Of course, I've also heard the rumor that this is the last day. And it's good that things come to an end. And it's good that we're not finished also. So I was, I'm trying to, I thought to have a kind of re-entry to show, I might speak about why we do ceremonies like we did last night, and why yogic life is so detailed compared to more natural, contemporary natural idea of life, living. And I especially feel it with Petraea, You know, because she not only has to deal with all the details of our yogic life, but she's got the habits of another sangha for some years.

[01:11]

And it's like suddenly she has to wear someone else's clothes, or something like that. And I feel all... Anyway. So it all started with the Second World War. In some sense for me it did, actually. So I thought maybe I could approach this somewhat personally in how I got myself into this. I mean, if someone had told me, I don't know, when I was 15 or so, that there would be people who would sit for seven days, most of the day, including meals, in a three-foot square next to other people in a three-foot square, I would say, you're nuts, this is not true, or some sort of prison, or I don't know what it is, it's not. And here I am doing it with you.

[02:12]

And some of you even like it. At least after it's over. Yes, anyway, I don't know. Anyway... Why I said it all started with the Second World War is because, you know, I mean, of course, living in Europe a large part of the time now, it's clear to me that people my generation and slightly older, the war is, you know, yeah, a huge part of their psyche, psychic background. But for me as an American, you know, my parents listened to the news every morning and every night. H.V. Kaltenborn and you wouldn't know who they were. And so I heard it all the time. But it made, how it affected me is it made me not want to be a human being.

[03:17]

And I, because if this is what human beings did, I didn't want to be one of them. And I think I've mentioned this in other contexts before. But it really, it was a strong feeling. I didn't want to be one of them. And so I was a human being who didn't want to be a human being. That's a kind of human being, I guess. But more it's that the ways you could be a human being that were offered to me by our culture and my education and blah, blah, blah, just didn't... I didn't want to do any of them because I could see that they were all Buy-ins cop-outs they were all ways you actually Promoted the system and I didn't want to be part of the system So I went to college only because my father forced me to and I Was gonna go live in a car

[04:23]

I did finish high school, but I was going to go live in a car and just drive around the United States. But my father, I was underage to buy a car. And my father wouldn't sign for me. So I went to college. And I, you know, you'd have to take college boards in America. And I was so uninterested, I walked out in the middle of the college boards. And... Went to work at the grocery store where I worked. I was supposed to work at 12, so to heck with the exam. But the colleges accepted me and got me to take the afternoon tests in the midsummer, so I did. Anyway, I went to college. But I refused to take a college degree, and mostly I never attended class. And I wouldn't, I wasn't, I'm not in my high school yearbook because I wouldn't wear a tie. And they wouldn't feed me at college because you have to wear a tie in the dining rooms.

[05:27]

So after I just stopped, and I had very little money. I mean, I can remember having 10 cents for two weeks, you know. I think a cup of coffee cost 10 cents. But I managed somehow to scavenge. Anyway, Then they decided that I could eat in the dining rooms if I'd wear a scarf. So I got a white scarf. Anyway, I guess that was a little peculiar. But it was also that it was partly that I was so unformed As a person, I was really, I was kind of like, well, not exactly a mess, but a mush. And I wasn't enough of a developed person to make compromises. But it was also that I didn't want to buy in to any of the ways you were supposed to be a human being, ambitious and blah, blah, blah.

[06:34]

Yeah, so I took jobs after I walked out of college. Before I would graduate, I went to New York and I worked in jobs, you know, sort of warehouse jobs. Warehouse jobs and waiter and, you know, sort of ships, working on ships and the merchant, stuff like that. Because that didn't seem so bad. That seemed like normal work. It wasn't kind of any, no prestige particularly involved. Okay, so then I met Suzuki Roshi. And during these years, I was not, you know, I was wondering what's love and what's sex and what's male and what's female and so forth, you know. I was ready to examine everything. But underneath everything was my question, deeper question was, what is a human being?

[07:40]

And at the college, I'd attended Paul Tillich, who's a famous Protestant theologian's lectures. And I attended the head of the philosophy department's lecture. And it was clear to me they weren't what they were saying. They were saying things, but they weren't what they were saying. And I found out much later that they definitely weren't knowing something about them later. Okay. So by chance, through a samurai movie and a friend, I ended up going to Tsukiyoshi's lecture. And he was the first person I'd seen who was what he was saying. So I, you know, I really appreciated him. You know, I went to one lecture, and I thought, well, I'll come back, you know. And I really appreciated him.

[08:47]

But I also studied him, because here was a human being. The only time I'd met a human being, human being, had Dr. Konze, who I studied with. He said, no one's ever called me a human being. And it is a funny term, human being. Anyway, we don't have much that's better. Living being, a non-being, a living non-being. Hey, maybe we could use that. In any case, I had met somebody named Shukrila Ali in Iran. Iran. in Bandar Shapur, in a little town, and he was extraordinary. And there was something, so I think he was probably a Sufi, but I'm not sure. And he was there with his younger brother, who was about 15, and I suppose Shukra Ali was about 28 or something like that. But meeting him, that was the first time I'd met somebody I felt, hey, this is okay for me as a human being, this person.

[09:55]

And a certain feel and look of him, and look from him, and his way of the nuanced space in which he lived, I found with Sukershi four or five years later. Okay. So I decided to study him. And what did I find? Well, here was this little guy. He always seemed bigger than me, but I've seen myself standing beside him in photographs, and it comes up to about here. Here. Anyway, pretty small guy, big guy in my life. But anyway, so I studied him. And what did I see? I saw a person who, this is one of his sticks, and he often carried this stick, who carried this stick, who always stood, usually was standing with his feet a few inches apart.

[11:15]

And he spoke from inside. And I noticed that he had... I mean, this was a... Now I'm conceptualizing it, but it was a noticing which I felt and then continued to observe. But he... I am talking about last night's ceremony. He... had an external rhythm, an external pace that sort of included everyone's pace. So I would watch him come in every lecture and come to the side from his office and around, and then he'd be there and he had a kind of pace that everyone felt their pace in, but his external pace

[12:27]

eventually began to coordinate all the paces. I could feel it happening. And then his an internal kind of metabolic pace or something like that began to be present in his voice and then began to awaken this inner pace in others. It's what made his lecture so effective. Some years later, a friend of mine, George Leonard, discovered a film that somebody had made, something you could not do until there was film. But somebody made a film of somebody, I think it was, giving a talk to a group of high school students or something in a high school auditorium, and they filmed it for some reason. I don't remember at all what the reason was. I could look it up if he wrote about it in one of his books.

[13:30]

Anyway, what they noticed when they filmed this really slow, when they took the film and they slowed it way down, they found out there was this extraordinary coordination between the movements of everybody in the audience. Is that somebody, the speaker, particularly with the speaker, and the speaker's eyelids would be going, and somebody's hand lifting up a cigarette would be going exactly in the same rhythm. The entire room was rhythmically coordinated at a micro-level, micro-movement level. So you pick something else, but nobody's conscious of it. I mean, I'm sure none of them were conscious of it. But yogic culture is somehow sort of conscious of it. I wouldn't try to speculate exactly how they got there, but it sort of is something that's understood.

[14:42]

Okay. I mean, just today when I was sitting down for lunch, I had to cough, and then Dan coughed, and then David coughed, and then somebody on the West Town coughed. Very similar cough, too, not just... And so we could call that a kind of bioresonant posture. It happens all the time. You know, somebody sneezes or coughs and then other people sneeze and cough and, you know, etc. So there's a kind of bio-resonance going on at that level. Okay. So anyway, one of the things I noticed, for instance, was that that's about the time I noticed that Sukershi always went through doors with his foot nearest the hinge.

[15:47]

And so I watched it for some time, you know, a couple months. And then finally I said to him one day, I said, is there a rule that you're supposed to walk through the door with your foot nearest the hinge? And he just laughed. There was somebody else in the room, I can't remember, some other Japanese person. And they laughed at me when I sat down at the piano. So... But, you know, many of these things are in a yogic practice, like living in a heiji or living in Rinso-en or something like that with Sukhirishi, most things aren't taught. You're just supposed to pick them up bodily. And that's, you know, but for us, I think, many things I have to point out because we're just not... bodily engaged in the intra-face of phenomena and being.

[16:59]

Now I just changed from inter-face, which is between, to intra-face, which is, intra means inside, inter means between. So intra-face, there's a kind of face between. And... is the study of this interface or interface with, you know, the sensorium and phenomena, because all information and phenomenology is very, as I said yesterday, very close conceptually to Zen Buddhism, contemporary phenomenology. And... And this, from a yogic point of view, this interface is an action. You enact your perceptions. If you don't enact your perceptions, you're very passively related to the perceptual interface. And one of the, you know, I've told you the story of meeting the Maharishi a number of times, but I can just run through it again for those of you who, it's a curious story.

[18:15]

I was at the University of California, I was a degree-less employee of the University of California, but my job was putting together educational programs. I got the job because I wanted to educate myself. So I got this job where I could pick any topic in the world, really, it was great, and say, okay, I'm going to invite the best people in the world on that topic and then listen to them. So that was my job. So I'm walking back to where I parked my Volkswagen Bug. to drive to my bicycle in San Francisco to go home. And I'm walking along, and I see all these crowds around this building. I told you this story before. So I knew the building well, and there was no way to get it. It's about 10 or 20 people deep at the door. So I went around to a window, which I knew, because I know the buildings, because I was organizing meetings and seminars and conferences in the buildings.

[19:21]

So I climbed in the window, and there was this little guy, with flowers all around him. I don't know who it was, but it was the Maharishi. So I got there just near the end of the lecture. And he said a few things and smiled. It was very nice. And then the crowd started moving out. And where I was in the window, I didn't go out the window again. I went out. Securities used to tell me, you came in the door, but you better be ready to go out the window. He'd say that to me in Dukesan. You better be ready to go out the window. Oh, okay. Whatever you say, boss. So, but this time I went out the door. And I found myself walking right along with his entourage. He was very new. I mean, I think this was maybe one of his very first visits in the United States.

[20:26]

It was about 1962, 63, something like that. So, I suddenly find myself right next to him. There was a car, and he was standing next to the back door. And I was standing here, and there was nobody between us, and there were some people talking to him, and they were talking about getting him to Canada, if I remember correctly. He was going to Canada. And there he was, nasty man. And then it came into my head, he's pretty good. And then I thought, what made me think he's pretty good? And then I realized I'd coordinated my breathing unconsciously and non-consciously with his. So he was breathing and I was breathing and I was in exactly the same rhythm. And then so I noticed that and then I stayed with it and felt and I could feel his metabolic pace. And to some extent I could feel his presence in mind.

[21:27]

And I thought, hmm, okay. It was clear I learned that from Sukhyoshi. I didn't exactly know I'd learned that from Sukhyoshi. It was one of these things from studying him and studying his external and internal pace and watching how it affected people. So maybe we could say, if I try to make up some words here, there's a... or use some terms I've emphasized, we have physical postures and we have mental postures. And I would say also we have mutual postures or maybe phenomic postures. I mean, if I say phenomenal posture is that phenomenal has a meaning of extraordinary in English. That's phenomenal. I don't mean that. I mean, there's no such word as phenomic, but there is a word phonemic from phoneme, so I can make up phenomic.

[22:35]

So a phenomic posture, in other words, there's a kind of posture of phenomena itself, and then there's a mutual posture with others. And there's mental postures and physical postures. And so what I noticed with Sukhyoshi was that, for instance, when you do something, when I would then try it out, which I've been doing ever since, always, or most of the time, walking through doors with my leg nearest the hinge, What does it do? It brings your mental posture joined with your physical posture, and then your physical posture communicates your mental postures to others. We don't think this way, but yogic cultures design their lives this way. I mean, it's mostly not conscious for most people, but it's not not conscious.

[23:39]

It was not not conscious to Sukhiroshi. Well, okay. So we have mutual postures, phenomic postures, and mental and physical postures. And when there's a kind of tissue, tissue or nexus of mental and physical postures which communicate, establish, The posture... The circumsituated posture, the circumstantial posture. Okay. So you're in the midst of these, which I'm just trying to find words for, coordinated forms. So here I was, a person who wouldn't wear a tie and wouldn't wear shoes most of the time.

[24:44]

I went through the whole winter with... in New England with snow, just in these little rubber Japanese things. And I liked Zen because you could go barefoot, you know, in the Zendo. But now I wear a tie, I don't care, you know. And the only kind of coordination I've ever seen similar to what I saw with Tsukurashi and when he was with other Japanese priests. was when you go to an orchestra and you see the orchestra tuning up. They're straightening, in those days they all wore tuxedos, they're straightening their tucks and they get their instruments and they sit down and adjust things. And it's all coordinated. It's orchestrated. And they all begin to build through their physical motions, which they don't have to all sit down the same way or enter the same way when they sit.

[25:46]

But all the physical postures that are prior to their playing their instruments help set up the metabolic field where they play their music together. So I'd noticed this going, my father was a good musician, and I am not at all, but he'd bring me to symphonies and stuff. I could remember when I met Tsukiyoshi, I could see the same kind of orchestrated form. So again, I said it all started with the Second World War because I really didn't want to be a human being, but I was studying what it is to be a human being, and the first human being I was able to have a lot of contact with that was the kind of human being I wanted to have contact with, was Suzuki Roshi, and I noticed that he was like a trained musician in the details of his life.

[26:50]

Now, why do you do it? Because Okay, what's the source? All right, going back to the Eightfold Path, we could understand, again, the last three, concentration and mindfulness and effort. Effort isn't the right word. I always forget it because it's not the right word, but we don't have a word for it. Energetic vitality or something like that.

[27:53]

But we have no word in English to translate this thing called effort in all the Buddhist lists, a version of that. Okay, so that is the technology of the interface with phenomena. It's the mind. It's mining thusness. It's mining impermanence. It's mining interdependence, intermergence. It's mining the metabolic mutual field. And it's done by developing an attentional density which perceptual activity is a kind of action. And how do you give form to that action? And so you develop certain forms.

[28:54]

You can't give form to everything. You develop certain forms. Like Sukhya Rishi would say, if you all sit the same way in the Zendo, I can see your differences. If everyone's sitting differently, everyone's just different. But when everyone tries to sit the same way, you can see people's differences right away. So, in a certain way, if you do create forms, like we bow, we bow when we see each other, walk through the door, do things with two hands, and so forth, do things through a, one of the rules for a monk is you never lean on anything. And if you do lean on something, you're communicating something by leaning. You always are standing within and through your own spine, through your own posture. There's lots of, I mean, Shri Krishna, really, I put my hands like this way.

[29:57]

No, no, take my hands, you put them some other way. He constantly fine-tuned how I walked, how I did things. Yeah. And it's just not a culture I was brought up in. But when I discovered it through him and then through, you know, lots of other things, I began to see that for a person like myself who wanted no forms, because I didn't like the forms that were offered, oh, here were some forms I could accept. And... And then once you do develop certain forms like everything is done, you do things, certain things precisely, always the same way. It's still unique or a singularity, but you see the difference.

[31:00]

The differences flow in through sameness. Differences flow in through sameness. So it becomes a way to enter the perceptual field. the interface, the overlapping interface of you and me, of me and you, of us and phenomena, of us and each other. Yeah. Now I wanted to talk about otherness as our own otherness within non-otherness, but that's for next session. Or I don't know, wind. So we can think again of the effort, the directionality, the intentional vigor, the intentional presence, let's call it effort, and mindfulness, attentive mindfulness.

[32:06]

And mindfulness also means full mind. It's a good English word for this. It's a mind full of knowing mind itself within mindfulness. That's all effort. I mean, this is not just... It's a kind of... There's a mental posture behind it all. And if the mental posture isn't energetically there, the way... A yogic culture understands the interface of phenomena and beingness and becomingness. It's just you're passively sliding along and stuff. So a lot of this comes out of the mental posture, the posture of the spine in the world, allowing difference and otherness to flow. So in a ceremony like last night, we're... You know, I don't think it's... One of the big questions for me, you know, the biggest question for me is, can there be a lay... You've heard me say this over and over again.

[33:19]

A lay, mutually realized depth and breadth of the teaching that's Transmittable Generation on the surface I'd say no, it's not possible Means everything I'm doing is fruitless But what the heck? The it's Why not try to do something fruitless who needs fruit? anyway So that's one question and the biggest question that defines me and my life. But the other question is, a related question is, what about all these yogic details and ceremonies and stuff like that? And it's one thing Sukhyoshi was never able to really get across to me is ceremonies as an expression of

[34:34]

of a mutual posture. In fact, as some of you know, I made an embarrassing comment. Time magazine came out and tried to interview the first Zen monastery. I'm always against being in the media, but they interviewed Tsukuyoshi and then me. I was, Sukershi was quoted as saying, I'm hoping one day that we can really do this ceremony the way it should be done over two days or three days or something like that. That would be wonderful. And I was quoted, not knowing he'd said that, in Time Magazine as a 25-year-old. Well, if we ever had ceremonies more than an hour, I'd quit and I'd walk out. And, you know, Sukershi and I both looked at this story in Time Magazine and... I'm out of here. I answered the, he presented the koan to me once of killing the cat, Nanchuan killing the cat.

[35:36]

What would you do, he said to me, Sukershi and Yamada Reirenroshi, both of them or others, asked me this question. What would you do if you, if Nanchuan held up the cat? I said, I'd leave and he'd have nobody to kill the cat for. She said, you have to stay in the situation and solve the problem. So I've been staying in the situation now for 50 years. Yeah. Anyway, the other question is, what are these ceremonies going to become? Because we don't have the inclination for them. They're sort of symbolic of things and they're... represent you know graduation or prestige or something but uh recognition but to enjoy them like you enjoy a piece of music and to have the words fit with our views oh spirits and powers had dr kanzi once i always call him here dr khan

[36:48]

Dr. Kunze to his face, but I like calling him that. Anyway, he was a cantankerous guy, but we were also sort of friends and had a long association with him. Anyway, he said that in Thailand or someplace, they wanted to spray the local ponds for malaria. And they were going to spray something on the ponds so that it would kill the mosquitoes. And he was somehow the local boss and this priest in his little village area. And he wouldn't let them do it. And he said, why not? You know, malaria is a problem. We're going to spray the ponds. And he said, well, I don't know. He said, what about the dragons and the fishes? But ecologically, somehow he was right. He brought in the kind of what you can't figure out. All spirits and powers.

[37:51]

Dragons and fishes. Thanks.

[37:55]

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