Thank you for the short time I'm here, a few weeks, giving me the time to speak with you. And you came all the way from Germany for the lecture. This is impressive. And the Antioch students who are here made me think about what the What about Buddhism could be useful to you? Or what about Buddhism to any of us? But of course, thinking about when I was in college and high school, and I wish that I'd known about practice in those years for myself. So I was wondering, I mean, whether you two decide to practice Buddhism or not, that's entirely up to you.

[01:04]

But you're here, so maybe we should see if we can make sense of what we're doing here. And we have to start usually with our views, the so-called Eightfold Path, which you might know something about, starts with right views. And right view in this case, I think, that opens us up to practice is that we're born incomplete. And just growing up naturally is not going to complete us. And so I'm speaking about what we just chanted, a penetrating dharma. And in this case, the penetrating dharma is another way to say wisdom. And wisdom is to say that, I mean, Buddhism assumes we need wisdom to complete or develop ourselves toward completion.

[02:10]

And that wisdom is something like a software program. So, I mean, I just try and think, what is it? It's imagine if you bought a computer. Most of you have. And it was incomplete. Well, in fact, it is incomplete because you need software. And the machines change too, but they change much slower than they change at a faster pace than Darwin could imagine for sentient beings. But the machines do change, but the software changes much faster. And in that sense, Buddhism is a kind of software. Wisdom is a word for a kind of Buddhist software that assumes you need to apply the software to develop as a human being. And you apply the software primarily through

[03:23]

intention and intention to apply the software somehow you have to come to the view that i ought to do this i mean that's not so easy to come to but if you come to that intention to apply the software then you have to look at how you're going to apply it and the main way we the only way we apply it is through attention And so, again, Buddhism assumes, Zen assumes, that first of all you have to develop your attention because the attention you're born with is pretty insufficient for really applying wisdom software. And, you know, when you're your age, your life is full of, I mean, possibilities. and directions, and possible directions, and the decisions you make at this point will affect your whole life.

[04:37]

I mean, they're not final, but they do affect your whole life. Even if you change them, they affect your whole life. So if we continue this kind of metaphor, which I've never used before, of wisdom being a kind of software, but it struck me today. I mean, partly, you know, people make fun of me, especially my daughter. Because, this one, because I'm not good at software. I'm not good at my smartphone. I'm not smart enough. And I have very little interest in learning it. But I'm pretty good at human software, wisdom software. I've spent a lot of time studying the software of Buddhist wisdom. So what's your ingredients? Well, your ingredients are primarily attention and intention.

[05:39]

And when are you going to download the software? Upgrade your software. If you're born incomplete, you need some upgrading. Buddhism just assumes that. You're not born complete. I mean, you've got to... And you need human wisdom in order to move toward completion. And so you have to choose what software program, what wisdom program you want. And it's not a simple matter of education. Education... educates you to learn things, but not to transform how you exist, how you learn. Okay. Now the main time in which we download wisdom software is in zazen. And that downloading process occurs

[06:42]

when your body and mind move toward stillness, and the more they move toward in the direction of stillness, and the more they achieve stillness, the more the downloading process takes hold. But it's also something you can download wisdom in your daily activity. But if attention is the main tool, and again, I want to say for those of you, I say again, because I've spoken about some of this many, many times, attention is not simply consciousness. Attention is a dynamic of consciousness. And attention can function outside of consciousness like it can function in dreaming. So to develop your attention is the first step in opening up the package of wisdom software.

[07:50]

And the way to bring, the way to develop your attention is to see it as a capacity. You know, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the great Austrian, governor of California, he said famously, one pump with the mind in it is worth 10 without the mind in it. Well, that's a... Yeah, that's when you just think about that. That's an incredible recognition of Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was a weightlifter. He noticed that one pump with a mind in it was worth 10. This is what he said, you know. He could have said 11 or 9. It's with the mind in it. What he means is, of course, he's developing... He's developing his muscles, shaping his body, but he's developing it with attention. And he's simultaneously developing attention. He's not just exercising his body, he's exercising attention.

[08:56]

And the more you exercise attention, the more powerfully attention accomplishes your intentions. So simply, I mean, much of beginning Buddhism and basic Buddhism and which the rest of Buddhism develops through and from is bringing, starts with bringing attention to attention. Noticing when you're sitting, attention. But also noticing in your, or just sitting outside looking at this. Unbelievably for me after so many decades living in a green room, mountainside and valley. You can bring attention to your seeing. Buddhism just assumes that we want to develop this equipment. So you don't just see things. You develop attention.

[10:00]

You notice attention is part of seeing. And you can develop the attentive part of seeing. You can develop the attentive part of hearing. So you can feel attention within the hearing. You can feel attention within the seeing. You can feel attention within smiling, smelling. sitting here i can feel attention and if i want to bring attention to attention i can also use breath to bring attention to attention because if i bring attention to breath And I can more and more stay with the breath or stay with, bring attention to the spine. My spine, this spine, I'm a multi-generational being. This spine I inherited from my parents and generations and so forth. But right now I occupy, use this spine. And I can bring attention to this spine as I'm sitting here speaking.

[11:03]

I can bring attention to the breath in the voice. And when I'm doing that, I'm exercising. It's a little gym, a little fitness studio in speaking and sitting. I'm developing, exercising attention. And attention begins to have a power of its own through the five physical senses. attention develops as almost an additional sense, or in a sense that accompanies attention, accompanies the five physical senses, and attention is the way mind attends to the five physical senses. So I think Buddhism, and it's not obvious, we just look around, we see things, etc. Buddhism says, notice... That attention is part of seeing, hearing, speaking, etc.

[12:09]

And you can develop attention. And that attention, attention that you develop becomes the power by which you down... Excuse me for using these metaphors. By which you download how the world actually exists. and how we can potentially exist, and do exist, and move toward this existence, and we move toward our... Buddhism assumes, and I'm not saying it's right exactly, but boy, it assumes, and it's been true for me, that Buddhism assumes that we move toward our fullest expression through developing attention, and then using that attention to intend... Various teachings. Like what I'm speaking now are teachings. To bring attention to attention or to notice the mind that arises on every percept or attention, what happens when attention is part of every perception.

[13:11]

You're developing attention. And you develop it in your breath. And your heartbeat and your whole metabolism begins to function in a different way when it's attended in a big space. Now, yesterday I went, hope you don't, my two older daughters always objected or sort of objected when I mentioned them in lectures. And she's starting to object already. But anyway, I went and saw her horse named Hazen yesterday. It's not Hazen, it's Hazen. And I was fascinated because she's rebonding, maybe so, I mean, it looks like, with her horse after living in Germany most of the time for the last couple of years. And so first she let the horse run around the paddock, the field, the fenced-in field.

[14:21]

And, yeah, but the horse wasn't just running in the field. It was running in the field of her attention. And so she let it run around, or I don't know if she let it, the horse, it looked like it was having a lot of fun, running this way, running that way, galloping in four-legged beauty. But at some point, I don't know, 20 minutes, half an hour, or 15 minutes, I don't know, Sophia began to take this field of attention, which the horse realized it was in the field of her attention, She turned that attention like into a channel and brought the horse to her. And then she started walking around and the horse just followed completely behind her as if it was on a rope. And it wasn't on a rope at all. It just had her nose somewhere toward the middle of her back and just walked along.

[15:30]

So she walked this way and that way and the horse just followed along behind. So what I would say, I mean what a Buddhist would say, is she developed a field of attention and turned it into a channel of attention and the horse joined in that field of attention and then in that channel of attention. Now I think when most people read or look at, study the ten oxherting pictures, They think it's sort of like, yeah, you take care of your ox and you have it on a rope and you train it. After a while, you don't have to use the rope and pretty soon you can let the ox free in its field. And I think as Westerners, we tend to look at that and say, well, yeah, it's now the ox no longer needs attention, so it's free of attention. But in fact, the ten oxfordian pictures are from an ancient animal husbandry culture.

[16:32]

And they know what horses and oxes do when you establish a mutual field of attention and channel of attention. So the ox can be turned out into its field because it's turned out into the field, a developed field of attention. So, I mean, you can hear my words or these words. They're partly mine. But, you know, it doesn't make sense. It won't make really bodily sense to you unless you try it out and begin to experiment with the difference between seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, feeling, et cetera, tasting, with attention in it and without attention in it.

[17:34]

When you take a mouthful of peach or one of the wonderful food we make here, when you bring attention to it, One of the great things about ariyoki eating is sometimes it's the most boring food in the world. You'd hardly want it. But somehow when you're eating it in an ariyoki, you're bringing attention to it in a way that it has a taste that it doesn't have in most circumstances. So the experience, too, of bringing attention not only to each of the five physical senses.

[18:35]

Mind is considered a sense, too, a source of... So there's six senses in Buddhism, but the sixth sense, mind, really accompanies the first five and is a source of thoughts and ideas and so forth. But if I hold this stick in front of you, you can bring attention to it. And your attention, if you're not skillful, you don't have yogic skills, your attention is on it, and it goes away, and it goes on, and you're thinking, geez, do I have an SMS? Or how do I look? Or, et cetera, all the things one can think of or be distracted by. Do I have some more emails? But can the attention just rest on the stick? When it's seriously achieved, yoga skill, when your attention just rests wherever you put it. But just moving in that direction makes a huge difference.

[19:37]

So if you move, bring your attention, it goes away. Then you bring it back, it goes away. That's the ten oxen in your pictures. This is the ox, you bring attention to it, it goes away, bring it back, it goes away. And after a while, you bring attention to it, it goes away, but it comes back by itself. And that means you're developing the skill of attention. Now, let's imagine you all have now fully brought attention to this lotus staff. You brought attention to it. Now you're maintaining that attention. You can feel that attention in your body and say, I take this away. And you still feel that attention. but it's not focused on the stick anymore. So what is the object of attention now that the stick isn't there? The object of attention is attention itself.

[20:41]

So now, that's just a simple example, attention to attention. And if you develop the skill of bringing attention to attention and maintaining that, physically feeling it in your body, breath, and so forth, then you can bring this back out. And the field of attention is noticing it now. It's in a field of attention that you've established. And that's what happened to Hazen, maybe, or in Buddhist terms that's what happened, or that's what happens to the ox in the Ten Ox Serving pictures, that you establish a field of attention in which the ox has its true freedom. Yeah, like that. Now in Zazen you can develop a skill of of bringing attention to the spine and finding attention in the spine all the way up to the top of the head.

[21:49]

Even though there's no spine going through the middle of your head, you feel like there's something, like a channel going through. And if I say, you know, you have a spine, yes, that's true, but that's thinking. If I say, I have a spine, but if I say, I feel my spine, I have many spines I feel, not just one. You know about spines, right? So in the beginning of zazen, I have one kind of spine. After about 10 minutes, I start having a different kind of spine. And after 20 minutes, I can feel a kind of awakening all the way up into my head. And if I continue to develop it, it becomes a kind of presence. And so I think for us, as this wisdom software culture is new to us, one of the ways to enter it is through bringing attention to the spine and

[22:57]

In any circumstance, you can bring attention. Walking around, whatever you do, you can establish a kind of inner vacation by bringing attention to the spine or bringing attention to your breath. You don't have to be in the zendo. It's kind of great just to stop and take a three-breath vacation. In the middle of things, you've got a lot to do. You stop a minute, just... And even the spine may, on the second or third breath, itself open up with your three-breath vacation. And when you do that, you're exercising attention. It's a little fitness, three-breath fitness studio for attention. And it somehow, after a while, it begins to make an attentional field that has width, borderless width and depth

[24:04]

that whether you have an SMS or an email, somehow it doesn't, it's so flimsy compared to the satisfaction of this attentional field. Now, one of the things, you know, you guys, you too, from, you know, just... dropped in here and didn't really know what you're getting yourself into, and suddenly you find yourself bowing to everybody, you know. And I get so in the habit, you know, at the counter at the airport, I bow to the person that's doing my ticket, and I think, oh God, I've got to stop that. But why do we do these bows? You can call this a monastery, you can call it a temple, but it's basically a mutual practice center. And in a mutual practice center, we can use each other to help develop our attention, our attentional body.

[25:11]

And you know, brain consciousness smears things together. Brain consciousness makes everything look like it's continuous. It's like if you have a movie film. It's actually lots of little frames, right? But if you run it at the right speed, it looks continuous. And if you can run it at a speed, if you're frantic and nervous and anxious all the time, it speeds up and the frames go like, you know, through brain consciousness. If you're calmer, it slows down. And if you really have discovered the stillness behind activity, the stillness is the secret of activity, You begin to see frame by frame, and you feel the gaps between the frame. Brain consciousness wants to take away the gaps.

[26:14]

But Zen practice, Buddhist practice, the Buddhist software, wisdom program, wants to slow it down so you can feel frame after frame. You can feel the gaps as a kind of space. And so one way to practice these things, you know, you use your breath, you use your spine, etc. To practice these things, you can use the tradition and what we're doing, is you bow to each person you meet. And the pattern is something like, stop, bow, disappear, resume. So you stop. And even if you're in a hurry, you can't see if you can stop. You bow, and then you feel you just disappear into the gap. Mind the gap, isn't that what they say in New York? Mind the gap. You disappear into the gap, and then you resume. And what's interesting is, as you develop the feel of that, you feel the other person who bows with you disappearing into the gap, or disappearing into the shared space.

[27:31]

So somehow you make a space outside of brain consciousness, which is trying to run things together and make it look continuous, because the world exists, molecular, atomically, however you want to look at it, scientifically, it actually exists unit after unit and perceptual unit after unit. I mean, the units of this mountain are different than our units, but it's changing. The units are just different paces. And practice Buddhist software is to discover the pace of your metabolism and the space of the world as it's present in your senses. And once you get good at it, you can do it at any speed or anything. You can do whatever you want. I mean, a tennis player like Federer, he's not thinking. He's just in a space in which the ball is coming to him, almost like in a movie, but a very slow movie. So you don't have to, you know, we do pick things up with two hands, we bow to each other, etc.

[28:48]

And some people think this is all just ritual, but it's ways to notice the dharma of each appearance. And it's a way to develop attention so that attention, I think, I mean, I studied, studied, I studied Pablo Casals once, but I didn't study with him. I studied him because I organized, with some help, the Pablo Casals Masterclass about two centuries ago, I don't know, a long time ago. I was young. And I watched him very carefully. And I remember he said, if I'm playing, he said, I know what the people, I can feel the people in the first row, I can feel the people up in the balcony, I can feel the drop of sweat coming down under my arm, and I can feel each note. That's a field of attention and a channel within the field of attention.

[29:56]

So you can do this as you wish, in poetry, in language, feeling each word as its filaments reach out and call forth for other words. So, again, you don't have to be in a zendo, you don't have to bow to each other, but in ordinary daily life you can just take a three-breath vacation. and things like that, which develop your attention and begin to download the essential software of how we actually exist. Thanks.

[30:41]

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