First, I want to thank you for supporting me to have the, much as possible, the uninterrupted time I need to write. And thank you, Anne, for bringing me food and things like that. You know, the primary mind or fundamental mind of zazen is a non-conceptual mind. And so, for me to try to write this, I'm talking about this not to involve you in what I'm doing, but to involve you in practice as I'm experiencing it these days, too, because if the primary mind, fundamental mind of zazen, of practice, is a non-conceptual mind, then in order to write, I'm facing, I'm... How can I put it?

[01:21]

From within a non-conceptual mind, I'm facing the concepts which have to be formed in order to write something, because language is nothing but concepts. The word the is a concept, both in its etymology and use. So I'm facing these concepts which, the presencing of concepts, the presencings of concepts which arise from a non-conceptual modality of mind, And then one can notice what concepts point back at or flow back easily into non-conceptuality and what concepts, once they're formed, take you away from non-conceptual mind. And then how to kind of mark the ones that take you away so that they have a limited power.

[02:37]

Something like that. And I find it extremely interesting. You know, I've spent the last 50 years kind of cultivating non-conceptual mind and to feel that interface, which is also practice. And what I'm doing is the reverse of zazen in a way. In zazen you're releasing, and you can understand that release as a progression through the five skandhas. And you can feel the concepts release into non-conceptuality or dissolve, something like that. And then the mind moves back into conceptuality, out of conceptuality, because the mind is always seeking conceptions because it's the way the mind functions is through conception. So particularly the left brain, particularly the mind of consciousness functions through concept.

[03:43]

So you're actually making a kind of paradigm shift We could even say a left brain, right brain shift by moving, and I think it's useful sometimes to think that way, when you move from a non-conceptual, comprehensive field of mind, inclusive field of mind, to a conceptual and conceptually defined frame of mind. So that's a kind of, you know, wide view of our practice which you can locate yourself in i'm locating myself there in the process of presencing concepts within through writing and you're locating yourself there and attempting to locate yourself primarily during these three months Now, as you know, I'm always studying, because this is also my life and our life together, is studying what is the difference between lay practice and monastic practice.

[04:54]

You know, I believe in both. I mean, I love both. I think there's no alternative as well. But I at the same time want to investigate monastic mind and lay mind, monastic practice and lay practice, because perhaps through an investigation I can understand the differences. I want to investigate the differences because if I can understand the differences then perhaps I can find ways to teach that remedy or include the differences. Okay. So what differences did I just notice? Well, I get to Boulder, get to Chautauqua, which is such a pleasant place to be and teach. And here I am sitting with all these, you know, there are about 30-some people, a little more, experienced, mostly quite experienced practitioners, people I've been practicing with 10 years and more, and some 20 years.

[06:08]

And... Unbelievable what happens when you live on it. And I find when I'm speaking, starting Thursday, the seminar was Thursday, Friday, Sunday, this wonderful man's there I like a lot, who's David... It's his last name. Anyway, I would say he's an early software developer. He started a company and he's, I would say he's in his own somewhat peculiar way enlightened. And his way of speaking about his experiences, which are, I would call, enlightenment experiences, is rather different than my way of speaking about them. But we have a wonderful kind of

[07:10]

back and forth. He comes in with a long, he's 84, comes in with a long, strong voice. He's only got one eye, the retina, detached from the other. But he's very handsome and very, you know, kind of intellectual, professorial looking man. Anyway, he was there and then all these people I'd been practicing with a long time. And yet, I start to speak on Thursday, my immediate experience is I have to say more in order to say less. I found myself saying more than I say to you and in the end saying less. So, you know, I'm here and I try to bring the mind of being here. Now you may not feel such a difference between the mind of monastic practice and the mind of lay practice i don't know i've been doing it so long that i really feel the difference and i get there and i want to bring the mind of monastic practice into the seminar and i can't i mean not much and i find myself surprising i say in one afternoon what i could say in the whole practice period here you poor guys i think they're getting short change down there at crest town and one day i

[08:39]

give them much more than I give to the whole practice period. Yes, but what's the difference? I'm trying to wonder how to explain the difference. So I thought, maybe it's like a photograph. There, I'm speaking about the visual content, let's metaphorically, the visual content of a photograph. And I have to say a whole lot about the photograph. to make any progress in what I'm trying to speak about, the practices, the craft of practice I'm trying to speak about. And I realized, what do I do when I speak here? Well, I find here I immediately am speaking about the pixels, pixels, that make up the photograph. Pixels is short, it was created in the 60s, I believe, from picture element, and from short for pictures being... That's a lot of pics, meaning pictures.

[09:42]

And I guess it wasn't used for the little dots that make up magazine and newspaper photographs. And I guess they're not called pixels, but I think it's only a video film term. But in any case, I'm thinking more in a way of all those little dots that make up, you know, a magazine. If you look closely at the photograph, it's little dots. And with a magnifying glass, you see it's little dots. But I guess, you know, let's call them all pixels. Now, the pixels are what the picture is constructed from. So here I feel I can speak about the pixels. I don't have to talk about the content of the photograph much if you're following my metaphor. I can just speak about the pixels, which is where practice exists in constructing the picture. And I find, I guess, that here we are, in order to get through the day, this repetition of days, which is not a repetition, you have to adjust yourself every day, your moods, your state of mind.

[11:07]

You kind of have to reconstruct, I think, your day, your mind, your relationship to others. you keep having to construct the mind that is in the immediacy of the day. I found in Chautauqua and Boulder that they are mostly in what I would call, some state which I'd call everybody mind. They're defining themselves through everybody. and through what they have to do, and they're not really usually in the midst of constructing their state of mind, their moods, feelings, noticing their psychological patterns. And they're able to distract themselves.

[12:09]

So we are too, but to a lesser degree So I would say we have more something like, or I have, we have together here, monastic life, something more like the mind of each one being together. I'm trying to find words for this, you know, things we don't have usual words for. So I'm saying the mind of each one being together, which is different than everybody mind. It's much more located in the pixels. The mind of each one being together, also being together. The mind of us, but this us, Okay.

[13:15]

So there, you know, I found that I'm speaking to everybody mind, and I wanted to speak to the mind of each one at that moment being together. And they were experiencing being together. I think I could feel that, and I could locate myself in their experience of being together, but they were conceptually still together. because that's where they, what they inhabit. They were conceptually still in the mind of everybody. And they couldn't, it was hard for me to, you know, one of the things I'm trying to do in teaching is kind of reduce the strength of the everybody mind. So they, the conceptual everybody mind, and they slip more into the mind of each one being together. I don't know if this makes sense to you, but I'm trying to explain my experience.

[14:19]

Okay. And I'm trying to understand it, because if I can understand it, these differences, I think we can, I can hopefully teach in a way that brings these differences into some kind of relationship and focus. which allows lay practice and monastic practice to develop within each other and maybe even in some kind of harmony, synergetic harmony, fruitful harmony, relationship. Anyway, okay. Now, what I'd like to do now, today, in addition to what I've just said, is to share with you. Oh, and by the way, thank you very much, Nicole, for letting all of us ordain you yesterday.

[15:27]

And people have been calling me from Europe. Did it happen? I say, yeah, it happened. Catherine called this morning. Okay, what I'd like to do today is make the word feel, F-E-E-L, more of a technical term. Now for many years I've been making a distinction between feeling and emotion and suggesting that we've, you know, got to get rid of the conflation of feeling as emotion. And see feeling as a distinct territory in itself, different from emotion, the movement of emotion. And go back to the more ancient sense of feeling as being able to touch the world, touch, to know the world, touch, a touching experience,

[16:47]

a touch knowing of the world which is not particular to any sense organ. So, to feel something. Now, we can't, for example, I've been speaking before I went to Boulder, we can't think the field of mind. we can only feel the field of mind. We can't think the presence of another person, we can only feel the presence of another person. We can't think immediacy as the present, we can only feel immediacy. Now I use the word immediacy As usual, one of the things they asked me up there is, Boulder, what do you really mean by immediacy?

[17:49]

Well, I'm using immediacy as a substitute for the word present because present has a quality, present, as if it existed. Present has the quality of thingness as something caused by the past and the basis of the future. There ain't no such thing. So I speak about immediacy, but immediacy can't be thought. It can only be felt. I mean, I can intellectually think about immediacy in contrast to the word, the thingness of the word present, but that's not, I can't think it as experience. I can only feel it as experience. Now let me try to give you another kind of example that which influences our actuating practice, actualizing practice.

[18:53]

And I think you can see the tangible presence of a worldview in this example. I'm speaking to the pixels of practice here. I suggested that during the orioke meals and so forth you feel and define yourself as presence and feel the others as presence and feel the sum of the others as presence. The allness of the others as presence. These things you can't think, you can barely, I can barely conceptualize. Pretty difficult for me to, to take me a long time to just to be able to say what I just said. Straighten out some conceptions that allow me to say this.

[19:56]

No. So I can feel, hopefully, the presence of each of you topography and the presence of the allness of us now I'm using allness now as a new technical term in related to but different from all at onceness all-at-onceness I've been using for many, many years to mean the most inclusive sense of everything all at once, which affects this. So I do that, it affects what's happening in Germany.

[21:01]

You know, the butterfly effect and all that stuff. It all is interpenetrating. So that's all-at-onceness. And the Dharmakaya is a concept, the Buddha as space, is a concept, basically, of all-at-onceness. Because unless you have the idea of all-at-onceness, space, inclusive space, is not experienceable. So experienceable inclusiveness we can call all-at-onceness. Now, allness, I mean... The horizon of this immediacy. The horizon of this immediacy. Now, immediate is, I think, a wonderful word. It means, basically, not halved. Not cut in half, so non-dual. Not halved. Or it means no in-betweenness. Or it means middle. Middle. So its etymology has both the sense of middle and a middle which has no in-betweenness.

[22:12]

It's not halved. It's immediacy. Non-graspable immediacy, not halved. If it was halved, you could grasp it, but it's not halved. And you are an inseparable part of immediacy. And the immediacy of all this has a horizon. this situation. Okay. Okay, so example I want to give where you can feel maybe the cusp, the bump of a worldview. If I emphasize presence, I'm also emphasizing my experience of presence.

[23:17]

Okay? It's not graspable, and it's something like an in-here-ness. Now, there's also an out-there-ness. Ingrid is out there. Christian is out there. But my experience of Ingrid as presence is in here. Now I'm just using, it's too simple to say in here and out there, but it allows us to maybe, because the mind, again, works through conceptions, something much more subtle than in here or out there, out there, in here, is, can be maybe grasped conceptually and then opened up into what's much wider than a simple distinction between in-here-ness and out-there-ness. Okay. But let's stay with in-here-ness and out-there-ness.

[24:19]

So, if Ingrid and Christian, or all of you or one of you, primarily my actual experience is the in-here-ness of Christian's presence. I don't even know if it has a name like Christian. and the in-here-ness of the also nameless Ingrid is more real than the out-there-ness of Ingrid and Christian. Well, in a practical sense, the out-there-ness is more real, but experientially, the in-here-ness is more real. But if I believe somewhere that the out-there-ness is more real, the in-here-ness seems like, oh, I'm indulging myself with some aesthetics of presence or something like that.

[25:24]

You know, it's not really very important. It's kind of nice and it's lovely and it's loving and it's schmaltzy and, you know, etc. experientially, the in here-ness of presence is what you really know. The out there is an externalized conception of consciousness, and if we use the right brain, left brain again, of the left brain. So you actually have to establish a firm pivot on which you can shift these two worldviews, which are also a shift of the two truths. So I'm trying to make the word feel, give it a fixed enough feeling, a fixed enough experienced definition as field and presence, let's say,

[26:35]

that you can use that as a benchmark or measure of your own mode of mind as presence or as out-there-ness. So the adept practitioner is always resting in presence. and shifts to out there-ness only for practical reasons. The adept practitioner knows that the most real way the world is, is in the presence you feel of the world and each person and each thing. And the out there-ness is just practical. Now, out-there-ness is what the scientists measure, the physicists, etc., and all that, but the experience, the actual experience, not the conceptualized out-there-ness, the experience is where you 100% of the time exist, not maybe fully, maybe only partially exist, but 100% of the time you at least partially exist in the feel

[28:01]

of the world, not its out-there-ness. Is this too much? Are we going a little too fast? Is everything okay? I see you're not yet. If you go this way, I say, off with his head. No, I'm just... The headless. There's that wonderful book about the man who lost his head. by an English-British colonialist? What? All of ourselves. No, not all of ourselves. Way before, in the late 1800s or early... He was a British colonial who wrote a book about the man who lost his head because he had some kind of enlightened experience of not having a head. I Have No Head. I Have No Head is what it's called? By D.H. Arden. Yeah, that's right. That's the book. Go ahead. Thanks. Maya Anja, she always comes to the rescue. So let me say a little more about this sense.

[29:16]

There are physiological differences which seem to be part of this shift from left brain to right brain. The physiological differences are, seem to be, when mind, breath and body, attention, breath and body, the dynamic of attention, breath and body, are more in a singular pace with phenomena. So the more you establish that, in your walking, talking, etc., the more you'll find yourself, the more the, again, I've decided to use this left brain, right brain, the more the right brain kicks in or shifts in. And the more you pull breath in

[30:38]

and the conscious mind have a feel. And that feel is maybe like looking at a group photograph. If you look at several group photographs, they all kind of look the same. There's a bunch of people usually in a pile. But if you look closely, each group photograph is different. Somebody's shifted, somebody's turned their head, etc. But if you just look at the group photograph as a group and feel it as a group instead of think, oh, there I am over there and that's not too good of me and there's so and so and he always looks nice and so forth. So if I can sort of right now feel all of you, each of you being together as a group photograph, I can really only feel it or grok it. I can't really think it. Now, I want you to get a feeling for that feel of a field of mind, which a physiological feel of the field of mind as a pivot on which you can shift from what is basically...

[32:03]

the mind of zazen and practice, the mind of awareness, of inclusiveness, to the mind of distinctions, concepts, and so forth. And that you begin to know the pulse of this shift between these two modalities And within the feel of the field of mind, you can also change the focus, pull the field in so you could act, or release the field to act on its own. And the basic mind of practice is continually releasing the field into its own activity. Dogen in this, you know, Fast School and Continuous Practice says something like, the cause of continuous practice is not the result of continuous practice.

[33:27]

Or the cause of continuous practice is not predictive of what continuous practice will do or become. So the cause is not the end point. If you can't know the end by the cause, he says, something like that. Basically he's saying the world is always diverging. the expanding universe, you know. It's not all coming together into oneness. It's expanding into divergence, divergences, incompleteness, as I said last time. But at each moment, there can, within this mind, which feels the world. I'd like you as much as possible just to feel the world for three months.

[34:29]

Don't think the world. Feel, get in the habit of feeling things. Feeling in a way that you can't think them. It's not just feeling as a kind of word, another word for emotion, because we use the word in English, feel, all the time for all kinds of things. And now I'm saying, sort out its conflated uses. and make it a technical term and a particular experience on which you can pivot a worldview, your world. Okay. Now, to take this one step further, into the pixels of our experience, which was hard for me to do in Chautauqua.

[35:32]

Every time I wanted to move in that direction, there were no pixels around. I mean, there were just no pixels. All there was was the contents of the photograph or the contents of the people together. and there was the sum of the people together, but there wasn't the allness of the people together. So, you know, to discover the allness of being with, the allness of the mind of each one together, We really, I mean, the main way that's studied is the relationship with the teacher. The teacher is supposed to be able to do that. But it's also with the sangha. It's very hard to do that with a diverse group of people who aren't together all the time.

[36:40]

I mean, once you know the experience, once you really know it, in a Christmas shopping crowd you can feel it. But until you establish the experience in yourself, it's very hard to bring it into a diverse group. Okay, so right now, Again, I often say you learn to make that yogic shift from the particular to the field. It's something I've been trying to develop as a practice and a teaching for some years now. To know the shift from the particular to the field. The particular which you can notice within sensorial particularity. And the field that you can't think. You can only kind of feel it. Now, let's call, let's call the, I don't know what word to use, because if the field is an allness, if I can feel the field of us right now as an allness,

[38:06]

then the allness itself has to be added to the allness. The all becomes an ingredient within this group. Because there's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14. 14 persons in myself. And so there's 14 of us, plus the floor and lamps and all, which make something we can call a sum. But that sum then becomes an experience of allness, which has to be added to the sum. And that allness becomes a kind of jewel. which allows me to experience the pixels of all of us together, to some extent at least. And it also becomes that point which joins everything, joins all at onceness, opens into all at onceness, opens into the vow to save all sentient beings, or better, the vow to awaken

[39:26]

each and every sentient being. It's in that experience of the all as allness, or the allness as the all, in which the vow to awaken all sentient beings can be actualized. That was a good time to leave. All of you can leave now. Now the vow to save all sentient beings is being actualized. Now, what I'm saying about may sound kind of esoteric or slippery or hard to grasp, but it's actually our experience.

[40:29]

And it's just seldom conceptualized or seldom pointed out, at least in English, so that we can enter into the pixels of practice. Now in the koan I spoke about, I think I spoke about the other day, number three in the Hekiyan Roku, the Blue Cliff Records, Suzuki Roshi calls this experience of the actualized allness great activity. So when you see the technical term great functions, which is sometimes translated, or great activity, it means that mind which knows what covers heaven and earth, knows that mind, non-conceptual mind, through which one can function, which is always relating to allness and all-at-onceness.

[41:47]

So we have a term in Buddhism translated as great activity and great function, which I'm trying to give another, because what does it sound like? Who knows what great activity means? I'm now trying to define it experientially within, because we can't, great activity is just two words. But I think we can have a feeling for the field of allness or the field from which allness arises. Okay? Thank you very much.

[42:35]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_89.31