Okay, are you ready, Nicole? Yes, I am. She says no. That was a yes. Okay, so we're starting. Yes, we are. Oh. Okay. Good morning. Good morning. Or good afternoon, rather, for you in Europe. einen schönen Morgen oder einen schönen Nachmittag. We are still trying to thread the needle of the West with the lineage of Zen Buddhism. Wir versuchen immer noch die Nadel des Westens mit der Leerlinie des Buddhismus zusammenzubringen oder einzufädeln. And that means also to bring a new kind of monastic inclusion into lay practice.

[01:09]

And certainly a new kind of lay life which did not exist in the Tang and Sung dynasties when Zen took its form. And certainly a new kind of lay life which did not exist in the Tang and Sung dynasties when Zen took its form. And it's clear that the COVID pandemic pushed me from what maybe I could call in-line face-to-face teaching into or onto online practice and teaching. And it's clear that the COVID-19 situation pushed me from what we might call an aligned or in-line practice from face-to-face into an online teaching and practice.

[02:24]

Yes, and... But now that I'm doing it, I recognize that I am quite sure that online practice and teaching with you and with others will continue to be part of Zen practice in the West. Aber jetzt, wo wir damit angefangen haben und ich das tue, da bin ich mir ganz sicher, dass die online Praxis und Lehre und das, was wir hier miteinander tun, Teil der Zen-Praxis im Westen sein wird. Even if the COVID pandemic becomes a year-round COVID season still, or ends, still there will be, I think now, online Zen practice and teaching.

[03:36]

I think even if the COVID pandemic has a full-year season, or even if the virus can be suppressed, I think the online teaching will be part of our teaching and practice. It becomes a year-round COVID season. Yeah, I tried to say that. Okay, fine. That's a long season. Yeah. Yeah, and I know there's many people who can't easily make it to a Zen practice center. because of age or circumstances, it's not easy to come to a Zen practice center.

[04:44]

And then I know many, a number of practitioners who had enlightenment experiences when they were even teenagers. And I'm sure it's happening right now. Teenagers aren't that different. And I'm sure they would be good if they could find online support, confirmation, some sort of feel for realisational practice which supports their enlightenment experiences. And I am sure that this is still happening today.

[05:45]

Teenagers have not changed so much. This is certainly still happening. And then it would be good if these young people had access to online teachings and support that promotes and supports their enlightenment experiences. And last week, last Sunday, I spoke about the gestural path. And unless you explore this gestural path yourself, you won't discover much about it because it opens up into a tuning of yourself with the world. And if you don't explore this gesture path for yourself, then you will never learn much about it, because the gesture path leads you into a new kind of harmony with the world.

[06:49]

And I need to keep, I think, coming back to these basic practices, basic concepts, so that we get them into our system. So the gestural path we could call, well, it's spatially conceived and, yeah, biologically articulated, physically, bodily articulated. Über den gestischen Pfad könnten wir sagen, dass er räumlich gedacht ist, aber körperlich artikuliert wird. When you struggle with the translation, it always makes me, often makes me smile a little bit because it makes me feel how much I struggle with trying to find out how to say it in English, and then you try to find out how to say it in Deutsch.

[08:10]

When you have to fight with the translation, then someone has to smile about it, because it reminds me how difficult it is for me to find words for all this in English. And then of course I know how it is for you to find words for it in German. Of course everything is biological. But when you, for example, align intentionality with attentionality, you can change the world, you can change your own world. And aligning intentionality with attentionality is the basic dynamic of Buddhist wisdom practice. Yeah, so the gestural path is awakened in the body biologically when the gestural path is articulated with the chakra column and the spine.

[09:42]

And you begin to feel that presence, the biological bodily presence of the spine and the chakra column in everything you do. And you begin to feel the presence of the spine and the chakra column in everything you do. your whole body becomes like a column which folds out into the world and folds the world in. Deine... Diese ganze Säule wird dann zu etwas, wo du die Welt hineinfalten kannst und woraus heraus du die Welt entfalten kannst.

[10:58]

Ja, and you're... You're... finding yourself in tune with the paths of the world, because this is a gestural path, and the gestural path is a twin with the successional path. So again, the successional path is an ongoing journey. experience of one thing after another, in what I would sometimes call zontal time or in horizontal time,

[12:04]

Horizontal is, of course, like the horizon. So the experience of horizontal time is it's time which isn't going anywhere. It's not going into the future. It's just present in the present. It doesn't go anywhere, but what did you say? It's just in the present. It's present in the present. So you don't feel so much the pressure to do things and to go places because the present is the present. It doesn't have to go into the future. And then you don't feel so much the pressure to go somewhere and to do things because the present is the present and doesn't flow directly into the future.

[13:39]

It doesn't mean you don't go into the future, of course, but the feeling is your fundamental location is just in the present and there's no need to go anywhere or do anything at each moment. So Zen is a kind of, I don't want to say philosophy, it's a behavioral philosophy. It's how you locate yourself and your behavior and your fundamental behavior, which is in what I'm calling horizontal time, that doesn't go anywhere.

[14:43]

But in behavioral time, you also have conventional time and the conventional way of looking at things, feeling things, and the fundamental way of locating yourself. So the gestural path is a way of supporting and locating yourself, your experiential, experientiality, locating experientiality in the successional path. And so the gestural warning or the gestural path is a kind of your experience reality, your experientiality, as they sometimes said, your experiential reality in the path to each other following the moment to locate.

[16:05]

Now this sounds intellectual and maybe too philosophical, but we live, as I said two or three weeks ago, we live actually in our descriptions, in our brain, conscious, cultural descriptions of experience, not so much in our actual experience. And maybe that sounds intellectual or too philosophical or something, but as I said a few weeks ago, we actually live in our descriptions of our experience more than we normally live in our actual experience. So if you get these ideas clear in yourself and enact them, you have to keep enacting them, repeatedly enacting them until they become presence and not descriptions. So you're turning a concept or a description into a presence, and as a presence it functions differently

[17:13]

In the accumulation of descriptions. Everyone's trying to find a vaccine these days, a vaccine against the coronavirus. But maybe we need a fact scene, a fact scene against the delusional, over-mythologized narratives we have in our descriptions of experience. Aber vielleicht brauchen wir auch so etwas wie einen Faktstoff, einen Impfstoff, der uns Fakten einimpft, gegen die verblendeten und irregeleiteten Beschreibungen unserer Kultur.

[18:50]

Did you say, excuse me, the delusional descriptions of our society, did you say? Delusional or over-mythologized descriptions of the world. Okay, thank you. Also unsere verblendeten oder irregeleiteten und übermäßig mythologisierten Beschreibungen der Welt. In order to give vibrancy and vitality to our practice, we actually need some conceptual guidance. I happened to hear a portion of a lecture by an Asian teacher the other day Asian Zen teacher who complained about the fact that he practiced for years in China and Vietnam and there was no explanation given and he felt he wasted those years.

[20:09]

So he seemed to know, because he also lives in the West, that since... that we explain things more, he found the explanations and now he teaches explanations because it allows you to move more fully, directly perhaps, into the path and not to have to spend so much time trying to find it out intuitively or autodidactically yourself. Und er weiß das. Er hat auch im Westen praktiziert und hat dabei gemerkt, dass wir im Westen sehr viel mehr erklären und die Lehren ausarbeiten.

[21:13]

Und jetzt lehrt er inzwischen auch die Erklärungen. So I'm pretty careful to try to only use concepts which can be enacted, which are doable, experienceable. So I'm trying to suggest that when you hear a concept, you look at it carefully to see if you can find a way to experience it or enact it. Yeah.

[22:15]

I mean, it's helpful to have an understanding that the mind is not just consciousness, there's actually, we can say, layers of mind. And the layers of mind are hidden from us when we only notice the surface level of the descriptions given to us by consciousness. But Zazen meditation gives us the chance to begin to feel the space between the descriptions. Aber die Zazen-Meditation gibt uns die Gelegenheit, den Raum zwischen den Beschreibungen zu spüren.

[23:46]

I can remember one of my first Zazen experiences that I noticed and conceptualized way back in 61 or so. is that I imagined you're driving along a road and there's nothing but billboards. And my experience was, once I started Zazen, even from the first few days, I think, I began to experience more and more space between the billboards. And my image was that I began to see forests between the billboards, forests of trees and so forth, from which the billboards were made.

[24:51]

And my experience was that I had the feeling that in these spaces I started to see a lot of trees, forests and trees. And I started to see that the adverts from the wood, all these materials from the spaces, i.e. the forests and trees, are made. So I remember once I had that image, it was useful to use that image to more and more feel the in-betweenness of the billboards. And it gave me my first really experience, though I didn't have the name for it, of the fourth skanda, the skanda of the associative mind, intentions and all kinds of things, which are used to construct consciousness.

[26:21]

So before I knew about the five skandhas, which became a very, very, very important practice and teaching for me, I began to feel and find myself located in associative mind in zazen and sometimes in other times as well and not just in consciousness. And then I found I could shift from finding myself identified with or defined through conscious mind, shift into associative mind, which widened the field into dreams and all kinds of aspects of mind that don't fit into consciousness.

[27:51]

And then I started to notice this shift from the exclusive location in consciousness, that I could shift into the associative spirit. And that became a kind of expansion of the field of the spirit into, for example, dreams and all kinds of things that appeared that did not fit into the categories of consciousness. And then, continuing observant and investigative Zazen practice, I began to find you could find yourself in an open field of mind which wasn't even filled with associations. So these teachings are available to us through practice, through observant investigative practice, without thinking too much, but a lot of noticing, and noticing which is a kind of questioning.

[29:11]

To notice always has a question, how much did you notice? So I talk about the gestural path. which you can begin to sort of feel spatially, like if you offer incense, you kind of take the incense from the center of your body and actually you're kind of moving the center of your body into the center of the incense burner and centering yourself with the altar figure, if that's where you are, in front of an altar.

[30:13]

Also zum Beispiel, wenn du ein Räucherstäbchen da bringst, wo du das Räucherstäbchen aus deiner Körpermitte, aus der Wirbelsäule, aus der Mitte deines Körpers heraus in das Zentrum des Altars, des Räuchergefäßes hinein platzierst und das dort zentrierst. But the gestural path, the more you bring yourself into the recognition and enactment of feeling for a gestural path, you find everything is a gestural path. Even individual words are gestural paths.

[31:23]

And from my point of view, the bodily embodied practice of right speech is when you feel the gestural path of each word. Aus meiner Perspektive zumindest ist die rechte Rede des achtfachen Pfades die Praxis, wenn du die gestische Bahnung eines jeden einzelnen Wortes bemerkst oder spürst. I remember reading about Frank Sinatra once many years ago. He would swim lengths of pools underwater without coming up to develop his breath capacity. Ich erinnere mich, dass ich einmal von Frank Sinatra gelesen habe, dass er manchmal ganze Schwimmbadlängen durchgetaucht ist, um seine Atemkapazität zu erhöhen. And he said, then if I can hold my energy and my breath, I can make each word feel and tell the story of what's embedded in each word.

[32:34]

And he said that if I can hold my energy and my breath, then I am able to make every single word carry the whole story with it or express it, which is actually in every single word. So he tried to emotionally embody each word as he sang it. And you can feel it in his songs and you can feel it in Bob Dylan too. Even the word, as I mentioned to someone recently, even the word the and a our gestural paths.

[33:36]

If I say the mountain, that's quite different than a mountain. Wenn ich sage der Berg, dann ist das ganz anders, als wenn ich sage ein Berg. The word the gestures toward the mountain in a different way than the word a gestures toward the mountain or the hill. Das Wort der macht eine Geste in Richtung des Berges auf eine andere Art und Weise, als das Wort ein eine Geste in Richtung des Berges macht. So in a way, the, well, let me say, Norman Fisher, who's a fine Zen teacher, and when I practiced with him many years ago in the 70s in Green Gulch, and Tassajara first, then Green Gulch,

[34:48]

Norman Fisher, who is a good Zen teacher, and when I practiced with him earlier in the 70s, first in Tassajara and then in Green Gulch. In Green Gulch, he asked me a question once in Doksan. Is Buddhism nothing but a kind of search for harmony? Well, I knew the answer was no, but yes. But I didn't know how to express the yes. And I knew that the answer was something like Nein, aber ja, und ich wusste aber nicht, wie ich diese Art von ja zum Ausdruck bringen konnte. And now I would say that, but yes, is that the gestural path is actually a tuning of yourself with the world, because everything in the world is not simply an activity, not an entity, but an activity, but an activity which is a gestural path.

[36:07]

And now I would say that this yes to the question is that all practices in Buddhism are a kind of tuning in or tuning in as a So when you begin to tune the successional path, the moment after moment successional path, with the gestural path, Wenn du beginnst, den Pfad aufeinanderfolgender Momente mit den gestischen Bahnungen in Einklang zu bringen, dann beginnst du, dich mit der Welt in Einklang zu bringen.

[37:16]

And your whole body is a complexity of paths of your vascular system, your... hormonal system and so forth. One of the problems I've been facing, questing myself with, is how do I express the feel of interiority? And one of the difficulties that I have faced or that I am looking for is the question, how can I express the feeling of interiority? And so far I haven't been able to find an image which satisfies me. Yeah.

[38:17]

I have a number of images I'm exploring, but maybe I'll come back to it another Sunday. But it's not only your immersed world or your inner world is a world of biological paths. Everything is a path. Each person you meet is in the midst of their own path, psychological, emotional, cultural, and hopefully, hopefully, dharmically, if they're practitioners.

[39:18]

So if you begin to feel the in-betweenness, the amongness, the in-betweenness of the descriptions of the of experience which you live. Yeah, you begin to, actually what you're doing is you're shifting from awakening yourself to and shifting from conscious mind to absorbent mind.

[40:25]

And the word zen basically again means absorbent. So zazen is sitting, absorbent mind. So absorbent mind feels, notices the world, but doesn't think the world. Der absorbierende Geist bemerkt die Welt, aber denkt sie nicht. So I wanted to speak today, believe it or not, about Wados. Also, ob ihr es glaubt oder nicht, ich wollte heute eigentlich über Wados Wendesätze sprechen. And Wados is a phrasal path. Und Wado oder Wendesätze, das sind vielleicht begriffliche Bahnungen.

[41:49]

The gestural path is bodily articulated. And the phrasal path is mentally and mindedly articulated. Conceptually articulated, mindedly, etc. The translator is having a little problem here. Sorry. But it's fun, isn't it? In a moment it will be, once I find the solution. I want to say this differently, but I don't know how. Phrasal is such a nice thing in English. I wish we had it. Ja, ich mache Begriff, also Begriff, Begriff, ja, Begriff nehme ich einfach als Wort. Der begriffliche Pfad

[42:55]

So I'll just give you, because I really will try to stay at 45 minutes today. I'll just give you a quick... behavioral and bio-dharmically, a bio-dharmic explanation of how the phrasal path works. You said two things, bio-dharmic and what was the other? So I'm using bio-dharmic in the sense that as intentionality, when intentionality is aligned with attentionality with energy and power,

[44:02]

It's the dynamic of Buddhist wisdom. And when you feel the interiority, which you call your own, when you feel the interiority, and biologically, and locate it dharmically, so then I'm calling bio-dharmic, there's a tremendous energetic, realisational power in that. Und wenn du Innerlichkeit spürst, die nennst du dann deine eigene Innerlichkeit, und die... So let's take a simple phrase I've often suggested to people.

[45:25]

just now is enough. Because it's factually true, because whatever your now is, it has to be enough. Because you don't have anything else but that now. So when you take A simple phrase like just now is enough as a vaccine or a fat scene and enter it into the descriptions of the descriptive experience that we live in. Und wenn du so einen Satz nimmst, genau dies ist genug. Und diesen Satz als eine Art Impfstoff, also wie so eine Impfung durch Fakten, in die Beschreibungen, die du lebst, hineinspritzt,

[46:52]

After a while of mechanically repeating it, it becomes a presence. And when it becomes a presence, its presence settles out of descriptive consciousness into absorbent mind. And then when... But that presence carries its intentionality into absorbent mind. But this... And just now is enough becomes your embodied presence and inoculates you against delusion. And each moment on this successional path you feel just now is enough.

[48:13]

And every moment on this successional path you feel just now is enough. So maybe next Sunday I can come back to the inoculative path of the phrasal path of the huados and say more about how it's an ideal practice, monastic-like practice, monastic practice which is ideal for lay people. And maybe I can come back to that next Sunday and say a little more about the vaccinating or the immune-making power of the Wado practice as a practice of the concept thread.

[49:18]

And the way in which that is a monastery practice, the... What monastic practice offers is a 24-7 practice, but for the layperson, maybe 16-7 is good enough, and that also will transform those sleeping hours. So, thank you very much, Nicole. Just now is enough. Vielen Dank, Nicole. Thank you. Genau dies ist genug.

[50:12]

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