Well, the fact that the field of mind is difficult to understand is quite interesting for me. It means I have to find a better way to talk about it. Which makes me think I should speak about the five skandhas tomorrow. Maybe it would be tiresome to you because you've heard me speak about it before. I'll suffer. Poor baby. And I didn't think I would speak about it because I thought we couldn't get ourselves ready for it or in a place where we could make sense of it. And it's the most important list in Buddhism. And lists are quite important in Buddhism. And... But I feel that now we can make sense of it. Okay, I didn't finish with this little example.

[01:02]

So say that you can rest your mind on this now. Your mind just stays there. So what you are is you have a stick or striker, a stick arisen state of mind. Through this object, a certain state of mind is arisen. If it were a flower, it would be a somewhat different state of mind. So you have a state of mind that's arisen through an object. In general, consciousness, awareness, arise through objects. So that's the object of perception. Now I take it away. and you're still concentrated, but the object's gone. What are you concentrated now on? The field of mind itself. In other words, you don't lose your concentration, but you take the object away, but you still have the whole mind and body that's concentrated.

[02:15]

So now the object of concentration is the field of mind itself. Now I can bring this back into the field of mind. Then I'm noticing it from the field of mind itself. Those are three basic and very important distinctions within Buddhism that you mostly discover through meditation. Very difficult to notice it otherwise. Now let's just take this state of mind that I've been describing, in which you go from the object, a particular object, an engaged perceptual object, to the field of mind, the contentless field of mind. We're not speaking about some absolute contentless field of mind.

[03:24]

If you talk that way, we're talking in entities, because there's no absolutes. So what you have is more a direction. In one of the teachings, it's indicated by a circle with a kind of half moon in it. It means it's going in that direction. The circle going this way means it's going in this direction. But, you know, it's like when you say that you arrive and you've got a lot of suitcases, you start putting them down. As you start putting them down, you're already free of the suitcase. You still may have a bag over your shoulders, but basically there's the freedom from the suitcases. When you start picking them up, you now have the baggage of the suitcase. You may not have every bit of baggage down. You may still have your shirt on or your raksu or your hat or something, but there you still have your hair.

[04:26]

You shave your hair off. But basically, so there's a spectrum. And when you're this direction in the spectrum, it's like being free of thought. I mean, otherwise, if you're putting down the thoughts and have less thoughts, or self is less present, then you act as if you're free of self. You act as if you're free of the baggage. Do you understand? In other words, there's not endpoints. It's black or it's white. It's always shades of gray. But when it's moving toward less gray, there's the feeling of being free of gray. When it's moving toward more gray, there's the feeling of being dark or black or something. So that's when you see things as activities and not entities. Okay. Okay. Okay. So... When you go from the object of perception to the field of mind, it's not absolutely free of concepts, but it's much more free than ordinary consciousness, because you've kind of interrupted ordinary consciousness.

[05:48]

If we define consciousness as a tapestry of concepts, When you take away the sense that it's an interlocking field of concepts, you have something other than consciousness, if we're defining consciousness as an interlocking field of concepts. And again, self and language are activities, creations, dependent on consciousness. There's no language without consciousness. To name something is to make a concept. So language is a creature of consciousness. Now, it doesn't mean that in dreams, which is not consciousness, you don't have language or words, but it's like your grandmother's there and she's partly somebody else and you know, etc. There isn't a kind of There is language, because we become languaged beings.

[06:53]

But the language doesn't function in the usual way. It functions as kind of symbols. It functions in a semiotic way, perhaps, but not a grammatical way. Am I being reasonably coherent? Okay. So, Buddhaghosa, great, Buddhism, got a great name, Buddhaghosa. He said, he used the example of a monk who has, for some reason, put oil in a bowl, probably a wooden bowl, and you oil it. And his teacher asked, would you bring me the bowl, bring me some water?

[08:00]

And the monk says, I'm sorry, but the bowl has oil in it. And so the monk, the teacher said, well, then would you bring me some oil and I'll put it in the oil container. And the monk says, I'm sorry, the bowl has no oil in it. And both are true. There's a kind of sheen of oil in it, which interferes with the water, but there's not enough oil to pour in the oil container. This is an example of, you know. So what that means is, how that's used as an example, is in this mind of which you use an object and then you go to a concept-free mind, or a mind not defined through concepts, there's still a residue of consciousness in it. Still a residue, like the oil. So it means there's association and there's embodied conditioning.

[09:03]

Embodied conditioning is, you know, I know what's back and front, left and right, and so forth. You know what I mean by embodied conditioning. Embodied conditioning doesn't disappear in this case. But it's relatively or nearly free of self-referential thinking. And self-referenced, self-narrated objects. I don't know what to call these things. Non-self-referenced objects. So you can have a mind which is relatively free of concepts. And that mind knows things, notices things in a different way, and that's what I'm speaking about here. Now, early Buddhism emphasized using techniques to take cognition away entirely. And that was considered penultimate.

[10:06]

Penultimate means the step before cognition. the next final step, the penultimate step. So to free yourself from cognition and concepts was considered the penultimate step for enlightenment. So the more you have a mind which is free from conditioning, the conditioning of concepts, etc., the more likely you're going to see things as they are. And enlightenment means To see things as they are and then embody that way they are. Something like that. Now, one aspect of this mind, and here I'm relating it to Buddhism, is that we could call it a fifth state of mind.

[11:19]

It's a fourth state of mind, and zazen is a mind in which dreaming, waking mind, and non-dreaming deep sleep are unobstructed. and it's a bodily mind, an embodied mind. Now we're speaking about a mind that if we look at distinctions, and again, I don't think this is particularly useful to you, but I think it's worth speaking about, which is here we have a mind in which the field of mind is not the wholeness, the unity of the field of mind is not a divided by the object. In ordinary discrimination, consciousness, the SCI of consciousness, consciousness, means scissors. Basically, it's the same root as scissors.

[12:20]

So consciousness is the mind that cuts things up into pieces and discriminates. And we have to discriminate. So consciousness tends to discriminate no, is a mind, it doesn't tend to, is the mind of discrimination, of comparative thinking, it's where language functions, and it's when primarily narrative self functions, and it's, again, a fabric of concepts. What I'm calling awareness is a mind defined through the field of it, not through the contents of it. So it's a mind that isn't cut up into pieces. So that's why your decision, your intention to wake up at 6.02 moves through awareness but would get blocked in consciousness. It would run into concepts, run into concepts, run into concepts.

[13:21]

So intention works underneath or around consciousness. Consciousness. Intention is not a concept in this sense. Or it's in a concept, but it's not a thought. It's not discursive. The more... So, to speak about... You know, in science, if you... If a galaxy is moving away from us, there's the red shift.

[14:27]

Moving toward us is the blue shift, or something like that. So because we see the red shift, we know it's going away. Because light is... My daughter's very interested in why, Sophia, why you can't see the stars during the day. She said, they don't go away. Why can't you see them? So I had to explain Newton's experiment that before Newton, they thought that glass added color. But Newton showed that glass, a prism just broke up light into its color. So I had to explain it. Blue diffuses in a different way, so it scatters and makes the sky look blue as the sun hits the prism of the atmosphere. The atmosphere functions like a prism. So, when you see the evidence, you guess something's there. You can guess the galaxy is moving away because it's the red ship. So, even though you may not experience awareness,

[15:30]

But it is interesting that somehow intention can pass through your sleeping and wake you up. So there's some kind of mind there that we don't know what it is. That mind I'm calling awareness. It's clearly not consciousness. Now, what evidence do we have for awareness? And how does awareness come in? Well, what I'm suggesting here with you is that We can talk about awareness as a different liquid than consciousness. If consciousness is conceptual, awareness is non-conceptual. Because if it's possible, if something can be constructed, it can be deconstructed. You can construct consciousness and you can deconstruct consciousness. So now you have problems which are not so important to figure out. But if we identify awareness with right brain and consciousness with left brain, which to some extent is true, then there's no territory for deconstructed consciousness.

[16:48]

So if you deconstruct consciousness, take the concepts out of consciousness, does it shift over to the right brain? I don't think so. but you actually have another kind of consciousness, a consciousness that an awareness can play a role in. So, these are all things I am trying to use English to define. They are parallel to, for instance, a term like sanya-sanya, which means a mind which doesn't arise through associative thinking, but can make associations in this present moment. And the more you are familiar with that mind, the more it's present, the less you're stuck in concepts. You know, artists, painters often turn on the radio. I lived part of the New York art world for years, and almost every painter turns on the radio, and it's just going, and it kind of occupies something, and he can paint more freely.

[17:53]

He kind of takes, gathers his consciousness, and he can paint. So we develop techniques to write poetry or to paint, et cetera. And the teaching is here, the more you are familiar with awareness or a non-conceptual noticing, a non-conceptual consciousness, the more likely you're to come into a new relationship to suffering and more likely to realize enlightenment. I hate to use the word enlightenment, but enlightenment. Okay. Okay. And you have the word interleaf. Interleaf is to take a blank piece of paper and put it between a printed paper.

[18:55]

So like if you put a blank piece of paper between every page of a book, it's called interleafing in English. Or you might interleaf between lithographs or something so they don't print. The old photo albums used to have interleafed pages. So in a way, this practice of going from an object to a field of mind, an object to a field of mind, is you're interleafing a non-conceptual mind with a conceptual mind, or interleaving it, you know, it's like that. And when you do that, your thinking becomes more intuitive. Intuitive thinking seems to rise out of nowhere, you know, and then we have a feeling that it's true usually. But the more you practice, all your thinking is intuitive. You don't get to it by thinking to it, it just keeps arising. So practice increases or makes basically all thinking intuitive. You still with me?

[19:58]

I'm trying to read that Swedish face of yours. Okay, so the six paramitas. Six parameters are very simply. Maybe I should write them down. You don't have to get change. I know. I don't need to spend. Oh, thanks. He's one smart fellow. Right here. Okay, parameters means perfections, six perfections, perfections, perfection.

[21:07]

or the six completions or the six going beyonds also means gone to the other shore so it means nirvana and the first is generosity the second is discipline There it is. Patient. Now, those are the first. We want to put these, one of you, practice in the experiential context. These first three are the entries.

[22:10]

And the next is energy. But we can understand that as intention, vitality, aliveness. And the next is meditation. What includes mindfulness? What mindful attention? Okay. Now, what do I mean by saying it's an experiential situation?

[23:25]

It doesn't mean it's good to be generous. This is more like instrumental compassion. In other words, it leads somewhere, produces something. So, something like that. So generosity means, like we were speaking yesterday, that, I don't know, you had some aphoristic comments about a situation, you can't not be part of a situation or something. Whatever you do, if you're here, if you're not here, you're here. Not here is a way to be here. Well, there's no way that the main offering you make or participation you make in any situation is your state of mind.

[24:32]

Whenever you're with a person, the main thing you're offering them is your state of mind. If you really know that, then you think, geez, is this the state of mind I want to offer people or not? So out of your caring for others, what are we offering people? One way to work with generosity is to have the attitude in your mind, the feeling in your mind, that I will give this person whatever they want, whatever they need. I mean, you know, there's a certain practical element. They need a train ticket and you don't have the money, well, I mean, you may not give them a train ticket. But the feeling is, if I could, I'd give them a train ticket. So it's a practical matter, too, of just helping people. Your name is Awesome, right?

[25:38]

Awesome. I think Awesome, Awesome. Thank you. Your comment about compassion led to this. I'm not making fun of your name. I'm trying to remember your name. Awesome, Awesome, Awesome. Okay, so when you're with a person, The bodhisattva practice is... Now, again, it's not easy to do this. We have habits, we're immediately scanning the other person, saccadically, etc. And you've already, you know, like or dislike this, you know, etc. But, to some extent, you try to say, try to generate a state of mind which is like, just now is enough. When just now is not enough, just now is enough. At the level of just now is enough, you try to feel just there for the person.

[26:43]

There, this is kind of a common sense, but there, whatever this person needs, if I can, I'll give it to them. Discipline, the second one, actually means learning. We discipline ourselves to learn. The root of the idea of discipline is to learn. So the second one is you're willing to learn from the other person. So you're just present to receive, you're present to offer, and you're present to receive. So the dynamic of this is with each person, the bodhisattva, and each of us to whatever extent we can, has this feeling of, I'll give this person whatever they need. It's a nice feeling. You start to develop it. You meet people in a train station and they come up and they, where's the track so-and-so? Well, I'm sorry, I don't speak German, but I think it's over there. And you just feel completely open to whatever the person needs.

[27:47]

And it's not so hard. If you develop this as an intention, the more you realize it, actualize it, the better it feels. So it's kind of nice to do it. Again, this isn't about I'm this kind of person, I'm a good person, a good person would do this, a bad person would do... It's just something you do, like playing the piano or whatever. Because we're not in the sense that you have a nature. I have an inherent nature. I'm trying to be a better person. It's just a way of being in the world. What do you call it? The integrity of being. So we're talking about the integrity of being. And integrity of being covers everything we've been talking about. How do you weave body and mind together? That would be the integrity of being. And simultaneously, though it's often when you start practicing sequential, first you feel, you know, I'll give this person anything they need.

[28:58]

And the second feeling is, or simultaneous feeling is, I'll receive whatever this person offers me. And the third is patient. You have the patience to just be there and let something happen. And that means you're in the situation with the other person on their terms as well as your own. And it's extremely vulnerable. you feel vulnerable, kind of naked, the more you have this feeling. And then, like almost every list of Buddhism, there's energy or something. But we don't have a word for it. It means all those things. Vitality, clarity, intention, etc.

[30:02]

So, The patient is supported by energy, vitality. And that vitality is supported by meditation. And that meditation is supported by worldviews about how things actually are. So you can approach it either way. You can approach it through the worldviews, You meditate, you have this vitality, you bring this vitality into patience just to be present to the world, present to each person, and willing to give each person what they need. So this is a kind of common sense, but it's developed in a way that you actualize it with each person you meet. But you don't put yourself down. We have a practice called maximal greatness. And maximal greatness means... The practice is... You do something.

[31:10]

And you take pride in whatever you do. And pride in Buddhism is not a bad thing. In America... I mean America, it's... Pride in America. It's... In Western culture, hubris, pride goeth before a fall, is at the center of our... But in Buddhism, pride, a certain pride in what you're doing is considered healthy. So you take pride. I did that pretty well. But a Buddha would have done it better. But you don't put yourself down. Somebody said, what if you say something terrible to somebody? Well... You say, I didn't say all the things I could have said. So you say, take pride, I only said this one terrible thing to this person. But I had about 15, I almost said. And then you say to yourself, but a Buddha would have not even said that one shitty thing.

[32:13]

So it's a, you know, it's, we also call it rising mind. You don't say, oh, I'm terrible. You say, oh, I did that pretty well. I could do it better. And so you're not, when you practice something like this, you're not saying, oh, well, I didn't really do the six parametres well, or I didn't, you say, geez, at least I remembered the six parametres, you know. So you take a certain pride, I remembered the six parametres, but I sure wasn't my usual, you know, like that. So this kind of stuff is at the center of Buddhism. Rather really practical. Okay? Anybody have something you'd like to say?

[33:18]

Around this one too. I don't care anything. What is wisdom? Wisdom is to know how things actually exist. And to actualize that in your life. I mean, that's how Buddhism, anyway, understands wisdom. You mentioned yesterday the movement towards the inside, with wisdom in outwards, with compassion. And in relation to what, recognizing things as they actually are, how would you combine that with this model of moving things inside? Well, we can relate it to the sense of a contentless mind, and a mind defined through content.

[34:53]

The word for everything as it is in Buddhism is tathagatagarbha. And tathagata is also a word for the Buddha. It's the word for the Buddha which describes a Buddha which is everything in its all-at-onceness. So the Buddha is a historical person, but he's also a concept of everything in its all-at-onceness in which it makes everything possible. And what literally Tathagata means is coming and going. it sometimes means thusness but the thusness is thus coming thus going okay so you in that word there's this sense of a pulse things are simultaneously coming and going that everything is moving changing um streaming maybe you can think of each of you as a kind of streaming

[36:03]

You're a kind of streaming and you're a kind of streaming, something like that. Not an entity. I'm a kind of streaming. And this streaming is flowing together. And it can be pulled apart. And wisdom also means to recognize the connectedness between us and the world. And to actualize that connectedness. And garbha means simultaneously womb and embryo. So womb, womb, an embryo. You're a good example. And so it means that everything is simultaneously an embryo and simultaneously the condition for an embryo. That there's a fertility in everything. So... Okay, so this is the idea of that how things exist is a kind of pulse.

[37:11]

And it's a pulse, we could say, of awareness and consciousness. It's a pulse of interdependence and interindependence. a very particular, and everything connected. So in ourselves, we can feel that, and it's a kind of folding in and folding out. You fold everything in, it all disappears, you absorb everything. In Zazen, it feels like everything is folded into you. And, but it also unfolds. So there's a kind, from practice you begin to feel a kind of, I mean I feel, you know, from having practiced a long time, that there's a kind of, when I practice this from the particular to the field, the field is folding in for me.

[38:25]

And We can think, if we try to... This state of mind in which... It's sometimes in Wayan Buddhism called the mind of totality or something. I don't like the word totality. But it's a mind of unity which is not broken by discrimination. So there's a feeling of... when I I mean I'm using myself as an example of in the process of teaching because of being with you because that's what we're doing right now and because I've been doing this for you know, 45 or more years, I should have to know something about it.

[39:31]

So, when I come and I sit down with you, I have to say something. You know, I don't... I don't know what to say. I mean, I have some ideas. I might talk about this or that. But really, I have to feel an entry. Because I'm not at all interested in giving you information. I mean, it just doesn't interest me. And I can't do it even, because it feels like I'm insulting you by giving you information. And I mean, I'm happy to give you directions to how to get to Yohannesot, if you want to know the route. But beyond that, I'm not interested in giving you information. So I have to feel an entry. And so when I sit down with you, and one reason I come a little after you've been sitting for a while is because if I come in the beginning, I create the field with you.

[40:38]

And then I can't find the entry because I'm part of the field. So if I come after you've started, you've created a field. If you think I'm nuts, you can, it's all right. I'm just telling you my experience. And, you know, maybe they put people in mental hospital for this, but anyway. So I come, and I sit down, and I can immediately feel the field here. And so I'm entering it. I haven't created it, I'm entering it. So then, as soon as I feel a certain thing, and it will occur in different bodily locations, as soon as I feel a certain thing, it's like I tune in to the field you've created. And as soon as I feel that, I might ring the bell. If I try to, but I'm skillful enough at doing this that my trying to or wanting to doesn't interfere anymore.

[41:45]

When you have samadhi, you know what samadhi is, right? A field of mind in which there's no thought. Or a concentrated field of mind. Or this would be an example of samadhi. But this would be an example of samadhi too, if you're concentrated. When you're doing zazen, After a while, you've done it for a while, pretty soon you have a non-conceptual field of mind. And it really feels good. It feels quite blissful. You think, hey, this ain't so bad, right? Almost as good as sex. Or maybe it's better. But there actually is a relationship between sexual really disappearing into a relationship with another person and samadhi. So, You feel this feeling, and then you think, oh, this is what they've been talking about. This is samadhi, and it goes away. Okay.

[42:47]

After you're more skillful, you can think, oh, this is samadhi, and you can examine it, and you can hold it without it going away. But for the beginner, they can't do that. I mean, usually can't. So... So... Once I feel that, I feel a kind of field and it's all at once-ness and it's drawn into my body. That's called wisdom. That's another word for wisdom. And that is represented by Manjushri. And Manjushri is the bodhisattva of wisdom. And Manjushri usually has a rope sometimes, but at least a sword. And a sword means he, she is cutting attachments. So the drawing in or the feeling of everything and it's all at once-ness is also wisdom. Now it's wisdom because what you generate from that mind has a feeling of truth like intuition.

[43:53]

Now I want to caution that there's danger. All feelings of truth are not true. And there can be deceptive or faux false enlightenment, and there can be deceptive intuitions. You have the feeling of truth, so you really believe it's true, but you're wrong. I think we have a president that's like that in the United States. I mean, if I asked who are the two most famous enlightened people in the world, I mean, one of them is the Dalai Lama, probably, and the other is Bush. Because Bush has had a conversion experience. A Protestant conversion experience is phenomenologically very similar or the same as an enlightenment experience. And he believes he's in contact with the truth. This would be called false enlightenment in Bush. Delusion. Yeah, or delusion. But it's rooted for him in the experience of Protestant conversion experience, which feels like it's true.

[45:00]

But probably the experience was true. But coming out of the experience, he came into a fundamentalist Protestant view of the world. And that reified that Protestant view of the world. And he's told this means you're in contact with God. You can have, again, as I said earlier, you can have an experience of oneness But then if you say, ah, I had this experience of oneness, so the world is one, that's delusion. An experience of oneness doesn't mean the world is one. But you can have such a powerful experience that everything is one, but then you believe everything is one, instead of just noticing you had an experience that everything is one. So we say, not one, not two. It feels like one, but it's actually two. It feels like two, but it's actually interrelated. And not-two-ness is not-oneness. Okay? Is that clear?

[46:02]

Okay. But I'm just playing with words here. But I'm trying to aim at something, and I try to unsay the words. I say them, and then I try to take them away. okay so when I have this feeling of a feel that joins us which also feels like a kind of all at once-ness everything is included in this feel it's an inclusive feeling there's no inside no outside and yet it all feels undifferentiated and drawn in so then when I start to talk I unfold that feeling. And that's what... And I do that because it makes it more fun for me to teach. It might be a better way to teach.

[47:05]

I don't know. But I don't do it because it's good, bad, or indifferent. I do it because it feels good. And it feels satisfying. And I feel... what I'm talking about may more likely make sense. But I can also tell when it doesn't make sense. So I get very clear sensation. This isn't making sense. And then I try to follow where it is making sense. And see where it leads me. So often I start seminars and I have no idea where I'm going to go. Because I keep following what makes sense. And very often I come to things I've never thought of before. A way of looking at this which is completely new to me. And when I give talks or do a seminar, I don't come to ways that are things I've never said before, never thought before, that are new to me.

[48:10]

The laboratory hasn't been a good one. To me, this is the laboratory. And I'm, you know, you're Okay. So that is drawing in and out. So the Bodhisattva of Compassion is the feminized Avalokitesvara Kuan Yin, Kannon, iconographically very, very similar to the Virgin Mary. So it's almost like a universal archetype. I don't like Jung's universal archetypes and collective unconscious because that's another theological idea. But there is some truth to it. And iconographically, Kuan Yin, or Kanon, or Avla Kittishvara, the Bodhisattva of Wisdom, is feminine and is, again, very similar iconographically to the Virgin Mary. It represents some place in our human culture.

[49:15]

That's the bodhisattva or goddess. Sometimes in Tibetan Buddhism it becomes clearly a female with protruding breasts. But in the Chinese and Japanese form of Avalokiteshvara, it really looks like a female, but it could be a male. The breasts aren't particularly large. So Tara, you've probably all heard of Tara. Tara is a development from Avalokiteshvara. So Avalokiteshvara is the unfolding and the cutting off and folding in is wisdom or Manjushri. So now So why call these things bodhisattvas? Why anthropomorphize it or bodhisattvasize it? Because when this drawing in, the characteristics of Manjushri are the characteristics that you feel when everything is completely folded in and contained and complete.

[50:30]

When it's folding out, it has this quality of generosity. Whatever you need, I'll give you. You know the song, Just Give Me a Call, winter, spring, summer, fall. It was a popular song. That is almost a version of chance in Buddhism, where you call to Avalokiteshvara, whatever you need, I will give you. Whatever you want, I'll give you. In the summer, spring, winter, fall, whatever you want, I'll give you. That's the spirit of... You've got a friend. You've got a friend. That's it. That's basically a song, Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara's song. Okay, anything else we can uncover here?

[51:35]

You said that the first three were entry, and also I get a sensation of that. What you're doing here is that you're giving me some wisdom about how the world functions, like the conventional truth. That gives me some more ideas. And you also inspire me for meditation and giving me practices for mindfulness and attention. which I just find these days, start doing small things give me energy, give me intention and stuff like that. So, am I thinking you're wrong? Yeah, that's right. Well, the entry can be, as I said, from either end. It can be. From either end. The more traditional entry is from the bottom. But for the practitioner, most people who start this practice, they're already fairly good at practice, fairly experienced. So then they start with how to just be generous with each person.

[52:39]

But the idea is, in all of these lists, you go through them several times. So in this list, you might practice this way, but you find out it deepens your meditation and develops your wisdom, and then you bring that back to the practice of generosity. So all of these are mantra-like practices. You just repeat them. This is the classic meeting between two people. And when there's a feeling of this every time you meet someone, you will soon be a bodhisattva. You keep returning to the phrase, I hope this is useful for you. And just to feed back the usefulness, that's why I keep...

[53:43]

turning quiet as soon as you... I remember I once had one of Shell's friend who's a mountaineer. He was the first one, first Swede on Mount Everest and I had him in for... The first Swede on Mount Everest. Yeah, it sounds like an Olli Olsson joke. But I had him in for a training, and the group sat quiet. First he did a night session, and then they did a morning session, and they were quiet, and he was like, don't you have any questions? And they were like... Yeah, well, no, you keep talking. And he left and he called me up and he said, did they really hate me that much? But as soon as he left, they had lunch and then they came to me and they asked me all the questions they wanted to ask Michael that they didn't ask because they were so into taking in through the pores almost.

[54:45]

So that's one of the things happening here for me is like I'm trying to take in and I'm not very much in the transmitting mode on the conscious level anyway. So there's been quite a few things and the usefulness is, one of the usefulness is to stay in the blur. Yeah, I understand. Thanks for telling me that. Yeah, so that's one of the things I'm trying to do. I'm trying to stay in the blur. B-L-U-R. Yeah. The fuzzy, the blur. Because I can see a lot of things that I easily can relate to. But that would be the easy way out as well. That's good. So I'm trying to relate but not make it the same. Good. And I have a way of understanding and getting knowledge through expressing. So when I express, that's kind of a closure.

[55:48]

So I'm being a bit careful of what I express. Well, that's good, and I really don't like it when people tell me they understand right away. Gregory Bateson said once, it's very difficult to teach in America because... Whatever you say, they say, yeah, yeah, great, groovy. And they don't know that what Gregory just said was the opposite of what they think. So if you can't experience that it's different than what you think, or you don't give it a chance. I mean, I'm speaking to you about things which, to speak about this in this way has taken me decades. So I really feel somewhat not respected when somebody says, oh, yeah, I understand that. Boy, I wish I was that quick. It's taken me forever. And one more comment. No. It really made... That was one of the things that got...

[56:50]

made an understanding or made me or which i grasped was the the thing with the stick yeah and why it's important to look at the specific or what do you call the particular the particulars and then go back to look at the particular to get in the state of mind and then take the particular and look at everything in that state of mind. That was one thing. I'll stay with that. But again, this is actually an example I've used for many years because the stick is here now. And there's a famous Zen teacher who always put up one finger. There's a koan about it. Gute. No matter what. And it was an important experience for me because I was secure she told the story. And...

[57:53]

And so I was engaged with one of these stories that he told, and I would kind of like keep them, hold them in front of me while I was doing other things. And then one day, with no reason at all, he was doing the bells, and he put up one finger. And whoa, it was an experience for me. But anyway, Kutay put up, whenever Panipa would say anything, he'd say, like, Now, is he pointing at something? Or is he just saying everything is one? Or is he showing that always there's a different background whenever you put up your finger? Anyway, this is a terrible story, actually. Well, it happens. The stick, right? Well, he said, so he had a young... monk who uh began to imitate him people come to visit the temple and they'd say well is your teacher here you know and what is buddhism you know and uh so the teacher called the kid in and said uh yeah uh what is buddhism the kid put up his finger and the teacher the story is just cut off his finger with a knife

[59:12]

And the kid went, ah, and went running out. I said, stop. He turned around and the teacher went. Whether it's true or not, it's a good story. What happens with a stick when you put it behind you? From the point of view of Buddhism, This is the classic encounter. Classic? Encounter. So if you're doing, if you're a psychotherapist, this would be a way to be present to each person you're seeing. I think if you're a business consultant, when you're with a group of people, this can be in the background of what you do. And there's simply nothing wrong with this. You know? And it's a resource, as they say about Gute's finger, you could never exhaust the resources of Gute's one finger.

[60:23]

But you can never exhaust the resources of something like this. It's so simple and so profoundly opening if you just make use of it as a resource, time after time. And it's time you're with people. Look in the mirror. Oh, sweet mirror on the wall. There's a joke about that, but I won't tell it. It's not very good. Okay, what else? Shall we stop? People are going to go away with just the statement that you said that George Bush and the Dalai Lama are the most famous in the life of people right now. Yeah. Well, that's all right. That's just a good warning about enlightenment. You had a comment about the collective mind union.

[61:29]

Yeah. Collective unconscious. Yeah. You said, I don't like that, but there's something to it. Well, there's something to the idea that there's an archetypal There are archetypes among human beings. But to tie that down, that we share some underlying unconsciousness, all of us, I don't think it makes sense. It certainly doesn't make Buddhist sense and doesn't make sense to me. And particularly when he identifies these archetypes with Greek statues. But it's not entirely right. Because certainly when you look at the Avalokiteshvara and the Virgin Mary, they're very, very similar. But what would be a difference with Avalokiteshvara, for instance? The classic one, we have a big statue of Ablakitishvara in Crestone.

[62:30]

You've never been to Crestone? No, not yet. Not yet. That's a nice positive way to look at it, from my point of view. From mine too. We have a really great statue and it was commissioned, I'll tell you the story because it's kind of interesting. It was commissioned by the Japanese government, as far as I know, for the Hiroshima Peace Park in Hiroshima. It has a memorial after the atomic bomb. It's blown up horribly by Truman and the U.S. government. But I know an irony about that. It's a funny irony, you know. I know a guy who was in Japan, in San Francisco, he was a garden designer, and he was a student in maybe Nagasaki or Hiroshima, and he was a student whose job was, as some students have, to be in the basement of some kind of factory, steam factory, you know, some energy producing, where he had to read the meters every hour, but he studied.

[63:41]

So he's way down several floors, four floors below ground or something, when the bomb hit. And he came up and the city was gone. People were disfigured and burning and leaping into the river and, you know, I mean, horrible. What? It was his job. He was in charge of nuclear power plants for PG&E, Pacific Gas and Electricity. In California. And he was a garden designer. I mean, how you would take that as a job after you've been in Nagasaki? Anyway. So... This statue was made, but actually it's very common for a sculptor casting bronze, a bell or a sculpture, to cast several and to figure out which one they like best. It comes out differently. You make the cast and you pour the metal and you can just pour the metal again. Sometimes they melt it down. So he made, at least all I know, is he made two. And generally you melt the other ones down.

[64:43]

And he, one was in the Peace Park at Hiroshima, Hiroshima, and the other was given to a friend. That friend, after 20 years or so, sold it. And he sold it to a man I know named Roberto Agnolini, who'd become a friend, but I met him through this statue. And he is an Italian who studied architecture and design in Germany, in Munich, and then he fell in love with a man who had a shop in Colorado Springs. And he's a great person. I like Roberto. And the man who he was in love with eventually died, and he inherited the shop, and he's got this shop. And the image of the shop was this large Avolo Kittishvara. That's it. And I'd heard that he was willing to sell it to us or something.

[65:46]

But, you know, I have a weakness for beautiful things and an inability to prevent myself from acquiring them, if they're acquirable. So I'd heard about this statue and I didn't want to go see it. Because I thought if I see it, then I'll think it's crazy that it's in the shop. It should be in a Buddhist center or something. So I didn't want to go see it. But it took two or three years and somebody got me to go see it. Oh, okay. It's all over. We have to get this. So I asked him how much he would sell it for. And he had it for sale for about $35,000, I think, which was a crazy price. It's worth... A statue this big can cost $25,000 in Japan at this quality. I mean, just to cast it, to cast a statue of this size, nine feet tall... I have a friend who has a foundry in Santa Fe who does casting for Los Angeles artists.

[66:56]

To cast a nine-foot statue... with virtually no detail was $25,000, $35,000, $40,000. So just the casting. So I thought, this is a ridiculous price. And he lowered it to $25,000. So we found a way to buy it. It took quite a while. He lets me buy things and pay over years $50 or something. So anyway, we bought it. And there's also a spirit in Buddhism that you don't buy things unless they're given to you or partially given to you or the feeling is to give it to you. So he clearly had the feeling of wanting us to buy it, wanting to give it to us, so we bought it. To complete the anecdotal part of the story... There's a photographer named Bill Elsey who has become a friend. He's quite a wonderful guy, good photographer. And he lives out in the valley.

[67:57]

We live in Crestone. It's a mountain that's 4,600 meters or something, 14,400 feet. And you come down, it's like a chair. It comes up like this. And we're here. We're at 8,600 meters, which is about 2,500, 600 meters, something like that. We're pretty high. Air's thin. And the valley in front of us, like this room, is the size of the state of Connecticut. It's hundreds of kilometers. So this is like an ocean. It was an ancient lake bed. It's the highest so-called alpine valley in the world, this thing. Anyway, it's quite, it's like an ocean. And Bill has a house right out here. And we're right here. And he makes his living just to, he wakes up in the morning, takes pictures of this mountain. Because the mountain is like a weather machine it throws hail it throws storms it's always another dimension up there kind of wind snow blowing up off the mountain it's kind of great to come out of medication and then do it the stuff's going on in the mountain right great and it's high it's higher than almost anything in the alps only a few mountains in the alps higher and um

[69:19]

So anyway, he just takes these pictures. And he's a good photographer, so they're beautiful. And you buy them for $1,000 or more. Anyway. But he's part of a group there called, he became involved with this Japanese group who's beside it. There's more religions in one spot, Crestone, than any place in the world. There's at least 12 Tibetan groups, four or five Christian groups of various kinds, Carmelite monastery run by a woman, Abbess, with men, monk, male on, And there's a... I can't list them all, but there's two Zen groups. Okay. So, right next to us is this Japanese new religion called Shumei. And they asked him to go to Japan. When he was in Japan, somebody went out jogging In Hiroshima.

[70:27]

And they passed our statue. Because the sister of our statue is in Hiroshima. And they couldn't believe it. I know this statue. This is in Creston. You know. So they got all these Xiumei women, women connected to this new religion, and they all, there's this statue, it's at Crestone, because Xiumei, I mean, Xiumei is kind of a fantastic thing. They had E.M. Pei, you know, the Chinese architect, designed his greatest work for them, a museum complex that cost a billion dollars. They have money enough to do that. And they have a billion-dollar collection. And they took a forest out, I don't know how they did it politically, in a national park, put a tunnel in, put the forest back in, and built this extraordinary museum. So he was... And it's connected to a woman who's a shaman. A lot of shamanism in Japan, particularly in Korea.

[71:31]

And the head of it's a woman who is a kind of medium. You don't need to know all this stuff, but it's kind of interesting. Okay. So... The world is complex and amusing. Anyway. So... He got this whole group who were in Hiroshima for some reason to come and look. And this statue was kind of like in the park and not so well tended. And so one of the persons, the woman who saw it jogging, told the story that her sister was at Creston Mountain and all these Japanese women burst into tears. And so now they're tending it. They're bringing flowers to the one in Japan. So it's funny. Our one in America is taking care of the one in Japan. And so Bill took a picture of it. So we have a picture that Bill Elsey took and framed beside it.

[72:32]

And it is slightly different. In ours, this hand... The thumb and finger are not touching. In the one that the park has, they touch. Other than that, as far as we can tell, with magnifying glasses, they're dentical. Okay. All of that was the anecdote. Now the point of the story. She is standing on a lotus pod. which is, you know, a circle with new dots and leaves coming up. It's a standard symbol of Buddhism because the lotus is rooted in the muddy water but lifts up above the water. So as the cross is the symbol for Christianity, the lotus is a symbol for Buddhism because it's rooted in the mud but lifting up above the water. So she's standing in the lotus pod She has the embryo. If you've ever had Japanese soups, you can have a lotus embryo, which is in a clear kind of gel with a little tiny folded up lotus leaf in it.

[73:40]

And that's somehow the seed of a lotus. Anyway, so she's got this lotus embryo. She's holding the stem, and this is the lotus embryo. And then there's the... Lotus bud. And where's the lotus flower? You're looking at it as the flower. So the iconography is completed by your looking at it. And that's very typical Buddhism. So they have the lotus pod, the lotus embryo, the lotus bud, but not the flower. Because the flower is, again, you're relating to it. And it's not an entity. And in that sense it's an activity and not an entity. So I think that's a good place to... Stop, now that you know that you are the lotus flower.

[74:43]

And if you go to your Hanusok and see the Roshi, he's got one of these too. Got a teaching staff. You've got the teaching stick with that. I have a teaching staff. It's exactly like that. It's true. I have a teaching staff where you put your hand on the embryo. That's why it's a little confused. I just sorted it out. And there's a bud, and then up here there's the pod. But as a teaching staff, it means the same thing. Now we have the flowering of a glass of water. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I've got lots because people have been giving me... Oh, wow. See, we're prepared. We're generous. Very generous. All right. Thank you very much. I hope you don't mind my anecdotes. They go on a little long. Wonderful. Yeah, they go on a little long sometimes.

[75:46]

Very nice. If you hear about in Zurich, they had a whole very large... Did you see it? Yeah, I saw it. It's really great too. I know most of the statues because I lived in Japan long enough. There's only one statue I wasn't familiar with. Have you been to the museum? Because what's great is to go underground and up in the other part and see what's in the glass cases. This was a show of wooden, mostly Avalokiteshvara or similar early figures of Buddhism, many armed and so forth. It was quite wonderful sculptures. In the book, they had the information about how they built them from different pieces of wood. Yeah. The four or five. And I have to think about the Buddha in Johanneshof, which was made from, I think, five pieces. Oh, more, seven of these. They've got the information of how they did that back then in the book. Yeah, that's another anecdote, the statue we have at Johanneshof, but I won't tell you that right now.

[76:52]

But in order to make these statues so they didn't crash and split, they made them of various kinds of wood so they checked each other. They expanded the conversions. Yeah. Various pieces of wood.

[77:11]

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