Several persons told me that what I said at the end of yesterday afternoon was a little bit dense. And maybe even was not understandable. And I admit that I tried to squeeze another seminar into a short period of time. But that it was not understandable, oh dear, I can't believe that. Because everything I, every cell in my whatever, is tempting to be understandable. So I have to sort of seriously regroup.

[01:05]

Regroup? Like group and move? Yeah, regroup and start over. So it was suggested that maybe I should unpack some of what I spoke about yesterday. And But I want to try to understand where the non-understanding happens. So I feel I'm in a field now with you of understanding and not understanding.

[02:10]

Ich habe jetzt das Gefühl, in einem Feld mit euch zu sein, in einem Feld des Verstehens und Nicht-Verstehens. And if you would give me leave, that means permission, if you would give me leave to speak about this a little bit, I would be happy. So what I feel sometimes is certain words have a pivotal meaning for me which are obvious. And I mean, if you say, take care of the baby, we know what that means. If we say, take care of the house, that is a different feeling. Yeah, but by house I mean the baby too, then that has to be understood.

[03:22]

But maybe that's not too good an example, but anyway, so it came up. So the word I'm speaking about now is continuity or continuum. Because from the point of view of Buddhism, your existence is your continuum. Aus der Perspektive des Buddhismus ist deine Existenz, dein Sein, das ist dein Continuum. So experiencing your moment-by-moment life as a continuum is essential for Zen practice. Even if that is understood as a series of particularities which are paratactic, that means just beside each other and not necessarily connected.

[04:40]

And paratactic is a word mostly used in the film industry because you put scene beside each other, which seem unrelated, but the audience makes a relationship. So we have to, as I said yesterday, we have to establish a continuum in order to function. So what continuum we establish establishes the world we live in. Now, do we have a choice about continuum? Yeah, of course Buddhism assumes so. I'm not sure in recent centuries people assumed so.

[06:20]

I would say that probably in the recent centuries people assumed consciousness was the definitive continuum, if not the only continuum. But a statement like a hold to the moment before thought arises assumes a continuum that is not only consciousness. Aber eine Aussage wie zum Beispiel, halte dich an den Moment, bevor Gedanken aufsteigen, so eine Aussage geht von einem anderen Kontinuum aus als dem Bewusstsein. Please give me a word which does not yet exist, also assumes a continuum that isn't simply consciousness. Now I'm assuming here in this unpacking that up to no place to go, nothing to do, that was up to there was reasonably understood.

[07:34]

And it's after that that I began enjoying a view from some other place. Okay. early on in my practice, when I tried to find conceptions that allowed me to continue practicing. One of the first was the concept of a background mind. My experience was, I remember the image I used in the early 60s, was driving along, you see a bunch of billboards.

[09:01]

And if they're all next to each other, all you see is billboards. But actually, between the billboards is a landscape from which the billboards are created. And the picture that I used for it at the time, and that was based on my experience, is that when you drive along somewhere, you see a whole series of advertising boards or display boards along the roadside, but that you normally only notice the boards themselves. But if you look at it, you can suddenly notice that there is a whole landscape between and behind the boards. But since in my practice I was beginning to see between the billboards of consciousness, I began to feel that Zazen was locating me in the landscape, mindscape, from which the billboards of consciousness were created.

[10:02]

And we could call that a stage of Zen practice. In other words, I noticed that there was a background to consciousness in which I could shift my sense of identity to or my sense of location to. And because I created this metaphor of the billboards and landscape, it allowed me to start practicing with what's the physical feeling of a background mind that's different from the physical mental feeling of the billboards.

[11:12]

And that was based on already sensing what I later would, the years would say, that in yogic culture, all mental phenomena have a bodily component. And all sentient bodily phenomena have a mental component. And mostly that's true. Okay, so then I realized I could feel, physically feel the difference between the background mind and the billboard mind.

[12:19]

And I could use that physical feeling to sort of tune in background mind. And turn the foreground mind of billboards into karmic advertisements I didn't have to tune into. And then as I continued very soon, you know, within those early months, soon after, I realized I had to have some term other than consciousness. And because the word consciousness has SCI in it, which etymologically is scissors,

[13:25]

I decided that consciousness is where we categorize, cut up the world into parts, and awareness is where we experience it in a more holistic way. So now I had these terms, foreground mind, background mind, awareness, consciousness. And I began to explore how awareness could be a background mind or also sometimes a foreground mind. And having a bodily mind feeling for awareness, I could see that it was always present, even now.

[14:43]

when you're sleeping and clearly not conscious in an ordinary sense. Even when you're sleeping and obviously not conscious in an ordinary sense. I hope I'm not being too basic here, but I'm trying to kind of open up how I came to my views. Hello, I haven't seen you before. It's the only day I've been here. Well, I'm glad you're here though. You're a friend of this guy? Then you must be okay. Yeah, okay. Okay. And then, so I began to feel awareness was

[15:56]

I mean, an example would be like, the example I found is that you fall down, I've said this so many times, you fall down and you catch yourself. You don't get hurt, you don't break the packages you're holding and so forth. And slipping on the ice, and this occurred to me when I slipped on the ice, it occurred in New York City. Yes, and it was clear that it happened within consciousness, but it didn't function within consciousness. Consciousness simply doesn't operate fast enough to think, well, I put my elbow here and I protect the glass pitcher here.

[17:37]

So I realized awareness did it, not consciousness. Awareness organized how I wasn't hurt during the fall. So, awareness was almost like a guardian angel always present, taking care. So I began in my practice to nurture awareness.

[18:38]

These were all possible because I recognized these things as steps or stages which I had to reformulate for myself in order to develop. Why did you have to reformulate them? Ah, okay. Um mich zu entwickeln. Danke. Translation team here triangulates. Okay. Now, the third image, partly related to what I'm talking about this morning, was the strange algorithmic fishhook. Now, there's an idea you never heard of before. This is completely an algorithmic fishhook. Und die dritte Idee, die mir heute Morgen dazu eingefallen ist, ist die Idee von einem merkwürdigen algorithmischen Angelhaken.

[19:53]

Yeah, I mean, I recognized when I started reading Koans, studying Koans. Als ich angefangen habe, Koans zu lesen, Koans zu studieren. I remember there were, you know, lines in them, poems in them, etc., Like between... I can't remember the poem now. But between friendship and something, there's no difference. Maybe you remember the poem. Between friendship and alienation, there's no difference. The old plum tree fully blossoms, the northern spring almost... Now, could you say that in German, please? You're making me totally dependent on you. We planned that earlier.

[20:59]

Yeah, so I remember walking down Broadway in San Francisco And that poem was, as I spread yesterday, the no place to go, nothing to do, was held in the background of my mind. The southern branch and the northern branch own the whole spring. Yeah, it's just a nice poem. But suddenly I really felt how we're owned by a field of aliveness.

[22:23]

So from various experiences like that, and that's a clearer one than most, Now, this sense of a sentient field in which we are arising, I couldn't have thought of. It appeared through owns the whole spring. Cedric Villani, I don't know how to pronounce his name exactly, a French, I don't know if he's from France, but French... mathematician who won the Fields Prize, this highly touted prize in mathematics, said something like, you're a mathematician, right?

[23:40]

He said that mathematics can show us beyond intuition worlds which we can't grasp mentally, but through mathematics we can. So I had some kind of experience like that. There were worlds that I couldn't quite grasp, but the koans gave me these special fish hooks to catch a fish that I didn't yet know existed. For a long time I resisted using any computer analogies.

[24:40]

Yeah, I prefer earlier meanings of default and things like that. Earlier meanings. Oh, okay. Wait, how do I translate that? Can somebody else? Default? Yeah. Default meant something that is now a default position as a computer term, and that's not what default meant before. Oh, it meant something else. Yes. Oh. See, she only knows. I mean, it should have meant the same thing, but not really. Okay. So, but now I'm trying to be contemporary. Even I still can't make my Mi Phone work. For some reason, my emails on my phone only go up to January 2016.

[26:12]

I have no idea why. She says she can fix it. David can fix it for me. Okay, so... what I felt was corns give me a kind of fish hook. To catch a very specific kind of fish, which I don't even know what this fish is yet. But my experience was these strange fishes are swimming through the mind space all the time. Aber ich hatte das Gefühl, dass diese merkwürdigen Fische die ganze Zeit über durch den Geistesstrom schwimmen. So you're at dinner with some friends, having fun, or a cafe or something, and suddenly this fish, nobody else notices, swims through the space, and this fish are... Whoa!

[27:22]

And it's just so... Wenn du zum Beispiel mit deinen Freunden zum Abendessen sitzt, und dann auf einmal... schwimmt dieser merkwürdige Fisch an dir vorbei, und du hast den Angelhaken und fängst diesen Fisch, und niemand anders hat den Fisch bemerkt, und du hast ihn aber und wunderst dich. Und dann sagst du dir... Und dann kannst du dir sagen, ich habe gerade den Fisch aus dem Kohen 23 gefangen, und außer dir weiß aber niemand, wovon du sprichst. So that's why I call it an algorithmic fishhook because it's like a search engine algorithm which searches through millions of data and finds what you're looking for. And so, you know, I'm in awe of koans that they discovered these algorithmic fish hooks, which still work today.

[28:28]

Okay. Now, I said that in recent probably centuries, we've assumed the definitive continuum is consciousness. Freud, in noticing that people knew things in the associative mind on their couch that they didn't know in their upright consciousness, Assumed then, okay, so there's an unconscious... in which the associative mind can delve, delve?

[29:40]

Look into. Okay. But he still assumed that the unconscious was made from conscious contents which consciousness didn't want around. Yeah, they were kind of conscious discards or dangerous traumatic elements, he thought, weren't they? But Buddhism assumes there's a non-conscious field which accompanies everything. So this algorithmic fishhook is fishing in the ocean of non-consciousness, not in the puddle of unconsciousness.

[30:57]

Are there any psychotherapists here where I'm offending? Okay. Gibt es hier irgendwelche Therapeuten, die ihr beleidigt? I'll speak to you later in the lobby. Okay. Now... I would guess that in the Middle Ages in Europe, people assumed, or commonly people assumed, Meister Eckhart and others, for example, assumed that there was a spiritual continuum functioning beyond and outside of consciousness.

[32:16]

A God-driven, something like that. A spiritual continuum. And this spiritual continuum knew more and showed you more and pushed into revelation things that you couldn't understand necessarily consciously. So, I'm just making this up, but let's say it's somewhat true. Okay. So, Buddhism assumes not that there's a spiritual continuum exactly, except in a wide use of that word.

[33:34]

Buddhism assumes there's something like, what could I call it, I've never said these things I'm saying this morning, an activity continuum. In other words, if there's no entities, there's only activities. To think in terms of entities is simply delusion. It's convenient, but it's delusive. If you think in terms of entities, I mean activities, then every so-called entity you notice is an activity, minute changes going on all the time. dann ist jede Entität, die du bemerkst, eigentlich eine Aktivität, in der klitzekleine Veränderungen ständig passieren.

[34:56]

So just as your thoughts, your stress and things like that can affect your stomach, so wie deine Gedanken oder der Stress, den du hast, deinen Magen beeinflussen können, if you develop, if you train yourself, as Westerners we need to train ourselves to do it, to notice the world as itself, as the fluctuations of minute activities. Wenn wir uns das beibringen, und als Westler müssen wir uns das beibringen, die Welt als klitzekleine Aktivitäten zu bemerken. You begin to tune into those fluctuations. Dann fängst du an, dich in diese Fluktuationen einzuschwingen. That starts to generate a different kind of consciousness. And basically it generates a field consciousness, because fluctuations occur in a field, just like kind of physics would say.

[36:03]

And a field consciousness is different. Now I'm not saying a field awareness, I'm saying a field consciousness. So through awareness and practice we turn consciousness, entity consciousness, entity noticing consciousness, into a field consciousness which notices the minutia of activity. Right now I'm speaking within what I experience as a field of overlapping awarenesses and consciousnesses. I am speaking in the midst of a field of overlapping awarenesses and consciousnesses.

[37:21]

And that's one reason Ivan Illich, who was a close friend and teacher for me, he wanted to never give a lecture which required amplification. And I feel the same way. And we discussed this, the two of us. And basically I think he would agree that with amplification you lose contact with the shared field, the mutual field. I've given talks where you require amplification. I think you went, there were about a thousand people at that conference. In Bremen, where, I don't know, where, in Oh, fuck.

[38:34]

I mean, I don't have the bandwidth for that many people. I did have lectures where I definitely had to be reinforced. I think you were there in Bremen, maybe, or... And I do this, what I'm doing, because I just like the sensation of being in your field. So, I would say that in recent decades, centuries, that we couldn't imagine, it was common in the West not to be able to imagine, again I'm saying, a definitive continuum outside of consciousness.

[39:48]

a continuum outside of consciousness. Kierkegaard and various poets intimated there was something outside of consciousness, but, you know, it really wasn't taken fully seriously. It's almost... Like, we can't imagine the Internet without electricity. We could say electricity is the continuum of the Internet. If electricity disappeared, there wouldn't be any Internet. Yeah, or maybe silicon. See you soon. See you soon. Was that a silly word?

[41:02]

There's silly putty, isn't there? Silly putty is that putty you can shape and it bounces. What's it called in German? Silly cones. Silly cones. We're getting close, I can tell, the mood, we're getting close to a break. So the question is, if we can't imagine, I would say, as you can't imagine the Internet without electricity, many people can't imagine the world without consciousness. But Buddhism assumes we have a choice of continuums. So let's see if we take a break now, if I can start up and re-enter this continuum immediately afterwards.

[42:19]

Thank you. Thanks for translating.

[42:21]

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