Yeah, so we're actually inside our minds here. Wir sind in Wirklichkeit innerhalb in unserem Geist. Yeah, I can make that as a general statement that what we're experiencing is inside our minds. Ich kann das zu einer allgemeinen Aussage machen. Alles das, was wir erleben, ist innerhalb unseres Geistes. But what I'm talking about these days is being inside our mind, almost like inside a car engine, changing it around. But how does an engine get inside itself and change itself? While it's still working. Pistons are going like this.

[01:01]

You're going to move this piston over here. Well, I mean, how are we conceptualizing? It's an amazing thing. I mean, I don't think that... I mean, this is one of the things that yoga culture brings to the West. I think we think about that we can change our attitudes and understand our personal history better. Maybe cognitive psychology is in effect changing the structure of the mind to a degree. At least changing the emphasis and functioning.

[02:10]

But we're changing something more like how the mind is put together. By changing the stages in which we know, you change how we know and what we know. So it's something, I think, amazing, a miracle, remarkable that we can do it. And I think you can understand that it's possible and something about, imagine doing it yourself.

[03:18]

Yes, I want to try to make this and other points clearer today. But first let me say that a woman wrote me a letter I don't know, a month or two ago. Maybe a month ago. Usually I get around to answering a letter after six months or a year, and then I think it's too late. At the time I have to sit down at a desk, I don't use to write letters. But I decided to behave better since I nearly died. Well, I didn't actually nearly die at all, but, you know, you sort of think maybe I could just start being more normal.

[04:42]

I can answer a letter. So I started writing a letter. I thought it could be a short note. That's the problem with writing letters. It's three pages. But I promised this woman I would answer her letter. letters occasionally if she wrote me. No, she can't travel. I prefer face to face, but she can't travel so easily. And she's Been practicing many years, and that's quite a mature, developed practice. But she's having a lot of problem with the phrase, one-pointedness. Eka grata, in Sanskrit.

[05:44]

In Sanskrit, it's called eka grata. And since I think if she was confused about this, maybe we're confused about it. And this is certainly an aspect of the mind. One-pointedness. Now there's a problem with the one and the point. Yeah, so in general it's, you know, you... You really have to look at these words in their functional context.

[07:01]

And you also have to recognize that many of these ancient words migrate from teaching to teaching, century to century. And they simply change their meaning as they go along, in time and through different disciplines. So if any of you hear one-pointedness and you take it literally, verbally, you're just simply making a mistake. I mean, you just have to remind yourself to make sure you're seeing how it's used in the context of the teaching in which you're looking at.

[08:26]

The meaning is not in the dictionary or in the words, but in its meaning. what it's a sign for in a functional context. But I'm committed to, I have to speak about and use words like one-pointedness. Because you're going to run across them in your own study. But every time I use it, I try to give it a functional, contextual definition.

[09:29]

And I remember the time when this woman heard me speak about it, I think during a sashin repeatedly. And I just surprised that somehow I didn't make myself clear. She still took it too literally. And she took it too narrowly, and it kind of dried up her practice for three months. And she took it as a duty to practice it since I talked about it. Just in general, never take anything as a duty into practice.

[10:35]

Duty is your thinking mind's intention. And duty brings thinking mind into your zazen. So you can use thinking mind to bring an intention to zazen. Or mindfulness practice. But then you see if the mind of zazen, not your thinking mind, but the mind of zazen, takes it up. And whether it does or doesn't, it's no longer a duty. It's just something that happens or doesn't happen in your practice.

[11:52]

Usually these terms which last from over generations keep a kernel of their yogic truth, and help link, weave various practices and centuries together. Yeah. But also, they've passed through the mint, where you make money, Okay. They've passed through the mint and the coinage of a number of different languages. Aber Sie gehen auch durch die Presse... This is another reason, excuse me for mentioning, that you need teaching.

[13:18]

You just read these terms and you can't see what their functional contextual meaning is. So one-pointedness, what does it mean then? It means that the mind can most simply rest wherever it's put. One-pointedness is also often a synonym for samadhi. So let's take samadhi as meaning mind concentrated on itself. So mind can simply rest on itself without distraction.

[14:29]

So you could say there's a unity of mind. You could call it a oneness of mind, but one is always a problem. Maybe we have unison, non-pointedness. We have not-pointedness. Okay, so there's a unison or unity of mind that can be brought to a particular object can be brought to a person And can almost in an elastic way go back to just being concentrated on itself.

[15:34]

That skill of bringing the mind to a focus or releasing it, and the focus can be everything all at once, is in Zen practice called one-pointedness. And it's rooted in the earlier practice kernel, the earlier kernel of practice, where you can just learn to concentrate on a single object. Okay, now what we're talking about these days is also this kind of being able to let your mind rest without distraction.

[16:41]

To do that, the mind has to keep releasing itself into the present context. And that's virtually impossible unless you... have freed yourself from the sense of a permanent self. So I keep coming back to these things because one of the tasks, duties of your practice is for you each to explore when you feel that you're really functioning with the idea of a permanent self. And when you notice that, that it's either clear you feel that way or it's the implicit way you behave, you try to poke that loose from being the governing function of mind.

[18:31]

You try to poke that loose. From being the governing function of mind to being an aspect of mind or an alternative one way we can behave. one way we can function. To being an aspect of mind. One way we can function. And our habits will make us function that way. But we begin to feel we have a choice to release that head. Okay, now I talked about this idea of sedimenting minds.

[19:54]

Now, one of the problems with the visual consciousness is it gives us the sense that we're living in a room. We're in this room. We're in the room of the garden. Outside becomes a kind of room of nature. And we walk around in it. Yeah, it's going to be there. You go out the door and it's still there. The room hasn't gone away. So the room of the outside seems fairly permanent. You get into a car and it's the room of the car. And you drive the car around like you might walk around the living room trying to avoid the couch.

[21:12]

But as you drive, actually, you find you're in a more inactive, interactive environment. We still can view it pretty much as walking around the living room, but at a higher speed. Because the vision... That's how Sophia looks at it. But... But... Because visual consciousness lets us see near and far.

[22:17]

Separate or connected. Yes, and then it opens us up to all those things, good and bad and so forth. Visual consciousness is almost inseparable from comparative consciousness. But in sound, the sound text as I said, or taste text, we go through a a continuity of gradations.

[23:18]

All sounds seem near. Your eyes are closed. All sounds seem near. I mean, you can think, oh, that must be far away because it's If you know what it is, you know that there's distance involved. But Sophia doesn't, for example, have much in her aural consciousness. Oral text. Doesn't have much sense of distance. So, a couple days ago, she suddenly stopped and And we stopped and we, why she stopped.

[24:27]

You know, it's some kind of real faint sound, somewhere out there in the web of sounds. We looked at her and she said, And she said, let's invite it to lunch. It can sit down right here. Because the sound was right there for her and she thought it was already in the room, so she wanted to feed it. So for her, the sound was right there, right in the room, as it was in the room. As I said, we want to kind of like... Part of vijnana practice is to free ourselves from the domination of visual consciousness.

[25:44]

That's a rewarding practice. It might take months. days, weeks, years, but it's worth doing. Okay, now in this seminar we're trying to talk about the context of knowing. Okay, now when I spoke about a kind of what I call a grounding mind, when that grounding mind is primarily the nearly passive accompaniment of thinking mind, when that grounding mind is nearly the passive companion, accompaniment of thinking mind, it really does disappear into the background.

[27:06]

It's just an assumption, unexamined assumption. and it becomes a kind of pre-understanding. Let it... Whatever we see and think about is... rooted in this pre-understanding, but the degree to which it conditions, edits, shapes our understanding is unobserved. And I've talked about this kind of thing now and then in other ways.

[28:09]

This is the first time I've... I'm pretty sure I've ever spoken about it this way. Now, this pre-understanding, this pre-condition of understanding, that's the basis of our thinking, we can begin to... bring this pre-understanding to our attention. This is an aspect, a dynamic of the first noble truth, of the first of the Eightfold Path. The perfection of views.

[29:12]

Because these are basically views that pre-form our understanding. So how do we do this? Really, we have to do it with the body. We have to use the body as a kind of wedge into the mind. Or a wedge between the layers of mind. Again, let me come back to the practice of noticing without thinking.

[30:15]

Feeling before thinking. Now, what's that? You have to do that. It's a kind of physical act. You can think it, but you have to kind of... Find a way to physically remind yourself to do it. And embodied mind is the wedge. It has more... than just plain old thinking mind. Yeah. So... So another way is phrases.

[31:27]

Now this koan says the one phrase before something or other, the lip of the mortar. blooms. Okay. So, here's phrases. The lip of the mortar. A mortar is something you know you grind things up in. Often wheat or spices or something. Of course it leads to our food, the flavor in our food, it can. So you can say the lip of the mortar. a flower blooms from the lip of the mortar.

[32:35]

This means that the physical world blooms through our activity in it. And our activity is often a phrase, not embedded in language, but drawn out of language and embedded in the body. This is the mantra-like phrase. Now, what is a mantra phrase? You all know this. But it's a phrase that you repeat. And to repeat it, you bring an intention into attention.

[33:40]

And as I say, you can feel the bodily component of attention, which you can't in intention. If I say intention to you, you say, oh. If I say attention, you say, oh. So you can feel the bodily component in Achtung. So when you bring an intention into your attention repeatedly, This is now different from an ordinary thought because by repetition and attention you're embodying it.

[34:43]

And it begins to have the power of a wedge in the mind. It begins to have a liberating power. Okay, now the two minds I've suggested that you imagine sedimenting. The two grounding minds that we bring into interactive attention. are the mind of non-graspable feeling, the mind that's essentially recognizing on each moment the field of mind, the mind that, for example,

[36:11]

I feel feeling all of you all at once without discrimination without any comparisons and the other is what I have called earlier subject based objectivity Now why do I use such a clumsy phrase? Because we have this, I don't know, this confusion around the subjective worlds and objective worlds. Mm-hmm. A novel is subjective.

[37:22]

A book of history is more objective. We can understand that kind of distinction. A fictional movie and a documentary. Not a science fiction, a fictional movie. How do you translate this? I mean, but still, the documentary is made by a person. The history book is written by a person. And even science now, when it... when it points out that the instruments that measure scientists' instruments influence the measurement.

[38:25]

So that's a way of saying there's no really purely objective world. Because the world we measure is influenced by the machines we choose to use to measure it. Wenn wir die Welt messen, wird sie durch die Maschinen, mit der wir sie messen, beeinflussen. And we plot up the machines and we operate the machines. Und wir haben uns diese Maschinen ausgedacht und wir benutzen sie auch. But still there's this problem with objective and subjective. So what I'm saying is that through meditation practice, you come into a mind that feels completely objective.

[39:36]

But it's still, of course, your subjective experience. So I'm calling it subject-based objectivity. So why do we experience it as objective? Because we just see things, we just hear things. We bring no baggage to it. We can feel that we brought no baggage to it. There's no comparisons. There's mostly just gratitude. With Anton's help, we have a new term, left-set acceptance. Left-set acceptance would be gratitude.

[41:00]

That you don't just accept things. Everything you accept, you just feel so grateful for. A friend of mine, Brother David Stein, to rest. sent me an email recently, and he's created a website which says the center of Christianity is gratitude. Okay. So this mind of gratitude objectivity, which is sort of the house of these more specific minds of sound, text, etc., object, text, can also be grounded or sedimented as an initial mind.

[42:17]

So you get to know the experience of this mind. You feel gratitude. You feel clarity. Everything seems to be just as it is just as it is. And everything seems to have a shine. And there seems to be, when you really feel it, an easy joy in our body and mind. Why not start out each moment with this mind? Among the possible initial minds, if you have a choice, don't you think this is one of the better choices? Thank you. Vielen Dank. Thank you very much.

[43:42]

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