Nicole has just recently finished her coursework at Oldenburg in psychology. And has been practicing with us and with me for eight years, six years? No, eight. Eight years. She started when she was 12. Yeah, and I've been to Two practice periods at Creston. And so I always wonder what this experience of somebody schooled in psychology, practicing Zen the way she has been. So I asked her, say something so I can learn something. So, would you say something?

[01:01]

One thing that has always preoccupied me in recent times, or an area of experience that I am currently exploring, You want me to translate now or later? As you wish. Later is fine. Later is fine? I mean, whatever you want. You want me to feel connected now? Yeah, I want you to feel connected now. All right. One realm of experience that I'm investigating at the moment and an experience that I always make during Sashin is that there is a phase in Sashin, the first three days approximately, where I always have the feeling of karma cooking. It is always a very psychological phase, where it is simply about psychological content, which I am very familiar with, which comes up.

[02:28]

And then at some point, They cook themselves so high that they come from the stories that they normally create in my life and of course always come back. These are always very similar stories that you tell yourself. Where they cook themselves so high that they no longer fit into the stories. So almost a little bit because the experiences get too intense. And I make the experience that for, let's say, pretty much the first three days I feel like I'm karma cooking in a way. The first three days are usually for me somehow predominantly psychological experiences where it basically starts out with the stories that are very familiar to me, the stories that I tell myself. and that then boil themselves down in a way that at some point I'm left with some kind of physical trace, some kind of intense feeling does not fit into the story anymore, or the story doesn't satisfy the feeling anymore.

[03:43]

I just said it a little differently, that the story, the feeling with which then at some point remain unsatisfied. It is often the case that when I tell the story, it satisfies this longing, or this fear, or a rage becomes a revenge story, or somehow that there is a correspondence between the story and the feeling, which satisfies each other. And that is in the sashin that the feeling becomes too intense. And then I experience that that in Sashin a state of mind is more established, which Roshi has now called Gwasal, in which I actually have the feeling to have no more psyche. So it's like the feeling of no before and no after. And the way in which mental contents are connected And what happens after a while in Sesshin is that a mind establishes what you just called awareness, as you've talked about it, a mind that I experience as

[05:01]

a mind in which the contents of mind are not really psychological. They very much refer to the present moment and to sensory information. It's more like attention jumping around in the present rather than a psychological context. this mind where there's no before and after, and this lack of time span somehow also takes away the psychological aspect of the mind. And I realize then, when these intense physical experiences, which don't feel complete yet, like pain, fear, I feel it as the core, the individual core of a certain complex of stories that I tell myself. When that appears in this spirit, This is an experience where I experience a psychological process in a field of awareness.

[06:42]

This is a field where I ask myself, what is happening there? What happens to me? What happens to the psychological experience? And how do you eat with it? And I noticed that when then psychological processes come up in that mind, that they come up much clearer than they usually do. They come up as something I would call the gist of the energy of a particular set of stories that I usually tell myself. Okay. And the field that I'm exploring is how am I in this, or, well, yeah, it's difficult to say, but what is this field where there's this mind of awareness and psychological processes come up in that, and what does that do with this organism, what's happening there?

[07:54]

So overall, if you can put it together, it's an attempt to explore what happens when psychological processes take place in the being. That's a way of trying to bring together the things I've learned, or how they bring themselves together. And maybe I could say in a kind of concise way that what I think I'm really investigating there is what's happening when psychological processes come up in a state of awareness. Yeah. Because you said that you felt like you no longer had a psyche. Yes, yes. Then these are actually not psychological processes, but yes, who knows? It is actually, you are right, these are not psychological processes, but it is the core of an energy that is normally a psychological process.

[08:57]

He's mentioning how I said before, it's actually, as I said, it's really not psychological processes that come up. And I said that that's true and that's really the way I experience it. It's more that it's the gist of an energy that usually is a psychological process that comes up. Do you then, are you talking about maybe the difference between I feel a feeling or I observe a feeling as the process that is then unfolding? And you mean observing what happens in the being and feeling normally? Yes. I also feel the feeling. But I would say I'm not just identified with it.

[10:05]

And even in the pain, it's actually not a rejection of the pain, but it's a feeling of, it's actually fun somehow. In addition, during the break we talked about what you said before. And we came to the conclusion that this change between feeling what is and observing what is, or looking at it, as it is in meditation, also conveys further knowledge to others. Thank you. just as an addition during the break we also talked about the question that I brought up before the break and they came to the conclusion that maybe it's helpful to look at the shift between feeling a feeling and observing the feeling and then see what happens in this case The situation where you feel the feeling, but at the same time you cannot observe it, is then an ecstatic situation, that you are standing beside yourself.

[11:15]

Is that a question? He asked the question, is the feeling where you feel the feeling but at the same time observe it, is that an ecstatic feeling where you are kind of out of your own place? Ecstatic doesn't really come into resonance with what I mean. It's a very detached, suspended in English, I would rather say. And in German there is no very good word for it, somehow more in the open. Yeah. Thank you. I said that ecstatic doesn't really create resonance for the kind of experience I'm having, I'd say more something like suspended.

[12:16]

Andrea? That is really interesting to me because in my work I also try to separate what I now call the gist, the gist or the substrate maybe, from the story. And if I succeed in the therapy, I have the feeling that I can leave the concentration in the deepest peace and just make it available to me like a space. This is also my feeling about what happens in Sejin. And yes, there is nothing more to do. This also fits the question I asked before, why not heal?

[13:19]

Yes. And my feeling is then that when we get down to this substrate, that I can leave that deeply alone and just provide a space in which it can be there. There's nothing to do. And what in our language we call neurosis is always the story around it. What I am saying is that we are going in the opposite direction. I don't know this experience very well. I haven't seen it in practice, but as you describe it, I have the idea that we usually experience feelings when we tell stories and talk to ourselves in a linear way, that we experience the meaning of the feelings that we think about, that we live in the background of the story.

[14:24]

I what I wanted to say relates to what Andrea just said and since I haven't been practicing for such a long time I don't know the experience of session but and it seems to me that what we usually experience is the meaning of an emotion the meaning that we that we give give something give the That is what we want to integrate into ourselves, the meaningful background, which arises from the figure and the background. So, as we usually do, the background is the story. Is the meaning in front of the background of the story, like a figure in Gestaltstherapy, figure and background?

[15:28]

Yes. My experience is also the same as Andrea said, that it is about this not-doing or this full acceptance of what is or what was. and I don't notice anything else that has this strong effect than that you really hold inside and don't do anything, so I don't think there is any other experience than this holding inside, or like with Sesshin, to be there for a little longer, and when sitting, the experience itself is that I accept that I am there with what is, so it is the pure experience of it, I think so. One thing that I would like to add to that is also very similar to what Andrea said, how the strongest effect of how to deal with these experiences is really to

[16:31]

If you don't do anything to them, that has the stormless effect on them and that's very similar to, I think, what we do in Sechin. To accept it. Yeah, to accept it and how it's very difficult to teach that or to convey that to clients who don't have that experience. And the only thing we can do then is to pause and pause in a way, in the sense of practicing also within the session. Yes? I have a question too. Angela is a mensch? I have a question to the phrase mind and mind that you brought up yesterday, which was so well explained by the sentence.

[17:39]

Oh, really? I don't have to do anything. It's great. I'm just letting it happen. Okay. I would like to check my understanding of that phrase. Are we speaking to me now or you? I'm speaking to you and she's also speaking to you. Oh, okay. Who am I speaking to? I'd like to check on my understanding of that.

[18:43]

My understanding is that the first mind is that we recognize dualism and that in this phrase, Angela is a good person, that Angela has a vertical dimension that we project our knowledge, our mind, on what we know about her. And that is the first term, mind. And then if I understood that correctly yesterday, the second term, mind, is a kind of meta-level, meta-stage. That if I see others as a construct and see how I project what I know onto them and thus construct them, then I see myself as a construct as well. And my question is, if that is the case, is then not aliveness also a construct?

[20:13]

Aliveness. Well, I would say that the experience is, I mean, you could say philosophically, yes, it's a construct. So that's applying the same kind of thinking too. But experientially, you know aliveness most fully when you take away all constructs which can be taken away. Also, wenn du dieselbe Art zu denken auch darauf anwendest, dann kannst du sagen, ja, das ist ein Konstrukt. Aber in der Erfahrung erfährst du Lebendigkeit dann am vollständigsten, wenn du alle Konstrukte wegnimmst. And then it gives you a point of view from which you can see the addition of constructs when you add constructs.

[21:19]

It would be something like the idea of original mind or something like that, which is prior to constructs. That would be something like the idea of the original spirit, where the experience lies before the constructs. Okay. I would like to add to the question If you say that the living, the pure living, is not a construct, then is that the pure reality? What is reality in this context? The question that arises for me when you speak about aliveness as not being a construct

[22:36]

Then the question is, is that also then the reality or what is reality? Is aliveness reality in the sense that it's not a construct or is even before aliveness, is there another layer of what then is really reality? Maybe something like absolute reality. Okay. Oh dear. I think We can't say what is reality.

[23:53]

Because whatever we say about reality is a construct. So the question is, what construct is the most fruitful? The most fruitful construct is there's no reality. Or there's no ground of being. Okay, now if we say there's no ground of being, which is the basic assumption of Buddhism, at least Buddhism rigorously looked at and studied, So if there's no ground of being, then all we've got is the parts. Yeah. And... And not even the parts, because the parts implies units, so all we've got is participants.

[25:13]

So let's think, no, the parts are participants, but let me use the word parts. Okay. If all there is is parts, then all there is is the relationship between parts. And then our life is how we arrange those parts. But in order to practice, in order to have some basis for understanding, You've got to have some situation where you say there's less parts and I can compare that to more parts or something like that.

[26:20]

So one of the ways to talk about less parts is aliveness. Thank you. Now the key point in what I'm saying here is establishing aliveness as your continuum. As a continuum. It's not really right to say your continuum, because it goes beyond mine and your, and so forth. Now, one of the best authorities on Buddhism is a man named Yuan Wu, who was the compiler of the Bluetooth records. And he says something like, whole intact being is always appears before you.

[27:43]

And he says something like, whole intact being is always appears before you. Intakte Sein. Das ganze intakte Sein erscheint vor dir. And it's made exactly for you. Und es ist genau für dich gemacht. Okay, now, this again isn't meant to be necessarily rigorously analyzed as it's fully true or something like that. And because it's clearly a conception. And conceptions immediately have problems because they imply entity-ness. But what Yuan Wu means, it's useful to view everything that appears as the whole of being.

[28:46]

And to say that it's fitted to you exactly. Takes it out of the realm of an entity concept and makes it your activity. He also says, establish a mind without, as she mentioned before and after, Er sagt auch so etwas, wie sie das auch gesagt hat, stelle einen Geist ohne vorher und nachher her. Establish a mind without before and after.

[29:48]

Stelle einen Geist ohne vorher und nachher her. And realize Buddhahood right where you stand. Und verwirkliche die Buddhaschaft genau dort, wo du stehst. What I'm trying to get at is what kind of... dynamic maybe is our conceptions like this? Now, let me ask Nicole a question. There's a car that's in the way of the trash. Oh, really? Okay. Is your experience of the first three days of Sashin being more of a psychological process?

[31:02]

Perhaps you're being cooked by your karma and the last four days are cooking your karma. In any case, so the last three days are not so obviously a psychological process. But would you say overall it's a meta-psychological process? Does it help alleviate change, transform your psychological situation? I say in German first? Yeah. Even if it does not feel like a psychological process at the moment, it is definitely a process that has a very clear psychological effect.

[32:18]

It very clearly, even though within those last four days doesn't feel like a psychological process, it clearly has psychological effects. I mean, very many stories or particular stories just don't appear anymore after that. Because, you know, many of you in this room have been practicing with the Dharma Sangha and with me as long as she has and longer. So we have a room full of experts here on relating practice and psychotherapeutic processes. Sometimes I think we should get together. We should figure out if there's some kind of school that is developing through practicing and that can be used psychotherapeutically without expecting the person necessarily to practice.

[33:40]

in which practice and psychotherapeutic effect can be brought together, which can be used in such a way that the client does not necessarily have to practice in order to apply it. It would have been my car if it wasn't in Freiburg. Yeah. Siegfried Essen in Austria... Siegfried Essen in Austria... ...says that... Who's the woman from Esslin?

[35:02]

Who was... I can't remember her name. Anyway, and Bert Hellinger and Buddhism, from his point of view... Virginia Satir. Virginia Satir, yeah. And Bert Hellinger and Buddhism have, from him, continued the development of constellation work, the concept of constellation work. And taken from whom now? The first name I didn't get. Virginia Satir. Oh, yeah, but... We went on Bert Hellinger, Virginia Satir, haben das von... And from his point of view, how constellation work is developing as psychological practice, the big contributor now is Buddhism. I wouldn't know if this is true but this is what he said but it seems like there's enough of an overlap that it ought to begin to be part of the development of our approaches to what it means to be alive

[36:16]

So, let me say in related, also you asked about healing the other day. And others brought that up. And I think what came up in the discussion here, just letting something be, as you said too, is more the attitude toward healing in Buddhism. And it's not that you don't want to heal, but your primary attitude is to accept that And if you have a feeling of I want to heal this or I want to get rid of this or something like that, it interferes with a deeper process.

[38:00]

So you bring it into your life. You want it to stay in your life. You know, this whole great being appears before you and nowhere else. And then he says, it's like water poured into water. Suchness poured into suchness. It's sort of like the feeling as you pour the pain into the water or you pour the water into the beach sand or something like that. It's very similar to the, I mean, what I'm trying to get at here is a basic attitude in Buddhist practice.

[39:07]

And that basic attitude is rooted in a particular conception of the human being. So I'm trying to get to that particular conception. Okay, now another example that I'll use is the attitude toward dreaming. There's basically two attitudes toward, attitude, the relationship to dreaming. One relationship is to develop or find yourself in the circumstances continuously of lucid dreaming.

[40:23]

And if we continue, now if I use that as an example, to continue the development of a definition of awareness in contrast to consciousness, Yeah, is if you can... when you're going to sleep. Now, this is... this kind of practice isn't for your clients. Also diese Art von Übung, die ist nicht für deine Klienten gedacht. I mean, it might be for your clients, I don't know. Vielleicht ist die für deine Klienten, das weiß ich nicht. I'm just using it not to say that it can be useful in a psychotherapeutic transaction, but rather that it's an example of what Buddhism is about.

[41:32]

Ich benutze das aber nur als ein Beispiel, nicht um etwas zu sagen, was in einer psychotherapeutischen Transaktion und Prozess gut wäre, sondern nur um zu sagen, worum es im Buddhismus geht. And I think the more thoroughly we understand what Buddhism is about, the more it can inform our lives, inform whatever we do, And especially inform a practice so close to Buddhism, which is psychotherapy. Okay, so here the effort is, when you go to sleep, Now you can't go to sleep unless your consciousness goes to sleep. Or your consciousness has to get out of the way so you can go to sleep.

[42:36]

So you try to stay aware while you go to sleep. While you let go of consciousness. And there's usually a little bump you go over. And your breath, breathing changes. And your breathing changes to involuntary breathing, breathing from voluntary breathing. Like you can go into a room and your kid is pretending they're asleep. You can tell right away they're pretending. Anyway, so if you can let consciousness settle out of the way, and yet stay aware and go over the bump the breath bump and little physical shift usually into sleeping

[43:44]

that awareness can immediately become lucid dreaming. Now it's interesting, you can be lucidly involved with a dream And still not remember it when you wake up. So you have to create a little kind of you know how comic book characters have little bubbles coming off of them. So while you're having a lucid dream you have to create one of the little bubbles that says remember this. And maybe you have to take one point inside a shop in Carmel. And then that'll help you remember it later.

[44:55]

Okay, so one attitude toward or practice with dreaming and helps your practice of Zazen too, is to get skillful at lucid dreaming. But when you wake up, you have what seems like the opposite attitude. Although it's really exactly the same attitude. Yeah, if we understand the complexity of the attitude. Okay, so when you wake up, you do not try to remember the dream.

[46:12]

I mean, you can if you want to. There's no Buddhist police hanging around saying, don't remember that dream. And it's sometimes interesting to remember a dream. And even sometimes to analyze it. But usually you take the power away of the dream when you analyze it. Mostly it gets disassembled into consciousness. But I'm not in any way saying that analyzing dreams is not fruitful.

[47:16]

All I'm saying is that the Buddhist attitude toward dreams, at least in Zen... is to note the feeling of the dream. The felt sense, perhaps. The texture. And then that becomes a strand, a thread, throughout your day. So one of the ingredients of my day is that if I do have a dream, and let me say that when I was practicing most, and I'm again just speaking about what happens when you practice, For the five years I practiced most intensively, I didn't dream at all.

[48:19]

Yeah, but that's another subject. But now I do have dreams. And when I immediately try to get a physical feel for that dream, I'm not particularly interested in the details or anything, just the feel. And then that feel becomes an ingredient, sometimes a large ingredient, ingredient in the rest of my day or several days. Now what is the assumption there? The assumption is that whole intact being appears before you and nowhere else.

[49:21]

Die Annahme ist, dass das ganze intakte Sein vor dir erscheint und nirgendwo anders. Okay, now let's take Yuan Wu again. Lass uns nochmal Yuan Wu heranziehen. When you had the when you have the gist of Buddhism, when your understanding of Buddhism is pretty good, Concentrate without interruption. Without breaks. And let the womb of sagehood mature and develop. and let the womb of sagehood or the embryo of sagehood mature and develop.

[50:41]

Okay, now what these images share, pouring water into water, or concentrate uninterruptedly, is some kind of continuum. When I bring the feeling of the dream, why do I bring the feeling of the dream? Why don't I bring the details? And if I do bring the details, I just use them for the feeling. Because the feeling will weave into the continuum and the details don't weave into the continuum. They sort of stand out.

[51:43]

So if I have some pain or a psychic lesion, I don't try to heal it. I just weave it into the fabric of living. The washboard of life. And if it heals, great. If it doesn't, too bad. Because I'm going to put my trust so completely in the continuum of aliveness and living itself, I'm going to trust that if it doesn't heal me. So what? Excuse my attitude.

[52:44]

In the continuum and what of living itself? Continuum of whatever and living itself. Okay. And you have to ask yourself, too, Remembering these are just words. When Yuan Wu says, concentrate continuously without interruption, without breaks, don't say, well, I can't do that. That's for some kind of yogic nitwit. Don't say, well, I can't do that. That's for some kind of yogic nitwit. You have to look at what Yuan Wu is saying must be possible.

[53:59]

So it must be possible for me. And if you don't know what it is, then you weave your not knowing into the continuum. You take what the hell could concentrating without interruption, without breaks mean? Du nimmst, was zur Hölle könnte das Konzentrieren ohne Unterbrechung, was könnte das bedeuten? Und das machst du zu deinem Kontinuum. Du fügst einfach fortwährend Dinge dem Prozess des Lebens selbst hinzu. And trust that when you're ready to understand, you'll understand or do it or be able to do it. But if we add some intellectual understanding just to give ourselves a little confidence, for example, we all uninterruptedly have our attention on our posture.

[55:01]

Zum Beispiel haben wir alle ohne Unterbrechung unsere Aufmerksamkeit auf unsere Haltung. Alle von euch wissen mehr oder weniger, wie ihr gerade sitzt. Viele von euch wissen auch, wie ihr nachts schlaft, auf eurem Rücken oder auf der Seite. In order to stand up and not keep crawling, we learned as infants to keep our attention on our posture. So it's not a question that it can't be done. It's a question of what prevents us from doing it. Now it interests me too that when we say something's on the tip of our tongue or on the tip of our mind, Do you have the same expression? Yeah, but not the mind thing. Well, I just made that up.

[56:17]

Okay, so if you have something on the tip of your tongue, a name or something, Okay. You may not know what it is, but you definitely know what it isn't. You can't remember Andrea, but is it not Angela? No. Not Norbert? No. Not Nicole? You know what it isn't, you just don't know what it is. But knowing what it isn't is a form of knowing. And there's a great deal that's on the tip of our mind that we know what it isn't and we allow that knowing what it isn't to be a form of knowing.

[57:22]

And this is part of the craft of developing a somatic cognitive process. Or perhaps we can say a subliminal cognitive knowing that's always with us. And how do we make it more apparent? Okay, so I should stop soon. So I will try to say, finish this thought off a bit. Okay. Now I, as an entry, use the... to locate your continuum in aliveness.

[58:28]

Now, if you do that, one of the fruits is you always feel centered. You always feel actually quite secure where you are. Yeah. Now, As I said, this also is related to the feeling of presence. And related to what I called the field of awareness. But the continuity of aliveness becomes a field of awareness. Now we can see that continuity and field and medium are kind of different forms of each other. Now we can see that continuity and field and medium are somehow different forms of each other.

[59:46]

It's like the electron which goes through a thing and if it goes through one hole it's a wave, another hole it's particles. And because we think in entities we can't grasp that. So the same thing takes different forms depending on its context. Depending on its medium. Observed through consciousness is one thing, observed through awareness is another thing. Is it different then? Well, no, it's only medium dependent. Now, this is one of the problems with how do we remember something.

[60:53]

If we think of what we're trying to remember as an entity or some sort of unit, it's very hard to bring it into memory because it's a kind of morphing thing. Now, if we try to bring it into the present consciousness, let's imagine the present consciousness is three ovals. We could have one oval, which only the right... I don't know what I'm talking about. Only the right-hand side is the present. The left side is... Most of the left side is the past. But one part is in the present. But this present is primarily defined through the past. Aber diese Gegenwart, die wird hauptsächlich durch die Vergangenheit definiert.

[62:02]

Or you have a present which is mostly defined through the future or anticipation and only part of it is really defined through the present. So let's imagine that oval is turned vertical to the other ovals. So the past and the future and these other ovals. And this oval at right angles to the other two. is almost entirely defined through the immediacy of the present. The present, whatever that is. You know, the present doesn't exist. The present is just a moment that is so short it's immeasurable. The present is the duration you create in yourself.

[63:18]

And you're in charge of that duration. How wide it is, whether it's mostly in immediacy or it's mostly past defined, etc., So what kind of a prudent event, prudent means to persist or have duration, what kind of prudent event is the present? Also, welche Art von überdauerndes Ereignis ist diese Gegenwart? And what is your participation in its perdurance? Und was ist deine Teilnahme in seinem Überdauern? Okay. Now, Yuan Wu says, establish a mind without before and after. Yuan Wu sagt, stelle einen Geist her, etabliere einen Geist ohne vorher und nachher. Wow. That's possible. It's just another kind of mind where you're not making comparisons. When you're most fully centered in the experience of aliveness, you have no idea of a lifespan.

[64:33]

And the Diamond Sutra says the Bodhisattva has no idea of a lifespan. It doesn't mean a person who's a Bodhisattva doesn't know they have a lifespan. It means the fundamental mind through which they know the world is not conceptually rooted, comparative mind. Now that mind is most open to all the weavings of past, present and future. So the image here, now I'm using Freudian concepts of the unconscious, etc., as a straw man. If you look up the word neurotic in an English dictionary, it says, no longer in serious use.

[65:44]

Well, thanks a lot, dictionary. What the hell am I going to do? They don't give me something else to use. Okay, but there is not an emphasis on, in Buddhism, not an emphasis on some kind of dynamic of an unconscious container with contents there through repression. Traumatically excluded from consciousness somehow. Now I'm not saying this isn't the case. I'm just saying this has never been the concern as how the teaching has developed of Buddhism. So people would certainly recognize so-called Freudian slips when you have parapraxies.

[67:10]

Or some kind of psychosomatic shifting of the shoulders. Or dreams, etc. But the idea that there's some container with contents that have to be indirectly signaled to us through parapraxis, etc. Can you define parapraxis? It's like a slip of the tongue or something like that. Yeah. Any alert person would notice that somebody makes a slip that's in their speaking. It suggests something else is going on. But it's not understood in the way Freud tried to understand it.

[68:21]

From the point of view of Buddhism, although this is also not wholly the case, The basic view of Buddhism is everything we are is present in us as part of our life situation, context, all the time. And there are many things we don't know. You know, I mean, in a way we can say Buddhism developed from the recognition that consciousness doesn't know the holy dreams nor non-dreaming deep sleep. Buddhism developed.

[69:22]

So the insight was because all we got is the parts and no creator. How do we rearrange the parts maybe so that we can know So there's less of a separation between dreaming and consciousness and so forth. What mental and physical posture would unite dreaming mind and waking mind most likely? And the Zazen posture is what was discovered 3,000 or 4,000 years ago. And the first thing they assumed, and I think fairly accurately, is non-dreaming deep sleep surfacing is in Zazen.

[70:24]

And you begin to have a mind that overlaps dreaming, non-dreaming and waking minds. And that overlap can transform consciousness. But within consciousness, if you want to transform consciousness, first you have to create a clearing. Then you have to get some of the shrubbery and brush and trees to the side. As I suggested, one way to do that is this practice of going from the particular to the field. Because you go to the particular through ordinary consciousness. Ordinary sensorial consciousness.

[71:59]

But then when you go to the field, the field of all at onceness, you kind of clear away conceptual comparative thinking. Because if you see things with an all-at-onceness or feel them with an all-at-onceness, you can't think about them. So you begin to develop a mind in which there's no before and after. As Yuan Wu says, suggests, recommends. As happens to Nicole when she sits Sashin. And I would say, without before and after and without here and there, And even without self and others.

[73:03]

And without past and future. And that dynamic is quite a different kind of mind. Now let me just take it a step further. Which we also sort of stepped in this direction last night. Is this now field of mind, this medium of mind, a medium of field of awareness, is also a field of connectedness? You suddenly feel Located all the time, at home all the time, because everything is part of you, familial. Du fühlst dich plötzlich immer verortet, weil alles irgendwie immer vertraut erscheint.

[74:08]

Okay, and now, if your sense of, if your, now we talk about Yuan Wu saying, concentrate uninterruptedly. If you know, really know that all you've got is the parts, that knowing is a kind of uninterrupted concentration. And if you then find it just happens by the continuum of the field of connectedness, The field of connectedness and the contents that are connected suddenly become the field of mind or space itself. Or the field of become the field of space itself.

[75:20]

And then we have something where you can say, you can concentrate or know in all instances mind as space. So now we can... riff Yuan Wu's statement. Concentrate uninterruptedly on the mind as space and let the womb of sageshood or embryo of sageshood develop and mature. Now, I would presume that, well, first of all, this is not so difficult to do.

[76:28]

And I would presume that what Ralph said, where he said no memory, no desire, etc., this is very much like creating a mind concentrated on space. Or centered on aliveness. And the client then feels awakened by your aliveness, or awakened into a mind themselves that might resonantly feel like space. So what we have here is A concept that everything we are is always present.

[77:44]

Now, I'm not saying it's true. I'm saying it's a very useful concept to work with. Now, again, many things we don't know. Okay. But the view is they're always present. It's assumed in Buddhism that the main condition, the main problem in not knowing is the structure and function of consciousness itself. So you have to find some way to know in a wider way than through consciousness.

[78:46]

A way that lets subliminal knowing surface into your life. and integrate with superliminal knowing. This is the basic concept of the alaya vijnana and of practice in Buddhism. Yeah, now this concept, I think, can inform how you function as a psychotherapist or as a person and being alive somehow. I like the word arigato. It's a Japanese word which means thank you. And it was taken from the Portuguese obrigado which means thank you. But the Japanese have created some kind of false etymology.

[79:55]

So that arigato means isn't life difficult. So when you say thank you, you're saying thank you and we both recognize isn't life difficult. By the way, you brought up earlier mind and mind. And the way you understood it is very useful for you to pursue, to weave into your activity. But it's not quite what I said. Okay. What I said was, the first mind, and maybe we should just limit this to the first mind, is to know that everything Percept points to the mind as well as to that which is perceived.

[81:18]

You want to get so you really know that. And you don't want to know it intellectually somewhere and act differently. You want to bring that into your every perception. If you do that, that's great. The second mind is only to feel that, not just to know it. Excuse me, but for ranting like a madman. But you know, I don't know how to say these things, so I just have to get on a roll. And see what happens and trust that maybe something will come out. So it's time to stop having things come out and have something come in.

[82:29]

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