Well, tomorrow is the day we commemorate as Buddha's Enlightenment Day, so you have a few hours left to really commemorate it. Though, you're already enlightened, so we'll remind ourselves of it tomorrow. If you have trouble remembering, And by the way, have you remembered to forget everything? There is that kind of problem in this practice, to remember to forget where you are. And I think because of such an important day for Buddhists, we should at least sit up until the calendar says it's December 8th. So let's sit at least past midnight tonight, as usual, on Rohatsu Sushi.

[01:23]

And tomorrow we'll do Buddha's Enlightenment Day ceremony. What I actually want to talk to you about today is a magazine article I've been reading. I borrowed it from Judy. I don't... my mail is so mixed up. I kept expecting my issue to arrive. It's probably arrived, but I don't know where. So I borrowed Judy's yesterday night or sometime. And it's interesting to me, this article. I'll tell you about it, but... And it has some vague relationship to what we're talking about. But it's an article which I've been expecting to come out. I knew that the Scientific American finally agreed to publish it. But there's the fact that a woman wrote it, named Evelyn Fox Keller, wrote an article a few months ago called Cognitive Repression in Classical Physics.

[02:55]

because the scientific American and the scientific establishment has been boycotting articles of this kind because it so disturbs our view of reality that they're not willing to publish it. In fact, they just did a big issue on the brain and they summed up all of the major... this was about two months ago... and summed up all of the major work on current brain research, and they left out everything that was interesting. What was great about the issue is that all of the most interesting work, which indicates that the world that we call out there actually exists the same way we store it in our brain, and it's not, if we can say, actually exists, and it's not this three-dimensional world that we think it is. I couldn't... I myself couldn't... I myself would have had trouble with this. I mean, I've thought about this for some years. I would have had trouble with it, say, 15 years or 20 years ago when I was struggling pretty hard and psychologically was quite vulnerable.

[04:19]

would have been quite disturbing for me at that time. I wanted the three-dimensional world to be quite predictable so I could just figure out what was going on. But what seems to be the case is that a remarkable consistency seems to be possible in different dimensions. So one dimension is quite consistent and it's very difficult to see outside it. But that when you start, and this is where it comes, in what I've talked about before, Bell's Theorem, or Bell's Inequality, which is the study of quantum mechanics, physics. When you start studying things, minute particular, the different, what should we call, different realms overlap. But the overlapping of these realms, you can notice in other ways. I don't know if I make this sound too mysterious. It's mysterious only because it's unfamiliar to us. But it's been noticed in other ways and it's talked about in Buddhism a lot.

[05:45]

In fact, what we've been talking about is about it, but we have here, merging in the 1970s, two languages, a kind of poetic, elusive language of Buddhism. reflecting, but not trying to explain reality. And the scientist was trying to explain it and trying to find also language. In fact, in January I'm meeting with a group of physicists from all over the United States to talk about this very thing. I don't know what date, but sometime in mid-January. But anyway, I'll try to make it fairly simple. It is actually fairly simple, but it's a little hard to describe. The results of these experiments, which are finally being published

[07:12]

Scientific American, though they announced a few months ago that they were going to publish it, they had a little footnote for some reason, a little gratuitous footnote, which said, don't think that because we're publishing this article it has anything to do with Zen or ESP. The Scientific American just threw that in for some reason. Anyway, it's that First of all, these tests have to say one of three things is not true. One is that there's an observable reality separate from us. That's one thing. And most people accept that there's an observable reality separate from us, which is You can see the regularly consistent things you can see, and that those things exist separate from us in some way. In other words, every time we look out there, we can see a tree. And what keeps that tree going is something separate from your looking at it. Now, these tests, these experiments they did,

[08:31]

deny that or one of the other two things. Now a radical positivist would say that only your sense impressions are real, which is, I think, too extreme in the other way, but there's certainly that. That's one aspect which is pointed out in the story I mentioned yesterday, which is, I meet you outside the gate. Where is this place? I meet you outside the gate. Okay, the second thing is that you can, that induction is a reasonable way to figure things out, is that you can take a few consistent examples and induce from those that other things, similar things will happen. From a few you can figure out a lot or many. And the third thing, third is that things are separate. That the world is local. Now this is the one that's probably, though all of them are in question, this is the one that I think is the most likely to

[09:57]

be at least accepted at first as being not true. It looks like, at least in terms of quantum mechanics, the world is non-local. And I talked about this before. Do you remember that? Anyway, not about a year ago or so, I don't know. But local. So because this became a dispute between, I don't know, I hope this is vaguely interesting to you. This became a dispute between Niels Bohr and Einstein because Einstein said quantum mechanics, it can't be so. Einstein, twice, I mean Einstein with his extraordinary genius and daring to think things, and pose things no one else thought. Twice in his life, well you can't, maybe he didn't fudge, but twice in his life he wouldn't, this is too much, he says, can't be that. And one of those occasions was that the universe is non-local. He said it's got to be local and the upper velocity of the speed of light demonstrates its locality. In other words, no information can pass between any two objects faster than the speed of light.

[11:15]

It makes sense? So something that's out there is actually away from you. However, these tests seem to, and they've got another one coming up, which they're going to do at the University of Paris sometime in the next few months, which looks like it'll confirm that in actual fact the world is non-local. In other words, that there is instantaneous transference of something which is faster than the speed of light. And so no one can figure out how it gets from one point to the other. I mean, there's no medium, there's nothing. The whole nature of the universe is, according to Einstein, is that the speed of light is a constant. But they first began to suspect it, because if you have positive... Now, I don't know I haven't thought through it enough to see. As far as I can see, none of this challenges anything Buddhism. As far as I can see at present. But it could… I have to think through, I have to think through the… well I was sitting in the garden thinking about this stuff, you guys I could hear you out here being hit with a stick. And that there was a remarkable similarity between it all somehow.

[12:47]

I'll seem like we're doing the same thing. Anyway, I have to look at the whole idea of causation in Buddhism to see if it affects it, because that's where I think the effect would be. But basically, as I said, first Buddhism assumes that everything changes. But then Buddhism also assumes that those changes continue to change in relation to each other, which also denies Bell's inequality, or confirms Bell's theorem, if you put it the other way, or denies Einstein's separability. Things are not separate. And when they first began to suspect it, is that Any group of particles that are separate but were once related in the past, if you do anything to any one of them, it affects all of them instantaneously. In fact, the whole wave picture created by all of them collapses instantaneously. So it looks like there is more connection

[14:11]

It looks like, now if I extrapolate a little bit, it looks like that there's more connection between two things or more that related in the so-called past than there is between things in the same, in what we call the simultaneous present. In other words, that cousins would have more relationship to each other than two people who had no connection with each other in the past. Now, not from a prior...this doesn't mean that it was predictable from the past, it means that the cousins in the common space have more communication. And this does seem to be so in the case of twins. Now, I'm taking this out of physics. our human behavior. But they've done a lot of studies with twins, and identical twins. And identical twins who have been separated from birth and have never known each other. And they've done uncannily similar things. It's just unbelievable how similar they are. And they don't seem to be... They're more explainable that they knew at the same time what each other was doing than that in the past they... They're doing it because in the past they came from the same age.

[15:45]

If you follow what I'm talking about? If you say it's because they both came from the same egg, then it's nothing unusual. But because they were once related, they have a relationship in our present three-dimensional time, which is more of a connection than anything you can describe in terms of time and space. And this also fits in with I told you about Mike Murphy's Moscow elephant projection, is that it's not a broadcast. Nobody else could receive it. Only the person with whom Mike had prior contact could send it and receive it. So somebody could be standing right beside Mike and not receive it. This also seems to be, as you well-known. Women who live together begin to have periods at the same time. But also it's pretty, to me, well-known, that people who live together, many people who live together, share dreams. In fact, sometimes a couple, for instance, one will have one half of a dream and the other half of a dream. One will complete

[17:10]

So Schrodinger says science is based on – this is another part of the same thing – science is based on that the world is objective and knowable. Or, we can say it another way, the world is separate from us, yet knowable. Okay? The world is separate from us, yet knowable. And without that, science doesn't make any sense, as it's currently kind of worked out. Now, our sanity is involved with this, you know. Most people's sanity is involved with it. I mean, Piaget's object permanence – I've talked about that before, haven't I? But you've been around long enough, princess, I'm sorry. She always says, no, you haven't talked about this. Anyway, Piaget's object permanence is that, and it was Piaget who shouted Eureka when a blind child did it, which is to confirm his

[18:36]

that at some point it dawns on a child that where he left something it'll be there when he goes back to that place. And they watched, Piaget watched a film of a child, blind child, crawling around, and it suddenly dawned on him where he'd left it out there in the dark room. And he turned his body and crawled right to that spot and it was there what he'd put there, I don't know, an hour before or the day before. And Piaget has a whole theory about that when it dawns on you that the world is permanent, that that tree is going to be out there, that you can begin to build a personality and a psyche and so forth on that object permanently. So, this is, the world is knowable. But again, quantum mechanics suggests it's not that simple. Well, I don't think we have to worry, because the three-dimensional world is tremendously consistent. And you can function it pretty well, you know. And in fact, Buddhism goes so far as to say, don't look for signs in reality.

[19:54]

Now, a crazy person may think this world is organized for its benefit. You know, a person, sometimes schizophrenic people, and the sign of schizophrenia is everything happens, you begin to see, oh, that's a sign that this is happening, as if the whole bloody world was organized to give you messages all the time, that everything else is out there working to relate to your psyche. So Buddhism says this is a dangerous way to start thinking about things and stay away from it. Now, astrology, though, is also, unless you think of astrology as a, what shall we say, a sophisticated number theory that reflects You could work it out so you could not see, but I think basically astrology also is based on the idea of action at a distance, or the non-separability. If the pattern of the stars, that particular pattern of the stars at the instant of your birth affects you, then we're talking about the non-separability again.

[21:12]

So astrology is, and we're publishing Lama Govinda's book where he ties together the I Ching and astrology and the year signs and so forth into what was a consistent Chinese method of character, characterology. So astrology is another system which In other words, the fact that astrology is remarkably effective, even though, as Suzuki Rishi said, it may be true but one shouldn't be involved with astrology if you're practicing Buddhism. Some Buddhists are involved with astrology, but in Zen generally they say, look at your own self, don't look around the stars and all that stuff. But astrology is effective. And if so, it's another hint that there's this realm which... other dimensional realm. Now, I remember when I was a child, I used to... I was very interested in questions like this and I used to put my hand on... probably all of you did this, I don't know... put my hand on stacks of Bibles and said, there's a God, let him strike me down.

[22:42]

The other kids would get around. I even agreed to do it in the Catholic Church once. In the main cathedral in Pittsburgh. And I would come in and all my friends were going to come in with me and during service I was suddenly going to interrupt it in front of everybody with a Bible and say, if anything's true in this church. Now, I planned it and everything. I didn't think I was taking much of a chance. I didn't expect a bolt of lightning to come crashing. It would have been great if it would, and my parents would have been so proud of me. My father was a scientist, so, you know, just one experiment in there, you know, just frazzled. I think it would have changed the whole religious complexion of the United States. It wasn't that I thought that it demonstrated there wasn't a God, because I figured, you know, I'm only, what, I don't know, when I started doing that, I was about eight or so years old, I figured there's a lot of smart people who've lived, and a lot smarter than me, and they can't all be wrong. It can't be a delusion. There must, I thought there must be some evidence for God. But it certainly can't be the simplistic idea of God that most people have.

[24:10]

And that God who could keep track of all the actions of everybody and decide that my action was worthy of a bolt of lightning just didn't seem to make sense to me even at that age. But I still had the feeling there must be some evidence. Now, my feeling is that this paper demonstrates to me what people may have seen as evidence for God, a realm of action that is not explainable, and a realm of relationship that's not explainable in three-dimensional terms. Young Huan was sweeping the ground. This is the koan after the koan, after the Mu koan and the Shoya Roku, two follow it. One is, the first one after the Mu koan is, Nan Yuan is about to go somewhere and Di Jiang says, where are you going? And he says, on a pilgrimage. I told you this earlier. Di Jiang says, what is the purpose of your pilgrimage?

[25:37]

And Nanyuan says, I don't know. And Dijiang says, not knowing is nearest. Now this whole koan is a commentary on the world is not separate but not knowable. So Schrodinger says the world is separate but knowable. But this koan poses that the world is not separate, but not knowable in the usual terms. So he says, not knowing is nearest. Next one is, a young one is sweeping. And Dao comes up to him and says, too busy. Too busy. And Yanwan says, you should know that there's someone who is not busy. And Dawood says, then there's a double moon. I talked about the double moon. And Yanwan pulls up his broom and says, is this a double moon?

[26:56]

So this is related to Mu and not knowing his nearest. And to know this reality of the quarter moon is also full and complete in itself. So even though you're busy, know that there's one who is not busy. Even though you live in a three-dimensional world of wars and violence and ambitions and loves and acquisitions inquisitions and so forth. Also know that you live in a non- or multi-dimensional world. Also know there is one who is not busy. Then this is a double moon. Is this a double moon? Because this quarter moon is full and complete in itself. And how do you approach this? If you approach it, you miss it, we say, or not knowing is nearest. So Zen is an attempt to actually get at this, what can I say very clumsily, non-three-dimensional

[28:28]

reality in which we're unified. So the effort, when they say, to be unified with your koan, be unified and identified with your koan, is the clue of how you begin to enter this non-local world. So the point of a sashin is to develop mental and physical continuity. The point of your koan is to develop mental and physical continuity. So you keep trying to develop mental and physical continuity, and you keep trying to get rid of distracted thoughts, or merge them, or absorb them, or surround them, or don't, you know, the sky or space. And you begin to keep trying to have mental and physical continuity with your friend and with your teacher. And finally, we say, you will know each other. You will know, I don't know how to put it exactly, but you know each other identically what you already know, though you may not have known the prior cause.

[29:55]

In other words, we who practice together will develop a connection by which we'll know what the other is doing on some level. So, again, a lot of these koans are about this. And it's not something you can... What is interesting about all of the work they've done in ESP, which is it's pretty clear that if there's an extreme situation, for instance, your child is in a terrible car accident and burned to death, it's not rare for the mother of the child to wake up screaming and protest it the more it disappears. that it does not seem to be something you have control over or can learn or can improve on. It seems to occur, this connection between people, seems to occur for its own reasons and its own terms. But in Zen we would say it always exists. It always exists.

[31:21]

And yet you have no, what shall I say, three-dimensional access to it. It always exists. And you can begin more and more to practice and assume that it exists. So that what happens to your cousin also happens to you in some way. It may be very minor, but it happens to you. And it happens to you simultaneously. But there's some kind of connection like that. This is certainly the metaphysics of the Avalokiteshvara Sutra and the thrust of many of the koans. Many expressions like boat and bank flow together or forget the a floating cloud and drifting boat. What I think a very important clue is, when you view people, when you view human beings, without regard to beginnings and ends, there is detection. I don't know if that makes sense to you. When you view people

[32:51]

When you view things without regard to beginnings and ends, there is detachment, there is also Juki, the prediction of enlightenment. So one effort that Koan practice is trying to get you to do in Zen is to stop thinking in terms of beginnings and ends, to stop thinking in time-space frameworks. So I guess that's just something you have to explore on your own to see if that makes any sense to you. To stop thinking of people in terms of beginnings and ends. I think this is all too explicit. I probably won't talk about this again, but since I just read the article, I thought I'd share with you my thoughts about it. Too explicit because it makes it into some kind of thing or possession or something like that.

[34:36]

And it's not. It's like I said, Zen is... To expect Zen to do good in the world, maybe it doesn't do good, but really to expect Zen to do good in the world or, you know, to be a career. One of the things I was trying to get at yesterday is don't think of Zen as a career so that there's a difference between student and teacher. It's like sleep. I mean, it should be unnoticed. Zen as a teaching, I think, should be unnoticed the way sleeping, eating, walking, so forth, are rather unnoticed. No one says, sleeping is good for the world. But, if people didn't sleep, it wouldn't be so good. And the way some of our leaders take uppers all the time and fly around, maybe a little sleep might do better. Someone else said, in the eye it's called seeing, in the ear it's called hearing. What is it called in the eyebrows? Then there's a whole number about the eyebrows are very embarrassing because they're up above the eyes and they should be below and what are those holes?

[36:01]

But, you know, in the eyes it's called seeing, in the ears it's called hearing. What is it called in the eyebrows? And he answers, the great function without purpose, the great function without purpose. When we sorrow, we grieve together. are happy, we rejoice together. The great function without purpose. When there's sorrow, we grieve together. When there's joy, we rejoice together. So Zen is, you know, when we're talking about host and guest, It's the two people, when host meets host, the two people who are not busy meeting. Guest is the person who's busy. You know, then we always talk about host and guest. So we should know, sometimes when you meet your teacher, you are meeting guest is meeting host. Sometimes host is meeting guest. Sometimes guest is meeting guest and sometimes host is meeting host.

[37:34]

And always, of course, all of them are meeting. But sometimes we, in koan practice, we take one or the other role with a sense, with an instant understanding of whether we are host or guest. And again, these koans are playing with this host or guest idea. These are teaching devices, like Dogen created the grasping, granting wave as a teaching device. Host and guest is another teaching device. Double moon is another teaching device. You should know there's one who is not busy. When there's joy, we rejoice together. When there's grief, a great function without cause, a great function without purpose. And there's some struggle, you know. I think Philip remembers probably in Japan the struggle I had was, what should I do? Should I come back here and do this thing that the Tsukirishi want me to do?

[38:59]

And all of this Thai business, you know, there is a rule, I don't know if I should tell you, that you don't have to wear your Kesa at dinner, you can only wear your Raksu if you want. So, I wore my Raksu, and Sukharshi wore his Kesa. He'd let me do it. So everyone wore their Raksus because it was more convenient, but then it was such a trouble, after the last period of Zazen you have to stop, take your Kesa off, put on your Raksu. Anyway, I was struggling with it all the time. What kind of identity should we have and what was selling out and what was American culture and what was Japanese culture? So we need, in practical terms, to establish some identities. Now, these identities begin to have an openness to connections, or more than connections, relationships, identities, which, though we look separate, we're not.

[40:07]

So a good Zen teacher, or priest, or layman too, is, when he meets people, he knows their host as well as their guest. Even though he may only respond to guest, he is acknowledging their host. Anyway, this is the way to practice with people, according to Zen. And host and guest are not different. Quarter Moon is all and complete. But if you only know Quarter Moon, you forget, you get more and more dissociated from yourself, thinking there's only Quarter Moon, only three-dimensional world. And I think if we only struggle to perfect the world in its three-dimensional terms, it will get pretty bad. We must struggle in three-dimensional terms, but we also must struggle or acknowledge our great identity. This is Bodhisattva's vow. That, as long as there's one suffering being, there is no enlightenment. So, all beings, we must, are enlightened when you are enlightened.

[41:45]

These are words, but they express a wide view of this existence of Zen practice. So it's to finish, you know. Two things. One is, three things. One is, some people have come and said, it is yesterday's moon, but can I tell you about something? Of course. But the sharing of things as giving them away, sharing and giving away, not as some possession or some attribute. Yes, we should share them.

[42:55]

and the ten difficult studies. I don't mean as a scholar, though we should know how a scholar does it, because if you don't know how a scholar does it, you don't know how to read the text. But we should understand those ten things, or three of them, or twenty of them, by their existence in our practice, not as a scholar would. You know, it's a little bit like you and a friend when you were a kid suddenly figured out, well, that's what our parents want, or that's what we want, or that's what our teachers expect or our friends expect. Geez, I didn't see that. tell our friends, you make a little club or agreement or you write about it so finally your friends can figure out what the parents really want. Well, Buddhism is a club like that, except it's already existing. Except that we meet outside the gate, we're also creating it.

[44:17]

But at some point, some people got together and said, geez, this makes sense, let's try to share it with others. So they made some pact or agreement. And we are just, if it makes sense for us too, there may be other things that make sense, but if it makes sense for us too, we are like those kids, you know, coming to some agreement. Yes, it makes sense. If anyone else wants to know about it, let's tell them about it. But let's not push it on them, please. If, but they want to know. And if it's, let's act on and test the truth of it. So let's see if now until forever we can develop, increase our mental and physical continuity.

[45:19]

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