So we had waking mind. Dreaming mind. And non-dreaming deep. And again, these are categories we can notice pretty easily. And in the service of studying the waking mind, fairly recently, and then he puts... proto-scientific way, dreaming mind was related to waking mind.

[01:00]

And as you know, Freud also connected dreaming mind, one part of it, and the other part was free association, or what we would say in Buddhism, associative mind. And for some of you, if you know, associative mind is what we would call the fourth skanda. So Freud, with his gift as a writer and his... and so forth, by relating dreaming mind and associative mind to waking mind, really transformed the thinking of the West and now most of the world.

[02:04]

Now, yoga teaching Zen enters into this in a different way, a more participatory way. We all can each do. And the result of that is what? I call the fourth mind, and it's also called that in Hinduism, I think, too. And we can also call it awareness. Yeah, anyway, good enough to connect the two. And then we have The mind we mostly inhabit, consciously inhabit, is consciousness.

[03:31]

In Buddhism we don't understand these things as entities in general, but rather as functions. So if you just look at consciousness as, geez, I'm conscious of you, there's not much way to practice that. But if you recognize that consciousness has a structure, Now, as soon as you recognize it has a structure, you can recognize that you can participate in the structure. And if it has a structure, it can also be destructured.

[04:47]

So what practices best structure the mind and what practices can deconstruct the mind? Now, these are all questions that drove the development of Buddhist practice. And I guarantee you, although enlightenment occurs... pretty quickly, instantly, a turn. The maturing and permeating of this turning around in your consciousness and worldview, is the deeply satisfying work of a lifetime. But although enlightenment and the maturation of enlightenment can occur in one lifetime,

[05:47]

The development of Buddhism in the way I'm speaking about and the development of a teaching has taken hundreds of years. And there still is not... There's not a complete agreement. There's rather different schools and different emphases. But for the most part within Buddhism I'd say there's a general agreement and the differences are mostly emphases. Okay. So with consciousness we have to look at what it is, what its job is, is to give us a predictable world, a knowable world, cognizable, chronological,

[07:16]

And meaningful. Now I suppose that's fairly clear. And you know, it was only about four years ago maybe, that I really saw how clearly consciousness was connected to predictability. and the necessity of predictability and the relationship to predictability to the delusion of permanence or implied permanence.

[08:44]

Now, when I first started to practice, It was clear to me that consciousness was connected with control. And for years I spoke about Buddhism and consciousness within the background, the way we need to control the world and how that's related to consciousness. In the background of my teaching and experience was this idea that consciousness and control are connected. Because I had a direct experience of that. It took 25 years later or so

[09:46]

25 years later, 30 years later, how old am I anyway? 30, 35, 40. Anyway, before I saw that really it's about predictability, not control. And to see that what I call control, which is also predictability, We want the world to be predictable because we also want to control it. But the idea of control wasn't a fruitful concept. But as soon as I saw that actually what I meant by controlling... Deeper sense was predictability. Then how consciousness is structured like this became clear. Okay. And the relationship to self.

[10:51]

Okay. So consciousness is also the medium for self memory and language. and in effect for karma.

[11:55]

Okay. So if you understand, if we understand it, if you understand it in this way, self is not all the ways we know the world or observe the world. Self is a function of consciousness. Consciousness is a function of mind. We can say ego is a function of self. Okay. Now, self. In the selbst.

[12:58]

So, self, as we've gone over very often, the job of self is to supply separation, Connectedness and continuity. And so, also, gives us a sense of agency. What do you mean by agency? That someone did it. Yeah, I was the person. I did this. I acted on it. Yeah. And personal history.

[14:01]

Right. OK. I'll be. Is there anything anybody wants to say about this? Yeah, go ahead. I have a question. Is the consciousness the result of the waking mind or the function of the waking mind? Yeah. I can say some words about it.

[15:13]

It's pretty clear to us that consciousness doesn't belong exactly in dreaming mind. So we can say pretty surely from our own experience, without knowing anything about Buddhism, Does it belong in waking mind? Yeah, it belongs to waking mind. But is it the whole of waking mind? I would say no. It's the Obviously. Okay. So I'm walking along, right? He is the same example. And I trip over Neil's plastic water. And I start to fall and I catch myself. Okay. That clearly happens faster than consciousness. But imagine that I'm sleepwalking.

[16:16]

I went to Japan and somebody, some of you know this, Mikhail Poguchik, and he is a martial arts... trains all the time, right? He sleepwalks. He sleepwalks. You know, this kind of stuff. So there were 12 of us sleeping in a little room about as big as this. And this is Guy sleepfighting. Who dares wake him up? Well, his best friend just said, come on, Michael, go back to bed.

[17:18]

But in general, if I'm sleepwalking or half asleep, just waking up, and I fall over this, I'm not so likely to catch myself. So obviously, awareness works in waking mind As well as working in sleeping mind. But it works differently in both. Or what I'm presently calling awareness. Why do I call it awareness? I don't call it awareness because conceptually it fits or philosophically it's connected. I call it awareness because for me it's a very similar experience, physical experience. My experience of the mind that catches me when I fall And my experience of the mind which wakes me up at 6.02 a.m.

[18:42]

without an alarm clock is a very similar physical tuning. So I'm calling it awareness. I suppose these guys studying these things with, you know, by studying the brain might say, geez, when you fall, a different area of the brain is lit up than when I fall. have some kind of continuity during the night which wakes me up. Yeah, and I am not trying to be philosophically, I'm not trying to develop a philosophically consistent system, nor a scientifically testable system, although I think that

[19:52]

It's probably worth testing. What I'm trying to do is talk about these things in a way that allows us to practice. And to have a sense of a knowing mind In contrast to consciousness, it's very helpful in practice. And it fits in with most of the pedagogy of Buddhism. What I'm doing is thinking, should I add something?

[21:07]

Should I talk about something? Maybe this is complicated enough so far. I don't have to bring in more stuff. One question. Where does the unconscious fit in the scheme? To make it more complicated. No. Well, yes and no. No. There's no precise concept of the unconsciousness in Buddhism. There's certainly the concept of knowing things that we're not conscious, that don't occur in consciousness. And maybe I can come, I should come back to that. Okay. I've forgotten something here, but I can't quite think about what it is until I create the context.

[22:34]

This is a narrative sense of self. And I think you understand this sense of separation, almost all of you, because your immune system is a sense of self. Your immune system knows what belongs to you and doesn't belong to you. And you have to know this is my voice and not just something you're hearing in your head. So self allows us to know separateness. And what happens when we practice We actually are lessening the emphasis on separation and increasing the emphasis on connectedness.

[23:42]

And, and, and. Changing how we experience continuity. Because the self is a function of consciousness. It establishes continuity through language. Through thinking. Well, I should say thinking. Okay. And, yeah, maybe that's, I don't know, maybe that's too much or not enough or what? Does anybody want to say something about this?

[24:44]

What did you mean when you were speaking about control? What's actually control, the kind of control you're thinking of? Of course, . Well, when you meditate, one has a tendency to not want to let go. and get out of control or out of thinking or out of where you can measure what you're experiencing. And that's also to get out of... Yeah, okay. Yes. I have an additional question to what you said about the structure of consciousness.

[25:56]

Is the structure that consciousness wants to structure everything? Consciousness wants to make the world knowable. Yeah, it's again like Sophia turning all her physical actions into descriptions, language descriptions, in order to, in a sense, structure consciousness in terms of physical activity. And as I said earlier, the structure of consciousness is to have a sense of here and there. Now, Yuan Wu says, create a mind, find a mind that has neither here nor there.

[27:02]

Nor before or after. That's a knowing without up and down, left and right, front and back, etc. So, one of the first things, but you do have to have a sense of here and there. You're there, I'm here, etc., It's the case, but it also needs to structure, consciousness needs to show us that. So, again, when we teach kids to count, say the alphabet, we're actually teaching them to structure consciousness. So we can know the world, go through the door, etc. Now, a blind person has to structure consciousness. a kind of proprioceptive bodily feeling, not consciousness in the terms of eye sense for sure.

[28:28]

So a blind person has to feel where the door is, and that's quite different than the way we do it, if you have all your senses. So we need the world to have a time sense, one thing after another, and one thing located in space. Yeah, and it has to be somehow meaningful to us. Okay. So this is the self that Buddhism wants us to be free of. Buddhism wants us to be free of the self that's a creature of consciousness. And to see that sense of self is nothing permanent. It's not an entity.

[29:43]

Self is what makes consciousness meaningful. I'm such and such a kind of person and I have this history and I can do this. So all senses of observing are not the self that Buddhism wants us to be free of. Okay. So, let's take a break and come back in a little while, half an hour.

[30:26]

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