Thank you all for being here and I could have thanked you earlier, but anyway, thank you and some of you coming all the way from Europe and so forth. And you'd think that after I've, I don't know how many Sashin lectures I've given, 1,500 or something like that. It would be, oh, just to give another sasheen lecture, but I actually never, I always don't know what the heck I should speak about. And I have some inhibitions in this sasheen because, and you've noticed, I think, because I really have a feeling of leaving you alone, and I like to, I trust my feelings always. And leaving you alone, because I think because there's quite a few mature people here practicing, and we have quite a lot of accumulated experience in practicing. This is more and more the case in sesshins. And so the sesshins begin to take on a different character than they had. And they begin to carry themselves more. I mean, each of you carries the sesshin.

[01:25]

There aren't a few people carrying a lot of new people. Most of you aren't new. And most of you have real experience and practice now. I mean, please don't think, oh, in Japan or Korea or someplace, this was the real thing. The real thing is right here. You have been practicing. more than most people who are supposed to be practicing. Yeah. And, you know, I don't like to give you phenomenological descriptions of practice. That interferes. I mean, I'm a person who's quite opposed to guided meditation. It guides you and, I don't know, you don't need guidance. What you need is find out for yourself. And Zen particularly is a practice, which isn't really so much a teaching, so it's more a teaching about how to teach yourself, or how to let yourself discover this reality, this actuality. So we don't want to tell you the way it is,

[02:54]

teach enough that you find out the way it is, and what you don't find out, you don't find out. It's okay. You can't find out everything. But it's much better to just know what you find out than to have a lot of other knowledge from Buddhism about the way it is. Or it's supposed to be, or something. What's our actual experience? Use the tools of practice. to widen your actual experience. You could even say, this is carving out a cave in emptiness. And I also don't want to give you too many ideas because, you know, sometimes in seminars and kirteshows and practice period I can bring up various ideas, but Here I'd really, so sheen, enough is happening through your sitting and trying to stay sitting, stay awake, stay in the schedule, this is a lot. Enough probably. And yet, you know, yesterday I speak about something, it's, and I realize,

[04:19]

You know, it's really not so easy to make obvious things clear. And the obvious, as I say, timelessness hides in the structures of time. Much of our teaching hides in the words you use. I wish it was as simple as the difference between Florida orange juice and California orange juice. They're both orange juice, and they're both orange juice, but Florida orange juice is quite a lot better than California orange juice. They're both orange juice. Orange juice. But it's not so simple as that.

[05:26]

Okay, we convert, here's a simple thing which you can get, but I don't think it's so easy, at least it's taken me years and years to get the difference. We convert, let's say, to try to have an access, we convert physical space to conscious space. This is the physical space here, but right now I've converted it to conscious space. Does that make sense? Somebody shake your head yes. Oh goody. Okay. So we convert this space to conscious space. I just converted, I'm looking at you, I've converted this room to conscious space. It's happening in me. I say versions of this all the time. Okay. Each of you is also converting this to conscious space. I think the example of the Ajanta paintings, what's that, 200 B.C. to 850 or something, A.D.? I don't know exactly when the paintings I'm speaking about, but the example I've used before of these Ajanta paintings, instead of painting

[07:11]

like I paint that Buddha, or I paint, say, Gary in the back, as if he's out there. If you live in a world where you assume that conscious, that we live in conscious space, not physical space, Then perhaps you do what, supposedly, Ajanta painters did. Instead of painting Gary like out there, we painted Gary as if he's arising from the darkness of his own inner consciousness. So the background of, if I painted Gary in that way, the background wouldn't be a background of scenery, et cetera, out there.

[08:13]

because Gary's moving toward me in the painting. I'm not moving out. Just like if I look at you right now, you're arising from my darkness. Darkness, black lacquer, gouging a cave in emptiness. So you arise, you're appearing as I live this conscious space. So if I painted Gary as if I reversed myself around and was Gary, I could paint Gary as if he was arising out of some darkness. So Gary appears, but Gary appears out of his own darkness. So I paint Gary appearing out of his own darkness. That's a rather different way of thinking of a painting.

[09:23]

So what's a Buddha? What's a Bodhisattva? Again, I always say, if you're practicing Buddhism, you really have to deal with the fact that Buddhists are not in the past, not a heaven-like figure. This is not a theology, but it doesn't make any sense unless the potentiality, fact of Buddha, Buddhism, Bodhisattvas is here. But can we make that existential leap, that extraordinary leap, really? So if we take on faith, or out of a necessity of an understanding we've come to, that we are all simultaneously Buddha's and also sentient beings, then what's the difference? You've got to deal with that. What's the difference if you're a Buddha and you're a sentient being simultaneously? Now that's really where faith in Zen, faith in core Zen practice comes in, is faith in this vision, faith in this understanding,

[11:00]

that we are simultaneously Buddhas and sentient beings. And you can get a sense of your own practice right now. Do you really, is it just an idea, or do you really have some kind of cellular, gut-like, grounded, embedded faith that somehow we are Buddhas and sentient beings, and there's the possibility of a Buddha here in this sendo. here in this life, in Boulder, and on and so on, mentioned. If you don't come into that existential quandary, that radical faith, it requires radical faith, your practice is not, you know, It will always be on the surface. The surface may have some depth, but it's still on the surface. It doesn't get to the source where things arise. So this is, you know,

[12:23]

by as basic a koan as we can come to, simultaneously sentient being and Buddha known. If it's the case, what can be the difference? Well, the difference, of course, is partly how we act in the world. But more decisive than that is how we see the world, view the world, experience the world. Okay, so say that's the case. Say the difference between your being a Buddha or a sentient being is the way you view the world. If you view the world one way, hey, suddenly the grounds for maturing, for Bodhisattva practice, for maturing oneself as a Buddha in the world are there. Another way of viewing things? Not there. So what's this shift? How can we make this shift? How can we sense it? How can we have faith in the potentiality of the shift? So I'm always working on how to talk about these things. How to talk about them in ways that's true to my experience.

[13:48]

and talk about them in a way that doesn't interfere with your experience, doesn't lay a trip on you. So I find myself whole, [...] whole gut-like, gut-like engaged. There's some vintage of it. He said that when he opened his mouth, you could see his guts. I'd like to be like that. Now, if you do, if you take on, if you understand this possibility, or even have a little sense of this possibility, that not only is, not only do we convert, I just try to say it as mechanically as I can, not only do we convert physical space into conscious space, spiritual space, awareness space,

[15:25]

complex space, it isn't just here. The whole complexity of a human life is in this space that I am converting, and that each one of us is doing the same thing, willy-nilly or with or without knowing. And after a while, of accepting this on, you know, come to the conclusion that this must be so, and then acting it, enacting it, you begin to develop, we could say, a sixth sense. So you start feeling not the physical room, you feel the conscious space of the truth-bearing space truth-bearing being space of each person. It's like another sense you develop, so you walk past three people and you feel three different spaces. The room is an occasion for thirty-some spaces.

[16:54]

So, Zen is sort of, maybe it's kind of brutal. I mean, it's not based on morality. Morality is part of it, because your ability to function has a lot to do with your morality. And if you can't function, you can't realize anything. But that's kind of practical way. It's not fundamental. Fundamentalism is more, this is just the way Might be nice, might not be nice. This is gouging out a cave in emptiness. I suppose I could say I'm watching Sophia, without wisdom, gouging out a cave in emptiness. I mean, Marie Louise and I are trying to help her, and Asanga tries to help her. She's growing up in a, she will probably grow up in a pretty good environment growing up in Asanga, and I hope with us as parents. And certainly, we do it with heart, with care, with values, and so forth. That makes it better, but it's still a cave in emptiness.

[18:34]

She wasn't here just two, three, four weeks ago, and now she's carving out a cave in emptiness. And the cave itself is empty. It's a place to live, that's all. It itself is empty. She's going to start taking it as real. So, trying to get at these things, the koans were developed. And I think we can, you know, usually, within a certain lineage, a particular lineage, or within a particular sangha, a particular time, there's certain koans which you need to come back to. You need to come back to similar things over and over again. And Sugiyoshi came back to this column of Nanue and Matsu polishing a tile. I mean, I don't know how many times he lectured about it over and over again. And Dogen spends quite a bit of time on it.

[19:57]

to create some image that you can get yourself into. Now, it's a simple, fairly simple koan, all in all. And it's not one I, I used to come back to it a lot myself. I come back to others now more often. But let's just start with this, because I'm trying to, I thought yesterday I would try to find some way to speak with more subtlety or accuracy about original enlightenment. So we have this Matsu. Now he was, I mean, I suppose if anybody wanted to think of the ten greatest, most influential Zen masters, on most people's list Matsu would be first. Certainly one of the most powerful, creative Zen teachers. All of the Zen lineages. And here he is sitting doing zazen and Nanyue thinks he's kind of misguided. So much for us, you know. And Matsuda already received supposedly the seal of realization and transmission and so forth. So here he is sitting zazen. He sat zazen a lot. And you know, most of you know the story. Nanyue comes in, his teacher. What are you doing?

[21:32]

What the hell do you think I'm doing? I'm doing zazen. Why are you doing zazen? What's the purpose of your zazen? Oh, to make a Buddha, to become a Buddha. So Naniwa goes out, comes back a little bit later. He's got a tile. In Japan, the temples in China, broken tiles all around the place. They come off the roof, they freeze, crack. So he's got a piece of tile. He comes back and he sits down near Matsuri. What the hell are you doing now? I'm polishing a tile." Great! What are you trying to do that for? Well, I'm making a mirror. How the heck are you going to make a mirror out of a tile? How are you going to make a Buddha from sitting Zazen? So what do you say? So Nanyue said, when you want to

[22:46]

When you want to make a cart go, do you hit the horse or the ox or do you hit the cart? It's a great little dumb question everybody puzzles over. Do you hit the cart or do you hit the horse? It's great how such a dumb question can get us, you know. Something mysterious is going on here. Well, of course you hit the horse. I mean, it's a nitwit if you don't hit the horse. But even if you hit the cart, you're hitting the horse, because if the cart doesn't... I mean, a good cart driver will sometimes just tap the cart and the horse goes, but you're still hitting the horse. Because the horse hears the cart. Dogen gets into it, you know how Dogen goes, he says, are you hitting the horse with the whole earth? What is hitting, you know? You could get into what is the intention of the hitter. If you... Point is, yes, we practice zazen.

[24:08]

So here we have, of course, since it's in the context of this koan, and he's talking about tuingsas, then the cart in some ways represents the body or the teaching or something like that. The horse represents something that responds. So what do we hit? What we have to hit in this understanding is our views. It's our views which make the difference between a sentient being and a Buddha. And the views in which you're doing zazen make a huge difference. If you sit there, even Matsu, With the feeling, I'm sitting to make a Buddha, this view is not very deep or fruitful. So, Sakya Rishi says, when a tile is a tile, a tile is a mirror. When a sentient being is a sentient being, a sentient being is a Buddha. When a sentient being is a sentient being, tile is tile, mirror is mirror, Buddha is Buddha. All this kind of talk.

[25:32]

And it means that somehow you have to come into the faith that simultaneously, only instantaneously, no matter how much you polish the tile, it's not going to become a mirror. It's either a mirror or it's not a mirror. It's either going to instantaneously be a mirror or not. So all of this is to give you an image or give you a story or a feeling when you're sitting. What are you sitting for? Do you have some idea? Oh, yes, this is what I'm working on. Yeah, you can work on problems in sitting. And I think there's always a couple days in a session where you have a lot of pain, a psychological pain, emotional pain. For some reason, after the first day or two, all the stuff, all the ways you've been shitty come up. or all the way people have taken advantage of you, hurt you. You know, usually there's some kind of emotional pain surfaces for a while. Yeah, that's good. It's good to, for some reason, a lot of, a lot of what we are

[26:54]

hides in the structures of our life, and you have to get out of your routine, out of your structures, to have much of what really is affecting you, down deep, come up. So Sashin serves that purpose too. So I have again, shifting topics slightly here, I have again a number of times said that when you feel in zazen, some loss of boundaries or, I said this morning in zazen,

[28:00]

Do you feel you have some boundaries and let them go? And it's a pretty common experience for a meditator to have an experience of you don't know exactly where your boundaries are. And as I say, you lose your thumbs. It's fun to watch you guys sit. You start out with great mudras and pretty soon Then they come back. Mine too. And you have this funny experience that there's about a galaxy between your thumbs or something, and you're like, where is my thumb? Sometimes they're barely apart. Sometimes they seem to be about six inches apart. Okay, so this is a fairly common experience. And even for non-meditators, you know, this kind of experience, sunbathing, napping, lying in bed and feeling your floating, this kind of, where you don't quite fit your boundaries, or you don't have a sense of boundaries, it's not uncommon.

[29:23]

But it is uncommon, I think, to imagine that an entire religious tradition can be based on such an experience. Really seeing what such an experience is about and taking the experience of no boundaries as real as the experience of boundaries. But no, taking the experience of no boundaries as more real than the experience of boundaries. Gouging out of space and emptiness. We've gouged out of space and we live in the cave, but the cave is actually expanding and contracting If you, if I, if one recognizes, realizes, lives the feeling of converting physical space into conscious space, I have no word, spiritual space, awareness, into Buddha space,

[30:59]

You know, we designed this endo and, you know, we brought some kind of Buddhist space, conscious practice space, and new space. I don't know, I'll have to find a new word, some sort of word. The understanding wasn't too hard to come up with, but instead of understanding, but what can I call this space? Dharmakaya space. Yeah, but also at each moment we're converting this space. I keep saying this in various ways and hope you get a deeper and deeper feeling for it. So if I convert this space into truth-bearing space, I call it that, I convert this space into truth-bearing space, it begins to be a mold which influences me. Now let's talk about body sheath again.

[32:41]

If you put your, this little kid's game, you know, I'm going to know a lot of them pretty soon. If you put your hands like this, it's difficult to say which finger, move that finger, move this finger. Why is it difficult? Because you live in an image of your body, not your actual physical body. If you didn't have an image of your body, you could just feel exactly which finger is which. But it confuses the image of your body. So we're actually living in an image of our body. There's other ways you can notice it, like the way if your arm goes to sleep, say, you can poke it somewhere and you can find your arm, but you can't find it from inside. But you can find it as soon as you create an image of your arm. So we have a body sheath, a thought-covered body. This thought-covered body, through zazen,

[33:44]

begins to change. This body sheath begins to change. And partly the body sheath is generated by how we view outer space as physical and exterior to us. And that creates a boundary. And such things are changed when you start feeling this truth-bearing space We'll call it that for now. And it begins to be the truth-bearing space begin to be a mold which changes you. This is very much related to the whole idea of a dharmakaya buddha. You change your conception space, you change your experience of space, you change... Yeah, like that maybe? It begins to penetrate you, or

[35:11]

affect you. It begins to be a mold. So now we have this koan of Dungshan's, you know, someone asks, among the three bodies of Buddha, which one does not fall into any category? Dungshan says, aptly, I'm always close to this. If he said, oh, I understand this, he's fallen into a category. If he says, oh, I know the Dharmakaya Buddha, then it's a category. How do you not fall into any category? Now, practically speaking, in Buddhism, ignorance is a view of things as permanence, but practically speaking, it's expecting predictability. Now, it's good to see it that way, Because ignorance has the feeling of evil or sin or stupidity or, you know, it covers all those things too. We're ignorant of how we affect other people, how people affect us, what our... Yeah, that's all ignorance. But ignorance in Buddhism is more fundamental than that. Ignorance of how we actually exist.

[36:36]

that ignorance is most expressed in needing or wanting predictability. When you see it that way, you can understand it's not so bad. We naturally want predictability. Excuse me for going back to Sophia all the time. We would like Sophia to be a little more predictable. When she nurses, when she sleeps, when she wakes up, come on. And we expect her, you know, she's only around, she's only been outside, whatever this outside is, it's the big inside, we call it, of course, a womb embryo in Buddhism, so we don't think of it as outside. Tathagata. You know, when we started this thing, I said, what did we, we vowed to taste the truth of Tathagata's words. You chant that before I talk, that's a big responsibility. I mean, I hope you're talking about somebody else. But maybe in some way, if I can feel this womb embryo space, my words maybe reflect what we mean by the Tathagata's expression of the Tathagata. So, you know when I ask,

[38:09]

Mark, somebody's going to get some flowers for the house, I'd say. Get such and such a kind of flowers, they can last longer. And you get flowers, I want them to be predictable, I want them to be there three or four days, not just... Like, you buy these florist irises, irises. And they seldom ever open up, they just sit there like this. So I say, buy some more predictable, no, I want with a different predictability. And you want the zendo to be here, you want to wake up and you don't want the zendo to be gone the next morning, particularly if you're sleeping in it. So we want predictability. But if that is the structure of your mind, it's only sentient being, no Buddha. And to imagine you're both sentient being and Buddha simultaneously requires a mind of a lot of unpredictability.

[39:27]

which you head the cart or the horse. Among the three bodies of Buddha, which one does not fall into any category? I'm always close to this. I'm always close to this means I'm not expecting anything. But I'm close to not falling into any category, or I'm close to awakening the category of the Dharmakaya. Some songs stop in the middle. Now, the Sheen is nearly over, I think. And always on my mind when I'm speaking about practice is how you can continue, make use of the practice, of course, in your daily life, wherever that is, or here at

[40:58]

this special or maybe very ordinary or mundane situation in a way of living here at Creston. Now, I've been practicing long enough for at least a few things over the years to mature in practice. And I say that not to speak about myself, but to assure you that practice does mature in ways you can't predict often, and in ways that you can't track or measure over years of practicing. This isn't some kind of gradual accumulation of understanding, rather a maturing process, often a maturing process of very simple things from the first days of your practice or from ordinary common sense. And we've seen some, shall we say, maturation of some things just in these seven days.

[42:20]

I started out speaking about a ribbon of continuity. Yeah, to give you, I mean, to give you a feeling of, you know, something that might bring us through the session to this point, nearly the last evening. And in fact, exploring this or coming back to, continuously coming back to this ribbon of continuity, it's evolved into a mind of continuous abiding. A non-dual mind of continuous abiding. A mind of continuous abiding is necessarily non-dual. And I think we've seen, I hope you've seen, The power of not waiting, the secret of not waiting, which I spoke about the other day, this whole practice of original enlightenment and original mind is rooted in not waiting. It doesn't mean you're in a hurry. I'm not going to wait for that guy.

[43:48]

No, you're quite willing to wait, because there's no waiting. I don't care when he comes, I'm not waiting. Now there's... Yeah. And I guess in our practice we, I don't know, I mean, how can I say, we map, map out, not exactly, suss out a topography, you know, patterns. We have, I mean, what I'm speaking, this use of phrases, which is so unique to Zen practice, and such a aku mantra, as I call it, a powerful way of practice, isn't, of course, limited to Zen, but Zen seems to have made it the core, the center of this practice of not waiting based on originally Buddhas,

[45:19]

originally enlightened. But even, according to Gunther, a book on Padmasambhava, the sort of first great Tibetan teacher from who the Tibetan schools derive, he spoke about the revelatory phrase and the mystery spell, or the revelatory spell. And this is very, very similar. I mean, I can use this, what's it called? A telling experience, yeah. It talks about a mystery spell, a telling experience, or revelatory experience, and a mystery phrase. So we have certain experiences in practice. They may be clear, distinct experiences, or just

[46:40]

kind of new place you find yourself in. Now I want to emphasize here again that characteristic of mature zazen practice, it doesn't mean you don't have various experiences or samadhis and so forth, but rather, yes, yes, okay, but more common, more fundamental is a dozen of immense satisfaction. A satisfaction so thorough it kind of gets into your teeth. I don't know why I say teeth, but that's what occurred to me to try to express. Can your teeth feel satisfied? But yes, you feel so thoroughly satisfied. Every part of your body feels satisfied. And this is also closely connected with another side of feeling really relaxed, as I've said, deeply at ease.

[48:06]

I think I spoke about this early on in the practice period, that, you know, we're... I don't have words for it exactly, but we're not looking for degrees of understanding so much, or we don't have experience of degrees of knowing so much as degrees of satisfaction. In almost every period of Zazen, particularly the more you're free of comparative thinking and so forth, which locks you into some kind of continuity, another kind of continuity, every period of time is something different. When you get past, as I call it, the boredom barrier, which sets in after about four years, sometimes earlier with some of us, and then you have a a downward-sloping learning curve. It seems like your learning curve is like this in the beginning, then it starts going like this, and occasionally you're going to be, oh my God, and luckily there's spurts occasionally. But this flat learning curve, or downward-sloping learning curve, when you get past the boredom, is accompanied by a growing satisfaction of just sitting.

[49:32]

ease and growing trust. And this satisfaction and ease and trust is part of the medium of truth-bearing knowing, truth-bearing being, I don't know, again I'm out of words, of this mind of continuous abiding. So someone reminded me today, as I speak, I've spoken often about looking at dreams, and one of the useful things about the way in Buddhism

[50:42]

Then you work with the dream, which is to take, as I've often said, a phrase or an image from the dream, and just stay with it, and let the day speak through it, rather than trying to analyze the dream, or analyze it in the context of the dream. Analyze, or no, let the dream, the dream was a gift, So let it continue its gift-giving by allowing it to penetrate your activity rather than try to bring it into some conscious pattern or understanding, though that's okay too.

[51:44]

often quite useful and interesting. But I think if you want to analyze a dream, okay, fine, do it, but don't let that interfere with this, which I find, deeper process, without thinking of what this symbol means, which is everybody's got a different idea anyway. Just let it sink into your life. Now what this shows you is that an image from a dream or a phrase or a feeling has a similar power to working with a phrase. And some image or phrase, from the dream it happens, so many things appear. It's like a little door in the surface of the world. stay with the phrase and it opens up and there's other things underneath it that seem to be unrelated to the dream. You kind of open something up and it's a kind of, what's that called, an artesian spring, an artesian well that flows of itself. But this doesn't happen so much unless, or it happens much more and is part of a mind of continuous abiding.

[53:15]

So, until you really have discovered the secret of a mind of continuous abiding in your daily life, it'll happen more in zazen. Because zazen kind of gives you that same kind of mind, sometimes for a period or two, and we call it various kinds of samadhi. So, Padmasambhava, a very long time ago, I was speaking, too, about the revelatory phrase. Isn't that funny? We're not talking about language so much. Because Padmasambhava, like all Buddhists, was sort of like, watch out for language. It locks you into a particular kind of mind. It locks you into the structures of your culture. But take a phrase or a word, mantra-like, out of language. For some reason it has another kind of magic. It's almost magic. It's not magic related to language. Yet it's a phrase, words from language. Very mysterious. Maybe you're going back to, in fact, the word wado, which is the word used in Chinese and Japanese for

[54:39]

a turning phrase, means the root of language, the root of a word, to go back to the source of a word. So perhaps the sense of it is that these revelatory phrases are more aboriginal, primordial, aboriginal, earlier than language as a structure. Maybe Sophie's little noises are revelatory phrases, which if she didn't learn English, she would turn into little noises that meant something. She already means something. Oh, I've got gas, or something. I changed her yesterday, and I won't tell you the experience I had. A simultaneous fountain, as I was saying. She's blissed out. Oh dear. Revelatory phrases.

[56:05]

It's strange, there's this magic in a phrase. An incantatory magic or spell, incantation is not a spell. It's also always funny for me the word spell, like what holds letters together into a word is a spell. When we chant in the morning sometimes we come into what Padmasambhava means, I think, by a spell, which is we suddenly feel attuned, sometimes, to each other. And through practice, sometimes, through, again, I use these words like various kinds of samadhis, you find yourself in tune, various ways, situation you're in with people around you, etc. And it's already a taste of non-duality when you're attuned. So we approach these things from various ways and get tastes of... I mean, we don't think of singing in a chorus as non-duality, but probably it's a taste of non-duality.

[57:32]

So to make these so-called esoteric Buddhist terms more accessible, ordinary experience opened up, matured, maturing ordinary experience. So these satisfactions, insights, realizations, our kind of turning around experiences. They don't make a map exactly, there's no map, I think. But they're like buoys, buoys, you know buoys? Buoys, buoys, things you tie a boat up to or mark a fishing net or in the ocean. Bullion. Bullion. Almost the same, huh? I tell you, English is just this German dialect. So, you have these buoys, you know, that are sort of patterned for you, that allow you to come back to the surface and know where you are.

[58:58]

locate yourself again. But there are also buoys that allow you to let go of the surface. So these experiences allow you to let go, but also give you a territory to return to. So such things as the mystery of coming into attunement, or, using Padmasambhava's language in English, a revelatory phrase, or a telling or showing experience. I mean, just a deep satisfaction is a showing or telling experience. You know something from that satisfaction. Yeah, so what I'm trying to speak about here is to give you a... try to put in context for us what seem like disparate unrelated experiences or you work with a phrase here and you have this kind of experience sometimes you feel satisfied in zazen or sometimes tensions drop away out of your body those all actually come together to

[60:24]

or start to relate to each other as your practice matures in some way that, I don't know if I say a territory, begins to create a territory in which you can reconstitute, reaffirm yourself and reconstitute yourself. Reconstitute is like to make yourself new, but to reaffirm is also to sense something you've always known. It's on the edge of being forgotten. And a number of you have spoken to me about a feeling of, four or five of us, you, six of you, spoken to me about a feeling of being close to knowing something, something opening. And I want to just give you advice at this point. When you have that feeling, and all of us have it to some extent,

[61:28]

all situations, which isn't waiting. You don't try to make experience happen, you don't push, but you rather try to locate yourself in the feeling of being close. So, you may say to me some version of, I felt close. Okay, just see if you can stay in that closeness. And be patient, but don't wait. You know, we're in a different world. I mean, these things sound contradictory. Be patient, but don't wait. But we're not in our usual way. We're making sense of the world. I mean, Buddhism, maybe it should be, isn't about wholeness. It's not about oneness. It's about an ocean of immense potentiality and spontaneous creativity. Creativity? Spontaneous creation. Which is not like it's always been there, always going to be there. It's the same for... I mean, you're in something that doesn't fall into any patterns.

[62:55]

So that's why we speak about the senses, the eyebrows are above, because the senses give us accumulated knowledge. Perceptions give us accumulated knowledge when brought together with associative thinking, which almost is automatic. And analytical thinking, create structures with an assumed order. The trouble with an assumed order is it's an assumed order. And whatever order there is in this ocean of immense potentiality, the order, if there is order, it's beyond our knowing. It helps to have a few buoys, but you can open yourself into it. The key is a mind of continuous abiding. Now, it's quite useful when you first start sitting in the beginning of a period, particularly the first period of the day, to, I would say, give about 10 minutes

[64:30]

to embedding yourself, immersing yourself in your breathing. You can count, you can follow, you can just be in the presence of. Allow yourself to have some, you know, somebody's 10 minutes, one person's 10 minutes might be 2 minutes, another person's 10 minutes might be 20, but some number of minutes actual time, the beginning of a period, and then just let go out of the breathing, Now, I've spoken often, because it's the most useful introduction I've found to different kinds of minds, to experience the different kinds of minds, I've spoken about the three minds of daily consciousness. Now, maybe today I'd like to speak about the three realms of daily consciousness. If you know the three minds of daily consciousness, it's easier to get a feeling for the three realms of daily consciousness, and I'm making up these.

[65:57]

titles myself. I mean, the Three Minds of Daily Consciousness is a traditional teaching, but I don't know what it's called. I call it the Three Minds of Daily Consciousness. So I'm making up a phrase, the Three Realms of Daily Consciousness. So don't look it up, you won't find it. But again, what I'm speaking about is a traditional teaching. One mind of daily consciousness that we are aware of all the time, as you could say, is cause-produced. It's a present mind. All minds are present minds. It's a present mind that arises from the past. Yeah, we all know that mind. It's our habits, what we want, et cetera. And another, this is Yogacara teaching, Another present mind is the present mind which has effects in the future, the mind which anticipates the future. And these are actually somewhat different, and you can begin to feel the difference between a mind that's anticipating a future and a mind which is arriving from the past. Now, they're very closely related because

[67:23]

We usually want the future to be like the past, or we want the future to be better than the past, but that's just a version of the past. The third mind we could call original mind or initial mind, it's another way of understanding original mind, is a mind that does not arise from the past and does not anticipate the future. It's a mind that arises only from the present. And you can begin to feel such a mind. Now, to feel such a mind, to actually feel it distinctly enough that you can get the physical feeling of such a mind, as you know, Mind has a physical component and every physical, all physical aspects of a mental aspect. So any mind has a physical component, but you can't really feel the physical component unless you can make the feeling of the mind distinct.

[68:44]

and to come into a feeling for the distinctness of an initial mind or an original mind. I say initial because it's the same mind on every moment. Every moment shapes it, but initially it's the same. Again, it's a way of speaking about suchness or sameness. Now, again, a gate to this Mind is the five skandhas. If you can begin to feel the distinction within the five skandhas, and some of you, so far have only gotten the distinction between one or two of the skandhas. That's great, because you get the distinction between one or two of them, and you're patient, you'll get the distinction between the others. To really have the skandhas make sense, you really have to feel each skandha. You can't approach it through understanding. You can hold it in mind with faith. That's called access through principle.

[70:11]

Access through practice is to have the actual experience of each. But they're related. There's an important dynamic to get access through principle, which you hold the conception, presence of the teaching, moment after moment, in this mantra-like way. And access by practice is to experience and realize it. They work hand in hand. and allows, you know, as I said, it's a little bit like you're looking at a tree and you can see all the leaves and they're making sound, right? And you can't, how can you distinguish which leaf is making a sound? Which sound? But if you focus on a particular leaf, you can often pick out the sound of that leaf. and you can hear it more clearly than when you were just listening. So it's a little bit like that. Access by principle is to pick out the shape of the leaf, shape of the teaching. Access by practice is to hear the leaf. So a teaching is see the teaching, hold the teaching,

[71:43]

present, and then it works to allow you to begin to experience, if you trust the teaching. So, if you are able to more and more come into the skandhas, you can begin to feel And you can, again, we've spoken about it, use it actually as a way of practicing zazen. You start out your zazen with consciousness. After you hear the bell, sit down, get settled, you slip already into associative thinking. Then you can slip into perception only, no identification. Then you can slip into non-graspable feeling. And then, outside the continuity and territory of non-graspable feeling, you can slip into the form, skanda, where things begin to be spontaneously created.

[73:08]

And that kind of experience, which is just the skill of getting to know your own mind, getting to know your own way of actually being alive, is what we're trying to do here. Nothing special. You can begin to feel an initial mind that doesn't have any baggage with it, that arises from the immediacy of each situation. And the more that is a non-dual mind of continuous abiding – this is a phrase I put together in English to try to get to make a technical term that allows you to get a feeling for this teaching. This initial mind, ah. So the Lankavatara Sutra says, rest the mind in the absolute.

[74:23]

And this means, again, going back to what I spoke about yesterday, coincident or simultaneous knowing. And I'm using knowing instead of knowledge, because knowledge is something you store up. This is just a knowing. You don't store it up. We're trying to enter a world not construed or snarled in story. We're trying to come into a world which we don't make sense of. which doesn't fall into any kind of system. The problem with philosophy and psychology and so forth is, after initial insights, they try to make it into a system. Well, okay, it's normal. The system has a tremendous power. But if the system then closes off and we get dozens of schools and versions, each one a little bit closed off, Somehow, we don't want to turn Buddhism into a system, or into a system like philosophy. If we tell our story, each day it's a new story. It's more that kind of feeling.

[75:47]

So when the Lankavatara Sutra says, rest the mind in the Absolute, it means, when you practice coincidence, let me come back to the word coincidence. In English, there's a word, coincidence, which means two things that happen by accident. And coincident means they happen identically. And so if you want to say coincidental knowing, you'd have two things by accident happening. And I guess in German, the word coincident is closer to coincidental. Or is it the same, has both meanings? No, that's of course not what I mean. But a coincidence in English is not the same as coincident. Yeah, yeah. So a coincidence is, oh that happened and that happened, they happened to happen, isn't that a coincidence? Coincident in English, if I said it, coincidental knowing, English speakers can tell the difference between that and coincident knowing.

[77:31]

simultaneous, inseparable, two different things happening at the same time as one. So, I don't mean to confuse these dialectical differences between English and German. So, but in English I think coincident knowing works better than simultaneous knowing. But, okay, so the practice of the experience of coincident knowing, which is to see birth and death, or birth and decay, and also to see a world without birth and decay, because there's no comparison. So to see birth and decay simultaneously, and also to see birth and decay and no birth and decay simultaneously. This skill or practice of simultaneous or coincident knowing

[78:38]

is the background of the Lankavatara Sutra being able to say, rest the mind in the Absolute. And this is to rest the mind in this case, where there are no comparisons or determinations or measures. This begins to reconstitute you, yourself, consciousness, awareness, in the world, and I guess I can't say any more. So it's right within your own grasp, or a grasp which constantly lets go, a mind of continuous abiding. which is by necessity, necessarily, non-dual, and a non-dual mind slips through the structures of consciousness and habitual thinking and so forth. You know, it doesn't make any sense to send some

[80:07]

I'm beginning to a guided meditation, if I say anymore. Please trust me that if you, in little ways, incremental ways, taste, come into, feel, trust the potentiality of a mind of continuous abiding, whether you enter it with a phrase or enter it with your breath, Slowly, this mind of continuous abiding will become continuous and mature. And if you cannot give it any structures, which immediately makes it dual, you'll find, oh, better stop there. You might find any way it'll be satisfying Thanks.

[81:19]

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