Thank you very much for joining me and each other during this seminar and both seminars. Next Wednesday I guess I fly back to the United States. So this is the last lecture of this seminar. So I have to imagine what to leave you with. To leave you with something that brings together what we've been talking about.

[01:04]

Or perhaps, if possible, something that brings you together with the practice in the future. Yeah, I don't know. You know, I can't, the time between Zazen and now is too short for me really to discover what to say. But I mean, I do something every day, as you've noticed. But actually, I'm sort of like only two-thirds of the way along in what I'd like to bring to you. Yeah, I need about two and a half, four hours.

[02:13]

Because first I feel some kind of like electromagnetic fields or something like that. And it's sort of like we just chanted in Japanese. And maybe something of the meaning in the Japanese is present to us, even though we're doing it mostly out of respect for where the practice came from. But in any case, there's some meaning in the Sino-Japanese that we translate, but does it come across in the Sino-Japanese? Yeah, so I have some.

[03:28]

I mean, I'm talking about this just because part of what I'm doing is what I'm doing with you. So I feel these various fields and they have different charges and they begin to come together. And I can't do it the day before. I can do it when I have an internal momentum toward this talk. And I can't do it on the day before, for example. I can only do it when I have something like an inner momentum towards this lecture. And then I have to translate them into words.

[04:35]

And then I have to see if the words hang together with the other words. And then I have to translate into words that I can speak with you that speak in your language too. Your practice language. I guess I'm saying this because in some ways that's how you can practice with these teachings too. Let them be kind of fields of possibilities and let them come into an absorbent process. Now yesterday we talked about directional consciousness, And comparative consciousness.

[05:56]

Just as, you know, something you can kind of feel and notice. And probably we shouldn't even use the word consciousness. But that distinction is obvious in Sekirashi's most basic, over and over again I've said, zazen instruction don't invite your thoughts to tea okay to not invite your thoughts to tea is a mental formation that again we can call directional or intentional consciousness Yeah, so that's obvious. And we quite without any effort feel the difference between inviting our thoughts, not inviting our thoughts to tea, and inviting our thoughts to tea.

[07:22]

Now, part of the dharmic knowing of oneself is to know, to notice such a distinction. And then to stabilize that distinction. Until you get quite used to that you can feel the energetic difference between the two. Okay. Yeah, a kind of cusp or bump. And you can begin to use as a tool, as a resource, the different minds.

[08:32]

And we can use this intentional, directional mind to put a koan into our absorbent mind. Yeah, or a turning word or something. And you know enough now because you've made the distinction that you don't think about what you're putting in there. Und ihr wisst jetzt genug, weil ihr diese Unterscheidung gemacht habt, dass ihr nicht darüber nachdenken müsst, was ihr dort hineinstellt. You put some ginger into the soup. So wie ihr zum Beispiel Ingwer in die Suppe tut. But you don't want to climb in the soup and start thinking about it.

[09:46]

Aber ihr wollt nicht in die Suppe hineinklettern und dann anfangen darüber nachzudenken. You just put ingredients into the soup. But that means you have to trust the soup as also a process. And if you keep pulling the ginger back out of the soup, well, what the hell did I put the ginger in for? And I don't know, and it's too much, I don't know. It doesn't work. Is this meaningful? Did I put it in the soup the right way? This is all a form of vanity. Indulging yourself and giving yourself something to think about.

[10:47]

We don't have faith exactly or anything to have faith in but a kind of faith or trust in the absorbent soup called Zen. I mean, again, I'm using the word Zen in its basic meaning, which is absorbent. Und ich benutze dieses Wort Zen in seiner grundlegenden Bedeutung, nämlich der Bedeutung absorbieren. And Zazen is a sitting absorption.

[11:48]

Und Zazen bedeutet sitzendes absorbieren. And Zafu is a sitting fu, a sitting cushion. Und Zafu ist ein Sitzfu, also ein Sitzkissen. Yeah. Fusen, no. Um... So the... You're not... Sometimes when I first started practicing, nobody knew what the word meditation meant in our sense, and it was a kind of contemplation. And it's not until maybe... 15 years ago or so, that I began to use the word meditation. I just wouldn't use it, because it meant to contemplate on, to think about, etc.

[12:49]

But we're sneaking into the culture and we've taken over the word meditation. Now it belongs to us. As mindfulness belongs to us and right livelihood now belongs to us. Okay. Everything is an activity and not an entity. If it's an activity, it's a process. And as a process, it's a kind of alchemy. So interdependence, as a translation, just sounds like they sit beside each other, kind of leaning on each other.

[14:10]

So a much better translation would be interemergence, or as I say, intermergence. Because when you put things together, and they're both activities, they start doing things together. Okay, so yesterday I spoke about in the afternoon And none of it was taped, so it was blowing in the wind. So now we'll catch a little bit of it and bring it back. Yeah. So I said, looking at... your flower arrangement, that for me, through the practice of simultaneous mind, mind simultaneous with the object of perception,

[15:31]

or to even take the arrow a little bit away as an object of attention, is a process of as I said, starting out with it as a concept and then it slowly becomes more and more equally present and then it's so strongly present then it's called in the teaching the practice of sameness or suchness or something Because on every percept, what comes across is mind is the same, mind is the same, mind is the same.

[17:00]

And the percept is different, but what you experience in the most satisfying way is mind reappearing. And it becomes so experientially real and true, that you can shift the location of the world and your own identity from the object of perception and its associations to the arising of the mind. So again, here we have, we've made a distinction.

[18:03]

First it was invisible to us. That on every percept mind arises. And that's also the teaching of the Vijnanas. Every percept is accompanied by mind. Okay. So now we've taken something that you were doing but was invisible. We've made the distinction. And then the distinction begins to have its own life. And the energetic dimensionality on either side of the distinction begins to shift. And you cannot think your way to this.

[19:18]

You can only practice your way to it. It is inaccessible to you if you don't practice it. Except as an idea. Or if you're a genius like Rilke. Genius helps. But genius also usually is a kind of enlightenment but abbreviated. I mean, I'm not putting down Rilke or anything. But their genius carries them forward without them developing so much. There are other aspects.

[20:31]

I mentioned to someone the other day that Sukhiyoshi used to give us a Chinese Zen quotation which the person with something wrong with them wins the race. Yeah, and what that means is that when you have something wrong with you and you take care of it, you take care of everything and you end up stronger than you would have if you hadn't had the problem. So we each need a little genius or a big problem or both. Most of us have both.

[21:43]

Okay. Okay. Now... I don't know why I embarrassedly point out my lack of... Fluency in German. Fluency. Ich weiß nicht, warum ich immer wieder auf peinliche Art und Weise das Fehlen meiner flüssigen Sprache im Deutschen herausstelle. because I freshly recognize it all the time especially when I'm here but I've been reading Rilke since I was 18 or 19 or something quite regularly for many years and I've read many different translations and with many different translations I can turn the poem into whatever I want

[22:53]

So I don't really know what the poem says but I gave her the German. But there's only some parts of it that I want to comment on now or mention now. And she can tell me if it actually says anything like I'm going to tell you. I think it starts out with something like outer space, outside space violates things. It's here. It is? No. Doesn't say it.

[23:59]

Well, every of the four or five translations I have, they all say something like that. Can you say again what you said? Outside space? The space outside you violates things. How would you say it? Well, this part, the beginning, I said the first sentence. I have to do it literally, but this says... the space that birds fly in, or this actually is more throw themselves through, is not the intimate space that heightens your gestalt. That's what I said. And then he says something like, if you want to know the essence of a tree, throw, like the bird, but throw or wrap your inner space around it.

[25:01]

I say it in German? Yeah. Does that say sort of what I said? Yes. Oh, goody. Okay, so you can keep that for a little treasure. Oh, great, thank you. Find it in its other sources. Okay. So Rilke, writing this, clearly knew what I was talking about yesterday, where the flowers were in my inner space. Okay, so if you establish, now what I'm talking about is setting up and also stabilizing the distinction between outer space and inner space. Okay, that's like stabilizing the distinction between noticing, setting up, noticing, and stabilizing the distinction between intentional consciousness and discursive consciousness.

[26:49]

That's a basic practice of Dharma mechanics. Okay. So. So if you notice that distinction and begin to experience the difference and stabilize the difference you are an alchemist. You're changing lead into gold. Or you're changing the usual body into a body body.

[28:08]

Okay. Now I said the other day, you want to... I don't know, are we going to... How long do you want to go? Your knees have to vote. Okay, well, I can just stop right in the middle and we can start next year. This is a fair choice I'm giving you. Yes, stop, but we don't want to be mean to him, but tell him to stop. Okay. I said you want to notice appearance.

[29:09]

And I said you could notice appearance through the five skandhas. And when you notice appearance through the five skandhas, you're actually creating a change in scale. like from molecules to atoms to fields of subatomic particles is a change in scale so to go from consciousness discursive consciousness to intentional consciousness, is a change in scale and to go then to associative consciousness and to percept only mind these are changes in scale and what's brilliant about the five skandhas is their categories in which you can rest in each one separately from the other

[30:33]

The first job is to set up the distinction and stabilize the distinction. That's Zen mechanics. And once you set up the distinction, the relationship isn't, you know, form, feelings, perceptions, inputs. The relationship is consciousness, associative mind. percept only. And then form. And Dogen says, again, enter fully into immediacy. And consider this the entire universe.

[31:52]

I like to consider because, excuse me, the etymology of consider is astrology, to do it by the stars, considerial. So it's appropriate to consider the whole universe with the stars. Okay. And you allow that change of scale to be like an electromagnetic field or something. It has its own dynamic. As you might have guessed, I'm now talking about the world. Okay. I mentioned to someone recently that when the lecture goes on so long, your knees are in your ears.

[33:11]

You can put your legs up. You have my permission. And to heck with what your neighbors think. Because I can feel your heart better than I can feel your painful knees. Okay. I'm talking like I'm going to be talking until 12.30, but I'm not going to. I'm going to stop recently. Okay. So every appearance joins mind and body and mind phenomena and the world.

[34:21]

They're like little electric plugs you keep putting in. When you physically enact appearance. And I said, one of the simple tricks is to fully intend to complete everything. Or to discover nourishment on each person, each appearance. And to complete each is like putting the blood together and nourishment is like the flow of electricity. Someone said to me yesterday, you know, you've got to talk more realistically with people who you're practicing with. He said, you know none of the people you practice with have ever practiced footing and flooring.

[35:35]

Du weißt, dass keiner der Leute, mit denen du praktizierst, jemals Füßen und Boden praktizieren. Oh, ich glaube nicht, dass das unbedingt stimmt. Wenn ihr doch einmal davon wisst, wie könnt ihr es dann vermeiden? Even now and then you put your foot down and you feel the floor come up and you say, ah, footing and flooring. Yeah, once a month, this is good. When you stabilize the experience of mind and the object of attention, you're opening yourself to a non-dual experience of the world.

[36:46]

You're joining yourself to the world. If that flower arrangement is in me, the world is in me. And the longer I have, more often I have that experience of the world, the flowers being in me, And the longer I, the more often I have this experience that the flowers or the world is inside me. And whatever Rilke says, outside space, externalized space does violate things. Things become truly what they are when they're within your inner attentional space.

[37:57]

And this is also, we can understand, the absorbent mind, Zen as absorbent mind, this is absorbing object and perception in one non-dual experience. It absorbs what in one thing? The object and the perception or the object and mind as one thing. unitary experience. And also background mind and foreground mind as we talked about yesterday tend to come together. And we can understand this fusion as the deeper meaning of Zen as absorption.

[39:14]

It's how the practice reveals the deeper meanings of the word. Das ist die Art, wie die Praxis die tieferen Bedeutungen of the word or of the world? Of the word. Des Wortes. Of this word, Zen. Okay, dieses Wortes enthüllt. Okay, so I've just spoken about simultaneous mind. Now I can talk about gestational mind. But I won't say much. Because I'm listening to your knees. And mine. I mean, mine are not too bad. I wonder if my legs have ever gotten so bad I can't talk.

[40:18]

Maybe. It must have happened. So, now, gestational mind is, we could say, the simultaneous mind over time, durative, temporal mind. So, simultaneous mind is a special acknowledgement. The gestational mind is the mind in various dimensions which relate to the world. So it's the soup of the world.

[41:19]

That's cooking over time. Gestating. So when you establish and get used to first the concept and then finally the feel of it, of simultaneous mind, and then when you know the canoeing without thinking, the hishirio, the unmeasured thinking, And trusting that as a process which is interactively going on outside your sight.

[42:20]

Then a dynamic storage process is going on. And things are emerging from these new relationships in the storage process. The warehouses are all thrown around. And they are producing Because the interrelationship produces new relationships which start to seed the whole process. And that's a description of the Elia Vijnana. And the Elia Vijnana is an experiential definition for the world. Of the world you absorb through to keep it simple, non-duality.

[43:34]

When you surround the world with the intimacy of your inner attentional space. So Dogen again says, fully enter immediacy. And immediacy literally means non-dual, no in-between, no media. And consider this the entire universe. Form the mental intention that this is the entire universe. If it's the entire universe, you don't need anything else.

[44:49]

You're fully located in the entire universe. Good luck. Thank you very much.

[44:52]

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