Good morning. Good morning. Okay, now the topic again that was given to me is mindfulness. Mindfulness is not enlightenment. Maybe there's some relationship but in any case mindfulness is a practice. In which you change the continuity of your being. And As I said last night, when you change the continuity, you change everything.

[01:08]

Now last night I tried to give you fairly briefly an overview or interview of mindfulness practice. I always am amazed that Ulrike can translate all these things. I hardly know what I'm saying and she seems to know better than I do. So, I wonder how she can be so clear when I'm not sure that I am. Probably when you translate it to yourself, it gets even clearer.

[02:17]

Yeah, I hope so. Okay. If I'm going to talk about mindfulness, I have to talk about breath. And my first reaction when I have to talk about breath is I think, oh, my poor students who are familiar with me have to hear me talk about breath again. It's like a breather. A breather in English means a break. On the other hand, I've been practicing now for 30, consciously practicing for, intentionally practicing for 34 years.

[03:31]

I should tell you I've been practicing five years, then you'd be impressed at how developed I am. But if I say I've been practicing longer than some of you are old, you think, oh, I'd better try something else. LAUGHTER But when I look at, so when I start thinking about, speaking about breath, I recognize that through these years I've actually gone over the shall we say, in breath practice. I could say that, I will say that my body, breath and mind are pretty much together all the time.

[04:45]

But when I notice that and think about speaking about breath, I realize how much I could do and how limited my practice is at the same time. Now, if I'm going to speak about mindfulness to you, I also have to speak about where I have to encourage you to practice. When I first met my teacher, Suzuki Roshi, I was struck by him.

[06:21]

He was quite a marvelous person. And I, of course, wish all of you could have met him. But after the pleasure of being around him, going to his lectures and observing him and so forth. At some point I concluded this must be an enlightened person. If he's not, then whatever he is, is good enough for me. Anyway, I had that feeling. But then I also of course noticed that he was a Japanese person, that was pretty obvious. And I always thought he was much bigger than me, but then when I'd see photographs, I'd realize he was much smaller than me.

[07:44]

So it wasn't so obvious to me that actually he was Japanese and smaller. He seemed big and perfect at first. But I understood that I was going to practice to study his enlightenment or observe his way of being. And I also realized I was going to study his his Japanese-ness. Because I wondered, of course, how much is this Japanese and how much is this Buddhism, his own originality.

[08:47]

And studying or beginning to observe his to see if I could understand the degree to which what he did was cultural and culturally Japanese. It made me notice my own culture and study my own culture. And actually out of that perception I eventually went to Japan, was perhaps the main reason I went to Japan, other than that he asked me to go, so that was maybe the most main reason. But I'd noticed we would at some point, we established what I would call a kind of domain of attunement.

[09:51]

And I would know what he was going to say next, or if he started a lecture, I would know how the lecture would go, even if I'd never heard him say, talk on this subject again. So our minds became quite related, except sometimes it would feel like we came to a similar feeling, but then the decision of what to do would be different. So, noticing that difference, it seemed to be usually a cultural difference. So when I went to Japan for four years and then regularly for about 20 years, I was studying not just Buddhism, but also his culture.

[11:16]

And the third thing I noticed, the third area that I practiced with him or in which I studied him, Was that I saw that his Japanese-ness and his enlightenment didn't entirely explain what I was seeing. And the key to both, I began to realize, was his practice, his craft of practice, his practice of the way. And what transformed his culture was practice.

[12:37]

And what freed him from his own culture was practice. And what created the conditions for his enlightenment and his enlightening way of being was practice. And the medium for that practice was breath and mindfulness. I read an article recently that I actually shared with Martin too that interested me. It's a study, a psychological study of a report on research on so-called expert performance. And one of the theses is that one of the biggest differences is between people, is not between the ordinary person and the professional person, but the very best people in a profession and the ordinary people in a profession.

[14:09]

Like athletes, musicians, artists, doctors and so forth. And the people who seem to have an uncanny ability, it's not explainable, people generally have said, oh, that's because they have some uncanny ability. And what seems to be the actual difference is the amount of time they practice. They looked at, for example, violinists who were at the very top and then good and then sort of best in their mute orchestras.

[15:25]

And they seemed to all have similar promise when they were young, but when they were older, the very best had practiced 15,000 hours, the next level 10, the next level 7,500. So what I'm saying is if you practice for 35, 38 years or something and you could have put in a huge number of hours, but you put in some, it's still pretty good. Something happens when you just do it. And just doing it is more important than almost any other factor. If you have patience with no results.

[17:05]

I remember a friend of mine, a poet, Robert Duncan, saying when a young person comes to him, two young people come to him with poems, He said one person may be very talented but I look at the other person and I can see for some reason he's just going to do this all his life. He says I have almost no interest in the talented one. So, this is all to encourage you. No matter whatever you think of yourself, practice works if you just do it. And the just doing it really becomes powerful when it actually becomes the continuity of your being.

[18:23]

So it becomes, again, When I actually start thinking about breath, it's a joy to have the excuse talking with you, to come back to talking about mindfulness and breath. Now mind, in German you don't have a word for mind. In English, in general, we don't have words for Buddhism because it's a different territory than the English language identifies. But the word mind in English is actually a fortunate, you know, it fits quite well, it's a good translation.

[19:27]

So I guess we can just use mind Because mindfulness is also quite a good translation. Now I used the word elixir last night to describe mind. And elixir is also an interesting word. It goes back into the Arabic, I believe, through Greek, but it means not only the underlying principle, but it also means the underlying substance. And it also means that which cures all ills and increases longevity.

[20:30]

And if there is an elixir, I think it must be mind and mind joined to breath. Now, part of the practice of mindfulness is to discover mind, which is not brain or thinking or feeling and so forth. That also isn't contained in the idea of consciousness. So we need some way, some approach. You have to start somewhere.

[21:57]

And you have your thoughts. And you have your breath. And the discovery is that bringing thought and breath together is the way to discover mind. So first you have to study breath. Or become aware of your breath. And ideally you're going to come to the point that you are always aware of your breath. As I'm speaking now, I feel my breath in my words. And I feel my breath not only coming into my words, but also coming into my body. So the idea is to first become familiar with your breath and then slowly bring mind, body and breath together in a common awareness.

[23:30]

Now, it doesn't mean that you punish yourself for not achieving that. And it doesn't mean that you don't sometimes just relax into your normal habits and be unmindful as hell. But even then you're aware you're not mindful. Which is a kind of mindfulness. At least it's a good excuse. Now, I emphasized, yesterday I said the main practices of Buddhism are mindfulness, meditation and analysis.

[24:51]

Analysis isn't so much thinking as it's... The word analysis in English means to separate things into their parts. And the word vijnana, which is very basic in practice, means to know things through their parts. The vijnanas are each sense field. It means to know each sense field separately and then to be able to put them together in different combinations. Literally it's a craft. Now it's pretty difficult to practice unless at some point you recognize you are in possession of your own life.

[26:02]

Now, we won't worry about, I hope, unless you want to worry about it at the end of the seminar, who is in possession of your life. But if you have a feeling of my life is my own possession, the deeper you recognize that, it's the beginning of practice. So if you apply a little analysis to breath, what are the ingredients, the parts of breath? Well, that's fairly simple. You have two lungs. Two nostrils. One mouth. What else? You get a long breath and short breaths.

[27:19]

And the breath can come in one nostril, out the other, or vice versa. And actually during the day it changes. And you're usually using a different part of the brain, left or right, depending on which nostril you're breathing through. And if you're distracted or you want to do creative work, you can change your mind by changing which nostril your breath goes through. Yeah, now you can say, well, this is awfully mechanical, you know. Well, it is true. There's a craft here. You are stuff. But then there's the intention to do this and the ability to notice. Mm-hmm. And then you have the question of whether your exhale and inhale are the same length or not.

[29:03]

And part of practice is simply to take a little time each day, when you look out the window, look at a tree, or when you're doing meditation perhaps. Is slowing down your breath and lengthening your breath and evening your breath so that the exhale and inhale are the same length pretty much. Now we speak about the breath body. Now what animates the corpse, if a corpse could come to life, is mind, feelings and so forth. And in Buddhism we don't call the corpse the body, we call what animates the body, the body.

[30:21]

It's the body in the sense of it's an own organizing field or self-organizing field. Most of us live in a thought body. And when you meditate, you think, geez, I can't stop thinking, etc. It's not that you can't stop thinking. It's that you can't get out of your thought body. So part of the practice of mindfulness is to create another body for being other than the thought body. And you would be surprised, only in Buddhist teaching, how many possible bodies there are to establish the continuity of being.

[31:30]

But the first gate is the breath body. And you begin to establish the breath body by, first of all, discovering your breath and finding a continuousness, a continuity in your breath. So your breath doesn't jump around so much. So your breath breathes itself. It isn't just tied to whether you're anxious or busy or whatever. So beginning this study and this practice, you find a little bit of time each day to notice your breath.

[32:55]

To notice whether your breath is long or short. Whether you're breathing with your upper chest or with your diaphragm. And what emotions and feelings tend to go with your breathing? And then sometimes you see if you can just settle into your breath, noticing what the average length of your breath is and lengthening it a little. And making the exhale and inhale more or less the same length. Now two more ingredients you have in your breath is the pause at the top of an inhale and the pause at the bottom of the exhale.

[34:26]

And you'll find if you lengthen either of those pauses, there's a kind of opening that occurs. Anyway, the breath is a treasure, a treasure that everyone has and most people, I think unfortunately, don't explore. And if you really do develop, I'm going to take a little break now, and if you really do develop your breath, it creates the conditions for mind, body and the phenomenal world to come together in a kind of visceral coherence.

[35:42]

But it starts with the intention to do it, and the determination to do it. And it starts with homeopathic doses of practice. 10, 15 minutes, half an hour a day of paying attention to your breath. And in this practice of looking at the length and evenness, maybe only 10 or 15 breaths a day. Even these little small amounts of practice begin to introduce you and make you familiar in ways that aren't even clear at first with another way of being.

[36:51]

Another way to discover yourself and make space for your processes, whatever they are. Okay, shall we have a mindless, I mean mindful, maybe, what, half an hour? Mini-mouse. I'm a feminist.

[38:07]

You think I'm an artist? I met him last year, but he was quieter. At least you couldn't hear it too clearly. Well, generally I start out sitting seminars at the beginning of a period with a little sitting. But several of you have made me feel like I'm a sadomasochist if I ask you to sit.

[39:08]

By causing you this agony. So, I mean, I don't know what to say except that it is a skill to sit. And you actually have to make a physical commitment to it, to do it regularly. By physical commitment I mean you have to keep, as I mentioned in the last seminar, these hinges open.

[40:15]

If you don't keep these hinges open and loose, it becomes pretty hard to sit, you know. But in the yogic view of the body, these hinges are where are the gates in which chi flows and mind and body psychologically flow. Since we're here we're talking about mindfulness, which is a more general practice than sitting meditation. We won't sit much, but a little bit.

[41:18]

So you'll join me in sitting for at least a few minutes. And you can sit on a chair if you want, you know. Hang from the ceiling by ropes. You can lie down. As long as you don't snore. And keep me awake with the light. I'd like any thing you'd like to bring up about what we've talked about, mindfulness or sitting practice if you like, or the view of mindfulness and so forth.

[42:31]

You see how mindful I am? Hmm? Yes. There was one point I felt uneasy about when you said it and to summarize it, as I understood it, it was the more you do something, the better you are. And for me, it's somehow not the right way because I have the feeling that in order to live a full life, we have to have an integrative life and to live as many possibilities as possible and not to specialize too much. So if you have to be, if you want to be very good in this topic, you have to specialize. You only do this thing and nothing else. And so your life becomes very narrow. And that's not a goal for me.

[43:52]

That's the right way. So what do you think about that? Yes, in German. The more we learn, the more we concentrate and the more we do something, the better we can do it. And that's a kind of specialization for me. And while I have the idea that we all have an integrative approach to our work, where we try to provide as many opportunities as possible. I understand. It brings you out from mindfulness, actually. You can answer the question.

[45:17]

Well, I think because I presented it rather generally. In my experience, people I know who are good at things, not talking about Buddhism now, Singing or athletics or physics, say. They tend to integrate everything they do, and it may be a variety of things, through a kind of viewpoint resting in their main interests. In fact, I think my own experience is for creativity a great deal of randomness is necessary. For me, at least, Time Magazine sometimes can be as useful as the Surangama Sutra.

[46:35]

If I had to choose one or the other only, I think I wouldn't choose Time Magazine. But a certain randomness is powerful if it's related to a viewpoint that is making use of the randomness. And a certain coincidence becomes very powerful when it is in relation to a view that simply channels this coincidence. But in Buddhism it's not that kind of thing. You're not specializing in that way, of course. I mean, mindfulness and your breathing is present in whatever you do, whether you're an accountant or a mathematician.

[47:48]

Mindfulness and breathing are present in everything you do, whether you are a book holder or a mathematician. So I think that something like practice, which covers everything, you can bring yourself to it, and the more you do bring yourself to it, the more effective it is. It's a kind of deep familiarity joined with consciousness or intention. Okay? Good enough?

[48:51]

All right. Can I say something? Yes. I don't think you present it in the way that one is better than the other. It's just more like the phenomena. To study excellent performance, what is that and what causes it? Partly I'm speaking also to the idea we have in general and often attached to Buddhism that some kind of insight or enlightenment experience is the most crucial thing. And from the point of view of Buddhism enlightenment as an experience is almost inconsequential. How can I express it?

[49:59]

An experience occurs in time, has a before and after. And enlightenment means more deeply something that doesn't occur in time. In the usual sense of time. So, in any case, Buddha's practice primarily is a way and a craft of being. And so the Buddhist practice is mainly simply a path, a path of being and a way of being.

[51:02]

Okay, something else. Yes. I have a question about breathing. I have noticed that I sometimes come to a point where I fear that the breath is out. I have a question about breath. When I watch my breath, I can reach a point where I almost feel my breath is going to stop. And that creates a certain kind of fear. I'd like you to say something about that. I understand, yeah. Well, of course, I don't know you well enough to know exactly how you're breathing. And part of practicing together is you actually intuitively coordinate your breathing with the people you practice with and study their breathing by joining yours with theirs.

[52:17]

So then you know when a person speaks about breath, I would know what they meant, really. But in general, the problem with when it's... Well, first of all... Well, let me see. In general, the problem with breathing when it's stopped is you're stopping it up here in your upper chest. Yes. And when you stop your breath, it changes your chemistry and your air in your brain, and there's a good reason to feel anxious. But if your breathing practice becomes developed, it's outside of kind of psychological realm.

[53:22]

You can use it psychologically as a practice like Stan Grof does and so forth. But for a meditator, your breath doesn't stop so much as it becomes so slow. It's the equivalent of stopped. Maybe you're only breathing three or four times a minute or less even sometimes. But it's almost stopped, but it feels like a continuity. It doesn't feel like stopped. And we also connect, I'm sorry I'm giving such an elaborate answer, but, you know, the way I think, I guess.

[54:44]

We also connect concentration with stopping the breath because normally, like a watchmaker doing something, they stop their breath in order to do something minutely. So the concentration of meditation is a field concentration, not a point concentration. And so when it's identified with the more common form of concentration, we tend to stop our breath. Last point, there's also a way in which we're weaving mind and breath together.

[56:13]

In fact, that's the best image. I think you weave mind and breath together. Once you've gotten the ability to weave mind and breath together so they pretty much stay together, then you can begin weaving that joined mind, that breath mind into your body. And I'm speaking about this now as a kind of general encouragement to you not to be frightened by practice. Because as long as you're in your thought body, which we talked about, the experiences you have are usually familiar to you or versions of what's familiar to you.

[57:34]

And it's something I've emphasized quite a bit for practitioners is that we have a self that in which we have permission to be separate from each other, but not different from each other. And many people are in therapy because they begin to have feelings that are different from what they imagine other people have. And Jung had to go through this, recognizing the demons and images and so forth he saw, felt, were not the work of the devil, but the work of himself.

[58:43]

This is a very deep thing in the Western self is that we want even our unconscious to be somehow shareable or at least not that different from everybody else's. And this conception is so powerful that even when Jung successfully negotiated this territory, which before was considered demonic, He still had to say it's shareable, but now it's universally shareable. It's universal archetypes. In Buddhism it's not shareable. It's not universal.

[60:14]

It's at root chaotic and creative. And new things that appear that no archetype has ever heard of. So it's a... It's a fundamental difference in view because Buddhism starts from the idea that you put several things together and something new emerges. There's emergent properties, like in chaos theory, that have never happened before. So when you start moving out of your thought body, you begin to have experiences or intimations of experiences that you're not sure anyone ever had before. And that naturally frightens us.

[61:21]

And often we then stop the process by stopping our breath. And that's one of the main reasons we learn to sit with a cohesiveness. Because when you're continuity, what does self do? What are the functions of self? Self has to give us the experience of separateness. That this is my voice and not Ulrika's voice. That my immune system... I get mixed up.

[62:34]

My immune system knows what belongs to me and what doesn't belong to me. As I told the story last weekend, my little daughter, and she's about three, said I told her to do something and she wouldn't do it. And I said to her, Sally, Virginia and I made you. You belong to us. You have to do what we say. And she said, it's too late now. I belong to me. But everything is like that. Your breath belongs to itself.

[63:35]

Your body belongs to itself. Your thoughts belong to themselves. And when you change the mixture, you change a great deal. So in order to do this, because we know the fear that can come when you move out of the imagined shareable thought body, which has so many psychological processes you have to take care of within the thought body, And within the story that joins and makes the narrative of the thought body. But you can also step outside that and study it from outside. And the main way to do that is to establish a physical sense of continuity.

[64:58]

And that's the basic advice when you do meditation, don't scratch. Because really, when you scratch, then you're going along with your thoughts. Is it a real ant? But when you get so you don't scratch, actually it suddenly gives you a strength that you're not afraid of your thoughts anymore. This is just basic meditation stuff I'm presenting to you. I think you have to know it if you're going to look at mindfulness practice. Let me go back a minute to the functions of self. This is the longest answer I've ever given to somebody for one thing.

[66:00]

One function of self is to establish separateness. The second main function of self is to establish connectedness. There are actually various categories of connectedness, how you feel it and where you, etc. And third is, the function of self is to establish continuity, how you get from one moment to the next. And for us, continuity is supplied primarily by our story. I'm such and such a kind of person and I can get through this.

[67:02]

But Buddhism changes that. Buddha nature has discontinuity, another kind of coherence and presence rather than continuity. So it works with the basic functions of self in a different way. While you still use the basic self, you also have another way of working with the basic functions. What I'm pointing out by looking at your question in so much detail, if you look at anything, just don't scratch, it opens up into the whole of Buddhism. Or the whole of whatever your particular viewpoint is or life practice is. So when you work with very simple things like don't scratch or paying attention to mindfulness, paying attention to your breath, they work throughout every part of your being or system.

[68:54]

Now, let me just say that re-establishing a different continuity of self, etc., has nothing to do with enlightenment. It has to do with insight and then making an intention based on that insight. But the insight's not so hard to come by. The intention to act on it is much harder to come by. And the actually acting on it is even harder. But it's all pretty easy. You just have to decide to do it.

[69:56]

Okay. Something else? And yet I have a question, although the decision was already the answer. I wish I could sit in silence and enjoy it so much. And it gets louder and louder and louder. The body gets louder, everything gets louder. It's unbearable. And I ask, is there another answer than the one just given? Well, I think your answer contained everything and the intention, but still I have another question.

[70:57]

Okay. I have such a deep longing when I sit down to retreat to stillness and experience the stillness and enjoy the stillness, and yet what I find is just everything gets noisier and noisier and noisier. So is there maybe another answer than the question you just gave? The answer I just gave. She sees all my answers to these questions. What's the problem? What's the matter with noise? That's what you are. I knew it was another question. So when you sit or practice mindfulness, you create a kind of background mind.

[72:03]

And that in a way releases the noisiness and allows you to see it. And you have to wait quite a while for it to calm down. Maybe this is a good point for me to speak about counting your breaths. Because one of the ways to, when you count your breaths, and I'm speaking to your, what you said actually. When you count your breath, you are, the number one or two or three is a thought.

[73:06]

So counting your breath is bringing a thought to a breath. In some kind of simple, regular way. And generally we count exhales. Or exhales and inhales, but both the same number. And generally it's like one, then one, two, like that. You don't have to try. Generally you want the feeling, if you want an image for your breath, because if your breath is up here, you'll tend to stop it more.

[74:21]

So the basic breath practice is to, first of all, just take an inventory of the various ways you breathe, when you first sit down, when you're thinking, and so forth. And you don't interfere with it. Just notice it. And then second is to bring some intention into it. And the tradition seems to be quite accurate and consistent over two or three thousand years now that the counting and naming are the basic, that cover most of the territories.

[75:27]

And generally you count to ten and then you start over again at one. Otherwise, you know, now I've been doing this 38 years, I'd be 2,300,000, or 1,800,000. You have to stop somewhere, so 10, and then stop. I've gotten up, just fooling around, I've gotten up to a few thousand, but you know, it's after that, it's... Somebody speaks to you, you say, I lost it. So... So you bring intention into it to count or name.

[76:38]

Let's say now we're talking about counting. And after you've made this sort of general inventory, you bring an image to your, an intentional image to your breathing as well as an intentional counting. Now this is a big thing to do because the basic practice of Zen is uncorrected mind. Nun, das ist eine ziemlich große Sache, denn die wichtigste Praxis in Zen ist, einen unkorrigierten Geisteszustand zu erreichen. Denn sobald man zählt, korrigiert man ja, oder richtet seine Intention darauf. Aber sobald man sich hinsetzt, beabsichtigt man ja auch. Und sobald man morgens sein Gesicht wäscht, intendiert man. So you're actually developing a negotiation between the presence of intention and the presence of uncorrected mind.

[77:52]

So the image you bring into your breath is that the most useful basic image, I think, is that your exhale is coming down to your base of your spine or into your hara. And the inhale, it seems like in the image, is coming in from the bottom or from the base of your spine or your hara and coming up. And it actually feels like that. Now, if it feels like that, it makes your chest barely moves at all in breathing. So your whole body starts to breathe.

[79:08]

You start breathing up into your shoulders and down into your stomach. And this kind of breathing is less likely to become stopped or irregular. Now, what we Westerners usually do is we get quite upset or we feel like we're not doing well because we can't count past one. Or maybe with a heroic effort you get to ten occasionally, and three usually. And we think this is bad. We failed as Buddhists, we should try something else.

[80:16]

And you're right, you're all failures. You're not smart Asians who can do this. Well, Asians have problems with it too. But they actually have different problems. It's much easier for them to count than for us. Because their mind, at least my experience is, their mind is much more visual than ours and their counting interferes with their process differently. So what we do is I feel that you start to practice and then you have a new practice which I call counting to one. And the practice of counting to one usually lasts at least a couple of years.

[81:19]

And what's happening, in fact, if you can count to ten, you're not in zazen mind. Because what you could notice when you can't count to ten, because I think you all know how to count to ten, right? Mm-hmm. I mean, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, et cetera in German, is a basic incantation, a kind of mantra learned anciently in our culture. But just let me mention something that seems obvious to us. We organize dictionaries and things, encyclopedias by A, and then all the bears and then all the cats and so forth.

[82:23]

ABC goes back into the pre-Greek times, but the organizing of the alphabet as a storage retrieval system is the 12th century. What goes back in Greek times? Chanting ABC, the alphabet, learning it as a child, as a kind of mantra. So the phonetic alphabet as an incantation is ancient, but as a storage retrieval system, it's only the 12th century. So for something like 30 generations of people or a very long time, no one thought of organizing things that way.

[83:40]

And it changed the way people used books and studied and so forth. I only mention this because sometimes what seems totally obvious to us is not. Ich erwähne das nur, weil es oft so ist, dass etwas völlig offensichtlich ist, aber wir es nicht bemerken. I believe there are totally obvious things lying right in front of us now that we don't see. Und so geht es uns jetzt auch. Es gibt also Dinge, die nur zu offensichtlich sind, uns direkt vor der Nase, aber wir das nicht bemerken. And that spirit is part of the practice or the path of discovery in Zen. So if what you see is noise or your story or etc., when you go into zazen, zazen mind doesn't yet know how to count.

[84:58]

So it's like a different kind of mind with a different kind of liquid which doesn't know how to put itself in categories yet. So when this little boy, what's the little boy's name? Michael, Michael, and when you teach him to count and the alphabet, you're teaching him how to, you're giving him a technology and structure of outer consciousness. By which he can begin to organize things. That's over there, this is over here, and so forth. But interior consciousness in our culture doesn't have much technology or structure.

[86:03]

And part of practice is you're entering into a consciousness of another viscosity. And as soon as you do that, it frees your story and much of your memory to come up into your mind because it's not held in place by a structure you've developed. And that itself can be scary. And you'll find out that your consciousness is made up now, or your stuff is made up of conscious materials, unconscious materials and non-conscious materials that you didn't know you'd stored and they're not stored in relationship to self.

[87:21]

So mindfulness practice then is to just be present in the noise. And see what's there. And as you become more mindful, you begin to be able to go to the source of the noise and the source of thought and see how it arises. Once you can get to the source, the noise will stop. But that requires some developed mindfulness and a developed consciousness in meditation. So I guess I'm saying these things in this way because I'm convinced now

[88:23]

in the West we do not have the degree to which we don't have cultural support for meditation. Makes it very difficult to continue doing it unless you really see how it works. and it makes it really difficult to do it properly and to continue with it, unless you really make yourself clear how meditation works. Okay. Something else? Yes. Sometimes I fall asleep and I realize that when I am awake, I am always awake. Sometimes I fall asleep and I practice it first when I wake up, and then someone is very surprised, During meditation or during my...

[89:28]

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