Those of you who are out at the right and left, if you want to turn this way, that's fine. There's no rule. And I'm suggesting it not just because it might be more convenient for you. I feel your presence more. Okay, and I forgot, you know, I guess I, in my mind, we were like a winter branches seminar in which I wear robes and so forth in the morning for Teisho. And also I'm just well trained, you know. It's in the Zendo or in the Dharma Hall, and so I put on my robes. When Nicole, as a jisha, came to pick me up, she said, oh, you're in robes.

[01:13]

And I'm sure she was ready to race over to her room and put, no. Mm-hmm. And this is, as I've been saying, an experiment on how to use these facilities and also how to, in this case, do a Dharma Wheel meeting and a seminar overlapping. And so we'll meet together in the morning like this. And we'll separate after this seminar.

[02:31]

We'll sort of meet separately. And find out how it works for all of us. And Nicole Barden has been practicing I don't know, since she was 17 or 18, isn't that right? For 17 years now? Is that right? Now 18. Oh. That last year has made a big difference. So after so many years, we ought to be able to hear her voice. So I thought maybe we could do this seminar together somehow. And since I've known her now, obviously for a long time, I appreciate what I would call her four commitments.

[03:35]

One has been her commitment to practice, which developed over the years. And another was her commitment also to respect her own needs and inner requests. And so she went to the university while also being here as much as possible. And as we're essentially a lay practice Sangha, it's great that she was able to respect her own needs and requests.

[04:50]

And from the beginning, she's implicitly committed herself to practicing with others. And off and on, and more recently, she's committed herself to developing a practice place together with all of us. And since we are a lay practice place again and it means we really have to explore our life living practice Not just the forms of a practice center or a sangha center or a monastic center.

[06:02]

So that's why I mentioned these four commitments because, which I see that she may have five or six others she hasn't told me about or I haven't seen, but it's worth exploring with her in the seminar how she has developed her practice. Now quite a few of you are new to me. And so you won't be familiar with how I try to approach and teach and present the Dharma. I'm trying to do it in realistic terms, accessible in our own way of cultural thinking.

[07:27]

And sometimes I even have to make up words because there's no English word or German word that I know, of course, and really no translatable Asian word or even an Asian word for... dharma practice, aspects of dharma practice. But what I'm emphasizing in this latter stage of my own practice Is to look very carefully at the basics. I'm saying that because, I mean, I feel that, because it's very clear to me the basics are the foundation of all the practice, all the Dharma practices.

[09:04]

And I'm emphasizing it also because if you're a new practitioner, it's a special opportunity to look closely at the basic practices because you'll develop the foundation of practice much more effectively. now during these three and several days I want to speak about how we view and experience the body And I think this is probably for us Westerners the most important, crucial aspect of practice, how we conceive of the body and how we experience the body.

[10:38]

Ich glaube, das ist für uns Westler vielleicht eine Art Schlüsselpunkt, wie wir den Körper, welche Sichtweise wir zum Körper haben und wie wir ihn auch erfahren. Now, the basic instruction for Zazen practice. Yes, to be really basic is don't move. And don't move is a kind of Dharma door. And one side is actually a different kind of body than the other side. And don't move is not an instruction you simply follow, try to follow. It's not? It's not an instruction, yes. It's a code, I'm using the word a lot recently, it's a code for the word trying to not move.

[11:52]

For discovering what it means to not move or, yeah. Try to not move, etc. So if you move, you haven't made a mistake. But if you explore what it means, what it feels like to not move, then you're on the path. Because I mean, I'm going to say things which maybe don't make sense at first, but I hope they will eventually. Not the... effort and the degree of success in not moving changes you physiologically.

[13:22]

Denn diese Bemühung und das Ausmaß, in dem du Erfolg hast dabei, dich nicht zu bewegen, das verändert dich auf physiologische Weise. I don't know if this makes sense at this point, but it gives you a physiological location in the world and not a physical location in the world. And I don't know if this makes sense for you at this point, but it leads to the fact that you have a physiological orientation in the world and not just a physical orientation. Again, I'm using English and I don't know. She's using high German. Austrian German. I tried. And I'm using low American. In English, it takes some time to distinguish some kind of turning it over. What would be the difference between a physiological location and a physical location? Now I speak about this also knowing in a way I'm hoping to create what I would call an imaginal space.

[14:42]

In other words, if I say, just bring up, there's an alternative to a physical location, which we could call a physiological location, that creates a different space in which you imagine your life. It can't. And the concept of the Buddha and the concept of enlightenment physically articulated in these statues, for instance, creates the potential or the potential space of awakening of enlightenment. So this is actually extremely important.

[16:22]

Because if you live your life, oh, it's a mess, and God, what happened in Barcelona yesterday, and so forth, it's... It's disgusting. Horrible. And you can start having a imaginal space where it's all crap. I mean, sometimes it pretty close to is. But the teaching of Buddhism is there is this alternative imaginal space in which awakening and transformation is possible for all of us, and at least it could be an obligation or possibility for you. And I believe the title of this seminar is something like The Mind and the Body. The and is wrong.

[17:50]

But we do make this distinction, body and mind. And it's a useful distinction. But if you practice don't moving as much as you can, You become more and more directly immersed in the experience of the simultaneity of body and mind. If somebody does something terrible or you hear this news, you may cry. So here's a percept, you've heard something told, and it's a perception, the mind processes the words and the body turns into tears. Und da gibt es diese Wahrnehmung, ihr hört diese Nachricht und ihr verarbeitet, euer Mind, euer Geist verarbeitet das und der Körper verwandelt es in Tränen.

[19:16]

And what happens when you really become a physiological location and not a physical location? Not so much a physical location. Emotions, feelings, body, words, all are felt. It's a kind of energy. And one of the basic teachings is to notice mind arising on every percept. that when I look at you right now, yes, what I'm seeing actually is I'm seeing my own mind see you. And that's not obvious to us. If you tried to build a robot, an AI robot, which could be programmed to do almost everything we do, you'd probably want to write a code, write a software for it, so that it was in a Newtonian world.

[20:52]

No, I'm just throwing this out. What the heck? And I know it took me many, many years to really accept and experience we do not live in a Newtonian world. It's brilliant mathematically as Sir Isaac Newton was and how imaginatively creative he was. He still assumed that we live in a container space. We move around in it, but the space stays still.

[22:05]

Now, I might say, the space pretends to stand still. And it took, and Newton also assumed we live according to a universal clock time. And it took the mathematics of Einstein to show that it could be approached mathematically, but it took Einstein to do it. And to say it simply, again to throw out an imaginal space for all of us and me, is we are space and we are time.

[23:25]

And our lived life is coordinating that space and time with others and with phenomena. I could say very simply that externalized reality is delusion. And internalized realness is enlightenment. And I state that as a fact for your imaginal space. And I change the word from reality to realness in English at least. I don't know what you did.

[24:41]

Was it okay what you did? I tried something. Okay, good. Because, you know, the word real and reality originally meant relationship, real relationship. Yeah, so it meant relationship. The relationships are reality. But it also meant real property, like land that you owned or something like that. So a real estate person is called a realtor. He's one of the least real people, but, you know, I mean, not always. I hope none of you are realtors. Sometimes. I mean, there's one that's president of the United... No.

[25:48]

Okay. But because of the identification with real property, we turn reality into the exterior. And we did the same with the word phenomena. The etymology of phenomena means that which appears to the senses. So it means Just what I said, when I look at you, I'm seeing my own mind. They seem to have been wiser in the early days than now. Because the word phenomena is used now in English to mean that which is the stuff outside of us, not us, the stuff outside of us.

[26:55]

And the problem with this body-mind, body-phenomena distinction And the problem with this distinction between body and phenomena is that we tend to identify our body with phenomena. We treat our body as sort of like it was the clothes of our mind. And we do plastic surgery if we think our body is the clothes of our personality. Now I can cut my fingernails and toenails without changing my mind too much. Though for some reason it's getting harder to reach my feet.

[28:02]

I don't know why. They're just going away. Still, I can cut my fingernails, etc. It doesn't cause me any neurotic or mental pain. But if I lost arms and legs or something, I think the brain would have to start reprogramming itself. Because we really have something more like a bodily mind brain. And practice recognizes this. Practice assumes this. And so the first Dharma door here is don't move. And exploring how difficult it is actually to not move.

[29:31]

And of course, when you don't move, your heart hopefully is still beating. It might slow down a bit and your lungs are still functioning. So what doesn't move? Well, you discover that the mind can not move or move less. And you discover stillness. Stillness is a kind of in the sense that it's a relationship that you discover called stillness. Now, so I've given you one basic thing to look at in practice for those of you who've been doing it forever or a long time and those of you who are fairly new. Also gebe ich euch diese eine grundlegende Sache, denjenigen von euch, die das schon ewig machen, oder eine lange Zeit, und denjenigen von euch, die neu hier sind.

[30:56]

The Dharma door of don't move. Dieses Dharma door, sich nicht zu bewegen. Which Zazen is really a practice to experiment with the Dharma door of don't move. And for you to develop the attentional skills to notice the difference between the two sides of this Dharma door, And the attentional skills that develop, evolve through being on the side of the Dharma door where stillness resides. Now, the other Dharma door I'll mention briefly, because the clock is ticking.

[31:57]

Our agreed-upon clock time based on planetary movements and all that stuff tells us we don't have much more time. But those of you who are sitting cross-legged may have a bodily time that's saying, hey, couldn't he stop talking? So this second Dharma door I want to mention To label everything, every percept. No, that's already. How do you notice percepts? But let's not go there right now. To notice every percept. And we tend to notice things and not relationships.

[33:29]

First of all. And our language helps us notice primarily things. To notice those things as as activities. In contrast to our habit, at least in English for sure, to thinking of them as entities. Now these two Dharma doors are getting you to change your habitation, your habits, your cultural and personal habits. And your body and mind And bodily mind are inhabitations.

[34:36]

Körper und Geist, Körpergeist, das ist etwas, was hier bewohnt. We live in the habits we have. Wir leben in den Gewohnheiten, die wir haben. And that's our delusion, but it's also our opportunity. Und das ist unsere Täuschung, aber es ist auch die Möglichkeit, die für uns besteht. Because habits can be changed. Our habitation can be changed. So when you look at a tree, most of us would see an entity called a tree. But actually, you're seeing two things. The tree looks like an entity because it's still. It functions because its roots and trunk give it stillness. So we think it's an entity, but actually what you're seeing is stillness.

[35:53]

When you look at a tree really, you're seeing its activity as a tree and its stillness as a tree. And on the other side of don't move, we can find a stillness as an alternative to thinking. Da finden wir eine Unbewegtheit als eine Alternative zum Denken. And a new kind of knowing. Und eine neue Art des Kennens. Which can change our life. Das unser Leben verändern kann. And is in the realm of this potentiality of enlightenment. Und sich in diesem Bereich der Erleuchtung findet. In Ordnung? A few suggestions for your imaginal space.

[37:12]

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