Good evening. Good evening. So I want to continue this evening on the series of talks about Sazen, this sitting meditation practice that we do. So, I've talked, been talking about this in terms of four aspects. I've spoken a little bit already about posture and breath, and the other two that I want to talk about are mind and the transformational function of zazen. So I want to start talking about mind tonight. Just a little bit about what I said about posture and breath. There's much more that could be said, of course, but we emphasize a great deal the uprightness of our posture in zazen because this posture becomes a way in which we learn an attitude that goes beyond just a formal meditation hall practice.

[01:09]

So this is a way of finding our deep, deep, deep inner balance, not leaning left or right, not leaning forward or holding back. So we try to find center. And that's a dynamic place that's shifting. So to find our uprightness in a way that's relaxed, not tense, is subtle. And it takes a while to find our seat in this practice. So I'm glad that there's some new people here tonight. That's wonderful for us and for those of you who maybe sets us in for the first time tonight, it takes a while to settle into this deeper posture of uprightness. One thing that I'm emphasizing is this, as part of finding that center is this kind of tilt forward and backward with our pelvis so that we're not slumping back, not straining forward.

[02:17]

a little bit forward. So, to actually pay attention to this body, to the yogic aspect of our zazen is important. Again, there's much more that can be said about that. We also talked a little bit about breath. Breath, which is an aspect of this posture, and that is always happening, but our attention to breath our attention to inhale and exhale is a way of knitting together the whole of our zazen awareness when we breathe, when we inhale we actually are breathing with our whole body oxygen goes through all of our arteries and capillaries and veins through our whole body so to feel breath as part of our posture and to be aware of breath is very very helpful not just in the formal zazen itself but also as we emphasize how the awareness of zazen then becomes part of our everyday activity and breath is also a great

[03:36]

guidance for us to remind our Zazen mind, our Zazen body. So we can talk more about that, of course we will. And if you have particular questions about posture of breath, I'll try and leave some time for discussion tonight. Starting thinking about starting to talk about mind and zazen I just I kind of felt like this is such a huge topic so I'm not going to talk about it just tonight and maybe one of the themes the next few months including during the three-day sitting coming up will be mind of zazen and the transformational function of zazen because they're kind of connected all of course all of it's connected But I wanted to start talking practically about how it is that the mind of Zazen functions as we're sitting, and again, to have some discussion.

[04:48]

And one aspect of this is that there are traditional teachings about mind in Buddhism, in Indian Buddhism and in the Zen tradition from China and Japan. I was up in Minnesota for a seminar Saturday and there was a fellow there who had just started sitting formally at that group and had been trying to sit on his own. And many of us had that experience that that's pretty difficult. So this, the actual Zazen practice is something that's always available that we can do anywhere, anytime. But practically speaking, to have a Dharma context, to have a place where we experience and express Zazen, but then also can be exposed to this great teaching tradition going back 2,500 years from one perspective anyway, maybe further actually, helps us to have a container in which to actually take on the practice.

[06:00]

Can you hear me back there, Adam? So one of the teachings about mind in Indian Buddhism that I think is particularly helpful to start off with when we start to sit is about the six consciousnesses. So the Heart Sutra that we chanted refers to them. So what we, so we have a very, our usual idea of our mind and of our thought processes is pretty limited. And part of what the Zazen experience does is to open up different, different aspects of that. In the Heart Sutra it refers to these first six consciousnesses, eye consciousness. So this is one that's very important for us as human beings. We're particularly visually oriented and when there is an eye object, a shape or a color, and an eye organ, the ability to see, then there comes about an awareness, a consciousness of some visual object.

[07:12]

This is one part of our experience. Even when we're sitting facing the wall, and there's not so much going on, it's not like television or a movie screen, although Lovato was talking about how she can easily see things moving around on the wall. So, you know, there's things that happen, but this is one aspect of our consciousness or awareness. And of course then there is sound consciousness, which is actually recommended as a meditation object. It's very helpful. We can continue to hear the traffic and sounds around us, through walls even. And then there's nose, smell consciousness. taste, tongue consciousness, and physical consciousness, which is very important in Zazen because part of what we're doing is feeling our body in a new way, experiencing our body, feeling the pressure of the cushion on our butt, feeling the tension in our knees or in our back or in our shoulder, feeling the tension of holding our hands in the position in the Cosmic Mudra.

[08:25]

so actually physical consciousness is fairly subtle but there's a sixth which is not how we're used to thinking about mind which is mind consciousness that there are thoughts happening as we're sitting just as there are sounds of vehicles passing by or color or shape on the wall and we're used to thinking I think that we are what we think or that we control what we think and one of the first things we learn in Zazen is there's all these thoughts going on, the tapes are rolling and that faculty, that aspect of consciousness is not in our control, we can realize we've been thinking about something and not being aware of our breath or our posture in any way. Uchiyama Roshi says that as we sit, our stomach continues to secrete digestive juices, naturally, in the same way our brain continues to secrete thoughts.

[09:33]

This way of thinking about thought and about consciousness, then, is that we don't have to identify with those thoughts. So the practice, or common practice instruction in Soto Zen is, as thoughts arise, let them be there, don't try and stop them, but don't do anything with them either. Thoughts arise and we let them go, just as we let the sounds of the vehicles pass by. And of course, it's more complicated than that because our consciousness is patterned after certain kinds of thoughts and certain ways of thinking. and actually in the Indian Yogachara school, and I won't go into a lot of detail tonight, but there's a whole way of seeing how this sixth consciousness gets, how we get caught in it, how we get caught in this thinking. Again, the point of talking about all of this in the context of our Zazen practice is to give you a framework for just sitting, for being present, for allowing the thoughts to come, allowing them to go, not doing anything with them.

[10:49]

But if you see that you're thinking about something, just seeing that and letting it go, and it may come up again, part of why it comes up again has to do with what's called the eighth consciousness. So first you have to say the seventh consciousness. This is in the Indian Yogacara Buddhist system. And again, I can talk about this, maybe we'll have a seminar on this later in the year, but the seventh consciousness is just this faculty we have of separating ourself from our experience. We think there's some subject smelling or tasting or hearing or thinking these things. We think there's some self and some other. This is one of the aspects of our human consciousness, or of the kind of consciousness that human beings have. Maybe other beings have this, I don't know, some animals seem to be self-conscious in some ways. but this is in some sense the fundamental problem that we separate ourselves from each other and the world and the wall in front of us and our own breathing and yet also that's just what it means to be a human being is that we do this we have to accept that we do this this is the world we live in

[12:15]

But to be aware of that, to hear that we do this and to hear that, yeah, you're not the only person who thinks you're separate from the rest of the world. This is something that human beings do. We get caught in estrangement and alienation and so forth. consciousness the consciousness that we usually think of as consciousness the discriminating consciousness is is about discriminating it's about making definitions it's about separating it's about discerning this from that now buddhism is not about getting rid of that buddhism is about seeing through that not being caught by that so again please don't fall into the heretical school of lobotomy zen This is not about getting rid of thinking. This is about settling into this deeper place. And what's in the Yogacara system, they talk about the eighth consciousness, which is the storehouse consciousness in which all of our patterns of thinking are stored, positive and negative.

[13:21]

And we have the capacity to support the wholesome, positive, constructive patterns and to not support the harmful ones. and yet all of that is there this is soup of awareness and out of that these thoughts arise in our sixth consciousness from our own experience the things that happen during the day maybe lists of things you have to do tomorrow and so forth all of the things that might all of the thoughts that might appear to your sixth consciousness all the thought objects that might appear during the period of zazen come out of this in buddhism we say uh... this storehouse from many lifetimes of awareness but even if you don't want to get into many lifetimes just from all of the decades that you've been around we have many thoughts and they're connected to other thoughts so as we're sitting naturally thoughts come up so that's a very very very brief description of a way of talking about mind in zazen from the point of view of uh...

[14:32]

Indian Buddhist Psychological School of Yogacara, I want to throw in now a Zen way of talking about it from an old Zen story, maybe more simple. One of the ancestors in our lineage named Yao Shan was sitting very still and upright one time, and one of his students said, what are you thinking of, sitting there so steadfastly? And he said, I'm thinking of not thinking. Or another way to translate it might be, I'm thinking of that which does not think. And the student, who was very good, I remember this dialogue because he was very good, said, how do you do that? How do you think of not thinking? How do you think of, or how's thinking of that which doesn't think? And he said, Well, he used a different negative and it's usually translated as non-thinking.

[15:38]

I like the translation better, beyond thinking. So, this is about foreground and background. We're used to thinking of our thinking in terms of the thoughts that are parading around in our sixth consciousness. And we've been trained not just in our culture, this is beyond the problems of our culture, this is part of the human dilemma. We've been trained to have an ego. And that's not a bad thing. We need to be able to figure out how to, you know, how to get through the day, how to pay the rent, how to take care of our lives. So Buddhism is not about getting rid of your ego, but it's about not getting caught by it. It's about seeing this background that Yaoshan was referring to when he said beyond thinking. So, what our zazen allows us is this actual experience of a deeper kind of awareness.

[16:42]

You can't call it thinking exactly, but it's a kind of awareness, it's a kind of consciousness. So maybe you could say, beyond thinking. Thinking that is beyond the thinking that is beyond. Or thinking of the beyond, or thinking of that which is beyond the thinking that's not beyond. going beyond our usual thinking. In a way, it's a kind of thinking, but it's not that thinking that cuts things up into little pieces. It's the thinking that puts things together into wholeness. It's the thinking that allows this deeper wholeness to emerge. So very naturally in Zazen, as we're sitting, thoughts are there, sounds are there, sensations are there, all of the first six consciousnesses. And in some versions of the Yogacara, they say to see through how the eighth consciousness is guiding the sixth consciousness,

[17:58]

and they call that a ninth consciousness, which isn't. D.T. Suzuki talks about this in terms of enlightenment. But at any rate, our practice is just to watch the whole thing, to be present and aware from this deeper place that allows the thinking to go on but is not caught by it. So sometimes we call this Mind, with a capital M. Anyway, calling it anything is part of sixth consciousness or part of discriminating consciousness. You can give it any name you want, if you want to give it a name. So, beyond thinking that works for me, but whatever. Whatever thinking, anyway. The point is that as we settle into the experience of just being present on our Kushner chair, allowing ourselves to be present, studying how it is that we're here with our posture, with the details of our physical posture, with our breath, with really enjoying and engaging what it is to inhale and to exhale.

[19:13]

And then also allowing these sensations to be present. we start to, in ways that we may not even recognize, we start to connect with this deeper kind of awareness, with our experience of this deeper awareness, the background of all of that. So you might ask, well, what good's that? So what? And You know, it's not that, again, it's not that you should get rid of the first six consciousnesses. It's not that you should lose your, you know, faculty for discriminative thinking. In fact, when we talk about transformational function, we will talk about how we need to express this through precepts and we need to use our ability to taste and smell and sense in all kinds of ways and to discriminate and discern. But when we have this deeper, this experience of, again, words don't get it.

[20:26]

That's the nature of it, that words don't get it, because words are taking things apart. A lot of the koans, the Zen stories, are about using words to put things together instead of taking them apart. but it's difficult to talk about. And yet, each of you, even those of you who've done Zazen for the very first time tonight, have this experience. You may not be able to say anything about it or even recognize it, but in some way, being present and being aware in this deeper level, allowing this background awareness, deeper than our thinking, not caught in the limitations of conventional thinking. Open to more possibility. This is a great resource. So I've talked at times about the creative energy of Zazen.

[21:41]

and how Zazen is a kind of form of creative expression, but it's a form of creative expression that, because it allows this beyond thinking to inform our everyday activities, other possibilities can appear. Right in the limitations of the particular life that you're doing, your work, your relationships, your family and friends, right in the specifics of the context of your creative world, the world you're creating. As we are willing to settle into a regular practice of Zazen, we start to have this capacity to allow our life to be informed by this, let's call it beyond thinking, this deeper awareness.

[22:50]

So again, it's not about trying to get to beyond thinking and getting rid of thinking. Yahshua said, I think about not thinking. He didn't say I don't think. How do we integrate are so this is this gets into the transformation of function but anyway this is a this is a big topic and uh... these two descriptions of it in terms of these uh... yoga chara eight consciousnesses in terms of the story about how do you think of that which is beyond thinking is one way to get us to to uh... open the door to zazen mind So maybe that's all that I'll say about it tonight. I'd like to hear your questions or comments or responses. Eric? I don't mean this to sound like a sort of a cliché Zen joke of some kind, but when you talk about transformative function,

[24:00]

Which consciousness is undergoing transformation? Is it the sixth consciousness that does all this discriminating, or is it the eighth consciousness that produces all these patterns, these entangled roots that come forth? Well, I suppose it could be any of them, but primarily it's about not transforming any of those, actually, but of allowing a transformation of how we experience and carry those. So some people may, you know, one example, we haven't started doing it here yet, or maybe you did for some of the half-day sittings or yogi practice, eating in session, eating formally with eating bowls, but many people who do that in the context of meditation experience a change, a deepening of their sense of taste and their appreciation of taste.

[25:02]

So, you know, in some sense everything is transformed. So I haven't really gotten to transformative function yet, but in terms of mind, it's the, this deeper faculty of being aware is itself, awareness is transformative. We don't have to worry about transformation. part of the mind in Zazen is not that you're trying to get anything in particular out of it, because anything in particular that you might want to get from Zazen is just one of those thoughts in the Sixth Consciousness. Yes? I just started a new job last Monday. Congratulations. Thank you. I found that it's very cerebral. It takes a lot of sort of mental juggling. My question is how does one, what can one do to maintain a sense of awareness or presence while also doing a lot of planification?

[26:09]

Yeah, most of our ordinary activity and for some of us our work activity involves It's not just the sixth consciousness, actually. It's something more than that. It's our training and experience of making discriminations and arranging things and classifying things and categorizing and so forth and putting them together in new ways. And so your question is how to How, while doing all of that classifying and arranging, how to maintain a state of presence or awareness? One thing that's very helpful is just to stop and take a breath. Because that's something that's not, you know, we can think about breathing but something that happens deeper than just a thought so you don't have to do anything special about how you're thinking about classifying and arranging things but just to feel how it feels in your body to be aware of your breathing as you're taking care of the work the intellectual work of

[27:38]

doing what you need to do in that context. Does anyone else have some suggestions from that about that, though? Yes, LaVonne? This is not original with me, but I found that it works. If you're sort of in a rush and you're doing one thing, if you can slow down within it and tell yourself, you must get this done, But if you rush, you'll do it wrong, and you'll lose everything. But if you decide to slow it down in one section, it usually helps. I've had that experience too. When you're feeling like you have to hurry up, the most effective thing is to slow down. And what you find when you slow down, you don't actually lose time. Strangely enough, it makes you more efficient so that you get it done at about the same time as if you brush.

[28:45]

And you're much calmer at the end of it. Mary? I think that when we spend a lot of our time doing procedural work, As Tycan mentioned, I think just taking a few breaths can be very helpful. But in addition to that, I find it also does help to just consciously check in with your body. And just notice a little bit about, are you paying any attention anywhere? Are you hungry? Are you thirsty? Do you need to shift your position? How does the chair under you feel? Do you want to take a few steps? Just anything that reminds you that you know the body as well as the mind. Yes. Yes, Steve. Yeah, along the same lines, it just struck me that there's very few things that we do that don't have physical aspects to them. And if you can find a way to throw yourself into, for example, what you're writing, what you're typing, to not be separate from that.

[29:54]

Nick? That's the aspect of having a regular Zazen practice where we are paying attention to our posture And one of the things that happens, I think usually gradually rather than suddenly, is that we start to have this faculty of actually paying, being aware, not necessarily thinking about, but being aware of our physical context. So that becomes more available in the middle of work during the day. Yeah, Nancy.

[31:02]

I find that when I'm doing activity. I can really start to subtly grasp at it, and grasp at it and try to control it, and before I know it, I'm rechecking something I did, and I have to do kind of what Mary was describing, of just really sort of physically stopping for a moment, and breathing, and sort of coming back to, wow, this sort of separates from it, because I can really just sort of attach to it. I remember when I was a teenager and I had started high school and I remember being in the bathroom one time and I was worrying about, you know, did I look okay? Was my hair right? Did I, did everything, you know, was it the way it was supposed to be?

[32:06]

And then I, I realized that there were like, you know, five other girls in the mirror doing exactly the same thing. And not one of them was looking at me. To wonder, to wonder if I had my things right. All of these other students and teachers walking around this high school worried about And so it didn't matter what I was looking like because no one was looking at me. They were all worried about themselves. And so that was kind of a moment of realization that I carried with me through my whole Western life. I find in my job, particularly if you know I'm a teacher, but for me, when I am in the middle of a lesson and trying to calm down, yes, breath certainly helps. But it also helps me to kind of relax and find awareness if I realize that I'm not the only one doing something at this point in time. Everybody else is working. Everybody else is proceeding along their path. And that leads to something that I hadn't mentioned yet that has to do with mind and zazen, which is the background of the background.

[33:25]

So this is even harder to talk about. to be aware of all the other beings so just you know you're talking about just the other girls in front of the mirror but actually as we are doing whatever we're doing maybe we can feel it a little bit more meditation hall but it's actually happening wherever you are there are many beings so this mind with a capital M that sometimes talked about in Zen has to do with an awareness that moves in many dimensions of time and space and beings. So, I don't know how much to say about that tonight, but there are many beings who are part of everything we're doing. It doesn't mean that they're controlling you like we're puppets on strings. It means that actually there's, we can't be doing this practice, Yaoshan, and that anonymous, we don't remember the name of the student who asked that question, but we remember his question.

[34:38]

So this ability to connect with mind in the way we're talking about tonight is something that is supported by generations and generations of this tradition of Dharma, but also it's horizontally supported by many beings who never heard of Zener Buddhism or meditation or anything like that, who are in the world supporting us to be doing what we're doing now. And that's going on at your workplace too. So this is this deeper background that can start to inform our ability to take a breath or to apply ourselves to the particular intellectual even task that we're doing. Yes, Kat?

[35:57]

The idea of foreground and background. So if things were going well in terms of us being more in touch with beyond thinking, might it be that eventually we wouldn't be in the foreground of our conscious thought as much of the time, and we'd be more frequently in the background of the larger, the background It's not exactly that we get in, that we shift into being in the background all the time or something like that. It's more like a kind of access between them. There's a connection that's made. So the background, maybe it can only be expressed in the foreground. But we, we start to have more access to, or it has more access to us, maybe is a better way to say.

[37:00]

So yeah, we start to, just the faculty, so it was great the way many people had responses to Matt's question about how to practice with the need to do calculations and deliberations and thinking in a particular task. This is evidence of, and you know there are many people who didn't speak who might have, but everything that was said is evidence of this background working in the foreground. It's actually not just foreground and background either, there's many layers of that. But yeah, there's a kind of connecting up of this deeper mind or deeper awareness that becomes available. Yes, Adam.

[38:07]

I was thinking, when is that background, can intellect can take over that space too? And then prevent perhaps spontaneous action you have this story you're telling yourself, what that background should look like. And I think spontaneous action can be very powerful for breaking out of habitual living. So I just wanted to see what you thought about that. Yeah, we can intellectualize about the background too, and make up stories about it, and that's just more foreground stories. But this background is this possibility of emergence in each breath of freshness. So really this is about the quality of, yeah, spontaneous is a good word.

[39:13]

There's a kind of tenderness and rawness to this, whatever, to call it background is, you know, maybe to make it into a thing, but anyway. This quality of openness and rawness and, you know, anyway, maybe using these words also defames it, but we use words, that's what we've got to do, so. But, you know, but we know what we're talking about. There's this, something can happen that we don't expect. And sometimes that can be quite marvelous, or it can be quite mundane too, and still it's deep Zazen light. A guest shows up. A guest shows up from beyond creation, as we were saying. That's the Zen story we've been talking about.

[40:16]

Yes. I haven't been able to stop thinking about that one. Do you have something to say about the guest? How can it be outside creation? Yes, how can it be outside creation? Yeah, that did throw me off that part. I mean, right away I was attracted to it, but then when I thought from outside creation, it seemed that these divisions were being made. I guess I didn't know what to do with that. Well, maybe from deep within creation, from beyond creation, from, I don't know. I don't know. So we think of mind as something we, you know, our usual, one of the usual ways of minding mind is figuring out mind. And so it's hard not to kind of, you know, from outside creation, I guess, Joseph, we apply this figuring out mind to that. What? From outside creation, what? But the background awareness is about just being with it, allowing something to emerge from our belly or our shoulders or from, you know, the end of an inhale sometime or, you know, we don't know.

[41:30]

It's about being open to the unknown. We don't need to be afraid of that. We start to develop a kind of relationship with something that's very intimate and very deep and that we all share and that each of us has our own particular relationship with. So it's from outside creation. Let me say, yes, Levon. I have this question that's related to art. Say you take a Renaissance painting and you have the foreground, the middle ground, the background, and the neck that holds it all together, the structure. What I usually find is I see all of those things, and then I go back out and take the whole picture again. So is that... And is the whole picture, isn't the whole picture in each part?

[42:32]

Or, you know, maybe not. I've learned all of the parts, so I can just look at the whole picture. Yeah. What's the structure that holds it all together? Usually any painting will have a sort of skeletal section to it, which means that it could be in the pattern of all the figures are contained within a triangle. It could be repeats from side to side, but there's always patterns like that if you look at a painting. In Renaissance stuff, you can see it easier, but in modern stuff, especially if you go into abstract, it will frustrate you. Some of it, sometimes you can see that. The Renaissance stuff is wonderful. You're tempting me because since last Monday I've been to both the Chicago Art Institute and the Minnesota Institute of Art and seen many wonderful paintings. So I'm going to, sometime in the next month, I'm going to do a Dharma talk about museums. Should include the Milwaukee Art Museum.

[43:37]

I was just there Saturday. It's incredible. Yeah, so part of this big mind, this deeper mind, is that we can appreciate art more fully. So there's much more to talk about. We just scratched the surface of this, so we'll talk about this more.

[43:59]

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