I feel I'm in your seat, Russell. I was sitting there just yesterday, was it? Anyway, thank you for letting me sit in your seat. Yeah, okay. So you expressed a deep interest, seems to me, in our practice of why it's the way it is and perhaps how it came about. And also you had a sense that the practice belongs to us and we can change it. Have more zazen or work periods a little different and so forth. Now what you expressed is It's right, and a basic understanding of practice.

[01:06]

But let's look at it as simply as we can, so we can see the roots of what we're doing. And we have a great opportunity If Ivan Illich thought he should study Chinese and someone said Japanese is better than Chinese, it's even more different. I'm not so sure. Maybe it is in some ways. It's the most non-Western view. Although its music and aesthetic is more to our taste than Chinese aesthetic. Chinese opera, for instance, is bewildering for most of us. And at least... No plays and kabuki we can have some feeling for. Yeah.

[02:12]

But he wanted to take a perspective on his own culture. So even if you don't want to study Buddhism, this is a great way to look at your own culture and to look at yourself. So, simple things. We say, in the beginning, there was logos. And we translate that as word, but I'm, you know, again, I'm not a scholar in these things, and it can be also translated other ways. But in any case, it pretty quickly has the feeling of reasoning. In the beginning, there was the principle that governs the universe, the cosmos. Universe is already a bad word. Because it's not one poem. It's not a uni-thing. It's a multi-thing. So we should have a multiverse. It's anyway a cosmos, maybe. That's cosmetic. Anyway. So the principle governing everything was...

[03:20]

logos. And we took logos to mean pretty soon, quickly, I don't know what its absolute original meaning was, to mean reasoning. If we take it as reasoning, what does that mean? It immediately separates us from animals and wilderness. Because animals don't reason. So it sets up in the earliest time humans as different. And the rest of the world, rest of what we see, lacking reason somehow, lower or less. So the wilder becomes, as Russell pointed out, it's etymology, the wild beast. In Europe, in German, isn't venison a wilder or something? What's a wild deer meat? It's what in German? on a menu.

[04:22]

What is it called? Vilt. Vilt. It's the same. It's called wild vilt. We call it venison, but in any case. Now, let's go look at the Indian vision, view, prior to Buddhism, is the idea of dharma. What is the idea of Dharma as the governing principle? It's order. And it stays order. It's not reasoning about order. It's order. That does not separate us from everything. Everything has order. I want you to really understand what a difference a view makes. What a difference a day makes.

[05:24]

What a difference a day makes. Little thing, how's it going? Anyway. Seven little hours? Some little hours. Twenty-four little hours? What a difference a day makes. Anyway, what a difference a view makes. Because if our view is that the governing principle is order, then our job is to order ourselves, not develop our reason. And that's fundamental to yogic culture. That's the root of yogic culture. What do we see before our eyes? What order do we see before our eyes?

[06:26]

The order we see before our eyes are boundaries. Boundaries separate and boundaries join. Rivers are a kind of order. Trees, etc. When you wanted to mark out the realm of the city, As I said, you plowed a furrow. Or the emperor planted trees as the boundary of his or her realm. Now, one of the big boundaries is the boundary between wilderness and cultivation. And in India, pre-Buddhists and Buddhists, you went into the wilderness.

[07:31]

Now going into the wilderness meant you went into the forest. And Buddha, and for the practice period, they retired to the forest. Which it means in this sense of wild, and I think wild really means come to so often mean for us the wild behavior of a child or something like that but actually it means that which orders itself but we tend to take it as a human dimensioned place where things order themselves because we don't think of the spiders in our bathroom there's a lot of them in mine as in the wilderness but they are certainly ordering themselves but my bathroom is a little wild but you know But we think of, you know, human size, we're deers and lions and bears and people. And we call it wilderness. So Buddha went into the wilderness. Jesus went into the wilderness. All the famous Indian saints went into the wilderness.

[08:32]

Which meant they left the city gates. Which meant they went across a river. Or it meant they went into a forest. And what this means is that wilderness has a gate. And the walls around Indian temples had a direction outward. They're walls. But they used to make small indentations all on the surface and put figures in them, and the figures were going toward the outside, which made the walls have a direction toward the wilderness. So the order of the temple is meant to be brought out into the wilderness, into all the directions, and that is a necessary relationship. It's not to cultivate the wilderness. It's a direction. Now, if we walked up, if we started in Crestone, and we walked through the baka and past all the lots, the pipe sticking up out of the ground for plumbing and

[09:48]

electricity and things, and then we came up to Crestown Mountain Zen Center, and then we continued up into the mountains. At what point do you enter the wilderness? What's the guy's name? Gary Boyce? Gary Boyce owns this mountain. He owns the top of this mountain, I believe. Does it make it wilderness now that some guy owns it? It's kind of weird to me. But anyway, if he doesn't own it, the government owns it. I don't know. You know, Gary Boisser. The government is pretty much the same probably. At least we know Gary. But in any case, at some point we can feel we're in the wilderness where things really take care of themselves. And although there's been a lot of tree cutting, still... we can call it wilderness. But where does the wilderness begin? I say the wilderness begins here. This is the gate of the wilderness.

[10:52]

We have to determine somewhere where the gate is. I mean, you can walk up the hill and you can say, well, you know, I can see there's an old mine here. And then you walk a little farther and you find a tin can. At what point do you enter the wilderness? So we decide Crestone Mountains Uncenter is the gate to the wilderness. It's an act of imagination. But that's why all temples in Japan are called mountains. In the middle of downtown Tokyo, they're called mountains. And the gate is called the mountain gate. And I think it's very important for us to put walls around this place. And a gate. And it's very important also what's in front of the gate. Now, if it was touch and go to raise the money for this Japanese hut, it's going to be harder to raise money for a gate. What the hell should we give you money to make a gate for?

[11:52]

Buy one of those metal aluminum fences that they put in front of a cattle guard, a monk guard. You know, big spaces would fall. But anyway, it's very important that we, at some point, build a gate out there People, the feeling of coming in. Gates and walls divide and join. So this is our mountain gate. This is our hall of the bright moon. This is Crestone Mountain Zen Center. Now, this, in a yoga culture, everything is practice. It's philosophy, it's also practice. Now, what is the main boundary that we see?

[13:02]

If you look into the landscape, into the world, into the, whatever this is, we don't really know what it is. I mean, there's no explanation for Janie. There's no explanation for a dog. There's no explanation really for anything. We don't know what this is, but we look at it and what do we see? We see a certain kind of order. Things take care of themselves. There are boundaries. What is the biggest boundary? The biggest boundary is the sun. Night and day. It's the biggest boundary in our life, night and day. And there's a Tang Dynasty poem, statement, that Ezra Pound liked, written in gold, a Tang Dynasty bath, in a Tang period bath. And it says something like, Sun makes new again.

[14:13]

Day by day, make it new. And yet again, make it new. Okay, what does this mean? Kanjis are probably something like, sun renew, renew sun. The sun renews everything. Orders everything through its renewal. So change here is not just a philosophy, everything's changing. Everything changing if you look at it as practice, is renewal. So now maybe you can understand, if you've read this book of Dan Layton's on Dogen's Rules, or if you know anything about Dogen's Rules, the intricate thing he goes into about bathing. I mean, he tells you to brush your teeth every morning and to chew the, you know, they didn't have very good equipment like us, you know. They didn't have major corporations offering you new styles of toothbrushes. you know, every three months.

[15:16]

I can't keep up. I like the most, you know, contemporary toothbrush and they keep changing it before I wear them out. They've got a new one in the market, you know. I think my teeth are just about the same, but... Anyway, you only chew the chewing stick three times, not more, and then you brush your tongue. And you wash your face a certain way. You have the towel and you wash your armpits and he goes into it and You've got to remember that they didn't have running water. They didn't have hot water. You only have hot water on four to nine days. That's the time you wash in whatever the temperature of the water. If it's zero degrees out, you break the ice and wash. That's just the way it is. There isn't running water. That's the way it is. I mean, too bad. I mean, you know, we take for granted warm water in the morning, but in most of the world... If you live in a cold place, you've just got cold water in the morning. That's all it is. It's brisk, I'll tell you. Bracing.

[16:18]

Feels good, though. I mean, I don't choose to do it, but when I have to do it, it feels good. And, you know, Dogen also has one of the strange rules is don't offer incense with a hand with which you wipe yourself. Look, Probably, if we want to be down to earth, most people's hand smelled of shit all the time because you can't wash it. You can't really with cold water and there's no running water in the house. And yet every time you go to the toilet, you don't go outside and find, you know, a basin somewhere with a running stream and wash your hand and there's no soap. So most people, and now there's lots of anthropological theories that we shake our hand, we shake people's hands with our right hand because we want to show them we don't have a sword in it. Somebody's theory, it might be true. It might just as likely be we hand them the right hand because it doesn't smell as shit.

[17:22]

So Dogen made a thing is you don't offer incense with the hand you wipe yourself because that hand is likely to carry the feeling of having been used to, and they didn't have toilet paper, you know. They had a stick or a moonbeam. That's an old joke, I'm sorry. Okay. So what happens in this yogic culture is one of the big boundaries through which we order ourselves, is the boundary of night and day, and day, the sun, renews everything, and you renew yourself every morning. Very specific instructions, wash your teeth, wash your ears, wash your nostrils, wash your eyes, wash your armpits, wash your face.

[18:33]

From Dogen's point of view, if you come in the Zen-do smelling, you're not, you know, without brushing your teeth, you're not practicing Zen. And it's not about cleanliness. It's about, the word in Japanese for beauty, and beauty basically in all cultures means order, the word for beauty means cleanliness. Kirei means to be clean. And cleanliness, beauty is related to cleanliness and cleanliness is related to renewing as the sun renews everything. If you take water and you dump it on the earth, it comes back in springs pure. So the sense that everything you touch should be renewed or made beautiful or clean. There's this basic sense in a yoga culture. It's one of the reasons we wear robes in such a way. Basically, you never clean your robes. I mean, with sitting robes, we may have to sometimes.

[19:38]

But you should wear robes, change your underwear often enough, always for ceremonies, and every few days, because your sitting robe and your robes should never get dirty. That's the custom. Now, I'm just telling you why Dogen's, if you happen to be reading this book of dance, why Dogen goes into it at such length. And so, these kind of robes are made in such a way that they can't really be washed. You can't really wash this. Now, what I'm trying to do is show you that something as basic and sometimes annoying to us as Dogen's all, Dogen's stuff about how you wash yourself with your brush and you can't do this more, et cetera, is rooted in something of view so fundamental that we are ordering ourselves that the basic governing principle is order, not reason.

[20:42]

Okay, now how do we order ourselves? Because now ordering is understood to be a tool. a tool of practice, a tool of construction. So, when you wash yourself a certain way, you're using the idea of ordering yourself, making yourself clean, renewing yourself, like we have the Nenju ceremony where we renew the Zendo. And every morning we come in, we get up before the sun again. We get up not to beat the sun to the punch. We don't get up, you know, to get up with the sun, we get up to do our own thing parallel to the sun. We don't wait till the sun tells us to get up. We get up early enough so that the sun and we both get up together and both are in the act of renewal. Because, okay, we have this idea basic Buddhist idea is everything changes.

[21:49]

Another basic Buddhist idea is, a way of looking at that is, change is renewal. Change is also interdependence. But interdependence is actually a bad translation. Because interdependence, if everything was just interdependence, it would lean on everything, everything would turn into mush. Everything isn't interdependent, it's inter-independent. Each thing stands on its own and is simultaneously dependent. That's very different. Everything is inter-independent. And if you don't see that distinction, you don't understand much of Buddhism. Everything is inter-independent. Now, it's inter-independence is also understood as a relationship between macrocosm and microcosm. that the smallest thing somehow duplicates the largest thing. The grain of sand is like the stars in the Milky Way, that we somehow are also the cosmos.

[22:56]

Now this is an act of imagination. It's a structure of imagination. But it's an act of imagination drawn from the sense that order is the essential principle, And an expression of that order is to recognize that there's interdependence, there's boundaries. We are also those boundaries. And there's this interrelationship which we can conceptualize as a macrocosmic, microcosmic relationship. Now, if... If that's the case, what is this relationship? Now, when you look in the mirror, what do you see again?

[23:59]

Well, let me say from this yogic point of view, you see three things, or there's three things looking in the mirror. There's a, as I said yesterday or a couple of days ago, a bioelectrochemical event. And when you take an aspirin, you're relating to yourself as a bioelectrical chemical event. You're saying, well, if I stick this chemical thing in my body, it'll affect my chemistry. And if you squeeze a pimple, you're relating to yourself as a bioelectrical chemical event. That's what you're actually doing. There's physical things there in the wind. And you see the surface of it. You don't see too much of it. You see the surface of it. And there's a... Much teaching in the early Dharma literature about skin, the boundary of skin. So you look in the mirror. Secondly, there's consciousness. And consciousness has its own organizing qualities.

[25:03]

As I said, something may arise as a a path in the neurons and, you know, from some, you know, chemical, electrical thing that happens, it can turn into an emotion. And once it's an emotion, it's in a different memory frame. It's in a different historical structure. If it just happens to you as a bioelectrical chemical event, it's not the same. Once it's in your consciousness, it's part of who you think you are, what your mother did to you, and blah, blah, blah, and all that stuff. whether you're in a good mood or bad mood. And of course whether you're in a good mood or bad mood is partly chemistry. Some people seem to be wired to be happy all the time, and some are wired to be kind of depressed all the time. In any case, what's interesting is you can work with your consciousness and change the wiring. The wiring affects the consciousness, but the consciousness can affect the wiring.

[26:05]

So that's two things looking in the mirror. Now we all know what the third thing that's looking in the mirror is. It's that which can't be seen. The seeing which can't see itself, the seeing which cannot see what is seeing, is also looking in the mirror. Buddhist practice is involved with these three things. Consciousness. Now we can say that the medical doctor takes care of our bio-electrical side. And the psychiatrist or therapist takes care of our consciousness side. So David's got those two covered. He's working on the third. And the third is not the psychiatric and therapeutic profession, but the religious profession. Or the shaman. The realm of spirit and soul and mind. So those three things, those are three boundaries. We can look at it and say there's these three boundaries.

[27:08]

Now, yogic culture starts with the body. Actually, it starts with the landscape. You look at the landscape and you say, everything's taking care of itself pretty well out there, in there. And what is the principle? Everything seems to order itself. What is the principle of ordering? Things are renewed. Things are inter-independent. So you begin to bring that ordering into your body. And that's what we do in practice. Get up at a certain time, wash our face a certain way, etc. We begin to recognize that order. And through recognizing that order in our body, and then we begin to recognize those postures, those physical postures, which renew us or purify us, make us feel better or more wholesome, etc. That's what yoga is, etc. Yoga are stretches or movements, pliancy, which moves us from one state of mind or feeling to another.

[28:10]

And then we have consciousness, thought, reason, logic, etc. Philosophy, views, views you hold. So we work in practice a lot with views. and how those views, such a simple thing as whether it's initially reasoning or initially order, transform all the ingredients that come in contact with that view. So let's start over again. We start and we look at the landscape and we see order. We bring that sense of boundaries, walls that both divide and separate, night and day, renewing inner independence into the way we take care of our body. Walking, sitting, standing, lying, the four noble postures.

[29:15]

Small changes in our posture make a big difference in our mind and body. We discover that. And through ordering the body, through discovering mental postures, we can begin to study the mind. And then studying the mind, we begin to see those mental postures which allow us to study mind itself and this realm of spirit, soul and mind. Big mind, pure mind. And now we look back into the landscape with awakened eyes. And we see that the landscape is also not just order and boundaries, but also emptiness. So you go from a kind of chaos to order, ordering the body, ordering consciousness, or discovering the order of consciousness.

[30:21]

and discovering mind, and discovering mind is free from boundaries. And then you look in the landscape and you see the landscape, so-called landscape, is also free from boundaries. And it's returning to a wilderness where everything takes care of itself. And so Crestone Mountain Center is a Dharma wilderness gate. where we are discovering, as Russell's poem says, that wilderness or emptiness, order and emptiness, that is our true existence. Yeah, that's enough for today. Thank you very much, I think. Or I don't think. May our intention equally penetrate every being and place.

[31:28]

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