I just got word that Tetsugen Roshi, his wife, died last night. Most of you wouldn't know her, but I guess they moved to Santa Fe recently. She died in Albuquerque Hospital of a heart attack. So we should do a service for her tomorrow. I think she went by the name of Jisai Holmes. You know, when I was in Japan, particularly when I first lived there, the first years, I found some things quite annoying and some things quite amusing. And one of the things I found amusing was that when a certain date comes, everybody switches to summer clothes.

[01:46]

It doesn't depend on the weather, it depends on the date. So, a day comes and they say, oh, it's summertime, everyone puts on summer clothes. Summer kimonos come out and everything, and winter clothes get put away. It might be freezing cold, but then they have the summer clothes on. And I always thought that was a little peculiar. But then this morning, when I felt we should have a fire this morning, even though it was rather warm, I realized, oh my gosh, I've become like that. And Randy had made a, at the tanto, made a decision not to have a fire. It was warm. And so Joe didn't make a fire. And then I came down here and started throwing pieces of paper at the stove. And, but you know, I guess, you know, I hate to admit it, but I guess It's not just a habit, it's a kind of different way of establishing continuity. So I've come to a... Like when I come in the room... So I had to think about it, because I used to think it was dumb, but I realized I've become that kind of person. So if you don't want to become that kind of person, you can stop practicing now.

[03:16]

You know, when I come down, mostly when I'm in the hall, I have a kind of hall mind, shall we say. And when I come in the room, the first thing I see is the rug, the table, whether the incense burner has an incense stick in it, and whether there's a fire. And they kind of go together for me, until we decide it's summer. And if we decide it's summer, no fire, no... That's kind of how I feel, actually. It doesn't mean that if it got really cold again, we couldn't put a fire. We could. It'd be rather nice if you're like, ah, it's kind of cozy to have a fire again. But still, that would be an exception. We have a tendency not to have a fire once we decided it was warm enough for a number of days. But until it's warm enough, my sense is to keep the visual world that we practice in a certain continuity in it. Now, what I'm kind of working around at here is, and by the way,

[04:41]

I'm happy to be interrupted or have some questions or whatever. I talked about this translator, Prajñātāra, and he translated the Diamond Sutra, and I think the Lankavatara Sutra, and a number of sutras, and quite a lot. He did a huge... I told you enough about him the other day. extraordinary person and how so much work he did to make practice possible in China and for us. And he seems to, from what I can study, and he's a real person. I mean, people know quite a lot about him. We don't know much, really, about Bodhidharma this person. And he really did sort of ask himself and work on, both in India and when he came, I think he was, what did I say, 67 or something like that, when he came to China finally. 47? I don't remember what I said. But anyway, it was

[06:04]

You know, not a young man when he made this trip and then he had quite a difficult life because of the political turmoil in China at the time. He really was motivated by one thing. Why do we cause ourselves so much suffering? Why do societies cause ourselves so much suffering? Is it inevitable or can we get to the root of the problem? And this is where really the This is also the dynamic, we could call it, of the Four Noble Truths. I mean, there's suffering, and then there's, as I said again the other day, there's suffering and then there's a cause of suffering. But you don't get to the third, that there's a holy truth, that there's an end of suffering, until you yourself relate to that cause. I'm causing it. We're causing it. I take responsibility for the cause. It's that act of taking responsibility for the cause which leads to the possibility of ending suffering. It's not just a logical thing like, well there's suffering and there's a cause of suffering and because there's a cause there's an end. You get to the thing, because there's a cause then that has to cause you. That's not, you know, that's not just logic. There's you in there and if you don't make

[07:30]

find a way to take responsibility for this in yourself, then there's no end of suffering. And that's exactly what it... Diamond Sutra starts out with this wonderful thing, which I've always liked. This is how the Bodhisattva... The Buddha said it's a buddhi. This is how the Bodhisattva Mahasattvas master their thinking. Now, we have an idea, we have a vision of humankind that's a political necessity because, you know, the Greeks, the Romans created an idea of universal citizenship. The Greeks had an idea that, well, real people were men, but not slaves were excluded and women were excluded. And before that it was tribal or blood-related, etc. And slowly the definition has come up.

[08:34]

through the ages, and the American Revolution was about, in a sense, you could say the American Revolution was about saying all people are citizens. In England, only property owners were citizens. If you didn't own property, you were poor, you were not, you couldn't vote, you couldn't participate in society, you weren't really human. Poor people weren't human. And the American Revolution was to say poor people are also human, because everybody in America was poor at the time, for the most part. jacks of all trade and masters of none. So now we have a definition of humankind which is politically convenient because we want to avoid religious definitions or Muslim definitions and so forth. So we have some definition of humankind which means everybody has a right to enough food, housing, and medical supplies, things like that. Of course, it's impossible to achieve, but it's a wonderful goal, and the United Nations, Western policies are kind of based on that idea. But it also is a coercive idea, because there's not any spiritual element in it at all. And it's an outward looking, it's a kind of practical way, and I can remember when I first started meditating, people would say to me, you're wasting your time.

[09:59]

You know, you should be out helping people. And as I've pointed out a number of times, no one said when I went to a bar for 40 minutes, no one said I was wasting my time. They said, did you enjoy your beer or whatever, you know. But as soon as I meditated, they said, you're wasting your time. Whose time and what time? So what the Diamond Sutra says is we have to have a much bigger conception of what humanity is or what sentience is or what humankind is, and it says, the way you master your thinking is however many species of living beings there are, whether they're born from eggs, from the womb, from moisture, or spontaneously. They tried to cover all the bases there. Not unless something mossy growing underneath. They're a sentient being, you know. There's a few in my shoes, I better get some of that. Whether they have form or do not have form.

[11:01]

You know, you couldn't sell this to the United Nations. But anyway, whether they have form or do not have form, whether they have perceptions or do not have perceptions, or whether it cannot be said of them that they have perceptions or do not have perceptions, we must lead all these beings to liberation. And when this has been accomplished, We do not, in truth, think that a single being has been liberated. Okay. And then the next one goes into more visibility when a bodhisattva practices generosity. So that enters us into the six paramitas. Which is basically this Mahayana vision that you can't realize freedom from suffering or realize enlightenment until you relate yourself to sentience as a whole. feel yourself connected and feel yourself responsibly connected or interconnected or dependent on and so forth. That's why the Parmitas as a Bodhisattva practice are the ways you practice connectedness, generosity, patience and so forth. So Prajnatara

[12:29]

relating himself to this question and wanting to see if he could get to the root of the problem of how we treat each other, how our societies, how the Chinese kingdoms are fighting all the time. And he came to the conclusion, and India was not in any better shape, he came to the conclusion that the problem is thinking. our relationship to thinking and the way we identify with our thinking. So the things he translated, the Diamond Sutra and the Lankavatara Sutra, are all about changing your relationship to thinking. I mean basically a statement like this, not a single being, we've saved all these beings and not a single being has been saved, basically says you're changing your relationship to thinking. No, I think it's useful to think about thinking, or to notice our thinking, or observe our thinking. The other day I said there are six images of practice, didn't I? Six images of Zazen. Maybe it'd be helpful if I write these things down. Yeah, I wonder what that clicking is. Oh, it's a mouser.

[14:17]

I felt like a little bit like a rodent. Is this the only pen we have or do I... maybe I have some other one somewhere. One is a spa. Two I think was a... um... a laboratory and three was a hospital and four was a I'll get out of the way in a minute and four was a madhouse that was a retort or cauldron or furnace. Isn't that in chemistry, isn't a retort something you... Yeah, a retort or cauldron. And six was a field. You won't find this in any sutra, I just made it up.

[15:45]

But as far as I can tell, in all the years I've been practicing, all the teachings fall into those categories. Basically, sometimes we do Zazen and it's a kind of spa. We're just refreshing ourselves. It's just an act of doing Zazen. The way your energy works, you feel refreshed afterwards. And in some ways that may be the most important aspect of Zazen. is that to do that, it's like, you know, you feel lousy if you don't sleep. And there may be other things that happen during sleep, but sleep just makes you feel better. And Zazen makes your more subtle body feel better. And second is the laboratory. I do think that what we're doing here is really a kind of inner science. and you learn to observe your thinking, observe how you function, and so forth. And if you don't observe how you function, you can't do much about your thinking. And third is the hospital. You do learn how to cure yourself, how to take care of your health, how to redirect your energy, and so forth. So there's a lot of teachings that have to do with kind of how to take care of yourself physically and psychologically.

[17:10]

And the madhouse is, Zazen is a place you let yourself go crazy. You get, so that you can, once you get, so you can sit, so that you know you don't have to move. As soon as you have some, as long as you think, well, if it really gets bad, I'm gonna move. You can't let yourself get mad, go crazy. But once you know you can sit there, no matter what happens, the building could burn down around you. and you'd only get up if you wanted to. Then you can let all kinds of stuff happen. You can begin to let things appear, you can begin to feel how shitty you are, et cetera. And the retort or cauldron is also kind of like a furnace or place you purify yourself or transform yourself or cook yourself. And finally, it's an open field. It's an inclusive area. And I think if you notice your own zazen, particularly as it gets more developed and you can begin to see the different qualities in your zazen, and you're not just kind of struggling with your thoughts, you'll begin to see that your practice falls into these six areas. Next week, I might think of a seventh or cut it down to five. But so far, that's what I think for the last couple of months.

[18:38]

Those six cover the bases. Now, I think what characterizes thinking... Again, I mentioned this the other day. What should we say? Let's call it characteristics of thinking. And this is, again, just obvious stuff. One is, there's a lot of it. We tend to identify with it. And three, it preoccupies us. We could also call this, it's difficult not to notice. And again, I spoke about this the other day. And I think we don't want to, oh, thanks for the cushion. We don't want to look at zazen, I mean, as thinking.

[20:03]

as only something that has some important meaning. It could be like thinking your dreams, all dreams are important or something. A lot of dreams are junk mail. A lot of dreams are garbage. They're just kind of distracted thoughts. It's no different than daydreaming. Or kind of, you know, there's garbage dreams and garbage minds and so forth, garbage thinking. And there's just a lot of thinking. If there was a small amount of thinking, it would be a different problem. But there's a lot of it. And if you leave yourself alone, usually there's just, well, it's gone. So you have to deal with the quantity of thinking as well as the fact, the second part, that you identify with your thinking. So the fact that you identify with your thinking is the biggest problem. But even if you stop the identification with your thinking, there's still a lot of thinking. So you have to kind of weave yourself, work with your thinking, and find various ways to work with your thinking. And the third is, it preoccupies us, or it's hard not to notice. And the example I gave was, if you're sitting in a restaurant or bar or something like that, and you're talking to a friend,

[21:36]

and there's a television set right over your friend's head, it's very difficult because your eyes keep jumping up to the television set. You know, and I was in some place in Boston the other day, and there was a television set, every place I looked there was a television set, and every place I didn't look there was one in the mirror. So I tried to avoid them, you know, but then I'd look over there and it'd be the damn thing in the mirror. We are so constructed that we tend to notice edges. We tend to notice motion. We tend to notice movement. If somebody's standing in the woods entirely still, you probably won't see them. You walk right by them. They have to move. Or you wait for an animal, something in the dark. You wait for the movement. Because that's what we perceive. So because thinking is a kind of movement, we're going to keep noticing it. Even if you don't identify with it, you're going to keep noticing it. Do you understand what I mean? Now, there's a lot more going on in us and with us than thinking. The problem is, even if you stop identifying with it, we have a habit of noticing edges, so we don't notice things that don't have edges.

[23:03]

You don't notice the animal which is still in the bush. But there's a lot of things happening in us that are still. Or are only centers, no edges. Or move at a different pace than we move. And we have a certain mental pace and we notice things within that mental pace. Now one of the signs I notice when somebody speaks to me saying, Doksan, they point out something that's not in the usual category of things we notice. And it's always a great relief to me to hear that because it means they've learned to notice what is not usually noticeable. Once you learn that, many other things start coming up. that can't be taught, that can't be shown, that are not in the sutras, but they start coming up, and you... So you want to... So... Am I making sense? Okay. So, the problem with thinking is threefold. It's quantity, we identify with it,

[24:30]

And it tends to be the kind of things we notice, I think because of the way we're genetically constructed, but mostly because we know the world through thinking, so we build a habit, our habits are to notice thinking. Okay, what are the practices in relationship to thinking? If you can't read my handwriting, you can guess. Five practices in relation to thinking. One is we leave it alone. Two, we observe it.

[26:23]

Three, we intercede. Four, we change the basis. Yeah. And five, we change the nature. of thinking. We change the basis, really, of continuity. Now, one thing I want to speak about at some point is this whole mostly false problem of the distinction between sudden and gradual realization or enlightenment, but also the way in which it does make sense and is a legitimate distinction. I mean, it's been on my mind for a while to speak about it, but I will do it. Now, those at such a shorthand that I think they need some

[28:02]

elaboration. Yes? To leave it alone is the basic practice of Shenhui, or us, to practice uncorrected mind, or don't invite your thoughts to teach. Just what comes up, there it is, you let it appear. And the second is you observe your thinking. And that's also what we do sometimes. You follow thoughts to their source, you follow moods to their source, and so forth. And you observe how your states of mind arise and so forth. That's the second one. And the third one, you intercede. Most koan practice is basically an intercession. Do you understand what intercede is in German? No. What is it? It means to interject, to throw, interject means to throw something into. Intercede is to interfere for the benefit. I mean, Martin, say that you're having an argument with somebody.

[29:27]

If I interceded for you, it would mean I would interfere on your behalf. Like so, in a law case, or if two dogs are fighting. If you intercede, you're trying to... I don't know what the word is in German. I don't know. Do you? Look it up, I don't care. I have a... blimp. What? I have a blimp. Blimp. She has a blimp. Yeah, okay. Have a look. You can have a glimpse, too, but you only have a glimpse, so it's going to be hard to read the entry. She has a glimpse of what you're saying. She's going to have a look. I see. She has a glimmer of what I'm saying. You have a glimpse, an idea. I-N-T-E-R C-E-D-E I exist. That makes sense? Anyway. Could you give me an example? Yeah. Okay, so you're thinking. And you, in the midst of thinking, you repeat, this very mind is Buddha. That's interceding with your thinking.

[30:48]

Or if you're practicing mindfulness, you say, arriving, arriving. As I say something, I say arriving. That's interceding with your thinking. Now generally, most intercessions in practice, and most Koan practice is intercession, a kind of intercession, is you either intercede with right views, Eightfold path starts with right views. You intercede with right, for instance, you tend to, our thinking tends toward permanence. You remind yourself that everything's impermanent. To remind yourself is to intercede in the habit of thinking. That make sense? So most Koan practice is to, your thinking's going on and you keep putting something into your thinking that begins to change your thinking. The classic one in Buddhism would be to somehow remind yourself that things are impermanent or interdependent or so forth or unique. For instance, each moment, because we tend to think in permanence, in terms of permanence, we tend to think in terms of predictability,

[32:16]

And when you think in terms of predictability, you don't know that this is unique. This minute, right, this moment right now, is absolutely unique. It will never happen again. It hasn't happened before. And when you really know that it's unique, you know that God can't know the future. you know that God can't know the future. Because if this is actually unique, we don't know what's going to happen next. And it can't be known what's going to happen next. So, to practice right views would be to find a way to feel, energetically feel, the uniqueness of each moment. I mean, how often do you sit in a situation, like this or any place, and think, oh, jeez, I wish this would get over. Once you realize uniqueness, you never feel like that anymore. Almost never feel like that.

[33:34]

Each situation is absolutely unbelievable, appearing. And the difference is simply the different kind of mind, the different relationship to thinking. If your thinking tends toward permanence, as thinking does, because thinking is about predictability. Sentences are about predictability. Grammar is about predictability. Everything is about predictability. As soon as you're thinking, your mind is shaped by predictability, by the need for predictability, you lose touch with uniqueness. You lose touch with timelessness and so forth. This is kind of common sense. The thing is, we have to, it takes practice to notice. So that's, those are right views that you intercede or bring into or interject into your thinking and you bring them in in a mantra-like way you bring them in just repetitively until they wear down the thinking or shift the energetic balance and Zen particularly emphasizes number three well, it particularly emphasizes three and one

[34:58]

and they work together. The Tendai, the more philosophical schools, emphasize number two, to observe and study your thinking, but you also do that in Zen, we do. But it's not unique to Zen. But the intercession, the way we intercede in our thinking is unique, pretty much within all of Buddhism, unique to Zen. Now, fourth, is to change the basis of continuity. What I said the other day is that we know that there are different categories that people live in. Different cultures, different tribes, different civilizations have different categories of the way they see the world, perceive the world, think about the world, and so forth.

[36:09]

And anthropology has made that clear to us. That helps us, because if you really don't see that as a possibility, it's hard to really see the possibility of Buddha nature. But we are not trying, it should be clear, we're not trying to achieve, we're not trying to become a Chinese person, or a Japanese person, or an Indian person. We're trying to, if you're practicing, become a Buddhist person. which is not the same as a Chinese person or Japanese person. It's a kind of unique creation of people like Prajñātāra, Bodhidharma and so forth. It's a way of being to free yourself from identifying with thinking and to establish a continuity of beingness and non-beingness outside of thinking that's unique to Buddhism.

[37:13]

Now, sometimes there are a lot of overlaps with shamanism, there's overlaps with other teachings to some extent, to maybe some kinds of Christian monastic life and so forth. But as a kind of science, how does one do this and how does one transform one's body and mind as a kind of science is, I think, unique to Buddhism. And so what we're doing here is trying to find a body and mind, realize a body and mind, which Buddhism has taught us is a possibility, that does not fall into any category of any other culture. And I think that we actually may have a certain advantage over people practicing in China and Japan and Korea and so forth now, because we have more of a cultural contrast. In other words, when your culture is very much like the teaching and seems similar, when the idea of acceptance, for instance, how to accept yourself is also how to accept your government and accept the emperor, etc. It's much harder to see acceptance as a practice. So we, for us, once we get the hang of this, it's much clearer how Buddhism differs

[38:41]

from our usual way of thinking. If the usual way of thinking is very mixed up with yogic ideas, it's much harder to see the difference. That's probably the main reason Tsukishi left Japan. Because not many people could see the difference anymore between Japanese culture and Buddhism. And there's a big difference. It's just that they have come to look very much alike. Okay. Now, to change the basis of continuity, this works directly with our tendency to identify with our thinking, and we in the West particularly to identify with our thinking in terms of a self-story. We have a habit of thinking of ourselves as somebody who had a past, somebody who will have a future, and we think of this present moment as that which we do that leads to what we're going to do in the future. This is a very adhesive, sticky form of identifying with your thinking. I mean, everybody tends to identify with their thinking. I mean, if I just look at that

[40:07]

that plant, and I see it as a plant, and I think that's a plant, I'm identifying with my thinking. I'm identifying with that thought as being an accurate perception of a plant, something like that. But if I think that plant belongs to me, or if I think I like it, or don't like it, then I'm getting into a more complex kind of identification. Do you see what I mean? If I just look at the plant, my thought I take my thought as real. The plant goes far beyond my thought of it. So there's already a problem that I take my thought, that my thought of the plant is real. That's already a problem. But when I start identifying with it, and then when you start thinking how you think of people, if I, using Martin's example over there, again, if I think of Martin as the plant, well, yes, there's somebody over there dressed in black, you know, Yeah, that's one kind of identification. But if I start thinking Martin is my friend, or Martin's a student, or I want Martin to do this or that, or I wish Martin would, you know, shave his head and become a priest, or I wish he'd go back and establish the quadrinity process in Arizona, then I have a much more complicated, involved-in-myself story. And then Martin becomes part of my story, not just the plant or something.

[41:35]

So, now there's other aspects which I've spoken about before, is our senses, the job of our senses is to create a seemingly three-dimensional world. Now we know this world is many more dimensioned than three. We partly see the fourth being time. For various historical reasons, sometimes the fourth dimension is considered what scientists would call the fifth dimension. but the fourth dimension in scientific terms is time. And we hardly notice that because of our permanence thinking. So now one way to work with your tendency to identify with your thinking and to take your thinking as real, both as person, as self-story, and as three-dimensionality. Maybe it's three-dimensionality, I'm throwing a monkey wrench into the thing and making it too complicated. But this sense of knowing things that are centers without edges, or knowing a more subtle way in which we're relating.

[43:02]

That doesn't occur within the three-dimensional perceptual world. In other words, if I can know or feel what you're thinking, this does not fall into any ordinary sense. It doesn't fall into any three-dimensional description of what's happening here. So, if Janie, for instance, knows when I'm leaving, which often she does, I'm going to go to Denver or I'm going to go to Europe for a while, she'll start hanging around my car or hanging around my back door. I've been told, I say, Janie, I don't tell her anything, she starts hanging around. So something's going on there that's not the ordinary three-dimensional way of looking at things and thinking about things. I mean, as you know, my theory is that Animals occupy the Sambhogakaya body much more than we humans do. Animals are in the bliss body much more. That's why they're happy being animals. I mean, they'd get terribly bored being an animal if they weren't, I think. So, I think animals enjoy themselves because they're

[44:27]

they have this bliss body life because they're not, primarily because they're not interfered with by thinking. And, okay, now. Past, present, future type thought stream continuity. So we identify with our thinking because we see it as ourself, particularly in the West, we also identify with our thinking because we need to establish continuity. Kind of the people we are, we need to have some sense of continuity. So, instead of trying to do something to your thinking, that's one approach, you take the sense of continuity out of thinking And that's basically what mindfulness practice is. Mindfulness is to shift your sense of continuity out of thinking into the phenomenal world. So if you're walking and you say, walking, walking. Now, if you just notice, now I'm stepping forward. Now this is a long breath. Now this is a short breath. Basically, you're shifting continuity out of your thinking into your breath or your body or the phenomenal world or your activity.

[45:58]

If I say, if I'm walking and I feel like I'm, you know, when I get up, I feel, well, if someone asks, who am I? I'm a walking person. I'm not Richard. And, you know, you can practice that at first, but eventually, if you really don't feel like Richard or Mark or Rhonda, you know, you feel like that I'm a sitting person. And when somebody asks you, you actually have to think about it, what is my name? Because you no longer identify with your thinking in your name much or your person. And it actually does happen. Okay, when you're walking, you notice you're walking, that is a process of taking your sense of identification out of your thoughts and putting it into your physical activity. Isn't that clear? Okay. When you say arriving, on each step arriving, then you're practicing a combination of changing the basis and intercession. Because to say arriving is not the same as walking. Arriving is kind of like this very moment is unique. Arriving. Now I'm arriving. Just now arriving. It's a taking and a

[47:24]

an Enlightenment view. Okay, one thing I didn't say earlier, there's two ways you intercede with your thinking. One is right views, accurate assumptions, perceptions about how the world exists. Those are right views. We also intercede with Enlightenment views. And the one I like a lot, and it relates to what I'm speaking about, is Dung Shan is asked, you know, it's one of the koans at the end of Shoryu Roku. Among the various bodies of Buddha, which one does not fall into any category? This is a very astute question. Among the various bodies of Buddha, among the various ways we can perceive ourself, which one does not fall into any category? And what did Dungshan say? I'm always close. Yeah, I'm always close to this. And what is, I'm always close to this, as a statement? It's a statement that doesn't fall into any category. So you can't really answer the question with a category either. But it's also a very interesting phrase to work with. Instead of saying, arriving, you say, I'm always close to this. So I'm talking to you, and I look at you, and while I'm looking at you, talking with you, I feel I'm always close to this.

[48:53]

This phrase intercedes with my thinking and begins to change. It's like watering a plant or something. My thinking begins to dissolve or change when I have such a thought. It also brings me into this unique moment. So it's interceding with my thinking with an enlightenment view, not a right, accurate, the way the world exists view. Do you understand? So Mu, Mu meaning famous koan, does a dog like Janey have a Buddha nature? Moo. So moo is both a sound, a way of saying it, and interjecting into every thought, into every perception, emptiness. Or no. Mark? No Mark. Advaita? No Advaita. So, now, the main ways we change the basis of our thinking, we can say change the basis of continuity, it also means of your thinking, but that's one step more, which is, what are the other basis for continuity other than your thinking? Well, the most classic is your breath.

[50:22]

And breath does a whole lot of things other than just change your continuity. But one thing, if you can keep bringing your mind to your breath, bring your attention to your breath. So I become a breathing person, not a thinking person. So if once I can actually stay present with my breath, no. This isn't difficult, this isn't philosophical, this isn't intellectual. Simply, can you do this? I mean, Buddhism is wisdom, meditation, and discipline. Discipline means you can have all the wisdom in the world. You can meditate all you want, but if you can't do a simple thing, like bring your attention continuously to the breath, it's all kind of talk. And this doesn't require brilliance. It just requires a kind of subtle effort. It can't be too strong an effort. It has to be a gentle effort. It has to be a cooperative effort. It has to be an accepting effort. But it's transformative. One of the things it does is, after a certain while, it brings the breath into the possession of the heart.

[51:46]

Because the breath, normally your breath, if anybody measured your breath and your thinking, if they could have an EEG and all that stuff, wire you up, they'd see that your breath and thinking went right along. And physiologically, most of us are breath-mind people. That our breath goes along with our thinking and our identification is with our thinking. When you shift your identification, From your thinking to your breath, at some point your heart grabs your breath away from your thinking and takes it into its own possession. But the heart can't get hold of the breath until you get it free from the mind, from thinking. And once that happens, you're in a physiological different kind of world. You actually have changed your body by this practice. because when your breath is related to your heart, a whole lot of different things begin to happen. One is that you're open to a kind of feeling world, a, we could say, emotional world, or your emotions, you find that basically you progress through stages of emotion unrelated to self. Now, emotions are only problematical when they're

[53:14]

in the service of the self, and the self is formed in thinking. Now we also, if you study yourself, you'll see that you go from moment to moment, not only from thought to thought, and patterns of thought, but you go to a kind of feeling, whether you feel good, or whether you've had a cup of coffee, or whether you know what your mood is, etc., but that mood is integrated with your thinking. Now once you use breath to pull your continuity away from the mind. It's taken over by the heart and then your feeling is not tied to thinking anymore. Your feeling is tied to something much more subtle. It's a little bit difficult to talk about it because it's not in the category of thinking. So, what am I saying here? What I'm trying to say here is that... This is real simple. It's a no-brainer. It's a no-brainer.

[54:46]

But it's transformative. If you practice it, you'll become a different kind of person. And I'm sure if people hooked you up, your energy, your electrical body, and so forth, will be different. So you're entering into something that is transformative. It will make you different, even if it's a no-brainer. But it requires seeing it clearly and doing it. That's all it requires. Seeing it clearly and doing it. And you won't do it, the Mayan position is you won't really do it fully unless you see you're doing it for everyone. It requires too deep an effort to only do it for yourself. If you only do it for yourself, that's more fun. I mean, actually, I think this is the best fun in the world. You know, I'm basically a Shedonist, or a Hedonist. And I do this because I like it so much. Now, so that, to change the basis of continuity, if you change the basis of continuity to, this is, I'm just explaining why I said, could call it thinking. When you change the basis of continuity to your breath,

[56:16]

you also now change the basis of thinking. Because thinking doesn't run from thought to thought to thought to thought anymore. It's much more like, well, if I use the example, it's like two doesn't come, generally it's one, two, three, four, five, six, right? And three follows from two and four follows. Once you change this, change the identification, the sense of continuity and identification with thinking, it's now one, zero. one zero one and sometimes the one is a two or sometimes the one is a five but one zero two zero one that's a very different way of being a very different way of experiencing the world your whole pace to So the main ways in which we remain... Again, instead of trying to fiddle with and fight with and understand and blah blah blah your thinking, you change the basis of continuity out of your thinking. Doesn't mean you shouldn't work on your thinking. Understand your thinking better. Understand, as I always say, your self-story and things. But you're working on it from a position

[57:47]

where you're not tied into identifying with it all the time. It's much easier to work with. And there's a different kind of investment of energy in it. Okay, the main basis is of continuity. One is thinking. Another is your breath. Another is your body. Another is the phenomenal world. And the fifth is the field of mind itself, which we could call the Yogachara vision, concept of emptiness. Okay, so now you're practicing all of those things, if you're practicing Zen, you're attempting to bring your sense, am I making enough sense here to go on? attempting to bring your sense of continuity out of your thinking into your breath. That's one thing you do. You're also attempting to bring your sense of continuity out of your thinking into your body. And you begin to simply feel, and this is the four foundations of mindfulness, you begin to feel the continuity in this stock, this earth stock. And, you know, my continuity is here.

[59:10]

Right here. It's not going anywhere either. And you bring your continuity into the phenomenal world. And when you bring your sense of continuity into the phenomenal world, the phenomenal world begins to flow into you, nourish you, etc. It's amazing how isolated we are from the phenomenal world when your sense of identification is what you think. The phenomenal world doesn't help you at all. It doesn't nourish you. It doesn't tell you anything. It's kind of nice if you're out taking a hike or something. And here you have a big overlap with shamanism, and also Taoist thinking too, Taoist practices. Now the fourth, or the fifth is, the fourth as an antidote to the first, or fifth altogether, did you follow that? There's five. Five bases of continuity of thinking, breath,

[60:11]

body, phenomena, and the field of mind itself. So, these four are healthier, wholer, holier than identification with your thinking. I mean, thinking is, what could we call it, a tool run amok. You know, to run amok is, it's like to be totally crazy to It was like some of us were dancing the other night. Okay. So it's a tool out of control, or a tool that's so effective that we've identified with it as ourselves. It's the great tool. We have no other... I mean, Janie, no matter how much Janie is a sweetheart, she doesn't have much self-reflection. I mean, I just don't think she senses anything. You know, I wish I could be another kind of dog. Right? You know, in the future I would like to really live in a... You know, could I get a nice hotel room at the fair play? I mean, she just doesn't think about things like that. So we have this immense and powerful tool that gives us

[61:40]

the world we live in, but it's also our problem. This is what Prajñātāra came to the conclusion. We have to change our relationship to our thinking, to this immensely powerful tool, which, you know, I saw an interesting thing recently, that Minnesota, Wisconsin, Wisconsin has a little piece of land in the middle of Canada. You know that? up separate from the United States. It's a little tiny chunk of land. I don't know, it's probably as big as Sewatch County or something like that. And it's owned by Wisconsin, but it's inside Canada. You can only get to it by going through Canada. And Wisconsin has just voted recently to just give it to Canada. Well, you know, I wish that all these people fighting over little pieces of land in the Balkans could just say, well, you can take it. You Albanians take that farm.

[62:41]

I mean, in the end, they'd all be much better off. You know, they'd have economic relations, they'd have friendly relationships, who cares? Financially, it's like somebody calculated how much Saddam Hussein would have if he hadn't, if he ended the blockade right away. He'd say, oh, you can have our chemical weapons. What are we ever going to do with bioelectric weapons? He'd have something like five hundred billion dollars in oil revenues. I mean some astronomical amount of money in oil revenues that he's lost. Which he could do all kinds of things with. Control his neighbors financially and all kinds of things. But instead he wants poison gas. And he's got gas that everybody wants to buy and he wants to have gas that he can kill people with. I mean, he's really identifying with his thinking. who he is, he wants to control, you know, the Near East. Okay. Yeah? Where and how does Gordon's thinking fit into this? Okay, well, I'm coming to that. What time are we supposed to stop?

[64:07]

Oh, I'm just warming up. Oh shucks, I'm sorry. Now, let's just look again at the difference between common sense and Buddhist sense. I think the simplest example of this is, what's natural curiosity? Like, I look at Marlena, it's natural curiosity, what kind of person is Marlena? I look at it, or there's an apple out here, you know, and I think, oh, is that edible? You know, what time is dinner going to come? I look at the clock, you know, whatever. I can, it's natural curiosity to look at something and wonder about it. But in general, as soon as we have satisfied our curiosity in terms of our self-story, or we name it, what is that? Oh, it's a cat. The cat's gone. I mean, something comes in. We see a mouse around here. What is that?

[65:35]

and it goes out of sight. So what happens is we are, as I've said before, we're always collapsing our energetic fields. In other words, if I hold this, let me get something better, if I hold this slipper, my beads. If I hold these beads up, you say, what's he got in his hand? Oh, it's beads. As soon as you name it, the field of mind that's observing this collapses into language and is carried off into a stream of a sentence. It's beads, it's a Buddhist bead, etc. It becomes grammar. You understand what I mean? It goes into not only the thought stream, it goes into the language stream, and the language stream is very future-oriented because Farmer chops wood, you know, something happens. Beads, you know. So, if you hold yourself back from naming it, no beads. What's that? You know? There's no beads to be saved. There's no mark there.

[67:01]

So, now our natural curiosity extends to look at this, examine it, and study it. That's normal. All Buddhism says is don't stop the examination once you've named it. That's wisdom. And that doesn't come naturally. Someone has to tell you to do that. That's number one, as a Buddhist teaching. Number two is, bring your attention to attention itself. In other words, I attend these beads, so I name all their beads, now they're gone. Instead of naming them, I just let my mind rest on them. Somebody said the Greek aesthetic was to have no meaning beyond but establishing beauty, to install beauty in the eye. So a statue is there, it's not supposed to mean anything, it's just supposed to capture your eye, and hold your eye. I think that's great. So the wisdom of Buddhism says, don't name it right away, just allow yourself to rest with it. That's first. Second is, bring your attention to the attention itself.

[68:34]

So I don't only attend to the beads, the object, I attend to attention itself. I turn my attention back onto attention. Does that make sense? No? Yeah, okay. Alright. How would that relate to when you see horns right away and you know there's an ox there? Well, I could be going in that direction. We're going to need about five more seminars to get there, though. Okay, my standard example. I hold this up, and you concentrate on it, right? And you eventually become one-pointed on it. This is one of the main tools of Buddhist practice, along with bringing attention to the breath, is to develop one-pointedness. You can rest your mind on it, it doesn't go away. The state before that is when you rest your mind on it and it goes away, it comes back by itself. The state before that is you can bring it back easily. The state before that, it's real hard to get it back. You have to use a lot of effort. Eventually you achieve one-pointedness and you can just rest your mind on something and it stays there.

[70:00]

Now you've rested your mind on that, okay, let's imagine we all have. I take it away. But you remain concentrated. What are you now concentrated on? Mind itself. You're no longer concentrated on an object. Samadhi is mind concentrated on itself. So the mind itself becomes the object of concentration. So you're no longer concentrated on the contents of mind, but the field of mind. And when you bring something up into that field and now examine it from the mind concentrated on itself, we call that insight or vipassana. When you really examine something from a mind that's concentrated on itself, That's called insight, inner seeing. It's all quite simple. It's just a matter of doing it, and of seeing its possibilities and potentialities, and feeling its possibilities and potentialities. You know, it's like... I think I told you before this conversation I had with Debra and Dan when they were here, and we were talking about how when people cook a Japanese

[71:29]

meal from a recipe, it usually ends up tasting quite funny. Unless they've lived in Japan. Because you can't cook food unless you know what it's supposed to taste like. You have to cook toward the taste. The recipe doesn't tell you what it's going to taste like. So, I mean, I can take... I mean, it's interesting to be here with quite a number of German people because things that If an American cooked them, they would end up tasting one way. When a German cooks them, they end up tasting another way. I've gotten quite used to the difference, but I can see the difference right away. I can tell a German cooked this, followed the same recipe as the American, but it tastes different. And it's much more pronounced with Chinese and Japanese food. It's quite different. So to cook toward what a real miso soup tastes like is not easy to do. So, the point I'm making is that you have to know the taste. If you're going to read these koans, you have to know the taste of what they're talking about to understand them. Because they're like recipes, and if you don't know the taste... So what we're talking about here is to get the taste of this practice.

[72:51]

So, I should go to this fifth one. Well, to change the base of continuity is you, and this is the most classic Yogacara and Zen practice, and that's where this very mind of Buddha comes from, is that you now establish your continuity, your sense of being, not in the contents of mind, but the field of mind. You don't identify with the contents, you identify with the feel, and various contents appear. So, if I have that feeling, if I hold the beads up, a bead arising mind appears. If I stop looking at the beads, and I look up at you, this group of people mind arises, which is different than the mind I just felt with the beads. Now the word thusness or suchness means that I have a continuous experience of mind arising on every perception, and that's called thusness or suchness. I like to distinguish between thusness and suchness a little bit, but let's not worry about that right now. So when I look at Marlena, I feel, not only Marlena, I feel Marlena mind arising.

[74:27]

Now you know in Zazen probably how exquisite birds sound sometimes, or the bell. Why is that? Because you're hearing your own hearing. And when you hear your own hearing, you hear the bird differently. It has an exquisite blissful feeling. When I look at Gary and I feel my own mind arising, and I see Gary generating a mind, it's a blissful feeling. So if you come to realize this practice, you feel a kind of bliss all the time. Because when you rest in mind itself, it's blissful and that's what the Sambhogakaya body is. And you really are now changing how you function physiologically and psychologically. And this is then, where now we're getting close to the third noble truth. Obviously, and I've gone through this often with you, I'm going to have to go through it more, but obviously when I look at Gary again, I'm seeing what my mind can see of Gary.

[75:51]

Like when I hear the bird, I hear what my ears can hear of the bird. I don't hear it the same way another bird hears it. So once I know that, I know I'm always hearing myself. But that isn't exactly the ordinary sense of self. When I hear the bird, I hear this being arise on a bird call. And it's a wonderful feeling. But normally, As soon as that's captured by thought, it's deflation, you know, a loss of energy. Okay, so that's changing the basis of continuity, and the main antidotes to the continuity of your thinking are breath, body, phenomena, and the field of mind itself. the first four of the major ways we relate to mind through practice. Now, changing the nature of mind itself, that's a little harder to get a feeling for, or change the nature of thinking itself. So, since it's five o'clock, I'll try to do it briefly. Okay. Any questions at this point?

[77:21]

Am I answering your questions as I go along? Yes? You have a question? No, you're answering the questions as you go along. Oh yeah, well that's wonderful. So far so good, huh? Yeah, I feel sorry for you three people who haven't been at the other lectures, but I guess I'm trying to present this so it stands pretty much on its own too, so you're not dependent on the previous lectures. Okay. Should we take a little break? For a minute? Do people want to go to the toilet or something like that? Randy, if you want to give another tape, that would be useful. Oh. In case we go till 7. It's much better when I give lectures. They end after 40 minutes. They sanitize it. I don't know. So at least you know what you're getting into when you ask me to do a seminar.

[78:30]

If you only ask me to give lectures from now on, I'll understand. But at least we can have a more interactive discussion, you know. A more interactive feeling discussion. Because much of what I'm talking about here doesn't require a lot of smarts. It requires going slowly. and doing it. And what I wanted to get into was more this visual thinking that's in this koan, and obviously I'm not going to get to it today because I'm getting only this far. Okay. If I have a tendency to have permanence thinking, permanence thinking would be like to to hear a bird and think I'm hearing a bird, and not realize I'm hearing my own mind hear the bird. I mean, we are hearing a bird, but that's second. That's a second-level reality. The first-level reality is you're hearing your own mind arising on the bird. The more I remind myself of that, or the more I remind myself

[79:59]

that Frank is impermanent. I'm sorry to tell you, Frank. I didn't, frankly, I didn't mean to break the news today that you're impermanent. But, you know, you are. And you're impermanent and unique, and they're related. If you weren't impermanent, you wouldn't be unique. You're unique because you're impermanent, and you're impermanent because you're unique. So you have this uniqueness that appears every moment. And you're changing. And so forth. And there's no inherent... Because you're an own organizing system, at every level, things have their own organization, as I said before I went to Europe. And that own organization is independent of others. It's both interdependent and independent. And the more I notice things like that, or let's just keep it simple, and say I keep noticing your uniqueness and your impermanence, I won't invest, I won't take refuge in thinking about you in the same way as if I think you're permanent. Or if I look at, I don't know what, this

[81:26]

this Creston Mountain Zen Center. I'm very attached to this place. I like it. I hope it lasts, as we talked about the other day, modestly I hope it lasts 500 years. Actually, I feel a thousand or two thousand, but I try to be modest about these things. So, 500 years, okay. That's why Frank's doing such a good job in the bathroom, because he's building it. It's a 500-year bathroom. I mean, this Can you imagine how many bottoms it would take to wear out that tub? A lot over many years. So we're putting in a big thick tub. But if I, every time I think about Creston, no matter whether I think on it to last 500 years and they're working towards that, etc. I know The first-level thinking is that it's impermanent. The first-level thinking is unique. The first-level thinking is here momentarily. The more I feel that, I don't take refuge in... My identity is not tied up in Creston. Creston... I mean, I'm here. I love being here. But if Creston disappeared, it doesn't... You know, it affects what I do. It affects my schedule.

[82:50]

But, it doesn't affect my identity much, because I have a habit of thinking, I have impermanence thinking all the time. Whenever I look at something, I see its impermanence, and things get less, more and more transparent. It's a little bit like, when you have permanent thinking, more permanent thinking, each object is a vehicle of reality. Like it's a train car, or an automobile, and you can get on it and go somewhere. So, you tend to take refuge in your thinking. Now, when you take the three refuges, as you're going to do pretty soon, you take refuge in Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, which are all impermanent. What is Buddha? What is Dharma? What is Sangha? Dharma means, you know, that. It means you take away your habit of taking refuge in a future, thinking things are impermanent, etc. So it's like if you looked at a train, and when you have permanence thinking, the train is a big, wide, comfortable train, you know, but the more you have impermanence thinking, the train gets thinner and thinner, until the train is only just this kind of thing you can see through. And if you get into it, as soon as you stepped into it, you'd be on the other side of it. Does my image make any sense?

[84:18]

So impermanence thinking begins to take the permanence away of the thoughts and the vehicle of each thought as something you can take refuge in or believe in or care about in a certain way gets thinner and thinner and thinner because it's transparent and you can't invest in it anymore. That's changing the nature of thinking. Once you think like that, you don't have any problem with getting your continuity somewhere else, or even if you have a sense of continuity in the thinking, the transparent thinking, transparent thinking is just a way of functioning. It's not something you've identified with, because it's too thin to identify with. Does that make sense? So when you practice no mark, you know what a mark is, the Buddha had 32 marks, right? Some people say it more than that. We've got several marks here in this guy, but you're not a multiple yet, 32. Anyway, but each mark, each mark supposedly is a hundred meritorious acts. A hundred acts of merit is one mark. So 3,200 acts of merit, you've got more than that. You have innumerable acts of merit. But anyway, here's Mark with his innumerable acts of merit.

[85:42]

But whatever I say about Mark, whether I think he's permanent, or whether I think he says, I went through this the other day with Mark, because I like his name, it works well, because a signless state of mind is a mind without Mark. So if when I look at Mark, I see no Mark. I see, you know, whatever I say about him, he's this kind of person, he's that kind of person, he used to be married, he's now... Anything I say diminishes him. is beyond anything I can say about. So the luminous Mark is there when I recognize no Mark. But no Mark depends on Mark. This is the teaching of form and emptiness. If we come here and there's, I've never heard of Mark, I've never met Mark, I can't have any experience of no Mark. No mark depends on a mark. You understand? I mean, if I, using Jeffrey Hopkins' example, if I come in, while Randy was away, if someone comes in here looking for Randy, and they have an experience, where's Randy? Randy's not here. There's no Randy. But that depends on knowing Randy. But they have an experience of a non-Randy.

[87:10]

You understand what I mean? You look at it, there's no way in the here. Well, it's the same way you need a strong ego to experience egolessness. If you don't have a strong ego, you can't experience the freedom from ego. If you have a weak ego and you experience egolessness, you're a borderline case. You're in trouble psychologically. So, to have an experience of a markless mark requires mark. Does that make sense? And that's what form and emptiness means. To have an experience of emptiness there must be form. To have an experience of form there must be emptiness. And that way of thinking, if I know anything I say about mark diminishes mark.

[88:12]

So when I first see Mark, I have no idea of Mark. There's a fantastic presence there which I can't, which does not fall into any category. And that's exactly what Tungshan's answer meant. And all I can say when this Markless Mark appears is I hope to always be close to this. And that changes the nature of thinking. The other practices get away from thinking. or go back to thinking, this changes the nature of thinking, so that's the fifth one. So that's the best way I can describe that for now. And that happens through simple repetition of withholding naming, withholding categories, so that when I sit here and look at you, if I have a mind which I can feel physically, now Yogacara practice is to feel the physical quality of different states of mind,

[89:14]

And then you can hold a state of mind. If I feel physically a state of mind here in which you're all markless or signless, there's a kind of presence I feel in my body that's really nice. I like it. And I feel at that, I feel both more vulnerable And I also feel more connected. And I feel my reality is held in my heart, not my thinking. And when you get more toward this, you know, talking again,

[90:12]

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