For those of you who weren't here yesterday, this non-flipchart list. For next year, I'll contribute some, you know, you can buy a flipchart. Room in this house to store it somewhere? Yeah. Anyway, I made this list. as a list of the conditions, the situations in which we experience self. And I would say that the three most prominent, for us as experientialists and not as scientists, is the bodily sense of self, also the sense of survival.

[01:06]

which, as I often say, we really need to make that vow to stay alive. It makes a difference. And then the self as agency. And then self as imagination. The imagined self or the envisioned self. And it's the narrative and imagined self which suffers, which is vulnerable. And it's interesting, it's the very imagined self which is also vulnerable. how we suffer.

[02:26]

You're in love and a new imagined self is generated and then it's destroyed and you suffer. But the bodhisattva is also an imagined self. And again, speaking about the large sutra of perfect wisdom, In 25,000 lines. And all 25,000 lines are about the imagined self. How you transform societal and personal self, which are also imagined selves, into the reimagined bodhisattva self.

[03:42]

Yeah. Okay. So, thinking about this list last night, And asking myself what's missing from it. Or what's folded in it which hasn't been unfolded. One of the things that occurred to me was is that we have to add the mental location. When I went through this by finding the sensorial location by putting my finger on my forehead,

[04:46]

And we can understand the sensorium is also a location. No. I can get taller, can't I? Um... Um... The, um... the usefulness in making these distinctions even if they're intuitive and obvious by separating them out and choosing to emphasize these it allows you to decide to practice with them You can emphasize agency and practice with it.

[06:14]

Or you can emphasize, probably this would be better called the physical location. And of course the temporal location, which we have in Hannover, I spoke about it, which is really, you know, the experience of a durative presence established through scanning, in particular, psychotic scanning. The experience of duration on the knife edge of the present and past. Now, when I tried to sort of think of my example of a mental location, believe it or not,

[07:37]

I opened a can of dog food in the Google Earth application. Yeah, and when I opened the can of dog food in the Google Earth application, All the places where the dog food came from appeared. So the cattle-filled prairies of Texas appeared. The wheat fields of Wyoming. The corn fields of Indiana. Anyway, that is a kind of metal location. It's like to know, I mean, maybe I've got to drop this.

[09:21]

But this is how my mind works. I actually opened a can of dog food in the Google Earth application and I said, oh yeah, so that's what it means. I always enjoy a little confirmation. He knew he was finally being recognized. So also, for instance, being a vegan is a mental location. And I have a close friend who's gone from being a vegetarian to a vegan. Ich habe einen guten Freund, der von einem Vegetarier zu einem Veganer wurde. It's harder and harder to go out to dinner with him. Und es wird immer schwieriger, mit ihm zusammen essen zu gehen. But in any case, he's a vegan because someone pointed out to him how horribly chickens and cows are raised in these agricultural factories.

[10:34]

And he can't eat anything like cheese or anything anymore because he sees these cattle now they're raised. So for him that mental location is present all the time. So I'll leave it at that. Really to start studying the self we have to notice that our physical location, our temporal location and our mental location. Okay. And I'm just making the list more complicated. Or more complex. Now, here, and what I want to bring out here is, and I brought by rewriting Proust yesterday.

[12:06]

Of course I'm very happy with Proust as it is. But if I imagine Proust as a yogi, Then he would imagine why, as I said yesterday, why the taste of the madeleine and tea trance was so joyous. Why the taste of the madeleine and the cake was so joyous. You would have seen it was because of the transformation of his senses or that's what he would have noticed instead of the psychological dimensions of the memories that came up.

[13:12]

So here, if I look at agency, I want to put in personal agency and situational agency. Now this is, if I use words to describe the difference between these things, There's no difference, really, that I can easily point out in words. But if I can make the same words go in different directions... Yeah. maybe I can give you a feeling of why a situational agency is more yogic.

[14:44]

So, say that we just had a break. Say that I say, let's have a break. And that's personal agency. If I'm saying it because it's time for a break. Because, you know, we need a cup of coffee or we need to stretch our legs or something. Okay, but if I say we need a break as situational agency, Of course, both of what I'm describing occur, you know, for us. But if I only call a break, usually anyway, when the break is part of the process of the teaching, that would be situational agency.

[16:19]

Now that, again, is obvious people, you know, you do that. But the degree to which one emphasizes it makes a difference. Okay. So situational agency would be to do something not in the situation but as the situation. It's hard for me to think of examples. Yeah. It also has to do with, like Koan 3 about Nan Chuan and the cat, has to do with reading phenomena.

[17:44]

Yeah. Yeah. So the Nanchuan and the cat is, you know, we could say is the mind established in the monks by Nanchuan threatening to kill the cat. Which, you know, was a mind as short as that, but it's a mind in which you change direction. And did the monks understand that? I would say no, they didn't, but they experienced it.

[18:51]

But they didn't know how to tip it so it flowed. But Zhao Zhou, the main disciple of Nan Xuan, did. So this is like the I Ching and so forth. It's about, as typical in China, about how you read phenomena. Let's take somebody like Gaddafi. He clearly isn't reading phenomena. In other words, he could have, if he was good at reading phenomena, he could have long ago seen the energetic points at which it required transformation.

[20:02]

He could have anticipated what's going to happen and tried to stop it. Or he could have anticipated and transformed the situation. But he functioned primarily from personal self-agency and not situational self-agency. So the yogi is constantly making decisions through letting the world tell him what to do. Or her. Yeah, so the yogini, it doesn't mean you're like a robot.

[21:05]

It means you see the potential possibilities and you function through the potential possibilities. Well, we all do that. You have three jobs offered you and you take one of them. But the difference in a yogic culture is not just big things like when a job is offered you. But moment by moment you're dancing with phenomena. Because the your experience of self is a shared experience of self. It's interesting, the word self, actually the etymology of self, is separate or apart from.

[22:27]

But the etymology of a part is a share. Like when you have a part in a play, you have a share of the play. So that... A yogic culture emphasizes self as a part of a shared beingness. And in our Western culture, especially since the 1500s, with the Christian evolution of the separate individual, which again creates Western science and democracy and individualism and so forth.

[23:44]

But in a yogic culture, the experience is more that you're a share of a whole instead of separate from the whole. You're making decisions a little bit differently. Again, from a simple word like self, you can see two cultures evolving in two different directions just by the emphasis. Are you apart from or are you apart of?

[24:45]

Okay, it doesn't work as neatly in German. Now, anybody want to say something here? Yeah. What have I not understood? Holons? Holons, H-O-L-O-N-S, yeah. Exactly, it refers to this kind of mutual relation. Holographs, et cetera, yeah. Yeah, it's like that, yeah. Anyone else?

[25:47]

Yes. I'd like to add something to the point eight narrative, which is restored memory. Neuroscience tells us since some years that there's no way memory doesn't change. gets restored in a new way when you remember things. So in that sense, Proust, by experiencing the memories of his grandmother within the field of the sensorium of eating the madeleine and the tea, this memory was changed, was restored differently. So in that sense, a more wholesome self appears when you memorize things from different points in that list, I feel. So it's actually a technique to restore memories and the self in relationship to memories.

[26:53]

I am very fascinated by the new knowledge of neuroscientists, that every memory is re-saved after the memory, that is, memories constantly change, that there is no permanent memory, and that it opens up a memory depending on which field I am in, I could imagine in every point of this list, one could pick up a memory and that there is now a way to change it in the direction of a more healing development, for example, if I open the breast in the form of a sensorium, so let it come up again. And in this respect, for example, I would add to point 8, that is, the re-saving of memories. Yeah. Proust even has Albertine's mole, his male-female lover, mole move at different points in the book.

[28:02]

He says it's in different places. And it was an intentional of him to show that memory changes. All his girls have names that could be boys' names. I like your point that restoring memory from different points of view is good. Now, Usually, the research I've seen referenced, when you restore memories, you restore them slightly differently.

[29:30]

First, I only partly believe that. I don't care what you say, I know I'm right. No. When you talk about restoring memories in yogic practice, you are speaking about increasing the attentional depth of the memories. I mean, basically, of course, what this research shows is true. But my own feeling is the emphasis on the... on false memories and the distortion of memory through remembering as an always-going-on process, is somewhat overemphasized.

[30:51]

And it's true that whenever you bring a memory back, you bring it back in a new context. Memories occur contextually. And context transforms memories. But part of the practice I want to speak about next if we have time before lunch. All these practices are compressed. I can take any one of them and I can speak about it in such detail like I bored everybody for a few minutes. So I have to decide what level of uncompressing is good for each situation. Decompress. Okay. So what I... try to do to experiment with memory is I go to places which I have been before or I look up quotations or texts I remember

[32:32]

Is that comment in such and such a book I haven't looked at in 20 years actually on page 55? I look it up and it is. Or I go back to a hotel room I haven't been in in a long time. And I ask, there's something different about this hotel room. What have you done? You've moved, you've put a different, yes. I'm always exploring. How much are they changed or not changed? In my own case, I find it's very little changed usually. Now, is that just because I have a good memory? And I learned very early when I worked for the university, I had about a thousand phone numbers memorized.

[33:50]

At least. And I learned very early to memorize them with my body. Like if you ask a Chinese or Japanese person, what's a particular kanji? Character. Yeah, I've taught this one. And someone like Kaz knows 10,000 or 20,000 kanji. He kind of creates a feeling of the kanji and then he... Oh, that one, yeah. So it may be that people who create more bodily memories Remember better, I don't know. But I'm always wary of recent research.

[35:06]

And I test it. But of course, basically it's true. But to what degree is it true? Okay, so I want to talk about something else, but first I want to see what anybody else has to say. I spoke a little bit about what you asked earlier. Yes, I found it very helpful to hear again from you how important this physical feeling of self is.

[36:09]

I found it very helpful to hear again from you how important the bodily sense of self is. You asked us yesterday to just put out our definition of self. And I tried to feel out this question for the last 24 hours. And an important part for myself is this bodily self, self as space, self in space, self as energy, or energy field, and how much the image of the self is influenced by these factors.

[37:20]

So my bodily sense of self has on one hand clear-cut borders, but at the same time also fuzzy borders. And so has my imagined self. Okay, thanks. Anyone else? Everyone else? Yes. I have a question concerning memory. Is the memory of trauma or a very hurtful thing always clear or clearly defined? Well, of course it depends on the person and on the trauma and all kinds of factors, right?

[38:47]

Of course. Also, natürlich hängt es von vielen Faktoren ab, von der Person oder von der Art des Traumas und so weiter. And one of the, seems to be one of the current emphases, one of the emphases of current psychology is thinking in terms of dealing with trauma. Isn't that true? And that's one area where I think there could be a clear usefulness to therapists of working with trauma the way Buddhism works with your experience. Thank you. What? They do. They do. They use Buddhism? Yes. Yeah, okay. Because, I mean, trauma is memory, bodily, physical memory.

[39:48]

And as you discover more and more ways to participate in the mind and the structure of the mind, you can transform, change, how you relate to that memory, how it functions within you, and so forth. Of course, in Buddhism, the effort would never be to get rid of it. The effort would be just to change your relationship to it. Now, I often have said, you can concentrate on this pencil or this striker.

[41:16]

And I say, now that you've established a concentration on a one-pointedness on this striker, maybe I can take it away. And you stay concentrated. Now, what is the object of your concentration? Consciousness itself is the object of your concentration. So you can concentrate on consciousness. Now you can bring the stick back into the concentrated consciousness. and view it from the point of view of the concentrated consciousness instead of having the stick generate the concentrated consciousness. Now another way to work with this

[42:18]

is to not bring it back and just sort of like just look into the space in front of you feel into the space in front of you hear into the space smell into the space and see if you can just stabilize that field of consciousness So it doesn't need to go anywhere, doesn't need to add anything to it, etc. And can you see it? Or is it invisible? You can maybe feel it, but it's not seeable, etc. You ask questions of it. Now, to do this, you have to have already developed, as a yoga practice, a non-interfering observing awareness.

[43:33]

It's like when you're doing zazen and you have an experience of samadhi. And as soon as you notice it, it goes away. And if you're inexperienced, that's what happens. If you're experienced, you can bodily hold the samadhi and observe it and study it. That's a non-interfering observing awareness. Probably one of the two or three most basic yogic skills all the teachings depend on. Okay, so you can just, every now and then, just stay with this contentless consciousness

[44:46]

And get familiar with stabilizing it. And get familiar with... You can get familiar in various ways. You can ask, is it square, is it round, is it... Et cetera. The sphere, does it have no shape? And you develop an ability to feel it and sustain it. So again, one of the assumed skills of the Prajnaparamita teachings, for example, is developing a sustained awareness and a stable awareness. Okay, now if we take the practice of naming, And I'm thrilled that a number of you, or maybe all of you, tried it out.

[46:29]

I mean, not because I care whether you do what I suggest, but I'm just so happy you've discovered it. It makes me feel better about the world. Okay, so maybe we can talk about a three-fold practice of naming. One is you practice naming. As we've talked about. And again, all these practices are incubatory. I can only tell you a few surfaces. And the term of these practices is usually a lot more than nine months. So I can verbalize a few surfaces and if your intelligence doesn't get in the way and the idea you understand

[47:43]

It's always better to assume you don't understand. It's almost always wrong when you assume you understand. Non-understanding is much more fruitful. And if everything is an activity and not an entity, then incubation is this treating everything as an activity. Okay, so naming. Now, if you practice naming, things often become more vivid. then things often come toward you, as you mentioned.

[49:05]

You're, in a way, liberating when you name something in a way that cuts off associations. You're liberating it from associations, freeing it. And when you liberate it from associations, you also liberate attention. dann befreit er auch die Aufmerksamkeit. And again, attention is a form of mind. Und die Aufmerksamkeit ist eine Form des Geistes. So the naming not only liberates the object from an object-defined world, also befreit dieses Benennen nicht nur ein Objekt von einem...

[50:23]

but it also liberates attentional awareness and creates the possibility for sustained attentional awareness. And one of the keys to the prajnaparamita practice again is the ability to sustain awareness. And even Saint Augustine assumed that you couldn't sustain awareness. But you couldn't. Could not. Most of the experiences by Western mystics talk about how fleeting awareness is. But all the Buddha's teachings say you can actually sustain it when

[51:31]

And that ability to sustain awareness is also the ability to restore, in the sense I meant, memory, which you're not convinced about. It sounds like you're not convinced. Okay, so now I gave you another fold of That's one fold of name. I already gave you the form, the fold of now naming namelessness. Okay. Now one of the things that happens when you name naming, when you name, when you practice naming,

[52:48]

Even in the first attempt some of you have done this. There's a vividness which begins to appear. And this vividness How old is he? Somebody is going with him. Fourteen. Fourteen. He gets up like maybe. Yeah, and he's got four to fall down on, and I have two. So, at the point where this vividness is embodied... you use the vividness as a signature of the practice.

[54:05]

And instead of practicing the naming now, you practice the vividness. And this practice of in the same way you would name something, instead you notice its vividness. Or you notice its clarity. So you experience on every object you... experience a clarity or a brightness, every object shines. And when you begin to feel the shine of everything, And it's interesting when you look up the etymology of words, many English words, the root is shine.

[55:32]

So now instead of practicing naming, you're practicing the... perceptual clarity. And that also helps you develop sustained attentional awareness. Now, in a like manner, if you incubate the practice of naming namelessness, This turns into a practice of repeated conceptionless. And this stabilizes attentional awareness. So a stabilized, sustainable attentional awareness is again a basic, more advanced yogic skill.

[57:02]

What does that do? It's an advanced yogic skill. As non-interfering observing awareness is a beginning of the yogic skill, this is an advanced yogic skill. And for those Buddhists who believe in reincarnation, it's considered the way in which you can explore past lives. Is das die Art und Weise, wie man vergangene Leben erforschen kann? But for, you know, neophytes, dumb bunnies like me, who are stuck with one life, it's a way to explore one's past.

[58:26]

Ist es die Art und Weise, die Vergangenheit zu erforschen? You take some vivid thing like the way your desk looked in third grade. And you see if you can have enough sustained attentional awareness to extend it to the room, to the students who are in front of you, to what the teacher looks like. even to the next day. And this is considered part of developing a rich sense of self. Now I'm feeling a little badly.

[59:33]

Because you're not really supposed to tell people all these things. Because they may try to make the shoe fit. They try to do it instead of actually discovering it for themselves over five or ten years. Suzuki Roshi never told me these things. He hinted at them so I knew later that I discovered them. But I never started saying these things until I started coming to Europe. And that's Martin Kramer's fault. He kept inviting me back. Then I found I wasn't speaking as in San Francisco.

[60:51]

I was always speaking to people in monastic experience. So I found I had to start speaking about things that generally you don't because you don't want to rob people of discovering it for themselves. But at the same time, I think we have a wonderful, mature Lei Sangha, so I'm happy. But I often wonder what I'm doing. I don't know. But when you realize you've said too much, it's a very good time to go to lunch. But I hope it was helpful.

[61:56]

Okay, now, because we're... Are we going to end at what time this afternoon? Seven, five, three... What do you think? As usual, four or five? Five o'clock. All right. Well, it's not... I got no place to go.

[62:06]

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