, peyote, masculine, etc., we suddenly realized it's not just an unconscious... It's not just what's hidden from us, it's not just our unconscious, what we've accumulated but aren't aware of, but also there's a way in which our perceptions are locked into a model.

[06:00]

And I'm not recommending anybody take LSD, particularly peyote or mescaline or something like that, but what it did societally is make clear that Perception flows in sound and light and so forth. There's a world of energy and detail that isn't there when we see a conceptual outside, only when we take the outside in. And I think we're always trying to make Buddhism into a religion or some kind of experience that falls into the categories of religion or spirit or soul.

[07:07]

And I think it'd be better to think that what Buddhism is talking about is not something in any category we're familiar with. That when you try to turn Buddhism into a religion, I don't mean that we bow and all that stuff, but turn it into something that's comparable to the experiences of Western religions, you're probably doing yourself an injustice. You're probably putting a room around yourself. And most of us look for Buddhist experience, I'm afraid we do, in the categories of consciousness. And that's what Freud basically did. I mean, where else would Freud look? He looked for, he sensed something, he saw people's afflictions. He also was, seems to have been, I don't know,

[08:13]

his head was somehow, somewhat out of his culture, and he looked at it. But he was unable to look outside the category of consciousness, because unconsciousness is a category of consciousness. So basically he looked in what wasn't conscious, but could be conscious. And it can be an extraordinary experience if you've done therapy, and you begin to have a feeling of what you've repressed or what you've not seen is part of your world, there can be suddenly, walking on the street or something, an experience of wholeness, of completeness that is contagious. What's interesting is experiences of wholeness are contagious and begin to make other things feel whole. It may not last. Maybe it lasts. And I think that psychotherapy isn't religion and it isn't philosophy either.

[09:37]

It falls into some other category, a new category, a new category of the way we know ourselves that you do it damage if you try to put it in some other category than its own new category. At least that's what I'm saying just now. Now, it's very difficult to look outside of categories of consciousness and awareness. In Buddhism, sometimes we say awareness itself is a prison. You're imprisoned in your own awareness, not even consciousness. So, you know, one thing I can do is try to interface us with some of these statements in Buddhism. According to Keizan, he comes before these fellows, this old boys club.

[10:48]

We chant every morning. But it doesn't remain such a club. He said something like, our body and mind are ceaselessly moving. Okay? Our body and mind are ceaselessly moving and appear as skin and flesh, bones and marrow. Okay? This is all right. But let's... Our body, what's he talking about? Our body and mind are ceaselessly moving. Okay, they appear as skin and flesh, bone and marrow, and function as sensation and perception, activity and consciousness.

[11:58]

and function as sensation and perception, activity and consciousness, and sometimes appear as peach blossoms and green bamboo. Oh. Yeah. What is it? Deshan, this famous Zen master who burned the Diamond Sutra after meeting with Lungtang. And he was an expert on the Diamond Sutra, supposedly. There's lots of good stories about him. He later was the guy who brought the stick into Zen. I still leave it around, but I don't hit anybody anymore. Nobody likes it. he went to visit Lungtan and they had quite a meeting you've arrived at Lungtan when Deshan said who have I met and then they talked from the afternoon they talked well into the night

[13:29]

And finally, it was quite late, and Longkang said, that's maybe time to go to bed. And Deshan, Tokusan in Japanese, Deshan opened the bamboo blind, and it was pitch black outside. He turned back and says, it's dark out here. And so Lungtan took one of these paper lanterns. There's some things I'd like to do here. At a heiji, when the old rosh traipses along up the stairs early in the morning before all the monks come up, his jisha carries a paper lantern with a candle in it. And he's kind of stumbling along in his robe, drooling, you know. And the sky's carrying this. It's kind of great, you know. I want to be like that. So he gives him a paper lantern.

[14:34]

Lung Tan gives him a paper lantern. And so he steps out. And as he steps out, Lung Tan blows it out. At that moment, supposedly, he was enlightened. It's like the punchline of a joke. All these stories, that punchline, boom, Peter's enlightened, boom. And Sukhya, she says, Dogen says, we don't know whether he really enlightened or not. How do we know? We can't test it. All we know is that the next day he burned the Diamond Sutra. Does that enlighten? But he also said, a single, the next day he said to Long Tongue, a single hair of Peter's in vast space. Hmm. Or also, Agio and Dogen, Dogen said in a lecture one year of lecturing like this, Dogen said, myriad holes, a single hair pierces myriad holes.

[15:42]

Okay. And Agio supposedly also got the punchline and was enlightened during the lecture. And later in the evening went to see Dogen, and as he went in the room he said to Dogen, I don't ask about a single hair, but what about myriad holes? I don't ask about a single hair, but what about myriad holes? And Dogen said, gone through, pierced. an angel bowed. Okay, so I tell you this story about this llama bathing in the dark, or Rinpoche bathing in the dark. How do we come up against this story? How do we... What, in what we've accumulated living these years, of this story, why in both these stories of

[16:56]

Lungtan and Deshan and Ejo and Dogen is a single hair. I don't ask about a single hair. A single hair in vast space. A single hair pierces myriad holes. What are we talking about? This doesn't fall into the categories of consciousness. We're not in categories, we're not in The model, I mean, our thinking is so caught in the model of, probably the most powerful thing is the model of the individual, the independent individual, and the model of an outside that we live in, that we inhabit. Not an outside that inhabits us, but an outside we inhabit. And it's so hard to get our thinking. I mean, no matter what kind of genius Freud was or how much opium he took, he still thought in the categories of consciousness.

[18:00]

Buddhism is saying, hey, can you think, can you be, can you think non-thinking, can you be not in the categories of consciousness? What could this mean? And I, you know, I historically appreciate phrases like, be here now, you know. But I sort of don't like them either. Be here now. I mean, and I, it makes me hate to talk about the present all the time because I can't get you a feeling of this many layered present which pierces myriad holes. Some other category, what can I help for? But here we're engaged, and I think there's a kind of elastic understanding that we stretch among ourselves, stretch between ourselves.

[19:19]

Sometimes it stretches us. David Abram has a piece, somebody that you may know, his book, The Spell of a Centrist, and he's a good friend, and me and his wife, I like him very much, and he writes beautifully. And he talks about coming back from cultures in the Far East where it's a different pace, it's a different, different dimensions. And he tried to bring himself back into that while being here. And so he imagined a big, he sat with his eyes closed, sat in darkness and he imagined a big bubble, balloon of everything, his whole past.

[20:34]

And he kept making this balloon or bubble bigger and bigger. with everything he could think of from his past, anticipations, hopes, events, etc. And then he made another bubble, and he made these bubbles to try to share something he experienced. So he just created this as his own practice, but a practice he could share. So he made another bubble of everything he Wanted in the future, anticipated his fears, what he hoped for, etc. He made these two big bubbles and then he let them leak slowly into the present. Until they disappeared. And then he opened his eyes and he found the world settled on itself. Now we can say something like that, you know, we can speak about this everything in its place where there's no good, it's not about doing any good, it is goodness.

[21:45]

And it's not about helping anyone. Nobody needs any help. So you get out of these categories of consciousness, which are important, but it's not the whole of our world, through this dharma gate, this dharma threshold, where the world rests in itself. And again, let's not speak about the present, but the presence of the present. The presence of the present is your experience of the present. And you start out with the presence of your body, you're ceaselessly moving. You can start out with your own presence and you can begin to extend that to peach blossoms and green bamboo. And at some point the entire present

[22:48]

I don't know how to put it, coincides with your presence of the present. It's as different from the usual way of looking at things as it is different to see a tree from the outside and to feel you're seeing a tree from the inside. I'm not saying I see trees from the inside, but I'm saying it's some kind of difference like that. Or the difference of seeing people always in terms of their Buddha nature, not in terms of their personality. That's a big difference. In Time Magazine or someplace, Bodhidharma is quoted, Bodhidharma, Dalai Lama is quoted as saying, yeah, I say there's no ancient past, but still, Time Magazine isn't quoting Bodhidharma these days. I tried to interview this guy, but he just sat there. I cut off my arm.

[24:04]

The Dalai Lama says that empathy is a taste of Buddha nature. When you experience empathy, you're actually tasting Buddha nature. And I like that because I think that we have to find all these things, these teachings of Buddhism, in our ordinary experience. Empathy is something we sometimes feel. It's not necessarily how we always feel. We don't always empathize as the first way we feel. But it's possible. You know it's possible. And what's interesting is what happens when you do something all the time. If you empathize sometimes, and most of the time compare, the empathy is sort of a nice feeling, but it's the thinking tied up in comparison which leads your life.

[25:20]

It's the boss, it's got the reins, But when empathy is 99% of the way you feel, and comparative thinking is somewhere in there occasionally, something else is the boss. Something else begins to happen, and I can't explain exactly. It's the difference, you know, sort of the difference between the different model here is instead of trying to which patterns do I have that are good, which patterns do I have that are bad, let me improve my patterns. Oh, this is okay. No, no, certainly we should do this. But can we also just stop patterns, remove patterns altogether, good and bad patterns?

[26:28]

Then what kind of world are we in? It's not imaginable, because we can only imagine in the categories of consciousness. So Freud practiced, let's go back to Freud, he practiced the meditative technique of associative thinking and free association, he called it, and he, through that linking, got people, got a lot of stuff uncovered, like gluey strings, that go back to things when you don't... I mean, basically he's working with the fourth skanda. He suspends consciousness, which immediately eliminates the things that are unconscious. But if you're in the fourth skanda, things that are unconscious will come up. As soon as you become conscious in the ordinary sense, they go away again, just like in dreams go away as soon as you become conscious. So we could say what we're practicing is non-associative thinking.

[27:37]

Non-association. So you have to have a certain technology of Zen practice. Again, this is one of those things that's, you know, let's say there's mindfulness Buddhism and there's meditative, or meditation even itself isn't a good word. They're like apples and oranges. I mean, certainly meditation is a kind of mindfulness. But the vastness of what the sutra and the koans are taking about is simply not accessible through mindfulness practices. Mindfulness practices make it possible. Mindfulness takes the karmic paving off your life. Okay, so you have some technology, let's talk about technology of sitting.

[28:44]

So you, I talked about it the other day a bit, and you come in, you get up on the platform, why not? I mean, this isn't the greatest of all places, but here at least you can practice sometimes. And this practice, as I said last night, is everywhere present. It fills the universe, I said, why not? What else? So it doesn't matter whether you're here or somewhere else, this is just convenient if you want to make use of it. Don't we have this platform? You can use it if you want. And if your motivation is to realize yourself, realize this world outside the categories of consciousness, then you have a deep movement into Spiritual, religion, you don't know what it is. Another category. A category outside of consciousness. You climb up on this platform to see if you can taste a little bit. Some category, some way, outside of consciousness.

[29:45]

And if some of us get stuck with a deep motivation for some reason, I don't know why, okay, then you climb up on a cushion and you sit there. Oh, another chance to get outside the categories of consciousness, which drive me bloody mad anyway. At least drive some of us bloody mad. Just make use of the categories of consciousness, but don't live in them for God's sake. No, for Freud's sake, no. For Freud's sake, that's good. I like that. Don't live in the categories of consciousness for Freud's sake. This is a new epigram. Okay, so you sit there and there's some changes. I don't know, you know, if I observe myself going to sleep, there's... I don't know why, I sometimes go, I do that, I don't know why.

[30:50]

I know when I do that, I'm about to go to sleep. And then I start breathing differently, and I notice the different breathing, and then images start appearing. I can do this standing up talking to somebody, believe it or not. And Marie Louise notices it. She'll say, you're asleep, but no. So I'm sitting in a chair talking, and she'll be talking to me, and I'll be having another conversation. I'll be answering her, but I want to go to sleep, so I'm just... And there's a whole other conversation. I feel it as answering her, but when I bring it to the surface, it's bloody nonsense. Isn't that right? So this other kind of category of thinking appears that doesn't relate to the present, the usual present at least, and images start appearing.

[31:50]

Well, in a similar way, there's a similar kind of pattern because physiologically Zazen is like falling asleep and into relaxation. That's why you can stay in one position. You know, you can stay in one position for hours while you're asleep. You can stay in one position for hours when you're in zazen. But if you're in consciousness, you can't. You start to hurt and you get tired and you want to move and so forth. But you can just put your body down and fall asleep. So you just want to get to that place in zazen, the technology of zazen. You can, in effect, let your body go to sleep while you stay awake. and stay upright if possible. I blame it on spring fever. This session I've been quite sleepy. But there's a similar kind of shift.

[32:52]

Suddenly the breathing changes and images appear. And then because you're awake you can stay with the breathing and you can dissolve the images can move out of the first skanda then, you're out of the first skanda already, and you can go into associative skanda, and then you can put, simply take disturbing thoughts or interesting thoughts, you just put them aside. You don't repress them, you just put them aside. And you move into the third, second, first skanda. maybe just form itself. Now there's no associated thinking. What happens is wisdom messengers begin to appear.

[33:59]

There's some kind of perception, there's some kind of feeling. But wisdom messengers, it's almost like wisdom messenger waiting in a room to the left or to the right or down, sometimes below and above and front and back. And there's a little difference whether this area around us, it's not just a simple circle, it's a really much more layered space. There's a little difference whether it's near or far space. And wisdom messengers start to appear and practices things you've known, suddenly they come together in a new kind of coherency. Or you get a taste of something, you get a taste of a single hair piercing myriad holes. Where did it come from? I mean, suddenly, oh yes, the world rests in itself. Now after a while, now

[35:10]

Okay, so here we are. We've created a non-associative mind, not in the categories of usual consciousness, neither in the categories of unconscious nor consciousness. So we're in a different territory than Freud ever imagined existed. And where does it lead? What does it do? What happens? Well, one is, in this space, I mean, sometimes your whole body might become transmluent and flow into a white Tara. I mean, it's like a body, but the body is flowering into white ivory. Or it can be our black Vajradhara. So then you really do feel the body and mind ceaselessly move, sometimes appearing as flesh and skin and bones and marrow, sometimes functioning sometimes as peach blossoms and green bamboo or white tars.

[36:23]

Now it's not so easy to notice this. It happens and we don't notice it because the categories of consciousness say, well, that was a funny feeling. but when you kind of take away these shapes and models we have for knowing. It's like as if there's a Buddha field, you know, karma paves over the presence of the present. Dharma plows, makes fertile the presence of the present, and mindfulness helps plow or make fertile the presence of the present, the many layered, myriad layered present, and wisdom messengers

[37:31]

arrive not because one, you notice them, and two, because they can be heard and felt. They can be noticed and heard and it's a fertile field. There's some reason for them to appear. And when these wisdom messengers start appearing after a while, it's not just messengers, the rooms they came from begin to appear. And your whole sense of presence begins to extend and widen. Now, if you practice, if you're doing your zazen with somehow basically comparative thinking, conceptual thinking, categories of consciousness as your implicit way of thinking, And if more than that, you believe in these categories of consciousness, and more than that, if you attach your identity and destiny to these categories of consciousness and keep imagining a future in the categories of consciousness, the wisdom messengers don't appear.

[38:41]

You just don't get the point of these cultures. You think you understand, but they don't reach you down to the earth and up into the heavens. What category of world is this? single hair pierces myriad holes. Thank you very much.

[39:22]

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