So I'm thinking about, of course, what I might speak about that could be useful to you in practice, in imagining practice or practicing. We could say... something like, practice is about changing your birth body into a wisdom body. And I mean, of course we have a genetic disposition but the emphasis in Buddhist yoga culture is that Overridingly, we're also nurture, not just nature.

[01:02]

And we can shape ourselves really amazingly through intentions. I mean, you may not believe in mind over matter, but when I raise my arm, that's mind over matter. I mean, my intention, look where, stay down. I was just at a conference in Tucson, Arizona, of neuroscientists.

[02:07]

I was there as sort of the wild card to give a couple of short lectures. That's more or less the case. And they're all concerned with studying the mind as it is different from matter. And how the mind could arrive from matter, molecules partly conscious, and so forth. Buddhism is not uninterested in sources, but primarily it just says, there are these ingredients and let's see what happens with them.

[03:16]

How do we mix these ingredients of consciousness, intention, the body, etc. ? There were 1200 people at the conference, and I don't know, 50 neuroscientists and physicists and so forth. I guess. I never counted them, but it's a lot. Okay, and they're all interested in studying consciousness as it happens in us human beings. Not all of them, but it's the major theme. One of the first things I noticed being there is I studied consciousness too.

[04:20]

But I study consciousness from inside. And I study consciousness so that I can subjectively, as a person, study objectively consciousness. And I know that if I study consciousness, it changes consciousness, even transforms consciousness. Yeah. Okay. So I was thinking, you know, maybe I should look at some basics of practice, going back to reviewing in my mind what are the basics of practice.

[05:36]

And I would say that First of all, what you're doing when you're doing zazen, sitting meditation. The basic rule is you take a posture where you can sit fairly comfortably, at least for a short time. And where the way you sit supports the body so you don't have to use musculature and attentiveness to maintain your posture. So then you're taking basically a physical posture, an asana in the way we speak about it today, nowadays.

[06:44]

But also you're taking what I would call not just an intention, but a mental posture. A mental posture you hold as your physical presence. Eine geistige Haltung, die du als deine körperliche Präsenz hältst. And the mental posture is, don't move. Und diese geistige Haltung ist, bewege dich nicht. Of course you are moving a little bit, you can see I'm moving a little bit. Und natürlich bewegst du dich ein bisschen und ihr könnt sehen, dass ich mich auch ein bisschen bewege. And my heart is beating and my lungs are working and so forth. But still if I have a mental posture of not moving, it affects the whole body.

[08:01]

And what it does is it begins the process of creating an attentional, intentional interiority. Yeah, it's the best way I've come up with trying to describe it. An attentional, intentional interiority. Now, we all do things. We go to bed, we get up, we eat, etc. And we have thoughts. And our thoughts, we think, are our thoughts. some kind of interiority, at least we think other people don't know them.

[09:20]

They asked a group of first graders once, what are thoughts for? And the majority agreed, thoughts are so you can keep a secret. And we sort of think we're keeping a secret, but of course what we're thinking is written all over us. At least to some extent. Okay, but attentional interiority is... Can I give you a feeling for it if you don't know what it is?

[10:24]

Also eine Aufmerksamkeitsinnerlichkeit. Wie kann ich euch dafür ein Gefühl geben, falls ihr noch nicht wissen solltet, was das ist? But if you sit... Sit. By sit I mean zazen. Zazen means absorbent sitting. Wenn du sitzt. Zazen bedeutet absorbierendes Sitzen. If you practice this absorbent sitting... it kind of absorbs exterior consciousness. And if it doesn't absorb exterior consciousness, you can't sit for very long. Because the job of consciousness is to make you do things. Participate with others, imagine a future, etc. And if you're defining yourself by external things and by your job and by other people, the power of that external consciousness is, I mean, it's the most powerful thing in the world, almost, or maybe it is.

[12:03]

No, I'm not saying to generate a wisdom body from a birth body. It's necessary to do zazen, meditation all the time. But probably it's necessary for a while. Because if this sitting absorption absorbs exterior consciousness. I think it happens to us sometimes when we're doing something like sunbathing. You know, you hear things down the beach, etc. The sun is burning you, but you don't know it, etc.

[13:06]

But in general, we live within our externalized consciousness. And the fact is, you cannot sit very long, particularly a sashin, unless you absorb your external consciousness. And the commands of consciousness no longer are very loud. If they are loud, you get up, you don't do it. You stop sitting, you start moving, you take notes.

[14:23]

Yeah, so... But somehow if we could talk about the reasons anybody wants to do this, but often it's because makes you feel kind of good, free. You are finally located in yourself in a way that feels like it should be that way. And there's almost an alchemical shift of changing lead or something into gold. Because the absorbed external consciousness turns into an internal consciousness. And once it turns into an interior consciousness.

[15:44]

It's not anymore exactly shouldn't be called consciousness anymore. It's another kind of knowing we can perhaps call maybe awareness. And this awareness, I'm calling it awareness, it's the field of mind and the modalities of knowing are many. But we have to have some way to speak about it so you can understand what I'm talking about, or feel what I'm talking about. So you do begin to have this feeling of an attentional interiority. And things just don't bother you the same way.

[16:54]

There's a kind of stillness to the attentional, like you put mud in a glass or something like that, and next morning it's all settled out and the water's clear. And somehow many of the concerns of consciousness settle to the bottom of, out of entirely, this interior stillness. It's one of the first steps in what practice can do is free you, really can free you from emotional and It's like you take a little vacation whenever you sit.

[17:59]

And also one of the strange things that you notice is you make a different decision from this stillness, from this attentional interiority, you make a different decision than you did earlier in the day or yesterday from giving conscious consideration to the alternatives. It's like when you wake up and you've had an intuition or you just, I don't know, suddenly look the other way and you have an intuition. Oh, that's what I should do. I have no choice. From this potential interiority your thinking starts becoming a flow of something like intuitions. Your thoughts become Yes, the things that appear to you as thoughts now appear much more like insights or a flow of intuitions instead of just ordinary thoughts.

[19:52]

There's a clarity or sureness about them. So it's like a kind of magic. You think, I'm not doing anything. I'm the same person. I've got the same body. And all I'm doing is assuming a physical posture, an upright physical posture, which allows you to be in a kind of sleeping mode, but you're awake. And you've done nothing but have a physical posture going to a mental posture, don't move, and hey, you're making different decisions that seem much more accurate for the way your life is. Excuse me? You may start by suggestion or by intuition of your own developing this attentional interiority.

[21:10]

developing this attentional interiority. And there's two main ways you develop this attentional interiority. You form an intention to bring attention to attention. And attention is kind of like a muscle. You develop it. I mean, you're not just using it, you're developing it. you're developing an attentional skill, a yogic attentional skill. By yogic I mean really everything functions through being embodied, not just thought. So you bring attention to attention.

[22:45]

And you now are seeing that you can form out of wisdom an intention to bring attention to attention. Now this attention that develops through bringing attention to attention Because you're not now just naming entities and words and objects, etc. You're noticing the mind which notices the object. And you're discovering how your attention to an object doesn't have to identify with the object. You can actually much more intimately identify with the attention which is attending to the object. And again, you've made a step in freeing yourself from mental suffering.

[23:52]

Because the attention isn't really suffering. What you think about the object or what happened is what the suffering is. And the other way we develop this attentional interiority. As you know, you classically in all such similar disciplines or approaches to knowing, you bring attention to the breath. You form an intention to bring attention to the breath.

[25:10]

Yeah, what you discover is quite easy to do one or two or three times, but four or five times or ten times, you start thinking about things. And you can also call this early best practice counting to one. Early best practice? Early breath practice, counting to one. Because you bring attention to the breath, one, and then you start thinking about things. And then you bring your attention to your breath, one, and you start, it's there. And then you say to your friend Michael, who's sitting with you, I got to two today. Eventually, though, you get to, you can count to ten or whatever you want. And what do you learn by doing this?

[26:29]

This is also a conceptual learning process. Well, if it's easy to do it two or three times, Follow your breath. As I always ask, why is it so difficult to get to ten? Well, because you go back to your thinking or forward to your thinking. And what's so darn interesting about your thinking? You're just wondering whether you should have cornflakes or shredded wheat for breakfast. But it's because you establish the beingness of your continuity in thinking. And it can be very scary to find the continuity by which you define sanity is interrupted.

[27:47]

And at first it can be quite scary. So you have to find some way to establish continuity in another way because you need some sort of continuity or you're kind of like in a druggie state. So all you can do is shift your sense of continuity to the breath or to the body. And to carry your continuity in the body is a very different experience than the mental continuous stream of mind that happens through thoughts.

[29:08]

Because in fact, There's no real continuity. There's just moment after successive moment. And there's no real continuity. So if you want to know how things actually exist, they actually exist as a succession of appearances. And your body is much more in the topography of actuality than your mind is. So when you begin to establish continuity or a presence in a succession of appearances, you're within a topography that's closer to how we actually exist. the topography of how we actually exist.

[30:29]

Good, thank you very much. We have a team. We need a team here. Okay, I thought of one other thing I might mention. to add to this summary of basics. To go back a moment, obviously when you are able to bring attention fairly regularly to the breath, Like right now, maybe you can feel that I'm speaking within my breath. My speaking is not really arising so much from my mind.

[31:30]

It's arising from my body Even prior, a little bit prior before my thinking thinks it. So that's something that's happened just because I've been doing this for 55 years and I've gotten used to having attention enliven and enhance the breath. And if attention is woven in with the breath and the breath is going throughout the body

[32:31]

Then you're weaving a new kind of attention throughout the body. Attention you can even follow like a little flashlight. Check out your organs, stomach, shape of the lungs and so forth. You can try to look for the heart and the kidney and all, but actually the heart and the kidney are all part of a systemic process, so you end up noticing the whole process of the heart functioning and the organs functioning. The other day I was wondering if Socrates and Plato and Aristotle had had sashins and zazen, would they have asked the question, how do you know thyself? in the same way that a Buddhist asks.

[34:06]

Because Buddhism actually started some centuries before Buddha's time, began a process of of knowing oneself through developing attention to attention. What did he say? Knowing oneself as a hundredfold. And knowing and discovering the inseparability and simultaneous interrelationship of body and mind. Yes, and the last thing I will say, and I think I may have given you too much in these 40 minutes, but that is all really to say one practice that's important that I haven't mentioned in a long time is following thoughts to their source.

[35:37]

Okay, so I'll be fairly brief, I hope. I say I hope, I don't know what's going on. If you follow thoughts to their source, You notice something bothers you. Or you notice you've got a headache. When did the headache start? Or when did the thought that gave me that moment of anxiety start? So you say, well, I want to know myself, I want to know how I exist. So you try to follow a thought back to its source. Now, we're not talking about following back into past lives or anything like that, which don't interest me.

[36:53]

But just to follow us, see if you can see the trigger when something happens. Well, it's a very active, intentional process. I mean, in a way, if we talk about the... The mind stream is going downstream. When you follow thoughts back to the source, you're swimming upstream. But you have to make an effort to swim upstream. And it's actually not too easy to do. What was the thought?

[38:03]

I don't know what the thought was. I don't even know what I just said and she asked me what I just said. So actually, what was that thought before and that thought before? But you get done with it. And pretty soon you're sitting and something can occur to you that makes you wonder where that came from. And you can actually go back upstream. And you can see, oh, I thought of that guy in the brown jacket and for some reason it started the process that gave me a headache. So you do become much more aware of the triggers that lead to compulsive thinking or anxiety and stuff like that. What else? But you're also getting used to being attentive to the process of thought, the sequential process of thought.

[39:24]

And you begin to create a kind of little tube of awareness that thought happens in. And you begin to be more present in your thinking as it's happening. And you begin to see how oh here's the stream of thought coming toward me I'll divert it. Or I'll stop it. It's like in lucid dreaming, you can decide, well, I think I'll change this dream. So these are all attentional skills. And strangely, you try little things like following thoughts to the source. And I could give you a suggestion, and I just have, that you could develop your zazen enough that you can follow thoughts to their source.

[41:03]

But I can never tell you everything that happens when you develop the skill of following thoughts to their source. And how that changes or transforms how thinking functions. It actually makes thinking more spontaneous and less acculturated. Anyway, that's enough to say. Thank you very much. So we can have a break and then a few minutes or so, and then I'll come back if anybody has any questions.

[42:12]

Is that all right? Shall I do that? OK. Thank you. I hear from my translators that was pretty dense and complicated. They're not sorry. I guess I'm talking about basics, which I'm so familiar with. It gets complicated. Or complex, let's say. I just said, bring attention to attention and, you know, all right. So anyway, does anybody have anything you'd like to say? Yes, of course. What I find very helpful is to live together with my beloved husband.

[43:26]

The place where tracing the thoughts to the source really helps me is in living with my dear husband. A non-intentional side effect of Zen practice that turns out to be quite positive. Suddenly there may be some not so great feeling. I don't know. What did you say? No, no, no. I just... some disagreement, some feeling that something is wrong.

[44:37]

That happens in marriages? I've never heard about that. And then it is possible And then in this inner attentional field it's possible to detect where that initially came from. Not the place where the discord, let's say, where that actually surfaced, but the place earlier where it initially happened, and then in the end you're just wondering, geez, what actually happened here. because then what's possible is then you can start really looking at where it got initiated and not so much with a continuation of the discord.

[45:52]

Then we can really look at what's at the basis of that discord, and then ideally, if it really turns out well, start dealing with it differently. I've tried that too, but it doesn't always work. But maybe I have a career as a marriage counselor. You sit over there in full lotus and you sit over there in full lotus. Someone else. Yes. If you put the attention to your attention, then you free the person. Sort of, that's true.

[46:59]

Yeah, it works that way. But not the first time you do it. this aspect that when you speak that it arises from the body? You once spoke in a winter breaches seminar how you anchor yourself in different points of the body. And then from that network, the words come. Yeah. But if I do do that, which happens, I find myself locating myself in the body in the way other people are locating themselves or could.

[48:05]

So that will be a feat to others more clearly. Mm-hmm. but if I do that, then I locate myself in a way in the body in a way that others also do, or as they could do, and then that allows me to speak more clearly. And that's an interesting thing, because you have to speak often, and then you usually try That's interesting because usually when we try to speak then we try to make use of the source of the head and not the source of the body. Yeah, but if I use the source of the head I get mixed up. Or I don't say anything interesting. Yes? I have a question. I don't know how do you come to this term of interiority?

[49:10]

How is that to be understood? Okay. Well, I think... Say that you're doing satsang. And you notice, like if it's at Johanneshof, you notice tractors go by outside the sender, and there's birds in the morning, and so forth. And you can feel that as exterior to yourself. But you can also, developing a kind of stillness or motionless, you just hear it inside you.

[50:15]

You can even close your eyes during Zazen and still feel many things, a kind of space inside the body. and then you can open your eyes and be surprised where you are. And when you develop, the more you get used to that and you develop an interiority, for instance like being able to explore your body, Je mehr du das tust und je mehr du eine solche Innerlichkeit entwickelst, wie zum Beispiel, dass du den Körper von innen spürst, dann kannst du anfangen, diese Innerlichkeit im Kontrast zu einer Äußerlichkeit zu erforschen.

[51:17]

The most simple example I can give, as I always give, is that when you hear birds, you hear them as outside you, but actually you're only hearing the capacity of your own hearing. Das einfachste Beispiel, das ich immer gebe, ist, dass wenn du Vögel hörst, dann hörst du sie, als ob sie außerhalb von dir wären. Aber tatsächlich, was du hörst, ist einfach deine eigene Hörfähigkeit. Also offensichtlich hörst du den Vogel nicht so, wie ein anderer Vogel den Vogel hören würde. sensorial oral skills. This was observed, you know, a couple thousand years ago in Buddhism. And became the source of teachings. That when you hear the bird as your own hearing, it's a tremendous feeling of familiarity and inner presence.

[52:44]

Maybe I shouldn't say this, but when you develop more your attentional skills are more highly developed, you can project this interiority to the exterior and you can feel the exterior world as if it were interior. You feel it completely as an interior experience, even though it's about the exterior. Yes, so the more you... the longer you practice and get familiar with these things and incubate them in your experience, what I'm not talking about isn't anything special, it just develops.

[54:07]

Developed if you have an intention to develop your attentional interiority. It's interesting. With people like most of you, I don't know very well, and I haven't practiced with you for a long time. I tend to explain things in more detail than with people I've practiced with a long time, because I think they know everything already, so I don't have to explain. So maybe you made me go into more detail than is necessary. Excuse me. Does anyone over here want to say something?

[55:17]

You always look a little worried. Okay. Yes? So if you were to continue what you just said about the interiority and so forth, then in the end everything that happens is part of my interiority? Yes. In actual fact, that's just a fact. It's happening in your sensory. So you know it as also, you don't know it as primarily exterior, you know it as also exterior.

[56:19]

It developed through the shorthand, the short way of saying it, is there's always a dual horizon. If I look at this bell, the bell arises, is a physical bell, which I have in my hand, right? But I can't know it's in my hand unless my mind is knowing it. So a mature practitioner always feels mind and the object arising simultaneously. But since the job of consciousness is to protect you from tigers, if a tiger is leaping at you, you don't say, oh, it's also a mind. I mean in Crestone we have bears and you know they're around when I'm on the way to Zazen sometimes and I don't plan to think they're only mine.

[58:03]

But if I know it's also mine in this case I may be more settled and composed in how to relate to the bear. And just for another little thing here, this kind of mind where it's a an extension of interiority. The exteriority is an experienced extension of interiority. It's something called the Sambhogakaya.

[59:09]

Which we could translate as the internal mind body. But I've never done this with a bear. But I think animals... more naturally are in an internal mind-body than we are. And I've had experiences like, which I've mentioned occasionally, In a totally dark night in Kristallnacht where I, the night before, loaned my flashlight to someone and I'm walking down through the woods without a flashlight and you can't see anything.

[60:12]

And this particular time was before we'd cleared a path which I can sort of find with my feet. And I was going along and going along and feeling my way and trying to not walk into trees and things. And I suddenly found myself in a large biological field. And I realized I'd walked into a group of deer, of about 12 or 15 deer that were at that time, that springtime, always around. And they weren't disturbed at all.

[61:16]

Because I think they were in the same kind of mind I was in. If I'd been in the usual sort of... external mind, I would have thought, oh, there's some deer, I bet, and they would have said, oh, they were awful. And there were male deer as well as female deers. And so I I suddenly recognized where I was. And I said, don't change your state of mind. And I stood there for a long, maybe 10, 15 seconds, kind of enjoying the intimacy of this biological field.

[62:16]

We were all moving and breathing and breathing. But five or ten minutes away I could hear them hitting the board saying Zazen is going to start. So I whispered to the deer, they're playing my song. Well, I didn't say that. But I gently found my way through the deer and they just stayed right where they were. So I think animals are in a higher state of mind, at least less conscious, but in some ways a higher state of mind than we're in from the point of view of yoga.

[63:35]

I think from the perspective of yoga, animals are in a higher state of mind, at least a little bit.

[63:52]

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