No, I think we've established, as I said yesterday, enough ingredients that we can put these practices together in a way we can practice them. He practices together so that we can practice them. Yeah, and it's important to me that I think you can practice them. Otherwise, I'm speaking to, as we say, deaf ears. Yeah, and then I can't hear myself. I'm speaking to a mirror. So it does make a difference when I feel the degree to which you can practice these.

[01:08]

Okay. Now you can practice... Let's go back to... letting thoughts come and go. You can practice releasing, releasing, releasing, without having thoughts appear. Thoughts don't have a chance. They're, you know, shut down before they get there. Anyway, so we can do that. But it's hard to practice with thoughts or before thoughts the room of mind.

[02:24]

Okay, so I've been searching for some kind of way to speak about this, as you know. So one way is to imagine that we have two Films are two strips of plastic. And on one film, there's images and things happening, a story. And the other film is just blank. How do you pay attention to both the blank one and the one with images?

[03:31]

Or maybe, let's use the example of a digital camera. If you turn on a digital camera without taking any pictures in which the screen in the back is visible wherever you point it You see images of wherever it's pointing. Frank, the floor, etc. Okay. Now, how do you keep your mind simultaneously on the screen independent of the images and on the images? Attention will go to the images.

[04:46]

You can keep reminding yourself, well, the images are in a camera, the images are in a camera, but still your attention goes to the images. And that's, of course, one way to practice. I mean, you know, if you read Dharmakirti and those guys, they say you've got to keep reminding yourself, it's in a camera, it's in a camera, it's in a camera, until you actually begin to notice it. All right, now, but what happens when you reminded yourself enough? Whatever I'm seeing now is being seen by my mind. How do I remind myself of that, regeist myself?

[06:07]

That's one thing we cannot do in German. You can't regeist in German? No. Oh dear, okay. I'm sorry to hear that. Okay. Okay. Now one way is that your senses, your attention sees the images. But you feel, your attention perceives the images. But you feel the camera. You feel the screen. Because obviously, mind and body are perceiving the images. But our attention goes to the images.

[07:24]

But the feeling has to go to the body-mind. Otherwise the camera is quite boring. It's so much more interesting to see the images than to think about the camera all the time. So that's a description of the basic problem. So then we can say, why I said yesterday, allowing thoughts to come and go, And releasing thoughts. And in effect melting into the field of thoughts. And so I-ness or me-ness, me-ness, lesson. No, any beginner can do this.

[08:47]

It's basic beginning instruction for Zazen. It does require maintaining attention, but one can develop that. Okay. But then why is letting thoughts come and go and experiencing as a focus of attention the room of mind in which the thoughts come and go Why do I call that an advanced practice? Well, it's advanced because it depends on a lot of other practices. You can understand it, but it's difficult to do it. It's difficult to feel the camera while you're perceiving the images.

[10:09]

Even though the camera is your own body and mind. Okay, so what does developing a feel of the mind depend on? Well, it does help if you've practiced enough and explored the body that you can really feel the body as an entirety. You no longer feel your feet are down there. Your feet are actually beside your ears. Or you feel your feet just as... much present as your ears or shoulders or whatever.

[11:22]

And one nice thing, I think, is when you're really within the satisfaction of zazen, you can feel the brain. It's a big space. You can feel activity in it. And you can feel like when a headache might appear and things like that. And you can feel whether the activity is toward the front or back and things like that. Now the brain is not the mind. But it's a starting point. If you can feel the brain, feel the body. Now, these are just examples of extending through feel to everything.

[12:43]

The mature practitioner does not think the world. They think it if they need to, but basically they feel everything. Sie denken, wenn es nötig ist, aber grundlegend spüren sie alles. You don't think the person in front of you, you feel the person in front of you. Du denkst nicht die Person, die vor dir steht, sondern du spürst sie. And the more you feel the person in front of you, you feel a very particular person, but you don't know who the heck it is. Oh, that's Peter. I guess that's Peter. Doesn't his last name start with O? Did it start with Z? Oh, ich glaube, das ist Peter.

[13:49]

Fängt nicht sein Nachname mit O oder vielleicht mit Z an? Yeah, so the knowing in the sense of mentally knowing comes after the feel. Und dieses Wissen, dieses mentale Kennen kommt nach dem Gespür. And the immediate feel is not based on the history of the person as you know them. Okay, so I'm not trying to, well, anyway, I'm just trying to give you here a feel for the field of practice. which makes it much more likely that one can feel the mind in perceiving. And one also practice that helps is developing a sense of the field of mind.

[14:56]

And someone asked me recently, appropriately, is the field of mind inherent? But it's no more inherent than any other aspect of mind. But it's a capacity of mind, like all the other capacities of mind and perceptual functioning and so forth. But it makes a difference what you emphasize. And if you keep emphasizing in most of your perceptual moments, the feel of the world as the prior mind, pre-mind or something like that,

[16:12]

And you notice the particular in the context of the field. And the particular that's perceived does not arise from thinking and return to thinking. The particular arises from the field and returns to the field. So you start thinking in context causality and not foreground causality. So you start thinking in context causality You start thinking in context causality instead of foreground causality. Okay, now, I mean, if you were going to think through something, You think it through in terms of the context as well as every other factor you can imagine, discover.

[17:52]

But our culture and also the way consciousness functions tends to think in terms of cause and effect. I can remember when I was young, I kept wondering, you know, young, I was like 20 or something. This cause and effect is something, somebody's trying to fool me. Because it's not cause and effect. It's cause, cause, cause. Every effect is a cause. So you're running along one cause after another one cause.

[19:00]

You're stuck in this causal chain. And cause, cause, cause and effect, it's a foreground phenomena. And it has a causal directivity. Yeah. In a sense that it keeps pushing you toward the result. So daily consciousness tends to work that way. Okay, now. What we're trying to find ourselves engaged in is what we could call maybe context, contextual causality.

[20:09]

Is that what you perceive primarily is context always. And when you perceive context, you don't perceive time and change so much as relationships. Spatial time and... So the energy that goes into perceiving time and changes, when you perceive context, that energy goes into perceiving your relationships. And the relationships, it's not so simple that some foreground aspect leads to another foreground aspect.

[21:25]

So instead of foreground-background relationships, you have an all-ground or something like that. Now, to be present, to develop a field of mind, to develop context absorption, so at each moment there's absorption, And a spatial feeling, not a comparative feeling.

[22:26]

So, you know, it's a slippery sort of territory here. But when you're perceiving context and you're perceiving relationships, you feel yourself in the midst of those relationships and you're more likely to perceive yourself as a participant When you perceive, instead of perceiving foreground, and yourself separate from it. Yeah. Okay, I hope that's clear enough. I'm trying to get us in a little different world here.

[23:30]

Okay. Okay. So, now one way to practice this because you need all of these things kind of fit together. You need dharmic articulation. You need to articulate dharmas. And another way to engage in this process of basically restructuring consciousness Now, because what's happening when you develop context absorption instead of causal directivity, you're not only perceiving differently, you're actually changing the mind that perceives.

[24:50]

And you have to incubate this practice long enough that the mind, the consciousness, is restructured. So you're not only perceiving differently, by perceiving differently you make the mind different and then perceives, etc., something evolving. And by dharmic articulation to articulate dharmas means to experience things in units. Units which don't have fixed boundaries.

[25:54]

You're always establishing the Dharma boundaries. And when the Dharma boundaries are wide, time seems to go slowly. The child lives in the same clock we do. But the Dharma boundaries within that clock time are very different. And you can change your own experience of time by... how you develop the sense of Dharma boundaries. And although context engagement can be as quick as any other way of knowing, Developing the practice, you have to be slow at first.

[27:08]

To absorb the complexity of standing walking, requires kin hin. As soon as we start doing fast kin hin, all that absorption of immediacy changes. Of course, something else happens when you're walking quickly. Right now we're talking about trying to get a feel for articulating dharmas. And one good technique again is to join breath and attention. And just every now and then stop and breathe in an object.

[28:24]

And breathe out a field. Just trying to breathe in the particulate matter. the feel of the particular the feel of the object not your thoughts about the object just the feeling of that arises through an object breathe again and breathe out a field of mind This is a way to start getting an experiential sense of a field of mind and an established sense of a field of mind. And to mention what I mentioned in Kassel,

[29:29]

This practice of enactment rituals, or Dharma enactments, like how my hand is on the stick and this hand is on this stick, And how I feel a completeness in each thing I do. This is enacting dharmas. And to use turning words to also articulate dharmas. The two together begin articulating mind and body as one activity. werden Sie anfangen, Körper und Geist zusammen zu artikulieren, als eine Aktivität, und fängt an, das Bewusstsein zu verfeinern, sodass das Bewusstsein

[30:57]

And also begins to restructure consciousness and the mind. And also enters into the language agreements which the whole structure of culture and governance is based on. and enters into, it's the key to language agreements. Language agreements are world views. It's a world view that we're separated, or it's a world view that we're connected. Do not steal, and if you do, you end up in jail. It's still a language agreement. They put you in jail if you break it. They might.

[32:20]

So actually all of culture and society is based on language agreements. So dharmic enactments and turning words are keys that can change language agreements and can change whether we immediately perceive on how we perceive, how we absorb immediacy.

[33:22]

And let the depth and vastness and immediacy of interdependence and intermergence articulate us as part of the context. Now, if you do start this sense of knowing context and relationships, as an engaged field of mind, that has a spatial, embodied spatial quality, which you discover at first through a certain inner slowness,

[34:26]

which allows the next moment to appear from the context. This is also the mind which can feel the screen, feel the screen of the camera. Das ist auch der Geist, der diesen Bildschirm der Kamera spüren kann. Or can feel the mind as it perceives. Oder der den Geist spüren kann, während er wahrnimmt. It's the simultaneity of two dimensions. Es ist die Gleichzeitigkeit von zwei Dimensionen. And this becomes... the continuity of our experience from moment to moment. First slightly, now and then, and eventually more and more present.

[36:03]

And strangely enough, the field of mind is almost more satisfying than what appears to the mind. We almost don't need anything to appear. Just being alive is enough. Okay. Thanks. Thank you.

[36:44]

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