Good afternoon. I like Simon's answer to my question today. Beat and I were looking out the window from up the top of the house at the chain gang out there moving stones Yeah. Looks like that. And I said, Simon, what got you put in prison? He said, everything. Everything. Poor guy. There's no hope.

[01:01]

Now, I don't know if today's Tay Show will be, you know, a few minutes or hours. It depends whether I'm formulaic or narrative. Yeah, I promise it won't be hours. Okay. Yeah, so how do we get to where we are? I started the Sashin with the feeling that it would be good to emphasize... Sashin is an opportunity to realize mind as a medium. Now, I often say things like every perception points to the object being perceived and the mind or sense perceiving.

[02:04]

Every percept points both ways. Now, that's the threshold or basis of all adept Zen practice. If you don't really know that, feel that, most of the time your practice won't really cohere. Cohere, what does that mean? Come together, become coherent. In other words, your practice, if you don't feel it, it goes this way and it's quite good, maybe it goes this way, it's quite good.

[03:32]

But once you know that every percept points to mind as well as the object perceived, Your practice goes this way. I understand. I just thought you said... I know. I'm going to stop. Okay. She's ready for anything. And when you... are continuously aware that each percept points to mind as well as the object perceived, then these various ways you've practiced all come together and start working together even outside your own intention. So I was meeting again, as you know, with these focusing folks.

[04:40]

And I was trying to... Because they don't have a concept of medium of mind. Or it's implicit, but not very explicit. because they don't have a concept of the spirit as a medium, or let's say it's implicit but not explicit. So I decided, it's something I've been trying to play with for some time, to bring up the idea there, too, of medium of mind. And yeah, so as Nicole would remember, since the group didn't have a basis in Zazen, quite a few did, but most didn't.

[05:54]

So I had to emphasize a phrase. So, as she knows, I experimented with various things and came up with mind and mind. So then I bring that to you. Now I'm explaining this, I guess I'm going on the narrative and not formulaic route. Ich erkläre das und ich schätze, ich beschreite den Weg des Geschichtenerzählens und nicht den rein formulatorischen Weg. I'm explaining it this way. Ich erkläre das auf diese Weise. Because I think it ought to help you in your own practice.

[06:57]

Weil ich glaube, dass es euch in eurer eigenen Praxis helfen sollte. Because practice is a process. It's a process. It's not all in the text and the sutras. It's a process that belongs to you. And it's sort of like connect the dots type thing. The sutras give you a lot of dots. Koans give you less dots, but big ones. But if you don't practice underneath those dots to connect them, koans are some kind of riddle and sutras are boring. Okay. All right, so I decide to start this asheen with, it's not exactly a decision, it just comes up as what I should do.

[08:09]

Which is, yeah, nothing new, but I'm emphasizing it in a certain way. Now, I mean, as you all know probably, sashin, the word sashin, means something like to gather the mind. And there's two senses of that. You're gathering it yourself through sitting. But you're also gathering it through sitting with others. So you're experiencing the gathered mind through sitting with others. Gathered through seven days or what, five days now? And really it's not the same as sitting alone. So it's five days of sitting gathered through your five days and gathered with 45 of us or something like that.

[09:26]

And it creates a dense medium. Which then you can observe. And when things come up in it, they come up more clearly, not different than come up other times often, but it comes up more cogently. Cogent means able to be discerned. And when things appear, they appear more clearly or more clearly. Maybe other things don't appear as normally, but those that appear, they can be distinguished more clearly. So I know that you can get the picture of this gathered mind I wanted you to experience as a medium and a continuum.

[10:33]

A medium like a liquid you're swimming in. You're sort of generating it. Sometimes the water level is pretty low and sometimes it's pretty high. Du bringst das sozusagen hervor. Manchmal ist das Wasser sehr hoch und manchmal ist das Wasser sehr niedrig. And if you can discover how to generate this medium of mind, in other words, the Sashin gathers it for you. And each of us is helping the other. Okay, so now it's gathered. Now what to do with it? Okay, you kind of got a feeling that you're actually like singing in a chorus.

[11:41]

It's not just being gathered for you, you're generating it yourself. Du musst so ein Gefühl dafür bekommen, das ist so ähnlich wie wenn du im Chor singst. Nicht nur, dass das für dich gesammelt wurde, sondern auch, also du musst schon auch selber singen. And because you're also the one singing, dancing, singing, generating, you can take this which is gathered and now generated and make it a continuum. Kannst du das, was gesammelt wurde und nun hervorgebracht ist, kannst du nehmen und dann zu einem Kontinuum machen. Das kannst du zu deiner Erfahrung der Kontinuität machen. Was ich hoffe, wie ihr sehen könnt, recht möglich ist. Aber so wie der Koan das auch sagt, es ist schwierig. Tatsächlich schwierig. I think then we can notice that when this generated, gathered mind goes into self-referential thinking, it's like going through a little hole.

[12:57]

Very intense and interesting. But separates you from others. And is a continuum of thoughts, not a continuum of the phenomenal world. Now the phenomenal world is a continuum. Die Welt der Erscheinung ist ein Kontinuum. Continuously reappearing phenomena. Das sind fortwährend auftauchende Phänomene oder Erscheinungen. Now, wisdom is to recognize that to establish your continuum coincident with the phenomenal world is much wiser than through self-referential thinking. Weisheit bedeutet zu erkennen, dass wenn du deine Kontinuität durch die Erscheinung etablierst, dass das viel weiser ist, als sie auf selbstbezogene Denken zu etablieren.

[14:20]

Okay, now I think that's crystal clear. I don't know if it's crystal or glass clear. You're not going to go there. I think what I've just said is pretty clear. But it may be a little too many distinctions all at once. But perhaps for some of you, luckily, Frank is trying to squeeze it all into this machine. No. Rick, I've never listened to one of my tapes, so I don't know what it's like. All I know is the few times I've heard my own voice, it sounds like my brother.

[15:22]

Okay. Okay. Now... But I also try to make it, continue to make it as clear as I can, so you don't have to bother with this little machine. Okay. Now... From early on in practice, I... I became more clearly aware of subliminal cognitive processes.

[16:24]

And you have the word subliminal? Yeah. It means beyond the threshold of perception, right? Yeah. Liminis means threshold or limit, and sub is under the limit of consciousness. Supraliminal means above, into consciousness. I think they're rooted in German and so, you know. Well, to me it's all German. Because for me, in English, it's the French, half of American English vocabulary is French, and that's the Latin part, not the German part. Oh, okay. For us. The other half is German. Okay. Now, one of the things that confirmed me in this in my first months and years of practice, which is I had a friend who was a pure mathematician studying at Berkeley.

[17:58]

And I, you know, talking with them, discovered that pure mathematics is a process of trying to solve problems that no one solved before. So, I mean, there's no pathways to solve problems that there's no pathways to. No one's ever found a pathway. Okay, so what do they do? And it's a conscious process in the field of pure mathematics. Is you gather all the information you can about the mathematical problem. And you just hope that your non-conscious mind is a lot smarter than your conscious mind.

[19:05]

And you wait. And you see if things pop up, literally. And that's unfortunately how Teller thought up the hydrogen bomb, outside a grocery store waiting for his wife. I think it was Teller. Anyway, what pops up is not always good. In any case, after that it was clear that most scientific discoveries I ever read about are this process. And then I noticed very simple, extremely mundane things. I've never been much of a party-goer. You sort of, as someone called me once,

[20:06]

I'm the poet at the picnic. Everyone is having a good time and I'm in the woods sort of, oh nature. But now I just live in a big party all the time. We have a schedule, but parties, you know... Be careful what you don't want. Okay, so anyway, I noticed that when I did go to parties, which I had to occasionally as a young male... Or just a person. So I would be there sort of participating. And suddenly it would occur to me in a while I should get ready to go. And then I noticed that actually this was, as soon as that thought appeared, it was the right moment to leave.

[21:41]

But that being so clear only happened after I started doing something. So I began to see that my first thought about something was usually what I should do. It often got interpreted in consciousness to I should do it after I say goodbye to the host or something. Oh, Wiedersehen, yeah. Sweetheart, this lovely day. Do you know that song? Has flown away, no. Should I translate this out?

[22:54]

No, no. Sing it, Nicole. Okay. But through many simple examples like that, I began to kind of develop a subliminal, superliminal awareness of an edge. Jedenfalls durch viele kleine Beispiele wie diese habe ich so eine Art sublime, also unterschwellige oder überschwelliges Gewahrsein entwickelt, das so ziemlich am Rande immer war oder immer an der Kante. Ich konnte spüren, wenn etwas durch diese Oberfläche hindurch stieg und habe begonnen, dem zu vertrauen. talked about beginning to trust the activity of your life. And when you can start trusting the activity of your life, he's very clear, you also can begin to start respecting yourself.

[24:00]

And putting faith in practice and in yourself. These are such huge steps to trust, to have respect, to have faith in your life. These are big things. And that they can come out of little things like beginning to trust how our mind works. Okay. So now I presented this idea of a medium of mind. And I tried to give you a way to practice toward it.

[25:15]

So I suggested that you use the phrase mind and mind in any way you want, and I suggested a few. Okay. I also suggested another way to this medium of mind was to notice the basic experience of aliveness. Perhaps the basal, B-A-S-A-L, the most basic fundamental experience of all. Simple, extraordinary aliveness. Simple, extraordinary and unable to be completely fathomed. And non-conceptual, non-comparative aliveness.

[26:33]

Just in zazen, notice the sensations of aliveness. Something in your shoulder, knee, an idea, whatever. And the metabolic hum in the background, foreground. Hum, like the hum behind the radio. Or the metabolic sum in the background or in the foreground. Metabolic. Okay, so. And feel in Zazen this aliveness appearing.

[27:49]

By noticing again the various sensations. But not conceptualizing it and not comparing it. If you conceptualize or compare it, it conflates. Wenn ihr sie konzeptionalisiert oder vergleicht, dann schrumpft das zusammen. Also du lässt diese Lebendigkeit und dann wirst du entdecken, so wie ich das gesagt habe, dass die Lebendigkeit ganz eng zusammenhängt mit der Präsenz. So now I've made a relationship, suggested a relationship between the medium of mind, aliveness, presence, and we could also say a field of awareness.

[28:56]

Now, when you're in a field of consciousness, consciousness has the SCI of scissors in it, in English. Yeah. And it means to cut, to separate. And I use awareness to mean a connected field of mind not a cut up field of mind so if you have a non-conceptual consciousness we'd call that awareness In my way I'm speaking.

[30:15]

So you end up with a field of connectedness. The medium of mind is a field of connectedness or a field of awareness. Okay. So in the first couple of days of Sashin or so, I got to this point where I was saying, medium of mind. Yeah, and then because you're all leading me by I can feel your practice. Yeah, and you're leading me in the particular way of this particular every each. So this medium of mind becomes a medium of a field of awareness and connectedness.

[31:23]

A continuum. So of course the whole point of this is if you can really get a feel of it as a continuum, you may be able to continue it after Sashim. Now, what is the fruit then of this medium of mind or field of awareness? Well, it's connective. You don't feel separated in it, you feel connected in it. And the more you find your aliveness in a field of connectivity, the more you feel at home in the world. So a field of awareness is connective and also locative, locating.

[32:32]

You feel located. If you're in a field of mind, A medium of mind. You're always at the center of it. And you can use every sense field to center yourself. You hear the tractors outside or the birds or whatever? And that field is coming from you and can be folded back into you and you can center yourself in every perceptual field. Okay, so I found myself presenting the fact that this medium of mind becomes a field of awareness which is connective and locative.

[33:38]

Also habe ich mich dabei wiedergefunden, wie ich erkläre, wie dieses Medium des Geistes ein Feld des Verbindungenstiftens, des Verbindenden ist, und auch ein Feld des Verordnenden. And the psychological and emotional and cognitive fruits of feeling connected and located are inestimable. Okay. But then I found myself. I've told you all about this medium of mind and how good it is. I think it is. I find it is. I think you will find it is. But it's also a field of cognition. It's a subliminal cognitive process. So that made me start talking about, okay, now I've got to say, why this is a subliminal cognitive process.

[34:57]

To be continued. Well, you don't want it to be ours. I mean, yours, I mean mine, ours.

[35:13]

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