Well, what I was going to talk with you tonight is more about this idea of home, that meditation is a way to your long-lost home. I did mention a few weeks ago I wanted to talk about the Heart Sutra. I'd still like to do that, but I think what I'd like to do is kind of get some material ready for you, at least copies of the Sutra that I could pass out, and I haven't done that yet. And somebody wanted to talk about the precepts, and the precepts is the same thing. I need to kind of make up some copies, I think, to do that. So anyway, I'll work on those things. Tonight, I wanted to talk with you a little more about this idea of home. There's various stories.

[01:08]

There was a story I think the Buddha told about, I'm not sure if it's the Buddha exactly, but anyway, it's a kind of analogy of if you're at a palace, there's somebody at the door who's watching who comes and who goes, and that's pretty important, because part of the idea of home is that it's a place where you can feel secure and at ease and safe. And partly how you feel secure and safe is that you observe who's coming and going. And in that sense, there's various ways to do that. But one of the classic ways is with the five skandhas, which is a way to categorize the

[02:19]

comings and goings. The five skandhas, skandhas is a word that means heaps or piles. But what it is, is form, feeling, perceptions, impulses and consciousness, or formations and consciousness. And essentially, these five groups, groupings, this comprises any experience we have can be put into one of these groups. And form includes, you know, this is said to be then the pile of all the possible forms is in this pile. And that then includes our sensory experience, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching.

[03:21]

And it includes also the, well, if you observe any particular form, of course, you notice that in order to be aware of colors, we need to have an eye that's capable of receiving colors. And we need also to have consciousness. It doesn't help to have a good eye and no consciousness, and it doesn't help to have consciousness without eyes. So the, but in particular, the quality of the fact that we can receive certain kinds of information is also in this category of form. And then more particularly, the objects are in this category. And we can look at each particular category, and we can divide up, and what is it? You know, we, so in this category of forms, we have sight objects.

[04:29]

Sight objects are a little different than we tend to think of sight objects. The sight objects in this case simply refers to colors. And we could also say shapes. What we see is colors. Okay? We don't actually see objects. Right? That's something that, you know, to the fact that a certain grouping of colors appears to us as an object is not included in the seeing. That's included in a kind of what is in another category called perception. The fact that we can put together a grouping of colors and call it a particular thing. Okay? So we have colors and shapes. Some people argue that shapes is just a function of color, and basically what we see is colors. And we hear sounds.

[05:35]

Again, if you think about it, you know, hearing sounds is different than, you know, if we say, if we hear a chirping, and we say, what was that? We say, that's the sound of a bird chirping. Again, that's a kind of mental function. That's a kind of, that's not just hearing. That's naming. Say, that's a bird making that sound. Or we say, that's a plane. The other night, I was driving last night, and it was raining, and I was driving along, and there was this whapping. It sounded like something was whapping the side of the car periodically. And it turned out it was the windshield wiper. When it got over to the side, then it would go whap, and it would start back. When it got over to the side, it would go whap. And, you know, then it explained it. Otherwise, it's this mysterious kind of whap.

[06:37]

So hearing, strictly speaking, then, is just the sound. We like to think that there's some, you know, it must be some object. So we tend to imply, or not imply, but project, or, you know, that there's an object making the sound. What is it we want to know? And we want to know other kinds of things, too. You know, like, what does it mean? So anyway, this is all different than just the sound, okay? And taste is like this. And we don't have very many words for taste. We have a tremendous number of words for colors, but we don't have so much for taste. So we taste something, we say, well, it tastes like a peach. But we don't have a word for peachy. We have, so basically the taste, we have salty, sour, sweet, peppery.

[07:46]

Salty, sour, sweet, peppery. Bitter. Bitter is the fifth. And then in Japanese and Chinese they have the sixth flavor, which is plain. So you have something to refer to. You know, that's your white rice, which is, in that style of eating, that's home. You go out on little flavor adventures and have something salty and you come back and have your rice, which is plain. So you can come home and then you go out on another little adventure and you have something sweet and sour and you come back to home. And you have something crunchy and moist and you can come back home. So in that kind of eating you have a kind of home, which is plain. And so that's another kind of aspect of home in some ways, is that basically it tends to be kind of plain and you want some kind of place in your life that's plain. Because we're always in the middle of adventures and everything, we get tired out.

[08:51]

And after a while we can't even taste that something is hot or spicy anymore because our whole life is hot and spicy. So we need to be able to come back to something plain. Touch is another interesting one because when we touch, if you observe touch carefully, we have rough and smooth, hard, soft. We have hot and cold. And we never actually, you know, strictly touch a thing. What we touch is hard, soft. So if I touch this, you know, if you actually just touch, it's hard, it's smooth, it's cool. But I can look and say, well, I've got my hand on a bell. Okay. But the touch is not actually touching the bell. It's touching, you know, when we have particular sensations. So anyway, I bring this up just to, because then if you're observing the senses carefully

[09:53]

and this category of form carefully, you'll notice that things are not involved there. There are no objects. You have colors, you have shapes, you have hard and soft, you have flavors. But you're never actually seeing a thing. That's another, this is another category of things called perception. And thinking. I think I see a chair. I believe I see a chair. I see a chair. So perception names things. This is the third category. Perception names things. Now this is cool, solid, smooth. If I hit it with a stick, it makes a sound. It must be a bell. What is it? It's all those things. But is the bell, you know,

[10:53]

actually all those things? We sort of, so we make up, there must be a thing there called a bell that has all these characteristics. And is there a bell apart from the characteristics? Or can it be missing one of these characteristics? Can you have, you know, when do you call it a bell? All right. So after a while, you'll find that it can be rather difficult, you know. So we have koans in Zen. What is it that's ringing? And then, you know, you can say, well, the bell is ringing, but I just hit it with a stick. So is the bell ringing? Or is your ear ringing? Or is your consciousness ringing? And so, and then sometimes, so sometimes we just say ringing is ringing. That's pretty clear.

[11:55]

But obviously, if there's not ears and consciousness, there's no bell ringing. You know. And if we look, if we observe things carefully, we find it's actually very difficult to, you know, actually get at what the bell is. We can say, well, it looks this way, it feels this way, it sounds this way. It must be a bell. Okay. But as to what it actually is, we don't know. Whatever it is, anyway, supposedly there is an it. We say, well, there is an it that has these characteristics. Anyway, this is getting a little off, but I only mention this because of these, we're talking now about these five categories and to observe form carefully is something that we don't often do. And in order to categorize by this gripping method into,

[13:01]

if we're observing what's coming and going at the gateway of awareness at our home or our temple or our palace or whatever we want to call our mind or being, then we can use this kind of categorization. And we can see, begin to see just what's there. There's a very famous story about the, I think I've told you before, the man's wife leaves him and they've had a big argument and she runs out and he chases after her. At some point he decides to chase after her and he meets a monk on the road and he says, have you seen my wife? And he says something like, well, a bag of bones passed this way,

[14:02]

I don't know any more than that. But it's kind of like, well, I saw some colors go by. And I don't know whether it was man or woman or, I did see some colors go by, I can't tell you more than that. So he's in that sense carefully observing and not necessarily then thinking about, gee, I wonder who that was, where was she going? What was she up to? Why is she moving that way? Why does she look like that? Gosh, I wonder if she needs any help? And so on. So there's a lot of other things that, at some point may be actually appropriate for us to do, but as far as our sort of, this careful kind of observation, we can begin to make these distinctions. So we've talked now about the first category

[15:03]

and then the third category, perception. Perception names things. That's a bell. I'm me, you're you. We're sitting in a room. This is a room. This is a room. What is it that's a room? Well, it's got a floor, it's got walls, but it's also obviously our awareness. And suddenly now we say, well, these particular kind of aspects of our awareness, namely we see these colors that, well, I think I'd call that a wall, wouldn't you? And then there's a ceiling. I'd call that a ceiling. That's up above. And then the floor is down. This I'd call a floor. This color is here. We're all sort of sitting on it, right? It's holding us up. That must be a floor. We must be sitting in a room. This is a room. And so that's perception, that we can group together these things.

[16:05]

But obviously all of this is happening in awareness. And we took this little mental action to designate a room, a person, a cushion. So this aspect of naming things in Buddhism we call perception. The second category, which we kind of skipped over because perception is so much related to form, the second aspect, the second skanda is called feeling. And feeling is sometimes called sensation. I don't know that sensation is any better than feeling. Because feeling is not really what we usually consider feeling, so it needs a little explanation. It basically has to do with liking, disliking you, or in other words, is it pleasant or unpleasant? Feels pleasant, feels unpleasant.

[17:06]

And so it's this, or there can be a neutral kind of feeling. And there's physically pleasant, physically unpleasant, physically neutral, and then mentally pleasant, unpleasant. So when we have a sensation or any of the forms appear, usually along with form or along with any moment of experience, there's some quality of pleasant, unpleasant, liking, disliking. And neutral, yeah. And one of the kind of characteristics of, I'm not sure just the exactness of this, but of a Buddhist, so to speak, or one of the kind of ideas or practices is that although there may be, that at some point, somebody who's accomplished or enlightened or whatever the qualifications are anyway,

[18:10]

although they may have physically unpleasant sensations, they no longer have mentally unpleasant, they only have mentally pleasant and neutral. They'd stop having mental suffering, mental unpleasant, even with physically unpleasant things. And that's a mark of enlightenment? Well, I'm not sure what it's a mark of, but it's a kind of a mark of somebody who's been practicing for a while, one way or another. So the mind can still label pleasant or neutral, but will not label unpleasant? No, the mind can still label the physical sensation unpleasant, but as far as the mental sense, there's no longer the mental sense of unpleasant. The sensation is unpleasant, but in other words, you can have an unpleasant physical sensation, doesn't mean you have to have an unpleasant mental sensation. You know, this is really a bummer.

[19:14]

There's kind of a little more acceptance or tolerance. You know, Yvonne Illich says things like that, you know, from a Catholic point of view. One of his, he says that in the modern world, people aren't willing to suffer enough. You know, because the first sign of some physical suffering is they have mental suffering. Well, people generally have an unpleasant, when we have an unpleasant physical experience, then we also tend to have unpleasant mental experience. We become depressed or sad or angry or annoyed. Why does this have to happen to me? And so on. And rather than, that's something, you know, so part of what we cultivate as far as having some equanimity is to understand that it's impossible to control the physical world to anything like the way we think we ought to be able to.

[20:20]

And consequently, it behooves us to develop some composure with physically difficult experiences. Not that we need to go around, you know, hitting ourselves with little whips and whatever, but just sort of with the normal amounts of physical discomfort that, you know, we could probably, we're going to have to, it will help us to be able to tolerate that without becoming unduly distressed. Because what will tend to happen is that we, if we're focused on being comfortable and not having uncomfortable physical sensations, our life gets very narrower and narrower. We have to have a very narrower and narrower kind of life so that we can avoid, and it depends on our preoccupation, but, you know, Dogen Zenji, of course, says things like, if you're just interested in comfort, it's sort of like the princess and the pea. Eventually even lying down becomes difficult and painful.

[21:23]

Because if you're too focused on being comfortable, then you can find this little thing wrong and then pretty soon you've eliminated the gross level and then you want a finer level of being comfortable. So anyway, most of us realize this at some point and, you know, we have various places in between there where we're willing to have, we obviously can't eliminate every last bit of discomfort and uncomfortable. I used to try that with the cold at Tassajara to keep dressing more warmly. And in fact, no matter how warmly I dressed and no matter how many things I put on, there would be some cold that would get through. See, and then pretty soon you're so insulated, right? And still the cold's getting through. So I found that I could wear about half as much and there'd be the same amount of cold. You know, you wear half as much and then you have like 5% more cold because you couldn't get rid of that last 5% or 10% anyway.

[22:28]

There's a certain amount you can't get rid of. Anyway, we're sort of going a little bit back and forth here, but feelings then is this pleasant-unpleasant neutral. And that comes along with every moment of experience, some quality of pleasant-unpleasant. The third category, perceptions. The fourth category is in some ways the largest, although the category of sensory experience is obviously quite large. But included in the fourth category is emotional states or mental states, or you could call it attitudes, or you could call it just the fact that every moment of experience is a certain shape to the mind. And so this includes a wide range of things.

[23:32]

Some of the more basic ones it includes is the fact that in every moment of experience the awareness has a shape. There is some, so to speak, contact with a sensory experience, with a thought, with a feeling. We're aware of something and there's a particular shape to that moment. It also includes the quality of concentration. Every moment of awareness there's some degree of concentration. And then, of course, there's refinements of concentration. There's more concentrated and less concentrated, but there's always some degree of concentration or we're not alive. Buddhists understand it this way. Concentration. There's various qualities of energy. There's mindfulness. Again, I think most Buddhists understand that there's always mindfulness, but mindfulness may be rather weak at times.

[24:37]

This category also includes factors such as kindness or love, non-harming. It includes greed, hate, delusion, anger, joy, equanimity, tranquility. All of these are mental states or aspects of consciousness. Consciousness never comes just as consciousness. It always has a particular quality to the consciousness. And part of what, you know, another one included in this group is wisdom. Wisdom is a kind of development of, in some sense, is considered in some sense to be a development of mindfulness at times. But the quality of wisdom is seen in various ways

[25:48]

and described variously. And I don't know exactly how I want to talk about it tonight. For one thing, you know, one of the ways it's described classically is that wisdom is what sees the three marks in all of this. In other words, anyway, the transiency of things, the impermanence, the suffering and the lack of own being or self, that the bell, that we can't really get hold of the bell. We can get hold of solid, cool, we can hear sound, but as far as the bell itself, we don't know anything about it. We only know the characteristics. So we say that the characteristics don't have own being.

[26:57]

There's no actual bell there that we can know. All we know is characteristics. But wisdom is also, in a sort of simple way, reminding us of our own deep wish or what's of real advantage to us and what's of actual disadvantage to us, and that kind of remembering or reminding in a very simple and basic kind of way. So in some sense, we're not exactly trying to get rid of, necessarily shape experience moment after moment, but we should have some, try to accompany experience with some wisdom. I don't know if that's making sense, but anyway. Because we're not going to be, just as we're not going to be able to eliminate uncomfortable sensations, we're not going to be able to necessarily make our mind

[28:00]

the way we would like our mind to be. But we can be present at that time, and we can observe carefully, and we can remind ourself about what's of advantage, disadvantage, and to remember, to remind ourselves to look carefully or closely at things and to try to know what's what. And knowing carefully and seeing carefully what's what, then we have some better basis, a clearer basis on which to act and proceed in our life. The fifth category is consciousness itself, which comes along with all of this. And consciousness is a word that is, you know, the closest thing perhaps in all of this to what could be called I or self. But one of the things about consciousness in this case is that it's understood to be momentary and always arising and passing away. So there's one moment there may be sight consciousness

[29:04]

and then sound consciousness, consciousness of mind consciousness, consciousness of a thought, consciousness of a feeling, consciousness of a sensation. So consciousness is always qualified. There's consciousness that's arising as anger and consciousness that's arising as love and consciousness of joy. So is this the same consciousness or a different consciousness, you see? So from the Buddhist point of view, each of these is a different consciousness. It's not the same consciousness that arises as one thing and then as another thing. If it's arising as one thing and then as another thing, now it's another thing. It's not the same thing. How could it be the same thing? Okay? This is your brief introduction to five skandhas now. This we are going to talk about for the Heart Sutra anyway because at the beginning of the Heart Sutra it says that Avalokiteshvara, our Bodhisattva friend here, when practicing deeply beheld, observed that the five skandhas

[30:08]

in their own being are empty and were safe from all suffering. So we've also been kind of talking about some of the ways in which the five skandhas can be considered to be empty. Now, there's many interesting... I think I spilled some tea just then. There's some interesting kind of metaphors, I guess, is the word you call this, for the five skandhas. The one I like... well, there's a couple that I like, but one in particular is each of these skandhas is given some kind of... well, form is said to be like a mass of foam because it has the appearance of something but it's not really that solid when you touch it.

[31:11]

The mass of foam can look like a great thing but there's not some substance there. Feelings are like a bubble because they soon burst. Isn't that true? Pleasant, unpleasant, pleasant, pleasant, unpleasant, unpleasant. Terribly unpleasant. Pleasant. In Buddhism sometimes they say, even the pleasant things, basically it's a big open wound, folks. And pleasant, just because you get the sore washed and bathed and dressed once in a while doesn't change the fact that it's basically a wound. A wound. Last night I had the pleasure, so to speak, of hearing Matthew Fox. I went to an event in San Francisco and he said this is Catholicism's great gift to spirituality,

[32:16]

is this idea of the wound. And he says, everybody's been wounded. Are you familiar with this? And then he asked the audience if they were familiar with this. He said, no, we don't know anything about it. Everybody agreed that they'd been wounded. But anyway, Buddhism says, yes, it's kind of a wound, isn't it? And it's frustrating. So anyway, the feelings are like a bubble because they soon burst. Perceptions are like a mirage they deceive. You know, something that you can look at something and you see a rope on the ground and it looks like a snake. You see somebody and you can think all sorts of things about them without even knowing them. And you can jump to all sorts of conclusions from your perceptions, how you name things, how you call things.

[33:18]

And this can be rather misleading. The deer mistakes the scarecrow for a man, you know, or this sort of thing. And we're sort of in the same boat, mistaking things for other things. And because of that, on the basis of our perceptions, then we're treating people and ourselves a certain way. You know, we look at this last week. I was kind of unhappy, and then I go, geez, you're such a baby. I really wish you didn't have to be such a baby. I'm saying this to myself, right? And Patty says, why do you call yourself that? And I say, all right, all right. I won't call myself a baby. I wish I didn't have to feel so bad and miserable and unhappy. But anyway, we tend to name things, and then consequently we treat things a certain way. You know? If you're a baby, then you can sort of say, well, grow up, you baby. And so depending on what you've decided to call yourself,

[34:22]

based on this faulty perception, you know, mechanism of perception, or you call somebody else, then you can treat them a certain way. And this is what we do to the Iraqis, you know, as a country, and so on. You know, we say they're evil or they're this or they're that or Hussein is this or that. You know, this is perception at work anyway. It tends to be rather mischievous and something of a mirage. It's also called a mirage because it has the impression of something there that isn't. It gives us the idea that there's something there that isn't. If you don't have the idea that something is there that isn't, then you can sort of, you know, then you can treat something as, you know, that everything in that sense is something bigger than it is. You know, it includes everything then. We're treating, you know, each thing we pick up or each person we meet or our own being is something much bigger

[35:24]

because it includes everything. And it's where we're relating all the time to some vastness, which in certain religions you can call God. Buddhism doesn't have that, so we can just say, you know, the vastness or whatever or, you know, the emptiness. George and I were joking today. I saw George because he lives next door to the Sherwood Baptist Church and he was saying, well, you've heard the one about the Tibetan, the Lama hot dog maker, you know, make me one with everything. And he said, yeah, but you could also say make me one with nothing. Anyway, the formations or the mental factors, formations, impulses, formative factors, attitude, mind shape, mind bend, bent. These are known to be like a plantain tree or it's like saying it's like an onion.

[36:24]

There's layers and layers and you never get to any core. That you can say is truly me or truly this or truly that or now I've gotten to the bottom of things. There's endless layers. And consciousness is like a magic show, creating this and that and the other thing. So if you think about this, now how do you make yourself at home here? You know, but we don't have any other place to make ourself at home. You know, even though we have this massive foam, the bubble that soon bursts, the mirage, the magic show that, you know, nothing to get hold of in terms of these mental factors. That doesn't sound like much of a home. So what makes it home is that, you know, we can observe the comings and goings.

[37:26]

That's what we do in meditation. We can observe the comings and goings. We can see all of this. And also we begin to see that home then must be some place where we do this and home is not then some place where we feel a certain way or we see a certain thing or we have a certain kind of experience and we're no longer trying to find our home by creating a particular kind of experience, a particular moment of experience. We're no longer trying to create a certain kind of mind or a particular quality of being which we call home and that we want to come back to and that we want to re-establish and that we want to perpetuate. So in that sense, you know, in some ways now

[38:27]

then home is like an alternative to having the notion of a self which is to have the notion that I want to go on perpetuating certain qualities of physical experience. I want to go on. I want to have this kind of mind and not that kind of mind. This is the kind of mind that's me and that I would like to establish as opposed to this other kind of mind which I would say is not really me and I have to watch out for that person because they could do this to me and they could interrupt the flow, the habitual flow of thoughts and emotions and feelings that I call me and so on. So rather than that, we want to develop some sense of being at home which is to observe this coming and going. And not to, rather than trying to regulate it per se or produce or stop it, the flow of things.

[39:29]

And if you look at the, when you look at the skandhas of course then there's various exercises to say when there's a form we can say that is not me, I am not it. That is not the self. That there is no self when we look at form. When we look at a feeling, that's not me. That's a feeling. The feeling is not me. I am not that feeling. And we can do that with perceptions. We can do that with mental formations. We can do that with consciousness. None of those, we can see that none of those are me. And this is helpful too because it reminds us that we are not our feelings. We are not our sensations. We're not our physical being. I mean, you know, in a certain sense we are

[40:33]

but also, of course, we're not. We know that. If we lose a hand, it's a terrible experience but we know that I'm not my hand. And we have many experiences like that. So that's also a kind of reassurance or a kind of... you know, on one hand it's... you begin to wonder, well, what am I then? But this is the kind of basis for having an actual, a real kind of home rather than a home that is a kind of fictitious kind of home. A fictitious kind of home is a place that we... where I'm a happy person and I'm going to generate happy, happy, happy. And then things happen that, you know, assail my happiness and it turns out I can't keep my happiness and now suddenly I'm homeless because I was, you know, I understood myself

[41:35]

to be a certain kind of person. But when we recognize that... the more we recognize that's... that I am not that, that is not me. You know, our home is not something that is dependent on producing or stopping particular experiences. So I think, anyway, this is a little... for tonight, anyway, this is... I don't know if it's of use to you exactly but this is a little bit about how and why this is a little bit about meditation and its business. So one of the things in Buddhism we're doing is introducing wisdom and trying to develop wisdom which will then help guide this aspect called chaitana or will or the impetus to action. So that will or impetus to action is accompanied by wisdom and generosity and patience rather than being accompanied by anger and...

[42:37]

hatred and greed and so on. And partly this is then based on... so wisdom is this quality that we begin to observe and know carefully what... what's what, how does life actually work so that we don't make, so to speak, stupid mistakes. Let's make more smart mistakes. This is interesting. Now the other night I did a cooking class on Tuesday night and it was an unusually small class. The first time I did this class there was 18 people and the second class there was 15 and the third class... at 6.30 there was three assistants and one student there and the class starts at 6.00. I've been accumulating assistants week by week and then the number of students has been diminishing. This is not the point of the story but... So I had to start making the bread, you know, anyway

[43:43]

at 6.30 even there was no students, you know, so... me and the assistants went ahead and made the bread and gradually while we're making the bread more students started showing up and... and then of course one has to keep explaining over and over again no, this is how you knead and this is what we did to start with and where did you put it, you know and you explain that over about three times as new people walk in. But the next day I got this mysterious phone call from someone who said I came to the class last night and nobody was there so I went home. What happened? I thought we were having class. It was on my calendar. So we eventually talked later in the day and he said well I got to the driveway there there was only one car parked there usually there's eight or ten cars parked there and I was a little late so I figured I didn't want to go disturb the people in the house. So I just turned around and went home. I said well we were there. So here's a perfect... you know, here's a kind of simple, you know, silly example but this is our tendency to not actually investigate or look closely at things

[44:45]

and to think that we know what's what and we make assumptions so as though and when we know what's what and so then, okay, we know that there's no class there's just one car here there must not be a class and we don't make this kind of effort or take the time it's going to take some time to investigate something or to, you know, look at it from various points of view and to try to find out what is, what's what what is it? Anyway, the... so wisdom is included in this fourth category the fifth category which I haven't mentioned yet is known as consciousness and consciousness is simply awareness of something so the aspect we can call awareness and in Buddhism, I mean, perhaps this is the closest thing in this categorization to a self but if you look at consciousness as it arises

[45:46]

you see that it arises differently on each occasion there's no defining mark or characteristic that you could say this is the same consciousness as it was before you know, so we have consciousness of sight objects we have consciousness of sound we have consciousness of emotions consciousness of perceptions so what's the quality of this consciousness that we can identify as being the same consciousness moment after moment? All we can say is, well, it must be me who else could it be? you know, it must be my consciousness so that's known as a thought you know, thoughts are in the fourth category then you might be aware of that thought that's the consciousness so these aspects are arising all together you know, these five skandhas there's, you know, moment after moment there's some particular grouping of these skandhas and, okay, so the idea of consciousness here

[46:51]

is that it arises as one thing and then, you know, disappears and then it arises as another thing and so there's no way we could there's no way if we try to and basically we're never we can't, we're not exactly aware of consciousness we're aware more of the objects the feeling, liking, pleasant, painful the perceptions, the emotions and thoughts and we're aware of sensory objects but what is consciousness? what is awareness? okay, and then you can say, well, it's awareness but can we say what it is? so people have tried to say something about awareness you know, like, well, it's red and it's green and it's yellow and it's blue even if it's not red or green or yellow or blue right? because consciousness, when you see something there must be awareness there but the consciousness is so the consciousness is both the colors but also we can say the consciousness isn't those colors

[47:52]

right? because the colors are the other group right, the first group see? should we turn on the light? it looks like it's going to get a little dim in here last night and that's my connection with the I'll get it here plug it in so we tend to have you know, Buddhism at various times talks about in the Heart Sutra we've sort of started talking about and I'm going to get you copies of it still

[48:53]

but this is a a short thing, kind of about wisdom if you can sort it out at the beginning it's said that the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara when practicing deeply or observing things carefully with concentration and careful awareness and mindfulness and looking closely could distinguish these five skandhas and notice that they don't in fact have any own being there's no there's no thing there okay so we can the point of this is I mean this is to help us in some way in terms of our wisdom or understanding and what this is is to begin to as we've been talking about now to begin to observe things and

[49:53]

look at them closely and try to find out what is it what is a color sometimes what is a sound what is a thought and so this comes back to things like you know, who am I and so for instance we may decide at times well, I'm I need to do something about my anger I'm an angry person or I'm a shy person I should do something about being so shy or I'm a good person or I'm a bad person or so we have various self-images okay is it true? what you think just because you think it do you suppose it's true? is there actually a person there that corresponds to this thought I'm a shy person or I'm an angry person or is there a person there? what is a person? for goodness sakes

[50:55]

and then how do you decide what is you? who you are? how do you decide this? so because moment after moment here's another event happening called seeing or hearing or an emotion or a thought a physical sensation so how do we decide what kind of person we are? or how do we decide what is self and what's not self? so I'm not an angry person then when anger comes up you say we say that's not me, get out of here you shouldn't be here because I don't want anger to be part of my person so we say to our experience you should go away now I don't want you around so various parts of ourself we like to we like to say go away or we like other things as they come up we like to say well please hang around I don't mind having you here you amuse me or whatever

[51:57]

so in this way we try to structure our experience and we try to go on being me or who we thought we were supposed to be or who we thought we were and this gives us a lot of this is a certain kind of a problem in our life right because it's kind of impossible and so if you look closely at any particular thing right look closely at self how do you decide what's self and what isn't self? if you take a something you see is that yourself or is that somebody else you look at across the room you see all these people is that you or is that all those people? obviously you know you can say on one hand well that's I see all those people I don't see me that's all of you but what are you seeing? you're actually seeing colors and then there's a perception that says

[53:00]

all those people those colors are a bunch of people so that's perception at work saying identifying the colors as people but then there's also consciousness there's awareness of the colors whose awareness is that? that's consciousness right and so everything you're seeing whose else is it but you? I mean where is seeing happening? so you right away you know you say well no I don't I see a bunch of other people but seeing is in your own awareness that's your awareness of seeing it's not somebody else's awareness of seeing so how could what you see must also be part of you know how could you say well what I see is not part of myself then pretty soon every object

[54:02]

if you say that if you say everything I see is not part of myself then you also you also would have to say well then my thoughts aren't part of myself either my emotions aren't part of myself either those are just other objects too and I'm observing them so pretty soon you have a self which has if you follow that through then you have self which has no characteristics because as soon as you have a characteristic it can't be self anymore right in the same way that you say about colors oh I see the colors that's not me so I also experience the thought the thought's not me I'm experiencing the thought the emotion isn't me I'm just experiencing emotion and emotion so we can also say about all these skandhas we have there's a simple kind of saying is we can notice that in all these form, feeling, perceptions impulses, consciousness that is not me I am not it you know and you say

[55:02]

your hand well of course it's my hand but is that you? if you lose your hand you don't say well I'm not here anymore no the hand well the hand is me but on the other hand it's not me you know it's my hand but I'm separate from my hand I'm not my hand okay so we have a so on one hand the self we have to either say that the self such a thing is either includes everything right everything we see everything we hear the thoughts it's all got to be included or nothing is included right everything is eliminated the self is there's no self or the self is everything this is the you know and then different religions like in Hinduism they say or some religions sometimes they say you know I am I am that so I am that and I'm that and I'm that and I'm that we don't sort of so we can't discriminate and say well I'm that but I'm not that what's the basis for making this discrimination

[56:03]

you see of what the self is is there any basis to it so we make this discrimination a lot about what the self is without having any real basis for making the discrimination and we develop a sense of who we are and we have this idea about it and then at some point but if you look there's really no basis for that and anything we can say is kind of like a it's kind of a generalization I'm a shy person what we really mean is on several occasions or at least one occasion that was very important to me I behaved in a way that I would call shy so you know ergo therefore I must be a shy person right or I'm a difficult person well on these particular occasions or at least this one occasion that made me look really bad

[57:04]

I sure behaved in a difficult way so we tend to not talk very carefully so one way to as soon as we say things like this one thing we can do is notice that it's a thought that's a thought oh that's a thought and then we can look at it more carefully is the thought actually true is there any actual basis for this and what I'm actually talking about and it's much more helpful if you actually can specify on such and such an occasion so in Buddhist psychology this is the way we do it we say on such and such a particular occasion this was the particular these were the particulars this is very different than saying oh I'm a shy person I'm a difficult person I'm an angry person I'm a bad person I'm difficult to get along with

[58:09]

whatever and I wish I was more you know X, Y, or Z I wish I was more forgiving I wish I was more understanding I wish I was more loving and then how would you ever determine that, right? basically whatever you think you'll find the evidence for isn't this true? if you think you're a shy person then you'll particularly notice and pay attention to the times that remind you that you're a shy person yep, still a shy person damn! and then the times that you're not shy you won't notice oh that was just an aberration oh well yeah on that occasion yeah I was a little more outgoing but that doesn't really count so we tend to notice the things that confirm our own understanding and our own view and our own thought so in this

[59:09]

so part of what we're talking about tonight this idea of what is it is to look more carefully and more closely and to begin to identify on this particular occasion these were the characteristics or these are the characteristics right now, this moment and that doesn't have that doesn't mean that and that's all we can do that's what that we can say with some degree of you know, accuracy and we can also then notice so we can notice these five elements skandhas and then we can also notice that that's I am not that that is not me there's no there's no the self is something that we're making up also then you know, self in the sense of I'm a shy person I'm this I'm that and it's very hard even to say then

[60:11]

you know, I had such and such an experience you know, if you say just if we take something simple like seeing I see you you know, there's I subject see verb you object you know, actually in your experience can you find which is which don't they all kind of come along together in one package which you can just as well just call it seeing right and then within that seeing you know, there must be I but you can't actually can you actually put your hand on it can you put your finger on it I mean, can you separate out the the I that's doing the seeing from the seeing so well all you can say is well, there must be an I I mean, somebody's got to be seeing isn't this right so that's the way we think we say well I must be doing the seeing because it's not you who are doing the seeing but actually if you look carefully

[61:12]

at your experience you say I see you can you find the I that's doing the seeing you can experience seeing you can say yeah, there's seeing and right away in seeing seeing includes I it includes you it includes the subject it includes the object it's all in this event that we tend to label seeing and then for the practicality of our language we say I see you isn't this true that experientially we can't find the I that's doing that seeing in the same way you know I feel sad can we there's sadness but can we find the I that's feeling the sadness apart from the sadness basically you know all we can experience is the sadness and then we say I must be doing the sadness but if we just observing our experience carefully we can observe

[62:14]

sadness and we say on this occasion there is sadness but and accurately and carefully speaking we can't say I am sad we can say there's sadness this is not something we're making up now this is just this is just careful observation of one's experience right what am I making up no this we're not making up something okay this is not some you know trick to say you know it's just looking carefully at your own experience what can you know so we can find sadness we can find colors we can find seeing we can find hearing we find sounds we find sensations we find emotions and when we

[63:17]

tend to in language as soon as language comes up then we stick in an I I'm experiencing this I must and then we go I must be this I must be sadness I am sad and then once we've created this I like this who's doing who's having the sadness who is sad then we figure well I I should do something about this because this is me by golly and this is important so I better I better fix this I better do something about it I better straighten it out I better I want to be something else I don't want to be sadness but the I that was the sadness we just made that up all we what we really experienced was sadness yes we there was

[64:18]

there's sadness there's awareness of sadness is there a self is there an I can we actually separate out the I that's that and if we can separate it out why do we want to tie it in with this sadness how can we identify so closely with the sadness if the I is not the sadness so this all has to do with wisdom you see looking very carefully beginning to find out and investigate what is it and and what is what is the self then is there a self can we actually find the I that's supposedly doing all this experiencing and people who have made this kind of investigation carefully over the centuries

[65:19]

nobody's been able to find it yet so if you find the I who does all this experiencing and so on then you know you'll be first so nobody in Buddhism said Eureka which apparently means I've found it so if you take another thing say take body right we make a distinction between body and mind you say well I know what the body is it's obvious the body's the body right but is there any experience you have a body that doesn't that mind doesn't come along with it what experience do you have a body there there's not mind present every experience of body

[66:20]

is an experience of mind only we you know for the sake of language and discussion and talk we say no that's well that's body but all of our experience of body is through mind right there's no experience of body that's you know mind must be there consciousness is there mind is there right and in the same way every experience every experience of mind there's a body there we may not be aware of body and we have this idea that body you know exists moment after moment and is a continuing kind of thing but actually you know

[67:23]

but we when we are observing carefully moment after moment what is it and we look at any if you look at any particular thing or sensation you know we know we have this body and it's a certain shape and we have this sort of idea but you know you can do this simple thing like take your hand and put it on your head and if you close your eyes and then if you feel the floor or what you're sitting on the chair and you feel your hand on top of your head and then if you experience the hand on your head the weight on the floor being supported by the floor and how much space is there between those two sensations and you can't tell these two sensations could be you know right next to each other or they could be universes apart so to tell how much space there is

[68:27]

between your hand and the floor you have you open your eyes and then you kind of compare you know you kind of you know you have to put those two sensations you say well you'd sort of stop thinking about those two sensations and let's just put me up against the wall and then we'll check out this is we'll put a yardstick up here behind me we can tell you know how much distance there is there and how tall I am but experientially you know if you're experiencing in your body we don't know how much space there is you have to put that up against some outside measure if you if you just put your awareness you know in any part of your body without having you know an external standard to putting your arm up against the wall say well my arm is about as long as you know such and such but if you just put

[69:28]

your awareness in your arm you can't tell how long your arm is how much space is in your arm but we have the idea that you know our body is a certain shape it's a certain size that must be the body but when you observe carefully and you have your awareness actually in your body there's not a particular shape there's not a particular size and things are very flowing and dynamic and mysterious as to what it is you know as to what's what so we come back then to you know the Nangaku and the Sixth Patriarch what is it and he said as soon as you call it something you've missed the mark you call it body you've missed the mark you call it mind you've missed the mark you say I'm sad you've missed the mark for the purposes of language

[70:34]

and for the purposes of discussion and for the purposes of talking about things you know we we use language but in some sense you know to observe things carefully we should also know what we're leaving out or we should know that our designations are kind of tentative and for the purposes of the language and for the purposes of communicating and not really intended to describe reality your actual experience of your own body of your mind of sensations of form of feelings perceptions impulses consciousness of these five categories or groups so in some ways you know this is you know a few weeks ago I talked about

[71:34]

I told you that story about how I was I ordered the things from the seed catalog and when the box came I thought that they the stuff hadn't come that I wanted because they told me that they had to back order the seeds the ground cover and I was getting this twelve by six foot piece of netting and I didn't realize it squashes up like a down sleeping bag into a packet about like this that's six by twelve because it's in this little box and finally about six weeks later I opened up the box and everything's in there that I ordered and then each seed packet says the best teacher of gardening careful observation of the obvious so this tonight what we're talking about is nothing different than this you know just to carefully observe your experience is the basis for is in fact liberation is freeing you from all these thoughts of who I am my problem is

[72:36]

other people say and so on and my body is five feet tall you know because as soon as you're in your own body and you don't have this external standard to hold up to it you know there's infinite space there could be any kind of space in your own body just in your hand just in a finger your awareness in your finger and you're not sort of seeing your finger and oh my god the room is much bigger than my finger you put your awareness in your finger and it's there's a universe here there's many universes just in your finger this is not something somebody is making up right? it's just your own experience looking carefully at your own experience It also reminds me that

[74:19]

that story I told you many months ago about Robert Akin Akin Roshi when he was in he was he had been in Japan when the Second World War started and he was arrested and put in prison and one day they were in the dining room and one of the other prisoners actually well before that they kind of they kind of heard from the Japanese guards as the war was coming to an end they heard from the guards the guards had kind of let them know that you know if they lost the war they were going to kill all the prisoners you know so you better not you know root for the other side to win sort of thing you know because if they win we're going to kill all of you you know so everybody was kind of depressed you know feeling really sorry and unhappy and worried and one of the prisoners came into the dining room where most of the people were and said guess what and they said what and they said well if the Japanese lose the war they're going to kill us everybody said

[75:22]

yeah that's yeah we heard that and he said well 100 years from now it's not going to make any difference that's a little bit you know like what's the perspective that we take on things you know and we kind of decide and this is where you know fights start right we decide that the fact that I experienced something is a problem for me and I'm going to blame you we do many things on the basis of our perception and our understanding and our you know what we think is what what's what why is it like this and we look around for you know why is it like this Kurt Vonnegut who's you know such a wonderful kind of sardonic author he said the thing that we don't want to admit to one another and that we almost never will talk about is that it's really painful life is really painful

[76:26]

because if we admitted that you know it would be you know we don't want to admit how painful it is but it's really painful and it's very easy then to say well it's your fault or it's you know it's the government or mom and dad I heard this did I tell you that joke I heard about person had a went to his therapist and he said I had this Freudian slip the other night and the therapist said well really and he said yeah I was I was having dinner with my mom and I said I meant to say please pass the potatoes and I said instead I said you've ruined my life laughter I remember the other thing I wanted to tell you

[77:27]

but you know I couldn't believe it this morning there's this article wonderful article in the paper across from the comics in the Chronicle it's about this new book out called The Myth of Beauty I think that's the name of it written by somebody Wolf Naomi right and now there's a perfect example of what are what are what are women doing beauty she points out things like you know the Miss America you know over the last 20 years they all they're getting lighter and lighter they weigh less and less you know the myth of the beauty is thinner and thinner right there's a you know 33 billion dollar diet industry there's a 20 billion dollar cosmetic industry there's all these external standards that are you know that women are buying into you hold up the standard to yourself then you go how do I measure up to this standard and now apparently women are getting

[78:29]

their nipples moved so they have the official breast you know like if your nipple isn't in just the right place you know you can have it surgically moved I had no idea don't these women ask men you know for like a man's opinion women buy into the standard because men buy into the standard well nobody asked me I find it kind of interesting that nipples are in different places you know personally not that I have that much chance to observe you know where nipples are located but anyway there's this external standard right and so you know we have there's certain problems that we have in life because we take these external standards that are you know somebody's made up or they're out there in the universe or we've got them

[79:29]

from mom and dad or we've got them from somewhere from school from our culture and we we sort of you know kind of like look at the standard look at what we think of as our self and you know how does it measure up and instead of just experiencing and looking very closely and carefully at our own experience you look carefully and closely and experience if you experience your body from inside it doesn't have any shape my girlfriend Patty and her friend Elise they're making these puppets to do the Vimalakirti Sutra and one of the great sayings in the sutra is Shariputra who's one of the the Buddha's foremost disciples is meets the goddess of wisdom and she does various things and says various things and finally after a while he says goddess you're so you're so wise you're so beautiful you're so wonderful the only thing I don't understand is why are you still in the body of a woman because at various times

[80:29]

in Buddhist history you know women have gotten a bad name and theoretically you have to be in the body of a man to get enlightened you know and if you're in the body of a woman you don't have a chance at least this was the understanding at one point in Buddhism so you see at some point the sutra here's a new sutra that comes out where we're going to try to change this kind of understanding right and so she says but Shariputra this is this is not real this is just an appearance I just appear to be in this body and Shariputra kind of like really it sure looks to me like you're in that body I mean what body I mean I'd say you were in that body you know and so finally you know she through her eloquence she can't convince him so at some point she changes bodies with him she's in his body he's in her body

[81:29]

and then she says to Shariputra Shariputra why are you in the body of a woman and he sort of looks oh my goodness and he says well I don't know I there's nothing I can do about it I'm not I'm not really in the body of a woman this isn't really me and she says well that's the way it always is Shariputra what did you think before about your body what made you think that you were in the body that was you in the body of a man what made you think that you were actually a man these are appearances Shariputra after a while he goes yeah I can see it's pretty and then she switches him back he says oh yes well it makes a lot of sense now that you mentioned it that these appearances

[82:30]

are not really real in the way we take them to be really real and we should have some understanding of that so we don't go off and get our nipples relocated and you know all the various things that we might do to try to you know measure up to some standard it's the same thing with food you know when I started cooking I thought that there was a way things were supposed to taste and I was trying to get certain dishes to taste the way that I thought they should taste instead of just tasting the way they are what's wrong with a carrot tasting like a carrot no it should have some caraway on there and a little vinegar and a little you know maybe a little salt and some you know red pepper and then it tastes good what about a carrot being a carrot tasting like a carrot what's wrong with that can't we just taste something the way it is and appreciate that and also find this kind of you know this spacious quality

[83:30]

right there and the very particulars that you know are the particulars of our life observing carefully and you know we need to have that time to observe carefully we need to be you know have some quiet be receptive you know be concentrated to be able to receive something and to experience it closely enough to notice the space there you know one of Patty's yoga students complains every so often and he says this pose says nothing to me this pose doesn't speak to me Patty just gets sort of frustrated because she doesn't know what to say you know like you want the pose to speak why don't you shut up you know I mean probably for it to speak to you you got to be quiet for a while you know

[84:28]

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