Start out with a practical but mundane topic. I would assume there were not enough toilets for a sashina this size. I've been meaning to say from the beginning, please, if necessary, in the middle of a period of size, it's okay. I forgot to mention it. I'm sorry. Right upstairs here, there's quite a lot of unused space beside the doksan room. Maybe someday we can make some toilets or sleeping space or something up there. Yeah, we could have smaller sashins. But anyway, I haven't heard any complaints yet, but I'm willing to hear any if there are any.

[01:07]

You know, practice is a spectrum. And we are, the path is a spectrum. And we are every point in that spectrum. But not all the points are developed. But when you enter the path, you can begin to experience, but also feel, know at least, that it is a spectrum. And a spectrum which can include the whole of your life. And through the longer you practice, the wider the spectrum gets. And the more committed your practice, the depth of the spectrum increases.

[02:40]

And the more committed your practice, the depth of the spectrum increases. Now that's maybe the real topic or fundamental topic of the last four teshas. I know, I mean, I feel that yesterday's Tesho was, yeah, okay. But I think many of you didn't really believe it. How could something so near as immediacy be so far away? And we don't quite believe that something so near can be so far away.

[03:47]

And I presented engaged immediacy as something like jumping on a moving skateboard on Mars. That's kind of hard to believe. Okay. But I'm trying to be realistic, actualistic, and present practice as a lifetime habit, lifetime habituation, habitat.

[04:58]

And you don't know where it's going and quite what's going to happen. But for a variety of reasons, you decide, you feel this spectrum is more inclusive than others. And the path is articulated through really existential decisions in which you're honest to yourself. You're willing to look at the consequence, sometimes not always favorable, of existential positions, decisions you come to.

[05:59]

And you decide to measure yourself within the spectrum of the past and not by the sort of coarser macro identity we have in our journalistic society. And that takes courage. And it sounds like that choosing the path is more dangerous, but actually you're more in touch with your life on the path.

[07:13]

Now the sort of mythologized but rather factual 10,000 hours of practice to be really good at anything is, yeah, relevant. I think it was first a Harvard study in the 80s which brought this out. And Malcolm Gladwell author who writes in English, made it rather popular. Talking about the 10,000 hours the Beatles played in Hamburg clubs and things like that.

[08:18]

Or at the 10,000 hours and more, 15, 50, that chess players just stare at the board. There's a lot of truth to this. And that's what I'm speaking about. Because complexity does not yield itself to intelligence. Complexity opens up through a kind of nano-mind A mind which can just notice without thinking about, without thinking about, just notice, notice, notice the fabric, the tissue of your life.

[09:39]

The map of your life so far. They need the kind of electron microscope of stillness. And there we need this kind of electron microscope of stillness. the stillness which just lets you notice, notice, notice, and leads you into the complexity of the spectrum of the path. What I'm saying here is fully my experience over a long time. It is not necessarily an icy cave in northern Korea.

[10:42]

It's the... absorption you bring to your own daily life. Now, one of the ways Zen differs from other Buddhist schools and teachings is for the most part we're not giving you descriptive teachings. We're giving you tools which you can use or not use.

[11:49]

And we say practice is daily life, but it means the investigated daily life with the tools of teaching. Und es heißt zwar, die Praxis ist das Alltagsleben, aber was das bedeutet ist, das untersuchte Alltagsleben, untersucht mit den Lehrwerkzeugen. The tools of Zazen mind. The tools of attentional each hail breathing. The tools of stillness. And again, all points of the spectrum are present within you, but they need to be drawn out, brought into your attentional life.

[13:06]

And one of the characteristics of the style of Zen practice is again the investigation of your actual life. of your actual life. You're not going away from your actual life. You're bringing your actual life into the spectrum of practice of the past. So Zen emphasizes starting with the things you already are. You already have rituals.

[14:19]

Your morning cup of coffee, the order in which you dress or wash your face and so forth. You hardly know they're rituals unless you don't do them and then you feel a little funny. But one of the qualities of this 10,000 or 50,000 hours Which was first emphasized on fine-tuning physical things like playing the piano or the violin or something. But it's also... But it's also clear that it's in collaborative relationships, relationships with others and with institutions of our life.

[15:36]

This collaborative life is also a complex. And our Sangha life is a collaborative experiment. And how are we going to establish a collaborative Sangha when we're also a lay community? We need to investigate this, and creatively. And again, in this 10,000 hour stuff which I've been... known about for 20 or 30 years now.

[16:46]

It's the flat learning curve. It starts out and then for years it's just flat. Then there are little spikes. And you have to be patient during this long, flat time. Oh dear, am I still on the path? But if you feel the depth of the spectrum of the path, you stay on it. Yeah, so you investigate your own rituals and fiddle with them, change them. Yeah, and you already have, as we talked about in this session, imaginal spaces in your life.

[17:53]

As a little kid, everyone commends you for being a big eater and then you overeat the rest of your life. This is an imaginal space. He's a big eater. And being a boy is an imaginal space, or a girl, or a woman, or a man. So the imaginal space of standing up into the Buddha or eating out of the Buddha's skull asks you to look at your own imaginal spaces. I'm a good person or I'm a failure.

[18:58]

You can try to get rid of or examine these imaginal spaces, but another way is just to replace them, feel them and replace them. And this is the tantric dimension, the dynamic of Zen practice. We don't imagine a particular deity as is done in Tibetan practice. But we can feel we're always in an imaginal space and we can begin to transform those imaginal spaces. I thought about Lama Govinda this morning when I talked about thinking about Tantrism.

[20:05]

I knew him. quite well. But of course at the beginning I just was written his books first two books profoundly influenced me. He was born in Waldheim, Saxony with a German father and a Bolivian mother and the Bolivian side of his Beingness was very important to him. And he studied in Heidelberg. And he studied in Heidelberg.

[21:18]

No, excuse me, he studied in Freiburg. He studied in Freiburg. Yeah, and then he first was a Theravadan monk and then he became a Tibetan practitioner. He was first a Theravadan monk and then a Tibetan practitioner. And I was asked to jisha him. Jisha? To take care of him when he was in Japan. And we became friends. I took him to Koyasan, which is the center of Shingon Tantric Buddhism in Japan. And he liked being there very much, but he didn't feel they really were... fully engaged in tantric practice. From his point of view at least. And I remember I asked him at some point, when you visualize, do you visualize an image or do you visualize it multidimensionally and live the image?

[22:25]

I had a feeling at the time that he didn't really know how to answer my question. But later I realized what he meant was 10,000 hours. Anyway, later in life, I supported him, had the Zen Center support him for many years, and he died in a house that San Francisco Zen Center gave him. And I couldn't have imagined that Reading his books, you know, late teen years or whenever it was, that I would one day be taking care of him until he died.

[23:49]

And back then, when I was reading his books, maybe in my late teens or so, I would never have imagined that I would take care of him until he died. He also started the International Buddhist Union or something like that, and now you're on the council of the Deutsche Buddhist Union. I guess I'm telling this anecdote to you because I want to impress you that we, these us, you and I, I don't know if we're human beings, but whatever kind of beings we are, we're engaged in this Buddhist practice and making it happen. He was a nice, really nice guy. And I helped him. We designed together his final book on the I Ching. We published it.

[25:05]

So the spectrum of the path, in my case, I had no idea I would end up having this relationship with him. I had no plan to be a Buddhist teacher either. Here I am. What the heck am I doing? But here I am. I'm doing it because of my feeling for you. Sometimes You know, you might visualize yourself as an egg. Now here, if you have this experimental investigating attitude toward the path, you might wonder, what...

[26:13]

Egg? Why did this image of myself as an egg come up? Dann kannst du dir die Frage stellen, warum ist dieses Bild von mir als Ei aufgetaucht? So then you ask the visualization, what does this mean? And you realize you're an omelette. Dann stellst du der Visualisation die Frage, was bedeutest du? Und dann erkennst du, dass du eigentlich ein Omelette bist. You think, oh, I thought I was an egg and I'm only an omelette. Dann kannst du sagen, ich dachte, ich bin ein Ei, aber jetzt bin ich doch nur ein Omelette. Then you can wonder, but where is the chicken? And where the chicken is, it begins to be a question you can ask. And then the great Garuda bird of wings of gigantic proportions appears. Or the egg, you feel really, and you kind of denied it at first, the egg was about to burst. But then you realize, why was it about to burst? Maybe it's already burst.

[27:23]

And then you realize, actually, you have many pasts. And when you change direction in your life, it awakens a path, a past you didn't know you had, which actually led in that direction. So the ache which was about to burst actually burst in the past and led you to where you're practicing, how you're practicing now. And one of the images of practice in koans is pecking in and pecking out. You know, baby chicks peck from inside and the mother pecks from outside and boop, the egg opens.

[29:02]

And you may have noticed I've been doing a lot of Dokusan the last three days. What's Dokusan but pecking in and pecking out? It was in the spectrum of practice. So what's exciting to me about this recognition of the spectrum of practice is that it is all here. But you have to be in the presence of it with a kind of intentional depth.

[30:17]

And your intent or intentions are actually layered as well. And are various. And Open up, unfold imaginal spaces in which you can live your life. So, it gives us something to do. Yeah, when you have nothing to do. And nothing is better than something. Thank you very much.

[31:15]

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