Now I don't know if you will feel how important I feel this yogic practice of time is. I don't know if you will feel how important it is to me that you understand this yogic concept of time. conceptually important, conceptually because it allows you to notice that other conceptions are less real or less able to be experienced. And experientially important because if you do practice it, I think you'll find yourself engaged and embedded in the world in a much more satisfying and nourishing way.

[01:16]

Oh, Okay. But I hardly know what I said. Anyway. And experientially important because I think you'll find if you can engage your experience and engage the world, which we can create a technical term, which is not mine alone, of embeddedness Embeddedness I'm using to mean that you feel connected with the phenomenal world.

[02:20]

The out-there-ness of the world. The in-here-ness of the out-there-ness of the world. Yeah. And you'll find this, I think, you'll find this satisfying and nourishing. And will contact your eyes suffering. And will contact your eyes suffering. In other words, well, we'll come back to that.

[03:38]

So what I'd like us to do this afternoon is after I speak about this for a little bit and depending how long We take a break. And then, as we often do on Saturday afternoons, have small groups. Okay. So I spoke before lunch about bodily time. And finding a way to locate yourself in bodily time. And in your metabolism heartbeat. breath beat and so forth and that takes a while and maybe one of the keys is again this word nourishment I mean say you're walking down the street

[04:59]

and you feel jittery. But if you try to walk in a way that at a pace that you feel nourished by walking, then you're probably in finding yourself located in bodily time. I mean, I don't think my daughter, youngest daughter, would like my saying this in what's public. But in the middle of her heart and homesickness, she laid down under a tree and identified with the sky. And the sky had a kind of presence and permanence, or it's there, just undisturbed.

[06:31]

That made her feel better. So I, several times I've spoken to her since. I said to her, remember the sky is your friend. And such things do help us. Okay. Okay. So bodily time. Now contextual time. This is very Latin word for us.

[07:41]

Really? Yeah. Okay. It's mental not so bodily. You don't have context in Germany. Contextual? So we'll see what you make. Okay. We could have sight-time, then you could have sight-sight or something like that. Sight-like places. No, I'm just kidding. Okay. So contextual time is like, okay, maybe I'm in bodily time now. And I feel I'm somehow in the pace or rhythm of my metabolism. And I feel pretty located in that. And I don't feel I need anything. There's a completeness.

[08:49]

But now I'm in this situation. This context. And this changes things. And the more I feel the context, the more my bodily time is either compromised or extended. And when we leave this afternoon, sometime this afternoon, you'll bring your experience of bodily time into the context of the street or the automobile or whatever.

[09:54]

And I find it useful to kind of notice that shift. And not think of it as clock time. Yeah, I mean... We actually do these things all the time. But what I'm suggesting is noticing them and then bringing attention to them makes it something different. And contextual time We could also call resonant field time.

[11:10]

To feel a resonance with the field you're in. Now one of the problems we have here of Buddhism basically says there's no truth. Except there's an exception made for Tom because there's a few for him. Okay. And Tom mentioned to me the other day something about transcendence. And I said, there's no transcendence. And he didn't say, but one could say, shucks, what am I doing this Buddhist stuff for?

[12:17]

I want to be transcendent. But we use transcendence, kind of we all use it, to mean something like a little better. But We have to be careful using such a word. I mean, the trans means to cross. To cross over. And it's used in philosophy to mean something above and beyond ordinary being. And much of Western contemporary philosophy Deleuze, Husserl Yeah, thanks.

[13:27]

And Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are all trying to cope with the idea that there's no transcendence. Mit der Idee, sozusagen, fertig zu werden, dass es keine Transzendenz gibt. Because transcendence implies there's something outside this situation. Denn Transzendenz impliziert, dass es etwas gibt, das außerhalb dieser Situation existiert. And that basically is theology here. God or a creator or something. And since Nietzsche, people are trying to deal with God is dead?

[14:29]

Oh dear! And it's so embedded in our language and our thinking that it's very hard to imagine there isn't something outside this situation. So maybe we could use instead of transcendence, incendence. But that sounds incendiary, which means everything burns up. Okay, so Buddhism's been dealing with this for a long time. So if we have the concept that the world, which is basically just a word,

[15:32]

And it's worth examining when you say, well, everything in the world, or I live in the world, right, etc. What do you mean by world? Do you mean your experience of the senses? Do you mean what you read in the newspapers? Now, Buddhism says the world is interpenetration. We can take several words. Interdependence. Inter-independence. Inter-emergent. In other words, everything is emerging. I call it inter-emergence.

[16:41]

Because the basic idea of interdependence in Buddhism doesn't quite fit any English word. It doesn't mean that everything is just leaning against each other. It means something like everything is simultaneously creating each other. Okay. So if the world is this inter-independent, inter-penetrating... What?

[17:52]

Something. How do we relate to it? Because one of the rules of Buddhism is we only know what we experience. The rest is extrapolation of some kind. Now we don't want to There's all this stuff, right? If there's not God behind it, creating it and kind of taking care of us, but in a messy way. I survived this accident and the others didn't because God helped me. Why didn't he help the others?

[18:56]

So if we can't use God to bring things together, Yes, to unite things, to make things. Then we need something else. Aha, we have oneness. We experience oneness. Which could be spelled W-O-N as well as O-N-E. Oneness, we win. But we haven't won. So Dogen would use some word if he had to use some word like allness.

[20:05]

Because if there's no God taking care of things and it's not united somehow in one truth And Einstein can't find the theory that unites everything. And we have the nice ecumenical idea in religion that all religions lead to the same truth. Which, from the point of view of Buddhism, is nonsense. Kavach, that's such a strong word.

[21:07]

Kavach, what is it? Nonsense. Nonsense, okay. I like it better. Why some people would say unsin, like non-sin. Non-sin. Non-sin. Non-sins. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the desire to have it somehow integrated makes sense. We want it to be. But from the point of view of Buddhism, different is different. Different teachings lead to different places. That's all. Different Buddhist schools produce different understandings. There is not one universal enlightenment experience. That's a nice idea, but I know quite a number of enlightened people and they are not enlightened in the same way.

[22:10]

Suzuki Roshi would say, each of us, we each have our own enlightenment. Even in Zen, that's a rather dramatic or drastic thing to say. But again, in Zen, Buddha is our beginning, not our goal. So we don't know where we're going. But we do know that the experience of the mind without contents has a similarity to others who experience the mind without contents. Wir wissen aber, dass die Erfahrung des Geistes ohne Inhalte der Erfahrung anderer Menschen gleicht vom Geist ohne Inhalte.

[23:37]

And without contents is not the same for everyone. Dieses ohne Inhalte ist auch nicht das gleiche für alle. And without contents is obviously related as an alternative to with contents. Und diese ohne Inhalte ist ganz klar auch in Bezug zu dem Mitinhalt. So the with contents that were there or sometimes reappear influence the without contents. Diese Inhalte die da waren oder da sein können haben einen Einfluss auf den inhaltsfreien Geist. So we could take one word for the world is allness. And we have that joke I've been told a few times that the Dalai Lama goes into a pizza place.

[24:39]

And the guy says, well, what would you like? And His Holiness says, I'd like one with everything. Okay. But of course, even a scrap of flour is with everything. But even this smallest piece Dogen says, given this, given this, the myriad things, the 10,000 things, the 10,000 things, okay, the 100 grasses, Each blade of grass contains everything.

[25:56]

Now that's hard. I mean, we can understand that if everything is interdependent, each blade of grass is everything. Das können wir schon verstehen. Wenn alles voneinander abhängig ist, dann enthält auch jeder einzelne Grashalm alles. Dogen sagt auch, verorte dich in der Unmittelbarkeit. Okay, here we are. You place yourself in the midst of immediacy. You're not thinking about other things or much, but you feel yourself located in bodily time. And immediacy time. Contextual immediacy time. And you consider this the entire universe.

[27:11]

I like, I always like it that in English the word consider means by the stars. Considerial with the stars. So it's astrology. It's both astronomical and astrological. Each of you is an astronomical being. And thanks for dinner. So although we can't exactly experience allness, we can consider this immediacy the entire universe.

[28:17]

consider this inseparable from allness. Now, that is hard to imagine as an experiential thought. I mean, it's hard to imagine through thinking that you can experience this. But I do, again, it's a few guarantees. You guarantee it's possible? No. A few guarantees. I'm making a few guarantees every now and then testimonials smoke lucky strikes it's the best hotel in Hanover That's a testimony.

[29:40]

Reference? All right. If you do imagine, if you do have the feeling of placing yourself in a maze, placing yourself in bodily time, placing yourself in the context of immediacy, and you consider this the entire universe, and you do that for the next six months, Well, the rest of your life, really, but I'm trying to make it easy. Yeah, do this for the next, well, five and a half months.

[30:53]

Okay. You will feel a difference in how you are part embedded in the world. it will have an incubatorial effect. As I often say, we're not interested in understanding, we're interested in incubation. Even an understanding doesn't have power until you incubate it. Selbst ein Verstehen hat gar keine Kraft, solange es nicht ausgebrütet wird. Okay, another word for allness. If I'm making up, Dogen would say, yeah, allness. He said something like that. Ein anderes Wort für allesheit, wie vielleicht Dogen...

[31:55]

We have universe and multiverse now, physicists talk about multiverses. Both of these words are non-experiencible concepts. You know, it's hard to experiment with them. But the Buddhist word for everything all at once, is Tathagatagarbha. And Tathagatagarbha means going, coming, womb embryo.

[33:14]

The best we can say about this world is it's coming and going and it's simultaneously womb and embryo. That you can bring into your experience. Yes, coming and going. Entering emergence. Okay, so that's contextual time. And the third time I'm offering you, for the third time, is gestational time. Now Dogen talks about, and I think it's translated as ripening time. I actually think I like gestational time in English better.

[34:18]

What's the difference? You're just supposed to translate. I don't have a word for gestation. Austragezeit? It doesn't sound. Is this Moritz and Max? It's a medical term, gestation. All right, well, I don't care. Use right thing or gestational. I like gestational because it relates to gestures. She was giving us an example of a gesture. Ridiculing. Because gestational time is like, for us it means carrying time, meaning the animal or the person carries the other.

[35:24]

So if you add a gesture for that, that's a little too much. Okay. Um... In koan, well, I guess, of the Book of Serenity. In what number? Twelve. Shushan, it's a funny name like Shushan. Shushan. And Jin San. And Wu Dong. You don't have to know these. And Fa Yan. They're all hiking along in south-central China. in the province of Zang.

[36:33]

I'm saying all this because these are four, as far as we know, real people in a real place in China. And although hundreds of years ago Yeah, not so different from us. And this is a big storm. And, you know, in those days they were walking. You know, they didn't have other means. And the rivers are swollen. And so they see a temple and they stop in the temple. Temples were often where travelers stopped. And they asked if they could stay out the storm for a few days in the temple.

[37:38]

And they're, so they're sitting around the hibachi. And they're four friends, Max and Noah. And Kurtz. And they're in Dijon's temple. And they don't know Dijon. So he's quite an important figure, became an important figure in the Soto lineage. And they're just, you know, guests staying in the temple. But he notices them. And I think he noticed that they were in bodily time, so they're, you know, experienced practitioners.

[38:53]

And they're in contextual time. created by the storm and the rivers and there's in the contextual time of staying warm by the hibachi but di jang is you know pretty smart fellow and he notices they're not really in a shared resonant field. So he goes over and says, Oh, excuse me, you elders. And Shushan and Jinshan were already heads of their own temple.

[40:10]

Makes me think, I remember at a neighborhood meeting in San Francisco once years ago, This woman came in and I met this Chinese woman and her name sounds like a fork falling on the floor. I met this Chinese woman and her name sounds like a fork falling on the floor. And she's also, she was great. And she, I remember she also, somebody asked her to speak at this community meeting. And she got up and she said, my thoughts just sat down. And she sat down. Anyway, so Dijang sees these four guys.

[41:23]

There should have been a few women, but in the future there will be women. And he says... The mountains, rivers and streams, excuse me for interrupting you elders, are they the same as you or different from you? And Xu Shan said, identical. And Di Jiang held up two fingers. And Shushan said, different, different.

[42:25]

And Shushan held up two fingers. And then he left. And then they started making fun of him. Oh, who's this temple priest? And Faryan said, don't make One of them said, oh, you don't expect elephant tusks in a rat's mouth. In other words, this guy is just a rat, and he's acting like he's got tusks. Yeah. And Thayen says, I think maybe he's got something, this guy. So the next day the storm was over. And they all were getting ready to leave.

[43:28]

And Farian said, you go on alone. You go on together. I'm going to stay here with Dijon. And Farian said, you go ahead. I will stay here with Dijon. And he did stay with Dijak some years and founded the Fayan School of Zen Buddhism. And after a while the other three came back and they all studied with Dijak. So this is an example of gestational time. Das ist ein Beispiel für diese reifende, austragende Zeit. Di Jiang saw that they looked like they were in contextual time. Di Jiang hat gesehen, dass es so den Anschein hatte, als seien sie in dieser reifenden Zeit.

[44:33]

So he entered their contextual field. Excuse me, elders, may I say something? Are the mountain streams and rivers the same as you, elders, or different? In other words, what is interdependence? What is allness? What is embeddedness in the phenomenal world? And none of these four were, from their own experience, able to respond to this. So he transformed their contextual time into a gestational time, which led to us practicing here today.

[45:45]

Okay, so let's have a break. It's time for contextual break. Thank you very much. Sorry, everyone.

[46:07]

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