They thought they were going crazy. They were used to a whole lot of controls. And they put some artists, poets down there and they thought, hey, this is groovy. Now, this is a kind of general picture, rough picture. So in general, Again, consciousness, central emphasis of consciousness is it can know things, but it knows things primarily in the category of predictability.

[01:17]

That's what consciousness does. Okay. Someone else? Yes, partner? We also try to get the body involved in in this practice and isn't it that the body involved assumes or allows the predictability because the body is able to store all these informations? I mean this is somehow going on in the body and when I close my eyes and I open them after a while again I still know there's the bamboo outside because my brain can store this information and then The predictability is obvious because not much has changed in a few minutes outside the window.

[02:24]

Yes. And that's the information out of the body which is somehow stored in my body. Yes. Deutsch, bitte. The question is, how do we get the body in there? And our body, our brain is able to store information. When we look out of the window and we see the barbus and close our eyes and after a minute we open our eyes, then we just know that there is a barbus out there and it is obviously not there. It is still there, but it should have happened in a minute. So we can say, I cannot delete that. Well, what I'd like to go to and where I... ended up last night is in the physicality of mind.

[03:31]

So I'm wondering how I can get there. Right now I'm dealing with the problem of this list. Okay. I would say, though, in general, Otmar, the body is more able to deal with unpredictability or uniqueness than mentation. Then with mentation or then mentation can? The body is able to deal with uniqueness. A bodily knowing is immersed in uniqueness because it's not immersed in consciousness.

[04:39]

And mentation is immersed primarily in consciousness. Okay. So let me introduce what I've been talking about a little too much recently, but it's unfamiliar to you. Which is what I call Libet space. Lebit, L-E-B-I-T, a guy named Lebit. Because this guy, Benjamin Lebit, in the 70s, He wrote a paper called Timing of Cerebral Processes Correlated with Consciousness.

[05:42]

He wrote quite a few papers, actually, with similar names. He was a research psychologist in San Francisco in the 70s. And when I was, yeah, practicing, I'd been practicing about 10 years or 15 years at that time. I read about his work. Never met him. And, yeah, I said, geez, that's right. Because I already knew this from my experience. And what did he show? That if you wired up the body and the brain, that if you decide to move your arm, the stuff wired up to your brain and shows that the decision to move your arm was made before you moved it, before consciousness decided to move it.

[06:59]

It's some milliseconds, 500 milliseconds about, consciousness is tardy. So consciousness creates the illusion that has made the decision, but actually it's only edited the decision. Now, I've read some people who say, oh, this means everything is psychological determinism. I think that's nuts. Because consciousness creates the context for decisions even if it doesn't make the decision.

[08:06]

The example I gave the other day was I was in Italy for about a month teaching in Cortona and Volterra. And my friend, my close friend Earl's wife is Italian. And so we stopped to see her as we were leaving Italy. And oddly enough, where she lives... Her father built the first swimming pool in Italy in 1923. Yeah, and it doesn't happen to be heated. And it was quite cold when we were there.

[09:11]

So I decided, you know, with Sophia, my three and a half year old, I would go swimming. I tested the water. It was about 19 or 18 or something. And I thought, 45 years of Zen practice and I don't think I have the courage to go in this cold water. But my little daughter was looking at me, Papa, are you going in? I think I'd rather sunbathe. So I decided, okay, I'll do it. So I went to the end of the pool and climbed up to the second diving board and stood on the edge. And my bodily knowing was saying, uh-uh. But my consciousness was saying, Sophia said, Papa, jump in. So I used consciousness to force my body to do it.

[10:26]

And on the way down, I tried to change my mind, but... Yikes! It took four or five laps before I was sort of warm. Blue. But my daughter was proud of me. So there's somehow the interaction between bodily knowing and consciousness. But consciousness basically creates the context for decisions and edits decisions But it doesn't make the decision. And in the 60s I noticed that something knew I was going to do things before consciousness knew. Okay.

[11:30]

Now, this is a very important fact. And Dogen calls it taking the backward step. In effect, to physically step out of consciousness. Now, that's in the background of the way the doshi does a ceremony, or we do kin-hin, walking meditation. So if I'm doing kin-hin, walking meditation, everything's a mudra, right? So I'm standing, And I step forward on my exhale.

[12:41]

Half a step. And my ankles are this far apart. And I step forward in my exhale. And I inhale as my heel comes up with my opposite foot. And I step forward on my exhale. And I can even pull my energy all the way up through my heel, over my head and down. But you're going so slowly, it helps you walk with no anticipation of past or future. Now the doshi, that's the person who leads the service, says that the doshi is standing like this. And you're the Buddha, Martin, why not?

[13:59]

But it's often dressed in black. And so I'm on the bowing mat. And I step back. In some cases you do step back. So let's say I step back. And I'm going to go around the cushion up and offer incense to Martin Sattva. But really, if I'm somewhat experienced at this, when I step back, there should be no information in my body that I'm going left, right, forward or back. So I'm entering, physically I'm expressing timeless kind of space. If the doshi can do that, or has that feeling,

[15:00]

then a kind of somatic resonance or somatic field is generated in which everybody suddenly feels in a kind of timeless space. They feel there's no place to go, nothing to do. Everything seems right here, no future, no compulsion. So this is like Yuan Wu says, establish a mind where there's not before or after or here or there. And what's the point of this? To be in the actual physical space. prior to consciousness.

[16:13]

The space of bodily knowing prior to the editing of consciousness. Okay, so if you hear a statement like in Koan 20 of the Shoyuroku. In walking, in sitting, that means all physical activity. Holy Hold to the moment before thought arises. Hold to the moment before thought arises. And then look into that and see not seeing and then let it go. Now that statement, we mostly read it, you think, hold to the moment before thought arising.

[17:38]

Thanks a lot. But if you have a physical sense of this, you can actually find yourself in this bodily knowing before consciousness arises. Now, if you're in consciousness, it's very clear what you're going to do next because your consciousness is anticipating what your body has already decided. I think we have maybe the nature of the body as well as the nature of the mind. Someone else. I have a question.

[19:02]

Yeah. What you said when you were standing there, a step backward is taken, but there is no sense of going anywhere. Did I understand that right? So who, what knows what has to be done? Who knows? What knows? There's a pattern by which we do service. Yeah. And I do know I'm going to go to the altar. But at each moment, I stop as if I could go any direction. So ideally, there's no information in my body that shows I'm going to go left or right.

[20:03]

Now, if you, when you find this place, it's much more, it's much easier to let situations lead you. As perhaps when you're writing, writing writes writing. Writing will take you places, the act of writing takes you places consciousness couldn't bring you. Or Picasso said when somebody asked him about painting. He says, I start painting this and I paint this and by the time I'm finished I realize what I really wanted to paint was that little barn in the corner. But I didn't know it until the act of painting led me there. Yes. Yes. The ordering, the structuring force of consciousness we had to learn with difficulty, some difficulty.

[21:38]

And when I'm in the level of mind, I should realize with how much effort we keep up the structure of thoughts. Let's see if I got it in English. You're asking, was it difficult for us as children or something to... My question leads to what I had to state and which was clear to me that thinking, as we usually do it, is much of an effort. Yes, it is. That's true. And now we think that it's an effort to reach this state of that mind.

[22:56]

Really, it's probably vice versa. In other words, let's call it the mind of awareness and the mind of consciousness, all right? Now we think it's an effort to reach awareness when actually it should be easy. Yeah, that's right. What? Somehow it seems so crazy. We put so much effort in learning something that is so difficult to dislearn again. That's right. Particularly as Westerners. What do we do with? Well, now we have some big questions here. Deutsch, bitte. Okay.

[24:11]

What? You said we could do that really simply. No more schools. No more schools. Yeah, schools are part of the problem. But really the cultural view is the main problem. Well, I mean, this is something I've thought about a lot. But that would take a whole, you know, much of the day to start talking about. Let's just say simply that Socrates... supposedly the source of our wisdom in the West, followed his daimon, his inner voice, or not even inner voice, inner knowing. Yeah, and what Did the word daimon become in Christianity?

[25:12]

Demon. So in general in our society, I mean Jung says, People don't examine the mind carefully because they're afraid they're going to find the devil or Hades at the bottom. As a long process, we've... we've prized consciousness over other forms of knowing. And our educational system is entirely based on consciousness. I've often spoke about the three minds of daily consciousness.

[26:22]

Yeah, immediate consciousness. Immediate consciousness means that, well, let's say you're taking a walk in the forest. You're not talking, you're just walking and feeling the path, the space, the air. And secondary consciousness, then, in this way of looking at things, is you can notice something. Oh, look over there. The bushes have been trimmed, or there's something over there. Now, that's also in the immediate situation. But then your friend says, you're walking with a friend, and he says, Jeez, I've got to make a phone call at 5 o'clock.

[27:23]

And you think, oh, jeez, I've also got to do some things. And then you're suddenly not in the immediate situation. Okay. The consciousness, that's called borrowed consciousness. We're borrowing it from others. Phone calls, ideas about the future. It's not arising from the immediate situation. Okay. Now, most of our educational system is in borrowed consciousness. Knowing facts, comparisons, etc. It's very useful. But if it's where we're living, it's debilitating. And if you're in borrowed consciousness all day, you go home and you collapse at the end.

[28:41]

If you can stay rooted in immediate consciousness, consciousness as somatically in a somatic immediate field, You tend to feel nourished all day. Because immediate consciousness is not debilitating. Okay. Yeah. With immediate consciousness meant what in the Diamond Sutra is called the mind that is not The past, not the future, but also not the mind of the present.

[29:47]

No idea of a lifespan, like that in the Diamond Sutra. No, I mean your past, future, lifespan, etc. No, not lifespan. Lifespan. I remember vaguely that with what mind did the monk eat the rice cake? Okay. Yeah, that's referring to a lot of things, but immediate consciousness is one thing it's referring to. Yeah. You said that there are three kinds of consciousness. What's the third one? Every day? You mean at this time? There's the... Yeah, I'll show you.

[30:51]

It's easier if I draw it. Look. What? The secondary. The secondary. Yeah. Now this, you know, I've discovered by creating this darn list. It's the first time I've ever done it, except in my mind. There's so many other things I have to present. See, it makes sense, the list. Borrowed consciousness.

[31:56]

You don't have to look at it. Secondary consciousness. Immediate consciousness. Okay. So, you're walking along and you are just with your friend, say, and you just, you feel the space, you're not thinking about anything. Right now I can feel each of you. I don't have to think about you. Okay. But then I notice that Melita is younger than I and blonder than I. But if I let my hair grow, it's long, blonde curls. Okay.

[32:59]

So that's secondary consciousness. Okay. I notice that in this situation. Yeah. I also know that Melita works for a television station. Number one or number two or number seven? One? Two? One, okay. Number one, of course. And that's part of consciousness. It's like... I can know Melita is younger than I am, but I can't know her birthday just by looking at her. Her birthday, whatever it is, April 17th, 1984, That is all in the realm of calendars and all kinds of things.

[34:16]

I can only know it by being told. So that's borrowed consciousness. Now, a person who's practicing tends to be, or ideally is, in immediate consciousness. And let me say, I really noticed this once, I've told this story before, when I was in Munich, and I saw the Dalai Lama. And I know him pretty well. He stayed at my center in the United States the first time he came to the United States. So he was with us for eight days, and he wasn't famous. He didn't have this big entourage, and so we just hung out for eight days.

[35:17]

It was great. He's only six months older than me. Yeah, borrowed consciousness. So anyway, I some years later was in Munich and people said, oh, let's go see the Dalai Lama. We've got seats or we've got tickets or something. It was a huge conference of Protestant young people. I mean about a million, I mean thousands. It was in a big stadium. And the physicist Weizsäcker And the Dalai Lama gave a talk.

[36:29]

Weizsäcker gave a very intelligent talk. Interesting talk. Entirely in borrowed consciousness. It's all right, you know. Everybody sat there. That's the trouble with my list. It's mostly in borrowed consciousness. Dalai Lama got up there. And he started to speak. First actually he noticed me because my blonde curls aren't so visible. He waved at me. And as I often say, he's a little bit like a chipmunk, not just a monk. Because he stretches his head and looks around.

[37:35]

So he gave a talk which had no content. We all want to be happy, don't we? The reason we practice is to be happy. Each person wants to be happy. That's basically what he said for about 20 minutes. What are you going to do? You have to give these talks all the time. But he never left immediate consciousness. Except for one or two moments when he complained about the Chinese. And everyone felt great. It was like the joy during one of these big peace marches where everybody is happy. And afterwards we all flowed out with this big flow of young Protestants.

[38:37]

And they were singing, not Buddhist hymns, but singing. And we got on the subway, the underground, what do you call it? And people are singing in the trains as some grouchy old Bavarians come on. But mostly everyone is really happy. You have to call this a city, a city of special power. So what the Dalai Lama was doing by staying in immediate consciousness, he was in a way using his words, throwing the words out and then pulling people into immediate consciousness. So, for somebody like His Holiness, He says something, and if it goes up here, it comes back down here.

[39:43]

So this is not immediate consciousness. Even this line in the borrowed consciousness is immediate consciousness. But if your starting point is borrowed consciousness, even if occasionally you make some remark like, geez, that woman in the front row is beautiful and blonde, It returns to borrowed consciousness. So the yogi, the Zen practitioner, the mature Zen practitioner, for the most part, his or her mind is always... located, rooted in the immediate situation. Unfortunately, our whole educational system is here. And our society has not emphasized this much at all.

[41:10]

The only, practically only time this is partly a joke and partly true, the only time we learn about awareness is when we learn not to wet our bed during the night. You have to teach a child to, during the night while it's sleeping, keep some control over their bladder. So we know about awareness. But some societies, like Japan, for instance, and so-called primitive societies emphasize awareness much more than consciousness.

[42:13]

And what we're trying to practice is an interpenetration of awareness and consciousness. We should stop soon, huh? So I wanted to speak about the two truths or the three truths or the four... No, yeah. And how this whole list I gave you really turns on the dynamic of consciousness. And knowing that How do we practice? Yeah, let's do it tomorrow morning.

[43:18]

Okay. Thanks. So let's sit for a few minutes. Thought arises.

[45:29]

Before consciousness arises. The consciousness you'll let go of when you sleep tonight. consciousness that will reappear and shape your life.

[46:48]

And in which we mostly think we know who we are. Thank you for being here today.

[49:21]

Thank you to see how to hear that. Thanks for translating. Thank you for your willingness to be rearranged in the room. I like this better, actually. And maybe it's good to be rearranged. Maybe the break will change the room another way. Does anybody have something you want to say or bring up?

[50:41]

You said yesterday in one sentence that awareness is very much connected to breathing, breath. Could you say something more please about that? Is it a general connection or is it a sort of path or an entry? You know, one of the hidden elements in the current of my teaching is for some reason a deep resistance to speaking about things I've spoken about before, recently. But since I've been speaking or talking or doing whatever I do, continuously for about two months now, every weekend and through the weeks too,

[52:20]

Almost everything I want to say I've already said. So I have a resistance to saying it. I keep avoiding certain topics and I wonder how. Then I can't say what I want to say because I need to build a certain kind of picture. It's a peculiarity of mine. I don't know why. Some teachers can give the same lecture every time. I feel comfortable. Okay. Here we go. Okay. Awareness is connected with the body. I think we have an image of the content of mind.

[53:37]

Well, first of all. Okay, go ahead. Mm-hmm. And I probably should speak about the five dharmas. Okay, but if we have an image of thinking, thoughts, moods, as a kind of units of content... Yeah, in what are... Where does this content appear? It occurs in the field of mind. Okay. And thought, you know, you could have another picture.

[54:47]

You could have a room or a warehouse or something like that. Or some continuous series of rooms with nothing around it. But clearly, through practicing meditation, you have much more the sense of like words on a page. And the page gets bigger and the words get farther apart. So through our practice, Zen practice, meditation practice, we end up with this, with a metaphor, image that fits our experience. Of contents of mind. and a field of mind in which the contents appear.

[55:57]

When you have this experience, everything that appears is a dharma. Because a dharma is a process, not a thing. So someone asked me recently, is it in the five dharmas, discrimination is called one of the five dharmas? How can discrimination, which is one of the problems we have in a way, identifying with our discrimination, How can it be a dharma? Both a dharma if you experience it as appearing from the field of mind. Is that a clear image? Does anybody have a problem with it? It's like there's things under the surface of the water, and when they appear, you say, oh, that's a name of the feeling.

[57:16]

And I've been trying to think... going beyond what you asked, but I'll wend my way back, perhaps. Because the questions people have asked, and the person who asked the question about the unconscious yesterday isn't here today. But he asked something like, He asked, where does the unconscious fit in this picture? Actually, I've answered that question many times, but it's actually rather difficult to answer. And in this new context, I have to respond differently. And I don't have much problem with the concept of the unconscious in this context.

[58:17]

That's fairly easy to deal with. But what's more difficult is the experiences people have which are explained through the unconscious. Like the functioning in unseen in consciousness of forgotten memories. How do we explain that in this picture? Well, this isn't a picture of everything, but how do we explain it, at least in this picture? So the functions... The consciousness, what I would say, are something like forgotten functional memories.

[59:37]

Excuse me, forgotten? Of the unconscious. Of the unconscious, yeah. Also, die Funktion des Unbewussten, würde ich jetzt mal sagen, wäre also eben vergessene Erinnerungen. Forgotten functional memories. Vergessene funktionale Erinnerungen. Forgotten dysfunctional memories. Vergessene dysfunktionale, also nicht-funktionale Erinnerungen. regressive patterns where we're in part of our personality we're held at 14 years old or something like that. Yeah, creative aspects in which the unconscious for a writer or artist or something like that functions to widen or rearrange his conscious associations. Mythopoetic images of the self. Like you think you're Napoleon.

[60:53]

Or a beautiful princess when you're a fat old man. Or any kind of image that works beneath the surface. and affects how you think of yourself. That's some of them. Okay. So the question is not how do I explain the unconscious so much, but how do I explain those aspects of people's experience? And I'd be happy for those of you who are therapists or those of you who think about these things, if you want to add some aspect or dimension during the day.

[61:54]

That's fine with me. I like it. Okay. Okay. Now, in addition to the aspects I mentioned, the conscious, unconscious, is what I call a threshold dynamic. It's like Hades is the god, Hermes is the god of doorways, gates, thresholds. Hermes.

[63:08]

And Hades is the god of the netherworld. And the netherworld is not hell. Nor is Hades hell, though it becomes hell. It's just where the shades, the disembodied bodiless spirits are. Now that doesn't have the feeling of devils or ghosts or anything like that. It's just some dimension of us that remains after we're dead. It's not transformed into a place of suffering I think until Christianity. So in a no play, as I've often mentioned, the front part of the stage, which is the smaller part of the stage, is the time and space of the audience.

[64:20]

When you step into the back part of the stage, which is the larger part of the stage, you're in a timeless space, which is also a kind of nether world. Where the spirits... of the spirits of the dead can appear. The way of walking I talked about in Noh plays are extremely slow. It's all like Kin Hin. When the actor steps into this back part of the stage, his demeanor and voice changes. It affects the audience.

[65:38]

Another kind of voice starts to feel in the audience itself. And sometimes in the midst of one of these things, an actor will not just move slowly, but stop or freeze, and the audience caught up and actually gasps or screams a little bit sometimes. And my translator and I are going to try that sometimes. Gasp! Okay. So this is another example of this threshold dynamic.

[66:55]

But it makes a big difference what you think are on the two sides of the threshold. And mostly we think of the unconscious as some dimension, repressed dimension of the conscious. That's not the case in Buddhist thinking. It's just a different area. And the border is not hard to cross. Okay. Okay. So we can think of the field of mind and the contents of mind as a threshold dynamic.

[68:04]

Let me just say, Sophia, a while ago... said, you know, I used to be in you, Mama, didn't I? I used to be? Be inside you. Sophia said to Marie-Louise. And Marie-Louise said, yes. Sophia said, but I couldn't have been in your blood. I must have been in some kind of bag. And so Marie-Louise said, yeah, well, that's right. That's a good... And the eggs of your future babies are in you already, she said. Sophia said, I miss them already. Well, this is a threshold dynamic.

[69:15]

When you step behind this line, you also could be in the presence of your not yet born children. Hades is not only the god of the netherworld he's also and the dead, he's also the dispenser of the world's riches. Maybe he's the god of inheritance taxes. But it's a funny contradiction of this threshold stuff that asks us, how can the god of the dead dispense riches?

[70:22]

But isn't that what happens? Hermes is a thief as well as a herald and messenger. And this emphasis on this kind of contradiction is more Western than yogic. But the dynamic of the threshold is more emphasized in yogic thinking. Okay. All right. So there's the content of mind and the field of mind. And that's a kind of threshold. Okay. Now, breathing... Okay, now, before I get to breathing.

[71:34]

The field of mind, the experience of the field of mind, in other words, when you can hold to the moment before a thought arises, you have a much stronger physical feeling of mind and thinking than when you're thinking. So the field of mind in experience seems to have much more physicality than thinking. As we talked about yesterday, the activity of thinking can get very separated from physicality. You can think about anything. As I say, you can read the back of cereal boxes. Yeah, Dr. Oetker.

[72:51]

Dr. Oetker. Yeah, you know, Dr. Oetker has not much physicality. I mean, he himself may, but when you read his name... You can see how German I'm becoming. But again, as I implied or said yesterday, Anybody who's thinking, I really feel, is substantial, is substantial usually in a physical sense. So we have the terms in Buddhism, live words and dead words.

[73:53]

And you could say dead thinking is non-physical thinking and live thinking is physical thinking. Okay. Now, breathing can be associated with... dead thinking and it can be associated with live thinking.

[74:35]

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