So I'm, of course, being responsible for practice periods here and in Crestone. I'm trying to understand them. I understand enough so I feel I can responsibly participate in leading them and defining them. But really that's just a process of noticing and participating my understanding lagging behind my noticing and participating. So last year we had

[01:02]

in this first practice period here, 35 with visitors, part-time participants, maybe 40 or some more persons much of the time. And here now we have what I called we 13. And still, in the same way, I feel myself drawn into practice period. And drawn toward you as the It sort of just, I don't know, happens. I'm not intending it exactly, but drawn toward you as the entirety of my life. Yeah, and that's probably if you're completely new to a practice period, not necessarily your experience, but I've done so many that

[02:27]

It is strongly my experience. Yes, so involuntarily sort of it just happens. And also I find I enter each minute of the time of practice period as if each minute was the front door of 90 days. So betrete, als sei jede Minute die Vordertür der 90 Tage. So each minute lets me feel into the 90 days we have together.

[03:47]

Und so lässt mich jede Minute in diese 90 Tage, die wir miteinander haben, hineinspüren. So I think maybe I should start out with what I could call practice period instruction. Yeah, and we could call it also sashin instruction, zazen instruction. But somehow the kind of instructions I... tend to give, offer, during practice period, different instructions come out than if it were a sashim, say. Yes, so I want to bring the question into the practice period and particularly this teisho. What's going on here?

[05:05]

What's going on with each of you? What's going on with us together? It's a kind of dance. I don't know, we could call it like military maneuvers. We're all doing the same thing, sort of. But I think of Picasso's, I read, said to Braque. They're both painters, of course. He said something like, you should know the Catalan Cardanza dance. Where it becomes a communion of souls, he says. Because he says, each step is counted. Mm-hmm. And everyone of all ages, backgrounds, etc.

[06:28]

does it together. It seems to be the national dance of Catalonia. Yeah. Well, I mean, in some ways, each step, each appearance in practice period is counted and counted together. I don't exactly mean counted one, two, three, but it counts, it matters. And it's like a bodily progression, but it's not like military bodily progressions. It's more like a dance. And it's... Yeah, it's a, as I've said a number of times, it's a Chinese creation and one of the unique aspects of Zen as a, in China developed Buddhist practice.

[08:11]

But I can't entirely with words express what I feel, mean, or what practice period is. Aber ich kann nicht ganz in Worten zum Ausdruck bringen, was ich fühle oder was ich meine oder was die Praxisperiode ist. Mostly we're just going to do it. Zum größten Teil werden wir sie einfach tun. And I will point to some of the doings of it. Und ich werde einige der Dinge, die wir tun, auf die werde ich hinweisen. Now a statement I've mentioned often recently and just not recently in the Winter Branches is again, Dogen, within, sometimes it's just sometimes, but I would say the better translation is within a time,

[09:20]

Within a time, as if there's a number of times available and you choose one. This is the time, it's a time. Yeah, it's not time in general. This is already something. What's going on here? Is this in the realm of your experience? Ist das im Bereich deiner Erfahrung? Okay. Within the time, I, eh, hey. In einer Zeit, ich, eh, hey. No, if I say, I, Richard, if I say, I would like such and such.

[10:30]

Wenn ich sage, ich möchte das und das, Richard Baker möchte das und das. No, no. I, I changed it. Okay. If I say, I, please do, I ask you to do such and such. That's not the same as I, Richard, ask you to do such and such. Or I, Zen Tatsu, ask you to do such and such. Or I, Genrinji, the name of our temple here, ask you to do such and such. So this is already a different world than we usually live in. There's not the assumed, always present continuum of I. Yeah. Within a time, I, Eihei, enter an ultimate state and offer profound discussion.

[11:57]

Okay, already, what is this? Enter a profound, enter an ultimate state. What the heck is an ultimate state? What could he be referring to? Now you can say, oh, he's referring to a particular samadhi. But what do you mean by samadhi? And what choice do you have among samadhis? And can he just enter? Oh, think. Yeah, what should I do today? I guess I'll enter a samadhi. Got nothing better to do. Yeah. So... Is this your experience?

[13:15]

We have to ask ourselves this kind of question. What's going on here? I enter an ultimate state and offer, well, I offer some profound discussion. I offer some profound discussion. What does he mean, the ultimate state offers the profound discussion, or I, Ehe, offer the profound discussion? And then he says, And I simply ask you to be steadily intimate with your field of mind. And I steadily ask you, each of you, to be steadily intimate with your field of mind.

[14:20]

Now perhaps the profound discussion arose because the assembly was steadily intimate with its field of mind. What's the role of profundity? Where does it arise? And if there is profundity, perhaps in what we're discussing, where is it coming from? I am offering profound discussion. Wenn es Tiefgründigkeit in dem gibt, was wir hier besprechen, dann woher kommt die? Bin ich das, der die anbietet? Oder fordert ihr mich zu einer tiefgründigen Diskussion auf? These kind of things we should understand or at least have a feel for.

[15:43]

And yet, and then to be steadily, what the heck is steadily intimate? Dogen is going to enter an ultimate state Simultaneously and probably part of or interrelated with the assembly being steadily intimate. The assembly entering steady intimacy with their thoughts? No, with their field of mind. Now do you experience thoughts, mental formations, or do you experience a field of mind?

[16:58]

This you should ascertain. No, ascertain means you should examine and make certain. As certain, certain. As certain means to assay, to examine and make certain. Das solltet ihr untersuchen und feststellen. Yeah, I mean, if this is what Dogen is saying and what we're, I mean, are you just here for a visit or are you here to practice Buddhism? Und was macht ihr hier? Seid ihr hier einfach, um den Ort mal zu besuchen oder seid ihr hier, um Buddhismus zu praktizieren? So the difference between being caught up in the self-fenced continuum that we usually are, self-fenced, fenced in continuum by self, Or caught up in thoughts which are usually self-referencing

[18:01]

And instead of being caught up with thoughts, self-referencing or not, your attentional vitality is located in the field of mind, not the contents of mind. What's going on here? This we should ascertain. And as you know, I feel there's a lot of lineage from the West that leads us to sit here and practice, and not just from Asia. And one of the places it was first examined was by painters.

[19:21]

Now, Cezanne said, if I ask you, you're a sitter for a portrait, if I ask you to sit like an apple, If I ask you to sit as still as an apple sit like an apple it's so that I can paint your head like a door. Now, Cezanne was known for doing a hundred sessions to paint an apple. And he was known to ask sitters to sit 150 times for a portrait. What's going on here?

[20:54]

Now, imagine that I'm... I can't do anything really except talk. But say that I was going to paint you. And I required 150 sittings. And we're just, you know, in some farming community and you're the local woodcutter. What kind of relationship do we have to have that you would agree to 150 sittings? And what kind of person do I have to be to be willing to sit in front of you 150 times? I would certainly enter an ultimate state.

[22:07]

So we can assume some kind of samadhi is going on. If 150 observations he feels are necessary, periods of observations, He also said something, I want to see what's beneath the exterior. Okay. You know, this may sound funny to you, but this is, I think, a shift a phenomenological shift from the world which had an outside to a world which has no outside or is only inside.

[23:09]

And that's one of the things I hear from people. They don't really often get what I mean when I say that. And I don't know quite how to convey it. But just imagine we were back a few hundred years. And we thought heaven and hell really existed. Now, where would it be? I mean, Sophia, when she was quite little, told one of the farm girls here, because she went to kindergarten with him,

[24:17]

And Sophia, when she was still very little, she told one of the little girls from one of the farmhouses when she went to kindergarten that there was no God. And this is quite a Catholic neighborhood, and the little girl was a little surprised. And Sophia said, I came here by airplane and there's no God up there. Yeah. So, and the hell, is it down or up or where would that be? When you stop to think that there's some outside space, where God could exist and creation could occur from, you're in a different world. And we in the West are still trying to recover from this disability.

[25:22]

This delusion. No matter how much we want to like the feeling of a God presence or an outside space where things are, I don't know, better or worse or something, We have to... Look in another way. You know, in this great interaction between, as far as I understand anyway, European body culture in the 1800s and 1900s, Much of what happened is we've spoken in Berlin between the wars.

[26:43]

And this building and Hugo Kugelhaus are part of that movement. To show how it's built, how each beam rests on another beam, that's all a part of being in a world which has no outside. And one of the proponents of, well, part of that body movement picked up on Indian ideas of chakras and asanas and nadis, is that how you pronounce it? And in 1855, somebody, some guy who was very interested in...

[27:53]

Indian, I think. I'm not sure. I forget his name. He got a corpse out of a river in India, which is easier than most rivers. And he dissected it. And he found no chakras. So he published this and it changed the whole glamour about Indian chakras because scientifically there were no chakras. But we or some of us know from our experience that there is an experience of chakras. So we can't look for chakras like we look for the heart or the kidney.

[29:18]

We have to look for them through, within certain kinds of relationships. And the need for a God space or creator space or something like that, we have to look for in a different way. Okay. So someone like Cézanne was, there was no, I can't know if I can really make this clear, but let me just say there was no outside for him.

[30:31]

Ich weiß nicht, ob ich das wirklich klar machen kann, aber sagen wir mal, es gab kein Außen für ihn. There's only what he saw or could use or could notice. Es gab nur das, was er gesehen hat oder benutzen konnte oder bemerken konnte. And if he's looking at an apple and particularly likes it, say, or feels it, He doesn't just try to reproduce an image of the apple because he's equally interested in the paint that the apple will be reconstructed from or represented in. Weil er genauso interessiert an der Farbe ist, aus der der Apfel rekonstruiert und in der der Apfel abgebildet wird.

[31:38]

So here the ingredients of the apple are also the paint. Und hier sind die Zutaten des Apfels auch die Farbe. And the ingredients of the apple are also what's used to apply the paint. And the ingredients of the painting of the apple is also the state he enters in order to paint the apple. And the 100 sessions or the 150 sittings These are the ingredients of the painting. And it's not about liking the guy or disliking the guy. It's about an observing process that goes beyond any kind of self-reflection.

[32:43]

Any kind of self-rejection. So if I was Cezanne and I could paint you, You might think 150 sittings, I don't know. But then you'd have had a million people looking at you in museums in the last 50 years. Because somehow in the paint and in the application of the paint is the 150 sittings. Otherwise it's just decoration. And we know the difference between decoration and a painting.

[33:45]

So we have 90 days of 150 sittings with each other. Something like that. When am I supposed to stop in this new schedule? I guess I'm okay. What? I don't really know. I'm just rhetorically asking. I don't go by the clock. Are you mad? For Zazen, yes, sort of. This morning I mentioned to... that the hitting of the bells is a conversation with everybody in the sender.

[35:09]

And she knows this, and I wanted to emphasize it again and have our discussion about it. Now, one of the, as I say, truisms of Yogacara Zen is all mental phenomena have a physical component. And all sentient or felt physical phenomena has a mental component. Okay. And that's the kind of given that you can explore in your practice. And now with each minute opening up into 90 days, you have a chance to do it.

[36:26]

But it's also the practice to intentionally bring things together. When you begin to be present to your breath, your breathing occurs in a field of attentional awareness. You are bringing the, I mean, breathing and the heartbeat, they're part of the autonomic nervous system. They happen autonomously. But if you bring them into awareness, you can begin to participate with them. And part of Zazen is to bring you out of consciousness and into an awareness in which the autonomic nervous system, autonomic kinesthetic processes can be felt.

[37:55]

Okay. So, When you ring the bell, in this kind of field we're trying to develop in practice period, before you hit the bell, you create a mental formation Bildest du ein geistiges Gebilde.

[38:59]

Or you create the thought. Oder du schaffst den Gedanken. Now it's time to stop Zazen. Jetzt ist es Zeit, Zazen zu beenden. And you hit the bell with that feeling. Now it's time to start Zazen. And then you form a second thought, now it's time to do Kinyin. Now, if it's just 5.20 or something, whenever it ends, and you think, oh, it's 5.20, a computer could do that. You're not an alarm clock. If we need an alarm clock to hell with the door on, just put an alarm clock there.

[40:04]

You're there for the mental formation you bring to each touch of the bell. And we know the difference. And if it's storming out and raining and pouring on the roof, you hit it, oh, in this rainy, we're going to do Kinyan under this rainy roof. Now the bell sounds different. And if you've been in some inner attentional space, in zazen, and you know your body is telling you it's time to ring the bell, So you can have a feeling of ringing the bell within

[41:14]

coming out of your inner attentional space. And you know everyone, that we thirteen are all in our inner attentional space. So, this particular morning you may be saying, Let's bring our inner attentional spaces together in Kenyan. If you're not doing that kind of interaction with how things actually exist with no outside, you're not really in the practice period. You're not doing a practice period. You're just an alarm clock doing the practice period.

[42:25]

It can be replaced by a computer. Or a alarm clock. There's a kind of responsibility here. All sentient beings, these, us three, thirteen sentient beings. You vow to save all sentient beings, you know, and mean it to some extent, or whatever that means. But now we're asking, can you simply be present to us 13? Counter yourself. Steadily intimate with our mutual field of mind. It's not easy.

[43:46]

It requires a kind of shift in worldview. A shift in a kind of autonomic worldview. Worldviews that function at a visceral level, they're just automatic. That are? Just automatic. Okay. So... When we are doing the echo we hit the bell on the word Lera and on the word Manjushri and not between Manjushri and the next word or the previous word.

[44:54]

It's a signal, it's not punctuation. And the signal, the word is the signal and it's reinforced by the bell. Okay. Now, again, I feel these are such... Seemingly minor points I wouldn't mention except probably in a practice period. With any confidence at least. Where does chanting happen? Where does chanting happen? It happens within chanting.

[46:07]

If you think it happens in a space that can be punctuated, you're living in a container world, an entity world. How do you mean punctuated? That can be like separated by a punct... I mean, there's a page, right? Yes. And the text of words is on a page. Yes. And the page, the text occurs on the page. Okay. All right? And you can punctuate, you can put a comma. Okay, yeah. Right. But in the old days, they didn't separate words because the words only occurred within the words. Okay. Also, dieses Wort Satzzeichen setzen ist so gemeint, dass wenn man ein Blatt Papier hat und da sind Worte auf dem Blatt Papier und wir gehen davon aus, dass wir diese Worte durch Satzzeichen trennen können, das ist anders. Früher wurden Worte ungetrennt einfach hintereinander, alle Buchstaben hintereinander geschrieben, weil man davon ausging, dass die Worte aus den Worten herauskommen.

[47:11]

So to indicate that kind of difference that the chanting occurs within the chanting, the bells and signals occur on top of words instead of between words. I've been trying to point this out for years, and most people, as soon as they get a chance, say, hello, bye, goodbye. You know, it's, they punch, they put the bells between the words and not on the words. So we chant in different locations, the old zendo, the new zendo. But where does chanting itself happen?

[48:13]

Only within chanting. The spaces that occur between the words in chanting are spaces created by the chanting. They didn't exist there before. So the space, the words of chanting aren't in a space which is continuous with an outside space. Which has an identity independent of the chanting. That's a belief in universals. There are no universals.

[49:16]

There's only a flow of multiplicity. There's only a flow of uncertainties. A flow of contingencies. And there's no unity bigger than or behind those contingencies. If you think so, you believe in God. Only unity within the flow of multiplicities is the unity you give to each multiplicity. And that's the practice of Dharma. We're a flow of multiplicities and a flow of arrivals if each multiplicity arrives to us as a Dharma.

[50:21]

We're a flow of multiplicities or arrivals a flow of arrivals, when each multiplicity arrives as a Dharma. So the difference between hitting the bell between the words and on the words is a difference in worldviews. And this difference, whether you hit the bell on the words or between the words, this is a difference in worldviews on a visceral level. So chanting occurs within chanting. And practice period occurs within practice period. And it does not, as Dogen says, does not exist in any usual sense of time or 90 days.

[51:23]

Clear? I don't know. It sounds subtle, but it's really not. It's just a difference in view. And appearances, by the way, are not just sensorial appearances. Appearances are also kinesthetic appearances. When I sit down and do zazen. There isn't just one sitting. There's a series of sitting, maybe at least 150. When my spine appears out of its autonomic fog, into an appearance. This is a kinesthetic appearance. So at that moment, the appearance of your spine in your sitting is a dharma.

[52:39]

And then the shift of your neck and Shoulders are appearances. Each is a dharma. And each we complete. And if we find this dance together, we'll discover practice period together. Well, here I just got started and I already said too much. Thank you very much.

[53:28]

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