Since some of you know that there's a, not too close, fire, I'll say something about it, the little I know. Christian's been climbing up to the top of the dome to look at it, and he says it looks smaller. And it's across on the other side of T Road? Yeah. Yeah, so it's Gary Boyce's new property, not his property. That's right. And Marie Louise is there, has been there since this morning. I've had to check on Sophia. She's doing fine. I said, did you have lunch? I made pasta. She said, okay, fine. And speaking to Marie Louise, she says she has a cushy job. I don't know what her job is, but you can hear all these walkie-talkie phones and trucks and noises and She says it's not clear that in these conditions, if they can get it under control or not.

[01:08]

And Brian, you said you found out the wind's gonna shift? Right now it's from the east, from the mountains. So it's blowing toward Moffat. It's supposedly, according to me, surrounded Gary Boyce's house, but not burned it. And it's gotten in the trees. And I think in the trees it's much more dangerous for us because the sparks can go miles and miles and start fires. So, I mean, I'm not trying to alarm you. I'm just informing you. And we've been here many years now without a fire. And we've done a lot of clearing, as you can see, more park-like, underneath the trees, so we have a chance of controlling a fire if it does come up the hill here.

[02:14]

And Christian has been reviewing our emergency procedures and how to evacuate and how to stay and be safe and so forth. But, you know, it's about five miles away. I think it's probably, I looked on the map, it's probably seven or eight miles. Seven or eight miles away. Anyway, I had to fight the first Tassara fire years ago. I don't think we're going to have a fire, but if we do, it'll be something we do. That's all. And... And Ulrich Halstenbach called me just a little while ago from Germany to give me a report on our taking possession of this new property.

[03:24]

Hotzenholz, it's called. And Ulrich is the person who has done the most over the last year about to coordinate the fundraising and think through the whole process of communicating to the Sangha about it. And as many of you know, I wrote over the last two years a number of lengthy essay-like letters to explain why I thought it was important that we could buy the property if we could. It's across the street. And Beata Alldag and her husband were crucial in

[04:29]

in getting the whole process started and making it happen. So anyway, Uruk Atmar sent me a couple upbeat emails about getting the key and a team of people, nearly 10 people I think, went and learned how the heating system works, which is quite complicated and so forth. And we were given a bunch of keys. And Wolfram, the owner, moved everything out into a lower basement room where he can use for some time. And he completely cleaned everything, washed all the windows, put flowers in the rooms, and so forth. And seemed to be quite... okay, he said, I'm less emotional than I thought.

[05:32]

I mean, he designed the building, he lived in it for years and put his heart into it, but he's parting with it with less emotion than he thought he would have. And we're having a so-called, we do Easter seminar in which the residents in Johanneshof lead the seminar, gives talks and things. And we invite all the people who make pledges to us during the year to come, which is about a hundred people, I think, to come and just be there for the weekend for free. And there's about sixty people, I guess, and somewhere more than fifty, it gets pretty tight in Yanisov. Some people will be sleeping for the first time in Hotzenholz. And they're going to have some of the seminary in Hotzenholz and so forth. So it's quite interesting.

[06:34]

And for me, the process of deciding to buy it, independent of whether we bought it or not, was a process of developing the Sangha. And it has been a very good process, I think. And now we'll see how the building, having the building and the rooms and the spaces, helps or how it does develop the lay and monastic Sangha. And now we have lots of rooms, all of you invited. You know, if you want to brush up on your German, on your Deutsch. You're welcome to come. Gate 5 at Denver, I think. Gate 7, we pick you up and serve. Okay.

[07:36]

Sophia, the other day, was on the phone, called me. And she said, what would you answer to Mama's question? The question she asked you. She asked, Marie-Louise asked you, what is practice? Right? And you said, coming into accordance where they're finding a love for all human beings. Yeah. Perfectly good answers. We just had the Shuso ceremony for her just before, just before the Sesshin. And so, Sophia says to me on the phone, Papa, what would you answer without hesitation? Without hesitation, I don't know. And I said, mind not straying from mind.

[08:49]

And I guess that's a, let's say that's a perfectly good answer, too. Mind not straying from mind. Now, Shen Yang, I guess that's the rather well-known and well-respected Chinese Zen teacher who spent a lot of time in the West here and died, I think, last year? Recently, anyway. And he has a book out called, a lot of books out, but one of them is, I think, The Method of No Method. And he talks about Hong Ji and what he calls silent illumination, which I don't like the term silent illumination much. But anyway, he speaks about the method of no method. And I often speak about Zazen as the practice of uncorrected mind. And then very similar ideas are in Dzogchen.

[09:55]

It's almost like Zen in many ways. They have a lot of teachings, though, about how you inhibit or stop distracted thoughts and so forth. Yeah, so there are a lot of methods that go along with the method of no method. So I was thinking not straying mind, not straying from mind. And what I mean by that is that in everything you do, your attention is always resting in mind as well as in the objects of attention, the objects of mind. So you're always aware you're seeing mind as well as the objects of mind. And that's, first of all, an intellectual idea. I mean, Wittgenstein said in the lecture to a group of people, there's no indication here in my perception that this is my mind perceiving it.

[11:05]

What I see is you. So you have to remind yourself, or you have to create the conception that remind yourself of the conceptual fact that everything you're perceiving is within your sensorium and within your mind. Now, practice is to experientially know that. So as we speak about attention to the breath, continuous attention to the breath, breaking the connection between self-continuity established in thinking and shifting to continuity established in breath, body and phenomena. We also have the parallel practice of mind not straying from mind, mind not straying from the awareness of mind.

[12:13]

If you can do these two things, or either of them, or both of them, you've come a long way in practice. Mostly, the big problem is the self-narrative self, the self that you experience based on self-narration. And that, I mean, I would say, Sometimes I'm pessimistic and I say, out of a hundred people who practice Zen seriously, maybe half of one of them actually frees themselves from the referencing self-narration. If you can insult somebody, if you can go up to somebody and say, you asshole, and they react negatively, they're involved with self-referencing. If they just hear it as words... They're not. But if you can hurt or embarrass people, I mean, naturally we're hurt or embarrassed in various ways, and that's sort of our responsibility to be sensitive to and be sensitive, be able to experience shame.

[13:25]

However, if you really are free of self-referencing, you hear it, but you don't have emotional reactions to it. And really, my experience is not many people get free of self, the self-narrative self. In the end, they come back to it, and why shouldn't they? That's how our life is configured. That's how we relate to others. That's how we have a job and so forth. So there's a lot of skills involved in leading your life based on on the self-narrative self. But it is possible to free yourself from the self-narrative self, or your fundamental experience is not the self-narrative self. So now what I'm trying to speak about here is instead of talking about a method of no method, I'd like to speak about it as trusting in mind.

[14:37]

You have no method because you trust mind. But what mind do you trust? Yeah. So I'd like us to experiment, I'd like you each to experiment with seeing the degree to which you can trust mind. And what mind? Can you trust any mind or only some minds? And how do you make the distinction? So as you know, I speak about the three birth minds of consciousness, waking mind, sleeping mind, and non-dreaming deep sleep. Dreaming mind, waking mind, and non-dreaming deep sleep. As I mentioned yesterday, a non-dreaming deep sleep is hard to notice because it's contentless. or nearly content-less. And so what we notice, the aspect of noticing is content.

[15:45]

We have the same basic problem in zazen. And in effect, if we are able to notice non-dreaming deep sleep, the mind of non-dreaming deep sleep, you notice it as a field and not through its contents. And it's also the case that you can begin to notice aspects of zazen mind as a field, a field of mind, and not through the contents of mind. Okay, so I find it useful to think of minds as liquids with various viscosities.

[16:53]

For example, when you wake up in the morning and you stop dreaming, as I've said this very often, but let's get on the same field, same page, your daily activity and what you need to do and what you need to do to preserve the narrative self appear. They float to the surface, let's put it that way. But if you can change the viscosity of mind, if you can begin to participate in the qualities of mind itself, which you can, I mean, you do it all the time, but you can refine and make it a real craft. If you change the viscosity of mind, the contents of consciousness sink out of sight.

[17:55]

And dreams come back, float back into attention. And so you can call dreams back and you can experiment with, you're half awake and there's a dream that was kind of interesting. And you can either take one object of the dream and focus on it and go back into dreaming. It's a way to go back to sleep when you can't sleep. Or you can not go back and not take an aspect of the dream, but feel the different field of mind, that's dreaming mind, and shift into the viscosity of dreaming mind. And sometimes you re-enter the dream at a little later date.

[18:57]

A little later date? What later date? Anyway, at a further on point in the... context of the dream and you can experiment with whether you use a feel for or memory of an aspect of the dream or whether you use the field of the dream itself and the more you can use the field of the dream itself you can begin to actively decide to do lucid dreaming or not So lucid dreaming is to have a feel for the field of mind that dreams. You know, this isn't Buddhism. This is just us human beings. This is what we do. And if your life is defined by consciousness and the self-narrative self, well, then you're not too interested in these things.

[20:09]

But if you're just interested in What are the contents of this weird life we have? Weird, wonderful, magical, strange, not entirely, not entirely fathomable at all. Well, then all aspects can have equal attention. you can give attention to this very important times, useful times to bring the attention to are when you're falling asleep and when you're waking up and then beginning to find how a particular kind of consciousness can penetrate sleep. And I brought that up yesterday, that when we sit sashin, there's a different kind of sleeping occurs or often occurs.

[21:16]

There can be a feeling of being awake all night, the whole room is present to you, and yet you're asleep. So I don't know what sashin is for. a wonderful, strange institution developed by our Dharma ancestors. And it looks like nothing. What does it do? It's a kind of, we can call it a kind of posture. So speaking of trust, We trust our, in a way, I think we can say that we, a person who does zazen begins to make use of, and I would say actually trust his or her posture. And zazen is a posture you can, you can, Experiment with trusting.

[22:20]

I don't say just absolutely just trust willy-nilly, but experiment with trusting. For example, if you have a decision to make, in what mind do you trust the decision the most? If you find, as I've certainly found, over the years, if I do zazen and come to a decision, I trust that decision much more than the decision made in consciousness. And I trust it more than intuition. Intuition often fools us because it's so darn convincing. So intuition is useful if I have intuitions about it, yes, but I will more fundamentally than either conscious decisions or intuitive decisions, I'll trust the decisions made in this posture. And then what this posture? Well, this posture is also, there's a mental posture that arises through this physical posture.

[23:26]

And I trust this mental posture too. And the mental postures, I said yesterday, which is this allowing, absorbing, non-contradictory mind we, I call, awareness. So I would say the method of no method is developing the ability to trust in awareness. So we don't, you know, in Zen, particularly and especially our lineage of school of Zen, assumes we don't know where we're going so we don't want to give you too many methods because methods assume you know where you're going. So if you don't know where you're going, well, you can use certain methods, certain things to nudge yourself. But basically you're nudging yourself into a mind you can trust.

[24:32]

And more and more you let that mind happen. And that mind that you let happen, we can call, I'm calling awareness. The Diamond Sutra says something like, don't abide in appearances and mind will arise. Well, don't abide in appearances. Mind will, what they mean, what the Diamond Sutra means is really what I'm calling awareness will arise. And non-abiding in appearances, as Shang Yen also speaks about, which is... They're appearances, but you don't abide in appearances. And if you don't abide in appearances, you keep releasing appearances, things appear.

[25:36]

You receive them, you release them, you receive, release them, receive, release them, receive, release them. A kind of fluidity starts happening, receiving and releasing. Not abiding, just receiving and releasing. Not abiding, not abiding. Self-referencing stops. Referential thinking stops. You can't have referential comparative thinking if you're just receiving and releasing, receiving and releasing, not abiding in appearances. Time and space become very fluid. You know, physical space is the space of physics, let's call it, the space of science. The structure of the space of science, physics or something, is... The structure is invisible. But the structure is gravity. In the fall, we can't see the structure.

[26:41]

However, we can see the structure in this building because if it wasn't for... this room would fall apart, and particularly in this wind. So it's stuck together by all kinds of techniques, building techniques, but it's mainly stuck together by gravity. But the structure, gravity as a structure is invisible. And the mind spaces of awareness and consciousness, let's call them two mind spaces. We have more, we have samadhis, we have minds that overlap waking, dreaming, and non-dreaming, deep sleep, and so forth. So there's a variety of minds we explore through practice beyond our three birth minds. But the structure of these minds is usually invisible. But you can get a feel for the field of minds and the implicit structure.

[27:52]

And these are biological spaces. Consciousness is a biological space. An experiential, biological space, something like that. Awareness is a biological space and it has a certain structure, invisible structure, you can begin to feel, see the effects of, and begin to trust. And to make it really simple, and you can use phrases like Calling forth, sometimes I say this use of phrases in Zen, I call calling forth phrases, calling forth mind. You can use only connected or you can use only separated.

[29:00]

Let's take those two. I often suggest you practice with already connected instead of the implicit already separated that goes with our Western thinking. But now I'm saying just try out only connected. I think if everything you look at, you bring this conceptual posture only connected to that looking, you'll find it shifts you into something what I would probably call most of the time awareness. And if you use the phrase only separated, I think you'll find yourself pushed into consciousness, thinking about, comparing, etc. And as you know, the SCI of conscious is the same SCI as scissors. And that's what consciousness does, it separates.

[30:04]

Awareness, it tends to be inclusive, it tends to integrate. Let's say the invisible structure of awareness is integrative, is integration, is... And if you bring conflicting thoughts, comparative thoughts, anxiety into awareness, awareness just dissolves. It's not a funny way if you can begin to put anxieties on the shelf. Awareness is, I see awareness sometimes as a big room with a lot of shelves on the side. And the shelves you put all kinds of stuff, junk. comparative thoughts, ambitions, etc. And you kind of stay in the middle of the room. And if you have... can put the divisive thoughts and feelings, anxieties on the shelf for a while, just for a while.

[31:15]

They're still there, you can come back to them. Just for a while, awareness begins to integrate, to accept. In fact, the things sort of come off the shelves back into the room, but they're just there. And there isn't anxiety associated with them, you can just sort of study them. And this can be brought into daily life too. The more you find yourself in a modality of mind, I don't know what words to use, a modality of mind of non-abiding in appearances, say, things suddenly seem very precise, very clear, this wonderful high altitude, high altitude light that we have here.

[32:21]

It's almost the illusion of enlightenment because things are so precise and hold their space in this kind of... And this, you know, this kind of experience is characteristic of a certain level, a kind of realization. Things are very precise and motionless. It's almost as if everything is stopped happening in succession, but somehow stopped and precise and bright and clear. So stillness and motion are experienced simultaneously. And that's a kind, let's say, an extension of or an externalization of, or nothing's external, it's all non-external, a experience of awareness in the world, not just...

[33:42]

daily life in the midst of activity and not just awareness in Zazen but the more familiar you get with awareness in Zazen and trusting awareness in Zazen and trusting where it leads your practice the more this awareness can be part of your life all the time I think sometimes it's like being a dolphin or something You know, if there's various viscosities of mind, these underwater mammals, I mean dolphins, they live most of the time underwater, all the time underwater, but they breathe air. It's a little bit like we can become, breathe the air of consciousness. We can be conscious as necessary, but most of the time we're, as I say, bathed in the sensory.

[34:45]

It's almost like being within the water of awareness. Within the water of awareness. Breathing consciousness as necessary but finding everything connected the way it feels underwater anyway this is the best I can do to give you another feeling for awareness and consciousness okie doke thank you very much May our intention equally penetrate every being and place.

[35:38]

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