Cosine, you can remind you of that. That's the pause that refreshes you. Okay. All right, so these six dharmas are an attempt to do something complete like that. So first of all, as I said the first night, you just name the flowers. So I invite you all to look at the flowers and just name them. Flowers. Blume. Blume. Doesn't it change your mind? Your state of mind? It's different than if I say this is a flower.

[01:09]

So you begin to occasionally practice that. You're walking out and you look at a tree. And you start your walk, walking. You're locating yourself in the world and in your body that way. Okay, now let's take the next one, appearance. Now with this one, this one with appearance, You peel the name off it. So it's no longer flower. You don't even know what it is. You just feel it in your body. Your senses. It's just the appearance. You don't know what it is, but it's appearing. I think it affects your breathing.

[02:22]

Depending a bit on your posture. So appearance. Now when you do something like that, use a word like appearance, you're using a word to point at the undivided world. Now the undivided world doesn't mean exactly there's a reality out there that's divided and undivided. Because you're also that reality. So it's a way of being. And you shift your way of being from a divided way of being to an undivided way of being. So it's just appearance. Maybe a more proprioceptive way of being. And we can look at, feel the world sometimes.

[03:35]

We don't know what the world is, but there it is. Or here it is. Now that sense of being able to take the names off something and be in the world without knowing where you are or what it is, is really important. And we practice with that sometimes with the word what. Everything you look at, you say, what? What is it? What is that? What is that? What is that? It sounds like I'm an immigrant.

[04:40]

In koans, somebody says, the teacher says, what is it? Or what is in a context where they use it? Like, what do you want? They're pointing out this practice. I think it depends very much on what you're looking at. I don't have any problems if I look at a flower or a tree to feel that oneness with the flower or this tree. But it's different if I look to Renown or Neopet or something other, then I can't have this feeling of oneness. You should, can you say that in German? German? Yeah, but you need more practice.

[05:58]

Armpit. Armpit. I chose the flower because it's easy. But we could use armpit or plastic Buddha. It doesn't matter what it is, it's just easier with the flowers. So I suggest you practice these things with the flowers on the breakfast table. And trees. But you begin to do it with everything. And maybe when you look at your friend or just a person. And if you begin to have that sense of just seeing the appearance of people, Without having any sense of liking and disliking.

[07:07]

Or this is that kind of person and I really find that kind of person boring. If you really kind of develop that way of seeing. That way of seeing actually leads to some remarkable things. Sometimes you might be in a crowd in downtown Zurich. And a lot of people are going by. And suddenly one face appears to you like... It could change your life. Somebody you've never met, and normally it's just a face, some bum or some old man. But suddenly you may see, in this crowd there was a Buddha. But that doesn't come from, it comes from just, you know, seeing without knowing what you're seeing.

[08:09]

And with that way of seeing, teachers appear everywhere. So it's really non-discrimination. But anyway, your question is great, but that's why I'm starting with the easy one. So next dharma here is associations. And here, you're not naming it, you're allowing associations Everything that comes up around it to appear. It's not much different from free association. Except you're mostly not following up on the association. It's more simultaneous free association. You just let everything that comes up about the flowers. Even if it seems to have nothing to do with the flowers.

[09:16]

Whatever your state of mind is now, you're not dealing with the appearance of the flower, you're dealing with the appearance of your state of mind. You're beginning to sense the appearance of your state of mind. And on each thing you do or look at, the appearance of your state of mind changes a bit. And again, it's not something we notice usually. But you can begin to bring this to your attention. What is the appearance of your state of mind? Now, I'm not going to go into the next three dharmas.

[10:18]

And I may not have time, but if I cannot do it in the afternoon, but the ability to just see the appearance of something without naming it, and to be in the state of mind that comes with just naming and be able to feel the appearance of your mind without thinking or discriminating about it opens you up to the next which is wholeness. Which is a way of perceiving in which you're perceiving wholeness or mandalic wholes.

[11:19]

You don't have to get up. And that's expressed sometimes by a circle with, I can't remember the kanji, but a gate in it. And that means that when you perceive wholeness, it's a gate mind. It opens you up to the world in a different way. Okay. Now, it's almost time to go to lunch, so let's just sit for a few minutes. Oh, but this I remember. These arise from this. of the connection between the skanda of Ford and all these things which speak with Ford.

[12:47]

Do you want to say that in German? The . Okay. This is, this word here is vijnana. The main school Zen is primarily based on Yogacara school. And the vijñāyas are so central to Yogacara school that another name for the Yogacara school is the vijñāna vāda.

[13:48]

Vada, the idea. And its practitioners were called, traditionally, . OK. But these vijnanas, while they are the word for consciousness, they are actually the practice of the form skandha because this is as form arises in the eye consciousness and form as it arises in the ear consciousness And that's before feeling, perception, association, etc. are added. So if you practice each of these, you practice first just as the form or signal arises.

[15:09]

And then you add feeling. You see all the feelings that arise through that vijnana. And likewise, how perception associations arise. And then, in a sense, get absorbed back into the field. So say you're practicing the ear field consciousness. If you really have created a field of ear consciousness, you'll hear the sound of those birds and children and things. And then you may have perceived, oh, birds. And then it gets reabsorbed back into the field and you forget whether it's birds or not.

[16:27]

So the field has more integrity than the object of the field, the object. The field of hearing has more integrity than the object of hearing. Does that make sense? Gita Singh? Now, when you are practising this, you practise with one of these fields being active and the others become dormant. And you let the dormant fields come into the active field.

[17:28]

And you practice this now and then in homeopathic doses. And let that weave into the text of your day. And if you practice occasionally with each one of these as primary, you can eventually perceive all of them simultaneously and all of them are active, not just one or two. Now, almost all of us, by cultural bias, this is the active, the eye consciousness is the active field of awareness.

[18:34]

And all the others are gone. Most of us have no sense of smelling something while we're doing things. And if you're sitting with people, say, in a restaurant, talking, people shut out all of their sounds, information. And if you say to somebody who's sitting with you, what was that song that's on the music? They didn't even hear the song. It's certainly part of your sense fields, but we tend to make them all dormant except this one. Now a blind person, you know, makes this one the primary one, usually, or the others.

[19:40]

And blind people have an extraordinary ability to walk through rooms, to feel somebody coming in, to... But if you're in a place where they suddenly turn the lights out, we're helpless because we're so much in here. So anyway, it's quite simple. You tend to practice each of these until you can bring all of these into one. It seems to me that process oriented psychology particularly emphasizes bringing this one into your attention, the proprioceptive body.

[20:41]

And because we are primarily in this field, the body becomes a territory of secondary process. If you were equally balanced in all these fields, your primary process would be here too. But it would be harder actually to separate primary and process, because it would be happening in all of them, primary and secondary. Okay. Now, I would like to... To make this make sense, I have to tell you something about this one and this one.

[21:58]

We've done enough with this. We spent almost all day yesterday on the pious compass. Now, just as a little help to me as a teacher, how many of you feel that I've given you too much this time? And you don't feel nicely overloaded, you feel too overloaded. Now, I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing, so I'm not going to be hurt by what you say, so please tell me, if you think it's too much. No?

[23:08]

Okay. But, yeah. It's probably the first part. Yesterday. No, no. The second part of the script, the first part, it's probably maybe because it was too early. What was the first part? The first part of what I said wasn't so clear. About how this is a practice of form? Okay. The connections. But let me just say one thing that is that Teaching something like this, it's important that you're a little bit overloaded. Because if you're not overloaded, you're still sort of capable of thinking about it and analyzing it, etc. You should be too tired to do that. It should be just... We should be just going in, you know.

[24:10]

But I don't want to overlook it, you know. Okay. If I look at this, the formskande, now these are in a sense a mindology practice. Yeah, our psychology practice, right? It's not science. or as a kind of science of consciousness. So this forum skandha does include this as a physical object. But what it's really about is your perception of this as a physical object. So I can perceive this as an object and my eyeballs involved and as I said I can create a field that arises because of my looking at this. So now I'm emphasizing the field that arises in each consciousness in a sense because of the world of form.

[25:35]

Okay. And in that sense this is a practice in this skandha. Okay, now, by creating a field consciousness that's not attached to the object of perception, you're creating a very open state of mind. And something happens in that open state of mind when it's not attached to an object of perception. And you begin to then be able to perceive more subtle objects of perception which you wouldn't have noticed if you emphasized the object of perception. Now the idea is that we are actually perceiving a great deal.

[26:45]

We're perceiving a great deal that falls into the categories of conscious perception, unconscious perception, non-conscious perception, and maybe orphans. there's a in computer you know you can have things floating in your hard disk which have no directory no no name and there's no way to get at these bits of information that float in computer space okay So you can buy programs like Norton Utilities, which clean them up.

[28:04]

Yeah, OK. So the sense is that if this is your eye consciousness, that can't be. Can you sort of see that yellow circle? OK. No? No, all right. It's the field of eye consciousness. And within that field of eye consciousness you have your usual consciousness. And within that field you also have your unconscious scripting, things that you're scripted for, but you're not conscious that you're scripted for.

[29:19]

It might not be that big, but it's something. But there are things that are outside that are being perceived that are outside any way for you to know you're even perceiving them. So these things go right into the storehouse consciousness. And also these things from your conscious script are going in the storehouse consciousness. And these things that are non-conscious or beyond consciousness are also going into here There's no way to have access to the fullness of this storehouse unless you create a fullness in your consciousness

[30:39]

Now one of the ideas here is, as I started out earlier, is this idea of inclusivity. So you have something that's bad. Why is it bad? Because it works against the whole. Okay, so it's bad because it's only a part. Okay, so if you can put that part in a whole context, repeatedly put it in a whole context, So it doesn't work against the whole. Then that thing which was bad before that you try to get rid of works in the fabric of your life in a different way when you experience wholeness rather than partness.

[31:42]

So you can say that the psychological dimension of this is a purification process. But purification through wholeness rather than getting rid of. So if you can practice more and more each of these in wholeness, which is this dharma you begin to have a fuller relationship to the storehouse. Okay, now, so I need to show you more about the storehouse of consciousness and how it works here.

[32:48]

So, but if you, would you be willing to go out for a walk? Okay, so let's get our shoes and go out for a walk. At least that little bit of practice of the vijnanas. And I hope you got some sense of the territory of experience. Now, I think what we only have time to do is for me to finish giving you this overview and then perhaps we have time to sit for a little bit and then we will Say sayonara, I mean auf Wiedersehen.

[34:02]

Okay, now I mentioned that Ulrike, I mentioned the Krummelanke earlier. And Ulrike and I first practiced these things so that she could translate them walking around the Krummelanke. Which I realized was the Krumelanka Bhattara. And it's a two and a half kilometer round lake. Now, if you imagine a lake like that, or a lake here, Lake Constance, or this lake here in Zurich, if you imagine that a lake like that, that every leaf that's fallen to that lake the impression of that leaf is still somewhere in the water.

[35:14]

Even a branch that fell into that lake in the 14th century and has long since rotted away. Still the impression of that branch is still there in the lake. It remembers not only the city of Zurich, but that lake remembers the ancient life around this lake. At the same time as the lake is a repository of all the impressions that have ever happened to it, It's still immediately responsive to every tiny insect that skitters across its surface.

[36:17]

And to the many reflections, the dark, the black-green reflections of the leaves. And where you can see deep into the water through the reflections. Now, if you imagined a lake like that, that is an image of this storehouse consciousness. And everything that's ever happened to you, and some teachings they say all your past lives even, are playing in an intricacy of impressions or moment. Now this isn't exactly memory.

[37:24]

And it's not exactly unconsciousness. It's the foundation of consciousness and unconsciousness and so forth. Now, where is this lake Where does it exist? Is it in your right shoulder? Is it in your brain? No. It doesn't have a location in that sense. It's the whole of your physical body. It's like the woman who the pain in her back released and these many times when she felt existence was perfect came out.

[38:31]

So the memory is not here and it's not here or these impressions. They're in between things. You can't have much here, much here. You can have an infinity of things here. And if I bring this up, it brings up many things. And so forth. And also as you may have felt when we were... doing our practice there in the park, the location of the laya vijnana is also outside you. Many of the impressions of the laya vijnana are stored in the sound of a child on a tricycle.

[39:41]

And there's no way to have access to it without the tricycle. Or the sharp sound of the ball being kicked. So that sharp sound is also your alaya vijnana. So in that sense, this phenomenal world is your storehouse consciousness. It's not limited to inside or outside. Do you understand? So you can't say it exists and you can't say it doesn't exist. If you try to grasp it, it's gone.

[40:42]

But you can activate it through the practice of the six vijnanas. Now, if you are functioning primarily through your conscious or unconscious script, You will pull out certain things out of this. But you won't activate this as an alive part of you. You may have felt while we were standing in the park practicing this that you were What I mean by saying you're maturing your mind continually. Did you, when we walked back, walking along that street, did you feel a little differently? So if every day, again, practiced in homeopathic doses, weaving these old practices into your text, it starts to mature your mind continuum.

[42:00]

And as your mind continuum becomes more mature, for example, if I put this Buddha up here, Actually, this is the Bodhisattva Manjushri. If you bring your attention to this for a little while, or the flower or my staff, or the rug in front of you as a field of light, It really doesn't make any difference whether it's the Buddha or the blood. You are not just seeing the blood or the Buddha.

[43:01]

You're maturing your own mind continuum. You can do that a little bit every day or now and then. Pretty soon how things happen to you will be different. In other words, if something happens on the waves of the ocean, it just doesn't happen in the waves anymore. all the water fields to the seven miles deep of the water field. So when things happen to you, you can feel them with height and depth. And a spaciousness.

[44:03]

Now being, in the sense that being is understood in conclusion, being is divided into essence, And its extensions, essence and its extensions. Temporal and spatial. And spatial includes the sense of a reality limit. And so, So if you practice the wholeness, that's the fourth of the six dharmas, the wholeness of each of these sense fields, and you begin to also see in wholes, now I'm not going to go into the practice of seeing

[45:28]

and a mandalic seeing and dharanic seeing or dharanic memory. But the various practices that lead to wholeness in your seeing. So you see relationships with the wholeness. Now, when you see that way, that's form as wholeness. When you see form in the usual sense, that's form as delusion. Now, so you see form as wholeness, and At the same time you know it's all impermanent. All simultaneously interpenetrate.

[46:30]

And the more you see it that way, a kind of brightness appears around everything you see. But still, the situation is, when you learn or happen to have a cultural base where you exist more in these skandhas, In other words, you use perception and you use representational thinking but you don't live there. Then you begin to develop more sense of the subtle body. When you have more sense of the subtle body that's how you relate to people. So it's almost unavoidable that the Javanese do that. Because they certainly simply have more sense of the subtle body than we do.

[47:51]

Yes. I have a question. Do you know Japan? And many times in the newspaper I read that Japanese working people have difficulties because they work so hard and suicide rates are very high. So I don't know if it's true or not, but do you know Japan? How many people are really practicing this Buddhism in Japan? How this works out really in the practical life? Because we hear, I don't know if it's true or not, how is it treated there? How many people in the West are really practicing Christianity? That's true. That's not the point. But in the West, we are a Judeo-Christian culture. whether we practice Christianity or not. And they are a Buddhist culture whether they practice Buddhism or not. And a Buddhist culture emphasizes this place more than this place. Whatever way you practice Anything you teach or art can be misused.

[49:11]

So maybe the idea is that if they practice it more, then they might not misuse it. No, in fact, it's the not practicing it, but using it, which is the problem. And I only use this as an example to say it's really not real esoteric. You don't have to become a shaman to do this. Now, I would like to give you... How are we doing for time? I want to present the three and three dharmas. And it's fairly simple. And then I think we take a break. Now have a little bit of a pause. Naming.

[50:13]

The middle. Appearance. I'll say it. Silence. Sense. I'll explain. Sense impressions. Associations. And then we have three more. Wholeness. Emptiness. Now, in a sense, these six dharmas, the first three are practices related to the five skandhas, and the second three are practices related to late Mahayana Buddhism and the

[51:24]

Six vijnanas. Or the eight vijnanas. You'll see later why. Sometimes say six and sometimes say eight. Okay. Now again, hope it'll be nice if we can do the weather holes and there's a big parka. big park out uh which would about a two or three minute walk we can walk to okay now let me use the you can sit down and i'm going to Okay. Now we have to talk about the sense of where you live.

[52:33]

All right. Now, do you live in, we, most of us do live in representational thinking. It's like we do various things but when we feel at home we feel the continuity of self in representational thinking. Now you don't want to get rid of that but you want to change home base in Buddhism and there's various ways to do that. I don't know which glass is which anymore. Clean enough. Do you want some water? Okay. So, one practice is to reside in the light continuum. Now, this morning when we did Zazen, we have all these church bells.

[53:36]

And as I said yesterday, there's a point at which suddenly you begin to hear the bells and the birds differently. When you do that through the practice of zazen and the changes that occur, you are actually residing, at least for a little while, in the sound continuum. And in a similar way, you can reside in the light continuum. For example, if I have this glass, this glass is also light reflecting on it. You only see it because of light. Now when you look at the glass, because of our cultural training, you see the glass, you see the object. But you can also see the light which makes you able to see the object.

[54:43]

And you can kind of shift. It's like one of those games where you see a face and it's an old person's face one way and a young person's face the other. It shifts. So you can make that kind of shift out of seeing the physical object to seeing the light. And I can see the light of this room as the primary thing I'm seeing, not the objects in the room. Okay. Now, I think that's really what's going on for people when they go sunbathing. People will go sunbathing even to the point of being burned and ruined for a month. for a particular kind of experience they have, sunbathing. So you're lying down on the beach or wherever.

[55:56]

And the sun is strong enough, to move you into the light continuum so you see the pinkness of the blood in your eyelids and you feel the warmth and you actually representational thinking stops and you don't care where you are or how long you're lying there And then usually sounds change. And you can hear children playing on the beach and seagulls. And you don't care. It's wonderful. You hear them off the air. And you've shifted to living in the sound continuum. So I think it's a direct experience that the

[56:57]

heat of the sun moves you into the light continuum which moves you into the sound continuum. And it's a vacation and a relief because you're outside representational thinking. So it's actually a kind of meditation. Mm-hmm. People go to these sun parlors to get fried. And they say, so I look beautiful, but I think it's for the experience. You say it's because of the appearance, but I think it's because of the father. Yes. But that should actually happen, if it happens with consciousness, then it brings something. If the consciousness is here, and that's what I always ask myself, when I see the people in a row and let them talk, then I already have the feeling that there is a silence, that it is no longer the awareness in life that is being dug away. I think otherwise I could find it very good.

[58:05]

Oh, you've got to laugh. She's saying that when it happens consciously, when this would happen consciously, then it would be something different. But when she sees all these people lying around being baked with the sun and it doesn't happen consciously, then they become like... Well, I'm not making moral judgments about... I'm not making moral judgments about sun babies. I'm just trying to mention something that is familiar to us. I'm not recommending sunbathing. But what I'm saying is right now while I'm talking to you I can occupy myself with representational speaking, thinking, and reside in the light continuum as home base. And I can talk, I can do things, but that's not where I'm living. And one of the vijnanas would be, I can also reside in the continuum from your eyes.

[59:26]

And the continuum from your eyes. The eyes are one part of the body where you see the divided and undivided world. So, I can also reside in the sound of her voice. Or the sound of my voice. So I can feel it's being shaped into words, but I can feel the kind of hum through the voice while I'm also speaking, shaping it into words. And when you begin to hear the hum of the voice, You're in the form skanda. She isn't up there anymore. And you're more in the subtle body when you hear the hum of the voice than when you hear the separate words.

[60:34]

So these are just basic practices you can bring to your daily life. You can be working at your desk. And if you're working in representational thinking, and you're residing there, the residence there creates anxiety. Geez, there's seven more pieces of paper here and I've got to get this done and I've got to make this phone call. Because your emotional, your other skandhas, including emotional needs, come into the representational thinking. And representational thinking can't satisfy them. But say you're at your desk. And you're residing in the light continuum of the room.

[61:46]

You feel at ease. And you do this thing. And then you do the next thing. But where your anxiety and emotions are is not in these little things. Now, if someone comes in the door and says, we just went bankrupt. You may lose it. Because if it's big enough, you have to deal with that. But most things don't require anxiety all the time. I mean, anxiety is necessary. I mean, If we didn't have disease you wouldn't have an immune system. And if you didn't have an immune system we couldn't leave this room. So disease is necessary so that we can move around and do things.

[62:53]

And in a similar way, anxiety and suffering is necessary for the kind of being we are. But you don't need to suffer about whether this piece of paper and that piece of paper is, you know. Yes. But the problem is sometimes time runs. I have to do things until a certain time. And then I feel it's not time enough, and then I get into trouble. Yes. Well, ruthlessly. What I mean is, for a period, if you want to practice this, You have to take the consequences of not getting some things done. But if you are willing not to sacrifice your state of mind, if you take as a simple rule, I will not do things that sacrifice my state of mind,

[63:55]

My state of mind is where I live. It's more important than my apartment. Or renting a bigger apartment. Once you really reside there, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you get more work done. But if you try to do it so you get more work done, it's probably not going to work. Now, the general access to this, the light continuum, the sound continuum, are refinements on beginning to reside in your breath. Okay, enough? Let's have a break.

[65:13]

Yes? I have a question. Yesterday I just had these five standards in the world and suddenly for the three lowest standards it's always the fault, it needs the one which is looking at the things. It needs me that I see consciousness. And for the two worker ones... It doesn't need me. I'm in the way. And I would like to know the way to stay in this transformation from... Well, that's why... Do you want to say that in German? Also, gestern diese drei, diese drei Standards habe ich für mich ausgeteilt, die drei unteren. And for the 300 and for consciousness, it needs someone who looks at it and says what it is. For the two above, it is actually the one who has determined what is happening at the moment, what is happening on the way and what is happening at all.

[66:15]

And I ask, where is the transformation between the one who is now and the one who is no longer, how does it happen? Okay. That's a good observation, that when you're in the last three skandhas, particularly the last two skandhas, they need, and these skandhas are designed that way, The latter skandhas require a more defined self. And they create a more defined self in order to function within them. The The earlier skandhas still require a self, but a less defined self.

[67:23]

So in a way, you have the ship of self. Then you began practicing the five skandhas to have a self which you can participate in its creation. Then you move your sense of location to the earlier skandhas. And then you need a less defined self. Then you get more in touch with the subtle self and subtle body. But once you begin to feel this, you can have a more defined self when you need it, and you can pull back from that and have a less defined and more subtle self. Exactly the kind of questions you asked, again, people asked over and over again. And to answer your questions, the five skandhas and the eight vijnanas were attempts to answer these questions.

[68:42]

Okay, so let's have a... It's 11.13. Let's have a 15. Pause. Okay. All right. Well, I want to bring something up here. You can look at the... This word for consciousness is vijnana. Das Wort hier für Bewusstsein ist Vijnana.

[69:42]

And this is Vijnana. Und dies auch. And these elements are, again, this is solidity-like. Erde bedeutet auch solidität. I'm just putting this on for, it's not me. So these are ways of experiencing the world. Es sind Arten, wie man die Welt erfahren, erleben kann. And an element in the world, when you, at the same way there's an element of earth and solidity in the world, there's an element of consciousness. So there's consciousness there and consciousness there. And these are practices of consciousness. And the question is, how does this consciousness arise? How does this consciousness arise from here? And how does consciousness arise but also give the sense of individual identity?

[70:50]

Now, the distinction between karma and dharma is this sense of sequentiality as a way of perceiving and simultaneity as a way of perceiving but also karma is graspable and dharma is non-graspable so when you reside in these Skandhas, you're producing more karma. When you reside in these skandhas, you're producing less karma and you're more in the realm of dharma. Look at that. I just want to get that. Again, most of this teaching comes from the Lankabhatara Sutra.

[72:03]

And so here's just a statement in the sutra. O Gotama, the name for Buddha. O Gotama is all oneness. Is all otherness. is all otherness, is all bothness, is all non-bothness, is all subject to causality, is since it arises from manifold causes. Now, to deal with questions like that, Buddhism produces koans. Like this, the famous one of Yakujo and the Fox. We don't want to lose Helena. I found this last time I gave a lecture, this old man came up to me.

[73:21]

Who is at the back of the lecture hall. And he said, I was able to appear briefly at this lecture. Actually, I'm a fox. Because hundreds of years ago, I was practicing Buddhism. And someone asked me, and I was a teacher of Buddhism, and someone asked me, can you be free of karma or not? And I said, yes, through practice you can be free of karma. As a result of this answer, I've been a fox for 300 years. And that's presented as a koan. So what would you say to him? Because the teacher, Yakujo, says something to him which frees him from being a fox.

[74:33]

And the next morning they all go out and find a dead fox. He says, there's a dead fox on the mountain. And they all go up and they do a burial for a Zen teacher. He probably found the fox earlier in the week and did this whole number. And here's some other questions. Again, oh Gautama, is all unexplainable? Is all explainable? Is there a self? Is there a no-self? Is this world real? Is this world unreal? Is there another world? Is there no other world? Is another world existent and simultaneously non-existent?

[75:37]

In these worlds, is there liberation, enlightenment, or is there no liberation? Is there an intermediate existence? Is there no intermediate existence? And so on. So I think it's interesting. These guys were hard-working guys, you know. Trying to get this stuff out there. Okay. I'm hard-working. Make this clear. As are you. Okay. The first of the eight Vishnayagas, it's quite simple. Like, do you have a windshield? Do you have eyes? Okay. It's eye consciousness. Okay, now the sense of eye consciousness is extremely important. Okay, we have the eye. And it sees an object. And normally, when you don't see an object,

[76:40]

You're not seeing anything. What Buddhism says is there's one, two, seeing consists of three things. Eye, the object, and the field of seeing. And this is absolutely essential idealism. Now, again, let me give you my standard example of this. To give you a feeling. This is a staff. And if you concentrate on it, you can finally become one-pointed. And the ability to become one-pointed is essential for this practice.

[78:15]

So you can concentrate on this and finally eliminate all thinking but this concentration. You can be concentrating on your breath or on mu or anything. Now that you've established concentration on this I take it away. You can still maintain your concentration. The concentration arose through an object of concentration. But I can take it away and you can maintain the field of concentration. Okay, so you have a field of concentration without an object of concentration. Now I can bring this back up into the field without disturbing the field.

[79:16]

And that's called one subtle understanding of vipassana. When you can create the one pointedness, that's shamatha. When you perceive this from the field of concentration, that's vipassana. Okay. Now, when you are practicing meditation, some of you, you will come to a point where you're sitting, maybe perhaps in a session. And it takes time to settle down. And suddenly you feel extremely settled. And all thoughts disappear.

[80:31]

And there's just a kind of field of light. And you are really concentrating. Or it's effortless concentration. And then you say to yourself, oh, this must be samadhi. And it disappears. And you lose it. But that's a lot like when you're having a dream and you try to understand the dream, it disappears. So when you can maintain the field of concentration, you can have the thought, this is samadhi, and it doesn't disturb it. In other words, if you develop the field of concentration and I put this into it and it disturbs it, That's not a field of concentration. When the field of concentration is established, it's not disturbed by what you bring into it. That's clear enough? Okay, so when you can establish a field of eye consciousness in a very similar and resonantly similar way then you can get an idea of what eye consciousness is.

[81:54]

Okay, then we have Ear compasses Nose Tongue This is really very simple Body Mind associations, and here we have intent, imagination, intent, imagination, And here we have a storehouse.

[83:15]

Repository of impressions. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. This is also called the seed storehouse. Aren't the first four a part of the fifth? The first four are part of the fifth and the... It's all a part of your body.

[84:25]

The eye, the ear, the nose, the tongue. Yes and no. You can say that these four are included in here. Okay. And you can say that these five are included here. And these six plus the world are included here. And this is the point at which they work. Now as Barbara said to me, right, this could be taught over six months or a year.

[85:32]

Or ten years or six weeks. But normally this would be taught over quite a long period of time. You know, for a whole week you might work on this. But I'm not here more than once a year. So I want to give you, make this clear enough that it works in you. And can you mention what you're going to the opera last night, what you said to me? I went to the John Caves Opera last night. It was a very good experience for me too. It was an opera I put together from pieces of 200 or hundreds of different existing operas.

[86:35]

What did you say in German? What did you say in German? See, that's what I'm hoping happens, that if you get the feel of this, then it starts appearing when you go to the opera, or appearing when you do something. Without that experience of it, it won't make sense. I mean, this can't be understood intellectually. Okay. So let me... Let's see, how much time do we have? We have about 20 minutes.

[87:40]

The backbone in Zen has given up there, if you see. Oh, by the way, since you asked about a mentor, I thought I'd show you the distinction of mentor and a trained therapist. Yoda, you know Yoda. I went to Disneyland and I loved it, so they get it. Disneyland. And Ulrich, now it's clear? Yeah. Ulrich and I both wear them sometimes. Actually, George Lucas, who created this guy, his wife used to come to my lectures at Greengill. He's an acquaintance of mine. He's an acquaintance of mine. Anyway, I'm Court Jester of Buddhism.

[88:45]

Is there hope now for business? Somewhere between Jedi and Jester. Okay, so let's sit down for a moment. through the dharmas a little bit. Then we'll sit and have a break or lunch. Okay. So if I take these flowers again and we practice this first dharma. Now again. Dharma is an effort to perceive things in units. to try to get to a level where things, how things actually exist.

[90:00]

Now, in very early Buddhism, a Dharma was attempted to be a kind of atom. They tried to find the smallest units of reality. As I've said many times, the effort of, say, the Buddha, Lawrence Radiation Lab and their linear accelerator. What's the big one in Europe called? CERN, yeah. Is to try to discover the atom, the charm particle, et cetera. And we've tried to do that outside, India tried to do that inside. India spent put tremendous intellectual and experiential energy into discovering the elements of existence inside.

[91:03]

And they reduced things to tiny dharmic units. And then they discovered that these dharmas, just as the physicists did, are infinitely divisible. So the emphasis shifted from being units of reality to being perceptual units. And they actually assigned a length of time at which was the smallest length of time you could perceive something. And actually some psychologists have done studies of how quickly you can perceive something whether lines this way or this way.

[92:04]

And that is very similar to the length of time, almost exactly the length of time the Buddhists came up with. So that sense of a perceptual unit now means in practice the sense of completeness when you do something. If I can take these Think like I took the box and I separated the parts out. And what sort of, what is a unit of perception? All right. Now, the word vijnana, up there, for consciousness, jana part means to know and the vij part means parts so the word means to know the parts together first to know the parts and then to know the parts together you've already seen how fruitful

[93:15]

taking consciousness and separating it into form, feeling, perception and impulses can be.

[93:31]

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