I won't question it precisely, but I can question the direction. And when? The morning you talked about different minds. To which mind do you trust most? I ask this because, um, particularly when you talk about the world as it actually exists, it's actually what makes you confident that you can say that. Um, No, say that last part again.

[01:02]

What makes you confident? Me or one in general? Confident that I can say what? That the moment is an activity. As it actually is. That's a good question. I reread your article about the correct view of mind. in the Discriminative Mind, right? Where you talk about content, structure, field, mind, and how to go in the direction of freedom. Going in the direction of? Becoming free. Freer, yeah. Freedom, yeah. And that one has to choose between what one can choose, unconsciously or unconsciously, to this actual world.

[02:10]

Thinking mind says that thing is just as well as a concept, form and field, like any good film as well. But you say it's the world as it actually is. And from my heart, from a different mind, I hope or trust, but I don't have a reason. So that's my question. Do you hope or trust that this is, or one can know, the world as it actually exists? Yeah, that this is more than a modern model. Yeah, but you don't know for sure? I can't explain it. Yeah, I understand.

[03:20]

I practice it because I believe in it, Okay. German, please. I can't ask the question exactly, but only in that direction. Roshi has spoken of different wines. How do I know which mind I can trust or can trust more? I come to the question, because in an article he wrote that you can decide in a world as it really exists, to be able to decide for this world.

[04:23]

And the most important thing about the cultural world in which we live is that it has a certain content, a certain form, a certain field. And our crisis helps us to free ourselves from this field of content. from a discursive point of view, this model is also just a model. And I believe that it really is closer to the truth from my experience, but I cannot justify it. It seems to me that this is quite a different position actually than you had, say, five years ago.

[05:29]

But it's a subtle version of the position you had. Yeah. Now, I'll try to respond to what you said. But I think I'm responding to considerations we all have when we're trying to say, geez, how does this world actually exist? And how do we exist in it?

[06:48]

And how is our existence separate from it or inseparable from it? In all Buddhist practice these questions are implicit. Now there's no way A statement in language like the world as it actually exists can be supported. This you can't prove. And Buddhism would say the reason you can't prove it, though, Buddhism would say the reason you can't prove it might be somewhat different than the usual way of looking at it.

[07:56]

Buddhism would just say whatever all of this is it's so vast and subtle and so enfolded unfolded outside of our ability to understand it. Like in mathematics they say, you know, we know three or four dimensions, but there's ten dimensions mathematically, or ten or eight or twelve, depending on the... which are enfolded outside of our ability to even imagine them. Just something like the Big Bang, this is hard to believe. The calculations may show, it's been expanding, that all of this was, you know, tinier than tiny.

[09:10]

And moments later it's, hi, hi, how are you? Everything's fine. So Buddhism would say it's just completely beyond us to understand how this actually exists. It's enfolded out of the reaches of even our imagination. Now, we could speak about how we ourselves are enfolded in the same way the world is enfolded. And we could look at how we are also wrapped up or embedded there. We are enfolded in the same way the world is enfolded, in a related way.

[10:16]

And we're actually all the time related to that enfoldedness outside of our consciousness. We're related to that enfoldedness of the world outside of our consciousness. That even two people, even if we can understand it biologically, that even two people can create another whole human being. Now this is, you know, quite amazing. And my enfoldedness and your enfoldedness are probably in some kind of relationship. And maybe we can understand dowsing and spoon bending as some kind of relationship that we can't understand.

[11:23]

Okay, but let's look at the phrase, how things actually exist from another point of view. In a more... non-philosophical sense, it simply means to know the world as impermanent. That's all. Emptiness is just a folded out way to say the world is impermanent. So, It's from the point of view of Buddhism.

[12:31]

Maybe I'll learn German one day. My little daughter, Sophia, she speaks English quite well. But she speaks it as if it were German grammar. So verbs come at the end. Oh, okay. Papa, will you do this not? Something like that. So from the point of view of Buddhism, it's a delusion to see the world as permanent. And there's two aspects to that. There's knowing it's impermanent. Almost everyone knows that. But there's acting in the world as if it was knowing it's impermanent. Almost nobody does that.

[13:41]

In some aspects, but moment by moment, most people act as if it's permanent. So the world as it actually exists just means to actually know its impermanence. Then, if you accept that, then all Buddhism unfolds from that. How do we know it's impermanent? How do we see what makes it difficult for us to notice it's impermanent? And much of practice is rooted in the rewards of knowing it's impermanent.

[14:51]

Because although it's scary to know how fully it's impermanent, It also feels better. Does that sort of answer your question? In the direction of. But it's also, I think still we also have to do what you said, is practice with the hope, with the, some kind of feeling this makes sense, but you're not absolutely certain. Now, Buddhism is one way to cut the pie. The pie of impermanence.

[15:55]

The Hindus cut the pie of impermanence somewhat differently. They assume that yes, everything's changing just like Buddhism does. But they assume there's some higher, unchanging, transcendent world. And Buddhism says, well, maybe, but we think it's all here. If there's a transcendent world, it's in this world. It's not somehow separate. So you have the idea of sudden enlightenment. Now practically speaking, almost all Zen students want enlightenment.

[17:00]

And it's a problem that they all want enlightenment. Yeah, because it's, you know, then it's in the category of desire and, you know, it doesn't work too well. But even though most Zen students want enlightenment, I think most of us don't actually think about, recognize what it means if enlightenment is possible. If enlightenment is possible, what kind of world are we living in? Again, I mentioned this morning, I'm reading Robert Musil. And You know, there's two or three pages I've been reading just recently.

[18:21]

He's like Proust. You have to spend a couple of years reading him. It's like reading philosophy, really. And so he has a couple, two, three pages, which basically... He says, sometimes a drop of incandescence comes into the world. Incandescence. An incandescent light is a light bulb that glows. Incandescent means it shines, it sees through, it makes the world transparent. Incandescent is bright or shining. burning. A drop of incandescence comes into the world and its glow makes the whole and its glow transforms the whole earth. Its glow makes the whole earth look different.

[19:24]

Now he could be describing falling in love. And I think falling in love is the experience most of us have which is closest to enlightenment. And it is very peculiar that falling in love makes the world different, not just the person you love different. Okay. But I think he's actually describing an enlightenment experience. But he doesn't know what he's describing. He doesn't quite know. Well, this was a wonderful what happened, but... What does it have to do with the world?

[20:58]

He doesn't have a context to put it into. Or he doesn't have a non-context to put it into. And then the next page he says, culture is a... civilization is a... a framework of meaningful experiences, a framework which makes experiences meaningful. And yet every few generations this framework changes and different experiences are meaningful in a different way. And he says those changes happen incrementally, little by little, so you hardly notice them. But then we notice our children, our grandchildren are living in a different world.

[22:02]

But then he says it happens little by little. And he implies, could it happen all at once? But from the point of view of Buddhism, it could happen all at once. Doesn't mean you can change the whole culture, but you can change all at once within a culture. That possibility is not really what kind of world or mind do we live in. That we can be... We can develop our being within the magnetic field of culture.

[23:29]

And then yet we can step out of it somehow. Can we? Is this possible? These are real questions I'm asking myself and asking us. And that's what this idea of the golden wind means. Can we find ourselves in a different magnetic field? In which we feel our world Beautiful like, as if we were in love. Or we can feel integrated and whole in some kind of new way. But not something you can think your way to.

[24:30]

Okay. Someone else? I'm looking for how to ask the question. You asked the question yesterday, do we live up to our potential, do we live our potential? You often have to say no to this question. Because I have an idea of how that could be.

[25:40]

It is not like that. And in my concert it is related to a sense of feeling guilty, of guilt. Not to do what I should do. What do you think about that? It's fairly common. Well, it's a complex question. On the one hand, we want to answer the way we think human beings should be and the way we want ourselves to be.

[26:49]

For that reason we take the precepts. You vow not to kill, not to take what is not given and not to lie and so forth. And these precepts have really nothing to do with Buddhism. They just express the way we'd like human beings to be, in the most simple way. And then they're Buddhist in the way you hold them in your actions and your thinking. So the precepts are one response to how we want the...

[27:57]

how we want to be true to how we think human beings should be. But we also have this self which is formed in relationship to other selves. On the one hand, that's related to this idea of what kind of human being we want to be. But that same self is also tied to comparison of the people and what the culture wants you to do and what your talents are and so forth. And those things get confused. And I think one has to separate them out. And if you can live the way you really want human beings to live.

[29:31]

There's a transparency in that. A lack of conflict in yourself. It feels sort of good in yourself. And that makes it much easier to deal with, well, I didn't fulfill my potential as an architect or... So if you, very simply, if you feel good about yourself in a fundamental way, the other things are more practical. I didn't do this, I did that, or something. But they don't, aren't your identity. In other words, if you feel fundamentally good with yourself, in yourself, then the other things are more on a practical level.

[30:35]

I didn't do that or I didn't achieve that. what you identify with. Look at me as if you think I'm going to know what you left out. Just always the last part. I pretend. Yeah, I guess it might be the last part. But really, simply, it's a change in how you identify yourself. Now, I'd like to get us all on the same page. Do you have that expression? So we're all in the same place in the book. That's kind of impossible. Yeah.

[31:41]

And I've been talking so much recently, because like I just met with this group of Austrian psychotherapists for five days or so. just came from there. And I've been meeting with them for, I don't know how many years now, 14 years. And it's nice, it's kind of having a couple extra days, we could really go much more slowly. into definitions of awareness of consciousness, of self. functions of self, the medium of consciousness, alternatives to consciousness, and so forth.

[32:58]

Yeah, but... So I'm sort of reluctant to try to enter into the flip chart, useful to do it but I don't know we don't have time but it's also I'm trying to find a different way to speak about these things today but the The question of what we identify with as ourself is at the center of practice. And when that process of identification is dysfunctional, it makes us dysfunctional and it's also a hindrance to realization. I also recognized a problem during this last seminar that I hadn't really seen before, which is

[34:11]

Where do we recognize ourself? The sense we have of being a person, being alive, we know the feeling of that in consciousness. It's the privilege, if we have several minds, We know we have dreaming mind and waking mind, for example. And now we have zazen mind. So that's three minds we can all be quite easily familiar with. But what mind do we give the privilege of being the real definition of ourself? Does that make sense? And we think that's consciousness.

[35:34]

And you can't, even Buddhist practice can't entirely take that away from us. Yeah. that Buddhist practice can take it away from us, but then your practice has to be pretty developed. Okay. Now, what do I mean when I say, just very simply, we have waking mind, sleeping mind, and zazen mind. Why do I say they're different?

[36:41]

Recently in a seminar a woman said, when I wake, sometimes I have these vivid, beautiful dreams and I wake up thinking, feeling so good about me. She's sleeping and she has a dream, a vivid good dream. And then some mornings she wakes up and she's had a terrible nightmare. And when she has a nightmare she says, it's only a dream, it's not me. But when it's a good dream, she says, oh, that's me. Now, why do we do that? Well, partly is we give consciousness the privilege of deciding who we are. A bad dream, we say, that's not us. No. We can't solve the problems of the world today.

[38:01]

I'd like to, but we can't. I'd like to try. But we can maybe look at some things a little bit. Part of the reason we give consciousness the privileged position Well, because it's the territory of self. It's where we have access to memory as something we can do something about. That's where we think we're in charge of our actions. Self is a sense of the observer who's doing this living. And the self is the sense of agency, that the self is deciding what to do.

[39:25]

And the self has a sense of ownership. This which I do belongs to me, and I have the consequences of these actions. Das Selbst hat auch so etwas wie ein Gefühl von Besitztum. Das bin ich, das gehört zu mir. Ich entscheide, was ich tue. Okay. But a man named Benjamin Leavitt... Ein Mann mit dem Namen Benjamin Leavitt... In the 60s... In den 60er Jahren... In San Francisco... I'm making it easy to translate. No. noticed that there's a significant delay between the body knowing it's going to move the arm and consciousness knowing it's going to move the arm. And this has now been well established in science, biology. So if you wire the person up, the body knows the body is starting to move the arm

[40:31]

about 500 milliseconds before consciousness knows about it. And 500 milliseconds, that's pretty quick. But in molecular time or neuronal time, it's an eternity. It's really long. So the delivery to consciousness, the information delivered to consciousness is tardy, late. So who's deciding to move the arm? So consciousness, we can say, I think, is not the decider, it's the editor. Or it's the referee. So it decides, oh, I won't move the arm.

[41:52]

But being the referee is different than being the decider. So, We experience self as the decider, but that's a delusion. It's more accurate to experience self as the referee. Then Buddhism would ask, how can we be closer to the referee, I mean the decider, the real decider. If you do any kind of sports or music, you can't decide where each finger is going to... It happens.

[42:58]

You can train yourself so that once you're playing, you're not thinking about the decisions. So some wholeness or awareness that's more fully connected than consciousness is, is making the decisions. So let's just use the idea of decisions. So waking mind consciousness is not really the decider. Or the consciousness may think out decisions, but then we also often make wrong decisions.

[44:15]

And sometimes we have the feeling in a big decision, I had no choice. The decision just appeared because it was too big a decision. He had to say, well, I do want to change my job or I do want to go to college or something. Or there's intuition. And what characterizes intuition? A feeling that it's a sureness about it. It feels sure. You trust in intuition. It's sort of a knowing that pops through the surface of consciousness.

[45:15]

Okay, now when you go to sleep and you're dreaming, there seems to be a different kind of self-present. In a dream you make decisions sort of differently. It's different than you do consciously. And you'd say that in situations, you're in situations you wouldn't choose normally. Now you can say it's just a dream. But Buddhism wouldn't say that. Buddhism would say this is a different mind and there's a different activity. of being in this mind.

[46:22]

And anybody who has much experience in meditation would say, would know that they actually make different decisions in meditation than you do consciously. You don't know what to do and then you meditate for a while and then it sort of becomes clear what to do. And it might be different than what you thought. And sometimes in meditation you can find where you lost something. You always find things in the last place you look. That's just a joke.

[47:25]

But you cannot be able to think where you... And then you can go into meditation and concentrate and you can visualize where your keys are, where something is. So that means some different kind of... something is different is functioning. So we could say these are different minds. Is there a mind that unites them? Are these the only minds? Or can we transform each or all of these? This is what practice is about.

[48:29]

Discovering those questions and finding answers to them. I think we've talked too much. Or I have, I mean. I'm trying to feel my way toward something we... Something, anyway. And I'd like us to, on Saturday afternoon, break into two small groups after the break. Yeah, and let's divide it right here. Okay, so these six and these seven. Here six and there seven.

[49:32]

And then we'll have a half hour break and then do that. And I have to think about what questions you might want to look at. Maybe the distinction between awareness and consciousness. If you have some feeling of that. But I haven't spoken about it in the seminar, so you have to depend on someone else. Or maybe I'll think of something else. I mean, think of something else, yes. I'll let something else decide and then I'll referee it. Okay. And then after that we come back? Yeah, come back after our break.

[50:34]

Maybe we take a 25-minute break or something. And then come back and then divide into small groups? No, we've just divided you. Yeah, yeah, okay. No, I mean after the small groups do we come back? Oh, yeah, why not? Okay. Yeah, after the small groups. I think we like it better if we come back at the end. Yeah.

[50:52]

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