and made your history, you'd say, oh yes, now I understand. This is what being, recognizing your Buddha nature is. In other words, you have many experiences that could be a different identity than you have, but haven't been tied together. So you can awaken another history. So you can awaken another history. Then there's also non-consciousness in the sense that you were hearing these birds. Or there's a tremendous amount of perceptual information coming in all the time, and much of it leaves impressions in you. And poetry and painting and so forth often awaken some of those perceptions.

[01:14]

And I would call those more non-conscious. But then you also have the question of the fact that I would say that Westerners primarily define the location of their identity. In conceptual thinking and in the eye consciousness. And the simple example of that is thinking your feet are way down there. When you think your feet are down there, it makes very clear that you feel you're located up here somewhere. Okay, so one of the practices, you know, the depth practices in Buddhism is to open up all of the jnanas, all the sense fields.

[02:17]

Okay, let's just say the proprioceptive field. We could also mention your mouth, your smell, and so forth. The sense in Buddhism is you have a complete identity in each sense field. And like some particular animal may organize its identity around smelling and go around everywhere and its eye perception takes a secondary place to its smelling perception. So My experience, and it's also understood, that all of these sense fields are actually active except they're not noticed when you are dominated by eye consciousness.

[03:34]

And they're also storing, we could say, identity information or reality information. So all that storage in Buddhism is called the alaya-vijnana. The storehouse, it's called the storehouse consciousness. But it means information that's accessible to the consciousness. But there may be more information, but this information is accessible to the consciousness. But it also means accessible to consciousness, accessible to consciousness. Okay, accessible to, say, feeling consciousness, which is not thinking consciousness.

[05:02]

Okay. In other words, a great deal of things that have happened to you can't be transferred over into conceptual consciousness, it won't go. Much of what we dream about comes to us in the form of dreams. This is again, I and Buddhist understanding. comes to us in the form of dreams, because it can't get across out of awareness into consciousness. But you can go across consciousness into awareness. So, for example, when you're trying to remember a dream, you have to kind of create a special state of mind where it won't come back.

[06:21]

But if you go a little bit back asleep or you can create a certain kind of feeling or remember the feeling tone of an item in the dream, a detail in the dream, But you can't pick up the... So then you can start feeling the dream again and open it up and even have it continue. But then as soon as you try to think about it a certain way, you lose it again. So if your identity or sense of organizing yourself is primarily in conceptual consciousness, Only certain parts of your experience can get across into conceptual consciousness.

[07:34]

And then often only in certain kind of captivating feelings or images. But you can go across. Your sense of continuity or how you organize yourself can go out of conceptual thought into non-conceptual awareness. Or even into the field of smell and feeling of taste and feeling of proprioceptive feeling and so forth. So when I say it's a storehouse of consciousness, it means things that can be conscious proprioceptively or in various ways, not just conscious in terms of our usual conceptual consciousness.

[08:42]

So you could think of the laya vijnana or the storehouse consciousness as the big puddle of reality in which you swim. And how do you swim in it? So that's the idea of karma and non-consciousness. And consciousness is all kind of like ways to speak fairly accurately, but simply about this larger idea of the storehouse consciousness existing in several different sense fields and so forth. Before I come to your third question, does anybody have something to say about this? Does it make any sense? I think It is very difficult to speak in English.

[10:10]

So speak in German, fine. Mostly what we deal with in psychotherapy we are in the conceptual and when we work on the biographical material. And there are people who ask about the meaning of life, or maybe people who have early traumas, who have been traumatized, that they kind of enter different levels and realms. And when I found 12 people, then I can combine the usual cemeteries, then I can partly work in a conceptual way, and must or cannot combine it with

[11:28]

And when I have clients like this, then I can work on one hand within the conceptual realm and on the other hand go into areas where I can train the awareness. And I remember it was a work that I had done to myself, that I had to work biographically for a very long time and had to work personally unconsciously. And then came the collective unconsciousness at some point. And now something happens that suddenly falls into a completely different room. And for myself, I have to say that I had to work for a very long time on my biographical material and on my personal unconscious. And after that, even I had to deal with the collective unconscious and work on that.

[12:39]

And it's just recently I feel I can kind of enter different spaces. It's just another space. It's just another space. When you're meditating? Yeah. Sometimes it happens when I'm hiking or being on the bicycle. It's just another space. Than your usual space? Yeah, yeah. And it is combined with the experience of joy, of happiness, but also of fear, just losing my identity. Yeah, that's true. I mean, I think in some way it's a bit strange, because what you do about this anxiety, you try to sterilize, feed it for other people, see it as a separate person, you know, a necessary thing, that keeps you all alive, you know, and this man and this thing is an option for this.

[14:02]

and get a clear identity. And a lot of patients have a lot of fear to lose their identity. It's important to stabilize it. And later, I think it's important that you can be able to let it go again. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Sometimes it's a bit difficult to differentiate, you see, to know which to reach, which you are, the occasions are. So you think you have to look first one and then the other. Yeah. I'm not quite sure, but I think so. I constantly ask myself whether this is not the concept of the game. But you can translate this into this, and then, and so on. The more I try to understand it, the less I understand it.

[15:04]

It's not big of a deal. I have this experience that during breakfast, I had to go many different directions. I had to go historically, And then, sitting still, the same dimensions were there. And I went through it like this. And it was like Ireland. Like breakfast and sitting here. And I thought, maybe I'll just bring this half-hour of breakfast and half-hour, maybe ten minutes of meditation, because meditation was quicker for me. And then I go around again, the next experience to explain. I would like to do this all day.

[16:06]

When you talk or something comes up and you sit still. I don't need a comfortable action, obviously. If I do that, then that means probably no action, no action at all. And such an attitude is what targets one back at all. Then I'm comfortable there. I can't get good out of a piece of cuties. I personally never had the feeling that I felt it was a problem for me, the feeling that I had to act on my emotions.

[17:09]

My personal problem was to have a coherency between what I was feeling and what I was doing. So that's what I relate more actually. So this whole idea to break this cohesive connection, adhesive between action and thought is something I hear and I can see that for some people it's a problem, but other than kind of extreme states, I mean, we all know then sometimes it's not the ordinary thing I feel I deal with. Thank you. So this, what is emphasized in Senso, this connection between action and emotion, to break, I have never really seen that as a problem of mine, except perhaps in an extreme state, in which he enters one or two times in his life, where he has such a loss of control over his actions.

[18:09]

What I experienced more as a problem in my development is that I often could not act according to my feelings or emotions. and that I have worked more personally to establish a coherence between my emotions and my actions. And that is also a question for me, how this now goes together with such a meditation practice, where this focus is now on this breaking of this connection. And I feel in me, I want to create a functioning connection first. I would like to speak in German. What I understand as therapy is actually an interruption of habit and of familiar patterns, also of concepts that are connected to it. Where is the feeling, thinking and action? What I consider psychotherapy is kind of the changing of habits and patterns in a person's life. ...

[19:18]

And that's actually the neurotic behavior that keeps us in a certain compulsive behavior. For me there is not a difference in what happens in meditation and psychotherapy. I also believe that this stabilizes, if I, as in Art of Voyager terminology, I create stabilization, if I look at myself and my habits, and the patterns, and then I break into patterns of solutions, patterns of how I try to pull myself out of a swamp, or therapeutic theories that also represent patterns of solutions. I think that this is stabilizing a person or stabilizing the ego structure in the old Freudian sense to distance myself from certain behavioral patterns and let go of them, even kind of solutions and kind of theoretical therapeutic context.

[20:56]

How do you get someone to let go of them? I mean, they see them, but how do they let go of them? Through dissociation and through perception and look at yourself in a different way, So you're creating something like an observing self, at least in some forms of psychotherapeutic interactions. This is a question that's been important to you, self and ego and so forth, and in relation to Buddhism. And what you're saying now is there's a self who's

[22:02]

primarily defined through the fact that it's an observer? And is that different from the self that carries your biography? Yes, it's different. It's like observing your breath or at least in one stage of the process is observing capacity of your breath and something else that I can't even see. But this is one of the basic things in curfew, as I understand it, that there is someone, this kind of dissociation, and there is someone who, when you are able to look upon yourself, Maybe you should say that in German. I don't know if what you are saying is the same as what you have been free of the senses. I wonder whether this observer just rises when you open up your sense fields.

[23:29]

Don't most people have an observer sense to some extent? Maybe mixed up or not well defined? Yes, I think there are many different types of therapy. In my opinion, there are similarities with meditation. What I, as a very intensive therapist, learned about bioanalytics, is first of all the opposite. Peter? Peter? Could you close the door? For now. What did she say? She said, well, there are different approaches, various therapeutic styles.

[24:36]

Her main training is bioenergetic, so to still have an observer self is still considered pathological. I don't think that's the case. Here, the observer is not someone who is going to draw the people and their feelings away from him or her. So, where it separates, the observer is a fine structure that does not remind you of how to move and express yourself. That means, you are there, where you are, and you don't lose yourself again in your cathartic experience, in your head. Martin, what did you say in English? about the observer's self in biochemistry.

[25:53]

The observer's self in biochemistry You deal your roles away, especially when you have control over situations like this. So you're out here and the action you're feeling, you see a problem or whatever, it is pushed away. I understand the observing self, it is more that kind of witness which is able to be present in anything you're doing, feeling, whatever. but you are not completely identified in the normal, in quotation marks, neurotic identity. Okay. In this part, we talked about the subservient . You're very much identified with the experience, yeah? And then the observer is almost not present.

[26:58]

But you are in the current experience. But I think experience, yeah? But I think this tube is approached in the same way. In the same way. What is the tradition? Yeah. Yeah. Yes, cool. That would be much better. Yes. I think you have to suggest something. There are probably two things between the therapeutic process and the therapeutic person. I would like to agree with you on the therapeutic process. schon bei der Antwort, dass er bei dem Ausbruch vom Kühler ein ganzes Kühler ist in diesem offiziellen Schlaf, wo er dann auch vorher war, verliebt.

[28:10]

Ich denke, dass es ist ja beides möglich, in der Präparation präsent zu sein, fühlig zu sein, und von daher auch wahrzunehmen, was fühle ich, und gleichzeitig schon dann zu machen aus dem Kühler aus, was dann aus ist. I think you talked about two different observers. One is the neurotic one, who is judging, good and bad experience. Controlling. Controlling. And the other can be the non-judging observer, like meditation. But is the non-judging observer really set? Well, I think he has to go off to any corner. Sometimes she has to go up, too. But it's still a conceptual institution, that observing self, and I think it's... So this sounds more behind it, or behind her?

[29:26]

I don't know whether I'm still feeling or doing something like that when I'm in that aspect. That observing is still a... Beyond this conceptual perception there is something of another quality which is really outside any kind of observer What is that?

[30:31]

The moment when my body hasn't any more. There are moments where I don't feel my body anymore. And where I maybe, but this is already a concretization, because I didn't stop this concretization earlier, And maybe that already is again something which I make concrete because I can't stand being without a concreteness. Yeah, I think that can be pretty scary for people to feel their body boundaries are lost. It can be quite scary for people who have a fragile ego. They can think, Jesus, I'm going crazy. I think by that I got my knees. Something to hold. And there is sometimes something where this body is no longer there, where maybe something...

[31:33]

Sometimes I feel something or perceive something where only the chakra is there, or I feel something at the end of my spine, or that's then the only reality or something. Yeah. And then I come up from this experience and I feel somewhat more whole or kind of purified. And this non-graspable feeling of wholeness I don't get through psychotherapy?

[32:35]

I don't believe you can have it through psychotherapy. You can reach it. When you have the different levels, in yourself, as a way of accompanying your client into the different states. It's quite easy to be flexible. Because you touch the white background, then you leave it again, you go back to the other, but it's there for a second. This is living in the house, not even though the house may be defined. Vielleicht kannst du das auf Deutsch sagen.

[33:40]

Hier geht es darum, wie man in dem Haus lebt und jetzt nicht, wie das gebaut ist oder wie die Architektur ist. Es kann sein, man lebt jetzt in dem Haus und weiß gar nicht Bescheid. I just wanted to see and to say, I didn't feel that when you work with non-verbal methods. Yes, because all of the visualization you do with words. And the accessible is much more easy in painting, or whatever colors, or little fingers, or the music. For me, it's just waiting. to access this learning zone. But I find, especially with you guys, it's quite a bit of overtalking, just seeking to play where there is this non-boundary. But I'm very happy with this. I'm not so scared. It is a question, is there psychotherapy, or is it always something else?

[34:50]

As far as what we're describing, I wouldn't say psychotherapy. It's been a while since I heard that. When you say all psychotherapists meditate in some way, they couldn't work, what do you mean by meditation? When you're with the client or when you're thinking about what to do about the client or with the client? Sometimes in the middle of a discussion like this I hit the bell once just to kind of stop things and then go on.

[35:57]

What I'm interested in is when you're working with a client, a little bit in the line with Gerald's statement that you have to stabilize something first, then you can work on something else, or there's a sequence. When you're working with a client and you begin to feel they have developed some kind of stability, what do you use to What do you suggest to them or do to guide them in incorporating their own experience? Does that make sense? So when you work with clients, as Gerold said, that you first of all have to stabilize the client to a certain extent, or want to, and then how does the next step go before the client incorporates his own experiences, so to speak, and then goes to the next step? Incorporate? Yes. I mean, the client is coming to you with all kinds of problems or ambivalences or whatever, right?

[37:18]

And what do you try to convey to the client as a sense of a center in his or her experience? Anybody, I'm not just asking you, I'm just asking anyone. I'm trying to find out, and I'm saying, what could be the next possible step? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So, in other words, the feeling is if their next step grows in some full way out of what they're doing, it will create a center or will be integrative. So, there's also the situation to sit there in a quiet moment and to create an energy store in the moment, to create in this moment

[38:36]

There is a space to think about. If he is enabled to do some step freely, it will be the integration. Some step freely, like change his job or something like that? Yeah. I see. I don't necessarily know how to put it. If you give him a certain decision or a possibility, he can decide himself.

[39:44]

That's what I'm going to do. I don't know how to put it. I don't know how to put it. I don't know how to put it. She told me she doesn't want to come. So if I accept it, then I can't stop living. If I accept it, then I can't stop living. It depends, but it was all remembered, for example, in biomechanics. And you use, for example, you start a reaction, for example, to heat a potion, and then you combine it with feeling, rest, feeling, and then you remind the case, boom, you are rested.

[40:44]

And so when you do that several times, the person, for example, is able to have a different feeling of the shoulders and so will behave in a different way because energy can flow through the shoulders which was blocked before. It is standardized that this person should do a bit of exercises. One of the exercises that you hope that the feeling would go together with it. And as I know, something I've seen very often, you have the same, you try exercise at home. When you discover something, it's a quality exercise. I'm still wondering how to answer your third question about the division between thought and action, and Ulrike's comment on that too.

[41:48]

And I'll try to find a way to respond to that. So it's almost 10.30. We've been here an hour and a half. Should we take a break? Okay. And then maybe what, 20 minutes or something like that? So maybe 10 to 11 we come back? Okay, thanks. Maybe I could try to say something about From the point of view of Buddhist practice, as I understand it, about some of the things that came up in our recent discussion.

[42:56]

Maybe you could, yesterday we all introduced ourselves, maybe you could introduce yourself, say what your interests are and what you do. Yesterday we all asked for it and maybe you could do it too. Yes, with psychotherapy and I wish I could die in God. [...]

[43:59]

I wish I could die in God. I wish I could die in God. I wish I could die in God. I'm still sort of driving, but I'm a psychotherapist since several years and I would like to explore what we are doing here more and kind of what I experience from inside, kind of transform it in my work. And I applied it in my work and work from there and also I like singing. Singing? Well, we might ask you later to sing. I know the feeling of you're still driving very well.

[45:07]

I think of, anyway, I'd like to try to, as I said, respond to some of the things that came up in our last meeting, last session. And also I'd like to try to, if I can, bring it to the point where I feel the limitations of Buddhist practice are. I can make clear where I think the limitations of Buddhist practice are. Because in some senses I would say that personally I have made my life work through Zen practice. I think I could also say that I'm a casualty of Zen practice. Yeah. So when I think about your... Martin.

[46:42]

Martin can't believe that casualty means what it means. Oh. Like casualty in the Gulf War. Yeah. A Zen accident, you know, things like that. A Zen war. I also... For me it's useful to see how clearly when you are as psychotherapist person, you is in the fullness of your being relating to another person, it transcends psychotherapy or any theories. And that's probably quite enough. But if you're going to stop and try to teach what you're doing to someone else, then you'd have to stop and say, hey, which part is meditation, which part is psychotherapy, and so forth.

[47:51]

Okay, let me start with the idea of breaking the adhesive connection between thought and action. And Ulrike felt that this wasn't such an important thing for her, but rather sensing a coherency with her behavior in her story. But my own experience, I mean, I've been doing this pretty long time. And at the scale at which I used to do it, particularly in California, I mean, I've seen literally thousands and thousands of people.

[49:22]

Not in a psychotherapeutic way as you do, because I didn't want to enter their lives in that way. But, you know, I'd see sometimes 40, 50 people a day all day long sitting, you know, hundreds and hundreds of people. And I over and over again was struck by how people don't trust their own thoughts or are afraid of their own thoughts. And I think of the whole particularly Catholic Christian tradition of you have to go to confession and your thoughts are dangerous and they might be the devil. And probably you're aware that the the inner voice of Socrates as daimon became the word demon and devil in Christianity in English.

[50:35]

And I believe Jung in his early, I mean kind of his early breakthrough was He heard inner voices and had these inner figures, and Christianity taught him to fear them, and yet he had to recognize them as part of himself. So, in any case, I find that what releases you to be open to any aspect of yourself Including the fear of going crazy. Or the fear of harming someone else. Or the fear of seeing aspects of yourself which don't fit in with your image of yourself. My experience in Zen meditation with people is that what releases people into this more open territory, inner territory, is when they actually feel they can think anything without necessarily acting on it.

[52:03]

So it's not like, I believe, Dostoevsky says, the thought of the father is the same as killing the father, something like that. You could explore murdering your father in fine detail, if you like. You can amplify it, whatever you want. But you just sit there. What you brought up is, doesn't this create a kind of schizoid division in the person? Well, we also talked about the, I mean, the word dissociation was brought up. Now, I don't know how it's used in German, but in English, if my memory is correct, dissociation is different from disassociation.

[53:21]

So you could say, be detached. Or you could say, disassociate yourself from the situation and observe it from the outside. I think when it doesn't have an A in it, disassociation, if my memory is correct, it means like when you don't feel this is your own body or something. You don't feel this is your own body. You feel disconnected from what you do that's not like you doing it. But I don't have a dictionary of psychological terms here, so I don't know exactly.

[54:27]

But I heard it in the discussion was going back and forth. It wasn't clear what word was being used. I think James, isn't it James Joyce, who describes someone as living two feet from their body? So-and-so lived two feet from his body. Anyway... When you practice and you... And to me this is one of the main psychological techniques of Zazen practice. Is you allow yourself to feel things completely. And you recognize it as yourself, of course. And what you're feeling and so forth.

[55:45]

But you have a choice of whether to act on it or not. And you feel this isn't your only self. So in this point, the role of intention And the role of intention in deciding what you do becomes extremely important in Buddhism. In fact, intention is the seventh vijjana, is the whole thing that makes the storehouse consciousness and all the fields of consciousness work. So letting yourself feel whatever comes up, And on the one hand, you don't invite your thoughts to tea.

[57:04]

But you also don't throw your guests out the door. So you let anything that comes up, comes up, and you say, oh, that's what it is. And I think as a Zen psychological technique, it's often valuable to amplify things. To exaggerate them. Okay, now, when do you act or how do you act? Because as you said again, your clients, what you're trying to do is get them to feel a connection between their thought and actions. Well, at first, I mean, it's a more primitive situation and you're not very developed.

[58:15]

You do what you have to do. And you have an observer self which kind of tries to modulate your behavior in relationship to other people. But what you're trying to do is get to the point where you can act without an observer self and you can act with a feeling of nourishment and integration in what you do. And right conduct, right speech, and so forth, which the same word means complete conduct, complete speech, etc. And part of monastic practice, which is hard to do as a layperson, You limit yourself to the schedule and you don't do anything else unless you just start doing it.

[59:42]

Like I say to people when you're having food, don't have seconds if you think for a moment about having seconds. But if you're thinking, I want seconds, I won't have seconds, but you find your hand is out there with the bowl getting seconds, then have them. And you begin to try to experiment with when things are happen in that way and when they don't. And simple things, for instance, when you go to a restaurant, if you can't make up your mind what to eat, the moment you can't make up your mind, you eat whatever your fingers touch it. Hopefully in the less expensive part of the menu.

[61:01]

And if you practice in these, and monastic life is full of these little details like this, in which you practice until you can just do things without ambivalence. So in a way, you redo your whole life. You start from, should I wash my face in the morning? Oh, well, I guess I'm washing it. Now how these kind of practices of going back to a really primordial state almost and then working out to how you find your behavior, I don't know if a lay person can do this easily. Okay.

[62:05]

Now, What Gerald brought up was when you first start working with a client, you try to give them some sense of themselves as a separate person and their own identity and so forth. Now the initial practices in in Buddhism in general, are mindfulness practices. And the emphasis is not on your interconnectedness with everything, so much as trying to just be where you are all the time. And really you're trying to bring yourself out of your thoughts into just what you're seeing, just what you're feeling, like sitting here and so forth.

[63:38]

And this does eventually lead to deep feelings of interconnectedness, but initially just makes you feel quite independent. And we practice with things like seeing this as completely independent. And also seeing it as interconnected. Somebody uses it, etc. It was made from something and the clouds are in it. And you actually try to see that sometimes you feel completely independent and sometimes you feel interconnected. And you try to get to know those territories. Now, what you said about you have this experience and then you have an experience of eating and then you have an experience at different levels of consciousness and so forth.

[65:01]

And you brought up how when you have too much of a meditative state, then it interferes with taking action or something like that. Now, One of the skills of meditation practice, which I don't think is so well understood, is the development of a language at the non-graspable level of feeling. Okay, now here I'm distinguishing very clearly between feeling and emotion.

[66:10]

If I did lay out the five skandhas for you, well, I might not just put it on and show you. Okay. Now, is there anything to write with? Yeah. Form. Heel. I don't know if I could get all the way to the first line, but...

[67:17]

Emotions in Buddhism fall really into the category of perception. Because they're graspable. Perception literally means to perceive, means to grasp hold of something. Okay. So if you have a thought, it's a specific thing. Oh, I have this thought. I'm angry.

[68:51]

That's a specific thing. I wasn't once angry. Now I'm angry and I won't be angry at some other point. In that sense, emotions fall into perceptions. But feelings is more like in this room, and this is the best example I could come to, is in this room right now there's a feeling. It's a feeling that wasn't in the room an hour ago. And it's a slightly different feeling than ten minutes ago. But if you tried to grasp it, you can't really say what it is. You could say it's a soft feeling. Or warm. You have to use those kind of adjectives. So, okay.

[70:12]

But there is a feeling here if you don't grasp it. And we're all participating in it, but if you stop and try to grasp it, it's gone. And it's very much like, again, a dream. A dream is quite not graspable exactly. When you learn to meditate, what you're learning to do is to more and more allow non-graspable feelings. And begin to speak them or know them as a language. Man fängt an, diese Gefühle zu sprechen und sie sozusagen als Sprache zu kennen. Okay, so when you have a very strong emotion like falling in love you feel it in your chest and

[72:11]

And you can remember what that feeling is. But we are so much in the eye consciousness that it takes something as powerful as falling in love before you start feeling it in a physical territory, you think. And this is what I call your Schatzkiste. And so what you were trying to speak about, what you were saying about meditation and so forth, and you, you begin to know the feeling of meditation in your body. And this can become more and more fine-tuned until you know maybe 20 or 30 or 50 different feelings in meditation. And you get so you can produce them almost at will. Just like I can say the word tree and I can go outside and say the word tree.

[73:37]

So I can say this feeling or not say this feeling. In that sense it's a kind of language. In other words, you don't have to be meditating to have the feeling. Your body remembers the feeling. And then you can act from that. Okay, so the technique of meditation is that you become more developed at it. There's two main ones I'll mention here. One is, while you're doing things, having breakfast, You can take that feeling of meditation and turn it into a little seed in your chest. And allow it more space or less space according to what you're doing in the conversation and so forth.

[74:44]

And according to how this interferes with or benefits the people around you. Because what might be a very good feeling for you can actually be rather disturbing in social consequence situations. The other kind of technique or approach is to really develop a background mind. A kind of parallel level of consciousness. And again, the example I usually use is of a pregnant woman who's doing her life but aware that she's pregnant. So you try to become pregnant with practice. So you do things, but you still have this feeling of this pregnancy.

[75:48]

And mindfulness practices and so forth, koan practices, turning word practices, mantra practices, all start to create that background mind. So you're not so much going into a meditation experience and then into having breakfast or into talking to somebody, but you're in a pulse moving your sense of your location from one to the other, keeping both alive. Psychotherapeutically, I would think, and socially, you have to do this with some caution. Because you can actually affect people quite strongly around you. These people who can hypnotize a whole audience have this kind of ability to distract people with something and with another level just completely absorb their consciousness.

[77:07]

But while you're with your patients, clients, you can be talking to them and also trying to awaken them by using other... other senses of continuity that you can awaken in them and get them to start responding on another level. And I'm sure that's what many therapists are doing anyway, naturally. And free association and so forth are such techniques.

[78:14]

But what meditation does is give you an ability to articulate this much more finely, I think, than average. lessons I've learned as a person, as a teacher, and what I want. Yes, they can hypnotize a whole audience by distracting them from the foreground, the consciousness, and then pulling the consciousness away or binding it firmly behind it. And there is a certain message, I mean, this is what hypnotherapy is based on, I assume. That the foreground consciousness is busy with something and then some message is then transported into this background consciousness.

[79:26]

This is just an example, a parallel example to see what he can work on today with the meditation method. Okay, now I would like to speak more about, but I don't think I will now, this sense of the observer consciousness and moving your sense of continuity and consciousness. But if somebody reminds me, we can come back to it. Now, what was it, Kirill, we brought up at lunch about the duality and... I mean at the bread, yeah. became our experience, especially with experience of a strong emotion like anger.

[80:36]

And there were techniques, for instance in Tibetan Buddhism, to identify completely with the emotion and then say, let go more than the color of the emotion and feel more and more pure energy. Energy, charity, Yeah, space, emptiness. And when there are possibilities in the same approach, you have to direct the process. Okay, let me give you at least a brief conceptual picture. When you go to school, you're educating your consciousness. You learn to perceive things a certain way and format your experience.

[82:05]

Unfortunately, our education primarily educates awareness out of our consciousness. As I said, if you're a Buddhist parent, you want to try to educate your child's consciousness, but not educate awareness out. So when you practice things like direct perception, bare attention and so forth, Technically what you're doing is re-educating your consciousness, your outer consciousness. So your outer consciousness is more accessible to awareness.

[83:08]

So when I look at this microphone, And I can just stop all conceptual thought for a moment. And just see it. And just see it for a moment. It would bear, as we say, bear attention. Immediately my breath changes, physically things happen. Then I go back to talking. But every time you do a little thing like that, you're actually re-educating your consciousness to be more open to another kind of field. Okay. You're also re-educating... Now, you're... I won't try to go into this, but we could say there's primordial mind, there's awareness, and there's interior consciousness.

[84:25]

And what you're trying to do and what you're doing with meditation practice is you're educating awareness to be a kind of interior consciousness. And the reason you can't count to ten when you start zazen is because awareness has not been educated to count to ten. Now, Tibetan Buddhism has an immense panoply of visualization practices. Which is a way of educating your interior consciousness. And from the point of view of Zen, they feel these things over-educate interior consciousness.

[85:32]

But Zen might be wrong. Okay, so when you get the ability to count to ten without excluding distraction, you're developing a non-repressive one-pointedness, which is formed by So what happens through various meditation practices is you make your interior consciousness more full of buoyancy or energy or brightness. And you make it more absorbent to your storehouse consciousness.

[86:33]

And you educate it enough so it permeates exterior consciousness. Okay. So when you practice mindfulness of anger, for instance, what you're doing theoretically, which I'm trying to present this theoretically to you, The architecture of it. But the person practicing doesn't know what they're doing. They're just trying to be mindful. So they're saying, boy, am I angry. Instead of just being angry, meditation practice says create an observer of the anger. Now I'm really angry. Burning. Now I'm less. What that does is it helps develop an observer consciousness and a background mind. Now, the importance of that is you create the possibility of shifting the continuity of identity from the anger to the field of anger, or to the field of perception.

[88:13]

And when you do that, you're actually educating and creating interior space. You're creating interior space for your anger. Okay, now the other approach, which is just another practice of the same thing, is you let the instead of shifting to the field of the anger you immerse yourself completely in the anger without even an observer until you experience the anger as energy and finally until just a whole range of things that are happening in your body, mind and so forth. It's almost like you're on the outside of the leaf and then through a microscope suddenly you're in the leaf and there's these big cells and things like that.

[89:35]

And you get inside your anger and you begin to see various strains that have made it as if you were miniature and the anger was something you could feel this thing happening. Okay. So, I think that's enough for this kind of stuff. So what I'd like to do is just say a little bit about what I think the limitations of Zen practice are. Again, this is an emphasis on all of this as mindology, not psychology. And if you understand yourself this way, it's quite helpful. But I'm very definitely a westerner.

[90:53]

And so when I have experiences, when I have perceptions and so forth, let's use a sort of computer terminology, which is useful not so much because we're like computers, but because computers are the most complex thing we've built yet. is that when I have an experience, it occurs to me with formatting attached. It's like if one of you sends me a disc with some information on it, and I put it in my computer, I may just put the one sentence you've sent me into my computer.

[92:03]

But when I try to fit it into my text, it has different formatting built into it, different tabs, and it doesn't quite fit. And it goes into, you don't see the formatting, but it's there around in the space around the word. So I have experiences that as a Westerner are formatted in terms of my own personal history, my ego and so forth. And I can so emphasize the mindology side of my own experience That I can pretty much ignore the formatting that comes with me as an individual with a story and a psyche in the West.

[93:16]

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