So I would like to start with some discussion from you guys about any of this. I would like to start a discussion from you guys about any of these things that we have discussed today. To sit to zazen right after lunch is a little sleepy. So you all understand it perfectly? There's no questions about it? Michael, let's have something. Do you want to say it in German? Now what do you mean by practical advice?

[01:07]

Every day. Well, I don't know if this isn't so much everyday life as at any time. I suppose the kind of stabilized way to practice with them is in meditation. As I said this morning, like the practice of following a thought to its source.

[02:11]

And that's a basic practice. Something comes up and you try to see, oh, that was caused by that, which was caused by that. And you keep tracing, you... quite often practice tracing something back to see when it first came up. In a way there's no first because it's all arising from the moment you were born. But there's still, there's a kind of definition to each state of mind and thought that you can kind of get to when it arose. And when you do that and how often you do that, it's really up to you. I mean, you know about this practice.

[03:20]

You might not do much with it for several years. But it's kind of, you know about it in the background. At some other point, you might feel the need to make an effort in it. Yeah, or you can take it on more consciously and make an effort to do it. And the rest is, like I said, looking at Helena, practice during the day once or twice a day or once or twice a week, stopping and kind of looking at something and seeing if you can see the five skandhas. Like you're sitting on a balcony or something. And you look at a tree. and you see what associations arise, what feelings arise, and so forth.

[04:24]

It's a little bit like a good cook can go to a restaurant and say, oh yes, this has got this in it, this in it, this in it. But if you don't know anything about cooking, it just tastes like food. That may be good. But if someone says, what do you suppose is in this? You have no idea. Paprika, I think. You know. If you know how to cook or have some experience, you can begin to say, oh, this has got this, this, and this. So keeping the five skandhas in view is a little bit like learning how to cook. Because you're either going to be cooked You're either going to cook your karma or you're going to be cooked by your karma.

[05:35]

And if you don't know the ingredients, you're going to be cooked by your karma. But I'd advise you to learn how to cook. Okay. Someone else? He said you haven't spoken that much about experience and he feels quite defined and limited by his own experiences. Limited but also stabilized. You talked of purifying and the opposite. Contamination.

[06:38]

Contaminating experiences. Yes. Things that I have learned from my own experiences, from my own processes. He feels that he has still remnants in his body which are quite stubborn residue of these experiences. Yeah, of course. Yeah, remember I put... Boy, Philan really went to work up there, didn't he?

[07:41]

Remember I put on after consciousness experience. Earlier, do you remember? Yeah. So... The question here is, how is your consciousness, how is your experience created? How do you experience something? And how do you store that experience? And how do you get access to that experience? And how does that experience affect your way of perceiving? So that pretty much covers the territory, doesn't it? So, you know, I'll try to respond to that between now and tomorrow.

[08:43]

It's a rather big question. I mean, if we can understand that question, what do you do about your experience, then that's all psychology, Buddhism and everything. It's a great deal of your life. Now, one thing about the five skandhas here and the decorated consciousnesses Do you take the old ones away here? I describe this as a process going in this direction. also goes this, it's also this horizontal.

[09:48]

Does that make sense? No, yes. Do you understand the sense that it goes this direction? And do you understand that you can go backwards in this? Okay, you go to a restaurant and you have dinner. And it tastes a certain way. And you say, how was that made? When you say that, you're going backwards. Oh, it's got paprika in it and rice and... So when you practice that, and you just, you can't, most of these things you can't really do in the usual sense. That's why it's said you should keep the five standards in view. because it's not exactly something you can do but if you keep keep them in view keep reminding yourself of them you'll begin to find that these five areas you can begin to sense them

[11:16]

Okay. So I think that you see that usually there's a kind of process that goes this direction. And we usually are just living here. And you can reverse the process. And practice is to reverse the process. And the ability to do that depends on over some period of time keeping them in view. No, I don't think I can be more clear than that. You can try in meditation specifically to see now which skandhas happen here. Now, the people I talked this to last year Quite a lot of them have really gotten a real feeling of it.

[12:42]

They'll say something to me, oh, that's in such and such a scoundrel. I'll say, yeah, that's right. So first of all, you're introduced to it, and then you have to get familiar with it. it's not difficult but it's good to get familiar okay now it doesn't just have to go one, two, three, four, five you can have a perception and then a feeling arises from that and from the feelings associations arise It's not a fixed system. Generally, this is here and this is here. You can actually go right from form to consciousness. But in general, to understand them as a pedagogical device, we put them in this order.

[13:45]

And it's a kind of truth, roughly, to the order. Okay. Now, when we, in our culture, educate persons, what are we educating? Primarily, we're educating perceptions and associations. And we attempt to control the individuals in the society by making this the major definition of people. This is very intrinsic to Western culture. And it's why Plato was opposed to poetry.

[14:58]

And as we know, before Plato, there was an oral culture. An oral tradition based on memory. On mnemonic devices. And the what? Mnemonic, memory devices. And what's that? What are memory devices like that? The body. So Culture before Plato emphasized this and this. Because the body falls here. And if you have a culture memorized, you can't change it by perception. Because you can say, well, this is right and this is wrong, but everyone's, they just, you're acting out of memory, out of body.

[16:06]

So Plato was afraid of trance, of absorption, meditation, of poetry. Meditation and poetry. because it's not controllable. You can't develop society. So since Plato, there's been a more and more emphasis on developing this as where culture reaches to. So this is where we're acculturated and what we use is a control device. So you can see it when people get drunk. They start expressing feelings.

[17:10]

They've lost this control. And so we are more acculturated here and wilder here. Now, again to use Japan as an example. Japan teaches people intent, willpower, and so forth. Japan, the people, intentions, feelings, and so on. And willpower works here. Your feelings are kept in shape by willpower, intention, how you're supposed to feel. Now, one of the things that I noticed when I first went to Japan to live, I went in 68 or 69.

[18:12]

And I left San Francisco in the middle of flower power. And the uprising of the present rock scene, light shows. I mean, have any of you seen this movie, The Doors? That was pretty retro like it was. That wasn't a clean exaggeration. That's what I kind of suppose you could try. I mean, it was kind of the gruesome side where people got too much into the drugs. But I knew all those people. In fact, I went to Jim Morrison's first concert in San Francisco, which first occurred, which was in the middle. So I was used to all this psychedelic stuff, right? I got to Japan, it was extremely psychedelic, and they didn't take psychedelics. Because at least it was a psychedelic like because it was a great freedom at this level So a lot of their ads and images and graphic things

[19:20]

were really far out and weird. But they held themselves in place. Japanese are very held in place through will and holding their feelings in place. Now, I'm making this comparison not to... not to really show any difference between us and Japan, but to point out that these various possibilities are available to you. And in fact, I'm sure those of you who are therapists see people who sometimes really exist more in the feeling skanda than in the perceptual skanda. And they have trouble with that because the control mechanisms in our society are about this and not about this. Or what we accept. I'm using this example again also to show that these have a horizontal identity.

[21:03]

Okay. If you are more acculturated at this level, it means that this level can't entirely accept or understand what happens at this level. Do you understand that? That makes it worse, I think, by the way. So you have a whole range of, you have a history in this skanda. What I mean by that is, I have feelings about this rose, which are not perceptions. They're just feelings.

[22:17]

They don't ever get formed into perceptions. And those feelings are part of my memory. Now, Proust's remembrance of things past begins with the smell of the hawthorn, doesn't it? And out of that... And out of that smell, six volumes appear. So in one kind of memory or feeling about this flower, there are many things folded together. And so at this level you have many, a kind of history of associations, even a kind of an identity that isn't at this level.

[23:18]

That's one of the problems with the limited view. of lying on the couch and telling the psychologist what you feel. And using free association or something. No, free association is bigger than your script sometimes. But still you're attempting to make your history conscious through free association. Not all your history, not all your experience can be made conscious. Something that only exists at the level at which it was occurred. So it's a little bit like, again, the example I find most useful, is you have a dream.

[24:39]

Now, it's very useful to try to understand the dream and to try to use various approaches to... to pick up what's going on. As indicative of secondary archetypal processes. Now, in Buddhism we might do that too. But the more basic way is you feel the dream. However it appears to you, you feel it. You don't try to understand. But you learn to take that feeling and stay with that feeling in your body. And then you go through your day and you let the events of the day speak to you through the feeling of the dream.

[25:44]

Now, do you understand that idea? In other words, you're not trying to translate the dream into another medium. You're leaving the dream as you find it. But you stay in the feeling of it So the same is true in each of the skandhas is you have a kind of experience that's not translatable into other skandhas. And so one of the reasons we dream is because we have, say, well, I mentioned the experience earlier of meeting in objects. Yes, I have previously mentioned this experience of meeting objects.

[26:48]

The example that I may have already mentioned before, The Japanese and Chinese usually don't put handles on cups. And, no offense meant, it's not because they're stupid and don't know how to make handles. They're quite smart, actually. They don't put handles on things because they want you to use two hands. They want you to have to pick something up like this. Because they see your body as a field of energy. And when you do something like this, you're denying that field.

[27:51]

And you're doing it from, when I just reach out with a handle, The handle exists in the perceptual skanda. When you... I'll try to give you some more examples. When your definition is a perceptual... See if this makes sense to you. When the perceptual skanda is the definitive skanda. Let me go back. Let me say something else. We design our clothes to fit our body so that we have freedom outside our clothes.

[29:00]

Again, this is an example I've used before. The Japanese design clothes so you have freedom inside the cloth, inside your... Now, these Japanese designers who are successful now basically take that idea of these big pieces of cloth that you're free inside and adapt them to Western taste. And so when you have these big pieces of cloth, just as they come off the loom hung on your arms, you have to learn to use them with your whole body. You can't use them with handles. It's like the kind of outfit you get on, jacket. It's clearly more from Asian cultures. where your whole body relates to it, not pulling on a shirt.

[30:16]

And the clothes are meant to reflect the way your body is an aura or a field. And you definitely don't want to put tight things around your waist, which actually cut off the energy body. So the obi and the things that Japanese women wear are meant to be flat and wide here and give you strength here in this main chakra where you organize your experience. Now, most cultures long ago forgot the intelligence that's in the culture. And so people just do it. They don't know what to do. Okay, so the sense in this is, when I pick something up, I am defining my energy field.

[31:27]

So I pick it up. And when I use both hands, I'm bringing energy to it. And as I told you earlier, Many of you quite often, when I get on to this, when someone asks Izuki Roshi, my teacher, what do you notice first about being in the West? He says, everyone does things with one hand. Because for him, like if Helen and I went to lunch, And she asked me for the soy sauce or the salt and I pass it to her. And I have a sense of using both hands.

[32:31]

And I have a sense of turning my body toward her. I'm passing myself to her, not the salt. And actually, when I do that, there's a sense of directing your energy to the person. Now that comes out of a culture which emphasizes the form skanda. And practices relating to that are called the practices meeting in objects. So, for example, I'm going to Japan next to In August. And I have to bring presents. Now, if somebody who's not Japanese doesn't know Japan, you don't have to bring presents.

[33:38]

But I've been going there regularly for 20 years, so they know I know. And you have to do something physical. It's not serious if you don't do something with an object. Like somebody brought this rose. You have to do something like that. Just thinking it isn't enough. You have to think it and have a physical expression too. So when we, the practice of meeting an object, which I can't really go into much, is how the physical world speaks directly to you without any intermediary. And often in our dreams, like when I had this dream of this spaceship, and the spaceship was full of these fake American Indians, I can actually trace much of that back to where it arose, but it's all about

[34:53]

what's happening during the day where I feel a meeting going on in objects that isn't mental exactly. But occurs in my dreams. So a lot of this stuff, when we don't emphasize a chakra in our daily life, that dimension will start appearing in our dreams or in some other way. And I believe that the Mendelian practitioners, and maybe I should say the pops, but I feel like I'm talking about my dad, I always called my father Pop. But anyway, I believe the Mendelian approach has this idea of you dream something up in another person or dream you.

[36:07]

Like I had a student recently who in practicing had a very painful back. And they really wanted to move. And I said to them, don't move, just don't be stiff. But stay and let it hurt. And this went on for about two years. Every time she sat, she had this particular pain in her back. And the pain bothered her a lot. And then in this last sashin we did at the Haus der Stille a month or so ago.

[37:23]

She stayed with this pain again, it appeared. Felt like a knife was being pushed in her back. But suddenly it relaxed. Other muscles had been tight before that she let relax, and underneath those muscles was this really painful one. And a flood of images came up. And those images had to do with a very muddy stream that her mother used to tell her not to go to because it had sewage in it and stuff. But she remembered as a little girl going down to the stream behind the house regularly. And just the way the stream went and the grasses bent into the stream and were swept along by the water and stood up and so forth.

[38:31]

All of these images came up of when the world was perfect. And a flood of images came up of other times in her life when she's known the world is perfect. But she had no way to deal with the idea that the world is perfect because her mother said, oh, go near that stream and this is that. She didn't know what to do with the experience that the world was perfect. Like we have, don't you have a German expression, a happy donkey is skating on thin ice? Isn't there such an expression in German? How does it go? When the cow is happy, then she goes on the ice.

[39:45]

I heard it near Hamburg the other way. Cows here and donkeys there. Well, there's a strong thing also coming from Greek and Roman culture of hubris. Of pride to goeth before a fall. Pride goeth before a fall. When you have pride, you're soon going to fall. And there's a kind of thing like, better watch out if you get too happy. And so we have an experience of which when we experience the world as perfect, we don't know what to do with experience because no one corroborates it. Everybody says, watch out, you're feeling too good. So this was all in a very painful spot in her back that hurt all the time.

[40:52]

And she was so relieved when she could see that. So that's a kind of a memory that's stored from the images of the stream and in her physical body, and you can't get at it in the usual way. And again, in Buddhism, what we would do to practice with such a thing Well, it's helpful to remember that the world is perfect occasionally. But also you try to capture the taste, get to know the taste, the memory that comes back of when the world was perfect. And see if that can be like a little seed that's present even now, sort of underneath the layers of things.

[42:02]

So you kind of water that seed a little bit. You know, with feeling a little more at ease and things. So that was a long response to your question. Have a good day. Have a good day. I was in Japan in a restaurant, and at the same time, Princess Diana was visiting Japan. And they thought you were Diana. It was a very shrugged man who thought I was Diana, and he wanted to kiss me. So all his friends were trying to dissuade him that, not that I wasn't Diana, because that was too difficult, but that it wasn't a good idea that, you know, I tried to get him outside. But he was just being nice, and he wasn't difficult at all. I had a drunk man come up to me in Tokyo once and he was a little disheveled Testing your German.

[43:27]

And he grabbed me, he was quite short, you know. And he grabbed me and he held me quite fiercely. And he said, you're not better than me. You're not better than me. Because Westerners were seen as better. Now if I went, he'd say, I am better than you. I am better than you. It's a good question, but I don't know how to answer it really better. What do they do? Yeah. Yeah, that's probably what happens these days. Their sense of a directed consciousness seems to, this definitely seems to change.

[44:38]

It's hard also to say because Japanese get drunk very, very easily. They're highly susceptible to alcohol. So just one little tiny drink and they're drunk, so it's hard to know, you know, it's kind of like a national pastime. Yes. Do I understand it correct that as a result of five skandhas we have the experience, right? Yeah, yeah. And experience is past, right? Yes, right. And this... There's not a danger if we, you said it's a two-way process, both directions. Is it not a danger that if we go too often back in the other way, back to the form, past direction, that then we are blocked to believe at the present time because then we have standards and concepts to go back to the past and this blocks our life.

[45:44]

I think we're living now at this moment, not in the past. You see what I mean? Oh, yeah, very clearly. Of course, the past is there. It's present. But we have to take distance from the history of the experience. Yeah. And this is a conflict for me, how past is there, but I live now, not in the past. Yeah. So we are first to eliminate the bad experience that we had in the past. There are slaves that always had this... Pain in their back, yeah. How can I do that? Yeah, maybe you should say that in German. I said that the result is the experience. And the experience is the experience. It happens. It happens. And he said, there are two ways, this process, forward and backward. For me, this is a problem, that we are going too strong into the past, because that blocks the area, the present, now that it was the area, the area was so little experienced, and that I was already in the past with the concepts and standards so small, that it also blocks me.

[47:04]

And I said that Yeah, I really appreciate your question. because it shows that I've been clear enough that you can actually get some sense of how this works. Okay. Now, you're both right and wrong. Of course, you're not wrong, but when you go When you start with consciousness, and you go back, oh yeah, that came from an association.

[48:09]

And that goes, oh, and that was, yeah, I recognized that song. And I had a feeling about it. And so you've gone back in the past in relationship to that one thought. That's clear. That's what you're saying, right? But that's if you live here. And One of the problems with consciousness is that it's the past. So as soon as I see you and I've brought associations in, I'm already in the past. You have a green sweater on and a grey collar and I have associations from many things, people dressed this way and so forth. And there's various things that I apprehend you at various levels.

[49:16]

As soon as I put, and the prasabha putting it together puts you into the past. However, if I live at this point, or I live at this point, I'm going forward into the present. It's only in the past when I live here. Do you understand? Yes, but there is also an unconscious. Maybe there are some connections to the past. It's in the unconscious. You see what I mean? So I have to find out what is the unconscious that we experience from when I was a child. As you said, the experience for this girl with her mother. So how can I find out about the unconscious, about the unconscious?

[50:20]

Okay. Let me try to deal with the unconscious or speak about it in a moment, all right? And then I'd like to take a break. But before I talk about the unconscious, and I'll see if I have time before we should take a break, let me... speak about this in the context of living in the present and living in the present of the present, which I discussed in Cortona. All right. So, if I live in the present, the again the best example i have come to is say you're in an airplane and the airplane is um an engine is blown up or something and you're probably going to crash the engine is

[51:43]

You look out the window and you say, oh shit, kaput. Sorry, we'll get you to translate these bad words. I avoid them. I don't hear them. Finally a pure woman. Good upbringing. So say married or something. Anyway, so... If you at that moment compare yourself to the person who was going to be met at the airport, you're not living in the present. Now, almost everyone will do that. Oh, I was planning to be met at the airport, but you know. Or you remember the thing, who you were when you got on the plane.

[52:59]

But actually, if you practice over and over again, living in finding your definition mostly in the present without reference to past or future, If the present is only a tunnel between the past and future, you're not very alive. Okay, but if you practice emphasizing the present and sort of de-emphasizing your identity being in past and future, I'm pretty sure if you're in the airplane, you won't think too much about the person who's going to be met. And in extreme situations like men and women in wartime, in combat, you talk to them and they say they don't have a sense of time, and they're not afraid.

[54:03]

Or sometimes they're so afraid that they get on the other side of that. But in any case, what I'm saying is that one sense of living in the present is to have your sense of where you live of how you define yourself in the present, not from the past or future. So, say that I'm in a terrible crisis and five horrible things just happened. And I have to give a lecture. And I've had no sleep. I can say to myself, jeez, I wish I didn't, you know... Maybe I'll cancel the lecture. But, you know, I just figure, usually, well, I feel horrible and there's terrible things. I'll let the lecture come out of that. Because I just have a habit of making use of whatever's there. And I don't have many wishes that were otherwise.

[55:40]

If I have a chance to change it, I will. Okay, so that's the sense, and that's a very important thing to develop, the sense of defining yourself through the present. But that's not living in the present of the present. Okay. That is more like when you practice, as I've mentioned several times, following a thought to its source, you begin to be, as I said earlier, you live at the arising of thoughts, not the reception of thoughts. You're present as you first hear that song of the Krumer-Lanka song, you're present at the moment you first hear it and you feel this sadness arise.

[56:51]

You're present when you first feel the flu coming three days before you have any symptoms. Or you feel the ingredients of a headache happening And usually you won't ever have headaches again. Because you begin to know this situation plus what I just feel right now and the way my shoulder changes, I'm going to have a headache later in the day. So you immediately... look at the situation, the mood that caused that, you relax your shoulder and probably, etc., you won't have any. Okay, so that's living more in the present of the present. And that's why the form skanda is emphasized. And practices of bare perception. Because the form scandal is closer not only to the present of the present, but it's also closer to emptiness and to the undivided world.

[58:18]

Okay, so here we have emptiness. And here, this consciousness is loaded to consciousness. Do you understand? It's loaded with feelings, perceptions, impulses. So, when you begin the practice of the five skandhas, so you can go backwards in the five skandhas, you're getting closer up here to awareness. Like the awareness I said... that wakes you up at 6.02. So awareness, when it begins to have feelings, perceptions, impulses, consciousness, in Buddhism we call it consciousness, When awareness is loaded, we call it consciousness.

[59:24]

When you unload it, we call it awareness. Now, I say the word it as if it was They were both the same thing. One is loaded, one is unloaded. Like it was a full truck and an empty truck. But we don't know if it's the same truck. We know there's a difference. But this is language, it's like language says, it rains. Do you say that in German, it rains? But no one knows what it is. I mean, rain rains. But you see, our language requires a theological implication that things are happening from outside.

[60:34]

We say, my stomach hurts. Someone who owns the stomach. But when your stomach hurts, stomach owns you. So, you know, in some languages you just say stomach hurts, you don't say who owns the stomach. So in any case, what's interesting about this is that you can say that awareness and consciousness have different viscosities. I'm just making this up. It has a different temperature, a different fluidity. This has lots of marks, this has almost no marks.

[61:38]

So if you try to float the idea that you're going to wake up at 6.02 in your consciousness, If you try to float the idea, it will sink. But you can float it in awareness. And it will float right through your sleeping and wake you up at 6.02 a.m. So, for example, the images have a different weight than such kinds of ideas.

[62:38]

So if you have an image from a dream, you try to grasp it with perception. starts coming apart. And you start not being able to remember the dream. But if you can kind of change your state, if you can remember, if you go in the dream and you can remember one vivid scene in the dream, and you can kind of like stay with that vivid image, you change the viscosity of your mind, and then the other things that float at that level will suddenly, the rest of the dream appears. Do you understand that image? In other words, if you try to grasp a dream here, it all starts to sink and slip away.

[63:40]

Sometimes you can get hold of it delicately with an association or with a feeling. In other words, whatever skanda arises changes the temperature and the viscosity of the mind. Now, I'm using these terms viscosity and temperature in a scientific way, but rather loosely, but to give you a feeling that different things float differently in Europe. Okay. The root of consciousness, the SCI, in English means to cut, to separate.

[64:46]

Der Wurzel von consciousness, da das SCI heißt zu schneiden, And the root of awareness in this part is to be wary, is to watch. I just happen to adopt these two terms to mean divided consciousness and undivided consciousness. I think I'm going to have to talk about unconsciousness after the break. Now, what I would like you to do, if you would be willing, is after... What I'd like us to do is take a, let's see, we've been at this now about 100 minutes.

[66:03]

No, an hour. An hour, a little over an hour. And so I'd like you to take a, say, 10 to 15 minute break. And then I'd like you to, there's about 35 people here, I guess. No, 30 people. And 25 or 30 people. So I'd like you to break up into small groups of maybe five or six people. So five or six little groups. Just the ones of you here and the ones of you here. Without much, don't try to choose the nicest person. Now, the reason I would like you to do that is because one is I'd like you to share with each other a little of the experience or how you understand these terms.

[67:10]

And maybe how these terms relate in any way to any kind of religious experience or feeling you might have had in a church as a kid or in nature or by the ocean or like this woman had with feeling the world was perfect. We don't really have much permission to talk about these things. We can talk about all kinds of experiences, including even sexual experiences nowadays. But we don't have much permission to talk about religious or spiritual experiences. But you can talk about anything, Anna. Just talk about whatever you want. Because the main thing is I don't want these seminars to be me this way all the time.

[68:16]

Because Sangha is so important in Buddhism. Sangha means a deepening awareness of how other people exist in you and how you exist in them. And how we all participate in creating understanding. And create opportunities for others and others create opportunities for us. And often express things that we feel too, but haven't quite expressed. But not to be serious, just have a good time talking to each other. So, in other words, we have a break, and sometime halfway through the break, you start getting together and sitting down. No strict rule, just sit down with each other and talk a little bit. And then at some point I will ring the bell once, twice, and thrice.

[69:24]

But there might be five or ten minutes between each hit. So all I mean is maybe we should sort of think about getting back together. But if nobody responds, then I'll hit the second bell much later. Okay. Makes me wish I understood German. So I could participate. Nothing I love better is a good conversation with nice people. Makes me see how each one of you is a whole world, a whole repository of impressions.

[70:29]

But I like the feeling anyway. So, does anyone have anything you'd like to, you'd like to continue the discussion of any particular point with all of us? Yeah. I would be interested to know where the validation comes in. You mean value or validation? Values. Mm-hmm. It must be either perception or the impulses. It's a really good question. And it's such questions that make the system work.

[71:30]

I don't mind if you stay seated or stand up. If we just had awareness, wholeness of mind, Well, you can't really imagine a world that way because we need divisions. And the nature of consciousness is it's discontinuous. The nature of awareness is it's continuous.

[72:34]

Die Natur von Achtsamkeit ist eine Kontinuität. Now, again, one of my favorite quotations is that, I believe it's Immanuel Kant, says that What's essential about a human being is the integrity and continuity of consciousness over time. And that makes sense, right? But it's not Buddhism. And we actually tie up, we start thinking we're going crazy if we don't have a sense of integrity and continuity over time. But in Buddhism you want a sense of a continuum, but it's a spatial experience, not a time experience.

[73:42]

Buddhism emphasizes the discontinuity of time continuity, of time experience. So you're not tied to a one self which experiences everything over time. Okay, I'm throwing a lot of stuff into this response. But because there's a discontinuity of consciousness, we can change our mind. You could never change your mind if you only had one continuity of consciousness. So the discontinuity of consciousness allows values. This is better than that. Okay, so we make decisions out of our experience about what's better or worse.

[74:54]

You know, it's in some ways as simple as you don't put sand in your gas tank. I mean, you can put sand in your gas tank, but your car won't run very well. And you can eat sand, as some babies do, but, you know, won't... So we... You could begin to see how you build up, I like this, I eat this, et cetera. Anyway, we create through a number of means preferences on a small scale and a big scale. And most of those are cultural. And they are present in all of these.

[75:59]

In other words, if you have a value that joy is dangerous, and however that's communicated to you by your parents and your culture, when you feel joy here, you'll inhibit that. Or if you have compulsive thoughts that murdering your father is probably bad, you'll repress them. But if you're in a Buddhist culture, it's not very important how much you think about killing your father. Because if it's not connected with action, it's not very serious. The thought itself isn't so important, it's the action. So the thought may be contaminating, but really it's... If, as Dostoevsky, I think, says, the thought of killing the father is killing the father,

[77:12]

If you really had a morality like that in Buddhism you couldn't practice meditation. Because the nature of meditation is all this stuff comes up. Anything any human being has done or been can come up. And by learning to sit still Without reaction, you build a deep confidence that you can think anything without it being dangerous. So as long as you really feel confident, I'm not going to do it, you can think all the things you want. You know. If you think intensely enough about somebody with glowering eyes, they may realize you're thinking sort of bad things about them.

[78:15]

But mostly... although we receive subtle messages from people, there's such a complexity of them, they're pretty much lost. I'm not saying there isn't a communication at a thought level. It's just that it's not. I mean, I can think all I want about this flower is wilt. But it's got a whole lot going for it. It doesn't care what I think. If we got enough of us in this room all thinking wilt, wilt, wilt, Oh, poor babies. I think the flora might begin to have a hard time. Particularly if we let the water dry up. But in general... In general, you know, you don't have to worry.

[79:36]

So values are brought in at all of these levels, but not so much this level. And different cultures teach different ways in which values are operating. Now, you'll see when we discuss the six vijnanas, the eight vijnanas, the impulses move to the seventh place. And it's the operative vision. But I'll show you that tomorrow. Okay. Yeah. That's right. I'm not saying there's absolutely none but I'm saying like right now in this room is

[80:48]

What, ten television channels? And if you were in America, there'd be 40 or 50 in the room. And there's how many radio stations? Does it bother you? Yeah, maybe a little. Hardly. The difference between your experience of this room where there's a lot of television channels and being in the wilderness or up in the mountains where you can't receive television, there's some difference, but whether it's the television presence. Though occasionally people have come from the dentist and have a certain kind of feeling that receives radio signals. And then you hear singing in your mouth. But in any case, all of you have a lot of thoughts going on right now.

[82:16]

But your own processes are so powerful that they filter out almost everything. So to really receive something from you, I have to really change the way I'm receiving in order to get it. That's why explicit mental telepathy occurs, for instance, when your father dies a thousand miles away and you suddenly have a stomach pain. Or you have a powerful dream. But generally it takes a very overt Big event. Like identical twins sometimes, where they're already built-in receivers. If something serious happens to one, the other will often feel it. But even then it has...

[83:08]

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