I tried to feel what this... Where does the word nature lead me to within myself? And where did it lead? To other words. Basic art substance. So, about, let me tell you, a German word would sort of have, let me, differently, it had more weight. Yes. What was the German word?

[01:03]

Original. So would you translate original mind by Eigenschaft? How would you translate original mind? There's no real German translation for the prefix he uses, which is ur. It's something like arch. Like the ur root, the goethe. Like arch, you know. Arch. Primal. Primal, yeah. Okay. Well, there is this idea of original mind, fundamental mind, ur mind. Ur mind. If you don't find it. Okay. And this experience led me to notice that these words drew me into somewhere else. Was it a good somewhere else? Okay. Ecstasy, you know, means somewhere else.

[02:11]

So what I think I should do is continue some of these basic categories. And in ways we can, you know, feel our way into. But first, let me see, it's 10 after 12. What time are we supposed to end today, Otmar? Eight o'clock, nine o'clock? It's going to be an all-night session. Okay. Okay. And are there restaurants around here nearby?

[03:16]

I just saw a list at the door of four restaurants nearby. Okay. They're open on Saturday, I presume. We should find out if we go to these restaurants if they're also open on Sunday. Usually they are. Okay. Okay, so we'll continue a little bit and then we'll take a break for lunch. Okay. Now, okay, so we've got these three minds and a fourth. And what we notice if you see what happens when dreams arise, Thinking, you can't think too much or dreams won't arise.

[04:19]

There can be a kind of knowing in the midst of dreams. And there can be a kind of observing in the midst of dreams, lucid dreams, but it's not the same as consciousness. Okay, so if you notice that, you can draw the conclusion that if I want to observe these three minds, I can't do it with thinking. comment and question about why is thinking so interesting, addictive, etc. And Andreas, last night I spoke about the nature of mind. Perhaps we could translate it as source mind, the source of mind. And that's like Ur. Okay, so now if we notice these three minds and ask ourselves the question, can they be more related?

[05:35]

And we notice that we can't observe the mind of dreaming if we're thinking. So then we have to... Then we can conclude we have to develop an observing mind which doesn't think. Okay, so what are the categories we've got now? We've got non-dreaming deep sleep, dreaming and wake. And we've got a fourth something we're calling a fourth mind.

[06:37]

And we've got an observing mind that isn't Now I call it technically non-interfering observing mind. And what is one of the first experiences of the beginner in sitting? That as you really more and more the body absorbs your attention. The space between thoughts and thinking gets wider. And at some point, there's virtually no thinking going on. And you've heard the word samadhi.

[07:38]

So you think, Oh, this must be samadhi. And immediately samadhi has gone away. Now, do we have to conclude that to observe samadhi is to stop samadhi? So a yogic skill is you can begin to, with a corner of your mind, observe samadhi and not interfere with it. So we can call that non-interfering observing mind. Now, this non-interfering, I call it NIOC, non-interfering observing mind, is one of the basic yogic skills of practice.

[08:47]

Okay. Now, I think we can call, say that awareness is perhaps the function of this, the knowing function of this fourth mind. And as you begin to wake up, not in zazen in the morning, for example, Yeah.

[09:55]

For example, in Zazen in the morning. That you wake up into awareness more than into consciousness. Or you notice that you don't have to wake up into consciousness. But you notice you're awake, but it's not really thinking consciousness. So let's call that awareness. Well, what's happening is you're actually generating awareness. No. In other words, awareness is something that we could add to these three given minds, because we also are born with awareness. So it's like a fourth mind that we don't notice, like non-dreaming deep sleep.

[10:58]

But what we do when we practice meditation and mindfulness is we establish ourselves more and more in awareness. We not only establish ourselves in it, we create awareness, we exercise it, we generated. And we find that a big part of the process of generating awareness is rooted in or connected with breathing. So breathing It's more connected with awareness than it's connected with thinking. Okay. So that's the inventory so far.

[12:30]

Okay, now consciousness. Why does consciousness interfere with observing dreaming? Now, much of Western philosophy has emphasized the development of consciousness. And emphasizing reason, rationality, and logic. And logic or rationality is a kind of natural conclusion or expression of the nature of consciousness. Because consciousness can be deluded, superstitious, irrational. And without developing your consciousness, making it more internally consistent, we tend to be deluded or irrational or

[13:33]

So we have emphasized logic and reason as the highest form of consciousness. Or even the highest form of mind. Now, Buddhism, I think, would agree that it's the highest form of consciousness. But it's not the highest form of mind. What is your name? As Wolfgang noticed, there's more subtlety when he shifts to awareness than when he's in consciousness or usual consciousness, thinking consciousness. Okay, so consciousness in Buddhism is seen as a tool of thinking but not the highest form of mind. So, developed awareness

[15:06]

if we wanted to make comparisons is a higher form of mind than developed consciousness. But that doesn't make sense to say higher or lower because actually what you want to do in Buddhism is develop your consciousness and develop your awareness. Okay, now how do you develop your consciousness? Well, education and so forth. Okay. Now, consciousness is even highly developed consciousness can be deluded. Because what is the nature of consciousness? No, we're not talking about the nature of mind here. We're talking about the nature of consciousness. or function of consciousness, job of consciousness.

[16:26]

So we're now looking more specifically at waking mind and consciousness Yeah, the main aspect of waking mind. And what is the job of consciousness? Sorry, this is for some of you to review, but... We should look at all these categories. The job of consciousness is to create a predictable world. You can't live in the world unless it's fairly predictable. If this had the quality of dreams right now, I mean, you'd change faces and ages and your grandmother would appear in the middle and, you know, things like that.

[17:32]

That may be going on. Underneath your thinking may be the presence of your grandmother or... fantasies and so forth. But consciousness keeps that rather hidden or out of sight. Because, yeah, as I say, when you go outside, you want the tree that was there earlier to still be there. And the root of the word true and tree is the same. It means the predictable world. So we can't function unless the world is predictable. So this is the job of consciousness to make the world predictable. And also to make it knowable, cognizable.

[18:48]

And also to make it chronological. To see things in succession, in sequence. And to see things as meaningful. So that is in a way the what-ness, the what-mind consciousness is. Consciousness provides us with a predictable, knowable, chronological world. And when we really develop its capacity to be predictable, knowable, and chronological, we actually end up with logic and reason. Okay. And that the way in which consciousness makes the mind

[20:11]

The world meaningful is through self. If the world doesn't feel meaningful, we're lost. People who have had brain damage of some kind that makes them lose any sense of meaning, they're really lost. They don't know what to do. So, consciousness, To make it simple, consciousness' job is to make a knowable, predictable world. Also, um es einfach zu machen, das ist die Aufgabe des Bewusstseins, eine erkennbare, vorhersagbare Welt zu erschaffen. And in contrast to less developed consciousness, which is irrational and deluded and so forth.

[21:16]

Dies in Kontrast jetzt zu einem weniger entwickelten Bewusstsein, das also verwirrt ist, getäuscht ist und irrational ist. But this knowable, predictable world that we need... from the point of view of Buddhism, is a fundamental delusion. Because it tends to see the world as permanent. A predictable world is implicitly seen as permanent. You want the tree to still be there. It doesn't jump across the street. Eine vorhersagbare Welt ist implizit permanent, also beständig, weil man will ja, dass der Baum, wenn man rauskommt, immer noch da steht und nicht über die Straße gehüpft ist.

[22:21]

And we turn the world into nouns. Yeah, it's a tree, it's not treeing. Yeah, it's actually a baumin, it's not a baum. The tree is an activity, it's not a thing. Okay. So this is... Mahayana teaching is rooted in the idea of two truths. Of two truths? Two truths. Two truths. Truths. One truth seems to be true, makes us think it's true, as Robert Musil says, life forms a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise. And our senses confirm that.

[23:44]

Consciousness confirms that. Oh yes, it is pretty much predictable, pretty much permanent. And when we see difference, we see difference as separation. We don't see difference as change. So the activity of seeing difference notices separation, but the mind of wisdom notices change. Oh, excuse me. One small please. The mind's ability is to see difference. Distinction. And that capacity to see difference in a predictable world sees separation. And the harder capacity is to see the change in the tree moment after moment. What's easier to notice when you first start this is to notice the moment-by-moment change in mind.

[24:58]

So one of the gates to noticing change, not just intellectually, you know everything's changing, is to notice that, again, I'm seeing mind and not just objects. And I see that my mind is changing all the time. I look at you, and then I look at you, and I look at you. It's a change. And I don't see so much you changing, but I see my mind changing. But if I get used to always seeing my mind change, it opens me to noticing Hey, you're different than you were a moment ago. And the feeling in the room overall is different than it was a moment ago.

[26:13]

So this opens you to each moment is in fact and experienced differently. as unique. Now that's a very big difference. To see uniqueness instead of separation. And consciousness can't really see uniqueness. Consciousness can intellectually, logically know about uniqueness. But consciousness is not just a medium of thinking. Consciousness is also a medium of knowing. And as a medium of knowing, It can't experience uniqueness.

[27:20]

What's the difference between thinking and knowing as a function of consciousness? Anyway, I'm making a distinction between thinking and knowing. Thank you for pointing that out. Right now, I will say that awareness is more the medium of knowing. Consciousness is the medium of thinking. Sophia came in the apartment. Six months ago. And she knew the apartment, but consciously couldn't understand the apartment, didn't know where her room was, etc. So there was knowing that wasn't thinking. Okay. Excuse me. We have in German, there's a difference between, I think there is some English word like I can, K-E-N, is there?

[28:41]

Can? Yeah, it's something like knowing. It's something like knowing, yeah. Intimately knowing or having experienced it, being close to it. In my ken means, in English, usually it's not used very much, but it means to be in the territory with which I know, I'm familiar with. Yeah, yeah. So this is sometimes mixed up, knowing and kenning, so to say, no? We have problems here. Consciousness, as I described it, it's whatness. How it does its job is through memory, language, and self. In other words, consciousness is the territory for language and memory and self.

[29:45]

So most of our knowing is in the categories of language, self and memory. But not all of our experience can be known through language, self, and memory. If something unique happens, if it's really unique, It's not rooted in memory. So always at each moment, there's experience which hasn't been experienced before. So the deeper you get into these things, you find there's no words for it in any language. And particularly in English and German, which haven't developed in a yogic culture, the words actually really don't allow you to notice things.

[31:10]

Sometimes people tell me they'd rather hear Buddhism in English. Because the German words are rented out to Christianity, leased to mythology and so forth, occupied by the culture. By that measure, I should understand Buddhism in German. But what I've tried to do is shake the culture out of the English words. Yeah. So... What we can come back to is what is knowing that's not in the category of consciousness, language, and memory. Okay, for now? I never fully satisfy him.

[32:22]

That's why he comes back next year. Okay, so we've come a long way in one morning. Looking at some very simple categories and then beginning to see what the relationships can be or what results from the relationships. So I think this is a good enough place to stop. Consciously, I think so. But is this conscious thinking my body told me first? Because it's hungry or it has to pee? Or am I sort of thinking about how it's going to work and when we end in the afternoon?

[33:26]

Or nothing, it's not important. I like the pace at which we're translating together because we're struggling together. So let's sit for a few minutes. What hears the bell? Was hört die Glocke? Consciousness, awareness, the body. Wo ist sein gewahrsehender Körper?

[34:28]

Who hears the bell? Wer hört die Glocke? Do you feel, hear your own hearing? Fühlst du, hörst du dein eigenes Hören hörend? Yeah, so let's come back in two hours, in a quarter to three.

[36:27]

Thank you very much for this morning. Thank you for translating. Didn't everyone see more of that? Okay.

[37:28]

Could you do the scene? Is it working, Gerald? We won't get this, so that's all right. So we had waking mind. Dreaming mind. And non-dreaming deep. And again, these are categories we can notice. Pretty easily. And in the service of studying the waking mind, fairly recently and many years ago, proto-scientific way, dreaming mind was related to waking mind.

[38:41]

And as you know, Freud also connected dreaming mind, one part of it, and the other part was free association, or what we would say in Buddhism, associative mind. And for some of you, if you know, associative mind is what we would call the fourth skanda. So Freud, with his gift as a writer and his... and so forth, by relating dreaming mind and associative mind to waking mind, really transformed the thinking of the West and now most of the world.

[39:45]

Now, yogic teaching Zen enters into this in a different way, a more participatory way. We all can each do. And the result of that is what? I call the fourth mind, and it's also called that in Hinduism, I think, too. And we can also call it awareness. Yeah, anyway, good enough to connect the two. And then we have The mind we mostly inhabit, consciously inhabit, is consciousness.

[41:11]

No, in Buddhism we don't understand these things as entities in general, but rather as functions. Yeah. So if you just look at consciousness as, geez, I'm conscious of you, there's not much way to practice that. But if you recognize that consciousness has a structure, But as soon as you recognize it has a structure, you can recognize that you can participate in the structure. And if it has a structure, it can also be destructured.

[42:28]

So what practices best structure the mind and what practices can deconstruct the mind? Now, these are all questions that drove the development of Buddhist practice. And I guarantee you, although enlightenment occurs pretty quickly, instantly a turn. The maturing and permeating of this turning around in your consciousness and worldview, is the deeply satisfying work of a lifetime. But although enlightenment and the maturation of enlightenment can occur in one lifetime,

[43:28]

The development of Buddhism in the way I'm speaking about and the development of a teaching has taken hundreds of years. And it still has not... There's not a complete agreement. There's rather different schools and different emphases. But for the most part within Buddhism I'd say there's a general agreement and the differences are mostly emphases. Okay. So with consciousness we have To look at what it is, what its job is, is to give us a predictable world, a knowable world, cognizable, chronological,

[44:57]

And meaningful. Now, I suppose that's fairly clear. And, you know, it was only about four years ago maybe, that I really saw how clearly consciousness was connected to predictability. and the necessity of predictability, and the relationship to predictability to the delusion of permanence or implied permanence.

[46:25]

Now, when I first started to practice, It was clear to me that consciousness was connected with control. And for years I spoke about Buddhism and consciousness within the background, the way we need to control the world and how that's related to consciousness. In the background of my teaching and experience was this idea that consciousness and control are connected. Because I had a direct experience of that. It took 25 years later or so

[47:27]

25 years later, 30 years later, how old am I anyway? 30, 35, 40. Anyway, before I saw that really it's about predictability, not control. And to see that what I call control, which is also predictability, We want the world to be predictable because we also want to control it. But the idea of control wasn't a fruitful concept. But as soon as I saw that actually what I meant by control deeper sense was predictability. Then how consciousness is structured like this became clear. Okay.

[48:32]

And the relationship to self. Okay. So consciousness is also the medium for self memory and language. and in effect for karma.

[49:36]

Okay. So if you understand, if we understand it, if you understand it in this way, self is not all the ways we know the world or observe the world. Self is a function of consciousness. Consciousness is a function of mind. We can say ego is a function of self. Okay. Now self. In the selbst.

[50:38]

So self, as we've gone over very often, the job of self is to supply separation, Connectedness and continuity. And self also Gives us a sense of agency. What do you mean by agency? That someone did it. I was the person. I did this. I acted on it. Yeah. And personal history.

[51:41]

Okay. Now, is there anything anybody wants to say about this? Yeah, go ahead. I have a question. Is the consciousness the result of the waking mind or the function of the waking mind? Yeah. I can say some words about it. It's pretty clear to us that consciousness doesn't belong exactly in dreaming mind. So we can say pretty surely from our own experience, without knowing anything about Buddhism, Does it belong in waking mind?

[53:13]

Yeah, it belongs in waking mind. But is it the whole of waking mind? I would say no. It's the... Obviously. Okay. So I'm walking along, right? He has the same example. And I trip over Neil's plastic water bottle. And I start to fall and I catch myself. Okay. That clearly happens faster than consciousness. But imagine that I'm sleepwalking. I went to Japan and somebody, some of you know this, Mikhail Polgorchik, and he is a martial arts, trains all the time, right?

[54:25]

He sleepwalks, he sleepwalks, you know, this kind of stuff. So there were 12 of us sleeping in a little room about as big as this. And here's this guy sleep fighting. Who dares wake him up? Well, his best friend just said, come on, Michael, go back to bed. But in general, if I'm sleepwalking or half asleep, just waking up, and I fall over this, I'm not so likely to catch myself. So obviously, awareness works in waking mind as well as working in sleeping mind. But it works differently in both.

[55:27]

Or what I'm presently calling awareness. Why do I call it awareness? I don't call it awareness because conceptually it fits or philosophically it's connected. I call it awareness because for me it's a very similar experience, physical experience. My experience of the mind that catches me when I fall And my experience of the mind which wakes me up at 6.02 a.m. without an alarm clock is a very similar physical tuning. Yeah. So I'm calling it awareness.

[56:29]

No, I suppose these guys studying these things with, you know, by studying the brain might say, geez, when you fall, a different area of the brain is lit up than when I fall. have some kind of continuity during the night, which wakes me up. Yeah. And I am not trying to be philosophically, I'm not trying to develop a philosophically consistent system, nor a scientifically testable system, although I think that it's probably worth testing.

[57:52]

What I'm trying to do is talk about these things in a way that allows us to practice. And to have a sense of a knowing mind in contrast to consciousness is very helpful in practice. And it fits in with most of the pedagogy of Buddhism. What I'm doing is thinking, should I add something, should I talk about something? Maybe this is complicated enough so far. I don't have to bring in more stuff.

[58:53]

One question. Yeah. Where does the unconscious fit in the scheme to make it more complicated? No. Well, yes and no. There's no precise concept of the unconsciousness in Buddhism. There's certainly the concept of knowing things that we're not conscious, that don't occur in consciousness. And maybe I can come, I should come back to that. Okay. I've forgotten something here, but I can't quite think about what it is until I create the context.

[60:14]

This is a narrative sense of self. And I think you understand this sense of separation, almost all of you, because your immune system is a sense of self. Your immune system knows what belongs to you and doesn't belong to you. And you have to know this is my voice and not just something you're hearing in your head. So self allows us to know separateness. And what happens when we practice we actually are lessening the emphasis on separation and increasing the emphasis on connectedness.

[61:22]

And, and, and. Changing how we experience continuity. Because the self is a function of consciousness. It establishes continuity through language. Through thinking. Well, I should say thinking. Okay. Maybe that's too much or not enough. Does anybody want to say something about this? What did you mean when you were speaking about control?

[62:41]

What is actually control, the kind of control you're thinking of? Because that is what is meant by . Well, when you meditate, one has a tendency to not want to let go. and get out of control or out of thinking or out of where you can measure what you're experiencing. And that's also to get out of... Yeah, okay. Yes. I have one more question for you, I have an additional question to what you said about the structure of consciousness. Is the structure that consciousness wants to structure everything? Consciousness wants to make the world knowable.

[63:55]

Yeah, it's again like Sophia turning all her physical actions into descriptions, language descriptions, in order to, in a sense, structure consciousness in terms of physical activity. And as I said earlier, the structure of consciousness is to have a sense of here and there. Now, Yuan Wu says, create a mind, find a mind that has neither here nor there, Nor before or after. That's a knowing without up and down, left and right, front and back, etc.

[65:08]

So, one of the first things, but you do have to have a sense of here and there. You're there, I'm here, etc., It's the case, but it also needs to structure, consciousness needs to show us that. So, again, when we teach kids to count, say the alphabet, we're actually teaching them to structure consciousness. So we can know the world, go through the door, etc. Now a blind person has to structure a kind of proprioceptive bodily feeling not consciousness in the terms of eye sense for sure. So a blind person has to feel where the door is, and that's quite different than the way we do it, if you have all the senses.

[66:19]

So we need the world to have a time sense, one thing after another, and one thing located in space. Yeah, and it has to be somehow meaningful to us. Okay. So this is the self that Buddhism wants us to be free of. Buddhism wants us to be free of the self that's the creature of consciousness. And to see that sense of self is nothing permanent. It's not an entity. Self is what makes consciousness meaningful. I'm such and such a kind of person and I have this history and I can do this.

[67:29]

So all senses of observing are not the self that Buddhism wants us to be free of. So let's take a break and come back in a little while, half an hour. Thank you.

[68:41]

Yeah. May I ask a question? Yes. About your understanding of the self, because I'm a psychologist, and your idea of the self seems to me a lot of connected to the Freudian ego or I. But when I try to teach people about the self, for me it's something that is beyond consciousness. It's more like a bigger self. has to do a little bit with the spiritual self and has to do a lot with the connectiveness with yourself and the open world. The concept of self that Roche has presented here seems to me to be more like the Freudian self, Okay.

[70:36]

It's just that Buddhism wouldn't call that the self. What you say is true. We don't call it the self. The self is seen in Buddhism as a useful way to take responsibility for actions and to view things in terms of our personal history. but essentially a hindrance. What you're describing as a self is not a hindrance.

[71:37]

Sometimes, like Sri Yukteswar would say, the self covers everything. When he said that, he didn't mean this sense of self. So what I'm trying to show you here is what Buddhism means by self and why it's seen as a hindrance. Okay, so in a sense, it's just terminology. But, so we have terms like original mind, big mind, self that covers everything, etc. Yeah, and at least in Buddhism, it's a bit of a confusion to call both those territories of experience self. At least in Buddhist terms, self is our narrative self, our self developed through our personal history.

[72:44]

and which assumes a certain kind of permanence in the world, as if we're going to remain the same. Okay. Okay? Okay. Okay, yeah. Well, anyone else? Yeah. Where is the observer in the first... In the waking mind there is an observer. In the dreaming mind there can be an observer. In the non-dreaming mind there is probably nobody. Where is the observer here? In the first waking mind there is probably an observer dreaming mind, probably to a non-dreaming deep sleep, probably not.

[74:03]

And where is in the fourth mind the observer which includes the others? This is a good question. I mean, the problem with a list like this, it eliminates too many questions. It's better for your practice to have a little bit of understanding and then a lot of questions. And then see what happens when you try to answer the question. Basically, we have a distinction in practice between observing mind and observing self. All the activity of observing It's not the self.

[75:06]

Only some of it's the self. Because you can observe without a sense of how that fits into your personal history. Now, this is something that's actually quite important to sort out. Because we we get ourselves in the conundrum of who did that or who is knowing this. And all observing isn't a who. Okay, now that responds to some of what you said, but I'm not sure I got everything that you said. Okay. Anyone else?

[76:08]

I've got a beginner's question. That's the kind I like best. When the predictable and Yeah, but the predictable is sort of associated to the conscious, to consciousness. Does the other way around mean that the consciousness can't cope with the unpredictable and the unordered, unstructured? Yeah, pretty much. In other words, consciousness can, in its logical capacity... can know about the unpredictable. But it's very difficult for consciousness to experience the unpredictable.

[77:17]

It always tries to make it predictable. Back in the sixties, Some psychologist I know, maybe it was Frank Barron, I can't remember, put people in sort of, what were they called? Tanks where you're suspended. Samadhi tanks. What? Samadhi tanks. Later they were called Samadhi tanks. Samadhi tanks is a later version, a commercial version. Not Orgon, no. Orgon Box, that was Reich. Reich. And this psychologist, when he put airline pilots down there, they freaked out.

[78:14]

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