dimensions, aspects of self. By the way, he said last night, he reminded me he's in the States. If you have a feeling, well, let's explore it together. Because it's kind of, I don't know what I'm saying, but we're in the States together. Yeah. And my emphasis was not kind of intellectual ideas of self, but really just why we believe in a self and in what ways is a self, functions of self, essential.

[01:01]

I mean, I think from my point of view, to look at what Buddhism means by less self or non-self, requires us to look at why we're so the ways in which we're actually convinced of the experience of self. And to speak about that, I have to speak about being. And in order to speak about being, I think I have to speak about my new word before me. And so Hannah and Ulrike, is there anything you think I should speak about from the last seminar?

[02:26]

Well, yes, you shake your head, but I don't hear anything. Yeah, why not start? During the last seminar, you talked about practice of the Bodhisattva. And in connection with this, the topic of space was very much present. And in connection with space, you refer to meeting.

[03:40]

And I think these are all areas that are very relevant to us, And my impression is that these are all things that are very relevant for us working as therapists. And I would very much like to deepen and expand this. I am still staying with something. You also mentioned that the bodhisattva's practice also means You also mentioned that the practice of bodhisattva also means the aspiration to become a Buddha.

[04:53]

And for me, somehow there is a connotation of the hierarchy. So to become a Buddha, wanting to become a Buddha. And this for me is difficult. Because first of all, Bodhisattva translated means enlightened being. Bodhisattva? That's what I think. So the Heart Sutra starts, Bodhisattva, practicing deeply the Prajnaparamita, and so on, understood that the five skandhas in their own being are empty.

[06:07]

And for me there is no real difference to a Buddha, And so what I understand is what it's about with the bodhisattva is this potential which is within us. That is, so to speak, the practice. So that is practice. But still the hierarchy with the Buddha is not clear to me at all, because for me this image of the Bodhisattva And what I do not understand is this hierarchy with Buddha because the image of the Bodhisattva, the symbol of Bodhisattva, having the body throughout with ears and eyes and open to the world.

[07:25]

With that, I could not recognize anything where the Buddha could be more enlightened or in any way beyond that. And maybe it is that the Buddha, through his compassion, set in motion the wheel of the teaching. Okay. So that's a reviewer. some of the things we spoke about. So depending on how we all feel, we can bring some of that in. Certainly, one meaning of the Bodhisattva is somebody on the way to being a Buddha. Another sense of it is that to various degrees we're all bodhisattvas.

[08:47]

And in the sense that that is meant, then good candidates for bodhisattvas are therapists. So Saihap, right over here. Hannah? Yeah, for me, those were very, For me the most relevant or most fascinating during the last weekend to somehow get the bodily feeling

[09:48]

How maybe a bodhisattva like me may feel in his or her hands, or his or her feet? And how do you feel And also he or she feels the space arise between him and herself and others and allows to appear. and does not assume that the space already exists.

[11:12]

And that's what I would like to continue. Okay. You continue and maybe we'll continue. Ulrike? There is a whole range of wishes to continue. Well maybe we can just go back in time and start over. Well it starts with that I haven't been here on Friday. In the small groups as well, during lunch, when we ate, the sentence came up, when Roshi walks across St. Stephen's Place. Oh.

[12:13]

Yes, yes. That's good. Yes. So this really made an impression. And what I somehow, the glimpse I got from what people told was it was about equanimity. But of course I would like it very much if you could talk about this again. Next year, come on, Friday. Yeah, on Friday I saved the most irrelevant incentive. Go ahead, Ulrike. The topic was also the receptivity of the Bodhisattva.

[13:31]

And which was very relevant for practice was where you could dissolve the glue between mind and body. By bringing energy more toward intention. to allow the body to lead with its intention and its thinking. And I think this is quite important for professional feelings. Okay. And the big topic, like Christa also mentioned, was referring to the meeting and the relationship to the objects and their interdependence and mutual arising.

[15:44]

So very much she would like repetition. And then there are terms which stuck with me, like multi-referential, but in contrast to set-referential. And you made a riff on three of the six parameters. Yeah. And this sentence of Susukuro Shiki, this recommendation to you, put your mind in your head.

[16:54]

I couldn't talk about all those things. So, next up. How am I going to sort it out? How did I sort it out? In terms of Suzuki-Wash, that's my beginner mind. It's always a culture for me. It moves me when I don't understand that it's my beginner's mind. Especially when the sentence appears, [...] Space is emptiness with room for any potentiality. So that we choose every moment, opening to space and emptiness, how we want.

[17:58]

Did I say it in German? No, you didn't. This fact that the space is empty, that the potential is lost, brought me back. This brought me back. It brought me back to what I had avoided to understand. Is the bodhisattva experiencing again that he in self-referential thinking. The Bodhisattva on his way to becoming a Buddha, experiences collapse into self-referential thinking. And by arising from this, the path is continuing towards the Buddha-ship. . Thanks.

[19:01]

Christina? I have nothing on my mind, I'm sorry. Otherwise you couldn't translate. Yeah, but I made it later. That's all right. although we don't like hierarchies, the concept of the Bodhisattva is about hierarchy. It's about the difference between people. And the big difference is In most of our culture a hierarchy privilege is established by either genetics or genealogy.

[20:17]

By your privileged birth or your genetic, by your birth through class or your birth through genetics. That's just a fact of human society that there are these differences. What Buddhism says is that main difference is not to whom you were born, or the genetics of your birth. What's your opportunity to practice? Practice makes the biggest difference, a bigger difference between people, the genetic or But there is a difference between people.

[21:34]

And why are some people more accomplished than others? Or more privileged? The main difference that's available to all of us is practice. So in that sense, the Bodhisattva is the one who makes that main difference of practice available to every person she meets. I grew up in a time in the 40s and 50s, 30s, 40s and 50s. When it was assumed that mind and body were distinct.

[22:53]

A very intelligent, stupid, well, very intelligent man, Herman Kahn, who was a physicist and the most prominent analysis, analyst or strategist about mega death, nuclear war and so on. Sorry, he was what? He was a physicist. About physical? Probably the leading strategist about how about nuclear war. He's a rather big, we could call fat man.

[23:54]

And he said at one point, I'd be just as happy to be a brain in a Petri dish. I don't need this body. I mean, the fact that someone could say that, and sort of believe it, is unbelievable. But a milder version of that was, you know, when I was in school, if you were athletic, you probably couldn't be smart. Then you'd find always very athletic, smart people, you'd find. Mm-hmm. Anyway, so I could never make sense of those ideas. So I felt welcomed by the change that occurred in the late 20th century. in the 60s and 70s and so on.

[25:19]

And one of the biggest and most articulated statement about mind and body was, what is on those days? Okay, so my view was that body and mind can be experienced separately. inseparable, but can be experienced separately. And they can be woven together.

[26:21]

The experienceable separateness can be woven together. in a way that allows an integrative relationship to the world. But now a distinction, it's taken me most of these years, in the last 50 years I've been To see this distinction is too simple and actually not the case with yogic, experienceable yogic Buddhism. Okay.

[27:32]

Now, there's a number of positions I have to take in order to make this make sense. You know, the familiar, what's familiar to you is often what hides difference from you. So I discovered that the practice really becomes, in many instances, the examination of the familiar. For example, the assumption we have that space separates. And then the recognition at some point that this is actually a cultural assumption and not a fact.

[28:36]

And the space act also connects. And the unfolding of this observation It is in the background and foreground of much of my teaching and understanding of Buddhism. So I, you know, the idea... Let's take again, as I've done before, don't invite your thoughts to tea.

[30:10]

Okay, well, this statement is based on the distinction between discursive thoughts and intentional thoughts. You can have the mental formation to not invite other mental formations to tea. So there's something different about these two mental formations. Okay, so in order to make that clear, I'm calling the intentional mental formation a mental posturing. A posturing is something you hold and live within. Okay.

[31:26]

And the thoughts you're not inviting to tea is more what we mostly mean by thoughts. And let's call them discursive thoughts. Okay. Now, it took me some time, not 50 years, but it took me 30 years or so, to really see that the the experienceable difference between these two are a necessary distinction in almost all Buddhist practice. And to go a step further, that in a yogic culture the mind's main job is to establish mental posture.

[32:51]

The mind's main job is not thinking. The main task of the mind is not to think. Thinking is a tool. A very useful tool. But it's an analytical tool. But it is a it's It's a function of practical knowledge, primarily, and not a function of wisdom. A function of wisdom. Now, I'm just talking in general territories. I can't tell.

[34:01]

This is too subtle, various and complex to fit into English. But for the sake of us as practitioners, And for the sake of us as psychotherapists or as practitioners or living beings this is very fruitful exploration of what it is to be a living being. At least that's how I feel. Okay, so for the sake of what I'm talking about, let's assume that mental postures are the foundational and most effective aspects, functions of mind.

[35:21]

And in fact, mental postures are present, whether we know it or not, in everything we do. Your culture is a mental posture. If you have a mental posture that space separates, this is a controlling mental posture and will control your senses. We think maybe senses are more basic than mental posture. The opposite is true. If your mental posture is space separates, your perceptions will confirm that space separates.

[36:28]

If your mental posture is that space connects or also connects, you will begin to see connections. So we can't assume that to be a natural being or something like that, if there is such a thing, is to be defined through the first thing that happens to us. We sense things, we smell, we taste, we feel, we look at our mother as an infant and so forth.

[37:30]

But very soon mental postures begin to be part of it. And the mental postures contextualize the sensorial precepts. So then you need wisdom. Because you need wisdom to know what mental postures you should contextualize your experience with. And wisdom is not just being intelligent. Wisdom arises from people.

[38:50]

So it's some sort of wisdom that allows us to develop the wisdom arising through others that allows us to develop the mental postures. It's the... It's the... wisdom that arises through our being together that allows us to form the mental postures which contextualize our experience. in an intelligent, effective, generous, compassionate way. And if it's taking me 50 years of a daily actualization of Buddhist practice, It's not surprising that taking our culture centuries to come to simple recognitions.

[40:02]

It took America about 50 years of having cars before they thought of panning the dashboards. There will be thousands of people with their skulls broken open. Let's pack the dashboard. As I think of it, the first person hits the dash. And in my lifetime, I have a pretty clear awareness of life back to at least 1850. Through my grandparents and great grandparents.

[41:27]

I used to be in the houses which they lived in in the 1800s. And they didn't have computers, but basically their daily life was probably not so different than I didn't have. And the people I practice with, I know every day, will at least be living in 2050. I expect you to be around in 2050. Okay, that's 200 years. That's a normal unit of life. Not much changes in those two energies.

[42:37]

Superficially, real things, no, no. Cultural views, how you view a human being, not much difference in 200 years. Ten of those units bring you back to Christ. Twelve and a half of those units bring you back to Buddha. So I think we're a very young civilization about to destroy its planet. So, in any case, these cultural views, these implicit or not acknowledged mental postures control our personal life and our cultural life. Goodness sakes.

[43:45]

You know, when I'm with you guys, gals, I start thinking, I don't have to walk through the topic, I can crawl through the topic. So if we have an extra day and a half, I can crawl through the topic. and in the practice period for 90 days where I roll in the mud but it's an illusion that we can crawl through this topic because on Sunday morning I'm going to have to start rushing So what I've at least established this morning, I hope, This is the role of mental posture.

[45:23]

From the point of view of Buddhism and yoga culture, the essential role of mental posture Yeah, and then to look at those mental postures and how they're significantly and or slightly different from our mental posture. Now, if the main emphasis, the fundamental and most effective Dimension of mind is mental postures.

[46:30]

What does that have to do with being? Okay, time for a break. Thank you. Go ahead. Good late morning.

[47:37]

During the break, we had a discussion about a term that I used in translating Ulrike, what Ulrike said. Ulrike said... Begegnen spürt sich anders an als meeting. The term begegnen is not good to translate it with meeting. Und wir haben versucht, was für einen Begriff wir finden können, der besser passt. And we tried to find a term which would be viel besser. And engaging, we came up with engaging because We found engaging in the context of object engagement. And it brought me back to the last year when you talked about inter-emergence.

[49:08]

And I remember that last year you talked about inter-emergence. And somehow this is another way of putting it. Yes. engagement and inter-emergence there's no such English word as inter-emergence but we can say inter-emergence in English you can translate it any way you want in English it would be inter-emergence which is understandable to people inter-emergence of the conflation of the two Yes already. I would be interested in when you would use engagement and when you would use meeting.

[50:27]

Well, in ordinary social situations, I would say, it was nice to meet you, of course. And if I said, it was nice to engage you, they might say, well, later, please. I'm ready for engaging. What about encounter? Yes. Well, in English, encounter has the feeling of to meet something for the first time. I encountered this unusual situation. But I appreciate this kind of discussion because I'm constantly having it with myself.

[51:44]

Okay, what else? Okay. Yes. Did I understand it correctly? Did you see these magnet postures as kind of the source of our behavior or the force that forms our behavior? Yes. I would put it, it contextualizes our behavior.

[52:52]

Yeah. Did I understand correctly that these mental postures are observable? Well, mostly they're not observable, they're just people's culture. Practice is to make them a Jew. The Eightfold Path, the main teaching of the Buddha, it follows from the Four Noble Truths. The first The absolute first teaching is right views.

[53:55]

Because your views control everything you do. So the first emphasis in practice is to notice what views you have and turn them into wisdom views or right views. Also ist die Betonung in der Praxis zu sehen, welche Ansichten du hast und sie zu verwandeln in Weisheitsansichten. And we see in, excuse me, the irascible, stupid, irascible, the stupidity of American politics right now. the right wing of the Republican Party, the Tea Party, they are so involved in their views, they will vote against their own best interests. They'll vote against common sense.

[55:01]

They'll vote against facts. They'll vote against the facts and common sense. They vote their views. This is the sad fact of our way of functioning as humans. So if it's that way that we cannot observe metapostures, we can. Don't we have like a vicious circle that we, with what kind of metaposture do we use to observe metapostures? Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean,

[56:20]

I mean, most people just don't have the time and discriminatory intellect to explore their mental postures. And so they're lucky if they inherit some better mental postures. But the job of people who create culture is to think through as thoroughly as you can. And here you're using thinking, analytical discriminative thinking. To derive, almost like a kind of mathematics, non-delusional mental postures. Or mental postures which are defective within a certain... beneficial way of being in the world.

[58:13]

For example, I mean the most simple example again, I'll get it over again, but to get If we get certain simple examples clear in our mind, it allows us to extend it to other things. Sitting in this physical posture is not zazen. Sitting in this physical posture accompanied by the mental posture, don't move, is zazen. It's the decisional posture of not to move which makes zazen powerful. So, hi, I wondered where you were. Well, this is good. I wouldn't want you to be anywhere else.

[59:33]

And in Buddhism, the mental postures which are considered effective and beneficial for all beings, are arrived at primarily through meditation. Which is another kind of discriminative thinking. So that's the basic position we can talk about in more detail if you want us to go forward. Somebody else has some refinement here. Yes. So this first of the eightfold path, the right views, I'm looking for measuring right and wrong.

[61:01]

Oh, okay. How do you mean, can you have such a measure? Yes, you can have such a measure. So the glance of wisdom, but still the question is, when is it here? Okay. Well, it's very clear we do not put sand in the gas tank of a car. You can argue about that if you want, but your car won't go very far. And you don't drink gasoline. There's a guy who drank gasoline in San Francisco, drunk, and he lit a cigarette. He just died. In a way, it's that simple.

[62:02]

Some things really work, some things don't work. And we can make those decisions. Yeah. If you beat your child, you're going to have a child who's going to be an adult who beats other people. So that's a little more refined than putting sand in a gas tank, but It's still based in the sun. Okay. Well, let me give you a more subtle example from last weekend's seminar. The topic was the receptivity of the Bodhisattva.

[63:20]

Without explaining how the Bodhisattva does it, let me just say, the Bodhisattva, and what we all do, but the Bodhisattva compassionately and intentionally does it. establishes a receptive space. Well, where other people feel comfortable. For example, she went and saw the Dalai Lama speak in Vienna the other day. And she described him as in the midst of 10,000 people which he was going to speak with, being completely relaxed.

[64:37]

And partly through being relaxed, he created a receptive space. He also creates a receptive space because he practices the three minds of daily consciousness. Okay, what are the three lines of daily consciousness? Well, I haven't talked about this for years. And it is a teaching of the Dalai Lama himself as well as of the Buddha in general. As you take a walk here in the woods. Christina and I take a walk in the woods.

[65:49]

We're walking along just silently within each other's mutual space. And there's a couple of trees over here and a group of trees over there. Technically that's called, in translation, immediate consciousness. Okay. So at some point, while we're walking along, we notice that several trees, a whole group of trees have been cut down over there. And I might say to Christina, well, Giorgio and Dorian had those trees cut down.

[66:50]

And we can call that secondary consciousness. Okay. And then, after another bit, my cell phone rings. They have so many towers around here, they can even find me in the forest. So I pick up the phone and somebody says, you've got to come back right away, I have to talk to someone and you forgot a meeting call. And that's called borrowed consciousness, but not borrowed in a negative sense. And the classic example of borrowed consciousness is your birthday. You do not know your birthday from walking in the forest.

[68:04]

That depends on the culture, calendrical, you know, etc. And that's a different state of mind than immediate consciousness. To make it more graphic let's say we have our consciousness.

[69:19]

Let's say we have secondary consciousness. And third, we have immediate consciousness. It's nothing, right? You walk along in immediate consciousness, what is the source of immediate consciousness? It's the situation you're in. What is secondary consciousness? It's still arising from the situation it is in, but it's reflexive, it's a comment on something. Es kommt immer noch aus der Situation, in der du bist, aber es ist reflexiv, es ist ein Kommentar auf die unmittelbare Situation.

[70:46]

But still, the source of it is your situation. The source of moral consciousness is not your situation. Of course, borrowed consciousness is the telephone, your birth date, things you have to do, etc. And borrowed just means, not negatively, borrowed from your culture. And the immediate consciousness might be no different than Thoreau or Emerson walking in the forest of New England. But the content of their moral consciousness will be different. And most of them, 99%, what you learn in the university is part of consciousness.

[71:58]

William James learned to live at a certain time when he was born. You can't figure that out walking in the forest. Okay, so these are energetically different. And a sensible person can feel when they are in need of consciousness with the rising of the church. And can feel when they are in need of consciousness. And one, if you're bored consciousness all day, you get home and you want to watch a football game and have a beer. Sounds like fun. But my point is, the borrowed consciousness exhausts you.

[73:11]

The immediate consciousness nourishes you. The more you are in the immediate consciousness, the more you feel nourished. Okay. The practice of a yogi, what? Oh, is that Ilana? is to speak as much as possible, entirely from the immediate consciousness. And that's my job, too. I mean, I have a certain amount of information I could bring in, but basically I'm bringing it in through worlds arising in this situation, That's why when scholars read prepared papers about this, It's not arising from the media situation.

[74:23]

It may have once arose from the media situation, but we're quite wrong. So the point of my drawing is If you start a poor consciousness, you go down in the secondary consciousness, it's really difficult to get down in the middle consciousness and push you back up. You can't establish human herself in the consciousness of the basal, basal or fundamental consciousness. But if you go into secondary consciousness, come right back into... Then you can go into secondary consciousness and right back into... You can go into moral consciousness, but it's still... No one listens on it now, you take him back to there.

[75:38]

So, this is interrelated with, I won't go through it unless you ask me to, establishing your continuity in the body, breath and phenomena and not in thinking. Okay. So, you can discover a way of achievement. If you send a bar of consciousness, you might be putting sand in your mental gas tank. It's that clear what you need to do.

[76:54]

And it's simply that Yogi finds a way to establish him or herself all the way in a meaningful way. Comparative, discursive thinking is entirely a tool, but not where you dedicate yourself. Okay, so you can make those kind of distinctions. So what I started to say is the Bodhisattva establishes a certain kind of receptive space. Also was ich begonnen habe zu sagen der Bodhisattva errichtet eine Art von empfangenden Raum.

[78:13]

And that individual Bodhisattva person can notice that when they begin to do self-referential thinking, like, am I smart enough, or does this person like me, or, you know, I'm feeling somewhat... As soon as you have those thoughts, the receptive space... but if you can make the yogic shift into less self-referential thinking or multi-referential thinking your thinking is referencing everything in the situation.

[79:24]

That receptive space starts happening. And what Eureka referred to, as I sort of said, I'd spent a couple of days before the seminar, Walking back and forth in St. Stephen's Watts. And my enjoyment and my practice was to meet each person I saw in the real world exactly the same as any other person. With no idea of, you know, comparison, each person was like an astonishment.

[80:27]

And I went, as I said the other day, I could have gone back and forth for several hours. I was having such fun. Every person was extraordinary. And almost everyone was smiling at me. So, I mean, something was happening that was fun. But if I'd start thinking about myself, you know, and I'd... Okay. Yes. This immediate consciousness is also something natural. When I go through the forest with my daughter, who just read a fairy tale book, and a shaman, and I say, look, these are palm trees, the kind that my daughter says, no, these are my siblings, and the shaman says, these are ghosts.

[81:42]

So this immediate consciousness, it's not something natural. Because when I'm walking through the forest with my little daughter, I just read a fairy tale book with a shaman. With a shaman? Shamanic person. What are you introducing your daughter to? And I tell my daughter and the other person, these are some kind, what kind of trees they are. She will answer, no, these are my siblings. And the shaman, he will say, it's spirits. The shaman will answer, it's spirits. So this immediate consciousness is a thousand worlds at the same time, depending on how you grow up, in which culture you grew up. It can be. It could also be having even a shaman. can't walk through without having any thoughts about anything except what's pure.

[82:50]

My father used to take walks with me when I was a kid. And he seemed to know the names of all the plants and their life histories, etc. And I found that interesting. But sometimes we just walked. It was just the smell and the feeling. And one basic practice of the Vijnanas is to practice walking in the forest with only your nose. Keeping your eyes nearly closed and seeing if you can feel the path of your nose. Or you do it with your ears or you do it with the five senses.

[83:52]

And of course if you go to that extent it's not natural. But in Buddhism there's no idea of that. It's all art. And you can do it with baggage, shamanic baggage, or without baggage. Okay. Something else? And the baggage, is it something like borrowed consciousness? Borrowed consciousness often has a lot of baggage.

[84:54]

It might not, it might just be you're thinking through something. If you're thinking through something It has a different energy than if you're just being in the midst of the sensory. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Be formative. Be formative. Be formative. See, I can't say what this is to you at most. But it's probably, since English is a German dialect, and about half the words of the French, Latin origin, and half are Germanic

[86:10]

But the most basic words, the earliest words are primarily German. Water, father, other things. So maybe it does, what I'm saying does allow you to work with it in Germany too, in Germany. But being in English, I mean, the word be, the word be is actually a complicated etymology. of the translation of two verbs, primarily two verbs, but lots of chunks of stuff, of exist or is, plus was and am.

[87:15]

Was and am. So was and am bring an actor into it. It was the case. I am. And existence is the be part. Okay, that's English. It must be also related to German. But the actual use of the word in English, being, it's mostly the state of being, the condition of being. And becoming... as the feeling of arriving through being.

[88:16]

Like obtaining being. Okay. So... Okay, so let me use the example. Where I noticed it most clearly. People were spreading the bowing mats in meditation hall in Zambia. And the bowing mats are set up so you can do them as a gesture. So you can do it as a gesture, you don't have to think about it. Like if I take this off, it's folded as a gesture. That's a gesture. That's a gesture. That's a gesture, that's a gesture, that's a gesture.

[89:35]

I don't have to think about it. Okay, so the bowing mats are folded in three and then once. So you just, when you fold it up, you take the two ends and you just fold it in three, like an accordion. Then you fold it over and then you put it somewhere. They're like tatami surfaces, those and that. I noticed, Debbie, we had more people in the Zendo. We had a hundred and... So we had to arrange the mats very carefully so everybody could fit in. And the floor of the Zen though is Vermont slate tile.

[90:51]

Slates. Set like diamonds. So it forms a grid where you can put your map. And I watched all of these people, probably for a long time, getting down on their hands and knees and adjusting the mats according to the grip. They were doing it. And the yogi doesn't do anything. The yogi deforms. Because everything is a forming.

[91:51]

A way of thinking about everything as an activity. Every action is an action which you use to form the mind, to form the body, and to form the world. And there's no reason to do anything for any other reason. So the mantras set up by being folded in threes and then once so that you can just go like this and when you pick them up you just go like this and done. Related to the concept that you do things with two hands. Yeah. And this is true in Korea and China and Japan as well.

[93:23]

I do think in two hands. So if I pick up this bell, you know, I'm picking up the bell to move it to here perhaps. But I pick up the bell as a yogi. with the feeling that I'm forming my mind in how I pick up the bell. So I bring the other hand into play. I bring it here when I have a few of my mind in presence. and I put it down like this and I have the feeling I'm forming my mind in doing that and the mind is being so I'm forming the mind I'm forming the body in how I do it and I'm forming the so called outer world

[94:25]

So, from the point of view of yogic practice, after they spread the vans, We then bow. And what is the bow? As I've shown you before, it's a standing a certain way. Your feet is like that. But again, your feet have to be somewhere. It's arbitrary where they are. Well, not completely arbitrary. You're kind of weird if you're standing like that. But within a certain range, it's arbitrary. So, if you're practicing mindfulness, your attentional space ought to reach to your feet.

[95:51]

And so you choose some posture that you always maintain. Or virtually always maintain. And then you notice when you're not mindful. Because your feet may go like this. Okay, so the whole practice of the bow and up to chakras and into this side and up, all of it is process of forming the mind. There's a practice of forming the mind. So you may be bowing to the Buddha. You may be bowing to another person. And bowing to the forming of their mind

[96:51]

But you're also bowing from the forming of your mind. But spreading the mats is exactly the same thing. There is no value difference between them. So the... A mature practitioner gets the mat, stands in the middle of the space, just forming his or her mind. And then forming the outer world and forming the body and doing it, coming back up to stay in it. So spreading the mats and bowing exactly the same thing. But everybody in the room, most everybody, but a few, thought it was something different, they were doing something.

[98:10]

So they're not in the worldview of practice. And once you understand this, you understand the details of monastic practice life. So that's where I came up with the word reforming. Because being is kind of like a condition of being. But we're not just being, we're forming being. If everything's an activity, you're forming being, you're not just being.

[99:39]

You're forming being. And becoming again is like you arrive somewhere through being. So in my mind, I use performing as a substitute for being and becoming. And it has a resonance with pre-forming. Or performing. But performing and pre-forming, but anyway, they have a resonance with those words. but B-forming is not done before it's in the immediacy of the moment you're B-forming and you can change your

[100:53]

to change your world view you have to use repetition in a world that's always unique so it's a repetition which is not a repetition and because a world view is a mental posture it's present in everything you do So you have to bring a contrasting or antidotal worldview into everything you do, moment by moment. So I think the simplest in English is Which is in every instance, every instantiation, every appearance.

[102:21]

You have the mental posture. that you're forming the world or forming the mind. So maybe just now forming the mind. Just now forming the world. Just now forming the body. There isn't anything else. That's in fact what we're doing. Just now we're forming the body. Just now we're forming the body. Just now we're forming the world. And it's all interrelated. And we can understand the world now phenomenally. as the otherness of mind and body, or perhaps the ingredients of mind and body.

[103:33]

There's a very rich guy, a family in Texas, oil one. And at some point, I can't remember the name right now, but at some point they think cornered this world's gold market or something. Cornered means they... found a way to control the gold market in the world. And it didn't work and they lost a few billion. But they could afford to and they're still rich. And one of them, I think the son of one of them, He seems to be a very nice guy. I know people who know him. And he created the Habitat in Arizona.

[104:59]

Maybe you've heard of it. It's a completely enclosed greenhouse thing. They lived in it. Pretty sure they got overrun with insects, and nobody could live in it in the air. But he was politically very different than his brothers or his uncles who controlled by cornering the gold market, but he was trying to corner the environment. We don't live in a habitat. And if we go to Mars, we have to bring our habitat with us.

[106:05]

But it's not a habitat. So, We are our habitat. And somehow, in our Western thinking, We've left the environment until recently out of the equation. We can go to Mars or the moon or someplace and bring our habitat along with us but in a very limited way. So in the kind of thinking of Buddhism, the environment, the context, the phenomena, has an equal weight with mind and body.

[107:29]

We have to speak about being as the relationship of mind, body and phenomena. Is that clear enough? What do you think, Christine? it's not clear it's somehow in a mist it's in a mist where it might coalesce might coalesce in the mist come together well let me try to give you another second How much time do you have?

[108:48]

They're feeding us at one, right? Pushing something between the bars. Okay. Okay. Sukhiroshi said to me when I was the first year or so of practice, I was the dogma. And the Doan is the person who hits the bell. So I don't remember exactly, but for a couple of years I did it every morning. And And he said to me, I asked him, when, I had mentioned this before, when do you speed up?

[110:11]

Well, this is something you guys brought up, that I brought up last weekend. I said, when do you speed up? And he said, you don't speed up. He is my teacher. I trust him. What he says is true. So far, what he said to me was always true. So I said, thank you. And then sometimes he was the door. And he clearly speeded up.

[111:17]

So, Maka Hanya Haramita Kinyo Kanji Saibosatsu Gyo Jin Hanya Haramita Okay, what I didn't understand and it took me years to really understand it is what he meant and what he took for granted that I would understand is you create a mental posture to not speed up Okay, so what does that mean? That means the concept of weaving mind and body together. Weaving the differently experienceable qualities we call mind and body is not the basic conception.

[112:45]

It's not the basic conception. The basic conception is mind, body and phenomena are separate. But they function together. And how to function together, how to allow them to separately function together is practice. Now I've been doing that, of course, in something like that for years. But the significance of the distinctions was not really clear.

[113:49]

Okay. Now, consciousness, mind is understood as being conscious, cognitive and reflexive. Is there somebody who wants to come in? Sounds like somebody is up there. What? The door was a... Okay, by reflexive, there's two meanings of reflexive.

[114:54]

I'm using reflexive with a sense that the mind can reflect on itself. The mind can observe itself. So consciousness is... No. Mind... can be conscious, cognitive, and observe itself. The body can be cognitive but not conscious and not reflexive. So the body has its own way of cognizance. And we've spoken about Benjamin Libet a number of times. Who was the first person in the 60s, first person and in the 60s to point out that the body mostly plans, in a sense, plans to do something before the consciousness knows what's going on.

[116:09]

and consciousness can't interfere or initiate but it's usually an editing process The body has already decided it's going to pick up this watch before I decide to pick it up. And one of the practices that I do all the time is try to, as much as possible, let my body make decisions. So if I have a funny combination of clothes on, you know that my body decided I didn't look in the mirror. So what was Suzuki Roshi saying? He's saying he had mental posture to not speed up.

[117:28]

But while he has that mental posture, The chanting is beginning to come together. And the more it comes together, the body almost feels it has the same speed, it's just easier and easier because everyone's doing it together. So what are the ingredients of the situation? The ingredients are the mental posture not to speed up. The ingredients are the cognition of the body in hitting them. the so-called wooden fish.

[118:30]

And the phenomenal ingredients, the ingredients of phenomena are the sounds of the chanting, the feel of the people. So, So the basic idea is basic. The power of this idea is that taking this mental posture, frees the body to cognize on its own. And freeing the body to cognize on its own allows the ingredients of phenomena to enter into the activity of the body in a way that wouldn't be possible if I had an intention to speed up.

[119:40]

Okay, so now my understanding is that yogic Zen practice is to feel mind and body and phenomena as separate entities engaged in the same activity, similar activity. So that's, for me, a radically different concept than I had before of integrating mind and body. Okay, so let's just take an immediate example. I'm just sitting here speaking. I have two or three mental postures which are present in my speaking.

[120:57]

But they're mental postures and they're not controlling what my mouth and lungs and body does. And I'm letting my body speak things that I don't know. I don't even know what I'm saying sometimes. You may have noticed. And I commonly say things I've never thought of. The other day I quoted the novelist, the British novelist E.M. Forster. It's not Forster, it's Forster.

[122:00]

Anyway, he said, how am I supposed to know what I'm thinking until I see what I say? And it's something like that. Or it's like Foucault saying, writing writes writing. You don't know what you're going to write sometimes until you start writing. You know, it's again, it's sort of why I've tried to create this picture. The French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure is credited with being the source of most of modern linguistics.

[123:00]

Again, I'm not a scholar, but this is my impression. then what it seems that what he did is he said language isn't just about language. Language is the very way we think. So you can study how we think through studying language. And thinking forms what we notice. As I said earlier, if you think, space separates the senses, numbers and space. So you can feel the categories in which you're noticing the world.

[124:06]

So if I now change the categories so that I have a feeling I'm allowing the body, its own cognition. And I'm allowing the body to relate to the phenomenal ingredients in its own way. And I'm in a parallel way, allowing mind to relate to the ingredient phenomena in mind's own way.

[125:12]

I have a threefold partnership. There's a partnership of body and phenomena. There is a partnership of mind and body. And those three partnerships, if I do think, if I perform things, which I'm now using the power of language, to contradict the way I used to think. Okay, so if I do a big ceremony like we just did when I ceased to be the abbot of the Crest of the Mountains, etc.,

[126:16]

Dan Welch became the abbot and I became the inkyo. Very nice feeling, wonderful ceremony. And inkyo, my new role is, as I've told some of you, is the retired abbot. But the kanji, the characters, in is a shade or shadow or ghost. And kyo is stays, doesn't go away.

[127:17]

So I know the shade doesn't go away. This is a I thought being backseat driver was bad enough. But in planning this ceremony, I planned it within these three partnerships. Okay, so first of all, the planning, the preparation is part of the ceremony. You don't prepare it and then perform it. So preparation is part of the ceremony and getting ready for it.

[128:20]

So you don't prepare months in advance, you prepare in a time frame which leads right into the ceremony. And you leave some of the most basic decisions to being in the midst of a situation with pressure. because the ceremony is not an entity the ceremony is an activity and the activity flows through the ceremony so and then you create a situation which has a greater complexity than you can think And then you create certain mental postures, you establish certain mental postures for the various participants.

[129:49]

And then you let the greater complexity than you can think, so it just may be happening. It would be like this, which is common in Asian music, is you create music which nobody can play. You can only play it as best you can, but if you were better, it could be further. And you create a situation where the people who are there in the ceremony become part of the ceremony and can start shaping it themselves.

[130:53]

They're not just watchers, they're participants. So you create a ceremony so the participants and the audience of the ceremony are also participants. Somehow it really worked. It's the most universally liked ceremony I've ever done. I'm not much for ceremonies. I refuse to attend any graduation or consideration. Yes. But I've got to do these things as part of my job. And maybe because I'm not inclined to do ceremonies, I've had to think them through quite carefully.

[131:53]

and by mental postures, I would say to Dan, for instance, when you're walking between here and there, you create a mental posture that you're going several kilometers, even if it's only 15 feet. So as he walks into that thing, there's a feeling I'm going a long distance to climb this mountain. And when he makes other motions, we say, okay, now make these motions as if it's a thick liquid you're moving your hands through. And what's amazing is everyone feels this deep feeling. Or people get up to congratulate him. Like somebody from the town gets up and says, the town of Christelden supports you.

[133:23]

We say, you get up in one breath, what you speak is one breath, and you sit down in the third breath. so no one is talking they just get up and they say what they can in one breath and sit down in one breath so the ceremony comes together and in some ways for many people we have people from Europe and New York, California, etc. And people have known each other for 30, 40, 50 years. And haven't seen each other in decades too often. And everyone likes Dan so much that somehow a... It was like a big constellation.

[134:53]

Excuse me for misusing the word. I mean, people went through so much in this ceremony. And the last part of the ceremony, we set up this big room we have, which is a dome. So there are like six living rooms in the dome. And each one with the rugs and lamps and so forth. Couches. So all these people float out of the ceremony into that room. And then we're free to move around. They all started talking, them and this thing. And it was supposed, something like that's supposed to happen as part of the ceremony.

[135:57]

And these ingredients were created With this sense, mind, body, phenomena has three partnerships, which create a certain time space. Okay, that took a little longer than I thought, but it was exactly what I thought. Thank you very much. Yes, afterwards. There was one with liquid. Yeah? He started doing a whole play with that much water on the whole stage.

[137:01]

Really? Yeah, and you know, the women's face wet, so they moved just like you described. Well, in Buddhism we just imagine it. We don't dump the floor with water. It's the same idea, yeah. The theater of Milano introduced this, that on stage he had about 8 cm of water and every actor who moved there had to move completely differently. The fluid was slowed down and the column of the women was quite heavy and therefore there are completely different dimensions. Okay, should we come back at 3 or 3.30? 3.30.

[137:46]

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