I've been doing this Zen meditation stuff for 58 years, I think now. It's a long train. And what has struck me over these years is that how different the culture yogic Zen or East Asian yogic culture is from a Western culture. And so I've had to really... I've had to develop two parallel streams or two streams, one talking about Zen practice and the other talking about the cultural difference or trying to demonstrate the cultural difference.

[01:11]

To some extent, this is not two streams because Zen practice itself is based on the potentiality of transformation. And so the teachings, particularly embedded in the koans, are actually ways in which we can change our state of mind. And luckily, our mind-body identity has plasticity. And if you do take some repetitive pattern... it not only changes your behavior patterns, it also changes, rewires your brain. I know that that's the case now. I've always felt it was the case, but neurologically, you rewire yourself. And so that's kind of exciting.

[02:19]

But if I... trying to give you some examples if I use my watch here someone gave me and I move it around it's hard to tell the time for sure but if I can stop it moving I can concentrate on it and if I can stop myself moving I can concentrate on it now If I just learn to concentrate on this, this is actually quite an achievement. Your attention comes to it and then your attention goes away and your attention comes to it and your attention goes away and eventually your attention comes back by itself. And then eventually it just rests on the object. What I'm bringing up here is that Zen practice is really developed an attentional skill.

[03:30]

And I would say that East Asian yogic cultures are attentional cultures, not cognitive cultures. Now this sounds like just some words I've said, but if you're Well, let's just take the word mindfulness. Mindfulness would be better translated as attentional attunement than mindfulness. You don't quite know what mind means even, but attentional attunement means that you can... Keep bringing your attention to things and actually engage it, attune yourself to things. Now, yeah, so if I try to reprogram you a bit for the 20 minutes we have, 24, 23, 21, I could say to you, please substitute the word aliveness

[04:40]

for every time you think of self or you do comparative thinking or you think of, yeah, anyway. And you cue yourself in a Pavlovian way, I think comparatively, and you say aliveness. You bring the word aliveness to each step you do. You bring the word aliveness to... Now, I'm trying to here, obviously, give you a feeling for the practice, not some intellectual description of this. So... And if you bring your attention to each step, going upstairs or downstairs, say, you cue yourself to do that, what you're doing is you've formed an intention, which is mentality, to bring attention to the breath.

[05:42]

So you're bringing, just by bringing the word aliveness, which is language and concept, you're actually mixing mentality with the breath as a vehicle of attention, and that attention can pervade the body. So eventually, if you keep doing that, attention begins to pervade your body. Yes? Can you speak louder, please? Well, I'm speaking about as loudly as I can. So... I think what you'd have to do is turn off the fan and maybe in this weather we don't want to do that. You can? All right. There's a seat right there you can sit in. Yeah, okay. You mean I can stand in the middle on a chair?

[06:50]

I don't think standing will make a difference. Anyway, so if you bring attention to your breath, you're actually using the breath as a vehicle, as I said, to bring attention into the body. Now, often we say, people say, bring attention to your breathing. It's really not to your breathing. It's to your inhale and your exhale. And it's not even to the inhale and the exhale. It's to the bodily experience of the inhale and the bodily experience of the exhale.

[07:51]

Now, maybe some of you will try this. And it's surprising that if you do, and say you bring the word aliveness to this inhale and aliveness to the exhale, you begin to... you diminish your sense of self, you diminish your comparative thinking, because an attentional world is not a cognitive comparative world. And now of course in East Asian yoga culture or Zen culture, you make comparisons, but the definitive dynamic is attention, not comparative cognition. And that is a huge shift if you start doing that.

[08:53]

It changes how consciousness functions and so forth. Now, let's go back to this again. I'm just trying to find examples. If I can finally concentrate on this, and my concentration rests. Now, this assumes a certain kind of skill. I mean, again, yoga culture assumes you're born incomplete. You're not some kind of thing that's just going to grow like an acorn into a... Obviously, for sure an oak tree, who knows what you're going to grow into. But anyway, so that you, so it assumes, practice assumes attentional skills. And an attentional skill is able to be able to put your mind somewhere or your attention somewhere and it just stays there. That takes a while to achieve, but it really makes psychologically a huge difference in how you deal with your problems, notice your suffering, and so forth.

[10:02]

Okay, so say that you can now concentrate on this. And your attention stays on it. Say that you all have got that skill. What happens if I take it away? You're still concentrated. What are you concentrated on? mind. You're concentrated now on mind itself or whatever mind is. We can define mind in this context as that which you're concentrated on when there's no content. And you can experiment with noticing content, taking content away, diminishing content and meditation practice which is really a distillation of stillness. Because the more you can find a bodily mind stillness, that's there all the time. No matter what you do, where you are, it's just there. That's parallel to being able to stay concentrated.

[11:08]

Now, if I can just be still and feel that field of... Now, not... something you're concentrated on, but the field of mind, now I can bring the watch back into the field. And that's a very different experience if the watch is in the field and not in the... So you can put various contents in the field or you can take the contents away. Okay. Now, I say that because... I'm assuming that in your daily activity, if you're alert, various things will come up which suggest that that might be the case. Phenomenology sits visceral, primarily.

[12:10]

is very compatible with Zen practice. Okay, so I'm looking at you guys, right? Or feeling your presence, or being in the midst of your presence. So I know, in fact, you are entirely in my sensorium. I'm actually, I'm looking at you, but I know, and you're out there, and there's an out there-ness, but in fact my experience is entirely within my sensorium. Now, I can conceptually know that, but can I feel it? Can I experience it? So Zen practice, one of the dynamics of Zen practice, is to develop the ability to feel, for me to feel all of you within me.

[13:14]

Not within, I don't know, within, you know, within my experiential field. Okay. So why bother? What's that about? Well, if I... And this would be enacting the phenomenology all of us talk about, most of us talk about, but we know about it, but we don't do it. And practice is about how you do these things. Okay. So let's say that at present I can feel all of you as a field of activity within my sensorium, and it's changing, and you're changing. Okay. Now, how do you develop this? Well, concepts are a very important part of Zen practice.

[14:17]

People like to think they're not, but if you say, when you're sitting, do Zazen, The concept of don't move is what makes meditation work. If you don't have the concept, don't move, yeah, you're going to get up, you'll be distracted, etc. But the concept, don't move, is part of the practice of how you arrange your posture and so forth. So... So if I now feel your presence, what does that mean? It means that when something appears, I know it's my own imagination. It's not quite real, it's what I'm seeing. And I know that there's a mystery involved.

[15:21]

I mean, if I hear a bird song, What I'm hearing is what my ears will hear of the bird song. The bird song is way more complex than my ears can hear. And what's strange about that is, is that when you begin to have the experience enough, there's a tremendous sense of connectiveness with the bird, even though you know you're not hearing the whole of what another bird would hear, but you're hearing your own hearing and that's often accompanied by bliss. So somehow when you begin to experience your own experience of the world, it's accompanied by bliss. It also develops, you know, you probably are not lonely anymore. You don't feel separated from things.

[16:24]

You feel connected. You see a tree blowing, and it's like it's blowing inside you. It's, you know, you can't think your way to that, but eventually at some point you start saying, geez, everything's just happening. I feel connected to everything. And this is developed partly simply from the skill of still sitting And a concept of noticing when any object appears, mind appears with it. So the watch appears, but also the watch only appears if what I'm calling mind appears with it. So eventually you get to have the feeling of mind appearing with every object. I look at you, and I feel myself looking at you. So mind appears, and after a while, that sense of mind, and actually it's given a very simple term in Zen Buddhism, sameness.

[17:34]

There's a sameness. Everything, if I look at you, or I look at you, or I look at you, you're different, and each of you is different, and when I look back and forth from you, you're already changed. Am I 24 minutes up? 20. Okay, thank you. So, but I still feel mind on looking at you. I feel mind looking at you. I feel mind looking at you. And there's a sameness to that field of mind which appears. Okay. Now, You're also trying to get to feel the world as a succession of appearances. And that's, again, takes a little bit of time because we want to think in terms of continuity of self and etc but from the point of view of and one reason I used aliveness is from the point of view of Zen there's no being or beingness even beingness there's being implies some kind of continuous existence there is actually only momentary existence but how do you get there

[18:57]

And one way to get there is if you begin to bring a word like aliveness to each inhale and each exhale and each appearance and each looking around, you begin to actually train the body to notice the world as a succession and the need to feel it as a continuity gets weaker and weaker. It also, of course, changes, I'm 83, it changes your relationship to death because, jeez, that's a nice appearance now, who knows what's next. Okay, maybe if somebody has some questions because, you know, where am I going to go with this? We'll find out. Yes? What is the mind, the position of mind? Is it the same as awareness? Well, these things are very difficult to translate.

[20:00]

Okay. Mind is a useful English word, covers a lot of territory. I would say that one definition of mind is that field without contents that I mentioned a moment ago, right? Does that... You understood. No, it's what thinking can occur in the midst of. Now, awareness, if I'm walking along and I trip and fall, I probably will catch myself much quicker than I can think. My elbows, etc. I would call that awareness and not consciousness. But awareness and consciousness both can be in the larger category of mind. But one of the things that practice does is connect you to awareness as a continual presence that's not cognitive but is aware.

[21:07]

I understood that word mind is ever described on the books like mind and it's confusing a little bit. Yeah, well, I don't know what word... Naturally, if you're going to do something like this, you have to define the terms in a shared way that we all agree how they are. But even if you go to somebody like Vasubandhu, He himself is interpreting mind contextually from page... So, for instance... Yeah, one second. I'll come back to mind as imagination and as a ripening field and as other dependent. But anyway, for right now, what did you want to say?

[22:10]

I was just going to ask a question far enough from that. You mentioned consciousness. You seem to imply that consciousness is a deliberation. There isn't time for it. It's something much more immediate. So are you saying even rejuvified consciousness has been always involving some sort of representational conceptualization? Generally, in order to practice, we have to make definitions about consciousness. Consciousness is reifying, predictive, confirming, monitoring, etc. Mind is wider and awareness is wider than that. But I have a watch here. which is an iPhone watch, right? I got it because it would have saved a friend of mine's life because he fell and the watch will call an emergency service. So I thought I'd try it out. So when I'm driving down here, it turns out it's connected with the GPS of the car.

[23:15]

Right? So before the GPS tells me where to turn, my wrist starts to vibrate. And then the phone tells me, etc. Well, there are fields of knowing which are much like that in the sense that you're signaled by... you receive a signal that it's time to leave or that you, I don't know, I don't have, I can only develop these ideas so much, but for instance, when you know a, you hear the first note of a song, and suddenly you know, oh, that's the Doors or that's Mick Jagger or something like that. That knowledge is waiting there for you all the time. All those songs are in some field and they are cued in with tiniest bits of information.

[24:19]

So there's fields of knowing that you learn to become sensitive to through seeing the limits of consciousness. Okay. I'm embarrassed to have the task of being the Swiss clock in this session. But is this fair also for the other session in parallel that people can switch? But the good news is also that you have actually another time clock just starting now. The second topic. Okay, now let's see what time it is. So I'll take one question there. Okay. Go direct to the problem, right? First of all, enlightenment is a shift. It can be a nanosecond shift. And when enlightenment can occur to anyone, anybody, right?

[25:22]

It occurs when there's a shift which may not be a measurable experience, It might be a measurable experience, but it may not be a measurable experience, but there's a moment within your non-conscious experience where everything is loosened up for a second. And when it comes back together, there's a freedom. There's a kind of freedom. Now, there's also many within your culture... shifts in realization that we can call enlightenment experiences. And much of Zen practice is designed to make those shifts more likely. But enlightenment itself has nothing to do with Buddhism. It's at some capacity we human beings have. And it happens Sometimes it's a big experience which lasts for days.

[26:25]

Sometimes it's... You don't even hardly know what happened, but suddenly you feel free. You don't feel upset anymore, and so forth. Okay, so let's take whatever break we're supposed to take. Okay. Well, no, I think you should let people... I mean, some of you may want to get away, so... Yes, I think you're all free to move around and just continue with the second. Thank you. No, no, I... Shall we wait? No, no, no. My Swiss watch is... Now Zen has developed a number of tools for noticing your experience.

[27:28]

And one of them is called the five dharmas. And the five dharmas are appearance, naming, discrimination, wisdom, and suchness. Now these only make sense as attentional categories. So it means that, again, in this attentional world of, you know, when I first started to practice, one of the questions that was asked was, of course, everyone asked, what is Zen? You really have to ask how is Zen or how is the what of Zen? Because we're in in in yoga culture, you're in a how world, how things happen, not what they are. And another very useful thing is to train yourself to notice everything as an activity and not as an entity.

[28:35]

There are actually no entities. There's only activity. So you have to kind of find some way, if you're a westerner especially, okay, this is an activity. Well, yes, I'm drinking out of it. Someone made it. I can set it on the table. It has a certain weight and so forth. So in It's for momentary, an entity, but really it's an activity. Okay. So, if everything is an activity, then everything is about appearance and not about the things that are said. Again, if I look at you, or look at you, and I have a feeling about you, And then I look at you and I forget you. When I come back to you, you're different. If I think you're the same person, some kind of entity, when I come back, I'll see the same person.

[29:36]

You know, it's interesting that one of the first times I noticed this process was that it didn't feel right to me when you said space separates things. I didn't feel right. And at some point I realized the concept of space separating is a cultural idea. Space also connects, or space also is a distributive field, something like that, how to talk about it. But I noticed this when I first went to live in Japan. I had lived previously in San Francisco, but primarily in New York, and you sign for a taxi. Then no taxis would stop for me. Well, the taxi drivers are smart enough to know that I was a Westerner by my behavior as well as by my appearance, and they know Westerners don't know

[30:41]

where the addresses are. I mean, the addresses are, you know, the house I lived in was the 31st house built in that district in the 1800s. The next house was number 2000. Well, how's a taxi driver? So when you put your hand up to signal, the taxi drivers would just drive by and they'd often just go like this. And then after about two and a half months, They began to stop them. And I tried to study what had I done. Well, I realized that for the taxi driver, space is a viscous medium and you gesture in it. So if the taxi's over there, I have one kind of move. If the taxi's here, I have a different kind of move. And I gesture for the taxi. As soon as the taxi's felt me gesturing, they stop. But that is a different world.

[31:45]

That's a world in which space is a medium of, well, this is immediately, we're not in a Newtonian world. for Newton and for most of us practically, we live in a container of space. It's not a container. It's a shape we're making and adjusting. And we're not in a... There's no universal time. Practically speaking, there's successional time, there's sequential time, there's non-comparative time. And of course we have a shared clock time, but really there's no universal time. So what is time? Each of you is an embodiment of time. Now, Nicole, you may speak about that a little, I don't know.

[32:46]

No? Okay. I said the five dharmas before, now I'll say the four marks. The four marks of a dharma. Okay. The four marks are birth, duration, dissolution, and disappearance. Now these are meant to be enacted. They're not just a concept. So you... And birth is a... Because there aren't these distinctions between the human and the non-human and self and other and... inside and outside. The birth, when something appears in this way of configuring it, when something appears, it's born in the phenomenal world and born in you at the same time. So it's a mutual birth. And then it has a duration. Immediacy, immediacy, has no duration.

[33:49]

I remember when I was a kid, I asked my father, How come there's no 12 o'clock? My father was a scientist, engineer, and he said, well, what do you mean there's no 12 o'clock? I said, well, it's a millionth of a second before 12, a millionth of a second after 12. There's no 12. And he said, rather smartly, when something is approached and passed, you can say it exists. But this has stayed with me all these years and immediacy has, the present has no duration except in your experience. Okay. So what happens if you practice the four marks is you experience the present as a duration within your own sensorium and mind and it can have the dimensions of childhood duration, it can have the... be very short. So you begin to be in charge of the kind of time you have.

[34:53]

And Dogen, for instance, calls this ripening time because it ripens in you. But that means that Ravi here He is also a partitioned unit of time. You're not just Ravi. You're also a partitioned unit of time. I'm a partitioned unit of time. You are and you are and you are. And so once I get the feel of that within this field of mind, I can begin to feel the people around me ripening at different rates. you begin to feel an overlap with your sense of time and the sense of time of another person. And you're not making the reference to clock time. Clock time is simply an illusion, an agreed upon illusion that gets us here at the right shared time. So one of the things that yogic practice does is shift you out of an actual experience, shift you out of Newtonian container space and Newtonian universal time, and you begin to experience time as something that's maturing, ripening within you, and ripening in this

[36:09]

Everything is its own time. This ripens. This plastic will last 500 years longer than I will live. So it's ripening at a different rate than I am. That's this concept of a hyper-object. When it's raining on your head, that's the weather. But when you... It's also climate change and the sixth extinction and the Anthropocene because the way it's raining on your head has to do with... But you can't think your way to that exactly. All you feel is the weather. But you can't experience it as... Well, we're multi-generational beings. But we experience ourselves. But in fact, we're multi-generational beings. And that multi-generational... the dynamic of our life is more accessible when you do things like no longer think in terms of more universal time.

[37:13]

Okay, so the five dharmas. The first in this list, usually instead of birth they say appearance. So the practice is to start noticing appearance. And doing something like aliveness, or in terms of space being something that connects us as well as separates us, if I say already connected, if every time I look at you... Okay. What I noticed years ago is that when I shifted from saying I'm already separated from you... When I shifted to, I'm already connected with you, I just tried it on. In other words, I said, okay, I'll take this concept and build this concept into my thinking as an antidote to my taken for granted assumption that I'm already separated from everything.

[38:22]

Okay, what I found is after a while of saying on each exhale, on each inhale, on stepping, on looking around, already connected, already connected, already connected, that occurred prior to my sensorial apparatus. And my sensorial apparatus before was giving me the information I'm separated from. At some point it shifted and began to show me the connectedness. And then it's a little dangerous because you start feeling so intimate with everyone you meet. They say, hey, you know, I'm not like that. I was just being friendly. So you have to learn to modulate connectedness. Now, living in Japan off and on for 35 years, I modulate connectedness, bodily movements, touching, standing in somebody next to an elevator, in an elevator crammed in, very differently in Japan than in the West.

[39:33]

And so that the already connected changes the world, but it has a cultural shape in Japan. It has a different cultural shape here. And if you're in California, it's a little easier to have than in England, for instance, to feel immediately connected. Okay, so let's go back to the five dharmas. If I have five minutes. I only have five minutes? I've done another 20 already? Yes. This not ripen like that in me. Okay, so... So you get to notice appearance. You get to notice appearance, [...] and each one is unique. And you begin to feel its uniqueness. Okay, the next dharma is naming.

[40:38]

There's almost instantly a naming happens. As soon as the naming happens, discrimination happens. So the five dharmas are to catch yourself first feeling the appearance and watching yourself name. And then you see if you can cut that naming off from happening so quickly. And as soon as naming happens, you start discriminating, right? Okay, so those are the three of the first dharmas. appearance, naming, discrimination, and you need to watch yourself doing it. You need to become alert in this attentional world, attentional attunement, engaged attentional attunement, by the way. In Japan, they particularly like ginkgo cutting boards, ginkgo wood cutting boards.

[41:42]

Why do they like ginkgo wood cutting boards? One, it's a softer wood, so it's easier on their very sharp knives. But also, it makes the best tune of any wood cutting board, so you tune the kitchen and how you do the cutting. because they're into attunement. Not harmony, but attunement. So there's a kind of like, oh, that cutting board makes the whole kitchen feel better. These things are carried out in little details, like the taxi, or what used to drive me a little nuts if you do this green tea ceremony, not the powdered tea ceremony, but the green tea ceremony, or tea, you make tea. Nowadays they tell you 90 degrees and so forth. That's crazy because you're supposed to feel it in the pottery. You're supposed to feel the thickness of the pottery, the temperature. You're supposed to know something about the tea. So your body is making the tea. And when you pour the cup, you keep holding the thing and drip, [...] drip.

[42:54]

And you think, geez, what's wrong with these Japanese? Well, for them, the drips are... attentional units they're experiencing attention they've made this tea attention attention it's not just drip of tea it's attention attention it's the different the world view difference is carried out in all these things okay i'll finish the pie down this okay so then you bring wisdom in Now, if I am experiencing everything as an interiority, you're an interiority which I projected into the exterior. So you're exterior, but I projected you into the exterior. But I still know you as imaginary, or an act of my imagination, rather. I know you as other dependent, the technical term, because you depend, and you're also other dependent on my mind noticing you, because my experience is what I'm noticing, and my own experience is ripening.

[44:11]

The experience I have of the projected interiority is different now at 83 than it was at 27. because my own attentional interiority has ripened. OK. So when I bring wisdom or right knowledge to the discrimination, the third, so appearance, naming, discrimination, and then the antidote of right knowledge or wisdom, I know that all of this is ephemeral, interdependent, not graspable, and then the fifth is suchness, and suchness is a word for enlightenment maybe, but suchness is a word for emptiness or non-graspability. So it starts from appearance and ends up with suchness.

[45:12]

And if you use this little technique, it's a device, it's an attentional device, you end up with experiencing the world as suchness. Okay? We don't have to be stricter than the Swiss clock itself, so let's say we can have one, two short questions. All right, you're in charge. With respect to naming, you mentioned we need to watch ourselves when we are doing this. Yes. But I think maybe it's better if we be more... creative or constructive when we then watching as naming is powerful yeah naming actually I think this is beautiful it has a power in it yes this ugly it has a power in it yeah that's why we do it yeah so I mean maybe in addition to just watching could we try to be a little bit more fancy okay my question

[46:33]

In other words, you want to do fancy naming. Need more creative. Well... Bring more power, energy. Okay. So you get in the habit of stopping appearance before it names. Then you can name it anything. Or you can have names coming from other things. So, you know, I call notice... one of the main practices is to notice without thinking about. It's usually translated as non-thinking, but it actually means noticing without thinking about. And I call that word connoticing. So I'm always finding the words in English have so much baggage, I can't use them usually. I have to change them into all kinds of other things. And connoticing is one that is some kind of, a little bit of creativity. Okay. Yes. One last question.

[47:36]

What is your experience like, for example, visual experience like when you are not naming? What is it like to see? You see an attentional field. I'm just as well as I can say it. You feel an attentional field that pulses. And the pulsing, what's interesting, it's not just this person and this person. It's like you three may have a certain kind of pulse and you over there may have a different. So there's a field and you can feel the field itself has a dynamic independent of the contents. But the main thing is it's often connected with bliss, and it's often connected with a feeling, a profound feeling of connectedness, like you're just not separate from anything. So you feel, oh, I know what it's like to be a tree.

[48:36]

Okay? Thank you, Richard Baker. You're welcome. I hope it made some sense. The next icon button on mind changes Martin Can you hear me? Okay. Well, I just changed my mind. I am going to speak about embodiment of time, at least a little bit.

[49:38]

Mostly what I want to do is, thanks for reprogramming us a little bit at least and introducing the groundwork for what I would like to do is go into possible applications for how to do this, focus on certain concepts that Bekiroshi just presented, like one is the attentional attunement. The other one we could focus on is is to train ourselves to experience a succession of appearances rather than sticking to the experience of continuity. So, okay, I want to look at these applications. But also we have, somehow I got myself stuck in the title of this workshop with this circular self-referencing phrase, mind changes mind.

[50:43]

And in this context, you know, I had to start wondering again, well, what's that supposed to mean? Is there two minds, or is it the same mind changing itself? And cognitively, I find that question a little frustrating. I mean, I find circular definitions like that are a little frustrating. But I want to look at and open, unpack that phrase and just see what the possibilities are that may emerge from that. So how can we change? Or, well, no, let me start over. The first implication here is that minds can be changed. And as Pekaro, she just established when, thank you for doing the very difficult work for me, that we have now some shared sense of what is meant by mind.

[51:51]

I'm speaking in the same tradition as my teacher, so I think everything you said is true. Oh, that's not good. Yeah, so let's use that sense of what is meant by mind. And as he just introduced, we need an engaged bodily mind. So first of all, the implication here is that the bodily mind can be changed. And for anyone who's ever tried New Year's resolutions, you may have noticed, as I have, that it's not so easy to change the bodily mind. Or in other words, not every mind can change the mind. Oftentimes I have the best possible reasons why I want to change the bodily mind. But then even the best possible reasons may not unfold the power to actually grab hold of the mind that it changes.

[52:59]

So then we have two questions in there. First of all, how can we change the mind? And how can we develop a mind that can change the mind? And the second question is what I want to go into with more application. So, developing a mind that can change the bodily mind. The approach in Zen practice is, or the observation is, well, you basically need to train yourself. That's a craft. And you need to develop... It's a new kind of bodily mind, not the one... that is at the receiving end of change. So you're introducing, generating a new kind of bodily mind which essentially functions through stillness. And stillness is something that

[54:06]

In Zen practice, we teach ourselves through still sitting. Now, there are many other paths of how you can develop a very thorough study of the mind, and many of them refer to the experience of stillness. But just in Zen practice, what we're doing is using the posture of still sitting which then the idea is that the stilled body with, as Bekiroshi said, if you add the concept of not moving, and that not moving then is not a rule. You know, many people, when I know, because I'm giving the introductions in the zendo, in the meditation hall oftentimes, and people are so worried that they are doing something wrong. You know, they sit basically in some should field. I should not move. I should be like such and such. So I always say, the only thing you can really do wrong in meditation is to sit in that should field. And so the don't move is not a should.

[55:16]

The don't move unfolds its power when it's an intention of stillness, just that. And you hold that intention of stillness sort of like against or into the midst of the activity of movement, the impulses to move, the mental movement that's happening already. So you're holding that intention not to move into all of these impulses that may arise, and you are locating yourself in that intention. So now you've just created a little dynamic here. Now we do actually, as this phrase suggests, now we actually have differentiated our experience of what's going on into sort of like two kinds of mind. One that's holding the intention not to move. and one that is more or less in an activated or sometimes a meditation, even a kind of agitated state.

[56:30]

But now you have created that dynamic with two minds working with each other and experience the one much more clearly because you have the contrast of the other. So that, I think, to be clear about that possibility in this phrase is very important if we're going to work with it. OK. Okay. So stillness. I could say a few things, but I mean, a meditation instruction, I'm not going to do the whole thing, but just to say, more or less, if one does decide to meditate in the still sitting posture, you would want to make sure you have a pretty stable basis that can be like, this is not a very good meditation table. You want to have your feet on the ground, or if you can sit cross-legged, of course, you want to create a stable basis through your legs and then have a posture that supports the uprightness of your spine.

[57:42]

I think with Gerald, at the latest with Gerald, we will hear a lot about the role, maybe, of the power of the spine, the role of the spine in meditation. But the upright spine, you know, or the direction, you want to hold the direction of an upwardness. And if the spine isn't fully, like if for me, for instance, I have all kinds of little twists in my spine, at least I know, somehow my spine seems to know what it would be like to be upright. So you work with the power, as one of the panel speakers, that was a great, I thought, for our thinking, was a great contribution, the power of imagination, and to use imagination as part of the craft of practice. So you can now, again, as I... said before, you can use the image, the imagination of the uprightness of the spine and hold it, kind of lightly and kindly hold it in your actual, in the experience of your actual spine.

[58:53]

Okay. Okay, so that about the posture. And then, since now you've introduced this idea of embodiment of time, one little sequence that I want to suggest is... I don't know if any of you are interested in practicing, but I'm just going to talk as if. When you are in this posture, things are going to appear. It could be bodily sensations or a percept. I mean, something's going to appear. And we're always saying in Zen that what we're doing is we're exploring our experience, right? But that's actually a very tricky thing to say because if I look at...

[59:58]

my unexplored experience, if I just start with what do I experience now, I could easily say, well, I see a bunch of people and see the fan over there and that fan seems to be pretty far away from me. I'm here and so forth. You get the picture. If I said that about this room, I think nobody would want to be inclined to call the doctor on me. So that sounds normal. But for the kind of person who would decide to practice, that description of what I experience right now, that sounds normal. But the kind of person who would decide to practice would feel a little funny about that. would say, yeah, sure, that sounds normal, and that's reasonable to think of what's happening here this way, but it feels like something's missing maybe, or it feels like I almost want to engage the space in a way, and I don't really know how.

[61:04]

What I have an impulse, what I have a yearning to do right now, I can't do within the categories of my description. So the kind of person that would decide to practice Zen has that kind of dissonance happening. I think at least that was the case in my case. And so I have very little experience with Japan. I've been there once, last, or a couple of years ago. And maybe the highlight of what I noticed in Japan, there's a lot of highlights, but the one thing I really liked is that the Japanese, they have adopted, I guess after the war or something, they have adopted the German word achso. I don't know how many of you are German speakers here, but ach so. Ach so is untranslatable. Or maybe if you were to say in English, you'd say, oh, so it is.

[62:09]

Ach so, so it is. But then they've turned it into a question. And they say, like, unbelievably often they'll say, and it means something like is it like this is it like this and i've turned that for me i just loved how they would encounter all kinds of things that were happening you know like we would say i would speak with one japanese person say this is how it is you know just explain something to them this is how it is and they would go And the feeling that remains is something like, really? Is it really like this? And I do that in meditation now all the time. So something appears. Again, we're sitting still. Something appears. And as a meditator, I now go and say, is it really like this? And I want to look at what is flowing into... What's the foundation of my perception?

[63:17]

What kind of information is flowing into the perception that I take to be as this is how it is? Okay. So, I mean, just as one very simple conceptual tool here is views precede perception. We know that's not something necessarily that I would know as a Zen practitioner. That's something I also know from psychological studies that's cognitively established, that views, our worldviews, and Baker, she just gave the example where space connects or space separates as a worldview, underlying worldview, that then can change Well, nothing's going to change the noise of that train. That changes the percept, perception. So views precede perceptions. And perceptions precede how we think, feel, and act, more or less.

[64:25]

I mean, we do lots of things that aren't necessarily based on perceptions. But still, more or less, there's a cycle where it keeps confirming itself. The perceptions flow into actions, and then we're shaping our lives, shaping our world, more or less around or in accord with how we perceive it. Now, again, in this moment of still sitting, what I want to look at is the other cycle, the cycle of how do views flow into perceptions. So I want to look into what happens before what I have come to call that, for several reasons, the threshold of perception. You want to learn how to look into what happens before the threshold of perception. And one may find that one can actually bring attention into all that processing

[65:32]

And you can see how far, that's one way for me at least to describe the increasing skill that one can learn in meditation to further and further penetrate the perceptual process that originally starts just at the moment when a sensory signal meets one of the sense organs. So that early is where perception begins. And how early on into the process can you bring your attention? Okay, so now I hope I've established there's a lot, usually, there's a lot that we can find if we just look at what has already flown into the percept, into what's perceived. So it may be, let's say, it may be, I just take a feeling in my chest or something right now. I'm sitting there, I perceive a certain feeling in my chest, And in this practice now, why are they doing that?

[66:35]

Then we'll stop the discussion session. But you would have all together with what you want to say, plus discussion, six minutes. That's perfect. OK, good. So you want to, no, you don't want to. I want to. in this moment of perceiving or just noticing a feeling, let's say, that comes up. But it could be also an so-called external. It could be hearing the water. Now I'm working with how to train attention. When something appears, that which appears, I will first of all receive with attention. Receive with attention. you may want to notice that attention can be more or less receptive. Attention not equals attention. So you can use attention.

[67:38]

Attention has various kinds of qualities. And so in this practice here, I'm suggesting you bring attention to the quality of your attention. Is it receptive? One thing I find great is that somehow, for many of us at least, we can learn, but for many of us intuitively, just to give myself the instruction to hold attention receptively, my body somehow knows what to do. Attention does open up. Okay, so I hold, what appears, I actually receive, almost like a gesture or like a gesture, with the grip of my attention. And now I'm holding it. That's the second step here. Now I'm holding it in attention. What does it mean to hold it in attention? Well, you may notice that, at least for me, there's a moment when attention actually settles in the object that it's holding.

[68:41]

Again, it could be a feeling, it could be the bottle here. And suddenly there's this channel established where both where there's a feeling of, well, this is a stable connection now. It's like when on FaceTime you can just talk. There's a stable connection and there's a feeling in German I would say of Einrasten. Attention clicks into the object. At that moment, when attention has clicked into the object, You can see if you can get yourself into a mode of just listening. Kind of unconditional willingness to just listen. If it's a feeling in the chest, my experience is that feeling has a lot of non-cognitive stories to tell me. Okay, so now I've established to hold something in attention.

[69:48]

And then the last step is, or actually I say, within that holding, I found that it keeps being necessary. I need to click the refresh button on my attention. So at some point, the object has almost faded from attention all by itself. It's like attention has gotten used to it. I think it's called habituation. But now I want to click the refresh button and refresh the contact with the object of attention and it may tell me a new story it may be a different kind of thing the next time i refresh it okay then that's the last thing um it's either gonna change and then it fades away and it disappears it may do that by itself But if your object of attention is, say, a mountain, it's not going to fade so quickly. So then what you can do is literally, intentionally, gesturally disengage your attention from that object.

[71:00]

You literally, I'm not going to do that now, but you just let go. And letting go is one of these things that many people say, but how do I let go? So difficult to let go. I've actually taught myself how to let go with physical things. There's nothing here, oh yeah, this won't break. I literally, I take something into my hand and I feel what it's like to let it go with my hand. I just feel what it feels like. And in my case, I find it a little scary. I find it a little scary. I'm losing control of it. I don't know what it's going to do next. And I'm noticing that the feeling of scare in there is one of the reasons why it's so difficult to let go. But if you do teach yourself, do that with your whole body-mind activity, teach oneself how to actually let go, fully release something, then that's what I need to do right now. Okay. Could I, so that I don't only have the task of being a clock, ask you a content-related question?

[72:18]

Yes, please. Because I am actually a researcher on the embodiment of time. I do research, a spiritual researcher, a psychologist, a neuroscientist, and at the beginning you stated you want to talk about the embodiment of time. Could you just say a few words about the embodiment of time from your perspective? Sure. So these four stages that I just went through with receiving, holding, watching a change and then releasing, that is a way of studying the flow of time. It's a way of studying the flow of time throughout the phenomenal world, but it's also a way of studying how time flows through me and how I can participate. Maybe that's actually the most important point, how the so-called eye of attention can participate in the flow of time. Okay.

[73:23]

One last pressing question. Yeah. My practice has got a little bit to lose. But as you describe it, and I think it's probably something in how I'm hearing you describe it. I think people will not understand anything what you're saying. Sorry, that was a... As I hear you describe it, there's quite a lot doing it. But I don't think that's what you really mean. Yeah, yeah. I think I suspect you mean there's a bit more allowing. That's true, yeah. But it comes across as a lot of doing. And I know it can get a bit of use in my own practice. It tends to get a little use, but Well, thanks for pointing that out. That's completely true. And that's one of why it's very important in the headline of this circular phrase, mind changes mind. It doesn't say, I change mind. It says, mind changes mind. And so you're perfectly right in pointing that that's one of the most important qualities that ought to be present in such an investigation. Yeah, thank you. Okay, thank you again, Nicole Barney.

[74:25]

Thank you. The next speaker is Gerald Reischede. Please come to the stage. Hello. So what I think we heard is a great base for what I would like to talk about. And I would like to start with the sentence, I think we need a new or different way of science. Instead of going and studying objects outside ourselves, we should start experiencing and studying ourselves. So we're turning towards ourselves. And I call this I mean, doing this on the cushion is the best way to establish something like a laboratory of self-study.

[75:42]

And if we do that, we can find some very interesting phenomena and maybe something that Jeffrey Krippel called something impossible happens. So just imagine you're sitting on your cushion and suddenly you notice a small tingling at the base of your spine and you don't attach any force to it and it gets stronger and it starts moving you and it changes in the long run it starts to change your life as you knew it before and for several years throws you off the path you were familiar with and this was the beginning of what I later called the awakening of the Kundalini

[76:49]

So Kundalini is described as a snake, a rolled up snake at the base of the spine that starts unfolding, unrolling, becoming straight when it's awakened. And it creates, I must say, sorry, louder and it creates new energy channels so it's not that there are channels that just be used but it creates new energy channels and on its way up it hits obstacles blockages and it just wants to get through these obstacles So just imagine it creates two channels on the left and right side of the spine, going through your neck, into your head and reconnect.

[77:55]

Different feeling of energy and very different, you both were talking about life energy, It was like a very specific new life energy system that had established itself, I must say. My experience with consciousness has changed completely, fundamentally. So consciousness for me now is a simultaneous consciousness of the body as well. So the separation might be possible on an intellectual level, but not in my daily life. So I would like to define this as a new body-mind consciousness that has established since then.

[79:00]

Also my work as a psychotherapist has changed quite a bit. I'm listening differently and I react differently to my patients, often to my own surprise. My image of myself as an I-self has changed. I is no longer the exclusive driving force for my action and I allow these tendencies towards dissolution of myself to occupy more and more space. This is an important part because since then there is no gerite anymore, at least most of the time, who's doing something or wanting something. It's just doing and accepting and reacting. There's actually very often no person in the background, so to speak, anymore.

[80:04]

So I would like to add two more important experiences. For one is I connect my breath to the spine and start seeing or hearing from there. What do I mean by that? So usually we associate our senses with the respective organ and we see or hear and we defined seeing and hearing by doing it. So actually it's a kind of limiting perspective And it limits the possibilities by pre-defining what seeing or hearing is. So, if I start seeing from my lower spine, it changes the whole subject.

[81:17]

So, what I mean by that is I connect my attention to my breath, my breath to the lower spine and I include my body seeing through my eye to an object. So it's like a breath, seeing, object, consciousness. And interestingly enough, in addition to that, when I look or perceive with my breath spine, body, eye, consciousness to an object, I see two things. I see the surface as I normally do, and I see the object from its inside. So it is as if it looks at me and I'm looking at it.

[82:22]

And that's quite interesting, you mentioned it in your talk, that irritates people. I can irritate people. So I move away from that and look at the person from a distance rather than being really close. But I can shift into normal seeing and looking so that doesn't irritate anybody. So in a way it expanded and widened my feeling and experiences, experiencing of consciousness as a body, breath, world, object consciousness. We have an interesting saying in Zen. It goes like, heaven, earth,

[83:24]

Cosmos and myself have the same roots. That's a picture I really like because the root connects everything and we never lose the connection. Actually we don't, but sometimes we do by thinking, by doing something, by wanting something or Gerard wants to act. Then we interrupting this, this connection. So, I'm still very fascinated and amazed by the Kundalini process, a process which I would say is present in the human body. So it's present for everybody and it's possible for everybody to experience it, but, I don't know what it triggers, what triggers it.

[84:26]

I don't know what a good condition is so that it is triggered. And when it is triggered, it makes its way through the body. It can change a person's life. And if the conditions are right, their lives will become more vital, more direct, and more clear. So, In the end, it ended for me and it is a beginning with a completely new, pure energy system. And it has no other reason to be there than to show and let me feel that I am alive, that I am energy. once in a while it poses the question, what do I want to do with it? And that's a general question.

[85:29]

What do we want to do with our life energy? What do we want to do with our lives? And the Kundalini system, so to speak, points out to most of the time, just enjoy. Thank you. I'm open for remarks and questions. We've got time for a few questions. Maybe we'll start. One, two, three, one, four. Thank you very much. How do we wake up the kundalini? What are our exercises? I was hearing that question because I don't think that we should do anything. So you find if you look for books about kundalini a rave of things that might awaken the kundalini.

[86:37]

We don't know what we are getting into it Because my experience, as I said, was a very painful one. And not only just for some days, for about two years, it was very, very painful. So I don't know if you want to really go through this. So if it happens, stay with it. If it doesn't happen, maybe be happy that it's not going to happen. But I wouldn't force it. And I actually don't know what we can do. I don't think that we can do much about it. That's at least my experience. Sorry to say. Yes, I'm curious, I want to elaborate or explore a little bit more when he talks about you connect your breath to your spine and you kind of see and hear from that place. So the organisation that I lead, I've got some staff who have been remotely diagnosed and remotely healed by other people. Sorry, I'm doing the interview.

[87:40]

So some of my staff are able to remotely diagnose and remotely heal other people. And when they're remotely diagnosing, they have different ways of doing that. So some of my staff can visually see as if they are looking through their eyes. But others, they're kind of more sensitive in their body. They kind of see... through their body or they feel the emotion through their body as opposed to how you would feel it like an emotion. So I'm curious as to, so they would actually say it's a whole body experience as opposed to just in the spine. So I'm curious as to what's your experience around, is it actually a full body kind of experience through the senses as opposed to just the spine? Yeah, it is a full body experience and I always try to find an entrance. So the breath is an entrance into the spine and the spine expands into the body and then into the sense fields. So, and I'm using that entrance while I'm standing here. I'm using the entrance as often as I remember it, or I must say as often as my body reminds me to do it.

[88:51]

So it became, in a sense, it became a pattern that I don't have to think about, which my body reminds me of. Yeah. I don't know if my question answered fully, because we do research on the perception of the body and the sense, the full sense of the body during meditative states. And so I would, and usually we do like phenomenological interviews, so we dive into that and try to get a grasp of that. And so I would be very curious if you could say a few words, like how do you know that your sense of your body changed? I hope you can describe that. Yeah. when I see with my breath or contact with my breath and my body, there's a different way of being connected.

[90:12]

So the body feels like, well, yes, there are boundaries, but they're quite open. So it's a felt body that is quite open in both directions. So it's not this limited, my skin is the end of my body, or even a little wider. It extends into the local world, so to speak. And actually it's a very nice feeling because it enlarges the breath which takes in the world and breathes out my inner world. So Suzuki Roshi, one of our teachers in our lineage says, while breathing in, we're breathing in our soul called inner world, while breathing out, we are breathing out in the soul called outer world, but actually it's one world.

[91:16]

And then he says, continues and says, this is like a swinging door, breathing in and breathing out. And then he adds, if I say I breathe, the I is not necessary, just breathing. But that's the feeling of the body breathes with the world, in the world, into the world, the world breathes into me. And I often can say, Is the world breathing me or is an I breathing? So this is a very, very open feeling of joy. Okay, we just have, sorry, just have time for a last, the fourth question. Yes, please, you. I simply would like to share some opinions and experience that you have put on Taoism.

[92:24]

Because in Taoism, a key element is energy. And like you all reported, there is a painful experience when the Kundalini energy is lost. My experience is that also in Taoism, This painful experience is this balance of body and energy is broken. So maybe too much energy in the body, it will give rise to painfulness. So I also encountered such an experience, and I suggest to do sports, running. Because of this energy, it will it can be transformed or used to activate, to strengthen the physical body. So in that case, when the physical body is strengthened,

[93:30]

But a higher level of balance between energy and the body will be achieved. In that way, we can easily go through this phase. That's also my personal feeling. Yes, but I don't want to achieve anything. I just did let all this happen. And once the energy system, all these channels here, were established... I just felt happy. The pain since then went away and I don't want to achieve anything. I just let the energy do whatever it wants and I'm not using it at all. Because there is no garage anymore. It went away with this establishing of this energy channel. So that's the best I can say. Do you get anger? Of course.

[94:32]

And then I let go. How do you manage it? Then I let go. I feel the anger and sometimes I say something and I show my anger and then it's gone. That is automatically what happens to everyone? I don't think so. How? Often we... don't express it, often we don't feel it, and then it stays. And that's my experience as a psychotherapist. It stays there waiting to be shown. It's a wrong situation. But if someone is as specific enough to express it, far more so fine. So I have the opportunity and the freedom to express it or not. Because I accept it, I feel it, feel it in my body, and if I don't if I don't show it or if I don't do anything with it, it just disappears after a while. And I have to have the courage and the... Yeah, just let this happen. And there's no residue left.

[95:37]

It just disappeared. Okay, thank you. Thank you. We have the last book by Ravi Vej, Western Psychotherapy and Buddhist Zen Practices. Let's try a sound check. Can you hear me back there? Yes. Are you all warm too? Yes. Good. Good. One of the psychological definitions for consciousness is all that I know through my experience of self. all that I know through my experience of self. And it invites me to look and see and to define what is it that I mean when I'm talking about the self and I'm talking about the psychological self. What is this that I'm experiencing things through before I develop a meditation practice, in this case a Zen practice.

[96:41]

And As a psychologist, I have studied child development. And one of the experiences of having children is that all your child development training from university comes back to you when you watch your kids develop. And we were in the process of delivering the first child, my first child, my daughter. And in the middle of my wife having contractions, the head was out. And my wife stopped having contractions, started to laugh. I thought, oh, she's turning hysterical. She's in pain. What's happening? So I said to her, what's going on? And she looked at me and she said, look, the baby has your ears. So I checked, and that wasn't the case. And I said, I'm not going to look now. Have the baby out, and then we'll take a look at this. Now, in terms of our psychological development, that statement was extremely important in terms of the bonding development and the relationship development psychologically.

[97:55]

In saying that, she defined that child as a product from both of us. She still had the child inside herself, and it had qualities that were related to me. So she made a room for the child in our relationship. family through that. If you ask my daughter today, she's now 28, if you ask her who she is, and if you ask her about herself, one of the things she'll say is that she has her papa's ears. And funnily enough, when she had a baby, I was in Sweden during that time, when she had a baby, the first picture she sent to me was of ears. And she said, look papa, he has it too. So what she described and what she is doing and what she is experiencing is that she is experiencing her life as a continuous development from that moment at birth up to where she is now.

[98:57]

There's a sense of continuity in it. And we all do that. We all develop in a sense that our life is a continuity from the moment that we are born up till the present moment. and we see the past as being a continuous past, unbroken, seamless, and that we see ourselves today as the result of all the different experiences that we had, all the different factors that formed us and informed us during our development. Those factors may be social, those factors may be cultural, those factors are certainly familiar, Those factors may be intergenerational. All the things that happened to us made us who we are today. And if we look back, we see our past as an unbroken, continuous experience that has gotten us to where we are today. And this provides us with a reference point.

[99:59]

This provides us with reference points whenever we are in a new situation. where we've not been before or in a familiar situation which we think we know. We always know who we are because, well, I'm Ravi who grew up in India. I'm Ravi who studied psychology in Berkeley. I'm Ravi who had a grandfather who was a Methodist minister. I reference my history to try to place myself in the environment in which I am now. And so I hold on to my history as a part of myself And I do this psychologically. I do this somatically. I keep it in myself, and I see myself as whole when I'm in touch with my history. I work as a psychotherapist, and one of the aspects of being a psychotherapist is that people come to me who are experiencing some kind of suffering in their lives. They come to me with symptoms that appear in their life today.

[101:02]

They come to me with problems that appear in their lives today. They come to me and they're looking for help. They're looking for some kind of healing with me, solving these problems that they see in a life that they experience as being unbroken. And when they come to me, we talk about the symptoms. We talk about the way they are suffering today. We go into depth about how the symptoms look, how they feel. We explore them in the body. if they have particular areas of their body where they experience tension or pain, where they experience the feelings that they have associated with symptoms. And I often use different tools and different possibilities to explore these symptoms and to attempt to go back to where they occurred. So I will talk to them. I have a client, for instance, and she came to me and she has a great deal of fear when she has any kind of physical symptoms, she's afraid of dying immediately.

[102:07]

She gets heart palpitations, she's afraid of dying. If she experiences too warm, she's afraid of dying. And when I looked at her, I said, well, how long have you had this? And she said, well, since I was 10, it's always been there. And so I said, well, what happened when you were 10? And she said, oh, nothing much. I said, well, you notice, you remember this happening since you've been 10. What happened? And she said, well, my mother got a diagnosis of cancer then, and I was scared she was going to die. Well, it was easy for her to find that connection. And she said, every time since then, her experience was that when there's any kind of physical symptom, she's existentially threatened. As a psychologist, I would say she's fixated. on that point in her past, and she's carrying it and holding it. And through seeing her life as continuity, she's bringing it into the present. So as a psychologist and psychotherapist, my goal is to work with this continuity.

[103:11]

I attempt to go back to where that trauma occurred, where it developed. I look at how she learned patterns to support it. I look at what kind of responses other people had who were important to her. And we attempt to go back and go through her life, treating it as a continuity to try to heal the traumatic experiences in each stage, each developmental stage of her life, and attempting to heal the pain that she had attempting to heal the traumatic experiences that she had as a result of this experience in her past. And she experiences it as that's when it began and that's what's been confirmed and what's been developed. That's how she sees herself today as that 10-year-old girl who was scared of losing her mother. This is the psychological element and the psychological base of my psychotherapy.

[104:12]

is that I look at development, the development of a child, and I look at how it gets people to be where they are today. So when we are adults, we still use that aspect of a historic self or a narrative self. We still use that concept to locate ourselves in the situation which we are at the present. We use our experiences, our memories, to locate ourselves in the present and we experience ourselves as being permanent, non-changing. I'm still the same person I was 10 years ago. It makes me feel safe in a new situation. It makes me feel safe in a world that I experience as constantly changing and as constantly threatening because it's constantly changing and unpredictable. So when all that we know is experienced through the self, what we're doing is attempting to locate ourselves in a historic memory which is just a fantasy an illusion in a as an attempt to find some kind of permanence and some kind of security and some kind of continuity in our lives so that when the world changes around us we experience there's some security in our own personality now when we

[105:36]

When I work with people in psychotherapy, my goal is to heal that trauma from the past. And I find that as I begin to work with them and we begin within the therapeutic relationship to heal that trauma, that they begin to see their lives really as having many more aspects as just these traumatic experiences. They begin to loosen up their feeling about trauma. this permanence that their past may have had, and they begin to see the possibility of changing their own narrative and their own sense of who they are in the everyday life. When I first came to Zen practice and I first experienced my teacher, Richard Baker, Roshi, one of the things that I got from him was practical instructions on Zazen. and the two factors that he talked about today that are so important which were sit still don't move and focus on the breath and focus on the awareness of the breath in the body on the awareness of exhaling and inhaling and i took my place in the cushion and i thought there could be nothing easier

[106:51]

You know, the breath, it's always there. Hey, I can do this. I'm a psychotherapist. I'm a psychologist. I'm half Indian. It's in my blood. The Texas part, maybe not. Yeah, and I can do this. So I sat down on the cushion, and I thought, this is going to be easy. And I focused on the breath, and I used the exercise of counting my breaths. One. Two. Two. God, this is taking a long time. Is it ever going to be over? Oh, I'm supposed to be counting my breaths. Let's go back to it. One. Two. Dinner's supposed to be after this session of Zazen. I wonder what we're going to have for dinner. I hope it's better than lunch was. Oh, I'm supposed to be focusing on my breath. This simple exercise. of just focusing on the immediacy of an experience that I'm having at the present, not focused, not experienced through my sense of being permanent, immortal, just focused on my awareness, was extremely difficult to do.

[108:11]

I was so used to defining myself through thinking. I was so used to defining myself through memory. I was so used to defining myself through things that I experienced as being non-changing, as being permanent. And here I am, sitting still, not moving, and focused on an experience that is only occurring in the moment, and it was so extremely difficult. But I stuck with it. And this is what we do in Zazen, is that we sit and we open ourselves just to the breath, focus on the posture and the breath, and we train ourselves in Zazen to be able to do that wherever we might be. So I sat there and I sat up with it and I sat through it and it took many years of training. It took many years of sitting Zazen. And I began to take that into my everyday life. And what I found was that it profoundly changed how I experienced my everyday life to treat each breath as a unit of moments of time, and to begin to see the world not as a continuity of breathing, but to see it as each individual breath.

[109:28]

So when I go through my day, I focus on my breath, I focus on my posture, I focus on the appearances, the phenomena that arise, and I begin to get a sense that my life is not a continuity, that each moment ends at the end of the exhale and reappears during the inhale. When I do this in Zazen, I lose all track of normal time. and I begin to lose track of thinking. I don't focus on establishing myself in my thought. I establish myself in my posture and my breathing. When I have my clients learn Zazen and when they practice this, they experience it as a very rewarding and nourishing exercise because they no longer define themselves on the basis of their traumatic experiences, their pain and their suffering, they're beginning to define themselves on the basis of the breath, the appearances that are sharing that space and that moment with them.

[110:32]

And if they keep at it, they may even experience a moment of just content-free, historic content-free, just experiencing and being aware sensation of the moment. And this is very nurturing, very rewarding to somebody who has defined themselves on the basis of pain and suffering. And the moment that they experience this, they experience that there is a possibility for us to be free from emotional suffering. And this is an extra aspect that is very, very useful. and very rewarding for people, and it's the sense of aliveness that we've talked about all evening, that they experience being able to achieve, having been through the psychotherapeutic process of healing some of the trauma, they are free to be able to experience the moment of the breath and the immediacy of the experience in the relationship to the space and the objects around them. And when they have that experience, they realize that a life is possible, since a life is just this moment.

[111:37]

It is possible to have a life that is free from emotional and psychological suffering. So, I... Is it okay? Okay. We have some time for questions. I squeezed it in, but... Does anybody have questions? Please. I find it interesting how this benefactory effect of loosening the continuity, which is also loosening the fixation on identity, on constructed identity, that this kind direction once counter also on a societal level where a lot of societal trouble comes from this fixation of identities and it's no longer in terms of not only in terms of national states with the groups and subgroups and the gender questions where the identity graph is not called the

[112:51]

You know, even the word identity, part of it is entity. Identifying as being an entity. And if we use what Baker Roche talked about as to see ourselves as activities, that in itself frees us from that. And if I experience myself in this moment like I do, as I locate myself not in my past, not in my historic past, but in the breath that I'm having right now, I can let go of having to see myself as an entity. I'm the activity of breathing. I'm the activity of talking with you. And it's a relief from all these narrow limits that may be there. The notion of identity is positively connotated. Yeah. It is. Please. I have just two minor experiences in my younger years meditating in my own naive way. One was... It just happened once, but I remember people around me were a little nervous about what was happening to me.

[113:55]

And the other was suddenly not feeling my body. Now, was I too rigidly breathing in and out and not getting enough air? And I wonder how one can lose one's sense of one's body, of the body, even momentarily. Well, I wasn't there, so I couldn't really tell you. I have a hypothesis about it. One of the things that happens when we do sit still is, of course, our blood pressure comes down. And this is a phenomenon that the researchers are finding when it's very good. I don't talk about using meditation this way, but for people who have blood pressure problems, it does, if you do it regularly, successively. it will bring down the blood pressure. And maybe you had low blood pressure on that day and you fainted as a result of that. But I don't know. I wasn't there. The sense of the body changes immensely because we learn about our body even through the feedback we get in our families and the culture that we're in.

[114:58]

The sense of the body of someone growing up in India is very different than the sense of body for someone growing up in the West. And it's defined... by the feedback and the experience of exchange that we have with the culture, the family, the people around us. So when you have the experience of body when you sit still, it'll be an experience just based on that moment. And it'll be very different from your concept or your presuppositions about what body feels like. Yet I'll talk about feeling the space around you as body. It's very, very much a part of that is Define yourself out of awareness and experience and not out of thinking your body. And that makes a difference. What feelings do you feel from the experiences that you have or that you've been on? Do you have feelings for your emotions?

[116:02]

Feeling what is necessarily part of the experience? I would say yes to all of that. Well, I start out by focusing on the physical body, on my posture, on my breath, sitting in an upright posture, great spine, on my breath and not moving. And then I just experience what is it like. I start out with a concept, but I move from the concept into an awareness of the concept. And then I lose the words for it. So I couldn't really describe what it's like after that. Because it is an experience that is outside of the realm of my linguistic possibilities. Sometimes. I can move my focus of consciousness, perhaps.

[117:05]

Or my focus of awareness, I would say. Outside of my bodily center, you know. Sure, I think we all do sometimes. But we learn to focus on awareness. We learn to be able to hold our focus on the awareness. And that gives us more possibilities of being able to do that. But the main question is, you know, I don't go in with an expectation of what's going to happen. I don't go in with a wish to do something. I go in and I watch the show. I see what happens. Yeah, no, no, no. The minute you want something, you're going to be disappointed. No, no. I have intention to sit still and then I see what happens. Back there, please. You gave this example of a woman who was partly still 10 years old. and she remembered, she could identify her trauma, I suppose it would have been unconscious trauma that happened.

[118:06]

Sure, sure. Do you apply exactly the same techniques? Oh, I would. I have a series of techniques. I almost always ask how long they've experienced it. And they may have a memory of that, they may not. They may say it was always like this. And I say, what is your physical experience of it? How do you know you're scared? Where do you experience the scare in yourself? Are there other sensations associated to it? And while I'm doing this, I'm building a relationship to them. I'm creating an intimate space between us. And I'm sort of feeling into that intimate space to get a sense of who they are across from me. And sometimes I'll have an intuitive flash as to, you know, a scene that will be there that will tell me what it might be related to and I'll act on it and see what happens. But I will explore it through associative thinking. I'll ask them if they have dreams about it. I'll see if there were other people in the family who had that. But psychotherapy is a process of exploring the history.

[119:08]

And there's many different aspects of being able to do that. And sometimes I'll just tell them, well, maybe we have to take care of the 10-year-old girl. When I do that, it's a dissociation from that. It's a dissociation from the continuity. Because then she's looking at the 10-year-old girl and not at herself as a grown-up, as being a result of that 10-year-old girl. They're both existing in the same space at the same time. So there's lots of possibilities as to how I use that. And I have to be short today, but that's it. With this, one last question. What do you do with your academics, if you have any? With leave and fame, money, sex, whatever? Well, one of the things I do is, first thing I do is to accept that that may be true sometimes. The second thing that I do is to remind myself that the problem with attachments is that they deny the fact that everything changes constantly. Having an attachment, let's say I'm attached to my watch. Well, it's treating my watch as an object, as an entity.

[120:12]

And it's denying the basic fact that, you know, it's changing constantly. So if we see ourselves as activities, if we practice seeing ourselves as activities, and we see ourselves as constantly changing activities, what is there to get attached to? But this watch will remain intact for a sufficiently long period, say for 10 years. Oh, I've lost lots of watches. True. True. But I'm changing. And the relationship is based on the fact that everything's changing. so attachment it doesn't mean I don't like nice things but it means I remind myself and I remind myself when I put on the watch in the morning I touch it to my forehead to remind myself that it's not an entity that is a constantly changing activity in my life that's part of my life for this moment and it may be gone and I may be gone in the next moment it's unfolding it's something new each time

[121:14]

And if I experience my life as a successive series of moments and not a continuity, then I can experience it new in each moment. Thank you. Thank you.

[121:27]

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