So what I remember is that when I remembered to start again, I had not one trace of, oh, I forgot, I just started again. As if there were no gaps in time. Yeah. So basically, I kept the feeling pretty much all the time present. Of course, sometimes more present than others. And I decided not to bring any other phrases into my practice or anything else into practice until I resolved that one. I thought if I resolve this one, this will be good enough. I don't need any more for a while. Okay. Did you want to say something else? Oh, yes. In the Sendo, there is a calligraphy.

[01:24]

In Vienna? In Vienna, yes. There is a calligraphy and it says exactly that. Actually, it says not coming, not going. Okay. Yes. Yes. I have a question that we can answer later. For me, the question is, where is the difference and the effect in there between such gate-sets and what is brought to you with affirmations and positive thinking? Here's a question which we could go into afterwards too. What's the difference between the distinction and the difference in the effect between gate phrases like we are talking about and the affirmations and positive thinking? Like the power of positive thinking?

[02:27]

Some people try to somehow put their life in a more positive way by that kind of positive thinking. In the 40s, there was a book in America that was a big success, and I can't remember the name of the author, but I remember my mother read it. Dale Carnegie. Dale Carnegie. Somebody almost my age. Dale Carnegie's Power of Positivity. All right. Anyway, my mother read it. My mother was wonderful, but she was a little dippy. Everything was too positive.

[03:37]

Oh, well. I don't know. Anyway. Yeah, and then I think the Book of Miracles. You know, every day you read one phrase from the Book of Miracles. I think it works like the dynamic of it is very similar to gate phrases. But gate phrases are an attempt to get you to... I would call wisdom phrases, and they're an attempt to get you not to feel positive or negative, but they're transformative.

[04:39]

But the way it works is very, very similar. What I don't like about it is the promise of this positive change, because I think there is not a kind of a positive, stable world you can just bring yourself into. Yeah. I mean, I couldn't practice with a phrase like, feel good today. It's not going to work for me. Because I may feel all kinds of things.

[05:40]

And when, you know, in America, everybody says, you know, all the time, have a nice day. And I sometimes say, I'm sorry, I have other plans. What do you mean, telling me to have a nice day, you know? So the question then, when I ask myself, who am I? Then comes up, who is feeling rotten? Who is feeling this? Who is not having a good day? The question, who am I? Okay. That's all in Deutsch as well? When I sit down, I've never done anything else in the last few years.

[07:06]

I sit down, look at what's going on and try to question myself. When I get back into that monkey state, am I that or am I not? Sometimes I think, that's wrong. Yes. Who is that? And then I always get access to a deeper level. This answers me in some kind of deeper level. No, it's one of the most basic of all phrases to use. And it's in various ways, who's asking the question, sort of in Zen is a very, you ask a question, the teacher says, who's asking the question? But I feel that that kind of practice works in the kind of Sangha monastic situation. But I wouldn't in ordinary context suggest to somebody work with who am I.

[08:08]

But if somebody was working with it, I would support them to work with it. And the reason I wouldn't suggest it is because who in our culture in ordinary life is so psychological? And I would suggest that sometimes one also works with, what am I? Or I'd drop the, am I? And just have a feeling of whatness. In all situations a kind of whatness. Anyway. Thank you. Someone else? Yes. Why not? Why not? I like what you said about stillness, but I don't understand it.

[09:46]

I can feel it bodily, what you need, but what is stillness? The world is moving, and how can there be stillness? You said every activity comes from stillness and goes back. It tends to go... Or every activity can be that way. And then it tends to go back to stillness. But there's no world without movement. How can there be stillness? Okay, so Deutsch, bitte. There's a problem in Germany. For me, if you say stillness, difficult to say. I don't translate it with stille or ruhe.

[10:50]

I would like to say stillheit. Okay with me. How can there be silence when there is no world without movement, when the world is constantly moving? How can there be silence? Okay. So I use the word stillness. Stillness. You can say it in English. Stillness. I use the word stillness. And I talk about it in a particular context. And as I'm talking about it, I try to have the feeling of that stillness in my own body and speaking.

[11:59]

When I try to give examples where you can catch it like the tree both moving and still or the wave, the shape of the wave is a return to stillness. And I try to give examples where you can also feel them, like the example of the tree, where this stillness is in motion and in motionlessness and in the form of a wave that returns to the water of the ocean. And from the word and the context you catch some feeling. Okay. That feeling is far more complex than the word stillness. And if you have that feeling trust that feeling. And trust me in presenting them.

[13:02]

In a way trust the situation in presenting you this or something. I mean trust me as a practitioner trying to share my experience. So don't think about, oh, the world is, everything's moving, and don't think about that. Just trust the experience. And then stay with the experience. And see what the experience reveals about the world. If you're thinking rushes ahead, then you kind of destroy the feeling. And rationalism and ego and all, they don't want you to trust this feeling. So we usually try to argue ourselves out of when we touch something more actual, more real.

[14:09]

But I'll just say that overall, yes, everything's changing. But again, the word dharma means what doesn't change or what holds. Yeah. So this is a kind of entry into discovering what holds even in the midst of movement. That's also this practice, as Gerhard mentioned, to know the one who is not busy. So that's one kind of entry. Another is you have a feel for the stillness and trust this feel. Do you understand? Does that make sense? Okay. Have all five groups reported? No. All right. In our group we shared the experience what worked for us in practicing and realized this was mentioned from some more people that after a while they get a feeling

[15:52]

Practice deepness if there is a bodily feeling and it's not just coming from mind or... Ambition. For most people, breath was very important. For most people, breath was very important. And also in our group also the women were more talking about practice in their daily circumstances and how they in encounters can enter in practice and somehow.

[17:08]

We found also that when practice works, it allows us to be more able to listen to the other person and allow them to be themselves, just like they are. One woman said that an entrance for her is the stillness, and she tries to see the stillness behind everything, or feel the stillness behind everything. Okay.

[18:15]

Yeah. So he wants to add to the group which was reported before. Maybe I think people can't hear in the back unless you speak up a little. So it's the impression that the men don't practice in everyday life. No. Not true! Yeah The point was in our discussion that sitting is like the basis that allows you to bring practice into your everyday circumstances. And a regular kind of practice is the prerequisite to enable to bring other kinds of practices to life.

[19:18]

Yeah. Yeah, I understand. Yes. In our group we were not kind of prepared that we have to talk about it. So my words may be incomplete in some way. First we looked at what in each of us they found their practice, what they are doing. Most, the majority of people also practices yoga. Most people also had some kind of body work they are doing.

[20:22]

It all helped. And what I find also was in common in our group was working with the breath. And part of people has a regular sitting practice. And part of people has a regular sitting practice. And there were two turning words that came up. The first was open expanse, nothing holy or open space. Yeah. If you meet the Buddha, then kill him.

[21:23]

So the feeling was the essence of Zen is also going against dogmatism and nothing to hold on to. And that the emphasis is very much on everybody has their own experience. Opposed to somehow just believing what you're told. Okay. And extraordinary experiences that somehow opened up for you another kind of reality. Some experienced that happening in their practice.

[22:31]

And I had an experience from my childhood where I went fishing with my grandfather and I had to be very silent and still and I shouldn't talk or anything, move, I shouldn't even move. So that's what I know and the other have to add. Gary Snyder, the poet's feeling is that perhaps one of the roots of meditation is from hunters and fishermen. They have to be very still for a long period of time and they discover something happens. So when I see all these wooden things in the forest around Germany, I think, are they for killing or meditation or both?

[23:41]

So, you know, I think we should take a break. But is there like one or two more people or should we, yeah? I wanted to say something to these entrance phrases. They are very helpful for me. and And what I feel what has to happen is that you get a feeling in this region here. Yeah. And therefore I think the English term is very helpful. Gate phrase. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the reason why phrases like feel good today don't work, because they don't reach to this place.

[25:22]

You can't feel them like that. In our group, I found interesting there was a woman who said what is helpful for her is if she names things differently. Yeah, I can understand. Let's continue to whatever extent we do continue. After a break. And I tell you, when you talk about these things, it makes me so happy. I like hearing that practice sometimes is beneficial. Okay. often as many of you know we have these kind of somewhat random titles and then trying to you know cope with the title

[27:04]

The presumed subject of this seminar. And then various things come up. And the seminar starts to go in its own direction. And particularly things come up through each of you. Yeah. And I wonder always, is it possible to bring some of this at least together? Even Giulio's asking about disappearance is not so easy to say.

[28:18]

When the world is so obviously continuous, at least in our experience, Yeah, what can disappearance mean? You can understand the image of wiping the blackboard. Yeah, I hope that helps, but if we don't have an experience of an eraser, maybe it doesn't help much. And disappearance in a way means you participate in letting things go, letting things be impermanent. In other words, enact, enact is hard to translate, but enact the dissolution.

[29:29]

But it also means at a deeper level of understanding these this teaching, which we can get a feel for from the word suchness, because suchness is a word that represents the experience of feeling mind on each percept. And feeling emptiness and impermanence on each percept.

[30:33]

And feeling sameness or equalness. on each percept. Everything is equal in value to each other's thing. And that's part of the realized perception of interdependence. Okay. Now, I think it helps to have some understanding like that. Certainly the teachings, the commentaries, the sutras are full of such attempts to present suchness, say, to you. Now, what would be for you a signal that you have some experience of suchness? Well, of course, any of what I mentioned. But let's try to look at small things.

[32:04]

Like when you notice in sitting you've lost your thumbs. You know there's somewhere in this big being space But maybe the Grand Canyon is somewhere between them. And you're kind of like sitting still, of course not thinking. You're still, where the heck are my thumbs? And they sort of seek each other like Michelangelo's hands. Yeah. And you discover them and they touch. But that feeling of the body losing its boundaries and being in a big space is a taste of the Dharmakaya, this body, space-like body.

[33:11]

Yeah, and I think it gives us a certain confidence to realize that these great terms in Buddhism are so close in our actual experience. For the Dharmakaya Buddhas to call the Buddha that is so formless that you can't even offer an incense. So wherever you offer incense is good enough. Okay. So when in your, just, say you meditate fairly regularly, do zazen. You may be sitting at your desk or something. And you notice the tea bowl, the book, whatever is on your desk.

[34:24]

Just looks very precise. Or even might have a kind of shine. Somehow the book or the tea bowl or cup has a kind of almost shine around it or within it. Mm-hmm. When you have that experience of this preciseness or brightness in the perceptual field, this is an experience of mind and an experience of suchness, actually. So suchness also means when this process of birth naming discrimination itself disappears.

[35:40]

When even in the four marks, appearance, abiding, and dissolution, even those don't appear anymore noticing because you mostly just notice the field of mind. So on one level this practice, this appearance is to let go, keep letting go. Of the habit of permanence. And I often suggest that I describe practice as breaking the habit of permanence.

[36:52]

But on another level, it's the disappearance of the whole process into the field, undisturbed field of mind. Okay, so now let's approach this from another point of view. We've been talking about studying the self and studying the world. And, in fact, how self and world are often one act And in the end, it's a studying the mind. And then we also have the theme of studying the mind in relationship to karma. Okay, so as you know, our basic practice is acceptance. Our basic meditation practice is uncorrected or unconstructed mind.

[38:11]

Yeah, and the first level of mind that appears with free-floating thoughts The instruction is not to invite your thoughts to tea. But sometimes what I'm suggesting now is, yes, that's the basic stance, basic mental posture of practice. The posture we in Zen always return to. If you're doing some more structured form of meditation, as soon as you start thinking, am I doing it well, just return to unstructured meditation. This effort to have uncorrected or unstructured mind is the starting point and the ending point, return point of meditation.

[39:15]

So that's the basic question. But sometimes we actually produce a thought intentionally. Or notice your thinking intentionally. And this, on the one hand, can be a more psychological practice within Zen. And that's useful and, you know, something I think important for us in the West. But now I'm speaking of it as a basic and traditional way to study the mind, the mental activity of the mind.

[40:21]

So to begin with, you notice your guests, your thoughts. Yeah, maybe you don't invite them to tea, but you notice, oh, there's a guest in the house. And you name the guest, oh, that's Mr. Thought. Frau Thought. Men usually have Frau Thoughts and women have Herr Thoughts. So Mr. and Mrs. Thought appear. You say, no tea, but I notice you. So this process of naming thoughts, percepts, and so forth, is an essential, a basic practice.

[41:29]

You just, in a sense, label it. And sometimes then you peel the label off. So in a way you practice labeling the thought and then peeling the thought off. Peeling the label off. The next practice I suggest is the practice of following a thought to its source. And in serious practice this is something you should get good at. So you notice a thought has appeared. And you try to sense where the heck did that come from. I was sitting here and then there suddenly was this thought from nowhere. So you trace it back.

[42:43]

Well, it was, I heard a bell. And the bell made me think of it. Or it might go back, I thought of that, and then I had that kind of feeling. And then my knee hurt. And I resented having to sit here. And I started getting angry at the Dohan for being so stupid as not to ring the bell. And then I realized other resentments came up. Like that. Now, That's very useful to actually just see the kind of mechanical associative process which thinking is.

[43:46]

And that you identify, I mean, the bell you don't identify with, it's just a bell. The bell, the sound of the bell. But it made you think of this, and there's a little more identification. Then you think of this. And then somehow the bell made you think of the bills you have to pay. And you have a very direct association, self-relevant referencing association to that. So you notice the difference in feeling with the bell and the different sound of the bell and the different feeling when you think of the bill. And this kind of practice is pretty hard to do jogging.

[44:51]

So this kind of practice, it's useful to do, pretty much only possible to do in sitting practice. So you notice on thoughts and percepts and moods which ones seem to have more self-relevance and which ones seem to be just part of the world. Now, one of the fruits of this practice is you find yourself not in the time present, but the mind present.

[45:58]

Now, what do I mean by that? I think the example I've found is useful is having a headache. Yeah, usually when you have a headache, or it could be a cold or the flu, you notice it after the headache starts to hurt. But the headache had an earlier source. There's something that triggered the flu. more blood in the brain, which causes you to hurt. So when you are in the effects of a headache, you're not in, in a way, you're not in the actual present. If we define the present as where things happen,

[46:58]

Where the headache happened was half an hour ago. Or yesterday evening. Yeah. But if you get used to following thoughts to their source, or even following a headache to its source, I feel like I might get a headache. When did this feeling first occur? Well, actually, it was a while ago. And after a while you notice, what I noticed on this particular, is that there's a little feeling of something in the blood vessel in my head that preceded a headache. And once I got so I could notice that, As soon as I noticed it, I could kind of relax in a way that stopped me from having a headache.

[48:34]

So I ended... I would say that's the... When the headache happened is the... is the... more fundamental present than just noticing something after it's happened. So we could try to make some distinction, I'm sorry, the source present and the effect present. If you get in the habit and if you get experienced at following thoughts to their source, somehow you open up the possibility of noticing things when they first arise.

[49:34]

Yeah. And so the... This practice of following thoughts to their source leads to having a more present mind, present to when things actually are triggered, when things actually happen. And you feel sort of like you're in the present present or the source present. Now that is a mind you actually construct through the craft of practice. Then it's much easier to see something appear.

[50:35]

Did you want to say something, Giulio? My practice at this moment is acceptance and self. But I find to myself a big piece of honesty that the example you made, as soon as you feel that in the blood vessel, on one hand you're practicing that, I have that experience that it works, but at the same time you reinforce a very big sense of self because you say, I'm Richard, I don't want to have an headache. and you make a very big discrimination and you're very detrimental about what's going to happen to you. And the way I, at this moment in practice, I can never get rid of, like, it can peel me on in a way, in the end there's still somebody there saying, I want to be happy and I don't want to have a headache. That's good, I like that.

[51:37]

But I don't have a feeling of, it's me, it's more at the level of pleasant and unpleasant. If I hit the stove, I pull my arm away. If I feel a headache coming, I let the headache not come. I sometimes get the flu or a cold. But I often feel it's coming and I can sort of like a train coming down the track. And I say, oh, go on by, don't stop at this station. And I don't feel much self in that. To me, it's just pleasant and unpleasant. Self comes in when it's like and dislike. Now, but I don't think one should interrupt psychological processes where, yeah. And some people use Zen as a way to kind of stop themselves dealing with their own psychological maturation.

[53:06]

Particularly in our culture, maturing the self is an important part of practice. And I see people, you know, What's the word? Expatriates. Expatriates. There are people who live in, say, Japan for 12 years. They leave at 25, they come back at 37. And they haven't matured. They're really about four or five years older, not 12 years older. Because in Japan, you don't have the interactions. You can live as an outsider. You don't have the interactions which mature you. And I see some people use Zen meditation that way.

[54:07]

Because it's a powerful process and you can use it to hold off your own maturation actually. But that's another question I can't really speak about now. But I understand what you're saying and I think your sensitivity to it should help you develop a craft to figure out how to put practice and psychological work together. Okay, so.

[55:09]

There's a cake waiting when I stop talking, so don't get nervous. Okay. But I want to see if I can feel my way into this with you. So you, in addition to following thoughts to their source, you can also notice a thought and wonder where it's going. You can begin to notice where thoughts will lead. Okay. All right, so those are two practices, two or three practices of naming, following thoughts to their source, thinking where they lead, that give you a sense of the, yeah, dynamic of thoughts themselves.

[56:33]

Das sind drei Übungen, das Benennen, das Verfolgen der Gedanken zur Quelle und das Verfolgen, wo sie hinführen, die dir ein Verständnis geben der Dynamik, der Gedanken im Mind. You're participating in finding yourself, participating with awareness or consciousness in how thoughts relate to each other and produce each other and so forth. Okay, now we can also practice with what is the relationship of thoughts to the field of mind itself and not just to other thoughts. Und dann können wir auch üben damit, wie die Beziehung ist der Gedanken zum Feld des Meils selbst und nicht nur mit anderen Gedanken. Okay. So in this kind of practice you try to notice how a particular thought affects your feeling and your mind. Und du kannst hier bemerken, wie ein bestimmter Gedanke dein Fühlen beeinflusst und deinen Zustand des Meils.

[57:41]

Now, this is easiest to do if you start from a rather calm, tranquil, relaxed feeling and sense of mind. And so in that mind you feel rather you're in some kind of, let's say, samadhi. Now, let me say something about samadhi. We can define it most simply as mind concentrated on itself. Now, the new practitioner will sometimes have an experience of samadhi. It just happens. It's rather like the strange experience of hearing a sashin and it hurts like heck.

[58:46]

Then suddenly all go away for half a period. What is the fine tuning that at one moment you really hurt and the next moment... You just feel concentrated and clear. And then you lose it and then it starts hurting again. Well, that's an interesting territory that Sashin allows you to explore more than you'd like. Okay. So now when the beginner has an experience of samadhi that just appears sitting or something, they notice it. They say, this must, hey, this must be samadhi. And then it's gone. But the more experienced meditator can notice its samadhi and actually examine the samadhi without disturbing it.

[60:05]

So ideally, that's the starting point for this kind of practice. You can have a relaxed... clear state of mind. And you produce a thought. Let's say you produce a subtle thought. But transparent thought. That's hardly different from mind itself. Okay, but let's stop at that point. And go back to Martin's question. Who produced this subtle thought in the middle of Samadhi? Because Martin is a troublemaker, bringing these things up.

[61:12]

Okay. Well, then we're going to have to sort of, yeah, something produces the thought. Now, We know the self isn't permanent. We know it's not substantive. Yeah. Or at least we know that intellectually. And through practice you begin to have some experience of something like that. And I think one of the best examples is, you know, the difference between making a decision in your ordinary mind and making a decision in zazen mind. Should I buy this house or not? How should I design this new building?

[62:16]

Should I drop out of my profession or leave college or go to college or something? Often these are decisions which you say, I had no choice. Well, when you say you had no choice, who made that decision? What? What context made this decision, that kind of decision? Okay, I think we have to imagine two kinds of selves. Okay, now that may sound like a problem to you. And you can say, oh, that bakery is so darn complicated again. Two cells, and one is a big enough problem for me.

[63:25]

But it's no more complicated than if you had a car with two engines. You have an electric engine in your car and a gasoline engine in your car. Maybe you inherited this house and you found it in the garage. And you used the car for a couple of years, but you didn't know it had an electric engine as well as a gasoline engine. No one told you what that little dial, that little thing you pulled was for. Yeah. But once you realize it, oh, geez, in the city, it's, yeah, in this context, I'll use the electric engine. That's not complicated, is it? Any of us could do that. They make such cars now. But if we think of two selves, I don't know. I think we believe we have only one self.

[64:27]

That's the experience we have. But often, if you want to make a decision, it's interesting to compare your feeling about doing something when you think it through, feel it through in sāsana, and when you feel it through in ordinary circumstances. Aber wenn du eine Entscheidung triffst, ist es oft interessant, den Unterschied zu bemerken, wenn du das durchfühlst und durchdenkst im Saarsein und in gewöhnlichen Umständen. It's like von Heisenberg's dropping the spoon in the metal bowl. Es ist wie dieses Beispiel von Heisenberg, der den Löffel in diese Metallschale fallen lässt.

[65:30]

He discovered he knew things or could discover things in one mind that he couldn't discover in another. We can also say that, yes, it's a different mind, but in a way it's a different kind of self. So why do we have to add the idea of self to a different kind of mind? Because there's still a sense of meaning in this different kind of mind. I've often had to design things, a restaurant, a building, and so forth. And I... look at it, think about it, fiddle around with it.

[66:38]

But then usually I wait till in zazen it just visually appears to me the way it should look. And the image that appears has much more information in it than I was able to consciously figure out. Und dieses Bild, das in mir erscheint, das hat viel mehr Information als alles, was ich mir vorstellen konnte. So you can say, who designed the building? Which who designed the building? Wir können also sagen, welches wer hat dieses Bild, dieses Gebäude entworfen? So I would say it's not my autobiographical self that designed the building. Und ich würde sagen, es ist nicht mein autobiografisches Selbst, das das Gebäude entworfen hat. It's some other sense of self or self-functioning. Okay. So I'm just proposing that today, opening ourselves to thinking about that.

[67:48]

Now, how does Buddhism deal with this potentiality. Of the sense of self or one who decides in meditation versus one who decides in our usual state of mind. And it's related to Suzuki Roshi, for instance, saying, You have an innermost request. Listen to your innermost request. And I think we all can feel that. Like we can taste that water's wet. And sometimes we may even feel thirsty in our life, wanting this innermost request, like wanting a drink of cool water.

[69:00]

Like somehow you know, I mean, my life is this, but somehow you have a feeling of what you really want or need. What does Mick Jagger say? Sometimes you don't get what you want, but you get what you need. A great Buddhist. Yeah. Keith Richards was asked, what do you think of Mick Jagger? He said, oh, he's a lovely bunch of guys. So it's maybe something like that. So how Buddhism deals with it, and Tsukiyoshi refers to it in this innermost request, we could say innermost request is a kind of embryonic Buddha nature.

[70:15]

It's sort of like You know, in this baby, the blood knows what to do. Usually the fingernails know when to come out. And mostly the teeth come out and everything develops. Well, I don't think that's just physiological. I think we also sense... But there's some kind of nature we have that wants to come out. And sometimes we have too tight shoes on and our feet don't feel good. And sometimes we've chosen a life which is sort of like

[71:17]

too tight shoes. So a big part of Sukhiroshi's teaching was to learn to listen to your innermost request. You're the kind of person you want to exist in the world. Who might be you? If you want somebody to be like that, you better realize that means you. Okay, now how does Buddhism deal with this? Again, asking that question. This is where the emphasis on vows and precepts comes in into Buddhism. The vow cuts through the autobiographical sense.

[72:39]

The vow might arise from the autobiographical self, But the vow itself is in significant ways independent of your autobiographical self. So let's say we have something like an intention-based self, Which is like in the category of pleasant, unpleasant, and neither. And we have a self-referential self.

[73:40]

Yeah, which is based more on likes and dislikes and neither. neutral, or carried a little further, greed, hate, and delusion. And this topography itself is worth exploring in yourself. When do you feel Greed, when do you feel like and when do you just feel it's pleasant? So let's say that we have a vow-based self. Or an intention-based self. Which is somehow a bit different from... Self-based self.

[74:59]

Self-referencing self. If we had words for this, it'd be easier for me to talk about it, of course. But we don't have words for it because meditation has not been a big part of our culture. So it hasn't been possible to explore these distinctions and bring them into language. Okay, now the intention-based self... Now, we human beings have vast memory capacities. Yeah, you can see it in the way an infant learns. Unbelievable how much they can learn and how fast, particularly when they don't have much other memories which inhibit how you remember it.

[76:15]

Es ist unglaublich viel und wie schnell sie lernen können und das ist gerade deswegen, weil sie nicht viel andere Erinnerung haben, die das behindern. Sophia walks by a Chinese couple talking, she starts speaking Chinese or it sounds like Chinese. Und wenn Sophia an einem Paar vorbeigeht, das Chinesisch spricht, beginnt sie Chinesisch zu sprechen oder es klingt jedenfalls so. And later she remembers it. Und später erinnert sie sich daran. Okay. So you have a memory of, you know, wanting to produce a thought. And in the vow-based or intention-based self, that self-functioning decides to produce a thought. Now just to say a little more about this difference between the self-based mind and vow-based mind.

[77:26]

Earlier in the seminar, just to kind of fill the picture out in case you think about it later, I said we can make a distinction between an observing mind and an observing self. Well, the vow-based mind And you know, when you take the precepts, you take the vows. In some senses, they're not even Buddhist. They're just like what we would like a human being to be like. Don't lie, don't kill, don't take what's not given.

[78:27]

It's the vow, really, to just be an ordinary human being. And for those of you who want to be extraordinary, it's a kind of, you know, And those of us who are depressed might be uplifted. The vow just to be an ordinary human being. Okay. And this vow, again, or these precepts cut through are a new basis for being different from your personal history.

[79:29]

They relate to and they may clear up your personal history or something like that. But the vow-based intentional mind hasn't accumulated the karma of your personal history. And this vow-based self accumulates karma in a different way. Karma being the arising of intentional, the accumulation of intentional acts, not accidental acts, intentional acts. So taking this distinction between observer is that the vow-based mind rests in the observing mind, which for most purposes is the percept-only mind, the third skandha.

[80:54]

It's things just as they are. In the realm of pleasant and unpleasant. Now the self-based mind rests in the observing self. This is me. I have a certain history. I like and dislike such and such. Now, to get used to this vow-based mind. That's also the territory of meditation practice. And it's the territory of awareness. In contrast to consciousness. Now again, you may think, how can awareness and consciousness really coexist?

[81:55]

How do they work together? Well, Sophia is developing a very vigilant awareness. And that's one of the kinds of awareness or consciousnesses that scientists are trying to study with imaging. But the vigilant awareness is like her fear of falling. And babies from very early have a fear of falling. You have to hold them a certain way. to the heart and to the body. And if Sophia's too near an edge, she learned to go downstairs real quick.

[83:19]

She realized there was a problem. If you don't go down, then backwards. Yeah, and she plays with this fear. She experiments with it. And when I talk to her about don't go in the street or don't touch electrical outlets... It's really extending this vigilant awareness, which isn't consciousness, to the street and to electrical outlets and so forth. So I'm using consciousness to affect awareness. But at some point, it's not conscious anymore.

[84:23]

She feels the presence of a street or a cliff. Or you might, for instance, if you were on a... in a... If you drive from Colorado Springs to Creston, you pass over, you can pass over. You have to go a little detour. I guess it's the highest bridge some sort in the world. Over the Rio Grande Canyon. It's not the Grand Canyon, but it's still a pretty steep canyon. A car can drive on it one way, but it's just wooden boards with wires. And it moves, and it's a way long ways down there.

[85:27]

So you know consciously you know you're safe. But awareness isn't so sure. And you can feel consciously I'm fine, but awareness has its own presence. So at that time you're feeling the knowing of consciousness and you're feeling the knowing of awareness. Both right there. They're both right there. When they're one, the awareness isn't really part of your personal history.

[86:27]

And it's that awareness, that kind of knowing, which is rooted, developed through meditation practice and the vow-based self. Und dieses Gewahrsein wird entwickelt durch die Meditationspraxis und das auf Gelöbnissen basierende Selbst. And in practice that's called great functioning. Und in der Praxis wird das großes Funktionieren genannt. To function through this awareness rather than thinking. Durch dieses Gewahrsein zu funktionieren eher als durch das Denken. Or to function through both, of course. Oder auch durch beides zu funktionieren, natürlich. Oh, the cake is getting dry. But I'll stop in a minute. So you produce a thought, a subtle thought. And you notice how it affects the mind.

[87:37]

And then this vow-based self produces a vigorous thought. Perhaps a painful thought or a pleasurable thought. And then you notice, how does that affect your... The painful thought or the erotic thought or the pleasant thought, how does that affect your... field of mind. Sometimes you produce a lot of thoughts. This is just part of studying the self and studying the mind. And what you're doing now is studying what kinds of thoughts affect the field of mind. And what you find out in this process is, yes, sometimes the field of mind or awareness turns into consciousness.

[88:47]

But if you identify with consciousness, then that's where you are. If you can physically feel, stay identified with the field of mind, So you have a field of mind, of thought and consciousness. And it makes a difference which you identify with. Which in your body you can feel identified with. And if you feel identified, or settled in the field of mind, eventually you see that whatever thought you have doesn't disturb the field of mind.

[90:00]

And the more you can feel that, Und je mehr du das spüren kannst, umso mehr spürst du wieder dieses So-Sein. Or the imperturbable mind.

[90:29]

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