Now, but the thing is, there isn't just one way to divide things. You can divide things a number of ways. And you can divide things in more than two parts. But in general, at least at the level we can perceive, we can't handle more than two or three parts. And when you're building systems, the upper limits, six or seven in combinations or something like that, I forget. Mm-hmm. Okay, then there's the question is, is the way we perceive or the way we can divide perception related to the way the world is divided or not divided? No, sorry, I was wondering whether the tape recorder was switched on.

[01:11]

Did I say something interesting? Yeah. Okay, the interesting question is, okay, let's make it simple, is perceiving in a divided and undivided way, this is something that certainly has to do with our perception. We can perceive in a divided way, and we can actually perceive in an undivided way. But does that correspond to a world that exists in a divided and or undivided way? My opinion is, and experience is, yes and no. And my experience and my opinion is yes and no.

[02:22]

It's not just a simple mirroring. The way the world exists and the way we perceive are interrelated, of course, but not necessarily exactly the same. Maybe we could say because perception is an act of separation and the act of separation is a choice. And the choices are affected by skill, talent, culture, history, circumstance. Okay, so the server appears in front of me with something resembling food. Now, the subject-object distinction is that I, as subject, perceive the object, the server.

[03:31]

It was also another subject. And he or she has some kind of pot wrapped in a towel, and this is an object which is not a subject. So we have some distinctions here already. Now, if I stay... If I stay... Okay. Now, to complicate matters slightly, there is also a distinction that we make perceptually between background and foreground.

[04:42]

Now, let me say as a footnote here, I nowhere near have sufficient wisdom or a long enough life to decide anything about which is best. So if I sound like I'm talking about what's best, I'm actually only talking about my preferences. And I have preferences. And my preferences is for a yogic way of perceiving. It's made my life work and it's deeply satisfying for me. But For the most part, this way of perceiving that I treasure is enacted in Western society.

[05:57]

This is sort of being outside convention. It means I'm playing the game by slightly different rules than everyone else. So maybe I just like that, I don't know. Maybe I don't like yogic perception at all, maybe I just like different rules. And I'm afraid that's partly true. But I've tried out a whole bunch of different rules and this is the different rules I like the best. Okay. So... All right. So the background-foreground distinction.

[06:59]

Now, Western culture makes a very strong background-foreground distinction. My own feeling is that there's a lot of psychological problems that are caused by this. But on the other hand, it may produce a very efficient and productive culture. Because I think it could be at least sufficiently demonstrated or you could be persuasive enough to make a case for, you could make a persuasive case for that a background-foreground distinction uses energy in a very productive way. And when you look at the hatred between people in Yugoslavia and so forth, all this fighting that's going on now,

[08:20]

I'll bet that they have basically different ways of organizing their perceptions, perceiving the world, and so they don't trust each other at a perceptual level. And that's probably more basic than their history of shared atrocities and economic inequality. So I think, just another aside, that for the world, this anthropology and travel and so forth, has offered to us is different perceptual world views.

[09:48]

It's necessary to create those of us who can move in a mix And while some teachings and some worldviews and some religions very strongly commit themselves to one mix or another, Or shall we say one unmixed form or another. Buddhism is particularly teaching about getting at the source of the mixes and being able to create your own mix. And so Judy raised one finger.

[10:50]

Okay. I could stop. It's been about 50 minutes or I can Continue a little bit. What should I do? Well, please shift your legs. And dinner will be an hour late. No, I'm just teasing. I think I'm just teasing. So, okay.

[11:58]

So let me just go back to the point. Our culture makes a very strong background-foreground distinction. We screen out We screen out automatically almost everything that isn't foreground and we relegate it to the background. And you can You can see that in, as I've mentioned a number of times, in people's conversations, the way when they're having a conversation with you, they don't hear conversations around them, they don't hear the music in the background, et cetera. It all becomes background noise. And we don't like background noises intruding on our foreground.

[13:02]

And one element of this distinction, Ned Hall distinguishes by saying it's polychronic and monochronic. A sense of multiple times and single times. And a simple distinction would be like the, you can see it in Japanese businessmen, When they're meeting with Germans and Americans, they meet in offices with just one desk and a few chairs. And as soon as the Europeans or Americans are gone, they go out to their desk among hundreds of desks.

[14:30]

Even though they're the president of the company, they want their desk to be in the field of activity. And they're not a bit disturbed by all the input. While Northern Europeans, as I've mentioned before, are the largest consumers of earplugs in the world. I don't think it's a simple matter that you can just say, well, these noises at night shouldn't bother me, I'll take out my earplugs. Because we develop a way of using our energy which, when the background-foreground distinction is altered, it's very disturbing to our energy.

[15:44]

Okay, so here I'm just thinking out loud in a way. Okay. Okay, so, and I don't want this to be too long, so I'll try to go kind of quickly. So the server's in front of me. And I turn the server into my foreground. And everything else becomes background. The room, what else is going on with the serving, it's pretty much in the background. Of course, not completely. That would be impossible virtually.

[16:58]

But for the purpose of perceptual efficiency, it becomes background. So what happens is, in our culture, is the subject-object distinction coincides with the foreground-background distinction. So the object appears out of the background, creates the subject-object foreground, and then disappears back into the background. And I think this is the basic way we perceive and are taught to perceive when our language reinforces and so forth. Okay, so the server is in front of me. And if I see myself feel, sense myself as subject and the server as object, then I'm in a kind of, a bit of a jousting with this person.

[18:26]

What will he or she do? What will I do? And how do we cooperate? And he, she is a little bit invading my territory and I'm a little bit invading their territory. And my immune system, my psychological immune system is recognizing them as other. But I've been well brought up, so I share my candy. Now what are some other possibilities? The server is standing in front of me and I don't so much perceive the server or myself I perceive something the server and I create together.

[19:58]

Now, I've talked about this kind of thing a lot with you, but for me anyway, it's helpful to keep going over it. Okay, now this is actually a rather different way of perceiving in which there's not a feeling of jousting. There's not a feeling of territory. There's not a feeling of being invaded. There can be, but the rules of when you feel invaded are quite different than when there's a clear subject-object distinction. I have to present this partly because to look at these koans and much of Buddhist teaching, you have to recognize that it developed in a different kind of culture and generated a different kind of culture.

[21:14]

It's like the musician's hands which study the violin through studying the violin. Or the body of the way which studies the way. In other words, Buddhism helped create the culture which allows you to study Buddhism as a member of that culture. Now, we are, in Confucius' terms, outside convention. We are outside the cultures which Buddhism developed. So it gives us actually a certain power and special insight into these cultures.

[22:18]

And it gives us the opportunity to use a vocabulary of cultures or modes of being. And when you really see that there are modes of being, then you understand emptiness. John Halifax told the story of the other day of being an anthropologist when she first started studying other cultures. And Joan Halifax has recently told a story when she started to study other cultures as an anthropologist. And she as a Westerner has now studied a Bedouin culture, a North African culture. And when she first had this experience, I think this is correct anyway, And she began to take on the other culture to try to understand the other culture.

[23:56]

She tried to make herself a member of the other culture in a way to observe it. So she was in the process of giving up her own cultural position. And then she actually really couldn't have their cultural position because it wasn't hers. And she ended up in a gap between cultures. And that gap was her first physical experience of emptiness. It was the seed that led her into practicing and teaching Buddhism. So the server is standing in front of me.

[25:26]

And I have the habit of recognizing not subject-object, but recognizing something the server and I create simultaneously. And there can be a kind of jousting in that. And this kind of so-called dharma combat between Jiu-Ju-Ti and Shi-Ji. Jiu-Ju and Shi-Ji. Jiu-Ju and Shi-Ji. Those guys. Obviously, I should stop soon when the translator can't translate anymore.

[26:33]

But I should just finish this little... I'm fine. It's just these words. All right. This little set piece right here. But there's a kind of jousting that can occur, or dharma combat, but it's within the cooperative field that you've generated together. It only exists by generating it together, so it's essentially cooperative to begin with. So she, by circling him, is trying to generate it and then act within that field. But he stays outside the field, doesn't generate it. It's not so much what he says, but can he generate a field in which they experience each other as one?

[27:36]

Or as a one, not two? And it's not so much what he says now, but the question is, can he also produce such a field, where within it you now find yourself as one, as one and not two? Okay. Okay, and then more, in a more developed sense, if you've practiced with seeing, seeing, in other words, practiced with really recognizing that when I see Gerd, for example, Gerd is a construct within my field. So it's not just something Gerd and I generate together, if he were the server, or just sitting across from me. It's also my habit of generating the serving pot, generating everything in the field.

[29:00]

The pot isn't really cooperating so much, but the pot is generated within my field. It's not just a pot within the field. You know, understand what I mean. So, in other words, instead of seeing an object, you see yourself seeing the object. Okay, now we've again talked about that a lot. But what's the fruit of that? The fruit of that is you no longer have a simple background-foreground distinction. You begin to have a middle ground perceptual field. The basic divisions in the world are twos and threes.

[30:03]

Two, of course, is the most basic. Yes and no, dark and light, and so forth. Okay. And basic to Buddhism is the sense of the two truths, or the undivided world and the divided world. But there's always the third, and in Yogacara teaching the emphasis is on the third. And in early Buddhism there were two bodies of Buddha, and in later Buddhism there were three bodies of Buddha. Okay. So that the middle ground, of course, the middle way, the middle ground is the... is a combination of foreground and background.

[31:13]

But it's distinctly different from both background and foreground. And it's where the subject-object distinction disappears. And this foreground-background, when you're... You can't grasp non-dual perception. You can only grasp dual perception. But you can so generate a state of mind which doesn't interfere with non-dual perception. So that while you're looking at a tree, say, you can feel some other kind of perception going on underneath the conscious perception.

[32:23]

I think in psychologically and culturally healthy individuals this is going on all the time and pretty much uninterfered with. And I think what's happening in Zazen, as you begin to, because of the physical difficulty staying in one place primarily, you lose full control of your conscious perception. And other layers of perception begin to function. And you can begin to feel it and it gives you this feeling of malaise or something's going on, you don't know quite what it is. Now, this is all part of creating a middle ground field of perception.

[33:38]

So when the server appears, he doesn't appear out of the background, he appears in a middle ground. And the whole room stays in the middle ground. And there's still a background way back, but much more background and foreground keep entering this middle ground. And this middle ground is most fundamentally sustained by awareness. I think that's enough to give you the idea of what I meant. In other words, we don't have to have just foreground-background perception, we can also have a middle-ground perception that you can begin to intuit and finally mature or develop.

[35:24]

And I wanted to relate this to, or at least try to, perceptual enlightenment, compassion enlightenment, and wisdom enlightenment. But then dinner really would be tomorrow. So, again, We're like these blind turtles, half-blind turtles, grasping the middle ground of this board. Or this koan says, a thousand worlds, a thousand perceptions on a single event. And when you first hear about this, middle ground or, you know, then we have mind ground too, which I didn't go into.

[36:47]

Mind ground, middle ground, foreground and background. You feel like a wild goose or duck or goose trying to pick water out from milk. And as this koan says, although you don't have the fishing pole yet, plant the bamboo now. So I hope we're planting bamboo now. Thank you very much. May our intention equally penetrate every being and place with the true merit of Buddha's way, should all who hence stay undeveloped

[38:01]

Satsang with Mooji No, when you you know that Zen we practice well in China when the Zen school developed it throughout most of the ritual of the institutionalized church of the time

[39:26]

Now, I think some of you feel that what we do is quite, you know, there's a lot of form, if not ritual, to what we do here in Sashin. And you may be right. But anyway, I have to think about it all the time because I'm responsible for getting us to do these things. Even though Chinese Zen, they considered throughout all the ritual, but the essential stuff, Still, China is a culture where, in Confucian Chinese culture, ritual is considered one of the main channels of being.

[40:51]

And of course, you can throw out a lot of ritual in the 9th century, and then you have 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, et cetera, to accumulate a lot more. And then when it came to Japan, the Japanese threw out quite a bit. And Suzuki Roshi And Suzuki Roshi in particular has really only kept what he considers essential in his efforts to bring Zen to the United States and to San Francisco.

[42:02]

So I try to understand what we're doing. Mostly I know it because it works or has worked for me. Yeah. So I don't know exactly where to start, but I'm going to try to feel my way into saying something about this with you. Maybe I can start with a story about my daughter Sally, told a few times. She's 29 now, but when she was quite little, I was asking her to do something or telling her to do something.

[43:21]

And she didn't want to do it. And I became quite outraged, or at least I acted that way. What do you mean, I said. I said, Virginia and I made you. We manufactured you. And I said, and you belong to us. She said, it's too late now. I belong to me. She was real teeny.

[44:22]

I thought, shit. You know, I stepped back in awe and stuck out my tongue. But, of course, we still had some influence on her and still do today. So what I'm trying to get at is the, again, I don't know if it's useful or not, but that the culture in these koans are embedded in. So we can understand better why the third, Dogen says, the third patriarch temporarily called it mind.

[45:24]

The Nagarjuna, he says, provisionally called it the body. So, I mean, we can sort of just gloss over this so we can say, what the heck are they talking about? What do sometimes they call mind provisionally and sometimes provisionally called body? Dogen says the body is the bones and marrow of beyond consciousness and non-consciousness. The body is the bones and marrow of beyond consciousness and non-consciousness. And this koan, this really simple koan about one finger, also talks about the ten body controller.

[46:38]

And wait till you find out what the ten body controller is. No, also in this koan it says, when Jyoti died, he said, as you know, I inherited one finger zen from Tianlong. And throughout my whole life I have not exhausted it. And anyway, he then said sayonara and he died. He didn't say sayonara either.

[47:40]

Maybe you'll say, Auf Wiedersehen. Can we just see Ulrike sitting up in bed? Auf Wiedersehen! And I'll say, Sayonara. She also asked me, is there an enlightenment for those of us who just hang in there? Who are you speaking about? Okay. So anyway, I think it was Xuanzhi said, geez, when he heard about his death, said his finger should be cut off. And these guys were a little loony in it. The other Buddhist schools always referred to Zen people as kind of like bums or something.

[49:18]

They didn't dress properly and do the rougher stuff. And also they mixed with farmers and things like that. And they grew their own food and, you know, Nanue was referred to in this koan too because somebody went by him, saw him doing some work, and they said, why don't you have somebody do that for you? And that's all he did. And this is, in the koan, presented as the same as the one finger. So anyway, Chang Ching said when Zhu Di died, a satisfied man, he didn't need fine food.

[50:34]

And one song, the commentator wrote the commentary of the Shoyuroku. Said, not greedy for fragrant food. He is truly a dragon in a blue pond. Now, such a statement about somebody who was famous for holding up one finger was as strange to the Chinese as it is to us, I'm pretty sure. So what's the point of this?

[52:04]

It's quite strange to come across this in the middle of Koan. It doesn't seem to have any reference to anything else. Suddenly talking about whether he liked fine food or not. What does it mean that he liked fine food? Now let me change the topic a little slightly. I've talked a number of times about Suzuki Roshi's advice to me, perplexing at the time advice to me, to put my mind in my hands. And this is another example of paying attention to these small details. I would say, before you could speak, your mother and father communicated to you in various ways.

[53:25]

As I said, they undoubtedly supported your infant head in their hands, in their hand. And in some way that infant body may still exist alongside your obvious body and you can still feel the imprint and support of your father's hand or your mother's hand. No, no, this is a level of awareness that you probably wouldn't normally come to unless you have practiced zazen, and even then you might not, but you might.

[54:27]

And they also, when you were, you know, whatever you were doing, they rattled your crib and so forth. Probably you understood more of what they were doing than they knew themselves what they were doing. Because you were operating at an intuitive proprioceptive level which they only... an open proprioceptive level on which they were only intuiting. Now, my theory is that we talk our way out of the proprioceptive channel.

[55:44]

And I would say, perhaps overly simplistically, that it goes back to Plato's rejecting the body and poetry and a culture that's memorized. Preferring an ideational culture. I was testing you. Preferring a culture based on ideas. In any case, for us this, what I suppose Mendel would call the proprioceptive channel, stays open even though we learn to speak, but it can be diminished or enhanced.

[56:53]

And my theory is that we don't have in Asian culture a Plato event and so you have this proprioceptive channel even predominates over the language level of being we speak about. And I think one of the satisfactions and even excitement of Zen practice is you open up this channel. And we have to do it to some extent to practice Zen.

[57:58]

And certainly that's the level at which this koan exists. Okay. So, as I said, it was difficult for me to imagine how to put my mind in my hands. And what I... I tried various things, of course, but it wasn't until I really recognized years later that my mind was already in my hands that it became easy. Now, the hands are the particular gift of human beings.

[59:02]

It makes us different from dolphins and other creatures that are intelligent. And in Buddhist culture, the hands are considered to be almost a mirror of the mind. And you can feel some people's hands, and they use them about the same as they do their feet. They're usually cold, thick, and unresponsive. Okay, so a lot of emphasis is put on the posture of the hands in Zazen.

[60:20]

And it's always a major part of all Buddhist statues, what's happening with the hands. Okay, so the standard... One of the standard postures is you put your left hand on top of your right hand. And you overlap the fingers about. Now, if you're left-handed, maybe you should put the right hand over the left. And it's done differently. But in any case, the idea is to put the more less active side of your body on top of the more active. And then you bring your thumbs together in a kind of oval and touch your thumbs together lightly.

[61:28]

Now, it's thought that if the thumbs are too pushed together like this, it means you're thinking too much. And if the thumbs are sort of like that, it means your hand and your mind are too lax, loose. Okay. So the first level of... Well, let me say, first of all, there's another posture, which is you take your thumb of your right hand and put it in the palm of your left hand. And you close your left hand around the thumb. Cut it loosely, and then your right hand around the left hand.

[62:37]

And you pull that up against your stomach. And generally you want your arms going down along your sides. So that's quite a strong position and particularly nice when it's cold out. And for the last several years I've been emphasizing this position mostly. And a few months ago, I went back to sitting this way. As the main posture I use. It's fine to go back and forth. Okay. So at first when you sit this way and you get so that you can keep your thumbs touching lightly and the oval of your hands pretty good, your thumbs have not fallen apart nor pushed up into the air.

[64:05]

This becomes a way to physically monitor your posture. It's a kind of barometer of your state of mind. So if mind and body are really one or deeply interrelated. And if really we also have a body-mind as well as a mind-body, then we need some means to join these or feel the joining of these. So the hands are the main way.

[65:15]

Now, mostly you're just told to keep your hand in a certain posture, and again, as usual, it's not explained. And generally it becomes clear in your experience why you're doing it. But I think in our culture it doesn't always become clear because we don't have this channel so open.

[66:18]

Okay, we can say that the first stage is Basically you're monitoring your mind and your mental and body posture. The second stage is you're threading awareness through body and mind and consciousness and zazen mind. And zazen mind. Okay. Now, what do I mean by this? I think that the simplest way to give you an example is to talk about a dream practice of holding a physical object. And I've mentioned this sometimes, but probably not to all of you.

[67:32]

And if you want to practice at night through the sleeping time, one way you do it is you take a physical object and you hold it while you're asleep. And you can find your old teddy bear if you want, or doll. And babies are practicing. You didn't know it with their teddy bears. So I could take this stick for instance and I could hold it. Sometimes I take two objects and hold one in each hand that are different and see what happens.

[68:39]

But what happens is if you take a physical object that you make a conscious decision to hold on to. Some people carry a little father and balance a little Buddha statue on their forehead or something. I don't think anybody's gone so far as a pole with a ball on it. It's usually a rather wide-based Buddha statue. Yeah, so... What happens is if you make a conscious decision to physically hold something, that level of consciousness that made the decision stays present all night.

[69:56]

Otherwise you drop it. Okay. So what happens is it makes a little kind of conscious tube that stays awake while you're asleep. And it's much more likely to make all your dreams lucid and you can participate in them. Und dadurch wird es also viel wahrscheinlicher, dass eure Träume luzide werden und ihr an den Träumen teilhaben könnt. Okay, so the holding a physical object becomes a kind of like a physical thread that follows you, like in a fairy tale, into the realm of sleep.

[71:00]

Und solch ein physisches Objekt festzuhalten, das wird jetzt so eine Art Faden, das einem folgt im Schlaf, also wie in einem Märchen. And it tends to not only give you a little tube of consciousness into sleeping, it also tends to generally integrate consciousness and awareness and waking mind and sleeping mind. You... Anyway, I can't explain it further than that, but if you get adept at it, you'll find that more and more you're living in all your different states of consciousness. Now this one finger is also this one thread. Now, when you are sitting zazen, and you can maintain, exactly the same thinking applies, when you can maintain the posture of your hand, you begin to maintain a certain level of intention through zazen mind, and also that starts out in your conscious mind.

[72:33]

Okay, so it starts out as a way of monitoring your zazen. And then becomes a way of threading consciousness through zazen mind. In a strange way, it allows you to go deeper and deeper in a zazen mind because you always at the same time feel in touch with this physical thread running through your zazen mind. Okay, that's the second stage.

[73:35]

The third stage is that it begins to be a channel through which you can put things into your zazen. Okay, for example, again, going back to the dream example. Say I decide to sleep with this stick. Okay, and I decide... I want to work on the koan of Jyoti's finger while I'm asleep. So as I go to sleep, I create a feeling of this whole koan or some aspect of it, and I focus it physically on the object and go to sleep.

[74:42]

And if you get a little bit good at it, you can almost always choose what you're going to dream about. Or I can choose to work on the koan while I'm sleeping. This technique of working with your sleep is directly the same as working with zazen mind and conscious mind. And this is part of yogic practice to join together waking mind, dreaming mind, and the mind of deep sleep. Okay. So you can... your mind being in your hands, you can begin to have certain feelings in your hands that will affect your zazen practice.

[76:00]

You can also begin to use your hands as a channel, for instance, to warm your body. It's a kind of controlling station or something like that because you can warm your hands and then spread the warmth up through your body. So the hands become a kind of physical door to the mind when this channel is opened. Okay. Now the fourth stage is your hands begin to be the shape of your mind. When you see somebody in a meeting tapping their finger, you know, or something like that, it's clear their mind is in their hand.

[77:14]

You can see that he's nervous or something and it's getting through all the impediments of the body, because these channels aren't open for us, and it's in the hand. But if such a person can very easily, knowing their mind is in their hand, find their hands resting very calmly, it will also calm their mind, of course. So what started out as a way of monitoring your mind becomes a way of shaping your mind. And if your mudra is good and rounded, your mind will be rounded. Doesn't mean you sometimes shouldn't just sit with your hands completely relaxed or whatever you want.

[78:37]

That's up to you. I'm just saying there's a profound relationship between your hands and your mind. And there's also a relationship between your hands and the mind of other people. Now, Now we're sitting here and sometimes I think it's pretty difficult and of course your legs are hurting, your back hurts, but you somehow find a certain dignity in your posture. And that dignity partly comes from the presence of other people being in the room.

[79:43]

I think if you were sitting at home, you might not... I mean, to sit at home by yourself and do a seven-day sesshin would be quite difficult. The middle of the second morning, you'd be, this is crazy. But if we're sitting with each other, We support each other and we feel some power in our sitting. Where does it come from? Like my daughter Sally said, it's too late now, it belongs to me. So somehow we are able to give each other power that belongs to us. This was true when you were a baby. Your mother and father gave you power which belonged to you. And what you have in a body culture is much more awareness of the way in which we receive nourishment and power and dignity from others.

[81:29]

It belongs to us, but somehow it also arises from others. So again, you may be sitting and you may, even if it's difficult, you find a certain dignity in your posture. You may even feel a certain pride in just being alive. Now, Derrida in grammatology says something like this. A word when it's loosened from its dictionary meaning. Derrida also sagte in seiner Grammatologie, also wenn ein Wort befreit oder gelockert wird von seiner Wörterbuchbedeutung.

[82:49]

A word released from its moorings. Ein Wort, das befreit ist von seinen moorings. Moorings are where you tie a boat up. Von seinen, also tauen. floats on the margins of consciousness. And sinks into our body. And this is in some way in which we, the way we use words in koan study. But also when you are sitting and you feel some dignity in your posture or pride, that arises from sitting with others, really. And yet completely is a discovery of our own power.

[84:01]

You might say that these words or these feelings or its mind playing at the margins of our body. And when you feel this, you're beginning to feel not only the mind in your hands, your mind in your hands, but also your mind in your body. So when we, you know, chanting has always been a kind of mixed blessing for me.

[85:07]

I love hearing it from a distance. Sometimes in the midst of it, here we go again. And my usual mind resists shifting into the mind of chanting. But if I can make the switch, then I just luxuriate in the sound and experience of chanting. But chanting now daily for many years, I have begun to kind of naturally hear the chanting that goes underneath everyone's conversation.

[86:20]

There's a kind of physical presence in chanting, which is less obvious but present in all of our conversation. So when we do things, even walking in kinin and shashu posture, part of these things, as Sukyoshi taught me, It's almost like a kind of telephone line to other people. If you do it, partly it is its exactness. And partly is it that you turn your hand up slightly, which makes it vulnerable or open.

[87:22]

And everyone's doing it the same. And you begin to get used to this kind of physical detail in our posture. It somehow opens you up to other people. To this feeling of dignity or mind on yourself from other people. Or on your breath or on your... even in your state of mind. Now, when we were doing the koan seminar, we were really in the realm of mind.

[88:39]

And in the sashin, as I suggested, we are in the realm of the body. Another kind of language which has its own specific grammar and so forth that I'm trying to make you familiar with. No, I won't try to talk about the ten body controllers, though I have the whole list of them here in my sleeve here. It might be interesting. Tomorrow I might read them to you. It's kind of interesting. Right now I just like to make us, have us be more aware of just what I've been talking about.

[90:00]

And how our body is not so separate from other bodies. And I think sometimes you clearly feel almost everyone in the Sesshin and sometimes some people more than others. The other day I talked about the Christ event, how Christ, Jesus as Christ, changed Western and world consciousness. And you could even talk in German culture, certainly in Western culture, a Goethe event or a Rilke event. These people do change our consciousness.

[91:23]

But you could also talk about your neighbor event, the guy, male or female, sitting next to you. Because this sense of our consciousness... The event of our consciousness, the physical event of our consciousness, is not limited to just great people. It's occurring all the time. And it's the way we find our own nourishment. The way we find our own power and really our own most individual identity. Anyway, this is the teaching of the background, foreground teaching of Zen Buddhism.

[92:28]

So as far as we are practicing zazen, in sesshin I think just pay attention to the way breath threads you together. Thank you very much.

[93:10]

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