And now this topic of self. I think, I guess I've been feeling that we are rich enough, mature enough in our practice that we have established a territory where we can talk about it productively. Mostly it's not productive because we have, most of us, fairly simple ideas. You know, I made the decision, I came to Sashin, I exist. And at that level we can't argue with it. Yes, you called up and said you wanted to come and you showed up. And then there are sort of intuitive ideas of self and the world that are constantly confirmed in our activity.

[01:29]

And you can't argue with people's intuitive sense of the world. And you cannot argue against the intuitive feeling of the world of people. But at the same time, sashin is in fact a kind of searching for the self. Like perhaps the Butoh dancer dances to see if he can find his feet, he or she. Yeah, implicitly, Sashin is a kind of seeking for the self. And I think, as you all find, particularly the first Sashins are lots of review of the self.

[02:35]

Self-history. But there's always the question in the middle of your knees hurting, You're wondering, who made the decision to come to this dance session? I must be crazy. Someone's crazy here. Yet most of you stay. I mean, very, very seldom, you know, have we had somebody run away. So, you know, it helps that your neighbors are watching you. That helps.

[03:44]

But more deeply, it's that some self of us, something we can call self, wants us to do the Sashim. So the very difficulty of Sashin makes us on some level, look for this self which made this stupid decision, painful decision. Yeah, and so for some reason I, or whatever, I've decided to speak about self. Now, I haven't done justice to the topic. I mean, on the one hand, how could I do justice to the topic?

[04:48]

You have that expression, justice to the time. Because this has been the explicit and implicit subject of philosophy and religions from beginningless time. But even by my own lights... By my own lights means by my own standards. Even by my own lights, I am not doing it justice. But I hope I engage you in your own investigation. And... and bring into your already ongoing investigation some new perspectives.

[06:13]

So yesterday and last night I said we should investigate our ideas about And we should investigate our experience of self. And I contend, unless you do both, neither investigation is useful. If you only investigate your experience of self, your ideas of self, unexamined ideas of self, will influence your investigation. Yeah, and so if you, in the light of how I spoke yesterday in the lecture, different ways of conceiving of self and its permanence or impermanence.

[07:32]

If you make yourself intellectually, rationally clear about which of the many views of self you feel comfortable with, Yeah, which one are you kind of able to accept as possible? Then, when you examine your experience, you'll notice... Yeah, when your experience doesn't fit the idea of self which you think must be true. No, I said we have intuitive ideas about the world. And they must be very basic to our kind of mental, physical makeup.

[08:34]

Yeah, because they're present in cultures all over the world. And they're reflected in the language and assumptions of the culture. But Nowadays, we're clear, most, a large percentage of them don't agree with science. I don't mean that science is automatically right, but, yeah, we have to give us pause for thought. But we're not just limited to our intuitive ideas of time, space, matter, self.

[10:00]

We have certain other intuitions that doesn't make sense. And then you have Sashin and meditation practice and mindfulness practice. Which really lets us look past our intuitive sense of the world and culturally assumed sense of the world. And I would say, we won't speak now about the Alaya Vijnana, but the Alaya Vijnana gives us a wide territory of human possibilities. that go beyond our culture.

[11:05]

Okay, that's enough to say about that. And language itself, while culturally formed, has so many possibilities of expression. So what we're in the midst of doing as the Dharma Sangha is we're trying to find the language which supports the realm of experience that arises through a gathered mind. realm of experience that arises through a gathered mind.

[12:14]

And then, using this language we discover together, Talking to yourself in this language. This language which may suggest a world that's counterintuitive. Or maybe more deeply intuitive. Okay, so let's imagine in a New York cabbie. In a new cab? I'm testing you again. A New York cab driver. Sorry, I keep failing. No, you keep succeeding. Oh. There's no failure here. Oh, good. So we can imagine a New York cabbie might have a number of identities.

[13:16]

First of all, he's probably Eastern European or Russian. I don't think there's any born-in-America cab driver. You land in New York Port and you go directly into a cab and then you work there the next 20 years. Well, you know, let's assume he has some kind of personal identity. And he has to have, let's say, a familial identity. And a social identity. And a social identity. And a societal identity. And let's say a cultural identity. But he may not have all of them. And he may be a somewhat different person at home than he is in the cab. But he himself or she herself has some experience of all of these five I mentioned identities as having some sort of central core.

[14:37]

Unless there's a kind of multiple personality disorder here. What's it called nowadays? Dissociative identity disorder. which, strangely, supposedly only occurs in North America. I don't know why. Anyway, there's a lot of discussion in psychological literature about whether it's really a disorder and really exists, but the cases that exist only happen in America. Don't look at me. It's not all American. Yeah. So, I mean, I guess, to the extent that such people exist, they have separate histories.

[16:16]

Their memory is dissociated. But except for some exceptions, like I'm told, sometimes so-called multiple personalities, one will have allergies that the other doesn't have. One will be short-sighted and the other will be, you know, have perfect vision. Sometimes I wonder if I could find another personality to improve my eyes. Sometimes I ask myself if I can't find another personality to improve my eyes. And to get rid of my hay fever. In any case, for most of us, there is some kind of central unifying experience.

[17:21]

Okay, now let's imagine a lucid dream. Yeah, so imagine you're dreaming, or there's a dream going on. And let's say somebody is climbing a cliff. And it's a rather dangerous cliff. And the person climbing might fall. Now, if you're doing this climbing, I mean, if this climbing person, if... if you feel located in this climbing person, in other words, you have some fear of falling, and in the dream you're being very careful about what you take hold of and so forth, we could call this person the decider or the...

[18:30]

protagonist. He's carrying the experienced sense of self in the dream. This is a me who might fall. Yeah, I think even if you don't have lucid dreams very often, you can imagine this. But there's also an observer of the dream. Usually in a lucid dream, it's lucid because you have a sense of observing it. Okay, so the observer is watching the climber. And the observer is, yeah... not dissociated, but somewhat detached about whether the person falls or not.

[19:36]

We say detached, yet not separate from. Okay. So now we've got the decider and the observer. And I called, implied the other day that the observer was the deuterogonist. But now there's also the atmosphere of the dream. Somehow the atmosphere is a sort of third party to the dream. The atmosphere somehow contains or is shaped by the feeling of the guy might fall, etc. So in this dream, this dream metaphor image, where is self carried?

[20:51]

Well, our usual experience of self is carried by the the protagonist who carries the story, the danger. And it's interesting, somebody asked me if I knew the etymology of experience, the word experience. I can't believe I don't after all these years. But I immediately looked it up. And it's really, the root of it is fear. The root of it is to fear, to try, to attempt. But underneath that is the idea of fear. So here's this protagonist climber who has some fear he or she will fall and is trying, attempting not to fall.

[22:06]

And they're the carrier of the story and the experience. Okay. But again, we also have the observer and the atmosphere. And of course they're all you. I mean, nobody else is dreaming this dream. Although I've often had the experience of dreaming a dream which I share with my wife. But we won't explore that. Nor will we explore whether the climber has the same history as the dreamer. Same memories. These are interesting avenues. Unless you want to stay another week. The one who decides to do the Sesshin usually a week is enough.

[23:24]

Okay. Now, what we can ask is these two terms I've suggested. Selfness and non-selfness. No, I can't use selflessness because, as I said, it has too much baggage and it means something really different. But I think we can understand without much explanation selfness and non-selfness. Or perhaps less selfness. Okay, so then we can say that the protagonist, the decider, has the strongest sense of selfness. The observer and the atmosphere have less sense of selfness. And that's very interesting.

[25:09]

It means parts of you carry more selfness than other parts of you. So part of the practice of freeing yourself from self is to shift your sense of locative self. Locative identity, located identity, to the less selfness. Okay, so that's that image or metaphor. Okay. Now I could bring in more about how practice divides, how language, our culture divides the world up.

[26:18]

And how Buddhist wisdom, rooted in meditation and emptiness, Also durch Sprache und wie der Buddhismus, der Meditation in der Weisheit und Leerheit gründet, wie der Buddhismus die Welt unterteilt, und wie wir Aufmerksamkeit in diese Welt, die durch Weisheit unterschieden wird, bringen können. significantly and critically, critically in a positive sense, changes our experience of self. Our, yeah, experience of self. Okay. Now I think that this, I want to I think I have to stop in a few minutes.

[27:29]

So I'll just try to say a few things that may help you in your own investigation. Because while this is my investigation, it also has to be our and your investigation. If it's not your investigation, you're here for entertainment. And I'm not entertaining enough for seven days of Sashin. Okay. So this image of the dreamer the observer and the decider and the atmosphere, is very similar to our experience in meditation. I mean, just notice it.

[28:36]

Yeah, whether the bell's going to ring, you're not going to ring, and what's happening, what you're thinking about, there's layers of... layers of self and less self going on in you. Okay, so now let's say that the decider The one who gets up when the bell rings. And usually the observer and the atmosphere kind of conflate and the decider takes over. But when you sit down again, the decider kind of He wishes he could decide, but, you know, he's not the Doan.

[29:46]

And it's, yeah, so the decider is the loser. And who wants to identify with a loser? A painful loser. So you start identifying with the observer. Hey, this is a little better. Yeah. You even identify sometimes with the atmosphere which the observer appears and disappears sometimes. And the atmosphere has a conceptual and experiential relationship to the ayatanas. No, I won't develop that idea.

[30:54]

I'll just give it to you as part of your investigation. Okay. Now, the decider is spatially, situationally engaged. But, you know, except that history is built into the decider's actions, maybe the observer actually carries more of personal history. who you are, who you want to be who you intend to be so the observer has a kind of intentional identity and we could say the decider has an instrumental identity

[31:58]

Okay. But, okay, now in this picture there's a kind of unity of experience in the present moment. But I would hold that if you examine this There is a relation, there's a flow of past experience into the situation. But that flow fluxes. And sometimes it draws on one part of our experience and sometimes draws on another part of our experience. So I would say we have an integrated temporal, over time, sense of self. But not continuous.

[33:19]

And definitely not permanent. So there's a constant integration going on of past experience with the present conditions. So if my picture is correct, this is not a permanent self. Yeah. It's not even a continuous self. Because it's constantly being affected by the immediate situation.

[34:20]

So we could even say, perhaps, that if we look at the two truths, the conventional truth, the intuitive world, the practical world we deal with, where we have to treat things as if they were fairly permanent, fairly predictable. Even if we know the world isn't that way, practically speaking, it's true, we have to act in the world that way. That's the conventional truth. And the decider is acting primarily in that conventional truth. But the observer can be more integrated with the fundamental truth. So we have a complex picture here of what self is.

[35:27]

And to just add another level of complexity for the heck of it. I think we also have subtextual selves subtextual underneath the text. And again, quoting Milton Erickson. He noticed that people would disagree consciously with what was being said. But their head would nod. It's actually nutate. Their head would nod. Another word you don't know.

[36:29]

Notation. Yeah, notation is to nod your head. It sounds like notation, but I'm really testing it. She's good. So they'd nod their head to either the hypnotized state that was underlying, or they'd nod their head to another level of acknowledgement, which consciously they didn't acknowledge. Did you follow that? You got the image. You got the picture. The last part again, please. Not the hypnotic state, but the... that they unconsciously, you know, whatever is not important. I'll say it again. Okay. So, you know, these kids' pictures where you connect the dots. And just to throw this in the...

[37:30]

Manga artists like to draw a picture which from a distance looks like one thing. When you're up close, it's another thing. Have any of you seen the movie The Transformers? I haven't seen it. I've been told about it. I guess it's terrible and wonderful. But you know all these little toys and cartoons which are trucks and then they suddenly turn into people and robots and then they fold back into trucks. There's no... It doesn't surprise me at all that these toys are all from Japan. Because they do have this idea of identities.

[38:51]

Different identities are folded together. So it's like there's a bunch of dots. And you join the ones with numbers and you have one picture. Maybe you join the dots, the numbered dots, and you end up with a picture of your mother, oh my God, or my father. But maybe you join the dots that are leathered, A, B, C, you know. And oh my goodness, it's a Buddha. And the sense of the Malaya Vijnana is there are many unconnected dots within our experience. And you may find that much of your experience is already the experience of a Buddha.

[39:53]

It's a subtextual kind of identity, implicit identity that you haven't connected the dots yet. But if you shift your sense of identity more to the non-selfness of the observer who's integrated with the decider but not so identified with the decider you may find the dots within your experience which are more like the activity of a Buddha start connecting That's my Buddhist presentation of the investigation of self as Buddha. Okay. Thanks for translating it.

[41:02]

You're welcome. Thanks for listening. Thanks for your investigation. Thanks for being almost Buddhas. From one almost Buddha to another.

[41:37]

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