I obviously put this list on the flip chart. It was on my forehead, but on the inside of my forehead. I thought I would put it on the outside of my forehead. And although it's... obvious. When you put a number of obvious things together, you create a lot of complexity of relationships between the various obvious aspects. And of course, even the order you put them in. And the that everything changes.

[01:32]

It's obvious. But the implications of everything changing has not been obvious in Western culture. If everything changes, there has to be... interrelationships, then there is interdependence. And if there's interdependence, there's interemergence. Because change is not just a shell game. You know a shell game? We have three cups and we move them around.

[02:35]

It's not just a shell game of parts you're moving around. The parts are changing each other. And if there's change, there's uniqueness. If there's uniqueness, there's no oneness. I mean, all of Western civilization is based on the idea of oneness, of God. But if you really follow the implications of change, Or the obviousness that at each moment there's absolute uniqueness. If there's absolute uniqueness, each moment is something new, so there can't be oneness.

[03:37]

There can be unison or momentary unison but not You can have an experience of oneness or an experience of allness but all is always becoming more because it's producing more. itself. It's emergent. So all is always becoming different at least. Now that follows right now I can say it is just to me totally obvious but it hasn't been obvious for hundreds of generations.

[04:41]

So the obvious is not so obvious. I remember a rather big experience I had on the way to the warehouse where I was working. I, like Clinton, I smoked, but I never inhaled. I really didn't inhale. It was terrible. But I, you know, sort of late teen, I still blew it out of my nose at least. And I was going back to the warehouse after lunch and I took a cigarette package and I threw it down. One of my many responsibilities in the warehouse was a book distributor.

[05:44]

distributor was that I had to keep the warehouse clean. So on this railroad track that came actually to the back door of the And then stopped. And I never saw a railroad car in it but when we used the warehouse just the railroad car track went up to it. So there was a certain poetry to it because we were at the end of the track. So I threw the cigarette package down. And I walked a few steps. And I thought, who's going to clean that up? And I thought, God. No nature.

[07:26]

You can just dump things into nature and eventually they disappear. Yeah, but interdependence and all that stuff But really I stopped in my tracks, literally stopped in my tracks at the end of the track. And said to myself, why, what world do I think I'm in? that I threw that down. And I expected it to disappear somehow. And it wouldn't disappear. And it just flashed on me that I really made a distinction between outside and inside. And it just flashed on me that I really made a distinction between outside and inside. So I realized at that moment everything was inside.

[08:37]

There's no outside. And I've never strayed from that realization. It's all inside. You right now are inside. There's no outside where you're located. It's all an inside. So I went and picked up the cigarette package, threw it on the floor of the warehouse, and swept it up. But right now, I was just told the other day, What do our apothekers do, even in very green, eco-responsible Germany? They supposedly just dump it in the garbage in the water system. And our oceans are full of pharmaceuticals. If I swim in the ocean, I'll start growing breasts. Or I'll become infertile.

[10:01]

Anyway, so that everything changes and there's interdependence is obvious and its implications are not. So, at the break Andreas asked me, he said, what is this agency stuff? Why wasn't it clear? What did you feel when I said agent? I have had the feeling that the word agent has anything to do with me.

[11:04]

I couldn't relate it. Well, yeah, it may be a little confusing, but it's... It's now the standard way in philosophy to speak about self as choice. But I don't know any more exact way to say it. May I say something? Yeah. No. You've been talking too much already. No, go ahead. A Ghent agent in Germany has something like a special agent and this much more than... 007. That's a benign version. Oh. Sinister. Really? More sinister character.

[12:05]

Oh, yeah. Oh. And so... Why can you be more sinister than James Bond? Harmless. It's more... It's not just a neutral way of something which is acting. Yeah. But something which, you know, more of a personality. Again, to a sort of someone who's doing things. Yes, but more in a negative connotation. Well, I... I don't know if we can clear it up, but agency. If I ask you to do something for me, you're my agent. It just became clearer to me that doing the acting self... We can observe without the sense of agency. But that I can decide to observe or decide not to observe is agency.

[13:10]

But that I can decide to observe or decide not to observe is agency. A camera can observe, but doesn't have any sense of agency. And if it came alive, a camera came alive, it would suddenly have a lot of problems. It would start to suffer immediately. I'm not taking as good pictures today as I did yesterday. I can't compete with his multi-lens Nikon. So the camera says, I don't want to be sentient. I don't want to suffer. Does anybody have any comments on this? Or comments on what we talked about or anything you want to say?

[14:11]

Yes. It's not quite clear to me what freedom from self means. When I'm sitting here, I have quite a good feeling of myself, and I always thought that freedom from self means freedom from ego, from that which I have built up over the time. Okay. Okay. Is it another self? Well, I don't know. Let's try to figure it out. I mean, I don't think there's no obvious response. And there are responses, but there aren't answers.

[15:15]

But I hope by tomorrow, as you're departing, we can I have some sense of that. But our mutual friend Peter Nick never sounds like a German name to me but he says Nick is a German name from his part of Germany. Anyway, he's a research botanist. And one of the things that he's quite interested in is how plants have a sense of agency. Because plants make decisions about growing this way or that way or in the shade of another or... Blocking the shade of another.

[16:25]

They don't exactly have a central nervous system, but they do make decisions. Okay. Yes. I might... I feel in being in a certain ambivalence because on the one side we are, what we are doing is taking things apart quite exactly, quite accurately with language. Yeah. Yeah. Excuse me, Regis says here and he's quite, besides him, I'm afraid of men's words, they express everything so

[17:32]

Clearly, pointedly. This is named dog, this is named house, this starts here and this ends there. They know everything what has been or what will be. The words know everything that has been and will be? They know everything. What is the they? The people. The people. And no mountain will be wondrous anymore. Or mysterious, wondrous. And then he says at the end, I would like to see things. I would like to see things. And in the end she says, I love to hear the things singing.

[18:44]

Was war die vorletzte Zeile nochmal? Ihr rührt sie an. Ihr rührt sie an. Sie sind starr und stumm. Yeah. You touch them. They are rigid and mute. Die letzte noch bitte. You all kill my things. Rilke is right. I would like to add to the agency. Yesterday you talked about the corner of the three monks. And when the third monk heard what had happened to the cat, he took the sandals, put them on his head, turned around 180 degrees and went out.

[19:58]

Where is the agent there? It happened, but where is the agent? Well, none of the other monks of the West Hall and the East Hall could do anything. So the question in the koan is, why could they do nothing? And why did, and this is interesting in relation to this list actually, why did Zhaozhou have the agency, his own power, to put his sandals on his head, which in China is a sign of mourning? And mourning for the cat. And then he left. That's agency. When I When I was given this koan by Suzuki Roshi and Yamada Reirin Roshi, who was present at the time, how were you going to save the cat?

[21:12]

I said, I will leave and he will have no one to kill the cat for. Suzuki Rishi looked at me with a gentleness and fierceness which I had never forgotten. And said, you have to stay in the situation and solve the problem. And I'm still trying. And I'm still trying. Anyway, OK. Yes? Is it imaginable that you program a computer so that he would develop a cell?

[22:18]

A lot of people think it's possible. I think current neurobiologists and philosophers think it's not possible. I don't care. I have enough problems with this self. If the computer wants to have a self, that's fine. But I understand the question. What's missing for the computer to develop a self? What do you think? But it's interesting to think about it for 10 minutes. But feeling has a lot to do with it.

[23:27]

And the discrimination of feeling would be very hard to compute. Okay, anyone else? When I look about this list, it might seem that I understand most of them, but the last one, mastery, doesn't compute. Well, I thought I'd throw that in to confuse things. I'm glad you were the first one to be confused. Without a problem, we don't have anything to talk about. Okay, someone else. Okay. Okay. So let's talk about the list.

[24:41]

As a way of, as you say, using words to point out something. So I would like you to notice if the words do point to aspects of your own experience? Or are there aspects I have left out? Or are there... ways in which the list helps you think about the relationship among the aspects.

[25:49]

So let's just go through again. We have The sensorium. You're talking about experience here, not philosophy. So there's a sense of location because we have a sense, we feel, we sense things. smell, hear, taste, touch, etc. Our location is our sensorium. It's not only our sensorium, because the pie of the world is bigger than the five slices, five pieces,

[26:59]

of the five senses, five physical senses. So there's a lot happening as I pointed out yesterday. There's several phone calls you haven't taken which are in the room here somewhere. So there's things going on completely outside of our sensorium. Some of which might be in the sensorium of insects or plants. And there are some that are outside our sensorium, but we still sense. Because they affect things we do sense. Or because we also have rather subtle senses that go beyond five physical senses. But we have to be careful about imagination.

[28:03]

Because the experience of intuition, which always feels like it's true, and the experience of coming to know things that appear out of nowhere in our sensorium. Who's that mathematician who the movie A Beautiful Mind was made about? I forget his name. I think he was... No, no, Turing was his predecessor.

[29:21]

No, he was at Princeton and anyway, they made this movie about him. What? Nash. Yeah, that's the fellow. What's his first name? His name is Nash, yes, you're right. Anyway, he went completely schizoid, or quite crazy. Quite paranoid. And someone asked him, or he said at a later date, and he's credited, I think he got the Nobel Prize, he's credited with some completely new ideas in mathematics and economics. And he said, I believed my paranoid ideas because they came to me with the same sense of validity that my insights into mathematics came to me.

[30:23]

So as I trusted these insights and they got me a Nobel Prize, I trusted the paranoid feelings. So one of the main admonitions in Buddhism for the monastic is that you do not see meaning in signs. dass man in Zeichen keine Bedeutung sehen soll. I was walking along and there was something in the road and that meant to me that I shouldn't go that direction. Ich sah etwas auf der Straße und das hat mir gezeigt oder bedeutet, dass ich nicht in diese Richtung gehen soll. You can get very off when you see meaning inside. Man kann ziemlich weit daneben geraten, wenn man in Zeichen eine Bedeutung sieht.

[31:27]

So, but there still are is... a knowing that is an epistemic process that's more subtle than the five physical senses. And as I said yesterday, I'm using epistemic specifically to suggest there's a process of knowing which isn't limited to the senses. But there's our sensorium. We start with experience. And the sensorium leads us to the perspective of And the act of noticing sensation as a location or as a sensation.

[32:32]

is an experience of observing. Is the biology of observing necessarily mean there's a self who or which observes. Or as a plant sort of observing, on some level observing what plants next to it, Is there a plant self that's doing that? Or can we shift from a kind of biology of observing, which is part of sentience, and then sometimes coagulated, into a self.

[34:01]

If we pull this biological field into the agent of a self, if the If the experience of self, inselferates, like incorporates, inselferates, inselferates, observing, English is not just, doesn't work for what we're doing here. So there's this inselferation, It's an insufferable use of language.

[35:04]

Your game. Game means you're up for the... Will self ever give observing back? Can we say... with some Buddhist power. Self, let go of the biology of observing. It doesn't belong entirely to you. You're a very useful part of it. But you don't own it. Anyway, we can have this kind of conversation with ourselves. We can keep this kind of conversation within ourselves. So there's observing.

[36:13]

And once we notice observing, notice, knowledge, knowing, notice, observing, observing is quite a thing all in itself. It gives us the sense that we are doing it. But it also includes memory. Memory of the past. Images of the present. Associations. Etc. And it is experienced as an interiority. And we also, since we can observe, the world flows through the five senses.

[37:17]

The world, as we know it, is flowing through the five and six senses, including mind. And of course it's changed, limited, etc., by flowing through us. We, for example, I always say, hear a bird in a different way than a bird hears a bird, as we have different... oral apparatus than the bird. So it flows through the six senses, but it's not an exact replica of what's out there. Which I think one of the word Husserl uses for what's out there that isn't in the senses is the hyl, H-Y-L-E.

[38:28]

Who says that, Husserl? Husserl, not Cicero, Husserl. Husserl says, Husserl says we... He has a word for what's out there that doesn't come into the senses. I think his word is hyl, H-Y-L-E. And what doesn't get into the senses, we leave to the botans. That's what they said. Okay. So observing leads to both an experience of interiority and exteriority. And the experience of shifting from the interior to the exterior, etc., all of that. is choice and agency.

[39:32]

Now, if you fall in love, you want to belong to the other person if I give myself to you will you handle it with care will you always be true to me in every way you can like that or you want the other person to belong to you Now what kind of self is that? The agency of self you can give away when you're besotted with love. Okay, good enough. Okay, then there's a sense of responsibility.

[40:45]

It comes because you have a choice. And all civilization is built on that point. In a tribe, the rules of behavior are about responsibility. Okay. And John Searle, the American philosopher, teaches at Berkeley. And John Searle, an American philosopher and a teacher at Berkeley, he has a whole book on... All of civilization, culture, etc., is built on the verbal contract or a contract. You and I agree on certain things. I am always surprised when you drive that people really do stay on their side of the street.

[41:56]

Thank goodness. Yeah, I mean, it would be impossible if they didn't. To drive. Well, you have to drive extremely slowly. Okay, so the next is narrative. We create, and I should have put imagination in there. Okay, so in narrative there's a story of ourselves. And the story is woven from our own experience and from our cultural assumptions and our cultural experience, societal experience. Okay, now why the last two are there is because Plato says, and he's one of the early places you can start looking at the development of the Western self, Plato emphasizes knowledge of the narrative self.

[43:17]

Der betont das Wissen oder Kennen dieses erzählenden Selbst. And emphasized self-mastery and control of the self. Und betonte auch die Selbstbeherrschung oder Selbstmeisterschaft und Kontrolle des Selbst. Oh, now we have a problem. If there is self and there is self-mastery, What self is mastering the self? What is self-control? And Plato emphasized the development of self-control. So he had to have a higher self. that controlled the lower self.

[44:29]

As soon as you have a higher self, then Plato had something like soul. Now I believe, as little as I understand, you know, the history of ideas, etc. That it was assumed from Plato on, pretty much, that only an elite could do this. Only an elite who could developed self-mastery and the masses did not develop self-mastery and had to be led and controlled. And that sense of an elite in Catholicism became monasticism. Monastics had the knowledge and training to master themselves.

[45:35]

And one of the main texts, subtexts of the Protestant Reformation was this mastery should be universal. Everyone should master themselves. So Protestantism on the whole has been against monasticism. against the expert and the elite. We have this problem right now in the Dharmasana. Should we buy Hudson Holz? It's really about this very question. Because the assumption within the Dharmasana lineage teaching of Zen Buddhism and Buddhism in general.

[47:03]

Not in the Pure Land Schools. The Pure Land Schools do not have monasticism. And everyone can chant Namo Amida Butsu, Namo Amida Butsu, Namo Amida Butsu. And if you chant it enough, you don't need to be a monastic. It's good enough. And you don't have a sense of an elite which passes the teaching. There's no lineage in Pure Land Buddhism. In Pure Land Buddhism, Sukhirishi wouldn't exist. So, my experience is, practically speaking, in this topic, As I've endlessly said recently in various letters, it doesn't seem to me to be an accident that every person who's made a decision to make practice the main thing in their life above all other very attractive things,

[48:31]

lay possibilities, and devote themselves primarily and only to practice have been people who have done practice periods. That's the case in the last 50 years of my practicing. It's a 90-day period of monastic practice. Theravada was all-year-round practice. The Chinese practice is in 90-day units. And I love the 90-day units because I get to hang out with you for 90 days. It's wonderful. It's almost like a little marriage and a fair. A Dharma affair.

[49:44]

Anybody want a Dharma? No, no. So I don't know, but this question right there, the last two are, is it lay and Protestant or is it monastic and... I don't know about Catholic. But you can see that once you put in knowledge and wisdom about the self, you create the dynamic of who knows the self and can in Buddhism, not control the self, but extend the self to others. The entire Prajnaparamita literature

[50:44]

In 25,000 lines, that's one of the sutras. It's all about how you develop a self you can extend to others. And naturally enough, those are the persons who pass the lineage. So concepts of self and knowledge of self are essential to the transmission of Buddhism which is about freedom from self. I think it's time for lunch.

[51:45]

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