I want to go back to this performance of my walking around the room. I mean, I don't think probably most of you have not ever been at a lecture where the person who's supposed to be giving the lecture gets up and walks around the room. See how easy it is to be unique. To do something for the first time. And every moment is like that, actually. So because you didn't have any expectation that I would do that, you probably thought, maybe he's going to the toilet.

[01:02]

Or maybe he wants to open a window. Or maybe he wants to say hello to his old friend Volker. So all of those thoughts come up. Something like that. Now, where did those thoughts come from? They're, of course, your self-accumulated experience. Because in other circumstances, you've seen people get up to open a window or something. Weil du in anderen Umständen vielleicht schon mal gesehen hast, wie jemand aufsteht und ein Fenster öffnet oder so. But I just walked around the room. Aber ich bin einfach um den Raum herum gegangen.

[02:02]

Now if I danced and sang at the same time, which I'm incapable of doing, but if I had, you really would have been surprised. Wenn ich jetzt aufgestanden wäre und getanzt und gesungen hätte, was ich übrigens überhaupt nicht kann, aber wenn ich es trotzdem gemacht hätte, dann wäre ich wirklich überrascht gewesen. So when these ideas come up, maybe he's going to open a window. Can we call that an experience of self? I can't think of anything else we could call it. Because it's clearly based on your experience. And we're trying to figure out what the word self means here. And we're also looking at that we feel consistently that we are a self. Or we feel consistently we're a body.

[03:22]

But at my age of 76, I notice my body is not sure it's consistently a body anymore. And Neil, who's a much younger man, He has his knees, his hips, and his ears. His body is getting to be pretty inconsistent. That's right. And when I got up this morning, I looked in the mirror.

[04:22]

And I thought I was burnt. I mean, no, on a cage. No, that's not Bernd, that's just unshaved me. And then I thought, shall I shave or not? And I thought, well, today I'll be an unshaved person. I feel more like an unshaped person. Now, if I'd shaved, I would have felt a little different. So what is this consistent experience of self? Now, I think women feel differently when their hair is down instead of up or something.

[05:37]

Or whether it's short instead of long. Or whether, as in Nicole's case, it's gone. I don't know if I should say this, but she told me last night that her father wasn't entirely happy a few years ago when she decided to shave her head. It's not the way daughters are supposed to look. Yeah. But now, he told her a few days ago that he hopes she never grows her hair out again. Because he likes, I guess, the way you look now.

[06:38]

The shape of your head. Okay, so maybe Nicole with long hair and Nicole with a shaved head are two different people or maybe they're with long hair she's still the person with no hair and with no hair she's still the person with long hair Oder vielleicht ist sie mit langen Haaren immer noch der gleiche Mensch, der sie ohne Haare ist, und ohne Haare der gleiche Mensch, der sie mit langen Haaren ist. But maybe when she has short hair, she begins to manifest a personality that's there, but is undeveloped. Aber vielleicht fängt sie an, wenn sie keine Haare hat, eine Persönlichkeit zu haben, which we all know somehow, we can choose what kind of self we want to be.

[07:41]

As soon as you know that, you're practicing Buddhism. Like you can choose the self you want to be. Taking the precepts is a process of choosing the self you want to be without wearing this. Yeah. But then who made this decision to choose the self you want to be? Well, sometimes there's a wise self that makes decisions.

[08:41]

And sometimes the self doesn't make such wise decisions. So, So what is this self that makes decisions? Is the agency, the decisional self, the agency self? The decision. He's the Kaiser of transactions. Give me a moment, this is what agency is. That middler. Yeah. Can we have the sentence again?

[10:01]

Well, I don't know what it was. I mean, you know, I'm living in the moment. All right. What is the decisional self or the self as agent? This is a basic idea in Western philosophy that the agency of self, I don't know what word is used by Heidegger, for instance, or something. There is a word for it. So I'm just bringing up problems here on this prologue, Deggy. What is the self which makes a decision that's wise? To study the self. And what is the decision what's the self that's not so wise? And is the What is the observation of the self that's wise or not wise?

[11:23]

Now, is that observation of the self being wise or stupid? Is that a regression? There's a self that observes the self, which observes the self, etc., Well, we don't want to get into an infinite regression. So what is the observing of the observing? And what's the reference point for the observing? These are all the stuff you go through when you try to look for the self. Is the body the self?

[12:23]

Is the decision-making the self? Is the observing the self? So at least we can come to the conclusion, even now, that there's no permanent self. There's no continuous, consistent self. Okay. So, what, is there some point in our life that is consistent? Now, consistent, I was told by Neil Cole and Neil, that there's a problem in Deutsch with the word consistent. And it's consistent that there's two words that help them.

[13:34]

But in English, consistent means to stand together. Sister is to stand and con is together. And so what stands together or stays together. And Heidegger makes a point that what stays together is close to what being means. So now, what's the problem with the word consistent? I'm asking you. The problem is that there's not one word that captures all the connotations that the English word has.

[14:47]

So there's no consistent word for consistent. There's no consistent word for consistent, yeah. When you look into a dictionary, you find like 10 different words for it, and they all describe a slightly different angle at what it looks like. Like continuous is one. The German word for continuous, kontinuierlich, and then permanent. beständig is one translation for it, then belonging together is one for it, zusammengehörig, or just plainly consistent, but that's not one of the words that it's easy to feel bodily. We don't use it that much in that context usually. I see, okay. Well, I can't solve this problem. Das Problem kann ich nicht lösen. But... Again, walking around the room. If the various ideas that came up from your self-accumulated experience were all ideas that arose from your past experience, associations,

[15:55]

But probably none of them guessed that I was doing it because you were manifest, potentially manifest Buddhas. Okay. What was consistent? Well, the mental finger was consistent. The mental finger of attention. So in other words, you had various ideas, associations come up that I think we have to call self. Also in anderen Worten, ihr hattet verschiedene Ideen, Vorstellungen, die aufgestiegen sind, von denen ich glaube, dass wir die selbst nennen können.

[17:12]

Und diese unterschiedlichen Assoziationen, das war die Grundlage dafür, eine Entscheidung zu treffen, was ich da eigentlich tue. Aber darin One thing that was consistent was that your attention was consistent while I walked around, or fairly consistent. I didn't see any of you listening to an iPod. Okay, so let's imagine in Buddhism. Buddhism said to itself, thinking about this for centuries, I'm doing it this weekend, this debate I've been sharing with you now has been going on for centuries.

[18:18]

Say one of the decisions they, the Buddhist tradition made is let's look at what's consistent in life. If self is inconsistent, if the experience of self is various, if the experience of self is discontinuous, And yet it would be important to have an experience of continuity in your life.

[19:25]

What can we shift attention to to find something consistent? Well, the decision was, we shift attention to attention, and attention itself. We shift attention to the it-ness of self. I'm testing my transit. We shift attention to the it-ness of self. Okay.

[20:27]

So let's say that you... We're not talking about non-self. Let's talk about shifting attention from self-continuity to attentional continuity. Now, if you shift attention, if you... And English doesn't do this any better than Deutsch. If you shift attention, if you shift continuity to attention, attention as continuity is kind of boring.

[21:46]

It's kind of neutral. It doesn't have the excitement of suffering. Or it has less suffering. I mean, self carries a lot of baggage. All your traumatage, that's luggage that's got trauma in it. But attention is often the porter. The porter, the one who carries it. The porter for self. In other words, your attention is edited by self. And your attention can carry the anxiety that originates in self.

[22:53]

Now, Buddhism feels that self is, while self is a vehicle of continuity, But self is also the vehicle for suffering. The vehicle for delusion. The vehicle for a biased way of looking at the world. a vehicle for the narrowness of self-referential thinking. Now, if you accept that self is the vehicle of continuity and the vehicle of suffering, Say you conclude that.

[24:08]

Is there an alternative? Now that's a real existential question. Is there an alternative? Okay, one possible alternative is to bring is to create an attentional point in your life. Now the attentional point itself is, I never said quite what I'm saying before, and so I just came up with the idea of an attentional point. And I don't know how well it works, but I'll try it out as a phrase. Okay, if you shift your sense of continuity from the self-point, to an attentional point, an attentional point which might carry the baggage of self, but an attentional point which doesn't always carry the baggage of self.

[25:41]

For instance, the attentional point after a while, I mean, it couldn't carry the idea that I'm going to open the window. The attentional point in my walking around the room might have been various ideas you had. But it didn't carry the idea that I was circumambulating the Buddha. Now, if the next, when we start this afternoon, if I walk around the room again, or around from the other direction, then you might say, is he circumambulating the Buddha?

[26:57]

Or is he expressing, if you know enough about Buddhism, Is he expressing the outward movement of compassion by going one direction and the inward movement of wisdom by going the other direction? And if you read Koans much, Sometimes the person being under discussion, the protagonist or the antagonist, at the question of the roshi or teacher, he gets up and shakes out his sleeves, because he has good sleeves,

[27:58]

And then circumambulates the room in a certain direction or goes from east to west or west to east. But if my attention, if my experience of consistency my experience of continuity, is carried in a relatively self-free attentional point, is carried in a relatively self-free attentional point. And while that attentional point may be rather boring, There's no plug there for your iPod. But the attentional, the consistently held to attentional point. draws out things from the world.

[29:33]

But just now, having my attentional point, including you, I came up with the term attentional point, which I've never thought of before. And if I wasn't here with you, I wouldn't have thought of those two words putting together that way. So within my sentences, There are structures underneath the sentences. I think Humboldt pointed this out. He was born 100 years before I was born.

[30:34]

Exactly. That these structures underneath the sentence structures are a simultaneous exploration of language possibilities. So, attentional point rose up as one of the possibilities in language, but through my being with you. So my point is, is that the attentional, while the attentional point itself seems rather boring and less interesting than the suffering himself, By the way, in English suffer also means just to undergo, to experience.

[31:40]

while I'm not undergoing the highs and lows of self-referencing experience, by shifting my feeling of continuity to the attentional point, indem ich mein Gefühl für Kontinuität in diesen Aufmerksamkeitspunkt hineinflagere, gleichzeitig zahlt uns dieser Aufmerksamkeitspunkt zurück dafür, dass er langweilig ist, indem er die Umwelt zum Vorschein bringt. Instead of the Weltenschwang, it calls forth the Umwelt.

[33:07]

Is that a word everybody understands? Your immediacy, your immediate situation that is defining you. Yeah, die Umwelt, also die Umwelt. Okay. So, anybody want to say something? Yes. So is this attentional point, isn't that just the noticing of things? Yeah. But you're shifting your sense of continuity to noticing. rather than noticing what arises through self-referential thinking. Okay. Something else? Yeah? What about the attentional field?

[34:26]

We haven't got there yet. We have to start thinking about the attentional point. What happens when you go to sleep? Where does the attentional point go? Anyway, there's further questions, but right now I'm just trying to create the possibility you can shift from self-continuity to attentional continuity. more consistently and more often you make this shift. Now let's just imagine a person is having a lot of anxiety and various kinds of problems. Yeah, they feel unsure about themselves, etc.

[35:43]

Or maybe they're inflated about themselves. And they go to see a therapist. And the therapist says, $50. That would be cheap, right? That would be cheap. Please shift your attention from self-referential thinking to the consistency of an attentional point. And don't come back until you've accomplished this. And have another 50? No. They might... What would be the case is they wouldn't have the capacity to do this. If they could do it, it would change everything.

[37:05]

As soon as they accomplished it to some degree, their anxiety would subside and so forth. It would come back sometimes. It wouldn't be so ever-present. Self-referential thinking would be simply less. So maybe the practice of looking for the self is discovering not non-self, but less self. you can feel when you're really engaged with self-reflecting thinking, you will feel better. Okay. But the average person coming to a therapist who told him that wouldn't know how to do that.

[38:26]

So much of Buddhism is trying to teach you how to do that. That's the point of daily meditation. That's the point of crash courses called sashims. Do you have an expression like crash course? It's crash course. Okay. Last schedule. Crash course from December 1st. Anti-self, not anti-self. Less self, crash course. Okay, someone else. What struck me was the term focus.

[39:30]

For me, a self-centered intention or attention means a relatively narrow focus on something or someone, while a less self-loaded attention has a wider focus. I was thinking about the word focus because my experience is that when I think in a self-referential context, then I feel like I have a really narrow focus, just focusing on one thing or something, whereas when there's less self in my focus, then there's much more of a feeling that it's a wider field, a wider sense of focus. Which basically means that if the self was disappeared, that then the focus would be a 360 degree angle. That's a good image. But Suki Rishi would say, when the self disappears, the self covers everything.

[40:31]

Now that's a special meaning of self in that context. I remember I was struck, I would think I was 17, 18, 16, living in the YMCA and my family had moved to New York. I stayed on to work for the summer as a lifeguard in the swimming pool. I guess I'm telling you the context because it was the first time I lived by myself, you know, and so forth. By myself. I'm telling you about this whole connection because it was the first time I lived all by myself. So did I live next door to myself or just by myself?

[42:02]

Yeah. These are all English games. Yeah, that's, yeah, doesn't work. And I read an article in the local newspaper. The Pittsburgh Post Gazette. In the Post Gazette? Yeah, that was the name of the newspaper, Pittsburgh. I used to be a delivery boy for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. I was very good at throwing newspapers from my bicycle directly onto the porch and not onto the roof. But sometimes under the roof. Anyway, the article said, had interviewed a whole bunch of people. And they, successful people and unsuccessful people. And it asked the question, how much do you think about yourself?

[43:18]

And all the most successful people said they almost never think about themselves. And the more unsuccessful you were, the more you thought about yourself. So in Buddhism we make you all think about yourself in the beginning. So that you forget yourself. And Dogen said to study yourself is to forget yourself. And to forget the self is to be identified by all things. And to be identified by all things is to be enlightened. Okay.

[44:26]

I hope we have much.

[44:27]

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