I've missed having some discussion, questions with you. This afternoon we'll make up for it. So what I've tried to do in this so far is really quite simple. That to point out that we have, that our thinking is rooted in a kind of grounding mind It's a pre-knowledge, we could call it, on which our thinking is based. Yeah, you can almost think of it as a kind of... It's the highway, the road on which thinking rides.

[01:16]

And like I said, you know, to read the Sports pages, just such a simple thing. Unless you read them regularly and follow several sports, it's... fairly incomprehensible. And then there's all the acronyms. Radar is an acronym. Radar is for radio detecting and ranging. Who knows that? Yes, CMZ is for Creston Mountain Zen Center as an acronym.

[02:18]

Well, in the sports world, there's nothing but acronyms, NBA, PGA, all kinds of ones. You have to know. Okay, so... Now, this continues to be simple, because what we're doing is just... trying to establish for ourselves an initial mind. Now, if you live in a monastery and the whole monastery is organized a certain way and a schedule and you do it for years, I think probably the life is designed, you could say monastic life is designed to sediment these two initial minds I've pointed out.

[03:46]

And if you have lived in a monastery environment for a long time and you follow the schedule and know everything well, then I believe that the whole structure goes beyond these two spirits that I have spoken of, to set off, to sediment. Wow! Sorry I went so long. This time it wasn't a problem. No, good. You're very familiar with monastic life. That helps. But for us laypersons, all our daily activity is sedimenting the autobahn of the contemporary world. for us lay people all of our activity is in effect sedimenting the autobahn of contemporary thinking of the contemporary world for all of us lay people I understand the words I don't understand what you're saying for all of us lay people our ordinary activity is in effect establishing as a grounding mind

[05:09]

etablieren als Grundgeist... This Autobahn of contemporary life. Okay. Diese Schnellstraße des... Schnellstraße. ...oder Autobahn dieser zeitgenössischen Bedingungen. You know, with my, you know, stupidness about German, I hear Schnellstraße and I see a lot of snails. On a road going along the... That's like this road. A schnenken. Yeah. So as Lepi, we have to find some kind of acupunctural surgical way to introduce an initial mind into ourselves.

[06:18]

And that's, again, some fairly simple practices that only take repetition. And again, these are very simple practices that simply require repetition. Okay, so now let's say that you have accomplished sedimenting these two initial minds. The mind of non-graspable feeling. The second skandha. the feeling that accompanies all mental activity, but has not yet taken the form of emotions, thinking, and so forth.

[07:25]

So that's a starting point on each perception, ideally. Okay. Now the other I called subject-based objectivity. Or let's just call it subject-based clarity. Oh, for short now, let's shorten it further to just clarity. Okay, so a mind that's initially clear, and you have the feeling, as I said yesterday, of seeing things just as they are.

[08:30]

And if you have that experience, it's a kind of both minds, both these initial minds. If you have the experience of either or both of these initial minds, you feel like you can breathe, you feel free and... open. Yeah, normally we have so many associations and comparisons, but we don't feel so free. We always have to do things and think about things and worry about things. So we're trying to Look at the way the mind works, how the mind functions. And tape. Now we're not creating anything new yet. We're just taking the ingredients we already have. The ingredients.

[09:39]

We have, but we may not notice until we practice. Because it takes a certain... calmness, mindfulness, to notice these things. And a mindfulness of body to even stop and let stop outside your habits. Now, if you do this, again, get the feeling of it, you don't lose the pre-knowledge of ordinary thinking, you just interrupt it. So each moment is a kind of interruption of our usual habit of thinking. Think as much as you want, but Each moment you interrupt it.

[11:06]

I used to say it's like, instead of like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, it's like 1, 1, 1, etc. Or maybe it's like 1, 0, 2. zero, seventeen, zero, three, like that. You have the feeling That was a wild card. You have a feeling of returning to some kind of beginning point all the time. Okay. But what happens when you do begin to find these initial minds, find these

[12:10]

What happens when you find the mind of non-graspable feeling and objective clarity as your initial minds? Okay, you do start from a kind of emptiness. A kind of openness. And then the world arises. And then you have the... the... the... accurate conditions for dharma practice. Yeah. So the most incisive description of dharma practice is Dogen's genjokoan to complete that which appears.

[13:26]

Now, this probably is not your habit all the time, to complete that which appears. But take a little time to try it out. If it wasn't so full of snow, I'd say go out in the yard here and sit on the benches and look at the playground. And let whatever appears, appear. And when it first appears, you don't think about it. But letting it appear is a process of noticing.

[14:38]

And so you... I don't know how to describe it. You have a bodily sensation, more of a bodily sensation almost than a mental sensation of letting the sensation coagulator, cohere. Or this appearance to become an impression. It impresses, you feel it, oh, this, yeah. the garden, the tree, or whatever. And then you let it go. Okay, so that is the needle and thread of Dharma practice.

[15:40]

Okay, now, so now this Dharma practice is occurring and is part of your practice. I mean, the initial mind makes clear that you are a participant in this circular process. Und dieser ursprüngliche Geist macht klar, dass ihr ein Teilnehmer in diesem kreisförmigen Prozess seid. You're the one that notices, you're the one that makes sense of it, and you're the one that releases it. Und ihr seid diejenigen, die es wahrnehmen, die dem Sinn geben und es auch wieder entlassen.

[16:47]

And you may be the one that starts a train of thought, thinking about it. And then you may come back and just feel the garden there again. Okay. Now what's happening when you do this is you're actually, this initial mind is beginning to sow, sow like, sow seeds. Okay. is beginning to sow a grounding mind. So appearance Since things appear, it's a kind of sowing. It's like you're throwing seeds out into the environment. And simultaneously, it's a kind of harvesting. Like you're harvesting part of the... Harvesting part of the environment.

[18:05]

You're the threshold. Maybe you're completing it as a kind of threshing. Then you let it go again. But as you develop the habit of these initials, as you develop the habit... making these two minds your initial minds, that begins a process of a kind of a process of sowing a new grounding mind. And then these initial minds are not just, so to speak, sedimented in you at the first layer of your mental processes, mind-body processes, as the initial, as the

[19:27]

They're not just initial minds sedimented in the mind-body process. They're sedimented in how you know the world itself, phenomenon itself. It's almost like there's an interweaving with phenomena. Not almost like, there is an interweaving with phenomena. So it's not just a mental process, it's a process of transforming our relationship to phenomena. Now maybe we can come a little closer to the wisdom of not knowing.

[20:43]

The wisdom of not knowing is the initial mind doesn't know. And the process of letting knowing assemble itself is not guided by thinking. But guided by... Yeah, these... newly grounded initial minds. In effect, through not knowing, knowing assembles itself. And you feel clearly how to act. Yes. So I decided to see, just for the heck of it, I just picked up a book.

[22:08]

I said, what does Hongji have to say about this? He's one of the most famous Zen masters in our lineage. Okay, so I took a few... sentences from what he said in these pages. And I thought I'd read them to you. And I'd like to see if you can feel what we've been talking about in what he says. Well, maybe if you read this sometime, you'd say, oh, yeah, this is familiar to me. The Essence of Emptiness. I gave him a copy, sir. Yes, please. Because it's very hard to translate a written text.

[23:21]

Marie-Louise, if I read something, she can't translate it. The essence of emptiness opens out from mind and body as if it were inseparable from space itself. Opening out Emptiness opens out from mind and body as if it were inseparable from space itself. The entire territory is satisfaction. Body, mind and phenomena are one suchness. Körper, Geist und Phänomene sind eine Soheit. Whatever appears is instantly understood. Was immer erscheint, wird sofort verstanden.

[24:26]

And you know how to gather it up and to let it go. Und ihr wisst, wie ihr es sammeln oder einsammeln könnt und es wieder loslassen könnt. It is like the resting of the great ocean accepting hundreds of thousands of streams. Reed flowers intermingle with the snow. Reed flowers are white. Autumn bathes in the bright moon. This is the vital occasion of interacting functions. Dies ist die lebendige Gelegenheit von interagierender Funktion. So, you can see that, I mean, this isn't, this is a kind of poetry, but it's also a kind of

[25:31]

Poetry that describes something. Weed flowers intermingle with the snow. Autumn bathes in the bright moon. This is now a kind of philosophy. This is the vital occasion of interacting function. And I started out using the image of a loom, shuttle, text, weaving, and so forth. That the whole earth is the that the students, the practitioner's text, the whole world is the practitioner's eye.

[26:32]

So here it says, through the loom of opportunity, The shuttle makes its passage. The original source empties out. Though when moved, it can respond. At that moment, you must peer right through it. This activity is called the single bright occasion. The one bright pearl. And a pearl is used also because if a pearl is in a bowl,

[27:35]

It's always rolling and hard to see and the bowl's white and the pearl's white and so forth. It arrives with the 10,000 things emerging and disappearing. Just let everything entirely fall away. And come together through itself. Without extraneous conditions. At night the moon rises and the water glistens.

[28:49]

The spring wind blows. And the flowers blossom. This is the true body of coming and going. I don't know if it does, but I hope that helps you understand Zen talk. Even this stick I've shown you many times is a kind of example of Zen talk. Here's the lotus embryo, a curled up leaf. You find them in Japanese soup sometimes, and I'm a little... I shouldn't eat it, you know.

[29:52]

And this is the lotus bud. And this is the lotus seed pod. And it's designed so it's held here in my hand. And in many figures these things actually you'll see if you look at iconography run down into the clothes and around and appear in another hand and things. But then we can always ask, where is the blossom? Well, if I'm holding it correctly and the right kind of teaching is appearing, where is the blossom? So the phenomena is everything all at once is the blossom.

[31:05]

You're the blossom. Thank you very much. Thank you for translating. Thank you.

[34:52]

Now, did you have any luck with this text, or is it obscure or difficult, or does it make the clarity itself? So I'd like to hear anything from anyone. I would like to ask you two things. Sure. I understood that the initial mind This mind is I can experience on the one hand through the non-graspable feeling.

[36:42]

And the other aspect is clarity. They can be different minds, but they can be the same mind. In the sense, this is just your feeling. You can emphasize one or the other, or both. And my two questions are... So this feeling and the clarity is not separated from myself. Okay. The mind recognizes itself only through itself. Yeah, okay. In other words, the mind without mind doesn't exist Sounds logical

[37:59]

And then you talk about clarity and non-graspable feeling And it sounds to me like a wonderful fairy tale that touches me very deeply Is it something we had from birth on and we just, you say, mislearned it or forgot about it? So how come that we are thinking so much? Why is it that we're thinking so much? So is it about to find this mind again or do we construct it in a new way, as a new mind?

[39:14]

It's like constructing or reconstructing. And why did we lose it? Well, you've asked enough questions for a seminar. So I can try to answer some of them, I can remember them, but it may be nobody else will have a chance to say anything. But I like all your questions, so I will try to answer them. But I like your questions and I try to answer them. I misunderstood you.

[40:14]

I thought you had asked somebody. Somebody else wanted to ask something. No, not yet. I mean, yes, I'd like to, but I don't know. Whatever, it happens. Okay. Well, from the point of view of practice, it only makes sense to ask the question, is this a mind we had in infancy? If you have some idea of trying to practice to uncover something that's there at the root.

[41:15]

Yeah, but I think that's in virtually every sense not productive. And even if It was so. It's sort of like regressing to a more infant state of mind. It's parallel to Freud. I think it's Freud's idea of an oceanic feeling, a kind of... so that ecstatic or religious experience is some kind of return to a primitive state of mind. In which I think the opposite is the case. And I don't see this mind in Sophia.

[42:27]

She can be happy, joyful one minute and you interfere with her and she can be fierce the next minute. And she has no ability She has little ability to stabilize her mind. But if you're strong enough with her, she can be crying like mad and screaming, and you're strong enough with her, she can clear up right away. There are times she loses it completely, but seldom. So there's some kind of ability in there. But that's parallel to what amuses me when I see somebody in a terrible state of mind.

[43:37]

Something I've noticed for years and in myself too. And the phone rings and you can pick it up and be charm itself. Where does that come from? Why don't you stay that way when you hang up? Why don't you stay that way when you hang up the phone? In the middle of a fight you should say to somebody, pretend you're on the phone. No, I think this is a mind we generate. But as I've spoken about it, this grounding mind, But as I spoke about this founding spirit... Is...

[44:50]

For those of us who practice, it's not unknown to us. And for anyone who doesn't practice, you can usually find ways that they say, oh yes, I know that mind. But the decision to make it your initial mind And to stabilize it or establish it as your initial mind. is a mature, wise, yogic decision. I don't think it was like that at any time in your life, unless you make that decision.

[46:06]

So it's like, you know, we're born And somehow, human culture has given us the choice to learn languages. We're born with, you could say, some kind of language instinct, for sure, which is related to the development of the brain. But the mastery of a language is a personal choice, a cultural choice. The mastery of a language. And to decide to be educated or do anything is this kind of choice. Well, this is, I would say, a kind of yogic education.

[47:17]

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