It's said in early Buddhism that a monk should have a mind well established in the four foundations of mindfulness. Perhaps more specifically, a monk should have an adept practitioner, should have a mind established, well established, in the four frames of reference. Yeah. Now, rather than read that and sort of get feeling from it in English and whatever Nicole said in German, and sort of like the words come into us.

[01:06]

And yeah, so we have a sense right away. We get a sense of the meaning of a sentence real quickly. But let's go back and look at it carefully. Well, first of all, let's just say, could we take this as an example of a Buddhist definition of mind? So, at least part of the Buddhist definition of mind. Okay, so we're not talking about a mind that's sort of given at birth. It's a mind that's well established. Through practice or something.

[02:18]

And it's established in four frames of reference. Not established in the brain. If you said his mind is established in the keyboard. And when you say something like that, you have to think about what it says about the pianist when we say that his spirit is established in this keyboard or there. Let me think of a good word for establish for a second. Does anyone have an idea? Established, established, who is there? Me. Grounded? Yeah, is that okay? It's a little different than grounded, but it is so sophisticated. It's Latin. What's wrong with sophistication? It's good in English, but it's not so good in German.

[03:22]

Okay, so you have to decide. The only problem with grounded in English is that has a strong feeling of a ground of being, which is denied in Buddhism. Okay. Okay, so. You'd have to say, I mean, we could say a pianist has a... His skill as a musician is grounded, perhaps, in his familiarity with the keyboard. Wir könnten über einen Pianisten vielleicht schreiben. Aber jetzt würde Michel Foucault sagen, dass das Schreiben das Schreiben schreibt. And I'd definitely find it the case if I start writing something by hand

[04:24]

Certain things appear that wouldn't happen if I just thought about it. And if I write on a keyboard with the pace of a keyboard, things appear that's different than appear when I write with my hand. So perhaps we can say there's a mind that arises from the keyboard of a computer typewriter. And it's a different mind that arises when you write, and particularly if you write with a brush. Okay. I'm sorry, I always say that. Yesterday I used the word fascia and she just transferred it like, wow.

[05:32]

I've met my match. Okay. But now you said something about metal of the... Yeah, that the... because it's metallogical to this discussion. I'm throwing out things that are just parts but seem maybe to be unrelated. And sometimes I say that I speak in a mosaic. And only after a while do you see that the mosaic creates a pattern.

[06:38]

Okay. So... Going back to the... So then I was going to say something about if you grow up in China or Japan... Up until very recently, although they had printed books, all communication between people was written by hand. And it's written almost always, till recently, with a brush. And when ballpoint pens first appeared in Japan, Their name, what they're called is Manen and Pitsu or something like that.

[07:42]

10,000 year pen. Okay. Because if you do write, as everyone did, with a brush, You're writing with this paper, etc. And the four elements practiced in the Four Foundations of Mindfulness Solidity. Fluidity. Upward rising, upward movement. Presence. And space. These are considered the four elements of the body, the earth, fire, water, and air element. And in a yogic culture, we identify ourselves through the four elements.

[08:59]

We don't identify ourselves through self so much, or soul, or something like that. As I say, if you practice with the, just try out, say, who is breathing or what is breathing. Or you might try out here is breathing. Because the who, we can get rid of the who. I mean, you can be in a coma for 10 years and there's no who present that we can identify, but there's breathing. And I think if you ask yourself the question, who is breathing, or what is breathing, or here is breathing, you'll find it different.

[10:03]

It's a simple example. If you describe yourself one way, You have a different experience than if you describe yourself another way. And if you find yourself feeling here is breathing, I, me, mine are much more in the background. And a much deeper difference than we can almost think about. So we have these two What do they say, an iceberg is 10%, 90% of it's underwater or something like that?

[11:17]

Okay. So we have these two little surfaces here that look very similar. I am breathing and here is breathing. And you can be like a polar bear. And you can be like a polar bear. Or you can just jump over there. And then they sort of float away, and, oh, this one, whoa, this one's really deep under the water, and this one was kind of shallow under the water. But I'm... But on the surface, they seem nearly the same. So really, the person who practices is the person who notices such a difference. And then, really, I like saying here is breathing naturally.

[12:20]

Because I feel like it includes you. And of course the air you just breathed out is now in my lungs. Yeah, it's just the way it is. It's not good or bad. So we're sitting here sharing air. You know, I think Jung said something like, self is perceived as individual when in fact it's collective. That's a very, very interesting observation in all the ways you can frame it. We're each sitting here is a sense of a mutual interrelated body is actually happening here.

[13:38]

And if we could hook ourselves up to wires, we'd find out that our metabolism very quickly starts relating to the other's metabolism. But what's interesting about that, to the extent that it's true you know, pretty much true. Why can we notice the separation so much more vividly than we notice the connectedness? You can know about the connectedness, but it's very hard to experience the connectedness It's clearly if we experience the separation.

[14:50]

Trying to answer such basic questions like that inform the whole development of Buddhism over the century. Okay. So, used for the newspaper as 2,000. Yeah, and it takes, I don't know how long, but it takes a kid maybe till they're 10 or 11 before they can read a newspaper. But you'd think that's kind of too difficult, but it should simplify. And the 2,000 is a simplification. Yeah, but when MacArthur wanted to simplify things,

[15:51]

The smarter people in Japan said, he's trying to simplify our intelligence. Because they assume in their culture that you're not born a reasonable length of time. Also wollen die, dass die Sprache so kompliziert wie möglich ist, wie das überhaupt von Menschen in einer vernünftigen Zeitspanne erlernt werden kann? And it's clearly possible because there's virtually a 99% literacy in Japan. A much higher percentage of the culture has IQs of around 140 than in Western countries. And this is, although it might be to some extent genetic, it's certainly probably primarily cultural. Okay, so just imagine that a scholar will know 30,000 or more kanji.

[17:23]

That's a heck of a lot of things to know. And you can't know them with your head. If you ask a Japanese person, what's that kanji to know? Oh yeah, that one. Their hand knows it. I remember when I was organizing persons' numbers, not telephone numbers. And that included their home number, not their cell phones. They didn't exist. Yeah, their work number. And I would just kind of visualize them and then my hand would dial it.

[18:24]

So the memory possible through the whole body is far greater than thinking it. So what are you doing during 10 or 20 or 30 years of learning kanji with a brush full of wet ink? You're practicing embodiment. You're embodying, and they speak about a kanji, a character has a spine. And you can feel the presence of the person Ten years of 52 weekend seminars can't compare. on studying embodiment.

[19:36]

So you have a population which you don't have to explain embodiment to them. You don't have to explain that mind and body are interrelated. Okay, so something like that's behind this statement. A monk, an adept practitioner, has a mind well established in the four frames of reference. hat einen Geist, der gut in den vier Bezugsrahmen eingerichtet ist. And what are those four frames? Was sind diese vier Rahmen? To make it very simple, they are the body, the feelings, the four foundations of mind.

[20:39]

Which I just spoke about, of course, in this seminar in Hannover. But it's so thoroughly related to this potential interrelationship between psychotherapy and Buddhism, I'm reviewing it a bit. Okay. So, these are four targets for mindfulness. They're four frames of reference in order to establish a mind. They're four frames of reference in order to establish a mind. not a mind in the brain, but a mind rooted in your activity and in your body. The answer is, through 2500 years of Buddhist tradition, is you've located in these four frames of reference.

[22:03]

Okay, so if you are going to practice mindfulness, then you implicit, no, explicit in mindfulness practice is what you choose to bring the mind to. Okay. So let me put that aside for a moment and talk about the obvious practice, habit, custom of analyzing things into parts.

[23:12]

Yeah, it's not so obvious, but it's not so obvious as it seems to us because we take for granted to analyze things into parts. Das ist nicht ganz so offensichtlich, wie es uns erscheint, weil wir ja das als gegeben haben, sondern... But they were what in a sense? Just one line of letter. Sondern das war, wo Sätze einfach eine ganze Zeile mit Buchstaben waren. What does that mean? Was bedeutet das? You can't read them with your eyes. Dass du das nicht mit deinen Augen lesen kannst. You can only read them by saying them aloud, embodying them. But if you say them, the body knows the separations, but the mind can't see the separation. So I can imagine people that time, oh, why didn't we think of that earlier? It's so easy to separate the words, how much faster you can read. And a few people might have said, and I think a few people did say, but you're taking away embodiment from us, the practice of embodiment.

[24:27]

And then cultures for quite a few centuries A few thousand years. Yeah, but it only was a few hundred years ago we thought of an index. So we shouldn't take these things so for granted. What seems obvious to us doesn't. If it didn't seem obvious for thousands of years, why the heck do we think it's obvious now? I'm trying to go somewhere, you can see. Before we have lunch. Okay.

[25:27]

Okay. So in the Vedas, which are written between 1200 and 800 BCE, in the early Vedas, they have some idea that there was a cosmic body and we dismembered the cosmic body and it became the universe or something. Very strange idea. Not strange to me, anyway. In the later Vedas, you separated things into parts looking for an essence. So here's the parts and what makes the parts stick together?

[26:35]

And they, you know, at some point they said, well, it's breath. Clearly, when you no longer breathe, the body starts falling apart. So it's breath which glues things together. And of course, spirit, breath, soul, psyche, they're all words related to breath. And then they thought, well, the wind is the cosmic version of breath. Or to create a second level of causation. God is a second level of causation.

[27:53]

So there's causation of the various ways the world works, but the real causation is an underlying causation of some divine activity. Some ground of being. But Buddhism denies this. And And strictly speaking, Buddhism denies it real strongly. I like reading this. Santarakshita, who lived in the 8th century, he wrote, there's movement, there's movement. Everything's changing, there's movement.

[28:58]

But this movement is devoid of prime matter. In other words, it's devoid of some combination of prime matter and divine creation. It's devoid of a self. It's devoid of any similar constructions. Any similar constructions like self or divinity, etc. Movement is unmixed Without even a mote of extraneous nature. In other words, the parts are all you got, baby.

[30:00]

There's just the parts. There's nothing outside it, gluing it together or making it happen. Except that there wasn't some kind of underlying inherent nature. That there... They couldn't accept there was no underlying inherent nature. Which in the end creates a pedagogy of uncovering rather than generating. Okay. Now, if you read koans, commentaries by Zen teachers, the less developed ones will talk about Buddha nature and mean it.

[31:36]

And it's not. You can teach Buddhism pretty effectively with this idea. But the better teachers like Dogen and most of the, and Yuan Wu and others, but they clearly, fundamentally, don't teach through the idea of Buddha nature. Okay. So what does this mean in relationship to the fourth foundation of mindfulness? Buddhism is a soteriological teaching. No, it means it's organized through the assumption that enlightenment is possible.

[32:46]

In Christianity it means something similar, but it doesn't mean enlightenment, but it's used in philosophy to mean a teaching that leads to enlightenment. In other words, Buddhism is... The basic idea of Buddhism is interdependence. That everything changes. But also that everything has a cause. But then what is the cause? The cause is interdependence itself. Okay. There's no prime mover. It's the all-at-onceness of things in their interrelationship causes things to happen.

[33:51]

In a sense, this is obvious. In a sense, it's so obvious, we don't notice it. Okay, so rigorously, within the thinking of Buddhism, is the idea that interdependence itself is causation. I want to make sure we have a feeling for that before I go on. And those relationships result in a kind of cause. I remember as a kid, a kid, I don't know, teenager or something, I somehow had this image that if you took a whole bunch of objects, Yes, say they're trapezoids and cubes and pyramids and so forth like that.

[35:09]

Yeah, different shapes. And they're just sitting there. But if you add movement... But if you shot them all out into space they'd organize themselves immediately. All the triangles would start bumping together and they would find ways to bump together. So what parts you divide things up into becomes a source or changes causation. Okay. Now, mindfulness as a practice has been rather captured by this convenient English word, mind.

[36:13]

As you all know, it's quite hard to translate mind into German. So it's kind of interesting because you can realize whatever mind is, it's not quite in the English words, it's not quite in the German words. You've got to find out for yourself what mind is. But mind is, yeah, very useful and it's been completely adopted by all scholars. However, of course, the cognitive scientists are having a big problem to describe the four foundations of mindfulness as the four foundations of attentionfulness.

[37:25]

This is really a study of attention and different levels of attention. And assumed in mindfulness practice as a dynamic pedagogy, that it's a field of causation. Okay. You use mindfulness to divide things up into parts. And it's extremely important what parts you notice. You just don't notice everything.

[38:43]

And the next image on television will have the product right where the tennis ball is. A deodorant. Okay. So when I watch these ads, I try to see if I can look at what they don't want me to look at. I'll see if I can look at the duller tennis player. It's very hard. Your eyes go to the other tennis player. Okay, so what... I mean, you're selling a view of life. And what you bring your attention to forms your view of life. Okay, so Buddhism says study, notice what you bring your attention to.

[39:59]

So the first practice is to separate your attention from the six animals. Another sense is like a snake. And the lion is going into the jungle and the anteater is going to the anthill and the snake is going into the hole. And it's like your senses are leading you in these different directions. That kind of attention is not mindfulness. Sorry, I think I did not translate the last part. How did attention, did you say attention attaches to these animals? That kind of attention attached to the six senses is not mindfulness practice. How do you develop attention, which is part of the senses, so it's not caught by the senses?

[41:05]

Okay, maybe that's enough. Dividing things into parts, choosing what parts you bring attention to, and developing mindfulness itself in that way, And then holding in mind the particular parts. And mindfulness, I mean attention, let's say attention. I mean to give you a feeling for this, you can think of the breath as a kind of exercise machine in a gymnasium. Okay, and then you ask attention to get onto the machine. And by putting attention on the breath machine, you know, you start strengthening attention.

[42:16]

Da trainierst du dann und stärkst die Aufmerksamkeit. Also richtest du deine Aufmerksamkeit nicht nur auf den Atem, sondern eine der Hauptgründe dafür, dass du deine Aufmerksamkeit auf den Atem richtest, besteht darin, die Aufmerksamkeit selbst zu entwickeln. Also sein. So this is a real specific kind of practice, mindfulness. Okay. So we have lunch here, is that right? If we want to? So if we... What time shall we think of coming back? If we're stopping more or less at 12.30, 2.30? Is that good enough? Okay. So let's sit for one or two or whatever, who knows, minutes. Now, as an exercise in mindfulness, I'm trying out just now, asking you to bring your attention, like when I'm speaking, to the fading of my voice, not the appearance of it, not the sound of the bell with some kind of, oh, that's a word, I know what a sound is, etc.

[44:11]

Because you know this is not a bell. This is an activity. It's only a bell when I hit it. And that it might be, you know, a hat or a teacup or something. So the activity itself is fading. So hearing my voice and Nicole's voice, see if you can have attention go to the fading rather than the appearance. Schaut, ob ihr eure Aufmerksamkeit auf das Entschwinden legen könnt, anstelle die Aufmerksamkeit auf das Auftauchen zu legen. Das ist ein Beispiel dafür, dass man die Dinge in Teile untergliedert und dann wählt, auf welchen Teil man seine Aufmerksamkeit legt.

[45:30]

Thank you. That's a good thing.

[47:18]

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