I want to give you some too mechanical description of part of our practice, but maybe it will be helpful in some ways. You know, to think about something, it has to be divided into parts. You can't think about it unless it's in parts. Actually to do anything, for anything to exist, for time to exist, there have to be parts. People ask me a lot, what is practice? And it's pretty hard to answer, it's one of those things, you either know it or you don't.

[01:04]

But I guess it would be, you might say it's closely related to a sense of wholeness in what you do, and a clear sense when things don't feel whole. By whole I mean maybe there's a sense of it fitting together. In Buddhism we don't say there's... can you turn the machine down a bit, please? In Buddhism we don't say that there's an original whole, unified one thing, of which the parts are later. The parts and the whole are the same thing. As Nagarjuna says, there's not the slightest difference, the slightest something between

[02:16]

samsara and nirvana. But there's a wholeness to the parts that gets messed up when we fiddle with it, whether we fiddle with it on the scale of, you know, America's, I don't know what, seeking after comfort or happiness, or when we fiddle with it ourselves. And it requires some skill in your practice, which goes on whether you're in zazen or in everyday activity, to begin to participate in that wholeness and cut down on the fiddling.

[03:23]

That we do all the time. And I don't know if I can give any kind of example, but say you're at a party, you know, and the thought occurs, maybe I should leave the party soon, you know. Actually something comes up, you should leave the party, you know, and immediately you give it a, you stop it, you know, and then you think about it. Should I leave the party? Is now a good time to leave the party? Maybe I'll leave the party later, maybe it isn't good a time to leave the party, that kind of thinking. We're actually trained to do that from the time we're children, because if you don't

[04:26]

watch yourself, if you just sort of do whatever arises, somebody bops you, you know. So we get very careful. But we have to go back, you know, in our practice to doing whatever arises. So before you even think, should I leave the party or is now a good time to leave the party? If the thought arises, before you give it form, the minute the thought occurs, should I leave the party? Maybe that's when you should leave the party, you know. I don't mean you get up and you just rush straight for the door, but you, you know, leave with some ... Anyway, what I'm talking about is not leaving the party, but when

[05:34]

such a thought arises, the minute it arises, you can act on it without thought. So likewise, when you're taking a nap or going to get up in the morning, you come to some kind of awakeness and you ... then you think about it, shall I get up, shall I not get up, you know, what shall I do? You know, at that moment, you can get up. You can take that as a practice, you know. The minute it occurs, shall I get up, whoops, you get up, you know, and you walk around the room, figure out what to do next, you know. I always like a line of Lew Welch, the poet, when he was living as a hermit, he looked in the mirror in the morning and he said, I don't know who you are, but I'll shave you.

[06:38]

Anyway, if you get up that way in the morning, that may be how you end up at the mirror, you know, I don't know. But usually, we deliberate it and decide. And likewise, there's a lot of deliberation that goes on about what we just did, not about what we're going to do, but what we just did. Should I have done it that way? Did I forget such-and-such? Again, you can practice by the minute you finish something, even if it's a mistake, you do the mistake completely and go on to whatever is next. So, each thing, you try to do it immediately, without thought.

[07:53]

Again, this is why we, to help that practice, we set up a situation like this where you can act pretty much without thought, you know. The motivation to leave the party arose without your having to think about it. Usually you don't start thinking, now is the time to leave the party. The minute you start to think that, the idea has arisen. So, as you give up thinking, actually, what we should do arises, you know. Most thinking is a protective device, it's a kind of form of paranoia, actually, in which we're trying to control our faces, ourselves, you know. So, it takes, actually it takes a great deal of courage to do this, and I think the first

[09:03]

thing a teacher looks for in a student is courage and commitment, beyond whether he's talented or, you know, smart or dumb or something. So, you know, all the stories about leaping into the whirlpool and coming out the other side, standing up, etc., it actually takes that kind of, you know, courage because you don't know what will happen if you give up thinking, if you actually give up thinking, particularly if you're afraid of what you might do, you know. There has to be some, before you can do this, there has to be some sense of a whole, and

[10:04]

normally we don't even talk about this because it's too confusing, you know, to talk about such details. But yesterday I talked about entering the calmness of your mind and sitting still. And many of you already sit quite still, actually. Maybe inside there's still some movement, but you sit pretty still and you're pretty calm. But you still have some doubt and you still have some ideas in your mind. It's one thing to be calm, you know, another thing to be completely empty. So, each situation you meet with, you have no idea at all before.

[11:10]

And it makes you look kind of funny actually sometimes. It makes you look kind of dopey or fuzzy or something because some person, you see some person and it's like you've never met them before. Of course you've met them before, but the more you feel that way, the more even a complete stranger you've met before and your best friend you haven't ever seen before. That's the kind of experience you have. You don't know quite what you'll do next at all. I don't mean that you don't have plans to do such and such or you still don't check

[12:12]

to see if you've forgotten your key before you lock the door, you know. I mean that your mind lets go instantly of things. There's no after image, you know. You know like when you look at a bright light and you close your eyes or something, there's some image. Your mind has that all the time, you know, various images left over from what you just did or thought about or something. And your skill and your practice is how to notice things like that. When you're doing something, you're quite free to stop what you're doing and do something

[13:13]

else if the idea occurs to you without a great deal of thought. If you are at a party and it comes up that, should I leave, at that moment you can say, okay, something's telling me to leave and you can practice in that way to leave right then. When you're eating, something says, now I should stop eating and you can stop eating. Then. The more you become aware of what you should do without thinking about what you should do, the more you find you have those signals all the time and you don't pay attention to them.

[14:17]

Eventually, there's no signals. You just do what you do without any hesitation. And there's no danger of doing something wrong, you know, in the usual, in the sense you might be scared of, because this kind of sense is based on seeing the whole situation. You, when you're at a party and you're ready to leave, you already know the whole situation of the party without thinking about it. Yeah. So, in our zazen practice too, we have the same kind of practice.

[15:26]

We start out our practice counting our breaths, you know, counting our exhales, one, two, three, et cetera. And for a while, you know, after a while you get kind of involved in it, like, which was one, you know, which was two, or I got mixed up, now I have to go back. Actually, it's just one breath, one breath. Anyway, it's interesting how we get involved in which one was what number, did I lose count, et cetera. Anyway, there's no beginning and end to our breathing. There's no beginning and end exactly to any breath, it just goes, you know. But we begin by counting. So that's a pretty good practice, actually.

[16:37]

And it takes quite a long time before you can just count. And at first it gets worse till you can't get past one or two, you know. You start out being able to count to ten, and one year later you can't get past two or one. But eventually you can count to ten or one hundred or whatever you want to do, you know. And we follow our breathing. There are many simple therapeutic benefits that come from counting your breaths and the centering that gives you and the relationship between your mind and your breathing and your thinking, your moods that you notice that go along with your breathing. But eventually you see that there's nobody counting the breathing.

[17:51]

The breathing is you. The breath is you. It's the breathing counting the breathing. And when you can really trust the breath, breathing counting breathing, or thinking, thinking, thinking, there's no more you who counts the breathing. There's just breathing, you know. Just thinking if there's thinking. Nobody who reflects on the breathing. This is what we mean by shikantaza. We say just sitting, but actually shikantaza is almost impossible to do. And there's no way to explain how to do shikantaza, but eventually

[19:13]

breathing is just breathing. And breathing is everything at once. But it's pretty difficult to do this. You can't let go into this until your breathing is rather deep and stable. So part of counting our breathing is the period we go through while our breathing gets more settled and deeper. In this process,

[20:24]

each of you will have various kinds of experience on your zazen. What the experiences are often don't make any sense until much later in your practice. But anyway, you have various experiences. Each person's are maybe a little different, and there's no need to talk to each other about your zazen experience. To just accept it as you accept your breathing without

[21:29]

there being anybody breathing, just breathing is you. This kind of practice is both in our zazen and in our activity, so that more and more we come to our activity without any thoughts beforehand about what it should be or could be. Whatever it is, we work with that. So whatever your zazen practice is, you work with that. It sounds like you can say, well, then whatever it is, is Buddha nature, or expression of Buddha nature. That's true, but

[22:34]

I don't know, at this point I can't say anything. There's quite a difference, though, between the usual idea of everything is an expression of Buddha nature and your breathing being just breathing without anybody breathing. The entire Prajnaparamita literature, the Gone Beyond Wisdom literature, is entirely about this point, entirely about bodhidharma's I don't know. So the way we practice it in zazen is called Shikantaza.

[23:41]

And this skill in your practice, the other side of that skill is compassion. And it can't be just mechanical. It can't be just some understanding with which you check yourself when you notice you're fiddling too much or you're overlapping things or the whole sense of some wholeness of the parts is gone. There has to be a constant practice of Buddhist morality, of compassion, which means always giving up what you have to others, offering up what you have to others. There's no virtue or merit in anything you do, actually.

[25:14]

And if there is, if there's some sense of virtue or merit, you constantly give it away. It's not for you. Only with this kind of constantly giving away everything you have, having what you have for others, can you actually just have breathing, breathing. Okay.

[26:17]

Do you have any questions about anything? What does impulsiveness mean? What does impulsiveness mean? You mean instead of just being spontaneous, how does that differ from being impulsive? I think when people say he's impulsive, I think usually they mean he's acting without considering the whole situation. It's not that sense of whole. Maybe it's very similar to spontaneously moving with what arises, but it's without the consideration of the whole.

[27:41]

What we're talking about exists before words, but then the form it takes, sometimes we say impulsive, sometimes we say spontaneous. But what you want to get to in your practice is how it arises. Being there present at the moment it arises before it takes the form of words. Yeah. If you're not going to consider it at all, how do you consider the whole? You are the whole though, so you don't have to think about it. You are the whole party, you know, unless you're sitting over there in the corner, you know, being the poet at the picnic. Yeah. Then maybe you're not the whole, you know.

[28:50]

But our Zazen practice is to helps us, I think, be the whole. Yeah. Well, there must be a first step. And so you do the first step, you know, right now. Well, then maybe you don't have a sense of the whole. Anyway, what I'm talking about you can't actually talk about, you know, because words are the opposite of what I mean. So when we start describing it with words, it already gets pretty tangled up. And what I'm talking about too,

[29:52]

I don't think you can try to do. What I'm saying is that you begin to notice something like when at the party you feel like you want to leave, to think, does that mean I want to leave right now or should I think about it for a while? When you get up in the morning, just get up. That is practice. You don't have to figure it all out at once, you know, or figure it all out at all. Eventually, when you practice is pretty thorough, going, you don't think of things that aren't possible. You may think of things that you can't complete in this lifetime, but that's good, get them started and somebody else will then continue, right? Yeah. Along with this recognizing thought,

[30:54]

initial thought, don't you have to know yourself well enough to discriminate between what may be a spontaneous urge or thought and what may be a selfish desire which might be Yes, of course. This is what Zuckerberg used to call the briar patch. Full of thorns, you know. Anyway, there's nothing to say, you know. You are, you are you. And so you have various experiences and you can, you notice that some of them hurt people and some of them don't. Some of them create karma and some of them don't create karma. So you can't isolate

[31:58]

something, you know, right now and say, ah, that's what I'll do. Our practice includes having, at the beginning, coming to an awareness of when we're creating karma and when we're not and getting freer and freer of karma-producing activity. But much of, much of, you know, this, maybe first of all, you have to have, you have to develop trust. Trust of yourself and trust of other people. As I say often, even when there is no possibility of trust, you trust. And that kind of, since there's no alternative to trust, you know,

[33:04]

you have to start. Everyone's sitting around waiting for the other guy to trust and then they'll trust, right? And your practice as a Buddhist is to start trusting and trusting yourself. So that's why the first practice you work on, in addition to karma, is having some faith in Buddha nature or the possibility of wholeness or something like that. You know, it's quite simple, but you have to have some beginning like that. Yeah? How are these spontaneous impulses related to desires? You're thinking too much about it, you know?

[34:25]

Just notice what you're doing. And notice the thinking you do about things. But try to go back to when the thought first arose. In your zazen you can see each thought coming up and going away. And you have come to a decision, actually, the moment a thought is produced. But usually we go through a whole process after that of thinking about it, you know? But I don't mean you can do anything you want, but that's not our freedom, you know? Yeah? In terms of the morality that you discussed, in terms of giving, can taking away be giving too?

[35:28]

Do you mean receiving or taking away? Oh, a situation where you feel that to be in harmony with others, you may have to say no rather than say, well, you can have this and you can have this and sure, I'll take this and this. You know, you have to say, well, I feel we have to stop here. You'll have to you'll have to decide that for yourself. Of course, it might be. You'll have to figure that one out, I mean. Then you'll see. If everyone hits you on the head afterwards, you'll know that it wasn't such a good idea, you know? Yeah? No.

[37:07]

You'll find out. Thank you very much. Thank you.

[37:21]

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