Funny how many of us have been chanting together quite a long time, quite often, and yet almost, or often anyway, the first line or syllables we're all hunting around to find out where we can chant together. You'd think we'd have it worked out by now. I'm still working on the what we can do about the Santa Fe House. For those of you who don't know, a few weeks ago, the government, which is U.S. government, which had taken over the savings and loan, that had the loan on the thing, sort of decided to foreclose, in effect, on the property. December 31st, so I've been trying to juggle some possibilities into existence and quite a few possibilities have come up including including selling it several possibilities but it looks like we it looks like now we can I don't know if it will actually fall into place this way but so far it looks pretty good that someone will co-sign for the loan

[01:28]

Because as a church, a nonprofit organization, we can't get a loan. And I can't personally get a loan because I don't have any regular job. And I guess this is a regular job. But anyway, somebody will co-sign it, which probably might work anyway. And then somebody else wants to rent it for a year. So it looks like present that we'll keep it. And my... attitude was shifted a lot by your reaction to selling it here at Crestone and then in the meeting in Santa Fe, which you expressed strongly enough, wanting to keep it, that I have been trying to go in that direction among the various possibilities. So I hope that if it does work out, we can strengthen the Santa Fe Zen Center. through this.

[02:30]

Because after all, Grald and Gisela started in Santa Fe. Mark and Lynn started in Santa Fe. Santa Fe, which made this place. Don started in Creston. And Steve and Angelique were there a long time. So, anyway. But anyway, I spoke to somebody from Santa Fe today, and they said it's 21 above there, and with the chill factor, it's 21 below. So it's colder there than here. But I'm surprised at how warm, despite ice creeping in behind me on the floor, I'm surprised at how warm this room stays. It's kind of chilly in the morning, but given that we're not heating it, it stays pretty warm. Though I noticed there seemed to be quite a draft coming out of Sarah's old room. Yes, I'm sure the paints and glass have ice on them.

[03:34]

So, how is it sitting right here, those of you? Is it cold? Can we put towels around the door on the other side or hang something? Because when I'm over there, I can feel a draft coming in. Can't you feel a draft coming around the door? Yeah. Yeah. Maybe we could do something about it. Okay. Okay. And I would like to do a ordination ceremony for somebody. And Gisela getting her robes. And do a precept ceremony too for... one or two people who have raksas, and I know maybe one or two people want to take the precepts without a raksa.

[04:39]

It's a nice combination. See, try to do a triple feature ceremony. And... But I don't know exactly, I was thinking of doing it a week after the Sashin, but you're leaving, Ruth, before that, right? So the Sashin ends on a Sunday, is that right? Are we sitting Sunday? We're sitting Saturday, and Sunday morning is the 8th, is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That would be on the 8th. 9th. 10th. The 10th. Counting. It's hard to count when you practice. That wasn't too much. The 10th then is Tuesday.

[05:46]

What about doing... Will you be here on the 10th? Could we do the ceremony on the 10th? I think we could. You'll be here till when, Ruth? Okay. So if it was the tenth, that's in time, or even the eleventh. Okay. Well, tentatively I'll aim for the tenth. And I have to do some preparation first, and I also have to go to Santa Fe to work out this bank loan. Pretty quickly after the session, because we only have two weeks before they, two and a half weeks before. And from what I hear, the government doesn't care about, you know, normal things. They just, not like a bank, you can go and talk to them. I want you to wait a few weeks. But I feel good I don't have to leave during the Sashin.

[06:47]

I thought I'd have to leave during the Sashin, but I don't have to, I think. Maybe I can be here till the 13th or 14th. I have to wait till someone comes back from California who's going to co-sign. And I'd like us to put Arnett, a man's name, Arnett Torrey Knighton, on the altar, who just died of AIDS. And I kind of have an adopted daughter I helped through high school named Heidi. Arnett was an old boyfriend of hers, who's half English and half some American combination. I don't know what. And he was quite wild.

[07:52]

He used to, when Heidi was living in our house, he would be out in the front lawn shouting. I don't know if you remember Arnett, Robert, because he caused a huge stir, because she wouldn't see him often. He'd park in front of the house on Page Street and shout and holler and stand in the front yard. We had to get the police to get rid of him. It was quite wild. Buddy seems to have had an affair with a woman who was using crack. Anyway, he died a couple days ago. Heidi called me up. Steve reminded me in his first talk, which I listened to on the tape, that I said once, one way to understand dharma was it was to stand still for change.

[09:13]

Jeez, that sounds pretty good. Sounds good. You usually remember your good lines. What? What do you mean? Editing, huh? Anyway, that's true. And last session I spoke about, just a few weeks ago, primarily about emptiness and the practice of and experience of emptiness. And it's such a non-obvious topic, shall we say, emptiness, that maybe I should come back to it in this session, but in a sense I am coming back to it because in talking about appearances I'm talking about form, in talking about form I'm talking about emptiness. And this virtual reality that I brought up

[10:22]

It just made me... I came up in a conversation with someone the other day. It made me start thinking about it, thinking that virtual reality is a... a description. It could be a way of... a synonym for... or an equivalent of emptiness. Because the word virtual I guess, Mahakali, if you know about virtual gravity, don't they put on gloves and all kinds of things? Do you know how they do it? And then they create the... They can take something and it's as if it were real, virtually real. So it's interesting. So I looked up the word virtual. Virtual happens to... Virtues happens to be the fifth order of angels, right? And the word virtue means a power.

[11:28]

Actually, the root is V-I-R, meaning man. And it means a capacity or power. So virtual reality is something that has the power of reality. But it's not. But a virtue is something like, you can say, each thing has its own virtual virtue. Each thing in English, you know? Each thing has its combination of qualities that make it unique. And as Steve said today, that the word surface is a kind of... tricky because when you actually give each thing its surface as it appears on its face, on the face of its surface, you are actually moving away from what our usual surface is of a sense of unity or an interiority or

[12:50]

Self. You're moving away from the sort of generalization of world and self. And seeing, it's almost as if you're moving toward the outside by giving each thing its particularity. And yet, when you're moving actually toward where there's no outside and no inside, Now someone said, I can't remember who, said that we have to find our life in holding on to or in the realm of justice and mercy or compassion and reality. But, you know, it's obvious what is reality is a rather big question. And it's a good way to get out of conversations at parties. Nobody comes up to you and starts getting boring.

[13:58]

You say, what is reality? But if we're going to start, if we're going to ask ourselves such a question, what is reality? I remember I asked Imad-e-Rerum Roshi, what is reality? in a sashin, actually, in 1962 or something. And he was entertaining, entertaining, accepting and entertaining questions. And I asked him this question. And he said, oh, that's such a big question, we'll wait till tomorrow. So the next day at lecture time, He had us all sit, and he said, we all should sit, and we said, sit, and close our eyes. He had us close our eyes, and blah, blah, blah, and I forget what. Then he said, this is reality.

[15:01]

I thought it was great. I don't know. I didn't know what it was, but it felt like anybody who would attempt to ask such a question was doing okay. Yamada Reverend Roche used to come up. He gave me my first ordination. He actually was the, one of the people who ordained Deshimara Roshi, too. Deshimara Roshi referred to in his books as his teacher, along with Sawaki Kota Roshi. But anyway, Ramada Rev. Roshi was a great guy, a rather scholarly Zen master who was in Los Angeles. So Kureishi used to invite him up to come to our sashins, and he'd come sometimes for the whole sashin, sometimes for the last three days or something, and give So he'd have two lectures a day. He'd give one, as a Christian he'd give one. So what is the power or virtuality, perhaps, of reality or of appearances or of thoughts?

[16:12]

Now, this is quite important in practice. You know, Sri Yukteswar says, the most common instruction, don't invite your thoughts to tea. But this is very, very good practice and the most basic practice. But don't invite your thoughts to tea is a thought. So no matter how we do it, I mean, if you say, how do you start out with a clean slate? I don't know, again, in German, that means a blackboard. Do you say that in German? To start out with a clean slate. It means to start out with nothing written on the blackboard or something. I guess in the old days, blackboards were made of slate, stone. Anyway, but even if you start out with a clean slate and you haven't written anything on the blackboard or empty board or whiteboard or whatever, you still have the slate.

[17:18]

And you're still standing before it. Or even if there's no slate still, you're standing before it. On the surface, perhaps. So I'm sort of trying to... I guess I'm trying to deconstruct the way we put things together, usually, and in sesshin... Again, it's obvious there's a good chance to allow things to deconstruct through the strength of your sitting and posture. And I don't want this, you know, I don't like my talk to be too somber or serious. I mean, this isn't really serious, but each of us, I mean, we could say maybe the basic rule of Sashin is to help each other and leave each other alone.

[18:28]

So we're trying to support each other without bothering each other. We create this situation where we support each other to not be bothered. So we don't talk to each other, we take care of each other through eating, but we don't, you know, we do it in the simplest, direct way. And that can start to feel sort of somber, but I hope you can shake that off and feel fresh in this practice. But this question of how we entertain the thought of don't invite your thoughts to tea is quite important in practice. Well, there's no way to start out with a completely clean slate. because you've got the slate and you've got you and so forth, obviously.

[19:34]

So, but there's a difference between saying invite your thoughts to tea and don't invite your thoughts to tea. They're both thoughts, but the fruit of one is rather different than the fruit of the other. And this is something you experiment with, while the basic practice is to not invite your thoughts to tea. I mean, there's no interior jailer standing over you with a gun saying, don't invite your thoughts of me. I was just in New England and they have them license plates in New Hampshire live free or die. It's horrible. You see these right-wing people looking out there. Are you living free? It used to even be illegal to put tape over it. But I think it went up to the Supreme Court and they decided you could tape it out of your license plate if you wanted.

[20:41]

It is horrible. Your answer is a rather nice place, except for its license plates. So, yes, our basic practices don't invite your thoughts to tea, but sometimes, whether you intend it or not, you do invite your thoughts to tea. This is also a subject of study or observation. Now, just looking at these words, I was trying to get... look at this as simply and basically as possible. The word face means boundary or what's first presented to you. And the root of it, D-H-E, is to put or place something.

[21:46]

In Latin, sacerdos, I believe it is, means a priest. But it's one who puts or places things exactly where I think the word sacred is the root is dedicated to a single purpose. And the dos part is to put or place, like the face of it. So the face is just as it's put or just as it's placed. So maybe in what is reality, at least we need to start with as or how things first appear, to stand still for change. Now this is quite a practice because we immediately, as I said yesterday, have this habit energy and desires, needs, all kinds of things to do something with whatever happens.

[23:01]

Which is when you do that is you're bringing the subject you into it. So as much as possible you're trying to let it be, let the subject be as little present as possible. You just, as it appears, each surface. So it's got a kind of fractal surface. Many surfaces appearing. And you don't try to join them. Now, when you practice this way, you notice each of these things as it comes up. Now, in a way, we can go back to taking the precepts or being ordained, because all of this stuff of taking the precepts or being ordained and why being ordained is so usually accompanied by wearing a rope.

[24:12]

You are all in a kind of robe. There's no rules about wearing robes here, but many of you are wearing a kind of robe just because it's more comfortable to sit in. So we say in the morning, now we open Buddha's mind. But actually, although I may change the Japanese, the Japanese says, now we open Buddha's robe. But it means now we open Buddha's robe mind, a field far beyond form and emptiness, the Tathagata's teaching for all being. So when you take on Buddha's practice, you wear Buddha's clothing. This is just part and parcel of yoga culture where it's so related to actually doing things and the physicality of things.

[25:22]

So Buddha's mind is also wearing the robe or wearing the teaching or wearing the precepts. So when you wake up in the morning you put on your appearance, and depending on your character and your state of mind and settled inner qualities, you put on your appearance each day. Either it arises with the force of your character and intention, or it arises from being passive or insecure, and you feel that you have to do certain things, you have to be a certain way. In any case, you put on an appearance. And we come out of the dispersed body of dreams, of the more fractal multiplicity of the many-faced being we are in dreams.

[26:37]

And you wake up and you put on your appearance. And you do it in stages. And we don't have enough bathrooms to do it fast here. In a monastery you want to do it fast, 10 to 20 minutes, so that people don't have much chance to put on their inner face. But here people would be peeing on the... cushions if we had a 20-minute. And that wouldn't be good. The cats would join in and it would be a terrible mess in here. But in any case, you get up in the morning and we go pretty quickly in Sashin, the daily life here, from the many-faced night dream being into the many-faced zazen being. And before you put it all together, you kind of slip into the space in which, from which these things, these faces arise.

[28:04]

And you can ask yourself, where do these appearances flow into? And what do they flow from? They appear and disappear. Now there's thoughts and there's appearances. I open my eyes here and I see the altar, it appears. And I have various thoughts. And the interrelationship between the thoughts and the appearances are, it's almost one thing, not quite. So generally we put on our appearance in the morning through our sense of being offended or and not our needs aren't met or things we feel pressured to do or things we want to do or things we have done and so forth.

[29:17]

But when you put on Buddha's clothes, you're putting on a rather different appearance. So it's actually quite helpful to wear robes, to put them on in the morning Either it's a raksu or full robes. You put them on, and unless you're completely a nitwit, it at least reminds you a little bit. Oh, shucks. Is it kind of troublesome to put all these things on? What? What? A nitwit is somebody who has the wit of a nit. A nit is something real small. N-I-T, not K-N-I-T. So curious, he says, I wear these robes.

[30:38]

Several times he said, I wear these robes so I'll behave myself. It reminds me. But whether it's the physical form of robes or carrying beads or shaving your head or or practicing a koan, or practicing a mantra, or paying attention to your breath, all of those are Buddha's mind robe. When you open Buddha's mind robe, you're opening the inner face of your mind. So to take the precepts is just to remind yourself to wear Buddha's teaching, to wear Buddha's clothes. And really, it's up to you to do it, but the precepts or the rakshasa or the practice helps you.

[31:52]

and makes the way you remind yourself, hear your, as Steve said, innermost request, makes it more subtle. So in a way, each thing that appears to you, the virtual reality of it, the power, the capacity of function, presence of each thing that appears, arises simultaneously from the object of perception and from you. As they say technically, co-arises. I gave you an attitude yesterday which I said, take each thing as it appears in its localness or in its particularity.

[33:10]

Now, this is already, you know, making the shoe fit. Now, I don't want to give you instructions exactly about how to sit. or how to practice. I mean, I do give you instructions about your posture. By the way, I noticed quite a few of you are wearing socks for walking and so forth. And if you're sitting seiza, with your legs back, I always remind you, socks are fine for walking, but if you're sitting cross-legged, it's better not to have socks on. But anyway, there's many little rules about sitting, so I can tell you those things. And they help you leave yourself alone. So it's a little more subtle or difficult, slippery, to leave yourself alone on your mind's interface.

[34:12]

So you have to try it out. I mean, I'm making suggestions, and I would suggest that you try out the opposite of my suggestions, as well as trying out my suggestions. And you want to find some way, a territory where you leave yourself alone the most. So, this is already a suggestion, a territory where you leave yourself alone the most. Now, that's a better suggestion than if I make a suggestion, you should have a territory of practice where you leave yourself alone the least. You could have a little, you could hit yourself. So I think I can make a case for a suggestion to leave yourself alone the most. Now, one way to do that is when you're sitting to produce a subtle, non-graspable thought.

[35:16]

Now the difficulty in producing... I told you this is not somber. Now the difficulty in producing a subtle non-graspable thought is it's non-graspable. And if you try to do it, it's not there. But anyway, it's possible. Yes? One time you were talking about the difference between intention and awareness. Yeah. Where that balance is. Well, I don't want to go into all that, but one of the distinctions between awareness and consciousness is awareness will support intention but not conceptual thought. So intention is more subtle and non-graspable, actually, than thought.

[36:35]

Okay, so the distinction between graspable and non-graspable is something you're going to have to fiddle with. But in general, the distinction I make is emotion is graspable. Feeling, like the feeling in this room, is not graspable. So as you notice the feeling or try to take hold of it, you don't have it. But there's definitely a feeling in this room. It's not anger, not sadness, not... So in this practice, and I'm giving you a kind of more developed practice of not inviting your thoughts to tea, and I don't know why I'm doing this, but I decided to. So you attempt to produce a subtle feeling or thought which you can't really grasp hold of, and if you do, so it's something you have to kind of let happen.

[37:38]

I often say when you start your breathing practice, really you start out taking an inventory of how you breathe, noticing the differences when you first sit down, how your breathing is, when you're thinking, when you're not thinking, and so forth, when your posture is hurting and all that stuff. On a similar way, in observing the arising of appearances, we could call this the practice of observing the arising of appearances, the arising of thoughts, feelings, emotions. And here we're not just talking, we're not talking about following a thought or appearance to its source. That's another practice. Very, very closely related, but actually the fruits of it are different. Here you're just letting the particularity, the localness, of each thought arise, or each appearance arise, without trying to do anything with it.

[38:46]

You're not trying to grasp it, but you're not trying to interfere with it. Now, you can begin to look at these appearances in more detail, almost microscopic detail, as if in slow motion. And you begin to allow these appearances to appear in ways affected by your posture. And you can notice them from that way. And also when appearances... Now this may sound kind of strange to you, but when these appearances appear, are they in front of you or to the left or right? And when something appears to you, can you look at it from the side, the right or the left? And can you look at it from the center of your body instead of the upper part of your body? Now, can you look at it with a visual feeling as if you were seeing it with your eyes?

[39:53]

Or can you look at it in a sense, look at it through your nose as if you were smelling an inner appearance? So when you do this, what you're doing is you're practicing with your sense fields, you're practicing with your vijnanas to begin to distinguish between hearing something or the way an appearance appears when you're hearing it, even if it's only a virtual reality. In other words, you're not actually hearing something, but something appears and you bring the sense field of your ear to it as if you can hear a tone to this appearance. Now, you don't have to do any of these things. But if you're bored sitting here, you've got seven days, and you want to practice with the vijnanas, with the inner mind robe face, Now, the main practice, I would say, is to begin to see the difference between how appearances arise in a subtle state of mind and how they arise in a non-graspable state of mind and how they arise in a graspable state of mind.

[41:11]

And you can do that by creating a vigorous state of mind in which you like this or don't like this or feel this way or wish, and then notice what happens to your mind. And when you have a more neutral and then subtle state of mind, Now, I'm just saying these things, but if I say these things, even if it's not really a territory you can find yourself in, still, it will probably, in some ways, begin to happen to you. Because there's a kind of permission involved in speaking about it so that I'm, in a way, creating a permission to notice something that's usually in the realm of excluded knowledge. There's so much that we notice that we're taught to notice. There's so much that is there that I'd at least have to point out the possibility of noticing.

[42:17]

Though mainly you're trying to notice without letting habit energy, push it into universals or permanence or this is who I am and this is the way it is and so forth. Just more, more open. Not going anywhere, as I say, not doing anything. Let a thing have its place, take its place. The word face comes, obviously, in Latin from facere, facere, I guess it would be pronounced, to do, to make. So the face, the root of face is to do or make, to face something, your face, the face of something. And the root of the, when you look at the word virtue, the root is, I mean, this is a big word because in its root it means the world.

[43:26]

It also means an assembly of people brought together to make a decision. So that's where the idea of virtue comes up, how we relate to others. And it also means the life of man, or the life-age of a man, the age of a person, in the sense of the fullness of a person. And it also means the world. It means a group of people coming together, like a court or something, to make a decision. That's a powerful combination of things. The world, an assembly. and the age, the fullness of a person. I'm suggesting that you can find this world and this fullness and also the deeper sense of how we exist together.

[44:34]

by a simple practice of paying attention to each thing as it appears, so you begin to know how the world appears to you before you put subject into it, before you put mercy into it, compassion into it, justice, just as it appears, what maybe we can again call tentatively reality or virtual reality. And I think you'll see that each thing appears coupled with, joined with emptiness. And each appearance is appearance plus emptiness. And each thought is clarity plus intention and emptiness. So you're beginning, if you can get into this, how the world appears to you in this very basic way.

[45:41]

And then we're studying form, which is also emptiness. Before you put it together, if you get very familiar with this, how you face it, how you put it together, how you make it, will become more subtle, particularly if you can begin to find these things in a more subtle state of mind. Anyway, this is again our practice of sashin, this treasure of sashin, to open Buddha's mind, It's our redemption.

[46:35]

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