Yeah, every time I, almost every time I start a lecture, have to give a lecture, I, yeah, I don't know exactly what to do. I, sometimes this experience, apforia, I don't know if that's how you pronounce it, it's an important idea in Buddhism of coming to a point where you're blocked or you don't know and yet that's at the basis of everything because ultimately the root of everything is a mystery. You can't even explain one word fully. Yes, sometimes it's more the case than others. sometimes it's not so fruitful. Sometimes it's fruitful.

[01:02]

But I'd like, to the extent that I, what I'm trying to do, like in the last few days, last few teishos, is kind of plot, plot, describe the topography, tomography, tomography is sliced through, topography is the surface, the topography and the tomography of experience from a yogic point of view. Now, the difficulty or the ease, I don't know what difficulty is, is that not it's unfamiliarity to us practicing, but it's unfamiliarity in our culture, it's not a common territory of experience, and so I have to find in my experience, I can't just use some Buddhist terms, in my experience, a way to speak about it that also overlaps with your experience or perhaps awakens your experience or brings experience you have to your mindful attention.

[02:28]

And I think one thing that might be useful when we try to, and it might help me, it would help me, is that sometimes in the seminars you bring up something that, can we all understand what this meant? Or what I intended, or what was successfully or unsuccessfully brought forth. And I know that... I think Christian mentioned that in the last seminar you spoke about these four revocations. I call it in my mind four revocations where you revoke the substantiality of the world. The word revoke is to reverse or avoid or withdraw from. So to withdraw from or reverse the substantiality of the world these four revocations, as I call them, are to see everything as interdependent, an activity, a construct in mind.

[03:43]

Now what you're trying to do when you do that, I mean, from one rather, maybe, let's say a simple point of view, it's just the way things actually are, so it's the truth. But the truth isn't enough for Buddhism. The truth, Buddhism wants transformative truth, or They're true and transforming. So in what way is it transforming to get in the habit of these four revocations, revoking the substantiality of the world? I mean, even in its substantiality. But our relationship to it can't be described by substantiality. or entity, entity-ness. So, you get in the habit of noticing that everything, each thing is interdependent, an activity, a construct, and mind, perception.

[04:51]

And what you do when you do that is you unhook the mind and the self from a substantial world. Now, even if you think of things as relatively substantial or just et cetera, you know, like that, that also makes a container world, a container space. And the assumption of a container space really, really, yeah, makes you a container. and changes the potential of practice and realization and freedom from suffering, mental suffering. Now, the term I would like to use today, made-up term, sort of made-up term, factic unitary experience.

[05:54]

How's that? Something to work with. Now, factic... I don't know what's a word from factual and from facticity. That things are facts. And I think mostly it's been used by Heidegger and people comment on Heidegger. But what I mean by factic is that there are certain facts. Well, this sounds like the opposite of the four revocations. I'm sitting on something, you're sitting on something, you're breathing air, etc. You may also be thinking about Chicago. Now, if you're thinking about Chicago, that's also a fact. Why are you thinking about Chicago? If you're thinking about Chicago, it's also a fact, but it's not really a fact in the sense that I mean unless you're also aware you're sitting here, breathing, heart beating, etc. Then the thinking is also a fact. But if you're so caught up that the fact of the world isn't part of your thinking about Chicago, then I wouldn't call this a factic experience.

[07:08]

Now, what do I mean by unitary experience? Well, the things come into, fall into units. But what I really mean by that is you experience your experience. This all sounds so Zen, I'm sorry. You experience your experience. Well, most of the time, we are, we have experience, but it just kind of slides by. We don't know whether it's creating karma or not creating karma. It just... we're not really engaged in our experience moment by moment. And unless you're engaged moment by moment in your moment by moment experience, there's no dharmic practice. And by unitary experience, I mean something like dharmic practice, dharmic experience. Now, Dogen speaks, you know, one of, I think, I'm finding it It's useful to take certain phrases and really work with them until you kind of thoroughly have probed their possibilities as much as possible.

[08:30]

So one of the ones we use is to complete that which appears. And I'm also using these days not to dwell on anything. Well, that's also a bodeless mind, one of the main stations of practice. Not to dwell on anything. To complete that which appears. But to complete that which appears, it appears, and so it disappears. So to complete that which appears also means to release. So you get in the habit of completing and releasing. To complete and release that which appears. Now Heidegger imagines, divides the world into three worlds.

[09:34]

The surrounding world, what he calls the with-world and the self-world. These work fine for thinking about practice. And he says that the surrounding world and the with-world are structured and appropriated by the self. In other words, for most of us, the surrounding world and the with-world all point to the self. Now the question again here, and one of the implicit questions about what I'm talking about is, when does the self appear in our activity? And Sophia, you can read to yourself. When does the self appear in our activity? We follow the schedule.

[10:37]

You know, most of the time, follow the schedule. Now, is it an intention that's following the schedule? Or is it you or I? Do you have an I experience of following the schedule? Well, probably it's more of an intention. You've made an intention and the intention you made that keeps you following the schedule was a complexly constructed intention through being here, through your personal history and so forth. So once you've made the intention, that intention keeps you moment by moment following the schedule. If you every moment had to decide, do I really want to follow the schedule, boy, you'd have a hard time. It'll be a hard practice period. But still, even though it's perhaps an intention which follows the schedule, it still is your experience or my experience.

[11:39]

So what's the difference between mindness, my experience, and I experience? Well, these are the kinds of distinctions that you can't even make without yogic, some yogic, attentional awareness, but that are fundamental to practice and fundamental to finding yourself in the world in a new way. Because again, if we can only do the kenyans that are possible in this room because of the givenness of this room, well, but if we change the room, we can do different kinds of kenyan. So how does our yogic practice, awareness, change the world in a way that changes our mind? Now, I don't like with worlds very well.

[12:45]

I don't know, you have to create some sort of term. I prefer through world. So, maybe surrounding world, yeah. The through world and the self world. Now, through world, I use through world because I like the word. Through is in one side and out the other. I went through. And through is also, I've completed it. So this also has some correspondence to the three horizons of Buddhism. The world of desire, the world of form, and the world of formlessness. The world of desire is when you see everything in terms of whether you like it or don't like it or how it affects yourself or how it gives you pleasure or don't give you pleasure.

[13:52]

And really, I mean, if you're practicing, one of the skills of mindfulness is to really, without criticizing yourself, just simply take an inventory. How often are my moment-by-moment decisions on the basis of pleasure, pain, like, dislike, etc. How it affects the self. Now, one of the things we're trying to do by these four revocations, the practice of seeing things as constructs, interdependent activities in mind, is it actually separates you, frees you from, to a considerable degree, from this desire world. A world defined through its relationship to self. Now the form world is more like a world of equanimity or equalness.

[14:57]

Each thing is equal. It's more, maybe, fact, factic. But these are, you know, these limit our views. And when you're in the when you are in the habit of the desire world, how it affects me, how it relates to me, etc., like that, you can't really see your worldviews. The advantage of freeing yourself from that, releasing yourself from that, is you begin to be able to see your worldviews, the limits of your thinking, the limits of your attitudes, etc., It also opens you to knowing the world as space or as the field of mind, not the contents of mind again, but the field of mind.

[16:03]

Now the... this ... factic unitary experience. What is the unitary? Units. Not oneness, but units. Well, the most, the basic way again to come into the mindful attentional world is through the mindful breath attention. And it's through the breath attention, again, when we release it from its constituting itself, finding its continuity through your thoughts, you come more into this second realm of just things as they exist.

[17:24]

into the facticity of the world, and you begin to have this sense of things begin to have a form. Or, I'm using the word unitary, kind of they appear as units. Units that we can understand. And this is not about existence. As someone said, it's about, Buddhism isn't about being, but seeing or understanding. Instead of seeing the world as a container, you see it as a tent you pitch. To pitch a tent means to put up a tent. So at each moment, even in the room you live in most of the time, it's still a tent you're putting up. You have the feeling it's a tent. And the way you walk into it, you change the tent. You offer incense, you change the tent. I've offered a lot of incense in my life.

[18:27]

Would it fill this room? I don't know. But I never attach to the incense. I offer it. It goes up in smoke. And for me, it's a kind of experience. I mean, most of you don't offer incense all the time, but you could. Just stick a bunch of altars around. But when I offer incense, to me, the offering of the incense is very much like these four revocations. of its interdependent construct, activity, and mind. So when I offer incense, I don't attach to any particular aspect of the offering incense. And that feeling of the offering incense, of completing that activity, I really do have a feeling of completing it, as present as I'm able at that moment, I don't have any thoughts other than the incense.

[19:30]

I put it in. I like to put it in so it barely stands up, so you don't have a long, stinky part that burns underneath. Some people push it way down, you know, like there's going to be an earthquake. It's not a bad idea, though, because sometimes temples burn down because the incense falls over and falls on the cloth. So you have to put it in strongly enough that it... But it's nice just lightly and And you complete it and it's done. So in a funny way, for me anyway, each activity is kind of like an offering. An offering, I like that, completing that which appears as an offering. And knowing it's an activity and there's no self. When I offer incense, there's no I that offers the incense. There's no self involved in offering the incense, except in the sense of an intention or completing it or something like that. And if you feel, for me, if it's useful to feel everything is like incense, because then I really feel the insubstantiality of the world.

[20:43]

Yeah, it also relates to me for the practice of the paramitas, etc. In the sense, again, each activity is an offering and you don't expect anything from the offering. That's also to not dwell on anything. Let the mind flow freely without dwelling on anything. How can you really start noticing when the mind dwells and when it doesn't dwell? And when you have a spatial sense without boundaries, without a specific location, Until you have some kind of, let's say this, go back to this term, factic unitary experience.

[22:10]

Where you feel located in, through, at each moment. Located by each moment. And I maybe is a marginal experience. Mindness My experience is even a marginal experience. It's just more of a sense of offering. And then your experience can be noticed and you experience your experience. You're in the midst of your experience. You don't know where it'll go exactly, but you're in the midst of your experience. Then the teaching can be brought in. Until you really are in the midst of your own experience, as your experience, which unless it's as a unitary quality, you can't really experience it. Until that's the case, you can't bring teachings in. But then you create the field where teachings can function.

[23:15]

Teachings don't, I mean, teachings can get us started. To have breath, mindful breath, attention is a teaching. But to really bring teachings in, like the kind of, trying to look through the, between the layers of our experience with a yogic awareness, this can't be done until we establish our experience in our experience. Then the teachings can be brought in not in some way that's foreign to us, that's something outside, but something that makes our experience more clear, clearer. And you find yourself in a situation where each thing has a preciseness and clarity and it's simultaneously an absorptive quality.

[24:24]

It tends to disappear and it tends to be very clear at the same time. But to be in the situation where At each moment there's a kind of clarity and cessation. This takes some yogic skills to get there. But when there's a clarity and cessation in each moment, yeah, there's a tremendous freedom from self. of freedom from entanglements, at each moment a kind of, or not a kind of, a release. Yeah, I've said too much, or probably not enough. Thank you very much. May our intention equally penetrate every given place.

[25:32]

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