Thank you so much for being here. Looking at the schedule yesterday with Jonas, who's our Eno. There's a first period is 40 minutes and there's an asterisk beside it. And the asterisk says something like what? Sazon is voluntary. Voluntary, not required or something, right? And then the second period is only 30 minutes and it says, it implies it's required. Well, why don't we just make both of them voluntary?

[01:08]

You know, I kind of hate it that you come here and then we have to kind of force you into sitting, if you're maybe not familiar with it. But probably we could say it's the main point of this seminar. And for me, what I'm doing is speaking to the meditation body or the zazen body. Yeah. And I think unless you do some sitting, like we do a bit of sitting, a half hour sitting before I start saying something, Again, the assumption is, I mean, maybe the assumption is for you, if you think about it,

[02:22]

not only that maybe doing a little zazen is a good thing to do, but that I can't really give a talk that's relevant to the topic unless you have some sitting practice. So what I'm saying here is that that The Buddhist yogic worldview is significantly different from our Western worldview.

[03:36]

You know, I mean, it's maybe a little hard to believe how different it is. Because we all have hair and noses and so forth, and we like to live under roofs. But the differences are, I think, not even apparent to the Japanese or the Asian, East Asians or Americans or Europeans very easily. Now let's just take a small difference. In a traditional Japanese house, you sleep and are awake in the same room.

[04:54]

Now this seems, well, probably it's a small country and it's got half the U.S. population one-eighth the area, livable area, etc. So their houses aren't big enough for bedrooms. And we divide our houses up, of course, into standing-up rooms and reclining rooms. In fact, when you buy an apartment or a house or something, you pay for how many reclining rooms there are.

[05:59]

Okay. We don't associate posture exactly with minds. We know it's easier to sleep when you lie down. And we know that dreaming mind and sleeping mind is different from the waking mind. But in traditional, I know Japan better than other East Asian countries. So I'll just say Japanese. And the Japanese sleep in the same room and they get up and put their bedding away and do their daily life in the same room.

[07:12]

And just, you know, in a traditional... When I lived in Japan, it was still mostly a traditional way of living. Nobody thinks about it. They don't. I mean that this is important that you sleep and stand in the same room. But it represents a transition from one kind of mind to another kind of mind in the same space. So Zazen, the word for the meditation we do, is called Zazen.

[08:16]

Now, since some of you are, I think, new to sitting practice, I decided to, I thought maybe... I'll use this as an excuse to start over again. To look at practice in a very basic way. Like, why do we make one period voluntary and one period not? So the za part is sitting. And the Zen part is absorption. It doesn't really mean meditation.

[09:19]

It means the absorption that you can discover through sitting. And what is the... What is the mind that's not standing mind, not reclining mind, but the mind you can absorb through sitting? And in a Japanese traditional house, there is virtually no furniture. There's usually a table. But there are not chairs. And not having chairs makes you always, in every domestic situation, and restaurants and so forth, sit in what's basically a meditation posture.

[10:21]

So the culture has made a basic decision, and most Japanese people, they don't think about their own culture, they just do it. And when they build a modern house now and can afford it, they have one Japanese room stuck somewhere and the rest is all Western. Yeah. And they complain about the Caesar sitting posture. But they don't know why their culture made this a kind of implicit rule.

[11:23]

Which is in the sitting posture, particularly without chairs... Your body has to support your body. And your spine has to, and we know the spine even from physiologists, know the spine is, we could almost say a kind of mind. And even from physiology we know the spine as, we could almost say, a kind of spirit. And so the architecture leads you to always use your own body. And also makes you more right-brained than left-brained.

[12:29]

So there's no question in my mind that what we, I mean, it's a simplistic distinction in some ways between bodily right-brained and bodily left-brained. Maybe it would be appropriate to talk more about that later. But Western culture is dominantly left-brained in general. Except for some people, and for maybe artists and musicians, they tend to be more toward right brain. So what I'm saying here is that the This Western worldview and this East Asian yogic worldview is so different that it turns you physiologically into a different kind of person.

[13:52]

It realigns the mental continuum. It changes the interconnectedness of the mental continuum. Yeah, this is a big, this is a, you know, it's... A big difference. Whether it's a big deal or not, I don't know, but it's a big difference. And it happens incrementally. Okay. Now, Most of us establish our identity through, thank you, through within our consciousness, within our consciousness, and in comparison to who we were, who we might be, and others.

[15:18]

And if your identity is primarily defined through consciousness, you will probably never be a meditator. Because there will always be things that are more important to do. weil es dann immer Dinge geben wird, die wichtiger sind, dass man sie tut. And you don't see the effects. I mean, sometimes the effects are pretty quick, but generally you don't see the effects for some months or longer. I mean, others may notice, hey, geez, it's more pleasant to be around you now, or something's different about you, etc., But you don't notice it because you're still thinking and noticing the world in the same categories.

[16:36]

Okay. Yeah, so I'm trying. We have two days. Or a day and a half. This morning and this afternoon and tomorrow morning. And the topic is the practice of compassion. And compassion is already a rather subtle topic within Buddhism. And it's... Probably it's not the right word to translate the Japanese and Chinese and Sanskrit word. And wahrscheinlich ist es auch nicht das richtige Wort, um das Sanskrit-Wort oder das japanische und chinesische Wort zu übersetzen.

[18:00]

Maybe altruism would be better. Vielleicht wäre altruismus besser. I don't know. Weiß ich nicht. But it's not about feeling and morality and so forth. Es geht dabei nicht um das Gefühl oder um die Moral oder so. It's more an expression of wisdom. Sondern es ist eher ein Ausdruck der Weisheit. And wisdom in Buddhism is to know that everything is interactively interconnected. And what does it mean to know that? Well, it's pretty easy to know it intellectually. But to embody it, and to embed it, now I'm using the word embed in a specific way, to embody, I mean to, yeah, that's pretty clear, to embody it,

[19:04]

To embed it, I mean, it's a current technical use of the word as well as my own use of the word. To mean it's become part of all your perceptual interactions with the phenomenal world. I have to be a little careful here because if I present too many unfamiliar ideas, the mind stops working at the second or the third. And you fall asleep or you start thinking about something else. So after I say things at the beginning of each session, usually or something like that, I hope we can have some discussion together.

[20:41]

Okay. So, if sitting absorption represents a different mind than the consciousness of standing, Of course, we sit a lot all day long in an office in front of your computer and so forth. But it's sitting because we're tired of standing. Now they have computer desks which you can stand all day long at and even exercise at. Und heutzutage, Victoria Beckham does that.

[21:52]

This I didn't need to know. Heutzutage gibt es so Büro-Tische, wo man stehen kann und sogar nebenher Sport machen kann. She's a Spice Girl or something like that? Yes, Spice Girl and wife of David Beckham. Oh my goodness. Fashion designer. You know a lot about this. I know he's a handsome guy, but still. Okay. Don't forget you're sitting right in front of this Avalokiteshvara. And we don't know the difference between you and her. And she doesn't know anything about spice. Okay. So we sit down because we're tired of standing or we want to rest, but we don't sit down because it's an implicit or explicit meditation posture. Okay, so that's a little riff on sitting. Now, what about absorption?

[22:56]

Okay. So it's not sitting thinking, it's sitting absorption. Okay. Absorption means a... a... non-conceptual mode of knowing.

[23:59]

Now, normally we think of knowledge as And I don't know what the... Wissen sounds like wisdom. No, wissen ist knowledge. Weisheit. Weisheit. Well, knowledge in English literally means knowing locked in. Something like that. Locked in knowing. Okay. Also im Englischen ist dieses Wort knowledge. Das ist so wie eingesperrtes Wissen. Die zwei Teile des Wortes. And generally knowledge is understood as perceptions... gathered and organized, categorized in thinking. You acquire knowledge by thinking about things. But some of us will notice that intuition sometimes seems truer than most of our knowledge and we didn't arrive at it by thinking about it.

[25:00]

So, intuition is a fruit of absorption knowing. Okay, now, I don't really, I mean, at least in English, I don't have words to describe this. There's 600,000 more words in English, I believe. And among those 600,000 words, there aren't words for what this foolish person here is trying to talk about. We've been making distinctions in English since Shakespeare and when we got French and English-German together. And the distinctions I'm trying to make between sitting when you're tired of standing and sitting as a form of meditation, etc., we just don't have words for it.

[26:35]

Or a knowing process, which isn't a knowledge process. Or a knowledge process. Ah, this is difficult. Sorry. See, even the translator is challenged. Yeah. And she's been translating for me for 50 years. No. 20? 10? 10, yeah. Okay, also, oder die Unterscheidung zwischen einem Prozess zu wissen als Verb und die And the only example we have of it, easy example that we are all familiar with, is intuition. And intuition is an insight or a knowing that has to push through consciousness to get noticed.

[27:54]

But the process through which this intuition developed, and often it's obviously full of information and knowing, It's got a real assessment of the situation that appears as, whew, gee, that sounds true. But the process by which that intuition happened is invisible to us. Aber der Prozess, durch den sich diese Intuition ereignet hat, der ist unsichtbar für uns. Der ist unter dem Bewusstsein verborgen. So wie alle Sterne im Moment hinter unserem grauen Himmel verborgen sind.

[29:09]

Die Sterne sind immer noch da. Now what Zazen does and what a developed, mature meditation practice does is really do something like make all your thinking intuition. You find yourself in a flow of intuitions which feels like it's really accurate about how the world is. Du findest dich inmitten eines Flusses der Intuition, von dem du das Gefühl hast, dass das wirklich zutreffend ist für die Art und Weise, wie die Welt ist. And you don't have to think your way through to it. Und du musst dich nicht dorthin denken.

[30:10]

Well, these are big changes from, you know, like, well, there's a required period of zazen and... But still, this is so out of our own categories of defining ourselves, it's really hard to do it. feeling, maybe we can talk about it at some point, that brings us into this presence of mind which is not thinking mind. So zazen brings you in or gives you a taste of or allows you to establish a non-comparative, non-conceptual modality of knowing.

[31:27]

And just by being present in the world without thinking about it, but being present to the world, accumulates a kind of Deeper knowledge. Now, some of us Westerners get competitive. Hey, our culture is pretty good and, you know, I don't like this Japanese stuff, you know. And actually, if I pull off my rubber mask here, I'm Japanese. Like some of these movies. But actually, whether you believe it or not, I am an ordinary Westerner who used to be skinnier.

[32:47]

And if I have any professional training, it's in history. So I wonder, why did this way of being human, of discovering our humanness, um, um, Because to me it's not about Asia or the West. It's just human beings get started on a certain cultural pattern and then they get stuck in it. And most people in the yogic culture as well as our western culture, our mind culture, get stuck in their culture.

[33:48]

This culture, this yoga culture exists in Asia to unstick Asians from their culture. And your culture becomes a game you play, but it's not your identity. So I wonder, why did Asia come up with this more than we did? Well, I think it's, you know, they don't have a creator God and so forth. There's various reasons why they came up with a more scientific way of looking at beingness.

[35:03]

And I study now and then, and sometimes very carefully, Heidegger. And he came up very close to this kind of worldview. Yeah, which is interesting. He didn't have practice to take it the next step, but he got right at the edge of this worldview, this yogic worldview. Okay, so let's have a break. And maybe I'll say something about this statue when we come back. And I hope all of you don't act like statues and you all say something too.

[36:05]

I hope that you don't all start behaving like statues, but that you also say something.

[36:27]

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