And I began with an apology and kind of confession. The first three nights, I missed the first three talks given by the practice leaders the last period of Zazen. I was a very dope son at the time. when you get down here and listen to their talk. Actually, I was asked if I thought that you should face in or face out. And I said face in, but face in could be taken a different way. So you're facing in. So maybe you know it, but I wasn't here. I don't like the implication of me not being here to listen to their talk, because they're here listening to my talk.

[01:07]

So I feel it's kind of like the implication might be, well, it's important for them to listen to mine. It's not important for me to listen to theirs. And I really am ashamed to give that impression. In some way, it made it more important for me to listen to their talk. for not listening to mine. And also, it's important for you to see that I come to their talk and listen to them. I'm sorry I missed the first three talks. I'm sorry for the confusion that may have caused you about food. More important for me to support other teachers than it is for me to teach myself. because I'm going to be gone pretty soon. Another kind of apology I'd like to make is that trying to teach the backward step, trying to teach how to think of the unthinking.

[02:27]

It's something that I want. You may have the impression that I know how to do that, but I don't know how to do it. It's how it works for me as it is for anybody else. And I'm learning from you how to teach, how to teach, not thinking how to practice, not thinking wicked. I really don't know how. So if I hear, if I sound like I know how, that's just my persona. Not really how I feel inside. Inside, I'm really wondering what's the way to do practice. Part of what I've been trying to do the first four lectures was to convey some feeling for what Dougie Van Dien called total exertion.

[03:57]

Totally exert where you are, your light position, your dana position. in the state of total reversion, of concerted activity of your life, in that situation is where this backward step is going on. In that situation is where the thinking you're doing is non-linear. Because your thinking is also totally exerted. total exertion in the vessel, the container in which Buddha is living. In one sense, Zen practice is really mindfulness practice.

[05:15]

So when Zen students hear about mindfulness practice, they often I think, oh, that's a nice practice. I would like to do that. And I remember one time, one of our Zen teachers was asked, somebody said, would you tell us about mindfulness practice? Or would you, what about mindfulness practice? He was giving a talk about Zen or something like that. And somebody said, what about mindfulness practice? And he got a little angry and wouldn't really talk about it. I don't remember exactly what happened, but I do remember he really seemed to be angry. And I think the reason why he was angry was because the tone of the person's voice was kind of like, well, you've been talking about something, and then there's something else that I've heard about called mindfulness practice. Would you talk about that then? And rather than say, that's what I've been talking about, he very politely just got angry.

[06:24]

So we are talking about mindfulness practice all current. However, I think one of the characteristics of Mahayana Buddhism, the way Mahayana Buddhism practices mindfulness, I feel, is just like mindfulness in a kind of mythological context. In other words, if you just say to people, be mindful, they can try, and that's good. But in order to bring your whole life, your whole creative imagination into the practice of mindfulness, Many people, especially lay people actually, find it helpful to have some mythology, some creative, you know, huge context in which this concentrated practice is happening so that you feel that during the ups and downs of your life,

[07:45]

During the time when you can't even understand you're doing mindfulness practice, it's still going on. If you look at your life in a very small section of it, sometimes you cannot understand how this could possibly be helpful, what's happening. The obstacles sometimes are so difficult that you just can't see it. But if you think of the myths, the great myths, you see that there are certain sections of the wonderful myth where the people are really smashed down. That is part of the scenario. And I feel that we need classical myths and personal myths. We have the basic mindfulness practices in the middle, but it's surrounded by this mythological scope, a grand grand context.

[08:51]

So when we come down to talking about little things like putting on your robe loosely and having a belt around here and putting down thick matting and putting a person on top of a thick matting, this kind of mindfulness practice is in the context of the way it's perfect and all-pervading. It's in the context of doing the same practice, doing the same practice that Shoppelman would. Here you are pulling off these little details, but actually you're being told that you're in a much bigger situation than just this little cushion you're pulling out of it. Tom mentioned in one of his talks that the myths of Morin Psyche was an important one for his development.

[09:55]

And it has been for me too. I found that the approach there, the more feminine approach is often very helpful for developing concentration. That sometimes people try to concentrate by kind of running headfirst into their threat, and they miss it. Or they run headfirst in their breath, and they grab their breath, and they meditate on it, but they choke it. Whereas, for example, in the myth of Amor and Psyche, when Psyche is supposed to go meet, supposed to go collect some golden fleece from the rams, She goes trotting up there in the middle of the day to meet them. And on the way, the reeds tell her, don't go now. Don't go noon to meet the rams. Don't go to meet your breath at high noon.

[11:00]

Go at sunset. When the rams run so virile. And even then, don't go directly to the ramp and try to get the police off of them. Collect the police from the bramble around the edge of the pasture. Circle your bread rather than trying to go right up to it and grab it. Because if you grab it, you might not get the bread. You might just get your own rabbit. But you could go around the bread, circle around it in the twilight. You may be able to collect it without getting knocked off your feet by the power of your light. So that's an example of a myth that kind of, and also not only that, but she didn't think of this herself. A myth told her this. But a myth also tells you that you can't do it yourself. And yet you have to go traveling up a hill on your feet

[12:09]

ready to meet around a high unit, and then get some help. That's the classical myth that I think helps all of us learn the feminine approach to learning about our psyche. And parenthetically, the first part of that myth up to the point where she loses, where she breaks the union with, where I say she, when the mind, when the psyche breaks its union with love. Up to that point, and including that point, is almost exactly parallel, I feel, to the threefold transformations of consciousness that are taught by Vasubandhu in the Vijnapti Mathratha Siddhi.

[13:12]

So you can see, but Vasubandhu's description is not mythological. It's psychoanalytical. And so the story is quite awkward supplement. And then there's personal myths, too. Each of us actually, I think, within the huge context of classical mythological dimension, we also have our personal little nitty-gritty myths that we need to cope with certain things in our lives, certain uniqueness of our own ups and downs. And I'd like to give you an example of this.

[14:16]

Last summer, a woman came to visit Green Gulch with her daughter. This woman is a Chinese woman. She grew up in Taiwan. And she happened to be the next door neighbor of another Chinese woman. They were children at the time. This Chinese girl was the next door neighbor of another Chinese girl. And they were best friends during their young years up to their adolescence. And then later, they both married. men from the same high school in Minneapolis. Now, these two men were not best friends, but they did go to the same high school. That's what you could do for a day.

[15:25]

And one of these people with me, one of these men was with me. So this woman who came to visit was an old friend of my wife. Now, she got married and had two kids. And then, unfortunately, she and her husband got divorced. So she came to visit with her oldest child, her daughter, who was a year younger than my daughter. And when this girl comes to visit, in one sense, I feel pretty comfortable. because she's what is known as a bombshell, 11-year-old bombshell. She's half-Chinese and half-Caucasian. So I'm comfortable because I'm not worried for her health.

[16:32]

I'm not a, sometimes, my daughter's pretty energetic, so sometimes I worry when kids come to visit that my daughter's gonna push him around. But you can't push this kid around. So that's nice. But on the other side, I'm kind of scared of what will happen. The wall starts shaking when you're done. So anyway, she told her mother, one day she told her mother something, and she said, Because her parents are separated, now she comes to visit her father sometimes. And one time she visited her father, and she came back to her mother, and she said, I really feel bad because when I left dad, I didn't even... say goodbye to him properly because i was so excited to get back to be with you and uh and then she said to her mother you know it's like it's like if you get a pound dog for christmas now a pound dog

[18:04]

Does everybody know what a cabbage patch doll is? Anybody not know what a cabbage patch doll is? You don't? Well, there's these real special dolls. We get them, and they come with papers. And they come with a name, the papers, and the name of their doctor, and the report they came from. And you can take them in for occasional checkups and so on. I just don't. They're just all, but they're very, very well marketed dolls. They were very popular for a while. Very famous in America for a couple of years.

[19:08]

And then somebody made pound puppies, which would be puppies that are from a pound, you know? A dog pound, and a dog pound, and they take a lost dog. So you can get these. commercially produced things that are supposed to be from a dog bone. So you're saving it in a dog bone, right? And so they have this poignant quality. So she said it's like getting a pound. So children who get Cabot-Panthol are very happy because there's a waiting list for them anyway. but feeling like adopting a horse, and you have to wait. I mean, pound dogs are also very rare and wonderful. So she got a pound dog one time. So she said, it's like getting a, it's like on Christmas, you get a pound dog, right? And you pull it out of the package, and you're very happy to have it, and you set it down. among all the papers, from the wrapping papers, from all the other presents.

[20:11]

And he started opening the other presents. And then somebody cleans up the paper and accidentally takes your pound dog with the paper and throws it in the garbage. This is this little girl's story she's trying to explain. And she says, and then you realize that your pound dog's in the garbage. So you run down to the garbage can. And just as you get to the garbage can, you see the garbage truck driving off. And she lives in Boston. And she said in Boston, what they do is when they find nice stuffed animals and stuff in the garbage, what they do is they put them on the roof of the garbage truck. Boston garbage truck practice. So she said it's like you run down. You run down. through the garbage truck. And you go to the garbage can and you see your dog going off on the roof of the garbage truck.

[21:13]

And you chase it, but you can't catch it. And she said, and then the garbage truck comes back in a few days, right? Picked up the garbage again. And the Pound Dog's on top of the truck still. And you run down to get it, and the truck leaves already before you can catch it. This is this girl's myth that she created all by herself to explain what it's like, what living with divorced parents is like. And the wonderful thing about the story from many wonderful things about the story, one wonderful thing is that she could dream up this myth to cope with her situation. And the other thing about this myth is that it didn't fix it up. It explained the tragedy. It put the tragedy out there so she could see it and deal with it and hurt with it.

[22:15]

She didn't have a happy ending because her parents are divorced, and she really has a problem. But there's her myth. We need to be able to get it out there for ourselves. Both in the classical sense, it works for all of us. In the individual sense, we have the little stories. We have the ability to see it. In the same way, during a session, you are generating a myth about your mind. It's there someplace. People have myths about how they're trying to take the backward step. There's something about this whole thing, the tragedy encapsulated in this situation. We've lost something, you know?

[23:17]

And we need to be able to recognize that. And we need true recognition of what we lost to achieve reunion. Actually, what we lost, what we lost, what we should be able to lose is objects. What's the myth that you can make so you can see that you've lost all these objects and thereby achieve reunion? I was attracted to Zen meditation by first hearing myths of Zen practitioners. And then I found out about the meditation practice center. But these myths make it possible for us to dedicate our total energies to the practice of mindfulness or practice of taking care of the minute details of our life.

[24:32]

So we can totally exert our tenderness. But back to the two kinds of banging. You know where we work? We're at the more exciting part, when you sit. spread a thick mat, and use a cushion on top of it. This part always gets me. Here he is talking about this grand project, right? Complete perfect emancipation. Dropping body and mind, manifesting the original face, manifesting. And now he says, spread out the map.

[25:37]

Put the Krishna out. How willing it is to come down to the concrete details of a situation. How boring and ordinary. And such a contrast to this lofty state, this curriculum. He wrote one, two, three, four, five, five or six manuals on how to sit. And all of them, he goes into details about this cushion. All of them, he makes a point that you have a cushion under you, a big one under you that you're sitting on, and then a little one to prop your butt up. And he says, you know, you may have heard about some of the ancestors, some of the Buddhists who sat on diamonds. right, or mountains, or rocks. But they always put the mat down on top of the diving.

[26:42]

Again, I always thought, what's he trying to prove? What's the point here? The other. Yesterday, I was talking to someone, and he told me that he has, for a long time, in his house, he has little special places in his house. And I said, do you mean kind of like altars? And he said, yeah. He said they're places for alignment. And I thought that's a good, that's a nice way to think about these altars is kind of align yourself. Like we have altars here, you align this altar here, you can align yourself with the perfect wisdom.

[27:43]

And up at the Buddha Hall, you can align yourself with complete enlightenment. And then back to A bathtub is a holy place because you can get in a bathtub and you can align your chakras. In a bed, you can align your energies, coordinate your various rhythms. And in a zendo, you can align yourself with the zending practice and you can align yourself with the ancestors. You can align yourself. And here, with this cushion now, getting down to the cushion, you can align yourself with Dogen's engine to put the cushion down. By the time you put this cushion down, you're aligned with Dogen and your little cushion on top.

[28:46]

Now, you know, we have the round cushions. But it doesn't say here that it's supposed to be round, unfortunately. If it said it was round, I would have a problem. But it just says put a cushion on top of the thing. So we can, therefore, align ourselves with the Buddha's ancestors by doing a little thing, by having these special places and special little things that we can use to put ourselves straight forward and in line with the practice and the realization. And then he said something else, which, again, when I'm reading this text,

[29:55]

It's like if you're giving a cock-a-butt that you might want to stick over this part, then sit either in a full lotus or half lotus position. Actually, he says full cross-legged or half cross-legged position. And he explained how to do that, and I talked about that at the end of the day. But today I'd like to talk about the fact that some people don't sit that way, don't sit cross-legged. Now, the easy out is to say, well, don't worry, don't worry, it's okay. Because later he says, don't be attached to the sitting posture. It has nothing to do with sitting or lying down, right? So you can do what you want, it's okay. But then we come back to sit-up. So in one sense, definitely don't be attached to anything. Don't be attached to the sitting, like any posture. On the other hand, if you don't sit that way, why don't you?

[31:01]

Is it because you don't think you can? And then I say, oh, wait a minute. And I thought of what Michael said. Are you selling yourself short? Are you sure you can't sit cross-legged? Maybe you can't today. I can understand that. Maybe you can't tomorrow. Maybe you can't even this year. But still, maybe you, what about working towards sitting cross-legged? Maybe not even in this lifetime would you sit cross-legged. Like somebody said to me last, or whenever it was, somebody said, well, I'm kind of hoping for a body, to get a body that I'll really be able to sit with. That I'll really be able to sit well. Again, this is a mythological dimension. one of the greatest monks in the history of Chinese Buddhism.

[32:02]

He couldn't understand the . He studied them, but he somehow was smart enough to know he didn't understand. This was a real smart guy, too, by the way. You want to hear how smart he was? Huh? Who doesn't want to raise money? He was so smart. He was like a peasant. And it sounds like he came to the monastery. And he couldn't be a monk because he was a peasant. They had a class system there for a while. And he wanted to study Buddhism. And the teacher said, OK, you want to study Buddhism? So we're working the field. Then after he did that, he said, what should I do now? And he said, oh, OK, here's a book. Study it. So he took the book out in the field with him.

[33:07]

On his lunch break, he memorized it and brought it back and said, I memorized it. He said, oh, really? Wow. And the teacher just kept giving him all the books. His whole library he memorized on lunch breaks. So he was a alert kid. And he grew up to be this fantastic scholar and wonderful example of devotion. And in his old age, as I said, he didn't feel he could understand the perfect witness. So his great vow was that he would be reborn in a pure land where he could understand the greater. So if you don't feel like you sit cross-legged, still I think you should work towards it. Not with a sense of being attached to it, but also not with a sense of I can't do it. In that way, you align yourself with practice. Don't skip over it and say, well that part, I can't do that part, I'll do the next part, and the part before that, but this part I'm gonna skip over.

[34:15]

No, please don't do that. I like to do that too sometimes when I hit certain parts. either because I don't understand them or because I'm afraid it's gonna make people irritated. But I think it's better to deal with them and figure out what is the meaning of this and how can you integrate it? How can you work with it? How can you align yourself with, The body, the Buddha didn't answer it. But this body here you have right now, it aligns with their body. Of course, it's not exactly the same body, but it is the same body. It's the same body. Listen to your rope and belt and arrange them properly.

[35:52]

I'm not sure exactly what that means. But I have myself, I wear two little kind of belts around me. I wear one thin one and one thin one like a rope like this. This kind of thing. And then I wear a flat one. It's called an obi. So I just stick and wrap it around. Then when I sip, it rises up. So I put it back down here so that it's kind of below my navel. And that worked pretty well for me. You don't have to have an obi on them. But I do wear it when I wear a robe. If I'm not wearing a robe, then I don't put it on. I just sit there. But I don't have anything up pinching my abdomen.

[36:55]

And Obio, well, it's on my abdomen. It's flat, so I'm having to get this sort of, don't have any kind of like line. There's no band pressing me on my abdomen. It's more like, it's more like pulled on my abdomen. And it's kind of nice because it goes all the way around the back. So if I'm breathing in my abdomen, as the breath pushes on all the way in the front, the breath through my abdomen is massaging my back. So that worked pretty nicely for me. It's that the breath through the band on the back also worked in the back. It helped me find the right place in my back. That put me at sort of an angle like that. And I try to get the belt in a place where it supports and relaxes my lower back. I heard a story about Sasaki Roshi.

[38:00]

Somebody said they went to the monastery and they saw this kind of decrepit little man walking by. He could barely walk. And later, the person found out that that was Sakaguchi. And then later, the person saw Sakaguchi sitting. And he said that when he sort of got strapped in to his sitting posture with all his belts and stuff, he was a totally different person. But he had a lot of energy. So even if you can learn how to sit this way, even when you can't walk anymore sometimes, you can still sit pretty well. and you can use your breath to enliven your posture. So you need to experiment with how to take care of your abdomen in such a way that it's still relaxed on the page and comfortable in there.

[39:08]

This is really, in Zen meditation, this area down here is really important. So you want to prepare and sit down, but you don't have it before you start sitting if you've got this area well sort of positioned and kind of cumbered and or supported properly. And next, you place your right hand on your left foot or anywhere you place your right hand against your abdomen. Touching your abdomen below your navel. A very pertinent person, but two to three inches below the navel for most people. And find a comfortable place, a place that you feel good about. And that place, your left hand on top of your right hand, with thumb tips touching.

[40:08]

And as I mentioned, if you To verse your legs, I recommend versing your hands also. Actually, in 1972 and before that, I used to sometimes practice yoga in front of the mirror to see how my posture was. I would sit. and look down the floor and sit for five minutes or 15 minutes or whatever. And I would look up in the mirror to see my posture. And I would often notice that I had drifted off and I would be leaning some strange way. And I would correct it and adjust myself vertically and everything and look in the mirror. And then I would look down again and practice another 10, 15 minutes and look up again and then notice again perhaps how I drift off. you know, correctly. And I keep doing that, and so I sort of kind of learned. I learned how often I drifted off, and which way I drifted off, and so on.

[41:16]

I actually did that at Katagiri Roshi one time. I went into his room and just sat there while he was studying, and sat zazen, and then I just asked him to say something every time I significantly drifted off. I did that for a while. I said, OK, if you want to jump, keep doing that. But little by little, I learned something about my tendencies of my posture. And for a while there, I noticed, I heard about it and also saw that I think my left shoulder looked higher than my right shoulder. For a while, I was sitting like this. And I also noticed that my mood here was getting really ugly. My hand was getting really ugly. I can't remember exactly what. And I couldn't fix it. I couldn't make it beautiful.

[42:17]

I couldn't do it. It just stayed ugly. By ugly, I meant that one side kind of like had this soft curve to it, and the other one had a sharp corner to it. And the combination of the two, this really, I forgot what it was, but it really bugged me. And I say 1972 because I was going to be Shiso, and one, Tatsuhara. And I'd be facing out, and I didn't want everybody to see this . So what I did was I reversed the mudra, because when I hit the mudra in the other direction for some reason, It would balance. I don't know what happened, but it would balance. And so I did that way for two months, not the whole two months. And then I switched back, and then it was okay. The hand balanced. There was something about it. I got into some habit that I just couldn't bend my head, couldn't relax my hand. One hand was just, there was some energy block in the knuckle or something. I couldn't do it.

[43:18]

So I reversed and tried the other direction, and the other direction even worked. And then by sitting that way for a long time, the hand somehow got over whatever the problem was. During the years I've been practicing, I've had various little episodes like that. And something that Norman said last night about the innocence of Shakyamuni Buddha. Excuse me for saying so, but I think there was some innocence in my sitting in early days.

[44:21]

Kind of a boyish innocence, willing to try to do certain things. And in some ways, I think we all should cultivate a kind of innocence. Or not cultivate any, but discover an innocence which doesn't really have an opinion about ourselves. that really doesn't know that we can't do certain things and can't do certain things, but really just willing to try whatever interesting, free of our sophisticated understandings of ourselves. And another thing which I found very helpful, which I've been stressing over the last couple of years, is that holding the moon against the abdomen and not in not letting the mudra sort of rest on anything. It can touch your finger.

[45:23]

Anyway, the edge of the baby's finger is back. You touch your abdomen with it. If you touch your abdomen with your baby's finger, it naturally pulls your arms in the right position. This is another kind of indirect approach, a more feminine approach, as I said. If you just try to hold your arms up like this, you may, by sort of doing it, doing it, you may get all kinds of tension in your back and so on. But if you just more just touch your baby fingers to your abdomen, that does it for you, so you don't have to do it. They just come, they just sort of come out along, they come, the slight little thing of the fingers, the baby fingers touching the abdomen, just that does it. And also it makes this very particular event there, of those baby fingers touching the abdomen.

[46:30]

It's very particular. It's much more particular than the ant just being down there someplace. And it's even more particular than saying, for me anyway, more particular than saying, touch your abdomen with your mudra, or your hand. Because you could touch it in a lot of different ways. And therefore, you can lose it in a lot of different ways. It can drift away from your body in a lot of different ways. Therefore, it's not so easy to spot when it does drift away from your body. If it's a particular spot, it seems to be particularly easy to tell when you lose it. Because it's that one little spot there, the baby finger against the abdomen, below the navel. And you've got to really be down there to have that happen. It's not going to happen by accident. It's rarely met with in 100 million culprits, that kind of thing. But it can happen. And then again, I've been stressing that if you do touch here,

[47:33]

and hold that hand lightly, you're really in a very precarious position. You're in a state of balance. And balance, when you're balanced, always, balance is always fragile. And vulnerable to change. So this is the mudra. I think it's very helpful that way, to sit in a balanced way. And in that way, you don't really use your muscles in your back so much. Because if you sit like this, leaning forward like this, you're using a lot of muscles to hold yourself up. Or if you're leaning to the side or backward, you're using your muscles. Well, you're balanced. You don't use your muscles.

[48:36]

You use your muscles just a little bit, just to sort of keep yourself from falling in some particular direction, a slight little thing. And when you finally arrive at a balanced place, you're not using your muscles anymore. And in that sense, your body drops off. And not only does it drop off, but it only drops off For a moment, the building drop off. For the next moment, the last moment, it drops off just for that one because in the next moment, you get a whole new body coming up to get the balance again. So in order to keep the balance going, you have to stay there. You have to be right there taking care of yourself. And here, this is a physical rendition of a slight discrepancy will show up. or if you can be in a balanced state, as soon as you start thinking of objects, you'll notice that you fall off.

[49:39]

Or another way to put it is if you're in a balanced state, you'll have more trouble thinking of objects because this kind of awareness in your posture, in one sense, isn't really aware of an object. There's just a balanced posture. There's not somebody thinking about it. There's just a balanced posture. So says, don't lead the right, the left, forward, backwards. In other words, just balance them. against the root of the mall.

[50:48]

Eyes should remain open. Breathe gently through your nose. He doesn't say to follow your breathing. I think in one of his texts he says to follow your breathing. Yeah, and one of them he says, don't make it too long or too short. But in the book of Isaiah, he just said breathe gently through your nose. Doesn't tell you to follow it necessarily. But it's going to be hard for you to practice breathing gently through your nose without being there. So of course you're always mindful of your breath. Of course. Do you know that, what we're talking about, being mindful of your breath and breathing gently through your nose? I think that's what it means. All it does say to do it, to be mindful. But I think that would mean... All right.

[51:53]

So there you have it. And then you know what that leads up to is now, once you've settled into this posture... Oh, this is now sort of unusual. If you look at what he says, he says once you've settled into the posture, take a breath and exhale fully. and then swing from right to left. So he first tells you to adjust your posture, and then he says take a deep breath and exhale. He says take a breath and exhale fully, and then swing from side to side after you've already adjusted your posture. And in one sense, it seems like, well, you just got adjusted, and now you're swinging from side to side. Isn't that a little strange? And one way to understand this is you've just adjusted your posture. Use swingers side to side to kind of like, one more time, really settle yourself, really root yourself in the ground.

[52:58]

Kind of like planting a tree. Wiggle it into position. Once you get it in the right place, then sort of wiggle it in back and forth just to make sure you're really settled there now. So then you're sitting. And then think of the unthinking. Or take the backward step and turn the light around. And in the early version of the Krukan Zazeni, he said something a little different. Once you've settled into the steady immobile sitting position, whenever a thought occurs, actually he said, settle into the posture and then regulate your breathing.

[54:09]

And then he said, whenever a thought occurs, be aware of it. As soon as you are aware, it will vanish. He doesn't say, vanish it. He said, as soon as you're aware of it, it will vanish. And then he said, if you remain for a long time predictable objects, you will naturally become unified. This is the essential art of Zabak. As soon as a thought arises, Become aware of it or be aware of it. As soon as you're aware of it, it will vanish. If you remain for a long time in this way, forgetful of objects, you'll naturally become unified. Again, it's indirect method.

[55:15]

You don't make yourself unified. You just watch your thoughts. They disappear, and unification occurs spontaneously by that effort. Later, he then replaced this instruction with, think of that which doesn't think. How do you think of that which doesn't think? Nothing. This is the essential part of zazen. And therefore, this zazen is not meditation. And just now, what that means to me is it's not meditation.

[56:17]

It's just the way you are. It's just your ordinary thinking. Your ordinary human thinking is totally exerted in its fullness. It's not a special medication technique. That sounds, people feel that this is really esoteric and difficult to understand, but it's not in meditation. It's just the way your mind really doesn't work all the time. Your mind is constantly taking the backward step already. And in one of the translations, in one of the versions of the book, he says, take the backward step. The other one, he says, study the backward step. Study it. Don't do it. Study. It's already going on. Study it. Watch the backward step. Learn the backward step. Model yourself on the backward step.

[57:20]

Can you see that your mind is constantly doing this backward step and turning around? And this is the same as observing your thoughts and noticing that they vanish. Someone asked if they have a question and answer, but the lecture's already gone too long. But if that person wishes to ask a question, I'll give you a chance. Yeah? Not particularly today? OK. Maybe tomorrow and early. You know, I mean, and it's just kind of...

[58:33]

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