So, for people who haven't been here for the last few weeks, we've been doing a practice period called A Thousand Hands, A Thousand Eyes. And the focus of this practice period is kindness. As part of the practice period, we've spoken about vulnerability and about loss of control, about sickness, old age and death. We've spoken about the earth. And we've spoken about nourishment of the body. of the senses, of the intention, and of consciousness itself.

[01:07]

Today, I'd like to go into a dharma or a mental event that's so basic that we tend not to pay much attention to it. And that's, in Sanskrit, sparsha, or contact. And sparsha, another name of sparsha is touch. But the dharma itself does not refer to physical touch. It refers to the contact or the conjunction that happens at the beginning of every thought. It's the moment when the ability to sense, the object of the senses, and the consciousness or awareness come together.

[02:12]

And that's a moment. And in that moment, we have our first very basic experience of ourselves or the world around us as an object or as a subject of attention. And contact's different from attention. Attention is the basic ability to rest our faculties in a particular area. But contact is the moment when it happens. And so we can also speak about touch. physical touch as arising from contact because physical touch is a development of contact in which there's a relationship with the subject or object of our attention. That's as short an explanation as I can give of contact. So the important thing to know is that contact

[03:18]

is such a basic experience that we tend not to notice it. Sometimes, if we're not paying attention, by the time we notice what we're doing, we're well past contact, well past feeling, well past perception, well past thinking, well past sub-vocalization, and all the way into action. Okay? So sometimes we've gone through an entire karmic series of events before we ever notice that we're in our lives. But through practice, through the process of Zazen, and I can see all the Vipassana students, everyone who's ever taken a Vipassana class going, yeah, contact, yeah, yeah, contact the Dharma. Something. Thank goodness.

[04:20]

In Zazen, in the process of Zazen, we sit down. And basically, no matter what happens, we're like the fairy tale in which the third son goes and sits in the haunted house all night. And no matter what happens, he's just sitting there. That's his task, is to sit there for an hour in the haunted house. castle or the haunted house. Well, we do that every time we sit down in Zazen. We sit down in this haunted body and mind that's subject to all sorts of habits, some of them good and some of them bad. But the fact is, the truth is that when we're in our habitual way of contacting, feeling, perceiving, thinking, speaking, and doing, we're rarely actually with our lives. So to study contact is to study our lives before we begin to adjust or act habitually.

[05:31]

And contact is a subtle nourishment. It nourishes the senses. It's where food nourishes the physical body. Contact nourishes the process of feeling, sensing, and thinking. And the way we contact something, the perceptions that we have about it, totally conditioned by our current intention, our current motivations, and our past experience. So that It's very hard to have a pure experience. As a matter of fact, we can't have pure experiences because we have to have a conceptual framework to actually have an experience and begin to understand our experience.

[06:34]

When we talk about stopping thinking, we're not talking about stopping contact or the operations of thought. We're talking about stopping our reliance and our habitual way of approaching those thoughts. Oh, there's so much to, let's just look at it. There's so much to say, but I want to be brief because I'm also aware that it's nighttime and several people have been marching and protesting about the war or getting ready for the beginning of spring. in one way or another. So I want to be able to be brief and allow time for questions. So I brought some books to show and tell. And if I really give this lecture, it will probably take about three hours to give, so I'm just going to hit the high spots.

[07:35]

But this one's called Sensory Awareness, the Rediscovery of Experiencing. And it was written by Charles Brooks, who died maybe 20 years ago, about the teaching of Charlotte Selver, who passed away about six years ago at the age of 101. She was teaching until she was 101. And she was teaching according to the... the teachings of her teacher, Elsa Gindler. And Elsa Gindler cured herself of a grave illness by experiencing her life. And Charlotte picked up the teaching and

[08:37]

developed a discipline called sensory awareness, which is very close to the practice of Zen. And I studied with her and several other people have studied with her also. And here's another book that you may be interested in called A General Theory of Love. And it's by Thomas Lewis, Dr. Thomas Lewis, who lives close to here. And it's about love and how love operates in the human body and mind. And I may quote from these books. So let's just talk a little bit about touch, because touch is a very interesting form of contact. Remember, touch is not contact itself. But in touch, we can... Explore contact because touch, out of all the five senses, it's very clear when you touch something that you're acting and receiving at the same time.

[09:52]

Just if you take one hand, if you have your two hands in the mudra, this is the mudra and the two joints of the middle fingers touch each other. and the four fingers touch each other, and the thumb tips touch. But if you're just holding the mudra and doing the mudra, you won't feel that touch. You can actually feel your attention or the lack of attention by what happens to your hands, your thumbs, and how present you are to the sense of touch in your hands. So although it's the cosmic mudra, You don't feel anything like cosmicness most of the time. Sometimes we can go through an entire period of zazen without even feeling the mudra once, because we're thinking or reacting to something that has happened. But when we want to pay attention and feel the cosmos in the palm of our hand,

[10:59]

We'll lightly touch the hands in the way that the form says to touch them. And then we'll draw our attention there. And suddenly the world changes. The universe changes for us. It's the oddest thing. So I want to talk about an exercise that Charlotte Selver once gave in a workshop that she was giving. And she asked each person to put their hands on someone else. And we're not going to do that exercise tonight. because we're in lecture and not a workshop. So this is what she said. So the assignment was to touch somebody, to bring your hands on another person, but not manipulate him or her. This may not be easy. One may understand that the hands are not to be active, for instance, that we're not to stroke or massage.

[12:04]

But simply to come into full permissive contact with another person, and I add, or with ourselves, is something many of us have been conditioned against since early childhood. Okay? And unconsciously we may control our contact and in so doing interfere with our own sensation and direct the others. Although unconscious, it's already manipulation. We are actually working when we touch one another, or when we touch ourselves, when we even touch the thumbtips to each other, working to try out our hands, not as agents of our will, but as organs of perception. For this, all of their native sensitivity and flexibility must be gradually Even when we've gained freedom to find and adjust ourselves to the structure of the other person, it may not be easy to sense and adjust to his or her balance or to our own balance.

[13:15]

If we come to him or to ourselves as an object rigidly, the fine nuances of balance are lost. if we may come openly and sensitively, it may help him to a release in which his balance changes, which we then have to follow. There is constant change, for this is no mechanical equilibration, but the ever-renewed coming into equilibrium of a living being with a living being. Indeed, however we touch him or ourselves, we may somewhat disturb our partner's freedom. Our hands may feel hard to him, or heavy, or light, or fluttering. He may feel handled, restrained, pressed, or sometimes a very disappointing experience, not really touched at all. Okay?

[14:18]

So, anyway, the more The mere fact that one comes to the other quietly and without overt manipulation is normally very moving to the person who is touched. He feels cared for and respected. And the one who touches, if he or she is really present in what she does or he does, is apt to feel something of the wonder of conscious contact with the involuntary, subtle movement of living tissues. So you understand that no matter whether we're trying to control or not trying to control the touch, even try it right now with your own mudra. If you put your hands into the form, which is the first two joints of the middle fingers overlapping, the fingers touching each other, the thumbtips touching and gently circling the energy point someplace between the belly button and the pubic bone.

[15:21]

Okay, so it's a soft hand with a little finger in contact with your body there. Do you feel how you're, even if you're not trying to control it, just the fact that you're trying to do the form may get in the way of your experiencing the sensation. And if you experience sensation, it may get in the way of your doing the form. What are we to do? Okay, so just notice that for a moment. You don't have to look at me. Look inwards and just notice what it's like to have your hands in the form and be completely receptive at the same time. You feel?

[16:25]

It's not easy. We generally slip onto one side doing or the other side sensing and it's hard to balance the two. It's hard to be responsive or I should say it goes against our habits to just be in complete contact, completely responsive and completely appropriate at the same time. This is the study of a lifetime. And when you try to sit up in the posture, it gets even more complex, let alone be with someone else. So please, if you're hurting to the point where you can't feel or hear, please adjust yourself. Come to a sense of the earth and come into uprightness so that you're available for yourself and for the room.

[17:31]

So touch is really interesting also because it's life-giving. Touch is life-giving. And when we're denied touch or contact with other people, we can get extremely undernourished. Actually, there have been studies with monkeys and with children that show that primates can't develop normally unless they're regularly touched. Okay? And I won't go into the studies, but we're primates, and we're built this way. And touch is how we receive our basic messages about the world. And so our habits of perception around touch and around contact itself are ingrained at a pre-verbal level, a very, very old level of consciousness.

[18:39]

Because think about it, even in the womb, there is a quality of touch all over the skin of the baby. So let's say if the mother is tense, And the quality of nourishment can be decreased because the circulation between mother and baby can be restricted. The skin can have a taut quality. Not to mention when the baby comes out into the world and is held in certain ways, depending on whether there's receptivity or not, The baby learns different things about human life. So I highly recommend this book, A General Theory of Love. I'm not going to be able to talk about it too much, but it talks about the limbic systems of the body, the pre-verbal, pre-thinking systems of human life and how it's possible to actually re-educate them.

[19:52]

through various exercises, through various types of therapy and so on. And I want to point out that even if a therapy or a conversation or a moment of giving or a phone call or whatever is not felt as a physical experience, it is a moment of contact. It's a moment of sense contact. So it will nourish us in all the ways that touch nourishes us. And so how does it work? So to understand this, I looked a little bit at, I don't know if you remember an old book by Eric Byrne called I'm Okay, You're Okay. And another book called Games People Play.

[20:53]

I think Games People Play. I don't know. I read these books when I was in high school. So I think the last time I read these books, it was maybe 1969 or 1970. But they made a big impression on me at the time. And the particular theme of those books was a philosophy of... human interaction called transactional analysis, as I remember. Please correct me if I'm wrong, because 1969 was a long time ago. But I think that the gist of it was that human interaction, which we think of as a storyline in conventional therapy, is actually a series of contacts called transactions or strokes. that we receive various kinds of strokes from the world, and we're conditioned to receive various kinds of strokes.

[21:57]

Does this sound familiar? I think that's what it was about, and that most people are conditioned to receive unhealthy strokes. And in the absence of healthy strokes or healthy touching, Unhealthy ones are preferable to none at all because, as I said, we starve. Our sensory life starves without touch. So how to retrain touch is how to retrain the way that we come into contact with the world. And retraining contact is even more basic than retraining touch. So I think one of the most important pieces, even if you're working with yourself as a subject or as an object, is to invite contact, to ask permission of yourself for what's about to occur.

[23:02]

So we do that when we put ourselves into the seated meditation posture. And also I wanted to mention that about a month ago, I went around and adjusted, maybe three weeks ago, I went around and adjusted people's posture in the Zendo. And I want to do that again, but I wanted to ask your permission before I did it again. Because I noticed that when I said in the Zendo, you know, if you don't want to be touched, give a signal, I realized that I hadn't asked permission of the people I was touching. to touch them, even though the practice committee had discussed it. So you can email me or say something in this Q&A or at any time about this. So the first thing is to ask permission. And the second thing is to start with positive and respectful sorts of touch.

[24:10]

So like, for instance, to express appreciation to yourself or to another person that's not made up, it's not kind of manufactured, but it's actually truthful, is the safest possible way to start retraining our sense of contact with the world. So everyday types of appreciation. like, thank you for doing the dishes. I appreciate your kindness in driving me to the airport, or whatever it is. And, you know, the more honest and specific you can be about it, and the less it can be something like, you're a great person, the safer that retraining is. We can ask for strokes.

[25:13]

We can ask for the appreciation we need. And we can learn to accept the touches and strokes of other people. Now, what does this have to do with practice? Well, we say the unity of the three wheels, giver, receiver, and gift. we talk about not taking the world or yourself as an object. But what does that mean in everyday life? So in Zazen, when we sit Zazen, we'll feel the texture of our thoughts, and those are touches too. Those are touches that are the result of other touches in the past, plus our present intention. And so... practicing with touch and practicing with receiving the gift of our current experience is important.

[26:20]

Now, I want to just talk a little bit about today, about war and what kind of touch war is on our consciousness. And to do that... I have this, I have a poem from War Stories, called War Stories, from Zen Monster, which Michael just received. And there's a wonderful picture of the great vehicle in Zen Monster that Michael drew or calligraphed. And I think we have it in the front office. So I'll just read a few lines. of the kind of touch that Charles Bernstein thinks war is. War is the logical outcome of moral certainty.

[27:22]

War is other people. War is a five-mile hike in a one-mile cemetery. War is the slow death of idealism. War is for the state what despair is for the person. War is poetry without song. War is moral. Peace is ethical. War is resistance in the flesh. War is the desecration of the real. War is raw. War is tyranny's greatest foe.

[28:32]

War is tyranny's greatest friend War is a battle for the hearts and minds of the heartless and mindless. War is our inheritance. War is our right. War is our obligation. War is justified when it stops war. War isn't over even when it's over. War is the answer. War is here. War is this. War is now. War is us. Okay? So it's just a few thoughts. This is actually a two-page poem. So it's what kind of nourishment to the senses does war give? What kind of nourishment to the senses does any experience give?

[29:40]

That's the practice of contact. And I think maybe I'll stop here and take a couple of questions or comments. I know this kind of conversation opens out much more than it explains. So I think I'll just stop here. And how much time do we have for questions? What time is it? Thank you. 22 after. So I think that we could have a few questions or a few comments. I remember at the end, he was specifically talking about war. Yeah. And I wanted to see if he's been talking about war or if it's sort of a mixed science limit resonance with our nation that can't regulate itself in the world.

[30:47]

And so, in the world, often people have limit resonance with the people they're fighting with, and it'll be about that as well. But, yeah. Excuse me, limbic resonance. The feeling of limbic resonance is the feeling of identification and attraction. Okay, sorry. It's very hard to know whether something's, whether a resonance or an identification or a mode of contact is healthy or unhealthy if we don't have role models or experience.

[32:06]

Okay, the first thing that one has to notice is whether that contact is damaging or not damaging. If it's causing harm, it's probably not healthy. Okay, so that's the grossest level. Does it cause harm or does it not cause harm? It's hard to do that kind of retraining. But I think that if we are honest with ourselves, we will begin to notice whether a certain kind of contact or a certain kind of touch causes harm. And we can even ask ourselves, okay, body, mind, is this harming the body? Okay?

[33:11]

Is this harming me physically? Is this harming me physiologically or emotionally? Is this harming my ability to be clear and to think clearly? Is this harming me spiritually? Is this harming my happiness? and the happiness of all beings. So that's the first, there's a kind of a net, a kind of a sieve of whether it's harmful or not. That's the first one. The second sieve is, okay, maybe I can't, maybe it isn't harmful, but is it helpful? Okay? And to find out whether something's helpful, we may have to be receptive to the object or subject of our attention.

[34:16]

We may have to ask them, is this helpful? I mean, it sounds so stupid, but it sounds so obvious. But we might have to ask. We might have to get reality checks. Is this helpful for you? Even asking ourselves, is this helpful? I know it's not harmful. Like last week when Trevor asked about the book, reading the detective novel in his, the murder mystery in his room. You know, maybe it's not harmful. Is it helpful? It might be. I don't know. That's why I didn't want to prescribe. And then If it's not harmful and it is helpful, is it widely helpful? Does it help all beings? Okay, so these are increasing levels of skill and start with not harming.

[35:23]

Okay, it follows the precepts. Thank you for your question. Yeah, Keith and then Michael. Yeah, it is. I'm not saying that it isn't that. What I'm saying is it occurs. It's not what we, the Dharma of contact, sparsha, is not what we commonly think of as touch. Even though the word, a word like it is used to mean touch in everyday life.

[36:27]

When we talk about it as Dharma, we're actually talking about the moment when the ability to see, the I object and the I consciousness come together. Okay? So when all of those come together and conjoin, that moment is called contact. And contact conditions feeling. Okay? Feeling conditions perception. Does this sound familiar from the 12-fold chain of causation? Okay, that's how it goes. Okay? Yes. No, sight, it is touch. It does come into contact. That moment, those things do come into contact. If you sit zazen and notice hearing or seeing or smelling or tasting or feeling, you'll notice that there is contact.

[37:31]

You'll notice that there is a moment of contact, but it's not the moment at which we say, oh, this is a hot sensation, this is a cold sensation. That comes much later in the experience. Check it out in Zazen, don't believe me, okay? I don't know everything, so check it out. It's interesting that we're talking about how that impression of these two books particularly Thank you. Thank you. And that book is also your... I mean, that's the first time that your drawings appeared in print, right?

[38:35]

That Mahayana, that great vehicle. That's great. It's like two stick figures on a giant M. Oh, it's a motorcycle? I'm sorry, Michael. It's a motorcycle. It's a great vehicle. I'm getting in trouble. Does anyone have a question or a comment? Yeah, consciousness is the most subtle. Okay? Actually, the sense organ is mind, as I remember it.

[39:39]

The ability to think and perceive. But all five of the sense experiences are consciousness. Okay? All of them are consciousness. So... And all of them have that moment of contact. And this is what touch, what physical touch has to teach us about sight and hearing and so on. Try this in Kinyin sometime. If you're hearing sounds on the street, you may be able to feel the moment at which those sounds touch you physically. And you can feel the contact of your foot on the floor, and you can feel how that changes, the temperature of the floor, how much one part of the foot touches and how much another part touches. You can feel the temperature of the air. You can smell the faint residue of incense from other times or maybe the fragrance of breakfast beginning to be cooked.

[40:50]

You can see light in your eyes, but you don't necessarily have to focus. You can feel the moment when the kinesthetic sense comes to your consciousness and guides your walking. So try it sometime during kinhin, because even more than zazen, you're doing a deliberate process of change. And so you'll be able to feel what touch has to teach about sensing. And you'll be able to feel the transformation of the thinking. It's very interesting. And in the process, your self-view will dissolve just like that. You know, any rigid concept that you have about yourself as one thing Check it out.

[41:52]

Did you hear? That sight happens quickly. Sight happens quickly. Please do. Yes, so it seems that something happens very, very quickly and my interpretation of what it is that I see. So I'm wondering if it really is possible to be able to experience that contact as it happens separated from the section where it is to proceed. You can experience the moment of... and then you can experience the next moment of perception. And you can notice that by the time you perceive and label something, the freshness of that perception is already finished.

[43:00]

Okay? This is what Dogen Zenji means when he says, turn the mind inwardly to study yourself. You're turning back and looking at the mind that thinks and before thinks, the mind that perceives and before perceives, the mind that senses, the ability to sense and the moment of contact. You may not be able to experience the moment of contact itself. You may only be able to infer it. But notice how you begin to approach it more and more closely as your attention deepens. Absolutely. Yeah, check it. Yeah. So I'm giving you the words, which are the teaching. And again, I'm saying that they're worthless as words. They're only valuable as far.

[44:04]

They're only as valuable as they're true. So I'm not I'm not saying to believe me. OK. Don't believe me. Check it. Huh? Check it. Yeah. Study it yourself. Because that noticing the process of your perception and your thinking will give you a kind of experiential wisdom that nothing else can give. Okay? Because when you're Stability becomes, when you become stable, and then your experience becomes the content of your waking up to your life as it is.

[45:15]

You don't have to think about them. You just have to notice what happens. What I say might not be true at all. Uh-huh. Then you have to remember it. Yeah. Well... Anyway, you can remember it as long as it's useful and then throw it out. Yes. Well, we think that, you know, that's our preconception. So Dima is asking a very good question. If touch is necessary for life, what about celibacy?

[46:16]

Okay, you've come to the right place. I can talk to you about celibacy because I've been celibate for, what is this, 2008? Twenty-one years. So I took on a practice of celibacy to study myself and the way I contacted and touched the world. So we have a preconception that to be celibate is to be asexual and not to touch anything. That couldn't be farther from the truth. Sexual thinking and feeling arises in humans. part of human life. And touching is part of everyday experience.

[47:17]

And intimacy, the practice of intimacy is actually helped by the practice of celibacy. I'm not saying everybody should be celibate. I want there to be people and relationships. I'm not against people and relationships. I'm not even against my own relationships. I'm not holding a fixed position that celibacy is the most important thing and any other practice is no good. That's not what I'm saying at all. But what I am saying is that how it occurred for me was that after my breakup with my husband, I noticed that I wanted to grab onto someone else as an object right away to replace that person in my life and take away the pain. So I noticed that everybody was looking awfully good to me.

[48:21]

I mean, better than they actually might have. really be. And that there was a sense of urgency about that, like now, tonight, today, this moment. And so then I thought to myself, or my practice started whispering to me, hmm, this is interesting. Maybe you better not act on these impulsive, grabby, Because you could get into really bad trouble. You could hurt yourself and another person. And so I made a promise to myself that I wouldn't replace that relationship right away. And I thought, okay, for a year. The grieving process lasts a year.

[49:23]

Maybe I'll just cool it for a year. And so that became so interesting. And my life started to become so intimate that I became motivated to continue that for another few years. And I've really enjoyed what might to the outsider seem like deprivation because it isn't deprivation at all. What it gives is a sense of equal importance to everyone in my life without glomming on to any one person as the person of my dreams. I hope this makes sense. So it gives me the ability to meet and appreciate people in my life at a human level and at the level of touch and contact

[50:26]

without having to jump into a set of actions with them. I'm not saying that this is forever, and I'm not saying that it's the only way. But touch and intimacy becomes even more important when you're celibate. Yeah. Yeah. I'll come to mind. Yes. It can be manipulative, yes. Okay, for people who don't know, toucheth healing. If you work with people with AIDS or people with chronic illnesses, you may get exposed to touch of healing.

[51:30]

And a lot of nurses practice touch of healing, and it's a non-invasive, sometimes not even physical contact, way of experiencing and feeling somebody's aura at their skin. And so what you actually do with touch of healing is is to come close enough that you can sense them as a living, breathing human being with skin. And you feel that touch against your skin. And there's actually been many studies to show that it works, and there's been at least a couple of studies to show that it doesn't work. But anyway, the point of touch of healing is to heal. But if the other person becomes an object to you and it's like heal, heal, you know, like a dog, heal, heal, you know, then it's not healing at all. For real healing, the word heal means whole, wholeness.

[52:38]

And for to be healing, you have to experience the whole person, not the person as an illness. Yes. Well, you know, the miracle about it is they don't have to sense that you're making that contact for it to work. There's actually a study done at Stanford that showed that people who are prayed for heal faster than people who are not prayed for, whether they know that they're being prayed for or not. Isn't that interesting? And this is the last question because I can see knees coming up and that look for some people.

[53:43]

But people who are prayed for scientifically have been shown to do better than people who are not prayed for. So when... Blanche and Lou and Marvin sit here and chant the names of people who need help in the morning for the well-being ceremony. They're generating healing by that action. And it works. And they don't have to know. The manipulation comes in when you want to make sure that they know that you prayed for them, you know, or that you're healing them. It means that you're seeing the world or your own illness as an object and you're coming away from the bare, appreciative, non-manipulative contact that is actually wholeness and healing. So this is a subject that we could study for a really long time.

[54:48]

And so I just do want to close with that. And if you have any comments or feedback, I gratefully accept it. And we'll do that in another setting. So thank you very much for your attention. And good night. Intention equally extends.

[55:19]

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