I'm passing out a colon and I'm not going to discuss it. I'm not going to lecture on a colon. How's that? But I thought it might be interesting and using for your edifying here. Look at it at some point in the future. Very grand. It's a natural instinct. This one, yeah. I've got that. And this one. No, we don't want to do it. I don't know if you want to do it. I was trying to say. We didn't do it.

[01:00]

Don't read the koan, please. I passed it out because I think perhaps if later you looked at it, you might see the context of what I'm talking about as it's kind of laid down in the koan and how that is different from the way Steiner might put something down. And since I know very little about Steiner, I mean, I've read a little bit of occult science and got stuck when you start talking about how you practice. And also, I read some in my 20s, and I've read some of the book that Robert sent me, his Essential Steiner, last year. Thank you. Now, Bill is always asking me, I said to Bill last night, what do you want me to talk about? He says, angels. I can't even claim an angelic presence. Anyway, Bill has been asking me about, talking to me about angels since I first met him.

[02:31]

And we've driven along in cars and obscure places and he suddenly says, don't you have an experience of wings beating in the air? And, you know, it was great. I mean, I love it because I've never even known anyone who believed in angels. He wasn't in a mental hospital. Yeah, or in the Middle Ages. So Bill was a revelation to me, an actual human being. And then he described to me the experience, which must have been a turning point in your life. And I think from... point of view of Zen, we would consider it some kind of enlightenment experience, some kind of turning experience. And I felt, you know, when he described it to me, I could intimate or feel what he was talking about, but not in the full sense that Bill's experienced it.

[03:37]

And he brought it up. You bring it up almost once a year. You're asking me, well, I just want to know if they come around. And So, actually, it's given me a lot of thought and I've really been very touched by it because there's an intimacy to it that you share this with me and that you, I think, want me to have the same experience so we can experience the same things. You know, it's nice. But I can't claim to know too much about angels, I'm afraid. Now, a student, apprentice, partner of mine, there's no word that really describes the partnership of two people practicing Zen together. Student, there's too big a division in the word student. And apprentice may be okay, but it's a little funny, soundly. I don't know. But anyway, a student, apprentice, partner of mine in practice is a doctor in Berlin.

[04:39]

And he's actually from a... I don't know, many generations of doctors going back in the Middle Ages when he had a many great grandfather who was a surgeon in the Middle Ages, whatever that meant. Can you hear in the back okay? Yes. And so anyway, he's a sweet guy. He actually gave me the fax machine we have here. And so a few nights ago, the phone kept ringing in the middle of the night. And I always keep the phone by the bed in case somebody wants to talk to me. Beep, beep, beep, I put it down, you know. Ten minutes later, beep, beep, beep, almost all night long, finally I turned the machine off, and next day I forgot to turn it back on. I had 12 messages of calls, and so the next night I started doing it again. I guess when the faxes come in at that time, one in the morning or so, it's usually Europe sending me something, and whoever did it doesn't know we have a dedicated fax line now.

[05:41]

So the next night it started again. I thought, jeez, I'm not going to every 10 minutes pick up the phone. So I got up and I fiddled with the wires and we plugged in the wires. And I was totally asleep trying to get the wires straightened out. And then the fax came through automatically. And here's what it said. Dear Richard, we're back in Berlin, blah, blah, blah. They were just in the Azores. And he said it was good to practice in such a slower environment than Berlin. He said, first I had a lot of nightmares with lots of blood and helpless surgery I had to perform. But then the dreams changed to angels who settled down in my chest and wonderful light feelings which are connected to my breathing and my spinal column. So I thought, geez, this was a real transmission. Literally.

[06:49]

What it struck me is, and I'm presenting it to you because I'm wondering how would somebody versed and experienced in Steiner's teaching understand somebody who said this to them, and how would I understand? And I can say something about it in the sense that say somebody came to me And they said to me, I've been having these feelings of angels who settled down in my chest. And I have these wonderful light feelings connected to my breathing and my spinal column. And I, you know, you might think yourself, any one of you, whether you're practicing qigong or therapy or Steiner or whatever, how you'd respond to such a thing. I think my own experience or key understanding is different is different. That there's no, Bill pointed out, I feel there's no one truth. There's an approach to truth, there's an approach to the mystery. And Zen is a language and teaching a craft about approaching the mystery.

[07:54]

And so if someone came to me with that kind of feeling, I would... particularly in a situation like doksan, which is the interview between two people practicing together and meeting, I would try to let... I don't have a better word for it than body, but what we mean by body is a whole lot of things. Even a poem, the root of poem in Kaya is very similar. And so body is a kind of poem that speaks and listens. So I would let the poem of my body, perhaps, listen to this person and give an immediate present, whatever he or she was feeling at that time. And I would try not to interfere much. And I would... see if I could make a space now in general this a lot depends on my own experience and and my capacity for experience because I don't bring theories to it now and So I would try to feel or allow a space that allowed these angels to appear to reappear or the

[09:19]

I would create a feeling of light around my spinal column to see if the other person, if there was a similar feeling. And I would probably kind of explore with the person whether this angel was a psychological experience or a psychological voice. Sometimes craziness, I've had a lot of people who practice who begin hearing voices. And I'm much more tolerant than therapists usually are. I say, oh, yeah, what did they say? Are we talking about it? And it's often quite interesting and very seldom a real problem. Or I have experiences floating around and stuff like that. So anyway, I would listen and I'd try to feel out if this is a psychological voice or a personal voice. or a lineage embodiment voice.

[10:20]

In other words, when you study the lineage a lot, you begin, and the koans particularly are a way of presenting lineage masters with a certain style of each lineage. And if you read koans enough, you begin to pick up a presence that's not only runs through a whole series of people, but is particularly individuated in certain people. And often in practice, you'll develop a connection with one or more different people. And sometimes that presence will be there. And that would be in somebody who's been practicing quite a bit. That would be less likely in a new person. And then I would see if it was a meta-presence, that's what I would call it. It's something I discussed with His Holiness once. A meta-presence, and by that I mean that we in this room create a kind of presence, and in Buddhism we could call that presence even an embodiment or a body that we can relate to, speak to.

[11:28]

So I would try to sense if it was a metta presence arising in the community or in a relationship with several people. Or I would try to feel out if it was a, and that's very close to what I call a bodhisattvic presence. In other words, I think that together a group of people practicing, a particular group of people in a particular lineage will create a presence that's like Manjushri or like Avalokiteshvara or like some other bodhisattva. And there's a little different bodhisattvic presence to different lineage. So I try to sense out whether this person had a kind of bodhisattvic presence coming in through, that has arisen through his or her practice and the way they're practicing because these practices, I mean, particularly Zen, always emphasizes the craft of practice.

[12:31]

And the sutras are always read almost entirely in terms of how they're accessible and how you can do it, how you can realize. And So any particular teaching you're working on may have a kind of embodied identity that can engage in a metalogic way with your own subtle bodies, et cetera. So I'd try to see if that was the case. I'd just listen or feel what I felt, and if it appeared in me, I'd assume it was the case. You become a field in which... I mean, there's no longer the person in you. There's the field there. And I'd also consider whether it was a... I'm presenting this as if I'm thinking. I'm not really thinking, and I'm just present, much as I can be present, or not present but aware.

[13:38]

if it was a meta-presence or embodiment arising from the phenomenal world. Because as we talked about speaking with trees the other day, there's also a presence that arises from the phenomenal world. Still, even though I would do all this, I would never view this as coming from outside or external. I'd view this as a phenomena that can't fall into categories of inside or outside. But probably, although I would listen to this, I would probably, all in all, in the direction, emphasize the spine more than the angel. Now, I'd also look and see and feel that this feeling of angelic presence or... angel or something like that, is not just a voice or some kind of teaching or access or channel or capacity for teaching, but I'd also just see if it was a feeling of being blessed or blessing, because often practice allows us to be blessed and in particular with non-referential states of joy and bliss that arise without reference to anything.

[14:57]

These can take various forms in you. But I would, again, pay more attention to the spine, bringing my spine into a visual alignment with the other person's spine within my own imagination. And for practice, if you're interested in zazen, the posture of your backbone is the most important thing. And McGarjuna speaks of how do you make a snake straight? You put it in bamboo. It's actually rather difficult, particularly if the snake is as dangerous as the ego itself. So he means to put your mind in your backbone, but he also means that your backbone is a mind. Now, you may not identify it as a mind in the usual sense, but in Buddhism, every part of your body is a mind. is a kind of consciousness that through the development of inner space in your practice you begin to hear the language and vocabulary, another kind of language of whole body feelings and inner sounds and colors and images that speak to you.

[16:17]

So if you are doing zazen, the most important thing is to support your own back and to have a kind of lifting feeling through your back and to eventually begin to feel your backbone as a column of light and awareness, and in fact your whole back. And it's one of the main areas to open up the backbone of your hara, or one of the main areas, at least used in Zen, to open up the whole body. as a field of being and consciousness and awareness. So, anyway, that's how I would respond to such a letter or such a presentation of somebody. Now, since I don't know really much about Steiner, I think I should present the carpentry of Buddhism, or of Zen at least.

[17:22]

And I'll explain what I mean by that. And I, you know, I wasn't going to speak, and I asked Bill beforehand, you know, you don't expect me to speak in this Steiner conference. He said, no, no, I'd like you to be present. I said, well, and then a couple days ago. So, but actually I was giving it some thought, and I felt, you know, that since I really cherish this dialogue with Bill and with Lindisfarne and with each of you who are friends, I think if we're in dialogue, there's got to be a dialogue. And so I thought what might be useful is to present the structure of, more or less, the structure of Zen practice as we do it and it's understood within my lineage. And because I think that way there can be a sort of contrapuntal resonance, perhaps, and to see how these practices work together, because I'm definitely learning things being here. And so anyway, I can just present this in some of it.

[18:31]

Now, what do I mean by carpentry? I mean, in a sense, if I tried to create a simple image, You live in a house, shall we say. You're the dweller in a house, and you're also the house, and you're also the carpenter. And for most of us, we only know our house the way our neighbors see it. We only know our house from the outside. Most people, particularly in the West, very, very little know our house from the inside. It's almost like excluded knowledge. It's taught out of us. And I like the example of the word common sense, which nowadays means sense common to others. And originally it meant sense common to all the senses. And we've lost the ability to have a sense common to all the senses. I think we've literally educated out of us and we start with infants.

[19:33]

except for the Irish. They hang in there. And you can feel it in Ireland, actually. And so... Okay, so in practice, in other words, the design of the house is quite important, or the worldview you have, or the cosmology you have is quite important. And in Zen practice, there's always a reference, of course, to the worldview. And you have to often, particularly in America, which is one of the difficulties in teaching in America compared to Europe, is Americans are less culturally secure, and they're also quite anti-intellectual. And if you mention Kant, they... Kant do what? You know, they... And if you talk about any things in Europe, you know, that, oh, yeah, my grandmother lives in the town where Kant was born or something like that. And there's a feeling of connection even if you don't read things.

[20:36]

And... So... But still, I often get sort of criticized by people I practice with that... presenting too much to design. And in general, people want religion to be simple. And Buddhism is extremely simple in that you can take, at least Zen, that you can take any point and it leads to all practices. But it is also pretty complex. Not complicated, but complex. Yeah. What do you mean by presenting too much design? The architect would ask the question. No, that's what I mean. Well, you'll see. But when you look later at the koan, you'll see that when it refers to practices like the six fields of consciousness and so forth and the teachings from the sutra in general, although the background of the sutras is in there for sure, generally the things that are explicitly there are the carpentry or the worldview related to the carpentry or practices related to the carpentry.

[21:58]

So when I talk about how you follow your breath, by that I mean carpentry. You're not concerned with the design of the house and so forth. Now, mostly in Zen, we expect the carpenter to figure everything out. And in general, particularly in traditional monastic teaching, almost nothing is given but how you hold the nail, three in your mouth and one in your hand and so forth. And you're expected to, in the context of practicing with others, find out the teaching. Now, my own feeling, and Bob brought up the importance of monastic practice, and on the one hand, well, I think that we have a very sophisticated lay sangha, in the larger sense, in American Europe, and with more time than people in the past had to practice, Still, I cannot see that practice is possible without, I mean, a depth practice.

[23:03]

I can't see that it's possible without some monastic time. And one way I've brought sashins to Europe is I've done them as really encapsulated seven-day monastery practices. So we brought the eating bowl, really set up a little monastery, and we have to have all this equipment. So people ask me, once you do a sashin, are you there? It's an immense job, actually, to move all this stuff and get it and buy it and et cetera. So we create a little monastery for a week. And Gaurav and Gisela are just going over to help me with a two-week one where we spend a week on koans and then a week of sashim. And Randy was just there helping me for the mei sashim in Hamburg. But also I think some kind of practice like this is necessary. I mean, you know, as my students, fellow practitioners know, there's much more teaching given in Europe than here.

[24:05]

Because the monastic style is you don't give much teaching. You create a situation where you can work on one thing with density. And also there's a pace to monastic life and a saturation to monastic life and a microcosmic human organism, all of which help you learn the teaching. And the teachings are also built into the life in a way that, and I've tried to kind of, made an effort to try to kind of cull out what teachings I can from monastic life and make them more available to lay people, many adept practices which traditionally aren't talked about at all. Or, unfortunately, a lot of Zen teachings and lineages forgotten. Because there's such an emphasis in Zen is don't present anything to anybody that they don't understand. or are not already clued into. And always make it look like it's... because you don't want to compassion it.

[25:10]

Mr. Curie used to talk about the difference between transmission or death teachings and mercy teachings. And boy, once that idea got out in the community, people were furious, tremendously upset at the idea that they might be getting mercy teaching and not transmission teaching. So you just can't talk about these distinctions. So I made a decision to only do adept and translucent teaching. And those people want to do that, and those people want something else. I mean, because I don't know how to deal with all these problems, particularly when I bring these teachings out of monastic life and try to identify them. And I'm also trying to... look at the teachings through my own experience and through lots of time with Suzuki Roshi in Western words and in a Western paradigmatic, dogmatic context. In other words, I'm not really concerned with the terms in Sanskrit and Pali.

[26:11]

I'm trying to find out how these teachings can... I can use Western words to do it. There's an interesting dissonance when I speak in German or through a translator, is that German doesn't have the vocabulary English does. It has a lot of precision, but English has an immense vocabulary and a lot of possibilities and distinctions which make it somewhat easier, at least I think, to teach Buddhism in English. And so I feel that although we're chanting the Heart Sutra in German and things, I feel that certainly practicing with me, but in general, Buddhist practitioners, are going to have to learn their study in their home language and also English, and also the greatest volume of scholarship done in English. And Robert writes in English, so... You have to study Robert. I mean, Robert and Tom Cleary, I mean, have, you know, given us much of what we in Zen are trying to practice.

[27:16]

And... Okay. So, but still, there's not only some teachings can't be extracted from monastic life, and also the context and pace of monastic life allows something to happen that is very difficult to happen in lay life. Lay practice is considered by far and away more difficult than monastic practice. I think it's possible, and I'm trying to create the bridges and trying to figure out the practices that you can do in lay life that work. Now, I know when I practiced the first five years of Sukhyoshi before we founded Tassajara, I finally just decided San Francisco was a monastery. And I pretended it was a monastery. And I lived every day walking the street, this is a monastery. If I go crazy, where am I going to go crazy to? I'm still going to be here in this monastery. And I just lived in the fog of San Francisco and sunshine and amidst the oceans and the bay there, pretending San Francisco was a monastery, because I knew I needed the context of it.

[28:23]

And out of that experience in Sekiroshi's feeling that people weren't getting it without a monastery, we found it in Tassajara. All right, so now if you're back to the house, if you're the carpenter, The carpenter, you're learning various practices, five skandhas, breathing practices, residing in your breath body, so forth. Using breath to thread inner consciousness and outer consciousness together, so forth. Using breath as the thread through which you explore the four elements, explore your body and its resonance with the phenomenal world in terms of the four elements. these are all carpentry. And eventually, as you practice and find out what this house is, as both dweller living in the house and the carpenter, eventually you become the electrician and the plumber, and you begin to know the wiring of the subtle bodies and so forth.

[29:43]

And then eventually you begin to shrink the house down to a little... dot, a little pearl, and carry it in your schatzkiste, in your treasure box. And you're able to expand it to cover everything, and so forth. Those are more adept practices. But still, you start out as this carpenter in this house, and you sit down as the dweller carpenter and sort of wonder what to do. Now... So now I'll try to say something about the... I'll just sort of list... I think, I hope fairly simply, some of the practices in Zen you would do. Now, these are partially in an order. You start with some things first, of course. But in general, the order can be anything. And really, every practice includes the others. So if you practice one thoroughly, it leads immediately to the other. And that's the trouble with describing. You describe one, you start to see, oh, jeez, I've done all of them now, and I've only described one.

[30:47]

So first, probably, we can say is the ability to sit still and to sit down and sit still, inner and outer. Now, this Zen, Chinese Zen, has tried to incorporate all the major teachings that they emphasize, which is mainly Madhyamaka and Yogicara and Huayen, and a lot of Theravada and so forth teaching. And try to bring them all together and bring Samatha and Vipassana all together in one kind of lump that is realized through evolved sitting practice. But just described as simple sitting. So you learn to sit down and sit still. inside and out, which actually is quite an accomplishment. I mean, just to sit still inside is... I mean, outside is hard enough.

[31:51]

And you start scratching the various acupuncture points which move around as your energy changes and so forth. You think they're ants. Mm-hmm. Sometimes they are. Especially when you're tougher. Mosquitoes up your nose. Anyway, that's one thing. And... And it also, sitting still, has a very powerful psychological dynamic to it because through sitting still, you break the adhesive connection between mind and or between thoughts and action. And as long as you are, your action, your sense of activity or you might act on something is tied to your thoughts and your identity is located in your thoughts, you're afraid to think certain things. a lot won't come up.

[32:53]

And, I mean, Freud used basically a meditative technique of free association. But you could say that Zazen practice is a very wide practice of free association. Now, one thing I can throw in here as a kind of, for those of you who practice, Zen practice is not about clearing the mind. And it's not about you're a failure if you can't count to ten. And I mean, in fact, I said this often, but let me say it again. When you can't count to ten, it means you've entered zazen mind. Because your outer consciousness is educated to count to ten. It's just awareness, which is what I make a distinction between consciousness and awareness. Consciousness is, the SCI means to cut consciousness. And so consciousness is the way we perceive the divided world or perceive the world in the divided world. And awareness is the way, and I'm using English words, which don't exist in German quite, but for example.

[33:57]

And awareness, which the root is to watch, it's pretty good. I mean, I turn it into a technical term, meaning that mode of perception or non-dual perception which sees the world as undivided. And I also am always trying to find ways in which I can make clear that this is familiar to us. We already know these things. And for example, example I use all the time, is if you wake up at 6.02 in the morning without an alarm clock, it's awareness that did that. Because you were not conscious during the night, but you woke up at 6.02. I mean, I can, I find I can wake up, it's crazy, you know, on the time of my watch and when I just landed in Frankfurt, or the time in America, or the time that's in Frankfurt, or the time I watch. I don't know how it happens, but I can do it. So this is awareness.

[34:59]

Now, what does this tell you about awareness already? It means that, well, I have to make up some terms and say that consciousness and awareness, and many other states of consciousness and awareness, but I'm emphasizing for the sake of clarity these two, this distinction, has viscosity, temperature, so forth. And while conceptual thought and consciously self-conscious control thought will not be sustained in awareness, it sinks, you could say, intent will will pass through. So you can make an intention, I'm going to get up at 6.02, and that intention, which is not thought in the usual sense, will pass through a word. So that's why bowing is so important in Buddhism, turning your vow to realize Buddhahood with each person you meet into a sensation, you could almost even call it

[36:02]

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