If Neil and I were strong enough, we could just take hold of this soft floor and pull you all forward. But since we're not, at least I'm not, maybe he could do it. It would be nice if you moved forward some. If we're going to discuss the nature of mind, I need the mind's clothes. Just got here and you're leaving.

[01:13]

Operating the machine. Right. Who's operating the recording machine? Oh, you can do both? It is a recording. It's already working. It's just two buttons on the input. But I mean, but Gerald can do it or somebody. No, he explained it to me on the phone yesterday before he was there. I just got used to it. All right. This Jerry, is that Jerry? Yes. Jerry. Hello, Jerry. Thank you. Thank you for moving on. You can't look really to know what Buddhism is.

[02:40]

Doesn't help much to look at historically what Buddhism has been. Really, to understand Buddhism, we have to look to what it is. What it is in our experience. Yeah. So first we have to look at our experience. feel into our experience. So I can't tell you much about the nature of mind. Well, I'll try to tell you what I've observed or thought I've noticed. But if we're going to... accomplish anything these two days, we need to have some experience individually and shared experience of the nature of mind.

[03:58]

No. If we're all doing a sashin together, it's fairly easy. Or at least the basic technique. conditions make it easier to know the nature of mind. And one of the reasons this practice of sashin exists, because if you sit together over seven days, actually, Fairly quickly, the metabolism of everybody starts to be in sync. You can measure it. Starts to be in?

[05:00]

In sync, in synchronicity. In sync, yeah. Not in the bathtub. Then it will be there, too. Then the metabolism of all participants starts to synchronize relatively quickly. Yeah, but here we don't have so much opportunity to come into a mutual feeling of mind that makes it easy for us to notice. mind and then speak about it. But still, to some extent, we have to find this physical sense of mind.

[06:06]

And for some reason it does just help if there's a field of mind of others in which we can feel this. Yeah, because again, Any concepts I tell you about it don't mean much. What will mean anything is some experience of mine. Now, so we have to look at some Let's try to at least look at some categories of mind to help our noticing. Well, but first let me say, if mind is such a big part of our life, we ought to know something about it. But maybe that's not true.

[07:17]

Maybe mind is just some kind of... untouchable. It's just, we hardly notice it, you know, when I'm looking at you. Do I see mind? No, I see you. In fact, I'm seeing mind, but the information, my senses say, I'm seeing you. So one of the first aspects which I have to remind ourselves of is all of real practice in Buddhism is to develop the habit of seeing mind as well as objects. To see everything as a mind object.

[08:18]

And how to do that or what that means, we can talk about that during our two days. Well, it's very clear it's good to know something about the body. And we have a lot of doctors to help us do it. Yeah. If you're going to, I mean, we know we should exercise, take care of our teeth, do things like that, etc. Wir wissen alle, dass wir unsere Übungen machen sollten, uns um unsere Zähne kümmern sollten, usw. But how do we exercise the mind? Aber wie üben wir, trainieren wir den Geist? Well, you do learn how to think. We learn to do mathematics and speak a language correctly and so forth. When we tell a child to learn ABC, one, two, three, four, you're already learning.

[09:35]

That's already a structuring of the mind. But on the whole, we don't have mind doctors in the same way we have body doctors. We have psychotherapists. Maybe that's about as closely as we get to a mind doctor. But psychotherapists are primarily interested, usually, in the self. And how our experience of the self and history of the self affect us. how we behave and feel about our self.

[10:35]

But from the point of view of Buddhism, the self is only a function of the mind. And the mind is much more than the self. But how do we observe it? Well, the practice of mindfulness is the practice of beginning the observation of mind. And just that topic would be enough for a seminar. And we were just in Hannover with at least some of you, Andreas and Gerald. And we talked about wide choice of Calm mind.

[11:44]

And were we ever wide and joyous? Well, I don't know, but it was okay. We spent most of the time actually on just what could be meant in yogic sense by a wide mind. We explored and discovered something about that really one adjective. in relationship to mind for most of the seminar. But now we're talking about not just the wide mind, but the nature of mind. So I think this topic requires us to review what we know and have practiced within the Dharma Sangha about mind.

[12:59]

For some of you it will be mostly new. And for some of you, it'll be partially or mostly a review. But for those of you for whom it's, you know, partially a review, let's really see if we can feel each category, each distinction. And really see if in ourselves we have the experience and clarity of these distinctions. And you might. You might not feel it the same way. In that case, trust your own experience.

[14:09]

And let's share that, if it's possible, because that will benefit all of us. Because the touchstone... where you start from, is always our experience. The only way we're going to get anywhere is if we work with our experience. And especially if it's different from what I'm saying or what Buddhism is saying. You can't find out what Buddhism says unless you start from your own experience, whatever it is. So I'm going to present some basic, simple things.

[15:17]

But I'd like to present them in a way that we really have a feel for them. Mm-hmm. And I've been doing this for years. Yeah, I've been noticing my own experience. Listening to what Suki Roshi said for years. a decade or more. And studying Buddhism. And then studying my own experience now, observing my own experience and studying it for many years. And studying that in practicing with others.

[16:29]

And much of the development of my understanding has come through practicing with others. Okay. Now, If I say mind is such and such, that's going to influence you. But it shouldn't keep you from noticing your own experience as being similar or different. Yeah. But I do want to influence you. Because, you know, we have to start somewhere.

[17:31]

Buddhism is 2,500 years of influence. And we have to know how that, in a way, influence developed And we have to know how this influence, maybe better than influence, developed. But again, we need to trust our own experience. But try on this long tradition and see how it fits your own experience and how it makes you notice your own experience. Now I'm not just speaking about this right now in relationship to these two days. But I'm trying to give you a feel for how practice itself works as long as you practice the rest of your life.

[18:41]

Yeah, we say wave follows wave, wave leads wave. Our experience leads the teaching. And the teaching leads the experience. And you don't get too many waves ahead. You stay in relationship. And you don't get too many waves ahead. So let's start with some basic categories. Well, waking mind, that's pretty basic. Dreaming mind. And non-dreaming deep sleep. Yeah. Now, this observation is behind all of Buddhism.

[19:54]

And the questions noticing these three categories raise Und die Fragen, die diese drei Kategorien aufgeworfen haben, die haben zur Praxis geführt. Also ich nehme mal stark an, dass ihr diese Kategorien vorher schon bemerkt habt, obwohl es schwierig ist, nicht träumenden Tiefschlaf zu bemerken. Aber man träumt ja nun nicht immer. If you really notice these three categories, and you ask yourself some basic questions, if these minds are so separate from each other, could they be connected? I'll close the window.

[21:05]

Yeah. Okay. Thank you. So we have these three categories. Waking mind, which you're all more or less in right now. Sleeping and dreaming, which probably not too long ago you were enjoying. I hope enjoying. Although we don't always enjoy our dreams. And our sleeping mind is, you know, these two types of sleeping, dreaming sleep and non-dreaming sleep. And what is the first fact about these three minds?

[22:25]

Is they don't know each other very well. You know very well. You only partially know your dreams. And mostly, actually, we don't know our dreams and they're hard to remember. And why are they hard to remember? That's a good question. Why are they hard to remember? Okay. And non-dreaming sleep, we don't know at all what it's like.

[23:27]

Except that it's generally thought to be, felt to be, the most blissful of our three minds. Yeah, there's a lot of problems in consciousness. There's a lot of stress in dreams often. But non-dreaming deep sleep seems to be free of stress. Actually, we can't know exactly what it is because we have no observer in non-dreaming deep sleep. All right. So we can ask ourselves a question.

[24:28]

If you have a scientific... Or you just feel during this lifetime you ought to know what's happening here. You might ask, is there any way to relate these three minds or make them know each other more? And this impulse led to meditation. It seems, though, we don't really know if you go back 3,000 years or so before Buddhism.

[25:32]

There was people tried psychedelics of various kinds. But the tradition from which Buddhism developed decided it was better to do it with with meditation. To just look into the nature of mind itself. Okay, now as I started to say earlier, For I've been reviewing these things, which I'm doing right now with you. Myself for a lot of years. Going over the same things and finding them clearer. Usually clearer and clearer.

[26:42]

And then sometimes not so clear. And then after a while, if I stay with it, the not so clear leads to usually greater clarity. So I'm sharing my reviewing right now, not with the sense that it won't be clearer two years from now. And it looks like I'll be back in Berlin in a year. You can check in. Because already this year it's a little different than I would have expressed it last year.

[27:45]

Now, I'm speaking about it because really to do this practice you've got to engage in this process yourself. So what happens if you decide to try to answer the question, can these minds be more related, know each other? How can you do this? You can't do it with thinking. You can't do it by thinking alone.

[28:47]

Because thinking is what you do when you're awake. So you have to find some way to notice the mind not through thinking. So somebody, I guess, somebody just sat down. Maybe they just gave up. I can't do this. I'm just going to sit down. I give up. And then it all became clear. There might be quite a bit of truth to that actually. Gary Snyder, the The poet thinks that maybe his training is as an anthropologist. Because he says that perhaps hunters, you have to sit a long time and wait for the buffalo.

[29:53]

And while you're waiting, you are enlightened and you decide why I shouldn't kill. Or something like that. Or you're real apologetic for killing the bear. Yeah, anyway, might be some truth to that, too. In any case, people discovered if you sit down You can observe the mind. Because, you know, if I'm moving, and this is moving, I can't see anything. But if I sit still, I can begin to see the movement of the mind, if the body is still. And it was discovered that if the body sits still, the mind starts to become still.

[31:09]

And if you can keep from thinking about it, you can start to observe. the mind. Now this much must be clear. Well what happened was, yeah, they discovered there's more, there's A mind that links the other three. The other two, yeah, all three. The way dreams surface in sleeping, an aspect or quality of dreams surfaces during the day now in waking mind.

[32:17]

And what was discovered is that also it seems like... non-dreaming deep sleep surfaces in meditation. So meditation was the kind of test tube, the experimental method, by which these three minds became more connected. And in fact, a fourth mind was created.

[33:29]

So the practice of trying to observe the three minds generated a fourth mind. Now, what is this fourth mind? Does it only exist in yogic practice? No, no, no, it doesn't. I don't think so. But to establish this as a location within which you inhabit... This is yogic practice. And that's what the third eye means. The third eye is a fourth mind. To know the world not through the five or six senses, but this additional sense.

[34:31]

And I spoke last night about the drawing of the tree at the base of the spine of this ancient Buddha statue. This is another expression of the fourth body as well as the fourth mind. Or the body which supports this Fourth mind. Okay, so we've got pretty far from just looking at three categories. Waking, dreaming and deep sleep. And seeing if we can enter into the relationship of these three. And as I often say, you don't have to depend on meditation.

[35:54]

Just start noticing the mind as you go to sleep and the mind as you wake up. And notice the transition between dreamings, between consciousness appearing and dreaming disappearing. And see if you can slip back into sleep and dreams appear and consciousness sinks. So we can use the metaphor of a liquid So können wir also die Metapher einer Flüssigkeit benutzen.

[36:59]

Which is common to Buddhism but also occurred in my own experience trying to understand these things. It's almost like there's two liquids with a different viscosity. And consciousness will float in one and dreams sink in it. And in the viscosity of sleep, consciousness sinks and dreams float. Okay, so you can really get a feeling for the different viscosity of waking mind. And dreaming, sleeping mind. If you can really feel the different viscosity... physical feel of it, it will make it much easier to go to sleep or wake up.

[38:07]

To my mind, to my thinking, this is just knowing about ourself, knowing about the life we are in the midst of, the living we're in the midst of. I think another example of this fourth mind that occurs, is daydreaming.

[39:08]

I think daydreaming, it's not waking, it's not sleeping, but it's a territory where things seem to float around. Yes. Swim around, yeah. And I think also, as I often mentioned, I think sunbathing is a kind of fourth mind, meditative mind. One time I was sitting with a friend meditating on a dock of a lake. And my friend wasn't used to my meditating. I hadn't seen him for years. And he said, what are you doing? And I said, we've got about a half an hour or nothing to do, so it's like sitting here in the lake, you know. And a few minutes later, I looked over and he was... lying on the dock, sort of like this.

[40:21]

And I said, what are you doing, Earl? He said, I'm worshipping the great sun god, O Tanmi. So I think when we... When we do sunbathe, the sun kind of holds us in place and we're in some other space that's not sleeping and not usual thinking waking. But to establish us in this mind is the job of meditation and mindfulness. Yeah, so I think now is a good time to have a break. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you for translating.

[41:22]

You're welcome. Is your shirt the Fighting Irish, Notre Dame? I have not the slightest idea. I got that for some reason. Yeah, it's the Catholic College, Notre Dame, ND, and it's called the Fighting Irish because it used to be Catholic and Irish. Might signify something. And as this Catholic college, which had been mostly Irish in Chicago, began to expand its football team, it found it had a lot of Polish people on it.

[42:25]

It's an interesting t-shirt with an ND sign on it, Notre Dame, and it's about the fighting Catholic women, who were also in Chicago, who were also in Chicago, as Roshi said, and who then So I'm going to tell you something about your shirt. No one else can. Not at least my age could tell you. Because now it would also be politically incorrect. But Notre Dame had a very good football team, college football team, before professional football team. And when another university would play Notre Dame... The opposing team would sing, Shame, shame on you, Notre Dame.

[43:35]

For letting the Polacks steal your name. Because they were called the Fighting Irish and they were all Poles. You didn't know what you were wearing there. And did they win? Usually. Does anybody have something about, well, not the fighting Irish, but about the mind you'd like to speak about?

[44:37]

I hope Valentin didn't offend you, you know. Yes. Something I already thought of yesterday, because I came to meditation from body work, from craniosacral work, and I experienced when I do sessions on somebody that this difference between this thinking, because there's anatomy and technique related to this, But the real work is more the change to the awareness, to intuitive work. And I think there's a similarity to the way the mind is observed in meditation, because when I work in cranial, there's a certain point at which this switches from thinking about what I want to do to knowing where I want to go.

[45:56]

German, please. So I came to meditation through body work, craniosacral work, and I liked it a bit, and yesterday I went up again, that there is this difference between consciousness and the truth, or between the thinking mind and the consciousness, which is very obvious there, because there is a point in treatment where you, or where I, from the anatomical point of view and from the technical point of view, go to the intuitive level and then actually no longer think, but know what is happening. I think it's just like this state of meditation. Let me see if I understood your English. You say that in yourself as the cranial worker, you notice a shift from thinking or consciousness to awareness, and then your awareness guides what you do rather than thinking.

[47:04]

And probably your work is also related, is parallel to shifting the client from thinking to awareness. And your shift from thinking to awareness helps induce a shift in the client from thinking to awareness. Is that pretty much what you meant? I'm sure there's a lot of best cases. Here, you want my head. Have the rest of me, too. Yeah, it's so.

[48:16]

I think it's so. And what's interesting is the avenues to knowing this distinction between awareness and consciousness is in in the West is often through body work and through sports. But body work, a sort of ordinary massage, for example, probably wouldn't have led there unless we also had the parallel development of Hindu and Buddhist yogic practices coming into the West. So, um... No, just a little history, which I think may be useful to notice.

[49:39]

First, I think that, as I again often say, that lineages and developments in the West led us to Buddhism more than Asia led us to Buddhism. Lineages in the West. Yeah, philosophical, philosophy, art, psychology. The traditions in the West led us to Buddhism more than... then Asian Buddhism led us to Buddhism. But once Hindu and Buddhist... traditions came into the West, they precipitated the development rapidly. And at the center of this, for some At least one of the main centers of this was a place called Esalen Institute on the Big Sur coast.

[51:14]

And to me this is interesting partly because the founder of Esalen is one of my best friends, along with you guys. I mean, that's Michael Murphy. And he's just a California kid who grew up in Salinas, California. And if you've ever seen the movie East of Eden, he's the square brother in the movie. James Dean is the wild one. The author knew these two boys, and he kind of based his story, East of Eden, on these two boys. Yeah.

[52:21]

But Michael... went to Stanford and got interested in meditation. And then Ami is the most gifted natural meditator I've ever met. From the time he was 20-something until he was in his early 30s, he meditated eight hours a day. He worked as a bellhop and a desk clerk in hotels to support himself. He just loved to meditate. It felt so good. Then he inherited this place on the Big Sur coast, which was his family's summer home. Yeah, and so Michael just started doing the things that meditation had led him to notice.

[53:45]

So he invited Fritz Perls, for instance, who founded Gestalt Therapy, to come and live at Esalen. And you invited Stan Grof, one of your teachers, to live at Esalen. And Michael is a gifted athlete and he wrote The Psychic Side of Sports. Because he personally noticed that body work Rolfing started also. Heide Rolf lived at Esalen. Charlotte Silver was there. Sensory awareness. So he noticed these things and that sports and body work And meditation all led into a similar territory.

[54:51]

And cranial therapy was often practiced there. So it's interesting that here's this one guy who happened to inherit an extraordinary piece of property on the Big Sur coast. Who used this summer home to bring the strands of kind of bodily intelligence and psychotherapy together. And we're doing it here too. You say this and I hear it and I think, yes, that's right.

[56:04]

But I also hear this ability to notice the distinction between awareness and consciousness as something very new and not possible without certain kinds of developments like Esalen. I also think that this ability, this distinction between being aware and being aware, is completely new and also not possible without things like the development of Esselin. We notice it, and it's our experience, but it's hard to notice these things unless you have a certain permission or situation which allows you to notice it. Okay, and that's, again, what we're trying to do here. Someone else want to bring something up? You talked this morning about the psychotherapist self.

[57:13]

Primarily study self, I said, yeah. And the difference to the Buddhist self, or to the Buddhist way. So where do you see the difference? Because I can't really see it. Well, let's continue and see if we can find out. You tell me what you think after a while. Okay. Okay. Anyone else? Someone else? Maybe it sounds funny, but I just would like to share it with you. You talked about the feeling of sunbathing. The feeling of? Of taking a sunbath. Oh, yeah, yeah, sunbathing, yeah. It's something I like very much because after taking Xanabas, I just feel really connected with the world and I feel the kind of physical response. And I have the same feeling when I do a sashimi after two or three days. I really nearly fall in love with everybody.

[58:18]

I don't know. It's kind of strange things, washing dishes or sitting and you just... I feel a total love and connectedness to a person or I feel the same when I do very, very deep breathing. So is this the force mind you were talking? Yeah, Deutsch, bitte. I actually just wanted to share it. When I take sunbaths, I notice after a short time that I feel totally connected to the world and also feel something like a physical resonance. And I have the same feeling when I am in the sea for two or three days, I suddenly have the feeling, even with such very simple things, when I wash dishes, that I have the feeling that I love Somehow the people in a very special way, without judging them, categorizing them, there is simply this feeling there. Or when I do very deep breathing work or body work, which you just talked about, there is this feeling of connection and love there.

[59:23]

And I wanted to know from Roschi that this is the fourth spirit that he spoke of. I think we could say it's the fourth mind or something like that. But I would just... notice that this relationship, what you said is just, yeah, I understand. And I think that being in love or falling in love is something, is probably a taste we have of this fourth mind. developed fourth mind.

[60:33]

When we're, in a way, outside the territory of self, when we fall in love, we give up our self or feel a larger sense of self with the person we're in love with and the world, usually. And I think when I practice meditation I often feel like the sun is shining on me. Yes. Anyway, yes. Someone else?

[61:34]

Yes. It's two things. The same thing like falling in love happened to me when my second daughter was born. It's about one week. I could have kissed everybody in Berlin. Berlin may have been lucky. I don't know. But you couldn't do it all. And the second is, well, you talked about somebody who is a hunter and stops shooting. I mean this happened to me before I had any contact to meditation because I've been a hunter and was sitting there waiting and it's kind of meditation to sit there because you have to be very calm, you have to kind of be part of the nature else the animals would find you because they are much better than we are so we have to really be in it and

[62:45]

One day I stopped shooting. I said, what is this good for? It's kind of interruption. I interrupted something that was okay. And I had to steal away because if you are with hunters... You can't not shoot. No. People don't like you when you don't shoot because they are so... Yeah, I know. I have to shoot. Deutsch bitte. Is that what you were talking about? Yeah. Deutsch bitte. Thank you. The one thing is that... You can all speak English. You all speak English. You said we all speak English. It's not true. The one thing that struck me in the story of Sashin, it happened to me when my second daughter was born. I liked the whole world for a while. That was such a great thing. To be there, a child is born, it's something so special.

[63:49]

Well, okay. Yes, I know that. And the other thing was that at some point, I'm a hunter, I stopped shooting at some point, because I thought, I'll get everything mixed up. So, everything was right, and if I had shot, there would have been a bang, and everything would have been mixed up. And if I had hit, I would have... Yeah. Anyone else? No, you meant? My experience regarding these three states of mind that Roshi described at the beginning is that there is a kind of stiffness, of inflexibility. And does this fourth state of mind have something to do with becoming more flexible or to be more situational in the future?

[64:54]

My experience about the three states of mind you were talking about... Given states of mind. ...given states of mind is that they seem to be very unflexible and like rigid almost. And the experience during the zazen especially is that something gets softer and more flexible, more able to adjust to the situation that is really going on there and responding somehow. So is that part of the fourth mind you were talking about? Maybe the fourth body. Okay. Yeah, I mean, what you've said and you've said and what Melita said have kind of been so clear.

[66:05]

the experience you've described is so clear, but it's made me feel something I can't quite, don't know how to express yet, so we'll have to see if it comes up. Now let me say at this point something I spoke about in Hannover, Which is that this thinking of the mind or understanding the mind as a kind of liquid results in a different way of teaching and expressing things. Instead of expressing things so that they are clear and graspable, You express them so that they turn into fish and swim in these minds.

[67:24]

Or you express them in ways that they'll enter a particular liquid of mind and stay there and get immersed, bathed in that mind. And you express yourself in such a way that you look for a certain area of the spirit, stay there and somehow... Yes, you stay there, but you swim so much that there is almost no separation anymore, so to speak. So mantra and repetition are an essential part of the process of understanding. You don't try to think about it and understand it.

[68:27]

Maybe you put it under your standing. Man legt es unter sein Verstehen, sozusagen. And let it really get soaked over time and the soaking produces understanding. So as a teacher, I shouldn't just present things in a way that you can understand them. I should also present them in a way that you can understand them. But so that they sink into your mind and stay there. for a while.

[69:30]

And then hopefully float to the surface at some point. Oh, that makes sense. It's really quite a difference in the way understanding is understood to occur. And if you see that, the koans make a lot more sense. Koans are full of turning point, turning phrases, which you turn in yourself And the turning in yourself engages them with the details of your life. And a thinking that occurs through your lived experience produces understanding. Which is often actually what happens when you have an intuition.

[70:32]

A thinking has been going on underneath the surface and then pops up. And from the point of view of yogic practice, this thinking under the surface or through your living is what's called real thinking. And the pure mathematicians and creative scientists I know all think this way, to come to something they can't think their way to. Und die Mathematiker und Wissenschaftler, die ich kenne, die sind nicht, sie sind dahin auch so gekommen zum Verstehen, nicht durch das sich hindurch dorthin denken. Okay, so, yeah, something else.

[71:54]

Noch jemand noch etwas? Yes. I'm always so interested in patterns and signs and symbols. And in the Aum symbol there is on the right side, this little pattern that I guess shows the fourth mind. Could you say something especially to this kind of sign, the quarter moon with the dot in the midst? I am very interested in symbols and signs. And there is this sign of Om, where in the corner there is the fourth moon with the dot. And it symbolizes the fourth spirit. And I asked Roshi if he could maybe say something about that in particular. Well, strictly speaking, symbols aren't used in Buddhism.

[73:03]

Things that we might think of as symbols are used. But it's much more to be understood as a drawing of an experience. So something that prefigures experience but doesn't symbolize experience. So... You mean prefigure. To prefigure something is to shape something that leads to, like a seed. A seed isn't a symbol of a tree, but it prefigures the tree. Also, das geht darum, dass eine Art Vorgestalt oder wie ein Samenkorn oder so was da ist, was sozusagen in der Erfahrung vorausgeht, aber das nicht das Symbol der Erfahrung ist.

[74:09]

So a Buddha isn't a symbol of a Buddha. A Buddha is something, if you immerse yourself in it, it tends to turn you into a Buddha. And the circle, many times circles are used. And there's a long tradition of the use of circles. They're meant to allow you to enter your experience with a sort of roundness and sense of the sphere of presence. And when these There's a whole series of circles that are used in teaching Buddhism.

[75:19]

But some generations will destroy them or refuse to teach them because they become too much like symbols. And you try to understand them rather than turning your experience into letting these lead your experience. So I think your feel for these figures is probably helpful to your practice. Okay. So anybody else and then I should say something more perhaps. Yes.

[76:10]

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