I'm sorry to keep you, kept you waiting. But I lost five or ten minutes somewhere. So they were there, and then when I looked, they were gone. Yeah. But you are professional waiters. I mean, not in the restaurant, but... Waiting for nothing, of course, but waiting. Yeah. So I'm trying to, as you well know, trying to find categories to talk about Buddhism that work in Western culture. die in der westlichen Kultur funktionieren, aber die auf eine Art und Weise in der westlichen Kultur funktionieren, dass sie die westliche Kultur so ein bisschen abhellen lassen, so dass der Buddhismus hervorscheinen kann.

[01:20]

And Andreas Hagen, he left, huh? Yes. I thought he was going to be here for a week or something. Originally they wanted to stay for two monk weeks, but then they had to cut it short to one monk week. Oh, that's what I thought. Anyway, he's gotten himself trying to do something about the old tapes. cassette tapes. And he said he found them interesting because I actually said something way back there in the ancient past. And he almost says, not quite, but almost says that I could hardly understand what you're saying today if I hadn't listened to those because they're the basis.

[02:36]

Yeah. And unless you all promise to live with me the rest of my life, we can't do anything about this problem. But it's not the rest of your life. It's only the rest of my life. That's not too bad. Because I don't know how to bring all these things back together as you... We're only here together in different configurations. Yeah, but maybe contemporary technology will help us solve the problem somehow. Yeah, because I have to speak to you about

[03:39]

what I can explore with you. And one of the distinctions you've made endlessly and you're not yet tired of hearing it, I hope, is between consciousness and awareness. The distinction as I'm making it isn't as emphasized in the same way in Asian languages. And I've used over the years the job of consciousness is to make the world predictable. And I've, you know, I've always kind of not liked to use the word job.

[05:16]

Okay. Well, you don't use job. People don't have jobs in Germany. Well, I translated it so that I like it already. It's task more. Okay. Now she's telling me. I don't like to use the word job. Well, tasket, it sounds all right. Tisket, a tasket, you know. A green and yellow basket. Nothing to worry about. It's a nursery rhyme. Oh, a kindergarten rhyme. But I have not been able to avoid using... I have kept using the word job. I suppose task is fine. Because somehow, outside my usual consciousness,

[06:19]

Job actually links things together better than another word I could use. So right now I would like to define consciousness as mentation that makes the world actionable. And the world becomes if you can translate actionable It's very hard. Yes. Something you can actuate or act on.

[07:40]

To make an actuateable world isn't quite an English word like that. Okay. And you can't act in the world unless the world is predictable. If the world is constantly unpredictable, you can only respond, you can't really act and plan and so forth. Yeah, so now I'd like to say that to define consciousness as having the job of making the world predictable and conceptualizable. And in contrast, awareness Well, let me say consciousness borders the world.

[09:04]

Consciousness creates borders. Awareness takes away borders. Okay. Now I can make this more complicated philosophically if we talk about the fact that awareness, the definition of awareness needs consciousness and the definition of consciousness needs awareness. And because they need each other, you can't think of one as primary. Because if the job of consciousness is to make the world something you can conceptualize,

[10:05]

Denn wenn die Aufgabe des Bewusstseins darin besteht, die Welt zu etwas zu machen, was begrifflich fassbar oder konzeptualisierbar ist... And then if the job of the world is to act in a non-conceptualized world... The job of awareness, you mean? The job of awareness. Und wenn aber die Aufgabe des Gewahrseins dann darin besteht, in einer... then you're involved in noticing when you conceptualize and discovering what it means to take conceptions away. And the easiest model I can give you for this is, again, hearing an airplane or a car and taking the label car or airplane off the sound. So awareness in this sense isn't an original mind.

[11:37]

It's a mind you create from consciousness. But consciousness is created from awareness. No. I didn't plan to talk this whole time about awareness and consciousness. Yeah. Yeah. But if you're going to notice Zazen mind, Sukershi would call it big mind.

[12:43]

He used the term big, he needed the term big mind. We have to give you some way to notice, but not conceptualize, notice Zazen mind. Of course, to not conceptualize is a conception. But it's a concept with the opposite effect, unusual conception. Now, it may sound like I'm talking about some kind of philosophy.

[13:44]

I'm really trying to give you something similar to driving instructions. So you know when you can turn left and when you can turn right and so forth. If we just drove without any rules, we'd have a lot of problems. So we have to... It helps... I'm trying to give you suggestions or instructions which help you notice your meditation experience. So, for example... when you notice you're making the world predictable, you say, aha, consciousness is at work.

[15:04]

Because if you don't notice that consciousness is at work, you think consciousness is showing you the world exactly as it is. So whenever you see yourself making the world predictable, You say, hmm, consciousness, yeah. Thanks for doing your job, your task. But actually, the world is not predictable. Awareness acts in the... Awareness knows the world as not predictable. So you might then at that moment feel a shift to awareness and feel yourself in a non-predictable world. And likewise when you feel

[16:16]

you're naming things or conceptualizing things. You could say, oh, yeah, so look, consciousness is at work. So by doing that, by seeing that consciousness has a job to conceptualize, name, entity, make turns into entities. Yeah, and predictable. Then you feel yourself making the world predictable and conceptualizable. Believe it or not, that then is a taste of or an experience of non-duality. And one of the tasks or jobs I find myself trying to realize in this practice period

[17:34]

is to make the ideal of non-duality an accessible experience. So I'm trying to suggest to you experiences that are adjacent to non-duality or lead to non-duality. Or that adjacent end. or lead to. Yeah, I mean, if we look at the different schools of Buddhism, Zen is a particular school, different from Tibetan Buddhism and Theravada Buddhism and so forth. Now, as I've used the word job

[18:52]

to make you notice the activity of consciousness. Zen teachings emphasize non-duality more than other, the experience of non-duality more than other Buddhist schools. It's not that other Buddhist schools don't emphasize the practices that are in effect non-dual. In the fabric of the teachings, the way Zen has decided to present them as a Chinese creation, one of the most useful suggestions or goals ideals and are considered anti-rooms anti-rooms

[20:39]

Like anti-rooms? No, no. A-N-T-E. It means like a forecourt. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's understandable. Yeah, okay. The experiences of non-duality are preliminary to or anti-rooms for enlightenment. So enlightenment as a physical, psychological experience often is, because it's basically a kind of biological experience. body-mind experience. It's not simply an experience of non-duality. But it's much more likely to arise physiologically.

[21:53]

If you are familiar with more and more familiar with experiences of non-duality. Okay, so I'm trying to give you suggestions for within the scheme of Zen, transposed into Western culture. of experiences of non-dual. So any experience of connectedness is a taste of non-duality.

[23:00]

So as I've used the term in the last practice period a lot, ma, the ma board, etc. So using ma Using the concept of Ma to notice space instead of entities. To notice space as the field of interactivity. to notice in betweenness, to find yourself noticing space and in betweenness more immediately than you notice entities. So if you feel yourself

[24:08]

acting in space, stepping into space all the time instead of in a way that it feels open and unpredictable. So that you find yourself again as you are. And that you can kind of train yourself to do. One of the most basic is every time you put your foot forward, you wonder if the earth is going to be there or the floor. And a very basic exercise is, for example, that every time you put your foot forward, you ask yourself whether the earth and the ground will still be there to support the foot. You feel your foot. Hoping there's a floor there. Maybe walk around with your eyes closed for a while.

[25:40]

And if you almost feel the floor or ground coming up to meet the foot. We could say you're in the forecourt. Forecourt. A courtyard before a building is a forecourt. In the forecourt of non-duality. The world is nothing but... What is the world, right? What is the world? It's sensation. And it's sensation for us in five categories. Yeah. The five physical senses. We can even say the five physical source senses.

[26:47]

Because they're the source of our experience of the world. But they're not just sourced from outside us, they're also sourced from inside us. So when you start playing with things like feeling where the floor is as you step. Again, playing with the boundary between awareness and consciousness. Awareness always starts with zero. Awareness is an activity of subtracting. You subtract, take away the borders. You subtract, take away the conceptualizations. Now, consciousness is always adding.

[27:58]

It doesn't start with zero, it starts with one. One book, one house, one floor, one road, etc. And it's always adding. That's why it's so exhausting. Consciousness tires you out. You're adding the world up and the numbers get bigger and bigger and bigger. And you're my age, my God. And when you're as old as me, then... My God, I shouldn't have said that. My Buddha, excuse me. I was trying to help Sophia this week. And she has to study. Most people start a year ago. She has to study for these tests she'll take next week, for what school she goes to next year.

[29:25]

Yeah, and she decided finally this week maybe to study some. And Marie-Louise says, you know, you're just like your father, you just trust in awareness. She's relaxed, she doesn't care whether she does well or poorly, she's just fine with it all. Yeah, and Aren't fathers supposed to be more involved with consciousness than mothers? Anyway, in this case, the mother is more involved with consciousness. So anyway, so this week, though, it was helpful, I thought, and she thought, if I tried to help her.

[30:28]

And I was clearly able to help her because I was unable to help her. I haven't studied geometry for 65 years. And she tells me, now, Dad, how do we isolate the Y here? Isolate the Y? Why do we isolate the Y? Which one of these lines is X and Y anyway? Yeah. And she says, don't you know how to... No, I said, I know how to find Y, but I never used the term isolate. Ich weiß, wie man das Y ausrechnet oder findet, aber ich habe noch nie dieses Wort benutzt, das Y zu isolieren.

[31:48]

And part of the reason she has to study for this is because she knows these terms in German and they're different in English. And in English they're different than they were when I was 65 years ago studying it. So I had to say to her, I have no idea how to isolate the Y. She said, well, let me show you. I only even knew this a couple of years ago. She said, oh, thanks. So she showed me and said, and then she solved the problem. I said, see, I've taught you, I've helped you. Because I couldn't help her. She had to figure out how to do it, and this was good, so I was quite useful. And one of her problems is she doesn't really sometimes make the effort to figure it out herself, but with me she has to do it.

[33:06]

So I've said to her, you know, it's okay, Sophia, that you're kind of zen and Everything's groovy and you're not worried about anything, but let's worry a little. Consciousness isn't all bad. Okay. But when you feel the categories of the sense world, When you study the fact that you know the world through five categories, then and when you know the world you're more likely to, when you know the world as Yuan Wu says, it's an underlying, inconceivable reality.

[34:24]

You know, we have this con, which I implicitly am coming back to all the time, number 12 in the Shoyaroku. Shushan sang to Dijan, What do we call the world? What do we do about the world? And Dijan says, What do you call the world? The infant is born And then there's sensorial information, sensorial experience, sensorial something or other, sensation, let's call it.

[35:27]

And then the sensations turn into information. And then are woven on the looms of the parents in the world. And we as then practitioners are unweaving these categories. So we experience each one separately. And we feel we're knowing the world in categories that we weave together and separate. And then we will more likely feel that these five categories barely touch the inconceivability of the world we are in.

[36:30]

That's open in significant ways to awareness. Okay? To be continued. Because our intentions are the same, to get every creature and every place through.

[37:24]

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