In a simple sense, I would say that meditation is about unpacking our lived experience. And again, in a simple sense, mediation is about unpacking our relationships, our interrelationships with others. And in fact, most Buddhist teachings are purely about unpacking And actualizing and articulating our relationships with others in a way that's beneficial to others and oneself.

[01:02]

Now, David Durkin here, my old friend from his childhood, he's naming the group they're practicing with, young university students, right, mostly. He is naming it the Zen lab in his cautiousness. But I have considered from the very beginning that everything I do is a kind of laboratory experiment. So almost always when I give a talk, I don't know what I'm going to say. But I feel something with... you and Gary and Trish, that makes me want to say something.

[02:44]

And I hope you'll have a little patience with me because I don't... I'm finding out what I feel. I have some images and I have some feeling, and then I have to see if I can, in the field that you're creating with me, find some words. And I hope you can have a little patience with me. Because what happens to me is that I have pictures and I have different ideas. But I will now try to say what I want to say inside the field that you or we create together. You said sometimes is there vulnerability. I feel a lot of vulnerability and controlled terror.

[03:45]

Because a few times I've been in a very large audience and with this I get there and I look at it and I say to myself, Why are all these people here? And what do I have to do with them? I don't have anything to say to them, and I freeze. I've had that happen several times. Well, that's the price. And Gary suggested last year or a couple of years ago and this year that I might do some kind of guided meditation.

[04:55]

And guided meditation is really not very characteristic or common in Zen practice. It doesn't mean that it isn't useful to do. But there's always a tendency to make the shoe fit. and it can take away the Zen practice I would define as a path of discovery. It can take away your own ownership of these discoveries. And so oversimplified again, the general way in Zen is, here's some simple descriptions of the posture, see what happens.

[06:04]

And Zen is really two things, a physical posture that you kind of evolve, develop. And I said, as I said, mainly... The breath the other day, the breath and the spine are the two most single, single most important factors in the posture. Yeah, so right now, I mean, Zen practice, the stillness, mental and physical stillness of Zen practice is not limited to Zazen in the Zendo. Right now, the elixir, I don't know what words to use, the elixir of stillness is available to you right now.

[07:23]

Right now, for instance, you can see if there's some kind of conscious stillness in you. Then you can sort of just wonder, what's conscious stillness? Do I feel something like that? And then you can bring your spine, the spine and your spine into it. Last week, we had one of the experts, Jeffrey Sandhofer, here, who is... Everyone was asking me about chakras, so I looked up chakras on the Wikipedia.

[08:51]

And there was quoting Jeffrey Samuel as a world expert on chakras. He's also a physicist among other things. Sorry. And sitting next to me, over there, next to me was a practitioner of Bon, the earlier, the pre-Buddhist religion, sort of religion of Tibet. And again, so they were both asking me, they don't think chakra practice is part of Zen.

[10:02]

Even Japanese tantric practice, they think doesn't use chakras, but that's not correct. And you couldn't use, you couldn't practice Zen meditation without having some relation to chakras because they're just part of the practice. You might notice, again, normally we don't say this publicly like this, but you might notice when you're sitting at some point, in certain modalities of mind, you start to feel a tingle here. And to stabilize your breath so you're not breathing with your upper chest but with your diaphragm.

[11:03]

We suggest that people visualize the breath coming out in the oval and then coming up from the bottom, as if you were breathing from your heart, up. This is part of the visual. Okay. So... And it does. You can feel it, and it does... stabilize, settle your breathing, so that you don't, when you... Because of the danger, when you concentrate, that you cut off your breathing if you're breathing with your chest.

[12:30]

And if you're breathing with your diaphragm, there isn't that likelihood, because if you cut off your breathing, then you change the blood flow to the brain, and then you get interested in your experiences, and, you know, etc. And when you stabilize your breathing in this way, that you really develop a dwarf breathing, and that the main activity of the breath, or that it is not the only activity of the breath in the upper chest area, But when you're stabilizing your breathing with this visualization of an oval, Your inadvertently or advertently getting the experience of creating a visualization pattern. And And that visualization pattern begins to have a life of its own, independent of your breathing.

[13:52]

And again, I just should say as a matter of responsibility, To be concentrated on your breathing is beneficial, but it's really concentration on your breathing is on your inhale and your exhale, not on the generalization breathing. And just out of responsibility, I would say that if you concentrate on the breath, then you actually concentrate on the individual inhalation and the individual exhalation. And not just on the breath. That would be a generalization. They're both transformative, but really each in concentration on your hails.

[14:56]

I call it hail breathing, attentional hail breathing. It's a different world that arises through that than from attention to breathing. So when you bring attention to your breathing, you're also training attention and permeating your body with attention and generating an attentional body. So we don't usually say, we just say bring attention to your heels and then let the person discover

[16:01]

What happens when you develop a kind of muscle of attention? And then you're actually developing the a culture rooted in attention rather than a culture rooted in cognition. And even though cognition is there, the main dynamic of the world is attention. And this oval... then begins, in its independence from breathing, becomes joined to, and yet independent of breathing, begins to be part of the spine and your chakra system.

[17:35]

Und dieses Oval, das man visualisiert hat, das wird dann auch irgendwann, hat so wie ein Eigenleben, das sowohl verbunden ist mit dem Atem, als aber auch unabhängig vom Atem gespürt werden kann. Und das ist eine Verbindung zu der Wirbelsäule und den Chakren auch. And for some practitioners, the chakras become very important, but they're also articulated. I can spot a first or second generation, even, Japanese person, if they hold their teacup here and here, because these are little chakra shells. And after a while, they just hold it in any old place. And for some people, the chakras become very important. But also, I can see from the first glance, if someone in the first or second generation emigrated from Japan, whether the person, if she is still connected to the Japanese culture, then she holds her cup of tea, for example, either we say here,

[18:41]

So the chakras are an internal experience, but they're also part of an extended bodily field. Okay. Now, just one other Zazen-related point. Sukhiroshi would say, the most common thing, don't invite your thoughts to tea. But after a while, if you do that, and everyone can do it with no yogic experience, you can feel that you're not inviting your thoughts to tea.

[19:43]

But after a while you begin to see that the discursive thoughts are one modality of mind and the intention not to divide your thoughts to tea is not usual mentation. And as soon as you notice that you begin to be in the territory, you can develop the territories of mind with different viscosities or valences. So as you develop the

[20:45]

the valence or modality of the mind which doesn't invite the thoughts to tea. which is the first surface is an intentional mind but in the end the jewel of stillness is hidden in the intentional mind. Okay, so that's enough on all that, I think. Again, in your sitting, you can feel how your posture, where your spine is, etc., Just right now.

[22:10]

And maybe you'll feel your breathing along your spine. Okay. All right. Now, the other day I said something about the difference between the words meditation and mediation. This is because Gary and I decided to do this this year, more together than last time. It's made me over the last months, it's been percolating and incubating here and there. And the fun of such similarly lettered words as mediation and meditation

[23:19]

I've often enjoyed the difference between who and what. The three-letter and a four-letter word starting with W. In German, different. In English. And if you ask yourself, who am I? And you let that settle a little bit. Treating it as a real question. And then you shift and you say, what am I? I think at least my experience is, The body is called forth and the associations are called forth in a different way with a what am I than with a who am I. And... Yeah.

[24:58]

And... I find this quite mysterious and wonderful. And to take this another step or two, which I tried to do the other day and I'm trying to do today too. I've never done before. It's stimulated by you guys and Gary and Trish. Okay, so what I said is, if I say the word meditation, it arises in a diffuse, you'll have to be patient with me here, a diffuse field, spatial field. Now, I'm not a mathematician or a physicist, but I'm very touched by a physicist and mathematician named Paul Dirac, D-I-R-A-C.

[26:20]

He's dead now, but his equations and his brilliance and eccentricity too opened up much of what Einstein discovered. And his mathematical formulas that he developed show that space is not infinitely divisible. It's not infinitely small. There's a point at which it can't be smaller, so there's some quantum particle which means space itself is dimensional. I mean, the stuff of space is a kind of stuff of space which has dimensions, which is not the same as just the space measured by the room.

[27:55]

In my own thinking, I call this nanofine space. Nano. Yeah. Fine. Yeah. Granular. Yeah. Okay. Nano small. I like that better. In German, fine is a different color. Okay. Nano klein. Okay. Nanoply. Nanoply. That's kind of stupid because nano is already small.

[28:56]

But that's fine. Yeah. Well, so why I'm bringing that up is I'm not saying that what I'm calling an experience is physical reality. Also, the reason why I'm saying that is I'm not saying that what I call experience is physical reality. I don't have the training to follow Paul Dirac's equations. But I do know what I consider to be actual experience. Now we're born with a particular birth date. So we naturally think of time and space as existing before we were born. But feeling they were in existence before we were born means that while we're alive, we tend to think they're just the way they were before I was born.

[30:01]

You're so courageous. You're just stuck here. Oh, he told me. And common sense takes for granted that consciousness is a kind of window on reality. And sometimes we even think the window is a mirror and we're seeing ourselves in reality. But Buddhist teachings assume Fine articulation.

[31:24]

The space is experienceable and malleable, and its time is also. It's easy to say Newtonian time and space are sort of out of date, but really, what does that mean in the East Asian yogic world where the teaching assumes that's the case? So looking for some way to give us an experiential sense of this. Yeah, I'm suggesting we feel the spatial granularity maybe or diffuseness that the word mediation calls up.

[32:36]

You said spatial granularity. What else? That's enough. Now let's assume that through zazen, through meditation, you have developed the attentional skills to distinguish between an intentional still mind and a discursive, actionable, actional mind. Okay, so there's various layers of consciousness.

[34:03]

There's also awareness, which is different than consciousness. And there's also unknowing, which is rooted in consciousness. attentional noticing, but not through cognitive referentiality. And there are different layers of the spirit. There is what we call consciousness. There is also awareness, and that is another level of the spirit. And beyond that, there is also a kind of noticing knowledge, a kind of knowledge that, through attentive noticing, So a regular zazen, five times, seven times a week, you develop an interoceptive core.

[35:13]

You develop a kind of Which regular Zazen kind of rebalances every day. And it's quite helpful to get all your organs back in tune. The word you used the other day speaking to me about this was you feel recalibrated. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I know a number of surgeons, one in particular is a heart surgeon.

[36:39]

And if you do hundreds of heart operations after a while, you can tie knots with your two fingers and things like that. You just develop extraordinary attentional skills. Supposedly, somebody looked at my daughter, Sophia, who's now 18, and she's quite a good pianist if she wanted to be. She truly enjoys it. But as a kid she played the cello for years. And somebody looked at her and said, oh, you must have played the cello because your left hand is bigger than usual. And I had no idea playing the cello made one hand bigger than the other. So these skills like being able to distinguish between modalities of mind just develop rather naturally

[38:04]

with regular sitting. So that you can feel the diffuse granularity, my mouth wanted to say muscularity, granularity of... of the diffuse space that arises through the word mediation. And then you can feel the difference with the diffuser, finely grained space that arises within the associations of the word meditation. And then you can, in the midst of those differences, you can begin to say, hey, they not only share a lot of letters, they also share a concept of collectivity.

[39:41]

collectivity. And connectivity. They collect things in a similar way and they connect things in a similar way. And if you notice this in this way, then you can see that these two words not only have a whole series of letters together, but also similar One little thing I didn't finish a few minutes ago was that zazen is a particular kind of posture you evolve And you don't just sit down in the posture as if it was a mold. You're slowly negotiating it as you sit. You live near Charlotte Silver, where she lived.

[41:14]

When she was about 100, I sat down beside her on her couch in her house. And her body was something like a 14-year-old, a little small. It got smaller all the time as she got older. And she was about 100 at this time, I guess. And I said, Charlotte, you know, in my experience with you over the years, I've had some small meditation experiences. Small enlightenment experiences, I said. And she told herself after a full 16-year-old height, what do you mean small? Yeah. One thing I remember when she said to me, she didn't say stand up, she said come up to standing.

[42:52]

And I was struck first by how simple words can be transformative. But from those words in the marina in 1962 or something like that, in the San Francisco marina district, where she was giving a seminar with Alan Watts, So before I always just stood up getting from point A to point B. But after that I always feel a whole process happening as I get up.

[43:54]

I come up into standing and there's about a hundred little positions. And since then... Which is helpful when you're old. When I got up, I just went from point A to point B. There were only these two points. But since she spoke these words, getting up means for me the whole process and the running through from hundreds of mini positions to getting up. And that's very useful when you're old. She also at some point sat up in the corner of the room like over there where you are. And she asked us all to close our eyes. So dutifully we did so. I think I did anyway. And then she said simply the word blue. And it literally blew slowly across the room to me and I could feel it coming and I felt it hit me and go through my cells and I've never heard language other than in that way since then.

[45:16]

Okay. So now, end game, so you don't get too anxious here. Now, Zen assumes with these phrases, like, this very mind is Buddha, or something like that, that you locate them in your attention, intentional, attentional space. And they float like real objects in all your activity.

[46:20]

They're just present all the time. So if we were... We're not doing much longer together, but I would suggest as practitioners you install the word connectivity in the midst of any thoughts about mediation and meditation, And now we won't be here together for so long, but as an exercise I would suggest that you look at the word connectivity in English as, let's say, you can look at it in German yourself, it's maybe verbundenheit, or it's verbunden sein, the word verbindungen selber, verbindungsstiften, verbunden sein, Yeah, and you'd have to install some German word which worked for you.

[47:28]

But Zen practice, this is really what Zen practice has developed independent of Indian Buddhism as Buddhism was sinified in China. The power of phrases, aphorisms, that float in your intentional space. Phrases. So, now maybe you can have the attentional imagination at least that you can take away the word meditation and you can take the word mediation away and even the word connectivity

[48:30]

Jetzt kannst du vielleicht dir so etwas imaginieren als ob du das Wort Mediation abziehst oder wegnimmst und das Wort Meditation wegnimmst und sogar das Wort des Verbundenseins wegnimmst. And you're left with a kind of feel of a kleine nanospace, diffuse, subtle space. Now let's establish the four Brahma-viharas, the four unlimiteds and indescribables and unmentionable in this fine granular space. So the four Unlimiteds, Brahmaviharas, means divine abodes.

[49:31]

How to live like a divinity, maybe something like that, I think. The first is the practice of unlimited friendliness or loving-kindness. It's translated both ways. And you actually see if you can take that on as an attitude that is in all your actionable or intentional space. And then the second is empathetic joy.

[50:34]

And that means the ability to take joy in anyone's success, even perhaps your idol. So it's a good test to see if you have that capacity. And the third is equanimity, unlimited equanimity. Brother David likes these three. So equanimity means something like a wildly... Oh, I didn't say.

[51:48]

There's something in a certain posture, but the mental postures don't move it. So the physical posture is something you evolve and develop. But meditation is not meditation. Zazen is not Zazen unless it's accompanied by the mental posture and image. Don't move. Zen tries to make the length of time of the meditation periods long enough that it's not so easy not to move. Then if you get the ability to not move, it doesn't mean you have to sit for 10 hours without moving.

[52:56]

It just means at some point you actually get the ability to just be still. So the mental posture and the physical posture work together to create stillness. You know, kind of biological stillness. In a world where everything is changing, this biological stillness is a true treasure. Okay, so that's also what's meant by equanimity. They're just able to be still in each successive moment. And the fourth Brahma Vihara is compassion.

[53:57]

To really be able to put yourself in anybody and each other's shoes, mind, body, fingernail. Every person you see, you see, there go I, but for a gene or two. Okay, now, finishing. If you establish those four in this nano-clined space, Buddhism assumes that that space is a form of connectivity.

[55:05]

And it's not just established in your extended haptic space. The mediator, who's also a moderately accomplished meditator, can establish that in the midst of the field of mediation with the other participants. At least Buddhism and Zen in particular Their teachings are based on experience and the imagination that this is possible.

[56:16]

And it's reached through practice. And it's reached through metaphoric thinking. And metaphoric thinking is the kind of thinking or noticing that occurs in a culture based on experience and not on intelligibility and cognition. Metaphorisches Denken ist die Art von Denken, das in einer Kultur gepflegt wird, wo die Kultur auf Erfahrung basiert und nicht auf Kognition. Because metaphors can reach into the mystery of why there's anything existing at all more effectively. Aspectively, that's a new word, than ordinary thinking, unusual thinking.

[57:24]

Aspectively, that's a new word, than ordinary thinking. So that's the back, that's how Meditation practice can be the background and the foreground of mediation practice. And it is happening whether we like it or intend it or not. What meditation does, or Zazen does, is give you a more opportunity to actively participate in it.

[58:40]

Thank you very much for your patience and for being my laboratory and drawing this out of me, which I hadn't thought of before until this week. Well, I will speak about it. Okay, thank you. It must be time for a break. Just before, just a few comments. What do you think? Is this too much or is it useful? May I ask a question? I assume that in your Buddhist communities there are also conflicts in some form. And I'm asking you right now with what method or communities do you try to resolve conflicts? Could we let her translate?

[60:02]

You might, because I'm so used to her translating, I can hear it better. The question is, he's assuming that also in Buddhist communities there are conflicts. There are conflicts. So what would be the method or the approach? How do we address conflicts in Buddhist communities? I guess first you'd have to say that there's an attempt to notice them as a persistent pattern. And the next step is to, in the staff, which is the people, the positions of the work, to discuss it and think about how to accommodate the center to And then the next step is a kind of

[61:10]

intervention with the entire residential Sangha and sometimes a larger Sangha to discuss this whole thing and have the person say something. Person or persons. And if it's not resolvable within the Sangha, we ask the person to leave. And much of the early Theravadan teachings are all about how you make this process work and decide it's not going to work in the community, so you have to... Anyway, it's a kind of consensual, compassionate, tough process.

[62:34]

Many of the early Theravada teachings are exactly about how to make such a kind of process work well. I would describe this as a consensual, accompanying, rather difficult or hard process. So here I would find it interesting what are the possibilities or how could that be incorporated with, he's calling it secular maybe, mediation. Mediation master? No, so this is interesting because I'm called in to deal with conflicts in spiritual communities.

[63:41]

In Zen communities. He's our super mediator. And so when I come in, people see me coming and they say, well, there must be trouble. But for me, First of all, there's a picture a lot of people have of Buddhist communities that there's no conflict. And more dangerously, There are people in Zen communities that feel like if they feel that there's a conflict, that they're doing something wrong. So the most important thing, I think, is to see that conflict is like breathing. It's inevitable, it's normal, and it's part of what happens when human beings live together.

[64:50]

And then the hope is that this is when the practice really has its challenge. Can we bring our practice to this moment that's created this disturbance and this stillness that we want? So it's a great opportunity for people to actually deepen their practice. So this is not time out from practice because there's conflict.

[65:54]

It's conflict has arisen in the practice and in the community. And now we bring the practice to see if that can help steer us through, with some help, through the conflict to get to the other side. What I love about doing work with the Zen community is that people have access to themselves. So when you ask what's going on, you don't get this blank look. What do you mean? It might be hard to talk about it, but I'm always amazed.

[67:02]

at how ready people are to be able to find what's happening inside them and to be able to find work to say it. And it gives me great hope to feel like these islands of Buddhist places that can do this are doing this not just for themselves, but for outside communities, too. I share your hope. You may be a little more optimistic than me. Well, it's much harder when you're the target. Sometimes I'm the target.

[68:27]

When you're just there to try to help and you're not part of it, it's much easier not to get so caught up in it. I think it's... There's problems, like simple problems of having a role like mine. Somebody said once, you know, when you're in the room, everything is different. Just even in social situations. And I say, well, how can I know that? It wasn't in the room. So I don't know the difference, but everybody else knows the difference. I need a camera that's there ahead of me and I can look at the cameras.

[69:32]

And I'm, of course, treated differently and I'm not in the daily life in the same way. So often I really don't know what's going on. But what I notice about you is over time, I don't know if you always had this, but I think I see you have the courage to be seen. I hope. And that makes a huge difference. And I depend on people like Ulrich and you to keep me informed about, hey, heads up. I always need people like Ulrich or Nicole to warn me.

[70:34]

So should we take a bite? 15 minutes?

[70:41]

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