Maybe I just want to see you because you're such a wonderful group. You have such a depth of presence that it makes me want to bring forth forms of the teachings in more abundance than I can in the days we have. And because you have such a depth that I want to present the teachings in a abundance that is not possible for me in the time, in the days that we have. Yesterday evening I gave you a Zen statement. You are a location. I didn't say your location, I said a location.

[01:03]

You may make it yours, but it's a location. And I said you are time, you are space, and you are breath. And I said, you are this very breath now. And I asked, what is this you? And then I asked, what is this you? Which is sort of like asking, I said, is it a who or a what? And that's like asking, and I did that, is that a who or a what? So that was a kind of zenny question of, is there a who in wholeness?

[02:09]

Und es war auch eine sennige Frage. Gibt es ein wer in dem wer sein? Werheit? And what what is what whatness is is there a what whatness is listening? Und welche washeit hört zu? Now these questions are you know meant to be intriguing and unanswerable and yet somehow answerable just by being present in them. But I wasn't really so interested in emphasizing the intriguing, engaging question.

[03:14]

Perhaps more I was suggesting that you investigate what is a location. Sondern vielleicht habe ich eher vorschlagen wollen, dass ihr untersucht, was ist ein Ort. And each of these, time, space, breath, deserves investigation. Und jedes davon, Zeit, Raum, Atem, verdient es, untersucht zu werden. And unavoidably, of course, I can investigate these things. through you know to the extent that I use words as pointers at attention. So how are investigators influenced by English?

[04:16]

And I know enough Japanese to know the investigation in Japanese would be different. But I depend on you to investigate in German and see what the difference is. But in English, location means to locate, means to place. To place something. Yes. When you look at the etymology of words, nouns and verbs conflate into a single kind of activity. And if you look at the etymology of the words, you can see that nouns and verbs merge into a single activity.

[05:44]

Like in Chinese, you have to really see the context to know whether a kanji, a calligraphy, a character is a noun or a verb. But since everything is, what I'm trying to get you to inculcate, to press in, inculcate, is that everything is an activity. There are really no nouns. That's a delusion that there's a noun. Okay. Nouns are delusions. Okay. Okay. But again, what I've seen, one of the main topical themes of what's happening in this Sashin, is basically I'm trying to weave into you that wisdom is a form of weaving.

[07:03]

Yes, there may be groundbreaking or mind-blowing individual experiences. Okay, but for the most part, the wisdom of practice is weaving, it's a process of weaving into your thinking. Yeah, okay. Aber im Großen und Ganzen ist der Prozess der Weisheit das Hineinweben in dein Denken.

[08:15]

Und so wie ein Webstuhl das mit dem Schiffchen tut, musst du das mit der Aufmerksamkeit tun. Entschuldigung, mit der Absicht tun. And weave it into each moment's situation. Yeah, now, mind is generally treated as a noun. But mind is really a form of minding. And it's rooted in an archaic German word, Mina, M-I-N-A-N-E, which means to love. But much of minding means to care about. And the more ancient etymology of mind is to turn within the attention, to an attentional turning, to revolve within the mind, but a turning within attention.

[09:37]

Now, I mean, you may feel what I'm talking about is awfully obscure. But I'm really trying to give you fodder for a worldview change. Because Western etymologists are prejudiced to think of mental activity as thinking. Weil im Westen sind wir dazu geneigt, die geistige Aktivität als Denken zu verstehen. But the turning within attention doesn't have to be thinking. Yeah.

[10:56]

And in East Asian ideographic cultures... What you read is an image, not a concept. And the image... is full of space. You can't make it. It occupies space. It couldn't be made with two by fours. So there is a thinking which is a series of imaging. Also gibt es ein Denken, das eine Abfolge von Bildern ist.

[12:04]

And what Dogen calls the most important word in Buddhism maybe, Hishiryo means to, as I say, to notice without thinking about. So to notice without thinking about it is to notice as an image and feel the image, but not categorize the image conceptually. Now, what I'm saying here, for those of you who can hear this, is that you practice with seeing if you can image paratactically or successively without thinking. Now, maybe I'm expecting too much. Maybe I just have to live with each of you as Jisha, Anja and good friend for months.

[13:09]

And the root of friend and free also means to love. And by the way, this job of Anja, Jisha and friend is open, you know, anybody you can apply. Yeah, so, okay. Now, Thinking through thinking and knowing through images is a successive process. One thing follows after another just in succession. Das eine folgt auf das andere in einer Abfolge.

[14:30]

But thinking is a consecutive process in which each sequence is organized in terms of the previous and the next. Oops. Oops. I remember a friend of mine called me up and says, Oh, Dick, I can't come to see you. I'm afraid I'm stuck in New York. So I called his office and they said, he's in San Francisco. So I called him up in his hotel. And I said, hi, this is Dick. He said, whoops. He said, whoops. Okay, I'll come to see you, I said.

[15:33]

So, consecutive and succession. Okay, okay. Unless you really investigate how you know you wouldn't see the difference between succession, paratactic succession just one thing next to the other and consecutive thinking which actually changes your knowing into a predictable predictable sequence.

[16:42]

And enlightenment is such a kind of little tiny shift which suddenly your body is knowing the world differently. So if a fly is flying around your desk, the fly is creating space. And perhaps if there's a printer on your desk and a vase with flowers, The printer and the flower vase are creating space. The space is an activity of the fly and the flower vase, etc., etc.

[18:00]

Der Raum ist eine Aktivität von der Fliege und dem Drucker und der Vase usw. And your experience of the space is also an activity of scanning, saccadic scanning. Und deine Erfahrung von dem Raum ist auch eine Aktivität des saccadischen Absuchens. Not just saccadic scanning of the eye, but actually a whole bodily... process of scanning. So maybe the question of my hot drink statement last night wasn't really, are you a who or are you a what? Maybe it was really, are you a mind which includes the dynamics of what-ness and who-ness?

[19:18]

I'm being as a kind of inadvertently philosophical, but I'm not trying to be philosophical. Ich bin auf vielleicht unausweichliche Weise philosophisch, aber ich versuche gar nicht philosophisch zu sein. I'm trying to enter you into the craft of practice. Ich versuche euch in die Handwerkskunst der Praxis hineinzuführen. Okay, so you're sitting at your desk and this fly is buzzing around. Du sitzt an deinem Schreibtisch und dann fliegt da diese Fliege umher. And you yourself have an experience that the fly is buzzing. in a kind of spatial territory. But in physics, there's no actual duration here. It's just one thing preceding another. Aber in der Physik gibt es hier keine tatsächliche Dauer, sondern es ist einfach ein Ereignis, das aufs nächste folgt.

[20:35]

But you experience sensorially duration. Aber in deinen Sinnen erfährst du Dauer. So your senses create duration. Also erschaffen deine Sinne die Dauer. And when it's spatial duration, we call it duration. When it's temporal or successive duration, one thing following another, we call it time. So when you stand on our little wooden bridges here, When they're not icy and you don't fall down. So when you're standing on one of our little bridges looking out at our tapestry of a landscape.

[21:38]

You're creating a sensorial image a repetitive sensorial experience we call space. And it can feel kind of timeless. But as soon as your intention or circumstances push you into the next dimension, sensorial, durative space, it's now the present. We call it time. So your durative, sensorial experience It's called space or time depending on whether it's successive or repetitive.

[22:50]

Now, what I'm investigating here is the simple statement I said last night. You are a location. Und was ich hier jetzt erforsche, ist diese einfache Aussage von gestern Abend. Du bist ein Ort. That location is a sensorially created duration. Und dieser Ort ist eine in den Sinnen erschaffene Dauer. Which, when it's repeated, is called space, and when it's successive, it's called time. die, wenn sie wiederholt wird, Raum genannt wird, und wenn sie aufeinander folgt, Zeit genannt wird.

[23:53]

So, now we've investigated you are time as well. Und jetzt haben wir damit gleichzeitig auch die Aussage untersucht, du bist Zeit. Okay, now what do we call this? Wie nennen wir das? It's a capacity of mind. Let's call it a capacity of mind. A capacity of mind we can call minding. Okay. Okay. Now, mind and consciousness are like the air around us. With fractional distillation you find out there's neon and Krypton, etc. Helium and others. But the genius of East Asian culture and

[24:56]

Buddhism within that culture says, yes, yeah, but everything's an activity. So air isn't just space, it's a gas, and it's a gas which is a composition, and it's a composition within, it's a construction under construction. So mind and consciousness, they're not the same, but mind and consciousness are constructions under construction. And you're not just the observer of the construction, you're also the constructor.

[26:07]

So the observing wholeness and whatness are observing the very construction that's being constructed But that's what the skandhas are all about. The skandhas say, okay, here's consciousness, but consciousness is under construction. When we do some fractional distillation, we find out its form, feeling, perception, associative mind, and consciousness.

[27:10]

For us, this is a revolution. A revolving of mind into noticing it's revolving. So you can begin to study your scanning process. You can actually begin to know something before your mind notices it as consciousness. Du kannst tatsächlich etwas wissen oder erkennen, noch bevor dein Geist das als Bewusstsein erkennt.

[28:13]

Aber dann muss dein Aufmerksamkeitsstrom nicht nur im Bewusstsein eingefasst sein. Also ich liebe das Bewusstsein. I mean, I feel it's a prison, too, that forces me into thinking things are predictable when they're not. And consciousness forces me to categorize things in ways that are really other people's categories, not necessarily mine. But consciousness is the way I care about you. It's the way I care about how we maintain, create this center. Consciousness is how I express my, not the only way, but the way I express my caring about my daughters and grandchildren and, you know, wife and so forth.

[29:40]

But I also know that consciousness isn't the whole of the mind of air. And I want to bring the distinctions of the skandhas, which are the most useful distillation of consciousness I know, And the most useful distillation of consciousness that Buddhism has found in 2500 years. So I want to distill the skandhas, fractionally distill the skandhas, into my background mind.

[30:48]

So my background mind is full of memories and all kinds of stuff. The capacity of mind is rooted much in associative thinking, which is all of the interconnections that go beyond consciousness, but are a kind of memory. Mind also means memory. Okay, so what I'm saying now is who each of us is, is a knowing, and that knowing is a capacity of mind. Let's call it that. And that capacity of mind can be developed, changed, etc., occasioned.

[32:06]

it can be created by certain occasions, like falling asleep or drinking alcohol or falling in love, all those things. Okay. So if what you are is a capacity of mind, That's what Buddhism would say. We could gloss it as a capacity of knowing. So Buddhism says, hey, Do something about this capacity. Exercise this capacity. Articulate and exercise this capacity.

[33:26]

And the way to articulate and exercise the capacity is called practice and wisdom. And since consciousness is the way we usually know the world, But we know the world isn't just consciousness. And consciousness in its emphasis on predictability is basically delusional. So let's use consciousness as a way to love, to care about, to mind about Also lasst uns das Bewusstsein benutzen als eine Art, dass wir uns kümmern und sorgen und lieben.

[34:35]

But let's not limit our knowing to consciousness. Aber lasst uns unser Erkennen und unser Wissen nicht auf das Bewusstsein beschränken. Okay, so let's break down consciousness into its parts, how it's constructed. Also nehmen wir das Bewusstsein mal in seine Bestandteile auseinander, so wie es konstruiert ist. So the first layer under consciousness is the associative mind, which Freud changed the world with. Die erste Schicht unter dem Bewusstsein ist der assoziative Geist, mit dem Freud die Welt verändert hat. And the layer under that is percept. percept only mind. And the layer under that is feeling, but really, for our purposes, non-graspable feeling. And the layer under that is form, but it's not a noun, it's an activity, so maybe it's formatting, more in the coding computer sense.

[35:42]

Okay. Now, okay, so this is a teaching I never would have thought it up myself, but I received this teaching, and by exploring this teaching... I found, I discovered, that each layer is a form of knowing different from, significantly different from, consciousness. Each is actually a wider way of knowing than consciousness. If we do it as a pyramid or a triangle, consciousness is the point at the top, but it's narrowed all of the layers beneath, so-called beneath.

[37:07]

I really feel so terrible that I'm so stupid and don't know German. And I create all these problems for you to translate what I say to you. But I just don't have auditory language skills. Okay. Okay, but I can talk a lot. I saw my sister the other day and she said, When you were little, you always talked a lot. I don't remember. I just thought something should be said. No one else said anything, so I did. Okay. So I'm going to try to finish in a few moments.

[38:29]

Okay. So what you discover if you begin to slow down the process of consciousness construction, you find that the layers which lead instantly to consciousness are actually wider and more inclusive than consciousness itself. What you start to find when you look at the process of consciousness in a time loop, when you slow down the process, is that the layers under consciousness are actually wider and more comprehensive than consciousness, but still lead to consciousness immediately. But the job of consciousness is to protect us from tigers. And cars coming around the corner and how to grow food and so forth.

[39:31]

It may be other layers of mind which tell us which plants are edible, but at least if we're going to cook, we need consciousness. So consciousness is necessary. Percept only mind doesn't protect you from tigers. Here comes a tiger. What a beautiful taste. There's no predictive quality, it's just a tiger getting closer and closer. Okay, so I want to, as I go through, I mean I don't do it every zazen, but often, as I go through the body points, And I go through a spine, mind, space sequence.

[40:45]

I go through the Skanda sequence. So first I'm sitting and I say, caring mind. These are codes. I say caring mind and I feel consciousness. I can feel consciousness. I can feel the brain being conscious. And then I say open mind and I feel the relaxation and spaciousness of associative mind. And the predictive imprisonment of consciousness is loosened.

[41:48]

And then I say precise mind. And precise mind is percept only mind. It's crystal and precise. And then I say boundaryless or spacious mind for non-graspable feelings. And then I feel formatting mind, the succession of signals. And that's actually a process of coming out of consciousness, going into zazen in a deeper and deeper way.

[42:50]

So it's a technique of entering zazen. But you're also establishing and getting to know each as its own way of knowing. And then it again, it's a kind of scaffolding for consciousness itself. So if it really becomes your background mind, so it's not just consciousness, it's you feel all five of these categories in how I'm present right now.

[44:16]

So I'm not thinking about you, but I'm receiving on all five levels. That's why I find so much to talk about. You're giving me signals on all five levels. Oh, it feels so good. It's a kind of sensorial wonderland. Sinnliches Wunderland. Okay, so this scaffolding is present when I am a location. Dieses Gerüst ist da, wenn ich ein Ort bin. So if there's a durative mind scanning going on,

[45:19]

which creates the experience of space and creates the experience of a present, the scaffolding of the skandhas is present in that durative scanning. That means the immediacy, with no media, the immediacy of each moment. Und das bedeutet, dass die Unmittelbarkeit, also ohne dass es vermittelt wird, die Unmittelbarkeit eines jeden Moments, wird dann auf eine viel vollständigere Art und Weise empfangen, als das nur im Bewusstsein der Fall ist.

[46:21]

Of course you're not. No one is only conscious. But we can form ourselves so we're predominantly definitively conscious. in memory and so forth. So we could say wisdom is to bring the skandhas into the activity of minding the present moment. Also könnten wir sagen, dass Weisheit die Aktivität ist, die Skandas in sich kümmern, das Gegenwärtigen Moments zu bringen.

[47:43]

Yeah. Now that's the best I can do at this time. Thank you. This teaching staff, in this case, is the magic mushroom, Soma, and I just bit it. I'm trying. Mögen unsere Absichten gleichermaßen jedes werden.

[48:26]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_76.47