Thank you for letting me read that letter to you, to Graham, yesterday. And a few days ago, his exteriority and interiority disappeared. What went away was gone. Gone, gone. And now he's ashes, actually, as of yesterday afternoon. And what are we sitting here? You know, I've been practicing with many of you for 20 years and 30 years. And so, of course, I ask myself, what are we doing? And why do we continue, or rather, how do we continue, or what do we continue?

[01:07]

Yeah, and you know, I noticed over the years that I can usually feel when somebody has done psychotherapeutic work. I've been to a therapist. And I have no sense of whether... Go ahead. And I have no sense of that... that the therapy was good, bad or different. You have a sense? I don't have a sense of whether... I don't know. But I feel, and there's of course many other aspects, but the aspect I noticed is there's an attentional surface.

[02:10]

I've noticed over the years some people are sort of all surface, you know, arrived somewhere from their childhood and culture and that's their surface. And some people have, some persons have an attentional surface. You can feel their attentional surface in, in my case, one's own attention. Now, I'm not making a comparative distinction here between practice and psychotherapy. But just in this aspect of an attentional feel when I meet practitioners all the time obviously that's my life but when I meet a practitioner and somebody who's practiced somewhere else I can feel an attentional depth in the person

[03:51]

So that if you do psychotherapy, whether it's good, bad or indifferent, you have brought attention to your own surface and your surface with others. No, I'm speaking about that's really separate from the psychological processes a person goes through in psychotherapy. So what I'm emphasizing here is practice is an attentional process. also psychological, but primarily an attentional process.

[05:11]

And I can also sense, usually when I see somebody who's been practicing for some years with us and with me, The attentional depth begins to not change much. And I feel then I'm going to see them less, once a year maybe, or But when I feel somebody is still engaged in this attentional process and attentional depth, I'll probably see them several times a year. Now these are observations that arise from my trying to sense what I should talk about, how I should teach, how we continue practicing together.

[06:25]

And these are observations that arise from the question of what I should talk about or can talk about, how I should teach and how we should continue together with the practice. Now, my lectures or taste show don't fit into the 40 or 50 or 60 minutes very well. But it's because I only see you, not regularly, most of you, so I have an imaginal sense of your life. Hmm. Now I'm trying to make a distinction here between imagined and imaginal, because I don't imagine much about your life. How could I? But I have an imaginal, from seeing you, knowing you, being near you, I have an imaginal experience of what your life, you know, something about your life.

[07:41]

And I feel that maybe somehow I'm accompanying you in Dortmund or Berlin or Wien or something. Somehow our eye or our practice comes to mind. So then I want to speak to all that and that makes how can I fit all that into 55 minutes. But in Sashin it's a little better because we have this time together for seven days. So what I'm speaking about, trying to speak about is What are we doing?

[09:09]

What is our practice? I'm always asking myself that question. Well, I would say, in short, we're exploring our lived life. If that's the case, then each of us is exploring our living, our lived life. Wenn das der Fall ist und jeder sein oder ihr gelebtes Leben erforscht, dann ist die Frage, was ist das Gefilde für diese Art von Erforschung? And what is the agency of that exploration? The agency, the self, or the observer or attention.

[10:12]

So if you, in this very simple sense, if you say, I'm exploring my, our, lived life and lives. And I'm exploring my lived life and I'm exploring, we're in this together somehow, I'm exploring our lived life. And we've created this place to explore our lived life together, at least sometimes. So we've made this place so we can practice together sometimes. And we've made it as a kind of beacon, a signal or a warning, hey, beware, for others who might want to practice. What was written over the door in Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha?

[11:31]

Beware all ye who enter here, or something like that. So... Anyway, so we obviously want others to be able to practice if they care to. So we've made this place to practice with others and so others can practice. Those are the factual details of what we're doing. And maybe noticing the factual details makes us notice them more attentively in our own life.

[12:36]

So if we ask ourselves these simple questions, if we're exploring our life, what is the territory we're exploring? And what tools or agency are we using for the exploration? Okay, as soon as you ask those questions, those questions, you can see that obviously one agency or mode of exploration is the self. And the self functions as an observer. Yeah, and so then you can begin to see that the observing function isn't the entirety, is not simply the self.

[13:44]

the observing function can be separated from the self. So if you just look at the observing function, you're already exploring your lived life. And you begin to notice things like, sometimes the observing function is really basically self-referential, comparative, and sometimes it's less self-referential. And what you're doing, as you're noticing the agency of self and the observer, And by doing that, you're developing attention.

[15:15]

So attention itself develops through this process of exploring one's lived life. And attention itself becomes a new kind of, I mean, it's present for us, but it becomes a new, it energetically in its range becomes quite different. What was the subject? Attention. Energetically becomes different by bringing attention to attention, and its inclusivity or scale or range becomes different. So we can say yogic practice is a development of attentional skills.

[16:19]

Now, those attentional skills become part of our lived life. And sometimes they're... They're used during a crisis or a certain stage of our life, and sometimes they become part of our life, like eating and sleeping and so forth. Now there's this word, hishirio, which is usually translated as non-thinking. Yeah, but as a practice, we can better translate it as noticing without thinking about. Now, this becomes a very important fulcrum dynamic.

[17:42]

And what did Archimedes say? I can move the earth if you give me a fulcrum. Well, a phrase like Noticing without thinking can be a fulcrum for a whole lot of the process of exploring your mind. So you're using this attentional... dynamic tool to notice can you have non can you have noticing without thinking about

[18:53]

And the more you can feel noticing and prevent or stop or lessen thinking about, You're really exploring the agency of observation. And such a simple idea, which is not the same as just doing zazen. You're bringing this observational tool into your process of observing all the time, wherever. Yeah. And what it does, it kind of pries self away from the observer. And then focuses... more on non-thinking.

[20:26]

And so the translation of non-thinking begins to make sense. I can say these things. Yeah, and I can say them with conviction because I've spent a lot of time exploring these things. But the explanation means almost nothing unless you really explore it yourself. So if Zen and Buddhism in general is a process of exploring not one's self only, but one's lived life, then we have to look at the tools we use to explore. Okay. And when you explore your moment-by-moment activity, motivation, etc., the self gathers karma, gathers views, gathers attitudes.

[21:58]

The self is studded and ornamented with traumas, big and little. Some German words have a little oomph to them. And this begins to turn up a lot of our psychological processes. And we can look at them as they're not just us as self, but they're also just processes which we can look at them from a non-self-referential point of view. So this process of studying the agency of observation,

[23:14]

becomes a process of seeing our psychological habits, views, accumulations and so forth. And the longer you practice with some kind of effectiveness the self-referential dynamics are less and less. But as long as you're alive there's layers of self underneath self. So when practice just becomes part of how you're alive it lasts your whole life. Okay, so now we're saying Buddhist practice, Zen practice, is exploring your lived life.

[24:41]

Now we've spoken about the agency, the tool you use for this exploration. And you notice it in three categories. Self, non-self-referential observation, And bare or pure attention. And now early Buddhism talked about bare attention. And it's a useful term because you can see it means it's It's just attention, as much as possible.

[25:51]

So then part of practice becomes developing attention to attention itself. And this folds into what's called simultaneous mind or sameness. The more you experience attention itself and not what attention is and not the object of attention, you begin to experience mind itself. the more you begin to experience the spirit itself. Okay. Okay? Complete? Ready?

[26:51]

Okay, next. Alright, so what are you going to use this tool to explore? Well, mind-body phenomena. No, these aren't exactly separate. The boundaries aren't sharp, but they are attentional phases. Mind, body, phenomena. So we could explore, and we don't have time, the mind and the body and phenomena as attentional territories. Yeah, and it's good to ask us mutual, I don't like human beings, because it excludes the non-human, us mutual beings,

[27:59]

The way our attention functions for us mutual beings is we can notice a distinction between mind, body and phenomena. Sometimes I think I'm saying it just to see if you can straighten it out. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, thanks. But if you eat a stick of celery, is that mind, body, or phenomena? Yeah. Okay, now we can also look at, and that's my emphasis today, in the few minutes I have left, what I would call the three postural minds.

[29:18]

And I mentioned them yesterday. The first postural mind is the mind that appears in the posture of sleeping. I mentioned it first just because it's obvious, it's a posture. We generally, unless you're driving, as I say, you generally sleep horizontally. I know somebody who claims he can be asleep and still drive. I don't ride with him. No, thank you.

[30:27]

I'll take a ride with someone else. Anyway, so what we should notice, this is, as I said yesterday, it's a safe posture. Usually we feel safe sleeping, hopefully. And it's a horizontal posture. And it calls forth a particular mind. And I'm also calling our usual activity a posture. And so maybe I could say emotional, like emotional, but this is just emotional movement posture, emotional posture. Responsive, emotional mind. And I've been reading a fair amount of Aristotle recently for some reason or another.

[31:49]

And basically he's studying responsive, emotional mind. And its functions. Okay, now... What characterizes, one of the big differences between the Asian view and the Western view, East Asian view and Indian view, and maybe it's because they saw that we create our life and not that some outside thing creates our life. But the primary dynamic which we're bringing into our lives now from East Asia and India, which I can call something like the non-motional mind, And to distinguish it from also the horizontal sleeping mind, we have the vertical non-motional mind.

[33:16]

And the non-motional vertical posture mind We can say sleeping, the horizontal posture, calls forth a mind that reconfigures. It takes the experiences of consciousness and reconfigures them. And the reconfiguration can be very different. Just for the heck of it. I had a dream last night. I was on a ship.

[34:17]

And a close friend of mine two or three years ago died who I was on a ship with for two years. So I'm on this ship with a bunch of people. And at some point the ship is going up Broadway in New York. It's a huge ship, you know. And it was going against the traffic. This is a reconfiguration I wouldn't have thought of on my own. And as I'm looking out, I'm seeing this huge freighter. You know, I mean, it's 500 or more feet long. Somehow going up a main New York street. Without any, it didn't seem strange to me at all.

[35:18]

I was just hoping cars would get out of the way. And one little black Volkswagen didn't get out quite fast enough and it got half crushed. Now, while I'm doing it, while this is going on, I'm thinking, where did that black Volkswagen come in? And I can realize where that came from, and I can know the ship, and I know who the people are. So I can sort of put the reconfiguration together, but I never would have on my own put it together that way. Now, the Buddhist approach to dreams is, well, of course you can interpret them, but the interpretation is in the service of consciousness, which is usually restrictive. So the more Buddhist approach is you capture the feeling of the dream without interpreting.

[36:39]

As a kind of treasure, negative or positive, it's a kind of treasure that's been given to you by this horizontal, safe, dreaming mind. And you let that feel of the dream penetrate your daily life for a while. A few days or at least one day. And you can feel how the attentional presence of the dream continued in your daily details kind of explicates the details or affects them. Und dann kannst du sehen, wie die aufrechterhaltene Präsenz des Traumes in den Details deines Lebens, so wie diese Details... It explicates the details and... It explicates and affects the details.

[38:09]

Okay. But now, in this... yogic view, we've added a new kind of mind, not sleeping, dreaming or non-dreaming deep sleep. I mean awake consciousness, dreaming and non-dreaming deep sleep, which are the basic categories. As yogic practitioners, we've created a new mind, which is the vertical, non-motional, still mind. And it's a kind of truth mind that's called forth.

[39:09]

And that changes the game for exploring our lived life. And Zorro said, we'll talk about this tomorrow. And Zoroff has said, we'll talk about that tomorrow.

[39:31]

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