And if you go to some of these places like Bali, they're still trying to figure out what to do with towels and sheets. So here we are trying to create an inner Buddha field. To live as Europeans and Germans and Americans. I think that's enough for now. Okay, let's take a break for 20 minutes or so. Thanks. And thank you for translating.

[01:03]

Maybe you could say a little bit about what you were saying about it's not, is it evolutionary, you're a maverick, etc. That's interesting. Well, I mean, people may automatically put it on a scale of progress. And I don't mean it as a progress at all. Or should I just say it? Ulrike brought up just after we finished a few minutes ago that nomadic people certainly traveled and so forth. Probably as tribes, not as individuals. But she asked, did I mean this in some sort of evolutionary sense or sense of progress of a development of consciousness? Really, almost not at all.

[02:18]

I don't know much about progress. As I mentioned recently, if we At this point, and it's only been a few decades where women have been considered equal as men, we are still in the dark ages. We're pretty benighted. There may be some big progress present. There are certainly causal relationships. And I guess I agree with Carl Jasper's idea of an axial point in history where Confucius, Buddha, and so forth all lived at the same time in Socrates.

[03:33]

Anyway, but really it's much more a matter of lots of small differences. And like knowing a city without a map. Does anyone have some questions? I think it might be good to talk a little together at this point. Yes.

[04:34]

Thank you. Well, my question is that you said we shouldn't identify with our personal history or kind of tie our identity to our personal history, which of course everyone does. And afterwards you gave us an alternative, and can you repeat that? Well, I'm glad you rephrased it, because I didn't say we shouldn't tie ourselves to our personal history. We should not only tie ourselves to our personal history. And if I said should, I really didn't mean it. I just mean there's these alternatives. Are you interested? So it's possible to base yourself in a kind of absolute consciousness, which is different from basing yourself in your story.

[06:06]

And as I've said, I guess in the Sesshin, this is also to produce, to come to a kind of absolute sanity. Where it is quite unlikely you could go crazy. You still may be a neurotic stinker, as I said. This isn't about dealing with your neuroses or your shadow particularly, etc. It's about establishing a place from which you could not go crazy. So, anyway, we can... You know, we just have to be patient, as I've been saying, with the long, flat slopes of the learning curve. You make a little progress and it's flat for some years, forever.

[07:24]

Sometimes it feels like you're going down and backwards. But it takes quite a while if you kind of let these things remain fertile in an inferring consciousness, then usually some kind of different soup occurs. I don't know how you say all these things. Okay, someone else? I felt a little shock when you said that the consciousness is an artifact.

[08:35]

What do you mean by this? You don't mean artificial? I mean manufactured, made by us. In a creative sense. Artificial just means it's made, too. The word in English, artificial and artifact, are basically the same. Artificial is contrasted to natural, like our city Frankfurt is artificial and the tree is natural, but actually they're both artifacts, constructs. Artifact and artificial have something to do with each other. Consciousness is also artificial in the sense that it is fabricated, that it is something that is made. For example, I don't see any difference between a tree and Frankfurt. I don't see it as a natural tree and Frankfurt as something artificial.

[09:40]

Both are made and in this sense both are an artifact. And our cities are as natural as anthills. They're also natural. We may prefer another kind of nature. But an idea like... Consciousness is an artifact. Really, if you spend some time with it, it can be earth-shaking or consciousness-shaking. Okay, yes. about what you call inferring consciousness, kind of.

[10:42]

Maybe you can give an example what kind of perceptions and how to deal with that, and that comes out. Yeah. Okay. You want to say that in the mother tongue? Okay, that's what I'd like to come to at least an initiatory sense before we go to lunch. So let me come back to that in a minute. Yes? If you say consciousness is an artifact, what is of course interesting is where it can be worked with.

[11:45]

And I don't know if it is working with God. Yeah, and you said to me at the break something about... how your practice is affecting your ... seems to affect your life, but not much is happening in your practice itself, or ... and how do you make ... and it seems to be happening outside you or without your intervention. So what ... can you say that in German or something like that? It's more and more that the control is actually not a control ability. I don't have the feeling to be able to control anything in any way. And that's why it's also the case that when you talk about the post, I of course also ask myself where the point is where you can get in or where you can get in between.

[12:53]

What artifact implies that somebody creates it, but who manufactures it then? For the most part, it's an own organizing process. I don't like the word self-organizing process because we have a non-self-organizing process too. So I've coined the phrase an own-organizing process. So how do you give yourself over to your own-organizing processes? Okay, one more question maybe, then I'll try to respond in general to them. Maybe it's contributing to the question of Julio.

[14:03]

I think he just said consciousness is an artifact and then he said this is absolute consciousness we should base ourselves on. Do you use consciousness here as two different terms, or is this absolute consciousness also in some way an artifact, or is it just a process of... Well, for me it's more like taking layers off of something which is there. Yeah. Our consciousness is an artifact, and then he said, there is the absolute consciousness from which we define ourselves. That's an absolute artifact. Whether the consciousness is changed in two different ways, that's the word, or whether this absolute consciousness, also because it is in power, seems to me to be more of a process of uncovering, of taking away from Schick.

[15:17]

Yeah, well, it feels like that, I know. And in practice you have to sort these things out as you wish. And in general, in the Zen, in the central Buddhist middle way is to not give definite answers. some schools in Buddhist history have said there's an underlying permanent consciousness and that's somewhat how we experience it but I think if you say that you get yourself into trouble So I would say that maybe it's always present but not permanent.

[16:27]

And how you describe these things to yourself is extremely important. It's like they say, if the Big Bang, etc., if the temperature or something was one degree different, the whole thing would have happened differently. Very small differences in how you define things affect how you see what happens. So much of Buddhism has to do with a kind of internal grammar or syntax. And most cultures are based on an interplay between mathematical and grammatical ideas. And most cultures are based on a combination of such grammatical and mathematical ideas.

[17:41]

Shouldn't we just talk in this context about awareness anyway, not consciousness? Yeah, the way I use the two words, it's better to say awareness. But we can talk about a non-dual consciousness. Okay, so let's look at this idea of an inferring consciousness which is so important. Okay. There are several important ideas here. If there is an inferring consciousness, implies that there's no revealed teaching.

[19:00]

In the beginning was not the word, was not Buddha's word, was not the sutras, was not the stupa. There is only the constant state of revelation. So there's no reveal teaching. There's a teaching which reveals or a revealing process. So wisdom in Buddhism is not something that you earn through old age. Although that is a kind of wisdom and we need more old wise people.

[20:04]

But wisdom in Buddhism, again, is not a product of the mind. In Buddhism, it has nothing to do with the content of the mind. It has to do with the condition of the mind and the process of the mind. So in the idea of an inferring consciousness, it means that you're in a world where there's no revealed teaching that are nothing stable. It means you have enough inner stability to decide for yourself how the world is without comparing it to the way it's supposed to be. And you have the confidence to discover that yourself.

[21:12]

Now, the idea of an inferring consciousness also has in it that this is not an attitude of drawing inferences from sense perception. This is not just an attitude. It's an attitude that, if you have it, changes the consciousness itself, which has the attitude. Otherwise it would say it's good to practice inference as a logical process.

[22:14]

But that's not what it says. Nagarjuna in Madhyamaka Buddhism says you have to have an inferring consciousness. Wouldn't it be better to say inferred consciousness? Well, in the sense that your consciousness was developed through a practice of inference that everything's changing. So you might be able to say, I inferred from seeing that everything changes... I inferred that I should have an inferring consciousness. Meaning a consciousness which is in the process always of revelation or revealing or inferring.

[23:37]

No. And inferring consciousness views, for example, in Sashin we talked about, you might have some questions that come up around that. That dream experience is real experience. It's not a comment only, though sometimes it is, on your daily life, which is more real. Now, let's look at daydreaming a minute. In the gymnasium class, some kids are studying and there's two or three kids sitting there daydreaming.

[24:59]

It would be interesting to know, is it the brighter kids or the dumber kids that daydream the most? But in any case, what happens when you daydream? You have withdrawn, as I said recently, one leg of this experience from the physical world that's inside you. And you're not really paying attention to what the teacher is saying, you know, you're sort of the clouds, you're thinking, I don't know. Come back, says the teacher, pay attention. And the better kids perhaps are always established in the present situation.

[26:09]

And certainly one of the practices of mindfulness is to continuously establish yourself in the present situation. But as we've talked about many times, in actual fact, everything I see is a kind of daydream. Because everything occurs in my sense fields. So I see you all, and I know you're out there, but for me, every one of you is only seen in my sense views. And you're all in her sense fields, and we're all in each other's sense fields, and they're all kind of overlapping.

[27:13]

And if we have a developed inner palace, there's a lot of room for that to move around. So in fact, once I see that, I realize that it's not so different from a daydream. When I try to establish reality only from the outside, it's rather primitive, you know. I better wash dishes all day. I need to establish a stability of consciousness that's entirely inside. That at the same time is in communion with the phenomenal world as it appears. Now, the more you feel this, the difference between something occurring in my sense fields now and something occurring in my sense fields when I'm dreaming, not too different.

[28:43]

Now, how do you know you're not dreaming right now? There are actually ways to check up on that. At least, you know, to some extent. For example, if you look at your hand two or three different times, and it's nearly the same each time, you're probably not dreaming. Or if I look at the words on a book and the title remains the same, then probably in a dream the words kind of change and it's hard to focus on them and so forth. But except for those kinds of differences, dreams are real experience from a Buddhist point of view. Things really happen to you.

[29:57]

You can learn things. You can be taught through dreams and so forth. And as it's in this koan we just looked at where Nanchuan says, people nowadays see this peony as if they were in a dream. And we can say that what he means is they see the peony, but they don't see the dream. They don't see that the peony is in their mind. So when they see it outside, it's actually like they were seeing it as a dream. So one of the things when you are dreaming, you see the dream. An important Buddhist practice is, if you develop lucidity in dreaming, you then...

[30:58]

take that lucidity that you learn in dreaming and apply it to your daily life and make your daily life more lucid. How you do things in ordinary wakefulness, how you do things in dreaming, can be transposed and you can learn from each. Okay, so now again an inferring consciousness. If I'm doing zazen, as I said last night, and in the midst of sitting I feel very tall, Or I don't feel I have any boundaries.

[32:21]

Or sometimes if you're dreaming, you see the background of the dream is rushing. An inferring consciousness notices these things and accepts them as real experience. You don't say, oh, I'm actually that tall. And you don't say, oh, that was only in my mind. You say, in this experience of wakefulness, I feel this tall. In meditation, I feel that tall or this tall. That's all. And you don't, you're not comparing them. You just note. And you're able to draw a conclusion from that. Now, if you're always dismissing your meditation experience as a dream or unreal or comparing it, it won't develop as part of your inner vocabulary.

[33:38]

So an inferring consciousness is a consciousness which can look at things in parts. And isn't tied to the generalizations of the culture. And isn't quick then to jump though, I'm channeling or this is a past life or something like that too. It might be all those things, I don't know. But the basic Majamaka idea of inferring consciousness is you just note the various things. And you keep living in the parts without establishing a map. And you get to start knowing the parts through the parts.

[34:47]

Again, don't mean you don't do other things, but if you use a map, you know it's a map. Das heißt nicht, ihr macht nicht auch irgendetwas anderes, aber macht euch klar, wenn ihr eine Karte benutzt, dass ihr eine Karte benutzt. Und wie ich oft gesagt habe, ihr solltet wissen, dass die Karte nicht mit dem Gebiet oder dem Territorium zu verwechseln ist. Und ihr sollt in der Lage sein, diesen Unterschied zwischen Karte und Territorium zu machen. inhibits inferring consciousness. That's what? What do you mean by territory?

[35:50]

Did you say territorium? The territory of your own experience or the territory of your meditation experience. Actually, I like the word not only topography, which suggests the surface, but I like the medical term, the tomography, which is a layer through something. Okay, so I think It is said in Buddhism that you do not withdraw yourself from the objects of the world.

[37:12]

You analyze the objects of the world. And through analysis you make them disappear into a state of cessation. Yeah, state of cessation. All right, so let me just take this one simple example I've used very often. If we concentrate on this as a physical object, this is very basic practice. It's counting your breaths and so forth. Okay. At the same time as we concentrate on a physical object like this or your breath or whatever, any object of concentration, you don't want to do this with too much fierceness or discipline.

[38:20]

Because you also want to let what happens when you do that. And what happens is you can't concentrate on it. A lot of stuff comes up, associations, memories and so forth. So you're in that way turning yourself over to your own organizing processes. And recognizing the field that arises whenever you hold something up. Sukhiroshi gave me the koan of Gute holding up his finger. Or he presented the koan and I took the koan. And he knew I took it. And he would come back to it every now and then and hold up his finger. Pretty soon I saw everything that appeared as Gute's finger.

[39:52]

The Marriott Hotel. That sculpture, you mean. This microphone. You sitting in front of me. And one day he was doing the service, the bell, and I was out in the audience. And he was doing the service and stuff. And he had the stick, we had a big stick to hit the big bell. And a kind of field had been established between us. which we had sort of locked into. And then while he was doing the bells, he went... And I'm still reverberating from that. So when you put up the stick, you try to concentrate on it, and the effort to concentrate on it establishes a field.

[41:21]

And then as the field is established, you develop the skill of one-pointedness. And they go together. You don't try to do just one. You develop the skill of one-pointedness and the ability also to allow a field to happen. This is basic education and development of an interior consciousness. It's like learning the alphabet. Learn to be able to do this. It's the first two to 15 years of practice. Every moment of it's worth it, though.

[42:29]

These are testimonials. I don't know if every moment of it's worth it at all. It's what some of us do. You don't get paid much for doing it, I guarantee you. Who knows? Maybe in the long run. Anyway... So you learn to be able to keep your mind on the object of concentration. And so I said, that's an achievement. Then you take the object away and you maintain the concentration on the field that was established and you no longer need the object. And then you stabilize that field. And the object of concentration now is the field, not the stick. So you've shifted the object of concentration from the stick to space or emptiness. To an experience of cohesion that is not substantiation.

[43:59]

And when you can do that, you can stabilize your inner consciousness. And from that stabilized inner consciousness, you can build various interior palaces. So that's enough for now, I think. Maybe we sit for one minute or something like that. An immeasurable minute. Does anyone have any questions or ideas in your mind from lunch or from life? I think we are still in the process of the emergence of consciousness.

[45:28]

It seems as if we are able to shape the freedom in our consciousness. If we have an appropriate understanding of it. in the time of Plato and Bonhoeffer and all the other great figures, they did not have a process in which a jump that took place in the city took place. But I think that there was a kind of social push that was needed there. I don't think that's possible. I mean, the condition of a genie is not that you stand out of society on your own, but that the genie is carried in the environment so that a person can realize it, which is already possible in a large environment. The way we change Buddhism and our consciousness is very euclidic.

[46:32]

We change our environment. We get into, for example, a monastery-like situation. And will it be that we change our consciousness? And I would just like to ask a few questions I'm still working with this thought about how we create and change consciousness. And my understanding is that Well, it sounded as if we can just change our consciousness after we have realized something, change it the way we like it.

[47:43]

And how much is that created and supported by the surroundings? And my definition of a genius is not that there is a person who just is outstanding by itself, it's a situation where this person can gather something that comes out of the surroundings and bring it out, like a flower that brings the soil. the situation where we in Buddhism change our consciousness is that we create a different environment. So that changes. So it sounds a little easy when you say that Plato and other figures at that time by themselves created this thing.

[48:46]

I think you add a much wider... background and support system. And what my question is, how much ring do we have, actually, and how much is it dependent on our environment and society? Well, there's the A large number of scholars and others have been working on these things for centuries. Well, of course, the idea of this axial point in history Is it not only where Plato and actually it was Parmenides, it was the next generation with Parmenides and Confucius and Lao Tzu and Buddha, all contemporaries.

[50:11]

The implication is not only that they were supported by, they came out of their culture, but something was happening in India, China and Europe, Greece. that had some similarities that in the same 15 years produced these people who changed their respective cultures. Now it seems that Sensitive people often anticipate the mind of the next generation. And usually, I would say, if we try to look at that in an operational way,

[51:15]

That they couldn't, in today's lingo, their present-day culture of their contemporaries didn't compute. Man könnte sagen, dass für diese Leute einfach mal in einer zeitgemäßen Ausdrucksweise einfach etwas nicht übereingestimmt hat in ihrer jeweiligen Popkultur. No longer held together in some way. It was more of a fossil. Irgendetwas war in dieser Kultur bereits wie überaltert. I don't mean dead or a fossil, really, but just no longer quite the glue was different. And often sensitive people, some kinds of sensitive people, can't, the world has to compute for them or they tend to fall apart. And then anticipating where things are going or have already gone but we haven't noticed it, they actually bring forth something for people.

[52:51]

I believe when studies have been done, I think Hofstadter has done a study of genius or something, of genius or people who are seminal figures in their culture. That such people seem to almost always have a number of people who believe in them. And that confidence from someone else or something seems to be needed to actually go that extra distance into something quite different than most people do. and we all might be such sensitive people on the edge of falling apart unless we find some new way to put this all together so we decided to believe in each other

[54:07]

Up to a point at least. Now, how do you change consciousness? This is really a version of Giulio's question. I have another question which goes a little bit into this direction. In the sense when I really think through this idea of an inferring consciousness or this own organizing consciousness, I think there's a small temptation to feel this has a kind of almost inherent quality from which it organizes itself. I have a question that goes a bit in that direction.

[55:32]

If I really say that there is such a consciousness that organizes itself, or if we find access to it, that it draws its own conclusions, isn't there a bit of an attempt to take a step backwards, that there is some kind of consciousness that has such an inherent or own existence? Well, I think that contemporary chaos theory and Buddhism for centuries has made a great effort to analyze these things through to the point where you see there's no inherency in these things which even so are own organizing. Yeah, the contemporary physics and Buddhism have made great efforts to prove that these self-organizing processes have no independent existence or such an inheritance. And I'm convinced by the arguments myself. And by my experience.

[56:34]

But to go through it rigorously would take a little time here. But I think we should go through it a little bit. Does someone else want to say something? Yes, Mike. Would it be too simple to describe the inferring consciousness as the non-compared consciousness? Or would it be only one aspect? Would it be too simple to describe the inferring consciousness as the non-compared consciousness? Well, it depends what you mean by comparing. If you mean that seeing difference is a kind of comparison, foreground from background, then the inferring consciousness definitely sees difference.

[57:38]

But if you mean by comparison that it compares this difference to established knowledge to find out if it's true or not, no, it doesn't do that. Or doing that's a secondary process. It's doing that kind of comparison as a secondary process, not the primary process of this kind of consciousness. No, I think the basic question in all this is, so what? I mean, yeah, it's kind of interesting, but Jesus.

[58:43]

I mean, Buddha, who cares? And I kept being faced with that with these Oldenburg folks, because, you know, at least we, as I said last night, I believe, have a kind of tacit agreement this might be important. So I had to ask myself the question there, because it was coming from Ulrike and others, why bother? I think that... One day they say the ancients just boiled chestnuts and their fortune was no more than contentment. All their lives they never saw from anyone.

[59:45]

But that's bringing exactly to the point. But from here to there, how did we get there? Then you have to believe that, too. and they boil chestnuts at the edge of a hoe. That's the part I like. Okay. Does that have to be translated, what we just said? It's nice to hear that. But you think, you know, in the midst of most of our lives it sounds like unobtainable candy.

[61:00]

Yeah, by 45% sugar by weight or something like that. You read the labels. Well, one thing I think we've noticed is that small differences, as I said, make a very big difference. The difference between concentrating on a physical object And transferring that to the concentration on the concentration as an object is a very small difference, but an extremely big one. Or a distinction in being the hermit is not one who separates himself from the world, but the hermit is one who analyzes the world.

[62:22]

They produce people who are nearly the same, but it's a big difference. Okay. Now let's go back to this inferring consciousness. In English, when you say it, it sounds a little bit like a furry consciousness, like a little cat or something. It's a nice furry consciousness here. Their consciousness comes in two categories.

[63:31]

Dual and non-dual. And there's many consciousnesses that fall into the category of dual consciousness. And there's only one consciousness that falls into the category of non-dual. But that's not actually true. Because if non-dual consciousness is only one kind, then we have a God. Then we have a ground beyond this or something. Or we have... Anyway, you get the idea.

[64:33]

Hopefully. Because if there was only one kind of non-dual consciousness, then it couldn't be created or changed or affected or whatever. So, if you have many dual consciousnesses, that dual consciousness is always in a pulse with a non-dual consciousness. then the gate through which you realize a non-dual consciousness is affected by the gate by which you enter or realize the non-dual consciousness.

[65:42]

And the dual? If you go into a room from the north door, it's a different room than you go into the room from the south door. Yeah, no, I understood what you mean. I think you just... Well, I may have reversed it, yeah. It's the same room, but if you enter by a different door, it's a different room. It's the same room. It's room A known through the north door instead of room A known through the east door, which is something different. Not much different, maybe, but something different. And if you don't make those kind of distinctions, you end up in Hinduism or a kind of deity very rapidly.

[66:47]

Which has a kind of Brahman state which is permanent or something like that. Okay. Now, in a way, it's important that these things are true or not. But in another way, if you look at it one way, you produce one kind of person. If you look at it another way, you produce another kind of person. Now, Wang Bo, likens the Buddha substance, the Buddha nature substance, to Quicksilver, to Mercury.

[68:01]

Whenever you put it together, it immediately forms a whole. If you take it apart, it forms lots of little holes. Globular. Supposedly, the Hubble telescope just verified that black holes exist. This is, by the way, I don't know if you've noticed, but this is actually a solidified black hole. I've disappeared in this many times. Mm-hmm. You're just supposed to translate.

[69:03]

No, I'm just kidding. Actually, you know, I want you to understand that a wisdom consciousness is something we all have or could have or it's what we are. And this process we're going through, talking about it, has been gone through since Buddhism existed. I'm not teaching you anything. I'm engaging you in a process. And this process is what teaches us. And I often say that, like I said, Ulrike and I gave the lectures at Oldenburg together. And sometimes she agrees, and sometimes she says, I'm just translating.

[70:16]

But actually, not only in translating, but talking, taking drives, walks, there's a process going on of trying to figure out, come to, how to recognize and discuss these things. So this process is not just Ulrike and myself, but us who talk together regularly in the Dharamsanga now for some years. And I'm afraid I recognize more than you may the degree to which you're part of the process for me and I think for all of us. Okay. Now this is a kind of delicate matter to start talking about something that doesn't seem to exist, like the field when you take this away.

[71:30]

But imagine that when you put this up here and you concentrate on it and then create the field of concentration, That field of concentration, where is it? It has to be in you, right? But it's also a part of or related to everything around you. So it's something you... maintain or don't maintain. And it's kind of like a lens, an invisible clear lens that you can move around and look at things. And the moon is sometimes used as an example of this.

[72:32]

And in Buddhism, that's what the nimbus means and the halo around the body. And when a person develops that field, you can actually feel it sometimes. And under certain circumstances, see it. So this isn't just, you know, ideas. Okay. This takes a lot of energy to do this. I'm sorry, I'm tiring you out, I realize. So, at least I'm tiring myself out. So... I'm going to try to say something about this, then we can take a break. Okay.

[73:45]

So we're back to the to the inferring consciousness. Okay, now this is not a consciousness which we would say, well, sometimes I infer and sometimes I deduce and sometimes I daydream. This is a consciousness that when you deduce, you're also inferring. When you are daydreaming, you're also inferring. The nature of the liquid of this consciousness is that it always is inferring, noticing, etc.

[74:49]

Okay. And this consciousness comes to see things in parts. And it sees... All right, let's use the example of the word wave again that I mentioned in Sashin. Okay, the word wave, at least in English, is W-A-V-E. And you can rearrange the letters so they're A, E, V, W or something and it doesn't make any, it's just other, not a word.

[75:50]

So at one point the letters are just other. You move them around and then they fall into the pattern W-A-V-E. And you suddenly see them as a unit. And that's a word, wave, and it means something to you. Now an inferring consciousness notices this act of substantiation. Because when you see things in parts, you not only see the word wave, you see that there's an active substantiation that glues the letter together as a unit.

[76:51]

And when you realize that with the seeing of the word wave, that a process is very important, where the loose letters are given shape, And that act of substantiation, that experience of substantiation, then calls forth immense associations of ocean, children waving goodbye to their parents, you know, things like that. And all of language is there, and the description of the world we have through language, which is dependent on the simple act of substantiation. Ja, und es ist eigentlich alles da, die Sprache ist da, und der Prozess der Sprache, wie wir mit der Sprache wirklich unserer Wirklichkeit Gestalt geben, auch das ist alles da. Our sense of reality and personal history and identity, everything is dependent on this act of potentiation.

[77:52]

Und unsere ganze Wahrnehmung, unsere ganze Persönlichkeitsbildung, unsere ganze Art, wie wir die Realität verstehen, alles das ist völlig abhängig von diesem Prozess der Gestaltgebung. But what is it? It's empty. It's not graspable. It grasps you, but is it there in the letters? You put the letters in a different pattern and it's not there. But you get the letters even close to spelling the word and suddenly it substantiates. Und wenn die Reihenfolge der Buchstaben aber nur annähernd dieses Wort Welle ergibt, plötzlich ist also diese Form da. So when you see the word way, you see the four letters. Und wenn ihr jetzt also dieses Wort Welle seht, ihr seht diese fünf Buchstaben. You see the space around the word. Ihr seht den Raum um das Wort. You see the act of substantiation. And you see the associations that arise from that act of substantiation.

[78:58]

That's to see things in parts. You analyze all the parts. And the word analysis means, in English, to loosen things altogether. And that's exactly what it means in Buddhism, to loosen things so they're not substantiated. And you can experience the substantiation. Und das ist genau das, was der Buddhismus darunter versteht, oder wie es im Buddhismus gemeint ist, eine Handlung, wo wir Dinge auflockern, sodass wir sie in den Einzelheiten sehen und gleichzeitig diesen Prozess der Substanzgebung erkennen können. Nun, ich würde gerne hier eine Unterscheidung machen zwischen dieser Gestaltgebung und dem Prozess des Zusammenhalts.

[80:04]

When we see the letters in some other order, we can give it experience of cohesion. But if you practice with this, you feel that you can begin to see the word has cohesion, but you can refrain from giving it substantiation. So here's one of the answers to the so what. As you begin to give the world cohesion, but you don't give it substantiation. When you allow it to substantiate itself, it's out of your control. The word wave is something real. If you keep practicing with this process of analysis, this practice of analysis, you see the word as letters, and you see it come together as a word, and you can see it as letters again.

[81:31]

Now if you analyze an object in the Yogacara method, Like, I don't have my sweater here, but if I analyze my sweater, in the Buddhist way, The standard way, which Thich Nhat Hanh also always uses, is the sweater is made of non-sweater elements. It's made of munching sheep. And rain and grass and clouds. And herders and shearers. Yeah, and trucks and gasoline and... And stores.

[82:50]

And Deutsche Marks and banks. Dollars and banks. And if I don't put it on, it could be a rag. So it only becomes a sweater when it becomes a pullover. Well, we could shrink it. Yeah. You know what that means? Then she gets it. And she and Gisela are working together in this, you know. They shrink my best things and then she gets it. The way women stick together these days, you know. So it's only at the last instance that the sweater is a sweater. And the sweater is a sweater when I pull it over.

[83:52]

So this sweater is an object of consciousness. And it's an object that's constructed. And the consciousness that constructs it is also a construction. Because the consciousness that constructed it is the five skandhas and the vijnanas and so forth. So you analyze the sweater into its parts and it's pretty nearly empty. Then you analyze the consciousness which analyzed it and it goes into parts. As the poet philosopher Paul Valéry says, everything is made of nothing and the nothing shows through. So, the more you do this, the more you develop a wisdom consciousness. And you develop a realization or a direct experience of emptiness or of non-dual consciousness.

[85:26]

Now, this original mind or original consciousness or non-dual consciousness, so let's go back to the so what. This practice of seeing things in parts, means you actually begin to see things differently. They affect you differently. They call forth associations in memory differently. And the more you get in the habit of that, it's more and more different. And then, so it changes the what of what you see. And it changes how you see also. Because it changes the consciousness that sees. Because your consciousness itself begins to be a consciousness that is like this field that allows all these things to happen.

[87:07]

You begin to develop a consciousness that is there... How can I say? I can't say before all the parts are there, but it's a source consciousness. We call it in the koan communion with the source. And sometimes this consciousness, this original mind, is also thought of as a kind of stream of seeds. Because so many possibilities are there. Now, when you divide things into parts when you deconstruct things you have a chance to put them back together differently.

[88:11]

You create a state of mind like water in which the letters for wave are floating randomly. In fact, you have a whole mind in which the whole world is floating randomly. But anytime you put anything together virtually, there's an own organizing process that occurs and they start to form patterns. It says in one of the columns we looked at recently, yet the water spider still makes patterns. And this original mind is very responsive to whatever is happening. If you interfere with it, it's much less subtle. It's no longer an original mind. So how do you allow this to happen without interfering with it?

[89:45]

Which would be bringing an I into it. And you've already analyzed I out of existence. It's not dependent on the body. It's not different than the body. It's not the same as the body. It's not different than the mind. It's not the same, etc. Until you see that all these things exist, but they're all at the same time empty. And you see, all these things exist, but at the same time they are completely empty. So awareness or big mind or Buddha nature or great function all refers to letting this consciousness itself enter an own organizing process which, through its own sensitivity and process, makes things happen.

[91:06]

I told you it's a delicate matter. Maybe you don't have to translate that. Now the last thing I'll say, assuming you all understood that when I just said. It's not only when you put things together is there an unorganizing process. But there are what are called emergent properties. Is it any things you put together, then something happens that's not the parts, but happens when it's put near each other or together.

[92:14]

This is expressed in one koan we looked at as the seven flowers and eight blooms. There's seven flowers, but when you see it, you're the eighth bloom. Or the seven flowers themselves have a field of seven flowers, which you can call the eighth bloom.

[92:44]

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