I can hardly imagine living in a world different than, other than unsurpassed, penetrating in perfect dharma. Just think about that. To live in a world that we described as unsurpassed, penetrating, perfect dharma. What an openness that is of possibilities and perfections. And while you're sitting here and I'm, you know, I'm bowing three times, right? Sometimes I wonder, such an odd thing to do. Some kind of little observer that I think I once was, finds what I'm doing, what we're doing, pretty strange.

[01:03]

But I've been doing it so often and fully for so long it's quite... it is what is natural for me, to me. And yet the little observer that I used to call myself still says, how the heck did you get here? This isn't what you were like. This isn't your nature. Sometimes it gives me some perspective on what we're doing, too, because we all have this observer of various sizes that has some idea that we're a particular kind of person, you know, et cetera. As you have noticed, you will notice, you notice that I am always trying to find noticing words.

[02:12]

Maybe I can say, call them noticing words. Words that help us notice how we notice. Words that help us notice how we notice. And in that, I'm noticing the... structures and activity of mind, of mind and body, of mind and body itself. I don't like to say itself all the time. Maybe I should say mind, the mind-body, it-bodies, instead of itself. We could have it-mind or itself or it-bodies. I don't know. Anyway, to even make a distinction between itself, it mind, and it bodies is to try to find noticing words that help us notice our activity of mind and body.

[03:19]

And I often wonder how I find out how I come to what I speak about with you. And of course, first of all, it's you and me. I mean, first of all, it's my practice, this practice, whatever it is these days, plus you, the particularity of each of you. But then I wonder why, because I'm trying to notice my own. My own? Anyway, this activity... of teaching and practicing together. And why is it different in one context than the other? Well, of course, by speaking to people in English, it's rather somewhat different than when I speak to people, speak to people through a translator.

[04:28]

And then, yeah. And then if I'm speaking to Dharma Sangha practitioners, that's different. But what about this context, what am I speaking to? Well, I'm speaking, I would say, to you, to persons. Persons? That's not right. Either you're somehow not just persons. You, the particularity of you, who... is spending about one-third of waking mind in Zazen. Now here, by what I've just said, is I'm distinguishing waking mind from consciousness. I never made that, never emphasized that before. though I'm using as a background or a foreground of everything we're speaking about the last few Tayshos, I guess it's the fifth now, right?

[05:32]

Checking with the Anjo, but he's asleep. I've been using the context of non-dreaming deep sleep, dreaming mind and waking mind. Now, I don't want to identify waking mind with consciousness. for, again, the simplicity of thinking about its sake, we can say maybe waking mind is the container of consciousness. And consciousness usually takes over waking mind. Now, I think it can be helpful in our practice to imagine, to feel, to try to locate a difference between waking mind and consciousness. And all of these things you ought to explore. You ought to explore the sense of the observer. I think a good time to do it is, you know, when you go to sleep. Watch the observer observing go to sleep.

[06:37]

And where's the observer go when you go to sleep? Into dreaming mind and he gets all confused. He, she gets all it. There may be observing mind. Is it an object there that's... Is the object the observer or is the object the body? When the left hand holds the right hand, is the observer in the left hand and the observer's in the right hand receiving? I mean, I'm not trying to give answers here. I'm just trying to say that we ought to explore this with this... Explore the activity of observing itself and the way in which we identify with the observer. To the degree to which we think we fundamentally are the observer and perhaps the observer reincarnates. Where does the observer go when we sleep?

[07:42]

Where does the observer go when we die? Is my observer part of your observer? Is your observer part of my observer? Do we have some mutual meta-biological observer? I think we do, actually. So the observer becomes attention, and attention, again, is it an object lying there in bed, or wherever you lie down? Is it an object which has these various aspects, breathing, attention, et cetera, or is it rather not an object exactly, but an activity constantly flowing together in various ways.

[08:45]

And when you bring attention to your breath, breath is the vehicle that carries attention into the body, carrying the observer into the body. Or maybe breath awakens the observer, awakens attention. Or maybe they transform each other. This I think we should notice. This is who and what or whatever we are is in this kind of... is this experience and if we have the right noticing words we can notice this experience and hopefully notice it without interfering through noticing much. Okay, so again, who am I speaking to? I'm speaking to... Certainly, what I'm saying comes out of you and my practice and your presence and your particularities.

[09:48]

But it also, much of what I've been speaking about in these taste shows, I would not speak about in Johannes Wolf. You may think so, but it's actually different. Or in the Boulder Chautauqua Seminar. Because here I'm speaking to you who spend four to six periods of Zazen a day, which is about maybe a third of your waking mind, a third of your waking hours. That's a lot. And if we describe Zazen and Zen practice as rescuing waking mind from consciousness, Now, I'm always presenting consciousness as the problem. It is the problem, but it's also fantastic. We can't function. I mean, it's wonderful. Consciousness is a wonder. It's so wondrous, it takes us over.

[10:52]

And then we think we're that consciousness and that observer which observes through consciousness, etc., and not necessarily the observer which observes through dreaming. But sometimes we get mixed up. So if you're spending a third, let's say, of waking mind in zazen, and then so not really in consciousness and not fully in consciousness, not fully dominated by consciousness, you're constructing, if you think of yourself not as an entity, but as an activity, you're constructing a different kind of person. Four or five, four to six periods of satsang a day in a ritualized context will change what kind of person you are.

[12:00]

It really will. It does. And if it's four or five years, it really changes you. So what I'm speaking about now and speaking about as I did last time, the subtleties, I would say the subtleties of dreaming mind, the subtle aspects and presence of dreaming mind. I can speak to you about this because you're spending four or five, because you're spending a third of your waking mind and much of your sleep in something that can be close to dreaming mind. Okay, so again, there's me and there's you, the particularity of each of us in our practice.

[13:02]

Then there's the fact we're in the context of one-third of our waking mind being in jatam. Okay, and then what else do we have here? I would say that I use the word metabiological or metabolism. We develop and you can test it and show it. If you're interested in Zen and science and so forth, you can show that there's a... Yeah, and you can show it just by people who live together in a school dormitory. By, you know, clocks in the same area. That there's a mutual metabolism of some sort or meta-biological mutuality or something, mind-body, that occurs.

[14:14]

So it's not just that we're spending four or five or more periods of Zazen a day of our waking mind. We're also in some kind of mutual metabiological space. And we all know about mirror neurons, a coined term by an Italian, I believe, neurobiologist. been made popular in the last couple of years. So we're being reinforced, whether you are kind of, you know, at first, I mean, you don't, you have to let yourself into it, like you have to let yourself into zazen. It's almost as if you're letting yourself into a warm pond or cold pond or something. You have to let yourself into this mutual metabiological space, field.

[15:20]

And we have years of habit to resist it because it feels like it's crazy-making or we lose our boundaries. So zazen also can give you a core literally a kind of core, an internal core, which retains its core-ness, retains its... I don't know what word, solidity, coherence, which retains its coherence as you allow yourself into this scary. I mean, it is actually scary. Some people just can't do it. metabiological, mutual metabiological space. But that is what happens in practice period. I'm also speaking to that. I find myself drawn, I mean, part of it, so, yeah, each of us are the creators of it.

[16:29]

Now I'm, this is, Why I mentioned bowing, etc., at the beginning of the lecture, is because what we've got here, to put it simply, is a built environment. Vendo, altars. And I'm very used to a built environment and particular built environments. I'm interested in what built environment I live in. And the built environment is not built just with logs from San Juans, mountains across the way, but it's built by our actions, too. It's built by bowing. And we're very lucky. We have some extraordinary, kind of as a haphazard, amateurish, monastic, a bunch of bunglers. We've got a really quite wonderful group of statues, figures here, altars.

[17:35]

and I've been living with these with altars for so long I can remember it was so funny my daughter Sally I had little Buddhas I don't know why I do this I have little Buddhas everywhere you know I had them on the sink in the kitchen I mean in the bathroom in the kitchen some people think Padmasambhava should not be in the bathroom in the sink but I just put them everywhere I mean I try to put them in appropriate places but I remember Sally went around one day Several times, and she kept turning them away. And I said, are you making them do zazen? No, no, I don't like to be looked at by these Buddhas all the time. Especially in the bathroom. I'm sorry. But I noticed myself just now, I mean, Christian's the jisha. I put, you know, I come to the altar and And I dare to offer the incense, and I put it in.

[18:42]

I've done that for a lot, so I do it. And then I pull my hand away rather quickly, and I start noticing, why the heck do I pull my hand away so quickly? Because I feel I'm in a dangerous place. It's kind of electric in there. It's hot. I mean, I really have some kind of weird sense that I can only approach it carefully. I can approach it with, I'm sorry, here I come with an incense dump. I'm doing something nice now. Okay, well, can I have you take my hand? Now, it's an ancient idea to create a built environment around particularly a geomantic space, ley lines, etc. All over England, there's these ley lines, which people can feel and notice, and the stone hinges on them and stuff like that. And where there's great old ancient trees are often the site where later they put a Catholic cathedral and so forth. So there's an ancient practice that seems to be built into us long before philosophy even, or such things, to enshrine some kind of presence.

[19:55]

And in fact, it's what we're doing here. We've got a built environment, Zendo, et cetera, and I hope we can continue to build it. And the more accurately we build it to enshrine, that's the word I'll use, a presence or a practice, the more likely it'll last for a long time. Again, I've often, I've watched Kyoto transform itself. And where there is a temple or shrine or something equivalent to that, the city can't, no matter how valuable the land is, the city usually can't encroach on it. It goes around it. So, maybe rice fields, when I move there around, around some of the major temples and gardens, and they're still Now there's shops and short-time hotels and restaurants, but still, when around, there's a sum which disappeared.

[21:12]

So you just rolled over them. But somehow, it is something almost permanent where you can get a built environment to enshrine, practice presence of the Buddha, Buddha-mind. And that built environment is built by our actions, by bowing as we cross the Kannon, Kuan Yin and the Kanondo. By my bowing three times, you know, etc., I'm getting creaky and rusty and it takes me time to get down there and back up, but In that space that I build by the bowing, and we are sitting here in a particular spinal posture, we're creating a built environment that supports a mind, a waking mind, which is open to consciousness, but also open to dreaming mind, and non-dreaming deep sleep mind,

[22:26]

and zazen mind, and the dharmakaya mind, the sambhogakaya mind, and so forth. And the nirmanakaya mind. Yeah. So that's all a kind of I guess, an introduction, prologue, to speaking about dreaming mind, to continuing what I said the other, yesterday, or day before yesterday, rather, about dreaming mind, since I've given it short shrift in the past, speaking about non-dreaming mind primarily as a dynamic and presence, the root of our practice. So let me go on a little bit more about dreaming mind. All right, I described Dreaming Mind as a timeless context.

[23:35]

Perhaps it'd be better to say a simultaneous context of what has happened and what could have happened. Let's have a kind of unit of noticing called what has happened and what could have happened. And what has happened and what could have happened is the content of dreaming mind. And it's timeless or time-free, rather, or something like that, better to say time-free, because it's held rather simultaneously, as you know, grandmother and different times, events, all held in the same simultaneous context. Now you can ask rather anthropologically, what is the purpose for us of a simultaneous context mind?

[24:40]

Well, I'm not really interested in trying to describe the is-ness of something through its usefulness. But it is, it is useful or not. a simultaneous context, a time-free simultaneous context that's rolled up in us and unrolls when we can put consciousness aside enough to dream. Now, I don't think we can say, we have phrases like, it's just a dream. Well, that's useful sometimes. You're talking to a kid, don't worry, it's just a dream. And we also say, that's my dream, my deepest dream. So when you look at colloquial phrases like that, they tell you a lot about how we actually think about, feel the presence of,

[25:52]

of dreaming mind in consciousness. These words point out a kind of intuitive sense of dreaming mind is just a dream or it's my deepest dream. So I don't think that consciousness is simply the absence of dreaming mind or that consciousness appears when dreaming mind recedes, well, when dreaming mind goes away. with more dreaming mind recedes into the background but my own experience and I think it's much more the case experienced as the case if you're a meditator and because if you're a meditator and you begin to have waking mind your not consciousness but waking mind the awareness of waking mind to be the definitive mind then consciousness

[27:01]

doesn't dominate waking mind, then consciousness is something that you let happen or you use in the larger context of waking mind. But dreaming mind is there too. And you can begin, when you're not identified with consciousness but you're identified with waking mind, you can begin to notice the activity of dreaming mind as a presence within and a background for consciousness. Now, neurobiologists say that, you know, I always say this, I think these are probably true, but I always say probably, I don't know for sure, that people who are creative tend to be a more balanced genetic mix of male and female. I think it's probably true. I saw recently that...

[28:03]

autistic autistic children which are usually more often boys you may have read the same story autistic children and who are more often boys just have too much testosterone in the brain there's too much of a male brain makes you autistic so I'm feeling very feminine In any case, it's probably true that there's a kind of genetic balance of male and female in the more equal balance and more creative people. But I also think it's the case that creativity is closely related to a balance of dreaming mind, a balanced presence, constructive balance, a formative balance of dreaming mind and consciousness.

[29:14]

Because dreaming mind is again the field, the simultaneous context of what has happened and what could have happened. So it's the simultaneous context of potentialities and obstructions and frustrations I think you'll notice that a lot of your dreams are frustrations. What could have happened are endless frustrations, repeated, you can't find this and you can't find it, and you try to look again and you can't find it. That's what could have happened. So all that what could have happened and what has happened, held in a simultaneous context, the more it's a present background of consciousness, it becomes the kind of person who can hold multiple perspectives, who can see things from a variety of ways, who comes up with ideas, because right there is this simultaneous context of potentialities right on the edge of consciousness.

[30:22]

Now, of course, there's a danger here because I would say that, you know, more schizophrenic people or persons are probably the balance between dreaming mind and conscious mind is not in balance, is out of balance. And they're taken over too much by the possibilities of what could be or what could happen, etc. So one of the dynamics of dreaming mind, I think, I've experienced, is that it brings focus and ideas to consciousness. Because, you know, you may have all these possibilities and you're half asleep and things you have to do, et cetera, but when you wake up, all of those things, by what's possible to do, come into focus. So dreaming mind becomes a dynamic of focusing and consciousness, but it also has right at the edge of everything possibilities and ideas.

[31:31]

Now, so practice, zazen practice, make space for these two minds and three minds to function and for one to participate in the balance, change the balance, actualize waking mind in a more fundamental sense, in situational sense, in an immediacy, not dominated simply by consciousness. Now, so I would say just a few things about Dreaming Mind. One, it's a simultaneous context for what has happened and what could happen.

[32:38]

It's also a background of consciousness And as a background and presence within consciousness, it's one of the main things that develops through meditation practice. And through finding a stillness and equanimity and a kind of core, undisturbable core. And third, I would say the dreaming mind is a little bit like a rubber sheet. A rubber sheet in which all the things that have happened and could have happened and accidents and illnesses and things, car accidents you might have had. The movies like to show all these car accidents you might have had. the rubber sheet sinks down and all these things, the contents of what has happened could have rolled together, sort of, I don't know. This is what I experienced, I'm sorry.

[33:41]

But in this rubber sheet, they roll together and they become iconic representations. And they often become formulaic representations. And then the fourth point I'll make about the mind, it's often the vehicle then or the container for the dynamic of psychological neurotic formulas where we behave in a formulaic way from the past and the dynamic of those formulations occurred by all of this stuff rolling in the rubber sheet together and becoming iconic, and that's a creative way, or becoming formulaic and then patterning our behavior. So one of the things we do in practice is we kind of shake this rubber sheet, throw things up in the air with it, you know, and they come down differently, or we tear holes in the rubber sheet.

[34:49]

and allow consciousness and non-dreaming mind, etc. It's non-dreaming mind which transforms the rubber sheet and the formulaic representations which are resultant of dreaming mind. Anyway, that's the best I can say, kind of give you a definition or feeling for this thing we are, this activity we are, through noticing words, to notice mind itself through noticing. This is difficult too, but practice allows it. And it's great to do it with you. Thanks. May our intention equally penetrate every being and place.

[35:53]

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