Guten Morgen, Ira. How do you say it in Swedish? Guten Morgen. Guten Morgen. Guten Morgen. That's, you know, in Boston or New England, they still speak a kind of Elizabethan English, because that's when people came, and more so than England does. But when you go out jogging in the morning in Boston, people go by and say, good morning, good morning. It's much like German or Swedish. Good morning. Good morning. Swedish is moron. Moron. I always feel a little bit like that when I go jogging in the morning. A little bit like a moron. Moron. Really? Not really. Okay. Is there anything you'd like to... mention or what you've thought about what we did yesterday, etc.

[01:02]

A lot of thinking and a lot of questions. You were talking about distinctions amongst other things yesterday. Then you mentioned the concepts of consciousness, awareness and attention. We have a few words for that in Swedish. And English too. There are literally dozens of words in Sanskrit. that show you distinctions. Because for Swedish, for instance, there would be, you could use two words to describe those three concepts, and that's one too little. Yeah. If you want to make distinctions. Yeah. And so I noticed for myself in translating, I've got it a bit mixed up in the distinction between those three. Yeah. Okay. Because I can see that there's a difference between being conscious and aware and paying attention.

[02:15]

Yeah. Okay. That's good. Yeah. So that's where I am right now. Okay. We can spend the next week on that. What else? The afternoon yesterday... what you spoke about on one level, it was very interesting, caught my attention. Good. And on some other level, it made me very, very relaxed. I felt very eased in my whole sort of sensational mind. And I felt quite moved, and I'm very grateful for that. So thank you very much. You're welcome. You haven't said much, except on the boat we were talking. It's OK for me to say otherwise.

[03:17]

OK. I don't have anything else now. OK. I'd just like to hear your voice as part of me. OK. Anyone else want to say something? Yeah. No, I don't have a question already, I'm afraid. OK. Oh. Yeah. You remembered that, though. Yeah. Okay. Well, let me, unless somebody else wants to add something, or you want to add something, let me speak to what you brought up and also... Yeah. I've taken as a kind of... exercise here or point to continuity is that you don't know anything and it's clearly not true but you know I'm trying to experiment with how to talk about wisdom first and practice second now wisdom I don't mean I don't know what wisdom you know philosophy etc but

[04:36]

wisdom in Zen means to know how things actually exist and to have the teachings which enact how things actually exist. So I'm trying to start with the kinds of the world views that arise from meditation and then usually are taught after meditation is developed. So I'm trying to start backwards, start with wisdom in a Buddhist sense. See if I can speak about it in a way that allows you to make use of it And if, because if you can make use of it, then that's another entry of this view of the world into the potpourri, potpourri, of, you know, this new global culture which is developing.

[05:54]

Now, let me just give you a little tiny example. If I thought of this morning at breakfast, speaking about throwing things away or waste things or something. I don't remember what was said at breakfast. But anyway, I was walking back to the warehouse where I was working as a book, and the first, paperbacks were just starting. When I was a kid, there were no paperbacks, and then paperbacks started. I think Conrad's Secret Agent, the first anchor of paperback. Published by Random House. But by the time I was out of college, there was a distributor in California called Paperback. Paperback. Paper Editions or something. I happened to be the warehouse manager there.

[06:57]

So we only sold paperback. No hard facts. Anyways, I was walking back to work once and... And I've never smoked like Clinton. I've never inhaled. But anyway, I did smoke in the sense that I just kind of played with a cigarette or blew it up my nose because you were supposed to smoke in those days. But I've never inhaled. I've inhaled marijuana a few times, but not cigarettes. Anyway, so I was walking back and I had a cigarette and I had the last cigarette and I threw the package down on the ground. And there was a railroad track. There was a certain poetry to it because there was a railroad track that went nowhere. It came up to the back of the warehouse and stopped because at one time the warehouse had railroad access.

[08:02]

It didn't at this time. So there was a kind of like the world stopped right there. So I threw this down and I took a step or two and I thought no one will clean that up. Well, this is fairly obvious. My mother always told us not to throw things out of the car window, because then litters, don't litter. No, don't litter, this is pretty obvious. But when I threw it down, I thought, why did I throw it down? And I thought, because I think there's an outside. In the warehouse, I wouldn't throw it down because I'd have to sweep it up. So I threw it down because I thought somehow, oh, I know what made me think. It was like leaving your engines on. You leave your engines on while they're there because you think God, nature, it's going to take care of things.

[09:03]

If you throw them down, they just disappear somehow. So I recognized that I believed there was an outside that was somehow different from the inside. So I went back and picked up the package of cigarettes. The crumpled up cigarette package. And it was a, I'm sorry to say, don't litter becomes an enlightenment experience. It was definitely an enlightenment experience. Let's say a small enlightenment. But, and I've never since had made a distinction between outside and inside. So this is, what's the difference? Well, the difference has to be that I'd been practicing for a year or so. So the experience of Don't Litter affected me in a different way. It actually changed my worldview. So I couldn't leave my car engine on. It's illegal, in Germany at least, but not in America, most places anyway.

[10:09]

So mostly what I've been talking about, you don't worry about when you're practicing, when you first start to practice. In fact, you're discouraged from studying Buddhism for the first couple years or so of practice. Because you don't want to try to make the shoe fit. Do you have that expression? So, because what happens when you just sit, because somehow it feels good, or your friend does it, or some reason. is in fact you're weaving mind and body together. I mean, we take as a commonplace now that mind and body are somehow are related or connected or the same thing. New age, I call it sometimes, thinking. And it's taken for granted, but when I was young, mind and body were different, the Cartesian dualism and so forth, you know, mind and body were people, somebody like the guy who invented the hydrogen bomb,

[11:27]

not Oppenheimer, wasn't the other guy, whatever, anyway, he said he would be happy to have a brain in a Petri dish because his body was just something to carry his brain around. His body got bigger and bigger too. Herman Kahn. And so people thought that way in those days. But mind and body can experience differently. And we can experience it differently. So they're two territories of experience. Let's not call them something really different, body and mind, because there's actually brain-like centers in different parts of the body that they've discovered. But they're two different ways we can experience things, two territories of experience that can have a relationship. Zen practice is a particular way to weave mind and body together.

[12:34]

I would assume martial art is a somewhat different way to weave mind and body together. And I suspect there's a difference between karate and tai chi and so forth. So what happens when you start to sit is a process of weaving mind and body together, and that's part of bringing attention to the breath. Because the breath becomes the kind of loom on which mind and body are woven together in a certain way. And you begin to have a bodily mind, if that makes sense as a term. We can say body-mind, but bodily mind is a physical component to the to the mind. And again, like speaking, there's a physical component to speaking. And that physical component is the way motion and memory and associations enter the speech.

[13:39]

Like a singer, when they sing with their body, you can feel the meaning of their words. And a company like Frank Sinatra, for example, was quite good at it, used to try to, I read somewhere, swim lengths of pools underwater to develop his breath so that he could bring his breath in that sense into his singing. You also develop a capacity to let, as I started out, something like non-dreaming deep sleep arise in your, it's almost like it surfaces into your body and mind. And, you know, after you've been sitting a long time,

[14:45]

The mind of sitting, I call it the mind of sitting, but I have to have some term, is integrated into your consciousness, integrated into your body. But still, if you don't sit for a few days, the sense of some wider mind surfacing in your life sort of sinks. If I start sitting again, if I'm traveling and I don't sit much, it kind of sinks. As soon as I sit, it starts surfacing again. And surfacing is during the day and the week, not just when you're sitting. So a practitioner has this... before they are involved with wisdom teachings, has this combination of weaving mind and body together, generating a kind of bodily mind, and layers of mind that aren't accessible to consciousness, or the job of consciousness is to exclude

[15:55]

Because consciousness includes what doesn't fit into it. It starts being part of it. I mean, consciousness becomes more porous and inclusive. In addition, you just have a certain amount of flight time. Flight time? Like a pilot, how many hours do you have to be in the air to get your license, right? Well, it's sort of like if you have a... A thousand hours of zazen, or something like that. Well, you're just so familiar with this mind. It becomes your fundamental mind. It's not something you have to work at. Yeah. Okay. Now, yesterday we had this wonderful trip. That was great. Thanks for organizing this.

[16:59]

Could you organize my life for me? If you've done such a good job for these three days, I might look at what it might be like for the rest of you. Anyway... There's this island you could spend a third of your year. Yeah. Oh, there is. Okay. For me, it's great because it's so much like my childhood summers. As I said, most of you are born in Maine and went back every summer for many years and lived on the beach. In America, we had three months vacation. It was a big part of the year from school. Do you have that in Sweden too? In Germany, they have six weeks in much of Germany. The world as presented to us through sensorial consciousness

[18:24]

is so convincing, these rocks, particularly here. I mean, it looks like Sweden's not gonna be moved easily, you know, with or without an army. I mean, these rocks down in the ocean, you know. I mean, this is a sturdy country, at least at the shoreline, I don't know. And so it's hard to remind yourself I have a feeling for the fundamental truth that this is all impermanent, etc. And the word now, even, I try to avoid the word now because it has a passive container quality in English. So I rarely, I don't think in terms of now, I don't say now. If I do, I say the concept now. Because it's a concept. We talked about this enough yesterday that you see that the now is actually something we generate.

[19:29]

There's no duration to the now. The duration to the present we create. How do you remind yourself of that? Because the fundamental truth is to remind yourself of that or to get to know that. How are you going to get yourself to do that? When sensorial... When the sensorial present, the sensorial consciousness, the sensorial present that consciousness presents to us, this is how we form ourselves, how we enact ourselves. And a little aside, that concerns me is the expansion of public space through computer games.

[20:38]

Because computer games are basically public space. It depends on how you define public. You know, in a place like Japan, they don't have any sense of public space. It's all initiated space. It's all space that you, you don't have a traditional culture. You have a, to enter a space, it's always other people's space or your own space. And to enter other people's space, there's a right, R-I-T-E space. not an R-I-G-H-T. And all space is subjective. There's no non-subjective space in a country like Japan. Public spaces, we take it for granted. is the creation, I think, of the British Empire and tourism and so forth.

[21:42]

I watched in Bali when I was there once. They don't know how to create public space and they're trying to make hotels because it's a tourist business, the biggest business, but they don't, they're just trying to figure out how you create public space where anybody feels free to enter, right? And Japan is quite, you know, I don't know. I mean, I haven't been in Japan much in recent years, but Japan is real. There's much of Japan. You just go into certain restaurants and they clearly don't want you. You're not part of the local community. It's like Stammtisch in Germany. the table where only the locals sit. The whole restaurant's like that. A stamtisch is you enter by a right. You don't enter it by a R-I-G-H-T, right? Well, the whole culture is a stamtisch in Japan. Do you have the same idea in restaurants here? Yeah. Yeah. I think Sweden has very much public space. With the Alva Masla.

[22:46]

We have this thing called Every Man's Rights. R-I-G-H-T. That everybody's allowed to go into the forest and pick berries. There are hardly any private roads. If somebody has a house next to the lake, you're allowed to walk along the shoreline anyway. I've read about that. So it's very much crop expensive, I think. Yeah, I've read that you can go, as long as you're not hurting the crops of a farmer, you can go have a picnic on his field. You can even tent there for one night. Really? That's not true in most of the world. You can park your tent... Anywhere, as long as it's not... As long as the people living in the house can't see you, you're not on their land. But if you're outside the fence or something, you can park the tent wherever, as long as you don't ruin crop or ruin the forest. I see. For one night. Or eat a cow. Yeah, for one night and then you have this.

[23:48]

So it's very much popular. But we have stammbord at Christmas. Is that true in Norway too? We don't know. It's not as much, but it's quite... I've read about it being the case in Sweden. Okay. But I'm defining public space as the space in which we form ourselves, the space of other people. How you decide on your career, job, how you want to, etc. And it's also... This is a little diversion from our topic, but... So we form ourselves in... These young people are forming themselves in computer games. And they actually, you know, if you take a monkey, get a monkey, and you put a rake in its hand, tool, stick, what's called peripersonal space, his brain starts, as soon as he uses the stick, his brain, the clumps of brain cells that represent his right hand, say, immediately indicate the hand out at the end of the stick.

[25:10]

There goes our warrior. I see antlers on your head, checking, taking care of all of us. You see how good his harakai was? He didn't even say anything. Left, he saw my eyes. I'd like to be a friend. Of course. I said, this is not all of us left. If you... If you hold the monkey's hand down and you show the monkey a hand on a computer screen, his hand will, if the hand is extended, his brain will light up as if the computer screen is his hand. And if you make the hand enlarge and get gigantic, he will... the brain area that represents that hand will light up as if the hand became three or four times the normal size.

[26:21]

And if a gigantic spider appears in the television monitor, the monkey's hand will jump. His hidden hand will jump. The point I'm making is that this peripersonal space and extra-personal space where we extend our body, we form our bodily reactions in it. It's obvious to me that these high school killings All these kids are gamers, computer gamers. And they get used to shooting and killing and extending their body and so forth. There's been a study about that. Yeah, I didn't know that. When the first one happened, they brought in this psychologist from West Point. And he said there's a wonderful book called High Tech, High Touch, where they describe it. And they studied it and they found out The psychologist went into one of these game parlors and played a video game next to a kid, a 12-year-old.

[27:22]

And he said there's a number of things that turned out. One of them was that the kids in high schools came out shooting. They began shooting immediately. without even looking to see if their target had fallen or not. Oh, really? Yeah. And began shooting, and they shot compulsively. Like in Columbine? You mean you're talking about the actual shooting? The actual shooting. Columbine, yeah. This is right near where we live, actually. And they shot indiscriminately, and they had a higher score of shooting than the FBI agents would have had in a similar situation. Really? They had more targets than they had. And he said one reason is because in the computer games they begin shooting immediately to get points. The second thing is that if people grow up with guns, they learn the first rule they learn is don't point guns at people. And all the FBI agents have learned that as kids. And these kids didn't learn that. The third one was that he said that he could see that they had no distancing between the reality on the screen and they depersonalized in relation to people as a result of that.

[28:24]

So that's exactly what happened. Well, these kids who get good at computer games are world champions and they can play all, you know. They obviously can extend peripersonal space, extra personal space, into tiny things, which, you know, I couldn't do. But they've extended their body. Their physical experience of their body can be extended to very tiny and very quick. Okay, so... So that was a little aside. It relates to what I want to talk about, but right now I can't think of how I'd like to put it. When you sit, we could say, you sit down, just to come back to this in some way, you sit down outside of your usual peripersonal or extra-personal space.

[29:41]

And when you fold your legs together, left and right become rather different. I mean, you don't know which is left and right. And we have a body sheath. We say a thought body. And you can see if you do what kids do sometimes is you put your hands together and you roll them up and then you say, move which finger. It's quite difficult to do. And it's difficult to do because you're seeing your body from outside. So you're mixed up with your body orientation. If you feel your body from inside, it's very easy to do. So when you sit down, we say you drop body and mind. You sit down, one of the experiences you begin to have is you sit down outside, left and right and up and down and so forth. That kind of orientation. So you begin to feel the world differently.

[30:46]

For instance, one thinks your legs... I don't know why I should bother with this actually, but I'm saying it so I'll continue. your legs begin to feel merged. So there's like one territory here. You can actually, as a process of sitting, move that feeling of a merged body up your torso. And then it kind of folds out. So you feel in a very full way connected. It's as if your body, as if this peripersonal space now is the totality of your body and what's around you. And you can tell when some people have a big space around them, some people have a smaller space around them. Generally, from what I've read and known quite a lot of politicians, like Jerry Brown, he's a close friend of mine, he's ran for president twice, so forth. People like that are politicians partly because they have a very big personal space.

[31:47]

They walk into a room and the whole room can feel they're in the room. And people with that kind of capacity are often led into politics, I think, or people choose them. He's an electable guy. He may be a nitwit like Bush, but he's electable. So when we practice, we begin to form ourselves in a different space than public space. So you begin to have a different sense of the space you're in or what the space you generate is because normally we're forming ourselves in our cultural societal space. So one of the things Zazen does is take away cultural space and the usual sense of the world of certain kinds of distinctions So if you do zazen regularly, you begin to reform yourself in a new kind of space.

[32:55]

Of which one example was, for me, no outside and no inside. I mean, you feel like the world was one big stomach, maybe. We're all in some kind of shared territory of which there's no outside. We think there's an outside to the universe. If you think there's an outside to the universe, then you can imagine a god. But in Buddhism, there's no outside to anything. So there's no place for something to be outside. So as soon as you feel it's all inside, that becomes your worldview. You're Then you ask questions like, well, it's all inside, and we have these distinctions between waking, dreaming, and non-dreaming. Do you sleep? How could they be merged? Or something like that. Or if it's all inside, when it's all inside, you become centered in a particular way.

[34:04]

I think of Wittgenstein saying, there's nothing in this scene right now, that tells me there's an observer. I mean, I'm the observer, but there's no information here that you're being observed. You understand what I mean? There's no information here. It's like a camera, you know. If there's a picture, there must be a camera, but there's no information here that tells me there's an observer. I have to remind myself I'm observing. That's a phenomenon very often. Only one person has a camera. They're never on the pictures, so there's no evidence that they're there. Okay, so I think the entry to this, to piercing the veil of the seemingly seamless present,

[35:09]

The consciousness presents us with a seemingly seamless... Seamless? Seams are where you sew something. So it seems to be seamless. But it's actually only... five or six pieces of the pie, and the pie is bigger because we have the slice that we hear, we have the part that we see, we have the part that we feel, but actually there's all kinds of things in between. For instance, right here in this room, there are, I don't know, dozens or hundreds of cell phone calls. There's probably television programs. We just don't have the sensory apparatus for it. But we think we see everything here, but in fact, there's all kinds of things happening here outside of our senses, just not in the territory of our senses. So when you start feeling not only this water of the mind, but actually it's in five or six distinct categories.

[36:18]

And there's all kinds of things in between those pieces of pie. So again, I think that the first thing I would recommend as a practice to, maybe we have to take a break soon, a practice is to remind yourself somehow that All perception is twofold, as I said yesterday. It points to the mind perceiving it, in the sense perceiving it, and it points to the object. Somehow you have to remind yourself of that. And so you have to just take some kind of phrase or word or something and get in the habit of reminding yourself

[37:25]

that you're seeing your own mind. You're only hearing that part of the bird you can hear. And the fact of it is, is that the more you meditate and practice mindfulness, the more, as soon as you hear the words, it opens up the experience. But if you're not meditating regularly, then you have to find some way to remind yourself until it becomes the habit of how you see things. I think this is probably the main entry into beginning to see or feel what in the two truths would be called the fundamental truth in relationship to the conventional truth. Okay. Since you've been sitting here a while, let's have a break. Is that okay?

[38:28]

Is it okay to have a break now? And then we'll continue. And what I'd like to do is try to define awareness better and consciousness better. Yes. I think we have... I go down to the reception and just ask if we have to check out from the rooms. Because another group is coming in. Another group is coming in. So you can stay, but I think we have to pack and then we move in the afternoon. Not terrible. Well, everything is changing. It's the fundamental truth. But I'm attached to some aspects of conventional things. So you may stay. Yes. Besides, we have a cup of coffee down there. Don't have to change this room.

[39:20]

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