Of course. About your understanding of the self, because I'm a psychologist, and your idea of the self seems to me a lot of connected to the Freudian ego or I. But when I try to teach people about the self, for me it's something that is beyond consciousness. It's more like a bigger self. has to do a little bit with the spiritual self and has to do a lot with the connectiveness with yourself and the world. The concept of self that Roshi has presented here seems to me to be more like the Freudian I Okay. It's just that Buddhism wouldn't call that the self. What you say is true.

[01:01]

We don't call it the self. The self is seen in Buddhism as a useful way to take responsibility for actions and to view things in terms of our personal history. But essentially a hindrance. What you're describing as a self is not a hindrance. Sometimes, you know, like Sri Kriya Sri would say, the self covers everything. When he said that, he didn't mean this sense of self. So what I'm trying to show you here is what Buddhism means by self and why it's seen as a hindrance.

[02:27]

Okay, so in a sense, it's just terminology. So we have terms like original mind, big mind, self that covers everything, etc. And at least in Buddhism, it's a bit of a confusion to call both those territories of experience self. At least in Buddhist terms, self is our narrative self, our self developed through our personal history. And which assumes a certain kind of permanence in the world, as if we're going to remain the same. Okay. Okay?

[03:27]

Okay. Okay. Yeah. Well, anyone else? Yeah. Where is the observer now? In the first two, so in the Wrecking Mind is an observer, in the Dreaming Mind can be an observer, in the third, in the Non-Dreaming is probably no one there, but if we ... Where is the observer here? In the first waking mind there is probably observer, dreaming mind probably, to a non-dreaming, deep sleep probably not. And where is in the fourth mind the observer which includes the others?

[04:30]

This is a good question. I mean, the problem with a list like this, it eliminates too many questions. It's better for your practice to have a little bit of understanding and then a lot of questions. And then see what happens when you try to answer the question. Basically, we have a distinction in practice between observing mind and observing self. All the activity of observing It's not the self. Only some of it's the self. Because you can observe without a sense of how that fits into your personal history.

[05:40]

Now, this is something that's actually quite important to sort out. Because we we get ourselves in the conundrum of who did that or who is knowing this. And all observing isn't a who. Okay, now that responds to some of what you said, but I'm not sure I got everything that you said. Okay. Anyone else? I've got a beginner's question. That's the kind I like best.

[06:41]

When the predictable and predictable Yeah, but the predictable is sort of associated to the conscious, to consciousness. Does the other way around mean that the consciousness can't cope with the unpredictable and the unordered, unstructured? Yeah, pretty much. In other words, consciousness can, in its logical capacity, can know about the unpredictable. But it's very difficult for consciousness to experience the unpredictable. It always tries to make it predictable.

[07:43]

Back in the sixties, Some psychologist I know, maybe it was Frank Barron, I can't remember, put people in sort of, what were they called? Tanks where you're suspended. Samadhi tanks. What? Samadhi tanks. Later they were called samadhi tanks. Samadhi tanks is a later version, a commercial version. Not Oregon, no. The organ box, that was the Reich. And this psychologist, when he put airline pilots down there, they freaked out. They thought they were going crazy. They were used to a whole lot of controls.

[09:00]

And they put some artists, poets down there and they thought, hey, this is groovy. Now, this is a kind of general picture, rough picture. So in general, again, consciousness, central emphasis of consciousness is it can know things, but it knows things primarily in the category of predictability.

[10:09]

That's what consciousness does. Okay. Someone else? Yes, partner? We also try to get the body involved in in this practice and isn't it that the body involved assumes or allows the predictability because the body is able to store all these informations? I mean this is somehow going on in the body and when I close my eyes and I open them after a while again I still know there's the bamboo outside because my brain can store this information and then I mean, the predictability is obvious because not much has changed in a few minutes outside the written area.

[11:15]

Yeah. And that's the information out of the body, which is somehow stored in my body. Yeah. Deutsch, bitte. The question is, how do we get the body in there? And our body, our brain is able to store information. When we look out the window and we see the bamboos and close our eyes and after a minute we open our eyes, then we just know that there is a bamboos out there and it is obviously still there, what happened in a minute. So we can say, I cannot do that. Well, where I'd like to go to and where ended up last night is in the physicality of mind.

[12:22]

So I'm wondering how I can get there. Right now I'm dealing with the problem of this list. Okay. I would say, though, in general, Otmar, the body is more able to deal with unpredictability or uniqueness than mentation. Then with mentation or then mentation can? The body is able to deal with uniqueness. A bodily knowing is immersed in uniqueness because it's not immersed in consciousness.

[13:27]

And mentation is immersed primarily in consciousness. Okay. Now, so let me introduce what I've been talking about a little too much recently, but it's unfamiliar to you. Which is what I call Lebit space. Lebit, L-E-B-I-T, a guy named Lebit. Because this guy, Benjamin Lebit, in the 70s, He wrote a paper called Timing of Cerebral Processes Correlated with Consciousness.

[14:33]

He wrote quite a few papers, actually, with similar names. He was a research psychologist in San Francisco in the 70s. And when I was, yeah, practicing, I'd been practicing about 10 years or 15 years at that time, I read about his work. Never met him. And, yeah, I said, geez, that's right. Because I already knew this from my experience. And what did he show? That if you wired up the body and the brain, that if you decide to move your arm, the stuff wired up to your brain and shows that the decision to move your arm was made before you moved it, before consciousness decided to move it.

[15:50]

It's some milliseconds, 500 milliseconds about, consciousness is tardy. So consciousness creates the illusion that it's made the decision, but actually it's only edited the decision. Now, I've read some people who say, oh, this means everything is psychological determinism. I think that's nuts. because consciousness creates the context for decisions even if it doesn't make the decision.

[16:57]

The example I gave the other day was I was in Italy for about a month teaching in Cortona and Volterra. And my friend, my close friend Earl's wife is Italian. And so we stopped to see her as we were leaving Italy. And oddly enough, where she lives, Her father built the first swimming pool in Italy in 1923. Yeah, and it doesn't happen to be heated. It was quite cold when we were there.

[18:02]

So I decided, you know, with Sophia, my three-and-a-half-year-old, I would go swimming. I tested the water. It was about 19 or 18 or something. And I thought, 45 years of Zen practice and I don't think I have the courage to go in this cold water. But my little daughter was looking at me, Papa, are you going in? I thought, I'd rather sunbathe. So I decided, okay, I'll do it. So I went to the end of the pool and climbed up to the second diving board and stood on the edge. And my bodily knowing was saying, uh-uh. Uh-uh. But my consciousness was saying, Sophia said, Papa, jump in.

[19:07]

So I used consciousness to force my body to do it. And on the way down, I tried to change my mind, but... Yikes! It took four or five laps before I was sort of warm. But my daughter was proud of me. So there's somehow the interaction between bodily knowing and consciousness. But consciousness basically creates the context for decision and edits decisions, but it doesn't make the decision. And in the 60s, I noticed that something knew I was going to do things before consciousness knew.

[20:08]

Okay. Now, this is a very important fact. And Dogen calls it taking the backward step. In effect, to physically step out of consciousness. Now, that's in the background of the way the doshi does a ceremony, or we do kin-hin, walking meditation. So if I'm doing kin-hin, walking meditation, everything's a mudra, right? So I'm standing, And I step forward on my exhale.

[21:32]

Half a step. And my ankles are this far apart. And I step forward on my exhale. And I inhale as my heel comes up with my opposite foot. And I step forward on my exhale. And I even pull my energy all the way up through my heel over my head and down. But you're going so slowly, it helps you walk with no anticipation of past or future. Now the doshi, that's the person who leads the service. Say that the doshi is standing like this.

[22:33]

And you're the Buddha, Martin, why not? You're often dressed in black. And so I'm on the bowing mat. And I step back. In some cases you do step back. So let's say I step back. And I'm going to go around the cushion up and offer incense to Martin Sattva. But really, if I'm somewhat experienced at this, when I step back, there should be no information in my body that I'm going left, right, forward or back. So I'm entering, physically I'm expressing timeless kind of space. If the doshi can do that, or has that feeling,

[23:52]

then a kind of somatic resonance or somatic field is generated in which everybody suddenly feels in a kind of timeless space. They feel there's no place to go, nothing to do. Everything seems right here, no future, no compulsion. So this is like, Yuan Wu says, establish a mind where there's not before or after or here or there. And what's the point of this? To be in the actual physical space prior to consciousness.

[25:05]

The space of bodily knowing prior to the editing of consciousness. Okay, so if you hear a statement like in Koan 20 of the Shoyuroku. In walking, in sitting. That means all physical activity. Hold to the moment before thought arises. Hold to the moment before thought arises. And then look into that. and see not seeing, and then let it go.

[26:20]

Okay, now that statement, you mostly read it, you think, hold to the moment before thought arising, thanks a lot. But you can, if you have a physical sense of this, you can actually find yourself in this bodily knowing before consciousness arises. Now, if you're in consciousness, it's very clear what you're going to do next, because your consciousness is anticipating what your body has already decided. So we have maybe the nature of the body as well as the nature of the mind. someone else.

[27:47]

I have a question. Yeah. What you said when you were standing there, a step backward is taken, but there is no sense of going anywhere. Did I understand that right? Yeah. So who, what knows what has to be done? Who knows? What knows? There's a pattern by which we do service. Yeah. And I do know I'm going to go to the altar. But at each moment, I stop as if I could go any direction. So ideally, there's no information in my body that shows I'm going to go left or right.

[28:54]

Now, when you find this place, it's much easier to let situations lead you. As perhaps when you're writing, writing writes writing. Writing will take you places, the act of writing takes you places consciousness couldn't bring you. Or Picasso said when somebody asked him about painting. He says, I start painting this and I paint this and by the time I'm finished I realize what I really wanted to paint was that little barn in the corner. But I didn't know it until the act of painting led me there. He says, I start to paint, and I paint, and I paint.

[29:57]

And finally, I know, I originally wanted to paint this little barn at the bottom of the picture, but only the painting itself led me to paint and to know what I actually wanted to paint. Yes? We have learned a lot from the orderly power of consciousness. the ordering, the structuring force of consciousness, we had to learn with difficulty? Some difficulty? If I am on the level of the mind, then I would have to recognize how much effort we put into maintaining the thought structures. And when I'm in the level of mind, I should realize with how much effort we keep up the structure of thoughts. Let's see if I got it in English.

[31:00]

You're asking, was it difficult for us as children or something My question leads to what I had to state and which was clear to me that thinking, as we usually do it, is much of an effort. Yeah, it is. That's true. And now we think that it's an effort to reach this state of that mind. Really, it's probably vice versa. In other words, let's call it the mind of awareness and the mind of consciousness, all right? Now we think it's an effort to reach awareness when actually it should be easy. Yeah, that's right. What?

[32:01]

Somehow it seems so crazy. We've put so much effort in learning something that is so difficult to dislearn again. That's right. particularly as Westerners. What do we do with? Well, now we have some big questions here. Deutsch, bitte. Okay. Ich denke, das ist irgendwie verrückt. Wir verbringen unheimlich viel Zeit und Kraft damit, etwas zu lernen, damit wir unheimlich viel Zeit und Kraft darauf verwenden müssen, das wieder zu entlernen. Und die Frage ist, warum machen wir das hier? Er sagte, das ist dann hier im Westen vor allen Dingen so. Und das fragt sich, wozu machen wir das eigentlich, diese Mühe von vornherein? Also, das können wir uns auch eigentlich sparen. Okay. What? You said we could do that really simply. No more schools. No more schools. Yeah, schools are part of the problem. But really the cultural view is the main problem. Well, I mean, this is something I've thought about a lot.

[33:21]

But that would take a whole, you know, much of the day to sort of start talking about. Let's just say simply that Socrates... supposedly the source of our wisdom in the West, followed his daimon, his inner voice, or not even inner voice, inner knowing. Yeah, and what? Did the word daimon become in Christianity? Demon. So in general in our society, Jung says, people don't examine the mind carefully because they're afraid they're going to find the devil or Hades at the bottom. As a long process, we've prized consciousness over other forms of knowing.

[34:24]

And our educational system is entirely based on consciousness. I've often spoke about the three minds of daily consciousness. Yeah, immediate consciousness. Immediate consciousness means that, well, let's say you're taking a walk in the forest. You're not talking, you're just walking and feeling the path, the space, the air. And secondary consciousness, then, in this way of looking at things, is you can notice something. Oh, look over there. The bushes have been trimmed, or there's something over there.

[36:00]

Now, that's also in the immediate situation. But then your friend says, you're walking with a friend, and he says, Jeez, I've got to make a phone call at 5 o'clock. And you think, oh, jeez, I've also got to do some things. And then you're suddenly not in the immediate situation. Okay. The consciousness, that's called borrowed consciousness. We're borrowing it from others. Phone calls, ideas about the future. It's not arising from the immediate situation. Okay. Now, most of our educational system is in borrowed consciousness.

[37:04]

Knowing facts, comparisons, etc. It's very useful. But if it's where we're living, it's debilitating. And if you're in borrowed consciousness all day, you go home and you've collapsed at the end. If you can stay rooted in immediate consciousness, consciousness as somatically in a somatic immediate field, You tend to feel nourished all day. Because immediate consciousness is not debilitating. Okay. Yeah. with immediate consciousness meant what in the Diamond Sutra is called the mind that is not

[38:21]

The past, not the future, but also not the mind of the present. No idea of a life span, like that in Diamond Sutra. No, I mean your past, future, life span, etc. No, not life span. Life span. I remember vaguely that with what mind did the monk eat the rice cake? Okay. Yeah, that's referring to a lot of things, but immediate consciousness is one thing it's referring to. Yeah. You said that there are three kinds of consciousness. What's the third one?

[39:36]

Every day? You mean at this... There's the... Yeah, I'll show you. It's easier if I draw it. Look. The secondary. Yeah. Now this, you know, I've discovered by creating this darn list. It's the first time I've ever done it, except in my mind. There's so many other things I have to present. See, it makes sense, the list. So we have borrowed consciousness, borrowed consciousness, you don't have to look at it, secondary consciousness, immediate consciousness.

[40:56]

Okay. So, you're walking along and you are just with your friend, say, and you just, you feel the space, you're not thinking about anything. Right now I can feel each of you. I don't have to think about you. Okay. But then I notice that Melita is younger than I and blonder than I. But if I let my hair grow, it's long, blonde curls. Okay. So that's secondary consciousness. Okay. I notice that in this situation.

[42:03]

I also know that Melitta works for a television station. Number one or number two or number seven. One, two, one, okay. Number one, of course. And that's part of consciousness. It's like, I can know Melita is younger than I am. But I can't know her birthday just by looking at her. Her birthday, whatever it is, April 17th, 1984. I don't know. That is all in the realm of calendars and all kinds of things.

[43:08]

I can only know it by being told. So that's borrowed consciousness. Now, a person who's practicing tends to be or ideally is in immediate consciousness. Yeah. And Let me say, I really noticed this once, I've told this story before, when I was in München, Munich, and I saw the Dalai Lama. And I know him pretty well. He stayed at my... center in the United States the first time he came to the United States.

[44:09]

So he was with us for eight days and he didn't have this, he wasn't famous, he didn't have this big entourage and so we just hung out for eight days. It was great. He's only six months older than me. Yeah, borrowed consciousness. So anyway, I some years later was in Munich and people said, oh, let's go see the Dalai Lama. We've got seats or we've got tickets or something. It was a huge conference of protestant young people. I mean about a million, I mean thousands. It was in a big stadium. And the physicist Weizsäcker And the Dalai Lama gave a talk.

[45:20]

Weizsäcker gave a very intelligent talk. Interesting talk. Entirely in borrowed consciousness. It's all right, you know. Everybody sat there. That's the trouble with my list. It's mostly in borrowed consciousness. Dalai Lama got up there. And he started to speak. First, actually, he noticed me, because my blonde curls aren't so visible. He waved at me. And as I often say, he's a little bit like a chipmunk, not just a monk. Yes. So he gave a talk which had no content.

[46:25]

We all want to be happy, don't we? He says, we all want to be happy, right? And the reason we practice is that we want to be happy. Every person wants to be happy. And that's basically what he said for about 20 minutes. What are you going to do if you have to give these talks all the time? But he never left immediate consciousness. Except for one or two moments when he complained about the Chinese. And everyone felt great. It was like the joy during one of these big peace marches where everybody is happy. And afterwards we all flowed out with this big flow of young Protestants.

[47:28]

And they were singing, not Buddhist hymns, but singing. And we got on the subway, the underground, what do you call it? And people are singing in the trains as some grouchy old Bavarians come on. But mostly everyone is really happy. You have to call this a city, the city of special power. So what the Dalai Lama was doing by staying in immediate consciousness he was in a way using his words throwing the words out and then pulling people into immediate consciousness. So for somebody like his holiness He says something, and if it goes up here, it comes back down here.

[48:42]

So this is not immediate consciousness. Even this line in the borrowed consciousness is immediate consciousness. But if your starting point is borrowed consciousness, even if occasionally you make some remark like, geez, that woman in the front row is beautiful and blonde, it returns to borrowed consciousness. So the yogi, the Zen practitioner, the mature Zen practitioner, for the most part, his or her mind is always... located, rooted in the immediate situation. Unfortunately, our whole educational system is here.

[49:44]

And our society has not emphasized this much at all. Practically the only time this is partly a joke and partly true, the only time we learn about awareness is when we learn not to wet our bed during the night. You have to teach a child to, during the night while it's sleeping, keep some control over their bladder. So we know about awareness. But some societies, like Japan, for instance, and so-called primitive societies emphasize awareness much more than consciousness.

[51:06]

And what we're trying to practice is an interpenetration of awareness and consciousness. We should stop soon, huh? So I wanted to speak about the two truths or the three truths or the four, no, yeah? And how this whole list I gave you really turns on the dynamic of consciousness. And knowing that How do we practice? Yeah, let's do it tomorrow morning.

[52:10]

Okay. Thanks. So let's sit for a few minutes. Thought arises.

[54:21]

Before consciousness arises. The consciousness you'll let go of when you sleep tonight. Das Bewusstsein, das ihr loslöst, wenn ihr heute Nacht anschleift. consciousness that will reappear and shape your life.

[55:39]

And in which we mostly think we know who we are.

[55:43]

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