I'm interested in teaching, practicing with you a traditional Buddhism, but within the context of our life here in the West. And this is what some of you wouldn't know or I don't know. We call it Prologue Day. So we'll sort of more or less start the topic this evening.

[01:01]

Right now we'll do whatever we want. So I would like to... Today, speak about the distinction between awareness and consciousness. And I'm, you know, just trying to keep track of what contemporary cognitive sciences doing. I try to pay attention to what Over the last 20 years, 15 years, the definition of consciousness has proceeded backwards.

[02:17]

The definition of consciousness has proceeded backwards. But we're all living in the midst of our consciousness, among other states of mind. But we usually don't see it as a medium through which we are existing. In other words, if I look at a stone under the water in a lake, say, a pond, It's usually quite easy for me to see that the stone is seen through the water.

[03:36]

And I can check that, because if it's not too deep, I can reach and get the stone and hold it up. And because of refraction, it's usually smaller than it looks under the water. And often, if you've been a collector of beech stones, you get them home and they're dry and they're dull, but they were beautiful when they were wet. And so we have a way to check that it's actually, it's different seen to the one. But we have no way to check what something looks like outside of consciousness.

[04:51]

There's no way I can take this out of consciousness and look at it. I can pour water over it, but that doesn't help. So we're stuck. Because we're inside consciousness, we have no way really of experiencing the boundaries of consciousness. But awareness, if we think that if we establish that there's a different kind of mind than consciousness, And my view is that it's not useful to think of it as just a version of consciousness.

[06:08]

And if it functions differently, if it makes us understand things differently, And particularly if it lets us see the boundaries of consciousness. Then I would say it's a different kind of mind. Then I would say that if that's the case. Why do I say if that's the case? Because I'm absolutely certain it's the case. But I say if that's the case because, you know, we... We have to establish this in our own experience. You can take my word for it.

[07:10]

But that won't go very far. Because the whole culture will make you. think in the usual way. So you have to establish this in your experience. And that's what we do during Zazen. Now, I would say that the whole point, virtually the whole point of satsang, is to establish yourself or establish your non-self in awareness.

[08:16]

Now, there's the problem of... of first-person accounts. Do you understand? My experience. And there's a lot of attempt by, in particular, Francisco Varela, who is a scientist and a Buddhist and There was an old, was, or is, unfortunately dead now, friend of mine. There's a long tradition of... In science and psychology of denying the validity of first-person accounts.

[09:26]

Es gibt eine lange Geschichte in der Wissenschaft, also die Gültigkeit von Erfahrungsberichten, also Berichter der eigenen Erfahrung sozusagen, die Gültigkeit zu leugnen bzw. zu negieren. And a third person account, a person seeing it from the outside, like an experiment on something in a laboratory, you can't do with consciousness. But that would be totally crazy to then discount everything about consciousness because there's no way to look at it from a third-person point of view. Now, why do I mention this? Sounds a little technical.

[10:32]

Because actually what we're doing here is trying to establish a shared first person account. You're sort of trying to squeeze what I say into German. It's kind of great to watch. You need a garlic press or something. massage it into German gender. Yeah, so that's our job, the sangha's job, and the teacher's job,

[11:42]

Und es ist die Aufgabe der Sander und auch des Lehrers, is to share, is to develop a shared first person view, experience of the world. And to know when that is the case and when it's not the case. So sometimes I have to tell somebody, I can't really practice, I can't really be your teacher or your friend, the kind of friend a relationship which a teacher is in Zen. Because the territory isn't there to share this mutual love.

[12:44]

territory of mind, something like that. So it's what I guess in science you'd call peer review. It's the same in Germany as peer review. Yeah, you can't get something published if all your fellow scientists think it's nonsense. So sometimes somebody has experiences that that I don't know if they're true or not, but they're in the... I can tell they're... Oh, it's too complicated to explain.

[14:04]

When you have the problem, why would you want it? No one's been sitting on that bench recently, I see. It's being slowly covered. Andreas, there's so many people coming to the seminar, we may need that fence, so that's why. Andreas said that there's so many people coming to the seminar that we may need the bench. Okay. Okay. One of the things I've been thinking about recently and will come up in this topic for this seminar is the shift from the early Buddhist way of looking at things to the

[15:23]

Mahayana to the Zen way of looking at it. And that would be important if we try to talk about whatever the word, concept, Buddha means. Because there's a big shift from early Buddhism to... later Buddhism and Zen. And it's not easy to talk about. And you can look at the whole history of Buddhism as generated from the difficulty in talking about what the Buddha is. Now, one of the shifts, one example of the shift from early Buddhism to later Buddhism is a shift from

[16:35]

a rather more moralistic emphasis in practice, or we could say a psychological emphasis in practice, or an emphasis on afflictions, defilements, so forth. What was the first? Afflictions? Afflictions, yeah. To, sorry for the word, epistemological concerns or worldviews, or to a greater emphasis on our ignorance about how the world exists. So, Mahayana Buddhism is really an emphasis on if you view the world in a deluded way,

[18:18]

If you're ignorant of how it actually exists. Now look, I can say in that sentence, ignorant of how it actually exists. And I'm referring to the world as an it. We have a female expression for the world as a she. So that sounds politically correct. Okay. Okay. Well, whether it's a female it or a male it, the English lost all that because it's a combination of French and German.

[19:40]

French and the Germans have different ways of indicating gender, so I finally said, to hell with it. So, but... What is the world? What is the it? We don't know. I mean, what is this? So that also is a problem. What is this? What we're doing right now? So that's also the very problem. What is our view on this which we can't really know? We get it. So in any case, for Zen, the main problem is our worldviews.

[20:52]

Our ignorance of how the world actually exists. And this is also, excuse me, for bringing in Western culture, but why not? The concern of Heidegger. What world shall we give priority to in deciding what world actually exists? So here, if we say in English, we opened up a can of Worms. You have the same expression in German? No. What do you open up?

[21:54]

A pile of ants. A pile of ants? A pile of ants? A pile of ants? So I think that it helps to get so you notice world views. Yeah, because I lived in... Japan for four years and then off and on for 35 years. And since I'm practicing Buddhism in Asia and in the West, I have three points of view, I think. And some of them are very, you know, completely superficial, but I notice them.

[23:15]

Yeah. Neil and I are staying in the Mercure Hotel. Yeah. Which I guess is a French chain of hotels, is that right? And they have as their logo a kind of calligraphic M. And it's on the soap, it's on everything. But it's very un-Zen. It's un-Zen. It's un-Zen. Yeah. And why? Well, it may be, although there's a tradition of typography, et cetera, in the West, it's

[24:29]

And calligraphic typography. And topography. And the topography of calligraphy. But usually based on a flat, stub-nosed pen. It's based on a flat... Stub-nosed? Flat. It's a pen with a flat nose to make it. So a pen with a flat nose. And this M is, I would say, pretty clearly based on a brush. So it may be influenced partly by the aesthetic the aesthetics of Japanese calligraphy in the West.

[25:44]

And you see it in all these freeways. I mean, I've been driving on freeways since I was And in the last 20 years, at least in the United States and in Germany too, they start putting Japanese stone gardens in the middle of the roundabout. In other words, you throw a bunch of stones in the middle and it looks sort of Japanese. But it doesn't to me at all. Because it's a different world view places the stones. Okay.

[26:47]

I'm going to finish and then we'll take a break. Okay. So... What's the difference with this M? You really don't feel the weight of the brush. Yeah. You feel it's kind of a mentally controlling the brush to make a very light touch and then down and up and then a light touch away. You feel. You can see the mental presence. Yes. in the way the brush is handled, brushed way back somewhere. In Japanese calligraphy,

[27:48]

mental presence in the brush is much less and the physical weight of the brush is much more present. So they would never put the brush on Very lightly and try to do it, and then they just plop it on, you know. So you just take the brush and you just put it there, and you can see the brush. Then they make it, and then they might draw it off. But it's a very different feeling. And it turns the same W, or shape of a mountain or something, into a physical object. Hi, Harry. Looked like you arrived with your entire apartment on your back.

[29:06]

Oh, really? It was an impressive display walking by out there. It was bigger than you. Okay. So I'm not saying you should go around and examine hotel logos for world views. But they're present everywhere and you can begin to feel a difference. Now I bring up also such a trivial example. And as you know, most of you know, and many of you know, I'm fond of the word trivial. Because it means an intersection or a fork in the road. Trivia, trivial, is three roads. So it's one road meeting two roads.

[30:25]

It means there's a choice. So at one time, obviously in the work, these small things were important choices. But as our worldview changed, small things became less important. And trivial stopped having the meaning of a choice of your path. And as you know, there's a Zen expression, I can't resist telling you this, as you probably know anyway, the Zen expression, when you come to a fork in the road, take it.

[31:39]

This is true. But it's actually practically true. And it points to the choice that awareness can come to a fork in the road and take it. Consciousness can't come to a fork in the road and take it. Well, why do I read some, you know, I don't know, thinking some kind of, Something in a newspaper.

[32:45]

And an English woman, a scientist, I think, was writing something. On her way home every day, she had a choice between a beautiful route and a quick route. And every day on the way home, she agonized. Should I take the short route or should I take the pretty route? And every day she couldn't figure it out. One day after, really, she said, five or six years of this problem, she just decided she wouldn't decide, but see which way the car went. Well, we all know this.

[33:47]

So she'd get there and she'd just see if the car would go one way or the other. And she just Surely sometimes it was a mistake. But that's the difference between letting awareness decide and consciousness decide. Now, then the craft of practice is How much can we let awareness decide? So what I would like, I would hope, you know, after we come back from a little break. We can actually have some discussion together on what we noticed that's similar to this kind of stuff. So, thank you very much. Thank you for being our host.

[35:07]

And thank you for getting everyone to come here.

[35:09]

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