Not psychology, how psychology and Buddhism can work together. Two talks by Richard Baker Roshi during the Wisdom and Compassion Conference at Matripa Center, Healesville, September 1997. Thank you for coming. How many of you are psychotherapists? Oh, less than the smallest number we've had so far. And this is supposedly most on the topic. Now, I know a very modest amount about Buddhism. And I don't... And relatively speaking, I know a little bit more about the interface between Buddhism and Western culture and Buddhism and psychotherapy perhaps. But also, you know, although in a relative sense I know a little more, it's only relative to us on the whole knowing very little about it.

[01:15]

It's something that's been happening just the last few years. And no one knows... really enough, I mean, psychology and psychotherapy are quite new, and Buddhism is quite old, but very few Westerners really know Buddhism extremely well, so it's very hard to make definitive statements about it. So, really, I think that we have to think of this discussion or lecture, whatever it is, as an experiment among ourselves to find out, at least in your own thinking, to find out what this relationship is. Now, as for myself, I am not particularly interested in, and I don't see any reason to talk about psychology and Buddhism.

[02:22]

because they're both worthwhile things to study and I have no interest in comparing them if one is better than the other, more interesting or more complete or something like that. They're clearly different and I know that when I started practicing Buddhism in the late 50s and early 60s, I'd had some experience with psychology and studied it in college and things like that, but I discovered 20 years later or more that psychology and psychotherapy had changed a great deal since then. Much more than Buddhism had changed in the same period. So in a sense, I mean in fact, psychology and psychotherapy is developing quite rapidly. all over the United States and the rest of the world. And Buddhism is kind of coming into our society in increments, but it's not particularly developing in anywhere near the dramatic fashion that psychotherapy is developing.

[03:29]

But, of course, it's somewhat similar, because as Buddhism... we get to know Buddhism more, it's almost the same as if Buddhism were developing, because we find out more about Buddhism and so it affects how we see psychotherapy and so forth. Now, as I've said, you know, quite a number of you I've been speaking with during this week, but quite a number of you I've not, and All in all, I would say, in a sort of philosophical, scientific sense, Buddhism is much more like physics than anything else. But in its way of relating to people, it's much like psychotherapy or psychology. So my sense is that the question we have to look at together is not what is psychology and what is Buddhism, But when is a psychotherapeutic intervention, or when is a relationship with a psychotherapist more important or more appropriate than to practice Buddhism?

[04:47]

Does that make sense? Because that's where it comes up. Should I practice Buddhism because of what? the way I'm looking at the world or the problems I'm facing, or should I not? And where it comes up with me practicing with people is, should this person really be seeing a therapist and not doing practice, or should this person be doing both, or should this person not do both? Now, it may interest you that the therapists who practice with me in Colorado, and to some extent in Europe, they decide to stop doing therapy while they're practicing. I mean, stop practicing as a therapist while they're practicing Buddhism. And this has not been... It's been my feeling that this should be the case, but I have not, in the most particular case, I didn't suggest it.

[05:53]

The person came to this conclusion on their own. because the way of relating to somebody who practices as a practitioner is different than the way you relate to somebody who's a client or a therapist, a client or a patient. And last night when I was speaking with Doug, I know them but I don't know their names, Jeff and Lyndon. They both said, and Lyndon very particularly said, that we've been... Because there's no chance in this conference, which is really more of a parallel classes than a conference, there's been no chance for us all to be together except the initial forum, and there's no chance for the speakers to go to each other's things or talk, so we've been meeting in the evening for a while. And Lyndon said that a problem she has...

[06:54]

faced a number of times is that when somebody has been her client and successfully completed as far as she's concerned their therapy and then they enter her practice group the relationship is quite difficult it can be quite difficult and in a couple of cases she said it had been a disaster I didn't go into what a disaster meant but I'm discussing these things with you I'm just bringing things up because of the Because these are problems we have to solve which there are not answers to. Why would that be the case? We can speculate but it's not very clear that it's the case all the time or only some of the times and so forth. Now let me say that I think if what a person is looking for in this intervention. Now, I'm calling it an intervention, it's more than just an intervention, but in a way, if you start practicing Buddhism, it's an intervention in your life.

[08:01]

Suddenly you're looking at things differently, you're changing your habit, you're changing your schedule, etc. It's a kind of intervention. And when you decide, geez, I need to see a therapist, or I'd like to, or whatever, this is an intervention. Something comes into your life in the form of a person, or so forth. Now, when that when what the person really needs is a relationship of intimacy and support that's not a peer relationship. In other words, not just your buddy or something like that. When a person needs a relation of intimacy, considerable contact and support, they definitely should practice with it. They should see a therapist and not a Buddhist teacher. A Buddhist teacher should not give, not only cannot usually give that kind of attention to an individual practitioner, but in general should not. The teacher should leave, particularly in Zen anyway, and I think in most schools.

[09:06]

In fact, it's a little funny when too much of a personal interaction starts developing with a teacher. It's difficult for the other students and it allows the person's ego... and social needs to substitute for practicing. The teacher's job, and I think I'm speaking largely for Buddhism, but you have to remember that I only really know Zen moderately well. I don't know any other Buddhist teaching from the inside. So, by necessity, and through my experience, I'm speaking primarily about Zen and the way I practice Zen, and Sukhirashi did. I do think much of what I'm saying applies to Buddhist teachers in general and Buddhist practice in general, is the Buddhist teacher wants to let the practice itself mostly evolve through the practitioner rather than helping the practitioner.

[10:14]

And you help the practitioner by being present by being available at some times, by setting up the practice, but mostly you want to leave the practitioner on their own to find their own way in the practice, in their own pace, etc. And to kind of find a way to go through things on their own. someone brought up, I just remembered, a question about a kind of experience in meditation of aloneness the other day, and I meant to respond to it, and I didn't get to it. Not loneliness, but aloneness. And there's definitely a clear time when you practice that you feel completely alone. This is a natural part of practice. And... And so it means, I think, that a person who's practicing needs... A person who's deciding to practice, it requires certain capacities or qualities in the person.

[11:37]

One is they have to have a significant amount of will and intentions. And my experience has been, if a person is kind of moderately disturbed and neurotic and confused, but doesn't have much willpower or intention, practice won't help them much. A person can be quite deeply disturbed, but if they have will and intention and a view to working through this that relates to practice, they can be quite disturbed, quite schizophrenic even, and and use practice to help them. So I think if I'm faced with somebody who's asking me something or I'm thinking about it with people, I have to look at what kind of will and intention they have and what kind of patience they have. Because practice takes a long time and there's not much day-to-day support unless you get the support from the experience of meditation itself.

[12:40]

Now, some people find meditation itself very supportive. And so these are decisions which are, you know, it's not clear, but we can make some basic decisions. Now, I'm calling Buddhism a mindology and not a psychology for a number of reasons. One, I think it is a mindology and not a psychology, and I don't think there's any psyche in Buddhism. But then Buddhism doesn't have things like we have child psychology. There's no child-karmology. Buddhism doesn't have any... There's nothing in Buddhism about how you relate to a child's stages of development. I mean, there's a little bit, but basically it's in terms of their spiritual development and not in terms of their development as social beings and so forth. So there's clearly things that Buddhism has not concerned themselves with that psychology does. Now, the practitioners who are practicing with me who've decided on their own to not relate to people as a therapist are people who are being seen themselves as teachers or are practicing in a way that they're likely going to be teachers.

[14:04]

So they have discovered, like at Crestone, if new people arrive and two or three of them have... kind of problems and there have been a number of people have come with problems one from a car accident some brain damage and from some crisis in their life and so forth if they start to turn to this person as a therapist and relating to the therapist that person has not been able to find a way to help them through practice and a kind of emotional connection starts. And then when they say something like, well, maybe if you went and sat and you did this and that, they suddenly feel maybe this person's being hostile or they're rejecting me or they're not being sympathetic. Or if you say, come on, just don't baby yourself, you know, or something. You know, it's not clear, you know, what... So... Now, the people who practice with me in Europe are mostly not living in our centers, by far the majority.

[15:17]

And they're therapists, they continue as therapists and so forth. And I have done two teachings each year, primarily for therapists. One... has been, as I mentioned the other day at the forum, a group of Austrian psychotherapists who have decided to limit it to 20 or 25 people and have the same group every year. So we developed a language together. And it was very helpful for me, for sure, and I think helpful for them. The other is a group of psychotherapists in Kassel, who it's a general public seminar, but we aim it towards psychotherapeutic themes. And those people... mostly they're continuing in psychotherapy and they find it useful, because they're all practitioners, to bring greater clarity from their practice into how they relate to their clients and so forth. But if you're becoming a Buddhist teacher,

[16:22]

My impression and belief and experience is that it's best to stop being a therapist until you really are very clear about how you're a Buddhist teacher. And then you could start doing therapy again. I think that would be... That's my impression. I'm happy to hear other people's views. Now, if a person's interest is more philosophical... how does the world exist, how do I exist, etc. Clearly, I think that they should practice... I would tend to recommend they practice Buddhism and not necessarily see a therapist. I mean, they can if they want. I'm not saying they shouldn't. But I'm trying to look at what I feel are responsible decisions. Now, I think we tend to think that... Freud discovered the unconscious and the unconscious has always been present.

[17:27]

I don't think so. I think the unconscious is a modern creation. I would say it comes with industrial society. In other words, we've always had a degree of an unconscious dynamic in how we function. But the degree to which unconscious is an important part of our life, oppressing... invisible part of our life sometimes, I think is modern. And I think it comes with poor old Descartes, who gets the blame for everything, but I think it comes with Descartes and the idea, not from him, but at a time when it occurred, afterwards with industrialization and so forth, is we start to have an industrialized urban society where it's important that a person be productive, a person function well, and be in control of themselves.

[18:29]

And democracy emphasizes you have to control yourself. No one's going to control you if you get out of line. I mean, if it's a monarchy, off with his head. And in a certain way, as I said the other day, a monarchy gives you freedom which democracy doesn't. because you can do anything you want as long as you don't push it to the extent that they take your head off. But in a democracy, we are always trying to keep ourselves in line, behave a certain way, etc. I mean, you look at these paintings from the Middle Ages of Bruegel. It looks wild out there. I mean, nobody would do a painting of, you know, unless you were living in a drug-ridden ghetto or something, a painting anything like that expressing something about society and so forth. And I think that the... So the way I would say it is that we know from experience that our existence is bigger than ourself.

[19:42]

I think almost everyone knows that. that our existence, the whole of our existence, doesn't fit into our self. That's what the unconscious is about, that some things don't fit into the self. And I think the more we try to have a productive, efficient self, the more it doesn't fit in. Because lots of things are not productive. And if you imagine the self as a boat, you start piling a lot of things in the boat, the boat's either going to sink, which some people do, they have so-called nervous breakdowns or something like that, And sometimes, mostly it falls overboard. And then it begins to fill up the bay and you get stuck in the mud of all this stuff that's fallen overboard. So you have to deepen the channel or you have to widen the boat, the capacity of the boat or something like that. Now, So the unconscious is a dynamic of our Western society, I think.

[20:51]

Again, there's no sharp line where there is no unconscious, but it functioned as a dynamic within the person's own functioning differently. It functions as a dynamic in our society in a way that Buddhism has never had an experience with. And much of Western philosophy has never had an experience with until recently. So psychology, in a way, develops... when the psyche becomes dysfunctional in a way and we need the input of something other than philosophy. Now let's look at the word self itself. The word self, I mean, as has been pointed out, no one referred to themself as a self until fairly recently. they'd refer themselves as a soul. There's so many souls in this room, or something like that. And in Europe you still have people talking that way, more than in America, I'll tell you. And Plato would think that there's no need to understand the self.

[22:02]

You should understand the way the world is. I mean, he wouldn't even have a clear idea of a self. You should understand the way the world is and the order of the world orders you. If you think of yourself as a soul, you're thinking about yourself as connected to God. So if you understand God, you understand the soul. But the self for us is cut off from the cosmos and cut off from God. For the most part, we think of the self as something separate from the world and separate from God. It belongs to us. And the word self means one's own. One's own blood, one's own problems, one's own etc. So, self has come to mean for us what's most essential in what is one's own. And it also has come to mean more and more how we control ourselves.

[23:30]

It's an instrument of control. It's most characteristically used in a phrase like self-control. And often the self is seen as having no content, it's the observer which controls the content, which is getting out of hand, or something like that. I think there's a reason why I'm talking about these things. I'm partly trying to put it in a contemporary situation because I'm trying to emphasize this is not an age-old problem, this is a contemporary problem, which we are the contemporaries who are trying to experience, know, solve, relate to, etc. Though in a lot of ways we can't look back for answers, we have to look into, oh my goodness, ourselves, for answers. And because we think that the self is cut off from the world, one of the main ways the self relates to the world is through self-expression.

[24:50]

So art and some of the things you're doing in the other seminars and modeling and things has become extremely important in a way it was not in the past. Art is something craftsmen did, you know. But now the artist and self-expression and to express yourself has an entirely new importance in our culture. And we... And this idea of the self is cut off from the world and from divinity also gives us the sense that each of us is unique in some particular way. Now, in most other societies, there'd be a general assumption we're pretty much like everyone else. And even in being different, we're like everyone else. But we think in being different, we're different. And there's an emphasis toward individuation in a way that's specific to us.

[25:52]

We're some unique kind of being. Well, I mean, you know, both are true. And we have to look at the dynamic of what's... I mean, if you look at it as, for instance, the word for self and identity in Chinese means a share of the whole. Now, when you think of yourself as a share, as a part of a whole, a share, your share of a whole, that's a very different way of thinking of yourself. The word for body means that. Now, our word body goes back, it seems, it's not clear, the etymology, it goes back to brewing vat, like where you make beer. We're kind of brewing that, where things brew, but it's still separate from the world. So our sense of self and body emphasizes our separateness and not our connectedness and not the way in which we're part of the whole.

[26:55]

So I guess what I'm saying here is that if someone comes to me and they clearly see themselves as a self, as something unique and particular in this world, and they... feel in some kind of isolation from the world and so forth, I would probably tell them to work on your problems, you ought to do therapy. But if they came to me and they said, you know, I have these various problems, but basically I think if I understood the world better, if I understood how things worked better, I would feel better. Now that's quite a different approach. The two people might have the same problem, but one gives you a ground to work differently. than the other. And if a person is obstinate in not seeing that the way the world is is the way they are, no matter what they see from meditation or Buddhist practice that the world and they are interrelated profoundly, it doesn't make any difference to them.

[28:05]

Because they're very involved in their self and how their self functions. And often they have so much pain they can't be involved with much else. But again, as I made this distinction between inward consciousness and outward and interior consciousness yesterday, much of what we think of as the self and as our private individual, a lot of the problems is we constantly need confirmation from the outside world. but confirmation through affection, through people liking us and things like that, not in the sense that, well, there's problems out there and there's problems in here, or there's the same kind of thing out there as in here. Our inward sense of self needs a confirmation that's different than if you think of yourself as Buddha nature or something like that. But, again, clearly if I... If someone comes to me and they're miserable... First of all, if they need a lot of contact with somebody, I would suggest they see a therapist.

[29:17]

If they are miserable, ambivalent, conflicted, etc., they don't feel that they have a consistent way of viewing the world, I would say they should see a therapist. In the sense that Freud... thought that dreaming and the unconscious were functions to give us one story. The dreaming was always trying to integrate our story. And the unconscious is always relating to what story we have and integrating in one story. If a person has a strong feeling like that, they should probably do therapy. Are these distinctions too fine or are they making sense? Because I think at this point it's a craft of whether one uses therapy or whether one uses Buddhism or whether one uses both. If you're trying to integrate your story into yourself, I would say you should do therapy.

[30:21]

If you're trying to widen your experience of yourself, if that's the sense, you want to widen your experience, and you're not so involved in self-control, then probably Buddhist practice is a good thing to do. So, from this point of view, we have where the person's at, what their views are, in that sense, and what their problems are. We have to decide whether it's therapy or it's practice. Now, one reason I also don't say Buddhist psychology is Buddhist psychology implies that you can do Buddhist psychology instead of doing Western psychology. That Buddhism has a psychology that's equal to Western psychology, it just isn't true. Buddhism really has no psychology in the sense we're talking about that Western psychology is a psychology.

[31:23]

So I think it's much better to point out that this Buddhism has a mindology a study of how the mind works, because then we can see what the possible relationship is. We don't say, oh, do Buddhist psychology instead of doing Western psychology. So if you say, oh, do Buddhist mindology instead of doing Western psychology, then you can say, well, I'm making a choice between a psychological approach and a mindological approach. Sorry, I've made up this word, mindology. There are things in Buddhism, in Zen practice and in Buddhism, which can be very useful to somebody who is trying to work with themselves psychologically or trying to work with a therapist.

[32:37]

Now, the most basic would be mindfulness. The practice of mindfulness helps you just change the palpability of awareness and consciousness. And the more palpable mindfulness is, the more you can experience what you're experiencing. Consciousness itself, in a sense we could say, becomes denser. not denser in the sense of stupider, but denser in the sense of more palpable. And our experience has a more substantial feeling, a more grounded feeling. It feels like it belongs to us more. And related to mindfulness, is the practice that's particular to Zen of holding something in view, which is a form of mindfulness, but it's in particular, if, say that you have a particular problem that you're working on, or the therapist suggests you work on something, if you hold it in view, repeatedly keep it in your presence, intentionally keep it in your presence, the world starts to work on the problem.

[34:04]

The world starts to show you things about this. Little things come up that you start to notice that, oh, that relates to this. If you hold it in view, it attracts solutions. Does that make sense? If you have any questions of what I mean by, like, hold in view, you can please ask. Another is... And in this, now mindfulness, you can suggest mindfulness and holding in view to, if you're a therapist, or if you're practicing on your own, I mean, trying to study yourself, this can be done without doing meditation. Mindfulness and holding in view are not tied necessarily to meditation. But if you want to... Another practice that helps you integrate your story... is the first couple years, as I've mentioned, of doing zazen. Because what happens if you, particularly in Zen, if you have an unstructured... Now, this is particularly Zen.

[35:12]

It wouldn't perhaps be so true of Vipassana meditation. It wouldn't be so true of Tibetan meditation, probably, unless you did it for extended periods. The doing of meditation for an extended period of time in a way that's unstructured... I mean, the structure is in the posture. but you decide to sit still. Now, let me say also, sitting still and not moving for 20 minutes or 30 minutes, and really deciding you won't move, opens one dramatically to the contents of the unconscious. Because basically what you've done, what you do is you break the adhesive connection between thought and action. When you deeply know, you can think something without acting on it. you allow a lot of things to come up you wouldn't when you still fear you might act on it. For instance, say you have some compulsive thought, you know, about killing somebody or something. It's scary because you think you might do it. But if you know deeply down, you can think anything without acting on it.

[36:18]

You can have any thoughts you want. Oh, machine gun, the bloody lot. I mean... And even if you keep thinking compulsively, where's that machine gun? So sitting itself in that one learns, not just sitting when you want to or sitting when it's comfortable or something like that, but sitting as a discipline where you don't move. You learn not to move and you learn not to scratch. Because learning, if you scratch and fidget, you haven't broken the connection. And it's ego, mostly. It's not ants, it's ego. You feel that little thing in your ear crawling around? It's probably ego. I'll make him think I'm an ant. So you scratch and there's nothing there.

[37:20]

Oh, I'll fool him, I'm now down here. When you practice for a specific length of time, on a regular basis... Now, I sometimes suggest to the therapist is they ought to have their waiting room a little zendo. So it would be expected that you'd come 40 minutes early and sit for 40 minutes before your hour. And if some would do it, it'd be quite interesting. You'd step in... But I think you'd find quite a different person came into you to do therapy with you. Then you'd have the therapist, sometimes you'd have two doors. One you come in, one you go out, so you don't see the people. If you're weeping, you can go out privately. You have another zendo out for the going out people and a zendo for the coming in people. Um... If you learn to sit, if a client did learn to sit on a regular basis for a particular length of time, not only do you break the adhesive connection between thought and action and open yourself to things, the kind of mind that's present in zazen is neither a waking mind nor a sleeping mind.

[38:52]

and it has a different liquidity, a different viscosity, a different texture. And the things that come into it get changed by coming into it. It's like a different soup stock. And then you put a carrot in this soup stock and it'll be different than you put a carrot in ordinary consciousness. Now what happens when you review your story in consciousness, And, of course, Freud was using meditative techniques. When he had people free associate, and we had people lie back on a couch, basically it's a meditative technique. And there's some people trying to figure out where do you learn these meditative techniques. But free association is not very different from uncorrected mind. You allow things to come up without interfering with them. As we say, don't invite your thoughts to tea or to a cappuccino or, you know, whatever. So the meditator lets things come up, and they're not only coming up... Now, let me say again, consciousness controls how they come up and keeps some things unconscious.

[40:09]

Consciousness is constantly editing. The job of consciousness is to edit so that you can function. We could also call zazen mind an unediting consciousness, And more and more, as you get an experience of it, you less and less edit, and more and more stuff comes up. And as it comes up, it actually goes back into your storehouse consciousness. I think that most of us would accept there's something like that. In new patterns, the connections are usually, I think, more accurate and more thorough when they pass through this unedited consciousness. So you're actually... changing your karma. As I say, instead of being cooked by your karma, you're cooking your karma. Because zazen mind is a kind of cooking process that deals with your karma, your associations and memories in a different way. So that's another practice that if a person is doing therapy,

[41:21]

the therapist can assume that's going on, if they're meditating. Another is, and this would be a very specific meditative skill, but very useful in psychology or in one's own psychological exploration of oneself, because I think any meditator in the West first couple years at least of meditation are basically a psychological process. You're working with your story, you're working with your views, your desires, your attachments, your habits and so forth. And so, whether you're seeing a therapist or not, you're involved in a psychological process and you develop a very useful tool, you can develop a very useful tool, which is following thoughts, moods, feelings to their source. And it's a little bit like you get, as you develop the skill of non-interfering observing consciousness, you begin to be able to trace a thought to its source.

[42:32]

You think something and it's bothering you, where the hell did that thought come from? And you go, oh, there, I saw it came up when I thought of that person in a green jacket. Then you can say, well, why a green jacket? And then that can lead to Why did seeing a person in a green jacket bring up this thought? Something like that. Or you can follow not just a specific thought, but a mood. You have a certain mood. You can feel this kind of sadness has started or some maybe elation or something. And you can say, when did that start? And when it started is we could call the true present. Generally, you're in the midst of stuff happening. long after it was initiated in your body and in the way you function. And the more you can be present when things are initiated, the more you're in a kind of true presence for you as a person.

[43:35]

And this also has a... Other benefits, I mean, you're a meditator, it's not just psychological benefits. For example, you get so you can actually tell when a cold is starting or a headache is starting or when you first are, I mean, you can tell, if I'm not careful now, I will start feeling flu symptoms in two days. And you can feel that change and you get to know it and you can start acting, you know, the image I have is you're a train station and the flu train is on the track down there. And you start changing yourself so that two days later when it comes through the station, go on by no passengers, just kidding. You wave it through, you know, it goes right on through. And you may have a moment of feeling a little sick, but mostly you don't get sick. Mostly you don't get headaches. Mostly you don't get depressed. And it's not just because you've understood where depression... what's depressing you, but you've understood the chemical moment when depression starts, and you can start participating in that state of mind that supports.

[44:48]

We say you have a sinking mind or a rising mind. You can feel something happening. You can feel your mind start to sink. And if you're not present, it just starts going down. But at that point, you can say, whoops. And you can do various things. You can increase your heat, you know. you can do various things that intentionally give you more of a rising mind. Now this isn't the same as solving the problem, but it's altering the problem. Now here we're talking about Buddhism more as a mindology than a psychology, because here you're using how the mind functions to relate to your problems, or relate to your state of mind, relate to your moods and so forth. No, another practice that can be useful is... When am I supposed to stop? Eleven.

[45:49]

Eleven fifteen? Eleven. Nine thirty to eleven. Okay. And so do we need a break before I stop at eleven? No? Okay. Without moving, don't worry. Um... is to clear the psychic space around you. Now, what I mean by that is that if you're a practitioner and you have a... you want to work with yourself psychologically, you can sit down, and when you're sitting, you can see... And this sometimes comes up when you... try to explore your body or follow thoughts to their source, you find one side is more open than the other side. Or one side of your body feels darker. So then you say, now why is this side darker?

[46:54]

I can't penetrate. And why is this side more open? And you can begin to try. You can see how you penetrate this side. and then you can move to try to penetrate this side equally. And you can do something quite interesting. You can switch sides. You can say to yourself, okay, I can't get rid of the dark side, but I'll put it on the right side instead of the left side. And actually you can switch it, and then the right side becomes hard to penetrate. This is quite interesting that we can do that. You can't get rid of it, but you can switch it. And sometimes you can't switch it, you know. So you can begin to... But then you can extend that feeling, and when you sit, you'll feel, oh, it's darker on my left side than my right side, or vice versa. And then you can start saying, who's on my left side? You can say, where's my mother? And you'll find your mother is somewhere in the psychic space around you. Or you can find, where's my father?

[47:57]

Or where's my spouse? Or where's my brother? Or where is an angel? Where is... And you begin to feel that actually this psychic space around you is populated. And you can ask yourself similar questions like, where's my mother in my body? Where's my father in my body? In psychology, we're often working with our parents, and you can find that your father has rented your shoulder, and your mother has a lease on your hip. And some school teacher still is hanging on to your mid-back. And they're at different periods. One started when you're 14 and one started when you're 8 and so forth. And you can begin to see certain ages in which things have, you know, and you can have a meeting and ask all these renters and leasers to kind of release themselves.

[49:02]

And actually something like that, you need some kind of image or metaphor like that. You can start working with energies that are around you. And from the point of view of a practitioner, clearing the psychic space around you opens you to bodhisattva presences, opens you to more how you'd really like human beings to be and not how you're stuck in how human beings have been to you. Is this making sense? So I think meditation and mindfulness open up a range of psychological techniques to the therapist or to the individual working with themselves psychologically, which some of them are not available in traditional psychology. But they work within psychology and they're basically psychological practices. Now, this again wouldn't be emphasised in Asia much because the dynamic of the self is different than for us.

[50:07]

Buddhism has not been developed to deal with these things. But Buddhism, being a wide-ranging capacity, can be used to work with yourself psychologically. Holding in view mindfulness, the field of zazen, clearing the psychic space, sitting still and breaking the adhesive connection with thought and action, between thought and action. That's something, that's enough for now. Okay, now maybe I should define mind and how mind is understood in Buddhism and why I think that this would call this a mindology.

[51:09]

I would say there are eight main capacities of mind. And this is a rather loose definition related to specific things in specific terms in Buddhism, but for the most part, definitions that I find useful in practice. One is that mind has no form, no color, no shape. Mind also has the capacity to have direction. You can have intention. I can direct my looking. I can direct my mind in this particular direction. Mind also has a field quality. You can have a field of mind, of awareness, and you can begin to experience a lot of these things if you're a practitioner, or anyone can.

[52:30]

You can begin to practice with these things physiologically, for example, if you move your sense of seeing from the front of your eyeballs, if this makes any sense, to the back of your eyeballs, and in martial arts they speak about this, having soft eyes, so that you see a field. So if I look at you more from the feeling of being from the front of my eyeballs, I'm seeing each of you specifically, and it tends to make me think about you. But if I change and I have this soft eyes feeling from the back of my eyes, then I just see the field of view and I don't think about you. Now, if we want to say, for a Buddhist practitioner, the basic posture of seeing is soft eyes. In computer language, that would be the default position. Sorry, I'm not a cognitive therapist, but, you know, that would be home base if you're a baseball player.

[53:38]

Somehow, we don't mind saying home base, but we have a little problem saying default position. We're not ready to accept you. And you can practice this different sense of mind, the field of mind versus the particularity of mind, by shifting from soft eyes to front to soft to front. And that shift begins to teach you something about different qualities of mind. But you have the physiological clue that lets you experience this, lets you trigger this So mind has a field quality, it has direction, it has structure. And as I've said earlier in this conference to some of you, when you teach an infant their ABCs,

[54:49]

or to count, one, two, three, four, five, basically you're developing the structure of the mind. You're developing the ability to say here and there, this object, this object and this object. So that's one, two, three. And then as you learn language, learning specific words continues to structure the mind so that you can hold distinction. Some of us have a greater ability. Shakespeare had a vocabulary of 30 or 40,000 words, which means he could keep in mind that many distinctions. Most of us can't. You could teach somebody 30,000 words, but they'd soon only know 8,050 or something like that, because the ability to use a word is the ability to retain a distinction. And that's a kind of mental structure.

[55:52]

And that can be taught. And Asian cultures teach it by making a very complex language intentionally to train the mind to develop the structure of the mind. And the great tendency in the West, because we do not understand that, is to simplify the mind, simplify the language, simplify... They're now trying to simplify German. reduce the places where you put commas and things like that. And it's okay, but you simplify the mind when you simplify the activity of the mind. Now, you can teach structure and you can also teach in-betweenness. For example, again, excuse me for repeating myself from the other day, we can teach someone, and I play with kids this way, to count their fingers, but you can also ask them to count the spaces.

[56:55]

And generally we only ask kids to count their fingers, or count this, this. We don't ask them to count that. By not asking them to notice this, they are not learning... an essential part of how the mind is structured. I saw a movie once, a video once, actually, of an Australian Aboriginal girl. Suppose I should tell the story in Australian, see if it sounds right to any of you, or it's a myth. They had a little black Australian Aboriginal girl, and a little, you know, classic blonde white girl. And they were, I don't know how old, seven or eight years old. And somebody had arranged on a stump... about 55 or 100 things, all kinds of things, a piece of bone, a piece of feather, stones, all kinds of stuff, right? And the two little girls were brought up to it, and they looked at it, and then they just pushed it off. Then they said to the little white girl, put them back in the order they were.

[57:59]

The white girl, she got about three things up there, had no idea what went. They asked the little black girl, and she went, boom, [...] and they take them up. It was exactly as it had been. If this is the case, and I saw it in this movie, it's a very different kind of mind. They're taught something different than we're taught from infancy. You look at something and you see it differently, and you see the relationships, not the things so much, and you remember the relationships rather than remember the things. If you try to remember the things, you kind of... But if you see the pattern, then you can do something different. So I tell kids, okay, you've counted my fingers, count the spaces. And they say, well, there's one, two, three, four. I say, how come there's only four spaces and five fingers? Is that the colon? No. So it's actually rather perplexing at first when you ask a question, which it's a stupid question, but, you know, you ask a stupid question, why are there four spaces and five spaces?

[59:12]

Oh, no, there's a fifth, there's five spaces, but then you have the problem of six spaces or seven. And then actually the space isn't countable. It's accountable, but not countable. And our culture doesn't pay much attention to in-betweenness. while, for instance, Japanese culture has a specific word for it called ma. And ma means something like Right now, if I look at you, not as individuals, but relationships, right? And I see you as relationships. Let's just imagine strings. There's a string connecting you, and there's a string connecting you, and a string connecting you, and a string connecting you to everybody. There's a mass of strings here, right? Because if each of you has a string to each other person, it's a kind of fabric of strings. But there's actually a pattern to that fabric. And when you see how that pattern is, it's called the ma point. And you can grab hold of that and pull the whole situation.

[60:15]

So every situation in this way of thinking of in-betweenness has a ma point where all the relationships connect. And if you know that, you can relate to the situation through the ma point rather than through the particularities, which is something different than relating to the field. Are you following me? In other words, if we divide the world up differently, you end up with a different world. So if you divide the world up noticing the relationships as well as the things, and then the pattern of the relationships, and not just the pattern of the things, you end up with a different world and a different energy, a different dynamic of functioning in it. So the fact that mind has structure, and that structure is malleable, and that structure can be developed, has a lot to do with the practitioner and how Buddhism is different from psychology.

[61:19]

These are not something that's necessarily of concern to a psychologist. It could be. When a psychologist, a research psychologist, is studying how the mind functions, then he's doing something very similar to Buddhism. in that sense, then that psychologist I would call a mindologist, because he's not dealing with the psyche, he's dealing with the structure of the mind. Okay, so mind has direction, a field quality, it has structure, it also is own-organising. In other words, it tends to be own-organising, I'll come back to this, and it also can be self-observing. So part of the capacity of the mind as structure is it can create, it has an own organizing quality, and it has a self-observing, it can have a self-observing dimension.

[62:22]

And mind can be concentrated on itself. It's called samadhi. So mind can be, that's one of the capacities of mind, And just as mind can have structure, it can be free of structure. But that's back to no form, no color, no shape, etc. Mind, not only is it interesting that it has structure, and that structure is not given, that structure is developed. And it's not so consciously developed by us, but it is developed. And when you practice meditation, you are more consciously developing the structure of mind. and you're more consciously understanding how your mind functions, because you see the structure of it. And the vijnanas, the eight vijnanas with Manas here, etc., if you see as an hourglass, is just a picture of how the mind functions through the senses to the storehouse consciousness.

[63:32]

And this narrow opening is Manas, which is the capacity for structural self, and that can be widened. You can open up the transference from the storehouse into consciousness and awareness. But that's an understanding of the structure of the mind. And is that eight? Seven? Probably. Yeah, probably, I left one out. A mind can be free of structure, has direction, has a field quality, it has own organizing capacity, it has self-observing capacity, can be free of... Okay. Yeah, there are two, really. Okay. Now... It also has... OK, now let's go to the next step.

[64:34]

Mind has three conditions. Is this interesting to you? Yes, very. Mind is such a complex... Well, but you are your mind, it's just we don't study it. But obviously, if I can say here and there, they're structured. But the big thing is, is not just to notice their structure, but to realize you can participate in it. That's what's really dramatic. Of course, absolutely. When you said, you said it's structured, you explained how the structure happens, and you also said it can be free of structure. Can we remove structure? Yes. Can we only recreate structure? Can you destroy spontaneity? Because all the therapists are going to listen to this tape later and we're just the practitioners in here. I had this question.

[65:37]

You mentioned that the mind can be structured or it can be free of structure. I wondered if we can actually remove the structure. Samadhi, that mind can be concentrated on itself and not on a particular object or structure, is the step toward freeing yourself from structure. That's one way to look at it. Okay, there are three conditions of mind. I'm calling conditions, I don't know what to call them, let's call them conditions of mind. One is an initial state of mind, we call original mind. Mind before thought arises, mind before percepts. We call it primordial mind or original mind, and it is not only initial mind, it's initializing mind, because it's where your basic views rest. Okay, so that's original mind or initiating mind.

[66:40]

Then there's everyday mind. And everyday mind is just everyday mind. But everyday mind can be governed either by self or by Buddha nature. So when Buddhism talks about Zen is nothing but everyday mind, they mean everyday mind is the field of Buddha nature. They don't mean everyday mind is the field of the self cut off from order or divinity. and then there's resultant mind or generated mind. These are very definite practice things. Is that through practice you then generate a mind which is inclusive and which you know how to maintain, which becomes your default position, which becomes home base from which you go into everyday mind or into activity etc. And that's not quite the same as original mind, because we all have original mind, but we don't all have a generated resultant mind, that we learn to create a mind that we experience that's free of structure.

[67:52]

Now, this isn't so important now, all in all, I'm just telling you the Buddhist view of mind. Okay, there's those three conditions. Now, I'd like to give you... Let's see, how many? I think five definitions of mind. Or qualities of mind. The other is capacities. How the word mind is used in the West? Because there's no such word as mind in Buddhism. And then when you try to use geist, for instance, in German, it's not the same as mind. Mind is the most useful word we have. We're lucked out in English to have the word mind, because it covers a lot of territory in Buddhism fairly accurately.

[68:56]

The word mindfulness is a fairly accurate description of what we mean by the practice of mindfulness, whether it's used in Sanskrit or some other Buddhist language. Okay, but still we're developing mind as a technical term, a technical Buddhist term in English. Now, how is mind used in English as a technical Buddhist term? It's used, first of all, particularly if you're practising, to mean the whole of being, that everything you do, think, see, has the quality of mind. There's nothing that aliveness isn't involved with mind. In that sense, if I look at a tree, it's not a tree, it's my mind seeing the tree. That there's nothing that you study, your psychology, your unconscious, it's all in this larger framework of mind. That's one definition of mind, as an all-inclusive term for being alive, something like that.

[70:02]

Then we have a small mind or usual minds. I don't mean small... Let's not say small mind, let's say particular minds. Oh, I know... What I left out in that list is mind can have, in the capacities of mind, mind can have various bases. In other words, it can have a base... One of its bases can be the sense of hearing. One of its bases can be the sense of smell. One of its bases could be bliss. One of its bases could be just looking at you. So mind can have various bases. So in other words, mind is a plurality. It has the quality of simultaneity, plurality, and it can have different bases. So that's important because we don't have one controlling self from a Buddhist point of view or one mind to control.

[71:05]

You are open to a plurality. So the whole problem of ambivalence would be different in Buddhism because you'd expect to be ambivalent. You'd expect that this... If you see mind all on one level, you say... Well, sometimes I feel this way and sometimes I feel that way and I can't make any decisions or something, right? But if you see that with this kind of mind you have this way of viewing things and with this kind of mind you have this way of viewing things, then they're not in conflict. You switch to this mind and you can see you feel this way and you switch to this mind. I mean, for instance, say that you have found that you have cancer or something in you. You can be in one mind where you're terrified and you're suffering, etc. You can switch to another mind where you feel, this is the way it is and I'm accepting it and I feel quite clear about it. And that's not in conflict, that's just a different view. And then, instead of trying to heal your suffering, you can let your suffering be on that level and move to the level where you feel healed.

[72:12]

You don't have to heal because everything's fine. It changes the view of what healing is. And in that way you can keep the suffering as a resource to draw on, like a kind of fire or anger, but you don't have to remove the fire, but you don't always have to sit on the fire. When you begin to see mind as a multiplicity and a simultaneity, then it changes how you work with the mind. OK, back to particular minds. Particular minds are homeostatic, means they tend to stay in place, and they're own-organising or self-organising. I try to separate self-observing from own-organising, so I use my own term, own-organising. co-constructing, you can say, or something.

[73:13]

Okay. Now, homeostatic is a very simple idea to understand. When you wake up in the morning and the alarm clock goes off and you don't want to wake up, it's clearly your mind is homeostatic. It wants to continue staying asleep. Right? When you're doing zazen and you don't want the bell to ring, it's clear you're in zazen mind because you don't want the bell to ring. You want zazen mind to continue. Okay? If you're just waiting for the bell to ring, you're no longer in Saravan mind. So whatever mind we're in has a tendency to persist. And that mind not only has a tendency to persist, it organizes things in its own terms. So, again, when your sleeping mind... Let's just try to take some simple examples.

[74:16]

I'm dealing primarily here with oversimplifications because we only have an hour, an hour and a half or so. Let's deal with what Freud thought his interpretation of the dreams was his greatest book, most significant contribution, I believe he thought. So anyway, it's a fruitful thing for us to study, and in Buddhism the basic things to study is what your mind is, what your body is, what your sleeping and waking and conscious states are, and things like that. That is the subject of study if you want to understand how we exist. So I think Buddhism is not that interested in dreaming mind, but it's one of the most apparent alternative minds for us, so it's useful for us to use it as an example. I don't mean Buddhism isn't interested in dreaming mind, but it's one of many minds.

[75:16]

When you want to stay asleep, this is its homeostatic quality. But when you want to stay asleep because you want to continue to dream, this is its own organising quality. Because you know that dreaming mind organizes things into dreams. And as soon as you wake up, that dream is gone, because waking mind starts organizing your day. You'll need a cup of coffee, you're going to go to work, etc. So waking mind has been trained and has a tendency to organize your day. Dreaming mind organizes dreams and images and emotions and all kinds of things. So mind has these two qualities. It tends to persist and it tends to organize the contents that are in it. according to that kind of viscosity, that kind of fluid, that kind of content, the characteristic of that mind. Does that make sense? Okay. So mind... So that's, we could say, small mind, or no, particular minds, because you could have a bliss mind.

[76:29]

You can have all kinds of different minds. This is similar to... It can have various bases. And then you can have so-called big mind, which is mind without structure or awareness, or mind that you begin to taste through the dharmakaya, through zazen. And big mind can have various qualities, but one of the qualities is, for instance, when you're sitting meditation and you can't find your hands. Where the heck are my hands? And then your thumbs aren't together and they feel like they're about a mile apart. It's like two 747s trying to find each other. Oh, there he is. Well, you're actually experiencing big mind, which doesn't have the usual sense of structure, or you don't know where your boundaries are. You know? This is big mind. I mean, it's actually a taste of the Dharmakaya. It's not, you know, Dharmakaya is the realization of the Buddha.

[77:32]

No, it's something that we experience. It's just when you develop it more and can fully identify with it, then it's a much more bodhisattva quality, capacity. And last and also least, I've only got four here, though, is monkey mind. Monkey mind is mind which doesn't have much homeostatic quality, doesn't have much, and it tends to just, you know, disorganized, distracted, etc., which we have quite a bit. But we could call that one of the... part of the definition of mind within Buddhism, which would be a particular kind of mind, big mind, mind as being itself, and mind as... as distracted.

[78:35]

So that kind of covers the way the word mind is used in Buddhism. Can I ask a question? Sure. This thing isn't helpful, is it? It will be to future generations. Can you explain where thinking fits into all of this? For instance, the kind of thought that might go into solving a mathematical problem or creating a piece of music or a chess problem, rational thoughts such as that? Well, I haven't dealt with any of the contents of mind. We've talked in other seminars about how awareness... can have the content of intention and dream images, but it couldn't have the content of logic. There may be some kind of subtle logic, or it may be a person who's an idiot savant who can solve, you know, tell you that in the year 2400 and something it'll be a Thursday, you know.

[79:47]

That kind of calculation may be done So I can't strictly say that awareness doesn't have any calculating logic, but it's not a logic we can follow. So there are different contents to different minds and different memory bases to different minds. Conscious thinking of which we're aware is where logic occurs, the logic that we can be aware of. And I think that... that this is also a social construct. In other words, there's a basic truth to logic. But, for instance, the Greeks, no. The Chinese and the Egyptians, I believe, way before Pythagoras, knew what a right triangle was. And they knew a right triangle, that the hypotenuse was the sum of the squares of the other two sides. But they didn't know how to prove it.

[80:48]

They didn't know it was true for all right angles. Pythagoras was the first person to know it was true for all right angles. And Pythagoras is one of the people who developed the idea of proving something with absolute certainty through logic. Now that is a capacity that all societies don't have. Our society developed it. And so the kind of rigorous logic required of mathematical proof is the development of the conscious mind. What a cultural development. And that's where we do our logical thinking. But we do... There's many kinds of thinking, like Dogen spoke of. Think non-thinking. There's thinking that goes on that doesn't follow language-based thinking. But if we're talking about language or mathematical-based thinking, that occurs in the conscious mind. It doesn't occur in the bliss mind. This is interesting, I think.

[82:01]

Do you think it's interesting? I mean, I'm telling you these things to the extent because I've been so interested that I'm kind of trying to... So, naturally, I find it interesting, but I hope you do, too. Because it is us. This is us, you know. And we're starting out with very simple things, like the mind has structure. What does that mean? Well, that has a lot of implication. Yes. On the last thing, five, I said there were five. I forgot one, I can't remember. Maybe there were only four. Four ways we normally define the mind. We'll do meditation together if you want, and if I think of it, I will announce it during meditation. Now we're nearing or close to the time, at the time we're supposed to stop, but I'm happy if you want to have a little discussion or something, because no one wants to meditate that long. Can I ask a question regarding the soft eye and the front eye?

[83:09]

And the soft eye, does it resemble looking with the heart? I would say that if you have soft eyes, you're more looking with the heart. But also, since it's a technique very specific also to martial arts, you may not be looking with the heart at all. You just want to see the field and see everything happening in it. So you may not have a heart feeling at all, you may be quite aggressive. Right, like samurai. Yeah. The other question is, but I think you're more open to feeling the tones of the heart. One thing I didn't say is the word for mind in Japanese and Chinese is shin, which means the relationship between the mind and heart. And that no real thinking can be divorced from the heart.

[84:13]

Because all thinking that has any substance is rooted in caring. If you don't care about something, your thinking about it is ridiculous. It just kind of wanders about. So there's a physical basis. But also, I didn't mention in this, that also the practice of stabilizing yourself through the breath, And giving yourself a sense of continuity with your breath, in addition to finding continuity through your story, is another helpful thing that practice brings to psychology. Because normally most people in the West find their continuity through their story, but if you start adding ways you find continuity, like the experience of bringing attention to your breath, you start having a continuity that operates independent of whether your story is challenged. So some people, they get a letter and they think, oh, I've lost my job.

[85:16]

But you return to your breath, the disruption isn't as great, because you still feel a continuity. So, coming back to what did you say again? That soft seeing or soft eye is synonymous with the heart. Yes, and I was speaking about the heart. So, this relationship is important in the culture. Buddhism adds this relationship. You're relating to mind and thought as energy, as feeling and as thinking. And although you can't say the mind is located here, the thinking part we feel in this area where all our senses are, and the feeling part we feel in our solar plexus. Solar is nice, the word sun. Our warm place, our solar plexus and our heart is where we feel when we're in love, our heart aches, and where we feel our energy is here. So you can work with these three areas as a practitioner.

[86:17]

bringing them together as three physical locations of mind, the energy end, the feeling end, and the thinking end. So that relates to your, about heart, yeah. The other question is regarding the the Asian vocabularies of the mind and the Western simplification of the mind. And I'm aware that there's over 120 states of consciousness and so on in Buddhist Abhidhamma. But in Western therapy, Psychoanalysis, behaviouristic therapy or humanistic or transpersonal tends to lead the client or work as a catalyst to be able to discriminate more. The more you can discriminate or the more you can make distinction, the better you are able to function in the social world.

[87:21]

So I tend to... It's a kind of different social multiplication of... conscious mind in Western therapies it tends to be, rather than simplifying. Can you clarify for me? In other words, you're saying that the Western psychotherapeutic view or psychological view would be that it's better to be able to make... the more distinctions you can make and be clear about, you tend to function better. Yeah. OK. In what context, you know, you could better behave in a particular way. So, that seemed to be an oversimplifying way of saying it, I guess. Yeah. So, if that's the case, I didn't know that that would be the case, but it makes sense, those distinctions are made by mind from only one base. conscious thinking. And the Asian Buddhist view, the Abhidharma view, is each... there are many bases to minds and each of those bases makes different kind of distinctions.

[88:33]

So the distinctions add up because you have different minds making distinctions. There's not one mind making a lot of distinctions. Anything else? Are we having bladder fever? I'd like to say something about our schedule. First of all, I would like us to start at 2.30 this afternoon instead of 2.00. So far I felt the seminars were too... people's stomachs were too full at 2.00. And at 2.30 there's a little more time or take a break or take a walk or a nap or something if you want. And then we'll go to 5.30 instead of 5. Is that okay with you? I've checked with the authorities. And so I would say that right now we need a break.

[89:36]

And generally the breaks have worked best if they were half an hour. So let's come back at 20 to 12 and we're supposed to go till 12.30, right? So if we come back at 20 to 12, I am open to discussing meditation practice a little bit and then sitting if you'd like. Or we can just sit as you wish. Okay, so let's have a break until 20 to 12 and I will sit with you if that seems to be on the schedule and I would like to. Okay.

[90:09]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_87.49