Well, if we're going to speak about what is reality, we might as well begin. And I don't want to take what we're doing or what I'm doing too seriously. Because, you know, I do this because I enjoy it. It's kind of fun, actually. But at the same time, to ask, seriously ask what is reality is no monkey business. But at the same time, I don't know. Monkey business means things that have no consequence. Yeah, so if we even come close to in this seminar to having a sense of what our

[01:06]

reality is, or find our own reality challenged, or can imagine perhaps slightly different or significantly different reality. Then we are, you know, something extraordinary has happened, or magical has happened. Or frightening, perhaps, has happened. Yeah, well, if you really feel that, see that, yeah, it is consequential.

[02:25]

And should be consequential. What the heck are we doing this for if it's not consequential? Yeah. Yeah, at the same time we're just looking at the stuff of our life. The ordinary old stuff of our life. Now, the question what is reality doesn't lend itself to mantra-like repetition. It's really too abstract. But it is a question that's explicitly and implicitly in all science and philosophy.

[03:28]

And at least hidden in our own thinking, if not explicit. We can't take a step or do anything without some sense. reality and of consequence. So where do we start? Why don't we start with what are our personal priorities? What's most real to us or important to us? Well, yeah, it'd have to be, let's say, what would make sense would be your family and your job or profession. or your workplace or your job.

[05:00]

Yes, maybe your house, apartment, something like that. But then it would also have to be something like your state of mind or moods, something like that. Because your state of mind, minds, or mood, yeah, they're present at your job, with your family, and they affect everything you do. So maybe your state of mind ought to be Yeah, a high priority. And if you get to this point, then you're somewhere close to, you know, Buddhism and Buddhist practice. You know, now I'm speaking about all this, you know, what I'm speaking about, you know, really...

[06:08]

pretty obvious, but really just to get us if we can on the same page. Do you have that expression in German? No, but we can say on the same level. On the same level. Yeah. Yeah, that's all right, too. Let's be on the same level and the same page. You can say starting point or something, starting place. Yeah, same place. Maybe we can just let ourselves down into this mutual space. Out of our usual thinking. As if we're letting ourselves down into some kind of liquid or space. Because this right now, sitting here, is some kind of reality.

[07:20]

Or is it? Now, if you do accept, if we are at the point now where we can say, yes, my state of mind is important, If you think now, well, my state of mind, you know, it's better if my job is better or I don't fight with my spouse or something like that. Yeah, if you're... In other words, if your stated mind is defined through your story, well, you've come to the first of the Eightfold Path, but you're not going to go much further on the Eightfold Path.

[08:32]

To notice the importance of your state of mind is the first of the Eightfold Path. Your state of mind is formed by your views. And if you really just take for granted that your state of mind is shaped by your story. Yeah, then that's the way it is. You're going to have to improve your story, get a better apartment. Yeah. But can you see your mind separate from your self-referential thinking?

[09:53]

Now, at that point you're at a very key point. And you, you know, need to make some kind of decision. If you want to go further on this path, this first teaching of the Buddha, Look at your intentions and behavior and speech and so forth. Because the path of Buddhism is simply that, to study our views, our intentions, our speech, our behavior. And then how that is formed in your livelihood. And then the next is effort, energy, vitality.

[11:10]

And maybe jogging is enough. Going to the gym, having a personal trainer. That's not so bad, actually. I could lose a personal trainer myself, other than you. No. Or at least more jogging or something. But then the next is mindfulness and concentration. Yeah, so mindfulness and concentration.

[12:12]

Now we're at a point where we have to look at our mind, wonder what kind of mind it is. Yeah, what kind of Yeah, mindfulness is the way we notice, in fact, study our behavior, conduct, speech and so forth. Conduct, speech. No, I didn't think I would go over the Eightfold Path like this, but I would really like these basic teachings to be like a piece of music you know very well. And you can play it by heart and play it

[13:14]

with different instruments. So here's mindfulness as the way to actually study our behavior, etc. But if you're always involved in self-referential thinking, it's pretty difficult to even practice mindfulness. Now, I would say that the most difficult thing is to... One of the one or two most difficult things for us is to separate self-referential thinking from thinking itself. Or to separate knowing from thinking.

[14:31]

Now here again, you just need to take maybe a serious inventory. See, take some ten minutes, you know, when you're... Maybe there's a... Well, it's a wonderful day today. But not so good for sitting on the lawn. But just take some time when you've got nothing to do and see how... Many thoughts you have or observations, whatever you call your thinking, are really self-referential. concerned with yourself or how it relates to you or your past, present or future. Now, if you really want to practice Buddhism, you've got to change this before you understand anything else about Buddhism. It's all just a nice mental exercise.

[15:45]

You don't get past this. How are you going to do it? Your thinking is, particularly for us in the West, thinking is inseparable from story. Even if we change our story. We're not free of a story. We just have a new story. We have the same story with sort of different... Yeah, something, you've changed it a bit, but it's still a story. How are you going to get out of your thinking? Yeah. Now, how do we get to this point? If your priorities are, you know, something like what we discussed.

[17:02]

But obviously your state of mind affects all your priorities. And If you see your state of mind as inseparable from story, that's the end of the story. Or rather, you better continue your story. Although we may be deeply ingrained in this habit, we all have an intuition of something that's not just our story. And in this intuition is all of Buddha's teaching. So when we talk about being free of self, This is, again, a rather abstract idea.

[18:16]

But we can speak about being free of having the mind identified through story. with a mind identified through self-referential thinking. Okay, again, we have this question, and if we stop right now by asking what is reality, from the point of view of the Eightfold Path, We can't get any further on the path of asking what is reality. For the Eightfold Path is nothing but the path of asking what is reality.

[19:23]

Oops. You said you can't continue the Eightfold Path if you ask this question now. If you Well, let's just start over. Yeah, please. Sorry. The Eightfold Path is nothing but an answer or a way to answer the question, what is reality? Okay, so if we've got ourselves to this point by looking at the Eightfold Path or just by common sense, we can ask then what is self-referential thinking or what is story, how is story present in our thinking?

[20:30]

Is your mood tied to how well your story is going? And, you know, bad news is going to make your... your... It's going to make your state of mind, you know, challenge your state of mind. But does it only affect your story and not really your mind? No, I'm just throwing some questions out here so that we can, you know, how do we observe whether our mind and thinking is inseparable from our personal story?

[21:30]

Yeah, and again, the practice of being free of self means have your mind Not that you have no self, but that your mind is not entirely defined through self. Self as story. And again, let me emphasize, in the West we think of reality as a story. The whole of our religious background and progress and all of this stuff is a story. In the West, our Christian, our religious education, our idea of how we develop ourselves, our idea of societal progress, it's all story.

[22:32]

And time-framed. What about some kind of timelessness? Well, one way to loosen the grip of self-referential thinking And the lock that story has on our thinking. Is to find yourself more in your senses than in your thinking. And this is something that happens, yeah, it seems to happen rather naturally through meditation.

[23:51]

But it also can happen and needs to happen intentionally. So you practice something like direct perception. You find yourself immersed in your perceptions. Yes, I like that you're in a sea, a sensorial sea. A sensorial tapestry, a flowing tapestry.

[24:55]

Tapestry is not wallpaper. I'm turning you all into wallpaper, I'm sorry. A tapestry is a... A goobler. A goobler? A hanging cloth? A woven cloth. Or a text, a sensorial text. Now, when Sukershi first came to America, he said that... he was, you know, not young. Well, he seems pretty young to me right now, but he was not so young. And he felt he needed students who were already prepared. And from his reading in Western philosophy, he thought American transcendentalism would be a good preparation.

[26:17]

And maybe he was right. Because, you know, you know, As much as some Europeans don't like to hear it, America is just settled by Europeans. You're responsible. But I don't blame you or America for Bush. Anyway. But still, you know, these folks were Europeans, second or third generation Europeans. And they... But they were confronted with an entirely new, differently inhabited world.

[27:20]

And being inhabiting a new world which was differently inhabited really seemed to change how they thought. How they thought. How they understood thinking. And Thoreau in particular saw the world as text. And Thoreau, in particular, understood the world as a text. He thought, we have this new world, and we can also think new when we look at how this new world is. So his idea was that the world was a text.

[28:54]

That at each moment you read. And not just that, you had to let the text also read you. And he thought, that you could only go beyond where you are at any one point if you let the text of the world read you. Now, what did he mean by that? So now we have someone... This is actually pretty close to Buddhism, what he's saying. This morning we had a number of wonderful claps of thunder. And upstairs, when I went upstairs, Marie-Louise and Sophia were still rocking with the house, because the building was shook up there, didn't it, in Zendo?

[30:12]

But I was offering incense, and I thought it happened because I offered the incense. I started believing in God. There was a Korean Zen master who came to Tassajara once. And we never had earthquakes at Tassajara, not very often. And Korean Zen masters like, they're very dramatic. So he had this staff and he was giving his first lecture to us. I invited him to come visit us. And they usually start out their talks with some kind of quats, you know.

[31:13]

Yes, you know the point of what I'm going to say now. Anyway, he hit his staff and he went, and the whole building shook. We were, oh, okay. Were you there at the time? I keep hoping for the monk. But, you know, I think if you just let this thunder, when this thunder came, it was big enough, you just felt it without thinking about it.

[32:30]

Probably there isn't much self-referential thinking. Oh, this thunder was meant for me. Or I've heard thunder like this before. It's just this particular thunder, that's all. And, you know, maybe if the thunder read you also as text... This day has already been changed for you by the thunder. And the more that kind of thing is the case... and the more you find yourself first of all in a sensorial realm and not a thinking realm you will find the more this is the case you'll find yourself seldom bored.

[33:59]

Because Well, this thunder was rather unique. It didn't happen yesterday. But actually, the more you find yourself in a sensorial realm, or that as your first location, where the heck are you anyway, Even if it's not big thunder, it's always, actually, moment after moment, it's unique. When your world is defined by your thinking, the world is not unique. It's usually rather repetitious.

[35:00]

So one of the ways you can notice if you really are somewhat loosened from, free from self-referential thinking, is you find yourself rarely bored. Yes, or you find yourself in a rather unique, unpredictable situation, moment after moment. Not unique, not predictable. Okay.

[36:18]

So where we've got to now, perhaps, is the practice of the Eightfold Path, the path of asking and answering what is reality. As Buddhism suggests to us a path, is through the practice of mindfulness. Perhaps we should call it sensefulness. I like the way you use your nose in this. So the practice of the Eightfold Path then would proceed in freeing you from loosening the grip of self-referential thinking on yourself.

[37:36]

It proceeds through... Proceed through loosening by finding yourself immersed initially or first of all in a sensorial world. Yeah. Okay. I hope it's clear. We've got that far. So that means, yeah, we have to awaken our senses. What does it mean to awaken our senses? Now, we're right here following the menu of the Heart Sutra. You could see no eyes, no ears, etc.

[38:49]

This is part of the menu. And no eyes, ears, etc. That follows from, first of all, awakening eyes, ears, etc. And separating each of the senses from each other and from I, E-Y-E, and I, consciousness, domination. Now that sounds like a good place to stop. For our senses are, you know... What do you call an organ that you don't use anymore like your appendix?

[40:07]

Vestigial. Vestigial, yeah. German, please. Vestigial. They become vestigial. Vitiated. What's initiated? The energy of life is taken out of them. And they kind of like hang around like unused organs while thinking and eye consciousness dominate our world. Did you mean I-consciousness before or the consciousness of I? I meant E-Y-E and the pronoun I both. Okay, then I got that right. Good. Double I. And we want to awaken them.

[41:10]

Because if they're dominated by I-consciousness, they're dominated by thinking. If they're dominated by thinking, they're dominated by our story. In some cultures, ear consciousness is more important than eye consciousness. Okay. We need a break, I think, and we need some food conscious, I mean some tea. Thanks a lot. Thanks for translating. You're welcome.

[41:57]

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