Good morning. Good morning. You became green today. Yesterday you were more red, I think. What about tomorrow? Well, I liked Christianus and Christus. A lot of Christians in here. Christus. Image of water, the boat. And And over the years the water has been the best, I think, most accurate and fruitful metaphor for the mind that I have found.

[01:15]

And I seem to Every year I start this seminar, I think, as I did the other night, with, you know, mulling, musing, thinking about why and how it's different from other seminars I do. Und es scheint so zu sein, dass ich das Seminar immer so beginne wie am vorletzten Abend, dass ich darüber nachdenke, And if we do this next year, I hope... Probably I'll start the same way again.

[02:18]

I seem to have to locate myself in this seminar by talking about the location. Yeah, and I guess I'm looking for permission to... I have this seminar somewhat different than others. And I'm looking probably also for permission from you to... step forward into the seminar as I do. And I think my reflection, reflecting on what the seminar is for me, I'm also trying to

[03:21]

hoping to elicit from you reflections on the center. And I hope that this way of doing the seminar also leads to you, and this reflection of the seminar from my side, that you yourself say something about how you see this seminar. And I find... if I remember correctly, I surprisingly speak about not exactly the same, but similar things. And it's always possible that you understand these things so well and reflected on them so thoroughly during the year that, you know, it's somewhat redundant.

[04:49]

Or very redundant. But maybe for you it's somewhat like it is for me. Which is, even though what I speak about in seminar with you, and then, you know, it's part of... It's part of what I do all year round, which is, I don't know, 300 or so lectures a year. And when I come back to it here, for me it's really different, like I found it for the first time. Or going into it again, it becomes more developed and clearer, perhaps.

[06:17]

Anyway, this is my... And... But it does help me, and I ask you during the seminar points, to tell me something about how the seminar is useful to you, unless there must be some reason you come back. And I really want to encourage you to tell me during the seminars how the seminar works for you, how it is, because there has to be a reason why you come back again and again. Because the focus for me always in the seminar is what constitutes relationship with others.

[07:29]

And what And in particular, how that is part of the psychotherapeutic relationship. Yeah. And of course, yeah. Anyway, that's enough on that. Sometimes I imagine practice is sort of like being in a dry dock. There's no water in the dry dock, but there's a boat. We all climb into the boat. And then we start filling the dry dock with water.

[08:31]

And then to make it interesting, maybe we put some holes in the boat. Or some of us have to get out of the boat and swim alongside it. Or swim back and then try to catch up. Or maybe in the end we just sink the boat. Now what I mentioned in the Last seminar, and I've been thinking about how to talk about it for a long time, is the initial awareness of mind arises through knowing that all perception points at mind as well as at the object.

[09:45]

That each perception, any perception, points at the mind perceiving as well as pointing at the object perceived. That's just a simple fact. It's a simple fact that's at the center of... All of Yogacara Buddhism. And Yogacara Buddhism is virtually identical to Zen. Okay, so let's say this is a fact. So we don't want to just know this fact.

[10:55]

Yeah, we want to, because we can know something in some sort of category of the mind which doesn't affect the structure of how we think. exist. Mostly we don't. We externalize objects as a habit and that's the way it is. Okay. So first it's a fact, let's call it a fact, and then you don't just want to know this fact, you want to remind yourself of this fact. So you develop some habit that you inhabit of reminding yourself of this fact.

[12:13]

And like most of these things, at first it's rather mechanically you remind yourself. Yeah. What I'm perceiving is my own mind perceiving. Yeah. You just keep reminding yourself. Until eventually you... This knowledge... this knowing is part of every perception. And this knowing eventually becomes an awareness. Now what do I mean by the distinction between know it, it becomes a a always present knowing and awareness.

[13:25]

Well, I'm trying to make a distinction between knowing it and acting within the knowing of it, which I would call being aware. And that means you have some feeling, feeling of being in the field of the object or the other person is in your sensorial field and you are in their sensorial field. So that the person, let's take a person, you know, that's what we're always, that's the main and most influential object in our living, lived life.

[15:01]

The person is no longer an external object. Relating to in some proofs. Thinking or specific perception. You feel, but you're in a kind of liquid or something like that. A mutually generated object. Now, there's a somewhat technical, perceptual term I brought up in the last seminar.

[16:04]

Which is, in English, rather oddly pronounced, it's saccade. Und der wird im Englischen ziemlich merkwürdig betont als, oder ausgesprochen als, Sakkad. Yeah, it's like sack and fish. Sakkad. Es ist wie ein Fisch, der so heißt, oder in der Zusammensetzung aus sack, wie das sagt, Sakkad. But for some reason it's spelled... S-A-C-C-A-D-E [...] But if you're not familiar with the term, it means the way you scan an object or a person when you look at them.

[17:15]

Okay. Now, this scanning process is an essential part of the V. fundamental view of Yogacara then. And one way it's so fundamental just because we have the knife edge of the present. Everything is past and then immediately future.

[18:18]

I mean, everything is future and then immediately past. And the present has no duration. A millionth of a second to 12, and then there's a millionth of a second after 12. How long is 12? Okay. Well, scanning is one of the main... ways we create a sense of present. It creates the feeling of a spatial duration. So if I'm looking at this, looking at you, I'm actually... putting together a lot of information.

[19:20]

And the congealing? Congeal is like jello when something sticks together. And the congealing of that information, we feel we're in a space in the present we can act. Now the scanning, the process of scanning is just outside I think when they studied it, it's around three times a second. And that's a bit faster than consciousness can notice.

[20:20]

And when they tracked the scanning of eyes, of a person's eyes, when you scan another face, it looks like, in the diagrams I've seen, you see there's about 80% of them you scan the person's eyes. You do a few scans of the nose and mouth and some of the proportions of the face and then the eyes. But the ears are doing the same thing and the proprioceptive spatial sensitivity of the body is doing the same thing, etc. Now, we could, so, instead of saying we're in a simultaneously generated liquid...

[21:44]

And maybe it's more helpful from the point of view of practice or entering into this as participatory, in a participatory way. And imagining this as a mutually generated scanned space may be more... Okay. I don't know what studies, I've only read a little bit about this, but my own experience of this to the extent that I can find it in my experience. Not only do I scan just outside my consciousness, and the other person, say, it's simple, the other

[23:04]

The person is scanning just outside their consciousness. I'm at the same time aware of being scanned. They're aware of being scanned. I think that if there's sexual attraction, then the scanning is not limited to the face. This is fairly obvious and people notice it right away. Now, because we notice the scanning, we react to the scanning by avoiding it or accepting it.

[24:16]

If you... Want someone to like you? You open your face to scan me, baby. Scan you, baby. You know, if you really want to keep a little distance as they scan your eyes, you avert your eyes. No, if I don't want social space with a person and I want practice space with a person, I turn off facial scanning and turn on proprioceptive scanning. No, it's just, there must be exactly, nearly exactly the same kind of situation with the client.

[25:32]

We talked yesterday about how you alter the pieces of the puzzle. Once you're more engaged. But also the way you participate in the mutual scanning process. or deflect a mutual scanning, has something to do with what puzzle appears. What was that? You're scanning each other?

[26:32]

No, that was just what we were talking about yesterday. Oh, really? Like, often we just meet this problem. Yeah, well, I'm trying to keep up with you guys. Maybe we should leave that point and come back to it. Maybe that's enough detail there for this moment. But, you know, bodhisattva practice, the six parameters, which start out with generosity, discipline, and patience, are really about developing an attitude of

[27:47]

willing to give the person you're standing in front of whatever they need. And discipline means to learn. And so the second is to be open to whatever they offer you. And the most generous thing you can offer another person is your own state of mind. It's worth offering. So if you have an image of the Buddha, you feel the presence of the Buddha, or you feel this openness of the person, whatever, that becomes part of the scanning process.

[29:22]

such an interesting, wonderful person to me, and such a wonderful person to me. And what he said he felt was he, most of his life, he never lived outside the presence of Christ. He lived, as he would say it, in the enfleshed space of Christ. And you felt that. Felt something like that. I might say it's more, maybe it's kind of Buddha, but it was, you know. And you felt with him deeply unequivocally accepted.

[30:53]

And you can notice in yourself, do you with another person feel deeply, unequivocally accepted? Fühlt man sich bei einer anderen Person tief? Because whether you do or not, it's completely apparent to the other person. It's just present in the scanning process, if nothing else. Okay, back to... the awareness of each perception points at the mind perceiving and the object perceived. So from knowing you go into a a sensorial awareness of mind.

[32:17]

Mind is the medium of the object perceived and the This field is called, technically, an ayatana. A-Y-A-T-A-N-A. pronounce the letters wrong in German and you outnumber me too it's easy to spell in Japanese but very hard to spell in German The next step is you begin to feel

[33:26]

which I've implied already, but more specifically, you really feel you're in the medium of the mind. So this is the difference between being conscious and being... conscious of consciousness. Now this is almost impossible to say in English. If you said to most people, I mean, Buddhism rests on being conscious of being conscious. Most people wouldn't care, but if they did, they'd say, well, I'm conscious of that, I'm conscious.

[34:50]

Yeah, saying like, I know I'm conscious. But that's not the same as being experientially conscious of consciousness. So the consciousness of consciousness is to be experientially conscious of consciousness. Now let's leave out of the question whether to be conscious of consciousness is awareness or not. Let's leave that out. I think here the metaphor again of water will serve us. It's a When you look at, as I said in the last seminar, if you look at a stone, under water, you experience the water

[36:08]

through which you see the stone, as well as the stone. You can see the stone, and you can see the water that you're seeing the stone through. And with a little experience of swimming in lakes, you'll know that the stone is somewhat easily enlarged and refracted and displaced. And If you see a stick in the water, it goes in and then it goes... Now, according to Illich, before the year 1000...

[37:17]

People thought that was because the eye ray bent. Greek and early Christian optics had the sense like when you looked in a mirror, it was bending the eye ray. And the... No, just a little bit. not central to what I'm saying right now, but as far as I know Buddhism never thought that. But the sense of a gaze going outward and taking hold of an object is very Buddhist. And I suppose in the context of Yogacara, I would explain that.

[38:44]

Is when awareness, when the psychotic process is within attentional awareness. Unawareness. undeflected attentional awareness, then you feel gripped by the other person's gaze. And we learn to turn that off. It's disturbing to people. But we also can learn how to develop that as of the entirety of the sensorial field to establish a profound non-subject-object connectedness.

[40:02]

And how can we learn this to develop a complete sensory field? zu schaffen, um dann zu etablieren, the last part I didn't get. A non-subject object. The difference between one of the different, you know, if we have the metaphor of seeing a stone in water, you can take the stone out of the water and see its color is different and so forth. So you can study what the medium of the water does to the stone. So I can put this under water and take it out of the water and look at it.

[41:10]

But I can't take this out of mind. So I have no way to compare and see how the medium of mind affects my perception of this object. Now, how to answer that question is one of the developments within Yogacara Zen. Okay. While you were away, I mentioned while I could put this under the water and take it out and then see how it's different.

[42:13]

Like a stone, you can see it's a different color. But I can't take this out of the mind and see what it looks like when it's not in the medium of the mind. But you can't. Gee, do I say all those things? But you can. Funny, it feels like a quantity when it's translated. It doesn't feel like a quantity when I say it. But you can feel the medium of the mind in your activity.

[43:20]

As space? As like a liquid? And as an implicit and... either rigid or pliant structure. But more of that later. If we go back in that direction. And I think it's time for a break. And thank you very much. See you later. Thank you. Speaking about Dry Dock, Al Green. You know, Al Green is one of the, I think, great black singers. He says,

[44:21]

I can make a boat sail on dry land. And even with all the powers I possess, I can't get next to you, baby. I don't know why I ended that way. But it's such a great line. I can make a boat sail on dry land. I can change the seasons with a wave of hand. That's the power people feel in computer games. [...]

[45:30]

That's the power people feel in computer games. [...]

[45:46]

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