With a book and a half-filled baby bottle that Marie Louise gave me. mit einem Buch und einer halbgefüllten Babyflasche, die Marie-Louise mir gegeben hat. I found a way to sit on the bench on my side in a kind of awkward position. Also ich habe einen Weg gefunden, auf der Bank zu sitzen, auf meiner Seite, in irgendeiner Art seltsamen Haltung. And then I propped the book on my hip so it was very, just barely balanced. Und ich habe das Buch auf meine Hüfte so aufgebaut, dass es nur... And then I stood the baby bottle up on the book. And I decided to go to sleep. Now again, giving you basics again. In Yogacara Zen practice, all states of mind, or mental states, have a physical component.

[01:20]

And all sentient physical states have a mental component. Which means part of Zen practice is to learn the keyboard of mind, the physical keyboard of mind. So one of the things you can learn is the mind that goes to sleep. So we all know it to some extent, and you can reproduce it physically and go to sleep almost instantly. So I decided to go to sleep in that way. But keep the milk, the baby bottle balanced on the book that was also balanced. I went to sleep, but I kept the baby bottle, and I slept 45 minutes or more, and the baby bottle was still standing there when I...

[02:30]

I used to practice with a little baby Buddha statue I'd put on my forehead and it would keep it there all night. A simpler practice is to Hold beads or a coin or put a coin like there and then keep it there all night without spreading your fingers. Then yet sleep deeply. This is techniques to do exactly what von Heisenberg tried to do. Das sind Techniken, die genau das sind, was Heisenberg versucht hat. So when you go over the bump into sleep, you notice it and you say, now I'm asleep.

[03:39]

And I cue myself to say, now I'm asleep, I'd better turn over because otherwise I'll snore and drive my wedded wife from bed. Sometimes I say, what is that terrible noise? Oh, that's me snoring. This is all Zen practice. Ja. We're supposed to stop at five, is that right? Oh, any old time, but... Ja. He heißt in der Praxis, er sagt, er hat immer noch ein Präsensbewusstsein, wenn er schläft.

[04:46]

Practically speaking, this means that you still have presence, consciousness, when you are asleep. Oh, yes. You have awareness, not consciousness, I would say. Okay, so let me go back to that basic. Because we have time to do that before we end. There's a problem in using consciousness to cover just too many things. And so far, the scientists who are trying nowadays, it's the hot topic to study consciousness and so forth. The scientists so far can't agree on what they're studying. What is consciousness? But in Zen practice, we just can't use the word consciousness for... the many ways we know.

[06:00]

Okay, so I put consciousness on the flip chart over there. Consciousness is a function of mind. Self is a function of consciousness. Ego is a function of self. No traditional Buddhist would say ego, because ego is a contemporary idea, but it's okay. Okay, what is consciousness? Or what are the functions of consciousness? Yeah, we talked about this. I tried to put a whole lot of stuff into Pail the other day, into the lecture at Pail.

[07:03]

You know what a pail is? I don't know what a pail is. A bucket is a pail. So I put it into the bucket of paint. I can't resist such little things. Some people would pail at such a pun. That's a different thing. P-A-L-E. Okay. The job of consciousness is to present us, to show us, to create for us a predictable, cognizable world. We need to have a predictable world. And the The job of consciousness is to sort out the elements within the perceptual field which tend to repeat.

[08:17]

Und die Aufgabe des Bewusstseins ist, auszusortieren aus diesem sensorischen Feld die Elemente, die sich wiederholen. So we notice nouns more than we notice verbs. Und so bemerken wir Hauptwörter mehr als Verben. We notice trees more than we notice treeing, though I know that's hard to say in German. Now the problem there is, is that consciousness in showing us a predictable world, and reinforcing our need for predictability, creates an implicit sense of a permanent world. We act as if our basic initial assumption, our initial mind, is permanent.

[09:19]

But the initial mind of a realized person is uniqueness or singularity. So consciousness, we have to work against consciousness to know uniqueness. Okay, now if you go to sleep at night and you wake up You decide, I always pick 6.02 for some reason. You decide to wake up at 6.02 without an alarm clock. Many people can do that.

[10:42]

And I found you can do it on watches that are wrong or you can do it on the real time and your watches, you know, etc. It's amazing. I don't know how it works. Well, some kind of intention is present during the night. Irgendeine Art von Absicht ist gegenwärtig die ganze Nacht hindurch. You have an intention to wake up at that time. Du hast eine Absicht zu dieser Zeit aufzuwachen. Or an intention to keep the baby bottle balanced. Oder die Absicht, diese Babyflasche im Balance zu halten. My wife wasn't a bit impressed that I did it. Und meine Frau war nicht ein bisschen beeindruckt, dass ich das getan habe. Oh, oh, oh. A friend of mine, Wendell Berry, came home after he won, I don't know what, the National Book Award and some couple other things all in the same week.

[11:53]

And he came home and He's been away and he came home and his wife's name is Tanya and said, Tanya, do you know all this happened? And she said, don't think that's going to make a damn bit of difference around here. So what is it about mind that, while you're sleeping and obviously not conscious in any ordinary sense, You can be aware of what time it is. What kind of mind is that? We can say one thing about it.

[12:54]

If mind is like different minds or like different liquids, And so we can say have different viscosities. Intentions will float in our awareness or, well, intentions will float in the mind of sleeping. along with dreams and other things, but comparative thinking won't flow. So as I say, when you wake up, your dreams sink out of sight. If you know the physical feel of dreaming mind, you can... Bring back the mind, and then the dream floats to the surface.

[14:05]

You don't have to remember the dream. You remember the mind of the dreams. And your dreams float to the surface again. Okay, so now dreaming mind is different than zazen mind and so forth. But I'm trying to speak of two kinds of knowing right now, two main kinds of knowing. One I'm calling consciousness. And the SCI in consciousness is the root of scissors, two to cut, to separate. In English scissors, yeah. So consciousness cuts things into parts. But awareness is aware or watchful. So it's more awareness that knows elucidated. which is the lucidness of dreaming sometimes.

[15:25]

So we can say about awareness, if I try to create some kind of experiential definition. Awareness is what wakes you up at 6.02. Awareness is what is present while you're sleeping. And awareness is what we become conscious of through practice. I have no other way. I mean, my vocabulary in English is too limited. We become conscious of or knowing of awareness, reflective of awareness, but that conscious of awareness is not consciousness.

[16:41]

So that's experience. In your experience, there's a difference, but I don't have the language for it. So I'm stretching at least these two words, awareness and consciousness. And my other usual example for awareness. As you're walking along and your hands are full of say, Christmas shopping presents or something like that, birthday presents. Kids' birthday party. And some of them are breakable. And you slip on the ice of the street in front of the department store. And you somehow fall and catch yourself and don't break anything.

[17:44]

Consciousness is too slow for that. That's awareness that does that. you don't break anything you don't hurt yourself and yet you know maybe skin your elbow or something but basically you're okay so awareness is very fast you can't Think, well, I'd better balance. No, it just happens. And part of Zen practice is to learn to function, to discover how to function through awareness and not consciousness. Okay, so that's enough for today. Very good. Thank you very much.

[18:45]

Das ist genug für heute. I always like a little appreciation. Ich mag etwas Wertschätzung immer gerne. I'm free of it, though. Aber ich bin auch frei davon. Will anybody else want to offer something? Let's sit for a moment. Lasst uns einen Moment sitzen. Obwohl der Mind im Körper verwurzelt ist.

[19:53]

The mind is experienced also through the body. Und der Mind auch durch den Körper erfahren wird. The boundaries of the body are not the boundaries, only boundaries of the mind. Sind die Grenzen des Körpers nicht die Grenzen, die einzigen Grenzen des Minds? Hypnot. Hypnot.

[20:54]

usually the first evening of a seminar, I try to speak about at least some aspects of the seminar as we'll hopefully develop it tomorrow and Sunday. But tonight I thought I would just try to give you a definition in Zen practice of the, yeah, one understanding of the word concentration. Yeah. And... One way to understand or enter into practice that, yeah, hopefully will... be some basis for our discussion tomorrow and the next day.

[23:25]

And we spoke about today, because we had a kind of what I call a prologue day today, And we spoke about the distinction I find it necessary to make and often speak about between consciousness and awareness. But now I'd like to add to consciousness and awareness Well, let's say the word presence. You can hear me okay back there? And this... This is the real voice. Um... Yeah, and I don't say that.

[24:46]

I say I add a word, presence. Yeah, as an experiment for each of us to notice how we know things. Now, Yuan Wu, I mentioned him again earlier. Und Yuan Wu, den ich auch vorher schon erwähnt habe, Er sagt, wenn du einmal das Wesentliche der Belehrung verstanden hast, Once you've got the gist of the teaching, Wenn du einmal das Wesentliche der Belehrung verstanden hast, Concentrate uninterruptedly. And he emphasizes that by saying uninterruptedly without any breaks.

[25:49]

And the embryo of sagehood will mature and develop. Or you can say, the womb of the sage will mature and develop. Oder man könnte auch sagen, die Gebärmutter des Weisen wird reifen und sich entwickeln. Now, what does a statement like that mean? Und was bedeutet eine Aussage wie diese? What would it mean to somebody who has little experience of meditation or Zen Buddhism? Was kann es für jemanden bedeuten, der wenig Erfahrung von Meditation und von Zen Buddhismus hat?

[26:52]

Now, why should we give a statement like that any credibility at all? Yeah. From a thousand years ago. Well, Yuan Wu, as I said today, was one of the handful, really, of creators of what is Zen Buddhism. He was the compiler and really the author of the Hekigan Roku. The Blue Cliff Records. which is the most famous collection of a hundred koans in the Zen tradition.

[27:57]

So if we're going to think that perhaps Zen Buddhism makes any sense, let's give it a chance. Then something that Yuan Wu said, probably we should, you know, take seriously or look at carefully. He also said, realize right where you stand. create a mind with no before and after and no here nor there can we imagine a mind without before and after or here and there?

[29:15]

So he's certainly talking about a mind which isn't our usual consciousness, which is nothing but here and there and before and after. And how do we create such a mind? And how does the mind... I mean, each of us is or... I can't say you have a mind. You are a mind. And certainly, if mind is capable of neither before or after, nor here nor there, This is also your own capacity. So I think we need to imagine this as a possibility.

[30:19]

So again he said, concentrate uninterruptedly. What possible concentration could be uninterrupted? And what possible concentration could you imagine is the womb of the sage? And what kind of world do we live in if we imagine the world is the womb of the sage? Well, if Buddhas appear in this world, They appear from somewhere.

[31:36]

I mean, not all babies are Buddhas, though they come close. But... Buddhas do appear. Or the possibility of realization is here. So what kind of here is this? that a Buddha might appear in? What kind of here is here among us? Yeah, I mean, Yuan Wu is asking us to ask ourselves this kind of question. Okay. I ask you to imagine the stillness of a tree.

[32:45]

The stillness of a tree when it is both still or moving. Let's just imagine ourselves standing By a tree. And the tree often is moving according to the breeze, the winds. And aspen trees, where I live in Colorado, they don't seem to need a wind. The leaves just kind of quake, shiver. But when you look at the leaf, it's always moving from stillness and returning to stillness. And even if the tree

[33:47]

seems to be completely still, or is completely still, as far as you can tell. The possibility of movement is right there, always. So in the stillness there's a feeling of movement. And in the movement you can feel the stillness the tree returns to. You know, now another maybe easier example to feel Imagine the wave of an ocean. The shape of the wave is the stillness of the ocean. If you look at it, it's trying to return to stillness.

[35:07]

That's what makes the shape of the wave. I'm not talking about silence. It's not the silence. It's the stillness. The wave is trying to return to stillness. And if it didn't, it would fly off somewhere into a cloud. And it does, of course, to some extent. But if you look at the form of the wave, the form of the wave is its desire to return to stillness.

[36:17]

So we can say the form of the wave is stillness. This is a parallel statement and nearly equivalent statement to saying form is emptiness and emptiness is form. But in a realm or in terms of our experience, that's not philosophy, you can feel it in the wave. And we can feel our own mind returning to stillness. Particularly, it's almost like consciousness is a rather shallow lake.

[37:26]

And the water doesn't really have a deep stillness. Deep lakes do, but shallow lakes don't. So consciousness is always sort of jiggly. But mind itself, even through consciousness, wants to return to stillness. Okay. So we could take this word concentration of Yuan Wu's to mean to feel the stillness of each occasion. In the activity of each occasion, you also feel the stillness.

[38:32]

In the activity of a person, you know, person, living person, breathing, talking, whatever, thinking. The stillness is also there. Ja, diese Stille ist auch da. And if the agitated person, if a person who's agitated can feel you feel their stillness, they'll be quite relieved. Und wenn eine Person, die aufgeregt ist, spüren kann, wie du ihre Stille spürst, das kann eine große Erleichterung sein.

[39:35]

But to know that, you'd have to feel the stillness in yourself first. So if we take this word concentration of Yuan Wu's, To mean to feel the stillness in the middle of activity or whatever. Then to concentrate continuously means you'd have to feel your own stillness continuously. As if the ocean felt its waves, but also felt its deep, calm, still depths. Yeah. Now, conscious, we could say that the shape of the wave, the activity of the wave, is something like in Buddhism we think of or understand consciousness.

[40:55]

Responding to circumstances, and so forth. Mm-hmm. But if we only know consciousness, we really only know the activity of the wave. So practice is asking you to discover this stillness in yourself. Or more specifically, the mind which can be still. And so in meditation practice, in zazen practice, one of the things we're trying to do is discover our own stillness.

[42:00]

ist eines, was wir versuchen zu tun, unsere eigene Stille zu entdecken. Or discover our own ease. Oder unsere eigene Entspanntheit zu entdecken. Or discover, perhaps we could say, our own power of being alive. Oder auch unsere eigene Kraft, lebendig zu sein, zu entdecken. And sometimes you, as I say, find your seat. Und manchmal, wie ich sage, findest du deinen Sitz. You find your seat so that You just don't feel distracted. You feel so completely at ease. You may feel, this is just being alive. This is really what it is to be alive. You don't feel conditioned or ambivalent.

[43:09]

It's just a power of being alive or the power of aliveness. So you don't look to cosmologies or mythologies or theories about the world. This feeling at ease is... is at the center of your being alive. And it feels like the measure of what it is to be alive. So it's a kind of, we could say, source of order. In other words, where do we find order in this world?

[44:17]

What is this world? When you have this experience of finding your seat, and strangely, when you really find your seat, the seat disappears. You feel some aliveness that can't even say has boundaries. And this sense of ease or here-ness or now-ness can also be found in your daily activity. And as we spoke earlier today, again, it's also discovering that point where you feel nourished by what you do.

[45:27]

So we can call this concentration of Yuan Wu to feel the stillness, the potentiality of stillness. I don't mean that you have to be absolutely still in some kind of, that's an idea. I mean that you're moving in the direction of stillness, just like the wave. You're not moving in the direction of activity. Or when you move in the direction of activity, you still feel the stillness. Still feel the stillness. And to feel the direction towards stillness. It has the same dynamic in your life as to be absolutely still or something close to that. Again, we're not talking about entities. We're talking about relationships.

[47:05]

We're talking about a relationship of moving toward stillness. Which allows you to begin to act or sense your own stillness. And this is a kind of presence. Not just awareness or consciousness. I'm calling it a kind of presence. And you feel that presence in the world. And I think she's 27 months old. So we're walking along and she was feeling very relaxed. So normally she always wants to walk, but she wanted to be pushed in the pram.

[48:08]

And she only wanted to be pushed by her mother. I'd say, what difference does it make? I can push just as well as Mama. No. But she wanted me there walking with him but didn't want me to push. Maybe someday the father will be needed to push. I hope so. But anyway, we're walking along here coming down the wall And said, and a woman came walking towards us.

[49:09]

And she said, in German, much better than, you know, in German, two and a half, you know. Anyway, in German she said. Yeah. Mm-hmm. that one is walking, that one walking. And the woman, you know, but anyway, she said, that one walking. And then she pointed to the wall and said, that one not walking. She likes facts. And then we went around one of these little corners, shapes. And right after she said, that one not walking. Then she said, walking around.

[50:15]

We were walking around the wall, but it was actually sort of the wall was walking around. No, whatever she meant, I don't know exactly, but it was great. But it made me think of Dogen. He says, don't forget, the blue mountains are always walking. Er sagte, vergiss nicht, die blauen Berge gehen immer zu. Here's another one of these guys you can trust, Dogen. Und hier ist wieder so ein Bursche, dem ihr vertrauen könnt, Dogen. What does he mean, the blue mountains are always walking? Was meint er damit, die blauen Berge, die gehen immer zu? Of course he means the blue mountains always. such a Buddhist teacher would always mean the blue mountains as we are seeing them in our mind.

[51:20]

So if the blue mountains are always something out there, but also for us in our experience, within our sensorium and within our mind, then the blue mountains are a kind of activity. Particularly when you have the mind where you find each thing moment by moment unique or singular. And in not a habituated environment. Yeah, not habituated, but singular environment. phenomena, environment.

[52:34]

So, you know, you still have your habits and the world is predictable and so forth. But within that, simultaneously, you feel the uniqueness and the singularity of each moment. I can't resist telling another story about my middle daughter, who's now 24. Sorry. She was two and a half to three or something. because she was still sitting in a baby seat beside me as driving. And her head was swinging around, nearly hitting the dashboard, because she was asleep, you know. So I said, Elizabeth, watch your head.

[53:53]

She said, you watch it, I can't see it. So out of the mouths of babes, we say, In English you have an expression, out of the mouths of babes, out of the mouths of babies comes. So I think maybe Sophia did mean something when she said, the wall doesn't walk, but it walks around. It's a non-thinking kind of direct perception.

[54:59]

And it picked up my own feeling because as I was walking back, I was feeling this stillness in everything. The stillness which is also a bridge. A bridge to phenomena. Yeah, I can say a bridge because what kind of world are we in? Why is it an embryo or womb? You know, we have... The topic of the seminar is studying the self and studying the world. Das Thema dieses Seminars ist das Selbststudieren, die Welt studieren. And you said earlier, what is the world? Und du hast vorher gefragt, was ist die Welt?

[56:06]

What is the world? Was ist die Welt? We don't have much of a word for it, we just got that. We all know sort of what we mean by the world. Wir haben ein Wort dafür, wir wissen ungefähr, was wir damit meinen. But the world or we say cosmos or universe. But universe is one verse. There's some multiverse maybe. I don't think we can grasp it with one word like universe. Ich glaube, wir können es nicht ergreifen mit einem Wort wie Universum. So the biggest word that Buddhism gives to this all-at-onceness is Tathagata Garba.

[57:07]

And Tathagata means is the biggest name for a Buddha. And it means the activity of coming and going. But coming and going as something we can realize. So the tagata is one that comes and goes, appears and disappears. As the world at each moment appears and disappears. And garba means both womb and embryo. So this is the womb, embryo, coming and going. Now that's a word you can practice with.

[58:18]

Or you can feel the coming and going. Your own attentiveness, your own mind, your own activity, waking, sleeping. And you can feel, yeah, perhaps in this there's a kind of fertility. So the whole situation is a kind of fertility. Obviously, everything appears from somewhere. So in a way, each situation is a kind of womb, a fertile situation. And each particular is a kind of embryo. Or when you look at it one way, it's an embryo.

[59:25]

When you look at it another way, it's the context. It's emptiness in form. So womb embryo is another way of saying form and emptiness. Okay. So that kind of feeling is in this statement of Yuan Wu's. Practice continuously. Concentrate continuously without breaks so that the womb embryo matures and develops. The womb embryo of sagehood or enlightenment. Or our true nature.

[60:34]

Now, how can you... Okay, so... How can you feel this... How can each of us get access to this stillness? Because if I did follow or... tried to make my intention Yuan Wu's suggestion here, part of my looking at you, for instance, would be to, as I look at you, to feel my own stillness And to feel your stillness at the same time. Yeah, how do I do that? I have some sense that there is this stillness in both of us.

[61:40]

Yeah, but I of course don't want that to shut you down in any way. Oh God, I hate that guy. I always feel still around him. And I wanted to dance. Yeah, but some of the best dancers I've seen are always moving out of stillness. And like the wave returning to stillness. So if I say, look at Volker and if I feel your stillness, you're not Volker. You have no name. You're a presence, a particular presence, but often unnamed. Then... Well, I think the easiest way is to feel it in your breath.

[62:55]

So in my breathing, I feel the pauses of the end of the breath and the top of the breath. Or when I exhale, I feel to just disappear, go over the edge. A bit like the wave. And then the inhale comes back. So you can have the habit, begin the habit in your own breathing. First doing it rather intentionally or mechanically. As you're, say, walking around. To disappear on each exhale. As if you were willing to die. And then surprise, inhale comes back.

[64:09]

One day it won't come back. Don't be nervous. You're getting used to it with this practice. It'll help you at that moment. So get in the habit of disappearing on the exhale. Exhale. And the world reappears in the inhale. So in this way, in your breath, you can begin to feel this stillness. Or you feel this stillness in your horror. Yeah, it's not in your head, not in this upper part of your body. You know, when you feel your feet are down there. How'd your feet get down there? Your feet are down there if you locate yourself up here. But your feet, you're everywhere. So you're moving that sense of location or...

[65:32]

physical feel of the world below your navel. And you can get a feel of that by breathing down into that point when you exhale. And letting that point come up your backbone. That kind of habit also can bring you into your own feeling of stillness or moving in the direction of stillness. Yeah. Now, if I feel that, you know, I can also feel that in this unnamed Volker even if he doesn't feel it gets there but if I feel it he may be more likely to feel it

[66:41]

Even if I don't say anything. Point it out. And now I called it a bridge as well. Because it is connectedness. You feel intimate with the world. Each person or each object. Du fühlst dich vertraut mit der Welt, mit jedem Objekt, mit jeder Person. You feel something similar in each object or each person. Du fühlst etwas Ähnliches in jedem Objekt, mit jeder Person. This coming and going or this stillness in yourself and in each thing. Dieses Kommen und Gehen, diese Stille in jeder Person und in jedem Ding. The world feels just as it is. Everything feels like it is as it is and it's in its place.

[67:57]

Yeah. So it's a kind of, this concentration is a kind of bridge in which the phenomenal world becomes your or your extended body. Now I could also say instead of stillness or bridge maybe, I could say the fullness of mind. Because in this sense, feeling that everything happens within one's own mind and sensorium, the sensory system, you feel the fullness of mind, which is open, accepting of each situation.

[69:11]

So we could call this concentration the fullness of mind, but more the phenomenal and bodily fullness of mind. Good. I mean, we don't have words for this territory, but this can be our experience. It feels like one, momentarily one, biological phenomenal unit.

[70:19]

This relationship feels momentarily like one unit, biologically phenomenally Okay, so we can say this concentration is simply the fullness of mind. And the fullness of mind is also the womb of sagehood. Because the blue mountains are always teaching us. In other words, there's this so-called world is teaching immeasurable, fully potential, and with this uninterrupted fullness of mind, all our interactions begin to teach us.

[71:51]

To show us how things actually exist. And how we actually exist. And we can call that the womb of sagehood. Yeah, I think that's enough. So that's my effort to open up the word concentration, the sense of uninterrupted concentration, through which we can realize how we actually exist. So nice to sit here with you.

[73:05]

I wish I had something else to say. Or if I start on something else, we'll be here till 10 o'clock. So thank you very much. And thank you for translating. On this beautiful early summer evening, this still light evening, what shall we talk about? You came back to hear someone else talk?

[74:20]

Seid ihr zurückgekommen, um jemanden anderen sprechen zu hören? Yes. Wer trainiert wen im Zen? Ist da ein Ich, das trainiert wird, oder ein Ich, das den Meinen trainiert? Who is training whom in Zen? Is there an I that is trained? Is there an I which trains the mind or is the mind training the I? The mind is training the I. But the I discovers some opportunities and suggests them to the mind. But tomorrow, you know, it's a little hard to go into.

[75:26]

This is such a deeply ingrained feeling in our culture. Is that there's a who does things. Like we see it earlier in the afternoon, we said, it rains. We always presume a doer. And we can say, rain rains. You don't have to have a doer. But we do have an experience of an observing mind. And the mind is capable of observing itself. And the capacity for the mind to observe itself also gets conflated with our sense of self.

[76:44]

Okay. Now, if you do tests on, you know, wire somebody up so you can measure their responses, The body, the neurons are in some sort of, you know, millionths of a second. But consciousness is in tens or hundreds or thousands of seconds. And so when they measure the arm is going to move.

[77:51]

The arm moves before there's a conscious recognition that you're going to move the arm. So who's moving the arm? It's occurring in a faster time than consciousness. So that's... I'm just causing a problem. No doer. What? No doer. There is nobody doing. I won't say that either. Ha, ha, ha. Because certainly I decide to practice. Or I decide to sit. But is the request to sit deeper than the I asking the request? And is it the autobiographical self which is asking?

[79:11]

Or is it some sort of wider self that covers everything, or some interactive self with phenomena? We have to study what we mean by self. And the observer. But since that's been a fundamental question in Western philosophy for years, centuries, forever. We're not going to answer it tonight. Tomorrow we can try. It makes me think of somebody asks my teacher, Suzuki Roshi. Now, this is not the answer I'm giving you. But I just remembered this. Someone said to Suzuki Roshi, if a tree falls in a forest and there's no one there to hear it,

[80:13]

Does it make a sound? And Suzuki Roshi said, it doesn't matter. So much for that. So something else. Yes. I have a question to mind. Is it both soul and mind together? I don't know. I mean, we have these words, soul, spirit, psyche, the pronoun I. The experience of subjectivity. Self. What else? Psyche. It's very hard to separate them out and define them.

[81:49]

And that's some of what we're trying to do in this seminar this weekend. If you look them up in the dictionary, they're defined in terms of each other often. Soul means spirit and spirit means soul and so forth. And I think that we have trouble defining these words because they're part of a whole cultural view we don't really have anymore. But if we said, you know, this building has soul, we would know that's a different statement in saying this building has some spirit. So we do have in our own experience a sense of how we use these words.

[83:00]

But the Buddhist sense of mind, which you don't really have a translation for that in German, or the English word we can use, mind, is quite convenient. Yeah, but in general, mind doesn't mean soul. What we mean by soul. But it can certainly be, soul would be an aspect of mind in Buddhism. But if you understand soul as that which continues after death, then that wouldn't be a Buddhist idea.

[84:03]

Because everything changes. There's nothing permanent like that. But we do have an experience we can call an experience of soul. And what does continue after death, in Buddhist terms, would certainly be something that changes. If there is something that survives after bodily death. But, yeah, that's enough to say. Something else. We talked today about causal differences, and the reality of each is different.

[85:23]

So looking at the wave, would it be very different, because this kind of feeling of stillness in the right part of the brain at the very beginning, when you talked about today, shouldn't it be nearly the same, and the difference is coming afterwards? In German, please. You talked about the differences in cultures and the influence of self-realization on perception. But to see the state of the waves is something I have never felt. In other words, are you asking, although there's cultural differences and cultural differences do shape how we view the world, And that's certainly true.

[86:39]

Is something like the wave returning to stillness outside culture and true for everyone? Outside cultural differences and then true for everyone. Yeah, I understand. Well, that's an extremely important question. Because that comes down to, do we find out who we are? Are we somehow Germans or Americans or French? In some sort of way that really makes us different.

[87:55]

And much of history of the last few hundred years has been to try to say that if you're a German, you're different than French. There's different mythology, different wars, different experiences that make us different. And the Alsatians feel more French than German. And the building of nations in the last couple centuries has been to try to make people believe if you're English, you're not French. But now culture is escaping those definitions. Yeah. So if there is some nature, true nature... That's true for all of us, no matter what our ethnic or national identity.

[89:25]

Then it would be very important to find that. And that's actually the whole of Buddhism is to notice that. Now, a non-Buddhist might not notice or emphasize the importance of the wave returning to stillness. Maybe they'd emphasize the power of the wave to do something out of it. To generate electricity. Yeah. Maybe the Buddhists wouldn't generate electricity, they'd just make the water calm and still. To heck with electricity. So there can still be some difference even in something that there is no difference.

[90:27]

But certainly the whole, all these terms of original mind, true nature, are all an attempt in Buddhism to find some thing that joins all of us. Okay. So maybe that's enough for this evening. We're not careful. We'll be discussing politics. And I'll tell you how disappointed I am with the United States at this time. The worst it's ever been. So it's a good time to stop. Thank you very much.

[91:25]

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