I would like to start out with your contribution to our discussion. I would like to know more about how I can practice this state of mind together with others. How I can see or recognize other people in that state of mind. By this state of mind you mean, let's say, the host mind. Well, I think the more strongly one not only recognizes it in oneself, but is able to have a physical connection

[01:05]

feel of it pretty continuously. Again, you all know that this basic idea of all mental phenomena have a physical component and vice versa. And when that physical component of host mind, shall we say, you can physically feel your embeddedness in that mind. When that happens, then you feel it in other people immediately. Doesn't mean you don't feel it at other times, but it's kind of like the basis of your initial mind with others. And it does not mean that you do not perceive it otherwise, but it is a kind of basis of your original spirit.

[02:46]

In a way this turns one's body into something like an antenna. Maybe an insect's antenna or automobile's antenna. What do you call it in German? Do you say antenna? Same word. So you begin to receive and send. Their body is a kind of antenna or something like that. Yeah, that's enough for now. Yes, that's enough. Yes, as I understood it this morning, our discursive thoughts are intended to be the original deep thoughts. As I understood it this way this morning, the discursive thoughts become initial thoughts through our intentions.

[04:06]

Can become initial thoughts, yes. Who? who or what gives the initial mind the direction which view is relevant now? You mean what? How do you give the impetus to initial mind or direction to initial mind? By your intention. And so now you want to know where intention comes from? You want to know where discursive thoughts come from, too?

[05:23]

You want to know where babies are made? If we have time to do it. Oh, okay. Well, there is a certain given. First of all, we exist. And I suppose we could explore the development of, say, intentional mind in a child. But I would say, my current study being Sophia, she's much more intentional mind than discursive mind. I can't tell you a funny story.

[06:29]

This has nothing to do with what we're talking about. Marie-Louise is trying to get Sophia to eat her breakfast. So she ate whatever it was, you know what I'm saying? It's really good. Mmm. And Sophia said, Mmm, mmm. See, I can do it without eating. What can you do, I mean? There's a humor in her intentional mind. Making fun of Marie-Louise's intention. Okay. Anyway, we have intentions.

[07:30]

more in a more fundamental sense than we have discursive thinking. But we can form, you know, the ingredients of our life as we can form intentions with our discursive mind. You can think about what I'm saying and then you can form an intention to do it. But the intention to do it, you know, you have to kind of get into your body. That's why I said Pavlovian, because you make it into a kind of like entering a door, you let the door cue you. Cue you?

[08:42]

Cue? Okay, good, thank you. So the door doesn't... The door... can be part of your intention. It's hard to make it part of your discursive thought unless you're an architect or something. So does that sort of answer your question? Sort of, okay. I think only sort of. Yeah. I'm a little bit confused with the terms. Maybe I misunderstood something. You were talking about this connection between consciousness and self.

[09:46]

And with self you mean the ego, so the illusion that you are separated. No, I don't mean the ego. Can you say this in German? Yeah, Deutschkirche. Yes, well, I am a bit confused with the terms, and it is about this relationship between consciousness and the self, and I have just asked if it is meant with the self, so practically the ego, so this illusion that one has a limited self. Well, you know, I of course don't know quite what you mean by self and ego and so forth. So I would have to define ego in this context as I use it. I would say that ego represents, let's say, selfish self. very comparative self.

[10:49]

But self is simply a way to function based on narrative thinking, based on our memory, our personal history. So from the point of view of practice, it's useful to think of self as a function, a way of functioning, and not as an entity. So, again, Your immune system functions like a self. It knows what belongs to you and what doesn't belong to you. It's an aspect of self, we can say. So I always emphasize three functions at least of self.

[11:53]

One is how we're separate from the world. We are separate from the world and we have to know that. You have to know this is my voice and not a voice inside you, for example. And self also has to supply us with connectedness, a sense of how we're connected to the world. And Self has to supply us with a sense of continuity from moment to moment. And finally, I would add a fourth, Self has to make things relevant. If you have a person who's had some kind of brain damage who can't recall, put memory in function, they can see the present, they see everything, but nothing makes any sense because they can't put it in context.

[13:08]

So in that definition of self, we all have to have it or we can't function. Okay, so what does Buddhism mean by... freedom from self or non-self. It definitely does not mean no self. And sometimes Buddhism is rather stupidly taught that way, it's just wrong. Okay, so now if we see that self has these functions, then we can practice in relationship to those functions.

[14:17]

Okay, one emphasis of practice is to increase the experience of connectedness while not losing the sense of separation. And what Christoph was bringing up is really how do we increase the sense of connectedness. And practices also to increase, or rather change, how we experience continuity. And practice is also how to change how we experience continuity.

[15:19]

Now, All of these functions occur at a cellular level. The body itself functions with a sense of connectedness, separation and continuity. But our consciousness reinforces all that in our thinking. Okay, are we still with me? I mean, this is all I've gone over before often, but for me, you know, I... I think it's really important to make these things clear until you really have this as how you define your own experience or how you notice your own experience.

[16:36]

And so we have habits, usually kind of vague habits of We have habits of thinking which are often not very articulated. Few of us really make a distinction between emotion and feeling. kind of conflate them. But if you're going to have this investigating, observing mind, you have to... You have to observe in some sort of category. And you can use words as part of the categories of observation. But As you practice mindfulness more thoroughly, you find when words are the categories of observation,

[18:02]

our cultural and personal habit in using words is often not very clear. And what you find is when you try to make the words useful tools of observation, you often find your back at the etymological roots of the words, not the conflated, generalized use in ordinary speech. Because the words at some point represented very subtle distinctions and they kind of get lost after a while.

[19:10]

If we don't feel those distinctions. So, I mean, let me just... This isn't about etymology, but just if you ask yourself, who is breathing? Or who's doing this? If you just change the word and say, what is doing this? What is breathing? It becomes a very different question. You feel something different when you say, what's doing this? So the what-ness of you is quite different than the who-ness of you. So, I'm here sort of justifying my definitions. Okay.

[20:16]

So, mostly we experience the functions of self in our consciousness. In the most part, We experience the functions of self in our consciousness. Like we establish our thinking from moment... We establish our continuity from moment to moment in our thinking. And a big emphasis in practice is to change that. So self and ego are, as I defined it, ego is a function of self and self is a function of consciousness.

[21:26]

Self and consciousness have overlapping kind of functions. Because consciousness' job, with the help of self, is to establish a cognizable, predictable world. So part of practice and part of zazen practice and mindfulness practice is to discover how to function outside of consciousness. Okay, now did that help at all? Okay. All right. Okay. Someone else? Yeah. I wanted to say something about the host mind.

[22:37]

It's all women speaking here. What's wrong with you men? Go ahead. Andreas, you weren't here this morning, so you can't speak. Excuse me. Go ahead. I realized something. When the host mind flows into the discursive mind, The host mind is something like feeling a feel, like a feel in front of you. The host mind is something like feeling a feel, like a feel in front of you. The host mind is something like feeling a feel, like a feel in front of you. This cursive mind is more like everything is moving all the time around me.

[23:48]

But ideally it is nice to be in the host mind. But then I have a feeling it's not enough. I'm waiting for more. Then it... So I'm sitting there and expecting something and nothing is happening while I'm expecting it. I'm moving into my thoughts. It's more like greed doing it that way. In other words, you like being in host mind but it gets boring.

[24:52]

It's good, but if the time gets longer, then the question comes, what's now? And I think that's my expectation. So then you turn on the mental radio. Yeah, yeah, I think we do that. Yeah. Yeah. Sukhriyoshi used to say, it's the desire for mental excitement, a little mental excitement or something interesting that is an enemy of practice. And sometimes a little excitement can be calming actually.

[26:09]

Or just exciting. Goethe said, who can look at a sunset for more than 20 minutes? Here's this glorious display and after 20 minutes you're bored. Well, I think that Yeah, all of that is just the way it is. When is it different?

[27:10]

Because the implication of what you're saying is maybe it should be different. if we're emphasizing host mind. Well, I think it becomes different in two ways. I think it becomes... I find it becomes different in two ways. One is when... Well, three ways. One is there's... After a while, there's more knowing... more thorough knowing in host mind than there is in discursive mind.

[28:12]

And the depth of that knowing is just so much more satisfying and full, fulfilling, kind of not in discursive mind so much. And if you're in discursive mind, you notice, the second thing I'd say is that you notice there's a contrast between how you feel in discursive mind and how you feel in host mind. Do you know how it feels to really feel kind of good in your house and Feels nice and things feel settled and all the physical objects are at rest.

[29:21]

And then you turn the television on. And you want to watch the news or something. And then there's quite a few interesting things on television. But after a little while it doesn't feel so good. You turn it off and you feel better. Well, discursively, after a while you want to turn off discursive thoughts because you simply feel better. Even if they're interesting. So that's the second. And the third is when, as I said to Christoph, when there's a continuous sense of host mind, then discursive mind is not depleting anymore.

[30:29]

And when that's the case, the discursive mind itself changes. the discursive mind then feels more physiologically rooted. It feels like your body is thinking discursively, not just your mind. Okay? Yeah. Just a comment about that. Christos talked about the expectations.

[31:33]

And I wonder if the expectations being different from intentions. Expecting something is then expecting the bang, expecting the excitement. If we go back to being the host mind, we go back to intentions and can let go of the expectations. if that's also part of the good feeling you were talking about. Yes. James Joyce, the Irish writer.

[32:38]

I was talking to somebody in Ireland recently. And they said, oh, it's James Joyce Day today or something like that, a national holiday. And I said, have you read Joyce? Oh, no. And I asked, have you read Joyce? No, no. I happen to read Joyce all the time. I like his English. He defines consciousness, it seems, as the movement of the mind to protect itself. And I don't think he invented the idea of stream of consciousness, but he certainly brought it to everyone's attention, the idea of consciousness as a stream of consciousness. Ich glaube nicht, dass er diesen Bewusstseinsstrom definiert hat, aber er brachte es in das Bewusstsein vieler Leute, dass es einen Strom des Bewusstseins gibt.

[33:52]

So, from his novels, you could say Finnegan's almost unreadable Finnegan's Wake and Ulysses, not unreadable, are descriptions of continuous movement of people's minds to define themselves, protect themselves, notice themselves and so forth. And we get so that we need that kind of movement. I think the word emotion has definitely movement, motion in it, emotion. So I think we get a kind of addiction to mental activity, to something happening, anticipating the future.

[34:57]

Things might be better. And that is this sense of distraction or mental movement or anticipation is one of the main things we have to kind of deal with in practicing. And the acupuncture gate phrase that I always emphasize, things are better in German. Torsatz is gate phrase? I'm abandoning gate phrase. Torsatz. Quats. Torsatz. Is just now is enough. Torsatz. Just now is enough. Because sometimes it's not enough, sometimes it is enough, but there's a different feeling when you feel like just now is enough.

[36:20]

Then there's no excitement. But there's a depth of knowing. Well, you know, really we get used to these things. Practice is to notice yourself. What do we say in our culture? Know thyself. Buddhism is more like notice thyself. And the act of noticing changes what we know. Okay, someone else?

[37:24]

Judith, you must have been saving up questions since November. You've got a big basket of them. Go ahead. I would like to add something Krista said. I often feel a kind of boredom while I sit. And I had asked myself, is this also only a concept I have? Because I don't know how it feels to be outside the concept of boredom. I call that the boredom barrier.

[38:25]

When the learning curve is descending. And at first, when we practice, pretty soon it's... It's a kind of Zen sickness or it's the real problem with practicing Zen. Most teachings give you interesting things to do. Stages, measures of success, medals you can win, things like that. Yes, things you can chant, visualize, etc. I'm not saying this isn't good, it's just not the way Zen goes about it. Zen feels it's more powerful to not give the mind any excitement.

[39:31]

Until you simply break through this boredom barrier. Yeah, and it's also one of the main defenses of the ego. The ego doesn't like it that you're practicing. What is this Buddhism business? You're already the greatest. Or something like that. So, I mean, the ego's... has several lines of defense. Yeah, it's sure you're not going to be a success in the world if you continue.

[40:42]

Yeah, people are going to think you're strange. And ego will finally threaten you often with craziness. You may go crazy doing this practice. And if that doesn't work, it threatens you with boredom. It's this last line of defense. Because craziness is the least exciting. Well, I'm sort of joking, but sort of serious. But let's look. In the known multiverse, we are the most complex instances of any kind of event that is known.

[41:49]

We are extraordinary events in this universe. How can you be bored with yourself? Because consciousness simplifies your experience of yourself. And that simplification is boring. So you want something more interesting. And we can say practice is to break past that simplification. Okay, maybe it's a good time to take a break. Thank you very much. Thanks for translating again.

[42:59]

Come again.

[43:00]

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