This is interesting and satisfying for me to do this with you. But if I ever practiced with some of you or with people in Sweden again, I do think I would try to have a Swedish translator. because the dynamic with a translator is I can feel the translator trying to figure out what I mean. And although I speak in, I think, relatively simple English usually, the way I put English together is different than most people would. So then the translator has to deal with it, and you have to deal with it, and you have to deal with it in both English and Swedish, and I have a much bigger, more intimate feeling for what's coming across. Because without a translator, I feel I'm talking at your heads, sort of. Which isn't bad, you have nice heads, but...

[01:04]

We have an expression from a koan. In the eyes it's called seeing. In the ears it's called hearing. What is it called in the eyebrows? And this is another way of saying exactly what I said earlier. Maybe the eyebrows know what's going on. If you said 50 or 60 or 70 years ago that there were television programs and phone calls in the air with no wire, etc., the people just completely couldn't have believed it. But from the point of view of Buddhism, there's a great deal of information happening in situations that's outside of our usual senses. So how do you not be fooled by the seemingly seamless present? Is that all right to say?

[02:20]

It is so wonderfully convincing. As I said, I'd like to make a case for it tomorrow on how beautiful our seemingly seamless present is. Okay. So you can actually take a phrase like that what is it called in the eyebrows, and try to kind of feel the world with your eyebrows. I often use my cheekbones. The most traditional way is to feel the world with your hara. And you have to practice these things. It's a craft. You know, you go up to the refrigerator door with your hara. I mean, you have to find some craft-like way. Do you use the word handwerk in German? Yeah. You use the same word? Handwerk. Yeah. It's a kind of handwork, maybe, but craft. And if you try things like that, it's... You find something different.

[03:31]

And you find that you are beginning to define yourself, actualize yourself in a different space than the culturally defined sensorial consciousness. Now, you asked me just before we started the distinction between mindfulness and meditation. Meditation is a form of mindfulness and a kind of anchor of mindfulness. But mindfulness is actually a separate practice and Buddha supposedly said that the four foundations of mindfulness are in themselves

[04:38]

can lead to freedom from suffering and enlightenment. So what are the four foundations of mindfulness and what do we mean by mindfulness? Well, mindfulness is, first of all, it's the body. But that is meant, that includes, well first of all, and primarily, breath. So mindfulness of the body, the first aspect is mindfulness of the breath. And much of what I've been speaking about yesterday really falls into these four categories. But mindfulness of the body also means the clarity of mind with which you do everything. And one aspect of mind, which we don't think of as an aspect of mind, is energy, aliveness, vitality, the ability to bring energy into your attention.

[05:40]

And So mindfulness of the body includes the way the body itself... I mean, the body in Buddhism is not the corpse. It's not the stuff. It's what makes the corpse alive. It's more like the body of someone's work or something like that. You might use the term something like that, I presume. I don't know. In any case, it definitely does not mean the stuff of the body. It means what makes this stuff alive. so how do you how is the body present in our activity so breath is one posture is another and the four noble postures and noble actually in English is rooted in the word knowable what can be known is also what noble means

[06:46]

So the four postures are reclining, sitting, standing, and moving, or walking. And you then notice the mind that accompanies those four postures, and you begin to notice the mind and awareness, consciousness, as it's present in our different postures. And every... Most words have a gesture. You can sort of... You can kind of let your hand play out the gestural aspect of words. Big. Small. Friendly. Not so friendly. You know, if you say words and you just let your hands... Feel it. Actually, there's a gestural quality to language.

[07:51]

That's posture. That's studying the body. That's mindfulness of the body. In the Buddha, when he's like this, it means have no fear. When the Buddha touches the ground like this, it means situated immediate. Anchor yourself in your immediate situation. And it also means to discover, to practice with, to notice the four elements. And the four elements are, we have them in Western culture too, medieval times especially, and they're somewhat similar, but they're not again considered elements in the sense that they're some kind of given units.

[09:02]

They're territories of experience again. Because everything is thought of in experiential terms, not as entities. So, solidity, the first is earth, but that's solidity. You kind of feel your solidity. You have a sense of bringing attention to your solidity, but also other people's solidity. So when you meet somebody, you... it's almost as if your solidity talks to their solidity. You know, some men are so solid and big and strong, it's quite interesting, and it really takes over their mind. I see people walk down who, you know, like built, like they were made of bricks or something, you know, and they really, you know, you can see in their face that they just know they can do almost anything with their body.

[10:02]

And, um, So there's solidity, and then there's the water element, which means fluidity, or the suppleness, pliancy, a softness throughout the body, etc. And fire is energy, vitality, and upward movement. And Air or space is the sort of interactive sense of your self with the world. And it would include being aware of your peripersonal space, etc. And again, a simple example of that is... a chef has to know when he's cutting, he really has to know where his body is, you know.

[11:07]

And with a car, you can tell just exactly where your fender is when you go. So this is really an extension of your body. And So that's the simple way of mindfulness of the body. But it would also include, and this is harder to do unless you... Some kind of sitting or meditation is necessary to do a kind of really exploration of the body from inside. And the idea is you want to be able to bring attention to all parts of the body, to your organs, your stomach, etc. So you actually learn how to, at first, you know, maybe you bring attention to your thumbs if you're practicing.

[12:11]

And you can feel your thumb, you can feel your arm, then you try to move inside your arm or feel within your arm. And at first it's kind of imagination. It might be good for you. Imagination. But you begin to be able to feel almost the shape of the muscles. And usually when I do this, I work my way up the arm and I find through the shoulder I can enter into my chest. And so I use the shoulders in entry. And then I go around the lungs, inside the lungs, around the lungs, around my stomach. And I begin to feel my body from inside. And what's interesting is when you begin to work with this, and sometimes you can feel it in, you know, the stomach will have, or the heart will have a color. there's a kind of sensation of color or something, but then you're actually feeling the whole circulatory system, not just the heart. Or you feel your fascia, the thing that, I don't know what the word is.

[13:24]

Yeah, things like that. You can feel that, and that's what acupuncture things work with often, that the way fascia connects it. And you can begin to find acupuncture points from inside. And I'm fairly certain that acupuncture was developed not by poking a lot of needles and saying, how do you feel? But somebody, a meditator, beginning to feel certain points from inside. So the body as taught through acupuncture was initially discovered through meditation like this. Nobody's ever told me this. I'm fairly sure it's true, though. because you can begin to start feeling. And one of the ways it's noticed it does is you start itching at certain points. Like there's a fly, ants on you or something. And if you pay attention to it, and it will go away if you don't kind of try to get rid of it, it will start moving.

[14:28]

And the places it moves to is often acupuncture points. so this is just assumed in yogic practice that you know your body from inside you also know it as a thought sheath but you also know it as dropping the thought body dropping our visual image of the body which we need you need to have that visual image if you're cutting carrots or onions or something Okay, the feeling is to notice how feeling accompanies our activity. Well, let me go back to body. Mindfulness of the body also includes clarity of mind, clarity of attention.

[15:30]

So that means, mindfulness of the body means when you're walking, You really feel clear with each step. One of the ways to practice this, and you mentioned, I might say, something about kin hin. When we do kin hin, kin hin is walking meditation. Oh, I'm telling you all these things that aren't useful to you, but anyway, it's kind of beautiful. You walking meditation, we put our hands, this is not to suggest that you should do this. This is just to suggest we do it in particular ways because the particularity of how you do things affects you. So what we do is we put our hand here.

[16:32]

This is already, you know, this is, if you work with healing or anything, this heats up here. You can feel it heat up here. So you put your thumb there, and you close your fingers slightly around your hand, and then you put your hand, you have it parallel to the floor, and you put your hand here. And then you can feel the difference between this You know, just relaxing. And just being like this, or being like this. Some people do it this way, which is too artificial, I think. Let's use it. I think you put your hands like this, and then you turn them up slightly. In the middle of your body. Turn them up slightly. And you can feel that's slightly more alert. It requires a certain kind of attention. and it then opens up this little space of an egg there. If you do this, this opens up.

[17:33]

That's only for Zen practice in a practice center. It's not a normal way you'd walk around, but I'm just showing you as an example of attention to detail. Then when you step forward, you step forward on the exhale, And as you inhale, you lift the back heel. Now, when you're meditating, the best way to get a feeling for the kind of breathing that works in meditation is to imagine an oval of an exhale going this way, and an inhale coming up like this way. And the way the diaphragm works, when you exhale, the diaphragm makes it feel like the air is coming in from down here. Of course it's not, but it feels that way. Now when you breathe that way, you're not breathing with the chest.

[18:38]

And when you breathe with the chest, there's a tendency when you concentrate to cut off your breathing, like a watchmaker might stop his breathing to do something carefully. when you stop your breathing, when you're concentrating, it affects your brain right away because you're getting different oxygen in your brain and so forth. So this oval, now I'm telling you this for a reason, the oval, the visual oval, of the breath going like this. Once you do that, you get a feeling for that, it really stabilizes your breathing. And in meditation, your breathing can get extremely slow, one or two breaths a minute, for example. And there's no, it's all, your chest remains very still, your torso remains still. But then, what we call, what sometimes is Kundalini and so forth, it's called a subtle breath, it's not really a breath. but it's a kind of breath-learned energy paths.

[19:43]

So this oval, after a while, you get the feeling of breath and energy combining and coming up the spine. So you begin to feel like you're breathing right up your spine. That is the feeling, even though in fact, of course, you're not breathing, but it's a feeling. So this oval begins to be an oval in which that you visualize as you breathe. You begin to feel this in your body and it feels like you're breathing up your spine. And eventually it feels like you're breathing right to the top of your head. And one of the signs of developed meditation is this whole top of your head itching. Or feels kind of ticklish. Kind of interesting feeling.

[20:48]

And that's why the Buddha has a thing on top of his head. And it's also related to Nimbus of Christ and Buddha figures and things. When you begin to feel that you begin to have a kind of almost visible field around you. So this is a subtle description of the body, which you don't learn in school. We don't learn in our culture much. Okay, so when you're doing this, you're doing actually an exhale, and I'm stepping down. When I lift my heel, now you understand why I mentioned it, you're doing what's called heel breathing. you feel like your breath is coming in your heel, comes up the back of your leg, through your spine, through your head, and like this, and then you step forward with the exhale. Now, every time you do, if you do walking meditation, you don't do that every time.

[21:56]

You do it a few times if you want to, and you can feel the... how it affects the posture, how it lifts the whole body. But for the most part, you're just walking forward with inhales and exhales. But it's a way to continue zazen mind in walking. And it's a way to begin to integrate your... So this is actually part of the posture of standing. And... So each of these postures, the four noble postures, are knowable. Sitting is different than standing. When you're standing, you have a feeling in this posture of your entire body being filled with vitality. And you practice this.

[22:57]

You don't just wait till you happen to feel it. You kind of like have the sense in it and you open yourself to that. When you have, the more you practice this vitality of the body or mindfulness of the body or they're also called not the support foundation mind but they're called the four awakenings because you're literally waking up your body with attention it's like you wake somebody up wake up wake up you're saying your body wake up wake up you're not treating your body as a given object that does its own thing your your intelligence and awareness is part of your body Now, the second feeling is... Okay, so that concludes when you walk, you know where you're walking, and you feel... One way to practice for this is you step forward as if the floor is not going to be there.

[24:19]

And your foot kind of seeks the floor, and the floor comes up to meet it. So you're walking like a panther, or like an animal who's... There's a kind of animal quality to it. And sometimes you, I found it useful to use the word arriving. So each step I have feeling, arriving. Not going anywhere, arriving. Arriving, just walking to get coffee. This is also a way to engage yourself in situated immediacy. So one of the first things I'm suggesting is you drop, you try to maybe replace now with the concept now.

[25:21]

So whenever you think now, you kind of, in a Paslovian sense, try to remind the concept of now, the concept now. Okay, feeling is, you notice when you bring likes and dislikes to everything. Oh, I like this bell, I don't like this bell. You notice the baggage of I like it, I don't like it, I feel good, I don't feel good, you know. And you kind of like try to loosen that baggage of feeling, pleasurable, not pleasurable. And neither pleasurable or not pleasurable Neither pleasurable nor not pleasurable is a wider state of mind. Just as there, whatever's there. Everything begins to feel as just in its place. But feeling also means non-graspable feeling. Now by non-graspable feeling I mean like right now in this room, there's a certain feeling that we've generated.

[26:29]

You can't say what it is but it's a little different than when I was standing here. And now it's a little different sitting. And each of you in your posture and each of you are kind of creating a feeling in this room that we can't say what it is, but it's where most of the information is. The more that feeling has a kind of presence, the more we're in touch with each other. So sensing the... emotions, feelings, attitudes we bring to our actions is mindfulness of feeling. And mindfulness of the mind is then noticing the states of mind, the kind of mind you're in, much of what I've been talking about, etc. And the last mindfulness of phenomena really means the mindfulness of the impermanence of phenomena. Impermanence. Each thing is a construct, it's an activity, it's impermanent, and it's known through mind.

[27:42]

So you learn to remind yourself of that. Those are the four foundations of mindfulness. So again, let me sort of start over. You remind yourself somehow using the word now and turning it into the concept of now. By getting the habit of thinking, feeling, the concept of now, you can see if you try to shift that feeling to what I'm calling situated immediacy. I don't know what you want to call it in Swedish. Some kind of a proactive immediacy. Proactive isn't quite the right word because proactive means to protect yourself by anticipating.

[28:46]

I mean, that's technically what it means. But we can use it in a wider sense. To me, reactive, it sounds like something happens and you react. That's already too late. It wants to be a simultaneous proactive immediacy. Sometimes I, you know, instead of... I don't like interactive. I don't like... reactive. And I don't like interactive. That emphasizes separation. So sometimes I use for myself interactive. There's no such word in English. But an interactivity, an interactive. So the second thing I'm emphasizing is you see if you can find a way to anchor yourself in a situated immediacy.

[29:51]

Maybe you can imagine giving birth and say, whatever that feeling is, that feeling of being present when I'm giving birth can be right now, or right now, right now. So you have to find some way to remind yourself of this situated immediacy. which will be, as I said, the moment we are born and hopefully the moment we die. The sense in Buddhism is that you die intentionally. Once you know you're dying, you intend to die. And that used to be a Western concept of the intentional conscious death. And And that's very, very true in Buddhism.

[30:53]

If you're a Zen teacher, once you know you're going to die, often the classic situation is you call those you're practicing with together, and you sit and you say, well, goodbye, it's been great practicing with you, and so long, and then you slow down your heart and die. But you don't do it. It's a kind of suicide. But you do it when you probably would die within the next week or a few days or something like that. There's one famous story of a guy who did that and then he didn't die. Another two weeks. He had to gather everyone two weeks later. Get his timing off. They didn't sit there and wait. No, they didn't wait two weeks. I'm sorry. Yeah. Yeah. I like the story about the Zen teacher whose legs were broken also. That's true, yeah. He never could sit well.

[31:55]

And so, and his legs, he injured himself, nothing else. And he sat, gathered everybody, and he said to his leg, you haven't obeyed me in life, but you're going to obey me in death. He went, and perished. I mean, a little drama, it's okay. There was a lot of situational immediacy. There's one guy, a Zen teacher who died, who was a friend of Sukhiroshi. And he said to his attendant, could you bring me some water? And the monk brought a glass of water. I said, bring me some water. And he brought the pitcher of water. And he and threw the pitcher and died I plan to be more calm and less dramatic but at each moment who knows what's happening um

[33:07]

Okay. Now, the third, I guess the third thing here, or fourth thing, replace the concept with now, situated immediacy, and a feeling of anchoring yourself in situated immediacy with a sense of the mystery, you know, of, of, well, anyway. And, um, The third is to remind yourself that each perception points to mind as well as to the object. And the fourth thing I guess in this list I've made up is to know the difference between a content-defined mind and a field-defined mind.

[34:19]

So let me try to give you a sense of that. I think one of the easiest ways to do it is to... What I expect is you'll hear this, you might try it, you might feel it a little bit while we're talking. But if it just is a possibility, perhaps you'll begin to notice the possibility in your own activity. Once you know intellectually or conceptually the possibility, you may begin to notice it in your own activity. So let's take a door. I think it's very useful to use a door, a threshold. In Japan, the door to entry is called the genkan. Genkan actually comes from Vimalakirti's hut. Vimalakirti's hut. He was a lay person. You know, probably a real person.

[35:26]

But he has become mythologized. And he had a little hut in the abbot's house in his monastery. Supposedly to be like Vimalakirti's hut. Which was a tiny hut, but he could have thousands of people in it at once. And the entry was called the mystery gate. But Now, every Japanese house has a genkan. It's kind of a mud room. But it actually means Mr. Gate, and it comes from, and we have in English, entrance. The entrance, the threshold. So you use the entrance, or the threshold. So you're coming up to the door. You stop, and we actually have one of those little rules. that you're supposed to not be told. You're supposed to pick up by noticing. But I'm telling you, because we don't live together in a monastic setting, is you always step through a door with the leg nearest the hinge.

[36:27]

And if you don't, it doesn't mean you, you know, I tell this to students and then I watch them come to the door and they do a little dance. I call it the door dance. But that's not the point. The point is when it feels natural or whatever to step with the other foot, you're just aware of what foot you're stepping in. This is mindfulness practice. And it's different than Zazen practice. So you're just aware of what foot. You have to find some way to develop this awareness. You trick yourself. Like, I'm going to have this little rule. And after a while, it's just natural for you. You feel, as you go through a door, stepping in. So, you use that feeling of stepping in to feel the room and don't think the room. I think it's interesting that, I guess, in German, room and space are the same word.

[37:31]

Is it true in Swedish? It's only one word. It's only one word. In German, they've got another word for room, as in house, for all of us, called also Zimmer. Zimmer, yeah. Zimmer free. Yeah. But they also use the word Raum, which is space. Yeah. we have room, which is the same as room, which is space. Yeah, we have room, but you can use the word for room as, is there room? Yeah, is there room? In English we say, I don't have any room in my stomach. Yeah. We say that in Swedish too. Yeah, after last night, none of us had any room in our stomach. So you step in and you You don't think the room, you just feel the room.

[38:33]

And maybe you even identify with the space of the room. And then you go in and you do whatever you have to do. You start thinking about the room again. I've got to sit over there or whatever. But you use that as a little transition to create a starting point for an initial mind. Because what we're trying to do is begin to notice the units of experience, the duration of the present, the units of experience that in fact is how we function. Consciousness makes it seem like one continuity, but in fact we're knowing things moment by moment. And if you study a person physiologically, psychotically, etc., scanning, you're scanning and creating a moment. You're scanning and creating a moment. You're scanning and creating a moment. That's outside of our consciousness, but barely outside of our consciousness. you can actually begin to feel it. So this is a kind of way to trick to stop the psychotic scanning that merges into a seamless present.

[39:45]

Stop it and notice it by just feeling the room and then going in. Now another way to do this, as I brought up yesterday, is as Ravi said, to pause for the particular, is you allow your attention to be absorbed by each particular. As I said, one way to do it is the sense of doing things with completeness, with a feeling of, I mean, when I bring it to here, because that sort of feels like a natural stopping point, or feels complete. Then I My daughter, Elizabeth, who's my middle daughter, is 27 or something. There's a singer and a composer and a nice person. And about this much taller than I am. She's big. And she discovered that she really is moved by a painting.

[40:48]

If she goes back to the painting with a tablet and a pencil and draws the painting, she draws herself into the painting. She experiences the painting. She feels really complete in how she knows the painting then. She likes it, she looks at it, but her senses aren't just mental seeing of it, doesn't engage it away. When she draws it, she begins to see things. You know, it's an interesting story. There's a Swedish artist, not Swedish, Swiss artist, excuse me, who I used to know moderately well, and she loves to draw insects. Does beautiful drawings of insects, and she's fairly well known in Europe and sells these detailed drawings of insects. She began drawing insects, and she found wings were coming out of the wrong place and things like that, you know. And she began to wonder why that was the case. And she found that the closer she got to nuclear reactors, the more the insects were like that.

[41:57]

So she tried to present this information to the scientists. Scientists, oh no, we've tested the insects. There's no radiation leakage. There's no exposure to, you know, et cetera. But they weren't drawing, they weren't looking closely enough at the insects. They look at the insects and they say, oh, the wings are in the right place. But when she drew it, she saw that they weren't actually in the right place. So finally they had to admit that there was some kind of problem around nuclear reactors that they weren't able to measure, but the insects were. And so, you know, we generally see the insect the way we're used to seeing it. But if you draw it, it's different. She had a wonderful series of pictures of... They're kind of almost like lice that are on plants. The patterns on their backs, the color patterns on their backs are different. Really? I haven't seen that. Maybe it's the same person.

[42:58]

I think it probably is. It's so much from Switzerland. Yeah, it's a woman from Switzerland. I can't remember her name right now. Based on how close they were to military reaction. Yeah. Must be the same person. When you pause for the particular, you can also try, when you're trying to learn this, to breathe the particular. If I look at the glass of water, I have a feeling of pausing long enough to breathe my observing the glass. So you're trying to create a pace, a body pace, a sensorial body pace. At first, it's rather mechanical. And after a while, it just becomes natural. Okay.

[44:00]

Another way, again, as I said, I started out, is you notice each particular and you feel it's complete. I'm going to get another example. It's when I look at a Picasso, or let's say, take some famous artists, Picasso, Cezanne, or Matisse, What I see is their enlightenment experience. Picasso, from my point of view, paints the aura of each object. He paints a kind of field. Each object has a field and you can feel the interaction of those fields, of the objects. Matisse, my experience with Matisse, is he paints the space and the objects appear from the space. Now, either of these would be, when you first feel this, an enlightenment experience. So my sense is that most artists actually are artists because they've had an enlightenment experience of some kind.

[45:10]

And it changes their worldview. And then they want to get back to this feeling, not only because enlightenment feeling is one of the better feelings, is you feel that you're in a situation the way things actually exist, and it makes you feel satisfied and complete. You don't need anything. You have everything you need. And you can practice that with a phrase like, just now is enough, in English. Because just now is not enough if you have to go take a pee, if you're hungry, just now is not enough. But actually, at this moment, if there's no food and no toilet, just now better be enough. So the fact is, just now has to always be enough, because that's all you have. You never have more than just now is enough.

[46:13]

Just as situated immediacy is enough. So that's one level of mind that can also be simultaneously present with just now is not enough. Because just now is not enough is actually true too. Sometimes you are hungry or you've got to talk to somebody or you're anxious or whatever. But with a phrase like just now is enough you can kind of like I mean you're on a bus train is late there's a car accident, and you're going to be an hour late for a meeting, you can be anxious. You can just be just now. Right now, might as well bliss out on the bus, because I'm not going to get there in time anyway. Now, we can tell that to ourselves, but to actually feel that in a normal way. Okay, so... If what Picasso or Cezanne or Matisse is doing is trying to paint their way back into a poet, you can find in certain poems, a poet, often there's certain really bright clusters of words that have more vitality than other words.

[47:33]

And those similar bright cluster of words keep appearing in poems or something. And I'm convinced that represents their enlightened experience and then they're adding other things to it. But it's an entry into the world how they've experienced when they felt most complete and satisfied. If that's the case, We don't have to wait for enlightenment or wait to be a painter or something like that. The more you can just bring yourself into the immediacy of a situation. So, that's a long riff on to pause for the particular. But basically, you're kind of pausing with your breath or with your attention for each particularity. Now, if you do that, you're interrupting piercing the tapestry of concepts, consciousness. You're kind of taking one little particular and bringing your attention to it.

[48:37]

Now, do you go back to consciousness? No, you go back to the field of the mind. So again, so okay, so I'm talking with you now. Now what I notice, if I notice the incline of your head, okay, And then I have a habit of noticing something, and then I go, I feel the field of you. This is a yogic technique of perception. So I feel the field of you, and then I go back to a particular, like the double ring on your finger. And I don't think about you. I just notice the shine of the gold of the thing. And then I go back to the field. And then your hands clasped. And then I go back to the field. So I'm not going back to consciousness in the usual sense. I'm going back to your hand resting there, your locket.

[49:42]

And so I just look at the particular and then the field. Particular and then the field. Particular until it's almost simultaneous. Field and particular. This interrupts consciousness and opens up the territory of mind to more information. So when I practice this yogic perception, from particular to field. So what we've gone from is consciousness to a particular, and then the particular to the non-content defined field of mind. Consciousness is a content defined mind. But if you have content, the content has to be in a field of mind. Okay, if you have words on a page, the page has to be there.

[50:46]

So, you can go from content, or a particular, to a mind which includes content, but it's defined through the field. Does that make sense? I mean, I think intellectually you can hear it, but the experience of it is something else. Now, it so happens that that a field-defined mind is more right brain and is what I would call awareness and not consciousness. So your awareness, aware of something in a field-defined mind, you're aware in a different way than in a content-defined mind. And this, it's this field-defined mind, which allows you to have a knowing and a noticing slip right through the little tunnel that we go into when we go to sleep.

[52:00]

So it's this field-defined mind that can be present while we're sleeping. and can decide to wake up at 6.02. And when you've practiced meditation after a while, you can be asleep at night. I mean, all you may be able to do it, but it's only happened to me after I'd been meditating a while. And someone can come in the room. You know they're in the room. You stay asleep. You can have a conversation with them and not wake up. If the conversation is, I'm going to leave the keys on the refrigerator and I'm going to have to... My wife is leaving in the middle of the night or something, I'm imagining a situation. She does it all the time. Well, it could be if there's a fire. She's a volunteer fireman. Um... I can say, oh, fine, good, etc.

[53:06]

But if she says, what will you do tomorrow in the afternoon? That kind of question would probably wake me up. Because it requires a conceptual thinking. If it doesn't require conceptual thinking, I can have quite a long conversation with somebody and still completely my body just stays asleep. And... So... particularly after a sashin or something, if you do a seven-day sashin, sometimes all night long, you can feel the brightness in the room, but you're still found asleep. You can feel the presence of the room. Now, you can also get to that kind of non-conceptual awareness by trying to feel the world with your eyebrows or cheekbones. You basically are shifting attention away from ordinary sensor, sensorial awareness. So you can play little games with yourself like that by shifting attention from our usual sense fields.

[54:12]

Now I tell people when they read, study koans for instance, read with your ears. But what I mean is you bring a feeling of awareness up your spine, and you have a hearing field, and then you study. But you keep your attention in the kind of aural, A-U-R-A-L space while you're reading, and you notice things in the text that are different than if you're concentrating in the usual way. But, okay. How was that? Did that make any sense? Interesting. I was thinking about this, you know, you saying about the painter and the musician, and I was thinking it's true for like athletes and dancers and everything, you know, they have these moments of, you know, a meditative mind and that's what you try to come back to.

[55:25]

That's right, yeah. And in Zen practice, you say, let's not limit that to dancing or art, but let's make it the art of our living. It's like when you dance or something, you know, it It's just moments and you don't know when they're going to appear. You can't control it. But when you practice like this, I suppose, then you can control it and you can prolong it. Well, you can let it happen. If you try to control it, then you're in consciousness. So you've got to create a mind that lets things happen. And you can have simultaneously a mind that lets things happen and a mind that does things. And lunches at 12? That's soon, huh? Ten minutes. I'm just thinking that what you talked about today with mindfulness is very similar to what David says there with the continuous practice which actualizes itself, which is mindfulness.

[56:25]

And when you talk about moving into the field, That's the now of kundalini's practice, which is not originally possessed by the self. Yeah, that's right. Just as he's saying, when you shift to the field of mind, the self mostly disappears. Because self, at least as Buddhism thinks of it, exists in the territory of consciousness. When you're not functioning through ordinary consciousness, self is minimized. Now, you have an observer, but the observer is not the self. Observing mind is not the self. Observing mind can be the self, but the observer which accumulates personal history is the self. To just observe is not the self. What is that? Observing. In other words, one of the complexities of us human beings is that if I can observe this glass, I can observe myself observing the glass.

[57:36]

That's all. That simple. A capacity of mind to observe can observe itself observing. And we confuse ourselves when we connect the capacity of mind that observes observing and say, oh, that's me. It can be you, but it is a process of observing that carries a lot of information. But the carrying of information, which makes consciousness, is also not the self as a problem. Self-referential thinking is the problem. Okay, so why don't we sit for a moment, a couple minutes. Very nice of you to get up.

[58:40]

I don't mind if you do a horizontal sitting.

[58:43]

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