Whoever's operating the bells, in this case it's you, is responsible also for starting the chant. So you just don't hit the bell and wait to see if anybody chants. Hitting the bell and starting to chant are the same. So when you hit the bell, start. And have your voice a little ahead of everything else's. And you establish the pace and tone. The sense of practicing in a sesshin like this is that you're involved for a week in establishing a kind of communal identity. I know the word communal has a bad connotation these days, but common identity at this moment among us. And the responsibility for acknowledging or establishing that identity shifts from one to the other.

[01:11]

So, when you're serving, when you come in, you're ready and you stop for a moment at that pantry way. And you come in and you do the bows. This way of, well, first let me, an aside, which is I'm mentioning these things not because I'm a particular believer in rules or a particular believer in Buddhism, but these things have been very useful to me in practice. And like this thing, how you get on the altar when you come to your place. It arises from a worldview in which Buddhism doesn't exactly say there's no gods, but it says if there are gods, they're a particular realm of existence which may or may not have anything to do with our realm of existence.

[02:34]

It doesn't exactly say that there aren't other realms of existence than ours. But we have our own realm of existence. And so there's no... there's no out there that's running this. Though you must have heard that kind of statement a lot, the degree to which it permeates practice is not so immediately obvious. So the word mindfulness can be translated, as I've often said, as the establishment of the immediate present. So this room doesn't exist independent of us.

[03:37]

This room exists. Whatever this room is, you're creating. So the responsibility for creating this room has something to do with this identity that we have for this week among us. And so when you stop there for a moment, you, for everybody in the room, establish this room a certain way. And again, what I... The best... image of this, which I think you can stay with this week, is to think of this as an aquarium. This is a flooded building. It's not only underground, it's underwater. And when you stand there at the door, you're looking in here at all the other fishes and the seaweed.

[04:39]

And when you move, Now we're not talking about reality here. Maybe we don't, but we're talking about a way of looking at things that's very powerful, effective. And I've used this image of liquid a lot, haven't I? It was an experience that occurred to me in the early time of my practice. And then I sort of thought, well, this is just a beginner's experience. And then since then, particularly in the last few years, it's more and more been, I find it a useful way to catch something that's important to practice. So, each of you at various moments establish what this immediate present is by the way you hit the bell.

[05:59]

And that's why there's so much, there's stories in Zen of you know exactly the mind of the student by hearing him hit the bell, or hit the bell for doksan. In service, you can see the The mind way is for a person in such a simple thing as the first bell is okay when they're doing service, then the second, third bell you can barely hear, and then the fourth one will... Of course, there's going to be some variation. But there's a difference between the variation that kind of is... part of the bell and where you're standing and things and the variation that comes out of your state of mind. And though you don't, aren't so aware of it, you know, maybe you feel you're just being carried along in this machine, which is also true.

[07:12]

At the same time, you're creating the sesshin for each person, for every person. And so what we're doing here in Buddhist point of view is you're establishing two identities. One is you're establishing a kind of identity by your practice, individual. You're establishing another kind of identity that's this sashin and won't occur in some other sashin and won't be the same as when you return home. Or, for those of you who live here, it won't be the same after everyone leaves. So part of the sense of sashin is that you actually become somewhat, you know, these things are a little bit like exercise.

[08:41]

You don't do any exercise, but you do exercise for a few weeks, and a few weeks make a big difference. your job or do something like that. Work out. You're in terrible shape, but two weeks later, you're not just two weeks next to it. Well, just doing this every day actually makes quite a difference. And so by the into Sashin. Later on in Sashin, you'll have some intuitive skill at moving from your own personal identity to the identity of the group, feeling the group, and establishing the group, and shifting out of it. And this is different than practicing by yourself up here in the mountain. That also is good practice. But in general, the most progress, in particular cases, in particular persons, most progress in practice is made in this kind of situation.

[09:59]

And this pulse again, this sense of moving from this particular identity we're creating, practicing together, and your own, there's some kind of energy in that that affects your most private, personal, intimate experiences. I don't know if any of you have read Rousseau's Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But it's a book well worth reading. If you are still inclined, you have to. And I lived many years, but it comes back to me every now and then. And he tried to write everything about himself and to write what was most difficult to write. Of course, the writing itself was part of it, as diary writing, we talked about a little bit here before, and writing in general became a way, along with confession, Catholicism as a way of defining the self.

[11:17]

So Rousseau tried to tell everything about himself, to say, this is what an individual is. And I think in general, most people would say that Rousseau did more to create the modern self than any other person. And Crane Britton says, to argue whether Rousseau created the French Revolution or the French Revolution created Rousseau is to argue about the chicken and the egg. But in any case, Rousseau's idea had a lot to do with the French Revolution and the modern idea of political revolution. I think what we can see happening, and what I called my German friends the biggest party of the century, at least that's what it looked like on television, the opening of the Berlin Wall, now Czechoslovakia and so forth, is that communism has been unable to repress or ignore the modern concept of self.

[12:23]

I think you could almost say that sums up much of the whole situation. But what I'm getting at here is, because I'm interested in your freedom of exploration, is that the self is not a something that like uh freud uncovered and has always been around or human covered and always been around the self is something that's been created by our society and our culture so forth For much of human history and prehistory, probably the self was below the threshold of description. The self as something we look at and study and say, where this or that kind of person is, an object of study and observation is probably fairly new.

[13:34]

And some of you, one of you is a doctor, and one of you is a musician, and one of you is a psychologist, and one of you was going to be the head of Esalen. He was coming, but he had a jogging accident just before he... And so he couldn't come and couldn't sit, and he needs to have an operation. But he's been to Sashingir two or three times? Two times? an old friend of mine. And here's Essen, which is certainly, for Europe as well as America, one of the major definers, one of the institutions which redefined how we look at individuals and psychology and transpersonal identity and all that stuff. And one of you has studied philosophy for many years until you read a book, Zen Mind Beginners, my Encyclopedia's book, and found that philosophy wasn't where you wanted to seek your identity anymore.

[14:46]

And whatever you do, it's also part of how you find your identity, and I think the way in which you look at the the way medicine looks at the body, and the way medicine keeps records on individuals and is in medical institutions as well as individual doctors, is a part, on one part, the way we reveal ourselves, another point, the way society controls us. So we have with, try to keep this simple and I don't know enough to make it too complicated actually, we have with Rousseau the idea of the individual having a right to liberty and equality and their own individual life.

[15:54]

And then you get democracy, you get political systems built around modern idea of democracy, built around the individual. And then you get forms of social control to control the individual. And then, I'm afraid that Jung and Freud, I find the theories of psychology sometimes not convincing or not a little simple to my taste. But the craft of psychology I find very powerful. But Jung and Freud both shared the Western white arrogance that this is the way it is. And even when anthropology began discovering other ways it is, it's said to be more primitive versions of us, not yet arrived at us. So Jung warned us against studying Asians.

[17:00]

teachings and things. We'd get in trouble that our active imagination would be interfered with by visualization processes. And that somehow the Orientals were quite primitive because they'd never really discovered psychology like he and Freud had. And Freud thought the Oedipal complex was universal. But if you have a society in the South Seas which brings up children communally, you don't have that as complex. Now, what I'm getting at here is a short review of Western history, psychology, is to say that we don't know what we're doing. And I'd have to apply that to Buddhism, too. When you look back at Buddhism, there's lots of differences. Chinese, Indian, Japanese Buddhism, and different schools with different emphasis.

[18:05]

And they are also trying to discover self. Now, if we call self, like Frank Sinatra and Gorbachev, as a way of getting through the day and night, or a way in which you survive whatever happens to you, I think we can call that, in a larger sense, self. Even the so-called great perfection teachings of Dzogchen and Mahaludra, Atiyoga and Zen. There's a lot of dispute in Tibetans because some scholars think Dzogchen is really Chinese influence on on Tibetan Buddhism, the Zen influence on Tibetan Buddhism. And the Tibetan scholars say, oh, well, actually, this all came from India and only part of it went to China and Japan.

[19:09]

So even some sort of competition or ego gets involved. Who's got the most of the true teaching? In any case, these Dzogchen, Mahamudra, Zen belong to a kind of great perfection schools. which you're studying for some reason. Don't ask me why you got yourself here. Only one of you is an ex-Jesuit. Now, one thing I want, I'm trying to test your ability to practice non-thought. I don't want any of you to try to figure out who is the psychologist, who is the doctor, who is the ex-Jesuit. It's a white elephant peeing in the snow. So the point of the Great Perfection teachings is to try to have some experience of yourself free from any fabrication, any construct.

[20:23]

This is what's most characteristic of the Great Perfection teachings. So we create this little situation here for a week. or for some of you for a year or six months or something like that, in which you create other structures than the usual structures, structures peculiar to this situation. Then you try to let those structures give you enough support so you get fed and sleep enough. And then you try to see if you can reach that point where there are structures and constructs. There's no fabrications, no weight. They're not, but yet you're kind of at the threshold of them. You're at the point at which they appear and not quite firm or believed in.

[21:26]

So you're withdrawing. One of the practices is to withdraw belief, withdraw a sense of reality from the structures of self. Now, Zen practice is, Buddhist practice is divided up easily into as many divisions. One is the realm of desire, the realm of form, and the realm of formlessness. And what I'm emphasizing the first day or two or so of this Sashin, the realm of desire, is to just be open, as I said yesterday, to your story, to how it's shaped, to whatever you feel. whatever appears. And to perhaps practice bodhidharmas I don't know, to be open to, for this week, not knowing who you are, what you want to do.

[22:41]

How are you going to live your life? What allows you to live your life? Do you have the resources without anything outside you? Do you have the resources? What are your, as a phrase in Zen, your own provisions? How do you turn to your own provisions? What are your own provisions? Not provisions, you know, Buddhism is trying to create a situation, not so much to give you provisions, but let you find your own provisions. The trouble is with systems is they're supposed to work like machines. So you have, again, I should probably study Jung more before I say things like this, but Jung is sort of, it seems to me, opposed to being in love because it's a loss of, by projecting the animus or anima, you're losing your individuation and so forth.

[23:53]

But I would say that from the point of view of practice, Buddhist practice, being in love or in love is quite close to... I mean, in practice, in a way, you fall in love with yourself. Accept yourself, false and all. And maybe you have some kind of feeling, openness like that to others, which Nobody else wants you to feel it. So I think that... And then, you know, Rousseau created... We called... Somebody said Rousseau was the architect of the modern self, but he created a building he couldn't live in. In the end, he found it wasn't habitable. He... in the later writings talks about losing himself in reverie in nature to forget the self and freud calls this something like in the oceanic feeling which i think if i remember correctly connects with infantile feelings of childhood or being in the womb or something

[25:18]

So this oceanic feeling is religion, is most religious feelings, I think, Freud says, and it's some sort of infantile feeling. See, I think that's the problem a system gets into, because it's got to explain this by explaining that and make it all work. You are in practice definitely losing yourself in recovery for an oceanic feeling, and I don't think it's infantile myself, at least. If it is, I like it. So how do you find, how do we create or locate some way of existing which also doesn't become a self that's uninhabitable? And I think all of you to some extent have the experience that your life is uninhabitable. I like David Byrne's song where he says...

[26:20]

You have a nice, I don't know what the name of the song is, you probably know. You have a nice house, and you've got a nice wife, and you've got a nice car, but the water's flowing underground. Something like that would make a song like that. Is that what it's called? Well, that's sort of that feeling. You've got this nice house, and you've got this nice wife, and you've got this nice job, but it's uninhabitable if the water's flowing underground. So I think we all feel something like that. There's this life we have, which is more or less habitable, but then there's this water. So you come to sashing to immerse yourself in that water. See if you can get out of the... and go back and forth. So here you're having the experience going back and forth between this intimate self, non-self, story, and then into what we're doing here together.

[27:24]

in any case whatever you do what we're doing here and what you're doing here not because you yourself are special but what we're doing here is pretty unique For whatever reason, you're engaged in, as a westerner, discovering how you live, discovering self, rediscovering self, discovering a new self, in the context of a Buddhist practice. And this is of necessity going to change Buddhism, not only because it's Western, we're Western, but because Buddhism, if you study Buddhism with any detail, in any detail, it's been changing regularly.

[29:13]

And the practice of dharma, in the simplest way, the practice of dharma, again, is to experience things in units. That's really, I think, what dharma is. In perceptual units, or whatever you notice. without comparing yourself to the vast universe or other people, just this moment. Here you are, whatever you are, sitting on this cushion. You've got your little world here. And the sense when we come into the zendo and you bow to your cushion, you are sort of saying, hello world, how's things? It's like almost like it was a presence.

[30:27]

Then you turn to the room and you acknowledge the room with the feeling of like maybe you just built it and you're very glad there's a roof. The rain doesn't come in. Some warmth and there's some light. So you acknowledge the room. It's again like an offering. You're offering the room. Because there's such an underlying feeling in Buddhism that this didn't exist in the past and won't exist in the future and only exists right now or will only exist in the future because of your interest in it or your respect for it. And it only existed in the past because of your predecessor's respect or feeling. This is where the sense of lineage comes from. So every time, you know, usually if you've just built a house and you go into it and think, oh gosh, finally got the windows in.

[31:44]

But you lose that feeling after a while. Part of practice is to not lose that feeling, to stay at that. So you bow to your cushion. Then you bow to the room. Because in fact, you're making the room and your state of mind and the room are intermingled. So you have some respect. The cushion, then you turn and look at, oh, there's a roof. I offer this room to you. Now, you may think this is a little religious or stretching the case or tiresome. But in fact, that's what's happening. Whether you acknowledge it or not is the question. So you sit down Enter this space of yours. You enter through the front door, sitting down.

[32:46]

Then you turn around clockwise. Face the wall. So you've gone from acknowledging this to acknowledging your cushion, acknowledging the room, and then sitting down. And you do, in a sense, the same thing with your body. You say, oh, here's this body. legs, stomach, ribs, head, neck. And the first question is, are you at ease with your body? If you can't be at ease with your body, what's happening? Can you acknowledge your body in the same way you acknowledge the room and the cushions? and then acknowledge more subtle senses of your body, or a body, like mine.

[33:48]

And you just get in, you create a habit, a kind of, I suppose in computer talk you call it a macro. You bow to the cushion, bow to the room, and then in a sense bow to yourself, sit, and then acknowledge your body and your mind and it begins to be a way to enter meditation very quickly. And you don't take these things for granted or slight them. Your breath is quite amazing. Now we can define enlightenment in various ways, but say that we define enlightenment as the absence or pliancy of non-thought, or rather the absence of thought constructions.

[35:01]

If we define enlightenment in terms of karma, then we'd have to say your body is enlightened as well as your mind at the moment. So your body can realize enlightenment or live in enlightenment, and your mind may not. Your mind can, your body... Now, in Buddhist history it's been thought that, partly as I spoke about yesterday, that many generations or ages or lifetimes or at least years of purification processes were necessary. If somebody comes to you with a problem and says, I'm upset, I'm going to go bow a hundred thousand times. It takes care of a lot of problems to bow a hundred thousand times. It takes months.

[36:06]

So Zen practice has tried to are kind of, again in this kind of life, in these details, kind of create a situation which has the same effect as years or lifetimes of various practices to get ready for the great perfection teaching. Because you're supposed to be a ready vehicle before you study these things. But Zen has tried to put it all together so you study it all together at once. So that's one reason we sit in this posture and sit and it's tiresome and your legs hurt and so forth. And by the way, I meant to say at breakfast, but I forgot. If any of you want to sit at a table for the meals, because it's just about as much as you could do, or if you want to concentrate more on tzazen, it's important, it's good to be able to sit during the yes, but if it's hard,

[37:08]

And you want to try sitting in a chair if one or two or three of you, sometimes we've had six or seven people do it. We can set up a table easily here. Serve your meals sometimes. If you want to, you should speak to a girl who'll do speaking. And it's perfectly okay with me. And even on your cushion, the important thing is to stay on your cushion, not exactly your posture. Let this sitting all day long in this position, dealing with the discomfort and so forth, is then schools attempt to create the kind of practices that are considered to be preliminary.

[38:12]

Now again, as I've said many times, most of this pain you feel, difficulty is because of your mind. I'm so tired of saying this. If you put your arm on a chair on a table and you left it for eight hours, after about an hour or two, you'd want to move it. Bring me a glass of orange juice. Please move my arm. You'd want to move your arm. But if you fall asleep, it's very easy to do. You fall asleep and leave your arm on the side of your bed or a chair, a closet, a chair, for a long period of time. So the question is, how can you achieve that state of mind that's awake, that allows your body to be as relaxed and undisturbed as if you were asleep? That's actually one of the points in Zazen. When you can come to that point where you can just leave your body alone for hours, even if it hurts, you can wake up and find your legs in a position that hurts quite a bit, you didn't even notice it while you were asleep.

[39:26]

So you can lie there, or sit here rather, for two or three hours even. You've just forgotten about your body, but you're completely awake. Dogen calls this the dropping off of mind and body. But at that point, when that happens, you're a different kind of person. ordinary psychological processes, so forth. Something else is happening, different processes So a different kind of dynamic. In other words, a parallel dynamic of the way you live begins to occur. That is occurring anyway, but it occurs differently when it only occurs at night or in certain moments. But when it occurs and you can actually shift your sense of self,

[40:33]

than we have approaching the kind of dynamic of existence that Buddhism is trying to present to us. But getting to the point where you can experience yourself remarkably free of structures, fabrications. You can have an unfabricated state of mind or awareness. It's not so easy. So it's a sheen as a shortcut. This is a short, swift path, believe me. So, to finish, you say again, Dharma practice is to perceive things in units without comparison.

[42:03]

I can't find any glamorous English to put it in. It sounds rather pedestrian, but anyway. So when you're standing, you're just there. Feet, that's it. That's all of everything. When you look at something, that's that unit. When you sit down, this unit. Like that. So the way we do the meals, you pick up the bowl. Then you pick up the spoon. You pick things up. Generally we use two hands and everything because it directs your energy toward it. And it's like you bring the bowl up. Then you eat. then it's not like you start eating while you're bringing the bowl up. You bring the bowl up. So when you ring the bell, it's not like there's three bells.

[43:06]

Yes, there's one bell, and one bell, and one bell. That's three units. There's a fourth unit, three bells. And you have a sense of one bell, One bell. And you also have a sense of three bells. One bell, three bells. One bell, three bells. One bell, three bells. And it's like to practice that deliberately at first. There's deliberate mindfulness. There's unconstructed mindfulness. Deliberate mindfulness is like that. One bell, three bells. Two bells, one bell, three bells. One bell. One bell, the first of three bells. One bell, second bell of three bells. That's deliberate mindfulness. And if you have a... Rousseau said somewhere, too, I, my mind needs to... You can find things that are like Zen, Spinoza, Kant, Rousseau, and so forth.

[44:12]

He says, my mind must proceed at it in its own time, not in anyone else's time or any other time. And that's very much like that. My mind or life must proceed in its own time, not some other person's time or not some other time. So by this dharma practice, you're finding your own time, finding that own time, your own time and other time, a kind of communication between the two. But you don't want to lose the fact that you are time. It's a kind of pace, dharma pace, you find in Sushant. Sometimes you rub against it, and sometimes you feel. I mean, the schedule looks like it's not your own time, but somehow this way things work in opposites, the schedule makes you find your own time.

[45:19]

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