We also talked about the immutable spirit and the divine spirit. What I found particularly beautiful was that many people sat together and it just happened. We could just stay together a little bit with our immutable spirit and we didn't have so much of a priority on the later years. We were talking about immediate consciousness, borrowed mind, and what was beautiful about it was more that we could be together in a sort of immediate consciousness, and that was actually the main thing. In your group? In the group, yes. That's good. What we talked about. and someone in Europe says that he had some very strange, very strong experiences of the non-human being, i.e. the perception of trees, or the veritable perception, or also of people, and that he feels very separated from them in everyday life at the moment, i.e. the feeling that he lives a lot in the divine spirit, One person said that having been in a zazhin and having had some very strong experiences from immediate consciousness, for example, about trees, how we...

[01:31]

Communicate with trees, coming back to everyday life and being back mostly in borrowed consciousness sort of missed and felt what was missing very strongly. And for me it is so, my observation to this challenge was that I actually have the feeling that both spirits are actually always there for me now, in a different direction. So that I, when I actually go through the abyss or when I move someone, always also with this feeling of inevitability, of how I perceive someone, and that for me it's more a matter of what I focus on. So whether I put more of this weight on this body or whether I put more of this weight So that I notice that I find both minds are always present and I can sort of choose or lay more weight on being in the one mind or the other, for example, meeting persons, or I can change that.

[02:52]

I can emphasize different minds. Good, thank you. The same to us. You know, I really appreciate it when you do say something because, well, I don't feel like I'm teaching. In a vacuum, if you don't say anything. Because I can feel some internal discussion going on in you. But to have one of you or various of you try to articulate what you... feel makes it much more realistic for me to be here. The only reason for me to be here is because of your participation. Yeah. I have a question.

[04:11]

I work in the therapeutic realm. What is the difference between healing and psychotherapy? Because a lot of what I hear It's a completely different kind of explanation. It differs from other therapeutic explanations. For me, there are a lot of difficulties that come from people, because otherwise there is usually a completely different explanation model, i.e. separation of body and mind. What's the difference between Zen and psychotherapy? For me... In one word or...? For me it has something therapeutic too, but I found the different explanations, how Zen explains things, how the different lines of psychotherapy explain Things are, that is sort of diversion for me, so I get into a little difficulty there.

[05:17]

For me, personally, it has something therapeutic. I work as a therapist. Okay. Yeah, that's a question. I'd like to come back to that. Right now I'd like to hear anybody else who can say what happened in your group. Yes, Julio. It's actually not something that happened in the group. Oh, it's all right. I realized that in practice and in my daily life I call it subconscious, with a very strong theme. That's like something I have to be within my life, within my consciousness. And there seems to be a force in me that I have no control over, that it's more like a partner, like it's not under my conscious will.

[06:21]

A partner, that sounds good, yeah. And I realized that I didn't really have any idea how it fits into the framework of media, secondary, and powerpoint. I have noticed that in practice and in daily life, I have a very strong connection to the subject matter. I have learned that I have no idea at all how to describe it in these three parts. Now, you don't see how the partner, you don't have that's sort of independent of you, how it fits into immediate or borrowed consciousness, you mean? They're going this way and the elephant's going that way. Well, first of all, I want to say again, these are not big categories.

[07:48]

Big categories. They're not big boxes you can put this in and that in. It's more like hot and cold water. Sometimes it's warm and sometimes it's muddy. So the distinction is just so that you notice the difference between the hot water and the cold water. So this teaching, which I say again, I think is extremely useful, but it's useful in noticing in your activity a difference, say, from being nourished by what you're doing and being depleted by what you're doing. Now, if you've got an elephant walking around too, have any of you seen that movie, rather famous, about the gorilla and the black and white teams? Right.

[08:50]

Nobody's seen it? Oh, it's kind... I mean, sociologically, it's famous in sociological circles. And I've never met... I've only read about it. But I... What? I'll explain. Yeah, please. But I met somebody the other day who saw it. They said, you're going to see a movie, and I want you to count a number of times. I can't believe this. A number of times a black team and a white team score a goal or something like that. And it's a film that lasts, I guess, about 20 minutes or something. This person watched it and afterwards he said, well, the black team got three goals in the etc. He was told to watch, she was told actually, to watch the black and white team.

[10:08]

But then she was told, okay, now let's watch it again and don't look at the black and white teams. The whole time of the game, there was a gorilla Wandering around in the field. And people don't see the gorilla. It's like you're watching a soccer game between Munich and some of the... And there's a gorilla on the field. We don't all see your elephant. We know it's on the field somewhere. Yeah, we just have a tendency to turn things into, I don't mean you, but just turn things into entities, into things.

[11:19]

This is just a way of noticing your experience. Is Romi coming today? She called me this morning. I'm sorry. Oh, yes. Because I was going to respond to what she said yesterday. It's all right. Someone else? Yeah. that different sort of, in immediate consciousness itself, that different sort of grades or, yeah, specifically. When I am separated or in a relatively relaxed state, then it is one kind of movement, and then I hear how the opponent or the opponent is moving, or how the opponent is moving.

[12:20]

When I'm in a zashin or a rather relaxed surrounding, when I hear it rains or something, for example, then it's quite a relaxed thing. Then there's a different way of immediate consciousness when it's potentially dangerous, for example, like climbing. Or when you drive with a car very fast. You wouldn't do that. That's the same as their differences. Okay, so let me just try to put this idea of immediate borrowed and secondary in a context again.

[13:39]

We have the experience of a, let's say, a horizon of immediacy. And there's a spatial quality to it. And simple examples of it are like taking a walk where you're really not trying to go anywhere, you're just walking along. And most of what your senses sense is just your immediate surroundings. So that might be actually good for climbing. I know in America there's a man named John Muir.

[14:54]

There was a man named John Muir, M-U-I-R. And he's kind of the person who was the seed person for the American park system. Park system, national park system. And he loved to do things like if he heard a storm coming, he liked to go and find the biggest redwood tree and climb to the top and... ride the storm out. He didn't have a Porsche. Or an Audi or something. Anyway, so he also once was stuck on the face of a cliff. He got some place, and again in those days they didn't have all the climbing equipment we have.

[16:01]

Late 19th century sometime. And he got stuck on this cliff and he couldn't move because it was like this and there are no handholds. He got down somewhere and he saw he couldn't go down and he couldn't get back up and so on. And he said he just froze there for about half an hour. And then after a while a different way of... And he suddenly saw slight shapes of the side of the cliff. And he was able to use that to move up and off the cliff.

[17:03]

I would say this is maybe an extreme form of immediate consciousness. Now, Romi last night, yesterday afternoon, said with an aggressive state of mind or angry state of mind, which is certainly immediate, would that be immediate consciousness? It's an immediacy you're conscious of. But it's not immediate consciousness, what we mean by it. I read a, similar to John Muir, I read a pretty long article the other day about George Washington. He was obviously a mythic but not mythological figure.

[18:11]

He turned out to be quite an extraordinary capable person. And one of the things that he found when he was quite young in his first battle He had no fear under fire when people were shooting bullets at him. He was completely relaxed. And this article by a historian said that some people are like that, some people are not. It makes a difference if you're in war. As long as he's not being hit by the bullets, he's just in a normal situation. He's not anticipating the bullets. He's just like, no. I would say that's immediate consciousness. The fear of the bullets is not immediate consciousness.

[19:34]

Yes. For me, this immediate mind means also to be free from comparison. And not to identify with that what you think or doing. In that case anger could be immediate if I don't identify with it or stay detached from it. Yeah, you could look at it that way, yeah. So this is like a vocabulary, a way of looking at one's experience.

[20:36]

And through practice you can deepen, stabilize this experience. You know, I think maybe we're going into too much detail. But on the other hand, you know, if we don't go into detail, the advantage of going into detail rather, is it may make it easier for you to practice, notice this, if you see some of the problems involved. So, I said there's several aspects to this. Notice the distinction between the two.

[21:39]

And also, not to think of them as categories, but rather more as the line, which might go from immediate to secondary and back to immediate. In other words, the dynamic of the practice in which there's a kind of dialogue between the two. And the third, and what I would mean by deepening it, is the discovery through practice, which is also related to deepening your mindfulness, that you can locate yourself in a particular mind.

[22:53]

Physically locate yourself. I mean, say that you're in a dark, strange house and you have to hear a strange noise. And you get up to explore. Does the anticipation that something might be there make you uneasy? Or are you just in your normal state of mind in the dark? Could you just stay in that state of mind? So one of the characteristics of practice or characteristics of the Buddha is fearlessness. Fearlessness.

[24:01]

And we could say that's actually related to another basic, and we're talking about basic teachings here, of what's called one-pointedness, but this seems to be not a good way to define it. And what it really means, and what it means in terms of, and it also means what we mean in Buddhism by concentration, it means the mind can establish itself and stay there. But it's more like a field, a fully aware field, than just a narrow concentration. So the third part of this third aspect of this practice is that you can establish yourself in this immediate consciousness and not be disturbed or taken out of it by borrowed consciousness.

[25:32]

Or it can become your, as I said, initial mind. Now, I mean, when I say something like initial mind, I mean, I think, do you really hear this? Now, I'm trying to speak about this so that you can not just practice so you feel better, but so that you can practice in a way that you base your life, thinking, etc., on how things actually exist. And how do things actually exist? They're momentary and impermanent. In fact, there's just momentary appearances.

[26:47]

Dharma practice means to feel that and not to blur it into a kind of sense of continuity or duration. It's as if you could look at a movie And just see this and not blur it in, you know, you can just see the scene, the scene, the scene, without making it a continuity. So sometimes I use the term the paratactic pause. And those of you who are film lovers, In the film world now, you may know the term parataxis because Eisenstein used it. But he meant to put unrelated pictures beside each other and then the audience makes the connection.

[27:50]

But the word really just means to place things side by side. So you put this beside this. And you don't establish any relationship between the two. So you see this, and then you see this, and you don't think, oh, it's upside down and bigger. Still has the price tag on it. Or it's museum identification. All right, so you just see this and then you see this and you don't, you have a pause where you just see what's there.

[28:58]

Okay. And that pause, if you get in the habit of it, just to feel things and not think things. Of course, the next moment you're thinking things. But it's a little bit, you want to come to the point where you're saying 1, 0, 2, 0, 3, 0. Or better, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, and some of the 1s are 3s and 5s. Now, Zen practice assumes that you come into this way of seeing things. So, and this again, the ability to locate yourself in a mind

[30:28]

means you have an articulated bodily experience of mind. And one of the basic practices of this, the beginning practice of this, is the sense of hara. You take your sense of location out of the head and shoulders and put it here. Don't wait for some mystic experience. Just start practicing it in the simplest way. You have to open the refrigerator. Walk up to the refrigerator with your hara.

[31:35]

You meet somebody. You meet them with your... Try not to fall in love with them. You meet somebody with your gut. And, you know, I was watching, I was in a restaurant the other day. And there was, well, I said, oh, yeah, hotel, restaurant. It's not important, is it, though? Berlin. Where you left me. You abandoned me there. I dropped you. My room wasn't ready, so I sat all morning in this hotel restaurant. And there were There was a lot of Japanese tourists.

[32:40]

And there were a lot of Westerners, of course. And there was an Indian man. Who was my waiter. And so I was watching. And the Japanese people And again, this is not because they're Japanese, it's because they're in a yogic culture. The first thing I noticed is that all their arms were very loose and their shoulders were very loose. So it's kind of about watching young Japanese tourists walking up to get food at the counter, you know. So the way we imitate gorillas, you know. And all the Westerners were very tight up here, walking from down here. And it's very clear, but the Indian man, because I was thinking now, from the point of view of Japan and China, India is the beginning of the West.

[33:47]

From our point of view, it's the beginning of Asia. But I looked at the way this Indian man walked, he was the beginning of the West. There's a big difference whether you feel, I mean, do you feel your feet are down there? In what sense are your feet down there? I'm getting old enough that they are getting down there. So my socks only reach to my waist. But... They're not down there. They're only down there if you locate yourself here. So can you locate yourself in your hara? Because this opens you then to locate yourself in various body centers.

[34:51]

Where you begin to feel where different minds are located. I wouldn't say this is a basic teaching because it's somewhat advanced. But it doesn't mean we don't have that experience. But it's certainly a fundamental It's fundamental to practice, even if it's not a basic teaching. Yes. I wanted to ask about this birth consciousness, what you said earlier. that the immediate consciousness is nourishing, nourishing, and that the purified consciousness categorically draws out energy from everything.

[36:16]

Could you principally or generally say that the immediate consciousness is principally nourishing and that the borrowed consciousness is generally sort of depleting? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, but that doesn't mean that so-called borrowed consciousness can't be very engaging, interesting, and so forth. Yeah, but you don't, probably after an hour or two of that kind of maybe exciting thinking, you feel kind of depleted. These are not strict, they're just emphases to notice. So to be able to notice and then to be able to choose between them.

[37:35]

And it gives you the basis for developing an initial mind for Dharma practice. Okay. Now, one of the basic... Oh, I'm going to stop and have a break in a minute. So many things about this. It really depends. Practice, in many ways, really depends on a sangha. In a sangha where you spend time together. And it's helpful if the sangha has a similar kind of lineage forms in it. Okay, now one thing I just... I often mention, so a lot of people try to do it.

[38:36]

But traditionally you don't mention it. Okay, what I'm going to mention is a simple thing. When you come in a door, you come in the door with your foot nearest the hinges. Now, why is this not ever mentioned? You shouldn't have to learn it verbally. Then you can try doing it and you can notice you do it sometimes and you don't other times. But I have never found, except one or two times, a Westerner who learns it by just noticing a teacher or a Morse. or others do it. Our bodily awareness doesn't extend to noticing which foot a person comes in the door. But if you live with somebody, you might notice after a while that every time that person goes to the door, they go through the door there.

[39:54]

What's the importance of such a silly practice? I see students coming up to the door after I've told them, and then they do a little dancing. You don't have to do a little dance. There's no Buddhist police watching you. You can just step across it, whatever. But then you notice you stepped with the... the other foot. The point of a practice like this is to help you develop an initial mind. So you use the door, the threshold, as I say, the entrance to To stop and feel the situation, rather than be physically present, rather than just thinking, going right through the space.

[41:30]

I mean, maybe it's like going on stage or something, but it's just you're entering a room, but you use it. You feel the space and then you step in and think the space. There's an animal-like quality to it. Now I said I would try to speak about the... Five skandhas. Since we're doing basic teachings. And I think we can do it. And thank you very much. You know, I'd like this to be fun for you.

[42:44]

Serious fun, maybe. I'm trying to introduce you to a world. If you get a feeling for the world out of which practice thrives, arises, thrives, your practice will more likely thrive. Okay. Now, Eduardo brought up yesterday his experience in music. It just reminded me of, there were several musicians at the last seminar I did in Johanneshof.

[43:48]

So I just, you know, at that seminar I mentioned again because it's a kind of useful example, this what I call Libet space. And I said, what was interesting for me about that is, although Benjamin Libet did this work in the 70s in San Francisco, I already had a feeling, I mean it just confirmed my experience from practicing during the 60s. I noticed that it began to notice in the 60s that my mind would present something to me as, you know, one of the possibilities. But I had the feeling that this was some kind of social behavior, like, oh, yes, you could do this or that, but in actual fact, my body had decided already to do it.

[45:05]

So I began to act on the first information that came into consciousness rather than thinking about the information. Like, should I do this, should I do that? It's like when I'm speaking to you now, I mean, it's very similar. I don't have any plan about what to say, roughly, a general idea. I might think, well, I should Well, maybe I could end the weekend with speaking about sex and fashion. But five minutes into the Friday evening, it occurs to me, so I talk about it.

[46:20]

So I just speak about whatever appears. I hope it works for you, I don't know. And that's a kind of trust that there's a deeper organizing process going on than my thinking about it. One of the things I noticed, like sitting Zazen, my body would know when somebody else was going to ring the bell. And I would think sometimes, how did I know that? And a moment later they ring the bell. Well, it dawned on me that if my body knows before my consciousness knows Then the other person's body is acting before their consciousness knows.

[47:49]

And then... So my body senses what this body knows before either of our consciousnesses recognize it. And I had so many experiences like that that when Leavitt's work was published, I thought, Oh yeah, that's right. And anyway, several of the musicians in the seminar in Johanneshof, came up to me afterwards. And they said, when you're playing in an orchestra, that's what it feels like.

[48:54]

That you know what to do before you do it. And I sometimes think, gee, I wish I had some musical talent. That would have made me look better than that. I mean, you prefer me to sing to you than to talk, I'm sure. But you're stuck with my talking. So you brought up psychology. Yeah. There's a lot of similarities and a lot of differences. And I'll just give some brief headlines. When I started practicing in the beginning of the 60s, there was genuine hostility from the psychotherapeutic community to Buddhism.

[49:55]

And the Jungians felt a lot of similarity, but they thought Jung was the Buddha. And they felt rather threatened by it. And the Freudians thought, oh, this is nuts, you know. The Freudians. But now there's a tremendous interaction between the therapeutic community and Buddhists. And in a week or so I'm going to meet with psychotherapists, mostly I guess, in Kassel. To speak very specifically about some questions of what is the relationship. But, you know, I've been doing this 45 years.

[51:13]

And it's taken 45 years before somebody said, let's really look at this together. A lot of people have tried to make various approaches, but I don't... Yeah, I don't think they've been as rigorous as they should be. And for about 15 years I've been meeting in Austria with a group of psychotherapists For four or five days. Once a year.

[52:13]

And we're still trying to find out. Okay. And I've thought I could, you know, I've seriously considered writing a book about psychotherapeutic uses of Buddhism. And many therapists I know practice helps them work with their clients, and particularly if the clients also practice. And one of the similarities is the importance of face-to-face intersubjectivity. Yes. And I think we're wired, our brain, our nervous system, our limbic system is wired for intersubjective space.

[53:31]

I'm really convinced that the brain, limbic system, etc. develop profoundly through the interaction with the mother during the first 18 months of life. And I think that's behind Dogen thinking all real teaching is face-to-face. Because we're wired to learn things that way, discover things that way. So that's one very big similarity. But a big difference is that really Zen is only interested in symptoms, not causes. Despite all the cause and effect teachings in Buddhism, really we don't care what your mother did to you 25 years ago.

[54:53]

And there's some point to understanding these things and bringing them into the consciousness and all that stuff. But the emphasis in Buddhist practice, and Zen in particular, is not to go back in the past and bring things into consciousness. But to take consciousness in the present and extend it into what's non-conscious and unconscious. And to deal with how these things function in the present, we can call it symptoms, but function in the present, not what caused it. And metaphorically, this is expressed in the story of, you know, if you're shot by an arrow...

[56:02]

Your first job isn't finding out who shot it. Your first job is to get the arrow out. So this is always working with... You've got all these arrows stuck in you, saint. Let's get them out. Okay. Horst, did you have something you want to say? Yes, I want to ask. Can I speak in German? In German is fine. It's probably the same energy that I have experienced. I have experienced art, [...] The highly developed have never meditated, or maybe only meditated.

[57:16]

They have meditated. [...] I would like to know if the creatives or the creative protest is something similar to what you were talking about, like many writers that I think might have been secretively meditating or probably being enlightened or whatever, I don't know exactly, but this creative process, this is what interests me and if you could say something about that. From the same sort of ground, if this arises, the same energies. You have the same sort of value. Creative processes like meditation have the same value on coming from the same ground. When he is intensively painting.

[58:33]

Yeah. And then he is in a completely different world then. I'm convinced. Okay. I think, of course there's similarities. Yeah, it's the same territory. But is there some difference between being a Buddhist, being an artist, and a Zen practitioner? Yeah, there is some difference. I think most artists, poets, painters, were large painters.

[59:35]

Yeah, well, let's just say most are actually working from either an experience of bliss or an enlightenment or awakening experience that they've had. And they've discovered that a mind deeply engaged in the particular, whether it's words or creates a state of some sort of bliss or clarity and that keeps one doing it So now the difference is the artist discovers how to do that in his painting or writing, but the monk discovers how to do that in his physical activity.

[60:46]

And the limitation I see in it, if it's only in one's art, not a limitation for... Anybody but the artist, though. For instance, if I read a poet or a painter, it's particularly clear in... in writing, is that often the writer is trying to recall, come back to, recreate the enlightened experience in their writing. And it is often the most brilliant part of their writing, but it also becomes often somewhat repetitious. Coming back to this fundamental experience.

[61:55]

A certain light. So they don't The art doesn't give them the craft to extend it into the whole of their life. But it's been very much in Zen among all Buddhist schools, particularly that art is part of the practice of a practitioner. As an amateur. But many of the great Zen artists were really amateurs. They weren't so skillful. But... But some were very good artists in addition, and then those are really the best ones.

[63:02]

So I would say that if one is practicing and doing art, it can be a very fruitful relationship. Okay, so let me speak about the five skandhas. Maybe first let me speak again about this horizon of immediacy. And also what I said about the... the habit of perception of a particular field. And I'm always surprised that no one questions me on this. Because I think it's a startling thing to say.

[64:20]

I mean, if you're a cook, you have to learn how to cut without cutting your fingers. I suppose if you're a watchmaker, you have to learn how to let your vision change so you can do things in detail. A musician has to listen to the orchestra as well as his own instrument. But in general, we don't have... In general, we don't have a general idea of training how we perceive, unless it's for a particular profession. We just let our senses do what they do. We see things, we hear things. Oh, that's nice to hear that.

[65:20]

So there's three aspects of yogic hearing, we could say. One is to hear it in its particularity. Yeah. Another is to... To hear it as part of a fabric, a weaving of sounds. And the third is to hear it as the hearing itself, hearing. You're hearing within the capacity of the ear to hear. So you know you're only hearing what your own hearing can hear.

[66:31]

Now, what's the fruit of that? One is there's usually a kind of bliss associated with hearing that way. There's a kind of affirmation of one's own existence in hearing that way. But it also renders the world a great mystery. Because you know much more is going on than you... You're only hearing a small portion. There's a mystery out there what really the sound is.

[67:32]

So you feel there's a great mystery which you're only partly engaged in. So there's a kind of walking in the world with a kind of modesty or dignity or humility. But we don't generally think of the fruit of training or learning how to hear in this way or see or taste. If your life depended on it, you could probably learn it quite quickly.

[68:33]

The Vietnamese in the Vietnam War learned how to smell when Americans were near. Too much meat they're eating. Well, your life may not depend on it, but maybe your true life does or your enlightenment does. And this is again. the depth of the decision to practice. There we could have called this seminar the decision to practice. But the more you see your life as a construct, And you see you're emphasizing nurture, not nature.

[69:49]

And the more you're willing to feel, sense, think in ways that bring you into the satisfaction of finding how things actually exist. Now, let's go back to this horizon of immediacy. Or what I sometimes call a larger somatic body. When You don't just, you know, I said the future is something you grow into.

[70:56]

You don't go into, you grow into. But the present is also something you grow into. There's the mystery of what's partially revealed in each sense. And the present isn't a fixed thing out there. The present is something that's appearing in your senses and in your mind. And you are creating the present. You're creating the duration of the present. There's no such thing to create it. Now, permanence, the permanence or duration of the present is a complex illusion. Of different overlapping modalities of mind, memory, etc.

[72:01]

That blur the dharmic and biological pulse. It's a complex illusion too, because while everything is impermanent, Each thing is at a different time, a different clock, a system-dependent clock. So this is impermanent just like I am, but it's going to probably outlast me. Why should it outlast me? But it's got a different internal clock. So it gives the illusion of permanence.

[73:04]

Okay, so you are growing, the present is appearing and you're completing it or... growing into it. And so you feel the world building up around you. Yeah, I mean, it becomes If you live in Colorado, what we do, where our center is, you know, there's 340 days of sunshine. It's high altitude. Things are very clear. The light is extremely clear. And things are just very precise. Now, Practice makes the world somehow like that, like that kind of difference.

[74:17]

Things have more detail, preciseness. It's like you're being brushed by the physicality of the world all the time. Maybe the world is painting you and you're painting the world. Well, this is a different feeling to have the world building up around you and you're participating in this world building up around you at each moment. Now this is a funny difference, but just an anecdotal difference. I've lived long enough to have several wives. And I know lots of people And I'm a sentimental person.

[75:29]

And I miss them all. And if I could, I'd try to arrange to see all night. People have walked in and out of my life at various times. But if I really thought about that, it would be too painful to live. But in this horizon of immediacy, where the world is building up around me at each moment, they either walk into this world or they don't. And if they don't, well... But when they occur to me, like I think of that person, you know, I trust the appearance of that person in my feeling or mind, and I realize some aspect of that person has just walked into this horizon of immediacy.

[76:53]

Something's happened that's similar to if that person actually hadn't. walked into the restroom. So suddenly I don't miss them. They're there. They're here. And the whole relationship to loneliness or changes, you're just not lonely anymore. Because everything is always here because there's no other here than this one. Okay. Thanks. Newton time. Now we start on the five skandhas. Form, feelings, perception, generally translated impulses and consciousness.

[78:03]

Okay, feeling, let's translate really as non-graspable feeling. Before feeling turns into pleasant, unpleasant, or naive. And let's translate impulses much more as something like Associative mind. Quite similar to Freud's mind of free association. You know, there's two or three dynamics to this Freud's discovery of free association. One is he recognizes the different mind than consciousness. He discovered that in the mind of free association, things came up. that wouldn't come into consciousness, which tries to organize things and relate everything.

[79:17]

So it's a free association, free of the editing of consciousness. Not being a westerner. He thought, oh, these things are appearing from somewhere. There must be a container somewhere where they're coming from. So he thought up the idea of the unconscious. The Buddhist wouldn't think of it that way. They wouldn't think of the simple tenderness with all the stuff that happened to us when we were young. Yeah, they would more feel, the Buddhists would more feel there's a realm of associations that includes everything all at once, the phenomenal world.

[80:36]

And the way we function, it may not be so different, but it is a different concept. So he also initially found that people entered into free association more if they were lying down and reclining than if they were sitting up. And I know this seminar would be very different if all of you were in chairs. The difficulty in trying to sit on the floor, if you can't, actually allows me to speak about things. It doesn't matter if some of you are in chairs, but if 60% of you are in chairs, then I have to speak differently, I've discovered.

[81:42]

So if I were to sit in chairs at 60%, I would have to speak differently. Now, what's also forgotten usually is the therapist has to be in a mind of free association as well as the client. So the ingredients are some kind of posture, reclining or something like that. A mind that's not consciousness, a mind of free association. And that mind of the client is resonantly connected with the mind of the therapist. I think there's a technical term for that, but I forget what it is. Okay. Okay.

[83:03]

Now, what I wanted to speak about, actually, what I'd like to emphasize in this seminar is how we define form. Okay, but first let me say that The easiest way, I think, to learn the five skandhas is to use them as a way to articulate the entry into Saifah. Okay, so you decide to sit down. What decides to sit down? Well, maybe Libet is in there somewhere deciding. But let's just say consciousness is decided.

[84:12]

You get up, you wash your face, and you think, okay, now I'm going to sit zazen. Then you think, well, I have other things to do. I probably only sit 30 minutes, et cetera. That's all consciousness. Okay, so you notice consciousness. And you say, hey, I'm in the fifth skandha, the fifth skandha. All right, all right, I'm in the whole fifth skandha and I'm only washing my face. So, now you go sit down. Bow your cushion, bow to the room. What is that bowing about? The horizon of immediacy. Now locating yourself. Ah, the pillow. Turning around, locating the room. And what's even the gesture?

[85:25]

As you know, it's a kind of bringing the aura of the body, the feel of the body, the spongy material that surrounds us. bringing it into the center of the body, lifting it and releasing. You really feel the physicality, mind-body feeling, not just a couple of hands doing something. Whoa, how exciting. Whoa. And then you sit down. Already you've started to do that. And you kind of let consciousness go. What usually appears. The fourth skandha.

[86:25]

You kind of let things occur. It's a little bit bigger space. Things are loosely related. So you say, oh yeah, this is the fourth skandha. This is what they meant. It's the heart sutra. Then you try not to invite these guys to tea. Try to invite these things not to tea. Yeah, I'd like to talk about that too. No, I didn't get there. Okay. So this is the fourth skandha. And you're bringing attention to the posture and the breath.

[87:27]

And at some point, you can begin to notice it and begin to encourage it to happen or let it happen. You slip out of the feeling, slide out of the feeling of mind of association. Now you just hear things. What are the sensations in the body? It's when itches start to appear. Maybe the boundary between, for the beginner, the boundary between the mind of associations and perceptual mind are itches. From free association to unassociated itches. It might be a bug, but

[88:29]

Nothing there. Just scratch it and then it appears over here. So. Yeah. Often these itches, when you get more sensitive, appear at acupuncture points. So you learn to sit without moving, without scratching. And you get deeper into the mind of perception only, percept only mind. And you get deeper into the mind of perception only, percept only mind. You say, ah, this is the third skandha. What is this like? Is this here? And you begin to hear, or feel, rather, feel each sense distinctly.

[89:57]

Tongue is resting in the mouth, the roof of the mouth. Mouth tends to, particularly for the beginner, get filled with saliva. And he starts to feel more alive for the beginner. And it is an example of a kind of awakening throughout the body of feeling. And then you begin to, as I say, hear hearing itself rather than the object of the hearing. And if you do have your eyes a little open, or you ideally do, or you happen to look up at something,

[91:21]

It's like your attention is at the back of the eyes rather than the front of the eyes. And you feel the looking more than you... feel the object being looked at. Okay, so this is percept only of the third skanda. But as the percept only mind becomes more the hearing of the hearing and less the object of the hearing. You slip into the second skanda of feeling only. of non-graspable feeling.

[92:36]

Or the realm of neither, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. We start out feeling pleasant or things are pleasant or unpleasant and neither is very small. And eventually the middle expands and things have to be very unpleasant before they're unpleasant. Things have to be very, very pleasant to be even noticed. So you have a wide feeling of neither pleasant nor unpleasant. This is the territory of non-graspable feeling.

[94:02]

As I said, right now there's a non-graspable feeling in this room. This particular feeling, none of us can say what it is. It's different now than it was five minutes ago. But you can feel the difference, but you can't describe the difference. More subtle, more this, I don't know. But basically, you feel the difference. So we can call it non-graspable feeling. Now this non-graspable feeling, although you may have a more extensive sense of it through meditation practice, Am I meditating now?

[95:05]

Am I meditating now? Or am I talking? And I'm engaged with you right now and... Still, non-graspable feeling is here. And this feel of the non-graspable feeling is what I'm speaking to. And it's the territory of most of the information in this situation. It's the medium that allows information. If the non-graspable feeling isn't there, everybody's in their own space. So on the one hand, by practicing the second skanda here, in your meditation, you're getting familiar with it, so you begin to feel it all the time.

[96:23]

It's always there. It's what's called being alive. It doesn't have to turn into eye consciousness, self-consciousness. So one aspect of this practicing of the five skandhas like this is you recognize it's the activity of the world itself, not just meditation. But you also learn to stabilize yourself in each of the skandhas. So you can stay in the mind of free association if you want to. Maybe you're writing a poem. And you want to be in this mind of free association while you're writing.

[97:25]

You want what the poem needs to appear without your thinking your way to it. When you think your way to it, the poem suddenly becomes dead or stiff. And when you think your way to it, the poem suddenly becomes dead or stiff. Or maybe you want to stay in the percept open in your mind. You need a vacation. So this you could do too. So you're learning to establish each of the skandhas as a territory of mind. Okay, now form. Thank you.

[98:44]

Okay, so you can see, I think, that you can use the entry into the practice of meditation as a way to explore and identify for yourself the five skandhas. So now we're going to go to one o'clock about. So I think it would be a good time to take a stretch or stand up. And for me, since I couldn't get to the toilet during the seminar, during the break, and then we'll finish. I think that gives you some taste of the five skandhas, but let me speak about form.

[99:53]

Now, conceptually, the five skandhas don't work unless you have a beginning point of form. Because although our world really arises from non-graspable feeling, which, as Buddhism states, and I find to be a fact, that all mental, emotional, physical processes are accompanied by some kind of non-graspable feeling. If a person's been in a terrible accident, do you want to find out first if they have any feeling? They may not be conscious, but if they have some feeling, maybe they're alive.

[101:05]

But still, we're in a phenomenal world. And what does that phenomenon work? Yeah, we call it form. Okay. Now, we generally take the word form in the phrase form is emptiness. It could mean something like the stuff of the world, the rocks, the mountains, the galaxies. Yeah. And that's really not what the word form means in German. Buddhist practice.

[102:08]

Doesn't mean we're ignoring the fact that there's you know Galactic red shift, things like that. But we're talking about our experience of the world. So we're talking about our experience of form. Now, the word phenomena, as I may have mentioned, philosophy uses it to mean that which appears to the senses, whether it's real or not. And the etymology of the word means to shine. Or to bring into the light. So the word phenomena works very well for Buddhist practice. Because it means something like to bring into the light of the senses.

[103:12]

Yeah, and often the word form is defined as being form in contrast to substance. And often in Buddhism they speak about form and color. They're used interchangeably. Color is a word for form, or a way to translate the word color. Color just means to cover something. To cover, like when you paint something. So color is what something's covered with. But this is clearly perceptual, because is it blue, is it blue-green, is it purple, like Andreas is showing? In both Japan and Europe, only kings were allowed to wear purple. It's completely a non-graspable feeling, mustn't it?

[104:34]

Okay, so whether we call it form or color, it's clearly a perceptual or experiential dimension. So the form of the five skandhas means the form we perceive. So what is form? How do things actually exist? How does this actually exist? For us, how it exists is we experience it. Or we perceive it. Now, perceiving it, I see it's gray and so forth. To experience it, I have some kind of more... physical interaction with it.

[106:03]

I notice various aspects of it. So I experience it. I have an experience of an object. I have a perception of it. And it's also mine. Every object, whenever you perceive something, that active perception points at the object and points at the perceiving mind. Now, when I experience this bell, like cheap silverware, I smell the metal on my hand. Okay. Now we also have views of it.

[107:11]

Now do we view it? How do we view it? Do we view it as an appearance? Do we view it as mind? Do we view it as permanent? Or do we view it as impermanent, implying it could be permanent? Or do we view it as impermanent, knowing everything is impermanent? These views are at the root of the whole process of the five skandhas. If I view this as implicitly permanent, that affects my non-graspable feeling. That affects how I perceive it. If I perceive it as or implicitly permanent that then is an editing process which then supports how free free associating is and then supports more fully

[108:34]

the job of consciousness, which is to make things predictable or implicitly permanent. So the five skandhas begins with how you know form. And it's where views first come into start shaping Reality and experience. So now, if form is the root of our worldview, because how we perceive form shapes consciousness.

[109:59]

So when we root down through consciousness to how consciousness is formed, The consciousness is a construct of the five skandhas. We feel that the bottom of the foundation is one. So form is a kind of signal that signals how the whole rest is going to develop. Now, because form is the basis, Let's think of it that way for now anyway.

[111:01]

Is it permanent or is it impermanent? If it's impermanent, what do we call it? We call it absent of permanence. What is the absence of permanence and emptiness? So now we have the formula, form is emptiness. So is emptiness at the basis of the development of the five skandhas? Or is permanence of form? No. To really think this through rigorously is rather subtle. Simple but subtle.

[112:07]

But in general, in practice... You want to remind yourself that it pertains impermanently. And it shifts. And it shifts. Now, before I understood this with any subtlety particularly, just through practice, Yeah, and only after a couple of years of practice. I noticed the difference when my daughter broke my teacup. Erst nach einigen Jahren des Praktiziers merkte ich den Unterschied, dass zum Beispiel als meine Tochter die Teeschale zerbrach.

[113:12]

I had a teacup that was made by, somebody had given me, by Hamada, who's the national treasure potter of Japan. It would be sort of like having a teacup made by Picasso. And probably worth more. Hamada cups are now worth $10,000 to $25,000. In those days it wasn't worth that much and he was still alive and... It had been given to me by somebody who knew Hamada. But let's say it's a rather valuable teacup. I'm sitting at my desk and Sally, who's now 43, comes in. And knocks it on the floor.

[114:26]

I've had two Armada cups knocked. One I never found out who did it. This one I never did it. And I was amazed at my reaction. My reaction was simply, oh, now it's become something to clean up. And part of that reaction was, oh, now somebody can make another one. Yeah, so we have more Hamada cups coming along and other people making cups and so forth. And he has lots of imitators. He was asked once, why don't you sign your He was once asked, why don't you sing your shawls and cups? The best ones will be mine, while the worst ones will be yours. But I was surprised that I had no feeling of irritation with my daughter or that I'd lost anything.

[115:58]

Because the tea bowl had completely become an activity, yeah, we could even say in the horizon of immediacy. It was no longer an object to me, it was an activity. If I'd really treated it as an object, maybe I'd put it in a glass case, you know. So for me it was an activity. For my daughter it was an activity. A different activity. Then it was an activity because I was cleaning it up. So even though I didn't understand emptiness with much subtlety, my practice had brought me to really... feeling everything is impermanent, and that impermanence is its real primary definition.

[117:10]

So what we're practicing with, and many of the teachings are aimed at or presented is to see things as impermanent. Or to see things as an appearance, a momentary appearance. Or to see things as impermanent. Or to see things as the activity of the mind in perceiving. All these become your habit or your inhabitation. and you begin to notice your views.

[118:42]

But you may view it, you may experience it as an appearance. Or you may emphasize the experience of things, the activity of things. So you may know in one sense that it's permanent, or impermanent. But you also notice there's a view Basically it's a kind of permanence. Now Nagarjuna tried to work on this problem. And he emphasized the teaching of emptiness. So let me try to give you an example. I hit the bell. The sound is clearly impermanent.

[120:01]

You can hear its impermanence fading. But that impermanence is established by the sound itself. In other words, the ear and the vibrations and the sound fading, the aspects of the sound establish its impermanence. Right? Make sense? Right. How can you shrug your shoulders without being so clear? Yeah? Okay. So that stick right now is not establishing its impermanence.

[121:08]

It's not fading from sight. No, I can know it's also in a sense impermanent because I'm perceiving it. And I perceive it a little differently all the time. And I have a yellow one too, you know. I mean, I should be a magician. Suddenly you see it's yellow in my hand. I do try to change my rocks and things so you... If I could put on a blonde wig occasionally. So I look like Shiri. That would be good. Maybe some of you who know theater could help me with my presentations. But that stick is not establishing its... Permanence, impermanence.

[122:10]

Do you understand what I mean? Now, if I happen to notice that it's a perceptual event, it's a mind, then I begin to feel its impermanence. And the fact that its use, you know, There is not being used there, but here it's clear what its use is. Then it can have different positions. It can be there or there. It's a kind of impermanence to its positions. But the stick itself is not establishing its impermanence unless you say time-lapse photography over a hundred years.

[123:11]

He's got the direct approach. All right. But the sound is establishing by its own nature its empowerment. So that's interesting. But what's the problem with that statement? Philosophical problem. The philosophical problem is it establishes its impermanence in relationship to the assumption of permanence. To say it establishes by its own nature its impermanence means it could be permanent. But it can't be permanent because there is no permanence.

[124:28]

So how do we perceive impermanence? Okay, when you hear the sound, you don't hear impermanence. I'm trying to be precise here. You don't hear impermanence. you hear the absence of permanence. Because when I look at this, I can also see the absence of permanence. So Nagarjuna's point is to perceive the absence of permanence on each thing. So this is a concept. In other words, I bring a concept, I look at you, and I feel the absence of permanence.

[125:34]

Okay. So form is emptiness when there's an absence of permanence. Because form is emptiness, it's not. There's permanence and impermanence. Emptiness is the impermanence, form is the permanence. It's not that form is permanence and emptiness is impermanence. It's that form is exactly emptiness. Because form is the absence of permanence. And if form is the absence of permanence, then it's empty. Form is emptiness means to perceive everything as the absence of permanence.

[126:38]

And we can say that emptiness is the absence of form. So in the practice of the five skandhas, to really make sense of the five skandhas as a means of transforming consciousness, You want to get in the habit of mu. Mu is this koan which tries to do all this. On every object of perception you say no or empty. So mu means no and it means emptiness.

[127:55]

So it's simply a way to say Absence of permanence. Absence of permanence. Or it's a way of no interacting with, I tend to see it as permanent, no. I tend to see it as permanent, no. I tend to see it as permanent, no. Here we see the absence of fear. Okay. So our practice, our most basic practice can be you get in the habit of Every time you see something, mind.

[129:03]

Or activity. Or appearance. Or percept. Or perception. or the absence of permanence. It's a good habit to develop, a wisdom habit that brings you closer into the immediacy how things actually exist. Well, that's enough for basic teachings. And I'm 30 seconds early. So shall we sit for a moment? Absence of permanence. Public order!

[130:13]

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