I like it that we all bow together to start. You couldn't do it in a college classroom. You couldn't get everybody to bow. Some sort of cult or religious event. But it does These little things like that begin to initiate the mutual, durative presence. It might be mysterious or a little magical. But still, little practical things like that bring the subtle way we are alive together.

[01:08]

So I thought I should give you, present a little bit more so that you have enough rounded stuff to speak about. Round it up. Round it. Okay. And this topic, you know, is... all we can do is start to engage with it, and perhaps as we go on with living, which I assume we all will do, we can continue with it.

[02:09]

Yeah, it's for this weekend, but as I said earlier, It's 2500 years old as a topic and unresolved. And you could say the history of Buddhism is self-sneaking back in at every chance it can. Buddha nature is the Chinese form of self sneaking back in. It sneaks in and then we try to take it out and then it sneaks back in. So we can do it here as a Sangha, but individually the same process happens.

[03:17]

So to bring this to any kind of practicable resolution, We'd need at least several seminars in a row. Or if we could do a practice period here. If we had 90 days, it could be a theme that keeps coming back during the 90 days. And partly in what I'm speaking about now, I'm trying to continue what we started in the Winter Branches Seminar. Which is looking again at awareness, as Yunitz started us on the other day, it's your fault.

[04:20]

You take it back, too late. You know, it's when in Rome do as the Romanians do. Do you have such an expression in German? When in Rome do as the Romans do? To howl with the wolves. To howl with the wolves? That sounds very Romanian. I'm not the wolves. I'm not the wolves. And Otmar yesterday brought up Benjamin Libet.

[05:20]

And so I think I'll start there. And I've spoken about it quite often, and I often just call it the Libet effect. Which is simply that Libet was a... research psychologist in San Francisco who discovered and at least published in 1983 a paper which seems to have been a significant revolution in what we might call biological psychology, I guess. Which is, he noticed that there was about a 200 millisecond lag Between when wires attached to your brain area, your skull, show that you've decided to do something.

[06:29]

And then consciousness makes a decision to move your arm, but the body's already decided to move the arm 200 milliseconds sooner. So this brings up the question, what is the location of self or the agency of self? Now, some people jump to the, I think, naive conclusion or even stupid conclusion that this somehow suggests deterministic behavior. That conscious will was an illusion.

[07:40]

Now, how I would look at it, for instance, in a typical experiment, the person, the testee, what do you call it, the person doing the test, is looking at some kind of clock or movement. And then you decide to stop it. But the brain scan shows that actually the body decided to stop it some couple hundred milliseconds earlier. But I would say myself is that what's happened here is she has been requested to do something. That request is an intention. She's taken that intention into her consciousness, which is also a process to various degrees of embodying the intention.

[09:23]

And an embodied intention is part of the process of mind, if not consciousness. It's the process of mind, if not consciousness. So she's made a choice to initiate a bodily intention, an intention which is embodied, then embodied. In a sense, it's her will which embodied the intention. And then the embodied intention, as we know, happens faster than consciousness. Okay, and so then she... decides, pushed by the embodied intention, to stop the clock.

[11:02]

So what's interesting about this is not that, to me, is not the 200 millisecond delay, But the consciousness, consciousness receives a signal. Which they claim, consciousness claims as its own. It's very egotistical of consciousness to do that. Consciousness says, that's mine, I made that decision. But consciousness didn't make the decision. Consciousness made maybe the decision to embed, embody the intention in the first place.

[12:06]

The signal from the body is given, according to your circumstances, a narrative interpretation. So this introduces us to the flimsiness of our narrative scheme. Flimsiness? Flimsy, it falls apart easily. Neil is a good translator, probably, because he reads in English all the time.

[13:10]

But you read high-class literature. It doesn't have words like Flynn. Yeah, but when you read a lot of English and you're too lazy to look at it in the dictionary, you get a certain understanding, but funnily enough, you can't translate it. You get a fear for it, but you don't have the word ready. That was... Me, when I was a kid, I'd read all these words. I didn't know how to pronounce them or really what they meant, but I made up meanings. So Winn Libet's work, I thought it was published in the 70s, but it was 83. I'm telling you this because for me it was rather important in a way. I thought it was the 70s because, and maybe it was because he was in San Francisco and maybe there was an article about it before he published his paper or something.

[14:28]

But when I finally read about his research, I wasn't a bit surprised. Of course that's the case. Because I discovered the same thing myself in the 60s. No, I'm not. bragging or taking any claim away from Mr. Libet. I'm bragging about practice. What happens when you practice? And I remember clearly when I first noticed it and started the process. I was at a party.

[15:44]

I'm telling this anecdote just to put it in the context of daily life, which we all have. So I'm at a party, which I didn't want to be at. I went as an obligation. German windows don't work that way. You have to turn it one... I have to teach a German how to... Anyway... Oh, he's half French, that's right. I'd learned to, not that this is relevant at all, I'd learned to squat when you wait at a bus or something for my time in the Near East.

[16:49]

You know, you just sit down and I'll just... I can't do it at all now. The bus would run over me. But I used to just wait. I could spend half an hour sitting there. So I'm squatting like that and sort of leaning against a wall. I remember very clearly this party in the 60s. And I noticed that... I thought to myself, I should probably leave in the next 20 or 30 minutes. And then I noticed that actually my body was already in the midst of preparing to leave. Why should I wait 20 or 30 minutes? I might as well leave.

[17:50]

Something has decided to leave. So my first thought was I should act on the first signal from consciousness. But then I thought, why does that signal take the form of I should leave in 20 or 30 minutes? Why does my consciousness say, let's get out of here? So it was clear to me that my body was saying, it became clear at least, my body was saying, let's get out of here. So then I thought, well, why does the signal, consciousness, shape the signal into leave in 20 minutes when it means leave now?

[18:57]

So I thought, The signal must be coming from somewhere else. So then I began really paying attention, giving attention to bodily and conscious signals. And I mentioned tripping yesterday and biting the tongue and stuff like that. And what I noticed was that through sitting regularly, Without any much idea of what I was doing, except it was nice to be with Sukhirashi.

[20:12]

I started having a mental continuum that sort of included what in those days I called the unconscious, and now I call the non-conscious mostly, and the subconscious and pre-conscious. And so I began to be have what usually is dreamlike stuff and unconscious stuff present in my daily life. So it's a little bit as if my body was pushing into consciousness.

[21:27]

And I became aware of bodily signals before they became conscious signals. before they became conscious signals. And I noticed that the conscious signals were given a narrative twist. You're doing this for yourself or for others or you're doing it because of some reason. And the reason my consciousness gave was not always the same reason that my body had decided to do it. Part of my process of beginning to make a distinction between awareness and consciousness.

[22:32]

A distinction I developed in a somewhat primitive sense from the early 60s. Speaking of it as a background mind. I remember sometime in the early 60s I gave a talk in Houston Smith's class somewhere. So I said that Zazen enters you into the landscape of the mind And that landscape of the mind has trees and rivers and things and mountains.

[23:41]

And from the trees, they make billboards. And then all kinds of things are pasted on the billboards. And I said, that's consciousness. The billboards were consciousness. And if you found the right, you know, it's like the entire highway was solid billboards as it is in some places. Las Vegas. But if you drove along at the right speed, you could begin to see between the billboards and see this other landscape of the mind.

[24:46]

So I first spoke about background mind and foreground mind. Okay, so now I'll just go back to the example I use a lot, simple example. Of your walking along again with a bunch of packages. And you trip on some ice or something like that. And somehow you fall and catch yourself and don't spill the water. And... Clearly, it all happened too fast for consciousness. So what did it?

[25:50]

That was a question I asked myself. What did it? Again, I'm not a neurobiologist, so I don't have to find the neurons, the pattern of neurons which establishes awareness. I just had to notice that something was happening which wasn't useful for me to call consciousness. And I noticed there was a little bump when you go to sleep. A change in your breathing. And then a little bump. And then you go to sleep. And there was a similar little shift in breathing in the first 10 or 20 minutes of zazen and a little tremor and you went into zazen.

[27:02]

So, I mean, you know, somebody might say, how can zazen have any importance or meaning? It's just a position. You cross your legs or you sit. I mean, it can't be real. I have a book somewhere, Meditation Works. Meditation works. I haven't read it, but there it sits in my bookshelf. Meditation works. And I think, how can you prove to anybody that meditation works? What does it mean? Well, of course,

[28:03]

I don't sleep standing up. If I lie down, I'm able to sleep much more easily than standing up, unless I'm driving. Okay, so the posture makes a difference. Strangely, the posture, a kind of posture almost like you were sleeping on your back, but you're upright, And if done repeatedly through many levels of boredom, you begin to be able to enter into minds that are like sleep, but different. So this was my study and exploration in the 60s. So I asked myself, you know, not as, you know, just as because it was my experience, when I fall down like this, what's doing it if it's not consciousness?

[29:35]

So one thing that I concluded was that it's... If you get up and you fall down, you don't expect to fall down, so... Awareness immediately saves you or helps you. So awareness is there like a guardian angel. You don't shoot angels. No, but we are protective angels. Okay, so it was like a guardian angel. Okay, and... And if it's always there, then it must be like the background mind.

[30:50]

It's in the background. But if it's in the background, could it be in the foreground? And I did discover you can do things like stay, if you have an intention to stay conscious, something like conscious, you can go over the bump into sleep and stay conscious. But if you stay conscious, really stay conscious, then you can't sleep. So some other kind of awareness, that was the essence of consciousness or something, went over the bump into sleep. So if it's always present,

[31:53]

And it's always in the background. And it could come into the foreground. That's what I thought it could. And at the same time, my friend Michael Murphy was pointing the phrase, broadly or maybe, in the zone. And he's the best natural meditator I've ever met. And so at some point I realized that in the zone and in the flow, the psychological version, Awareness, which I now realize, awareness is the background mind. And some contemporary psychologists now identify Freud's unconscious with awareness. And with primarily right cerebral hemisphere activity.

[33:07]

So it's in some sense you are kind of bringing the right hemisphere forward. Or bringing the experience at least, which you could... Now, awareness is clearly more embodied than consciousness. Okay. Consciousness can get really way away from the body. Herman Kahn, who was the main insight inventor of the hydrogen bomb, said once, you could just put my brain in a petri dish, I don't need this fat body. Of course he was wrong. I wish he'd been wrong about the hydrogen bomb, too. Yeah, okay, so When you bring your attention, you have an intention, as I say, to bring attention to the breath.

[34:56]

When you bring attention to the breath, you're also beginning to infiltrate awareness into consciousness. you're beginning to embody the mind. And the embodied mind is more saturated awareness. Okay, from that point of view, When we are bowed together at the beginning of the seminar, and we are in some kind of breathing cadence, And I'm speaking within my breath, within the breath, our breath, the breathing.

[36:16]

To some extent, all of our background minds are coming into the foreground. And we all, to some extent, in the zone. And the more you practice and the more you know the physical cues, the more you know the physical cues. Clue? Cue? I don't know. A cue?

[37:19]

Like an actor is given a cue, but now you say this. Yeah, a hinweis. A hinweis, yeah, that's it. We could ask him. No, did you see how quickly my consciousness tried to take credit for that? The narrative web was... Yeah, but then if you do get to know the physical cues of the presence of awareness, you have to ignore the conscious cues. noise because the consciousness is saying this isn't part of my narrative history this isn't really going on

[38:20]

And so you have to say, consciousness, would you please go over there for a little while? Oh, I mean over there. No, no. Over there. And leave me alone for a little while. And let me feel the warmth of this presence. This dance with Sonalana. Okay, so that's all. So what should be the question for the small groups? Dancing with phenomena. Who is dancing with phenomena? In the small groups. That could be the question. Who is the who in the small groups? Who is making decisions? Okay. Thank you very much.

[39:23]

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