And it's a wisdom text laid on top of a basic Theravada or Hinayana text. Or rather, not text, but Hinayana or Theravada teaching. Now this is a tantric yogic idea. Which is that I'm not going to be very good at describing this unless you can do the best I can. Which is that you are the site and this may sound kind of obvious but I'll try to make it clear. You are the site, S-I-T-E, of your own existence.

[01:07]

You're the location of your own existence. You're the site, S-I-G-H-T, of your own existence. How do you make yourself the site of your own existence? When self, when your existence is bigger than yourself. Now, I moment ago talked about tying practice to the four structures of your activity and your thinking. And that's necessary in how you practice. For all of us. And as I described it, it's like a spiral. You move out into a kind of wider territory and then you need to come back into home base or familiar base to get your bearings and then you go back out again.

[02:33]

So this makes a spiral with ever widening circles as you widen the capacity of your existence. And I don't just mean it goes up, it should go sideways too and definitely go down. Now, your existence, we could say, if we imagine, again, this is non-theological, so everything happens in you as the site of what happens. There are many forces in your existence that work in you and through you.

[03:36]

So how do you stand in the way of your own life? Or sit in the way of your own life? Now, I don't know what stand in the way of means in German. The connotation in English is like, if you stand in the way of a truck, you'll probably be killed. Same? So to stand in the way, in the way. But if I'm trying to go out this door and Geralt is standing in my way, I probably won't go anywhere because he's bigger than me. So there is this sense that you have to be careful when you stand in the way of your karma.

[04:38]

You may get swept away by a trucker and a karma. It's a little bit like maybe there are searchlights, searchlights coming from within you and from out of you that are kind of searching through the sky. And the question is, how do you stand in a place where all these searchlights start to hit you? Now remember I said yesterday that Zazen practice is a sense of being informed by the seated Buddha while you're formed by the seated person you are.

[06:13]

So this sense of tantric yoga is the sense of a posture that mediates between you and Buddha. Almost as if Buddha were here. And you are here. So this is in the background also of this koan. of Matsu and Nanure, what are you doing? I'm aiming to become a Buddha. I'm sitting to become a Buddha. I'm figuring about how to become a Buddha. Nanure says, oh, not to translate. So then a few minutes later, while Matsu is sitting, he hears off to the side.

[07:39]

And he looks off in the middle of the room and there's Nanui sitting in the middle of the room with a tile, a blue tile. And Matsu interrupts his sitting What are you doing? Can't you see I'm rubbing a tile? What are you doing that for? I'm making a mirror. You can't make a mirror by rubbing a tile. You can't make a Buddha by sitting zazen. That's the second part of the story. What is this sense of making a mirror or making a Buddha?

[08:44]

There's no God or no something out there. If there's such a thing as Buddha, it has to be here. This is the way this kind of Buddhist culture looks at it. And it's the sense that your spiritual life is present with you, but you don't know how to manifest it. That the Buddha capacity is there. So we understand that when you decide to sit zazen, when you decide to sit zazen, is it the seated person who decided to sit zazen? Or the seated Buddha that decided to sit zazen? You understand?

[09:55]

In other words, if your spiritual capacity is sitting there with you, your spiritual life, your inner request, now, did the decision to set zazen come from the person's life or your spiritual capacity? Of course, you might be sitting just because you've got a crush on somebody who's also in the Sesshin. Sitting because you've been having lots of trouble recently and somebody said, try that. It hurts like hell, but it might be good for you. But also, we would understand that it's your spiritual capacity or seated Buddha which also suggested you sit. So how do you listen carefully to who asked you to sit?

[11:13]

Can I ask something? Yesterday evening you said the way is the ordinary mind. But what is the ordinary mind? Because the ordinary mind doesn't make sense to you. But how it then can be the way? Okay. You want to say that? That's a good question. What I'm sitting here debating is what to introduce now because it's 5 o'clock or after and probably we should stop in 10 minutes or so.

[12:53]

Unless I want to talk through KeenHim. One of the reasons I introduced this koan about Matsu and Nanyue is to illustrate for you how in Buddhism in general and Zen in particular you read a text. Okay. So I can use the same story that Beate just brought up. Zhao Zhou asks, this I gave you at the hot drink time, and I meant this, of course, just to be something that sticks in you.

[13:54]

So Zhaozhou says, what is the way? Zhaozhou asks, what is the way? And Nanzhuang says, ordinary mind is the way. Nanzhuang says, the ordinary mind, that is the way. Now everyone knows ordinary mind is not the way. And everyone knows that everyone isn't a Buddha. So he still says ordinary mind is the way, though. So he must have to say something a little more to define this a little better. So Zhaozhou being one of the great... Later, one of the greatest of all was Zen teachers.

[15:16]

As I told you yesterday, Matsu had a tongue that reached to the tip of his nose. Zhaozhou was known for not shouting with a stick, but supposedly fire played on his lips. That's just a way of saying he was very alert. Well, more than that, but that's enough. So Jiaojiao is quite alert, and he says, Can you turn towards it? And Jiaojiao is very alert, and he says, Can you turn towards it? And Nanzhuan says, If you turn towards it, you turn away from it. So then this ordinary, this particular ordinary mind is mind you can't turn towards. So if you can locate the mind you can't turn towards you'll find this is ordinary mind.

[16:20]

Mm-hmm. Okay. All right, I think what I'll do, since you have the cards, I think I'll leave tomorrow or another time. This subtle sense of tantric yoga is mediating. between the subtle body and the usual body. So when you pick up these ritual practices of how you bow to people, how you lift up a bowl and hold it right here at this point,

[17:22]

are part of this tantric yoga where you use the physical activity that you can do in an ordinary sense to mediate or awaken the subtle body. So it's a kind of tantric yoga. Make sense? All right. When you chant, and we're chanting pretty well, and we're chanting pretty well, you chant, as I said, with a feeling of energy in your stomach and coming up through the middle of your body. And most of the chanting occurs between your neck and the top of your head. And really between your throat, lower throat and the roof of your mouth. feel a bit like you're chanting to yourself inside your throat.

[19:08]

I'm not counting. I'm not doing that. I'm going... It's in here. Can you feel that in yourself? Okay. Now you can pick up the card, if you would, please. I'd like to start chanting this in English tomorrow. What I'd like to do is fill this sashin up little by little, taking each step as we become familiar with it. Now I'm sorry we don't have this in German.

[20:10]

Or the meal chant in German. But if someone would translate the meal chant into German. In the next Sashin I'd be happy to chant it in German if it goes English. Okay, now in this, I just want to get a little familiar with the English since that's the language we're using for the chanting. That's how you do it? avalokiteshvara bodhisattva, you don't have to, I'm just reading it out loud, when practicing deeply the prajnaparamita, perceive that all five skandhas in their own being are empty.

[21:17]

Now, the five skandhas are in the next paragraph, third word, form, and the last four words of that paragraph, feelings, perceptions, impulses, consciousness. In Belgium, we spent several days just trying to understand how you could slow down your experience so you could be in the midst of this. Because you can take this form, feeling, perceptions, impulses, consciousness, and locate a kind of sub-identity at each point. And it's not so easy to make this clear, but basically form is their perception of the signal.

[22:29]

Feelings are feelings you have about it. And then perception is to seize or to shape or to recognize, including an emotion, which is a shaped feeling, so to say. And then the next impulses is gatherers or things that formulate, put together these perceptions. And consciousness is how each of these perception forms in the preceptor produces consciousness. Now yoga as a practice of, shall we say loosely, mental postures How do you find your existence in the midst of these five skandhas?

[23:46]

So you enter in a sense into a partnership with your own life and the way you perceive. And you can take the id, ego and superego and unconscious, id, ego, superego of Freud, which is a kind of tripartite, familial, Darwinian struggle, familial, family, which never can there be completeness, because the id and superego and ego never quite get it together. And you could locate this in Superego's struggle in the third and fourth skandhas.

[24:47]

Okay. This may take more than five minutes, I'll do the best I can, okay? Sit comfortable. So, it won't be much longer. So, practice means to, maybe we could say, to make yourself into a sponge. A sponge where you're the site of your feelings and certain kinds of experiences, tonal experiences. Now we take the word feeling for granted. But actually I think the word feeling only came into the English language in 1771.

[25:50]

And feeling as a faculty, a psychological faculty, was introduced by, I believe, Mendelssohn in 1766. Ten years before the American Revolution. And then romantic poets and many people took up feeling as the primary territory of our existence. So truth became beauty and not logic. Truth is beauty and that's all you need to know or something. So it doesn't mean people didn't have feelings before 1771.

[27:10]

It just means they didn't think of feelings as a specific faculty that needed examination or study or definition. Now, feelings is considered a more definitive territory of your existence than thinking and believing. And feeling, not emotions. I don't know in German. But emotion is a specific thing, like sad, happy... angry. Now actually what Buddhism means by feeling, the English word doesn't cover either, so I don't know what the German word covers.

[28:15]

Now when we're translating in Belgium, feeling in Well, in French it's sentiment. And sentiment doesn't have the same feeling of feeling in Buddhist. Yeah. I'm going somewhere, believe it or not. Right. So what's interesting when we start looking at these basic words like feeling, mind, self, psyche, soul, human being, person being, we don't know what we're talking about.

[29:18]

We can't even define them from language to language. As soon as we get toward the big topics the most important things to us we don't know what we're talking about. We don't know where it is. Where is this thing called? Well, I mean this thing called I, you, etc. It's a song. Where is this thing called love? Where is this thing called self? Soul or mind or feeling. Okay. And I'm trying to talk to you about it.

[30:33]

So, yeah, go ahead. I'd like to, it was great. Is Buddhist sense perception everything you perceive by mind, or does it include also physical perception? As related to feeling, is feeling, in the sense, an answer you... Feeling is something physical, isn't it? An answer the body gives to a perception, or is it the felt, the physically felt perception only? You know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah. Is it as if... Is it as if... I want to work out the difference between feeling and perception, whether perception is only the spiritual, immaterial perception, or whether it is also the perception that I have, for example, when I talk about something.

[31:43]

Do you have a feeling perception, and what does the feeling ... Okay. I can't get into it in too much detail because we could spend the next six months just on, you know, discussing it. Meaning twice a week. But basically mind and body are not considered separate. So a physical or mental perception that gives shape to something that produces consciousness would be in the category of perception. Now, I'm going to drop the topic of feelings for a moment. Basically, what I would like you to do in Zazen is enter the territory of feeling.

[32:45]

I want our zazen to be more soulful and not too spiritual. I want us to get down and not always up. And there's a story about that. Zen, one sort of, you know, senior Zen teacher, a Zen teacher pushes a, student forward ask a question ask a question so when he tries to answer a question the teacher hits him several times and says even if you asked 10,000 questions you'd never understand you oaf So the other teacher says, well you, says to the main teacher, you're the dummkopf. How can you expect to teach students when you're so lofty and difficult? So harsh with the students.

[34:30]

And then he says to the student, I know he says to the teacher, you better just get out of here and go back to your room. And he says then to the student who asked the question, you're great, everything's fine. But what these two teachers are doing is participating, one in emphasizing spirit, and the other in emphasizing soul. So one is emphasizing what we call the grasping way or emptiness, no Buddha, no, etc. No, no, no. No soul. No soul. And the other one is emphasizing your Buddha, your feelings are great, etc.

[35:32]

Everything is yes. He wouldn't say there's a permanent soul but he would say there's a suffering redemptive soul. Okay. So these two teachers are working together to put the student into a situation where he doesn't know what's going on. And they pretend they're criticizing each other. Now, when I used the example of the five skandhas to say that what happens instantaneously from formed consciousness is like that.

[36:47]

But with yogic practice you can slow that down so you can feel form, feeling, perception, impulses, consciousness. Yes. And you can practice so that you can be upstream and go downstream in this or back upstream. And you can stop at any point in the stream. So you can perceive. The word perceive is a downstream word used to explain an upstream phenomenon.

[37:50]

And it's just an example that, at least in English, we don't know what we're talking about, or we don't have much definition of the real topography of feelings, emotions, thoughts, and so on. In any case, you can stay, if you want, in the realm of feeling in this wider sense of feeling and not move into the realm of perception. As you move downstream you begin to load consciousness with energy and structure. you can destructure consciousness moving back upstream toward feeling and form.

[38:53]

Now you have at least the visual image of that if not the understanding of it. Okay, the visual image is very important. Okay, now When you chant, this is the point I'm trying to get to. Now, speech is much wider than language. In other words, all speech is not limited to utterance and language. And as you can slow down and be in the midst of the five skandhas, you can feel speech at the stage of pre-utterance. And speech at the stage of pre-utterance may be a color. Maybe a certain kind of physical feeling.

[40:08]

Maybe an image. Maybe a particular place in the body. So before I say something, I can feel the words pass through an image or a color. And I can stop them at an image or color. And not utter them, and that's still considered speech in Buddhism. Now, I wouldn't be telling you this if I didn't think you already understood it. So, when... When I'm talking with you now, I have a certain feeling in my body.

[41:08]

And I pay attention to that feeling and speech is produced. And I can turn that feeling into an image. And I can speak from the image. Or I can move the feeling to different parts of my body and speak from different parts of my body. Okay. Now, when Ulrike translates, she's doing this, but probably not paying attention to it. In general, anybody I've had who translates well and fluidly doesn't know what they said. They don't know what I said, and they don't know what they said. That means that the language is coming from a point of pre-adherence.

[42:18]

So, if she was going to practice this kind of mental yoga, she could actually with practice get a physical feeling of that spot from which translation occurs. And if she could return to that spot in her body, let's say it's in her body, if she could return to that spot, she could probably remember what she said. And that spot is also closely related to dharanic memory. And these that we're chanting are Dharanis. And Dharanis are meant to create the state of mind which allows the spiritual capacity of Dharanic memory to come into play.

[43:22]

Or Dharanic awareness. So when you chant, you're chanting not out, kanji, zai, bo. Because you're in a way almost chanting at the spot in your body of pre-utterance. Almost chanting at the spot in your body of pre-utterance. As if you could chant in a sense at the location where she translates from. So I'm saying various things. She doesn't have time to think about it.

[44:29]

This is not at the realm of thinking level. But obviously a kind of thinking is going on. And it's going and hitting her at a certain spot. And if she can stay concentrated on that spot German comes out. So right here we're practicing this Buddhism. So when we're chanting there's this feeling of chanting inside the body at the point where utterance and pre-utterance are almost together. So this chanting is thought to increase and open up your spiritual capacity and open the realm of the audible and sound in speech beyond the realms of just specific language which if you can open up this realm beyond language which you think as a structure onto yourself you open the realm of feeling which is larger than thinking

[46:03]

So this is another example of the tantric use of mental postures to mediate your spiritual identity. That's the end. I'm sorry. I want to see how the wake up bell works. This morning a whole room didn't get awakened. And I wish I'd been in that room this morning. In fact, I had some requests from others to sleep in that room.

[47:19]

So, can you hand me that bell? I need the pillow, too. Might be better to use this bell. And this is what I used in... Belgium? Yeah. Belgium? Yeah. Walking down, you just walk, you know. The little one's okay too, but it tends to get pushed off his pillow.

[48:21]

Does the wake-up bell start in the zender? Why isn't it kept in the zender? Well, the day before last night it was up. I sleep there. Anyway, normally you wake up the Buddhas first or you wake up the people sleeping in the Zen bell. Do we go in the kitchen too? Anyway, normally, usually, the Zen custom when you use the wake-up bell I don't know why I had two bells laid out to bring and I didn't ring them.

[49:23]

I'm sorry. Normally you ring it like this. You do that three times in the Zendo. At the altar. Then you do that in the kitchen and on the stairway and at the last point and so forth. And you go to the, even though no one's sleeping in the kitchen, you go to the major places of the center and ring the bell there even though no one's there. There's a sense of waking up the place, not just the people. Are you okay? Good.

[50:31]

You know, to show how closely connected we get when we do a sashin together, is that one person just before the accident in the kitchen occurred started having anxiety that there was going to be an accident. And another person had an anxious feeling during Zazen seeing Harold with a knife in their Zazen, the same period. So this is an example of what I, whether it's just a coincidence or not, it's an example of what I mean by our existence is bigger than ourself.

[51:35]

I'm going to put, this is something I've almost never done before, but I'm going to put something on a piece of paper. There. So, is that big enough, more or less, you can read it? Four. Feelings. I'm not writing on the wall. Feelings. These are the five skandhas that I mentioned yesterday. the receptions. And I'm giving you the traditional translation in English of the last 20 years or so.

[53:12]

I'm glad you're paying attention. This is very basic ancient Buddhist teaching from the original times. And although the sutra says no form, no feeling, no perception, no impulses, no consciousness, it doesn't mean they don't exist. It just means that in addition to this, they don't exist. It's like when we say there's no self in Buddhism.

[54:17]

It doesn't mean there's no self. It means in addition to self, there's no self. Simultaneously with self, there's no self. Okay, now... Please remember that I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm only trying to give you my understanding from my experience and from the lineage teachings I've received. But this is something you have to figure out for yourself. because these words are first of all inadequate translations of Sanskrit words and now you're translating them into German in your mind and then you have to see does this fit any location in your own experience

[55:44]

Now, when we... Ulrike and I talked about this recently, trying to see how to make this clear, and something she suggested was perform, we could say, signal. And for feelings we could sense them? No, to put a feeling content to form. Aha. But this is also sensing. And putting feeling content. You have to remember that. You can't read my head right.

[56:48]

And perceptions, the word perception literally means to seize, to seize hold of something, to perceive, to seize hold. And what did you suggest there? To put a cognitive content. A cognitive content. Now, it's assumed, I'll be explaining this to you partly, because it's assumed in all developed Buddhism that everyone knows this. And it's assumed in the koans that people know what these are. And it's chanted in the Heart Sutra every day and so forth. But surprisingly, in the West, for some reason, these things aren't taught very often. But not only would... You'd be familiar with it, the practicing of this, and you should know how to practice it.

[57:59]

Now impulses, we also have gathering and what else? Association. Gathering. This is association. And consciousness is... Consciousness. Will you say anything else about consciousness? To see these four points simultaneously connected and in pair. Okay, so I'll just tell you some things about it. See, why I come to this is I'm trying to come to a sense of the territory of feelings in Buddhism.

[59:01]

And as I suggested, it was only Moses Mendelssohn in, what, 1766, who produced a sense of feeling as a faculty in Western thinking. And while people felt homesick or they felt they were in love, they felt sad before 1771, a word to cover these things, homesickness, sadness, love, as the general territory, with the word feeling was only 1771 in England. So, okay, so then we can ask, what is the territory of feelings in your life?

[60:17]

And what's the territory of feelings in Buddhist practice that zazen is really about? Okay. So the sense of form here is also what we call bare perception. As I suggested, if you could just see this pen, without any feelings about it or sensing about it, barely see it. Now there are exercises in direct perception that I could do with you, I don't know if I will with Sashin, that you work with these different levels. That was a sense that we call this upstream and this downstream. This is like the source of a stream or a sprint. So when you just perceive something, then you begin to have a feeling of it, or you give some feeling content to this form.

[62:00]

So maybe you hear the note of a song. It's just the notes, just sound. You don't have any feeling about the sound. It's just sound, sound. It would be like practicing with these airplane sounds. You just hear them. You don't think it's a jet plane or it's an American plane or a Deutsche plane. It's just a sound. Sometimes airplanes sound like kind of the music of the spheres. I think these planes are a little rougher than that. But in any case, you just hear it. You don't think airplane or something. And this is a basic practice just to hear hearing.

[63:12]

Like maybe you just heard a note of a song or a few notes. Now in Buddhist terminology, this is not considered a perception yet. In a sense you've perceived it, in a sense you've heard it, but perception is limited to this territory in Buddhism. I'm sure in Sanskrit it's a different word for hearing. Just hearing and perception is two different words. They wouldn't use the same word. Okay. At perception, you're shaping it into a thought. Oh. Well, no. First at feelings, you have the note of the song, and then you begin to have a feeling from the music.

[64:14]

And at perception, you think, oh, that's a particular song. You have an idea. That's the song. It's such and such a song. The name of it may be. And at this point you think, oh, that's a song I heard in 1964 or something like that. The first time I was in Berlin or San Francisco. So you begin to have associations. It gathers the patterns in your mind that begin to come into work. And then these together make consciousness. A little bit like he dropped a stone into a pond and when it hits the water, the water ripples out and this is kind of a signal of a form and it falls through this and ripples out into consciousness.

[65:36]

As you go from here to here, as you go upstream to downstream, you're beginning to load consciousness. You add something here, and you add feelings and you add perceptions, and you add a whole context of perceptions. And here social patterns and so forth come in. And so you have a quite structured consciousness by the time you get here. So what you call a structured or loaded consciousness. And loaded consciousness is very slow. It's too slow to perceive this. So when you're looking, when you're seeing things with consciousness, you always see things too late.

[66:53]

That makes sense more or less with me. Does that make more or less sense? Okay, so you might say that there's a kind of pattern here, which runs from here, and it gets more and more loaded until you get something like that. One could say that it forms a pattern here, so to speak, that starts up here and then becomes wider and more loaded, and then looks something like this. Okay, as you go this way, you tend to unload it. Do you see? It gets less loaded if you go this way. So in practice, you can work your way upstream.

[67:54]

And consciousness becomes more bright as you go upstream. So if we try to give some other definitions of these five, maybe we could say the quality of this one is perceived. I mean, when you perceive something and you just perceive form, it's very precise. You just see the light along the edge of the pen. You just see the blackness. It's very precise. Okay, feelings are characterized by depth. And experience. Okay. And perception. Impulsions, we could call patterns.

[69:14]

And consciousness we can call light, perhaps, and knowledge. Maybe we can call it perception. Well, let's just say definition. OK. Now, what you're trying to do in Zazen basically is get yourself most of the time in here. Okay, now let me give you this little exercise which you've seen before. If you concentrate on this, until there's no other thing in your mind but this stick, that's the object of concentration.

[70:38]

Now, if I take it away, can you maintain concentration on the field without the object? And then, and that's, Buddhism is all about field concentration and field awareness. That's really what non-duality means. If you're concentrating on this object, at the same time as you're concentrating on the object, you create a field of concentration. Okay, I take this away, then you have a field of concentration, you have concentration without an object of concentration. Okay, now if I put this back up in the field of concentration, you can observe it from the field of concentration, not as an object, do you understand?

[72:17]

Now you're observing it from you, concentrate. Put it back up in, you're observing it from the field of concentration. Okay, we could call this field of concentration without unloaded consciousness. Do you understand? If this is loaded consciousness, so now we've got consciousness that's loaded. We've got ten thousand myriad things. If you can drop them out, you're unloaded consciousness. And simply speaking, we can call unloaded consciousness awareness. And we can call the field of consciousness, we could also call it the field of consciousness.

[73:32]

We could call unloaded consciousness also just the field of consciousness or awareness. So at this point where you just have a signal, that's equivalent to this. It's very precise. You're just looking at this. Okay. When you take that away, here you are surrounding this awareness. Do you see that? But when you begin to just see their attention or just see things without this stuff loading consciousness, then you're very close to awareness. Okay. And down here, when you take out the way, right here is also awareness. So both ends of this are awareness.

[74:53]

Now feelings are put vertically between form and perceptions. But horizontally, feelings go out in all directions. So when you have an experience, when an event occurs in your life and it turns into experience, it happens here. And there's a feeling of depth here. So at this point, like perception, there's very little feeling of depth. You just perceive something, a song. And here, while you have many associations with it by 1964, etc., there's no depth.

[75:55]

The feeling of depth occurs here. This is part of the way it's understood to get free of associative and conceptual thinking, to get to here. Now, feeling is also very close to awareness. So, feeling for a Buddhist is the main territory of experience. Yeah. Is this the same thing as intuition?

[77:07]

The trouble with intuition is only women can do it. The problem is that we have relegated intuition and imagination to women and artists. I'll draw one last little picture and then I'll stop. In a very simple way, Freud would say that we have a conscious life And we have an unconscious life. And there's also a little passageway between that we repress things down into the conscious life, unconscious, and dreams and so forth come up from it.

[78:25]

And dreams are a kind of bridge or a kind of communication or language. Now I'm using dreams sort of loosely and loosely interchangeably with zazen, zazen mind. Because we have to have some basis in which we're talking about. Now, a scientist I know was part of a group of people that met with His Holiness the Dalai Lama a while ago. And they met in the dark cell, I believe. And they asked, as a group, they asked His Holiness, now, what do you have as equivalent to the concept of the unconscious in Buddhism?

[79:39]

And His Holiness spent a lot of time thinking about this. He went to his advisors. They all discussed it. And finally he came back after a day or so and said, we have no such concept It may be that Buddhism just doesn't know some things Freud and Jung knew. Because it's not just Freud and Jung, it's an entire culture surfacing in some insights of Freud and Jung. But Buddhism has spent an immense amount of time minutely examining these things. This isn't 1771.

[80:54]

This is way before the birth of Christ. And So the fact that with their minute examination of this and the tradition of examination passed from generation to generation, it's not just a few geniuses here and there, it was passed with each generation continuing the study. These traditions are quite intact in Tibet and they don't have any idea of the unconscious. I think that should strike you as completely remarkable. If I try to draw a similar picture, I would say something like this.

[82:09]

Here's conscious life. And this territory here of dreams is not just a language or a bridge, but it's a territory in itself of existence. It's not telling you about this unconscious life here. You're living in this space. So the image is more like that. this being conscious life and this being, what could we say, dream or dream-like, we'll say, for now. And you live in it, so there may be some territory about consciousness. But it's not understood as being so separate.

[83:11]

It's more like sand at the bottom of a stream or something like that. And in Buddhist way of looking at this, this whole thing is awareness. So awareness includes unconscious or dream life unconsciously. for several days and discuss this stuff. Jung is conceptually closer to Buddhism than Freud. But the dynamics of how it operates is quite different from Buddhism. Now the only theoretical The only theoretical psychologist that I know about who seemed to me to have intelligently and accurately combined understandings from Hinduism, Buddhism with psychology are James Hillman and Arnold Mandel.

[84:45]

Now, there may be others, I just haven't read any others. They're the only two I know about. And so far as I can tell, for the most part, I mostly agree with them. In the sense that the way they use meditation ideas and Buddhist and Hindu ideas, I agree. So the psychology and theories of the 1990s are far more sophisticated than Freud's. But really, I'm putting this up here at this point for you and Sashin to... talk about a way of thinking and viewing yourself. This Heart Sutra that we have been looking at is a teaching about how to view the self.

[85:59]

As I pointed out, the historical Buddha rejected asceticism as an attempt to reject or eliminate the self. Which is an element in Western monasticism. And in Buddhism in some ways, too. Basically, the Buddha and Buddhism says, we don't reject the self, we study the self. But what self are we studying? And whatever all the different meanings of the word self and what methods do we use to study the self? Now If I study myself through you, I try to understand the best I can how you understand me.

[87:37]

And I use primary processes, secondary processes, questioning you, all the intuition I can muster from my feminine side. And then through you, I also try to study myself. And through you. And I do it carefully. I'll get three different answers. So the point I'm making is, the way you choose to study yourself shapes the answer you get. Now this isn't just a simple idea that there's a difference, there's this sort of self, this unconscious self, or, well, it's... It's not just this...

[88:40]

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