then I think it's also important to see that a mind is homeostatic and self-organizing. In other words, a mind tends to continue once it's started. And it tends to organize itself. If you're in an angry mind, it'll tend to stay angry and color everything with anger. And it'll self-organize itself. You'll think of other reasons to be angry. Or the simple example is, when you want to sleep, The mind of sleeping mind generally tries to stay asleep if you're tired.

[01:10]

And it might convince you that the Alarm clock is something else. A phone that doesn't have to be answered. I had a college roommate who would have six, maybe six alarm clocks. And he put them under piles of chairs and all kinds of places. And the last thing he did was ask me to wake him up. I'd come in and the chairs would be in a pile, the books would be knocked over, and he'd be sound asleep. All the alarms turned off. Neil, Neil, there's a test today. You have to get up. All right. Okay, so mind is relational.

[02:27]

It arises through relationships. And mind in Chinese and Japanese means... The initial meaning is heart. But because the heart... Heart, yeah, the heart. So the word shin, or shin in Chinese... It means heart or heart-mind. So it's a relationship. And I think in the Middle Ages in the West it was more like that too. That thinking was understood to arise as a kind of byproduct. It's... Its basis is emotions, caring about things.

[03:29]

But in any case, the word heart-mind is just an example that it's relational, it arises through relationships. Now, we also use mind in Buddhism to mean being space. In other words, if I'm looking at you, you're part of my being space. So the whole realm of Sense impressions and feeling and bodily sensation is mind.

[04:46]

And there's a mutuality to mind. I think one of Freud's Inventions is, you know, this mind of free associating. Which in Buddhism is the fourth skanda. Although its dynamic is understood in a different way than Freud. But to awaken the mind of free association, Freud had some idea, something I think he called evenly suspended attention. Now, I don't know exactly what he meant.

[05:57]

But I said that. I would want a mind that was neither... affirmative nor negative, that was undistracted, and in myself was a mind of free association. And if you do enter such a mind, for instance, you draw a similar mind out of whoever you're looking at or So that this sense of being space is... includes a sense of the mutuality of minds.

[07:06]

That mind is contagious. I think it's Aristotle who talks about looking as a sense of touch. Particularly if I gaze at you, you may feel physically touched by the gaze. So that also would be an aspect of this gaze. Being space. It's mind expressed through the eyes and not that the mind is limited to the brain.

[08:14]

But I believe you can organically understand the eyes as extensions of the brain. Anyway, you feel through the gaze the touch of mind. Now, this is mind, this is local mind. This is a field of mind that is... situational. This is a mind that is part of our practice. Now what about non-local mind? There seems to be Sometimes a feeling of mind pervades everything.

[09:39]

Like, for instance, you haven't talked to somebody for months and you pick up the phone and they're on the phone because they just called you. This may also be that seems like there's some kind of quality like this. But it's not part of Buddhism. It's not part of our practice. It's like mind reading or something like that, or ESP. Yes, some people have certain gifts, but it's not part of our practice. Yes. extra sensory perception.

[10:48]

Levitation may be possible, but it's not part of our practice. It might be part of some people's practice. In general, it's not part of our practice. And Buddhism would feel that if you reify such things as mind in general. Beyond the realm of your occasional experience. you're creating a belief system or a god or something like that.

[11:53]

Yeah. The problem with the reification To make it more real or concrete. To make theories about it. For instance, Zen feels that reincarnation is a theory that may be true, but there's no reason to make theories about it. But Tibetan Buddhism has made a theory about it since the Karmapa. Zen says Fine, be reincarnated, but let's not make a theory about it.

[12:55]

Zen isn't trying to explain everything, just trying to work with your actual experience. In that sense, it's not a religion. It's not trying to say what all of this is. It leaves a lot to just mystery. And we have it. the ability to enter this mystery to various degrees. But Zen feels that even entering the mystery should be experiential and not theoretical. So being space as mind is not some kind of mind like the table or something. It's your experience or her experience or her experience and our mutual experience, but it's not something...

[14:16]

permanent or there. It's not prior to creation. We're always mutually creating mind. Where's the distinction between mind and experience? Well, you experience your body. Yeah. Would you ask what's the difference between experience and the body? Your body is one kind of experience, your mind is another kind of experience. That's all. Yeah, but then experience is the more in... It's more encompassing than mind. Or is it conflating mind and experiences? Or is experience an activity of mind?

[15:32]

Who is experiencing? No, that's not my question. Not my question. Let's not go there. Mostly we don't experience mind. Through practice. And some texts say it's only possible through meditation practice. And I hate to say it, but I think mostly it's true. Only through meditation, through still sitting, can you actually extend your experience and discover mind as an experience.

[16:40]

So that means that normally you think the world is as it is. You are, for instance, you're part of the world. But then through meditation experience I can see Oh, it's not... I can see my creating you, the process of creating you. And that's mind. Yeah. When I started... Deutsch, bitte. Also, ihr versucht es jetzt irgendwie zu fassen für mich und das... When I started the practice, There are many things I know now that I simply didn't think, I didn't believe.

[17:52]

I don't know why, I'm a peculiar person, you know. Extremely skeptical. I've never believed anything anyone has told me. My parents, nobody. I've only discovered everything I know is my experience. We could go into that a little more, but I don't know. When I went to college, I tended never to go to class because I didn't like what they told me. I studied on my own. So when I first started practicing, form is emptiness. Form is form. But now, after 45 years of practicing, most of what's central to Buddhism is also my experience.

[19:22]

And Zen also doesn't use like the Lotus Sutra where Buddhas appear from... If it's not your experience, we don't study it. Or we take it and study it as meditational experience and not as... shared, not as exterior experience. And you asked last night about belief and something like that, didn't you? Because you said yesterday, I think in the morning, there is no belief.

[20:23]

But on the other hand, there's trust, you know. For instance, trust in the teacher. I trust that you're giving the right direction or whatsoever, the right suggestions and whatsoever. That's not the... Could we say something like that? There are no dogmas in Zen, and there's not something like a list of beliefs. Yeah. Yeah, like you have to believe this and [...] that. We try to be like that. Mm-hmm. But there's a lot of dogmas in Western Zen teaching like don't think and stuff like that. But what I meant was, I mean, the similarity between belief and trust is that you trust in something which you cannot quite grasp.

[21:47]

And you believe in something you cannot quite understand. Yeah, but there's a difference between... trust and faith and belief. We have faith that this might be true. So, according to Augustinus, Yeah. Saint Augustinus? What's my favorite?

[22:48]

Belief means to believe in something you cannot know. Whereas we want to believe where we cannot know and where we can know we want to know. In Buddhism, in Zen, we want to have faith in what we can know, but not in what we can't know. And what we can't know, we leave to a kind of mystery. And we don't make theories about it. Because it's also a philosophical position. Because if you make theories about the mystery, you reduce the mystery to something very small. The view Buddhism has is there's nothing singular about this. Singular. Singular. the idea of oneness in Buddhism is nonsense.

[24:07]

That somehow everything is somehow a big oneness and integrated. It doesn't mean you can't experience oneness. It doesn't mean you can't have a way of being in the world which brings things together in a coherence. And you have an enlightened experience of oneness. And there's an awful lot of Zen teachers, traditional, famous Zen teachers, who talk about oneness. I think they're wrong. I'm convinced they've had an experience of oneness. But there are many experiences of oneness. So, from the point of view of the... most fundamental view of Buddhism.

[25:24]

We have complex, interactive worlds within worlds and they're not all consistent. So we say something like not one, not two. It looks like one, but it's not one. It looks like two, but it's not just two. And not two-ness is not oneness. So not two, not one opens you up to many possibilities, including experiences of oneness. Now, if you have an experiential belief system, you may find it works very well to produce things, you know,

[26:27]

that confirm oneness. But someone else's subtle system might produce a slightly different kind of oneness. So I think the theoretical idea that all religions and teachings are paths to the same truth is nonsense. Excuse me for having such a strong point of view. But I would say all the different teachings are paths into the same mystery.

[27:45]

But they don't end up at the same point in the forest. Even two Zen teachers, we say you're born in the same lineage, But we die in different lineages. So you do make practice together. But the fruit of your teaching, you may be in slightly different parts of the forest. Close enough to touch, maybe. But there might be a Christian and an Orthodox Catholic right in between you. Somewhere else in the forest. Yeah. Okay. Okay, now it's important that mind is, you notice how mind is homeostatic and self-organizing?

[29:08]

Because when you notice that, you can, in meditation, there's a tiny feeling of a mind that appears, like some people say, something's there, it was there for a moment. After a while, you get the ability to kind of hold it. If you can hold it, suddenly it opens into a mind of its own, and you can sustain it. And once you can sustain it, it tends to then develop. There may be millions of such possibilities. In my range, there's many. In some other practices there might be a different many, slightly different many.

[30:15]

But since I'm starting from a particular point of view, everything's changing, nothing is permanent. If I start with that view, I will probably somebody who practices with similar views will find similar minds. Okay, now let's look at the idea just as an example. I've mentioned it many, many times. So lasst uns also einfach uns anschauen, diese Vorstellung, die ich schon sehr oft gesagt habe. Und diese kulturelle Idee, die wir haben, diese kulturelle Vorstellung, dass der Raum uns trennt.

[31:15]

If that's your view, that view is located prior to sense impression. And your sense impressions will confirm that space is separate. But if you view that space also connects, however we want to understand that, Mutual minds. Pendulum clocks swinging together. The moon affecting our productive rhythms. But it's not in the realm of consciousness, which is SCI, scissors, consciousness separates things. So if you have the view that space separates,

[32:21]

within your consciousness your senses will confirm that. But if you have the view that space also connects that will widen your sense of consciousness or in a more bodily awareness, your senses will now begin to confirm that space connects. Okay, so that's just a little riff to make clear that views are prior to sensory percepts. And they shape your percepts. Okay. Okay, so now we've talked about the specifics of Mind as a...

[34:09]

Mind as duration or particular minds. And mind as being space. And we also can speak about mind as meaning the entire sentient activity of human beings. Buddhism looks at it that way. Including the body. But from the point of view of practice, it's important to look at the faculties of mind. That mind can have a field quality. that you can not only experience the contents of mind, you can experience the field of mind in which the contents arise.

[35:19]

And once you can... Feel the difference between the field of mind, the page of mind, you might say, and the contents on the page, the contents of mind. You can shift your physical and mental emphasis from the contents to the field. And when you do that, that's called a samadhi. Or when mind is concentrated on itself, which is something similar, that's also a samadhi. So that's one of the faculties of mind, is it can be concentrated on itself.

[36:20]

Okay, since we're doing the basics today, you can concentrate on this. And you would say you have a stick arising mind. A mind that arises through the concentration on the stick. Now, the practice is to not just see the stick, but to feel and see the mind in which the stick appears. indem der Schlögel erscheint. Like, not just to hear the bird, but to hear, feel your hearing of the bird. Also nicht mehr nur den Vogel zu hören, sondern auch dein... And not think about reality.

[37:27]

Think about actuality. And the actuality of your hearing of the bird is more actual than the bird. And the actuality of your hearing of the bird is more actual than the bird. Within your experience. Because you only hear a version of what the bird is doing. A version that's within your capacity. Another bird has a different feeling of this bird. to this bird. He would hear, for example, I am in love. Or I better guard my nest. Or let's sing together. So you can have a stick arising mind where you feel the mind and the stick.

[38:34]

And once I have this concentration, this one-pointedness, I can take the stick away. And the mind is still concentrated. What is it concentrated on now? Mind itself. So mind can be concentrated on itself and that's one of the Main yogic skills. It doesn't have to be drawn out and leaked out into the reality of objects. In this way, mind is nourished by perception, not drained by perception.

[39:36]

Okay. The field quality of mind technically is called ayatana. And mind also has a directionality. Responsiveness. So you can have intention. And because mind has directionality, it can have a direction toward Seeing everything as form or seeing everything as impermanent. And mind also can be structured. So I guess that's enough.

[40:40]

We can say maybe a particular mind has a particular viscosity. Yeah, I'm just, you know, I don't have English words for these things. And the Buddhist and particularly Abhidharma words for these things don't mean anything to us. By viscosity I mean, for example, when you wake up Dreams sink out of sight. Because the liquid of consciousness doesn't support dreams. But the liquid of consciousness Consciousness supports what you're going to do in the afternoon.

[41:49]

But if you change the sort of viscosity of mind into more like a dreamlike mind, What you have to do in the afternoon, it just sinks out of sight. So you can use the word viscosity to kind of feel the presence, because all of these minds can be present simultaneously. I'm sorry. All these minds can be present simultaneously. And I use the word viscosity just to mean you can change the viscosity of mind. You can change it in a simple way right now.

[42:50]

Just move your feeling to the back of your eyes. You can call it soft eyes or something. You feel more connectedness and more of a feel the sensation and not so much particular. And somehow your energy may move. more into your body. So all of this is mind. Is that enough of a definition of mind? Exploring the territory. Yes. Is there something special, for instance, like when there is a sensory impression and this sensory organ and

[44:09]

this sensory impression is going to be connected with an experience of an organ, of a certain phenomenon in the body. Today I had a very short experience. I heard the birds singing and I had an itch here and it was very short that I had this feeling that here the birds are singing. That's good. That's some kind of mixing. No, it's not mixing. It's just your noticing. Practice is to just... We don't want to explain all these things. Practice is just to let those things happen. You might hear the bird in some other part of your body at another time.

[45:40]

Talking to someone, you might hear one level of their voice with your ears and another level of their voice somewhere else. I like what Virginia Woolf wrote about before and after the First World War. What Virginia Woolf and Ford Medicsport So Virginia Woolf and? Ford Maddox Ford. Ford Maddox Ford? His name is Ford Maddox Ford. Okay. His name is actually Hofer, but he used the writing name. Hofer would have been simpler. Oh, Hofer. A German name. Great novelist of that time. And one of the main subjects of their novels is the corruption of the liberal logical dialogue.

[46:49]

In other words, before the First World War, England was developing a kind of way of speaking about political events. It was true. When the First World War came, the politicians still spoke about we have to do this and that, but actually underlying it were secret agreements with Russia and France and so forth that had nothing to do with what they were saying. They didn't let anybody know. it was all figured out already. So under the liberal dialogue that we're all voters with the same rights and the same information.

[47:57]

There was a conservative elitist agenda actually being hit. And it turned all intelligent people into You couldn't believe anything. So she said, before the First World War and after the First World War, if I was with a group of people in a social situation, what was the difference? Did they say anything different? She said, no, they said the same things. But under what they said before the First World War, there was a kind of hum, a kind of singing, a kind of excitement about the world.

[49:02]

After the First World War, they said the same things, but there was no hum underneath the words. They fell in dead space. And I mention that because this very corruption is happening in America right now, big time. And our body hears the singing, not just the words. So it's lunchtime. Why don't we sit for a few minutes?

[50:26]

Yes, Gisela? I would like to say something about the construction of a field of mutual relations I try to enter into this field. And it happens something as an extension of the field of seeing. And I don't have the solution for that. It's as if I would see the forest on this side and on that side, but I'm not able to leave the forest.

[51:31]

And I look only in this direction and it doesn't go away. And I try to get out and my heartbeat is going faster and faster. Is it okay? It doesn't vanish, it doesn't disappear, it doesn't go away. We're going to sit for a few minutes. Why don't you let it settle? While we're sitting. I thank you for the Dharma field you're giving to me.

[54:13]

I'm giving to each other. At our field, in Palmerfield, and yet at some way we're also the only person existing. No one can take this position that each of us has. Niemand anders kann diese Position nehmen, die jeder von uns hat.

[55:21]

As Sukhiroshi has said, these birds are singing just for you. The Buddhist teaching was written just for you. With this feeling, you make it your own. If we do sasen, if we meditate, there's Buddha, there's Dogen, there's Nagarjuna. There's bodhisattvas. Even together we are kind of bodhisattva. And individuals. Because we practice, there's Buddhism.

[56:48]

Without practice, there's no Buddhism. there won't be Buddhism. In this sense we are absolutely unique. You can't say good or bad. Your uniqueness is your responsibility. And you shouldn't. Again, I'm quoting Suzuki Roshi.

[57:51]

And you shouldn't qualify it as good practice or bad practice. Or this is... Too difficult for me. I'm not intelligent enough. No, this practice is made just for you. This kind of confidence we need. To say good or bad about your practice is a kind of vanity.

[58:56]

Just practice with your full intention. This then is the activity of a Buddha. This is how each of us needs to understand Buddha. With our breathing. With our heart and our mind. with our heart and with our mind. Quarter to three, like yesterday.

[60:30]

Okay. Okay. Thank you very much. Dream time. to find yourself at rest within yourself. A great ease.

[61:33]

A relief. A relief, well, Nothing to do. This is a first step. A first step we keep returning to.

[62:50]

Does anyone want to say anything? I would like to say something. Just something which came into my mind is when is a tree a tree and when is a tree a poem? What mind is it when it is a tree and what mind is it when it is a poem? My feeling is that this sentence, this phrase, is very much connected to this teaching of self, of mind, but it talks about the same area from a different perspective.

[71:25]

Okay, German, please. I think Roshi spoke about a sentence from Tsugi Roshi last year, which goes like this. When is a tree a tree and when is a tree a poem? When is a tree a tree and when is a tree a poem? And I have the feeling that this is actually the same That's what we're talking about. Then partly it's this, what I called, the mind from which intuition arises. Or it's the mind when we're struck by the uniqueness of each thing.

[72:32]

I don't think we write a poem or feel like the language of a poem comes to us unless we feel the uniqueness of whatever we're looking at or feeling. Let me come back to that in another way in a Probably a few minutes. Someone else want to say something? Any of the questions I came up, I haven't responded to, I should be reminded of? Yes?

[73:50]

Nouns? Ground and mind, yeah. Okay. Okay, okay, yeah, yeah. Yeah, okay. Oh, okay. Some Buddhists speak about coming to the ground of being or the kind of ground of mind or something like that. It's okay to say. But if you're rigorous, you wouldn't say it.

[74:58]

But, you know, if you're not speaking your own language, it's hard to find... how to say these things, even if you speak this language. So I think you have to, I have a different standard for Asian teachers than Western teachers. At least in their lectures and speaking, the Asian teachers usually just don't know the Western language well enough. and are not familiar enough with Western thinking, philosophy, et cetera, to be actually precise. An exception to this is Trungpa Rinpoche.

[76:03]

He had a genius for using English. But the problem with ground is, if you say there's a ground of being, or mind, we think of the ground as the basis. And the ground is there before the trees grow in it. So there's a tendency to think of the ground of being as a prior situation. And strictly speaking in Buddhism, there's no priorness.

[77:06]

Everything has equal priority. Okay. all of this that we see around us. As is said, it's a miracle or a amazingly unthinkable that there is anything at all. So all of the stuff that we see, trees, mountains, people, So we see, from our point of view in our life, we mostly see beginnings.

[78:36]

I remember when you were pregnant. Now this beautiful little girl is here. So that's just the way it is, yeah. And Giorgio has certainly seen many of these trees growing up here when they were not here or tiny. And Giorgio has certainly seen many of these trees as they were not there or as they were very tiny. We tend to think in terms of there must have been a beginning or a prior situation. Okay, so we have two choices. There was a beginning or there was no beginning.

[79:46]

We only have those two choices at this level of thinking. Buddhism chose no beginnings. All the sutras and etc., no beginning, no end, etc. So among the choice, these two choices, actually the no beginning is the easier one. It's the least familiar, but it's easier. If you have a beginning, then you have to have Something that made the beginning. Or what was before the beginning. I mean, what was before the beginning is not thinkable. Okay. So Buddhism chose, well, here it is.

[81:01]

It's probably always been here. Yeah, it's just been here. There's been some form of something. That's just the way we have to get used to that unusual idea. It's always like some version of this. So strictly speaking, when you... are speaking about Buddhism, you have to avoid any suggestion of priority, of prior-ness. That's hard to do because our language, the whole structure of our language implies beginnings and ends.

[82:13]

So there was one advantage of my being sick other than it was quite interesting. And I get to know a lot of really nice doctors and technicians and nurses and things like that. I met a whole world I didn't know about of people really dedicated to helping other people. I mean, I knew about it, but I was never in the midst of it. And even though one of my closest friends and a teacher... for me, was Ivan Illich. Who made the word iatrogenic well known in English. Iatrogenic, it means... Doctor called, medical called, caused illness.

[83:16]

Yeah. Yes, okay. And I've discussed with him whether I should do the operation or not. Because he had a huge cancer hanging off his face that he decided not to treat. And it was a cancer that could have been easily operated on. I won't tell you that story. Not that I know all of it, I know quite a bit of it though. And he wrote the book Medical Nemesis. But I understand his initial decision.

[84:26]

And most of my life, I've made decisions not to receive any medicine or treatment. This time I decided, what the heck? I don't have to be stuck in a rut, I'll try it. And don't forget my daughter saying, get your feet on the ground, Dad, and on the operating table. But when I discussed it with Ivan, he said, I think his brother is a doctor. But in any case, he at some point decided maybe he'd get... have an operation, but by that time it was too late.

[85:32]

Illich decided to make his operation when it was too late. They said it spread too much. So at some point you cut your fingernails, maybe you can cut something like this off. I don't get the meaning of it. You can cut your fingernails. You can cut a tumor off. Anyway, he didn't, and his life was informed by dealing with this constant pain. Sometimes walking, he'd collapse and fall down for a while. He'd have to get back up. Anyway, I decided to do the operation. And one good thing about it was I got seven weeks in a suburb of

[86:33]

with nothing to do except go to 20 minutes of treatment a day. So I got very close to finishing this book I had been working on for years. Do I have to get sick again? But once I finished was back in the center. I mean, I always give priority to immediate situations. I never sit down at a desk. Anyway, the title of the book is Original Mind. The Practice and Craft of Zen in the West. And I'll probably stick with the title. The publisher likes it. But I actually have some problem with original.

[88:02]

Originary would be more accurate, but it's an unusual word for English speakers. Originary would mean it has the quality of being original, but it's not the first. Like ordinary. Maybe I could try that. What the heck is that? I don't know. Anyway, so that's my response. Yeah, and if you... Anyway, I've just said enough about it for now.

[89:23]

Okay. A couple aspects of mind I didn't speak about. One is the alaya-vijnana. Alaya Vishnayana is an idea or a mind fact that there's some kind of storehouse mind storehouse, which contains the imprints of every experience you had.

[90:25]

And we have to understand self and consciousness and so forth, draw on those imprints. You can say memory, but... It's a wider idea than memory. And we can spend a lot of time on the vijnanas and the laya-vijnana, but we don't. There's no need to. And I just mentioned. Okay. Yeah, and there's the aspect of observing mind. Mind has the ability, the capacity, to observe itself.

[91:31]

And we spoke about that the other day, didn't we? An observing mind, observing mind, and a bigger and bigger observing mind. But because of our central nervous system or whatever, we have an ability to not only notice something, but notice we notice it. I remember... You know, all of these questions I... You ask me a question and I seem to be able to say something about it. But many of these questions stayed with me literally for years. And I couldn't... I couldn't, yeah, I didn't, I just stayed with the question.

[92:44]

And one of them was this quality in an observing mind. And I think I did make already the distinction at that time between an observing self and an observing mind. But I remember sitting on the steps having lunch on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, when I worked there.

[93:23]

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