I asked myself the other day, what is the difference between myself and Wittgenstein? Seems like a funny question. I mean, some things were obvious. You know, he had a surpassing intelligence. He was Austrian, he lived in England and Norway. These I haven't done. I asked it of myself because he says many things that I would say, and he has very similar interests in how things happen and exist. But the difference is that I've spent a very relatively large percentage of my life meditating. And he didn't.

[01:03]

And I mention this because all of you are different. Each of you are different in that way. And I think it's useful to recognize that that locates you in the world in a rather different way, even than such surpassing figures is. Wittgenstein, an Austrian-British philosopher. So I think you can take it for granted without feeling some comparison with various people you read, etc., from our own culture, that Through meditation, you become a rather different kind of person. I mean, we can say we study ourselves.

[02:13]

Zazen, I just wrote this this morning or yesterday or something, just trying to locate something. Zazen is a way we study mind and body. our usual mind and body. But the study of mind and body and Zen meditation transform mind and body. And then you study that study, observe, actualize. That transformed mind and body. So it doesn't surprise, it shouldn't surprise you when, and I don't think you should necessarily go, for example, to Freud as an authority on the unconscious because he's an authority to some extent anyway, his Victorian version of the way mind and consciousness work, et cetera.

[03:19]

But aside from his historical, you know, seatedness, etc. Yeah. You're probably going to have a different feeling about what are the contents of being. So I guess I'm saying something like how do you learn to trust your own experience of yourself and trust the definitions of yourself that arise through practice, which will be in some contrast to the definitions of yourself that arise through your culture, affiliations and affinities. I'm amused that You know, the other day it appeared in my mind.

[04:29]

Not that I know much about it, but the phrase, the sentence just appeared in my mind. YouTube, YouTube, yeah, you know what that is? I barely know, but anyway. The news puts me on YouTube now and then. YouTube feeds off the view, this is the sentence that appeared, YouTube feeds off the view that we don't really exist unless we're filmed. Does that make sense? I mean, I think people think they're more real if they're filmed. I don't know, I guess people hold their cell phone in front of them. And the cell phone is filming them and then they're more real somehow. I mean, I think there's some. But I think that's also that we identify with the present. We identify being with the present. Yeah, that's kind of natural.

[05:41]

It's very hard not to do that, I suppose, to identify being with the present. And then you identify the present with other people's present. And then you want other people, somehow you want other people to know about your present to confirm your identity or something like that. There's some process going on. where we really want to be known by others, but not necessarily the others that we live with. In fact, the people I know who are well known by others aren't very well known by those they live with. It's some kind of hermeneutical... sense of self that's compressed in the subtext of our excuse me for putting it such a kooky way but how do you it's somehow part of our text compressed in our text this view that we need to be known by others

[06:49]

So I started to say, Freud said something like, the unconscious is the royal, no, yeah. Is that what he said? The unconscious is the royal road to understanding ourself or something like that. No, he said dreams are the royal road to the unconscious. That's right. Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious. Now, I don't think any meditator would say that. I don't think most meditators would give much weight to the unconscious. And what is... Because the boundaries between consciousness and unconscious, if you meditate enough, they kind of dissolve. You don't need a royal road. And you wouldn't define consciousness

[08:05]

unconsciousness in terms of the repressed contents of consciousness. And as I pointed out many times dreams is the royal road to the unconscious mostly has been reversed and dreams become a way to become more conscious of ourselves. But I think for a meditator The dreaming dream, and maybe I should say dream time, not just dreaming mind, because it's like an alternative realm of time, an alternative temporality. It's like an access road, maybe, along a freeway. Freeway is consciousness. There's this access road. You can come into consciousness. You can go off and drive more slowly on a nice little road and see things. No. Because if dreaming, as I said, is a simultaneous context of simultaneity, a simultaneous context of what has happened and what could happen, all together, parataxically,

[09:32]

And of course also what couldn't happen sometimes, flying, et cetera. Once I had a dream years ago, I was orbited at eight feet off the earth. And I was going through, I've mentioned this occasionally, because it really stayed in my mind. And I was going through forests and I never hit a tree. And I thought, at eight feet high, how the heck? And then I realized at some point, after, you know, circling about a thousand miles, I realized that somebody had, some computer had programmed me so I wouldn't hit anything. They found an eight-foot wide opening all around the Earth. So I went right by houses and trees and, you know, mountains. Didn't hit anything. But I was rather annoyed they didn't tell me first. I was willing to be orbited. But I wasn't, I really wish they'd told me that I wouldn't hit anything. Because at first I was really, they were coming like mad at me.

[10:38]

But I got all the way around the earth and landed and it was fine. And I woke up and, you know, this is what couldn't happen. So you have this realm of what happened, what could happen and what couldn't happen. All kind of given the same weight. It becomes an intricate kind of place one can be. You know, I think it actually... I mean, I'm not interested, again, in sort of explaining things by how they function for some kind of integration. Because I think we may not be unified wholes, particularly we make ourselves unified wholes the best we can, but we may just be a haphazard, somewhat haphazard concatenation of things. But I think that dreaming mind or dream time as an alternate time, like a fourth kind of time, past, present, future, because dream time is not a version of the past, it's not a version of the present, and it's not going to be what happens in the future.

[12:00]

But it's present to us. And I think as an alternate temporality, it functions, it does in fact function as part of the complexity of being alive. If we are just mentally in the space of past, present, and future as versions of each other. It's much too... Our world is actually more complex than that.

[13:04]

So dreaming mind is an alternate temporality, is a dream time, is... part of the complexity of how we exist. Now, it's said that the, I don't know, this isn't so important, but the Buddha supposedly had five dreams before he left the palace, you know, probably omens. And later, Buddha didn't sleep and things like that. But all the early texts says, I mean, it's great. They say things like, he came back from teaching and his back was sore, so he took a nap. This is great. And it said the Buddha generally took a nap after eating if it was a hot day. And later, there's a kind of shift in the development of the concept of Buddha.

[14:07]

And later, he doesn't dream. And then finally he doesn't sleep. And that's the stages toward the cosmic Buddha. I doubt if the historical Buddha didn't sleep. And he died from eating spoiled pork or mushroom or something like that. So he was fairly quite human. But probably it's reasonable to say, I think, that he didn't dream because if you meditate enough, dreaming and waking are so fused in sleeping that you don't dream. But in any case, I just wanted to go a little bit further in speaking, as I did the last two Tay Shows, about dreaming mind, to present dreaming mind as a dream time which is an alternate temporality.

[15:14]

And it has the power of otherness in our life, and thus the power to be present in the moment-by-moment choices we make, which is our life. Now I heard that you guys, guys means gals to me too, you decided to speak in the seminar about pulse of wholeness, unison, and dissonance. And I had said, I think in Tayshia, that I wasn't ready to talk about it yet, so I'm glad you went ahead. But The idea of pulse as part of our practice, I think, is a very important one to get used to.

[16:26]

If we take the two truths, for instance, the two truths are usually, and I usually too, speak about them in essentially intellectual terms. There's the conventional world, and there's the fundamental world, and the conventional world is dominated by, is viewed as predictable and so forth. And the fundamental world is not permanent, not predictable, etc. And by noticing one's habit of assuming entitiness, etc., You can transform and notice and knowing that things are activities and not entities, you can use these two words. You can notice your habit of seeing things as entities and just develop the habit of seeing things as activities.

[17:33]

The simplest example I give you for many decades is to notice trees as treeing. Really don't see trees. See the activity of trees. Until you no longer see the noun tree, you see the verb tree. The gerund tree. That's a kind of nut tree. The gerund nuts. But there's another way to look at it, and I started to say, is that the conventional world is dominated by consciousness. Okay. So then what, if we looked at that, how can we understand the fundamental world or fundamental mind? Well, then we can look at something like a pulse. because this is not just an intellectual philosophical distinction between two worlds based on different assumptions about how the world exists, but rather let's see if we can discover it experientially.

[18:47]

So I've spoken about the pulse from the attentive point or the particularity to the field. Last two or three years I've spoken about that a lot. And you, ideally, as a yogic practice, you develop the ability to go from the particular to the field. And from the field to the particular. And then the whole field of attention flows through that attentive point. Now, if I say that to, you know, should I write that in my book? I don't know. I'm trying to. But I don't know if it's accessible to anybody who doesn't meditate. So one has to make it accessible enough verbally so that people can understand it verbally. even though it's not their experience, and maybe if they understand it verbally, they can notice when it is sometimes their experience or could be.

[19:55]

No. How does that interplay with what could be, what can't be, etc.? That's another question. Now if we take the distinction I made the other day really clearly for the first time between waking mind, I've decided to do that, between waking mind and consciousness. Okay. And the basic practice of Buddhism is to bring attention to attention. Okay. So you bring attention to attention. You bring attention to attention. And you bring attention to the sensorial and objects and the body itself, the attentive body itself. And one of the contents, one of the ingredients, is the field of attention itself.

[21:04]

Okay? All right. Now, if you can bring attention to a sensorial object or a mental object and to the attentive body itself, you can also bring attention to the field of attention as the field of attention is an object of the field of attention. I mean, in a sense. This is not just word games. It is part of the study of one's mind and body because the study of one's mind and body is going on through attention and that really is transformative and practice when attention is brought to attention itself. And then that naturally leads you to bring attention to attention as the field of attention. Okay. Now, if you begin to discover the pulse between the contents of attention and the field of attention itself as space, let's call it as space, in which the contents happen, the contents of the world start to shimmer.

[22:32]

the contents of the world start to shimmer within waking mind. And the waking mind now is like the field of attention. And the contents of the world shimmer in that field of mind. Now, what's the effect of that? The field of the mind doesn't carry karma. The field of attention doesn't carry karma. The field of attention is non-temporal. The field of attention doesn't carry personal history. It's not a vehicle for personal history. So what do you have? Suddenly you have a situation in which with attention to the field of attention, personal history stops.

[23:45]

This is also to say you're entering, now we could say have a physiological, physiological experiential knowing of the fundamental truth. And you can have a shift to the conventional truth of consciousness, of self-narrative, and the meaning given to the contents of consciousness. But... Okay. Now, does your identification of what and who you are and all shift to the contents of consciousness? Well, in a practical sense, yes. But if your identification... You can't really identify with the field of attention. It's not... There's nothing there to identify with.

[24:52]

It is is-ness itself. So this is another way to come to understand what thus-ness means in Buddhism. Because the field of attention is thus. It's where everything stops. It's no other location, as I've been speaking about. When you come to no other location mind, we can say one way to, another way to describe that is this field of attention in which the contents of consciousness, the contents of the world, shimmer, but you don't identify with them. As soon as you start identifying with them, the shimmer goes away. The light goes away. So they say the Buddha, blah, blah, blah, is always in samadhi, etc.

[25:55]

I don't think that's so great. It's good to be in samadhi sometimes. Or to be able to return to samadhi, the pulse of returning to samadhi, that's manjushri. And then opening up, unfolding, avalukiteshvara, that's another pulse. To know these pulses in how you breathe, But I would say, ideally anyway, and pretty close to something, to the truly adept realized person, virtually always, identifies, not identifies, finds themselves located in thusness and not identified with the contents of consciousness, and then you act within the shimmer of the contents of consciousness. Now this is something I couldn't even say to people who don't meditate.

[27:02]

I mean with any sense of their feeling. And this is another sense of being. This is not being identified with the present. Being identified through the present. Because the present is just the shimmer of the contents of consciousness. Okay, now we can speak about entering the context of consciousness in this pulse of unison, wholeness, all-at-onceness, something like that, and dissonance. Okay, that's enough for today. Okay? Thanks.

[28:03]

May our intention equally penetrate every being and place.

[28:17]

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