Now skandhas mean something like heaps, heaps, a heap of coal, a heap of grain, and it's often translated as aggregates, aggregate, an aggregation of things. And the idea is that everything in our sentient experience... It's interesting, the word sentient in English means what is sent to us, what's brought to us. The root of sentient being. The idea of the Pascrandi is that everything that's sentient fits into these five parts. And what's significant about their organization is that there's no concept of self in any of the five pāyas.

[01:08]

So it's a way to look at us without the concept of self. Now, in early Buddhism, it was more like through the pāyascandhas, we create the notion of self. It's added on to these five. But later Buddhism, so it's a way to enter, it's a way to condition the world so the self can join, be part of the world, is part of the world. But later Buddhism, it becomes... the way, a way in which we can enter the conditioned world free of self. You follow the distinction? Okay, so I'm going to start the way it's usually presented is warm, healing,

[02:23]

Reception Impulses And sometimes D.T. Suzuki first person Japanese person who really introduced Buddhism to the West in a way that it could be felt or practiced, let's call it that way. He calls it confections. And confections is probably more accurate in the translation, but it doesn't work in English because it means candy. confectionery at the candy store. But it means that which is put together, putting together, scoundrel. And fifth is consciousness. That's the usual way, and it's usually indicated this way.

[03:34]

And when you chant the Heart Sutra, when you chant it next year, maybe, you chant, there's no problem, no feelings, no perceptions, no impulses, no consciousness. So my Anabuddha Buddhism is apathetic. What I take puts a no in front of these things. But it's, again, a bit like saying the... The flower is not red, nor is the willow green. Well, immediately, what do you see? Red and green. But the flower is not red, nor is the willow green, a rather famous state aphorism. Okay, the way I would prefer to present it is to put consciousness first. And then I would call this more accurately or usefully associative mind.

[04:42]

Yeah, um, percept, perception, or perhaps percept only, and peeling, and form. So, um, I suppose we were going to put... That doesn't look like an eye.

[06:17]

so say you're I'm trying to put this in the context of of experience say that you're we're sitting here and you have some kind of you notice something but you don't quite know what you noticed but then you have a you know feeling You still don't know quite what it is, but you have a feeling. And then you realize a car is driving by slowly, and it's got its radio on, and you can hear it. So you recognize it's a song. So the vague feeling, let's call it a signal, is for when you start having a feeling, what? At least you get a feeling. Then you have a perception that it's a song.

[07:30]

That's the first three scars. And then you say, oh, that's the song my mother used to like. Bing Crosby. Bing Crosby. Seems I really look like Christmas all over the world. Anyway, so then you have an association, and then your consciousness is affected by that association with your mother. And you may remember, so the first is you have some kind of vague feeling, vague sense. Then there's a feeling. Then you, oh, that's a song. Oh, that's the song my mother used to play. That's an association. And then that becomes part of consciousness. So the idea is, here, that consciousness is made up of a virtually infinite number of these things all day long.

[08:45]

The wind is a certain way, it's sunny, it's not sunny, somebody says something. All of them are part of a process of which is happening much faster than psychotic scanning, three times a second or so. So your consciousness is constantly being generated, almost like a surface of water, lake, or ocean, where things are coming up, currents are coming up to the surface all the time. Carrying flotsam and jetsam, carrying pieces of seaweed, carrying a jellyfish or two, you know, like that. And what we experience is this. We mostly don't experience it. And what Freud got people to do with basically, as I said, meditative technique, pre-associating your mind down, changing your posture, is he got them to kind of drop their consciousness and begin to just literally pre-associate. And what he discovered, of course,

[09:50]

is that this is a kind of territory of mind that's in some ways less functional but wider than consciousness. And this mind knows things that this mind doesn't know. So this mind is editing all the time. It edits, excludes. For the purpose of functioning a certain way, it edits and excludes. And one of the most powerful dimensions and dynamics of its functioning is the fish of self. And so things that don't support the fish of self are also pushed out of consciousness, pushed out of self-recognition. Now, there is an idea in Buddhism called the Alaya Vishnana, sometimes translated the stored house consciousness. And that is sometimes, particularly in earlier days, coming to the West, after turning everything into Christianity and Protestant Christianity especially, what the early translators did, they turned it into psychology.

[11:08]

And D.G. Zuck I mean, it's a concept of Buddhism, it's a psychology. And so then the Avijjana, it equates with the unconscious. It's not accurate to equate it. It's not a container. It's a field of association. And it's not a field of association that's related to repression or suppression or exclusion or anything. It's just not in the categories that consciousness... makes use of. Much of it's not in Ken. But everything that comes into associative mind, from the point of view of the Elaya-Vijñāna, comes here, from the Elaya-Vijñāna, but it has no sense of being excluded or repressed. But the Elaya-Vijñāna, we're not going to talk about it today. take, you know, another seminar or something like that.

[12:20]

Okay. So the point I'm making here is consciousness is one mind. And as we have discovered, associative mind is one mind that can be part of consciousness, but also can be different from consciousness. So this means that, for instance, again, when you shift from a conceptual conscious to a non-conceptual field of mind, you're actually opening yourself more to this kind of associative mind. Now, perception, or percept only, When you, to use the example we have, when you hear, hear, this is percept only, when your field of awareness is just a single percept, like you're hearing a bird, you're not thinking about the bird, etc., you're not associating, there's no association, just the bird, or just the airplane with the name field off.

[13:43]

Is naming associations? Yeah, naming is not necessarily an association, but when you perceive the airplane with the idea of the name. I mean, these are clouds, yeah? They're clouds that kind of, you know, where you can't really say, it's only this and it's only that. But when you, a clear example is, if you peel the name off the airplane, you just have the sound, that would be a mind perceptible. If you add the name, well, it's beginning to drift up toward associative mind. layer that can easily start gathering association. So you feel like each of these, they're all one field, but they can also be separate fields.

[14:49]

And we can sort of characterize them. Sort of like, something like, this is consciousness, this is the associative mind, this is perception, this is feeling, and this is everything. So there's a kind of feeling of a cone. Here, this is more knowing, more aware. This is more functioning, more precise, more focused.

[15:55]

When you just hear something, just snap it, Again, there's oil in the bowl, there's other things going on, but when the emphasis on how your state of mind is defined is through just the smell, just the hearing. It would be like if you looked at a painting, and you just saw the colors, and you didn't put it into an organized pattern, you just got fucked. And of course a good painter actually can pull himself away from the content within the structure of a painting, and then look at how the colors work all together. A good painter, so you feel the color level, in a way you can feel the color level, independent of how it's applied to the objects. The folk painters did that to an extreme, where trees became pink, cups became green, etc. So,

[16:58]

Now, feeling, now the way this is usually taught in a philosophical way is feeling is, again, as I said in some ways earlier, is pleasurable, it's pleasant, unpleasant, and neither. But really, pleasant, unpleasant, neither, and definitely emotion really belong in the category of perception. because they have a beginning and end. They're something you grasp. Percept, sept means, in English, use this word, sept means to grasp. And so concept, percept, what you can grasp. So the center of this, I mean, you can include, of course, say that it includes pleasant, unpleasant, neither. and sometimes neutral, but neutral isn't right, it's neither.

[18:04]

Well, neither would be this non-graspable feeling. And I mentioned yesterday what I mean by non-graspable feeling, like there's a feeling in the room that you can't quite say what it is, etc. Well, it's like you hear the music and there's a feeling, you don't know what the song is yet, but you have a kind of feeling to it. And it's not yet a person. Now, what is form? Well, form is... First of all, you have to have a start from the list. You can't really start with feeling or perception. So in a sense, as soon as you notice form, you perceive something. So... So you've taken association out of this, and you've taken most of perception out of this.

[19:08]

You've taken away all perception that leads to association, and it's barely feeling. So you could call it like signal. That's the first kind of indication. But you could also call it resistance, as two objects can't occupy the same space, usually. So the true objects resist each other, and there's a sense of resistance in the world. You're here, I'm here. There's a wall. So that's not even in the realm of feeling yet, but it's what occasions feel. Occasions makes happen. We could also say that if we try to deepen the understanding of this, that form is duration, or is the concept of now. Because there's no perception until you have, or perception, as the other horse John does, fall into the category of having a conscious presence.

[20:13]

So as soon as you have a sense of the concept of now, or a concept of duration, or of a situated immediacy, this is the beginning. It has to begin somewhere, so the list begins with form, and it's pared down, pared down, pared, I have a paring knife, but pared down is possible at some level. Okay. Now, each of these can be a realm, each of these is a realm of experience. That's part of consciousness, but not notice, because noticing is a function of consciousness. You have to widen the way you notice to begin to have a feeling for these other things.

[21:14]

And percept only wouldn't be so noticeable. I think unless you meditate. But one of the common experiences of meditating is you have no association No grasping, no grasping at things, but you hear things. In fact, they did studies of one kind of Hindu meditator and one kind of Buddhist, Zen Buddhist meditator years ago, 60s sometime. And what they did is they rang a bell. I don't remember now. whether you ring a bell or you poke somebody or whatever, but let's say they ring a bell or make a sound. At least this type of Hindu meditation, there's probably many types of Hindu meditation, but this particular person, and what he did was, here comes the sound, boop, right?

[22:19]

And there's a kind of... You know, there's a reaction if you wire somebody up. There's a reaction. Then it comes again. There's a reaction. The Hindu meditator very quickly suppressed the reaction. And there was no reaction. After, I don't know, five times or ten times, I don't remember. Boy, it's a straight line. And there's a reaction, and it's a straight line. For the Zen meditator, there's a really very characteristic difference The hundredth time the sound comes, there's a reaction. But it's not a reaction like this. It's just... So that meditator, which doesn't suppress the sound, just hears it and doesn't react to it. So the Hindu meditator was getting like this and then finally suppressed it.

[23:25]

Zen meditation never suppresses it, but doesn't have this kind of thing. It just goes up, down, goes back to a straight line. That would be a percept-only mind. You're just here. And you have no associations, no reaction, you're just here. And this state of mind You can also, for yourself, experientially and conceptually now, related to the host mind, which isn't inviting anything to teach. And that percept mind, host mind, also tends to have a feeling of satisfaction, ease, and bliss. So, the more you The more you experience mind as simultaneously these five you see the experience the underlying structure of consciousness the more you then can either be present in only one of them

[24:42]

Or you can be allow in each occasion. Now, Dogen, one of the things Dogen says is, complete that which appears. Ginger Cohen translated, complete that which appears, knowing things are simultaneously, particularly, and all at once. And all at once he means, like Mumunarayoshi, that everything all at once is participating to make this movement possible. So just let's stay with the phrase to complete that which appears. If you have begun to articulate your consciousness in terms of these five, and you can see there's no self, if you've begun to articulate consciousness in terms of these five, you begin to feel each one separately, like the books.

[25:50]

And you begin to feel engaged. In other words, trustorship depletion would be to have a sense of the form, a sense of feeling, a sense of just being. bell is cold or round, smells it metal, then the association. And you can feel it as part of consciousness, but you can also feel how each particular example comes. Now when I say pause for the particular, that little phrase has all of this in it. And when you complete that which appears, you may, in a sense, one way to understand that is you actually run through it. You see something appear, you feel its form, you feel the person. You feel the bliss. Just be engaged. You feel the satiation. You can feel it ripple in your overall consciousness. Now, to notice these things, you have to.

[27:00]

Most teachings are understood that it's something you hold in the background of your consciousness. And you let them inform. what you're doing that's true of this teaching too but in particular this teaching like others and like has come up now you mentioned you do it slowly at first you slow down the process generally the way of slowing down the process is to do it in meditation so you can understand again uh you should understand the feel of each one.

[28:11]

And there's various ways to work with... One way is when you sit down, you've made a conscious decision to... to do meditation. And you have to go to the door, you have to go to wherever you're going, you have to put on comfortable clothes, that's all consciousness. In the U.S., off of Crestone, it was announced by a wooden board that we hit for 15 minutes. The first round is, it goes op, [...] and then you, that's the introduction, and then you hit it once a minute for seven minutes, and then boop, indicates the first round. And then once a minute for five minutes, and then boop, boop, that indicates the third round. And then once again for three minutes, except those three minutes are open when the water's medium in rotation comes in. Look at these seven hits, boop, one hit. People are supposed to be in this endo by the second round.

[29:13]

So it becomes a process where you start dropping usual thinking. Here, okay. And then by the time you're in the zendo, you bow, you're pushing, turn around, bow, and sit down, you're already sort of in associative mind. And you sit down and you kind of notice, yeah, I'm kind of pre-associating, you're not thinking anymore, you're just, you know. And as you settle and you become more still, then you begin to have like hearing your own hearing, you know, percept only mind. is this and that period. And then it's almost like you're descending into it, something, letting yourself down. And then you have a feeling of just feeling, not even Percepts the various things that occur.

[30:15]

It's all little lifts in a larger field. And of course, then this is rooted in the form of your posture. Cross leg, sitting on a bench, whatever. You're in the room. But now the room has just become the form. And you get in the habit of descending through, ascending through these, so that more and more you can actually feel the difference of each one. And you can feel when you shift from percept, only mind, to association. And you simply just get familiar, like swimming or something. It just gets familiar. You really feel comfortable in the water. And the more it matures, as I said, it's just feeling.

[31:22]

Percept only is a kind of great pleasure. But eventually you let go of the pleasure of percept only mind, and you're just in the feeling. non-graspable feeling most of the time when you sit and it's very rich actually very rich because somehow when you come back or when associative mind comes in it comes in in a new way with rich association so it becomes a very creative process you can also practice with perception which is also the vijnanas vijnanas are each of the senses, plus the 8th is jnana, the 5th is jnana, this is what I call, it's translated as story, consciousness, and the 7th is jnana, it's manas, the editing mind, that decides what goes in and out, and then you have the five senses.

[32:27]

But our visual, our, particularly in the West, Our consciousness is dominated by visual, visual dimension, visual sense field. When monks, for instance, in the 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th centuries, et cetera, chanted, but there was just a line of letters. They weren't divided into words. That would be a world which primarily emphasizes aural, a-u-r-e-l, a hearing dimension. Because you cannot visually tell where one word ends or not. You can only tell where it ends by chanting. So if you chant it, it's very clear. But visually, you cannot distinguish them.

[33:29]

So that's simply another culture, another way of being, another way to integrate or integrity of being. But what Buddhism has done is said very early times, yeah, this is the way it works, develop each one. Now, the main way I worked on, and I used to bring people with me on the walks, is around, there was a picture lake in Berlin I liked that you could walk around the whole lake in about an hour. And so I did it myself quite a few times, but then I did it with other people too. As you walk along and you try to close your eyes, pretty much, and then you just walk along and see if you can find the path by smell. because there's leaves and things like that, and actually there's a different smell to the side of the path than the path, which is mostly, you can actually do it.

[34:36]

After a while, you can get, you can really smell your way along the path. Then we also try feeling, and then you try things like to see if you can proprioceptively, that's your body balance and your physical awareness of space around you, the way I use the word and the way it is used sometimes, You walk and you see if you can feel like a blind person's eyes, the presence of objects. Like you can feel actually almost like you're being brushed. You can feel a tree that's to the side of you while your eyes are completely closed. And you can walk along a little more and you can feel that probably tree tree. You open your eyes and three or four. And so you're developing, you're not only developing skills in a blind person, and say, yeah, I'll send one of these beads to what's around me. But whether you develop that sensitivity, what you're beginning to do is separate the sense fields.

[35:43]

So each one is its own territory. The way for a painter, the color field has to be its own territory, separate from the form field. And if you begin to separate them, you find out there's a mind that's really just rooted in sound. That doesn't have to get brought into consciousness and brought into visual consciousness. And, you know, when I talk about these things, many aspects of practice, there are... another big group in the Dharma Sangha for some reason. And it's actually the demography study of populations. The demography of the Dharma Sangha in Germany and in Europe is quite different than the demography in the United States.

[36:44]

Because in America it's still counterculture. And there's not so much counterculture in Europe. an American Secretary of State would probably not admit that he did yoga. And certainly if you're running for Congress, you would tell anybody that you're the president, you would say I did yoga. But in Germany, nobody. Merkel could say, well, I do yoga, and I know where you get it down. Okay. One of the big large groups, fairly large groups of women in Dharmasana Europe are musicians. And when I'm speaking, often the musicians are talking to me afterwards. They said, what you're talking about sounds like how I feel and we feel when several people are playing music.

[37:45]

We really play it together. We suddenly find ourselves together. Something else, you have to release yourself in some way and just be in the field of being together. And you know hip-hop, you know, you can hear music where sometimes it's the orchestra or jazz, they're just really going together. Sometimes then they lose it and come back together. So that all has something to do with this. So when you practice with each percept, like taking a walk in the woods and resisting, you know, hugging a tree, and just the feeling, that's such a nice story, the feeling of the right or left, or you try to do it just your smell, your nostril, you try to do just hearing, you begin to it's not again about getting accomplished at it it's about beginning to feel that each sense is a different feel different mind and so that's just this part the vijnana is coming here

[39:03]

Okay, I think that's enough for now. Let me take a break. And get out what I want to do quickly, give me an experiential feel for this. And I think I can bring up something else today, which will help us enter this. And then we'll call it quits. What time is it? I can't tell what time it is. Quarter to three. Yeah, quarter to three, and we're going to end at four. So shall we have half an hour or 20 minutes? 50 minutes. 20? 20. Okay, so let's come back at 5 or so after. You see what I mean? I'll be a concept. Yep. How hard is this? 24 hours.

[39:55]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_81.22