Guten Morgen. Guten Morgen. I'm always a little perplexed about, um, ja, ja, what to speak about and how to speak about practice with you. You know, many of you know I say something like that quite often. But for me, it's always a new kind of perplexity. You're here for various lengths of time. How do I enter into something with any continuity with you? Yeah. Yeah, and I'm in myself entering into some 45 years or so of practice experience.

[01:15]

And how can I make that be of some sense to you? Some of you are going swimming in a local lake. Maybe we're somehow all able to get into the same lake. We may have different senses, different familiarity with what's under the water. Yeah, but we can still get into the water together. So I said the other day, yesterday or the day before yesterday, entering Zazen.

[02:23]

We enter, let's say, a time place. in which we can't actually say, if you notice carefully, exactly what kind of space this is. And our sense of time is different. And our sense of self or the one who makes decisions is different. Whatever we are, the answer is you already are the answer. The answer is in you or You are the answer.

[03:32]

But we have to stretch our consciousness to be somewhere outside our usual self-formed consciousness. So I'd like to suggest you go, when you go into zazen, you intend to notice what happens. You intend to notice your experience. But I don't want you to anticipate what you're going to experience. And as much as possible, see if you can find a mind which notices but doesn't think about.

[04:59]

And what I'm asking partly is, you know, what connects this experience we call ourself And what I'm looking for is, what connects this experience that one calls oneself? What is the connection that our experience of zazen with our usual self? And what connects this experience? We have a camping song, a children's song in America. Yeah, I mean, maybe Ravi knows about it.

[06:00]

I think it's real simple. It's a foot bone is connected to the ankle bone. Do you have such a song? This is a song. The ankle bone is connected to the leg bone. The leg bone is connected to the knee bone. Knee bone is connected to the hip bone. Leg bone is connected to the hip bone. Now hear the word of the Lord. Isn't that what it goes? Now hear the word of the Lord. This is the strangest religious song I know. Now hear the word of the Lord. This morning I was thinking, is that really what it is? Now hear the word of the Lord.

[07:01]

Now we can say, hip bone connect to the leg. Now hear the word of the Buddha. Now hear the word of the Buddha. Maybe it makes a little more sense. But what connects all this stuff? What is your mood or mind that gives you a sense of this connectedness? Yesterday I... Yeah, I was on the edge of this sickness that Sophia has and Marie-Louise has. Sophia had pretty high temperature yesterday. Now she seems to be okay. She went through it like last night's thunderstorm.

[08:12]

Wasn't that a great thunderstorm last night? One time we had a thunderstorm like that and the farmhouse over there burned down. It got hit by lightning. And some of those strikes sounded pretty close. But it's almost worth the excitement. I stayed in Japan once and Many times I stayed in Japan, lived in Japan, but I was in an inn in Japan. And they put a hot charcoal, live charcoal burner in the foot of my bed. And it was nice for my feet.

[09:21]

But I said, isn't this a little dangerous in a bed full of silk on a grass floor in a wooden building to put these things in? Don't the buildings burn down every now and then? Yes, the woman said, yes, for a couple of hundred years, but it's worth it to keep your feet warm. Oh, you can get out of fires there easily because you just walk toward any wall and it pops out. Yes. So what connects our experience? So yesterday going up and down stairs I could notice I was on the edge of maybe getting sick.

[10:27]

And I could feel my mind checking up on my body. What kind of shape are you in? And I could feel my mind deciding, geez, if I take this or that attitude, it will absorb the sickness and make it better. Yes, all right. You know what? What is this mind, mood, tension, connectedness we feel in our body? You know, there's this way of treating the reflexology where you put pressure on the feet and then you feel better all over.

[11:30]

It's a sort of What? Akupressure shiatsu. Is it not? Akupressure shiatsu. Shiatsu means in Japanese finger pressure treatment. Shiatsu means in Japanese finger pressure treatment. But there's, you know, from the point of view of reflexologists, all these, the whole body is represented in the feet. So from the point of view of reflexology, the whole body is represented in the feet. So I would suggest when you sit zazen and you, if you sit cross-legged, when you lift your foot up, you know you have your whole body in your hands. Yeah, you might lift your foot up very carefully or sensitively. Very carefully.

[12:38]

And with a sense of these acupressure points, or yeah, in the foot, are also They're from inside your foot. Can we know our body from inside? What is it? Greek, Socrates, etc. Know thyself. In Buddhism, we might say, know thy foot from inside. Where are you going to start to know thyself?

[13:40]

Well, in Buddhism, we start very simply with the object you are. Are you an object? The first foundation of mindfulness is to know the topography of the body from inside. Are you just a self-formed object known from outside? Are you a non-self object? We say often, you know, in Zen, sit like a mountain. It means sit, of course, still as a mountain. That's with the solidity of a mountain, the solidness.

[14:46]

Stability. Yeah, we can feel that. But what is it like a mountain? What is a mountain really like? A mountain has no sense of self. A mountain, I don't think anyway, a mountain says, I'm sitting here like a mountain. A mountain has no such idea. A mountain is just a location. The sense that the mountain has no overall sense of self, I'm pretty sure. And we can best sit with solidity when we have no overall sense of self.

[15:50]

When we're just a location. When we're just a location. Location. It comes from the word locus. Yeah. Focus of attention and concentration. You know, when a movie is made somewhere like in Morocco or Timbuktu or something. When a film is filmed in a place like Morocco or Timbuktu, we say it's filmed on location. Maybe a zazen is being filmed on location.

[16:56]

What is this location that you are? What is the film of this location? And locus is related to focus, and focus is related to hearth. And hearth is the center of the heat, the center of the home. The hearth is where the food is cooked, the house is warmed, and the pottery, the ceramics that make... The dishes, etc., are main. Yeah, so locusts and hearth has all this sense in it of the dishes, the food, the heat, etc., No, I'm certainly stretching these words to fit what we're talking about.

[18:15]

Yeah, I like Marlame, the French poet. He says we must dislocate language to find its meaning. He says we must dislocate language to find its meaning. So I'm trying to dislocate, to relocate language. And one of my points is we need to free up our language to notice our experience outside of expectations. Yeah, without expectation.

[19:28]

So again, the mountain doesn't say, foot of the mountain connected to the lower mountain. Also der Berg sagt ja wieder auch nicht der Fuß des Berges verbunden mit dem unteren Teil des Berges. And the lower mountain connected to the forest mountain. Und der untere Berg verbunden mit dem Waldberg. Forest mountain connected to the stream mountain. Und der Waldberg verbunden mit dem Flussberg. The stream mountain connected to the snow mountain. Und der Flussberg verbunden mit dem Schneeberg. Snow mountain connected to the top mountain. Now hear the word of the... Yeah, no, maybe just find your body as a kind of location. Yeah, maybe there's still a patch of snow on the left shoulder out of the sun. And deer going across your chest.

[20:31]

And mountain goats up here somewhere. Or a mosquito. Forests are across your tummy. You're just a location. Good. makes Zazen a lot easier, I'll tell you. The pain of Zazen is quite diminished. The pain is just down there somewhere in the lower mountain. Yeah, doesn't melt the snow up here. Mm-hmm. So you can begin if you can find this experience of just being a location.

[21:36]

It can be the basis for noticing what kind of connectedness there is. If we want to push ourselves into this experience, It's very, very hard to get there because the habit of the self is so strong. So Sashin is one of the shortcuts. And you can feel. I mean, I think those of you who have done Sashin. No, sometimes you just sit there. And sometimes you start thinking, when are they going to ring that bell? And you can see that the self-connectedness has appeared. The narrative self. The narrative self has appeared.

[22:41]

But if you can let go of this self, then you stop caring about whether the bell rings. You can begin to have this experience of self appears and then an absence of self appears. And just a location. You know, this is the teaching of mindfulness in Buddhism. Really bringing it into your body, into your actual location. So you know your inner landscape, bodyscape. And the foundations of mindfulness teaches the marks, the targets of attention, or suggests the targets of attention.

[24:07]

Thank you. The targets of attention that are most transformative... ...are most easy to notice and... and are most useful to notice. And targets are marks which in themselves are kind of inner acupressure pressure points. So this is Buddhism, but it's also just common sense. You are this body. This is Buddhism, but it is also a very simple reason.

[25:08]

You are this body. Or do you live this body or does the body live you? The words don't work to describe it. When you're in a cafe. Yeah, out here in the garden. One of my dreams when I was young is to have, if I ever had to have an apartment, I always assumed it'd be in New York. Because I thought, sort of, More than a mile or two outside New York, it was just desert or wasteland. So I imagined having some kind of little apartment and a little garden.

[26:12]

I'd have to be rich to have one bigger than this platform. But I imagined having such a little garden. But what did the garden represent? And what is it to go out and sit in the garden? Or imagine we're sitting in a cafe by ourselves, perhaps reading or just sitting. Oder wir stellen uns vor, wir sitzen in einem Café, vielleicht alleine und lesen. Or with a friend. What tape is running, what film is running when we're sitting in a café or a garden? Do we feel when we're at the cafe or in a garden, say that the film or tape that's running is most fully us or something like that?

[27:26]

What tape is that? What is that glue or connectedness that we feel at that time? When do we feel in touch with our life? And what is that feeling in touch with our life? When we can say to ourselves, oh yeah, I want this life I live. Or we can say, I want some different life than the one I'm living. In our culture, sometimes the soul is considered our hidden life, our other life. Which hides behind the person we're supposed to be.

[28:35]

What kind of life do we want? Are perhaps cafes and gardens our western sort of sendos? Sind vielleicht Cafés und Gärten unsere westliche Art von Sendung? Are they sort of institutionally or consciously a kind of meditative space? Sind es institutionale oder... Are they institutional or... A kind of meditative space. Sind sie eine Art meditativer Raum? Yeah. And often, strangely, they're often in public. What kind of meditative space in public?

[29:35]

Are they maybe some form of zendo in our culture? When you're in this zendo in Zazen, what tape is running in this location? Uniting you or not. And what are the territories of our existence? Dreaming, waking, sleeping. Zazen. Etc. And so on. Now I should stop. But some of you, seven or eight of us, are going to receive lay initiation, lay ordination on Saturday.

[30:38]

And you're going to come into relationship with this experience. A relationship to this object that you've made. Namu kye butsu. And one of the things where I'm talking about here is an invisible foreground of what I'm saying. Is that All objects are in fact relational objects. We can feel that like the mountain is a relational object. A shared activity and location unites the activity of the mountain.

[31:58]

And to change our worldview is also one of the entries to it is to find all objects, mind objects and relational objects. to change his view of the world is that one should That you see all objects. All objects are mind objects and relational objects. And you find the yoga craft of mind to notice this. Yeah, I should talk more about that. But this... that you've made is a relational object. And when you open it, just the making of it is a relational object.

[33:02]

But I want you to understand, of course it's a piece of cloth. And it's based on the idea of the Buddha's robes were made from scraps of cloth sewn together. And now this has some sort of cosmology in it and rice field patterns and so forth. And you've made it. And please, it's not an object. In a way, you can say it's an object. Sure, there it is sitting in my hand. But if you take away the relationships, it doesn't exist. It wouldn't have been made. Zen is a kind of origami practice. Zen is a kind of origami practice.

[34:29]

The great origami masters in Japan are often Zen masters. And they have a little piece of paper and you say, can that piece of paper be a hippopotamus? And a guy looks at the piece of paper and goes, and there's a hippopotamus. Let's try an unnamed animal of the imagination, okay? So this robe the way you put it on and off is a kind of origami. The transmission documents are a kind of origami that's supposed to be complicated enough that you can only learn it from another person.

[35:32]

works best with face-to-face communication. Too complicated to just write down. And Marie-Louise and others of you know how complicated it is if you try to write down just how to make a rachshund. And so far, none of the descriptions are really perfect. We have one nearly perfect one. Yeah, okay, good. Okay, so this is a relational object, let's call it. A non-object object. Okay, so when you put it on your head, for instance. Now, you never put it on unless you put it on your head. If you sometimes put it on without putting it on your head, you shouldn't have it.

[36:57]

Because then it means you think it's an object, and then you think you're living in a worldview where Buddhism can't survive. Also, wenn ihr das so macht, dann denkt ihr, das ist ein Objekt, und dann lebt ihr in einer Weltsichtweise, in der der Buddhismus nicht überlebt. So how do you put it on your head? Also, wie tut ihr es auf euren Kopf? This edge, open edge. Most have it more open. Okay, die offene Seite ist nach vorne. This edge goes there. Die geht nach vorne, die offene Seite. Toward the front. Nach vorne. Now, if you have it this way. Und wenn ihr es so habt... Then this edge goes. Then get these out enough on there. Okay. And when you put it in the bag, you put this edge in it. And if you put it on your suitcase, you never put it under anything. It's always on top, the first layer of your suitcase. If you think it might get damaged going across the Atlantic or something, you apologize and you put it under something to protect it.

[38:09]

I actually never put them in my suitcase. If it's going to be checked, if I bring it anywhere, it's in my hand luggage. Okay. So you can either put it this way on your head and do the chant we do. Or you put it, just touch it to your forehead. And then you open it. And then you open it. And this is a kind of cosmological star pattern here. It goes on this bone. When you take it off, it's the same way.

[39:21]

You don't just take it off and fold it. There's a way to do it. And this goes down, this goes down. And if you'd make it smarter. So the raksu is all kinds of things. But one of the things it is, is to start you on the habit of knowing There's no such thing as an object that's not a relational object. We're not living in a container. You can think of it that way, but it's a delusion. There's no ether or stable background against which anything can be measured. Even if you think in scientific terms, it's...

[40:23]

Just a field of moving electrons. The great, all the work of Einstein really derives from one major insight. There's no fixed space and there's no fixed time. Es gibt keinen fixen Raum und keine fixe Zeit. It's all a relational object. Es ist alles ein in Beziehung stehendes Objekt. Perhaps I'll relate, that means to tell, more about this later. Vielleicht werde ich darüber noch mehr sprechen in Zukunft. Thank you for the time. Vielen Dank für die Zeit. May God bless you in every way.

[41:36]

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