So I'm going to just say something about otherness and maybe we can come back to it. Right now, you are other than I am, right? It would be nice if I could feel you from your side. But that's maybe nearly impossible. However, the more there's a mutual interiority or the more there's a non-dualistic non-conceptual mind, you get very close to feeling things from their own side. Suki Roshi said, when is a tree a tree, and when is a tree a poem? When a tree is a poem, which is sometimes the case, it's when you're close to feeling things from their own side. Now, from the point of view of everything's changing, at each moment you are also other. Because on the one hand, I think I'm a continuity.

[01:02]

But in fact, I'm other, other, other. I'm other than I was the next moment. So the more I know my own otherness, I'm much more open to the otherness of the tree, the otherness of another person, etc. So that's a little hard to grasp in a practical way, but I'll just throw it out for now. Excuse me, may I ask, is that what I sometimes protected myself? Yes, of course. Of course. Whereas I want to permanently say predictable. Yeah, we defend ourselves from otherness all the time. Okay, thanks. And part of practice is to stop defending yourself from otherness. But to do that, you have to have a base that's not based in thinking. If you're based in thinking, you go crazy if you, you know... So you have to, that's why the reference point in situated immediacy is essential, because that gives you a base where you can let go of protecting yourself from otherness.

[02:10]

Where you can seal yourself, but not armor yourself. Do you understand the difference? Armoring is to protect yourself. To seal yourself is to feel so integrated that you're not disturbed by difference in what happens. you feel sealed and complete. When I look at What I'm seeing is my looking at you. That's attention to attention. I'm not actually seeing you. I'm seeing my looking at you.

[03:11]

Let's use an example of hearing. It's the most accessible, I think. And hearing is especially interesting because it's non-spatial. So when you hear a train whistle, it's right here. If you hear a voice, it's right here. It's all here. So of the senses, and in Buddhism there's six senses because the mind is a sense. The mind is a sense which accompanies each sense because there'd be no hearing without a mind that hears. But also mind makes sense of the world in addition to and in a separate way than hearing. So in Buddhism we say there's six senses, not five. typically people have this experience in meditation you're sitting and the birds start singing usually we're up before first light we get up because we get up not because the sun gets up because we're our own center the sun gets up because it gets up we get up because we get up and you often that's one reason temples

[04:30]

Meditation halls have gardens around them. Because you want the birds, you want the... So you hear some birds. And what you notice, often there's a bliss accompanied with hearing the birds. And that bliss almost always, or is, the experience of hearing your own hearing of the birds. Now we know from analyzing bird sound, that a bird has a very complex sound. You can slow it down, it's like a Bach fugue or something, which the birds have ears which can hear. Birds can also sing two tones at once, and they can sing in a range way outside the human ear. So we're not hearing what birds hear. We're hearing our portion of it. So we're actually, in fact, only hearing our hearing of the bird. That's a life-changing fact.

[05:32]

Excuse me for saying so. Because we think we're hearing the birth. But we're actually only hearing our hearing of the birth. So when I see you, I'm only seeing my seeing of you. And since I like my mind, this is wonderful. I feel good seeing my seeing of you. But now... Does that limit me? Well, I find the opposite because one is if I see my seeing of you, I have a tactile experience of seeing you. Say that you're looking in some water and there's a stone in the water. You can see that you're seeing the water, the stone through water. And if you have any experience with living by a lake, you know that the stone is slightly enlarged, magnified by being the water, and slightly refracted.

[06:43]

If you put a stick in the water, it bends. In the Middle Ages, they thought the eye beam bent. They thought when you looked in a mirror, you sent out a gaze, and it bounced off the mirror and bent with you that eye gaze. They didn't think of it the way we think of it. But there's actually a kind of spiritual aspect to this, which is also part of Buddhism. Now I'll try to come to that. But if you see this stone underwater, you can see that you're seeing the stone through the water. And you can take the stone even out of the water and see... that you're seeing. Now you see it here, and it's different, right? You put it back in the water. The adept practitioner sees the mind they're seeing through, like I was seeing through water. The only difference is you can't take the stone out of the mind and look at it in some other medium.

[07:50]

So we have no comparison. I can take the stone out of the water and say, oh, it's wet, but I can't take... this out of my mind and see that it's wet with mine. So you have to remind yourself of that. Okay. But if when I look at you, excuse me for using you as an example, but if I look at you and I feel myself feeling and knowing you proprioceptively, auditorily, and so forth, if I, on the one hand, I also then am more aware of your seeing me. So I am no longer an entity. I'm an activity that you're engaged in, and you're an activity I'm engaged in, and there's a feeling of a mutuality there or some connectedness there. This is called the ayatanas in Buddhism, that the object and the sense create two fields which overlap.

[08:56]

This is in fact true. But we don't notice it. Now another aspect of this is if I know that all I'm seeing is my own seeing of you, I know you're much bigger than that. Much different than that. Much beyond that. Because I can only know the portion, like I can only hear this portion of the bird song. So when I hear only this portion of the bird song, I know there's a mystery bigger than myself. I always feel the mystery because I don't think I'm seeing all of you. I know I'm only seeing that which I can see of you and that which you're letting me see. And there's much more to it to you and to the seeing than that. So simultaneously whenever I see any object, I not only see mind, the object It points to the perception and points to the object.

[09:59]

It points to the mystery, which isn't included in the seeing. Now, our senses don't let us know that. So you have to remind yourself. And if you remind yourself of it, you begin to see it. Let's take already connected. If you have an intention to remind yourself on every perception that you're already connected, you'll begin noticing the connectedness. If your conception is you're already separated, you'll Confirm separation. Your senses will tell you you're separated. Okay. Because your worldview is prior to perception.

[11:07]

Perception reinforces the worldview. Perception free of concepts can alter a worldview. But mostly perception is within the categories of our views. So if I have a view we're already connected, my perceptions will keep telling me, yes, we're separated, we're separated. Well, because it's also true, we're separated. If I have a worldview of already connected, I'll start noticing ways we're connected. I'll notice that there's a so-called negative space between us that's positive, that we're actually always shaping. Like if a film director has to know things like this in two degrees, if he's filming two people, he has to film the space that they're shaping. And he'll tell an actor, lean forward a little. Let's make a narrower table so that the space between them... Because he's filming the space between the people.

[12:10]

Because that's really what the audience is getting. So, in fact, I will start noticing how we're shaping a mutual space my view is already connected. So the senses will confirm a view. So it's very important to work with your views. If you see that something's the case, like everything's changing, simple. Then if you find ways to remind yourself of that, your senses will begin to show you that's the case. Okay, now, the The big problem here is, the big problem of the two truths, is that the job of consciousness is to deceive us. Consciousness is the problem. But consciousness is also a great treasure. I'm going to make a big, I'm going to try to make a consciousness, I'm going to be on consciousness aside later, I hope.

[13:19]

Right now, I'm I'm on awareness's side. Because consciousness, the job of consciousness, is to make things predictable. If I throw this at you, you would like to be able to catch it. You know, if a tiger jumps at you, you've got to do something about it. So the job of consciousness is to act in the world in a way that we can function. So you're not saying, as somebody throws a You know, rocket, you're not thinking, well, that is just, you know, my mind only and it's pointing to you. You know, you're going to get hit in the head with a stone if you do that. But, in fact, if you also know that, you may affect the way the person who's throwing the stone throws the stone. But it doesn't help if it's coming off the hillside or something. consciousness' job is to make the world cognizable, predictable, chronological, and contextual.

[14:31]

And that's what consciousness does. And it does it through creating a tapestry of concepts. You know the story about the, I think they show it to business people a lot, of the gorilla in the soccer game? Yeah. And they are supposed to count all their vowsers when they're playing basketball? I think it's soccer. Is it soccer? I heard basketball. I haven't seen the movie myself. Basketball. Yeah, I have a good friend who saw it, a lawyer. He wanted to prove them who has the truth. And did he see it? No, he didn't. He was supposed to count all the bounces from the red team. And then he said, did you see the... Gorilla went up sharing and did push-ups. Yeah. And he said, no, no, no, no, no. And everybody in the room said, no way. And they were lawyers, all of them. Yeah. But my friend Marek said he could put money off. It was no gorilla in the movie. Yeah. And then they showed it once again. And the gorilla came out. During the game, they played basket and went like this.

[15:31]

That's right. Push-ups and everything. And they saw it, all of them. And no one saw it prior. Often people take two or three viewings to see the gorilla. Wow. And it's there, but it's not expected because it's not in the tapestry of our conceptual framework. If you see a UFO or something, you know, or if you see, you know, I had an Indian, a friend who was not an Indian, but he was a white man who grew up with Indians and trained by the last Yurok shaman. And he lived with us for some time. He says, if the Indians, not your kind of Indian, Native Americans, see something, hear something in a bush, they think something's there. If a white man, he's a white man, but he means me. Huey Newton, the founder of the Black Panthers, had a...

[16:40]

I don't know, I'll just tell you anecdotes every now and then, had an answering machine that said, this is Huey Newton, more power to the people. And my friend Garrett Stern, Huey and I were very good friends for a long time, my friend Garrett Stern left a message, Huey, how come when you say more power to the people, I feel left out? So Huey changed the message after that. where was I when a white man sees something then he goes over to the bush and there's nothing there he decides there was nothing there the Indian Native American decides well there was something there but it's outside my perception or you know something like that he assumes that his senses told him it was real and doesn't just check it out by his conceptual tapestry that was Harry's view I don't know I don't

[17:42]

I don't hang out with Native Americans enough to know if it's true. But it would, ideally, the people I know who practice, who've seen this film, see the gorilla. So if something strange occurs, it's outside conceptual, we tend to think, what's that? Or it's strange? Or it's not... Or we don't see it at all. So... Okay. So... Pause for the particular. Pause for the particular. This... I'll stop with this, I think. This is a practice you can try out. And it's a practice which opens you up to the sense of dharma. The sense of the word dharma. Buddhism could be probably just as well called dharmism instead of Buddhism. Dharmism means, basically, that this world exists in momentary units.

[18:52]

And are you present to these momentary units or not? Mindfulness practice is to begin to be present to these momentary units. But it's very difficult to be present to the momentary units because consciousness wants to blur this momentariness and make things predictable. Now, one way to kind of counteract that in a way kind of like cutting through the fabric of consciousness is whenever you see something pause for a moment with it so for example if I'm going to pick this cup this up when I put my hand on it I stop for a moment and I feel its coolness Then when I bring it up, I bring it up and I do it in a way that I feel complete. So when I stop, I used the word earlier, do things so that you feel nourished.

[19:58]

Now I'm saying, do things so that you feel complete. So when I do this, I don't just bring it here. I'm not just getting it. This is a separate act. And I do it in its own particularity and let it feel complete. Sorry. And if I do each thing and have a feeling, letting a certain completeness be present, you will feel, at the end of the year, more complete. If most of your actions are kind of rushed and you just do it, you won't feel as complete.

[21:00]

It's that simple. But that takes a little time to start having a feeling for. When I came and I bowed at the cushion and I sat down, That's part of pausing for the particular, or letting things feel complete. Dogen has a very basic teaching, same Dogen, says, complete that which appears. So that already means that lifeism is a series of appearances. The length of a Dharma was calculated by Abhidharma theorists could be, I don't know, some fraction of a second. But it's interesting that contemporary research psychologists say that the smallest unit we can perceive is just about the same length of time as 2,000 years ago when they decided how long and dharma was. Because of dharma, I mean, things are all here, but we're actually establishing duration.

[22:06]

We're establishing what the present is, and things are appearing. Okay. So, if I look at you, there's a moment where my senses, proprioceptive senses, my body sense, my visual sense, etc., have a sense of you. Now, if I establish that as a concept, I don't see that you're changing all the time. Now, I can practice with that by looking over at you. You're gone. Sorry. And I look at you. And then I come back to you. You're actually different. Your face is different. So I can do it by practicing with closing my eyes. I can have a feeling for you or looking at you. Close my eyes. Open my eyes. Different appears. So I'm trying to train myself to notice appearance. So if I have a feeling

[23:10]

feeling that I'm seeing you, seeing my own seeing of you, if I think of that as continuous, I don't experience it as appearance. I only can experience it as the liquid of seeing you, the liquid of the mind, when I notice it's a constantly reappearing. So you can't think your way to this. You have to give yourself little practices to notice it. And one of them is this pause for the particular. Whatever you look at, rest in it a moment. Now what Ivan Illich talks about, the gaze, is icons are considered in Russian Christianity, and I think in the Middle Ages, they're images, not concepts. And they engage your viewing.

[24:12]

And through the icon, they say in Russia, you look at God. So if you go into Catholic churches, you know that they're not recent, they're painting windows, etc. They're meant, I think, to engage the gaze. in a way that brings you out of conceptual thinking, the way you can get engaged in a dream. And the more you can be engaged in the dream, there's so many aspects of the dream that if you just looked at it, you don't see much. But if you allow an engagement of the gaze, it's transformative. of Catholic churches, shaped like this, are meant to awaken your body aura. They're shaped that way because it sends that when you go through, your own nimbus is awakened by going through that door.

[25:18]

And a lot of these instructions are esoteric and were kept as a secret. But most Catholic cathedrals, ancient ones, Middle Ages, medieval ones, are based on the chakras. And it was known by the craftsmen but not publicly known because they wanted to influence you unconsciously. Yeah. So, when we allow ourselves to be, our senses to engage an object, we actually interrupt this saccadic scanning and we interrupt the fabric of consciousness. And you open yourself to a non-conceptual consciousness, or what I would call awareness, in which you know the world more in terms of the fundamental truth instead of the conventional truth.

[26:25]

So now the question is, how do you bring a mind that reflects fundamental truth into your daily mind a conventional truth. That's the basic problem of practice. Now, you can say, well, one's right brain, one's left brain, and so forth. That's actually partly true. I think an infant is right brain dominated from people I know who have done studies. It seems that the the baby infant is right brain dominated till about 18 months to two years. Then they shift to left brain. And what meditation probably does is make the right brain dominant. Because you begin to be more dominant right brain. But the problem with such simple categories is black and white. She's one or the other.

[27:26]

But in actual fact, both are present in each other. But I'm sure that if you measured a meditator, their right brain is much more active than most people. So we're talking about real physiological changes here, not just mental changes. But it's more than just whether there's an emphasis on the right brain or left brain. Is that enough talk for today? What? Maybe? You said no? No. Or is it too much? No, I don't. Can I add something? Of course I've been waiting. Do you practice to pause? Yeah. Is it the same thing to do something very, very slowly? When you eat, you eat very, very slowly. That's a good way to learn it. But it doesn't mean you have to do things slowly at all. But you have to get kind of feeling for it.

[28:28]

But once you have a feeling for it, you can be very quick. My experience, I don't know, when it goes very, very fast, inside it's slow motion. For instance, the biking. The faster it went, the slower inside it was. I don't know, I can't describe the feeling, but it was a paradox in itself. Well, coming back to Michael Murphy, he wrote a book called The Psychic Side of Sports. which is now called In The Zone. They changed the name. And Michael is often credited with thinking of the idea of being in the zone. He says he doesn't think he's the person who thought it up. But like when a tennis player is playing and suddenly everything slows down, the ball comes to you very slowly, that's called In The Zone. And that's very much like you're playing tennis, so it's not slow. but you're in a mind where everything is at a different speed.

[29:31]

Exactly the same in golf. Yeah. And Ronnie Peterson was a Swedish Formula One fan. Yeah. He describes when he drives at high speed. That's what happened. Yeah. That is why I said it's not necessary to do things slow sometimes. But you may have to train consciousness to do things slowly to begin to feel this. So it... we come right back to intention and attention when we do that I can just for instance Annika Serestam she has been a golfer for many years she had a problem of rushing when she took the club and we just took a routine taking a big breath and taking the club slowly up from the back And that is, I was thinking about your question, and I've been thinking about that.

[30:33]

But that was practicing. Yeah. Being aware of the club. That would make a shift. Yeah. Because that's a shift. And that would start it all through the breath. Because she was so nervous. Yeah. So it started there, and then being attentive to the club. Yeah. And that was really a start of the routine. And she's still doing it. Yeah. Well, when I taught golf with Michael, that's the kind of thing I taught about. Ah. Because I'm not a golf player, so I can only talk about things like that. Yeah, I mean, Nicky Lauda talks about the same thing. Nicky's brother is a close friend of mine. And he has this... And his... His brother, Florian, is a very good driver himself and considered being a racing driver.

[31:35]

And I've been going along with him. It's like another world. You're going along with him in a Porsche, and he's going around a corner at some unbelievable speed. And my glasses slide across the desk, and he just takes my glasses and hands them to me. We're going around about 90 or 100 miles an hour around a corner. And I remember once he drove me from Salzburg to Vienna, picked me up in Salzburg, and there was a car coming from another distance. And I said, and he was passing another car, and I said, Florian, there's a car coming. Florian said, he's going to turn. A moment later, he turned. And he says, my brother has this to a high degree. And it's a kind of field consciousness. But that's another thing we can talk about is because pausing for the particular kind of awareness and a field consciousness of a mind that's defined through the field and not through the content.

[32:41]

This is much of how we can get a kind of conceptual grasp of non-conceptual mind. I think we didn't want to do that today, though. Yeah. Because we've got to stop, and I've been talking too much. But it's hard for me to imagine how I'm going to talk about these things. I'm doing as well as I can. You're doing very well. You're doing great. Thank you. Can I take a practical? 7.50 in 25 minutes. We're supposed to be down the road 300 meters down just by the little house. We can see it's a roundabout down there. Shouldn't we all walk down together?

[33:43]

Yeah, we could do that. Can we walk down at 22? So in 15 minutes we meet outside here. Is that okay? Okay, for everyone. Just outside here. And pretty warm clothes. That's it. Very informal. And the ferry is... Leaves at 6 or something like that? Leaves 560. Oh, really? Soon. So you said a red tie, right? Another piece of information. I will be sitting...

[34:14]

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