Some self or psyche that's there waiting to be discovered. And some techniques discovered better than others. No, the technique of discovery is also the kind of self you discover. Nein, also die Technik der Entdeckung ist auch die Art von Selbst, die man entdeckt. It's just as if you remember the way you store your experience or remember the way you store your experience affects the experience you have. and how you retrieve that experience you're not only retrieving what's there you're shaping what's there as you retrieve it retrieve to bring back because the needs of the moment that make you retrieve the experience shape

[01:04]

the experience into what you need. So the self you discover through Zazen practice will be a different self than you discover through psychotherapy self. There's no self, one self, waiting there to be discovered. Now, the self and individuality in general is below the threshold of description in our society for the most part. And it's brought to the threshold of description by various techniques.

[02:18]

One is diary writing. And Catholic confession is one. where you begin to examine and study yourself. And what Freud and Jung did is they took old traditions of how you take care of yourself by yourself and brought in what are basically meditative techniques lying on a couch, free association and so forth, and brought in certain techniques and the use of a second person, so you didn't do it yourself.

[03:24]

So what's happening with Buddhism and Hinduism, but I think in this instance mostly Buddhism coming into the West, a technique of discovering the Self is being introduced into the West. Now this sounds very different from the way most people practice Buddhism as a non-self and no-self and so forth. But in comparing or talking about what Jung did, Freud did and so forth, I'm not saying that what Buddhism did was better or something like that. It's not a matter of better or worse, really. It's a matter of what kind of human being we are.

[04:38]

And we have a certain experience as Westerners which is different from the experience of people who grow up in non-theological yogic cultures. Okay. Can you imagine a culture without any idea of public. I think most of us take the idea of public and private as ordinary, normal distinctions. But, for example, Japan has no idea of public like we do. Back in the 50s and 60s, as I mentioned occasionally, this is an anecdote, they used to have signs up in the Tokyo airport, don't wear your underwear at the airport.

[05:57]

And in those days, you went up to a Japanese man or woman walking around in their underwear, and you said, you're wearing your underwear in the Tokyo airport. They might say, well, it's hot. Don't you ever wear your underwear on a hot day? You might say, well, yes, I do, but I usually do it at home. Inside the house. A Japanese person might look and say, what's the difference between inside the house and inside the airport?

[07:11]

If I wear my underwear at home, why can't I wear it at the airport? I mean, it just doesn't, it didn't occur to them that there's this distinction between public and private, where you dress up when you go out and you dress a different way. They have lots of distinctions in their culture, for sure, but one of them wasn't public and private as we know it. Now the sense of public as we know it was probably created by Jean-Jacques Rousseau more than anything else. he had this idea of me and you and you being different the individual and society and the unique individual opposed to society and so forth And you could compare St.

[08:25]

Augustine's confessions to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's confessions to see some real differences between how they conceive of the individual. And also monastic traditions have created a sense of public through discipline. Because the monastic traditions ran the churches and the schools. And the schools taught all the kids. And the military also formed traditions of discipline. and the real way for an army to control a population is not to use force and soldiers but to turn the population into soldiers to make the population think they have to discipline themselves and organize themselves and produce

[09:32]

I think if you look at Europe, the nation states that came together earlier are more influenced by monastic concepts of discipline and the nation states that came together later are more formed by military concepts of discipline. This all goes together to create an idea of the public which is watching you. The idea of a public that watches you forms who you are. Do other people have these thoughts? That's the public watching. Do other people have these experiences? That's the public watching. You don't have to have the public watch. So somehow in practice, if we're going to start having territory that really belongs to us, you have to get free of a sense of a public scrutinizing you.

[11:11]

And I could go into this in a lot of detail, but then I'd be talking as long as just I could go into all the details, but then I would speak as long as yesterday. So I won't do that. But if you can try to practice more within the sense or the territory of feelings, in this larger sense of feelings, you can get away from this sense of what people will think or are my thoughts crazy or so forth. And the realm of feeling is also closer to the realm of mystery and the unexplained.

[12:27]

I think that's enough for now. Anything more I bring up will take more time. Good afternoon. Well, yesterday I did that thing about the five skandhas on a piece of paper, which Dogen Zenji calls five-layered wisdom. Five layers of wisdom. He says bright vision or clear vision is wisdom.

[14:09]

And the five layers of wisdom, the five skandhas, produce clear vision. Now the reason I Again, the reason I did that on the wall was to see if I could find a way to give you permission to realize that how we exist is really unexplored territory. Or it's been quite explored, but it's still largely unexplored. And it's a little scary to realize, really, that it's unexplored. It takes quite a bit of courage.

[15:29]

Let's just imagine Freud's courage in stating there's something no one noticed before, the unconscious. No matter how much, however you want to study his motives and so forth, still took him courage to say, this is something no one else has noticed before. How many of us have that courage? And if you do have the courage, how are you going to get anybody to listen? Freud had a lot of skill in getting people to listen. And Freud's division, I can remember when I was first presented it, I think in high school, a gymnasium, I suppose.

[16:47]

And, uh, it, ego and superego, and I thought, can it really be this simple? And my first encounter with Freud is when I was quite young, maybe six or seven. My mother embarrassedly told me, Freud says all sons want to make love to their mother. And she said she didn't think it was probably true. Got me to thinking though. So also what I'm presenting is the power that simple distinctions have.

[18:26]

In other words, Freud may, once he noticed the unconscious and tried to think of it, divide the psyche, the sense of unconscious, into functions. And he came up with this three-part, this three-fold division, which is also a little bit like mom, dad and the kid. I'm not making fun of Freud, I'm just having a good time. So, yin and yang, yin and yang is a very simple distinction.

[19:30]

You can't really say how much yin and how much yang is in a carrot. How much yin and yang is in any of us? So the distinction, you can't prove anything on the distinction. Yet it's an extremely powerful distinction. and has changed the way a lot of people think in the last 20 years or 30 years in the West. Conscious, unconscious is a very powerful distinction. And I would say these distinctions that Freud made have changed our civilization. So I'm saying you should look at what distinctions you make in looking at yourself.

[20:50]

So I made the traditional five distinctions of the five skandhas yesterday. OK. Now, before I get into that any further, I'd like to say something about this mat. Now, watching the various ways the various of us have decided to roll up or fold up this mat, I decided to use as an example of the typical way of thinking in Buddhism. And the typical way of thinking is that you fold the future into the present. You typically anticipate the end and the beginning.

[21:52]

For example, when you... Traditional Zen way of putting your shoes, when you put your shoes at a door, you put them backwards, so when you leave, they're ready to go. So... In Japan, for instance, in the entryway you often see shoes all over the place, but one pair of shoes is turned backwards. Usually somebody with some Zen experience is in the house. And it's generally adopted in hotels and so forth. These little slippers are all put out backwards. So this is folded up so that when you want to open it, you just open it directly. So you wouldn't fold it up this way. And then when you're this way, you're stuck with the past.

[23:09]

So generally you put the two ends together and then you fold it in thirds. And then you can open it directly. Or you could fold it in thirds, which is a little bit harder. Anyway, I just thought, because that's just a characteristic style of Zen Buddhist way of doing simple things. And also what I'm trying to illustrate is how conceptions influence simple ways you do things. Because if you have the sense that the end, the future, should be folded into the beginning, you'd have done that without even knowing why you did it.

[24:32]

You just would have done it. And you can see the same pattern in Japanese and Chinese poetry and so forth. So this five rank, the five skandhas, are a different way of dividing up consciousness or the way you perceive yourself than we usually use. And unless you see this as a structure behind the talk, Buddhist talk, it's pretty hard to understand the term like appreciative discrimination.

[25:55]

Or Dogen's famous, think non-thinking. So think that which doesn't think is really hard for us to get a hold of unless you have the background of the five standards. Now let me go a little further in the sense of the differences certain concepts make. First somebody mentioned to me that it sounds like I don't like Christianity. And the Christianity I grew up with, which is a pretty simplified Christianity that is an excuse for a lot of opinions and racism and other things.

[27:17]

I had a lot of trouble with when I was young and probably don't like. But the Christianity of practicing Christians I respect. And the Christianity of my friend, say, Brother David Steindlrost, we have a good time together discussing Buddhism and Christianity. But Ulrike gives me a hard time about this too. Is that what you said? And so, you know, I have to think about it. And partly what I've been trying to do recently, you see, when I started out Buddhist practice, I thought, felt something like, well, I have to be a Westerner, and Sri Kriyayana emphasized I have to be a Westerner first to practice Buddhism.

[28:46]

So I actually studied what does it mean to be an American, what does it mean to be a Westerner, and I tried to get a feeling of that. At the same time I was feeling that as a Westerner I could adopt Buddhism or replace the Buddhist way of thinking replaced my way of thinking with the Buddhist way of thinking. But I've been fairly successful at that. However, what I feel now is that It's not really so much a question of can you change the way you think and exist in order to practice Buddhism, but rather how can Buddhism be a practice for us Westerners who have a different territory of existence than Asians.

[30:06]

Our individual identities are immersed in a particular psychological milieu. and a social and material environment that shapes the self which is part of the larger social identity. So as the West is different from the Asia and its culture and history, it produces a different kind of self and a different kind of person.

[31:19]

So part of my thinking recently has been aimed at what is the soul in the West? Now I don't mean, I mean I think that for a lot of people the soul is just some sort of part of you that belongs to God. And you don't pay any attention to it until when you're ready to die and then you hope that God notices it's around. But the soul that I'm... The only soul I can... Think about Vishnu to Buddhism is the soul which belongs to you, perhaps as well as God, but which belongs to you.

[32:43]

And is part of your own existence. So part of my, again, description of the five skandhas was an attempt to show how soul as a function is very closely related to the feeling skandha. Okay, if we had more time, there are some other examples I'd like to bring up, but I won't do it.

[34:12]

Right now I wish that all of the teachings I've given in Europe this summer I could somehow inject into you so you could take the next step. Because there are some things I'd like to go along with you but I can't do it. Now someone else asked me about Hara. And this person had read about Hara and wondered why I wasn't talking about it. And it's pretty basic Zen Buddhist teaching. But it's also very difficult to teach.

[35:14]

And as I told you, Sukhiroshi once told me, put your mind in your hands. I have no idea what he was talking about. I mean, what mind, and how do I get hold of it, and how do I put it in my hands? I mean, I really had quite a thing, and it sort of... I really did not know what to do. But to really get a sense of it, you have to have a different idea, understanding what mind is. You have to be able to begin to move your sense of location in your body. But before you can move your sense of location in your body you have to have a sense of location. Then you have to have the sense that this location can be moved.

[36:50]

To have that, you have to get rid of the sense that you have a nature. And that you are passively born into a world which goes along without you. So, you know, Kant says that the essential human existence is the integrity and continuity of the self over time. And St. Augustine says that the self grasps time as existence. When you have a sense that your self exists over time, and your continuity is in your thoughts,

[38:11]

And when you have experiences that break that continuity, you might be going crazy. It's very hard to have a sense of breaking the continuity and moving your location. So to really do these practices actually requires some work in noticing how you already exist. I think in the sense that, Hara, the first thing to do is to begin to practice regularly, in zazen and out of zazen, bringing a sense of identity to your breath and out of your thoughts.

[39:33]

Can you start by counting your breaths, counting your exhales? Until finally you actually get a kind of physical feeling of your breath. A physical feeling you can reproduce in other situations. So you can begin to reproduce that physical sensation out. that physical sensation during the day, on your work day, and find yourself located on your breath. And a certain stage of realized practice is when almost all the time your sense of location is on your breath.

[40:40]

This is close to the idea of one thought, 10,000 years. 10,000 years, one thought. So what is this one thought? This kind of thinking is really in the skanda of feeling, not in the skanda of thought. Now, Now, I was trying to find an example for this sense that dreaming is a territory of existence, not a language or a channel of communication.

[42:02]

Because what I would also like to get across is that, at least with you who practiced with me for some time, is that imagination or an imaginal territory is also a territory of existence. Now using Kant again as a kind of the probably greatest representative of most modern thought, He thinks of imagination as the means by which a concept is turned into a thought. It's a mere bridge. So imagination and intuition and so forth are something, as I said, are the problems of women and artists. It's not considered a realm of existence.

[43:32]

But if you look at all the tankas that are hung in the other room next to the kitchen, And the one you guys gave me as a present last year. All of those represent the realm of imagination as a territory of existence. Because for a genuine practitioner of Zen, Zazen and mindfulness is a territory in which he exists. It's not a practice to achieve something. It's one of the meanings of no gaining idea.

[44:39]

In the Heart Sutra it says no attainment, no idea of attainment. It's like you may have various goals in your daily life, but mostly your daily life is just you living it. And mostly you don't have goals in sleeping, you're just sleeping it. So for a practitioner, zazen, you don't have any goals really, you're just zazening it. It becomes a third territory of existence. Okay. Now, I think I can illustrate that best perhaps by a dream. Because from the first night, from the evening of the first day, I asked you to try to enter this territory.

[45:58]

I suggested you enter this territory more. the feelings gandha. So I suppose the subject of this session could be mind or mind slash the feelings gandha. Now, again, when I ask you, ask people I'm practicing with, what's the difference between emotions and feeling, most people haven't even ever thought about it much, let alone noticed it. But in the five skandhas emotion falls into the thought category, not the feeling category.

[47:09]

Do you understand? Well, because it's a shape, it's an emotion, it's a feeling. We can call it a feeling because that's what our language says. A feeling with boundaries like sadness, anger, that's an emotion. So, something sieved, something shake. And the third skanda is where things are shaped.

[48:09]

Yes. I was thinking about how to translate this better into German. Probably it would be that you would use the, which I think is a little bit forgotten in German, if you make out of the word a noun, das Fühlen, so to speak, it would probably be, because then it's more an active process, a living process, so to speak, the feeling as a verb. You make it a gerund. Yes, a gerund. Exactly. Well, in general, all words in Buddhism are gerunds. Gerund is like not do, but doing. I-N-G words are gerunds. Not the same.

[49:18]

Not the same. Anyway, words in Buddhism tend to be verbs, or verbs in the category of verbs, and Buddhism doesn't use nouns much, or they think of nouns as verbs. Buddhism uses verbs very often, and you think mainly in the form of verbs, and less in the main verbs. Okay. Yeah. Is there a technique to separate it? For instance, when you have this pencil, you feel something like a mandala that has to do with death and love and silence. Yeah, yeah. And that comes out. That's the pencil my boyfriend used to kill himself three years ago. and it looks like it, and I just said, oh, that's an emotion.

[50:20]

And if I want to switch it again, it doesn't work. You want to say that in German? In German? I was wondering if there is a certain technique in which you can break emotions and feelings apart. Okay, the basic practice of Zen Buddhism is to swim upstream. Is to return to the source. Is to turn the light around and look inward. Before any Buddha has appeared. Before the universe is differentiated. These are all expressions in Buddhism to mean swim upstream. Now our general personality goes downstream. So you see the pencil which your boyfriend did himself in with two years ago.

[51:26]

Let's hope not. Frustrated writer. And it causes this horrible association and then you're downstream and you're stuck, unhappy, depressed, etc. Okay, can you swim back upstream to the point where you just see the pencil? Yes, that's the point of that practice. So you get so that you can stay in the skanda of feeling without it turning into a thought and then into, in your case, an association, which is the fourth skanda.

[52:26]

Okay, now I said yesterday consciousness is very slow. The five skandhas happen like this in consciousness. Awareness is very fast. Now, the example I can use about that is, if many people are about to have a bad accident, car accident, or fall off a cliff or something, their whole life flashes before their eyes in a moment. Now, It doesn't mean just five events that were important flash before in your eyes.

[53:35]

Literally the whole fabric of your life, thousands and thousands of things seem to be there. And that's not because you're seeing very fast sequentially. It's because you're seeing simultaneously. Now, consciousness sees this way. One, two, three, four, five. Awareness sees this way. But it sees all five. And it sees four and three and two and one and seven and eight and so forth. And so the more you have a taste of awareness, the more you can perceive the processes of yourself kind of in slow motion. I remember I asked Lama Govinda, when you practice a visualization, do you see it front or back, or do you move it around, or what? And at that time I was visualizing in consciousness, I wasn't visualizing in awareness, so I didn't know how to visualize in awareness.

[54:59]

Now I can give you an example from this dream. So in looking for an example, that first evening of the first day, I thought I should practice what I'm preaching. I'm always trying to do what I'm talking about. So I couldn't think of an example, so I thought, well, I'm going to have to dream one. Because I'm talking about dreaming as a territory of existence.

[56:00]

Like Zazen is a territory of existence, not just something you do an hour a day to calm yourself. and when you change your concept of zazen like the concept of how you fold up the mat if you change your concept of zazen so it folds future, past and present into a territory of existence Your zazen will be different than if you just think of it as a time to become calm or count your breaths. You still may practice calmness and count your breaths, but you're then doing it in a territory of your existence. Let me say just a little aside about practicing darshan. Practicing Zazen usually requires a teacher.

[57:24]

And the development of your practice requires the development of your relationship with your teacher. It's not just the presence of a teacher that helps, it's the development of a relationship with a teacher. I'm equally important as a Dharma friend. I almost know no one, or it's very rare, for a person to practice without a friend who also practiced. Someone else who shares the aspiration with you. And if you find one or two other persons who share the aspiration or inspiration with you to practice, your practice will develop much more powerfully. That's Buddha. You have to do it completely with others.

[58:27]

That's Sangha. And they're not contradictory. You have to do it completely alone and you have to do it completely with others. And they're not contradictory because they're not sequential realities, they're simultaneous realities. And you do both simultaneously. And they don't interfere with each other. And third, Dharma, you have to know how to do it. You have to do it alone, you have to do it with others, and you have to know how to do it. And the Dharma friend that you practice with is an essential part of the development of your practice.

[59:38]

Okay, now I think I'll only do this dream number. And I won't try to tie up any of the other things I've been talking about. Maybe tomorrow or the next day. Maybe I'll forget everything. we'll have a party tomorrow instead. And I don't usually use personal anecdotes of this kind but this is the only example I came up with so I can give you the example of this dream. Now I have for many years had various dream practices and lucid dream practices. And so I've developed, they started in my first or second Sashin in 61.

[60:45]

And then I've developed them since then. So I decided I should enter a dream territory as my existence. Enter it as a feeling skandha realm. So there's quite a few techniques for doing this, but I'll just tell you the ones I happen to use. And there are separate techniques for developing awareness through the night that aren't dream techniques, but I'm only going to limit myself to dream techniques. I took a Buddhist rosary

[61:45]

and I held it in my hand. And it's important where you locate it. So you can locate it, just learning to hold anything through the night is helpful. If you're watching, there's a little Buddha sitting in your forehead, and see if it's still there in the morning. When you're bored with sleeping, it has nothing to do with, you know, making the night interesting. I've done lots of practices like that. It takes a little few days to get back into the swing of it, doesn't it? But this time I just took my juzu, or the Buddhist rosary, and I held it in my hand against my chest.

[63:20]

Then I took the gray light you see at your forehead just before you go to sleep. And then I notice the brightest part, the silver part, right in the center of the gray light. And then I stay with that. And if you can hold on to something physically and stay with a mental focus and then let yourself go to sleep, your consciousness, a kind of consciousness goes into your sleep with you. So if you can hold something in your hand at the same time and bring your spiritual concentration to this silver woman, the light, then you can take your consciousness with you and take your sleep at that moment. Is this too strange?

[64:24]

Is it all right? You want me to continue this? Yes, of course. Is it too personal? Anyway, so usually what I do then at a certain point when I've got the concentration I start slipping, I move the concentration on the clear, bright part of the gray, the silver part, I move it down to the center of my chest where I'm holding the beads. By the way, this isn't very hard to do. You just have to practice that. You have to decide to do it first. That's the first thing. Okay, so then when I did that, as soon as I move it, usually I go to sleep and I start having a dream. So I had this very vivid dream that was about the most troublesome, painful part of my life.

[65:33]

And it was about two people in a situation and so forth. So then I woke up in the middle of it because it was time to get up. And I didn't want to lose it. So at that point, what I do anyway, is I memorize a number of the details. And for example, I memorize the dominant color, which in this case was, there were several colors, but the main color was orange. It was on the walls and on a towel. Then I remember the physical feel of the shapes of the rooms and halls. And if I do this I can stay awake and keep in the dream and memorize these things.

[66:47]

And then the sound of people's voices, the look in their eyes, the quality of light, the overall tone, there's a kind of sound tone that I find in a drink. And by memorizing the spaces in the dream, are they narrow, or big, or tight, or the rooms have corners, you can't perceive the corners, things like that.

[67:54]

So I remembered all these things. And I could explore the territory pretty carefully. And so then the next day when I went to sleep, I started, I had a little bit of fun with it. I started out with the same process. And remembering the details and hoping to have continuation of the dream. but not really curious. This time I had a little funny experience going into it because the sense of it is when you're trying to keep a thread from the usual conscious mind, follow that thread like in a fairy tale into the dream territory.

[68:56]

So I was sort of thinking as I was falling asleep, I want a direct line into the dream. Suddenly there's a payphone appeared. We've had a direct line there. So I was in my dreams of half-coin. I said, this is a good pun. There is a direct line here. And then I looked again and the payphone was gone. It had been removed. And there was a spot of sort of glue or something on the wall where it had been. And I felt, now I've lost the thread.

[70:21]

I was looking around, almost asleep, looking around, now where's the thread? And I looked at the spot of blue. And I noticed it was kind of reddish, and in the center it was quite bright red, in fact. And orange-red is the best color to meditate, concentrate on. So I looked at the glue where the phone had been and saw that the center of the glue was very bright, and I thought, oh, I found the thread again. So, So I concentrated again on that and went to sleep and then immediately had a dream about teaching the five skandhas. It was about the history of the five skandhas and certain things I hadn't noticed about it, the dream was telling me.

[71:23]

And part of this And when I was talking about the five skandhas in the dream I could see myself from upside, from up above doing it and I could see the five skandhas in all orders at once including upside down including looking at them as if I was in the wall, I could see them backwards from behind. This is an example of visualization where it's not on one surface, you're in the midst of the visualization from all points. From back? Well, it was like, if you could imagine, maybe a bit like this, if you could imagine a movie where the five skandhas are floating entities and I was floating in among them, kind of studying them.

[72:49]

At the same time, I was thinking about the history of them, and I thought, no, this was a late formation, and I'm going to have to look it up, because the dream was partly about when they were actually put together as Black Skynes. Then I had a second dream about an old friend of mine, which is what I call a current status dream. Yeah, the current situation. What I find is, and what this dream is about, I'm going to try to make this all short now.

[73:53]

What this dream is about is this particular friend of mine who I've known for years, and it was a dream about where he's at now, I'm at, and where our friendship is at. And that's what the dream I started out with was about this troubled time in my life was the current status of that time now. And I find in this dream space which is also zazen space things mature much more absolutely than in my conscious space. In other words, my feeling about my friend in my conscious space is pretty much dated from the last time I saw him about a year ago. I mean the territory of my existence in the third skanda of thinking and fourth skanda.

[75:12]

But in the feeling skanda, which thinks non-thinking, and works through images and a different way of thinking. So it's thoughts produced from the feeling Skanda, not thoughts produced from the thinking Skanda. So in the dream, a year has passed in our relationship. But in my conscious thinking, a year hasn't passed. Now, does that anecdote give you a sense that the dream is a territory of your existence, not something only related to your conscious or unconscious?

[76:24]

In other words, let's take the first dream, the troubled time, about the troubled time and this troubled period in my life. If I want to resolve that in the conscious life I can work on resolving it in the dream or practice territory. Now, I can ask the dream I can say to myself in this practice time please take the next step in the development of this situation. And if I can take the next step in my practice dream space existence,

[77:29]

which I don't know if I can or not. But if I can, taking the next step in my conscious life will be quite easy. But to ask questions of this Zazen dream territory I have to ask it with thoughts formed from the feeling skandha and not ask it with thoughts formed from the thinking skandha. That's why koan practice, you're always trying to move the words into your body, move them into a mantra repetition because then you move it into the feeling skandha and out of the thinking skandha. So you can say to yourself, for instance, I'd like to really at this point see where my relationship is with my mother, whether she's alive or dead.

[78:48]

and you can immerse yourself in the presence of your mother and it may appear as images it may appear as you're sitting on her grave having a conversation with her or something. It's very difficult to ask that question from a thinking place, from the thinking skandha, but it can be asked from the kind of thinking that the feeling skandha does. And you can immerse yourself in the presence of your mother or father or a friend or a situation. And this isn't, you know, Ulrike being a scientist knows of instances when scientists have discovered certain things through dreams.

[80:14]

What was that one scientist? And I believe Watson worked out the DNA code in a dream. And I believe Teller worked out the hydrogen bomb in a dream. We have to be wary of the dreams of scientists. The point is that this territory of dreaming and the feeling skandha Zen and Buddhist culture tries to bring that into your Zazen as your Zazen matures. So dreaming becomes a way of thinking.

[81:17]

In fact, Zazen, the way things happen in Zazen is... dreaming is only a portion of it. And part of that, to go back to hara, is the ability to move your location into your body. The more you can move your location, as long as your location, sense of location, is stuck in the adhesive stream identity of thoughts, very little of your life occurs in the feeling skandal. And this idea of awareness and consciousness, which I've talked about as the difference between awareness and consciousness, And in this sense, as I have spoken about awareness and consciousness, consciousness and awareness and the differences between them, the Asian culture is just as powerfully transformed and comparable to Freud's idea of the West.

[82:40]

And if you, through studying Buddhism and through the Sashin, can bring the sense of awareness and consciousness as fact, a kind of fact, into your life, it will change your life. You change society. So when you're doing zazen, keep trying to see if you can find a way to first of all sense where your location is. In your thoughts, does your thoughts keep carrying along like in St. Augustine, self grasps the continuity of thoughts. And your sense of your integrity and mental health is caught up in the continuity of thoughts.

[83:58]

See, if you can sense your location, if that's where it is, And then see if there's a possibility of letting it fall out of the thoughts. Slip out of the thoughts. When you do a sashim, you're actually, we could say, changing your frequency. And when you begin to develop concentration, you're intensifying your frequency. And you're moving the sense of location into another frequency.

[84:58]

So you can use concentration, a kind of physical concentration, the concentration in your breath, to begin to move the location out of your thoughts. Then you can begin to move it into your body. And if you do zazen and it's painful enough and you're dreaming of the bell ringing, you know? Oh, you know. It may happen. Out of sheer desperation you may move your location just to get out of the pain. Most of the distraction and most of the pain and boredom is all the struggle to get, it really represents the struggle to get your location out of your thoughts.

[86:18]

And so sometimes you have to be kicked very hard. This is a very easy Sashin. I've never done a Sashin this easy in America. I've never done a lecture where everyone wasn't sitting in zazen pose. And where there are mostly 40 minute periods. So I'm not, I'm being a lousy teacher, I'm not kicking you hard enough. Because you really sometimes have to be quite desperate to make that little move of your location. And once you do, it's such a relief. Almost all, but not all. Almost all the discomfort disappears immediately. And you feel very relaxed. You think, is this the vacation spot I've been looking for all these years?

[87:39]

It's right here all the time. Thank you very much. Bonjour. How are you? I have a student named Ihsan Dorsi. He was born Tommy Dorsi, not the musician, but his name is Ihsan. And who lives in that room past the office?

[88:46]

Did I keep you up last night? Sorry. I was up till after midnight trying to talk to Ihsan at the hospital. Went back into the hospital recently. He's tested positive for AIDS for the last four or five years. And the last year and a half, for two years, he had ARK. And now I guess he has technically AIDS because he has lymphoma cancer. As of just a couple weeks ago, he's feeling well. And bad enough taking AZT really makes you feel totally shitty, like you'd like to die.

[90:12]

And supposedly the doctors in the house here might know, supposedly he was down the other day to His total white cell count of all kinds in his body was 600. What's it supposed to be? 400,000. Now, is that per liter or? Per milliliter. Per milliliter. Yeah, anyways, and the count... And the kind that protects your immune cells, maybe the T-cells, were zero.

[91:16]

I guess chemotherapy was doing that partly, because he started a couple weeks ago. So now he's on IVs with antibiotics. He's up to 400 of the T-cells. It's amazing to me people survive with so little white cells.

[91:43]

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