Now I could go on with why I think this experience of aliveness itself is an opening to many Well, I suppose some philosophers might say an ontological openness or something like that. Yeah, or I could say an openness to being itself. But, you know, if I say being, it's a bit intangible. What's being mean? But we do know what aliveness means. So before I go on, does somebody have something you'd like to say?

[01:02]

Yes. In the introduction, as far as I remember, you said something about, and that's how I remember it, how the unconscious and the conscious are weaving together. And that's something that I'd be really interested in. A question like, am I partially responsible for the unconscious? Well, it wouldn't be there if you weren't there. But what responsibility means in that context, that's something else.

[02:30]

But let's again try to be precise. I don't mean you're not being precise. I mean to talk about these things, I have to make myself precise. Sondern ich meine, um über diese Dinge zu sprechen, muss ich mich selbst genau machen. Zunächst einmal spreche ich kaum über das Unbewusste. Ob das jetzt ganz spezifisch auf freudianische Weise gebraucht wird oder auf allgemeine Weise. repressed material or blocked material or something like that. So I would use non-conscious.

[03:32]

But in what I said earlier, I didn't even use non-conscious. I said, when a subliminal knowing meets or weaves or whatever with a supraliminal knowing. Okay. And a subliminal knowing isn't quite the same as non-conscious. And subliminal, when we use a term like subliminal knowing, I think we have more of a feeling of how to get access to this knowledge. knowing, this subliminal knowing, because non-conscious is all kinds of things we don't have access to.

[04:53]

Yeah. Okay. So I will maybe proceed in that direction. by continuing with this locating yourself in aliveness. Okay. Look, you're walking along the street. I mean, you know, Much of what I say I think is kind of silly. I mean, it's just, you know, something, I don't know.

[05:54]

But I try to find examples that you can feel. Yeah, so say you're walking along the street. And you really are establishing your continuity in aliveness. And that aliveness is alive to the world. You can't have aliveness without aliveness to the world as well. So you're walking along in the immediacy of circumstances. Of course, in English, circumstances means what is around you. Circumstances, what stands around you. And you feel the vividness. Yes, because aliveness is vividness.

[07:04]

I haven't started testing you yet. You just don't know about that. Of which? Of that it's difficult to translate vividness and aliveness in a different way. Really, I don't know that either. You see, what I say is true because in German it's one word. You see, what I say is true because in German it's almost the same word. In English we have to work hard to get all these words together, but you just... So let's say that you're walking along with this feeling of your continuity is aliveness itself. And you see... You know, a group of people walking up towards you and past you.

[08:19]

Now, I think we often have habits of, well, those are interesting people. Or they're not so interesting. Or, well, that person isn't even a person I dislike. It's the kind of person I dislike. And which one's attractive and so forth. Well, I mean, one still has such thoughts. It's part of the scheme of things. But if your feeling of, if your continuity is aliveness, You feel the aliveness of these other people. And it's like deer or animals. It's quite interesting. And feeling their aliveness and not your mental ideas about people invigorates your own aliveness.

[09:24]

And to feel the vitality of these people and not your mental... Your mental what, excuse me? Invigorates your own life. No, but your mental, not seeing your mental... Not seeing your mental formations. And not seeing your mental images about these people. That reinforces your own vitality. Yes, okay. Now I don't want to overload this simple experience of first noticing aliveness. And then see if you can establish aliveness sometimes at least as your experience of continuity. Yeah, again, I don't want to overload that with too many teachings, etc. But when you do something like establish your continuity in a new way, Because most of what happens to you is through your continuity.

[10:53]

If you change the tape, I mean, sort of like something like that, it starts registering all kinds of different, it registers the world differently. If you change the cassette, it's kind of like that. Cassette? I guess so. In my days it was a tape. Okay, if you change the tape... I don't know. If you change the tape, I think it's kind of like that. Then... And cassettes are disappearing now. Yeah, that was already pointing to the past for me. She knows how to put me in my place. Yeah, yeah.

[11:56]

That's German, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Okay, now this experience of locating continuity through aliveness is nearly the same as what we mean by a person has presence. And one way you can notice when you feel somebody's presence, you can feel them come into the room or feel them when they're walking on the street. And it's interesting to notice in a group of people sometimes one will have a presence and the others don't so much. In my experience, when I kind of observe that, now what's going on there?

[13:04]

The person with presence is at least partially locating their continuity in aliveness. And it gives their thinking, because there may also be thinking and observing, its own presence. It's almost like, since they don't have to... I'm just making this up, but this is what I experience. I have no footnotes here. Okay. When a person is not establishing their continuity in their thinking, as most of us do it by habit, their thinking has a kind of independent power.

[14:27]

Because it isn't tied down to establishing continuity. So the person with presence like that, you feel the continuity and the aliveness, and the thinking is sort of noticing what's going on around, more than most people who are just like going along inside themselves. I try to find terms for these things. Because, you know, I'm always exploring experience through experience itself. But then, you know, I sort of like, you know, somehow I have to keep saying things about these things.

[15:48]

No. It's not just because I'm here talking with you. But it's also because in my experience and in practice, the ability to express what you're experiencing deepens the experience and clarifies it. Sometimes it can conflate it, but if it's done right, it deepens and clarifies the experience. When understanding is the release of a next step, So sometimes to try to define it makes a shift of understanding and opens you to a next step. Yeah, it's a bit like... crying.

[17:08]

Crying in Buddhism is primarily thought of, other than ordinary crying, you're lonely or miserable or hopeless, feeling hopeless. Crying is a sign of understanding. Or a feeling of compassion, of connectedness. And as I say, when this comes up for us, comes up like this, I say many of us only cry in movies, men especially. And when that comes up for us, I mention this example of crying in movies.

[18:16]

I do it all the time. It's terrible. I have to have towels. Then it's like this, for example, that we mainly cry in movies, especially men cry mainly in movies. And it's usually, I mean, observe what makes you cry. Often we're touched by something or we feel connected by it. So, and sometimes in the sutras, Buddha's sutras, it says such and such and such, and then the Buddha said such and such, and then so and so cried with understanding. She's good.

[19:30]

Well, we could have the Buddha who's gone beyond the trivial, you know, things like that, but actually... Okay. Now the term, the sort of Heideggerian term I've come up with recently is being in feeling. Sometimes it's observing in feeling.

[20:30]

I could say observing through feeling, but I really mean more like in feeling. I like the etymology of the word alive. or its prior forms at least, which were on life became alive. And it meant something like when you're riding on your life. So it's sort of like you're riding in your feeling Or you're locust in feeling, located in feeling. Now this is the second skanda of feeling, which is really non-graspable feeling. So it's not feeling as it's often conflated with emotion.

[21:41]

I feel angry, etc. For me it's a technical term in the way I speak about Buddhism, non-graspable feeling. And when it comes up again, the example I usually use, is that right now in this room there's a feeling. And it's something different than five or ten minutes ago. And most of the content of what's happening here is in this non-graspable feeling. But if we try to say what it is, you can't.

[22:42]

You can't say what it is, but it is what it is. And each of us is a participant in this non-graspable feeling. And if one of you sits a little straighter, it changes the feeling in the room. If one of you starts thinking about something else, Say I'm looking over here and I feel someone in the room has started thinking about something else. It's just right in the texture of the feeling. So I don't know, I tried various terms out. Retrieving, feeling retrieved. retrieved found again something like that yeah like a dog a retriever is a dog that goes so you feel retreat found again in feeling relocated in feeling so all of these terms i can make up observing and feeling etc

[24:13]

Often, as some of you have noticed, you have been hanging around now and then, you know, when we do all these things. As I try out funds and then finally one sticks. But the experience I'm trying to speak about is all of the terms, but I can't quite use all the terms. So eventually, being and feeling is the one I think is going to stick. And so I try all the different terms and the experience is all these different terms. But I can't say them all. And at some point I find those who stick to it. I think feeling in being is what sticks.

[25:20]

Yeah. No, I, you know, some of you I only see once a year. And some of you I've never seen before. Like you, I think I've never seen you before. I would have remembered because you're taller than me. I always wonder when I look at my daughter, what's it like up there? Then I may not see... Who knows? I guess you will invite me back next year? Okay. Well, then I might see some of you again next year.

[26:22]

Okay. So how much should I say to you? I mean, maybe to locate continuity and aliveness is enough and we can go home. And in a sashin, I could, you know, I would seldom do it, but I could in a sashin. That would be enough for the whole sashin. So I'm expressing my embarrassment right now at going on to more things that really should take a week each. So we have this noticing aliveness. Finding satisfaction, fullness in aliveness itself. See if we can shift our sense of continuity to this experience of aliveness.

[27:52]

Let's call it a field of aliveness. It's both a continuity of aliveness and a field of aliveness. And this field of aliveness opens us to being in feeling. It's establishing what others would say, he or she has presence. But the experience of the person who has presence isn't so much, well, I have presence, I don't know what the hell that means if you said that. But the person who's seen as having presence, their own feeling is something like the peripersonal space.

[29:02]

You know what that is? Peripersonal space is like when you drive a car, you can feel where the fenders are. That's peripersonal space. The fenders? You haven't studied car mechanics? But she's good on psychological terms. Yeah, I mean, if you study the brain of a chimpanzee and you put a tool in his hands, his brain makes his body feel like it's this big to where the end of the tool is. Does that make sense? Yeah. So in a car, one of the thrilling things about driving often is that You can just miss something by about this much.

[30:03]

And your peripersonal space is being stimulated. Your perimeter, peri, is your perimeter and personal space. So they feel that maybe if they tried to say what they felt, they'd say their peripersonal space is wider. Something like that. But again, we don't have words for these kind of things. I mean, we don't think about ourselves in these terms much. Buddhism does, but how do I find words in English for it? And I think those of us who have done sashim would say that at some point the boundaries of your body are not just your physical body. And if you're a beginner at Zazen, you think, oh, this is just some kind of idea.

[31:23]

But the experience keeps returning, and at some point you realize your bodily experience is not limited to the physical body. Because maybe the body is an activity, not a thing. Okay. So we have aliveness, continuity of aliveness. And now we have a feeling of presence. And the present becomes more present. Okay, so now let's talk about it as a field of awareness. Now I'm making a contrast here between awareness and consciousness.

[32:25]

So I mean, I think that as it came up earlier, I should give some definition of consciousness. I think the simplest example is consciousness is what you wake up into in the morning. Once it's established, it's very difficult to go back to sleep. And dreams sink in consciousness. And in dreaming mind, dreams float to the surface. So it's a different kind of liquid. Liquidness. Yeah. And once consciousness is established, I've got to do this and I better get up, you know, make my daughter's breakfast and so forth.

[34:03]

Unless you're completely exhausted, you can't go back to sleep easily. And very simply again, the job of consciousness is to make the world predictable. To look for predictability, to establish predictability, to remember that when I looked away she'll still be there. And through making the world predictable, make it cognizable. When it's predictable and more has a quality of entities, we can understand it and act within it.

[35:05]

And then to make the world sequential. And if it's sequential, that's the way it's predictable, because it's sequential. And finally, the main points, I think, would be also to make it contextual. That's to give it meaning. Yeah, and I think that, for instance, when these examples of brain-damaged people and so forth, when they can think very clearly, but they can't put themselves, their self, in any relevance to the context.

[36:08]

They don't know what's going on. So then consciousness' job there in contextual is to establish consequentiality. Also ist die Aufgabe des Bewusstseins da, zusammenhängend, Folgerichtigkeit herzustellen. It sounded awfully good. It was. It was? I don't know what's going on, but I appreciate it. Now, awareness doesn't do that.

[37:13]

Awareness is just aware. It's non-conceptual awareness. Non-comparative awareness. Now, consciousness at each moment calls forth the memories, the accumulated experience that supports consciousness. Now we all know that Freud discovered he put somebody in a semi-reclining meditative posture. And what is that term again, Ralph, that you established, the therapist established? Evenly suspended attention. That's a term I like.

[38:19]

Yeah, I always forget because I only use it when I see you. Wonderfully too often suspended attention. There's too many interruptions at least in our attention. Yeah. Evenly suspended attention. Yeah, and that opens up free association. Okay, so what you notice when a person free associates... or dreams, they know things that aren't known by consciousness. Now Buddhism doesn't presume that means there's an unconscious.

[39:19]

Buddhism would assume, yes, it makes sense that there is something we can call unconscious. But rather we would say that the liquidness of consciousness calls forth one kind of memory. And the liquidness of awareness calls forth another realm of consciousness. So awareness not only puts you in a rather different immediacy, the experience that's called forth into this immediacy In other words, the immediacy rooted in awareness calls forth different accumulated experience than the immediate present rooted in consciousness calls forth.

[40:36]

Okay. Time for a break, probably. Oh, dear.

[41:01]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_75.32