Now, as usual, I would like to hear anything from you about what we've spoken about so far. And I did put this poem of Basho's here. sitting quietly in its column of simultaneity, in its column of interdependence, happening all at once, sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes. Grass grows.

[01:06]

By itself. I think that doing nothing is the most difficult part. And most Westerners respond to forms of Buddhism which give you something to do in Zazen. So in much of what I've been saying, I'm trying to take away the need to do something during meditation. Does anybody have anything they'd like to say? Yes, Martin. Yesterday you said that sometimes you can put the suffering somewhere aside on a shelf.

[02:13]

I'm noticing that it's fairly easy to create a sort of calming on a certain level for the suffering or of the suffering. I do experience that emotional suffering does manifest as bodily feelings. And I notice that it is sometimes difficult to bring that into Sarsen. And I noticed that sometimes it's difficult to penetrate there in Zazen.

[03:40]

I can often feel and observe it in Zazen. But it seems to me sometimes to be a kind of emotional and physical language without words. Sometimes it feels like an emotional and bodily language without words. I notice when I'm lying in bed. And I feel into there and a dreamlike images are added. I have more access to what's actually happening there. At the same time it's more difficult to kind of do something with it or maybe even control it, in a sense, because you slide into sleeping So, I ask myself why it is so difficult for me to immerse myself in this language, which brings these two verticals together, so to speak.

[05:21]

So I'm asking myself, since sadhana is the place where the horizontal and the vertical are merged, why it is so difficult for me to enter into this kind of language there? It's just the way it is. Well, practice is also to be in the midst of a lack of success. I mean, we can't expect practice to solve all human problems. If it even solves a little bit, it's good. So, I mean, the main posture of fruitful living is acceptance. And it's not about what we want there to be, but to accept what is there.

[06:52]

And then within that acceptance, we see what practice, what happens. Someone else? Yes. I only get to see you once a year. But that's a lot, maybe. It's good, isn't it? So something that might match this topic that you just spoke about, the inner and the outer. Because at present I'm perceiving something was in me which might have already been there since forever. With age 11 I thought actually I'd rather be a woman. And then I told myself I will never join the army service.

[08:19]

And that I still prefer women... like women better than men. Not prefer. So I told that to a friend this morning and she told me, well, you're just a hidden lesbian. It's one of the alternatives. This is one of the alternatives, yes. So what I have noticed at age 11 and thought at that time seems to still have its influence today.

[09:21]

Then three weeks ago I read a newspaper article that women in Japan aren't able to make a career. Aren't able. Aren't, are not. Maybe small ones, they don't get support, they don't get any financial aid to become entrepreneurs or anything. And I thought this is pretty sad because Japan is a culture that's been influenced by Zen Buddhism. And so yesterday I spoke to my karate teacher about it and he said, well... So maybe I misunderstood him, but basically I understood he meant that we in the West are a little bit advanced on some aspects and we have to teach the East some things too. In Zen Buddhism it's practiced that you recite the patriarchs.

[10:38]

And I got sort of a little irritated maybe even. Not irritated in a sense, just kind of... knocked against that, that's the patriarch. And I noticed just men are being shot. And that really works within me. Yeah, I understand. Some groups do, Zen groups, in fact, my former San Francisco Zen group does chant a list of women's names. And it's more politically correct, for sure.

[11:41]

Das ist politisch ganz bestimmt korrekter. But it's not historically correct. Aber historisch ist das nicht korrekt. The fact is, Japan is a very male-dominated society. Die Tatsache ist, dass Japan eine sehr von den Männern dominierte Gesellschaft ist, wie ein Großteil der Welt und ein Großteil von Asien. So there have been very significant women practitioners and teachers, but there's no demonstrable line to the present. So my emphasis is to recognize in the echoes which we chant the responses during the chanting to recognize the women who practice But my main emphasis is that from now we should have lineage of men and women where there's a mixed succession, not necessarily all men or all women.

[13:26]

I don't want to pretend history is different than it was but I want to emphasize as much as possible practice equally for men and women. And it's clear from my experience of 55 years or so that women often get it quicker than men. And I always try to show you my grandmotherly side, but I'm not too good at it.

[14:37]

Yeah, I'm working on it. Yes. I have a question to this process of falling asleep and you said one can observe it. And I've tried it a lot and every time I fall asleep the observer who can observe it just vanishes out of my grasp. Do you have any advice? How? How? I can exactly observe. Well, first of all, you have to know it's possible. And I guarantee you it's possible. Then I think maybe you need to work on establishing an attentional point.

[15:57]

An attentional point you hold within a field of mind. And so as I've pointed out sometimes, one of the main ways of yogic knowing And what I've been trying to do yesterday and today is jiggle certain possibilities into our awareness. And without explanation, mainly. And I hope if you start wearing, as Basho said about his poems, if what I'm saying is well-tailored enough,

[17:01]

And you start wearing some of these views. You're wearing the views will start connecting the points. Okay, so I emphasized, for instance, that this poem is written with a conception of simultaneity. It's not successional time, it's simultaneous time. And the poet Basho assumes that you're more likely to, as a poem written in simultaneous time,

[18:21]

It is more likely to precipitate an experience of the poem than if it were written in narrative, progressional time. Er geht davon aus, dass es dann eher eine Erfahrung verursachen kann, als wenn es in beschreibender Abfolgen der Zeit geschehen würde. Okay, now, what I'm saying now is just, you know, to try to link this to everything I've been saying, not just speaking to you now. Also was ich jetzt sage, ich möchte eigentlich alle diese Sachen miteinander verbinden, nicht nur was du gefragt hast. But another example of yogic experience, a way of experiencing the world yogically, as I pointed out pretty often, is you don't think about things.

[19:39]

You notice. But you don't think about what you notice. Okay, so how do you develop a habit of not thinking about what you notice? One way is you notice particulars. You let particulars appear. You don't let grass grow by itself. You don't like grass grows over there? Like grass grows by itself. So, wie das Gras von alleine wächst? You don't try to... I mean, sometimes we intentionally notice things, of course.

[20:48]

Natürlich tun wir manchmal absichtlich etwas bemerken. If you're playing ping-pong, you want to intentionally notice the balls coming across the way. Maybe an interesting example. All right, so you notice particulars without thinking about them. And then you shift to the field. So in this particular case, I might notice that your thumb and finger of your left hand are like that. And then I notice the field. Of everything all at once. And then I come back to you. And I notice the rate at which you're blinking.

[21:49]

And then I go back to the field. And then I notice how concentrated your face is. Or maybe I just notice that Susanna is writing with a red pen. So I would say this is the usual mode of mind for a yogic practitioner. You're just in a field of noticing. You're noticing the field and the particulars of the field. But you're not thinking about it. And that tends to develop an attentional point which has a

[22:52]

experiential feel that's not related to consciousness. And then that attentional point, once you develop it, can be brought over the bump into sleep. As I've said in the past, when I was the teacher in San Francisco in California for many years, I never spoke in such detail about it. But coming to Europe and mostly speaking to people who weren't long-time practitioners, I found I had to be more explicit.

[24:11]

But the question is, how can I be more explicit without taking away your own discovery? What you described, noticing, not thinking, going back to the field, noticing something, how much intention is that? How fast is this taking place? Try it out. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Like that. Yeah. Okay. No, it's like, just do it as you wish. Take care and enjoy yourself. I have no intention.

[25:14]

I noticed that I do this. And I noticed that I do it and it helps me give a lecture because then I don't have to think about what I'm saying. And then I noticed that actually this developed through also imitating Sukhiroshi bodily without being aware that I was. And then I gave hundreds of seminars over many years and decided not to talk about this process of specificity of the field.

[26:28]

Because I had a kind of inner rule not to talk about things that other people can't experience. Weil ich eine Regel mir auferlegt habe, dass ich nicht über Dinge sprechen werde, die andere Leute nicht spüren können. But one day I decided, maybe I'll just start talking about it. Irgendwann habe ich dann entschieden, ich werde einfach mal drüber reden. And then I started. Many of you have heard me say it quite a few times. Yes, Tom? May I ask a question? May I ask a question? I wish you'd just ask questions and not ask if you can ask a question.

[27:29]

May I ask a question? Connected was an example that we yesterday experienced together, or is this too personal? Well, let's find out. We share one thing, that we both have a daughter who is 12 years old. Yes. Along with Sylvia. She's 12 too? Probably more here than I thought you all did. I was once a daughter of 12 years old. Yeah, go ahead. Anyway, go ahead. And your daughter called multiple times yesterday. Family sick. I mean homesick. And even during dinner yesterday.

[28:31]

And I tried to put myself into the place of a dad who gets called every five minutes. And I got tenser and tenser. And sat exactly right beside you. I was totally admiring. With what calmness? You calmed her down. Over a distance of many thousand kilometers from here to Spain. And we all know, when we have a 12-year-old daughter, how difficult that is. We all want to know what of the Zen practice we can take with us into our everyday life.

[29:49]

What in your Zen practice gave you the skills to deal with this situation so entirely differently than I have done? She always takes all the credit. Well, I mean, it's... If I say what it feels like to me, It sounds like I'm trying to be Zen.

[31:00]

And I don't think of it as being Zen, but I suppose maybe it is. But Marie-Louise is saying, don't even answer it. But when I answer it, for me it's just like it's the first time she's called. So it's like, oh, that's my daughter's voice. What do you have to say? I noticed this change in myself years ago. And my 50-year-old daughter was just with us for two weeks. And somehow she brought up this cup she'd broken. And she brought it up as if, which I thought she knew it was fine that she'd broken it.

[32:02]

But because I thought we talked about it in the past, but anyway, she brought it up and said, geez, I broke that cup. That will. Anyway, it was a cup by Hamada, Shoji Hamada, who was a national treasure potter of Japan that someone had given me. I think Honami-san gave it to me when I was ordained.

[33:19]

Anyway, I used it, and it was probably in my apartment in San Francisco, by far and away the most valuable thing in the apartment. And probably, in fact, more valuable than everything together in my apartment. And she, I don't know what, it was sitting on my desk. I just used it as a tea and coffee cup. And she knocked it off the table. And I remember I didn't have one bad feeling. It just no longer was the Hamada cup. And it now was something to be cleaned up. So I got a dustpan and then I kept the pieces for many years.

[34:31]

And I had someone in Japan, as I was talking about yesterday, repair it with gold. Well, gold, it sounds like gold, but it's just, they take a little gold leaf, which is not very expensive, and put it, mix it with the glue, and it leaves a little gold line where it's repaired. But it did surprise me when it happened because my mental structure of the time was that I was careful with this cup.

[35:45]

And I was aware it was quite extraordinary that Honami-san gave me this cup. So I kind of my mental structure would have imagined that I would care. If anybody asked me the day before, do you want your daughter to break this cup? I would have said, absolutely not. But now I would say, oh, it's great you broke the cup. Help me notice something. But actually that structure of caring about the cup was, and I didn't even know it, was gone.

[36:57]

It had been replaced by acceptance. What happens is what happens, and that's the way it is. And you saw it in the reaction in Japan to the tsunami. There was no kind of reaction when these nuclear power plants and everything and all that terrible stuff that happened of why me or this shouldn't have happened. I mean, they just, it happened. Of course, there's now responsibility and blame and so forth. But the basic reaction was, it happened, that's all. I want to come back to the simultaneity.

[38:08]

My practice emphasis at present lies in everyday life and everyday has something to do with speed or pace. It's my observation that certain kind of paces do support certain kind of states of mind and don't others. I want to refer to a state of mind that more likely experiences simultaneity is probably more likely to be experienced in a reduced pace and through pausing.

[39:46]

And conversely, consciousness or conscious registering of activities is more likely connected faster by the activity than is more not really noticed or not conscious. And so if I am at a certain kind of pace, it opens more the mind of simultaneity, which is accompanied by some kind of space, spaciousness feeling. Gerald and I have been practicing since 83. And he speaks like this, and I think, is that my voice?

[40:47]

Not in the sense of mine, but the voices are interwoven. So maybe from what you said I can shift to what I'd also like to speak about. We have these big categories of space and time. And working with the concept of space which in the West we think separates us and in a yogic culture it's assumed it connects us and of course experientially it both simultaneously connects and separates and it's useful in yogic practice To feel space as a kind of medium, a liquid almost.

[42:20]

Which emerges through your activity. If you think of it as an already there-ness, it's a kind of delusion. I mean, this room was there last year when Heinrich of Hanover was responsible. And now Angelica of Hannover is responsible and letting us be. And we can say all the spaces who now are in this space. And it was here last year too.

[43:31]

That's not really true. This space was created by a farming tradition of Heinrich's parents and grandparents or something. Dieser Raum wurde geschaffen durch eine landwirtschaftliche Tradition von Heinrichs Vater und Großvater. Yeah, and Heinrich changed it a lot. Und Heinrich hat es sehr verändert. And now you're changing it. The men's room disappeared. Und jetzt änderst du es. There's only women's rooms now. Es gibt nur noch Frauenklubs. This is a good lesson for us men, you know. But our use of it right now is changing. Yeah, I mean, this room is its use. So how do you get to know that experience?

[44:48]

You have to kind of take away the already there-ness. And actually, when you have the idea appears already there, you kind of cut it off. Okay, but we need a substitute to help cut off already there-ness. And the phrase I've suggested in the spirit of koans and using phrases is already connected. Or maybe in this case you might say, just now being connected.

[45:54]

So if I meet somebody, even if it's a totally new person who's standing at a bus stop, The field I feel is already connected. I don't at all feel I don't know this person. Or that it's a stranger. I feel that it's a person who may think he or she doesn't know me, but I'm going to show them they're wrong. Yeah, so you can practice this with telephone operators, with waiters and waitresses, and so forth. Yeah, and so you know that you're entering the sphere of what might be thought of as no connection, but in fact you're connected.

[47:28]

So you can enter this sphere of non-connection from which you believe to be non-connected and know that you are connected. And you really know it, as I've often said, if you're lost in the woods and you can't find anything and it starts to hail, and then somebody appears. Oh, you feel connected right away. Yeah, okay. So you can practice with a phrase already connected. which helps you to enter into space as an emerging field. And although I can't cover everything in a seminar, of course, of two days or three days, one of the most, if you're going to do Dharma practice, it means to learn to notice the world as appearances.

[48:59]

If you want to do Dharma practice, you have to learn the world as appearances. Tom mentioned how you bring practice into daily life. Well, there's a difference between zazen and mindfulness practice. But if some of the experiential insights of sasen practice quite noticing the world more and more as appearances needle appears And Nico appears.

[50:02]

And Beate appears. Oh, and you too. Bernd appears. And if I don't think of you as already there, when I come back to Bernd, you're slightly different, which I might not have noticed before. Because Baron, like most of us, is in a constant state of reappearing. So, just like you can work with already connected, you can work with the pause for the particular. What is the phrase we usually use for pause for the particular?

[51:20]

I don't know, did you say something special? No, not at all. No, it's something specific that appears here. The individual. The individual phrase. You guys have been practicing with me for decades! Okay So some phrase in Deutsch or English, the pause for the particular, allows you to start developing the phenomenological process, sensorial process, of noticing the world not as continuity but as a series of particularities and to begin to integrate particularities

[52:25]

Begin to integrate your own pace with particulars. So that you can integrate your own rhythm, your own beat with this specific, with the special rhythm. So, already connected, to pause for the particular. These are expressions which bring the insights of zazen into your daily activity. It's a kind of articulated mindfulness.

[53:42]

Based on the arising through the wisdom of Buddhism. Okay, now, so that is the big category of space. Which philosophers have been trying to deal with Aristotle, etc., forever? What was the main concern of Einstein and Heidegger and Husserl in being in time and so forth? So what would be a yogic way to enter into intimate time? What would be a yogic way Give me some other words for intimate time.

[55:00]

Intimate time. Yeah, I try to be always, I don't know, let me just keep going. Use English. Intimate time. The intimacy of time. Vertrautheit. Die Vertrautheit von Zeit. Okay. It's very common for us to say, I have no time. I can't do this because I have no time. This is comparative time. This is clock time derived from planetary time. We've created an abstraction that we call clock time based on the sun and the moon and so forth.

[56:12]

But clock time has then shared shared time in order to organize things, is a time we've agreed upon that we share with each other. But it's not your time. You can't have no time because you are time. You know, carbon-14 is a dating process discovered by, what's his name?

[57:15]

I forget his name. Physicist. Carbon-14. Carbon-14. Carbon-14. So if you can find something which has carbon in it, a dinosaur bone, you can then know how old it is because carbon disintegrates at 14 molecules per minute or something like that. So that's carbon's time. Yeah. So carbon is its own time. Yeah. Carbon can't say I have no time.

[58:22]

I've got 14 disintegrations a minute. That's as much as I can do, sorry. Well, you're the same. Okay, so your heartbeat is something like 60 to 70 beats per minute. Dein Herzschlag ist 60 bis 70 Schläge pro Minute. Your breathing rate is, I don't know, about a fifth of that. 10, 12, something. Dein Atmen ist ungefähr ein Fünftel davon. Okay. There is almost no phase synchrony between the heartbeat and the breath beat. But sometimes in non-dreaming deep sleep, a phase synchrony occurs between the breath and the heart. No, I've never scientifically tied myself, well, once it happened, but to things and measured these things.

[59:44]

But I think that a phase synchrony of breath and heartbeat occur during zazen sometimes. Can I ask a technical question? Yes. Does it mean that one breath is one heartbeat, or can it be three breaths and one heartbeat? Yeah, like that. It's in a syncretic relationship, but not one-to-one. Well, if my supposition is correct, It means that what's happening in zazen, which is one of the assumptions of pre-Buddhist India, is that zazen is partly the surfacing of non-dreaming deep sleep into meditation.

[61:02]

So what I'm getting at before we break for lunch is what I would like to continue with after lunch. And by the way, I've been speaking about this, trying to speak about it in the dark since February. Or since January or February, yeah. Finding language for this that I can share. And most simply I would say there's three modalities of time.

[62:14]

To give them simple names, there's bodily time, contextual time, and gestational time. and ripening time. Okay. So I think, yeah? Say that again, bodily? Bodily, contextual, and gestational. And if you look at the koans carefully, you can see that a teacher operates with his practitioners in these three times playing with them as musical chords.

[63:19]

Okay, but we have to start somewhere. And the only place to start is bodily time. So as a practitioner, you see if you can start noticing bodily time. Find yourself in the midst of your breath. I'm responding to Geralt here. Find yourself in the midst of your breath. In the pace of your breath. And in the pace too of your heartbeat. And in the pace of your metabolism.

[64:42]

And sometimes I kind of create a new word, mentabolism. Your mentality and your... Okay, because it's body, mind, it's your mentalism. Now, you know, I found when I first started practicing Zazen, To give attention to my heartbeat began to affect my heartbeat. And I also realized, hey, there's only so many heartbeats there. If this guy stops, I'm gone. I began to think, this is kind of scary to notice this thing which eventually will stop.

[65:47]

Somehow I didn't feel that about breath. I guess because breath is more intentional or conscious and your heartbeat is more autonomic. But after a while gazing, gaining a little courage, And less heart sickness and homesickness. I began to feel the pace of the heart in the midst of things. And one of the teachings in Taoism in China and Japan is to divide the body up into three Tan Tians or Dan Tians.

[67:10]

which is roughly this area, this area, and then below. And these distinctions are, in some sense, meaningless. But they're not meaningless if you bring attention to them because something happens when you bring attention to particular targets. If you bring attention to the breath in zazen, it's very different than not bringing attention to the breath. So attention is the most powerful tool and treasure you have. It's way more important than the concept of self, the organizing principle of self. Okay, so you bring attention to this area of the body,

[68:23]

From the navel, a little below the navel to up here. And you feel it as a metabolic unit. You feel it as a way you're entering the world. Und du spürst es als eine Art, wie man in die Welt hineintritt. Und wenn du das tust und Aufmerksamkeit auf diesen Teil auf diesen Tantien richtest, wird es den unteren und oberen Tantien auch auf neue Art und Weise spürbarer beleben. So, since Niko is sitting in front of me here, when I get up and here, see Niko, because of practicing this way, I feel this whole area of the body relating to that area of the body in him.

[69:59]

So it's not necessarily relating to Niko and that head sitting up on top of it. It's this big, strong male body there. Or, you know, I'm sure it's Kieslis, that big... present female body yeah so this is a way to begin to notice bodily time where you if you say I have no time you know you're lying Or you say, practically speaking, I have no time. But your experience is, this is time.

[71:13]

The heartbeat is time. The breath is time. The metabolism is time. The overall kind of rhythm that we hear in the world. Insects, car noises. Because we're in a resonant field and it can actually be measured. There's a resonant field going on with everything around you. So the first step to enter yogic time, not clock time, the actual time you will live until you don't live, is to find ways to bring attention to bodily time and to know conceptually this is fundamental time.

[72:22]

And that I will not lose connection with this fundamental time. No matter how busy I am, no matter what pressures on me, I stay within bodily time. And if I have to sacrifice it to run for a bus, Or to deal with an emergency, like our two doctors here, medical emergency. If I find I'm sacrificing bodily time, I know I'm sacrificing bodily time. And when you get good at it, even in an emergency, you don't sacrifice bodily time.

[73:49]

You function better within bodily time. And you change the emergency too. You change the emergency. You don't lose that time. If you don't... You flow the process, you improve the process if you don't lose that time. Yeah, so say that in Deutsch, please. Excuse me. And now... And now... Clock time is telling me that bodily time would like lunch. Thank you very much. Thank you.

[74:37]

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