I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Could we make it one notch brighter? So I can see your lovely faces a little better. Thank you. I suppose I don't have to say, but I will that I feel very grateful and privileged to be able to talk with you and practice with you.

[01:22]

And I always, as you know, have the dilemma of how much to say, how much to point out. Can I limit myself to pointing out in ways that help you in your own discovery? And then I also have the feeling of I don't, you know, sometimes if I don't point out, I and that there are just some things you go over the surface of and don't see the openings in the surface. So I don't know. I overdo it usually. I always do everything to excess whatever it is. So probably I will say too much. But Robert being here,

[02:29]

Robert Flagg, who's our tenzo in this session, he's amusing me very much. And maybe amusement isn't the right word, a kind of enjoyment of Robert's experience in practicing with us. One is he's brought up in a little different school of Zen than ours, for the most part, although we both study in the same temple. So there's some differences there. But we're both sort of half Japanese. Maybe he's more than half. Robert, how old were you when you first went to Japan? Twenty? It was in the teens. You were 18 or 19? Oh, yeah?

[03:31]

You don't remember? Jeez, you've practiced zazen too much. Okay, so Robert has spent maybe half his adult life, something like that, in Japan. Yeah. And I didn't go to Japan until I was, I guess, around 30. Then I spent the next four years in Japan and then I went back to Japan some weeks or months every year for about ten years. So my process of integrating started before I went to Japan and after. Robert's in the middle of integrating now with what we're trying to do here in the West. And I think that, if you don't mind my speaking about you, Robert, I think if he's in Colorado Springs, I imagine he doesn't... The difference is obvious.

[04:43]

But when you're here in a practice where we're trying to do Zen practice and we do it a little differently and a little the same, it's... much more apparent, perhaps, how different Zen practice is in its fundamentals than what we usually think of as ordinary life or ordinary experience. And, you know, I get bored with myself that I have to point this out so often. bored too with trying to find ways, words to express this which don't sound too newage, I mean new age. But there's a set of words for it. You see, if you really follow my suggestions to

[05:50]

refrain as much as possible from daily life consciousness. For lack of better terms, non-daily life consciousness begins to surface or press on you. And of course it surfaces in dreams and in images during satsang, and a kind of different tactile feeling in your body. Now I'm working with a phrase from this koan, you won't find out how to turn things around, not turn yourself around. Now, if you really pay attention to that, I mean, I think most people would read it sort of casually, turn yourself around. But to turn things around, revolve the zendo?

[06:55]

Turn things around. What? Why such a thing? And Linji, Rinzai, It says, when someone comes to see me, I listen to him and his words are dreams. I look at his environment. And if he's speaking about bodhisattvas, I produce an environment of compassion and pity. If he's something else, I produce an environment of purity. If his environment is some other way, I produce an environment of stillness. He says, if I see somebody who's master of his environment, I know someone who is in the realm of the Buddhas and ancestors.

[08:00]

What are we talking about, the master of your environment? Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I feel I should give you some suggestions or tell you what I know so you can, you know, notice the difference between turning yourself around and turning things around. And what world this comes out of because you're, you know, whether you like it or not, if you practice mental and physical yoga, you're at the edge of this world. So now, Going to Japan, I've tried to make clear in my own mind and experience what Japan is. There's some things I find very annoying about Japan. It's aesthetic culture I, for the most part, like very much.

[09:05]

In addition to that, in Japan there's a yoga culture, which I, as you know, feel is not Japanese. It comes from the practice of yoga, the practice of mental and physical yoga, as then embodied and externalized in a culture. So it pleases me again to see Robert working with these things because I've gone through this myself and it makes me, confirms in me again, you know, that this territory is quite possible for us but we have to discover it. And we're lucky in a way because of the cultural difference we're forced into shifts in view.

[10:11]

And as you know, the Eightfold Paths, Buddha's first teaching, starts with right views or complete views. And I think Thich Nhat Hanh translated it as right visions. But the view or vision you bring to things, as I said yesterday, really makes a big difference. The path begins with recognizing your views developing your livelihood speech, the Eightfold Path, and then through the release of energy and mindfulness and concentration, coming back to those views again and discovering those views on the yogic path, not on the cultural path. The basic process of the Eightfold Path. No, I want to say again for, you know, I feel a little bit, I think that the way I'm speaking and the way I'm trying to struggle with finding English words and making them fit or changing them may be a little hard for you who are not so familiar with English as a native tongue.

[11:32]

But again, I feel, you know, as I've often said, most of you know, I've said, and then I noticed that I can hear you, even though I don't understand German, that I can hear you in German, because my feeling is you hear the sound in German more than in English. So I know what to say next, because I can hear you hearing what I'm saying when it's translated. But now I feel I'm going to have to work with hopefully not just speaking in English, but finding a sound that you hear that maybe you will, even if you don't get all the words, you'll get what I'm speaking about. Not just for Germans, also for Jacqueline, whose native tongue is French. But your English is getting better every day, isn't it? Yeah. My French is getting worse. So if you're practicing and

[12:58]

And in Sashin, and you're following my suggestion and the rules of Sashin to refrain as much as possible from daily life consciousness, non-daily life consciousness begins to itch, tickle, disturb, bother you. And one of the first forms of it that comes up in you is lots of karmic stuff. Associations, sadness, usually I think you taking off the lid of daily life consciousness and all the adjustments that go with that for a consensual identity, you... stuff usually will... you make more openness in yourself and stuff bubbles up. Now, maybe the whole sashin is taken up with a certain kind of sadness, satisfaction shift back and forth. kind of pain that's also a kind of satisfaction.

[14:06]

That often can get pretty deep and take over the sashin and hopefully the last two days or so will be a process of coming out of that. We can, you know, come back into a clarity, a greater clarity in our daily life consciousness at the end of sashin. Now, if you get through the karmic stuff, and one way of getting through the karmic stuff is, and I'm not saying you should get through the karmic stuff, I'm just saying that the process of becoming more open to non-daily life consciousness and to this... tangle of associations we call karma is a process of also becoming more aware of what I call interior consciousness.

[15:18]

Now we've spoken about this here and in Europe quite a bit and I think most of you are familiar with at least the possibility of an interior consciousness and And that makes a big difference, just to know that and to recognize that we awaken and educate an interior consciousness when mostly we have educated an exterior consciousness. But it's valuable to come back to this sense of interior consciousness quite often because one is I think it'll make exterior consciousness more accessible or clear to us. And it's valuable to come back to it because Look, we barely understand or we don't understand exterior consciousness. What is consciousness is nobody really knows. So interior consciousness is even more elusive. But again I have to talk about it if we're going to look at these koans.

[16:27]

For instance, it says, sitting in the heaps of form and sound. Sitting in the heaps of form and sound. This is a Zen expression of one dimension or territory or something like that of interior consciousness because heaps is obviously a Q word to mean the five skandhas. Skandhas means heap. So it means you're sitting within the five skandhas of form and sound. Now here they could just say form, but they're saying form and sound. And form is often translated as color. And the word for form and color are often the same word. So these are not really philosophical ideas like form so much as color, sound. sitting within the heaps of color and sound.

[17:30]

That's not exactly the same as sitting within your own karma. You're sitting within the heaps of form and sound, color and sound. This means you've slowed down already the five skandhas. They're not just one quick blip of form, perceptions, feelings, impulses, consciousness, form, feeling, perception, impulses, gatherers, consciousness. No, no, you're in a kind of, now maybe it's like a map where there's France is green and Germany is yellow and Belgium is blue and so forth. Maybe there's a kind of map you feel of color and maybe one's kind is blue and another's kind is yellow and another's kind is gray and Now in interior consciousness you feel something like this that you can't and you shouldn't try to grasp.

[18:33]

So this koan is talking about what I'm calling interior consciousness. And believe it or not, when Linji speaks about I know a person by his or her environment, he's actually speaking about interior consciousness, as manifested in your immediate situation as environment. Now if we talk about the present, I'm wondering about here, there's a little mosaic, you know, If we talk about the present, again, this is a kind of philosophical idea, present, past, future. But if you examine the present, you know, it's completely not graspable. We know the past is gone, the future is not here, but the present itself is, you know, what, what, whatness.

[19:36]

So maybe we should use immediate situation. And as we know... the immediate situation as a kind of memory, as I've been saying, a present memory, something which has duration, and the duration is not in the world, it's in our experience of the world, and that duration can be various. It can have depth, extent, etc. Now, if you experience the present as duration, as the immediate situation, then the immediate situation has certain kinds of boundaries. And our experience of the immediate situation, and then if, again, if it has duration, the immediate present includes, merges into the future and includes the past because it's a moment you're holding when actually, actual, the present is like a circle of fire.

[20:44]

And there's a technical term in Buddhism which calls the present a circle of fire. Now where is that circle of fire? Where are those flames in which past and future is burning or appearing? Now I was struck by this again that when I went out today, Robert put my shoes out for me. Thank you, Robert. And it struck me again how, for me, my sense of this and doing things like this is that it's part of the immediate situation. It's not in the future. It's definitely part of the present. Because in the immediate situation, Robert knew I was about to come out and put my shoes on.

[21:52]

Or someone put my shoes on, I don't know. I assume it was Robert, because it's... It was me. It was you? Okay, so, good. Thank you. So this sense of, which is not anticipation, but recognizing the immediate situation, which includes something which isn't exactly in the future. This is so characteristic of a way of doing things in practice that I was struck by it. And the feeling that it's not the future. And so where are these boundaries of the immediate situation which has a feeling of events folding in together? Now when you are sitting in the heaps of form and sound, this is again, as I said, an experience that's not exactly your karma.

[23:32]

It's a kind of territory in which your karma appears as perceptions or appears as feelings. Now let me try to give you another example of this sense. If you're practicing, I can say, rest in your mind. Don't rest in your thoughts. But we're addicted to our thoughts. and without following our thoughts, it's very difficult. Most of us never see anything in our life without thought coverings. We never see a round past through thought coverings. If you do, maybe it's too big to say it's enlightenment,

[24:34]

but it's a kind of enlightenment, just as shifting your view. This difference between yogic culture and our culture, both very powerful cultures, both powerful ways of organizing the world. If you can begin to feel that shift, that shift in view is what enlightenment is. We shouldn't even talk about enlightenment, we should talk about enlightening Because a person who is enlightening or enlightened is a person who's in a fluidity of views that shifts. Seeing things in a numerous way simultaneously is just the way they see things. So you get a familiarity. If you get familiar with this experience of a shift, Alan Watts was very good at it. He could say something and make you feel a little shift.

[25:38]

And that familiarity with that shift is getting familiar with the territory of enlightenment. Now, enlightenment is such a screwed up word in English that I don't know what word to use. But all I can say is being familiar with that shift is the territory which generally is called enlightenment in Buddhism in English translations. It doesn't mean no thoughts. It means a fluidity of views in your thinking and proceeding. a kind of inner pliancy or ease, and it's actually experienced as a kind of pliancy. Okay, so why are you not bored if you rest in mind?

[26:43]

Because we're so addicted to thought coverings. You have to... Actually, the way you work with it is a kind of pulse of... if you can get to this point, a kind of pulse of seeing yourself pulled into thoughts and then coming back to rest in the mind. So there's a kind of interest in this pulse. It would be very hard to do in ordinary daily activity, but in Zazen and in Sashin, you can kind of feel this pulse. And if you get used to this pulse, so you're kind of amusing yourself with the pulse rather than with thoughts. Does that make sense? You're substituting your interest and addiction to thoughts to this feeling of, oh, I can feel myself being pulled into seeking outside or believing in an outside. Then you pull yourself back and you feel. Now what's interesting is this pulse actually is a kind of massaging process.

[27:45]

And it massages a kind of light into view. If you keep doing it, you find something else starts to appear through this massaging a kind of light. Once that is present and you feel a kind of light in the way your lightness and light, in the way your thoughts and feelings rest in a kind of light, I mean really it feels like that, then the pulse slows way down. You don't have to pull yourself back so often. maybe every ten minutes or so. There's a feeling of a shift and you shift back. Now this territory I'm describing all is the territory of interior consciousness and it's a kind of developing a kind of workability. Like clay is workable. You know some clay is so not workable, some clay is workable. So again, I don't have words for this, but I would describe one of the initial experiences of interior consciousness of sitting in the heaps of form and sound is a kind of workability, a territory.

[29:03]

This is gray, this is blue. This has this sound, this has this note. You can bring the sounds together or you can bring the sounds together with the environment. And once you're in the territory, you may not be too good at it, but you can feel it. Now, one of the aspects of this is you stop fighting with the physical world. So one of the aspects of the schedule is to stop fighting with the schedule. I mean, big deal. The world's not going to fall apart while you're here struggling with the schedule or not. You know? Nothing's going to get worse anywhere because you're not out doing something for a week. And the schedule isn't deteriorating your sense of identity.

[30:09]

Well, maybe it is deteriorating your sense of identity. Maybe you ought to leave. But in any case, it's not too harmful. So you just follow the schedule. And it's very hard for you. Everybody wants to do, you know... Peter wants to do Peter's Buddhist practice and Hildegard wants to do Hildegard's Buddhist practice. It's hard to do just Buddhist practice without Hildegard or Peter or Richard or Zen Datsun. I know from personal experience. Yeah. So, one of the things we're trying to do is not fight with the schedule.

[31:11]

Another is not fight with physical objects. So that's one reason we pay so much attention to, I pay so much attention to, simple things like putting out the straw mats. And I just ordered Double straw mats is eight. That's all they had in SoCo Hardware in San Francisco. But they're being sent to us. Maybe they'll get here before the end of Sashin. Because it'll make it easier if we have things that aren't quite so funky as most of the ones we have here. And they're folded a certain way. Three and then in half. And three is a single fold. You know, if you fold something in half, it's kind of fiddly. You have to fold it like that. But in three, it's an accordion. It's one movement. So generally, things are folded in three. And if you study the Oryoki, which I would call full-service camping gear... Because it really is camping gear.

[32:22]

It's for the traveling monk. But it's also like, you know... you know, an eight-course dinner with all the proper silverware and, you know, glasses and things. It's got everything, full-service camping gear. So, all of this stuff and the Zendo, and there's aspects of the Zendo that, well, it's better not even to point out, that... Sashin and practice in a monastery is a kind of environmental training ground for a yogic sense of interior consciousness that extends beyond your body. Now, when I start saying things like that, I think, oh, shoot, I'm becoming so esoteric and new-agey, and I shouldn't say it. And then I have words like energy field. I don't know what to say.

[33:22]

I don't know what to say, you know. I don't want to sound... put you off from hearing if this... So we try to get these things down, like how we pass out the cards, how we do things, to sort of lessen the fighting with the physical world. Because if you can get into knowing how to use objects, you create a territory. Now we're moving from daily consciousness to a kind of karmic upsurgence of entanglements, sadness and satisfaction, and then into a sense of interior consciousness and the discovery that this interior consciousness is in the external environment. And it's in the external environment and becomes manifest when we stop fighting with the external environment.

[34:26]

So this full-service camping gear, the oryoki, is not just meant to be an easy way for the monk to carry his or her bowls and get a meal, but also it has to do with how we treat objects. And as you know, those of you, I've talked about you, how we treat objects in relationship to the body field, where you hold an object in ordinary, you know, an ordinary Japanese restaurant, they hold the teacup at a chakra, It doesn't have handles so you can hold it with two hands and all that stuff. This is an attempt to use the physical object to activate this larger environment which we inhabit. Now, I don't know what to call it, you know. Environment, environs means what encircles you. And environment means what is around us that helps us grow or gives us our identity.

[35:35]

And habitat means what's given to us and what's received. So I wish I had a word which meant gift encirclement or gift habitat. what we receive and what we give and give to others through becoming alive within our gift habitat. I don't know. There's no words. So here I'm entering into this territory of maybe I'm saying too much, but let me give you, from this point of view, three characteristics of interior consciousness. One is, when something happens outside you, you have a feeling it's happened inside you.

[36:40]

And you, maybe we can, I could say you almost have a feeling there's a fluid band that connects you. More than a thread, a kind of fluid band that connects you, almost like the outside event not only happened inside you, but is connected to you. Now, I'm not trying to talk scientifically or say this is true or false. I think this is what can be experienced through yogic practice and through developing a meditation where you come to an ease within yourself. Another aspect is you know what's going to happen before it happens. Now, only in the immediate situation I'm not talking about predicting the future. I mean this in a very small way. For instance, if I'm doing the service Now, first of all, let me say, as I've said before, the experience of your body is primarily an image of your body.

[37:49]

And I've given the example of if your arm goes to sleep, and you can't, if it's really asleep and you can't find it, say, where's my arm? It's over there somewhere. And yet if you find one spot where you can touch it or move a finger, then your whole arm is apparent to you. If it wasn't an image of your arm, then you'd have to feel all the spots. You'd have to wake up. But all you have to do is awaken one finger and then you can feel your whole arm because the image of the arm appears. So there's an image when I'm going up to the altar. There's an image of the altar and this habit I have of how to go up to the altar, which I'm walking within this image. And that's the same every day. But every day I'm also quite different. In fact, from moment to moment I'm quite different. Sometimes I'm murky. That means kind of dark. Sometimes I'm fumbly.

[38:54]

Sometimes I'm very clear. Sometimes I feel physically very present. Sometimes I feel a kind of strange sensitivity moving through the air toward the altar. Various things. And whatever, while that image of walking the altar remains the same, exactly how I'm walking within that image is different. And I really, I never try to correct that feeling. If I'm feeling murky, I get more murky. Whatever it is, I put my energy into that. So if I'm fumbly, I kind of fumble my way up to the altar and fumble the incense. David hands it to me, I kind of... whatever it is, I do it. I don't care whether it's right or wrong, I do it. Now, whoever's hitting the bell, it's very interesting. Some people will know, instead of taking 28 seconds to get back and start, I'm going to take 40.

[39:57]

And when they start hitting the bell, the first hit I know, the last hit's going to come, you know, because you're speeding up, and the last hit's going to come just when I bow. How do they know? They can't think about it. Sometimes if you think about those things, you feel too connected with people, you're interfering, or it feels something. No, you can't give an image to it. If you give an image to it, you've lost interior consciousness. And one way to practice with this is don't analyze your dreams. I know it's fruitful to analyze dreams and it's interesting, but we're a little greedy for psychic knowledge and stuff. It's okay to do it sometimes, of course, but in practice, enter, I mean, in a way we could say, try this on. If dreams aren't understandable or meant not to be understandable, don't try to understand them. Take the part of your dream that's understandable.

[40:59]

Generally, it's the feeling. You wake up with a feeling. Really enter into that feeling. Now, if you're a professional therapist, you're going to have to analyze that, or maybe you want to, or you enjoy it, I don't know. But I'm just saying, also practice with the feeling. Just staying with the feeling of the dream, whatever it is. In fact, make it more vivid. This kind of practicing with territories of blue or yellow or sounds instead of analyzing, instead of trying to create an image, feeling your way into the map of interior consciousness without thinking, without discursive thought, without analysis. So then there's a kind of bond between myself and the person hitting the bell, where they don't know, but they know that, oh, that's Murky Dick, and he's gonna be slow getting back there, and they somehow, the first two hits know exactly how long it's gonna take, because in the second, it's a little short in the second.

[42:15]

And, oh, there he is, okay. The physical object knew. This is what Linji means by the environment. The striker knew, your hand knew. It's not any... It happens. And once that kind of connection is there, actually through the whole sashina, I can feel that person. Once you make such a connection, and the altar and the handling incense is all practiced at coming to that tensile sense, that can stay, and it can even stay at a distance when the person goes away. Does all really mean like you phone them and they said, oh, I was just going to phone you. This is not magic. It's a kind of connectedness that's possible when we really awaken through yoga practice, interior consciousness.

[43:19]

So all these little things, the Aokibos, how we bow, have all been worked out as a kind of shared mental yogic interior consciousness practice. Something like that. And what I'm trying to do here is limit what we do, you know, or emphasize in what we do those things aspects of Zen practice which have to do with this development of an interior and then internalized exterior or exteriorized consciousness brought into the interior. So sitting in heaps, sitting in the heaps of form, And sound, form and color. What's the next line? Walking on top of form and color. Walking on top of form and sound.

[44:29]

This means both ordinary life, it also means the... Nirmanakaya Buddha. Like Avalokiteshvara, looking down on form and sound, hearing the cries of the world, walking on top of form and sound. It means now, this feeling of gray, this feeling of blue, you're mixing them, using them. Linji, master of his or her environment. Masters, I don't like that word, but on top of, I don't like that. But I think you know what I mean. This is now a kind of vocabulary, like I can speak a sentence and I can speak it in a sequence of words with some grammar that

[45:36]

allow you to understand it. Well, there's a grammar to interior consciousness, too. You're not forcing something unnatural on yourself. You're learning to use the ingredients of interior consciousness to speak and act, just as we use exterior consciousness in the form of language and gesture. So in practicing this asheen, you're here in the midst of a kind of tension between daily life consciousness and non-daily life consciousness. And in that tension and in the lesions of that, up is coming your karma. Lesions means wounds or openings. And then as you begin to feel this karma association come up, sometimes something comes up which is really, you know... One good thing to practice with is noticing the difference between when you're asleep coming into awakeness.

[46:51]

You've heard the wake-up bell. There, at least two hours earlier, there's some mistake. And you can feel a transition into coming into being awake. And that transition is worth studying because it's a transition. That transition is a territory of interior consciousness. And actually that kind of transition is always going. And if you study that transition, you can feel the transition from sleepiness to consciousness and then to a willingness to get up. But you can actually carry that same movement into a more vivid consciousness. To feeling awake right to the tips of your fingers. So again, Sashin is a a tension, first of all, and pull between our cultural conditioning, our daily life consciousness, our non-daily life consciousness, and then kind of a karmic material appearing.

[48:03]

And then within that karmic material we see a certain structure or pattern. And part of the way we activate that pattern is also these little things like you bow and you put your hands here. Now there's various ways, but whatever way you choose, you know, you learn. And it's actually activating a kind of architecture outside you. Just like when you use your Eroki bowl, you put it in this chakra or this chakra. And you bring things to the center and put them down. You move things into the center and that kind of thing. So you begin to feel as this karma comes up and associations and you have a kind of feeling level color, sound, consciousness, you begin to see there's a structure to that or a pattern to that. And that structure or pattern is affected by your external circumstances as well as your internal circumstances.

[49:07]

So this is a kind of riff on how difficult or sitting in the heaps of form and sound, walking on top of form and sound, yet how difficult continuity is. What is this continuity? Thank you very much.

[49:52]

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