I continue to be touched and impressed that you're here. Really, and that I'm here too. I'm touched by that too. And I'm trying to imagine a feeling what world we're in. Yeah, what world are we in? I mean, if we're speaking about basic teachings and practices, then yeah, we're in the ordinary world of walking around, standing, sitting. standing in front of the sink washing or doing the dishes or something and in this world of most ordinary circumstances when I say that I hear in English the word ordinary which means to weave

[01:06]

And we don't usually think of ordinary as being a weaving. But if you're practicing, then ordinary is also weaving. So at each moment in the most ordinary circumstances, you have a choice to practice or not to practice. Why? Why bother to practice? Just live your life. Yeah, but I think we get stuck somehow often.

[02:26]

We get sticky or mixed up or we're not feeling so good. We don't feel good. Satisfied. Yeah, everything feels incomplete. Yeah, it's the normal, ordinary state, often. But it's also quite natural or normal to sort of say, is there some medicine around? Yeah, and there is some medicine. And for us it's a practice. How do we take this medicine? Well, if you notice you don't feel complete, for instance, You may also notice when you do meditation, somehow you feel a little more complete.

[03:48]

Or you can have the feeling of completeness or ease in your sitting. Or you can have the feeling of moving toward completeness or moving toward ease. And if you have a daily experience of of not necessarily good zazen or something like that, concentrated, but still a feeling of a little more thorough sense of oneself. This becomes a kind of presence that lasts through the day, much of the day.

[05:06]

And we can have more simple, unencumbered breathing. Uninterfered with, undisturbed. Yeah, we feel a little more relaxed moment by moment within ourselves. So this is a kind of medicine. Now I was surprised in reading this text of Sukhiroshi's How often he comes back in this text at crucial points.

[06:10]

To confidence and faith. He speaks about having to have faith in this big mind. Now, what he means is not faith in the sense of belief. But he could have said belief, he could have said to believe in big mind, it would work just as well. But this is not faith in an outcome. This is faith in a process. I think to put it in our contemporary way of thinking, I'd say faith in a process. And that process is informed by wisdom.

[07:12]

And formed by the wisdom of understanding how things actually exist. Now again, there's this kind of tension between consciousness and our kind of wanting to be permanent and And not wanting too much trouble in our life, of course. Yeah, there's a tension between that and how things actually exist. Because we can't be sure. How do we live on the edge of that we can't be sure? I spoke yesterday and I said, using what I'm calling chaos and complexity physics, the language of that,

[08:34]

That we're living on the... I implied that practice is living on the edge of order and disorder. At the thaw-freeze point. Or as the term is used, the edge of chaos. Well, that's maybe too dramatic to say it that way. But, yeah, maybe it's not, but let's say it is. And mostly we're living in a world of established order. An already woven order. Long ago taken off the loom. Yeah, and we've made our life that way and it feels better.

[09:49]

It's what we do, how we live. And generations have participated in developing this order and teaching us each generation how to sustain this order that other generations created. But in this order, standing around, washing dishes, etc., you have a nervous breakdown. It all falls apart. Some of us, not most of us, don't have nervous breakdowns, but sometimes we're at the edge of feeling like we could lose it. Or if you have a serious thyroid problem, something like that, which sends your system haywire. And you're completely jittery.

[11:03]

Or you lose your job. Or a close loved one is ill or dies. Suddenly this order is very fragile. Yeah, it's... And sometimes the order itself is oppressive. There's too much order. So this is kind of, without most of it not knowing it, we do live on the edge of order and disorder. But more in the realm of our immediate experience, perhaps we live on the edge of complacency or uniqueness. What was the last one?

[12:21]

Uniqueness. Can you hear her over there in the far end? Yeah, okay. Your voice sounds so soft. Yeah, or... Yeah, are we living in a habit world or can we live in a non-habit world? Can we inhabit a non-habit world? Well, practice is, you know, the sense or the kind of, I think, it's a kind of inner request. To feel how things, to live in how things actually exist.

[13:29]

Even if we don't feel the edge of disorder... We can know about it. And occasionally we have the experience of it. And if you look at the details of your life, the decisions that have shaped your life, for most of it, it's a whole series of additions Of decisions to establish order. Including financial order. Which will sustain us until we die. And yeah, there's no reason we shouldn't have such order. But there's also no reason we shouldn't live on the edge of knowing how immediate and... I don't want to use the word fragile, how immediate everything is.

[14:52]

Aber es gibt auch Gründe dafür, am Rande davon zu leben, wie unmittelbar, wie fein alles ist. Yeah, I mean, my own opinion is... You're talking about the world now. The world has been, in my lifetime, a terrible mess. More people were killed in the last century, which was most of my life, than have been killed in all wars added up in all previous centuries. It's mostly been separated from me. I don't have to deal with it. But somehow I can't avoid being aware of this world. And the Yeah, the dreams of, you know, most recent.

[16:18]

I mean, the whole stock market seems like a Ponzi scheme. You know what a Ponzi scheme is? Yeah, like Madoff, right? And somehow, it's what has sustained all this, paid for all this. As much of it has fallen apart. And I must confess, I'm glad. Yeah, I mean, of course I can say that because I am not affected by it much, you know. I live in the mountains. I don't have a job, you know. I've never had any insurance, so I've not lost anything.

[17:21]

But my feeling is something has to happen. Some serious disorder has to happen if our way of thinking about the world is going to change. So, you know, I hope that out of this disorder we can rebuild a world that makes more sense. Yeah, maybe if I... could live in the world we may build, I wouldn't be a monk or a Zen teacher or a practitioner. Well, but there are many ways we can find to try to create a world that we think is responsible and fair. Es gibt viele verschiedene Wege, wie wir daran teilhaben können, eine Welt aufzubauen, die mehr Sinn macht, mehr Verantwortung hat.

[18:43]

So how do you create a world right now in your ordinary daily life that you feel really good about? Because you're in the midst of situations all the time, saying hello to people, walking around, putting one foot in front of the other. All of these are opportunities to practice. And I often say in a custom, not just me, it's a tradition, that you walk, you step forward with each foot. As if the floor might not be there. No, I spoke yesterday about, I tried to use again this strange, out of context word, attractors. But I'm trying to emphasize to see things as a process which you trust rather than a plan.

[19:59]

It doesn't mean at all that you don't also have plans. But practice is, on a moment-by-moment basis, you're in the midst of a process that you trust. And it takes time to develop the trust. You have to abandon yourself a little bit to trust. But after a while it becomes, you know, rather natural. Now, what do I mean again by trust in this case or attractors? As I said yesterday, you bring, I said, emphasize, bringing attention to the spine and to your breath.

[21:24]

Okay, then we can ask what happens when more and more of the time Your attention is on your spine and your breath. Standing in front of the sink. Walking around. Saying hello to somebody. Or my speaking right now with attention on both spine and breath in my speaking and sitting here. Well, I would give a different lecture if I didn't have that feeling. So that if I trust attention to spine and breath, and it sounds awfully mechanical, but here it is, I trust that to allow me to find something to say.

[22:35]

And also, what kind of world am I living in again? What kind of space, physical space? You know that, okay, let's say there's a, let's create in our discussion here a couple measures of mindfulness. Again, at each moment in the ordinary circumstances, You have the choice to accept the order as woven or to notice it as woven or to participate in the weaving. In a sense to become the loom yourself.

[23:56]

And re-weave the order that's there. Now this may sound a little crazy, kooky or something. But I'm trying to say, in our most ordinary of circumstances, we have this ordinary choice. To bring the basic teachings into our situation. Or to not do it. And there's a difference between just not doing it and the choice to not do it. The choice to not do it is also practice. Because you're not going to reweave everything, but boy, I mean, you have a good job here.

[25:01]

Let the trees do their own weaving. But you can choose... You notice when you, ah, just go along with things. Or no, I want to feel like being more mindful. And you can say, who's doing it? But again, going back to complexity, blah, blah, blah. If you ask, who's doing a hurricane, a typhoon? It's only a bunch of little molecules and turbulence, little turbulent whirls. But with certain conditions, they all get together and suddenly, out of nowhere, you have a... very calm, nice air, saying, hey, everything is fine, everything is ordered, and suddenly, disorder.

[26:06]

Great, I love storms. Who did it? Mrs. Her, Cain. Mrs. Her, Cain. It was Mrs. Frau Herr, Frau Hurricane. No, Herr Hurricane. The whole system did it. All the conditions came together to do it. That's more true of you than true that you are functioning through itself. Self is part of it. The more you can kind of like not identify with the wholeness of self, and you'll find out that much of your moment-by-moment choice to practice or not to practice arises not from a who decision but a sensitivity to the possibilities of situations.

[27:36]

So one wise thing to do is create situations, create a life which allows this sensitivity, allows this sensitivity. Okay, so now let's go back again to the two, let's say, two measures of mindfulness. One is you notice attention itself. Or you're mindful, as I say often. I'm mindful that this is a stick. But I'm also more mindful What's most real is the mind of the stick, the stick as mental sensorial phenomena.

[29:07]

I got this recently when I was in Japan. And the best building wood in Japan is keyaki. It's virtually gone. It's all, over hundreds of years, became temples and other buildings all over Japan. And it becomes big drums because it holds a sharp edge very well. Anyway, they denuded Japan of keyaki. But somebody made this of a root of a keyaki tree. I thought that was rather nice, made from a root. Okay, so somebody has to like the tree.

[30:22]

Someone has to want to make this. And someone wants to show the natural grain, but show it's not natural because it doesn't grow that way. That's a human interference. So it's natural and it's not natural. What does that mean? And it's the shape of the backbone. This is to remind me of the spine. The spine is a teaching staff. And also it's derived from, as I've told you before, a back scratcher. Don't forget, most of the world never had hot running water in big bathtubs. And there weren't lakes nearby. It was kind of hard to wash. So people got stinky and itchy.

[31:39]

Oh, God. And you were so stinky, the flies gathered around you, so you had a whisk to get the flies out. So here you have a well-washed practitioner in front of you. But still, there's mind on this from how it's made, conceived, growing the tree, and my use of it. And it's a simple fact. that everything I know about it is within these senses and mind. So one measure of mindfulness, a measure of when you're practicing mindfulness, is in addition to the object you see mind.

[32:42]

Or I could even say primarily you see mind and also the object. Now, and in addition, if you feel breath on your senses and cognition, When you notice these two things, you notice that this is happening, or you bring attention to this, this is practicing mindfulness. So you can notice in the midst of standing at the sink or something, are you practicing mindfulness or not? Do I feel the dishes or whatever you're doing as mind? And do I feel breath at the same time? Yeah, sometimes you do it, you feel it for a few moments.

[34:15]

Or maybe all morning or all afternoon. But then there's the edge where you're not feeling it. And then you choose, oh, okay, that's fine not to feel it. Or, no, I go back to the breath. That's the world of practice. It's that simple. Okay, now then the question is, what inventory of practices do you have to bring into this situation? So far, what we have, what we've discussed, Is the awareness of objects as mind and the feeling of the process that arises when the mind rests in the spine and the breath.

[35:21]

And then to trust that process in the moment by moment activity, ordinary activity. Okay, one little anecdote. I saw in the news the other day a German woman, neuroscientist in some institute in Berlin, Eine deutsche Frau, eine Neurowissenschaftlerin aus einem Institut in Berlin. Who's interested in the plasticity of the brain and so forth. Die sich also sehr für die Plastizität des Gehirns interessiert. And she wonders, which is a very legitimate question, I think. Und sie stellt sich die Frage, meiner Meinung nach ist es eine sehr legitime Frage. What happens to the plasticity of the brain?

[36:24]

Was passiert jetzt mit der Plastizität des Gehirns? When? Kids and adults spend four or more hours a day in a two-dimensional world. Looking at computers, etc. I'm not sure that's a real problem. But the basic idea is there. You are weaving body and mind and brain together. in your activity, even as an elderly adult, like the guy sitting in front of you. Okay. I hope, wherever you are, brain. Okay. So it makes a difference what world you live in. That's the point I'm making.

[37:33]

And if you live in a you inhabit a world of habit only and your attention is mostly not even in the immediate circumstances but in plans and your worries about yourself and stuff. Yeah. that will create one kind of world. But the more you can be in the multidimensional immediacy, the more practice can bring you into multidimensional immediacy. That actually transforms you. It's a process which transforms you. And you have the choice.

[38:36]

Now you might want to ask, why do I say multidimensional instead of three-dimensional? Oh, I don't know. Maybe if some of you ask, I might try to figure it out. Thank you very much. Man.

[39:03]

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