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Mindful Interdependence: Embrace Impermanence
AI Suggested Keywords:
Seminar_What_Is_Mind?
The talk explores the intersections of Buddhist practice and consciousness, focusing on the nature of mind and the transformative potential of consistent practice. Core themes include the limitations and capabilities of personal spiritual practice, the nature of self and consciousness, and the profound experience of interdependence and impermanence. The discussion emphasizes altering one's perception of boundaries and embracing a more connected, continuous awareness of breath, energy, and the presence of mind. The talk concludes by highlighting that understanding these dimensions can foster spiritual development and offer insights into selflessness and interconnectedness.
- Allen Ginsberg: Mentioned in a historical account about an LSD conference and the political controversies surrounding it, illustrating the societal challenges faced by academic institutions in the 1960s.
- Reagan and the LSD Conference: An example of political pressure impacting academic freedom, showcasing resistance against Reagan's conservative agenda in California.
- Kinsey Report: Cited regarding the presence of homosexuality on campus, highlighting societal attitudes of the era.
- Self and Mind: Discussion of how self is a function of consciousness, which highlights the Buddhist view of consciousness as a construct that shapes personal reality.
- Dogen’s Teachings: Several references to Dogen's emphasis on the self as interconnected with the world and the nature of reality, revealing how practice can align self-awareness with the broader tapestry of existence.
- Tathagata and Thusness: These concepts describe the interconnected, impermanent nature of all things and the ultimate Buddhist teaching of enlightenment being an all-encompassing potential.
- Suzuki Roshi’s Story: Illustrates the idea of selflessness as an innate quality revealed through the cessation of ego-centric perception.
- Yuanwu’s Insights: Discusses concentration as a path to enlightenment, emphasizing a seamless integration of practice and realization.
- Four Constants: Practical teachings for maintaining awareness in breath, mind, space, and stillness, and their roles in facilitating a deeper experience of selfless consciousness.
Each point captures an essential theme or teaching from the talk, offering insight into the speaker’s exploration of how Buddhist teachings on mind and self are applied in practical practice.
AI Suggested Title: Mindful Interdependence: Embrace Impermanence
There were lots of problems and occasionally really big problems. I mean, I got in situations, political situations in the university where a number of huge crises occurred where the board of overseers of the university met about me and another one where a number of people tried to destroy, actually just get me fired or destroyed. And... And in both cases, I was doing what I thought was right. So we don't have too much delay before we go to lunch. I'll just say one of them was I organized a conference called the LSD Conference. And Reagan was running for president.
[01:04]
Reagan was running for governor of California. And the university thought if Reagan gets elected, he would cut off the budget of the university. A lot of the budget. So the university was convinced Reagan would use the LSD conference as a way of attacking the university. So they had, I mean, I had tremendous pressure on me, political pressure from the state and from the whole university system to cancel the conference, and I refused. And Allen Ginsberg saved me. Because Reagan was going to attack the university for drugs, homosexuality, promiscuity, things like that.
[02:20]
And those days in America, they also said, I couldn't invite Allen Ginsberg because he was gay. I said, are you mad? Half your professors are gay. And Reagan was attacking the university because he said, there's 25,000 students, right? And according to Kinsey, 10% of the male population is gay. Mm-hmm. So Reagan was saying the university's got 2,500 homosexuals in it. That was America in the 60s. I mean, it was insane. So Alan and I made a deal that he would not come to the conference officially But if they canceled the conference, he would go to Time Magazine and say, they threw me out because I was gay.
[03:36]
So I went to the university and I said, well, Alan's going to go to Time Magazine, New York Times, et cetera, and you... They said, okay, you can do the conference. Okay, so in all of these, and quite a few other crises, practice sustained me completely. But I've had two or three other occasions where my practice didn't show me a way. Normally, Through practice, suddenly the whole situation would open up. I could see a path right through it, what to do and in what order and so forth.
[04:39]
But I've been in a couple of situations where there's nothing, no matter how much I practice, I don't see a way through the maze. So all I can do is live the situation. Now, if I'd started practicing when I was younger, or perhaps if I was a a religious hero, I'd be in better shape, but, you know, I'm who I am. So practice itself has limits depending on your own capacities. So practice may not be able to solve and cannot solve in my life all problems. But it's allowed me to survive most problems relatively unscathed.
[05:46]
But not completely unscathed. I think what I went through this last year is the result of some of these things. What I went through last year, medical stuff, is actually the result of some of these things. So I'm actually... Getting to be as old as I am. I used to be younger. Time to have lunch. Anything anybody wants to bring up?
[07:20]
Yes. I want to thank you for the term host mind, which I didn't know yet, but I know now I knew it without knowing it. You will. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I have a lot I'd like to say, but, you know, how can I, that I feel, how can I make it into words?
[08:36]
That's my problem. Not unusual problem for me. Mein Problem, nicht ganz ungewöhnlich, ist das, was ich fühle, zu Worten zu machen. Mhm. very simply that we say. So we have had this question. I said one aspect is essence of mind. Another is the function of structure.
[09:38]
and ingredients of mind. And the third is the function of mind. And the fourth is the fullness of mind. Now, That's been in the background of what I've been saying. And the structured ingredients we've talked a lot about and some of you brought up, which is like the five standards is here. And in practice, it helps to have, as I said earlier, some way to notice our mind. and to begin to articulate our mind through what we notice.
[11:06]
Okay. Now, by the functions I mean, as I've tried in the last few months to make clear I've said that consciousness is a function of mind and self is a function of consciousness so now I'm not speaking in neurological terms or philosophical terms I'm talking about in practice and in Buddhist terms. Now, self isn't all the ways we sense that we are in the world.
[12:11]
Self in Buddhism is That sense of self that swims in consciousness, that lives in discriminating love. In which its sense of permanence comes from... partly arises through consciousness itself. Because the function of consciousness, whether it... no matter to what degree it's selfless or self... The function of consciousness is to supply us with a predictable world.
[13:32]
And the self participates in that. And the self participates in that. Self and consciousness are also the realms of memory. As I've often said, it's to supply us with separation, connectedness, continuity, and narrative relevance. Separation, connectedness, continuity, and relevance, narrative relevance. In other words, its job is to tell our story to ourselves. Now, if I think that you can see it, experience it this way, you can also be clearer about what it means to be free of self.
[14:50]
Or to be less self-involved. The reason we want to, I mean, partly we want to be less self-involved because, you know, to be too selfish is usually, even if it's not socially dysfunctional, it's a kind of unhappiness. The problem is that self, from the point of view of practice, The self traps us in consciousness.
[15:53]
So if you are establishing your sense of the world primarily through self, you're establishing consciousness, and I think it's clear now, consciousness is not the whole of our being. If you have the feeling, establish a contest... Excuse me. Yeah, go ahead. Oh, I was stuck. Why are you stuck? I just got muddied up. Okay. That's what I meant, too. I said, if you're... If you know your world primarily through self, then you're basically stuck in consciousness. Which is okay, I suppose. But we know from what we've been discussing, it must be clear, that consciousness is not the whole of our being.
[16:59]
So to see the functions of self-consciousness and so forth, you can begin to change the way they function. Yeah, the two big shifts through practice is more emphasis on connectedness. And you actually begin to find your boundaries in another way. Yeah. You know, I mean, just to throw a few, just to... Is the boundary of a flower its fragrance?
[18:10]
Or its petals and its stem? Is the boundaries of the moon... The tidal shores? Where the tide is, the shores of the sea. The tidal shores of the sea. Or the moon reaches into our own bodies. So, whatever these little poetic examples mean, till through practice you begin to feel your boundaries are not limited to your physical body.
[19:14]
I mean, certainly mother and child feel like this, and even fathers and child. And with friendships, we have kind of different boundaries. And through practice, you begin to find As I said earlier, you feel like you're in some kind of connecting material. So one thing that practice does is shift us. We stay feeling separated in the same way, but we feel now more connected than we feel separated. Not just with other people, but with phenomenal world. And the other shift is from finding continuity in your thinking to finding continuity in your breath.
[20:16]
body and phenomena. Most of you know, this is simply accomplished by being able to make your breath a constant to bring your attention consistently to your breath. And so when you also see that your story is edited through the self, let me put it, your memory, your personal experience is constantly being edited to support your particular idea of who you are.
[21:40]
Die wird ununterbrochen dadurch unterstützt durch die besondere Idee oder Vorstellung davon, wer ihr seid. Selbst wenn ihr auch keine psychologischen Probleme damit habt, wer ihr seid, through this editing process of producing a coherent story. Now, funny things happen. When you practice more, and you're not so tied to your story, establishing a particular story of yourself. Well, one, you're not so easily offended because it's hard to offend if your story is kind of, you're not too attached to your story. But your dreams change too.
[23:00]
Strangely enough, your dreams become more relative when you're less attached to your story. More relevant. In other words, instead of feeling, jeez, where did that dream come from? That's a bizarre dream I had. Your dreams just seem to be extensions of your story. So, again, what I'm saying here is just giving you an idea of and a feeling for, I hope, that if you can see the structures and functions of mind, you can begin to participate in and...
[24:07]
How, what are, if you can see there's a structure to mind, you can change the structure to mind. And if you can see functions, you can shift the emphasis among the functions. Okay. So now I also see that fullness is not full because it's missing an S. I see that fullness is not full, but what is missing? S missing in fullness, yes. An S in the fullness is missing. Oh, and I'll do it in a minute, sorry. Just for me, yeah. Fill it up. Oh. Um... Suzuki Roshi once was, when he was a kid, he learned in school about a little worm that attaches itself to fish.
[25:56]
And I think it was called a Mijinko. Mijinko was the Japanese name. So he was cleaning up the pond at the temple with his other young monks with his teacher. And They were, you know, cleaning out all the gook and there was a fish there and he looked at the fish and he saw this little worm on it and he said, a mijinko. And his teacher said, shut up. And he was quite shocked, but he realized that in some sense he was bragging by knowing the name of this little worm. So when he told that story, he also said that selfishness is not, or selflessness is less self-relevant thinking.
[27:04]
is not something you kind of do, but rather that's something that's already there. And what he meant was that... Yeah, well, when we can... take the concepts off the world and we have some now and then experience of that that begins to open us to the possibility of a mental continuum which isn't so involved in self. And so you begin to act with less self-centered or self-referential thinking, just because you've changed the way you are in the world.
[28:49]
So how do, I'm trying to find a way to give us a feeling for this because we can't think it exactly but we need to feel it. And but I, but If you want to bring the various practices together or insights or teachings together, Yuan Wu says, for example, if you can concentrate without breaks, Concentrate continuously without breaks.
[32:05]
You bring forth or you mature the womb of sagehood. Now what does he mean by concentration? He means something like this. In other words, This practice is based on enlightenment and as I said simultaneously matures enlightenment. And this kind of practice brings together the teachings and your experiences in practice.
[33:16]
So it's pretty difficult to... You can't make a conceptual framework for all the teachings. But you can make a practice... continuum or stream for the teachings. So these are what I would call the four constants. Now we've just spoken about breath. But what I mean is that as much as possible you intend and you do Find yourself in your breath. And you can trust this experience. You just see if a constant, like you're breathing all the time,
[34:19]
But you're trying to join that breathing with attention. And you're developing an attentional awareness. An attentional awareness which is in contrast to consciousness. It can be the mind underlying consciousness. And it can be the mind that surrounds consciousness. But in any case, Joining breath and attentional awareness is the most basic way to practice. In addition and parallel, you want to see if you can feel your...
[35:35]
Again, energy, but it's not exactly energy. Vitality, energy, something like that. It means you're maybe always doing a kind of Yoga in whatever situation you're in. When you're walking, you feel... Anyway, you... You said that? You translated that? It's like you feel a sidewalk coming up through you. Or you relax your upper body and let it kind of sink into your hara.
[36:55]
And simultaneously bring energy from your, bring your legs up into your hara. It's a little bit like you do on the job yoga. Like you walk along and you decide to open your backbones. You're walking but you're lifting your backbone up. You're sitting in a restaurant and you, if you don't look too weird, you sit completely straight. You sit just like you were in Zaza. And then if you decide to sit in a relaxed way, you really feel relaxed.
[37:57]
So to sit in a relaxed way also becomes a kind of posture. So you know when you decide to sit in what looks like a relaxed way or makes everyone else feel more relaxed. And when you just, nobody's by, you don't know anybody in the restaurant, so you sit there. Lifting up above the soapsuds of consciousness. Okay. So you don't just... I don't know how to say it. It's like... Maybe you know this already.
[39:07]
Maybe some of you know it for sure. Maybe you'd feel it, particularly if you're doing athletics, but, yeah. But just whatever situation you're in, it's almost like your energy... is ahead of your body or leading your body in what you do. And of course that kind of experience and your breath are working hand in hand, breath in mind. Okay. Those are two constants I'd say each of you ought to try to bring into your, what do they say nowadays, 24-7. Okay. Now the second is a constant, a continuous feeling of the presence of mind.
[40:34]
Now, the simplest way to enter into this is what's called double perception. Is that whenever you perceive something, the perception is of the object and simultaneously of the mind perceiving. So you just get in the habit of seeing the senses, feeling the sense that's perceiving and the mind perceiving simultaneously with what's perceived. You just remind yourself. Remind yourself. I'm just making a little... Remind. Remind. You just... I'm just making a little... To remind yourself in each moment
[42:00]
Every time your discriminating mind happens to be programmed to remind work. And that's what Dogen says, the main purpose of the discriminating mind is to show us how to practice. So he calls it the doorway to much more essential minds, the mind of grasses and trees. And the mind of truth. And the mind of bodhicitta, the mind that puts others' enlightenment over your own. I mean, since we're sitting here, the example is right now, I'm looking at you, but I feel my mind knowing you.
[43:32]
I'm not just looking at you, I'm also feeling my mind look at you. I wish somebody told me that when I was your age. Yeah. You know, when I was a... I've had a habit since I was able to read. And I think she has this habit too. Of often having a book with me to read. And... Yeah, I like to read. But that wasn't, I think, just as much or even more... I thought I lived in a container.
[44:33]
And the container was pretty predictable and boring. Boring? Boring, yeah. It was completely predictable. It was not interesting. Dentist's office, restaurants, I was always reading. I remember when I was about 18 sitting with a pretty girl in a restaurant reading. And some guy who had a crush on this girl came over and said, why are you reading when you're with this woman? And I said, oh, excuse me. But my feeling was, why wasn't she reading? Okay.
[45:37]
But at some point, through practice, the world ceased to be a container. During the 60s, the most reported late 50s and 60s, the most reported psychedelic experience I heard was that the walls weren't flat. The walls were kind of wavy. I mean, that's not the whole of psychedelic experiences. Sometimes the walls wave at you. But clearly, most people were surprised at the degree to which their conception that walls were flat controlled what they saw.
[46:54]
So it's surprising, it seemed to be surprising to people that once you took the idea that the walls were flat away, walls often aren't very flat. In a way, the world then becomes text. Or texture. But now, I mean, I still like to read. But if I don't have a book... couldn't be more. But now the whole multidimensional lattice of being space.
[48:13]
Multidimensional lattice. Lattice is like a fence. There's something woven together. Was text, is text enough for me? Text. You know, if I'm looking at you and I feel my mind looking at you or knowing you, it feels like It's not the world that's the container, it's my mind that's the container.
[49:24]
And in a way you're contained in my mind and I'm contained in your mind. And you're messing with my container. No, no. But it's true. You are participating in this mind. And the mind... doesn't, the container has boundaries that can keep expanding. And Dogen says, you know, the whole earth is the true human body. Now he's speaking into some kind of experience like this.
[50:25]
The whole earth is the true human body. Now that's more interesting than calling it, you know, stuff or a container. This is the true human body. Now the fourth one is to continuously feel the space or stillness of everything. I can say emptiness too. But I put space and stillness there because they're two doors. They're easier for us to experience space and stillness than emptiness. Okay.
[51:37]
But maybe it's time for a break. We have space for a break. Okay, thanks. I think I have to establish a little better than I have the sense of a mental continuum. Again, we're going back to the beginning in the seminar, in the beginning of Buddhism. Everything's changing.
[52:46]
What holds or what kind of continuity or continuum is there? And I remember very early on in my practice, I had the sense of... what I called a background mind. And now I would call intentional and attentional awareness. But in a way, I began to see my thoughts just happen through doing zazen. It just happened through Zazen. And the presence of Sukhiroshi because his presence undoubtedly introduced to me this mind.
[53:48]
I began to see my thoughts as if they were sort of like billboards along the highway. And when I looked more closely, you know, there were big spaces between the billboards. And I began to see how the billboards were actually constructed from the background, from the forests or the cosmos. So my practice in those days was very much a process of shifting my sense of location, I could say identity, but better sense of location, from the billboards to the
[54:55]
space surrounding the billboards. Basically, I'm still talking about that in various ways. And to see past the billboards is not different from taking the skin of concepts. or the conceptual enclosure of the world. But if I just say this, you know, to take the concepts off without the sense of, within our own experience of a continuum, It's just kind of words that don't mean anything. So I think we have to have a feeling for this mental continuum that's not concepts.
[56:00]
And then through a practice like this, we can articulate it more and mature it, develop it. So in the mornings at Johanneshof and at Cresta, We say, now I open Buddha's mind or Buddha's robe. A field far beyond form and emptiness. The Tathagata's teaching for all being. Now normally in the morning shoe, this is a small version of Buddha's robe. And you put it with this edge forward on your head.
[57:15]
And you say, and also you put it in your head because you're lifting your energy up through your spine, and this is considered the spot of wisdom. So it's not a mental exercise, it's a yogic exercise. So it's like what I do in ceremonies, the wisdom water, I put water here and I throw it around. So this is the same thing, same feeling? And then I say, now I open Buddha's robe or Buddha's mind. And again, yoga, I've lifted my hands up through the chakras and kind of pulled this whole auric field up into my hands. Yeah, I'm not just talking nonsense.
[58:19]
This is what it's like. You can Yeah, it's a different feeling of the body that you begin to know after a while. The other day somebody was like this, right? No, they were like this. So I came up and they were, I pushed their hand away, because normally your hand should be that far apart. So they were sitting, they were a new person, they had their hands there and I put my hand like this. And they were somebody like Uli who studied boxing and they went... So now I'm careful and I bring my hand up, you know, and someone goes, whoa.
[59:28]
So, now I open Buddha's robe. A field far beyond form and emptiness. The Tathagata's teaching for all being. This is how we start each day. A field the mind and the rope are a field far beyond form and emptiness. This is kind of made like a rice field. It means the mind is a kind of sacred sphere. Ingo made his from a coat he found abandoned by the subway entrance.
[60:37]
Day after day the coat was there, so one day he said, it's an offering from Buddha. So he cut it up and sewed it back together in the form of Buddha's robe. And that's the tradition, actually. You find old cloth and put it together. And the Tathagata, Tathagata means vastness. Tathagata means Buddha, all in its, Buddha as Everything in its all-at-onceness. In this sense Buddha is identified with space. Because in this sense then space represents all possibilities.
[61:39]
And all possibilities are another way to speak about Buddha. And the sense that enlightenment, potentiality, fact of enlightenment is everywhere at once. So that's in the word Tathagata. So the Tathagata's teaching for all being Now Dogen again says that the entire universe or earth or cosmos is the true human body. And the appearance of the true human body liberates beings. So, in other words,
[62:45]
When you yourself manifest this true human body, in your speech and your activity, in your thinking, you actually... This is the way we liberate beings. From whatever, from the conceptual... enclosure, conceptually enclosed world. From the suffering that results from being stuck in consciousness, identified with consciousness. And so forth. So... This physical space, which we move around in, and this being space that we feel embedded in.
[63:56]
Yeah. Now, How do we establish this mental continuum? Or this sacred space. And establish it not just in a sense of the fruit of zazen and some insight when I was younger and younger only and noticed this background mind. But a fruit of all your activities.
[64:59]
Yeah. It's not something extra you've added to the world or an insight in the world which remains more or less the same. But rather each moment is this insight, each moment is bringing this sacred being space. into presence. Okay, so some of this I've been speaking about, of course, these two and a half days in an evening. And so I'll just review Some of this.
[66:08]
One is to see things in their particularity, as I've said. Each thing kind of shining in its own independence. Shining with the mind which knows each particular thing. And through knowing things in their particularity, free of concepts, you experience this essence of mind, which is the first on the other side. And you're immediately confronted with the impermanence of everything. The first and most basic of all Buddhist teachings.
[67:16]
So you have an actual experience of the impermanence of things. The momentariness of things. The duration is in us, because everything itself is immeasurably brief. Duration is an aspect of this little island of 5% or 4% in the middle of... dark energy and matter. So all of this stuff has a certain pattern of duration. But as you know it in its particularity, which means its momentariness in the mind as well, you feel its impermanence. And then after a while you have a shift from momentariness to uniqueness.
[68:27]
And uniqueness Each thing is non-repeatable and new. Okay. And this begins to alter what I call the embedded self. What Dogen calls the mind of grasses and trees. The way most of our self is carried in the phenomenal world through our sense perceptions.
[69:37]
You know, the way the smell of autumn can bring you back to other autumns, etc. But most of our pattern of who we are is carried in the phenomenal world in our situation. Yeah, and that's also mind. the mind of grasses and trees, Dogen called. And it is the hardest part of our self to free up, to loosen up. But to really see impermanence as uniqueness, actually loosens up the embedded self as well.
[70:43]
Yeah, so then also we begin to know Second major teaching in Buddhism, impermanence, I mean interdependence. Now, this isn't just an ecological or intellectual idea, but an experience of the interrelatedness and interdependence of each thing. And interdependence is an idea of equality. Yeah, the owl, the butterfly, the wet leaves, the air, they're all equally important.
[71:59]
If you take one out, you affect the whole thing. We're making these changes so fast these days that this interdependent Skein, S-K-E-I-N, it's the way, it's a weaving term, don't worry. No, but sorry. The fabric, we're changing this fabric too fast for it to recover, environmentally. Okay. you begin to really feel the equalness of each thing. As a more basic feeling than comparative difference.
[72:59]
So it's actually then, it's also a form of structural selflessness. And this is also, we could say, a mind free of preferences or in the direction of freedom from preferences. That's also a way of talking about, again, freedom from preferences. Self, or a non-self referential continuum. Now, the example of this I came up with a couple months ago is these old-fashioned Christmas tree lights. If one is out, they're all out.
[74:19]
And you can never figure out which one is out. You have to try each one out. And you finally get the right one and they all light up. Well, The mind of interdependence is like this. When you really do have a mind quite free from preferences, when you really feel things as equal, the world lights up. The world lights up. And the third basic teaching is interpenetration.
[75:21]
And interpenetration is this experience of not just interdependence, but all-at-onceness. Everything is interpenetrated in everything else. Everything in the whole world makes this possible. Alles in der gesamten Welt macht dieses möglich. Okay. All of these together, the particularity, the uniqueness, the interdependence, etc., interpenetration, are called together thusness. Und all dieses, was ich jetzt aufgezählt habe, die Einzigartigkeit, die Besonderheit, die Durchdringung, die Abhängigkeit, zusammengenommen, nennt man so halt thusness. And the Tathagatis, Thusness is teaching that benefits all being. You can understand that it benefits all being. And so these ways I've just spoken of, the independence and impermanence and so forth,
[76:31]
Open us into this sacred being space, not just simple physical space. Now I can come back to the fourth of these four constants. Again, I've spoken to some extent about them. Space is just, you develop space by feeling. I mean, an easy way to start is with a tree. Let's use a tree for both. You see the tree and you feel the space the tree occupies. And you just get in the habit of seeing this just like you see mind when you see an object.
[77:47]
Now the practice is to see the space of the object. And it's the space of this bell that makes it useful. Without the space, there'd be no ring. So it's the absence which makes this function. So you begin to feel The space of each thing. And the shape of the space between things that's always changing. Yes, there's a kind of deeper feeling of space connected. Now it's articulated space connecting. So this is another habit you develop in the craft of practice. And stillness is
[78:49]
is similar. And I have given you the example again, I think earlier, of a tree moving, and you can feel the tree is always trying to return to stillness. And you can feel that in yourself. You're coming out of stillness and returning to stillness. This is the basic teaching in the dharmas, the four marks and so forth. Things appear, Dogen says, to complete that which appears. And then it disappears. So things that are appearing and disappearing. But you feel that appearance and disappearance, but you yourself feel in stillness.
[80:08]
Du fühlst dieses Erscheinen und Wiederverschwinden, aber du selbst fühlst die Stille dabei. Das ist auch vollständig enthalten, diese Geschichte von Da Wu and Yun Yan, die also fegen. Du siehst so beschäftigt aus, Yun Yan. And Yunyan says, Dao Wu, you should know there is one who is not busy. So this is that Yunyan is the stillness, even in busyness, Yunyan feels. So if you begin to feel the stillness in each thing or the space of each thing, this is another sense of the, I would say you establish these four constants. You feel a continuous attentional awareness in your breath.
[81:32]
You feel like you're breathing with the world as well. You almost feel like you're floating and moment by moment in breath. And you feel this is carried forth in your vitality, your readiness, your energy. And you also have the constant of finding yourself in the field of mind. That's beyond form and emptiness. And the fourth constant being you feel yourself in.
[82:34]
You feel this space of each thing space and stillness of each thing. Simultaneous with its activity and form. And perhaps the entry into the experience of emptiness, one way of looking at it is the experience of not being found. It's you look for the self. And in the end you can't find the self. And so what do you substitute for the self?
[83:35]
You actually have an experience of it not being found. Do you get the feeling of that? Well, you know, I remember when I was young again in high school, I used to go out into a particular glade in a kind of small forest. I was a little bit like the farmer. What? Glade is an open space. But there's no trees. I... read about a farmer once who said, I feel much closer to God when I'm dowsing than when I go to church. So I didn't know about sacred space religion.
[84:48]
I was a confirmed aggressive atheist. But I'd go out there and I knew I wanted to go to this place and I... didn't know what I was looking for there. It was a kind of religious impulse, but then I got there and it's just trees and grass. But if I could have entered into the experience of it not being found, I would have felt better. Does that make sense? In other words, there's the experience of the presence of not being found. And your ability to find yourself in that situation without a reference point.
[86:12]
So we could call the experience of emptiness the experience of not being found or the experience of being free of reference points. It's an incredible feeling of openness and potentiality. So these four constants, if you practice them, even one of them We'll bring teachings of Buddhism together for you. And we'll show you teachings that maybe Buddhism hasn't discovered yet. Yeah, that's a good place to stop, isn't it? Could you stand sitting for a minute before we, I mean sit, stand sitting for a minute?
[87:22]
this sacred sphere, sacred space, this being space, which is also able to know, to know, not to accept, but to know the suffering of others, of ourself, There are so many aspects of this world. And although it often disturbs us, wounds us, and should, we can accept it because this being space is so much the fullness of mind.
[89:37]
It's also the case that in all circumstances we need to be, we need to discover this true human body. It's only through each of our manifesting this true human body That we can liberate beings, including ourselves. And have any hope of transforming the world. Thank you for joining me in this sacred space.
[92:16]
And thank you for making what I'm talking about clear.
[92:21]
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