That was a great storm, huh? A lot of hail stuck to the ground in front of the building. Maybe we'll have snow this winter. Two winters without snow. I heard this is 2008. It's going to be the coolest winter in, I don't know, decades. I can't believe it, but maybe it's true. Will be true. Now... The koan says, we've been discussing, says it should be easy to express oneself.

[01:08]

But to say the whole of it is difficult. And of course that's the problem you see me having. And I really think it should be simple, but when I tried it, it's not simple. If any of you live near Kassel, maybe I'll continue in Kassel or Hanover next week. Because Atmar told me we can't extend the Sashin two days. Now I want to say something about sitting. You know, mind and body are clearly inseparable. And yet it's very funny that we can have a very painful body and a calm mind.

[02:19]

And we experience our calm mind is very separate from our painful body. And we could say there's no words exactly to describe what happens. But the mind somehow gets rooted in itself rather than rooted in the body. Or the calm, still mind finds parts of the body which are still and roots itself in the still parts of the body. And as I said at the beginning of the Sashin, to really get this as a treasure in one's life.

[03:30]

You begin to find the stillness of everything. Things are moving around for a while, but they're always seeking stillness. Every little object is seeking its own stillness. And then movement and thinking, activity arises from stillness and returns to stillness. Now, Ching Ching says, I almost don't lose myself. And one thing I wanted to speak about, I felt going in that direction at the beginning of the session,

[04:34]

Which is this almost don't lose myself. Yeah, now that's rather different, significantly different than I almost lose myself. That's different than almost don't lose myself? Yeah, almost don't lose yourself is very different than almost lose yourself. In other words, what he's saying is the difficulty of knowing the whole of it In other words, what he says is that the difficulty of knowing the whole thing can only be known or can only be participated in by losing oneself.

[05:54]

And he almost doesn't, but does enough to know, to not know, to participate in the whole of it. Und er verliert sich fast nicht, aber er verliert sich genug, um in dem Ganzen teilnehmen zu können. But the effort to know the whole of it, then you don't lose yourself. Aber in dieser Anstrengung, das Ganze zu kennen, dann verlierst du dich nicht. It's another interesting way to say, not knowing is nearest. Es ist eine andere interessante Art und Weise zu sagen, nicht wissen liegt am nächsten. Mm-hmm. Or Dung Shan's, I'm always close to this. The mind without categories. Okay. Now I guess to get there we're really going to have to talk more about this subliminal knowing.

[07:05]

And if I can make that a little bit clearer, that will be as much as, I think, a lot we can do in the Sashim. So let's just, I'll try to make it as simple as possible. There's supraliminal knowing, let's call it that, and subliminal knowing. Also lasst mich das so leicht wie möglich darstellen. Es gibt überschwelliges Wissen, sagen wir mal, und unterschwelliges Wissen. Now, the word knowing itself is a kind of problem for me. Und das Wort Wissen selbst ist für mich ein gewisses Problem. Because knowing is such a basic word, there's no words to describe knowing. Weil Wissen ein so grundlegendes Wort ist, dass es keine Worte gibt, um Wissen zu beschreiben. Yeah, the root GNO just means to know.

[08:06]

But if you take a word like life, life has words behind it or underneath it. Like life, the word life means to preserve the body. So, Life is to preserve the body. Alive is a version of on live or to be on living, to be on top of living itself, inside living itself. But know is just to know. And it's connected with, of course, familiar, family, household.

[09:15]

And originally, you know, it's from the Bible, Jonathan knew David. Bad boys. And no has meant sexual intercourse. So know really means, in its most basic sense, to really be engaged with. It's an active learning-knowing process. Yes, so the question here for our practice is how do we activate fully this knowing process? No. Let's just take it for granted that most of knowing is not conscious.

[10:35]

And let's not call it unconscious. Because unconscious, I think, should be restricted to blocked knowledge. Knowledge that's repressed or resisted. And most of our knowledge is non-conscious, it's not unconscious. It's latent. Yeah, just not called forth. How do we call forth our knowledge? It's often said that one aspect of enlightenment or of Buddhahood is omniscience. And I think it doesn't mean you know everything that Google knows. I don't think it means that you know everything that Google knows.

[11:59]

I'm just imagining Buddha googling with goggles on. No, it means you have an experience of everything that appears as a kind of knowing. Okay. So, I mean, if you go over this territory slightly more, We've had this sashin of sunny days and rainy, stormy days. And when you see a tree or feel a tree blowing in the wind and the leaves and its rootedness in the earth, So you can say it's something objective.

[13:09]

But Really, it's based on your knowing this, having a feeling for this tree and the leaves and the rain and all that, is all your experience of the trees and rains, etc., before. I knew a Texan who lived in a flat, treeless area. And he said, I hate trees. When I go north, they're going to fall on me. Of course, he was joking, but he really meant he's not familiar with trees. No. If you're So the tree is actually a subjective object.

[14:27]

It's not objective. It's a subjective object. Yeah, if a branch came off the tree in the storm, then it wasn't helped by Jörg and Atmar. It was not helped. By Jörg and Ottmar, who are pulling branches of trees now. And back here, once, eight or nine years ago, a huge tree just fell over. Now, if that happens, it adds to your experience. So it's everything you see, you could think of as a subjective object. And most of this is not really conscious. It just appears when the tree starts blowing around. And it's non-verbal or something like that.

[15:29]

Kind of kinetic knowledge. So most of our knowing is, again, non-conscious. Now, it's in the system of seeing, walking around the body, etc., So the question is, how do we make use of it, or what calls it forth? You know, in English we have the expression, you must have similar, it's on the tip of my tongue, or tip of my mind.

[16:32]

You feel it physically, but you can't quite get it. Okay. Okay. Now, I use the example of what some people didn't like, a washboard. Ich habe das Beispiel, das einige Leute nicht gemocht haben, von dem Waschbrett benutzt. It sounded a little bit too much work. Hat sich nach zu viel Arbeit angehört. But I'm really emphasizing the bumps. Aber was ich da wirklich betone, sind die Gnubbel. Sag mir mal ein besseres Wort. Buckel. Buckel, yeah. Because, again, if we imagine everything as I said yesterday, in moments, moment after moment.

[17:37]

Okay, so there's a continuous perception of the world. or an assumption that the world is continuous. For instance, if you all looked toward the altar and then you looked back and the windows weren't there, you'd be quite surprised. Because you have an assumption the windows are still there. Even if I tell you, actually, they're not there anymore. They're not there. You and Sophia would say he's lying. I try to say things like that to Sophia. Liar, Papa.

[18:51]

But it's in your mind that it's there. It must be still there. So actually you have a perception, an assumption and perception of a continuous world. But it's a passive, basically, perception. You check up on it now and then, but you're not constantly with it. So maybe now, instead of the word mindfulness, we need sensefulness. Also brauchen wir statt das Wort Achtsamkeit jetzt das Wort Sinnesfülle. Senseful mindfulness. Oder... Okay.

[20:02]

And it's almost like you put the mind of the hand or the hand of each sense on the world. And this is the washboard. You could feel everything. And if that is the washboard, then you can feel everything there. Each of the five or six senses simply dwells in the world that is accessible to that sense. Yeah, you get in the habit of this. And this is a kind of supra-liminal knowing. But it calls forth subliminal knowing.

[21:06]

And they begin to weave, grow together. Mm-hmm. Now this is part of the Yogacara development of the Alaya Vijnana. That there's a simultaneity of subliminal and superliminal knowing. Mm-hmm. Yeah, maybe that's all I need to say. So your awareness or attention rests in the breath, as I often say, but in the body and phenomena simultaneously.

[22:30]

You find a way to feel attention in the breath, body and phenomena. And in phenomena in this way I'm calling sense fullness. And then knowing comes in little bursts. Bursts like a balloon burst or like a burst, a little... Oh, burst, burst. Okay, yeah. Yeah. Now... Okay, now what's the point of this?

[23:31]

Part of the point of it is that you have a lot of your so-called, let's say, body cognitive knowing. It's all tangled up. And knotted. Knotted? I just said the same word for tangled. And verstrickt. Verstrickt und verknotet. Yeah, okay. Because knots are harder to get apart than tangles. Tangles, you can kind of put tangle in the water and get it separated. A knot, you've got to untie. So these karmic and karmic tangles and knots. From socially given values. socially enforced values and so forth, and our own experience.

[24:49]

Okay. There's almost no way you can get to this. And the presence of this tango and knots is one of the meanings of suffering. And how they affect our functioning in the world. Now you can untangle some of these and untie some of these with psychotherapy. And sometimes sashin and zazen helps a lot. It particularly helps with tangles. Yeah, I mean, there's a process in sitting.

[25:52]

As I said, when your structures and conceptualizations kind of crumble. And everything's sort of like Nothing's left but your aliveness. And that experience actually untangles a lot of things. Creates a psychological spatial sense in which you can see how you're tangled up. And again, the eightfold path starts with right views. Yeah, but the four noble truths start with suffering. And right views are suffering. And when your views are right, it's the most effective way to end suffering.

[27:02]

So it's the first of the eightfold path. But the Four Noble Truths means that our views are tangled up and knotted up. What is knotted up? Your views. The most obvious is that you think the world is continuous. Or predictable or permanent, etc. So zazen and extended periods of meditation like we're doing help untangle our views. And again, psychotherapy will help untangle our views.

[28:05]

But a very large percentage of our views lie in a huge, massive tangle that's unexamined. I'm exaggerating. Not much. Okay. I mean the infinite, almost infinite moments of experience we have are all lying together with all kinds of stuff we get from our culture. Die liegen alle zusammen mit diesem ganzen Zeug, das wir aus unserer Kultur haben. And it's almost, let me exaggerate again, like a swamp.

[29:15]

Und lass mich nochmal übertreiben, das ist fast wie ein Sumpf. You look down to do it, psychotherapy isn't going to do a damn thing. Du schaust darunter und siehst dann, das schafft die Psychotherapie auch nicht, verdammt nochmal. Zazen is a little flashlight in the darkness. So the understanding is the way to do something about it is it occurred through all the details of our life Now you have to bring it into contact with all the details of our present life. So the more you can practice a kind of sensefulness... The more the hand of the mind can rest on the world moment after moment, the more the accumulated experience

[30:18]

The majority of our knowing is non-conscious. And often we would mistrust our body. If we just do what our body says, we might hit somebody over the head, you know. You said that, pow! Stop that, you know. So we don't actually trust our body. We want to keep checking it up with our mind, make sure we don't hit anybody over the head. Sophia has a problem with her first cousin. Sophia had a problem with her cousin. Or her first cousin has a problem with Sophia. Sometimes one's got a truck in their hand and the other's got a slingshot and they're about ready to... Really?

[31:43]

And one even pulled a knife. I won't say which one. Basically I have to tell Sophia, you can't always trust your body. I'm glad you're ready to fight back, but still. How can we trust this bodily knowing more? How can we make use of our non-conscious knowing, which is most of our knowing? The teaching of the Yogacara, in my experience, limited as it is, is to bring this non-conscious knowing through mindfulness and sensefulness together with the particularities of the world. with the every each of the world.

[32:58]

And if you look at the teachings of Buddhism, they're all about this. Mm-hmm. The Paramitas, the Brahma Viharas and so forth. It's how to bring our non-conscious knowing and our conscious knowing together in the mindfulness of the world. Through body, breath and phenomena. OK. Might as well try it. Yeah.

[33:58]

Thanks. May God bless you.

[34:27]

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