Now it interests me to hear from you descriptions of your practice. And Neil mentioned to me at the break, and we've been practicing together Thirty years. Decades. He doesn't want to even admit how long. Decades. And he said it makes him very happy that I'm speaking in such detail about things. Yeah, maybe I overlooked the detail earlier. And maybe I'm just more aware that I have to make the detail clearer.

[01:10]

But what I'm also... noticing is how similar the description of a fairly new person is to the description of practice by a very experienced person. And partly it's that we... We're noticed, we have to use, obviously, if we're going to speak, we need to notice with words. And so... While the newer person in practice may be noticing things that are present, but they're kind of shadowed.

[02:23]

They're a little bit in the murky, murky. But the words make it sound the same. And I'm just in my own years of practicing with you. I'm aware how much, how developed your practice is. I just totally, you know, I don't want to sound schmaltzy, but I'm kind of thrilled by it. See, my German's getting really good here. Um... And I really would like this practice to work for you.

[03:50]

And I don't do these sort of public seminars much anymore. But... But it does seem to work for your and others' practice. Okay, so I'd like to... bring some things we talked about yesterday and today into some more precision of description, in a more precise description. Even though the words can remain the same, Maybe I can make them more illuminated and more precise.

[05:07]

I like what Andreas said. I think you said something like mindfulness is more melting into the event stream. It's not so separate from, as an observer, it's more merged with. Now, that's a good, yeah, that something like that happens, and it's hard to even notice it or find words for it, but you did find words for it in a way that I think is quite good. And these small distinctions make, if you're not there, it's hard to know what a big difference it makes. And it's like Ralph said, when he let the knife show him cutting, and once he let the knife show him and the carrot show him,

[06:33]

it began to affect everything he did. Thank you. It doesn't have to be that bright. That's good, that's fine. You mean you couldn't see me at all in this murky... Okay. Or as Reinhard said, doing this exercise in which you let your body take the lead, made him notice his zazen practice newly. But it's very difficult to know in practice how to let your body take the lead.

[08:04]

You may think you're doing it. But... But actually having the flexibility or pliancy to really let it happen takes time. I remember when I was in the first years of practicing, I felt quite relaxed, you know. And I felt my mid stomach area here was relaxed. And this is before I started putting on weight. But one day I was sitting there and suddenly it just went and settled down.

[09:19]

I didn't make those noises. But it felt incrementally like that. It was a release that I had no idea was holding my body. And speaking to David, it is necessary to find some way to bring practice Into your, this David, Dorkin David. To bring a practice into your territory or experience of continuity. Because it's in that continuity where you live.

[10:35]

So you have to somehow inject wisdom teachings or reference points of some sort into the continuity stream. Now, all of you who've been practicing with me a long time know that in my first year or so of practice, I started using the phrase, no place to go and nothing to do. And what you made me realize when you spoke about your experience of turning words and so forth aren't so effective. And what you helped me to understand when you talked about your experience is that changing sentences, repeating sentences, is not so helpful.

[11:54]

I thought, you know, I remembered, of course, how effective this no place to go and nothing to do was for me. But now it made me recognize that it was because I had a good shift point. I knew that it would be great if I could just feel at ease, open, nothing to do. Permanent vacation. Which I feel now. My life feels like a permanent vacation. But I was, I don't know, I was a graduate student working on a PhD in Asian Studies.

[12:54]

I had a full-time job as assistant head, believe it or not, engineering and sciences extension. And I was recently married and had a young baby. You can imagine I was rather busy. And so I just, every time I thought, God, I've got to go do that, I said, no place to go. And every time I thought, geez, I have to do this, I immediately said, nothing to do. And I don't know what gave me the kind of faith that I should just keep doing this. But it somehow, I guess from Suzuki Roshi, it has to be, I wouldn't have had the persistence otherwise.

[14:12]

I knew it was possible through him. I remember watching him when he was in his 60s, I suppose. Working in the stream at Tassajara, rebuilding the wall that had washed out and big stones were being moved. And the young men who were working with him were kind of worn out long before he seemed to be tired at all. And I remember standing on the bridge and looking down into the stream bed. And watching the young man and Shizu Kiyoshi. And Sukhiroshi was just relaxed.

[15:47]

All of him would stand there. They couldn't move a stone. He was just relaxed. Just like no one. He had no place to go, nothing to do. And the young men, we were all young then. The young men were all kind of pushing and stopping, and they never relaxed. And that simple example of he was just continuously relaxed. Maybe such examples inspired me. But I persisted anyway and just... Every time I had something to do or someplace to go, I responded with this phrase in my mind.

[16:50]

And it took me, I would say, after about seven or eight months, I kind of forgot to do it. It's a pretty long time to do it, but I did it for seven or eight months. And then I forgot, and I didn't even know I forgot. That's what's called forgetting. And suddenly after three months or so, after a year had passed, I suddenly remembered. We used to say no place to go, nothing to do. Maybe I'd had a small success with the phrase and hadn't noticed the success because I'd had a success.

[17:54]

But then I started again, and it took another three months. I suppose a year or two months is what I sort of remember. Suddenly, I had no place to go, nothing to do, and I've never felt otherwise since. And this was something different from enlightenment experiences. This was part of the development of a stream of mind, which I finally learned after a year or so, to sustain, bodily sustain. Yeah. Okay, so one needs to find some way.

[19:30]

And one... So here's what we've been speaking about today. Zen practice is rooted in developing a uninterrupted stream of attention. Zen praxis wurzelt darin, einen ununterbrochenen Strom der Aufmerksamkeit zu entwickeln. Okay. And that is simultaneously rooted in the intention to realize this uninterrupted stream. And this is something about the chemistry of character, willpower, clarity, and so forth. There is some kind of, as the word I used was alchemy, between the intention and the trying to actualize the intention.

[21:01]

There's some dynamic between the Actualizing the intention and the intention itself. And it begins to affect you. As we, you know, mind over matter, etc., right? Do you want to see a good example of mind over matter? Look, matter just leapt into the air as soon as I asked it to. I feel like that Peter Sellers, yeah. But we do know that when we have certain kinds of attention, certain kinds of moods, it does affect our body.

[22:11]

You get upset if you're stressed and your body produces ulcers and stomach aches and things. So there's a chemistry of the mind, maybe, that we develop that chemistry a lot through zazen practices. And that chemistry becomes available to us. But it does seem to be dependent on developing this bodily, it really becomes effective when you develop this bodily stream of attentions. Now let me tell you another story from the koan.

[23:11]

In 1998 we've been looking whether you know it or not, indirectly at these two koans, 20 and 98. As the koan relates the story, Chan Master Su Shan Ren, that's a great name, yeah, says to Dongshan, please tell me a question. No, please give me a word which hasn't yet been thought of. I partially mentioned this yesterday.

[24:16]

And Dongshan said, no, no one would believe it. So Xu Shan Ren said, but can it be approached? And Dong Shan said, approach it right now. And Ren said, although whether I can or not, it can't be avoided. Now this is a real, I mean, this is a manufactured idea. conversation in the Song Dynasty about young Tang Dynasty people for the sake of my being able to tell you about it.

[25:26]

But it's still a real conversation by by us, by them. Okay, so say that I am sitting here with Neil and Sylvia and Katrin and Gerold and Gisela and so forth, that I feel something with you. And you too, and you, and, you know, all of you. And, and, um, I'm exploring with you, um, I'm exploring with you, uh, I'm practicing with you and I'm wondering if I should try to identify the subtlety of feeling I have.

[26:45]

So I want to say something to Neil. Neil, I'm wondering if there's a word that I can bring out that says something about our shared practice. So I try to find, if not a word, I try to find at least a question which can probe this feeling which there's no word for. So I say to Neil, can you tell me a word that has not yet been, that doesn't yet exist? Also sage ich zu Neil, Neil, kannst du mir ein Wort sagen, das es noch nicht gibt?

[28:04]

And Neil, because I'm saying that, realizes I'm speaking about something that we both feel that we can't express. Und weil ich das sage, weiß Neil, dass ich diese Frage stelle, weil ich etwas ausdrücken möchte, dass wir beide spüren, dass wir aber nicht ausdrücken können. So Neil is in this field, shared field, otherwise the conversation wouldn't have happened. And so Neil says, no, because it wouldn't be of any use because no one could understand. It's only this particularity at this moment. It can't either be a word for others or it can't be a word at all. Und dann sagt Neil, nein, das ist in diesem spezifischen Kontext, das würde doch niemand verstehen. Das ist entweder ein Wort, das nur jetzt zutrifft, oder ansonsten würde es gar nicht zutreffen.

[29:09]

And so Neil says, no, it can't be. No one would understand. Und dann sagt Neil, nein, das kann niemand verstehen. So then I ask, you know, but can it be at least approached? Can you get closer to it? So to really bring it to a culmination, Neil says, approach it right now. And I, you know, I love Neil, so I say, well, even if I can't approach it, it can't be avoided. And it is a little like falling in love. For some reason with somebody you have some kind of feeling that's not with other people. I remember Mike Murphy, who's a very old friend of mine who lives in California.

[30:26]

Very late in life, he had a son. And he was saying to me, Dick, you know, I don't know what it is. I mean, I have this funny feeling. I can't understand it. He was speaking about his little son, Mac. And he said, today I realized I'm in love. But it was for him actually a feeling he never really had before. Yeah, despite a few girlfriends. Yeah. So there is this territory, this field in which we can't give words to it, but we can approach it or acknowledge it.

[31:42]

I'm still trying to speak also to the fact that We use the same words for experiences which are quite different after you've been practicing 10 years or longer. Maybe it's like maybe you're in a museum and the lights aren't on or it's dim or something. Vielleicht so wie wenn du in einem Museum bist und die Lichter noch nicht an sind oder es dunkel ist. But you can see a bench and there's paintings and things like that. Aber du kannst eine Bank ausmachen und du weißt, dass da Gemälde sind und so. And slowly, as you practice, the lights get more bright.

[32:49]

Und langsam, wenn du praktizierst, dann werden die Lichter immer heller. And then you're looking at a painting. And you're trying to look at the details of the painting. So you have a little flashlight. And first it doesn't help much because the batteries are weak. It helps some. So then you put new batteries in and it helps a lot. And there is a kind of energy that flows into this uninterruptible stream. And one of the stages of practice is when you can begin to just by sheer intention or that bring more energy into everything you do.

[33:52]

More presence into your presence. Or you can withdraw presence from your presence. And then somebody says... in this painting of somebody or other, are the brush strokes all the same? Because in more amateur painters, they paint the barn this way, and they paint the sky that way, and they paint a tree some other way. But often, the best painters It's the same brushstroke no matter what they're painting. So Zen teaching suggests, you know, just one of those little wisdom phrases, look at the brushstrokes.

[34:59]

So with the flashlight now, you can actually look at the brushstrokes. And whether it's a tree or a person or whatever, it's the same brushstroke. And you suddenly feel the rhythm, the mind of the painter be in the painting. rhythm of the brushstrokes. And when you feel yourself into the rhythm, the pace, the mind pace that the painter painted from within, The painting itself suddenly opens up. You find, as it may have been, you're approaching the mind pace and space that the painter had.

[36:26]

And practice, you know, you describe the museum and the paintings and all pretty much the same way, but there's a difference when you actually feel the brushstrokes than just, oh, it's a painting on the wall. Now as you develop your practice, as your practice progresses, processes, things do become clearer. They become more accessible. Yeah, and reach into you more fully. Yeah, but this happens in its own pace through your attention to the potentially uninterrupted attentional stream.

[38:10]

And the uninterrupted attentional stream, the closer you get to realizing this, ...begins to teach you how the world actually exists. Okay, now I have to stop soon. One of the things I've been... Okay. Obviously, I'm trying to explore practice, having grown up in a Western culture. And I'm trying to know what this teaching is which actually developed in China and Japan and Korea.

[39:14]

Now, we all are pretty biologically similar. We can reproduce together. Any of us who are called human beings could usually reproduce together if we are so inclined. What our mind space or what our bodily mind space often is quite different, sometimes barely overlaps. I have to keep putting myself in Chinese shoes or Japanese shoes. To try to understand what... To try to feel, rather than not understand... feel what's going on.

[40:41]

And one way is like looking at this little story I told you about. Can you give me a word which has not yet been thought of? Und ein Beispiel ist diese kleine Geschichte, die ich euch gerade erzählt habe. Kannst du mir ein Wort sagen, das bisher noch nie gedacht wurde? Or from Shoyuroku 20. In sitting or in walking or sitting. Oder aus dem Shoyuroku 20. Im gehen und sitzen. Hold to the moment before thought arises. Now, I know before I started practicing, I would not have even... I couldn't have imagined such a sentence. I would have just skipped over it. But through practice, I've tried to... committed myself to taking these things seriously and then trying to see, hey, is this possible?

[41:57]

So once I've heard that phrase and believe it's possible, it's functioning in the background of my thinking stream. And my thinking stream is noticing things. But this is still in the background. I've now developed enough of an observing stream which isn't only thinking. And the observing stream is making my thinking stream, the thinking stream, much more sensitive to details. And generally my thinking used to be, and still is to some extent, in generalities.

[43:17]

It's not really in specifics. But now that generalities are sort of dissolving, I don't have to hold the world in order through generalities. I can actually... What are these specifics about? And some of these specifics suddenly are about the possibility or the fact of, or the fact that I've already done it, held to a thought, to a moment before thought arises. So just this concept of hold to the moment before thought arises

[44:23]

Also einfach dieses Konzept, halte dich an den Moment, bevor Gedanken auftauchen, funktioniert im Hintergrundgeist, um mir die Möglichkeiten dorthin zu kommen, zu zeigen. Ich kann mich dahin nicht denken, aber ich kann die Möglichkeiten bemerken. So the whole phrase is in walking or sitting. And the whole sentence is in walking or sitting. Just or only hold to the moment before thought arises. And then look into it. So you're not only holding to the moment before thought arising, you're looking into it.

[45:42]

And then you see not seeing. And then the statement finishes, and then put it to a side, put it aside. And that's also a description of a Dharma, but a Dharma that arises in non-consciousness and non-conceptual stream and not a Dharma which arises in consciousness. Okay, now I will try to give you a few more little comments. Because I can't be back in this situation the same way tomorrow. Terry Deacon, Terence Deacon, is a brilliant neurologist and scientist.

[46:56]

Has written a couple of books, and the most famous one was some years ago called The Symbolic Species, I think it's the name. And he makes the case, which is convincing to me, that our mind, our brain, our neurology develops through its activity. And the huge influence on the neurological structure, our neurological structure is the centuries of reading. Yeah. I mean, when you simply teach a kid the ABCs, or counting, you're teaching the child how to structure the mind.

[47:57]

You're teaching the kid to structure things, to see that you can structure things in categories and then compare them. Yeah, okay. Now, what characterizes and what strikes me so powerfully in our own Western culture is, yes, I think that's true, what Terry Deacon says. But is that our writing system and reading system Eliminates space.

[49:15]

The space behind the words is just dead. Irrelevant. Now the imagist poets, English poets, American and French too, Apollinaire and Marlon May, again using the page as part of the poem. So where you put the words brought the space of the page into the poem. And they thought of themselves, as Ezra Pound and others, thought of themselves as imagist poets. And they consciously intended to use images to interrupt the linear way poems had been written, metrically.

[50:22]

Und sie haben sich bewusst dafür entschieden, Bilder zu benutzen, um die lineare Art und Weise, wie die Gedichte bisher metrisch zusammengesetzt waren, zu durchbrechen, zu unterbrechen. Which opened up in English to prose poems. Und das öffnete im Englischen den Weg zu prosagen Gedichten. Okay, all right. So, there's that picture. Also, da ist das Bild. Okay, now what do you add, what... What is this very basic act of reading and writing which the Chinese, East Asians, Chinese and Japanese and so forth do? Their kanji characters consist of space. Deren kanji, Schriftzeichen, bestehen aus Raum. You know, one of the first things I noticed when I started studying calligraphy is that, you know, our A, B, C, D can all be made of two-by-fours.

[51:53]

You could nail them together and you have an A. The spaces are relevant. But Chinese characters are held together by a field of space. You couldn't make them up two by fours. You can make them by feeling the space and then writing in the space. Du kannst sie machen, indem du den Raum spürst und dann in den Raum hineinschreibst. And what does this do? It changes the language into a bodily experience instead of a mental experience. Primarily mental. Das verändert die Erfahrung der Sprache in eine körperliche Erfahrung hinein und nicht so sehr in eine geistige Erfahrung.

[53:05]

And it changes how the body experiences space. Und es verändert die Art und Weise, wie der Körper den Raum erfährt. So, you know, in Japanese, the newspapers, because of MacArthur, are limited to 2,000 characters or so. But the average pretty educated person knows about 6,000. And the scholar might know 20,000 or even 30,000. The mind can't know that many kanji. Only the body can. So if you say to somebody, what is this character? They say, um... Oh, it's that one.

[54:05]

Their finger, their hand knows it. It's almost like they reach out in space and pull the character out. It's like the thousands of kanji just around them in space and they just pull that one out. Yeah, that one. So our Chinese and Japanese Buddhist ancestors, Zen ancestors, are functioning in space and assuming a space that's constantly being created in ways we don't. It's not just that entities are now activities.

[55:07]

The space itself is an activity. This space we're in right now is an activity. And we're bodily like we're all little antennas receiving the space and sending, broadcasting the space. So part of this effort that I'm suggesting, to bring the minded stream and the self-referential stream into a bodily stream, That bodily stream begins to incorporate, literally incorporate, to bring into the body Phenomena and space itself in which phenomena is arising.

[56:30]

Now we weren't brain trained by learning kanji from childhood. But for various reasons, which we won't discuss, our culture is moving in that direction. And Zen practice can help us move directly into this sense of an incorporatable spatial world. Und die Zen-Praxis hilft uns ganz direkt, uns in eine einverleibbare, räumliche Welt hinein zu bewegen.

[57:35]

And I try to give you tomorrow, try to give you a feeling for the feel of the world as it's arising as space. Und morgen werde ich versuchen, euch ein Gefühl für die Welt zu geben, wenn sie als Raum auftaucht. Which teaches you. That's enough for today. We can start up again tomorrow. Thank you very much for your patience.

[58:07]

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