but one thing that seems to happen is there is a stream of consciousness that well let's put it another way if you take a camera the camera does not photograph itself it photographs what's in front of the lens You can't make the camera photograph itself unless you put a mirror in front of it. So there's a certain quality to daily consciousness where you're holding a mirror up all the time. So you're hearing and seeing yourself while you're seeing things around you. But when you go to sleep, that mirror is taken away.

[01:03]

And since I've tried to slow down the process of going to sleep and study the transitions, I can take the mirror, or the mirror goes. So I can hear things that are going on in the room and think about something, but the mirror is gone. And then the next step is you stop hearing the birds and the people around you consciously and you move into a stream of dream or other association. Other than telling this as an anecdote, I'm saying something that consciousness is pretty mysterious and how you're conscious in your dreams or not conscious in your dreams and how conscious can be selective and hear the birds but not hear a noise that's driving everyone else in the room a little crazy

[02:23]

And I completely can't hear it. I'd swear it wasn't occurring in the room. So can I trust my consciousness? Anyway, that's a little anecdote Now, when you have experience, where is your karma stored? First of all, it's stored where it happens. If it happens in the feeling skanda, it's stored in the feeling skanda.

[03:25]

And you can't retrieve it, all of it, through the thinking skandha. Because it's stored in a way that's totally in his skandha and inaccessible to this skandha. So Ulrika can probably recreate the lecture, which she can't remember, but probably could recreate it if she could enter her feeling skandha and then generate it out of the feeling skandha into the thinking skandha. In other words, since the translation doesn't occur through the thinking skanda, or that's minimally used in the translation process, the content of the lecture is not stored in the thinking skandha so she can't remember what it was afterwards because mostly our memory is tied the way we remember things is through the thinking skandha

[04:47]

and that's because we identify the self with thinking so most of the identification of self occurs through and our experience occurs through thinking This means that most of your experience that occurs in the feeling skandha which is by far away the majority of your experience, is inaccessible to you. Or only indirectly accessible to you. I think that's a serious problem. Yeah. Why are these experiences not stored in the fourth skandha?

[06:13]

They are, they are stored in every skandha. No, no, they are stored in every skandha. Okay, nowadays, let's take music. Music is and is in many cultures a very developed way of communicating. People sing together. they'll remember a lot of stories and stuff through singing and oral tradition. And as all of you probably know, that a certain song you hear from ten years ago,

[07:16]

immediately has associations connected with who you cared about at the time or what was going on or what was politically happening and so forth. So songs, our memories are stored in songs. Now, we want to think in entities. But I'm handling this bell. So this is a hand. That doesn't have much meaning at all. That's a word. Turns it into an object and a noun. But this is handling. And when I handle this, it's quite different than if I handle this.

[08:38]

And if I take my feet and try to handle this, or feet it, it doesn't work very well. In the hand. Only. The experience is created by handling this. There's no way through language for me to have the experience of handling this without handling it. So again, the stomach is not just a thing. And digesting milk is different than digesting carrots. So there's many digestions and many handlings. So in a song that you sing or you hear played on the radio, in a way like handling the memories in the activity of handling, the memory exists in the relationship between you and the song.

[09:57]

And if I said to you, remember a certain kind of feeling, but I could somehow prevent you from remembering that song, there's no way you could recall that memory without the song being humming it or something. You'd have to do something to bring it back. So memory is profoundly all around us, not just in us. So if you live in one place all your life, you create a different kind of memory that enriches your life than if you live in lots of different places. A little bit like if you go back to where you grew up, suddenly these memories appear from seeing a wall or a tree or something.

[11:20]

Okay. So singing has... People didn't used to just listen to records. They sang a lot with each other. And there would be occasions where people would sing together and so forth. And I'm sure that during those times there was a kind of memory created that is very different than our experience now. Now, that's all to say that now one of the first things that happened is music got stuck in auditoriums. Music in our society is highly institutionalized. Die Musik in unserer Gesellschaft ist wirklich hochgradig institutionell.

[12:49]

We created a kind of music that you have to go to an auditorium to hear. Wir haben eine Art von Musik geschaffen, wo man in ein Auditorium gehen muss, um sie zu hören. And then we created professional, and part of that is professional musicians. Und ein Teil dieser Entwicklung ist, dass es professionelle Musiker gibt. And then you have to pay an admission fee. Und dann muss man einen Eintritt bezahlen. And then that kind of music being brought into the auditoriums was continued and dramatically changed, dramatically continued through records. And then through tapes and so forth. So now it's quite unusual for people to sing together, actually. And people sing on the street sometimes and things.

[13:50]

Mostly we listen. And we pay an admission price of buying the disc. And this is maybe a rather weak analogy, but the point I'm making is that music in this sense is a way we store experience. And we've institutionalized the storage And we've also institutionalized much of our own experience We usually go to doctors to take care of our bodies We go to therapists to get in touch with our memory and so forth. do you get, what I'm saying is, how do we as individuals get back in touch with our memory and not let it become institutionalized by our society and by ourself?

[15:17]

You have to be willing to sit down in the midst of your karma. Now, when in Zen you say, don't think, it means in Zazen, get out of the thinking standard into the feeling skanda. But you don't repress the feeling skanda. Nor do you repress the thinking skanda. You just move your sense of location to here. And by saying, pay attention to your breath and so forth, we're trying to get you to move the feet to the feeling skanda through the breath. So when Dogen says, think non-thinking, he means the feeling skanda, which is another kind of thinking.

[16:30]

He doesn't say, don't think. He says, think non-thinking. And so many people understand Buddhism to mean don't think. But that's because no one teaches or understands the five standards. You know, they teach Zen as some kind of zapper, you know. Zapper. If I had a big electric wire here, like a cattle prod, and I touched you, I'd go, zapp. Do you have a word for zapp in German? If you get hit by lightning, what happens to you? You go, zapp. Probably the younger generation knows these expressions. I know you've lived here in Heidelberg 40 years.

[17:50]

Okay, so I think we should take a break in a minute, all right? So I think you've got the sense of the dynamics of the five skandhas by now. You can actually use it. And you actually study how you use it already. So the question here is, when experiences happen to you, the kind of consciousness you have in the midst of the experience affects how it's stored. If you bring a spiritual consciousness to the walk this afternoon, You will store it in a different place and in a different way than if you bring a practical consciousness to it.

[19:12]

So how you are present in an event What kind of concentration you have, what kind of state of mind you have affects how your karma happens to you, how it's laid down. So by being in a more conscious state of mind, shall we say, to keep it simple, you actually transform your history. Because you start storing your experience differently. Now I've already made the point that where it's stored is different. If you want access to what's stored in this skanda, you have to be able to practice this skanda. Now, one of the four foundations of mindfulness is to be mindful of your feelings.

[20:16]

But that language is using downstream words describing an upstream event. because you're not being mindful of your feelings so you're not being mindful in the common sense of mindful of your feelings You're being feeling full of your feelings. So, in other words, it means to basic Zen practice, Buddhist practice, to know your feelings through your feelings. It's not easy to do. to know your feelings through the feelings without translating them to thoughts and so forth.

[21:40]

And everything I'm saying applies to each of these hands. Yeah, to know the history of associations and will and willingness through that skanda and not through translating. Okay, so that's stored where. Next is, how do you experience, how do you turn an event into experience? I think we'll worry about that after we have a break. Now you can turn the break into experience.

[22:50]

The five skandhas. Now, part of their organization is as a perceptual dynamic. and a way to discover the self. And part of the five skandhas are five categories that cover everything in the world. This is a complete description of everything in the world. Which say, you know, other lists usually aren't. In other words, there's nothing you can name in the world that doesn't fall into one of the standards. So this becomes a substitute for the world. And it becomes the Buddhist sense of self. So it's a sense of self with no idea of self in it. Anything that happens in the world, you can point out and say, oh, that's the form skandha, that's the impulse skandha, without saying self or identity.

[24:18]

So self becomes a tentative formation that exists within the five skandhas. Okay, so now let's go back to the dynamic of this as a perceptual schemata. This form means the entire phenomenal world, anything you look at, you know, form. It also means your body. So in a perceptual sense, this, in relating to karma, is when I hear a song in the foreign world, it has many associations.

[25:22]

So the form world is an alive world, alive with your own history. Now, as a practical thing, you could say this is something like bare perception. Now, I tried to give you a feeling for this in the Sashin. And I don't think I did it very adequately, and I don't know if I can do it any other way than what I did in the Sashin. But bare perception would mean to just see this without... Now this is... I'm using the word perception which belongs here, but I have no other word to use.

[26:30]

So I'm not seeing this and turning it into a percept. I'm not seizing it and shaping it into a percept. Now... I don't know if I can draw this, but I'm using Kant again as a straw man. Do you have the expression straw man? It means something different, actually.

[27:30]

What does it mean? It's not the last straw you hold on to. In English it means a straw man is using him as an example for the purpose of the argument, but it's not really exactly what he is. Maybe it's related to a scarecrow. He says something like there's perceptions. And perceptions get translated into consciousness. And if you have several perceptions held in consciousness,

[28:33]

What, as I said last night, once you've perceived something, like I've perceived Horst but I can turn away from Horst and have the image of Horst in my mind and I can keep the word Horst in my mind And I can keep Ulrike in my mind. But I'm no longer perceiving Ulrike or Horst. But I can keep Horst and Ulrike in my mind. Okay, that's obvious, but it's not so obvious. The ability to do that can't cause imagination. To be able to hold an image in continuity over some time.

[29:46]

And I don't know Kant well enough, but he seems to have the sense that imagination has some rules or structure of its own. By which you hold an image. So this is why in the statement I gave you he emphasizes that the essence of human existence is the an integrity and continuity of self over time. So what's essential to human life is that I can turn away from horse and keep horse image in my mind. And that I can have a concept or experience of myself which I can walk around with and keep in continuity the way I can keep Horst's image in continuity.

[31:05]

And that structure and that Imagination, if we call this consciousness, we can also call it the stuff that's gluing it all together, we can call it imagination. And I guess what he thinks is that self has structures built into it and self controls the structures of all this. So he thought it very important that the self maintain continuity. But Kant didn't meditate. And this is all kind of squashed together.

[32:20]

In other words, in order to slow down the process and begin to see stages, you need to practice meditation. No matter how much you think, you can't experience this because thinking squeezes it together. So part of practice is to slow this down until you begin to see it. And that's what it means to keep the skandhas in view. In Zen you have this image of the lake or the mirror. Does that mean to perceive things without associations? The mirror... It's a big question.

[34:04]

I'll try to see if I make it simple. Mirror bait means to have a mind that is able to reflect things just as they are. So... Yeah. But that's not all it means. It also means the totality of your being is a mirror. Yeah. And so I'll try to come back to it. The last thing I said is really what it means. Okay. So I'll try to come back. The mirror is such a fundamental image of Buddhism that I could maybe spend half an hour on it, say, six months. Okay. So bare attention is maybe like a mirror. You just see it.

[35:25]

And you don't bring the structures of self and imagination and everything into it. The perception is not there, but way up here. Also jetzt die Wahrnehmung im Sinne von dem ersten Skanda, die ist jetzt ganz da oben. It would be like again, I guess, as if you could just hear a note of a song. Also ungefähr zu vergleichen, dass man nur eine einzige Note von einem Lied hört. And you like just heard every note, but you didn't even put it together as a song. Also man von dem gesamten Lied hört man jede Note getrennt und man verbindet es nicht zu einem Lied. And you really have no feeling about it yet. Yeah, it's just kind of boom, boom. Now that's a perception, but really perception belongs here, so it's a kind of what we call bare perception. It's a perception which hasn't seized it and turned it into a song or something like that.

[36:36]

You can do it, you can see that way. And more and more you can just take a moment like I said to Daniela looking out the window and being in your breath or just look at a leaf of the tree and you don't even know it's a leaf. It's just something I don't even know if it's green. It's just something. Do you understand? A friend of mine did a painting once. This is a little joke on me. He did a painting of that famous Marilyn Monroe picture of her on a calendar in the U. And this is a famous picture A painting based on the calendar photograph of Marilyn Monroe that became famous.

[37:44]

He painted her completely naked against a sky all blue with a few clouds. Since it was unsaleable, I guess he gave it to me. Most of his paintings he sold, but this one. So it's quite a big painting, you know, from here over to the left. And I hung it in our kitchen. And my family would complain. My daughter would complain. The visitors complained. We had to have breakfast with this. I always thought it was just pink and blue.

[38:45]

But for them, they formed it into an image right away. It was just pink and blue. That became a joke in my family. Oh, yeah, it's just pink and blue. Anyway. So this is just pink and blue. It's a filler perception. And at this point you add feeling to it. And you begin to feel the notes, not just bare perception. You feel the notes and you can feel a kind of emotional feeling association with it. And then you recognize it's a song.

[39:56]

Oh, that's, you know, yesterday at the Beatles. Yesterday. And then a lot of associations come in. Oh, gee, that was 1960. That's when I left home and, you know, et cetera. So you have a lot of associations. That's at this level. and all together they create consciousness it creates an instance let's call it an instance of consciousness now in Kahn's scheme at this point in consciousness it Somehow it's all held in a unity, and you can make a decision based on all the contents of consciousness.

[40:57]

So Kant asks himself the question, how do we hold the contents in unity? How do we associate them? How do we hold them separately and associate them and then hold them in unity? And then how do we use them as a basis for decisions? And for him, they all happen here. But Buddhism may happen at these various points. Okay. But we create consciousness from this initial perception. So consciousness doesn't exist as Jung says, that we don't create consciousness, we wake up into it as a child and we wake up into it each morning.

[42:12]

That's not the Buddhist image. In some sense that's true. But it's true in the sense that the sun goes around the earth. In some sense the sun goes around the earth, but also the earth goes around the sun. So when you wake up in the morning, you create consciousness. Consciousness is always generated from here to [...] here. So I said last night, step into your own consciousness. So you're taking a walk along here and there's trees and there's all these kind of things. There's actually a powerful presence along that path.

[43:15]

There's a presence of individual trees. and there's a presence of groupings of three and four trees and there's a presence of the roof of a house pushing up into the leaves and as consciousness exists between you and the song You can walk along and have consciousness arise in cooperation with the trees and the... Now, we do that.

[44:17]

We do that anyway. But we still tend to think, well, I can't, that we're actually walking along with a continuity of consciousness and the trees are sort of blowing out there. And somebody might point it out and say, oh yes, that's a beautiful tree. But that's different than walking along and stepping into the presence of the tree's arising consciousness in you. In feeling the trees happen in you. You're not estranged from the trees. I said dreams instead of trees. What's the saying? It's a dream. You're dreaming the past. She's always ahead of me.

[45:31]

So your consciousness at the end of the walk or as you go by these four trees is different than going by these two trees. So if you really pay attention, there's not a continuity of consciousness over time. So you're walking around, there's this consciousness,

[45:47]

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