giving you more details about sitting posture than you need, at least at present. But I'm assuming you're all mature, not overly finicky or overly ambitious people, and that you won't try to over You know, try to pay too much attention to details to try to achieve something. There's a tendency to want to, particularly for a careful person to learn these things and do it right, but it's better just to be aware of them. Don't even learn them. And don't try to do it right. Just you develop a kind of, well you know the word proprioceptive initially meant, the medical term I believe, or used as a medical term, the body's ability to know when it was upright.

[01:19]

But you can't know mentally. Like in the dark, you can feel yourself upright, but that's a proprioceptive ability, the body's ability to know itself. And in Buddhism, that's a very fundamental idea, for the body to be able to know things, not only know itself, but to know things, without having to be conceptual with mental knowledge, or mental in a simple sense. So as you practice, your body gets so it knows things non-conceptually or more directly. And that's also another reason we put our hands this way, because you begin to be able to experience the space between your fingers and thumbs. And as you begin to experience that space, you begin to be able to feel this larger space. It's like this is a little echo of a larger space.

[02:21]

It's not an accident that in Christianity religious figures are presented with halos and poros and things. But in Buddhism that's not understood as a quality of saintliness, but rather just a quality of being alive. And we don't notice it. If you're a particular kind of person, it's going to be more apparent and people are going to notice it more because you're such a person that everybody looks at you very intently and thinks about you. But this sense of finding your seat where you really just feel here also makes this sense of space much more apparent and tangible. And when your hands begin to really just be there doing their own zazen, it's not you doing zazen.

[03:33]

Your hands are doing zazen, your legs are doing zazen, your shoulders doing zazen. I mean, it's not the you controlling it all. Each part is doing its own meditation. And when that begins to happen, your hands are doing their own meditation, you begin to feel your hands in communication with your stomach. It's all very responsive. You're developing a responsive body that knows something, the best I can say in English. And what I'm trying to do now is go over a little bit some of the territory I spoke about in the talk in Amsterdam the other night. And when now the question of pain and so forth has come up. There's often going to be a kind of numbness in your body, what's sometimes called an off feeling. Suddenly, you don't know where you're... There's a numbness that's different, but it's similar, not entirely different, from suddenly you don't know where your hands are or your shoulders are or something.

[04:45]

Now, some people get a little scared of that. I know I have one very serious and good student that's from Germany who... who lost the sense of where her head was and things. And sometimes you can feel like your shoulder's over there, your legs are up there, and your head maybe is here. You don't know. It's a funny feeling. And some people have it more extreme than others. And this woman had this experience and she even had it outside of Zazen. waking up in the morning, she didn't know if she could reassemble herself to go to work. And she was quite frightened, actually. Oh, my God, I'm going crazy. Where are all the parts of me? But if you're familiar with meditation, and once she realized that this is something that was arising from sitting and it was no big deal, now she rather likes it.

[05:47]

She already knows how she can get that feeling more often. Oh no, that's too much the other direction. Now one of the things that you do in adept practice, which you don't do in ordinary practice, is you actually tell people about some of these things, not so that they can make the shoe fit, but so that they can sense how their practice is developing, the certain signs in practice. And so I mention these things up to a point. And I'm assuming you're all mature enough not to try to say, oh, I'm good or bad because I have these experiences, or I'm not good because I don't have them yet, or, oh, wow, I had one. This is great. I mean, that's nonsense. I mean, it is really nonsense, and it's a normal or natural or common reaction, but not one you should get involved in.

[06:53]

Okay, pain. Now, partly there's just going to be pain as you learn something. This posture is worth learning. So there's going to be a certain amount of stiffness involved. By the way, for you, for instance, I would suggest that you try sometimes sitting and you take a little cushion, you know, and you put the cushion between you like one place and you sit on it like that. Well, you could do a big one like that, the white one. Yeah. That's one possibility and another. Can you slide me that white cushion? Yeah. Yes, a little bit, but . But you can try. And because, as I pointed out many times, Japan is so, so fundamentally has kept, Japan has kept touch with its shamanic and

[08:10]

and yogic roots. And that's why they don't have furniture. Because they want the population to sit in meditation posture. And that's why they don't have handles on their cups. Because they want you to use two hands. Because when you direct your body, I mean, they know how to make handles. And so this posture is very basic old meditation posture. And Japan's losing this now. And they've forgotten why the culture asked people to sit this way. But basically, it's a meditation posture, and you have the whole population sitting in meditation all the time. Okay, so one reason, one is you're just learning it. Two is you've got lots of stuff going on in your body.

[09:13]

A lot of your karma, your experiences, is in your muscles, in your layer, in your body. And this is a clear hold. What I mean is that you're always holding your body in some way. So, for instance, in a monastery, you walk around like this. All the time. not just in king hand. And it makes your back die. But once your back relaxes, then there's no problem. As long as your back has stuff tied up in it, it starts to hurt if you hold. And there's nothing wrong with this hold. I call it a clear hold. In the same way with this posture, if you sit, there's a certain layer, there's certain layers of stuff that you get rid of and that open up and come out if you learn to sit straight.

[10:16]

And after a while, there's not much left in your body and usually your body is, your back is softer in here and you can relax throughout your body. So that's one thing, there's pain involved in that. And we'll sit this way or this way or like this or this. And if you straighten up sometimes it's just emotionally easier to be like this. And when you do straighten up or things change, it feels painful. And your body will, your sort of ego karma will make you want to get up. Because it's going to give up or you're going to give up. In other words, early meditation is a kind of struggle between your karma and your ego and the practice. And you're trying and you're the pains in your posture are often trying to get you to stop because the ego is in a fight with the posture. Does that make sense? And the battleground is you.

[11:17]

And so, okay, so that's another reason that that's happening. Also, zazen is so designed that you can if you really want to and you know how to do it so you're not hurting yourself, and you sit long enough, you can go through quite a lot of stuff. And that's also considered valuable because we have, particularly in our culture, we have no puberty rights. Nothing that tells us the world isn't the way we hoped it would be. There's no rituals of father to son and mother to daughter. father to daughter and mother to son, to pass on things. We don't have any ritual way of doing this anymore. So I think we grow up not being able to face much pain, not being able to face disease, not being able to face lots of things. And so it's actually a kind of ritual of being immediately in your existence in a way that you know you're suffering, you know pain.

[12:29]

And once you can accept it, your own suffering, your own pain. And this is pain you're creating, so it's a little different than something like the doctor tells you you're going to die in a year. But it does make you much more accessible to people who are in trouble, because you're often willing to be in their shoes. And that's much better than somebody who visits you and says, well, I'm glad I'm not sick like you. They're staying inside. So that's another me. I'm just giving you the grace. And then... Then as long as you have a centralized nervous system, we all have, or a way in which you experience things as you, the pain in your body is going to be much more.

[13:46]

In other words, if you can just let your legs do their own sitting, my leg seems to be hurting down there. It's not you hurting anymore, it's the leg hurting. Sometimes you can let your body teach you calmness. I mean when you you're sitting in session and it's no pretty been sitting a long time several days and your legs are just dying and It's you feel it's my legs are dying. I want to get up. This is horrible But if you stop can stop kind of change your point of view And have the feeling Oh yeah, my legs are hurting. How are you? And the legs say, oh, it's not so bad, Lex. And the legs, if you can kind of be independent, just say, oh, those are legs. Legs actually aren't hurting much. It's your receiving the message and say, as soon as you can break that kind of connection, just let your legs be.

[14:55]

Then your legs can teach you more about being calm. So when you can just sit and let your arms be and your legs be, the pain isn't so much. It's the message of the pain and how your brain receives it that's painful. If you change the way the message works, if you're not actually hurting yourself, it's not bad. I had a funny experience. I went to Mount Zion. hospital once for a multiphasic medical examination. And this is, they give you a lot of tests. I thought I should do it or someone told me. And one of the things they do is they monitor your pain threshold. And they have a little sort of metal thing they squeeze your Achilles tendon with. So I didn't know what they were doing. This woman was down there, this nurse. So I'm standing there, and I could tell it wasn't doing me any damage.

[16:01]

I guess it was supposed to hurt, but I was just standing there. She was doing this now. I didn't know what the hell she was doing. And finally she said, doesn't it hurt? Because I certainly would have let her know if there had been damage being done. But it was just, for me, it was just pressure, greater pressure. And I wasn't reacting to it. It was a little peculiar. But I'm not particularly tough, you know. I'm kind of weaky. But I've just gotten used to letting things be. She was doing the same thing. So I said, oh, is it supposed to? Oh, yeah, it hurts. I said, no. But that's not anything special. It's just, you know, you're sitting. See, I get used to my legs hurting. They hurt right now. But they're... Is that enough on pain? Is that all? You only give, say, good reasons for suffering the pain or by saying it's other neutral.

[17:12]

On the other hand, you have emphasized not to be too aware of the correct position. Yeah, all those things. Yeah, so that's the other side. You have to work it out. Yeah. It is quite a subtle negotiation aspect. Basically this practice, the fundamental posture of this practice is uncorrected mind. But uncorrected mind is itself a correction. Do you make sense? Seeing it as the miracle. To try it. Say, oh, do I have uncorrected mind? You're correct. Okay. So the question is, how do you do it? How do you have all this information about practice and just let it happen and not act?

[18:16]

How do you have pain? All right, so I'll give you, during this weekend, I'll give you 10 or 20 practices you can do. And then you'll say to me, Well, do I do some of these practices? Do I not do some of these practices? What do I do when I'm moving? Well, okay, you're practicing. And you decide to count your breath. Then you think, well, that's a correction to decide to count my breath. No, I won't count my breath. But to decide not to count my breath is also a correction. What do you do? At this level of thinking, there's no answer. So you begin to feel, oh, well, I started counting my breaths. I guess I'll count my breaths. One. Then you stop.

[19:40]

Oh, okay. And then you sit for a while, and then something else. Maybe I should... Not drilling in myriad things. So you repeat that to yourself. I can't tell you what's the right way to do it, because really I'm trying to teach you uncorrected state of mind. Now, this is sort of amusing here. From ancient... From ancient... This is a koan which starts out. Have all the sages since antiquity... Have all the sages since antiquity... Sages... Wise men.

[20:46]

Yeah, the devisants. If all the devisants since antiquity had a truth that they haven't spoken for people. And Nan Chuan says, they have. And then in the commentary it says, in fact, from ancient times till now, the ancestors and the Buddhas have never spoken for people. Never taught anything. But this very not helping people deserves special investigation. So this is something I can give you the general feeling for, and I can give you lots of practices. But how you practice uncorrected mind, which is also allowing certain practices to happen, And this is something you have to find out by your feeling and your skin and your general health.

[21:53]

So if you're... And you should have the freedom to move when you sit. But you should also have the freedom to sit still. And learning to sit still is quite important and difficult to do. So there's going to be some pain while you learn how to sit still. It's just the way it is. Now, I brought these books partly just to show you that these are the two main collections of Collins, Luke Cliff Records or the Heikigan Roku, and the Book of Serenity or the Shoyu Roku. And these are the most classic and central teachings in Zen Buddhism. and most unique. There's no other school of Buddhism which uses these kind of teaching stories like this. And so I have my placemark with Goethe's bed. I lie to myself.

[23:03]

That's where he died, I believe. Weimar, Goethe's house, bedroom with deathbed. This is this koan I gave you the other day. A raja of an East Indian country invited the 27th Buddhist patriarch, Prajnathara, to a feast. Can you understand what I'm reading? No. No? Okay. A raja. Raja? Prince. Prince, yes. A raja of an East Indian country invited the 27th Buddhist patriarch... Prajnathara to a feast. And the Raja asked him, why don't you read the scriptures? Why don't you read the scriptures? Buddhist scriptures.

[24:04]

Yeah. The patriarch said, this poor wayfarer, wayfarer, one who travels, one who goes along the way, A wayfarer, this poor wayfarer, doesn't dwell in the realms of body or mind when breathing in. Doesn't get involved in myriad circumstances when breathing out. I always reiterate, such reiterate, say over and over again, reiterate, I always reiterate such a scripture, hundreds, thousands, billions of scrolls. Okay. So that's scrolls? Scrolls. Dead Sea Scrolls, unrolling the teaching. What are you saying? Scrolls. Scrolls. Scrolls.

[25:04]

Scrolls. Scrolls. They didn't have books. They had rubles. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Now, that's the koan. And there's just... This koan has all of Buddhism in it, all of Zen in it. And... Or it's utilized in that way. So, for instance, here's a little of the commentary just to show you what we're talking about. The opening two lines eulogize of a poem. Now, so then they comment, I'll just give you a little more to show you how Zen works. So there's a poem that comments on the case. And the first two lines are, a cloud rhinoceros, rhinoceros? A cloud rhinoceros gazes at the moon.

[26:09]

You can just imagine this great cloud figure of this horn that looks like a rhinoceros, and it's illuminated, perhaps, by the late sun and the moon. It's all glowing. A clouded rhinoceros gazes at the moon, its life-engulfing radiance. Life-engulfing? Life-engulfing to completely swallow, to completely fill. Yeah, okay. If the dam broke, the Zyder Z, you'd have Holland would be engulfed. It's life engulfing radiance. That's the first line. The second line is a wood horse romps in the spring. A wooden horse gallops in the spring, swift and unbridled. Swift and without bridle. Okay. Now, these opening two lines eulogize, comment on, not dwelling in the realms of body or mind and not involved in myriad circumstances.

[27:22]

Now, if you're practicing Zen, you have to kind of be able to get why, how these two lines about a wooden horse and a cloud rhinoceros have anything to do with breathing in and breathing out. So actually, as you must be able to see, this is a coded language. This is coded for adepts. And the idea that these are simple riddles is nonsense. And this is just the way Zen has decided to do it. I can't tell you. I'm just teaching the stuff to you. Okay. Okay. So, then it goes on to try to make this clearer. According to the analysis of the canonical teachings, the basic teachings, the five clusters we talked about, the five skandhas, form, feeling, perceptions, impulses, consciousness. The five clusters in the 12 sense media, 12 sense fields, eye, form, ear, sound,

[28:29]

nose, smell, tongue, taste, body, feel, mind phenomena. These are the vijnanas. And the 18 elements, the 12 media plus the 6 associated consciousness, these are all called the three groups. When Prajnathara brought up this body and mind, what he really meant was, without implicitly saying it, was this whole teaching in the vijnanas, sense fields, and the skandhas. So some people say, Zen teachers never talk about the skandhas and the vishyanas. This is the background that you need to understand this koan. And we talked in Belgium about the vishyanas, didn't we? I think that's what we talked about. So then it goes on, he says, about the Sanskrit word, which is translated as breathing out and breathing in. Now there's a Sanskrit word which doesn't just mean breathing, it really means breathing out and breathing in.

[29:32]

Anapana. And there are six methods involved with this. Counting, following, stopping, contemplating, returning, and purification. So this also, Colin, assumes that you know all these practices of breathing. Counting, following, stopping, contemplating, returning, purification. So And this kind of breathing, you actually, when you practice breathing, when you're breathing, you're doing some of these all the time. It's just that you don't notice it. And practice is to begin to notice it and see the different states of mind, different kinds of being that arise when you notice these things. So, now, if we don't do anything else, it says here, If you have not yet embraced the principles of these teachings, meaning the vision is ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, you have no basis to abstain understanding, to attain, to realize understanding of the mystic path.

[30:46]

So what we can do here, this, we can, as much as you want, we can look at these teachings. because it's the basis for the understanding that this koan's really about. But without that basis, it's really hard to get. But again, you have to be able to hear these things and just hear them and let them be seeds and not try to do all of those things. But that's also... you know, partly if you were living with me, Crestone, what I'd try to do is to find a way to, first of all, get you so that you hear the teaching without trying to make the teaching part of your personality. Because as long as you take the teaching as part of your personality, I shouldn't be teaching. Does that make sense? So I'm just telling you this so you can get a feeling for it.

[31:52]

what we're trying to do. What if it's a myth story? Yeah, I'm noticing a story here. Keejo, a teacher, asked another man, Renshan, to receive the robin teaching, to receive transmission. And Renshan said, I am not such a person to receive transmission. And Jijo said, since you are not such a person, you are such a person.

[33:00]

He actually says, since you are not such a person, you do not afflict him. But it means the one who is not busy. Does that make sense? You don't interfere with the one who actually hears the teaching. So somehow what I'm saying here is, is the best way to approach these teachings is you're interested, they affect you, they're part of what you're doing in Zazen. At the same time, you hear them like they're in a movie or something. You don't try to take hold of them. You just hear them, oh, that's interesting. Yeah. And see, the second level here is a priceless jewel is hidden within the pit of the clusters of being.

[34:02]

A priceless jewel is hidden within the clusters of being. So this koan starts out with, well, you have to learn how to breathe, count your breathing. And then the more deviant part is the subtler side of that is there's a jewel hidden within the clusters of being. Well, what are the clusters of being? This is a way of how you experience yourself. And clusters of being is not so different than my saying there are many rooms in this room. It's clusters. Oh, a cluster. I know that. It happens in German, too. But nobody knows what a word is, and then they find out it's a word that sounds just like English, except it sounds like English pronounced differently.

[35:04]

Okay. Now, I don't mean to... bother you with these books but I just wanted you to see that what I'm talking about is in these koans and I'm just trying to make it as clear as is useful to you. I'd like to stop talking for at least a few minutes and we're going to stop altogether in a few minutes but is there anything anybody would like to say or bring up? Lunch is in half an hour or so. Yesterday you talked about being exposed in the golden wind. That was a koan. Yeah, it's a koan. A monk asked the young man, how is it when the tree withers and the leaves fall?

[36:11]

The young man said, body exposed in the golden wind. Well, I can't, I don't catch the connection of these two. That's the point. Yes. The first time I spoke in Winchester, it was as if the wind was going through a grain field. Yeah, it's like that too. Now, none of this stuff works unless you bring your life to it. In other words, you can read a con, but if your own stuff doesn't get mixed up in that con, the con means nothing. Or it means something quite unimportant. It's that when you study a koan or study Buddhist teachings or do your zazen, Buddhist posture is here, but mostly you just bring your stuff to it. Psychology, your story, your emotions. And the koan works if 90% of the koan is you.

[37:16]

When 90% is you, then koan has a certain power. But when it's 90% koan and you sort of... That's me. So when you have a phrase like this, body exposed in the golden wind, and this image comes up of the wind and wheat field, that's right, that's you, and that's part of the kong. And then when you have, what about when the tree withers and the leaves fall? Then you have something else now that can be present. It's not meant to be thought about. It's just meant to be present. Let me give it to you. How is it when the tree withers and the leaves fall?

[38:20]

And the pointer, the introduction, says, ask one, answer ten. Raise one, understand three. Seeing the rabbit, he loses the falcon. He uses the wind to fan the flame. He doesn't spare the eyebrows. But how about this, entering the tiger's lair? Here, listen to this old story. Jung then is also famous for all his one-word, one-phrase answers usually have three qualities in it. And there's a teaching about the three, his answers are always very short, but there's always usually these several dimensions of Buddhism, his short answers. So just a koan like that, you start out with the feeling of it, body exposed in the golden wind, and you can stay with it for a year or two because these various kinds of teachings are there.

[39:26]

And you don't have to rush it. And each part of it is quite satisfying. And don't think of it in terms of, oh, there's enhancers somewhere, I have to get to the answer. That's a very limited way of studying koans. I mean, I've been working with koans now for 30 years or more, and koans in which turned my life around. I still come back to them. things find out me that I didn't see before. I feel I've given you a little too much this month, and I didn't intend to. I really just intended to talk about posture, but why don't we sit for a minute and then In any posture you are, just sit as you are.

[40:30]

And then we'll go have lunch or get ready for lunch. Parameters? I'll read you a couple things just to bring this koan a little more into focus. And also because I'm experimenting with, can koans be taught? To what degree can they be taught in lay situations? I was just in Japan for three weeks, and we spent a week in Kyoto getting used to sort of Japanese life and things. And then we went up to a little house I have on the beach up on the end of the peninsula facing Korea, which is a wonderful little house.

[41:36]

Not as big as this room, but pretty big for a Japanese house, and we all stayed there. And we worked on cons every day. Went to the beach in the afternoons. Pardon that. We're actually pretty effective. We're talking about breathing now, and we're talking about, remember, why don't you read the scriptures? This poor wayfarer doesn't dwell in the realms of the body and mind. Breathing in doesn't get involved in myriad circumstances when breathing out I Always reiterate such a scripture hundreds thousands millions of scrolls Okay, so that's the basic case And it says here

[42:47]

In the subtle round mouth of the pivot turns the spiritual works. The pivot is like the door hinge and the hole in which the door hinge thing goes is the pivot. Do you understand? In the subtle round mouth of the pivot turns the spiritual works. This is the subtle round mouth of the pivot turns the spiritual works. What spiritual works are being turned in the mouth? It's very vivid, isn't it? In the ancient classic era, the pivot is called the hinge nest. The hinge nest. Now, do any of you know Tsukiyoshi's book? In Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, he has a section where he says, breathing is a swinging door.

[43:50]

That's this teaching. A simpler form, but it's this teaching. The pivot is called the hinge nest. Guopu's annotation says that it is a der hinge. Flowing water doesn't go stale, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so that's one thing. It also says here, the whole earth is the student's eye. The whole world is the student's volume of scripture. The whole earth is the student's volume of scripture. The whole world is the student's eye. And as I've said before, it begins with the state before the beginning of time. A turtle heads for the fire. The one phrase specially transmitted outside of doctrine, the lip of a mortar bears flowers.

[44:59]

Now tell me, is there any accepting and upholding, reading and reciting in this? Now, I don't expect you to remember all that, or even to have gotten it. I just want to introduce you to a few more key phrases from the koan, primarily this door hinge. Student's I is I-E. I-Y-E. I-Y. Now, you had a couple questions. Do you want to bring them up? I think about putting much emphasis on the senses. There is also written in scriptures by Zen Master Laki Wampo that you should beware of putting too much trust on the senses or empathies.

[46:28]

Because the Dharma is not dependent on anything, not on senses either. So if you would be blind and deaf and dumb, you also... could have adverbs to the Dharma. Might be better, actually. Huh? Might be better. Right. So that's one part of the question. Do you want to say that in Dutch, or do you understand what she's saying? Yeah, another part of it is that I have noticed that my... Psychotherapies, these things are used as a tool. And a lot of them come out of mindfulness practices. So, for instance, Avatar, which is the hottest news in Amsterdam.

[47:30]

It's a new thing, which combines Buddhism and psychotherapy. And they started with mindfulness practice of this, what you're talking about, like seeing things from this field. kind of for you. And after that, they had to work with that to pay $2,000. I should start charging more. But, you know, it's a good sort of, yeah. People who have meditated for a long time say, well, this is really the gap between sacrifice and Buddhism. Avatarism. Huh? Avatarism. Because you get tools, and in Buddhism, you never really know how to do it or something. Anyway, this takes a long time. Who's teaching the avatar?

[48:31]

Well, in Amsterdam, quite a few Dutch people. Oh, huh. went over. There's also a teacher who's supposed to be enlightened in the Advaita Vedanta tradition. At the moment, he's going to Florida to learn it because he's 72 cents. It's a very important thing, you know. 50 students will just go with him. Really, yeah. Yeah, a woman I know was the first teacher in Germany. And... She knows the man who originated it, and I think I met him once, I don't know. But she thinks he's learned it, he's got it mostly from reading Castaneda. That's what she thinks. Castaneda? Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, you know, you emphasize it quite a lot, this going on with this kind of work. It appeals to me too.

[49:35]

Yeah. Yeah, I know a lot about the background of this avatar and its relation to the quadrinity process of Bob Hoffman. Yeah, well, we should create more tools. I think there'll be many teachings that arise that are actually much more accessible than Buddhism to people and that will be done, these kind of programs offering lots of results. I can't do that. I can't promise any results. Oh dear. Okay, so go ahead with your... But you also had a feeling of religion, or where does religion and something more basic or something start?

[50:44]

Yeah, like the roots of Buddhism. Buddhism is obviously a religion somehow. Creative Book of Republic of Asian Countries Address on Nature Religion. Traumatistic stuff. And I think the Tibetan Buddhism, the Vajrayana, really sort of introduces the old stuff back into Buddhism after they have cleaned it out in the first stages. That's my guess. But I wonder, in the West, we don't have this connection with the base anymore, so we make it maybe much quicker into a religion. I also think about the The way we stand in this, because we are all pioneering right now, I feel, you know, kindergarten level, maybe, to grasp this whole thing.

[51:53]

And I feel confused about it myself, because... I tend to feel that they're most interested in the real basic Uyghur stuff, in the original, let's say, North American Indian stuff and so on. That's the most honest and clean stuff. I also wonder whether Buddhism has subjugated that too in Asia, in a way. Yeah, anybody else have some ideas along the lines of Anu? Feelings? No, I just thought it was suffocating. Subtigated, over-drugged. Would you repeat, please, that what you said about the Indians and Buddhism?

[52:58]

Because I don't understand that. We talked this evening about it. I'm interested because I just visited the Indians, and I'm attracted to both, to Zen Buddhism and to the Indian spirituality. The American? Yeah. I don't know. I really come to generalize. It's very worthwhile. Okay, anybody else have something to say about it? What is this thing we're doing? Well, that's another point, but sometimes I ask myself, if you see people living in a Buddhist society like in Asia, they don't say they actually practice in Buddhism, but I think they have in some sense in their mind maybe a stronger contact with that Buddhism.

[54:09]

They say that they have nothing to do with it. Definitely, they say that Japanese businessmen will say, I don't know anything about Zen Buddhism, that's in the mountains and it's cold and hard, or something like that. But they'll go to a meeting with German and Dutch and American businessmen, and they'll control the agenda with their stomachs. And they'll control things in the meetings by how they move something on the table. It's just straight out Buddhism. They don't know it anymore. It's just part of the culture. Yeah, that's what I mean, because I might feel attracted to Buddhism, but I feel like I'm really part of that Christian society I was born in. I feel things I was just brought up with, which are still really strong.

[55:12]

Yeah, there's a lot of... I've known some major Buddhists who, in the last days of their life, they ask for a priest. So when the chips are down, what comes out is heaven or a priest. You said these Japanese people controlled it? What did they do? affected or controlled the agenda of the meeting. Agenda? By being able to draw energy into their stomach and energy out of the people who are speaking and so forth. That sounds more shamanistic than Buddhist. Buddhism is a form of shamanism. Where is it then?

[56:17]

Where is it now? Yeah. Well, I don't... You see... I mean, I don't... I'm not proposing that I have answers to these things. I'm just going to tell you where I put my life and what decisions I've made. Growing up in America and having some contact with Indian shamans and quite a lot of contact And working with two people who are Westerners who are, one, very trained in shamanism, the other, knowledges of shaman, I just don't think you can go very far in shamanism in comparison to Buddhism.

[57:24]

That's just my view on that, but there's any comparison. I mean, there's overlapping territory, but that's about it. I would say that Zen or Buddhism is a large population urban shamanism. It's not dependent on your native village or the particular mountain or the plant life, etc. But it's a shamanism, kind of shamanism, developed in China and India. But the root of it is yogic. yogic practice. And Buddhism, to my mind, and I'm just again telling you that, is a very, very worked out system. Far more worked out than shamanism is.

[58:26]

And so it's much more useful to us because we live in a complex civilization and so forth. Now there are two important women teachers in America who talking with Anna, one I knew and the other I just found out, have said that they're not Buddhists. Their roots are Buddhism. They started out in Buddhism, but they don't call themselves Buddhists anymore. That's interesting to me because there's no way I would not call myself a Buddhist. I might be a lousy Buddhist, but I'm definitely a Buddhist. And I'm not a Christian disguised as a Buddhist. I'm pretty clear that my roots, the way I see things, are not underneath it Christian, I'm pretty sure. But I think that the way Christianity and Buddhism may affect each other is really quite interesting and valuable, and I think, I would say most people I know that I practice with

[59:40]

deep down remain Christian. And their intuitive way of looking at things ultimately is Christian. Could you give an example in which they are more Christian? Yeah, this is hard to answer, but I can try. There's a poem. Well, here's an example. There's a koan I like using, one of the ones I want my students to know, which is Daowu and Yunyan are somewhere. Yunyan is sweeping. Yunyan is sweeping. And Daowu comes in and says, you're too busy, too busy. Yunyan says, You should know there is one who is not busy.

[60:51]

Dao says, Oh, so, a double moon. Yunyan says, Is this a double moon? That's a very basic koan. One of my oldest students said, but isn't saying there's no double moon a double moon? You don't understand this language, so I have to explain. And I said, no, it's not the same. They said, well, I want to keep the door open for perhaps there being a double moon. That's Christian. When you say, it rains, that's Christianity. When you think there's a doer behind things or any ground, when you speak of a grounded being, that's Christianity.

[61:55]

When you speak about all is one, that's Christianity. In Buddhism, all isn't one. What about Buddha nature? I remember one thing from Suzuki Roshi's book where he says about Buddha nature, something formless which is at every moment ready to take form. If that's something that... If you understand that as a substance, then you're into a Christian way of doing things, a Judeo-Christian way. Yeah, the question of Buddha nature is, there have been actually two women that have done quite marvelous books. One a woman named Sally Field, I think, is that right? No, sorry, Sally, oh, right back, called Buddha Nature. Another one, a woman written, a book written by a woman who's I guess Indian, married to a, I mean, you know, Indian Indian, married to a, I don't know. Somebody.

[62:58]

I can't tell by her last name, but she's done a book on the Buddha within. And they're both studies of Buddha nature. Quite good books. And they both point out that Buddha nature, for many times, for Buddhists, has slipped into being a kind of double moon. Now, the idea of a double moon is that See, Jungian says, Daewoo says, there is one, you're too busy. Jungian says, you should know there is one who's not busy. Meaning that in the midst of this busyness, there's a deeper sense of being, or there's Buddha, which is not busy. So, is he positing two things? a deeper reality, a grounded being. So he says, aha, a double moon. A double moon means there's the moon there and then there's the real moon behind it, like Plato's idea of an ideal form.

[64:02]

And so Dao says, is this a double moon? So in Buddhism, there's nothing behind this. This is it. If there's spirituality, this is spirituality. If there's God, this is God. There's no other. That's completely the teaching of Buddhism. Very hard to accept that. Very hard to accept that. And our language, when you say it reigns, our language poses, our language always assumes in it that there's an actor and a doer. Why am I a Buddhist?

[65:05]

Why would I not, I have to ask, I'm just asking myself the question in front of you. Could I at some point say, okay, I'm teaching this stuff, we don't need Buddhism. But one is I know where I get this stuff, and it's Buddhism. So it wouldn't be quite straight of me to say that. Two, I can constantly open up my practice and understand it better by going back to Buddhism, by going back to tradition. And for me, Buddhism is a language. It's not the truth. It's a language about the truth. And it's not a revealed religion where the truth revealed teaching. Christianity assumes that the truth revealed the truth to us. But there's no such thing. In Buddhism, Buddhism is just us guys.

[66:10]

And we can change Buddhism. You can change Buddhism. There's nothing that we have to be stuck to. So, So Buddhism being a language, I'm using the language all the time, and the language I find, it's a meta-language, it's a language about languages. And I find this language is always revealing itself. And this sutra, this column right here says, when you really are practicing, the world becomes one. The whole earth becomes the scripture. So this is a lot like Don Juan. Castaneda is always learning things from the world by being in a certain state of mind.

[67:12]

But I don't know Castaneda personally, but Castaneda's books are definitely fabrications. They're novels. They may be the truth, but they're novels. he's definitely influenced by Buddhism. It's not pure Shamanism. I'm not saying that what he's writing is Buddhism, but I know the ideas that are current in the world he lives in, and I can see them appear in the later books and not in the earlier books. But I mean, I think Kesem is fantastic. I'm not putting down at all. I think he's just an amazing creation that he's done. that he's been able to put out so much that's so far out and make very much of it plausible, particularly if you know, if I read it the way I read Kant. But it's still something he's fabricating.

[68:17]

I mean, it's true, but those events as they happened, I don't think happened. Isn't that the same as with koans? Koans are fabrication. Yeah. We could take a story tonight and say that I told about the double moon and you said something else. We'd write it down and then we'd put commentary on it and we'd have a koan. So I don't find any problems with using this language. In fact, it's It's this time and what I've been trying to do is I think trying to show you how the language you use is also spiritual language. It's like breathing. There's the physical act of breathing, the chemistry of breathing, which establishes the clarity, the possibility of clarity.

[69:28]

When you begin to bring your attention to your breathing, And when you begin to bring your attention to your breathing, then you're doing spiritual breathing. I'm just making these terms up, but we can say spiritual breathing. And the word in English, the word spirit, of course, means breath. inspire, expire, so forth. And when the breathing is, and subtle breathing is your energy, how your energy works, your psychic channels work. So there's three levels of breathing. There's the chemical chemistry, and then there's what I would call spiritual breathing, or mindful breathing, and then subtle breathing. which is a kind of subtle way your energy works that's monitored by your breathing, but is a kind, in Tibetan Buddhism it's called whims.

[70:40]

About the double. In the koal, you said there's one who's busy and there's one who's not busy. That sounds familiar. I've been reading that some teachers say that everyone has a Buddha nature already, so there's something double there too. Yeah, but we all have a Buddha nature, that's right. Or we don't have a Buddha nature, we are a Buddha nature. So isn't that the double? No. Why not? Why not? I don't know.

[71:49]

I don't know. I don't know. When you do zazen, your posture is informed by Buddha's posture. And at the same time, it's your posture. Is that two postures? The one that beats falling becomes the other. There's definitely difference. I mean, there's definitely different things in the world, but that doesn't mean that there's something behind that that joins them all.

[72:55]

For instance, if you say all is one, then there's a double moon. But I think that this philosophical way of talking is kind of boring to keep this up. But we can come back to it. I mean, I'm not abandoning the question. I just don't want to... Is it candy or tape? It's tape. Okay. Okay. You see, make as much noise as you want. Just do it. It didn't work. Yeah, just do it. Well, but it's like these people try to blow their nose silently. And you wish, please blow your nose, you know.

[74:02]

The whole Zen does waiting while ten minutes pass for a perfect time. It's better just to blow your nose. Okay. let's see we exist this room is here I'm sitting here if I say and I'm breathing if I say I can pay attention to my breathing Then I've created a language. I've created a teaching. That we talked about last night, right?

[75:02]

Okay. If I say that the mode of perceiving something is like the five skandhas. There's form. I have a feeling about it. I change that feeling into a perception. And then I associate that perception with many things, and altogether that is consciousness. There's a kind of common sense to that, or logic to that. But that's a language. And if you divide, if you take Freud and you say what we are is id, ego, and superego, that's a language. And it affects the way you see the world. It affects the way your therapist talks to you. If the therapist talks to you in terms of the five skandhas, he'll talk to you differently.

[76:07]

So I am interested in what language... seems to me to be the most thorough and developed. And so far, as far as I can tell, it's Buddhism. So I use Buddhist language. But as soon as I say the five skandhas, it's no longer natural. But it's not natural in the first place, because as soon as your parents smile at you, nature is gone. They're already influencing you. As soon as you... Start speaking a language. It scopes your cheeks. And Dutch people look different from German people even though the language is similar. The face is molded different. And Japanese people in... Native Japanese, Japanese people who are fully genetically Japanese, who I run into in Japan, who were born in Canada or the United States, I walk up to them and start speaking English.

[77:22]

I can see the English in their face. They're not Japanese. I mean, they don't. So there's no way to get away from we've already got form. Now, Buddhism is a teaching which tries to work with form, create form, and undo form. And therapists will use lots of stuff in Buddhism. There's no reason why they shouldn't. And there's a few therapists, I think, who actually seem to understand Buddhism. But most therapists are just using things from mindfulness practice. I think it would be useful if I did this thing, which I did at the lecture, about the constructor, the rope, because that creates a certain... Do you mind if those of you who are going to go through that at the lecture, I do it again? Okay. So I was at a seminar. It might have been...

[78:24]

somewhere, and a woman said to me, because I was talking about that things are a mental construct, and a woman said to me, she, that night after the seminar, had awakened in the middle of the night with the, sounded like somebody climbing in the window, and she said, then she finally got up and found out it was just a window banging. And she said, is this what you meant by a mental construct? That the window is, I think we talked about this in Munster a little bit, that the window is, the person climbing in the window was a mental construct of mine. And I said, yes, it's true. But that's not all that I meant. Because the window banging was also a mental construct.

[79:28]

And the classic example of this is, again, there's a person walking along and sees a turtle-nosed snake. That's a call on a turtle-nosed snake. Sees a snake and they jump back and they realize it's a rope. So they're not scared. They say, oh, it was just a mental construct of mine. And in fact, it was only a rope. But then they look at the rope or the stick and they see that it's also a construct of fibers, leather, of wood, and so forth. The point here is, of course, that the physical world is a construct. The perception of the world is a construct. Even if it's a perception of a rope, it's still a construct. And if you perceive it as a snake, it's also a construct. That's clear, right? That's not clear? No, when I see a snake, it isn't. Why should it be a construct? It is a snake. But it's also in you a construct. All right.

[80:33]

So what is the meaning of this teaching, this rope example? I remember when I first heard this rope example, I thought this was simple common sense. Of course, you know it's a rope and it's not a snake. But the point is that So I'll use you as an example, okay? Because you're golden and red and yellow. Nice person to look at. Okay, so when I look at her, your name's Elizabeth too? Okay. When I look at Elizabeth, I have a daughter named Elizabeth. Lisbet. Lisbet, yeah. I have a daughter named Elizabeth who's just turned 13 and is 176 centimeters tall. How tall are you? Six foot one. Six foot one. How old is she? Just turned 13. And she's really going. She feels proud of herself. And she said to me a couple years ago when she was going, she said, Dad, I want to be half an inch taller than you.

[81:35]

I said, okay, I should find it. I said, but what about the boyfriend? She said, any man who's scared of a tall woman isn't worth thinking about. I said, okay. I said, I don't know, but what about when you're 16? She said, we'll see. Anyway, so now she's 176 and a half centimeters. So, when I look at you, Elizabeth, what I see is When I see you, I'm seeing something that my senses are putting together. I mean, I know you're there. But what I see of you occurs within my sense fields. I'm constructing you. And the more closely I look at you, I could close my eyes and visualize you and open my eyes. The way the collar is on your neck and your earrings and your blonde hair and your gray socks and so forth.

[82:42]

Now, so the term mind only in Buddhism doesn't mean the English philosophers, Berkeley's sense of everything is only not real out there. It means the world exists. but I only can know it as mine. It's as if my mind is a liquid substance and I am generating you in this liquid. Now, one of the differences here is, once I know you're a construct, you're in this field, I can broaden that construct, dim it, make it more vivid. I can get depressed and barely see you, and so forth. I can intuitively coordinate my breathing with yours. I can intuitively coordinate my breathing with yours.

[83:44]

Now, let's take that another step further. This construct I've made of you inside myself, which I look at inside myself, is the same as saying, hearing, hearing. But I'm seeing myself see you. When I see myself see you, it's not a static concept or construction. It's changing all the time because you're changing all the time. So it has to keep changing in relationship to you. So I have to be a person who can receive this construct and let it change inside me. So the more vivid this is, the more the construct of you begins to have a life of its own in me. So now let me just again make a kind of exaggerated but true example.

[84:57]

If I run into somebody, as I did in the lecture the other day, if I run into somebody in ten years and I've known them well, that construct of them, through my knowing them well, will have aged. And when I see them after 10 years, I won't be surprised. They'll look the way I expected them to look. But if you don't know somebody that well, you see them later like seeing somebody who's a friend of somebody. And then you're startled, like, they look old. Because they didn't age in you. You didn't know them very well, and you just remember them as you met them when they were 30, and now they're 40 or something. And often with a good friend, this construct has such vividness that you can meet somebody ten years later and pick up a conversation where you left off. Now, this is part of what this koan's about.

[86:07]

When you do this, when you develop... When you hear yourself hearing, as I said, this is a different world than just hearing the plane or hearing the mosquito or hearing something. The mosquito begins to fly through your field in a different way. You can feel it articulating your field. In fact, the mosquito may even sort of fly within your feet, bouncing off the edges of it or something like that. I mean, I'm just saying something. When I make a construct, like hearing, hearing, I make a construct of myself, I know, I can see myself perceiving you. And not only just doing that, I'm also maturing my continuum and increasing the capacity for me to myself.

[87:16]

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