It's great that we start by singing or chanting together something we don't understand at all, most of us, and then something we understand, sort of. Yeah, it's great to join together in what we don't understand and then what maybe we understand. And I think maybe to follow up on yesterday, I might speak about the five skandhas. And inside, some of you are saying, oh no, not the five skandhas again. Yeah, but it's what I consider residual teaching.

[01:11]

It's a teaching that underlies and remains no matter what teaching. It's present that five skandhas are there. But I feel okay about speaking about it again. Because I'm told that I always speak about it differently, so that's okay. In any case, it's a re-visioning or re-envisioning of the five skandhas. So the five skandhas are form, non-graspable feelings as I teach it, the percepts, perception, associative mind and consciousness.

[02:18]

Yeah, and one of the basic things it does is it changes how we see ourselves. And how we see ourselves, how we imagine ourselves as a location in the phenomenal world. It makes all the difference in the and your world. Yeah, and to begin to feel and see ourselves as... a representative of the five skandhas, is a big difference. You know, Michael McClure, one of the beat poets, an old friend of mine, now a Buddhist teacher too, I think, he always refers to the... we're just an old skin bag...

[03:40]

Michael McClure, a beat poet, who is also a teacher of Zen, refers to us simply as such old leather bags. A skin bag in an unnamed location. But I want to shift us from, you know, as I've been saying, both in the Dharma Wheel and in the seminar. And I guess the seminar folks are leaving today. I'm getting attached to you it's sort of nice to feel you here I know I'm not supposed to get attached but actually I can handle it yeah it would be nice if you could all stay longer but you know I won't even hint at that

[05:02]

Maybe I'll see you again someday. I say that and lots of popular songs float through my mind. Someday, you know, I stop. But what I'm trying to do is shift us from a sense of a, as I've been saying, though some people don't like the word physiological, from a sense of a physical location to a physiological location. Maybe I should say a biological location. And as I've pointed out, the word biological means the logic, the reason for being alive.

[06:25]

And the reason for being alive is much of how we see ourselves. And really, again, how we see ourselves really is a balancing point in how we exist. So maybe we should talk about Dharma logical. Dharma means to know the world and how it actually exists through individual appearances.

[07:40]

So practice is to develop us all, really, we could say, as dharmalogical beings. We have a new logic through which we experience aliveness. No, and we could also then, you know, fooling around like this, we could have pranological. How the reason for being alive through breath energy commands us. Prana means breath energy. Yeah, and maybe, let's not stop there, let's have prajna logic.

[08:46]

You know, I'm fooling around, but I'm live serious too. I'm not dead serious yet. Prajna then means, I think you all know, but it's translated usually as wisdom, but it actually means something like a bodily realization of how we actually exist. And the skandhas are the most basic description within Buddhism as a whole of biologically bodily realization of how we actually exist.

[10:19]

Now, the way to Learn the five skandhas is to practice them as a way to enter sasen. And it's a way to learn to develop yourself through the five skandhas. So we start with consciousness, the fifth skanda, because that's where we're at usually. Notice my hand went up here automatically, as if consciousness is up here somewhere. And my hand is right.

[11:28]

The consciousness sees the world, but it's not really grounded in seeing the world. I sometimes feel sorry for giving you all this work. I just say something and then you have to work to turn it in. It's okay? Good translators don't think about what they're translating. It just appears. And this is an interesting dynamic. I mean, as soon as somebody thinks about how to track, whoops, they don't, you know, it doesn't work. Hey, you translated that very well. She's good, you know. Okay, so we start with consciousness.

[12:45]

And of course if you get into the zendo and you walk through the door and not the wall, that's for advanced practitioners, you end up sitting on your cushion through functional consciousness. And then you sit down. And you begin to find, as I've said yesterday, your posture. And you find your spine, your spine, mind and breath. And you find your spine, your spine, mind and breath. And actually, as you find your spine, mind and breath, you sort of let loose of the room.

[13:56]

You're withdrawing attention from how consciousness constructs the room you're in. Du ziehst die Aufmerksamkeit ab davon, wie das Bewusstsein den Raum konstruiert, in dem du bist. And you're bringing attention, you're letting go of consciousness, and you're bringing attention to how the body establishes interiority. So letting go of the room, letting go of consciousness, suddenly there's a shift and kind of what we call associative mind, the four skandha appears. And one good thing to learn by doing this, you know, in many Zazen periods it helps, is there's a physical shift, like there's a physical shift when you fall asleep, there's a physical shift you feel as you let go of consciousness and enter this fourth skandha.

[15:38]

And the fourth skanda has a It's a kind of dream, you know, it's a version of dreaming mind. Yeah, some of its contents, kind of contents, could be in consciousness and many don't belong in consciousness, never fit into consciousness. Just like the things we see in dreams. They don't belong in consciousness.

[16:39]

I mean, where the heck did that come from? Well, it came from the fourth skanda. It was waiting around for you. Yeah, and it's a kind of... confective mind. I mean, a mind, confection means like pastries in English, but it also means what puts things together. And so it's not only contents, it's also contents what's associated with each other, associative contents. And there's not just one layer to this fourth skandha. There are many foundational layers.

[17:43]

And strangely enough, they're there, but the more you've let go of consciousness and the more you've entered this almost liquidity of stillness, The stillness seems to have a viscosity which pushes contents on other foundational levels up into a kind of interior knowing. And it's really good to get to know this interior knowing. Because it's where the dynamics of our personal history and trauma and wounds and so forth, all are present, but we keep them out of consciousness, if we can.

[19:19]

And it's where also the complexity of associations which are so beautiful and the condition and potential for enlightenment resides. So it's good to stay for a while in this associative mind. And don't cut it off like, oh, this is just thoughts, you know, something like that. This is you. This is your accumulated history and cultural history and personal and so forth.

[20:20]

And the magic of potentialities which you'd never realized before. So you get to know it. You not only get to know the shift from consciousness to this fourth skandha, but a certain kind of breathing goes with the fourth skandha. the breath is a kind of barometer of your inner atmospheric pressure and you kind of just get to know this breathing that's associated with associative mind And this is not just coincidental to the shift into sleeping.

[21:51]

It's the same kind of or same shift from consciousness into sleeping or into the barometric space of the fourth skandha. And not only is it comparable to falling asleep, this shift in the associative mind, it is actually the same shift that takes place in this atmospheric space. So in a way, by practicing the teaching of the five skandhas, you're establishing the interiority or the space within us where much of who and what we are functions. Yeah, so it's good to get to know the space and to let your bodily field feel it.

[22:54]

Now we have the third skanda, which I call percept-only skanda. You're isolating each of the five senses. Sort of isolating them from each other as you do in Vishnana practice too. And you're experiencing each sense as if it were the definitive sense. And maybe it's good to start with touch. Haptic, tactile sense. And they say, and it seems to be true, since I've had a lot to do with babies, babies is the first sense, touch is the first sense that babies have.

[24:25]

They locate the gravity, the mattress, the crib. Sie lokalisieren auf diese Weise die Schwerkraft, die Matratze in ihrer Krippe. Yeah, and they feel turning around. Sie fühlen auf diese Weise, wenn sie sich herumdrehen. And they feel the nipple and bodily warmth and so forth. I mean, it's the way that I would feel sure. It's the way an infant, a baby, first begins to experience its environment. That's why I think in the first months and even years, a lot of touching and holding and physically interacting is important for the child to develop.

[25:46]

And they say this haptic sense of touch is the last sense to disappear, to dissolve when you die. And you also say that this haptic-tactile sense is the last thing that disappears when you die. Yes, I have not been there yet. then I won't have any senses left to notice, but somebody else can say, hey, he still feels touch. Yeah, I mean, maybe it sounds gloomy, I talk about it, but this is our life, which is life because it ends. So, breathing practice, life begins with a breath.

[26:56]

And life ends with an exhale. And in between are all the breaths which can develop as wisdom, compassion, connectivity and so forth. So I would say first we explore this haptic visceral tactile sense. Because it's given us our first sense of the world.

[27:57]

It's the platform and scaffolding on which we've developed all the other information from the senses. So we have lots of teachings like when you do kinan you breathe through your heel to awaken your contact with the world. And it's called healed breathing. And you feel the world then coming up through you, bio-dharmic-ologically. And then there's hearing.

[29:09]

Hearing is probably the next most dharmically accessible sense. Hearing is how we establish space. We hear space. How you hear a car coming or hear a bicycle coming. Or if you drop something, you know more or less usually where it fell because your ears located it in space. So, now resting in the definitive, resting in auditory experience, hearing experience, that's the... as the way we can develop a feel for interior space.

[30:41]

Now, in our culture, we don't develop interiority much. Yes, some of us do, but it's not really something... We have outer sports, but we don't have many inner sports. So we can say the five skandhas are developing inner sport. So with the... hearing skandha you begin to feel the have a physical interior space really just as hearing

[31:42]

Hören ist die Weise, wie wir den äußeren Raum schaffen, aber es ist auch eine der Hauptweisen, wie wir den inneren Raum schaffen. So perhaps now we can understand better why in Chinese Taoist teaching and so forth, the macrocosm and the microcosm are thought to echo each other and that your interiority echoes the exteriority. Now, if you don't just see yourself as an object in a world of objects, if we see one of Kohlbrunner's cats around here, walking through the fields or across the campus somewhere.

[33:04]

It doesn't feel like an object in the world. It feels like quite a live little furry thing. Well, we're a live little furry thing. I mean, So now, through practicing the five skandhas, you begin to feel yourself in the world of an interiority which is profoundly located and related to exteriority. And maybe in some other seminar I can develop the... relationship between interiority and an exteriority rooted in interiority.

[34:10]

We can't do everything, but at least we're here right now together. And we're discovering together this magic of an interior space that we can develop, it's not automatic, we can develop through, in this case, the skanda of inner hearing. And when your outer hearing in zazen is related to an experience as an inner hearing, You hear the outer hearing as an inner hearing too, and then you hear your own hearing, which is actually a wonderful, blissful experience.

[35:30]

Wenn du das äußere Hören auch als inneres Hören hörst, dann hörst du eigentlich dein eigenes Hören. Und das ist eine glückselige Erfahrung. And also it has the dynamic that this inner audible, this inner aural space. Und es hat auch die Dynamik dieses Inneren. is where we can experience directly the dynamic of naming. Because you hear like just now a car passed or something. In Crestone, you know, when I'm in Zazen, I don't know whether I'm in Crestone or Yanisov, but anyway... In Creston, what I hear are the New York-Los Angeles flights. And here, what I hear are the tractors. Haying early in the morning because they expect sunny days. So here comes a tractor or something like that?

[36:51]

And is it a tractor or just the music of the spheres? I can peel the, really you can sort of have the visual, imagistic experience of peeling the name off the tractor. And you can feel very grateful the tractor because it's awakening your interior audible space. And showing you that it's possible to... know to be engaged in aliveness without names. And without the linguistic, cognitive cascade of information.

[37:55]

You can just You begin to peel the labels off everything and pretty soon you're in another kind of space. And proprioceptively and haptically you're now also feeling the people beside you and you're sensing out the room but you're sensing out the room through your... within an interior, within an interiority of the senses. Now when we focus on visuality, seeing, visuality, yeah, I don't know what word to use because they all imply the outside.

[38:57]

This inner seeing without the eyeball. I've often wondered if a blind person, who is blind from birth at least, sees, creates an interior visual space anyway, even though they haven't created an exterior visual space. So you begin to create an interior visual space now. The inner auditory sense has created an interior physical space. The inner visual interiority has created a visual space.

[40:12]

And now you can rest in this and experience it again, see something way in the distance in this visual space and you can bring it up real closely without adjusting the lens. It's like you could be in a dream and there's a background to the dream, but the background to the dream is far away. And in this visual space in which you're participatory because you're practicing the five skandhas, you can articulate the background and bring it into the foreground. Was that too much? It was a little too much. Okay, it was fun, though. So, like in a dream, you can, in inner visual space, you can explore the details of the, for example, the associative skandha.

[41:45]

And this inner visual space allows you to know the outer world in new ways, in more subtle ways. But you have to discover that for yourself. These are only, really what I'm saying are only hints, they're not descriptions. What I'm trying to say is this inner space, this interiority, is something we all exist within. And through the practice of the five skandhas we can begin to articulate it and develop it and relate it to exteriority. There's a couple more senses too. And there's two more skandhas.

[43:08]

But it seems like the clock is saying, you know, based on our galaxy and so forth. Not universal, galactic. Yeah. So I had leave the other skandhas and whatever I might have said to Niko. Also lasse ich die anderen zwei Skandals und was ich sonst noch gesagt hätte für Nicole. It's a scandal that I would just... I would do this to her. Okay, thank you very much. Vielen Dank. ...

[43:53]

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