I have to work on words a little more. I had the impression once that this inattentional space So I have to create order in myself because at first I thought the inner attentional space you're talking about you equate it with the contents of that space. but includes the contents and the often involuntary quality of the contents and the involuntariness is a factor of the medium itself.

[01:16]

Yes, the contents are enclosed and also the involuntary contents and this involuntaryness is part of the medium of this inner space. So there's also an image or maybe an experiencing that relates to that, to me. And I would like to see if you feel the same way. I want to see if that's fitting with what you mean. So I first ask myself, is attention a quality of consciousness? When I follow this question, my sense is that attention is a little bit prior to consciousness.

[02:40]

My sense is that attention is like filaments extending into, stretch out, reach into space. On the other hand, it is hard to define something that is not consciousness. My feeling is that these two are constantly moving toward each other.

[04:03]

The two being consciousness and attention? Non-consciousness and the readiness to get there? which I would call the tension, the readiness. And that this, [...] that this also makes a space.

[05:05]

Whether inner or outer, this is in any case an inner space. This moving toward each other and this relationality seems to make its own space, inner, outer, whether inner, outer, I don't know, let me say, I see it as an inner space. And when you open the eyes, just as you said about your experience in the Zendo, one notices that some of it is also present in the outer space. Okay. The base of our lived knowing, something like that, is not inclosable by or definable by words.

[06:39]

and our actual experience, actualizing experience or something like that, is sometimes less or quite different from the words we might use to point to it. And sometimes it's much more and it's always at least some significantly different usually. But we have to use, or at least it's certainly useful to use words to try to direct attention to it. So in the end, you have to trust the words that appear to you to explore it.

[08:04]

And in the end, you have to trust the words that appear to you to explore it. But it's not the understanding which is important, but the exploration which is important. Or the understanding which is incubated. Okay. So let me go back to the Le Carre story. Here's this old woman in some threat of being killed. But she still has to go shopping occasionally. And she has to open and close the windows and doors and things.

[09:09]

And sometimes she sits down. And in the novel, Le Carré is sort of like, shows her trying to find a certain composure so she can deal with her situation. And so she sits down and kind of tries to just notice, I'm sitting down, at least I'm here. And he almost gets the reader to sort of feel he's sitting down with her. In other words, I think he's showing her as needing some kind of bodily location to deal with her dangerously changing, possibly, situation.

[10:40]

And he shows, it seems to me, a kind of... and again quoting Chandrakirti who was Nagarjuna's disciple and he lived from 600 to 650 Yeah, 50 years. I mean, what did he accomplish in 50 years? Wow. He was an Indian scholar at Nalanda University. And he said again that our departure point is observing the movements of the body.

[11:50]

Fully mindfully, with full mindfulness observing the movements of the body. And by departure by our departure point, he means establish an initial mind. In this in a world of interdependence and inter-emergence, when the new is always happening in the midst of interdependence. And so, I mean, we need to find English words at least for interdependence.

[13:05]

We have to say, as we said before, we have to have words like interindependent and interemergence and so forth. So this is a world with no fixed ground. There's no ground to anchor yourself in. It's a constantly moving plurality with no center. This is the worldview of Buddhism. So how do you create a location, a center? And the point of beginning or the initial mind, Chandrakirti says, has to be, is best to be your body.

[14:17]

And so I've been trying to find for years a way to, within Western paradigms, to put words together in some kind of order that the phrase becomes a Dharma door. And the first fascicle of Dogen I ever studied carefully was Uji, his fascicle called Being Time. And Joan Stanbaugh, who is, I guess, the outstanding translator of Heidegger into English, Joan Stanbau is an herausragende Übersetzerin von Heidegger ins Englische.

[15:52]

And translated Being Time, Heidegger, into English. Und sie hat Sein und Zeit, Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, ins Englische geschrieben. And she's also written a very insightful small book comparing Dogen's concept and practice of Being Time and Heidegger's. So this has been an explorative practice for me for decades half a century but it's again taken me a long time to just Okay, the phrase I have to use is bodily time. And not bodily space.

[16:54]

And not the breath or something. So I'm saying, let's start our, let's have our initial mind, the Dharma door, being bodily time. Now part of time, when we speak of time, we mean also our experience of the present. And as Dogen says, the past time flows through us, future time flows through us, and present time flows through us. The past flows to the future, and the future flows to the past, and so on.

[17:56]

Okay, and the present, of course, is a durative temporality. And certainly, I always like to use dragonflies. Dragonfly, the present time, is different than our present time. And I think probably for each of us our present time is I know it is, is different. We don't share the same present. We share an overlapping present. And a culturally determined present.

[19:09]

Which we make the present fit our cultural habits. Okay. Okay, now... How long is the present? What we mean by immediacy. Immediacy means in English no in-between, immediate. So there's nothing in-between us and this present we call immediacy. But, you know, the time has, in a knife-edge, there's no dimension to it. It's already past, already, not yet future. Already future. It's already past, already, not yet future. And you've heard me say that the present is a saccadic scanning process.

[20:29]

Like that. And when they... It means that you scan back and forth when you look at something. It was discovered by a French physiologist or optician or something in the late 1800s by accident. But anyway, he did a simple thing. He thought he was looking straight at something and he put a mirror up and watched his eyes. And his eyes were going all around, but his brain was making it look like a single event.

[21:47]

And what's called a visual field of continuity... is 10 to 15 seconds actually, quite long. In other words, if you, as I said the other day, driving along and you see a sign saying Stuttgart, And it's raining and you can't see the sign sometimes. But you have a steady impression because your brain averages out and comes up with one impression. And much of what you're seeing is averaged out.

[22:49]

smoothed out. You can give a person an initial image and then show them varieties of it and they don't even see them. They only see the averaged out version of it. Okay, so time for us is actually a, maybe the present is 10 or 15 seconds long. And after that it's past or not yet. In any case, it's a word which is, even if we're not conscious of it, is a dynamic event in us, time.

[24:04]

It's a word that represents a dynamic event in us, even if we don't experience that word. So if I say bodily time, what I'm saying is, and by using the word time also, I'm contrasting bodily time to clock time. Clock time is, you know, Earth orbital declination time. But I'm not so aware I'm orbiting the sun. I mean, order. The time I know is the length of my life.

[25:25]

But the Diamond Sutra says that Bodhisattva has no concept of a lifetime. That's like non-arising consciousness. To not have the concept of a lifetime arise in your thinking. It's a misleading concept. Even if true. So... The experienceable time is the time of the body.

[26:26]

The heartbeat, the breath, the experience of the organs, the whole proprioceptive process of balance and posture. And as I say, you are time. And Dogen says, you are time. And Dogen says, mountains, mountain. Berg, Berg. He means mountains are their own time. Dragonfly is dragonfly. He didn't say that. And we, bodily time, So you can't be, as I'm sorry to say so often, you can't be out of time because you are time.

[27:48]

You can only be out of time in relation to somebody waiting for you somewhere. But the bodhisattva rests in bodily time and arrives leisurely and infuriates the person who is waiting. Okay, but the point I'm making, Chandrakirti, a thousand years ago or more, made, Dogen made 800 years ago. Is to create the site of your life in bodily time. Site, S-I-T-E. And that always is your reference point.

[28:55]

It will at some point end. But as long as it, until it ends, it is, it, You are this bodily time. And this bodily time is bigger than you. Okay. And you're bringing this attention. A part of practice is to bring attention to attention. And to notice, really, and you can notice it in inner attentional space, you can notice when your inner attentional space is free of content.

[30:04]

Or has content. Or when it's just associative mind. Or when consciousness comes in. Or when tension comes in and moves around without the agency itself. Or when the tension carries a kind of self with it that's not yet conscious. Or when the tension, when it's independent of consciousness and not dynamic of consciousness, In other words, attention can be a dynamic of consciousness. And it seems like it belongs to consciousness. But attention can be independent of consciousness.

[31:11]

And as I say, attention can be a presence within lucid dreaming when you're clearly not conscious in any usual sense of the word. So this inner attentional space gives you the opportunity to study consciousness, awareness, attention and so forth. Which outer attentional space doesn't give you the same opportunity to study the dynamics and layers and modalities of mind.

[32:13]

So I'm trying to go to where I was with you last year. But with the inclusion of how I worked with this over the year. And last year I spoke about physiological time. Which I change now into just saying bodily time. And I had contextual time. And I had gestural time. And I had And that's when I went out and sat on Andrea's lap, I think.

[33:26]

Isn't that right? Didn't I do something like that? I just, good excuse, I jumped on her lap. But I dropped just real time. I've included it now as a subtext of or subcategory of contextual time. And I've also as a subcategory brought in contingency time. Contingency means accidents or circumstances. And it's another subcategory of contextual time I've brought in. Who dare I? Constellating time. Constellating is to know by the stars, right?

[34:29]

Constellate in English. Is it the same in German? Like consider is sidereal, to know by the stars, and constellate is to know by the stars. Okay, so now this distinction I find very useful. I hope you will and do too. The more I know... I'm sorry to use the pronoun my, because I don't really mean it, but my bodily time, this bodily time. So I'm here. I know I'm going to speak with you.

[35:30]

This bodily time. So I know I'm here and I'm going to speak with you. So I locate my sense, I create a sense of location in breath, body, and interceptive awareness, and so forth. And then I sort of become aware of your individual bodily times. And I can make some sort of shift from, I'm going to use pronouns again, my bodily time to your bodily time.

[36:36]

And I can feel your bodily time is pretty similar. I can feel your bodily time as similar Or perhaps rather different. And then I can withdraw from your bodily time to my bodily time. Then I can go back to your bodily time with a little different entry. like I'm trying a different station or tuning or something. And the process of shifting back and forth between another person's bodily time and yourself and then back is a kind of purifying, sometimes erotic experience.

[37:39]

Or it can create a wider contextual time. And all of you at once are creating a contextual time. So I can use the distinction between knowing with some thoroughness and sense of location in bodily time. I can know with some thoroughness the sense of location in bodily time. And then I can move from that into the contextual time that you're establishing.

[38:43]

we are establishing. And as I've mentioned occasionally, somebody did a movie many, many years ago, I don't know, in the 60s or 70s. Seems like yesterday to me, but you know. And George Leonard did a... I don't know if you know who George Leonard was, but anyway, a writer and editor of the Look magazine. Look magazine. Gone. Can't find it anymore, even if you look. Anyway, this guy made this film of an audience being talked with a speaker.

[40:07]

Also, this film shows an audience to whom a speaker speaks. And he was looking for something, I forget, I don't know what he was looking for. The filmmaker. But what he saw was, as soon as the audience was really paying attention to the speaker, All the movements came into sight. In other words, somebody, the speaker, would do something like this and somebody else would scratch their head and it was all occurring as if it was choreographed. It was interesting.

[41:11]

He found a certain speed you could notice this. At other speeds you didn't notice it. So this happened anyway. So this happened anyway. Now, part of yogic practice, bodhisattva practice, is to find yourself in the middle of the averaging of durative time. And watch yourself from a meta level. Creating a sense of an immediacy, a present. So you make a shift from your bodily time to contextual time.

[42:28]

And the yogi gets used to doing that. Because there's no outside. It's all inside. You're creating various kinds of insides. There's no outside. It means, it's a way of saying, it's all interconnected. See again? To say there's no outside is a way of saying it's all interconnected. So the practitioner for this kind of approach to practice moves into contextual time, feels the contrast with one's own bodily time, and joins one's own bodily time to the contextual time.

[43:51]

Which any orchestral musician has to do automatically. Or normally. And sometimes the time is just the circumstances and sometimes it becomes a kind of constellation. Not necessarily or surely in the specific sense of a constellation in therapy. But it's in the same territory. I think. And now the third kind of time is what I call gestational time. Okay.

[45:20]

Now, what do I mean by gestational time? I think the simplest thing is to say it's the time of an intention. In other words, when you have an intention which you can hold, that intention functions somewhere. It can function in the spatiality of immediacy. But mostly it functions temporally, out of sight. And you could call this a ripening time or just an incubatory time, and I like a pupatorial time.

[46:24]

Or you can call it, I prefer gestational time. Now, there's a teaching in Buddhism called the Alaya-Hijjana. How have you translated gestational time with me? How do I translate it? OK. All right. So in some ways gestational time is the most formative time of your life.

[47:27]

I shouldn't say time of your life because that's an expression. Oh, I had the time of my life. So maybe we should say the most formative temporality, temporal dimension of your life. Because that's where your intentions and karma, impressions and everything mature, integrate and so forth. Now the teaching of the alaya-vijjana, which is a particular Yogacara teaching developed quite a bit of time after the Buddha I mean, it's implicit in Buddha's teaching, but it takes time before the conception is developed in a way that it can become a teaching. And vijnana is one of those words which means to know things separately together.

[48:56]

That sounds a little bit contradictory, but it's the way things are, to let things separately together. So the teaching of the Alaya Vijnana is, in my experience, means that The stream of your experience flows in the stream bed of bodily time flows in the streambed of contextual time, flows in the streambed of others' bodily time, Parents, friends, children, strangers.

[50:18]

And flows in the sensorial experience of phenomena. So your experience of phenomena also as an activity. I mean, here we have Dogen saying things like, the entire universe is the true human body. And what's translated as entire universe means something like the experienceable all-at-onceness. So let's bring bodily time and contextual time, which is both contingent and constellating.

[51:19]

And the mind of non-conscious arising, which knows, let's say again, maybe the inner attentional mind, which knows the world in its inside otherness, which knows the world in its inside otherness, Sorry, inside otherness. Almost, let's use the image again, like a big washing machine. It's turning your karma and your experiences and your sensations and all your accumulated information

[52:48]

And realigning it and reconfiguring it and so forth. And as soon as you bring consciousness into it, it's gone. Or mostly gone. Or appears as intuition or daydreams or something. So the bodhisattva establishes this mind of non-conscious arising which is the mind in which The subtlety of connectivity of all of us is more apparent.

[53:51]

And I would say, and I don't know anything about really constellation therapy, But somehow it seems that it's been discovered how to tap into this field of the alaya-vijnana. and allow it to surface into a present created by several people or even moving objects around. Okay, that's all I want to say. I'd like to read you a description of that in a koan.

[55:15]

But if I do that, I'll do it tomorrow. But I thought I should at least say that much so that we could then have some discussion. And Ulrika, are you ready to discuss or are you just stretching your hands? Stretching. Okay. It's time for dinner anyway. I'm really on time, on clock time. I'm embarrassed to say so.

[55:55]

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