Is there anything you'd like to speak about or thoughts or observations about, you know, what we talked about this morning or anything? Yes. I went through the process of meditation through the five dharmas. A thought appears. I name it the thought. I discriminate it. I'm not the thought. And I sort of go back into the lightly focus on the breathing. Mm-hmm. And I come back to the suchness. Is that the procedure? That would be fine. That's okay. Those are the ingredients and you can apply the ingredients. I often say you either cook your karma or get cooked by it. So in a way you're cooking your own. You can use this any way you want. That's the idea. That's the ingredients. We had a discussion on coming here to this place.

[01:09]

You mean driving when you're driving? Yeah, we were driving, me also, and then the importance of when you're working with this practice, the importance of having dealt with other stuff in your life. If I take myself as an example, the first time I had driving, and he had a if we generalize as psychologists, parts of me were closed, and parts of the therapy we've been doing is that, you know, opening up that closed part. How important is that sort of work, therapeutic work, when you can work with practice of thoughts and mindfulness and so on? Yeah. Well, as I said, Buddhism, in my opinion, although not everyone agrees with me, but I think they're wrong, Buddhism is not a psychology, it's a mindology.

[02:11]

But it overlaps with those aspects of psychology, which are studying the mind and so forth, because psychology is bigger than just concern the psyche as a field. I think you can't expect Zen practice to do all it can do, and no teaching can do everything. You can't expect Zen practice to do all it can do, probably, usually, unless you spend some time in monastic practice. Monastic practice, you mean? Like living at Crestone, where you live separate from societal conditioning for a considerable length of time. In Japan and China, it would be generally considered 10 years if you're serious. Two or three years if you want to be a moderately good priest or teacher, but to be a realized teacher who freely has embodied the teaching at considered ten years is a minimum.

[03:14]

Okay. So, most of us can't do that. Right? Any takers? No, I'm just kidding. Most of us can't do that. So you have to do some combination. But just to know that is helpful. That's one aspect. I mean, as a layperson, it's useful to know that, what I just said. Because you can kind of, like, there was no monastery. I mean, you know, in order to do what I'm doing, I had to create a monastery to do it. Because there were no monasteries, no Zen monasteries. So I practiced as if San Francisco, where I had happened to be living at the time, was a monastery. It was just a big one. I pretended it was a monastery. But at some point Suti or she made clear to me that he thought, you know, most of us weren't going to get it unless we had a more monastic practice. So I started hunting for a place and found Tassara.

[04:15]

And then we purchased it, luckily. And immediately lots of people who... had been practicing this way and that way suddenly made it their life. And the difference was clearly Tassahara. And we find the same thing. Lots of people practice in the modified lay monastic situation of Yohanneslav. But every person, I think, I have to really stop thinking, but every person who's made it their life decided this is the primary way when it has been at Creston for practice periods. Most of them, like Atmar, I told you who the, she asked me last night on the boat, who was living at Jansav and so forth. One of them is Atmar Engel. Do you know Atmar? Atmar, I mean, he spent six months a year for ten years or something at Crestham.

[05:19]

Um... Okay. Um... And there are psychological, this is a rather thorough answer, but I think it's important, because Ravi's here, and you are involved with therapy as well, some of you, or all of you, as well as, you know, to some extent, Zen practice. There are aspects of Buddhism that can be used in a psychological way, which... Were they used in the past in a psychological way? Probably in any serious sense, not really. Why would there be a difference? Because we're different people than some Chinese, some dynasty Chinese folks. I mean, the idea that we're somehow the same kind of person from Greek times until now, in my opinion, is just not true.

[06:23]

And... one of the main things Ivan Illich and I share, my friend and mentor. And so the teaching has to be different. So for us to enter into practice in certain, we have to deal, in fact, I would say that Freud didn't discover the unconscious. I mean, I would say that Freud didn't notice the unconscious. What he did, how can I put it? Freud noticed the unconscious, or he decided to describe things that weren't present to consciousness as having some kind of depository, so let's call it the unconscious. But I would say that up until, you know, 100 years before Freud and up until industrialization, etc., in general, people didn't have an unconscious in the way we think of it now, because the self wasn't...

[07:27]

under pressure or demand to have very clear boundaries and function a certain way. When the self has to function a certain way, it excludes things that interfere with the functioning. I think Freud discovered the unconscious about the time the unconscious began to be a factor in Western people's lives, something like that. But Now that we do function this way, I think it's very useful, or can be useful, to take aspects of Zen Buddhism and use them in psychological ways. And I actually would like to do a book about that. I don't know if I'll live long enough. Because I used Buddhism in psychological ways for my own benefit. Now, to actually answer your question, not give you background.

[08:28]

I think for lay persons and for more monk-like practitioners, psychotherapy is maybe essential or very important. And they can work together. And somebody like Ravi, they definitely can work together. When we first sent out our announcement that we founded, we're founding Tassahara in 1966 or so, we set off the brochure. I designed a brochure. The second one was, I forget the first one, what it's called. The second one was called An Unconditioned Response to a Conditioned World. And I designed this great big piece of paper folded in a rather origami way because I wanted, you know, to come in the mail. And, you know, Harold gives it and he says, Maude? I can't even open this thing. Will you come over and help me? And so Maude has to come over. They have to unfold it, you know, because I wanted a physical engagement with it. I didn't want it just to be read.

[09:35]

What is this? So we sent that out to 25,000 therapists in California. No response but hostility. Nobody was interested. They rejected the idea. It's our territory. You stay out of it, you know, etc. And the Jungians were saying things to me like, well, you don't even want to try meditation until you're 35, because it's at least 35, because it's dangerous. So it's been a huge change now. The largest component of the Dharma Sangha is probably therapists. The second largest component, you know what that would be? Computer programmers. Because they all said, well, how's the mind work? Next is probably medical doctors, maybe. Anyway, so I think therapy is important to do, useful to do, and it can be a useful relationship to practice, particularly when the therapist doesn't feel competitive.

[10:43]

And what's good about doing this with Robbie now, I think, is that much of what I'm bringing up, I can only bring up in a rather abbreviated way during these three days, So to the extent that you feel you want to explore it further, Ravi can do it with you. Does that answer your question? It does. And there are aspects of... In fact, you can use Zen practice to protect yourself. to get enough of a feeling of well-being that you don't really have to go any further. So, someone else?

[11:46]

I had a lot of questions last night. They were answered in your dreams. No, no. You came in front this morning with us. I'm pretty empty right now. I'm not asking you. I'm observing that you were observing. Okay. I have something in my mind that I'm not... I just think it's something that I'm thinking. And it's probably a construct. And that's the way I want to bounce it off, just to see it outside of myself. I hope it's a construct. I can't understand it if it's not. Yeah, and when we are meditating, my construct is that in order to see and behold my own senses, to hear what I'm hearing, I have to have a different position than in my hearing.

[12:47]

I need a different perspective. by through cultivation of being in the fundamental truth or in the concept of now within myself that sort of establishes that platform whereby I can behold my conceptual mind the tapestry of concepts because otherwise I'm in the concepts and I need the different perspective and that's what we are cultivating That's right. My concept now is, first of all, I tap into that and I can start to sense that it's two different minds. It's the Sai Zen mind and the conventional mind, the ordinary mind. The more I meditate, for instance, as a monk in 10 years or for 20 years or whatever the year might be,

[13:50]

you said the two minds coming together is it that I'm more and more established in that mind of fundamental mind to behold my conventional mind well to the first part of what you said I said that's right um What's more important than whether what you said is right or not is that you explore this the way you're exploring it. So the second part of what I was saying, what you said, I'd rather not say that that's right or not right, but rather just say that kind of exploration is essential. And you, through that exploration, you discover yourself how these two minds relate, etc. The way I'm asking now when I can hear it from outside is that it becomes sort of an accomplishment not a competition not that but it's like from my background it's more of this is the way it's supposed to be and then I realize it's a construct this is the way of enlightenment or enlightening in an activity and as long as I feel it's an accomplishment then I can't dive into it

[15:24]

I want to stay out of it. And just letting it be. That's why I'm not responding to you. Because I don't want to. It's just to be. It's all fine. It's not fine. I mean, it's true that one becomes more accomplished at distinguishing, knowing, settling yourself in one mind or the other, at being able to make shifts. But if you think of it in terms of accomplishment, that's I mean, it is an accomplishment, and it's not competitive, but it's better just to do it. And the more you just do it, the more you find subtleties that don't fit into any concept. You want that to be something in addition to that. You wouldn't just do it, but don't worry about it. That too. Which I found made it a lot easier.

[16:28]

Feedback. Yeah. So let's get, did I miss somebody who wants to say something? So let's just continue a little bit with this host guest gathering in, gathering out. Again, this is a way to recognize that there's these two different minds and to develop a relationship between two different minds and integrate these two different minds. And what suchness, we can say suchness means something like non-duality. But if we call it non-duality, that's concept that points at it but the experience of it is that everything just has a presence a non-conceptual presence it doesn't fit into concepts and but there can be an advantage to concepts in the sense that you have the experience of hearing hearing

[17:53]

which is the experience of completeness and I'm just using these as kind of symbols of practice in a wider sense. Hearing, hearing could also be feeling, feeling or noticing the field of thinking. Okay, so I'm using hearing, hearing, hearing, semiotic way. If you just hear hearing, it has a feeling of completeness and bliss. Now, I remember, let me just say something about bliss. I want to say something about bliss. You know, I noticed for years when I was practicing that I often felt good or at ease or kind of... Yeah, I don't know.

[18:57]

I can remember the only time I ever really felt it as a kid was, like, late at night, you hear a train whistle in the distance or something. And I remember thinking, I could die on that sound. But, you know, how can, you know, you're going to college, you're in high school, and you're supposed to study and do things, and how can you say that I want to build my life around hearing train whistles at night? You just don't do that. You know, so in my experience of, yeah, this is serious stuff, you know, you don't... But this kind of nice feeling come up. But at some point I said, this is quite persistent, this nice feeling. It keeps coming up. And at some point I said, this is an aspect of practice I should allow. So that's in a way recognizing it conceptually. And the recognition of it conceptually... began to make it the main experience of maizate.

[20:00]

Or as we were talking earlier, when you not only feel the subtle bliss and then the more explicit bliss of hearing, hearing, which locates you, But then when you have a concept, I'm hearing, hearing, I'm only hearing what I can hear, that opens you to the fact that there's a mystery that's part of it because you're only hearing a portion. So you become embedded, anchored, located through hearing, hearing, but located in a field that you don't understand, that's beyond understanding. So it makes, it gives you a much more subtle aspect of the world. You could say that opens you to the feeling of Momonyamata Roshi, to know, the most important single thing is to know that everything, everywhere is working to make this moment possible.

[21:10]

Okay. Now, you know, if you have that feeling, if you take that as an intention or as a way you locate yourself in the world, that everything, everywhere is working to make this moment possible, You actually relate to things quite differently. So you can't separate conceptual concepts from practice. As I said, to sit down is a concept. To not move is a concept. To not scratch is a concept. But we use them not to identify ourselves, but to articulate, notice, etc., and to recognize they're just concepts. Okay. A friend of mine, Norbert Johansson.

[22:15]

Do you think he might be Swedish? Norbert Johansson, who's a psychotherapist in Kassel. And I meet with two groups of psychotherapists once a year, a group in Austria, which I've been meeting with, as I told you, I don't know, 18 years, and a group in Kassel off and on for about seven or eight years. And his wife, Angela, is also a psychotherapist. And Norbert is huge. He's really, really a big guy. You know, I feel like a kind of teenage girl when I give him a hug. But he says, what he does with his clients, one example he does, is he asks them to walk three steps with their eyes open, and then three steps with their eyes closed. And it's quite an interesting good idea, such a simple thing again.

[23:17]

But they feel the difference between walking with their eyes open and then walking with their eyes closed, and he says, almost immediately they have a feel for their situation that's different. His wife said she tried to enter this feeling by, she did a Tibetan Buddhist practice where they were seven days in the dark. And there's actually, I don't know if you've ever seen the film, The Elder Brothers Teach or something like that, Elder Brothers Warning. And it's a group of There's a number of, two or three groups of Indians in Native, well, Native South Americans in South America who win the Portuguese and the Spanish and others game. They just got the hell out of there and went to the mountains or went to isolated swampy jungle areas. And this one group live at one of the highest places in the Andes and they've seen that the snows

[24:26]

that used to be for generations, as long as they can have any cultural, tribal memory, have been deeply deep in snow all year round, and they're not anymore. And they feel this is the source of life for the planet, because they see it goes down the hills, etc. So they've had a German anthropologist, filmmaker, who interviewed them, and they decided they'd give a warning. One of their tribe speaks English, speaks German. So this German fellow made a movie, which is quite wonderful to see, but while I'm bringing it up, is the tribal medicine men, or shamans, or teachers, gurus, when they pick a young, I think it's only men, I haven't seen the movie for 15 years or so. They pick young men, and I know from Native American tribes, there's a process where you pick the boys who are most likely to have the power to be shaman.

[25:40]

Anyway, they pick a certain number of boys, real young, and then they bring them up in darkness for 15 years. Back in caves. and they bring them food, etc. And then when they come out, they have a different, you would think, they have a different way of relating to the world and knowing things and sensing things. But one doesn't have to go to the monastery for 10 years, and you don't have to go into a cave in darkness for 15 years, or even perhaps a Tibetan practice of 7 years. Do you know Christoph Boothink? What he does, which I think is also quite interesting, is he, when he's working, he's a puppeteer. He develops puppets and stories for children. He lives in Nordkastel. Anyway, mid-Germany somewhere. He, when he wants to work and make a new connection with the audience, he brings the feeling of darkness behind his head around to the front,

[26:49]

and then acts in that darkness which he's brought from behind his head. That's actually very similar to yogic techniques to do something like that. And you can get a feel for it, maybe. It's interesting also, as I said earlier, that we're auditorily more sensitive behind our body than in front of our body, which if you're a bicycle rider, that's quite useful, you know. Okay. So in these four... marks and five diamonds are also in a way, when you peel the name of something, maybe you're un-conceptualizing things, you're just something like bringing darkness in. When you walk as if the floor might not be there, you're bringing a kind of feeling of darkness in. You have to feel your way toward the floor. So, you know, I was going to call my book that I'm in the middle of writing, Original Mind, The Practice of Zen in the West.

[27:54]

That's the title that the publisher paid me a lot of money for 20 years ago. Anyway, I hate to admit it. But I think now I would probably call it Original Mind, The Craft of Zen in the West. Which is implied in... Kaz is titled there. Unfolding enlightenment implies that enlightenment is a craft, not just a one-time experience. Okay, so let's take the example of host and guest. So we could say that the host sense of Being the host is the mind which doesn't invite the thoughts to tea.

[28:55]

Now if you bring that feeling, you get to know that feeling in Zazen. Now again, consciousness and our consciousness is how we form ourself. So we can't abandon it in the stages of pulling one's identification out of consciousness can be an excruciating psychological and fearful process. But not only is it a way that we have formed our identity by which we function and feel good or bad or hurt, our feelings are hurt or not hurt, it's also the way we're compassionate, the way we love our children, the way we love our mother and father and friends is through this identity we've created. So you almost feel like you're not caring for people when you pull your identity outside of societal, cultural, and conceptual consciousness. So you really have to have some anchor, as I said, in situated immediacy.

[30:00]

And let me just have a little footnote here. Again, it's quite useful to do a simple thing like change the words with which you talk to yourself. And... So you don't say tree, you say tree. When you think, when you look at a tree, you say tree. When you think about yourself, you think, sometimes I'm Latta. Not always, sometimes I'm Latta. But then you notice, sometimes I'm a mother, sometimes I'm a wife, sometimes I'm an independent person. Sometimes I'm Buddha. Sometimes you're Buddha, yeah, that's right. And the more you feel these various roles, you can begin to feel that sometimes I'm Buddha. And again, to try to substitute for yourself, whenever you say now, try to remind yourself the concept of now.

[31:06]

Just if you remind yourself that, every time the word now comes up, you think the concept of now, You will enter into the now-ness in a different way. It will no longer be something that's there if you participate in or not participate in, etc. And it's the same for everyone. It will be situated immediately. So you either say the concept of now or you say something in Swedish that gives you a feeling of situated immediately. or English. Many people I know, Germans, find it easier to practice with English words because the German words are leased out to Christianity, the Nibelungen, my half German, half Indian, half American friend. All Buddhist.

[32:12]

So he said, don't worry, I got to, which means thank you very much. And I would traditionally, you're supposed to respond with no, no, no, no. That's what I said, yeah, yeah. Okay, so you have, so again, you have to slowly, in a homeopathic dosis, or acupuncture-like technique to replace now with the concept of now. And that's also to apply right knowledge. In the midst of the habit of discriminating the present as a now, you bring in right knowledge, the concept. actually change the way this puzzle is put together.

[33:19]

What also helps is a fair amount of time doing zazen where you more and more have an experience of the mind, the territory of the mind, the physical embodiment of the mind which doesn't invite the thoughts to tea. The more you can feel that, not just occasionally or not just know about it, it becomes an essential part of separating your identification from societal, cultural, conceptual consciousness. And it becomes an essential part not because it's actually a different location. It's a kind of different location. But it's not just that it's a different location. It's at a location where you actually feel better.

[34:23]

You feel healthier, more complete, more satisfied. So it becomes a way you can feel this more integrated sense or fully located sense in the midst of doing things. Now say that you've established fairly well this feeling of the mind which doesn't invite your thoughts to tea. Now, you develop that primarily, I think, for any one of us, in Zaza. Because, you know, if you're moving, and this is moving, it's very hard to see it. If you can slow yourself down until you're physically still, then you can start seeing your emotions and mind and thoughts and conceptions moving around.

[35:25]

But you begin to have a kind of observing mind rooted in the stillness of the body, which can see the movement of the mind. And the more there's a stillness rooted in the body, it slows the mind down. In any case, you can begin to study the mind. But until you can begin to study the mind, you can't really have a sense of the mind which doesn't invite the thoughts to tea. So again, once you've established, physically embodied, established, you know, you're familiar with this mind which doesn't invite your thoughts to tea, but you're in some kind of situation, everyday situation, you can feel when you shift to the mind that doesn't invite the thought to tea. So what does it feel like? Well, it feels sort of like, well, there's objects out there, the out there-ness, but you don't think about it.

[36:32]

They're just there. And when you have the experience of this there, that experience of they're just there is the territory of non-duality. You feel like they're coming toward you instead of you're going and they're coming toward you and identifying you rather than you're going out and identifying them. Something Dogen says very clearly. So when feel like they're coming toward you and identifying you. This is the gathering in. You feel that because you don't feel the separation of conceptualization, things feel like they're coming toward you. There's a feeling of intimacy. Now I'm repeating this in various ways to see if I can, that together we can have some feel for it.

[37:40]

So you have the mind which doesn't invite thoughts to tea, which means you're not conceptualizing and discriminating things. You just see them, form, color, etc. You're not thinking about them. You're making association, and I said sanya, sanya, you're making association, sort of, in a mild way, gentle way, but it's not a mind that arises from conditioning, not strongly arising from conditioning, previous associations. And the more you drop the conceptualization of discursive thinking and just notice, there's this feeling of gathering in. When you turn to act in the world, this unfolding, this granting way, It's the granting way when it's rooted in the gathered in way.

[38:49]

So what I'm trying to describe is in the territory of our experience, if we can take the ingredients of our experience and see them and rearrange them a little bit, that's what a yogi does. And a yogic culture is one that does that. So we can identify, for the sake of our conversation, the gathered-in way where you feel there's a non-dual kind of flow. You don't feel separate from the... It's conceptualization that makes us feel separate and then allows us to act in it, you know, move them around. So we can say that this non-conceptual or less conceptualized world is awareness. And in this less conceptualized world, the fish of self has no water to swim in, or very little water.

[40:01]

It's kind of lying on the beach going... So, but as soon as you create a conceptual framework, then we call that leaking, or entering the weeds, the terms are in the Koan studies. You've entered the weeds. Well, entering the weeds is, you know, we do that because that's how we relate to people, etc. So... But the adept keeps the fish of the self in his own or her own aquarium. But the less adept person... the fish of self starts swimming into the other person's concepts and saying, hey, I'm pretty good, I know a lot, you should respect me, etc. So the adept wants to keep the fish of self, are you following my metaphor, from swimming into the other person's concepts?

[41:08]

I want you to notice my fish of self so it swims into your concepts. But as soon as you form a conceptual world, which we call the secondary, first principle is emptiness, The second principle is form. Now, why do I call this emptiness? I called it awareness a minute ago, but now I'm calling it emptiness. Okay. He'll straighten this off. So, when the fish of self swims into the other person's territory, that's when you're talking, as you spoke to me at the break, when you're in the societal world. So, But the adept can feel that and can feel the presence of self-referential thinking. Now, I can make a distinction which is too fine to really develop between self-referenced thinking and self-referential thinking. And self-referenced thinking would mean something more like we're aware of the functioning of self, but we don't identify with it.

[42:12]

But self-referential thinking, we refer everything to the self. whether it affects me, whether I like it, whether it furthers my career, it doesn't further my career, etc. So you can begin to feel through what I'm talking about, and we've come a long way in two and a half days, we're talking about beginning to feel a mind-body territory which is non-conceptual, which doesn't allow the fish of swellness So you're relatively free of self. Doesn't it let the fish of self loose or have a place to swim? And then creating the conventional world, but now it's rooted in an understanding of an experience of the fundamental world or fundamental truth. And to know when the fish of self swims into the other person's territory, when it stays in your own territory, and when you...

[43:14]

have a way of just relating to the other person's territory, not as mine and yours, but as just a role. As you said, you have a role of a mother, you have a role... In this, you have a certain role. You have the role of a therapist or the role of a business consultant or something like that. Okay. So, these terms, gathering in and granting, host and guest, not inviting your thoughts to tea, are all ways to describe articulate and develop the relationship between this mind you discover in Zazen, which will make decisions differently than the usual mind you have. Okay? That's about as clear as I can be about this. And these terms are useful. Cholstengel, gathering in And I think you can see now, if you have a host mind, it feels at home.

[44:18]

Everything gathers in because you're not separating yourself from things conceptually. So you have a feeling of everything's gathering in, nourishing you, et cetera. So why don't we sit for a moment or two? Then pretend we're conventional people go have lunch. And I will probably can now You do have more possibilities of speaking about the five skandas afterwards. I think you'll see. Unless he asks me some sort of something which suggests I go in a different direction.

[45:27]

No, no, no, no. No, it's five skandas. What? I've made you curious? Yeah. The five skandas. No skandas. It's the tabloid Buddhism. The six parameters. That's true. That's even a further development of conventional. The more this mind is present, we call it the mind of wisdom.

[46:51]

If you want to, shall we have a shorter lunch and shorter afternoon? Shall we continue to have the Swedish discussion? And maybe if I'm present, you can still talk without my interfering. You don't have to switch to English. Okay, I wouldn't mind being present. Okay, so shall we do that that way? And for those of you who would like to work on your sitting, if you're sitting in a chair, the higher you get yourself, the easier it is to get your legs in some sort of cross-legged posture. But the way you two are sitting, it's just fine. And it's a little more concentrated this way, but this is also fine. Your feet tend to get cold out there. But This posture allows you to have your back straight.

[51:05]

Sitting in a chair, you have to keep using musculature to support yourself. When I first started, I sat with three cushions, people used to laugh, I'm going to hurt myself when I fall off. And I sat with one foot way back, I called it the half lily, because lilies are the flower of funerals, and it nearly killed me. I had one foot sticking out back here and one foot sort of out. I could only do it until Sukurishi in the middle of every period would walk around with a stick. So I tried to last. Usually I'd put my feet in and then about five minutes later they'd snap out. But eventually I kind of learned how to do it. But again, if you... get yourself high enough, you can have your legs crossed. Then slowly, as your legs get a little more flexible, you can switch to two cushions. But some people's legs never get, so you can sit easily or they have knee damage or something, and then you have to work away a bench or a chair or something.

[52:18]

Okay, let's have lunch.

[52:19]

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