Naskandas means something like heaps, heaps, a heap of coal, a heap of grain, and it's often translated as aggregates, an aggregation of things. And the idea is that everything in our sentient experience, it's interesting, the word sentient in English means what is sent to us, what's brought to us, the root of sentient. The idea of the Bhaskanians is everything that's sentient fits into these five. And what's significant about their organization is that they are There's no concept of self in any of the five planets.

[01:10]

So it's a way to look at us without the concept of self. Now in early Buddhism it was more like through the Paya Skangas we create the notion of self. is added on to these five. But later Buddhism, so it's a way to enter, it's a way to condition the world so the self can join, be part of the world, is part of the world. But later Buddhism, it becomes the world, way, a way in which we can enter the conditioning world free of self. Okay, so I'm going to start the way it's usually presented is warm, feeling,

[02:23]

Impulses. And sometimes D.T. Suzuki, the first Japanese person who really introduced Buddhism to the West in a way that it could be felt or practiced, let's call it that way. He calls it confectionism. And confections is probably more accurate in the translation, but it doesn't work in English because it means candy. Confectionary at the candy store. But it means that which is put together. Putting together, scum. And the fifth is consciousness. That's the usual way, and it's usually indicated this way.

[03:35]

And when you chant the Heart Sutra, when you chant next year, later, you chant. There's no feelings, no perceptions, no impulses in your consciousness. So Mariana Buddha, Buddhism in an apathetic way, puts a no in front of these things. But it's, again, a bit like saying, the flower is not red, nor is the little green. immediately what you see, red and green. But the flower is not red, nor is the will of green, a rather famous state, apyrism. Okay, the way I would prefer to present it is to put consciousness first. And then I would call this more accurately or usefully associative mind.

[04:42]

Yeah. Percept. Perception. Or perhaps percept only. And feeling. And form. So... Um, I suppose... Clear here.

[06:07]

Put... That doesn't look like an eye. Um... So say you're... I'm trying to put this in the context of experience. Say that you were sitting here and you have some kind of, you noticed something, but you don't quite know what you noticed. But then you have a feeling. Still don't know what it is, but you have a feeling. And then you realize a car is driving by slowly and it's got its radio on and you can hear it. So you recognize it's a song.

[07:13]

So the vague feeling, let's call it a signal, is for when you start having a feeling, at least you get a feeling, then you have a perception that it's a song. That's the first three songs. And then you say, oh, that's the song my mother used to like, you know, Bing Crosby. Bing Crosby. Seems I really look like Christmas all over the world. anyway so then you have an association and then your consciousness is affected by that association with your mother and you may remember so the first is you have some kind of fake feeling fake sense then there's a feeling then you oh that's a song oh

[08:25]

That's the song my mother used to play. That's an association. And then that becomes part of consciousness. So the idea is here that consciousness is made up of a virtually infinite number of these things all day long. When there's a certain way it's sunny, if it's not sunny, somebody says something. All of these are part of a process which is happening much faster than psychotic scanning, three times a second or so. So your consciousness is constantly being generated, almost like the surface of the water, lake, or ocean, where things are coming up, currents are coming up to the surface all the time, carrying flotsam and jets and carrying a piece of sea, carrying a jellyfish or two, you know, like that. And what we experience, is this. We mostly don't experience it.

[09:28]

And what Freud got people to do with basically, as I said, meditative technique, free associating your mind down, changing your posture, is he get them to kind of drop their consciousness and begin to just literally free associate. And what he discovers, of course, is that this is the kind of territory of mind that's in some ways less functional, but wider than consciousness. And this mind knows things that this mind doesn't know. So this mind is editing all the time. It edits, excludes, for the purpose of functioning a certain way, it edits and excludes. And one of the most horrible dimensions of dynamics of its functioning is the fish itself. And so things that don't support the fish itself are also pushed out of consciousness, pushed out of self-recognition.

[10:36]

Now, there is an idea in Buddhism called the Alaya Vishnana, sometimes translated, the storehouse consciousness. And that is sometimes, and particularly in earlier days, whether it's in coming to the West, after turning everything into Christianity, and Protestant Christianity especially, what the early translators did, they turned it into psychology. And G.G. Suzuki turned its concept of Buddhism into psychology. And so then the Elayavishyana gets acquainted with the unconscious. It's not accurate to acquaint it. It's not a container. It's a field of association, and it's not a field of association that's related to repression or suppression or exclusion or anything. It's just not in the categories that consciousness makes use of.

[11:43]

Much of it's not in the categories. But everything that comes into associative mind, from the point of view of the Laya Vishniana, comes here. from the elijahs, but it has no sense that they excluded or repressed. But the elijahs, generally, we're not going to talk about it. Take another seminar or something like that. Okay. So the point I'm making here is consciousness is one mind. And as we have discovered, associated mind is one mind that can be part of consciousness, but also can be different consciousness. So this means that, for instance, again, when you shift from a conceptual conscious to a non-conceptual field of mind,

[12:55]

you're actually opening yourself more to this kind of associative mind. Now, perception, or percept only, when you, to use the example we have, when you hear, hear, this is percept only, when you're Field of awareness is, you know, just a single percept. Like you're hearing the bird. You're not thinking about the bird, et cetera. You're not associated. There's no association. Just the bird. Or just the airplane with the name field of. Is it this naming association? It's a fork. Yeah. Naming is not necessarily association, but when you perceive the airplane with the idea of a name, I mean, these are clouds, yeah?

[14:09]

They're clouds that kind of, you know, you can't really say, it's only this and it's only that. But when you, a clear example is, if you feel the name off the airplane, it just had the sound, that would be aligned to perceptible. If you add the name, well, it's beginning to drift up toward associative mind. There, it can easily start gathering association. So you feel like each of these, they're all one field, but they can also be separate fields. we can sort of characterize them. Sort of like, something like this is consciousness, this is an associative mind, this is perception, this is feeling, and this is everything.

[15:19]

So there's a kind of feeling of a cone. Here, this is more knowing, more aware. This is more functioning, more precise, more focused. When you just hear something, just smell something, Again, there's oil in the bowl, there's other things going on. But when the emphasis on how your state of mind is defined is through just the smell, just the urine. It would be like if you looked at a painting and you just saw the colors and you didn't put it into an Orbeez-nosed pattern.

[16:25]

You just got the colors. And, of course, a good painter actually can pull himself away from... the content within the structure of the painting, and then look at how the colors work all together. Good painter, so you feel the color level, in a way you can feel the color level, independent of how it's applied to the objects. The faux painters did that to an extreme, where trees became pink, cups became green, et cetera. So, Now, feeling, now, the way this is usually taught in a philosophical way is feeling is, again, as I said in some ways earlier, is pleasurable, it's pleasant, unpleasant, and neither. But really, pleasant, unpleasant, neither, and definitely emotions really belong in the category of perception.

[17:29]

because they have a beginning and end. They're something you grasp. Percept, sept means, in English, use this word, sept means to grasp. And so concept, percept, what you can grasp. So the center of this, I mean, you can include, of course, say that it includes pleasant, unpleasant, neither. and sometimes neutral, but neutral isn't right, it's neither. Well, neither would be this non-graspable feeling. And I mentioned yesterday what I mean by non-graspable feeling, like there's a feeling in the room that you can't quite say what it is, et cetera. Well, it's like you hear the music and there's a feeling, you don't know what the song is yet, but you have a kind of feeling. And it's not the other person.

[18:31]

Now what is form? Well, form is... First of all, you have to have a start for the list. You can't really start with feeling or perception. So in a sense, as soon as you notice form, you perceive something. So this is, you've taken association out of this, and you've taken most of perception out of this. You've taken away all perception that leads to association, and it's barely feeling. So you could call it like signal. That's the first kind of indication. But you could also call it resistance, as two objects can't occupy the same space, usually. So two objects resist each other, and there's a sense of resistance in the world.

[19:35]

You're here, I'm here. There's a wall. So that's not even in the realm of feeling yet, but it's what occasions feel. Occasion makes happen. We could also say that if we try to deepen the understanding of this, that form is duration, or is the concept of nothing. Because there's no perception until you have, or perception, and the other, of course, John does, fall into the category of having a conscious presence. So as soon as you have a sense of the concept of now or a concept of duration or of a situated immediacy, this is the beginning. It has to begin somewhere. So the list begins with form. And it's pared down, pared down. Pared down is possible.

[20:38]

Okay. Now, each of these can be a realm. Each of these is a realm of experience. that's part of consciousness, but not noticed, because noticing is a function of consciousness. You have to widen the way you notice to begin to have a feeling for these other things. And percept only wouldn't be so noticeable, I think, unless you meditate. But one of the common experiences of meditating is you have no association No grasping, no grasping of things, but you hear things. In fact, they did studies of one kind of Hindu meditator and one kind of Buddhist, Zen Buddhist meditator years ago, 60s sometime.

[21:49]

And what they did is they rang a bell, or I don't remember now, whether you ring a bell or you poke somebody or whatever. But let's say they ring a bell or make a sound. At least this type of Hindu meditation, there's probably many types of Hindu meditation, but this particular person. And what he did was, here comes the sound. Boop! Right? And there's a kind of... You know, there's a reaction if you wire somebody up. There's a reaction. Then it comes again. There's a reaction. The Hindu meditator very quickly suppressed the reaction. And there was no reaction. After, I don't know, five times or ten times, I can't remember. Boy, it's a straight line, and there's a reaction, and it's a straight line.

[22:49]

For the Zen meditator, there's this really very characteristic of difference The hundredth time the sound comes, there's a reaction. But it's not a reaction like this. It's just... So the dead meditator, which doesn't suppress the sound, just hears it and doesn't react to it. So the Hindu meditator was getting like this and then finally suppressed it. The Zen meditation never suppresses it, but doesn't have this kind of thing. It just goes up, down, goes back to a straight mind. That would be a percept-only mind. You're just here. And you have no associations, no reactions, you're just here. And this state of mind, you can also, for yourself, experientially and conceptually now, we're talking about, relate it to

[23:54]

the host mind, which isn't inviting anything to tea. And that percept mind, host mind, also tends to have a feeling of satisfaction, ease, and glistening. So the more you... Okay. the more you experience mind as simultaneously these five you see the experience the underlying structure of consciousness the more you then can either be present only one of them or you can be allow in each occasion now Dogen, one of the things Dogen says, is complete that which appears.

[25:00]

Ginger Cohen translated, complete that which appears. Knowing things are simultaneously particular and all at once. And all at once he means like Mumen Raiyoshi. Everything all at once is participating to make this movement possible. Just let's stay with the phrase to complete that which appears. If you have begun to articulate your consciousness in terms of these five, and you can see there's no self. If you've begun to articulate consciousness in terms of these five, you begin to feel each one separately, I think. Oops. And... And you begin to feel engaged. In other words, superstarship epletion would be to have a sense of the form, a sense of feeling, a sense of justice.

[26:12]

The bell is cold or brown. Smells like metal. Then the association. And you can feel it as part of consciousness, but you can also feel how each particular is part of consciousness. Now, when I say positively particular, that little phrase has all of this in it. And when you complete that which appears, you may, in a sense, one way to understand that is you actually run through it. You see something appear, you feel its form, you feel the person. You feel the bliss. Just be engaged. You feel the association. You can feel it ripple in your overall consciousness. To notice these things, you have to in the usual teaching. Most teachings are you hold these, most teachings are understood that it's something you hold in the background of your consciousness.

[27:15]

And you let them inform what you're doing. That's true of this teaching too. But in particular, this teaching, Others in like has come up now you mentioned. You do it slowly at first. You slow down the process. Generally the way of slowing down the process is to do it in meditation. So you can understand, again. You should break some. You should understand. the feel of each one and there's various ways to work with one way is when you sit down you've made a conscious decision to to to do meditation and you're

[28:26]

You have to go to the door, you have to go wherever you're going, you have to put on comfortable clothes, that's all consciousness. In, you know, that's all for Crestone. So I was then announced by a wooden board that we hit for 15 minutes. The first round is, it goes, bop, [...] and then you, that's the introduction, and then you hit it once a minute for seven minutes, and then boop, indicates the first round. Then once a minute for five minutes, and then boop, boop, That indicates the third round. And then once again, for three minutes, except those three minutes are open when the warrior's leading in rotation comes in. Look at these seven hits. One hit. People are supposed to be in the zendo by the second round. So it becomes a process where you start dropping mutual thinking. You're like, oh, okay. And then by the time you're in the zendo, while you're pushing, Turn around and bow and sit down.

[29:28]

You're already sort of in a social to mind. And you sit down and you kind of notice. Yeah, I'm kind of pre-associating. You're not thinking anymore, you're just, you know. And as you settle and you become more still, then you begin to have like hearing your own hearing, you know, percept only mind. This, this and that period. And then it's almost like you're descending. into it sometimes, letting yourself down. And then you have a feeling of just feeling, not even percept the various things that occur. It's all a little width and larger feet. And of course, then this is rooted in the form of your posture.

[30:30]

Crossed leg, sitting on a bench, whatever. You're in the room, but now the room has just become the form. And you get in the habit of descending through, or ascending through these, so that more and more you can actually feel the difference of each one. And you can feel when you shift from percept, only mind, to associate. And you simply just get familiar, like swimming or something. It just gets familiar. You really feel comfortable in the water. And the more it matures us, it's just feeling percept only as if kind of great pleasure, but eventually you let go of the pleasure of perceptive only mind, and you're just in the feeling, non-grasps of feeling, most of the time when you sit, and it's very rich, actually very rich, because somehow when you come back, or when the associative mind comes in, it comes in in a new way, rich association, so forth.

[31:52]

So it becomes a very creative process You can also practice with perception, which is also the vijñanas. Vijñanas are each of the senses, plus the eighth vijñana, the alive vijñana, this is what I call, it's translated story, consciousness. And the seventh vijñana is manas, the empty mind, that decides what goes in and out. And then you have the five senses. But our visual, particularly in the West, our consciousness is dominated by visual dimension, visual sensitivity. When monks, for instance, in the

[32:53]

7th, 8th, 9th, 10th centuries, et cetera, chanted, but there was no, there was just a line of letters. They weren't divided into words. That is, that would be a world which primarily emphasizes aural, A-U-R-E-L, a hearing dimension, because you cannot visually tell where one word ends or not. You can only tell where it ends by chanting. So if you chant it, it's very clear. but visually you cannot distinguish. So that's simply another culture, another way of being, another way to integrate integrity of being. But what Buddhism has done is said very early times, yeah, this is the way it works. Develop each one. Now, the main way I worked on, and I used to bring people with me,

[33:55]

on the walks, is around, there was a particular lake in Berlin I liked that you could walk around the whole lake in about an hour. And so, I did it myself quite a few times, but then I did it with other people too, is you walk along and you try to close your eyes, pretty much, and then you just walk along and see if you can find the path by smell. because there's leaves and things like that, and actually there's a different smell to the side of the path from the path, which is mostly, you can actually do it. After a while, you can really smell your way along the path. Then we also try feeling, and then you try things like to see if you can proprioceptively, that's your body balance and your physical awareness of space around you, the way I use the word and the way it is used sometimes,

[34:57]

You walk and you see if you can feel like a blind person's eyes, the presence of objects. Like you can feel actually almost like you're being brushed. You can feel a tree that's to the side of you while your eyes are completely closed. And you can walk along a little more and you can feel that probably three tree. You open your eyes and three or four. And so you're developing... You're not only developing the skills of the blind person, hence you have a vision, I'll say, why should you be towards a mouse? But whether you develop that sensitivity, what you're beginning to do is separate the sense fields. So each one is its own territory. The way for a painter, the color field, has to be its own territory, separate from the form field. And if you begin to... separated, you find out there's a mind that's really just rooted in sound, that doesn't have to get brought into consciousness and brought into visual consciousness.

[36:15]

And, you know, when I talk about these things, many aspects of practice, there are another big group in the Dharma Sangha for some reason. And it's actually the demography study of populations. The demography of the Dharma Sangha in Germany, in Europe, is quite different than the demography in the United States. Because in America, it's still counterculture. And there's not so much counterculture in Europe. an American Secretary of State would probably not admit that he did yoga. And certainly, if you were running for Congress, he would tell anybody that you were president, you would say, I did yoga. But in Germany, nobody. Merkel could say, well, I do yoga, and I know you'll give a damn.

[37:20]

One of the big, large, groups, fairly large groups, the women of Dharmasan in Europe are musicians. And when I'm speaking, often the musicians have thought to me afterwards and said, what you're talking about sounds like how I feel, how we feel, when several people are playing music. We really play it together. We suddenly find ourselves together. Something else, you have to release yourself in some way and just be in the field of being together. And you know, you can hear music where sometimes it's the orchestra or the jazz, they're just really going together. Sometimes then they lose it, they come back together. So that all has something to do with this. And so when you practice with each percept, like taking a walk in the woods and resisting, you know, hugging a tree, and just to feel them, that's such

[38:26]

feel if you're right or left. Or you try to do it just your smell, your nostril. You try to do it just hearing. You begin to... It's not, again, about getting accomplished at it. It's about beginning to feel that each sense is a different feel, different mind. And So that's just this part. The Vigiana's coming here. Okay, I think that's enough for now. Let me take a break. And give what I want to do, give me an experiential feel for this. And I think I can bring up something else today, which will help us enter this, and then we'll call it this. What time it is?

[39:27]

I can't tell what time it is. Quarter to three. Quarter to three, and we're going to end at four. So shall we have half an hour, 20 minutes? Fifteen minutes. Twenty. Twenty? Twenty. Okay, so let's come back at five or so after. You see what I mean? How hard it is to go when I leave? It took 24 hours.

[39:57]

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