I was glad to hear that in the seminar you spoke about questioning, practicing with questions. Yeah, I want to try to look at this a little more closely or carefully. Since the real lecture is here, maybe next time we'll have more people on this side. I can actually just keep quiet and let her talk because she already knows. Okay.

[01:01]

And let me go back again to this background mind. And I told you first it was an early experience of mine. Mm-hmm. And because of practice, it's not that I hadn't noticed it before, but because of practice I noticed it more specifically. Now, I'm not speaking about this to give you any information. I'm speaking about it in the context of our developing skills and noticing our experience. Sondern ich spreche in dem Zusammenhang darüber, indem ihr eure Fähigkeiten entwickelt, Dinge zu bemerken.

[02:24]

Because much of practice is simply noticing what we already know, but don't know we know. Denn ein Großteil der Praxis ist, Dinge zu bemerken oder zu... Again, it's not something transcendent beyond our experience. Most of Zen is hidden in our experience. So it's not so much transcendent as intrascendent. Ascendant means to climb. So transcendent means to climb over. So there's the weather vane. You can't hear, I take it.

[03:37]

Yes, she can hear some. Some. Well, I can talk louder. She hears fine. Okay, then why did you close the window? That she can hear better. But rain-mixed words... One of the best teachings. It's like the Buddha's gentle rain. So, intrascendent would mean to climb into. You know, and I... Paul Rosenblum, again, he likes this word, kori. And Paul Rosenblum likes the word quarry.

[04:46]

Which in Japanese means here. Place here or here here. Here, like here. Yes, so in Japanese it means here. But if you look at the kanji, the character, it actually means inside this. So that's not transcendent, but it's inside this. So again looking at my experience, because of practice I noticed more specifically what I'd already had some experience of. But there was a background, that there was a mind in the background of consciousness.

[05:50]

And then I noticed this more and more as I sat satsang in the first months and first year. And observing your thoughts you begin to see the space between your thoughts. So, you know, I had this image because I had to talk at a class or something or other. Houston Smith, a friend of mine, a professor of world religions, And a kind of hero of mine too, because he had this kind of extraordinary face that looked like it had been somewhere. Es war auch einer meiner Helden, auch deshalb, weil er so ein wunderbares Gesicht hatte, das so aussah, als sei er schon irgendwo gewesen.

[07:24]

It always made me think, his face made me think of the first line of an E.E. Cummings poem. Und sein Gesicht hat mich immer an die erste Zeile von einem E.E. Cummings Gedicht erinnert. Which the first line is, somewhere I have never traveled. Somewhere I've never traveled. Gladly beyond any experience. And then later on there's the line, not even the rain has such small hands. Anyway, at his class I had to say he wanted me to say something about Zen practice. So as I told you, I came up with this image that the mind was something like moving along the road and seeing billboards

[08:33]

And then I said that the spirit is something like when you move along the street and the spirit is something like these billboards along the street. And that these billboards are the thoughts. And between the billboards, I could see the nature or space. And from my experience, I could see that the billboards appeared out of the background. Aus meiner Erfahrung konnte ich erkennen, dass diese Werbetafeln wie aus diesem Hintergrund heraus auftauchen. Die waren nicht eine Kontinuität, sondern sie sind immer unablässig aufgetaucht. Und aus dem, aus dem sie heraus aufgetaucht sind, das habe ich Hintergrundgeist genannt. So let's say that trying to look at practice pedagogically.

[09:43]

First Zazen made me more sensitive or look at more detail to what I already experienced. Zuerst hat mich das Praktizieren sensibler gemacht, um mit mehr Detail meine Erfahrungen anschauen zu können. And then when I discovered this image of the billboards, etc., I then discovered I could hold an image present in this mind, And the image became a kind of signpost. And this image became something like a... which kept pointing me back to this experience.

[10:52]

So if I just waited until the experience appeared in Zazen or something like that, I experienced it sometimes in Zazen, sometimes not. and less often in my ordinary experience. But I found if I held this image in my mind, the image became a kind of thing that my mind went around the corner of the image and into background mind. Then I discovered, without knowing I discovered it, that the image itself was in background mind.

[11:55]

You noticed it and you knew it before? No, I didn't. I used it, but I didn't know that actually the image itself was in background. Okay. And what I didn't yet really know, understand, is that holding the image itself generated background mind. I just wasn't able yet to notice all the depth of this image, the dynamic and depth of this image.

[13:11]

Yeah, but I didn't need to know because I could use the image. This isn't really true. Because the image is actually made up of lots of images. Aber diese Bilder, die eigentlich aus vielen Bildern zusammengesetzt sind, und es können eine ganze Reihe von Bildern innerhalb dieses Bildes verwendet werden, also habe ich das Bild nur auf sehr einfache Weise verwandt, um die Ecke herumzugehen damit, oder um den Hintergrundgeist zu bemerken. if I'd understood that the image itself generated background mind, then I would have understood better the difference between intentional mind and discursive mind.

[14:23]

And this is an essential distinction in practice between intentional mind and discursive mind. Again, the thought to not invite yourself your thoughts to tea is a mental formation, but not a thought in Buddhism. Discursive thoughts are mental formations, but they are what we mean by thoughts in Buddhism. So an intentional thought we need another word for because it's a mental formation that isn't what we really mean by thinking.

[15:30]

Because we have a very primitive, in our language, very primitive map of mental activity. All mental formations pretty much are called thoughts. But if you think all mental formations of thoughts, you don't have enough sensitivity to the territory of mind to practice. So, yeah, a while ago somebody was here at the practice month.

[16:48]

And this person was experimenting with when he practiced, what was he like, and when he didn't practice, what was he like. And he found that when he wasn't sitting regularly, he was, yeah, much, went to more parties, saw people more, talked to them on the telephone more, etc. And he found that when he sat regularly, he had almost no need to talk to people or go to parties and things like that. Yeah, except where there was a real conversation and a real activity. Basically, his sense of this, in his case, something close to background mind, He became like a companion that he'd rather spend time with than going to a party.

[18:10]

He just found himself more engaged in his actual experience and the depth of his actual experience and most social encounters couldn't come to that depth. And that's one of the effects of when you first start to practice. You find a certain kind of friendships fall away. Often they come back with a kind of relief in the person, that there's a new depth of engagement possible, because you're more deeply engaged with yourself.

[19:19]

Of course it's incorrect if I say you're more deeply engaged with yourself. I should say something more accurately, like more deeply engaged with this activity of mind and body. Okay, so I found myself in those early days of my practice is that I have this new companion, this new buddy, this new friend. Mind itself. I hadn't created yet or found a way to have my breath as my companion. But definitely background mind was my companion.

[20:45]

So around that time I discovered that not only did I not feel lonely anymore, Also um diesen Zeitpunkt herum habe ich auch herausgefunden, dass ich jetzt nicht mehr mich alleine fühle, sondern I virtually wasn't capable of feeling lonely. Dass ich eigentlich beinahe nicht in der Lage war, mich allein zu fühlen. Because I never felt an absence. Weil ich nie eine Abwesenheit gespürt habe. My buddy, background mine was always there. Denn mein Freund, der Hintergrundgeist, der war ja immer da. It's like having a shadow or a guardian angel. Yeah, but this... I said to myself or described this experience to myself as background mind being always there. But that was an inaccurate description.

[22:07]

Because it wasn't always there. Yeah, I didn't know how to apply the teaching of everything's changing. I actually applied it to everything but the background mind. Of course, the so-called background mind wasn't always in the background. Sometimes it was everywhere all at once. Sometimes it was foreground mind. But my initial experience was that it was a mind in the background that was always there.

[23:07]

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So for a long time, many years, I kept the name in my own experience of background mind. Like this garden now is a background to the sender. And then I felt within the garden a mind background to the garden and the plants. It was like a kind of ground of being. But I knew that in Buddhism you can't have a ground of being because it's a different theology. But still, it functioned for me as a kind of grounder being, even though I was careful not to call it that.

[24:13]

Yeah, it was always there when I wanted it. So in my mind it was continuously present. Now let's look at a definition, a sort of definition of the soul. And to define the soul is that companion which accumulates experience. And there are certainly we have mind in a way that accumulates experience. And the depth of maturing is in that accumulation of experience.

[25:34]

But also, once you get sense of this other companion of background mind. In contrast to what we could call soul or something like that, and if we tried to think of it in Buddhist terms, That dimension of mind that's always accumulating experience or accumulating karma. But does it accumulate only or does it mature the experience it accumulates? What's the dynamic of maturing the experience that's accumulated?

[26:42]

What's the dynamic of maturing the experience which is accumulated? No, you can ask that. That's an example of a question you can ask. That's a fairly sensitive, I mean, you know, developed question. Das ist eine ziemlich feinfühlige oder entwickelte Frage. Das bedarf einer Weile, bevor man so eine Frage stellen kann. Another image that I had as a beginning practitioner, every question is like a pencil.

[27:45]

One end writes the question and the other end erases it. So I always had the feeling if I find the question, if I can write the question, the eraser is also in the question. The eraser meant finding the answer. Or the eraser meant not needing the question anymore. So that image always helped me too, because every time a question would come up, like, yeah, how do I, what is such and such in practice?

[28:53]

Yeah. I knew if I could really proceed with the question, stay with the question, refine the question, the eraser would be there. The answer would be there. So that little image of the pencil gave me confidence that in every question is hidden the answer. And that you don't really, to put it in other words, you don't really come up with a real question until the real answer is pressing on you. And to put it another way, you can't really come up with a question if the answer doesn't push you towards it.

[30:04]

Sophia likes to hide. So she says, I'm going to hide in here in the kitchen under this. Please find me. Well, what she really wants is to hunt. She doesn't, I mean, she doesn't, but she, you know, you understand. And so, Somehow the question, the answer hides and says, please find me. I'm here somewhere. If you can find the right question, I'll show myself. Atmar was telling me he had a dog. What kind of dog was it? That's a... Yeah, tell them what it used to do with the Stitt.

[31:27]

In Deutsch is okay. But they also wanted to be busy, they wanted to keep a herd together or something like that. And Juti was also around in Cresson. And when he wasn't busy and he loved to catch and search for sticks, then someone had to throw them away. But when he was so busy, he dug up sticks in his father's garden. Although he knew exactly where the stick was, he dug through the whole garden. He didn't know where he was and he was overjoyed when he saw it in your foot. But he knew exactly where the thing was. Mother was of course not so happy when she saw it in your foot. So that's what, you know, one of these questions does. It says, dig up the garden. Yeah, or the answer is making you dig up the garden. Rosemary, when she wants to plant something, she puts her pigs out on the ground.

[32:31]

The pigs go, and she can plant what she wants easily. I just saw them today, they're great. So the point sometimes is not finding the answer but digging up the garden. And developing the garden. Okay, if we go along with, dear, we go along with soul as accumulating experience. And this process of accumulating experiences as a continuous experience.

[33:46]

If I look carefully, if we look carefully at background mind, what's the dynamic of background mind? Wenn ich oder wir mal ganz sorgfältig den Hintergrundgeist anschauen, was ist denn die Dynamik des Geistes? Ist das, dass er immer gegenwärtig ist? Es fühlt sich so an, als sei er unablässig gegenwärtig. Let's not get into thinking it's a noun. Let's recognize in Buddhism there are no nouns. There's only verbs. When you find yourself thinking in nouns, you can know this is what we mean by delusion. So if I don't think of background mind as a thing or a noun, and I'm sensitive enough to look at the

[34:53]

the activity of background mind, the activity of background mind is continuous releasing of experience. It notices the billboards and releases them. And that was in the image. Because the image was of driving along, moving along some sort of road or something. And the billboards were appearing as you drive along. You know what that's like.

[36:12]

And sometimes the billboards seem one after another like they do close to cities in America. And sometimes there were spaces between them. But I realized the billboards were, I really got it that the billboards are only billboards. The thoughts are only billboards. Yeah. So in the image is already the sense of the continuous releasing. But for the first few years of my practice, the image functioned as a continuous companion. Now, if I'd seen sooner or when I did see that it was a continuous releasing,

[37:16]

I would have started practicing continuously releasing. And that, it turns out, is the dynamic which matures experience. You're continuously accumulating experience and you're continuously releasing experience. And the continuous releasing of experience is a tremendous sense of freedom. You never feel weighted down. You have plans to do things, but at this moment, you're releasing. Man hat zwar Pläne, was man alles tun muss, aber in diesem Moment ist es so wie Loslass.

[38:28]

At the next moment, the plans reappear. There come the billboards again. Und im nächsten Moment kommen die Pläne wieder und die ganzen Werbetafeln sind wieder da. Manchmal hauen sie einem mitten ins Gesicht. Aber dann lässt man sie wieder los. So at each moment, there's a feeling of space and freedom. And it's true, and you get into what, you know, this thing of, I said the other day of Benjamin Leavitt, that we're 500 milliseconds about late consciousness as an editor and not the decider. Begin to be inside the bodily knowing, not the conscious knowing. No, I didn't plan to speak about any of this.

[39:39]

Yeah. But I got in here and I felt like saying that. What I'd planned to talk about was the distinction between bodily knowing and consciously accessible memory. Because I was really trying to think about this experience of Sophia of knowing in her body and yet not yet knowing it consciously. But if you're here next week, there's a chance I'll feel like talking about that when I get into the lecture.

[40:44]

If I had known that background mind was a constant releasing, it wasn't continuously present, it was a continuously present releasing. das nicht unablässig da ist, sondern ein unablässiges Loslassen, dann wäre eine der Fragen, die ich seit Anfang des Praktizierens immer hatte, was ist Leerheit? Diese Frage ist immer bei mir geblieben und sie ist immer noch da und sie ist immer mit mir gewesen 45 Jahre lang. And I would say only in the last four or five years have I really come to images of, accessible images of emptiness as practice.

[41:55]

Practice images as clear as the billboard, etc., My question just kept going past the billboard image. Because the billboard image wasn't rich enough yet in my experience to be a target for the question. Because the continuously releasing of experience is the practice of emptiness. Not as an idea, oh, background mind is empty.

[43:10]

That's just not helpful. It's just an idea. But the actual experience of releasing the contents of mind as soon as the contents of mind appear... Aber die eigentliche Erfahrung des Loslassens der Erfahrungen, sobald as soon as experience arises content, sobald der Inhalt des Geistes auftaucht, dass man ihn loslässt, war also eigentlich mein begleitender Freund Leerheit. the field of mind with its contents released. Thanks.

[44:03]

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