And I know a similar situation in sitting in the Zen. And for me, there's a link between the two. You experience a feeling of similarity, yeah. Yeah. My question just is, what is happening there? What is it? You have a lot of faith in me if you think I can answer that. Ah, there's the gap. Can you give me an example of a gap? I don't have a concrete example. Could there be a concrete example of gap?

[01:05]

Well, in Zen practice, a teacher watches for gaps. When there's a hesitation or pause or speechlessness or a shift from, say, live words to dead words, Now, traditionally in Zen, at that point you'd slap the person very hard across the face. Or you do something to startle them. Or you just might walk away. I mean, in the West we have to be gentler.

[02:06]

But it's not really exactly gentler because in a body culture it's more powerful to make body statements. And in a body culture you don't see this as abusive. And it's like men in sports situations, they're always kind of banging each other. You know, like in games you watch them, they suddenly, they're happy so they all bang at each other. But that kind of physical stuff I found you can't do in the West. Except in sports.

[03:31]

And people I found years later, even big strong men hold it against you. So in the West we have to be less obvious. We change the subject. A kind of dramatic change of the subject or something. Walk away or move your body into another space or something. Change your breathing. So that's how Zen works with gaps of various kinds. But it's a feeling of the gap as a potential upward movement. And to bring this upward movement into yourself and see if it catches the other person.

[04:33]

What this also suggests is an intimacy and permission between the two people to do this. Yeah, so if there's intimacy and permission, you can, you know, pound somebody. But you have to be careful, again, it takes the permission away sometimes in the West. But I've told the story before, but I know Suzuki Roshi, an example is that Suzuki Roshi once saw a gap appear in a number of people. And a gap appear in myself. They were different gaps. But he knew he had permission with me to do anything. You know, and he was a little guy.

[05:46]

I mean, to me he was big, but in photographs I can see that he was quite a lot smaller than me. And he walked into this group of people, I don't know if they were... Ten, twelve people around. And he just grabbed me here and just put me... And then he began hitting me like mad and shouting, You should understand under my anger! You should understand under my anger! And I was just... And he wasn't the least bit angry. But it's not showbiz. It's a kind of, it's a way to communicate. So I have, there's a number of experiences like that I had with him. But I trusted him so completely, I was just down there thinking, well, this is quite interesting.

[06:48]

But I trusted him so completely, I was just down there thinking, well, this is quite interesting. The problem with some people is that they don't have any trust. And when there is an interruption in contact, it's a helpless situation to find out what can bring a new contact or a new... to create a new possibility to come together. For me, it's something like a creative act. I let the snow find out what's possible. For me it is something like a creative act when the therapy or the contact comes to a stop where I notice that somehow there is nothing left with trust, on the side of the other person, no matter where I am and that I try to be very inventive and try to do something completely new, which gives a chance to succeed again.

[08:11]

I find it very difficult at this point. I find myself, and I don't know if it's comparable at all to a psychotherapist's experience, that this real, this thorough trust is only developed by living and practicing together. There have to be lots of instances in which this trust is reinforced. I find that there are people, for instance, who start out with a great deal of trust in me and myself in them. That's just there in a bodily sense. And it's confirmed through a depth of common practice recognitions.

[09:22]

But unless that's followed up with a lot of time together, it starts to erode. And then that trust, which was so strong like love can be, starts being critical of very small things. Like somebody who maybe is in love with somebody but you're separated a long time and then you're kind of more critical than you'd be normally of people. And that's one of the problems with lay practice is developing a sufficient context of trust.

[10:27]

Anyway, I don't know if that was useful, but it's something that's important for me to have recognized. It was useful for me to understand in a better way the quality of that, what I called gap. And just sometimes sitting there with the person, and what can I do now? And nothing of my usual repertoire is helpful. It's just there has to be something that is different from everything. Well, I think... Deutsch, bitte. What I always ask of myself In establishing a basis, it's necessary to use the repertoire of what one knows.

[11:58]

But in advancing the situation, you have to put yourself in a position where repertoire doesn't work and you have to find something new. Some creativity that comes out in the interaction that surprises you perhaps more than whoever you're with. Because they think it's repertoire and you think, whoa, where did that come from? I mean I don't ever enjoy a seminar unless I get over my head. Then I have to figure out, how am I going to swim? I was just wondering if it is the same as what we have in the group, that it is actually good when it comes to this point where both no longer know how it goes on, that exactly from this process the new thing arises and that it is important to run away.

[13:27]

Yeah, I wonder whether this is related to what we discussed in our group to actually approach this area, this point, this gap, you know, where both people don't know where to turn and where to move and to not to be afraid at that point, but to just hold. It just creates trust. Yeah. Yeah, okay. What else? And I wonder whether we or whether people have similar experience as we try to explain now, try to specify now, whether people have similar experience in their early childhood, And they don't have a consciousness about that, but the body knows something about that.

[14:31]

And that is the route that they have to look for something in their later life, what is some kind of practice, Zen practice or spiritual practice or mindful practice. I said, and I wonder if such qualities that we are talking about right now, if it is not something that many people have experienced in their early childhood, that there is something there, but they do not see it in their intellectual consciousness, but the body has it. And here's a direction I could go a little more detail. There's a relationship between seeing all of this that is, which we call the world or the universe or something, as pointing toward us as a unifying center

[15:52]

And as a unifying center, it can be called Tathagatagarbha or Dharmakaya. And there's a relationship between these two concepts. And Dharmakaya is more like, I won't try to go into it, but this space that connects is mind. And Tathagatagarbha is to look at all that happens as seed of karma or dharma. And that each thing that happens is simultaneously a seed of karma and dharma or dharma.

[17:05]

And the whole situation is simultaneously the womb of the seed. So at each moment, whatever happens is the seed of Dharma or Karma. And at each moment, the context, which is inseparable, is the womb of that. Okay, now if we conceive of this all that there is that way, now you would call that a wisdom view. In other words, we in fact look at all this that is some way. Mostly we see it as a container that we walk around in.

[18:20]

A neutral container. This would be a deluded view. Or an anti-therapeutic view. And certainly anti-sociological view. So as a practice you take on the view of all this as Tathagatagarbha. Okay, so now if you take this all on as Tathagatagarbha you can recognize these gaps as embryonic enlightenments. And then you can look back and you can see, oh yes, the life I led, and this would be a kind of psychological perception, but also a Dharma perception.

[19:22]

The kind of life I lived. The context I grew up in. The way in which my parents were the victim of their ancestors aborted my embryonic enlightenment. And there's a difference between an aborted embryonic enlightenment and a miscarried embryonic enlightenment. And miscarried embryonic enlightenments have a greater chance to come alive. Because there can be later contexts which carry the enlightenment.

[20:23]

But when they've been aborted, we don't really... they're dead. Yeah, and some of them are just in a very slow womb capsule. where the term is not nine months. But this discussion is entirely for the two of you with a new child. where the term may be nine years or 44 years. So the Tathagatagarbha, you can imagine, you all see the movie 2001. At the end of it, there's this sort of baby floating in a kind of clear plastic case. You can think of the Tathagatagarbha, you can think of this space which is also memory as plumb full of little embryonic enlightenment still floating there waiting to pop.

[21:32]

Waiting for the right context for you to recognize. Because enlightenment, if it's anywhere, is here. How could it be somewhere else? So this is full of enlightenment right now. So that's the idea of Tathagatagarbha. It's quite a nice vision, isn't it? But it also looks back at one's history. If you see that your parents or your life context aborted these things, Dharma practice is to stop aborting things. Overall, the most powerful single thing is the altruistic vow to become enlightened for others. That vow can free us from the most destructive thoughts and destructive even suicidal habits.

[23:11]

Was I connecting with this? Does that make sense? Anything else? Do you have anything else? I could imagine, when we meet next time, in such a round, that it might be very exciting to see which thermotherapeutic exercises or tasks could be given to us in such a way, or where Roshi might have ideas about them. An idea that I also had. Christina is saying that maybe when we meet again next time we already have tried out or thought of some Dharma therapeutic practices and or maybe we even now can think of some that we can just try out with each other so I said at the beginning of this meeting that I would talk about um

[25:18]

perfecting the personality at the end of this meeting so you'd stay here. And Christine is trying to make sure we have a meeting next year. Okay. Yeah, so I'd look forward to next year or now discussing Dharma therapy, yes? Oh, I see, yeah, good, that's good. Oh, that's good. So let me say something just because it's occurred to me several times. The Apple computer was developed in a garage by two guys, Steven Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

[26:25]

Steve and Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Steven Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Yeah. I don't know how you pronounce it. W-O-Z-N-I-A-K. Do you know I can't spell? Oh, yeah. How would I know you can't spell? You can't spell in English. I've tried to tell you many times that I can do it, and you say, I can't say it in German. But you can create a spell. I've known this for many years, too. Anyway, they practiced Zen with Stephen, with Shino, Kobun Shino Roshi.

[27:33]

There's also a teacher of mine, a friend of mine. And... They picked up the idea of a mouse and the mouse and other things from actually Xerox company developed the first ways of interacting with the screen. And before Apple was invented, I was brought down to Xerox and I saw this secret research project on interacting with a computer screen, with a television screen really in those days. But they think so, that the Apple computer is very connected with Buddhism. In simple things, like making the packaging as developed as the computer.

[28:44]

In the early days, if you got electronic equipment, remember Yeltsin was... horribly packaged. Apple was always packaged very nicely, easy to get out, the instructions were clear and stuff. They paid attention to all the details equally. Then they tried to make it physically interactive. And one of their ideas, I feel quite sure, was this idea of using two hands so you had the mouse. But as the company has gone away from the founders, you began to have this one-handed little pad in the middle where you do the keyboard and the thing with the same hand, if you want.

[29:49]

And that's a shift into a kind of mental space. Where you see, oh, well, it's more convenient and efficient to use one hand to do both. Without the sense of what's happening when you approach something with both hands involved. Even a computer. I only bring this up as a kind of funny little example of where you can see physical space in Buddhism and where you can see more mental space to try to make it efficient in another way. Yeah. Now, I think I should speak about, and I'm going to have to sense for myself with you, when I'm going into too much detail.

[31:34]

But like Eric brought up at lunch today, The relationship between view, intention, concept, etc. Now again, I don't know the words available in German to make these distinctions. On a certain point of refinement and distinction, the language differences make a big difference. Okay. But I think I should try to say something about that. And I think I should try to say something about the different kinds of perception.

[32:40]

And there's sensuous perception and non-sensuous perception. And there's perception and apperception. Apperception is... Now, air perception is used in English to mean perception with a full knowledge of this perception. That could be perception if you say of somebody it's a bang from a gun. That's an air perception? No. I mean, apperception can be used in two senses.

[33:45]

One to mean perception with full awareness, with active awareness. And it can also mean perception in a more psychological sense where you're fully aware how this perception arose in your personal history. That you were frightened of this gunshot because your father was a hunter and because he...whatever. But in Buddhism, we can't just use the English use of it. So I should distinguish, if you want me to, between unconscious and unnoticed perception. Active perception.

[34:55]

And active perception, memory-based active perception. Non-memory-based active perception. And perception with awareness and heightened awareness. Buddhism makes all these kinds of distinctions, and this is a greater level of distinction than we usually go into. But when you enter into the distinctions between mental space and physical or embodied space, you're in a territory where this makes a difference. And if you're going to understand what's meant by both enlightenment and emptiness, you have to make these distinctions. And how Buddhism then as a craft of practice is simultaneously therapeutic and soteriological.

[35:58]

Now, the individual practitioner doesn't have to know these things. But the practitioner who's a teacher or is becoming a teacher needs to know these things. Because the teacher has a responsibility to see that going this way or this way is a big difference. But the practitioner only has to go that way. They don't have to know why they didn't go this way. I think we should stop in a moment.

[37:18]

But I just want to add, bring up and brought up two or three things here that I think we can follow up on tomorrow. And I think it might be good if they're there for us to muse on this evening. I don't know if I can be very clear about it, but it's come up in me several times during our conversation now, so maybe I should make it more explicit. So let's talk about memory-based perception for a moment. But first let me say that If I look at any of you, what I see is completely based on memory.

[38:46]

I can't have any sense of the color, two colors or the cloth or anything if I don't have some memory. So all my perceptions are not in a vacuum. They're in an already constructed context, a context constructed from memory. So if we could try to list the kinds of space here, And I can list, if you'd like, 20 or more. I've listed some of them at the Kimse Seminar. But our purpose here is... For our purposes here, I will say that this one... The fact of this space... And for us it's memory.

[39:54]

This is not the space of physics or probes, spaceships or something. It's the... Space, anything I look at, I'm seeing through the veils of memory. The associations of memory. And primarily then, space as memory is mental space. And as mental space, we see the associations, but there's a kind of disconnectedness.

[40:56]

And one of the reasons I use so often my old saw, I don't know exactly where old saw comes from, but it means... Sword or saw? It means when you've said something so often, it no longer has much meaning. An old saw is like a cliché too often seen. Eine alte Säge ist ein Klischee, das man zu oft gesehen hat. Und ein Klischee, das einfach nicht mehr stumpf ist, so ähnlich wie eine stumpfe alte Säge. Ja, meine alte Säge, das also Raum entweder verbindet oder Raum trennt. And how the concept of space separating blocks the experience of space connecting.

[42:12]

And the more you're in a memory-based space, the more you don't feel space connecting. Because in a memory-based space, you see all the associations, which are primarily arising from you, not from the immediate situation. Okay. Right now I...

[43:15]

I can't give you sufficient examples of bodily space, though I've been talking about it quite a bit. But, for instance, when people are eating with the Zen bowls, which are entirely function in bodily space, you can see when a person goes against the bodily space enacted by the bowls, When they put something down that's here, like that, that's a mental space. It's the straightest line between two points. That's mental.

[44:41]

If you hand something to a kid, they take it into their body. To look at it, to feel it, to know it, to care for it. So if you watch somebody who's naturally, or whatever reason, a bodily space, even if they pick something up and put it back down, they tend to pull it into their body and put it back down. Because bodily space is something elastic. Something gummy. And so when you pick something up, you feel a kind of physical elasticity, and you pick it up and it's pulled towards you. And you don't just put it down in a straight line, you push it. through the connectivity.

[45:43]

So when you have practices, and many of the practices in Zen are to interrupt mental space and try to push you into a bodily space. And you can't explain that to most people. And I can go to Zen groups and look around and say, it's all mental space. They're doing all the stuff, but they're doing it all in mental space. And there's a different kind of feeling or satisfaction when you're in a place where there's a bodily space. Mm-hmm. And the more you're in bodily space, you open yourself to a non-mental territory, a non-memory territory.

[46:50]

You open yourself to the immediacy, immediacy, the no media, immediacy, She wants to stretch so you can all stretch. Hello. I need a stretcher. Siegfried asked me about this man I mentioned, Vasubandhu.

[47:56]

I think any of you interested in this kind of the description of the mind and its function from a Buddhist point of view, you can find any book that you like on the Abhidharma And there's I think the most creative then Creative and one of the most intelligent authors is Herbert Günther. And he's a German who lives in Canada and writes primarily about Tibetan Buddhism, but also Buddhism in general. And he's very creative, even over-creative in finding English terms for complex Tibetan and Sanskrit technical terms.

[49:15]

And like Heidegger, he creates some ungainly hyphenated words. And he's done a book on, it's in English, on an introduction to the Abhidhamma. And Lama Govinda has also done a book on the Abhidhamma. I think his best book is the Secrets of Tibetan.

[50:15]

I can't think of it right now, but the book in the Abhidhamma is quite good. I think Günther has a better intellectual understanding. But I'm pretty sure that Govinda's books exist in German, and probably Günther's books exist in German, but he writes in English, I believe. But his English, when you talk with him, is still... Half German. A very strong accent. Okay. Now, is there anything you'd like to bring up before we... Okay.

[51:40]

But I thought as I would start out... I think I'm headed for a description of manas, citta, and the vijnanas. But I think first I maybe will say a couple of personal things. The first is just maybe a little bit amusing. Which is that, you know, I have this recurrent dream in which I have a house somewhere. Yeah. And this house is either in a kind of forest that has a secret path to it. Or it's on the beach. Sometimes a lake, but usually the ocean.

[52:44]

And there's always a long pathway to it. And I have this dream on a fairly regular basis every year, several times a year. And what's funny is that although the house is somewhat different in each dream, and it's sometimes in the forest and sometimes in the ocean, I have the absolute sense that I know the house thoroughly. Even though it changes I know it thoroughly. So I know for instance I remember clearly using the bathroom the toilet and stuff like that. And often in the dream I'm showing somebody else the house.

[53:53]

And I show them exactly where the toilet is and where the sink is and where the kitchen is and so forth. And how these trees here I planted, now they're a bit taller. I mean, it's real detail. And often, you know, like the forest one, I might have say six or eight dreams in a year about it in which I find the path and I kind of have to lose it and then I have to find the path again to it. So I like this house. It's really a nice place. And when I'm there, I really feel like I'm living in it.

[55:02]

Although sometimes the overall message of the dream is how seldom I visit it. Or how I'm not maintaining it, or how the path gets overgrown, things like that. But what I've noticed when I visit this house, I can also, in zazen, it usually follows from or leads to an experience in zazen in which I feel very tall. And I feel I'm lifting up into a kind of sky mind. And like I lift up into the sky mind and I can feel it almost brushing my head.

[56:22]

It's almost like a kind of heaven. And it lowers to be close to my head as well as my lifting into it. And when I lift into this and can feel this, let's call it sky mind, I have exactly the same satisfaction as if I were living in that house. So then if I have this feeling in meditation, I can usually pull that down into my daily life and for the several days experience myself living in that house as if it were here in this room. And it's almost like to try to make this sky mind satisfaction real,

[57:27]

When I hear it translated, I say, this sounds kind of nuts. Anyway, it's almost as the satisfaction I feel in this sky mind To try to make it real, I pulled it down and formed it into a house where I could live. And when I'm too busy and I have too many things to do, it kind of pops back up there and disappears into heaven. But what's nice is I know if I intend to, I can lift myself into it and pull it back down and build it around me. What is also very beautiful is that if I really want it, then I can pull it back to me and manifest it around me and live in it.

[58:43]

No, I don't know. You guys are professional dream folks. So maybe you hear things like this all the time. But the only thing I would say that is influenced by my Buddhist practice Is the ability to notice very precise layers of mind enter them, sustain them, and physicalize them? And to be able to compare the feeling in a dream, say, to the feeling of a particular slice of mind in zazen.

[59:46]

So I think that ability probably comes from practice. Now continuing on a personal vein, I thought that approaching these distinctions like manas, cittas, vijnanas and so forth, it might be useful for me to describe my own process of constructing my mind.

[60:50]

And I experience it as a kind of constructing of my mind. Now from having studied in high school and college Freud a bit, I knew this id, ego, superego, unconscious sort of divisions. And I actually, although I didn't accept those divisions as real necessarily for me, for some reason I'm a person who I don't ever accept anything unless I experience it myself. And that tendency in myself has been reinforced by Zen practice.

[62:20]

But what I did accept out of Freud's theories was that there was some kind of dynamic system to the mind of interrelated parts. So I definitely received that sense that the mind could be some sort of interrelated system that could be tuned from Freud. And that was a kind of faith or hope. And when I encountered Buddhism, my faith and hope was much increased because Buddhism definitely says the mind can be developed or transformed or attuned. So I had it in the early year or two before I started practicing and the first couple of years of practicing.

[63:31]

I had a pretty fairly serious kind of crisis of mental suffering. That was partly, at least, precipitated in an explicit form by my sister's nervous breakdown. Okay, so I tried to see what was going on in my mind. Maybe I can just, again, please, keep these things in mind if I write them down.

[64:38]

Although this is extremely simple, but no. Although this is extremely simple, but no. But let's see, I had some feeling of a spot of attention. And I also had some feeling of a general field of mind. I don't think it's worth writing down, but for you, I mean for me, it's worth writing down. And I also had the feeling of a kind of reservoir, non-conscious reservoir, I'd call it.

[65:39]

Now, I didn't think of it as unconscious. I thought it was just non-conscious. And then there were personality factors. And they were like arrogance, fear, confidence. But what I noticed was that my spot of attention was always okay. Particularly at this time.

[67:02]

Okay. So if I brought my attention to something, if my mind was in that attention, there was not much problem. But I noticed that my general field of mind was generally unstable. It was subject to... Now, let me take a break. Let me say something else for a moment. The reason I'm putting it this way partly is to say that I think what Buddhism gives us is the tools to work with the mind we find we have. So I think someone else might have some other different experience of their mind.

[68:05]

But in any case, I think we start out with our own inventory. So to make that clear, I'm giving you a feeling of what my inventory was. So I noticed, and this was really before I started to practice, that my general field of mind was subject to moods, sometimes depression, compulsive thinking, various things, which I didn't like too much. Sometimes it felt like the general field of mind could envelop my spot of attention. Okay, so what I did is I began to develop the ability to sort of stay in the spot of attention.

[69:25]

And I also discovered that if I was tired, That was easier. I found if I was exhausted, was really tired, then I just had to stay with that to function. But if I was real rested, then I had all this other energy for all this. Better to keep myself tired. And I noticed that everyone liked me better when I was exhausted. That caused less problems. I decided not to worry about the personality factors either.

[70:41]

Well, they're extremely persistent. I figured they can be... That's just a craft, personality. I saw personality as a craft that I could develop. But I couldn't develop my personality as long as my general field of mind was so shaky. And sometimes I would lock my spot of attention into a book. As if I locked him into the book and then the general field of mine wasn't a disturbance.

[71:41]

So from the time of taking my sister to this mental hospital and a lot of other things that happened, I just began to work with this spot of attention. And I suppose that took some kind of willpower and so forth, but still, this was okay. It was like a little flashlight, and what was in the flashlight was all right. Now, when I started to practice, I noticed that I had a, I would say, a background noise. And then that made me notice we're sort of functioning in a foreground mind. And I began and into the background mind I put the non-conscious reservoir.

[72:46]

And what I discovered was the non-conscious reservoir, which was also things would come out of it. And there was a kind of pressure from it, I could feel. But still, my own feeling was, this was less of a problem, whatever came from this, if this state of mind was more stable. So I could say this was the personal work I did before I started practicing Zen. So practicing Zen made, again, made me more and more see this background mind.

[74:09]

And I discovered that the spot of attention could be both in the background mind and the foreground mind. So I could move in zazen this spot of attention into my background mind. And in the background mind, there was a much more permeable membrane between non-conscious material and my conscious mind. So I found that my foreground mind, my energetic mind of daily activity, blocked this reservoir from flowing into my mind. So I saw the background mind which I could generate in zazen.

[75:13]

And I saw almost the entirety of zazen mind as a kind of background mind. So I saw in the background mind also assumptions I had about the world, like space connects, space separates, that then conditioned my perceptions. I didn't see that clearly for a while, so I had an experience of that, but that's an example.

[76:14]

But I saw, for instance, a very simple one that I had a presumption that I was a big eater. And as a child, it was completely true. They'd order eight quarts of milk for me a day. And I never gained weight. So in fact, I was a big eater, but... I also had the idea of being a big eater, which I saw influenced how I ate. The idea influenced me as well as my appetite. So I began to see how things functioned. I began to see my background mind gave me access to basic views. And there's where the word view comes in. Basic views that conditioned what I did. Okay, so this observation made me think, okay, then I can put into the background mind other views, contradictory views.

[77:28]

So I thought, well, if my background mind has these ideas like I'm a big eater, I thought, well, I could put in an idea like think thin. But that never occurred to me until I was about 50. Because until I was in my 40s, I weighed 20, 15 or 20 kilos less than I do now. So I could compete with Siegfried on the scales. And I'm taller, so it would be a competition.

[78:58]

OK, so then I began to work with koans and phrases, a mantric like phrases. And I saw that repetition was a way to put things in the background mind, which then influenced the foreground mind. And this was a process of noticing during my first year or two of practice. And I also saw the background mind as the flood of re-parenting. In other words, I noticed that the more I could make this a permeable boundary between non-conscious, the reservoir, An involuntary and partially voluntary recapitulation of my life occurred. And in that process I reparented myself. I made my life and experience it my own.

[80:40]

From Suzuki Roshi, I also added the idea of an inner most request. So, because Suzuki Roshi spoke about that a lot, That we can get to a point where we know what we really want to do. And it's not a decision, it's already there. And it's something made up from your personal history, but it's also your deepest wishes for how the world would be, how you could be. And then I also added in an active way, which is still in its background, The innermost request sort of went into my background mind.

[81:59]

And then I added various wisdom teaching. And they were closely related to the innermost request. I mean, the dynamic was quite similar. What I saw as wisdom, it was almost like they talked to each other. And then I began to notice the operation of something I would call big mind. Or we could call it wisdom mind, something like that. Wisdom mind. So I noticed that intention started here in the foreground mind. So I could have an intention to open myself to my innermost request.

[83:25]

But the background mind I must have had to leave alone, but I could drop these fishing lines of intention down into it. And I found that... For instance, if I had a wisdom phrase I wanted to put in my background mind, and I really thought of it as putting it in something, I would pick the thing and by intention and an intention to repeat it, I would set up the waja in my background mind. And I would also have an intention to be open to the contents of background mind flowing into my foreground mind.

[84:32]

And then I found sometimes that, what I would call big mind again, something took over. And the more I developed the skill to be open to background mind in my daily activity, I don't know how much detail I should go into here, but I noticed that the spotlight of attention I found I could hold that place which gave me a feeling of well-being, while at the same time I had the confidence then to open myself to whatever would come from my background mind. And I developed an attitude of welcome and trust.

[86:00]

Now, I didn't know at this time that I was practicing Buddhism really. I just was trying to survive. But my decision to develop welcome trust was not different from a healthy conscious attitude. I decided I was going to stay alive. So I was going to trust whatever it meant to be alive. Even if it destroyed me. It would be better to be destroyed than to not have trust in that kind of decision.

[87:10]

Sometimes I'd go to bed and think, well, I'm going to wake up in the morning stark, raving crazy. But because of this attitude, I thought, I'll worry about that in the morning. Right now, it's more important to go to sleep. So I developed the ability to push the fear off into when it happened, but not to anticipate it. But what was interesting, which I didn't expect, is again, as the more I opened myself to background mind coming into the foreground mind, The more I opened myself to big mind and basically enlightenment type experiences, I was actually doing psychotherapy at the time to deal with my anxiety that came from the unsureness that came from my sister's nervous breakdown and from myself.

[88:49]

And he was a very nice guy. And he had confidence in me, which gave me confidence. But one of the most... important things he said to me was he said that one point I said this is getting better I said do you think I'll get free of it entirely And he said to me, no, I think you'll probably have recurrent episodes of this every year or every couple of years. And I heard him and I said, oh, no, I'm not.

[89:51]

So I decided to try something else. So that's why I decided I had to figure out how my mind worked so I could change the problem. Yeah. And it's, I don't know, it's kind of mechanical. But it helped me. And after a while I made it a little less mechanical. But I also used this. Then what the next step was, I really studied the Abhidharma and Buddhist teachings in much more detail.

[90:54]

And I saw how Buddhism deals with the same thing and how it's much more refined in Buddhism. But still, the foundation was this. And then the Buddhist house was built on top of that. Now I would like to start on the Buddhist house.

[92:02]

But I need a kind of break before I do that. I don't know if we should take a break or we should have some discussion. Okay, so it's 10 to 11 almost. Let's come back about 20 after, 25 after. Good, thank you. We'll meet again in 20 minutes.

[92:30]

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