Thank you very much, Nicole. It's getting cold here, so I'm wearing a padded jacket here. Hier wird es kalt, deshalb trage ich eine dicke Jacke. Three little words, three little words, I love you, can change your life. Drei kleine Worte, ich liebe dich, die können dein Leben verändern. And as we spoke last week, two little words, just this, can transform your life. So I've been musing over the week of how can I make that understandable? And I found what I'm doing is trying to make conscious, conceptually conscious practices that were not conceptually conscious when I practiced them.

[01:24]

And I'm trying to make them conceptually conscious because I'm trying to find ways to speak to you about them. Yeah, and I find in trying to make them conceptually conscious, I also am discovering what I've been doing and discovering implications and potentialities which I have been doing, which I haven't explored. And I'm trying to make them conscious. In a way, it hasn't been necessary for me to make them conscious, but...

[02:32]

I'm finding fruit, I'm finding... There's no other way I can develop this teaching with you, you know, face to face through a screen without making them conceptually conscious. And for us Westerners, it's when things become conceptually conscious that we're most likely to think they're real. I'm imagining a conversation. Honey, I bought you a new car. And Honey says, no, you didn't buy me a new car.

[04:06]

And the other Honey says, well, look out in the driveway. Yes, there's a new car in the driveway. That's consciousness. Well, that was awfully nice of you and crazy too, but thanks. Yeah, so what did I consciously, sort of consciously know when I started practicing with Suzuki Roshi? Or rather, what did I know after practicing with Suzuki Roshi that I didn't know before I practiced with him? Or maybe rather the question, what did I know after or since I had practiced with Suzuki Roshi that I did not know before I had practiced with him?

[05:32]

One, he introduced me to Zazen practice. And I experienced a distinction between the contents of mind and the field of mind. And I found I could shift my sense of location my reference point, my sense of location, from the contents of mind more or less to the field of mind. And I found out that I could more or less pull my reference point or my feeling of location out of the contents of the mind and locate it in the field of the mind. No, I had no idea at that time the significance or importance or ramifications of that distinction.

[06:48]

And I could give a whole Dharma Now series four on the implications and fruits of that distinction between mind as a field and mind as contents. So that distinction was one of my resources that wasn't available to me until I met Suzuki Roshi. And then he was lecturing, as I've said, once or twice a week on the Blue Cliff Records, the Heikigan Roku, a collection of 100 koans. And the dynamic of the koans is almost always a phrase that

[08:14]

somehow captures the essence of the koan and is the rounding point and pervasive point of the koan. And the dynamic of such a koan is almost always functioning in such a way that there is one sentence in it that encompasses the essence, the essence of the koan, and makes the koan round and ensures that with this sentence the content of the koan can be penetrating. Yeah, so I knew that... that these phrases, sometimes a single word, sometimes a phrase, were intended to be repeated in order to kind of embed them in your living activity.

[09:38]

Und ich wusste, dass diese Sätze dafür gedacht waren, dass sie immer wiederholt werden, so dass man sie in der gelebten Aktivität dort einnistet. And one of the rules of yoga culture is that everything is an activity. Nothing is really an entity. And... And I think it takes a while to actually just absorb, and you do have to work with, absorb the difference between imagining things as entities and imagining things always as processive activities. I think it really takes a while and you have to work with it to absorb it deeply.

[10:48]

And to indicate, for example, that everything is a process and not an entity. Figures of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas often have many arms. Sometimes a thousand, often two or four or like that, six. And to point out that things are always processes and activities, that's why some Buddha statues have many arms, sometimes a thousand arms and sometimes four or six arms. And I can remember as a kid, I saw a movie, I don't know, in grammar school age, of Sinbad the Sailor or something like that.

[11:56]

And the monster in it had many arms, you know. Yeah, but... For somebody who looks at the world processively, of course we have different arms. Sometimes I have these arms and sometimes I have these arms and so forth. And one way to understand this elusive, often elusive anyway, concept of emptiness is to think of it as entitylessness. Entitylessness is a pretty good synonym, experiential synonym for emptiness. emptiness. So Wado practice, which I've been talking about since when, February or March?

[13:24]

And those of you who are new today or... fairly new to this. You're just going to have to fit yourself in because I can't review everything. But for an adept Zen practitioner, If you're faced with, geez, I automatically see things as entities. How can I shift to seeing things as activities? Well, for the Zen practitioner, he or she just says, well, I'll enter it into the flow of my lived activity.

[14:33]

my accumulated experience. So your accumulated experience, your lived activity is riddled, in every sense of that word, with assumptions. So to see everything as an activity and not as entities is actually a worldview shift. These words, activity and entity, when you see that there are alternatives to each other, they are actually a little mini worldview.

[15:56]

There you are. When you see that these words, entity and activity, that these two are actually alternative, that there is a real alternative, if you see that, then you can see that you can enter something like a mini worldview. So the dharma of the four marks, the dharma of the units of experience, you bring to each percept as a unit of experience. You bring... Not an entity, an activity, an activity, not an entity, an activity.

[17:01]

And eventually it begins to work in you like some kind of time release capsule, time release wisdom capsule. And the way you do that is that you actually go to every perception object, to every dharma, where the four characteristics of the dharma, that it appears, has a duration and so on, and then disappears. That you go to every... Now I will get back to what I hope is the main theme of this talk. But as I'm speaking, I imagine, in an inner debating with myself, in which you're part of the debate, I imagine, gee, that may not be understandable, so I better say this or that.

[18:13]

Okay, and I just said each percept is a unit of experience called a dharma. But to think of dharmas as percepts is just a kind of training. You mean the other way around, to think of percepts as dharmas, right? To think of percepts... As dharmas. It's a kind of training. Yeah, or dharmas as percepts. It's a kind of training. Okay. Yeah. Because it's not just, I mean, anything that appears, anything you notice is a dharma.

[19:17]

Weil alles, was erscheint, alles, was du bemerkst, ist ein Dharma. You notice it has a certain duration. You release it. It releases. You release it. Those are the four marks of a Dharma. Du bemerkst es. Es hat eine bestimmte Dauer. Du lässt es los. Und du lässt es los. Es lässt dich los. Das sind die vier... The way I said it this time is it releases itself and then you release it. Yeah, I should repeat that. I didn't say it quite that way. So, for example, the imagery of dreams... is basically the same as the often imagery of Zazen.

[20:39]

And the kind of dream images are often very similar to the kind of images that can appear in Zazen? But when an image comes up in a dream, lucid or otherwise, it's in the medium, the viscous medium of the dream, and it has a certain way it plays out in the medium of the dream. But when a picture appears in a dream, whether a lucid dream or not, then it appears in the density of the dream spirit, i.e. in the medium of the dream. And within the dream there is a certain liveliness. Yeah, but in zazen, imagery can appear, and if you then treat it as a dharma and hold it for a moment and examine its duration and release it, it functions in the medium of the field of mind of zazen in a differently associative way than in a dream.

[21:49]

It's kind of exciting to notice these things. But if a picture appears in the context of the Sazen spirit, i.e. in the Sazen spirit, and then you let it go into the associative activity of the spirit, then it has a different kind of dynamics or the spirit has a different kind of density than in the dream, for example. And that's pretty... So all this that I'm speaking about arises from, really, and I didn't intend to speak about this, but here I am, noticing the difference, noticing the field of mind in which things appear differently than in the consciousness of mind. And all that I'm saying now comes from the distinction, and I didn't plan to talk about it like that, but it comes from the distinction of noticing things in the field of the mind in contrast to noticing things in the conscious mind.

[23:10]

Yeah, so in this kind of practice, what I'm doing very simply is, you know, in many... of the ingredients are the same as in our usual life, but you're now not only cooking them differently, you're discovering menus you didn't know existed before. Recipes and menus. So you're your own chef de prajna or chef de wisdom. Du bist also dein eigener Prajna Koch oder dein eigener Weisheitskoch. I look to see if I can say something funny and see if Nico finds it funny or not.

[24:11]

Chef of Prajna. Of your own cooking. As I say, you either cook your karma or get cooked by it. Yeah, so what's happening again, entering into this phrasal establishing of phrasal repetitional phrasal stream. Also, was wir hier tun, wo wir diesen Wiederholungswende Satzstrom in diesen Strom eintreten. What's interesting, and I did it, but I didn't know I was doing it in those early days, is basically I'm establishing a repetitional stream intentionally.

[25:25]

Was ich da getan habe und damals habe ich noch nicht bemerkt, dass es das ist, was ich tue. Aber ich habe im Prinzip ein I'm establishing it within the contents of mind and reading koans or looking at my own experience where I was so busy and had so much to do at that time in my life. And I established it in my own daily stream. And that in a stream, so sets of koans and so on, in a daily stream in which I had an incredibly lot to do back then. Yes, so I'm establishing it within the contents of mind, but the repetition, you know, these are like algorithmic

[26:33]

I mean, they change. You establish a certain algorithm and then it changes and changes and changes. I mean, I'm using this computer imagery because it's familiar to us, even if I'm misusing it. What did you say about algorithms? You had a thing. Algorithmic what? Phrasally shifting as algorithmic. Some sort of gobbledygook. You really expect me to translate these things, right? Well, I like to challenge you. Okay. Okay. I'm challenging myself, too, you know.

[27:42]

Well, it does make sense what you're saying, but it's just not easy to say. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so I like, I put this phrase, the intentionality of the phrase together within the contents of mind and experience and reading and so forth. And then as I'm repeating it, the algorithm changes and says, hey, you don't belong in the contents of mind, you belong in the field of mind. And this phrase sinks into the field of mind. And the more I repeat it, the more I notice that the algorithm itself says, hey, you, with these contents, this does not belong to the contents of the spirit, but it belongs to the field of the spirit.

[29:02]

And when this is noticed, then the turning point slowly sinks into the field of the spirit. And what's kind of miraculous about this, at least from my experience, and I'm just always astounded by all this, is that its first appreciation or articulation within the contents of mind It sinks into or lifts into the field of mind. Is that first appreciation or an articulation in the contents of the mind is noticed and then this feeling sinks into the field of the mind or rises up?

[30:04]

Now it's not in the current contents of mind. Now it's in the field of mind. And in the field of mind are the implications and potentialities of all your accumulated experience, not just the current contents of mind. So experientially, and I'm using sort of images from physics, but actually experientially in that field of mind, And I'm using pictures from physics here, but in fact I'm speaking from experience.

[31:15]

In the experience of this field of spirit, Your accumulated experience is merged with the viscosity of the field of mind, but yet appears as sometimes little flowers or sometimes little stars, little particularities. And those then are attracted to the sticky surface of the intentional huado. In the field of the spirit is your whole experience treasure. Everything that you have collected in your experience has almost melted, like with the field of the spirit itself and the viscosity, the density of this field. And at the same time it seems like, I don't know, maybe small flowers or small stars that are Of course, when I was practicing in those early days of the 60s with Suzuki Roshi, I didn't have any conceptual grasp of this situation like I'm expressing now.

[32:22]

I was just doing it. I was, as I said, very busy and had so much to do and a new job and a little baby and so forth. It's now 50, near 50s. She's grown up and maybe I've grown up a little. So I had, as I told you a couple Sundays ago, I created this phrase just because I was kind of desperate of always having something to do and some place to go. So I countered it with, because I'd been studying koans with Sukhirishi, I countered it with an antidotal

[33:41]

activity phrase. No place to go, nothing to do. And so I met him or opposed him to a kind of anti-medicine activity phrase, namely, there is nowhere to go or I have to go nowhere and nothing to do further. One of the characteristics of wados, when they have the right stickiness, is that they feel like apodictic statements. Apodictic means it's just clearly true. Und eine der Charakteristika von diesen Wado-Wendelsätzen ist, dass sie, wenn sie wirklich die richtige Art von, ich nenne das jetzt mal,

[35:05]

Anziehungskraft haben, oder er sagt, Klebrigkeit haben, dann sind das so apodiktische Sätze. Und apodiktisch bedeutet einfach mal, dass es ein kleiner, klarer Satz ist, der ganz eindeutig stimmt, der eindeutig wahr ist. So the power of I had nothing to do and no place to go, the power of that came from it was more fundamentally true than I had these future-oriented things to do and to go to. I feel like Zorro then... You don't know what that, but there were these serial movies when I was a kid called The Mark of Zorro.

[36:12]

Whip a big circle like in the moon there. And he would start going over a cliff and they would say, next week, you know, you can see what happens as he rides his horse over the cliff. Ich fühle mich gerade wie im Zorro-Sem, und das kennt ihr wahrscheinlich alle nicht, aber früher gab es diese kleine Fernsehserie Zorro, wo immer, gerade wenn es spannend wurde, dann hat Zorro seine Peitsche gezogen und hat mit seiner Peitsche ein großes Z und einen Kreis in die Luft gemalt, und dann ist er mit seinem Pferd über die Klippe gesprungen, und dann hieß es, Fortsetzung folgt. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So because I see that I've just run out of my ideal length of time, 40 minutes. But the horse still has a little ways to go before the edge of the cliff. Aber das Pferdchen muss noch ein paar Schritte weiterlaufen bis zur Kante der Klippe.

[37:25]

So it feels true. It makes me think of Descartes. I think therefore I am or I am consciousness. Also so ein Satz, der fühlt sich richtig an. I'm sure it had an apodictic quality to him. Wow. But from a Wado perspective, it was apodictic in contrast to, I believe, therefore I am, which all of European Christianity defined itself through. I believe, therefore I am. And I'm sure when he found this sentence, this sentence felt true to him, so that he thought, wow, yes, I can rely on that.

[38:33]

I think, so I am. And but from the perspective of the yogic Wado practice, we would say that the truth of this sentence Now, if he'd been an adept Zen practitioner, he would have explored in many ways, I think, therefore I am, etc., etc. What? And I don't know enough about Descartes' life, but I suspect he didn't explore it that way because he was fooled by the apodictic quality of the recognition, the insight. And enlightened, probably. I don't know much about Descartes' life, but I almost assume that he probably didn't really explore the different perspectives on this sentence, but maybe a little bit, how do you say it, that was a bit deceitful for him, the apodictic quality, the feeling of this sentence.

[40:03]

Yes. So, and thank you so much for, I'm not saying goodbye yet, but thank you anyway for translating. I see the effort you're making and I'm so impressed. Thank you for saying that. You don't have to translate that, I guess. But I feel like, you know, this Wado practice is like I found a tool in the woods and I didn't know what the tool was for. But it was a curious tool, so I picked it up and I found later an abandoned car in the woods and it started the car. And then I found an old hut in the woods that was lived in by a hermit woman, which I didn't know as a kid.

[41:13]

And it unlocked the door, this tool. And then there was a bird that hit the window of this little cabin and broken its wing and my tool fixed the repair of the wing of the bird. So it's like I found another overlay of images. I found a silicon chip that integrates many circuits I didn't know needed integration. I'm using this as an example of the astonishment of both impermanence and the constant flow of potentialities.

[42:32]

And I use this as examples for both the astonishment of the past, as well as the flow of the past, as well as the astonishment of the flow of potentialities. Okay, so I can't go much farther, further or farther, in this riff on the hua dou. But when I start making it conscious and I see really what's been going on, if I try to affirm it through the reference point of consciousness,

[43:58]

I really do find just the Wado practice entered into a processive and so successive experience of the unfolding of the three times. I really think that the Wado turning point practice has led to a process and a process world and a path to each other following moments. The three times. It really is like a silicon chip, which has many, many potential integrations and reintegrations. So I want to say only one more thing.

[45:26]

For now. Because I have a lot that I would like to make clearer here. So these two little words, as I said last week, emphasized just this, which brings you into the particularity of each moment. You're also not just using just this. You're using just this as a phrase to establish a ribbon of potentialities. Du benutzt It's like a ribbon, which is a kind of, well, not flashlight, but a ribbon, which is a kind of beam of light, a kind of sticky beam of light.

[46:46]

Things stick to it, but it also lights up. And this, right now, the best words I can find, this sticky beam of light, this sticky ribbon of light, um, transforms our location into three times, past, present, and future. And the best words I can think of at the moment are this sticky band or this ray of light that things stick to, that pulls through the moments, transforms our relationship to the three times, past, present and future.

[48:04]

So you're using the two words to both work with the two words and what they bring up, in this case just this, but you're also creating a ribbon with various kinds of stickiness involved. Du arbeitest also mit diesen zwei Worten und all dem, was durch die Benutzung dieser zwei Worte erscheint. Und gleichzeitig aber kreierst du dieses Bändchen, das unterschiedliche Arten von Klebstoff hat, also an dem die Dinge unterschiedlich anhaften. A ribbon which, depending on what parts of the ribbon you make intentionally sticky, begins to make available to us, make visible to us, make conscious for us our accumulated aspects of our accumulated experience. Also ein Bändchen, das je nachdem, welche Anteile davon du auflädst, nenne ich das jetzt mal, also mit Klebstoff versiehst, sodass sie eine Anziehungskraft haben, dass dadurch intentionell unterschiedliche Aspekte unserer angesammelten Erfahrungen hervorbringen oder ins Bewusstsein bringen.

[49:40]

Yeah, and allows us to have access not through just self-referencing associative memory, but a much wider access to our accumulated experience. And that allows us to have access to our past experiences not only through our personal identity or our personal way of being connected to ourselves, but also through this This is real transformative experience. Potential. Okay. At the center of Zen practice. Together, thank you very much. Thank you so much for your talent and persistence.

[50:46]

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