Now I attributed quite a bit last night to not scratching. How can such a simple, is it possible that such a simple practice of not scratching could expose us to the golden wind. Could have such an effect. Well, it really depends on the context in which you practice.

[01:04]

Or, you know, if I say even in which you practice. If you have a feeling that you are practicing. then probably such a simple instruction is not scratching, is not going to... Yeah, you know, you may learn some discipline, but that's about all. Yes, so for example, if you, for the, say, practiced yoga, and The you who made the decision to practice yoga assumed that you were practicing yoga for the sake of the you who made the decision.

[02:17]

In German you have to choose which you you're going to use. I decided for the individual. Okay, that's fine. I don't really know the difference. But you don't practice yoga with the feeling that you're going to meet a different you in yoga. than the you who made the decision to practice. Of course, you actually in the practice of yoga might meet a different you. But If you're not expecting to meet a different you, you probably won't meet a different you.

[03:47]

So an understanding of the context and assumptions of Buddhist practice can develop through the instructions. But they're not so likely to develop through the instructions. But if you have some teaching, it's usually understood face-to-face teaching, Then the instructions can... Then the instructions will occur in a different context. It's like the difference between Yeah, it's really like the difference between planting a seed on cement or very dry earth.

[05:06]

And planting a seed on earth that will receive it. And if you plant the instruction, the seed on... earth that will receive it, then virtually the whole of Buddhism can open up through this one seed. If you practice it thoroughly enough. And the thoroughness has everything to do with how practice works.

[06:07]

And the face-to-face teaching makes a difference because you feel something about the instruction and the teaching. But you also are meeting another person who takes such a simple thing as don't scratch seriously. schlichte Anweisung, wie kratz dich nicht, sehr ernst nimmt. I mean, if you saw a big billboard somewhere along the highway in Switzerland or in Luzern. Also wenn du zum Beispiel so eine große Werbetafel an der Autobahn in der Schweiz oder in Luzern sehen würdest.

[07:09]

Yeah, it said, don't scratch. Wo draufstehen würde, kratz dich nicht. You'd think. Well, tomorrow there'll be a billboard which will tell me to buy something. Well, actually not scratching wouldn't mean anything. And of course, unless you're practicing meditation, this not scratching doesn't make any sense. Because we have no experience with how the ego functions in the midst of trying to come into stillness. Or how the body's energy changes when you sit. But even then if you don't have some expectation that maybe I'll meet a different you in practicing, a different me, a different observer,

[08:28]

So let's just assume you do learn to sit still. Sitting still means you're not thinking so much. So you're finding a body that doesn't think so much. And when you don't think so much, you discover your body. Because the body, you know, you have a body but it's kind of in significant ways hidden under thinking. The example I always give is this children's thing where you cross your hands twice. Once. And then somebody points to your finger and says, move that finger. And if you're feeling your body from outside, it's very difficult to do.

[09:53]

You have to figure out... But if you feel your body from inside, easy to do. So this basically is a technical term in Buddhism called thought coverings. Your body is in effect clothed in thought. Then you understand it really conceptually from the outside. And this seems to be understood now by body workers. If you can imagine your body, have a different kind of imagination of your body, work on how you imagine your shoulder or some part of your body.

[11:20]

Changing the imagination or the image Surprisingly, it does allow the body to do something, to feel something different. So in practice, it was, again, a simple instruction. You're beginning to find the body under the thought coverings. We might also understand this as the body exposed in the golden rim. And the idea of wind, yes, that's also there.

[12:30]

That in some sense there's a connectedness. The wind means something like connectedness. You begin to find a bodily connectedness in the world or with the world. And I don't know what the world is like, the word world is like in German. I don't know what the word world in German means. The word world in English has 50 different meanings. But the etymology is kind of interesting, actually.

[13:56]

The vir part, the world, W-R part, is virile or human virtue. The W-R part means something like virile, human virtue. And the ALD or LD part is like age, old. So it means, and it also means not just old, but to grow and nourish through age. So world is, you know, something like the realm, the human realm in which nourishment occurs and is shared by others. The shared world in which nourishment occurs. Yeah, and now, Is that useful to us?

[15:14]

Maybe a little bit. It's an example though of the verticality of a word rather than the horizontality of the word. Yeah, if you see a headline, world news. It means something to you. Basically, it just fills the space beside news. It's big news. Because the word is understood in the syntactical horizontality of a sentence. Do you understand what I mean when I say that? The discursive thought tends to go one, two, three, four, five and you put a word in that and the word just connects the previous and the next.

[16:24]

But if it said news of the shared and mutually nourishing world Well, they report a different kind of news, first of all. So the verticality of the word has a kind of connectedness that jumps out of the sentence. That's not limited to the sentence. And when you look at the, if you're interested in the etymology of words, very often the root of the word is an activity, not a noun.

[17:28]

And that fits in with Buddhist yogic thinking, Buddhist thinking. And actually there are no nouns, there's only activity, there's only verbs. Nouns imply permanence. And I don't know about German. German has more, percentage-wise, German has more verbs than English does. English has many more words than German, but most of the words are nouns. So at least in English, it's always implying the world is permanent. And consciousness itself, the job of consciousness itself is to show us a permanent world.

[19:02]

And the self wants the world to be permanent. wants to plan for a future that's predictable. Consciousness wants to show us a world that's predictable. So it's actually quite a big job to break the habit of permanence. Because language and self, the functions of self, and the medium of consciousness itself, isn't it strange I have to say consciousness itself? All basically imply the world is permanent. But if you think the world is permanent, you're not going to scratch through the surface of the world.

[20:07]

Robert Musil says life forms a surface, consciousness forms a surface that looks like it could not be otherwise. So really by such a practice of not scratching, you're getting strangely by not moving or finding stillness. You get under the surface of the world And find that there is a new, well, a different you. It might be a new you. It might be a new you of the same type of you.

[21:35]

But it might be a different kind of you. And if you can really think, imagine it might be a different kind of you, then we have sort of the territory of Buddha nature. A way of functioning, but it's a Not just a new you, but a different kind of you. And it's not a you that you own. And it doesn't feel like there's a you that owns it. So you're actually in a different territory. That's kind of hard to think about. Because when we think about it, And we want to think about it.

[23:02]

We find ourselves thinking about it in categories that don't apply to it. Because you're in a new kind of causal realm. Now the word Buddha nature in Sanskrit Buddha nature by the way is I think a problematical term I didn't expect I don't know what I expected to talk about here but I didn't expect to talk about that But somewhere in my mind-body I'm always working on something. And I find that I start talking when I'm speaking about drifts toward what I'm working on. And, uh,

[24:12]

You know, in China, as I said last night about koans, the idea of Buddha nature is very clearly a Chinese concept. And once it was hit upon, it hit upon? Once it was kind of like discovered or used? Hit upon has the sense of it being accidental. Sometimes somebody, you come up with a phrase or a word and it's just something you think of and then it actually clicks and becomes something the whole of Chinese Buddhism took up. Yeah, and it may be one of the keys to discovering the differences and similarities between

[25:28]

Judeo-Christian thinking, Western thinking, and Yogic Buddhist thinking. Sorry to give you all that stuff to say. It seems good. Something comes out. Yeah, it sounds good to me. Because we have, you know, self, spirit, soul, psyche. If you ask most people, what is your self? Most people couldn't answer it very clearly. What is your soul? What I hope goes to heaven. What suffers the world? What is psyche, spirit?

[27:09]

And if you ask a group of psychotherapists, they even say, well, psyche, soul, you know, they're working with it all the time, but what are they actually working with? Yeah. Well, Buddhism has to think about it pretty carefully. Because self in Buddhism is defined as that which hinders enlightenment. So aspects of self that don't hinder enlightenment aren't really called self in Buddhism. Aspects of self that don't hinder enlightenment are not called self in Buddhism. Now I'm speaking about this partly to try to be clear about it. But mostly to get you to think about it Yourself.

[28:27]

Yeah, and maybe also when you hear Buddhist teachings. And somebody says, you know, you should be free of the self or not identify with the self. You have some sense of discovering what that means. Ability to discover what that means. Because now, for so many people, since the ideas of a self connected with God, soul, spirit and things, The sense of a self that's connected with God, for example, psyche, soul, I mean soul or spirit, is pretty tenuous.

[29:36]

Tenuous means not too strong. So what we have in the West nowadays, contemporary West, is a conflated sense of self. In other words, a self that includes all these different categories. But a sense of inwardness, for instance, which is one experience of self, In Buddhism that would be true nature, wouldn't be self. And then I think a very important distinction to make, which I've been trying to last a year or two, trying to make clear, is the difference between an observing self and an observing mind.

[30:41]

And I think that's a distinction we have to kind of sort out. If you tend to think all observation, all noticing is done by the self, then you're always asking questions like, who's doing this? Then you're stuck. Then you actually can't practice Buddhism very deeply. So I would suggest next time you sit or just sit quietly in a chair, you know, Ask, who is breathing? And then just ask, what is breathing? And see if you feel something different when you say, what is breathing?

[31:47]

Okay, so because scholars have noticed how thoroughly Buddha nature has permeated Chinese Buddhism, Also weil die Gelehrten festgestellt haben, wie gründlich die Buddha-Natur im chinesischen Buddhismus, den chinesischen Buddhismus durchsprungen hat. They've looked for an antecedent or a word in Sanskrit for it, where it might have come from. Dann haben sie danach gesucht nach einem Wort im Sanskrit, wo es vielleicht herstammt. And the word is Buddhadhatu. Und das Wort ist Buddhadhatu. but it's not emphasized particularly in Indian Buddhism. And if we translate it Buddha Dattu when it's translated it means Buddha realm. But where everything is a verb Buddha In a world where everything's a verb, when everything's an activity, there's no such thing as a realm, except in the sense that it's a cause.

[33:30]

From that point of view, this room is not a room, but a cause. Now, an architect always knows a room has some causal dimension. Will this room cause people to feel calm, good, beautiful? But most architects really don't ask that question very much. They ask, how many people will the room contain? How much furniture can it contain? Yeah, and how much, you know, et cetera. But if you take the other view, that the room is a cause, then you design it differently.

[34:43]

and in fact to the extent that Japanese traditional architecture is influenced by this idea the architect in fact is often the builder but even if the architect is not the builder many decisions are left to the builder The door, what wood is used. Many decisions are made by the builder as he feels the room. How things will make us feel, what they'll cause us to do is the first consideration. So what world or what realm are we going to live in? How, when we practice meditation or mindfulness,

[36:09]

Do we change how we habitate the world, how we live in the world, and how we inhabit the world? And do we also perhaps change the world we inhabit? The world looks fixed. Don't let that fool you. It's not so fixed. And even in a world that's made by people who think it's a fixed, permanent world, even in a world that's made by people who assume it's a fixed, permanent world, if you inhabit the world differently, even that fixed world has dimensions that appear. Okay, that's enough, I think, for now.

[37:45]

And I'd like to have some, and it's nice we're such a small group because we have more discussion. So, like after the break, to have, you know, some discussion. Because actually if you want to practice mindfulness and or meditation, your idea about what kind of world you're living in, practicing in, is actually almost more important than the practice. If you have a sense of the world as it actually exists, I think, Buddhist thinks, a small amount of practice will have more effect than a large amount of practice.

[39:02]

in a world which isn't the way it actually is. Yeah, I think that could be clearer. I can say that more clearly, but that's good enough for now. Okay, thanks a lot.

[39:14]

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