Dogen, let me start with Dogen. Because of this truth, he says, we must study that the 10,000 things the 100 grasses are all, one by one, the entire world. That each thing, one by one, is the entire world. Okay. Now, that's clearly a philosophical statement. But why bother to say it?

[01:03]

Now, William Blake said something like, see the world in a grain of sand. Let's say this is a philosophic and poetic insight. But Blake didn't give us a practice. It was his, you know, other than, you know, to be a genius like Blake, then it helps. Other than to his instruction is to be a genius like me. Yeah. But Dogen is trying to instruct us in an experiential way. And I'm trying to see if I can express this.

[02:22]

How Dogen sees this, each thing, each blade of grass, one by one is the entire world. Now, I mean, to keep reminding, and he says, he doesn't say, notice this is the case, he says, we must study that. And he doesn't say, notice this is the case, but he says, investigate this. And he means study, investigate. Investigate means to follow the tracks. Yeah. So what is this study? Now... There's the concept in later Buddhism of the alaya vijnana.

[03:43]

And it's a part of the system of vijnanas. And it was a late creation. I'm mentioning late creation because I'm saying this is something... We're also a late creation. And Buddhism evolves in, you know, somewhat similar to science evolves. Der Buddhismus, der entwickelt sich weiter in ähnlicher Weise wie sich auch die Wissenschaften weiterentwickeln. And one of its evolutionary moments was the creation of the idea of Alaya Vijnana.

[04:46]

Und einer dieser evolutionären Momente war die Schaffung von Alaya Vijnana. Okay. And there's quite a lot of debate among the schools and among its proponents about what it really means about what it means I'm taking it to mean and I think Dogen is taking it to mean That everything, as I said a few minutes ago, we don't mind baby noises. Yeah, or even father noises. Yeah. I'm taking it to mean and I think Dogen is taking it to mean that everything that's ever happened to you or something close to everything that's ever happened to you is stored

[06:23]

in the Alaya Vishnana. And the simple translation of Alaya Vishnana is the storehouse. Okay, now it's something like, you know, somebody sees an accident like happened this morning. And they say, well, there was somebody, I saw him and he drove out in maybe a Ford. But if you hypnotize the person, He says, it wasn't a Ford, it was an Opel, and the license plate is such and such.

[07:42]

And this happens. People, under hypnotism, or... perhaps in meditative states, can remember the details of things which you can't remember in consciousness. Or the experience some people have in near-death experiences, of everything feeling like in moments everything in their life appears before them. Yeah, now, this kind of experience has been known about for centuries. It's not just something we know about through contemporary...

[08:43]

research. So there's long been an awareness that we know more than is accessible to consciousness. And Freud made, of course, a huge shift in the world view of human beings by positing the unconscious, since he noticed people knew things through associative mind, they didn't know through conscious mind. So, Freud has caused a big change in the way of view of the world by setting up this subconscious, because he noticed that people in certain conditions had access to other types of information.

[10:03]

So then, of course, part of the effort from even 3,000 years ago, but certainly beginning clearly with Buddhism, the effort from thousands of years ago and clearly beginning twenty five hundred years ago. How do we know the mind? And one of the early pre-Buddhist recognitions was dreaming mind non-dreaming deep sleep and waking mind don't fully know each other. And they made the kind of obvious question, is there a way to bring these three minds, which I call the three birth minds, together? And the rather incomplete anthropological and...

[11:24]

historical research suggests that there were at least two emphases. One was more psychedelic, which is soma, psyche and soma. Soma meant a plant that was psychedelic. I think you're speaking too loud. Okay, fine. So early historical and... I'm sorry, because I don't want to tell you all this stuff. Early anthropological and historical research... suggest that in India before Buddhism to answer this question of how we join the minds one was the long haired matted haired guys who took psychedelics And then there were the short-haired guys like me who organized the LSD conference but didn't take LSD.

[12:44]

And decided to do it through meditation. If it is possible to join the minds or get to be more familiar with each other, do it through meditation. And I myself in my life reenacted this decision and decided to put all my eggs in the meditation basket. And part of the decision was I just didn't want to see everyone taking psychedelics. I saw enough of that.

[13:50]

So the question is, is there a way that those three minds can be more overlapping? And what in a way was discovered through meditation is that there's a fourth mind which is a wisdom mind and not a birth mind. You're not born with it. It's an emergent mind through practice. And partly it overlaps the three birth minds. But also it's a fourth mind in its own way different from the other three minds.

[15:03]

And this fourth mind can be educated, evolved, developed and alchemically and catalytically merged with the other three minds or related to This spirit can be further developed alchemistically and catalytically with these three spirits. And part of this also was, it was clear if you meditate or if you just look at really what's going on in life, not everything we know is in consciousness. So where is this everything we know which is not in consciousness?

[16:13]

So trying to face that problem Later Buddhism said, okay, everything we know that's not in consciousness is in the Alaya Vishnayana. And then a lot of people said, well, it's everything we don't know, how do you know it's in the, you know, etc. ? If it's everything we know which we don't know, how do we know? So, of course, you have some debate. Now, my understanding of what Dogen is doing, when he says again, because of this truth, we must study the 10,000 things.

[17:23]

Now this is to avoid generalizations like many. 10,000 things. And a similar branch is the hundred grasses. That each of these things each blade of grass one by one is the entire world. Okay. So when he says study that, first he means just really grok it, get it.

[18:32]

Be able to hold it in mind. Okay. Then let's take another thing he says, which is, place yourself in the midst of immediacy. And consider this, as I told you yesterday, the entire universe. Or the entire world, I mean, sure, it's the same word. Okay, so let me recast, restate that in my way. Place yourself in the midst of immediacy. That already is a significant practice.

[19:34]

And to be able to stay there. And that's related to the skill of being able to just put your mind anywhere and it stays where you put it without thinking. So I'm reframing this statement of Dogen's. so tu ich diese Aussage von Dogen neu einrahmen, neu formulieren. Place yourself in the midst, place yourself in the middle of immediacy and consider this The functioning of allness.

[21:01]

Okay, the functioning of allness. You don't have to translate it. The assumption here is, now, okay. Ready? Let me see if I can go. Um, um, We've got the Hanover skies and we know the stars are back there. And if you're an astrologer, the stars are still working on you even when you can't see them.

[22:11]

Now there's no way non-corrected mind is a blank mind. It's not a tabula rasa. It's a mouse. No. It's the blackboard, but the blackboard is not black. I mean, not blank. Das ist so wie eine Tafel und nicht eine Tafel, die leer ist. But each molecule of the slate, if it's a slate, is incredibly active and stored with information.

[23:20]

Wenn es also eine Schiefertafel ist, dann ist es so, als ob jedes Molekül dieses Schiefers I think when I was a kid, blackboards were actually slate. Okay, so everything's changing, everything's an activity. There are no entities. It's good to, every time you think of something as an entity, rename it an activity. This bell is an activity. Not an entity. It has very little meaning unless I ring it. It was made by someone, it might even be signed.

[24:37]

And it's a glassy use of the elements, so it can actually, if you drop it, it can crack like glass. So one of the big steps in practice is you really never think of things as entities. You always think of them as activities. Now no matter how wise you are, consciousness functions through substantialist views. Consciousness functions through assuming things are entities which have a durative existence.

[25:40]

And consciousness in most of us functions through self-referencing. Now, emptiness is not an absence. It's entry. Entries may be absence. The entry to emptiness, the experience, may be an absence. But emptiness itself is also an activity. There is nothing that is not an activity. There's relatively difference in the speed, rhythm, etc.

[26:57]

of the activity. Stones are slow activity. But even to In Buddhism, there's images like a bird flies over a mountain. In Buddhism, there's images like a bird flies over a mountain. And its feather brushes the top of the mountain once every hundred years. And its feather brushes the top of the mountain once every hundred years. mountains are stones are slow activities but they're active okay now what I'm speaking about here is I'm trying to talk about non-corrected mind.

[28:18]

And I'm trying to describe non-corrected mind as the absence of, or the freeing mind of consciousness. I'm trying to describe non-corrected mind is mind known through the absence of consciousness. Okay, so you're knowing mind without the interference of the substantialist bias of consciousness.

[29:20]

So you're knowing mind also without the usual bias of self-referentiality. Okay. Okay. So in a way, you're knowing mind as, let's try some words out. If mind, maybe capital M-I-N-D, is without the referentiality of substantialist views and self-referencing. Substantialist means to think things are entities or substantial in some way.

[30:36]

Okay. Let's try slowly. I mean, I've never said this before either, so why should you be able to say it? I'm just finding my way. Because I have never spoken about this exactly from this angle. So, non-corrected mind is ideally a mind free from substantialist views. To think things are substantial and not changing. And free of self-reference. Okay. Okay, so then What is the activity of mind?

[31:45]

Now in Zen, we often use, I mean, Tibetan Buddhism uses light all the time. As, you know, inner light, etc. The clear light. But But Zen, trying to say something similar, uses darkness or blackness. Sometimes it's a black lacquer bowl that you can't see to the bottom of because it's black lacquer. You don't know where the bottom is. Sie nehmen oftmals eine schwarze Lackschüssel als Beispiel, die so schwarz ist, dass man nicht erkennen kann, wo der Boden der Schüssel ist, der Schale.

[32:49]

Okay, good, thanks. Okay, so now let's find some word. If everything that's ever happened to you is somehow present in you, And it's amazing if you do practice recollecting previous lives, which Zen just pays lip service to the idea of by a few people to previous lives. I didn't have one leading Tibetan Buddhism teacher say to me, I saw him talk to students and said, you'll have reincarnation.

[34:00]

Previously he looked at me and winked. And even a quite well-known contemporary Buddhist teacher kind of reprimanded me. To people who don't know, you always tell them reincarnation. Only to people who already know it's a myth, do you say it's a myth. It's not essential to understanding the wisdom of Buddhism. All right. But the practice of recollecting previous lives can be useful.

[35:16]

But not previous lives, your own previous life. I spent several years trying to develop a skill of taking some memory like what my third grade class looked like. And then recreating the room recreating the image of the teacher who's Mrs. Marshall And who sat in front of me and who sat behind me. And if I really got it going, then I could go to what was the next day like.

[36:18]

I mean, these are mental exercises which are kind of useful. It's kind of like mental aerobics or something like that. I'm not sure I'd recommend it to any of you, but here I'm talking about it. Okay. So anyway, my point is that although we don't have conscious knowledge of the knowing of the capital M-I-N-D, If the alaya vijnana is some kind of fact of everything that's happened to us, or a very large percentage, or much more known than consciousness knows, um, um,

[37:27]

then in what form does that knowing exist? The words I would use for it are conjunctive. It fits together. It fits together. And disjunctive, doesn't fit together. And paratactic. Paratactic means things are just side by side and not necessarily related to each other. Also Eisenstein macht es in seinen Filmen, dass er eine Szene auf die nächste folgen lässt, aber die Szenen miteinander irgendwie gar nicht in Verbindung stehen. So all this stuff that's happened to you of a large percentage is just sitting there beside each other.

[39:06]

And some of it is in a conjunctive relationship and some of it is in a disjunctive relationship. And some of it's in no relationship, virtually no relationship, except it's in the same space. Kind of space. A friend of mine, David Rothenberg, who's a musician and a philosopher, der Musiker und Philosoph ist, der eine ganze Reihe fabelhafter Bücher geschrieben hat, und das ist eines seiner neuesten, das ist aus einer Trilogie, drei Bände, und das heißt... And it's a study of how insect sounds probably influence us.

[40:25]

And I guess the longest biological rhythm known to man It's every 17 years, for example, it was 1979, 1996, and 2013, that all 17 years, cicadas appear all over New England. I don't think it happens elsewhere. People measure their lives in New England by, well, I graduated when the cicadas were, you know, or I was born when the cicadas came out.

[41:29]

early colonials were amazed all these holes would appear in the ground every 17 years and like a locust of Kaledi, you know. And if you study insect sounds and how insect and bird songs are all kind of different, related to each other, they begin to produce some music. if there's enough repetition. If you study how bird sounds and insect sounds even disjunctively relate to each other repeated enough rhythms start to appear over the

[42:35]

over the larger pattern. Now, I'm mentioning this because I really think something like this happens when you take away consciousness and you're allowing mind to function without correcting it. and I mention all this because I believe that something like this happens when you take away the consciousness and you allow the spirit to Without the interference of substantialist views, and self-referencing the mind free of consciousness and no stages of meditation or anything

[44:01]

just left alone, with enough biological vitality in your posture, patterns in a kind of what Zen calls thinking non-thinking, Zen sits a lot because this space of thinking non-thinking that rhythms arising from even disjunctive relationships Take time to appear.

[45:12]

And the emissaries of emptiness of emptiness And I call silence, stillness, space, the emissaries of emptiness. Allow this deeper functioning, spatial functioning of mind to develop. Now, as intuitions often, and sometimes deceptively, have the feeling of truth,

[46:22]

So intuitions, I think, arise from the functioning of mind, big M. But don't arise so much from consciousness. But to appear they have to often push through consciousness. And we say I had an intuition, that's what I should do. But I would say that the thinking that appears through non-thinking mind has the power, the truth power of intuition And I find usually it's more trustworthy and more complexly integrated than intuition.

[48:07]

And more complexly integrated. Okay. So I think that's enough. I would like to talk about Dharma positions. But maybe we'll wait until after. Dharma positions. But we'll speak about that after.

[48:42]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_75.05