And actually, we don't know much about physical attunement as Westerners. And excuse me for saying so, but... Unless you're in love, but, you know... Then it's forced on you. But my experience has been that... And I'm committed to lay practice. And my experience has been that without making this more explicit in some way, people aren't getting it. And so I try to find some balance in that allows you to get a feeling for this, that also allows you to continue it, or allows you to inform your practice of living after these six hours.

[01:13]

But also you're not non-threatening. The majority of you here, I don't think, are committed to this particular way of practice and so forth. So what am I trying to present? I guess I'm trying to give you a feel for this world, or this view, I think. And also, if you're a therapist, since the topic here, Buddhism, psychology, and Although I think we all have a certain psychological nature, even if we're not psychotherapists. Isn't that true? I'm sorry. So there's no question that Buddhism and psychotherapy are the main ways, other than in some ways physics is... if anything, closer to Buddhism than psychotherapy. But as a way of looking at the world and viewing your relationship with others, psychology and Buddhism are quite close.

[02:22]

So it's natural we should be talking in this way. And as I said the other day, though, I don't want to use psychotherapy or psychology as a Trojan horse to bring Buddhism into our culture. Hi. Hi. Now this is supposedly a seminar, not a lecture. But really, how can you discuss this and let me present some of it to you? Because if not, I mean, this is something I wrote when they asked me to send something.

[03:27]

So I sent something. So this language and what I'm talking about, I think I have to introduce to you. But I would like it if you felt free to ask me questions as we went along. and to have some discussion with me and discussion mutually with each other. So I'll try to give you a feeling for this. Now, the title they edited a bit. The title I sent them was Wisdom, the Practice of Inward and Interior Consciousness. And they dropped interior. I think they didn't know what I meant, why I was making a distinction between inward and interior. Now, I'll try to, of course, so that's the main thing I should do. I should try to give you a feeling for this, why I'm making this distinction.

[04:30]

But I think probably I should leave that and I think the practice or understanding of the four elements in practice to this afternoon. Now, I'll definitely try to present this in a way that I hope you can tell me whether I'm successful or not. Practical, even though it's not obviously practical, at least at first. And I want to continue what I started last weekend and yesterday in developing a kind of language we can share, because we have to have some kind of similar language. On the other hand, not all of you were here last weekend or yesterday, so some of you were. So I'll just hope for the best. I can redefine things again or redefine them in a new way, but mostly I'll just go along. And if you want me to define something, what I mean, I'm happy to, because I really think that we need... If you're going to practice Buddhism or understand Buddhism relationship to your psychology or your own life and culture, we've got to look at the basics thoroughly.

[06:01]

And we have to look at the basics with a clarity so that when we say something, we know that we agree, more or less, that word means so if you ask me to define something that's exactly what I would like because I've been trying to define these things for 35 years in other words my experience preceded considerably my ability to define what was happening and in a way you have to be willing to practice in a way that your practice if you're practicing Zen or Buddhism where your practice goes beyond your ability to know what you're doing Okay, so I'd like to take as a discipline looking at this description that they, basically I wrote them a general description of what I might say. They wanted, they asked me, I think, in order to pick my airfare, to teach for about a month here, you know, daily, you know, lectures and seminars and everything.

[07:10]

I just didn't have the time to even write out the descriptions they wanted so I sent them a general description I said divide it up into parts and here's some titles and I'll come for 10 days and so this is one part of what I said they divided up and then they stuck this title on top of it but here we are and that's what you read so let's see if we can deal with it So I said the... I parsed this again, like I did yesterday. I took the description and I parsed it out to sort of look at the different parts. So I start out with the ancient yoga cultures of Asia. Well... As I said yesterday, I think that if we don't look at the modern as kind of chauvinistic, like modern is best, but look at modern as a way of looking at the world, taste, aesthetic, interest, affinity, then there's various periods that we could call modern.

[08:23]

Indian-Greek period, maybe Song and Tang dynasties in China, and periods in India. And the yogic, so there's a rapport and affinity with these teachings. So I think when you're studying Buddhism in our culture, you're studying something that at the present time our culture has a great deal of affinity for and is, in a sense, modern. You're not doing something so counterculture as is obvious. I mean, when I first started practicing, people were saying, what are you doing staring at your navel? and what is practiced. I was like an outcast. But anyway, now I'm in the midst of a fashion. But there are some fundamental differences, and I would say the fundamental differences between Asian and Western civilizations is...

[09:33]

encapsulated in the word yogic. And yogic culture extends back in India very far and Indian culture spread into Europe and into Asia. And the word yogic basically it means they looked inward instead of outward. Instead of dividing Like we use an electron microscope to examine the particles out there. They said, one of the basic assumptions of yoga culture is that the macrocosm and the microcosm are interrelated. Now, it's not as simple, as I've said, it's not a simple relationship of equality. You know, the formal world and me are the same, but we interpenetrate, perhaps at a logarithmic level, It's a relationship where you have to raise the power of the situation to see the equality of the relationship.

[10:37]

Am I making sense, sort of? Now, because they assumed... I think this is true, and I think contemporary science thinks it's true, but I'm presenting it as an assumption. It's an assumption. You have to start somewhere. So the assumption is... that there's a profound interrelationship, in fact, a kind of identity between everything and between the all and the particular. So if you want to study the all, you study the particular. And the particular is also us. And the electron microscope is meditation. Or the atom smasher. So And they assumed then, one of their assumptions was that all mental phenomena has a physical component and all physical sentient phenomena has a mental component.

[11:43]

So in addition, if you study yourself, you're studying the world. If you study the body, you're studying the mind. If you study the mind, you're studying the body. But again, there isn't a simple identity assumed between mind and body. The mind and body, it's a relationship that you have to develop. and the malleable situation. So I said here the ancient yoga cultures of Asia developed complex and refined philosophies, sciences, psychologies, and technologies of meditation and consciousness that can deepen and transform our personal identity and our experience of the phenomenal world. Now that's what I've just spoken to that can deepen and transform our personal identity and our experience of the phenomenal world.

[12:50]

You not only are studying who you are, but the study is also a transformation of who you are, what you are. And it alters or changes our experience of the phenomenal world. Now, this is not something unfamiliar to us. Again, let's use the sometimes too extreme example of falling in love. When you do fall in love, which is an experience I suppose most of us have had, though I've known people who at 60 say, listen, I've never been in love before. Boy, wow, jeez. So I don't know what level of falling, but anyway, in any case, we know it transforms our way of looking at everybody and everything. Or if you just find yourself in the world in a way in which you feel more relaxed, and your body starts to relax, the world is different.

[13:58]

Now, we tend not to notice these things because even if intellectually you understand everything's changing, you've sort of got that picture now, your basic assumptions are that things aren't changing. I mean, just take the New Age. I call it Newage sometimes. LAUGHTER LAUGHTER I'm sort of part of the New Age, I guess, but in any case. The New Age really comes down continuously to seeking the one. This is completely a Western theological idea. Oneness is a Western theological idea. It implies there's some kind of God-like unity that you can find. In Buddhism, there's no such thing. Sorry. I'd have to see what Patanjali or somebody says and what they mean by one.

[15:17]

I don't want to get into these things too much, but there's an experience of oneness. That's for sure. But that doesn't mean that everything is one. there may be 50 experiences of oneness, or 10,000. We say, and here I'm, yes? Sorry, do you mean diversity is unity in that sense of time? Yes, okay, we can say. Okay, let me come to this a little bit. You're not up to there. I mean, you're up to there, but you're not talking about that. That's okay. Yeah, no, I'd like to deal with it, sure. That's what we're here for. Okay, when I say yogic culture, Buddhism doesn't take all of yogic culture. Buddhism takes those elements of yogic culture in which there's nothing outside the system. In other words, there's no concept of a creator god or a transcendent

[16:24]

In Buddhism, there's ideas of divinity, but it's not the same as a creator god. Strictly speaking, this is what we got. There's no way to get out of this. You can get inward in this. You can be folded in this. Like I used the example of the string theory where they say that mathematically the world is best described in ten dimensions. Three or four dimensions we can experience, but six or so we can't experience. They're folded in outside our three-dimensional reality. So Buddhism assumes the world is a plurality. We could say an omniverse or a multiverse, not a universe. And we say not one, not two. If you say it's two, no, it's one. But When you say it's one, it's not one, it's two.

[17:26]

And not-two-ness is not the same as oneness. So you could say diversity and plurality, or we say form and emptiness, but the diversity and the plurality, the diversity and the unity, are interpenetrating all the time. So we could say you have neither oneness nor two-ness, but something bigger than oneness and two-ness. So it's a different way of thinking about the world. You understand? No? Yeah, everything's connected and simultaneously independent. What? That's all right. Why is it one? It's just connectedness. It's just an inherent oneness that underlies the whole thing.

[18:29]

I know that you're saying that that oneness is something that the perception that we perceive is separate from us. It's a feeling of worth. Yes. You're only a point of care for us. It's where we're coming up with something here. If we're talking about the sound of our connectedness, But the connection is like this. It's momentarily connected. Okay. If you want to define it that way, it's fine. I actually don't think that you... What about the expression non-duality? Sure. Non-dual.

[19:30]

It's not one and it's not two. Yeah. Non-dual doesn't exclude one. I think I'm coming up against belief and logic here. Oh, dear. Just give it to me. No, no, it's okay. You introduced it like this. Oh, no. Thank you so much. I'm not complaining. I'm just ho-humming. Yes. I thought you were talking about the experience of being a mum. Mm-hmm. And you were talking about the experience of the vaccination and getting hospitalised from death. Yeah, sure. . I was going to suggest that Thich Nhat Hanh talks about how he called intervening.

[20:58]

Yeah. Where he says, like, ma and ma element, not ma element. Yeah. I'm just wondering whether... Well, that's another way of saying what I'm saying. Yeah. Oh, I know that it's quite upsetting to make it look like... Yeah, I'm sorry. So, What is it to avoid the word oneness uses emptiness? Emptiness of what? Emptiness of being simultaneously everything.

[22:02]

Okay. All righty. I think what we, at least in Buddhist practice, what you want to do is, I'm not saying you have to agree with this, but you want to relax into a feeling of the plurality of the world and not seek some unity. But let me continue and see if we can talk about this thing. some other way um and then i go on to say these views of the phenomenal world personal identity and the depth and pervasiveness of being um ought to be should be understood in the west if we're going to join in our mutual existence on earth i think uh

[23:28]

The great adventure, as I said the other day, of this century is this meeting of these two civilizations. And that somehow, we may not agree with them, but their ideas are interpenetrating our ideas. And I would say, in fact, that much of science, logic, mathematics, physics, biochemistry, et cetera, really implicitly has very similar ideas to put in it. So in some ways, it's another way in which there's an affinity within our culture for these ideas. Okay. Let me just continue with trying to give you not so much philosophically, but a feeling for... for the world from the perspective I'm trying to suggest.

[24:34]

The other day I flew here, well not the other day, some days ago, I flew from Vancouver to Japan, and then from Japan to Singapore to here. And I was staying with some friends. I was teaching in on an island near Vancouver and staying with friends on an island they own. And unfortunately, the family was a German-Austrian family, and they sold it to some guy who said he wanted it for their house. They'd had it about 40 years. Turns out to be a guy who buys these things and pretends to buy them for his house, and then he just cut timber. So he buys them for like $4 million, and then he takes $12 million worth of timber off and then sells it denuded. And so I was involved in trying to prevent that to some extent, what I could do.

[25:37]

Anyway, so we took off, and when I left, we flew over all of these kind of inland ocean, kind of almost inland seas that surround that part of Canada. And there was this red tide, red tide is this dinoflagellates, I guess they're called, a kind of, it makes the ocean red. It's a kind of a swirling protozoan that poisons the fish and marine life. But it was interesting to fly over it because you saw a topography of the water that's simply amazing. There'd be lines where it'd be very red. There'd be pale pink. There'd be greenish red. And they would meet in very distinct lines.

[26:40]

And one would be going this way and one would be going this way. It was like there was a really complex topography in the ocean of this water. When I think of birds migrating, they go from one place to the other just in the air, and yet they find their way by knowing the currents of the air and knowing perhaps the magnetic fields of the earth and the location of the sun. And these currents in the ocean You know, there's a river here called the Yara. I mean, just as definite as the Yara River has a course, some of these ocean currents are very specific, although they're in the middle of water. Now, what I would like to do is define us not just as human beings, but as way-seeking minds.

[27:45]

I'm looking for another way to define ourselves because we define ourselves, we have a habit of defining ourselves as a certain kind of person. And I'd like to redefine the world because we call the world something, we think of the world as something out there and three-dimensional. And as I've been emphasizing, the world is not three-dimensional. That's the way our mind conceives of it. It has to think of it so that we can avoid tigers that jump out of trees and so that we can walk through the door and stuff like that. But you look at this ocean with its patterns and these marine protozoans. This is much more complex than three dimensions. And even Pythagoras' theory, strictly speaking, that the sum of the... squares of the two sides of a right-handed triangle equal the hypotenuse sum.

[28:51]

It's actually never true. It's true if you're building bridges, but all surfaces are slightly curved. There's no such thing as a flat surface except in imagination. So all of Pythagorean geometry actually applies, practically speaking, in our world, but in fact everything is slightly curved. Just like this ocean, slightly curved. Now, how can you plot your course in a slightly curved world? How can you find your way? At least you won't fall off the edge. What? At least you won't fall off the edge. Yeah, okay. And you'll get back. Yeah. That's a good positive spirit. When you said way-seeking mind, is that what you said? Yeah. Way-seeking mind. Is that way-seeking hyphenated? I mean, I'm trying to... As you wish.

[29:52]

Because I heard it. Way-seeking as one word. Yes. But the mind that seeks the way. That's what I wondered. Yeah. Without the hyphenate. Yeah. Well, sometimes I write it as one word when I write it myself. It's a hyphenate. Uh-huh. I don't think it exists in the dictionary. No, no. And without the hyper, that's very different. Now, there's a koan where one person is asked, so where are you going? He says, I'm going on pilgrimage. He says, well, well, I'm on pilgrimage, and where are you going? I don't know. And then Tichang said, not knowing is nearest.

[30:53]

Now, this koan is just a simple phrase, but it's actually quite a complicated, complex kind of way of looking at the world is built on this you're going on a pilgrimage because our life is a kind of pilgrimage but where are you going i don't i don't know but then he turns that yet this not knowing is nearest so how do you work with this if you're practicing Now, it also is assuming that this moment right now is completely unique and not repeated. Now, this is just practically true.

[31:57]

But we don't usually, we might think it, but we don't usually notice it. And For example, there's a feeling in this room that we've all created. And when you two came in a while ago, it changed slightly, but then it integrated again in a new type of feeling. And we could call that a non-graspable feeling. A non-graspable feeling accompanies all mental activity and physical activity. But again, we don't usually notice it. We notice more specific emotion. We notice our thoughts about things. But what this view, which is a darn topic I stuck myself with, the practice of inward and interior consciousness, requires us to shift to noticing non-graspable feeling

[33:10]

more consistently than we notice more defined, graspable things. And this is not something you don't already do. First of all, you do it all the time, but you don't notice it. But sometimes you notice it. So there are various causes that brought each of you here. Cars, friends, how you got here. And presumably, you will leave here in a few days and find your way home. And that's what Princess Diana thought when she went out that evening.

[34:22]

But we don't actually know what's going to happen. And she disappeared from this earth. Otherwise, it was just one other moment. But at that moment, everything changed for her and the others in the car. But just because we don't notice that extraordinary precision of each moment doesn't mean that's not existing. And way-seeking mind is to be more located in that precision of each moment. Now, how do we find ourselves more located in that precision of each moment. One of the things that characterizes Zen in a way that makes it somewhat different than other Buddhist practices is we don't tell you where you're going.

[35:28]

We give you a sextant and a compass and something like that, but you're in this medium. Like I suppose the young bird doesn't know exactly where it's going, but it gets out there and it goes flying along and finds its course. Well, maybe we're going to end up in enlightenment or realization or in some particular place. Although Suzuki Roshi always said, we each have our own enlightenment. There's no one enlightenment we all experience. We're back to oneness. That's exactly right. I'm eyebrow to eyebrow with you right now. But you're still you and I'm still me. And there's still a particular relationship here.

[36:45]

If I turn to Colin, now there's a Colin-Richard relationship. But that doesn't break the relationship. That I just had with you. It just changed a bit. But isn't it that everything changes, including in life? There's a focus of attention. Well, that's one thing. In the field abstract of just light, all the electromagnetic forces... Yeah, everything, you know. ...which are at play, irrespective of any conscious human activity... Boy, you're scientific and philosophical. Okay. Yeah, all right. Synchronicity, yes. Impermanent, yeah. Alluding, yes. I'm smashing. I'm trying to get to the presence of this room really what it means that everything's changing and is absolutely unique on each moment. ...

[38:04]

And we seek it most deeply in our view. Our views. Now, the view that is most easy, which I've mentioned in the seminar yesterday, the view that's most easy for us to grasp, which is also somewhat different than we usually think, is most people, but generally we assume Colin's there and I'm here, And space separates us. That's what most of us think, right? I have to walk over there to get to Colin. My body does. The space separates us. But space also connects us. As you're anticipating. I mean, the moon isn't tied to us by a string. It But it's tied to us.

[39:14]

And we are tied to it through our reproductive cycles, the tides and so forth. The tides are tied. Now, we don't have our three-dimensional consciousness. Our bodies are profoundly, I mean, a profound event. But our mind is quite coarse. Our mind can very little perceive what's going on with our white and red corpuscles and so forth, and our hormones. Our mind isn't that kind of thing. Our body knows what's going on. And then the observer of our consciousness is even more primitive than consciousness. Okay? Sort of okay? Yes. OK, so let's just work with this idea that space connects. Let's assume that it might be true.

[40:16]

I think if you take a phrase like space connects and you repeat it to yourself, because you've got to ingratiate, you've got to take views I stayed in a friend's apartment in New York recently. I say recently. I don't know what recently was. Portugal recently means any time in the last couple of years. Well, whenever I was in New York some months ago. Anyway, I've stayed there fairly often, and they have this shower where the faucets go out to turn off and go in to turn on. And each one goes the opposite direction, but they both go out to turn off. Well, you know, it's a neat apartment because there's a little window where you can see the Empire State Building right out there, like there's a mountain.

[41:21]

So I'm standing there, and I'm trying to turn this thing, and I can always stall my finger. or get, you know, frozen. So, I mean, this last time I was there, I thought, I've got to get this drink. So, because my body has been, I mean, I wasn't born knowing how hot and cold faucets work. And I'm used to them sometimes turning left or right, depending on that, or I'm used to the red one actually being cold. But to turn out to go off, this was completely new to me. So I decided to try to figure out how to do something about it. So I decided that the left one is left, left, off, off, and the right one is right, right, off, off. So the right one goes to the right and turns off. So every time I wanted to touch the showers, I said left, left, off, off, right, left, right, off. And pretty soon I got it kind of right.

[42:24]

Now, what was I doing when I did this? I have a view embedded in my body, bodied in my embeddedness, that faucets work a certain way. I could not do anything about this as a habitual thing, even though I stayed there many times, until I created an antidotal, antidote, concept, view, that I reminded myself with language. And then I got it. Do you understand what I mean? Well, we have many views embedded in us that we don't see, that you can't even pry loose unless you create an alternative that you keep reminding yourself of. Now, Zen koans are really nothing but a kind of use of mantra to take words out of the syntax of language to transform your views.

[43:30]

Do you follow what I just said? Nothing that I'm saying is complicated or difficult to understand, but it's just sometimes a little too many things at once. I'm sorry. So we can assume that if I generally assume that Colin's over here and I'm here, that I have a view that we're already separated. Before I think, there's a view affecting me, my thinking, that we're already separated. I'm getting to know Colin well enough that I know that we're already connected. He's not so sure. So if I take a phrase, so let's create an antidote to already separated, and let's create a phrase already connected.

[44:39]

So when you start, I would suggest with the rest of today, You, as you're walking around, say to yourself, already connected. So you look at something like this, and you don't have to make some effort to, the flower is so beautiful, I wish I could glue it to my upper lip. You can, excuse me, you can, you look at it, you know you are already that. you are already connected. And I can look at you and I can feel already connected. And then I don't have to make an effort to be especially friendly or smile because I can work with that we're already connected instead of working with that we're already separated. Now... Can you define connected? What? Can you define connected?

[45:42]

That's right. Whatever it is, it's not one that's cheating. I'm clearly making progress. At least on the surface. I can tell. I haven't given up yet. I'm just using this to progress from another angle. and in what I mentioned last weekend. We need one of them to function as us, but when we... What's the phrase?

[46:52]

Well, anyway, we make it too concrete, we give it too much sense of term. But if you look at self as a function rather than as a thing, you can work with yourself much more effectively. So the three functions of self are separateness, connectedness, and continuity. Now, separateness, again, is... I'm not sure. I'm not sure. What a comfort difference. In a relationship. In a relationship. When you wake up, and you, as I said yesterday, when you wake up and you've just had a dream, and you can't remember the dream, the alarm clock's gone off, and you start thinking about what time you have to get to me.

[48:35]

or you start thinking about a cup of tea or coffee, and you can't remember the dream. But the dream left you with quite a feeling, so you try to remember it, but you can't remember it. Why can't you remember it? Well, I would say the most basic reason is because it occurred in a different kind of mind, which has a different memory storehouse. But if you can remember a detail or a feeling, you can sometimes regenerate that mind, which is kind of more sleepy or drowsy, not as awake. It's not in what last week we defined as borrowed consciousness. And the dream comes back. So what's happened is, if you try to remember the details... You can't really remember the details unless the details regenerate the mind in which the dream occurred.

[49:38]

And you can think of it as a different liquid, a liquid that supports images and intention, but doesn't support conceptual thought. So if that dream mind, and if you really can immerse yourself in dream mind again, you can even continue the dream. But you can't think conceptually about the day, what you have to do in the office and things like that. But as soon as you feel good enough and you let yourself recollect and you wake up, the dream's gone. You can keep some of it, you can keep some detail, you can keep a physical feeling and work with that physical feeling, but you can't Continue the dreaming process unless you regenerate the dreaming mind. So what I'm saying here is the three functions of self are separateness, connectedness, and continuity.

[50:40]

Strictly speaking, they're three different minds. One mind generates a feeling of separateness. One mind generates a feeling of connectedness. Now, the trouble for us is we try to establish connectedness in a mind of separateness. So separateness, your immune system is a form of separateness. Your immune system is a form of self. It tells you what belongs to this system and what belongs to yours or yours. And I have to know, you have to know that this is my voice. What's your name again? Millicent. And this is not Millicent's voice. Although you have a very nice voice, I wouldn't mind borrowing yours for a little while. So we have to be able to make that distinction for mental health.

[51:43]

And One of the most common, it seems, commonly noticed or common psychiatric problems now is borderlines. They're called borderline cases. The people have a very weak sense of self or where their borders are. Now, it may be that they're actually suffering from a kind of inability to get out of a mind of connectedness and establish a mind of separateness, and not just that they're ego. In other words, they can't generate a mind that generates the ego as well as they can't I'm just trying to find ways to think about this. No, no, I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Too many new things at once is difficult. No.

[53:07]

Those may be related, but that's another way of looking at it. The world is a plurality. The mind is a plurality. We are a plurality. we have different moods, feelings, perceptions, and so forth. And those different moods, feelings, and perceptions also generate or are, let's say, generate or are a function of different modes of mind. So we don't just have one mind. There's a mind that arises in this group, that is shared individually. So, I think it's useful to think of mind, states of mind, modes of mind, as liquids.

[54:19]

Liquids with different temperatures, densities, viscosities, etc. That's right. Yeah. You can use that. I think since you're not experiencing the wiring directly, it's a kind of metaphor to think of it that way, but Zen practice works with the actual state of your mind and doesn't try to explain it physically. But I think contemporary science should try to explain these physically. But I think it's more complex than can be explained physically. OK. So for us, I mean, the Buddha said, if one is to know something thoroughly, what should one know? And he answered himself, the body should be known thoroughly, et cetera.

[55:25]

And the mind should be known thoroughly. So if you're living, this is your lived life, from the Buddhist point of view, you study your actual lived life, which means you study things like the transition between waking and sleeping. And that's a useful place to see, most definitely, these different states of mind. So now, dreaming mind, I said, has the qualities, the viscosity, shall we say, in which images will float. And, interestingly enough, intention, but not conceptual thought. If you put conceptual thought in it, it kind of just melts into the water. But, if you take dream-type images and thinking in the mind of conceptual thought, ordinary consciousness, those images sink. You can't get at them. They don't tolerate each other. Yeah, you could put it that way.

[56:26]

So that's one example, which I think it's quite useful to get a feeling for, and get a feeling like in the different currents in the ocean, there's clearly a line here and a line there, and the water is either a different temperature or going a different direction. Well, when you wake up, you can feel these two minds rubbing against each other, and you can feel when you go into the mind where the dream reappears, and when you go into the mind. And that transition is very important to notice. So in this sense, Buddhism is a mental yoga. And we're concerned with mental postures as well as physical postures. Yeah? Yeah. Because you start with the intention, you create an image to reflect that intention, and somehow you should bring that to a more complex form or function of the mind. Would that be right? Say that once again. Now I have to ask you. Say that once again slowly, please. It's that kind of progression where you maybe start with the intention, an intention of good or an intention of whatever.

[57:36]

You create an image which somehow you embody that intention and then from there would you not create some sort of logic progression where you would actually express that? In terms of attention? it's like the expression of intention I mean what I'm saying is I have a lot of intention for good but like I keep coming up with stuff so either where is this connection that goes from intention through the process of image out into something which is actually quite useful and passionate in expression yeah well you're getting way ahead of me but that's okay no no it's perfectly alright um I think that um Yeah, one second. I think in not too long a time from now, we should take a break. But I want to continue for a little while more. Yes? If I'm understanding the discussion here, one of the things that you're pointing out is that we can get into certain habits of perception, certain habits of interpretation of our experience.

[58:43]

One might think, this is your body. This is God's body. It's not connected to us. It's your example. Your example of the immune system, how it recognises physiologically the sense of self, it maintains the sense of self that parallels mind function. And the equation of our community studying mind I think is certainly reflected in what a lot of neuroendocrinologists are doing now. And the difference from what you're saying here is that the point of reference is what it is we pay attention to in the field of consciousness. And a dream state is one of the things we can pay attention to. And when our attention is absent, the drink and the beer, and we don't remember it, our attention is just on the edge of that. What I'm understanding you're saying is that when my attention wanders, I don't know quite which state I'm in. I don't know where my one state is. And this is the type of attention which I understand you're talking about.

[59:48]

Intention. And when you pay attention, to the motivation, which is an intention, then it's clear. I think our attention is absolute. The intention could be there, but it's simply a involvement with the intention. It's a big difference between intention, I think, and attention, because attention allows you to get the quality of whatever it is, to flow from one state, the fluidity from one state to another, whereas intention language problems seems to be more related to that separateness, which is not necessarily an intention that one would have when one is in a connected mind. Can you hear her, what she's saying? No, not quite. Yeah, so I think when we speak, we should speak loud enough so everybody can hear. But let me just, I'll try to respond to what you said in a way that includes you. Let me try to respond to what the

[60:49]

what we've got in the air here. We've got a number of balls in the air here and they're all suspended. What I meant by intention, first of all, I'm just trying to create some fairly simple definitions. When you decide to wake up at 6.02 in the morning without an alarm clock, which some people It's fairly common people can do that. You're not conscious, yet you wake up, you look at your clock, and by God, it's 6.02. How does that happen? We don't know. I call that awareness and not consciousness. In other words, there's a quality of awareness. So in dream mind, or something like dream mind, and awareness overlaps with dream mind, You can make an intention and it will pass through that like a medium and wake you up.

[61:55]

And we as a culture educate consciousness. We don't educate awareness. And in general, the only clear time we use awareness to educate anybody is when we teach our infants not to wet their beds. And they keep in mind during the night that they're not supposed to wet the bed, but it's not conscious. But, you know, they get up. Falling in love would be another awareness thing we teach in the culture. Do we teach falling in love? I never got taught. Did I? What? And it teaches my attention to the experience of it. Yeah. Not the details of it. Oh, wow. Our love songs teach us to pay attention to it. I think you're right. Is it like what you're doing when you're riding a bike? Yeah.

[62:56]

In athletics, you often move into it. Again, an example I use, if you're carrying a bunch of packages and you slip on an icy street, consciousness is much too slow to prevent you from hurting yourself and save your packages and so forth. But generally we fall and don't hurt ourselves. And something calculates everything. That's something with awareness. And it's actually always present, like non-graspable feeling. It's always present. It's present right now. And again, if we took a photograph of this room, a movie film and slowed it way down, you'd find all our eyelids, all our movements are synchronized. And they become synchronized very rapidly. Soon after you have sat down in the room, your body movements will start being synchronized with the whole group. This has been studied with some care. So we establish a connectedness based on attunement that is outside of our ability or our habits of noticing things.

[64:06]

But we're acting in it, but we could act in it with more consciousness, more awareness. That's what I'm trying to talk about. That's what I'm trying to talk about. But I have to kind of fiddle to it. But there's several things in the air right now I wanted to, before I get more balls in the air here. If you take on a phrase like, if you have an assumption, like, again, already separated, all of your sensory input will confirm that. Everything you see, smell, taste will say, oh yeah, we're separate. Because the you that we're already separated precedes conceptual thought and percepts.

[65:12]

In Zen we have a phrase, hold to the mind before thought arises and look into that. Well, that's not so easy to do, to hold to the mind. One of the basic assumptions of yoga culture is there's a distinction between mind and thoughts. And you can shift your identity from the thoughts to the mind itself. That's basically what Zen practice is. To shift your identity from the contents of mind to the field of mind. And this has a powerful transformative effect on what you do. So let's now take on, if you take on in a repeated way, My middle example, left, left, right, hot, hot, cold, cold, off, off, on, on, etc. If you take it in a repeated way, already connected, already connected, already connected, and you say that, one is you're developing a background mind.

[66:15]

Background mind is a little like maybe a woman who's pregnant. She does her daily life, but she's very aware that her baby is there. And we need to become pregnant with these, with practice, with these ideas. And so if you take on an idea and you just keep it in your background mind, already connected, already connected, actually your sensory input begins to affirm that. The information you get begins to show you that's true. And then you begin to be able to see how that operates. This is actually a teaching. You can then... envision it, you start envisioning the world as connected. And when you start living in the world as if it were connected, envisioning it, you begin to have what we call three-fold moments of realization. The attentiveness becomes denser in a way like, again, I thought of the other day, like a water insect flying in the air, you can't see its course.

[67:24]

But as soon as it touches the water, you can see its course. So your attentiveness, you sustain attentiveness, and it becomes so palpable that fleeting moments, fleeting moments, it's like an athlete when they see the tennis ball slow down. You're in another kind of consciousness when that happens. And you can begin to have moments in which there's an increase in knowledge, there's a change in direction or realization, and there's a decrease of doubt. So we call them three-fold moments. But they're very fleeting. Normally we don't notice them. They just go past. They're fairly coarse consciousness. But by developing a sustained attention, by developing mindfulness, you begin to be able to act on these fleeting moments. If you make a big decision in your life, how long did it take?

[68:26]

It's not measurable. You thought, you thought, should I go to college, should I do this, should I move to Sydney or something? And one day you say, I'm moving to Sydney. Okay, it's 12 o'clock, it's five minutes to 12. It's one minute to 12. It's a half a minute to 12. It's one half second before 12. It's a half second after 12. 12 never happened. You can say logically, because 12 was approached... and past, 12 happened, but it had no measurable time. It's either a fraction of a second before or a fraction of a second after. We live in actually a realm of timelessness that's not measurable. It's not accessible to our three-dimensional consciousness, but in fact that's where we make our decision. That's this unique moment. The word tension has a root in it, like intention does, to stretch.

[69:36]

And mind, one of the things that mind does is it gives us a sense of a span, of a duration, when actually there's no... I mean, like that. So, if I say to you, intention, but if I say to you, attention, your body responds. So, attention is a physical posture. Intention is a mental posture. Of will? Intention is will, but when intention turns... Now, what I'm doing is to show how... nuanced intention and attention, how mental posture and physical posture are very close. Attention is a physical posture of giving, of directing, of looking at something, right? So that's a physical. Intention is the decision to do it.

[70:40]

But one is a mental posture, and we could say one is a physical. You're just about to agree that intention and will are intact. Well, look, these are words that are available to us in English. Yeah. Yeah. These are words. And we're trying to try on various words to make them useful, but let's not make the shoe fit too tight. Now, I still want to come back to your connectedness. So I'm still working on that. So let's go back to ancient India. One of the things that they did is they said we are given at birth in effect a waking mind a dreaming mind

[71:44]

and a mind of non-dreaming deep sleep. What's that? An empty mind. Well, I want to deal with three. And there's these three minds, the waking mind, we're all familiar with, dreaming mind, and we're not familiar with, but we know it exists, non-dreaming deep sleep. Those things we know. And it was assumed in Hindu culture that non-dreaming deep sleep was a form of bliss, that we actually need to survive, but we forget it more thoroughly than we forget our dreams. Because it exists in a mind that can't be translated into conceptual thought.

[72:46]

Just as we... So, waking mind only partly knows dreaming mind. And dreaming mind only partly is accessible, etc. And non-dreaming deeply... So these three minds are rather separate from each other. So what these guys proposed... Is there a mind that joins these three? Is there a mind that's more inclusive than these three? Is there a mind we can know that knows dreaming, waking... And that was called empty mind or various things. And Buddhism is just basically, in the early days they tried psychedelics and they tried yoga. And Buddhism is the tradition which said, okay, we'll try yoga and see if through yoga we can realize a mind that joins or is more inclusive or is even different and other than these three minds. Now, Zen doesn't say it exists. It says, okay, here's the tools to find out for yourself.

[73:48]

So, when you study the distinction between dreaming and waking, you're studying something from the point of view where Buddhism comes from out of Indian culture, very basic. You're studying this waking mind, dreaming mind. And it begins to open you to this possibility of a fourth mind, That is inclusive or separate. Now, by connectedness, I just mean get that, that there's some feeling of connection, there's an experience of connection, there's an observed relationship you can observe from the interior or exterior, something like that. I appreciate the clarity of your explanation. Are you happy to continue with the food option? Why don't we do something like that when we come back?

[74:53]

Why don't we take a break?

[74:54]

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