Now you've heard enough from me for a while. I'd like to hear something from you. So who's going to be second? Yes. Yes. that the subject, the soul, essentially relates to time in such a way that it is about overcoming time and achieving something eternal, out of time. Western philosophy, you can say that the subject or the soul relates to time in a way that it's about transgressing time and reaching for something eternal or achieving something eternal.

[01:03]

Wie verhält sich die buddhistische Seele zu der Zeit? And the way the soul achieves that is through thinking, not through practicing. So how does a Buddhist soul relate to time? Soulfully. Seelenvoll. Now, let me try to reframe what you said, see if I can understand. You're saying that when the subjective agent is not the pronoun I, but rather the soul, is that correct? So when the soul is somehow the subjective actor, then there's a transcendence based on thinking, but not on physical experience, but not on practice.

[02:35]

It's not on practicing something. It's more about something you achieve by your intelligence, rather than by practicing, by doing something, which you emphasized for the Buddhists. Yeah. Then there is a transcendence that takes place over the thinking and not so much over the physical experience, asks Roshi, or through the practice, but rather through the intelligence it is achieved. Well, I'm sorry to say, but a Buddhist would have almost no relationship to what you just said. I mean, it doesn't mean that the experience that is being pointed at is not real or valid or part of Buddhism, too. First I have no idea what you mean by soul. I mean I have some understanding of what when people speak about soul but soul as a sort of subjective actor, I don't know.

[04:04]

And probably some... I read a lot, and that's the kind of thinking, and I feel kind of transcendently wonderful when I'm reading, but I don't know if that would be... you know, a version of what you mean. Buddhism is a yogic culture. Part of a yogic culture. part of a yogic culture and one of the generators, creators of yogic culture which means mainly that everything is understood to be first of all through the body and real thinking itself is a physical experience

[05:18]

I quote Einstein, hopefully not to give special credence to what I'm saying. Just I remember reading once, he said he gets his ideas from his body. He says he'll be thinking about something and he'll start having a bodily sensation. And then he'll pay attention to that sensation. And if he feels into that sensation, thoughts appear, metaphors appear. And those tend to be more valid cognitions or knowing than ones that don't proceed from the body. So from that point of view, Einstein's what he said would fall into the context of Buddhist thinking.

[06:36]

But the way I see it is Whatever you do is contextual. You can say there's things that are valid or true even within a particular context. But you can't say they're true in all contexts. So Western culture is a particular context. And Western culture has changed in various ways. that Buddhism is beginning to have some credence in the West.

[07:37]

And... It looks like... We're practicing Buddhism because it comes from the East. But that's not really the way I see it. The way I see it is Western cultures come to the point where it wants to develop something like Buddhism. Hey, hey, and Buddhism's already developed, so it's trying to explore it. And I've thrown my hat into the ring, my shaved head into the ring. By trying to make sense of Buddhism through Western paradigms and Western language.

[09:10]

And for me, on the whole, it would be a mistake to try to bring Buddhism into the West with Sanskrit or Pali terminology. because such words have no filaments for us no coinage and they're often from a culture where the emphasis on what self is consciousness is etc. is different So I'm trying to find words that are familiar to us and modify them so they work for Buddhism. So they have a physical location in our experience which then we can develop.

[10:26]

I used to say I don't want to use science or psychology as a Trojan horse to bring Buddhism into the West. But I have to admit, I noticed it yesterday, I'm sort of using common sense, a special kind of common sense as a Trojan horse to bring Buddhism into the West. And of course for me there's the etymology in there that common sense used to mean a sense common to all the senses and not ordinary sense. And hence, then, also a sixth sense.

[11:32]

But I would look forward to some time if we ever have a chance to understand your context better or the context you're presenting, whether it's yours or not. Thank you for being the first to speak. Okay, who else? Yes, Gerhard. I have a question about consciousness and attention. Buddhism consciousness is reactive secondary and it comes from the complex of sense object as a sense organ including thinking.

[12:39]

So, my first question is, is there consciousness without an object possible in Buddhism? And how comes attention in it? And if consciousness in a way is a secondary, a reactive process, so you need an object, and then after meeting with another sense organ, consciousness pops up in a secondary way, in a reactive way. Yeah, yeah, I understand. How does attention relate to it? How is attention generated? Is it more primary than consciousness? Okay. German. The question was the relationship between consciousness and awareness. Consciousness, as we know, is something reactive, secondary. That is, I have an object, I perceive it, and then a consciousness unfolds that follows the object, something adapted, secondary.

[13:57]

The question is, first of all, is there a consciousness without object in Buddhism? Okay, so let me respond to the first part of what you said first. If I can. Okay, so the little example I've used often If I hold this up and you concentrate on it Okay, so first of all let me just go into it a little bit because it's part of the development of mindfulness Yeah, you notice, excuse me, but I'm doing this Because consciousness is also thought to be related to the chakras.

[15:04]

Okay. But as a mindfulness practice you bring attention to the stick. Okay. Now, it's considered, you know, one of the bases of practice is developing the ability to have attention rest on the stick. It's a kind of exercising, an exercising attention. Now again, for those of you who just came this morning for the first time, I spoke a couple of times during this Friday and during Friday of thinking of consciousness as something that can be developed and consciousness and attention as something that can be developed and strengthened.

[16:34]

And we can understand the four foundations of mindfulness as being four targets. I'm straying from your question, but I haven't forgotten. of four targets that it's useful to bring attention to. It's useful to bring attention to it because it develops mindfulness. And very simply, the four, the list of the four foundations is the body, feelings, not emotions. The states of mind and contents of mind.

[17:51]

And we could say states of consciousness and contents of consciousness. I think that's the easiest way, at least in English, to remember them. They're sometimes numerated differently. But I think we can grasp it experientially as body, feelings, states of mind, contents of mind. Now we can ask, why those particular targets? There could be other targets. And why in that particular order? Now, if you're going to do a practice seriously, you have to ask the, we can say, meta-questions. Why does this practice exist?

[18:58]

Why isn't it some other way? So one of the ways you develop a practice is to have the question present, why is it this way and not some other way? In this order. And I would suggest you just get in the habit of running through the four. Body, feelings, states and contents. And when you're sitting in a cafe and you're noticing your experience, Then sort of use this run-through to notice your experience. Body, feelings, states, contents. It's just the list is an entry into noticing your experience.

[20:01]

This is the craft of practice. And what's meant to hold in mind a teaching. To hang out with a teacher. And Satipatthana means to hang out with mindfulness. To hold in mind, to stay near to. And to establish both mindfulness and the base of mindfulness. And a base from which mindfulness can be anchored. So you're establishing mindfulness and then you use mindfulness to establish a base of mindfulness. So you have a sort of base of actualized mindfulness in your life.

[21:26]

And then that is a base for further mindfulness. You got the picture? And then there's fruits that follow from that that you can only know if you do it. I can't tell you. If you don't do it, You don't know them. That's just the way it is. There's certain measures you can use to enter into the fruits. But the fruits are known through a context which you have to create. I can't create the context for you. Okay, so as I said, I started to say, yesterday I spoke about the breath as an exercise machine for attention.

[22:53]

So you bring attention to the exercise machine of breath and you're not only developing the machine but you're also You are, and they have developed over the years in gyms. It's true. You're not only developing the machine, you're also strengthening attention. So when I try to bring my attention to this stick, I'm also developing attention. And the traditional stages which in fact are actual experience, Your attention, you can put your attention on it very easily.

[24:07]

Then it goes away. Your eyes lead it one way, your ears lead it another way, associative thinking leads it another way. The eyes direct your attention in one direction, out of the ears in the other, and then the associative thinking somewhere else. And sometimes that's characterized in early Buddhism as six animals which you try to pull in and get happily living together. One wants to fly, one wants to go to the anthill, one wants to go to the jungle. You liked saying that. Yeah, I did. So, attention is connected to all these sense-directed interests.

[25:08]

Now you're trying to develop attention as separate from these six. So you bring it back and then it goes away and then you bring it back and it goes away and etc. So attention doesn't belong to itself. Eventually it gets easier to stay. And when it gets easier to stay you'll actually find a brightening of your world which we all experience sometimes but it begins to be the ordinary way you see things you experience the space between things

[26:35]

You see every object with a kind of clarity. There's a kind of preciseness and brightness. Just from this simple exercise of making attention, attention of itself, not attention through the six senses. Okay. So attention begins to get easier to bring back And it gets easier to bring back because you're also developing not only attention, you're developing intention.

[27:43]

And intention is a quality of mind that's deeper than consciousness. Consciousness. Yeah. You can have an intention in the background of consciousness that continuously informs consciousness. As I've often pointed out, again, to look at these things very simply. When Suzuki Roshi gives the advice, don't invite your thoughts to tea. Yeah. So you, as I say, we can all do this quite easily. We can notice thoughts and we cannot invite our thoughts to tea. But again, at least in English to not invite your thoughts to tea is also a thought.

[28:54]

How do you use a thought not to invite your thoughts to tea? because it's not a thought it's an intention it's a mental they're both mental formations but one we can call discursive thinking and the other we can call intention And this is a conflation because we don't really explore consciousness, so we don't know the difference between one mental formation and another. And different mental formations generate different minds.

[29:58]

When you are waking up, And the shards of a dream are still present. Shards? No, I don't know shards. Pieces of pottery in an archaeological site. And the archaeological site of your waking up among the ruins of a life. Yeah. The shards of your dream are there. But, you know, if you can pick up one of those shards... And hold it, it can easily and often does generate a dream again.

[31:10]

Generate the dreaming mind. So the shard of the dream is a mental formation which generates a dreaming mind. Okay, so the intention not to invite your thoughts to tea generates a mind which can resist being dragged into discursive thinking. Okay, so when you do a simple thing like try to develop the ability to stay concentrated on something, you're entering into the craft of practice. And you're doing something like You know, being literate.

[32:28]

Being able to read. I mean, there's a very big difference between cultures which can read and cultures which can't read. Learning to read changes the mind. So in this, in a way, you're becoming wisdom literate or... Mind literate or something like that. Minderate. Okay. But you have to, you know, when my daughter, Sophia, is learning to read. Yeah. So she has to start with letters and words and putting words together and phrases and so forth. It's a process which kind of bumbles along and then suddenly it makes a leap.

[33:34]

And you start being able to read sentences. But you have to start with letters and then the spell of words and so forth. So this is like learning to read. Sorry, I'm going on forever here. But I'm trying to find ways to talk about this and this seems to be a good way, so I'm going on. Okay. So by bringing the mind, bringing attention to the stick, you are developing attention and you're developing intention. Because it's intention which is now also separating itself from or finding its independence from the six animals of the senses.

[34:48]

So eventually you can bring it back easily. Attention is working quite well. And finally it just rests there. And occasionally it goes away. But it comes back by itself. That's the fourth stage. You rest your mind somewhere and sometimes it moves away, but then it comes back. And that eventually the mind will just rest wherever you put it. That does not mean that the creativity of lots of thoughts and stuff is lost. Somehow, when you can rest attention somewhere, or attention finds its own rest, there's a phrase in some koans, where did the ancients find their rest?

[36:08]

Given all these different things, and then they kind of throw away line, where do the ancients find their rest? When attention rests on itself. Okay. Now, in developing, maturing such a simple exercise, simple conceptually. Now, in developing Maturing such a simple exercise, simple conceptually, there are many fruits along the way.

[37:33]

And you just, you can find out. Because each of these four stages, it's the stage of the development of a new kind of mind. Now you understand this so well. Just do it. One second, I'm still with Gerhard. So eventually you can just rest your mind on the stick. Then I can take the stick away. But the mind stays concentrated. Now what is the object of concentration or object of intention? The field of mind itself. Now that's a very big transition. So now the object of mind arises through mind itself as the object.

[38:35]

Now you can bring the object back into the field and you can observe it from the field rather than from the mind created by the object. Then you can begin to know the contents of the mind separate from the field or within the field of mind. So that's my response to your first question about what can be the object of consciousness. Now, the second part was about can attention be, does it derive from consciousness or how did you put it? How does attention relate to consciousness, and how is attention generated, like consciousness, generated only dependent on object, or can it be generated in itself?

[40:15]

And is it more fundamental, the consciousness, or is it also something which is reactive? can attention be generated through itself? Yeah, go ahead. . It's a really very good question. And it's a question that I'm in the midst of exploring. And I don't know quite how to answer it yet. And I'm using this seminar partly to try to explore how to answer it. So let's see if by the end of the seminar

[41:16]

I can say find some way to articulate what I feel. Right now I don't feel clear enough about it to speak about. Thanks for being patient. Someone else? Yes? Can you relate what you said about the core foundations mindfulness to the concept of the five skandhas. Let me say, I think it works better if you speak German first and then English, or let her speak English, but German first is better. Deutsch first. If anyone has a question, please speak German first. That works better. I can also translate, but that you speak German first.

[42:24]

I have in these four books Yeah. OK. He would like to know how or he discovered within the four foundations of mindfulness something that seems to relate to the five skandhas and he'd like to know how the five skandhas relate to the four foundations of mindfulness. Yeah. The five skandhas is when you're using mindfulness to study or examine the contents of mind Then you're studying the five skandhas. And the fourth, the contents of mind, is sometimes called dharmas, to bring mindfulness to the dharmas. Okay. Maybe we will Sunday evening about 8 o'clock get to the, you know, fourth foundation.

[43:47]

Or Andreas will sign you up for next year. One foundation a year. Okay. Someone else? Yes. Let me find out. When are we supposed to stop? You do not know. One needs a boss, and you look to your boss, and the boss lets you down. Okay, good. When you stopped those blows earlier, and we pointed our attention to what you were doing, and then we observed the field.

[44:49]

What aspect does the memory play in this area? I remember these steps, that he was there. And when he brings him back to the Rosh Hina, When you were talking about putting up the stick and we put it away and then we became aware of the field. I hope. Yes. What does memory, what part does it play in that?

[45:57]

I can remember that the stick was there. when you take it away. So it's... Even first graders can remember that. Kindergarten. It's a mixture of feel and remember, remembering. So maybe you can say something about that. And the other part was, when you were talking about the sight-centered consciousness, What kind of role does the observer play in that? Because it also gets mixed up sometimes. Bring that up later. Let's just stay with the first one. In a certain sense, the present is nothing but memory. If you can't hold in mind this duration, which is actually a knife edge, Not even a knife edge.

[47:10]

As I say, it's a minute, it's a half a second to twelve, it's a millionth of a second to twelve, and it's a millionth of a second after twelve. There's no twelve. Yeah, that's a word for it, this tiny unit of, the tiniest unit of experience. Hmm? No, no, in Sanskrit. It's sometimes said, if you scan the sky, a full night sky, Like at Crestone, where there's dry desert air and the stars are like... You can feel your mind ripples across the millions of stars. It's not?

[48:22]

Okay, sorry. I never went to high school here. Okay. But you can feel the difference when all the stars are there bright and when there's less stars. That feeling is a little unit of time. Sometimes called one of the ways to describe the smallest unit of time. Experiential time. In English, experienceable time. Yeah. Okay. So, I mean, like I said, we're all can actually, if you don't think too much, you can feel everyone in the room at once.

[49:26]

Just like you can feel the night sky. Okay. So this duration we call the present is established in our senses and in effect in memory. Maybe we have long-term memory, short-term memory, and micro-memory. There's a kind of micro-memory that establishes the present. Okay, so in that sense... There's memory. But in an additional sense you can't even conceptualize that as a stick unless you have associations from your experience.

[50:50]

So at each moment you're which lobe it is, it's been studied, is running through associations and picking out certain ones and saying, that's a stick. Virtually as fast as computers can get your phone call. I'm amazed. I dial the phone, right? As I push the last number, it starts to ring in Crestone. I'm still amazed by it. It's so cool. Faster than I can scratch my cheek, it starts to ring. I can't get my finger to my cheek in time. So there's a very fast process going through to give contextual meaning to the situation.

[52:03]

So that's an associative memory that's functioning. Now, those kinds of memory are separate from self-referential memory. So when we say the word memory, we have to actually start talking about what levels, what different kinds of memory are we speaking about. Okay. So that's enough for that, your first aspect, is it? Okay. So let me just, we should end, right? So let me just say that under the category the frame of reference of body the body as a target of mindfulness within that there are six targets

[53:32]

One is your activity. One is your breath. One is the four elements. One is the parts of the body. One is death. Okay. There's six, I think. Anyway, I'll think. Okay. So, your activities, breath, the elements, the parts of the body, anyway. My memory, you know. Yeah, and death. Now, death is a crucial one. You might imagine. Death means, you know, charnel ground meditation.

[54:48]

or charnel ground, where bodies are burned, or cemeteries. Okay. Leichenstätten. Krematorium. Genau. Der Tod wird auch als das Krematorium der Meditation bezeichnet. Yeah, but the practice is actually to notice the fading away of moments. Okay. Now this point becomes much more emphasized in the whole way the four foundations of mindfulness are understood within the Mahayana. Because within the Mahayana the emphasis is on seeing mindfulness simultaneously of emptiness. And this involves, as I said on Friday morning, shifting attentions from appearance to dissolution or fading away.

[56:09]

Die Aufmerksamkeit von dem Erscheinen hin zu dem Verschwinden der Dinge zu verschieben. Or so that you, when your attention goes to appearance, it doesn't go to appearance as substantiality. Oder wenn deine Aufmerksamkeit auf die Erscheinung gerichtet ist, dann ist es nicht auf die Erscheinung als etwas Substanzvolles gerichtet. It goes to appearance as insubstantiality. And as was pointed out on Friday, this really generates a different kind of mind. So what I asked the participants in this seminar to do on Friday, and I will now ask it again for those of you who are new, When you're listening to me and you're listening to the hearing the sound of the room notice the fading away of my voice and the sound of the room. fading away of this sound and also I will occasionally ring the bell and I'd like you to notice the fading away of the sound and not think of it as oh a sound an entity a word there's a sound

[57:49]

And I don't want you to think about it as a sound, as an entity and a word, like, yes, this is a sound. But let your mind be identified through the sound. Yes, and it's fading away.

[58:22]

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