I've been emphasizing today the degree to which practice is a physiological act. And as a physiological act, it has physiological consequences. And it takes time for those physiological consequences to develop and evolve. And much of Zen practice is about creating conditions where those physiological and psychological changes can occur.

[01:10]

And how can we, how can I put it? We want those changes to occur on their own terms. We want the changes to occur not guided by consciousness, but sometimes initiated by consciousness. Because guided by consciousness, you end up in consciousness. And one thing that we are very powerful, effective culture in the West, but it primarily has developed logical and the capacities of consciousness are highly developed in Western countries.

[02:37]

And we don't have much imagination that there's other possibilities in the world presented to us by consciousness. Then consciousness? But... Other possibilities? Then those... Then it makes sense. And I think probably the most basic reason is we've created... a rather satisfactory cultural space within consciousness.

[03:42]

It's not only where we are selfish in some kind of self-referencing, it's also where we're selfless. It's the world in which we care for others, care for our parents and our children and our lovers. And it's where we construct our own life. Yeah, we feel welcome in it. Ideally, you know, I mean, if you have problems or panic attacks, as it was mentioned, or anxiety, you don't feel so welcome in it.

[04:44]

But even if you don't feel welcome in it, you still want to be welcomed. So your view of the world is embedded in conscious experience. But even if you don't feel welcome, you still want to feel welcome. And so our worldviews are embedded in consciousness, in what we call consciousness. You know, when I say these things, I'm trying to say them in a way that makes sense. At the same time, I remember Suzuki Rishi, my teacher, used to say sometimes, I feel like I'm lying to you. And he meant he felt he's saying things that you can't really get often, particularly in those days in the 60s, we were all pretty naive about these things.

[05:49]

But if we now accept, recognize, play around with the idea that we're not only construction, that we're not inherently fulfilling a fate, which is back in the minds of many of us. What has happened today that I'm in a way taking the theme of what is practice, even independent of Zen practice or any, yeah, right.

[07:15]

And I've said that space and time are actually something we are constructing. A dragonfly has quite a different experience of time and space than we do. And as far as I know, there's no dragonfly that thinks the world was created in its image. But many of us underneath, we think this is somehow our world. And it is our world, and it belongs to us, but it also belongs to all kinds of other things. So practice means that you recognize that everything is a construction.

[08:15]

And it's also under construction. It's in the process of being constructed. And if it is in the process of being constructed... Maybe we can participate in it, but how the heck do we do that? And again, practice is discovering that we're under-constructed, we're being constructed, and we are part of the construction process. And what happens if you sit down in stillness? And stillness isn't just waiting for you to discover it.

[10:04]

Stillness is something you construct. Now I said that meditation does then is sitting posture and a mental posture don't move but of course you are moving your heart's beating your stomach is digesting lunch and so forth But in the midst of that, even that movement, the body movement, you can find a kind of stillness. You're finding a kind of Stillness we could also call imperturbability.

[11:15]

Kind of inner balance, a kind of equilibrium as well as equanimity. And I think of... Believe it or not, mentioning Proust earlier, I think Proust's asthma may have been, in effect for him, a discovery of experience in entrainment with the world. Entrainment, do you understand? Yeah, entrainment, but I don't understand. Like two bicycles. Yeah, yeah. Proust's asthma? His asthma. So he had to be in fact, because I look at Bruce, he has an incredible sense of detail.

[12:20]

Okay. And Isabella mentioned, who sweetly brought us to the hotel we're staying at and picked us up. And she said she was a guest in the forest where we saw a fox last night. And she said while she was there in the sun, she could hear the leaves falling, touching other leaves as they fell. That kind of being immersed in those kind of details is one of the fruits of practice.

[13:37]

According to Friends of Proust, accounts by Friends of Proust, he could stop on a walk and spend half an hour looking at a single flower. That means he has to felt a satisfaction within his own physiology, his own metabolism, and with his own sensorial experience of the flower,

[14:41]

Das bedeutet, dass er eine Art Zufriedenheit in seinem eigenen Sensorium, seiner eigenen Sinnlichkeit gespürt haben muss und seiner eigenen physiologischen Aktivität. To find it, I'm trying to find words here, an equilibrium somehow with the flower, flowers, flowers. Now I'm not saying if you decide to practice you're all going to be unable to take a walk because you're going to stand half an hour in front of every flower. We'll make a bunch of people can't function through the day. Where were you? Why didn't you show up at work? I was staring at a vlogger. But I think what, when I read him, what I feel is something opened him into a stillness which is actually the pace of the world.

[15:55]

In other words, dragonflies and dandelions each have their own pace. What are dandelions? That's interesting. You couldn't grow up in America without knowing what a dandelion is, but you can grow up in Germany without knowing what a dandelion is. Well, here comes a dandy lion. Not the way it's stuffed. So stillness is a kind of equilibrium, proportionate equilibrium, that makes you feel engaged with the content, the context, whatever your context is.

[17:42]

One of the metaphors in practice is each moment is 3,000 coherences. Of course, 3,000 doesn't mean any particular number. It just means that there's a particularity to all the coherences that make any moment. You'll have to say it again. To give an exact number, 3,000, doesn't mean it's a real number. No one's counted them. It means that each moment is very particular and could be numbered.

[19:04]

And you could develop, each of us can develop a an awareness field which engages the particularity of each moment. Yeah, as I mentioned, Hamburg yesterday. I was just at the Van-Hoh Museum. Could you say it correctly?

[20:05]

Van-Hoh? Okay, the Van-Hoh Museum. I won't go there. You don't need to say it. Yes, you just go there and go, anyway. And so I'm looking at the Cezannes that were there and also the Van Gogh. And they're painting brushstrokes, each brushstroke. And whatever they're painting, it's like the same brushstroke, but one turns into a flower, shot flower, the Japanese paid millions for, or one turns into... you know, a farmhouse or a peasant's back, you know, etc. I know that I've been doing this a long time.

[21:17]

What background of people catches the feeling of practice quickest? Most easily. Often, they're often musicians. And they're often orchestral musicians. Because what does a musician do? A musician has to hear music. each note. And what is a note? Basically, it's a dharma. The four marks of a dharma describe a dharma. It has a beginning, a birth. It has a duration.

[22:44]

And it dissolves. And the fourth mark of the Dharma is your participation. It disappears. In other words, if you're a musician, you are actually in training whether you intend it or not, to hear the world, feel the world as units. And if you are a musician, whether you do it intentionally or not, what you actually do is you switch, you synchronize yourself with the world, your environment, namely the music. And there's a beginning of the note that lasts for a moment. And whatever you do, it's not going to last forever unless it's a traffic jam.

[23:45]

So inadvertently, this is a Dharma practice. And the painter who looks at something and then from his or her feeling as a brush stroke for each moment of experience, this is the Dharma part. And Proust, I have to talk to my daughter who is asthmatic, if she agrees, but Proust has to pay attention to each breath. And being as asthmatic as he was, and having repeated attacks, serious attacks,

[24:55]

He had to be aware that each breath might be his last. Well, that acuteness is dharma practice. And right now, I mean, I've been, again, I keep saying I've been practicing a long time, so you don't have to worry about it. I'm saying it so you can be patient. It takes a while. And the success, as you can see, in my sitting here is moderate. Okay, but I don't bring attention to my breath anymore. My breath and attention are inseparable.

[26:29]

There's no separation for me between breathing right now, speaking right now, and the way breath and speaking are part of what I'm saying. So the breathing and speaking and attention are braided together. And I don't know if I can make clear that that also means that the associative and sensorial mind is also braided in. And I mentioned earlier musician, but I also said orchestral musician.

[27:32]

Because I've noticed there's a difference between orchestral musicians and people who just happen to be good pianists. Because orchestral musicians, I find, very quickly get the feeling of an equal, equally liberated, now that's a new word, equilibrium, an equilibrium, or, [...] or. But you said something, equally liberated space, mutual space. I meant equilibrium, but equally liberated in the sense of its mutuality. That may have to stay English.

[29:09]

You're hired. So again, what happens when you sit down? You're sitting down in this stillness. You're sitting down first through consciousness. And then as you let go of consciousness, you're in associative mind. Things come up freely. Again, like Freud noticed the so-called free association. And those associative mind, when you stop associating, you're in an empty space of occasional perceptions. And so what's happened?

[30:25]

You're actually sitting outside the activity of consciousness. Because, as Freud noticed, the most associations are either pushed out of consciousness or go into consciousness on consciousness's terms. But much of our experience is actually more finely articulated than can happen in consciousness. Let me just give you a dumb, obvious example.

[31:29]

You go out here and maybe it's icy and snowy pretty soon. And you slip on the ice. And maybe it's, I hope it's not you, but somebody's carrying Christmas packages and wants a glass vase. And you fall. And you fall. But you actually protect your packages, you don't break the vase, and somehow you land okay and get back up. That happened faster than consciousness. Das ist viel schneller passiert, als das Bewusstsein das hätte machen können.

[32:48]

You can't think that fast. I better protect this, I better put my elbow there. No, it just happens. So schnell kannst du das nicht denken. Du kannst nicht denken, oh, es ist besser, wenn ich meinen Ellbogen ausfahre und ich muss das Paket in die Richtung beschützen. Das geht nicht. Das ist alles viel zu schnell passiert. It's like, I mean, I'm so astonished when I send an email. Ich bin immer so erstaunt, wenn ich einen email abschicke. I'm sitting at my desk and I send an email to my... cell phone. I'm very modern. And I can't reach across to the other table before it's already there. And it went to about a thousand something or other somewhere on the planet. Well, we have inner workings that are not maybe that fast, but pretty fast. Then we Through practice, through the equilibrium of stillness, we open ourselves to letting this happen outside of consciousness.

[34:07]

We see it, you know, noticed by Benjamin Leavitt in the 70s in San Francisco, that your body indicates it's going to do something before the conscious mind thinks it's decided to do something. Now, since I've mentioned San Francisco, I was living there in the 60s. And Silicon Valley happened in the 60s. And Silicon Valley, yeah, auch in den 60er und 70er Jahren groß geworden ist. And part of this, perhaps I think, secret history of Silicon Valley are psychedelics. And vielleicht, ich glaube, eine der geheimen geschichtlichen Hintergründe von Silicon Valley sind psychedelische Drogen.

[35:24]

Steve Jobs and virtually everyone else think much of what they did is because they were taking psychedelics. Steve Jobs and many others believe that a lot of what they have developed came from the experience with psychedelics. And what do psychedelics do to you? And I'm not recommending any psychedelics. And what do psychedelics do to you? And what do psychedelics do to you? And what do psychedelics do to you? But psychedelics give you the actual experience that there's other possibilities than what consciousness presents to you. I happen to organize for the University of California, much to their dismay, displeasure, the LSD conference.

[36:33]

Ich habe für die Universität von Kalifornien, und zwar zu deren großem Unbehagen, die LSD-Konferenz damals organisiert. And the Board of Regents really actually had a meeting about it and decided I must be a communist. I mean, really. Und ich weiß nicht, das Dezernat oder keine Ahnung wer da jetzt, aber die... And I was even listed in the Psychedelic Review as an associate editor, but I never took LSD. And in the Psychedelic Review, I was even listed as... as what again? As what were you? Associate, I would say. She's passing out old gum to people. You want to reach you my gum? I've never seen this happen before.

[37:48]

Somebody passing around half-chewed gum. Well, okay. Go ahead. You finished? Yeah, I mean, that's the gum part. Okay, fine. And the gum, or whatever it is, is the same color as your socks. OK. But I decided, if it's possible, if there's this other body that lives waiting for LSD, I decided I won't take LSD. I just want to see if I can find a way to discover this other body. I don't know what words to use. through some other way.

[39:04]

And I discovered it, I think I discovered it through the equilibrated equilibrium of stillness. Okay, so that was just a riff to give you a feeling for some aspects of practice. And we should have one of those breaks pretty soon. But first let me say that if we, and I'm going back because, you know, talking about things I haven't talked about in many years, because so many of you are new to the way I talk about things.

[40:15]

Und ich merke, dass ich hier zurückgehe zu Dingen, über die ich seit vielen, vielen Jahren nicht gesprochen habe. Hauptsächlich, weil hier so viele Leute sitzen, die neu dabei sind, wie ich über diese Dinge spreche. If we're a construction and we're under construction. Wenn wir eine sich im Bau befindende Baustelle sind. And self is a construct. A construct that functions primarily within consciousness. And the self is a construct. Is a construct that functions primarily within consciousness. We can study its functions. And I've tried various lists, and I'm talking about the self as it's experienced in the West.

[41:25]

And I do think that different cultures have different selves. Different experiences of self. If any of you had been born and adopted by a Chinese family and lived in China, you'd be a very different person than you are now. Yes, you'd have genetic similarities to your parents, but much of you would be culturally so different. Yeah, I know. Du hättest dann schon die genetischen Ähnlichkeiten mit deinen Eltern, aber kulturell betrachtet wäre vieles von dir dann ganz anders.

[42:29]

That's a way of saying you're under construction. Und das ist eine Art und Weise zu sagen, du bist, du selber bist in einem Konstruktionsprozess inbegriffen. Okay, now if we accept that the self is under construction. With particular functions. We can study those functions. And one, as I mentioned earlier today, is obviously to establish separation. If you can't establish separation between yourself and others, you have all kinds of psychological problems. You can study how you establish separation.

[43:29]

Und dann kannst du für dich untersuchen, wie du diese Trennung eigentlich herstellst. But we're also a second function. We're connected. Aber eine zweite Funktion des Selbst ist auch, dass wir verbunden sind. And we can also study, investigate, how we establish connectivity. Und wir können auch studieren oder erforschen, wie wir dieses Verbundensein herstellen. And when that connectivity supports separation or develops it, etc. And we also establish, we have to establish continuity from moment to moment. Und wir müssen auch ein Gefühl von Kontinuität herstellen, von Augenblick zu Augenblick. And we also have the fourth, we have to establish a context. Und das vierte, die vierte Funktion, wir müssen auch ein Zusammenhangsgefüge, also einen Kontext herstellen.

[44:47]

Okay. Now, Zen practice, if you look at these four functions, Wenn wir uns diese vier Funktionen anschauen, Zen practice tries to get you to establish context not in the stream of consciousness, But in the immediacy of the 3,000 coherences. I mean, Proust is this extraordinary novelist because he established coherence the immediacy of 3,000 coherences while he was a social climber in all these salons. We may not be as talented or as smart as he was, But practice says, you know, really,

[46:11]

It's nurture more than nature, which determines our existence. If you have that contrast. Dogen, who was a 13th century Japanese Zen teacher, says, locate yourself in immediacy. Plant yourself in immediacy. And He doesn't say adopt the mental posture, but basically he means take the mental posture that this is the entire universe.

[47:20]

So it's like there's a physical posture, there's the mental posture, don't move. Dogen's saying take the physical posture of really feeling yourself in immediacy and then imagine this is the entirety of the universe. It's not meant to be true. It's meant to be a mental posture which makes you have no other location in mind. Okay, so I can only go again, of course, in such a short time into so much detail. But let me say one more thing.

[48:38]

One of the things we assume is that we're separated. I'm here, and what is your name? Heinz. I'm here, and Heinz is over there. In America, we'd say Heinz has 57 varieties. But we know you're not a soup. Okay, so Heinz is there and I'm here. And we think it's a fact that we're separated. But that's a cultural view. We are separated, but we're also connected. And Yogic culture emphasizes the connectivity more than the separation.

[49:53]

So you can experiment with a mental posture. You can notice that actually when I see Martin von Elmer, Maybe, not anymore, but maybe at one time I'd notice, I'd think, oh, I haven't seen him for a while, we're separated. Because if I think we're separated, if I have the mental posture that we're separated, My senses will confirm that. Because your view occurs prior to the sensorial functions. That's why the Eightfold Path, the main early teaching in Buddhism, starts with right view or perfecting view.

[51:06]

But if you change the view that's prior to perception, perceptions change. So if I notice I have an assumption that I'm separated, Wenn ich bemerke, dass ich eine Grundannahme habe, dass ich bereits getrennt bin, dass ich getrennt bin von anderen, dann kann ich zum Beispiel experimentieren mit dem Satz bereits verbunden. I've been doing this again. I'm sorry. It's so damn long. Darn long. Ich mache es jetzt schon so lang. That I never think we're separated.

[52:18]

I always think we're connected. So I've never met Heinz before, I don't think. No. No? Too bad. Last year. Oh, really? Hey, you're good. I met Heinz for the first time last year in Hannover. But I feel connected. I feel so connected, I could even give you a hug, but we'd probably... In Germany, you don't hug people you don't know. In California, I might, but you know. I remember when I first went to England, I was in Scotland. I gave some guy a hug. He said, oh, I'm not like that. And I said, it's just I'm a Californian.

[53:22]

So really, if you take the mental posture, the view that we're already connected, you'll find you feel so immediately, you don't have to go through the normal forms of being polite, you just feel connected, but you have to kind of act the way that's proper in your culture. So these are all examples of practice. Das sind alles Beispiele für die Praxis. Yeah, so let's have a break. Lass uns eine Pause machen. Thank you very much.

[54:18]

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