Yeah, although most of us have been practicing sitting meditation and mindfulness for, yeah, some of you a long time. Yeah, but... Like anything, it's good to bring ourselves back into the stream of practice with others. So I think you come here partly just to see your friends. Yeah, and partly to... Enter into the stream of practice with those who practice.

[01:11]

And mindfulness gives us an intimacy with the world and intimacy, ease, connectedness with the world, that would not be, I don't think it's possible without the practice of mindfulness. But as we noticed yesterday, last evening, and during the day yesterday, when mindfulness was articulated as a teaching or a phrase that was particularly effective in our life.

[02:29]

So in a way we have a chicken and egg situation here. Which came first, the teaching or the mindfulness? Because I think it's pretty clear that teachings of Buddhism need mindfulness first. and meditation practice to be activated or realized. And it's, I think, a big mistake actually when we try to separate the teaching and philosophy of Buddhism from mindfulness and meditation practice. Yeah, it just becomes another philosophy.

[03:30]

Maybe, yeah, maybe a good philosophy. But still essentially superficial. And superficial primarily because it's believable with our mind but it's not believable or realized in our body and activity and I think Nishida and Nishitani I think those are the two guys who in Japan used Zen as the basis for a kind of Japanese world philosophy. They used Zen as a source of a world Japanese philosophy.

[04:33]

And Dogen is being extrapolated into a philosophy in the same way. In the end, it doesn't work. And their work, Nishitani and Nishitas, are simply too divorced from mindfulness and meditation practice. And without the activation, activation, ground the activation of mindfulness in meditation practice, their philosophy is not really defendable from the point of view of thinking, understandable.

[06:06]

From the point of view of thinking, it's not understandable. Now, of course, as far as I can see and understand, meditation practice and probably mindfulness practice came before the teachings. Yeah, and I don't know, just not enough of a... historian to know, but it does seem that what the historical Buddha marks

[07:10]

What the historical Buddha historically marks or represents is the extension of meditation practice into mindfulness practice and into a teaching based on mindfulness practice and meditation. Now, why do I say that? I'm not talking really about history. I'm talking about how we also recapitulate this teaching in ourselves. Now, if we see this relationship between meditation and mindfulness and the teaching as one piece, I think we'll be able to practice with

[08:18]

more accuracy and more acceptance, fullness, thoroughness. Now sometimes I think we tend to see, let's say mindfulness practice, as something we add to our life. We add to our consciousness. No, chronologically or historically in our personal life, that's almost for sure true. Maybe we were born doing mindfulness practices, but we... Soon lost them.

[09:29]

And in our life, our particular culture, the teachings which activate mindfulness, articulate mindfulness practice, we weren't born into. Yeah. So from all of our experiences, my experience, I was in my mid-twenties when I added mindfulness practice to my life. But now that you're practicing, The thought that you're adding mindfulness practice to your consciousness is misleading. Even if it's chronologically true in your lifespan.

[10:32]

It's not exactly the way to think about it. Well, I mean, I don't know. Let's say we educate our thinking. But I don't think we... Yeah, I suppose you can say we add education to our thinking. No, and I suppose I want Sophia to go to school sometime and... Learn to think. And she already thinks, actually, quite clearly. Yeah, so she thinks. But mostly, if we're not educated... some kind of education of our thinking.

[11:45]

We're very prone to superstition and impressionability and Manipulation and so forth. So we educate our thinking so it's more logical, rational and so forth. But I don't think anyway that I've added rationality to my thinking. I feel more that I've articulated rationality the potential of thinking.

[12:46]

I've clarified what thinking is all about. So if I think about something, what I think about, the way I think about it, more represents what I'm thinking about. More accurately represents. Yeah, I'm less likely to think about it just in terms of how I want it to be or something. You do or you don't? I am less likely to think about it. Now from the point of view of consciousness, From the point of view of Buddhism concerning consciousness, consciousness is also just a way of knowing the world, like thinking is a way of knowing the world.

[13:57]

And it's assumed that we should train, discipline our thinking. Now, train and discipline, it's the wrong word. Discipline is good if you look at its roots. It means to be open to learning. Discipline are those, at least one way of understanding the word, are those conditions that make you open to learning. But, you know, training and discipline always have some kind of military and rigid school kind of... So I would say education is to be open to the potentialities of thinking.

[15:16]

And I think we can understand mindfulness practice as to be open to the potentialities of consciousness. Yeah, now I know that this soft intimacy I feel with the world And I know that this soft bond that I feel with the world... sitting here with you, just was not accessible to me until I started practicing mindfulness. And not only just finding mindfulness, but finding the teachings that activate mindfulness. So what I feel now is this is the nature of consciousness.

[16:34]

Yeah, I didn't really when I was... Growing up it took forever. Big part of my problem was my not understanding, not being able to realize the potentialities of consciousness. So I felt in this world disconnected, lost, unsatisfied with what was with how it was possible to live.

[17:47]

So I don't feel, you know, I did, I suppose, educate consciousness through the practice of mindfulness. But I would say rather actually I used mindfulness practice to discover the potentialities, the actuality of consciousness. But I would rather say that I used the 18-day practice to discover the potential or the realized reality of consciousness. No. I decided that the way to speak about mindfulness and meditation practice today is to speak about its relationship to the teachings.

[19:01]

And of course it's relationship to our living, our life. So the earliest teachings of Buddhism are the four noble truths. The eightfold path. And probably the next most basic and inseparable from all of Buddhist teaching are the three marks. And the three marks are... three marks of existence. The existence is marked by suffering, by transience, and by suffering. the absence of a permanent self.

[20:31]

Yes, even though you may not have thought of it in terms of the three marks of existence as the earliest historical Buddhist teaching, We all know that Buddhism is about suffering and non-self and transience. And in fact, Yeah, maybe probably in some ways we're rather bored with the idea. But being bored with it is also a way to resist it. It's a way to resist it. And to argue with it, like, oh, my life is partly suffering, but mostly it's quite wonderful and blah, blah, blah. This is also a way to really not look at these three marks of existence.

[21:47]

I can't get Igor, our dog, to eat unless he wants to eat. You can't lead a horse to water, all that stuff. I don't know, what can I do to get us to really look at these three marks of existence? Yeah, suffering. Sometimes it's translated as simply unsatisfactoriness. That, you know, no better how you look at it. I mean, look at how many of us here are in the so-called helping professions. We hear doctoring and massaging and, you know, listening, you know, to people all day long.

[23:07]

And some of us do all three at once. Massage, doctor, and what? And she's just in our little community in Creston, you know. having just been there, boy, there's some serious stuff going on. I mean, people are really... It's a tiny little community, and one person just died from a beautiful young black woman died from a faulty gas heater. And I know two people are planning to commit suicide together. And Yeah, I won't list all those things.

[24:25]

But this is just a little tiny community. So even if my life is not so bad, you know, I'm coming along. My life is also not separate from these folks. You can feel, particularly in a small community like that, like in a family, the ripples of these things in the whole community. Yeah, so, yeah, to side from, without reading the newspaper, that's, you know, then you're really in trouble if you read the newspaper. So how do we, how do we, the question here is not, how do we protect our own life? But how do we open ourselves except the world we're in?

[25:36]

Yeah. and transience or impermanence. Now again, there simply isn't a word in English for what is meant by this second mark of transience and impermanence. Now we know things are impermanent. Your car gets older, etc. Your car gets older, etc. Your body gets older.

[26:48]

Your relationships get older. Sometimes it's an improvement. Even old age is an improvement. A friend of mine began to notice he was getting older. And he said, it's interesting, but entirely unjustified. So that's not what the Buddha meant, only. Or transience that everything is changing. It's really, can you change the expectation Your expectation.

[27:54]

From an expectation of permanence to an expectation of impermanence. That's a training or a opening up of the potential of consciousness. Now, how can I give you a feeling for what I mean? Yeah, we step out the door here. In the back, say. There's all this white snow. It's beautiful. There's all the cars looking like insects. And there's a scene, and we just see, oh, there's a scene there, and we see it as a, yeah, as a scene.

[28:56]

Not as scenery, but as a scene. As a scene. C-E-N-E. But not as scenery. Yeah. S-E-E-N. Okay. No, S-C-E-N. S-C-E-N. But that's not the same as scenery. Yeah, I see. Okay. Whatever you said is true. Whatever you said is true. But in actual fact, you're not seeing it as a scene. You're scanning. You're scanning around and putting it together.

[30:02]

That's one reason it's so difficult to take photographs. that actually make things look like the way we actually see. I always notice it at Crestone because There's the center and there's this huge mountain right above it. But if you take a photograph, the mountain's way back there somewhere. But in our seeing, we bring it all together. Yeah. But we don't notice it. We just see a scene. Now, maybe to give you a feeling of what I mean, let's say that you look at a painting. And you, yeah, it's a painting that

[31:05]

And you stop and you look at it. And you look at one aspect here. And you look at another aspect. And sometimes you look at the whole painting and so forth. And I think of my daughter, Elizabeth, who's going to get married in July. And Sophia's getting married next? No. It seems like that. She'll be only four on March 10th, so she's not getting married. But anyway, Elisabeth is getting married. And she discovered when she was young, going to museums, that she actually saw a painting by drawing it. She discovered if she really liked a painting and then if she tried to draw it, it really made her see it.

[32:20]

That's an insight, actually, I would say, into the potential of consciousness. So now I'm just saying, say you look at this part and you look at that part. And you take for granted that while you're looking at this part, this part is still waiting for you to look at it. And then you go back to this part, you know that part's still waiting, and you can go back to it, etc. Well, we look at the world that way. Basically, we think we look at this part, and the other part's waiting for us. But to a mind that realizes the three marks, the other part is not waiting for it. You more expect it to change. Now there's a difference.

[33:45]

Now, of course, most of the time it is waiting for us. And we're surprised when it's not. But if you, through mindfulness, develop your consciousness, you're more surprised when it does wait for us. The result of such a ripened consciousness which doesn't expect permanence which rather expects things to Like a liquid, a fluid that's always changing. In a practical sense, your car is still parked where it was.

[34:46]

Usually. But if you don't, if you have a consciousness which expects transience, fluidity, you notice the world differently. And you feel your own activation in the world differently. Because the consciousness which notices the fluidity of the world as the as the root assumption of consciousness, also opens up our mind and body to an intimacy with the world.

[35:57]

Okay.

[35:57]

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