One or two persons, I don't know exactly, asked Ivo the Anja. What I meant by things only don't exist from their own side. And I think this is a statement directly or indirectly of Nagarjuna. But it's also Sukershi used to say it now and then. So I guess they asked Ivo if I could explain what that means if I happen to know. Or I can figure it out.

[01:02]

You know, when Sukhir used to say it, I used to puzzle about it myself. Because this stick exists from its own side as well as that it's also my perception of it and so forth. Can I do a translator question? Of course. Could you maybe say a word or two about this expression, to exist from one's own side? Because we just don't have it in German. I think it would help already. We don't have it in English either. You don't? Really? It's just a Buddhist thing? Yeah. Oh, I didn't know that. I use it all the time. Okay. Okay. I mean, that's your side, this is my side, right?

[02:06]

And you exist from your side and I exist from my side. At least I think you exist from your side. You think you do too? But It wasn't so good for me to use a human being as an example. I better use this. But the emphasis is, let me speak about it in relationship to physical objects. This certainly exists in a way from its own side. I didn't make it. Well, I can say I didn't make it, but if I also includes all human beings as it does, then some human being made it. Ich kann sagen, ich habe das nicht gemacht, aber wenn ich auch alle menschlichen Wesen einschließe, was es tut, dann habe ich das gemacht.

[03:22]

Jemand hat es gemacht. I think actually it was made by Suzuki Roshi's son. And I think he made it for me just as a present. But he also made it as a comment from the past. Because Tsukiroshi had given me and I inherited several of Tsukiroshi's teaching staffs. And when Sukiroshi died, asked me if he could have one of the staffs to give to a Japanese disciple of Sukiroshi. And I said yes, and I gave it to him. And so he kind of made this to replace the one that I gave him to give to another disciple.

[04:25]

So in a way, this doesn't exist from its own side. It exists from my relationship to Hoichi and Sukhyoshi and so forth. Yeah, I mean, everything that exists exists through a network of relationships. A hammer exists because nails exist. Et cetera. Yeah. Okay. But still I was puzzled why bother with saying things don't exist from their own side.

[05:43]

And I didn't get it until I saw that things, when you emphasize things not existing from their own side, it leads to certain ways of being in the world. And in a way it's much of what we've spoken about in this practice period. Does this room exist from its own side? Well, before it existed from the side of the Shrinerei. And now it exists from the side of the Zendo.

[06:46]

Not from its own side, but from the side of now being used as a sender. Well, this is in a way obvious. It's again like saying this is... known through perception and mental activity. But we've also talked about how we use this room in serving. And I think the other day I said something like material space. And it's the best, I'm going back and forth on what to say, tangible space, blah, blah. But I think material space in its contradictory, it sounds contradictory, is the most useful.

[08:11]

It's like the simple idea of the Big Bang. Sorry, let me add one. I forgot something. Is the Big Bang, conceptually, didn't occur in space, it made space as it expanded. So we could call that material space. Okay, now, where does that come in? That comes into practice in many ways. And now you guys may not, not all of you may feel this, but for example, when we do the Oryoki.

[09:30]

Part of the Oryoki is you practice, is you're picking up the bowls and you're bringing them into your space and putting them down. And the oryoki practice is conceived as if it were an extension and part of your bodily space. So when you take the Setsu bag, the utensil bag, you line it up with your spine. then bringst du sie in eine Ausrichtung, in eine Linie mit der Wirbelsäule. And when you take out the spoon, you feel it in your spine. I'm not saying everyone feels this, but I do. So I should say something about it. Und wenn du den Löffel zum Beispiel herausnimmst, dann spürst du das in Beziehung zu deiner Wirbelsäule.

[10:43]

Und ich sage jetzt nicht, dass das alle spüren oder spüren sollten, aber ich spüre das und deshalb sollte ich vielleicht was dazu sagen. And yoga practice assumes you feel something like this. So the spoon is taken out along the spine and put down and turned as you put it down. And the chopsticks are done the same way. But then the Setsu, again, you don't pick it up this way. You pick it up between the two fingers. And many things, tea ceremony and many of the arts of Japan are not done this way because they're thinking. They're done like that because it uses the body in a way that's not familiar or not a thinking way. And many, many things in the Japanese arts, the objects are not touched between the two thumbs and index fingers, because that is thinking.

[11:55]

Instead, they are rather touched with the whole hand between two whole fingers, because that uses the body in a non-thinking way. You're a brave girl, brave woman. So you take it and then you make a circle with it and put it down. So you're... One is a spinal line and another is a circle emphasizing the extended physical body. And when you do that, the more you get in the habit, you inhabit that doing. Your bodily mind begins to function this way. Yeah. Now, if you're thinking all the time, these things aren't important to you. They don't fit into thinking. They're not very productive. The other day I was reading about Jonathan Ive, who is the designer of most of the main Apple products.

[13:12]

Apple Macintosh. Jonathan Ive. And these two men, Jonathan Ive and Steve Jobs, the administration's job was supposedly, they said, to give them nothing to do. Just let them walk around and think and notice things. And that's what the staff here, the residential staff, is trying to do with all you practitioners. Well, at Crestone, There's so few people in practice period usually a totally new person almost has to be the tenzo.

[14:34]

But the tradition is you have when you come to practice period you have no responsibilities. Except to do what Agmar says. To give you a kind of vacation from cognitive thinking. And I hope you make use of it. And generally, if you've been in practice a long time, it reverses and all responsibility is taken away and you can just wander around and not do anything like you were a beginner.

[15:41]

So you rotate through the management hierarchy until you can do everything, and then once you can do everything, you're dismissed. Also rotierst du durch die... It's not coming soon. Also rotierst du quasi durch die management-hierarchie und wenn du alles machen kannst, dann wirst du entlassen sozusagen und kannst wieder nur umherwandeln. Aber das passiert nicht bald. Anyway, that's the idea. Das ist jedenfalls die Idee. Now we're going to, you know, as you well know, I don't read or understand German.

[16:44]

Many, many people can't believe that. And they assume after having lived here for 25 years or more or something, I'm just secretly pretending I don't understand. But you don't realize how exceptional I am. I have an exceptional skill not to learn anything. And I really don't know anything. I'm sorry. I'm describing it as a skill, but actually it's kind of stupidity. So I don't know what the chants sound like in Deutsch.

[17:46]

But I've... But I've been hearing that particularly the meal chant needs some improvement in Deutsch. So the various translators have been meeting recently, sometimes with me, discussing the chants. And we have a new translation, I guess mostly done, right? So we'll try it out sometime soon and see how we like it. I've been thinking about changing it for 20 years.

[18:58]

I mean, the English too, as well as the German. I'm not happy with the English. Some of the English. As I think I said to you a while ago, the English was done by Tsukiyoshi telling me what the Japanese meant and my turning it into sort of English. And it's remained more or less the same since then. And one thing that I don't like in English is the natural order of mind. But maybe we're going to leave it, something like the natural order of mind, or do we change it?

[20:01]

Well, now we said original order of mind. All right, original. It's the same kind of philosophical problem. We're recognizing it and not desiring it. Oh, this is good. Recognizing the originary nature of mind. The original mind? Original. Okay. Okay. Now... This distinction between... An essentialist way of thinking and a progressive way of thinking, viewing the world, is at the heart of most Buddhist controversies. An essentialist, like there's some kind of essence, and a progressive, that it's actually always a process.

[21:02]

No, I don't know if I can make that useful to you today or not, but I'll speak about it at least a little. Now, I said the other day, maybe develop a practice of what I called three attentional breaths. It can be five or seven, I don't care. Anyway, the idea is some sort of something you do in some pattern. Es können auch fünf oder sieben sein, das ist mir egal.

[22:15]

Es geht mehr darum, dass das etwas ist, was ihr in irgendeiner Art von Muster macht. Ein Muster, das ihr verändern könnt. Eine Sache, die wir in der Praxisperiode entdeckt haben, das ist diese... Engaged, emergent routine. Yes. Now emergent is used in contemporary thinking to mean something that appears that's new from the ingredients that are available. Now, the essentialist Buddhist stream

[23:27]

thinks there's some natural order of mind that's there or Buddha nature that's already there. That you're uncovering or recovering. No, I don't know what words work in German. But in English, to uncover means it's already there, and that's a whole different way of imagining practice and teaching than assuming you're creating it as you're noticing it. Now the concept of uncorrected mind doesn't really work if you think it's a process of uncovering. So the dynamic of the teaching to an uncorrected mind is to let it happen.

[25:05]

Let the mind happen. Let associative thinking happen. Okay. Oh dear, I'm making this too complicated. But it's actually what we're doing, so it's not so complicated. So... The fourth skanda is associative thinking. Associative thinking is to let your thinking happen. You don't think your way into it.

[26:05]

You have to just let the associations happen. And in Yogacara Buddhism, this is considered a karmically freeing process. Maybe it parallels a little bit Freudian psychology, et cetera, is to talk it through or notice it changes it. So you're just sitting and letting the process of cognition, of discovery, etc. happen. discovery okay so as I said we can think of Zazen as letting go

[27:08]

non-dreaming deep sleep surface in our zazen. Okay. So non-dreaming deep sleep is something physiologically we do. And if your bodily and mind state become similar to non-dreaming deep sleep, in other words, you come to a bodily stillness, you feel just located in stillness. the feeling like you hope the bell never rings kind of feeling and when the mind feels completely at rest there's almost no there's no usual cognitive thinking then that

[28:37]

physiological process of non-dreaming deep sleep may surface into the experience of awareness, but not consciousness. This is all to say that if you use the three attentional breaths, In your daily life, after you leave here. Sometimes, if you really can just stop for a minute in three attentional breaths, The engaged, emergent routine we've begun to experience in practice period. can surface in our life.

[30:21]

And each time it surfaces, it changes slightly. And that's the difference between essentialist thinking with, they think something fundamental, it's the same all the time, keep returning. And that's the difference between essentialist thinking But Yogacara Buddha emphasizes when you let it surface, it becomes slightly different, it develops. Now there's a physicist and cosmologist, quite famous, Nobel Prize, I think, Alan Guth, or Guth, Guth, I don't know. Guth, G-U-T-H. And he is the person who came up with the inflationary universe theory. One of his ideas is there are pocket universes.

[31:40]

I think it's a wonderful idea. But it also shows you how limited our thinking is. We can only think in imaginable metaphors. The ten dimensions or twelve of string theory can be mathematically described, but we can't really... make a metaphor for them. So I'm speaking about lines, the vertical, the spine, the circle. These are just metaphors, but they're all I got to think with. So the pocket universe is Little bubbles appear in the larger universe, in the expanding inflationary universe. And they have a different cosmological constant than the larger universe.

[33:00]

So they're a little bubble in a different temporal, with a different time zone. And I think practice period is a little bubble with a different time zone. We're in our little pocket universe here. And the question is, when practice period is over, will this bubble pop? And then it'll suddenly be in the larger cultural sphere we know. Which of course is also a bubble. It's just bigger. Okay, now... if we are actually somehow in a different temporal sphere than the one we used to live in all the time?

[34:28]

The question is not just will this temporal sphere of this engaged routine that we have come to know Disappear when we go back into our usual life. But also will it disappear when 20 or so people come for Sashin? How many people are coming? Twenty-one. Twenty-one. So there'll be 21 people, they'll be sitting all over the place here. And the question will be, can we maintain our temporal sphere sufficiently that they're drawn into it, or will we lose it with them? The waiting list for Sashin is a bit longer than usual.

[35:48]

Partly because those of you who are already here would have come to Sashin, maybe. But also because they're coming to see what the heck we're doing here. And they're wondering, is practice period just a schedule or will we feel this new cosmological constant? So will we be able to maintain the feeling of practice period and begin to include the 21 persons who are coming? with each appearance as a surfacing.

[37:02]

Our practice Our fundamental bodily mind can appear on any appearance. on each appearance. And as we've spoken, practice is to notice both the relative and the fundamental simultaneously. So we'll have a chance to see if we can maintain the feeling of this practice together and yet openly welcome and include the new people coming for a sesshin.

[38:17]

And if we can do that, we can maybe also do it in our usual daily life after practice period. That's only a portion of what I wanted to speak about. You know, when you want to realize enlightenment, it means you want some closure. verwirklichen möchtest, dann bedeutet das, dass du irgendeine Form von Abschluss suchst. Aber erleuchtet zu sein bedeutet, von dem Bedürfnis nach Abschluss frei zu sein.

[39:21]

Also es ist gut, so zu tun, als seist du erleuchtet, genau jetzt. Enlightenment isn't going to happen anywhere else. It's going to happen here, so start pretending. So I can feel free from needing to have closure. She didn't translate. That's all right. I don't need the closure of translation. Yeah.

[39:46]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_72.13