So I have to find something to say that will be useful, amusing, useful, interesting to those of you who are just being here tonight. And I have to find something to say that will start the seminar. There are seats right up here in the front. On the world's softest floor. I don't want to come here just like I'm going back to the United States for six months. in a couple weeks. And I've just been in Hannover and Göttingen and various places. And I don't want to stop come here to Berlin like a train station I'm stopping at for a moment and going somewhere else.

[01:17]

As much as possible, I want to stop here and not go anywhere else. I want to stop here in a sense in... Yeah, because, how can I put it? Especially for those of us who practice together, I want to stop here in your practice. Stop in the sense that I want to stay in the practice of... each of you because you're in my practice. And I also don't come here with some Having something I ought to say to you and then saying it.

[02:22]

Oh, I mean, I suppose those of you who have just come for this evening hope I have something to say. But for the most part, I want to find... What I like to do is find out what to say. You know that. Find out what to say with you. Through coming into some mutual mind. Mutual means something like, at least in English, to immigrate. to immigrate to another place to live. To extend where you live. If we're talking about the nature of mind, I think we have to talk about extending where we live.

[03:41]

That's good. Neil is so fast I always have to remind him to slow down but that wasn't too bad. It takes me an hour to give a lecture and him 15 minutes to give the same lecture. And when I speak about finding out what to say together, this evening as well as during the seminar. I mean not just that we understand each other or we're empathetic, but more of a an experience, a physical experience of some kind of common field of mind.

[05:00]

Now, again, I say that not just because it's such an experience is actually satisfying. And most of us actually do find it satisfying. Yes, sometimes on holidays. Christmas, I don't know. Or after some big storm or, you know... something that happens, we feel some physical sense of a shared mind. Now I mentioned that, again, not just because it's satisfying or interesting, But because in the yogic world, Zen is a yogic teaching.

[06:17]

And if you're not familiar with that way of thinking, in that sense, for Zen... the mind is also posture. So the mind, the sense of a physically shared mind, again, is not just something that's satisfying sometimes, but it's rather one of the most important conditions for the development of mind.

[07:23]

Okay, so we have this title, The Nature of Mind. And already I'm speaking about the development of mind. And, yeah, what will... Yeah, during the seminar, of course, we have to speak about the development of mind. And what is the nature of mind. And, you know, in yogic, the yogic world or in yogic Zen, In Buddhism. Mind and body are virtually interchangeable words. Yeah. So we could have the nature of body Or the nature of mind and mean virtually the same thing.

[08:48]

Now, what is that? Why is that? Why are mind and body virtually interchangeable? Yeah, we wouldn't be far wrong if we said the nature of mind is body. Or the nature of body is mind. Now, again, I have to introduce some, you know, vocabulary in a sense, concepts. In Zen, in all, in yogic understanding, all mental phenomena have a physical component. And all human physical phenomena have a mental component.

[10:00]

Now, what does that mean? Well, it means that all mental states have a physical component. It means you can get to know if your mindfulness is mature enough, developed enough. You can get to know the in effect keyboard of mind. You can learn to in a sense feel Touch this key and this mind appears. This physical key, this mind appears. And the more that becomes the case, you can bring the experiences or continue the experiences of zazen in your daily activity.

[11:02]

Now, in the West, we spend the real emphasis in knowing the nature of mind. In the West has been... connected to the nature of dreams. I mean, just you can ask yourself if you're going to be in a seminar like this or a lecture like this. It helps a lot if you really try to answer the question what is the nature of mind for yourself. Before you come here. Or right now. Have some idea, some feeling in yourself, because you already know something. What's the nature of mind? It's partly, it makes it easier for me if you've already thought about it a bit.

[12:22]

But it's also a kind of ritual. A ritual. You think about it for a while and we can think of it as a ritual in a positive sense. But of awakening... the feeling for the nature of mind, and that's what an evening like this is, and a seminar too, We're kind of engaged together in a ritual of awakening the nature of mind. Yeah, and I'm suggesting that there can be a kind of mutuality to mind. And a physicality to mind, that mind... Descartes has some ideas that body is physical and occupies space.

[13:54]

and the mind is non-physical and doesn't occupy space. Well, if you have that kind of mental posture or that kind of position, Yeah, you can easily see things that way. And your experience will confirm that position. Right. But then we have someone like, excuse me, our most famous genius, Einstein, who got, he said, his ideas from his body. Maybe his genius was to not take the prevailing cultural view and actually notice that his ideas... thinking, the source of his thinking arose in his body.

[15:34]

Now if I say the number five, Or the number six. Or seven. Yeah, there's not much physicality to that. They're all pretty much the same. But if I say intention and attention, you can feel a physical difference. And if I even say I would like to open myself to you, it's hard for me to say that without my hands doing that. And if you begin to notice carefully, you'll see that there's a physicality in

[16:49]

language and thinking. And Zen practice says, yeah, okay, increase the physicality of your thinking. What do we notice when we have an intuition? Usually we call something an intuition when it's in contrast to what we've been thinking. It's almost like something pushes through the surface of discursive thinking. And And what characterizes an intuition?

[18:07]

Usually that we're pretty sure it's true. It feels true. Usually we don't even argue with it. And we don't say we think it's true, we say we feel it's true. And an assumption of yogic Zen is that when thinking is physical, it's truer. And one assumption in the yogic sense is that if thinking becomes physical, then it is true. the physicality of mind and the physicality of thinking itself such thinking will be truer to yourself truer to the world and of

[19:14]

Yeah, even a flow of intuition which you can trust. So the practice in a way is to... gather thinking into this somatic field of the body. And you can think about six and seven if you want. But if you get used to and really begin to feel your thinking, then almost all your thinking is rooted in physicality. And now we can look at the word nature. The nature of mind.

[20:47]

Well, nature, at least in English dictionary, will say something like the material and phenomenal world. And it's used commonly to mean Trees. Farms, things like that. Things that are less artificial or less influenced by usually humans. So of course the word nature means birth. The root of it, it means birth. So nature is something like, if we try to expand its definition in English, It's the feeling of being at the source of things.

[21:49]

And this works quite well for us. Because it's material, a material or natural world with an emphasis on the purity or source of the natural world. The uninterfered with world. So, yeah, we have the idea of unconditioned mind in Zen practice. Which could mean something like the natural order of mind. The uninterfered with mind.

[22:50]

The source of mind. So maybe the nature of mind is to know the source of mind. And perhaps the source of mind is the body. Well, of course, before you were born, you didn't have much mind that you noticed. And after you die, I don't think you'll notice your mind much. There's various theories about that, but generally... You don't have much notice of the mind, even if you believe the theories. So maybe we could venture to say that probably the mind is rooted in the body. The body is maybe the source of the mind. Maybe we can try to say that the spirit is rooted in the body and the body is the source of the spirit.

[24:18]

Now let's go back to Freud a minute. Freud calls, I don't know how to pronounce Latin, but he says the dream is the Via Regia or something, the Royal Road. The Royal Road to... between consciousness and dreaming. And James Hillman said something like, most psychotherapy thinks of dreaming as the one-way street of morning traffic. Who said that? James Hillman. James Hillman. James Hillman said that most psychotherapists see this as as a one-way street of morning traffic from dreams to ego city. Well, if it's a one-way street, or if it's a highway at all from night mind to day mind, if you're practicing Zen,

[25:29]

you want to kind of divert that morning traffic from dreaming mind, night mind into awareness instead of into consciousness. We could describe zazen, that zazen means meditation but it means literally sitting absorption. So we could describe zazen or meditations and meditation as learning how to sit comfortably and do nothing. Yeah. Well, this posture, this pretzel-like posture may actually be a little painful sometimes.

[26:48]

But it's actually the most comfortable way to do nothing and not fall asleep. You can sit other ways, but this is for several thousand years understood to be the most comfortable. Yeah, there are other postures almost as old. Okay, to sit comfortably and do nothing. To not interfere with mind. To find enough ease in mind and body. that you don't interfere with it. That some kind of unconditioned mind begins to arise or natural order of mind.

[27:49]

And what's happening You're not involved in discursive thinking. You're not involved in consciousness, so I have to do this and that. But you're also not sleeping. You're not dreaming. You might be sort of sleeping, but anyway. It's very important to be able to sleep in Zazen. People who can't sleep in Zazen can't meditate. I've had some people who practice with me like that. They can't ever stop thinking once they're awake.

[28:51]

And they sit like this. So we have to be able to sleep, actually be able to sleep in zazen, but then wake up inside sleeping. Because we want to wake up in awareness... And not in consciousness. And we want to widen this experience, become more familiar with this experience, which is neither conscious mind nor sleeping mind. So you're in meditation in the morning, you're beginning One of the things that's happening is you're finding out how to adjust mind and body in an unconditioned mind.

[30:04]

Adjusting mind and body in awareness and not in consciousness. So basically what you're doing is you're learning to establish a continuum of awareness and adjusting mind and body in that continuum So it dreams it's not the royal way or one-way street to consciousness. And a contrast between consciousness and night mind, sleeping mind. a sharp contrast between night mind and waking mind.

[31:27]

But rather opening yourself to a flow of, for now let me call it night mind, a flow of night mind into awareness in a way that night and day mind are underneath consciousness. We can think of it that way. And then consciousness is extended into what is usually a territory reserved for sleep and dreaming. Now, If you've heard such a kind of statement like this for the first time, you're not used to how I talk. This may sound awfully complicated. I mean, you may think, jeez, I just want to wake up in the morning.

[32:37]

I don't want highways and continuums, etc. But it's a lot simpler than a car engine. Yeah, a car engine's got pistons and drive shafts and spark plugs. This is only a couple things. Awareness. Consciousness. A sense of the difference between awareness and consciousness. And, of course, tomorrow we'll have to establish a feel for the difference. Yes, I don't want to go into it now. Then you have to come back tomorrow. Just kidding. I have a three-and-a-half-year-old daughter named Sophia.

[33:50]

And as you many of you know, I'm pretending very successfully to be a young father. I actually have a 42-year-old daughter, too. And a 26-year-old daughter. I don't know how young they think I am. But Sophia is at present convinced I'm pretty much like other fathers. She'll change her mind, but... In the last April, I guess, we came back to Germany from six months in the United States. And we have a little apartment under the eaves, under the roof of the building at Johanneshof, the older part of the building.

[34:55]

And Sophia came in and we said, do you remember the apartment? No. And she said, do you know where your room is? No. But then we started putting the suitcases down, and she knew everything. She went right to her room, she opened drawers and knew where things were in the drawers, etc. So something knew. We can say her body knew. Her body clearly knew where to go and what to do. Or we could say her maybe awareness knew. But consciousness didn't know. Consciousness knew a lot less.

[36:01]

Then, I don't know, a couple months ago I was standing in my office and I could see Sophia sitting in the hallway with a whole bunch of shoes. And she was explaining in considerable detail, German and English, what she was doing. Now I'm putting a left shoe on my left foot. Jetzt ziehe ich einen linken Schuh an meinen linken Fuß an. Now I'm putting a different pair of shoes, my right shoe, my left shoe on my right foot. Nun ziehe ich mit einem anderen Paar Schuhe einen rechten Schuh an meinen linken Fuß. Now I'm putting my mother's shoe on top of her. the other shoe.

[37:08]

So I watched her about 20 minutes and she was going through all the permutations and describing them to herself. I would say she was physically articulating her consciousness. And I watched her over quite a bit of time that she was finding ways to make conscious her physical activity. So I bet when we go back to the United States in a couple of weeks, where she hasn't been for six months, she will immediately know the apartment because she will be able to translate what she knows physically into conscious knowing.

[38:17]

The apartment in America, the house in America. Now the question is, when she articulates her body into consciousness, which is a necessary Yeah, necessary and wonderful thing to do. But will she begin to think consciousness is the primary way she knows things? Will she lose touch with the way awareness knows things?

[39:24]

in a wider sense than consciousness. I just bring this up to find some practical way to illustrate this difference between physical knowing and conscious knowing. As essential steps in the beginning of the exploration of the nature of mind. And to also look at the way Awareness and consciousness can work together or one can dominate the other. Okay.

[40:34]

Now one more anecdote and we'll stop. The other day I taught in Hannover and then in in Göttingen and then I had a couple of days before I had to come here so I went to Dusseldorf. And I thought I should do something normal like go to a museum. I've been coming to Germany for a 20 years and I've never gone to a museum except once in Basel. So I thought I'm going to be a normal person for a couple of days and go to a museum. And outside of Dusseldorf there's this old and new museum in Neuss or Homburg.

[41:37]

It turns out that Marie-Louise, as an architectural student, was at the older museum years ago. Marie-Louise is my wife. But anyway, they had this new building Designed by Tadao Ando. I thought it would be nice to see them and see that building and also look more carefully at the Frank Gehry buildings in Dusseldorf. Yeah, it was a nice thing to do. Anyway, there's quite an interesting collection of Kemer and Japanese and Chinese Buddhist art. There was a particularly great painting of Hanshan and Jitoku.

[43:03]

If you would not know Zen lore, they're this kind of team of eccentric recluses, hermits, who had come down from their mountain hut every now and then into the local And they'd have a cappuccino or something, and then they'd write a poem on the side of the wall. And then they'd laugh and joke and disappear back in the mountains. Hanshan wrote all the poems, but Jitoka was his buddy. And here's these two guys, and they're going to... big round heads like watermelons and a wild hair topknot and they're grinning you don't know if it's diabolical or funny and one is embracing the other and Hanshan is

[44:20]

holding this piece of paper, presumably a poem. And all of them have long fingernails that definitely need trimming. And in fact the fingernails are split at the ends so they look like deer hoofs. So the feeling in the picture is that these two guys are not too far removed from animals. There's a clear animal quality about these two guys. except they're considered one of the greatest poets in chinese history and they both have these top knots which are clearly Buddha kind of bumps showing ecstatic, you know, rapture.

[45:49]

So what do you have here? You have actually these two bodies that are almost one, a kind of mutual physicality. Yeah, from the point of view of evolution, they're sort of like, you know, still animals. But also they're somehow able to be Buddhas or something close to Buddhas. Und zugleich sind Sie in der Lage oder sehr nah dran, auch Buddhas zu sein? And the sense of the body as both... kind of an evolution backwards or still animal.

[46:51]

And the evolution of the body is as a Buddha. Not an evolution in the future, but an evolution in the present. Yeah, and in the older museum, which is all these sculptural buildings scattered around a big untended garden. Tended, but books untended. And I looked carefully at all these, some Christian, but mostly Buddhist statues. statues, bodies. And I'd go, you know, from all the guard, you know, they have cameras watch you.

[47:54]

I was kind of, But I was going around behind all the statues as best I could. Every now and then I'd wave at the camera. And I'd find things like at the base of the spine, not a tail of some Buddha, right? But a little tree drawn, a flowering something at the base of the spine. And sometimes not instead of a tail, a snake. So this sense of the body... the top of the head, the base of the spine.

[49:08]

It's also the assumption of the evolution of the body through developing the nature of mind. So we've run out of time. So what can we do? So If you want, we'll take a five or ten minute break. And if anybody's here after the break, we can have some discussion. Since many of you won't be here tomorrow, it gives us a chance to have a little more contact. Thank you for translating. Thank you, my leader, for organizing. Thank you for being here. Yes, and thank you for being there.

[50:23]

Thank you for organizing and helping. What would you like to speak about? I know you're all here to hear someone else speak.

[51:27]

OK. We can just stop. You have something you would like me to speak about? Not yet. Okay. I would like to speak about how I came here. I thought I had sort of put too much burden upon my shoulders with events and things I had arranged for. And I thought actually I wouldn't have time to come here.

[52:42]

Not really. I'm glad you did. And I can't talk about it quite well, but how I sort of experienced this one hour. A little bit it seems to me like someone else did my work. And this narrowing of focusing onto consciousness which you talked about, I'm relieved from that. So that I have the feeling to be quite well prepared for this connection to the body. And that it stops that I separate between mind and body.

[53:46]

So that it stops that I separate, I have a division between mind and body. And I want to thank you for. You're welcome. Yeah, you know, if we can get the habit of the source of mind... Or of returning to the source of mind. On a kind of regular pulse, a regular basis. at any time, we end up, I think, I find, feeling quite prepared all the time.

[55:08]

Yeah, this whole teaching is about you're not just born with a mind and body. The mind and body emerge through your living. And the process, like Sophia, goes through a merging mind and body. Our culture only allows that to go so far. are culturally only given up to a certain point. But practice says, let's continue that, because that's actually the way to be most fully alive.

[56:14]

Okay, someone else? I've got a question. I don't know how to articulate it. Concerning the connection between conscious mind and self, you talked about when the dreaming mind goes to a conscious mind, I feel like the self is arising. When I wake up, the self is arising. As far as I understood Buddhism, the self is connected with suffering, with not very healthful conditions, but I never get an answer why the self arises. Maybe it's a stupid question. It isn't.

[57:15]

Deutsche Bitte. What interests me is the connection between the self and the conscious mind. As far as I understand it, when the sleeping mind goes into the wake, I have the feeling that the self appears. What I understand about Buddhism is that the self is brought into connection with suffering. The question I ask myself is why the self arises and is so harsh. Well, it's hardly a stupid question. But I actually like stupid questions. Because you're going to get into things through stupid questions. real basic or even stupid questions. German's real good. It's a question that contemporary science, who are studying these things, has no idea how to answer.

[58:32]

But I would just say for now that self in Buddhism is a creature of consciousness. Consciousness is the medium of self. What Buddhism means by self is something that swims in, lives in consciousness. It doesn't mean that self doesn't sometimes swim into dreams. But it doesn't feel too good there and it kind of gets distorted and tries to swim back to its refreshing context of consciousness. But it feels in control. And self is very connected as consciousness with control.

[59:37]

So the self doesn't like dreams too much because it gets out of control and it starts to morph. When it does what? Because it gets out of control and starts to morph. In dreams? Yeah. Morph is this word like the terminator. When you change, you morph into something. And self carries our karma in our personal history. So the self opens us to suffering, not to pain, but to suffering. So probably part of the vocabulary of tomorrow, we ought to define consciousness. From the point of view of practice, which I think is probably going to prove to be also from the point of view of science, which study brain functions.

[61:02]

But that remains to be seen. Okay. Anyone else? Yeah. Can you translate that? It is in connection with what was just talked about, is my question. I am... I asked myself why thinking is so damn attractive in a way of sort of addictive. So attractive, so addictive, this thinking thing, this damn thinking.

[62:20]

This damn thinking? You said so. Yeah. Literary translation. I say it in English myself. Damned by thinking. Well, that's true. I like both. I like meditation and I like... Sometimes I feel I'm really suffering from thinking and just have enough of it. I want to go back into this cooler state of being, being still inside. And... Then I try to get there, and get there for a minute, and then I want to think again. Well, at least it's very hard in everyday life when I'm within activity. I experience that I actually like both. Sometimes I like to be in a quiet spirit, and I suffer under this thinking spirit that always whines in front of me.

[63:22]

Why is something which is causing so much suffering so attractive or addictive? Are you going to be here tomorrow? We answer tomorrow. Why is thinking so addictive? Why do we like it so much? Why do we think thinking is necessary? Yeah, I started practicing because my necessary thinking got so unnecessary.

[64:37]

But I didn't find sitting cooler. I found it warmer. But anyway, tomorrow. Mañana. Okay, one more, anybody? Noch eine von jemand? Yeah. If consciousness has to do with thinking, has awareness to do with shutting up inside? Because I didn't quite get what awareness is. Yeah, I know. Deutsch, bitte. Deutsch. What's the last part? Shutting up. Oh, shutting up. Shutting up helps, but not shutting down. A feeling of silence in our body is good, actually.

[65:59]

But let me just give you a simple example of awareness. You're walking along and you're carrying a bunch of packages. And you trip. Mm-hmm. And yet you catch yourself, you don't get hurt. But what you did, how you put your elbow and how you did this and that, it's much too fast for consciousness. You didn't think, oh, jeez, I think I'll put my elbow down and then I'll do this or that. So what knew what to do was awareness. And it's a kind of thinking, but you weren't conscious of it happening. And it's wider and quicker than consciousness.

[67:13]

Or we could almost call it a kind of bodily knowing. And my other standard example is, when you go to sleep, you set your mind to wake up at, say, 6.02 a.m., But you're not conscious, but you wake up at 6.02. And I'm lucky that most of the time I can do this. Because I commonly think I'm exhausted and I have to take a A short nap. And I set the clock for 1700 thinking it's 7 o'clock. Or I set it at 530 thinking it's going to be 17. Or 16, 15, I don't know. And I wake up at the time I'm supposed to no matter what I've set the clock.

[68:27]

That's awareness, not consciousness. So it's a kind of bodily knowing, we can call it, which is wider than consciousness. So at least the way I'm using it, it's not about shutting down or repression or anything like that. But it might be about a feeling of some kind of silence in the middle of activity. Do you want to add something? I thought it was more like emptiness than silence. That's what I felt during your talk. I like that very much. Deutsch, bitte. Silence and emptiness are two aspects of each other. I think maybe, yeah. I hope that the feeling was emptiness. Thank you for noticing.

[69:58]

Thank you very much for being here this evening and I look forward to seeing some of you tomorrow.

[70:02]

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