I was hoping that we could start the morning with a sangha session. It would mean being more and more of a circle, if you're willing. Are you willing? Yes. I don't want to will you to do it. I can wish. Well, I guess you're not right. Please say something. I don't know. Yes. Yes. Thank you.

[01:12]

It's mine. Part of my feeling about doing this is maybe we will actually be in a more intimate relationship with each other, which is one of the main points of doing 90-day practice periods.

[02:30]

But we'll see what we can do in five days. And I also would like it to be part of an experiment to see if we want to continue next year in some similar way. Okay, I tried yesterday to give you a feeling for the ephemeral field of the two truths. We've always present mind. But now I just want to hear the always present mind.

[03:39]

Which with my ears brought here from Germany. I don't know. I'm not sure I want. I'd like to say something about this sense of a field of mutual being.

[04:49]

But first I'd like to Since it seems okay to be somewhat personal these days. I grew up in a way almost the opposite of Horst. And I had a problem in the opposite direction. my parents were very socialist ecologically minded persons and it was clear it was wrong to be better than anyone else

[05:56]

It was inevitable that you were different, but different didn't mean better. Man konnte nicht verhindern, anders zu sein, aber dieses Anderssein bedeutete nicht, besser zu sein. I constantly heard from my mother, particularly, how wonderful it was to be middle class. Vor allem von meiner Mutter immer wieder gehört, wie großartig es ist, wie sagen wir auf Deutsch, Mittelklasse zu sein. And I was... given the feeling all the time that if you do something in a way that makes somebody else feel you're better, they feel badly and you shouldn't cause people to feel better. And I've always had the feeling that if you do something where you give others the feeling that you're better, then the other person feels bad and you shouldn't do something that makes the other person feel bad.

[07:14]

But then you know kids play games. And I unfortunately, excuse me for saying so, almost always won. Kings like Monopoly, chess, checkers, I always won. Checkers? I don't know, it's when you jump. And, uh, So I stopped playing games. And I used to play Monopoly with a friend, but I always kept trying to let him win, and finally he just got mad at me. I would rather lose. So... My sense is so strong.

[08:24]

She knows this. My daughters, my three daughters, ask me to play games with them. I cannot play a game. They want me to play cards. There's such a revulsion in me not to play a game. I won't do it. And it's odd, you know, we'll be in an airplane for eight hours or something. Can't we play a game for these eight? I can't. I actually can't do it. I think it's kind of weird, but it really got into me. And this has been a theme. I mean, I walked out of college just before graduation because I didn't want a college degree. And when I was 17, I decided I didn't want to go to college.

[09:38]

I remember my father was a college professor and I told him that I didn't think I was smart enough to go to college. Als ich 17 war, habe ich beschlossen, dass ich eigentlich nicht aufs College gehen wollte. Mein Vater war aber Professor im College und ich habe ihm gesagt damals, dass ich dachte, ich wäre nicht klug genug fürs College. Mein Vater hat gesagt, na ja, du bist wahrscheinlich schon so klug wie die meisten Kids, die ich da im College kenne. Du kannst das wahrscheinlich schaffen. But I only want to do one thing, get a car and drive off into America and see what happens. Yeah, I always had jobs from childhood. I was seven or eight years old and I always had jobs and I worked 40 hours a week while I went to high school.

[11:00]

So I had enough money to buy an old second hand car. And I picked one out but they said you can't buy it because you're not 18. So I went and got my father and he came down and I thought, gee, I should be able to do it. But he wouldn't sign for it. Because he had to sign for it. He was older than 18. So I went to college instead. But my ambition was, I mean, I really thought, I don't want a career, etc.,

[12:22]

But I did have confidence. I feel I could survive anywhere. Put me down somewhere, I'll survive. So I had no fear about getting a car and driving off somewhere. But after going to college, I thought, maybe I should just collect soda. In those days, you could collect glass bottles, soda bottles, and turn them in for five cents. I tried to do that, didn't have enough money. But I had a kind of funny crisis, which I'll tell you about. I fell in love with my first wife, Virginia, and we were going to have a baby. I'd already started practicing.

[13:44]

And I asked Suzuki Rishi if he felt it was okay to be married and practice. And he said the problems of being married and the problems of not being married are about the same. He said the problems of being married Yeah, so I got married and I had a baby coming and so I had to have a job. And so I got a job as a secretary. It's almost over, Mr. I got a job as a secretary at the University of California, adult education.

[15:08]

Yeah, but I'm a secretary. I was hired as a senior clerk typist, but I couldn't type. LAUGHTER So the woman I worked for would say, would you type these letters for me? The woman you worked for? She would ask me to type some letters for her. But I've never learned anything. I don't have any skills. I couldn't even spell or type. So I'd say to this woman, Estelle Kane, they'll be on your desk in the morning.

[16:18]

And then when everyone left the office, I would stay and type. You had to make carbon copies and everything, and I would always be making mistakes. I'd call up my wife, Virginia, and I'd say, how do you spell such and such? Where do you put a comma? This is true. Anyway, she would usually have her letters on the desk the next morning, pretty well typed. But this job ended and they moved me to another department in the adult education part.

[17:23]

And again, I was a secretary. But, I'm so embarrassing to say this, but within about two months, they wanted to make me assistant head of the department. there were about 35 people in the department and I had to deal again with I was winning when I didn't want to win and I sort of got this the guy told me he wanted me to have this job because I was the one person who knew everything going on in the office

[18:30]

I handle a lot of information. So anybody wanted to know where something was or when something was done, I just knew it. So they made me assistant head. And now the crisis. I suddenly had an office and two secretaries. And I had to ask the secretaries one of them to do something for me. And I sat in my office and I had an extreme panic attack. I had no experience of asking anyone to do anything for me.

[19:51]

So I sat in this room and literally, this is really true, I wanted to use a pencil and blind myself. I sat there with a pencil. I can't do this. Is that extreme? A little extreme. But I sat there with it, holding the pencil. Because what if I say to her, please type this letter, and she says no. Do I pull out a gun? I didn't have a gun. I didn't have a gun. I was sitting in this office and it's a bit extreme now, but I didn't know how to deal with this woman asking me to take a letter. I was sitting there and had a pencil in my hand and I thought about it.

[20:52]

I really wanted to hurt myself. I wanted to blind myself. I was sitting there with this pencil and I didn't know how to do it. What if I ask her to do it and she says, but no, what do I do then? Then I pull a gun or how do you do that? So I sat there, maybe I think about, if I remember correctly, because it was a vivid experience, about 20 minutes, with kind of white light and sweat coming out of me. Mm-hmm. So finally I said, pull yourself together. You've got to go out there and ask the secretary. It was sort of my office and a kind of adjoining space and then where she sat. I walked those few meters like I was going to my scaffold.

[21:57]

I mean, really, it was real serious. Mm-hmm. I went out and I said to this woman, probably older than me, I was 24 or something. Could you type this for me, please? And she said, certainly, Mr. Baker. And I ran back in my office. And sat there thinking, how did that happen? I mean, this is real, absolute truth I'm telling you. So I've had to get used to being in a hierarchy situation.

[22:58]

Yeah, but still my motivation much has been to create communities and situations outside of our society because I didn't want to participate in our society. What are you creating? Society outside of the formal society. Because when I was young, my parents, the Second World War was going on. And every morning and evening, they listened to the news. I know all the names of Edward R. Murrow, H. E. Carpenter, etc., the people who told us the news every day over radio.

[24:14]

And the news was about what's going on in Europe. And whether the Americans were winning or the Germans were winning. And I couldn't get involved with the winning. I could only get involved with these people were killing each other. Und ich konnte mich gar nicht damit verbinden, wer da gewann, sondern ich habe immer nur gespürt, dass die Menschen sich dort ermorden. Sometime when I'm eight years old or something, I made a vow I will not participate in any society which conducts wars. Und als ich acht Jahre alt war, habe ich diese Entscheidung getroffen, dass ich an keiner Gesellschaft teilhaben werde, die Kriege führt. So that's one reason I didn't want a career and one reason I... made sure the American did not draft me.

[25:19]

Yeah, so here I am because Zen gave me something to do. Now I spoke yesterday about encompassments or entireties. And I said a moment ago, a field of mind. One causal dimension of seeing things as entireties And I'm using the word entirety in contrast to entity.

[26:43]

An entity you can appropriate. You can own an entity. This And if I can own something, then that turns me into an appropriator. Okay. And these are terms that Dan Lusthaus uses, appropriation and an appropriator. And I think it's quite effective use of English. Okay, if I see a tree or you or an event as an entirety or an encompassment, Is the sense that it is surrounding or it is surrounded?

[28:02]

Or neither nor? The feeling is it has... Temporary boundaries but not closure. Does that make sense? Das Gefühl ist, es hat flüchtige Grenzen, aber es ist nicht eingeschlossen. It has experiential sensorial boundaries. Es hat erfahrbare Grenzen. Okay. So I'm trying to find words, obviously, that describe experiences that are part of the center of Zen practice, but we just don't have words for in English.

[29:07]

Okay. So this... experienceable activity. It doesn't go on forever. It has boundaries at the moment you're looking at it or feeling it or hearing it. And it's clear that you can expand it and contract it. The boundaries expand and contract. And you can make the attentional experience more dense and more intense and with more depth.

[30:12]

So it's clearly a participatory appearance. Yes, but it's not appropriate. You can't appropriate. Now this bell, you know, I can take it home if I want. Or uses a teacup, which I've done, but tastes terrible. But the bell, it's stand, it's the guy who made it and signed his name in there, etc. And the sound. I can't appropriate it.

[31:25]

And the sound includes how you experience it. So, although I do it, every time I do it, I have, you know, many different ways to do it. And the whole idea is, you don't hold it with your arm, you hold it so it does it by itself. Anyway, the activity of it can't be appropriate. Okay. Okay. Again, now what I'm saying is, if you find yourself located in the activity of the world and not an entity of the world,

[32:40]

It lessens the feeling that there's an appropriator, an agency, someone doing it. Now, yes, sometimes we feel close to each other. And sometimes, of course, we don't. But that's not just an accident of occasion. It's more... when there's no appropriator. There's no ownership.

[33:42]

You're in situations that can't be owned. And you give up the experience of being in situations where there's any ownership. or even or at least much less of any sense of ownership now the twelve bases as I talked about yesterday Or the six, let's keep it simple, six ayatanas. And my experience of an ayatana is it's something like a timeless hourglass. This is a timeless hour.

[34:59]

This is a timeless hour. Because my experience of it, if I present this, is this sensorium organ, sense organs, these sense organs, are in a cooperative relationship with the bell, its look, its sound, etc., But it makes a kind of hourglass, like that. That's my, I tend to visualize everything, and that tends to be my visualization of it. That's a kind of visualization of non-duality.

[36:04]

The sound, the bell, the look are all something that don't belong to me. I can't grasp it. It happens momentarily. Der Klang, das Aussehen und so weiter, das sind alles Dinge, die ich nicht besitzen kann, sondern die im Moment geschehen. And similarly, if I'm using a tree again, if I look at a tree and I feel its stillness, activity, its habitat and so forth. Und auf dieselbe Art und Weise, wenn ich einen Baum betrachte und... It's a habitat for insects, birds. A habitat for us too. None of that can be grasped. You can't own it. You can only participate in it. nichts davon kann ergriffen werden.

[37:17]

Du kannst nur daran teilhaben, aber man kann es nicht besitzen. This is part of the emphasis in Buddhism on non-duality. Okay. Now I gave you the word the other day, hishiryo. Which means strictly... Linguistically, it means non-thinking. Fushiryo means not-thinking. It's not-thinking. You don't have not-non. We only have one not. We don't have non-thinking. That's a not. Can you untie it?

[38:17]

Shiryu means measure. Shiryu means measure. Shiryu is measured thinking or comparative thinking. So Fu Shiryu is not measured thinking. And He Shiryu is non-measured thinking. In other words, there's thinking, but there's, let's say noticing, but not thinking, a kind of noticing, but it doesn't measure, doesn't compare.

[39:24]

Now this raises many interesting questions, which I'm bewildered by all the time. I enjoy my continuous bewilderment. In English, bewilderment literally means to be in the wild. Okay. Okay. So key concept and practice from the earliest Buddhism until now is to notice without thinking, without measuring. And again, I will repeat, Dogen says, it's the single most important word in Buddhism.

[40:26]

So from that point of view, it's incumbent upon us, we're obligated to, or we're expected to, to practice, to realize, to actualize this word. And You just have to keep uniting it. I remember I used to do it all the time with the flowers on the breakfast table. I tried to have a direct experience without any thinking. And I'd notice when thinking came in, so I'd stop eating.

[41:39]

And then when thinking went away, I'd eat. And I'd let attention go around the leaves and the petals and so forth until I really felt like the flower was blooming in me. And one thing he'd find out during that is cut flowers in a vase often move slightly. Slightly different position by the end of breakfast. So you practice noticing without thinking. Now, this becomes part of creating a field of mind. Das wird ein Teil davon, ein Feld des Geistes zu schaffen.

[42:57]

So again, as I've often said in this room. Wake up little Susie. She goes from Somali right away. As I've often said in this room, and to pause for the particular, or to shift from the particular that you don't think about to the field. Now, this is a kind of basic yogic skill. Is you allow particulars to become part of your sense field? And then you use that particular as a pivot to create a field of mind where you feel everything all at once.

[44:11]

Okay. In that field... of all at onceness. It's almost like a lotus leaf or something like that. With stems coming down to various particulars. And the mind, the attentional Awareness shifts sometimes from the particular field to the particular, etc. And I've tried to speak about the craft of this at various times in various ways.

[45:13]

But the process seems to be guided by some larger integrative dynamic energy. So if I can maintain, and you maintain these things by a bodily feeling, So if I have a bodily sense of this field of mind, there's an attentional, a seemingly attentionally directed process, Which shrinks as soon as there are any conflicted thinking or comparison.

[46:33]

So any conflict or comparison or appropriation, this lotus field shrinks. Jede Konfliktgeladenheit, jeder Vergleich... Jede Unterscheidung, da schrumpelt das zusammen. Okay, so there seems to be... Now, this lotus field of mind, I've never called it that before, thank you very much, seems to thrive through the nourishment of non-duality. Yeah, and so there's some kind of integrative process that goes on of what particulars come to the fore occasionally and then disappear into the field.

[48:01]

Chinese Zen Buddhist monastic life is designed to increase the likelihood and opportunities for this experience. And one of the reasons I'm trying now to design a traditional It's sensitive to this Lotus field of mind. as a concert hall is to the music.

[49:08]

And even though everyone studies acoustics, there are a few really great acoustical spaces in the world. And it has to do with simple things like how close one instrumentalist sits to the next musician, etc. So, we can do meditation in any room. But in a room designed for meditation, there's a spacing of each person and so forth. I can imagine people think this is kind of kooky.

[50:14]

But a concert hall, good symphony hall, is not kooky. It makes a difference. Okay, so the sense is if you can increase the, as you all have noticed, the configuration that we create in this room makes a difference. And what also makes a difference is if some of us or many of us are intentionally or unintentionally allowing this lotus field of mind to gather. Und was auch ein Unterschied macht, ist, ob einige von uns, viele oder viele von uns, absichtsvoll oder unbeabsichtigt zulassen, dass dieses Lotusfeld des Geistes sich salbt.

[51:31]

Und wenn es das tut, the sense of each of us as separate individuals gets remarkably less. And there's almost a flow of energy and awareness and intimacy into the overlap of our mutual field of mind. And this arises in a culture which thinks nothing is given, there's no outside, everything has to be created. entsteht in einer Kultur, in der nichts vorhergegeben ist, nichts vorherbestimmt ist, nothing is given, what else?

[52:39]

Everything is created. Alles ist geschaffen und es gibt kein Aus. So if you do meditation with people over centuries in a lineage of passing the condition, und wenn du über Jahrhunderte hinweg mit Menschen meditierst und die Lehrlinie weiterreichst, you notice what habits, what spaces, et cetera, work the best. So one last little anecdote. Yunyan and Daowu, who are biological brothers and brother monks in Chinese monastery, And Yunian was the kind of dumber one. He seemed to be the dumber one. He's part of my lineage. His older brother in the stories is presented as a little quicker and a little smarter. But Jungian is presented as maybe slower, but maybe deeper.

[53:57]

So Jungian is sweeping. And Daowu comes by and says, you're too busy. And Yunyang holds his broom and says, you should know there is one who is not busy. And this refers directly to the uninterrupted simultaneous mind. So from this little story, you try to notice yourself. Do you have a feeling that even when you're busy, there's one who is not busy? And the more you develop that feeling, simultaneous feeling, yes, there's one who's not busy.

[55:17]

There's no place to go and nothing to do. Yeah. then there's more of this mutual body feeling going on. So Da Wu says to Yun Yan, ah, then there's a double moon. As some of you may know that Murakami has made good use of the concept of a double moon in his fairly recent novel called 1Q84. Now, what this little challenge from Da Wu It's okay.

[56:35]

So there's the moon. The moon has many phases, right? And even the full moon is only half of the moon. The other side is dark. So... So to say, ah, then there's a double moon, is to say that the reflection of the moon or the conventional truth is really separate from the fundamental truth. Lusthaus has a good image for this. If you put a pencil in a glass of water, or in a lake or something, it looks like it bends.

[57:38]

But to the local dolphin in the glass of water, it doesn't look like it's bent at all. Or it looks like it's bent in the air. Okay, so the difference is simply the rate of diffraction. It's the same pencil. The rate of diffraction is different. So the difference between the two truths, we could say the rate of predictability is different. In the conventional truth, the rate of predictability is quite slow.

[58:53]

You can buy insurance, things like that. But in the realm of the fundamental, very wet truth, where everything is connected the rate of predictability is zero everything is instantaneously changing but it's still the same moon or same pencil okay so Here the teaching is, traditional teaching is, change your diffraction rating. Change your appropriational rate. And in one, we tend to feel mutuality, which includes our environment, our circumstances, and the no longer otherness of our friends.

[60:18]

The no longer otherness of our friends. Yeah, so that's saying a little bit. And I think Christina, for example, was in our first practice period she's hinted occasionally she'd like to come back to another but in the practice period I think you and others noticed there was more of a feeling of mutuality or something going on can you say something about that

[61:26]

Can you say something about that? Yes, you have the opportunity to come together on one place and you know you can stay there for three months and practice together. And you put together a very ordinary task. and you have your jobs and it's not just for the sake of it, it's not just for the sake of it, it's really a shared life with others. So we have, for example, a time for movement, for example, because it is something that can be enjoyed in many ways. And that creates the possibility that in this inconsistency of the common work, that somehow it gets the permission to actually be quite there in the picture, rather than any other work.

[62:34]

Theoretical offices can have their own identity, but not in the context of the work. It's just a person. It's just a person. It's just a person. It's a personal question. Yes, that is the best expression for me, because you don't need anything, but you always need something.

[63:35]

And to be able to share that with others was very special for me. But that also means something that is completely understandable. That is, after these three months, we sat down and thought about it. What did we experience? That is understandable. And you can't put it into words. But we have to find out. Thank you. I would like to add to that. Yes, please. I can't say why.

[64:59]

I can't say why. And I was just there. But that was really helpful. Well, The point I guess here is that this sense of, and what's going to happen I think through Western Buddhism, is I think we can continue to develop our sense of individuality, and simultaneously develop new ways to discover in ordinary circumstances this mutuality. You know, I'm told that in, I read anyway, rather not told, that in Greek times they had one amphitheater, fine, I better check the number, which could hold 16,000 people.

[66:26]

There was a real conscious sense that in this Greek culture which tried to create some kind of individuality, These theater events where many people attended, was one of the glues of the society. And what do we have today? Soccer. I mean, football. But it is sort of true. Everyone all over the world wants to know what's going on.

[67:30]

She is special. If she's sleepy in Zazen, I know there was a soccer game before in the morning. Okay. So this sense of Mutuality can be enhanced and developed out of the experience of meditation into how we live with others. Okay, can we maybe sit for a minute and then go to lunch?

[68:25]

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