Now I think the main thing to take away from or incorporate perhaps from the discussion we had is that whatever we mean by mind aliveness Or perhaps beingness. Can you say beingness? Like I like to use the word treeing instead of tree. So what do you say, bauming? Bauming. But I also like to say tree-ness. Can you say tree-ness in German?

[01:00]

Anyway, what I think we could perhaps incorporate from the discussion that again mind or beingness whatever we mean by this field of aliveness is larger than and different than the various categories which language Dass das größer ist und verschieden von den verschiedenen Kategorien, die die Sprache dafür haben könnte. Um mit anderen und mit sich selber zu reden, braucht man Sprache.

[02:04]

Und wir sprechen in den Kategorien, die die Sprache uns gibt. And even though you may know intellectually that, let's just say mind, mind is much wider than the categories. That knowing is nowhere near as powerful as the habitual use of categories. So whether it's the German categories for mind, geist, and bewusstsein, etc., and its phrasal uses, Whether that's in Deutsch or in English, they're still categories.

[03:16]

But those categories, really, because they're the only way we can speak to ourself and to others, We make decisions about our life, basic decisions, everyday decisions, big decisions, on the basis of those categories. Okay. Now, if you practice zazen regularly, and you get into the habit of experiencing yourself outside of these categories,

[04:28]

or not only in these categories, then the categories have less definitive power over us. And in fact we can begin to use the categories more powerfully than when we identify with the categories. Okay, now I've lost it. We can use them more powerfully, the categories. When we know they're categories. Because then we can use them as only categories and not as a description of actuality. And that's simply one of the benefits of regular zazen.

[05:38]

is an accumulated experience of being to some extent outside the categories of language and so forth. That accumulated experience changes us. And you can feel it, of course. Okay, all right. Now I'm a distinction essential to my teaching. And I, let me say it a second time in a slightly different way. essential to my teaching in English.

[06:52]

Because in some sense this is my teaching, it's not exactly usual Buddhism. But it's not usual Buddhism only because in my experience of usual Buddhism, Let's call my practice as giving me an experience of usual Buddhism. And that usual Buddhism doesn't fit into the categories of English. So then, I've tried to make use of the categories of English to express my experience of usual Buddhism. So I end up with a somewhat unusual teaching of Buddhism that you won't find in any books.

[08:04]

Now in order to practice with others, which is different than just practicing with myself, I've tried to find ways to make things clear to others, which is not the same as finding them clear in myself. And I've been pushed by circumstances, what surrounds, what stands around, the circumstances of practicing with others have pushed me into this distinction. between awareness and consciousness.

[09:17]

Okay. Now, the distinction between awareness and consciousness, both of them categories of mind, If there are categories of mind, kind as we found out in the last hour, categories of somewhat different categories exist in German. What this means is mind can be structured. Okay, so these categories, whether they're German or English, reflect structures of mind. Diese Kategorien, egal ob in Englisch oder Deutsch, reflektieren, zeigen Strukturen von Mind.

[10:39]

So if mind can be structured, it can also be unstructured. If you build a building, you can also unbuild the building. You may have a sort of disturbed construction site, but you can unbuild the building. Okay. All right. So what does that mean? The practice is to... Well, let me see. Before I speak about practice, what that means is we can structure the mind.

[11:40]

We have a choice about how mind is structured. How we structure mind is limited by the starting point. And I think one of the reasons I am teaching in Germany, because mind as I know it, yeah, okay, the structures of mind and beingness as I know it, are more similar to Germans than they are to other Europeans. And it may be because English is basically a German dialect.

[12:43]

with 50% of its vocabulary from France. But I also find my mind, I'm using it for aliveness and beings, is strangely structured much like the Japanese mind. And why that's the case, I won't try to explore right now. Okay. But the point is we have a... We can structure our mind. And if you're going to unbuild something, you unbuild something that's already there.

[13:52]

So I think if you're not... if the cultural structure you have is whatever it is, that's going to be the starting point. So you're not starting, my point is, you're not starting from completely blank space. You're starting from something that's already structured, which you unstructured, which influences how you structure it. So then we have two things here which practice opens us to. It's not only can we experience the mind as structured.

[15:14]

And that's very different from thinking of mind as given. As some kind of inherent mind or inherent nature. So you can experience mind as structured and you can experience mind as unstructured and you can change the structure of mind and you can most likely be able to change the structure of mind not just because you know it's structured But because you have considerable experience of mind as unstructured. Okay, is that all crystal clear? It's very simple. You have two categories. Structured and unstructured.

[16:39]

And then you have the permutations of those two categories. All right. When you have a simple instruction, I don't invite you to pasta tea. and thoughts and you have a choice about not inviting your thoughts to tea you're participating in the structure of the mind because the thoughts are thinking and that's the mind can be structured as thinking But if you cannot invite your thoughts to tea, the mind can also have a structure of not thinking. Now, this has a kind of world view.

[17:44]

This is a view of the world. The more you absorb this and feel it, the more the teaching of Buddhism will become obvious. and the more you will also see the possibilities of nuancing the structure of mind. Okay. Now, Sukhiroshi always spoke about big mind. Which is basically a translation of Daishin. And he emphasized in using this simple English expression. Through Zazen you don't just know small mind, which in this case would be thinking mind.

[18:47]

But you also know, can know, big mind. An inclusive mind. Okay. Now, small mind is only small when you identify with it. If you think of small mind as thinking mind and you understand thinking as a tool of the mind, then it's not small at all. It's just a useful tool. But if you identify with the tool and you think you're that tool, then it's small. Okay. So I've again been pressed into making this distinction between awareness and consciousness.

[20:26]

Now that relates to small mind and big mind, we can leave aside for the moment. Okay. Now, the examples I give, it seems like, well, probably not more than a thousand times, is if you decide to wake up at 6.02 in the morning without an alarm clock. And you do it. What does it? Most of us can do that, or many of us can do that.

[21:30]

You're not conscious. You're sleeping. Okay. So let's give it a name. Let's make it a category. And let's call it awareness. And what fits into this category of awareness? What doesn't fit into the category of consciousness? Okay. All right. Yeah. So somehow, if we define awareness as that which can wake us up at 6.02 or Then it must be a medium for intention if it's not a medium for thought. So now we're making a distinction between intention and thought. Which also the admonition not to invite your thoughts to tea.

[22:53]

Because what you have is the intention not to invite the thoughts which are not intentions to tea. So intentions are not exactly thoughts. So intentions take the form of thoughts, but they're not thoughts. We can create intentions through thought. But thoughts, but intentions have to be joined to will. And will in a large sense. Okay, so if you will yourself to wake up at 6.02, It will continue through your sleeping and wake you up.

[24:07]

Now, we also might have to reconceive of what happens to mind during sleeping. Perhaps it's just folded together, and it's a spatial thing, and 6.02 and 12.40 are all kind of together. Vielleicht müssen wir auch ganz neu über Mind nachdenken. Vielleicht haltet er sich einfach im Schlafen zusammen, um 6.02 und 12.45 sind da alle zusammen. So let's leave the conception of foldedness out of it. It's harder to grasp. So there's a time from when you made the intention of going to sleep to when you wake up and somehow the intention passes even though you're not conscious. Okay, now, second example is you're carrying a bunch of packages.

[25:27]

Including what Atmar explained to me today was an American picture. You're carrying two. Gross glass American pitchers. Two. Two. And several Christmas presents. And you slip on the ice. And you fall. Maybe off your bicycle with all these things too. And somehow you don't get hurt and neither pitcher gets broke. What did it? It all happened way too fast for consciousness. But something made you land in a way that you weren't hurt and you protected the packages at the same time.

[26:34]

So you knew, you weren't just protecting your body, you knew the packages were in your arms, which are not usually. So this knowledge became part of an instantaneous decision about how to fall and not hurt yourself and protect the two American pictures. So what I say what did that is awareness. Okay, all right. So now, if we continue to try to develop the conception or category of awareness, if you're walking along with your arms full of glass pitchers and presents,

[27:37]

What's walking along with you? In my way of presenting this, awareness is also walking along with you. So we could say awareness is the companion of consciousness. And probably biologically, anatomically, it's closely related to left brain, right brain distinction. So the right brain is going along with the left brain. So we can say awareness is the companion of consciousness.

[28:45]

But consciousness is not necessarily the companion of awareness. As we know, when you're sleeping, consciousness wasn't very present, but you still got up at 6.02. So zazen practice, if we start trying to define the teachings in these terms, the intention to not invite your thoughts to tea calls forth awareness which can rest in itself and not identify with thoughts. And you can begin to have a direct experience of this structure. As you do zazen, You have the feeling of not inviting your thoughts to tea.

[30:10]

You've established an attentional body. An attentional body is in this case established through the posture of zazen. And the attentional body can is inseparable from awareness and can resist identifying with thinking. But at some point, for most of us, thinking wins out. I've got some really nice stories to tell you. Would you please come this way? And if you don't like nice stories, I've got some real scary ones.

[31:19]

You're going to lose your job, you know, or something. Off goes consciousness, identifying with thinking. And the attentional posture immediately is lost. But then you get your Dharma pump. And you pump up the attentional body. And awareness comes back. And resists the temptation of the stories of self. Okay. So now we know that the attentional body is related to the presence of awareness.

[32:29]

And as you're falling off your bicycle with your arms full of things that don't fit on the back rack, The falling off awakens the attentional body. Awareness thinks very clearly about how to save yourself. Okay, now an adept Zen practitioner primarily functions through awareness. They develop the skills of thinking, to use thinking to sort of set the stage, because awareness needs thinking to function in categories where thinking is required.

[33:53]

Okay, so if thinking sets the categorical stages, then you let awareness make the decision. And usually it makes better decisions. But this is a yogic skill to learn to set the stage that allows awareness to function. As I said, awareness does not... Awareness always accompanies consciousness, but consciousness doesn't accompany awareness. Okay, so we can say awareness is more fundamental than consciousness.

[34:55]

Now, awareness is related to unstructured mind. Or it works outside of structure as well as with structure. Okay, now you can unstructure You can unstructure mind very easily at any point you want. The field of mind is unstructured mind. Or we can say relatively unstructured mind. Okay.

[36:07]

Now, what do I mean by the field of mind? Or field of awareness? Now, I could say the field of consciousness. But in the way I'm defining these terms, there's no such thing as the field of consciousness. Yeah. Because the field of awareness is unstructured and consciousness is always structured. Okay. So, now, if I, the example I give all the time is having a feel like, if I look at you all at once, Without thinking about you.

[37:09]

I feel you, but I don't think you. And I can do that particularly by making a shift from particular to the field. It's very difficult to go from a thinking mind to a field of mind. Okay, I mean, all of this is incredibly simple. Okay, but maybe it's getting too much. Because it's one simple thing after another and they begin to pile up and look complicated. But let's say that a page of text in a book, on a piece of paper, the page of text can't go to the blank page. The page of text, if you imagine it, can't shift to the page.

[38:14]

It can only know it's other words in the page. Can it turn into a blank page? Yeah. Because the words are about the other words in the sentences. Nothing in the text says, I'm a blank page. So you can't go from the words to the blank page. But if you just look at the page, If you just look at, say, the words and you see all the streams between the layers and things like that. If you're looking at all those rivers that run through the... You can't read the words.

[39:43]

I see a few of them, but your mind doesn't put them in context. But you clearly see the blank page. It's very easy to shift from the rivers. So if I'm thinking about you, I can't shift to the field of mind very easily. But say I develop the yogic practice, which is to focus on particulars. And I'll give you this phrase, to pause for the particular a lot. And what I'm trying to get you into the habit of doing is in your thinking to pause for the particular within thinking.

[40:49]

So I can go from thinking and talking with you fairly easily to the particular of these flowers. And then from the particular I can go to the field of mind. So the more I notice a particular, this implicit, I can then go, just feel all of you at once. And what am I doing then? I'm establishing awareness. I've in effect unstructured mind and felt and it becomes a feeling that has knowing in it but it's not structured the way consciousness is structured.

[42:13]

So one way to begin to develop this, not just in zazen, to develop the fundamental mind of awareness, where your awareness is closer to perceiving, knowing mind itself, pure mind itself. is to get in the habit of noticing as your first impression of things the field of mind. So I give you as a practice sometimes to use the threshold of the entrance like you come in a door and instead of thinking or continuing whatever you were thinking about you use every door to stop thinking

[43:48]

For a moment. If it's really interesting, you say, just wait a minute, I'll come back. So you come to a door, an entryway, and you stop thinking for a minute, and you use the door to enter awareness. And you do it with the feeling mind rather than the thinking mind. So you feel the field of the room and that field of the room then is actually you've manifested, called up awareness.

[45:03]

Okay? Okay. Now we could start talking about the very basic Buddhist term reflexive awareness. But we might have something to do tomorrow. Why don't we leave that till tomorrow? Okay. So, again, in short, zazen is to increase your experience of awareness. Zazen Your experience of awareness has always accompanied consciousness. Your experience of awareness has always accompanied consciousness.

[46:05]

And your experience of awareness as a way to think, in one definition of the word think, as a way to know and act in the world, which can make your thinking more subtle and more, not just subtle, more accurate. Mm-hmm. And more free of self. Because the structure of self will stop. All right? Thanks a lot.

[47:01]

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