Well, I think we learn from this kind of discussion we had before and yesterday afternoon. I didn't do it much at all in the early seminars when I started teaching in Europe. Because I think to talk about practice you need and experience a Sangha with a lot of accumulated experience before there's a context for the discussion. I mean the more there's a feeling of another person is a version of me And then there can be a fruitful discussion when there's a feeling the other person is different than me, etc.

[01:09]

And it's not so much that other people's other practitioners' experience adds to ours. So it's good to have a wider feeling of the territory of experience. But I think it's mostly fruitful because it extends something we already know. Yeah, and it allows us to notice something we haven't. perhaps noticed.

[02:15]

Emphasize something we haven't noticed. So one of the treasures of the Dharma Sangha is that we have so much now accumulated practice experience to give. And that's really taken 20 years to create. Not that all of you are 20 years old. Only 20. But you know what I mean. Now I think maybe the most... obvious and startling thing we should contemplate is what Evelyn pointed out, that the idea of noticing-noticing or mindfulness is simply not part of our birth culture. Of course you can argue the point, but really it's pretty much true.

[03:32]

Now that's extraordinary. It really is extraordinary. How could our civilization have missed that? Well, I think it really, what it points to, is how young, as I often say, how young civilization is. Yeah, my best example of that is How recently is that we began to take women seriously as equals? We men. Women have never taken men seriously as equals. They just let us think we're equal.

[04:40]

but Freud is one of the I mean again you can say Freud had a lot of antecedents and etc antecedents yeah but Freud is a line a cultural line Demarcation. When he began to notice, noticing. And the first person to really make use of a meditation posture in a kind of philosophical, scientific way. The meditation posture being awake, lying on a couch. And, as a result, he tapped into what I would call the third...

[06:06]

The fourth skanda. Free association is basically the fourth skanda, associative mind. And as a result he saw that this skanda knows things that the consciousness skanda doesn't know. So then he assumed there was an unconsciousness. Where are these things that consciousness doesn't know kept? But the concept of unconsciousness developed in relationship to and in contrast to consciousness. And the unconscious tends to be what can't be conscious or what could be conscious but isn't.

[07:23]

Und das Unbewusste neigt dazu zu sein, dass was bewusst sein könnte, aber nicht bewusst ist. Oder einmal bewusst war, aber es nun nicht mehr ist. Und dieses Konzept existiert im Buddhismus nicht. Now, there's the concept of the alaya vijnana, which is sometimes translated as an unconscious, but it's not really an unconscious in the Freudian and Western psychotherapeutic sense. For example, there's a car accident. And the person involved in the accident drives away. And you go and you ask the witnesses What color was the car that drove away?

[08:52]

Yeah, blue, green, someone else said red. Yeah. Does anybody know what the license plate was? No. Maybe it had an M in it. But then you hypnotize the person and they tell you it was a blue car with a Pennsylvania license plate, M372 something or other. That category of non-conscious is not included in the concept of unconscious. But that category of non-conscious is included in the Alaya Vijnana.

[09:55]

So this is interesting in regard to what Joseph said and others. We notice things, but we don't notice we notice them. So one thing, just saying that, Joseph saying that and my saying it, shows not only the poverty of our language, but the poverty of the distinctions that language reflects. I always think of the vocabulary of Shakespeare. Which was some kind of huge vocabulary. It's a dictionary in itself. And I don't remember the numbers, but some people say, well, Shakespeare wasn't educated enough.

[10:58]

Ben Johnson wrote it. But Ben Johnson had a vocabulary in his writings of about 8,000 words, and Shakespeare something like 40,000. And what's the difference? Well, obviously Ben Johnson couldn't have written it. But Shakespeare had an immense ability to make distinctions and hold them and use words that reflected distinctions. And one of the things that practice is doing and mindfulness is doing is actually in an ordinary sense making us more intelligent. And I have statistical evidence of this.

[12:01]

Okay. Quite a lot of, I mean, not a very big sampling, but quite a lot of people came to Zen Center when I was a student and then a teacher. After college or after a couple of years of college. And they were mediocre students. And then they went back to college or went to graduate school and they were just straight A's right through. And that might be explained by, yeah, they're not so emotionally conflicted or they're more focused, you know, etc.

[13:08]

My own opinion is you should go to college at 14 or 20 or 30. In between, there's too much adrenaline. In between, there's too much adrenaline. But I think it's not entirely explained by that. I think it's actually you refine your ability to, for one thing, notice and retain. And also, and this is more subtle, you find that areas within consciousness that are particularly intelligent. And you can locate yourself in the most intelligent part of your mind.

[14:13]

Now I'm not promising all of you good grades. But you all get A's from me. Okay. Now, what did I hear from you? That the field of mind is wider than the noticing. That noticing is limited by the context, by the state of mind, by... And like in the question, the example I brought up of being hypnotized and knowing the...

[15:17]

We could try to make an analogy to something we're familiar with and say that there's a noticing that there's a writing down noticing. And there's a noticing that reads. And somehow we write down the license plate. There's a noticing that writes down the license plate. But we don't read what we've written down. And then we're hypnotized and we can read then what we've written down. Now, much of this, if I speak about this, because I don't have words for it, because our language doesn't reflect this kind of noticing,

[16:37]

So I have to use images because images carry a lot more information. And analogies, images carry a lot more information than does... So what I heard from you implied is that we can, that noticing functions in different contexts, at work or sashin or etc., or alone or with a lot of people, and that We can do something about the noticing.

[17:40]

We can catalyze the noticing. By catalyze I mean we bring energy and intention and attention to the noticing. Yeah. And in various ways we can affect noticing. But there wasn't as much recognition that we can also affect the field of mind. Okay, now if we make this separation of the noticing and the field of mind, which you all did directly or implicitly. It was a good topic that, I don't know, Judita and who else decided.

[18:40]

It was a good topic. Thanks. And it was a topic that I wouldn't have noticed as much as you would have noticed that you don't notice, or you do notice. So I might have suggested something else. Because in the fabric of this weaving of what we're talking about, some strands stand out to you, which don't stand out so clearly to me. So you spoke about or implied this distinction between the field of mind and the noticing. Now, this kind of distinction is built into the pedagogy of Zen teaching.

[19:55]

Do we practice with? Some teachings are directed at practicing with noticing. Some teachings are directed with practicing with the field of mind. Okay. Now I define consciousness usually in terms of its functions. Now I go through this list quite often with you, but really, it took me a long time to come to this list. Predictable. Knowable. Chronological. Meaningful. Now that defines The functions of consciousness. That's good if a tiger is about to jump at you. Or a tennis ball is headed your way.

[20:58]

Yeah, and that's, you know, self-preservation, etc. These functions of consciousness are essential. But in non-self-preservation Perhaps we should look at consciousness as a medium and not as a function. So now let's not call some aspects of it, as I do sometimes, or a different kind of knowing, awareness. Let's call it, as I said last night, non-thinking consciousness. Okay. If there's a medium of consciousness, and that medium, as I said earlier, is the medium of our psychology, our perceptions, our recollections, and so forth,

[22:26]

What can we do about the medium of consciousness? Okay. The main thing is the practice of mindfulness. Okay. Now, we can think of consciousness... Again, we don't have words for this. I barely can think of analogies. We can think of consciousness as a screen. Like a movie screen. But what does the word screen mean, in English anyway? It means something that separates, something that divides. And something that's movable. Screen the windows or something. And it's like a sieve.

[23:57]

A sieve has a screen. A sieve is like, you know, that you sieve flour or something. A sieve, yeah, that's it. I don't know. A sieve is a screen. A screen door that keeps the flies out. Yeah, one of those, yeah. Okay. Now, that is actually a characteristic of consciousness. It screens out things. It edits things, as you've been pointing out. But somehow, coincidentally, Freud and movies are about the same time. And what Freud pointed out is that you can use consciousness to reveal things. If you can bring things into consciousness, You see them, you can relate to them, you can clarify them, etc.

[25:10]

So that's also a quality of consciousness that it doesn't separate, but it's inclusive. So this medium in which we live is a kind of all points at once screen. Dieses Medium, in dem wir leben, dieses Medienbewusstsein ist ein Schirm mit allen Excuse me. Could you say it's like a membrane? Well, in that sense, it's a screen. But now I'm speaking about it as something, a spatial screen in which things are reflected all over. And a medium which connects... as well as separates.

[26:14]

So a practice is to emphasize the connective aspects of medium more than the separating aspects of the medium. So you have the gate phrase of already connected in contrast to, the assumption we basically make is already separate. So mindfulness effects are... this field of consciousness. Continuous mindfulness, particularly affects this field of consciousness.

[27:23]

And attention affects the field of consciousness. And there's various degrees of attention within mindfulness. And we can gather attention in our body, as some of you pointed out, and in our breath. And one of our practices, the Manjushri Avalokiteshvara kind of practice, we can parse as gathering in attention, or the field of consciousness.

[28:27]

And releasing the field of consciousness. And this is basically also the idea of Tathagata as coming and going. And the world is coming and going. Appearing and disappearing. So, because the world is like that, let us be like that. Now, let me just say that Werner Eisenberg Heisenberg wrote that to think that an objective world exists and that exists objectively through small particles is impossible. Okay. Now Heisenberg took that as true.

[29:41]

I think I take it as true too. But what's the Buddhist view? The Buddhist view is Let's see what happens when we take it as true. Now, this Zen master, famous Zen master, Dao Wee, instructed his female disciple, Miao Dao, Sounds like a cat, right? Sounds like a cat, right? She was probably one pretty kitty. I don't know. I never met her. I would have been happy to. instructed his disciple.

[30:45]

He said, I cited the following statement of Matsu. It's not mind. It's not Buddha. It's not a thing. Now this is clearly not a statement about reality. Yeah, or is it? But at least for sure it's a statement to bring your attention to. And one thing we've discovered in this seminar is how we articulate the field of consciousness through a phrase.

[31:48]

Through a phrase that has a point or maybe doesn't have a point. And Daoui said, I further instructed Miao Dao, don't take the statement as true. Okay, thanks a lot, Daoui. And Daoui. Very nice to be your disciple. Don't take the statement as true. Don't take the statement as something you don't have to do anything about. Don't take the statement as a flintstone spark or a lightning flash.

[33:02]

That's good, huh? Don't try to figure out the statement. Versuche nicht herauszubekommen, was das ist, diese Aussage. Don't try to understand the statement from the context in which it was presented to you. Versuche diese Aussage nicht aus dem Zusammenhang heraus zu verstehen, innerhalb dessen sie dir präsentiert wurde. And he's eliminated many of the basic aspects of Zen practice. You understand something in the context in which the teacher told you. You understand Mu from the tone of voice of the Mu when it was given to you, for example.

[34:04]

And then he said, it's not the mind, it's not the Buddha, It's not a thing. What is it anyway? Now, this is meant to, let's say, perhaps stop the mind. There's no categories in which to go. He took all the categories of attention away. So, again, this is a really wonderful, elegant example of... There's not content in the statement.

[35:08]

There's only content or experience in what happens when you face the statement. Yeah, maybe I can give you a statement of the Zen Master Hanshan. Yeah, he said, what did he say? He said, Suddenly it was like awakening from a dream. And I understood the immutability or what's the word? Imperturbability or unchangingness. I saw that things don't come and go.

[36:09]

Now just a moment ago I gave you a practice of gathering in and releasing as coming and going. But of course in a world in which A Buddhism where everything is changing, absolutely everything is changing. We can only ask, what doesn't change or what holds in place? And Dharma means what holds. The word hate. Okay. Now again, we go back to early, to the Upanishadic teachings of Buddha's time, and you have the idea of atman, of self as some kind of unchanging, motionless, permanent thing.

[37:20]

And the Buddha would say, That's an experience, it's not a description of reality. As many people in practice, some Zen teachers take this view, experience oneness. And they take that as a description of the world. Because it's such a vivid, powerful experience. But strictly from the point of view, Buddhism, that's a mistake. There was an experience of oneness. And practice is to say, then what is the relationship between of that experience of oneness to other states of mind and to the world.

[38:39]

And not jump to a theological explanation, even though it's very satisfying and convenient. So part of the discipline of practice is not to find resolution in consciousness, find a resolution of consciousness that's satisfying. That's satisfying. All fundamentalism is rooted in a satisfying, satisfying, finding a satisfying explanation for consciousness.

[39:45]

Finding within consciousness a satisfying explanation for one's experience. So Han Shan says, as if suddenly awakening from a dream, I saw that coming out of meditation, I think he means, I saw suddenly the truth of immutability, that things don't change. And Han Shan said, as if awakening from a dream, and I think he meant coming out of meditation, I saw suddenly the... that things neither come nor go.

[40:47]

And he says, I got up and went out on the stone steps of the temple. And the wind blew through the courtyard. And the courtyard was filled with flying leaves. And I didn't experience movement at all. And then I went out behind the temple to take a pee. To pinkel. That's what I say to Sophia. And I saw that the river pours but does not flow. There seemed to be no motion at all. Since then I have not been bothered by the problems of life and death.

[42:04]

So here is an experience very much like the Upanishadic experience of some kind of permanent, unchanging, yet it's simultaneous with motion, movement, change. So we can also add, at least to our, extend our sense of practice and consciousness to It's a possibility of a really deeply still stopped mind. Yeah. Now, I guess it would be nice to go on about what the different kinds of attention are that awaken the field of mind and almost the field of mind then hands to the hand of noticing

[43:26]

But I'll let you practice mindfulness. Attentive mindfulness. Aufmerksame Achtsamkeit. Intentive, that's a made-up word, intentive mindfulness. Absichtsvolle Achtsamkeit. Does it exist in German? This would be great. Since now it does. Okay. And intentive mindfulness is something different than intentional mindfulness. We have attention gathered in the body and the breath. We have continuous attention. What was your question, Paul?

[44:48]

I'm not going to bite. Please. Since you mentioned yesterday... You have to bear your right shoulder, you know, and all that stuff. Since you mentioned yesterday morning, you introduced the idea of observing self and observing mind, I've been holding the feeling of a reference point in what you've been talking about. And when what you're addressing is the presence of a reference point, When you're addressing the falling away of a reference point.

[46:05]

And when you're addressing the absence of a reference point. And I felt this very clearly in your statement that a shift from the world is permanent. I believe this is what you said. To a mind that's still. Has been implying all the while. In this discussion of mindfulness. You've been implying the presence of meditation. That's enough. Okay. Perhaps more than enough. Now this seminar has been very rich for some reason or other.

[47:29]

For me. And I apologize for not joining you for meditation in the mornings. Because then it would have been much richer. Because I benefit so much from sitting with you in relationship to the practice and teaching. But every morning I woke up after six or so hours of sleep and found I was still asleep in America. It seemed better to save my energy. Or I might be falling over now. And there's many places I would, because it's been so rich, this seminar, for me, there's many places I'd like to go.

[48:38]

And we've ended up really speaking more about the dynamic of mindfulness than we have meditation. But certainly to explore the dynamic of mindfulness, we need quite a bit of meditation. We at least have to create a basis in us still mind, a mind still enough to free ourselves from identification with our thoughts. But just partially in response to Paul's statement and what he said to me earlier, a couple of days ago.

[49:44]

I'd like to say that in the five skandhas, one of the rigors of the definition of the five skandhas Is it these five constituents or five heaps? Include all you need for knowing. And that the idea of self is not included. However, the practice of the five skandhas assumes an observer of the five skandhas. You can't practice the five skandhas unless there's an observer of perception, associative mind, and so forth.

[50:48]

So obviously the five skandhas doesn't assume that the observer is the self. So the teaching of the five skandhas assumes that the self is created from and within the five skandhas. So now we know, at least in terms of Buddhism, that the self of Buddhism is a creature of the five skandhas. The Self is a creature of consciousness. It swims in consciousness. Take it out of consciousness and it's like a fish on the beach. Put me back in consciousness. Or I can cause a lot of trouble.

[52:07]

Then what is the observer of the five skandhas? Okay. Now, we get ourselves trapped in, and I've said this often, but I think we should really contemplate this. Behind all these questions, who's practicing, who's deciding, etc., is the implicit assumption that the observer is identical to the self. And some people even get into the infinite regression that there's an observer of the observer, there's an observer of the observer, and so there's God. But observing God It's just a capacity of mind.

[53:27]

It's no more complicated than you can do two things at once. You can read a book and you can listen to somebody. If you can read a book and listen to somebody at the same time, then you can observe yourself reading the book. You can chant. And you can think about other things while you're chanting. But it proves, just that simple experience proves, you can observe yourself chanting or think about other things. So that observing function of mind is not necessarily self. If into that observing function of mind You bring your associations, your comparisons, etc.

[54:30]

You've turned the act of observing into a self. So it's the observing function of mind which allows us to develop the self. But it's manufactured from the five skandhas. From our personal history. From our need to give meaning to things. And if a person is brain damaged and can't give meaning to things, they can't function. So we have to have some kind of self which gives meaning to things. But we don't have to have all the observing functions understood as self.

[55:38]

So part of the practice of mindfulness And I think it can be done more directly in meditation. Is to notice when observing mind has self-reflection come into it and when it doesn't. And once you've noticed that, You can begin to strengthen or emphasize observing mind without self-reflection. And that is at the center of the practice of Zen. And we can understand as what the Buddha meant by know, permanent self.

[56:42]

I think that's enough for this weekend. And let's sit for a few minutes. And these wonderful folks in the kitchen who are don't like my lectures anyway are cooking for us. There was a sign-up sheet for people who didn't want to come to the lectures, but we limited it to the two. I signed up, but they wouldn't let me. I signed up, but they wouldn't let me. They told me I'm neither a cook nor a baker. They'd be like, no, I'm a baker. Thank you.

[58:15]

It's a pleasure to breathe the same air with you. And breathe, feel the same mind with you. And even the presence of somehow interrelated or common body. And outside of our noticing, Our bodies, our breath, our metabolism closely connected with each other outside of our usual noticing, not outside of our experience.

[60:17]

Not outside the field of consciousness, especially if we stop noticing. Or let the field talk to us. This is a kind of joy. I could be corny and say, that's our wedding ring.

[62:01]

I'm a sentimental guy.

[62:08]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_72.26