So I'm trying to speak about something that's very easy to understand. At least easy to understand if I can find the right images or words. If I can't find the right images or words, then it just goes right biased. Okay. So, let's go back. Back to background mind. Now, you understand that we are born with the minds of waiting, dreaming, and non-dreaming deep sleep. And you understand that... Meditation practice. Das ist gut. And you understand that meditation practice creates an additional mind, a fourth mind.

[01:27]

A new territory in which being is expressed or can exist. Okay. Now that's a basic conception behind Zen and Buddhist practice. Already you will realize that this means there's no essences or natural way to be. Because you're not born with this fourth mind, you generate this fourth mind. Now, of course, it's a potential. But it's a potential. Unless the potential is recognized and acted on, it hardly exists.

[02:51]

As a friend of mine, who's one of the founders of chaos theories, a scientist, If you look at the world in terms of emergent properties, if you look at the world in terms of specific combinations of things, make a new thing. The various potentials that are... He says something like, since the so-called Big Bang, we've used only 0.00 something or other percentage of the possibilities. So there's tremendous potentialities in our living, in our civilization, etc.

[04:05]

Buddhism is a teaching which is developed to develop this potentiality of a fourth mind. And, you know, Gary Schneider, the Buddhist poet, who the book Dharma Bombs was, by Jack Kerrick, was sort of written about, And Gary Snyder, who wrote the book Dama Bomben. Dama Bombs, yeah. What's a bomb in German? Bombe? A bomba, oh. Bombs? Ah, bombs. Ah, okay, I understand. It's called bombs, but you meant bomben. He thinks, having a background as an anthropologist, that maybe meditation was discovered by hunters.

[05:13]

Because you have to wait all day long for the animal to appear. You've got nothing to do and you can't move and pretty soon you're blissed out. And then a thousand generations later somebody thinks, if I'm blissed out, why do I have to kill the animal? I'll just sit here. Well, however it was discovered, if we sit still, we discover a wisdom mind that we're not born with. You know, but it's not so easy to do. If you're interested in something exciting, you will never discover this wisdom mind. Because you've got to move out of the areas that usually amuse consciousness.

[06:41]

So let's now assume you have intuited or understand this possibility of a fourth mind. You already have some experience of it. Now, without this experience of the fourth, what I'm going to call now simply the fourth mind, the historical Buddha could never have said there's a possibility of being free of suffering. Because in consciousness and dreaming, we may adjust our suffering, but we don't get free from suffering. In some ways, perhaps, this fourth mind is not a new mind, an additional mind.

[08:18]

It's perhaps, this is one way to look at it, non-dreaming deep sleep brought into awareness. But I still think you can say, even if it is, let's just speculate. Even if it is non-dreaming deep sleep, Now, it's not really exactly possible for us to know about this. Nowadays, maybe it is. Because non-dreaming deep sleep, we don't know anything about, because it's non-dreaming deep sleep.

[09:46]

But now we can wire somebody up with, you know, a neurobiologist could wire us up. And say, well, he's This guy isn't dreaming now, but he's asleep. Maybe that's non-dreaming deep sleep. Hey, what state of mind are you in? Non-dreaming deep sleep. And then you could wire the guy up or the gal up while they're meditating and see if the brain waves, etc., are the same or lack of brain waves. Even the Buddha couldn't do that.

[10:48]

So, anyway, we might be able to study these things in a new way. In any case, non-dreaming deep sleep, if it's in the realm of awareness, is already, let's say, a different mind. And being in the realm of awareness, it can be developed through awareness. Now, you want to, if it's, let's say it is non-dreaming deep, aware, non-dreaming deep sleep. that isn't consciousness, then how can you develop the awareness of this mind if it's not consciousness? But it's simply non-thinking attention.

[12:13]

Or, you know, thinking free attention. Attention free of thinking. Mm-hmm. And mindfulness, the practice of mindfulness, is a noticing without thinking. So we can say mindfulness is not thinking, mindful attention. That's all clear? I've got that. It's clear as mud, as we say.

[13:25]

It's so clear as mud, I would say. Dreaming, waking, deep sleep. the mind of meditation, which isn't consciousness. Just like sleeping isn't consciousness. When you really become conscious, you can't go back to sleep. So it's like two different liquids that don't mix, oil and water. Okay, so how do you bring awareness to a... How do you bring attention to awareness without turning it into consciousness?

[14:28]

That's the basic problem which many of the teachings address. Okay. Now, when I was first starting to, when I was practicing and beginning in the early 60s, I began to have the image, the metaphor of a background mind. In other words, what began to happen to me is in meditation. I began to see between my thoughts. Okay. It's like you're looking at a page and you see the words, but you see between the words the paper.

[15:31]

Now, when I started to practice I tended to identify myself through thinking and through words. And after practicing for a while And I really needed to practice because I was stuck in all these words and stuff like that. Yeah, and concepts, etc. And I couldn't untangle them. And there's so much accumulated confusion, suffering in these concepts and words. And I thought, you know, how do I sort this out?

[16:50]

And by combination of intuition and luck, I met my teacher. And when I looked at him, I saw someone in a different mind than I was. And he didn't do much of anything except he sat around doing nothing. So I thought, well, I can do that. I can sit around and do nothing too.

[17:50]

As long as it's not too long. So I began to sit regularly. And I couldn't still untangle all the thoughts and concepts. But I began to see between the thoughts and concepts. This is a kind of break, a kind of rest. It's like a break, a kind of rest. And in music, rest is a technical term for a length of silence in a measure corresponding to the sounds in the measure.

[18:54]

And I began to find a kind of rest in between the thoughts. And I found I could expand the space between and around the thoughts, thoughts, concepts, etc. And then I thought to myself, you know, this was a process over a couple of years, a year and a half or so. Because in practice first you get used to it, and you get used to it, and you get used to it, and then you start wondering about it. No, is this just an empty space between thoughts or moods, etc. ?

[19:55]

Is it just like a blank piece of paper? Or is it a piece of paper that has its own internal dynamic? Is it that's... The thoughts are just coming to me from the past. And there's one Zen school that is, you know, rather simply characterized as no remembering. No thinking or no anticipation. And don't forget. But don't forget means don't forget, no remembering and no anticipation.

[21:11]

Now, this kind of practice, it works, but I call it temple Buddhism. It wouldn't work for ordinary lay life. It works in a special situation where you live in a temple and you have lots of young attendant monks to take care of you. I remember when I was in Georgia in Germany, in Russia, Soviet Union. I took a long hike up into the mountains. This was before the wall came down.

[22:21]

I just wandered off. I was staying somewhere. I just walked off for some hours in the mountains. Luckily, I found my way back or I wouldn't be here. And I met a bunch of young kids as part of some program of Soviet youth in the mountains. And they had somehow got free of their minders. And when they realized I was an American, because I didn't speak Russian, they started speaking to me about Pink Floyd and the sting. How do you know about these things?

[23:26]

I don't even know about these things too much, except for my daughter. So that's one thing I remember from my hike. The other is that I found a church which was built above a cave. The cave was like three stories below the church. This is just an anecdote. No relationship to what I'm talking about. Anyway, in the center of this little church was a hole that went down to the cave. And several hundred years ago or something, some guy had walled himself into the cave for 18 years.

[24:37]

And those devoted to this saintly person let buckets of food and things down the hole and pulled them back up. Well, I hope this guy achieved a good state of mind during those 18 years. But it's certainly not what you'd call a lay life. It's the special circumstances. Some Zen teachings are dependent on creating a state of mind only under certain special circumstances. And I would say if you create a state of mind where you have no remembering, no anticipation, this is a pretty special state of mind.

[25:43]

Okay, now I present this because it's clear that Zen saw that the remembering and anticipation is much of the problem. But I think the Bodhisattva and us lay practitioners need a more subtle solution. Okay, so... I began to see between the thoughts. And I began to see that, yeah, even if you didn't remember or anticipate

[26:58]

things still appeared. It was as if they appeared out of the page itself and not from the previous page or pages. So I began to feel, understand that there was a dynamic of the page itself out of which the text emerged. I'm speaking metaphorically, of course. But, yeah, so there's more of experience of thinking arises and disappears, like the page has words on it, and then the words disappear into the page.

[28:04]

And so Zazen instructions like don't invite your thoughts to tea, yeah, suggest this dynamic. If you don't consciously engage your thoughts or identify with your thoughts, then the thoughts begin to disappear and the space between them gets to be bigger. And you begin to feel a background of the mind out of which your thoughts are constructed. The image I had once, a friend of mine who was a professor of religion asked me to go to his class, like a seminar that occurred in his living room or something, and talk about my beginning practice.

[29:25]

And at that time I was in the midst of trying to kind of like get a sense of what this term background mind which had come to me. So I described it as first, you know, when you first start meditating. Maybe it's something like driving along a road. On both sides of the road, there's billboards. And you can't see the scenery. All you see is billboards. There's places in America like that. But as you sit and you slow down, you begin to see spaces between the billboards. And the billboards were states of mind, consciousness, thinking, etc.

[30:36]

And I began to see that between the billboards was a Yeah, a background mind. Out of which the thoughts, modes, states of mind were constructed. the states of mind, etc., were constructed. So I wasn't so concerned that, say, an aggressive state of mind wasn't some kind of biological instinct, you know, of your mind. Aggressive beings in some innate way.

[31:45]

Nor was I concerned with why am I aggressive, because in the past I was angry or something, because in the past something happened. Now I can accept those past actions and our biology, you know, are seeds for this state of mind. But I also had the experience that this state of mind or state of mode of thinking while it had causes from the past it also just appeared out of the background mind.

[33:06]

In other words, certain ways the background mind was made possible these billboards to appear. Yesterday we were talking during the prologue day in the afternoon about Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday and Friday and so forth. And the word week I didn't mention, but the word week means wicker. It means the weaving of elm together to make the weaving of the days together. You know what elm is? It's a tree which you can take and weave it into baskets.

[34:08]

Like wicker. So the word week literally in English means the weaving of the days together. Well, I felt a weaving... of my thoughts, feelings, etc. together. A weaving that arose not only from the past, but from the background mind. As if we might cut the trees down behind the billboards and make the trees into billboards. So one practice and solution in looking at my suffering was to find the causes in the past.

[35:12]

But another was to see they appeared from background mind and dissolved into background mind. So it became a dynamic of absorption and transformation which didn't depend on knowing its cause. Okay. To use the example of a basket or wicker, I could see this wicker and then pretty soon I could see between the weaving of the basket. So one way to speak about Buddhist practice is also to say it's about how to notice our experience. And then how to develop our experience.

[36:41]

The craft of developing, the craft of seeing our experience. and then to develop a new territory or territory of experience. So partly I'm using this example of the background mind to suggest the way we can notice our experience. And develop this noticing. And creating a territory for this noticing. Okay. For me at least, and I think for all of us probably, it takes some time of familiarity with practice to begin to see its potential.

[38:17]

For me at least, and I think for others as well, it takes some time of familiarity with practice to begin to see its potential. For example, it didn't take me long to see the spaces between thoughts and moods and so forth. But it took me a while before I realized that space between thoughts itself was another mind. And that mind was much more integrated and healing. I could feel the healing of this mind. Und ich konnte spüren, dass dieser Geist viel integrierter war und auch viel heilsamer.

[39:18]

Ich konnte die Heilung, die von ihm ausging, spüren. Und wie kann ich diesen heilenden Hintergrundsgeist in meinen Alltag bringen? Did it only, or could it only appear in Zazen meditation? I feel the horse going over the cliff again. Because aren't we supposed to stop at 12.30 so we can have lunch and things like that, normal behavior? And we have to feed the horse. So let's sit for a moment and then we'll have lunch.

[40:31]

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