And I would recommend that those of you who aren't used to sitting cross-legged on the floor, use a chair. We have chairs here. I haven't decided to use a chair yet, but I'm not dissimilar. And those of you who were here last year, which is many of you, will remember there was a kind of delayed surprise birthday party for me because I was in my 81st year. And in this surprise birthday party, I wasn't allowed to look in a certain direction.

[01:07]

I had to sit in a chair. I don't know. I can't remember exactly, but something was going on. And when I was allowed to walk, there was Norbert Janssen. with many arms. He's already way bigger than me. And he was standing there with all these arms above me, like, wishing me happy birthday. Do you remember? When I was about to turn around, Norbert Jansen suddenly appeared behind me, who is much bigger than me anyway, but he was even bigger and had all these many arms that looked out from behind him or from the side of him.

[02:14]

So he just wrote me an email, a letter email. And he says, Dear Richard, in a few days, I'm facing the anniversary of my diagnosis. It was last year in Rastenberg when I began to have problems. was sitting and pain getting more and more severe. So this annual seminar had not only become an opening into inner realizations, Und so ist dieses alljährliche Seminar für mich nicht nur eine Öffnung in innere Einsichten geworden im Zuge der letzten 20 Jahre, sondern es wurde auch zu einem Symbol für einen Wendepunkt im Leben ganz allgemein.

[03:36]

I miss very much not being able to sit. And see my Dharma friends and see you this year. Long periods of sitting are still uncomfortable. But otherwise, there is a lot of progress, whatever that means. So you live in the same city, so you can maybe tell us something after I share the letter. Other than fatigue and my reduced immune system, I'm pretty well and I can use time for myself and for others as I like. In fact, I've won a lot of time in the present, which I think I will somehow lose at the end of life.

[05:06]

But worrying about that is only a weird construction. The cancer has taught me and told me a lot of things. Der Krebs hat mir viel gesagt und hat mich viel gelehrt. That there's nothing without an opposite. Dass es nichts ohne sein Gegenteil gibt. To celebrate and remember this, I find the practice of two hands really helpful. Not only because it emphasizes pleasant aspects of bodily experience, but because it also helps me go gently into the completion of each moment.

[06:30]

And now, sitting facing a wall has new meanings. In an early writing of a year ago, I called the day of my diagnosis the day I lost my images. I couldn't imagine anything, but I could see everything. It was a deep experience of knowing and not knowing. So I lost and I won. I'm glad to hear from Nicole that you are healthy. From my heart, I send you my best thoughts and wishes for a wonderful seminar at the Lichten.

[07:56]

And I wrote to him. we really will miss you too. And I said, my two hands are extended toward you and all our hands are extended toward you. Thanks for your good spirit. I will speak about you at the seminar. May I say at this point, I got an email and an SMS both from Angela and Norbert, and it was very important to them to say hello to each of you, to all of you.

[09:07]

It just came? No, I have been communicating with them the last week. Do you have anything you can add to what It just feels so... Okay. Yeah. Of course, the very basic... teaching of the five skandhas, which we often discussed, and unavoidably discussed, because it's so central to the conception of Buddhist practice.

[10:19]

And it's a teaching unique to Buddhism. It's not in Jainism or in Hinduism. And And it's the first teaching mentioned in the Heart Sutra, which is chanted every day in most Sakyat and monastic centers in the world. And it's basically a teaching a way to observe and participate in the construction and reconstruction of consciousness.

[11:37]

And it's so that there, it's five categories, as most of you know. And the categories are in effect ways to direct our attention. And these categories are ultimately, or what they do, is that they are ways to direct our attention. They are targets for our attention. And that in itself teaches you or shows you something about the conception of Buddhism. And what I'm looking at a lot in this sixth decade of my practicing Buddhism

[12:39]

is the way in which it's based on certain conceptions. ist die Art und Weise, wie der Buddhismus auf bestimmten Vorstellungen oder Konzepten aufbaut. Und die sind einfach und grundlegend. Aber ihre Einfachheit ist für uns revolutionär. Because Buddhist yogic culture does not assume that we live in a created world. We live in a world that's constantly being created.

[13:52]

And we can participate in that creation. Now, I will try to come to it. I spoke about it a little in the There are various ways to look at it as a process of creation. And one of what I said the other day, one of the three main watersheds in Buddhism coming to the West

[14:54]

is how that ongoing activity or process of creation is conceived or governed. And I think in Western Buddhism, we're going to have to not accept all of the assumptions of that process of creation that goes along with Chinese East Asian Buddhism. But I will try to come to that more precisely later in this seminar. But these as categories of targets of attention, because they're targets of attention, there's an emphasis on attention

[16:29]

There's an emphasis on attention as the primary dynamic of intelligence and creativity in a way that's not so common to us. Okay, so I, and maybe I should, and particularly you suggested I might go through the reminding, re-minding, re-consciousing, consciousnessing of the five skandhas if you want, but now I won't do it. Because for most of us, as G.E. Moore says, if consciousness is invisible, How do we peel the invisible, like it was cellophane, saran wrap, off the world?

[18:25]

How do we find one of the edges? peel it off, wet your fingers. So I asked myself yesterday and last evening and this morning, What am I talking about? Now, when I say that, there are certain assumptions for me, may not be apparent to you, built into the statement, what am I talking about? It's a statement that assumes the ongoing process

[19:43]

creative process of construction, experiential construction going on. And I have to sort out, in order to speak about this, I have to sort out my own language in relationship to how the language I find myself using has been used in the past. Because my statement to myself, what am I talking about? In that statement, for me, is the assumption that the process about what the experience and process about which I'm speaking, I only have a limited consciousness of.

[21:36]

So the assumption is that, yes, some of what I'm talking about is surfacing in talking. And some of it I, by the way, yesterday, day before yesterday, I started getting a cold, which really took hold yesterday afternoon. Yesterday and the day before yesterday I got a cold and yesterday afternoon it was really tangible. And it started as a sore throat, but I'm actually pretty well. But I always need boxes of Kleenex for my allergic nose, but now I'm going to need about a big pile of them.

[22:51]

Did you bring any? Oh, goody. Thanks. So... So it is actually for me a kind of discovery that what I'm speaking about has a form that has to be transferred into my consciousness. And once I see it surfacing in my consciousness, like a mind bird, Like an iceberg.

[24:00]

Oh. A mind bird. The ein Geistberg. So... She's good at translating this. Oh, mind bird. And, well, here we are in Rostenberg. Why not? I knew that. Um... So once I begin to see some of the peaks of the Mindberg, I can do a number of things. I can imagine how it extends out of sight. Or I can sort of try to change the liquid in which it's floating so it comes, gets taller. oder ich kann sowas machen wie die Flüssigkeit in der dieser Eisberg ist.

[25:15]

Eisberg? No, mine is. Let's give us that. I'm not cold. I'm warm. I'm warm. Are you making one of your remarks again? Well, sometimes I think of it as like a manhole cover, like in the street. Yeah. A mind hole. A mind hole. A mind hole. Well, yes, it's kind of like that. Some of you know Alexander Auer. She had this extremely bright kid, her oldest son.

[26:26]

And she was walking home with him when he was a little kid, like five or six or something like that. And he said, let's go down this street. She said, why? He says, because it was done in 1870. And she said, well, how do you know that? Well, I read the date on the manhole covers. She took him to a cemetery for a family thing once. When he was, I don't know, again, before school, four or five, five maybe, he already could read. And in the cemetery, he suddenly said, um,

[27:33]

this person lived 45 years and this person lived 72 years. And she didn't know he knew how to calculate. And then as they were leaving, she said, how come women tend to live longer than men? He was smart. She had trouble finding schools for him. Yeah, but he's turned into somebody. You can tell by the observation that women are longer than men. He's turned into something very interested in urban sociology. And he works for the city, I think.

[28:51]

But in any case, yes. In any case, manhole covers tell you quite a bit. And the entire cities, communication systems, waste system, electrical, all is underground. So, There's a kind of feeling, what I'm expressing in these images, is a feeling for something going on out of sight or off-scene, not in consciousness, but yet part of consciousness.

[29:56]

No, I'm always a little shy to speak to you about these things, which I'm sure from your own perspective you know more about than I do. But at the same time, I'm aware that it's taken me a lot of years to make, to have certain kinds of analogies or metaphors appear that, as far as I can tell, appear because of the incubating mind for half a century. Breathing.

[31:23]

You're breathing. Well, this is really good. Please continue. I hope the rest of you are participating. Yeah. So that these metaphors and analogies let me ask myself, how can I notice what I'm talking about when only part of it is surfacing? And I find myself using the concept, and I applied it, I said it last night, of an imaginal realm. And I have now found that I use a concept again and again.

[32:38]

And I applied that yesterday evening. And I call it an imagination. But then I realized that an imaginal realm or an active imagination is part of Islam and Jungian psychology and so forth. Rudolf Steiner and so forth. So they mean something different than I mean by the word imaginable realm. So I think I should use maybe imaginary consciousness.

[33:38]

And I mean, I would guess that if Freud comes up with the idea of an unconsciousness, That becomes, once it's there, all over the world it's begun being used. And if you're a therapist, Freudian or any, you probably naturally the imagination of unconsciousness as present, even if it's not visible, begins to affect how you activate, actualize your whole life, as well as your profession as a therapist.

[34:41]

Which, for me... I bring into my world not just an idea of unconsciousness and unconsciousness, but also a non-consciousness. and also more specifically the concept of the Alaya Vishnana.

[35:44]

And didn't you, Christina, ask me to say something more about the Alaya Vishnana? Oh, I see. Well, that's what I'm talking about, per your instruction or suggestion. So I have to, it takes a while to figure out, find out how to speak about these things in an instructive, useful way. But my statement to question to myself, what am I speaking about, has in it the assumption that I feel the activity of the alaya vijnana, or a non-conscious dynamic process.

[37:11]

So let me try to give you a simple example. If we assume that everything, again, I keep coming back to it, but I mean, for me, my coming back to it is always quite new for me, so maybe it is partly for you. is that everything is an activity. So let's look, there's an emphasis in the Rinzai school on koan practice. And there's an emphasis in the Soto school, which is more in that lineage,

[38:17]

I've practiced both, but I'm primarily in the Soto lineage. And the Soto school, one of its emphases, but only one of it, is on what's called Shikantaza. And Shikantaza is translated easily as just sitting. And most people understand that as somehow, most of us, as doing nothing, just sitting. But if you've embodied, cognitively embodied, the fact, functional fact, functional facticity, that it's impossible to do nothing.

[39:41]

Because there's always activity. If I say to myself, do nothing, I'd have to be dead. And then other things would be happening. So in fact, although I might say to myself, do nothing, my heart's being, you know, et cetera. So when, if you're in a world of, a dynamic of, of, Interactional interdependence or something like that is the case.

[40:45]

Wenn du in einer Welt bist, in der eine Dynamik wie... You'd immediately ask yourself, what's going on when you do nothing? So you study what's going on when nothing is happening. Because there's no such thing as nothing happening. Okay. I think we should have a break soon. So I'll just make a few remarks.

[41:50]

Why are you laughing? Because this doing nothing and going on and nothing, it's so full. Yes. So if you recognize that doing nothing is a form of doing, then you would discover what kind of doing nothing does nothing. Or does as little as possible. Dann würdest du entdecken, welche Art des Nichtstuns tut nichts, oder tut so wenig wie möglich. Or lifts up the manhole cover in the city surface. Oder hebt diesen Gullideckel in der Straße der Stadt hoch.

[42:58]

Or allows the mine bird to float a little higher in the... by changing the viscosity of its medium. Okay. And that would be, in the case of Shikantaza, a non-conceptual modality of knowing. And in the case of Shikantaza, that would be Eine nicht-konzeptuelle Modalität des Erkennens oder Wissens. And the example I used in the previous seminar. Das Beispiel, das ich im vorigen Seminar benutzt habe. As sometimes for a visa or entering the United States these days. She might mark. Or Getting your iPad, if it's an Apple iPad, to recognize your thumb or your forefinger.

[44:06]

You're supposed to put your finger down and and the pattern begins to fill in. And it asks you to move it around and so forth, and the lines keep filling in. So something like that happens, in a non-conceptual mode of mind. That's sort of like, as I said, the fingerprint of phenomena, the fingerprint of the world begins to fill in.

[45:18]

Now, how do you What is non-conceptual knowing? What is a non-conceptual modality mind? Well, it's, you know, words don't exactly, it's not exactly descriptible. But you know when you go to sleep. If you go to sleep lots of times, so we might as well study it. And I think you know that, we all know, that at a certain point, sleep takes state of mind, mode of mind, we can call it sleep,

[46:21]

bodily mode of mind, takes hold and we kind of disappear. No, since that's the topic just now, you can begin to feel the boundaries between disappearing into sleep and the prior to sleeping. And now there's an intermedial Intermediate? Yeah. In between. Intermediate state where you're not yet asleep, but you're primarily floating in images that are being volunteered to you.

[47:41]

And this is not, at least in my experience, lucid dreaming. It's a kind of consciousness, but a kind of involuntary consciousness. Das ist in meiner Erfahrung nicht wie luzides Träumen, sondern es ist eine Art Bewusstsein, aber eine Art unwillkürliches Bewusstsein. Wenn du ein Körpergefühl für diese Erfahrungen hast, When you can't sleep very well, say, you can simply shift in, not simply, but you can unsimply, shift into an involuntary, imaginal consciousness.

[48:53]

And you get a different kind of rest in that than usual sleeping, but it's not the same as not sleeping. In other words, if you increased your attentional sensitivity sufficiently, You can begin to experience those differences and make them a bodily tunable territory. So in a similar way in meditation, you can begin to know the particular modality of mind I'm calling non-conceptual knowing.

[50:04]

you can have the attentional skills to allow that to happen in zazen. So shikantaza is really the ability to establish a non... a... a non-conceptual modality of mind. So I just want to add one thing. All of this is not dependent on Zazen. In other words, if you establish this imaginal realm or imaginary consciousness, imaginal consciousness,

[51:27]

More? That's nice. If you establish this imaginal consciousness... Excuse me. I'm not sure if I should do imaginal. In German I have to make a choice whether I'm going the direction imaginary or I say pictorial. is pictorial, but then it only has the quality of its pictures. Or if I say imaginary, then it's a little different. Well, say both. Okay. When you come to a forking of a road, take it. So Zen practice is to bring into the details of your life, not just Zazen, This sense of another way of noticing the world.

[53:01]

So maybe I can unpack that a little more at some point. But I promised you that we'd stop for a moment. break and I'm a little late in fulfilling my promise. Sorry.

[53:31]

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