Now with this snowstorm, I feel I'm really at Crestone for the practice period. And your car got up here all right? All right. Good, thanks. So in the taste show I gave last time, I think I was completely clear in what I said, or as clear as I can be and as clear as I've ever been. But that doesn't mean I think it is easy to make the ingredients of what I spoke about, the content, the ingredients, your own. Digestible. Digest it. And I think it's, I mean, I know in my own case, I've been using the word feel and noticing that many times I couldn't use any other word to speak about practice.

[01:13]

And I certainly have designed my explication of the five skandhas really around the second skanda as feeling, not sensation, and yet it's taken me still many decades actually to really be willing to use the word feel and to get and to recognize with all its ordinary uses that I want to distinguish it sharply from thinking and suggest that most of the time we should be, as I said, feeling the world, not thinking the world. Yeah, anyway, it's certainly taken me a long time to come to the fullness of this emphasis.

[02:22]

Okay, so I think what I ought to do is speak really about the teaching that's in the word, vijnana, which we can understand to mean to know separately together. You know, there's the maxim or aphorism that supposedly there is, I believe, in fact, cut, inscribed in the forecourt of the shrine to Apollo at Delphi, know thyself. And that's attributed to Socrates and a whole bunch of other people, but it seems to have been just a, a maxim of old saying in Greece that they started attributing to wise men.

[03:27]

The other day, Sophia asked me, I have a couple of mala beads, which are skulls. And she said, why do you have so many skulls around, Papa? And I said, well, I don't know, life and death, it's a serious matter. And she said, but you shouldn't have skulls around, you should have heads of wise men around. Well, I couldn't argue with that. I don't know how I'd get a string of beads of wise men around my wrist. Severed wise head? No, I don't know. Then I would go back to Anne's book, which the correct title is on having no head. See, we have to get it right here in the age of Google. Okay.

[04:29]

To know things separately together. then this phrase, to know thyself. Now, thy is Bible talk, you know, and the Quakers, I think the friends, Quaker friends means they refer to each other as thy and thou and so forth. Won't thou come to the meeting? And in any case, it's given a kind of Christian cast by saying, know thyself. But in any case, it's whether... However we say it, it's not conducive to the way we think about things in Buddhism. It becomes know the soul or know some inner something or other, I don't know. So we want to ask ourselves in Buddhism, and we do ask ourselves, how do we function?

[05:40]

How do we function? How are we functioning right now? Well, and how do we explore our functioning? Well, I think I should speak to the visionaries and say we've got the five physical senses and mind, making six senses, not really senses, six sources. The world We know the world through six sources, the five physical senses and mind. Okay. Now, I haven't spoken about this in a very long time and really not in much detail since I used to teach in Berlin and I practiced walking around a lake. There was a lake near where I used to stay in Berlin. I can't remember the name, but there's lots of lakes in Berlin. And I practiced at that time, and I used to get others, we'd all walk in a line sometimes, practicing with various cities.

[06:43]

I taught in those days before, you're honest of. And I'd have people explore each sense separately. And you have to, you know, you've got to make an effort to do it, because the... Because primarily, I mean, I guess the largest sensorial territory of the brain by far is visual, seeing. But still, our culture, we see, we use the word see to understand, to mean understand. It's the dominant sense culturally and physiologically, neurologically. But it's, you know, in some cultures, Sound, aural, a-u-r-a-l, is emphasized strongly as well. And in practice, we find, I think, the aural, the ear dimension, is...

[07:52]

we find more emphasis when we're doing zazen, as I say, to use the example of hear-hearing. And as many of you would know, the Suram Gama Sutra emphasizes hearing as the sense which is most conducive to enlightenment. Okay. So you want to explore the senses, and it takes time. to really get used to any of these things and the craft of practice. Now we're not talking about a moment of enlightenment that changes everything. We're talking about a moment of enlightenment within the craft of practice. Practice before enlightenment and practice after enlightenment. So it takes, I don't know, a year or so to really work with each sense separately and begin to feel each sense separately. And again, it's ideal to start in a place like this, a practice period.

[08:57]

So I used to walk around this lake, not the whole way, it was quite too far on the break I had, but I'd walk 20, 30, 40 minutes at lunch around about half the lake or a third of it, come back. And I would walk sometimes on the path with just smelling the path. Keep my eyes nearly closed and shut everything down as much as I could, except smelling. And believe it or not, the smell, and that happened to be when I did it most, was the fall, the autumn, the crushed leaves of the path. I could actually smell the leaves in a different way than the leaves all piled up, not crushed, smell different. I found I could actually feel, smell the path and stay on it. Of course, the path you could feel your feet too, but basically I concentrated on smelling the path.

[10:05]

Then I tried, you know, shutting everything down but ears, my hearing, and then almost walking blind so I could feel the trees on either side like a blind person. And there's a different hearing dimension when things are near you or far from you, etc. Okay. Now, if what the basic teaching of of the jñānas and of each sense is that there's the organ of sense, there's the object, the eye organ and the object that one sees, and there's the field which is created. There's a field created. I mean, you can walk through it, you can do something, you know. It creates a space or field. Now, again, I'm trying to emphasize the idea of a field. And that field is a field of associations.

[11:08]

Now, if I emphasize hearing and the object of hearing, well, a field is created too, which we can call a mind sense, perhaps, because each of the five physical senses is associated with mind. and mind itself is a separate source, as I said. Okay, so if I see something with the eye and the object, a field arises, and we can call that field, let's call it a sense mind, the eye mind or something like that, and associations related to seeing will appear. If I emphasize the hearing field that arises from an object, a sound, and the organ of the ear, different associations arise. And it's actually a different space.

[12:16]

Because not only does a field of associations arise, a space arises which locates you and is a location. And it has a different topography than the sound space. So it has different topography, a different locating sense. Now, this is very basic Buddhism, Abhidharma Buddhism. And it's considered that you, this is part of the craft of practice. If you want to know thyself as functioning, becoming, So the space you feel yourself located in when you emphasize sound is different than the space, the visual space.

[13:19]

And the space you feel yourself located in and smell is different. There's a kind of intimacy to smell, a different topography. I mean, I wonder what this topography, white dogs. what the room, what the topography of a room, which is mainly known through smell, is like. In a good restaurant, you know, that meal, that one over there, you know, you can begin to feel the territory the location you're in through each of the five senses, physical senses. So there's a space, location, topography to the space, there's associations that arise in the space. And right now, listening to me, if you mainly emphasize hearing,

[14:30]

Associations related to hearing will arise. If you're looking around, as some of you kind of look around, we tend to try not to look around in Zen practice. Looking around creates a whole different kind of feeling of associations. So you can look, but you want to keep your eyes sort of fixed you know, or still, because you're emphasizing, and I'm speaking to the associations which arise through hearing, and bodily gestural motility, or something like that. Okay. Because the territory of a Taisho, is a different territory than reading, and I've been talking about it a lot, etc., etc. Okay. So that is, you can find out for yourself, find a way for yourself to practice noticing each sense separately, and the field that arises with each sense, and

[15:44]

And there's tons for all of this. You don't need to know them. And then you begin to be able to feel, like in the lecture, you bring two of the senses together more. Sometimes you bring three or you bring all of them together. But now you're bringing separate territories, source territories of knowing together and knowing them together separately. That's the craft of practice. And so you can bring two senses together, or three, or one, or all of them at once, etc. And as you know, I've mentioned so often, that the old meaning of common sense was a sense common to the senses and not ordinary everyday sense. It was like a sixth sense. And I think when we're not in such a visual culture and busy culture and so forth, people had to walk places and do things.

[16:55]

Probably all the senses were actualized, actuated in a different and more detailed way. Okay, now let me take another very basic thing, which I found in the last couple of years I like to unpack, which is The three most basic Zazen instructions, or I could say instructional concepts or something like that. But don't scratch, don't move, and don't invite your thoughts to tea. Don't invite thoughts to tea. Okay. Okay. Now, I want to go through, I'll just go through the third one. Don't invite thoughts to tea. Again, in a somewhat different way than I have before. So as everyone finds, it's fairly easy, quite easy to practice.

[17:59]

You know what it means right away, not to invite thoughts to tea. Okay. But this is a, you know, a helpful instruction for zazen. But it's a, you know, somebody said, you said, where's the, to someone you said, where do I catch bus number five? And they said, over there at the bus stop, that bus stop. Well, that's certainly a concept, over there at, that, buses, stops, bus stop, usually there's either a roof and maybe a pole with the schedule of the bus and things like that. So every one of those words brings forth associations, but basically it's a kind of direction, you go over to the bus stop. Now if the person said to you, well, you may have to wait quite a bit, time for a couple of cigarettes,

[19:05]

Well, there's something else. And, of course, to smoke a cigarette is sort of to study the mind a bit, you know. Something special, I call it special breathing practice. But what if this person is some kind of secret sage that's Mixes among ordinary people and they said it's at that bus stop over there That's where you get number five and it be patient It's a chance to be at the bus stop Who the hell you think you are be at the bus stop Well, this is a different kind of instruction to be it's not just go over the bus stop to be at the bus stop Okay, how do I do that? And maybe it's probably not an Art Nouveau French subway station, probably pretty ordinary.

[20:09]

But what's it mean to be at the bus stop? Now this is a, to say something like that is more like saying don't invite your thoughts to tea. So what do you notice first when you don't invite your thoughts to tea? You notice there's a difference between discursive thoughts and the absence of discursive thoughts. And you notice what happens when you may not invite your thoughts to tea for a while, but then suddenly you're caught by your thoughts and you're thinking about all kinds of things. And if you are being at this bus stop of Zazen, you'll find that you feel different in discursive thoughts than in the absence of discursive thoughts.

[21:11]

So now what are you doing? You're studying the mind. You've started the process of investigating the mind. I mean, in our culture, in Western education and so forth, primarily we learn to use the mind to study, to learn, but we don't use the mind to study the mind. It's not in the usual curriculum. But in Zen, it is the usual curriculum to study, investigate the mind itself. And just with a simple phrase like, don't invite thoughts to tea, you begin to study the mind. You begin the steps, the process. So you notice when you're caught by thinking, like discursive thoughts, discoursing, And when you're not, then you begin to feel the difference between the discursive thoughts and the absence of discursive thoughts.

[22:17]

Okay. Next you begin to notice, sort of the second lesson, is you begin to notice that it's not just that discursive thoughts lead to other discursive thoughts, which they do. but that discursive thoughts generate a field of mind which searches for discursive thoughts. If one topic's used up, it'll find another topic. So you begin to see that there's a structure to mind, and that structure can be experienced and observed. So you notice the mind that arises with discursive thoughts and you notice the mind that arises when there's an absence of discursive thoughts. Now the third lesson is you notice that

[23:25]

the thought to invite, the thought to not invite is not the same kind of thought as the discursive thoughts. If it was the same, as I've said often, if it was the same kind of thought, you'd have to uninvite the thought not to invite, and if you uninvite the thought not to invite, you'd have no instruction. So they must be different thoughts. Okay, so then we need something else. We need... We need to give them a different name. Well, they're mental formations, as I always say. They're both mental formations, but one is an intent or an intention, and the other is discursive thought. So let's call one discursive thought, and let's call the other an intentional mental formation. In my own thinking, I call them IMFs. And when I call them IMFs, that's clear. It's a technical term, IMFs, intentional mental formation.

[24:29]

Okay. So I noticed that this intentional mental formation is not a thought, is not a discursive thought. It's a kind of mental location. It's a kind of mental location posture, kind of mental posture. So you begin to feel the mental posture, a posture that goes beyond just don't invite. It's a mental posture. You can kind of feel a shift from discursive thoughts to the mental posture of not inviting. And you begin to know that shift. And the mental posture of not inviting, very much like the posture of not moving, is more satisfying than the mental posture, mental formation of discursive thoughts.

[25:40]

Okay. And then you begin to find out that you can, that there is a, they're experienceable, the structure of mind is experienceable, and it's experienceable primarily through a physical bodily topography. The bodily topography of experience is more varied than, and in excess, in addition to, the mental definitions, but they relate to each other and you can begin to know the shift to the mental formation, mental posture of not inviting. And you can hold it in mind or stay there.

[26:45]

And you can take a rest there. It's like a different room. So you can go to the room of discursive thoughts. Or you can go into the room. And then you lose your bodily presence. And discursive thoughts usually have not much bodily presence. So you can go into the room of posture. of not inviting, and your senses begin to function differently. And we can call that awareness too, instead of consciousness. Discursive thoughts generate what we can call consciousness. This mental posture of not inviting invites awareness. And it's actually also, as I've been saying, a shift from the more comprehensive right brain way of knowing from the left brain way of knowing.

[27:50]

You know, I read the other day, a person who has a stroke in the right brain, but the left brain is functioning fine, are absolutely convinced nothing's wrong with them. You can't convince them that something's wrong because the left brain supplies the world in the emphasis they've always known. Now there's Jill Bolt Taylor, who I've mentioned before, the Harvard neurologist, who had a left brain stroke. No, she had a right brain stroke, excuse me. No, she had a left brain stroke, and so she stopped functioning. And she really knew she was in trouble. She couldn't figure out what telephones were, how to make a phone call and stuff like that. But she discovered she felt good for several years. So if we notice that you're functioning here, what you may be doing when you shift from a location in discursive thoughts to now with some yogic skill, you can stay in the mind that waits or the mind that doesn't invite.

[29:12]

And that mind is actually a physiological shift into a more right brain way of knowing. And that's the mind that's supposed to be present in Atesha. Okay, so if we look at what's going on here, at this moment, something quite complex is going on. You have the five channels of the senses, the six channels counting mind, they're all functioning now. You're determining how you like your quartet or a quintet or a sextet you're determining how the music of your sensorial realm is being played you may be just doing it by habit because if you've got your identity tied to a certain perceptual pattern then that's what you function through And it's hard to notice outside that, and it's hard to know you can notice outside that until you actually start practicing each sense separately.

[30:17]

And noticing the structures of mind, and that the states, different states of mind, we can call fields of mind, and these fields of mind condition the contents and delimit the contents. And the sensorial fields also condition and delimit. So you're in the midst of these five, six sensorial channels, let's call them. And you can shift from awareness to consciousness. And in the Abhidharma, They have very specific definitions of a mind moment, and a mind moment consists of three sub-moments, which is receiving, duration, and releasing. So there's these three sub-moments, and actually if you read the analysis of this in the Abhidharma, it's 17 stages of each mind moment.

[31:31]

Ooh, but when you know them, you can feel that that's actually happening. Okay, now this kind of knowing how you function in the senses and through the structures of mind and through the shifts you can establish yourself like awareness and consciousness and so forth. That background And that experience of that background is really what makes it possible to understand and function through the particular and the field, and the field as an experience added.

[32:42]

So that's all happening here. And you will notice that thoughts They're also, you know, it's all happening in you, but thoughts externalize the world. And thoughts have particular associations. And then they generate a mind of particular associations. So what mental formations don't externalize the world? What mental formations allow in-here-ness? What mental formations allow out-there-ness? So, Some of this we can talk about as our shifts in worldview, but maybe it's more useful for most of it are just shifts, shifts in habit. Shifts in how you inhabit your experience, how you notice your experience, what you notice instead of something else. Do you notice consistency?

[33:47]

Do you notice inconsistency? Etc. Do you notice both? Anyway, that's just more stuff to try to make last tissue more comprehensible. And you can, I hope, feel the detail of it And then, because these details I'm mentioning are already part of your way of functioning, it's just we have habits which we don't notice a lot of it often. So practice is to get you, the craft of practice is to make you aware of these details and then with the intention of continuous practice, which is Dogen's substitute for Buddha nature. Basically, Dogen doesn't like the idea of Buddha nature and substitutes continuous practice for the idea of Buddha nature.

[34:49]

So with a sense of continuous practice, these details, these mental postures will begin to function in the myriad. The 10,000 things which are always arising. Thank you.

[35:23]

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