I can let the depressing day in, but still it's my... I can brighten it or dim it or whatever. And the more you develop this as a simple habit, you simply develop the habit of not being fooled by your senses. Now, if I throw this to Alessandro, he has to catch it. He doesn't have to, but he did. So he has to know this is outside. So our senses confuse us to tell us it's outside us. And to avoid being hit on the head with something, you have to know it's outside.

[01:02]

But by doing this to him, his brain made unbelievable mental calculations to figure out the curve of that and to catch it, which I think computers probably couldn't do yet. So this happened, the archivist happened entirely inside him, although he had to treat it as if it were outside. Now, the more you develop the habit of just simply seeing everything as inside, There's nice results. You never feel lonely. You never feel alienated. You don't feel disconnected. Such a simple thing has a tremendous therapeutic value.

[02:05]

So you can look at all aspects of Buddhist teaching as three dimensions in each teaching. It's consonant with reality. It's therapeutic. And it's realization. In other words, it leads to enlightenment. And it also gives you therapeutic benefit, like not feeling lonely anymore. Okay, so that's the second aspect. And the third is that it's qualified by views.

[03:08]

Okay. Now that simply means that if I, this is a view, so if I see everything as separate, that's a view that affects me. The most common view that affects you is the subject-object distinction. So practice is to train yourself, literally, to be free of the subject-object distinction, simultaneously with preceding subject-object distinction. And I remember about the third year,

[04:10]

being within every lecture. I said, what does he teach? And I had to come down to his teaching attitude. Attitudes are mental constructs which affect how we receive. And they're either delusionary or illuminating. Okay, so then there's a perceptual process. Process. Which is example, just attention, repeated attention. In fact, when I look at Marie again, there's hundreds of little looking, not just one.

[05:29]

So there's a perceptual process. I look at the flowers. I'm not just looking at them once. I look at them as a whole. I look at them in particular. So there's a process. That process is part of this perception as cognition without conceptualization. So here we're looking at something very simple in a great detail. And this is really the antidote to attachment and what's our title here? It's trying to respond to this idea of engagement, detachment, etc.

[06:30]

Another is the yogic process of attention. And here we have clarity. For instance, to be able to sustain clarity in perception, what most people don't do, that's a yogic process. And last is your psychological perspective. Your psychological dispositions. And this is like, do you have a attitude of trust in the world? Is your initial perception one in which you care or are averted from?

[07:30]

If I feel distaste for somebody, I'm going to perceive certain aspects of them. It's different than if I care about them. Your psychological disposition or emotional disposition, personal disposition, influences how each one of these happen. So in many ways, Buddhism starts with this. So this is, in the most thorough sense, is the vow of enlightenment. The altruistic vow to become enlightened for others. That's the most positive psychological or emotional attitude which influences all the others.

[08:54]

This is also where bliss comes in. As I mentioned last night, also the protection of the personality. And where the cheerfulness of the sage comes in. One thing you notice about people who have some degree of realization is they're usually cheerful at it. And that's because their experience in the moment and how they react is not tied to their personal history, but is identical with the few cousins. Relaxed, kind of good mood. And this is the fruit of this process.

[10:05]

It's not just some kind of, well, he was born like a good guy. So I said, it's good to go over the edge, but maybe I went a little too far. But our translator has kept up with it. Yes, please. Where does the Bodhisattva start? In Zen Buddhism, the Bodhisattva in this list starts with number six. But we can also talk about a Buddhakaya as well as a Bodhisattvakaya.

[11:05]

I'm adding something that's slightly different from the Bodhisattva view. Oh. That was fun. Thank you all.

[12:55]

Thank you for translating. He's had a stretch. Twenty-one. Twenty-one. It's really hot.

[14:42]

I'd like to start out with something that you'd like to bring up. Louder, yes. Do you hear what I said now? I'd like to start with anything you'd like to bring up. I think this morning you brought up seeing a deer, not a bear, or seeing a deer and acting differently if you know it's a deer than if you know it's a bear. And then the question came, but how to act? Because I think you act differently if you have the concept of what you're seeing as being the deer than if you have the concept as it being the bear.

[16:47]

And I think for me the question meant, how to act in daily life, because this is, to my mind, quite removed from daily life, to me, like this, here. Yeah. Daily life for me, but maybe not for you. I think you live for me, maybe not for you. In German, this morning came, and I repeat that I came incorrectly, I can talk about it, when you see something in the forest, and you know it's a deer, or you know, you see something, you do the concept, um um It's quite different.

[17:58]

You know it's a bear, you know it's a deer. And for me, the question is, how do you deal with your daily life? Especially in terms of what you do here, or how you interact with each other here. In my opinion, it's quite different. Yeah, it doesn't have to be. And in fact, it's this very point that the samurai took as the basis for his sword fighting stance. Such a person has to act. But is it a bear? Is it a deer? A human being, living or dead? Doesn't make any difference.

[19:01]

I mean, at the moment of acting. If I'm going upstairs in the dark, and I can't see the stairs, I take one step at a time. I don't have to think about it. If I come downstairs in the daylight, I come downstairs the same way. The other day at this hotel where I was in Steiermark, I went upstairs in this way, sort of.

[20:07]

With two flights up, I prefer to, actually about four, but two stories. But I prefer to walk. Usually, even if it's five flights, I walk. Ten, and I think about it. So in Portugal, I caught some commotion. I was just in Portugal a couple of weeks ago. Commotion, a little disturbance. In the port, there's the highest building structure in Portugal. In Porto? I went all the way up with my daughter and my other people, my grandson. And there's a stairway on the outside of it going down. I have to admit, we went up by elevator.

[21:22]

I couldn't resist. The door opens, though. I said, I'll see you down there. I trudged down, and guards met me at the bottom. They were laughing. I would have liked to have gone up, though. Anyway, so I went upstairs, and then I got up to the top of the stairs and realized I'd left my key on the... I'm downstairs. So I enjoyed my oil back down. And then I had a moment of thinking, oh, shit, I've got to go back up these stairs again. I'm sorry to have you go. But then why should it make any difference the second time than the first time? So I enjoyed each step the same way.

[22:25]

That's not enough. That's not different. That's a pretty ordinary mind. But I can't prove this to you, but maybe you'll find out. Ich kann dir das nicht beweisen, aber vielleicht findest du es heraus. Something, ja. Noch etwas? Everything I said this morning made sense?

[23:35]

No questions about it? Yeah. That's good. How can I make my practice useful in dealing with noise? Noise is a powerful disturbance in everything I do. I seem engulfed by knowledge. I seem surrounded by knowledge. I'm beginning to believe that I'm a hypochondriac about noise. But they are the machines. They are real. They are there. And it seems to me I'm suddenly prone. Everybody else seems to be unable to get anything done without using noise machines. and make a point of doing quite a lot of work that could be done by that machine with different means and different tools, traditional tools that are not engine powered.

[24:37]

And there's not going to be any difference. Other people will go on using engine powered tools. And I also happen to live in the vicinity of a military training area, quite large, a large military action. that provides an enormous amount of additional unnecessary noise. And I thought that practice would help me develop a way of dealing with it, because it's obviously more in my mind than it is outside it. Because although other people realize that the noise is there too, they don't seem to remember as much as I do. In German. I would like to get a hint of how one can make the practice usable or tangible for the surrounding noise. I personally suffer a lot from, especially with machine learning.

[25:40]

Especially when you are under the influence of abhorrence, which is always the case. I have the feeling of being surrounded by machine learning and This is, of course, a strong subject, the component of the machine, but it seems not to stay that way. And that would of course not have allowed me to make the tools with which I can handle it better. Personally, I try a series of activities that you could do very well with machines. with traditional tools to build a building that does not require any learning, does not require any technical energy. And to say that this is my responsibility, I would be exhausting myself. Things that you can do with machines are wrong if you don't do them with machines. But the responsibility was not enough. I would have used a bit of music. I have to add, in fact, I feel doing work that can be done by other helpful machines, the traditional way, the kind of factory parts I make, because, of course, it's more strenuous to do it with a rough machine.

[26:58]

Well, the moral question of its annoyance is separate from it annoying you physically or emotionally. Then it's affecting you emotionally. And I get annoyed myself by people. Cutting an area of lawn about as big as this with a big machine, you know, it's kind of crazy. But on the other hand, I could sleep completely comfortably in the middle of Times Square, it would be no problem. And I think that's partly Zen practice. Because I just don't react to input unless I choose to react to input.

[28:03]

I mean, if it's the level that inflicts a kind of pain, as some sounds do, then I would notice it. But if I'm sleeping and there's all kinds of noise, whether it's birds or trolley cars, I don't care. But it does seem to have something also to do with, like, Northern Europeans are the largest consumers of earplugs in the world. And I think in countries like Italy and Spain, they're much more monopolychronic. There's lots of things going on at once, and they don't... So monochronic and polychronic are two anthropological words. But I do think Zen practice makes a difference.

[29:06]

But strangely enough, Zen practice also, if you're with people, you can notice who practices Zen because if there's a song going on in another room, you can bring the name of the song into the conversation and the Zen folks notice it, the meditators notice it, and the others haven't heard the song. But Zen practice also has the influence that, for example, when a group of people is in a room and somewhere next to them a song is played, Die Leute, die meditieren, bringen dann den Namen des Lieds ins Gespräch und die anderen haben es gar nicht bemerkt. Könntest du ganz, ganz kurz die sechs Punkte noch einmal ansprechen und die Definitionen geben? Well, it could take six centuries or something like that, too.

[30:25]

The first is the five physical senses plus mind. The second is all sensory, all input is a mental representation. I'm seeing a mental and not just mental, but a proprioceptive body perception. And my views affect my perception of you. And the example I use most often, if I have a view that you're over there and I'm here, then that's prior to perception arising. So if I have a view prior to perception, that space separates it, that will make me, my perceptions will reinforce that view. If my view is that space connects us, then my perceptions will somehow begin to open themselves to that.

[31:51]

So your views affect, your views are part of this whole process, and I went into it last week and more thoroughly than I can now. is worked out in how the mind actually functions, where views and perceptual processes and thinking processes occur in a sequence in the mind. But our fundamental views of reality are there prior to perception. So you can say, yeah, this is what I see, but what you see is already edited and shaped. That's why Buddhism works so much with what your views are.

[32:54]

So the third is your perceptions, your knowing is qualified by views. The fourth is a simple perceptual process. And what kind of energy and attention I could put in that process. And we go to the yogic process, there's actually attention is like a muscle and you can exercise it and your attention can get finer and finer. Now another truism of of yogic practice is that every mental phenomenon has a physical component.

[34:00]

And that every sentient physical aspect, component, has a mental component. This is what it means that mind and body are connected. Mind and body aren't just connected, it's a field, a relationship that you have to cultivate. So it can be more connection or less connection. These are things I say quite a bit, but we're trying to build a vocabulary that we share. Okay. So that means that every perception I have also has a physical component. So in a way, my body holds the perception. And that's different than just looking. And a much different amount of information and feeling you have.

[35:02]

And that last is your emotional or psychological disposition. The mood, attitude, joyfulness you bring to it. Of course. What temperament and character can be developed as variable? Is there in this form of Buddhism something like love?

[36:30]

Is there in Buddhism something like love, the heart, path of the heart? Does it exist in this kind of... No, we're cold. Yeah. Well, yes, but what you mean, maybe no. If I look at something, the act of looking is a kind of caring. So, for me... Even the word mind in Japanese and Chinese means the relationship of mind and heart.

[37:48]

It means the relationship between caring and seeing. Caring and thinking. Seeing. But how you express this caring is also sometimes to leave people alone. To leave situations alone. And that's a kind of caring for the situation to develop through itself. Und das ist eine Art des Sorgetagens, das die Situation für sich selbst tun kann. But, and also, you know, some, well, anyway. Ich werde nicht mehr sagen.

[38:49]

I mean, Buddhism isn't anything but compassion. Ich meine, Buddhismus ist nichts anderes als Mitgefühl. But, but, you know. Maybe it doesn't sound like it. Doesn't sound right? Maybe it doesn't sound like it. For me, it... Something else? Yeah. I think that's kind of very close to the weekend engagement. The first one is more detached or disconnected, but it's also a lot of yoke energy.

[40:11]

It's a sort of yoke energy to practice like this. Why don't you point it out for us? The energy of these forces wanting to get this turned out, turned away, and it sort of creates a very strong energy itself, which is not directed, it's more like a... Like a battery, if you practice this. And so this also can be very useful, I think. Yes, I'd say so. As long as you're not attached to itself. And I have a feeling for this, but it's much more difficult to practice, I think.

[41:19]

And this is engagement without detachment, to me. So I'm not very clear about this. Okay, thanks. German. die haben sehr viel an gedenken und folgen längst zu tun. But this first encounter with this energy can, as you said, collect a lot of logical energy. It lies with the admirer, with God, when something happens, this desire for energy,

[42:22]

May I ask something? Sure. There is a different relationship to the object in both ways. And the first, you said it's cutting off. So this means that there is no contact to the object anymore. In which, the second one? In the first one. Well, if you are deciding not to have a cookie, no, you don't eat it. Yeah. So there's no contact with the cookie, except you're sitting there wishing you'd eaten it. And in the second?

[43:32]

There is no distinction anymore. You have eaten it. You enjoyed it. Well, these are just examples. The emphasis, I don't know if I can. Unless we have a lot of agreement on this, it's very hard to talk about these. The emphasis in early Buddhism is how you perceive how you perceive the object as a problem. And in later Buddhism, there was more an emphasis on not going this direction, but really how the perception comes into us.

[44:40]

So there was a shift in emphasis. And this, of course, is a natural way to function if you're trying to resist eating cookies or hitting mosquitoes. But if you're really viewing the world as something you can attach to or not, later Buddhism changes the way you perceive the world. So attachment just doesn't occur in the same way. This is, you know, what I'm talking about has been debated now for some centuries within Buddhist tradition. And it took a long time to sort out the distinctions to more or less the position I'm taking.

[45:42]

And I think you just have to expose yourself to it for quite a while. Okay, one essential part of the practice. Okay. When you bring your attention to your breathing, You're doing a number of things. You haven't you've developed an intention to bring your attention to your breathing. And as I've said, an intention is a more mental phenomenon, attention is a more physical. If I say to you, attention, you kind of react in a different way than if I say to you, intention. So when you have an intention and you bring your attention to your breath, and you do that repeatedly, you're physicalizing the mind.

[47:06]

Because you're mixing mind, body, and breath together. Every time I bring my attention or attention to my breath, it's like stirring in the body. It's like stirring in the body. So you actually are cultivating the relationship between mind and body. This is a decision again. Do you want to do it or not? It requires the intention to bring your attention to your breath. Now, the easiest thing in the world to do. All of you can do it. For three or four breaths.

[48:17]

Or maybe five. It's very difficult to do for 24 hours. Why? Why is something that's so easy to do for a few minutes so difficult to do all day? Because there's a subtle view in permanence. There's a subtle view that our actual continuity is in our thinking, not in our body. So as long as you think that, your mind, your attention is going to go back to your thinking. So your sense of identity is carried in your thinking. Your sense of reality and permanence is carried in your thinking. And thinking. Permanence. And your sense of continuity is carried in your thinking.

[49:20]

As long as that's the case, it's almost impossible to bring the mind into the break. Yeah. Is that because we experience something that changes? Yeah, it changes, dies, et cetera. Why is that? That's one thing. So I'm trying to, I know a lot of you for a long time and so forth, and I'm trying to talk to you about realized Buddhist practice. And it's pretty hard to do unless you've made a decision, for example, to bring your attention to your breath 24 hours a day. Unless you make that decision, a lot of what I'm saying doesn't make sense.

[50:49]

It's kind of interesting occasionally, but really it doesn't connect. I'm not here to convince you to do that. I probably couldn't if I tried. Yes. I realized it not living in a monastery. And would I be here if I thought I could only be done in a monastery?

[51:52]

But in my mind, the monastery is actually that really, and going from being forced with all kinds of identity, because I always think Yeah. Deutsch, bitte. It is possible.

[53:25]

And if your intention, if you have a strong enough intention to do it, and every time you have an opportunity, when you happen to think of it without forcing yourself, you bring yourself back to your breathing. Like right now I'm speaking in my breath. Wir machen es die ganze Zeit. Es ist nur, dass unsere Aufmerksamkeit nicht dabei ist. Und wenn du dich nicht kümmerst um Erfolg oder Misserfolg, und dich nur um die Absicht kümmerst, Okay, now when you're with other people, their breathing changes you. But your breathing can change them too. And one of the main things in Zen, the training for when you're with somebody dying, is how to bring your breath into regulation with theirs and then change it.

[54:35]

And it can be done all the time. You can do it. But it's not polite to do it to other people. So when you're with other people, out of both a feeling of wanting to be, a feeling of compulsion, We join our breathing with their breathing. And then we enter into their way of thinking and breathing. But if you're conscious of that, you can find yourself still connecting with another person and still staying with your own breathing. And I think you'll find that actually your friends like it. They won't say anything to you like, hey, Regina, you're breathing differently these days. Okay. Okay.

[56:03]

Question. Yeah. Compassion. Can you translate what she said? She already did it. It was English and German. Yeah, but how can you be in Zen Buddhism? Oh, sorry. That you are given a lot of compassion. Yeah.

[57:11]

In Zazen, you just feel what you feel. You don't try to develop anything. And you accept whatever it is. If you feel uncompassionate all the time, you accept that you feel uncompassionate all the time. But the acceptance of the kind of compassion. Pardon me? Your partner. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. She's crying. Okay. Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! And it's really my big problem now, because I was born in the Tibetans, and I think I know very well, but now I hear a lot of work, work, and education, but I have no respect for them at all, and I don't know.

[58:37]

I don't know. Okay. Sexes of type? I don't know. Well, I was born in the Middle East, and my father was born in the Middle East, and that's what I know. I was born in the Middle East, and that's what I know. I was born in the Middle East, and that's what I know. I'm not presenting compassion or any other attitude or feeling. That's something good or that we should achieve. What I'm trying to talk about now is just how we exist. Okay, now... So let's stick with that for a while, okay?

[59:49]

Thank you. If she's not feeling too good, I might even pat her or something, okay? I don't know if it's compassion, it just seems normal. If she... If I sense that something she had to be left alone, I'd leave her alone. Okay, so let me go back to... I'm trying to do something this afternoon. I don't know if we'll have time. We should take a break. I don't know if I can do it. I'm trying to answer your question. Which is, why aren't we born with this wisdom? But I don't know if I can... jiggle us toward how I would answer that question.

[61:10]

Yeah. Please. When I look at the second drawing here, so that could also mean that everybody has this very thin, homeopathic stream of wisdom, of perception. And it's only how it happens in your life that you can develop it. There's a complex situation of dependent practice. So I don't know if that's what you're saying. Okay, let's take a break.

[62:22]

Can we try to make it actually 30 minutes? So come back at 25 after? I'll try to answer your question. I don't know if I can answer your question at the same time, but I'll do my best. Okay, thank you. to the questions about compassion or love. I think it's a little like if, say, a mother doesn't love her child. It doesn't help to tell her to love her child.

[63:37]

You have to really look at what's going on so that you can see why this natural function of loving isn't happening. And I think our civilization is very young. I interviewed my mother recently, who is 94, I think. And so I asked her all kinds of questions. about all the great aunts and grandmothers and stuff that lived in her extended family household. I asked her who her first lover was and she said, oh, Dickie. But she remembered But what's interesting in speaking with her, her kind of memory of people she knew and people they knew,

[65:06]

It goes very clearly back to about 1850. I mean, to the extent they lived in the same houses and they remembered when General so-and-so Lafayette happened to visit a house in Vaucourt. And I know you guys. Some of you will be alive in 2050. So that's 200 years. And talking with my mother very carefully, there doesn't seem to be much difference between what people in 1870 told their kids and do now. I mean, there's some difference, but basically there was a very similar view of what a human being is. So when we look at not just our personal life, but our consciousness span we're in,

[66:10]

I would say that for many people, and very easily, it stretches 200 years. Particularly if you're a family that stayed in one place and so forth. Okay, so 10 of those go back to the birth of Christ. 2,000 years. It's nothing. It's 10 units of consciousness. And, you know, we think of Buddha being way back there. But fairly historic with some considerable historical accuracy for the last... Thousand years.

[67:32]

Ninety people connect us to Buddha through my lineage. Now this isn't just a game of telephone where I tell you and you tell her and you tell him and it's quite different by it gets to there. This isn't the game of telephone. I take 10 or 15 years to tell you, and you take 10 or 15 years to tell. And I... I devote all my energy to making sure we understand each other. So the teaching room has a tremendous intactness and development over the 2,500 years. So there's, what, 35 people in this room, maybe? Less than three times that stretched back to the Buddha.

[68:39]

That's nothing. How young is our civilization? And it takes a long time to develop a very small thing over several generations. I think we have a basic instinct to live together in a good way. And you find it mostly in mother and father and relationship to a child. And we've extended that to the family. I think at a basic level, we'd like to extend that to all people, but we just don't know how to do it yet.

[69:43]

And I think if you look at human history, it goes back that we know stories 30,000 years anyway. 30,000 years, 35, maybe 40, where stories have been carried with intactness. But we've only learned to live together for three or four, five thousand years less. And we're still learning how to live together. And so I think that we're at, again, a very young stage point in our civilization. Kosovo is an example of it.

[70:45]

We wish it were different. We have to bomb them to make it different. But anyway, we wish it were different. So I When I say something like, dissolve the distinction between self and others, this is to say, this is to discover in a very fundamental way compassion. So, Interdependence is another word for compassion. The more we actually know how inseparable we are, I mean, our Western civilization functions well because although we define ourselves through each other,

[72:00]

Although we define ourselves through each other, in other words, if you're even sitting alone in a rented room, who you are is tied up to your parents and your friends, and you've constructed yourself through yourself. But we mostly have to live alone in order to function. We go to work, but then we go home and we need separateness. The Buddhist vision is almost the opposite. How to define yourself not through other people, but through original mind, but through some basic experience of yourself more fundamental than how you compare yourself to others.

[73:12]

And then you can live functionally with people in a way that's different. The only point I'm making here is that I think we're very new to our civilization. And there's hope in that because you've got a lot of work to do. And I think that we are as much a part of that as any other generation, any other moment. Okay. Now, the answer partly to the, and I'm trying to speak to this because you have to leave today, And I can't answer it, but I can say some things that occur to me. The simple answer is change. Everything changes, so it can't have been there in the beginning. Because it changes, things develop.

[74:34]

That's the simple answer. When I went back downstairs to get my key, I couldn't have predicted that I'd forget my key. I mean, in some ways I could. I know how I forgot it. Well, it's a nuisance to go back downstairs to get my key. But that's what life is, a lot of nuisances like that. Okay. Dugin said life is one continuous mistake. But that's this emphasis on it's always a relationship. Okay.

[75:37]

Now, the Alaya-Vijjana is understood to be the storehouse consciousness. Now, I'd really like to be able to speak to you in some detail about this, but we just don't have time. Now, the alaya-vijjana is a late idea in the development of Buddhism. And it's a yogicara, citta-matra, though there's a little difference between the two teachings. Okay. Now, the alaya-vijnana is usually translated as the storehouse consciousness. Okay. Now, I would prefer to call it a reservoir consciousness or threshold consciousness. I'm sorry to cause you so much problem to find words.

[76:49]

Okay. Now, normally the way we function, this alaya vijnana is like a warehouse with all its doors and windows closed and everything in it is getting stale and spoiled. Why is that? Because we've closed the door. Why have we closed the doors? Because we experience our continuity in a stream of thought. Okay, so what we're doing in these basic Buddhist practices, if I try to explain it in a sort of scientific way, And the way Dignaga, Vasubandhu, Dharmakirti all struggled to work this out for us, is that if your basic process of identifying yourself is through the continuity of thought.

[78:07]

You don't refresh your existence. That's a mild word for it. You don't refresh your existence. Okay, so now what these practices are doing, like you bring your attention to your breath. And if you keep doing it enough, at some point your mind simply ceases snapping back to your thinking. It goes back occasionally, but it doesn't rest it. So if Zen is taught like you should not think, this is a mistake. you don't identify with your thinking. You don't find your continuity in your thinking.

[79:10]

You don't find your sense of reality in your thinking. Okay. Now, when you do, the alaya-vijnana, the storehouse consciousness, is the main material for constructing thoughts. If I look at you, what am I seeing? I'm seeing memory. If there's no memory, I don't have any idea of green, yellow, person, head, anything. All I see is bears and deer. Sorry. If I don't have memory, all I see is bears and deer. Or not even that. Because everything I see here is constructed from memory. So this is not the space of physics, this is the space, our actual human space is a memory-infused space.

[80:13]

Buddhism says this is delusion and promotes delusion. So the practice is to move you into an embodied space. Not a simple mental space. Okay. Now, when you repeatedly, through practice, in actual fact, bring your sense of continuity, when you, through practice, in actual fact, you bring your sense of continuity away from the conduit of thought, into your body, into your breath, and into phenomena. That's what the practice of mindfulness is about as well. Okay, so then you can think whenever you want to think.

[81:16]

It's just you find your continuity right now. It's the only way you can actually enter the immediate present. Okay, now, when your sense of continuity, for instance, when a person is feeling very anxious or having a little mild nervous breakdown, What do they do? They often go wash the dishes. Or something basic. You want to establish some continuity in your physicality. Okay. But Buddhist practice says establish your sense of continuity always in your body, breath, and phenomena. Yeah, but you can say it doesn't mean there's some sense of continuity that continues in your thinking. But basically you sense yourself here.

[82:21]

In this immediate present. And nothing else exists. And at the moment you die it's going to be like that. There you are. Yeah. And you, oh, you hear a motorcycle go by. Ah, a sentient being. You might even like the noisy motorcycle, you know, the lawnmower. Oh, shit, there's a motorcycle. I'm not dead yet. So you'd have a flash of compassion for this noisy motorcycle because you know in a moment you won't hear anything. Now, when your sense of your embodied continuity is in

[83:27]

is in the immediate present, then we can call this alaya-vijnana more of a threshold consciousness, because its contents are constantly being stirred up by the interaction with the present. That's where it came from, and originally it came from the present in the past. Plus your genetic disposition and things your parents told you and your cultural bias and so forth. Your cultural views. But still, it came alive for you and for a baby. You know that babies, you have to touch them, you have to hold them, you have to speak to them and speak to them physically if their intelligence has been developed. A baby doesn't develop intelligence if it just hears television.

[84:40]

I think it's very clear, not only obvious anyway to me, but there have been studies that show that the vocabulary of the parents who are in interaction with the child from infancy are a great measure of future intelligence. But it's not just hearing word. It's being present two words in a, what do you say in German, four eyes or face-to-face situation. Okay. So, all this practice says is our This whole reservoir of knowledge and experience we have should be in constant interaction with the environment, with everything that's happening around you.

[85:45]

It should be opened to the immediate present. That's opening the doors and the windows, airing out the warehouse. So then, whenever you construct thoughts, or you construct attitudes, which is what our thinking and emotional process is, it's drawing on your experience But an experience that's constantly being evolved and matured through contact with the immediate present. There's no way to predict this at birth. There's no conscious substratum at birth that's there throughout your life. Whatever is there, there's certain potentials, but it's constantly evolving.

[86:49]

So the alaya-vijnana is a kind of soup of good seeds and bad seeds, of forgetting your key and leaving it downstairs and remembering your key. Or putting arsenic in your neighbor's soup because he's, you know, threatening your, you know, whatever. Putting what? Arsenic in your neighbor's soup. Yeah, okay. What makes it interesting and why we call it a wisdom teaching, because it requires to make this soup really come alive, requires a magical ingredient. You.

[88:03]

Your aliveness. Your intention. Your Buddha mind or your deluded mind. Okay. Now... Something important to notice is a perception that, or cognition, that's known only to itself. Or known only as itself. Or known only through itself. Okay. Now what do I mean by that? A flash of lightning is like that. You can't really explain a flash of lightning to anybody else.

[89:13]

And there's something called the green flash. Any of you know the green flash when the sun sets? Have you ever seen it? Oh, no, I've seen it three times. It happens when the sun sets. And the American Indians, it's not so hard to see. But it's extremely brief. And if you have a single thought at the moment, you don't see it. So if you have any memory of seeing it, you probably won't see it. Because your memory of seeing it incapacitates your seeing it. And it's not something I can communicate to someone else. We can stand on a mountain ridge and watch the sun set in the ocean, and if you're lucky, there's a green flash.

[90:18]

And for the American Indians, it was a kind of religious experience to see that. But it's just such a brief moment and doesn't happen every time, the sunset. But if you look away for the briefest time or even think away for the briefest time, you miss it. But from a Buddhist point of view, all dharmas are like this. Okay, if we take this, going back to us all sitting here, The absolute uniqueness of this moment as we're talking right now. It can be known only as itself. You can't communicate it to anyone else.

[91:31]

You can live the moment of it, but you can't talk about it. But from Buddhist point of view, this is in fact the only reality. Other realities are extrapolation from this. But we can build buildings and function and so forth. Although in Yogacara teaching, this building is called the imaginary world. Why is it called the imaginary world? Because it arose out of Giorgio's imagination, in one way. And also because anything that wouldn't... How can I put that? If you... I can't say... I can't make... I can't explain it.

[92:39]

Anyway, there's another teaching. I'll leave it aside. I have to stay focused here. So this sense of a perception known only to itself or known only through itself which is also the mind of realization is not something that happened at birth. It requires you to make the decision to be present in this way. And you can't be, if you have ideas of aversion or dislike, you can't have this kind of knowledge. And it requires the energy of everyone to come into this for it to happen.

[93:45]

In other words, we could together come into some understanding of this. And I can maybe give you a feeling for this, but I can't do it by myself. It requires all of us to somehow come into this together. And that's also compassion. In other words, it's that everything that is real requires all of us to participate in. Yeah, as it requires all of those trees to make this forest. Sometimes a forest is called the bird's path. And it's a nice way to think of a forest.

[94:47]

It's a bird's path. And when a logger cuts down a thing, he doesn't think, I'm cutting down the bird's path. But in fact, this trackless path You can't even say what it is, and at each moment it may be slightly different for the bird.

[95:13]

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