And could you tell me the topic? The topic is Layers of Awareness and Consciousness. Okay. Do we ever talk about anything else? So the topic is Layers of Awareness and Consciousness. And the question is whether we ever talk about anything else. In this half century or so of practicing, I have actually not come to the end of my own observations of the layers of consciousness that we can add awareness to.

[01:05]

And some of you I've never seen before, so where will I start? Maybe I should start in 1961. When I first noticed my concept of consciousness was not sufficient was not a sufficient territory of experience, was not to cover what I was experiencing through meditation practice.

[02:26]

When I first noticed that my concept or my idea of consciousness and also the feeling of my experience was not enough to cover the experience that I knew from meditation. So, I mean, I really am a little embarrassed to go through some of this in order to, because, you know, those of you who have been practicing with years and decades are familiar with these distinctions. But I think we have to build up in ourselves and in myself too, I have to build up a picture, a feeling for what our are the conditions of our experience.

[03:36]

At those days I was pretty young, obviously in my twenties. But I didn't accept the world as a given from outside. But I did accept that the My senses presented to me a world which was more or less the way it was. Aber ich habe angenommen, dass meine Sinne mir eine Welt vorstellten oder mich mit einer Welt präsentierten, die wohl ungefähr so ist, wie sie tatsächlich ist.

[04:43]

And cameras seem to confirm that. I didn't ask myself, if a dragonfly invented a camera, what would his or her photos look like? So I accepted the sensorial world as it was presented to me. But my experiences through meditation did not coincide with my conscious apprehension of the world. This was good because the world I consciously apprehended, I didn't like at all.

[05:51]

It didn't seem to make sense. And it was causing me a lot of consternation. Consternation? I found a word you don't know. I used to know it. There's no excuse. I used to know lots of words. And I mean, the world still causes me a lot of consternation. But it happens in a way that doesn't overlap with my own experience of integrity, integration.

[07:19]

Yeah. So then I was having this experience that I was having experiences that didn't fit into the categories of consciousness. Now, we all know there are boundaries to consciousness. We all have dreams, and dreams don't fit in to the usual boundaries of consciousness. Now, Buddhism looks at these discrepancies or differences very, very carefully. And now, of course, contemporary sociology and science and neuroscience and so forth are looking into these distinctions carefully too.

[08:40]

But we're not going to look into them by sampling, doing sociological sampling or something. Wir werden sie aber nicht untersuchen, indem wir soziologische Gruppen auswählen. We're going to look at our experience from the inside. Sondern wir werden uns diese Unterscheidungen anschauen, indem wir uns unsere Erfahrung aus dem Innern heraus anschauen. How are we going to look at our experience from the inside? So the first teaching that Suzuki Roshi presented to me that really took hold was the Five Skandhas. And we all, those of you, those of us who have been practicing together for years, have given a lot of consideration to the five skandhas.

[10:22]

But the five skandhas can be an endless opportunity to observe the way we function. Because they are just sort of targets for noticing But the actual experience of noticing goes way beyond the formulation of the categories. But the formulation, the categories, give us a way to bring attention from inside our own experience. So if you get familiar with these categories,

[11:41]

They keep opening up territories, like their windows that keep opening onto landscapes, mindscapes, beingscapes. Yeah, they're new. then these categories open up entire fields or areas of experience. They are like windows that, if you use them, enter a whole new kind of landscape, spiritual landscape, and so on. I was going to make a joke about you didn't escape from that problem. Escape from the escapes. Yeah, that's a new problem. Yeah, it's another problem. Now, there's a British philosopher who was a contemporary working vessel in Wittgenstein, who died in the year I graduated, or should have graduated from college.

[13:17]

I went to the Near East instead. There was a contemporary of Bertrand Russell, and also a philosopher who... You said he graduated and you should have graduated? No, he died. Oh, he died. I should have graduated. See, it's always possible. You can die or you can graduate. He died, I didn't graduate. My point only is that he was alive during my lifetime. And one of the G.E. Moore was his name, George Moore. And one of the things he propounded or stated, it was that consciousness is invisible.

[14:26]

Yeah, I mean, not only in my early experience with meditation, not only was consciousness invisible, but what consciousness presented was taken for granted as veridical, veridical means true to the facts. But I began to notice again that My meditation experience presented what seemed to be facts to me which weren't accessible to me through consciousness. So I noticed these things and took the differences seriously.

[15:45]

And I still take the differences seriously. So if consciousness is invisible and yet there's something else going on behind, around, in the midst of consciousness that's different. What is going on? Außerhalb des Bewusstseins dann noch etwas anderes stattfindet, dann ist die Frage, was findet denn dann statt? Now, are the layers, like geological layers, you can look at one of them and dig deeper and get to another one? Es ist so wie geologische Schichten, wo du dir eine anschauen kannst, und dann kannst du noch eins tiefer gehen und dir auch diese Schicht anschauen.

[16:53]

Or they're interpenetrating fields, which maintain their differences, even though they're interpenetrating, mixed up together. Now, if they're conceptually layered, that's an easier problem to imagine solving. But if it's interpenetrating different fields, simultaneously different fields, this is a more difficult... at least conceptually, problem to imagine how he would solve.

[17:57]

Und wenn man sie aber eben als einander wechselseitig durchdringende Felder begreift, dann haben wir es hier mit einer zumindest konzeptuell sehr viel schwierigeren Fragestellung zu tun. Ja, fertig. Sehr viel schwierigeren Fragestellung zu tun. Obviously, you have to develop attentional skills in order to even have any hope of asking these questions, and responding to these questions. And it was clear that this practice of meditation, which Suzuki Roshi introduced me to, did develop the muscles of attention or the attentional skills.

[19:02]

Yeah, now I've had some conversations recently with people who would like to develop a secular practice center or centers. They don't like the idea of all the bowing and the Buddhas and all that stuff. I understand. I think if I started practicing without Suzuki Roshi or some generations later, I might have opted for a secular practice. Although I had read quite a bit about Buddhism and so forth, and various philosophical schools and sociological approaches, etc., still...

[20:25]

the decisive moment for me was meeting Suzuki Roshi. And if I hadn't met Suzuki Roshi, This is also the question, if you have a secular practice center, is there a teacher involved, and how does that work? Because if I just studied these things, I would have thought that study and understanding was sufficient, but also I wouldn't know of anything else.

[21:50]

I wouldn't have understood that Buddhism is a kind of athletic event. I wouldn't have understood that it requires not understanding really, but incubation. And it's, you know, the word for Everything all at once in Buddhism is tathagatagarbha. And that means the thusness of coming and going, which is simultaneously a womb and an embryo.

[22:51]

It's not just an abstraction like universe or multiverse or something. It's a concept that you practice. That you imagine that world, the context, the circumstances, as somehow a womb in which your living is embryonic and developing. . What's the embryo?

[24:11]

Your own living. Now, Gregory Basin, whose sociological philosophy comes very close to Buddhism, or is. He was a friend of mine, and we pretty much agreed on everything. And Gregory Bateson, dessen soziologische Philosophie sehr nah am Buddhismus ist. Er war ein sehr guter Freund von mir und wir stimmten fast mit allen Sichtweisen überein. He said something like, the world's problems are the ideas the world has. There are problems in the way we think about things. Okay, so how can we do something about our thinking? Well, I know that for some people who aren't used to, especially used to sort of trying to notice ideas as games.

[25:38]

Each idea is a kind of game that you play or you don't play. I always think of the word consider, which means to think about things, but actually it means to think with the stars. Sidereal, to think with the stars. And we don't use it that way astrologically anymore. But the kind of thinking this East Asian Buddhism does is because it thinks with heaven. They imagine a kind of heaven that's the controlling sphere of everything.

[26:42]

You get perplexed. But I know you're not perplexed. You only look perplexed. But I'll come to this, I hope, this idea of... overriding heaven because it's pertinent to how we imagine the world. Pertinent to how we imagine the world. So my experience is that practice in the West works when you get your views about the world straight or clear. Meine Erfahrung ist, dass die Praxis im Westen dann funktioniert, wenn du deine Sichtweisen auf die Welt, deine Sicht auf die Welt klar bekommst.

[28:04]

And until that time, by understanding, you're only moving the ingredients around and making them fit together better, but you're not transforming the ingredients. And up to this point, until you get your views clear, it's just as if you move the content back and forth. But you don't necessarily transform these contents fundamentally, you don't transform them. As I've said the other day, the Buddhist story is that the Buddha is called the Buddha because he was the one who woke up. . I mention this because, again, trying to find ways to speak realistically and usefully about the concept of enlightenment.

[29:18]

Because we tend to think of it as, if we think of it at all or reject it, we think of it as a personal experience. And it is a person. But that's kind of irrelevant from the point of view of Buddhism. Because all kinds of people, you know, fishermen have enlightening experiences.

[30:23]

As William James recounted, conversion experiences, Protestant conversion, Christian conversion, they are enlightening experiences. The trunks have enlightened experiences when they decide they've drunk too much. And the personal dynamics which led them into addiction, in addition to physiological addictive patterns. When they see those patterns and do something about it, they can often for a while or longer stop drinking.

[31:29]

So, I've never said these things before exactly, but let's see where it goes. So if you can stop drinking because you suddenly see the world in the way that caused you to drink or in a way that frees you from the habit or need to drink, So you wake up to another possibility of how to live. So that conception that it is possible to wake up is essential, and that's what Alcoholics Anonymous and the eight steps and all that is about.

[33:12]

Some people even think that the alcohol phenomenon Eightfold Path was influenced by the Buddhist Eightfold Path. I'm skeptical, but you know. But the point is, similar. That if you don't believe it's possible to stop drinking, you won't stop drinking.

[34:23]

And in Buddhist practice, if you don't believe it's possible for transformation to happen, you won't practice in the way that lets that happen. And in Buddhism it is exactly the same. If you do not practice in a way that you assume that a fundamental transformation can take place, I only have lost you, let me say. You only have lost me. Then it is also not possible, or you do not practice in a way that it is possible. So the important point for Buddhism is to imagine that it's possible to wake up to another way of being alive. The important point in Buddhism is that it is possible And the ingredients which make enlightenment possible

[35:29]

or happen, are here as the present and nowhere else. And they're not in the future. And when you have the thinking that enlightenment is old, maybe it'll happen later in the future, I have to do this, I have to learn the special Buddhist coding, which the algorithm is, you know, et cetera. So, important, essential for the teachings to send their roots into your lived life You imagine it's possible to be sober or awakened.

[36:55]

Okay. Now, I think we should have a break soon. But let me come back to the concept or idea of incubation. Also as a way to show you, to illustrate the power of the restrictive and liberating power of ideas. Yeah, I grew up in a family. My family were writers, scholars, scientists, engineers, things like that.

[37:56]

Leiters? My family were writers. They were lighters too. Particularly, they both smoked. So I took for granted that you studied and you understood that. And you gave attention, concentration. But I didn't think of attention as a kind of chemistry. And my own thinking I call it attentionistry.

[39:12]

Okay, she says. I can hardly say it in English. I don't think you can say it in German. Well, wait a minute. It is difficult. And in my own thinking, I make a word, a combination of attention and chemistry. So what I mean by intention mystery is that it's like Simic saying it's an athletic event, that incubation changes the way you work neurologically. And if we... No, no, no, I can't... Okay, I'm patient. But can you repeat it? That's more difficult.

[40:28]

It's easier to be patient. That attention changes you neurologically. And one of the big problems with smart people is they believe their understanding. Not only is understanding quite satisfactory, it seems to be conclusive. But you've built your world and education and career on understanding and you can't imagine dismantling that. So then you have the more complex problem of maintaining your understanding while you also examine your understanding. Dann hast du die komplexere Schwierigkeit, dass du dein Verstehen aufrechterhalten musst, während du dein Verstehen auch untersuchst.

[41:51]

And being open to the incubatory process, sending roots into your edifice, your structures, and changing them. So if I, yeah, go ahead. If I had not met Suzuki Rishiki, and really studied him, I didn't study Buddhism, I studied him. And I couldn't be satisfied until, or ever satisfied, until I understood him

[42:54]

in that I could even anticipate his sentences as well as I could while he was alive. And his sentences and his bodily presence still function in me. And I'm still... This is what teaching as a lineage means. So I got the example of incubation and through him I stayed long enough and practiced to incubate a few things. And not to change just mentally, but to change physiologically so my attentional realm was transformed.

[44:26]

Und mich dabei nicht nur mental zu verändern, sondern physiologisch zu verändern, so dass das Gefilde, der Bereich meiner Aufmerksamkeit zutiefst verändert wurde. So practice is to study or develop attention. Und Praxis bedeutet, die Aufmerksamkeit zu studieren und zu entwickeln. And to be open to the changes that occur through developing that. physiology, chemistry of the attentional realms. And to be open to the changes that take place when you deeply transform the field of attention, these areas of attention. I was going to go back to 1961 or something. But to look at 1961, I had to look at it through everything I've experienced since then.

[45:42]

So if you have some observations after the break, I will be happy. I'll probably be happy anyway. I'd like to be happier. Thank you.

[46:12]

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