I would like to... I mean, I think from where I stand, I think we've ended up in a, you know, quite unusual and good place. Yeah, I even think that where we've got to is not where most people would think about original mind. Partly because, you know, Cartesian dualistic and Entity thinking is so deeply embedded in our habits. It's our habit to think that way. And it takes quite a while to get away from entity thinking.

[01:01]

Now, four or five times I've used this example of Liddell and I kind of get bored with it, but I'll do it again. What I'm saying here is, if you want to Think in a yogic, know the world in a yogic way. You've got to substitute activity for entity. There's no entities, there's only activity. I think you can just take that as a general rule. There's only activity. From the point of view that this bell, there's no such thing as a bell.

[02:17]

As I say, this could be a teacup. Japanese or Chinese teacup. But I've tried using it that way and the tea tastes terrible. But from the point of view of this way of thinking, this is not a bell until you hear it. It could be all kinds of things, you know, a hat. I know. Once I was in some rather fancy house of some in Minnesota. And I noticed by the fireplace Minnesota.

[03:34]

They had lots of firewood in an extraordinary Buddhist bell. You know, a handmade Buddhist bell. And handmade bells, I mean, you don't need to know the price, but something like $30,000. $30,000. Well, this probably came over with some soldier after the Second World War. They didn't know what to do with it, so they stuck the firewood on it. So I was, you know, as soon as they all went in the kitchen or something to have tea, I sort of went over and took all the firewood out. And I found one of the sticks, you know, one of the pieces of firewood, I hit the bell.

[04:38]

This great sound went through the house. And everybody came running in from the kitchen. And they really did not like that I did that. They were quite offended. Why am I messing around with their firewood? In fact, And so they kind of pushed me aside I didn't offer them $30,000 for it but that might have changed the topic but for them it simply was not a bell and they resented my pointing out that it was a bell Yeah.

[05:43]

So this is a bell when it's used as a bell. And when I hear it, You can tell that the sound is impermanent. But to say the sound is impermanent is a relative truth. It's not an absolute truth. Because to say the sound is impermanent implies the bell is permanent. So to be strict in Buddhism, we don't say the sound is impermanent.

[06:45]

We say it exhibits the absence of permanence. Because that doesn't really imply that anything is permanent. Because the bell is also impermanent. It's just slower than the sound. Well, from the point of view of Buddhism, everything is impermanent. There's no really absolute, except that everything is impermanent. Okay. So there's no entity.

[07:45]

There's only the activity of the bell. And the impermanence of the bell. Now, you want to start thinking that way, if you can. Now, when you hear the sound, you can see the absence of permanence. But when you look at the bell, you have to remind yourself of the absence of permanence. Okay. So if there is no entity, there's no entity called original mind. There's only an activity.

[08:49]

So what would be the activity that we call original mind? We call it a noun. English has noun. We use a noun for it. In English we use noun, noun. Now there's a little boy, his parent, he lives in Hamburg. Janusz Perkson and Bernhard Perkson and his wife Julia spend their vacations every year at Johannesburg for some reason. And Bernhard is a, you know, a professor, a writer of books and a professor of journalism at the University of Hamburg. Anyway, this little kid is very sweet. And he's two. And We have a little whistle that makes the sound of a cuckoo.

[10:08]

You know, it's a little cuckoo bird, a little horn. Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo. He thought it was the greatest. So he was trying it out. Just at that moment, our cuckoo clock came out and said, one o'clock. He fell back literally two or three steps. And he said in German, I called it forth. It was just he was totally charmed of his power. And he had a smile that went beyond his ears. So he tried it again. I had to rush over the clock and move my hands.

[11:24]

And so he kept me busy for about, you know, 30 minutes every time. I tried to deal with it for half hours, but sometimes he'd get about three. Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo. Now, I have a friend named Ron. I had a friend named Ron Eyre. He's unfortunately dead now. And he did a series of programs. He was a producer for the BBC. Then he did a series for BBC Time Live called The Long Search.

[12:35]

And Yaya wanted to do a One of the sections on the Zen Center and partly on me and I wouldn't rather do it. Yeah, but we became good, quite very good friends. I used to stay with him in London. And I arranged for him to do an interview, though, as part of one of the programs on Buddhism in Japan. With a man who was my teacher in Japan, Yamada Mumon. Who is there? A Rinzai Roshi.

[13:45]

Anyway, so he filmed Mulman Roshi. And at the end of the interview, they have two cameras and it's people talking at this temple. When Roshi got up, and I've seen the film, I had it somewhere, he got up and he just turned and walked down the hall. You know, in this funny little Japanese waddle. The water is like a duck. Japanese people walk from here, not from here. So they have shoes which you have to slide your foot forward.

[14:57]

You can't walk in Japanese shoes this way. Slide forward. Plus you have kimonos on, which are pretty long, and if you're not careful, you step on them. You have to learn to slide your foot forward without stepping on your kimono. And I'm mentioning this just for the heck of it. But also because The conception of the body is reflected in the clothes and reinforced by the clothes. And the bodily conception is you don't tie your waist up and you want your center of gravity low. Und die Konzeption in dieser Kleidung ist eben, dass man nicht die Hüfte abschneidet, sondern auch, dass man das Zentrum der Schwerkraft ziemlich niedrig hat.

[16:24]

So it goes down. Also geht er so die Halle in den Flöckler. And Ron said to me afterwards, I had the experience, he may even say it in the film, I forget. It's like he turned around and we didn't exist. We disappeared. It was as if at the moment he turned around, as if we never existed. And that's probably true. He also, later, ten years later or so, Mumunoshi had, no one said, but basically it was Alzheimer's. And dealing with Alzheimer's, meditation practice seemed to help him. Because he never seemed to panic. Forget nervous, what he didn't know.

[17:33]

And the last time I saw him, I helped feed him. He used to say, he joked, that he was going to live to 99 and I was going to live to 100. I forget now, but nearly 99. And I don't know exactly how long he lived, but almost 99. So he'd get his, when he was eating, he would get his spoon, he'd put his spoon in and get it up here and then he'd forget why it was there. I know this feeling very well, actually. And he sat there and he looked at it.

[18:35]

And he sat there and he looked at it. And the last two or three years of his life he did not speak. He was silent. And I wasn't there, but what his disciple Shunan Roshi said to me. was the last thing he said was, I've forgotten everything I didn't need to know. Whoa! Now he's also, Vaughan also did an interview with a a Hasidic rabbi. Hasidic? Yes.

[19:35]

Hasidic. And I had nothing to do with setting up this interview. But during the interview, this guy talked continuously for an hour and a half or something like that. And Ron ended the interview by saying to this rabbi, You've been speaking so eloquently, so much. What about silence? Do you have anything to say about silence? and the rabbi said silence we don't talk about that and that was the end of it well there may be more to that than just humor Because supposedly, and here I'm quoting Ivan Ilyich again, the first phonetic character of the Hebrew alphabet, which is Aleph, which I guess probably is A in alphabet,

[20:57]

And in the Kabbalistic tradition Aleph is actually not a sound. It's a position of the larynx where the vocal cords are. It's a position of the larynx ready to speak, but silent. So it's the silence understood to be the source of all communication, words, etc. So, silence when we don't talk about it. And this sense, if Ivan is right, So instead of saying from this tradition, instead of saying in the beginning there was the word, it would be more like in the beginning there was the silence, which is the source of all words.

[22:56]

And in India they say in the beginning there was the sound which is underneath all sound. So whenever I look at teachings or traditions in Asia or the West, When you get back to, quite often, to the etymology, the roots of words, you seem close to people's fundamental experience. And at that level I find tremendous similarities in Ivan being half Jewish and Catholic and the secretary of the Pope. I rank him Catholic within the Catholic Church.

[24:00]

until he separated from the church. But I find that he and I found together that our thinking about things was extremely similar. So I find that this position of the larynx represented by Yes, good. Perfect translation. It's very close to what original mind means. Because as an activity and not an entity called original mind.

[25:18]

It represents something more like a posture. Or a readiness for activity. In the five ranks, it's represented by a circle with a dot. The five ranks is a teaching within our lineage. And we can also represent by my little circle. Now, Okay, so now I don't expect you to remember what I'm talking about.

[26:41]

I won't remember either. Somebody asked me, what did you say last night? but what I'd like to do is to put some stones in the stream of your mind so the water of your thinking has to go around these stones maybe we do it enough it'll make a new course for the stream Yeah, to say the hundred flowers are red is like a little stone in the stream. So what I'd like you to get out of this Get from this, get out of this.

[27:46]

Is a willingness to just look at your own experience. What is actually your experience? Not what it's supposed to be, but what is it? So now I want to speak about memory. Now memory is usually thought of as some kind of storehouse. As I've said, some sort of text. And since the alphabet, really, memory has been considered a kind of text. that you can go into and bring the past into the present.

[29:02]

But in an oral tradition. Now Zen, I think probably more than any other Buddhist tradition, tries to remain an oral tradition as well as a written tradition. So that's one of the meanings of a teaching outside the scriptures. And there's many aspects symbolic and actual of the transmission teaching process. Actual. What we call mind-to-mind transmission. the authority to teach and represent the teaching.

[30:22]

And when you receive transmission, you're no longer a Buddhist. We don't think of it that way. We say, you are Buddhism. What you do is Buddhism. It may not be too good, but what you do is Buddhism. So this is sort of the conception of an oral tradition. An oral tradition takes its form in the present. So memory or the past is not a court or legislation. Memory and the past. Like, you know, the Bible is a kind of court. It's a revealed teaching. You can go back and say, is this true or not true? So wie die Bibel eine Art Gericht ist, du kannst darauf zurückkommen und sagen, ist das jetzt wahr oder nicht?

[31:38]

Now, of course, within Christianity, there's various ways of relating to the Bible and quite a difference between Catholicism and Protestantism. But still, there's more of a relationship to Scripture, to the past as defining the present, than there is in Buddhism. Aber dennoch gibt es in jedem Fall mehr die Beziehung auf eine Schrift hin als etwas, was die Vergangenheit in die Gegenwart holt, als das in Buddhismus der Fall ist. And this is partly a difference in how the present is understood. Es ist zum Teil eben auch ein Unterschied dazu, wie die Gegenwart verstanden wird. Now, in an oral tradition, there's no difference between recollection and activity.

[32:51]

Now, what do I mean by that? It's sort of like Janosch and Kuku. He plays the whistle and a cuckoo appears. So he didn't say oh in my memory there's a cuckoo. He did something in the present and the past appeared. So in an oral tradition you call forth the past into the present through your activity. So, we call it various things, and I'm just, no, this is, I don't know if I should be talking about it, but why not? It's not that it's particularly... Some of these things are only talked about in certain situations with older students, but it's not that it's like that.

[34:14]

It's just that it doesn't make any sense. But literally we call it packing in and packing out. Like when a little chicken is ready to be hatched. Mama goes, out comes the chicken. But that's not just that the disciple is ready to hatch. It means the whole lineage, the whole teaching comes out when the right conditions exist. So our little Yonosh blew the whistle and the cuckoo came out. The little Janusz blew the flute into the flute and the cuckoo came out.

[35:29]

So the... Now again, I'm just... I'm using some things from Ivan Ljuc again. Just as a way of creating a feeling for what I'm talking about. And just to show you or make some suggestion that what you call memory and how you relate to memory may not be the way you usually think of it. The way we usually think of it. So the goddess of what's called the goddess of memory in Greek terms is Mimosimi. And mimosy is not the root of the word for memory.

[36:45]

Is that how you pronounce it? In English it's mimosy. Okay. Anyway, it's not the root of the word memory. The root of memory is memoria. So what was meant by memory when we talk about mimosome was more an image of a pool than a page. Now, what's the difference? Well, how is our memory, our experiences as memory tied together? It's tied together as a story.

[37:48]

The glue is a kind of narration of self. And the editing of the self. So we have the unconscious of Freud which is the edited out from the narration of the self. Now in Buddhism we have the idea of the Alaya Vijnana. And it's a fundamental idea in the conception of our living and our being in all late Buddhism. And it's usually translated, because we don't know the alternative, as a storehouse, something like the unconscious.

[39:03]

And it's much more actually more of a pool. from which things float up unrelated to self and narration. Okay. So one of the reasons I'm speaking the way I do is I'm speaking as part of an oral tradition. And I'm assuming a kind of pool of experience here, wider than memory.

[40:05]

And if I have an image of it, it's almost like each of you is floating on the surface of a shared and separate pool. And if I have an image of it, it's almost like each of you is floating on the surface of a shared and separate pool. a shared pool and also each separate pool. A kind of silence of friendship. A silence of already connected. Now, as I often say, the other wisdom phrase which has been most useful in addition to just now is enough is already connected.

[41:25]

Now, we have a cultural assumption. Go back to something I say too often. We have a cultural assumption, most of us, that we take for granted that space separates. You're there and I'm here. And I'm here and you're over there. Okay. But in fact, like, we're somehow connected to the moon. We all have our reproductive cycles, and the men don't notice it as much, but they can notice it tied to the moon. Yeah, and if you put grandfather clock, you know what grandfather clock is? This kind of swing. If you put them in more or less the same area of building, they all start swinging together.

[42:43]

So instead of, you know, you can practice with, instead of feeling this, which we think is a fact, but actually is a cultural idea, think of space as connecting instead of separating. Imagine like we're all in an aquarium. You can feel the, you know, one of you swims by me. We'll see we didn't hear you. Now our senses don't tell us that, but something also, our body maybe tells us that.

[44:04]

So try on the phrase, already connected. Whenever you meet somebody, feel, I'm already connected. I don't have to make a connection And it is absolutely more true. As I say, if you're lost in the forest for five or six hours and it's freezing cold, and you don't know how to get out of there, it's happened to me. And that's something, there's somebody walking. You don't feel, she's already connected. Hi, how are you? Totally stranger. And you know that you're already connected.

[45:07]

And in Sashin, you sit beside somebody you don't know. That's very funny for me. Beate came up and said she's going to come to Sashin. But we won't see each other. We'll just be sitting there not speaking, you know. But it's incredible. You feel a real connection between the person next to you who you don't speak with for a week. So Illich talks about the silence of friendship. And both of us agree that both Catholicism, as he understands it, and Buddhism, as I understand it, is a search for open friendship. And the real teacher-disciple relationship is developed in silence. In the silence of already connected. So in a way the Amaya Vijnana means the experience of all human beings, not just your personal experience related to the self.

[46:54]

It's not, I wouldn't go so far, it's not like Jung's collective unconscious. comes to Greek-based theological idea. But there's a sense that in our, the minuteness of our millions of moments, We've accumulated enough experience to make sense of almost anything. And even people like Einstein, they really create an image which then draws forth what was already there. And even people like Einstein, they create a picture that then brings out what was already there.

[48:12]

Yes, with the arm. That may not be true, actually, but he was German. I'm into cuckoo clocks because the Black Forest is where cuckoo clocks are. You know they were the first clock that was all over the world. Because I think the Italians invented clocks in the 14th century. But they were metal and very expensive and nobody could afford them. So in the black forest like where we live, where sometimes we have three meters of snow, and nine months in those days of winter, they had nothing better to do than make a wooden clock.

[49:16]

And they figured out how to make the insides of the clock of wood. So they became inexpensive and they were in Tokyo, they were in Moscow, they were all over the world. The first inexpensive clock. And then when metal clocks became cheap, inexpensive, Then they started making these kind of schlocky clocks with deers and huggers and you know. The original ones were quite simple. So the concept of the Elaya Nizhnyana is you can't think your way into your memory.

[50:29]

It's not there waiting for you to think it. That part of it that's waiting for you to think it is from the point of view of Buddhism pretty superficial. And it's related to the idea of memory as a text. And memory as a text narrows our perception of the present. And memory as a text narrows our perception of the present. we tend to notice only that which falls into the territory of the text. So we want to kind of disperse the text. And the oral tradition disperses the text. So here, when I'm speaking with you, I'm trying to call forth your history of being a Buddhist.

[51:32]

Because from the point of view of your life as Jnana, that's also in you. You just haven't made the connection. You've made certain connections that describe your life now. But in you, there's the poet, the painter, the Buddha, and so forth. So Melosina is the goddess of memory. And the mother with Zeus of the nine muses. And the mother of the... Venus or the Zeus? Zeus. Oh, Zeus.

[52:51]

How do you say it in German? Oh, Zeus. Zeus, yeah, Zeus, we say Zeus. Okay. Sounds like a zoo. And the mother of Zeus and the new... I mean, that's why German is quite difficult. Japanese was much easier for me and French was much easier for me than German. English and German and their basic words are so close except you pronounce them wrong. Or we pronounce them wrong. Zeus. Zeus. That's not a proper name for a god, Zeus. It's Ruth. Sorry. So Zeus and Mimosina had nine daughters. Seriously, these... And the nine daughters and the nine muses, the muse for the different arts.

[54:05]

And what is a muse? It's a guiding spirit. It's a source of inspiration. It's a poet. So for the for this idea of how the past is present, it's much more something that you muse your way, which also is to meditate, muse your way into. Muse? Anyone a good word for that? Muse, how do you... Do you have the three muses? Yeah, I know, yes, but there's not a verb from... There's none of muse, so... Muse, I'll muse.

[55:06]

If we muse, it means we think something over or meditate. Or just say meditate. Okay. Then it's also... This is a way of conceiving of our human experience that's much more characteristic of an oral tradition than a written tradition. It's much more characteristic of an oral tradition than a written tradition. So the oral tradition of us getting together and talking like this is extremely different than if you read a book about Buddhism. And things will be called forth in you that wouldn't be if you read a book. And many of you will say to me sometimes, you start to speak just about what I was thinking about.

[56:06]

And that's not because I have some magic powers. I mean, I don't mean to, you know, maybe. It's because we're dipping into the same pool. And in oral tradition, the person who tells the story keeps dipping into the pool and finding out what to say. And I think you'll find that when you do meditate or do sadhana, Particularly if you do it regularly or do sashins a different kind of dimension of our past experience comes up.

[57:31]

And while it's sometimes things we'd rather not think about In the end, it's somehow more satisfying and integrating. So for practitioners, it's probably healthy to do Sashin once a year or so. I'm not a believer in doing Sashin once a month. but once or twice a year it's quite healthy because it brings to the surface another kind of memory into it and the living original mind living an original mind is what calls forth our experience in this way.

[58:44]

Calls forth from and we can say a kind of silence or stillness. Calls forth both the present and the past. Okay, I think that's enough. So let's sit for a minute.

[59:18]

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