So if you really pay attention, there's not a continuity of consciousness all the time. So you walk along, there's this consciousness, then you step into another consciousness. And if you walk along slowly enough in a kind of spiritual space, You can let the presence of the walk in the trees affect how you walk. You can feel the associations and feelings come up as you walk. You can actually feel them making consciousness. And if you want to, you can hold back thinking and just stay in these first two skandhas.

[01:11]

What? It's not so easy. It's not so easy, right? But it's easier than you think. It's not so easy, but easier than you think. When do most people do it? When they go sunbathing. They lie on the beach, you hear a bird down there, you don't care, and then you sunburn. Because you think it was twenty minutes and it was two and a half hours. So there's a kind of movement from here, the form, the Thera perception, to here.

[02:13]

And the movement in practice is to swim upstream So you follow a thought or impulse because normally most consciousness is in here somewhere You begin to notice thoughts appearing And then you begin to notice the field of the thoughts. The state of mind of the thoughts. And you can start feeling then an impulse or energy coming into it. And you can kind of pull the energy out of it if you want. And then you can move up and you can see it as a You can take the associations out in a sense and just see the thought. Then you can see the feelings that it arose through.

[03:23]

And you can bring it back to the bare perception. And so the word, there's a word called Wado. And there's an expression Wado. which is when you take a word and practice with it over and over again, like, this very mind is Buddha. When you practice with something like that, you say, this very mind is Buddha. You have various associations with it. You begin to remove the association, you just have the thought, this very mind is Buddha. And then you get more to the source of the thought, of the feeling, mind, Buddha, you don't even have the words anymore, it's just a feeling of presence.

[04:24]

So you stay in the presence of this feeling, this mind is Buddha and the words have disappeared. And the word wado means to return a word to its source. So when you can get back up here and you're on the threshold of perception, the very threshold between the phenomenal world and yourself, Then awareness is here. That's the sticky stuff of time. It gets thick and heavy and slow. But here it's very fast. This is more like dream thinking because all the associations can tangle together and you can think of things in simultaneity, not in sequentiality.

[05:45]

So this is sequential causal thinking generates loaded consciousness. Simultaneous imaginal thinking is awareness. These two things are quite similar. But the basic Zen practice is to cease identifying with all of this and shift your identification to the field of consciousness and to awareness. You can do that by going upstream until the words disappear and you're at the source of language and you get into awareness. So Buddhism attempts to turn this spiritual life, not into some kind of magic, but into a craft.

[07:02]

It's really up to you to do it. But this is some of the language. Yes. It is so that this occupation, this skandhas, in sitting. I bring it together in me, how it works with an empty mind, how I can sit, how I occupy myself with the skandhas and at the same time have an empty mind. I assume this is all happening through sitting, or while I'm sitting, but at the same time I'm supposed to have this empty mind, and I don't tell you together how at the same time I deal with the five stars, I've...

[08:03]

But I thought I should at least let my thoughts pass by and kind of get stuck in skandhas. But letting them come and go is not the same as an empty mind. So? Should the skandhas come and go? Yeah. The basic Zen practice is an uncorrected state of mind. So if you want to ask a Zen question, you'd say, how with my correcting state of mind can I approach uncorrected state of mind? And there are many koans that ask that question. If what somebody says, ordinary mind, one koan is, ordinary mind is the Buddha.

[09:23]

If ordinary mind is the Buddha, how can I approach it? How can I turn towards it? And the teacher says, if you turn towards it, you turn away from it. And the teacher says, if you turn away from it, then you turn away from yourself. Yes, but if I have a thought and let this thought go on, then I cannot work with this thought in the sense of the canvas, as I understood it. My question is, when I have a thought and I let it pass without interfering, how can I work with it at the same time as the five skandhas? When you have a thought, in zazen or in any time, let's pick zazen because it's easier to talk about, you are in fact in the presence of the thought, not just the content of the thought.

[10:49]

If you don't grasp the content of the thought, you mature the thought. That's what I meant here. That's what I meant here. Now, it's maybe a little slippery or difficult to explain this, but I'll try to. We should end at what, 5.30? That's in half an hour, 20 minutes, or should we go to a quarter to six or something?

[12:04]

Are you doing okay, everyone? What? We just have to listen. You have to work more. I have to listen, too. because I don't know what to say until I listen. Why don't we just take a stretch, stand up and let's take a stretch and then I'll open a window and then we'll sit back down again and finish. So I've given you enough, I think, information.

[13:05]

And I think this is very powerful information. It's the kind of information that can make your life, most people's lives, it certainly made my life more subtle and satisfying. It has made my daily existence and moment by moment perceptions far more familiar to me, I mean, inseparable from me. I may feel dismayed with the world sometimes, but I never feel separate from it. So since you have enough information I think at this point and it's like a recipe maybe and you are the ingredients of this soup and the question is are you going to follow the recipe or not?

[14:34]

So the recipe is important but the cooking is what's really important. And reality just doesn't emerge from many causes. It emerges, emerges and merges. It emerges and cooks together. And you're the cook. Now, If your sense of things is too much involved in your chronology, and your sense of continuity, your experience doesn't mature.

[15:55]

First of all, events occur. And what turns an event into experience? What turns a perception, a bare perception into experience? It's its movement in the five skandhas. And through all the five skandhas. And in particular, it's this spending time in the feeling skandha. And zazen practice, meditation practice, is primarily the territory of the feeling skandha and consciousness.

[16:56]

Now your daily practice is primarily the thinking skanda and the association skanda. And your night time is primarily the feeling skanda and the association skanda. The feeling skandha and without consciousness. So sasen is the feeling skandha and consciousness. Now, how you're present in a situation affects whether an event that occurs is turned into experience or not.

[18:13]

Now if you, if something, let's, because it's easier to talk about something dramatic or something difficult, if you, so something terrible happened to you, let's take an example of both terrible and normal is a parent dies. Or somebody close to you dies. If you just accept that as an event, it may have a terrible consequence for you. But the more you experience it, spend time with it, cry and so forth, you go through a period of being maybe miserable, of grief, but it becomes part of your experience.

[19:59]

And that's obvious, that's common knowledge. They say, so-and-so died and they experienced no grief. We know that on some dramatic event like a death. But in a way, if we use grief to mean experience, we should grieve every event. Or we should know the joy of every event. I don't want to just limit it to grief. So whatever event happens, it really penetrates you, whatever it is. Just this seminar. Now this seminar, as much as possible, I am here and nowhere else. As much as possible, I don't think about other things.

[21:07]

I don't make phone calls, etc. I'm just here. And so it's not like other seminars. This weekend is not any other weekend. I'm doing this every weekend. Sometimes for a full week. And naturally some things that I've found ways to talk about or that I'm still working on come up again. But really for me each one is quite different. And I discover things I've never felt or thought before. And actually, this seminar becomes experience, it's not an event.

[22:13]

And through the experience of this seminar, I find the resources to teach. And I find nourishment, this isn't hard to do, because it nourishes me to do this. But it also will nourish me to go out to dinner with Ulrike this evening. Or to take a walk along the Neckar again. So how do you have a state of mind where every situation you're in nourishes you? Could you imagine your energy might be a little different? You might not say so easily, oh, I have no time, or you know, etc., Because you know you are time.

[23:20]

There isn't something called time that you're stuck in. You are time. Okay. Then how is your experience matured? It doesn't mature much if it is in your chronology. If it's stuck in your chronology, it's back there in your chronology. One of the geniuses of Japanese culture is it has the ability, like probably no other culture, to absorb many things and keep them and bring them into the culture without hurting much their indigenous culture.

[24:29]

And they learned that probably from being just the right number of nautical miles from China. But also, their very genius or ability in doing that has also got a very negative side, shall we say. Many things don't mature in Japan. They stay the way they are when they arrived. Like Shingon in Tantric Buddhism, Kobo Daishi was a contemporary of Padmasambhava. But it's stuck back in the chronology of Kobo Daishi's time.

[25:32]

It hasn't matured. So when your events are in your chronology of your history and they're not cut loose in your chronology, they tend not to mature. And as I said last night, you can often see the maturation of an experience in your dreams. It's almost like you're thinking chronology is going along, oh, continuity of self in time, everything is great, blah, blah, blah. And an experience that you had four years ago, an event occurred four years ago, You may or may not have experienced it.

[26:45]

An event occurred. And it's out there in your sticky stuff of time. But it's actually maturing. It's developing and changing. And after a while it starts knocking at you. Hey! And you start having dreams about this thing of four years ago. And it's matured out there in the sticky stuff of time, but it hasn't matured in your chronology. So it says to your chronology, hey, pay attention, I'll tell you another dream if you like. Okay, so in this sense maturing your experience is to allow your experience a non-chronological dimension.

[27:49]

And that's why space is the primary definition of identity and not time. I'm trying to think what St. Augustine says, because I like both of them, that we grasp time as self, I think. But in Buddhism you grasp space as self. And so that's what emptiness means. So the five skandhas form, feeling, perceptions, impulses, consciousness are the Buddhist idea of self. And then the sutra, what does the sutra say?

[28:50]

No form, no feelings, no perceptions, no consciousness, no impulses. So you throw them away. It doesn't mean they simultaneously don't exist. But simultaneously with their dynamics you also throw them away. It's like the cage On the one hand you have the cage, on the one hand you have the space between the bars. And the space between the bars is many, many millions of light years. And the cages are maturing one after another, big ones and big... I find very interesting that light years, time comes in from measuring space.

[29:57]

The expression light years never... Space, yeah. So there's a koan. It's a world... What? Satyashvili. Time equals way. Yeah. So there's a koan that's given sometimes. The world is vast and wide. Why do I put on my robes when the bell rings? Why do you? Why when the bell rings, why when the alarm clock goes off in the morning do you go up and go to work? The world is vast and wide. But can you live in both at once? You put on your clothes and you go to work and you do whatever you do. But you never lose the sense that the world is vast and wide. And this is actually a direct experience.

[31:15]

It means living in the spiritual world and practical world at the same time. But it's also a function of having lived your experience, experienced the events of your life, matured your experience, and you're always living that experience in this moment. So this is one way to understand such a phrase from the 60s, be here now. But behind be here now to actually, how do you approach be here now?

[32:19]

If you approach it, it turns away. Now be here now sounds good. Yeah. But behind Be Here Now is the craft of the five skandhas. And when a thought appears in your meditation, you just let it be in uncorrected state of mind. And don't do anything to it. Let it float free of your chronology. As if the DNA chain could break up into parts and float. You needed it, you could bring it back together. So the more you can allow your chronology to kind of float apart, and find your history is always present, your lived experience becomes much more subtle than a simple chronology.

[33:39]

And the same experience of 20 years ago is maturing in different ways. It's never the same. All your experience is maturing. And just sitting here with you, you are maturing my experience right now. You are cooking me. You are part of my history. You didn't intend it when you signed up. You didn't sign a little line and say, I'll be part of Bekaroshi's history. But in fact, as I'm sitting here, I feel you in my Geschichte. And my Schatzkiste. Schatzkiste. Schatzkiste. Because you have a kind of treasure box here.

[34:58]

And your experience is in your treasure box here. And the more I can like not think about you but just open my treasure box and I can feel you. And you're cooking me. I'm offering you a recipe. And I'm cooking you a little bit. And I hope that you make a very flavorful soup. And I'll see you tomorrow at 7 or 9.30. Or was 9.30 okay? Well, I've tried to introduce to you something of what we could call the Dharma system.

[36:06]

Dharma way of perception. And The creation of this system took many centuries in India and was a societal enterprise. I don't know what we could say it's equivalent to, but it might be equivalent to the scientific establishment of today. As the sciences attract many of the most brilliant minds of these last few generations, The development of this system of observing self and the world attracted the most creative and intelligent people for centuries in India and then in China to develop this way of thinking.

[37:39]

And this development of this system itself has attracted very prominent people in India. And although the Mahayana says no dharmas, no perception, no etc., still the basic way of viewing the world and Buddhism is based on this, viewing the world and the self is based on this system of dharma analysis. And although it is said in Mahayana that there is no self, no perception, no dharmas, this system is very important in this Buddhist system, where dharmas and this system were developed.

[38:45]

It's probably right. So I have not been... You know, I'm not really here attempting to give you too much in the way of how to practice it. Too much in the way? In the way of how... I'm not... Too much in the way, that's very colloquial. I'm not giving you... much about how to practice it. In the Sashin I can give more, I think, practice sense of such things. As we just finished the Sashin, Maria Locke, And in two weeks we do another Sashin in Vienna or near Vienna.

[40:01]

So in a seminar, like the example I gave you of Star Wars had to deal with the contents of massive retaliation, In a seminar I have to speak mostly to the contents that you already have in your mind about the way the world is. While in Sashin I can talk more to your body Traditionally Zen is taught really almost entirely through this skanda and to some extent through thinking skandha and consciousness skandha.

[41:17]

It's not taught traditionally so much the way I'm doing it. I mean, it's done this way, but I'm emphasizing in particular presenting Buddhism as a view which enters your feeling skandha. So I'm trying to give you a feeling for the world view and view of self that's characteristic of Buddhism. And I'm hoping that will be useful to you. Now next week I have to at Munster, the topic is sudden and gradual enlightenment. Just the idea of enlightenment presupposes a certain way of viewing the person and events.

[42:35]

So every event, every activity is perceived as one of its characteristics is that it has a potential for enlightenment. So the Dharma system is a way of viewing the world which increases the likelihood of enlightenment. And the distinction between, say, which I may speak about, appreciative discernment and critical discernment is that kind of distinction. And then, within Buddhism, how the mind and activity is viewed makes a difference in whether you see enlightenment as gradual or sudden. And how your life is lived and practiced has a difference between whether you view enlightenment as gradual or sudden.

[44:13]

But here I'm really just trying to give you a sense of mind in Buddhism. And consciousness in Buddhism. And how that relates to karma and perception. So before I go any further, I'd like to hear something from any of you who have some thoughts from last night, yesterday. Before I continue, I would like to hear something from you, if you have something to say about what I talked about yesterday evening. Yes. Yesterday, after the night, I was completely confused.

[45:38]

I couldn't find any clear reason at all. and in particular I don't know at all what I should do, what I should do or what should go away when I return to SIG. So it goes in the direction that I have always had my thoughts for seven days.

[46:04]

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