Well, I wonder what it means for us to be here together. Of course, as I said the other day, if there's meaning, I don't know meaning, but we'll find out by being here together. But we create some conditions of how we're here together. And that's, you know, the question I find in myself today. Just what is it to be here together?

[01:01]

And I think most of us will be here for, I hope, ten days, and some of us a lifetime. And the residents and a few others are continuing from the first ten days. And a few people have left. And many of you are new now. And so I have to start again. And also continue. And I want to remind you again that this is an experiment. Of course, again, all our practice, half lay, half monastic practice in the West is an experiment.

[02:16]

And especially this kind of practice month, sort of not a sashin, not monastery life. What is it? And I want to keep reminding you that it's an experiment. So that you'll find yourself in the midst of this experiment. You'll realize, I hope, that you're experimenting with your own experience. Now, the first way in which we're together And it is that we follow a schedule together.

[03:25]

And most of you know I emphasize this a lot. And I try to find different ways, various ways to speak about it. And one way I have spoken about it recently is as an intimation of imperturbable mind. Intimation means a taste of or a promise of. The ability to enter the schedule. Yeah, I mean I can find so many arguments in myself on why this doesn't make sense.

[05:06]

If we talk about all schedules, no, then we have a big problem. This kind of schedule for a certain period of time while we're meditating together opens us to the potentiality, possibility of imperturbable mind. And you know, I can try to say something about that more later, but I'll say just that much now. A mind that is present in us in all our various circumstances. Undisturbed.

[06:22]

Or nearly undisturbed. And where you can feel, wherever you are, whatever you're doing, You feel fine. As I say, as long as your heart is beating and there's enough air to breathe, what's the problem? You know, of course we want life to be interesting and so forth. But still, fundamentally, our just simple aliveness is our life.

[07:23]

And I like to bring a book to the dentist's office. But sometimes I don't, and then just somehow the dentist's office isn't so bad. If you look carefully at anything, it's beautiful. If you listen fully to anything, it's beautiful. So in some fundamental way, And in a fundamental way, our life is just being alive.

[08:40]

That's the basis of everything. Now, also what I'm trying to speak about is the... the way in which the mind and the senses are interpenetrate. Now, just to go back to the schedule a minute, one reason we get up, the main reason we get up so early, is so the day happens in you.

[09:40]

Or, as I say, we get up because we get up, not because the sun gets up. And ideally we get up a little before, at least somewhat before sunrise. So as I've said, as the arc of first light goes across the planet, And wakes up the insects and the birds here in our garden right here while we're doing sasen. And passes up the hill and westward. Every few meters, again, waking insects and birds.

[11:09]

And we can hear this whole process go on for some time after, during zazen and after zazen. And some process like that can go on in us too. We are certainly healthier, at least I am so convinced. When the day happens in us, When the day happens through us and as us. When our breathing and thinking in the world are in some kind of integration, some kind of common pace. then our senses and our mind, our thinking, are the same fabric.

[12:26]

Some people try to divide the mind. It's quite different, its own kind of thing, and it's quite independent of the senses. To whatever extent that might be true or the mind might be experienced that way, Yeah, that's not Zen practice. Zen practice is to the feel of our mind, the physicality of our mind. And that's not just because we're stupid. My mind, my body. You don't have to translate that.

[13:56]

I mean, even if we try to quote a big name whose posters and tongue are around, Einstein... He clearly spoke about, wrote about, spoke about, I don't know which, how his ideas came from physical feelings in his body. Well, there may be fruits of thinking free of the senses, but again, it's not our practice. Or at least to find as our basis, our fundamental mind, its relationship to the senses. Or to find as our basis, at least, mind related to the senses. So again, in these days we have together,

[15:16]

Yeah, I'd like you to practice fully hearing, fully tasting, etc. And to maybe use some phrase in German or something like fully hearing when you notice you're hearing. And so, again, getting up so early, it also is to bring our, through being a little tired, to need to bring our, to discover our vitality to get through the day. Also, wenn wir so früh aufstehen und etwas müde noch sind, müssen wir unsere Vitalität finden, um durch den Tag hindurch zu kommen.

[16:46]

Maybe you don't need to be reminded, but let me remind you that practice is not about right or wrong, but about 100%. To try to do things or be present in things, 100%. Not right or wrong, just 100%. And if you're tired, that's all you got. And after a while, some kind of vitality comes through the demand of a schedule like this. And by getting up so early, we also have the mixture of the mind of dreaming and deep sleep in our sasen.

[17:56]

And by getting up so early, we also have the mixture of the mind of dreaming and deep sleep in our sasen. We begin to make space for a mind that's wider than consciousness. Now, I've been struck recently thinking about how our culture is based on the ear and the mouth. The culture depends on communication. The way people live together in large groups of any size depend on our ability to communicate with each other.

[19:12]

And for most of our history, that's been oral language. So we can say in the most deepest sense our culture, our life is based on the ear and the mouth. Everything else is built on that. So I think that these two senses, the voice and the hearing, are the most ancient roots of our companionability or our communicability.

[20:16]

It's the oldest root of our way we communicate, the way we're together. And the act of seeing comes with reading. changes the mind. Because when the mind runs parallel to hearing and speaking, that's a different mind that runs parallel to the thinking that evolves through reading. In various ways I've been speaking about this in the last few months.

[21:24]

Because I'm struck by the way in which Buddhism is rooted more in hearing than in seeing. It's always said you hear the teaching, you don't read the teaching. So this face-to-face situation, this sacred circle, the range of the voice, is the most fundamental human condition. the most sacred circle or the most fundamental range of human being.

[22:50]

The range of the voice is the most fundamental kind of circle of shared being. And maybe it produces a differently rooted kind of person. Rooted in a shared experience and rooted in the mind in a different way. In our reading, newspaper, visual culture. Avalokiteshvara doesn't see the cries of the world in the Heart Sutra.

[24:03]

Avalokiteshvara hears the sounds of the world. So I'm emphasizing again that in these next days together, these two monk weeks, See if we can hear our way through the week. Through the two monk weeks. Yeah, maybe breathe and hear our way through the week. At least to give these ten days a different sensorial base in our thinking.

[25:10]

Yen Do, or in Japanese, Ganto, but Yen Do said to Xue Fang. Yen Do, or in Japanese, Ganto, said to Xue Fang. In the case 51 of the Blue Cliff Records. That Xue Fang would have Yeah, Ganto or Yendo says, Xue Fang would have really understood this well if I told him the last word. So part of his koan is about, what is the last word? What is on the other side of words? Now, I think this causes a real problem, this kind of what is on the other side of words.

[26:44]

Because if you look at the development of human beings, You know, some tens or twenty or million years ago, the human brain went through a great increase in capacity. The cranial capacity. Yeah, from, I think I read, 1,000 cubic centimeters to 1,400 or 1,500 cubic centimeters. Von 1000 Kubikzentimetern auf 1400 oder 1500 Kubikzentimeter.

[27:50]

And the chin and the teeth and the larynx changed. All seemsly... Larynx, the voice box? Also, ja. All changed seemingly in relationship to the development of language skills. And allowed the creation of this kind of world that we enjoy. So that our basic physiology is rooted in the senses. And I've spoken also about how the baby's brain goes from 400 grams to 1,000 grams in just a few months of interaction with the mother.

[29:11]

Yeah, so that this ability to communicate and the active communication in our anthropological history we could say, and in our personal development with another person, is inseparable from our communicating with each other. This development, anthropological development, the actual development of a large cranial capacity, and the development of the brain in the infant, and the whole limbic system is inseparable from our communication with each other.

[30:21]

So what kind of communication do we have here? Are we all finished? I mean, we're all finished and we're just finished products who happen to be bouncing around in here. I don't think we're finished products. I think the way we're living together right now and the way you decide to live together shapes our present life and our future life. Yes, so this is an experiment in living together, and here I'm saying, emphasizing hearing together. But if over our anthropological history as well as our personal history language communication has been so important,

[31:43]

Why does Zen speak about beyond on the other side of words? Yeah, I've tried to answer that, respond to that question a number of times. I just put it out now as a problem worth letting percolate in us. Which percolates, bubbles? Percolates like coffee. A percolator is a kind of coffee machine. What do you call a percolator? the kind of coffee machine which sends water up a tube and then it goes down to the coffee? You don't have such primitive machines in Germany.

[32:52]

Well, in America we have percolators. And it comes to mean, it's used to mean when an idea bubbled through you or works through you. This has developed so that you also understand when an idea springs up in you and works through you. Now, I don't know how to get to the next point I'd like to bring up.

[33:59]

But let me just say that in this koan that I referenced just now, is it says, you know, one of the key lines in it is in a poem in the koan. Yeah, like, what is it in the deep of the night? What is it in the deep of the night? Seeing the Many mountain peaks covered with snow. Die vielen Bergspitzen mit Schnee bedeckt sehen. Yeah. With no way out.

[35:02]

Ohne Ausweg. And there's lots of this kind of statement is kind of poetic line is very common in Zen stories. Viewing in the deep of the night, viewing the mountains, many peaks covered with snow. In such a statement, there's a strong sense of location. I think it may help to imagine in those days they just didn't have transportation like we have.

[36:05]

They didn't have what I would call arrival travel. They had context travel. They didn't have speed. I think Evelyn and Rene bicycling here from Zurich and Lucerne. We could call that context travel. The arrival was going to happen sometime, but mostly they were in the context of going up and down hills and so forth. It amuses me that they're both from Switzerland.

[37:22]

I mean, after bicycling in Switzerland, Germany seems flat. These hills are nothing. And Evelyn can stop and swim in the Rhine a few times. So that's context travel. You're going somewhere, but there isn't a sense of speed. There's a sense of context. As we've discussed in the past, the idea of speed comes with railroads. So in those days the world seemed vast and endless. And And you felt bound together by the bounds of the world.

[38:43]

You felt the boundaries of the world. And you felt bound together by those very bounds or boundaries. And the world wasn't a flat, permanent thing. If the world is flat and permanent, you couldn't ever see the world as mind. Because that would feel like hearing your voice in a mirror or feeling your body as walls. Hearing your voice in a mirror. Or feeling your body as walls. Because if you see everything as mind and it's permanent, then you're in a really dead world.

[39:51]

So beginning to recognize the world in the senses and in the mind means we can only accept that if the world is changing. a many-dimensioned intersection in which we're fully located in. So in a kind of clumsy way now, trying to say that practice in a place like Johanneshof, or the concept of practice in Buddhism, is to locate ourselves with each other,

[41:13]

for a while, to feel rooted in a location, with no way out, except in. Another kind of movement, another kind of freedom. So we're just here together in this schedule. In this practice. in this sitting together and eating together, within our senses, within our mind arising from our senses, an arising

[42:33]

in the sacred circle of each other. Yeah, that's enough. Thank you.

[42:52]

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