I decided to present the five skandhas just as a teaching and let the other aspects of the book that I've written To be only those topics which amplify what you need to know to understand the practice of Black Canvas. Okay, go directly to your personal difference in field with the five clusters of Canvas. of form, feeling, perception, associated meditation. And then the children will light a rod And your true nature will be clear and still.

[01:12]

And as is, as it is. Empty through and through. Now, turning your light around has the right meaning. One meaning in my understanding is normally when we are in the world, we're conscious. And the movement to consciousness through formative perception and associative meditation and the movement to consciousness through form, feeling, perception, and associative spiritual activity is unseen or unobserved or barely noticed. So the life normally goes this way to consciousness.

[02:14]

So to turn the light around can also mean to see, in the midst of consciousness, associative mentation happening, forming consciousness. To see perception happening. Non-grippable feeling. And form. Okay. This clearness and silence. Accept that this mind is true nature. And true nature. This true nature is mind.

[03:21]

All activity. All myriad changes and transformations in the sensory world have never shaken it. That is why it is called imperturbable mind and the fundamental source. So here Yuan Wu presents the pivot of knowing, self and other, as impermanent mind. Whether walking, standing, sitting or climbing,

[04:22]

Concentrate on the fullness of mind. Be naked and pure without interruption so that no subjective views arise. Now again, this is an effort to be objective. To free yourself from subjective distortions, likes and dislikes, fears, and so forth. And only when you do this can you enter the focus of life. Because the experience of the fullness of mind cannot be present when there's conflict, doubt, comparison. Yeah, or at least it can't be ambivalence.

[05:48]

At least it can't be noticed. Now, one of the ways in which there's this... pivot of objectivity, is resting in the six sines. And as you know, we've practiced this in the past, that you first of all have to kind of free yourself from the domination of I-consciousness, which is E-Y-D and the pronoun I. It's interesting that children don't like pronouns.

[07:06]

Sophia wants to call herself Sophia, or any of the other names we give her, Lingdu and things like that, which is Japanese for darling. Then to say, ah, she won't say, ah. It seems that I turns her into an object that belongs to others. She becomes a... I belongs to everyone. We're all I. But aside from that, We want to free ourselves from the domination of I and I pronoun being defined through the world. It's a little bit like our I looks at the world and our I pronoun this looks back.

[08:17]

Es ist so, als würde das Auge auf die Welt schauen und dieses Ich-Fürwort, the I-pronoun, das schaut auf dich zurück. Someone calls you in the telephone. Is this Richard? It is I. It's common to say, it's me, but correct is, it is I. If it's me, it's like an equal sign. Really isn't an equal sign, it's a copula, so it's an intercourse sign, copulation sign. It means the two words are interacting. In linguistic, in English, it's called a copula. So the I, it is I, I defined through you knowing, et cetera, that you try to end that domination or lessen it.

[09:33]

And one way to do that, again, if we refresh our sense of this practice, is to spend ten minutes or half an hour or so for several days in a row, just listening to the world. Or while you had this fire last night. You might close your eyes like Regina in the grocery store. And walk around in the midsummer night's darkness. And smell the world only. You can smell the fire, you can smell the grass more. You can smell when you get near a person. No one knows what you're doing.

[11:00]

You're just walking around, wandering, but you're sniffing through the world like a dog. Yeah, people say he or she's practiced too much. Yeah, look at that. but it's great to really smell the path so then you can also take the ear or hearing so you can practice hearing only Or just hearing. So even like right now, we can practice to only hear. See if no other sense can be present. And just allow yourself to be absorbed in the hearing as if the whole world was hearing.

[12:16]

I've talked to musicians, professional musicians occasionally. And they say when they play with an orchestra, a quartet or something, Without knowing anything about vijnana practice, this is six of the eight vijnanas, they actually practice this as a way to play in the orchestra or quartet. And they get so absorbed in the sound that the sound is like an immense space. in which their body disappears. And what was their body seems to extend into a sound articulation. And the person I'm thinking of right now said, this doesn't happen every time I play. Und die Persona, die ich jetzt denke, die hat gesagt, das passiert nicht jedes Mal, wenn ich spiele.

[13:36]

Aber ich versuche, so zu spielen, dass es passieren könnte. Und wenn es passiert, dann ist es das, was mich wirklich süchtig danach macht, ein Musiker zu sein. And I thought of that when speaking with Ilse yesterday. You know, I think artists and painters are people who try to come back to some experience they had by writing another poem, painting another picture. And we meditators try to come back to it through sitting meditation. And then bringing that experience into our daily life, that's the fullness of mind. So you practice with each one separately.

[14:38]

And you find that each one is a separate mind. They don't go together. They can be separate and together. And the word vijnana literally means to know separately together. And each separate mind of... hearing mind or smelling mind. Now in some Buddhist teachings and some Western philosophy some senses are lower than other senses. More animal senses and more human senses. And In Buddhism they're all equal.

[15:51]

We don't say the consciousness of the human is the highest and animals don't have it because then you really get stuck in a hierarchy of values. And it's clear that animals have some consciousnesses or modes of knowing, they're much more subtle than ours. Dogs, for example, seem to be better at perception at a distance and sometimes anticipating. And so when we enter the senses, we also enter into our our own animal senses that we have kind of waltzed with by consciousness domination.

[17:07]

I'm always struck when I go to Zurich, which is our nearest I shop in the city, but then try to get rid of it. From Johanneshof is the huge plot on the Protestant towers. And there's videos like this. And I think of the lost Catholic world that is still perhaps more present in Austria than Germany. Because it seems to me even German Catholics are Protestants. Of course I'm joking here, but I'm not tired of joking. Ich mache hier natürlich teilweise Witze, aber nicht nur.

[18:15]

And I think of the aural, A-U-R-A-L world of European cities before Protestantism. The aural, the sound world. And I think of this small world of Catholic cities before Protestantism. when you knew what time of day it is, what was going on, by the sound of bells ringing activities in time. And then with Luther and Calvin, you get these big reading, you get a reading, and the print became the medium of mind. Ivan Illich makes much of this. And the Protestant mind I maintain is a different mind than the Catholic mind. But it's the Protestant mind which is dominant in the world today.

[19:30]

But in Zen monasteries in Japan, big ones, it's all A-U-R-A-L, not O-R-A. It's often O-R-A-L, too. For example, if this was a This building would have identifiable musical instruments. like drums, bells, flat metal plates, things like that. Flat metal plates are in umpire, just to be flat metal. And the building over there, the meal building and the other buildings would have different, cut different versions of the same instruments.

[20:46]

So while we're sitting here in a Dharma hall, we hear the meal building begin a certain sound, which would mean the meal was half an hour away. And as that started a few minutes into it, another building would start with a huge drum. I mean, these instruments, you can't get these instruments there. Huge drum, boom, you know. And you feel, well, that's that activity happening in this building, and that's this activity happening in that building, and the architecture weaves through sound into your experience. Und das Ganze verbindet sich in einer Architektur von Klängen, die bestimmte Tätigkeiten sind, und das kommt in dir zusammen.

[21:53]

During morning meditation, there's a huge bell about as big as a meter to you. I used to have to hit 18 times with a log. It has to occur in direct relationship to the first period of exhaustion. And the next hit, the bell goes. And on the sixth of those, you get the next hit. And you have to stand and count. That's enough, you don't have to dance like that. Womp, womp, womp, womp. And the time is told by a time drum bell. The drum is hit once for every hour.

[23:02]

And the bell, to then show this size, is hit for every 20-minute period. So this is going on during meditation. It's not intent. Let's have silence. These big bells are going on. And cuckoo clock. No, no cuckoo clock. Well, I'd like to stand over my cuckoo clock. And each of these separate minds has its own memory base. Okay, so that's a quick vision. Okay. What? A crash course. A crash course. A bomb course.

[24:04]

Oh, you see. When the ancients... Yeah. Be naked and pure without interruption so that no subjective views arise. I can't hear it. Be naked and pure without interruption so that no subjective views arise and you will merge with this Buddha womb and also be this sage embryo. This is your own fundamental scenery. Your own original face. We say before your parents were born. When the ancients employed their hundreds employed, used, offered their hundreds and thousands and millions of expedient teaching devices.

[25:14]

We've only brought up a few of these. It was always to enable people to go toward this and penetrate the As soon as you penetrate deeply to the source, you will cast aside the tile, the tile that a human cannot get the key. you will, as soon as you penetrate deeply to the source, You will cast aside, throw away the tile that you knocked at the gate. You know, it reminds me of the Rumi poem. For years I knocked at the gate. And the door would not open. And when it finally opened, I found I was inside.

[26:17]

As soon as you, okay, practice at this level for 20 or 30 years, cut off all verbal identification, creeping vines and youthful states of mind and motion, cut off all verbal identification, creeping vines, that means attachments, and useless states of mind and emotion, until you are free of conditioned mind. Again, some obvious need for objectivity. I'm using objectivity and meaning some measure like this of how we exist in the world.

[27:45]

This will be the place of peace, bliss and rest. Das wird der Ort von Friede, Glückseligkeit und ein Ruhen in der Welt sein. If you seek a time when you finish, there will never be a time when you finish. That's what we talked about the first day. When you seek a time to be finished, there will never be time. You must constantly step back from conventional perceptions And group the attachments and move along with an independent awareness. Move along with an independent awareness. That means without collective identities Sit upright and investigate reality.

[29:01]

Look to the void and trace its outline. Take your head out of the bowl of glue. A hole in the sense of a pit? A bowl? There's a bowl where you stuck your head in and turned again. Unoccupied and at ease. Just preserve stillness. Never show your sharp point. And show never your sharp point. Abandoned and relaxed. Eating and drinking and hungry and thirsty. This is called secretly manifesting great function.

[30:15]

And activating the great potential without startling the crowd. So, That's a wonderful statement, I think. Yeah. I thought that if I keep meditating all these years, it will get easier and easier. And I forgot that when you get older, it gets more difficult. Yeah. And when they cut off your bottom and sew it on backwards, it's even worse. Okay. So this sense of objective reality This, which I'd say is right now for our seminar, is the stillness of the fullness of mind and a mind that arises from percept only before perception.

[31:31]

associative mentation. Just seeing, just hearing, without adding anything. And this sense of objectivity or detachment It's like the keel of a sailboat. It allows you to find your way in the waters of the mind and phenomena. That's enough. I'm sorry. I don't have them like that. I think we didn't answer all the questions for sure that arose through this seminar.

[32:56]

Ilse, you asked me to say something about thusness. I think the easiest way to understand thusness is it means to know each thing as equal to every other thing. Each thing is equal in value. That's the perception of inter-independence. and simultaneously to experience the impermanence or emptiness of each thing, and third, to simultaneously experience mind, Because every object points to mind as well as to the object. So that... So that it makes you to experience everything as arising from mind.

[33:58]

And those three together you can call dustness. Or sameness sometimes. Okay. Now, whether we continue next year or not, does anybody want to say anything? You've asked me, I guess. A few of you have asked me.

[34:35]

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