A piece of paper in German or English, I don't know what language you have it in. It might be easier for you if you can see it. So the first one I'd like to discuss is It starts with to cultivate and authenticate. And that's from the Genjo Koan and the second one I forget where it's from. Okay. And the word in Japanese is one word, and it means both cultivate and authenticate.

[01:06]

And the 10,000 things... The 10,000 things doesn't mean myriad or many, it means each specific thing. In other words, each time we look at something, We actually are authenticating the self. Cultivating the self in a certain way. cultivating and authenticating consciousness. Now here I'm speaking about consciousness and self as Dogen means them.

[02:12]

Like I said yesterday, what body is Dogen dropping? What self is Buddhism interested in us being free from? It's not the Jungian self, it's not many of the ideas we have about self. The self that Buddhism wants us to be free from, is the self which is the creature of consciousness. Creature means like an animal or anything. It's something that, in a sense, Swims in consciousness.

[03:31]

And is dependent upon the water of consciousness. And sometimes I say the fish of the self. But I try to not say that because then when I say it I can't say that the fish of the self is not always selfish. It doesn't work in German. Yeah, sure it doesn't. It's only an accident in English. So the medium of self is consciousness. Now, I don't have time to establish what is meant by consciousness. I definitely can do what I think. His consciousness from a Buddhist point of view, but I think it also is neurobiologically supported.

[04:46]

Okay. Anyway, so basically it means to see the world through consciousness is delusion. The job of consciousness is to make the world predictable. And we want the world to be predicted. As I say, when we go out into the garden, we want the trees in the same place they were earlier today. Yeah. But they're still treeing, even if they're in the same place. So consciousness doesn't allow us to notice the the non-repeatable uniqueness of each moment.

[05:47]

And consciousness conveys self-referentiality to the world. This is one of the two truths of Nagarjuna. Das ist eine der zwei Wahrheiten von Nagarjuna. The conventional truth. We have to live in this conventional truth. Die konventionelle Wahrheit, in der müssen wir leben. But if you think this conventional truth is reality, then it's imaginary. Wenn wir aber glauben, dass diese konventionelle Wahrheit die Realität ist, dann ist das eine falsche Vorstellung. As Uli... pointed out earlier. So to know it's conventional is to know it's also a kind of delusion. Okay, but then he says, for the 10,000 things to come forward and cultivate and authenticate the self,

[06:50]

It's realization, right? Okay, now... As I've said to you yesterday, I'm interested in the craft of practice. So I'd like to bring in what I would call the craft of yogic seeing. And what is implied here? Jijo Ji Jiao in the case 20 of the Shoyoroku, says, just hold to the moment before thinking. Just hold to the moment before thought arises.

[08:10]

No, you know, in my junior high school, in my grammar school, in my university and college, no one ever told me to hold to the moment before thinking. You know, Gregory Basin used to say, it's very hard to teach in America. Gregor Basin said it's very difficult in America to learn. It was in the 60s and 70s. He said, to whatever you say to them, they say, man, yeah, yeah. It's a she, right? It's a she. Gregory is a he. Definitely a he. And he said, whatever you teach, they say, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you say something that's... completely the opposite of how they function. And they say, yeah, man, good.

[09:19]

That's great. And they don't get it at all. Yeah. I remember... I heard somebody in the Denver airport once say in the 60s, like, [...] like. You don't have to translate that. Anyway, so when I hear something, when one hears something like, Hold to the moment before a thought arises. I think it should blow us away. Just that someone could say it. means somebody must be able to do it.

[10:26]

Otherwise they wouldn't have thought of it. What kind of person holds to the moment before thought arises? He says, anyway, just hold to the moment before thought arises. Look into it. And see not seeing. And then let it go. Well, this is prescriptive and descriptive... a pre-scripted description of Dharma practice. Okay.

[11:29]

Now, to give you a sense that this is not so far away from your own experience, we can start again with the phrase I gave you, to pause for the particular. Or to pause for the pause. Yeah. And... And when you bring your attention to the particular, to a single person, then immediately bring your mind to the field of consciousness. Now, up to about a year ago, I just let... assumed that when people practiced, this would develop for them. But about a year ago, I decided to actually make it a specific practice.

[12:32]

Because it does happen to you through practice. It just happens. I mean, if you sit and practice mindfulness and stuff like that. But to notice it and develop it, I found I'd better point it out. So, again, it's a paratactic noticing. I just notice, I don't think about it. Notice and then I feel the field of mind. Notice and then the field. And I often find it's useful to use doorways, thresholds, entrance. Yeah.

[13:41]

So whenever you come to a door, you just make use of it. My teacher showed me, he never told me, but now I tell people. He showed me that whenever he goes through a door, he stepped through the door with the leg nearest the hinge. You don't have to do it. You don't have to do that. When I mention it, then I see people going to a door and then they do a little Dharma dance to get the right foot going through. That's not necessary, just you're aware of which foot. How do you bring awareness to your activity?

[14:42]

This is one way to do it. So you can also use a threshold to... Stop thinking. And just feel the room. And then go in the room. Now, if you have lots of doors you go through, after a while it becomes a homeopathic habit. Small doses of practice have a big effect. What you're doing is you're beginning to shift from left brain dominance to right brain dominance, if we put it in those kind of terms.

[15:43]

You're no longer identifying... You're no longer identifying with the contents of consciousness, you're identifying with the field of consciousness. That's a major shift, to say the least. I say you're shifting from consciousness to awareness. Okay. Now, When you have this feeling of just the field of mind, and when things seem to come forward, and then they cultivate and authenticate another kind of self, not the same self, as in the first phrase.

[16:52]

It's a bit like, you know, in dreams, if you have lucid dreams, in the dreams, things come forward. The dream identifies itself. You don't convey the self to it. Anyway, it's something like that. So if you begin to weave awareness or non-discursive... awareness into consciousness, by interrupting our usual scanning process, then you begin to feel like everything is appearing And coming forward.

[18:01]

Okay, now that's enough on that just to give you a feel for what Dogen's talking about. Yeah. Because it really does feel different. And it really does cultivate and authenticate this aliveness in a different way. It's a little bit, you know, we're born with the minds of waking, dreaming, and non-dreaming deep sleep. I call them the birth minds. And through practice you develop generate a fourth mind that you're not born with.

[19:08]

A wisdom mind. Meditation and Buddhism is all about developing this fourth mind, which isn't just one mind. Now, I've mentioned the word scanning several times. A funny word that people who study Visual processes uses saccadic. And a bad word when people start to study these processes is psychotic. Yeah, not psychotic. No? That too. That too. What does that mean? Anyway, it's spelled S-A-C-C-A-D-E, but it's pronounced like it was saccad, like the fish.

[20:20]

So we scan about three times or more a second. Usually people's faces. And around the eyes, particularly in proportion to the face, they've been able to measure what people do. The eyes are doing this, but the brain is registering something like it was a... continuous picture. Like when you see a movie, you don't register the momentariness. And the research has shown there's even a little buffer which stores visual information for about half a second. from the scanning process.

[21:32]

So actually what you're getting is little shards, little minute pieces of visual information, and you're putting them together. Okay. So let me leave that aside for a minute. Okay. The continuous practice which actualizes itself is no other than your continuous practice right now. Now the key word there is now. Yeah. What does he mean by now? And that's why I spoke about the scanning process.

[22:38]

Now, Yuan Wu, who is the compiler of the Blue Cliff Records and one of the most... trustworthy voices in Zen, said, once you have understood the essence of the way, matured and developed the gist of the way, The gist is like the essence. the essence of the way, then practice continuously and allow the embryo of sagehood to develop and mature.

[23:40]

Enlightenment, I don't care. Good guys, the embryo of being a good guy. Yeah. Okay. Now again, this is not so different in what we're talking about, the dynamic of how phrases work in us. And in Buddhism, the universe, the multiverse, the cosmos, the cosmetics, are not, it's not a thing. It's called tathagatagarbha. And tathagatagarbha means thus coming, thus going embryo womb. All of this is simultaneously an embryo and a womb coming and going.

[25:02]

Now, this is a description of everything, and it's all at onceness that you can practice, that you can enact. Das ist eine Beschreibung von allem gleichzeitig, das du praktizieren und in dem du handeln kannst. Okay, so again, Yuan Wu says, once you have understood the essence of the teaching. Und nochmal Yuan Wu sagt, wenn du die Essenz der Lehre verstanden hast. Practice continuously without breaks. and allow the embryo of sagehood to develop and mature. Again, just a statement like this is mind-boggling. What? I'm feeling pregnant.

[26:09]

That's a, you know, I always hope there is rebirth because Not that I'm interested at all, but I'd like to come back as a woman. There's some things I've missed. Okay. But just the idea of continuous practice is kind of mind-boggling. I mean, look how hard it is to have attention continuously on the breath. But in fact, it's not so difficult. We already exhibit many examples of continuous practice. I find it very difficult to shift from the way

[27:12]

I was taught to use the knife and fork to the way Europeans use the knife and fork. And most of us are aware of our posture all the time. You're aware of how you're sitting right now. You don't have to bring attention to it. Your posture is your attention. And most of us, I think, are even aware of our posture while we're sleeping, on the left or right or on our back or stomach. Die meisten von uns sind sich sogar ihrer Haltung bewusst, wenn sie schlafen, rechts oder links. Unsere Haltung ist tatsächlich eine verwirklichte, ununterbrochene Praxis. Also der erste Satz, der erwähnt, which actualized itself, the embryo of sages, is no other than your continuous practice right now.

[28:46]

But he's got a very special definition for now. He says the now of this kind of practice, which actualizes itself, is not originally possessed by the self. It may be sometimes possessed by the self, but when you see that, you can start freeing. the now from the self. And then he says even the word now doesn't even exist before this continuous practice. Now, again, we think of the present as a container. In which things happen.

[29:57]

In which we're all separate. We don't immediately feel that we're also simultaneously connected. As... Norman said when he started, we're all falling together at the same time. It's beautiful when you feel that, just now. We're all falling together. Luckily at the same speed. This afternoon we're all going to open our parachutes and we're all going to... Off in different directions. Floating off into space. On the train to Amsterdam. Like that. Okay. So what is this now?

[31:07]

This knife edge of the present. Because again, as Norman said, it's always falling away. The present has no duration. Instantly it's past. As I questioned as a kid, there's one minute to twelve. There's half a minute to twelve. There's half a second to twelve. Then there's half a second after twelve. So why do we have an experience of duration? It's entirely created by us. And we create our own duration.

[32:12]

The first time I talked about this was in Rostenberg. I believe Christian was there. And these little tiny insects were getting caught in the dome of this point of this building, and they were kind of flying around, kind of half alive. Yeah. These little insects with their, you know, multifaceted eyes are creating their own, you know, And there's no externality to their present. You can't photograph it. It's an externality. It's a present in which they live. A prison?

[33:16]

A present. A prison, yeah, a present. In which they live, which has no outside. And we don't know what the duration, they may live only one season, but we have no idea how long one season is to them. There's all these different presents floating here. And even, you know, Sophia is, you know... You remember how long your childhood was? Yeah, it was half your life. Yeah, a big part of it. Sophia's living in that time now, and we're living in a different time. And yet, if we change the way we sequence things, we can begin to have again the time and space of the child.

[34:23]

start the way we sequence things in a sequence, then we can start going back to childhood. So each of us is in a different ripening time, even if we're adults. And for the moment, falling together at the same speed. Now, this now is generated by us. individually and mutually generated. And, you know, We can call it a no-reference-point space. Because, you know, this is moving, it's just moving slower than us. Everything is moving.

[35:28]

And when everything is moving, there's no reference point. And you can experience that. There's no actual reference point. This is one understanding or entry into emptiness. And the experience of this present, which you are generating, whether you intentionally do it or not, Yeah, I mean, you may think you're not doing it, but you're not doing it, as Norman said earlier, is a doing it. So the Buddhist adept is one who feels and participates in generating the present. In which all things come forward. Yes, again, Dieter explains somebody's feeling for that in the discussion yesterday.

[36:42]

And feels like you're discovering something. I mean, we don't want to make that philosophical because this is not a practice of uncovering. And that got Chinese Buddhism into a lot of trouble because you have Buddha nature, original mind, etc. It's not uncovering, it's a generating. But you actually are generating the present and duration in which you function. Now, most of the implications of that I'll leave to you. And what it means to continuously have the feeling As a continuous practice, that you are in a non-external space, that you are in a non-external present, that you are moment by moment generated,

[38:00]

This glass is only its use. If I throw it out on the hillside, it's molecule fodder. Fodder is what animals eat. Futter. Molecule footer. It's just going to sit out there and turn into molecules. It's a glass in the present as we use it. Yeah. So... Yes, but we also treat it conventionally as a glass and I put it in the cupboard and I don't want it to break and I wash it, etc. Yet, wisdom is to know and experience that you're generating the present. Dogen puts it, to complete that which appears.

[39:19]

Now we can read this again. Jetzt können wir das nochmal lesen. Die fortdauernde Praxis, die sich selber verwirklicht, ist nichts anderes als deine fortdauernde Praxis genau jetzt. Das Gewahrsein, dass dieses jetzt erzeugt wird. And it's not originally possessed by the self. And when you possess it by the self, it all collapses. So this is also a way to talk about selflessness. Or non-selfness. Because it's not that you have this troublesome self that you get rid of. If you change the world in which the self functions, you take away the medium for the fish of self.

[40:40]

And then it lies gasping on ego beach. Yeah. Yeah, but sometimes you give it a little water and it swims and it's happy and then you take the water away and... then word now, what he means by now, does not exist without this kind of continuous practice. The present in which Buddhas exist, now or 2,500 years ago, is this now which we generate. And when you generate, when this now is generated, This is called the actualized moment.

[41:51]

And is the seed of all Buddhas. And is in fact the practice of all Buddhas. And When you generate this present, all Buddhas become Buddhas by your practice. Suddenly know what the word means. You see how much Dogen is in something like this, a few sentences. That you have to bring a great deal of your practice to it. to have it come alive. Okay. So may we have a stretch break and then we stretch our minds or bodies with Norman. Thank you for being patient through this riff.

[42:50]

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