Yes. I would have seen the I as... The I, the pronoun I. I would have seen the self as coming together with appearance in one way or another. Yes? Were you finished? You look unfinished. As an answer to Christina's question of how the focus in consolation can express what's happening there,

[01:29]

Yes, okay. Siegfried? If your question was, Christina, that if you were thinking she still needs something, My conscious assumption was that she was having all the resources. That actually that was the basic concept of the constellation itself. These three important resources or powers that were also purified from personal overlays There were important indications like sensation going forward, going forward toward appearance

[03:00]

And also the implosion of the power of the conceptions. And many indications for fear being merely a construction that is paralyzing. When all decisions are made and are made public, then there can only be one decision or a change.

[04:34]

When all resources are available and revealed, then the only thing that is needed is a decision or a turning around. Then I am not really, then I can't or shouldn't allow myself to take on her view of something still missing. Maybe it would have been helpful for her to have a more focused

[05:44]

meeting with her own fear? Yeah, maybe so. But we have to be careful. Yeah, we have to be careful. My experience is that it is so important to skip something like fear and to have a good experience. I'm sensing a similar direction was talking about it during the break that it can be helpful to jump over fear and to have a good experience.

[07:07]

But in everyday life I think it's equally helpful to identify how it is to come closer to the obstacle but through noticing and identifying I'm opening up a space so that in a particular and fitting moment the experience becomes possible okay someone else want to say something yes oh the protagonist the protagonist thank you very much for this conversation

[08:34]

My feeling was what happened has directly to do with myself. And it's nice and kind of relief that you all see something larger behind all this. For example, this aspect that beauty and terror are so close, that feels like a relief to me. The question of how the eye is made contact, or how it could have made contact, or what was still needed to make contact, so this eye, I mean, I... In this situation, I had the feeling that there was something there that could have been removed.

[10:01]

That would have meant nothing else than giving this something another a good place just like we did before with other aspects. And it was helpful for me to see how sensation was the first part of me that went over to appearance. In that situation was actually expressing the fear, this block here, was expressing the fear that I was feeling too. Through that it was present and what it means to me is that I have to live and walk with this fear. ...

[11:37]

And that brings up the topic that I brought up yesterday of letting go. Loslassen und? Loslassen und rennen. From letting go and the topic of inseparability. And one possibility of letting go is to take it on and to walk with it. To accept it and take it with you and to walk with it.

[13:04]

Okay. Yes. I have a question. You told me that you wanted to become a Sikh. I have a question for you, because I sense that you wanted to create a safe place with perception, where you said to perception, please, you stay here and hold the fort. My impression was that it was an important point of securing this place, but then that didn't really happen. That in relationship to the question of what you possibly needed, would have been different for you if perception going along with your wish had stayed?

[14:30]

I have no memory of the situation. That's not so important to me. What was important was that at a certain point I had the feeling that both sensation and perception were with me. The conceptions were kind of... A little bit, they were sort of on their own. And then something else comes to mind because it's occurring here in this particular place.

[15:58]

Two years ago, I did a constellation here that was very, very important to me. And this fear that also became a topic two years ago is not something that just went away. It appears time and again, or again and again it appears, but my way of dealing with it has changed. Yeah, and that maybe also is what empowered me to... take it, to accept it, take it on and take it with me.

[17:08]

Okay. Now I was struck by the, by the, well my assumption is that most of us live in in appearance. And most of us don't live close to sensation, perception and conception. And most of us don't live close to sensation, perception and conception. But when they, you know, just looking at it from my perspective, when they're presented as structures of knowing, rather neutral, I mean, or free of self,

[18:24]

That's where you felt as the protagonist most comfortable. An appearance didn't feel comfortable at all. It was like a moth afraid of the flame. No, I have no idea if this has any relationship to your experience of the Gabriela or Gabi of the constellation. But it's a way to introduce my speaking about appearance. Now appearance, I think generally appearance has been decided upon certainly by me and I think Lusthaus and other scholars who look at this carefully decided that the word appearance is the only word we basically have for dharmas.

[19:57]

In other words, getting to know the experience of the world in... the experienceable world as parts. The experienceable world... The first step in getting to know that is getting to feel sensorial appearance. Is it as a beginning and an end? There's a beginning of appearance.

[20:59]

You have to start noticing the beginning. And then there's a holding and a release. And the refinement of that as a yogic skill is essential for any real Buddhist Zen practice. And you can practice it rather mechanically. Like I can look at Siegfried. And then I can look away. And when I look at Siegfried, while I'm looking at you, there's an appearance of Siegfried.

[22:02]

I mean, I think it looks like it might be you. And then when I look away, he's gone. So I look at Alexandra and she appears. Okay, and then I can look away and look back at you. Now, part of the secret of getting to know appearance is is not to think Siegfried is still there when I'm looking at Alexander. If I think he's still there, my previous experience will bias my next experience. If I think he's still there, So you have to develop the skill to really release, in this case, Siegfried.

[23:03]

And let your full attentional body Be full, in this case, with Alexander. So the dharmic act of appearance is noticing, holding, And then intentionally release it. Because it is changing, but we tend not to notice the changing.

[24:04]

But if we intentionally release it, then you notice the differentiation. So when I come back from Alexandra as an intentional, the fullness of the intentional experience, Siegfried reappears. It's not a continuation of his previous appearance, it's a reappearance. And then when it's genuinely a reappearance, I'm able to notice Siegfried's always slightly different.

[25:18]

There's always... different mists, clouds, sunlight crossing his visage. Then I look at Alexander and the energetic presence of Alexander is slightly different from moment to moment. And if I don't really get the feel of this dharmic appearance, then I keep seeing the continuity of experience that consciousness wants to foist on me. Do you know the word foist?

[26:29]

Kind of. Okay. To put over on you, to trick you with. Because... The necessary job, as I say repeatedly, the necessary job of consciousness is to make the world predictable. So consciousness being so powerful, Because we can only function in a fairly predictable world. Tends to deceive us That it is predictable.

[27:37]

So consciousness is the main purveyor of delusion. Purveyor means... Producer of. So you have to pierce the delusional veil of consciousness with the flow of consciousness unique appearances, which we call dharmas. Okay.

[28:39]

Now, again, the word appearance is used because it allows you to, which manifestation doesn't quite, allows you to really notice sensorially the beginning and end of noticing. As I said the other day, past is gone, future is not here, And the ungraspable present is constantly disappearing. And because the way we perceive, we perceive a kind of stage set of the present. But within the stage set of the present, we want to become more momentarily aware of the uniqueness

[29:57]

Okay, so something like that. I feel a little bit like I'm speaking into a medium or a liquid. which we're all swimming around in. And we all have a little different way of swimming and floating. And fish are coming out of my mouth. And different fish, you know, different fish are peering out of your ears and things. And I'm trying to get it all sort of like floating together, something like that.

[31:17]

Okay, for us, particularly for us as Westerners and probably in the last couple hundred years, The first job of practice is to get the experience of appearance out of the, to get the continuity of appearance out of the stream of thinking. Now here I'm using appearance as something like the locus of attention. Or the point at which we identify the world.

[32:19]

Yeah. Something like that. So as you know, the main way to do that is to have an intention to shift attention to the breath. And again, the dynamic of that is seen in the simple question. Why is something so easy to do for a few breaths so difficult to do continuously?

[33:25]

And it's certainly not because all our thinking is so interesting. Das ist bestimmt nicht, weil unser Denken immer so interessant ist. Es liegt daran, dass wir unsere Kontinuität von Moment zu Moment im Denken finden. And if you, through a drug experience or something, you take that continuity out of thinking, it has no place to go. People, you know, it's practically a nervous breakdown. So, for example, in a drug experience, if you take this continuity out of thinking, and there is no place in which you... So the first step in the Dharma practice of appearance is to get the continuity of appearance out of thinking.

[34:30]

And you have the tools to do that, attention, intention, breath, you know, et cetera. That takes a while, maybe two or three years of continuous attention to accomplish it. And that's an optimistic view, so don't get nervous. Because there's very good cultural and joyful reasons why Thinking and continuity are glued together. And normally, after a few moments, the sense of continuity... Immediately goes back to thinking.

[35:55]

But you have the resources. And the primary resource is the establishment of an unchangeable intention to do it. Expressed as a repeated attention to the breath. So what happens? And there's a big shift. It's really a huge shift. Because your continuity is established in your breath and then very quickly in your body and in phenomena. A large percentage of psychological problems disappear.

[36:57]

that are carried in the medium of consciousness and identity and accumulated experiences and so forth. You said consciousness, second one? Carried in the medium of consciousness. Consciousness? experiences and so forth. Okay, that's the first. Now, the second is to be able to shift the location or locus of attention. Or let's say, not just attention, attentional appearance. Sagen wir mal nicht nur Aufmerksamkeit, sondern sagen wir Erscheinung durch Aufmerksamkeit.

[38:14]

So the next Yogacharic skill or Zen skill. And that's why I put these lists on the... The first eight we spoke about here in 207 in some detail. But the first six are considered senses in Buddhism. Mano is the word for mind in this case. Mind as a sense. der Geist verstanden als Sinnesfeld. Die Betonung hier ist so, dass es sich um sechs Quellen der Erfahrung handelt.

[39:15]

Man hat hier also die fünf Sinne. which I call Eye, Ear, Nose, Taste, Touch. And then Mano. And I'm calling it Mano because Mano means mind as a sense. New things can be sourced in mind, not necessarily from hearing or speaking, I mean seeing. And Mano also accompanies, is part of, the experience of eye, ear, nose, taste, and touch.

[40:28]

And these first six also establish the field of knowing called ayatmos. A-Y-A-T-A-N-A A, Y, A, T, A, N, A. And then the next two, Manas, is the discriminating, editing mind. And the Alaya Vijnana is the eighth. And the Alaya Vijnana, this is the eighth point here. And these are called the eight Vishnianas.

[41:36]

And the word Vishniana means etymologically something like to know separately together. And the word Vishniana means etymologically something like And the alaya vijnana is not another word for the unconscious of Freudian psychology. How does it differ? It differs in that it's conceived to be a storage of everything, a storage of allness. Everything you've ever... done or something is stored as much as is imaginable in the alaya vijnana.

[42:37]

So it's not a place where repressed items or repressed aspects of what could be conscious are present. So it's not a place So the contents of the laya-vijñāna The contents are always available to every conscious act. They're only not available... but they're available according to context, associations, etc.

[43:39]

So the degree to which you develop abilities to... to think in an associative way, it calls forth the paratactic depth or calls forth the associations in your actions. Okay. You know, if you hypnotize somebody sometimes who has seen a car accident or something, they say they didn't see anything.

[44:41]

It's like the gorilla in the soccer game. You know all of that stuff, right? Yeah. But if you hypnotize the person, they usually say, oh, there was a gorilla there, and actually the license plate of the car is 734, etc. So the La Vigiana is more like that. It's just a depository. And the right? And the right hypnotic freedom from consciousness allows much of this to appear. Okay, now, vijnana is, as I said, is defined as to know separately together.

[45:43]

So the second dharma practice of appearance is to be able to shift the locus of appearance so it's primarily in visual consciousness or visual experience or visual sensation. or in aural appearance, A-U-R-A-L appearance, and so forth. So each of the five senses, you develop the ability to experience almost completely separate from the other senses.

[46:59]

Yeah, then you begin to get the ability to bring them together as a trio or a quartet or a quintet, etc. and to feel them in their ajatana, their particular field that arises between the object and the sensor. And then manas becomes something, this editing function. becomes something that you feel within, you feel the editing process and can narrow it or widen it.

[48:09]

So now that you've separated appearance from consciousness, consciousness as continuity. You now get the ability to move that experience of appearance. So there's eye perception, not exactly eye perception, but eye percepts oral, a-u-r-a-l, percepts, and so forth. And the alaya-vijnana becomes the basis for appearance.

[49:12]

Now, since we also discussed the five skandhas, I put them on again. So now, as we've been talking in the last two days, you can locate appearance in the sensation of form. And you can locate appearance in non-gratuitable feeding. Now let me say something about non-graspable feeling.

[50:25]

In this room, an example I always use, in this room right now, there's a particular feeling. And you cannot say what it is, you cannot grasp it, but you can feel it. And most of what's happening in this room is happening in this medium of non-graspable feeling. And if somebody else comes in the room right now, the feel will change. And some people shut down The field, some people enhance the field. Are you saying feel or field? Enhance the field of non-versatile feeling.

[51:28]

And we could say the bodhisattva training or experience is to always be able to enhance the field of non-graspable field. So this is another, you can shift the locus of appearance to each of the five skandhas. So each is a layer of the world. And they're not simply related sequentially to each other. And one direction, when you do relate them sequentially...

[52:32]

One directionality leads to consciousness. But the deconstructive directionality leads to awareness. You're deconstructing consciousness and ending up with an awareness which includes consciousness. Okay, so these are, so far, basic aspects of the practice of appearance. Okay. A third aspect of appearance is to get the experience of appearance as close as possible to the source of appearance.

[53:51]

So you have some experience of pure appearance before it takes form. And that's the reason for the Abhidharmic and Yogacaric analysis of experience into parts like conception, perception and appearance only, sensation only. Usually, consciousness conflates the process. And we don't have a direct experience usually of sensation leading to perception, leading to conception, leading to consciousness.

[55:10]

Und wir haben kein klares Erleben von diesem Prozess, wie die Sinnesempfindung zur Wahrnehmung führt und die Wahrnehmung zum Begriff und der Begriff zum Bewusstsein. Die Dinge scheinen sofort im Bewusstsein als Bewusstsein. They appear as consciousness and they appear within consciousness. And you hardly know what triggered, what was the initial sensation that led to a particular appearance. Now dharma practice is to slow this process down. and begin to separate it into parts, which you did in the constellation last evening quite well. There was a difference between sensation and... So to make that more of a

[56:24]

integrate that more with your everyday experience. Let's go to the driving of a car for a minute. When you drive a car, you want to notice when another car is appearing in your way. Sometimes it's a matter of life and death. Like you were almost forced into that truck. Here we have an anecdote within an anecdote. I saw a very close friend of mine who actually triggered my practice of Buddhism in many ways.

[57:48]

He's a poet and a novelist and he's descending rather rapidly into Alzheimer's. And I went to this so-called pioneer, so-called pioneer Zen teachers meeting. But I guess I qualify because I was the oldest and the first to start teaching in the West. But I took the afternoon between two parts of this week-long event and drove across Connecticut to see David. To see him.

[59:11]

And his wife's a poet too and she's more or less taking care of him. And it was interesting to see how his memory worked and so forth. You know the classic joke the doctor says, I've got bad news and good news for you. You have Alzheimer's but you won't remember. But he actually said this to me. Margaret, his wife, spoke about his memory problem. I said to David, Do you mind not remembering? He said, no, because I don't remember. So, you know, he was actually quite happy. He was all right. So far, anyway. Anyway, another... That is just to say, once he loaned me his scooter, a Vespa, you know.

[60:39]

I was 20-something. And I'd never really ridden a Vespa or a scooter. But I thought it looks fairly simple. You just go straight. So I decided to take it to work. and I got on the freeway and there were a lot of cars going quite fast on the freeway and I was on a ramp going around a corner and I didn't have any experience steering So I was trying to go straight with a slight curve.

[61:41]

And one of these huge trucks that carries steel and logs and things came by going around the same curve. And I actually found myself under the platform of the truck between the wheels. Because I wasn't steering and the thing went... So your experience made me think of this. But I just said, hold steady. And I kept holding, hoping that we turned at reasonably curves that work together. And the back wheels, which were right behind me, somehow I curved out.

[62:48]

No, that's just an anecdote. I have another anecdote within an anecdote, no, a lie within a lie, I'll tell you that some of it. So, when you drive, mostly you can talk to other people or listen to the radio or something and drive fairly safely. And the context of driving and Yeah, mostly moves the continuity of appearance into the body. Into the body. And the body's driving your car while you're talking to somebody.

[64:08]

So I mean, I'm just saying that it's just an example of the, we do know the continuity of appearance in the body. Of course it's better when the mind is also involved. But I've noticed that when the mind is sleepy, So the information from the senses and the body is not being understood correctly. So fully understood. Your body knows you're driving, but your mind says, forgotten you're driving. then it's necessary to take a nap.

[65:11]

Five or ten minutes will do it. But if your body is sleepy, sleepy, and your senses have shut down, then you need about an hour or half hour nap. So what I was saying is the Dharma practice is to move the locus of appearance as much as possible to the source of appearance. So, ideally to sensation. And this practice of being able to locate appearance in sensation, and to locate your experience of aliveness

[66:38]

in sensation only, before perception arises. or on the edge of perception. In itself it's a transformative experience, pretty much free from mental suffering. And the more you go toward conception as the first appearance, the structural conception like when I said walking down the hill I know where the Zendo is and where my room is and so forth.

[68:04]

That could be a rather neutral self-free a structural process. But it's very closely attached to the social self, the conscious self, the parental self, and so forth. And so that you're very open to mental suffering, anxiety and so forth. Comparisons, worries. now it does not mean that you should always locate the experience of identity or appearance in sensation or percept on them.

[69:12]

And avoid working on all the problems you have tied up with conception, personality. But it does create the sense in yourself that part of yourself is always free. So the emphasis is not so much on healing or getting rid of wounds, but discovering you don't have to live in your wounds And some wounds never heal.

[70:39]

And some wounds do. You can heal. But you don't have to always be in your wounds. You can be sometimes in sensation only. Free of mental suffering. Not through psychoanalysis or something like that, but through understanding the structure of mind and knowing how to locate appearance. And one last thing for now is that This sense of pure appearance as sensation only, as I said earlier, hides the miracle of appearance itself.

[71:55]

the direct experience of aliveness revealed to aliveness. And this existential knowing is not inconsequential. And without this, sometimes life individuals' life are slow suicides. Und ohne diese Erkenntnis sind manche individuellen Leben ein Selbstmord auf Raten? Yeah, that's enough. Okay. Why are you laughing?

[73:10]

Well... So let's sit for a few moments. Thanks for taking the time.

[73:22]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_74.45