As you can see by what I've been speaking about so far, I want to make as much as possible, I mean, I want to make completely possible this practice to be, to locate it within your own experience. Ich möchte es komplett möglich machen, dass wir diese Praxis in unserer eigenen Erfahrung verorten. Euch zu helfen und mir auch gleichzeitig es in eurer eigenen Erfahrung zu verorten. And at the same time, I want this intention and practice of locating it in your own experience.

[01:01]

Because the challenge of it, when it's challenging, it's more likely to take hold. Also es ist so, dass wenn die Situation herausfordernd ist, dann ist die Wahrscheinlichkeit größer, dass das wirklich greift. Okay. So I'd like to go start again with where I was yesterday and review it and extend it, I hope. Und ich möchte nochmal dahin zurückgehen, wo ich gestern war und nochmal zurückschauen und... And extended it, I hope. Now, I didn't intend at all to speak about the five skandhas and some of you say, oh my gosh, he's going to speak about the five skandhas again. Oh dear.

[02:03]

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I should have said that. But when I wanted to locate how revolutionary what we're doing is, and I brought in this potential friendship between Heraclitus and Buddha, and imagining how the Buddha would respond to the human being is always a new or different human being when he or she steps into the stream. And so there's no way to avoid the five skandhas if I'm going to speak about that.

[03:19]

Not that I wanted to avoid them. Yeah, but I can speak about the skandhas in the context of how different the thinking is that arises through the skandhas than the kind of thinking we're used to. But I can talk about the skandhas in the context of the question how different is the thinking that arises from the five skandhas than the kind of thinking that we are used to. And we could make a case for that the main and first teaching of the Heart Sutra is Avlokiteshvara, so that the five skandhas are empty.

[04:20]

Okay. So again, I think sometimes we think, oh, I know what consciousness is. Let me study the other four skandhas. But I actually don't think we know what consciousness is. We just think we know what consciousness is. Because most of our noticing is in the context of consciousness. What I'm suggesting as a practitioner, you notice the boundaries of consciousness. You notice it every time you go to sleep and every time you wake up.

[05:32]

Or you could notice it every time you go to sleep and every time you wake up. So I mean, first of all, you're not studying Buddhism, you're studying yourself. And you're using Buddhism as a tool to study yourself. But the studying's got to start with your own experience. And what's the biggest change in your experience, each of our experience? Between waking and sleeping, and between sleeping and waking. And the related knowing, that the kind of knowing of consciousness is very different from whatever kind of knowing there is during dreaming.

[06:39]

And I think, and I would say to my daughter, say if she's interested in Buddhism, I would say the first practice is studying, going to sleep and waking up. And once you've done that and you've developed the skills to notice going to sleep and staying sort of conscious into sleep, Then I might say to my daughter, well, yeah, you got that down pretty well. Why don't you try the fourth skandha? Or ask yourself the question, why can't I extend consciousness into dreaming or into sleeping?

[08:01]

What makes consciousness not penetrate sleeping? And what makes sleeping exclude consciousness? And how does that affect your life? You don't have to be a Buddhist to... This is just common... Common sense. And as you know, common sense used to mean a sense common to all the senses simultaneously. But even that which is built into the language we lost touch with and it turned out to be what everyone knows and it's the opposite. What's known by all the senses simultaneously is what's uncommon. Now, if you want to experience how consciousness might sneak its way into sleeping,

[09:48]

Then I might, if she asked me the question, if she's alert enough to ask me the question, I might say, well, you could try it all, Zazen, you know, we have a room over there where you could sit if you'd like to. Oh, those people? Yes, those people, us. So, then when we do sit down, And when we then sit down, as I suggest, you use the five skandhas as a way to enter zazen. Now you can just sit down, of course, and let what happens, happens. And that's very particularly a Zen approach.

[11:25]

As I've said, we're very particular about our posture and noticing each gesture in its completeness and how it gives us nourishment. But when you sit down, there's no rule. If there were other than don't move. But if there were rules, as you know, I've often said in stages, then you wouldn't discover anything. what's unknown to you and unknown to human beings maybe ever. So a radical, we can call it a radical openness is the dynamic of Zaza. Now, although we don't teach stages, there are stages in Zen practice.

[12:44]

I've been pointing this out recently. And the alert practitioner notices their stages and then wonders, you know, what to do about them or how to refine it or should I notice it, etc. And then that's what Toksan is for. And a vigilant practitioner notices these stages and asks himself, what should I do with them and how can I develop them further and so on? Or should I even notice them at all? And that's what Dokusan is for. Dokusan is the recognition that we are together on this path. Okay, now, but you can notice that yes, when you do sit down, doing and being consciousness tends to lessen.

[13:53]

And that lessening is a kind of stage in practice. And you might notice, particularly the more experienced you are and informed you are as a practitioner, You might notice that this is something like what you've heard about, studied a little bit, the skandhas. Yeah, okay, so you notice, yes, look at this, there's some kind of shift that occurs when I sit. And maybe you can notice the boundaries Now, I can give you all kinds of, well, quite a few, definitions of the, or job definitions of consciousness.

[15:35]

This job is to make, it is a job, sort of, responsibility to make the world predictable, categorizable, et cetera. Predictable, categorizable. You said job and something else. That's all. Okay. Job description. Okay. Yes, I can give you these words. And you can notice the consciousness categorizing things right away, naming them, categorizing them, etc. And you can notice that categorizing is usually in the context of there's a future, there's a past, and there's a self involved.

[16:39]

And you might even think, is this all there is to life? And it's certainly not. And we are, by doing zazen, you've had the intuition or the wisdom with the example of, hey, zazen is a door to a wider and more, perhaps more actualized experience of life. And by doing zazen, you have the intuition or the knowledge or a wider and more actualized.

[17:55]

So, yeah. So noticing the categories can be, the job description of consciousness can be useful. But the more useful in the long run, embodyable experience of consciousness is more important than its job description. I think somebody named Clarence Lewis in 1929 kind of started using the word qualia. And I think that someone named Clarence Lewis in 1929 or so started using the word qualia.

[19:03]

And the way it's used nowadays by psychologists, neuroscientists and so forth. And it's from the word, it's related to the word quality. So what is the experienceable quality of consciousness? And I like to use the word quali, which is the singular of qualia. Because I can say the property of consciousness or the quality of consciousness. Anyway, I've been saying recently the quality of consciousness. So what is the bodily feel of consciousness?

[20:08]

Okay, so how are you going to decide this? You know, in some of the traditional accounts of the skandhas, Form is said to be like foam. That's trying to give an experienceable qualia to the experience of form. A foam, you know, like foamy water. Yeah, okay. And then feelings are called like floating bubbles. Yeah, and associative mine is like steamy hot. Well, whether those are good quali for you, I'm just bringing in this sense of giving a word to the feel of an experience that is as old as Buddhism.

[21:40]

And why do you want to do this? Because it gives you a chance to make the experience more... It gives you a chance to precisely embody the experience. weil es euch Gelegenheit gibt, die Erfahrung präzise zu verkörpern. And also some of the fruits of Zazen are very slight feelings of joy or bliss or ease or softness in the body that are a kind of qualia that appear with certain modalities of mind. Now, what I'm doing here is I'm trying to bring this more fully into your experience and make it your own. Our own.

[23:05]

At the same time, in order to make it your own and make it accessible to your own experience, I'm finding right now I have to develop a language for the topography of experience. Because if you're going to fold this into your experience, fold it into embodiments, You have to be able to notice what you're folding in.

[24:06]

So I find I wasn't planning to do this either, but I find I'm introducing a more subtly nuanced or subtle topography of experience than I ever have before. And that must be because you're the best Sashin group I've ever had. I'm not appealing to your ego or anything. But you are a wonderful Sushin group. Okay. So, if you know, if you get to know the boundaries, you can locate the experience. And by getting to know the boundaries, you know that there are boundaries.

[25:20]

And if you really know there are boundaries, then you know there's something outside the boundaries. And then what happens outside the boundaries... is where much of your life happens. So let me at this moment go back to Nietzsche. He kept paper and pencil beside his bed. Because the thoughts, the rare fleeting thoughts that occurred couldn't stand the morning light. And And he also said that it's his illness and his fear of death which gave his thoughts the clarity in sleeping that he couldn't achieve in consciousness.

[26:37]

He was always on the edge of being sick and he was ill enough to think he might die and he was always on the edge of being somewhat crazy. And he said about these thoughts, I felt I'd been carrying them for a long, long time and they only surface at night and under the threat of illness or pain or death. Ich hatte das Gefühl, dass ich sie schon sehr, sehr, sehr lange mit mir trage. Und sie traten nur bei Nacht an die Oberfläche und nur unter Schmerz und unter der Furcht des Todes. And some of that intelligence is in the way a sashin is conceived.

[27:49]

Und ein Teil dieser Intelligenz ist Teil davon, wie ein sashin gedacht oder konzipiert ist. We're trying to let you Find your way out of ordinary consciousness. And the third period of the third day is like the threat of death. At least it can be kind of demanding. So we're not trying to make you crazy or sick or deaf. We're just saying sit still. It's hard, I know. It's funny, sometimes it can just disappear. I mean, you and the pain. That... part of you which feels your experience as pain suddenly can dissolve.

[29:06]

Fly away. Many of you have this experience. The problem is it doesn't last. Or it lasts for a little while. By the way, what time is it? Anybody know? Oh, we hit the clock. Okay, good. I forgot my watch. Ah. So this sense of having Nietzsche, the thoughts that he's carried, been carrying for a long, long time, It won't appear in consciousness, and it's not about unconsciousness. It's about they just haven't found a way to be present to him.

[30:10]

And they're not present to his consciousness, they're present to his sleeping mind. And when your attentional skills get better, you can notice, you're doing it all the time, but you can notice with some clarity, the layers of sleeping. There's a kind of profound thinking layer, there's a dreaming layer, and so forth. And again, one thing Zazen is trying to do, like a kind of bathysphere, bathysphere? The thing you drop down into the ocean to look at various depths? Were you talking about the submarine kind of thing?

[31:31]

Yeah. I thought it was something with water sphere. Water sphere. Submarine. I don't know. Okay. This is a sub-zarine, a sub-zasin. Anyway, you're sort of going deeper and deeper into a wider and wider space. And when you shift into these wider spaces, these are samadhis. And these samadhis have quality and can be embodied. So Suzuki Roshi is speaking about your innermost request. This gives me a chance to speak about it in a new way. Isn't just, you know, like we usually talk about it, is deep down you want the world to be a certain way, you want a certain kind of person to exist in the world.

[32:51]

And when you really recognize, I really wish a certain kind of person existed in the world, you suddenly think, oh shucks, that has to be me. Oh, yeah. You can expect someone else to do it, but if you expect someone else to do it, why not you? But there's another way of looking at this. It's the ingredients that come together to form who we are. Not just who we want to be, but who we actually are. Those ingredients are all kind of waiting in an interiority.

[34:04]

waiting till that the kind of interiority is available that they can come together and become you. So when I'm speaking, I'm always trying to speak to those aspects in myself And those aspects in you, which are waiting to come together. And this is also the concept that you're already Buddha. Whatever a Buddha is, it's waiting to come together in each of you. Jeez, I yesterday tried to get through the five skandhas. I really only got to the second. And today I only got to the first. This is progress. Deeper and deeper.

[35:27]

Shallower and shallower, deeper. Yeah. Muhammad Ali, you know, he just died. And he's a... a wonderful figure to study. He was always bragging. He said, I'm the greatest. He said, I'm the greatest. I knew I was the greatest even before I was the greatest. And he said, it's not the mountain ahead of you which is a problem, it's the pebble in your shoe. And he said, not the mountain in front of you is the problem, but the pebble in your shoe. And he once spoke before a graduation class in Harvard. And the people asked him questions and so on. And, you know, he was extremely dyslectic and was never able to learn anything, really.

[37:04]

Couldn't read a book, etc. But he was probably quite smart. And rather Buddhist. He said, if I can conceive of it, and I can believe in it, I can achieve it. And anyway, when he was at this Harvard commencement, some students said, Ali, can you give us a poem? And he said, I'll give you the shortest poem ever written. And he said, me, we. Right, well, what did the Buddha say when he was born? He was born, he stood up suddenly, stood on both feet.

[38:08]

And he took seven steps. And he said, I am the world honored one. I am the greatest. He did. That's what they say. And I was there. And this is my last birth. So by implication he's saying, I will show you how to die. And Muhammad Ali also said, he was named, he was born Cassius Clayton. His name was Cassius Clay at birth. And then Muhammad Ali now, right? Yeah. Yeah.

[39:27]

Yeah. I mean, yeah. Siddhartha said, geez, I'm going to convert. I'm going to be the Buddha. So Cassius Clay said, that was my slave owner's name. So he took the name Muhammad Ali. And then they asked him to serve in the army and fight in the Vietnam War. And he said, why should I fight against a Viet Cong or kill one? No Viet Cong has ever called me a nigger and people call me nigger in America all the time. Yes, right. So he said also, I don't want to be who you want me to be.

[40:32]

I want to be who I want to be. And what's interesting, with that kind of attitude, he became, most people would say, the most recognizable, famous person in the whole world. and loved and liked. Buddha has a lot of fans, but Muhammad Ali had more. So what is it? I am the greatest. I am the world-honored one. An Irish monk illuminating a manuscript wrote on the side, alone I came into the world and alone I shall go from it.

[41:44]

And yes, I think his mother was present when he was born. So strictly speaking, he wasn't alone. It wasn't a virgin birth, it wasn't even a non-mother birth. The point here is, and I think the point of the story about Buddha saying, I alone am the world-honored one, is your decision about how you're going to live and what you're going to do is entirely your own, with the help of others, but in the end, it's your own. And I think of his son dying. Everybody was around his bed, supposedly. And he sat up suddenly and he said, is someone dying around here? And though there may be people helping you, it's nice that you just were with your grandfather who died.

[43:30]

And he appreciated your being there and the family. But still, alone we come into the world. And alone we shall go from it. And it's your decision alone how you practice. Thank you very much. May our intentions be equal in every way and in every way.

[44:28]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_71.39